A black student who’s failing in every class comes up to my Jewish friend and says, “It is imperative that I pass my exams so that I can elevate my community in my profession.” My friend’s professor asks him to take the black guy aside and help him pass his exams by cheating. My friend refused.
The black guy ended up getting passed through all of his classes.
Joe* emails: Dear Mr. Ford:
I recently saw your segment on Netflix’s, After The Porn Ends. I was impressed by your knowledge and understanding of the porn industry. I am currently going through my own education in porn, albeit unwillingly. I was living with a woman who’s porn name is…. She got into web camming when I met her and was making a good living working part time from our home. Unfortunately this was not enough for her. She wanted to move to LA and become a “famous” porn star. She got addicted to the social media attention and a bunch of, for a lack of a better word, perverts telling her all they could do for her.
There was no reason for her to work at all. I asked her to give up the porn and in return we got engaged. We could have had a wonderful life, traveling the world and enjoying all that life has to offer. Unfortunately soon after giving up the porn she went into a deep depression. I took her to counseling through which I found out she was raped and abused at a very young age and the porn was her way of dealing with the abuse. In some convoluted way, reliving the abuse in porn was her way of dealing with it. After several months of trying we drifted further and further apart. We broke up a few months ago and she immediately moved to LA. She is now living [porn] 24/7 and is surrounded by nothing but porn people. I can see what she is doing through her web cam and social media. I am very worried for her health, safety and well being.
I am writing to you in the hopes that you may have some advice about helping her get her life turned around before it’s too late. I’m afraid she is going down a bad road and one which she might not recover from. I realize that she is the one that needs to want help. If there is any advice or suggestions you have for me I would greatly appreciate it.
LUKE: I would recommend you cut your losses. She won’t seek help until she hits rock bottom. Unfortunately, the consequences of her choices are forever. There’s no way to erase your porn past.
That you fell in love with such a woman reveals some painful things about yourself that you might learn about in therapy. You might look into a 12-step program for sex and love addiction, or perhaps Al-Anon or CODA.
This guy fell in love with a sex addict. You might identify with his pain.
Chaim Amalek: I wonder if they have something like this for working with other nationalities.
Luke Ford: We could get rich writing such!
Chaim Amalek: “How to deal with people from Haiti.”
Chaim Amalek: “How to work with Romani chip designers.”
Chaim Amalek: “The Luke Ford Guide to Western Cultures and Peoples Including Jews” would do very well in Asia.
It blows my mind as a convert from Anglo to Orthodox Judaism how much Jews invest in their kids and in their families and in their kin and in their group.
Anglos don’t make such dramatic in-group/out-group distinctions and they don’t live through their kids.
A Jewish friend took off work to go to a UCLA orientation all day for his incoming freshman kid. “Huh?” I said. “I don’t get it. Why would you need orientation for your kid going off to college? I guess I don’t get high investment parenting.”
Friend: “Gentile parents send their kids off at age 18 with a can of beer and a can of spam and a good luck.”
Miriam:
I went to orientation by myself for Uni along with every other college kid whose parents said “you’re an adult now, time to face life on your own”. The ones who had their parents with them were usually the ESL students. As a school administrator, I have had parents call me and told me “I am doing all the applications for my kid, because I don’t want him to worry about payment, loans etc”. I’ve had students boast “my mom and dad do all the applications for me”. Great, are they going to fill out your job applications to? Anyways….I don’t agree that gentile parents send their kids with a can of beer. I believe every parent knows their kids and knows when they can let go. At 18, they need to start learning to do things on their own.
* Sheryl Sandberg wrote an inspirational work memoir “Lean In.” I might title my inspirational work memoir, “Stepping to the side.”
* Secular Jew tells me: “You’re a Grade A shnorrer. If you had payas and a black hat, you could cheat, lie and steal and take welfare with the best of them. As far as making slick business deals, however, you’ll always be a goy.”
* Friend: “Why would Bill Cosby drug girls to have sex with them? He probably could have had sex with half of them just because of who he was.”
Luke: “Drugging them was more expeditious. He didn’t have to beat around the bush.”
* I was having a nice conversation with a white girl this morning and some disheveled sweaty foreigner from south of the border came by with a restaurant flyer and interrupted us to pitch all the glories of the non-kosher Thai restaurant.
Miriam:
I wish I could have seen your face when it happened. Speaking of foreigners, I had a dream that I got a job working in the border. There were hundreds of people waiting in line to enter the US. I was going to take a picture to send it to you. I guess these are the type of dreams your readers end up having.
* My Mexican just corrected my Spanish.
I replied, “Thank you. You’re making me a better Mexican.”
* I had a dream this morning that I went out and about, wheeling and dealing and improving myself in downtown LA skyscrapers and feeling really good about myself until everything I said and did in that job hunting got recorded and typed up in a report that exposed all of my false pretensions, delusions of grandeur and Fordian deceit.
Paul Ciotti: “But then you took a catnap and all your Fordian deceit of the morning got canceled out by your afternoon’s Lukian honesty.”
Steve Sailer writes: Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us by Alyssa Katz, a liberal journalist and NYU journalism professor who writes for Mother Jones, is the best book yet on how the sacred cause of “diversity” merged with pedal-to-the-metal capitalism to bring us the Great Mortgage Meltdown.
The book hasn’t garnered the attention it deserves—probably because it makes clear the bipartisan responsibility of both her opponents on the Right and her friends on the Left.
Our Lot focuses equally on the misdeeds of both capitalists and leftists. But I won’t give the boiler room boys as much attention in this review because they’re a more familiar tale, while Katz`s reporting on the role of her side is compelling “testimony against interest.”
Katz is remarkably frank about how government programs and political pressure to boost minority homeownership helped blow up the economy. She’s particularly good at explicating how leftist housing activists, such as ACORN and Gale Cincotta, the godmother of the Community Reinvestment Act, worked with Democratic politicians such as Bill Clinton, HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros, and Jim Johnson, CEO of Fannie Mae, to lay the groundwork for the Bubble and Bust.
Katz doesn’t devote quite as much depth to the Bush Administration`s culpability (which, to my mind, is even greater). Perhaps she lacked Republican contacts to give her the kind of inside story she got on her own party’s mistakes.
Still, Our Lot makes clear that on housing policy, the Clinton-Bush years form a single continuum with one overarching plan: boost the minority homeownership rate by lowering credit standards. I call it the Era of Multi-Culti Capitalism.
And there’s little reason to think that its lessons have been learned yet.
Katz begins her book in 1972, in the collapsing Austin neighborhood on Chicago’s Far West side, where Gale Cincotta was a Greek-American housewife.
Fortuitously for me, Our Lot fills in the political backstory of my own in-laws’ lives. My wife grew up in Austin, which had been a peaceful, densely populated working class [actually, middle class] neighborhood where small children could play safely on the crowded sidewalks. Suddenly, in the late 1960s, middle class blacks began buying into the neighborhood.
Friends warned my late father-in-law, a classical musician and union leader, to flee, that underclass blacks would follow. But he and my late mother-in-law, a schoolteacher, resolved to show that integration could work.
After my future wife was mugged twice and her younger brother once, however, my in-laws finally sold in 1970—losing half their life savings. They moved 63 miles out of Chicago, to a dilapidated farm where they lacked running water for their first two years. (And my father-in-law started voting Republican.)
How did this disaster hit Austin? Katz demonstrates that it was the direct result of a 1968 change in the Federal Housing Administration, which set off a bubble and bust in America`s inner cities, like a smaller precursor of this decade. As in 2005,
“In 1972, in Chicago and in every other city in the nation, almost anyone could get a home mortgage, including borrowers who didn’t earn enough to pay them off, on just about any house, for any reason. … And just like the recent adventure in lending beyond any rational limits, the mortgage disaster of the early 1970s was born from a lofty ideological conviction that enabled the basest of crimes and most foolish of gambles under its cover, insulated from almost any scrutiny until the damage was already done.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt had started the Federal Housing Administration to insure home loans, and Fannie Mae to buy loans from lenders. Together, these agencies created the familiar template of 30-year-year fixed rate mortgages with a moderate down payment that underpinned the growth of home-owning suburbanites after WWII.
FDR’s FHA, however, was reluctant to back loans in black neighborhoods—a practice that Cincotta later dubbed “redlining.” Eventually, in 1968, liberal Illinois Republican Senator Charles Percy and the Johnson Administration revamped the FHA in a more politically correct direction. Katz explains:
“The FHA was now, in effect, a front in the War on Poverty. … Under the new regime, homebuyers living in Chicago and other inner cities weren’t just eligible for loans. Lenders who signed up to sell FHA-insured mortgages were asked to do everything they could to make sure the buyers got them.”
Of course, the results of the Federal government`s encouraging mortgages with down payments of never more than $500 were absolutely predictable:
“Across the country, neighborhood destruction became a booming business, financed by the federal government. In Chicago they called it ‘panic peddling.’ In New York, it was ‘blockbusting.’ … The FHA-insured loans threw gasoline on that smoldering fire. … Indeed, the insurance made it profitable to seek out the most impoverished and unreliable borrowers, since the sooner a borrower defaulted on a loan, the more quickly the lender would get paid back in full by FHA.”
In Chicago, Gale Cincotta started a national coalition of “community activists,” who helped pass the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975 and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. Cincotta remains a heroine to the author, although she can’t quite make clear Cincotta’s logic. If the feds encouraging lending to minorities had destroyed Austin, how was more hair of the dog that bit you supposed to fix Austin?
Sadly, Austin remains unfixed. On a visit to Chicago earlier this month, my wife drove by her old house. Her former home had no doorknob, just an empty hole in the front door. But at least it was still standing, unlike two large apartment buildings on her old block, which are now just crabgrass-covered vacant lots.
Cincotta died in 2001—across the municipal border from Austin in Oak Park. In telling contrast to Austin, that prosperous suburb that had succeeded in saving its famous district of Frank Lloyd Wright homes (where my father was born in 1917) by limiting the number of blacks allowed to move in through its notoriously illegal but effective “black-a-block“ quota.
Katz notes that Cincotta`s organization of the left, combined with the invention of mortgage securitizing by investment banker Lewis Ranieri in 1983, made possible the disasters of this decade.
Cincotta began siccing her “pushy capitalist radicals” on Fannie Mae, which remained reluctant to buy the dubious mortgages of likely deadbeats. Still, Katz writes, “The reality was that to meet its growth objectives, Fannie Mae needed these poor people as much as the poor people needed them.”
Looking back from 2009, Katz asks:
“How did Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac … turn into the world`s biggest funders of Wall Street-backed subprime mortgages? … It all started with the best of intentions, with … the activists who demanded bank loans for the poor and urban.”
* Trump is pretty hard to ignore–he’s been a huge media personality for decades. It’s unfortunate that “a calm, rational immigration patriot like Tom Tancredo” is completely ignored, but maybe that’s because his presentation is so hard to refute. It’s similar to the problem with Jared Taylor; he’s so calm and reasonable no one wants to give him any air time. Come to think of it, you never see the most famous white racist, David Duke, on TV either. Wouldn’t you think that with the constant talk about racism on TV they’d want to interview a self-proclaimed white racist? CNN does these Soledad O’Brien hour-long specials on racism in America, and yet we never get to hear from an actual racist. Obviously the media is terrified to allow such people access to the Megaphone.
David Hazony posts on FB:
Pop quiz: Which of the following is most likely to be true:
(a) The Iranian regime is increasing its hateful rhetoric because, in the event of a historic reconciliation with the West, they want to maximize the drama of their transformation so they can look like forgiving souls.
(b) The Iranian regime has no intention of using the nuclear deal to bring about a historic reconciliation with the West, and therefore is increasing its hateful rhetoric to show that if a deal is finally signed, it is another big victory on its march towards regional dominance. If it’s not signed, it’s because they stuck to their principles.
(c) The Iranian regime is incompetent, so it doesn’t realize that increasing its hateful rhetoric is not consistent with historic reconciliation with the West.
(d) All that hateful rhetoric was never really serious to begin with, and we’ve been misunderstanding them all these years.
The fate of the coming generation might just rest on answering this correctly.
Luke Ford: None of the above. Iran has fundamental conflicts of interests with some other nations and they will get the bomb no matter what the US or Israel does because they have rational reasons for asserting their power and influence.
Is Iran’s rhetoric any more hateful than the Book of Esther and the festival of Purim when we celebrate the slaughter of 70,000 of our enemies, or the Passover when we celebrate the slaughter of Egypt’s first born, or when we pray in the Amidah, “And for slanderers let there be no hope; and may all Your enemies be cut down speedily. May you speedily uproot, smash, cast, down, and humble the wanton sinners — speedily in our days. Blessed are you, HaShem, Who breaks enemies and humbles wanton sinners”, or when at the end of the morning prayers (Shacharit), we Jews say the Six Remembrances, including:
“You shall remember what Amalek did to you on the way, when you went out of Egypt, how he happened upon you on the way and cut off all the stragglers at your rear, when you were faint and weary, and did not fear G‑d. [Therefore,] it will be, when the L‑rd your G-d grants you respite from all your enemies around [you] in the land which the L‑rd, your G‑d, gives to you as an inheritance to possess, that you shall obliterate the remembrance of Amalek from beneath the heavens. You shall not forget!”?
All strongly identifying tribal groups tend towards negative feelings about out-groups. Why would Iran be at peace with its enemy Israel having nuclear weapons? As surely as Esav hates Yaakov, Yaakov hates Esav.
David Hazony: You know, when you have to go back two to three thousand years to find something as bad as what the Iranians are saying, it makes me think, “Yup, let’s lift those sanctions.”
Luke Ford: Along with a million other Jews, I just prayed this morning for the complete destruction of our enemies in the Amidah. Of course, our enemies are G-d’s enemies.
David Hazony: It strikes me that “believe all rhetoric” was not my point, so I’m not sure what question you think you’re answering. Rather: Judge actions first, and then figure out what the words mean after the fact. One set of rhetoric happens to be backed by (a) military expansionism and the explicit attempts to conquer neighboring regimes; (b) support for terror groups that try to take the rhetoric literally; (c) a human rights record befitting an expansionist totalitarian genocidal political regime; and (d) an explicit connection being drawn between the genocidal rhetoric and the building of a nuclear bomb. The other set is kinda sorta lacking in all that. Don’t you think?
Luke Ford: You make good points. Judge actions first. Iran nor Muslims in general have demonstrated much competency beyond sneak attacks. The last time Iran launched an invasion was in the 17th Century. They’re not exactly a formidable power. They’ve had a nuclear program since the 1950s, so they’re losers aka typically incompetent low IQ Muslims, for not being able to build bombs by now. Israel has the only nuclear program in the Middle East and the most powerful military in the region plus the backing of the USA, so Iran has rational reason to want to develop its own nuclear program. Iran has a human rights record that is common to Muslims with an average IQ of 84. Israel does not boast about using nukes to blow up their enemies, so you make good points. It is obviously in Iran’s interests to get nuclear weapons. It must be unbearable for them that the Jewish state has them and they don’t. How can they live with that humiliation?
“The fate of the coming generation might just rest on answering this correctly.” Which generation? The American? The Israeli one? Iran presents little threat to the USA.
SIRUV ISSUED BY RABBI BELSKYS BEIS DIN AGAINST AISH HATORAH NY (Lefkowitz) SIRUV ISSUED BY RABBI BELSKYS BEIS DIN AGAINST AISH HATORAH NY R Belskys Siruv against Aish
From Wikipedia:
A shtar siruv (also spelled seruv) is a form of contempt of court order issued by a beth din (rabbinical court) in an effort to compel action by an individual.[1]
The siruv has been described as a form of cherem (which combines characteristics of shunning or excommunication) for a party who refuses to appear before a beth din. Under the terms of a siruv, the individual is to be shunned by the community until the terms of the order issued by the beth din are addressed. While most Jewish litigants are adjured from pursuing justice against other Jews in the civil court system, in the case of a siruv, the beth din may permit use of the secular courts by the plaintiff.[2]
Translated:
Relating to the case that Mr. Fetman brought against Aish NY / Greenman / Markowitz
To Whom it may concern,
This Beis Din sent three orders to these individuals and they refused to come to Beis Din. The Beis Din also sent letters to their attorneys compelling them to come to Beis Din in this matter but to our great sorrow they chose not to come to Beis Din, giving excuses that are meaningless and worthless.
All these excuses are deemed nullified and have no value at all.
It is this Beis Din Opinion that these individuals are in Contempt of Beis Din and everything that is written in the Shulchan Aruch (Yoreh Deash 364) is relevant to these individuals and anyone that can pressure them to go back from their evil ways and come to Beis Din should do so and it will be a great merit for them.
Signed
Rabbi Yisroel Belsky
Rabbi Avraham Raataa
Rabbi A. Kirsh
These individuals ignored this Beis Din orders to come to Beis Din and it is shocking that these people who manage such an organization are not following Hallacha and Din Torah.
Signed
R. Yisroel Belsky
R. Yaakov Libman
R. Avraham Raata
UPDATE JULY 22, 2015:
A source emails:
With regards to the allegations against Jacob Fetman, an attorney familiar with the case points out that Justice Demarest in her decision to confirm Rabbi Cohen’s award of $20,000,000 (twenty million dollars), made it clear that she did not review the merits of the case – her focus was to confirm or reject this award. As it is the public policy in NY state to uphold arbitration awards and because of the fact that there were no transcripts of the arbitration sessions (4 sessions totaling 140 minutes) she had no choice but to confirm the award – despite her reservations about Fetman’s allegations of the many violations of his Due Process. For example, in court it was acknowledged that a forensic report, which R’ Cohen bases his award on, was never provided to Fetman and in fact, once the judge ordered Aish to produce it (April 25, 2015 – almost 18 months after the award was issued), it was found to be dated AFTER the last session and on the date of the AWARD. Clearly, there was no chance for Fetman to dispute any of its ‘findings’.
It is note worthy that a criminal complaint which was alleged by Aish against Jacob Fetman is still pending in Brooklyn Supreme court for the alleged theft of $236,000 over five years – Mr. Fetman plead Not Guilty to this allegation and a trial is pending.
While Aish is a wonderful organization, with a very important mission, in court papers it was alleged by Fetman that executive compensation was substantially under reported and disguised as activities. Rabbi Greenman’s compensation over 2012 reported as (aish 990 filing) $101,409 taxable income and an additional $94,000 non taxable income was in fact almost double that. David Markowitz’s taxable compensation of $62,500 with an additional $50,000 non taxable compensation was in fact about $150,000. 2013 reported income for Rabbi Greenman was $118,310 taxable and combined compensation (with non taxable compensation) $216,929. Aish chose not to divulge any other executive compensation.
If the allegation against Fetman is correct – Aish NY, an organization with an internal budget of about $3 million dollars annually could have not “noticed” that $1.2 million annually was being stolen from it?? Why is it that Aish will not submit to examination of the ‘forensic report’ – what was the rush to issue an award when an attorney intervened on behalf of Fetman?
See attached Justice Demarest’s decision that Aish must produce the ‘forensic report’ to Fetman – when it was acknowledged that Fetman never received it. The award was issued 12/17/2013 – This decision by the court is 4/25/2015.
See the attached DA statement – Aish NY used Fetman and Merkaz the Center as a funnel to transfer monies from Project Inspire to Aish NY. Hundreds of thousand of dollars were transferred this way.
Lastly, see Dan Stein’s (Fetman’s original attorney and now the Chief of the Criminal Division at the US attorney General’s Office NY Western District) letter to R’ Cohen right after the award was issued and another letter to Mel Zachter, a noted accountant who agreed to examine the ‘forensic report’ but Aish never agreed.
R. Cohen’s decision states that Fetman took property from Aish which was proven in court that those properties were purchased prior to Fetman even working at Aish. That part of the award was struck out by the judge. The confirmation is pending an appeal.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As a recent article in the Forward states – its well known that Courts rubber stamp arbitration awards. Rabbi Greenman and his excellent attorneys took advantage of this perfectly.
G – Dan Stein letter to R Cohen 12 27 2013 Mel Zachter agreement 5 30 2014 brooklyn DA press release Jacob-Fetman-grand-larceny-indictment decision of judge demarest that aish must get me the report before the beis din session
Forward: Feederal agents raided the offices of a Jewish college that has prospered from millions of dollars in federal aid even though almost all its students live in Israel and hardly any of them graduate.
Federal officials declined to comment on the reason for the July 7 raid at Michigan Jewish Institute, in a suburb of Detroit.
But in 2012, the Forward showed how MJI’s assets soared as the college enrolled thousands of students in distance and online learning courses.
During a five-year period, MJI’s students claimed $25 million under the Federal Pell Grant Program, which is designed for the neediest American students.
