Thane Rosenbaum: Israeli teens who hired strippers after touring Auschwitz hardly match the Nazis’ degradation

This behavior is an insult to Jewish women who are made to feel undesired.

Intermarriage too often begins with a visit to a stripper.

Before visiting Bergen-Belsen, check out the Yelp reviews (all in German). Before visiting the Majdanku death camp, check out the Yelp reviews. Before visiting Auschwitz, check out the Yelp reviews.

If only there had been Yelp in 1943, four million Jews might not have died.

Tim: “I’m sure first lady Eleanor Roosevelt would have posted a selfie in support, and Hitler would have seen the light.”

According to Trip Advisor, the Treblinka Nazi Camps Tour is ranked #26 of 72 activities in Warsaw.

I can’t find any tours of the Katyn Forest massacre site. However, according to Trip Advisor, the “Katyn massacre WWII memorial” is ranked #102 of 156 attractions in Baltimore.

Chaim Amalek: “This could be your calling. As a travel agent specializing in tours of massacre sites. You could have them for Jews, Armenians, Africans, Poles, etc.”

If only Archduke Ferdinand had decided against visiting the scene of his near fatal encounter in 1914, 100,000,000 might not have died.

Thane Rosenbaum — a leading contender to replace Abe Foxman as head of the ADL — writes in the Los Angeles Times:

A group of Israeli teens traveling through Poland on a pilgrimage to major concentration camps spent the night after visiting Auschwitz in their hotel rooms being entertained by Polish strippers–both male and female. Reports throughout Israel were swift and alarmist. The behavior of these kibbutz teens reflected the wider moral decline of Israeli society. No longer a nation of puritanism and self-sacrifice, the Wall in Jerusalem now wails not because of a fallen temple, but because of Wall Street’s corrupting influences in turning Israelis into consumers of pornography and victims of rising crime.

There were other theories offered to explain this embarrassing event. Some argued that this had nothing to do with dishonoring the Holocaust and everything to do with celebrating the hormones. Teenagers so far away from home are bound to have flesh on their minds. Even a visit to Auschwitz isn’t going to turn that off. Indeed, it might have had quite the opposite effect. After all, the camp itself had once been a place where stripping–not for entertainment purposes but as a prelude to death–took place throughout the day with factory precision. Auschwitz may have put an idea into the heads of these teens.

Still others blamed the overbearing presence of the Holocaust itself on a nation that owes its moral survival to the annihilation of European Jewry. The youth of Israel have no doubt become bored and numb with the repetitiveness and dominance of the Shoah in their lives. With slogans like “Never Again” having been rammed down their throats for so long, and Masada complexes burned into their psyches, the Holocaust no longer has emotional resonance for them, whereas Polish strippers, which so few Israeli teenagers have experienced, do.

Others were more sympathetic. Perhaps given all the symbols of mass murder that they had seen in Poland, an entirely different kind of emotional outlet was required in order to deal with such profound feelings of collective loss and grief.

Posted in ADL, Holocaust, Israel, Thane Rosenbaum | Comments Off on Thane Rosenbaum: Israeli teens who hired strippers after touring Auschwitz hardly match the Nazis’ degradation

Defending Sweatshops Is Akin To Defending Prostitution

On May 6, Dennis Prager interviewed Benjamin Powell, Professor of Business at Texas Tech University. His new book is Out of Poverty: Sweatshops in the Global Economy.

Benjamin: “I think conditions are as bad as most people say they are.”

“The goal is improving the welfare of the workers in these third-world countries. What are the means to get there? The means that anti-sweatshops activists have favored would make the lives of the workers worse.”

Dennis summarized conventional thinking: “We in the West are for an ideal and if the third world does not allow for that ideal, let them suffer the consequences.”

“We hurt the third world when we tell them they can’t use carbon-based energy. It just leaves them in poverty.”

People in the third world tend to have low IQs and when you tell them that they can’t sell their bodies for sex, you are condemning them to desperate poverty as they generally don’t have minds and circumstances that can be leveraged for big bucks.

Benjamin: “We’re saying that we won’t trade with them unless they live up to our standards for working conditions and wages. This [conventional] view [against sweatshops] mistakenly thinks that if we don’t trade with them, their lives will be better. Their poverty existed before globalized trade. When these workers choose to work at a sweatshop, they are demonstrating that this is their least bad option. We should be engaged in getting them more options.”

Rationally, these options include prostitution.

Dennis: “The question is if their lives are better because of sweatshops.”

Or prostitution. Or selling their organs. Or doing other things that white and asian people want but don’t want to do themselves.

Benjamin: “Sweatshops are part of the process that leads to better working conditions and better wages.”

According to a common Israeli saying: “African women are the best value for money.”

Posted in Dennis Prager, Prostitution | Comments Off on Defending Sweatshops Is Akin To Defending Prostitution

Jews, Blacks & Race

The things that Donald Sterling said about blacks are common. They go on all the time everywhere there are blacks. Generally speaking, blacks and Jews are at the opposite ends of the social spectrum as Jews tend to have high IQs and blacks tend to have low IQs (according to books such as The Bell Curve). Therefore, associating with blacks is widely seen as slumming for non-blacks, just as light-skinned blacks usually stigmatize association with dark-skinned blacks (aka the brown bag test). Whenever people with dark complexions gain power, particularly in Latin America, they tend to hook up with light-skinned women.

Everywhere in the world, white women are regarded as the most beautiful. When blacks get money and status in America, for instance, they often get white wives. When whites struggle in status in America, they often take on latino or Filipina wives because they can’t get a hot white wife.

Contrary to the dominant narrative, Jewish attitudes to blacks closely resemble traditional Southern attitudes. Perhaps that’s why the media portrays Donald Sterling as a Southerner.

Larry Derfner, a Jewish left-winger, writes about Israel’s every day racism:

Nor was there any blowback whatsoever after Bibi Netanyahu bragged in 2007 that the cuts he’d made to child subsidies had brought a “positive” result, which he identified as “the demographic effect on the non-Jewish public, where there was a dramatic drop in the birth rate.”
Imagine the scandal if an American political leader boasted publicly that his cuts to child subsidies had reduced the “non-Christian” birth rate. Imagine the ADL’s reaction. But in Israel, in 2007, from the mouth of a once-and-future prime minister — nothing.

I bet a major reason most white people want to reduce welfare, affirmative action, set-asides and the like is that it would reduce the demographics of black and brown people, sustaining a white majority for a longer time, but nobody will say this out loud. I agree with Democrats that the Republican platform is covertly about race — discouraging blacks and browns and boosting whites. Tens of millions of Americans don’t like blacks and most of these people vote Republican.
Israel is an ethno-state. Its politics are about promoting Jewish interests. I wish the United States was similarly an ethno-state, promoting the interests of the people who created and sustained it for 200 years until the demographic disaster of non-white immigration over recent decades.
I agree with Larry Derfner’s descriptions of life in Israel but they don’t bother me. I accept that people prefer their own kind and don’t treat out-groups as well as they treat their own group. I don’t expect them to. This is a fact of life and whether races are nice to each other or not, whether they know it or not, they’re engaged in a struggle for scarce resources and one group will always win and the others will lose and possibly be destroyed.

Larry writes:

I’ve lived roughly half my 61 years in the United States, the other half in Israel. There is absolutely no comparison between American tolerance for public displays of racism and Israeli tolerance for it.
I’ve stood in the middle of Israeli crowds chanting “Death to the Arabs.” I’ve sat in a Tel Aviv soccer stadium watching and listening to an entire section of fans erupt in monkey sounds – “Hoo, hoo, hoo!! Hoo, hoo, hoo!! – after a black player on the visiting team scored a goal.
A few liberals and a few do-gooders and a few journalists wring their hands. But the racists in the street, the synagogues, the Knesset and the government go on doing their thing.
Does this mean all Israelis, or even most of them, are racists? No. Does it mean Israeli society, by commission and omission, encourages racism? Oh, yes. To a degree that would be unthinkable in the United States.
And the leaders of the U.S. Jewish establishment, Israel’s most valued, devoted, determined friends, keep pouncing on every untoward or conceivably untoward remark about Jews or the Jewish state. Yes, the ADL will send out a press release about its “concern” over the “inappropriate” remarks made by some relatively minor Israeli figure.
But it never hits hard at the major figures. It said nothing last week about Bennett or Lau. The ADL goes after anti-Semitism with a fist, it goes after Israeli racism with a sigh.
As a matter of fact, the ADL and the entire American Jewish establishment should suspend their campaigns against anti-Semitism indefinitely and take a look at what’s going on in Israel.

I can’t recall the Museum of Tolerance speaking out much against this racism in Israel. Perhaps you can correct me?

Generally speaking, American Jewish intellectuals, primarily of the left, have no problem lambasting white Americans for racism but this racism is just as present with Jews, who generally get a free pass in the media because we Jews, to a significant degree, own and control the media. See Donald Sterling’s remark: “I’m not a racist. I’m a Jew!”

The more secure the Jew, the more rooted he is in Judaism rather than in goyisha values, the more he feels safe and among kin, the more free he feels to say things that would conventionally be described as racist and bigoted (but really are simply commonsense). Compare the racial attitudes of Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn to the expressed attitudes of Reform Jews in Manhattan or Beverly Hills.

Shmarya Rosenberg, the Failed Messiah blog, hates Orthodox Jewish racism. He writes:

That rosh yeshiva who fathered the child out of wedlock at 17? I know of another rosh yeshiva who did the same – except his wife / live in girlfriend was not Jewish. In fact, she was an African American Christian. This guy was a Chabad hasid, and the Rebbe sent Rabbi Hodokov to fetch the guy and bring him to the Rebbe. The Rebbe convinced the future rosh yeshiva to abandon his wife and child and return to Chabad. I’m told he never saw that child again. He married a Chabad woman who is to this day extremely racist as are her children. These children – now married adults – may not–even realize where their mother’s racism comes from.

Should I report the story in full? Should I give his name?

I choose not to do it. For years I did not tell or write the story. But there is a purpose to telling it even in this edited form. Chabad is inherently racist. Its theology demonizes blacks (more on this in another post soon) and it calls for complete abandonment of non-Jewish children fathered by Jewish men.

I know a Chabad rabbi who, before he was Orthodox fathered a child with his non-Jewish wife. The rabbi has been a Chabad hasid for 20 or more years and by rabbinical advice (I believe from the Rebbe) has no contact with his first (non-Jewish) child.

Fathering children means accepting responsibility for those children. Children need financial security, protection and parental love.

Instead, based on a Chabad hasidic teaching, Chabad rabbis are known to tell fathers of non-Jewish children to pray for those children’s deaths.

(To PC this up, sometimes these rabbis say to pray that the non-Jewish children choose on their own to convert to Orthodox Judaism. To their credit, most Chabad rabbis wisely avoid the subject altogether.)

It takes a certain type of cultlike personality to abandon your small child on the orders of a rabbi. Of course, it’s that same type of cultlike personality that allows Chabad to send rabbis to tiny outposts all over the world.

Wikipedia notes:

The widely publicized lynching of Leo Frank, a Jew, in Georgia in 1915 by a mob of southerners caused many Jews to “become acutely conscious of the similarities and differences between themselves and blacks” and accelerated the sense of solidarity between Jews and blacks,[6] but the trial also pitted Jews against blacks because Frank’s defense attorneys tried to ascribe guilt to a black janitor, Jim Conley, and called Conley a “dirty, filthy, black, drunken, lying, nigger.”

In the early 20th century, Jewish daily and weekly publications were preoccupied with violence against blacks, and often compared the anti-black violence in the South to pogroms—this preoccupation was motivated by principles of justice, and by a desire to change racist policies in United States.[8] During the first few decades of the 20th century, the leaders of American Jewry expended time, influence and their economic resources for black endeavors—civil rights, philanthropy, social service, organizing—and historian Hasia Diner notes that “they made sure that their actions were well publicized” as part of an effort to demonstrate increasing Jewish political clout.

Who does that sound like? Wanting to publicize his good deeds to increase his political clout? Donald Sterling. This is a very Jewish approach. Jews are rarely abashed at receiving honor.

Steve Sailer wrote:

To quantify the statement that “Jews are a small group, but influential in their areas of concentration,” in 2009, the Atlantic Monthly came up with a list of the top 50 opinion pundits: half are of Jewish background.

Over 1/3rd of the 2009 Forbes 400 are of Jewish background, according to the Jewish Telegraph Agency’s reporter who covers Jewish philanthropy.

Joel Stein of the LA Times found in 2007 that people of Jewish background hold a large majority of the most powerful positions in Hollywood.

This is not to say that influential Jews are at all united in what they favor. On the other hand, it is more or less true that Jews hold something of a veto over what topics are considered appropriate for discussion in the press, Jewish influence itself being the most obvious example of a topic that is off the table in polite society.

I am not aghast at the following story. These Africans seem to have been treated badly by the Israelis, but if they Israelis had not come at all, the Africans would have been in worse shape. Life is hard when you are a black African and you have a low IQ and your country is filled with blacks with low IQs. There aren’t many good choices for you. These natives would not have been treated much better by any other people. The manner of the mistreatment would have been different according to the culture of the guests.

Here is a translation of a Ma’ariv (Israeli newspaper) article:

In hotel Paradise Mombassa [Kenya], crew members were humiliated by the Israeli tourists, it’s no surprise that even after the 2002 terror attack on the hotel, they refuse to forgive, not Al-Qa’eda but rather us (the Israelis)…

But for many locals, this new business face lift won’t make a big difference, the memory of those very years of total abuse by Israeli tourists and management is not going to fade away. They won’t forget the Israeli guests that sexually assaulted them or were just rude and arrogant. They won’t forget the Israeli management who came along with some bizarre professional demands, failing to pay their monthly wages on time and eventually just stopped paying altogether…

The Israeli client reacted enthusiastically, at the end of the day it was: a beautiful hotel offering sunny beaches at the time of the Israeli winter, complete with a flourishing cheap sex industry and just four and a half hours’ flight time from Tel Aviv…

Three years later, the humiliating practice is left like an open wound in the memory of the female hotel crew veterans. Once a week, just when the Israelis where checking out on their way back to the airport, a bell rang. ‘Get ready, the guest are leaving,’ announced the head of the entertaining team, frantically chasing the female crew. They were all ordered to gather near to the entrance gate and to chase the leaving busses while weeping desperately in front of the Israelis. Once they caught up with the busses they would bang on its metal frame with tears dropping from their eyes.

“It was a bizarre order,” giggled Saline Aching, the chief masseuse. “We were told to chase the bus, to sing and cry so the guests would know that we love them and want them to come back. I remember myself running like in a frenzied state, I would hit the bus with my fists shouting to the guests, ‘why do you leave us?’ ‘We miss you’, ‘We love you’. The Israelis would stare at us from the windows, some of them believed us to be genuine, others were shooting us with their video cameras. ”

Rahima Josef Katan: “If you were not crying you may find yourself in danger of losing your job. We were asked to think of something bad that happened to us, so we can cry for real. I didn’t cry.” “I didn’t cry,” Confesses Catherine Khaa, masseuse. “How could I, I didn’t love them at all. I fact I hated them.”

The weekly bus chasing was just one example of the way the staff were supposed to treat the Israeli guests. The principles were obvious: humiliation, stripped of dignity and hard labour. The guidelines were clear: The client is always right, the client must be happy, the client must return. The ones who carried most of the burden were the females amongst the entertainment team. Dorothy Maly recollects that once a week, on the arrival day, five of them would be taken to Mombassa airport. “We used sing to them Jambo Jambo (hello hello) and Evenu Shalom Aleichem. The local Kenyans were sure that we had had lost it but the Israelis were over the moon. They loved noise, once we arrived at the hotel, again we started singing loudly. In the night we were instructed by the manager to scream till the last Israeli leaves the dance floor. If a guest decides not to go to sleep, you were required to stay with him till he quits to his room. We were demanded to produce noise almost 24 hours a day. When we took a break, the manager would come and bark: ‘What’s the matter with you, do you fall asleep? I will cut your wage, move on…’.”…

“There were religious Jews who couldn’t sign the room service notes on the Jewish Sabbath. We would then keep a note with their room number attached to their bill. Once Sabbath was over, some of them would just refuse to pay. They would argue that we invented it all, ‘you forged our signatures’, they would say. The management would always believe them and expect us to cover their bills. I just couldn’t believe that humans can behave as such.”…

Mali, a dancer: “Saline, the chief masseuse would give us a shout when too many Israelis wanted a massage at the same time. At the time I knew nothing about massage. There was a woman that was brought over by the hotel’s rabbi and she was supposed to teach us. After a short instruction of five minutes I was apparently ready to have a go.”

In order to maintain ‘authentic African spirit’ the staff was obliged to put on very minimal clothes. Unlike the other hotels in the vicinity, where men were serving in uniform, in Paradise Mombassa the male crew were walking around half naked and with bare feet. The females were allowed just a minimal fabric on their breasts and pubes. “Even when temperatures dropped we were not allowed to cover ourselves.” Marci Mawagambo Aching said: “Sulami wanted us to look ‘authentic’ so when you walk around, the guests can check you out for the night. You must be attractive so they re-book another holiday. It was horrible, but what can you do? I needed the money. One of the Israeli female managers told us that we better follow Sulami’s orders, if he wants us too look like Africans, we better look like ones.”…

“All day long I heard the guests shouting Akol Kalul,” says Josef Katan. “Some of them held me by my arm and shouted at me Akol Kalul. Even on the beach they would just shout to passing people Akol Kalul, Akol Kalul. I would then ask them what that ‘Akol Kalul’ means? They would answer, ‘everything, even you’. I used to tell them that I am not Sulami’s property. He owns the hotel but not me. I thought to myself, “God, do they behave as such in their own country?”

In the best case scenario, the Akol Kalul was practiced in the free buffet bar materialising into gigantic chunks of meat put on a single plate. In the worst case scenario, it found its way into the massage room. Needless to say, not even one guest evaded his right to be massaged. Aching says, “The first thing the male guests did upon arrival, even before they unloaded their suitcases in the rooms, they would sprint to the massage room. They would enter the hotel with their eyes wide open asking, ‘where is the massage room?’ I used to plan the daily schedule, there was a competition amongst them who is going to get there first.

Mali: “My role was to tell them: ‘I am Dorothy and I am a masseuse in the hotel’ as soon as I mentioned it they would scream ‘massage, massage’. Most of them couldn’t speak English. They would just say, ‘I come now.’ A tourist from another country would wait even two weeks but in Paradise they wanted it all right on the spot. Sometimes, even before breakfast. Someone would come and tell you, ‘I come for a massage akol kalul, if you don’t do akol kalul, I take another masseuse’.”

“They would say: “I want Harpaya, (ejaculation), I would then ask what this Harpaya means and they would answer, ‘not only harpaya but we want it ‘all inclusive’, full sex.’ I used to tell them that we don’t do it and he would reply, ‘Read my lips, ‘the women are all included’, the salesman in Tel Aviv promised us that it’s Akol Kalul!’ Sometimes one of the female managers would suggest for to us to follow the guests’ demands just as a guarantee that they would come back.”

Katherine Kaha, a masseuse, confesses that she had to follow the demands… “I would start doing a massage, and then the man would tell me, ‘do it all over, you must do it’. In case I wouldn’t they would complain to the management. I didn’t like it at all but I did it. They would give me $1 sometimes two, I felt horrible.”

A frequent Israeli guest to the hotel: “There was always this problem with the massage, the Israelis used to abuse the girls to the very limit. It was appalling and it gave Israel a bad name. There were some groups I was really embarrassed to stand near to. They were so bossy and arrogant, they did whatever they liked, and just had good time.”

“One of the Israelis told me,” says Rahima, “you know Rahima, last night they provided me with a little baby girl, only 13 years old, I fucked her and gave her $5 just because she was penniless.” I then asked him, “Wasn’t she the age of your granddaughter?” He didn’t answer. On the same night he might as well have come back to the hotel shouting, ‘African women are the best value for money.’ Let me tell you, here in Africa, it isn’t that common that once you sleep with a woman you go and inform the rest of the world about it. But the Israelis kept it all open, they used to say about us: Mechona Tova, Mechona Tova (Good machine, Good machine).”

The passion for sex wasn’t only restricted to the massage rooms and wasn’t solely the business of the single male guests. It was rather prohibited to let local girls into the hotel. But a solution was found, just across the road, again in an Israeli partnership, a motel named Calypso was founded. This was where Israelis were hanging around in the nights. “Men used to come to our rooms asking us to go out with them,” tells Josef Katan, “but the worst happened in the morning when they shared the details of last night’s affairs with the entire dining room. They used to shout things like ‘ha, I went with her, I fucked and fucked and fucked her all night long and all for less than one dollar’. We understood exactly what they were talking about. When the first group arrived, I was telling myself that surely the second group would be better. But it was exactly the same. From tine to time they used to ask for room service, once the room service crew would enter their room, they would try to touch her. The waitresses were horrified, they never wanted to go with food to the rooms, but my personal case was different, they were afraid of me because I was rude to them. They used to call me ‘big ass’. This was Ok, it is better being ‘big ass’ rather than being their sex slave.”

“Even the married men used to find some ways to the girls’ rooms. For instance, one told his wife, ‘go to the dining room, I will be right there with you.’ Apparently he disappeared till the morning after. In the morning we were witnessing the woman screaming at her husband during breakfast. Once a man replied to his wife, ‘the women in Kenya are so great, they have a small hole, unlike you having such a silly big one’. All that at breakfast, in the dining room, in public. When the animosity went wild we always rushed to bring the hotel’s Rabbi in, he would do his best to make peace. Sometimes, the men used to sit in the dining room while the donkeys were having sex outside. As soon as the Israelis noticed the donkeys’ activity they would stand up and show their support: ‘good, good, good, forward, backward, good. good’.”

“Occasionally, one would come to me telling me in front of everyone else. ‘I will take Viagra and after that I will have the power to fuck. By the way, what’s your name?’ I would say Rahima. ‘Good, Rahima. I want to fuck you today!’” I asked myself what is going on. One guest asked me, ‘do you know Chartie? I went with her to the disco, I fucked her but she wasn’t good at all. Originally I planed to give her $10 but eventually I gave her $1 only. He was shouting like a madman and then Chartie arrived in the room. He then pointed at her with his finger and shouted ‘here she is, it was her’.”

Karen Tiglo, a room cleaner: “We couldn’t figure out whether the Israelis were wild animals or human beings. They would all the time offer me $10. I felt so humiliated. After a while they would know who amongst the female crew were desperate for money and would just go for them. Stela Matawa, a waitress: from time to time, a man would approach me abusively, in case I would refuse, the man would come to the dining room and shout, ‘leave out this girl she is crap, I took her to the room and she was useless’.”

Katherine Kaa experienced an especially traumatic event when a seventy-year-old man decided that he was in love with her. “I didn’t love him at all,” she says. “We went out to a discothèque, I was sure that I was just escorting him to assist him killing his boredom. On the way back, he and the taxi driver tricked me, rather than driving back to the hotel, we arrived at a place that hires rooms for the night. Violently, he tried to force me to sleep with him. But I couldn’t. When we went back to the hotel he told me that never wanted to see me again. And he would report to the management that I wasted his money without giving a thing back. After my refusal was reported, the hotel manager dismissed me for two weeks.”

According to a few of the crew members, not only did the Israeli management fail to denounce, some of the managers actually joined the party (their names are kept with the editors of the newspaper). Raymond, “At the time one of the managers learned to enjoy the massages. He started to demand: ‘do it here, here and there’ just like one of the guests. Another manager would pick girls from the entertainment team, he would say, ‘after all, I am a manager, no one would ask you where were you going.’ I had to accept it although it was rather horrible. The day after when he would pass by me, he would hardly acknowledge me. Every time, after our performances, one dancer would disappear into one of the manager s’ offices. The girls were afraid that this might be a professional issue to do with their performance but then, once in the manager’s office, they realised what it was all about.”

Posted in Blacks, Donald Sterling, Israel, Jews, Race | Comments Off on Jews, Blacks & Race

I’ve Been Using Food To Combat Anxiety

So on Sunday afternoon, I spent over an hour trying to figure out how I would get to and from the airport for my trip to Australia May 25 – June 13. I used to be fine spending $30 on a taxi, but I’m not fine with that anymore, so I checked out Uber and it appears to be about $20. I tried to download the app to my Blackberry but that wouldn’t work.

I went online and tried to figure out the bus schedule. This would only cost a $1.50, but I hate riding the bus (and this trip would require three transfers). I’ve only done it twice in LA, both times in 1994, and I don’t want to do it again, but I don’t want to waste $25 on a taxi or Uber and I don’t want to ask a friend.

I felt bad I wasted over an hour trying to figure out this stuff. Real life is not my strong suit and struggling with it raises my anxiety when I don’t have spare cash. So I ate an early dinner and by the time I was done eating, all of my anxiety had gone away and I was fine with the prospect of taking the bus, even though it required three transfers and I’d probably have to sit next to a bunch of losers.

I was struck by how food took away my anxiety. Maybe I have an over-eating addiction? I’ve always loved to stuff myself, usually with healthy food, but still, I was stuffing myself because that changed my emotional state.

So I downloaded a bunch of Overeaters Anonymous lectures and found that they speak to me as much as lectures on under-earning or love addiction or porn addiction. Wow. I have multiple addictions and just working one particular 12-step program doesn’t fix your other stuff.

I’ve long loved to pig out on my desires. When I was a kid, I’d sneak into the kitchen and eat sugar by the spoonful until my dad caught me one afternoon and I got so scared that I never did that again. I got a little older, my deepest yearnings moved from food to something more racy.

Other addictive techniques I’ve used to ease my anxiety include religious and intellectual extremism, exercising to exhaustion and working till I dropped.

I tend to eat the same things. For the past 17 years, I’ve been starting my day with a protein smoothie. Right now it is a frozen banana, two cups of water and some protein powder. Then I’ll either have half a bowl of cottage cheese or a bowl of oatmeal. For lunch, I’ll have a cup of oatmeal. And for dinner I’ll have another protein smoothie, two kashi peanut butter granola bars and two mangoes.

I’ve never been a snacker. That was a big sin my upbringing.

I always feel stronger after eating, more ready to wrestle with the tasks in front of me. I have more will-power.

The 12-step message, “You’ve got a disease, it’s not your fault”, sounds ludicrous to outsiders and it can certainly be abused, but it makes it easy for addicts to seek help and to work the program to recovery. For most of my life, I looked down on this message. I was wrong. I was able to get help when I realized that how things sound is not as important as how they work.

Michael Fumento: “Sorry, but cancer and flu are diseases. Drinking is a choice and it is the drinker’s fault. The answer isn’t avoiding blame; it’s accepting responsibility.”

Yes, and that attitude has worked so well for millions of people. Look at how wonderfully your life has turned out with this righteous approach. And yet the 12-step approach has worked well for millions of people too. What is objectively true is sometimes less important for an individual than what works for him. Lots of things sound absolutely bonkers and yet they can help you lead a better life.

Michael Fumento: Luke, you may be right. It has progressively become more common in America to deny responsibility for one’s actions, thus those who accept responsibility may be at a disadvantage. Like the politician who says “mistakes were made” versus “I blew it.” Shirk responsibility for that which you’ve done wrong; take credit for that which you had nothing to do with and you’ll probably go far.

Likewise, a major blow in my life was a wife who took that attitude first and then used it to justify her drinking, thus ending the marriage. Shirkers are parasites, and parasites often do quite well for themselves even as they sicken or kill the host body. That’s what’s happening nationally as well, Americans each year placing heavier financial burdens on the Americans from the years to come. Capitalism is out; cronyism and parasitism is in. But it IS sickening and killing the host body. The economy shrank last quarter and real unemployment was the second highest in US history.

Thus a formula which works for the individual is very bad for society.

Matiyahu, yes alcohol is addictive but that doesn’t make alcoholism a disease. It’s apples and oranges. 12-step programs call it a disease even as they say they exist to help the individual stop. There’s nothing you can do as an individual to stop a true disease. Therefore, alcoholism IS a choice. To the extent we pretend otherwise, we help no one. Moreover, nobody wakes up an alcoholic. There’s always a pre-addiction phase during which they could have stopped relatively easily but simply chose not to.

Posted in Addiction, Personal | Comments Off on I’ve Been Using Food To Combat Anxiety

Donald Sterling: ‘I’m Not Racist, I’m A Jew!’

Donald Sterling is not the first one to use this defense. Such Jews define chutzpah. Yes, it is common for Jews to believe that they cannot be racist because they do not belong to the oppressive white power structure. Jews will widely condemn Sterling for this remark but that’s just what we say publicly. Privately, I suspect many, if not most Jews, do not believe they can be racist.

I hear very few Jews worry about being racist. Secular Jews may worry about appearing racist but no traditional Orthodox Jew worries about that.

Chaim Amalek: Valid? Who cares! It is the sort of thing one expects to be put forth these days. Of course, his better argument is “It was a private conversation and none of your business. How would you like it if your private conversations were made public? How many of you would survive such scrutiny?”

Daily Mail: The tape was released to Radar Online and the friend signed an affidavit saying that Sterling is the other voice on the recording.
‘I grew up in East L.A…. I was the president of the high school there. I mean, and I’m a Jew! And 50 per cent of the people there were black and 40 per cent were Hispanic,’ Sterling says.
‘So I mean, people must have a good feeling for me.’

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America’s Insane Debates

From mindbodypolitic.com:

1. A woman has the absolute right to kill her baby until the moment it exits her uterus. She can also dismember it and torture it by burning it with saline fluid, plucking off its limbs, crushing its bones, or sucking its brains out.

These actions are guarded ferociously as her “right to privacy” by the entire intellectual establishment that silently blacks out or distorts descriptions of these killings. Some 50 million babies have been killed in the past few decades but this holocaust is left to private conscience only. Women or their doctors are not punished for it at all. In fact, they’re applauded and public funding is used to pay for it, even while that part of the public that doesn’t go along with abortion is demonized.

2. An eighty-year-old man makes a few untoward remarks to a girlfriend in the privacy of their bedroom. The tapes are recorded. and published. He is denounced as a disgusting racist with no right to his opinions and he is deprived of his property rights.

Leading “libertarian” activists say nothing or defend the media’s position. They tell people they ought not to say anything in private they can’t say in public. This is a thought-control much greater than that under Sharia law, which all these activists would denounce, correctly. None of them sees the contradiction.

3. The same people attack anyone who criticizes a paid porn performer for her consciously public acts. They argue that she has a right to privacy even though she sold her porn pictures to a public company voluntarily.

With equal confusion, recording the private sexual behavior of Tyler Clementi (the gay Rutgers freshman who committed suicide) is a vicious assault on his privacy and dignity (it is), but recording the speech of a Donald Sterling is a righteous act of public policing (it is not).

5. The same critics of Sterling who believe it is legitimate for him to lose his livelihood over private speech within his bedroom have a fit over the most minor constraint placed on their right to use speech in public to degrade, inflame, incite, defraud, mislead, or titillate.

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Jews & Racism

The principle underlying the Anti-Defamation League and the Museum of Tolerance and Jewish efforts to promote civil rights is that Jews are safer in a nation where racism and bigotry are not acceptable.

Down deep, all of us have a twinge that regards the different as subhuman. All peoples and traditions have varying degrees of hostility to outsiders. The Aleinu prayer in Judaism contains the line: “For they worship vanity and emptiness, and pray to a god who cannot save.”

If people are honest, they’ll admit that they find other people’s religions weird and disturbing. Jews find Christianity distasteful, Christians regard Jews as bad for rejecting Jesus, Muslims like to slaughter non-Muslims, etc. Whether we like it or not, we all prefer to live, work, socialize and worship with people who are genetically similar to us, and for all our rhetoric against racism, very few people enjoy most of their interactions with different races. There’s inherently tension and often conflict and tragedy to interracial relations. When I fly into Australia and all the custom officers are white as opposed to dominantly black in America, I feel much greater comfort because I am white and I prefer my own kind just like everybody else. When I go to the DMV or to the Post Office and most of the employees are black, I don’t feel great joy in my heart. My interactions with the Post Office and DMV are frequently exasperating. I generally get along better with my own kind.

I remember accompanying a friend into a strange building at UCLA in 1989. When we came out, I said, “What is that place? It smells bad.” She laughed. It turned out to be the financial aid building and let’s just say that the mix of races that frequented that building weren’t exactly the same as the student body.

The different races often smell differently and don’t like the smell of those who are different. The Japanese, for instance, often don’t like the smell of Caucasians. Asians and Caucasians tend to have different diets and they smell different. Some Seventh-Day Adventist churches used to seat blacks and whites in different sections and each side thought the other group smelled bad. Most people are happier when they lead a segregated life. Black neighborhoods, for instance, don’t want whites and latinos and asians moving in.

Any group that stands for something is going to discriminate. The more standards you uphold, the more discriminating you are going to be. So Orthodox Jews are going to inherently be more discriminating than secular Jews because they have more laws, practices and beliefs to uphold that go against the majority population. Orthodox Jews are the least interested of all Jews in promoting civil rights. Generally speaking, the traditional Orthodox Jew does not care about rights for blacks, latinos, Muslims, gays, etc.

While the literal meaning of the word “goy” is nation, when it is used in Jewish life most of the time, in my experience, it means something negative. Jews have survived as a distinct people for millenia by continually defining themselves against the majority population, as in, “That’s goyish” and “That’s Jewish!”

In all forms of tribal life, be it black or Muslim or gay or Chinese or Mexican-American, the members of the tribe are expected to put the interests of their tribe ahead of everyone else. The more traditional the form of tribal life, the more you will find hostility toward outsiders.

I found interesting the reactions of Jewish leaders to Donald Sterling’s putative racism. If Donald Sterling said things against non-Jews, would that have been condemned? As Israel sends illegal immigrants back to Africa, do mainstream Jewish organizations such as the ADL and the MOT condemn this as racism? I don’t think they should condemn it. I think American should emulate it. But I don’t think anyone should be condemned for racism. Preferring your own kind is healthy and that goes equally for Jews and non-Jews.

Wilmot Robertson wrote in his book The Dispossessed Majority: “The more minority influence has been brought to bear on the American legal system, the more its breakdown is becoming apparent. The English common law, which derived from Northern European folk law, functioned adequately, at times superbly, in the United States as long as the nation was dominated by people of English and Northern European descent. But when minorities became an important element in both the law-making and the law- breaking process, American law underwent a deep transformation.”

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Assignment Questioning Holocaust Resolved by Rialto Unified School District

On his radio show today, Dennis Prager called this assignment “scary” and the solution (required sensitivity training) “frightening.”

Dennis noted that the principal (Mohammad Z. Islam) is Muslim and that Holocaust denial is rampant in the Muslim world.

Dennis: “The issue is not sensitivity. The issue is truth.”

Deborah Lipstadt writes: “The Rialto school district says it plans to respond by offering sensitivity training and even quoted George Santayana: “Those who cannot learn from history are bound to repeat it.” But these teachers don’t need sensitivity training. Sensitivity is not what was missing here. These teachers were not “insensitive” to the victims of the Shoah or to Jews. They were just wrong. Critical thinking and a basic understanding of what happened in Europe 70 years ago are clearly in very short supply throughout the ranks of teachers and administrators involved in this fiasco. What they really need are history lessons.”

Rabbi Eliyahu Fink wrote on Facebook:

Surely, you heard about the critical thinking assignment asking students to write a paper arguing that the Holocaust took place or denying it took place. The assignment itself establishes that its position that there was a Holocaust.

The ADL emailed the school about this Holocaust assignment, the school revised it, and that should be the end of the story. In their own words: “ADL does not have any evidence that the assignment was given as part of a larger, insidious, agenda. Rather, the district seems to have given the assignment with an intent, although misguided, to meet Common Core standards relating to critical learning skills.”

But let’s commence the thought-pieces and handwringing anyway.

Daniel Oppenheimer: Maybe the next assignment should be drawing a picture of Muhammed and an essay exploring both sides of the arguments for why he was or wasn’t a pedophile.

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Gone Tribal

There’s nothing so beautiful that it cannot be perverted and debased and ultimately used for evil.

Love is great, but sometimes love leads to murder. Marriage is great, but sometimes marriage leads to murder. Religion is great, but sometimes religion leads to murder. Torah is great, but studying Torah sometimes makes people worse.

One painfully accurate description of me is “Torah weirdo.” That’s more of a reflection on me than it is on Torah.

Judaism is great, but the type of person who wants to convert to a religion is usually neurotic and unstable. Example one — me.

I discovered Judaism through listening to Dennis Prager on the radio when I went to UCLA in 1988. One thing that I loved about Prager was that unlike all of the serious Christians I knew, he didn’t regard the sins I wanted to commit as immoral, only as unholy. The other Jews I met held similar views.

Prager was a great bloke. He even enjoyed a little porn now and again.

A 1996 poll of Jewish attitudes showed that, in the words of Norman Podhoretz, “Jews are firmly committed to permissive social codes, sexual codes in particular. The gap between Jews and others in polls regarding non-marital sexual behavior, marijuana, and divorce laws is quite substantial: 58 percent of Jews had liberal responses on these items as opposed to just 31 percent of non-Jews. In like fashion, huge gaps separate Jews from others on abortion (86 percent vs. 44 percent) and control of pornography (71 percent vs. 45 percent).”

So I decided to convert to Judaism. In a way, it was like being reborn. Most of my ties to the goyim were weakened when I converted to Judaism in 1993 and I developed ties to Jews. From my neurotic unstable insecure place, I started taking on a tribal mentality. I thought first and foremost about Jews but all of my thinking was shot filled with my flawed psychology. I started worrying about another Holocaust. I got ready to get while the getting was good because Jewish history taught me that things could shift at any time. What the majority of the population thought about things stopped concerning me so much. I was looking for a niche where I could make myself great. Jews are like most people in most things but Jews do put a higher premium on social and economic success.

When I decided to write a book on porn in 1995, I figured it would be a stepping stone to a brilliant writing career. That the goyim would despise me for this didn’t matter so much. That Orthodox Jews would despise me for this didn’t matter so much. I was a rebel. I knew better.

At the time, my ties to my family and to my old friends and communities were weak and my ties to my new Jewish friends and communities were not strong. I was in no man’s land. Part of me was still goyish and part of me was Jewish. Part of me was holy and part of me was not. Guess which part won out?

I discovered that Jews were more calm about the natural passions for things such as sex, money, power. My choices were not unfathomable to my Jewish friends because they knew other Jews who’d made similar ventures. What two years ago would have seemed impossible to me suddenly became possible. I began doing what I wanted (indulging my passions).

As the years went by and I became more immersed in traditional Jewish life, I stopped interviewing porn stars in 2007. Orthodox Judaism has a strict moral code and the stuff I was doing was incompatible with that. It wasn’t theory that changed me as much as developing ties to real people and to real community. “Judaism” as a religion and “values” are all fine and good, but Yiddishkeit is concrete. You don’t have as much room to do your own thing once you join a distinct community. Then you’re accountable to real people.

It’s like the difference between what passes for conservatism today and paleoconservatism. Chilton Williamson, Jr. defined paleoconservatism as “the expression of rootedness: a sense of place and of history, a sense of self derived from forebears, kin, and culture—an identity that is both collective and personal.”

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Jews, Gypsies And The Overseas Chinese

Kevin MacDonald writes:

Gypsies are the opposite of Jews: a low-investment, low-IQ reproductive style characterized by higher fertility, earlier onset of sexual behavior and reproduction, more unstable pair bonds, higher rate of single parenting, shorter interval of birth spacing, higher infant mortality rate, and higher rate of survival of low birth weight infants…

Both the Jews and the Overseas Chinese are highly intelligent and entrepreneurial, but the Overseas Chinese have not formed a hostile cultural elite in Southeast Asian countries, where they have chiefly settled, and have not been concentrated in media ownership or in the construction of culture. We do not read of Chinese cultural movements disseminated in the major universities and media outlets that subject the traditional culture of Southeast Asians and anti-Chinese sentiment to radical critique, or of Chinese organizations campaigning for the removal of native cultural and religious symbols from public places. Slezkine paints Jews as deeply involved in the construction of culture and in the politics of the host societies, but the role of the Chinese was quite different. The following passage describing the political attitudes of the Overseas Chinese in Thailand could never have applied to Jews in Western societies since the Enlightenment:

“But few seem to know or indeed to care about the restrictions on citizenship, nationality rights, and political activities in general, nor
are these restrictions given much publicity in the Chinese press. This merely points up the fact, recognized by all observers, that the overseas
Chinese are primarily concerned with making a living, or amassing a fortune, and thus take only a passive interest in the formal political life
of the country in which they live.”

Chaim Amalek writes: “He’s not 100% right. He reminds me of Marxists who think their boy has cracked the code of history and figured it all out. Life is more complicated than that. Can’t blame yidden for the weakness of goyim in throwing open their borders and inviting in Somalis. It was WASPS who did that. And it was Ted (Not a Jew) Kennedy who threw open our national borders 50 years ago. It was Ronald (Not a Jew) Reagan who granted amnesty to millions of illegals 30 years ago. And the british elites who imported all those Jamaicans and Pakis — Church of England every last one of them. It wasn’t Yidden who said “Hey UK, what we really need here are millions of Paki immigrants to spicen things up.” As an aside, I suspect that once you are in the land of the Southern Cross, your heritage will further assert itself. As it so obviously already has begun to.”

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