The Gallant Hours

Posted on May 3, 2011 by Luke Ford

I watched this movie the other night. “The Gallant Hours is a 1960 American biopic docu-drama about Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey and his efforts in fighting against Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto and the forces of Imperial Japan in the Guadalcanal campaign in World War II.”

There’s a scene early in the movie where an aide to Yamamoto gets a message he thinks unimportant. When the message accidentally lands on the desk of the great admiral, he reads it and sees that it has great importance and he dispatches fighter planes to shoot down Halsey.

That made me think of Dennis Prager. He sees significance in many things that I think are of no importance — such as the public cursing by Donald Trump this weekend.

This attention to detail is what separates the great from the merely ambitious.

Posted in Dennis Prager | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on The Gallant Hours

I Want To Connect To My Deepest Purpose

Posted on May 3, 2011 by Luke Ford

I want to make it big. I want to be huge. I want to feel full of purpose and passion. I want to get up every morning eager to tackle the day. I want to see the path ahead and I want to feel confident that I can navigate the way. As long as I have the why, I can figure out the how.

I generally connect to my deepest purpose through God. He helps me feel passionate. If I feel like I am doing God’s will, then I feel full and strong and driven. I like it when I’m doing mitzvahs (divine commandments) and I believe they come from God and that by doing them, I am developing myself in a good direction and I am a blessing to those around me.

Connecting with those around me, that’s probably more important to my happiness than connecting with God. It’s too easy to think you’re connecting to God when you just go off and do your own thing. Connecting to a concrete community of people is more challenging but more rewarding and more Jewish.

I love when I feel part of a community and that I have a role suited to my talents. I love to make a positive difference and to make money doing it by producing a needed service. It’s easy for me to go off on half-baked projects that make me no money and probably do little good for the world.

When have I been happiest? When I was making good money from my writing. When I was doing loads of interviews for my blogs. When I’d go to events and I felt like an important person. I hate waiting around to get into parties. I want to be at the top of the guest list and to have the doors open to me and complimentary drink tickets pressed into my hand.

I love it when I go to daf yomi (Talmud study) every morning and look forward to seeing everyone at shul and to bonding over the study of the sacred text.

I loved running over the hills of Pacific Union College in the Napa Valley, eating up the miles.

I loved it when hot girls kissed me.

I loved being on 60 Minutes and Entertainment Tonight and ABC News.

I loved hanging out at Yamashiros with Cathy Seipp and Heather Mac Donald and Matt Welch and company. I like the cognitive elite. I find their company bracing.

I loved dinner at Eugene Volokh’s.

I love stepping on to college campuses. I grew up there. I always thought I’d be an academic star.

I love a rousing lecture and a good book and a good movie.

I love a passionate conversation.

I love a good turn from an Alexander Technique teacher. I love feeling aligned and poised.

I love it when I can help others achieve alignment and poise through my own teaching of the Technique.

I love to go to synagogues that use musical instruments on Shabbat.

I love celebrating Shabbat and Jewish holidays with people who do it seriously while keeping a twinkle in their eyes.

I was so excited to crest the grapevine in August 1988 as I drove into Los Angeles to start the fall semester at UCLA.

I love it when I can recapture that excitement about Los Angeles, when I can see the city with new eyes, and get that quiver again that I’m in the place to make my dreams come true.

I love the early morning fog flowing in from the coean and the crunch of jacaranda flowers under my foot as I make my way to shul.

I love going out in the evening and smelling the star jasmine.

I love it when words come easy.

Posted in Personal | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on I Want To Connect To My Deepest Purpose

Can We Celebrate The Death Of The Wicked?

Posted on May 3, 2011 by Luke Ford

Here’s a Jewish law perspective on celebrating the death of the wicked.

On his radio show today, Dennis Prager said: “Jews cite a famous statement – do not rejoice at the fall of your enemy. (Avos 4:24)

“Like the Jesus statement to turn the other cheek, these texts deal about your enemy in your personal life. The application of micro into macro is just wrong.

“Bin Laden is not my enemy. He didn’t do anything to me. He’s evil. I wanted Pol Pot dead. He did nothing to me. He only slaughtered Cambodians.

“I hate that mass murderers live.

“The Jews did rejoice at the fall of the Egyptians when they were drowned in the Sea of Reeds. The Jews rejoiced led by Moses. The Jews sang a song unto the Lord. Did the Lord say I don’t like your song? Did He imply it?

“It’s considered one of the epic poems in history.

“There’s a weakening of moral courage and a weakening of the moral compasses of our time, even among conservatives and the religious.”

“You can’t rejoice at the death of Bin Laden? What are you supposed to do? Nobody asked this after WWII. Imagine – Hitler dead, don’t rejoice. Nobody thought that way.”

“If I feel sad about Bin Laden’s death, what do I feel about the death of his victims? If everybody’s death is a tragedy, then there are no tragedies. If everybody’s death is supposed to evoke from me the same emotional and moral response, then everybody’s death is flattened out into some equal plain? Am I allow to cry at the death of his victims but not cry at his death? Isn’t the absence of sadness a form of rejoicing?”

“In WWII, whenever American won a battle, Americans cheered. When America won the war, Americans went wild.”

Proverbs 11:10: “When the righteous prosper, the city rejoices; when the wicked perish, there are shouts of joy.”

From Pragertopia.com:

Prager H1: Dennis talks to David Pryce-Jones, senior editor at National Review and Middle East scholar, about the consequences of Bin Laden’s death. We didn’t get justice. We got vengeance. What’s wrong with that?

Prager H2: Astonishing work by the intelligence community lead us to Bin Laden. The key was identifying one of the two couriers who came in and out of the terrorist’s compound. Did waterboarding play a role?

Prager H3: Should we rejoice over Bin Laden’s death? This has been a question asked by many, both on the Left and the religious Right.

Posted in Dennis Prager | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Can We Celebrate The Death Of The Wicked?

Conspiracy Theories Rife In African-American Community

Posted on May 3, 2011 by Luke Ford

In the Seventh-Day Adventist world I grew up in, conspiracy theories flourished.

I find them rare in Jewish life.

People who feel in charge of their lives are much less likely to believe in conspiracy theories. Happy people don’t.

Here’s an article on conspiracy theories about Osama: Robert Alan Goldberg, a history professor at the University of Utah and the author of “Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America,” explains:

“Eighty percent of Americans, he said, believe that Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy, rather than a lone gunman, as a government commission affirmed. Thirty percent believe the government covered up aliens’ landing in Roswell, N.M., and a third of American blacks believe that government scientists created AIDS as a weapon of black genocide.

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES REPORTS:

Pittsburgh Steelers running back Rashard Mendenhall says he likes to encourage people to think with his statements on Twitter — but who knows what they’re thinking after his controversial tweets concerning the death of Osama bin Laden.

One of Mendenhall’s tweets from Monday read: “What kind of person celebrates death? It’s amazing how people can HATE a man they have never even heard speak. We’ve only heard one side…”

He also commented on the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: “We’ll never know what really happened. I just have a hard time believing a plane could take a skyscraper down demolition style.”

FROM WIKIPEDIA: In Washington, D.C., The Plan is a conspiracy theory regarding control of the city. Theorists insist that whites (Caucasians) have had a plan to “take back” the city since the beginning of home rule in the 1970s, when the city started electing blacks (African-Americans) to local offices.[1][2] The “age-old” theory enjoys considerable, if quiet, support.[3]

Daniel Pipes writes: Conspiracy theories – the fear of nonexistent conspiracies – are flourishing in the United States. Republican, Democratic, and independent presidential candidates espouse them. Growing political institutions (the Nation of Islam, the militias) are premised on them. A majority of Americans say they believe John F. Kennedy was killed not by a lone gunman but by a conspiracy, and a majority of black Americans hold the U.S. government responsible for the spread of drugs. O. J. Simpson famously beat his criminal rap by convincing a jury of a conspiracy theory: that the Los Angeles police framed him. Two young men, their heads spinning with conspiracy theories about Washington taking freedoms away from Americans, blew up a government building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 (including 19 children) and wounding 550.

Posted in Blacks, Conspiracy | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Conspiracy Theories Rife In African-American Community

Travesty-Stan

Posted on May 3, 2011 by Luke Ford

Joe emails: They should rename Pakistan. What a joke. This was an overkill operation given that Osama was in “friendly” hands. If the pakis would have helped or would even have kept their filthy mouths shut, the operation would have gone something like this:

At dawn, pakistani utility worker uniformed/attired us special forces would have appeared with large chemical container trucks, around 1km from osama’s home. There would have been the sound of drilling and lots of pipes in the ground and coming out feeding into the truck. They would be noisy, lots of yelling. All of a sudden, with the special forces taking cover from a short distance, there would have been a very noisy and smelly explosion of the truck, with lots of weird colored smoke coming out and flames everywhere. Maybe even a few flaming mannequin corpses. Shortly thereafter, pakistani marked police cars would have come out with loudspeakers telling people to evacuate the area, the smell would have been overpowering, kind of like tear gas or skunk odor, and anyone with even a half brain would have gotten out of their houses to be evacuated as lots of blaring sirens came in with fire trucks to put out the fire.

Either Osama would have evacuated with the rest of the area, or if he did not, then you would have a team placed there to get him from his compound. Although all of the “actors” in this theater could have been US troops, this would have required at least cooperation with the pakis. If this happened without the Pakistanis in on it, someone would have called the real authorities and skunked the deal. Even if you could only count on tacit support, and the pakis acting stupid, you could have done it without helicopters – you could have gotten Osama as he walked on to a police van to get people the hell out of there.

Obviously, Obama feared the loss of operational security if the pakis were involved at all, and the raid went off like Entebbe with the assumption that the locals would be unfriendly if any attempt was made to secure Osama. The proof of this is that Osama lived in a house that was not wired with explosives at all – Luke Ford has more security in his hovel. And why was he so unprotected living in penthouse arrest? Because he knew that the pakis would never turn him in – he had bankrolled them with bribes and was volunteering his cannon fodder to fight any indian/hindu influences in Afghanistan or in disputed territories.

The bottom line is that the Pakistanis are dangerous to the US. Of course, they hold one card in a very dangerous game of poker, namely, a nuclear arsenal. At some point, one has to wonder why the same Seal team has not been deployed to take away those weapons so that we can clear out any remaining 3 story building in Pakistan where the rest of al Qaeda and mullah omar is hiding.

Posted in Pakistan, Terror | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Travesty-Stan

Trump’s Profane Speech Disqualifies Him From Presidency

Posted on May 3, 2011 by Luke Ford

Dennis Prager writes:

The following comments were made in a public speech last week by a man considering running for president of the United States:
On gas prices: “We have nobody in Washington that sits back and said, ‘You’re not going to raise that f—ing price.'”
On what he would say as president to China: “Listen, you mother f—ers, we’re going to tax you 25 percent.”
On Iraq and America: “We build a school, we build a road, they blow up the school; we build another school, we build another road, they blow them up, we build again. In the meantime, we can’t get a f—ing school in Brooklyn.”
The man is Donald Trump. And the words render him unfit to be a presidential candidate, let alone president. They also render a need for some Republican Party soul-searching as to how a group of Republican women could laugh and cheer at such language coming from a would-be presidential candidate.
On a number of occasions, I have written that the use of expletives in public discourse has been a characteristic of the Left. Public cursing is not an issue to the intellectual and artistic left. They shrug off criticism of such language as antiquated and elitist — not to mention hypocritical, given that prominent conservatives such as former Vice President Dick Cheney and President Bush were both caught using such language.
But there is a world of difference between using an expletive in private and using one in a public speech. For those who do not see the difference, think of the difference between relieving oneself in private and relieving oneself in public. It usually takes a university education and a Leftist worldview not to see the enormous moral distinction between public and private cursing. One affects society, one does not.
I hereby plead guilty to occasionally using an expletive when angry about something particularly vile or, for that matter, in a punch line to an off-color joke — in private to my wife or to friends. Likewise, while I find the vast amount of gratuitous cursing in movies injurious to society, I do not find all such cursing offensive. The use of the F-word in a powerful private moment in the Academy Award-winning film “The King’s Speech” was appropriate and genuinely humorous.
In general, however, the use of such words — whether in public or as a matter of general usage in private — is degrading to the user, to the listener and to society.
As a father, I even banned use of the word “sucks” in general conversation in my home.

Posted in Dennis Prager | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump’s Profane Speech Disqualifies Him From Presidency

Arab World Mourns Osama Bin Laden

Posted on May 3, 2011 by Luke Ford

Dennis Prager interviewed conservative author and Arabist David Pryce Jones (The Closed Circle) today.

Dennis: “Has there been silence from the Arab and Muslim world in reaction to Bin Laden’s death?”

David: “Yes. The Arab world seems to be silent and muted on the question. They are extremely disappointed.

“They feel that a champion of the jihad cause is gone and he is irreplaceable and they are downbeat. The official spokesmen will say that this is the right thing but the people on the street feel that this was a man who stood up to the United States and had a great future. He was presenting to the Arabs a joint united Arab-Muslim effort, a caliphate.”

Dennis: “This is exactly what I believe.”

“What does that do to the claim that Bin Laden is a perverter of Islam and represents only a tiny sliver of the Arab and Muslim worlds?”

David: “He made them feel that it is possible to go back to a pan-Islamic identity. They can’t go back. The world is too modern, moves too fast. He misled. I’m sure he believed that it was possible to unite all the Arabs and put the Christians and Jews in their place — underneath. He represented a fantasy. I’d like to believe that his death represents an end to this fantasy and that we’ll all grow up now.”

“Bin Laden was a would-be dictator and when the dictator is gone, it is hard to keep people together.”

David and Dennis are not optimistic about Egypt.

Dennis: “We’ve been told since 9/11 that Bin Laden represents virtually nobody in the Arab-Islamic world. So wouldn’t you think the Islamic world would say thank God? That somebody who was such a distorter of Islam has met his day of judgment. And we’re not hearing that. That’s very upsetting.”

“If Bin Laden was a perversion of Islam, then why aren’t Islamic societies celebrating the greatest living perverter of their religion? No non-Muslim has done 1/1000th the damage to Islam that Bin Laden did. You’d think every sheikh, every imam, every madrassah would say Allahu Akbar, our perverter is dead.”

Posted in Dennis Prager, Islam, Terror | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Arab World Mourns Osama Bin Laden

Rabbis Warn Against Celebrating Bin Laden’s Death

Posted on May 2, 2011 by Luke Ford

These rabbis evidently get their values more from leftism than from Judaism.

The Jewish tradition celebrates the death of the wicked such as Haman.

I’m embarrassed to have such foolish rabbis in Los Angeles speaking out with such nonsense. If you hate the needless death of innocent people, you have to celebrate the demise of a man dedicated to such an end. If you can’t celebrate his demise, you don’t care much about the death of the innocent on 9/11 and like events.

If you love God, you must hate evil, as the Psalmist said.

Rabbi Rabbs emails:

So, I suppose Talmud got its values from leftism rather than from Judaism, and I suppose you are embarrassed to have the Talmud in Los Angeles, because it says the following:

“Do not celebrate over the downfall of our enemy” (Avos 4:24)

Also, we don’t actually celebrate the death of Haman. Instead, we celebrate that the Jews weren’t annihilated. Haman did not die at Purim time. He had been executed a year earlier on Pesach, and we do not celebrate that with a party.

Rabbi David Wolpe reacted to Osama Bin Laden’s death this way: “Yesterday, Yom Hashoah, Bin Laden was killed. The proper reaction is sobriety, not revelry. This is a time to remember those who died, pray for those who fight, meditate anew on wickedness and redouble our dedication to justice.”

According to the Jewish Journal:

“It felt like people were celebrating a football victory, and it seemed to be, while understandable, not something you cheer about, any more than people would cheer when a killer is executed. A grim satisfaction is understandable, but cheering not so much,” Wolpe said.

…Brous quoted a rabbinic midrash where God rebukes the angels for rejoicing after the Egyptian army was caught in the receding waters after the splitting of the Red Sea. “ ‘How dare you dance and sing as my children drown in the Sea?’ God rebukes them (Megillah 10b),” Brous wrote in a letter to congregants. This idea is why we spill a drop of wine for each of the ten plagues.

Posted in Rabbis | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Rabbis Warn Against Celebrating Bin Laden’s Death

Taking Back Shaarei Tefila?

Posted on May 2, 2011 by Luke Ford

Allan N. Lowy, Richie Katz, Motty Naor and Emil Fish, Past Presidents of Congregation Shaarei Tefila ([email protected]) email: Dear Members, Former Members, Future Members, Stakeholders and Friends:

The time has come to take back our Shul from a cabal that has hijacked our Shul for their own purposes. They have a personal agenda that is inconsistent with that of a centrist Orthodox Shul. They have withdrawn our Shul from the OU, the RCC and similar community organizations such that Shaarei Tefila has become the pariah of the community, if not the laughing stock of Los Angeles. In the meantime our current president resigned last week, and the previous president who has been “running” our Shul does not even daven with us on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Indeed, last week that previous president pushed through a board resolution, in violation of the by-laws, that prohibits anyone from joining or re-joining the shul at this time so that he can protect the fraudulently elected current board.

While there are rabbinical candidates who are interested in leading our Shul, in the end they have all expressed the idea that until Shaarei Tefila rejoins the organized community they could not lead our Shul. Even a merger with another reputable Shul is out of the question at this time, until we abide by the rulings of the RCC and the OU. The only candidates who are interested in leading our Shul are Chabad rabbis, as they do not operate within the larger community but rather they operate in a sphere of their own.

We hope that you all had an enjoyable Pesach.

Before the Chag, the Bet Din issued a Hazmona to the president of Congregation Shaarei Tefila. That Hazmona is attached to this e-mail. Please read it as it as it affects us all.

Since the Hazmona was issued by the Bet Din, Jack Nagel resigned as the 2nd VP of our Shul, and Allan Goldstein, the 3rd VP is now serving as president. (The first VP, Stuart Goldman, has resigned many months ago). We all wish Mr. Goldstein Hatzlacha Raba in his new position.

Please keep those e-mail addresses (or fax numbers) coming. Out list is growing every day.

PS – Attached is a recent letter that was sent by Richie Katz to members of the Shul. Please read it.

Posted in Shaarei Tefila | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Taking Back Shaarei Tefila?

Osama Bin Laden Is Dead!

Posted on May 2, 2011 by Luke Ford

On his radio show today, Dennis Prager said: “We are told constantly that this can bring ‘closure’, a word I’m not a big fan of, to a lot of the relatives of the victims of 9/11. They are quoted as saying that.

“How could people then argue that capitol punishment does not give people a measure of satisfaction? Isn’t that what we did to Bin Laden?

“If Bin Laden’s death brings closure to victims of 9/11, then why doesn’t the death of other murderers bring closure to relatives of those victims?”

The New York Times obituary says of Osama, “he had become a hero in much of the Islamic world.” Doesn’t that refute the New York Times position that this is a tiny fragment of people?

Dennis: “I read with disbelief this article in the AP that Islamic scholars question Obama’s sea burial. Will one Islamic scholar please announce that Osama doesn’t deserve an Islamic burial? Is there anything a Muslim can do that renders his burial unimportant? I just want to know.

“These are prominent people in the AP article. Not radicals.”

“Did Osama or did he not so pervent Islam that he was no longer a Muslim? Can you do anything that renders you outside of Islamic jurisprudence? You can no longer be called a Muslim. I thought it was a faith community, not an ethnic community? There’s nothing you can do as an American that disqualifies you as being an American because it is defined by birth or conversion aka naturalization.”

Dennis: “This is not the end of terror. I don’t believe that most terrorist acts engineered since 9/11 were by Osama Bin Laden.”

Matt calls from Philadelphia to say that his rabbi sent out an email about the lessons of Passover and that we shouldn’t rejoice in our enemy’s demise.

Dennis: “There is a tradition on Passover that Jews take ten drops out of a cup of wine for the suffering of the Egyptian people, but that was for the Egyptian people. If it was the chief slave master, the Jewish tradition would not have done that and nobody takes any wine out except to drink it and celebrate the killing of Haman and his sons.”

“God told the angels not to celebrate. He did not tell the Jews not to celebrate. Angels run by different rules. We’re not supposed to be angels. When the Hebrews crossed the sea and watched the Egyptians drown, they sang a big song and God didn’t seem to object to the song.”

From Pragertopia.com:

Prager H1: A Navy Seals team killed Osama Bin Laden last night. The world’s number one terrorist, the dark mastermind of 9/11 is dead. It took a while but we finally got the bastard. Let other terrorists take heed. Dennis talks to Lee Smith, senior editor at The Weekly Standard, visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute and author of The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations about the killing of Bin Laden.
Prager 20110502 – 2 What Does It Mean?

Prager H2: Dennis continues to reflect on the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Dennis talks to Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, Director of the Center for the Study of Terrorist Radicalization at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Prager 20110502 – 3 Rejoicing in Bin Laden’s Death

Prager H3: Some callers have difficulty rejoicing in the death of this mass murderer. Dennis doesn’t. Dennis talks to Kamran Bokhari Regional Director, Middle East & South Asia for Stratfor, a private intelligence company, about the involvement of Pakistan in the killing of Bin Laden.

Posted in Dennis Prager, Terror | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Osama Bin Laden Is Dead!