For the first time, we’re going to do Torah Talk Monday night at the House of Rabbs.
* All the details about the construction of the mishkon (sanctuary) militate against cheating.
* There’s one act of creation allowed on Shabbos — conception.
* Is it OK to brush your hair on Shabbat? You can create electricity and sparks.
* Why does the Torah have so many details on what the priests wear? Because what you wear is profoundly important for the way it affects you and others. The more serious the yeshiva student, the better he dresses. I act differently in a suit than in shorts. People react to me differently when I wear a suit versus my mankini.
* If God hovered over us as He did for the Israelites in the desert, would things be great? Is God a loving therapist? Or would He start judging and smiting?
* Thank God there is no sex in this week’s parsha. If there were, we would learn how Torah not only removes sex from religion (no hookers in the temple) but brings religion to sex (within marriage).
* God is the only thing that does not demand that you compromise your principles. The stronger you are with your religion, the less likely you are to compromise yourself.
* This week’s parasha is all about keeping God alive in your life.
* Men gathering with men to worship God only helps women. It does so more than men gathering with men to chant, “The goalie sucks” or some such sports chant. (Dennis Prager)
* A commitment to ethics is not enough to govern a people or to keep it together. Ethics are not enough to perpetuate any organization, even one primarily devoted to ethics. You don’t need to belong to any people or religion to be ethical.
I’ve never been able to forget that. I always thought I was the good guy. Imperfect, sure, but I was fighting on the side of God. I fought to get important stories out to people. I fought to tell the side of the little guy who was getting squashed and abused.
I spoke truth to power!
When I got called an “internet terrorist”, I felt like that Michael Douglas character in the movie Falling Down who’s stunned to learn that he’s the bad guy.
As IMDB summarizes the movie: “An unemployed defense worker frustrated with the various flaws he sees in society, begins to psychotically and violently lash out against them.”
Through audacious strikes, we become famous. We love fame and attention and we tell ourselves it is recognition and our just due.
We particularly love the attention of pretty young women. We can’t get enough of them.
We’re constantly on the move. When we start to feel at home, we get booted.
We imagine ourselves the equal of the great men we terrorize. Because we have the massive ability to inflict harm, we feel we are big men. We love it when the powerful bid for our services.
We uneasily experience our decline from the pinnacle of success. It is a sick feeling when we realize that the price of our notoriety increasily outstrips its benefits and because of our past choices, we can do little to change the inevitable grinding of the mills of social retribution.
We’re kicked out of home after home and nobody bids for our services anymore. We have to humiliate ourselves to make a living.
We’re seized with the conviction that this won’t end well. We see that we bring misery to those around us. We feel ourselves becoming irrelevant. It is hard on our vanity. We rage when others fail to defer to our grandiose vision of ourselves. We become nostalgic for the days when we were big shots.
Friday, February 25, 2011 Radio Show
20110225-01: What a Lousy Country We Live In
Prager H1: Diane Sawyer highlights this startling fact in her prime time newscast: the US doesn’t provide paid maternity/paternity leave for all its citizens. Sweden does. But we don’t. Somehow this has become a human rights issue and the US is sadly deficient in Diane’s enlightened view… Democratic Ohio Senator, Sherrod Brown, says that the ability for public service unions to given millions of dollars to elect the officials with whom the unions negotiate their contract is a moral issue. He’s right. It’s immoral.
Friday, February 25, 2011 Radio Show
20110225-02: Happiness Hour: Easily Offended
Prager H2: If you’re easily offended it’s very hard to be happy. People are always hurting you. And, it’s not easy to be happy around easily offended people.
Friday, February 25, 2011 Radio Show
20110225-03: Open Lines
Prager H3: Per usual, callers set the agenda. Issues raised include: why does Dennis like Christians so much; what one question would Dennis want to ask an atheist; why did Dennis’s parents name him Dennis; where does Dennis get his values.
Thursday, February 24, 2011 Radio Show
20110224-01 It’s All about Profit
Prager H1: Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC asked the Leftist blogger who placed a crank call to Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker, why he thought the governor was so intent on reigning in the public service unions. The prankster’s answer: personal profit for Walker and his friends. To the Left, Marx is alive and well… The dictator Kaddafi is prepared to fight to last Libyian… Dennis talks to Peter Glover, journalist specializing in energy issues, and co-author with Michael Economides, Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Houston of Energy and Climate Wars: How naive politicians, green ideologues, and media elites are undermining the truth about energy and climate.
Thursday, February 24, 2011 Radio Show
20110224-02 No Mo’ DOMA
Prager H2: President Obama has decided that he doesn’t like DOMA, so his administration won’t defend it. … We should be more afraid of people who pursue power than those who pursue money… Dennis concludes his discussion of historian David McCullough’s 2005 speech at Hillsdale College on the Founding Fathers…
Thursday, February 24, 2011 Radio Show
20110224-03 Stuntman
Prager H3: Dennis talks to Hal Needham, legendary stuntman and film director. His new autobiography is Stuntman!: My Car-Crashing, Plane-Jumping, Bone-Breaking, Death-Defying Hollywood Life. Needham worked with just about every major Hollywood star from the 60’s through the 80’s — John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart and others. He’s most noted for his close association with Burt Reynolds and their wildly successful Smokey and the Bandit movies… Chris Matthews slanders Mike Huckabee, accusing the former governor of advocating ethnic cleansing of the West Bank.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011 Radio Show
H1: Showdown
Prager H1: Kevin Wall sits in for Dennis. The Democrats and their public service union masters have placed a very big political bet on opposing Wisconsin’s plan to scale back the union’s pay and benefit plans. The labor showdown has now spread to Indiana and Ohio.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011 Radio Show
H2: Laboring
Prager H2: Kevin Wall sits in for Dennis. Kevin continues his discussion of how organized labor is desperately trying to fend off the attempt by Republican governors in Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana to reign in the public service unions… The Justice Department has withdrawn its defense of DOMA.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011 Radio Show
H3: DOMA Done
Prager H3: Kevin Wall sits in for Dennis. The President has suddenly decided that the Defense of Marriage Act is indefensible…
Tuesday, February 22, 2011 Radio Show
H1: Four Americans Murdered by Pirates
Prager H1: Four Americans were murdered by Somali pirates. They were carrying Bibles. Is that why they were murdered? It’s a good question, but no one is asking it… The dictator of Libya is not going down without a fight which he means he will, without compunction, kill many of his own people to stay in power… Indiana Democrats may run away from their state just like Wisconsin Democrats have done from theirs.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011 Radio Show
H2: The Great Dictator
Prager H2: Dennis plays a few choice clips of Mohammar Kaddafi’s TV speech to the Libyan people. Very inspirational — if you’re a psychotic… San Francisco is considering a ban on circumcision. But, of course, they’re pro-abortion…. Wisconsin’s governor and Republicans must stand firm against the public service unions.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011 Radio Show
H3: Ultimate Issues Hour: The Evil of Communism
Prager H3: It’s a moral scandal that Communism is not studied as the evil that it was. It murdered over 150 million people.
Monday, February 21, 2011 Radio Show
H1: The Descent of the Unions
Prager H1: We love teachers; we have contempt for the teachers union… The Daily Mail in London reports that Gaddafi has fled Libya. If it’s true, where did he go?.. Tavis Smiley makes Bill Maher look like a conservative…
Monday, February 21, 2011 Radio Show
H2: Big Cheese
Prager H2: The Democrats fit of pique in Wisconsin is the biggest domestic story of the year… Dennis talks to Charlie Sykes, radio talk show host in Milwaukee, about the circus going on in that state… Columbia University students protest the idea of an ROTC office on campus.
Monday, February 21, 2011 Radio Show
H3: AARP
Prager H3: Dennis talks to Robert Samuelson, columnist for Newsweek and Washington Post, about the stranglehold AARP has on the federal budget… Dennis talks to Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts.
Like a good liberal, even a Center Left one, Megan McArdle of The Atlantic worries what the Republicans might do with such a precedent. But the Republicans don’t do this sort of thing, Megan. There is no equivalence.
Here’s how it breaks down:
Matthews Accuses Huckabee of Advocating Ethnic Cleansing
AP report of his visit to Israel. He doesn’t believe Israel should give up settlements to appease Palestinians.
This is how the Left operates: make a wild accusation, the more outrageous the better; don’t worry about backing it up because the media will always give you a pass even if it turns out to be an obvious lie. Next victim please…
Americans are fighting and dying, while the Afghans by and large stand by and do nothing to help them. Afghanistan’s leaders, from the presidential palace in Kabul to the river valleys in the Pashtun heartland, are enriching themselves, often criminally, on America’s largesse. The Taliban, whatever else they do, fight hard and for very little reward. American soldiers, handcuffed by strict rules of engagement, have surrendered the initiative to their enemies. Most important, the Afghan people, though almost certainly opposed to a Taliban redux, are equally wary of both the Americans and their Afghan “leaders.” They will happily take the riches lavished on them by the Americans, but they will not risk their lives for either the Americans or their own government. The Afghans are waiting to see who prevails, but prevailing is impossible without their help.
It is slated to begin next fall. The school is trying to come up with a Jewish approach to tackle football, which, if implemented, will likely kill all enthusiasm for the program.
I don’t know of any Jewish school that has a tackle football program.
I read one statistic that every year of playing tackle football takes six months off your life on average.
Judaism is not a pacifist religion and Jews are permitted to carry arms for self defense as needed, but it is not considered a symbol but merely a utensil.
Violent sports would certainly include any sports where the object is to cause harm to the opponent; bullfighting would be an extreme example and one which is certainly forbidden in Jewish law. But there are sports which are not inherently very violent which have come to be surrounded by an aggressive and violent atmosphere. For example, ice hockey is not a particularly violent sport but in some places brawls on the ice have become a draw rather than a distraction – a clear sign that things have gone too far. Fencing by contrast is a “martial art” but the atmosphere surrounding competitions is hardly bloodthirsty.
Aggression is one of the few tendencies that Judaism does not strive to legitimize and elevate on an ongoing basis. It may be an occasionally unfortunate necessity for individual or national defense, but not a personal or national quality to cultivate or take pride in. Sporting events that emphasize or cultivate aggression are not the right choice for someone motivated by Jewish ethics.
I went to an exciting Valentine’s Day party the other week. It was so fun, I kept it to myself and didn’t blog about it.
The host of the party was a fascinating woman named Antoinette Cabral.
I wanted to talk to her but there wasn’t an opportunity.
So a couple of weeks later, I asked her for an interview.
A few minutes before our interview was scheduled to begin, I got a phone call from Antoinette.
“Luke,” she said. “My stomach hurts. I won’t be able to do the interview. I ate a spider last night.”
“Oh, OK,” I said. “Perhaps we can reschedule?”
“I’m kidding!” she replied. “I’ll be right there.”
A few minutes into our interview, we returned to this subject.
Luke: “I did believe you. I believe everything you tell me.”
Antoinette: “Maybe part of my gift is to have that spontaneity and playful spirit to laugh and to joke and to have fun.”
Luke: “Insects are not a laughing matter because I went to yoga a few months ago and met this great girl. She was Jewish. She was cute. She was smart. She was accomplished. She excited me. Everything was going great. And then I said, ‘So what do you do for a living?’ And she said, ‘My life mission is to get people to eat more insects [and not just the kosher ones].’
“She’s got a YouTube channel where she teaches people how to prepare spiders and insects and eat them because they’re a good source of protein.”
Luke: “I’ve been forever scarred by that experience. So when you say you eat spiders, I go, ohmigod, another chick who eats spiders.
“I was so torn because on the one hand, she was hot. On the other hand, she ate insects that weren’t kosher.”
A minute later, I had Antoinette in tears.
Antoinette: “Most of us don’t know how to love ourselves. For me, just having a childhood where there was a lot of pain. My heart was closed. I felt awkward in my own skin. I was the ugly duckling in school.”
Luke: “Really? Were you tall and skinny?”
Antoinette: “I was skinny, lanky. I had braces. People made fun of me all the time. It was a private [Catholic] school of 30 kids and I was the one they made fun of every day. Can you imagine being that kid that everyone made fun of? I would come into class and I’d be so awkward. The kids were mean.
“I don’t share this story a lot, but there was one incident when I was younger when they decided to call me this name and when I think about it, I think ohmigod, I’m going to cry.”
And she does.
Antoinette: “And so everyone decided to call me that name and no one wanted to be friends with me.”
Luke: “That’s horrible.”
Antoinette: “This is mostly through grade school. I was the outcast. I didn’t know how to play. I didn’t enjoy my body. Just thinking about it right now, tears… I just have to give myself a moment.”
“I’d go home to a home where there was so much tumult, I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t know what to do except to cry. I needed to learn something else.
“I started a spiritual quest while I was in high school looking for deeper answers. I left the country. I needed to run away. I started traveling and the world started opening up. Every time I learned something, part of the pain started to heal. I started to play again. I started to feel confident. It was a whole spiritual transformation.”
I give Antoinette a super-absorbent paper towel to dry her eyes.
Antoinette: “When people look at me now, they say, well, she didn’t have bad experiences. How did she learn this?”
Luke: “You seem so confident.”
Antoinette: “I had to learn all this. In my first relationship, I was so needy. Do you love me? Do you validate me? It was so hard for him. It took a toll.”
“When we broke up, I had to learn to love myself in a new way because I was dependent on him for love.”
Luke: “You probably learned [in private school] your deep and abiding love for Roman Catholicism, which informs everything you say and do.”
Antoinette laughs. “School was a blur.”
Luke: “Were you high?”
Antoinette: “No.”
Luke: “Why was it a blur?”
Antoinette: “Because of the misery. I just had a block, all the pain. People say, ‘What did you want to do when you were younger?’ I don’t remember because I was so consumed by the pain. When I was older, I thought, oh, I can be a kid again.”
Luke: “I thought that from age five you were telling people that you wanted to become a sensual empowerment coach.”
“What were you good at at school?”
Antoinette: “I was a good student. How did you know?”
Luke: “Well, you’re Asian, right?”
Antoinette laughs in shock. “I was a really good student. I was good at everything. I was good at Math and English and Art and sports. Track and field. I was really good at running. High jump. I was good at the creative stuff. Anything that was an outlet. The only thing for which I got validation was to be good at these things.”
Luke: “Did you cheat in high school?”
Antoinette: “I think I did because I didn’t care. It was so easy. It was memorization. When you memorize things, who cares? I could study for a test and just memorize it.”
Luke: “And you put off the modeling until college?”
Antoinette: “I did a little bit of hair modeling when I was 16. And that was fun. It helped out my self-esteem… but I still felt self-conscious. We had to do these shows where we had to wear these outfits I didn’t feel comfortable in. They were revealing. One of the shows, I just ended up leaving. I’m out of here. I don’t want to wear this. I don’t even want to talk to them. I just left. That’s what happened when you’re afraid.”
Antoinette lists her interests on Facebook as “Feminine Spirituality, Hugging Trees, Dinner Parties, Cuddles Parties, Wine tasting”.
Here’s the official bio of Antoinette Cabral and some of the questions I asked her:
Antoinette Cabral teaches Feminine Leadership and is Sensual Empowerment Coach. She uses powerful tools and exercises to help women tap into their bodies and their sensuality to live sexy, soulful and sensational when connecting with the opposite sex. She helps men and women access their confidence and sensual power so that their ideal partner will find them incredibly irresistible, magical, and magnetic. Her love of travel, adventure, fun, spirituality and personal growth guided her to study with many master teachers in healing, Tantra, dance, meditation and massage. Please check her out at http://www.antoinettecabral.com.
What is sensual empowerment?
How did you become a sensual empowerment coach?
Can you sensually empower me to become irresistible, magical and magnetic to the ladies?
I’m tired of being irresistible, magical and magnetic to guys. Can you help me stop that?
How does this help a woman while dating? In relationship?
What are some things that women do that prevent them from attracting the opposite sex?
What are some of the top ways to disenchant men while in relationship?
Denis G. Kelly is formerly an executive in the banking industry that witnessed first-hand the horrific effect of identity theft both on individuals and society. Mr. Kelly decided to proactively fight this crime by providing education, training and community outreach vehicles. In addition to TheIDChannel.com, Mr. Kelly also founded IdentityAmbassador.org, which has a core belief that identity theft education must follow the F.A.C.T.S. principle: Free. Accurate. Current. Transparent. Shared. He also founded IDCuffs.com, which is an identity theft prevention company that provides basic identity theft prevention services. Mr. Kelly wrote The Official Identity Theft Handbook, which analyzes identity theft in its proper context and provides readers tangible takeaways that minimize the likelihood of identity theft or mitigates the negative consequences for victims. He also wrote An Identity Theft Paradise, a whitepaper outlining the dangers and systematic failures regarding synthetic identity theft.
Mr. Kelly has his Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) certification from the Consumer Data Industry Association, Certified Identity Theft Risk Management Specialist (CITRMS) from the Institute of Fraud Risk Management and Certified Identity Expert (CIE) from IdentityAmbassador.org. Mr. Kelly speaks at numerous industry events and is recognized as a leader in the field of identity theft.
In Unknown, Dr. Martin Harris (Liam Neeson) awakens from a coma after a car accident in Berlin to discover that his wife (January Jones) suddenly doesn’t recognize him and another man (Aidan Quinn) has assumed his identity.
This is the whole enchilada of identity theft as the criminal has stolen your entire life, including your wife. While this is good for Hollywood, identity theft does not function this way in real life. Nonetheless, many of the feelings and emotions that Neeson experiences are similar. Victims feel isolated, betrayed and it is you against the world just to prove you are you.
In the Unknown, this feeling is perfectly encapsulated when Neeson states, “Somewhere there is proof I am me.”
What many fail to realize is the “severe emotional distress” that many victims of identity theft experience. In fact, according to the US Department of Justice most recent National Crime Victimization Survey, the percentage of victims of identity theft that suffer severe emotional distress where personal information was fraudulently used is actually greater than that of total violent crime.
While the scars of identity theft are not visible, this survey indicates the impact is often greater and takes longer to recover from then violent crime (of course, these are averages and does not indicate every incident of identity theft has a more severe emotional impact than every incident of a violent crime).
Identity theft is further complicated by the mountains of misinformation and deceptive advertising and marketing campaigns of trusted organizations.
Let’s consider a credit monitoring service which is commonly marketed as an identity theft prevention service:
1) It alerts you of a change in your credit profile
2) You must reconcile to determine if it is fraudulent
3) Often times the alerts are not received and reviewed for over a week
4) The net result is if you identify identity theft, it has already occurred. This is after-the-fact.
There are other shortcomings of credit monitoring services including a false sense of security and information overload (and why are you paying to make certain the information information in your credit file is accurate when the credit reporting agencies are legally required to perform this task), but the main takeaway is that it is by definition a detection product.
It is important to understand and distinguish between Prevention, Detection and Recovery tactics/services.
There is no “silver bullet” prevention tactic, and it criminals’ techniques are always changing and sophistication increasing. So, before discussing specific prevention tactics, a general approach must be established. Become an identity theft prevention A.C.E.: Alert. Current. and Educated.
Specific tips:
? shred EVERYTHING that has personally identifying information before disposing
? place a fraud alert on your credit file every 90 days
? use a credit card instead of a debit card as you have lower liability
? Do not click on emails from financial institutions even if you know it is your financial institution
? do not provide information over the phone if a financial institution initiates the call even if you know it is your financial institution
? stay educated and current by reviewing identity theft news and the latest prevention tactics weekly for 5-10 minutes. The best tool for this is TheIDChannel.com.
A US TV journalist attacked in Cairo’s Tahrir Square was stripped and beaten with fists and the poles of hand-held flags, US sources say.
Lara Logan, 39, a correspondent on the CBS News show 60 Minutes, was recovering in private with her husband, Joseph Burkett, their son and her stepdaughter.
Parts of her body were covered in red marks, a source said. They were originally thought to have been caused by bites, but on examination proved to have been made by aggressive pinching.
“Lara is getting better daily,” said a friend. “The psychological trauma is as bad as, if not worse than, the physical injuries. She might talk about it at some time in the future, but not now.”
Sexual abuse is encouraged not only by hadith but — as I related in discussing the recent case of a teenager flogged to death in Bangladesh — by sharia standards that make rape practically impossible to prove and subject women to a death sentence for adultery or fornication if they come forward with an accusation but cannot prove it.
Islamic scriptures endorse wife-beating (Koran 4:34 again). Female genital mutilation is rampant in the Muslim world and scripturally based. As Caroline Glick notes, the World Health Organization reports that 97 percent of Egyptian women and girls have been subjected to this form of barbarism.
This despicable treatment is fortified by standards that treat women’s testimony as inferior to men’s, permit men to marry up to four women, and deny women the right to hold many public offices — particularly those that involve the construction of Islamic law and issuance of fatwas.
The unmistakable message at the core of sharia is that women, like non-Muslims, are less than fully human. It is a message we continue ignoring at the peril of tomorrow’s Lara Logans, and our own.
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
