February 10, 2011 Please Don’t Look At Women With Lust Luke Ford No sacred cows.

Please Don’t Look At Women With Lust

Posted on February 10, 2011 by Luke Ford

Do you think it makes them happy? It doesn’t. It creeps them out.

Posted in S.E. Cupp | Comments Off

Sobering Up After Another Day Of Crashing And Burning

Posted on February 10, 2011 by Luke Ford

I charge into life because I’m a man of great enthusiasm with frequent delusions of grandeur. I see these visions where I am a great man and they intoxicate me and make me forget all of my shame.

I want to charge ahead because I feel so full of myself. I feel confident, arrogant, untouchable. I’m the new sheriff in town.

I get all these pre-programmed ideas for what I’m going to say and do when people have no choice but to be in my presence.

So when I finally get the opportunity to interact with people, much of the time I’m acting. I’m not real. I’m spouting all these memorized lines that I thought were just so funny when I was at the peak of my bipolar cycle.

And then I slam into the wall and crash and burn.

After I fall flat on myself, I sober up. I pull myself together, get real quiet, and pay close attention to details so I can rebuild my life from my latest humiliation.

I realize my arrogant attitude isn’t going to work. I have to stop looking down on other people and jawing at them.

I don’t think so much, oh, I’ve been selfish. This behavior is forbidden by God and Torah. Oy, what would Dennis Prager say?

No, rather, I just realize that the things I’m doing are not working.

That’s how I approach life. I throw myself forward until I hit walls and then I lie in the gutter for a little while and observe life around me and resolve anew to be sober.

Then I’ll get these visions in the night of hilarious things to say. I try to memorize remarks about crack cocaine and striptease to drop into casual conversation the next day at school.

I’m just dying to drop my jokes on people and then, if I am not in the moment, they fall flat. All conversational humor has to be in the moment or it doesn’t work.

I hate it when people say to me, “Did you memorize that?”

Greg Leake emails:

Hi Luke,
if I may reference the Kaballah for a moment, Assi’ya is not Yetzirah, and certainly it is not Briah.
A model that has been helpful to me when trying to understand the situation that you present to us comes from ideas about the four worlds.
Often in life, in the process of receiving inspiration or getting an idea from brainstorming, or in the face of some other manifestation of a similar nature, we unknowingly float up into the influence of the worlds of Yetzirah and occasionally Briah. However, when we come back to the place where implementation is required, we necessarily fall into the laws of Assi’ya.
One translation for Assi’ya is simply “doing.” And obviously a world defined by activity is not a world of thinking or being inspired with some higher idea. In the world of Yetzirah, sometimes translated as construction, a blueprint can be elaborated. And in the world of Briah, sometimes translated as creation, an idea can be originated. Our experience with ideas at these deeper levels of cognition is entirely without the limitations that physics and psychology impose on us in the world of doing. A tremendously fascinating theory or hypothesis can be formed, and yet as soon as we move back into the world of doing all the constraints of the physical, psychological universe are imposed on that idea. Whether it’s a joke or a business idea or some other flight when we are touched by the inspiration of some other dimensions in time and wave length.
So the world of physical matter acts as a discipline with rules and constraints that make it tough to put the idea into practice.
Another of my favorites, Carl Jung, writes about psychic inflation. We have to walk between the pillars of inflation and alienation. And often when we have some tremendous inspiration, it is actually coming from a place of inflation designating the area where our psyche is weaker than another area. (This is true for everyone.)
The usefulness of psychic inflation is that it directs our attention to the place where our psyche requires more adaptation. It is a bit like a balloon, and where the fabric is thinnest is where one will feel the greatest effects.
So the idea is to realize that these different levels (for lack of an immediately better word) all are part of our functioning, but one level is not suitable to perform a function that is the proper sphere of a different level.
This is often seen in romantic infatuation when the emotional level co-opts the intellectual level. And suddenly because these levels have been confused, you have very smart people driving around some girl’s house all night honking the horn and screaming things out the window.
I was taught that the proper way to avoid these matters was to realize that first, there is the intuitive level, and then the intellectual level, followed by the emotional level, and finally the world of doing — the physical level. And as long as one kept the levels from interfering with each other, you were operating in a pretty sane relationship with your ideas and how those ideas can come into physical manifestation.
Please forgive me if I sound like I’m preaching. These are ways I’ve come to view the dilemma that you outlined, and it is impossible for me to know whether it is helpful for you or not.

Posted in Personal | Tagged arrogant attitude, crack cocaine, delusions of grandeur, Dennis Prager, new sheriff in town, visions in the night | Comments Off

Sarah Palin On The Learning Channel

Posted on February 10, 2011 by Luke Ford

Posted in Sarah Palin | Comments Off

Are Subliminal MP3s A Scam?

Posted on February 9, 2011 by Luke Ford

For the past month, I’ve been looking around Clickbank.com for information products to promote (the marketer gets on average 50% of the purchase price) and discovered that many of the metrics on Subliminal MP3s look great.

(If you want to know more about these key metrics for finding lucrative products to promote online, I recommend this ebook.)

A check of Keyword Eye reveals that there are a lot of searches for topics such as “subliminal messages”, “hypnosis”, “hypnotic”, “hypnotize”, “how to hypnotize”, “hypno”, “hypnotism”, and all these terms show up green!

What does green mean here? Green in Keyword Eye means that there is low competition for these search terms.

But is there any money to be made from these search terms?

I use the Google Keyword tool and check that out.

Yes! There’s moderate advertiser competition for these keywords.

I go to Clickbank.com and put in “subliminals.” I find my way to this Subliminal MP3s store. You can get three free subliminal MP3s just by giving them an email address and a name. And if you buy some product, you get a 60-day moneyback guarantee (just like all Clickbank products). Because of this 60-day moneyback guarantee, I feel no conscience qualms about promoting any of Clickbank‘s products, including the ones for enlarging oneself intimately and the like. If you’re not fully satisfied, get a refund and keep your digital download!

As a kid, I watched this Disney movie about college football players who were failing school and were about to get kicked off the team until they started listening to subliminal tapes in their sleep and it made them smart.

I figure that before I start promoting Subliminal MP3s, I’ll do a Google search on subliminals.

According to Wikipedia: “Subliminal stimuli (pronounced /sʌbˈlɪmɨnəl/, literally “below threshold”), contrary to supraliminal stimuli or “above threshold”, are any sensory stimuli below an individual’s absolute threshold for conscious perception. Visual stimuli may be quickly flashed before an individual may process them, or flashed and then masked, thereby interrupting the processing. Audio stimuli may be played below audible volumes, similarly masked by other stimuli, or recorded backwards in a process called backmasking. Introduced in 1897, the concept became controversial as “subliminal messages” in 1957 when marketing practitioners claimed its potential use in persuasion. Subsequent scientific research, however, has been unable to replicate most of these marketing claims beyond a mere placebo effect.”

Hmm. This entry makes it sound like subliminals have no effect, but studies have said the same thing about homeopathy and acupuncture and at various times in my life, I felt like I had some benefits from these alternative medicines (though I eventually quit both because I did not feel the benefits were worth the financial cost).

I click on the category for Spirituality, New Age & Alternative Beliefs and find the number two product is a course on conversational hypnosis by Igor Ledochowski.

I research the course and can find no criticism of it online. I research Igor Ledochowski and can find no substantive criticism of him online.

Here’s a representative comment:

I have only heard good things about Igor.
His conversational course is well respected by people in the industry whose opinion I rate.
Nathan Thomas knows his stuff well, he is on this board..
Principally it sounds like it is based on Ericksonian style language patterns.
If you search the web you will find some of his resellers use those awful meter long web adverts with high pressure sales.
Try not to confuse this message with the product.

I buy the course (a digital download of 16 lectures and a 631-page ebook) knowing that if I don’t like it, I have up to 60 days to get a full refund.

Almost three weeks later, I’m still listening to the course (I’m eight lectures in, I have not looked at the book yet). I’m happy with my purchase. I recommend the course.

Posted in Economics, Personal | Tagged college football players, conscience qualms, Google, google keyword tool, google search, hypnotism, sensory stimuli, subliminal stimuli | Comments Off

Another Republican Caught With His Shirt Off

Posted on February 9, 2011 by Luke Ford

I found this on NYTimes.com:

Representative Chris Lee of New York, caught in the midst of a scandal involving a shirtless photo he reportedly e-mailed to a woman, has stepped down, according to a senior Congressional official.
…
Mr. Lee’s decision to step down came after a photo of him without a shirt appeared on Gawker along with e-mail exchanges that reportedly took place between him and a woman who had placed a personal notice in the “women seeking men” section of Craigslist.
In one of the e-mails, Mr. Lee describes himself as a lobbyist who is a “fit fun, classy guy.”
Mr. Lee also tells the woman that he is divorced.
When the woman asks him if he routinely sends shirtless photos of himself, Mr. Lee responds, “Sorry, it’s all I had.”

This story hits me hard. I know what it is like to say and to do stupid things in the pursuit of fleeting physical pleasure that totally pales with what God has waiting for us in the much much better world to come.

Oy, I picked the wrong day to stop smoking crack.

In this fallen old world, I have often said inappropriate things to women. I am the king of inappropriate as my friends will tell you.

I have not, however, ever sent a naked photo of myself to anyone. I’ve never posed for a naked photo.

I am a man and I have some sympathy with Chris Lee. As a normal guy, he’s willing to do almost anything to have sex with a new body. Most men will do almost anything for a sexual conquest.

Many feminists get offended at the claim that the male sex drive is stronger, but when was the last time a woman threw her life away for sex with a stranger? I can’t think of any famous examples. Women will jeopardize life and career on occasion for an illicit relationship but they have to know the guy in question. I am thinking about the movies I Am Love and Unfaithful as examples of this. I can’t think of examples of women throwing it all away for sex with a stranger.

In my experience, I do not know of any woman who’s knowingly jeopardized anything significant for sex. All the women I know who’ve cheated (on me or others) did it to purposefully end a relationship, not for the thrill of exchanging sex with a new body.

Psychologist Roy Baumeister told Dennis Prager a couple of weeks ago:

“What happens over and over again if you track couples, when they fall in love, and their sexual interests match closely and they both think I’ve found someone who’s close to me and we’ll go on having sex every day. A year or two later, after the commitment’s made and they’re married, they revert back to their separate baselines.
“If married people have conflicts over sex, more than 90% of the time the men want more sex than the women. The women seem to lose sexual interest in their partner after a couple of years and the man, and the woman, often don’t understand what’s different.
“Women are not catching up to men in the illegal stuff. Men have a higher sex drive and are more likely to do illegal or immoral things to get sex.”

Chaim Amalek emails: “Stuff like this — plus the occasional Craigslist Serial Killer story in the local press — is why it is so hard to meet a quality woman through Craigslist. Seriously, Gary Studds, Barney Frank, Ted Kennedy and Bill Clinton all weathered exposure of doing lots worse, so why did he not stand and fight? Because he panicked, or because he proved to be weak?”

Posted in Sex | Tagged illicit relationship, mail exchanges, male sex drive, sex with a stranger, sexual conquest, shirtless photos | Comments Off

So important to stay in yeshivah and don’t do crack

Posted on February 8, 2011 by Luke Ford

Watch the whole show:

Posted in R. Rabbs | Comments Off

Love and Money

Posted on February 8, 2011 by Luke Ford

Greg Leake emails: Hi Luke,

Directing myself to your preliminary discussions, I would like to offer the idea that compatibility is the very most important ingredient of a happy marriage.

Naturally, sexual allure is a vital ingredient to courtship, but very quickly compatibility becomes the important element after marriage has take place. With the right chemistry and compatibility, a couple can weather almost any storm. But without that ingredient, any pitfall can be sufficient to have people calling their lawyers.

I would also list as important a girl who basically originates out of your own background. The exotic can be very attractive superficially because of its difference, but sooner than later one will wish to be with a spouse who understands where one is coming from often without some laborious conversation just to get to square one.

I would say that there needs to be some kind of rough parity in physical attractiveness. While the idea of great beauty can be alluring, it also means living with a hundred guys a week hitting on your wife. So my idea of a general equivalency in physical attractiveness is a help rather than a hindrance.

Naturally, the person who wishes to get married must bring maturity to the situation. One of the ideal factors about marrying late in life as I did is that people don’t have to do as much on-the-job training to weather the requirements of marriage.

Luke, you once made a wise remark about not wishing to have relationships with people who don’t read. I think you can apply this very neatly to potential relationships. Your desire for women who have some professional accomplishment and dress in power suits simply suggests that you have good taste. And it would be unwise to sacrifice a personification of that good taste for someone who does not measure up in your estimation.

Frankly, my view is that you are just as likely to run across a suitable candidate in the Gentile world as the Jewish world. And in my view, one simply cannot dismiss a good possibility if it comes along because the woman does not share your theological beliefs. I might add that my understanding of the requirements for modern Orthodox girls who are frum might not fit into the same category as an upwardly mobile, successful careerwoman who would probably see frum requirements as excessive.

My best advice about the money also comes out of my own experience. I decided that my astrology did not look good for money, and so I made it my business to place my resources in the hands of those who did have good financial astrology. This largely meant selecting mutual fund managers.

My recommendations would be as follows. 1) Robert DeNiro in the movie “The Score” told his protege, “Start figuring out what you want now, and then then spend the next 25 years getting it a piece at a time.”
2) Read The Lazy Person’s Guide to Investing by Paul B. Farrell, JD, PhD and The New Commonsense Guide to Mutual Funds by Mary Rowland.

The first book deals with mutual fund indexing with an eye to constructing different portfolios out of the indexing universe. The latter book deals with the larger mutual fund universe, and both books are very straightforward, easy to read, without technical jargon or complicated mathematical equations.

3) Subscribe to The Hulbert Financial Digest. This newsletter tracks the performance of a huge number of mutual fund newsletters. One does not need to try and size up financial newsletters based on how good their advertising is. From the Hulbert information, select a newsletter that has consistently performed in the top 5 over the last 15 or 20 years when risk adjustment has been included in the appraisal.

4) Open an account with a brokerage service or a mutual fund company as the newsletter you select suggests, and specialize in cost averaging on a cost basis in no-load or low-load mutual funds.

5) Do not get caught in the trap of thinking you do not have enough money to begin investing. Some mutual funds have very small initial fees and even smaller in cases of retirement accounts. A dollar a day can give you $365 a year to invest, although of course one would hope that more would be possible as time goes on.

6) As you begin to accumulate resources and investment capital, get out of California and do not move to New York. The tax structures in these states are sufficient to knock one back when, say, one is about to move from the lower-middle class to the middle-upper class. The taxes are simply too punitive. Pick a state to begin with that does not have a state income tax, like Texas or Nevada. (There are 4 or 5 states with no state income tax.) Oh yes, at your age I would suggest letting 50% equity mutual funds 50% fixed-income investments be your aggressive position. It’s never too late to get started.

Luke, I thought you made some illuminating remarks about the role of community in religious life. I would say in my experience that being part of a religious community helps one in their spiritual life and sometimes the most helpful thing to do is to leave it. I will also reference your discussion in respect to people who are pursuing a solitary spiritual discipline like meditation without the assistance of a community. I would say that it all depends on what kind of experience the meditator is having. If it is simply another ritual observation, the value may be diminished. On the other hand, if the person is caught up in rich spiritual experience, that can be sufficient. You once said that the Alexander Technique had done more for you than your other passions. I understand this and really plan to get around to looking into the technique. The thing that has probably done more for me than any of my various passions would be the practice of TM over many decades. Like the Alexander Technique, TM is not a religion.

Rabbs, if you’re out there, I always appreciate the humor and stoicism you bring to your dilemma. You told Luke that if he were not married in 10 or 15 years, his experience with Judaism would not be satisfactory. I have heard you interestingly rant about this subject, but I am still curious about what the technical factors are that causes a non-married Jew to feel this alienation. Do you wake up one day and simply reaize that it’s no longer working for you? Or is it a gradual, step-by-step process leading to an awakening awareness that something is wrong? How long did it take for you to come to the realization that would allow you to aggressively assert that a single guy is in deep caca at a certain point in Judaism?

> Do you have any favorite Vietnam movies? What has been your main career?

Luke,
those are very interesting questions, and regrettably, my answers are inadequate.

I do not have any favorite Vietnam movies. After I got out I refused to sit through a war movie for over a decade. (I once walked out of a movie when the cavalry came over the hill.) This was not because I was anti-war or did not ultimately believe our cause in Vietnam was just. I was very pleased the other day when you were conducting your interview and pointed out your belief that Vietnam was a measure to stop communism. Although we lost the political war, I don’t believe that we lost a military war. The American military overall is the finest fighting force in the world.

Actually Luke, I spent most of my younger life in a sort of bohemian existence which makes me think about the kind of general culture that most strikes me as being compatible with you. You know, it’s a shame you weren’t born 35 years earlier. Kerouac, Ginsberg, Bukowski, and the whole group of writers basically formed the last popular movement based on literary innovation. Although one could easily not find favor with their writing, one can be interested in the fact that the cutting edge of popular culture was actually being formed by writers. (Truman Capote once said that Kerouac didn’t do writing; he did typing. Maybe so, but an exciting literary movement really defined a generation.) After that, Ken Kesey and Leary kicked off a generation that was no longer about writing; it was about drugs. And since that time it has been about something as banal as rock groups. Back in the days when it was about writing, you would have fit right in.

I spent a lot of years as a hand-to-hand combat and boxing instructor. Since middle age, I have found myself primarily working in the investment field. The focus of my life ultimately has always been about my avocations.

RABBI RABBS RESPONDS: Hey Greg,

Always great to hear from you, and I appreciate that you continue to watch our shows. And, of course, thanks for the wonderful compliment.

You asked excellent questions. I believe I answered them in great length in these three essays I published in 2006:

http://rabbs.com/alone/no_good.html

http://rabbs.com/single/trapped.html

http://rabbs.com/shomer/negiah.html

Posted in Personal, R. Rabbs | Tagged gentile world, happy marriage, physical attractiveness, power suits, professional accomplishment, sexual allure | Comments Off

The Virtues Of Travel

Posted on February 8, 2011 by Luke Ford

Dennis Prager writes:

When I began traveling at the age of 20, I had one great goal in mind: I never wanted to hear the name of a place in the news and not be able to relate to it. Let’s be honest. Until you go to India or Honduras, they are abstractions. One can major in Indian history or Latin American studies, but two days in one of those countries makes that country more real than four years of reading about it.

One of life’s great moral challenges is to see the stranger as fully real. While travel does not guarantee that one will see all others as fully real — the father of modern Islamism, Sayyid Qutb, spent two years in America in the late 1940s and left seeing Americans as caricatures of decadence — it is very hard to do so without travel.

You also learn a lot about life. For example, I learned very early on, in the first of my four visits to India, that poverty was not the cause of crime I was taught it was at college. In fact, aside from abject, starvation-level poverty, it is not even the main cause of human unhappiness. In most of the poor places of the world, children seem considerably less jaded and laugh more easily than many American children.

I learned more about Islam in a week in Egypt than in two years at Columbia’s Middle East Institute. When the pretty young Egyptian waitress at the Nile Hilton in 1974 told me to read the Koran because once I did, I would become a Muslim, I realized that secularism was not, my professors notwithstanding, the wave of the Middle East’s future, and I understood how Muslims view the Koran and the non-Muslim world. When I offered to buy a beer for the Egyptian taxi driver who took me from Cairo to the pyramids on a very hot day, he politely declined, explaining that as a Muslim, he is not permitted to drink alcohol. I asked why he thought the ban was necessary. Because, he explained, if a man drinks and then goes home and sees his daughter lying in bed, bad things could ensue. That opened this 25-year-old’s eyes.

When I was in the Soviet Union in 1968 and in 1981, dissidents agreed to speak with me by meeting at a certain tree in a certain park — because sitting and talking with a Westerner would attract KGB attention. I then understood totalitarianism better than any of my Soviet studies classes could possibly communicate.

After visits to about a dozen African countries, I came to realize that the spread of Christianity holds the best hope for that sad continent. If anyone can name a better solution, this Jew would be interested in hearing it.

And I came to realize the overwhelming power of cultural values. How else to explain “honor killings,” the subverting of the most powerful instinct in the world — to protect one’s child — except through an understanding of the power of culture?