I’ve Got My Swagger Back

Posted on September 3, 2009 by Luke Ford

I just bought four sticks of deoderant at Walgreens. Just $3:50 each. It’s called "Swagger" and says it is the official scent of confidence.

I’ll let you know how it works.

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Berkeley Orthodox Mohel Is Ill

Posted on September 2, 2009 by Yisroel Pensack

I received the following email from the Berkeley Beit Midrash: 

Dear Friends,

As Rosh HaShana approaches and we reflect on the many blessings of our lives and the opportunities to effect positive change in the world, please consider the needs of Rabbi Chanan Feld and his family.

Rabbi Feld, longtime Bay Area Mohel and dear friend to many, is facing a very serious health condition and is currently unable to work.  He and his wife Jody, along with their three children, need assistance in meeting their medical and personal expenses at this time.

A fund has been set up to receive contributions for The Feld Family. Beit Midrash Ohr HaChaim in Berkeley, which The Felds co founded, will be administering this fund.  All contributions are tax deductible and will be completely anonymous. The Felds will not know who has donated to this fund. Checks with “Feld Fund” written on the memo line may be sent to the Beit Midrash at PO Box 9215, Berkeley, CA, 94709.  Donations can also be made through Pay pal ([email protected] write “Feld Fund” in the message box).

In lieu of calling Rabbi Feld, you can contact him directly by emailing him at [email protected].  A website (www.lotsahelpinghands.com/c/617304) is serving as a central location for the dissemination of information.

Please share this letter widely with your colleagues, community, and the many who have been touched by Rabbi Chanan Feld (Chanan Velvel ben Bryna).

“One who fully seeks righteousness and kindness will find life, righteousness and honor.”
Mishlei/Proverbs, 21/21

The full selflessness and generosity with which Rabbi Feld has served our diverse Jewish community over many years can only be responded to with our greatest generosity.

Todah Rabah/Thank you.

Shana Tova.

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Why Coaches Vote Republican

Posted on September 2, 2009 by Luke Ford

From the Wall Street Journal:

American politics are rich with characters and stereotypes—Joe the Plumber, Harry and Louise, Nascar dads and hockey moms, to name a few. But one persistent type hasn’t gotten much attention: the Republican football coach.

During the 2008 campaign cycle, college and NFL head coaches (and their wives) contributed a total of $13,286 to John McCain and the Republican National Committee. From that same group, Barack Obama and the Democratic National Committee received just $4,600—half of it from Lovie Smith of the Chicago Bears and the other half from San Jose State’s Dick Tomey.

In all, 20 coaches active in the 2008 season gave to Republican candidates seeking federal office. Three donated to Democrats. This disparity is even more striking given that, among the individual donors in the ’08 campaign cycle, Mr. Obama outraised Mr. McCain by more than a 5-to-1 margin.

Dennis Prager says on his radio show today: There is probably no area of life where there is as direct a relationship between work and deserved reward than there is in sports. There’s no affirmative action in sports. There’s no compassion in sports. It is entirely merit. There is no other criterion.

Hockey teams tend to be all-white and NBA teams tend to be all-black. And nobody cares. The best players play. Most NBA fans are white and are cheering their brains out for the blacks playing on their team.

This is the reason athletes are conservative. They don’t believe that you hire and fire on compassion, to make up for past deeds. Blacks succeed in the NBA not because they were historically maltreated, but because they play well.

If liberal policies were applied to sports, it would be the end of sports. Why would it be the end of sports but not the end of medicine, of the military?

That is why you have almost no liberal coaches or athletes because they know that almost all liberal policies destroy the institutions they are designed to help.

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Is Kundalini Yoga Sex Yoga?

Posted on September 2, 2009 by Luke Ford

The other night I was doing yoga and we were told to lie on our stomachs and raise our butts in the air and then crash our pelvises to the floor and repeat.

I am not ashamed to admit that many less spiritually developed beings than myself found all this friction and thrusting and rubbing strangely exciting. I wonder how many experienced climaxes?

"I’m not having sex right now," a hot shiksa told me last night, "so I’m doing Kundalini Yoga."

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Birthright’s Ties To Haredi Judaism

Posted on September 2, 2009 by Luke Ford

The Forward reports:

Many of the young people who pass through the Jewish Enrichment Center in Lower Manhattan view it with great affection. It is often the first time they have come in contact with a Judaism that is engaging and accessible. The rabbis responsible for the center’s educational and religious programs are charismatic and approachable people who, participants say, have had a large impact on their lives.

As the official New York follow-up organization for Taglit-Birthright Israel — which sends young people on free trips to Israel and lately is trying to keep them Jewishly engaged when they return — there could hardly be a better model.

But there are also those Birthright alumni who have been turned off by the JEC, sensing that it has a hidden, religious agenda that clashes with Birthright’s declared nondenominational and pluralistic stance. Their suspicions have now been substantiated with the revelation that the JEC’s rabbis were trained at Ohr Somayach, a Jerusalem-based ultra-Orthodox yeshiva with international branches and a publicly declared goal of turning secular and nonobservant Jews into ba’alei teshuvah. The JEC, it has emerged, was launched as an outreach arm of the yeshiva.

For some Birthright alumni who spoke recently with the Forward, this confirmed what they had already surmised.

The realization for one person came when he was asked to memorize lines of Talmud and encouraged to wrap tefillin every day. For another, it was the weekend he was required to spend with a Haredi family on Long Island if he wanted one more trip to Israel. And for a few, it came only after an all-expense paid month at a Jerusalem yeshiva, where they were presented with a stark choice of abandoning their current life for a more religious one.

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Facebook Addiction

Posted on September 2, 2009 by Luke Ford

I’ve never spent even an hour on Facebook during a 24-hour period but I have a friend who confesses she drank a bottle of wine last night by herself and spent six hours on Facebook. This does not seem good.

I have spent hours chatting on my live cam, but that was with a hot chick, so it doesn’t count as a sin.

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Who Do You Love More?

Posted on September 2, 2009 by Luke Ford

When I was a kid, some time between age eight and 15, I asked my mother who did she love more? Me or dad?

She said dad.

Should you put your spouse or your kids first? Dennis Prager tackled the issue on his radio show today. He said you should put your spouse first. It is too easy to forget each other through your preoccupation with the children.

I would put my spouse first and I would want her to put me first.

Usually it is wives who say their kids need more of their attention and usually husbands are more likely to say that they’ve lost a significant amount of their spouse’s attention since the kids arrived.

Women are more ruled by their emotions, so whatever they decide in theory before marriage may not matter much once their emotions of motherhood click in.

Dennis: I have all men calling in and they’re all saying that they put their wives first. Perhaps it is easier for men to put their wives first before the kids?

Luke: I remember John Gray (Men are From Mars) saying that men find it easier to appreciate their wives than the other way round.

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Feeling Like An Outsider In Orthodox Judaism

Posted on September 2, 2009 by Luke Ford

I have a several close female friends who’ve flirted with Orthodox Judaism but not finished conversions to it. They look obviously goyish. They feel like conspicuous outsiders to the Jewish community, and they fear that they will always be viewed with suspicion, distrust, and dislike. So they wonder if this is really the world for them? It has become very clear to these friends what born-Orthodox Jews think of them and it is not good.

I understand their feelings, but I believe they will will diminish once my friends prove themselves by completing an Orthodox conversion to Judaism and then shouldering their share of the load in the community.

To convert to Orthodox Judaism is easier and quicker — in most instances — than completing an AA degree at a community college, but it still tends to weed out those who are not up to the task.

I speak as someone who has been in three different Orthodox conversion programs — I never really got going with one in Sacramento because I left town in 1993, I was booted from the RCC in 2001 and I had one process I won’t go into right now.

Oh well, the honest man is always in trouble.

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Let’s Debate Fundamental Principles

Posted on September 2, 2009 by Luke Ford

Thomas Frank, who’s left of center, writes for the Wall Street Journal:

What’s dragging the Democrats down in the health-care debate isn’t confusion about details. On this the president and his supporters have proven themselves the ablest of technocrats, easily identifying each plan’s particulars and its shortcomings, laying everything out on nice flow charts.

It is the big questions that are tripping them up. Concerns about the size and role of government are what seem to leave reformers stammering and speechless in town-hall meetings. The right wants to have a debate over fundamental principles; elected Democrats seem incapable of giving it to them.

In his first hour of today’s radio show, Dennis Prager talks to Jeff Stier, associate director of the American Council on Science and Health. They discuss Big Pharma, lead in toys and e-cigarettes.

Jeff: The Obama administration wants to pay for healthcare on the back of the pharmaceutical. They’ve already gotten $80 billion in givebacks (money Big Pharma have earned through innovation) and Congress wants a $100 billion. Why not take it all away?

The best way to lower healthcare costs is to provide new innovative life-saving medicine that keeps people out of hospital.

Yesterday the head of the Gates Foundation said that drug companies should give away vaccines. They shouldn’t have to. The reason we have so much innovative drug development in the United States is not because Americans are so much smarter than everyone else but because America has a free market where people can take risks and make profits. Almost all drug development takes place in countries with a free market.

Many Republicans agree that pharmaceutical companies should pay for more healthcare.

Is there a level of profit where you would save pharmaceutical companies are making too much profit? No. If they make what economists may call "excess profits," competitors will enter the industry and drive down prices. The more money they make, the better, because it means they are making new drugs.

Jeff’s articles:

News Center
  Something to Chew Over (from the Wall Street Journal)
  Bitter pill for FDA: law on herbal supplements
  New Lead Law Poisons Housing (from New York Post)
[ List All ]
Health Issues
  The Drugs Do Work (from the Guardian)
  Healthcare Reform That’s Hard to Swallow (from Los Angeles Times, Detroit News, and Twin Cities’ Pioneer Press)
  Putting Organ Traffickers Out of Business (from the Guardian)
[ List All ]
Health Facts and Fears
  Congress Votes to Ban Genetic Discrimination
  Sick Kids Misused in Smoke Ads
  Mandatory Calorie Counting Struck Down by Judge
[ List All ]
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Anatomy

Posted on September 2, 2009 by Luke Ford

Reading between the lines on my blog, you’d expect that anatomy would be my favorite subject.

You’d be wrong.

Sure, when it is made personal I can find it attractive, but as an academic subject, it bores me.

I have to take anatomy as part of my Alexander Technique teacher training, but I find the topic puts me to sleep. I was never any good at studying stuff I wasn’t interested in.

I’ve never been interested in science.

Knowledge of anatomy does not necessarily add much to your Alexander Technique. You can be a great Alexander Technique teacher without knowing any anatomy but it sounds better if you know some. You sound more authoritative and professional.

When I am stuck in a class where I have little interest, I tend to slump and pout and vege out. I lie on the floor and nap. I do yoga poses. I feel frustrated and bored and depressed. I want to flee. I feel like my primary relationships are failures and I want to make that my Facebook status update.

I feel like I am going downhill. I want to go to bed. I want to curl up into a ball and disappear.

Today we each had to draw a scene from our childhood. My drawing was the only one that nobody could understand. They didn’t even know which side was up. The only part of it that spoke to me was the hairy hole in the middle of my picture that was supposed to be a rock garden.

My secret garden.

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