I really have to work on my lighting in addition to my character.
Couldn’t fall asleep until after 5 a.m. today.
Khunrum emails:
Luke: You seemed to become more unhinged with each new hovel-side chat. I can understand that you may consider yourself a loser. Sure, money may tight and your credit cards maxed out. However, President Bush is quickly putting together a "stimulus package". They say we’ll all get 800 bucks each. That should cheer you up (it does me). Hang in there buddy.
Last week both the Forward and the Jewish Week reported on a scandal at Yeshiva of Flatbush, a prestigious Modern Orthodox school. In December the school hosted a ten-year reunion for the class of 1997, but openly gay graduates were sent a letter explaining that they couldn’t bring their partners to the reunion. Specifically, the letter said:
The Director of our Alumni Association forwarded your request to bring your partner with you to the 10th anniversary reunion this coming Saturday night. As previously stated to you, we welcome your attendance and look forward to your participation. However, your partner cannot attend.
The policy of the school and that is enforced is that only graduates and their spouses (engagements are recognized) are invited. We cannot acknowledge or define your partner relationship as one that falls under this policy. We kindly ask you to respect and follow our Yeshivah’s policy and attend the reunion without your partner.
Some gay graduates chose not to attend. Others created a Facebook group called "Open Flatbush Reunions – End Censorship and Alumni Profiling" which now has over 330 members, including, according to the Jewish Week “a Nobel Prize winner who attended the school over six decades ago and a former principal of the school, Rabbi Alan Stadtmauer, who resigned from his position in 2004 as he came to terms with being gay himself.”
The best response I’ve seen so far is on Jewschool, where a gay alum of the Yeshiva of Flatbush writes about why and how the school is being hypocritical. My favorite passage:
Until this particular issue came up however, everyone was welcome at the high school reunion. There was no “tsitsiss check” or religious litmus test, no approved favorite movie or banned political opinion. People showed up, they brought guests, they shmoozed and ate and re-connected with their classmates. It didn’t matter what you named your kids. And it didn’t matter what halacha you may have broken in your life. Nobody asked you to testify as to which hashgacha certified your existence as kosher.
So when Mr. Eisenberg, the administrator, claims that “there are standards of halacha that guide the Orthodox community. All of our graduates are welcome to attend our reunion but only those involved in recognized halachic relationships may register to attend as a couple,” I don’t buy it. The standards of halacha that guide the Orthodox community surely exist — but they cover a lot more than the gender of who you date and marry. Modesty rules. Ethical business rules. Rules for sabbath observance. Sexual practices of heterosexual couples.
Would you like more examples?
Holiday celebrations. Mourning customs. Communal prayer.
The Flatbush administration has no answer for what makes homosexuality so different from other violations of Orthodox norms, that gay and lesbian alumni may not even be acknowledged to exist.
Is gay male anal sex prohibited by the Torah? Sure, but so is a man having sex with his menstruating wife, and no one has ever gotten kicked out of a reunion for that.
What’s weird about all this (and the Noah Feldman stuff) is that it centers around a high school reunion. It makes perfect sense to me that an Orthodox high school might not be Okay with anyone being out while they’re a student in the system, but once they’ve gone off into the real world, who cares?
Jane emails:
According to the University of Chelm, a new study has found a strong connection between the ability to see clearer and the pocket. In a double blind test, a group of people suffering from bleared vision and moral confusion was studied carefully. As soon as they have been touched in their pocket — a miraculous improvement occurred instantly.
Based on this study and in the spirit of Tikkun Olam, I am calling to revoke Yeshiva of Flatbush’s non-profit tax exempt status.
Reason: Discrimination.
Hopeful end result: Cure of blindness…
There is simply no justification for pornography in any facet of the Jewishly engaged world. No one is saying it’s okay. Of course, that hasn’t kept Jews out of the business. Ron Jeremy and Nina Hartley are Jewish, and here at Jewcy we’ve brought you interviews with Jewish porn star and producer Joanna Angel, as well as an interview with her distraught Jewish mother. You can even find an academic article on Jews in the porn industry over at the Jewish Quarterly. But no matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t find any publication, organization or blog willing to rave about how Jews in porn is a good or even acceptable thing.
When I finished reading through all of these discussions and articles it occurred to me that what I’d been looking for was something that would let my friend off the hook. I wanted some rabbi somewhere to be giving away free heters to porn stars. But there doesn’t appear to be any such rabbi. And the more I think of that, the more I’m okay with it, even proud of it. I’ve written before about how important I think it is for us to provide realistic sex education and information to the frum community, but I’m relieved to find that even I have clear boundaries. And pornography is way out of bounds.
Since the fall, L.A.’s Unified School District has canceled plans to build 19 new schools and additions because the projected students haven’t materialized. Enrollment is down 7 percent from 2003. The L.A. Times doesn’t even mention a decline or reversal of immigrant flows as a possible cause, blaming only
years of declining birth rates and increasing housing prices that have pushed poor and working-class families out of many gentrified urban Los Angeles neighborhoods.
Hmm. Housing prices haven’t really increased since last fall, have they? But there has been an anti-illegal crackdown (and a decline in construction jobs). Is the LAT so committed to its ‘Latinos are the future’ line that it’s missing a major social and demographic development happening right under its nose?
I’d be thrilled with either Mitt Romney or Rudolph Giuliani as the next president.
I’ve always admired the classicist Victor Davis Hanson (a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute) but his thinking showed up flabby and shallow on Dennis Prager’s show Wednesday.
Dr. Hanson is a big booster of John McCain.
Dennis began: "I don’t know if you got to see my piece on Giuliani and McCain…"
I can’t think of any major thinker who so routinely interrupts his interviews to inquire if the guest had read or been acquainted with Prager’s positions.
Victor: "My gut sense is that McCain is more likely to capture independent voters…"
"We’re applying a standard to all these candidates that Reagen would not meet. One of the most shameful episodes in our history was selling arms to Iran…"
Dennis: "Why do you feel that was shameful?"
Victor: "Because Iran was a terorrist-sponsoring state and we were giving defacto legitimacy to it by even dealing with it…while they were torturing Americans through their surrogates in Lebanon."
Dennis: "I’ve always defended it in that it provided the opportunity for two loathsome regimes to continue to fight [Iran and Iraq]."
Victor: "In theory it was but if that had been true, then we might’ve been more overt with… That time was closer to the Iran hostage fiasco, we were publicly condemning Iran and flagging ships in the Gulf while we were simultaneously selling them some of the most sophisticated arms in our arsenal."
And what about our support for Joe Stalin in WWII? Reality is difficult and sometimes you have to do things in a sneaky way.
Dennis says that on domestic issues, McCain is not a Republican. Hanson agrees that McCain is weak on illegal immigration and that he opposed Bush’s tax cuts.
Hanson: "I’m worried about who will be a strong leader in the war against terror."
There’s no war against terror. Terror is just a technique. We’re in a war with those parts of Islam that want to murder us.
Dennis: "A strong foreign policy while your country continues to erode internally…"
Hanson admits that McCain is no lock to appoint conservative justices.
Dennis says about Obama: "His changing accents depending on location is troubling."
Strike "location" and replace with "race of his audience."
Dennis is no fan of Tom Brokaw. I’ve heard him say that "Tom Brokaw is not a particularly bright man."
Prager plays a clip of Brokaw on Joe Scarborough’s show on MSNBC: "This election is about ending polarization. This election is about moving on with solutions… This election is about the end of dogma."
Dennis: "I hate insulting people. This has nothing to do with Tom Brokaw, only about his words. They are not real."
"This is the new way of getting you to vote against the Republicans and anybody who thinks like George W. Bush. We have to have unity. Of course the unity folks are all left of center. They’re saying that all division in this country is caused by the Right. But if you all come to the Left, we’ll have unity and no more polarization."
"Do you know how vapid this all this? I can’t handle such colossal superficiality. Solutions to what? What election in the history of democracy was not about solutions?
"The end of dogma. What about the dogma that the races are equal? That’s dogma. There’s good dogma and bad dogma. Calling for an end to dogma and polarization? What does that mean? Who do you not want to be polarized against? Are we polarized against racists? I would hope so."
Tuesday night at a Barnes & Noble in Chelsea, nearly 200 members of the "seduction community" turned out to hear bald-headed The Game author and scoring artist (he goes by "Style" in the field) Neil Strauss answer one question: What’s the best way to bang some hotties?
Strauss was on hand to promote his new latest tome, a follow-up to The Game titled The Rules of the Game. Rules is actually a two book package: The first book teaches the reader how to master the Game in 30 days. The second chronicles the sexual exploits of self-avowed Game master Strauss. He read for the crowd a slightly risqué-for-B&N excerpt of book two; it seems this one time, Style was sucking on sexagenarian titty, only to discover that the object of his seduction was sporting a colostomy bag! How offensively hilarious!
A lingering scent of Drakkar Noir cried out for Radar to take a closer look. Luckily, we were packing our hulking Nikon D200 phallus to document it all!
Strauss surveyed the crowd on further important matters, like whether they thought it was a good idea to conserve energy and NOT masturbate before a big date (the majority answered that you shouldn’t!), and fielded audience questions re: the complicated workings of the female mind and life in general. The PUA (translation: Pick-Up Artist) advised that ZOUT is great for getting out semen stains, loud talkers should buy a VU meter to figure out a comfy chatting volume, and that you should be honest with chicks that seem to want emotional involvement.
"On my first book tour, the audience was filled with the kind of geeks I was used to. On my second book tour, the audience was filled with frat guys," he says. He was even asked to offer training for sales conventions and political candidates (he declined).
Still, giving guys who were down on their luck the keys to the kingdom remained a powerful pull for Strauss. He was getting thousands of e-mails from dudes wanting deliverance, but he couldn’t help them all. Coupled with the fact that the seduction business was booming (the group boot camps that Strauss wrote about in "The Game" that cost US$500 per person now regularly go for $3,000 and more), Strauss came up with his own solution to meet the demand. He hired a staff and kick-started the Stylelife Academy (www.stylelife.com), an online "university" focusing on the art of attraction that charges members $19.95 a week.
Enter Strauss’ latest book and the lawyerly administrations set forth in the beginning. "Rules of the Game" is actually a collection of two books – the aforementioned "Stylelife Challenge" and "The Style Diaries: The Pickup Artist’s Companion," a collection of artfully sketched short tales that outline pitfalls of the game seen through Strauss’ eyes. "The Stylelife Challenge" is a self-help book set up on a 30-day cycle that include daily exercises and field missions for each day.
At first skim, "The Stylelife Challenge" is like most go get ’em books aimed at men: eat right, look people in the eye, brush your teeth, believe in yourself. Strauss concedes that these elements are evergreen, but he points out that what makes this book different is the rigorous testing these attraction tactics have undergone – he claims to have spent five years trying this stuff out on 13,000 men of all different backgrounds.
The missions run from approaching up to five strangers to make small talk to reframing what you do for a living so that it seems exciting. How do you win the challenge? At the end of 30 days, if you’ve completed all the tasks, you should have a date with a real, live girl.
But then what?
Strauss knows that getting the date is just the first step and keeping her in the long run is a whole other story. "The rules of the game are the complete opposite of real relationship rules," Strauss says.
That set of strategy will have to wait for another book.
Whenever I’ve come out with a new book, about half of Americans ask me, "How are you going to market it?"
I hate that. I’m not into marketing. I just want to do the work and let my work finds its natural level. I think of my reporting as deconstructing "marketing" and getting to the truth.
Well, how’s it working for me?
Not well.
I’m alone, I live in a hovel and everybody hates me.
So in my quest to earn an honorable livelihood, I’ve been studying internet marketers. And I’ve found I’m loving it. I find it hard to go to bed before midnight and I like to be up by 7 a.m (about half the time in between is sleep and the rest of the time I’m listening to books on CD or Dennis Prager radio shows).
Here are my favorite marketers. I think they important things to say to everybody:
* Joel Comm
* Frank Kern
* Neil Strauss
* Armand Morin
* Jay Abraham
I feel like I’m learning about human nature and it’s exciting.
I’m up to $10 a day from my Adsense.
From Hugh Hewitt‘s interview of Christopher Hitchens today (transcript here):
HH: So Christopher Hitchens, can any of the Republicans beat them, the Clinton-Clinton tag team from hell? Can anyone actually stop this?
CH: Well, I’ve been writing, best I can, to beseech people to think do you want this dysfunctional hillbilly family back in the White House? Do you want this guy back in the Lincoln bedroom, this interminable self-pitying, paranoid demagogue? Do you want the brothers, the Rodham brothers, remember them?
HH: Yup.
CH: Remember the charm of the Rodham, are they twins? I can’t remember.
HH: No.
CH: The bulky brothers who, the friends of Marc Rich, the authors of the Marc Rich pardon, the people who had a, what was it, a beech nut monopoly in Uzbekistan, or something, with these low-rent riff-raff, beseeching favors. She’s never been able to say no to anything they’ve ever asked of her. Do you want a second bite at this cherry? I cannot see how this doesn’t in the end, the reminder that they’re giving of what it’s like, turn into a political question, because here’s the thing, Hugh. I think because of the very tough time the United States has had at home and abroad in the last two years, those of us who thought that the Clinton years would just be an unpleasant memory, something in the rear view mirror a few years back, turned out to be wrong. To many people, including some who don’t remember it that well, the younger voters, it seems like a halcyon period.
HH: Yes, the holiday from history.
CH: Yeah. Now, now, you get ugly, crude, vulgar reminders of oh, yes, of course, that’s what it was like. All the time you had to see these bitter, twisted, selfish, needy, greedy, entitled faces in terms of voice in the executive mansion. No, no, no more of that, surely.
I get a call from a pornographer Wednesday afternoon.
Porner: "The worst thing I ever saw happen was when you left. I know you had to do it for a number of reasons. I don’t feel there’s anybody out there reporting the scumbag crap that these people are doing. Things were more under control when you were out there because they knew that if they did underhanded stuff, it was going to come back to bite them in the butt. Now there’s no control over these people."
