Tisha B’Av Edition – Parashat Va’etchannan (Deuteronomy 3:23-7:11) 7-23-18

Posted on July 22, 2018 by Luke Ford

Listen here.

* I can see many tendencies between the Jews of the Torah and the Jews of today. For example, Moses is not all stiff upper lip like a WASP. This parasha begins with him imploring God and in turn shows God expressing non-WASP emotions.

23 At that time I pleaded with the Lord: 24 “Sovereign Lord, you have begun to show to your servant your greatness and your strong hand. For what god is there in heaven or on earth who can do the deeds and mighty works you do? 25 Let me go over and see the good land beyond the Jordan—that fine hill country and Lebanon.”

26 But because of you the Lord was angry with me and would not listen to me. “That is enough,” the Lord said. “Do not speak to me anymore about this matter.

Moshe would rather blame the Jews for his not getting into the Promised Land rather than take responsibility.

* Moshe talks about what a good land Israel is, but objectively speaking, it is not a good land. It is largely devoid of water and oil. It is not awe-inspiringly scenic. Moshe may be romanticizing the land, or he may be looking at the land through the eyes of faith. Because God gave this land to His people, that automatically makes it a good land.

* God reminds me of a football coach. Deut. 3:26: “Do not continue to speak to Me further about this matter.” That’s a very common phrase said by NFL coaches.

* Deut. 4:1: ” Now, Israel, hear the decrees and laws I am about to teach you. Follow them so that you may live and may go in and take possession of the land the Lord, the God of your ancestors, is giving you.”

The purpose of Jewish law is to live and not to die, and to possess and maintain possession of the land God gave the Jews.

The U.S. Constitution is not an end in itself. It is not meant to be a death warrant. It is to help America live and to retain its sovereignty. If a crisis requires amending or suspending part of the Constitution to live, you do that.

* Deut. 4:3-4: “You saw with your own eyes what the Lord did at Baal Peor. The Lord your God destroyed from among you everyone who followed the Baal of Peor, 4 but all of you who held fast to the Lord your God are still alive today.”

Gross sexual sins are one of the things that God destroys people for. Widespread legitimized homosexuality was a reason God destroyed the world in the Flood and later destroyed Sodom.

Why is God so uptight about this?

* The purpose of Jewish law is to look wise in the eyes of the gentiles. “5 See, I have taught you decrees and laws as the Lord my God commanded me, so that you may follow them in the land you are entering to take possession of it. 6 Observe them carefully, for this will show your wisdom and understanding to the nations, who will hear about all these decrees and say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.” 7 What other nation is so great as to have their gods near them the way the Lord our God is near us whenever we pray to him? 8 And what other nation is so great as to have such righteous decrees and laws as this body of laws I am setting before you today?”

Revelation is awe-inspiring but unless you have a system to perpetuate what was taught and a community to safeguard the lessons, you can’t rely upon people’s feelings of awe to last long. Jewish law concretizes commitment.

* “9 Only be careful, and watch yourselves closely so that you do not forget the things your eyes have seen or let them fade from your heart as long as you live. Teach them to your children and to their children after them. 10 Remember the day you stood before the Lord your God at Horeb, when he said to me, “Assemble the people before me to hear my words so that they may learn to revere me as long as they live in the land and may teach them to their children.”

It is natural to forget things that are inconvenient.

* “And the Lord directed me at that time to teach you the decrees and laws you are to follow in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess.”

Jewish law is meant to be observed in the Jewish state. Living in the diaspora is a compromise with God’s intentions.

* “25 After you have had children and grandchildren and have lived in the land a long time—if you then become corrupt and make any kind of idol, doing evil in the eyes of the Lord your God and arousing his anger, 26 I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you this day that you will quickly perish from the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess. You will not live there long but will certainly be destroyed. 27 The Lord will scatter you among the peoples, and only a few of you will survive among the nations to which the Lord will drive you. 28 There you will worship man-made gods of wood and stone, which cannot see or hear or eat or smell. 29 But if from there you seek the Lord your God, you will find him if you seek him with all your heart and with all your soul.”

This seems like a realistic assessment of human nature. When people are in distress, they’re more likely to return to God.

The primary teaching of Jewish text about Jewish suffering is that it is the Jews’ fault for not following God’s commandments.

* How does a people perpetuate itself? Deut. 6:6 “These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. 7 Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 8 Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 9 Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.”

“20 In the future, when your son asks you, “What is the meaning of the stipulations, decrees and laws the Lord our God has commanded you?” 21 tell him: “We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, but the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand. 22 Before our eyes the Lord sent signs and wonders—great and terrible—on Egypt and Pharaoh and his whole household. 23 But he brought us out from there to bring us in and give us the land he promised on oath to our ancestors. 24 The Lord commanded us to obey all these decrees and to fear the Lord our God, so that we might always prosper and be kept alive, as is the case today. 25 And if we are careful to obey all this law before the Lord our God, as he has commanded us, that will be our righteousness.”

Posted in Alt Right, Torah | Comments Off on Tisha B’Av Edition – Parashat Va’etchannan (Deuteronomy 3:23-7:11) 7-23-18

The Power Of Forgiveness

Posted on July 20, 2018 by Luke Ford

Posted in Addiction | Comments Off on The Power Of Forgiveness

How Is The Jewish Media Reacting To The Jewish State Declaring Itself The Jewish State?

Posted on July 20, 2018 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Joe: “Netanyahu is nothing special. His major asset is that much of the global media is Jewish-owned and therefore biased towards Israel. That same Jewish-owned media is biased against the United States and Europe except when they do boneheaded things such as inviting in hordes of Syrians and Mexicans.”

* International Jew: “Well, we can see that the Jewish-owned New York Times is none too supportive of this move.

Let’s play a game. You find a Jewish-owned media outlet that supports this new law, and I’ll match that with a Jewish-owned media outlet that doesn’t support it. We’ll add up their subscribers/viewers to keep score.

I’ve already taken my turn actually; I said “New York Times”. 500,000 print subscribers, 2,500,000 digital subscribers. Your turn, Joe.”

Posted in Israel, Jews | Comments Off on How Is The Jewish Media Reacting To The Jewish State Declaring Itself The Jewish State?

Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by E.F. Schumacher (7-20-18)

Posted on July 20, 2018 by Luke Ford

* The education and Catholic conversion of E.F. Schumacher.

From the Amazon reviews:

* Small Is Beautiful is Oxford-trained economist E. F. Schumacher’s classic call for the end of excessive consumption. Schumacher inspired such movements as “Buy Locally” and “Fair Trade,” while voicing strong opposition to “casino capitalism” and wasteful corporate behemoths. Named one of the Times Literary Supplement’s 100 Most Influential Books Since World War II, Small Is Beautiful presents eminently logical arguments for building our economies around the needs of communities, not corporations.

* Schumacher’s perspective is informed by Gandhian and Buddhist concepts of scale, i.e., the appropriate scale for a business or a job is the scale that an individual can understand and enjoy. As such, he runs directly against the “bigger is better” philosophy of mainstream economics that argues in favor of increasing scale until marginal costs begin to rise. Further, Schumacher goes against the idea that profits, per se, are the only goal. As a free-market economist, I have strong doubts about these ideas; as an environmental economist concerned with sustainable systems, I have to agree that his ideas are more sensible than those that pursue profits at all costs.

If these ideas had displaced mainstream economics (to the extent that Gordon Gekko said “small is beautiful” instead of “greed is good”), we would be living in a very different world today. Schumacher is certainly aware that he is fighting an uphill battle, but his analysis never veers from good economics. He does not hope that people will just “do the right thing.” Instead, he pays attention to incentives and how they can be changed to accomplish his goals.

This book is full of wisdom, and the writing sparkles. Although you should read it to experience it yourself, I will leave you with this passage:
We are always having all sorts of clever ideas about optimizing something before it even exists. I think the stupid man who says “something is better than nothing” is much more intelligent than than the clever chap who will not touch something unless it is optimal.

Bottom Line: Economists study how humans use scarce resources. Their decisions are motivated by philosophies of why they want to use those resources. This book discusses those decisions with an important question: Is the goal more consumption or happier people? Since consumption does not appear to make us more happy, we have to ask what does, and Schumacher answers that question by noting that people living in communities and doing meaningful work are happier.

2014 update (after using the book to teach): Schumacher has a lovely vision for how a bottom-up system of production by the masses would work, but he does not describe a strategy for dealing with people(s) who prefer large and ugly, e.g., China, the US, Canada, et al. This weakness puts his advice into the aspirational rather than pragmatic section of my bookshelf.

* FROM MPCDOT.COM:

Our society is seriously out of scale. This fact has produced a range of dysfunctional behaviors that we have incorporated into our behavioral framework, creating further imbalance. The end result will be atomization, depopulation, and social chaos. The only remedy for this problem, long term, is reduction in scale, achieved by reorganizing nations into manageable and relatively homogenous populations, population and immigration control, and restraint of technological, economic, and social policies which give rise to problems of scale.

This remedy is not, I must stress, a devolution–it is not a reversion to the past, much less an idealized past free from worry. In any composition of society, there will be tension between traditional and progressive outlooks, there will be complacency and conflict and all the usual human evils. Nor is the primary concern Malthusian, that is to say an unsustainable growth in resource consumption (while this is a problem we face as a result of scale, it is not my focus here).

By scale I mean more than mere population growth; I refer also to the scale of complexity created by the West’s conversion to a multicultural, globalized social model. In this model, all distinctions including race (meaning ethnicity), nationality, culture, and religion are viewed as subordinate to the division between the managerial class and the managed class. Thus effective democracy is blunted and masses of people are shifted and reorganized in accordance with the decisions of a managerial class. Aside from the negative consequences brought about by heedless change, a second order of effects is seen in the dramatic increase in social complexity and the need for citizens to accomodate radically different (and in some cases incompatible) outlooks.

* Related link mentioned by Kevin.

Posted in Economics | Comments Off on Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by E.F. Schumacher (7-20-18)

‘Boyle Heights Anti-White Vigilantes Try to Drive Out Kosher Coffee Shop’

Posted on July 20, 2018 by Luke Ford

COMMENTS AT STEVE SAILER:

* These days “anti-gentrification” is just a generic term for kicking people you don’t like out of the neighborhood.

* If people in a 94% white neighborhood in say W. Virginia were protesting the opening of a Jewish owned coffee shop in their neighborhood (not that they would ever do that in the US – even in the worst of the bad old days there were no anti-Jewish shop boycotts in the US the way there were in Poland and Germany in the ’30s) then they would be condemned far and wide, but because it is Hispanics and Antifas, crickets.

I don’t think that the “liberal” Jews of America are going to like the new America as much as they thought they would.

* CBS News calls Boyle Heights “rapidly gentrifying”. That seems premature, considering Boyle Heights is 95% Hispanic.

* What would the reaction in the popular press be if whites had organized a boycott of a shop because the shop owner supported Barack Obama?

* The stereotype around here is of the “unbased” Jew – the secular liberal Ivy educated Ellis Island descendant (or nowadays even 1970s wave Soviet Jew descendant) Chuckie Schumer type Jews who are the epitome of American “liberalism”. BUT, there are a lot of Jews who are not like that at all – Israeli Jews, Orthodox Jews, Soviet Jews (the immigrant generation, not their kids), even some Ellis Island Jews who never drank the Kool-Aid. And in the future there are going to be a lot more (as a % of the Jews) because the Chuck Schumer type liberal Jews are dying off and not being replaced – either they have no children or their kids and grandkids are not (fully) Jewish anymore.

* An enterprising young reporter should put the national Chamber of Commerce on the spot and ask if they support the Boyle Heights Chamber’s decision to eject Shalom. Putting a spotlight on this could help erode their membership in more conservative parts of the country.

* Just remember everybody:

When an angry mob of mask wearing, feces flinging thugs engaged in de facto riot show up at your place of business to shut you down

YOU are the hater.

The day is going to come when somebody goes Napoleon on their asses and then it will get interesting.

* Remember those Trump inauguration protestors? The 200 who were arrested? And charges were pressed? The left forgot about them, and their moms had to mortgage their houses for legal fees.

There are legal ways to deal with protestors like these. Insist that the cops arrest people. Don’t clean up the shit. Hire a biowaste firm, and get a receipt. Automatic felony. Press charges. The cops and prosecutors can ID the perps. If not, or in addition, file civil charges against the organizing groups and a list of John Does. Get subpoenas. Put phone video online. Notify everyone involved to preserve evidence, including SMS stuff and web contents, with anti spoilation notices.

What about the sponsoring groups? Do they have a board? Contact the members one by one. Go to their offices or homes. “Do you approve of throwing shit at my coffee shop?” There are donor organizations and individuals who support the protestor organizers. “Do you approve of this? Do you think [current president of anti gentrification organization] should keep her job?”

What about the companies run by the board members? Perhaps their products should be boycotted.

And so on. Scorch the earth on these guys. A single event can produce years of hell for these guys.

* Blacks and Mexicans are sitting on potentially billions of $ worth of valuable real estate and you don’t want to put yourself between the Establishment and a billion $ horde.

Posted in Los Angeles | Comments Off on ‘Boyle Heights Anti-White Vigilantes Try to Drive Out Kosher Coffee Shop’