The Case For Gladstone

In 1989, I was living in Brisbane with my sister before moving to the Gladstone area to live with my brother. My doctor told me to be careful of Gladstone girls. They might give me a disease.

Comment: “Please explain how you intend to make a dirty, polluted industrial town look like an appealing tourist destination?”

Do You Live Near Australia’s Most Polluted Cities? “3. Gladstone has a mix of industries that contributes to its air pollution: coal operations, aluminium smelting and chemical manufacturing. This accumulation of harmful dust particles, in addition to car emissions, has led to an increase in asthma, allergies and similar symptoms.”

Gladstone has a reputation akin to Bakersfield.

MJ posts on the Gladstone Observer:

IS it time to reinvent Gladstone and our ways of thinking about this amazing region?

When I tell the outsiders where I’m working you can hear the disdain in their reply of ‘really why are you there?’, yet these are the same Aussies who have never left the comfort of their own patch to go exploring.

And let me tell you, when you do take the time to explore this region you are rewarded with one of the great wonders of the world. For example where else in Australia can you say you have the unbelievable Great Southern Barrier Reef at your door step?

To our west we have the sandstone region to explore and let’s not forget 1770 and Agnes Water and all beaches in between.

We are blessed with an abundance of parks and walking tracks and the best play area. I’m talking about East Shores and it looks like another bucket of money is about to be spent extending this area for everyone.

Yet it’s that name that seems to make ordinary people cringe and that name is Gladstone.

Do we need to reinvent ourselves with a new image and stop showing the world the vast tracks of coal that is one of our main export drivers, or hide the LNG and coal ships that earn the Queensland Government a bucket of money?

It breaks my heart to think the rest of this state and country think we are living in the pits and why would you want to holiday here – you only come here to make money and then get the hell out.

I say it’s time to make a stand. What we need to do is start using the tools we have to show the rest of Australia and the world that GLADSTONE is a thriving city with amazing facilities.

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From Katy Tur’s New Book – Unbelievable

It’s a good read and a quick read (took me less than two hours to finish).

This sounds like it is about Corey Lewandowski:

About a week after my July Trump interview, I went for a drink with a senior staffer. What did he think of Trump’s chances of making it to the convention? I asked. “One in ten,” he said. I told him about the unlikely way I got my assignment. He told me about his family back home. And with that I was ready to get on with my night. I looked at my watch. I had dinner with a friend.
I need to get out of here.
At the door of the restaurant, he had a question for me.
“Where can I go to meet thirty-something single women?”
“You have a wife and kids.”
“So what?”
I laughed the way you laugh when your friend’s grandparent makes a racist joke.
“I don’t know. I’ll see you later.”
I tried to forget the exchange. Nothing I hadn’t heard before. Also: men.
I don’t know what the staffer thought after that. He was nice for a little while. He’d text back quickly, trying to answer my questions. But he wasn’t entirely professional. He’d call at late hours, say disparaging things about women I worked with, comment on people’s looks, claim well-respected female reporters were “fucking” this guy or that one. He’d tell me that he could prove it because he’d seen “text messages.”
When the campaign sent water bottles and Trump towels to “sweaty Marco” Rubio, I texted the staffer to confirm it. His response: “You need some? I’m sure you get all sweaty sometimes too.”
At a campaign stop in Waterloo, Iowa, he bragged to Anthony and me about all the women who would want to sleep with him when he became Trump’s White House chief of staff. (So much for Trump’s chances being “one in ten.”)

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Parasha Haazinu (Deut. 32)

Haazinu consists of Deuteronomy Chapter 32 and is read between Rosh Hashanah (which starts Wednesday night) and Yom Kippur. Listen here.

* Det. 32:5-6. Moshe calls the Jews a “perverse and twisted generation” and a “vile and unwise people.” Is that anti-semitic?

* Det. 32:8: When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance,
when He divided all mankind, He set up boundaries for the peoples
according to the number of the sons of Israel.

It sounds like God is in favor of national boundaries and distinct peoples rather than all of just being brown.

* Deut: 32:15 “Jeshurun [Israel] grew fat and kicked;
filled with food, they became heavy and sleek.
They abandoned the God who made them
and rejected the Rock their Savior.
They made him jealous with their foreign gods
and angered him with their detestable idols.”

It sounds like God doesn’t like fatties. They disgust him. Their obesity reveals that they lack self control. You can’t trust them.

* “You have a fat wife… A fat woman is inherently untrustworthy as she is a sensualist, she sees no real difference between a pastrami sandwich and a dick in the mouth… The female Jew is particularly vulnerable to the zaftig seduction of the forbidden… So let’s start again. This is not your office and your wife would not be your wife if I came to her in the middle of the with a platter of cold cuts.” The House of Special Purpose, Fargo – Season 3 Episode 5

*Deut: 32:19: The Lord saw this and rejected them
because he was angered by his sons and daughters.
20 “I will hide my face from them,” he said,
“and see what their end will be;
for they are a perverse generation,
children who are unfaithful.
21 They made me jealous by what is no god
and angered me with their worthless idols.
I will make them envious by those who are not a people;
I will make them angry by a nation that has no understanding.

“28: They are a nation without sense,
there is no discernment in them.”

Another word for “discernment” is discrimination. No people that fails to discriminate will last long.

* 40 I lift my hand to heaven and solemnly swear:
As surely as I live forever,
41 when I sharpen my flashing sword
and my hand grasps it in judgment,
I will take vengeance on my adversaries
and repay those who hate me.
42 I will make my arrows drunk with blood,
while my sword devours flesh:
the blood of the slain and the captives,
the heads of the enemy leaders.”

This doesn’t sound like a message of love and inclusion.

* You are not going to see a fist fight at a Jewish wedding. At an Italian wedding or Irish wedding or latino wedding, you may well see a fist fight.

* We have to make a parnassah (living). What does that mean to you? How much moral flexibility does that give?

* Is the main reason that some minorities are afraid in America is that they subconsciously realize the majority would be better off driving them out?

Is this how they think subconsciously? They realize that the majority would be better off without them? I don’t know many Jews who think this way. Most Jews believe that they are an asset to America.

If minorities behave in a way that gives the majority an incentive to be rid of them, then it would make sense for these minorities to live in great fear of the majority discovering its group interests. Hence the rampant paranoia among minorities living in luxury and peace in America and all the lying by civil rights organizations and the massive gaslighting by MSM.

I suspect that the more convinced you are that the majority would be better off in America without your group, the more paranoid you will be about the majority developing its group interests. The less convinced you are that your group is a drag on the country, the more ease you will feel about whites discovering their group interests.

The more you hate the majority, the more you will fear them, and underlying that will be the fear that the majority would be better off without you and that one day it will wake up to its group interests.

It must be a horrible feeling when you realize that others are better off without you and your group. So naturally you hate them for being better off without you.

Wow, suddenly the behavior of organized minorities against America’s white Christian core make perfect sense.

When you do a Fourth Step inventory, you list off your resentments and fears. When you look at the lists, you notice that the people you resent are the people you fear and for the same reason — you’ve wronged them so you know that they have an incentive to hurt you and so you rationally fear them.

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‘The Secret Fear Plaguing The Unmarried, Untethered Orthodox’

Laura E. Adkins writes:

I did not grow up a religious Jew, but for my entire adult life, I’ve been a member of the Orthodox world. As a result, I’ve spent a lot of time in other people’s homes, with other people’s families; Orthodox life is built around the family, and Shabbat and holidays are desolate affairs if you’re by yourself.

Countless families and communities across the world have graciously opened their doors and tables to me. From the homes of close friends in my neighborhood to the home of an eccentric kabbalist-cum krav maga teacher in Israel, through the boisterous Chabad of Panama City and everywhere in between, every Shabbat and every holiday I’ve found a place amongst my generous fellow tribesmen and women.

I’ve never once been made to feel unwelcome. But I have also never forgotten that I am always a guest.

And while I pay my synagogue dues and give what I can to the communal institutions that have made me who I am today, and though I regularly host Shabbat and holiday meals of my own in my tiny apartment, there’s a little part of me that will always feel like a burden, a tiny voice in the back of my head telling me I’ve been given more than I can ever give in return.

It’s not a friendly voice. A child of divorce, I hate to need. I’ve been able to pack a dufflebag by rote in fifteen minutes flat since age eight. I have become a self-sufficient machine; my first word was not “mommy” or “daddy” but “cat.” I’m an introvert by nature, and at the end of the day, I live in my head much more than I do in the presence of others.

But the Orthodox Jewish world is no place for such singularity.

This point was driven home for me during a seminar course in college on religious leadership. Our first assignment was to tell the cohort a 10-minute narrative of our life and religious journey. When it came to her turn, a fellow Orthodox Jew from a wealthy coastal town who I’ll call Beth shared the story of a woman I’ll call Rebekah, a woman from her community who had no nearby Jewish family members of her own. Rebekah would come to Beth’s Orthodox home every Jewish holiday at the behest of her parents, who made room for this unmarried woman in their hearth.

When Beth was a child, she saw Rebekah’s visits as a burden; making space in the house, making space at the table, making space in the family for a virtual interloper during the pinnacle of family time seemed like a grand intrusion. But as Beth grew older, she realized that though it was never truly painless having her home opened to someone so different each and every holiday, she gained as much from Rebekah’s presence and unique persona as Rebekah did from her family’s hospitality.

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Forward: ‘In Leaving Orthodoxy, Tova Mirvis Voices Questions Many Secretly Harbor’

From the Forward:

I was not raised in modern Orthodoxy; I married into it.

And as I read Tova Mirvis’ memoir, The Book of Separation, it often felt as though I was reading my own misgivings and hesitations.

Her book opens with a chronicling of her first Rosh Hashanah, after leaving her marriage and Orthodox Judaism. Mirvis grew up in the modern Orthodox community, married within it, and raised her children as such. She has a deep appreciation for the customs and beliefs she has lived her entire life, but the knot of doubt that she used to be able to push aside – does God really care if I drive on Rosh Hashanah, eat a non-kosher piece of pizza, or daven with the established prayers, and even, do I believe in God at all – has only grown, and she can no longer live her life as a lie.

Mirvis delicately traverses a new world, and treats her old one, the one her children still live in with their father, with much respect and even love. She does not leave Orthodoxy for lack of love, but for lack of belief.

Like Mirvis, I have always lived with that knot of uncertainty; I have always questioned what in this religion is real, and what truly matters. I know I’m not alone.

As Mirvis sits in Rosh Hashanah services and questions her beliefs and God’s presence in her life, she looks at those around her in the synagogue and thinks, “Surely inside some of these minds burned this strange fire, these same doubt-riddled thoughts.”

I am not surprised that Tova Mirvis is no longer Orthodox. January 30, 2005, I interviewed her:

Luke: “Do you believe in God?”

Tova: “Yes.”

Luke: “Do you believe God gave the Torah?”

Tova: “I do. I think it’s more complicated… I don’t believe in the fundamentalist notion that he wrote it down and handed it off but I believe in an evolving dynamic chain of tradition. It has formed my life. It is complicated. I would guess that I don’t believe in it in the same terms that Wendy Shalit does.”

Luke: “How about in the terms that Maimonidies formulates in his eighth of thirteen required beliefs [the Jewish prayer Yigdal, which translated into English reads: ‘I believe with complete faith that the entire Torah now in our hands is the same one that was given to Moses, our teacher, peace be upon him.’]”

Tova: “Remind me.”

Luke: “That the Torah is divine. That every word of it is divine. And if a person was to say that a single word in the Torah is not divine, that that is outside permitted belief.”

Tova: “I don’t know. That’s a good question. Part of my Orthodoxy is that you don’t have to know all the answers. I don’t know. It’s a good question.”

Luke: “This was a question that obsessed the characters of Chaim Potok novels and it obsesses me.”

Tova: “What’s interesting about Orthodoxy is does the term mean sameness of belief? There’s little sameness of belief in Orthodoxy. There are basic tenets. I don’t think one could articulate an Orthodox theology that would apply across the board. It’s complicated and I live with that complication every day.”

Luke: “Orthoprax means correct practice. Orthodox means correct belief. Sorry to hone in on this, but would it be more accurate to call you Orthoprax than Orthodox?”

Tova pauses: “I don’t even know where to begin. No, I have no idea. I don’t know what those words mean. Is someone who belongs to an Orthodox synagogue and drives there [on Shabbat and festivals], is he Orthodox? I don’t know. Is one who davens three times a day but eats out [in non-kosher restaurants], is he Orthodox? I don’t do that, before that gets tagged on to me, but I don’t know. I don’t know what these terms mean. I don’t really think about them. I don’t know that there’s a need to define in that way.

“I am Modern Orthodox. I am liberal Orthodox. I am feminist Orthodox. But what does that have to do with my right to write fiction? The whole question of where writers are coming from is problematic and the least interesting way of looking at novels. I don’t know what my own personal beliefs have to do with it. Is it a credential test?

“People ask [a prominent Jewish author] if he believes in God. They want a yes or no answer. He thinks it’s not a yes-or-no answer but a discussion. To live in the Orthodox world is to be engaged in these questions and discussions and to wrestle with them and to be part of a conversation. It’s not to have all the answers. I just don’t believe that anyone does.”

Luke: “Are you familiar with Louis Jacobs?”

Tova: “Vaguely.”

Luke: “He was on the way to becoming Chief Rabbi of England in the early 1960s. They found a book he wrote in 1957 called We Have Reason To Believe where he accepted what is the universally held view in academic study of sacred text that the Torah is composed of different strands composed in different centuries and woven together over centuries. Because of that, he was thrown out of Orthodox Judaism.

“I bring that up because with your vast secular education, I am sure you are familiar with literary criticism and the asking of three basic questions: When was something written? Who wrote it? For what purpose was it written? If you apply those three basic questions to sacred text, you would come up with an answer completely different from that of traditional Judaism to its sacred texts. Do you wrestle with this?”

Tova, pauses: “Sometimes, but not to where I need to have the answer, to resolve it in my head. I think the same applies to issues of Orthodoxy and science.”

Luke: “Is Jewish Orthodoxy compatible with Modernity?”

Tova: “Yes.”

Luke: “So one can be authentically Orthodox and authentically Modern?”

Tova: “That’s what the Modern Orthodox movement is about. Modern Orthodoxy was founded on the principle that one doesn’t live in separate worlds where we do our Orthodox thing and then we do our Modern thing. We integrate them.”

Luke: “Do you think it is true?”

Tova: “Do I think that it is true?”

Luke: “Ontologically, ultimately? That you can be authentically Modern and authentically Orthodox and integrated?”

Tova: “I do.”

Luke: “I’m sure that much of what you learned at Columbia ran completely counter to your Orthodox Judaism?”

Tova: “I don’t know. It didn’t.”

Luke: “Did you ever take a class in Bible?”

Tova: “I didn’t. I regret that.

“I think these are interesting questions but they don’t have to do with fiction, with my fiction.

“I think of Wendy Shalit’s piece as a tzitzit-check, a sheitel-check. What are your credentials for writing. As a writer, I don’t pretend to have all the answers to the theological questions of Orthodoxy. I don’t pretend it in my life and I don’t pretend it in my fiction.

“I don’t think that writing from a place of certainty makes for the best fiction.

“I can discuss with you my own doubts though I don’t think that I need to. Orthodoxy is not always an easy package to hold together.

“I take issue with her argument that because characters struggle with communal norms and divine truths they are outsiders. I think she wants to do this to writers and to our characters. It is the second one that pisses me off more.”

After the interview, I exchanged some emails with Tova.

Eighty minutes after the conclusion of our interview, Tova wrote me:
I must tell you as well, in hindsight, that I have an isssue with many of your questions. Upon thinking about it, I wondered whether questions such as whether I believe in the one of maimonides 13 principles of faith are intended for discussion and thought, or to determine whether I’m really the insider I claim to be. if the former, then I truly am interested in the conversation and the ongoing exploration. But if its the latter, then I’d make the same objection as I make to her piece. Must we believe in the 3rd principle of faith, for example, to write legitimately about the ortjodox world. What if someone only believed in numbers 1-11? Does that disqualify them? And since its so on point, I’d love to quote The Ghost Writer, which I mentioned: “Do you practice Judaism? If so, how? If not, what qualifies you to write about Judaism for national magazines?” I’m feeling a little too much of Judge Wapter in the air.
I replied:
That was my favorite section of the Ghostwriter. I do not believe that you need to believe in anything to write on Orthodox Judaism or any topic. My questions on your beliefs were to find out where you are coming from. I realize this is a very sensitive area for many people… I had a fascinating discussion along a similar line with Alana Newhouse…in my book on Jewish journalism.
Later, I emailed Tova: “Why have you stayed Orthodox?”

Tova wrote back: “I’ve stayed Orthodox because it’s who I am, it’s my childhood and its my family, my parents and my children, and it’s part of all my memories. I’m Orthodox because I love ritual, because I love the texts, love the idea of a chain of ideas passed down from generation to generation, each one adding one more link. Because I love Shabbos, love that the chaos of my everyday life quiets down for those hours. Because sometimes when I least expect it, a cantorial tune, a word of a prayer will catch me off guard and move me, make me feel a longing for something deeper, fuller, higher. I’ve stayed Orthodox even though so many things about it anger me, so many things feel problematic and troubling and unresolvable. And I stay because the Orthodox world is so much wider than some people believe, because one can doubt and wrestle and observe and believe and that is all part of this tradition.”

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