The first journalist from an American Jewish pro-Israel publication to be given an Iranian visa since 1979 reported Wednesday that he had found little evidence to suggest that Iran wanted to destroy Israel, as widely asserted by critics of the Iranian nuclear agreement.
The journalist, Larry Cohler-Esses, assistant managing editor for news at The Forward, an influential New York-based newspaper catering to American Jews, also wrote that people in Iran, including its Jews, were eager for outside interaction and willing to speak critically about their government.
While he heard widespread criticism of the Israeli government and its policies toward the Palestinians, Mr. Cohler-Esses wrote, he also found support among some senior clerics for a two-state solution, should the Palestinians pursue that outcome.
“Though I had to work with a government fixer and translator, I decided which people I wanted to interview and what I would ask them,” Mr. Cohler-Esses wrote in the first of at least two articles from his July reporting trip. “Far from the stereotype of a fascist Islamic state, I found a dynamic push-and-pull between a theocratic government and its often reluctant and resisting people.”
Posted inIran, Israel, Jews|Comments Off on NYT: Reporting From Iran, Jewish Paper Sees No Plot to Destroy Israel
The corner of Pico Blvd and La Cienega Blvd at 6 am.
Darren Melamed: “Is that where you drop off your dates after a night out partying?”
Aryeh posts: “West Pico and Sherbourne. 14 police. 8 police cars. Mugging by gunpoint suspect in custody. Police reported he had crack pipe but no gun found.”
Posted inPico/Robertson|Comments Off on Stay Classy 90035!
We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
LUKE: The first step is a hard step for me to take because I think of myself as smart, disciplined and ethical. So how could I have compulsions stronger than me?
So the first time I took this step was in 2011 when I decided to see what I could learn from a 12-step program related to dating. And when I finally began working the steps seriously a year later, I decided I would accept and move through the first step just to find out the experience that awaited me as I worked further steps.
I’m listening to a great HerbK workshop online, where he says: “To come to the conclusion that I cannot help myself. On my own power, I am doomed. I must submit to a process that will lead me to a power other than myself.”
OK, that’s a challenge. Let’s take this journey again.
“This isn’t self-help. This is exploration of a process that reveals how helpless we really are.”
“Bill Wilson said you are either going for alcohol or you’re going for God. There’s no resting place.”
Posted inAddiction|Comments Off on The First Step Is The Hardest
How much of the kvetching about this potential American deal with Iran is just bargaining for advantage? I don’t know much about the Middle East and nuclear arms control, but all the heated rhetoric reminds me of the frightening talents of the intense hyper-verbal Ashkenazi lawyer. Whatever the case he’s arguing, he does it full tilt, even if it is just about where to go for lunch. And those maniacs in Iran? They remind me of daily Persian domestic disputes in Beverly Hills.
Posted inIran, Israel|Comments Off on Iran Vs Israel
I guess it is a promotion for the new movie Straight Outta Compton. This could be good for the Jews. I’m sure we’ll get our cut and we’ll be able to fund more yeshivas and Holocaust museums and donate to politicians.
Chaim Amalek writes: “This is what REAL racially conscious men and women do when they think their fundamental interests are being threatened. They don’t blog, they act.”
* The people out there committing violence at these public protests are mostly young black males, a lumpenproletariat driven by incoherent emotions, not ideology or long term principle. They cannot really be “controlled” directly, but they do respond to the overall discourse in our culture, which currently encourages them to blame cops and white society for their lot in life.
* The russians are playing both ends against the middle, they don’t want to see a more conservative america, they want to see her broken. And that might just be the inevitable result of what is happening, though I doubt russia will have much if anything to do with it.
* Directly on point; have you ever watched any of the videos featuring former KGB agent, Yuri Bezmenov, from the 80s. He describes Soviet subversion tactics that could be Democrat party get out the vote strategies.
* Black ghetto culture is an honor culture. Any public affront to your personal dignity must be met with a strong response or you will lose face. Think of it as “African duelling”.
If you try to rob some 7-11 and the owner manages to run you off, there is no loss of face. You merely failed. You were not “disrespected”. You suffer no loss of face in the black community.
On the other hand, if someone “disrespects” you, you will lose face in the black community and therefore must respond or the disrespect will spread.
The big problem is not that blacks kill each other for reasons of personal honor (it is their culture after all) but that they do not formalize it with a “pistols at dawn” approach. They just open up and start blazing away at a funeral, a child’s birthday party, a dance, a backyard barbecue, whatever. This saddles white folks with police costs, hospital bills, lifetime medical care, etc.
It was an honor crime that got Emmett Till killed. After he accosted, grabbed, and propositioned that white woman, the woman and her sister-in-law working the store agreed to keep it to themselves.
Unfortunately, the black witnesses started spreading the word in the black community (which Emmett probably welcomed since it raised his status).
This by itself wouldn’t have been so bad, except one of the black witnesses (or a friend) made a point of telling the woman’s husband about it when he returned to town. Honor, respect and status in the white AND black community was then an issue.
Emmett’s fate was sealed.
* RT is a valuable source of news on many international topics, but on this issue they simply don’t get it. They have no understanding of what it is like to live among people who regularly resort to gunplay instead of discussion.
There are some Russians and pro-Russians (e.g., The Saker) who will gladly shoot themselves in the foot before even thinking about allying with anyone who is sympathetic to them, especially lots of worried Catholics. They would rather punch them in the face as work with them. Sad.
I’m not sure we can call RT “Putin’s paper” as such since they seem fairly honest about reporting both the good and the bad in Russia. But when it comes to black violence they are clueless. Yes, it could be, as some here have suggested, that they just want to “stick it to the Americans”. If true, who would blame them after all the misery we have caused them as they tried to crawl out from under the rubble of Soviet days?
“Russia Insider” is a little better than RT in this regard. They are not afraid to make friends with others who share many of the same concerns.
I do wish someone could sit down with their editorial boards and talk to them.
* Putin doesn’t want this war of words and images with the West. He wants business and good relations. But Jewish elites are salivating over taking over Russia like they took over America. And they fear the rise of Russia as a counter-example of a great power where the leaders represent the national interests of the majority.
It’s interesting what Jews are trying to do in Ukraine, which is contradictory. On the one hand, Jews are using Ukrainian nationalism against Russian ‘imperialism’. There is some legitimacy to this since it’s understandable that Ukrainians want to be free of Russian influence, which has been no less corrupting than EU/US influence. So, even though Jews oppose goy nationalism, they find Ukrainian nationalism use against Russian nationalism. Make goy fight goy. On the other hand, Jews are trying to promote Ukraine as a ‘liberal democracy’ on the EU model by pressuring it to have ‘gay pride’ parades.
* Everything we know about history tells us that Black Lives Don’t Matter to Blacks. The open-secret story of slavery is that it’s a black enterprise, much blacker than not, that slavery has been hardest to stamp out in black Africa, and that few if any other populations have engaged in slavery in the wholesale way that blacks have. Few have been as willing to sell off people of their own race to buyers from other races. Then there’s the way they slaughter one another on a routine basis. The Rwandan Genocide exceeded the Holocaust in terms of death rate, with machetes as the weapon of choice (“industrialized systems of death” and “death camps” and all the rest are for sissy white people, apparently).
Africa’s always got several low-intensity conflicts (the highest intensity of conflict blacks can sustain) boiling. Internet says the war in Somalia has been going on since 2009, Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria since 2009, civil war in Central African Republic since 2012, civil war in Congo since 1998, Uganda since 1987, insurgency in northern Mali since 2012, south Sudan on and off (mostly on) since 1955. And where there isn’t war, there seem to be strongmen ruling with an iron fist.
This is all against a backdrop of more routine black levels of violent crime, infrastructure-wrecking levels of property crime, slavery, human trafficking, bizzare ritualistic murder, cannibalism, and general depraved insanity.
Posted inBlacks|Comments Off on Ferguson Ready To Blow
For more than four years, I have been going to 12-step rooms for my various emotional addictions. I’ve noticed that you can usually tell where someone is in his recovery by his body language. Those in the throes of addiction are distraught, slumped, tense, defeated, racked by anxiety, fear and pain. Those is recovery tend to be buoyant, happy, and upward directed.
I notice that resentment always manifests in added muscular tension. You can gauge how much resentment someone is carrying just by looking at him. A resentful person is locked and loaded in their body, their neck and back and face are tight. They’re like a loaded gun, ready to go off at any time.
About three years ago, I worked the 12 Steps and was able to let go of all conscious resentment. I still get mad at times, but this rarely lasts more than a few minutes. I use my brief bouts of anger as a fuel to take action to protect myself, to overcome my passive nature (the result of nearly 30 years of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome), but my anger never lasts more than a day. As a result of not holding a grudge against anyone, I have more freedom in my body, my thinking and my soul. Most of the time these days, I am happy, joyous and free.
* This falls nicely into iSteve’s classification scheme for things that are easy to predict but boring, vs things that are hard to predict but exciting. The hard-to-predict things are usually the outcome of a contest among near-equals — what stock is underpriced, who will win the US Open, what lane will get me fastest to the toll gate.
Mass-market movies are like that; every single one that gets a hearing at a major studio already represents someone’s strenuous effort to please the market. It can’t be easy to outguess that first-round group of experts, in a second round of experts, much less by a machine.
An example of the easy and boring kind of problem is: do we put $100 million into a movie about Albanian ditchdiggers, or into “Star Wars IX”.
As for high-tech help with the hard kind of problem, I’m skeptical. What’s the most important factor for a comedy: is it funny? Well, machine intelligence is nowhere near the point where it can figure out what’s funny, so if you insist on classifying comedies by computer, you’re going to have to feed in “funniness” as an explanatory variable in your model. And since for that you have to turn to a human, well, your whole problem is finding the right human; might as well stop right there and chuck the computer program.
* Steve, you are correct that using Excel for anything more complicated than a page or two of number calculation is a big red flag that people don’t know what they’re doing. At least use R if you don’t want to pay SAS a lot of money, there a lot of resources for it and it does Monte Carlo sims to the millions very well.
BUT: Relativity Media failed because Kavanaugh failed to grasp what makes studios money:
A. Television in various ways.
B. Toys, games, merchandise and rides at theme parks
C. US and foreign box office.
TL:DR version: its having cable carriage revenues not picking winners and losers in movies that makes studios money. Kavanaugh failed to grasp this fact and acted like he was Jack Warner in 1938.
Goldman was flat out wrong. EVERYONE in Hollywood knows deep down that movies don’t really make much money. They don’t keep studios afloat and haven’t since the DOJ broke up studio ownership of theaters directly in 1948. People in Hollywood just don’t want to admit that movies are at best a cherry on top, and provide little if any of the day to day operating revenue of movie studios.
Hollywood was able to make Raging Bulls and Easy Riders and Taxi Drivers … because TV production and revenues afforded that. Yeah Star Wars and the Shark helped but the real deal was TV production. Then home video (that revenue stream is now gone) in VHS and then DVD.
On Friday the LAT had a front page article on the “Media Meltdown” where Fox, Disney, Viacom, etc. had stock meltdowns of around 12% average. As ESPN reported big drops in subscribers due to cable cutting. Last year, the LAT estimated, the major companies including Time Warner, Viacom, CBS, NBCUniversal, Fox, and Disney reaped AT LEAST $48 BILLION in revenue from carriage fees. That’s Direct TV and Comcast paying to carry say, Fox News or Fox Broadcasting or ESPN. Which doesn’t happen if consumers say some combo of cord cutting, over the air broadcast, and ROKU/Netflix/Hulu can fill their entertainment needs.
Kavanaugh and Relativity went bust because he was fool enough to think that movies were the main money makers. EVEN IF he had hit singles and doubles every time out with every movie, he still would have gone bust. He would not have had that TV carriage revenue stream providing his near-risk-free operating cash to make big hits or misses.
I will caveat this by saying that franchises that sell:
1. Disney Princess fantasies and merchandise to little girls make money. Frozen being a great example. “Diversity” Disney princess fail big time.
2. Superhero and Giant Monster Movies make lots of money selling toys to boys. “Pacific Rim” flopped in the US but sold so much world wide toy merchandise a sequel is in the works.
3. One hit wonders like Avatar don’t generate much ongoing revenue. You’ll notice a Pacific Rim sequel is already filming IIRC, but there is no Avatar movie sequel. The latter’s story, actors, situation, did not lend itself to little boys in Asia and the West pestering their parents for a Space Marine as a Captain Planet Cat toy.
4. General animated movies with characters kids love make tons of money off toys and merchandise: “Minions,” LEGO movies, etc.
Kavanaugh *MIGHT* have made money in 1938 had he been able to time-travel and use computers there for quant analysis. Certainly you can say that there HAS been entirely predictable (people know a lot, they just won’t admit it) successes and failures in say, Superhero movies are pretty easy.
Marvel wins most of the time by casting solid to excellent actors as leads, giving them a good to great supporting cast, good scripts, decent enough effects, and telling fun, upbeat stories for the most part. DC mostly fails by having bad actors, worse scripts, worst directors, and grim, depressing stories that don’t move anyone particularly boys pestering for toys.
I suspect the easy money that allowed Hollywood vanity projects and stuff like Bridesmaids (which was likely mildly profitable but not excessively so) will vanish as people cut the cord as cable/satellite costs rise and alternatives get easier and cheaper.
Posted inHollywood|Comments Off on How Do You Make Money From Making Movies?
* HBD explicitly recognizes that, through no fault of their own, not everyone is cut out to be college material. Instead, this non-trivial segment of the population should be encouraged to work hard and have dignity in their work.
A society’s shitting on menial workers incents them to flee to more lucrative criminal endeavors, which is generally frowned upon.
As far as mass mestizo immigration is concerned, it is nonsensical to have any policy that affirmatively lowers national IQ.
Illegal alien work ethic in the abstract is respected. Unfortunately they displace the less-skilled natives and lower the nation’s average IQ, both of which incrementally lead to a lower standard of living for the country.
Posted inImmigration, Latino|Comments Off on We Don’t Need Low IQ Immigrants
By Theodore Shoebat and Walid Shoebat: Donald Trump was disinvited from a prime speaking role to an important gathering of conservative activists on Friday for his criticism of Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly after a combustible debate performance. As for the vacant spot at the Red State gathering, Red State chief Erick Erickson has invited Kelly to replace Trump. Kelly replacing Trump was a fair judgment in Erickson’s view for saying “blood coming out of her … whatever”. The comment stirred up a hornets nest. Well, Shoebat.com found a five year old interview of Meghan Kelly when she was climbing up the ladder not minding to get on the Howard Stern Show to gain fame while allowing Stern to discuss with her every sort of smut including her private sex live which is supposed to be sacred. She laughs and is okay with Stern discussing penises, breasts, in a very trashy nonchalant way.
Stern is a sleaze bucket who utterly despises women. But Kelly claiming that she is for women’s rights, then allows this reprobate to use her in order to further her career as a journalist says that Kelly is the one who owes an apology. Apologize and lets all move on. Stern uses women as an object of ridicule. And what about her husband? What man would allow his daughter or wife to get on some public adult radio and have a sleaze bucket talk sex with them? This is not a private matter. Kelly made this public.
Now lets compare this with Trump’s remark:
Donald Trump was right, Meghan Kelly is a wretch and a vulgar low life. Donald Trump posted on his Twitter that the biggest loser was Meghan Kelly:
Trump’s blood comment could have meant that blood was coming out of her ears, nose … whatever. Even if Trump was saying that Kelly must have been on her menstrual cycle, its a comment men usually use. Let the man who never used such comment cast the first stone.
Posted inDonald Trump, Sex|Comments Off on Blog: An Old Recording Of Megyn Kelly Talking About Penises, Breasts, And How She Has Sex, Proves Trump Was Right Kelly Is Absolute Trash
