I don’t know any better system for creating community and in-group cohesion than Orthodox Judaism.
I remember from my days as a WASP, there were many more boundaries. In traditional Jewish life, there’s a tremendous sense of being together. You’re likely to pray three times a day with the same people, eat in the same kosher restaurants, go to the same Torah classes, and do business together.
This cohesion might have something to do why so many Jewish industries, such as media and finance, stay Jewish. Cohesive groups will always out-compete individualist strategies.
With a 17th Coen Brothers movie on the way this week, I return to an old question: How have the two middle-aged men gone over 30 years without the kind of public spats that are common among showbiz brothers (e.g., in rock music: the Everlys, the Davies of the Kinks, the Fogertys of Creedence, the Gallaghers of Oasis, etc etc).
An interview in the Washington Post suggests one Coen strategy is to blur their individuality:
In conversation, as in their work, sibling filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen are known for a kind of uncanny symbiosis. Their sentences run together as effortlessly as they divide the writing, directing and producing duties they have shared over the course of 17 feature films, beginning with their 1984 thriller, “Blood Simple,” and culminating in their new satire of 1950s Hollywood, “Hail, Caesar!” So it seemed reasonable to ask, as they began a recent interview on a conference call from Los Angeles, that each brother identify himself before speaking.
“This is Joel talking,” a disembodied voice says with a sigh. “But we don’t care if you misinterpret. We really don’t. It’s not an issue. You can say whoever you want is saying it.”
“You can say you’re saying it,” chimes in Ethan, amid what sounds like cackling laughter. Back to Joel: “You can make stuff up if you want. We don’t care. It’s fine.”
My guess is that the blurriness of the Coen identities is an act. These guys are masters at insinuating images and assumptions into audience minds, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they consciously strategized a long time ago that they would get more work done if they de-emphasized in public their individuality and instead strove to give off the vague impression that they are identical twins (Joel is actually 3 years older than Ethan.) Over their 30+ years of doing interviews to promote their movies, they’ve managed to make the question of their differences seem extremely boring to the outside world. As with most things involving the Coen Brothers, that’s probably not an accident.
Since the Coens showed it could be done, there have been more brother acts who make movies together. So far, there haven’t been many sister acts writing or directing movies, although they are not unknown.
COMMENTS:
* Hmm, is there a subtext here about the cohesiveness of Jews and the fractiousness of gentiles?
* I imagine that the Coen Brothers have heavy overlap in their tastes, and this is reasonably common among brothers, much less so among brother-sister pairs.
It’s not enough that some movies can appeal to both sexes. E.g., women can enjoy Star Wars, but when it comes to passionate fans, the sex ratio starts to approximate that of, say, Comp Sci majors. If you’re making movies, you’re probably a passionate fan of many films, so the sex differences are accentuated.
* Note that SJW George Clooney stars in their latest movie “Hail Caeasar!” Yet despite Clooney demanding more roles for African-Americans, strangely this film features zero African-Americans, like almost every other George Clooney movie. Heck, “The Descendants” featured all Haoles, zero real Hawaiians.
Posted inHollywood|Comments Off on Living In Community
Scott N. Brooks, draped in a dapper shawl-collar sweater, looked out on the auditorium of mostly white students in puffy coats and sweats as they silently squirmed at his question. Why, he had asked, does Maria Sharapova, a white Russian tennis player, earn nearly twice as much in endorsements as Serena Williams, an African-American with a much better win-loss record?
Because Sharapova’s prettier, has blondish hair and longer, thinner legs? Because female consumers more want to buy stuff that holds out the promise that they’ll look more like Sharapova than Serena?
“We like to think it’s all about merit,” said Dr. Brooks, a sociology professor at the University of Missouri, speaking in the casual cadence of his days as a nightclub D.J. “It’s sport. Simply, the best should earn the most money.”
Or maybe the most money should go to the athlete who takes fewer artificial male hormones?
In any case, only two women make the Forbes top 100 highest paid athletes. Serena makes $13 million per year in endorsements, which is only half of Sharapova’s $26 million, but a lot more than most other female athletes. On the other hand, Serena makes about twice what quarterback Tom Brady, who has won four Super Bowls, makes in endorsements, and she makes more than ten times what Clayton Kershaw, the best baseball pitcher of the 2010s, makes in endorsements.
In the current Forbes list, the top five beneficiaries of endorsees are Roger Federer (white), Tiger Woods (caublinasian), Phil Mickelson (white), LeBron James (black), and Kevin Durant (black). Blacks would seem to do fine overall.
If you want to get it into the details, black men seem to do extremely well from endorsements, black women less so. Could this have something to do with blacks being more masculine on average?
Fortunately, college students know enough not to bring up suggestions like that. They know that if they just sit there with blank looks on their faces, eventually the racial haranguing will stop and they’ll be allowed to leave.
Maybe tennis is not as popular here as overseas, one student offered. Dr. Brooks countered: Ms. Williams is a global figure. As the room fell silent, the elephant settled in. Most sat still, eyes transfixed on the stage. None of the participants — roughly 70 students new to the University of Missouri — dared to offer the reason for the disparity that seemed most obvious. Race.
The new frontier in the university’s eternal struggle with race starts here, with blunt conversations that seek to bridge a stark campus divide. Yet what was evident in this pregnant moment during a new diversity session that the university is requiring of all new students was this: People just don’t want to discuss it.
The racist episodes that rocked the Missouri campus last fall, leading to resignations by its president and chancellor, set administrators here and around the country on frantic course correction efforts. They have held town halls to hear students’ complaints, convened task forces to study campus climates, adjusted recruiting strategies and put in place new sessions on implicit bias and diversity, like the one Dr. Brooks spoke at, held in mid-January.
More an introduction to the diversity on campus than an instruction manual for navigating it, the session featured eight professors who spoke about their teaching and research that related to race and culture. One presented a campus survey showing how Missouri students’ attitudes broke down based on their race (for instance, about 63 percent of black students identified as liberal, while only 38 percent of whites did). Another discussed myths about Islam and offered a few surprising facts (the country’s oldest mosque is in Cedar Rapids, Iowa). Yet another talked about cultural appropriation (Mexican-themed costume parties can be offensive).
And then there was Dr. Brooks, a 43-year-old African-American who teaches “Race and Ethnic Relations” and challenged the students to think about race through the prism of sports. He offered a gentle explanation of the Williams/Sharapova discrepancy: “Maria is considered a beauty queen, but by what standards of beauty? Some people might just say, ‘Oh, well, she’s just prettier.’ Well, according to whom? This spells out how we see beauty in terms of race, this idea of femininity. Serena is often spoofed for her big butt. She’s seen as too muscular.”
Here’s the most popular comment on this article:
Dave Boz Phoenix AZ 18 hours ago
The anti-intellectual nature of this browbeating session is disgusting in any setting, but especially in a university. It is obvious that this is not a “discussion” but a demand to submit to a correct set of opinions and answers. The facile and unsupported notion that a black athlete can only receive fewer endorsement offers because of racism is just one of the ill-thought out examples that indicate that this not a learning but an indoctrination session. The students know that they’d better not try to have a “discussion” or the browbeating will get worse. This is not a session or an environment for the purpose of learning; it is to make the students submissive and to encourage them to adopt the university’s approved thought process: “Submit. Conform. Obey.”
196 Recommended
COMMENTS:
* And then there was Dr. Brooks, a 43-year-old African-American who teaches “Race and Ethnic Relations”…He offered a gentle explanation of the Williams/Sharapova discrepancy: “Maria is considered a beauty queen, but by what standards of beauty? Some people might just say, ‘Oh, well, she’s just prettier.’ Well, according to whom? This spells out how we see beauty in terms of race, this idea of femininity. Serena is often spoofed for her big butt. She’s seen as too muscular.”
I think Dr. Brooks should be forced to hand over his personal computer to analyze what kind of pr0n he has on it. I’m wagering most of the women (assuming it’s not gay pr0n, which may be a generous assumption) look more like Sharapova (both in terms body type and skin color) and a lot less like Williams.
* Getting past the 2 Minute Hate imposed on incoming Mizzou students, some more interesting data:
“Since 1980, the percentage of blacks and Hispanics among those attending higher education institutions has more than doubled, from 13 percent to 28 percent in 2014, while the white population has dipped to about 52 percent from 84.”
52 + 28 = 100, right?
What are the other 20% of students, if they aren’t white, black, or Hispanic, and why isn’t their race mentioned? Why isn’t a nearly 40% decline in white enrollment any sort of problem at all?
“The four-year graduation rate for black students who started college in 2007 was 21 percent, a mere 1 percentage point higher than for the 1996 cohort. (At the same time, the rate for white students went up 7 percentage points, to 43 percent.)”
One in five black students who starts at Mizzou manages to graduate within four years. How many graduate within five years? Within six years? What percentage fail to ever graduate at all?
* There is currently a link on the NY Times front page (“Insider” section) to this article:
If you exclude a priori (because your world view does not permit it) the possibility that fewer blacks are selected for gifted programs because there are fewer (intellectually) gifted blacks, then the only remaining explanation is racism. If on the other hand, blacks dominate certain sports and whites are scarce, this is because of the overwhelming talent of blacks even in the face of the racism that holds them back.
So the whole deal is sort of a Catch-22, heads I win, tails you lose setup . You bring the whites to a struggle session and you dare them to say that blacks in general are less attractive or intelligent or whatever. If they are dumb enough to take the bait (and most aren’t) then you can brand them as racists. If they sit mutely, you can “explain” to them that they are racists anyway. Like all witch trials, the outcome is predetermined and anything the accused (in this case the entire white race) does is taken as evidence of guilt either way.
* According to the government 75% of the students at Mizzou score above 23 on the ACT.
The average ACT score for blacks in Missouri is 17. This is why only 20% of blacks at Mizzou graduate within 4 years.
The media makes the lack of diversity or low minority grad rates to be some mysterious thing or act of vicious racism. When the reality is that blacks don’t have the intellectual chops to compete at this high a level.
* In the comment section in the Atlantic article about this study, people pointed out that the researchers minimized the test scores of black students and focused on more subjective criteria for gifted ability.
* Why do Jews and Asians do better than non-Jewish whites?
What’s the appropriate response to that question that doesn’t apply to whites vs. blacks & Hispanics?
If the accuser says Jews and Asians have a better/stronger culture than whites, then that explanation can apply to whites vs. blacks. Given the insanely high rate of black illegitimacy that explanation, correct or not, certainly has teeth.
One thing is for certain: the accuser won’t claim that Jews and Asians discriminate against everyone else, and he/she/zhe/zher/it definitely won’t claim that Jews and Asians have better genes.
* “…the repugnant racist expressions that sparked last fall’s protests…”
They were fabrications. The media continues to cite them as if they actually occurred. Consumers know otherwise. At this rate the school will be shuttered within 10 years. We are witnessing death by race hoax, a symptom of The Antioch Syndrome, whereby liberal institutions succumb to their own promotion of anti-establishment agitation.
And it’s funny as hell.
* Maybe it has something to do with Serena looking like a middle linebacker. Just spitballing.
* Is every cultural battle really just a way that poor Jewish girls can get other people mad at the hot blonds who steal Jewish men away from them?
* Well we’re no longer allowed to argue that there is such a thing as objective beauty or objective aesthetics.
And we’re similarly no longer allowed to argue there is anything as masculine or feminine.
As Steve has noted, we’ve lost the vocabulary to explain why certain ideas are nonsense. As such, nonsense becomes the rule.
1984 was so prescient about language. Orwell’s greatness grows larger by the day.
* Because the elites don’t recognize (or don’t want to recognize) the idea of objective beauty—or that beauty is a good that is very pleasing and very valuable—-they have to complain/wonder why the prettier girl is rewarded more than the ugly one.
If the elites could just admit that women are ornaments while men are appliances, much of their consternation would evaporate.
* I would also add, to my knowledge, Sharapova has never uttered these words at a lineswoman:
“I’ll f-ing take this ball and shove it down your f-ing throat!”
* This Catch-22 is identical to the one in Corporate America, the difference being that (largely) 18-year-olds lack the background to recognize Reeducation Camp 101.
I vividly recall being required to attend a similar harangue as a J&J employee at a sales meeting, administered by a female lawyer. Paradoxically, the room was over 50% women and “minorities” were over-represented significantly compared to their percentage of the population as a whole, much less the population of college grads (given that a college degree was a hiring requirement.)
This was 17 years ago. We white males already knew enough to keep our mouths shut then. Our kids surely know it now.
The difference today? I can’t be fired for crimethink.
* “Submit. Conform. Obey.”
Translate that into Latin, and it would make a nice motto for some institution of higher learning today. The Latin translation, apart from oozing class, also has the great advantage that most people wouldn’t know what the words mean.
* I used to bristle at all this reeducation camp BS (especially the white privilege, “white males get to do life on the easiest setting,” etc.)
Now I just laugh.
There are millions of people who are smarter than I am. I respect that talent. Often, the people who before and today contribute the most to my comfortable living standard were drawn from this cohort, so I’m grateful to them. It does not remotely occur to me to resent them.
To those who resent me (and mine) and covet the benefits reality showers on us simply because our parents’ genes conferred a fast track to success, I can only say, “Too bad, so sad. It must suck to marinate your entire life in the realization that you were late in line at the genetic store.”
My white privilege is nothing but high intelligence and low time preference, characteristics largely dependent upon DNA. Those who attack this attack me at the cellular level, which is to say they clearly wish to exterminate what makes me, ME.
If this isn’t war, what is?
* “Scott N. Brooks, draped in a dapper shawl-collar sweater, looked out on the auditorium of mostly white students in puffy coats and sweats as they silently squirmed at his question.”
Yeah, we get it. Sharp-dressed fashion-plate black man. Grubby white-trash students.
Subtle.
Brooks, like all race-studies professors, is a fraud. He has phony degrees in phony subjects – credentials that qualify him as a peddler of bullshit. He is a state certified ju-ju man in the field of race/class/gender witchdoctory.
* One of the emeritus faculty members at the Mizzou sociology department is named “Andrew Twaddle”. Hard to imagine a more fitting name for a sociologist.
Posted inAcademia, Blacks|Comments Off on Steve Sailer: Mao-Maoing at Missouri
According to his website, Valizadeh grew up in Maryland and attended the state’s flagship university, where he struggled with women. “I was completely incapable of talking to women and creating a sexual vibe that made them want to sleep with me,” he wrote.
After graduation, he took a job as an “industrial microbiologist” in the District, where he “stumbled on an underground ‘game’ community” that taught him to approach women like a math problem, trying out pickup lines and strategies like formulas until one worked.
“Like a kid in a candy store I read everything I could get my hands on and started communicating with guys who had problems with women like I did,” he wrote. “The first thing I read was that skill with women can be learned, a concept that didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me at the time. I thought you were either born with the ability to sleep with beautiful women or doomed to having an unhappy sex life until your last days.”
Valizadeh eventually quit his job to write a book called “Bang,” an aptly titled “textbook for picking up girls and getting laid.” He then spent six months traveling South America and trying out his theories, memorialized in another book. Since then, he has written more than a dozen books, often about how to have sex with women in various countries.
Many of Valizadeh’s tips to readers, however, strike his critics as sexist, offensive, outdated and homophobic.
“A woman’s value significantly depends on her fertility and beauty,” he lists as a tenet of neo-masculinism. “A man’s value significantly depends on his resources, intellect, and character.”
The name of one of his websites, “Return of Kings,” sums up much of the neo-masculinist philosophy.
“Men will opt out of monogamy and reproduction if there are no incentives to engage in them,” he argues. “Past traditions and rituals that evolved alongside humanity served a net benefit to the family unit.”
Valizadeh is simultaneously arch-conservative (“Socialism, feminism, cultural Marxism, and social justice warriorism aim to destroy the family unit, decrease the fertility rate, and impoverish the state through large welfare entitlements”) and aggressively promiscuous, bragging about being in the “top one percent” of men in terms of the number of women he has bedded.
Bizarrely, he blames this behavior on women and women’s liberation.
“Elimination of traditional sex roles and the promotion of unlimited mating choice in women unleashes their promiscuity and other negative behaviors that block family formation,” he wrote.
Many of these arguments make Valizadeh unpopular, but it is a specific piece of his that has spurred several countries to try to consider banning him altogether.
That piece, an article titled “How To Stop Rape,” was published online a year ago. It begins by suggesting that the cause of most rapes is not men — “I don’t know of a single man entering adulthood who thought that rape was good and had to be manually taught it was bad” — but rather women.
“I saw women wholly unconcerned with their own safety and the character of men they developed intimate relationships with,” Valizadeh wrote. “I saw women who voluntarily numbed themselves with alcohol and other drugs in social settings before letting the direction of the night’s wind determine who they would follow into a private room. I saw women who, once feeling awkward, sad, or guilty for a sexual encounter they didn’t fully remember, call upon an authority figure to resolve the problem by locking up her previous night’s lover in prison or ejecting him from school.
“By attempting to teach men not to rape, what we have actually done is teach women not to care about being raped, not to protect themselves from easily preventable acts, and not to take responsibility for their actions,” he continued. “It was obvious to me that the advice of our esteemed establishment writers and critics wasn’t stopping the problem, and since rape was already on the law books with severe penalties, additional laws or flyers posted on dormitory doors won’t stop this rape culture either.
“I thought about this problem and am sure I have the solution: make rape legal if done on private property,” Valizadeh wrote. “I propose that we make the violent taking of a woman not punishable by law when done off public grounds.
“… If rape becomes legal under my proposal, a girl will protect her body in the same manner that she protects her purse and smartphone,” he continued. “If rape becomes legal, a girl will not enter an impaired state of mind where she can’t resist being dragged off to a bedroom with a man who she is unsure of — she’ll scream, yell, or kick at his attempt while bystanders are still around. If rape becomes legal, she will never be unchaperoned with a man she doesn’t want to sleep with. After several months of advertising this law throughout the land, rape would be virtually eliminated on the first day it is applied.”
Over the past year, Valizadeh has said several times that his make-rape-legal argument was “satire.” And he has accused media organizations that quote the blog of lying.
Whatever his intention, the blog post has proved bitterly divisive.
@rooshv that’s not satire, that’s an open call to rape on the 6th of February.
“Funny how hate speech becomes satire once you are called out on it,” tweeted an account claiming to be linked to the hacker group Anonymous.
When Valizadeh announced last month that he was organizing a series of “tribal meetings” for his followers in 165 cities around the globe, his critics immediately began mobilizing opposition to the idea. As word spread of the controversial “heterosexual men only” gatherings, petitions popped up in several countries calling for the pickup artist to be banned. So far, a petition in Scotland has gathered more than 57,000 signatures. A similar petition for the United States and Canada has been signed by more than 8,000 people.
As with his most controversial blog post, it is often hard to tell when Valizadeh is being sincere in his radical views and when he is simply trolling those who disagree with him.
He originally said he would attend the meetup in the District, for instance. But when Australians began planning protests against him, he tweeted a photo of a flight itinerary with stops in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne. “I just booked a flight to Australia,” he wrote. “See you somewhere there on 2/6. I’ll stay a while, see some sights.”
And when Australian officials announced they were considering banning Valizadeh, he tweeted a map of the island country with red arrows pointing to its “multiple vulnerabilities” and “weak border” and claimed he was “coming in by boat.”
Melbourne’s mayor, Robert Doyle, told local radio Wednesday that the city would charge anyone planning to attend one of Valizadeh’s meetups on city property with trespassing.
The strongest reaction, however, came from police in Des Moines, who wrote on Facebook that the meetup “may be a ruse to commit rape.”
Posted inDating|Comments Off on WP: ‘Neo-masculinists’ cancel worldwide meetups over fears of feminist ‘mobs’
No Alcohol for Sexually Active Women Without Birth Control, C.D.C. Recommends
Sexually active women who are not using birth control should refrain from alcohol to avoid the risk of giving birth to babies with fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, even if those women are not yet known to be pregnant, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended.
The C.D.C. report, released on Tuesday, estimated that 3.3 million women between the ages of 15 and 44 who drink alcohol risk exposing their infants to the disorders, which can stunt children’s growth and cause lifelong disabilities. The report, which appeared to refer exclusively to heterosexual sex, also said that three in four women who intend to get pregnant do not stop drinking alcohol when they stop using birth control.
“The risk is real. Why take the chance?” Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the C.D.C., said in a statement.
Alcohol consumption during pregnancy has been widely linked to stunted physical, mental and behavioral development of children. In October, a report by the American Academy of Pediatrics declared that “no amount of alcohol should be considered safe to drink during any trimester of pregnancy.”
About half of pregnancies are unplanned, and most women do not know they are pregnant until four to six weeks into the pregnancy, the C.D.C. noted. The only way to ensure that the effects of alcohol would not be passed on to a child, then, would be alcoholic abstinence.
The suggestion of indefinite sobriety did not sit well with some women.
Which type of people have unplanned pregnancies? Generally speaking, the less intelligent. Which type of people drink while pregnant? The less intelligent.
Biologists have long noted that species will tend to evolve behaviors which best aid them to effectively exploit their environment. Among these behavioral life history traits are reproductive strategies. Reproductive strategies are, as the name implies, the strategies individuals will use to reproduce. Here we will focus upon the two strategies demonstrated in r/K Selection Theory in Evolutionary Biology.
The science behind r/K Selection theory was hashed out decades ago. It emerged as biologists pondered why some species reproduced slowly using monogamy and high-investment parenting, while other species reproduced explosively, using promiscuity and single parenting. At the time this science was developed, the researchers were wholly unaware of its relevance to our modern ideological battles in the world of politics. The terms r and K came from variables in equations which described how populations would change over time. r represented the maximal reproductive rate of an individual, while K represented the carrying capacity of an environment.
r/K selection theory describes two environmental extremes, and the strategies a population will produce to exploit each extreme. As a result of these strategies, each of these two environments will produce a very particular psychology in the individuals exposed to them.
The first environment an organism may face is the presence of freely available resources, which is referred to as an r-selective environment. This most often occurs when a predator keeps a population consistently lower than the carrying capacity of its environment. Just as rabbits do not strip their grassy fields bare due to the predation they endure, the r-strategy is designed to exploit an environment where resources are freely available, everywhere.
In r-selection, those individuals who waste time fighting for food will be out-reproduced by pacifists, who simply focus upon eating, and reproducing. Fighting also entails risks of injury or death – risks which are pointless given the free availability of resources everywhere. Hence this environment will favor a tendency towards conflict avoidance, and tend to cull the aggressive and competitive. It will also evolve tendencies towards mating as early as possible, as often as possible, with as many mates as possible, while investing as little effort as possible rearing offspring. Here, there are unlimited resources just waiting to be utilized, and even the most unfit can acquire them. As a result, it is more advantageous to produce as many offspring as possible, as quickly as possible, regardless of fitness, so as to out-reproduce those who either waste time producing quality offspring or waste time competing with each other.
Since group competition will not arise in the r-selected environment, r-type organisms will not exhibit loyalty to fellow members of their species, or a drive to sacrifice on their behalf. Indeed, the very notion of in-group will be foreign, and the concept of personal sacrifice for other in-group members will be wholly alien. This is why rabbits, mice, antelope, and other r-selected species, although pleasant, will tend to not exhibit any loyalty or emotional attachment to peers. When resources are freely available, group competition is a risk one need not engage in to acquire resources, so this loyalty to in-group and emotional attachment to peers is not favored.
Here in the r-strategy, we see the origins of the Liberal’s tendencies towards conflict avoidance, from oppositions to free-market capitalism, to pacifism, to demands that all citizens disarm so as to avoid any chance of conflict and competition. Even the newer tendencies to support the ”everyone gets a trophy” movement are outgrowths of this competition-averse urge, and desire for free resource availability. Similarly, Liberals are supportive of promiscuity, supportive of efforts to expose children to ever earlier sexual education, and, as the debate over Murphy Brown showed, Liberals are supportive of low-investment, single parenting. Finally, as John Jost has shown, Liberals show diminished loyalty to in-group, similar to how r-selected organisms do not fully understand the reason for even perceiving an in-group in nature.
In the other environment, a population exists at the carrying capacity of its environment. Since there is not enough food to go around, and someone must die from starvation, this will evolve a specific psychology within such a species.
Posted inEducation|Comments Off on LAT: How Not To Raise A Workaholic
I understand why a blogger such as Failed Messiah (Scott Rosenberg) would burn out and seek a new direction in life. I’ve burned out on blogging several times, easing up for months at a time (but never entirely quitting) and then going in new directions. I’ve usually blogged primarily out of passion, and some of the time, the passion was simply gone.
About four years ago, a friend said to me: “Your blog is in danger of becoming irrelevant.”
I replied, “My blog became irrelevant many years ago.”
You are probably wondering what the future holds for “Failed Messiah”?
Who are the new owners?
We are a group of people dedicated to protecting the reputation of the Orthodox Jewish community.
A community that keeps to our tradition, and sets our standards high to protect the sanctity of G-d’s name. This can be accomplished in two ways.
Firstly, we will present articles and conversations that speak to what Hashem truly wants from us.
Secondly, we will continue to pursue and expose people that create a desecration of G-d’s name.
We would like to take this opportunity to wish Shmarya Rosenberg tremendous success on his new endeavor in combating poverty issues. We would also like to recognize his efforts in building up this web site.
While some may not agree with his approach, he was able to bring many taboo issues to the forefront of the community, particularly in the area of child abuse, forcing the community to address them. For this the community owes him a debt of gratitude.
Please rest assured that in the future, your confidentiality will be guarded and maintained.
Sincerely,
Diversified Holdings
Posted inBlogging|Comments Off on What Does The Future Hold For FailedMessiah.com?
How will you know your relationship is on solid ground? If she’s running after you, red-faced and trembling with love and yearning and desperation and desire and, yes, fear. The sexual polarity is aligned. The love amplified.
If you’re running after her, afraid to lose her love? You already have.
A good, if abstractedly imperfect, test of a woman’s love for you is to ask if she would she die for you. You can ask yourself this question, and if you’re honest you’ll know the answer.
Would she die for you?
Posted inDating|Comments Off on ‘No one loves a needy man, not even himself.’
I assure you that most Orthodox Jews do not fear Donald Trump and most of them will vote Trump in the general election. Left-wingers understandably hate Trump. Most American Jews are on the left.
But on the issues, some of Trump’s comments—particularly his proposed ban on Muslims entering the country—have sparked outrage among the state’s Jews. Fowler said that many of her Jewish friends “worry about the general sentiment of intolerance in the Republican campaign.” Rabbi Jason Kimelman-Block, who is closely following the New Hampshire race, including Jewish sentiment, from Washington as director of the Bend the Arc Jewish Action organization, said, “People are trying to hold candidates responsible for demonizing rhetoric, particularly Trump. Jews across the spectrum recognize Trump as a demagogue.”
Despite negative Jewish reaction to Trump’s statements on immigration, Israel and other subjects, some still expect that the small number of Jewish voters in the New Hampshire Republican primary will support him at the same rate as the rest of electorate. Geoffrey Skelley, a political analyst with Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball project at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, said voter research suggests Jewish Republicans often vote the same way as non-Jewish GOP voters. Efforts to find this slice of New Hampshire’s small Republican Jewish electorate, however, came up empty.
Donald Trump not only lost Iowa, he also lost his rabbi.
Rabbi Bernhard Rosenberg, the founder and sole member of the Facebook group named “Rabbi for Trump” announced Tuesday he is closing the group.
“Ladies and gentlemen of Facebook: Rabbi For Trump will be closing down,” Rosenberg, a rabbi from Edison, New Jersey, announced. Rosenberg went on to accuse Trump’s campaign of ignoring Jewish supporters in the Republican primary race.
“It seems to me that representatives of his campaign don’t care about the Jewish vote. They think they can win without it,” he wrote, explaining that he had “pleaded” with the campaign to clarify Trump’s platform on Israel and express complete support for the Jewish state. “This has not happened and I doubt it will.”
Rosenberg had told the Forward last month that he wants the New York billionaire to make clear that if elected he will not support dividing Jerusalem into its Jewish and Palestinian areas. Rosenberg had hoped to get enough supporters on his Facebook page to force Trump’s advisers to meet and discuss the issue of Israel, but at the end of the day he remained the only member.
“I do not dislike Trump and wish him well, but I can not fight for him if I do not believe he fully supports Israel and the Jewish people,” he wrote, adding that he is considering other GOP candidates. “If the (Ted) Cruz or (Marco) Rubio people want my support, I will be happy to give it to them.”
So the rabbi’s critique is that Trump isn’t pandering to Jews enough? What does Israel have to do with America? Israel’s welfare is irrelevant to America’s well-being. It is not a vital strategic interest. Israel should be as relevant and important to America as Nigeria.
No foreign state should be given America’s unconditional support. Countries don’t have permanent alliances. Allies depend upon circumstances.
Posted inDonald Trump|Comments Off on One-Man ‘Rabbi for Trump’ Dumps The Donald After Iowa
Ann Coulter writes: Any politician who claims to care about the drug overdose deaths sweeping the nation, but does not demand that we build a wall, deport illegal aliens and end the anchor baby scam, is a liar.
In 2014, more people died from drug overdoses than any year in U.S. history: 47,055. That’s more than die in car accidents—and it’s not even close.
The media and political class respond to this fact by asking themselves: How do we blame this on Americans—preferably white males?
Even as Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the head of Mexico’s largest drug cartel, is all over the news boasting, “I supply more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana than anybody else in the world” (The New York Times, Jan. 10, 2016), we’re informed, Hey, don’t blame Mexicans! It’s America’s appetite for drugs that’s driving the narcotics trade!
Mexicans aren’t at fault for dumping these poisons on our country because … it’s the 14-year-old American kid’s fault for getting addicted! Hucksters of cigarettes, subprime mortgages and fake weight loss pills should try that argument. We’re just selling what Americans are buying!
About the time President Bush threw open our southern border—followed by Obama rolling out the welcome mat for illegal aliens—Mexico aggressively moved into the heroin business. In 2007, U.S. authorities seized 367 kilos of heroin on the Mexican border. In 2013, authorities seized 2,162 kilos. During that same time period, heroin use nearly doubled in the U.S.
As a result, in the last decade, half a million Americans have died from drug overdoses, mostly heroin and other opiates. That’s ten times more than the number of Americans who died fighting the entire Vietnam War.
Instead, pandering politicians give fiery speeches about drug addiction being a “disease.” However that may be, drug addiction is the only disease that you absolutely can’t catch if you never take drugs. (I also don’t see anyone getting rich by giving people the measles or pneumonia.)
As Donald Trump has said, the best way to avoid becoming addicted to drugs is never to start.
It’s harder to stay away from drugs when Mexico is flooding the country with them. But no politician—except Trump—would dare suggest that we keep the drugs out.
Marco Rubio thinks we need government programs to “teach students skills to avoid gangs, violence and drugs.”
Yes, it’s American kids’ fault. While we’re teaching them about drugs, how about a government program to teach people skills to not to give all their money to scammers like Bernie Madoff, instead of criminally prosecuting scam investment firms?
Chris Christie gives passionate speeches about drug addiction being a “disease” that “can happen to anyone,” before demanding that we “start treating people in this country, not jailing them.”
Why is the only choice: a) Blame the addict or b) Don’t blame the addict? How about option c) Blame the drug dealers? Oh I remember! We can’t blame the drug dealers because diversity is a strength!
Not one Republican presidential candidate, other than Trump, has any intention of going after the Mexican drug cartels operating freely in our country. Absolutely none but Trump would consider building a wall on our border. Only Trump has denounced the anchor baby racket. Did I mention that El Chapo’s kids are American anchor babies?
Instead, the other candidates twist and turn to find some way to blame Americans for the fact that the country is drowning in drugs—brought in by innocent Mexicans.
I’m sorry, but with 50,000 Americans dying every year from drug overdoses, could you put away your “racism” hobbyhorse for five minutes, New York Times? It’s stupid, it’s not helpful, and it’s not true.
The recent surge in heroin overdoses is hitting black and white Americans about equally. According to the CDC, heroin overdose deaths from 2013 to 2014 (the most recent years available) increased by 8 percent for non-Hispanic whites, and increased 8.2 percent for non-Hispanic blacks.
Curiously, heroin deaths of Hispanics increased by 0.0 percent. They aren’t the users; they’re the pushers.
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