I've found my picture!

I have mixed feelings over this, but one does what one must...

Matisyahu leaves Chabad

"What we do is not at all about Judaism and not about Chabad. It's much bigger than one religion or another," he said. "It relies on something real that can speak to anybody. It's about truth and memory."

I am now preparing to slog through blogs which wildly cheer this or boo this on both sides of the affiliation and observance fences by getting my psychic football helmet on.

Though, it isn’t as though I didn’t foresee it in a sort of paranoid worrying way. Young and estranged to begin with, then jumping headlong into Chabad seemed like trying to make peace with your self-doubt by joining the USMC.

I want Chabad people and Chasidim in general to understand I do not intend insult by that comparison. Structure and discipline are not easy and sometimes they are at odds with some people and their needs. G-d go with Matt and his search for peace with himself.

SSDD Ad Nauseum In The East

Abbas wants return to pre-1967.

Israeli government spokeswoman Miri Eisin declined to comment, saying she did not want to prejudice negotiations. But the Palestinian demands appear to exceed anything that Israel would be willing to offer.

You don’t say.

Well, for those dreaming that Abbas would be the man to stand up to the internal pressure cooker of his people’s politics and be anything like reasonable… well, you’re probably already too delusional to let this change your mind or even slow you down a little.

Nevertheless, you might want to remember Aesop’s fable about the dog that lost a bone when he barked at a reflection of himself in the water. Losing what you have to get what you won’t is not a wise trade. Israel is the only side that has done any bending, and given the last time they bent till they broke ended up in the Holocaust, I rather think the drive to survive will not allow another break.

So what happens when spring steel is bent back until it can’t be pushed farther? Well, you keep it there and if you relax your grip for one second, it pushes back and flattens you.

Like I said, Aesop’s fable…

What I am drooling over now...

ArtScroll.com -- COMPLETE FULL SIZE SCHOTTENSTEIN EDITION OF THE TALMUD ENGLISH - 73 VOLUMES.

I can smell the exciting learning from here, and that is NOT sarcasm.

An Un-Orthodox Divorce

Sieger’s close-quarter domestic skirmishing has escalated into a legal war that raises disturbing questions about the rights of Orthodox women, the integrity of the rabbinic courts, known as the betei din, and the ethics of a number of ultra-Orthodox rabbis, who stand accused by Sieger of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to issue her husband the religious divorce ruling he wanted.

An Un-Orthodox Divorce.

Every time I read this I want to cry.

I resist.

I go read The Light and Fire of the Baal Shem Tov by Yitzhak Buxbaum and pray to G-d for enlightenment like his to come again. What happened to chesed?!

All of it reminds me of the disappointing scandalous mistreatment of some of the weakest people by various churches when I was young. What happened G-d?

Defendant does push-ups in court; charges against him dropped | IndyStar.com

"It wasn't anything this court would require anybody to do."

Maybe not, but it’s a less salacious kind of drop and give me fifty sort of story than one usually expects with the justice system.

Especially ours which just the drop and give me part suggests something like… well, you know…

At our learnin' center, we'll learn ya!

Employees alleged that teenagers were doused with cold water while tied up on a concrete floor and denied access to bathrooms. One girl was forced to sit in a tub of urine, and a boy was tethered to a four-wheeler and dragged on a sand track, according to the allegations. Thayer’s owners have denied all charges.

Abuse allegations, apathy show need for ‘boot camp’ regulations.

 

This next part has me all googly-eyed.

Despite the serious concerns about Thayer, the Missouri legislature continues to resist calls to require such boarding schools to be licensed and inspected.

Are you fucking joking? We practically do anal inspections of mailmen to make sure they aren’t thinking about maybe someday porking our underage daughters in the whole Pedomania of today, but people who are holding children against their will for forcible re-education should not be licensed and inspected???

I am truly living on the planet of the morons.

Several GOP House members denounce Islam

Several GOP House members denounce Islam

Several GOP House members denounce Islam.

This is noted by the Department of Redundancy Department because of its extremely repetitive inner meanings.

Also, why don’t we get equal coverage when Democrats mouth anti-semitic remarks? Oh that’s right, the press agrees, and the Democrats are smart enough not to do it that openly. The Democrat are the SS to the Republicans’ SA. The former is craftier and the latter is street-brawler enough to make themselves obvious.

Memo to the above parties. You’re both making us look like twits. SHUT UP.

So much for religion in the public square - The Carpetbagger Report

The Family Research Council didn’t see it that way. The group flipped out, said Samuldrala’s prayer could lead to “moral relativism and ethical chaos,” and explained its belief that religious liberty “was never intended to exalt other religions to the level that Christianity holds in our country’s heritage.” In other words, as the FRC saw it, minority faiths are separate and unequal, First Amendment be damned.

So much for religion in the public square - The Carpetbagger Report.

It's this kind of thing that has made my blood boil since I was old enough to go to Sunday school. This is not, never was, by design not, a Christian nation and the most religiously observant Christians among the founders specifically did not want it to be.

It was a nation largely of Christians, but was for all, and despite the goofs, gaffes, stupid mistakes, and hateful blunders, was supposed to remain. Out of all the religions of Earth, only Christianity in America lets you become a Christian simply by saying you are. All are welcomed to the Father openly. How horrid to subvert that into the most closed of thinking and hardest of hearts like this.

Great idea, bad execution as they say. Or to steal from tech support, divine intelligence is no match for mortal stupidity.

One boob shows off two more

What else do you call it when a state pol shows off a rack in front of a school class?

My take: why the fuss over seeing titties and none whatsoever over watching war movies in history class? Death good, sex bad?

If you can't beat them in the market place of ideas

Then run away and form a new nation???

When was anyone ever promised the world would go their way and when did someone teach them that anyone else getting their way was automatically be extension them not getting theirs?

Morons.

What I believe part x of y

1. G-d exists.
   This is the fundamental assumption based on my gut feelings.
2. I exist.
   How else would I write this?
3. G-d has a nature He did not make for Himself.
   How can the Uncreated Creator make a nature for Himself? That which is, is.
4. G-d made me in His image.
   That means I have his nature, not that He has two legs and two arms nor that he likes blue jeans, although He might.
5. G-d made me to help Him figure out what His nature is.
   If you want to know what you look like, you look in a mirror. If you want to understand a crime scene, you recreate the scene. If you want to know yourself, study those like yourself and in His case, create them if you have to.

What is the first principle of His nature? The second?

1. He has no power greater than Himself and hence has ultimate free will to do whatever He chooses.
2. He has a nature that circumscribes His will and directs His will.
3. He has a free will that circumscribes His nature and enables or obstructs it by choice.
4. He made me with this nature.
   I have free will and a nature which complement and both reinforce and oppose each other.
5. Good or evil depend on free will choices to do or not do.
   That which is compelled has no value. If G-d made me do a thing, then I could not be blamed for G-d chose. If G-d said I should do a thing and I didn't, I chose.
6. Therefore, G-d will not make me do anything.
   G-d cannot make me do anything without abrogating my free will without which He cannot judge me as having made the choice as opposed to him.

It would, and has, taken books and books worth of print to even come close to explaining my reasoning here. It's just something you feel.

What do you do when you open mouth and insert foot in NYC?

Obviously, you then shoot yourself in the foot.

A Jewish educator who can't utter a phrase of Arabic has been tapped to head the city's controversial Arabic-themed school, officials announced yesterday.

Why?

(...)who resigned under pressure last Friday because of her remarks to The Post defending "Intifada NYC" T-shirt.

Way to go. Intifada actually IS an Arabic word, herein spelled out in English and not Arabic script because, well, I don't speak a word of it either but have the good taste not to pretend otherwise nor give a display of really poor taste (not without there being serious heartfelt humor in it). Feel free to look it up.

I knew I felt a disturbance in the force. It was as if a great many souls, Jewish or not, slapped their foreheads all at once and went "Oy!".

The biggest threat to peace isn't the Prez or Israel... it's NYC government's lack of oxygen to their collective brain cells which by now must number less than rabid fans of the great works of Uwe Boll. As an added bonus, this Arabic language school is named for a Lebanese Christian who wrote some of the most beautiful and moving poetry of our times. The Prophet was one of the books on my bedside shelf.

Is it just me or does NYC have an obsession with incongruities that ultimately serve no purpose other than to perpetuate a total lack of progress on the part of humanity?

Am I taking crazy pills? Robots needing rights? Now?

1. Our present AI research (non-classified, publicly disclosed, for the tinfoil hat crowd) is nowhere near conscious self-awareness. Let me repeat: NOWHERE NEAR.
2. Our present robotics research can barely produce walking robots, Japanese eye candy notwithstanding. We cannot produce anything like the mecha of Japanese animation. CAN NOT. We are NOWHERE NEAR being able to.

These two things in concert tell you what about the article? Read it... and then ask yourself, where are Dr. Paul Moller's personal flying vehicles we were breathlessly told would be in our garages by the mid 80s?

Yeah, technological reality isn't nearly as sexy as fantasy, but let's not keep selling fantasy as reality to a public that cannot be bothered to tear itself away from bustanutingrannysbut.com long enough to actually use one of the plethora of online mapping services before they go on a trip.

In a recent /. article...

...there was a reference to an article and the reference was called:

Subpoenas Issued Over NSA Warrantless Wiretapping

and so I respond:

It's this simple... despite the idea often held by some cultures that corruption proceeds from the top down, it is rather the other way around. The people themselves are inherently corrupt and weak. They don't want to take responsibility for themselves, they don't want to take the blame for anything that goes wrong in their lives, don't want to acknowledge their fallibility. Yet deep down, they would have to be positively not human to not know and accept all of the above, but it terrifies them. So they bide their time keeping busy until something comes along to absolve them of all that and make them feel better.

While in past times these were some other ethnic group, some other nation, the devil, etc. we have today the modern political system. Someone else has wronged you, someone else got what should have been yours, you and yours have been held back by they and theirs. All these things are open to interpretation convenient to the subject audience to which the political/avaricious/power-hungry/self-deluded are preaching. They dress up with fun-house mirror magnifications of real issues mixed with non-sequitr reasoning and provide them to the people with the dual benefits to the seller of giving the audience the needed scapegoat du jour to avoid dealing with their fallibility and culpability, as well as providing an ultimately open-ended and thus never reachable hopeful land of opportunity to permanently right all of these probably non-existent wrongs against them.

We the people let this kind of thing happen because we the people buy into this kind of thing. They aren't selling us anything we didn't buy from them. If we didn't buy it, they'd have sold us something else, probably equally odious in the end whether or not it was as obvious as this or not.

While our collective modern intellectual and psychological exhaustion with trying to make sense of our truly warped world and the people who made it and the horrors of what that says about us may not always work well and probably will not, we can at least thankfully point to that and say it is thanks to this we have the modern sense of cynicism that gives us a chance to grab the reigns solidly, and pull back from disaster. Our collective history shows we won't, but perhaps a self-derived deceptive and deluded false hope is better than one sold to us by someone else. At least when it all falls apart, we can blame it on a conspiracy of one, headed by the person staring back at us in the mirror.

We have met the enemy, and probably wondered if we needed a shave when we looked at them.

From the "Why didn't they realize how bad they suck 20 years ago?" file...

Copeland started the show off on the wrong foot, literally. He tripped as he took to the stage, and then banged his gong at the wrong time so that "the big pompous opening to the show is a damp squib."

He did not hear Summers' opening riff to "Message In a Bottle," and Sting in turn misheard Copeland's drum intro -- "so we are half a bar out of sync with each other. Andy is in Idaho."

Even their fans knew how awful they were decades ago. Maybe being that close to the speakers really does cause brain damage and deadening of discriminatory abilities like... taste, and musical timing...

Another new post of mine on /.

But have you given thought to the slippery slope?

Those "powers" will be in place for the next White House occupant.

I've said this for years and no one ever believes it. They believe the liberal claptrap that only Republicans ever violate our rights and the principles of this nation. NO SUCH THING IS TRUE. ALL politicians seek to conserve power to themselves, to attract power to themselves, to serve themselves. It is simply that the liberals have a better sounding pile of claptrap to sell. The end result is always the same: every weakening of our system in favor of statism over the individual results in an opening to further weaken it by the next opportunistic self-aggrandizing set of idiots.

The liberals are anti-porn for the political correctness angle from their feminist branch. The conservatives are anti-porn from the moral correctness angle from their fundamentalist branch. BOTH sides have horribly anti-freedom ideas that have great amounts in common and they all boil down to them, the politically avaricious, being in power and us being with none. And they do it by selling us fear. Fear of terrorism, fear of sexism, fear of immorality, fear of racism, fear, fear, fear. Above all, they sell us a way to avoid taking responsibility for our lives. They sell us guilt. They sell us the idea that the world is full of evil things, that we caused it all, and that if we just hand over the power to them, they will hide our guilt, at least until the next time they need to use it against us.

Global warming, pornography, tobacco, crime, hunger, terrorism, etc. You name it, everything brought to you in the way of rule by crisis and fear thereof is a an evil lie and myth wrapped in convenient facts and seasoned with half-truths from someone else's point of view.

They sell us temporary absolution and enable self-denial.

We don't take care of our kids, teach them about sex and death and the world, and we let the state raise them in the public schools. We let the television raise them at home. And we encourage each other to believe that we do the best job possible under impossible conditions with their tacit cooperation. We simply find scapegoats de jure to blame for it not actually working right. We clap ourselves on the back saying the spate of Internet predators is someone else's fault and not that we have handed off our nation to a Lord of the Flies existance. All in the name of we the people not holding on to the responsibility that goes with the power of individual will and self determination and they the avaricious gaining the power, for if you will not accept the responsibility, you will not hold the power with which it goes.

Yet another /. post of mine...

That's what we're becoming. So totally wrapped up in the idea that we have some sort of "right" to exist that after engaging in hundreds of years of logical scientific inquiry, finding mountains of evidence that the planet's weather is dynamic, vibrant, and above all fickle, that there are regular up and down periods of cold and hot, we then turn a blind eye to it and against everything we just spent all that time digging up, and proclaim that the world should always have been exactly as it was on June 17, 1931, in Passaic, NJ or something to that effect, and that we must move Heaven and Earth to make it stay that way.

Of course, I'm sure the ancestors of the present day people thought that as they watched the Earth begin to thaw from the last ice age, and the oceans rose to cover the continental shelves and give rise to the planet-wide myths about a globe covering flood. Except, they didn't have scientific evidence in huge piles of books showing that this sort of thing happens all the time regardless of what the bipedal monkeys are up to.

It has been warmer than this in the past. Much warmer. It has been colder than this in the past. Much colder. We know this for a fact. We know that this happens with or without our activities. And we know that there is NOTHING we can do at our present technological level about it. So why do we insist that we are the ones causing it when for over half a million years it happened several times and we've only had this supposedly evil technology for only less than

.0003 of that time?

Because the global warming is real and there are people in this world and always have been who want the masses to hand over power over their lives to them. And so they trot out to us a false premise, that we are totally responsible for an actually natural occurence in the long span of planetary history, and another one that they can save us from ourselves if only we give them the reigns of power. Seems like the phoney-baloney oil crisis that never happened in the 70s, the phoney-baloney global starvation crisis that never happened in the 60s, the phoney-baloney Communist scare of the 50s that was horsehockey, and ten million other crises.

It seems on the surface that we are supremely full of ourselves and yet in truth we are terribly dubious, completely without hope, and utterly given to embracing our own fallibility. There is no faith in ourselves in this idea that we caused global warming and still none in the idea that we can stop it. Only false hollow beliefs put forth to enrich the power of others.

Have faith in our progress and our natures that we are not so bad as we would think and as others would posit. We have greatness unknown and unmatched simply waiting to be explored. Once we dreamed of exploring the universe and doing so in style and comfort where now we dream simply of returning to primitive conditions lest Mother Earth shrug us off in anger over our insolence. Mother Earth is a nonentity and the physics of the world merely uncaring and indifferent to us. We cannot make the world stay in steady state, we can only live around it, and we are supremely capable of doing it. It was never of question if we can, but if we will.

There are problems with how we treat the environment, but growing the power of the state over the power of the individual, regressing to dreary primitive states, embracing inanities like hemp and bio diesel, and forgetting all the wonderous things we've thought up in the past to overcome each problem in turn, is to turn our back on being human, and all the best things about that. We can solve the problems and there need be no doom and gloom, and the solutions need not involve handing more power over to those who have far too much already and not nearly the wisdom to know what to properly do with it.

The world will shrug. We will move with it.

More evidence that our reasoning is seriously fucked up

(Solicitor General Paul) Clement also argued that the appeals court was correct in holding that aliens outside the United States have no rights under the U.S. Constitution.

And yet, when you go to a foreign nation where the age of consent is different and lower, if you have sex with someone of the proper age of consent in that jurisdiction, the fact that you are an American citizen means in the eyes of the US government, that you are bound by American laws and NOT the laws of the nation wherein the conduct at issue occurred.

In other words, American citizens are chattel, owned by the US government and beholden to it no matter where those citizens travel. Foreign citizens are chattel whenever captured. The ONLY difference: the US Constitution is held not to apply to them. Let me repeat, the ONLY difference between US and THEM is the federal government's whimsical interpretation of the moment as to whether the US Constitution applies to you or not.

THIS is why Guantanamo is BAD.

This is coming from a conservative Republican mind you.

From the "What possesses you, Microbrain?" file...

You cannot make this stuff up. You could try, but without an article with quoted names, no one would believe you. They watched for a half hour before calling the cops mind you and didn't pay her a dime.

What cheap bastards.