Category: Social Behavior

Angry Versus Steady As We Go

Americans are upset with Washington. Some are angry. Some are VERY angry. Donald Trump says he is angry. He says the country is a mess. He is correct!

The “establishment” candidates are all part of the Washington group that has been running this country for decades. What do we have to show for it? Low paying jobs, crumbling infrastructure, high cost college education, high national debt, local governments struggling to avoid bankruptcy, and now even the stock market is in decline. And to top that off many other nations thumb their noses at the United States.

Is it no wonder then that Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Bernie Sanders are drawing big crowds to their campaign events? They are talking about changing the country with some specific ideas. Now you may not agree with all of their ideas but look at the establishment candidates. It’s all about a “steady as we go” philosophy that lines the pockets of the well connected.

The base salary for congressional representatives is $174,000 a year. The typical American family income was $53,657 in 2014. You think those congressional representatives are concerned with your situation? They are concerned with their re-election and that translates to contributions from the wealthy that want to keep everything the same as it is now.

So will the angry turn out in sufficient numbers to overturn the establishment? We can only hope!

The MatzoBall Is the Season’s Hottest Not-Christmas Party

’Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house, all the chosen were dancing—and looking for a spouse …

By , BusinessWeek, December 17, 2015 — 11:14 AM PST

Matzoball Martini

God’s callings are mysterious. Sometimes he asks you to free your people from slavery and walk through a sea. Sometimes he commands you to kill your son. Sometimes he tells you to gather your people in a darkly lit club, pump up the jams, and get them wasted.

“I’m in the business of making Jewish babies,” says Andy Rudnick, founder of the MatzoBall, a series of Christmas Eve parties for Jewish singles. “I’m a key factor in stopping the assimilation effect.” The first MatzoBall was held in 1987 in Boston. This year there will be 18 parties across the country, with a total of about 25,000 people paying $30 to $50 at the door. Rudnick says that once he started throwing parties, he never went home alone on a Christmas Eve. “Never. Never. That would be like owning a restaurant and not eating.” Now 51, he met his wife, Catherine, at a MatzoBall in 1997.

There had long been gatherings for the People Chosen to Have Nothing to Do on Christmas Eve, but they typically involved name tags, bar mitzvah bands, and synagogue community rooms. Rudnick figured that cool clubs would be happy to give him their space on a night they were closed. “I said, ‘Let’s deliver the hottest nightclub in a given city that happens to be all Jews,’ ” he explains. He was ruthless about keeping out “nebs,” or nebbishy guys he feared would kill the vibe, and still keeps older folks away by creating “MatzoBall Plus” events for people older than 35. The parties have been such a success that about 20 percent of the clubgoers aren’t Jewish. In Boston last year, Rudnick set up a private room for New England Patriot and famous Jewish sports legend Julian Edelman. The wide receiver was joined by regular MatzoBall attendee Rob Gronkowski, a gentile teammate. “He just loves the Jewish girls,” Rudnick says.

The party’s success begat imitators, leading to the great MatzoBall wars of the mid-’90s. Promoting became Rudnick’s full-time job, supplanting his earlier career in real estate. He battled other Jewish get-togethers by giving out free tickets while chasing away rival promoters who would hand out fliers to people in line for his events. He called himself the Jew Who Stole Christmas, taking on competing parties such as Washington’s Gefilte Fish Gala, Chicago’s Rockmitzvah, Seattle’s Latkepalooza, Tampa’s Vodka Latke, and the multicity Heebonism, which, at one gathering in Palm Springs, Calif., featured Jewish porn stars and strip dreidel.

Rudnick expanded to a monthly schedule, including a June Schmooze Cruise, which had a Clio-winning print ad: Moses stands in front of the Red Sea holding a staff and says, “This time, we have a boat.” He had a quarterly magazine, the Jewish Professional. (His girlfriend at the time was often the cover model.) Rudnick even started a video dating service—1-900-36-YENTA. He scaled back the business in 1997, when he started making more money selling the now-banned diet drug fen-phen, which led him to open a chain of nine plastic surgery centers. He had to sell his Sleek Medical Spas in 2012 when he found himself overleveraged.

He’s still in the medical business—Rudnick sells a health-care credit card—but he’s back to expanding MatzoBall and working to bring Jews together throughout the year. He’s about to release a dating app to compete with JDate, called MatzoMatch. Instead of using Facebook profiles, the app will connect to LinkedIn accounts and allow users to sort potential dates by college or industry. There will also be a matchmaking service for a fee, just like in the old country.

Rudnick is also starting a series of Jewish after-work networking events around the country, called MatzoMingles, and organizing a group trip to Israel next year. And for the second year, he’s selling a block of 200 rooms at Miami’s Fontainebleau hotel for a package that includes a Christmas Eve party at the nightclub LIV and a pool party the next day. Some of the attendees, he was surprised to learn last year, were the children of couples who met at MatzoBalls. Including, to his even greater surprise, his 16-year-old, 5-foot-8-inch identical twin daughters, who’d somehow sneaked into the club. “I didn’t know until I saw pictures of the MatzoBall,” he says. “They shouldn’t have been there.”

The Fear Factor and Its Consequences

Presidential Candidates and the Press are promoting fear to advance their agendas.

The fear factor has infiltrated America. Turn on any news program and there is an item about Muslims and radical jihad. The fear factor is taking over our sense of judgement. GOP presidential candidates and the press are enhancing and thriving on the fear. Cable news stations have found this topic as a subject that keeps the viewers tuned in and that means more advertisers and more revenue that leads to more profit.  The presidential candidates want to convey the idea that they are tough so they talk up their willingness to confront ISIS and Al-Qaeda. At the same time those candidates tell us that President Obama is not doing enough to destroy that enemy. He has no strategy and really doesn’t want to confront ISIS is their argument.

Watching Fox News Sunday today it was Juan Williams, the in-house moderate, who asked which presidential candidate was prepared to send an American army into Syria and Iraq. Williams asked what would any of those candidates for president do that is different than the actions being taken by Obama. The studio went quiet. No one had a response to Williams’ question.

Both Donald Trump and Ted Cruz have based their campaigns on fear and hate. Trump lays out the scenarios and Cruz simply campaigns on the same ideas. They are the leading candidates in most state and national polls and that is the frightening fact.

If we are to take them at their word all illegal aliens would be deported to their country of origin regardless of how long they have lived in the United States. Many of those people own homes, hold jobs, and have been part of American society for decades. Muslims would be subject to invasion of their privacy and monitored as potential terrorists even though they are citizens by birth. Birth citizenship would be denied if Trump had his way.

You may say I am putting words into Trump’s mouth but he has insisted that he was more like FDR now than any leader since, according to his statement on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. This appearance on that MSNBC program is great for increasing that cable station’s viewership and revenue.

Barracks at Manzanar

Barracks at Manzanar, where about 10,000 Japanese Americans were interned, as seen in 1942.(Los Angeles Times)

Seventy-three years ago, during World War II, the United States government forcibly removed 110,000 Japanese Americans from their homes and confined them in detention camps. Loyal citizens lost their property and liberty, based solely on their ancestry. The Korematsu decision validated that action: Relying on a deeply flawed evidentiary record — which included blatant racial animus, hyperbolized threats and misrepresentations by government lawyers — the Supreme Court ruled that the need to protect against the threat of espionage outweighed individual rights. -Los Angeles Times December 18, 2015

One of the comments posted on line about this story is a stunner. “WHAT NOBODY is speaking or writing about is that the Japanese incarceration was done for THEIR OWN GOOD AND BENEFIT. It was to keep them safe from harm of being murdered. Had any been murdered there would have been NO JURY that would have convicted the killer. In fact he may have been glorified. You just aren’t old enough if you know nothing about that and those days.”

The stories told by those held in those camps tell of lack of food, lack of sanitary facilities, and other deprivations. Those people were rounded up in days and put into the camps. Their homes and businesses were confiscated.

The leading GOP candidate for president, Donald Trump, has suggested the federal government create a data base of all Muslims and perhaps have them carry identification cards. Is the next step internment camps for Muslims?

Trump’s ability to attract large crowds at his campaign stops is a frightening message. Watching The Sound of Music (the Von Trapps fled Austria as the Nazis rose to power) sends the message that good people will rise above the messages of hate.

There was No One Left

Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller (14 January 1892 – 6 March 1984) was a German anti-Nazi theologian[1] and Lutheran pastor. He is best known for his statement, “First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a Socialist …… and there was no one left to speak for me.”

When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for the Jews, I remained silent; I wasn’t a Jew.
When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.

 Donald Trump spreads the same kind of intolerance. First it was the Mexicans now it’s the Muslims. Who will be next?

Will you speak out?

Let’s Have a Vigil

candle light vigil My local newspaper, Los Angeles Daily News, offered its support for the families of the 14 people killed in San Bernardino. Among their words were “deeply disturbing and dispiriting” events in San Bernardino. Were any solutions or new ideas on preventing mass killings offered? No!

We have a serious problem in America and their response is “our thoughts and prayers are with the San Bernardino victims.”  It’s the easy access to weapons that demands attention.  There is at least one weapon for every man, woman, and child in the United States.  Those weapons are owned by only 30% of the population.  In other words a minority of the population holds the rest of us hostage to a law that harms everyone.  Meaningless vigils of prayers, flowers and candles do nothing to stop the carnage.  Weapon control laws will be a step towards reduced violence.

Our weak willed congress has been bought by gun manufacturers and the NRA. What has made America great is leaders who can provide direction in challenging times. No one is in sight that offers that leadership.

Fear Mongers are Prevailing

I just posted a defense for minorities in the United States on December 1 and now two Muslims, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik have killed 14 people and wounded another 21 people. We don’t know their specific motive but it’s obvious that hate was part of their motivation to kill.

We have to control ourselves in not saying that all Muslims are killers. If it had been two Jews or two Mexicans we might have said it’s those minorities. “We can’t trust them” or words to that effect.

It was Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were the perpetrators of the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. Two White men who were Christian. We do not believe that all Christians are inherently bad. So why should we believe all Muslims are bad?

Bad people everywhere does not justifying painting a brush that all Muslims are bad. That’s hard to do when there have been too many attacks in the past few weeks and many more during the past year.

I understand taking precautions in admitting Muslims into the United States. Donald Trump’s idea of denying Muslims into the United States plays into the jihadist call for a war on the West. Trump is playing on fear. That fear is driving many to buy weapons that won’t stop the mass killing.

I have no solutions. We must hope that the grown-ups speak out loudly against the fear mongers who seem to believe that a war will solve this challenge.

Is Donald Trump the New Hitler?

Trump and HitlerThe similarities between Donald Trump and Adolph Hitler are frightening. The United States is not in the same condition as Germany in the 1930s but many people see themselves as victims of a similar plight. They have low paid jobs or no jobs at all while there are wealthy people who are earning fabulous salaries and bonuses. Bernie Sanders has pointed out that the wealth of the richest 1% is greater than the bottom 90%. 

Unlike Senator Sanders, Mr. Trump has rallied his support from those “victims” of illegal immigration from Mexicans who are “all rapists and murderers.” 

Today Mr. Trump has added all Muslims to his list of people to fear.  This methodology was the same used by Hitler in his campaign of hate against Jews in the 1930s.  Perhaps we should blame Sanders for the rise of Trump.

Trump has found minorities to blame for the plight of the poor in America.  Who will be his next group to blame? Will it be Jews or perhaps Asians?

Are Americans “that stupid” to fall for this clap trap?

Where are the sensible GOP candidates for president? Jeb Bush makes mild disavowals as does John Kasich and the others are silent.

Hillary Clinton may believe that the nomination of Donald Trump is her path to the presidency but there is a frightening tide flowing across this nation.

Am I just being hysterical?  The crowds at Trump rallies tell me we do have something to fear.

End the Gun Epidemic in America

New York Times front page editorial, By DEC. 4, 2015 .  The first front page editorial in 95 years.

It is a moral outrage and national disgrace that civilians can legally purchase weapons designed to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency.

All decent people feel sorrow and righteous fury about the latest slaughter of innocents, in California. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies are searching for motivations, including the vital question of how the murderers might have been connected to international terrorism. That is right and proper.

But motives do not matter to the dead in California, nor did they in Colorado, Oregon, South Carolina, Virginia, Connecticut and far too many other places. The attention and anger of Americans should also be directed at the elected leaders whose job is to keep us safe but who place a higher premium on the money and political power of an industry dedicated to profiting from the unfettered spread of ever more powerful firearms.

It is a moral outrage and a national disgrace that civilians can legally purchase weapons designed specifically to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency. These are weapons of war, barely modified and deliberately marketed as tools of macho vigilantism and even insurrection. America’s elected leaders offer prayers for gun victims and then, callously and without fear of consequence, reject the most basic restrictions on weapons of mass killing, as they did on Thursday. They distract us with arguments about the word terrorism. Let’s be clear: These spree killings are all, in their own ways, acts of terrorism.

Opponents of gun control are saying, as they do after every killing, that no law can unfailingly forestall a specific criminal. That is true. They are talking, many with sincerity, about the constitutional challenges to effective gun regulation. Those challenges exist. They point out that determined killers obtained weapons illegally in places like France, England and Norway that have strict gun laws. Yes, they did.

But at least those countries are trying. The United States is not. Worse, politicians abet would-be killers by creating gun markets for them, and voters allow those politicians to keep their jobs. It is past time to stop talking about halting the spread of firearms, and instead to reduce their number drastically — eliminating some large categories of weapons and ammunition.

It is not necessary to debate the peculiar wording of the Second Amendment. No right is unlimited and immune from reasonable regulation.

Certain kinds of weapons, like the slightly modified combat rifles used in California, and certain kinds of ammunition, must be outlawed for civilian ownership. It is possible to define those guns in a clear and effective way and, yes, it would require Americans who own those kinds of weapons to give them up for the good of their fellow citizens.

What better time than during a presidential election to show, at long last, that our nation has retained its sense of decency?

From Sandy Hook to San Bernardino

Tashfeen Malik age 27
Tashfeen Malik age 27, the face of terrorism

This year is ending on a very sad note. Apparently we have just experienced another act of terrorism that is almost exactly three years after the Sandy Hook massacre. In that time we have seen multiple massacres that have caused everyone to become accustomed to those horrible acts.

Our government cannot protect us from the quiet killer who showed no signs of planning to kill. We are all left alone to protect ourselves and our families. That means that those who don’t own a gun will now have to consider buying one and learning to use it.

Even those working in facilities providing services to the disabled will have to carry a firearm just in case there is an attack.

I am most depressed by our government’s idea that they do not have to pass any regulations that would limit the sale of guns. I just saw someone at a gun range in the San Bernardino area saying on the air that “Guns don’t kill people, it’s people who kill people.”

Congress just voted down a new registration program two days ago.

As I non-gun owner I have three choices.

  • Take a chance and hope I never am in a place where there are weapons being used.
  • Buy a gun and carry it with me as protection.
  • Move out of this country that has gone mad.

Will you buy a gun and carry it with you?

You Are Not a White Christian? Don’t Plan on Coming to Our Country

Hatred has found its home and it’s right here in the U.S.A. America has a history of discrimination against minorities. Black Africans, Jews, Irish, Italians, Mexicans and it goes on and on. Those people reading this blog in other countries must be wondering what is going on in the country that boasts everyone is welcome.

Now you know truth. If you don’t believe what you are reading here, just consider American behavior as told in the news media. Better yet read a few history books that tell you about our behavior.

As reported in http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/American_Indian_Genocide. This event was enacted in the television history mini-series Centennial.
On November 29, 1864, 700 militia from Colorado and the surrounding territories surrounded a peaceful encampment of so-called “Peace Chiefs,” predominantly from the Cheyenne and Arapahoe, who had been invited to end the “Indian Wars.” Without warning or cause, they opened fire and slaughtered approximately 150 Indians from various “western” tribes. Colonel Chivington and his men cut fetuses out of the women, slaughtered infants by stepping on their heads with their boots, cut the genitals off men and women, and decorated their horses and wagons with scalps, genitalia, and other body parts, before parading through Denver.

The internment of Japanese Americans in the United States was the forced relocation and incarceration during World War II of between 110,000 and 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry who lived on the Pacific coast in camps in the interior of the country. Sixty-two percent of the internees were United States citizens.

Today you are arrested and detained for being Black in America.

Is it any wonder that G.O. P. candidates talk about admitting Syrian refugees only if they are Christians. The others talk about developing data bases listing all Muslims and requiring them to wear identification.

They deny that their ideas are the same as Hitler’s Fascist controlled society that believed in a superior race and penalized, imprisoned, and murdered all who do not match their idea of who met the qualifications to be a citizen.

Does this all seem like a replay of Hitler’s Germany? It will be if one of those mad men become president of the United States.