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Felix Adler triumphs

I wrote a passionate blog a few days ago about the inability of most American Jews to see the historic importance of President Bush.

I've had more time to look at the situation. First, the Israelis, who are aware of their role in history, are wildly supportive of the American President. Seventy percent of Israelis and 80% of American Israelis strongly support Bush.

Second, the group of people in America who are most closely tied to history, the Orthodox Jews, are just as strongly supportive of President Bush as are Israelis.

Third, when I think of American Jews who reject President Bush, I think of real people ... Bobby G., Lisa B, Don N., Sara A., John P., Leonard K. and Rabbi L.  Real people, my friends. Nothing Bush says or does opens their minds. Lefty Fundamentalism is paramount in their secular-Jewish lives.

I believe the reason is that Felix Adler has triumphed.  Only a few people in New York will know who Adler is, a few more will know when I mention that he founded the Ethical Culture movement in the 1880's.  New Yorkers might know of Ethical Culture because one of the best high schools in Manhattan is named Ethical Culture Fieldston.

Adler believed that Judaism would thrive in America if it were stripped of its religious and ethnic elements.  That is what Ethical Culture is.  I believe that nearly every Conservative and Reform schul and temple in America now accepts Judaism in the form that Adler conceived it. The only difference among the shuls and temples is the overlay of ethnicity they allow back into their ethical culture worldview.  Some Reform Jews accept blintz's and rabbis wearing talit with a smattering of Hebrew in the service. Conservatives accept yiddish, gefilte fish and talit worn by the congregants.

The Conservative and Reform Jews of America have a spiritual system that is weak and superficial with only a sentimental culinary connection to history. 

The consequence is that Lefty Fundamentalism, which has been a triumphant religious view among most Jews for a century, has now trumped the Judaism of the Conservative and Reform.  Lefty Fundamentalism is today the religion of Conservative and Reform Jews and their spirituality is Ethical Culture with a schmear of lox and cream cheese.

I'm clearly not an authority on contemporary Judaism, so you have no reason to accept my views on this issue.  I even have a disclaimer:  my mother's side of the family were among the founders of Ethical Culture and one great aunt, Blanche Herz, founded the Ethical Culture elementary school in Manhattan and an Ethical Culture camp for girls in Maine. 

Is there a better explanation of the failure of Conservative and Reform Jews to recognize the Olympian importance of George W. Bush, the first significant friend of Jews in history?

New magazine

I often enjoy watching Deutsche Welle TV, especially when I’m traveling. It is refreshing. Now there is a comparable magazine that covers German arts and ideas online.  Signandsight.com

It is interesting to note that many Germans recognize the importance of using English to be part of The World. The Germans have a de facto appreciation of the world that commerce has created.

German use of English is in cold contrast to the truculent arrogance of the French.

Product endorsement

I would like to endorse a wonderful hair product that guarantees to keep you from going bald. The product is Charles Antell Formula #9.

I used a tube of Formula #9 and it worked.

The last time this product was available seems to have been 1951 or '52.  I was twelve years old and I loved the sales pitch on television, on our 9” black and white television. I ordered one tube and used all of it.

I have plenty of hair, now, fifty-five years later.  My father, grandfathers, uncles and two of my three brothers are bald; but I'm not.  I attribute my good fortune to Charles Antell Formula #9. (Of course I know about Gregor Mendel I wrote an article about him.) 

I googled Charles Antell and found only two sites; both interesting:

Richard Corliss: “Vagrant time slots would be filled by five-minute commercials for Charles Antell Formula No. 9, a hair product with lanolin. A chorus sang a frantic admonitory jingle ("Why are so many pee-ee-ple/ So rough and tough upon their hair?/ In beauty shops, in barber shops,/ It shouldn't happen to a mop./ Men! Women! You're ruining your hair!"); then a carny-campy pitchman promised follicle salvation through sheep oil. It could have been the first infomercial. If so, damn its eyes, and damn me for somehow remembering those lyrics 50 years later.”

The second site is more ominous for my beloved hair product:

"As early as 1953, the Utah Supreme Court addressed the conditions under which a foreign corporation was "doing business" in Utah so as to be amenable to suit for any purpose in Utah's courts. In McGriff v. Charles Antell, Inc., 123 Utah 166, 169-70, 256 P.2d 703, 704-05 (1953), our supreme court held that advertising in Utah, plus "something else," could constitute a presence in Utah sufficient to confer general personal jurisdiction over a foreign defendant."

Did my wonderful product get sued for advertising in Utah and get put out of business?  Did the suit somehow dispute the product's guarantee to help you keep your hair?

Well, if so, now we know the suit was frivolous.

If there are other 66 year-olds out there who saved their hair with Charles Antell Formula #9, please contact me.  Maybe we can resurrect the product.

ATTENTION: The product ingredients were tested in 2006 and the results are here.  Photos of the product are here.

The authentic story of this product is told below by Dennis in the comments.

Interesting scam

I just received a fax that asks me to vote yes or no on same sex marriage.  My reply is supposed to be by fax to a 1-900 number.

First, unsolicited faxes are illegal in the U.S., so this probably came from a Canadian phone. (This scam is unlike most, where the phone call fax comes at 4 am.)

Second, I live in the Castro District so same sex marriage is presumably a hot issue for me.

Third and most important, dialing a 1-900 number means I will be charged $3.95 for the call, with most of the money going to the scam artist who sent it to me.

Caveat emptor is bad government policy.  DA's and Attorneys General should be all over these scam artists.  The economic cost of leery consumers is very high.  Even worse, the sick, people with poor English and especially the aged are the common victims.

Martha: fire them

The Wall Street Journal this morning writes a very moving report of Martha Stewart's time in prison and the sympathy she has shown fellow inmates. I'm a Martha fan based on this show of deep humanity on her part.

The following quote is the problem: “Her empathy for the women she soon will leave has brought her into conflict with some of her corporate advisers, according to people involved: They want the public to forget she is a convicted felon and have counseled her to talk only about future plans.”

Martha, these are the advisers who put you in prison.  Fire them!

When you were first told by the press that you had been tagged for insider trading I told you what to do: Make a sincere publicly apology and donate several million dollars to women's cancer as penance.  You would have been a free person and very popular.

Instead you listened to your too-smart-by-a-half New York lawyers who told you that you could beat this case in court.

They were wrong then, they are wrong now.  Fire them.

The American public will love a Martha Stewart who cares about female prisoners' health, safety and education.  We are decent people, capable of great love.

Shame of the Jews

President Bush recently spoke to all Europeans:

"We cannot carry the message of freedom and the baggage of bigotry at the same time. We must reject anti-Semitism from any source, and we must condemn violence such as we have witnessed in the Netherlands. All our nations must work to integrate minorities into the mainstream of society, and to teach the value of tolerance to each new generation."  This quote comes from the Wall Street Journal.

President George W. Bush has been the greatest friend the Jews have had in 2,000 years.  No other leader in history has any claim to that title.  The only pretender to that title is Napoleon who gave Jews citizenship in Europe, along with other groups. There can be no evading or denying the extraordinary historical importance of George W. Bush in the history of Jews.

Bush made his statement attacking anti-Semitism in Europe a week and a half ago.  He is not running for election, he has been saying this now for several years, and the Jews of America gave him less him 30% of their vote.  The man is clearly acting out of his personal moral authority. I believe this makes him as great a president as A. Lincoln. 

There can be no reason for Jews anywhere to withhold their gratitude.  Rabbis everywhere should be extolling the greatness of President Bush; the failure of so many American rabbis to recognize moral greatness when it happens is a stab at the heart of Jews who believe the Jewish people have some claim to moral authority.  American Jews certainly don't have any claim to moral authority today; they have demonstrated a tragic depth of moral failure.

My father was a rabbi, a lifetime lefty who left the country when President Nixon was elected.  Yet I believe President Bush's refusal to tolerate Adolph Arafat and the Palestinians' continual murder of Jews, along with my father's love of Israel, would have helped him see Bush as a savior.

I continue to be ashamed of American Conservative and Reform Jews who have not recognized or appreciated the generosity and importance of this leader.  As a result I no longer call myself a Jew, I am an Israeli-American.

When history finally helps the deluded Jews among us to appreciate President Bush, I expect the story of Bush to be added to the Passover service. The first leader to befriend and defend the Jews is an exciting and historic story.

Startling

I hope I don't have to tell my readers what the TV show CSI Las Vegas is. Twenty million people a week see the show.

My only general comments about the show are that it is a detective story in the Sherlock Holmes genre. On CSI, crimes and non-crime homicides are solved with small clues and scientific logic.

The show gives a mis-impression about police work. There are no forensic labs in America that are half as capable as the CSI lab. Most crimes are solved, in the few cases where they are solved, by witnesses who secretly phone the police.

Misrepresentation of police crime solving is an old thing.  For thirty years TV and movies showed detectives collecting fingerprints and using them effectively.  This was nonsense before 1980 when the first statewide fingerprint data bases were developed thanks to the computer.  Before that hand sorting of fingerprints in local files was the limit.  San Francisco in 1979 had only 5,000 prints on file.  Still too many to screen by eye.

The most recent CSI show startled me. It turns out the dead male victim in the story, a rather meek man, was suffocated after having sex with a drunk woman weighing over three hundred pounds.  She fell asleep on top of him. She was more willing to go to prison for murder than to admit that her weight killed him.

In my days of sexual experimentation I only had sex with one obese woman and she was not on top.  I've never imagined this form of death.

What was your reaction? 

 

Compulsive liar

The Wall Street Journal has a box in today's issue comparing the court testimony of Bernie Ebbers, former CEO of WorldCom and Scott Sullivan former CFO. The box is not online for me to show you.  The statements by each are contradictory.  Ebbers says he only talked to Sullivan at company social events, like a football game.  Sullivan says they talked 8-10 times a day, usually had lunch together and often flew around the world together; moreover Ebbers was often in Sullivan's office dealing with accounting details.

I'll tell you who's lying.  Ebbers.

I testified several years ago before the California Public Utilities Commission against the merger of Sprint and WorldCom for the single reason that Ebbers is a total liar.  I had plenty of evidence from an online site, with twenty pages of declarations, and from a merger in Britain between WorldCom and a cable & wireless company.

I just learned about it

On January 16th there was an anti-terrorist rally in Berkeley around Bus 19, the burned out remnants of a suicide bomber, from a year earlier in Jerusalem.  The bus was brought to Berkeley by a Christian group.  The candles and prayer vigil by 500 people at the bus is best described on Jihad Watch.  All the local Bay Area press gave fleeting or erroneous reports on the event.

Two hundred pro-Palestinian demonstrators came to the site to shout and carry anti-Semitic signs. The loudest shout was “2-4-6-8 we are martyrs we can't wait.” The pro-Palestinians crossed the barriers and started a fight.  One got arrested for an hour.

I followed the story, at the time, in blogs.  What I learned two days ago was the shocker.  The Berkeley event was organized by a 75 year old female Holocaust survivor.  The City Council refused to authorize a permit, for fear of the pro-terrorist demonstrators. A radio campaign resulted in so many phone calls and emails that the Council reversed itself.  Then the council demanded $2 million in liability insurance.  The little old lady got the insurance.

On the day of the vigil the police delivered barricades and left them on the ground.  They told the 75 year old woman to put them up herself.

Does this make Berkeley the most anti-Semitic city in America?

S.F. Examiner

The Examiner, today, introduced its new design.  Much better typography and layout. 

The Examiner is free and is gaining in ad pages.  My estimate is that the Examiner now has a bigger readership than the Chronicle.  Both have roughly 150,000 readers. The Examiner should add another 50,000 this year while the Chronicle continues to shrink.

I further estimate that the Chronicle is losing money, big time, and the Examiner has broken even after only one year.

Women are paid more

Women are now paid more than men. Businesses are overcompensating in order to avoid sexual discrimination and sexual harassment suits.

The data comes from Dr. Warren Farrell published in a book that defends incentives for women.  Farrell's credentials are that Tarcher published the book and he is on the Board of NOW.  Tarcher does good fact checking. NOW is the mother of Politically Correct.

Farrell looked at 25 SICs, job categories, in Bureau of Labor Statistics data and found that single women with the same BA's, working the same number of hours, had higher starting pay and had higher salaries than single men. Among the SICs he looked at were investment bankers and dietitians.

I frankly don't doubt the data, nor do I doubt the other figure, that one-third of women in marriages where both spouses work, the woman earns more than the man.

All this research is done to find out why broader data shows the opposite.  Most researchers conclude that there is no discrimination in the market place ... men take more dangerous jobs, are more willing to travel and work longer hours. Fini.