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Another Jewish Divide

The Jewish Nation has divided many times in the past.  Part of it has always become the mainstream after a few centuries. It is happening today with a vengeance.

One of the first major divisions were the Pharisees and the Sadducees. This occurred shortly after the Maccabees won the war celebrated on Hanukkah, about 160 BCE.  It appears that the Pharisees became the mainstream as rabbinic practices were being developed, in the absence of a Temple, and the beginnings of the Talmud were underway.  The Sadducees chose a different path, rejecting the Talmud and the other written interpretations of the earlier oral books of the Torah.  Other revolting groups at the time included the Essenes and the Zealots. The Essenes practiced celibacy and died out promptly.  The Zealots still survive in tiny numbers.

The Sadducee views rejecting the Talmud tradition re-occurred with vigor in the Middle East as ‘Karaites.’  The Karaite movement grew rapidly in the 10th century and was a major movement in Judaism for seven centuries and still exists today.

The next big schism in Judaism occurred in response to Sabbatai Zevi.  Zevi saw himself and was acclaimed by others as the Messiah.  An historical wave of messianism swept the global Jewish community in 1665 until, Zevi renounced Judaism under pressure from the Turks and converted to Islam.  In response the global rabbinate distanced itself from messianic religion and distanced itself from esoteric practices for the next two centuries.

At various times Jews have been pressured by authorities to convert to Christianity and Islam.  The ones who pretended to convert often practiced Judaism covertly but were no longer accepted in the mainstream of Jewish life. A group of these so-called ‘conversos’ is still found near Sante Fe, New Mexico.

In the period of Israel’s creation, 1930-58, parts of Judaism, outside of Israel, distanced itself from the supporters of Israel but that disappeared around 1960.

Recently open hostility to Israel was adopted by the mainstream Democrat Party. Again a Jewish schism has arisen. The Reform Jews who are Democrats, along with some in the Conservative movement Democrats, are separating from mainstream Jews and Israel.  

Leading Democrats have a long history of Jew hate and anti-Israel views.  The State Department was strongly opposed to the creation of Israel. President Carter was strongly anti-Jew and wrote a book explaining his views.  The greatest hatred of Jews was found in President Obama as testified to by the Israeli ambassador, Michael Oren, and carried over directly to the administration of Joe Biden and Biden’s Senate speaker, Charles Schumer.

The schism is here, we get to live it.

Democrats Don’t Understand America

This blog will be hard for many readers to accept.  The Democrat Party as a whole does not understand the unique political nature of America.  

The best evidence is from the constitution of Japan which was created by the American State Department staff after WWII who were all Democrats.  It is modeled on the British system where the parliament (‘the Diet’ in Japan) elects the prime minister who is in charge of the executive branch of government.  In the U.S. Constitution, the head of the executive branch is elected by the entire American population. The same failure of Democrats to use the American system of government is found in the creation of the German post war government but Americans were not the only people involved.

When I was a student at the University of Chicago in the mid-1950s the authoritative text on government was by Herman Finer. The best government he recommended was the British parliament. Finer was an East European Jew; as I’ve pointed out elsewhere, Jews who came to America never appreciated the American system of government; they favored socialism and other Lefty ideas. Finer’s book on government was nearly the universal college text at the time.

The American system of government is unique because it was created de novo by a small group of very brilliant men who searched the global history of government for their ideas of governance.  The American system of a separate executive evolved from there. 

The evolution first included the creation of political parties, then the unification of the election of the president and vice president and finally the widespread use of state primary elections.

To see that the Democrat Party still doesn’t understand the uniqueness of the American system of governance, there are many pieces of current evidence.  

The Democrat Party has always had their electoral conventions controlled by big-city party bosses. When the city-boss system died out it was replaced by Superdelegates who can overrule the other ordinary convention delegates.  Very much outside the idea of American republican democracy.  

This latter development is why I refuse to call the Democrat Party the Democratic Party. It isn’t democratic.

The Democrat Party proceeded to step outside the American governmental idea with the office of President Nixon. Nixon was investigated by Congress for his spying on the opposition party.  What Nixon did had been the norm for both political parties for generations. Even before the threat of a Nixon impeachment the U.S. Senate forced Nixon’s Vice-President (Spiro Agnew) to resign and selected a likable, defeatable member of the House as his Vice-President (Gerald Ford.)  A new case of Congressional meddling in the Executive. A first in nearly 200 years.

In the past decade the Democrat Party has again stepped outside the American political norm. Aggressively. I will only mention a few of the outrages.  

In the 2016 election the Democrat Party claimed that Trump won because of Russian election interference.  A novel claim in American politics and proceeded for 4 years to promote this unsubstantiated issue.  In fact the Democrat Party used two secret Executive Branch agencies to carry out illegal espionage on the Republicans.

Then when Trump held the presidency, the House, under Democrat rule proceeded to impeach the president twice. Twice the Senate refused to support the impeachment. The second time, the President's time in office was finished, a situation not envisioned in the Constitution.  An unconscionable first time in American history.

After President Trump was defeated for his second term, the Democrats proceeded to bring a string of legal actions against him.  This act of legal warfare is unprecedented in the 233-year history of America. It will permanently discourage wealthy people and business people from seeking the Presidency.

The Democrat party had its New York office holders impose a bail fee that violated the Eighth Amendment which prohibits excessive bail. The New York bail was greater than the total U.S. Gross National Product when the 8th Amendment was passed in 1791.

The Democrat Party had the leading opposition candidate removed from the ballot in three primary states. Promptly ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

There are many more examples.  It is clear the Democrat Party doesn’t understand America, our Constitution, nor our moral foundations.

I Only Made Phone Calls

Two things its hard to give me credit for: tilapia and Kite Hill.

I’ll start with tilapia, a rather bland tasting small fish.  We have it in the U.S. because of me.  But what I did was to use my phone and my networks which are not visible to the world.  Here is how it happened.

Tilapia

I had a few clients in the Central Valley of California who were professional entomologists, advisors to farmers on pest control.  In general they favored alternatives to commercial pesticides.

One of them phoned me to ask if I knew of a way to control mosquitoes in rice fields?  It was a problem for his clients in the Sacramento Valley.  The fields in that area are flooded for rice cultivation by several large rivers. Rice grown in this area is one third of all the rice grown in the U.S. There are cities and towns in the area where mosquitoes are a problem during rice flooding periods.

I phoned my friend Katsu in Japan who was the head of the organic farmers in Japan and a close friend.  I put him on the board of a Third World aid group in Washington D.C. where I had influence and made a few phone calls to get him the presidency of the world organic farmers group.

Katsu told me Japanese organic farmers used a fish called tilapia, in English, to live in the rice fields and eat the mosquitoes and their larva.  

I phoned my friend the entomologist and told him and within two years all the rice growers were growing tilapia and selling them on the commercial market.

No one saw me make those two phone calls.  If you like tilapia, 'you're welcome.'

Kite Hill

The large park area next to my house in San Francisco is called Kite Hill.   In this case it was more than two phone calls that created this park.  

A neighbor called me, Felicia Ortiz, to say she wanted to create some vest-pocket parks in open lots in San Francisco.  The term ‘vest-pocket parks’ apparently came from a friend of mine Bonnie Ora Sherk. An environmental artist.

I told Mrs. Ortiz that I would help her if she was willing to be chair of a group to create the parks and the first park would be on the large open area near both of us that I had gotten down-zoned to single family homes a few years earlier.  She said ‘yes.’

I then phoned three political friends of mine.  I asked one to create a political action group to design and commission vest-pocket parks, with Mrs. Ortiz as chairperson.  The second one I asked to create a bond issue for the next election for $12 million to create vest-pocket parks. The third one I called to ask him to raise $50,000 for the bond issue and to buy the appropriate media.

We won easily and bought the land for the park.  The Park and Recreation Department takes care of our park.

Just phone calls and my network of friends.  I take credit but the evidence for my role is not visible.

Commerce and Technology

I am amazed by Abu Dhabi and Dubai. 

I know about these two because a relative of mine and her family live in one of them. These are modern cities with every fully developed aspect of commerce and technology.  How is this possible, when the leaders are first generation, live in tents, desert Arabs?

The answer is that both commerce and technology developed very slowly over 400 years, starting in Holland, but now both can be bought on the open market.  Anyone, anywhere can buy a high-powered computer, a jet plane, a modern hospital and a nuclear reactor.  The highest technology is on the market, including synchrotrons and Nvidia chips. 

What surprised me is the realization that commerce, too, can be bought as it is in Abu Dhabi and Dubai where banks, stock markets, courts, insurance companies, university graduate departments, medicines, tall building architecture, urban planners, communications industries, manufacturing and even research laboratories have been acquired on the open market.

That means that commerce and technology are very similar or may be the same.  

What they both have in common is that innovation in technology can only thrive where individuals have great autonomy and innovation in commerce can only flourish where there is no hereditary ruling class or a very weak one.

Celebrity-hood: Ignore It or Fight Back

America created the celebrity sometime around the first World War.  There was Edison, Ford, Lindbergh, Einstein and Rockefeller, Carnegie, Chaplin and many more.  

Just from looking at that list you can see that some were treated as positive and some as negative.

I want to make a simple point.  If you are treated as negative you have only two choices: ignore it all or fight back. If you are treated as positive, just sit back and enjoy it.

This is of current concern because  two celebrities have been treated as negative, Trump and Musk and they have chosen to fight back at the hatred fired at them.  

This is a problem because Trump is a great business builder and an even greater man as the first businessman to occupy the presidency. He will be remembered as the man who made Jerusalem the Capitol of Israel after 2,300 years; as the first president to recognize that government regulation was the greatest harm the American government can do.

Musk is the greatest engineer-businessman in an entire century.  

Such nasty treatment of both men is flat-out immoral and historically a sign of sub-human behavior by a large part of the public.

Many people have ignored celebrity-hood and been badly treated for the rest of their lives.  Two classic examples are John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie.  Three recent examples are prescient Richard Nixon, a truly great and visionary president.  Woody Allen, a historically important filmmaker was treated miserably and Senator Joe McCarthy who foresaw the problem of embedded Communists long before the majority of Americans, many of whom have never seen it.  

Just from looking at history, the choice of what to do when cast as a negative celebrity, the best choice is to attack your enemies, including the very powerful newspaper and TV media.