Video: Can Rebbes be Rockstars? (a la Nickelback)

This Yiddish music video -- Ich vil zain a Rebbe -- is not an entertainment music video. The artists who made this video spent a great deal of effort to convey a satirical message. Sure satirizing the lifestyle of the rich and famous is not a new theme, and this effort could be dismissed as a Nickelback knockoff.

Yet this application of satire and music to rebbeim with nuance and detail is at once masterful and unnerving.




More on - the controversy over this video....... /reposted from 11/08/

iPad Si, Netbook No

In April we got our iPad. The next day we put our two Dell netbooks up for sale on ebay. We had no doubt that iPad is a revolutionary shift in technology and that netbooks are nothing more than shrunken laptops.

The sales numbers are now coming in showing just that. Netbook sales are down and iPads are moving like hotcakes. From the AppleInsider blog:

Apple's iPad has been viewed as a netbook competitor, and even positioned as one by Apple. When the iPad was first unveiled in January, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs directly compared it to existing netbooks on the market, noting that he felt the new product was lighter and more useful than low-cost netbooks, which he said are just "cheap laptops." With a 9.7-inch display and weighing just 1.5 pounds, the keyboard-less, touchscreen iPad is a much different form factor from the traditional laptop.

When including the iPad in total portable computing sales, Apple vaulted past Asus and others, according to estimates released earlier this month. The iPad sold 3.27 million units in its first three months of availability.

Is Columnist Ross Douthat Jewish?

No, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat is not a Jew. He currently is a Catholic.

Wikipedia reports, "As an adolescent Douthat converted to Pentecostalism and then, with the rest of his family, to Catholicism."

Perhaps his next stage will be to convert to Judaism. Apparently not to Islam, judging from his thinly veiled bias in his latest op-ed in the Times. (Why did the Times need to replace Bill Kristol with yet another "conservative voice on the Times editorial page"?)

Right now it's a good thing Ross is not a Jew. Because for Ross Douthat to, "Integrate fully into our national life," he's much better off not being a Jew.

His column, "Islam in Two Americas," presents a strangely contrived binary dichotomy of two segments of our population. One is pluralistic, diverse and tolerant, the other is monistic, unitary and intolerant.

Obviously this guy needs to get out of his study some more. Any four year old knows that American society and culture is way more complex than the either-or world that he portrays.

Basic Talmudic analysis 101: Who divides the world into binary pairs of us and them? Often its the polemical starting point of the triumphalists and bigots, who think and want to say, Hey, they are not like us. Let's hate them, chase them away, or kill them.

Ross is not a Jew. If he was, he might get it that reduction to the binary can be (and has been) the first step to the final solution.

He's on the road, as his conclusion shows, to solving the Muslim problem in America, "For Muslim Americans to integrate fully into our national life, they’ll need... And they'll need..." It's not "we" - it's "they." And Ross knows what's best.

Oh yes, and if "they" don't do what Ross says, then what?

WSJ: Is Cool Christianity Kosher?

BRETT MCCRACKEN ("The Perils of 'Wannabe Cool' Christianity") in the WSJ writes that no, cool Christianity is not kosher.

He discusses all the recent gimmicky church services that pose as hip events, and concludes:

... But are these gimmicks really going to bring young people back to church? Is this what people really come to church for? Maybe sex sermons and indie- rock worship music do help in getting people in the door, and maybe even in winning new converts. But what sort of Christianity are they being converted to?

In his book, "The Courage to Be Protestant," David Wells writes:"The born-again, marketing church has calculated that unless it makes deep, serious cultural adaptations, it will go out of business, especially with the younger generations. What it has not considered carefully enough is that it may well be putting itself out of business with God.

"And the further irony," he adds, "is that the younger generations who are less impressed by whiz-bang technology, who often see through what is slick and glitzy, and who have been on the receiving end of enough marketing to nauseate them, are as likely to walk away from these oh-so-relevant churches as to walk into them."

If the evangelical Christian leadership thinks that "cool Christianity" is a sustainable path forward, they are severely mistaken. As a twentysomething, I can say with confidence that when it comes to church, we don't want cool as much as we want real.

If we are interested in Christianity in any sort of serious way, it is not because it's easy or trendy or popular. It's because Jesus himself is appealing, and what he says rings true. It's because the world we inhabit is utterly phony, ephemeral, narcissistic, image-obsessed and sex-drenched—and we want an alternative. It's not because we want more of the same.

Is Cholesterol Kosher?

Yes cholesterol is kosher, it is ubiquitous in living cells and necessary for health and life.

Huff Post has an article by Joseph Mercola that examines the "myths that portray fat and cholesterol as one of the worst foods you can consume." It also delves into a series of issues related to the real value of cholesterol lowering drugs.

Read the whole article. We highlight and cite this section which says things that we have been saying ever since we found out that lipitor gave us a serious case of liver disease and we started reading the labels and analyzing the inserts.

Most cholesterol lowering drugs can effectively lower your cholesterol numbers, but are they actually making you any healthier, and do they help prevent heart disease?

Have you ever heard of the statistic known as NNT, or number needed to treat?

I didn't think so. In fact, most doctors haven't either. And herein lies the problem.

NNT answers the question: How many people have to take a particular drug to avoid one incidence of a medical issue (such as a heart attack)?

For example, if a drug had an NNT of 50 for heart attacks, then 50 people have to take the drug in order to prevent one heart attack.

Easy enough, right?

Well, drug companies would rather that you not focus on NNT, because when you do, you get an entirely different picture of their "miracle" drugs. Take, for instance, Pfizer's Lipitor, which is the most prescribed cholesterol medication in the world and has been prescribed to more than 26 million Americans. [xviii]

According to Lipitor's own Web site, Lipitor is clinically proven to lower bad cholesterol 39-60 percent, depending on the dose. Sounds fairly effective, right?

Well, BusinessWeek actually did an excellent story on this very topic earlier this year, [xix] and they found the REAL numbers right on Pfizer's own newspaper ad for Lipitor.

Upon first glance, the ad boasts that Lipitor reduces heart attacks by 36 percent. But there is an asterisk. And when you follow the asterisk, you find the following in much smaller type:

"That means in a large clinical study, 3% of patients taking a sugar pill or placebo had a heart attack compared to 2% of patients taking Lipitor."

What this means is that for every 100 people who took the drug over 3.3 years, three people on placebos, and two people on Lipitor, had heart attacks. That means that taking Lipitor resulted in just one fewer heart attack per 100 people.

The NNT, in this case, is 100. One hundred people have to take Lipitor for more than three years to prevent one heart attack. And the other 99 people, well, they've just dished out hundreds of dollars and increased their risk of a multitude of side effects for nothing.

So you can see how the true effectiveness of cholesterol drugs like Lipitor is hidden behind a smokescreen.

Definitely worth reading the whole article.

Lone Ranger Obama Defends Ground Zero Mosque and Park51

President Obama has publicly defended the right of Muslims to exercise their religion in this country. "Just what did you expect from that liberal (socialist, marxist etc.) anyhow? Isn't he a Muslim?"

But seriously folks - Barack missed a real chance to defuse this issue. He should have convened all the living presidents from Carter and Bush One to Clinton and Bush Two (maybe even with Cheney and Dan Quayle and Al Gore) and had all of them together come out with a statement defending the freedom of religion and the Bill of Rights with specific support for the GZM - Park51 project.

Obama - you are so right on the issues -- so why do you keep disappointing us lately?

Jstandard: Miryam Wahrman's Cover Stories on Aphasia

The Jewish Standard has outstanding cover stories by Professor Miryam Wahrman, science correspondent.

Got ____? Aphasia: At a loss for words

Miryam Z. Wahrman, Science Correspondent • Cover Story

It’s hard to daven properly because I have to learn again,” said Avi Golden, who is recovering from a stroke that left him with aphasia — difficulty in communicating — as well as difficulties in using his right arm. Golden, who is an Orthodox Jew, has made great strides in his recovery over the last three years, with the help of the Adler Aphasia Center in Maywood, but he has a hard time with prayer, as the stroke left him unable to read Hebrew. On Shabbat he goes to synagogue, but he has not yet felt ready to be called up to the Torah for an aliyah. “I look and I pray,” he said. “It’s frustrating, but it’s good also.” In September he is planning to start taking classes at Lehman College in the Bronx, where he will be working with the speech clinic “to learn Hebrew again.”

read more

Aphasia advocacy

Miryam Z. Wahrman • Cover Story

A bill has been introduced into the New Jersey legislature (S1931 and A2811) to establish a New Jersey Aphasia Study Commission in the Department of Health and Senior Services. Sponsors of the bill include state Sens. Loretta Weinberg and Diane Allen and Assembly members Valerie Huttle, Gordon Johnson, Connie Wagner and Joan Voss. The Senate version of the bill (S1931) states that the purpose of the commission is to: “establish a mechanism in order to ascertain the prevalence of aphasia in New Jersey, and the unmet needs of persons with aphasia and those of their families,” to “study model aphasia support programs,” and to “provide recommendations for additional support programs and resources…”

read more

Adler Aphasia Center in Jerusalem

Miryam Z. Wahrman • Cover Story

According to the Hadassah College Website, the Adler Aphasia Center at Hadassah College in Jerusalem is the “first international branch of the Adler Aphasia Center in New Jersey.”

“My friend Miriam Josephs, who was very active in Hadassah, raised $100,000 for scholarships for Hadassah College, where they teach speech pathology,” said Elaine Adler. “That led to starting the center there.”

read more

Help for aphasia caregivers

Miryam Z. Wahrman • Cover Story

Mary Slade, a panelist at an Adler Aphasia Center information session who is recovering from aphasia, observed, “It takes a family time to accept that a person had a stroke and has aphasia. When you first get sick there is often anger, confusion, and frustration.”
Elaine Adler became a caregiver when her husband Mike had a stroke. “When the breadwinner becomes aphasic, what happens to the family?” Adler asked. “The spouse has to take care of the aphasic and the family…. I realized how important it is to help the caregiver.”

Times' Stanley Fish: Plagiarism and the Rules of Golf

We like Stanley Fish because of his sometimes strange analogies. In his current Times column, Fish compares the rules governing plagiarism with the rules governing golf. We do get it, we like it and we think it makes some sense. The problem is that most people who don't play golf won't understand what he is talking about and his analogy won't advance insights into the violation that we call "plagiarism" and the actionable tort that we call "copyright violation."

Fish proclaims what we already know by looking around at what goes on in the world, "Plagiarism is not a big moral deal." Let's see what Fish says about golf and plagiarism:

Golf’s rules have been called arcane and it is not unusual to see play stopped while a P.G.A. official arrives with rule book in hand and pronounces in the manner of an I.R.S. official. Both fans and players are aware of how peculiar and “in-house” the rules are; knowledge of them is what links the members of a small community, and those outside the community (most people in the world) can be excused if they just don’t see what the fuss is about.

Plagiarism is like that; it’s an insider’s obsession. If you’re a professional journalist, or an academic historian, or a philosopher, or a social scientist or a scientist, the game you play for a living is underwritten by the assumed value of originality and failure properly to credit the work of others is a big and obvious no-no.

We need to add a bit of Talmudic insight to what Fish says. In golf, if you violate the rules, there are penalties. A stroke or two can be added to your score for each violation. You can be disqualified from a competition or thrown off the tour if you commit a serious enough breach.

Let's say for a minute that we like to think of golf as a sort-of religion. And guess what? Golfers we play with do not observe the rules according to ultra-Orthodox standards. They know you can't take a do-over shot by the rule book. But many of us take "mulligans" usually setting our own accepted standards and trying to stick to them. One mulligan on the front nine and one on the back nine. And who has not joked about using their foot-wedge to advance the ball out of the rough?

Fish might have tried a religion analogy to explain what governs academic life. Originality is kosher and plagiarism is treif. Some folks who say they are religious, surreptitiously eat treif. Some golfers move the ball to improve their lies and save some strokes when they are out of the sight of their playing partners. Some scholars take shortcuts to enhance their reputations, put their name on the work of others to increase their output and pump up their CVs.

But at the end of the day plagiarism is not truly comparable to cheating at golf or to eating a cheeseburger. Unless you are playing for money, golf is a gentleman's (and gentlewoman's) game where you keep your own score, a competition where you are not taking the property of others if you enhance your own performance with a pencil on the scorecard. Do that and you are a cheater in the sport, a moral deal only if sportsmanship matters to you and your friends.

Religion in America is a personal calling. Unless you bring the ham into your house and desecrate your cookware, when you eat a pork sausage, you satisfy your appetite but take nothing of value from the pockets of your friends. You are a sinner within that system, and it is a moral deal on your Rosh Hashanah scorecard.

And then we come to scholarship which is both a calling and a competition. Cheaters violate their own standards and the standards of others. That's a moral deal on both levels. And of course there is that money that the plagiarizing cheater puts in his pocket, earned out of the intellectual property of others. "Not a big moral deal," insists Fish.

Fish says, "Plagiarism is breach of disciplinary decorum, not a breach of the moral universe." But Stanley. It is obviously a theft of property and that is in the Ten Commandments. So maybe you mean to say that it is a big moral deal in every traditional religious sense. But you just don't care a lot about those old rules.

We like Fish most because he does not take himself seriously. At the conclusion of his column he does a truly talmudic about-face and decides the rule of law, the halakhah, for the case in which another professor lifted his work, "They took something from me without asking and without acknowledgment, and they profited — if only in the currency of academic reputation — from work that I had done and signed. That’s the bottom line and no fancy philosophical argument can erase it."

WSJ: Pray for Cool - the Heat is Wrecking the Golf Courses

The heat has been oppressive and the golf courses are suffering according to the WSJ, "The Ugly Summer of 2010: Brutal heat has greenkeepers fighting to save their courses from ruin." The article reports:

The sustained record-breaking heat across much of the U.S. this summer, combined with high humidity and occasional heavy rain, is killing the greens on many golf courses. A handful of high-profile courses have already had to close, and if the heat continues, others are likely to follow. Golfers themselves deserve part of the blame for insisting that putting surfaces be mown short and fast even in weather conditions in which such practices are almost certain to ruin them....more...

That back 9 was brutal...

Hey America. How about a Kristallnacht for Our Mosques?

New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg writes about the so-called Ground Zero Mosque,

...Well, for a start, it won’t be at Ground Zero. It’ll be on Park Place, two blocks north of the World Trade Center site (from which it will not be visible), in a neighborhood ajumble with restaurants, shops (electronics, porn, you name it), churches, office cubes, and the rest of the New York mishmash. Park51, as it is to be called, will have a large Islamic “prayer room,” which presumably qualifies as a mosque. But the rest of the building will be devoted to classrooms, an auditorium, galleries, a restaurant, a memorial to the victims of September 11, 2001, and a swimming pool and gym. Its sponsors envision something like the 92nd Street Y—a Y.M.I.A., you might say, open to all, including persons of the C. and H. persuasions.

Like many New Yorkers, the people in charge of Park51, a married couple, are from somewhere else—he from Kuwait, she from Kashmir. Feisal Abdul Rauf is a Columbia grad. He has been the imam of a mosque in Tribeca for close to thirty years. He is the author of a book called “What’s Right with Islam Is What’s Right with America.” He is a vice-chair of the Interfaith Center of New York. “My colleagues and I are the anti-terrorists,” he wrote recently—in the Daily News, no less. He denounces terrorism in general and the 9/11 attacks in particular, often and at length. The F.B.I. tapped him to conduct “sensitivity training” for agents and cops. His wife, Daisy Khan, runs the American Society for Muslim Advancement, which she co-founded with him. It promotes “cultural and religious harmony through interfaith collaboration, youth and women’s empowerment, and arts and cultural exchange.”

Hertzberg tells us that the recent anti-mosque attacks have been coordinated by the likes of Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich, and further on in the report he tells us,

Defending the A.D.L.’s position, its national director, Abraham H. Foxman, reflexively likened the families—the anti-Park51 ones, that is—to Holocaust survivors: “Their anguish entitles them to positions that others would characterize as irrational or bigoted.” No doubt. But, as a guide to public policy, anguish is hardly better than bigotry. Nor is it an entitlement to abandon rationality itself.

So in the spirit of (by his own admission) the irrational and bigoted Mr. Foxman, we recall what the Nazis did once they decided that the synagogues in their midst were unacceptable to them.

They launched coordinated attacks against the Jews which let to terrorist actions called in those days a pogrom, "Kristallnacht or The Night of Broken Glass was an anti-Jewish pogrom in Nazi Germany (including Austria and Sudetenland) from the 9th until the 10th November 1938." Wikipedia sums up:

This pogrom damaged, and in many cases destroyed, about 200 synagogues (constituting nearly all Germany had), many Jewish cemeteries, more than 7,000 Jewish shops, and 29 department stores. Some Jews were beaten to death while others were forced to watch. More than 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and taken to concentration camps; primarily Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen.

Seems only logical that the opponents of the GZM step up their opposition and get to work planning their pogrom for "Mosque-nacht."

Oh, and a hearty "Sieg Heil" to Sarah, Newt and Abe.