Vote for Barack - Take Back America with Obama-Biden

In every language, we need political change.



We need a return to values - the values of truth, logic and facts, judgment and ethics.



Please go out and vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden in November.



Tzvee

Jon Stewart Video: Old Florida Jews not Voting for Obama

You betcha - this is funny!

Times: How to Fabricate Social Habits

There are three categories of repeated voluntary periodic social behavior that I have observed:

1. Mannerism - repeated actions that are usually personal but may be shared in families or smaller groups
2. Habit - discussed in this article below
   
3. Ritual - more dramatic than habit and institutionalized within a larger cultural or religious context
   

As a student of religions I want to study and elucidate ritual. The discussion in this article of inculcating habits related to the concepts of the clean and unclean in a social setting speaks loud volumes to me.

Dr. Curtis wanted to create a ritual taboo.

The question I have for Dr. Curtis is why she went to marketers when she could have gone to religious authorities and obtained much better guidance.

Warning: Habits May Be Good for You
By CHARLES DUHIGG

A FEW years ago, a self-described “militant liberal” named Val Curtis decided that it was time to save millions of children from death and disease. So Dr. Curtis, an anthropologist then living in the African nation of Burkina Faso, contacted some of the largest multinational corporations and asked them, in effect, to teach her how to manipulate consumer habits worldwide.

Dr. Curtis, now the director of the Hygiene Center at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, had spent years trying to persuade people in the developing world to wash their hands habitually with soap. Diseases and disorders caused by dirty hands — like diarrhea — kill a child somewhere in the world about every 15 seconds, and about half those deaths could be prevented with the regular use of soap, studies indicate.

But getting people into a soap habit, it turns out, is surprisingly hard.

To overcome this hurdle, Dr. Curtis called on three top consumer goods companies to find out how to sell hand-washing the same way they sell Speed Stick deodorant and Pringles potato chips.

She knew that over the past decade, many companies had perfected the art of creating automatic behaviors — habits — among consumers. These habits have helped companies earn billions of dollars when customers eat snacks, apply lotions and wipe counters almost without thinking, often in response to a carefully designed set of daily cues.

“There are fundamental public health problems, like hand washing with soap, that remain killers only because we can’t figure out how to change people’s habits,” Dr. Curtis said. “We wanted to learn from private industry how to create new behaviors that happen automatically.”

The companies that Dr. Curtis turned to — Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive and Unilever — had invested hundreds of millions of dollars finding the subtle cues in consumers’ lives that corporations could use to introduce new routines.

If you look hard enough, you’ll find that many of the products we use every day — chewing gums, skin moisturizers, disinfecting wipes, air fresheners, water purifiers, health snacks, antiperspirants, colognes, teeth whiteners, fabric softeners, vitamins — are results of manufactured habits. A century ago, few people regularly brushed their teeth multiple times a day. Today, because of canny advertising and public health campaigns, many Americans habitually give their pearly whites a cavity-preventing scrub twice a day, often with Colgate, Crest or one of the other brands advertising that no morning is complete without a minty-fresh mouth.

A few decades ago, many people didn’t drink water outside of a meal. Then beverage companies started bottling the production of far-off springs, and now office workers unthinkingly sip bottled water all day long. Chewing gum, once bought primarily by adolescent boys, is now featured in commercials as a breath freshener and teeth cleanser for use after a meal. Skin moisturizers — which are effective even if applied at high noon — are advertised as part of morning beauty rituals, slipped in between hair brushing and putting on makeup.

“OUR products succeed when they become part of daily or weekly patterns,” said Carol Berning, a consumer psychologist who recently retired from Procter & Gamble, the company that sold $76 billion of Tide, Crest and other products last year. “Creating positive habits is a huge part of improving our consumers’ lives, and it’s essential to making new products commercially viable.”

Through experiments and observation, social scientists like Dr. Berning have learned that there is power in tying certain behaviors to habitual cues through relentless advertising.

As this new science of habit has emerged, controversies have erupted when the tactics have been used to sell questionable beauty creams or unhealthy foods. But for activists like Dr. Curtis, this emerging research offers a type of salvation.

For years, many public health campaigns that aimed at changing habits have been failures. Earlier this decade, two researchers affiliated with Vanderbilt University examined more than 100 studies on the effectiveness of antidrug campaigns and found that, in some cases, viewers’ levels of drug abuse actually increased when commercials were shown, perhaps in part because the ads reminded them about that bag of weed in the sock drawer.

A few years later, another group examined the effectiveness of advertising condom use to prevent AIDS. In some cases, rates of unprotected sex actually went up — which some researchers suspected was because the commercials made people more frisky than cautious.

To teach hand washing, about seven years ago Dr. Curtis persuaded Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive and Unilever to join an initiative called the Global Public-Private Partnership for Handwashing With Soap. The group’s goal was to double the hand-washing rate in Ghana, a West African nation where almost every home contains a soap bar but only 4 percent of adults regularly lather up after using the toilet.

Over the last several years, such partnerships between corporations and those trying to save the world have become commonplace. Companies like Microsoft, Pfizer and General Electric have worked with nonprofit groups on health, technology and energy programs.

Not everyone is comfortable with the arrangements. Some critics complain that public health professionals are becoming too cozy with companies ultimately focused on their bottom lines. Others worry that these advertising techniques may be manipulative.

But what Dr. Curtis learned in Ghana suggests that saving the world may be as easy as hawking chewing gum, or, to use a more contemporary example, as simple as training Americans to spray perfumed water on couches that are already clean.

FEBREZE — the perfumed water used on couches — is one of the most successful examples of a habit-creation campaign, and, in a sense, the playbook for how Ghana learned to wash its hands.

Procter & Gamble introduced Febreze in 1996 as a way to remove odors from smelly clothes. Consumer surveys had shown that people were leaving their jackets and blouses outside after an evening in a smoke-filled bar. P.& G., which at the time already sold products that cleaned one out of every two laundry loads washed in American homes, decided to spend millions to create a spray to remove offensive smells.

The company ran advertisements of a woman complaining about a blazer that smelled like cigarette smoke. Other ads focused on smelly pets, sweaty teenagers and stinky minivan interiors.

But Febreze flopped. In fact, early sales were so disappointing that the company considered canceling the entire project.

One of the biggest problems, P.& G.’s researchers discovered, was that bad smells simply didn’t happen often enough in consumers’ lives. Interviews showed that consumers liked Febreze when they used it, but that many customers simply forgot that it was in the house.

At about the same time, the company’s staff psychologists were beginning to extend their understanding of how habits are formed.

“For most of our history, we’ve sold newer and better products for habits that already existed,” said Dr. Berning, the P.& G. psychologist. “But about a decade ago, we realized we needed to create new products. So we began thinking about how to create habits for products that had never existed before.”

Academics were also beginning to focus on habit formation. Researchers like Wendy Wood at Duke University and Brian Wansink at Cornell were examining how often smokers quit while vacationing and how much people eat when their plates are deceptively large or small.

Those and other studies revealed that as much as 45 percent of what we do every day is habitual — that is, performed almost without thinking in the same location or at the same time each day, usually because of subtle cues.

For example, the urge to check e-mail or to grab a cookie is likely a habit with a specific prompt. Researchers found that most cues fall into four broad categories: a specific location or time of day, a certain series of actions, particular moods, or the company of specific people. The e-mail urge, for instance, probably occurs after you’ve finished reading a document or completed a certain kind of task. The cookie grab probably occurs when you’re walking out of the cafeteria, or feeling sluggish or blue.

Our capacity to develop such habits is an invaluable evolutionary advantage. But when they run amok, things can become tricky.

Consider a series of experiments Dr. Wansink performed with a bowl of tomato soup that was secretly connected to a tube that pumped more and more liquid into the bowl. Diners ended up eating almost twice as much soup as usual, though they didn’t report feeling any fuller after the meal.

Dr. Wood studied exercise habits among students who transferred from one college to another. When locations remained stable — the new school had an outdoor track just like the old school, for example — students continued running regularly. But if the tracks were too different, the exercise tapered off, on average. In another experiment, conducted by researchers studying smokers, those wanting to quit were more than twice as successful if they started kicking the habit while on vacation, when surrounded by unfamiliar people and places.

“Habits are formed when the memory associates specific actions with specific places or moods,” said Dr. Wood, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke. “If you regularly eat chips while sitting on the couch, after a while, seeing the couch will automatically prompt you to reach for the Doritos. These associations are sometimes so strong that you have to replace the couch with a wooden chair for a diet to succeed.”

The researchers at P.& G. realized that these types of findings had enormous implications for selling Febreze. Because bad smells occurred too infrequently for a Febreze habit to form, marketers started looking for more regular cues on which they could capitalize.

The perfect cue, they eventually realized, was the act of cleaning a room, something studies showed their target audience did almost daily. P.& G. produced commercials showing women spraying Febreze on a perfectly made bed and spritzing freshly laundered clothing. The product’s imagery was revamped to incorporate open windows and gusts of fresh wind — an airing that is part of the physical and emotional cleaning ritual.

“We learned from consumer interviews that there was an opportunity to cue the clean smell of Febreze to a clean room,” Dr. Berning said. “We positioned it as the finishing touch to a mundane chore. It’s the icing that shows you did a good job.”

In a sense, a product originally intended for use on piles of smelly, dirty clothes was eclipsed by its exact opposite — a product used when women confronted a clean and tidy living room. And the more women sprayed, the more automatic the behavior became.

Today, Febreze is one of P.& G.’s greatest successes. Customers habitually spray tidied living rooms, clean kitchens, loads of fresh laundry and, according to one of the most recent commercials, spotless minivans. In the most recent fiscal year, consumers in North America alone spent $650 million buying Febreze, according to the company.

Dozens of other companies have also redesigned advertising campaigns around habitual cues. Beer commercials, once filled with busty women in ill-fitting tops, are now more likely to feature groups of buddies, because research shows that groups of friends are one of the strongest habit cues. Candy bar companies, through commercials, have tied their products to low-energy cues, transforming what was once a dessert into a pick-me-up for cubicle dwellers.

FOR Dr. Curtis and the Global Public-Private Partnership for Handwashing With Soap, such tactics offered enormous promise in a country like Ghana.

That nation offered a conundrum: Almost half of its people were accustomed to washing their hands with water after using the restroom or before eating. And local markets were filled with cheap, colorful soap bars. But only about 4 percent of Ghanaians used soap as part of their post-restroom hand-washing regime, studies showed.

“We could talk about germs until we were blue in the face, and it didn’t change behaviors,” Dr. Curtis said. So she and her colleagues asked Unilever for advice in designing survey techniques that ultimately studied hundreds of mothers and their children.

They discovered that previous health campaigns had failed because mothers often didn’t see symptoms like diarrhea as abnormal, but instead viewed them as a normal aspect of childhood.

However, the studies also revealed an interesting paradox: Ghanaians used soap when they felt that their hands were dirty — after cooking with grease, for example, or after traveling into the city. This hand-washing habit, studies showed, was prompted by feelings of disgust. And surveys also showed that parents felt deep concerns about exposing their children to anything disgusting.

SO the trick, Dr. Curtis and her colleagues realized, was to create a habit wherein people felt a sense of disgust that was cued by the toilet. That queasiness, in turn, could become a cue for soap.

A sense of bathroom disgust may seem natural, but in many places toilets are a symbol of cleanliness because they replaced pit latrines. So Dr. Curtis’s group had to create commercials that taught viewers to feel a habitual sense of unseemliness surrounding toilet use.

Their solution was ads showing mothers and children walking out of bathrooms with a glowing purple pigment on their hands that contaminated everything they touched.

The commercials, which began running in 2003, didn’t really sell soap use. Rather, they sold disgust. Soap was almost an afterthought — in one 55-second television commercial, actual soapy hand washing was shown only for 4 seconds. But the message was clear: The toilet cues worries of contamination, and that disgust, in turn, cues soap.

“This was radically different from most public health campaigns,” said Beth Scott, an infectious-disease specialist who worked with Dr. Curtis on the Ghana campaign. “There was no mention of sickness. It just mentions the yuck factor. We learned how to do that from the marketing companies.”

The ads had their intended effect. By last year, Ghanaians surveyed by members of Dr. Curtis’s team reported a 13 percent increase in the use of soap after the toilet. Another measure showed even greater impact: reported soap use before eating went up 41 percent.

And while those statistics haven’t silenced critics who say habit-forming advertisements are worrisome, they have convinced people who run other public health initiatives that the Ghana experiment is on the right track.

Today, public health campaigns elsewhere for condom use and to fight drug abuse and obesity are being revamped to employ habit-formation characteristics, according to people involved in those efforts. One of the largest American antismoking campaigns, in fact, is explicitly focused on habits, with commercials and Web sites intended to teach smokers how to identify what cues them to reach for a cigarette.

“For a long time, the public health community was distrustful of industry, because many felt these companies were trying to sell products that made people’s lives less healthy, by encouraging them to smoke, or to eat unhealthy foods, or by selling expensive products people didn’t really need,” Dr. Curtis said. “But those tactics also allow us to save lives. If we want to really help the world, we need every tool we can get.”

Two Years and 880,000 Deaths Later - Smoking is (still) a Sin - Rabbinical Council of America

Have the rabbis done anything more about this since we posted this last, a year ago?

So another 440,000 have died. Some effective ban!

440,000 people in the US die each year from cigarettes.

The US Surgeon General Reports:

... tobacco use remains the leading preventable cause of disease and death in the United States, causing approximately 440,000 deaths each year and costing approximately $157 billion in annual health-related economic losses.

We ought to put a little more effort this year into our anti-smoking efforts in the US, in Israel and around the world.

What can you do? If you smoke - stop. And more. Ask all the smokers that you know to stop smoking.

Won't you please use your blogs to spread this message and to help save lives?

And yes the news now (7/5/2006) is that rabbis say that smoking is a sin.

JTA - Rabbinical committee bans smoking - (finally does something useful) - Breaking News:

A committee of the centrist Orthodox rabbinical organization said Jewish law is opposed to smoking.

The halachah committee of the Rabbinical Council of America said the decision is based on a combination of the value placed by Jewish sources on health and scientific findings on the dangers of tobacco products.

The decision calls on all Jews to avoid or quit smoking.

RCA Release -- Text of the Ban on Tobacco

Signatories on the ban:

This teshuvah is issued unanimously by the Va’ad Halacha of the RCA, whose members are Rabbi Yosef Adler, Rabbi Kenneth Auman, Rabbi Asher Bush (Chairman), Rabbi Daniel Feldman, Rabbi Tzvi Flaum, Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb, Rabbi Chaim Jachter, Rabbi Yaacov Lerner, and Rabbi Zvi Sobolofsky.

It is issued with the haskamah of the following members of the Va’ad HaPoskim: Rabbi Dovid Cohen, Rabbi Michael Rosensweig, Rabbi Hershel Schachter, Rabbi Gedalia Schwartz, and Rabbi Mordechai Willig.

Palestinian News Network (PNN) Accuses Israel of Ethnic Cleansing of Thousands Based on One Anecdote

This story told by one Palestinian lacks all credibility. Specifically, Who, when traveling, leaves $500 in cash in their jacket pocket in their suitcase? The rest of the story this man tells is equally sketchy.

I'd ordinarily be inclined to listen sympathetically to a man's story of injustice and frustrating bureaucratic persecution at entry to Israel. Lord knows the Israeli immigration authorities at unpredictable intervals can give anyone and everyone a hard time.

But the details of this story make no sense to me. Examples: Confiscation of papers in SF - makes no sense. Denial of wife's right to leave Israel and return - makes no sense. Alleged theft of $500 by inspectors - makes no sense. (Why not accuse them of stealing $5000? $50,000?)

What is utterly insulting to all people of good sense is this story's generalization from one bizarre and sketchy anecdote to its conclusion.

The title of the story is, "Denied Entry: another step in the ethnic cleansing process of Jerusalem."

Ethnic cleansing because one man has a problem? Do not insult our intelligence.

But then they do and they will continue to and that is why 60 years later there is no state for the Palestinians.

Not because of Israeli policies. Because of zero credibility for the Palestinians.

Here below is just one paragraph, in a story about one man, but which makes claims that it speaks of the anecdotes of "thousands" - "who are being ethnically cleansed."

Ziad Sad is in the US, a Jerusalem resident, and one of the thousands of Jerusalem residents who are being ethnically cleansed from the capital city of Palestine. Under international law it is illegal what the Israelis are doing in Jerusalem and this is well known by anyone who studies the law or the situation here. United Nations resolutions condemn it; however the Israelis have yet to heed the call.

No evidence. No lists. No authority. No logic. Zero credibility.

LA News' O'Connor Fights New Yorker Satire With More Satire

Right back at you New Yorker. Take this...

Times: The Sacred Battles the Profane in Venice

A battle of the subcultures rages in Venice Beach CA.

You would think that the adults party to the dispute could work out this friction. After all, this conflict is going to recur every Shabbat, duh!

But no. It appears that there is no one in LA who is focused enough to mediate this nonsense.

Hey, wait a minute. Maybe we can get Larry David to make this into an episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and convince him to write an ending that resolves the feud.

Yeah, that makes about as much sense as this story does.

Monica Almeida/The New York Times. The Pacific Jewish Center, an Orthodox synagogue, on the colorful Venice Beach boardwalk.

Los Angeles Journal
At the Intersection of Synagogue and Boardwalk, a Feud
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

LOS ANGELES — The only synagogue on the Venice Beach boardwalk has weathered 80 years’ worth of oscillating economies, winos, shamans and aggressive panhandlers, disintegration of its own community and surf seekers on all manner of speeding wheels. It has stood as much for tolerance as faith in a community where the former is in high demand.

But for its congregants, it has been increasingly difficult to countenance the mannequins in racy underwear, creeping ever so often unto the property of their tiny, sun-bleached house of worship.

Over the last few years, the Orthodox synagogue, the Pacific Jewish Center, has been at quiet war with the owners of its next-door neighbor, Unruly, a purveyor of T-shirts, bathing suits and undergarments.

Worshipers say workers in the shop blast music on Saturday mornings, overwhelming the religious service held with the door open to the boardwalk. When the worshipers ask for the music to be lowered for an hour, they are met with hostility, they say, some of it smacking of anti-Semitism. Once in a while, the police have been called.

Further, there have been occasions when mannequins dressed in G-strings and other clothes that are decidedly not part of the customary wardrobe of Orthodox Jews have been placed on the synagogue’s property line — as a matter of provocation, some members suggest.

“We haven’t been judgmental about their merchandise,” said Judd Magilnick, a member. “It is a question of common courtesy. Even the more Bohemian, alternative-lifestyle types on the boardwalk are aware of our requests and wait until afternoon on Saturdays before they strike up the band. We have friendly cooperation from everyone else, even people you think would be accountable to no one.”

Ruly Papadopulos, whose wife owns Unruly, said that the business felt harassed by the worshipers but that the extent of the problem had been exaggerated. “The rabbi comes over and asks us to turn it down,” Mr. Papadopulos said. “We say, ‘Calm down, we will.’ ”

This episodic neighborhood schism might have remained just that, had Eric Mankin, a science writer for University of Southern California publications and a Venice resident, not wandered into Unruly this month, chasing after his dog who had gotten off its leash.

Mr. Mankin said he mentioned to the owners of Unruly, where a neon sign reading “Sexetera” hangs over the door, that the synagogue next to the shop was “something I’ve always regarded as a landmark of Venice’s inclusiveness and diversity.”

Mr. Papadopulos, Mr. Mankin said, replied that he hated Jews — something Mr. Papadopulos flatly denies having said. Mr. Mankin, who is Jewish but not religious, said he was flabbergasted.

The next day, Mr. Mankin appeared in front of the store holding a sign that read “Ask the owner of Unruly why he hates Jews.”

“If someone is going to proclaim loudly they hate Jews,” he said, “then people who are going to shop in his store have the right to know about that.”

Mr. Papadopulos was displeased by this and called the police. “He was the aggressor,” Mr. Papadopulos said in an interview in front of his store. “I never said I hate Jews. I said: ‘I hate you. I hate you!’ ”

Sgt. Stephen Showler, who is in charge of the Venice Beach detail for the Los Angeles Police Department, responded.

“It was basically a First Amendment issue,” Sergeant Showler said. Mr. Mankin “has the right to protest,” he said. “When I got there, he said, ‘I’ve been out here a couple hours. I think I’ll call it a day.’ ”

During two generations of life on the colorful boardwalk, where karma analysis takes place next to impromptu pot parties that abut bongo drummers and flip-flop barkers, conflicts among neighbors have been few, say even the synagogue’s oldest members.

In the 1920s, as Venice evolved into the “Coney Island of the West,” Jewish immigrants played a vital role on the boardwalk. There were several synagogues along the beach, and the area was dotted with kosher butchers and other Jewish merchants. Working-class Jews from Los Angeles called Venice their summer home, and many others migrated to the area, according to the book “California Jews,” by Ava F. Kahn and Marc Dollinger.

The mid-1960s saw an exodus of Jewish families, and the synagogues all but disappeared. The Pacific Jewish Center was headed for a similar fate, but in the mid-1970s, a group of young Orthodox Jews led by the author Michael Medved revived it.

About 80 people pile onto the simple benches each Saturday morning to pray against the backdrop of waves. “We invite anyone who has expressed a genuine interest and has shirt and shoes,” said Gary Dalin, a member since 1979.

Its most high-profile conflict has been with the state’s Coastal Commission, which has taken a dim view (along with many residents) of members’ desire to hang a strand of fishing line several miles long to create an eruv, or symbolic religious enclosure that would permit them to perform certain tasks, like carrying things, outside their homes on the Sabbath.

Mr. Dalin and others said that they had heard Mr. Papadopulos refer to the members as “greedy” and make other vague remarks that suggest he may not be fond of Jews but said that they were not particularly worried or interested. They just want the music turned down.

Sergeant Showler said that he had never heard claims of anti-Semitism until now but that there had been flare-ups between the store and the synagogue in the past. “It is an interesting place to have a synagogue,” he said. “Hopefully it won’t be an issue between them, and they can be good neighbors. This is my goal.”

Newsweek: God Loves (His) Mutual Funds

We read this Newsweek article with, ahem, interest...

Islam Bullish In A Bear Market The Amana funds, invested according to Sharia, have more than doubled since 2003, to $1.3 billion.
Lisa Miller

The funny thing about faith-based mutual funds is, well, that there's anything called a faith-based mutual fund. For one thing, Scripture is full of exhortations against accumulating wealth. The New Testament, especially, repeatedly reminds followers of Christ that earthly wealth means nothing in heaven. "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God," says Jesus. Also, it seems quixotic to apply a religious framework to something as material as the markets. What, after all, does God have to do with mammon? Nevertheless, faith-based funds have grown to nearly $17 billion from $500 million over the past decade, according to Morningstar, which tracks market data.

Even funnier is that some religions outperform others on the free market—at least in the short term. Faith-based funds work by screening out stocks that don't reflect the values of the faith group. So the MMA Praxis funds, founded by the Mennonites, have a pacifist and pro-environment bent: their funds screen out most oil companies and weapons makers. But financial companies are "more or less benign," explains Chad Horning, senior equity investment manager at MMA. That's why, over the past year—with oil prices up and financial services down—the MMA Core Stock Fund has performed below the market. The Timothy Plan, a conservative-Christian group of funds, also screens out "sin stocks"—tobacco, alcohol and many entertainment companies—but it doesn't share MMA's "green" perspective. Heavily invested in energy stocks, Timothy's Large/ Mid-Cap Value Fund has outperformed the market over the past year.

The big winners in faith funds (if you can be so crass) are the Islamic funds. They screen out "sin stocks"—and producers of pork products. The profitable difference is riba, or interest. The Qur'an strictly prohibits the borrowing or lending of money at interest: "Whatever you give as riba so that it might bring increase through the wealth of other people will bring you no increase with Allah," it says. Because of this prohibition, Islamic mutual funds, like those in the Amana group, don't invest in financial-services companies: they escaped the subprime mortgage debacle altogether. Most energy companies, however, are fine. "We don't consider ourselves an environmental or socially responsible fund," says Monem Salam, Amana's director of Islamic investing. "Energy was a big part of our growth." Over the past year, the Amana funds outperformed the market; their assets have more than doubled from $400 million in 2003 to $1.3 billion this year. Five years ago, most of Amana's investors were American Muslims, Salam adds. Now, he guesses, 80 percent of new investors are non-Muslims.

The managers of the Christian funds say they're in the faith-based business not to help people get rich, but to help them save—for retirement, for college—with tools they can believe in. Arthur Ally founded the Timothy Plan 15 years ago. "There's nothing wrong with having money and making money," says Ally. "What's wrong is hoarding money." At MMA, counselors help investors think about the concept of "enough." "Is it to generate as much as you can in your retirement account? Or is it to generate enough to do what you want to do?" says Mark Regier, MMA's stewardship manager. Amana encourages investors to think about how to give 2.5 percent of their wealth to charity, a tax called zakat mandated by the Qur'an. "You can amass as much as you want," says Salam. "You're purifying your wealth by paying that tax." Faith-fund clients may be happy to know that so-called vice funds, which invest exclusively in tobacco, liquor, gaming and defense, are having a tough year.

My Phavorite Phone Photo

Outside of the UBS Headquarters I took this last year when I first got my Sprint Centro Phone -- looking out from Weehawken across the Yacht Club and the Hudson River towards the City. I post processed the contrast a bit and generally I like the composition and colors.

No Martinis this Shabbat at the Kiddush in Atlantic Beach

Since my wife is in Argentina and my brother is in Jerusalem, I got to visit my dad in Atlantic Beach for Shabbat.

Rabbi Steven Riskin spoke at the ABJC and I only got to hear the end of his derasha. He used the word "tragic" about four or five times to describe the contemporary situation in Israel.

I cornered him at the kiddush and spoke to him about my take on his bringing a distorted and negative message to the good diaspora materialistic Jews of the ABJC.

Look, I said. The optimist say the glass is half-full and the pessimist says the glass is half-empty.

And yet here, even when the glass is 95% full, the Orthodox rabbi says that the situation in Israel is "tragic." What gives?

I told him, in fact the situation in Israel today is unbelievably not tragic! I told him, "I respect you and I like you and I think that YOU ARE WRONG."

His response was that he must report what he sees and what he believes.

I told him no, that he most certainly does not have to do that. And then I went back to eat lunch with my dad.

They have a full lunch at the ABJC every Shabbat. Now, okay, this is just lunch. There are no waiters serving martinis at the kiddush here. For those, I am told that you have to go shul in Westhampton Beach.

Poor Riskin. He has become an Orthodox Jewish apocalyptic fanatic.

One fanatic. No martinis. The food was good, and such large portions!