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Owner : Brian Nguyen
Hometown : El Monte, California, US
Basic car : Honda Acura RSX Type S
Engine : 2.0L K20Z1 with AEM cold-air intake, Hondata intake manifold gasket, Jackson Racing supercharger (roots type), 3.2" pulley, Mugen radiator cap and reservoir socks, Racecoated custom valve cover, Strup race header, Tanabe Hyper Medallion cat-back exhaust system, TEIN hood dampers
Power : 285 whp
Wheels : Desmond Regamaster Evo 17X8 +35 (white), 215/45R17 Falken Azenis RT-615 tires
Brakes : OEM DC5 Type-S Brakes
Suspension : Type II coilovers, Mugen front strut tower bar

Honda Acura RSX Type S lansiran in 2005 belonging to Brian this indeed not sembarang Acura RSX normally. Saw how tampilan outside this one car was seen the "street" really. Restoration of the exterior of the car was also begun with ubahan the front bumper used the Mugen make, side skirts, the wings behind A Spec, diffuser behind custom, as well as the increase window visors output of JDM DC5 Type-R. As Though want to clarified tampilan racing him, the whole body the exterior of this car was given the green colour screen by Pilo. For the sector foot-foot, this car stood on the rim racing the white colour of the measurement 17 inchi output of Desmond Regamaster Evo was wrapped the tyre Falken Azenis RT-615. Satisfied with ubahan in the exterior part, Brian then began memodif entered the interior part. Here was seen by several parts-parts racing that was simple berkombinasi with parts luxurious standard Honda Acura. Parts racing this including being the use jok front racing Recaro along with the Takata output seatbelt, was met also by the fitting jok behind and the door panel custom, shift knob

On the sunny and pleasant afternoon of July 4, 1999 – somehow it's always a beautiful day – I was commuting home, on foot, along Third Street in Bloomington, Indiana. A garish yellow crime-scene tape and a bloody mess in front of a street-side Methodist Church suddenly blocked my progress. I asked the police officer for an explanation – why did he order that I take a lengthy detour? He brusquely ordered me away. Idiot lefty that I once was, I automatically said, "Fascist," (still ashamed of that) and took the detour.







The blood on the sidewalk had previously nested securely in and fueled Won-Joon Yoon, a 26-year-old doctoral student. I would later, at the funeral, meet his family; they'd flown in from Korea. They were some of the loveliest people, and most devout Christians, I've ever met. Struggling to find the right thing to say, I opened, in my comments to his sister, by mentioning that I'd lost two brothers. This beautiful, poised woman rushed in to comfort *me* – at her brother's funeral. Won-Joon Yoon's father recited the 23rd Psalm, in perfect English, from memory. Everyone there – I could feel it – felt his or her own faith strengthened by this martyr's father's magnificence in the face of horror.





We, the citizens of Bloomington, had every reason to know that something like this was going to happen.





Publications had been left in our driveways. We had read these publications. We knew the drill.





The killer, whose name I refuse to mention, had been a member of a recognized religious group, a church, whose name I also refuse to mention. Let's just call it the killer-church. (I like and admire many things about Judaism: one of these is the tradition, shared with ancient Rome, of cursing fame-seeking wrongdoers to the erasure of their name: yimach shmo ve-zichro. Damnatio memoriae.)





The killer-church is a neo-Nazi church. The killer-church's publications, which the killer had left on my property and others, had named enemies, and an agenda. The killer-church hated Jews and blacks, all immigrants, etc. Christianity was a "deadly mind poison." The killer had apparently scored a trifecta in killing Won-Joon Yoon: he was an immigrant, he was non-white, and he was a Christian, entering a Christian Church on the Fourth of July. The killer-church's agenda is world domination through violence. The killer would start on this task by killing us, the citizens of Bloomington.





We were warned. We knew. We didn't take action. We tried to be nice, to be politically correct, to dialogue, to be tolerant. There were many town meetings. I attended one. After hours of talk, one Bloomington resident – I so wish I had gotten this bright and brave man's name – stood and shouted, "I'm NOT tolerant. I'm not tolerant of Nazis!!!"





He got it. No one else in the room did.





We erected nice little lawn signs.



Because, you know, the cardinal sin of political correctness is to be intolerant. We were afraid of being intolerant of a man who had a hit list that he'd distributed all over town. His scripture stated that he was going to kill us because we were the wrong religion, the wrong belief system. We couldn't be intolerant of that. Because intolerance was the worst sin in our church, the smug, university-town Church of Political Correctness.





Indiana is, north-to-south, quite long. Indiana is a northern state (Gary, Chicago suburbs), and a southern state: many Appalachian-born poor whites serve meals in the university cafeterias, and clear its grounds.





After the killings, the town's elites – university professors, journalists – began naming and shaming what they openly called "white trash," "trailer trash," and "rednecks." Professors and journalists openly stated that Bloomington's poor, Christian whites were all racist. The "rednecks" were clearly responsible for the killing.





In fact, the killer was not a redneck. He was a well-educated Indiana University student from a Chicago suburb. Not Southern. Not poor. Not a Christian.





Politically Correct elites are stuck like a needle in a record. The technologically-outdated metaphor is suitable to its outdated referent. PC elites can blame only their enemies of choice. Even when it is plain that their enemies of choice are not culpable, and that a new enemy, no matter how identifiable and articulate, looms. After 9-11, so many rushed to ask, "Why do they hate us?" As if we had done something naughty, and deserved to be firebombed.





I have a question I'm dying to ask those who support a mosque at Ground Zero.





What if the neo-Nazi killer-church were to demand to open a house of worship in Bloomington, Indiana? What if they wanted their killer-church house of worship right across the street from the Methodist Church where Won-Joon Yoon was shot to death? Where he was shot for no other crime than his ethnicity and his belief system, in accord with the killer-church belief system? Would you support that?





Of course you would not.





So, give us all a break, why don't you.





***





The Anti-Defamation League has come out against the proposed Mosque at Ground Zero. In explaining his decision, Abraham Foxman invoked the "convent at Auschwitz."





This mention of the convent was inevitable but unfortunate.





In the 1980s, a controversy raged about Carmelite nuns establishing a convent near, not in, the former Auschwitz concentration camp. After much debate and international press attention, the convent was moved.





Comparing the convent to a mosque at Ground Zero poses several problems.





Nazism is not Christianity. Nazism was a largely scientific and Pagan movement. Nazism was hostile to and hoped, eventually, to eliminate, Christianity.

 Poles, Catholics, and members of Catholic religious orders were specially targeted victims of the Nazis. Historian Michael C. Steinlauf, son of Holocaust survivors, identified Poles as the third most persecuted national group in Nazi-occupied Europe. Poland lost c. twenty percent of its Catholic priests. Many were tortured in unspeakable ways. The Dachau concentration camp was known as the "largest monastery in Germany." One could go on.





The point is that however one feels about nuns living in a convent near Auschwitz, those nuns were not adherents to the philosophy of the killers of Auschwitz, and those nuns were members of the group expressly identified for victimization, enslavement, and eventual extermination by Nazis.





Further: There is no canonical Christian scripture that states, "Slay the non-Christians wherever you find them," or, "Crucify, and cut off the hands and feet of the non-Christians" or "Oh, Christian, there is a Jew hiding behind this tree, behind this rock, come and kill him." There is no canonical Christian scripture that says, "If any Christian wants to change his religion, kill him." None that demands a tax on all non-Christians. None that demands humiliation of all non-Christians. None that demands that anyone who insults, or mocks, or draws a picture of Jesus be killed. There is no canonical Christian scripture that demands that all Christian men take up arms and kill others until Christianity achieves world domination.





Muslim terrorists do cite their canonical scripture to support their actions.





Yes, Christians have done bad things. But they have done those bad things in opposition to their own canonical scripture; they have not done those bad things in accord with a scripture that demands that they do those bad things. Either you think that that distinction matters, or you do not. History would suggest that the canonical scripture to which one adheres, and to which the congregants of a given faith adhere, matters very much. It certainly mattered in the case of the Bloomington killer. He distributed his scripture freely. He told us what he planned to do. He did it. We responded with lawn signs.



No, the convent near Auschwitz and a proposed mosque at Ground Zero are very much not the same thing.





The convent near Auschwitz and the proposed mosque at Ground Zero are diametrically opposed in another respect: their treatment in elite academic and journalistic discourse. "Bieganski" meticulously details the contemptuous and often quite dishonest press coverage that the convent near Auschwitz received.





The New York Times, Newsweek, Tikkun – all felt quite free to denigrate or misrepresent Catholic Poles in their convent coverage.





For the record, I opposed the convent, and said so to Benjamin Meed, who encouraged me to send to the NYT a letter I had sent him. I did so. The Times did not publish it. Perhaps it was not inflammatory enough. I tried to respect everyone's position, but it seemed pretty clear that a building that had been associated with Auschwitz, though not actually in the camp itself, was not the place for a convent.





When it comes to the Mosque, the very same publications that jumped to denigrate Christians cannot seem to find any reason why a respectable citizen might oppose it. Any opposition is diagnostic of "racism." Racism is, of course, the cardinal sin in the Church of Political Correctness (as elegantly exposed by Shelby Steele.)





I so wish I had gotten the name of that man in Bloomington. The one, lone man at the town meeting that got it that tolerance of intolerance is not tolerance at all.

From the Philadelphia Inquirer





Papers reveal Nazi aim: End Christianity Wednesday, January 9, 2002 By Edward Colimore INQUIRER STAFF WRITER





The fragile, typewritten documents from the 1940s lay out the Nazi plan in grim detail: Take over the churches from within, using party sympathizers. Discredit, jail or kill Christian leaders. And re-indoctrinate the congregants. Give them a new faith – in Germany's Third Reich.





More than a half-century ago, confidential U.S. government reports on the Nazi plans were prepared for the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and will be available online for free starting tomorrow – some of them for the first time. These rare documents – in their original form, some with handwritten scrawls across them – are part of an online legal journal published by students of the Rutgers University School of Law at Camden.





"When people think about the Holocaust, they think about the crimes against Jews, but here's a different perspective," said Julie Seltzer Mandel, a third-year law student who is editor of the Nuremberg Project for the Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion.





"A lot of people will say, 'I didn't realize that they were trying to convert Christians to a Nazi philosophy.' . . . They wanted to eliminate the Jews altogether, but they were also looking to eliminate Christianity."





Mandel said the journal would post new Nuremberg documents about every six months, along with commentary from scholars across the world, on its Web site at www.lawandreligion.com.





The material is part of the archives of Gen. William J. Donovan, who served as special assistant to the U.S. chief of counsel during the International Military Tribunal after World War II. The trials were convened to hold accountable those responsible for war crimes.





The first installment – a 120-page report titled "The Nazi Master Plan: The Persecution of the Christian Churches" – was prepared by the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the CIA.





"Important leaders of the National Socialist party would have liked to meet this situation [church influence] by complete extirpation of Christianity and the substitution of a purely racial religion," said an OSS report in July 1945. "The best evidence now available as to the existence of an anti-Church plan is to be found in the systematic nature of the persecution itself.





"Different steps in that persecution, such as the campaign for the suppression of denominational and youth organizations, the campaign against denominational schools, the defamation campaign against the clergy, started on the same day in the whole area of the Reich . . . and were supported by the entire regimented press, by Nazi Party meetings, by traveling party speakers."





A second online journal posting – to be added in about six months – will spotlight a secret OSS document, "Miscellaneous Memoranda on War Criminals," about the efforts of various countries to bring Nazis to justice.





A third installment – to be included in the journal in a year – focuses on translated, confidential Nazi documents. A message sent during the Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass") pogrom of November 1938 is titled "Measures To Be Taken Against Jews Tonight." Authorities were given specific instructions: "Jewish shops and homes may be destroyed, but not looted. . . . Foreigners, even if Jewish, will not be molested."





Mandel, whose 80-year-old grandmother is a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, said that allowing the public access to such documentation is "phenomenal."





"Some of the papers will answer questions that scholars have been asking for years," said Mandel, 29, of Berlin Borough, Camden County. "What did we know? When did we know it?"





The documents are part of the collection of the Cornell University School of Law library, which has about 150 bound volumes of Nuremberg trial transcripts and materials. They are housed at the school and are being cataloged.





"Gen. Donovan kept extensive, detailed records of Nazi atrocities," said Mandel, who taught at Triton High School in Runnemede and at Shawnee High School in Medford, where she led a course on "Literature of the Holocaust."





She and other journal editors – Daniel Bahk, Christopher Elliott, Ross Enders and Jessica Platt – examined hundreds of documents at Cornell before choosing those to be posted on the journal site. "The project could not be published in a conventional journal without losing the international accessibility that it demands," said Rayman Solomon, dean of the School of Law. "This student initiative will make a significant contribution to legal history scholarship while being of great interest and importance to the general public, especially at this time in our history."





Greg Baxter, marketing editor of the journal and a third-year Rutgers law student, said the online project was "definitely pertinent in light of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack" and Bush administration plans to hold a military tribunal to try the accused.





"The Nuremberg trials provide a framework for today's trials," said Baxter, 24, of Winslow, Camden County.





***





January 13, 2002 Word for Word/The Case Against the Nazis; How Hitler's Forces Planned To Destroy German Christianity By JOE SHARKEY





THE chilling testimony of crimes against humanity by the Nazi regime in Hitler's Germany have been on the historical record since the Nuremberg war-crimes trials of 1945 and 1946. But any criminal prosecution, and especially one as mammoth as the case against Nazi Germany, consists of far more than public testimony in court. The Nuremberg trials were also built on many millions of pages of supporting evidence: documents, summaries, notes and memos collected by investigators.





One of the leading United States investigators at Nuremberg, Gen. William J. Donovan – Wild Bill Donovan of the O.S.S., the C.I.A.'s precursor – collected and cataloged trial evidence in 148 bound volumes of personal papers that were stored after his death in 1959 at Cornell University. In 1999, Julie Seltzer Mandel, a law student from Rutgers University whose grandmother survived the Auschwitz death camp, read them. Under the Nuremberg Project, a collaboration between Rutgers and Cornell, she has edited the collection for publication on the Internet.





The first installment, published last week on the Web site of the Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion (www.camlaw.rutgers.edu/publications/law-religion), includes a 108-page outline prepared by O.S.S. investigators to aid Nuremberg prosecutors. The outline, ''The Persecution of the Christian Churches,'' summarizes the Nazi plan to subvert and destroy German Christianity, which it calls ''an integral part of the National Socialist scheme of world conquest.''





Verbatim excerpts from the outline would require extensive explanations. Instead, the outline is summarized below. JOE SHARKEY





In the 1920's, as they battled for power, the Nazis realized that the churches in overwhelmingly Christian Germany needed to be neutralized before they would get anywhere. Two-thirds of German Christians were Protestants, belonging to one of 28 regional factions of the German Evangelical Church. Most of the rest were Roman Catholics. On one level, the Nazis saw an advantage. In tumultuous post-World War I Germany, the Christian churches ''had long been associated with conservative ways of thought, which meant that they tended to agree with the National Socialists in their authoritarianism, their attacks on Socialism and Communism, and in their campaign against the Versailles treaty'' that had ended World War I with a bitterly resentful Germany.





But there was a dilemma for Hitler. While conservatives, the Christian churches ''could not be reconciled with the principle of racism, with a foreign policy of unlimited aggressive warfare, or with a domestic policy involving the complete subservience of Church to State.'' Given that these were the fundamental underpinnings of the Nazi regime, ''conflict was inevitable,'' the summary states. It came, as Nazi power surged in the late 1920's toward national domination in the early 30's.





According to Baldur von Schirach, the Nazi leader of the German youth corps that would later be known as the Hitler Youth, ''the destruction of Christianity was explicitly recognized as a purpose of the National Socialist movement'' from the beginning, though ''considerations of expedience made it impossible'' for the movement to adopt this radical stance officially until it had consolidated power, the outline says.





Attracted by the strategic value inherent in the churches' ''historic mission of conservative social discipline,'' the Nazis simply lied and made deals with the churches while planning a ''slow and cautious policy of gradual encroachment'' to eliminate Christianity.





The prosecution investigators describe this as a criminal conspiracy. ''This general plan had been established even before the rise of the Nazis to power,'' the outline says. ''It apparently came out of discussions among an inner circle'' comprised of Hitler himself, other top Nazi leaders including the propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, and a collection of party enforcers and veteran beer-hall agitators.





The regional branches of the German Evangelical Church, the main Protestant body, were often administered and financed through governmental agencies. The Nazis saw a distinct advantage in having Protestant churches ''whose supreme administrative organs were located within the borders of Germany,'' the outline says. This facilitated plans ''to capture and use the church organization for their own purposes'' and ''to secure the elimination of Christian influences in the Evangelical Church by legal or quasi legal means.''





The Roman Catholic Church, centrally administered from Rome, posed a different problem for the Nazis, whose relationship with that church in the 1920's had been bitter. In 1933, when Germany was under Hitler's total control, the Nazis made ''unmistakable overtures'' to the Christian churches in general, and to Catholics in particular.





Having already witnessed fairly smooth relations after the 1929 Lantern treaty between Mussolini's fascist regime and the church in Italy, many German Catholics ''accepted the Nazi proposition'' of peaceful coexistence. In July 1933, a Concordat was signed between the Reich and the Holy See.





''For the first time since the Middle Ages, the Reich itself had entered into an agreement with the Roman Catholic Church,'' the outline says. ''Moreover, the new treaty was apparently entirely to the advantage of the church. In return for the retreat of German Catholicism from the political scene, the church was guaranteed, by international treaty, freedom for Catholic organizations [and] maintenance of denominational schools and youth education.''





All Hitler seemed to demand in return was ''a pledge of loyalty by the clergy to the Reich government and a promise that Catholic religious instruction would emphasize the patriotic duties of the Christian citizen.'' This posed no big problem for the church, the outline asserts. ''Since it had always been the practice of the Catholic Church to abide by established governments and to promote patriotic convictions among the faithful, these stipulations of the Concordat were no more than legalizations of an existing custom. The Concordat was hailed by church and state authorities as marking the beginning of a close and fruitful collaboration.''





Of course, the churches stayed in Hitler's good graces for only as long as the Nazis considered their cooperation expedient. Soon after Hitler assumed dictatorial powers, ''relations between the Nazi state and the church became progressively worse,'' the outline says. The Nazis ''took advantage of their subsequently increasing strength to violate every one of the Concordat's provisions.''





In 1937, Pope Pius XI denounced Nazi treachery in an encyclical that accused Hitler of ''a war of extermination'' against the church. The battle had been joined on some fronts. Nazi street mobs, often in the company of the Gestapo, routinely stormed offices in Protestant and Catholic churches where clergymen were seen as lax in their support of the regime.





The dissident pastor Martin Niemoller spoke openly now against state control of the Protestant churches. He was arrested and imprisoned in 1937 for using his pulpit for ''underhand attacks on state and party.'' When a judge acquitted him, ''on leaving court he was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp where he remained until the end of the war,'' says the outline.





Still, in a society where the entire Jewish population was being automatically condemned without public protest, care was taken to manipulate public perceptions about clergymen who fell into Nazi disfavor. ''The Catholic Church need not imagine that we are going to create martyrs,'' Robert Wagner, the Nazi Gauleiter of Baden, said in a speech, according to the O.S.S. study. ''We shall not give the church that satisfaction. She shall have not martyrs, but criminals.''





But once they had total power and set off to launch a world war, the Nazis made no secret of what lay in store for Christian clergymen who expressed dissent.





In Munich, Nazi street gangs and a Gestapo squad attacked the residence of the Roman Catholic cardinal. ''A hail of stones was directed against the windows, while the men shouted, 'Take the rotten traitor to Dachau!' '' the outline says, adding: ''After 1937, German Catholic bishops gave up all attempts to print'' their pastoral letters publicly and instead ''had them merely read from the pulpits.''





Then the letters themselves were confiscated.





''In many churches, the confiscation took place during Mass by the police snatching the letter out of the hands of the priests as they were in the act of reading it.''





Later the same year, dissident Protestant churches joined in a manifesto protesting Nazi tactics. In response, the Nazis arrested 700 Protestant pastors.





Objectionable statements made by the clergy would no longer be prosecuted in the courts, the Nazis said. Statements ''injurious to the State would be ruthlessly punished by 'protective custody,' that is, the concentration camp,'' the outline says.





http://org.law.rutgers.edu/publications/law-religion/nurinst1.shtml

Friday Night Already......
Geez, how'd that happen?

I guess those 2 extra days at the beginning of the week threw me off. I've been as busy as a One Legged Man at an Ass Kicking Party the last couple of days and just missed the time going by.

I spent a lot of years missing things and wasting time. I don't like to do to much of that anymore. Having entered a statistical group where everyday above ground is a good one, I feel like I ought to be doing SOMETHING everyday. Doesn't really matter if it's all that important.
I figured out a long time ago that I'm probably not gonna go down in history as anything special and will, like most everyone who has ever walked this planet, be completely forgotten by the time my Grandchildren are gone.

I'm ok with that. Very few folks are ever remembered in the history books and 1/2 of them are remembered as jerks.

I figure a life well lived and being an ok guy is a good thing and nothing to be ashamed of.

OK. That's enough philosophical Horseshit for one day.

The weather here has been absolutely beautiful the last 2 days. Mid 80's and low humidity. Damn, I'd like to see a few more (9-10) months of that. Supposed to get hot and humid again tomorrow.
Screw it. I'm gonna be working the next 2 days so I guess it doesn't matter.

We'll hope for the best Monday.

We're entering the busy harvest and preserving season now and things are gonna get busy around here as we kick into canning mode big time.

The tomatoes are really starting to come on now and the wife will be making sauce, etc and putting that up soon.

The Pear tree had such a big crop it decided to break a big section off because of the weight the other day. This wasn't just a limb hanging down from the weight of all the fruit, it was a BIG section that was growing straight up. No way to prop that up with poles.
Self Pruning I say. Look at the bright side.

The good news is that there is enough wood holding on that the whole section hasn't wilted up. The leaves are still green and not curled up and the fruit is ripening well. Gonna have a ton of them.
QueenBuffness makes an ass kick Pear Jelly and cans the hell out of them. Hmmmm. Good stuff come February.

Trying to save on electricity an not use the dehydrator, I set a couple of screen door inserts across some horses and spread shell beans on them to dry. Perfect weather for it. As they were already dried pretty well on the vine I think they're good to go as is, but will probably spread them out there again tomorrow and give them another day to make sure before putting them up in jars.
We got close to 20# of beans from the two 4x12' beds. Not bad. Not as much as I'd like for storage but I will need to have more room next year.

Still have Black Beans and Great Northern Beans coming on and the second planting of Green beans sometime in the middle of September for canning. As you may have guessed, we eat a lot of beans. I love 'em and there are just so many ways to enjoy them.

My buddy with the Apple orchard says there's Apples ready now and told me I should get over there and get started on them. Another friend wants me to come over Monday and pick Peaches that are just going to waste.
I'm leaning towards the Peaches. Mine didn't do to well and Apples will be available for another couple of months.

And there's not much better in this world than a fresh Peach. Yep. Peaches it is, Monday.

As you can see, lots of food gathering going on now. It's amazing how much food you can grow, gather and collect for next to nothing. With the cost of everything going nowhere but up, it would behoove all of y'all to get going on raising some of your own. Plan now for next year. Think long term and get trees started first. Yeah, plant then this Fall. Figure out a way to scrape a $100 bucks together and order some trees.

The Arbor Day Foundation would be a good source. Pretty affordable when compared to other places and if you become a member it gets even cheaper. They do good work too. So giving them cash is doing everyone a good turn.

Win - Win as they say.
Since I've had such crappy luck with getting Nut Trees to grow lately, I'm gonna order some from them this Fall. Gotta be better than what I've been getting from the places I've been dealing with the last 2 years.

Probably more Peaches and Apples too.

Face it. How can you have To many fruit trees? Yeah, that's what I thought.

OK. That's it for tonight.

Gratuitous Picture for a Friday Night-

Like most PhD candidates, I was apart from normal society, submersed in hundred-year-old debates about the place of Jews in Poland. I read critiques like that of Stanislaw Staszic, who sharply harangued Polish society as a three-part caste system.* On the bottom were "stupid, unindustrious, and lazy" peasants, "terrible drunkards," "unworthy of justice or freedom;" in the middle were their immediate superiors, Jewish agents, "bloodsuckers," who worked, in turn, for those at the top, exploitative and greedy Polish noblemen, who created taverns, "like a net, for trapping the peasants."





 As an escape from ancient and distant Poland, I picked up Stephen G. Bloom's 2001 book, "Postville," and I had that supremely weird sensation a researcher can get when she realizes that her marginal, cobwebbed obsession has some pertinence in the wider world.





Bloom probably didn't realize it, but he wrote a book that resonated with all those harangues protesting Poland's de facto caste system. Iowans and Lubavitcher Jews in Postville, Iowa, probably did not realize it, but they were acting out tensions parallel to those that had been acted out in Poland.





In 1987, Lubavitcher Jews opened a kosher slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, whose population had mostly been Lutherans of German and Norwegian descent. A culture clash followed. I tried to summarize that culture clash in a review I submitted to Amazon. That review is below. Amazon never posted it. I've occasionally resubmitted it in the intervening years. It's not shown up.





I know what you are thinking. "You can't say that." I think the same thing. "You can't say that."





Anti-Semitism is real. There are snakes in the garden. Why feed them?





But. How do we talk about the very real issues that arose in Postville, in Poland, that are arising now in multicultural America, without saying things that could be exploited by snakes on every side (including the inside)?





You tell me. I'm listening.





This isn't just about Poles and Jews – and Iowans. This is about us all. Should English be the national language? Should four-year-old, physically handicapped, Ryan Thomas, the son of a police officer, been forced to remove his leg braces by airport security personnel, while Muslims in face veils walk through unimpeded? What's the difference between multiculturalism and balkanization?





I'm still listening.





It would be great if those who protested Bloom's book seriously tackled the issues he brings up. I read through the one-star reviews for "Postville" on Amazon. The one-star reviews conspicuously don't tackle the issues Bloom brings up. Rather, they misrepresent what Bloom wrote, and then they tackle Bloom himself. Bloom is a "self-hating Jew," a "gastronomic Jew." "I predict his grandchildren will not be Jewish."





Such ad hominem attacks merely squelch frankness and leave the issues to simmer beneath the surface of silent rage and resentment.





Below please find my (still censored) Amazon review of "Postville":





Stephen G. Bloom's "Postville," about recently arrived Lubavitcher Jews opening a slaughterhouse in rural Iowa, is one of the most shocking books I've ever read. Bloom says things that you are not supposed to say. If you do say the kind of things that Bloom says, you are supposed to say them with a truckload of disclaimers. Examples:





Postville residents, in true Iowa fashion, attempt to befriend the town's new Jewish arrivals – to invite them in for "cookies and Kool-aid" (86). They report that the Lubavitchers refuse to shake their hands, to greet, or to so much as look at them. "We're invisible to them," a resident says. "they look right through us like we don't exist" (47). "If they mix with us, they think we'll contaminate them . . . Like we have AIDS" (51). A man distributing fliers for a local event was stopped by a Jewish woman who would not even speak to him, but communicated with demeaning hand gestures (96).





Postville residents report that the Jews behave as if they are superior to the locals. Bloom himself asked, "Who died and made them rulers of the universe?" (82) One Lubavitcher "bellows", "We *are* the chosen people. That's what they Bible says, even the Bible *they* read" (67). Put-downs for non-Jews include "goyisher kop," meaning "stupid" (63), "eater of trayf," "eater of unclean food," (56) and "goyisher chozzerai," or "Gentile piggery" (210). Special put-downs are saved for African Americans (231).





"They were downright rude. They seemed to go out of their way to be obnoxious, especially when it came to business dealings. When they did their shopping, they bargained for the best prices, for everything from shoes and food to clothing and cars" (48). One Lubavitcher is depicted engaging in abusive business practices (211, 231); a rabbi steals merchandise from a shoe store. When confronted, he says, "Never raise your voice to me! Women are not to do that, ever!" (323). "No way could they possibly treat their own people as poorly as they treat us" (49).





Jews, according to the Lubavitchers' worldview, are not supposed to mix; they are a "nation within a nation" (73). Locals understood that religious proscription prevented the Jews from allowing Christians into their homes, though locals are eager to enter – "I'd give anything to do that!" (104, 174). Lubavitchers "stiffed" the local pastor's invitations (146). Jews received separate school facilities, and a separate swim time at the municipal pool (51, 111, 332). Oil, rather than candles, is used on the Sabbath, because oil does not mix, and it represents the need for Jews to remain separate (182). Assimilation is a "spiritual holocaust" (153). "The Jews are lambs surrounded by seventy wolves. . . We've got to stick close to each other . . . If we don't, we might get eaten" said the rabbi (147). Another said, "Wherever we go, we don't adapt to the place or the people . . .It's the place and the people who have to adapt to *us*" (209).





The Lubavitcher ethos was in sharp contrast to the majority local, Christian, agricultural Iowan one. "Through the brutal Iowa winters, scorching summers, pesticide-thick springs, around-the-clock autumn harvests, a communal bond was crucial if the community was to survive. Maintaining this support system was the undergirding of rural life . . .a collective soul arose" (56). One foundation of this Iowan ethos was modesty. It was not appropriate to be showy with wealth. This contrasted with the Lubavitchers' ostentation (151). Even appearance was a contrast: "The ruddy, weathered skin tone of the Iowans was anathema to the Hasidim . . . Jews spend their time inside. . . [the outdoors] was for goys who raked leaves or tinkered with cars" (165). There was concern that the Lubavitchers would not so much as allow the fire department to put out fires in their homes (86-7). "The Jews *were* out of sync with the natural symmetry I was growing to understand" concluded Bloom (114).





Locals did not find work in the slaughterhouse. The Lubavitchers imported workers from Eastern Europe for the dirtiest, lowest paid, non-union work (133-4). These workers were "prohibited from entering" a break room devoted to the slaughterhouse's Jewish workers who certified the meat as kosher (244-5). "I felt I wasn't in Postville at all, but in a working-class Eastern European village" (135).





[Bloom's description of the Eastern European workers reminded me of my father's description of Hunky immigrants and their "strong backs."





"Newly arrived non-English-speaking immigrants from Eastern Europe … all gentiles … had to have strong backs for lifting and sliding the giant carcasses along the factory kill floor and for hauling the heavy boxes of cut-up beef and chicken parts into refrigerated trucks. They had to tolerate sickening sights and putrid odors and be willing to work in the packinghouse's near freezing temperatures for eight, ten hours a day" (133).]





If local Iowans voiced any objection to any Lubavitcher behavior, they were dismissed as anti-Semites (65, 159, 198). Anti-Semitism was a problem, some concluded. A Jewish family received hang-up phone calls, swastikas were spray painted on buildings, and a Jewish boy was run off the road (119, 124).





The book closes with the commission of a crime by a Jew, who though he had "been involved in two robberies and an attempted murder" would not sign an affidavit because it was the Sabbath (253). Locals perceived a double standard in what they saw as a lenient sentence (256). Bloom condemned the Lubavitcher community's callous disregard of the victim (257). Bloom interpreted the crime as "a perverted outgrowth of . . . [an] an us-against-them mentality" (273).





My plan was to close with a sermonette on the responsibilities of an author writing about badly behaved members of a stigmatized minority, and on the considerable significance of this book to debates on multiculturalism. But I see that I've used up my allotment of words just summarizing the material that shocked me. I can only say that I have mixed feelings. Anti-Semitism is very real. And yet . . . In some ways it is exactly Bloom's no-apologies, Politically Incorrect approach that makes "Postville" stand out.





Would I have the courage to write a similar book about badly behaved members of my own stigmatized ethnicity? For his courage, I give Bloom's book five stars.





* Aleksander Hertz "The Jews in Polish Culture" uses caste as a way to understand Poland's pre-WWII social system.

Dee Snyder Looks Back...............

And does a little compare and contrast.


I love it.

Gratuitous Picture for a Thursday-

Beats a Poke in the Eye With a Sharp Stick...............

Indeed.

I just returned from the Eye Doctor after....................... Poking my dumbass in the eye with a sharp stick while cleaning up around the house.

Of course, it had to be my GOOD EYE too!
Kind of ironic that.

Break time for now and we'll see how it goes later so I can finish this job up.

Gratuitous Picture for a Thursday Afternoon-
Seeing Eye Chicken.

The Montrail Ultra Cup, arguably the most competitive ultra series out there, announced that the prize purses will be doubled for the 2010-11 season along with some new races and rule changes. Very nice! Good news for Glen Redpath and Meghan Arbogast, who picked up the wins for 2009-2010.

"Summer She's Coming On Strong".........



Damn, that's a great song. I had this song stuck in my head all afternoon as I was out in the garden picking beans & figured y'all should enjoy it too.

As a young lad, I saw this band many years ago and have never forgotten how good they were.

But the Garden is coming on strong and, tired as I was today, I still dragged my ass out there under the hot sun and picked beans. These aren't green beans, but soup beans that you'd buy in a bag at the grocery store, dried out already.
I really don't know the official name for them. I always have always heard them called, Cranberry Beans.

I call them Michael's Beans because my friend Michael Boone gave me the starter seeds for these several years ago.
They are a very prolific and easy to grow bean.
I got a huge pile of them today. Filled one of those big ass, Tupperware style boxes. I'm still gonna have to shell them out and dry them a little bit more, but that's all good. I've got a bunch of 1 gallon jars that we'll put them in after they're dried out nicely.
Good eating fer sure.

The Blackberries have just been crazy this year. I only got through 1/2 of the patch tonight and here's what I got-

That's a big ass bowl, by the way, as you can see by the hat there for comparison.

It's been an everyday thing to get at least this many berries. I figure there's about a week left on these things.

Good enough and I'll take it. QueenBuffness has been cleaning them and sticking them in the freezer for now. Jelly will be happening as she gets more time. She made an asskick pie from some earlier today.

Damn, Summer IS coming on strong!

Tomatoes are coming online now and in a week or so it'll be, full speed ahead on canning them.

QueenBuffness has really gotten the canning thing down and kicks ass on processioning all of the things that come on from the garden.
Yes, it's a lot like work.
But damn if it's not worth it.

There's no question about how it was grown or where it came from.
There are no Illegal migrant workers shitting out in the fields and passing along and sharing their own special blend of E-Coli to us. I like that.

That's about it for today. I'm still recuperating from the 4 day day stretch.

Later!

Gratuitous Picture for a Wednesday Night-

Damn I'm Tired...........

Had an unexpected couple of days work thrown at me Monday & Tuesday and four 12 hours shifts of non-stop ER Zombieland has worn my poor old ass down to a nub.

Getting old is not for the faint of heart I guess.
But people are sick & have sick family members and when my boss asks, I try to help her out because she's good people and the kinda boss everyone wishes they had.

That I forgot to schedule the weekend off for the upcoming Indianapolis Moto GP Race next month has nothing to do with it.

I've only had a year to do it and still forgot. But she got me covered even though I'm an idiot so it all worked out.

Made some much needed cash too so that's a good thing after all of the crap that decided to break down here in the last few weeks. So it's all good.

Of to bed now to sleep like a welfare whore if I'm lucky.

Gratuitous Picture for a Very Early Wednesday Morning-

What's interesting to learn about Bay Area venture capital firms, and on the heels of Thursday's TechCrunch Summer Party hosted by August Capital, is that not every one focuses on the United States.

In the case of Tano Capital, the San Mateo, California investment firm founded by Charles E. Johnson, the former President of Franklin Templeton investments, who's its managing director, has its investment interests primarily in India and China.

The firm, established in 2007, started with a few small investments, but then ramped up its activity considerably in 2009. It started with an investment in AltoBeam Technology, a China-based designer of digital TV chipsets. Then Tano placed $2.2 million in TongXue.com, a Chinese-based social network, that's become one of the 50,000 largest websites in the World (and with a really cool animated activity map).

In 2010, Tano Capital's activity increased, to the point that it has now as many deals in play as it did in all of 2009. And Tano's not totally out of the United States in terms of investment deals: it started the Tano Global Hard Assets Fund, which invests in U.S. hard assets.

Tano does all of this from it's offices in San Mateo, Mumbai, Mauritius, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei, and Tianjin.

Suzuki SX4

Hold the relatively wide track, the car provides a sturdy appearance. So the new length of the trunk volume benefits to the 270 to 515 litres rise - a measure that is in that class to the best one. If more cargo space is claimed, allows the rear seat backrests in the ratio 40:60 threw divided.