November 14, 2007 | 1:52 pm

What’s in a name? More than you think

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Follow me on

This one is from the Freakonomics School of Unconventional Studies:

The title of the paper, to appear in next month’s edition of the journal Psychological Science, is entitled “Moniker maladies, when names sabotage success.” Here’s the abstract:

In five studies, we found that people like their names enough to unconsciously pursue consciously avoided outcomes that resemble their names. Baseball players avoid strikeouts, but players whose names begin with the strikeout-signifying letter K strike out more than others (Study 1). All students want As, but students whose names begin with letters associated with poorer performance (C and D) achieve lower grade point averages (GPAs) than do students whose names begin with A and B (Study 2), especially if they like their initials (Study 3). Because lower GPAs lead to lesser graduate schools, students whose names begin with the letters C and D attend lower-ranked law schools than students whose names begin with A and B (Study 4). Finally, in an experimental study, we manipulated congruence between participants’ initials and the labels of prizes and found that participants solve fewer anagrams when a consolation prize shares their first initial than when it does not (Study 5). These findings provide striking evidence that unconsciously desiring negative name-resembling performance outcomes can insidiously undermine the more conscious pursuit of positive outcomes.

The last chapter of Freakonomics argued that people given “super-black” names, like the father who called his two sons Winner and Loser, or the girl named Shithead (pronounced “Shah-teed”), don’t do worse because of their names but often because of life circumstances. But this study looks at a much odder phenomenon of name association.

So what does this imply for people named Moses or Jesus?

November 14, 2007 | 1:36 pm

Former Pepperdine ballplayer the face of ‘Crazy Robertson’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The religion angle here is tenuous—the subject once played on Pepperdine’s baseball team—but the Wall Street Journal has a story today about one of L.A.‘s most recognizable homeless men, John Wesley Jermyn. He’s known as the “Crazy Robertson,” and this year an overpriced clothing brand was created in his honor (that might not be the right word).

Among locals and online, there’s much speculation about Mr. Jermyn’s personal history, including one oft-repeated rumor that he’s a secretive millionaire.

In a plot twist worthy of Tinseltown, Mr. Jermyn now has a clothing label named after him. Since it was introduced last month, “The Crazy Robertson” brand of T-shirts and sweatshirts, created by a trio of 23-year-olds, has flown off the shelves at Kitson, a haunt of tabloid stars like Paris Hilton. The clothes feature stylized images of Mr. Jermyn, including one design—available on a $98 hoodie—that has a graphic of him dancing and the phrase “No Money, No Problems” on the back. At the largest of Kitson’s three boutiques on Robertson, shirts bearing Mr. Jermyn’s likeness are sold alongside $290 “Victoria Beckham” jeans and $50 baby shoes designed by pop star Gwen Stefani.

(skip)

Mr. Jermyn’s slide into homelessness is a painful subject for his sister Beverly. And so is the clothing deal. She believes “The Crazy Robertson” founders are exploiting her brother’s condition to build their brand. “I think these guys saw an opportunity and they took it,” she says. “I am not happy with the arrangement.”

Ms. Jermyn, who lives close to the alley where Mr. Jermyn sleeps, says her brother has a form of schizophrenia. He refuses to take medication, she says, despite suffering from fits of shouting and cursing. In the years since his condition began deteriorating in the late 1970s, “he slipped through my fingers like sand,” says Ms. Jermyn, 64, who manages facilities for Oracle Corp.

In the late 1980s she testified in court in a proceeding to force her brother to seek help, but psychological evaluators found him “lucid and gracious,” according to Ms. Jermyn. She has made countless attempts to provide him with shelter and therapy, and she still visits him twice a week with food. She also pays for his cellphone and collects his Social Security checks on his behalf.

(skip)

Mr. Jermyn was raised in Hancock Park, a historic L.A. neighborhood that’s home to some of the city’s wealthiest families. His father managed one of L.A.‘s largest Chevrolet dealerships.

A star athlete in high school, Mr. Jermyn was selected by the Kansas City Royals in the 1969 Major League Baseball draft. He attended Pepperdine University and played a season for a Los Angeles Dodgers’ minor-league team in Bellingham, Wash. (He hit just .205 and made 12 errors in 63 games, according to the Society for American Baseball Research.)

Joel John Roberts, chief executive of People Assisting the Homeless, which provides shelters for L.A.‘s street residents, says the branding of Mr. Jermyn is “like designing a line of clothing patterned after Iraqi refugees fleeing the war.”

Here is a video of Jermyn’s dance-skating.

(Hat tip: LAObserved.)

1 Comments — Leave your comment

November 14, 2007 | 9:27 am

‘Crappy-tipping Jews’ cartoon

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

This cartoon from the University of Arizona’s student paper caused a big stir out there last month. In case you can’t read it, the “No Relation” sketch by staffer Joseph Topmiller depicted a restaurant credit card slip with a 7 percent tip from a Mark Goldfarb and this note beneath:

“Attention all crappy-tipping Jews!!! Just because you’re ‘screwing’ the server ... does not mean that it’s a mitzvah.”

The paper eventually apologized for the cartoon, but the response from the student body was mixed—many felt it was anti-Semitic; others that Topmiller had the First Amendment right to be a bigot; and some thought he was right.

Topmiller, who was soon fired and then rehired over the cartoon he thought was clever, emerged in the Tucson Weekly this month playing the victim.

“I was called so many names,” Topmiller says. It was ironic to Topmiller when people started calling him homophobic, considering he is gay—with a nice Jewish boyfriend, no less.

“But that’s the one thing I haven’t done: I haven’t called anyone names in my comic. I take certain stereotypes and certain situations and bring up something completely unrelated to (them). That’s what the title was based on. And I thought it made people think.”

 

To be fair, Topmiller’s previous cartoons “took shots at Mormons, the LBGT community and even quadriplegics,” which got him fired from the Daily Wildcat once before. But regardless of whether Topmiller meant to perpetuate an anti-Semitic stereotype or is just really naive, that is one crappy cartoon.

0 Comments — Leave your comment

November 14, 2007 | 1:01 am

Heaven or Hell?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Over at his blog, Daniel Radosh runs a weekly contest to see who can write the worst caption to a New Yorker cartoon. This was a finalist for the cartoon above:

“You know, I’m beginning to think, the halos and clouds and so forth notwithstanding, that this isn’t actually Heaven, but is in fact Hell. For one thing, the boredom here is so oppressive that it feels like we’re being punished, not rewarded. For another, I was a rapist.”

3 Comments — Leave your comment

November 13, 2007 | 12:37 pm

Jesus makeup and Wash Away Your Sins soap

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Well, here’s another tasteless attempt to make a few bucks. Among the Looking Good For Jesus products are a mirror compact, a coin purse and a mini kit that “redeems you in his eyes and takes the edge off sinning.”

The company, BlueQ, also sells Wash Away Your Sins soap—if only it were so easy—and Kills A Kitten Gum, and this is funny, to remind men that every time you masturbate, God kills a kitten.

(Hat tip: GeekHeeb)

3 Comments — Leave your comment

November 13, 2007 | 12:33 pm

More sinful behavior

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

As you probably noticed, JewishJournal.com has been having more server problems, which this morning shut down The God Blog. We’re back online now.

0 Comments — Leave your comment

November 12, 2007 | 10:56 am

‘LA is the apocalypse’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I’m taking off right now to interview Jonah Lehrer about his first book, “Proust Was a Neuroscientist,” so I saw it fitting to finally write about this post I saw on his blog a few weeks ago, a link to BLDGBLOG, a well-written architecture blog.

L.A. is the apocalypse: it’s you and a bunch of parking lots. No one’s going to save you; no one’s looking out for you. It’s the only city I know where that’s the explicit premise of living there – that’s the deal you make when you move to L.A.

The city, ironically, is emotionally authentic.

It says: no one loves you; you’re the least important person in the room; get over it.

What matters is what you do there.

And maybe that means renting Hot Fuzz and eating too many pretzels; or maybe that means driving a Prius out to Malibu and surfing with Daryl Hannah as a means of protesting something; or maybe that means buying everything Fredric Jameson has ever written and even underlining significant passages as you visit the Westin Bonaventura. Maybe that just means getting into skateboarding, or into E!, or into Zen, Kabbalah, and Christian mysticism; or maybe you’ll plunge yourself into gin-fueled all night Frank Sinatra marathons – or you’ll lift weights and check email every two minutes on your Blackberry and watch old Bruce Willis films.

Who cares?

Literally no one cares, is the answer. No one cares. You’re alone in the world.

(skip)

Los Angeles is where you confront the objective fact that you mean nothing; the desert, the ocean, the tectonic plates, the clear skies, the sun itself, the Hollywood Walk of Fame – even the parking lots: everything there somehow precedes you, even new construction sites, and it’s bigger than you and more abstract than you and indifferent to you. You don’t matter. You’re free.

I used to hate LA. When I first moved here for college, I started referring to San Diego as the Promised Land that I once took for granted. But now I love it here. I don’t feel as lonely as this writer implies most Angelenos do; I’ve never felt like I’m missing the neighborly support that other big cities supposedly offer. But, then again, I’ve got quite a few UCLA buddies still around, and I’m married.

What implications, though, does this psychological breakdown carry for religiosity and spirituality in the carefree city?

0 Comments — Leave your comment

November 12, 2007 | 9:01 am

Pastor Hagee the gentile Maccabi

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The Dallas Morning News recently profiled John Hagee, a megachurch pastor and the leader of Christians United for Israel. Hagee is a controversial figure in Christian and Jewish circles; his influence is important for Israel but his love for the Jewish state is clearly based on his understanding of the End Times.

Mr. Hagee said he is following the Bible’s mandate to protect Israel. He espouses an end-times theology in which he connects Iran’s nuclear threat with the Apocalypse, the final battle of good and evil on earth.

    In his book, Jerusalem Countdown, he writes: “Before us is a nuclear countdown with Iran, followed by Ezekiel’s war and then the final battle – the Battle of Armageddon. The end of the world as we know it is rapidly approaching.”

    His message fits neatly into the calls to strike a nuclear facility in     Iran.

    “Iran is Germany,” he said, and its president, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, “is     the new Hitler.”

“He intends to attack Israel first and then bring the nuclear fight to America,” he said. “His terrorist-trained people are in Iraq right now killing a third of U.S. forces there. That’s an act of war.

Biblical prophecy is not new. But Mr. Hagee, the nation’s leading Christian Zionist, seeks to channel biblically inspired devotion to Israel into organized efforts to affect politics and public policy.    

His group, Christians United for Israel, lobbies Congress on behalf of policies that support the state of Israel. The organization claims 50,000 members from churches representing 2 million people and conducts Night to Honor Israel rallies at Christian churches and hotel ballrooms – 75 cities last year.

Christians United’s second annual Washington event in July drew 4,500 supporters. President Bush provided a welcoming statement, and speakers included Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. Mr. Lieberman brought the crowd to its feet by comparing Mr. Hagee to Moses.

“Like Moses,” the senator said, “he’s become the leader of a mighty multitude – even greater than the multitude that Moses led from Egypt to the Promised Land.”

The story quotes Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State saying that Hagee’s influence is bad. That’s clearly not a lone opinion, but I’m not sure why the reporter quoted Lynn here, who, as I’ve mentioned before, is really a fringe figure in Christianity.

4 Comments — Leave your comment

November 9, 2007 | 4:33 pm

The New Nostradamus predicts the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Imagine you could predict the future. With precision. And all you were doing was using a beefed up version of John Nash’s game theory formula. Well, GOOD magazine (whose founder I profiled for an article in next week’s JJ) has a cover story on a guy who can.

His name is a mouthful—Bruce Bueno de Mesquita—and he’s being hailed as the New Nostradamus, making this lead quote oh-so fitting: “Some people think Bruce is the most brilliant foreign policy analyst there is,” says one colleague. “Others think he’s a quack.”

The chairman of NYU’s department of politics, Bueno de Mesquita (mmm, I’m hungry) has been more accurate in his predictions than the CIA.

“We tested Bueno de Mesquita’s model on scores of issues that were conducted in real time—that is, the forecasts were made before the events actually happened,” says Stanley Feder, a former high-level CIA analyst. “We found the model to be accurate 90 percent of the time,” he wrote. Another study evaluating Bueno de Mesquita’s real-time forecasts of 21 policy decisions in the European community concluded that “the probability that the predicted outcome was what indeed occurred was an astounding 97 percent.” What’s more, Bueno de Mesquita’s forecasts were much more detailed than those of the more traditional analysts. “The real issue is the specificity of the accuracy,” says Feder. “We found that DI (Directorate of National Intelligence) analyses, even when they were right, were vague compared to the model’s forecasts. To use an archery metaphor, if you hit the target, that’s great. But if you hit the bull’s eye—that’s amazing.”

His method is more psychology than foreign policy. He determines the motivations of the players involved in a specific issue, applies those to a “rational-choice” model, which uses game theory as its backbone, and arrives at an expected outcome. He’s had a lot of amazing gets, but this was my favorite mentioned in the article:

His model predicted that upon Khomeini’s death, an ayatollah named Hojatolislam Khamenei and an obscure junior cleric named Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani would emerge to lead the country together. At the time, Rafsanjani was so little known that his name had yet to appear in the New York Times.  Even more improbably, Khomeini had already designated his successor, and it was neither Ayatollah Khamenei nor Rafsanjani. Khomeini’s stature among Iran’s ruling clerics made it inconceivable that they would defy their leader’s choice. At the APSA meeting subsequent to the article’s publication, Bueno de Mesquita was roundly denounced as a quack by the Iran experts—a charlatan peddling voodoo mathematics. “They said I was an idiot, basically. They said my work was evil, offensive, that it should be suppressed,” he recalls. “It was a very difficult time in my career.” Five years later, when Khomeini died, lo and behold, Iran’s fractious ruling clerics chose Ayatollah Khamenei and Hashemi Rafsanjani to jointly lead the country.

Anyway, with the much-anticipated peace forum at Annapolis coming up between Israeli PM Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, New Nostradamus offered this model for achieving piece in the most contested—and holiest—strip of land in the Middle East.

“In my view, it is a mistake to look for strategies that build mutual trust because it ain’t going to happen. Neither side has any reason to trust the other, for good reason,” he says. “Land for peace is an inherently flawed concept because it has a fundamental commitment problem. If I give you land on your promise of peace in the future, after you have the land, as the Israelis well know, it is very costly to take it back if you renege. You have an incentive to say, ‘You made a good step, it’s a gesture in the right direction, but I thought you were giving me more than this. I can’t give you peace just for this, it’s not enough.’ Conversely, if we have peace for land—you disarm, put down your weapons, and get rid of the threats to me and I will then give you the land—the reverse is true: I have no commitment to follow through. Once you’ve laid down your weapons, you have no threat.” 

Bueno de Mesquita’s answer to this dilemma, which he discussed with the former Israeli prime minister and recently elected Labor leader Ehud Barak, is a formula that guarantees mutual incentives to cooperate. “In a peaceful world, what do the Palestinians anticipate will be their main source of economic viability? Tourism. This is what their own documents say. And, of course, the Israelis make a lot of money from tourism, and that revenue is very easy to track. As a starting point requiring no trust, no mutual cooperation, I would suggest that all tourist revenue be [divided by] a fixed formula based on the current population of the region, which is roughly 40 percent Palestinian, 60 percent Israeli. The money would go automatically to each side. Now, when there is violence, tourists don’t come. So the tourist revenue is automatically responsive to the level of violence on either side for both sides. You have an accounting firm that both sides agree to, you let the U.N. do it, whatever. It’s completely self-enforcing, it requires no cooperation except the initial agreement by the Israelis that they are going to turn this part of the revenue over, on a fixed formula based on population, to some international agency, and that’s that.”

2 Comments — Leave your comment

November 9, 2007 | 4:15 pm

Borats Anonymous

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I’m always late to the viral videos. Borats Anonymous is sort of religious, right? At least it has a bunch of Jewish jokes, and “Throw the Jew Down the Well” makes a rousing appearance. As does Rick James. I must say, though, that most these impersonators look more like Casey Affleck than Borat.

WARNING: Each of these videos is offensive in its own way.

0 Comments — Leave your comment

November 9, 2007 | 4:07 pm

LA drug ring fronting for Hezbollah

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

A seemingly small-time drug ring busted this week in Los Angeles was actually targeted for funding the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah, the Daily News has learned.

Prosecutors left out the terror tie when they announced Tuesday that federal agents and local cops had arrested a dozen people for allegedly peddling cocaine and counterfeit clothing in Bell, Calif.

But several sources familiar with the investigation said the predominantly Arab-American gang was believed to have smuggled its crime cash to the Iranian-backed terror group.

“This was a classic case of terrorism financing, and it was pretty sophisticated how they did it,” a source close to Operation Bell Bottoms told The News.

There’s not much more to the story, but you can read the rest here.

0 Comments — Leave your comment

November 8, 2007 | 11:28 pm

The Forward 50

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The Forward 50 is out, and guess who again got snubbed after missing the Heeb 100. Seriously, though, there are some surprising picks and even more surprising omissions. No Hebrew Hammer?

The Forward

says this year’s selections indicate a greater chasm separating Jewish innovators.

Pessimists have been warning for decades that as younger generations of Jews continued their acculturation into the American mainstream, those at the leading edge of the drift would float away from Jewish identity, leaving a smaller but more committed core. Optimists, if that’s the right word, predicted that the younger, more acculturated Jews wouldn’t disappear from the scene; rather, their Jewish identities would evolve in new and unpredictable ways, leaving the Jewish community as many small communities, with less and less identifiably in common.

This year’s Forward 50 list shows what look to us, at least, like clear signs of continental drift. When we sat down to take a long look at the community, what we found was not a hardening core surrounded by an evanescent periphery, but numerous pockets of identity taking shape on the landscape, most showing clear signs of solidity, but most quite disconnected from ― even unaware of ― the others.

From Los Angeles only seven (and a half) people made the list:

Seth Rogen and Judd Apatow
Henry Waxman
Jimmy Delshad
Roz Rothstein
Rabbi Boruch Shlomo Cunin
Rabbi Laura Geller
Robert Wexler

Well, at least we didn’t have Jack Abramoff on the list again.

0 Comments — Leave your comment