Okay, I'm the first to admit that I know nothing about cars.

In fact, I once wrote a pilot for a sitcom titled, Jews and Carburetors.

The story of an immigrant Jewish family from the Ukraine who inherit an uncle's auto repair shop in 1950's California, when Detroit muscle cars reigned supreme.

I thought my concept was hilarious.

But the networks, um, disagreed.

“Too Jewish,” said one (Jewish) D-girl.

A Harvard educated (Jewish) network exec said: “Can you turn the Jews into space aliens?”

My (Jewish) agent was like: “Are you insane?”

So, I may not know anything about horsepower, valves or oil filters, but I do recognize and appreciate industrial beauty. And these classic autos are breathtaking.

They definitely don't build 'em like they used to.

In line 8 cylinder, 2.9 liters engine. Only 20 were built between 1937 and 1939.

Built in 1931. V12, 4.9 liters engine. One of the first front wheel drive autos.

Built in 1939. In line 8 cylinder engine, 3.3 liters.

Five units were built between 1938 and 1946. V12, 4.5 liters engine.

Mercedes-Benz 710 SSK Trossi Roadster

Just one was built in Belgium in the 1930's. Six cylinder, 7.7 liters engine.

Unique car, built in 1931. V12, 7.2 liters engine.

Karen and I wish all our friends and relatives a lovely and meaningful Shabbat.

One of the most well observed and cynical movies about actors and acting is Joseph Mankiewicz's All About Eve, 1950.

Bette Davis plays Margo Channing, an aging Broadway star whose personal life and career are jeopardized by the treacherous Eve Harrington, Anne Baxter, a Machiavellian young fan who cleverly oozes into Channing's life.

The script is brilliant, filled with cruel in-jokes, swipes at Broadway, Hollywood, and television.

“That is all that television is, dear—just auditions.”

But one of the most painful and honest moments comes when Margo Channing reflects on her career.

Funny business, a woman's career. The things you drop on your way up the ladder—so you can move faster—you forget you'll need them when you go back to being a woman. That's one career all females have in common whether we like it or not. Being a woman. Sooner or later, we've got to work at it, no matter what other careers we've had or wanted. And in the last analysis nothing is any good unless you can look up before dinner—or turn in bed—and there he is. Without that you're not a woman. You're someone with a French provincial office—or a book full of clippings. But you're not a woman. Slow curtain. The end.

I imagine that post-modern feminists shudder at this monologue.

Years ago, I received an emergency call to the set of one of my movies. The star, a beautiful woman of a certain age, was having difficulty with some of her dialogue and demanded a rewrite.

Dutifully, I hopped in my car, drove like mad to the location, and a production assistant quickly ushered me into our star's trailer.

The lady was obviously distraught. But, I soon discovered, her lines were the least of her problems. No, our actress was going through a painful, slow-motion break-up with a boyfriend at least ten years her junior.

“I'm not getting any younger,” she said between gulps of wine, “I don't want to end up alone.”

I fixed her dialogue—shifted a few commas—and wished her the best of luck.

Last I heard, she was married—to her fourth husband.

To quote from Bereishis, Genesis 2-18: “It is not good that man be alone...“

Make no mistake about it, Barack Hussein Obama is a radical leftist whose vision is to transform America into a Socialist European-style nanny state.

From foreign policy—where Obama is in the process of sticking it to the UK's Falkland Islands—the Obama administration is breaking with the principled governance predicated upon American exceptionalism.

Yesterday, I attended a Republican Jewish Coalition lunch at Shiloh's a kosher restaurant here in Los Angeles. The speaker, Professor Robert G. Kaufman opened with this crystallizing statement:

“President Obama sees himself as an extraordinary leader leading an ordinary country. President Ronald Reagan saw himself as an ordinary man leading an extraordinary country.”

It's that simple and that complicated.

From the articulate and sane pages of the Wall Street Journal:

A string of electoral defeats and the great unpopularity of ObamaCare can't stop Democrats from their self-appointed rendezvous with liberal destiny—ramming a bill through Congress on a narrow partisan vote. What we are about to witness is an extraordinary abuse of traditional Senate rules to pass a bill merely because they think it's good for the rest of us, and because they fear their chance to build a European welfare state may never come again.

The vehicle is "reconciliation," a parliamentary process that fast-tracks budget measures and was created in 1974 as a deficit-reduction tool. Limited to 20 hours of debate, reconciliation bills need a mere 50 votes in the Senate, with the Vice President as tie-breaker, thus circumventing the filibuster. Both Democrats and Republicans have frequently used reconciliation on budget bills, so Democrats are now claiming that using it to pass ObamaCare is no big deal.

Yet this shortcut has never been used for anything approaching the enormity of a national health-care entitlement. Democrats are only resorting to it now because their plan is in so much political trouble—within their own party, and even more among the general public—and because they've failed to make their case through persuasion.

Full story here.

The media are in a self-righteous frenzy about the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a Hamas terrorist.

Was it a Mossad hit?

Probably.

Hope so.

Hey, I'm having trouble getting all worked up about the assassination of a known terrorist and bagman.

Dubai and the world press are just scandalized that false passports were used. Afterall, the assassins should have played fair and used their real passports, right?

They're also all worked up that there were false beards, bad wigs, big hats, and a clean get-a-way.

There's also outrage that there were so many assassins.

Because, um, their carbon footprint was way too big.

But the real scandal is that Dubai knowingly allowed this murderer and terrorist financier to use their country as a forward base for meeting with Iranian agents to secure arms and funding.

Look, if the U.S. can use drones in Afghanistan to delete terrorist scum—with collateral damage, meaning innocent civilians—then a clean hit in a Dubai hotel room seems perfectly within the bounds of counterterrorist activities.

You want to get all worked up about some false passports?

Knock yourself out.

I'd like to volunteer the use of my passport if it will help liquidate an Islamist terrorist.

It would be an honor.

But let's focus for a moment on Dahi Khalfan Tamim, the Dubai chief of police, who, not surprisingly, is a raving Jew-hater. Elder of Ziyon reports on comments that have not been reported in the clueless Western press.

Dahi Khalfan Tamim, Commander in Chief of Dubai Police, said Israel is a rogue state, and that goes beyond international legitimacy and laws. Its leaders have sick mentalities, and they need psychologists, saying that its use of passports shows great arrogance and contempt for the world.

(Tamim said that) the leaders of Israel have blood on their hands the blood of others throughout history, pointing out that the "Israeli" people are human beings like any other people who want to be loved and open to others but that the successive governments, the Governments of bloodshed and assassinations, and wars and the Governments of the occupation and aggression, are not interested in peace in the world at all.

He added that the vanity which haunts the Israeli mentality stems from the time of Pharaoh, and their hate comes up to this day and age.

He said that the entire world should study the mentality of the Israeli leaders throughout history. Their sick psyches needs to be analyzed by psychology professors, who need to examine why they launch crises, and why they brought on themselves hate from others, since the time of Moses, peace be upon him.

He said we will train our personnel in the passport of the forms and features of the Jewish people and their names, noting that no one can hide their features of Jewishness. He asked the appropriate departments to prepare nationality and residency sessions to familiarize the staff with [Jewish] forms and names, especially since most Jews hold dual passports [with Israel.]

More here.

I like the part about “training their personnel in the features of the Jewish people and their names.”

Good luck with that fella.

What a racist moron.

And this is the guy the world press is breathlessly quoting as if he's some Muslim Sherlock Holmes.

Meanwhile, where is the CCTV footage outside al-Mabhouh's room?

Whoops.

Once again, Elder of Ziyon reports that the so-called “careless” assassins jammed those particular hallway cameras.

Nice.

Apparently, Interpol is getting involved in the investigation and are looking to arrest the assassins.

But Interpol never sought to arrest al-Mabhouh, a known murderer and terrorist.

Weird how that works, huh?

No less than half-a-dozen readers forwarded this wonderful story.

When Pawel looks into the mirror, he can still sometimes see a neo-Nazi skinhead staring back, the man he was before he covered his shaved head with a skullcap, traded his fascist ideology for the Torah and renounced violence and hatred in favor of God.

“I still struggle every day to discard my past ideas,” said Pawel, a 33-year-old ultra-Orthodox Jew and former truck driver, noting with little irony that he had to stop hating Jews in order to become one. “When I look at an old picture of myself as a skinhead, I feel ashamed. Every day I try and do teshuvah,” he said, using the Hebrew word for repentance. “Every minute of every day. There is a lot to make up for.”

Pawel, who also uses his Hebrew name Pinchas, asked that his last name not be used for fear that his old neo-Nazi friends could harm him or his family.

Twenty years after the fall of Communism, Pawel is perhaps the most unlikely example of the Jewish revival under way in Poland, of a moment in which Jewish leaders here say the country is finally showing solid signs of shedding the rabid anti-Semitism of the past.

Full story here.

Last night Karen and I attended a Purim meal where we met a young Japanese man, a political science Ph.D candidate in here in California. He was wearing a yarmulke and explained that he was in the process of converting to Judaism. “All my life, ” he said, ”I felt like I didn't quite fit in to Japanese culture.”

I told him how happy I was that he was converting and what a relief it must be that he has discovered his true social and religious community.

Too often, converts to Judaism are discouraged by other Jews—usually ignoramuses—who tell the potential convert how hard it is to be Jewish, that it's a burden.

This is nonsense.

Judaism is a blessing and a gift. We should encourage Orthodox conversions.

Hey, I've got a fab-u-lous Idea.

While you're noshing on your mishloach manot, check out Haveil Havalim # 258, The Purim Edition, enthusiastically edited by The Israel Situation.

Unfortunate political associations aside, red shoes can be a fashion risk. The color not only pops but frequently overpowers whatever else you're wearing.

But this season, designers have embraced red in a big way, often pairing the powerful hue with bold arcitectural lines.

Red is the new black.

Prada does a clever boot that conjures the boxing
ring. A knock-out for the war between the sexes.

Flirty little red buds sprout on Carolina Herrera's
classic t-strap pump.

Christian Louboutin expertly layers multiple
textures and subtle patterns on this striking shoe.

The classic ballet flat in fire engine red by Omelle,
the hot new brand favored by Sex and the City ladies.

Okay, I'm going to buy these Sergio Rossi platform pumps
for Karen. Classic retro look, and the peep-toe is totally cute.

The late Alexander McQueen created towering platforms with
delicate and enchanting Chinese beadwork. Not recommended for
dancing—or walking. But hey, perfect for Purim!

Can you name the film and actress pictured?

Want to know where Seraphic Secret picks up some cool fashion trends, check out Karen.

Karen and I wish all our friends and relatives a meaningful Shabbat and a joyous Purim.

Learn more about Crossing the Line.

H/T Jack

When Hitler moved to solidify his power base in Germany, he discovered that the chattering classes, particularly university intellectuals, were early and enthusiastic supporters of the Nazi ideology. Scientists, lawyers, artists, and an overwhelming number of physicians were all too willing to provide an intellectual framework for Nazi oppression and genocide.

Moral clarity and courage are rarely found in universities. The chattering classes almost always find justifications for totalitarian rule.

During World War II Jean Paul Sartre—hero to the left— and his high-minded, highly libidinous existential buddies spent the war years yammering away in fashionable Parisian coffee shops while all around them Jews were rounded up and sent to the ovens of Auschwitz.

Thus, it's no surprise that American and European universities are natural breeding grounds for the Islamists who openly plot to destroy western civilization and finish up Hitler's Final Solution, finally.

As we have pointed out, Congo is the murder, rape and mutilation capital of the world, with 45,000 murdered every single month since 2007. Thus over 6.9 million people have been slaughtered.

You would think that the oh-so-compassionate left would be taking to the streets in protest.

But there is a deafening silence in regards to Congo.

Why?

Because there are no Jews to blame.

In fact, every odious charge brought against Israel/Judaism are crimes for which the Islamists and their western enablers are guilty. They are totalitarian thugs who cruelly oppress Jews, Christians, homosexuals and, of course, women. Apartheid is state law in Saudi Arabia—Jews are forbidden to set foot in this racist Muslim kingdom, and Christians are forbidden to worship. And Iran, with metronomic regularity, promises to wipe Israel/Jews off the face of the earth.

Jew-hatred is the coin of the realm in every single Muslim country on the planet. The Jews of Yemen, the last remnants of an ancient and proud Jewish/Yemenite community, are fleeing. Except for the 2,000 Jews of Morocco, the Arab Muslim world is Judenrein.

And the trend to expel Jews from their homes and lands of birth is spreading to Europe.

Jihad in Antwerp, Eurabia.

The Jews of Malmo, Sweden are fleeing.

In one generation, there will be no Jews living in Scandinavia.

The Jews of France and England have been targeted by Islamists and their leftist allies. French and British Jews are quietly making plans to leave their homes. The last time I was in Israel a real estate agent showed me blocks and blocks of empty apartments. “Purchased by French and British Jews who are waiting for the inevitable pogrom that will bring them to Israel,” he explained.

Europe has made a fateful decision. They have decided to trade loyal, productive Jewish citizens for disloyal, sharia-yearning Muslims who are frequently on the dole.

It's a recipe for national suicide.

Make no mistake about it, academic Anti-Zionism is the new Jew-hatred, and Western universities are the breeding ground for this malignancy, the new Reichstag.

UC Irvine, the epicenter of Islamist/academic Jew-hatred in California.

And guess which American church is ushering in the holiday of Purim with some old-fashioned Jew-hatred?

He converted from Islam to Christianity and became one of Israel's most potent weapons against Islamic terrorism.

The Shin Bet is quite good at penetrating terrorist cells.

One can't help but wonder how many Mossad agents are active in Iran. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad might want to, um, rethink the next family circle.

The son of one of Hamas’s founding members was a spy in the service of Israel for more than a decade, helping prevent dozens of Islamist suicide bombers from finding their targets, it emerged today.

Codenamed the Green Prince by Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of Hamas co-founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef, supplied key intelligence on an almost daily basis from 1996 onwards and tracked down suicide bombers and their handlers from his father’s organization, the daily Haaretz said.

Information he supplied led to the arrests of some of the most wanted men by Israeli forces, including Marwan Barghouti, a Fatah leader often tipped as a potential president who was convicted of masterminding terrorist attacks, and one of Hamas’ top bomb-makers Abdullah Barghouti, who is no relation of the jailed Fatah chief.

Snip!

Speaking by telephone from California, Mr. Yousef told Haaretz he worried that the Israeli Government might release some of the prisoners he helped put behind bars in exchange for Gilad Schalit, a young Israeli soldier abducted by Hamas from the Gaza border more than three years ago.

“I wish I were in Gaza now," he said. "I would put on an army uniform and join Israel's special forces in order to liberate Gilad Schalit. If I were there, I could help. We wasted so many years with investigations and arrests to capture the very terrorists that they now want to release in return for Schalit. That must not be done."

Full story here.

Meanwhile, the excellent blog, Elder of Ziyon reports that a Don't Mess With the Mossad T-shirt is selling like hot cakes.

The Irish Times reports:

Sales of Mossad-themed T-shirts, available by mail order, have risen tenfold since the Israeli spy agency was linked to last month’s assassination in Dubai.

Despite the fact that Israeli leaders are refusing to confirm or deny Mossad involvement, orders for the garments have flooded in over the past few weeks — from Israelis and particularly from diaspora Jews.

Eran Davidov, marketing manager of a top mail order company selling Israeli-made products, told The Irish Times they have been overwhelmed by demand since they launched a special “Show off your Mossad and Israeli pride” campaign earlier this week.

Full story at Elder of Ziyon.

The T-shirt's popularity is not hard to comprehend.

Normal people understand, on a gut level, that terrorists need to get dead.

They should not be treated like common criminals, but as illegal enemy combatants.

They should bot be handed constitutional rights, nor tried in civilian courts.

The hit in Dubai is another in the Mossad's long line of greatest hits.

Terrorists have learned two important lessons from Dubai:

1. Israeli intelligence agents and field operatives have the ability to penetrate deep into the heart of the Arab Muslim world.

2. The Mossad has valuable assets in the Arab Muslim world. Thus, terrorist leaders are on notice that their circle of trusted operatives is compromised. This constricts their movements and sows fear and paranoia in every terrorist cell.

I'm shocked. Just shocked.

Scientists have been forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the findings.

The study, published in 2009 in Nature Geoscience, one of the top journals in its field, confirmed the conclusions of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It used data over the last 22,000 years to predict that sea level would rise by between 7cm and 82cm by the end of the century.

At the time, Mark Siddall, from the Earth Sciences Department at the University of Bristol, said the study "strengthens the confidence with which one may interpret the IPCC results". The IPCC said that sea level would probably rise by 18cm-59cm by 2100, though stressed this was based on incomplete information about ice sheet melting and that the true rise could be higher.

Full story here.

Look, the global warming house of card is collapsing. Ordinary Americans realize that it's just a pretext for big government to exert even more control over our lives, to impose higher taxes, and to regulate, well, everything.

As I said before, global warming/climate change, whatever the label this week, is the new Socialism.

Leftists always manage to manufacture some great global crisis that, inevitably, involves massive government intervention because we, ordinary citizens, are just too dumb to recognize the Hollywood-like end-of-world threat, much less deal with it effectively.

There was the Bomb. We were going to blow ourselves up with nuclear weapons. The solution? Ban the bomb. This dopey movement still has some traction. Except when it comes to Iran. The Persian rush to nuclear power is getting a pass from those who, ostensibly, favor nuclear reduction.

Remember the population bomb? The earth was being overpopulated by filthy humans. The fix was, naturally, less human beings. Governments would step in and sterilize their over-libidonous citizens. India, from 1975-1977, forced sterilizations of the poor, until riots broke out and the government was forced to retreat.

(I'll spare you the The Gopher Tortoise Conservation, and for that you can thank me later.)

There was Global Freezing...

Time magazine, Dec. 1973.

... then Global Warming, and of course now it's just the Orwellian-themed Climate Change.

Have you noticed that the fanatics who rant about the weather almost never deal with true evil?

For instance, The Congo.

Evelyn Hockstein/Polaris

Since 2007 6.9 million people have been murdered. That's 45,000 a month.

Rape, torture and mutilation are part and parcel of the gruesome Congo landscape.

Nicholas Kristof has done a fine job of reporting on this hell on earth:

It’s easy to wonder how world leaders, journalists, religious figures and ordinary citizens looked the other way while six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. And it’s even easier to assume that we’d do better.

But so far the brutal war here in eastern Congo has not only lasted longer than the Holocaust but also appears to have claimed more lives. A peer- reviewed study put the Congo war’s death toll at 5.4 million as of April 2007 and rising at 45,000 a month. That would leave the total today, after a dozen years, at 6.9 million.

What those numbers don’t capture is the way Congo has become the world capital of rape, torture and mutilation, in ways that sear survivors like Jeanne Mukuninwa, a beautiful, cheerful young woman of 19 who somehow musters the courage to giggle. Her parents disappeared in the fighting when she had just turned 14 — perhaps they were massacred, but their bodies never turned up — so she moved in with her uncle.

A few months later, the extremist Hutu militia invaded the home. She remembers that it was the day of her very first menstrual period — the only one she has ever had.

“First, they tied up my uncle,” Jeanne said. “They cut off his hands, gouged out his eyes, cut off his feet, cut off his sex organs, and left him like that. He was still alive.

“His wife and his son were also there. Then they took all of us into the forest.” That militia is known for kidnapping people and enslaving them for months, even years. Men are turned into porters, and girls into sex slaves.

Jeanne and other girls were regularly tied spread-eagle and gang-raped, and she soon became pregnant. The rapes continued, sometimes with sticks that tore apart her insides and left her dribbling wastes constantly. Somehow the fetus survived, but her pelvis was too immature to deliver the baby.

One of the people the militia had kidnapped was a doctor who was forced to treat the soldiers. The doctor, seeing that Jeanne was close to dying in obstructed childbirth, cut her open with an old knife, without anesthetic, and removed the stillborn baby. Jeanne was delirious and almost dead, so the militia dumped her beside a road.

Full story here.

But hey, the genocide in Congo is relatively minor compared to the global threat of the weather, and of course, Al Gore's polar bears.