The SC&A Valentine’s Day Primer

Valentine’s day is fast approaching. It is with that in mind that we present our Valentines Day Primer. You have a little more than two weeks to avoid disaster. Use this time to prevent yet another romantic catastrophe.

We at the SC&A Institute are pleased to present this short primer that is guaranteed to make Valentine’s Day dinner and subsequent festivities memorable- in a good way.

Most of you understand that Valentine’s Day is a commercial adaption of a meaningful idea, employed in a cynical attempt to extract your hard earned dollars. Flowers and candy are overpriced, restaurants adjust their menus to include higher priced items and wines and because of today, florists will remain in a state of arousal until Mother’s Day.

Nevertheless, some of you will be sucked into the Valentine’s Day vortex, never to escape. It is for you that we offer this advice.

Firstly, unless you have done this before and have learned your lesson, do not seek to cut Valentine’s Day expenses by getting your flowers from a cometary or funeral home. Nothing puts a damper on romance more than an arrangement that is bedecked with a ‘Next Time, Vinny Two-Toes, We Get Your Kids‘ or ‘Off to That Big Saloon in the Sky‘ message, printed in gold, on a black ribbon.

If you insist on funerary arrangements, as a rule, avoid all arrangements that are horseshoe shaped.

If you’re going out for dinner, remember that the experience entails more than just food. Do not park too far away from the restaurant, to save on parking fees. If you are in an area that has high parking fees, chances are you can’t really afford dinner in that neighborhood, either. If your date, by some miracle, is actually accompanying you because she wants to, as opposed to going out with you because you were her last shot at free food, there are a few things you need to consider.

As soon as you close her car door (if that isn’t in your reality, ‘lucky’ is not a world in your vocabulary),  be sure to compliment her entire outfit. Start with your date’s shoes. More than likely your date is wearing sexy shoes. Of course, you don’t really know they are sexy, as all shoes tend to classified in the same way. The proper response is : ‘Yes, those shoes are really great (add points if you say, ‘Perfect!’).  You must say that. Women do not understand that to a man, the primary definition of ’sexy,’ means underwear- and as long as it’s coming off, it’s really  great underwear.

OK, back to VDay dinner.

If you park too far from the restaurant, her feet will hurt later on. Hurt feet have the same effect as flowers purloined from a funeral home. To repeat: That means you will be reading (or rather, in your case, looking at the pictures) a sports or handyman magazine after you date insists she has a headache that ‘just came on’ after the free food.

Onwards. Assuming you have actually paid for parking and managed to get her and her delicate feet into the restaurant, assume that she expects more than a fine meal and meaningful, loving conversation. She wants you to demonstrate how much you love her and how much she means to you.

This means she wants you to spend money. There is no other way you can prove to her that you love her. It’s about money. Now, she may say she doesn’t want you to spend the money- she may even insist on it, leaving you with the carefully crafted illusion and impression that she means it.

You are being tested. It is imperative that you be smart about it all and adamantly disagree. Make a scene, if you must, but leave her with the impression that your entire existence depends on her allowing you to be extravagant. Like her birthday and Mother’s Day, VDay is going to cost you and hurt you. When you are in pain, she will be happy, because you have demonstrated that you love her (and you have proved that she can indeed outsmart you).

Your date will order something off the menu. Of course, it won’t be anything reasonably priced, but rather a variation of something she likes that she has not tasted before. It is being ordered because ‘it sounds interesting.’ As a rule if food ‘sounds interesting,’ it means one of two things: It is more expensive, or, she hopes to later on chat with friends about her selection of dining fare and will remark on your Neanderthal tastes.

Now, ordering wine is a tricky issue. If she enjoys wine and can keep her clothes on if she has quite a bit to drink, order the cheap bottle. She won’t remember. If she does not drink, bite the bullet and order the expensive bottle, as she will remember that and in the end, that may serve you well, later on.

The worst case scenario is if you order the expensive wine, chugs glass after glass down like a sailor on his first night of leave then attempts to remove her clothes, in the restaurant.

There is no happy ending because by the time you break every speed limit and plow through every red light in town to get home, she will be sober enough to remember what transpired and she will be horrified. In fact, she will too furious to even to pass out (just so you understand, that means you aren’t getting any’) She will lash out at you for any one of a myriad of reasons, selected from that bottomless well that serves as her storage space for the contempt she has for you.

Now, we will assume that you are hanging on by a thread, and that the only thing that separates you from utter frustration (that you have bought and paid for) are a few words.

Here are a few remarks that are entirely inappropriate and must be avoided.

“Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.”- H.L. Mencken

“A man can be happy with any woman, as longf as he does not love her.”- Oscar Wilde

“A woman can be happy with any man, as long as he has money”- P. Santy

“You look like a million dollars, after taxes.- Anonymous

“When all is said and done, the weather and love are the two elements about which one can never be sure.”- Alice Hoffman

“There is no love sincerer than the love of food”- George Bernard Shaw

“Think about a woman. Doesn’t know you’re thinking about her. Makes you think about her even more.”- Martin Sage and Sybil Adelman, Northern Exposure, ‘The Bumpy Road To Love,’ 1991

Happy Valentine’s Day and Good Luck.

“Oxygen Of The Soul”

Many of Luxembourg’s Muslims this weekend fled their homes for a hotel after receiving death threats from Christian militants accusing the country’s tiny Muslim community of serving as agents for “global Islam.” The Muslims said they feared for their lives. It was disclosed they had been forced to pay special taxes that Christians imposes on Jews and Muslims in return for protection and security. About 45 Jews left their village in Sa’ada county in Luxembourg after Dawoud Yousuf Mousa, one of the heads of the local Islamic community, was warned Jan. 10 if the Muslims don’t leave within 10 days they would be exposed to killings, abductions and looting. About 45 Muslims left their village in Saint Adaire county in Luxembourg after Dawoud Yousuf Mousa, one of the heads of the local Muslim community, was warned Jan. 10 if the Muslims don’t leave within 10 days they would be exposed to killings, abductions and looting.

Four masked militants approached Mousa and delivered a letter to him warning the Islamic community had been under Christian surveillance.

“After accurate surveillance over the Muslims residing in St Adaire, it has become clear to us that they were doing things which serve mainly global Jihad, which seeks to corrupt the people and distance them from their principles, their values, their morals, and their religion,” the letter stated.

Pretty outrageous, right?

Well, not to worry. Substitute the word ‘Muslim‘ with the word ‘Jew‘ and ‘Luxembourg‘ with ‘Yemen,’ and the real news story emerges.

In Jews of Yemen, Liberals And Modern Kapos, Robert Avrech takes the plunge into reality, a skill held in disrepute by many on the left.

It is worth noting that Osama Bin Laden is from Yemen. It is also worth noting that the most fanatical terrorists in Iraq, those who are slaughtering Iraqi citizens–preferably women and children–are Yemenites. That’s right, not Iraqi “freedom fighters” as the liberals in the west would have you believe. No, the terrorists in Iraq are, for the most part, foreign killers: Yemenites, Saudis, Palestinians (big shock, huh?) Islamic totalitarians, all.

Avrech makes his point- radical Islamism manifests itself beyond Iraq and beyond the Israel-Palestine issue. As Hamas leaders and Hizbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah point out, they view conflict with their adversaries as a kind of religious expression (anti Jewish and anti Christian). Nasrallah has noted that Jews in Israel would ‘save us the trouble of having to round them up.‘

There are many people who extol the virtues of All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten- except when it comes to politics, religion and the Middle East. In those areas, black is white and day is night. Good becomes evil and evil becomes good.

Avrech dryly points to the hypocrisy of those who must follow the fictional script that insulates them from realities even kindergarten age children can discern:

I’ll never forget how the NY Times “journalist” described the burning of the Gaza Synagogues:

“Fires and pillars of smoke climb into the sky.”

In other words, the fires started all by themselves. Spontaneous combustion. G-d forbid he should be accurate, tell the truth: the Arabs immediately set the Synagogues on fire. The “journalist” well knows that this is the action of barbarians — and the N.Y. Times, liberal/progressive, defends barbarians, enables barbarians. Thus, as the Israelis were expelled from their homes in Gaza, as Synagogues were consumed, the Arabs also set up their rocket launchers –

– this is known, children, as cause and effect.

And the rockets were immediately labeled by these same liberal/progressive journalists as: “crude, inaccurate, ineffective.”

This is not only the death of language, but language that defends terrorism and terrorists; language and concepts that enable terrorists to continue their attacks, and language that makes it easy for the terrorists to gradually escalate and improve their killing methodology. Here the bloodless language of murder gradually, seamlessly becomes respectable.

Avrech goes on to note,

…in true Stalin-speak, downgraded, rendered as “just a crude rocket” launched by “militants.” Note that according to the N.Y. Times and their fellow liberal/progressive there are no terrorists any longer on planet earth.

In Paris, they are distilled into “angry youths.” In Pakistan, those who behead are reimaged as, at worst, “shadowy militants.” In Israel, most often, terrorists are defanged into “security forces,” or “angry, unemployed militants.” Indeed, the Palestinians, who invented and perfected modern state Arab terrorism, have been given the gift of Orwellian double-speak on a truly colossal scale.

Here we have language that is complicit in the murder of innocent men, women and children.

Democracy and democratic values have always known forces that were intent on deconstructing or destroying the values and the freedom we have come to represent. There are now entire political and religious ideologies that have been predicated on vilifying us and our belief that freedom serves all of mankind. These has become their primary objectives and obsessions. Oppression has always been the tool of those who would sooner kill millions, if necessary, rather than see their people free.

Americans- and American values- are different. Although we are raised with the conscious understanding that those that came before us were giants, and that we are obligated to defend and build upon those principles and ideals of our Founding Fathers, we understand that we are not better than they. While we are endowed with the privilege of improving the gifts we have been given, we are not meant to reinterpret the essential freedoms that is our destiny, with each successive generation.

The moral genius of freedom is clear. Generations born into freedom with no collective memory of oppression, have been elevated and liberated from the bondage of fear, and as such, are even more beholden to the morals and obligations that bestowed that freedom.

Those who would usurp real freedom by identifying with and supporting those who by their own words, abhor freedom and would deprive entire nations, religions, cultures and societies of freedom (including our own), are of course, free to speak their minds. That said, it is also clear that those people are not deserving of the freedoms they have been blessed with. They are not equal to those who see freedom as universal force for good. They are in fact, like convicted felons who have made their choice to live outside the laws of common decency and the laws that bind our community together and make our community a safe place. They want to see the laws of the jungle imposed so that they can impose their will on others.

We are passionate about real freedom for ourselves and those who are desirous of freedom because freedom is the foundation of our beliefs. Free peoples are free to choose the things they believe in, without fear of violence or repercussion. As we have noted many times, when given the choice, people will always choose freedom over tyranny.

Freedom, real freedom, is the only ideology in the history of mankind, that wants to make the world a better place, a place where each and every one of us can author our own destiny, without stripping others of their rights. In a free society, we are free to exercise free will. We can choose to believe in God or we can exercise that free will and choose not to believe in God. In a free society, God takes care of His affairs. In a society that isn’t free, the tyranny du jour and their adherents and proponents take it upon themselves to handle God’s affairs for Him- usually in a way that serves the tyrants needs.

That is an undeniable truth. Tyranny does not support morality or rightiousness. We have said many times that

When nations that are that are led by or are under the influence of tyrants or dictators, attempt to justify those actions, we can rightly assume that justification is false. Tyrants and dictators do not make moral choices, because moral choices can only lead to the demise of the tyranny.

Anyone that comes to the defense of tyrannical regimes and their leaders, have themselves made a conscious choice to defend and stand by what is immoral. They themselves consciously adopt an immoral posture.

The opposite is true as well.

Freedom makes the world a more civilized and moral place. Notwithstanding the reality that much of the world do not care about those ideals, that truth about freedom is unassailable. Those that resist and resent our involvement in helping to secure freedom for others, may at times, seem to prevail, but in the end, even that is illusory. Evolution, political and otherwise, has always meant that man was empowered and free to reach greater heights, unencumbered by the tyranny of other men asserting their dominion over his freedom, property, ideas or beliefs.

There are really only two ways you can hurt someone. Take away their dignity or take away their hope. When a tyrannical regime oppresses a citizen, they take away dignity. When that oppressed citizen no longer believes that there are free and good people who care about him and others in his predicament, he is left without hope. To the victim of tyranny, hope takes the form of an average American, from an average place.

Of the almost 7 billion people on this planet, only 300 million are Americans. To put that in perspective, less than 5% of the population of this planet are Americans- and yet, the world is obsessed with our existence and what we represent- that freedom liberates not only physical existence, but unleashes limitless human potential and opportunity.

In the course of just over 200 years, we have provided the world with ideas, contributions and realities that are in the consciousness of every human being on the planet. Given our numbers and short history, we should not have had this profound influence on history and mankind- and yet, we have. The secret to our our successes and influence can be attributed to one powerful word: Freedom.

The notion that all men are created equal, is a biblical concept. It took America to make that a reality, in those political ideas called freedom and democracy. “They will beat their swords into plowshares…nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore,” can only come about as the result of freedom and democracy for all mankind. It is folly to believe that anything less will bring about peace. The one thing we have learned is that democracies don’t wage war with each other. They do not take up arms to settle disputes. The same cannot be said of tyrannies, now or in the past.

Avrech is right, of course- ‘the bloodless language of murder gradually, seamlessly becomes respectable.’

Those who offer support to regimes that use oppression and violence as a matter of course and ideologies, do not represent America or American values.

“Freedom Is The Oxygen Of The Soul”- Moshe Dayan