welcome home lad

 

is this what you were expecting when you become frum?

jews without mitzvahs

 Wanna know the REAL difference between Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seger? 

In 1985, Peter Bogdanovich wanted to use Springsteen songs for Mask, since Rocky Dennis, the kid the film is based on, was a big Springsteen fan. He was turned down, because Springsteen was at the height of his popularity and wanted a huge royalty on top of the usage fee. Rocky's mother was heartbroken and said so.

Bob Seger stepped in and said they could use his songs without royalties, because he felt so strongly about the film. They did so.

After a furor in the press, Springsteen later folded and blamed it all on his record company. Which as we know now is totally on-brand for him.

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Jon Landau (born May 14, 1947)^[1] is an American music critic, manager, and record producer. He is best known for his work with Bruce Springsteen.

Born in New York City to a Jewish family, Landau grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and then in Queens before his family moved to the Boston suburb of Lexington, Massachusetts, when he was 12.

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Edward "Punch" Andrews is a music producer who produced many albums of Bob Seger and The Silver Bullet Band and served as his manager for over fifty years.^[1] Andrews has also managed Kid Rock^[2][3] as well as Grand Funk Railroad during the mid-1990s.

You can bet the managers had a big role in the decisions.

Approaching the rabbi

 

Victor Hugo

 Victor Hugo wept over poverty by day and sexually exploited it by night.

Behind the figure of the revered old sage, celebrated for his defense of the oppressed, lurked a cynical bourgeois who directly profited from the hunger of street urchin girls, frantically buying up young girls often just fifteen or sixteen years old. The man who made entire generations weep over the tragic fate of working-class women reduced to selling their bodies to survive offered himself that same misery for a few centimes. The great moralist even kept a horrifying ledger of his abuses. In his intimate notebooks, he methodically recorded the sordid rates, the ages, and the sexual acts, reducing the flesh of the wretched to a mere ledger of accounts. His encrypted journals are filled with chilling entries, such as: "The little laundress, 15 years old: 2 francs," or "Girl from the Rue de la Verrerie. 16 years old. 1 franc 50," amid cold anatomical descriptions coded in Spanish. The cruelty of this man is illustrated in an even more tragic way with Juliette Drouet, the devoted mistress who sacrificed fifty years of her life to him. While the writer positioned himself as the universal champion of freedom, he demanded total submission from his companion, locking her away behind double bolts and destroying her acting career. As he amassed a colossal fortune from his royalties, he took sadistic pleasure in keeping her in humiliating poverty. His correspondence reveals the ordeal of a broken woman. Shivering with cold in winter, Juliette had to beg him to pay the butcher or buy firewood, writing to him in despair: "I am so poor, my adored one, that I no longer have shoes to put on my feet." While she pawned her own dresses to survive, Hugo spent without restraint to multiply his encounters with adolescent girls from the poor neighborhoods. The literary world today maintains a convenient amnesia to protect the golden statue of the great republican in the Panthéon. His own writings depict rather a profiteer of morality who sublimated poverty in his books in order to better buy and enslave it in his bed.

Marx was vengeful

 

Leonidas Arkona

The arm wrestler who deliberately let a father win in front of his young daughter was Leonidas Arkona, a German professional arm wrestler.1 2 3

In a video that went viral on social media, Arkona was participating in a casual arm-wrestling match with a father when he noticed the man's young daughter watching nearby and cheering for her dad. Arkona appeared to deliberately hold back during the contest and eventually allowed the father to win.1 3

The heartwarming moment showed the little girl celebrating by clapping and hugging her father after his victory. Arkona's gesture was widely praised online as an act of sportsmanship and kindness, with many calling it "the best loss" and highlighting how the professional athlete prioritized the child's happiness over showing off his strength.1 3 4

Arkona is known for competing in high-level matches against prominent names in the arm-wrestling world, but in this casual setting, he demonstrated that sometimes the most meaningful victory isn't about winning at all.1 2

Rousseau

 Rousseau famously sent his five kids to die in an orphanage, where only 10-20% made it to adulthood, and to this day he is considered one of the main theorists in the field of raising kids.

It's insane how much people can get away with when they are in the good graces of the "intellectuals".