Thursday, April 26, 2012

Israel Marks 64 Years Of Independence

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israelis celebrated their country's 64th anniversary Wednesday with fireworks and military processions at a national ceremony in Jerusalem.
The festivities came immediately after Memorial Day for fallen soldiers and victims of militant attacks, an annual ritual of twinning grief with elation and pointing out the link between the two.
Preparations for Independence Day were marred last week when a lighting rig collapsed during a rehearsal, crushing a young soldier to death.

Speaking at the official ceremony, Parliament Speaker Reuven Rivlin cautioned against extremism of all stripes, naming ultra-Orthodox Jewish zealots, ideologues who burn mosques and activists who delegitimize the state as "those who threaten the future of Israeli society."
Government statistics showed that Israel's population grew by 137,500 since last year to 7,881,000. The Central Bureau of Statistics said 75 percent of the population is Jewish and 21 percent is Arab. The remaining 4 percent represents tiny minorities or immigrants who are not Jewish.
Traditional Independence Day celebrations include dancing in city streets and family cookouts in national parks. Some military bases open Thursday for visits, and Israeli cities host open-air concerts in honor of the holiday.

Monday, April 23, 2012

VIDEO: Find out what Chinese people think about Jews


     A well known American stereotype is that Jews love Chinese food, but what do the Chinese think of Jews? Rachel Guo, the creator of the web-based Chinese series "Real China, No Drama" asked the same question. The answers were presented in an episode fittingly called "Oy Vey: China on the Jews" and seem to stick to the stereotypical impressions of Jewish people in a country where bookstores are full of titles like "The Magic of Jewish Investment" and "The Kaballah of Smart Business Management"

Saturday, April 21, 2012

Conservative Jews in Israel OK gay rabbis

JERUSALEM -- The Conservative Jewish seminary in Israel has voted to allow gays and lesbians to become rabbis, overcoming years of opposition by many of its own leaders.
The Schechter Rabbinical Seminary, affiliated with Israel's Conservative Jewish movement, announced it would begin accepting gay and lesbian rabbinical students this fall.
The seminary's dean said it is committed to both Jewish law and pluralism, a reference to various branches of Judaism.
The decision late Thursday ends a rift with the U.S. branch, which has allowed gay and lesbian rabbinical students since 2007. It ordained its first openly lesbian rabbi last year.
The Conservative movement interprets Jewish law more strictly than the liberal Reform movement, but its ordination of female rabbis and other practices are not accepted by more stringent Orthodox Jews.

Read more here: http://miamiherald.typepad.com/gaysouthflorida/2012/04/conservative-jews-in-israel-ok-gay-rabbis.html#storylink=cpy
Read original post in Miami Herald

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Donna Feldman, la nueva latina super modelo?

         A new cover and layout for my glamazon sister extraordinare, Donna Feldman, who is seen heating up the pages of spanish language luxury magazine, Enlosocial. She is giving us super sexy south of the border. Each of these photos is proof positive that Donna Feldman is expanding in her global dominance of every demographic. Maybe soon Donna will be posing in front of an Igloo on the cover of Eskimo Living Magazine. There is simply nothing her beauty can't do.
Mira mi hermana, la bella modelo y sus fotos maravillosas.

Israel remembers Holocaust with two minute silence


Israeli soldiers stand in formation during the opening ceremony of the annual Holocaust Memorial Day at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem.

Millions of Israelis on Thursday stood silently and all road traffic stopped as sirens wailed for two minutes to remember the six million Jews who were killed during the Nazi Holocaust. The annual ritual, which is observed at 10 am, is a central part of Holocaust Memorial Day which began at sundown on Wednesday. Official events began on Wednesday evening with a formal ceremony at Yad Vashem Holocaust museum, attended by top Israeli officials, and were to continue throughout the day at various locations throughout the country. During the day, a special session of parliament will be devoted to remembering the dead, and radio and television stations run blanket coverage of Holocaust-related issues, screening films, documentaries and debates, many including the testimony of survivors.

    This year, for the first time, a delegation of European Roma and Sinti are attending the ceremonies in Israel, among them representatives from Poland, the Czech Republic, Germany, the Netherlands and Slovakia. During World War II, Nazi Germany exterminated about half of the Roma and Sinti populations in occupied countries. In his speech at the ceremony on Wednesday night, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged the world to wake up to the new existential threat facing the Jewish people -- a nuclear Iran. “People who refuse to see the Iranian threat have learned nothing from the Shoah (Holocaust),” he said. "They are afraid to speak the truth, which is today, as it was then, that there are people who want to annihilate millions of Jews. “The truth is that an Iran in possession of nuclear arms is an existential threat to the State of Israel,” he said, demanding that Tehran be “stopped.” Israel and much of the West believes Iran is using its civilian nuclear program to build a weapon, a charge the Islamic Republic vehemently denies.

Monday, April 16, 2012

Springtime on 22nd Street NYC as seen through my Hipstamatic Salvador Dali Lens

"Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation. "
- Salvador Dali
Balconies 
Cab
Skyline

Friday, April 13, 2012

New window display of the classic Original Boy Butter 16 oz

Located in NYC's Chelsea neighborhood the Blue DVD (165 8th Ave., 212-255-1080) is one of several popular stores on 8th Avenue specializing in adult novelties, movies, personal lubricants as they're an official distributor of Boy Butter products, safer-sex supplies, and the like. While you are there you can always check out the latest Boy Butter window display.
 "Try squeezing some Boy Butter into your tight agenda today."

Since 2003

Sunday, April 8, 2012

Flagging with the Feldmans on Easter

Check out these old time videos of me flagging with my nephews Nathaniel, Gabriel and sister Donna.

HIking Photos from the Santa Monica Mountains of Calabasas, CA

"Freedom- to walk free and own no superior."  - Walt Whitman
Hiking path
Rolling hills
Gnarled tree
Rock and Road
Broken tree and hills
Shady tree

Thursday, April 5, 2012

Op-ed: Israel and the Nukes of Hazard


Michael Lucas argues that, when faced with Iran’s nuclear aspirations, Israel should remember a lesson about whether the international community can be trusted with its security.


Six million Jews died in the Holocaust. Six million Jews live in Israel today, where the threat of another Holocaust grows greater by the day. But the world tells them to wait and trust.
As Iran moves closer to creating viable nuclear weapons, Israel has been criticized for suggesting that it might launch preemptive strikes on Iranian weapons facilities. We can’t know whether such strikes would prevent the nuclear empowerment of one of the world’s most dangerous countries. But we need to understand why the Israelis might take this step, and why we should hope they succeed if they do.
“Never again.” This was the vow that Jews have been determined to uphold since the Holocaust. A centuries-old culture of bookish passivity — of meekness, of not making waves — was murdered by the Nazis along with the 6 million. In 1948, when the nation of Israel rose from the ashes of the European slaughter, it did so with a new understanding of self defense as a matter of life and death.
The medieval theocrats who run Iran do not see the Nazi legacy the same way. In 2006, Tehran hosted a conference for Holocaust revisionists and deniers; Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently referred to the Nazi genocide as a “big lie.” But Ahmadinejad seems determined to make Jewish extermination a reality in our time, openly calling for the “eradication” of Jewish Israelis. "The Zionist regime is a center of microbes, a cancer cell,” he said last summer. “If it exists in one iota of Palestine it will mobilize again and hurt everyone." These sentiments were echoed in February by Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini. who called Israel "a cancerous tumor that should be cut and will be cut."
It is impossible not to hear echoes of Hitler’s Final Solution in such threats. After Auschwitz, the Jews cannot afford not to take them seriously. It cannot gamble with its very existence.
Yet the world expects Israel to hold its fire as Iran builds nuclear warheads — the most aggressive potential radiation treatment for the Zionist “cancer” that any anti-Semite could wish for. Huge destructive power in the hands of retrograde religious zealots: The danger of decimation is clear and present. But instead of bombing Iran, the editorialists say, Israel should wait for the international community to intervene through diplomacy and sanctions.
The problem with this is twofold. First, we do not know how far Iran is from reaching its goals, and the window for action may be closing. And second: If there is anything the Jews have learned, it is that the international community cannot be trusted to protect them. The Holocaust, after all, happened just 70 years ago; Germany, until that time, had been one of the most hospitable places for Jews in the world
Europe has not been a reliable friend since then, either. In the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Israel faced the most serious threat in its history as Arab armies — led by Egypt and Syria — massed at its borders to invade on the holiest day of the Jewish year. The United States insisted that Israel not launch a preemptive strike, promising to send weapons and supplies if Israel was invaded. But when the Arab armies attacked, America’s rescue mission was nearly choked off when its European allies — worried by the threat of an oil embargo — refused to let American planes land to refuel in their countries, or even fly through their airspace.
Thousands of Israeli men and women were killed in the Yom Kippur War, and Israel has not forgotten Europe’s betrayal. It has every right to be skeptical about Europe’s commitment to its safety. And the irony is that Israel often ends up doing the Western world’s dirty work in taking bold action against rogue states. In 1981, when Israel bombed a nuclear reactor near Baghdad, it was condemned around the world.But many analysts later credited the action for crippling Saddam Hussein’s nuclear aspirations. In 2007, Israel again overstepped its boundaries by destroying a nuclear reactor in Syria. Does anyone today think the world would be safer if Bashar al-Assad had the Bomb?
In the end, this is not just a question of Israeli national security or even of Israeli survival. It is part of a larger struggle between world ideologies. For more than three decades, Iran has been ruled by radical fundamentalists bent on exporting their backward version of Islam. By funding and arming of terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, Iran has become a leader in the worldwide movement to reject “decadent” Western values in favor of systematic misogyny, homophobia, anti-Semitism and religious bigotry. To use just one standard of measurement: Israel is a country that prohibits antigay discrimination, permits adoption and military service by gay people, and honors same-sex marriages. In Iran, same-sex relations are punishable by corporal punishment, imprisonment or death.
A nuclear Iran would change the balance of power in the Middle East and the world in potentially devastating ways. Whether Israel should proceed with a strike is a complicated question that Israel’s leaders will have to decide for themselves. It is their decision to make — not Iran’s, not Europe’s and not America’s —  because it is their blood on the line. The Jews have trusted the world to defend them in the past, and they have been betrayed. They must never make that mistake again. Never again.
MICHAEL LUCAS is the creator of Lucas Entertainment, one of the largest studios producing all-male erotica. He lives in New York City. This article is the opinion of the writer and not The Advocate.

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Followers