The RDL Podcast with Rabbi Daniel Lapin

If you have a few dollars, well, you didn’t MAKE that money—you TOOK  it.  This according to  the economics professors who teach your children and help them form their worldviews.  Do you patronize companies that give some of their profit to charity?  I explain why they would be acting more morally by reducing the  price of the goods you purchase. After all, why is it the company’s job to take additional money from you, the customer, to give to someone who is arbitrarily defined as a ‘charity recipient’. Are companies now in the redistribution business?  Must be why more and more companies boast of how much they ‘give away’.  Majority of students  believe that corporations and businesses are under the moral obligation to fulfill the social promises rashly made by politicians.  They believe that businesses have more important obligations than making money for their owners.  They believe the equation Poverty = Virtue and wealth is, in itself, evidence of moral malfeasance.   Where does this all end?  Can we fix it?

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Here’s a tough one to swallow:  Morality as we know it applies to individuals, not to nations!  The United Nations is nothing but an illusion.  An illusion promoted by some pretty horrid people, to be sure; but an illusion nonetheless.  The International Court in The Hague? Puhleez, it’s a joke.  You can ignore it. Everyone else does. If you don’t like what Russia is doing (whatever that is supposed to be), then stop whining. Just make sure we have the necessary military power and the will to project it.  That way you can tell them to cut it out. Otherwise you’re nothing but a buffoon. Remember one president who told us that he told Mr Putin to “just cut it out”?  If you don’t like China’s progress to colonial power and world domination, well just make sure you have the power. International relations operate not on paper but on power. Spend all your political capital on imaginary climate problems, placating the whining gender/homeless/race/ kindergartens and building windmills, and you can whistle while other less stupidly encumbered nations rule the world.  Just a word to the wise, it’s more fun being a citizen of a powerful nation than of a weak one. Did I always want to be a rabbi?  Actually, no.  What did I really want to be?  How do I keep up my schedule without relaxation?  What incident in history would I like to witness? What is the saddest thing I often see?  These are some of the questions that Cornerstone Television asked me. To my shock, I discovered just how open and candid were my answers. You’ll hear it all and more on this show.  Enjoy!

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Guess who’s building the Argentina-Chile tunnel in order to lock up the world’s supply of Lithium (ion batteries). Yes, I’m talking about your mobile phone—the one you love so much!  It was in 1956 that we saw one of the first movies to depict a Christian missionary negatively.  Guess who owns Kenya’s new railway. And Kenya’s port of Mombasa (which like Somalia and Yemen, was also named in Hebrew). Guess who owns Zambia’s international airport and its electrical power grid. I hope you’re seeing a pattern here because Our-Hate-America-Left does not.  They are still myopically obsessed with Russia as the existential threat.  Who has just built one of the longest bridges in Africa in the Congo? Hint: It wasn’t the Russians. The Congo possesses huge reserves of both uranium and natural gas. Guess who gets that now.  Both Congos are more concerned about election fraud than we are. In 1900 Joseph Conrad published his wonderful novel set in the Congo, Heart of Darkness.  Francis Ford Coppola based his movie Apocalypse Now on Conrad’s novel.  Back then Africa was the 3rd World. When I motorcycled through Africa in 1969, it was still the 3rd World.  It is no longer the 3rdWorld.  It is moving rapidly toward 1st World conditions.  The United States, however, is moving just as rapidly towards 3rd World conditions. The New York Times in a rare burst of candor, called Los Angeles ‘capital of the third world.” I show you ten metrics including water, transportation, corruption, public hygiene, & tribalism that confirm that we are heading towards 3rd World living. Acknowledging the problem is always the first step towards its solution.

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If you’ve read my book, Thou Shall Prosper-The Ten Commandments for Making Money, then you already know why Jews are disproportionately good with money. You’ve probably already adopted those timeless truths into your own financial life to good effect, but none of that explains why over 80 percent of American comedians of the past 80 years are Jewish. While we’re talking laughter, why are the wicked villains of television and movies characterized by their evil laugh? Was Samson really a comedian? The only one in all of the Bible? Also, why do most jokes revolve around the bedroom, the bathroom, and the church/synagogue? There is some really terrible news for South Africa. The University of Cape Town claims that "1 + 1 = 2" only according to the old, white, colonial way of thinking. Why did Wrestlemania take off so successfully in the 1980s? And we reveal the reason why a shared sense of humor is vital for couples contemplating marriage. Enjoy!

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What is the semi-addictive behavior in which most of us engage to our own detriment?  To what activity do most of us devote a shockingly high number of hours each week for which we get zero benefit?  What is worse, this activity not only brings no benefit but it actually causes damage to us.  If evil enemies wanted to harm the United States of America and render it weak both economically and militarily, they couldn’t have come up with a better plot than this one in which we willingly collaborate.  Not surprisingly, those weakest members of society, the least productive and most destructive, spend most time on this harmful thing.  Do you really want to promote uniformity of thought? Do you really want to eliminate all individuality and all diversity of outlook?  Well, just continue doing what you’re already doing and encourage others to do the same.  Is there a solution?  Of course!  Do you really think your rabbi would leave you dangling?

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Why did The Donna Reed Show help marriages while The Gilmore Girls hurt them? And how did boys start reneging on the social contract to become men back during the 1960s? Until then, boys sought to grow into men who would marry and who would cherish and protect their wives. Then, in what will turn out to be history’s most remarkable case of mass arrested development, little boys grew into big boys and big boys became 40 year-old adolescents. Men surrendered their natural authority in relationships; then they renounced responsibility. So understandably, the women had to step in; for whether in politics, business, or male/female relationships, nature abhors a vacuum.

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Culture is not the same as civilization. There are thousands of cultures but only one civilization. Banks & bathrooms in Beijing, Bombay, and Bangkok grew to resemble such institutions in Boston, Birmingham, and Berlin; not the other way around. Along with millions of others who voted with their feet, you and I also prefer civilization to any of the countless cultures we could have lived in. The problem is that civilization is a frighteningly fragile flower. What happens when we clip that flower off its roots? Why does it take so much more work and time to build a house than to demolish it? What does that have to do with the advantages that liberalism, progressivism, and socialism seem to possess among young voters in many countries? And why politicians and bureaucrats exempt themselves from the laws and regulations they religiously impose upon others.

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Numbers are your portal to progress.  What happened to England when all Jews were expelled? What happened to England when they returned?  Start devoting a few hours every week to improving your numerical literacy.  Stop telling yourself you can’t do math.  Nothing too complicated, just start on becoming more familiar with numbers than you are.  In Hebrew all five verbs for counting each also mean aristocrat (count) or prominence, power, and prestige.  Amazing Biblical coincidences.   When you can effectively number something, you can effectively change it.  Your weight, your bank balance, your number of friends, your charitable giving. Numbering everything is a key to success.  Gradually grow in numerical literacy to the point you’ll get to understand statistics, probability and calculus. 

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By far, the majority of people around you understand money as well as they understand magnetic resonance imaging. Which is to say, not much! As a not-very-successful fisherman in the cool, deep waters of British Columbia, I learned that you can’t possibly put salmon on your grill without understanding salmon. Similarly, you can’t put money in your bank without understanding money. And putting money in your bank is important. In 1925, President Calvin Coolidge said, “The chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world.” Isn’t that true for you? The spiritual nature of money and why the week should be five days long but isn’t. Why secular fundamentalists equate economic prosperity with moral depravity. Why atheists usually see profit as plunder. Why no atheistic society has ever created a vibrant economy. How this can help you in your work.

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Men are hardwired to want to make their wives happy.  We genuinely are happier when our wives are happy.  And we are miserable when our wives cry.  The problem is that most of us men are pretty clueless as to how to make wives happy.  And what makes it even harder is that wives never want to tell husbands how to make them happy.  While not disparaging gifts, remembering important dates, and breakfast in bed, in this show we explore the other really important things that make wives happy.  For maximum happiness, a newly married man should strive every day to be worthy of his wife’s admiration.  When can he finally relax and just be himself?  When he dies!  How building a beautiful bridge resembles building a beautiful marriage—and how it differs.  A man’s body will always follow the logic of his deepest convictions; he will be attracted to the woman who reflects his noblest vision of himself. 

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