Finally Starting My Real Estate Website

I finally did something that's been on my mind for months and I just hadn't pulled the trigger previously: creating a real estate website for my real estate business. I probably should have done it when I first became a real estate agent but I didn't, and then I should have done it after I completed my first real estate sales transaction and, again I didn't, and then I should have done it when I celebrated my one year anniversary of being a licensed real estate and, yet again, I didn't do it. 

The time has come, I decided, I really just need to have a website. Of course, yes, I do have one provided by my brokerage, however, I said that I really wanted a place especially to have information about my services, but I actually what was particularly driving me to have a real estate website was a place to showcase real estate videos.

Having published weekly real estate videos for over a year now, I wanted to feature these videos, as well as directing people to certain pages containing relevant real estate videos to help them out. Providing that value to people regarding real estate is something that deeply motivated me to create it. And, yes, there will also be various blog posts on the website, especially concerning the real estate market and other related information.

I finally created my real estate website and now I've got to go work on it - not only populate it with content, but also to get it into good shape.

Fascinating Article on American Police History

Having never thought about policing and its history, I had simply been under the impression that policing has been around for many centuries. However, in the Western world, that has not necessarily been the case. I found a recent article to be quite enlightening about the police. Published in an issue last month of The New Yorker, Jill Lepore's "The Long Blue Line" in the July 20th issue (pages 64-69) (as well as online as "The Invention of the Police"), the article discusses the origins of policing in America.

Starting off etymologically, Lepore writes

"To police is to maintain law and order, but the word derives from polis—the Greek for “city,” or “polity”—by way of politia, the Latin for “citizenship,” and it entered English from the Middle French police, which meant not constables but government. “The police,” as a civil force charged with deterring crime, came to the United States from England and is generally associated with monarchy—“keeping the king’s peace”—which makes it surprising that, in the antimonarchical United States, it got so big, so fast. The reason is, mainly, slavery." (64)

However, as Lepore notes,

History begins with etymology, but it doesn’t end there. The polis is not the police. The American Revolution toppled the power of the king over his people—in America, “the law is king,” Thomas Paine wrote—but not the power of a man over his family. The power of the police has its origins in that kind of power. Under the rule of law, people are equals; under the rule of police, as the legal theorist Markus Dubber has written, we are not. We are more like the women, children, servants, and slaves in a household in ancient Greece, the people who were not allowed to be a part of the polis. But for centuries, through struggles for independence, emancipation, enfranchisement, and equal rights, we’ve been fighting to enter the polis. One way to think about “Abolish the police,” then, is as an argument that, now that all of us have finally clawed our way into the polis, the police are obsolete. (64)

The serious issue that is confronting us nowadays regarding police is

The crisis in policing is the culmination of a thousand other failures—failures of education, social services, public health, gun regulation, criminal justice, and economic development. Police have a lot in common with firefighters, E.M.T.s, and paramedics: they’re there to help, often at great sacrifice, and by placing themselves in harm’s way. To say that this doesn’t always work out, however, does not begin to cover the size of the problem. The killing of George Floyd, in Minneapolis, cannot be wished away as an outlier. In each of the past five years, police in the United States have killed roughly a thousand people. (During each of those same years, about a hundred police officers were killed in the line of duty.) One study suggests that, among American men between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four, the number who were treated in emergency rooms as a result of injuries inflicted by police and security guards was almost as great as the number who, as pedestrians, were injured by motor vehicles. Urban police forces are nearly always whiter than the communities they patrol. The victims of police brutality are disproportionately Black teen-age boys: children. To say that many good and admirable people are police officers, dedicated and brave public servants, which is, of course, true, is to fail to address both the nature and the scale of the crisis and the legacy of centuries of racial injustice. (64)

Lepore goes back a century to modern policing, which incorporated militaristic conceptions:

Modern American policing began in 1909, when August Vollmer became the chief of the police department in Berkeley, California. Vollmer refashioned American police into an American military. He’d served with the Eighth Army Corps in the Philippines in 1898. “For years, ever since Spanish-American War days, I’ve studied military tactics and used them to good effect in rounding up crooks,” he later explained. “After all we’re conducting a war, a war against the enemies of society.” Who were those enemies? Mobsters, bootleggers, socialist agitators, strikers, union organizers, immigrants, and Black people.

To domestic policing, Vollmer and his peers adapted the kinds of tactics and weapons that had been deployed against Native Americans in the West and against colonized peoples in other parts of the world, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, as the sociologist Julian Go has demonstrated. Vollmer instituted a training model imitated all over the country, by police departments that were often led and staffed by other veterans of the United States wars of conquest and occupation. A “police captain or lieutenant should occupy exactly the same position in the public mind as that of a captain or lieutenant in the United States army,” Detroit’s commissioner of police said. (66-67)

Pointing out a cultural disconnect about how police were appearing on television, Lepore observes that

Two kinds of police appeared on mid-century American television. The good guys solved crime on prime-time police procedurals like “Dragnet,” starting in 1951, and “Adam-12,” beginning in 1968 (both featured the L.A.P.D.). The bad guys shocked America’s conscience on the nightly news: Arkansas state troopers barring Black students from entering Little Rock Central High School, in 1957; Birmingham police clubbing and arresting some seven hundred Black children protesting segregation, in 1963; and Alabama state troopers beating voting-rights marchers at Selma, in 1965. These two faces of policing help explain how, in the nineteen-sixties, the more people protested police brutality, the more money governments gave to police departments.

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson declared a “war on crime,” and asked Congress to pass the Law Enforcement Assistance Act, under which the federal government would supply local police with military-grade weapons, weapons that were being used in the war in Vietnam. During riots in Watts that summer, law enforcement killed thirty-one people and arrested more than four thousand; fighting the protesters, the head of the L.A.P.D. said, was “very much like fighting the Viet Cong.” Preparing for a Senate vote just days after the uprising ended, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee said, “For some time, it has been my feeling that the task of law enforcement agencies is really not much different from military forces; namely, to deter crime before it occurs, just as our military objective is deterrence of aggression.” (68)

While the article is not a complete history of policing, nor, for that matter, is it even a whole history of the culture of police in America, it's a fascinatingly insightful overview of police in America.

Star Wars & Judaism Series Completed

Having announced in May that I would be doing a Star Wars & Judaism Zoom series, I am proud to share that I have now completed this series.

Taking place on Sunday evenings from late May through this past Sunday, I am thankful to the handful of folks who joined me every Sunday evening for a dozen weeks to discuss similarities and dissimilarities of scenes from Star Wars movies against Jewish texts.

Drawing upon Biblical and Rabbinic texts, I compared and contrasted scenes and dialogue from the twelve theatrically-released Star Wars films, here are all of the source sheets from this series:

1. A New Hope
2. The Empire Strikes Back
3. Return of the Jedi
4. The Phantom Menace
5. Attack of the Clones
6. Revenge of the Sith
7. Star Wars The Clone Wars
8. The Force Awakens
9. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
10. The Last Jedi
11. Solo: A Star Wars Story
12. The Rise of Skywalker

While the first session was kept to 40 minutes, as I was on a basic Zoom account, I am fortunate that a couple of people stepped-up to sponsor and subsidize me upgrading to a paid Zoom account, for which I am very appreciative.

Thank you to all of those who joined in the discussions - it was a great experience! :)