Blog/November 2016/Nov 25th

November 25th

The week was busy as usual, though not particularly eventful for us personally. Not so on the national and international levels!

Here in Israel, the very dry, chilly, and windy weather has created a “perfect storm” situation for fires to spread. In case you’re not aware, as of last count some 200 fires were blazing across Israel. 75,000 people have been evacuated from their homes. So far, thank God, nobody has been killed. A number of countries have sent firefighting equipment and teams, including Russia, Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, and Croatia. We welcome their assistance.

There is hard evidence that at least some of the fires were caused by arsonists (estimates say up to half of them are arson), apparently for “nationalistic motives” — meaning Arabs being Arabs. You can read their spewing hatred online, on Twitter. Surprisingly, you can also find some Arabs there supporting Israel — mostly Saudis. The haters don’t seem to be concerned at all that in Haifa, where the worst fires have been blazing, there is a high concentration of Israeli Arabs who are just as much at risk as the Israeli Jews.

We pray for the safety of all our citizens, and in particular for the safety of our emergency services who have been working for the past four days to control the conflagrations. And we hope that our security services quickly find the culprits and end their careers with extreme prejudice.

On the international front, the USA seems to be split between celebrants and mourners. The Donald is certainly an enigmatic and polarizing figure, but let’s be reasonable, take a deep breath, and wait to see what’s actually happening. As near as I can tell, Trump has “walked back” just about everything he said during the campaign, as I expected. He’s probably going to be another Big Government leader, given his penchant for “public works” projects, among other things. We’ll just have to wait and see. At the least, we can hope that his administration is plagued by fewer scandals than the outgoing one has been.

In the tech world, this week saw some interesting developments. The CEO of Twitter had his Twitter account suspended. Heh. Much more disturbing, the CEO of Reddit admitted he surreptitiously modified people’s posts on Reddit because he “had a bad day”.

That’s particularly egregious, because Reddit posts have actually been used as evidence in court cases to prove the poster’s intent. So if the Redditors can arbitrarily modify posts after the fact, what good are they as evidence? Further, people who have been convicted in part based on Reddit evidence now have a firm legal basis to contest their sentence.

Both Reddit and Twitter have a decided “left-wing” bias; Twitter has been suppressing more “right-wing” posts, such as Scott Adam’s blog (he’s the creator of “Dilbert”). Facebook has also been proven to suppress views its founder doesn’t like (e.g. more “right-wing” views). Of course, Twitter and Facebook and Reddit are all private companies and can do whatever they want (as long as it’s not illegal, of course). However, it should definitely be a wakeup-call to all civil libertarians.

As for us, we’re trying to stay warm and out of the path of smoke (no, there are no fires in our immediate area, B”H!). It’s scheduled to be cold and dry for at least a week; we could certainly use a good rain!

This shabbat, RivQua is joining us. We’ll try to enjoy:

roast turkey breast, candied yams, rice pilaf, butternut-squash soup, roasted veggies, various salatim, and dates.

Until next time,
shabbat shalom!

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