Blog/March 2017/Mar 31st

March 31st

We’re fast approaching the holiday of pesaḥ. This week Esther and I did some preparatory shopping, but there’s more to acquire before the holiday. She started to organize and clean the kitchen, though to be honest it looks pretty disorganized at the moment. I’m sure I’ll regret having made that comment…

As mentioned last week, we’re going to make our own maṣa this year. B”H, I just got the necessary flour today, and I’ll be running some technique trials in the next couple days to make sure I’ve got it down (not using the precious maṣa flour, just using the ordinary stuff).

We just completed our first maṣa trial, with regular bread-flour: success! Key points: (1) the dough must be kneaded for about 10 minutes to get to the right texture; (2) the griddle must be heated very hot; (3) the dough should be thin but not too thin; (4) when it puffs up it still needs another bit on the griddle. The thin one we did turned out just about perfect. The thicker ones weren’t cooked as well, so they would have to be cooked longer, making them hard and tough. So “thin is in”. Also: you need at least two people working to make sure you make the maṣa without letting the dough become ḥameṣ. The entire process only took about 30 minutes.

According to Robert Frost, ”Good fences make good neighbors.” We’re inclined to believe that, given our experiences with our “new neighbors” over the past few years. Esther has been agitating for me to put up some sort of extension to the fence between us and those neighbors, and this week I finally got to it.

There’s a lot of ivy growing along the existing fence, so I bought a few rigid poles and some chicken-wire, and extended the height of the “fence” by half a meter or so — enough to make it less likely they’ll be able to peer into our yard. I then re-twined the ivy onto the fencing, so that it knows where it should climb. Given that we’ve just started the explosive growing season here, the ivy will probably form a complete barrier in a couple months. One can hope. After that, we can all just relax.

The War on Privacy continues. After the recent London terrorist attack in which one Khalid Masood, a Muslim convert who lived in Saudi for a while and was “radicalized” (though the police state, “it is possible we will never understand why he did this”), the UK government is seeking to force WhatsApp to weaken its end-to-end encryption. In the unlikely event that WhatsApp complies with the Surveillance State’s demands, people interested in keeping private conversations private will simply switch to other services. The smart terrorist will switch to using innocuous coded messages, as was common practice before powerful encryption became ubiquitous. The only losers are the public.

Jew Haiku:

Privacy is not
Guaranteed by your leaders
Seek solutions now

The Associated Press issued new guidelines for gender-neutral language. They are telling their contributors, “to avoid making references in news stories that suggest there are only two sexes in the human race”. I know my last biology class was quite a long time ago, and my field is not the life-sciences, but I do keep up in general with developments in science. To the best of my knowledge, there are, in fact exactly two biological sexes in the human species. For that matter, “sexual dimorphism” related to having two distinct sexes is applicable to most vertebrates. “Vertebrates” means “animals with backbones”, so I suppose that excludes AP journalists and most politicians.

The problem here is that words have meaning. Prior to 1955, for instance, the word “gender” was used only in connection with grammatical constructs, and had nothing to do with sex. As mentioned above, there are precisely two sexes in almost all vertebrates. In particular, Homo sapiens has two sexes. There are indeed people with chromosomal abnormalities, and there are also people with chimeric abnormalities. But they are very rare; and, by definition, abnormal. That isn’t what the current “gender wars” are about. They’re about asserting control and taking power.

George Orwell wrote, “If you control the language, you control the argument; If you control the argument, you control information; If you control information, you control history; If you control history, you control the past; He who controls the past controls the future.” Saul Alinsky wrote along the same lines, that “He who controls the language controls the masses”. And that’s the end-game: not “tolerance of the other”, but nothing less than absolute control of thought and society. Purposefully changing the meaning of words (rather than by the usual organic growth of language) is done in order to change the way people think and the kinds of thoughts they can express.

In much more uplifting news: Dinah (Sarah’s friend and our emergency-backup daughter) is getting married, B”H, next week! So the “shabbat kalla” is at our place, though perversely nobody has been invited, per her request. It’s going to be an exciting time! We’ll hopefully have a restful shabbat with her and our daughter…

… but then next week is going to be frantic! The house needs to be readied for the holiday, Daniela and Jeremy will be arriving, final preparations need to be made. It’s all good!

This shabbat it’s the three of us plus the incipient bride, Dinah. Our menu might consist of:
mushroom soup, baked trout, fried tofu, baked potatoes and yams, Chinese noodle salad, garlicky green-beans, imam bayildi, some variety of quiche, various salatim, and apple pie (as per Dinah’s request).

Until next time,
shabbat shalom!

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