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Blog/December 2009/Dec 18th

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Dec 18th (See this week's devar torah)
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Hi again!

Happy birthday, brother! (he's eight years older than I... check the blog from two weeks ago to figure out how old I am, if you care). And happy birthday Daniela, who is three years older than her sister (see last week's blog)!

A week's worth of Hanukkah! Leaving work early every day so I can light the candles on time, while still meeting deadlines. Avoiding sufganiyot as much as possible. Finding new ways to irritate people. It's been a busy week! It rained all last night, so I checked the Israel Meteorological Service to see what the forecast is. Here, in their words, is the forecast for today: "A risk of flooding in low lying areas,and in the sothern and eastern vadies. A fress sw` winds. Swiming in the MED. sea is dengerous due to high waves." Yikes! I'll try to avoid swiming due to the denger!!

Irritations this week included Google removing Shomron from Israel. Not only them: "Speedtest.net" removed all their Israeli servers, so only Pally servers remain. I complained, and they gave me a half-assed explanation saying that maybe there was a performance problem with the Israeli servers. Right.

Treppenwitz says it's time to get a few things off his chest. He should have started with Obama's egregious lack of honesty. Unfortunately for Obama, the Chinese won't roll over for him on climate controls. He is finding out that, outside of the bastions of moral relativism of the Western world, the Real World (tm) is not impressed with his words.

In Jerusalem, the eternal capital of Israel, the deadbeat Belgians have so far refused to pay 14 million NIS in back-rent due on their consulate. They "don't recognize" the new owners (new since 1983!) and so haven't paid rent since then. These are the people lecturing Israel on morality and ethics. So are their neighbors the Dutch, who are trying to figure out whether or not to boycott Ahava. Ironically, they probably don't know the name means 'love'. Then the British issued an arrest warrant for Tzippi Livni. She blew her opportunity to resuscitate her moribund political career. Ah, Europe, how I despise thee!

Now the Israeli government has approved a two-year, voluntary test phase for using biometric IDs. Under this system, national ID cards would have chips on them which store the person's fingerprints and facial profile. Naturally, these data would be stored in a central governmental database. One might think this a good thing, since after all we have to deal with terrorists and assorted other nogoodniks all the time. Think again! The government has shown no reluctance whatsoever to collecting all sorts of information on whoever it doesn't like at the time. So let's say you attend a demonstration. The police video the crowd, and every individual attending is immediately identified by the national database (which, we are assured, will be kept absolutely secure. Sure it will). Really, think again...

And good news:

An interesting thought from my friend Fred, whose most recent blog I read this week. Quote: "I think what I’m going to do when people who are preparing to make aliyah ask, as they often do, what should they bring with them?, I am going to make the following SUGGESTION. “Here’s something I didn’t do, and therefore I am constantly forced to improvise on the topic. I wish I had a list of everything, everything, that went wrong back in The States because it is so easy to lose perspective when you’re having a difficulty here and you forget you had exactly the same problem back where you came from…". True words, my friends.

Until next week,
Shabbat shalom!



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