Blog/December 2016/Dec 16th

December 16th

This week’s Torah reading is “וישלח”, which starts off with Jacob’s return to the Land, with his large family. Like many immigrants, he’s apprehensive about the security situation — despite having been promised by God that all would be well. Like many immigrants, he’s concerned about his financial future and about relations with the people in the new neighborhood. Spoiler alert: it works out for Jacob. If you come here it will work out for you, as well!

We had a cold, stormy, rainy, and cold week. Yes, it was that cold. Sarah was awakened in the middle of the night by water dripping onto her from her A/C unit (which is over her bed). My long-time readers will recall that Sarah and A/C have a long and troubled history together. In any event, she removed to the guest-room, and I was encouraged to determine the cause of the leak and fix it. As it happens, the installers never plugged the hole to the outside (through which the A/C unit communicates with its compressor). So water entered and pooled in the wall, waiting to inundate my daughter. Not good.

Fortunately, there’s an amazing product called insulating foam sealant, which I was able to get and spray into the hole from the outside. I took the opportunity to fill in another hole while I was at it. Time will tell if I managed to seal the holes sufficiently well.

We celebrated Sarah’s (Gregorian-calendar) birthday by having a “family movie night” out, with her cousins. We saw the new release La La Land, which we all enjoyed. Surprisingly, even I enjoyed it. Live and learn!

There are disturbing tendencies being nurtured amongst today’s citizens. Here in Israel this week, an artist-provocateur erected a statute of Netanyahu in Tel-Aviv. The statute was quickly removed. Then, a student at Bezalel art school made a poster of Netanyahu with a noose. Later, another posted a nude “picture” of him with a noose a bit lower on his anatomy. These displays caused a veritable maelstrom of condemnations and calls for investigations.

What I find disturbing is not these artists’ actions. Yes, they are in poor taste (or not, depending on your point of view) — but they are simply pictures and words. The disturbing thing to me is the reaction from some, calling to “close or defund the school” which produced the artists. In this case, the calls are from the “right wing” in Israel; however, the “left wing” also frequently calls for censorship of ideas or expressions they find distasteful. A healthy society needs complete freedom of expression, even distasteful or disturbing or offensive expression. We here in Israel need to abolish the laws against “insulting a public official”, and “incitement” and other such leftovers from the British Mandate era. Sadly, I don’t see that ever happening given the way our government “works”.

Various and sundry:

• The makers of “Evernote” have changed their privacy policy to (officially) allow their employees to view your notes. Time for me to work on my secure notes project, maybe?
• Epic post explaining why I hate PHP
• Yahoo admits that 1 billion user-accounts were compromised. In 2013! They only now got around to letting you know…
• The 5 stages of losing an election

Our year-end sale on 8th ended successfully. What I mean to say, is that the sale was successful, and is now ended. A number of existing customers renewed their licenses, which is very encouraging; a number of new customers came along, which is even more encouraging! We continue to improve the product, and the next release will be coming in January.

The weather will remain colder-than-average for the next few days, only warming to average around Tuesday. We’ll try to stay out of the cold and rain!

This shabbat it’s just the three of us once again. Our meals will consist of:
stir-fried broccoli and tofu, rice, baked chicken, baked yams, roasted veggies, wintry stew, various salatim, and marble cake.

Until next time,
shabbat shalom!

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