Engage

Kung Fu Jew was kind enough to respond to yesterday’s post about Israel, and ask some very interesting questions, to which I most eagerly reply. Please note that my dissection of these questions does not signify a desire to prove them wrong, merely an attempt to more fully explain my opinion, and to more accurately respond to the state points.

But do all people have a right to their own land?

I think that everyone has a right to land. Whether it’s “theirs” or anyone else’s is a matter of contention. What I do know for sure is that no one has the right to take someone else’s land. This goes both ways. The Israeli settlers who took Arab land in the past have built their lives there, and handed those lives down to their children. Those children deserve the right to continue living there as much as anyone else does. Unification into a single state with equal religious recognition and proprietary rights for all must occur.

And is that peoples or people?

What a fabulous question! As I understand it, what we’re dealing with here is the idea of national identity. If a person declares themselves to be part of a larger group (an ethnicity, religion, political party, etc.), can that group claim legal status or recognition based on the fact that its constituents have those rights? I don’t think so. Human rights don’t add up. They do not accumulate. If there are four people in one group and two in another, the first group doesn’t have twice the rights of the first. Each person still retains all of their full, inalienable rights. The system of a parliamentary democracy is actually conducive to this; it allows for compromise between seemingly uncompromisable factions. Hence a great potential for Israel to set a standard of religious tolerance and socio-political cooperation.

Im asking whether every nation should have a state, and whether each person is entitled to property ownership?

It is my opinion that no nation should have a state. Such a state will neverreach total neutrality towards all of its citizens. As long as it is a religious state, it is intrinsically biased. Bias by a governmental system or agency towards or against any of its constituents is intolerable. Government must be by the people, for the people. End of story. As to property ownership, it is is an injustice if someone is afforded more opportunities by virtue of governmental privilege to accrue property, or exempted from punitive measures applied to others for the same transgressions. Whether it is a case of the U.S. usurping land from native peoples by governmental policy, or of the Israeli government closing one eye and looking the other way as settlers steal land and property from its rightful owners, it is the same: the government is making a decision as to who to prosecute for crimes and who to silently endorse. In this case, complacency truly is compliance.

I welcome more opinions on this issue. My viewpoint is not at all static, and I am always looking for meaningful debate and discussion.

Existence

Partially inspired by an excellent article by a friend of mine, I have decided to write about some of my recent thoughts about Israel’s current political situation. This is something I’ve talked about before, but it’s also something I continually think about, so I think it deserves revisiting. I will probably write more in the future.

I have come to the conclusion that I do not, as a religious Jew, believe in the concept of the State of Israel. Judaism tells me that all people have a right to their religion. Judaism tells me that all people have a right to their land. Judaism tells me that all people have a right to their dignity. A religious state, whether a fundamentalist one that forces women to hide their skin from view or one with a democratically elected parliamentary majority, infringes on people’s basic human rights by nature of its existence.

No country can exist for any purpose other than the safety of its citizens. No governmental system can have any purpose other than ensuring that everyone is granted all of their rights. Perhaps the “ultimate” solution would be a world government allowing free and unrestricted travel to everyone everywhere. But society and politics have not evolved to the place where this is possible. Trying to create some kind of worldwide government now or anytime in the at all foreseeable future would be disastrous. For the moment, we must be content with our compartmentalized world, and strive to make it as humane and just as we can.

A very wise person once said “To be a Jew, it is not to be secular or to be orthodox, it is to be human.”. Jews need to move forward in the world; allow our understanding of it and how we relate to it to change as our surroundings do. This is how we have survived throughout history, and it is what we must do now.

Welcome to the working week

Man, what an exhausting couple of days. Between two full time work days (another tomorrow), Mock Trial, and the first episode of Joss Whedon’s new show, Dollhouse, I am wiped out.

Recently I have been doing a lot of thinking about what the purpose of blogging is. I am still not sure. I know that I find it interesting because of the potential to act as both an extroverted and introverted journal simultaneously, but there is a lot of other potential, and a lot of other considerations. For instance, does one target the entries towards other people, or should it be more of a picture of what the author is thinking? Are they mutually exclusive? Ultimately I don’t think they are, but there’s a fine line between revealing your thoughts and acting like other people don’t exist.

I think I will probably write some more about this topic in the future.

Forward

This has been an exhausting weekend, and it is not over yet. Yesterday I was at work all day, and was fortunate enough to have someone bring in a computer that had been dropped repeatedly, and, I kid you not, had port spilled over the keyboard. Last night we cooked a sumptuous Valentine’s Day meal, which included steak, sweet potatoes, and other such awesome things. Then we watched The Truman Show, with Jim Carrey, which is officially one of the best movies ever. It is transcendently beautiful and astute, especially because it was made before the era of reality TV.

I discovered a fabulous article on the BBC. My first name is Rafael.

Today I went to Costco in the morning to pick up my new glasses, which are very subtle. Then I worked from 12-4. Now I am home. My family is on their way back from a show at my school (M. Butterfly [which I was REALLY bummed to miss (they sold out of tickets to last night’s show [we got tickets to the matinee today (which I couldn’t go to [because I was at work (but last night my friend told me that there were in fact seats available at last night’s show [so I could have gone (which makes me pretty angry)])])])]), and we are going to go to dinner at our friends’ house in Conway. I have not seen this family for a long time, so I am looking forward to it immensely.

As I got my requisite slice of pizza for lunch it occurred to me that I have been eating junk food all day. I had pie when I woke up, a hot dog at Costco, and then pizza for lunch.

Pizzazz (Gonna Give It To Ya!)is a video made by two of my coworkers when they were in college. It is one of the funniest things I have seen in a long time.

We are having a Mock Trial meeting at my house tomorrow. I will be bedinnering the team. Pesto.

Over and out.

Placement

Now we have a week long vacation. This seems like rather poor planning to me; we have had one week of second semester. It was a good week, but it is weird to come back and then leave again immediately.

That aside, I think this is going to be a fabulous semester. I have awesome classes.

• Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
• Playwriting
• Chemistry
• Statistics
• Mock Trial

Besides these, I have three independent studies in Spanish, multi-variable Calculus, and Physics E&M (electricity and magnetism). I have not done much work on these for the past few months, so I will be doing a lot of catch-up this vacation. My hope is to burn through the Calc assignment I’ve had sitting around for about three months, get a few more from my teacher by email, and finish all of the Physics work I should have had done by the end of first semester. The Physics study is a bit harder than Calc. First of all, Willand I are preparing to take both of the AP Physics C tests in May, so we have an actual rubric to measure ourselves against. Secondly, my advisor gives me assignments for Calc, but my advisor for Physics was too busy to do this. So while he’s still my advisor on paper, and is very helpful when I have questions about the material, Will and I are making up our own assignments as we go. We’ve created some shared Google Documents to keep track of our work on these two independent studies, but have really fallen behind since then. No more.

It is good to reach the end of the week. I will be working both days this weekend, three days next week, and potentially next weekend as well. Also, the Mock Trial team is meeting four times over vacation. One of them is to go bowling.

Config

I am leaving the house in a little while for some freelance work. School was tiring today, but very productive, especially Mock Trial. We debriefed (a rather silly word) about yesterday’s trial, and we are working on our plans for meeting several times over next week’s vacation. I have also almost finished working out my work schedule for next week.

Success

We won our trial today. One more in the region. If we win that one, we have a tiebreaker against Tantasqua to determine who proceeds to the playoffs. Since we have school vacation next week we will be trying to meet at least once or twice to make up for the lost class time. We might also go bowling. Fun is an option.

Homework will now ensue. A two-page scene “with conflict” and a paper on the French Revolution.

Car

Our car broke down on the way home from school today. It had been making strange noises since yesterday, starting with a loud squealing, which I determined to be a bad belt yesterday. On the way home today very odd things began to happen. The radio turned off and then on again, started to sound fuzzy and crackly, the lights flickered, and then all electrical power cut out entirely. When I tried to turn on the heat and my father tried the headlights, the car lurched and started to lose power. Then, about five blocks from the house, the engine shut off entirely. We are pretty sure that the belt that I noted as bad is the one that drives the alternator. If the belt stopped working (when I opened the hood this afternoon it seemed very loose), the alternator would have stopped, and we were thus running only on battery power. As the voltage drained, we lost electrical systems, before the entire engine shut off altogether. My father is on his way home from the garage now. We will find out about the car tomorrow I suppose.

Meanwhile, I have a trial tomorrow. We’re leaving at twelve-thirty, and as it’s Wednesday, I have no classes whatsoever in the morning. I will spend my time relaxing, eating, and doing homework. I am not sure how we’re going to get to school without a car. I suppose we will figure it out.

Also, Will Szal’s site is up and running now. Check it out; there’s some pretty awesome stuff up, and more in the works.

Intellectual Property, school, and blood

Three important things have taken place in the last 24 hours. In reverse chronological order, I received an AWESOME Red Cross ID card in the mail that has my name and blood type and such AWESOME information, I had the first day of second semester, and I had some revelations about intellectual property.

The blood card doesn’t really need any further description. The first day of school went well. It was great to be back and see a lot of people I hadn’t seen in a long time. This is looking to be a fabulous semester; I have great classes.

Intellectual property, however, is a tricky topic. For a long time, I’ve been strongly of the opinion that it was permissible to pirate music (although I didn’t download for purely practical reasons [I just swapped with other people]) because the money that I spent on music did not go to the artists anyway, and I felt that I was listening to the music for the purpose of learning more about what I liked, and then buying tickets to shows and buying merchandise for my favorite groups, thus providing them with income down the line. I still believe that this is a good way to get money to artists, and support them. But a lot has changed since I initially formed these opinions. The Internet has evolved a great deal, giving artists a meaningful way to distribute their music to people without having record labels getting in the way of their profit. The Internet brings consumers closer to the suppliers, which is a potentially mutually beneficial arrangement.

So since this has happened, I now no longer have a method for justifying pirating music. I am in fact now stealing money. As much as we might like to consider ourselves Robin Hoods who steal from the rich for the sake of the comparatively poor (us), we are stealing, and that is wrong. Ultimately, if an artist expects to make money because they believe X number of people will purchase their music, and then half of those people just pirate it, they have lost half their money. There is no way around that.

Given all this, I run into problems. I have always strongly morally opposed DRM (digital rights management), because I think that people have the right to do what they want with music they own. The concept of intellectual property is that you are buying the right to use this music however you want. But you can’t just do whatever with it. There are laws and morals. You can’t argue that you should have the right to distribute that music to twenty other people (or just one) because that is illegal and wrong. So what is the issue with DRM? Why does, for instance, iTunes’ five-computer-per-account limit violate our rights as consumers? I mean, in an ideal world you wouldn’t need this protection because no one would be stealing the music. But the companies have a moral and legal right to impose protection in the name of preventing consumers from stealing the music.

My friend and I were arguing about this today, and it seems that the central conflict is in determining whether the duty the distributor of the music owes to the consumers or the artists is stronger. While I agree that we, the consumers, have a right to do what we want with the music, there has to be some give. What if someone has six personal computers that they want to use the music on? iTunes only allows five, so one gets left out. Is the five computer limit reasonable? Well, we have to weigh the potential inconvenience to consumers (or the infringement of their rights as the owner of the music) against the potential that removing or loosening such restrictions would do significant damage to the artists. Certainly the iTunes restrictions can be overkill and keep people from performing legitimate activities, but they definitely avoid a lot illegalities in the first place. If we were to remove all such restrictions and place the burden of enforcing this type of law on the government, it would never work. What governmental agency would have enough time or resources to prosecute everyone who violated these laws? It would be like trying to find the source of a chain email. The Internet is too big and too fast. The only thing that can stop this illegality is restriction of the content in the first place.

So while the technology for creating effective DRM does not exist or has not yet been implemented, I do think I support it in theory. For the moment, is it better to live with what we have? That is a difficult question. But I think Apple’s recent announcement of moving away from DRM is in their and our best interest. Ultimately, they are going to have the last laugh; they have ultimate control over the material, so when a better DRM technology comes along, they’ll take it. As a publicly owned and traded company, Apple is subject to public sentiment, so we, the people, need to make sure that we make a conscious effort to work towards more meaningful DRM in the future in the form of legislation and social change. If we demonstrate that we can be trusted with music, companies will be able to provide us with goods and services that reflect our ability to behave honestly in a relaxed system.

Until then, we might just have to tough it out and keep our eyes on the prize.

Failure

My wget script didn’t work. But I think I figured out why. Hopefully it will work tonight.

Change of plans

I ended up not going to New York this morning, so I am home for the day. I think I will see if I am needed at work, which opens at noon today, and I am planning to go see Brett Dennen this evening.

Brett Dennen

This was a fabulous show. Brett Dennen is sort of like David Byrne crossed with Ted Hawkins. Also, his guitarist is from Chicopee.

The show was a mix of more pop-ish music and a sort of very heavily salsa-influenced strain, which I really liked. Brett’s voice seemed suited to both; he was able to pull of the pop stuff and still maintain musical respectability (which can be difficult), and he could also switch to the more melodic feel of the salsa. Lead vocals for salsa have a unique quality in that they always sound as though they are falling. The voice sort of takes up a space and then gently falls out of it. It is a very graceful sound, and one that not many artists can create. Both the band and Brett were really good at this.

The opener, Angel Taylor, was awesome. She had a two-track EP for free, so I snagged a copy, and it is great. And I singed up for her mailing list so I got a free MP3 of another track, which is also excellent.

Another thing that is excellent is sleep. And the word “promulgate”.

Wikipedia and bed

Browsing the Wikipedia page for Mikhail Gorbachev, I found myself on the Plywood page within five minutes. There are apparently only three degrees of separation between the two. Who knew?

Bed is an immediate destination.

Wget

Wget is an awesome command line utility for file transfers. I just wrote a script that will check every day at midnight to see if any files have been changed on my website, and if they have, download them and write the progress to a log file. It will not redownload the entire site every time, which would take forever and be a complete waste of disk space. Wget has tons of options, and can be made to do almost anything.

Since this site is run by WordPress, the data for posts and pages is stored in a MySQL database. This is already backed up automatically once every hour to an email account I created expressly for this purpose. The command line script I wrote checks the folder where uploaded files, plugins, themes, and the PHP code I’ve written to power, for instance, the Exquisite Corpse page, live, so that I will always have a current copy of those files. I like to keep older copies of my database for the purpose of history and extra security, but one copy of these particular files is enough. Plus, Time Machine running on my Mac will keep historical copies of the backup folder on my hard drive, so I will end up with a similar result.

I will check the log file tomorrow morning to see if the script ran properly. Hopefully it will have worked and will henceforth take care of itself in the background without my ever having to pay attention to it again.

Manual labor

I spent the better part of the day at work moving things around. We are in the middle of a giant reorganization of the Service Department, and there is much to be done. We deconstructed and moved tables, lugged around heavy old computer equipment, organized hundreds of component screws, and more. Okay, maybe screw organization isn’t terribly physically taxing, but it was a long day.

In

I am about to get out of bed. It has been a relaxing morning.
Great quantities of some kind of tasty food are in my immediate future.

Glassware

The glassware at my house is almost as diverse as the silverware in origin and purpose. Interestingly, as the capacity increases, they tend to become less and less impact-resistant. Because of the rather high frequency with which we break glasses, we have about six or seven different sets. One of the inherent challenges this poses is storage compatibility; certain sets can be stacked in certain ways, some can be cross-stacked, but some cannot. For instance, there are a few sets that are completely incompatible with each other; if stacked they will break or become completely stuck, necessitating the use of hot and cold water as an agent of thermal expansion and contraction.

Another complication is that some of the glasses fit in the dishwasher in certain ways and others do not. For example, the top rack of the dishwasher has on the left side a sort of plastic ledge that folds down. If you stack only mugs or small glasses under it, you can fold it down and stack another layer of short items on top, provided they aren’t tall enough to hit the top of the dishwasher.

The smallest set of glasses currently operation has perhaps two surviving members. We have been using this one for almost a decade. Only a few are left, but they are incredibly strong. This is why it’s lasted so long. We have a concrete countertop, and I have dropped these glasses onto it from a distance of close to five feet, and they have been fine. They are practically indestructible. They are also very well designed in that they are constructed of safety glass, so when they break, they don’t break into many long sharp fragments, they break into many small and rounded ones. They are a pain to clean up, because they go everywhere, but you can sweep them up with your hands, and we don’t have to worry about missing them and having to watch out for them for weeks to come. Excellent industrial design. All glass-manufacturers should do the same.

I wonder if there is some sort of coalition or alliance of international glassware-makers.

Endweek

What an exhausting set of five days. I am SO ready for the weekend.

Tomorrow I am working all day. On Sunday, my family and I will be traveling to Long Island for my great-great-aunt’s one hundredth birthday.

X

We won our first trial!
This evening I took a hot tub in subzero weather, which was a fabulous experience.
I also watched X-Men. Similarly fabulous.
Sleep approaches.

Exquisite Corpse updates

I’ve made some back-end changes to the Exquisite Corpse page. I have been having problems with the script; the component that assigns a unique id to each poem for internal identification was malfunctioning. Sometimes more than one poem would end up with the same id, and since the script that displays completed poems didn’t know what to do, it would only show one. Thus, there were several completed poems that were not being displayed. I think I have fixed the problem by having the script renumber poems when they are completed. This has the added advantage of having the poems now proceed in numerical order according to when they were ended, not when they were begun. It should look nicer as well as operating more smoothly.