Author: shlomi

Last week I found a bumper sticker for my car. “The last time we mixed politics and religion,” it said, “people were burned at the stake.”

Yes, I bought it. No, I don’t think we’re near there — yet. But I am scared (a serious step up from worried) that President Bush and the religious right are at the cusp of controlling all three bodies of government. Judge Alito is a penultimate, if not the final plank in this ship of nightmares.

There are 11 states where women need to be rich, have friends, or be very brave in order to have even Roe-protected, first trimester abortions. As the father of a young teenager, I agonize now over whether I’d need (as opposed to want) to know about my daughter seeking an abortion. And what is at stake here is the freedom for me, as a parent, to decide that agony.

As a writer of fiction, of political commentary and on the Middle East, I look up articles and download information from the darker side of the Internet. I e-mail people that I don’t know that I’d want to meet in real life. These communications feed my art. I suspect that they are also grist for the NSA mill, and the basis for assumptions they might then make about people I know. And their friends. And others.

Cartoon by Richard Bartholomew

It’s because of my passion for freedom, for an unbiased judiciary, that FISA makes sense. And precisely for the same reason that Judge Alito’s penchant for fawning at the office of the President makes be believe that he is not the right choice to be one of the nine among equals, to sit at the country’s highest bench.

Let’s not kid ourselves; a liberal candidate is not in the cards. And a wise and balanced (or is it ‘fair and balanced’?) conservative is a better choice than a wild-eyed game changer.

I guess the core of my concern is that Samuel Alito is not his own man, does not represent the American citizen, and would not give the individual the rights they deserve especially in the face of the corporate Goliath.

Please help stop Judge Alito from assuming a throne from which he will help rule for the rest of his life, against the People’s common and secular interests.

Olmert is finally in the driver’s seat, it seems. By stepping up to the plate and making a stand against the silent, 380 kilogram gorilla of tacit government leniency on settler violence, he is making a winner-take-all move in a political arena where days, not months, decide the fate of the new party he now leads.

By blasting the police and civil servants in the Territories for their soft attitude when it comes to settlers rioting and destroying Palestinian property and lives, he is facing settler power toe-to-toe. This is not a bad gamble. At this stage of the game, the more he showcases the zaniness of the settlers, the more he gains on the secular and sane front.

The Hebron zealots, using a tactic that “worked” in other sites, is sending their Issacs — their underaged children — out to do the work they dare not do for fear of being arrested. So 15-17 year old boys and girls (and I use that nomenclature because they are clearly not thinking like adults) to torch Palestinian stores, destroy olive tree groves, and wreak mayhem and violence against Israeli — Jewish — soldiers and police.

It’s so attractive, and so non-Jewish. They hold to God’s word for their lives, yet they violate one of the specific commandments in the Bible: not to destroy fruit trees, even those of the enemy. God did not want Abraham to really sacrifice Issac, but these demented, cowards would send their own children to do their work.

I can see Sharon rolling his eyes.

Sharon will not return. The collectedly held breath has slowly exhaled, and Israel, and the world, as done all the mourning necessary until Sharon has departed this mortal coil.

Signs of return to “normalcy” in Israel begin with how the incapacitated Prime Minister is being treated. The government’s attorney general is declaring Ehud Olmert as a “temporary PM” instead of bowing to reality, as a technicality to prevent a reshuffling of the cabinet just before the already-scheduled elections in March. Sharon, I think, would approve of this bit of manipulation. A correctly functioning government, on the other hand, would take the 100-day technicality as law (it is), and not a guiding thought.

The Likud, having halted its withdrawal from government in the days following Sharon’s collapse, decided that that ploy would not garner them any more votes, and withdrew. Netanyahu, the right wing party’s head, has announced the next bright idea in garnering votes now that sympathy has failed: act more centrist.

Sorry, too late. Sharon’s legacy has created a centrist party, and the Likud can only survive by standing to its right. Like a celestial body moving into the gravitic control of a much larger object, the closer the Likud gets to Kadima, the more of its critical mass will shed and fall into the Kadima camp, and the more the more radical components of Likud will spin off and move into more comfortable orbits of their own. If Netanyahu isn’t careful, he’ll end up destroying the Likud.

Microsoft is continuing its misguided methods to achieve market dominance, this time in the web information zone. MS/NBC. Note the precedence of acronyms.

I’m a free-wheeler when it comes to software tools: Microsoft has great tools, usually with fairly logical interfaces. I’m sensitive to CUIs (Cheesy User Interfaces), so if the tool is cack-handed to use, features won’t keep me with it. That goes double for web sites. There are a lot that seem to go out of their way to be difficult to manage (Yahoo’s portal and interfaces, for example), some that are neutral, such as Google, and some that are fairly handy if you’ll only register as a personalized user and let them dump cookies to track your every move. (Yes, I know they log web pages and IP addresses. Yes, I know that properly mined, logs can provide quite a bit of information about users and their habits. Still, tack on an anonymizer and life is bearable in that regard.)

MSNBC’s web site is fairly easy on the eyes, even when surfing anonymously. The simple text ‘red alert’ banner when there’s a news flash is low-tech and simple, which is great because that’s when these kinds of sites get hit hard, so why make them work harder? The cute little feedback buttons (“how many stars does this article rate”) are also nifty, if useless in terms of the ROI for the individual reader (why should I care if lots of people like an article?).

This accessibility and handiness hits clear, hard walls when MSNBC feels the need. Want to watch a video? Sorry, only the latest version of Microsoft’s Video Player. Want to cast a ballot on a public poll? Sorry, your browser can’t handle that — try Internet Explorer. So Apple users, Linux users, UNIX users, and those of us bold enough not to use the Microsoft products get left in the dark, unvoting, unloved.

This might make sense if there were some pay-per-view scheme going on. There is one: advertisements that play before and after the video clip. But advertisements (theoretically) play regardless of video player used. What’s the profit for NBC whether Microsoft’s tools are used? None, of course. Worse than that, they loose ‘eyeballs’ on advertisements that aren’t paid. Not a logical or profitable track. And that’s the key to understanding that the MSNBC relationship is little different from the MS Instant Messenger product: burn the brand in, no matter what the relative profit or cost is for the activity.

I can’t even get a handle on why they wouldn’t let people vote on non-IE platforms. Best I can figure, it’s to up the frustration factor for users. Marketing stupidity!

So here’s some free consulting advice to Microsoft (and if you hire me, I’ll push to instantiate this): welcome all, but make ads on the delta.

Oh, you want it in English? Okay, fine. Allow anyone to view your content (check out CNN for ideas on how that works). But since you know what kind of browser is being used, add a commercial touting the MS product. You get up-front advertisement that you can control and tune to the user, and the user will sit though it because they want to see the video content. Perfect eyeball strategy. As for polls, use the simple bars you’ve been using until now but provide additional demographic or temporal information on the vote using IE-specific graphics. That way if someone wants to see the polling results as a function of time and location you can pop that up on some snazzy .NET-enabled service, while we poor Firefox slugs will have to make do with the raw data. Oh, and slap a little IE ad on the voting page as well: again, guaranteed viewing for your target market instead of cutting them off. And creating blog entries such as this one.

If you think about it, adopting this strategy can turn into a very measurable ROI for advertising investments, and you can more positively ‘turn’ viewers into users of your products. Okay, M$, I’m ready for my job offer…

Robertson has an admirable record of stuffing his foot so deep in his mouth he needs a proctologist to remove it. This latest bleating from the man who believes the kind thing to do is convert all those silly Jews to save them from Hell is unsurprising.

What will be equally unsurprising to me is if Israel retracts its withdrawal of support from the Christian missional — sorry, tourism — center in the Galil. There aren’t enough crazy Messianics running around up there, or mystics, so we gotta import more. Especially if someone waves money in front our country’s corrupt and kleptocratic government.

Robertson has proved he believes in his own divine providence. It’s up to the sane people to reject the man, and not his idiotic utterances. If other Christian fundamentalists want to help Israel out, let them restrain the evil they have wrought on Jews worldwide with their Southern Baptist-supported Messianic “Jewish” movement. AKA screw with ignorant peoples’ heads. That would be a real mitzvah, a real step towards fostering Jewish-Christian understanding. It’s called a cessation of hostilities.

If Ariel Sharon was the crusty, stiff toast, Olmert is the oily mayo of Israeli politics. Unlike all his predecessors in the seat of power, his claim to fame in Israel lies in being placed in Israel’s Knesset, a list-based, representative parliment, at the tender age of 28 in 1973. Too young to have street creds in Israel’s War of Independence (he was born in 1945), he cut his teeth in the Israeli army so unobtrusively it doesn’t register. Between wars and demobed, he got his law degree and played politics to be placed sufficiently high on a party list that, in the elctions that brought in the incompetent leadership that sealed the fate of Israel and its entry into the Yom Kippur War in October, 1973.

Like a leech, he stuck it out, taking a break from national government, and adding to his patronage powers, by becoming mayor of Jerusalem after the departure of much beloved, and far more competent, Teddy Kollek. He was primarily responsible for the tilting of the delicate balance of powers between Jews and gentiles, and between Jewish secularists and the religious sects and groups.

He’s consistently voted against withdrawal from lands, until he was given Netanyahu’s Finance Ministry after the latter resigned to set himself up to challenge Sharon. He is under current criminal investigation for bribe-taking and lining his pockets, and defected from the Likud party, where he had invested his entire political career, to follow fellow suspect, Sharon, to the Kadima kleptocratic machine.

And now, he is the man of State. I’m starting to regret Sharon’s probable departure from politics.