Author Archives: jik

Help stop the genocide in Darfur!

More than 400,000 people have been killed in Darfur since the genocide started in 2003. More than 2.5 million people have been displaced. Five thousand people die each month in the ongoing slaughter. We must stop the killing.

HMO as (bad) doctor

My wife and I each recently received letters from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, our health insurer through my employer. These letters introduced us to a program being run by BCBS which, to put it bluntly, is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Freedom of Religion is not Freedom of Taxpayer-Funded Discrimination

I am fed up with people claiming that the Freedom of Religion of the Catholic church and Boston’s Catholic Charities have been violated by the state’s insistence that they obey anti-discrimination laws. Which part of, “If you want to discriminate, then don’t take the state’s money,” do they not understand?

“Modern Orthodox not welcome”

Visit http://english.thekotel.org/. Note the section header “Bar/Bat Mitzva”. Click on it. Search the entire section for any mention of celebration of a Bat Mitzva ceremony at the Kotel. If you find one, let me know, because I sure couldn’t. I’ve therefore just sent the Western Wall Heritage Foundation, the owners of the site, a message… Read More »

MacOS X — so right, and yet so wrong

My wife and I finally caved in and bought a new computer for her, an iMac G5. Her old, slow PowerMac running Mac OS 9 just couldn’t cut it anymore. The slowness, crashes, hangs, and nondeterministic behavior just finally got to be too much to bear. Also, now that the kids are starting to use… Read More »