Verizon sucks.

Several months ago, I started having troubles with my phone line after a heavy rain. Verizon took a week to fix it the first time. I had no phone service for a week except for my cell. It happened again after another heavy rain. They told me it would take a week to get a repairman out. I told them to stick their service where the sun don’t shine and switched to Cavalier Telephone. Turns out they charge about half what Verizon was charging me, too.

But what Verizon didn’t do was send their repairman out a second time, so after the heavy rain from the remnants of Fay, I have no land line service. I am currently in live chat with Cavalier, which is taking an extremely long time for the rep to respond. Makes you wonder what the heck they’re doing on their end. Computer games? TV? Chatting with seven people at once? Really getting tired of seeing this:

JoannaD: Thank you for waiting. I’ll be with you in just a moment.

They’re scheduling a service call. 24 hours at the most. Well, that’s better than Verizon’s one-week service time, but I still have no phone until it dries out or they come and fix it.

I am so glad I’m leaving this craphole. The water comes into the front picture window when the gutters get full of pine needles. The gutters are full of pine needles, and my requests to have them cleaned have gone unanswered. I have towels in my windowsill to keep Tig from (sigh) drinking the water, or to keep it from getting into my living room. So far, it hasn’t done more than pool on the windowsill and rot out the wood under the picture window. Which, of course, doesn’t bother the management company.

Five days until the close. Eight days until I’m moved out of here.

I can’t wait.

Update: Something tells me CavTel shut my phone off several days early. I’m getting an out-of-service message now.

Well. I have a brand-new Blackberry that T-Mobile gave me for free. Don’t call me on the home phone, people. Try the cell.

When I was their age, my relatives gave us pen sets.

Nowadays, children get their first email accounts.

Sarah and Larry’s two oldest children have their first email accounts. Being a dutiful aunt, I sent them emails at Larry’s request.

On Sunday, I had dinner with my family, and my nephew was texting and receiving texts throughout dinner. His phone never stopped buzzing.

It is absolutely a different generation.

I don’t feel old, though. I’m going to upgrade my cell phone this week and start texting my nephew. Who may be going to my alma mater next year.

The years are sure going fast. I could swear he was only four years old last week. Nine at the most.

On an completely different note, Sarah is the Chocolate Chip Cookie Champion of Chesterfield County. She won first place in the fair, and third place for the cake.

Okay, so the Arab/Muslim conflict isn’t with Jews. It’s with Israel. Their proponents tell us so all the time, as do the media. So perhaps someone can explain to me how this relates to anti-Zionism:

Agents of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah have allegedly set up a special force to attempt to kidnap Jewish businesspeople in Latin America and spirit them away to Lebanon, according to the Western anti-terrorism official. Iranian and Hezbollah operatives traveling in and out of Venezuela have recruited Venezuelan informants working at the Caracas airport to gather intelligence on Jewish travelers as potential targets for abduction, the Western anti-terrorism official said.

See, not “Israeli” businesspeople. Jewish businesspeople. Like, say, my relatives the bookstore owners who decide to visit their relatives in Buenos Aires.

And if the kidnapping does occur, will the world make a peep? No, there will only be shrugs, unless Israel refuses to ransom the kidnap victims from the terrorists that are now part of the legitimate government of Lebanon.

South American Jews are in the crosshairs. And all roads lead back to Tehran, and the Jew-haters there.

Hezbollah operatives based there participated, along with Iranian spies, in the car bombings in Buenos Aires of the Israeli Embassy in 1992 and a Jewish community center two years later that killed a total of 114 people, an Argentine indictment charges.

In the aftermath of that indictment, filed in 2006, Hezbollah and its Iranian sponsors, chiefly the Revolutionary Guard, decided to shift from the increasingly scrutinized tri-border area to other countries, including Venezuela, Western anti-terrorism officials say.

“It preserves the capability of Hezbollah and the Revolutionary Guard to mount attacks inside Latin America. . . . It is very, very important to Iran and Hezbollah right now.”

Don’t tell me that the Iranian people are friends to the Jews. Because their leaders haven’t shown such friendship. And I have personally experienced the bigotry of Iranian students in America. One of these days, I’ll have to write about those experiences from my twenties. Because there’s nothing in Iran to prove to me that country has changed, and the students I met in the early 80s are now the ruling political class in Iran. Their hatred never went anywhere. It seems only to have deepened.

In a recent article, Isabel Kershner of the New York Times wrote the following about Israel’s security fence:

Israel started building the barrier in 2002 with the intent of preventing Palestinian suicide bombers from reaching Israeli cities. Consisting mostly of wire fence but also, in parts, of high concrete walls, much of the barrier, which is about 57 percent complete, has been constructed on land east of the 1967 boundary, inside the West Bank, leading Palestinians to characterize it as a land grab.

In July 2004, the International Court of Justice in The Hague issued an advisory opinion describing the routing of the barrier inside the West Bank as a violation of Israeli obligations under international law.

Israel’s Supreme Court, in response to petitions, has ordered several sections of the barrier route to be moved closer to the 1967 line, but most of the alterations have not yet been carried out.

There are several important things to note about these paragraphs.

Nowhere does Kershner write that since the fence has been built terror against Israel has decreased.
She mentions the ICJ’s ruling but doesn’t explain that the ruling is political not legal.
Even the Supreme Court’s ruling didn’t ignore the security issues involved.

When the Israeli High Court of Justice (or Supreme Court) ruled on the route of the fence in 2004, it wrote:

56. From a military standpoint, there is a dispute between experts regarding the route that will realize the security objective. As we have noted, this places a heavy burden on petitioners who ask that we prefer the opinion of the experts of the Council for Peace and Security over the approach of the military commander. The petitioners have not carried this burden. We cannot - as those who are not experts in military affairs - determine whether military considerations justify laying the Separation Fence north of Jebel Mukatam (as per the stance of the military commander) or whether there is no need for the Separation Fence to include it (as per the stance of petitioners’ and the Council for Peace and Security).

Still it concluded:

60. Our answer is that there relationship between the injury to the local inhabitants and the security benefit from the construction of the Separation Fence along the route, as determined by the military commander, is not proportionate. The route disrupts the delicate balance between the obligation of the military commander to preserve security and his obligation to provide for the needs of the local inhabitants.

Understand what’s going on here. The court admitted that it could not determine whose security credentials to trust: Whether to trust those then currently in the military or the partisan ex-officers. In the end, it ruled that the security question was moot, but determined that the damage caused by the fence was too great to justify any lessening security that might result from rerouting the fence.

Israel’s high court didn’t ignore the security issues it just ruled that they were irrelevant.

Now contrast that report with that about another recent court ruling.

On Sunday night, the Israeli High Court of Justice rejected a petition from an organization of terror victims, Almagor, against the release.

Among those freed Monday were two men whom Israel says have “blood on their hands,” meaning they had been convicted in attacks that harmed Israelis. Said al-Atabeh, 57, who had been in custody since 1977, was the longest-serving Palestinian prisoner.

Now Almagor had empirical evidence that prisoner releases were dangerous. Nadav Shragai recently provided the details of how released prisoners end up committing more terror.

I have no idea about the nature of Almagor’s petition. But if they provided proof that many of the terrorists freed in previous releases had indeed returned to terror and the court rejected that petition, then it showed once again that it deems the security of Israel’s citizens unimportant. It has demonstrated that inconveniencing Palestinians is worse than risking Israeli lives.

The media as demonstrated by the NY Times’s reporting also shows that their concern for the very real risks taken and negative rewards reaped by Israel is less important than that a process not leading to peace takes place. And, of course, Israel’s judicial system’s concern for Palestinian inconveniences at the expense of Israeli lives is met with Durban II.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.