This is the private Domain of Ruben Safir. It is a nearly 25 year old compendium of living experience, family experience, story telling, and shared culture. I have six children (Talyah Leah, Shoshan Rivka, Dovid Shimon, Itka Shira, Aviva Rochel, and Schmuel-Lieb Eliezar), and 3 grandchildren. The site contains many thousands of photographs, images, a resource section of archived news articles, many of which have otherwise disappeared from the internet, and many kids pictures sprinkled throughout. Due to my personal interestest you will find here substantial information here on Brooklyn, Free Software, Linux, Jewish information, history, the fine arts, Israel, events, and more. Take a look at the site map menu for categories that I've added to most of these pages

Over the last few years, I've been slowly reorganizing this site according to the site map. In the process, I've done a lot of recent writing and trying to get more of the images into organized compartments and onto webpages. I hope you find some of this material useful.

I've recently been struggling, as a web designer, in finding a compromise between making pages cellphone/tablet compatable or making use of the full desktop screen. The problem, of course, is that people have moved away from desktops to the small devices. Truthfully that sucks.

Just as the technology for video and photography is finally reaching the capacity to produce truly analogue quality, even museum quality, images, video and sound, people are being stripped of the full experience, and jettisoned to the their tablets. That not only limits their experience, but also prevents them from owning their own data. Ideally, your desktop systems are running your home and offices, and your phone is just a satellite to your home and office servers. We have a situation where the tail is wagging the dog. Partly out of frustration, I have decided (actually starting with the post of that above image of my desk), to stop robbing viewers of the full depth of media which I can produce, and to expand image sizes and videos. Fuck it. Nobody visits anyway and google refuses to list my considerable writings in a strange form of censorship. So I think I will start to display images and videos at their most effective size for full desktop display. Anyway, I almost always have Easter egg images all about the site, so don't be afraid to click on things.

Basic Contact Information:

May you have a kosher Peseach

Everything here, at least what has been produced by me, has been written with VIM, and the graphics have been created with the GIMP and other Free Software. EMBPERL, modperl, Perl and Python are used for development. I try to keep all graphics as PNG or JPG files.

On Coming Presidential Election in a Year of Chaos

I've been a Republican supporter since my run ins with the local Democratic Political Machines. I worked with the Thomas Jefferson Club in the 1970's and 1980's, but it became clear to me that New York City lacks a real opposition and it suffers from the lack of political debate and perspective. The Machine crushes political parties and reinforces the established left. You have to be a maniac to get anything done in New York and we have been fortunate enough to have one or two good ones. In today's political environment it has gotten harder for opposition canidates to gain any traction. The law has been changed to crush any conservative or business voices in our government.

As a Republican, I have a preference for a special flavor of Republicans over my life. On a nation scale that list includes the following:

Rudy Giuliani
Bob Dole - stop lying About my record
John McCain - So many thoughtful and positive things (bomb Bomb Bomb - bomb Bomb Iran) but as author of the McCain-Fiengold act that made him one of my favorites.
- Nothing in life is more liberating than to fight for a cause larger than yourself, something that encompasses you but is not defined by your existence alone.
George W Bush - Finished what his father should had. Bush knew how to appoint great men around him and proved that if motivated that the US can use its military to devastating consequences to our enemies. He also reminded the world that the US doesn't forget, even after decades.
Condoleezza Rice - "Hamas Terror Attack Should Erase Any Notion That The Iranian Regime Can Be Dealt With"
Donald Rumsfeld - "There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know."
Jared Kushner - Said almost nothing but was the force to almost everything positive that happened in the Trump administration.

With all that being said, I never put much politics on my home page but I feel that we have an opportunity to elect a truly promising candidate in Nikki Haley. If elected, Nikki Haley will prove to be the one politician to find the US out of the wilderness. She has the audacity of George Bush, the brains of Condoleezza Rice, the emotional integrity of John McCain and the directness and determination of Rudy. And she is a strong Israel supporter.

Support the election of Nikki Haley for President

The Likelyhood of Global War

It looks very bad right now for the Ukraine and this is the closest in my lifetime that the world is near global conflict. 20 years of failed pacifist foreign policy is pushing the planet to the brink - even to nuclear war, with hot spots in the Ukraine, China, Yemen, The South China Sea, Lebanon, Iran, Kurdistan, Pakistan, North Korea. The UN has been shown to be totally morally bankrupt and politically incompetent. Our inter-dependence without regard for political or moral consideration has proven to be our weak point and the world is now a powder keg as the West has preserved and strengthened genocidal despots all across the globe from China, Russia, and the Middle East. Events are overtaking us and spinning out of control. We are entering a very dark time and humanity itself is threatened at every turn, socially, economically and politically.

I would like to look back a year from now and see that I was mistaken about this, and that as the world comes into 2023 that it enters a safer and freer place where individual rights and peace reign about the world. But I see nothing in the present to cement that as a likely outcome from a society that is increasingly accepting of being under surveillance by government and private conglomerates, and truly ruthless tyrants who are willing to throw the dice and bet that through violence that they can fulfil their fantasies of global conquest and personal glory. That would include China, Iran, and Russia, but not only.

Now on to matters of interest

There are a lot of images buried in this webserver. I never thought of myself as a photographer, and I make no claim, but here we are. Starting with my Cannon AE-1 on film, until today, with my Cannon T3I rebel and my new G9X, I've managed to rack up thousands of images, and many of them are worth seeing, just for artistic purposes. I think I will start posting a few of them here, just to exhibit them and to give regular viewers something to enjoy from month to month.