TDDPirate’s Ideas

Yesterday, Yediot Ahronot publicized in its “7 Days” Friday supplement an article about the sordid past of Richard Goldstone, who condemned Israel for its war law violations during the Cast Lead operation in Gaza Strip.

To his credit, Goldstone was serious about responding to the allegations made in the article.  To the newspsper’s credit, they were serious about giving him the time to put together a comprehensive response.  Goldstone seems to have acknowledged the right of the newspaper to investigate his past, and was serious about responding to the allegations without evasions or refusal to respond to embarrassing points.

Assuming the correctness of the facts in his response and in the declaration, which he enclosed with his response, he is not to be faulted for what he did as judge in the Apartheid regime.  If Nelson Mandela and his people did not condemn Richard Goldstone, it says a lot about him.

Of course, Goldstone’s report about IDF’s behavior in Cast Lead operation is not equitable.  However it is because the law, as it is applied in this case, is not equitable. Goldstone should have added to his report also recommendations for changing the relevant international law so that it is equitable also toward democratic governments having to protect their citizens from bloodthirsty terrorists.

Time has passed since the Nov. 2007 council elections (with no publicity to the results of the pilot of computerized elections), and since the Dec. 2008 Taldor fiasco.

And it turns out that in their infinite wisdom, the Israeli government decided to continue to cater to the impatient, “want to know the results right NOW!!!” segment of the electorate in future elections.  Having learned from the experience of other countries, a system based upon near-field RFID tags was chosen for development and deployment.

However, according to http://www.eng.tau.ac.il/%7Eyash/evoting-relay-rfid2010.pdf, the chosen system suffers from serious vulnerabilities.

It seems that the real agenda of the politicians here, like everywhere, is still to get the populace to accept ballot systems, which allow the elections to be rigged.

As a trial, launched by Rachel Corrie’s parents, has been scheduled to start at March 10^th, I’d like to remind exactly what big goal did Rachel pursue when she was killed by an IDF bulldozer.

In the photo, you can see a fenced park.  The park had to be fenced in order to ensure that everyone who enters it gets searched for explosives, as a measure against entry of suicide bombers.

Rachel Corrie gave her life in an attempt to prevent the destruction of homes of Palestinian terrorists in Gaza Strip. As you can see from the photo, one can say that she won the effort to force Israelis to forsake open parks if they want to defend themselves against suicide bombers.

In today’s world, no act of legitimate self-defense or good deed by Israel goes unpunished. The story of the woman from Gaza, who tried to smuggle a bomb in her person when entering Israel for medical treatment, is known. Israel is accused of committing war crimes during the Cast Iron operation, nevermind the years of war crimes committed by the other side - the Palestinians in Gaza especially after the Israeli pull out from the Gaza Strip at 2005.

The most recent twist is the accusations that Israel utilizes the medical aid to Haiti as a pretext to steal organs for transplanting.

The best response to this accusation and others related to Israeli aid to Haiti, which I saw so far, is in  http://www.rantrave.com/Rave/Israeli-Aid-to-Haiti.aspx. The writer challenges the accusers to compete with Israel and overshadow its aid efforts by efforts of their own.

Whenever you feed people, who could not feed themselves, please do not only shed tears on their bad fortunes.  Please do not stop at providing them with a meal.
Please ask them about the circumstances, which prevented them from being self-sufficient.

Then do something to ameliorate those circumstances.  Sometimes you can do a lot for the price of a single meal for a group of people.

I suspect that several responses will go along the following lines.

• People past retirement age - why couldn’t they save in their retirement funds?  Probably they saved and lost the money to crooks or bad investments.
• People with disabilities - what inaccessible places and circumstances prevented them from exercising their full earning potential?
• Unemployed - probably need vocational training to train for an occupation with higher demand.  The expense consists of both tuition, free time for study, and stipend to live on while studying.

Some people will turn out to be lazy bums with feeble excuses - they should NOT be fed.

If you have a lot of money to donate, usually the best way to use it to help those non self-supporting people - is to make it easier for them to train for a better paying occupation.

After 2^nd Lebanon War at Jul-August 2006, the government of Israel set up a committee of inquiry - the Winograd Committee.  A domain has been registered in behalf of this committee - http://vaadatwino.co.il/ (the contents are in Hebrew).

Fast forward three years.  The Israeli government is trying to build a biometric database with data about all Israeli citizens, and concerned people are protesting this plan.  The strongest argument against the database is the risk of data leak, which may lead to rather adverse consequences.

To prove that the government does not know to protect its digital assets, the above domain was hijacked when its registration expired because someone in the government forgot to renew the domain registration.  The Website now contains a statement against the biometric database.

The following is an adaptation of the English translation of a talkback, which I wrote in response to an article in Ira Abramov’s blog (written in Hebrew), which commented on the results of the elections held in Israel at 2009 February 10, whose results showed the decline of the Israeli Left.

I do not think that the Israeli Left lost the elections due to leadership failures, divisiveness or other nonsense.

I think that it was a victory of the Palestinians in their war against the Israeli Left, pure and simple.

• After Rabin’s murder at November 1995, there was widespread support for Shimon Peres (who advocated the same pro-Palestinian policy, which caused Yigal Amir to murder Rabin). Until the elections were at last held at 1996, the support passed to Bibi Netanyahu and he won landslide victory in the elctions. Who helped him? All those Palestinian terrorists, who exploded busses during the months between murder and elections.
• One of the consequences of the Al-Aqsa intifada, which started at 2000, and which included terror attacks committed by suicide bombers almost every day, was that several people from the Israeli Left felt that they no longer have a partner in the other side, and withdrew support for policy of appeasement toward the Palestinians.
• The third round of the war between the Palestinians and the Israeli Left was held during the years from the Disengagement until now. The By continuing to launch missiles from Gaza Strip into Israel, the Palestinians provided ammunition to those forces in the Israeli Right, who opposed the Disengagement and demonstrated and blocked roads in an attempt to stop the Disengagement.

After such battles, which ended with unequivocal victory of the Palestinians, why does anyone still wonder that the Israeli Left lost its influence over Israeli politics?

Yesterday, the primaries election of the Labor party in Israel was aborted and postponed to a later date due to serious malfunctioning of the voting machines deployed for this purpose.

The provider of those machines was Taldor LTD.

Sources (in Hebrew):

• Primaries in Labor Party: why did the voting machines fail?
• Farce in Labor Party: the primaries were postponed due to the failures

I wrote previously about computerized elections.

In This is not the end of capitalism, Mark Shuttleworth (of Ubuntu fame) points out the need for capitalism with regulation. The regulators - those people who would regulate businesses - would need to have extraordinary personal qualities of resourcefulness, wisdom and incorruptibility. In other words, they need to have caliber like E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensmen (the qualities required by Lensmen include intelligence, utter incorruptibility, a high drive to succeed, and the highest drive to fight evil).

However, like Santa Claus, such people exist only in fiction. Therefore another solution is needed. A practical solution would, by necessity, be based upon a system, in which imperfect and corruptible people would nevertheless do almost as good job as incorruptible ones.

Fortunately, there is a precedent for systems obviating the need for supermen. The 18^th century political philosophers faced a similar problem. They were faced with the problem of designing a regime, in which people will enjoy freedom, even though they are governed by other imperfect people. The solution was to devise a system of checks and balances. It was embodied in the constitution of USA and worked well for several years.

Therefore, a possible solution to the problem of regulating capitalism is likely to come from a system of checks and balances. In the following I’ll try to sketch a possible design for such a system.

A business operating in an industry, which needs to be regulated, has to answer to the following stakeholders:

• Shareholders
• Employees
• Business partners (customers and suppliers)
• Environment

Regulation, when it is enforced, aims at restoration of balance of the interests of all those stakeholders. Regulation has to be enacted when money fails to work as a means to motivate the business to serve its stakeholders in a balanced way.

Let’s try to set up a feedback loop, in which bad regulation translates into loss of profits. This can be accomplished by nominating people, who act like the historical kings or modern Benevolent Dictators For Life (BDFLs). Each BDFL will be responsible for regulating all businesses in a particular geographical area. Every business in the region will pay the BDFL 1% of its profits. On the other hand, the BDFL will be subjected to lawsuits from any stakeholder, who believes to have been wronged by a business under the BDFL’s responsibility.

Thus, the BDFL will have an interest at ensuring that the businesses in his area will prosper in a balanced way. Since small businesses have larger growth potential than big businesses, the BDFL will tend to favor small businesses. The BDFL will balance the interests of businesses with those of the other stakeholders when formulating regulations, so that the business will thrive and the BDFL won’t lose too much money to lawsuits.

This proposal is incomplete, and leaves out answers to several questions such as:

1. What happens if a business operating in a geographical area gets to be so large that the BDFL of that area will profit more from favoring it than from nurturing other businesses?
2. Is the BDFL only to regulate businesses, or also develop infrastructure (like kings)?
3. How to select BDFLs from among candidates?
4. When and how to replace BDFLs, who do not do good work?
5. How to preserve the sovereignity of the people in a BDFL-controlled area?

Yesterday, USA elected the next President. Obama won the elections by clear cut margin. There was higher than usual turnout of voters.

Next Tuesday, on Nov. 11^th, there will be municipal elections in Israel. In some cities, in particular Jerusalem, the elections will have critical importance.

I’d like to urge everyone eligible to vote - to vote in those elections.

Remember, if you do not bother to vote, you in effect are voting for the candidate you hate the most!