שעת כדור הארץ והחרשים
ביום חמישי 24.3.2011 שעה 20:00, שוב יכבו את האורות לשעה כדי להעלות את המודעות לאיכות הסביבה.
ושוב, אצטרך להחרים את האירוע כמו שהחרמתי אירועים דומים בשנים קודמות. וזאת למרות תמיכתי ברעיון השמירה על איכות הסביבה.
הסיבה - בגלל חרשותי, אני צריך אור ואביזרים חשמליים שונים כדי לתקשר עם אנשים אחרים.
קישורים נוספים (additional links):
During the last several months, I noticed that the strongest voices in favor of accepting Hamas’ terms for release of Gilad Shalit, and against tough negotiations - belong to the Left.
The question, then is: why does the Left press Bibi Netanyahu to surrender to Hamas in the negotiations over Gilad Shalit?
The Leftist movements in Israel, such as Peace Now, have an agenda of demonstrating against the Israeli leaders whenever they try to play tough in peace negotiations with the Arabs, as if playing tough is equivalent to wish for war - rather than wish for peace from better position. They throw to the winds the maxim that negotiations which end in satisfactory results - start with tough-looking bargaining positions.
In the case of negotiations for Gilad Shalit’s release, I suspect that the Left knows that the key for Gilad Shalit’s release is to act tough and even be cruel toward Hamas activists in Israeli prisons. However they do not want that the Israeli public be exposed to the experience of tough negotiations with successful outcome.
Therefore, the Leftists would sabotage the process of negotiations by blaming the Israeli leaders for “abandoning” Gilad Shalit only because they try to play tougher in negotiations with Hamas. Nevermind the fact that true abandonment means that no one is giving attention to the abandoned person; rather than having to do with the specific kind of attention being given. The Leftists demonstrate - not against Hamas or the International Red Cross - but against Bibi Netanyahu and the other Israeli leaders. They try to persuade Netanyahu to release dangerous terrorists, whose release is sure to lead to tens and hundreds of Israeli victims.
Seems that for the Left, it is better to keep the Gilad Shalit problem unsolved, rather than risk the lesson that playing tough in negotiations pays huge dividends.
Israel currently suffers from serious water shortage. Efforts to alleviate the shortage are underway. One of the efforts is getting people to consume less water each month, by providing them with a certain quantity of water at one price, and any excess consumption costs much higher price.
This is bad socialism and is harmful to the liberty of people, because water bills are by apartments. So people need to declare how many people live in an apartment, and if someone moves to another apartment, the water bill payers of both apartments need to declare this change of living place.
A better solution would be to do what was done with bread few years ago. Economically, it was necessary to raise the price of bread. It was handled in a better way - the price was allowed to rise, but people, who live on welfare, got few extra NIS each month, to cover the extra cost of bread, so that they won’t be worse off.
In the case of water, poor people at any case lack the capital for investing into water saving measures - plugging any leaks in the water pipes, installing water flow limiters (חסכמים) in the taps, shower sewage recyclers, rain water collectors, etc. Well to do people can afford to make the investment which will reduce their water consumption - but need economic motivation to do so.
My suggestion is to provide water to everyone at high price. No need to report how many people live in each household. No need to compute water quotas for provision at lower price. However the monthly payments to people on welfare and on fixed budgets are to be adjusted upwards so that they’ll not be worse off than they were before.
Recently an American Jew asked me the following question, in view of the news concerning recognition of conversions into Judaism carried out in the Israeli army (IDF):
Hey, let me ask you something. My wife told me that Israel is in the middle of redefining who is a Jew, and that Reform/secular/assimilated people like me wouldn’t be considered Jews any more. Is that going to affect the Law of Return?
My reply to him was:
The law of return won’t be affected, but ability to marry in Israel will be affected, because the Chief Rabbinate has legal monopoly over marriages of Jews (corresponding bodies have monopolies over Christians, Moslems and Druze) and the scandal over recognition of conversions into Judaism (the actual subject worrying your wife) is relevant to getting recognized as Jews by the Chief Rabbinate.
People, who cannot marry in Israel, usually fly to Cyprus to get married there, and then their marriage is recognized in Israel. I have a cousin, who married in Cyprus, just because she was disgusted by the Chief Rabbinate.
The Law of Return explicitly covers non-Jews - if they have Jewish relatives (one Jewish grandparent or a Jewish spouse is enough).
As things look like, few years from now, civil marriages will be possible in Israel, because the group of people, covered by the Law of Return yet cannot marry in Israel, is growing each year (most of them are immigrants from the former Soviet Union and their descendants).
There is no doubt that the terrorists, whose release is demanded by Hamas in exchange for freeing Gilad Shalit, will murder even more Israelis in the next few years.
The only difference among Gilad Shalit and those Israelis is that today we know who is Gilad Shalit, and we can associate with him a photo, parents in distress and a life story. Whereas those dead Israelis are today nameless and we have no way to associate with them a photo, grieving relatives or life story. Only after they have lost their lives, we’ll know who they were.
Let it be clear. I believe that the Left-wing activists, who protest against the Israeli government’s handling of Gaza Strip in general and the flotilla in particular, are stupid, closed-minded, misguided and effectively are fifth column.
However, none of those attributes justify any form of attack on them by Right-wing activists. Not the smoke grenade, not personal attack on Uri Avneri and his ilk, nothing except for counter-demonstration.
Freedom of expression counts the most when one wants to express highly annoying opinions. Freedom of expression, in particular the freedom to question any of our sacred cows, is one of the foundations of our strength.
Let’s not deprive ourselves of real strength by threatening or silencing those misguided people!
Today, fans of the late Douglas Adams celebrate the Towel Day in his memory.
I managed to celebrate it by forgetting, for 1st time since I started to exercise in that particular gym, to bring my obligatory towel to the gym today.
Fortunately, a paper towel was available.
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.
At 20:00 tonight, lights are due to be turned off for an hour to raise consciousness of the environment.
Again, I’ll have to reluctantly boycott this event as I boycotted a similar event two years ago, and due to the same reasons.
As a trial, launched by Rachel Corrie’s parents, has been scheduled to start at March 10th, 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.
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