Bibi Netanyahu and the First Zionist Congress at 1897

Bibi Netanyahu was excellent Minister of Finance, who saved the Israeli economy from the fate of Argentinian economy. Too bad people do not recognize this fact and are angry with him due to cutbacks in handouts to poor people. They do not realize that if Netanyahu hadn’t cut back those handouts, those handouts would have suffered much more serious and less controlled cuts as the Israeli economy collapses.

Bibi Netanyahu was OK as Prime Minister.

However I am not happy with one thing which he failed to accomplish.
This failing is a reason why I and other people do not remember the exact date of the first Zionist Congress at 1897.

You see, Bibi Netanyahu was Prime Minister at 1997. However, he failed to arrange for celebrations to mark 100 years since the first Zionist Congress. The event could be used to explain to the world why Zionism was necessary given the status of the Jews in Europe and Russia at the time. Why Zionism is not as discriminatory as an affirmative action type movement. What problems Zionism set out to solve.

However, since the original Zionist ideology was different in details from Netanyahu’s ideology, budgetary excuses were invoked to avoid celebrating the event.

Ten years later, we have a chance to partially fix this oversight. At 2007, we can celebrate 110 years to the first Zionist Congress. Let’s start preparing for this.

Visit to the Neeman Library in TAU

Today I came again to the Neeman Library in Tel Aviv University (last time was before the Hamakor General Assembly on Sunday Dec. 18). The purpose of my visit was to read papers about the workings of the human visual and auditory systems, for a project.

Today I read an interesting paper published at 1968 by someone called Yilmaz.

After reading the paper, I went to the librarian responsible for running searches and asked her to search for Yilmaz’s biography and list of publications.

Power went out and the librarian’s computer turned off.

After few minutes, power came back. The librarian turned on her PC, and after the computer finished rebooting, she started running a search.

Power went out again.

I joked with her that “Someone” (with capital S) does not want me to know about Yilmaz. I decided to call it a day and go back home.

As I approached the exit of the library’s building, power came back.

Grassroots Leadership Crisis in Israeli Democracy

Recently I have been informed and/or been involved in three events. Each event is very different from the others, but there is a surprising and alarming common denominator among those events.

  • Eli Moyal, mayor of Sderot, told, in an interview publicized in Ma’ariv’s “Sofshavua” (Weekend) dated 16 Dec 2005, why he abolished the open door policy, which is the norm among mayors of Israeli development towns (which have lower average socioeconomic levels). He found that 99% of the people, who came to see him, came for three purposes: discount on the municipal tax (“arnona”) due from them, getting a job, and getting an apartment. He did not have the authority to grant any of those requests.
  • During the weeks before and during the General Assembly of Hamakor, it was evident that several people did not understand the proper roles of the governing board and the comptrollers. Some people wanted the governing board to take active role promoting various activities.

    They did not understand that Hamakor was originally founded in order to provide accounting and legal framework to people (“projectors”), who want to push their own Free Software related projects. The board itself should concern itself only with finding, nurturing and helping those projectors.

    Some of them even made proposals, which required enlarging the group of Hamakor officials, without ensuring first that there are enough volunteers to fill all the positions they proposed to create.

  • Today there was a dedication ceremony for the new Israeli Sign Language dictionary in a high school in Yahud. I attended the event and noticed that Deaf persons themselves did not lead the project or the ceremony. The dictionary was created by two hearing women (however one of them is CODA – child of deaf adults – and her mother tongue is Israeli Sign Language). All political speeches during the ceremony were by hearing persons. They at least took a Deaf woman to explain the audience how to use the dictionary software, and the concluding art program was by Deaf artists (drummers and dancers).

    If I compare this to the situation few years ago, when the Association of the Deaf in Israel (a wholly Deaf-run organization) led the fight for rights of the Deaf – I conclude that the Deaf community abdicated its leadership position. I believe that this was because of some poor decisions and infighting by some leaders of the Deaf community.

The common denominator I see among those events is the fact that training in the practices of leadership and democracy is not sufficiently ingrained in Israeli formal and informal educational establishments.

People do not understand that they should bother their mayors about waste disposal, traffic jams, schools and city planning rather than about their personal financial woes. Then they get corrupt mayors, who get elected because they obtain and give handouts to a group of supporters. For example, in Yeruham, there was a very good mayor. However he was ousted in elections because his electorate did not understand the proper division of responsibilities. The guy who replaced him botched his job, and now Yeruham is managed by an appointed committee, led by Amram Mitzna.

Discussions in Hamakor and several other nonprofits are full of comments by people, who are not familiar with the relevant Israeli law and expect the nonprofit leaders to accomplish miracles. People are not aware that if they want something to happen, they should move their asses and do something. They can only expect the organizations not to interfere with their endeavors (if the endeavors have worthy goals), and only sometimes to provide some help. But they themselves must be the movers and shakers.

The general situation in Israel has implications on the situation in the Deaf community. The Deaf community now finds itself in the uncomfortable position of being led by non-Deaf people, benevolent as they may be. The root cause for this sorry situation is lack of grassroots understanding of the political process and the responsibilities of each participant in the political process.

Lack of accessibility kills people (or: why I am not using the Israeli train system now)

Few days ago, Shmuel Katz, an hearing-impaired and sight-impaired man, was killed by the train in Tel Aviv.
He boarded the wrong train, and when trying to leave it in haste, he was trapped at the train’s door and was killed.

The root cause for his death is insufficient accessibility of train related information to people with hearing and sight impairments. Information about the destination of the current train in a platform is not always displayed, and announcements over the public address system are, of course, not heard by hearing impaired people.

The problem of the announcements is the reason why I stopped using the train until further notice.

My parents live in Jerusalem, not far from the Malacha train station in southwest Jerusalem.
When the train line to Jerusalem was reopened, I made frequent use of it to travel from Petah Tikva to Jerusalem and back. Since the reason for trips was to visit family rather than business or work, I did not mind the schedule problems of the train.

However, one day I read in the newspaper that due to schedule problems, the management canceled the stops in Bnei Berak, Petah Tikva and Rosh Hayin in a train run passing through Petah Tikva. The cancellations were announced in the public address system. This incident was newsworthy, because the passengers, who expected to leave the train in the canceled stops, blocked the train’s doors open and prevented it from leaving the station it was in Tel Aviv. The train run was canceled.

If I were on that train, I’d not have a clue about the happening, and would have risked finding myself in Hod Hasharon instead of my destination – Petah Tikva – and since there are no convenient bus lines from the Kfar Sava-Hod Hasharon train station to “my” train station, I would have wasted several hours getting back to my car parked in the Petah Tikva train station.

Therefore I decided to go back to using my car to visit my parents in Jerusalem, until the train becomes 100% accessible to hearing impaired people, and the management demonstrates more scheduling responsibility.

Yes! We have no bananas!

Yes! We have no bananas! Also, you can have both tea and no tea. However, you will be requested to leave your common sense to the loving care of your spouse.

Recently, there was a discussion in the Israeli Python mailing list about teaching the concept of a null string to schoolchildren in a Python course. The surprising thing is that in the world of Python and other programming languages, you can have both a string with characters and a string with no characters (“null string”), as long as they are assigned to different variables.

Few years ago, there was a Linux installation party in an obscure Israeli city. The compulsory trashcan got the label “/dev/null” (it was my own proud hand which wrote those fateful letters), and when it was emptied, someone took a shot of its location and labelled it as “/dev/null unmounted”.

What the bleep do we know!?

I was in Dizengoff Center because I went to see the Marlee Matlin starred movie. The movie was a cumpulsory movie for me, because was different from the usual mainstream movie. However I did not fully enjoy my experience viewing it. Compared, for example, to “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, the Hitchhiker’s wins in a big way.

I did not like the philosophizations which filled the movie. Philosophy and story line did not integrate well, in my opinion. Any philosophical discussion which confuses the exterior and the interior of humans is incomplete if it does not consider also:

  • Korzybski’s General Semantics
  • Love

About the subject of love, I noticed that Amanda, the movie’s protagonist, was essentially alone. While she interacted with other people, and some of her relationships were not exactly superficial, they were not deep either. Missing was treatment of the deep relationship which goes into love, in which both parties create a new joint world and bear children into it. Then the children grow out of the world created for them by their parents and build their own worlds, and then they merge their own worlds with their own lovers’ worlds and so the cycle goes on.

In the movie itself, love was not deeper than relationship with a cheating husband, some flirtatious dances, or eroticism from the point of view of cognitive psychologists.

Dizengoff Center, Tel Aviv

This evening I found myself with some free time on my hands while in Dizengoff Center.
So I wandered around its less traveled corridors.
Turns out that top floors of the Dizengoff Center have corridors, which qualify to be high-class bohemian areas. The top floors have all sorts of strange shops. Occult, cabala, gifts, scents, tattoos, piercing, you name it. Those shops look well-maintained, clean, high class. Unlike your usual bohemian quarters.
Do not bother to look for those shops at the bottom floors. The bottom floors have more conventional mix of shops – clothes, restaurants and cafes, electrical appliances, bookshops and other conventional stuff.

The big surprise is why Dizengoff Center is not more famous for its collection of strange shops in far away corridors.

NEW BUZZWORD – PREFACTORING !!!

THERE IS A NEW BUZZWORD – Prefactoring – IN THE CITY!
THERE IS ALREADY A BOOK ABOUT THE NEW BUZZWORD. JUST WAIT FOR THE COURSES, SEMINARS, ARMY OF CONSULTANTS WITH HASTILY-UPDATED RESUMES AND CLAIMS FOR 3-YEAR EXPERIENCE WITH THE NEW BUZZWORD!

THE DREAM OF PHBs AND OF 2nd RATE PROGRAMMERS HAS BEEN FULFILLED. PREFACTORING IS PANACEA, SILVER BULLET, BLESSING AND CURE FOR ALL ILLS AND BUGS AND AMBIGUITIES AFFLICTING SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS!

WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? DO NOT BE LEFT BEHIND! JUMP ON THE BANDWAGON!!!

Alarming plans of Israeli political parties re: Internet usage

According to today’s Ma’ariv, the political parties are planning to make heavy use of the Internet. The arsenal of tools to be used will include interactive ads, viral distribution of E-mail messages, and even astrosurfing.

The alarming aspect of the plans is that even spam E-mail will not be ruled out.

I have the policy of boycotting any entity which spams me. However, if all political parties choose to stoop to spamming me, for which party will I vote? 🙁

Source: Ma’ariv’s Saturday Supplement, pg. 7, article by Nadav Eyal “Spam E-mail from _____” (the actual name was censored to prevent online defamation until proved guilty).