Privatizing Building Permits

The minimum time required in Israel for a building permit is about two years, while in many cases, like the famous Jerusalem Towers, it took ten years and complicated Jerusalem's major, chief engineer and the architects (several successive designs were submitted following the Committee's capricious demands). Some of them spent two weeks in jail suspected of offering and/or requesting bribes. The major was condemned because it was discovered that the entrepreneur had donated money to the Major's favorite philanthropy. So the Government decided to privatize the permitting process. Several engineering groups are being examined to become authorized "Examiners" (בודקים). One of these groups needed an expert in water/sewage and I was invited to join. The fruit plate was in front of me on the meeting table. The pic was taken BEFORE I started to examine it more closely.

The authorization process is managed by the Chemical Laboratories Office on the British model (they all traveled to London to learn how it works there). I easily passed the first exam. The next day we met in a 14 store apartment building complex (106 units) under construction, but when they climbed the very dangerous temporary stairs to the roof (there was no lift yet), I remembered my idol Nero Wolfe. The genius never left his office and employed young Goodwin for the dangerous footwork.

Hungarian Freedom-Fighters of 1956: Not Antisemites

Russian propaganda presents to this day the Hungarian "Counter-Revolution" of 1956 as basically antisemitic and intending to re-establish Horthy's fascist regime. A recent book (in Hungarian) elaborates a synthesis of the work of Bela Kovrig, a Hungarian sociology researcher, who collected some 1500 questionnaires with data on the fighters that escaped to Austria after the failed revolt.

The demography of the refugees is remarkable: more than half are single men in under 25. 70% declared having taken part in the fighting. One third were students, a quarter workers and 20% professionals. Kovrig estimated that 10% were antisemitic, the rest followed the principle of "Keeping the Revolution Clean" - meaning no antisemitism should be allowed. They tried to create, as far they had a post-revolutionary political program, some kind of Social-Christian regime like that of West Germany at those times.

While the picture that emerges from Kovrig's questionnaires is clear and I believe representative of the actual fighters that escaped to Austria, in later phases of the process there was a re-emergence of older Fascist elements. I remember my parents during those times: we lived in fear. So much so that they left all their possessions - apartment, silver objects inherited from my grandparents, family photographs and who knows what else - and undertook a very dangerous escape from Hungary in war.

War-in-War against the Sufis

Within the long war between the Sunni and the Shi'a branches of the Islamic world, there is an ongoing war against the Sufi interpretation. The massacre that took place in the Sinai last week, more than 300 worshipers gunned down in a mosque, was a Sunni attack against the Sunni (Sufi) people. The Shi'a, in their own sphere, also exterminate the Sufis and destroy their mosques and shrines.


In Lybia, the rebels bulldozed the shrine of al-Shaab al-Dahmani, a revered Sufi sage. In Mali, they demolished mausoleums and libraries in the ancient Saharan town of Timbuktu which were UNESCO world heritage sites. Sufi worship halls have also been turned to rubble in Iran, where the Islamic government is has jailed thousands of Sufi followers. In Egypt, Sufi shrines have been torched and the Sufi chanting ritual called zhikr has been banned.

The Sufis are targets of the fundamentalist Islam that sees their kinder, gentler interpretation of the religion of Mohamed as a challenge to their own rigid orthodoxy. Sufi practices, like the whirling of the Mevlevi dervishes in Turkey, first practiced by Rumi himself, employ music, dance and spiritual recitation to awaken the God who Sufis say is asleep in the human heart. The poems of Rumi in translation are well known and loved in the West. What is unknown is the the bloody persecution of his followers in our days of resurgent, hardened, fanatic Islam.

I think that the pacifist, inner-orientated, purification-seeking philosophy of the Sufi is doomed. The stiffening of the Islam will lead toward its unification and toward a new round of clashes against the Christian world. The contact with this hardened Islam has already induced a hardening of Israeli Judaism, and in the long term, I presume, it will cause the resurgence of a hardened Christianity in the West.

(On the other hand, I always have another hand, the hardening of Israeli Judaism may have internal causes; and the hardening of Western Christianity may never happen.)

300 Sufis Killed in a Sinai Mosque

Discarded shoes of victims remain outside Al-Rawda Mosque in Bir al-Abd northern Sinai, Egypt. a day after attackers killed hundreds of worshippers, on Saturday, Nov. 25, 2017. (AP Photo)

The killers as well the 300 victims were Sunni fanatics. Why then? The attackers follow the strict Wahhabi (Saudi) line while the mosque follows the Sufi tendency. The Sufi are strict Muslims with a penitential, ecstatic, mystical orientation. Sufi means rough, woolen garb, while Saudi princes prefer white galabiya (long shirts) with golden decorations. Reason enough for exterminating each other. Although, who needs reasons? A good war needs no cause (Nietzsche).

The first fully rational beings on the planet

"The first fully rational beings on the planet will surely be artificial intelligence machines" (author).

We should not fear machines that are more intelligent and rational than ourselves, just as we discovered that there is nothing frightening about locomotives that run much faster and are a thousand times more powerful than we are. Someone could build a machine capable of leveling towns, but none one did it. I have a premonition that thinking machines will be used to help seduce women and other sexual activities; after all, everything living organisms do is for reproduction.  

Protest

Manifestación, Antonio Berni, 1934. Foto: Gentileza Malba, Argentina.

Mnangagwa, the "Crocodile," sworn in as Zimbabwe president

Mnangagwa, the "Crocodile".

What can I add? except that I am impressed by his name and his avatar, the crocodile.

"Bibi" sounds babyish to me. It does not even approach the alarming neural impact of "Mnangagwa the Crocodile".