The end of the country as we knew it

On 11 December, barely 14 weeks ago, I wrote the following: I (and I am not alone in this) feel now that everything that has happened to Israel and to me personally is about to be taken away by the extremist government that is in the process of being formed as I write these words. The juidicial system, the education system, the police ... everything that screams 'democracy' is now considered to be 'undemocratic' and has to be replaced.

I certainly didn't expect what would happen during those 14 weeks. I didn't expect the demonstrations that would grow and grow exponentially; I didn't expect that the Defence Minister would speak on Saturday night, saying that the 'judicial reforms' are causing irreparable damage to the army and its defences and so he could not support those 'reforms'. Whilst his being fired was a predictable move by the Prime Minister, I didn't expect that thousands of people would immediately take to the streets and demonstrate against this.

I've seen similar happen in other countries, but never in my country. I can't find the words at the moment to describe how I feel .... I am trying to work but I am listening to the television - the Histadrut has called for a general strike until the proposals are removed, the airport authority has announced that there will be no more take-offs, the local authorities have joined the general strike ... it's the end of the country as we knew it.

We're still waiting for Netanyahu to make his speech that will define how things will go from here. 

As an aside, there are a few statements that have been developing within me over these past weeks -

1. Every government is supposed to work for the people and improve their life. This government has worked only to improve the lives of its members.
2. The Likud party came to power based on a platform of handling the housing crisis, handling the rising cost of living, handling violence in the Arab cities, returning law and order to the Negev and handling Iran. It has done none of these things, instead concentrating on something (judicial reform/ruin) that was never mentioned in their pre-election platform.
3. Yariv Levin, the 'justice' minister is afraid that if he does not carry on with his legislation, he will be framed for some offence (such as treason). Paranoia.
4. The same YL said on 12 January "It turns out that there is another political party in Israel. A party that did not compete in the election that took place only two months ago". The name of this party is Yair Netanyahu, the PM's son. He thinks that he rules the country.  Did he stand in the elections? Who voted for him?

I don't see how we can continue from here. The first thing to be done is cancelling the firing of the Defence Minister: the last thing that anyone wants is that the security of the country be compromised. IMHO, the most responsible thing to do should be to call for new elections but I can understand why that is an unpalatable option.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
564	27/03/2013	Lost videocassettes reappear	TV series
1017	27/03/2017	Thesis update	DBA
1488	27/03/2022	Cystoscopy	Health

Reality Is Broken -- Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World

I am currently reading the above book, written by Jane McDonigal and published in 2011. I am also part of the minority who do not play [computer] games. Or do I? In the opening chapter, McDonigal writes that all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation.

It occurs to me that my music making is a game. It has

• a goal:  create a song
  
• rules: the 'rules' of music, primarily melody, harmony and rhythm
• a feedback system: I listen to the song and can hear (hopefully) where it needs improving. Also, one could include posting the song on YouTube then counting the number of plays that it receives, along with any comments
• voluntary participation: no one is making me do this!

I've only read the opening chapter so far, but somehow I don't expect that McDonigal will include making music amongst the games covered in the book. But still ... I quote a paragraph slightly further on in the chapter: When we’re playing a good game—when we’re tackling unnecessary obstacles—we are actively moving ourselves toward the positive end of the emotional spectrum. We are intensely engaged, and this puts us in precisely the right frame of mind and physical condition to generate all kinds of positive emotions and experiences. All of the neurological and physiological systems that underlie happiness—our attention systems, our reward center, our motivation systems, our emotion and memory centers—are fully activated by gameplay.  That's how I feel when I'm making music.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
465	25/03/2012	Pharyngitis, Darkness	Health, Van der Graaf Generator

UN Happiness report

It's hard to believe, but according to a headline that I read today, 'Israel has risen five places to fourth in the 2023 World Happiness Report, which is sponsored by the UN, through a poll conducted by Gallup, measuring happiness in countries between 2020 and 2022. In the 2022 report Israel has risen from 12th to ninth, and it now finds itself in fourth place'.

I can't figure out when this poll was conducted; is <this year>'s position dependent on the values of three years prior to <this year>? One thing is clear: maybe we were happy, but not in 2023! I suspect that the 2024 report will show a sharp decline in Israel's happiness.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
121	21/03/2008	Literary allusions	ERP, Literature, Satie, 1984
690	21/03/2014	Research questionnaire / 3	DBA
933	21/03/2016	Zero values in Priority tables (2)	Priority tips
1482	21/03/2022	Severe stomach cramps	Health

I contain multitudes

My current reading is "I contain multitudes" by Ed Yong, that is about bacteria within our body. Unlike most non-fiction books that I read, this one makes me feel old.

I studied microbiology in the years 1974-8, where the focus was on pathogens that might appear in food. We learned how to distinguish when faecal contamination occurred, according to the bacteria found in food. I don't recall them off-hand, but one indicated contamination within the past day, one within the past week, and one (almost certainly clostridium perfringens) within the past month.

But this book is about the good things that our internal bacteria can do for us, a view that was unheard of 50 years ago. It's statements like 'By the 1990s, scientists knew that there were more than 100 HMOs in milk, but had only characterised a few' that make me feel old. The way it's written, the 1990s were long ago, but for my studies, they were 20 years in the future.

I wouldn't say that everything that I learnt has been overturned, but it also seems so antiquated now.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
119	16/03/2008	Back to blogging	Office automation, Meta-blogging
120	16/03/2008	Chava Alberstein	Chava Alberstein
464	16/03/2012	Rubber duck debugging	Programming
1480	16/03/2022	My first year as a Londoner, part 1 - being a student	Personal, 1975, 1974

Goodbye, Dilbert (at least for the time being)

For those who don't know, Dilbert is an American comic strip written and illustrated by Scott Adams, first published on April 16, 1989. It is known for its satirical office humor about a white-collar, micromanaged office with engineer Dilbert as the title character. [Wikipedia]. I've been following it for years, sometimes very much enjoying it and sometimes finding it boring. A week or so ago, Scott Adams made remarks that were construed as racist and so many newspapers have dropped his comic. The strips were still appearing on Dilbert's web site - at least, until yesterday. Now he has disappeared. 

So as a reminder, I am pasting here a strip from a few days ago, that is very appropriate to my situation.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
463	15/03/2012	Sequencing "Lost" / 2	Van der Graaf Generator, Peter Hammill, Home recording
688	15/03/2014	Boy, was I wrong - programming naivety	Programming, Delphi, ClientDataSet
1381	15/03/2021	A year of Covid-19	Covid-19

Yes, today is the "anniversary" of Covid-19 in Israel and the date that the Occupational Therapist uses to compare values 'before' and 'after' the outbreak.

I wish I hadn't seen yesterday evening's News on tv

There was further coverage of demonstrations against the judicial ruin, this time in London, Paris and Rome - cities where the prime minister has visited or will visit in the near future. There was also coverage of counter-demonstrations: apparently someone setup a Whatsapp list but has managed so far to sign up 1,100 people. A physical counter-demonstration drew 10 people. I will refrain from drawing the obvious conclusion from this.

But what really upset me was a short clip of Simcha Rotman (1), chairman of the Knesset Constitution Committee, saying that all these demonstrations were because 'the left wing cannot accept that Netanyahu is the prime minister'. Whilst no left winger is pleased that Netanyahu is the prime minister, THIS IS NOT THE REASON FOR THE DEMONSTRATIONS!!!!!! Is Rotman so thick that he cannot understand that the people are against judicial ruin and the beginning of dictatorship? Has he even read any of the slogans daubed on the demonstrators' placards? 'No to judicial reform' is very much to the point. 

We are told that he had a three hour meeting with the President yesterday; hopefully this 'misunderstanding' has been overcome. But I doubt it. The rhetoric of the right wing needs to be taken down several pegs.

The father of Justice Minister Yariv Levin died on Saturday night, so the minister will be out of action for a week.

My anxiety level is increasing far too fast. This anxiety has dominated my thinking since yesterday evening, not allowing me to think about programming problems that are more immediate.

(1) I don't know to whom Rotman was speaking, but he did so in good English with no accent. Until these elections, no one had ever heard of Rotman, so what gives him the right to be so intransigent??

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
462	13/03/2012	Post mortem on the Negotiation exam	MBA, Negotiation
557	13/03/2013	Ring out the old, bring in the new! (My motorbikes)	Motorbikes
931	13/03/2016	Priority tip of the day	Programming, Priority tips
1298	13/03/2020	Apocalypse now (continued)	Personal, Kibbutz, Weather, Covid-19

More ideas for the 'blog manager' program

Recently, I've been forgetting to add 'This day in history' to a few blogs. The way that the procedure is written in the 'blog manager' program allows me only to find blogs for 'today', whatever 'today' might be. So for the past few days I've been thinking about adding the ability to find blogs for any given day of the year, not necessarily today. Fortunately, it was very easy to do this: I simply moved 99% of the code into an auxiliary procedure then called that procedure either with the date of 'today' or an arbitrary date.

procedure TMainForm.ShowHistory (adate: tdatetime);
var
 y, m, d, instance: word;

begin
 decodedate (adate, y, m, d);
 instance:= dm.NewInstance;
 with qInsert do
  begin
   sql.text:= 'insert into temp (id, instance) select entries.id, ' +
              inttostr (instance) + ' from entries ' +
              'where extract (month from curdate) = :p1 ' +
              'and extract (day from curdate) = :p2 ';
   parambyname ('p1').asinteger:= m;
   parambyname ('p2').asinteger:= d;
   execsql
  end;
 TShowEntries.create (instance, 'This day in history, ' + inttostr (d) 
                      + '/' + inttostr (m), true);
end;

procedure TMainForm.mnHistoryClick(Sender: TObject);
begin
 ShowHistory (date);  // i.e. today's date
end;

procedure TMainForm.mnSomeDayClick(Sender: TObject);
var
 adate: tdatetime;

begin
 with TChooseTagDates.create (nil) do
  try
   adate:= GetOneDate
  finally
   free
  end;

 if adate > 0 then ShowHistory (adate);
end;

Not only was I forgetting to add the blog history, I discovered that I had neglected to log a few existing blogs. This happened to me a few times when I was entering the first 600 blogs manually. I was forced to renumber entries in two tables that fortunately the SQL manager allowed me to do. But it's a pain and the possibility of making mistakes - especially in the tags per entry table - is high. So today I thought that I would add the functionality to renumber automatically, should the need arise again (and it probably would). The main insight was to renumber 'in reverse'; if the maximum blog id number is 1589, then first 1589 should be renumbered to 1590, then 1588 to 1589, etc.  One has to input a starting number, or rather, a stopping number. This would be, of course, the first blog after the missing blog, so that a gap would be left for the missing blog. Renumbering the tags per entry table is performed in the same manner.

This blog is actually being written a day in advance (11/03/23) but now I can show the blog history for 12 March, thanks to the new functionality.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
460	12/03/2012	Another example of Excel usage	ERP, DBA, Excel
461	12/03/2012	Proposed doctorate	DBA, Excel
556	12/03/2013	Pictures from a balcony (3)	Personal
816	12/03/2015	This boy is on fire	Programming, ERP
1016	12/03/2017	How to exclude rows from summation	Priority tips
1297	12/03/2020	Apocalypse now	Personal, Kibbutz, Weather, Covid-19
1380	12/03/2021	The continuing saga of saving unicode text - this time in the 'manager' program	Delphi, Unicode
1479	12/03/2022	Another dismal Saturday	Home recording

Further down the slippery slope to dictatorship

I haven't written on the topic of the judicial reform/introduction to dictatorship since I walked to the Knesset a few weeks ago. Whilst I personally have not been involved in the demonstrations, nothing has changed since then in terms of anything changing in the attitudes of the Justice (sic) Minister and the chairman of the law committee. The president has made two speeches on the topic; the first was like a shot across the bows - a warning sign but doing no damage - whereas his speech on Thursday night (i.e. 09/03/23 - a translation of the speech can be found here) was of a different species altogether: much more militant.

I want to quote from the speech of reknowned historian Yuval No'ach Harari, author of the book 'Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind' amongst others, who spoke at the main rally in Tel Aviv last Saturday night (04/03/23). The Guardian posted a translation of his speech that is. to put it mildly, excellent and outraged. I want to quote one part of the speech:

"Coups are not always carried out with tanks in the streets. Many coups in history were carried out behind closed doors with pens and papers, and by the time people understood the meaning of what was written in those papers – it was too late to resist.

History is full of dictatorships established by people who first came to power through legal means. It’s the oldest trick in the book: first you use the law to gain power, then you use your power to distort the law. When examined together, the laws this government is currently legislating have one simple meaning (and you don’t need a PhD in law to get it): if these laws are passed, the government will have the power to completely destroy our freedom".

Although Harari didn't say it outright, the closest parallel is Germany in 1933 when a madman was elected to the Bundestag, then became chancellor, repealed many democratic laws and finally started the path to the Holocaust. Have we learnt nothing from history?

Should the anti-democratic laws be passed, all that needs to be done is to repeal the laws concerning elections - and then Netanyahu, or his extremist son, or any of his henchmen, can become our dictator for the next 50 years. No wonder many people are suffering from extreme anxiety (apparently, the number of people seeking psychiatric care has jumped in the past month).

Ther was an interview with Harari on television last night; he repeated the second paragraph quoted above, but refrained from making the conclusion that I did (after all, he is a professor; maybe he wants his students - i.e. us - to make the conclusion on their own). But he did say that there is no way that we can return to the [legal?] situation as it was on 31/10/22, the day before the painful election day.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
69	11/03/2007	Weekend migraines (part 2)	Programming, Migraine
1589	11/03/2023	Further down the slippery slope to dictatorship	Israel

That's all, say amen, close the door

The title of this blog is actually a Richard Thompson song that is supposedly (and quite probably) about Sandy Denny. I recorded a cover version of this several years ago, but that's not the point of this blog.

I have just uploaded my resubmitted doctoral thesis to the UK Turnitin site, from where it will be accessed by the university staff. I only have to pay another examination fee of £150 and then my thesis will be passed to the external examiners. That's all, say amen. This is not the end of the doctoral process - there still will be the viva exam - but I've written all that I have to write. Actually, that's not completely true: the examiners will probably ask for revisions, hopefully minor.

I have just looked at what I wrote nearly three years ago when I was in the same position, about the problems that I had including a pdf scan of the signed submission form along with the thesis itself. Just as well as I didn't even think of reading this, as today I took a completely different approach and completely the task within minutes. I scanned the submission form then included this into the thesis as a Word file; I submitted the Word file - no conversion to pdf. I hope that there will be no problems with this.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
68	09/03/2007	Weekend migraines	Maccabi Tel Aviv, Migraine
555	09/03/2013	I'll never get those wasted hours back	Programming, Email, Problem solving, Nick Hornby
930	09/03/2016	Sir George Martin, RIP	Obituary, Beatles
1204	09/03/2019	The Tel Aviv saxophone quartet	Ambient music
1379	09/03/2021	Sometimes it takes a long time for the light to go on in my head	MIDI
1588	09/03/2023	That's all, say amen, close the door	DBA