The right posture

I've been saying this for years.

Borat

I have had a chance to watch Borat and...

Oh... my... GOD!

This is an extremely rare thing for me to say, but:

Sacha Baron Cohen deserves to get every penny he gets from this show.

(although I do hope he goes back to the people of that Romanian village and shares a little more with them, now that the movie has been so successful).

I mean, this guy is brave. You need the balls of a bull to do the stuff he does. I'm shocked he didn't get seriously hurt a couple of times there... just goes to show how polite americans are I suppose.

By the way, not sure if you know that, but the movie is sort of a private joke for Hebrew speakers; Borat speaks Hebrew throughout the movie (when you think he is speaking Kazakh), and what he says has little to not relationship to what appears in the English subtitles. My friend and I were busting our guts every time he was speaking, and it was kinda funny because everyone around us thought we were crazy. If you speak Hebrew, you have to see this movie.

Burn baby burn

This kind of thing is one my very few serious triggers... and the reason I absolutely detest (OK, "vehemently oppose" works here as well) every organized religion, regardless of its origin, belief system, or purpose.

When I moved to this country I was hoping I'd get away from religious fanatics influencing decision making at every level that matters. In Israel, the orthodox assholes command so much public agenda it's frightening. America has done a decent job at separating church and state, or so I thought. I dunno what to tell you, the last six years have struck a little too close to home. I hope that will change now that the reigns have been wrested away from the religious fanatics and zealots. But anyway, this post isn't about politics.

For people like David Paszkiewicz, all I can say is, burn baby burn, you and whatever "Jesus" you pray to. I hope you lose your job, get civilly sued together with the frigging school board who protects you, and lose everything you have as a result. And then maybe, just for karmic justice, get some chronic disease that makes the rest of your life miserable but doesn't kill you until you see everything you love and believe in crumple to nothing around you. Type I diabetes would do nicely, especially if it happens after you lose your health insurance.

Oh yes. Then I want to hear you try to prosletyze again about the how "god takes care of his believers" and how I "will burn in hell". I'll be the first one to spit in your face when you do. Jerk.

"It's not my fault!"

Tom Peters has an absolute brilliant piece of advice available for download on his website... specifically, I am quoting tip #22:

A “Mission Statement” That Matters! (Tom Peters)

I hate “mission statements.”

Or “vision & values” statements.

Especially when they appear on plasticized cards.

Why?

I totally support the notion of the importance of ... Clear Values. (Hey, Bob Waterman and I practically invented the whole thing via In Search of Excellence, 22 years ago.) Like all good things, the idea has been attenuated beyond recognition. A Tepid Top Team goes “offsite,” to someplace warm in February, produces 6 insipid statements that (1) differentiate them/the company from no one; and (2) they have no clue as to what it really means to live up to these statements, assuming they were serious in the first place, and not just following the herd. (No one has absorbed Gandhi’s “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”) Then they (3) return home, have their gin-soaked “gem” immortalized in plastic ... and hand it out ceremoniously to 20,000 of the Unwashed as Holy Writ.

Yuck!

But all that’s changed ... for me!

In a flash!

Now I’m a fan!

Bring on the plastic!

I was at a WooWoo resort last week in (Warm Place), giving a speech. Got up, as usual, at 4:00 a.m. Alas, room service not open ’til 6:00 a.m.—pretty crappy, but I can’t expect everyone to share my strange habits. So at 6:00 a.m. sharp (6:04, actually ... I took note) I call and place my complex order: a pot of tea. (Period.) I’m told it will be “about 30-40 minutes.” I think to myself it’s outrageous, but I hold my tongue. (I want—NEED!—the tea.) Some 45 minutes later ... NO TEA. I call room “service” ... and ... IT HAPPENS!

The guy says he’s sorry but ...

But ... “IT’S NOT MY FAULT.”

(You know, the Gremlin stole the teapot, we’re outta hot water in Arizona, or some such.) (That’s when I ... lost it ... and no amount of “right breathing” helped in the least.)

But ... IT WAS A GOOD THING!

Now I—finally!—realized I’d “seen” (it was almost religious) an inkling of a “mission statement” I could imagine & live with & publish & plasticize & champion!

I immediately put it on a slide, and used it to tee off my remarks a few hours later ... to vigorous applause. Herewith the “slide”/idea/Supreme Mission:

XYZ Corp: Complete Vision & Values & Mission & USP Statement

Any Service or Product is yours for absolutely NO CHARGE if any employee including the CEO ever says or implies at any point ...

“It’s Not My Fault.”

V. Big Cheese, Founder, CEO & Dictator

If we could flatly & finally eliminate “It’s not my fault” from the explicit or implicit vocabulary (“life style”) of room service clerks—and CEOs!—many of the world’s woes would be instantly righted. If ... ACCOUNTABILITY ... and ... SELF-RESPONSIBILITY ... were our routine practice, well, how fabulous! How effective! How profitable! So I invite you (Way to Succeed #22, remember) to fully adopt for yourself and your tiny or huge enterprise, temporary or permanent, my ... COMPLETE VISION & VALUES & MISSION & USP STATEMENT!

Eh???

The best get rich scheme

You must have heard already about the UCLA student getting tased 5 times (two links here) for refusing to leave the campus library.

I gotta say, this is ingenious - a new get rich scheme. Here is how it works:

1) Create a disturbance in a public location, preferably with a lot of excitable young people around
2) When police arrives, push all their buttons and make sure that you also push the crowd's buttons by being as loud as possible, and screaming at the top of your lungs to make it clear to everyone just how much you are being mistreated
3) Get someone to videotape on their cellphone the part where you scream out like a stuck pig for the benefit of the camera, and then post it to youtube
4) Profit! (by filing a civil lawsuit)

Just a couple of things to consider:

1) The "stun" mode on a taser gun does not disable a person; it's painful, but not debilitating. The police never tased the guy's legs, and he therefore could stand up at any point in time. To prove this point, watch the video closely, especially when he is tased the third time, and notice him kicking his legs up in the air right after the taser gun is removed from his midsection.
2) Also listen to what he keeps screaming while supposedly being in so much debilitating pain. "Patriot act"? Or the classic "am I the only martyr", as he was continually trying to incite other students to join his little rebellion? listen closely, or you'll miss a few other gems.
3) ...

Oh, heck, I can go on and on about this. No point, really, you can find plenty of stuff around, even from people who were there.

But I'll tell you my opinion: this guy needed to be tased as many times as was needed to get him to comply, and the officers should receive a commendation for being so constrained and managing to avoid an actual riot. I'm surprised they didn't actually use more force in order to shut him up; I would at least have set my taser to a higher setting so he is disabled, then dragged him out. Heck, this idiot fully deserved to be taken out with a well-aimed smack to the side of his head with a gun.

I wouldn't be surprised if the little shit planned this all along.

And the really sad part is he'll probably win some massive damages from his lawsuit, because California is like that.

What a country.

Abortion

I just finished reading a column (it's in hebrew, unfortunately, so I won't link to it) from a man whose wife just aborted their potential third child. By the way, there seems to be a bit of a language barrier here, I just couldn't find a non-awkward way to phrase that last statement.

Anyway, without getting into the pro-life/pro-choice argument, I have a question.

Humans are, as far as I know, the only mammal whose babies are born "not ready for the world"; that is, every other mammal's babies are born essentially fully capable of functioning in the outside world (if you have ever seen a fowl getting up on their shaking legs an hour or two after birth you'll know what it means). The reason for this is the size of human babies' heads. Had they been "allowed" by nature to be born when they should (after 12 months instead of 9), they would not be able to make it through the birth canal. That's also why quite a few doctors and researchers call the first 3 months of a baby's life "the fourth trimester"; a human baby really isn't really "ready" for the outside world until after that period if over.

With that said, it is entirely obvious that a human baby cannot survive on their own before it is born; heck, they can't really survive on their own for quite some time after birth. Which leads me to my question (warning, I'm getting philosophical here):

If a baby isn't "done" before they are three months old, can they really be termed an independent entity even before they are born? Or are they simply part of the mother, essentially an extra, say, limb?

This pondering leads to many other interesting questions, such as whether brutalizing of a pregnant woman that results in a miscarriage should be considered murder. I have no idea how to answer them, but it seems like this would be at the root of much of how society treats babies, born and unborn.

And before you state the obvious, the reason (in my eyes anyway) it matters that human babies are born too early is that it presents a much clearer distinction or separation between whether a baby in the womb is really an individual human. If babies were born ready for the outside world, there would certainly be a much more delicate question of when, exactly, they are "ready". In humans' case, this question does not arise (biologically).

USPS experiments

I just stumbled upon this... tickled my funny bone. Worth a read.

On voting

I have now been a US citizen for just over a week, and had a chance to prepare for the upcoming Nov 7 election. How different it is from where I was born! I was speaking about this to my wife, who spoke to a friend, who asked if I could describe the way voting works there... so here goes.

In Israel, we basically have general elections every four years - well, assuming that the government survives for that long, which I believe hasn't happened in close to two decades. But that's about it. There are usually between 25 and 35 parties to vote for, each of them vying for control of some of 120 seats in parliament (Knesset). While Israel tried the idea of voting separately for the prime minister, it had gone back to its traditional method, in which the leader of the largest party ends up the prime minister (although the process does not have to end this way, see below).

Each party presents an ordered "candidate list", providing the names of party members to the voters in the order in which they will fill won parliament seats. Number one on the list is the party leader, who is also the party's proposed prime minister. Some parties hold primaries prior to the election to form the list, although the smaller parties generally do not. Votes must be cast in Israel (no absentee ballots), except for navy men and employees for consulates and embassies abroad. This may sound surprising, but many Israeli citizens fly to Israel (at their own expense) to fulfill their civic duty and cast their votes on election day.

Each party offers a platform, and they can focus on pretty much any issue; some small parties get voted into parliament on single-issue platforms, such as the promotion of of the legalization of Cannabis (Marijuana). Only three platform elements can disqualify a party from being elected: negation of the existence of Israel, its democratic nature, or an incitement to racism. Otherwise, anything goes, if you can get enough people to vote for it.

At the end of the election, the total number of votes cast is divided by 120 to determine how many votes "represent" a seat. However, a party must gain a minimum of 2% of the total number of votes cast in order to "qualify" for a parliament seat, and that minimum number is higher than those necessary for a single seat, the intent being to reduce the number of parties eventually represented in parliament. Note that this number is higher than the number needed for one seat. With an average of about 65% turnout, and based on current population, one can expect around 3.2M votes to be cast resulting in about 26,000 "votes per seat".

It is possible and common to have "overage" agreements, where two parties agree in advance that one of them will "hand over" their excess or surplus votes beyond the last seat they won to the other party, who then gets to add them to their tally. The idea is that two parties that have a similar ideology can this way extract one more seat between them by adding their surplus together. Usually this type of agreement has some payback in the eventual coalition, and thus normally occurs between a small party and a large one. However, small parties occasionally band together to try and gain a single seat if none of them cross the qualification threshold.

If such an agreement does not exist, excess votes get redistributed between parties based on their proportional size resulting from the election; this is a little complicated, but provides a bit of additional excitement following the election as things are figured out and some parties may end up gaining or losing representation at the last moment.

Parties get financing based on a rather complex formula which takes into account previous parliament seats won as well as those won in the current election. New parties receive funding retroactively. Contributions are limited according to another formula which is tied to the consumer price index.

Once the election is finished and seats assigned, the president assigns the task of forming the government to an elected member of parliament. For the most part, this is the leader of the largest party. However, in the case where another block seems to have been formed which includes more than 60 members of parliament (a majority), the president may assign this task to the leader of the party heading that block. In other words, winning the largest block of seats in the general election does not guarantee a party the right to form the government. The president figures this out based on the recommendations of the leaders of all parties elected to parliament.

Once a member of parliament has been assigned the task of forming the government, they have 42 days to finalize it. If a coalition cannot be formed, the president then assigns the task to another member (usually from the opposite large party), who then has 28 days to form their government. While there are provisions for what happens if they fail as well, this has never happened. The process of forming the coalition government is complicated and delicate, requiring significant negotiation skills and political acumen, and must result in a block of 61 seats or more to represent a majority of voters. It provides much merriment to the media, and tends to sully the new government before it even takes office. Small parties often hold disproportionate power in this process, since they may swing the eventual government one way or another, depending on which of the largest two parties they side with.

And that's about it. We don't vote on specific issues, although a special referendum may be called (an extremely rare occurrence). Once we vote in the general election, all decisions are further made by the elected officials. There are no propositions, which is unfortunate; I find the notion of voting for major elements of public policy to be a great boon for democracy.

Like... wow

What can I say? this is certainly a new twist on ID theft.