On Israeli politics... Sharon doesn't want to lose the support of Washington, and he also was forced to make a deal, so there'll be new elections for their parliament. I presume that means that different parties will grow or shrink. I suppose if I were in Israel, I'd probably support the Labour party -- Ben Eliezer seems to me to have the most respectable positions (from what I've read). The dissolution of the alliances that held together the arrangement that's now shattered seems to have been over a genuinely important issue.. It's always irritating when people refuse to comprimise and say something along the lines of 'this is no time for politics'. BushJr played it heavily, and Sharon played it here too. What does that mean? Is it a suggestion that opponents should play follow the leader, and give them whatever they want?

There's an upcoming large party meeting this week in China... interesting things might happen. I've been reading about a number of the Taiwanese and Chinese capitalists joining the Communist party there. Strange... In practice, it appears that capitalism+bureaucracy yields more corruption than plain bureaucracy. It is of my opinion that capitalism yields some corruption in democratic states... I wonder how I should define corruption, in the broad political sense... perhaps deviation from the declared goals and structure of a system, in the interests of those who are causing that deviation. With this first stab of a definition, we can see how the distortion of governmental structures is going to happen in almost any political system by business interests (not to single them out -- anyone with power poses the same threat.. but money is especially powerful in democracies, with the media as omnipresent as it is). Hmm... I wonder how the Chinese Bureaucracy compared to the Soviet one... I wonder if there's a way to better confuse or misdirect the powerful, so their efforts are hampered in ways that don't seem attackable, and so their power is, so much as possible, leaked off harmlessly. In some ways, this might be seen as one of the more important functions of government -- to harness and diffuse the power of those strong enough to be a threat to the state (and its people, perhaps). Democracy does it, Communism does it, the Feudal system did it. This lets me actually see the 'other side' of reform arguments that are designed to simplify power structures and clear out crud. Should I endorse that strategy? Hmm.

I'm happy at work. They seem to like me. Yay.