“Moreover, this war has never been one just between Zionism and Israel on one side and the Palestinians on the other, occasionally supported by Arab and other actors. It has always involved the massive intervention of the greatest powers of the age on the side of the Zionist movement and Israel: Britain until the second world war, and the US and others since then. These great powers were never neutral or honest brokers, but have always been active participants in this war in support of Israel. In this war between coloniser and colonised, oppressor and oppressed, there has been nothing remotely approaching equivalence between the two sides, but instead a vast imbalance in favour of Zionism and Israel.

This thesis has been starkly confirmed by the events that followed 7 October, with the imbalance of power evident in the disproportionate levels of death, destruction and displacement: the ratio of Palestinians to Israelis killed so far is about 25-1. It is further reinforced by the overwhelming level of US political, diplomatic and military support for Israel, combined with that of the UK and other western countries, in contrast with the relatively limited military and financial backing for the Palestinians by Iran and several non-state actors.”

“In the past, where Gaza was concerned, this doctrine – described by Israeli analysts as “mowing the lawn” – involved periodically pounding the population and killing large numbers of them to force them to accept a status quo of siege and blockade that has lasted for 17 years.

I call this a temporary collapse of the doctrine, because while the events of 7 October exposed the bankruptcy of a force-based approach to an essentially political problem, the Israeli leadership has clearly learned nothing. Instead, it has doubled down on previous practices, in keeping with the Israeli adage: “If force does not work, use more force.” Israeli leaders seem to have forgotten Clausewitz’s dictum that war is a continuation of politics by other means.”

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posted by f.sheikh

Zero-knowledge proofs allow researchers to prove their knowledge without divulging the knowledge itself.

Imagine you had some useful knowledge — maybe a secret recipe, or the key to a cipher. Could you prove to a friend that you had that knowledge, without revealing anything about it? Computer scientists proved over 30 years ago that you could, if you used what’s called a zero-knowledge proof.

For a simple way to understand this idea, let’s suppose you want to show your friend that you know how to get through a maze, without divulging any details about the path. You could simply traverse the maze within a time limit, while your friend was forbidden from watching. (The time limit is necessary because given enough time, anyone can eventually find their way out through trial and error.) Your friend would know you could do it, but they wouldn’t know how.

Zero-knowledge proofs are helpful to cryptographers, who work with secret information, but also to researchers of computational complexity, which deals with classifying the difficulty of different problems. “A lot of modern cryptography relies on complexity assumptions — on the assumption that certain problems are hard to solve, so there has always been some connections between the two worlds,” said Claude Crépeau, a computer scientist at McGill University. “But [these] proofs have created a whole world of connection.”

Zero-knowledge proofs belong to a category known as interactive proofs, so to learn how the former work, it helps to understand the latter. First described in a 1985 paper by the computer scientists Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali and Charles Rackoff, interactive proofs work like an interrogation: Over a series of messages, one party (the prover) tries to convince the other (the verifier) that a given statement is true. An interactive proof must satisfy two properties. First, a true statement will always eventually convince an honest verifier. Second, if the given statement is false, no prover — even one pretending to possess certain knowledge — can convince the verifier, except with negligibly small probability.

Interactive proofs are probabilistic in nature. The prover could answer one or two questions correctly simply by luck, so it takes a large enough number of challenges, all of which the prover must get right, for the verifier to become confident that the prover does in fact know the statement is true.

This idea of interactions came when Micali and Goldwasser — then graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley — puzzled through the logistics of playing poker over a network. How can all players verify that when one of them gets a card from the virtual deck, the result is random? Interactive proofs could lead the way. But then, how can players verify that the entire protocol — the full set of rules — was followed correctly, without revealing every player’s hand along the way?

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posted by f.sheikh

Property taxes, the lifeblood of local governments and school districts, are among the most powerful and stealthy engines of racism and wealth inequality our nation has ever produced. And while the Biden administration has offered many solutions for making the tax code fairer, it has yet to effectively tackle a problem that has resulted not only in the extraordinary overtaxation of Black and Latino homeowners but also in the worsening of disparities between wealthy and poorer communities. Fixing these problems requires nothing short of a fundamental re-examination of how taxes are distributed.

In theory, the property tax would seem to be an eminently fair one: The higher the value of your property, the more you pay. The problem with this system is that the tax is administered by local officials who enjoy a remarkable degree of autonomy and that tax rates are typically based on the collective wealth of a given community. This results in wealthy communities enjoying lower effective tax rates while generating more tax revenues; at the same time, poorer ones are forced to tax property at higher effective rates while generating less in return. As such, property assessments have been manipulated throughout our nation’s history to ensure that valuable property is taxed the least relative to its worth and that the wealthiest places will always have more resources than poorer ones.

Black people have paid the heaviest cost. Since they began acquiring property after emancipation, African Americans have been overtaxed by local governments. By the early 1900s, an acre of Black-owned land was valued, for tax purposes, higher than an acre of white-owned land in most of Virginia’s counties, according to my calculations, despite being worth about half as much. And for all the taxes Black people paid, they got little to nothing in return. Where Black neighborhoods began, paved streets, sidewalks and water and sewer lines often ended. Black taxpayers helped to pay for the better-resourced schools white children attended. Even as white supremacists treated “colored” schools as another of the white man’s burdens, the truth was that throughout the Jim Crow era, Black taxpayers subsidized white education.

Freedom from these kleptocratic regimes drove millions of African Americans to move to Northern and Midwestern states in the Great Migration from 1915 to 1970, but they were unable to escape racist assessments, which encompassed both the undervaluation of their property for sales purposes and the overvaluation of their property for taxation purposes. During those years, the nation’s real estate industry made white-owned property in white neighborhoods worth more because it was white. Since local tax revenue was tied to local real estate markets, newly formed suburbs had a fiscal incentive to exclude Black people, and cities had even more reason to keep Black people confined to urban ghettos.

And what better way to pay for the program than to tap our wealthiest, who have benefited from our unjust taxation scheme for so long? President Biden is calling for a 25 percent tax on the incomes and annual increases in the values of the holdings of people claiming more than $100 million in assets, but we could accomplish far more by enacting a wealth tax on the 1 percent. Even a modest 4 percent wealth tax on people whose total assets exceed $50 million could generate upward of $400 billion in additional annual revenue, which should be more than enough to ensure that the needs of every city, county and public school system in America are met. By ensuring that localities have the resources they need, we can counteract the unequal outcomes and rank injustices that our current system generates.

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posted by f.sheikh

John Locke, the founding father of modern democracy based on principles of humanity, wrote that all individuals are born with “inalienable right of life, liberty, and property.” These sacred inalienable rights are universal which ought to be respected and protected by everyone. These rights and principles of humanity are backbone of our democracy and undermining them undermines the soul of democracy.

Democracy without principles of humanity is nothing more than a shell democracy carrying out charade of elections.

Biden is a willing accomplice of Netanyahu in crimes against humanity by continuing to supply mass civilian killing bombs to Israel despite 33,000 deaths of innocent Gazans, imminent danger of famine, and Israel facing Genocide charges at ICJ. Biden has not only undermined bedrock principles humanity and our modern democracy, but also our national core values.

Vote for Biden is not a vote for Democracy unless one happens to believe that the basic foundations of our modern democracy and humanity, such as human rights, liberty, and Justice, are no longer relevant. Or one believes that Palestinians have no such rights.

Biden is at least as much threat to our democracy as Trump. Fortunately, our democratic institutions, especially judiciary, are strong enough to withstand any dictatorial assault on our democracy as they did during Trump’s last term and will do so again if Trump is re-elected. But unfortunately, our democratic institutions are not equipped to foil assault by Biden on our principles of humanity, which are foundations of our modern democracy as envisioned by John Locke. It also undermines our credibility as well as our national interests in the world. Such a damage is hard to repair.