Adonis Diaries

Archive for May 1st, 2018

Tidbits and notes posted on FB and Twitter. Part 191

Posted by: on: May 1, 2018

Tidbits and notes posted on FB and Twitter. Part 191

Note: I take notes of books I read and comment on events and edit sentences that fit my style. I pa attention to researched documentaries and serious links I receive. The page is long and growing like crazy, and the sections I post contains a month-old events that are worth refreshing your memory.

Israel is sending disinformation that it demolished many Iranian targets in Syria, just to save face in this major fiasco. Otherwise, the responses would have been far worse than downing an F16

Can negative trade secret (Not working) be valid as theft in trials? In the hands of the competition, knowing exactly what went wrong (and why) can be worth billions of dollars.

“Should an engineer be free to leave a company and build on the knowledge and skills he gained at the old job? Are the tech industry’s giants too eager to use lawyers to cudgel competition? And are start-ups like Uber too willing to cut corners as they scramble to turn a profit?”— Daisuke Wakabayashi, New York Times

US district judge William Alsop, presiding over the trial Waymo v. Uber,: “Is an engineer supposed to get a frontal lobotomy before they go on to the next job?

“Negative trade secrets (Failed effort) need to be seen as a public good,” argues legal scholar Amir H. Khoury in IDEA-The Intellectual Property Law Review. He advocates the abolition of confidentiality for failed efforts in the name of greater development for everyone, and touts the economic benefits of this cooperative approach: “This information must remain open to all and shared among all in order for research to evade recurring mistakes and replicating dead-ends.”

The British had drawn the current fictitious borders among Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Kashmir.  As well as drawing many other borders in the Middle-East and Africa with colonial France

“If I was running a car factory, I wouldn’t let workers drive the cars home or borrow tools. But that’s what I do at five o’clock each day, all over the world, when my hackers go home from work. … So we’re working on refining our management techniques so that we can control that information no matter where it is—on our hard disks or even inside our programmers’ heads.”— L. Bob Rife, “Snowcrash” by Neal Stephenson

Qui repondrait en ce monde a la terrible obstination du crime, si ce n’est l’obstination du temoignage?
Deir Yassine, Rafa7, Gaza, Sabra/Chatila, Fallouja, Hama, Homs, Deir-Zour, Diyar Bakr…

Which adolescent group would actually exhibit a higher rate of criminal acts? 

  1. the group living in a clean and stable neighborhood, with an active and sensible community but whose family environment is violent and crude, or
  2. the group of adolescents living in a violent neighborhood but whose family have strong moral support?

We tend to underestimate the minor criminal acts in the specific situations within the environment we are surrounded with, such as overcrowding graffiti views, fare-breaking, window cleaning harassment on intersections or panhandling in our tendency to believing that lawlessness is the rule.

In the cases of smoking and suicide, it is the specific context that turns to be the dominant factor.

Al 3ajez bi mizaniyyat Loubnan maksoud wa sa yassel ila $86 billion this year. Kel siyassi “mouhemm” war militia leader, jamma3 $milliar.

Palestinian authority is Not permitted to borrow from foreign States outside the Israeli banks

 السلطة الفلسطينية برئاسة الرئيس محمود عباس معوزولة عن العالم ماليا وغير مسموح لها، ضمن القرارات الاسرائيلية ان تستدين اي مبلغ من الخارج الا بواسطة المصارف الاسرائيلية.

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Lebanon Parliament Never had time to hold any government accountable, or legislate during 9 years?

Posted by: on: May 1, 2018

Lebanon Parliament Never had time to hold government accountable, or legislate during 9 years?

The Lebanese Center for Policy Studies

As part of LCPS’s work on monitoring the Lebanese Parliament, we are publishing a series of articles on the performance of the country’s national legislative body.

These articles will focus on issues ranging from coherence among aligned parties and MPs, to the relationship lawmakers have with constituents. 

This article examines the ability of MPs to effectively participate in the decision-making process by engaging in legislative and oversight sessions as well as their willingness to exert effort to draft laws that meet citizens’ concerns and needs.

For parliamentarians to legislate and oversee the performance of the government, they should at least take part in parliamentary sessions and parliamentary committees in which draft laws are debated, studied, and reviewed.

Looking closely at their performance over the last nine years, little effort has been exerted by MPs.

Although there has been a high attendance rate in legislative sessions, only a fraction of MPs actually participated in discussions.

Many MPs are less keen to hold the government accountable as their attendance rate in oversight sessions is low.

Interestingly, party leaders do not often attend or participate in parliamentary sessions.

Committees meet infrequently, a rate which should be considered low given the challenges that Lebanese face.

As part of a larger project that the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies (LCPS) launched on the performance of the parliament, we examined the attendance and participation rate of 128 MPs over twenty-four legislative and oversight sessions from June 2009 to April 2017.

Keeping in mind that performance should not be confined to attendance and participation, the number and content of draft laws proposed by MPs is far more important.

Since only draft laws made public are those which are subject to deliberation, such data is misleading and hence was excluded from the performance measurement. In any case, looking closely at these deliberations, the data offers interesting findings.

Consider that although the collective attendance rate for all MPs stands at 84%, their participation rate in the discussion is about 37%.

Only one-third of MPs who are present in sessions contribute to the discussion. Given that MPs are only allowed to skip two sessions without justification, 85 MPs violated this rule—that is they did not provide any excuse—without any recourse.

More precisely, 56 MPs skipped up to three sessions, beyond the two granted by the bylaws, without excuse.

In fact, 14 MPs did not attend ten or more sessions out of the twenty-four sessions and one MP skipped 19 sessions altogether.

When zooming in on oversight sessions, it is interesting to note that the attendance rate is lower in comparison to legislative sessions and the parliament did not hold the 9 required oversight sessions; opting instead to hold only five.

According to the bylaws, for every three legislative sessions, the parliament must hold one oversight session.

Even when sessions were held, they were largely “for show”, that is MPs ask the government and ministers few questions and the government ignores their inquiries. Despite claims of corruption, MPs threats are hollow as no follow-up action is taken.

Using this data, we created a performance index which averages attendance and participation rates.

The average score of the 128 MPs was 6 out of 10.

Two interesting results emerge.

First, looking at the performance of each bloc, the Loyalty for the Resistance bloc—led by Hezbollah—scores highest with 6.6 while the Democratic Gathering led by the Progressive Socialist Party scores the lowest with 4.8.

The two parties that have the lowest variation within their bloc—meaning the difference between the highest and lowest scorer is smallest—are the Kataeb and the Loyalty for the Resistance bloc.

Second, while the highest scorers are from different blocs, five of the fifteen lowest scorers are party heads: Talal Arslan, Saad Hariri, Suleiman Frangieh, Michel Aoun, and Walid Jumblatt.

Even when they do attend, their participation rate, on average, hovers around 15%. This suggests that debate over policy issues does not take place in the parliament and instead is the result of wheeling and dealing elsewhere.

In fact, MPs do not see their main role as legislating or overseeing the executive.

When we interviewed 65 MPs to better understand their policy positions, we asked them how they spend their time in office. Almost 70% of them have stated that they spend their time interacting with voters, talking to the media, and interacting with other parties, while only 30% of their time is dedicated to legislating and holding government accountable.

The poor record of MPs is not confined to participation in the general sessions as it is also reflected in the number of parliamentary committee meetings held during this period.

Using publicly available data collected from 2010 to 2014 in the sixteen parliamentary committees where draft laws are studied and debated, it was determined that they met, on average, 323 times per year.

However, when one looks closely at the numbers, this totals about one and a half meetings per month per committee.

Apart from the administration and justice committee, the frequency with which committees meet is dismal. To put this in context, the environment committee only managed to meet six times per year despite the garbage crisis. As for the ICT committee, its members did not find it necessary to meet more than three times per year.

Once again, MPs do not seem up to the task of assuming their legislative and oversight roles. Attendance and participation are necessary but not sufficient to produce relevant laws and hold government accountable, meaning many MPs are falling short of carrying out their basic duties.

It is likely that action on the part of MPs’ respective constituents could spur Lebanon’s legislators to pay more attention to issues that matter to citizens and act as a check on the government by conducting oversight.

“Lebanese MPs: Little Time to Legislate and Hold Government Accountable”
By Sami Atallah

As part of LCPS’s work on monitoring the Lebanese Parliament, we are publishing a series of articles on the performance of the country’s national legislative body.

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adonis49

adonis49

adonis49

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