Working on a restaurant in Tel Aviv

It is not that I am indolent; I am really old and tired and tiring fast. Anyway, some projects are advancing.

INDOLENCE

Indolence means laziness, idleness, sloth, lethargy, torpor, inertia, and slacking. It describes me in general, although here I am working at age 80. 

Derived from the Latin indolentia, which originally meant "freedom from pain" or "insensibility to pain" in the 1600s, before shifting over time to describe the avoidance of exertion ("taking pains").

Bukele in Haiti

 

Bukele, President of El Salvador, sent 2000 soldiers to fight the criminal gangs of Haiti. Already, they are begging for the intervention of the United Nations. The pic shows Saucafolio, a gang witch doctor.

Blaming Israel

   

The blame started before voting in America’s midterm elections ended, and the extent of the Republicans’ drubbing was revealed. In an interview on election day, Donald Trump said that America would cut off military aid to Israel “at the end of the year”. Israel no longer needs it, he explained; the country is “thriving”. But there was another reason, the president added: “It’s a bad talking point.” J.D. Vance, the vice president, was more direct. On the day after the election, he blamed the war in Iran and also America’s relationship with Israel for the Republicans’ defeat.    From The Economist.

Right to worry

 

Investors are right to worry. In Texas, the destination for around a third of the new capacity planned for America over the next two years or so, the Democratic governor-elect, Gina Hinojosa, has endorsed an extended moratorium on approving new construction until lawmakers can work out how to wring concessions from tech firms. She will have allies in the state capitol, where the Democratic Party wrested control of the lower house for the first time in more than two decades. Democrats also took the governorships in Georgia and Ohio, two other states for which AI builders had big plans, and kept it in a third, Pennsylvania.  (From The Economist, the only media outlet explaining the situation clearly).

Still, I don't understand why the left is against industry and growth. They fight for deindustrialization and a return to "nature." They are against order and progress. The DSA webpage explains that AI produces profits for the billionaires, and they want to destroy that class. 

Spies everywhere

 Katalin Karikó is a Hungarian-born biochemist who shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Drew Weissman. They were recognized for discoveries about nucleoside base modifications in mRNA, which made effective mRNA vaccines possible, including the COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.

She was born in 1955 in Szolnok and grew up in Kisújszállás. She studied at the University of Szeged and moved to the United States in 1985. For years, she struggled to get funding at the University of Pennsylvania, where she worked with Weissman.

The new Hungarian government is opening the Security Services' top-secret files, and her file shows she had been working for them all along. Code name: Lengyel Zsolt; job: discover spies; position: secret officer in charge; motivation: patriotic. 

I remember that during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the AVO's secret files were also opened. My father went to see his own file (we lived in Budapest's center; the AVO HQ, the central security organization, was nearby). Somebody had informed on him that he was "clerical," that is, a religious person, which I assume meant a very black mark in the Communist regime. A few days later, my Father took the train to Zalaegerszeg, arranged with a local peasant to guide us to the frontier, we and my uncle Gyuri and his wife Ella took the train from Budapest, and we waited at the frontier until there were no patrols in sight, walked to Austria, and became penniless refugees. It was December 1956 and very cold. 

Progress a-la-American

 
Throuples, foursomes and other multi-partner relationships can now register as domestic partners in Los Angeles County, with unanimously approved new legal protections for polyamorous couples.

The measure allows people in relationships involving multiple partners to officially register with the city. The ordinance allows three or more individuals to formally register their relationship with the city. Some Massachusetts municipalities already recognize multi-partner domestic partnerships, and cities like Berkeley and Oakland have taken steps to ban discrimination based on family structure. Everything goes. 

I looked up the family backgrounds of the new Democratic winners and didn't find traditional father-mother-children families. Talarico, the new Senator of Texas, was adopted by his stepfather. One Somalian married her gay brother. Maybe it was always like that, but we didn't know.