Wealthy Jews making Aliyah

While Israeli bureaucrats are sucking me dry, wealthy people are leaving their home countries and moving to Tel Aviv. The necessary conclusion is that it must not so bad here as I am feeling.

Bloomberg:  "Wealthy Londoners are leaving the city as new taxes make it expensive to inherit. Losing wealthy individuals is normally a sign of trouble in the political economy of a country. Rich people are often the first people to leave, because they can -- unlike the middle class or the poor. Cities that saw large inflows of HNWIs include Auckland, Dubai, Montreal, New York, Tel Aviv and Toronto, the report showed."

HNWI: People who has more than a million dollars liquid.

Geosmin

Today's fish tasted muddy, not because it is bred in sewage-water (which is) but because of an organic compound called geosmin. This smelly molecule is produced by my favorite mold of the order Actinomycetales, and released when these microorganisms die. 

Everyone knows that a few drops of lemon juice on the fish neutralizes the muddy odor. The molecule breaks down in acidic media.

The human nose is extremely sensitive to geosmin and is able to detect it at concentrations as low as 5 parts per trillion. This had important evolutionary impact as it helped to locate fresh pastures after a period of drought. I rather love this earth smell after rain.

H3N2

I live in the Middle East where more than 30% of the people are influenza positive (WHO map above). Much worse than in America.

So I too got it. This flu virus is bad and specially for old people like myself. For the last two weeks I have been weak, feeling bad, unable to sit down for two hours and work. My clients are demanding their projects and boiling of anger that I don't answer the phone. I have been offered a teaching job in a college that is organizing an engineering department, but I had not answered. Bad. Today is sunny, today I may regain my powers.

Nuclear War is not The End

I sense an irrational fear of President Trump, specially in Germany. The fear and horror flows seamlessly from the revulsion Germans felt during Wall Street Crash. This is worrying because Germany again is a big power: Germany exports more than America and its armed forces are more effective. Fake currency replaces real one, and the world is flooded with dollars and the real money goes to the most stable and strongest economy, which many think is the Euro.  Thus, the dollar is sinking. This could get out of hand.

Anyway, nuclear war involving North Korea and the USA could be a geographically limited conflict, but China, Russia and NATO may not be able to keep out. Here, the land of Israel is a Gruyere cheese full of karstic limestone caves so we could find one to hide in. I am not worried, war would not shorten my life by much.

Dollar Devaluation

A year ago the US dollar was worth 4 Israeli sheqels, today 3.38 and it is sinking. What happened? I assumed Israeli exports are flooding the country with dollars, but it is the dollar that lost value. What happened to America that its currency got devalued 20%? Nothing, there is no crisis, in fact, there is raging optimism thanks to Trump's pro-business policies.

The most probable cause, I assume, is the world's panic of a North Korea vs USA nuclear exchange. The Europeans succeeded in creating a crazy image of Trump and frighten themselves and the world. They are selling their dollars. For America, this is an export bonanza.

Evo Morales, Champion

President Evo Morales (55) of Bolivia is a professional football player of the Sport Boys Club. He is paid 220 US$ per month. He is a pure blood Indian of the Quechwa people, married to an Israeli woman.

Khaybar - Where Mohammed defeated a Jewish Tribe

Jewish Stronghold in the Arab Peninsula

 

 

The clip by Shattem Al-Saud shows the Oasis of Khaybar, famous because it figures in the Quran. The Jewish tribes near Mekka refused to accept the Prophet's religion and were defeated. Otherwise, the Muslims would be now... Jews? It could have happened. 

Incredible Campaign to Return Former Illegal African Infiltrators

These cold and rainy winter days are witness to an incredible public campaign in Tel Aviv fighting the Government's decision to expel illegal African infiltrators that infest South Tel Aviv neighborhoods and turned them into a typical African slum. Moreover, there are demanding to return those who in the past had accepted the offer of three thousand dollars cash and a one way ticket back home to Eritrea.  The intellectual fishwrap HaAretz even sent a reporter to Africa to photograph them back home, and two double pages are dedicated to show their present state as living in huts with dozens of sweet black children, reminiscing the good times they spent in Israeli jails.

Why are hundreds of University professors and hospital doctors signing these petitions? In my view, they are trying to show the world how moral and good they are, that they are humanitarians and not the baby-bombing Israeli colonialist the world tries to paint them. It is like cold capitalist Rockefeller (the founder of Standard Oil) giving out small coins to beggars, to publish his generosity. May be the good professors and doctors are afraid, simply afraid, of the day they themselves become stateless, and want to make merits to save their lives. Here or maybe in Heaven, where an accountant  god they don't believe in may be writing down their actions.

Making A Will

Roman soldiers had to make a will and leave their affairs well ordered before parting to battle. Reaching certain age, every morning is like parting for battle and never knowing if one shall return with all the bits and sane.

I too wrote a will and left everything clearly ordered, so I thought, but in the process of talking it over with wife, daughters, banker, lawyer, etc. things became evermore complicated. Couples married over thirty years like us use to make a mutual will, the survivor takes all. My wife disagrees, what if I should remarry? What if I shall have more children? What if I go crazy and donate all to the Miskolc yeshive? and so on. The possibilities of something going wrong are infinite. There are many cases where the children get nothing and the Philippine caretaker inherits all. In the long term we all shall end with dementia, which is a good thing because death removes us unaware and shall stop bothering the presents. Now I shall drink a glass of red wine and sleep a siesta, and at waking up it will be all clear in my mind. That will be good.

Time and Space do not really exist

I became aware of the paradoxes of the quantum physics when meeting Yakir Aharonov in the UTA twenty years ago. We hoped he would receive the Nobel Prize for the Bohm-Aharonov Effect, but he did not. Pic.: The Micius satellite sending quantum signals to two Chinese receptors.



Today the Chinese have sent an entangled photon thousand kilometers and before that, they sent - instantly - encrypted quantum key over 9000 kilometers (from Beijing to Vienna). As if time and distance did not exist. Maybe nothing in real. The Chinese have built a working machine based on Schroediger's entangled cat idea. I wonder what we (Israel) have been doing in the last twenty years in the quantum field, I know of nothing serious.

The Morgenthau Monument

In my dream, I was visiting Germany and amazed by a monument to Henry Morgenthau facing me at the train station. The place was full of horse-driven carriages, young people carrying things and everybody moving forcefully. Having arrived from diversified, childless, smoggy London, I discovered the old, forgotten, 19th Century Europe. My host told me that Morgenthau is a hero in Germany, they are happy to have adopted the Morgenthau Plan after WWII and succeeded in reforming as a low tech agricultural economy, traditionalist and with no heavy, polluting industry. Like the Amish, the German population had been growing and they did not need immigration. Neighboring France, suffering from insoluble social problems, had started to adopt the Morgenthau Plan to large parts of its countryside.  

Adios, Tommy

Tommy ("Andy") Marjos stopped abruptly his facebook. His firstborn son Andres pasted a black ribbon on his; his granddaughter Carolina wrote a poem that she wished had been closer to him, all suggesting that he is gone. We arrived at the same time to Argentina, in 1956. His father died soon after and he was brought up by his mother. Had no relatives anywhere in the world. He married a Swiss German girl, had three kids then divorced because she was cheating on him with his best friend. Moved to Comodoro Rivadavia, married a criolla and had more kids ("Hay que poblar la Patagonia!") and ended his life quite content, surrounded by a big family. The pic is recent, it is his daughter's fifteenth birthday or her election as Miss Comodoro. His best times were during the Chile-Argentina War, when he worked for the Army intelligence as photographer. He emphasized his ethnic Hungarian roots and hid his Jewish origin, it was healthier in the environment he lived and worked; only lately he started to comment on Facebook about Jews in a positive tone. Adios, Tommy.

The Way of the Gods

That’s Shinto — the way (“to”) of the kami (“shin”). As to the kami — who might they be?
“I do not yet understand the meaning of the word ‘kami'” wrote Motoori Norinaga in 1771. If he didn’t, who did? Norinaga was the foremost scholar of his age; he devoted his life to studying the native literature from its ancient beginnings. "In ancient usage, anything whatsoever that was outside the ordinary, which possessed superior power or which was awe-inspiring, was called kami."

Shinto teaches nothing, enjoins nothing, demands no submission, works no miracles, effaces evil by cleansing it, transmutes dread into joy. There is no heaven, no hell, no nirvana — just “the rising sun each morning,” “the coming of the kami.”

P.S.: I wonder why the much more advanced, elaborated, intellectually satisfying religion of Christianity did not catch up in Japan. Christianity was adopted almost instantly by NorthWest European pagans, had a good start in China (see Memorial Tablet in the tomb of Matteo Ricci in Beijing), but it never became the state religion.