The Central American Dry Corridor

Corredor Seco of Central America (pic) is a vast area peopled by 55 million people that is increasingly unstable from the climatic and political points of view. Extreme dry years alternate with floods.

The NorthEast Syrian situation predicts that the Corredor's future is civil war and an unstoppable river of refugees to the USA. It is possible that I shall return to this area to provide water management consulting. 

Israeli start-up exits volume

In 2017 it was 23 billion dollars. Israel started exporting Jaffa oranges. Now we export ideas.

The EU explains us the financial sacrifices of living in Israel

The EU is financing many subversive projects in Israel, but they are ineffective since they have zero understanding of what Israel is. Take the project “The Burden of the Occupation”, cost 500,000 dollars, aimed at "expanding support for a two-state solution among Israeli Jews via mass distribution of tangible, relevant, timely and reliable information about the real socio-economic costs (including impact on growth, on conditions in the periphery, state allocations to social services and more) of the continued military occupation of the Palestinian territories.”

The Europeans do not understand that we Jews did not came to Israel to enjoy better standard of life and that we are not economic refugees. Why should an American doctor earning 400,000 dollars a year in San Francisco move to Beer Sheba to earn 50,000 dollars and fight Hamas in Gaza if not for idealism? Having made such economic and personal security sacrifice, he knows all about conditions in periphery (where he lives). What can the EU explain us that we do not know?

The whole idea of financing political activities in Israel is immoral. How would the Spanish government feel about a foreign country campaigning to convince the Spanish people to accept and vote for an independent Catalunya?  

The Rishpon Project

Yesterday we had a team meeting of the Rishpon Project. It consists in an a large abandoned house with a memorial park attached (see the stone with the names of those fallen in the wars of Israel). The house carries the name of the family that built it during the English colonial times, and has a beautiful hilltop position on the "kurkar" (red sandstone) facing the sea to the West and the long valley called Bassa (bitza in Hebrew) meaning swamp. The area was malarial during the Turkish and English eras, allowing the first Zionists settlers to purchase the land relatively cheap. Till the swamp was drained, hundreds of pioneers died of fever. Interestingly, Josephus - two thousand years ago - describes the valley as a paradise, and in fact the Municipality of Herzlia discovered (in my times as its employee) a Roman tunnel across the ridge that drained the valley. After the Arab conquest of Eretz Israel, the tunnel was not maintained and the valley became of pestilent swamp. I sat in the shade of that pine tree in the background and walked away with resin in my pants. The tree is full of Argentine "loros barranqueros" a green social parrot, very noisy. Somebody brought in a pair and they reproduced mightily.

Not a word on the market crash

I am reading the international press on the internet and there is no mention of the almost 3% fall on Friday's market rout and almost 10% in the last week. I think this week was dramatic in important events, yet the media ignores them. In my former blog, I reached the definite conclusion that American media was lying and falsifying reality, that it was tendentious and fake. They keep ruminating about Stormy, a prostitute that once was fucked and paid by Donald. So what?

Stock Market Crash

My saving account is 10% below last year and falling. The market is totally frightened by President Trump's aggressive moves: tariffs on Chinese exports to the USA, and the appointment of Bolton, a warmonger as national security adviser. After eight years of Barack Obama sedate passivity, the world is shitting in its pants. No kidding.

Yet America's goal is clear: it will not allow the emergence of a rival. Not another Soviet Union. Is China a potential rival? Yes. China denies it and tries to maintain a very low profile. How will Trump stop it? I do not know.

Two sectors slumped the most: Technology and Finance. They are exposed to foreign trade and uncertainty. Wall Street prefers stability, but the current situation was untenable. I think Trump is doing what has to be done, he is a strong leader, but I too am a bit frightened.

Dreaming of Three Bodies Problem

Friday is the noisiest day in my neighborhood. People is out on the streets till the evening, when it all quiets down. Sabbath morning is silent and only some religious people walks covered with white talit (ritual shrouds) to the early morning praying in the synagogue.


I feel lonely and longing for human touch.

P.S.: Reading The Three Body Problem trilogy. At first, it strikes how the Chinese author always presents the characters with a precise definition of their academic ranks and their positions in the hierarchy. Most Chinese. Second, in the whole thousand pages work there is no mention of sex or even a realistic romantic relationship; the characters act on the basis of cold career-advancement or other material motivations. Third, the characters have no families nor children. They live in a contemporary Chinese communist society, where the United Nations is world government. Naturally, the lingua franca is Chinese, and the Chinese are dominant. Four, the figure representing the evil Trisolans, Sophon, is a Japanese woman dressed as a ninja, beautiful and cruel.

Furthermore, another feature of the Marxist foundations of the Three Body Problem universe, is the absence of evolution: a man is a man in the past and in the far future. They can be substituted since they are all identical. No genetics, no evolution. Only technological civilization advances from era to era. The bottom line is that the universe is mechanical, although tremendously complex and interesting. God? No. It is physics, that's all.

Science fiction is not about the future, it is criticism of the author's society. The technical fireworks just camouflage the oppressive nature of the Chinese society of our generation.   

 P.P.S.: In our world, Wall Street loves President Trump but now, as it is becoming obvious that Trump is not a standard fake politician but he does what he says, Wall Street is frightened by this unknown phenomenon. Bloomberg's front page:

A Horror Week for the Dow Has Investors Begging for Trump Respite

Leishmaniasis in Israel

We have this ugly rodent, the rock bunny,   שפני הסלע  that  is a protected animal, cannot be hunted or killed. It carries the bacteria causing Leishmaniasis, a leper-like disease that had been eliminated decades ago. The multiplication of this biting pest means the return of disease.  People is thirsty for "Nature" and believe - from children's books - that it is benevolent and harmless. But Nature is indifferent to us.

When an Inbred Clan ruled the World

It seems incredible that the weak-minded idiot on the picture, with a ridiculous bird on his head, would be the all-powerful Emperor of Germany. Wilhelm was grandson of Queen Victoria and all European royalty were his double-first cousins. This inbred, degenerate clan led humanity to the terrible World War I and to the killing trenches of Verdun. Wilhelm exhibited a violent hate against the Jews: "Let no German ever forget this, nor rest until these parasites have been destroyed and exterminated from German soil!" Herzl vainly tried to convert him into a Zionist, to assist the Jewish People's Liberation by establishing the Jewish State, but he as other monarchs were hopeless.  Wilhelm advocated a "regular international all-worlds pogrom à la Russe" as "the best cure" and believed that Jews were a "nuisance that humanity must get rid of some way or other. I believe the best thing would be gas!"

Hundred years have passed and the criminal Kaisers and Czars are forgotten and their seed is no more. Here am I from those they planned to gas vomiting on their graves. 

IQ Demystified

Already 7% of the differences in IQ can be identified at DNA level.

"We found 187 independent loci associated with intelligence, implicating 538 genes, using both SNP-based and gene-based GWAS. We found evidence that neurogenesis and myelination—as well as genes expressed in the synapse, and those involved in the regulation of the nervous system—may explain some of the biological differences in intelligence." (quoted by James Thompson from Nature).

Intelligence relates to better synapses, generation of new neurons, thickness of the myelin sheath, etc. Nothing mysterious. It is truly depressing.  
 

Excessive Capital Accumulation

The world is awash in savings and there is a disequilibrium between available investable capital and available loan requests and investment opportunities. In special, in Israel we have many individuals with large savings and they have no safe and profitable investment vehicles. The banks are promoting investing in foreign stocks and loans, because the excess money here will inevitably be channeled into the local bourse and real estate (apartments for rent). Since people keep saving, TASE will surely go on inflating, and apartment prices will go on increasing. The State is budgeting much resources toward infrastructure, but the execution capacity of the population has reached a limit, and we have full employment. Importing foreign workers is unacceptable for a country already suffering from dangerous ethnic diversity.

The result is growing foreign exchange reserves that have to be invested abroad in low yielding bonds. Britain a hundred years ago solved this problem by investing in foreign colonies, like Argentine railways and slaughterhouses, or African plantations. Ultimately, there had to be a war to consume excess savings and excess productive capacity. If so, the safest bet is to buy shares in the armament industry.

American Marxist Subversion of Israel

One could not find a more phony occupation for this old Jew than writing an essay on the American Marxist poet Margaret Randall. My daughter had to write on an American contemporary feminist poet and having profiled her professors, we selected Margaret Randall, an American communist poet who lived eight years in Cuba during Fidel Castro and the Che revolution, and then moved to Nicaragua to take part in the Sandinista chaos. Since I was working in Nicaragua then and am well acquainted with Latin American things of those times, I thought I could help my daughter to understand the background. I was on the site when the Sandinista bandits were invited to enter Managua and take over Nicaragua, as Somoza Jr. did following Jimmy Carter's orders. 

Margaret Randall has authored dozens of Marxist/feminist books and maintained extensive correspondence with Latin American intellectuals. She is the only American poet forbidden by Senator McCarthy to return to the United States. I do not know if she is also a lesbian, she looks like one and partners with a woman painter, although she was married (to a man; in our days, one has to specify) and is mother of four children.

Anyway, the proposal to write the essay on her was successful and now we are engaged in ordering books and looking for bibliography. "We" because I am my daughter's research assistant. It is difficult, because her professors and teachers are of the highest quality, all them Ph.D.s in English Literature from Harvard and Oxford, talented Jewish women who married to Israelis and live here. They have absorbed politically correctness from the very source, and indoctrinate their students in spirit of the most extremist Berkeley feminists. The College also has an American Fullbrighter with a Hispanic name, he corrects "our" essays and I have to admit he is very professional and all his comments/criticisms are right. What is he doing teaching English literature in Israel? (The question does not imply any negative sentiments, I am happy to be corrected by him because he is an excellent editor).

But, objectively, he is a cultural missionary converting us to left wing American culture. (I had thought that feminism conquered Israel by imitation, but no, Americans are actively subverting Israeli culture. Meaning political culture, see how our poor President Katzav was defenestrated and jailed for trying to seduce his whore secretary.)

Some of the Fullbrighters are financed by the CIA, at least those in Argentina in my times, were. No doubt we are being actively influenced and subverted by crazy American left wing culture, but I think we - I mean my daughter and I - are in little danger of catching the lunacy. And it seems worth to run the risk of damaging our mental health in order to learn world class English literature. 

Career Advice

Here is an anecdote that any ambitious young professional should read and meditate on for an hour. 

First, how was Navarro recruited? During the campaign Trump told Jared Kushner to find some research supporting his protectionist trade views. Kushner responded by going on Amazon, where he found a book titled “Death by China.” So he cold-called Navarro, the book’s author, who became the campaign’s first economic adviser. Source.

Navarro has been promoted by Trump to the position of Trade Czar, in charge of America's trade relations with the world. But his high position and power did not fill him with hubris and blinded him with pride. Like the Pope who signs as "the servant of the servants of Christ", Navarro sees himself as the first and humblest servant of his boss. 

“My function, really, as an economist is to try to provide the underlying analytics that confirm his intuition. And his intuition is always right in these matters.” 

Here you have a good model, a man with a good attitude. I know nothing about foreign trade and am not sure if reviving the nineteen thirties's "Yellow Peril" phantom is reasonable, but I admire him.

New Semester

I got a lot of teaching hours this semester. Yesterday was a full day and am tired like ... I was about to say like a dog, only that dogs live a most pampered life. The campus is built on two levels and I had to walk up and down in the stairs several times. I am well impressed by the quality of the new class, they look serious and purposeful. I saw only one female in my classes, but the campus is full of religious girls that study psychology and other social work courses. There has been much building in the campus and the infrastructure is better than last year.

My little daughter is the national co-ordinator of some program of the Ministry of Education for exceptional students or whatever. She is in a meeting today. Yesterday was worried about meeting the representatives of Arab and of Haredi and of the settlements colleges. There was a problem how and in what language to write the invitations. I advised Hebrew and Arabic, both languages are official. Will the settlement colleges object? The multicultural age is arrived in Israel with its supersensitivity to pretended "offenses". In the end the only safe subject to write about will be food and pets.

A Horse Walks Into a Bar

Thursday night we went to the Kameri theater in Tel Aviv to David Grossman's "A Horse Walks Into a Bar" - a kind of stand-up black comedy. I could review the opus but someone did it better for me. The Washington Post.  Surprisingly, the WP reviewer Ken Kalfus noticed the same things I did and his review succeeded in sharpening some of my observations. The black, tragic joke of Dobaleh, from a family of dwarves that "passed through" Auschwitz death camp, that "we could say that Mengele is our family doctor" is notable. Kalfus writes that Dobaleh is dying, but that was left out of the act or I missed it (Kalfus is reviewing the book, which I did not read). I may have missed some details and I don't know if the people that stood up and left in the middle was real paying public or actors playing the part of the public leaving Dobaleh's failed standup routine.

All in all, good.

Remember Amalek

Today we read the chapter Remember (parashat yizkor) that starts with "Remember Amalek what he did to you in the desert when you were escaping from Egypt and you were weak and exhausted. He followed you and destroyed those straying behind and the sick and the weak..."

Paradoxically, the chapter also instructs us to erase and to delete the memory of Amalek under the heaven.

The result is that there are no Amalekites and no one remembers them. Only we are mentioning them all the time.

Since every generation we are attacked when we are weakest, it is fitting to imagine that it is always Amalek that is torturing us in the desert. Amalek, always the same Amalek, attacked us when the remnants of the death camps in Europe were trying to re-form in Israel. Three thousand years from now we shall still remember this Amalek, although no else will.

Early morning dread

Well, they came back. The reason is simple: the taxmen is again sending me frightening letters. I pay a tremendous amount of money but that only whets their appetite. How do I survive? I leave the bed a 0400 AM and drink coffee and do some works. The coffee makes me sleep and I return to bed for one hour. Then ready to work for the day. If the anxiety bothers me, I take 5 mg diazepam. Once a week, 60 - 100 cc  and cheap alcohol to erase myself for a while.  and start the week with a tabula rasa mind. I asked my doctor if there was any danger of addiction. He said that at my age there is none. Israeli doctors have a peculiar opinion about old age. They think one should spend his last days in comfort and contentment, and drink is an important part of happiness. I think this comes to us from Russia. As Solzhenitsyn says, we exchanged some habits after two hundred years living with Russians. Jewish abstinence did not stick to them, but we did learn to enjoy vodka with salted fish. 

Israeli Gas Royalties Fund

The Treasury is seeking candidates for the position of manager of the newly established Fund of Gas Royalties. That means that there are gas royalties and more are expected. The model seems to be Norway, that has one trillion dollars fund from oil royalties. They are not injecting that income in the national economy, so to avoid the Dutch disease or the fatal Venezuela disease. Anyway, they are so rich that living income is assured for all citizens, and working is more or less an option. They could learn environmental or gender studies in the universities, all of them.

The prosperity in Israel is starting to be such that my competitors are rejecting projects for lack of manpower. I am paying 50% tax, and wondering if continuing working is worth my stress.

Difficult days ahead

This is the second day of the difficult weeks ahead. Once again, I have to collect and organize documents to submit to the Authorities. Once again, my thoughts revert to the existential, I seek strength in my personal and family history. My parents courageously left everything and passed illegally the Hungarian - Austrian frontier, and we arrived at Vienna with absolutely nothing. They were not slaves to real estate mother language and culture, promising jobs. They were ready to throw it all away and start from nothing. Penniless refugees, yet we survived without much pain. What is the worst that can happen to me? Nothing. At my age, I am done and all I strive for the future is to help my grandchildren. They have good parents so my contribution is inessential. Let's get down to the work on the table and keep going.

The Shofar Sheep

The spotted sheep breed was created in England in the 17th Century (pic). They are called Jacob's breed because they are like those described in the Bible (Jacob was an expert in animal husbandry.and no one succeeded yet to repeat his results). Each animal may have up to six horns, each one of them can be used to manufacture the horn blown during the Jewish New Year and the Day of Atonement. A shofar with good sound sells for several thousands dollars.

Can Israel Expel Homosexual Refugees to Uganda?

Israel is gradually expelling the African refugees to peaceful and prosperous African countries like Uganda. Yet the process is not advancing smoothly as the refugees have found protectors in Israel. Mothers and children were excepted from the beginning. Now a second category are becoming un-expellable: homosexuals. The Israeli homosexual organization has organized mass protests and mobilized influential international "human rights" movements. The argument is that in Uganda, like everywhere in Africa, homosexuality is punishable with death, so sending them to Africa means a death sentence for them. It appears that the refugees are well integrated in the local gay scene and are loved. The government's limp wrist is powerless against them, so they will stay and keep enriching the country's diversity.

Former Argentine President to be Tried

Argentina's former president Cristina Kirchner and other senior members of her government have been referred for public trial over the cover-up of Iranian involvement in a 1994 bombing of a Jewish charity in Buenos Aires, the judiciary announced on Monday, according to AFP.

Argentine Prosecutor Nisman (pic) had claimed that the memorandum of understanding signed with Iran was a maneuver to cover up for the involvement of Iran and Hezbollah in the attack to AMIA.

Nisman had drafted arrest warrants for Kirchner and Timerman in connection with the cover-up, but was found dead before he could file them. A judge recently ruled that Nisman was murdered and did not commit suicide.

This case is really exceptional. 

Is Your Dog A Mensch?

Teaching dogs Yiddish

Is your dog a mensch? The Workmen's Circle is here to help you teach your dog Yiddish!  Yiddish for Dogs event in Dog People.  As one participant said: Kind of ridiculous...

Penis Whitening

The Chinese are mocking South East Asians (Indians, mainly). The Hong Kong English paper writes:

In Thai popular memory, as well as in much of Southeast Asia, America and the West in general thus occupy an aspirational plane, not just of financial muscle but also of libidinal power. Little surprise then that hospitals in Thailand are offering penis whitening services. Apart from Thailand, many of the clients for the service are reportedly coming from other parts of Asia. That is how deeply ingrained the binary of power and white phallus has become in the region after centuries of colonial and neo-colonial experience.

My impression is that many Northern Chinese, Koreans (pic) and Japanese are white skinned, and could pass for Ashkenazi Jews. Cantonese are olive colored, and the girls have black nipples and dark outer labia and anus. I know nothing about penises. 

Was Opening Up China a Big Mistake?

In 1972 the USA decided to change its policy of isolating Communist China and to open up the world markets  so China could make a living and develop. Few remember the incredible chaos and poverty of China in those times. Billion Chinese were starving. That is no exaggeration. After visiting China, I - like the FAO - published an article pondering if China would  be able to feed its growing population.

The Economist was then unsure if the coming, unavoidable Chinese competition would benefit or ruin British industry. After forty years, we can conclude that the integration of China in global economy brought us much prosperity (although traditional Western industries disappeared). Now, March 2018, The Economist arrives at the conclusion that Nixon's China policy was a big mistake. China industrialized and prospered, but did not became a democracy and an ally of the free world, as it was called then. At this point, it is too late to be sorry. The West will have to live with a large, rich and powerful Chinese empire and its smiling Emperor.

Julius Malema Lives!

Malema was the Youth Leader till the ruling party expelled him. Now he has reappeared and is leading the movement for the expropriation without compensation of White owned lands. There are ten Africans for each European - at this point, civil war is unthinkable.

South Africa is an important country. It is the world's largest producer of platinum, gold, chromium. Fate may have condemned it to Rhodesia's sad fate.

Welcome Prince William

Prince William is apparently the next British King. He is scheduled to make the first official visit by a British royal to Israel during Israel 70th. Day of Independence celebrations.

Official royal tours are made at the request of the British government. It would be nice to see more British presence in the Middle East.

Harvard is (objectively) Zionist

The Lion discovered the fact that Jews are discriminated against in Harvard.  

Plugging all of these numbers into Excel, using the NORMSDIST() function, Jews ought to be 14.4% of Harvard, but they are only 7.7%, therefore we might conclude that Harvard still has Jewish quotas to prevent too many Jews from attending.

Without any specific data on the subject, I do believe it to be truth. Jews were always and are today discriminated everywhere. In Hungary before WWII there was an open quota system, Jews in the universities and the civil service could not number more than their proportion in the general population, which was 5%. In Soviet Russia, Jews were forced to study in faraway Central Asian universities, and only a few were allowed in the first rank Moscow and Leningrad universities.

There is no more effective way to beat into young Jews that they have no future where they live than negating them higher education. When Gorbachev opened the door, thousands of young Jews left for Israel and the West. The million Jews that arrived in Israel changed the face of the country for good. Bottom line: Jewish quota in Harvard is good for Israel. American universities apply obscure "holistic" methods to dissimulate their admission policies, so most are unaware that they are being shortchanged. We hope those young American Jews will awake to reality and understand that only in Israel they are welcome and given a fair chance. We want them here building their country.

P.S.: They will not miss those fat cows (pic.) when they meet the Israeli variety.