No more Palestinian refugees

How miraculously good it is that Hillary lost! Under Barak Hussein Obama and her State Department secretary Hillary Clinton, the US was subsidizing and artificially expanding the number of descendants of Palestinian refugees, and fueling endlessly growing claims against the State of Israel. Trump cut it off in one strike, thank God. 

State Dept.'s Nauert said the UNRWA agency’s “endlessly and exponentially expanding community of entitled beneficiaries is simply unsustainable and has been in crisis mode for many years.” The number of Palestinian descendants with claims has reached ten or fifteen million, and in one generation more it may reach thirty million, all expecting to live off international charity. 

The US used to provide 200 million dollars of UNRWA's 560 million annual budget. The EU gives about the same, and individual European countries make up the difference. The institution will not die easily, as European antisemitism will not disappear and with it, their desire to harm the Jews. But Europeans will have to pay more for their vice and that may extinguish their enthusiasm. 

The endless agony of Argentina

Yesterday there was a run on the dollar in Buenos Aires and the peso lost 15% of its worth. To stop the avalanche, the Central Bank offered 60% interest on Peso deposits. This is the second time this year, with the difference that this one comes after the generous support agreement with the IMF International Monetary Fund. Dujovne, the Finance Minister, travelled urgently to Washington to renegotiate the agreement and ask for more funds.

How this affects common people? Food suppliers have stopped deliveries to supermarkets because of the uncertainty of prices, cars are left without gas till the government announces the new price, all the unions are demanding salary raise, panic seizes the population that lives from payday to payday.

President Macri stands for re-elections in October 27, 2019. If he fails to stabilize the country's finances, the Peronists (see Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner pic) will replace him. Then the revenge of the Kirchner gang, that is being investigated and jailed these days (for organized sacking of the State), will be fast and furious.

In 1807 the British sent a fleet to incorporate Argentina, then called the Provincias Unidas del Sur, into their Empire. That was the last opportunity for Argentina to become a civilized and progressive country like Australia, New Zealand, Canada. The natives resisted successfully. Pity.

Bull Market on Tel Aviv Stock Exchange

Could it be that Israeli firms are worth so much?

Let me think.

Israel Water System Turned Upside Down

So once again we have a serious drought in Israel, our largest reservoir - the Sea of Galilee - is drying up. Soon we shall be adding desalinated sea water to keep it ecologically healthy and attractive for tourists. The basic structure of the Israeli water supply system, where the Kinneret served as long term regulator and reservoir, us being turned upside down. A revolution by definition. Yesternight we had a tropical storm, some water, very irregular for August. Somebody should look into it and say something substantial. I for one went to see the Israel Meteorological Service's site and they say there is no significant weather (!) See pic. Very peculiar. 

Jim Rogers says that the best sector to invest is in agriculture, that is dying all over the world. Japan farmers are pensioners, American farmers are not being replaced, etc. and ag prices are 25% down in the last thirty years. Farmers will be very rich, he says. He pushes his RJA Rogers Agricultural Index.  He also says that China/Japan/Russia stock exchanges are 30% lower than thirty years ago, they will rise. 

How recessions start? The last one started where no one was looking: Island's bankruptcy, and then ENRON's collapse. These days Turkey, Indonesia are in bad situation. Could they start the debacle? 

The Battle of the Smelt

Delta smelt used be common throughout the Sacramento-San Joaquin estuary until its water was diverted to supply the 25 million people and farmers who live in the area. Invasive species and changes in water salinity and clarity also played a role in the smelt’s decline. They were protected under the Endangered Species Act in 1993 and a recovery plan was established in 1996. The average population between 2000 and 2006 was 353 fish. That population crashed to just 25 fish the following year. The EPA ordered to reduce the water diverted for human use and let it flow to the ocean, restoring the smelt's home environment. 

Trump is trying to undermine California's water policies that disregard the needs of the population to "protect" a barely surviving fish. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross this month ordered agencies under his jurisdiction, including the National Marine Fisheries Service, to circumvent the Endangered Species Act on the pretext that water deliveries blocked by ESA rules were needed to fight California wildfires. 

California's self-imposed "drought" is difficult to understand - it is magic cult of sacred "Nature" that never existed. America is fighting Chinese competition, poverty, etc.  with one hand tied behind. Can President Trump work the miracle of dividing the waters between Man and the Smelt? 

West Nilus mosquito attacks Jews

This racist Egyptian mosquito bites white people with visible bare skin, like girls in bikini or shorts, T-shirted men. Arab women that are totally veiled and covered except a narrow slit for the eyes, are immune to this pest. The West Nilus Fever has no treatment. 

It kills about one in a hundred people. Yesterday died one in Israel. A Jew, of course. 

About 1 in 5 people who are infected develop a fever with headache, body aches, joint pains, vomiting, diarrhea, or rash. Recovery takes months. I am feeling tired, is it because of the summer or is it because of the mosquitoes? No way of knowing. I feel like vomiting. 

Playing Hardball with the Ayatollahs

Trump intends to cut Iran's oil exports by November. That will cause more instability in Iran and probably in Iraq and Syria too. Europe sees this scenario as a direct menace because "the Middle East is our backyard". Tension and conflict in early 2019 is just what the doctor recommended for Bibi before the elections. If I was a Palestinian fallah I would prepare my visa to Chile, or as somebody advised, Indonesia. The next war will make the air unbreathable for them.  Photo from Der Spiegel. 

Kirchner Stories

Argentine President Kirchner filled the presidential plane with his friends of the kirchnerista party in a State visit to Venezuela. Once finished the visit, Chavez (pic) desiring to send away the Argentine mission in happy mood, sent to the  airplane sacks with US dollars. Uberti, the only one with courage to face "El Malo", protested: "Néstor, estás loco. Tenemos acá a la Mossad, a la CIA…, es una locura...". "Nestor, we have here the Mossad, the CIA... this is crazy...". But Kirchner shouted him: “Subí la plata, subí la plata, subila igual...”. Bring up the money, bring up the money, bring it up anyway...". Uberti was left in Caracas, punished by Kirchner.

The people from the isles

Before the Arabs conquered our land and settled here, there were many other occupants. Thirty two centuries before today, the Egyptians ruled Eretz Israel, when the whole Middle East was disturbed by the concerted attack of the Peoples of the Isles, currently known as Sea Peoples. It is surprising that of all the mighty peoples that lived here, none was able to establish itself for long, and it is the Arabs who inherited it (temporarily, because we are back). In comparison, the Han settled in the Yellow River valley some 5000 years ago, and no one could displace them. The Greeks settled in the isles and the mainland, and they are still there. In the Middle East, none of the ancient settlers survives. Not them nor their genes.  

The earliest mention of the Sea Peoples proper is in an inscription of the Egyptian king Merneptah, whose rule is usually dated from 1213 BC to 1204 BC. Merneptah states that in the fifth year of his reign (1208 BC) he defeated an invasion of an allied force of Libyans and the Sea People, killing 6,000 soldiers and taking 9,000 prisoners. 

About 20 years later the Egyptian king Ramses III was apparently forced to deal with another invasion of the Sea Peoples, this time allied with the Philistines. In the mortuary temple he built in Thebes, Ramses describes how, despite the fact "no land could stand before" the forces of the Sea People and that they swept through "Hatti, Kode, Carchemish, Arzawa, and Alashiya" destroying their cities, he defeated them in a sea battle. He gives the names of the tribes of the Sea People as including: the Peleset, the Tjeker, the Shekelesh, the Denyen, and the Weshesh. 

However, because this list is identical to the one Merneptah included in his victory inscription, and because Ramses also describes several fictitious victories on his temple walls, some Egyptologists believe that he never actually fought the Sea Peoples, but only claimed the victories of Merneptah as his own - a common practice of a number of the Pharaohs. 

Apparently the Weshesh are the tribe of Asher, the Denyen - the tribe of Dan and the Tjeker - Menasseh, while the Shekelesh were Issachar. The Northern Canaanite cities of Tzur and Tzidon were the only ones not attacked, probably they were related to the attackers or their allies. The Peleset were the Plishtim of the Bible, the Philistines, clearly a proto-Greek group. 

Ice People in Bed

A noticed that some scandal-mongering "journalists" are feeding the scandal-hungry world population with malicious rumors of bedtime issues between Donald and Melanie. That she is not accepting his hand when walking together, that she is cool and alien towards him, that she is dressing to give a heart attack to her poor old hubby. She is a proud model, Donald's infidelities that are surfacing in these days must be driving her mad. If Donald sought solace in porn star prostitutes instead with her monumental wife, there must be something wrong. Nordic "Ice people" are stereotyped as cold, frozen, frigid. I am an old faux-Orthodox Jew, more interested in the stock exchange than in sex workers in general, and zero experience with Slovenian models in particular, but I have my opinion, and it is that Melanie is sex bomb. 

Slippery Sloping Skyward

I was invited to submit a proposal for a project in the Alon Towers in Tel Aviv. The illustration is 5 years old, in the meanwhile, it was built. The structural work was done by a Turkish company, the rest Israelis. I sent a very low estimate.

A few years ago I took several projects in "luxury" tall buildings, but I purposefully downgraded my jobs because hated to work in large teams with authoritarian/sadistic  project managers. I specialized in small projects and my practice is prospering, but the cream tends to float to the surface, and so I am slippery-sloping upwards to Tel Aviv prestigious jobs. As I grow older and fatter, the more I hate working at those altitudes. I have ten more working years left, maybe. 

Rat Disease Epidemy in Israel

The Ministry of Health has forbidden the access to the Northern rivers because a dozen boys caught the rat disease, Leptospirosis. No, the boys did not turn into Splinter (pic) but it is to early to make a judgment.  When I was lecturing in hospitals and occupational safety groups, I used to emphasize that no sewage-related disease is recognized by the Social Security, except one:  Leptospirosis. Should anybody catch the disease, he/she/it is entitled to receive disability payments for life. No one ever claimed this benefit, because the disease was not present  in Israel. Now there is, but I doubt if the children will be able to claim occupational disability.

The truth about the Falashas finds its way to HaAretz

A ranking Haredi linked with the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi (pic) writes in today's HaAretz, my favorite extreme left-wing fishwrap, that "Yes, They are Jews-in-Doubt". "They" are the Ethiopian Jews. There was no Ashkenazi rabbi who opined that the Falashas are Jews, and it was the act of a sole individual - the late Chief Sepharadi Rabbi Joseph - who certified their Jewishness and forced the State of Israel to bring them all from Ethiopia. His motives were clear: to increase the "Sepharadi" voting mass and gain power through his Shas party. The article accuses the Sepharadi Haredim of hypocrisy and racism, because their Yeshives (high schools) reject Ethiopian students and they never marry Ethiopians. 
 The Ashkenazi Haredim, more honest, declare them non Jews and deal with them as human beings. They will not certify as Kosher the wine touched by Ethiopians because religion forbids drinking wine touched by non-Jews. There is a ferocious power dispute within the Haredi community, for a variety of issues. The Haredim are less than 10% of the population of Israel. 

Girls

Maggie Tabibi, a TV personality. In fact, more than personality, she is an image. Israel has girls. 

INTEL NVIDIA ET AL

Regular INTEL chips are losing popularity and newfangled accelerated graphic chips are interesting. They consume much electricity and emit much heat, creating refrigeration problems. I am betting in Nvidia but INTEL is bigger and interesting. It is difficult to displace a monopoly. The 36 analysts offering 12-month price forecasts for Intel Corp have a median target of 58.00,  +19.71%
increase from the last price of 48.45. The question is what are doing the Chinese and the Japanese. China depends on foreign-made chips. It imported $227 billion worth of integrated circuits in 2016. 

Israel is expensive

Tel Aviv is the world's ninth most expensive city, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). It is the second most expensive city to buy alcohol. I don't know, maybe I got used to crazy prices and keep drinking wine. I don't smoke, but I notice that cigarettes are so expensive that people started rolling their own cigarettes. May be it is not tobacco. 

Witnessing a Miracle in Israel

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As the sole descendant of my family, all Hungarian and Czech Jews starved and gassed in Auschwitz, I was always worried about Jewish fertility. The Jews in post WWII Hungary had abysmal rates, to the point that of the some 200,000 survivors, today there are not more than a few thousands. Not enough children to fill the Lauder kindergarten, generously maintained by American donors. That's why I consider the total reversal taking place in Israel as a miracle, something contrary to the expected and the explainable (*). 

I quote the Wiki: "Jewish total fertility rate increased by 10.2% during 1998–2009, and was recorded at 2.90 during 2009. During the same time period, Arab TFR decreased by 20.5%. Muslim TFR was measured at 3.73 for 2009. During 2000, the Arab TFR in Jerusalem (4.43) was higher than that of the Jews residing there (3.79). But as of 2009, Jewish TFR in Jerusalem was measured higher than the Arab TFR (2010: 4.26 vs 3.85, 2009: 4.16 vs 3.87). TFR for Arab residents in the West Bank was measured at 2.91 in 2013, while that for the Jewish residents was reported at 5.10 children per woman. 

The ethnic group with highest recorded TFR is the Bedouin of Negev. Their TFR was reported at 10.06 in 1998, and 5.73 in 2009. TFR is also very high among Haredi Jews. For Ashkenazi Haredim, the TFR rose from 6.91 in 1980 to 8.51 in 1996. The figure for 2008 is estimated to be even higher. TFR for Sephardi/Mizrahi Haredim rose from 4.57 in 1980 to 6.57 in 1996.^" 

I have seen this process with my own eyes in Samaria. From nowhere appeared young boys and girls and went to live in containers in the middle of hostile Arab population. Forty years after, not only that they had established themselves and build beautiful villages and industrial areas, but their example has diffused into the urban, secular Jewry of the country. Yesterday we went to a country club, and there was a surprising number of pregnant women and babies. We live in Kever Benjamin City, an upper middle class (number 8 in the socio-economic scale) city that always had left wing majors, with our own gay carnivals. A miracle.

(*) I presume that the Jewish religion has something to do with it. But looking in detail to that religion and the motives of the religious, it seems impossible, incredible. HaAretz today writes about a religious dispute about the kashrut (purity) of the Barkan and the Tepperberg wines. The Haredi Religious Court forbid drinking Barkan because non-rabbinical/doubtful Jews were employed in the winery (Ethiopian immigrants) and the Tepperberg because women (possibly menstruating) could come into touch with the wine. HaAretz makes fun of our holy religion ("Santa Fe" in Spanish) asking if male babies could be breastfed by their mothers. Illustration by  Dr He Qi, The miracle of Jonah and the fish.

How Argentina's pillage was organized

Argentine jails are these days filling up with construction industry managers and public servants.  The discovery of the gang's delivery man's diary naming names and dates has opened a can of worms. The methodology was holding meetings between building companies and the Minister of Planning in charge of public works, to distribute the contracts. Once awarded, the advance payment - about 20% of the worth of the contract - was "returned" to the gang. This was compensated by allowing non-payment of the VAT (Value Added Tax), which was written down as to be paid some later date or effectively, never. In addition, the companies were asked to make political campaign contributions to the Peronist party, that were more or less legal.

Jose Lopez (pic), the Subminister of Public Works, had an important role in the chain. He had been caught with zipped bags containing million of dollars while trying to get rid of them. He was throwing the bags over the gate of a monastery. He declared that the money was not his but property of some un-nameable top politician. Except the content of those bags, the rest of the money has disappeared in an ocean of fake companies and secret accounts. 

Of course, we cannot compare Argentina (200 years of independence) with young Israel (70 years) but we too had our little public works scandal, in which was implicated my former boss Alex Vizhnitzer. We have yet much to learn from Argentina, they have elevated corruption to its highest level of perfection. 

Digester Egg! There I come!

I am planning my visit to New York with my little daughter and her fiancée. First things first! Digester Egg!

Nestor Kirchner Legacy

Kirchner was a self-made lawyer in Santa Cruz, the windswept Patagonian province. When he won the Peronist party's candidacy, he was already a very rich man. Once in power, he imposed quotas "aportes" on each Ministry, which had to be delivered in dollars (cash only) to the Government House. The cash had to be counted and signed by his accountants and delivered in handbags, three times a week. Vicepresident Boudou was his controller, he too got very rich. The cash was then transferred to secret accounts in Seychelles and other islands. Another source of income was Techint, Argentina's largest building company. Its Venezuelan filial was nationalized by Maduro and the compensation was channeled to Kirchner in 100,000 dollar monthly payments. Techint says that they never paid anything to Kirchner, and the prove is that they were never awarded any public project under Kirchner.

When Nestor suddenly died, his widow inherited this well oiled "public monies collecting machinery" and the fattening of the family fortune. The Kirchner children are, apparently, not up to their parents, so there will no Kirchner dynasty. Although corruption was always a feature of Argentina's government, there was never such a systematic plunder as organized by the talented Nestor Kirchner.  

The Weekly Portion

This week we are reading the portion of the Bible dealing with Moshe's instructions before starting the conquest of the Land. 

First of all, the Israelites must destroy every sign of the religion of the natives. 

Second, the Israelites will create an organized religion centered in the "place the G-d will choose" and only there they will offer sacrifices. The Bible does not define the place, although Mount Gerizim and Mount Avel are mentioned.  

The Samaritan Jews still consider that the Temple is in Mt. Gerizim (pic) in Samaria (Shomron). A second priestly center developed in Judea, with center in Jerusalem, which competed with the Samaria priesthood. Contemporary Jews are descended from the Judeans and our temple is in Jerusalem. 

The chapter calls to give ten percent of the agricultural produce to the assistant priests tribe living all around the country, called Levi'im, as they are the only Israelites with no land of theirs. 

Now it is the third time we are following his program. 

The Sacking of Argentina

The former vicepresident of Argentina has been condemned to six years of jail for corruption. The case was abruptly solved with the finding of the diary of the messenger the network employed (pic) and the confession of the people mentioned in it. Presidents Nestor Kirchner and her widow headed the operation. Argentina had been systematically pillaged by a criminal gang that even ordered the secret service to kill the Attorney General while he was under heavy police "protection". The jailing of former rulers is a standard procedure in Argentina to "cure" crimes and corruption, a magical ritual that purifies the country and let's it start anew virginal and immaculate. Maybe this time it will work, although the current President Macri - the head of a vast family business (see Forbes's list of Argentine billionaires), has been linked to the 'Ndrangheta or whatever they call themselves. Since the leak of the Panama accounts, all this has been public knowledge. 

Escape from Managua

Our TAHAL team was completing five irrigation projects in Nicaragua, while all around the war was going on. That was in the end of 1979. Our leader, Chaim Ben Ezra, told me that the payment was conditional to the delivery of the drawings and documents, and I was determined to get the project over the end line. We were told to hoard food and I bought in the market a sack of beans and a sack of rice, enough for several months. The house I was living in Ticomo, near the university, had been robbed one night and the cleaning girl was missing with her things. I remember that I went to the central police station in Managua to receive a paper for the insurance, although I found nothing missing. No body asked me anything as I went in, there were some people asking to visit detainees, but nothing hysterical nor a warlike environment. There was no one to receive my complaint. Later in the office they told me that I have been in the "boca del leon", people was dead afraid of the place, known as the main torture center. I saw nothing out of the usual.

Then we were told that the team was going to be evacuated and each Israeli had to be at the airport next morning at 0500 AM. At that stage there were already shooting in the streets. The very same afternoon I took three copies of the plans and the files and went to the Central Bank to deliver the project papers. No one told me to do it, I did it because I loved Ben Ezra. There was no one to receive it, at last I found a frightened secretary and made her sign an ad-hoc receipt. Then next morning drove through the deserted streets of the capital to the airport. There was large plane that was being loaded with a piano and wooden boxes. Our plane arrived and next we landed in San Jose de Costa Rica. Ben Ezra and the Israeli Ambassador Olami were waiting for us and we were let in without border police checks and visas. Later we realized that the plane being loaded had been Somoza's escape plane to Miami, probably sent by the Americans to ease the transfer the power to the Sandinista rebels favored by Jimmy Carter. Later, Somoza found refuge in Paraguay, where he was killed in a faux-Parisian whorehouse.  

200 Million Unmarriable Chinese Young Men and No Angry Riots in the Streets

One of the advantages of a long life with a healthy brain is the possibility to compare the predictions of the past with current reality, that is, to learn the outcome of former actions. Chinese one child policy a generation ago led to an unbalanced demographic pyramid today, with some fifty million young men that cannot find brides. This outcome was noticed and predicted some thirty years ago and caused Western pundits to write long articles about its consequences.



Now we can see that they were all wrong. Some predicted that these young men would be tremendously angry and riot on the streets, creating social chaos during many years. Others predicted that the Communist government would be forced to occupy these young males in foreign wars, that would decimate this unmanageable population. Others predicted widespread homosexuality, like the Arab societies; other yet the government would establish accessible whorehouses for the people. All the Western observers predicted social dislocation and violence.

Nothing of that happened. Chinese men bear their solitude, and try to improve themselves to attract brides. They study like crazy, they run after the yuan, they pay to suddenly created marriage gurus. the pic, from Der Spiegel, shows one of these gurus, surrounded by single men who are his students, Cheng Ming, 26, (center) a teacher at a dating school in Hangzhou, China, demonstrates how to moisturize and apply foundation to one's face before heading out for a date. The Chinese are reacting in a radically different way than imagined by Western think tanks, the RAND and the CIA, and of course the eternal legion of ignorant/stupid journalists. 

Solving the Palestinian Refugee issue

There are probably more than ten million Palestinian refugees, in Israel proper and in the world. This population was created when in the middle of the 1947 war, a few thousands left "temporarily" their villages. The UN established a special organization UNRWA, to solve the problem, but instead it increased it to the current untreatable proportions. Most of the refugees have died long ago but their descendants have multiplied mightily and the UNRWA has grown to monstrous size - it costs about 500 million dollars per year, mostly to the American taxpayer.

Kushner is trying quietly solve the issue. According to Palestinian officials, he pressed to strip more than 2 million registered Palestinians of their refugee status so that UNRWA would no longer need to operate there. At last something is being done!

Environmental Planning in a Nature Reserve

Thursday night I lost my way in a Nature Reserve near the Maccabean  Tombs. The reserve has stone building with sanitary services, but the management will not operate the local, antiquated wastewater treatment plant. Parts of the reserve are let out to marriage "halls" (pic) but the Ministry of Health will not allow them operate without a wastewater treatment solution. I am planning a small rotary drums plant and the treated wastewater will be recycled in forest irrigation. Technically it is quite simple, the challenging (and expensive) part is getting it approved by all the bureaucracies.  Each tree and rat hole is catalogued and cannot be touched without permission. Some plants and animals are a little different from those five kilometers afar, and have been declared protected and in danger of extinction. A recent study classified seven different varieties of scorpions in Israel, all candidates to the "Protected" status.  It gets on my nerves that the "nature" the bureaucracies are defending is nothing more than the overgrazed shrub-bush, sadly degraded by the fucking (and fucked) Arab goat. Anyway, Israel has been densely inhabited for eight or ten thousand years, by humans and by the Neanderthals, so what is natural? On the other hand (I still have two hands), the public demands "Nature" and that it be "Protected" against themselves, so the poor salary-drawing homolesbian environmentalist is forced to invent it.

Herzliya Hills

I was invited to submit a proposal for a restaurant in the Herzliya Hills project. What? Since when there are hills in Herzliya? I looked up the project. It is where my old sewage pumping station used to stand. What did they do to that facility, with its historical and sentimental value? 

Intellectual Foundations of the Sandinista Movement

The Sandinista movement was perceived in America as ideologically Communist, and Ronald Reagan tried to destroy it through the covert Contra invasion. Of course it failed like the Bahia de los Cochinos invasion by John Kennedy. Reading Donald Hodgins, an American academic historian, it appears that, unlike in the CIA and the American government, in the academia it was well known that Marx was not among the intellectual progenitors of the Sandinistas.

Hodgins points out that Nicaraguan worldview was impressed by hundred years of American aggression, first to guarantee that no second transoceanic canal will compete with the Panama Canal.  Second, Nicaragua was "invaded" by American gold miners in transit to California, leaving a rather barbaric impression. Nicaraguans were also aware of the plans transfer the cotton/slave economy of the South, after the victory of the North, to their land. The Marine invasion in the nineteen twenties finally confirmed their fears of becoming an American colony.

Those were the ideological roots of Sandino, nothing to do with Marx or Russia. It is amazing that Reagan could be so blind, seeing Communists where there were none. In fact, the Sandinistas, when in power, held democratic elections and lost. And they moved aside and transferred the government to the Chamorro widow. They spent sixteen years in the opposition to recover the power. Today, the Sandinista leader Ortega and his family rule the country, more or less following the Somoza dynasty model. This time America lets it be. 

TAHAL and Kardan Serie A Bonds

My portfolio includes some Serie A Bonds of Kardan NV that will expire on 31 October and are sold today with a 60% discount on its peer value. The market is very cautious because Kardan has no cash to pay and it build on the sale of TAHAL to finance the payment, scheduled for February 2019. The Fortissimo Fund is interested in buying TAHAL, which has several contracts in Africa, mostly projects of doubtful profitability. Anyway, these bonds could be seen as an interesting speculation, save the existence of the Serie B bonds, whose owners are afraid that after the sale of TAHAL there will remain no saleable properties to pay THEM.  The situation is complicated because Serie B owners are considering to demand the immediate payment of their bonds, and that will cause such a legal jam that no one will see a cent for years. On the other hand, Kardan has been broke for years, yet it survives. TAHAL, the company that was my home for decades, was at some point offered on sale for one sheqel and no one wanted it. Benno Gitter, a banker specialized in appropriating State owned industries, rejected it. He told me. If Benno could mis-valuate TAHAL as worthless, then who am I to valuate Kardan today? Pic Yosy Grinfeld, owner of Kardan, the one who bought TAHAL now worth hundreds of millions.