Palo Alto residents discuss the Second Door

Psychologist Blasey Ford based her story of lifelong sexual trauma on several indirect proofs, one of them was her building a second front door on their bedroom (so she could never be locked in again). This is considered corroborating evidence by experts: "I mean, who needs two front doors?"

Neighbors went to check this second front door and truly, there is a small semi-hidden second front door. The locals wondered if it was an escape door as she presented it or just the addition of a "rentable property" that is legal in Palo Alto and very common.

The consensus of the locals seems to be that her home is in a most valuable site, near Google's campus, with the potential of producing an income of 1500 dollar per month. In fact, she said that the annex is rented out to Google interns. Apparently her love/need of that extra income is stronger than her fear of letting in strangers in her home. Maybe the interns are female or gay.

Some locals never heard of the Palo Alto University (pic from its website) where she works. The institution exists and occupies a modest commercial building. I have the impression that it takes in everybody and it is not a standard academic institution. In the mall on the other side of my street operates a "Holistic Health School", I imagine it is comparable to the Palo Alto University. May be I am wrong.


Both Blasey Ford and Judge Kavanaugh are working elite. Following the left's accusations of the  "privileged White" one could imagine that they are wealthy, parasitic, feudal aristocrats, but these people are decent, hard-working middle-class professionals. The best of America. The whole affair is a tragedy, the Senate should not allow this circus.

The Kavanaugh Nomination Drama

In my former blog I got caught in the Flint water scandal (declared "National Disaster" by Obama) and followed up the issue from the first water analysis to the fate of the millions channeled to Flint. Now I am being fascinated by the Brett Kavanaugh debate in the Senate. Kavanaugh is a Republican nominee, in a country divided. The trial, because that is what is, was carefully orchestrated. Feinstein kept the sexually abused woman in reserve till the moment came to make her public. The tactic was to gain time and leave the position open, so she was not allowed to fly - under false pretenses - to Washington. The Democrats did not let the issue be finished in the Committee, they lost but won a week and complicated the process by an FBI investigation aimed at collecting dirt on the candidate.

My impression that it is reasonable that two drunk teenagers tried to play with the drunk girl, but at 17 they were virgins and did not know how to do it. No penetration nor anything resembling it. To inflate this episode into a gang rape is ludicrous. The police would not even register the incident, as no one was hurt and they were all underage and drunk. Basically, nothing happened.

Brett had an enviable youth, a week in the beach with his friends, sports, beers, fun. None of the identity hang ups of a refugee Jew like me. He was happily unaware that he was the ruling class of America and "privileged". He appears a serious, responsible candidate to the Supreme Judge, a man born and raised for the job. I see nothing wrong with him.

 I assume the second raw were sitting the Senators' assistants and trainees, the future generation of American legislators. There was an immobile fat African woman, is she the next "Wise Latina"/"Wise Bantu"? Heather Sawyer, a homo activist and minority counsel for the House Judiciary Committee, was there. As we use to say, we survived the Pharaoh, we shall survive them too. Sad to see America so hysterical and divided.

Lindsey Graham: I am a single white man.

Yesterday's Senate Committee meeting was riveting. I found many little diamonds hidden in the manure-mound of the debate. At least we know Lindsey will never be accused of inappropriate behavior with a woman. I liked his blond clean look and I was impressed by his strong speech in the debate. He was the only man among those lachrymose little politicians, all shamelessly licking the ass of that woman. What she was doing at 15 in a drinking ski party with four bigger boys? 

Senator Graham, who has been in office since 2003 and serves on the armed services senate committee, shares with us the opinion that the last thing the world needs is a nuclear-armed Iran.  Quote: 'My view of military force would be not to just neutralise their nuclear programme, which are probably dispersed and hardened, but to sink their navy, destroy their air force and neuter that regime." Graphicly said, Sir. 

Warning

I am watching Judge Kavanaugh confirmation. Senator(ess) Clobuchar just said "We have to consider what internet sites (the defendant) looks to". She was not referring specifically to Judge Kavanaugh but to her experience as prosecutor.

Warning!  Don't look at this site if you want to be confirmed to anything. I am a natural born Jewish intellectual, lifelong liberal (almost socialist), but many classify me as rightist because I love the settlers of Judea and Samaria. I even think that the rapid re-peopling of those "territories" (a miserable plot of infertile calcareous soil of 10,000 sq.km.) in our generation is like a dream, like a miracle. Be warned that this is a Zionist pro-settler site.

Ariel Sharon (L) sits with his wife Lily (3rdL) and his sons, Gilad (2ndL) and Omri (4thL) in the West Bank in this picture taken in 1977. I think the pic was taken at the foundation of the city of Ariel. Begin spoke. I was there. 

Where are the slaves of the Ethiopian Jews?

An entry in Facebook tells about the Ethiopian Jews. They like others in Ethiopia, they too had Sudanese Bantu slaves, that trekked with their masters and families to the Sudan, where they too were all taken to Israel. The writer says that the original Jews do not marry with the slaves even in Israel, and there are cases that the original Ethiopian Jewish recruit refuses to obey orders from an Ethiopian officer of the slave class. I never heard about this but it would be only too human if true. Pic.: The origin of the story. 

Trump is winning the trade war against the world

Trump has done little in terms of foreign trade, yet he has frightened China, Germany and other exporting countries to discipline themselves. Almost all the currencies have lost worth vis-à-vis the mighty dollar. CNBC  estimates that the external debt of 205 countries is $76.9 trillion in dollars. A 1 percent increase in the cost of debt results in a need to increase interest payments by $769 billion dollars. A 2 percent increase, which is close to what has been the rise in the effective Fe Funds rate, if spread globally, would force nations to increase their payments by $1.5 trillion. To the USA. What are the tariffs on 200 billion dollars on China imports? Peanuts. 

Jews paying most of the tax in California

Delano county pays 12 million tax per year, Palo Alto many billions. This was the typical situation in the German towns in the Middle Ages, where the municipalities were financed by Jewish taxes. My grandfather paid the largest taxes in his city of Vac (Weitzen) in prewar Hungary. 

Pic. Andy Cheng celebrating bar mitzva in a Palo Alto synagogue. 

Misunderstanding with Russia

Israel sent 4 F-16 to destroy some Iranian facility in North Syria and coincidentally, a IL-20 Russian spy plane was arriving. The Syrian antiair using Russian S-200 downed the Russian with 15 dead. A tragic fuckup. Now the Russian are accusing the Israeli planes that they hid behind the Russian one, causing its destruction. It is a very serious issue. Syria is owned by Russia.

Next Day: Russia decides to supply  S-300 antimissile systems to Assad. It will make more dangerous to bomb Syria, for Israel and for the USA too. Not to mention that S-300 in incompetent hands represent the most danger to the Russians, as proved by the incident that cost the lives of 15 Russian personnel. Not good.

Astonishing! The Russian report does not mention the Syrian antiair battery that shot down the plane. It talks only about the Israelis. It reminds me of the famous case of a Jew beaten to death under the Szalasi fascist regime in Hungary, where in a fight among Nazis, a Jew ambled in and seeing a chair coming in his way, he moved aside and chair hit a Nazi. The gang stopped fighting and moved as one man to beat the Jew. 

The Spanish plan to conquer China

The Spaniards started early: already in 1526 the conqueror of the Aztec Empire Hernán Cortés (pic)  wrote a petition the Spanish government to allow him to explore the South Seas, that is, the Pacific Ocean. Cortes plan was to start conquering some island like Malacca and then jump to the continent, just as he did starting from Cuba in his way to Mexico. 

The plan was accepted but only in 1564, Miguel López de Legazpi was given five ships and 500 soldiers to take some seven thousand islands, which he named the Philippines. Established in Manila, the Spaniards sent missionaries all over Asia. One of them, Father Martín de Rada, wrote a memorandum comparing the poverty of the islands and the wealth of China, describing its inhabitants and its (nonexistent) military capability. His idea was to abandon those miserable islands and focus on rich China. 

Next, the Spanish governor of the Philippines Francisco de Sande proposed a detailed plan. He asked for five thousand soldiers from Mexico or Peru, and smiths, carpenters, master sailors and other tradesmen to build ships in the Philippines. He even offered to pay for the expedition, which he calculated would be profitable. He described the Chinese as "bad people, drunks, cowards, submissive. Their mandarins treat the people very tyrannically". The King did not approve the plan because Spain was broke and the difficulties of communication (it took four years to send a letter and receive the answer).

Successive plans took detailed and concrete form. The number and specialties (arcabucero, piquetero, etc.) of soldiers from the Spanish dependencies was estimated, and their equipment, salaries, etc. Spain would supply bronze for the cannons and technical personnel for shipbuilding and weapons manufacture. Most of the materials were to be procured in China itself (a cannonball cost two reals in China against nine in Spain). There was a need for silver to bribe the mandarins, corrupt then as now. The expedition would include 5000 Japanese Christian soldiers who hated the Chinese, and auxiliaries from the islands. They would land in Fujian while the Portuguese forces, led by Matias de Panela, would advance from Macao. They would meet in Peking. The Ming administration was to be conserved. 

The Spanish had no doubt about the feasibility of the enterprise. Ming had two million soldiers but no discipline, no training, no loyalty, and they could be mobilized only very slowly. After 800 years of war, the Spaniard had just finished the Reconquista of the peninsula, vanquished the Turks in Lepanto, conquered the kingdoms of America, they felt unbeatable.

The Spanish analysis of the weakness of China was proved true in the next century, when Manchu nomads broke through the Great Wall and China could only present a 50,000 strong army to beat them back. The victory of Nelson at Trafalgar put an end to Spanish plans and the incoming power - England - wanted only to exploit but no to rule China.

Addenda:  Can China be conquered today? I don't think so. It has a national Han government, it has a loyal well equipped army, many bases. There was a window of opportunity under Nixon, when Brezhnev (pic) proposed a concerted nuclear attack on China. Nixon took the English road and opened China for trade. The future is unknowable.  

Correction: Communists Ruling America

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In the fight against Kavanaugh, classist arguments are appearing. Kavanaugh is considered unfit for the position not only because of normal sexuality but because of his "black" family background. I mean "black" in the Communist sense, a system where having a middle class grandfather disqualified one for schools and jobs. Now "The New Yorker" offers a Marxist analysis of the candidate and finds that he has no proletarian ancestors but grew up in "White privilege", a damning genetic disability.

Kavanaugh’s mother was a district-court judge in Montgomery County, Maryland. His father is a retired lawyer, who worked for the United States Chamber of Commerce and served as the president of a trade group, the Cosmetic, Toiletry, and Fragrance Association. Gorsuch’s mother was the first female administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. (Ronald Reagan appointed her to the job, in 1981.) Powell’s father was a lawyer, and his maternal grandfather was the dean of the law school at Catholic University of America.

I hope this trend will die off. I remember my parents worrying that my father was going to be sacked for his job, because of his "bourgeois" (middle class) class-enemy parents. I was a child but remember it well, it was in communist Hungary in the nineteen fifties. The fact that he was a party member and a volunteer in the new Communist Army did not wash off this hereditary undeletable blot. Pic.: The first day of the revolution. People burned the AVO (the State Security Bureau) headquarters and destroyed thousands of damning secret files. 

Puritans Still Ruling America

It is difficult for a stranger like me to interpret the attack on Judge Brett Kavanaugh just before his appointment to the Supreme Court. Out of nowhere appears a woman who says that when she was 15 years old, she had a beer with 17 years old Brett, who later came to her room and tried to take her pants off against her resistance. Brett apparently did not know the rule that after you take out your gun, you have to shoot, if not, the consequences will be terrible. To hyper-excite a girl by starting sex  with a little violence and NOT finishing the action, leaves her utterly titillated and deeply disappointed - that is, a lifelong, resentful  enemy.

Any normal society would ignore this story of a honorable man, or interpret it so that the Judge has healthy sexual inclinations  and he is not a secret pervert as many are in public service. And his heart softens under the attack of a girl's lying tears. But in America 2018, a honest life and career is suddenly ruined by ... nothing.  

Hunger: Ceviche Classico

Left: A la Peruana: Raw fish marinated in "Tiger milk" (lemon juice), red onion, boiled batata, fresh lettuce, toasted maize grains.
Up A la Ecuatoriana: Shrimps and seafood.


It is 4.30 PM of the fast day. I declare it a day and I shall fast more, later. 

Cape Town Water Crisis (Update)

A few months ago the dams feeding CapeTown water supply system were almost empty. The available reserves were to last till May, and after that, nothing. Well, the rain arrived punctually as every year, and today all the dams are full 97% - fuller then ever. It appears that the "end of the world" scenario was a media event, to cause excitement without risking lawsuits. The same with Hurricane Florence, that occupied the media for a week. It came with wind and rain, the next day no one remembers it. 

Drought in Chile

The pic shows the Laguna de Aculeo this winter (south hemisphere). Normally, Chile has a regular climate and the rains arrive in time. Not this year. 

American blues

Postcard from the 1950s. Today, a  Californian remembers: 

"When I was a kid in California, a blue-collar worker could buy a BRAND NEW 4-BEDROOM HOUSE, 2-CAR GARAGE, 5 MILES FROM THE BEACH, for 4 times his annual salary. My California housing track was full of 4 or 5-child families, and the mom’s didn’t have to work." 

Julia Salazar's Fluid Identities

Julia is running for Brooklyn's State Senate candidate. She is an energetic agitator in extreme left circles, sometimes selling herself as a Sefaradi Jewess from Colombia, a Latina immigrant, sometimes Zionist and others anti-Israel. Jewish she is NOT. A journalist made an enquire who really was this 27 years old politician, and it appears that she was born in Miami to upper class Colombian father (Catholic, of course) and an Italo-American mother. She was engaged in many left wing movements under different names and identities. Lately she accuses the Israeli spokesman of touching her - "a very uncomfortable moment till I liberated myself". Politics is a most serious business, elected officials manage the public budget, direct the police department, decide about salaries and taxes, influence foreign policy, etc. How can anyone put his life in the hands of this lying self-promoter?

PS: She won the elections and represents Brooklyn. OK, lying may be too strong, rather that she is a bit confused. Thoughts: American Jews succeeded in making so vague and vaporous the Jewish identity, that anyone laughing at a Jewish joke may believe he/she is Jewish. She is "socialist" but does that word have for her a concrete meaning? Apart from being against Trump. 

Peru returns to natural sanitation

The Third World and not only it continues to dream of returning to a pristine Edenic Nature, and escape from their impotence to catch up with modernity. Having rejected hard engineering, the try to build their drainage system by investing in soft "natural infrastructure"– natural areas such as forests or grasslands that can purify water, absorb floodwaters, and like a sponge soak up excess precipitation in the rainy season and release it months later during dry months. Peru is seriously rejecting "engineered infrastructure", and investing millions in premodern green technologies. Wasted money and wasted hopes.  

Another Miracle: Antisemitism is a Civil Rights Issue !

The Senate confirmed Kenneth L. Marcus as assistant secretary for civil rights in the Department of Education. The vote was 50-46, with not one Democrat supporting him !  I have never seen such clear cut division in American politics, and the issue is... Jews.  Now we can clearly see that there are sharp ideological differences between the parties. And that the Democrats are the party of the  African Americans and the alienated intelligentsia. Marcus disagrees with the procedures and the substance of the Democratic Party's advanced program of transformation of American education.  First thing first, and he already has declared that Jews are an ethnic group - not less than American Africans - and they are protected by the Civil Rights legislation. I love President Trump. 

Connecticut GOP Goes Gay With Six Sodomite Republicans Running For Political Office

 Source. 

The title is from the source, a Christian site. In fact, Connecticut Republicans are smartly pre-empting the Democratic Party's arguments. Aristophanes in his comedies notes in passing the fact that the speakers in the Ecclesia (Assembly) are mostly homosexuals. He makes no issue nor fun of it. He does make fun of his rivals, putting then on scene dressed as women. I have nothing against homosexuals as politicians or any other honorable trade, just keep them apart from children. 

Casting our bread on the water

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres and 50 other diplomats walked to New York's East River Saturday evening to cast away their sins in a traditional Rosh Hashana ceremony, known as tashlich, led by Israel’s Permanent Representative to the UN Danny Danon.

Guterres wished a "year of peace and prosperity" to the Jewish people and the State of Israel and expressed hope that the "UN will be able to increase the trust it enjoys in the upcoming year."

The Solomor Epidemy

In Denmark, one in 10 babies conceived with donor sperm is born to a woman without a partner. It is called a solomor (from Solo Amor). Denmark has the highest number of births by assisted fertility treatment in the world, and 10% solomor is just the start of a powerful trend.  The reason may be social (unwillingness to become a father) and/or biological. The sperm quality among young Danish men is low, with a quarter barely able to impregnate his partner (from Rigshospitalet the National Hospital of Denmark).  

In the USA, AID results in about 100,000 babies per year — 2% of all births. The rate is higher in Japan (5 percent) and Denmark (10 percent).

Denmark is trying to solve the problem through unprecedented State support to anyone willing to make a baby. That system is feasible while the population is homogeneous as Denmark. May be I am wrong, because France is diverse and the State provides much social assistance, although diversity in Europe is a relatively recent development that is still undigested and not reflected in the laws and the social arrangements. 

The general unwillingness of young males to marry and form families is not of today. In Solon's Greece it was necessary to force by law everyone to marry. In Sparta, unmarried men were interrogated frequently by the police and punished and imposed shaming inabilities. In Augustus's Rome, the Emperor himself publicly harangued and shamed the reluctant.  Even today, in most countries, married men pay less tax. 

Hungerstein - The Hunger Stone of the River Elbe

Medieval inscription on a stone bordering the river Elbe in Germany. "When you see me, cry". It is called the Hunger Stone. It means that the river flow is low and there is draught and failed crops. In Central Europe, the stone can be seen today. 

Thucydides' Trap Nonsense

Ischinger (A German Senior Strategist in Der Spiegel): China, of course, represents a significant future challenge. The question for us must be: What contribution must we make to ensure that China's rise does not result in military conflict? That is the global political challenge. The ancient Greek historian Thucydides once said that war is unavoidable when an established power is challenged by a new power. In his era, it was Sparta and Athens. The challenge for us is to avoid stumbling into that trap.

It happens that I had studied the Peloponnesian War for years and Thucydides never mentioned a trap. He studied the causes of the war and said that the conservative, provincial Laconians, whose food was provided by Messenian subjects and their safety was based on an orderly system of alliances, were afraid of the disordered, mob-ruled, crazy, destabilizing, revolutionary city of Athens. One day the Athenian demos decided - against all advice - sail and attack the island of Sicily, peopled by Greek colonists. The crazy expedition failed and almost no one returned home. The Spartans feared that the Athenians, fueled by revolutionary ideas, would infect the Messenians and other subject peoples, and decided to impose order in Hellas.

It reminds me of revolutionary France, full of effervescence and energy, establishing Jacobin clubs in England. Ultimately republican France attacked its neighbors and caused mighty disturbance in the established order of Europe. No Thucydides trap at all, simple preventive self defense against a nation with feverish ideas and expansionist tendencies.

In the case of China XXI Century, no ideology, just commercial expansion, perfectly assimilable by the community of nations. 

No Air in Kever Benjamin City

End of summer 2018 and approaching the High Holidays, and here in Kever Benjamin City we have no air to breath, night temperature of 35 centigrade, the food is spoiled, daughter feeling unwell, me feeling unwell with the leg still aching. Yesterday we did our weekly visit to the supermarket, and then all day in the bed.

Left the pic of the Iranian atom bomb, 10 kilotons, small enough to fit in the head of a missile. It is clearly nineteen fifty technology, the bronze explosive primers are to provoke the simultaneous implosion to compress the plutonium nucleus. To create a homogeneous and efficient implosion, the primers must explode in certain order (and not simultaneously as I imagined), presumably in the order of the numbers.  Finely timing the primers to create an uniform implosion inside the steel ball cartridge, it is necessary to have some electronic timer. But the main obstacle to build one seems to be to accumulate enough plutonium, which cannot be purchased in the black market. The Iranians tried to refine some using thousands of centrifuges, but were discovered.

For the record: I am depressed. 11AM and still did not start to work.

Population

Liu Cixin in his monumental trilogy writes about the next thousand years of wars with the Trisolars (the graph illustrates the Three Bodies Problem) and end of the universe (collapse in the optimist scenery or eternal expansion in the worst of the cases). The oeuvre is full of quantitative calculations and marginally it presumes a steadily falling Earth population. In that context, it is natural and uneventful.  

177,000 babies were born in Israel between April 2017 and April 2018.  Israel has the highest birth rate in the developed world, with an average of 3.11 children per woman.  The distant runner-up is Mexico, with only 2.2 children per woman.  The average fertility rate for countries like France, the U.S., Britain, Spain, and the Netherlands is less than two children per woman.  The birth rates for Jewish and Arab Israeli women were identical (3.13 children per woman) for the first time in history during 2015. About thirty thousand new immigrants arrived, most from the former Soviet Union, France and the USA. 

The calculated correlation between economic performance and population growth is 0.7 which is huge. Economic performance is related to national IQ.  The Jews in Israel are the exception to that law. 

Have a Tolerable Jewish New Year !

(Since former "Happy Year" wishes did not work, this year decided to be modest)

Ofwat pressuring British water companies

Britain is possibly the only country that privatized its water supply monopoly and did not nationalize them back - yet. The regulator applies pressure to make the companies more efficient, employing the bureaucrat best-loved weapon: demanding more and more reports. As part of Ofwat’s 2019 price review, water companies have been required to outline a detailed business plan, detailing how they will charge customers between 2020 and 2025. In February, the environment minister, Michael Gove, warned water companies over their “concerning” behaviour.

Eight of 18 water firms fail to meet targets on tackling leaks

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Thames Water, which supplies more than 15 million people across the south-east, said it will spend £11.7bn on upgrades, including £2.1bn to reduce leaks. The company, which was ordered in June to pay a total of £120m to compensate customers over leakage failures, has asked to keep bills flat until 2025.

I think the British system is problematic. The Israeli method to combat our Mekorot monopoly is to allow private water enterprises to outcompete the old monster. Seems to me better. Only that Mekorot keeps losing hundreds of million dollars in failed projects.