The trouble with Eynat

The new major of Haifa. Eynat Kalisch Rotem has a doctorate in architecture and urban planning and teaches at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology’s graduate school. The trouble with life is that there are so many beautiful and smart women and so little time.   

Marcus Licinius Crassus

It is still October and instead of working, I am following Librivox's reading of Plutarch's biography of Crassus. This admirable Roman was born into a family of unlaughing misers, but very talented and energetic. He made his fortune buying up the real estate expropriated by Sulla, the dictator, and by organizing a 500 man strong building company that bought and repaired burned down or collapsed buildings.

He was also a talented and cruel general (he erected crosses with crucified slaves all along the road from Reggio Calabria to Rome), and lost his life fighting against the Persians. Roma was a welfare state, its citizens received a daily portion of grain so they did not need to work, and they were entertained 200 days a year with exciting circus shows. This easy urban life conduced to negative vegetative growth and the fatal weakening of the Roman State. 

October: No income

The last bill I sent out to collect was a month and half ago, and my income was nil. I worked little, drank red wine, slept a lot. I am feeling well and healthy but I have to work. It is not only that I have no income: the worldwide "correction" in the financial markets erased about 10% of my savings. I have to take myself in my hands because next March I am scheduled to travel to New York and walk a lot. My leg is still not 100%.

Today we have municipal elections in Kever Benjamin City. The candidates are not attractive. The serious problem in this city is that we have little tax-paying industry, so 80% of the municipal budget is based on the arnona - residential taxes, which are among the highest in Israel. All the candidates talk about greenery, trees, parks, special education for the imbeciles, street art and culture. No one is interested in attracting industry and I do not mean "satanic mills" but high-tech chimney-less enterprises. Pic.: A business  building in the new industrial zone of Raanana, a wealthy neighboring town. I designed a large bakery in it. Our own new industrial area, bordering the separation wall, is being filled with garages and nut-toasting mini-businesses.

P.S. Yesterday's elections gave my city a new major - a retired police chief. It may be a reaction to the former major, jailed for corruption. 

About the Squirrel Hill Saturday Morning Massacre

Unease, not yet fear, seized American Jewish community when the news of the mass murder in the  Tree of Life synagogue was published. The murderer thought he was defending the White Race against the Jews that were murdering them. And HIAS that was promoting the Honduran would-be immigrant/murderers column. Nonsense, but reflects the sentiment in the racist circles. He was a lone wolf, no organization behind him. This phenomenon of a lonely individual working up himself and taking up automatic weapons and gunning down anyone in a school, a synagogue, a marathon, a homosexual club, a Socialist youth camp in an island, etc. is not typically American. It has happened in France and Denmark and even in the Grand Mosque of Mecca.

Regarding antisemitism, I don't think this attack means much. What is surprising is that there is no one under 55 among the killed, they are all old people. The absence of active adults and youth says a lot about the calamitous state of Reform/Conservative Jewry. In five or ten years, there will be no minian on Saturday morning in Squirrel Hill. Sad.

The attack will strengthen temporarily Jewish identity in America, but not increase Aliyah to Israel.

NVIDIA strange collapse

We’re halfway through Nvidia’s fiscal year. Analysts’ average estimate calls for 34% sales growth and 52% earnings growth during the current fiscal year. Those estimates slow to 14% revenue growth and 10% earnings growth next year, which is admittedly a notable decline. The stock's price collapsed 35% this week. Notable and painful!

Klimt's Golden Water Snakes

Gustav Klimt,  Serpents Aquatiques II (Les Amies) (1904-07). [Photo/Courtesy of AKG-Images/Erich Lessing]

Students marrying

The marriage ceremony was Israeli standard. I gave a 700 sheqel cheque and did not dance because of my leg. Food was regular, salmon and a small piece of beef. The wine was undrinkable, with a strong aroma of synthetic ethanol. The chuppah was standing in the garden and the rose petals had been spread (pic) and even the chazan (the liturgical singer) was waiting to start when a sudden downpour made us all run for protection.

The boy's parent are family friends and he had been my student the last semester. By coincidence, an old woman in a motorized wheelchair was sitting at my side: She had been his special teacher from childhood. The boy had cognitive issues and the parents had hired her for home teaching. She told me the effort she had invested and also, the effort invested by the boy himself all those years. In the end, he graduated successfully and is a Civil Engineer. The Happy End: married a tall blonde Ashkenazi girl from a nearby kibbutz. 

A Lazy Week

The last week did very little engineering work. On Sunday I bought three bottles of Spanish Rioja red wine, very aromatic and tasty, I drunk one and then on Monday slept and heard on Librivox the African adventures of Mungo Park, Tuesday and Wednesday was spent in Ariel, preparing lectures and teaching. Today did little and nothing and now we are going to a marriage celebration in Kibbutz Eynat. My income was zero, and the Social Security revised my old accounts and found that I owe 1700 shequels "not final". My granddaughter weights 12 kg - her fanatic fasting mother has terror of lipids and carbohydrates and under-feeds them a totalitarian vegetarian/naturalist diet.  Noya (pic.: 3rd birthday) should weight 14.2 kg and be about 94 cm tall. 

Engineering Schools in La Plata and Ariel

One of the few advantages of old age is perspective, so I am able to compare the Engineering School I studied in La Plata fifty years ago and the one in the University of Ariel I am teaching now. La Plata was highly politized, the walls completely covered with faction propaganda, all inciting for demonstrations and strikes. In Ariel, politics is absent. Next week there are important municipal elections here, but no mention of it in the campus. The idiotic system of "autonomia universitaria" in Argentina, where the students elected the institution's authorities, mad it difficult to govern them.

One of the features of Argentina was that study in all levels was free and subsidized, and we were entitled to two meals a day for a symbolic 5 pesos. Very good meals. There were hundreds of "students" who did not really studied nor appeared at the exams, that could enjoy the status of student forever. Many students from the provinces and the neighboring countries, Peru and Bolivia, received a monthly stipend from their parents, but never graduated. I understand that this has not changed till now. In Israel, the studies cost about 11000 sheqels per year, and there are no free meals, so there is no tendency to become "un estudiante eterno".

The population is different. In La Plata it was Spanish and Italian, a very homogeneous population, with a sprinkling of Peruvians and Japanese. Here the majority is brown of native Arabs and Oriental Jews, with about 20% Europeans (Ashkenazim and half Russians). I used to be tall an Argentina, but in Ariel the students are taller (180 cm and above) and well built. Most boys practice in the gym and  have over-developed biceps and pectorals, specially the Arabs. Most have savage black beards and look like highway robbers. On the other hand, Ashkenazi girls are skinny and fragile, while the others are fat and loud. This semester I saw few Arab girls covered in black, maybe they have adapted the Tel Aviv fashion of mini-shorts cut at half bottom. I don't know, I don't ogle female bottoms.

Engineering is a mature, slowly changing area, so the syllabus has not changed in fifty years. Maths is now much easier, as computers do the calculations. Google and wiki provide much free and accessible information. However, the students here seem more stressed, possibly because they are paying a lot of money and have less cognitive resources (in average) - I cannot compare, but judging the quality from written exams, average Engineering student in Ariel is dumber than were my colleges in La Plata.

PS: Tried to find a pic representative of the students of Ariel in the internet. Nothing. The desire to be polite and never post anything remotely  "insulting" has emasculated the public space. I'll take one by myself and post it. An old man can be allowed to be rude and to take a pic. 

Transgender Gomorrah

Gomorrah was one of the five towns allied against the Hebrew,  (Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboim, and Bela), one of two (the other being Sodom) that was destroyed with sulfuric fire. The Hebrew spread malignant aspersions about it, slanders that persist three thousand years after. (Something to meditate on for the Hashemite Kingdom!). The fake image of these hot desert villages is that they were peopled by homosexuals of the torturing inclination.

Now, when religious people says that America is "like" Sodom and Gomorrah, they are increasingly correct. About 0.6% of the Americans have undergone sex change operations in the last ten years, and the numbers are growing. There are estimates of 1.5 million transgender individuals already. It is marginal but not so marginal.

To be PC I should never call it sex change operation. The Endocrine Society has updated its guidelines for providing gender-affirming treatment to transgender individuals...

They are not reproducing themselves. I doubt if they are economically productive, as their condition must take up most of their mental and other resources. Half of them intended suicide. Poor sad pitiable people, they are not enjoying sexual liberation at all.

Pic.: The Endocrine Society. They are making billions of gender affirming treatments.  

There is no life outside of the USA

Having worked a pair of years in Central America, I never thought of Honduras as specially poor but as specially violent. The population is a mixture of Indians, Spaniards and Africans, with a sprinkling of European pirate genes near the coast. The mixture is not harmonious, girls are fat and unattractive. Once I was walking in the Plaza, looking into the Arab shops, when there was a shot and somebody died. People crowded around, no one knew who and why, but soon they dispersed - nothing to see here. They are a race given to political disorder. These days a mass of Hondurenos has decided "que no podemos vivir en nuestro pais" - we cannot live in our country and are moving to the United States. Pic. on the Mexican frontier.  They may have taken example from the Gaza Palestinians that day after day assault the border fence with a fierce determination to get into Israel, and we have to shoot them. The same is happening in other "soft" frontiers: Mexico-America, Indonesia-Australia, Morocco-Spain, Libya-Italy. 

Einstein as he was

Einstein was photographed many times but the press uses only one or two iconic pictures of him. They never show his fine frizzled mulatto hair and his paunch. Like Marx, he was not the Nordic German type but pure Ashkenazi Jew. 

Yiddish Poets Fighting

The Yiddish poet Tino Moskovich wrote a damning critique in HaAretz about the anthology of the known Yiddish poetess Kadia Molodovsky titled Laylot Heshvan (Nights of the Month of Heshvan). The Yiddishist Amir Shomroni - who edited Kadia's book - wrote a mordant counter-criticism against Moskovich's  attack. Moskovich judges Kadia a "good poetess" but finds serious errors in Shomroni's translation: "Nothing less than a terrible mistake". Line by line, Moskovich analyses the translation's "problems" like the contrived rhymes and its pedestrian vulgarity.

Amir Shomroni does not suffer silently these insults to his opus magna (600 pages). He points out that the poem was originally translated and published by the eminent Yiddish poet Dov Stock (Sadan) in 1934, that is, 84 years ago, and that he attached a footnote explaining the archaic Hebrew used by Sadan. The Hebrew of those almost pre-historic eras cannot be compared to modern Hebrew that underwent much evolution and enrichment since then. And that Dov Sadan is among the best  researchers of Yiddish of his generation, and "further explanations are superfluous as the thing is well known".

If there is a literature presumed long dead, it is Yiddish poetry. I am surprised and happy that it is alive and able to fire such a furious dispute in October 2018. As Bashevis Singer said at his Nobel Prize ceremony: Yiddish is a long-dead language that has been dying ever since . 

Argentine Refugees

The situation in Argentina (and in Venezuela, and Brasil and the rest of the South) is so bad that the reverse transatlantic immigration is taking force. In the pic, the eight block early morning queue to the Embassy of Italia in Buenos Aires. They all want to "return" to their ancestor's country. The line in front of the Spanish Embassy is even longer. 

Eating Fruit is Bad for You

Today we made our weekly shopping in Beytan supermarket. As usual, I tried out all the fruits  but the grapes were so sweet that I passed and tried the carambola (left). It used to be an acidic fibrous tasteless thing, bought for its highly decorative star body,  but this was a very sweet meaty fruit. Cultivated fruits have been genetically modified to be much higher in sugar content than their natural, ancestral fruits. There goes the standard dietitian advice of eating MORE fruit because fruit is linked to reducing risks of heart disease, cancer and stroke. Another bad diet advice. 

But the fruit-based diet of some animals at Melbourne Zoo is posing problems for their health. Dr Senaka Ranadheera, a food scientist at the University of Melbourne said that sugar levels in some fruit, like plums, have doubled, although are still much less than those in soft drinks.

Overanalysed Jews

"The Association for Israel Studies lists thirteen affiliated institutes and departments of Israel Studies; there are eight Institutes of Palestine Studies in the world. Plus journals specializing in Palestine and Israel, dozens of international conferences on specific issues around Israel and Palestine and thousands of articles in a wide variety of journals."  writes Jeff Halper in Counterpunch.  

It seems to me crazy the amount of attention focused on us Jews, because no one ever gave a shit about the Arabs. Every word and action is reported and analyzed in detail. Jeff Halper has given A LOT of attention to us and how to solve the murderous hate we provoke by building a country here. He analyzes us on the model of "settler colonist vs natives", just like the French in Algeria vs the Arab usurpers (North Africa was Phoenician land and then Roman. They spoke Latin). The solution should be the same, ie to pack and leave, and let the natives to freely and happily massacre each other and occasionally to invade their neighbors. 


I think that Halper entirely leaves off hundreds recent and historical situations of one people settling on a land already peopled. How was solved the American Indian conflict with English settlers? And the Australian aborigines's conflict with Brits coming from so far? And the Hottentot conflict with the expanding Bantu tribes? and the Pygmies conflicts (conflicts? genocide) with the same? and the Arabs conflict with the Christian North Africans established in the Southern shores of the Mediterranean? And the conflict between the Charruas vs Solis' Spanish sailors on the River Plate? Ah, they ate them. 

My conclusion, when there is a significant asymmetry between the forces, no need nor possibility of complicated legal accords. Life eventually settles the problem, just let it be. 

P.S.: Tried to download a pic of what is called politely "the Bantu expansion" which is the successful extermination war of the Bantu tribes against all the native tribes of South and West Africa. Impossible! All what google offers are pics of European colonial people. For google, nothing happened in Africa till Europeans arrived. The only thing I found is the above article reporting that there is no war and never was. Khoisan is Hottentot in PCese. 

Dreaming

French scientists discover that lizards can dream. Pic: Iguana iguana. Their study on bearded dragon lizards (Pogona vitticeps) found that they have sleep states analogous to REM sleep and slow-wave sleep (or non-REM sleep). A new research by CNRS studied the sleep habits of the Argentine tegu (Salvator merianae).

Sprite Dreams

Trying to reduce my coffee intake, I buy a 1.5 liter Sprite Zero bottle and drink it. The clear liquid must contain some psycho drug as I cannot sleep till 2 AM and then have vivid dreams of dead people. Its energizing effect is different from caffeine. Tonight visited my dead aunt Ella: she was thin and evanescent, living in a neighborhood of old Jews in small cooperative shops. Ill.: Typical old world Jewish quarter. I am making a deliberate effort to avoid thinking on the long-forgotten past, I wish myself to deal with the present and the future, but to no success. I don't want to live in the past nor dream realistic strong dreams. Now I understand the tango figure "Fantasmas del pasado" (Phantoms of the Past). 

Israeli Business Culture

The pic is from the front page of Globes, the leading Israeli business paper. This is how our magnates look: underwear T shirt and khaki shorts and big glasses. Dress codes are for the goyim who live in the cold, but we, after a hundred years in this tropical climate, have found the sartorial style that fits us. Cotton underwear. 

Villla 31 under a bridge in Buenos Aires

The inflation in Argentina is 40% and a third of the population is officially "poor".  30,000 persons living in the streets of Buenos Aires. The government of Nestor Kirchner was like a pirate attack on the country, and they took everything movable. Argentina's foreign debt is growing exponentially and it means poverty for generations.  Sad. 

Ashkenazi and French Canadian Genetic Disease

What is worse than being born before one's time? To suffer from a disease and to die before the remedy is discovered? In our miraculous time, when we are almost all-powerful and there are remedies for almost all the diseases, nothing is sadder than to see people suffering and dying when the remedy is surely be available in a few years or months. I remember Dr Idelsohn of TAHAL, his two daughters carried some fatal mutation and he dedicated his life to create incentives for the disease be studied in the universities. In a few years, the disease became curable but he saw his daughters succumb one after the other and later he himself was no more. 

The nice Moroccan (Sepharadi) Jewish girl spent ten years trying to give birth. They tried everything, IVF and Georgian surrogates, and nothing.  Her husband is Ashkenazi but she is not, but anyway they underwent the routine genetic counseling in Israel. No rare Ashkenazi mutations were suspected because she is "Oriental".

But in the end they paid 6000 dollars for a complete analysis and the rare Smith–Lemli–Opitz mutation was discovered. The carrier frequency is highest among Ashkenazi Jews (1 in 43) and Northern Europeans (1 in 54), and almost nil in Mediterranean and African populations. For some reason, the Cajun-French Canadian population carrier frequency is similar to the Ashkenazi (BTW, the Israeli Rabbinate believes in genetic profiling to decide who is a Jewish descendant and therefore entitled to Israeli citizenship. I wonder if French Canadians may pass for Jews, should they want to. They don't want to.) The mutation affects the cholesterol metabolism and has no cure. The healthy boy in the pic was conceived thanks to in vitro selection of fetii. 

She was born just in the right time: if born ten years before, she would have no chance to be mother at all. 

Frivolities

What a contrast with Michelle Obama! Our current First Lady (yes, she is) is a former professional model who shocks the fashion world with her creations. Here she is exhibiting on the background of the Sphynx her "tropical explorer" model. She is too cold and distant in my opinion.

China Realizes Its Mistake

When I worked in Tian Jin, China, in the seventies, most of the professors were very skinny. Professor Jin, who spoke excellent English, was a veritable skeleton. He was very worried about the high prices of the apartments in China, and interrogated me about the Israeli situation. He was shocked by the prices here, and that was forty years ago when the prices were a quarter of today's. He was worried by the poverty of China, and I told him that the Chinese are so hardworking that in no time China will be a middle class country. I was right. I also told him that the one child policy then imposed was a big mistake, but he said that "We are too many". That inhuman  policy was a big mistake, an irreversible big mistake.

Today China is providing incentives for a second child. Currently the Liaoning province has a TFR of 0.9 which is among the lowest and most unsustainable among the peoples of the world. 20.6% or the population are over sixty: this northern population is dying off. The province was formerly known as Manchuria and is among the most industrialized.

Being a Jew, my Chinese hosts were curious why we are so smart. I told them that we underwent the most severe selection in history, expulsions and mass murders, so only the fittest survived and did not abandon their identity. In my case, Jews in Hungary (and Bohemia and Germany) had no permanent residence permits and for hundreds of years they lived as ambulant illegal small salesmen, from one fair to the other, barely tolerated in trades that did no compete with the natives, such as money-changing and unsecured credit. One had to be a genius to survive in those trades. And my parents, among the few survivors of Auschwitz and the forced labor brigades. The Chinese left it at that, but without understanding, because in those post Cultural Revolution, intellectuals were incredibly limited and "provincial", and there was nothing in Chinese recent or imperial history resembling anything like the Jewish experience that they could even remotely compare.

Pic: A propaganda painting "National Harmony" commissioned by the Japanese regime in Manchukuo, with dancing girls of five nationalities Chinese, Manchu, Korean, Mongol and Japanese.

Snapshot of J's Morning

An unexpected sum in US dollars appeared in my bank account. It happens that Medtronics, an American medical giant, bought Israeli start-up Mazor Robotics and paid 50 dollars cash per share. I had some Mazor shares. Instead of losing 1% in currency exchange to sheqels, I decided to buy something on the NASDAQ.

It was a very hot morning so I took time resting in the airconditioned private banking area. Without provocation, a woman "sexually attacked" me and advised me to enjoy the money, life is for enjoying specially at our age. I completely misunderstood her and said that apart of helping my daughters, I know no way of enjoying myself. What could I do? Travel? Cars? I have no desire of anything. She told me where she lives, that she is a wealthy divorcee, that all she wants is to have a good time. As for this old Jew, bought INTEL and Tower Semiconductors.

Illustration: Add 20 years and 20 kilos to visualize the incident.
P.S.: Judge for Family Affairs (female, all of them are) ordered to give half of the monies received by the founder and principal of Mazor Robotics to his ex-wife. Apparently they were divorced before the foundation of the company, and have not seen each other for some time, but she is entitled to the fruits of his work. He will also pay 30% income tax. No relation between this and the yesterday conversation.  

Irreparable Damage

It was enough the accusation of a lachrymose old woman to destroy the teaching career of Kavanaugh.  Over 800 Harvard Law alumni have signed a letter calling on the university to rescind Kavanaugh’s appointment. He was hired to lecture at the university in 2009 but is no longer listed on the staff directory.His course in Yale was eliminated and he does not figure among the teachers. Teaching is the thing he most loves, and in his defense speech he said that he would not be able to tech again. He knew.

Regarding Christine's house, it is only about 50 sq.meter - two rooms and a kitchenette. She lived years in that small house with no claustrophobia. The second street entrance was 100% to create a rentable property. I am unfamiliar with her milieu, but it appears that although she lives in Palo Alto, she is not rich, and although she has academic titles, she works in a low-prestige poorly-paid job.

Mud is starting to stick to both: he was known in Yale for drinking, and she had many affairs. Her boyfriend left her for cheating. Her "trauma" did not affect her sexual appetite. No one will come out clean and shining from this affair. 

Not like that Boy Scout Kavanaugh

Fenster:

Now Ted Kennedy.  A man’s man, not like that Boy Scout Kavanaugh.  He knew how to do sexual assault right.

I believe in Kavanaugh

“So the vomiting that you reference in the Ralph Club reference related to the consumption of alcohol?” asked Whitehouse.

“Senator, I was at the top of my class academically, busted my butt in school. Captain of the varsity basketball team,” said Kavanaugh. “Got in Yale College. When I got into Yale College, got into Yale Law School. Worked my tail off.”

… and liked beer. Which Irish boy doesn't? So what.