Portfolio Thoughts

TASE the Israeli Stock Exchange is falling. I have three big investments go bad: TEVA, BEZEQ and TOWER.

TOWER is chip fab. In the last ten years, I bought it and then, when started to fall, sold with a loss. Not once, but at least five times. Hope never dies.  Idiots never learn.

Bezeq was a communication monopoly bought by Alovitch, who distributed generous dividends (mostly to himself) and emptied the company. I feel the total amount of dividends I received may equal the loss on the stock, but I have no time to check. On the stock,  I am losing 70%.

TEVA is a well-known disaster. Fighting hostile takeover, they went into 20 billion debt, bought a fake Mexican company (they were in a hurry), they got hit by large penalties, and they cannot stabilize the firm. It seems directed toward Total Loss.

Prices are so low in Israel that I took out a loan (1% p/a/)  to buy something. What? The country is entering a phase of stagnation, with no government, the transitory thing we have now will not dare to take painful measures. The bourse will muddle through. There is a large unfilled demand for real estate, that may be a good area to invest. Weapon manufacturing seems promising. The Israel-China trade is booming. Israelis have money to invest, so all investable vehicles will rise.

I have decided to buy jewelry to decorate my daughters. They love it.   

Cumbia La Piragua

Me contaron los abuelos que hace tiempo
Navegaba en el Cesar una piragua
Que partía de El Banco, viejo puerto
A las playas de amor en Chimichagua.
Capoteando el vendaval se estremecía
E impasible desafiaba la tormenta,
Y un ejército de estrellas la seguía
Tachonándola de luz y de leyenda
(Coro)
“Era la piragua de Guillermo Cubillos,
Era la piragua, era la piragua”
Doce bogas con la piel color majagua,
Y con ellos el temible Pedro Albundia,
En las noches a los remos le arrancaba
Un melódico crujir de hermosa cumbia
Doce bogas ahora viejos ya no reman
Ya no cruje el maderamen en el agua
Solo quedan los recuerdos en la arena
Donde yace dormitando la piragua.

Guillermo Cubillos was a trader on the rivers of Cesar Province, Colombia. Like the Moroccan Jews of the Amazonas. I dream of those rivers and time. Improbable, but I am linked by blood with them.  

China inviting intervention

China"s Leadership is feeling strong enough to challenge the West. They say they will stop supplying rare earths, that are necessary minerals for the electronics industry. The price of this precious commodity will explode, making it worth to risk war with China. Black-flagged ships may soon be patrolling the Yellow Sea, waiting for a reasonable excuse to provoke China. Xi' peaceful rise may not be peaceful nor a rise. Very bad.  

Evolution of Greek Intelligence in the Antiquity

Left: the goddess flanked by two lions as in the Lions Gate of Mykonos. 3300 years ago. Those were very smart people. More than us.

The decadence of Greece fascinates me from old. Analyzing genotypes, a clear picture emerges: A small settlement of Minoan people (from Knossos) at Mycenae, in the Argos plain, and the progressive increase of ever smarter people (eugenic selection?). Then, their steady replacement by semi-moronic barbarians from the North. Building Cyclopean fortresses did not help them much. If you continue the curve down and down, you may find the profile of the current Greek population.  Source

Netaniyahu's Divine-Birth Myth

There are many myths surrounding the divine origin of kings and heroes of the Antiquity. Who could imagine that among contemporary Africans should circulate the myth of Bibi being an albino African that reached Israel and his position through a miraculous chain of adventures? Africans have even devised rituals to inherit his fortune, to steal his luck and success. Decapitating chickens is de rigueur. 

More tomorrow, if I have time.  In the meanwhile, let's hope that this night Bibi will succeed in consolidating a coalition and continue leading us. If not, new elections in Israel. That would be rather bad. 

Long Trends Omnia Vincit

The demographic growth and strengthening of the national-religious dedication of the Israeli religious segment is causing increased stress in the government structure. My granddaughters are learning religion in the kindergarten and Netanyahu is proving unable to form a coalition.

Labor got only 10% of British votes and the country is divided and ungoverned. The European Union is holding but the lack of a foreign enemy is making it purposeless. Surprisingly Russian bourse is the world's best, that country has pulled itself together.

China and the US are competing for hegemony. The US is increasingly desperate and aggressive, it all leads to a shooting war in Asia. The war could re-align the world into a new configuration. Remember: there were TWO Vietnam Wars. One with China and China lost. Other with France/US and USA lost. The pic shows how impressive is (or they want to be seen)  the Chinese military: Twenty-something mobile cannons firing at the same time, everything perfectly clean and ordered.   As a former AA team leader, I know how impossible is to achieve this level of synchronization. Even in a parade show.  This pic is fake. But real wars are unpredictable. 

I am expecting a new William the Bastard. In the year 1100 England was in chaos.  The Angles and the Saxons (North Germanic barbarians) were unable to govern themselves. Came William with his French-speaking Nordmen and imposed strict order, divided the land among his sub-chiefs, made a grand inventory and established a well-ordered tax system. The new landowners extracted rent from the farming population and gradually replaced them. This structure lasted 800 years. It was based on stable laws and agricultural rents. When farming produce became abundant and cheap in the early twentieth century and the rents of the aristocracy became worthless and England's structure collapsed. It is chaos again. England returned to island marginality.

BTW, Tom Segev's book 1948 about Israel's first year shows the beginning of a similar structure. Expulsed Arab houses and lands were taken over by well-connected former soldiers with initiative, and a middle class started to take form.  That structure disappeared or went underground with the organization of Israel's legal forms, but I am still suspicious about the origin of some fortunes. But they were small middle-class fortunes, they dissolved in the second generation. Something that did not happen in England, there landed fortunes persisted for many successive generations.

The English are an amazing race. 

35% of Israeli Business Outside of the Law

35% of the business has operate without an official permit and according to the law, they must be closed down.

Regarding building permits, my estimate is that 25% to 50% (in the Arab sector) are built without approved drawings, and about 100% of the existing building ten years old have additions and changes that invalidate the original permit and need to be re-permitted.

They are my potential clients and my market.

But the projects I love most are the bona-fide technical piping/treatment problems, they are difficult but intellectually challenging. 

Living in Fantasyland

Chandni Desai, from the University of Toronto, writes in an academic paper sent to me:  "He describes how a Palestinian peasant, Abu Nidal, whose land was being confiscated by Israeli occupation forces, began to speak the land during a direct action, while simultaneously mocking the settlers inability to comprehend the living relationship Palestinians have to land. ... It is these embodied ties and practices of resistance that enable Palestinians to enact a decolonial process on a daily basis, one that constructs a present and a future beyond settler sovereignty and the imagined geography (Said, 1978) that it imposes on the land."

Having been trained and working as an engineer, it is not clear to me the meaning of this mystic nonsense. I think the University of Toronto should be more exigent toward their teachers/employees and demand them to write clear understandable English. 

Anyway, Mr Abu Nidal may keep talking the land, he may enact daily a decolonial (sic) ritual, it does not change my imagined geography (Said, 1978). He (and Prof. Desai) may happily continue living their fantasyland. 

Orthodox Judaism becoming more liberal than the Roman Catholic Church

The Jerusalem Post writes that a gay rabbinical student, rejected in New York, will be ordained in Jerusalem.  Interesting. I always thought that a rav had to be married.  

The Best Beer in China

When I was working in China,  I was proudly invited to drink the local German beer, produced by authentic Germans. Not German Germans but Chinese Germans. As forgotten by the West (but never by the Chinese), Tsingtao province used to be a German colony. In 1903 German settlers in Qingdao, Shandong province established brewery which is still operating. I am not a beer drinker so - to quote Shakespeare - it is all the same to me. 

My hosts were very aware of China's conquest, division, colonization, and Western settlers on their land. They had it always before their eyes when considering who they were and where they were on this jungle-planet. It was 1985 and they still were deathly afraid of Western foreigners.

With some reason. 

Working myself up

It is hot here. I cannot focus and work. My wife has forbidden the air conditioner, that anyway, was too weak for this historical canicula.

Why force myself to work? I am not starving and my daughters refuse  money. The only REAL reason to submit myself to discipline is that I had promised to deliver for tomorrow morning and I am ashamed of my recurring fake promises and saying sorry.

In fact, I have this ugly policy of deceiving my friends and clients and promise impossible deadlines exactly for that reason, to create a sense of crisis and force myself to work.

The system is not working as it used to.  I dont know what to do. How to manage myself. How to motivate my old bones. 

Sprite Zero

Yesterday at 10PM the street temperature in Kever Benjamin City: 41 C. Summer. The girls walk in short dresses made from "estampado" - Casual Printed Short Summer Dress, made of the cheapest textiles printed with vivid floral colors as was the fashion in Buenos Aires in the sixties - and they are showing their white, unblemished, long legs up to the underwear and above. I am a very old man and they are driving me crazy. I drink a 1.5 liter cold Sprite Zero and feel I need to have sex, like at fifteen. This water contains citric acid and no caffeine but must have a secret aphrodisiac ingredient. I work on Zadoc's house project, the submittal was approved but in fact, he intends to build three separate apartments, so he needs a second unsigned drawing for the contractor. Some money came in and sleep better.

This State of Israel is changing its official forms. No more "Name of the Mother" nor "Name of the Father". Now it is "First Parent" and "Second Parent". This is an extremely nationalistic race-aware country while at the same time, extremely egalitarian, liberal and homosexual-friendly. Hungary would like to be like us, Mussolini's Italy may have been somewhat like us. Mussolini was socialist and liberal, never hurt the Jews.

Poland refuses to restitute Jewish property

There is a bitter dispute about the restitution of formerly Jewish property in Poland. The Polish, as one man, are against giving back a zloty to the legal inheritors of Poland's 3 million strong Jewish community before WWII. While most of the Jews, like the Poles, were penniless and starving, much of the urban property and factories were owned by Jews.

The argument is that the Polish people was itself a victim of the Nazis, so the Jews should go and demand Hitler. While it is true that for the Nazis, the Poles were second class subhumans (the first class being the Jews) and they pitilessly decimated them, the Poles themselves were no friends of the local Jews. Let us not make moral judgments of peoples condemned to death and being exterminated as were the Poles and Ukrainians too. The expropriation of the Jews and their expulsion is a recurring theme in European history: France 1200, England 1300, Spain 1495, etc.

An interesting question is if the five years Nazi rule did reduce the average IQ of the Poles and Ukrainians. The SS Aktion groups had orders to kill all the Jews and all the local intelligentsia such as Communist commissars, priests, teachers, and potential leaders. The Soviets followed by killing the Polish officer class. Poles and Jews lost about the same absolute numbers. How many IQ points the Poles lost as a result of this selective extermination? Considering the difficulties faced by Poland and Ukraine to reach their pre-WWII economic and intellectual output, as compared with similar like  Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Eastern Germany, that did not suffer the same policy, it makes sense to suspect that they lost some of their mojo. It does not make me happy, I feel their pain, their loss is a loss for all humanity. 

The Zen of Permitting

I accepted a permitting job of a Mikweh in Tel Aviv. Mikweh is a ritual bath. Females have to immerse themselves in holy mikweh water after menstruation and then are pure to serve their husbands. It was explained to me that the client was the son of the head of the religious council and the submittal is just a formality and will be approved with no observations. I asked for a low fee.

After submitting my plan and protocol, I was obliged to come to a meeting with the bureaucrat in charge of approving the permit. When I saw her, I recognized her immediately, she was Ronit, the green-eyed smiling monster that tortured me ten years ago with a similar job and I wrote a protest letter to her bosses. I realized immediately that she will never approve my permit. In the meeting, she described patiently (two hours) all the details she wants in the document to be submitted, I submissively wrote down her list of impossible desires.

I was so depressed that for a week I could not touch the project. My mind wandered around it, trying to find my balance and the feel of the problem. Like sumo wrestlers performing preparatory exercises waiting for the zen moment to arrive, my mind made rounds and rounds around the problem while never touching the file. When the zen moment comes, the two naked giants face each other and attack, and the actual contest is over in less than a minute. This morning I felt focused and strong enough to open the feared Mikwe file.

In ten minutes I knew what to do.  

They will never get us

I am reading about the Israeli demographic miracle:   “The more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied.” (Exodus 1:12)  It is a true miracle, a miracle of the human will. Yet no one seems to write about the Israeli economic miracle, which is no less miraculous. When I made aliyah to Israel, Israel had the image of a beggar and it was because it relied on annual assistance from the United States, reparation payments from Germany, and generous donations and remittances from American Jewry. Foreign exchange balance of Israel was permanently in deficit and respected experts advised us to pack and leave because the country was unsustainable. 

I had no interest in the macroeconomy and could not care less, but working closely with Benno Gitter, a very rich banker and President of Tel Aviv University, I realized he seriously worried about the unfeasibility of Israel's economy. This talented and good man sincerely dedicated his life to the economy of Israel. And he was not an optimist. Yet, miracles do happen in Israel, and now our GNP is at Europe's level or higher and the Bank of Israel is hoarding 100 billion dollar reserves. The country is growing at 5% per year, which ranks higher than all European countries and near the explosive Chinese phenomenon. 

The reason for the Israeli miracle, I think, is that each Israeli realizes that we have REAL enemies that are dreaming of cutting our necks, each one of us. This fact has a most sobering, disciplining effect on each Israeli and on the people as a collective. We do not have the luxury to build ideal net-zero water buildings, nor participate in self-harming suicidal protests like the yellow vests in Paris, or the MeToo in New York. We have experienced defeat and disaster, and we know that life is serious and the killer is really waiting for us around the corner.  

America under the influence of the Szar Evő conspiracy

Thinking on the net zero water house idea, I suddenly realized that the American Government has fallen under the influence of the occult followers of the cryptic conspiratorial "szarevo" philosophy.

The remote origin of the szarevo school is unknown  (although it was already known in the Antiquity as skatophagos), but in my times in Hungary it was widespread among Jewish and Calvinist upper-middle-class people with comfortable living standards, who did not publicly declare their doctrine but anyway, they were easily identified by their bizarre behavior,  The szarevo secret philosophy maintains that to waste is a mortal sin, and although they are wealthy they live like beggars and force extreme austerity on their families, servants, friends. In fact, the etymology of szar-evo is shit-eaters. I do not know if they drink their urine and eat (mixed with the cheapest rotten bread crumbs) their own excrements. If they do not do so, they act suspiciously like that. In school, I had a colleague called Fermin, who masturbated daily (as we all used to do) and collected the sperm in a bottle, which he kept in the kitchen refrigerator. He had not worked yet out what he would do with the increasing amount of sperm, but he strongly felt that it should not be wasted and flushed down the toilet.

Are the szarevo an organized sect secretly imposing their esoteric doctrine on the Government and the American people? Considering the bizarre and extreme recycling scheme of the net zero water house idea, they must certainly be very influential. They have convinced Americans that waste is a sin against the Planet, and having the world's most efficient water infrastructure and illimited freshwater resources in the Great Lakes and their majestic rivers, they should go thirsty and/or drink their own piss. We need a non-antisemite twin of Prof. Kevin MacDonald to write a book about how a handful of Hungarian szarevo refugees infiltrated American Government and is forcing the whole county to follow their bizarre eating habits. They are dictating to build stinking expensive homes and to live in them, and unnecessarily recycle all at a large cost.

Net Zero Water Building

The American Government has developed the idea of net zero building  (see scheme below) and now that I see it in its official configuration, I say it is unsustainable, it is fantastic money burning machine, pure unadulterated, preservers-free nonsense. It requires about ten times the length of piping of a conventional house, many pumps, and control systems, it requires space to connect all these pipes (and space within the building is very scarce), it requires a spacious underground basements (with lighting and air conditioning), it requires two underground water tanks (and a large one for fire fighting, did they forget?) and two water and sewage purification facilities (consuming lots of energy and chemicals) and so. The maintenance of two WWTPs is a headache, just think of the amount of plumbing work required to maintain a simple conventional building. What if the electricity supply is unreliable? The sewage will rot and contaminate the building? The health risks of a conventional building are serious, imagine how dangerous will be here, having abandoned the proven, centuries-old concept of disposing of the sewage immediately and as far as possible from the building, here it is storing and manipulating it. The chemical disinfectants like chlorine and additives like flocculants required are, in themselves, a pollution source. It is a nightmare, I would not live in such a bad-smelling, dirty, polluted, unhealthy house.

On the other hand, the water and sewage supplied by the municipalities are perfectly good and very inexpensive. Why should we want to disconnect from public services? The concept is sick and crazy.

Deplatforming

Ten years old Heartiste blog just disappeared from the internet and nothing related to it can be found through google or other search machines. It was a gross and offensive etzesgibber (advice-giver) about how to seduce girls. Once I commented on the blog that cynically manipulating a girl into the feeling that she was developing a stable relationship only to leave her was immoral. Not that I never did abandon a lover, but I always believed bona fide that I was to marry the girl in question. I always suffered much in the break-up and was never cynical or exploitative.

The epidemy of deplatforming is raging all over the internet. Spandrell is moving his blog out of the public sphere to a private address, in a futile anticipatory move. I commented that it is useless because in a totalitarian environment there is no place to hide, only strict secrecy and camouflage. He should know because he is from the former Soviet Union (I presume). 

The Eight Wonder of the World

"Start saving young" is a good advise, because compound interest is a miracle. Looking back (I have more past than future) I owe my present relative prosperity to early accumulation added to my parents' hard work and saving.

But there is more to that. My current abundance of projects is a direct consequence of thirty years of work and writing articles and books with no immediate monetary or prestige results. Suddenly I am known and strangers beg me to manage their projects. For long it was like my work was not noticed, but it was and now it is producing fruits.

I tried to have children while young, but it did not work out as planned. Having children was much more difficult than imagined and took much more time. Anyway, now my children are producing marvelous grandchildren, making me happy. Compound interest equation is working also here.

Bullshit Jobs: Permitting

"In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century's end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There's every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn't happen. 

Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. 

The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it." Source.

How do they know me? How do they know what I am thinking all the time? I spend most of my working time on fulfilling permitting demands, forms and the caprices of regulators (typically a middle-aged educated female trying to tell herself that she is doing something vital, important).

My only salvation is being paid. Sometimes, because my clients are aware of the futility of the permitting obligation and the waste of its cost and the consequent investments it always implies. They demand from ME (ME!) an explanation  why they should spend money on fighting imaginary, non-existent risks to the Earth (like my zero water and energy consuming projects). I have no convincing answers. 

"It's Frankensteen":

Brilliant.

What to do with myself?

I find myself nearing the end of my life, after having achieved my life goals, and still healthy and no diseases. I still have all my teeth and dream wet dreams. I took a long, enjoyable vacation in City Island, and now back home am rolling up my unfinished projects. It is boring. There are several interesting openings, but thinking them over, I realize I have done the same things in the past.  Well, I cannot sleep and drink and read about English landowning aristocrats all day long. I'll be active and engaged, something will come up.  

Living in a World of Un-Free Competition

It is clear and obvious that in economic life, free competition leads to the fast ruin of all the participants. Therefore the absolute need for cartelization.  And cartels can exist only with strong policing. Conclusion: Police is the key to well functioning, efficient and peaceful human societies.

I am reading about the economic history of Britain and how difficult was the transition from an economy regulated by trade guilds to a more open, almost competitive environment. Guilds were imperative for the survival of small tradesmen, limiting free competition that would have ruined all in no time. Guilds were severely self-regulated and they constantly protected their economic niche. They organized public parades to affirm their legality. Their most difficult problem was how to fix the "just price" for their products and services, that would allow their existence and at the same time, be acceptable for their customers. They were necessarily against innovations that would lead to differences between members and possibly destroy their regulated system - see Luddite rebellion. They were against newcomers, especially Jews that were more efficient and would undercut them.

We in the West live in a semi-free competition world. I am an engineer and my income is regulated by my guild and the State protection: for building permits and so a submittal signed by a professional engineer is needed. No building of business can operate without paying a fee to me or my guild members. The medicine trade is even more protected, as are architects and lawyers. To work as a lawyer in Israel, it is not enough to pass the university exams, there are guild exams too (very difficult) and the need to serve for a nominal salary as an intern in a law office. It is the same master system of the medieval guilds. In Israel, the rules to practice the trade were relaxed and suddenly there were thousands of immigrant doctors and layers competing with old, established practitioners. Very rapidly the guilds closed ranks and with the help of the State, they erected tall barriers. Interestingly, Israeli Arabs are accepted in existing guilds, they are equals and even given priority to practice in their ethnic community.

The Israeli state is constantly inventing new regulations and imposing new barriers for everything. I know of public lobbying such as the lawyers, that succeeded in limiting the number of new lawyers. New franchised professions are being created each day, such as teachers of retarded, that have to get master specialization and soon, probably, Ph.D. A building permit may require acoustic experts,  endangered species expert, whatnot. Twenty years ago most fields were open, and I did expert opinions in chicken farm smells, in chimney pollution, in many nascent areas. Today, all those areas are covered by licensed "experts" with officially recognized diplomas. I could find new, yet unregulated niches, but I have too much work and feel tired and old. I am looking forward to retirement and death.

An example of what I am talking about is "Street Sweeping Expert" (see below). Mr Carter offers his services and his certification as expert. He has developed the "Certified Sweeper Operator" which probably merits better salary conditions and may one day evolve into a licensed trade guild a-la attorney or pharmacist. Should Mr Carter get his way, the day will come when you cannot work as a street sweeper without a "Certified Street Swiper" degree.

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Additional Information

There are six kinds of sweeping.  While there is some overlap, each has different equipment and skill sets.
• Parking Lot Sweeping
• Construction Site Sweeping
• Highway and Roadway Sweeping
• Municipal Street Sweeping
• Indoor and Warehouse Sweeping
• Private Community Sweeping
Mark Carter has experience in all six types of sweeping.   He has over 10,000 hours of  “in the seat” operator experience as well as 30+ years running a street sweeping company.  He has trained over 100 sweeper operators in the basics, advanced techniques, and best practices.
He is a past president of the North American Power Sweeping Association and has served on the Board of Directors for 20+ years.  He has chaired the National Certification Committee for sweeping companies and chaired the Certified Sweeper Operator committee that developed a national online training course to train and certify sweeper operators.

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Israel exports 26 billion dollars worth of thin air in 2018

It appears that the most successful export of Israel is ideas, that is, companies. Luftgescheften. Thin air. Foreigners paid in 2018 26 billion dollars for Israeli companies and startups. What did they paid for? Ideas of products that can be sold. The actual product, once the manufacturing process has been established, can be made anywhere and better and cheaper in China.


Instead of an agricultural powerhouse, as envisioned by the Zionist pioneers, or the planetary finance center, as I thought should be our destiny, we are selling companies. Above: Eyal Waldman, founder of the Mellanox company whose product is cloud solutions, recently sold it to Nvidia for 7.36 billion US dollars.

What are cloud solutions? and why it is worth so much?  Right: "The Clouds" by Aristophanes, a witty, mordant play on Socrates' "idea shop". 

Balls on Ice

Mike Jagger (left: recent pic) got his girlfriend pregnant at age 72, at an age that the average man (not me!) has sex once a year, at most. How he does it? There are proven ways to increase old man fertility, and the most effective is the one employed in Argentina with older or indifferent reproductor bulls. They put the abulic bull to pasture in the same potrero with a young heifer for several days. Nothing happens but as the days go, they get more familiar with each other. Then they introduce a young potent bull into the potrero and the newcomer starts courting the heifer. The old bull suddenly loses its calm and excitedly pushes the youngster away and fucks the heifer. 

Amazingly, watching porn before sex also increases potency and sperm volume and quality, and the best porn is one girl with two men. The competitive instinct kicks in and the body tries to make sure that its sperm will win the competition. Take my word, this trick works. 

Be cool is also a piece of good medical advice. Reducing the temperature of the testicles improves sperm formation. There are underwear models with pockets for ice cubes, not very comfortables but effective. Two hours a day make the trick.

The most pleasurable method is five minutes of foreplay. Doctors advise it for females but it works also for men, an increase their sperm volume significantly. Find an attractive, friendly woman and try it. Any volunteers out there?

Struggling to Recover Work Habit

In the last two weeks I have been working but without my former enthusiasm.  Most of the pressure comes from projects that I had given for finished, but the regulators demand additions and explanations. That is, unpaid work. Yet it has to be done. I am feeling despair about the permitting system in Israel, the regulators - bureaucrats in their air-conditioned offices - fell no shame in demanding 10 thousand dollars worth of reports and plans from a poor Oriental Jew who dreams of opening a small bakery or workers restaurant. I commented on this scandal with some of my colleagues but they are indifferent, cynical, and even exploitative.  I am losing my taste for this line of work. Pic.: A corner kitchen of a mini-"humuseria", humus and felafel eatery in Kfar Saba. I am working on the permit in the last six months and there is always some additional document that is missing or needs correcting.


PS.: My criticism of the native bureaucracy may be unjust. The London sewage outlet project (the Thames Tunnel) required a 50,000 pages permitting submission. 

The city opens anti-air refuges

The Major Rafi Sa'ar ordered the opening of the anti-air refuges and start preparations for missiles incoming from Gaza. We are in the Sharon area, 25 km north of Tel Aviv. Already there are three civilian victims in the South, and this confrontation appears to be increasing. The Arabs should consider that we have a brand new Chief of Staff, hungry for action and begging to show he is not Mr. Milquetoast. Photo: Reuters. 

100 hours riding the 6 Train

We lived in City Island in the Bronx and each day we took the 6 Train from Pelham Bay Park to Manhattan and back, a one hour ride. I made my shopping in the K-Mart and J.Penney and so in the Pelham Bay Park Center, and ate at the most proletarian Thai food stall in the third floor of the Mall. I can honestly state that in three weeks saw not a WASP person (say tall, slim, blondish and clear eyes). Everybody I met in the Bronx was Afro-American, Afro-African and many many Caribbeans and Central Americans. I had spent months in New York in the winter of 1969 (my graduation foreign trip) and the Bronx was Jewish and Italian and Irish and remembered well the architecture and infrastructure. At first, I was rather amazed by the replacement of the population, but soon I got used to it and being a native Spanish speaker, I felt at home among the friendly Latinos. Moreover, people were polite, non-violent and cleanly dressed, sitting quietly in the train playing games on the phone or hearing music through earphones. The level of human noise, shouts and so, was zero. It was as if everybody had been on tranquilizers. In the seventies, there were many shops selling hard drinks, the owners had guns in sight against robberies, now I could not find one liquor store, and did not see even one drunk holding the brown paper bag with a bottle inside, as was so common in my former visit. The trains were old, the wagons jumped and made frightening mechanical noises, but fifty years ago that was normal and certainly better than Argentine trains; today - compared with the trains in China and Israel - the 6 trains are dilapidated wrecks. But clean and working. A hundred percent (!) of the personnel is African American, middle-aged obese men, and women, polite and efficient: as said,  the trains were clean and on time. They spoke strongly accented English, some exaggerated Black speech so that I understood none of the announcements but when asked face to face, they made an effort to communicate. Before traveling, I made a research on the internet about the physical dangers awaiting us and found maps with neatly delined dangerous areas, but in reality, the streets were clean and no menacing persons could be seen. I found the Bronx and New York in general totally pacified and safe. I can report not one violent scene and not even one naked knife or gunshot. Oh yes! The police shooting range is in City Island and lots of shots were heard during the day.

Summary:

In the last fifty years, a total replacement of the population took place. One wonders where the natives had gone, where are the Anglosaxons and the Jews. The current population, contrary to my internet impressions, is quieter and safer than it was then. No drunks nor angry Blacks on the train. It is less amazing and exciting a place than it was then, but now I am old and less excitable.

The infrastructure - transportation, traffic, water, sewage, communication, etc. - has been maintained and everything is working, but it is old and antique in comparison with younger, more advanced cities.

The air is pure and the water is potable. The food and cloth are cheaper and of better quality than Israel.

All in all, New York is an aging (maybe decaying) city and a good place to live.

Photo: The Pelham Bay Park Station. Source. This guy had a better camera and more talent than I.

Israel: Tax Paradise

I feel I am paying exorbitantly excessive taxes, but it appears that Israel is a veritable tax paradise. The graph above reflects the "tax wedge" extracted by the State from a typical employee. In Israel it is about 20% in comparison with 30% in the USA and 55% in Belgium. I always thought Norway, with its oil exports and reserves, imposes no personal taxes, but it seems that it squeezes twice as much as the State of Israel squeezes from poor us. 

Elijah will appear and come

The song of Toharlev  יעלה ויבוא about the promise that he (Elijah, the prophet from Gilead) will come and the fire in his trail. King Ahab allied Israel with the Phoenicians and married his son to the daughter of the King of Tzidon, and promoted the cult of the Canaanite God Baal per contra the nameless Judean God worshipped in the Temple of Jerusalem. Elijah was a popular rabble-rouser and his worst political enemy. Elijah is believed to be the harbinger of the Messiah and of the eschaton. Ancient politics and old songs... The singer, Gidi Gov, is almost blind. 

British Government promises a "Circular, zero waste economy"

"We have no time to waste. We are living in a climate crisis that will spiral dangerously out of control unless we take rapid and dramatic action now," Corbyn told Parliament. "Today, we have the opportunity to say, 'We hear you' ... By becoming the first parliament in the world to declare a climate emergency, we could, and I hope we do, set off a wave of action from parliaments and governments all around the world."

Analyzing this social development, I am amazed by the strength of the British and American peoples demand for an unreal, pure, zero net-energy and water economy. The politicians are taking up this popular protest and enacting strict regulations. Personally I am convinced that the sense of pollution and urgent need of "purification" has no material basis, and the regulations only make life more difficult and expensive, but the people want it. 

Why? One reason is the environmental education from kindergarten. Another is the eternal hostility toward industry, agriculture and the rich in general. The third reason is the lack of real dangers, or new ideologies (they are coming back to failed socialism, of all social systems) and possibly the fear of technology. There is no doubt that genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, space exploration (the suspicious Oumuamua object) are positing new unknowns and risks. But fear of the unknown never stopped the Polynesians exploring the immense Pacific in their fragile canoes, or the Manhattan Trinidad explosion (that may have pulverized the planet). Maybe all the existing emotion and passionate protests could be focused on a good war, and I hope we shall not be turned into the hated enemy.

The past is not encouraging for us Jews. When they are searching for a diabolic enemy, they always find us.

Pic. The 1903 Kishinev Pogrom. 49 Jews killed, 600 raped. 

Work Habit Lost

I used to work like a horse from 5 AM till midnight. Now, after a three week vacation on City Island, I am having difficulties to return to my former self and work habits. I sleep badly (Jetlag?) and I am aware of the neighborhood and the apartment building's all-night background noise, a phenomenon that I never noticed in the past. I lost my motivation,  can't find my mojo.

The Kaliver, Dead

The Nagykallo (Hungary) Hassidic dynasty changes generations as the 96 y.o. old rebbe Menachem Mendel Taub dies and a younger relative takes up the leadership of the court. The rebbe was the seventh in the male line of the original miraclemaker, the founder of the Hungarian Hassidic movement Itzhak Taub (1751–1821). This hassidut was deported in toto to Auschwitz and exterminated by the Nazis, and the young rebbe was taken out of the gas chamber and submitted to chemical experiments by camp-doctor Mengele. As consequence, he never grew a beard (a biblical no-no for Jewish priests) and conserved his youngish feminine face. He was married but sterile. After the war he settled in Israel and rebuilt, with the few survivors here, the Kaliver Hassidut, which follows the Hungarian tradition. The Rebbe spoke no Hungarian but sings (with Yiddisch accent) the "Szol a kakas mar" written by the original miracle rebbe.