Dreaming

Lately, my dreams deal with leaving. This night I owned a large gas station in Hungary and the SS sent me an invitation to their office. I presumed it was to expropriate my business, so decided to give it up and emigrate with my family. I felt no loss, the tone of the dream was light and before I woke I was just about to sleep with a beautiful lily-white girl. In my "real" life, I am leaving the university and accepting fewer commissions to start slipping into retirement. 

No one is guilty of the Flint Water Poisoning

It took five years of judicial investigations to realize that there were issues with the original investigation. Now it all re-starts from zero. 

“The Michigan Attorney General’s Office has dismissed all pending criminal charges arising from the Flint drinking water crisis, saying it has instead started over with an expanded investigation,” per USA Today. “The office … announced the dismissal of charges against all eight remaining defendants, including an involuntary manslaughter charge against Nick Lyon, the former director of the Department of Health and Human Services. Charges were also dismissed against other officials from the health department, plus two former Flint emergency managers and current or former employees of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality and the City of Flint.”

Just as I wrote at the first day, there was no crisis, there was no one harmed, the whole thing was made up to frighten the Blacks that racists were conspiring to poison them, and make them vote for Hillary. Good she lost. The pic is from the Jacobin that holds a different position.

In the article "Flint's Bottom Line", Jacobin concludes:  Detroit and Flint, taken together, lay bare a brutal fact — Michigan no longer seems to have any need for a large proportion of its children.  

What does it mean? Jacobin seems to suggest that yes, it was a racist conspiracy to dumb down and kill black children. Anyway, Jacobin says, there is no need for them. Jacobin seems to incite division and strife. 

Preserving exclusivity

The City of Herzliya is fighting against the Apolonia development (pic) arguing that has no infrastructure to another ten thousand inhabitants. They want to be inaccessible and preserve high real estate values. San Francisco has arrived to Herzliya. I do not like this anti-growth wave. 

TEVA flying with backwind

(1)  Oklahoma agreed to accept 80 million dollar penalty to discharge TEVA from the opioid pushing blame. May be it will be the end of all the litigation on the subject.
(2) The Competition Administration ordered TEVA to sell its Allergan business, and yesterday it was signed. Another problem solved.
TEVA's shares jumped 7%. I have some shares.

The East Asians

Spandrell profiles the Chinese people: "East Asians are just civilized but profoundly different people who mostly dislike us, think we’re weird, and just want to be left alone, taking advantage of us and scamming us money every now and then."  Correct. Spandrell  impresses me as one of those Russian Jewish refugees of the seventies, who instead of making Aliyah went to the USA. He loves languages. Now he is wandering in East Asia, teaching English to the locals or teaching Chinese to expats.

Average Building Permit Process Time in Israel: Five Years

HaAretz: the bureaucracy in Israel is a monopoly game: there are traps in the road that make you start anew. This time the leftwing fishwrap says the truth. For a building permit in this country they make you carry a heavy and expensive cross along the Via Dolorosa. The regulation adds 10% to the selling price. As an engineer, I am part of that ten percent. Sorry.

Global Hawk Is Watching You

Iran shot down an American surveillance drone, a naval variant of the Global Hawk. The pic shows the size and the fearsome profile of the bird. Haven't been these technologies made obsolete by spy satellites? Apparently the Hawk observes reality with a higher resolution and can sample the air over a chemical factory or an Israeli workers restaurant (today's menu: Fasulia). BTW, the Global Hawk costs 200 million US dollars. There are only 40 of them.

The catastophe started in Paris

The fertility transition in Europe was substantially independent of the Industrial Revolution, and was a process of cultural diffusion that emanated from France (where it began before 1830).

HDB CHICK twitters that "[Blanc] also …finds that subscriptions to Diderot’s Encyclopédie is negatively correlated with fertility across French départements in 1831, even when controlling for industrial
output per capita, urbanization, literacy and pre-industrial development." "Mas claro, ponele agua" as we used to say in the barrio. If you want it clearer (wine), add water. The French Revolution is the root of the depopulation of Europe, the dissolution of the traditional Jewish communities, the modern antisemitism (that so shocked Herzl while in Paris), the Holocaust, and God-knows what new disasters expect us down the road. Bonner Tal, another numerically obsessed blogger, calculates that the French people is done, in ten - twenty years they will suddenly become aware that they are a minority in their historical homeland. I think his numbers are wrong, but he got the essence. And then, from Paris it will spread to the entire world...!

This is bad for us, the Jews. Last March, 85-year-old Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll was murdered and set on fire in her apartment in Paris. Knoll’s Muslim neighbor, Yacine Mihoub, and an accomplice, confessed to stabbing Knoll to death. Authorities described the murder as an anti-Semitic hate-crime. In April 2017, another elderly French Jewish woman, Sarah Halimi, was stabbed to death.

Water Sabotage

Water terror. They cry for water while destroying the pipes. South Judean hills. 

Remembering R. Marshall Meyer

Rabbi Marshall Meyer was an American Conservative Rabbi who arrived at Buenos Aires around 1976 and founded the Congregacion Bet-El in the Barrio Norte, the better neighborhood. He was a sensation, Buenos Aires had never a modern American rabbi like him. 

He also organized a youth group and I was invited and went but soon left for the Socialist Zionist movement. Meyer was not Zionist, he was - I thought - Orthodox. I did not feel at ease, he spoke New York English (I did not) and his Congregacion aimed at the richer strata of Buenos Aires Jews while we were very poor, penniless new immigrants. I have the impression that had to pay to participate in some activities, that it was a club of rich kids, which triggered my overdeveloped inferiority complex. I joined the Zionist movements which were Socialist  (and anti-Imperialist i.e. anti-American) and never asked for money. 

Today Marshall Meyer is a national hero in Argentina for his courageous standing-up for Jewish (and non-Jewish) political prisoners under the Military Dictatorship. Well, as an American, we Socialist kids imagined that he was untouchable and protected by the CIA, but in those times everybody could just disappear. He spoke out, which the current pope did not dare to do. He was something. 

Fake News from Petersburg 1917

Trotsky's book on the Russian Revolution is exciting reading. He describes the clairvoyant leadership of Lenin in the successive congresses and programmatic papers, how the Vyborg industrial area workers were organized and prepared by the Bolshevik fraction for the insurrection. Trotsky consistently downplays his own importance and paints Lenin - whose contribution was writing position papers in the deep underground - as the giant whose clear vision and hard will pushed ahead the proletariat.

Yet it is clear that the unarmed workers did little and the active forces were front soldiers back from the trenches, thoroughly convinced of the incompetence of the Czarist officer class and its unwillingness to end the war. After it was clear that the forces guarding Petersburg and the Winter Palace, they entered unopposed and arrested the Provisory Government of Kerensky. The insurrection was a military action  led by Trotsky, who was the President of the Military Commission of the Bolshevik fraction.

Basically, the October Revolution was an unopposed military coup. Trotsky avoids ideology and presents no vision of socialism. It is all about destroying the Czarist regime and capitalism, because they are an obstacle to the development of the production. And a primitive army cannot fight the advanced German forces. He predicts the next war against Germany and the need for preparation. Stalin took over and completed the plan.  

Sleeping Well at the RAND Corporation

I was a fanatic follower of the RAND Corp. research publications, about demography and war strategy, but somehow I fell out of the habit. Today I visited their site and found nothing of interest to me. They write a lot about sleeping well, about the economic loss of sleeping badly, and little more. It reminded me of Friedrich Nietzsche making fun of the academic philosophy of sleeping well as the supreme object of life.

Ten times must thou reconcile again with thyself; for overcoming is bitterness, and badly sleep the unreconciled.

Ten truths must thou find during the day; otherwise wilt thou seek truth during the night, and thy soul will have been hungry.

Ten times must thou laugh during the day, and be cheerful; otherwise thy stomach, the father of affliction, will disturb thee in the night.

Few people know it, but one must have all the virtues in order to sleep well. Shall I bear false witness? Shall I commit adultery?

Shall I covet my neighbour’s maidservant? All that would ill accord with good sleep.

Peace with God and thy neighbour: so desireth good sleep. And peace also with thy neighbour’s devil! Otherwise it will haunt thee in the night.

Honour to the government, and obedience, and also to the crooked government! So desireth good sleep. How can I help it, if power like to walk on crooked legs?

Jewish Feygele Celebration

Tel Aviv is the world's gay capital. In these hours 300,000 are parading along the sea boulevard (pic). I am at home working on a four apt. building. Thousands of Europeans are here to take part in the famous sex parties and get to fuck some Jews. With so much cannabis around, everything is peaceful and super-friendly. Our hyper-macho Muslim enemies are wondering how is that these Jewish feygele beat them every time.

This is not what the pioneers imagined, but could be worse.

Homosexuality violates Islamic Law in Iran and is punishable by death. Several thousand people have been executed for homosexuality since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Fire in the Gulf

WASHINGTON (NYTIMES) - Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Thursday (June 13) that intelligence reviewed by US officials showed that Iran was responsible for attacks on two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman, a critical waterway for the transit of much of the world's petroleum.

Iran's clerical leadership seemed rational, but firing tankers is suicidal. Something is going on.

The holes in the ships look like caused by small mines. Is somebody mining the Gulf? Iran. It may have been a work accident while maintaining the minefield. 

Destructive Destruction of Israeli Corporations

Only three years ago Israel's economy was dominated by ten or so "tycoons" - self made men who built up business empires. They were nice modest people, like Alovich, Fishman, Dankner, etc.  None had a yacht and none built a palace for their twelve racecars. They were not that kind of people. Yet the focused hate of the media and the left-wing parties succeeded in embroiling each one of them in judicial procedures and paint them as criminals or suspected criminals(pic. the former tycoon Danny Dankner behind bars) .

Government economists argued that the concentration of so much economic power in few hands was deleterious to the country in many senses, not only economical but political and social. So new legislation forced them to dismantle their organizations, sell parts to the public, etc. The resulting situation is that today big corporations have no dominant shareholders, the shares have been dispersed and owned by pension funds and insurance companies that have no interest in the management of the business. So we have central businesses like Bank Leumi, the largest of Israel, Bank Poalim, El Al, Bezeq the phone monopoly, etc. that today have no visible personal owners and are managed by anonymous directories.

I think that this situation is very bad, because the directories (composed by bureaucrats and diversified leftists NGOs) have no enterprising spirit, no sense of business and no desire to expand and improve. In this sense the Chinese Communists were more intelligent: they sold for peanuts their State enterprises to enterprising individuals that developed them into global emporia. And not only that: a physical person knows that he can be sued, is vulnerable and will lose his fortune if he makes mistakes; not like a commission that has no fear of consequences nor responsibility. I am sure the Chinese hate the rich owners of their factories as we do, but they know that factories need to be owned by somebody, and State ownership is the worst. 

Israel Prepared for Missile Attack

Israel is prepared for next missile attack. It has been divided into 17 alert areas, so hen the missile is coming, the targeted area will be alerted while the rest of the country can continue sleeping in peace. I am in the green area, we are not expecting a flying bomb in the near future.  We shall have 90 seconds to seek refuge. 

The Czar Nikolay

Trotsky in his history of the Russian Revolution analyzes the Czar the last of the Romanov dynasty. He was a good looking sportsman, a man without emotions, "'without insides" (said the monk  Grigori Rasputin), a mediocre nobody spending his time in paddling in a canoe and noting down in his diary that he had tea on the terrace.  Probably he was quite stupid, too. All the while his army was destroyed by the Japanese in Tsushima, and later by the Germans. Russia's defeat in WWI produced millions of embittered soldiers who had been brutally flogged "to elevate their fighting spirits" and had witnessed the incompetence of the noble officer caste and were more than ready for a change. They started to doubt the divinity of the Czar and that the Jews had killed the Son of God. The Jews they knew personally had fought courageously and seemed good leaders.

Trotsky describes the vacillating Kadets during the revolution and how the extremist, terrorist left - the Bolsheviks - seized the power. This minuscule political illegal organization was the most virile, daring and decided element in the whole Russian universe. The Czar was unaware of their existence, he did not fight them, he was pleasantly occupied in open air sports, attending the Orthodox Church ceremonies and drinking his tea in the terrace. Soon after the Russian nobility found itself driving taxis in Paris. "Europe had a debt to history, and had to pay it".  

Trouble in China

A million strong demonstration is marching in Hong Kong central street. They are resisting the extradition law, meaning they do not want to be under Chinese Communist dictatorship. Taiwan is able to maintain its independence now for seventy years. It is a bad example for China mainland, it means that separation is feasible. Will the Peking government order a military invasion and massacre? Anyway, trouble down the way.  

Nostalgy for an America that is No More

Pinkwashing Homonazism

"Cosas veredes, Sancho... " quote Don Quixote. You will see things...  never imagined things. Israel is being accused of promoting Gay Parades, etc. to pinkwash itself, to be seen as a liberal society, hospitable and friendly to everyone. To make a contrast with the surrounding Islamist societies, where women are kidnapped and sold as sex slaves and gays are thrown down from tall buildings (remember the Islamic State?).

What can we say? Nothing. We should not care about what our enemies say, they hate us and will turn everything on its head, we should keep doing what is right.

Personally I am tolerant of homosexuals, because of something that happened long time ago in Buenos Aires. A Hungarian Jewish teenager, only son of Auschwitz survivors, of my acquaintance, killed himself. For being different. Better have him dressed as a prostitute and star in a parade.   

Guilty of Conspiring to Fuel Sales

A federal jury in Boston found the company’s top executives, including the founder, John Kapoor, guilty of conspiring to fuel sales of the drug, Subsys, by bribing doctors and misleading insurance companies.

This accusation against a Pharm company, for selling Phentasomething an opioid painkiller, a totally legal and FDA approved medicine, is something new. The company, Insys Therapeutics, agreed to pay 225 million dollars as forfeiture and other kinds of extraordinary tax. In other legal actions, TEVA agreed to pay eighty million dollars and the "toxic" Sacklers are begging for bankruptcy. The Sackler brothers are one of the most generous philanthropists, but giving out money for museums and medical schools did no good to them.

The future of pharm companies, and of large corporations in general, seems difficult. TEVA is being sued for manufacturing cheap and good medicines and for "fueling sales" in many States. That in addition to the very difficult problem of mountainous debts. Maybe the low valuation of the company is justified. I did not sell TEVA shares, it was a mistake. 

Fakenews: Was there any massacre in Tian An Men?

I remember the pictures of the Peking student demonstration carrying a giant Styrofoam statue of the Goddess of Democracy. There were few mentions of shooting students, the "massacre" meme appeared years later. Today, when the relations between China and the USA are tense, the Western press speaks non-stop of a massacre. I do not know what really happened, a Communist dictatorship is able to erase the memory of any event including famines, purges, anything. 

Baltimore Water Blackmailed

“For nearly three weeks, Baltimore has struggled with a cyber attack by digital extortionists that has frozen thousands of computers, shut down email and disrupted real estate sales, water bills, health alerts and many other services,” according to The New York Times. “[On May 7,] City workers’ screens suddenly locked, and a message in flawed English demanded about $100,000 in Bitcoin to free their files: ‘We’ve watching you for days,’ said the message, obtained by The Baltimore Sun. ‘We won’t talk more, all we know is MONEY! Hurry up!’”

“To be clear, the hostage is not a person. It’s data,” KPCW reported. “That data ranges from legislative bills to online payments for water and parking tickets.”

If what has been kidnapped and made inaccessible is data, how is that Baltimore has no backup? Apparently, the quality of municipal governance has declined in the USA. 

Your Brothers' Blood Cries Out To Me From the Earth (Kiev)

Looks like a good year

Looking back in this first half of the year 2019 I see it was good. I took a three-week vacation on City Island, Bronx, a very quiet and friendly neighborhood, with excellent air from the Atlantic Ocean. I had the best company I could ask, my little daughter and her fiance. Then my third daughter is expecting a baby girl, and I heard that the family is expanding in other continents too. The stock exchange produced several disappointments, like NVidia, TEVA, Bezeq, Tower, Mirland, and so. The losses were made up by other plays. These last weeks I was being harassed by my Clients because I was not keeping my schedules, but took courage and resigned three projects and returned the retainer. The University of Ariel has grown enormously and it is now a regular bureaucratic mass institution far different from the small, penniless, struggling, "illegal", boycotted settler initiative in "Occupied Territories" it was when I joined it. Probably this is my last semester there. 

All in all, the year started well.  

The Second Cold War

The trade war between the USA and China seems to be evolving to the formation of trade blocks, and then, Cold War blocks. China tried to prevent this development by its Belt initiative, building trade entrepots all over the world, but in the new world situation, we have to see if it can be operated.

An article referred to by Marginal Revolution blog maintains that Chairman Xi has recognized that China's aggressive and triumphalist policy was a mistake and now have to retreat in a Long March. We survived a bad Cold War already, we shall survive this too. Not me personally, but the Jewish nation. While friends of China, we are with the USA. (The ill. is from a Singapore paper, it is misleading). 

Paralysis in Israel

There is no government in Israel, and the bureaucrats are left unchained. They are the only ones that feel safe in their Olympus, they are like angry Zeus watching the human ants and feeling whom to strike down next. The bureaucrats in their airconditioned offices are privileged Whites while my Clients are mostly worthy Mizrahi people just out of the ghetto trying to realize their dream of an independent business - a pizza shop, a small worker restaurant, a small sandwich business. Tomorrow I promised to help a sandwich business in Hashmonaim Street Tel Aviv, in a dark underground cave. I hate to take money from this boy, but without the temptation of lucre, I am unable to work myself up and wear out my last grey cells to think out the solution to his problem.

To solve this problem, am meditating while drinking merlot and dancing the cumbia Alla va Maritza, yo me voy tras ella...  Colombia is the new jewel of the Caribbean, Cuba is no more. 

Dilemmas of an Israeli Water Engineer

I am designing the water system of an egg processing factory. On the one hand, I designed an ingenious used water recycling system, where the egg wash water is treated with flocculants and filtered and chlorinated, saving money on the water consumption bill. On the other hand, I am designing the wastewater treatment system, to render the water suitable for disposal in the municipal network. Egg sewage contains no sugars or easily fermentable carbohydrates but has proteins which cannot be degraded rapidly. To comply with the draconian regulations, I have to treat the wastewater almost to drinking water purity. The penalties for infractions are prohibitive and the unpaid accumulated debts to the water companies are a national problem. Recently there was some movement towards forgiving some mountainous debts, but we are living in a transitory year with no government able to take decisions.

Water costs about 5 to 10 dollars a cubic meter, for the industry, and sewage disposal costs about the same - if the sewage complies with the maximum content norms. If not, the cost of disposal jumps logarithmically. No kidding. Thinking of my Client, it would be better NOT to recycle the water and not to save drinking water, therefore increasing the volume of the sewage to be disposed of. The highly diluted wastewater would need less treatment to comply with the regulations, and most importantly, no worries of penalties.

Common sense says that Green/Environmental engineering harms the interests of my highly valued Clients, and does nothing to save the Earth. Israeli mothers warn their children to eat all the junk food because... children are starving in Africa. Israeli regulators are even more stupid, they force the factories to save water because in Erythrea it is not raining.

I shall adopt the Israeli method to deal with impossible choices: walk between the raindrops.

ללכת בין הטיפות

Solution

TASE Tel Aviv Stock Exchange Reflexions

Michael Rochberger writes in The Marker that the year 2019 is lost for large State projects because there is no government and the Ministers are busy in politics till the new elections in September and then to learn the subject.

The economy is stable, full employment, inflation low, private demand is not growing, so the great winners are the banks (red line on the graph). 73.77% growth in the last 4 years. The second line in green is real estate 45.09 %.

The total losers are technological companies, they lost 15% in 4 years. Terrible. I was hit by them big time - Bezeq and Tower and so.

Industrial companies are collapsing and cannot compete with Turkish imports. This development is very disappointing, I am a working engineer and my clients are hardworking entrepreneurs and I want them to profit, but in the current economy, it is impossible.

Open markets and the bureaucracy kill all local initiative. That's why I specialize in compliance vis-a-vis the regulators. I dislike this pointless torture, but it ensures me some income. Understandable, my Clients dislike (an understatement) spending on compliance and try to avoid paying me.

This is where I am now. What is to be done?