Korean Ballistic Anti-Ballistic Missile

Japan has announced that the last ballistic missile fired by North Korea did not follow a regular trajectory, making it difficult to shot it down. Ballistic objects fall at fantastic velocities from space, but once they are ballistic their trajectory follows Newtonian rules  which can be calculated and the object intercepted. Now it appears that Korean ballistic missiles can change route in flight and maneuver to confuse the antiballistic missile. I think should one missile miscalculate and humiliate the Japanese, America will give them free hand to restore their honor. Who will defend the Koreans? They have no allies.

The Japanese have. Seventy years of peace and prosperity have softened but not castrated the Japanese nation. In six month they can change direction and reinvent themselves as the martial people they always were. In Lagos I worked for a Dutch colonial who invited me to an Indonesian lunch. He had known the Japanese in Bandung and hated them with white hot passion. 

Antiballistic missile

It was announced that an Israeli antiballistic missile was successfully tried in Alaska. That means that we have some defense even if Iran produces nuclear weapons and sends it by the ballistic missile it already has. I just thought about the commercial applications of this new Israeli product. All European countries are exposed to nuclear missiles and they are protected by NATO. Japan is naked in face of North Korea's missiles. Australia may want to have one too. The market for this new weapon must be vast. We may be competing with the US but the world is big enough for all of us. Maybe we can't sell it because of American veto. In short, I know nothing. I do know I am losing a lot of money on the Israeli Communication Satellite company shares. BTW, wanted to order lithium batteries for my sweeper robot but the Chinese stopped selling them.

I assumed that they wanted to keep Lithium for themselves, but apparently methamphetamine labs buy these batteries as reducing agent. Anyway, I ordered a set from Turkey. 

Arab Intellectual Discourse

I am reading lots of analysis of Arab intellectual production of the 20th Century, which is mostly written and published in the West and focuses on the effect of colonialism on the Arab intellectuals. Said set the pattern with his Orientalism book and has created a veritable school of thought. What is shocking for me is the poverty of the documents on which this structure is built: The number of non-trivial books (that is, not children's illustrated stories or religious tractates or porn) are few, there is almost no intellectual discourse that can be analyzed, the journals consist in one or two pages with no controversies nor real content. The overall production of the Arab world, almost one thousand million human beings, is negligible. Contrast that with the copious production of Israel, full of controversies, rivalries, intellectual fights, thousands of original books published every year, hundreds of political films - most of it damning Israel and its "colonialism". There are more serious representations of Arabs in Israeli Jewish films than in all the childish stories of Arab TV and filmography. In extremis, compare Arab production with the explosive boiling over of Nigerian literature and filmography, which may be less abstract than German philosophical tractates and shockingly "vulgar", but impress the observer as a tropical explosion of color, libido and elan vital.

My point is that Western analysis of Arab intellectual discourse is more voluminous than the production itself. The West is trying to attribute intellectual thought to the Arab umma where there is none.

One reason for the wasteland that is the Arab production is that they live in harsh dictatorships, where original bloggers are jailed and journalists live in fear of writing a controversial word. They keep repeating the infantile formula of colonialist oppression because wrongly, they feel it flatters them and know that blaming the short episode of Western colonialism (say sixty years, from 1890 to 1945) they will have no issues with their own governments and they will enjoy the applause of Western universities. 

The Iron Age in Africa

When I worked in Nigeria, collected hand made iron tools. I walked the Onitsa Market on the river Niger, where hundred of African Ibo smiths manufactured original and interesting hand tools, agricultural machines and a large variety of machetes and knives. I bought a lot, very cheap for me, and had it sent back to Buenos Aires. It never arrived.

While in Europe the Iron Age followed the Bronze Age, in Africa it started EARLIER and followed directly the Stone Age. Ancients Greeks used heavy and expensive bronze body armor and hand machetes that were almost useless in battle after a few hits. African iron knives were durable although the quality of the metal (they mined and refined it themselves) was poor.

In Onitsa I bought also bronze statues, some of artistic value, sold to me as "antiquities". A few heads I brought to Argentina in my luggage, and later to Israel, but they disappeared. In retrospective, it is quite imaginable that the Niger River Delta people like Igbo and Ibibio, could have advanced more rapidly than the Europeans, even they peopling Europe instead us. I speculate that they "lost the train" with a difference of 2000 years.

When I worked in the Delta, the area was peaceful and policed, a legacy of recent British colonials. It hits me as paradoxical that instead of developing fast (the region is rich in oil and tropical agriculture), they descended into a jungle slum. The Delta peoples are intelligent, healthy and physically stronger than Europeans. I can't explain their failure but I am sure that raw IQ is not the answer. The IQ of British Africans is similar to that of the autochthonous population that created the Industrial Revolution.
  

Ethnic cleansing in Ethnic cleansing in Palestine

It is not surprising that within a general war, some larger ethnic groups seize the opportunity to clear out smaller ethnias. In the general ethnic cleansing or mass migration that took place in the Mandatory Palestine in 1947, no one noticed the evacuation of seven minority-within-minority villages. Those were the Metawali villages of  Tarbikha, Saliha, Malkiyeh, Nabi Yusha, Qadas, Hunin, and Abil al-Qamh. Their lands were distributed among the nearby kibbutzim and moshavim, and the larger Palestinian villages that had sided with the Jews in the War of Liberation. It is not widely known that the Jewish forces were very weak (and tired) in the Galilee region, and that the Galilee was conquered thanks to the collaboration of the Druze ethnic minority, the Chechen Muslim villages, the Christian villages and the Bedouins that hated and were hated by the Palestinian fellahin. Also the villages of the descendants of African slaves brought here by the Arabs, like Jisr-al-Zarka, sided with the Jews. I heard that the political secretariat of the Jewish Agency, headed by Golda Meir, distributed sacks of gold coins to secure their allegiance. We learnt that from English colonialists, like the political agent Colonel Lawrence. All the villages (except two Christian villages on the Lebanese border) that allied themselves with the Jews emerged untouched from the Palestinian Naqba, they still exist and prosper. They are the Israeli Arab minority. That is their secret shame.


What were those Methawali that some unknown (non-Jewish) hand ethnically-cleansed during the chaos of the 1947 war? The Palestinians follow the Sunni tradition of the Islam, like the Saudis and Jordanians, as against the Shi'a, followed mainly in Iran. Within the Sunni, the  Shafi'i madhab (legalistic thought) is one of the four schools of Islamic law, the one practiced in Palestine, while the Methawali followed a different interpretation. In the Middle East, people hides their real ethnic and religious identities, and the Methawali adopted an ambiguous coloration of Sunni, although with light philosophical disagreements with the Orthodox Sunni majority, with the idea that they could - should the need arise - present themselves as faithful Shi'a. The Alawites are another ethnia that never cleared up what they believe and to where they belong but now that they life depends from Iranian military assistance, they count themselves as Twelvers.  Within the Islamic world, till the return of the Jews to Eretz Israel, Palestinians were barely considered Muslim: almost no village had a mosque, and there was not one Islamic college in the country. The Palestinians - especially in the Galil - started to hit their foreheads against the tarmac only as a reaction to the presence of the Jews. It could have been different, but "It was written" that they would oppose the rise of Judea. 

Zur Baher

Amira Hess is my favorite journalist to vomit on. She sees the world in black and white - black being the Jews and white the colonized Palestinians and occasionally the victimized Ethiopian and Sudanese intruders. Today she writes about the village of Zur Baher, near Jerusalem. Under the Turkish Sultanate, the village (meaning Big Rock or Big Secret) had 24 families living in natural caves; these people has multiplied to 40,000 today. Part of the village has been annexed to the Municipality of Jerusalem and its inhabitants enjoy Israeli citizenship, the rest are Palestinian Authority subjects. A house on the Israeli side sells for 300 - 400 thousand dollars, while the same a few meters further sells for 100,000 US$. Almost like Detroit and its White suburbs. The Israeli side is under tremendous demographic pressure: Palestinians try to marry Israeli citizens and bring in their extended families, lots of undocumented transients, and much building without plans nor permits. The place is unmanageable, the police avoids entering the neighborhood and the government tries to establish order and legitimacy. For Amira this is intentional, malignant, colonialist, planned destruction and transfer, although I agree that from her despicable self-hating point of view it well may be so.

American right wing blogs - always ahead of the general press - have adopted a cold, scientific tone, they are full of statistics and data. For example, one note about Ilhan Omar, a Minnesotta senator, whose very name and family origins are obscure (has been married to her blood brother for nine years), mentions that DNA controls show that in 98% of the Somali family reunion requests there is no genetic relationship and that they are ALL lying. It is more or less like our family reunion requests of our Ethiopian "Jewish" immigrants. In our case, the so called "Jewish" Agency never rejects them because it is known that Ethiopian "Jewish" families are fluid, marry and separate without thinking it twice, are polygamous and polyandrous, and they themselves are not sure who their parents and sisters may be. In Hebrew: Ethiopian Jews are not lying, they don't know. The Jewish religion is most rigorous regarding family purity, but for the State of Israel they are all kosher Jews and please be in the airport three hours before the time. 

Dysgenic trends among Israeli animals

Of course yesterday's note was a joke, Israeli animals are not becoming smarter and fitter: the opposite is true. I went down to the parking and pitiful meowing of a lame - three legged - cat greeted me. Immediately appeared an old lady with a cup of cream cheese and milk with bread crumbs, and the beggar, slowly and graciously, moved toward the feast. I had to stop at the exit because an ancient and venerable dog, painfully dragging its bandaged hind leg, was taking a rest. Obviously, the poor animal had been hit by a car (maximum speed in our street 20 miles per hour) and a generous soul took it to the pet hospital. The bakery in front was spreading bread crumbs to the three hundred pigeons of the neighborhood. A few hungry hoopoes and colored birds tried to take part in the celebration, but they were aggressively expelled by the symbols of peace. Scenes like these are common in my pet-loving town. Obviously, the large and growing parasite pet population is not being selected for fitness in the wilderness but for begging ability. I see many females carrying small 5 kg white dogs, they function as baby substitutes, and being mostly silent and self-propelled, they are better that human babies. Extrapolating present trends, we shall end like the Romans. The Latter Day Israeli Jews - formerly Eritreans - will inhabit our city and wonder what happened to the giants that built those tall buildings. 

Eugenic trends among Israeli animals

Cats and dogs cross the streets in red light and get hit and maimed. On the routes I see wild animals killed - roadkills - such as foxes, small Samarian deers, lots of reptiles and frogs. When driving fast, blind birds hit my windshield and spiral off to the asphalt to be eviscerated by the car behind. The hoopoe, Israeli national bird, is the stupidest of all. This mass massacre can have only one result: the dumbest are not surviving and we are breeding an intellectually able wildlife population. Humans have exterminated all their competitors, lately the Neanderthals, but it well may be that the genetically improved animals around will rise and outcompete us. Sci-fi novelists fear the rise of intelligent machines, but the rise of intelligent animals may be more frightening. Good night children, sleep well and dream with sweet angels! 

The Shekel is the World's Strongest Currency

According to HaAretz of today, the Shekel (left) has strengthened some 25% regarding the rest of the currencies and now is stronger than the dollar and the euro and the holy Swiss Frank. What people is doing with this new acquisitive power? They take vacations in Europe and exotic destinations. They buy chachkes by internet and the post. And they invest in real estate.

I am in TASE Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and follow with interest real estate prices. The high prices are frightening: How can it be that an apt. in Tel Aviv is more expensive than in San Francisco? It is unreal, unnatural, irregular, can't be. I still cannot cast away my mentality of the sixties, when Israel was perceived (and was in fact) a struggling embattled mini-country, begging donations. Now we are a rich country whose currency is appreciated even by foreign banks.

I think I may take a mortgage at 2% interest and buy an apt. in Rosh HaAyin. I am antediluvian and statistically, I have been dead for years, which is not the best age to undertake long term investments, but I have daughters and now two or more new grandchildren are on their way here. We are just starting.  

Beyn HaMeytzarim - Three weeks of Sadness

In the Jewish year, today is fast day in remembrance of the Roman Army breaking through Jerusalem's walls - 2000 years ago. Now we begin a three week period of lamentations, till Tisha BeAv, the day when the Temple was destroyed. During these three weeks we avoid fiestas and festivities, some people sit on the floor in the synagogue to show their humbleness. We should not be fasting: the Romans are gone, Rome has been sacked many times and Africans live among its ruins, while we are steadily rebuilding our country and the Temple.   

Plumbing Excellence in Israel

In January I designed plumbing systems for four gyms in Tel Aviv area. The Client was an international gym chain planning to open forty new gyms in Israel. Against Israeli practice, they paid well and in advance. After designing four, I resigned because the architect produced new designs every two days and demanded constant updating of the drawings. The gyms are all working and very successful. Now I was called to do an expert report on one of "my" gyms because they do not want to pay the plumber for his substandard work. I wrote my 26 pages illustrated report. I never saw such a bad workmanship in Israel. The pipes were fake Giberit HDPE, some of them even re-used ones! I advised to disassemble the whole thing, bring in an expert plumber with suitable equipment, and remake the whole thing. Which is impossible, because the gym is working and most of the plumbing is embedded in the concrete structure. 

Grandaughter

Israeli Water Bureaucracy

Thirty years ago I was a ranking Dept. Manager of the Municipality of Herzliya. In my times, the Water Dept. consisted in a Romanian born engineer appropriately called Abraham Wasserman and two mobile plumbers. They occupied one room in the Engineering Division floor. Sewage was in charge of a Romanian engineer by name of Ferraro and a self-effacing Russian engineer Inna Mechanik, all crowded in the next room. Ferraro had also three maintenance workers with a pump. I was in charge of the Wastewater Treatment Plant, which consisted in a lab lady, an electrician and five lazy workers that seldom were at work.

Compare that to the Water Corporation of today, which occupies two floors in a luxury building. It has a directory of about ten politically connected nobodies, that draw large salaries and car allowances and have no duties. The Corporation has an accounting dept. of about ten accountants, a water planning dept., a chief and assistant engineer in charge of approving water plans for building permits, and a parallel technical group for sewage plans, and a Vaada - a Commission in charge of approvals. The Corporation has an annual budget and annual development program, with its auditor, and a body to evaluate execution bids and contracts, and supervise the execution. They have a public relations department, producing color brochures (pic), water quality reports, organizing school visits, and so. And plenty of good-and-not-so-good looking secretaries and security men, drivers and maintenance staff. All in all some 200 employees, and they consume of hundreds of plans and reports, they maintain internal meetings when they cannot be bothered and very important coordination discussions with city bosses and national ministries. The engineers receive phone calls only twice a week for two hours each (really!) , and to program a meeting takes two weeks. They behave as effendis, freely humiliating all "petitioners" and lower ranking persons they call "clients". The whole organization is tremendously busy, although their measurable product (water and sewage) is more or less of the same quality and quantity as was managed thirty years ago by Wasserman and Ferraro in their times.

This explosion of bureaucracy is explained by Moldbug: modern societies have an overabundance of useless people that cannot be absorbed by the production system. Paying the underclass to do nothing, like in the USA, is odious for society at large and for themselves, because they see themselves as precious and educated, with their fancy university titles in math-less subjects. There is constant pressure to find occupation for this mass of voting citizens, and creating air-conditioned office jobs in a rich Water Corporation (there are more than 100 in Israel) is a viable solution. In places like India and Egypt, the government explicitly creates bureaucratic positions, to throw oil on social unrest. In Israel, I have never heard anybody explicitly proposing this policy, but that is how it is working, specifically regarding young Arabs and Oriental Jews with college diplomas that are recruited into government service.

Productivity has grown so fast that agriculture, once the main human occupation, requires less than 2% of the workforce. Factories employ only a few thousand persons in actual production. The famous Israeli start-up sector employs no more than ten thousand smart people. That leaves the vast majority of Israel's growing population irrelevant and superfluous.

Israel possesses four populations sinks for the unproductive: (1) the Armed Forces, that neutralizes three and half years of each young man's life and one month per year. A modern army, like a modern factory, needs few soldiers, and the real function of the Israeli army is to pin down potentially troublesome young people (without paying them salary) and to indoctrinate them in patriotism aka Zionism. Only a few middle class boys, like the heroes of the last Gaza operation, who were disproportionally from the high schools of Kever Benjamin city, Raanana, Hod Hasharon and Ramat Hasharon, make actual contact with the enemy. The rest are irrelevant.

(2) The education system, which consumes a third of the state's budget and creates infinite number of jobs like teaching autistics to solve puzzles and paraplegics to dance. And there are all those courses in psychology and zoogiut (couple relations). (3) The religion establishment, which maintains and  occupies thousands of doctrine instructors and mashgichim (inspectors of ritual correctness of foodstuffs). The number (4) is the State bureaucracy and regulatory systems, which occupy about a third (my estimate) of the salaried population and cost about half of the GNP.

At last a politician with convictions

The Orthodox rabbi Rafi Peretz is our new Minister for Education. That in itself is a novelty, since it has been centuries since a fanatic Padre was in charge of education in any Western country. Maybe in Spain, under Franco.

The Minister started by offending our Diaspora brothers, saying that they were causing a second Holocaust through intermarriage. The American donors, with their beautiful blonde schikse wives and children, were shocked to be compared to Hitler's henchmen, sending Jews into oblivion. An hour later, he revealed that homosexuals can be "converted" to straight machomen and that he himself converted more than one, strengthening their repressed male principle. The Government announced that Minister Peretz does not represent the official position. Many of the current batch of European leaders are male and female homosexuals and we have no business insulting them or anybody.

In a way, I am glad we have leaders that are not influenced by Western decadence and dare to think differently. 

Living with Cannibals

It is becoming evident that the Neanderthal people hunted Humans and defleshed them with flint knives. The pic shows the cutmarks left on the bones - the Neanderthals liked the taste of human flesh and left only the bare bones. The two species coexisted in the same places at the same time, a situation that must have been uncomfortable for our ancestors. Eventually, those bestial Neanderthals died off (because genetic overload, vide Greg Cochran) or we exterminated them (in self defense, that goes without saying). 

The co-evolution of this two brother species must have been intense, and in the end, we humans were trained to fight as a group. That was not easy, because in war defecting is always the best option. But not only war was involved, there was also much sex, as humans still carry 2 to 5% Neandertal genes and the Neanderthals must have got some of ours. Clearly, it was not a pure dog-eat-dog relationship, sometimes it was also a dog-fuck-dog affair.

Thinking on this, I may have discovered the evolutionary secret of the singular beauty of the White female. When a girl with cute baby face, long light hair and shining colored eyes fell in the brutal hands of a Neanderthal male, he must have asked himself: To eat her or to fuck her, that is the question. The Neanderthals exerted a strong selective pressure on our race, that caused our girls to become what they are. The Neanderthal selection may have acted on males too, who knows. There were no Neanderthals in Africa, so Africans escaped having to evolve beauty and intelligence. 

Industrializing the Palestinians

The ministry of Health is dead afraid of Salmonella infection of eggs (and coli in lettuce) is trying to end the small cafeterias preparing on site egg and salad sandwiches. They want sandwiches prepared in large factories that can be inspected and supervised, and the sandwiches sold in vacuum plastic with date of production and the stamp of the ministry. It makes sense, and in general there is an improvement in the quality of Israeli foodstuffs. Of course, lots of small eateries are going to be put out of business.

Now I am working on a boiled egg factory, that would sell sterile pasteurized hard eggs to those sandwich factories and restaurants. The entrepreneur is a Palestinian Arab owner of the underground parking space (pic)  in an Arab town's industrial area and his Jewish partners. They bought Chinese machinery, the instructions are in Chinese, which no one here able to read them. The Arab is religious and built a small mosque above. There is a problem with kashrut, not because his religion but because Jewish rules forbid eating blood, and the planned process will not eliminate eggs with "hashash" - suspicion that an egg with some blood may get mixed with the others. The food expert says that hiring a full-time ultraorthodox mashgiach (ritual supervisor) may solve the issue. A black kaftaned Jew wandering around with a Gemara in his hands, in an Arab factory, will be a curiosity. I sensed no hostility in the place. In general, I work a lot with Palestinians, and never found any stress in their attitude, I think the supposed Arab-Jewish hostility is non-existent at street level. It is something invented at Western universities, that is what they think should be, and the Arabs tell them what they think they want to hear. 

The King of the West and the King of the East divide Earth

In 1567 the King of Spain (pic) was engaged in several fronts: the Turks (Lepanto), the English (the Armada) while organizing expeditions to conquer China. The Portuguese already were established in Macao, so the Spanish had to settle further in Manila as the forward base facing South China. Manila and the Far East was attached to nearest Spanish center, in Mexico. In 1567, the local government of Mexico City (the Cabildo) sent a petition to Felipe II demanding

“repartir la tierra de las dichas islas de Poniente y de la China, perpetuándolas entre los descubridores y pobladores”. 

That is, to divide the land of the Western Islands (Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, etc. are Western regarding them from Mexico) and China, and grant formal titles of property to the discoverers and settlers. The Spaniards in Mexico, a large kingdom recently conquered and divided among Cortes and his soldiers, felt themselves numerous and powerful enough to ask the King to allow them conquer China and grant them royal titles of property. 

Those were the years when the Spanish and the Portuguese kings divided among themselves the planet: Portugal got Africa and Brazil, Spain - Mexico and Peru and the Far East (China). Today we would say they were suffering from megalomania and hubris: but no, they meant it. 

God will provide

History suggests there will be a recession soon.

I took that from the last The Economist. The sentence echoes the anxiety taking hold of the financial world, and why? Because everything is too good to be true, to last. Cannot last, they tremble at night, we are getting too rich and not one black cloud in the sky. Ten good years, the statistics are against the eleventh. In fact, statistics say nothing of the sort, past drawings have no effect on the next one, in roulette, the ball can fall on red hundred times and then the one hundred first too.

I had a conversation with the bank manager, he tried to convince me that my portfolio is VERY RISKY and should invest on Bank of Israel bonds. That have negative yield but are... SAFE!

I don't know if recession, earthquake, the Angel Gabriel or the Solaran space expedition will arrive tomorrow or never, but I reject the concept that their long absence MUST mean that their coming is around the corner. I always succeeded in my dangerous adventures, and I always lament the many, wonderful, exciting opportunities that I let go because of small faith.

Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither

do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly

Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?

Moldbug shocks me

Moldbug writes: "50 years ago, Detroit was a thriving metropolis, the fourth largest city in America. It had no presentiments whatsoever of any imminent disaster. Today it is a burned-out ruin, more or less. This is the sort of objective phenomenon that, if you’re a student of history, you can’t help but try to explain.." 

Moldbug links to an old  promotional clip proudly declaring that Detroit has "the best water of the world." That publicity point stuck in my mind, as I have been following the water quality catastrophe of Detroit and neighboring Flint, and the "National Emergency" of lead poisoning of their drinking water. How did that happen?

Moldbug's article brings to the foreground the nowadays inconceivable idea that government could be an instrument working for MY benefit, not for implementing some utopic nonsense or to win over the voting lumpen proletariat. The lucidity of Moldbug cuts like a knife' for example, he asks why San Francisco's school administration votes, year after year, for the expensive and complicated school busing scheme, trying to impose unwanted social equality while causing much inconvenience to everybody and specially the middle class they represent. I would think that the closing anecdote is imagined, if it was not so ordinary and everyday.

We need a modern Karl Marx who can make clear how society works and for whom. Marx founded a movement explicitly for the industrial worker class of England and Germany and without any shame proposed a dictatorship for their benefit. He had the courage of saying out loudly the word "dictatorship". Who dares today to proclaim that democracy is not working for us and that any day it may cause the sudden collapse of all, just like Flint and Detroit?

I am old man and past the age of politics, so Moldbug's ideas are just entertainment for me personally. I have known Detroit then and know it now, but no one ever had put the picture "before and after" so clearly in front of my eyes. It is shocking. BTW, last week we had a large Ethiopian riot in this country, I and my family were immobilized for four hours in the traffic, and the police did nothing. We too said nothing and did nothing, we accepted silently our suffering. We watched Black teenagers running around in the streets, boys and girls, looking as they owned the city and us.

The Radio-Kabbalist

Around midnight the famous radio kabbalist is on the air. People phone and ask for diagnosis and solutions, the kabbalist identifies on the run the issue, reads aloud a relevant chapter of his book (I assume it must be relevant, because he mentioned seraphim and other creatures), and gives advice to the crying sufferer. In all the cases he identified the problem as pertaining to זיווגים  zivoogim, that is, pairing = coupling, and he always appeared right. One old maid cannot find husband, an old woman feels his husband stopped loving her, a man left his wife but is unable to have intercourse with his new girlfriend, and so. The kabbalist told this man that there is something still linking him with her wife, and discovered that their engagement rings were stored in proximity, he was told to give away her ring and purify the house burning candles in certain hours of the night; the old maid was led to discover that a rival was "evil-eyeing" her and was told to collect sand from a cemetery and spread it on the suspected rival's door, and so. The kabbalist was very fast and diagnosed the most "reasonable" cause, dictated a convincing counter-action and people went away happy and thankful.

If we accept the magical aspect of human sexual relationships, the kabbalist is like a doctor with a keen eye providing solutions that (in that context) sound perfectly logical and probably - effective. It is fascinating to realize that most of the people live in an alternative invisible universe, where celestial creatures fly over their heads and powerful magical forces cause to fall in or out of love, make sick and kill innocents and gold engagement rings make healthy men impotent. It was early morning when I shut down the radio, concluding that (radio) kabbalah is entertaining, harmless and surely helps many. 

TEMASEK: We beat more pessimistic expectations (= we lost less money than they said)

Temasek, the Singapore national investment fund, published its report, and it is not good. Actually they lost money, in the midst of world financial bonanza, while NASDAQ lifted 15% and interest rates are negative. Brett, the chief adviser, sweetened the pill saying that "Temasek will be seeking opportunities to generate long-term yield and it may also have more time to prepare. The fact that it beat more pessimistic expectations suggests it’s adapting well to a challenging environment.” 

Does he mean that till now they were seeking short-term yield? and that they had no time to prepare? If a fund is losing money in a booming world economy, is it adapting well? Really?

I am getting to the point that stopped believing that famously smart people are that. The person whom I find consistently more intelligent than I am, Gregory Cochran, has stopped blogging. I miss him. I hope he is well. 

Chinese Artistic Dance

Chinese serious dancing is difficult to digest for a Westerner, it must be learned to appreciate and love. It is like Ferro Quina Bisleri, an old Argentine bitter aperitif, a taste that has to be cultivated.

Ottoman Cadastre say Turkey Owns 26 Countries

Turkey has been holding the land registration of 26 countries that inherited from the Ottoman Empire. This treasure can provide documentation for unending real estate disputes. The Sultan Abdel Hamid II alone had fifty large properties in Jerusalem, which now may be claimed by his descendants. The Sultan had 13 legitimate wives and 17 kids and hundreds of descendants, all hungry to get rich fast. It is probable we could also find the famous "Charter" (agreement) assigning South Syria (Palestine) to the Zionist Movement. Herzl paid for it in sacks of gold, but it could not be enforced while that gonef (Armin Vambery's word, he knew him well) was Sultan. 

The fate of America if China wins

Fourth of July is the best time to wonder what should happen to the American people if the current America vs China silent war ends with Chinese victory.

We can model that scenario using the Chinese treatment of the Tibetan or the Uyghur population. The fate of the Tibetans is no more of interest of the world media: they have been assimilated into the Chinese state and they do not exist anymore as a political, ethnic, cultural or biological entity.

The Uyghurs are of more recent interest, and the State Department estimates that 3 million of them are residing in concentration camps, being re-educated. From 5 to 50% of the adult/active population are there learning Chinese and being transmuted into Han. I am impressed by the watchtower technology pictured above (from Quartz): it is much better that anything I have seen in Israel or elsewhere. Symmetric, clear straight lines, esthetic, non-menacing, functional.

Science fiction reveals the inner life of a people, and Chinese scifi is horrific. The Solarans terrorize humanity into submission and what is the fate they dictate to us? All humanity has to move to Australia. When food there becomes scarce, the Solaran praetor answers: How can be famine when there is so much fresh meat walking on two? Solarans, aka Chinese, are not a sentimental race.    

Palestinian Terrorists Pay Israeli Income Tax

Taxes are no laughing matter in Israel, yet one of the funniest things I discovered is that the Israeli Tax Authority deducts Income Tax from the payments received by Palestinian Terrorists formerly or currently jailed in Israel. The payments in the year 2018 totaled 502 million shekels (15 million US dollars). The average income tax being 30%, the Tax Authority pocketed 4.5 million dollars in 2018. The terrorists and their families receive monthly payments from the Palestinian Authority, financed by donations from the European Union and the rich Gulf Sheikhdoms. To maintain the usual income levels of the murderers aka freedom fighters, their salaries were increased as from January 2019 to compensate for the tax deduction.

I think that the tax dis-incentivates the fomenting terrorism by anti-Israeli States. The more terror, the more income for the Israeli Tax Authority. 

They must know something

America in full has arrived here. Blacks are protesting police violence. A White policeman has killed a Black youth and the Black community is burning down cars and shops all over the country. The Black was an Ethiopian "Jew", 18 years old, imported six years ago, drop-out from school who was being entertained in a local violent youth club by two social workers. They went outside for a cigarette in the nearby park and they had a fight and stone-throwing. A policeman passed by and tried to separate them, feared for the children and then for his life and shot him.

It was a big and irreparable mistake by the Iraqi Chief Rabbi to declare these Ethiopian highland natives - descendants of the Jewish tribe of Dan. Now they are here in mass and coming more, filling the special schools for retarded and occupying armies of social workers. Only the religious section of the Israeli population tries to avoid letting them into their schools and yeshives, silently subverting Israel's liberal laws. Why the religious are able to recognize that the Ethiopians are not our people, while the secular religion-less majority is powerless and paralyzed? I lost my religion when scientific studies confirmed that praying has no effect on the outcome, it is just magical rituals, and the Talmud is a collection of ancient magical nonsense. Yet, yet, the believers are the only people here acting sanely. We the rest who think ourselves rational, are sick.