Cat piss nation

The cat parasite Toxoplasma gondii drives crazy mammals to the point that mice infected gets so excited by the smell of cat piss that instead of running for its life, it tries to mount the cat. Which devours the mouse, parasite included. Half of all humans carry the cat parasite, but I ponder if in Israel it is not 100%. Young Israelis undertake extreme adventure trips and die falling off high cliffs in Indonesia, get eaten by jungle crocodiles and so. If they make it back here, they start up risky high-tech businesses and get rich in no time. 

Falsifying Clark's Farewell to Alms

Greg Clark's theory says that the lower classes in England failed to reproduce their numbers and were replaced gradually by the children of middle and upper class people. Since they had higher IQs and other parameters, the process produced a harmonious and effective society that brought about the Industrial Revolution. (*)

I found a Chinese study that evaluated the effect of the brutal replacement of the middle class by the poorest and lowest class as happened after the Communist conquest of China in 1949.  Its conclusion is that the social restructuration had lasting effect and the descendants of the pre-1949 middle class never recovered their grandfather's positions. If Clark's theory is correct, the high IQ families should have recovered their status by this time, but they did not. 

It would be interesting to study what happened in Taiwan and Hong Kong where this social engineering did not take place, but rich families migrated with their properties and professional privileges. Every Chinese society advanced in these 70 years, yet Taiwan and HK's per capita GNP is more than triple of the mainland. 

In comparison, the children and grandchildren of the ruling class in Nazi Germany did recover very fast their high status twenty thirty years after WWII, and the same happened, in Hungary, were the Christian fascist middle class silently recovered its social status in the sixties.  Hungarian Jews, that lost all their properties and were enslaved under the fascist regime, raised even faster everywhere they moved. From the paper: 

Chinese Communist Revolution was a class-based revolution with peasants as its main supporters. In 1949, the Chinese government soon registered every citizen as belonging to 1 of 3 broad classes according to his or her presumed role in the revolution: “good class” (“red class” revolutionary cadres, revolutionary soldiers, and revolutionary martyrs as well as industrial workers and poor and lower-middle peasants), middle class (middle- and upper-middle peasants, urban routine staff, small businessmen, intellectuals, and professionals), and “bad class” (also called the “black class,” including landlords, rich peasants, capitalists, capitalist roaders, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, and “bad elements,” such as criminals). This classification scheme was largely property based. 

One of the most visible and most consequential policies was the distribution of educational resources in favor of good-class children at the expense of bad-class children. Redistribution strategies included rapidly expanding education at all levels, opening special schools for government cadres only, and developing college admission policies that aimed to increase the enrollment of good-class students and restrict the number of bad-class students. More than 60 y have passed since these policies were first implemented. Most grandchildren of the revolutionaries have now completed their educations. A natural question to ask is whether these preferential policies actually succeeded or failed to transform the social stratification order. 

That may mean that the pre-Communist social stratification was not based on hereditary advantage like high IQ. Unlike in England and Europe. Or something else.

(*) I linked to The Telegraph because google did not produce even one faithful summary of Clark's thesis, all the references are misleading and untrue. I think there is a serious effort to confuse the people, and the motive is to maintain social harmony. "They" are treating us like violent, slightly moronic children. Pic source. 

About the Hostel World

"I am not of this world" was my feeling when doing permitting work in Yaffo, last week. It was (is) a hostel with an alcoholic bar that needed the municipal business permit. It was midday, and quite hot outside, but cool and clean inside. I was received by a young Arab who was having lunch on a communal table. My first impression was that it was some kind of whorehouse: ten or more European girls and one or two boys laying on large divans (bedlike sofas) in the communal hall, enjoying the fresh air and the background music. I am a fat old Jew, managed to ignore the environment and focus on my job of checking the sanitary facilities (the hostel asked for 80 guests, and the obsolete Israeli regulations demand a certain number of male urinals & pissoirs and female toilets - the hostel complies with those and other obsolete laws). I inspected the hot water supply and pressure of the firefighting water system and so. The pic reflects the decoration (I did not take the pic for the bathing beauties, but for the water infiltration problem). Only this morning, while reading an article about a Tallinn hostel I started to digest what I have seen. Tel Aviv has famous gay hostels, now I am curious how they look. These businesses are in my town and my country, so actually I cannot truly say that I am not of this world.  

Brasil is no Friend of the Swedish Friend of the Earth

The worldwide protest movement led by a Swedish teenager suffering from Down's Syndrome (pic) is causing unease in the Third World. She is saying that Brasil is not protecting the Amazonas rainforest and is endangering Planet Earth's atmosphere. The Brasilians understand this as a direct menace, she is demanding that the Amazonas should be taken from Brasil and made an international Nature Park. To me this is sheer colonialism, the natives are happy, irresponsible children that cannot be trusted with the land, which should be given to the guardianship of Whites. 

What is happening in Spain?

Births in Spain. Year 2018. Provisional data

	Value	Variation
Total Births	369.302	-6,07
Girls	179.480	-5,89
Boys	189.822	-6,25
Of a spanish mother	293.118	-7,57
Of a foreign mother	79.184	4,11
Variation respect the same period of the last year The population of the barrio of Buenos Aires where spent my formative years was mostly immigrant Spanish and Italian. The Spanish boys were practicing Catholics, they went to church and followed a moral code. The Italians were less formal and more loose. The owner of the house we rented, Mr Emilio Arutti, was a peasant from Andalucia, he was very mild and decent, I loved him. They were a loving, harmonious family, while my home was a nest of high-strung  immigrants always fighting and shouting.  His only daughter was unmarried and ten years older than me. We were alone in many opportunities and she was open and friendly, and I was a stupid boy. I left home at 16 and was virgin till an enterprising woman took me to bed and sat on me.  Well, the Spanish people seem to be disappearing. A quarter of the births if by foreign mothers, meaning that a serious change is going on. 8 births per 1000, that is, an increasingly negative growth. While in Denmark, Germany and mostly in the USA there is an active internet debate about this very same issue, in Spain there is none. They seem resigned to this reality. It is not that the Spanish are less race-aware than other Western peoples, they instituted the Limpieza de Sangre laws in 1500 and closed down their society for five hundred years. No Jews live in Spain since 1492, so no one can accuse us of being the cause of their demise. The table is from INE, the Spanish Statistical Institute. The statue represents a Spanish adventurer, Francisco Pizarro, a bastard from Extremadura, whose small but vigorous band visited the Inca sanctuary of Pachacamac and deflowered all the Virgenes del Sol.

Kardan: Buy? Sell? Do Nothing?

Kardan is holding company that owes the double of its presumed assets. Its owners sold all their shares before Kardan become almost worthless. Kardan has three assets that has been trying to sell for more than three years: TAHAL, the Dalian Mall and AVIS Ukraine. They almost sold Tahal for 100 million sheqels to Fortissimo Fund. Tahal, and I worked twenty years for that consulting company, is worth little to nothing. After Government subsidies stopped, I wondered how they were able to pay my salary. I am watching and waiting. 

Missing My Turn to Get Rich

Two unnoticed changes in Israel's building permits "industry" are causing me problems: One, the Government is starting to tackle the illegal building activity that has brought us a situation that most of the public land has been occupied by unrecognized villages, of Jewish settlers in Samaria but specially by the Bedouins in the Negev. In the past, the Government ignored the intensive building taking place in Arab villages. The Arabs and their Jewish friends had an effective international lobby that made almost impossible to bulldoze a standing and occupied building. The European Union would protest the inhumanity of throwing into the streets a poor Arab family of an aged sheikh with four wives and twenty little innocent children. The EU would automatically fund the rebuilding of the structure in the same place. Encouraged by  President Trump's backing, Netanyahu's last government started to act and illegal buildings are being bulldozed by the hundreds and the pics published in the media. It has caused a panic in the Arab but mostly in the Jewish sectors. This year, everybody is trying desperately go legal and to get a permit.

Second, the permitting bureaucracy has been strengthened and an additional layer of inspectors has been added. Once, the drawing plans were signed by non-professional bureaucrats, but now they are studied by dedicated full time specialists that enforce all the regulations and standards. These new inspectors enjoy their power of rejecting drawings for minor errors even if the error is non-compliance with a long-forgotten, never-enforced, idiotic colonial-era municipal order.

The result is that I have been inundated with work orders and the prices have doubled. It is a veritable bonanza for permitting engineers like me, with twenty years of activity and a wide network of contacts and publications. This bonanza arrives when I am about to close shop, as I am a generation after retirement age and losing patience with the mindless bureaucracy. Just when my window of opportunity to get rich arrives, I am too old. I shall miss it. As my father used to say, "Son, you will have to inherit less".

A world in peace and prosperity

The papers are full of frightening bad news but the reality is that humanity is passing through a period of almost complete peace and absence of serious wars and internal strife. Most of the countries have no internal rebellions going on, and physical violence has almost disappeared in most societies. Aparently the fake media is succeeding in pacifying the masses and their grievances have been reduced to the level of perceived impoliteness. Prolonged peace has brought increasing prosperity. There has been no famines - physical hunger - in the last seventy years, and food is abundant and very cheap. On the other hand, several Chinese societies - Singapore, Taiwan,  China itself, as well as the Germanic states, are growing fantastically rich. Over 15,000 dollar per month salaries are common in Singapore (and San Francisco). Stock exchanges, that represent the wealth of the saving classes, are inflating: people that has savings in the NASDAQ and Shanghai Bourse have seen their worth rise 20-30% this year. TASE increased only 13% and I am not complaining. The family has grown and more babies are on the way. All this is too good to be true, too good to last. שנה טובה

When the engineer fails...

Change of vantage point

Yesterday was Saturday and a cloud of exhaustion descended on me, I could not focus on the drawing in front of me. With chemical help,  I slept the night and now feel less tired. But it is becoming clear that I am not up to my projects, I have entered the different phase of my life and should start retirement. Of course I am afraid of the "golden years", although all my friends have retired and spend their time travelling in the old country. What can I do in Vienna and Budapest? Last time I found the Viennese schwarzwald torte with solid margarine - uneatable, and the Hungarian goulash came with greasy chips. The turn-of-century buildings of Budapest are uncomfortable and unsafe (pic. my old neighborhood, VII kerulet). What can I do? 

Golden shower in Iran

The boys of my barrio were crazy for football but we had no money to buy tickets, so we used to steal into the Velez Sarsfield stadium shortly after the match had started and the guards had left their posts. The tribunes were crowded and people had to relieve themselves in-situ. We had to pass under them with golden drops falling on our heads. We said "it is raining", pretending that there was nothing to notice. 

Iran is attacking left and right and lately sent a well-coordinated air attack on Saudi oil facilities. The Saudis ignored the attack, their papers printed pics of the King attending an exciting camel race. The Americans, ultimate guarantors of the kingdom, did not react. Saudi spends some 50 billion dollars per year on Western weapons, they have the AWACS capable of observing every bird shitting in the air. Iran, with its hundred million inhabitants, spends a fifth of that money on weapons but has an hyper-aggressive policy. 

Iran has been ruled for fifty years by a clerical dictatorship. The CIA easily ousted Mossadegh but does nothing against the ayatollahs. Maybe the West thinks that the ayatollahs in their black skirts and turbans are troublesome but not really dangerous, so let them keep raving, shooting fireworks and frightening the Saudis so they keep buying more weapons? 

The story of Honi HaMe'agel the Rainmaker

From time to time, the weather disagrees with human desires and there is no rain for a few years, or it rains too much and floods the streets, or it is too hot or too cold. It is told that there was a long drought in Jerusalem, and climate activist Honi sat in protest in the sand and menaced God that he will not move  from the circle in the sand he drew till rain comes. God relented and sent him rain, Honi was saved and became famous. His protest was the right thing to do and was supremely effective. It worked so well that in our days thousands, worldwide, are protesting against the climate (pic.: Australian schoolgirls) demanding that it change. They all want to show how much they want to save the planet. Pathetic, I say. Wish them success. 

Bitterness

My Hod Hasharon project was rejected by the Water Company. Two of my proposals were rejected this morning, I am too expensive. In the bank, the cashier retard credited me for 406 sheqels when the cheque was for 460. I had to wait half an hour for the correction. On the street, I saw a nice female bottom, tried to maintain the distance but in two minutes she was 50 meters ahead of me. Younger women walk very fast relative to old fat sedentary engineers. No chance that I catch a girl anymore in my life. "Uno", de Goyeneche:

Déjame que llore como aquél
    que sufre en vida la tortura
    de llorar su propia muerte.
        Uno está tan solo en su dolor...
    Uno está tan ciego en su penar...
    Pero un frío cruel, que es peor que el odio,
    punto muerto de las almas,
    tumba horrenda ...

Observation: I wanted to illustrate this note with the famous picture of Groucho Marx chasing a secretary around the table. Nowhere to find that pic. The images offered by Google are girls chasing boys, or muscular girls competing in a track. It seems it is forbidden to show images of females being chased or in a weaker situation than boys. Also lots of frightening posters of criminals and police emblems - as if to discourage would-be sexual harassment perpetrators. It is a new world out there. As Steven Sailer writes: You can go to jail for noticing. 

Israel voting pattern

Lee Kuan Yew, the father of Singapur, said that in a multi-ethnic country, there is no right nor left, each ethnic group votes its own party. Lee was a genius: when the English colonialist surrendered to the Japanese army, he learnt Japanese so well that found employment in the intelligence service of the Japanese occupation government. Israel is a super-classic multi-ethnic society and people vote as they were following Lee's insight, each one according its identity. 

The United Arab List succeeded in mobilizing the Arab sector and is now the third party in Israel. It is a very important political force. The Moroccan Jews voted massively for the Shas party. The secular Jewish sector of the kibutzim and the politically correct academicians voted for Labor and Meretz. The large religious sector voted for their representatives. There is no similar identity group in the West, nowhere Catholics marry only Catholics and vote for a Catholic party. Jewish religious people marry mostly in-group and is becoming a well-defined ethnia. Russian immigrants vote for Our Home party. The secular majority has divided itself according to the intensity of its hate of the Jews, and I mean the religious Jews, the only group that seriously follows the Jewish religion. I could say that "antisemitism" is the main issue between Netaniyahu (allied to the religious) and Ganz/Lapid, who hate the Jews. The argument against the Jews is that they are parasites, do not work and do not serve in the army. More or less the Nazi accusations against the Jews in Europe. The Jews do not work but exploit the majority, and they avoid fighting in the nation's wars. And have too many children. The terminology used by the press - here and in the West - speaks about right and left, the seating arrangement in the Assembly during the French Revolution. Lee Kuan Yew would have known better. 

Graphic story of the extinction of Hungarian Jewry

A genealogical tree of a typical Hungarian Jewish family. I know dozens like this. Large families in early 20th. Century, the abrupt cut with the appearance of Eichman in Hungary, and the postwar childlessness and dying off. 

No end to regulation

• Kanye West constructed four "Star Wars"-inspired structures on his property in Calabasas, California, which were intended to house the homeless. The dwellings were supposed to be temporary prototypes, but a Los Angeles county inspector said they had concrete bases so they looked permanent. Instead of securing the necessary permits, West opted to tear the homes down.
• The huts are crazy and the regulator is crazy. Find the difference with a central European country ruled by a would-be architect dictator who levels the houses he does not like? 

I thought vital Saudi installations were protected by the US

I was wrong. No one was watching no one saw anything. No one even knows from where the attackers came from and why.

P.S.: Two days after the attack, I can't find a declaration by Saudi authorities. Missing are the typical Arab war harangues swearing vengeance. Their silence is mystery.

Apparently no human was hurt, it was a surgical drone attack. Iran says they were not them. The Yemenis assumed responsibility but the attack came from the north and they are too far to target four (see pic) tanks with such precision. My take: Someone is trying to provoke a war against Iran, probably the Ayatollahs themselves.  From Kever Benjamin city, it looks like Iran understood that its efforts to attack Israel are met with strong resistance, while Saudi has no military resources. Its protector, the USA, wants to avoid war at all costs. Trump said: Iran is guilty but I don't want war. As if war was something one wants or does not want. Like in poker, pass (*).

The winter is coming and Europe needs heating oil.  Europe has even less desire to protect militarily the oil flow. Iran and other "rogues" have been saying for ages that the West has lost its mojo and is a "paper tiger". Now they seem to believe in it. Not good.

----
(*)  What is a pass in poker? Pass - To refrain from calling or betting when it is your turn to act. To “pass" is to indicate that one is folding when facing a bet which don't intend to call.

Reading Japan, understanding China

中原よ。

地球は冬で寒くて暗い。

ぢゃ。

さやうなら。

  

Nakahara, friend!

The earth is wintry, cold and dark.

Well then, good-bye.

I am reading Reischauer's history of Japan. Surprising that the Japanese use a supremely difficult writing system, worse than the Chinese. Europeans also used difficult systems in the past, like writing in Latin. But it was abandoned, the Japanese stuck with it. I also understood that the Chinese Communist Party is following the Japanese model of modernization, only that the Japanese were lucky to have the Americans to impose on them what they longed to do. For example, democracy and agrarian reform. The Chinese know that the dictatorship of the proletariat does not fit them, but they cannot find the way to wiggle out of the format and dissolve the Communist Party and reform in two or three competing parties. The West should not fear China. It is fated to become wealthy as Japan and South Korea, and then, stagnate. BTW, Nakahara was a poet, died at age thirty. 

Paris Unfit for Human Habitation

460 tons of lead tiles of the Notre Dame Cathedral vaporized last month and Parisians are breathing it in the poisoned air. This is a long term quite untreatable problem. The metal fallout formed a dust that has settled on the city and contaminated the soil and is stuck in air conditioning ducts. Measured lead concentrations  in areas close to the cathedral were between 10 and 20 grams per kilogram.

10 to 20 grams lead per kilogram equals 20,000 milligram/kg that is 20,000 ppm. About 10 to 50 ppm (parts per million) lead occurs naturally in soils, and more in urban areas. Universally, soil lead levels are associated with elevated blood levels in humans. Studies show high blood Pb levels are linked to  environmental conditions;  dry weather results in more suspended soil dust, which is breathed in by the population.

The Environmental Protection Agency allows concentrations of 400 ppm Pb in soils where children play and 1200 ppm in other areas of bare soil. The EPA doesn't have specific standards for a safe level of soil lead, but various organizations and researchers have attempted to come up with a number - somewhere between 300 and 600 ppm.  No doubt, the soil around the Cathedral is toxic and the place should be closed to tourists, or maybe, tourists allowed for short visits while protected by face-masks with anti-dust filter. Maybe Parisians should start to wear industrial dust-masks in the street, like the inhabitants of Beijing.  Left: Graph showing the concentration of lead particles in the air and the weather, in Detroit. Dry weather allows dust to contaminate the air and children's blood. All the soil in Paris and its buildings are contaminated and until decontaminated, unfit for human habitation.

One more reason for young Jews with children to move to Ashdod on the Mediterranean.

I think I'll buy TEVA

There is a worldwide shortage of cheap remedies, and the main producers are Mylan and Teva. They have been suffering from low prices dictated by the regulators, who never think about what are doing. Teva is very cheap, I bet it will survive the oxycontin issue and repay its debts, and become profitable again.

PS next day: TEVA continues to drop on TASE. In politics I am "oficialista" (always vote for the party in power) and in the bourse, contrarian. 

Mango Harvest

This summer we had a good yield in the mango plantation of Ramat HaShavim. Some mangoes were so low on the trees that even Arbel harvested a big one. 

Why there is no progress? Inelastically Supplied Jews

An academic paper confirms what I had long suspected: the factor impeding progress is the scarcity of what they call "genius" and "inelastically supplied superstar labor" and I call, with due modesty, "Jews". I mean real flesh-and-bone Jews, and also a close group of non-Jewish smart people. 

Digital versions of labor and capital can be reproduced much more cheaply than their traditional forms. This increases the supply and reduces the marginal cost of both labor and capital. What then, if anything, is becoming scarcer? We posit a third factor, ‘genius’, that cannot be duplicated by digital technologies. Our approach resolves several macroeconomic puzzles. Over the last several decades, both real median wages and the real interest rate have been stagnant or falling in the United States and the World. Furthermore, shares of income paid to labor and capital (properly measured) have also decreased. And despite dramatic advances in digital technologies, the growth rate of measured output has not increased. No competitive neoclassical two-factor model can reconcile these trends. We show that when increasingly digitized capital and labor are sufficiently complementary to inelastically supplied genius, innovation augmenting either of the first two factors can decrease wages and interest rates in the short and long run. Growth is increasingly constrained by the scarce input, not labor or capital. We discuss microfoundations for genius, with a focus on the increasing importance of superstar labor.

Imagining my fate in Venezuela

It was 1976 or so when they knocked on the door of the apartment my parents were renting out to a young couple. The neighbors said people without uniforms came and kidnapped the terrorists. That was a time when it was enough that one's phone number was in the phonebook of a suspected person to be sentenced to death. May be they were in fact looking for me? The same day I burned all my books and went to the Venezuelan consulate in Buenos Aires to get a visa. Venezuela was then a most prosperous democratic country, with fantastic oil income, many young professionals were leaving Argentina and moving to Caracas. Others went to Spain, Mexico, Italy, Brazil. The consulate was crowded and I could not even get inside. I talked to the people in the corridor and got the impression that the situation was much more urgent than I had thought. People were crying of fear and desperate to escape. I had a valid visa to the USA and an open Lufthansa ticket, so next day I was in New York.

The point is that Venezuela has self destroyed and seven or ten million have escaped and found refuge in Colombia and other hellholes. Almost all the Jews have left for Miami, certainly those who arrived from Argentina to share Venezuela's (temporary) oil bonanza and safety. Venezuela has been thoroughly ruined by Chavez and Maduro, the currency is worth nothing (pic) and its prospects are infernal as its oil production is falling and the price of the oil - collapsing. I did not like New York, and spent time drinking in the YMCA, then took the drunk decision to move on to Israel. Israel just had emerged from a big war and I was not sure it could survive. I was always Zionist, but my Aliyah - like everybody's - was not a clear-cut rational decision. In my drunken way, I had taken the best decision. I am at home. 

Vaca Muerta: The Cow is Dead

Vaca Muerta (Neuquén, Argentina) fracking project went in three years from discovery to full development (13,000 workers) and now to decay. With the current price of Brent at 56 dollar a barrel, Vaca Muerta cannot compete and is  sacking 1000 workers. Just as in the times of Rockefeller, the oil industry is suffering from cyclical chaos.  

Geffen

Corchito in Monte Hermoso beach

The short man is Corchito, a. Jorge Sogden, a local celebrity, with us the lifeguards. Corchito had crossed swimming the Laguna Sauce Grande, and before that, swam from Spain to Morocco. The pic was taken by the beach photographer fifty plus years ago, to his right (in the pic) it is me and then Socchi, my assistant lifeguard. I would not recognize myself today. The pic is in the local history museum, I am so old that have turned into a museum exhibit. 

Shakedi

The marrying kind

The grandson of the Chief of the Toldot Abraham Itzhak congregation  married the granddaughter of the Head of the Lelow Hassidic group. Toldot Abraham Itzhak is based on Jerusalem and grew out of the old Hungarian Yishuv of Jerusalem, while the Lelow Hassidim follow the old Rebbe from that Silesian (Polish/Prussian) village.

The old Hungarian Yishuv in Jerusalem was no more than a small extremely poor synagogue of old people who moved in the 17 and 18th centuries from Hungary to pray, die and be buried in the holy land of Jerusalem. Apparently, some married here and had issue. They subsisted from alms that were divided among themselves. The division of the alms was a permanent focus of strife, and there is a vast literature of letter in Hebrew and Yiddish accusing each other of laxness and sinfulness, and don't give to him but sent money to me. It is astonishing that from that community of poison-pen letters-writing pious beggars grew out the current dynamic (pic) group.

Lelow is a small village (population 2100) on the Bialka river. The Nazis killed almost all the Jews of the place, but the few that survived the Holocaust are rebuilding the community. I presume they are now more numerous than ever. Once a year they visit the tomb of the founding rebbe, to the astonishment of the native Poles of the village. They had not seen a Jew in ages. Once a Gur Hassid told me about his visit to the Polish village of Gur, where his sect was founded. He could not believe that such remote, muddy, small village out in nowhere could have been the cradle of their current community. But that is the power of the compound interest equation. 

Israel Without Ashkenazim

Following Prof. Jamal's attack on European Zionists, lets imagine what would happen if the one and half million Ashkenazim leave Israel to Europe and America. They can easily do it, today even Sudan (!) invites the Jews to come back and settle in that country.

I don't want to bring up South Rhodesia as an example what could happen here. Thirty years after the English left, the richest country of Africa became a "failed state" with no electricity nor food.

Should European Jews leave Israel, "Oriental" Jews surely would not because they have nowhere to go, and probably also the Russian/Ukrainian non-Jewish population would stay. Oriental Jews are harder ("more primitive") than we are and would immediately impose a Middle Eastern style clerical-military dictatorship. The Islamic clerics associated with the Jewish theocrats would accuse Prof. Jamal of slandering Allah and he would never heard about again. Ethiopian Jews would implement the Bible mandates, and you know what it says about what to do with conquered females and subject tribes. The Russians are the best (probably better than Germans) fighters and they would coalesce in military formations and go sacking Arab villages here and there. Northern Europeans just love fighting. Like the Vikings, they would sail down the Red Sea and sack the wealthy coastal Saudi towns. Without steady inflow of Israeli subsidies, the King of Jordan shall not be able to pay the salaries of his Bedouin army and the country would fall into chaos. The High Priest in Jerusalem would declare that Edom is ours and always was, and so it will be.

Decadent, depopulated, impotent West would protest and do nothing, as does nothing when Third World peoples commit their policies, like the Indonesian army taking over Papua New Guinea, or Burmese military exterminating the natives. No one expects anything different from them. Arab and Persian dictatorships would easily accommodate fellow clerical/military regimes, that is, a poor oppressed Israel would stop exciting their envy and hate like we do. 

Ignorant Palestinian Professor fights Zionist Ghosts and Academic Rivals

I received an academic paper by Professor Amal Jamal from the University of Tel Aviv titled "Unveiling …".   Having read several academic papers criticizing Zionism from the Settler-Colonialist perspective, I am surprised (and I should not be) that they deal only with past European Zionist debates and publications and ignore the vast and far more important literature on Zionism in Jewish religious circles. I have never seen any quotation of the vast Zionist literature in the Jewish communities of the Islamic countries, before they were dispersed. European Zionism died with the Jews of Europe, and at least half of the "settler colonists" combatted by Tel Aviv University Professor Dr. Jamal are not White Europeans but brownish refugees from the Islam.  For them and also for the important religious sector, the legitimacy of Israel does not follow from the writings of secular European Zionist leaders, but from the belief in the promise written in the Bible. I should add that many of them would not even recognize Jamal's post-Emancipation secular leaders as Jews. It may be surprising to Prof. Jamal and his Western colleges to discover that Jews keep the Shabbat and eat only kosher food. From the Roman times till the Emancipation the concept of secular, non-religious Jews was unknown. 

I mean that these academics are discussing things that have been long abandoned and are irrelevant to Zionism 2019. The leading and most dynamic sector of the "settler" movement today are the religious youth, and they totally ignore the old post-Emancipation Zionism of Poland and the Galut, and follow the rabbinical leaders of the Jerusalem yeshivot. These religious leaders are extremely influential in the government, and their representatives will hold key ministries in the next government. While Prof. Jamal discusses what, say, proto-communist Moses Hess wrote in Germany two hundred years ago, he is totally ignorant of the ideological debates of the Jewish religious universe. Jamal's condemnation of assimilated European Zionists' thesis is irrelevant for contemporary leaders like Smotrich, who represents the "colonial settlers" that Jamal tries to debate and oppose. Jamal is fighting ghosts and the actual settlers. And he lives here and meets them every day.  

(I have a correction to make: Jamal does not fight dead White Jews, he fights his living rivals in the academy, the dominant post-Zionist professors. Once I realized it, it was all too obvious. He is not very talented at it, and twice or thrice falls into vulgar anti-Semitic conspiracy accusations, like "hidden" motives of Zionism). 

(I am intrigued by the concept of "settler colonialism". They had to invent this new label since they discovered that colonialism is done by colonialist country, and Zionism is an orphan without a mother country. So the settlers are, all by themselves and without being the emissaries of a colonial power, colonialists. All this bizarre definitions are to show that the Palestinians have no agency, they are innocent victims, and not, never, God-forbid, that there may be something wrong with them. That idea would be unconceivable, destructive of their self-image and their mental sanity.)  

Jamal et al ignore the whole universe of that created the ideology that the settlers are implementing. Jamal has no access to the ferocious debates maintained by the different yeshiva heads which contain the sole relevant thinking in the settler sector. Even if he should read a few of the numerous brochures and books of the Jerusalem literature, he would feel absolutely foreign and incomprehensible all that arguing about God's mandates and later comments, and could not find believable that there is an actual connection between those exotic elucubrations and actual moving to Samaria. In conclusion, it is possible that the people that understands the "settler colonialists" are the ayatollahs of Iran (pic), who do think in religious terms. They could maintain an equal-to-equal debate with contemporary Zionism. 

Adoniyahu, the Chief Minister

A 2,600-year-old seal inscribed with the name of "Adenyahu Asher Al HaBayit," meaning apparently  "Adenyahu by Appointment of the House," was uncovered in dirt excavated in 2013 near the Western Wall.  The owner of the seal was a high functionary of the Court of King Solomon. I think that the meaning of "Of the House" is  something like "Adoniyahu from the Government". 

Down Days

The Hod Hasharon 4 houses project is not approved and the client is shouting. Yesterday I had a fight with a regulator and I wrote to everybody that she knows nothing. She menaced me. I am feeling down. Sick and tired. On the other hand, my daughters and family took me to the sea, it was nice, but I am in no shape to swim far from the beach. I am more exhausted and less independent each day.

I designed a project and sent the file to the building company F. to prepare the PLT file and print it. They made a mess of it and the project was not approved. I don't know how to proceed. 

Immigrants Increase German Human Stock

Interestingly, the number of births by non-immigrant German women has been rising (last year, by 3%). I think that the presence of a large population of immigrants from countries with high birth-rates, such as Syria, has a positive impact on the native population. Even so, 23%  (184,700) of all newborns in Germany were born to non-German women. The natives and the immigrants are mutually affecting each other: the natives are adopting some of the cultural traits of the immigrants, although it is the immigrant group that is reducing drastically its fertility in the German anti-children environment. For those who know how difficult is to increase European natality, those 30,000 additional native German babies are a net gain;  a by-product of Angela's immigration.