Incredibly Stupid Scholarship on Israel

I will trace some moments in the hegemonic production of an isolationist approach to the study of “Jewish History” as crucial to a quite anomalous project in which the state created the nation—not simply in the metaphorical sense of fabrication, but also in the literal sense of engineering the transplant of populations from all over the world. From: “Rupture and Return: Zionist Discourse and the Study of Arab-Jews,” Social Text 75, Spring 2003, pp. 49-74

I keep reading academic papers on the phenomenon of Israel and keep being amazed and awed  (from awful) by their stupidity. First of all, they all describe the Mizrahi (Arabic speaking) Jews in the Muslim world as living in a paradise, and wonder at the historical fact that one day the all left their thousand years old existence and moved in mass to Israel. This voluntary population transfer is inexplicable and anomalous for Western academics, and they attribute it to Western colonial practice of recruiting manpower in the Third World, almost like the cotton planters in American South importing African slaves. Developing this imaginary parallel, they search for the smallest grievances of the Mizrahi in Israel, something that could be compared to the Civil Rights and so protest movements in America. As they say in German, if you only have a hammer (the AfroAmerican protest movement), then everything looks like a nail. Incredibly for this old Israeli, even the "boureka" (popular) movie of the fifties, Sallah Shabati, is being dismembered and misunderstood to prove their thesis and accidentally (or not) to provoke social divisions in Israel. The element Western academics lack and they don't even know it, is belief in God and the Torah, which explains all the Jewish experience. Without God, the Yemeni Jewish community starting to walk through enemy Saudi desert towards the embattled Promised Land, an event that did really happen, is amazing and inexplicable.

Apparently the Academia cannot digest that Zionism is proved right and Israel is a prosperous and powerful state in this Middle East swamp of failed states and savagery. I am working now in several projects in all cases hired by the Mizrahi businessmen, who have built fantastic enterprises in Israel. In my daily life, I wonder what these academics, many of them Jews themselves, are seeing and writing about.  My opinion is that they are trying desperately to force Israeli reality into the imaginary pattern of Western colonial academic discourse. It is like a woman trying on fashionable shoes three or four measures smaller than her foot and taking a few steps in front of the shop's mirror. It happens all the time and believe me, it is painful for her and for the observer too.

Dont kill yourself on your enemy's door

It is a Chinese saying: Do not kill yourself in your enemy's door". It appears that it was rather common to take vengeance by killing oneself in front of the hated person's door, so he will be accused of murder. Apropos today I drove near my town's military cemetery, and a group of soldiers just walked out. Sunday morning a boy (soldier) left his home (Sokolov St, a block away from my house) to join his unit that was about to move to the North but he did not arrive. A search was organized and his body was found near the train station. It was only announced that it had not been a criminal or terrorist act: the unsaid conclusion is that he killed himself. They never disclose suicide, to avoid others copying it. Every year dozens of IDF soldiers kill themselves. I don't understand why, because  army discipline here is very mild and deserters get maybe a month or two of prison - spent mostly painting stones in an open camp. Israel enjoys peace these days and there was nothing to fear in the tour in the Northern border. Evolution should have deleted long time ago suicide, the fact that it did not means that we still come with many factory defects.  

Permitting a large cookie factory

This morning I had a meeting with the Ministry engineer in a large cookie factory in Holon. It is 17 km from my home, but the traffic is so bad that it took me two hours in the car. The factory is in a large brute concrete industrial estate, full of workshops and no place to park - everywhere they were loading or unloading cars. The cookie factory is a Bucharan family business, these are Jews that had been cut off from the world for hundreds of years in a Central Asian oasis and they are extremely religious. The walls were decorated with wildly colored pictures of Oriental Jewish saints and thank-you memorials of their generosity. It employs two hundred diverse workers. The cookies are excellent.

I had submitted my proposal about two years ago, but only three months ago received the retainer and started the project. The Government Officers were very angry - everybody was shouting in Russian - but surprisingly, the actual observations were mild and sensible, and only near the end I discovered why the commotion. The Bucharan Haredi suffers from a socio-genetic defect that prevents him from telling a true word, even when it is a palpable, visible, innocent fact, moreover, even when it would be to his own advantage! This character flaw reveals, I guess, an instinctive terror of authorities.  It appears that they had hired some Russian engineer before me and he had submitted untrue data, embarrassing the Ministry people. Then he decided to accept my old proposal, hiding that he wanted me to solve his badly poisoned situation. As always, I designed an elegant, technically correct and doable design and today we met on the site to see how it will be carried out.

After two hours of walking around with drawings in hand, everything was agreed. Because of ignorance and panic, the Bucharan had tied himself into a slipknot and hanged himself. Having established that I am honest as well competent, the Regulator in chief received a cookie box and exited. I waited for a cheque, hoping also to be honored with a cookie, but nothing, so I approached a cute Asiatic girl who was portioning a chocolate cream cake and invited myself.

Calories that this old obese Jew needs not. 

The highest IQ people ever: How they organized their lives?

According to Galton, the highest IQ people ever were the Athenians. Their contemporaries agreed. Athens of Pericles (pic) was the cutting edge of human culture. Athens' alter ego was Sparta, its black twin separated at birth: they measured up each other in a terrible 28 year Peloponnesian war, and Sparta emerged superior.

Spartans were of the Dorian race, tall and slim and Nordic-looking. Originally they lived in four agricultural villages in the high Eurotas river valley when somewhere in the Greek Dark Ages they held an assembly and decided to give up subsistence farming and appropriate the surplus production of the Messenians living on the other side of the mountain. The Messenians were Dorians like themselves, and they were many: 200 to 400 thousand, against Sparta's 10 to 20 thousand. So they carefully organized themselves for this ambitious project.

Each Spartan gave up his land and gold, and they formed themselves in regiments. They stopped eating with their families and established communal messes, each one contributing food. They organized intensive military training, use of weapons and experimented with battle formations. They established the agoge, a comprehensive war school till age twenty when they were recruited into regular regiments. For almost a generation they fought the Messenians, till they conquered them and divided the land among the homoioi (the similars, that is, "pure" Spartans that completed the agoge and had been accepted in a mess as equals).

To maintain the Messenians submissive, they created murderous Cryptic Patrols that systematically culled off the stronger-looking peasants. It was not conceptualized as a dysgenic/dumbing down program of the enslaved population, only as precautionary policing.

Being in campaign most of the time, they got a taste for male love and failed to care for families. Men being away campaigning, the women managed the farm. Eventually, Sparta learnt the business of war so well that conquered whole Greece.

They only neglected to reproduce themselves. There was no way to make young warriors to marry. The commune imposed fines and public shaming, but no children were a-coming. They would not accept non-Spartans, they would not share their wealth and power with strangers. At the peak of their power, no more than 3 or 4 thousand full Spartan citizens were left, lording over a Greece of 5 million.

When Alexander descended from Makedonia, the Spartans could not muster opposition for lackof manpower. Sparta was depopulated and abandoned, it became a tourist attraction, like say Venice today, with its North African gondoliers singing as tour guides.

My conclusion is that high IQ is unsustainable, it is poison. Eugenic societies don't last. The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that Pericles' open, liberal democracy is superior (*). It is a paradox because rationally, it should not be so, but the fact is that it is so. 
------------    
(*) Note that its "openness" was strictly limited. Athens was an ethnic refuge or sanctuary in the extreme Southern corner of the Greek peninsula, surrounded by Dorian peoples like the Boiotians  that applied a permanent pressure to drive them into the sea. Almost all the Ionians migrated to the isles and to Asia Minor, and only Athens remained as the last Ionic settlement on the mainland. Not less racist than the Spartans, Athenians had a multilayer procedure to establish the genealogy of the ephebes (18 y.o.) applying for military service and full citizenship. Those founded of mixed blood were sold as slaves.   

How to keep the money in the family

Fortunes dissipate in the third generation, that is a well demonstrated fact. Dynasties last four-five generations, even adopting extreme endogamy like Egyptian Pharaohs or Alexander's  Διάδοχοι successor dynasties, they are unsustainable. Lasting elite groups in history are India's Brahmins (who maintain their status over two thousand years) and the Jewish people (upper middle class everywhere)  and possibly, European aristocracy (that emerged with Pepin of Landen and ruled till WWI - see pic of a representative selection of nine kings*).  In more diluted way, it appears that the Norman fighting elite that entered Great Britain maintains its position to these days. 

The "secret" of a lasting multigenerational elite position is moderate endogamy. Marrying within the group,  mostly among successful members and constantly dropping off the unsuccessful. It is almost impossible to follow this rule for long because humans are by nature promiscous and unattracted to the familiar (which explains the rarity of fertile sibling pairing). The dropping off happened naturally during harsh winters and famine years, no one was forced to do morally repugnant selections, but now subsistence is ensured. 

The opposite of "keeping the money in the family" i.e. losing elite position in one or a few generations, is exogamy. Mixing between human lines, which happens to be the norm in recorded history. I have seen that in the Dominican Republic where the Spaniards have completely dissolved. It is happening all over the world. That's how it is. Can't do a thing. Accept and enjoy.  

As an old man nearing the end of his life, with neither fortune nor position to transfer to the next generation, I don't care and lack the ambition to change reality. All I want now is to avoid depression/indolence and complete this Ramat Gan job, and write that article about sewage pretreatment that I am dodging for months. 

(*) None of the faces radiates intelligence, or am I prejudiced against antisemites?

The Gods Thirst for Human Blood

There is something terribly wrong with the human brain that invents phantasy gods, makes human images from wood and believes that they thirst for human blood, and if not supplied, they would be terribly punished. Crops would fail and there would be famine and epidemies, and the worst, they would be defeated and massacred in the next battle.

This lunacy is universal: human sacrifice was imperative for the Aztecs, the Inkas, African tribes, the Druidic Europeans … and now I am reading that even ancient Sparta did not escape from this craziness. The pic. shows the altar of Artemisia - Orthia, where human blood ran in abundance till historical times. This Spartan cult existed already in the 9th Century BC around a rectangular earthen altar near the river. Later it was upgraded with river stones and surrounded by a wall. The Romans built an amphitheater around to allow tourists to watch in all comfort the sadistic ritual.

Originally, the cult addressed a xoanon (wooden idol) (pic) of malevolent reputation. Pausanias writes that the four villages making up Sparta  fell to quarrelling, which led to bloodshed; many were killed at the altar and the rest died of disease. Whereat an oracle was delivered to them, that they should stain the altar with human blood. He used to be sacrificed upon whomsoever the lot fell, but Lycurgus changed the custom to a scourging of the ephebos, and so in this way the altar is stained with human blood. 

J's Prognosis: More bloodshed to be expected. 

The Post-China Balance

The size of China’s displacement of the world balance is such that the world must find a new balance. It is not possible to pretend that this is just another big player. This is the biggest player in the history of the world. Lee Kwan Yew. 

I am starting to appreciate the Singapore genius. The entrance of the Chinese people in the world scene has changed  everything. Few realize it, and even fewer (or none?) are courageous to think it over to the end.

American elite universities are unable to solve the dilemma of a balanced student body. If meritocracy is worth something, then the student body will be Chinese with a sprinkle of Ayers and Jews. If they opt for balanced democracy, they need to discriminate against the Chinese. In Malaysia and Indonesia the Chinese minority accepts second-rank citizenship. Is that the American solution too?

There are many Think Tanks in America and Europe mapping out the future. How will all this end? They are not saying. Maybe the end is unhappy.



Is it good for the Jews? The little we know about the Kaifeng Jews shows that most of the time they were rich and powerful. They travelled to Peking to take the Imperial Civil Service exam and were promoted to mandarin positions.

My aunt Kovacs spent the war as a refugee in Shanghai. Never said a bad word about the Chinese people. As far as I know, the Chinese helped them.

 The Chinese allow others to live and we shall be able to live with them. 

Bad News for POT and me

Deep under the North York Moors Area there is a reservoir of potassium fertilizer without Cloride. It is better than the Dead Sea Potash. Sirius is selling it as POLY4. This thing could disrupt worldwide fertilizer markets and devaluate investments in Israel, Jordan, Saskatchewan, Ukraine and even the Colluli project in Eritrea. Sirius estimates the cost of production of POLY4 at 32.60 $ per tonne, and sale price of 158 $ per tonne. If that comes to fruition, POT called ICL in Israel is doomed. What really bothers me is the projected price for potash fertilizer, which is lower than current price. If so, the probability of fat dividends is zero. This week I shall start liquidating my beloved shares.

Kibbutz in the North

The family spent the weekend in the kibbutz of my little daughter. They have two factories, nut tree plantations and sheep. The managing committee is a gerousia of retired elders. My impression is that the commune is unsustainable, there is a permanent loss of younger people and birthrate under replacement. They compensate by accepting working age candidates, including Arabs, who - private opinion here -  are unsuited for egalitarian communal life. Some colored children. It is not behooving to notice the browning of the kibbutz. Let's hope no one reads this. 

Crossness Sewage Pumping Station becomes a Circus

Crossness was a key element of the 19th Century London's sewage system and it has been nicely conserved. It embodies the industrial revolution, with its massive iron pumps. Improbably, Crossness was transmuted into a tourist attraction and now, a circus. I wanted very much to visit it when in London but it was closed (asbestos removal). Next time. I like London. 

Turkish Paradox

Hungarian President Orban said that in this very moment, 100 thousand "refugees" are walking in the Balkan migration track, trying to infiltrate Europe. And Hungary is ready to repulse them with fire, should they reach the Slovak border. Personally he does not enjoy the idea, but there is Erdogan holding 2.5 million Syrian and Iraqi refugees in Turkey, being fed by EU transfers, and he may open the borders anytime he feels so.

Not that Europe cannot stop any number of unarmed pedestrian migrants, it could be done bloodlessly by erecting a wall, or by shooting the vanguard of the invader column. But Europe is paralyzed by its universalist ideals inherited from the French Revolution. They do not want to face Erdogan's blackmail and their position should be appreciated.

Erdogan pretends to represent and lead the Turks, but he is not. He is strong against Europe but weak against far away China. The Uyghur and the Kazakhstan Turks are being jailed and re-educated by their millions in Western China. An historically Turkish area that used to be called East Turkestan is being absorbed into ethnic China. One or two million Turks are jailed there and there is no one to talk for them, surely not Erdogan.  The Uyghurs are part of the enormous Turkish nation that lives from China to Europe, hundreds of millions of ethnically homogeneous people. It is not the first time China is absorbing a large piece of real estate, it has done in Tibet and today Tibet is securely part of China. But the Tibetans had no ethnic relatives nor allies, they were an isolated indigenous highland people. The Uyghurs should have ethnic Turkish and religious Muslim friends.  They never were friends of the Jews, so I shall say nothing for them. Let Erdogan defend them.  I end echoing Donald Trump's sentiment: The pox on all of them. 

Making Fun of Franco Strocchi

A decade after its publication, a humorous paper by Gare de Lyon (or some other masonic pseudonym) where he makes fun of the verbosity of a collegue Prof. Franco Strocchi (on breaking symmetry), appeared on my computer monitor. The paper demonstrates that NorthEast Asians are smarter than Europeans BUT the they have lower verbal IQ, so they may form efficient hunting parties but they will always be lost in a capitalist society. Therefore their GNP will never exceed Western countries' GNP. We can rest assured that we have nothing to fear from Amerindian and Chinese competition. Yet the 2019 SAT results in America show that things are changing. Whites were bested by the Asian students taking the test. Must we conclude that IQ is not fixed? Should be worried? Funny, is it not? 

Rejtő Jenő: Vesztegzár a Grand Hotelben

Wow! Our home in Buenos Aires was full of popular cheap short novels by Hungarian humorist Rejtő Jenő, and I devoured them all. Times were bad in Budapest of the thirties, and the novels -  took him a week to write - allowed him to eat. 

I loved the story of a luftgescheft Jew who sold the French Foreign Legion cheap "military" equipment like black handbags that he bought in a fire sale. He describes the Legionnaires marching in formation in the desert holding the fashionable handbags and flowery parasols. Unforgettably funny. Now a theater in Budapest announces a play based on another of his cheap novels: Quarantine in the Grand Hotel. There is a contagious disease and the authorities close down the hotel, no one gets in nor out. The hotel is full of international shysters and crooks, an intrigue develops to steal the valuable Bananoxid patent. A musical. No one is what it appears to be. May be in November I can take off a weekend and return to enjoy my mythical Ur culture. Budapest, Vienna, Berlin are still living off the cultural produce of the Jews. 

Coffee Aroma Closed Indefinitely by Ministry of Health

Two healthy persons were hospitalized after eating a tuna sandwich in Aroma coffeeshop in Tel Aviv, Sderot Ben Gurion. I live on canned tuna and Aroma is my client, so I am interested. It appears that about 0.5% of the population is allergic to fish, some to the point reacting to a kiss by a person who has eaten fish. The Aroma incident did not happen because the allergen was not on the label, most clearly it was a tuna sandwich. Now the health authorities are developing a frenzied media activity to show that they care and protect. They unchained a dozen inspectors to dismantle the place and find something criminal (apparently the temperature in one of the refrigerators was above the regulation. It happens all the time. It is late summer here, very hot.). 

These allergies are somewhat of a mystery. People who had experience with some molecule in infancy acquire tolerance to it as adult. Children are so overprotected that they grow up with weaknesses. Children should have a (moderately) dangerous childhood.

P.S.: Now the media is talking of food poisoning. That is more fathomable than allergy to tuna. 

Penis captivus

Zandspruit Clinic (S.Africa) was forced to close yesterday following its invasion by residents looking for 2 patients allegedly stuck together during coitus.

That's Nothing! Horror stories tell of girls whose vagina houses teeth — described in folk tales as vagina dentata — which sever every unknowing man’s member. 

Danny & The Juniors "Rock 'n Roll is Here to Stay"

                                                                                                                                                         Danny Rapp died of a gunshot (suicide) in a hotel in Arizona. The Juniors lived to late seventies.

The New Judaism

From Reuter:

Extinction Rebellion, which uses civil disobedience to highlight the risks posed by climate change and the accelerating loss of plant and animal species, is midway through a new two-week wave of actions in cities around the world.

Activists thronged the financial heart of London on Monday, unfurling banners, addressing passersby by megaphone or blocking streets around locations including BlackRock, the Bank of England, Bank of China and Barclays.

At BlackRock, volunteers glued themselves to the doors while others staged a mock dinner party with rolled-up banknotes on their plates. Police said they arrested more than 90 people.

The arrestees included Rabbi Jeffrey Newman of the Finchley Reform Synagogue, who was arrested near the Bank of England praying, singing and wearing a prayer shawl for the first day of the Jewish festival Sukkot.

It is amazing how Reform Judaism has transformed itself into an anti-capitalist anti-modern messianic movement. For some reason, it has decided that fire, that is, burning wood, coal and similar fuels, is sinful; that Nature's animals are sacred and hunting, breeding and eating them is against God's will.  It has developed a new set of ritual purity - kashrut - laws, that include taboo against wearing furs (in the original it was mixed textiles), intensively fed animals (in the original, pigs other unclean species), etc.

Yet, this new religion does not seem more arbitrary or crazy than the original one.

Quote:  Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western world is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists.  Why do I say it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs. There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for all of us. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

Increasingly it seems facts aren’t necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief.”

Pic.: Ecocide by Kantor. What I see? The Devil trying to seduce that innocent Swedish virgin girl. The pic could be hanged in any Church.

Long and Boring Holiday

Succot in Kever Benjamin. Yesterday had dinner in the sukkah of my daughter. The grand children happy playing with a dog.

Today too hot to go out so I slept late and then entertain myself  preparing a long, long, detailed Bill of Quantities for a processed egg factory.  Boring. 

I try to imagine the quantum universe we are living in. Apparently it is like balls on strings, many balls on many strings: the balls can move freely to the right or to the left each on its string (the string being time, the balls are quanta that can move to the future or back). The situation at the start defines all the possibilities, knowing the starting situation one can know all the possible situation in the future. One can move the balls on the string left or right, time is meaningless. The whole game is meaningless.  

The Hunt for 859 Escaped ISIS fighters

"Jelal Ayaf, co-chair of Ayn Issa camp, said:

- 859 people escaped from the foreigners section

- Sleeper cells emerged from inside 'open' IDP section". 

Many of the escapees are Europeans. It may be hypothesized that the Kurds opened the prison doors and let them go.

The hunt is on for these terrorists trying to go home in Europe and re-start their careers in mischief making.

America's Strategy in Syria

Saudi Arabian Prince Turki Al-Faisal said: “The situation in Syria, we really don’t know where the United States is, for example, is it in or is it out?”

Poor Saudis. They don't understand America's permanent strategy the world over. America has no other goal but to foment chaos and strife,  America wants having them all at each others throat, uncertain and desperate, all seeking its favor. Peace and harmony are dangerous, they could unite... against the primus inter pares. Like the Saudis today, they should be wondering what is what America is trying to do, in which side it is, how could we avoid its anger? 

Back to Analog Computing

Trying to understand how D- Wave quantum computers work, realized that they are not digital computers but analogical machines. It is like כלים שלובים  a machine of multiple communicating vessels where the system settles in a stable configuration which is the solution. Annealing, they say, heating the metal up and then let it cool down slowly, eliminating internal stresses. The solution is reached faster than calculating (digital computation). Imagine a river flowing down from a mountain. It is almost impossible to calculate its course, but the river selects it without effort, instantly. It seems to me simple, and more primitive than a digital computer, but that is because I do not understand anything of what I am writing, may be. 

Weapons Made-in-Nigeria

A group of Nigerian fighters. I recognize the weapons: they are the same to those sold in the Jos market. Ibo made. In my post-independence times, firearms were forbidden and very rare. 

The Japan I Missed

I have been a few times in the Far East, yet blinded by the stupid urge to work, I missed out its alcohol culture. Chinese rice liquors is the nearest I got, and did not specially like it. Yet it must have been somewhere out there but I did not see it. Chinese chronicles record the excessive drinking, singing  and dancing of the Yamatai people. Japanese adults on average drink 4.4 shots of hard liquor per week, the fifth highest in the world behind South Korea and Russia. Visitors to Japan comment that the country reeks of alcohol. I want to be immersed in that atmosphere !

Prisoner as I am of a vegan abstemious, fasting - ascetic clan, I fantasy of a lenient society. Japanese law makes no mention of such a crime as being drunk and disorderly. If anything, inebriation is taken into account as a mollifying factor if a crime is committed. Japanese society also tolerates sex in its versicolor forms. Japan is superior, if they only would change their writing so I could learn the lingo. 

Decoupling China and America

Decoupling aka Divorce is what Washington is advancing. America will not sell nor buy from China and will try to sabotage China's development. This policy was feasible before and shortly after Nixon opened up China, but now it is far too late. China has gained a mile long advantage in the quantum field - it has a working quantum communication system and advanced commercial quantum computing systems (Pic. the Qasky. You can buy it on the internet). No one else has any working quantum machine. Decoupling smells as war, and that is very bad. In my opinion, the Communist Party's rule in China is unsustainable and if left alone, in a decade it will collapse, like the Soviet Union. Then it will fragment and open up once more to Western colonization. My words have no magical powers, so the above does not mean that I wish it to happen, and my words will not cause it happen. Just thinking.

Thinking on Qasky and other Chinese quantum products, I like Chinese products and my place is full of them. China has supplied me good and cheap products, and I see China as a force for good. Of course, I am very shortsighted, going blind as I age. 

Operation Peace Spring

Ozan Ceyhun, a Turkish journalist, demands European assistance for Turkey's invasion of the Hasaka region of Syria. Modern Turkey was built on the ruins of the Turkish Empire, and it has been fighting valiantly for the last hundred years against further collapse and dissolution. Turkey's peak was five hundred years ago, when it fought (and lost) against the Spanish Armada in Lepanto. The last word has not been said.

Turkey hosts 4 million Syrian displaced persons, paid by the European Union. Europe has given up active use of force and prefers to pay off local warlords. It seriously reminds me of the Chinese Empire in its decadence, when it followed a policy of paying off Mongol tribes. It worked, till it did not. Letting the Syrian refugees to move on to Europe is Turkey's strongest card against that aging continent. Now, there is a new entity in the Upper Euphrates, the Kurd's country, which is a mortal danger for Turkey, as half of its population is ethnic Kurd. And the weakness of Syrian government has allowed the Northern Coast to be occupied by the Russians, and the North East by the USA. The current Turkish incursion to NE Syria is being done with the hegemon, the USA's permission.

In this complicated situation, Turkey started a war. It is a truism that it is easy to start wars, but difficult to stop them. Fortunately Israel is not involved.

P.S. Netaniyahu condemns Turkish invasion of Kurdish areas and promises humanitarian assistance to the brave Kurdish people.

Meat and Sugar

The researchers of the New York Times (I know one, nice guy James) discovered that one of the science  team that said that there is NO LINK between eating meat and cancer and coronary disease - the guy had once done some work for a meat factory or whatever. For the fishwrap HaAretz that proves that the guy is tainted and biased, and the study worthless. More than worthless, it definitely proves that meat does harm to humans eating it. To emphasize the point, on the next page there is a lachrymose article describing the sufferings of a heifer till it is served on the plate.

My wife and daughters are extremists of the meat taboo, so meat is almost unknown in my plate. I reject the idea that any research has to be considered tainted if it is financed by an interested party or any of the team had in the past worked for them. Scientific papers should never be judged on the basis of WHO did it or who financed it. The meat industry has a legitimate reason to investigate fake or tendentious aspersions against it.

Just think logically. Our ancestors and relatives the chimps eat meat. In fact, they hunt Colobus monkeys and eat them raw. Humans hunted animals and eat them roasted. Evolution should have corrected any biological mechanism if meat caused harm to us. Evolution works fast and with precision, anyone who did not profit from meat would not be among our ancestors. From an evolutionary point of view, meat cannot harm us.

The same for sugar. Chimps et al love sweets fruits. Sugar is a natural molecule found everywhere. I do agree that in our evolutionary history, sugar was very scarce and available in small quantities, therefore the super-sweet fruits and cookies must be unhealthy, and pure refined sugar, which is not found in nature, is poison.

(Written while fasting, so it must be true. Or not.).

The Ghost Hominin in the E Haplotype

Haplotype E is exclusively sub-Saharan (Nigeria, Ghana) and shows the introgression of a “ghost” species that shares a common ancestry with the modern human lineage. We are starting to understand the complex differentiation of the human species into such subspecies like Denisovans (South East Asia), Neanderthal (Europe) and the African "ghost", and the complex merging back, creating diverse mixtures. No one is superior to the others, and the general picture is a chaotic movement leading to no special goal. No signs that there is any tendency to "progress".

 My first book on human evolution was a children's book "Como el Hombre se Hizo Gigante" (How man made himself a giant), the Spanish translation of a famous, Russian Marxist children's book. It showed a clear and linear advance, from man discovering fire to the building of glorious dams and canals in the Soviet Union, the Five Year Plan. Evolution was progress. (The message was that humanity was progressing from the primitive disorder of capitalism to the higher stage of socialism). It was a simplified, somewhat infantile (well, it was written for children) but easily understandable and attractive concept. Almost a theology, a well ordered and purposeful universe. 

That theology was wrong. There is no progress but senseless chaos. A meditation point on this Yom Kippur.  

The author was M. Iliyn, pseudonym of  Il’ia Iakovlevich Marshak. Jewish names were not in fashion in the Socialist paradise. Still, we believed.

Kurds Abandoned - Again

President Trump announced his decision to move American forces out of former ISIS territory in North East Syria, currently occupied by Kurdish and American forces. Turkey moved military columns to the border with the intention of expelling the Kurds from the area.

We in Israel have no government able to take decisions or to react. The Washington Post writes that this is a betrayal of the Kurds and their delivery to the Turks. Some Israeli papers comment that America's betrayal of its allies in the Middle East (like the absence of a reaction to the attack on Saudi refinery) is a bad omen for Israel.

Anybody who was expecting else is a fool. America's political system does not allow the use of armed land forces (police) in its troubled inner cities or in foreign hot points. America under all its presidents acted as a restraining factor regarding Israel, it was always against Israeli actions. Remember Colin Powell's ORDER to stop Israeli advance into Gaza, which made an humiliated Ariel Sharon to order an immediate retreat of our tank column already deep in Gaza. Never forget nor forgive President Obama's order to stop construction in Shomron. America is our friend, but it will smack us on the head should we are try stand up. It will always keep us down and in attention to its orders. Sit! Fetch! Good dog!

The Celestial Empire rides again

Qiushi, the organ of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party announces: "New China turns 70, witnessing a golden age" .

In a few months,  the International Space Station will be retired, while China's space station will be mankind's only foothold in space.  A cargo ship named "Tianzhou" (Heavenly Vessel) is planned to ferry cargo back and forth to the station. It will be delivered into space by the new Long March-7 carrier rocket and dock with Tiangong-2 automatically.

Stalin would envy Xi's cult of the personality. In every page the main figure is the smiling Xi (pic). China radiates unity, harmony, planning - contrasting with the chaotic democracies of the West. Sparta and Athens, just as Victor Davis Hanson defines them. Yet, while the Soviet Union publications were full of authentic ideological debates, these are totally absent in their Chinese re-incarnation. It is the Celestial Empire once again. Sparta won the Peloponnesian War, yet Hanson loves the chaos and the dynamism of Athens.  

Israeli Rebellion Against the Climate

The climate rebels surrounded Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and painted the asphalt in vivid scarlet. The management of TASE surrendered and agreed to all the demands. From tomorrow, Earth will start to cool down and all the animals and trees in danger of extinction will be entitled to bodyguards for protection and monthly Social Security food stamps.

A UN committee was set up to discuss the details. It was leaked that Brazil is to be declared United Nation protectorate, the Amazonas will be fenced and the entrance for humans, forbidden. Kenya, Uganda and Zimbabwe are to be re-organized as one Eco-Zoological Garden, the natives to be re-settled in Stockholm, Los Angeles and Tel Aviv.  

Optimism in the Bourse

El Al jumped 14% with no reason in sight. The banks lifted 3-4%. I can't explain.

Praying to my Made-Up God

I am not ashamed to confess that I am going to pray on Yom Kippur and fast and beg absolution for my sins. You can say: J., with your astronomic IQ, you... you! praying to a God you don't believe in? Yes! Yes! Anna Frank wrote her diary as letters to Kitty, an imaginary friend she never had. No one laughed on her. My financial mentor, Napoleon Hill, advised to imagine a Council of Sages that I should consult before taking decisions. I should ask long dead guru Benjamin Graham about investments and so. Millions follow his advice.

I am convinced that humans need god/gods, so I made up one for my personal use. In fact, being a Jew there was no need to invent it because he was already fully made up by hundreds of generations of Jews before me. Next Thursday, the Day of Atonement, he will be there hearing my prayer and accepting my fast and letting me start anew free of the weight of a year of inexistent transgressions. It is almost as good as he really does exist and care. May be, better.

Gmar Hatima Tova! Should You Be Inscribed in the Book of Life, and not in the Book of  Mot (Mavet, in Hebrew, Death)! 

2,000 year old man

Shirley

C REINER: (As Interviewer) Sir, could you give us the secret of your longevity?

MEL BROOKS: (As 2,000 Year Old Man) Well, the major thing - the major thing is that I never, ever touch fried food.

She Jumped to Her Death and No One Knew

A girl jumped from the high building in front of my window last week. I did not see it and when investigating, I saw no blood stains on the pavement and there was no mention of it in the local papers. The ambulance service just registers the death and cleans up fast and no siren sounds. It is kept as a secret because suicide is contagious. Why people kill themselves? It is something that evolution should have eliminated long time ago. Logically, it should not exist.

Suicide ranks among the three leading causes of death among those aged 15–44 years. Attempted suicides are up to 20 times more frequent than completed ones. 800,000 suicides per year the world over. Sunny Middle East is the region with lowest suicide rates, Israel too being down on the list. The highest rates are the dark countries of Korea, Japan and Russia. 200 thousand people kill themselves each year in China alone. To me it is a paradox, as Orientals possess a stable brain that never goes mad.

A credible theory says that humans have developed religion as a defense against suicide. Chinese, Japanese, Koreans have no religion, they have no prophets and God never talked to them, they believe in no afterlife and know of no tabu foods, and everybody knows that way madness lies.

Apparently, a strong religion is a mental protection against suicide. One tricks himself to stay alive.  Thursday is Yom Kippur, a fast day, and I am on my way to the synagogue.