Annette

Yesterday my daughter and her fiance took us to the Cinematek Tel Aviv, to see a very long "rock opera", Anette. It is about a double murder drama. Motive: Doubts about the paternity of Anette, the baby symbolized in the film by a puppet. The emotional crisis is represented by a fantastic storm in the sea. The monologues of the main character, a start-up actor are answered by a Greek chorus formed by the audience. It is extremely stylized. The catharsis came with the final scene in the jail when Annette - this time a real girl - rejects her father's love. I understood the story only after looking it up on Wikipedia.   

Wasting time

I caught a cold and slept badly. The last 2-3 days have been difficult for me to concentrate on work. I waste my time on the internet with Prof. John Mearsheimer lecturing about China's demographic collapse and a China - USA war. He has a strong New York accent but speaks clearly. He says that Communist rule is illegitimate in China so the Party whips up nationalism to stay in power. He doubts the formation of a NATO-type alliance in Asia because the distances are too big.  For him, the suppression of Tibetans and Uyghurs are publicity items. BTW I like the Chinese position on East Turkestan. We met their monstrous faces in the Raqqa Caliphate. In conclusion, I have to work.

Demographic Collapse — China's Reckoning (Part 1)

Extremely clear and logical exposition. 

The Future is Theirs

This is an impressive pic from Bangkok. The child is not losing a moment but studying with the assistance of her mother - while being inoculated. These are the future scientists and engineers. How different is  Asian culture from the American feel-good education!  The future is theirs. 

The Chinese Real Estate Development Model

Evergrande development company is stopping paying back its debt, and the world is anxiously expecting the consequences. It has 300 billion in outstanding debt and it was being financed by sales of unbuilt apartments.  The model is something similar to a Ponzi scheme, which works wonderfully till it does not. Earlier this month, the government barred private equity funds from investing in real estate, cutting off a major source of funding for builders.

The company’s electric vehicle business, China Evergrande New Energy Vehicle Group, also lost the equivalent of $741 million. The EV company’s valuation was estimated as high as $80 billion earlier this year and now sits at around $6.5 billion. The personal fortune of the worried man in the pic stood at 10 billion, before the debacle. 

What we learn? That economic management in China makes mistakes. What will happen now? The building sector will be re-organized and raw materials sales to China will fall. Evergrande owes money to Chinese financial organizations which will be badly hurt. The coming events may depress the Chinese and open opportunities to American financial firms. 

Political Mechanics

 The first law of states is to survive. Once survival is assured, it will try to widen its security strip around its borders, eliminating all foreign influence and military presence. That will necessarily lead to regional influence. China is now trying to extend its security surroundings, and the current world hegemon, the United States, tries to suffocate the emergence of a rival. As Mearsheimer said, the weak Massachusetts settlement that became the USA, from its very beginning, has been relentlessly extending its influence and fighting off rivals. He predicted that the strategy to be applied against China will be the same applied - successfully - against the Soviet Union. China already has been surrounded by American bases, and the neighboring countries inevitably are afraid of China and will ally with America. America will contain, isolate and weaken China till it collapses like the SSSR did, and breaks up into smaller, less menacing units. Today we see Australia formally siding with America (and Great Britain) and nullifying the 50 billion dollars purchase of French submarines. Apparently, this was the original idea of Brexit: Britain aligning with America vs. continental Europe. We in Israel are an American satrapy, in fact, part of America's Imperium. All this follows from the physical nature of the entities in play and the mechanics of their interactions. The world is anarchy, no one is governing it while is evolving following unfeeling, mechanical laws.  

America: Social Protest

 

Ocasio is a Puertorrican - New York politician. She is going to the Met Opera, with a  serious message written on her ass. Revolutionary chic. The rich must be trembling.   

Palestinians Disappoint HaAretz's Rogel Alpher

 Rogel is a columnist in HaAretz and follows the paper's extremist pro-Palestinian and anti-Jewish line. Today he is raging because the six lifer terrorists that tunneled and escaped from an Israeli jail, received no help from the Arab population, and four of them were caught the next day. Rogel accuses Israeli Arabs of a lack of solidarity, of choosing the side of the Fascist (sic) colonization, against their own enslaved people. The terrorists tried to hitchhike and reach any friendly Palestinian place but were unanimously turned down and left rotting on the roadside. I suspect Palestinian drivers moved out of sight and phoned their friendly Shabak captain on duty. Rogel hyperventilates how this could be, since only last May the mixed cities of Lod and Acre were occupied by angry masses of armed Arab youth. In today's column, Rogel calls the May rebels "criminals" and "adolescents" while he curses the Arab mainstream as "bourgeois" that only wants to be allowed to make money and send their sons to study medicine in the USA. The jailed terrorists lived in a phantasy-world totally disconnected from reality, imagining that they would be embraced by the colonized natives. It must have been quite a wake-up to find them deaf to the call of Jihad and Revolution.

The Palestinians have deeply disappointed our journalist. Rogel curses them for not being up to his anticolonialist standards.  

Athens and Jerusalem

When Alexander arrived at the Himalaya and his soldiers refused to go on, he founded a city:  Alexandria Eskhata  (Ἀλεξάνδρεια Ἐσχάτη), "Alexandria the Furthest". This city at the end of the world bordering the Tarim Basin desert (China) was such a success that in a  generation grew into a large Indo-Greek Empire that lasted 300 years. How could be so many Greeks in that god-forsaken place? 

The Persian kings applied the policy of transfer of troublesome peoples to faraway corners of their empire. We know that the Northern Kingdom of Israel was transferred to the interior of the Persian Empire and was "lost". Maybe they became Pashtuns. (BTW, there is an insidious individual who is trying to bring them - god-forbid - to Israel.) The population of Jerusalem was re-settled in the center of the empire and founded Talmudic academies and eventually became powerful officials in the Persian kingdom. They were given back the treasures of the Temple, permitted to return, and even convinced the Persian King to finance the reconstruction of Jerusalem. 

The Ionian Greek cities of what now is West Turkey were the wealthiest satrapies and also the most rebellious. The Great King used to depopulate en masse the more turbulent ones and settle them as far as possible: in the Fergana Valley, a beautiful and fertile borderland, exposed to the attacks of Sakha/Turkish/Mongol nomads. The Ionians not only guarded the frontier but when trained by Alexander's Macedonian military experts, they conquered Afghanistan and North India. While the Judean exiles conserved their identity (we are the witnesses), the Ionian Greeks disappeared just as our ten tribes. Although Kabul, Bagram, etc. were once rich and civilized Greek cities, nothing is left of their past.     

A Fellow Life-Guard to Save Europe

 

It is extremely early in the morning and most of the passengers on the government plane to Venice for the G-20 meeting are sitting slumped in their seats, wishing they could grab a bit more shuteye. But not Olaf Scholz. Instead, the grinning German finance minister and Social Democratic chancellor candidate is demonstrating his swimming prowess. He thrusts his arms forward, turns his palms outward and swings his arms to the side before then pulling them back to his chest. He says he has even received life-guard training. If, God forbid, something were to go wrong on approach to Venice, a city Scholz has never been before, at least one person would have a chance of reaching the shore. He might even manage to save someone on the way. Source. 

Technically, Olaf possesses the skills to save Europe (should she be drowning...). 

Festivity in Epidaurus - 2500 years ago.

 

Ancient Theatre of the Asklepieion at Epidaurus  - 

Αρχαίο Θέατρο Ασκληπιείου Επιδαύρου

450 years before the common era, that is circa 2500 years ago, the play The Frogs was put on the scene in Epidauros, a suburb of Athens.  Today is Rosh HaShana and I have nothing to do so read again the play. It is very long and disjointed, starts with gross jokes about pissing, within the classical (already old) figure of the smart slave and the stupid owner. Then comes the chorus of the frogs, totally out of place, without anything related to the subject matter of the play. Later appears a chorus of mystical initiates, invoking Iacchus, an obscure daimon, played by a young man leading the procession of the Eleusinian Mysteries (mystery=rite) at the ritual cry of joy "iakhe" of the initiates. Long after this nonsense singing and dancing, the play turns serious around the question of which poet was better:  Euripides or Aeschylus. I imagine that the Athenian citizens (only free-born racially pure males) spent an entertaining evening watching the show (the entrance was free). 

Sweet New Year!

 

Raging Inflation

One is aware that prices are rising but only when facing The Economist table (left) do we discover that the inflaton is a general worldwide phenomenon. "All items" rose 30% in US dollars this year, meaning that the dollar has been devalued 30%. This is unheard of, while the papers say that inflation is non-existent and there is no danger of inflation! People who put their savings in the Bourse are dollar millionaires. But that means little, like the billion Reichmarks banknote that could not buy a piece of bread. 

FORBES says there is no core inflation   Airline tickets were cheap a year ago when no one was flying, and now they are just returning to their former level. Is that true? 

Who is enjoying inflation? 

Those having unindexed debts. 

I can get unindexed bank loans but the interest rate, now very modest 3%, is changeable. In what to invest? Real estate? I am so old that everything I do is for my daughters who don't need it.