Preparing the NATO occupation of Ukraine

 

The media is fearmongering that the nuclear reactors in Ukraine (pic Czernobyl) are emitting radiation and are close to an explosion. I know nothing but it appears to me that they are preparing the psychological ground for taking over these facilities. 

Inflation considerations

 

America is starting to fight inflation. Or is it? The country has enormous debts, and I wonder which policy favors it: inflation and paying back the debt with quasi-worthless paper, or no-inflation or negative-inflation, so its interest payments are lower. 

Drought in China

 

The Yangtze (the long river) has almost stopped flowing. Chongqing, Wuhan, Nanjing, and Shanghai depend on its waters. The Yangtze historically was known for its catastrophic floods. 

Argentina: President warns Attorney General

 

"Nisman se suicido, espero que Luciani no haga algo asi"  that is, Attorney General Nisman "killed himself" (it is known that he was assassinated by the Secret Police) and hope Luciani (the current Attorney General) will not do something similar. It is a death threat. Luciani formally accused Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, current Vicepresident, of managing the 10%  bribe system collected in all public works contracts and asks for 12 years in jail. The 10% was paid by the contractors to Kirchner - in US dollars or transferred to her bank account in the Province of Santa Cruz. All have been documented, including Kirchner's Panama bank accounts. Argentina's 45 million citizens are not surprised. 

Stasis in Ukraine

 

After six months of the war in Europe, the front seems to have stabilized. Ukraine has improved its weaponry with American and German stuff. Russia has attached a border strip largely peopled by Russian ethnics, and is digesting its conquest.  

Experts say this war could go on for years. It is ruining all of Europe. I don't know. 

Great Britain: 10% Inflation

 

The British currency is losing value very fast, Europe is slipping into recession and a holiday in England is becoming cheap for us Israelis. I love London. The Sondheim Theatre is showing "Les Miserables". It would be nice to visit around November but have no one to go with. The last two times went with my daughter but she is a teacher and "married". The wife is busy with her undead mother. London has to wait for me. 

Mearsheimer Warns about the Dynamics of Escalation

 

The dynamics of escalation in wartime are similarly hard to predict or control, which should serve as a warning to those who are confident that events in Ukraine can be managed. (Mearsheimer)

I heard much about escalation during the Cold War. I have to re-read On Escalation (Herman Kahn, 1965) and Escalation and the Nuclear Option (Bernard Brodie, 1966). In those contexts, it especially referred to war between two major states with weapons of mass destruction during the Cold War.  

Kahn's Scale:

IV. TRADITIONAL CRISES
Basic Description and Definition
The Rungs of Traditional Crises
Rung 4. Hardening of Positions-Confrontation of Wills
Rung 5. Show of Force
Rung 6. Significant Mobilization
Rung 7. "Legal" Harassment-Retortions
Rung 8. Harassing Acts of Violence
Rung 9. Dramatic Military Confrontations
A Recent Example of a "Traditional Crisis" Scenario
V. INTENSE CRISES
Basic Description and Definition
The Rungs of Intense Crises
Rung 10. Provocative Breaking Off of Diplomatic Relations
Rung 11. Super-Ready Status
Rung 12. Large Conventional War (or Actions)
Rung 13. Large Compound Escalation
Rung 14. Declaration of Limited Conventional War
Rung 15. Barely Nuclear War
Rung 16. Nuclear "Ultimatums"
Rung 17. Limited Evacuation (Approximately 20 per cent)
Rung 18. Spectacular Show or Demonstration of Force
Rung 19. "Justifiable" Counterforce Attacks
Rung 20. "Peaceful" World-Wide Embargo or Blockade

According to the above, the world is already in Rung 20 in the Russia-USA conflict, and very near regarding China.

The Colorado River is Drying Up

... while the main worry of the leader in charge is Indian Water Rights.  

I started to follow the West water supply problem twenty years ago when I was teaching in Baja California. The American Californians had decided to save the smelt sardine by channeling enormous volumes of drinking water down the Sacramento River and the Pacific. I imagined that the West desperately needs Israeli water engineers. Since then, their obsession with woke issues developed to the point that they handed the water sector, that is the Reclamation Bureau, to a Philippine-born social activist, who is very passionate about native children with no running water but has no idea of hydrology or water policy. 

"One of my proudest professional achievements was working through legislation that settled the water rights claims for seven Indian tribes and pueblos in New Mexico, Arizona, and Montana,” Touton says.

“You see a kid who doesn’t know any better, that water should be coming out of their tap and not hauling it from their trucks every week. Now, I lead the agency that is implementing that law and building the water projects that bring water into their home. It’s a great privilege.”

The situation in the West is dramatic and nothing is being done, just waiting for the rains. 

"She comes from the Philippines; she knows what it is to be poor. She has a big heart in addition to being very smart. It’s not about ambition or money; it’s having that passion. The water issue now for poor communities is huge. And I’m not worried because Camille is there.”

Is Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton the right person in the right position at the right moment?  

World Order

 At last, finished Henry Kissinger's heavy book. His thesis is that a set of small nations, each one sovereign over a territory, will find safety in a Westphalian-type arrangement, while two blocks of allied countries are doomed to fight a big war. The Westphalian Peace lasted 200 years, while the block system caused WWI and WWII. Why does it have to be like that? 

Self-walking Dog

 

Shiba Inu

 

The Shiba Inu (Bush or Small Dog) is a Japanese breed, genetically close to the wolf. It is aggressive and will hunt down smaller pets. 

Red Dog

 

The Earl of Enniskillen created this beautiful Irish Setter type. It is not particularly intelligent but it is full of playful energy. They are predisposed to epilepsy. 

Depressed

 

Red Cat

 

On the Wall Country

"The wall country will become the world's first testing ground for population shrinkage, which is crueler than the rat utopia experiment, at least it has been utopian..." (from Twitter)

Google Translate is a very big thing. I am reading conversations in Chinese and they are very interesting. As a Hungarian Jew, I am an overseas Chinese, as they called me in Kai Feng. The tweets are venomously anti-Xi. They all must be Formosan. 

The Unspeakable Secret Is Out

 Another argument for basing racial/subspecies taxonomy classification on archaic hominin DNA. We have that ability now. We didn't have it prior to 2010. Listen up people, it's rather easy: Euros have Neanderthal; Asians, Oceanians have Denisovan; Afros have Australopithecines

The quote is from a Chinese Twitter. I already knew the first two things but always heard that Africans carry genes from a mysterious, unknown hominin. This is the first time I see this mysterious animal named. What, who are the Australopithecines? The wiki says

"Australopithecina or Hominina is a subtribe in the tribe Hominini. The members of the subtribe are the extinct, close relatives of humans and, with the extant genus Homo, comprise the human clade. While none of the groups normally directly assigned to this group survived, the australopiths do not appear to be literally extinct (in the sense of having no living descendants.)" 

Clear, it is not. Even I could not make it more obscure and confusing. Didn't you say they were extinct? If they are not extinct, they must be alive. If they are alive, where are they? Who are they? Apparently, no one dares to identify them. Less than no one, me.

To make it more confusing, a pic illustrates the wiki article. The cute boy holding up a fossil is NOT a descendant nor a relative of the extinct/nonextinct Australopithecines. Stock Photo - corpus reconstruction of Lucy, female of the hominin species Australopithecus afarensis, living 3, 2 million years ago in the Awash Valley in Ethiopia, Moesgaard Museum (MOMU) (Henning Larsen Architects), a museum dedicated to archaeology and ethnography, located in Hojbjerg, a suburb of Aarhus, Jutland Peninsula, Denmark, Northern Europe. 

Nancy

Pelosi: "When I was a little girl, I was told at the beach if I dug a hole deep enough we would reach China. So we've always felt a connection there."

Me: "When I was a little boy, I was told that Mao could order the Chinese to jump all together, and all the Americans would fall off the Earth." I didn't worry because I lived in Hungary, and was a member of the Communist Pioneers protected by the glorious Soviet Union.

Kissinger Says "No War with China"

The Wall Street Journal writes today:

 Xi Jinping appears to be preparing for an even more consequential onslaught against Taiwan. Mr. Xi’s China is fueled by a dangerous mix of strength and weakness: Faced with profound economic, demographic and strategic problems, it will be tempted to use its burgeoning military power to transform the existing order while it still has the opportunity.

Yet, Kissinger had studied Chinese mentality and strategies, and says that the Chinese prefer to accumulate small psychological advantages till the actual war becomes unnecessary. I think that the WSJ is wrong, no war is expected. 

America is going "woke" in a totalitarian mode. It gives the impression of chaos and decadence. Lecturers are required to demonstrate in actual deeds that they feel for the poor and the Black. That they have empathy toward the so-called underprivileged. It is like the "Perach" program in our universities, only that it is for students. Judging by the results, the Democrats are good for America and us. Watching the White House Spokesman, that cute ma'divine, it goes against what I would expect. But peace, prosperity and victories in foreign affairs - facts are facts.  

The Brits Are Our Friends

 

I am a subscriber to The Economist since 1960 when I started to earn money. I interrupted my subscription when I felt they were focusing too much on the Jews and Israel, always negatively. Renewed tentatively my subscription around 2005 and since then I feel it is fair to us. The picture from its latest edition shows a Jewish boy landing from Ukraine in Israel. I had never seen such a nice, positive representation of a Jew in The Economist or any international media. Good!   

The Chinese Invasion of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast has been postponed

 
The much-predicted Chinese invasion of Siberia to alleviate its unmanageable population pressure is not taking place. Russia’s bordering ‘Jewish Autonomous Oblast’ at TFR 1.71 (2020) is a solid 2.7x Heilongjiang’s 0.63! The ‘inevitable’ Chinese demographic takeover of the Russian Far East due to “overpopulation” is another racial myth. BTW, Birobidzhan's Jews moved to Israel as soon as it became possible.

On the same line of thought, Speaker Pelosi's visit to Taiwan failed to provoke the much-announced military reprisals and world war III. Well, who would attack her when she arrived with a giant Afro-American bodyguard, her Secretary of Defense?

Sparta's Desperate Population Policy

 

Sparta, like all Greek states, had rigid racial laws of citizenship against half-bred and foreigners, and for many generations, it saw its citizenry (that is its army) decline. Sparta adopted customs of publicly humiliating unmarried and childless male citizens, in the theater, they had to give up their sites to youngsters, and in some festivities, they were forced to dance naked in a circle singing self-debasing songs. They celebrated annual ceremonies where marriageable girls were paraded naked, trying to inflame desire and attract suitors. Boys, from age 7,  were educated in the army, where homosexuality was de rigeur, so they were inexperienced and terrified of women. To help them actually to be able to consummate the union, it took place in private in obscurity, and the bride - with a shaved head - was dressed up in men's clothes. Childless married women were legally impregnated by an army comrade or a friend, free of the stigma of bastardy.

Nothing helped, Sparta's citizen body steadily declined to the point that there were not enough able Spartiates to govern its foreign possessions. To refill the infantry, Sparta called for Helot (slave) recruits, and thousands volunteered. When formed into battalions, the Spartans were frightened by the high military quality of the new corps, and secretly killed them all. In the end, the Spartan army numbered less than a thousand and there was no one to oppose the Boeotian invasion. 

Later, in Roman times, Sparta became a tourist attraction, with actors replaying Spartan religious rituals and war dances.  Athens left a large literary and political legacy, Sparta left nothing.