Rainmaking in Kenya

 In Nilai, Kenya, women make a daily pilgrimage to a reservoir where they spill milk onto the parched landscape as an offering. They will perform this ceremony every day until the rain comes.

They are not more stupid than Honi HaMeagel. 

Arabic Calligraphy

 

In Ramallah, there is an exhibition of the works of a Palestinian artist who spent eight months in Israeli Opher prison. I love calligraphy and I appreciate these works, even if created by the enemy. From Al Jazeera:

Throughout his eight months in an Israeli prison, 26-year-old Palestinian artist Mohammad al-Azeez Atef found refuge in the calligraphy skills he developed from a young age.

With meager tools consisting of paper, black and red pens, a handmade paper ruler, and coffee, he produced what he believes to be approximately 170 pieces of artwork. Some of them were gifts for other prisoners, and 50 others he managed to smuggle out throughout the eight months he was in prison,  between November 2021 and June 2022.

Ukraine War

 

Sputnik webzine analyzes the military situation in Ukraine. Russia has occupied and is defending a large land strip that it considers part of Russia. Putin's original idea was to detach Ukraine from NATO, but it is looking rather difficult to achieve and now, the war's goal is to increase Russia's territory. 

The war is fought with explosive drones and cannons (artillery), After the stabilization of the front, the conflict will continue for months and years. We are selling anti-missile weapons to Germany. The population movements are increasing Germany's population to a new record. 

BTW, watched a BBC report of the Beijing student demonstration 30 years ago, and how it was dissolved with tanks. It was a massacre. Interesting how such large and bloody repression could be denied by the Chinese government all this time - as it never took place. I almost believed it. 

Parched

 
The Yang Tze river is almost dry. Heaven is showing its displeasure with the Emperor. The Chinese people seem to be rather touchy with the long COVID closures and are disobeying. Black rainless clouds all over the planet. 

Credit Suisse Shaking and Quaking

The Swiss Bank giant has lost money and top personnel in 2021 and is downsizing. I have no sympathy for Swiss banks that destroyed the bank accounts of the Jews trapped in Nazi-occupied countries and never tried to find their legal inheritors after the war. Pirates, their reputation is gone. When they lost their secret list of depositors, harming many Israelis and Jews, that was the beginning of the end. When in a fit of wokeness hired a Senegalese to manage the bank, who wrecked the bank, I concluded that they have lost their cold Lutheran minds, and the bank is doomed. So it is. Its shares are collapsing, it lost 21% in the last week, underperforming the S&P 500 by a huge margin. Further, the same trend was observed over the last ten days (-24%) and one month (-22%). This ugly giant is kaputt. The Swiss still are the wealthiest people on Earth and will not starve. 

How the world changes! I wanted to illustrate this note with a caricature of a Swiss Gold-mining Gnome, but they have totally disappeared from the internet. Apparently, the Zurich gnomes became toxic and offensive and google has erased their memory.  

Mythical Weapons?

 

In Quora, someone destroys the myth: nuclear weapons are just big incendiary bombs. Nothing to fear.

"The power of nuclear weapons has been used as a boogeyman for so long that the actual power of a nuclear detonation has almost no relation to their actual destructive power. No nuclear power can afford to actually use one in combat because it would expose the mythical nature of nuclear weapons.

Well then, how dangerous are nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons, if they weren't their own category, would be classified as incendiary weapons. They set stuff on fire. They set a lot of stuff on fire. In fact, they can set things on fire as far as two miles away from the actual detonation. Besides this, nuclear detonations are very bright, and capable of blinding people 20–30 miles away. This is only constrained by the curvature of the earth. They also create hurricane-force winds as the air around the detonation expands and contracts. If you are outside and unshielded and within a mile of a nuclear detonation, you are going to die.

Which brings us to our next point. Modern cities are just not that vulnerable to incendiaries. Modern city centers and industrial areas are made of concrete and steel. Most of the damage in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was done because almost all the buildings were made of wood and paper. The initial blast set the city centers on fire which spread and ended up burning down most of the city.

 This leads to the most surprising revelation about nuclear detonations: If you are not outside, you stand a good chance of surviving even within the blast zone. Nuclear blasts are mainly line-of-sight killers. The vast majority of “radiation” created by a nuclear detonation is infrared radiation, or heat the same as a gas stove or fireplace makes. Unless the building you are in is collapsed by the wind or you fail to leave if it catches on fire or you happen to be in front of a window with a direct line of sight to the detonation, you are probably going to be fine.

Most of the radiation is Thermal or visible; AKA heat and light. This radiation goes out in straight lines (line of sight) for a fraction of a second. This is relevant because this radiation is only there for a fraction of a second and then is gone leaving only its effects. A small amount of alpha and beta particles (hard radiation) are also produced. This radiation is also absorbed by the first solid object it runs into. The amount of energy transferred depends on the distance from the explosion by the inverse cube law. Radiation follows the inverse cube law, which means that the effects drop off very quickly.

the nuclear wasteland around Chernobyl never happened, much less lasted for thousands of years. Some plants and animals did die from the fallout, but not all of them or even most of them. The exclusion zone around Chernobyl has become a de facto nature preserve. The forest is lush and the wildlife is thriving. A few people who owned property in the exclusion zone have moved back in and seem to be doing just fine."

I conclude that our MAMADIM are efficient against nuclear weapons. I am sitting in one. A final comment: nuclear bombs need maintenance, and after a few years, will not explode.  Pic: Aftermath of the Nagasaki attack. Lesson: Avoid building houses of wood and paper. Concrete structures such as the chimneys survived undamaged by the bomb.

Red Heifers Arrive

The red heifer is first mentioned in the Book of Numbers 19:3 when God tells Moses and Aaron:  "This is the ritual law that God has commanded: Instruct the Israelite people to bring you a red cow without blemish, in which there is no defect and on which no yoke has been laid."

The red heifers were actually imported from Texas and they look healthy. Soon the sacrifice ritual will take place somewhere in Israel, and the resulting ashes will serve to purify the priests. 

Tell me we are not going bananas...

On the other hand, Israel's GNP reached 50,000 dollars per year. Source the World Bank. About 5 times the per capita of Argentina, and 10 times the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Bananas or not, but very rich. 

Working in Barkan

 I drove this morning to Barkan, a settlement in Samaria with a very large industrial area. My Client is a catering kitchen, probably the largest in Israel. The manager is a very active, much-tattooed Sepharadi Jew, who has developed a small kitchen into the large business it is now. I am his adviser from the beginning, ab-ovo - and he has improved and enlarged the operation, added gluten-less and non-allergic products - all alone. He is the example that one man can make a difference. In my time, Singapur was searching for this type of professor, they offered money to equip any laboratory he wanted and hire all the help he needed. They were right, the right man can create a full industry. 

Pic.: Now the rest of the acts of Ahab, and all that he did, and the ivory house which he made, and all the cities that he built, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel?

From linear production towards a circular economy

 

ICL paid a 3% dividend. I am studying if to continue investing in it and found that they have re-invented their boring business of mining potash as a specialty minerals manufacturer. Their website proclaims that they "have changed from linear production towards a circular economy" and have a multi-diverse staff - homos, SM specialists, eunuchs, dwarves, and Fijians. I wonder why an honest mining company hired a woke PR department to lie for it. 

I was rather depressed these days because my cheese factory project was rejected (it is a returning client, all the layouts are in my archive, and used the old one), and now have to submit it anew. But five minutes ago, phoned the vice president of a large conglomerate client and told me that their Harish project is a disaster - it was planned by some other engineer - and they want me to go and save them. I pretend to have no ego, I work for the money, yet it feels good. My clients stick with me for life. 

The Wall Street Twitter I follow is convinced that China is collapsing because of the zero COVID diktat. I have no explanation for why they are doing that to themselves. OK, the virus IS a bioweapon, but they have vaccines. 

 

TASE: What's going on?

 

Israel is going through its best economic times, it is growing at the record-breaking rate of 10% per year. The rest of the world is starting a recession cycle but Israel seems to be unhurt. But the bourse is falling like a dead duck. Industries that I regard invincible, like ICL, Kenon and the banks, are being valued cheaper by the day. Theoretically, there should be a correlation between the economy and stocks. TASE is a puppet of the NASDAQ, that pulls the wires, but Gadzooks!, why?

Say Black without saying Black

 

Some Scottish or Irish person wrote a little book correlating IQ with the wealth of the Nations. I cannot name him because that would activate a switch in Big Brother's computer mind and I would be written in his Book of Reprehensibles. In the last twenty-something years from that event, many mathematically-minded seekers of truth either/or godless apostates have elaborated on its conclusion, testing thousands of hypotheses and clever statistical methods.  The latest and probably the most comprehensive is George Francis and his table on the left. I don't care about repeating his obvious conclusion, I only wish to say that reading his paper, it is almost impossible to discover what he is talking about. For example, the two variables, Ancestry-adjusted UV radiation and % tropical population. What is he trying to convey with Ultra Violet Radiation adjusted for Ancestors? and Tropical populations? Read the title of this note. BTW, what is "age heaping"? It seems to indicate the percentage of inhabitants of the nation studied that could read a hundred and fifty years ago. 100% of the Jews could read and write (too much) at least since Joseph enriched the Pharaoh, but that doesn't count. (Malignant Anglo bureaucrats registered Jews arriving in Staten Island as analphabets and retarded, because they couldn't read or speak their lingo). 

Bipolar World Order, Again

The Americans are already planning a post-Russian, bipolar world, with China and them as sole big powers. Russia is disintegrating. “It is becoming increasingly clear that Ukraine is going to win this war and that the Kremlin faces a historic crisis of confidence,” NATO General Hodges said. “Indeed, I now believe it is a possibility that Putin’s exposed weaknesses are so severe that we might be witnessing the beginning of the end – not only of his regime but of the Russian Federation itself.”

I lack the vision to imagine that scenario but I can agree with one thing: “The loss of energy markets, which compensated for the country’s lack of modern industries, cannot be reversed. European governments will not rely again on Nord Stream-1, having witnessed how easily it can be turned off, and are already making long-term investments in domestic energy supply.” 

Eastern Europe, the homeland of the Ashkenazi sect for 800 years, is becoming Judenfrei.   

My Long COVID

 

I was diagnosed with COVID a month ago and it passed with light symptoms in a week. But yesterday and today I am feeling tired and lazy (I cannot focus on work). The heat diagram left shows the symptoms according to a novel kind of scientific research. The paper is here. The lower continuous red-orange strip shows "fatigue" which is what I have. Apparently, it lasts forever. I found no cause or prognosis on the internet. No one knows why it happens.

The upper red line(s) refer to mental health issues like depression, confusion, etc. Probably I am suffering from that too, but I cannot diagnose myself.

 Americans are dying three years earlier than before, the same in Europe. This is a bad thing. Statistically, in America, I would be dead. 

After University, I spent many months touring the USA and Canada. I was introduced to a lot of beautiful, wealthy, marriageable Jewish girls. I definitely did not like American women. I hated the dirty food served at Greyhound stations and cheap restaurants. My family and friends in Argentina lived better than those in America. I attended classes at Universities and left unimpressed.  Thank God I did not stay.

From Bloomberg (T. Cowen):  The evidence is piling up that the US has been suffering from a deficit of human capital. For instance, a recent report showed that US life expectancy first stalled and then has been falling. In other words, current Americans — or at least some subset of them — are having trouble just staying alive.

Oh, God. 

America Needs TAHAL

 

From Upmanu Lall (pic), by SciAm: 

There is no central planning for water investments in the U.S. Compare that with the situation for energy, where we have the Energy Information Administration and the Department of Energy. Whether they do a good job or not, there are at least some people tasked with thinking about what should be done and to put some requests for money on the table. In contrast, we have seven or eight different federal agencies with some sort of jurisdiction on water. And that structure is then replicated at the state level and at the local level. 

 ...with agriculture, which is the largest water user, there are options such as agrivoltaics and shifting which crops are grown where. So you start thinking about restructuring the whole system. That is not just a question of liberating money. It’s more a question of getting some good, higher-level planning and thinking in place and then putting money behind these plans and innovations.

 One big concern is the California drought. The agriculture industry there is at an extremely high risk of dying.  More generally, we will see a slowly evolving epidemic of water system failures like the one in Jackson.

Dr Upmanu Lall is another Indian talent lending his brain to solve American problems. I find funny the expression "liberating money". But Lall is very good. TAHAL is my alma mater, תכנון המים לישראל - Water Planning for Israel, a national water planning company, that in its heyday had 800 employees and did much work in Latin America and Africa. 

. 

Wasted Efforts

 
Michael Pettis wrote:

They failed to recognize in their projections that as investment levels remained high – higher than the economy could productively absorb – an increasing share of growth could only be created by that part of the economy that operated under soft-budget constraints. 

This "growth" – which was really just activity and not growth – could only exist as long as the government and banking system were willing and able to tolerate an unsustainable increase in the debt associated with that activity. 

That means that as soon as debt levels became too high to continue managing, or once policymakers decided they had to address the debt before it became too high to manage, we would see much of the previous GDP growth reversed from the economy. 

Janos Kornai (Kornhauser) already discovered this in Budapest. Communist forced industrialization led to much activity and much waste. 

The Canaanite Dog

 

The Canaanite dog is a pariah, a feral breed descended from the domestic dog of the region. At Ashkelon, they found a 700 dogs cemetery and the dogs were Canaan. It is yellow with black and white patches. The wiki says that it is very common, although I used to trek in the Negev and Sinai, never saw it. 

Hank, Cash, Cline

 

About Angora Cats

The Angora Cat. I never met one. 

Angora should not be allowed to get fat. This elegant cat has fine boning and too much weight can be harmful. 

China fears a bad harvest and famine. It is hoarding soya and fertilizers. 

ICL shares will surely rise.  

Flint gets $626 million for incompetence (Continued)

The City of Flint was unable to maintain and operate its water treatment plant, and the untreated water dissolved the lead in its old pipes. President Obama declared a national emergency and the city received a present of 626 million dollars. For the last month the city of Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, has been without water supply. I understand that the pumps were not maintained and one broke down. The city had no money for the reparation and after a time, the second pump also went out of service. Jackson is 90% African and is blaming the city's former White residents for leaving and abandoning them. I presume Biden will give them national emergency funds to repair the pumps, and that will not be the end, because other Black cities are in a similar pre-emergency situation. 

Anti-Westphalian Trends

 

Henry Kissinger notes that in the Middle East the trend is toward the dissolution of the States: Libya has no central government and its large area is divided among several warring tribes and political factions. Syria has been divided into tribal areas and the formal dictator controls Damascus if even that. Iraq is divided into Sunni and Shi'a parts and a semi-independent Kurdish statelet. Iran is a dictatorship ruled by a utopian clergy. Saudia is owned by one family and Islam's most extremist missionary movement, the Wahhabis. It doesn't look very stable. In all of Africa, there is not one stable Westphalian state. Obviously, the peoples living in the region are unable to organize themselves into working States. Kissinger suggests that they could fall under the protection of willing world power, and mentions China, India, and Russia. Some kind of neo-colonialism.