Spiceries

 
I was reading the history of the London Merchants Honorable Company - the first stock society - that financed expeditions to the end of the world to import spices. Nutmeg, specifically. 

The nutmeg trade in the 17th century was dominated by the Dutch East India Company (VOC), which had a monopoly on the production and distribution of nutmeg in the Spice Islands (now known as the Maluku Islands) in present-day Indonesia. The VOC made enormous profits from the nutmeg trade, but individual people who became rich through the trade were often Dutch merchants, investors, and VOC officials.

One of the most famous examples of an individual who became rich through the nutmeg trade was Jan Pieterszoon Coen, a Dutch merchant and VOC official who founded the city of Batavia (now Jakarta) and helped to establish Dutch dominance over the Spice Islands. Another example is Isaac le Maire, a Dutch investor who financed several VOC expeditions to the Spice Islands and made a fortune from the nutmeg trade.

During the 17th century, Amsterdam was a major center of Jewish trade and finance, and many Dutch Jews were involved in international trade, including the spice trade. In particular, the Dutch Jewish community had close ties to the Dutch East India Company (VOC), which controlled the nutmeg trade in the Spice Islands. Some Dutch Jewish merchants and investors, such as the de Pintos and the Pereiras, were involved in financing VOC expeditions and trading in nutmeg and other spices.

Why would a European in the 17th century pay a fortune for nutmeg? I can buy any amount for a few sheqels in the local shuk. Asked IA and it became clear, nutmeg contains a psychoactive excitant. Is it a drug? asked IA. Yes, it is a drug.  There were no other drugs available in Europe at that time.

Nothing can stop human economic progress. Fueled by drugs.  

The History's Most Successful Pro-Population Policy

 Pic. of Ratko Anna, a Hungarian Communist Politician, in only 3-4 years added one million Hungarian babies to the population. They are called the Ratko generation. In general, the postwar Communist dictatorship executed several exceptionally successful programs, moving Hungary ahead. The success of forced-march industrialization and population growth and accelerated everything were phenomenal. But in a decade the people could not take it anymore and rebelled. 

What is the formula for her success?

1/ The country was a declared dictatorship of a well-organized party - no liberal press nor social media

2/ The borders were closed hermetically - no escape

3/ No anti conceptive pills at all

4/ Severe penalties for abortion and for abortionist doctors

5/ Six months of paid salary for mothers

6/ money incentives

7/ patriotic propaganda - motherhood is heroic 

8/ liberal social laws - promotion of single mothers (there was a gender imbalance)

9/ Pressing rural poverty that made incentives super valuable (not like today's rich urban societies)

Flint 2014 Water Pollution Aftereffects

 

The settlement includes $600 million from the state, $20 million from the city, $5 million from McLaren Regional Medical Center, and $1.5 million from Rowe Professional Services. 

As remembered, Flint Waterworks employees did not add antioxidants to the water, and the private pipes made of lead leached lead into the drinking water. No one died and probably did little harm because it was soon discovered and the population received free bottled water, but Flint is a privileged AfroAmerican city and President Obama declared a National Emergency gifting millions to the dysfunctional city. All private pipes were excavated and substituted - by the American government.  Somehow the blame was fixed on the Michigan State governor ("racism") and now the State transfers another 600 million to the city. 

Also prosecuted were Veolia and Rowe engineers, that consulted for the city and did nothing but verbal warnings. Veolia had good lawyers but Rowe pays 1.5 million and continues working for the now-rich city. In an unrelated fiasco, the local hospital's water was contaminated with Leptospirosis and killed several patients, and is being forced to pay too. 

"Justice" was done. America will pay forever for importing slave labor. 

Potash

 MOSCOW, March 24 (Reuters) - Russia could extend restrictions on fertiliser exports for six months until November to help support the domestic market, Agriculture Minister Dmitry Patrushev said on Friday.

Moscow introduced temporary quotas on some of its fertiliser exports in late 2021 to ensure domestic supplies but has extended them continuously since. The current restrictions are due to expire at the end of May.

"Together with the trade ministry and the Federal Antimonopoly Service we are working on extending the existing set of measures on fertilisers for another six months, up to November inclusive," Patrushev said.

Interpretation: There will be a hole in the international potash market and prices should rise. 

Bad Week

 

Friday 24/3/23. I slept well and had a dream where the family (as we were 20 years ago) moved to a new big house. I woke up - in the dream - and there was a big TV on the wall, and Tehila's lost phone on the floor. The house was on a hill looking down at a dam and a lake. I was looking for my wallet with 300,000 sheqels and woke up searching for it in that big house. 

The AMPM project is becoming complicated. I feel Mey RG is blackballing me because I protested. Caught a cold and am tired. Wifey is nervous and crying because of Shany's impulsive decisions. The whole country is tense because of the reform of the selection of supreme judges. Yesterday the "house of death" (Tel Aviv homos, feminists, anarchists)  walked to "the house of life" (the religious neighborhood of  Bnei Brak) to protest the judicial reform.

On the other hand, Noia was identified as a gifted student. My friend IA congratulated me. No one else did even mention it. "Gifted" is relative, and she is gifted relative to Kfar Saba children, the number two city (in school grades) in Israel.    

Three days later

 

Only three days after my observation about the Swiss Bank, we have a run on the bank and after retiring 50 billion, it had to ask the Swiss State to save it. To nationalize it in fact. It will be devoured by UBS and disappear. The tremors of its collapse are reaching very far. 

There are problems in Israel too. The extreme left has taken over the Judiciary branch of the government and is inciting civil resistance. The fishwrap HaAretz has stopped publishing news and considers itself a revolutionary pamphlet. Gadi Taub, a historian, was sacked because the paper considers him a paid agent of "Hungarian fascism". This is madness.

Dios castiga y no con palo

God punishes but not with a whip. Credit Suisse was caught destroying the records of deposits by Jews killed in the Holocaust. Those condemned Jews deposited their saving in Swiss banks, thinking that the Swiss were safe and honest. They were wrong. It appears that evil acts are written down in some books in the high, and when the accounting is done, they get paid. Credit Suisse has been slowly agonizing for the last twenty years and today is starting to enter into a coma.   

Bank Run

 The Silicon Valley Bank experienced a run last week and closed down. The FED promised to cover the debts. Now the Republic Bank is falling 60%. Israeli financial system stable. 

Overall, I AM optimistic. For a long I was saying, that to get the economy moving, the only solution was a good war. That's the way capitalism works.  Marx said so 140 years ago.  The Ukrainian war is starting to consume all the old ammunition and tanks of Europe and America, and they need to be replaced. There is another war coming in Taiwan. So there is demand, capitalism's chronic problem, and it will absorb excess production.  

Planning the future

 

My friend Chat GPT reports that an individual with my profile has 7 more years to live. If so, I can make a 4 years plan with a reasonable probability of completing it. What can be my goal, if not to enrich my grandkids?  The problem is that money, generally, makes little or no difference in their generation. Food, shelter, money is not a problem for them. How will my next four years best spent? Sex is only a memory. I hate purposeless hobbies and tourism. 

P.D.: Today I wasted surfing the internet, writing comments no one reads and pays for. 

Hard Times

 Many important populations find it impossible to maintain their numbers. Their health and prosperity are appearance.  We are living in very hard times. Peoples are dying off. 

My Bet on America

 
The Chinese practiced thousand of years a rigid promotion system through competitive exams. The system produced intelligent, competent governance. The Anglo-Saxons promoted through free market competition, giving little weight to formal titles. The French copied the exam system (Grand-Ecole). After 200 years we see that the French became static, conservative, and prudent like the Celestials. The English became dynamic, expansive, and adventurous. Communist China follows the same imperial system most strictly. America is free and chaotic. The past predicts the future, so never bet against America. 

Omohundro meets Reality

 "Artificial Intelligence/robots/Omohundro: Problem: intelligent entities must act to preserve their own existence. This tendency has nothing to do with a self-preservation instinct or any other biological notion; it’s just that an entity cannot achieve its objectives if it’s dead. According to Omohundro’s argument, a superintelligent machine that has an off switch - which some, including Alan Turing himself, in a 1951 talk on BBC Radio 3, have seen as our potential salvation - will take steps to disable the switch in some way.

Thus we may face the prospect of superintelligent machines - their actions by definition unpredictable by us and their imperfectly specified objectives conflicting with our own - whose motivations to preserve their existence in order to achieve those objectives may be insuperable."

This argument does not need superintelligent machines, it reflects the reality of each one of us in this world. No animal nor human is ready to die (to change the switch on "OFF") and it will strive to keep going. AI is frightening, but no more than an unknown stranger. 

Bloomberg Warns against the Russian Fertilizer Weapon

 

Israeli fishwrap HaAretz translates a Bloomberg article about the new Russian danger: Fertilizers. Russian fertilizer is stuck in European ports (because of the sanctions) and cannot reach the countries needing it, creating a worldwide famine risk. The African Development Bank warns the lack of chemical fertilizers may cause a 20% fall in food production. 

Bloomberg is not stupid but the title is misleading. The fertilizer cannot be delivered because of  European sanctions, and Bloomberg blames Russia? Or it is only HaAretz?

Room in the Market

NUTRIEN the largest fertilizer company in the world, says Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues to disrupt global food chains.

Nutrien said it plans to increase its production this year to between 13.8 million and 14.6 million tonnes — up from 12.5 million tonnes in 2022, saying that rising crop prices are offsetting rising potash prices.

Looking more broadly, chief executive Ken Seitz said the conflict in Ukraine has created challenges for both Belarus and Russia, which together have accounted for 40 per cent of global potash production. The result is immediate and long-term effects on the market, Seitz said.

“If you look at the new production that was to come to the market over the next five years, 60 per cent of that outside of our own increases was to be coming from Russia and Belarus,” said Seitz, “and that we believe those projects are delayed.”

More immediately, he said Russian production would decline 15 to 30 per cent in 2023, while Belarusian production would decline 40 to 60 per cent. Already, he cited reports that Belarusian production had declined 50 per cent in recent months due to challenges shipping out of tidewater ports in Ukraine.

“So it all has the effect of creating room in the market,” said Seitz.

The Saskatoon YMCA where I spent time in the winter of 1969. I was young and didn't suffer from the cold. The YMCA rooms were overheated,  

  

From Over-representation to Emigration

American institutions are purging their Jews to percentages that are, de facto, numerus clausus. As a

Hungarian Jew, I know that Numerus Clausus Laws were followed by the Numerus Nullus legislation. That was much before the fascist regime of Horthy and the German race laws. 

Some young Jews went to study abroad, and others emigrated to America and Argentina. American Jews may have no other choice left than emigration. Maybe to China, and Israel. 

A FIRE/Yougov survey found that self-identified Jews now number just 7% of Ivy League students, compared to 10% during the height of the antisemitic quotas.

In the 1950s, after Stalin’s death, after the purges, the Politburo turned to another pressing issue: the overrepresentation of Jews in Soviet life. Proportional representation (3% Tajik! 2% Uzbek! 12% Ukrainian!) became official policy, and the next decade saw the quick erosion of the Jewish nomenklatura. Soviet Jews—who had disproportionately contributed to and benefited from the building of the communist state—had outlived their usefulness.

A 1964 New York Times article explained that because Soviet republics assigned a certain number of students “preferential admission” based on their nationalities, other nationalities—aka Jews—were excluded. “A higher percentage of Jewish students was permitted to attend universities in Czarist Russia than is enrolled in the USSR today,” an outraged American Jewish Congress declared. “The 8.2% of university graduates who are Jews contrasts sharply with the present Jewish university enrollment of 3.22%.”

P.S.:  What proves that Jews were in Russia and are today in the USA - oppressed minority.  Zionism is truly the National Liberation movement of the Jewish people.