The Taxman took money from my account, without giving me an advance notice. It depressed me and I am thinking of closing the shop and stop working. I never planned to work till age 77, but here I am and what else is to do? People volunteer, not me. Some spend time in the club, but I prefer to hoard money and help my hardworking daughters. Traveling - did enough for one and a half lives. Sex - remind me what it was about.
Russia and China's aggressiveness has triggered a worldwide re-armament movement. Kissinger's Westphalian World Order is being shaken and a shooting war may be around the corner.
As always, I am undecided. For one, the self-elected Supreme Court protects effectively our international legality and democratic image. On the other hand, it tries to impose utopic humanitarian behavior on a community under daily, no, hourly terrorist attacks.
In 1980 Israel's gdp per person was about half of Germany’s; now it is 12% higher.
Amazing! The Soviet Jews who were left out with a visa for Israel but choose Germany... lost. Leaving Judaism means surely declassing. I learned that in Argentina.
In my adolescence, I used to spend whole days reading the latest Economist, missing out on classes, and not studying.
What did I learn today? That the world is already in a recession cycle, as Ray Dalio's book says. I have bought his book but it is so large that it cannot be read in the bed but has to be rested on a table, like the Tanach, so I just skipped around.
I am psycho.
Who is crazy?
I am crazy. I am a crazy golanchik.*
I want to be a fighter.
To fight the terrorists.
And return home in peace
To the Brigade that is a dream.
Who is a crazy golanchik?
I am a crazy golanchik!
* Golani is an infantry brigade.
The Swiss banking giant said 61.2bn Swiss francs left the bank in the first three months of the year.
68.6 Billion US dollars.
Switzerland's Foreign Currency reserves are about 800 - 1000 Billion US$. The Swiss are very rich. They could have easily saved the bank. But it was not worth saving.
We had here a week of Pesach work pause and it is mightily difficult for me to re-start work. On Sunday I traveled to Afula for Victory's new store, but I am unable to sit for long and work. How can I wind up to work? I do not need to work but I am afraid of the vacuum if I stop. Work maintains me in life. Or not. God, help me. Maybe too much valium makes me lazy as now I am.
The defunct Swiss Bank not only destroyed records of Jewish deposits during WWII but also helped Nazis to steal Jewish monies. Not only helped them but actively hindered the investigation of its criminal actions.
A committee of US lawmakers on Tuesday said troubled Swiss bank Credit Suisse Group CSGN.S hampered a multiyear investigation into the servicing of Nazi clients and Nazi-linked accounts.
Credit Suisse commissioned an investigation into allegations levied by a human rights organization that the bank held potential Nazi-linked accounts and failed to disclose them, even during Holocaust-related probes decades earlier. A Senate committee's recent investigation into the matter found the bank hindered the probe and "inexplicably terminated" an independent reviewer overseeing it.The "information we've obtained shows the bank established an unnecessarily rigid and narrow scope, and refused to follow new leads uncovered during the course of the review," Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, said in a statement.
Now we are starting to understand how those Nazis that immigrated LEGALLY to Argentina after the war arrived with such large fortunes and could buy themselves estancias in Patagonia. With the disappearance of Credit Suisse that chapter of the Holocaust is now closed and justice was not even remotely done.
Italians' mean age is 47; therefore, more than half are past the age of reproduction. With a fertility rate of 1.3 children per woman, the smaller "procreative fraction" of the population will fall by almost 50% with each generation. (If President Meloni adopts nationalist measures...) she will have to deal with the European Court of Human Rights, the Court of Justice of the European Union, and the United States, if she does not respect the treaties on the management of immigration, Islam, free and undistorted competition, and the European Union's defense policy.
If she is really very brave, she will carry on regardless and continue her policy. That is when the European Central Bank will deal with her. Indeed, Italy has become, thanks to Berlusconi, a beggar. It owes its survival only to the accommodative policy of the ECB, which massively buys its abysmal debt, and protects it from hedge funds. Remember that the ECB holds 780 billion [euros] of Italian public debt (30% of total debt), and that this is only growing. Italy's 10-year borrowing rates have already exceeded 4%, which is completely unbearable for the country's budget. Then it would be enough for the ECB to stop its purchases, or even to sell part of its stock on the market at a low price, to immediately raise this rate to stratospheric levels, and make Italy look like Zimbabwe.
Looking at the same place from the future (today), I found the Costa Atlantica semi-deforested by mestizo cattle farmers, with a developed frozen meat industry selling to the US market. It had happened spontaneously; Afik's plan had been long forgotten. Current issues were dealing with "Native" land rights, and sustainability accusations by American "woke" groups. They were demanding certificates of origin of the meat, that is identifying the "hacienda" that sold the cattle, and a certificate that it was "woke" in the sense that it was ecologically sustainable, not a "settler" farm on the new-fangled Biosphere Reserve, and so on - following the Save the Earth ideology. They were demanding that the US stop importing Nicaraguan meat considered immoral and harmful to the planet.
BTW, the "settlers" are mixed-blood Nicaraguans, certainly not Europeans. Those White Americans' impositions may be interpreted as a form of imperial interference.
The Future II: Argentina vs Brazil
When I was in high school in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Brazil were more or less equal. Those were times of military dictatorship and the papers used to compare their military powers. Argentine was worried that its traditional rival was growing faster and leaving behind the country. Fifty years after, today, Brazil's population and economy are five times larger than Argentina's. I have no data on their military.
For a whole week, I ate unleavened bread - matza - which is truly indigestible. Having survived Pesach, the escape saga from slavery, bought a large baguette and finished in ten minutes. At last, I felt full, free, and happy.
Local papers write that San Francisco transgender population is oppressed, lives in fear, and is cruelly discriminated against. They have no access to free transgender medical care, etc. In other, general issues their tone is standard (for woke America).
According to a leaked Pentagon paper, the Israeli Secret Service rebelled against the government and worked for its fall. The Economist writes that the elite pilots' squad started the mass protests when understood that without an independent Supreme Court, they could find themselves accused of war crimes and detained in Europe. It is difficult to be Jew.
The graph is from "Coin hoards vs population decline". Roman historians, for example, have been unable to agree on how to interpret an abrupt jump in recorded census tallies that occurred during the first century BCE.
Several foreign holders of Argentine indexed bonds demanded the State for falsifying the data and cheating them. The London tribunal accepted the demand and now Argentina will pay about 1.5 billion dollars. Triste.
See https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/latamcaribbean/2017/02/21/the-case-of-indec-in-argentina-shows-that-statistical-neutrality-is-an-unachievable-ideal/
