Don Segundo Sombra

 

En los pagos de Areco. Segundo Ramírez, del libro de Ricardo Guiraldes. Mi libro favorito. 

Heritage Center of Cochin Jewry

 What am I working on today? It is a Heritage Center of the Indian (Cochin) Jewry in a Moshav near my home city. They are brown-skinned, nice people, proud of their ethnic traditions as all the other 120 "edot" (tribes?) of Israel. They have a 2000-year history on the Malabar Coast. Thomas, one of the disciples of Jesus, settled among them and converted many, forming the  Saint Thomas Christian population of India. 

Sabiduria criolla

Inodoro toro, Mendieta perro.

4 Billion US$ Startup

In less than one year, these two boys, Din Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev (pic), founded a business called Decart, which attracted investments from Nvidia and Amazon, now worth 4 billion US dollars. It was a year of war, bombardment, and fear. 

Magic!

Internet swamp

 A post on X claims there are 100,000 articles on Hantavirus, suggesting it is a Moderna campaign to frighten the world. The reason given is that Moderna has many vaccines in store that need to be sold.

The internet has turned into a psychological battleground; it is difficult to make sense of it. Anyway, for me, the whole thing is irrelevant. 

The Coming Plague

 The Spanish passenger of the Antarctic voyage suspected of contact with the Hantavirus was put off on an isolated islet in the Canaries.  After the Regina Coeli Sunday morning prayer, Pope Leo XIV thanked the people of the Canary Islands for allowing the arrival of the MV Hondius, affected by a hantavirus outbreak. 

The British passenger was landed on Tristan da Cunha. 

Tristan da Cunha — the world's most remote inhabited island.

It sits in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean, roughly halfway between South Africa and South America. It's a British Overseas Territory with only about 200 residents, no airstrip, and normally accessible only by a six-day boat journey.

A British Army specialist team of 8 people — six paratroopers and two military clinicians — parachuted from an RAF A400M aircraft onto the island after a suspected Hantavirus case was confirmed in a British national who had been a passenger on a cruise ship hit by an outbreak.

The logistics were extraordinary: The A400M flew 6,788 km from RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, refuelling mid-flight from a RAF Voyager tanker aircraft, before reaching the island. Haaretz

Pandemic on the making

 Hantavirus causes respiratory disease. The cruise ship cluster is grabbing attention because of the person-to-person transmission via the Andes strain, and because passengers from many countries disembarked before the outbreak was detected.   The colalarga rat transmitted the mutated Hantavirus to a passenger of the cruise ship, killing several other passengers. Now they are trying to localize those who came into contact with an infected persons. One woman who flew in the same plane has been identified, and she is dead. They are trying to stop the epidemic before it endangers the whole world. 

My Alma Mater

From the La Plata El Dia, Argentina:

"Our faculty has an enormous pending debt with the educational system, since more than 70% of the students who enter do not go to the second year," Marín warned in one of the strongest passages of his message; "the graduation rate is lower compared to that observed 10 years ago." In that sense, he compared that before it reached 67% while today it is around 18%"

I don't believe that in 2016, 67% graduated, because in my time, graduating classes were no more than 10% of the entrants. I don't know exactly how many graduated in my class because I was the first to finish and left La Plata the day I passed the last exam. 

The Ebal Mountain

 

Har Ebal, the Samaritan Jews' sacred mountain. Taken in 2012.

In the Book of Joshua, after the Battle of Ai, Joshua built an altar of unhewn stones there, the Israelites then made peace offerings on it, the Law of Moses was written onto the stones, and the Israelites split into two groups and pronounced blessings and curses as instructed there.

In February 2021 a portion of the site was destroyed by the Palestinian Authority and the stones were ground up and used to pave the road.

President Trump Negotiating

 
US President Donald Trump told Fox News that Iran would be "blown off the face of the earth' if it attacks the US naval vessels escorting merchant vessels through the Strait of Hormuz.

Thinking out of the box

 
        Thinking

https://x.com/i/status/1939933166354972760

Who is Who in British Politics

Zack Polanski is a latecomer to electoral politics. He grew up in Manchester in a Jewish family, came out as gay as a teenager and spent two decades as an actor, boosting his income with odd jobs including hypnotherapist. In 2013 he told a reporter that he could enlarge her breasts using “the unconscious” (he has since apologised). Two years later he joined the centrist Liberal Democrats but failed to mesmerise voters, standing unsuccessfully to be a councillor in London. He switched to the Greens in 2017. Eventually he was elected to the London Assembly, where he still sits.

The Economist’s poll tracker puts the Greens just three points behind Labour and the Conservatives, Britain’s two traditional parties of government.  Polanski is the leader of the Green Party. (from The Economist).

Nous? Puissance régionale dominante?

Arab states fear Israel as a disruptive regional power, even a dominant one; the UAE still wants to do deals with it. (From The Economist)

They are starting to take us seriously. Good.

Tachos

 

The late Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza loved shiny decorations (a popular hobby among generals - see pic from North Korea). The people nicknamed him "Tacho Somoza" (In Nicaragua, "tacho" meant metallic waste, like the Coca-Cola bottle cap). His son was called Tachito.                                             

 

The World of Yesterday

 Finished reading Stefan Zweig's memoir (he and his wife killed themselves after the completion of the book). Five hundred pages, but only one is dedicated to the greatest tragedy of Europe - the elimination of the Jews. Zweig tried all his life to become a "generic" European, an Austrian, and never something particular like a Jew. I found that many of the expressions and ideas of my family and their circle of friends originated from Zweig, or maybe he captured precisely the spirit of the times. My uncle called his business "Europlast" to emphasize its Europeanness (vs. those lazy criollos). Zweig, like his generation, believed that his ethnic origin was an unimportant detail, but it was exactly what condemned him to desperate exile. I dislike cosmopolitan Jews; I am a Zionist. 

Israeli Photonics Startups

 
Within weeks in April 2026:

• DustPhotonics → Credo Technology — $1.3 billion
• Teramount → Molex — $430 million

Two Israeli photonics startups acquired for a combined $1.73 billion — both solving different but complementary problems in the same AI data center photonics stack. Israel's silicon photonics ecosystem has just been significantly absorbed into the global supply chain.

The remaining independent Israeli photonics player of note is NewPhotonics — worth watching as the next potential acquisition target.

Interesting. And April 2026 is not yet over!

Roof collapsed - engineer (91) jailed

 

A decade after the Iron parking garage collapse disaster in Tel Aviv, the court sentenced engineer Hanoch Tzahar (91 years old) to imprisonment and a fine, after he was convicted of causing the deaths of 6 workers through negligence and the injury of 23 additional workers.

Engineering is a high-risk profession, especially after 90. 

Sanchez: El Lado Bueno de la Historia

 

The President of Spain, Sanchez, assumes the leadership of the world progressive movement (he is head of the International Socialism organization). He calls it a fight for democracy, exactly like the fishwrap HaAretz. The Brazilian Lula has conceded the position. Bibi and Donald Trump are Sanchez's enemies. Per contra, Hamas, Hizballah, the Ayatollahs, and so on are on the correct side of history and "democrats".  "Vomitabile", to apply Giorgia Meloni's expression.  

Babies are not showing up

Social Security needs 2.1 births per woman to stay solvent. US is at 1.6. $39T in debt needs the next generation to service it. That generation isn't showing up at the numbers required.

That is a funny way of talking about the central problem of our generation. I am an only child, have no siblings, and no relatives. That is typical of the Hungarian Jewish post-WWII generation. That's why I doubt the common estimate of 60,000 Jews in Hungary. They may be only a small fraction of it. No more than 10,000.

Wall Street Expert

 
Claude the AI is being advertised as a Wall Street Expert. I asked it about Elbit. In less than a second, it answered.

ESLT closed at $869.79 on April 16, down 3.2% on the day, with a 52-week range of $369 to $1,016. GuruFocus So from its March 17 all-time high of ~$1,016, the stock has pulled back roughly 14% this month — a meaningful correction.

The bull case for recovery

The company's $28.1 billion backlog reflects future unrealized revenue, meaning that even if the Iran conflict winds down, demand for Elbit's systems remains strong, owing to rising defense spending globally — with 72% of that backlog coming from international customers. Yahoo Finance The war proved Elbit's systems in the field, which typically accelerates export orders.

JPMorgan recently raised its price target on ESLT from $580 to $930, while keeping a Neutral rating. Robinhood That's a significant upward revision from a major bank, signaling that even cautious analysts see the fundamental story as intact.

The next earnings report is scheduled for May 19, 2026 StockInvest.us — that's the most concrete near-term catalyst. Given that Q4 2025 results beat estimates by a wide margin and triggered a 16% jump, a strong Q1 could easily reprice the stock upward.

The bear case / risks

Insider activity is a yellow flag: insiders sold $61.9 million worth of shares in the last three months with no buying activity GuruFocus — people inside the company are not adding at these levels.

The median analyst price target is $882.50 — implying modest downside from the current price, with 1 Buy, 4 Hold, and 1 Sell among tracked analysts. Ticker Nerd The consensus is essentially: good company, full valuation.

The P/E ratio of ~77x is significantly higher than the 5-year median of 44x, and valuation models like GF Value place the stock at 150% above estimated fair value GuruFocus — so the premium is real.

The bottom line

The stock is caught between two opposing forces: strong and growing fundamentals on one side, and peace-talk headwinds + stretched valuation on the other. The most likely near-term recovery trigger is the Q1 earnings release in May — if it shows continued backlog growth and margin expansion, that could reset sentiment. But I'd note this as analysis, not investment advice — you know the geopolitical picture better than most analysts sitting in New York.

My opinion: Let me think it over, I don't know.