Kapstadt Reducing Water Pressure

The City is reducing the pressure in the pipes. They call it pressure management. You open the faucet and a sick trickle of urine-like liquid drips down slowly. They say that shedding (one day with water, one day dry) is worse, because people store more water than they need. The rainy season is in, the reservoirs are 50% full (50% empty).

Pic. The solution: Water pressure booster, a small centrifugal pump with electric engine. 

Franciscan Poverty

It’s beyond laughable that a one-bedroom apartment can sell for $1.5 million in San Francisco — and get multiple offers within a day. Or that dumpsters sport satirical “for rent” signs.

A family of four earning $117,000 a year is now classified as low income in the San Francisco area. This threshold, used to determine eligibility for federal housing assistance, is the highest in the nation . From

The Human Race

Humans share 98% of their DNA with chimps, but grown chimpanzees have the strength of five grown men. They're dangerous animals. Pet chimps always attack their owners. Chimp attacks are horrifying, tragic, and downright shocking. When chimps attack humans, it's something worse than your worst nightmare.

The 1937 Meeting of Ribbentrop and Churchill

In his "Gathering Storm", Winston Churchill describes his meeting in 1937 with Herr von Ribbentrop, the German Ambassador in London. Ribbentrop asked for free hand in East Europe, because Germany must have her Lebensraum, for her increasing population. Churchill said no. Then war is inevitable. "When you talk about war, you must not underrate England. She is a curious country and few foreigners understand her mind. She is very clever. If you plunge us into a Great War, she will bring the whole world against you."

That was exactly what followed.

Here too, as with the Nazi concept of work, I find amazing that Nazi thinking was based on eighteen century economic doctrines, totally wrong and obsolete. The fact about Germany is that its population was growing very slowly (and after 1972 it is decreasing) so here was no foreseeable need for more space. The idea that population will increase geometrically is an error conceived by the English cleric and political economy expert Malthus. A very harmful error because it was believed by the Nazis, and with their rigid logic they concluded that they needed more agricultural land to feed future generations. The concept that food production was limited by surface multiplied by fertility of the soil is another eighteen century concept, invented by David Ricardo. That equation had been made obsolete by Liebig, who discovered chemical fertilizers, the Nazi thought did not register the agricultural revolution  and was ruled by long discarded concepts. The had just need to look at the price of cereals (bread): with the opening of the American Middle West and the virgin lands of South Russia, the price of cereals fell to 10% of its former price and Germany could import any quantity wanted. 

Germany in 1937 had no population problems and did not need any living space. They went to war for the wrong reasons. They must have known it. Hitler's real reason to plunge the world into a war was to exterminate the Jews, and he wrote so in his will. All the talk about lebensraum is bullshit. 

Death through Work

One of the commonest accusation against the Jews is that they are parasites, that they do not produce anything material and do not like to work. The idea is so deeply rooted that the Nazis established death camps where the killing was done by over-working and under-feeding the Jewish inmates - a way of dedicated revenge. In Auschwitz, work groups went out each early morning to do some physically demanding labor while receiving very low calorie content soup. Inevitably, they died in few weeks, only the young and healthy survived for a few months, and then they became too weak to stand in the reviews and were sent to the gas chambers.

The concept that Jews were parasites always hit me as absurd, because the Jews I knew were very diligent, and they were paid good money for their services - meaning they were valuable. Why financial risk managing (like lending money at interest), or commerce, without which no economy can subsist, can be considered unproductive? Now I am reading classical economic literature, like the "Principles of Political Economy" by John Stuart Mill, and this nineteen century economist proposes this idea that only those activities that produce physical objects add to the wealth of the nations, while all the others subtract from it. And he is not the author of the concept but reflects the economic wisdom of former centuries.

The Nazis had this primitive and incorrect concept of economics, and felt that the academic economists of their generation - most of them Jews - were developing some kind of bizarre "Jewish economic science" aimed only at clearing the Jews of the crime of economic parasitism. They felt in their guts that something was wrong with those decent German peasants producing food (bread) through hard physical work should be poor while the Jewish intermediaries - pure consumers - were prospering. The concept is so deeply rooted that even today, when less than 1% of the population works the land and less than 5% works in factories producing physical goods, when 90% works in offices and other service jobs, Jews are thought (by honest but ignorant non-Jews) as unproductive.

Anti-Semites hang on to an obsolete, wrong, absurd notion, but one so deeply believed that was impossible to refute in the Galut. Early Zionist built a flowering farming sector which by its very existence refutes the antisemites' arguments. I always felt that Zionism's fixation with the "halutz" the Jewish farmer was wrong, but it answered and refuted a very damaging image, that - under the Nazis - actually was physically killing the Jews.  

Iran feeling Trump's Fury

Stealing water. There are serious shortages of drinking water and much stealing from national pipelines.

Trump announced that Saudi Arabia will increase its oil production by 2 million barrels. Jahangiri of Iran reacted: “If any country attempts to take Iran’s place in the oil market in this battle, we will consider it a big treachery and they will surely pay for this betrayal someday”. What? Iran is fearing it will not be able to sell its oil. That was supposed to be a state secret. 

Iran's free market currency is worth half of the official price. The country is tense and there are shootings in the Arab South. Since Ahmedinejad I have little sympathy for the ayatollahs. 

The IDF and the Moabite Whores

We are now re-reading the Balak section of the Bible. The Israelites emerge from the Sinai desert and enter Moab. The king of the Moabites estimates his forces to be too weak to resist and hires an international psywar expert. The God of the Israelites (gold?) convinces the expert that he should change sides. The Israelites overcome the Moabites, but in the end they are punished and they move on leaving Moab unconquered.

Why? The Israelite warriors, after a killing trek through the desert, are seduced by the Moabite ladies, and they "whore" with the new girls. If something the God of the Israelites really hates, it is "whoring". Bottom line: the Moabite whores succeed where magic failed, and save their country. I hope they gave a good time to those energetic Jews.