Escape from Managua

Our TAHAL team was completing five irrigation projects in Nicaragua, while all around the war was going on. That was in the end of 1979. Our leader, Chaim Ben Ezra, told me that the payment was conditional to the delivery of the drawings and documents, and I was determined to get the project over the end line. We were told to hoard food and I bought in the market a sack of beans and a sack of rice, enough for several months. The house I was living in Ticomo, near the university, had been robbed one night and the cleaning girl was missing with her things. I remember that I went to the central police station in Managua to receive a paper for the insurance, although I found nothing missing. No body asked me anything as I went in, there were some people asking to visit detainees, but nothing hysterical nor a warlike environment. There was no one to receive my complaint. Later in the office they told me that I have been in the "boca del leon", people was dead afraid of the place, known as the main torture center. I saw nothing out of the usual.

Then we were told that the team was going to be evacuated and each Israeli had to be at the airport next morning at 0500 AM. At that stage there were already shooting in the streets. The very same afternoon I took three copies of the plans and the files and went to the Central Bank to deliver the project papers. No one told me to do it, I did it because I loved Ben Ezra. There was no one to receive it, at last I found a frightened secretary and made her sign an ad-hoc receipt. Then next morning drove through the deserted streets of the capital to the airport. There was large plane that was being loaded with a piano and wooden boxes. Our plane arrived and next we landed in San Jose de Costa Rica. Ben Ezra and the Israeli Ambassador Olami were waiting for us and we were let in without border police checks and visas. Later we realized that the plane being loaded had been Somoza's escape plane to Miami, probably sent by the Americans to ease the transfer the power to the Sandinista rebels favored by Jimmy Carter. Later, Somoza found refuge in Paraguay, where he was killed in a faux-Parisian whorehouse.  

200 Million Unmarriable Chinese Young Men and No Angry Riots in the Streets

One of the advantages of a long life with a healthy brain is the possibility to compare the predictions of the past with current reality, that is, to learn the outcome of former actions. Chinese one child policy a generation ago led to an unbalanced demographic pyramid today, with some fifty million young men that cannot find brides. This outcome was noticed and predicted some thirty years ago and caused Western pundits to write long articles about its consequences.



Now we can see that they were all wrong. Some predicted that these young men would be tremendously angry and riot on the streets, creating social chaos during many years. Others predicted that the Communist government would be forced to occupy these young males in foreign wars, that would decimate this unmanageable population. Others predicted widespread homosexuality, like the Arab societies; other yet the government would establish accessible whorehouses for the people. All the Western observers predicted social dislocation and violence.

Nothing of that happened. Chinese men bear their solitude, and try to improve themselves to attract brides. They study like crazy, they run after the yuan, they pay to suddenly created marriage gurus. the pic, from Der Spiegel, shows one of these gurus, surrounded by single men who are his students, Cheng Ming, 26, (center) a teacher at a dating school in Hangzhou, China, demonstrates how to moisturize and apply foundation to one's face before heading out for a date. The Chinese are reacting in a radically different way than imagined by Western think tanks, the RAND and the CIA, and of course the eternal legion of ignorant/stupid journalists. 

Solving the Palestinian Refugee issue

There are probably more than ten million Palestinian refugees, in Israel proper and in the world. This population was created when in the middle of the 1947 war, a few thousands left "temporarily" their villages. The UN established a special organization UNRWA, to solve the problem, but instead it increased it to the current untreatable proportions. Most of the refugees have died long ago but their descendants have multiplied mightily and the UNRWA has grown to monstrous size - it costs about 500 million dollars per year, mostly to the American taxpayer.

Kushner is trying quietly solve the issue. According to Palestinian officials, he pressed to strip more than 2 million registered Palestinians of their refugee status so that UNRWA would no longer need to operate there. At last something is being done!

Environmental Planning in a Nature Reserve

Thursday night I lost my way in a Nature Reserve near the Maccabean  Tombs. The reserve has stone building with sanitary services, but the management will not operate the local, antiquated wastewater treatment plant. Parts of the reserve are let out to marriage "halls" (pic) but the Ministry of Health will not allow them operate without a wastewater treatment solution. I am planning a small rotary drums plant and the treated wastewater will be recycled in forest irrigation. Technically it is quite simple, the challenging (and expensive) part is getting it approved by all the bureaucracies.  Each tree and rat hole is catalogued and cannot be touched without permission. Some plants and animals are a little different from those five kilometers afar, and have been declared protected and in danger of extinction. A recent study classified seven different varieties of scorpions in Israel, all candidates to the "Protected" status.  It gets on my nerves that the "nature" the bureaucracies are defending is nothing more than the overgrazed shrub-bush, sadly degraded by the fucking (and fucked) Arab goat. Anyway, Israel has been densely inhabited for eight or ten thousand years, by humans and by the Neanderthals, so what is natural? On the other hand (I still have two hands), the public demands "Nature" and that it be "Protected" against themselves, so the poor salary-drawing homolesbian environmentalist is forced to invent it.

Herzliya Hills

I was invited to submit a proposal for a restaurant in the Herzliya Hills project. What? Since when there are hills in Herzliya? I looked up the project. It is where my old sewage pumping station used to stand. What did they do to that facility, with its historical and sentimental value? 

Intellectual Foundations of the Sandinista Movement

The Sandinista movement was perceived in America as ideologically Communist, and Ronald Reagan tried to destroy it through the covert Contra invasion. Of course it failed like the Bahia de los Cochinos invasion by John Kennedy. Reading Donald Hodgins, an American academic historian, it appears that, unlike in the CIA and the American government, in the academia it was well known that Marx was not among the intellectual progenitors of the Sandinistas.

Hodgins points out that Nicaraguan worldview was impressed by hundred years of American aggression, first to guarantee that no second transoceanic canal will compete with the Panama Canal.  Second, Nicaragua was "invaded" by American gold miners in transit to California, leaving a rather barbaric impression. Nicaraguans were also aware of the plans transfer the cotton/slave economy of the South, after the victory of the North, to their land. The Marine invasion in the nineteen twenties finally confirmed their fears of becoming an American colony.

Those were the ideological roots of Sandino, nothing to do with Marx or Russia. It is amazing that Reagan could be so blind, seeing Communists where there were none. In fact, the Sandinistas, when in power, held democratic elections and lost. And they moved aside and transferred the government to the Chamorro widow. They spent sixteen years in the opposition to recover the power. Today, the Sandinista leader Ortega and his family rule the country, more or less following the Somoza dynasty model. This time America lets it be. 

TAHAL and Kardan Serie A Bonds

My portfolio includes some Serie A Bonds of Kardan NV that will expire on 31 October and are sold today with a 60% discount on its peer value. The market is very cautious because Kardan has no cash to pay and it build on the sale of TAHAL to finance the payment, scheduled for February 2019. The Fortissimo Fund is interested in buying TAHAL, which has several contracts in Africa, mostly projects of doubtful profitability. Anyway, these bonds could be seen as an interesting speculation, save the existence of the Serie B bonds, whose owners are afraid that after the sale of TAHAL there will remain no saleable properties to pay THEM.  The situation is complicated because Serie B owners are considering to demand the immediate payment of their bonds, and that will cause such a legal jam that no one will see a cent for years. On the other hand, Kardan has been broke for years, yet it survives. TAHAL, the company that was my home for decades, was at some point offered on sale for one sheqel and no one wanted it. Benno Gitter, a banker specialized in appropriating State owned industries, rejected it. He told me. If Benno could mis-valuate TAHAL as worthless, then who am I to valuate Kardan today? Pic Yosy Grinfeld, owner of Kardan, the one who bought TAHAL now worth hundreds of millions.