Digester Egg! There I come!

I am planning my visit to New York with my little daughter and her fiancée. First things first! Digester Egg!

Nestor Kirchner Legacy

Kirchner was a self-made lawyer in Santa Cruz, the windswept Patagonian province. When he won the Peronist party's candidacy, he was already a very rich man. Once in power, he imposed quotas "aportes" on each Ministry, which had to be delivered in dollars (cash only) to the Government House. The cash had to be counted and signed by his accountants and delivered in handbags, three times a week. Vicepresident Boudou was his controller, he too got very rich. The cash was then transferred to secret accounts in Seychelles and other islands. Another source of income was Techint, Argentina's largest building company. Its Venezuelan filial was nationalized by Maduro and the compensation was channeled to Kirchner in 100,000 dollar monthly payments. Techint says that they never paid anything to Kirchner, and the prove is that they were never awarded any public project under Kirchner.

When Nestor suddenly died, his widow inherited this well oiled "public monies collecting machinery" and the fattening of the family fortune. The Kirchner children are, apparently, not up to their parents, so there will no Kirchner dynasty. Although corruption was always a feature of Argentina's government, there was never such a systematic plunder as organized by the talented Nestor Kirchner.  

The Weekly Portion

This week we are reading the portion of the Bible dealing with Moshe's instructions before starting the conquest of the Land. 

First of all, the Israelites must destroy every sign of the religion of the natives. 

Second, the Israelites will create an organized religion centered in the "place the G-d will choose" and only there they will offer sacrifices. The Bible does not define the place, although Mount Gerizim and Mount Avel are mentioned.  

The Samaritan Jews still consider that the Temple is in Mt. Gerizim (pic) in Samaria (Shomron). A second priestly center developed in Judea, with center in Jerusalem, which competed with the Samaria priesthood. Contemporary Jews are descended from the Judeans and our temple is in Jerusalem. 

The chapter calls to give ten percent of the agricultural produce to the assistant priests tribe living all around the country, called Levi'im, as they are the only Israelites with no land of theirs. 

Now it is the third time we are following his program. 

The Sacking of Argentina

The former vicepresident of Argentina has been condemned to six years of jail for corruption. The case was abruptly solved with the finding of the diary of the messenger the network employed (pic) and the confession of the people mentioned in it. Presidents Nestor Kirchner and her widow headed the operation. Argentina had been systematically pillaged by a criminal gang that even ordered the secret service to kill the Attorney General while he was under heavy police "protection". The jailing of former rulers is a standard procedure in Argentina to "cure" crimes and corruption, a magical ritual that purifies the country and let's it start anew virginal and immaculate. Maybe this time it will work, although the current President Macri - the head of a vast family business (see Forbes's list of Argentine billionaires), has been linked to the 'Ndrangheta or whatever they call themselves. Since the leak of the Panama accounts, all this has been public knowledge. 

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!