The Battle of the Smelt

Delta smelt used be common throughout the Sacramento-San Joaquin estuary until its water was diverted to supply the 25 million people and farmers who live in the area. Invasive species and changes in water salinity and clarity also played a role in the smelt’s decline. They were protected under the Endangered Species Act in 1993 and a recovery plan was established in 1996. The average population between 2000 and 2006 was 353 fish. That population crashed to just 25 fish the following year. The EPA ordered to reduce the water diverted for human use and let it flow to the ocean, restoring the smelt's home environment. 

Trump is trying to undermine California's water policies that disregard the needs of the population to "protect" a barely surviving fish. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross this month ordered agencies under his jurisdiction, including the National Marine Fisheries Service, to circumvent the Endangered Species Act on the pretext that water deliveries blocked by ESA rules were needed to fight California wildfires. 

California's self-imposed "drought" is difficult to understand - it is magic cult of sacred "Nature" that never existed. America is fighting Chinese competition, poverty, etc.  with one hand tied behind. Can President Trump work the miracle of dividing the waters between Man and the Smelt? 

West Nilus mosquito attacks Jews

This racist Egyptian mosquito bites white people with visible bare skin, like girls in bikini or shorts, T-shirted men. Arab women that are totally veiled and covered except a narrow slit for the eyes, are immune to this pest. The West Nilus Fever has no treatment. 

It kills about one in a hundred people. Yesterday died one in Israel. A Jew, of course. 

About 1 in 5 people who are infected develop a fever with headache, body aches, joint pains, vomiting, diarrhea, or rash. Recovery takes months. I am feeling tired, is it because of the summer or is it because of the mosquitoes? No way of knowing. I feel like vomiting. 

Playing Hardball with the Ayatollahs

Trump intends to cut Iran's oil exports by November. That will cause more instability in Iran and probably in Iraq and Syria too. Europe sees this scenario as a direct menace because "the Middle East is our backyard". Tension and conflict in early 2019 is just what the doctor recommended for Bibi before the elections. If I was a Palestinian fallah I would prepare my visa to Chile, or as somebody advised, Indonesia. The next war will make the air unbreathable for them.  Photo from Der Spiegel. 

Kirchner Stories

Argentine President Kirchner filled the presidential plane with his friends of the kirchnerista party in a State visit to Venezuela. Once finished the visit, Chavez (pic) desiring to send away the Argentine mission in happy mood, sent to the  airplane sacks with US dollars. Uberti, the only one with courage to face "El Malo", protested: "Néstor, estás loco. Tenemos acá a la Mossad, a la CIA…, es una locura...". "Nestor, we have here the Mossad, the CIA... this is crazy...". But Kirchner shouted him: “Subí la plata, subí la plata, subila igual...”. Bring up the money, bring up the money, bring it up anyway...". Uberti was left in Caracas, punished by Kirchner.

The people from the isles

Before the Arabs conquered our land and settled here, there were many other occupants. Thirty two centuries before today, the Egyptians ruled Eretz Israel, when the whole Middle East was disturbed by the concerted attack of the Peoples of the Isles, currently known as Sea Peoples. It is surprising that of all the mighty peoples that lived here, none was able to establish itself for long, and it is the Arabs who inherited it (temporarily, because we are back). In comparison, the Han settled in the Yellow River valley some 5000 years ago, and no one could displace them. The Greeks settled in the isles and the mainland, and they are still there. In the Middle East, none of the ancient settlers survives. Not them nor their genes.  

The earliest mention of the Sea Peoples proper is in an inscription of the Egyptian king Merneptah, whose rule is usually dated from 1213 BC to 1204 BC. Merneptah states that in the fifth year of his reign (1208 BC) he defeated an invasion of an allied force of Libyans and the Sea People, killing 6,000 soldiers and taking 9,000 prisoners. 

About 20 years later the Egyptian king Ramses III was apparently forced to deal with another invasion of the Sea Peoples, this time allied with the Philistines. In the mortuary temple he built in Thebes, Ramses describes how, despite the fact "no land could stand before" the forces of the Sea People and that they swept through "Hatti, Kode, Carchemish, Arzawa, and Alashiya" destroying their cities, he defeated them in a sea battle. He gives the names of the tribes of the Sea People as including: the Peleset, the Tjeker, the Shekelesh, the Denyen, and the Weshesh. 

However, because this list is identical to the one Merneptah included in his victory inscription, and because Ramses also describes several fictitious victories on his temple walls, some Egyptologists believe that he never actually fought the Sea Peoples, but only claimed the victories of Merneptah as his own - a common practice of a number of the Pharaohs. 

Apparently the Weshesh are the tribe of Asher, the Denyen - the tribe of Dan and the Tjeker - Menasseh, while the Shekelesh were Issachar. The Northern Canaanite cities of Tzur and Tzidon were the only ones not attacked, probably they were related to the attackers or their allies. The Peleset were the Plishtim of the Bible, the Philistines, clearly a proto-Greek group. 

Ice People in Bed

A noticed that some scandal-mongering "journalists" are feeding the scandal-hungry world population with malicious rumors of bedtime issues between Donald and Melanie. That she is not accepting his hand when walking together, that she is cool and alien towards him, that she is dressing to give a heart attack to her poor old hubby. She is a proud model, Donald's infidelities that are surfacing in these days must be driving her mad. If Donald sought solace in porn star prostitutes instead with her monumental wife, there must be something wrong. Nordic "Ice people" are stereotyped as cold, frozen, frigid. I am an old faux-Orthodox Jew, more interested in the stock exchange than in sex workers in general, and zero experience with Slovenian models in particular, but I have my opinion, and it is that Melanie is sex bomb. 

Slippery Sloping Skyward

I was invited to submit a proposal for a project in the Alon Towers in Tel Aviv. The illustration is 5 years old, in the meanwhile, it was built. The structural work was done by a Turkish company, the rest Israelis. I sent a very low estimate.

A few years ago I took several projects in "luxury" tall buildings, but I purposefully downgraded my jobs because hated to work in large teams with authoritarian/sadistic  project managers. I specialized in small projects and my practice is prospering, but the cream tends to float to the surface, and so I am slippery-sloping upwards to Tel Aviv prestigious jobs. As I grow older and fatter, the more I hate working at those altitudes. I have ten more working years left, maybe.