No Air in Kever Benjamin City

End of summer 2018 and approaching the High Holidays, and here in Kever Benjamin City we have no air to breath, night temperature of 35 centigrade, the food is spoiled, daughter feeling unwell, me feeling unwell with the leg still aching. Yesterday we did our weekly visit to the supermarket, and then all day in the bed.

Left the pic of the Iranian atom bomb, 10 kilotons, small enough to fit in the head of a missile. It is clearly nineteen fifty technology, the bronze explosive primers are to provoke the simultaneous implosion to compress the plutonium nucleus. To create a homogeneous and efficient implosion, the primers must explode in certain order (and not simultaneously as I imagined), presumably in the order of the numbers.  Finely timing the primers to create an uniform implosion inside the steel ball cartridge, it is necessary to have some electronic timer. But the main obstacle to build one seems to be to accumulate enough plutonium, which cannot be purchased in the black market. The Iranians tried to refine some using thousands of centrifuges, but were discovered.

For the record: I am depressed. 11AM and still did not start to work.

Population

Liu Cixin in his monumental trilogy writes about the next thousand years of wars with the Trisolars (the graph illustrates the Three Bodies Problem) and end of the universe (collapse in the optimist scenery or eternal expansion in the worst of the cases). The oeuvre is full of quantitative calculations and marginally it presumes a steadily falling Earth population. In that context, it is natural and uneventful.  

177,000 babies were born in Israel between April 2017 and April 2018.  Israel has the highest birth rate in the developed world, with an average of 3.11 children per woman.  The distant runner-up is Mexico, with only 2.2 children per woman.  The average fertility rate for countries like France, the U.S., Britain, Spain, and the Netherlands is less than two children per woman.  The birth rates for Jewish and Arab Israeli women were identical (3.13 children per woman) for the first time in history during 2015. About thirty thousand new immigrants arrived, most from the former Soviet Union, France and the USA. 

The calculated correlation between economic performance and population growth is 0.7 which is huge. Economic performance is related to national IQ.  The Jews in Israel are the exception to that law. 

Have a Tolerable Jewish New Year !

(Since former "Happy Year" wishes did not work, this year decided to be modest)

Ofwat pressuring British water companies

Britain is possibly the only country that privatized its water supply monopoly and did not nationalize them back - yet. The regulator applies pressure to make the companies more efficient, employing the bureaucrat best-loved weapon: demanding more and more reports. As part of Ofwat’s 2019 price review, water companies have been required to outline a detailed business plan, detailing how they will charge customers between 2020 and 2025. In February, the environment minister, Michael Gove, warned water companies over their “concerning” behaviour.

Eight of 18 water firms fail to meet targets on tackling leaks

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Thames Water, which supplies more than 15 million people across the south-east, said it will spend £11.7bn on upgrades, including £2.1bn to reduce leaks. The company, which was ordered in June to pay a total of £120m to compensate customers over leakage failures, has asked to keep bills flat until 2025.

I think the British system is problematic. The Israeli method to combat our Mekorot monopoly is to allow private water enterprises to outcompete the old monster. Seems to me better. Only that Mekorot keeps losing hundreds of million dollars in failed projects. 

My generation... and how it ends

Cristina Fernandez and Nestor Kirchner, former Presidents (both) of Argentina, did not start their careers as gangsters. Yes, they ended as bosses of a well organized corruption gang that vacuumed hundreds of millions from Argentina coffers, but originally they were courageous members of the Juventud Peronista. Gladis D'alessandro and Chiche Labolita were a young couple in 1975 - he had been the leader of the Montonero group of Berisso (La Plata). They left the organization and lived in the underground, knowing that their chances were few. One day a girl appeared at their door and said: "I am Cristina, Lupin's companera". We invite you to live with us in City Bell. They shared Cristina's house, till the four were discovered and detained by the dictatorship. Cristina and Nestor were let go after a month, Chiche was tortured and disappeared. Gladis was liberated after being tortured and taken to a tour in the city to "mark" their friends. The Kirchners are bona fide Peronists, having spent time in the underground and jail during the military terror. How is that this idealist couple ended as they did (see post below how they organized Argentina's emptying)? I don't know.  

No Admission for Arab Terrorists

There is a large right-wing, anti-government, anti-refugee demonstration in Saxony, Germany. I am not German and have no firm opinion about it, but I find it remarkable that the iconic head of Karl Marx's serves for visual background.  

No more Palestinian refugees

How miraculously good it is that Hillary lost! Under Barak Hussein Obama and her State Department secretary Hillary Clinton, the US was subsidizing and artificially expanding the number of descendants of Palestinian refugees, and fueling endlessly growing claims against the State of Israel. Trump cut it off in one strike, thank God. 

State Dept.'s Nauert said the UNRWA agency’s “endlessly and exponentially expanding community of entitled beneficiaries is simply unsustainable and has been in crisis mode for many years.” The number of Palestinian descendants with claims has reached ten or fifteen million, and in one generation more it may reach thirty million, all expecting to live off international charity. 

The US used to provide 200 million dollars of UNRWA's 560 million annual budget. The EU gives about the same, and individual European countries make up the difference. The institution will not die easily, as European antisemitism will not disappear and with it, their desire to harm the Jews. But Europeans will have to pay more for their vice and that may extinguish their enthusiasm.