Shuffling the Deck in Israel

We are entering a hotly contested pre-electoral period here in Israel. Political Alliances that held for years are dissolving and everybody is scrambling and positioning for the coming contest. Netaniyahu secured for us seven years of no-war and prosperity, the natives were pacified and the University of Ariel was funded. I wonder if the new political constellation can follow this act.

I am also worried about Oumuamua. 

Wishing the Best to Rashida

Her family’s story is typical of many Palestinians, with relatives scattered across the West Bank, Jordan and the United States. Rashida Tlaib (42) (pic: Pelosi swearing in  the new representative) is the eldest of fourteen children of a Palestinian immigrant to Detroit. The mukhtar Mohammed Tlaib said some 50 people from the illegal Arab settlement on Road 433 have immigrated to the US and now have children in schools and universities in America. 

“It’s a great honour for this small town. It’s a great honour for the Palestinian people to have Rashida in the Congress,” said Mohammed Tlaib, the village’s former mayor and a distant relative. “For sure she will serve Palestine, for sure she will serve the interests of her nation. She is deeply rooted here."

Let me add my congratulations and sincere best wishes for Rashida. I am happy that she and her numerous family have left Israel and are prospering far away. Already I feel safer driving on Route 433 to Jerusalem knowing that fewer Shahabs are throwing stones to Israeli vehicles. And Hon. Muhammed is wrong, she is not deeply rooted here, since she and her hamoolah abandoned their ancestral land for the Goldene Medine. Many Palestinians have reached high political positions in Latin America and now in the USA, and caused us no further problems. From this Kever Benjamin settlement, I wish 

All the Best, Rashida!

Mysterious rising salinity of Lake Kineret

There is increasing alarm among Israel's water officials that the salinity of the Lake - Israel's main reservoir - is rising, even to the point that it will become too saline for drinking purposes. Historically, the lake's salinity varied and it is assumed that in the times of Petrus the fisherman, the lake was undrinkable and the fishing villages bordering the lake derived their water from springs.

The graph shows how salinity and water level are inversely related, that is, when the water is low, salinity increases. That is logical. Today the lake is very low, and therefore saline. It appears that the cause is NOT climate change, and the rainfall - within historical oscillations - has not decreased. So, it must be that the contributing rivers flowing in from hostile countries, as damming and overpumping, maybe to harm us or just because they are using the water for irrigation. That was the accepted view.

But no, inflow measurements at the border show no change. The Syrian Golan is depopulated because of their civil war. and Lebanon's agriculture is agonizing under the Hizballah. The conclusion must be that WE are extracting (stealing?) more water from the upper Jordan stream. But how could that be if our use of water is strictly regulated by the Water Authority (my former employer) and every drop is accounted for?  Everyone here knows the answer but the journalists.

I prefer to quote Sherlock Holmes. “When you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” 

Steady as she goes

NASDAQ entered the manic mood and a buying panic has taken over the trading machines. In this very moment we are touching 7%  rise, a rate never heard of in this chaotic times. I had held steady all the time and did not sell when the end of the world was announced in the WSJ and now I am riding the rising wave. A bad person could say that I was not steady but drunk and sedated. Or too busy learning Old English to read Beowulf. Who cares...

The Iliad vs. Beowulf

The Greek heroic poem the Iliad, that tells the story of Achaean ships raiding the capital city of Troy can be compared to the saga of the North Germanic peoples sailing and raiding two thousand years later. The Iliad takes a picture of one day of fighting on the shores of Troy, it is well organized and deep, while Beowulf deals with family feuds and individual battle against underground monsters. No doubt, as a literary/intellectual achievement, Beowulf is inferior. Yet, both Greeks and Germans took over the world of their times some 500 years later, and both developed wonderful civilizations.

The Greek civilization was defeated by its own success, Alexander extended it all over the East, creating administrative and teaching jobs for Greek speaking persons in the colonies, and the whole structure was bastardized into a Hellenistic universal mixture and never again reached Plato's heights. The Germanic (English) civilization also colonized the world, and is being dissolved and diluted into a pidgin blend. In its success, it is dying before our eyes. The cause of the death of our  civilization, like heart disease in Jewish families of the Old Country, cannot be said out loudly. Death was too horrible to contemplate, and/or saying the word too loudly may cause Death itself to show up. 

Asking for sex in Israel costs 500 dollars

If you believe that having sex with a prostitute is performing rape, then Israel should be your home. The Knesset just passed a law imposing a fine on the male enquiring how much she takes. The fine is 500 dollars. If there is a match and actually they do it, the same fine. It is stupid as well drastic, but less than its Swedish model. This is another of the progressive laws that are five light-years ahead of the prevailing social arrangements in Israel. They try to impose advanced, feminist, unnatural and impossible rules on this Middle Eastern  population, 20% of which is fanatically Muslim. While Sweden imposes these kind of prohibitions on its own Nordic population, Israel tries to do it on traditional Afro-Asian Jews and on the 20% of the population that is fanatically Muslim and hates Western values.

It is well established that the prohibition of prostitution is followed by rapes and violence. Who wins by this law? Since it drives sex underground, it increases the value of the resource that only women have. It should drive unmarried males to legal marriage with assured free sex. The law increases female power and dominion over males. Interestingly, the argument that prostitution is immoral has not been heard, only that whores are victims of the hated, oppressive patriarchy.

In Greece prostitution was not only allowed but there were five different types: the slave girls (price 70 to 200 obols, while one obol is a workday salary), professional musicians for symposia (they could be hired at two obols a day), porne (low class) and heteira (high class) whores, and the sacred temple prostitutes (in Delos, a thousand). The Romans taxed the whole branch.

News from 2019

"I have seen the future! 2018 was a GOOD year!"