Strategic Error in the Illiad

When the dissension stroke the Greek expeditionary force in its tenth year of fighting against the Trojans, the balance of power suddenly changed and the Trojans started beating the Greeks. For the first time in this long war, they camped in the open, in the expanse between the walled city of Troy and the fortified Greek camp on the beach.  The next day attacked in force and they succeeded in reaching the sandy beach where the Greek ships were stationed. Then they made a fatal strategic error. They tried to burn the ships. 

Sun Tzu says that you always should leave an escape opening for the circled enemy camp. One should press and harass the enemy, but never let it without a potential escape route, because an enemy with its back to the wall or the sea will fight desperately to death. These kind of combats, even if successful, are terribly expensive in terms of fallen soldiers and must be avoided. Hitler, for example, totally encircled the British expeditionary force in the continent, but did not close the trap but let a few kilometers wide opening, allowing them to sail back with their equipment to Britain. That was the classical Chinese and Mongol strategy.

But the Trojans, instead of letting the Greeks embark and row back to where they came from, tried to destroy their only hope of getting away alive from this failed, endless, futile war. The perspective of defeat and slaughter united the Greek fractions, healing their bitter divisions, and hardened their fighting spirit. They beat back the triumphant Trojan forces to behind the high walls and strong gates. The experience of almost-defeat forced them to realize that brute violence would never take Troy. You shall make war with tricks, unheroic but effective. It took ten bloody years for the Greeks to get the idea.

Likud 1 Gantz 0

Surprise in the Israeli elections: The right wing Likud won - again - under Bibi Netaniyahu. His opponent, Benny Gantz, a former Chief of Staff, ran under an unclear program trying to collect left wing votes. He did not fake his views, it would have been pointless, it was the Israeli left - always living in an illusory world  - that convinced itself that Gantz is not the hard line, cruel, general we know. Gantz led the Army in the last war against the HAMAS in Gaza, with wholesale destruction for the world to see who he is. So, we shall keep Bibi, who gave us relative peace in the last ten years, and has established a visceral (?) love relationship with President Trump AND with Vladimir Putin. The illustration has no relation to the elections, no one should confuse Benny Gantz with that synthetic Japanese masturbatory object.  

What the Illiad is about

Thanks to Richmond Lattimore's new translation of Homer's Illiad, I am starting to understand the history. I have read several Spanish and English versions, and never got the sense of the action and never enjoyed the reading. Now I get it: the Achaians alias Danaans are a bunch of sea pirates, they raid seaside villages to take slaves and valuables. They have put their eyes on Troy, the richest city in Eastern Mediterranean. 

Although they have an "ethical" alibi, the seduction and running off of the young wife of Mykenos's old king with beautiful Paris, they know that this is just another pirate operation.  The objective is to carry off the wives of the Troyans and sell their children as slaves. They want their treasures of golden tripods, shining cauldrons, fine textiles, all the fine things they possess.

The story: The hard core of the pirate band is Agamemnon and his followers of Mykenos, and the Mirmidons (the Ant people), the shock troop of professional killers lead by Achilleus. At a certain point, Agamemnon who is the entrepreneur financing (and personally leading) the expedition, breaks down under the insolence of young Achilleus, and to put him in its place, takes by force his war-prize, the fair-colored girl Briseis. Achilleus, humiliated and bitter, retires from the fight. The Troyans take advantage of this internal dissent, attack in force and press the invaders back into the sea, and start burning the ships. Desperate, the king returns Briseis to Achilleus and adds seven other girls and many presents to pacify the Ant people. Back in the fight, the Troyans are pushed back to their fortified city and in a mano-a-mano, Achilleus kills their leader Hector (illustration). 

In summary, it is the story of an ugly discord within a gang of criminals, and how it is resolved, bringing death and destruction to the peaceful city of Troy. The second part of the saga, the Odyssey, tells the travails of the returning slavers. More suffering and more wretched misery. Agamemnon finds that her family has happily adapted to his absence and kills him, and Ulysses arrives home naked and penniless, and is forced to fight to recover his wife and position. 

Unsettling Settler Colonialism

"I am a White Settler Colonialist" writes Corey Snelgrove of Canada in an academic paper. She felt better after confessing her inborn, hereditary  culpability. 

Jeff Corntassel, a self-declared member of a First Nation, writes in the same essay his feelings about being a dispossessed Indian. He tries to inject into the paper some tribal wisdom, but there is none available. The wise men of the inexistent Indian band he imagines to belong were not literate and anyway, their wisdom - if any -  died off with them, a hundred and twenty years ago. 

Lastly, Rita Dhamoon, a recent immigrant from India, is traying hard to write something relevant to the subject of settler colonialism. What are/were Canada's First Nations and what they have to do with her? She finds that as a brown skinned female, she too is 100% colonized and dispossessed, with terrible traumas caused by White colonials.  

Is this the curricula of Canadian universities?

What is this craziness about settlers? The only bone-and-flesh settlers the papers talk incessantly about are Israelis in the West Bank. I may be paranoid, but this is old Christianity: they are learning that they were born in sin and have to confess and repent to be pardoned, and of course the worst, unrepentant sinners are the Jews. They do not believe in  God and all that, but it is the same thing.

My brain is shrinking and softening

As I "grow" older, my brain is betraying me more and more. I am also tired sooner. So do not give much importance to what  I am saying. My opinion tends to agree with the last argument that impressed me. Sad but being dead is worse. Maybe.

Now I think that the current negative real interest benefits the poor and harms banks and credit intermediaries. Jews - I mean the Jewish moneylenders of the far past. Low interests have an equalizing effect on society, the poor can pay their loans. The rentiers are fucked. I always accepted that social stratification is by IQ but who knows.

I am a NIEMAN, like my father. He was called that by my millionaire uncle Ivor Szabo, Andres in Argentina, and the insult depressed him for weeks. At this age I am what I am and no hope or desire to become else. I am travelling to the Bronx Island with my beloved  little daughter and her fiancee and I pay - what more can anyone desire? Is that happiness? Or am I just drunk?

Teva shares sinking

It was a terrible day for Teva's shares on  TASE.  Teva's stock is now trading at near historical lows from a forward-looking P/E perspective.

Ajovy , comes with bright expectatives but there are already alternative and largely generic drugs to treat migraine, meaning that getting insurers to cover more expensive anti-CGRP treatments, even for patients who have failed existing therapies, is going to be tough. Teva's Huntington's disease medicine Austedo is expected to contribute significantly. Over the past two years, Teva has also managed to slash around $7 billion from its total outstanding debt. All told, Teva seems to be nearing an inflection point on several fronts. 

But the bourse thinks differently. I have lots and lots of shares.....

Sick Sex is Killing Humanity

If our beautiful, intelligent, tools-manufacturing ancestors had evolved as Nature planned it, we would now be almost perfect. But they had a bad, sick side, in fact they were sex-crazy perverts that would immediately mate with any ambulant creature with a hole or a hose between their legs. So they mated with brutish, raw-meat devouring Neanderthal animals, who could not speak an intelligent word, and injected to our genome their primitive vital essence. 

Their incandescent sex-hunger made them approach and mate with the even more primitive Denisovans, veritable gorillas hiding in Siberian caves. Because of their sinful nature, half of humanity now looks like gorillas. 

And if mating with these two proto-hominids did not satisfy their degenerate concupiscence, they maintained secret affairs with a third and a even with a fourth pre-sentient species in Africa, endowing their unfortunate descendants with a monstrously prominent ass. Humanity is doomed, the Planet of the Apes (see pic above) is our sad future.