The East Asians

Spandrell profiles the Chinese people: "East Asians are just civilized but profoundly different people who mostly dislike us, think we’re weird, and just want to be left alone, taking advantage of us and scamming us money every now and then."  Correct. Spandrell  impresses me as one of those Russian Jewish refugees of the seventies, who instead of making Aliyah went to the USA. He loves languages. Now he is wandering in East Asia, teaching English to the locals or teaching Chinese to expats.

Average Building Permit Process Time in Israel: Five Years

HaAretz: the bureaucracy in Israel is a monopoly game: there are traps in the road that make you start anew. This time the leftwing fishwrap says the truth. For a building permit in this country they make you carry a heavy and expensive cross along the Via Dolorosa. The regulation adds 10% to the selling price. As an engineer, I am part of that ten percent. Sorry.

Global Hawk Is Watching You

Iran shot down an American surveillance drone, a naval variant of the Global Hawk. The pic shows the size and the fearsome profile of the bird. Haven't been these technologies made obsolete by spy satellites? Apparently the Hawk observes reality with a higher resolution and can sample the air over a chemical factory or an Israeli workers restaurant (today's menu: Fasulia). BTW, the Global Hawk costs 200 million US dollars. There are only 40 of them.

The catastophe started in Paris

The fertility transition in Europe was substantially independent of the Industrial Revolution, and was a process of cultural diffusion that emanated from France (where it began before 1830).

HDB CHICK twitters that "[Blanc] also …finds that subscriptions to Diderot’s Encyclopédie is negatively correlated with fertility across French départements in 1831, even when controlling for industrial
output per capita, urbanization, literacy and pre-industrial development." "Mas claro, ponele agua" as we used to say in the barrio. If you want it clearer (wine), add water. The French Revolution is the root of the depopulation of Europe, the dissolution of the traditional Jewish communities, the modern antisemitism (that so shocked Herzl while in Paris), the Holocaust, and God-knows what new disasters expect us down the road. Bonner Tal, another numerically obsessed blogger, calculates that the French people is done, in ten - twenty years they will suddenly become aware that they are a minority in their historical homeland. I think his numbers are wrong, but he got the essence. And then, from Paris it will spread to the entire world...!

This is bad for us, the Jews. Last March, 85-year-old Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll was murdered and set on fire in her apartment in Paris. Knoll’s Muslim neighbor, Yacine Mihoub, and an accomplice, confessed to stabbing Knoll to death. Authorities described the murder as an anti-Semitic hate-crime. In April 2017, another elderly French Jewish woman, Sarah Halimi, was stabbed to death.

Water Sabotage

Water terror. They cry for water while destroying the pipes. South Judean hills. 

Remembering R. Marshall Meyer

Rabbi Marshall Meyer was an American Conservative Rabbi who arrived at Buenos Aires around 1976 and founded the Congregacion Bet-El in the Barrio Norte, the better neighborhood. He was a sensation, Buenos Aires had never a modern American rabbi like him. 

He also organized a youth group and I was invited and went but soon left for the Socialist Zionist movement. Meyer was not Zionist, he was - I thought - Orthodox. I did not feel at ease, he spoke New York English (I did not) and his Congregacion aimed at the richer strata of Buenos Aires Jews while we were very poor, penniless new immigrants. I have the impression that had to pay to participate in some activities, that it was a club of rich kids, which triggered my overdeveloped inferiority complex. I joined the Zionist movements which were Socialist  (and anti-Imperialist i.e. anti-American) and never asked for money. 

Today Marshall Meyer is a national hero in Argentina for his courageous standing-up for Jewish (and non-Jewish) political prisoners under the Military Dictatorship. Well, as an American, we Socialist kids imagined that he was untouchable and protected by the CIA, but in those times everybody could just disappear. He spoke out, which the current pope did not dare to do. He was something. 

Fake News from Petersburg 1917

Trotsky's book on the Russian Revolution is exciting reading. He describes the clairvoyant leadership of Lenin in the successive congresses and programmatic papers, how the Vyborg industrial area workers were organized and prepared by the Bolshevik fraction for the insurrection. Trotsky consistently downplays his own importance and paints Lenin - whose contribution was writing position papers in the deep underground - as the giant whose clear vision and hard will pushed ahead the proletariat.

Yet it is clear that the unarmed workers did little and the active forces were front soldiers back from the trenches, thoroughly convinced of the incompetence of the Czarist officer class and its unwillingness to end the war. After it was clear that the forces guarding Petersburg and the Winter Palace, they entered unopposed and arrested the Provisory Government of Kerensky. The insurrection was a military action  led by Trotsky, who was the President of the Military Commission of the Bolshevik fraction.

Basically, the October Revolution was an unopposed military coup. Trotsky avoids ideology and presents no vision of socialism. It is all about destroying the Czarist regime and capitalism, because they are an obstacle to the development of the production. And a primitive army cannot fight the advanced German forces. He predicts the next war against Germany and the need for preparation. Stalin took over and completed the plan.