Israeli Water Bureaucracy

Thirty years ago I was a ranking Dept. Manager of the Municipality of Herzliya. In my times, the Water Dept. consisted in a Romanian born engineer appropriately called Abraham Wasserman and two mobile plumbers. They occupied one room in the Engineering Division floor. Sewage was in charge of a Romanian engineer by name of Ferraro and a self-effacing Russian engineer Inna Mechanik, all crowded in the next room. Ferraro had also three maintenance workers with a pump. I was in charge of the Wastewater Treatment Plant, which consisted in a lab lady, an electrician and five lazy workers that seldom were at work.

Compare that to the Water Corporation of today, which occupies two floors in a luxury building. It has a directory of about ten politically connected nobodies, that draw large salaries and car allowances and have no duties. The Corporation has an accounting dept. of about ten accountants, a water planning dept., a chief and assistant engineer in charge of approving water plans for building permits, and a parallel technical group for sewage plans, and a Vaada - a Commission in charge of approvals. The Corporation has an annual budget and annual development program, with its auditor, and a body to evaluate execution bids and contracts, and supervise the execution. They have a public relations department, producing color brochures (pic), water quality reports, organizing school visits, and so. And plenty of good-and-not-so-good looking secretaries and security men, drivers and maintenance staff. All in all some 200 employees, and they consume of hundreds of plans and reports, they maintain internal meetings when they cannot be bothered and very important coordination discussions with city bosses and national ministries. The engineers receive phone calls only twice a week for two hours each (really!) , and to program a meeting takes two weeks. They behave as effendis, freely humiliating all "petitioners" and lower ranking persons they call "clients". The whole organization is tremendously busy, although their measurable product (water and sewage) is more or less of the same quality and quantity as was managed thirty years ago by Wasserman and Ferraro in their times.

This explosion of bureaucracy is explained by Moldbug: modern societies have an overabundance of useless people that cannot be absorbed by the production system. Paying the underclass to do nothing, like in the USA, is odious for society at large and for themselves, because they see themselves as precious and educated, with their fancy university titles in math-less subjects. There is constant pressure to find occupation for this mass of voting citizens, and creating air-conditioned office jobs in a rich Water Corporation (there are more than 100 in Israel) is a viable solution. In places like India and Egypt, the government explicitly creates bureaucratic positions, to throw oil on social unrest. In Israel, I have never heard anybody explicitly proposing this policy, but that is how it is working, specifically regarding young Arabs and Oriental Jews with college diplomas that are recruited into government service.

Productivity has grown so fast that agriculture, once the main human occupation, requires less than 2% of the workforce. Factories employ only a few thousand persons in actual production. The famous Israeli start-up sector employs no more than ten thousand smart people. That leaves the vast majority of Israel's growing population irrelevant and superfluous.

Israel possesses four populations sinks for the unproductive: (1) the Armed Forces, that neutralizes three and half years of each young man's life and one month per year. A modern army, like a modern factory, needs few soldiers, and the real function of the Israeli army is to pin down potentially troublesome young people (without paying them salary) and to indoctrinate them in patriotism aka Zionism. Only a few middle class boys, like the heroes of the last Gaza operation, who were disproportionally from the high schools of Kever Benjamin city, Raanana, Hod Hasharon and Ramat Hasharon, make actual contact with the enemy. The rest are irrelevant.

(2) The education system, which consumes a third of the state's budget and creates infinite number of jobs like teaching autistics to solve puzzles and paraplegics to dance. And there are all those courses in psychology and zoogiut (couple relations). (3) The religion establishment, which maintains and  occupies thousands of doctrine instructors and mashgichim (inspectors of ritual correctness of foodstuffs). The number (4) is the State bureaucracy and regulatory systems, which occupy about a third (my estimate) of the salaried population and cost about half of the GNP.

At last a politician with convictions

The Orthodox rabbi Rafi Peretz is our new Minister for Education. That in itself is a novelty, since it has been centuries since a fanatic Padre was in charge of education in any Western country. Maybe in Spain, under Franco.

The Minister started by offending our Diaspora brothers, saying that they were causing a second Holocaust through intermarriage. The American donors, with their beautiful blonde schikse wives and children, were shocked to be compared to Hitler's henchmen, sending Jews into oblivion. An hour later, he revealed that homosexuals can be "converted" to straight machomen and that he himself converted more than one, strengthening their repressed male principle. The Government announced that Minister Peretz does not represent the official position. Many of the current batch of European leaders are male and female homosexuals and we have no business insulting them or anybody.

In a way, I am glad we have leaders that are not influenced by Western decadence and dare to think differently. 

Living with Cannibals

It is becoming evident that the Neanderthal people hunted Humans and defleshed them with flint knives. The pic shows the cutmarks left on the bones - the Neanderthals liked the taste of human flesh and left only the bare bones. The two species coexisted in the same places at the same time, a situation that must have been uncomfortable for our ancestors. Eventually, those bestial Neanderthals died off (because genetic overload, vide Greg Cochran) or we exterminated them (in self defense, that goes without saying). 

The co-evolution of this two brother species must have been intense, and in the end, we humans were trained to fight as a group. That was not easy, because in war defecting is always the best option. But not only war was involved, there was also much sex, as humans still carry 2 to 5% Neandertal genes and the Neanderthals must have got some of ours. Clearly, it was not a pure dog-eat-dog relationship, sometimes it was also a dog-fuck-dog affair.

Thinking on this, I may have discovered the evolutionary secret of the singular beauty of the White female. When a girl with cute baby face, long light hair and shining colored eyes fell in the brutal hands of a Neanderthal male, he must have asked himself: To eat her or to fuck her, that is the question. The Neanderthals exerted a strong selective pressure on our race, that caused our girls to become what they are. The Neanderthal selection may have acted on males too, who knows. There were no Neanderthals in Africa, so Africans escaped having to evolve beauty and intelligence. 

Industrializing the Palestinians

The ministry of Health is dead afraid of Salmonella infection of eggs (and coli in lettuce) is trying to end the small cafeterias preparing on site egg and salad sandwiches. They want sandwiches prepared in large factories that can be inspected and supervised, and the sandwiches sold in vacuum plastic with date of production and the stamp of the ministry. It makes sense, and in general there is an improvement in the quality of Israeli foodstuffs. Of course, lots of small eateries are going to be put out of business.

Now I am working on a boiled egg factory, that would sell sterile pasteurized hard eggs to those sandwich factories and restaurants. The entrepreneur is a Palestinian Arab owner of the underground parking space (pic)  in an Arab town's industrial area and his Jewish partners. They bought Chinese machinery, the instructions are in Chinese, which no one here able to read them. The Arab is religious and built a small mosque above. There is a problem with kashrut, not because his religion but because Jewish rules forbid eating blood, and the planned process will not eliminate eggs with "hashash" - suspicion that an egg with some blood may get mixed with the others. The food expert says that hiring a full-time ultraorthodox mashgiach (ritual supervisor) may solve the issue. A black kaftaned Jew wandering around with a Gemara in his hands, in an Arab factory, will be a curiosity. I sensed no hostility in the place. In general, I work a lot with Palestinians, and never found any stress in their attitude, I think the supposed Arab-Jewish hostility is non-existent at street level. It is something invented at Western universities, that is what they think should be, and the Arabs tell them what they think they want to hear. 

The King of the West and the King of the East divide Earth

In 1567 the King of Spain (pic) was engaged in several fronts: the Turks (Lepanto), the English (the Armada) while organizing expeditions to conquer China. The Portuguese already were established in Macao, so the Spanish had to settle further in Manila as the forward base facing South China. Manila and the Far East was attached to nearest Spanish center, in Mexico. In 1567, the local government of Mexico City (the Cabildo) sent a petition to Felipe II demanding

“repartir la tierra de las dichas islas de Poniente y de la China, perpetuándolas entre los descubridores y pobladores”. 

That is, to divide the land of the Western Islands (Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, etc. are Western regarding them from Mexico) and China, and grant formal titles of property to the discoverers and settlers. The Spaniards in Mexico, a large kingdom recently conquered and divided among Cortes and his soldiers, felt themselves numerous and powerful enough to ask the King to allow them conquer China and grant them royal titles of property. 

Those were the years when the Spanish and the Portuguese kings divided among themselves the planet: Portugal got Africa and Brazil, Spain - Mexico and Peru and the Far East (China). Today we would say they were suffering from megalomania and hubris: but no, they meant it. 

God will provide

History suggests there will be a recession soon.

I took that from the last The Economist. The sentence echoes the anxiety taking hold of the financial world, and why? Because everything is too good to be true, to last. Cannot last, they tremble at night, we are getting too rich and not one black cloud in the sky. Ten good years, the statistics are against the eleventh. In fact, statistics say nothing of the sort, past drawings have no effect on the next one, in roulette, the ball can fall on red hundred times and then the one hundred first too.

I had a conversation with the bank manager, he tried to convince me that my portfolio is VERY RISKY and should invest on Bank of Israel bonds. That have negative yield but are... SAFE!

I don't know if recession, earthquake, the Angel Gabriel or the Solaran space expedition will arrive tomorrow or never, but I reject the concept that their long absence MUST mean that their coming is around the corner. I always succeeded in my dangerous adventures, and I always lament the many, wonderful, exciting opportunities that I let go because of small faith.

Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither

do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly

Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?

Moldbug shocks me

Moldbug writes: "50 years ago, Detroit was a thriving metropolis, the fourth largest city in America. It had no presentiments whatsoever of any imminent disaster. Today it is a burned-out ruin, more or less. This is the sort of objective phenomenon that, if you’re a student of history, you can’t help but try to explain.." 

Moldbug links to an old  promotional clip proudly declaring that Detroit has "the best water of the world." That publicity point stuck in my mind, as I have been following the water quality catastrophe of Detroit and neighboring Flint, and the "National Emergency" of lead poisoning of their drinking water. How did that happen?

Moldbug's article brings to the foreground the nowadays inconceivable idea that government could be an instrument working for MY benefit, not for implementing some utopic nonsense or to win over the voting lumpen proletariat. The lucidity of Moldbug cuts like a knife' for example, he asks why San Francisco's school administration votes, year after year, for the expensive and complicated school busing scheme, trying to impose unwanted social equality while causing much inconvenience to everybody and specially the middle class they represent. I would think that the closing anecdote is imagined, if it was not so ordinary and everyday.

We need a modern Karl Marx who can make clear how society works and for whom. Marx founded a movement explicitly for the industrial worker class of England and Germany and without any shame proposed a dictatorship for their benefit. He had the courage of saying out loudly the word "dictatorship". Who dares today to proclaim that democracy is not working for us and that any day it may cause the sudden collapse of all, just like Flint and Detroit?

I am old man and past the age of politics, so Moldbug's ideas are just entertainment for me personally. I have known Detroit then and know it now, but no one ever had put the picture "before and after" so clearly in front of my eyes. It is shocking. BTW, last week we had a large Ethiopian riot in this country, I and my family were immobilized for four hours in the traffic, and the police did nothing. We too said nothing and did nothing, we accepted silently our suffering. We watched Black teenagers running around in the streets, boys and girls, looking as they owned the city and us.