Dysgenic trends among Israeli animals

Of course yesterday's note was a joke, Israeli animals are not becoming smarter and fitter: the opposite is true. I went down to the parking and pitiful meowing of a lame - three legged - cat greeted me. Immediately appeared an old lady with a cup of cream cheese and milk with bread crumbs, and the beggar, slowly and graciously, moved toward the feast. I had to stop at the exit because an ancient and venerable dog, painfully dragging its bandaged hind leg, was taking a rest. Obviously, the poor animal had been hit by a car (maximum speed in our street 20 miles per hour) and a generous soul took it to the pet hospital. The bakery in front was spreading bread crumbs to the three hundred pigeons of the neighborhood. A few hungry hoopoes and colored birds tried to take part in the celebration, but they were aggressively expelled by the symbols of peace. Scenes like these are common in my pet-loving town. Obviously, the large and growing parasite pet population is not being selected for fitness in the wilderness but for begging ability. I see many females carrying small 5 kg white dogs, they function as baby substitutes, and being mostly silent and self-propelled, they are better that human babies. Extrapolating present trends, we shall end like the Romans. The Latter Day Israeli Jews - formerly Eritreans - will inhabit our city and wonder what happened to the giants that built those tall buildings. 

Eugenic trends among Israeli animals

Cats and dogs cross the streets in red light and get hit and maimed. On the routes I see wild animals killed - roadkills - such as foxes, small Samarian deers, lots of reptiles and frogs. When driving fast, blind birds hit my windshield and spiral off to the asphalt to be eviscerated by the car behind. The hoopoe, Israeli national bird, is the stupidest of all. This mass massacre can have only one result: the dumbest are not surviving and we are breeding an intellectually able wildlife population. Humans have exterminated all their competitors, lately the Neanderthals, but it well may be that the genetically improved animals around will rise and outcompete us. Sci-fi novelists fear the rise of intelligent machines, but the rise of intelligent animals may be more frightening. Good night children, sleep well and dream with sweet angels! 

The Shekel is the World's Strongest Currency

According to HaAretz of today, the Shekel (left) has strengthened some 25% regarding the rest of the currencies and now is stronger than the dollar and the euro and the holy Swiss Frank. What people is doing with this new acquisitive power? They take vacations in Europe and exotic destinations. They buy chachkes by internet and the post. And they invest in real estate.

I am in TASE Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and follow with interest real estate prices. The high prices are frightening: How can it be that an apt. in Tel Aviv is more expensive than in San Francisco? It is unreal, unnatural, irregular, can't be. I still cannot cast away my mentality of the sixties, when Israel was perceived (and was in fact) a struggling embattled mini-country, begging donations. Now we are a rich country whose currency is appreciated even by foreign banks.

I think I may take a mortgage at 2% interest and buy an apt. in Rosh HaAyin. I am antediluvian and statistically, I have been dead for years, which is not the best age to undertake long term investments, but I have daughters and now two or more new grandchildren are on their way here. We are just starting.  

Beyn HaMeytzarim - Three weeks of Sadness

In the Jewish year, today is fast day in remembrance of the Roman Army breaking through Jerusalem's walls - 2000 years ago. Now we begin a three week period of lamentations, till Tisha BeAv, the day when the Temple was destroyed. During these three weeks we avoid fiestas and festivities, some people sit on the floor in the synagogue to show their humbleness. We should not be fasting: the Romans are gone, Rome has been sacked many times and Africans live among its ruins, while we are steadily rebuilding our country and the Temple.   

Plumbing Excellence in Israel

In January I designed plumbing systems for four gyms in Tel Aviv area. The Client was an international gym chain planning to open forty new gyms in Israel. Against Israeli practice, they paid well and in advance. After designing four, I resigned because the architect produced new designs every two days and demanded constant updating of the drawings. The gyms are all working and very successful. Now I was called to do an expert report on one of "my" gyms because they do not want to pay the plumber for his substandard work. I wrote my 26 pages illustrated report. I never saw such a bad workmanship in Israel. The pipes were fake Giberit HDPE, some of them even re-used ones! I advised to disassemble the whole thing, bring in an expert plumber with suitable equipment, and remake the whole thing. Which is impossible, because the gym is working and most of the plumbing is embedded in the concrete structure. 

Grandaughter

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.