Survival strategy

  My clients are back from their August vacations in Europe and are anxious to start building. Each day I am paying rent for the place and cannot start building because YOU have yet to produce the building permit! YOU, the culprit, is me. It is me that do not allow them to proceed with their projects, not the bureaucracy. Lately, their tone is becoming ugly and menacing, they want to come to my office and turn the tables and break the chairs on my head. They have frightened poor engineer me.

How to protect myself? Since my kindergarten times I am aware of the hostility I provoke. When the teacher asked a math question to all the class, I was always the first to jump and full of enthusiasm, shout the answer. The others hated me. Thus I learnt to moderate/hide my capabilities. Till now I am very fast learner and worker. I answer very fast and cannot imagine that anything I say or write would hurt anyone. I cause no harm, my intentions are pure, my words factual and true. It does not make me appreciated or loved.

Google and Facebook are perceived as monstrously powerful and they are sued a hundred times per minute. The EU has fined them for billions. What is the survival strategy of Google? They changed their name to Alphabet, and adopted an infantile, meaningless logo (above). Pure kindergarten colors, simplest of the fonts, nothing remotely menacing. I too should change my engineering logo (water flowing from a pipe) to something freaked-out-idiot-friendly, like a big brown stuffed teddy bear or so. Nothing to do with water engineering. 

On whatsup most of my contacts use extreme non-menacing avatars. Themselves half naked playing with a large ball on the beach. Or the picture of a lovely baby. No one could imagine the hardened evil bastards they really are.

Molina por que no toma

Working music, better than Mozart. My brain works better if I am not thinking but busy following the cumbia. I was born with a Colombian soul. Muevete Mi Negra!

Zimbabwe's Coming Famine

Organizations that follow African agricultural situation are alarmed by Zimbabwe's rising food prices. 

Seasonal livelihood strategies continue to be constrained mainly as a result of poor 2018/19 harvests, worsening economic challenges, and decreasing water availability and access, especially in arid areas, limiting household incomes. Agricultural and non-agricultural casual labor opportunities are very limited as better-off households have no or limited resources to pay for the labor. In-country and international remittances mainly from South Africa are below average.  As cash shortages continue, the use of mobile money has increased in both rural and urban areas is eroding disposable incomes owing to high service charges or rates.

The world is taking for granted that African nations will periodically suffer food supply crisis and need help to feed themselves. But Zimbabwe is a farmer's paradise and its inability to grow food is not "normal". A generation ago it was exporting food in quantities. Who destroyed Zimbabwe? I for one remember and know. It was the British left wing anticolonial movement of the eighties. They were (and are!) so sanctimonious and high-minded. They attacked the farmers under the illusion that they were expropriating what Nature was giving, not working hard in the middle of dangerous and unhealthy Africa. They were totally disconnected from reality. Thinking about the intellectuals general disdain for reality, I realize that Mao's policy of sending millions of students and academic workers to the countryside  to learn how and by whom their food was being produced, was justified. Mao was no peasant but had a clear idea of reality and may have been shocked by the emergence of the new class of Communist intelligentsia. May be the English Left needed to spend a few years in Africa to connect with its reality. That would have avoided the coming famine in Zimbabwe. 

Proud Ghost Dad

I ghostwrite my little daughter's seminar papers. I got a 95 and am proud of it. For sake of truthfulness, most of the writing is hers, my contribution is at best marginal, but let me feel good. I am surviving a fiery, cursed August. And it is not over yet.

She'll start teaching at a newly organized tichon (high school) in a half empty new town. They are a collective of young, idealist, leftist teachers, and families are moving to Harish to get their children registered in this elite democratic/communist outfit. 

Black August

This summer is hot and difficult for me in Israel. I can hardly focus and work. Yesterday I spent three hours in a meeting in the Ministry in Ramla, while my subject was not even touched. I sat and learned about Listeria and food factory planning. I am having a bad bad day. This morning I had an important meeting and I forgot it.

The bourse is falling all over the world, Trump's trade war is upsetting the world's monetary system, which anyway was unsustainable. America was being bled white, the industry was moving to China. It is a financial storm and I feel powerless even to try to understand it.

New Cuban Missile Crisis,This time in Romania

I am old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Russia positioned nuclear missiles in the Island of Cuba, close range from Washington. Kennedy received a nervous fit and forced Hrushchov to take them back. Fifty years after, America is positioning short range nuclear missiles on the Soviet border, creating a mortal threat to Moscow and tightening an already tense situation. Craig, an anti-Semitic politician, describes the new situation and blames … Romania.

"After falsely accusing Russia of violating the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), Washington unilaterally repudiated the treaty. Thus did the US military/security complex rid itself of the landmark agreement achieved by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev that defused the Cold War... resurrecting the specter of nuclear war by the deployment of US missiles on the borders with Russia."

Farewell to illusions

Clark's book The Farewell to Alms shows that the population of England underwent selection in the last thousand years, as the upper middle class replaced the lumpen that died off. Clark bases his conclusions on the systematic study of family names, a method that seems rather unreliable to me. Ashkenazi Jews had no family names, for example. But the English are different.

Now I am reading that Iceland was settled a thousand years ago by a 50% Norwegian and 50% Irish population. However, the current genetic composition is 75% Norwegian and 25% Irish. There was differential selection, just like Clark discovered.

These results are applicable to every group of humans. Extract your own conclusions. Keep it quiet.