About the Hostel World

"I am not of this world" was my feeling when doing permitting work in Yaffo, last week. It was (is) a hostel with an alcoholic bar that needed the municipal business permit. It was midday, and quite hot outside, but cool and clean inside. I was received by a young Arab who was having lunch on a communal table. My first impression was that it was some kind of whorehouse: ten or more European girls and one or two boys laying on large divans (bedlike sofas) in the communal hall, enjoying the fresh air and the background music. I am a fat old Jew, managed to ignore the environment and focus on my job of checking the sanitary facilities (the hostel asked for 80 guests, and the obsolete Israeli regulations demand a certain number of male urinals & pissoirs and female toilets - the hostel complies with those and other obsolete laws). I inspected the hot water supply and pressure of the firefighting water system and so. The pic reflects the decoration (I did not take the pic for the bathing beauties, but for the water infiltration problem). Only this morning, while reading an article about a Tallinn hostel I started to digest what I have seen. Tel Aviv has famous gay hostels, now I am curious how they look. These businesses are in my town and my country, so actually I cannot truly say that I am not of this world.  

Brasil is no Friend of the Swedish Friend of the Earth

The worldwide protest movement led by a Swedish teenager suffering from Down's Syndrome (pic) is causing unease in the Third World. She is saying that Brasil is not protecting the Amazonas rainforest and is endangering Planet Earth's atmosphere. The Brasilians understand this as a direct menace, she is demanding that the Amazonas should be taken from Brasil and made an international Nature Park. To me this is sheer colonialism, the natives are happy, irresponsible children that cannot be trusted with the land, which should be given to the guardianship of Whites. 

What is happening in Spain?

Births in Spain. Year 2018. Provisional data

	Value	Variation
Total Births	369.302	-6,07
Girls	179.480	-5,89
Boys	189.822	-6,25
Of a spanish mother	293.118	-7,57
Of a foreign mother	79.184	4,11
Variation respect the same period of the last year The population of the barrio of Buenos Aires where spent my formative years was mostly immigrant Spanish and Italian. The Spanish boys were practicing Catholics, they went to church and followed a moral code. The Italians were less formal and more loose. The owner of the house we rented, Mr Emilio Arutti, was a peasant from Andalucia, he was very mild and decent, I loved him. They were a loving, harmonious family, while my home was a nest of high-strung  immigrants always fighting and shouting.  His only daughter was unmarried and ten years older than me. We were alone in many opportunities and she was open and friendly, and I was a stupid boy. I left home at 16 and was virgin till an enterprising woman took me to bed and sat on me.  Well, the Spanish people seem to be disappearing. A quarter of the births if by foreign mothers, meaning that a serious change is going on. 8 births per 1000, that is, an increasingly negative growth. While in Denmark, Germany and mostly in the USA there is an active internet debate about this very same issue, in Spain there is none. They seem resigned to this reality. It is not that the Spanish are less race-aware than other Western peoples, they instituted the Limpieza de Sangre laws in 1500 and closed down their society for five hundred years. No Jews live in Spain since 1492, so no one can accuse us of being the cause of their demise. The table is from INE, the Spanish Statistical Institute. The statue represents a Spanish adventurer, Francisco Pizarro, a bastard from Extremadura, whose small but vigorous band visited the Inca sanctuary of Pachacamac and deflowered all the Virgenes del Sol.

Kardan: Buy? Sell? Do Nothing?

Kardan is holding company that owes the double of its presumed assets. Its owners sold all their shares before Kardan become almost worthless. Kardan has three assets that has been trying to sell for more than three years: TAHAL, the Dalian Mall and AVIS Ukraine. They almost sold Tahal for 100 million sheqels to Fortissimo Fund. Tahal, and I worked twenty years for that consulting company, is worth little to nothing. After Government subsidies stopped, I wondered how they were able to pay my salary. I am watching and waiting. 

Missing My Turn to Get Rich

Two unnoticed changes in Israel's building permits "industry" are causing me problems: One, the Government is starting to tackle the illegal building activity that has brought us a situation that most of the public land has been occupied by unrecognized villages, of Jewish settlers in Samaria but specially by the Bedouins in the Negev. In the past, the Government ignored the intensive building taking place in Arab villages. The Arabs and their Jewish friends had an effective international lobby that made almost impossible to bulldoze a standing and occupied building. The European Union would protest the inhumanity of throwing into the streets a poor Arab family of an aged sheikh with four wives and twenty little innocent children. The EU would automatically fund the rebuilding of the structure in the same place. Encouraged by  President Trump's backing, Netanyahu's last government started to act and illegal buildings are being bulldozed by the hundreds and the pics published in the media. It has caused a panic in the Arab but mostly in the Jewish sectors. This year, everybody is trying desperately go legal and to get a permit.

Second, the permitting bureaucracy has been strengthened and an additional layer of inspectors has been added. Once, the drawing plans were signed by non-professional bureaucrats, but now they are studied by dedicated full time specialists that enforce all the regulations and standards. These new inspectors enjoy their power of rejecting drawings for minor errors even if the error is non-compliance with a long-forgotten, never-enforced, idiotic colonial-era municipal order.

The result is that I have been inundated with work orders and the prices have doubled. It is a veritable bonanza for permitting engineers like me, with twenty years of activity and a wide network of contacts and publications. This bonanza arrives when I am about to close shop, as I am a generation after retirement age and losing patience with the mindless bureaucracy. Just when my window of opportunity to get rich arrives, I am too old. I shall miss it. As my father used to say, "Son, you will have to inherit less".

A world in peace and prosperity

The papers are full of frightening bad news but the reality is that humanity is passing through a period of almost complete peace and absence of serious wars and internal strife. Most of the countries have no internal rebellions going on, and physical violence has almost disappeared in most societies. Aparently the fake media is succeeding in pacifying the masses and their grievances have been reduced to the level of perceived impoliteness. Prolonged peace has brought increasing prosperity. There has been no famines - physical hunger - in the last seventy years, and food is abundant and very cheap. On the other hand, several Chinese societies - Singapore, Taiwan,  China itself, as well as the Germanic states, are growing fantastically rich. Over 15,000 dollar per month salaries are common in Singapore (and San Francisco). Stock exchanges, that represent the wealth of the saving classes, are inflating: people that has savings in the NASDAQ and Shanghai Bourse have seen their worth rise 20-30% this year. TASE increased only 13% and I am not complaining. The family has grown and more babies are on the way. All this is too good to be true, too good to last. שנה טובה

When the engineer fails...