The cat parasite Toxoplasma gondii drives crazy mammals to the point that mice infected gets so excited by the smell of cat piss that instead of running for its life, it tries to mount the cat. Which devours the mouse, parasite included. Half of all humans carry the cat parasite, but I ponder if in Israel it is not 100%. Young Israelis undertake extreme adventure trips and die falling off high cliffs in Indonesia, get eaten by jungle crocodiles and so. If they make it back here, they start up risky high-tech businesses and get rich in no time.
Monday, September 30, 2019
Falsifying Clark's Farewell to Alms
Greg Clark's theory says that the lower classes in England failed to reproduce their numbers and were replaced gradually by the children of middle and upper class people. Since they had higher IQs and other parameters, the process produced a harmonious and effective society that brought about the Industrial Revolution. (*)
I found a Chinese study that evaluated the effect of the brutal replacement of the middle class by the poorest and lowest class as happened after the Communist conquest of China in 1949. Its conclusion is that the social restructuration had lasting effect and the descendants of the pre-1949 middle class never recovered their grandfather's positions. If Clark's theory is correct, the high IQ families should have recovered their status by this time, but they did not.
It would be interesting to study what happened in Taiwan and Hong Kong where this social engineering did not take place, but rich families migrated with their properties and professional privileges. Every Chinese society advanced in these 70 years, yet Taiwan and HK's per capita GNP is more than triple of the mainland.
In comparison, the children and grandchildren of the ruling class in Nazi Germany did recover very fast their high status twenty thirty years after WWII, and the same happened, in Hungary, were the Christian fascist middle class silently recovered its social status in the sixties. Hungarian Jews, that lost all their properties and were enslaved under the fascist regime, raised even faster everywhere they moved. From the paper:
Chinese Communist Revolution was a class-based revolution with peasants as its main supporters. In 1949, the Chinese government soon registered every citizen as belonging to 1 of 3 broad classes according to his or her presumed role in the revolution: “good class” (“red class” revolutionary cadres, revolutionary soldiers, and revolutionary martyrs as well as industrial workers and poor and lower-middle peasants), middle class (middle- and upper-middle peasants, urban routine staff, small businessmen, intellectuals, and professionals), and “bad class” (also called the “black class,” including landlords, rich peasants, capitalists, capitalist roaders, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, and “bad elements,” such as criminals). This classification scheme was largely property based.
One of the most visible and most consequential policies was the distribution of educational resources in favor of good-class children at the expense of bad-class children. Redistribution strategies included rapidly expanding education at all levels, opening special schools for government cadres only, and developing college admission policies that aimed to increase the enrollment of good-class students and restrict the number of bad-class students. More than 60 y have passed since these policies were first implemented. Most grandchildren of the revolutionaries have now completed their educations. A natural question to ask is whether these preferential policies actually succeeded or failed to transform the social stratification order.
That may mean that the pre-Communist social stratification was not based on hereditary advantage like high IQ. Unlike in England and Europe. Or something else.
(*) I linked to The Telegraph because google did not produce even one faithful summary of Clark's thesis, all the references are misleading and untrue. I think there is a serious effort to confuse the people, and the motive is to maintain social harmony. "They" are treating us like violent, slightly moronic children. Pic source.
(*) I linked to The Telegraph because google did not produce even one faithful summary of Clark's thesis, all the references are misleading and untrue. I think there is a serious effort to confuse the people, and the motive is to maintain social harmony. "They" are treating us like violent, slightly moronic children. Pic source.
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.
Friday, September 27, 2019
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?
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 | |||
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.
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Thursday, September 26, 2019
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.
Wednesday, September 25, 2019
Missing My Turn to Get Rich
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".
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