She Jumped to Her Death and No One Knew

A girl jumped from the high building in front of my window last week. I did not see it and when investigating, I saw no blood stains on the pavement and there was no mention of it in the local papers. The ambulance service just registers the death and cleans up fast and no siren sounds. It is kept as a secret because suicide is contagious. Why people kill themselves? It is something that evolution should have eliminated long time ago. Logically, it should not exist.

Suicide ranks among the three leading causes of death among those aged 15–44 years. Attempted suicides are up to 20 times more frequent than completed ones. 800,000 suicides per year the world over. Sunny Middle East is the region with lowest suicide rates, Israel too being down on the list. The highest rates are the dark countries of Korea, Japan and Russia. 200 thousand people kill themselves each year in China alone. To me it is a paradox, as Orientals possess a stable brain that never goes mad.

A credible theory says that humans have developed religion as a defense against suicide. Chinese, Japanese, Koreans have no religion, they have no prophets and God never talked to them, they believe in no afterlife and know of no tabu foods, and everybody knows that way madness lies.

Apparently, a strong religion is a mental protection against suicide. One tricks himself to stay alive.  Thursday is Yom Kippur, a fast day, and I am on my way to the synagogue. 

Hungarian Ethnic Settlement in Israel

The people of the village of Miliya in Northern Israel, also called the Lajos village, are descendants of the Hungarian contingent of the Crusades. King Andrew II took part in the storming of Acre. These Hungarians speak Arabic and are Christians. We Jews (Judeans) returning to our land two thousand years after having been expelled by the Romans, find it occupied by a variety of foreign peoples, and the Hungarians are among the less exotic of them. One could also find hidden yet still recognizable descendants of the original Jewish population, but they have suppressed their identity, dissolving in the emerging Palestinian nation. 

Kling's Test applied to Israeli Universities

Prof. Arnold Kling estimated that only students with SAT 1300 are capable to benefit from university studies in economy (in the USA). Are there enough top students to populate the top colleges and universities? he asked.

He calculated the number of available manpower, and arrived to the conclusion that only 3 or 4 of the best universities (Yale, Harvard) could fill their classes with capable students, the lower ranking universities are fated to do with what we call "brara".

This semester there is a 84% jump in first year's math/comp students in Israel, to 17000. Engineering grew 10% to 35000. I do not have the numbers, but does Israel have 17000 talented people of the 22-24 y.o. age group of 150000 with the IQ required? Israel's average is 85 (!?) and we are 9 million, so do the math.

Say we set the cutoff point at 2 SD that is about 5%, then we have 7500 potential candidates. Half of them are females and 25% Arabs - which theoretically should not be relevant. But 30% at least has no desire to study math but continue in the yeshive, or study Law or Psychology or become an Army General or in case of being of the Palestinian persuasion, may be planning to be a suicide bomber. Some brainy girls may be attracted to the stage and/or follow a well paid career in the massage business. Any way I put it, there are not enough good students available.  In the best of the cases, only about 3 to 5 thousand in the 17000 has a chance to succeed. A large percentage - maybe 12000 - is doomed to fail, and there will be a strong pressure to lower requirement and standards. The industry will be strongly pressured to employ underqualified "diverse" professionals, as it is now. The worth of an Israeli diploma erode, for sure.

At least we make sure that no imbecile is left out. 

Work is Our Life

Had four days of holidays (weekend + rosh hashana) while did nothing. It resulted in a depression. I realized why my retired friends travel all the time, they pass their time in pointless touring the world and posing with a stupid turret in the background. They thirst for the feeling that they are doing something, they follow an itinerary that they have "to do". They leave the place with the satisfaction of having accomplished something.

That is not for me. I need a convincing purpose, like getting paid or getting laid. I shall work till I fall into the grave. 

Tel Aviv on Fire

Israel / Palestine, today. Salam, a 30-year-old Palestinian living in Jerusalem, works as a trainee on the Palestinian popular soap opera "Tel Aviv on Fire", produced in Ramallah. Every day, to reach the TV studios, Salam has to go through an Israeli checkpoint. There he meets the commander of the checkpoint, Assi, whose wife is a big fan of the soap opera. In order to please her, Assi puts pressure on Salam to change the end of the show. Salam quickly realizes that Assi's ideas could promote him to screenwriter. Salam's career is suddenly boiling, until Assi and the Palestinian producers and financiers disagree on how it should end. Stuck between an army colonel and his bosses, Salam needs to solve his dilemma with a master stroke finish.

The movie was financed by the EU and filmed partly in Luxemburg. For a change, Arabs and Jews are not shown trying to kill or falling in love with each other. I like the story and trailer, if this is European leftist political propaganda, well, it is not bad.  

Cat piss nation

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. 

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.