A society of lies

Since I am a retired but working man, I wake up very early and stay in bed thinking. The Friday edition of the fishwrap HaAretz we read is a totally untrue paper. For example, there are large pictures of black women in domineering positions, while in truth, in Israel we have very few Africans (about 1%) and most are small-bodied Ethiopians sweeping the streets. Simply, HaAretz reflects (1) American media, and (2) the untruth of that media. Another thinking point: Pliah Kotner. We lived in the same apartments house for twenty years and she went to school with my daughter. I used to meet her grandma, an Auschwitz survivor, and am friends with her parents. She married but vowed to have no children, you know, to save the environment. She turned to left-wing municipal politics and has been promoted to be in charge of Animal Rights. The right of street cats to be neutered humanely. A wasted life.  Another example: Israel is about to abolish exams. We do not want to hurt the feelings of those who fail so we lie and say that exams measure nothing. In our lying competitions, every one arrives first place. So we have lying doctors who know no anatomy, we are graduating lying civil engineers who cannot calculate.

The cause of this society of lies we are living in is Compassion. We are not able to tell African women that they are unattractive and ignorant. And they smell (in Brazil are more honest, and call it caatinga). We are unable to tell Philippine maids that we do not want them to stay in Israel and to have babies here, that we are Jews and they are not. They are human beings, sure, and possess human rights, but I do not want them in my synagogue. Sorry, we made a contract and it does not include that you will become an Israeli, however nice you are. We are different and want to stay so. But it is never said that in their face, on the contrary, we lie and lie and give them the impression that we want them. Our Western society's ideal is to be compassionate and never to insult anyone, we protect everybody's precious sentiments. This is a feminine thing, women are built like that, but you cannot live a life of lies for ever, at some point truth emerges. You know but you don't want to be there when it does.

I am not different and frequently, I too lack the courage to tell the truth and am humane and compassionate. We are only too aware that tomorrow we shall need compassion and help. I too sincerely feel compassion and do not want to insult and hurt good people. But as a society, we have moved too far and it will explode in our faces and we shall need to confront our hypocrisy. Good intentions, and we have them, will not be believed.  

I hoped that the constant Arab aggression and wars would protect us from this situation. But we had a few years of relative quiet, and the result is that women are taking over the universities, the bureaucracy, the army. We are compassionate and we are lying, the HaAretz lies about inexistent Israeli African beauty models, about imaginary Papuan genius scientists sending rockets to the moon. Children believe that it is real. 

End of an Era

America is sick and tired of the Middle East with its unceasing confused warfare, and wants out. President Trump abandoned the Kurds, after leading them to semi-independence, and looked to side when Iran destroyed the Saudi refinery. Living under American hegemony meant no-wars for us for a generation. With America out, and Europe impotent (because of its large Arab minority), the region from the Mediterranean to India is wide open for taking by second-rank powers. Russia, Turkey, Iran are contenders. We in Israel shall have to search for another competent and interested ally/protector. The next five/ten years will be tense for us. We may have to fight the Ayatollahs.  

Dreaming about Narayama Bushiko

The Ballad of the Narayama Mountain, an old Japanese movie. Last night I dreamt that I was sitting in a circle with old women and suddenly realized that I was in the place shown in the movie. The movie is based on a Japanese folk story of a remote village, living on the edge of starvation, where people reaching seventy had "to go to the mountain" to die. Summary from the wiki (with my editing):

The film is set in a small rural village in Japan in the 19th century. According to tradition, once a person reaches the age of 70 he or she must be taken by his son to a remote mountain to die of starvation, a practice known as ubasute. The story concerns Orin, who is 69 and of sound health and good teeth, but notes that a neighbor's son had to drag his father to the mountain, so she resolves to avoid clinging to life beyond her term. She destroys her front teeth so she will not be pitied, she sends her bad daughter-in-law with a present to her family - just when she know that they are going to be lynched (therefore cutting her line's link with the "black" family of the community), and recruits a friend to help her younger son to lose his virginity. The film shows the brutal, desperate life of the villagers, interspersed with beautiful vignettes of nature – birds, snakes, and other animals hunting, watching, singing, copulating or giving birth. 

Sailer cracked the Depopulation Enigma a Decade Ago

In occasion of an American election a decade ago, blogger-market researcher Steven Sailer discovered a link between "red" and "blue" States in the parameter of family formation (easy vs difficult). Bloggers, mostly, disregarded this discovery, but I always thought it was very subtle and astute. Now appears another peculiar economic study that links the tendency of young men (in America) to enter the workforce and their prospect to form a family. I never heard of Ariel J Binder but he must be quite smart to notice this correspondence.

Binder argues that changes in the labor market have interacted with changes in another market that values male employment—the marriage market—and that such interaction provides a more complete explanation of the data. ...Noncollege men experienced a tremendous decline in marriage propensities at the same time that they withdrew from the workforce....  

In addition to reducing marriage formation, this paper argues that these changes reduced the value a stably-employed noncollege man could extract from the marriage market. As a consequence, such men stood to gain less in 2015 from investing time in employment than they did in 1965.

If I understand the last paragraph, he is implying that young people accepts employment (becoming a regular working bloke) for the trade-off of having a steady woman in the bed and the kitchen. The mirror of this verity is that women do not consent going steady with a man without a regular employment. What has changed between 1965 and today that caused men to drop out? Binder says that the social and economic position of women has improved so radically that also their expectations/demands from a potential marriage candidate have increased to the point of disheartening the men.

I could add, to the point of depressing generations and causing an epidemy of addiction and suicide. And the dramatic fall in birth rates.

The solution to Western existential survival is knocking down women from their exalted, legally untouchable, economically privileged perch. To end with an Israeli note: females should pray in a segregated area in the synagogue and the Kotel (pic from the wiki). The coming elections will decide if that separation curtain will fall or erected higher. 

Incredibly Stupid Scholarship on Israel

I will trace some moments in the hegemonic production of an isolationist approach to the study of “Jewish History” as crucial to a quite anomalous project in which the state created the nation—not simply in the metaphorical sense of fabrication, but also in the literal sense of engineering the transplant of populations from all over the world. From: “Rupture and Return: Zionist Discourse and the Study of Arab-Jews,” Social Text 75, Spring 2003, pp. 49-74

I keep reading academic papers on the phenomenon of Israel and keep being amazed and awed  (from awful) by their stupidity. First of all, they all describe the Mizrahi (Arabic speaking) Jews in the Muslim world as living in a paradise, and wonder at the historical fact that one day the all left their thousand years old existence and moved in mass to Israel. This voluntary population transfer is inexplicable and anomalous for Western academics, and they attribute it to Western colonial practice of recruiting manpower in the Third World, almost like the cotton planters in American South importing African slaves. Developing this imaginary parallel, they search for the smallest grievances of the Mizrahi in Israel, something that could be compared to the Civil Rights and so protest movements in America. As they say in German, if you only have a hammer (the AfroAmerican protest movement), then everything looks like a nail. Incredibly for this old Israeli, even the "boureka" (popular) movie of the fifties, Sallah Shabati, is being dismembered and misunderstood to prove their thesis and accidentally (or not) to provoke social divisions in Israel. The element Western academics lack and they don't even know it, is belief in God and the Torah, which explains all the Jewish experience. Without God, the Yemeni Jewish community starting to walk through enemy Saudi desert towards the embattled Promised Land, an event that did really happen, is amazing and inexplicable.

Apparently the Academia cannot digest that Zionism is proved right and Israel is a prosperous and powerful state in this Middle East swamp of failed states and savagery. I am working now in several projects in all cases hired by the Mizrahi businessmen, who have built fantastic enterprises in Israel. In my daily life, I wonder what these academics, many of them Jews themselves, are seeing and writing about.  My opinion is that they are trying desperately to force Israeli reality into the imaginary pattern of Western colonial academic discourse. It is like a woman trying on fashionable shoes three or four measures smaller than her foot and taking a few steps in front of the shop's mirror. It happens all the time and believe me, it is painful for her and for the observer too.

Dont kill yourself on your enemy's door

It is a Chinese saying: Do not kill yourself in your enemy's door". It appears that it was rather common to take vengeance by killing oneself in front of the hated person's door, so he will be accused of murder. Apropos today I drove near my town's military cemetery, and a group of soldiers just walked out. Sunday morning a boy (soldier) left his home (Sokolov St, a block away from my house) to join his unit that was about to move to the North but he did not arrive. A search was organized and his body was found near the train station. It was only announced that it had not been a criminal or terrorist act: the unsaid conclusion is that he killed himself. They never disclose suicide, to avoid others copying it. Every year dozens of IDF soldiers kill themselves. I don't understand why, because  army discipline here is very mild and deserters get maybe a month or two of prison - spent mostly painting stones in an open camp. Israel enjoys peace these days and there was nothing to fear in the tour in the Northern border. Evolution should have deleted long time ago suicide, the fact that it did not means that we still come with many factory defects.  

Permitting a large cookie factory

This morning I had a meeting with the Ministry engineer in a large cookie factory in Holon. It is 17 km from my home, but the traffic is so bad that it took me two hours in the car. The factory is in a large brute concrete industrial estate, full of workshops and no place to park - everywhere they were loading or unloading cars. The cookie factory is a Bucharan family business, these are Jews that had been cut off from the world for hundreds of years in a Central Asian oasis and they are extremely religious. The walls were decorated with wildly colored pictures of Oriental Jewish saints and thank-you memorials of their generosity. It employs two hundred diverse workers. The cookies are excellent.

I had submitted my proposal about two years ago, but only three months ago received the retainer and started the project. The Government Officers were very angry - everybody was shouting in Russian - but surprisingly, the actual observations were mild and sensible, and only near the end I discovered why the commotion. The Bucharan Haredi suffers from a socio-genetic defect that prevents him from telling a true word, even when it is a palpable, visible, innocent fact, moreover, even when it would be to his own advantage! This character flaw reveals, I guess, an instinctive terror of authorities.  It appears that they had hired some Russian engineer before me and he had submitted untrue data, embarrassing the Ministry people. Then he decided to accept my old proposal, hiding that he wanted me to solve his badly poisoned situation. As always, I designed an elegant, technically correct and doable design and today we met on the site to see how it will be carried out.

After two hours of walking around with drawings in hand, everything was agreed. Because of ignorance and panic, the Bucharan had tied himself into a slipknot and hanged himself. Having established that I am honest as well competent, the Regulator in chief received a cookie box and exited. I waited for a cheque, hoping also to be honored with a cookie, but nothing, so I approached a cute Asiatic girl who was portioning a chocolate cream cake and invited myself.

Calories that this old obese Jew needs not.