Exotic Weapons

In his book, Shadows in the Sun, Davis (1998: 20) recounts what is now arguably one of the most popular ethnographic accounts of all time:

“There is a well known account of an old Inuit man who refused to move into a settlement. Over the objections of his family, he made plans to stay on the ice. To stop him, they took away all of his tools. So in the midst of a winter gale, he stepped out of their igloo, defecated, and honed the feces into a frozen blade, which he sharpened with a spray of saliva. With the knife he killed a dog. Using its rib cage as a sled and its hide to harness another dog, he disappeared into the darkness.”

Since publication, this story has been told and re-told in documentaries, books, and across internet websites and message boards (Davis, 2007, Davis, 2010; Gregg et al., 2000; Kokoris, 2012; Taete, 2015). Davis states that the original source of the tale was Olayuk Narqitarvik (Davis, 2003, Davis, 2009). It was allegedly Olayuk's grandfather in the 1950s who refused to go to the settlements and thus fashioned a knife from his own feces to facilitate his escape by skinning and disarticulating a dog.

Source: Science (sic)!

Tax Payers vs Benefits Receivers

Short  note: I made a calculation of Japan's taxpaying population (working age minus unemployment minus those earning less than the average salary, who are not taxed) in comparison with the retirement and other benefits drawing population. The Japanese State extracts less taxes from the population than pays out as benefits, and the situation is worsening. Japan makes up the difference assuming debts, that probably will never pay back.

Another interesting calculation is if the African population of America is a net tax contributor or it is burden to the State. Apparently they are positive contributors, although very marginal. It is the middle class (including the Jews that pay much of the revenue) that are keeping America in work. The same with Israeli Arabs, they are not much of a burden for the State, mostly because they are young. Contrary to what everybody is thinking, keeping them pacified does not cost much. 

This issue called my attention because I wrote exams for TALDOR (Ministry of Education) and they paid me only half of the published pay scale (50% tax!). And six month late. I'll come back to this thing later.

The Islamic University of Gaza

I have been looking for water engineering information on the internet and found that the Islamic University of Gaza, Faculty of Engineering, has excellent teaching materials. I also like its seal. 

I am learning new and surprising things every day.  

Political Thoughts from Pakistan

Leaving aside the moral and functional (non) desirability of parliamentary democracy in ethnically fractured societies... let's analyze China’s political economy... Source.
It is a skilled, efficient, and meritocratically recruited bureaucracy. This bureaucracy (which is the primary beneficiary of the system) has as its main duty to maintain stability and the integrity of the country, as well as to promote economic growth. Its feature is the absence of rule of law i.e. its unequivocal application. This is necessary to ensure that businessmen (or provincial chieftains) are never in a position to become primary drivers of government behaviour, which they would if a stable and consistent application of law was ensured. Instead, the state retains authority and autonomy precisely because it can choose to apply the law to whomever and wherever it wishes. It is apparent that these two main features are in permanent contradiction. How can you have a technocratic and meritocratic bureaucracy at the same time as the transient absence of rule of law? Therefore, the system is always in a precarious equilibrium.

J's corollary: More than a precarious equilibrium, the system is rapidly evolving to a one-man hereditary Emperor + meritocratic mandarinate, which seems to me the natural political order of China. 

Ashtonishing Disintegration of Japanese Society

From and official Japanese source: 

"The higher number of males in their 50s living alone is primarily attributable to fewer people getting married. The percentage of unmarried individuals among people at the age of 50 is often referred to as the “lifetime non-marriage rate.” Having remained in the range between 1 and 3% through 1985, the rate for males started to surge in 1990, and reached 20.1% in 2010. Furthermore, it is forecast to climb as high as 27.6% for men in 2030. A higher lifetime non-marriage rate is also expected for women, but it is not as high as that for men. The lifetime non-marriage rate for women was 10.6% in 2010, and is expected to reach 18.8%."

A survey of Japanese people aged 18 to 34 found that almost 70 percent of unmarried men and 60 percent of unmarried women are not in a relationship. Moreover, many of them have never got close and cuddly. Around 42 percent of the men and 44.2 percent of the women admitted they were virgins.

Think! A quarter of Japanese remains single and childless for life. The Japanese are smart, nice, sociable people, so what is causing this unnatural disintegration? On the other hand, the Nordic countries have comparable rates of non-marriage, but there is a difference. Nordics co-habit and have frequent and varied sex. Germans had been always individualist, even Takitus noticed that they build their houses at the farthest possible distance from the next neighbor. They too prefer to live alone. In fact, Japanese and Nordics (males, females) do not like each other much since - given the choice - they hate to share a home.  (I am not comparing to the African (Bantu) family structure, which is totally different.) We Jews are a bit  different, we love to spend time and criticize each other's homes and tend to live in crowded quarters. We like each others stink. Pic.: A Japanese man marrying an anime character. 

About the Evil Hungarian Communist Party

After the liberation of Hungary by the Red Army in 1945, the country prepared for general elections. The Hungarian Communist Party was very small, mostly composed by Communists that had survived the Nazi regime and the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and had returned to Hungary, almost all Jews. The Party, under the leadership of Rakosi (an assimilated Jew), took the decision to adopt a virulent anti-Jewish line, recruiting even former Hungarian Nazis (the Nyilas - Arrow - party). The Party also decided to enlarge its membership by recruiting "Kis-Nyilas" ("Small Nazis") individuals - that is, Nazi Party members who did not play any prominent role and carried the Nazi Party card mostly for career  purposes. These Small Nazis seamlessly re-made themselves into Small Communists and continued to operate the administrative machine of the State. The Americans in Germany followed the same policy of co-opting former Nazis.

The Hungarian people was/is fanatically anti-Semite since ever, and had been recently brainwashed by the pre-war Nationalist (Admiral Horthy) and Nazi (Szalasi) regimes. The Communists' idea was to present themselves as the most anti-Semite party and so win the votes of the lower and middle class. The survivors of the Holocaust were a pitiful group of traumatized individuals, that returned from the camps and found no living relatives and their homes occupied by their neighbors. The terrible Communist propaganda campaign targeted these people as black-marketers, speculators, the cause of the economic crisis, agents of foreign powers (Britain and Palestine - Israel did not exist yet and Zionists were called Palestinians). There were forty "significant" pogroms in Hungary in the period following liberation, dozens were assassinated. Rakosi and the party members did not think themselves Jews, they considered themselves Communists without religion or nationality. How is that it did not occur to them that they were fomenting a wave of hate that ultimately would be focused on them and that they would be chased in the street and hanged on lamp posts (as it happened in the revolution of 1956)?

Even with their cunning political scheme, the Communists gathered few votes. They called Uncle Joe (Stalin) and the occupying Soviet Army installed them in the power. The proletarian dictatorship lasted ten years of sheer terror and then exploded the Revolution. The AVO political police HQ were sacked and their identities published. They were lynched one by one. I was there, I saw and remember the bodies on the streets.

  

The Ancient Spanish Privilege to Kick in the Air

The "Right to kick" (EL DERECHO AL PATALEO DE LOS AHORCADOS) is an old Spanish idiom of disputed origin. The version I know refers to the right to protest granted to people sentenced to death, specifically, to kick in the air while being hanged. Meaning: you have the right to protest as much as you wish, but it will make no difference.

Someone in Tenerife, Spain, after waiting a long time in a queue and then his request was rejected, kicked in his way out a wastebasket with such bad luck that it damaged the copying machine. The Judge granted his right to be angry and acknowledged "the ancient Spanish privilege of the hanged man to kick in the air", but you are not being hanged and as an adult, you are expected to control your emotions. I sentence you to pay 70 Euro for damages to public property.

Others say that the students of the University of Salamanca enjoyed the right to make noise to convey their protest against a professor they disliked and not to be punished.