Melasma: The Sign of Death

Looking in the mirror I saw a brown blotch on my right cheek, in the same place where there was an identical blotch on my Father's cheek. It is melasma, also called hyperpigmentation, and it does not hurt nor causes any harm. Most elderly Jews in my street have more blotched skin than I do, but for me it is just the beginning. It signals an hormonal change: meaning, surprise!, I am getting older. Not dead yet, but already I am carrying on my face the dark sign of my decease. Be ready! On this optimistic note, I leave and sit at the sabbath table with my replacements. 

Israeli Mandarin Prof. Yaron is far from stupid, yet ...

Sammy Peretz reports in The Marker  (Hebrew) about the speech of a High Mandarin, Prof. Amir Yaron, Chief of Bank Israel, about Israel's public investment criteria. The Bank wants to select investments that most increase the GNP, and it has calculated the yields of investments in three key sectors: Infrastructure (each shekel invested  in roads and so increases the GNP by about five shekels), education (better equipped school facilities, highly qualified teachers, more pre-kindergarten hours and so) produces six times its cost, and investing in making the bureaucracy more efficient (more computers, more regulators and consultants, etc.) costs very little and each shekel yields ten, so he says. He prefers infrastructure, like Tel Aviv underground trains project (pic), even if it yields the less of the three investment alternatives, because it is well defined, is highly visible and reduces the time spent driving at rush hours. Who can disagree?

Yaron notes that Israel's population is one of the most educated of the world, and Israel's education budget is among the highest of the world in terms of GNP. Yet the latest PISA results show that Israeli students are among the worst, ranking lower than third-world countries. He wonders "What are those students doing all those years in school?" It is obvious that they are not learning, and we do not know how to spend  in education to achieve results.

He is aware that something is not working as it should, yet he repeats that unproved, untrue relationship between investment in education and economic development. Why? He knows that spending even more in education will produce no results, yet he increases year after year the Ministry of Education's budget to the point that Israel is number one in spending (and the last in PISA exams).

I shall not comment on investing in the bureaucracy. Yaron must well know that investing in regulatory agencies does not increase the GNP but reduces it. That is obvious except for those whose salaries are an item in the Budget, say, Prof. Amir Yaron. 

The Celestial Empire

The most important historical issue is the rise of China as a great power, possibly the greatest ever. Australia is in China's hemisphere and the nearest Western outpost, and is worried. Kevin Rudd, an Aussie sinologist diplomat, says that the Chinese people feels humiliated (it was colonized in the past) and to maintain relations on a rational, non emotional basis, the West should apologize.

On the other hand, John Mearsheimer, an American public intellectual, sees the situation in black and white: It is war and Australia must be part of the Western alliance. China knows only tribute-paying barbarians and enemies. Both speakers are very impressive.

I have been many times in China and like it. The first Israelis in China were TAHAL experts, they travelled in secret under different passports because we had no diplomatic relations. I wanted very much to go but they sent Dr. Moshe Mizrahi instead. He was the first to introduce Israeli heifers and establish a dairy farm. I was so bitter that attacked the project, saying that Chinese lack the lactose enzyme and will vomit the milk. I was wrong, of course, and the local milk industry has developed tremendously since. We could have maintained our primacy but did not. New Zealanders are there.

China was known then as facing famine, and the question was if they could feed themselves. What they did was to forbid second child. I told my counterpart that it was a very wrong policy, and I think I was right. Today they are in need of those unborn babies. I told them that Chinese poverty is a temporary aberration, they were a hardworking intelligent people, and Chinese prosper everywhere they are. They were very afraid of the future. And yes, they feared Western colonization and division of the country.

They have good reasons to fear the West and Japan. But they are easy to live with, should the West let them to. Whites (and Blacks even more, but they lack intelligence) have aggressor genes and cannot stay quiet.

Tacit Corollary: (1) Both American and Australian thinkers assume as certain that China and America are in (cold) war, (2) China's economic size equals America and will be two times larger in twenty years. It is unsaid that for America, it would be advantageous to precipitate the confrontation as soon as the conditions become propitious. 

In the Stress Lab

I spent four hours today in the Stress Laboratory of Civil Engineering Dept. with Michael aka Zack (pic). He is another of the elderly Russian Jewish geniuses that found refuge in the University of Ariel.







The subject is boring - the distribution and propagation of stresses in structures - but he added probability calculation which made it more intriguing. The students followed  Zack's "experiments" without much enthusiasm. Probabilities always fascinates me. 

The Solgar Military Drone

The Turkish military industry, and industry in general, is developing fast. The new drone can fly 10 km and shoot 200 bullets with good precision. It is impressive because the platform itself is light, unstable in the air and each shot causes a reaction that changes the position of the drone. Turkish industrial products are low tech but effective, and most importantly, inexpensive - we have many JCBs in the construction industry. Turkey disputes maritime rights with Greece, it is a latent shooting war. Bibi said that we are allied to Greece since Turkey nixes our gas pipeline near Cyprus. 

My Clients are Better than I am

The Regulator sent me a list of 25 demands: another interceptor, ten more non-return valves, two pumps instead of one (extra safety) and so on. I said OK we shall do it. My Client said NO, we shall not, we shall fight the expensive, senseless demand of this bureaucrat person. On second thought, he is right. I give in too easily. 

The Red-Hot Competition for IQ 100 people

From Deutsche Welle (Germany's Official Propaganda Medium, like the BBC):

Germany is most in need of electrical engineers, metal workers and mechatronics engineers, cooks, nurses, aged care workers, computer scientists and software developers. The government has been looking to draw people who qualify from Mexico, the Philippines, Brazil, India and Vietnam, among others. 

Labor Minister Hubertus Heil sought to allay concerns among immigrant-wary sections of the population, telling the Augsburger Allgemeine newspaper that the recruitment drive "is not about uncontrolled immigration, but about qualified people who we need so that our country can remain economically strong in the future."

This comes after Germany accepted more than a million Syrian refugees a year ago. Today the competition is not for mineral or other resources, but for working people. This is a totally new situation: People is not inexhaustible cannon fodder, but a scarce resource.  Argentina has about a million German descendants, mostly from the 19th Century, why are they unmentioned?