Tension between Hellas and Ionia

The geopolitics of the Antiquity has a way of not going away. Israel (Judea) and Greece (Hellas) and Italy (Rome) are coalescing in a block to build a long submarine pipe line to sell gas to Europe.  The Ionian settlements on the Asian seaboard, once Persian satrapies and now Turkey, aspire to become the energy hub of the region and want to control the sea. The conflicting projects caused Turkey to ally with the GNA faction in Lybia and to send a  military expedition to sustain the alliance. The GNA is in danger of being defeated by the forces of General Khalifa Haftar. In the pic Fuat Aktay pasha, a high officer in the court of Sultan Erdogan. No natural light, everything dark brown, a 19th Century desktop penholder with its ink bottle and a large official stamp holder. On the wall, a classic 150 years old print of Ataturk. Behind, an ornate mahogany cabinet with gilded bronze mounts and handles. The office suggests a man living in the 18th Century. 

The (non-Racist) Elephant Dung Gin from South Africa

The Economist reports that there is new gin in the market in South Africa, at 45 dollars a bottle, distilled with or from pure, natural, organic, non-GMO elephant dung. The gin has a je ne sais quoi reminding one of ... elephant dung or the smell of the veldt; this gin embodies the spirit of Africa. The Economist, always topical, comments that even Africans can now enjoy the new gin (if they have money) because, under the apartheid regime, they were unfree to get drunk on White alcoholic delicacies and had to do with inferior stuff. I doubt Africans with 45 dollars in the hand were refused a bottle of gin, and anyway, what is the point of mentioning that in a note about elephant dung gin?    

The Truth About Demolition of Arab Houses in Israel

The article in the fishwrap HaAretz today analyses why the Arab sector building is almost universally illegal according to the country's law and why the enormous budgets appropriated for the Arab sector are not used and at the end of each fiscal year, return to the State. On the graph we see that only 9 Arab municipalities used more than 40% of the State budgets,and and on the left end, 3 used up less than 10%. 

This validates my personal experience, when I was working in the Water Administration. My Dept. had a budget of about 250 million dollars to be "lent" for public water and sewage projects in the Arab sector. Half of each loan was a grant, not to be paid back, and the rest … too. I mean they never paid back and the loan was recycled annually and then erased. Yet we never succeeded in spending more than half of the budget, due to lack of suitable, bankable projects. The Arab sector had no working municipalities and city engineers able or interested in talking to us, and the sewage flew on their streets as in the Middle Ages.

Regarding the illegal construction going on, the issue is that according to the law, each building has to have a municipal permit, and almost none has. The Arab municipalities are a chaos, there is no one to submit a plan and if even if submitted, since there is no city planning at all, cannot be approved legally. The law say that illegal buildings have to be destroyed, and in the Jewish sector, they are. In the Arab cities and villages the Law is silent, not applied, but the people is worried from a strong rightist government may be willing to confront the issue. 

The article comments that Representative Achmed Tibi (right), trying to neutralize the menace, had formed a political alliance with Moshe Gafni (left pic), from the ultra orthodox sector, and both camps  - Arab and Haredi - are de facto political allies. 

Anyway, Ariel University is graduating hundreds of Arab civil engineers and in a few years the Arab municipalities will catch up and regularize their planning situation. In general, the Arabs have advanced much in the last decade in Israel. They have entered the universities are working in the general economy and making money. 

The Russia-China War and the Lin Piao Affair

It has been forgotten that in 1970 there were battles between Russia under Brezhnev and China under Mao. The Chinese were no match for the Red Army. Mao had been particularly irritated by the Soviet Communist Party disputing his ideological supremacy and turned   China away from the Socialist camp and invited Nixon to banquet in Peking. A fraction in the Chinese Party felt Mao was mad, and had to be eliminated.

Lin was in charge of defense in the Politburo. He wanted to build up the army. He believed that the US and Japan were China's major enemies. Mao turned against Lin who suddenly felt so insecure that took a plane to Moscow. The plane exploded in flight.

My point is that the Chinese dictatorial regime invites conspiracies. A dictatorship, historically, invites coups and golpes-de-estado. The world will never hear about internal tensions but they must exist today as then.

Are Uyghurs White?

The above graph by a Chinese science group shows that Uyghurs are about half and half. They were White 3600 years ago, when they left those famous redhead mummies, and then there was mixing with Northeast Asians. About 700 years ago there was an injection of Europeans, probably females brought in by the Mongol conquests. The forced sinization going on today can be seen as the dilution and absorption of an ethnic group. Of course, there is nothing sacred about an admixture that coalesced in historical times, yet...  (Applying Prof. Maersheimer methodology of realism, Uyghur volunteers had joined the Islamic State and were no friends of the Jews, so the Chinese State is working for me by repressing those dangerous, barbarian fanatics.) 

Ancestry makeup and variations in admixture proportion within XJU. (A) ADMIXTURE results of XJU with West Eurasia, South Asia, East Asia, and Central Asia Siberia populations at K = 4 (in order https://academic.oup.com/view-large/figure/96943814/msx177f2.tifto show a full picture of Eurasian populations, all populations of the four major ancestries (including representative populations) were included.). Proportion of each ancestry in XJU was highlighted with a pie chart. Height of the bar is proportional to admixture proportion.

Happy New Year from Manchukuo (1930)

I was watching Prof. John Maersheimer's lectures about power policies,  and if China's rise will necessarily be opposed - militarily - by the USA. His answer is yes, it is inevitable. America has consistently all along its history engaged and destroyed potential peer powers such as: Indian nations in the continent, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Germany, the Soviet Union, etc.

If China succeeds in rising, the Tibetan Lama Kingdom and the sinization of the Turki (Uyghur) nation reflects the future of its neighbors. The Chinese most hate the Japanese and the question is what will Japan do? With its sinking population, defanged of imperial ambitions, it may find a niche as a barbarian tributary state. (Postcard 1.1.1930). India is also nervous about a giant neighbor.

Maersheimer says that America is interested in the Middle East only because the oil is here. The power trying to dominate this area/resource is Iran. It follows that its clerical regime will have to change, it is something of a miracle that the mullahs still are in power thirty years after. If archeologists are right, priestly rule was common in the Mesopotamian States of the antiquity, a temple being the focus of the settlements. But in our days there are no other states ruled by God's Representatives on Earth. Our main interest is to keep Iran far from us. In this anarchic world (no one answering 911) we need to be part of a regional system. Who is the enemy of Iran? We should be their friend.    

Alignment of Forces in the Eastern Mediterranean

As if we had not enough problems with internal politics, now we are sliding into a regional confrontation initiated by Erdogan. Turkey will send troops to Libya at the request of the UN-backed government in Tripoli as soon as next month, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said today.

Libya's internationally recognized Government of National Accord (GNA) has been struggling to repel a months-long offensive by General Khalifa Haftar's eastern-based Libyan National Army (LNA), which has been supported by Egypt, Jordan, Russia, the United Arab Emirates and France.

Last month, Turkey and the Tripoli-based GNA leader Fayez al-Serraj signed a defense cooperation deal and a separate one on maritime boundaries in the Eastern Mediterranean, where Turkey is locked in dispute with regional rivals Greece, Cyprus, Egypt and Israel over access to waters rich in natural gas.

All this "plonter" was caused by Hillary Clinton and Obama, who destabilized the comic-opera dictator of Lybia, Colonel Khaddafi and caused his bloody decapitation. Why did she do that? Khaddafi had dismantled his nuclear project and was doggishly obedient of his masters. Even the stupidest Neocon could have predicted the chaos that followed his exit. Americans do not learn: Jimmy Carter ordered out elected "dictator" Tachito Somoza, not a bad man and slavishly "our", causing twenty years of Sandinista chaos and civil war.