Necromancy in Buenos Aires

Once again, Argentina is refusing to pay back its loans, and its credit rating has collapsed. Nothing new.

The situation is worsening and street violence has reached Venezuelan levels. Not even the long dead in the Chacarita cemetery are safe (pic). The big stone pyramids erected by the Pharaohs were all robbed dry, but the old aristocratic families of Buenos Aires imagined that their tombs were safe forever. Their bodies were taken with their gold teeth and rings and medals of saints. They were sold for magical necromancy, voodoo or whatever. Times change, Argentina changed. 

Why Wall Street is Not Afraid of the New Corona Virus?

Comparison of SARS and Corona from the day the WHO started tracking them (via /u/thejjbug). Note also that the WHO only started tracking SARS after 4 months, vs. just one month for Corona.

The graph, taken from Karlin's Blog, shows the exponential growth of Corona cases. Eventually, if we are lucky, it will stabilize and fit into a logistic curve. Anyway, it means a serious economic disruption but Wall Street is not afraid and it has not crashed. The Chinese government has been taking most seriously this epidemy from its very beginning, imposing quarantine on Wuhan, an 11 million urban agglomeration, and building in two weeks a brand new Corona virus hospital (the decision was taken when the epidemy had just started).

I think by their aggressive reaction that the Chinese must know something, and that Wall Street, by their indifference, must also know something. Somebody in this lying internet suggests that this may be a fabricated virus that specially loves Chinese people. I have no idea, I do not believe in conspiracies, I do not believe in secrets and don't take me seriously. 

Excess Work

I am not looking for work but work is looking for me. The last week's rains have caused enormous material damages, including the flooding of an Air Force hangar and damages to fighter jets (each costs like 100 million dollars), and the flooding of cities and underground parking. Two unfortunate people got caught in a lift and was killed. I am among the few free-lance water and drainage engineers with publications, and I am getting inundated by urgent orders. Money is no problem, they say. I always had too much work and worked too hard, but this is ridiculous and do less than my potential. The Arena center in Nahariya was about to be sold last week, after its flooding it seems doubtful. In Spanish: Dios le da pan al que no tiene dientes. 

The New Ashkenazim

8000 Ethiopians are immigrating to Israel in the next weeks. They are learning about Judaism and converting according the Halacha. These new Jews will fill the vacuum left by the losses during the Holocaust. They are, some say, the next generation of computer engineers Israel needs.   

Escape from Wuhan

The panic is spreading in Wuhan. The millions quarantined are desperate to escape. Only a few foreigners are able to report about what they personally see around. The government of China is acting forcefully to contain the virus and to isolate the area, but desperate people cannot be stopped. The police is not yet using firearms.  Some speculate that a biolab in Wuhan created the virus and it escaped accidentally. 

Shedding IQ

Athenians considered themselves the most intelligent of all and that was also the opinion of foreigners who came to study there. Fast-forward 2000 years and Athens is a big Palestinian village, so much that many Europeans did not want them in the EU. The Greeks of the Antiquity colonized and settled in Magna Grecia, the southern tip of Italy, and in Ionia, what is now Western Turkey. The people living there today is genetically the same as the original settlers, and there was no replacement by Slavic, Turkish or Italian invasions. Why, then, those Greek settled areas are among the most underdeveloped of Europe?

The only possible answer is that the colonizer populations lost IQ. Meaning that IQ is not a reproductive advantage on the contrary, it is dysgenic. In certain conditions peoples develop high average IQ and then they lose it. Contemporary European peoples are assuredly losing IQ. Danish IQ studies comparing current recruits with former generations show that the Flynn effect has stopped and reversed. In Denmark there is little immigration, but in France it is massive, and the phenomenon must be significative. Stupid peoples cannot manage democracy so their future is some kind of authoritarian regime or pseudo-democracy.  BRAWNDO, 8.5 Fl.Oz. per sip, will sell well. It's got electrolytes. 

No, We Dont Have SARS 2 in Israel - Yet.

It appears that the Wuhan coronavirus (SARS mutation) have not yet arrived in Israel. What we have is a very cold (for Israel) and rainy winter, and plenty of regular "shapa'at" killing old people. I got vaccinated, and it is working. The new SARS (pic.) is of unknown origin, the old one was caught from the Asian civet (pic.). When working in the hill country of Yunnan, the engineers with me stopped the jeep in a roadside minority open market and bought beautiful puppies, that were cooked with rice on open fire in a nearby "kitchen". They invited me but declined and arranged a separate room where I ate only rice. No one got sick, but the driver got drunk and almost killed all of us, proving that Chinese eating habits can be dangerous. Selling live animals is forbidden in Israel, and there is a special police to protect wildlife.

The Wall Street Journal writes that pneumonia deaths in China are not being registered as caused by the new SARS, suggesting that the epidemy is much wider than reported. No kidding, the new coronavirus is more infectious than the one that caused SARS .