Jews in China

 During the Tang dynasty. Very nice piece. 

Gary Chambers, the Senator from Louisiana

Gary - smoking marijuana - may be Louisiana's next Senator. Chambers said it is "long past due that politicians stop pretending to be better or different than the people they represent." What will the meritocratic mandarins on the other side of the Pacific Ocean think?

Virtuous Cycle

There is full employment in the West but Central Banks keep injecting liquidity. The new money is invested in high tech like Intel's fabs, but some find their way to the bourse. The growing demand for liquid assets fuels rise and the machines, that make the decisions in most funds, play the momentum. As Soros explained in his reflectivity theory, this attracts even more money creating a virtuous cycle that ends with the explosion of the bubble and recession. Prices have reached a permanently high plateau and inflation will keep them there indefinitely. Or not. As for me, although depressed, I play the game. One Hindu guru explains that money can be and is created, and inflated, people look for assets that cannot be created from thin air, like gold, silver... and bitcoin. Illustration: Dutch master Rubens. 
 

The Myth of China

I'm reading the Opium Wars book and it upsets the Leftist/Communist myths. Opium was not introduced by British imperialists, it had been extensively used as an expensive medicine forever.  The Brits in India produced better quality and cheaper opium, and the Chinese bought it. See left. 

Manchu-occupied China was suffering severe financial stress, as silver was its sole currency - taxes and army salaries were paid in silver, and from 1805 the South American silver mines were exhausted and the continent was undergoing a generation of chaos (rebellion against the Spaniards and post-independence civil wars). The silver inflow from Mexican and Peruvian mines had stopped. In this situation, the Qin state fell into semi-paralysis and European iron gunboats encountered feeble resistance.

Chinese imports of Bombay opium were bleeding Chinese silver, collapsing the Manchu imperial state. The myth that British imperialists drugged impotent Chinese does not represent all the truth about China's collapse, because the Manchu regime was already in an advanced state of decomposition. The Manchu ruling conquerors were 0.3% of China's population. They ruled by terror and bureaucracy.

BTW, now I understand why the exam to be recruited into the bureaucracy - the eight-legged essay - was just a composition about a classical poem or saying. Literacy was the key skill of an efficient bureaucrat: the Chinese writing system was incredibly complicated, and all the business of the large Empire was done by detailed reports and letters. 

Flower children in Israel

Not long ago it was the Age of Aquarius and many Jewish flower children sang with Rav Karlebach and settled in Israel.  One Dati-Leumi Aquarian turned up as a client, they live in a Hungarian-speaking moshav and tried to work the land in the highest, purest, Earth-friendly, ecological husbandry. Very nice idealist Americans. 

They refused to connect with the municipal services and built a wetland to recycle the water. They have ducks swimming in the black stinking pond and goats to graze the polluted swamp grass. They are paying religiously the municipal sewage fees although they never used the service. They decided to clean up that overflowing eco swamp and connect the house to the mainline. That requires planning and permits, my trade. 

When in Berkeley, California, in 1970, I befriended on the street a traveling group of "hippies", something resembling the "Hair" movie. Being the serious idiot I was and am, I failed to avail myself of the free sex they were famous for, and dropped off and continued my travels with the Greyhound bus.  

Cities are sinking: Solutions.

HO CHI MINH CITY: Nguyen Van Cu is a construction engineer whose specialty is raising homes. That means he has been busy of late. He recently put the finishing touches to a house he had lifted by more than two meters. A few years ago, he raised a 6,000-tonne church. The Mekong delta is sinking and Saigon is subsiding 8 cm per year. The cause is overpumping the aquifer but mostly the rising of the sea level. The idea of rising buildings is interesting. 

Epidemy in Israel

 

The COVID19 virus has been mutating for two years and now new and effective variants are infecting everybody, from the government mandarins to the last nomadic goatherd. Hospitals are full and there is nothing to do. The plague is on us, again. 

This morning I checked my BP and it was normal. It has to be measured twice and the second is always lower. All my childhood (male) friends are dead. Their goyishe kids (over fifty y.o.) keep writing me.