Victor Haar z"l An Obituary

My childhood friend Viky (Victor Adam Haar) was born in 1944 in the Budapest ghetto under German occupation. In 1957 his parents Zsigmond and Aliz emigrated to Argentina, with Viky and his sister. My parents found a job for Aliz in Laboratorios Szabo Hnos., Kessler and Cia. in Buenos Aires (the Szabo are our relatives) and we became good friends with Viky. He played the contrabajo (double bass) and built an electronic lab in his room, with an oscilloscope. He dropped from school and menaced his father with a gun, who sent him to a correctional institution. At 18 he bought a motorcycle and drove to Cordoba (800 km) and brought a criolla to Buenos Aires. My déclassé friend worked 20 hrs a day as a taxi driver and bought a small house in Pilar (or Caseros), a rural suburb, two hours colectivo ride from Buenos Aires. They had a boy Sergio and then twins (with cognitive issues). Viky worked in a factory, then started building and became a dollar millionaire. Her sister was killed at 15 in a traffic accident. He never drank nor did drugs, and saved money. He retired to Budapest with a woman of her Mother's age, then found a Colombian young woman. In the frontier, he had to legally marry her to bring her into Argentina, and days after arriving suffered CVI and died. Ana, suddenly a wealthy widow, described as "ignorant" by Sergio, brought in from Colombia her simpleton son. The sons, proudly, sent me a pic of Viky's tomb. To me, it seems like a public cemetery for indigents. I (and others) tried to channel him to a normal, middle-class Jewish life, but in vain. His son Sergio has two daughters by different women and runs some kind of "cultural" nightclub-cum-restaurant. Life goes on. 

Water

 

I went this morning to the Club to have a swim. The daughters were there with their children, which ignored me. Saw a few older Jews ... even fatter than me! It was not too hot. 

Credit Suisse looking for buyer

 

I am shocked that Credit Suisse has fallen into such hard times. In a sense, it deserves to be liquidated, because of the unpardonable action of destroying Holocaust victims' accounts. Antisemites, stealing depositors' money. Apart from that, it became a terribly managed institution, with a Senegalese manager and officials fighting each other. The old-time frozen Calvinist bankers have been substituted by the variegated chusma humanity. The American State Street Bank said they were not interested.   

Fossil fuels are killing us

 

A severe decline in childbirths has occurred over the past half-century, which will lead to considerable population declines, particularly in industrialized regions. A crucial question is whether this decline can be explained by economic and behavioral factors alone, as suggested by demographic reports, or to what degree biological factors are also involved. Here, we discuss data suggesting that human reproductive health is deteriorating in industrialized regions. 

Widespread infertility and the need for assisted reproduction due to poor semen quality and/or oocyte failure are now major health issues. Other indicators of declining reproductive health include a worldwide increasing incidence of testicular cancer among young men and alterations in twinning frequency. There is also evidence of a parallel decline in rates of legal abortions, revealing a deterioration in total conception rates.

Subtle alterations in fertility rates were already visible around 1900, and most industrialized regions now have rates below levels required to sustain their populations. We hypothesize that these reproductive health problems are partially linked to increasing human exposures to chemicals originating directly or indirectly from fossil fuels.

In my opinion, economic and behavioral factors CAN explain much of the phenomenon. Notwithstanding, this theory is interesting. 

Is air pollution linked to birth rate?  I know of no research linking them. The most polluted air was in England but no pop decline. The signs of decline started in France in the 18th Century. Greece and Rome in the antiquity suffered from the same problem and they were not burning fossil fuels. It is a mystery.

I dont believe in complicated reasoning

Suddenly, the stock exchange is crashing.  I wonder why. Bloomberg explains 

All of a sudden, the market’s back in “good-news-is-bad-news” mode. Any positive readings on the economy, particularly those on employment and inflation, can be interpreted as signals that the Federal Reserve will have to stay aggressive with its rate-hiking regime

The explanation is too complicated. I do not believe it is so. 

Ukraine Refugees in the New York Times

 

The pic surprised me. Then realized that the skin coloring app was being applied by the New York Times to trick its readers. Do they intend to impress their readers that Ukrainians are colored? Why?

Nuclear Priesthood

 

A nuclear priesthood has arisen in Russia. From portable churches to the consecration of weapons systems, the Russian Orthodox Church has been integrated into every facet of the armed forces to become a vital part of Russian national security, politics, and identity. This extraordinary intertwining of church and military is nowhere more visible than in the nuclear weapons community, where the priesthood has penetrated all levels of command and the Church has positioned itself as a guardian of the state's nuclear potential. Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy considers how, since the Soviet collapse in 1991, the Church has worked its way into the nuclear forces, the most significant wing of one of the world's most powerful military organizations.

Dmitry Adamsky describes how the Orthodox faith has merged with Russian national identity as the Church continues to expand its influence on foreign and domestic politics. The Church both legitimizes and influences Moscow's assertive national security strategy in the twenty-first century. This book sheds light on the role of faith in modern militaries and highlights the implications of this phenomenon for international security.

PSS: The priest reminds me of the Elbonians of Dilbert's world.