Lord Hannan on the small gangsters of Leningrad

 

Lord Daniel Hannan wrote the first sensible piece on the Wagner rebellion going on in these hours in Russia. In Yahoo News, my fav internet paper. Interestingly, he calls Prigozhin a small gangster from Leningrad - Leningrad and not Petersburg! - but not a member of Putin's Leningrad secret police circle.  His father was Jewish, now I see he looks like my Uncle Ivor. The  Wagner mercenary army and the legitimate Russian Armed Forces are apparently fighting. Wagner appears to be advancing toward the capital.  

Saudia is Doomed and They Know It

 
Saudi Arabia’s fiscal breakeven price of $76.10 per barrel means that it remains heavily in the red, with only Qatar being able to record a surplus thanks to its low breakeven point of $39.90 per barrel.

The Saudi solution is to diversify at a breakneck tempo, building up the Neom project which would be another Dubai (pic). 

Half of the young population has academic diplomas and will not do any physical work. 30-60% are effectively unemployed. All the work is being done by Pakistanis and similar on contracts. Saudi subsidies/alms to the Palestinians are being cut. 

No More War

 

The continent of Europe is tired and desperate to avoid wars. It has succeeded in living in peace now for seven decades and wants to continue enjoying quiet and prosperity. I hope it will succeed. 

But we know that war is the condition of the human species. Has it changed? 

Summertime

On Friday the 16 of June, I received the Permit for the Ramat Gan building. It was a very tense job, the owner called me every day and evening. Since then I did no work, I am taking a pause and just relaxing. My BP fell to the 110/75 region. Boring.

While I was not looking

 These days I was busy with the Ramat Gan project and did not look at the stock exchange happenings. Today I discovered that my portfolio grew very nicely - something like 20% in four sessions. I have no idea what happened. It could be that Ehud Barak insulting a female on the late evening news TV improved the national mood. Barak is a former Prime Minister, a war hero, a millionaire, and a monster, financing and inciting the masses to violence against the elected government. I hope he is finished and will disappear from the scene. 

INTEL is investing 25 billion dollars in its Israeli fab, it is the largest ever investment in this country. Parallelly is also investing 35 billion in Germany, 10 billion of it being a subsidy. There are no chip fabs in all of Europe.  If China keeps suffocating Taiwan, INTEL may find itself alone in the arena. 

Earth's Poles Moving Because of Pumping of Groundwater

 
Clark R. Wilson, a geophysicist at the University of Texas at Austin, and his colleagues thought the removal of tens of gigatons of groundwater each year might affect the drift. But they knew it could not be the only factor. “There’s a lot of pieces that go into the final budget for causing polar drift,” Wilson says.

The scientists built a model of the polar wander, accounting for factors such as reservoirs filling because of new dams and ice sheets melting, to see how well they explained the polar movements observed between 1993 and 2010. During that time, satellite measurements were precise enough to detect a shift in the poles as small as a few millimeters.

Dams and ice changes were not enough to match the observed polar motion. But when the researchers also put in 2150 gigatons of groundwater that hydrologic models estimate were pumped between 1993 and 2010, the predicted polar motion aligned much more closely with observations. Wilson and his colleagues conclude that the redistribution of that water weight to the world’s oceans has caused Earth’s poles to shift nearly 80 centimeters during that time.

Sounds logical. The UFO people may be investigating these strange changes in the orbit of this planet. 

The neighborhood has changed

I reside in the center of this Kfar Saba settlement, sitting in a chair in front of the Penguin ice cream shop on Rothschild Street. The next shop is a bakery but when I arrived, say fifty years ago, it was a dark dusty dress shop owned by twin Hungarian ladies. They had numbers tattooed on their forearms, they were survivors of Auschwitz. I told my mother to talk to them, but she was shy and never did. The next shop, now a pizzeria, was owned by a Hungarian with machines to make rubber stamps. I used to talk to him till he died. In the corner of the staircase of this old building, a Romanian had his watch repair shop, sitting on maybe 2.5 square meters. Next to the Municipality, a shoemaker had a wooden shack; he died and there are no more shoe repair shops in the town. The shack (restored and painted anew) is maintained as a historical souvenir of old Kfar Saba. Schoolchildren are taken to visit it. It is next to the first water well that allowed the existence of this hundred years old agricultural settlement. At the bus stop on Weizmann Street, old Yemenites were selling narcotic leaves they were addicted to. At that time there were still a few active farms.  A year before, eggs had been rationed, but the oldtimers continued buying "black market" eggs from Druckman's farm. Thinking back, the population of the town was depressing, poor, and miserable. 

Sitting on the street, I see a different public. Most women have blond hair, and there are five or six hairdressers on the block. There are quite a number of tall, original blonde Walkiries; they speak Russian among themselves. Many fat Philippine caretakers, shopping or accompanying old women. Some suspicious-looking muscular Africans, and some fat-assed Ethiopians. New tall buildings everywhere. The city shines with prosperity. I felt more at home then.