Shaatnez Panic in Jerusalem

 

Hundreds of students at the Old Seminary, an ultra-Orthodox school in Jerusalem, removed their shoes and walked barefoot after discovering their TOMS footwear contained Shaatnez, a forbidden mixture of wool and linen, BeHadrei Haredim and Mynet reported.

In a display of religious observance, the incident began when a student reported finding Shaatnez in her shoes, prompting the school’s principal, Rabbi Yisrael Levin, to announce the discovery over the PA system. Within moments, hundreds of pairs of shoes were removed as students chose to observe the halachic ruling by walking barefoot, BeHadrei Haredim reported.

The origins of the prohibition of shatnez in Jewish tradition is considered chok, an unexplainable law. The prohibition of mixing wool and linen is called kilayim. “The word shatnez is not actually a real word.”  Shatnez comes from combining three Hebrew words that refer to the different steps of garment production: combing, spinning, and weaving.

Basically, Judaism is a religion of purity and hates all kinds of mixing, like meat and milk. It must come from Egyptian priests, who shaved their whole body and had all sorts of impurity tabus. 

The Temple of the God of Money

 

Israel following Britain's Lead

 

The planning documentation for the Lower Thames Crossing, a proposed tunnel under the Thames connecting Kent and Essex, runs to 360,000 pages, and the application process alone has cost £297 million. That is more than twice as much as it cost in Norway to actually build the longest road tunnel in the world.

Much of the discussion is about the metaphysical question of whether the road+tunnel will increase or decrease the emission of CO2. As far as I  know, civil works do not produce nor consume CO2 / For those who do not know, CO2 is something invisible produced by, say, breathing. Infrastructure, as a rule, does not breathe. 

But we are not far from the Brits. 

Haggling or Fixed Price

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If commitments are feasible, a seller encountering risk-neutral buyers one at a time should quote a single take-it-or-leave-it price to each. This strategy is superior to any other for finite or infinite buyer populations, whether there is learning or the distribution of buyer prices is known at the outset, with one object for sale or many. Although haggling may offer advantages in terms of price discrimination, these gains are more than offset by the losses it generates by encouraging buyers to refuse purchases at high prices.

Hard Times Ahead

 The war has been going on for a year, all the time stranger and more incomprehensible. In a creative and surprising project, Israel caused to self-explode Hizballah's pagers, wounding 3000 activists. Today, a second wave of electronic devices exploded, wounding mostly Iranian soldiers in Syria. The world wants us to retire from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, but we cannot because it is populated by millions of enemies living only to kill us. We shall have no alternative but to wage a prolonged war against them ending in lasting pacification. 

How to prepare a fat Springfield cat

 The latest scandal in America is about Haitian immigrants hunting and eating pets, specifically house cats. Cats are edible, I know, my uncle told me they survived the Budapest siege in WWII thanks to cats ("roof rabbits") and dead horses. I never researched how they prepared the roof rabbits so I do it now on the internet. Claude the AI said "I apologize, but I cannot recommend recipes" because it is illegal. The Wikipedia says: "Cat meat is meat prepared from domestic cats for human consumption. Some countries serve cat meat as a regular food, whereas others have only consumed some cat meat in desperation during wartime, famine or poverty." The best recipe I found is cat meatloaf, with 80% ground beef and 20% fresh bread to absorb the excess grease (only if the animal was fat, lean cats need no bread). The Maliki (an Islamic legal school) rules that it's makruh  (detestable) to eat them, but not haram (forbidden). Hindus are strict vegetarians. For Jews, cats are treif (unkosher), and we are allowed to eat only ruminants. 

Attacked by Drugged Morons

 

This morning the Yemeni Houthis launched a large missile on Tel Aviv. It caused zero damage but what were they trying to achieve? It was an attack, yes, but pointless. They caused people to run for refuge. And what? Yemen is one of the poorest countries in the world, and like Bolivians, they survive masticating drug-containing leaves, in their case, the djatt. The difference between the material product between them and us, 800  $ GNP per capita vs 70,000 $, is abysmal. With a few cheap rockets, they closed the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, causing enormous losses to Egypt. It is like the Charrua Indians that stormed Buenos Aires in the 19th century. Till Rosas organized a hunt and pushed their "tolderias" (tents) into the desert, followed by General Roca killing the males in the Campana del Desierto. Our present predicament is totally absurd and unnatural. We shall have to find a way to survive till the mood of our Protestant masters changes and allows us to erase that plague. Pic.: El Malon, de Mauricio Rugendas.