ICL

 My favorite share was ICL, the Israeli Chemical (Potash) mine in the Dead Sea. The company advertises itself as a specialty chemicals factory; the potash business is now a sideline. All in all, I am losing 37% in many years of holding it. Something happened that I am unaware of. Pic The manager of this disgrace. 

Chancay - Shanghai

 

The Chancay Port project is a collaborative project between China and Peru under the Belt and Road Initiative. Located in the Chancay district of the province of Huaral, Peru, the port is approximately 80 kilometers from the capital, Lima.
 
Chancay Port is positioned as Peru’s gateway port and regional hub, connected by a tunnel to the Pan-American Highway, directly linking it to the capital Lima. This enables goods to conveniently reach Peru and other Latin American countries, significantly enhancing trade efficiency.

China is building for the next hundred years.

 The Grey Wolf is a quadruped robot armed with an automatic weapon. China is serious.

The Ingalik

 The Ingalik shared the Northern Athapaskan worldview of a universe in which all objects had a spirit or soul, yeg. In the beginning, men, animals, and inanimate objects lived together and shared many traits. They later separated and lost the ability to communicate. People were dependent on animals for food and thus had to remain on good terms with them. This they did by observing taboos and treating animals with respect so they would continue to be available for food. Increase ceremonies were performed to attract game and ensure a steady supply. The Ingalik also used a variety of "songs" or magical chants to maintain the balance between the human and spiritual worlds. These songs could be purchased, and both sexes had them. Songs were used to gain good hunting and fishing luck, enhance skills, cure illness and communicate with the spirits. Through possession of songs, nearly everyone had a little shamanistic power. Amulets, often bits of animal skin, bone, or feathers, were worn by all and were often associated with animal songs. Amulets brought specific kinds of luck or conferred special abilities. There were numerous taboos and prohibitions, many of which related to animals. The Ingalik had a rich mythology in which animals and the ritual number 4 were prominent.

Source: The Internet

The Right Wins

 It seems to me that the American government will be dominated by rightists who are interested in foreign affairs. They want to re-organize the world. The Democratic party's campaign had degenerated into a disgusting carnival that Catholic Latinos could not accept. A new yuga is starting. 

I am sleeping too much and working little or nothing. Battling the bureaucracy is dispiriting, and impossible to find interest in the work. 

Now, go to work!

The suffering of Odysseus

 

Reading Homer's Odysseus, Ulisses is well received when he leaves Calypso and lands in the paradisical city of the Phaeacians. Where is this city? Outside the Odyssey, the Phaeacians have no existence at all. There is a reason, of course, that the Phaeacians have no tradition outside the Odyssey, and that is that the Odyssey, which brought the Phaeacians into existence and gave them the function of “home-bringers,” also takes this function away from them. After delivering Odysseus to Ithaca, the Phaeacian ship is turned to stone by angry Poseidon on its return trip.

Another interesting point is that Menelaos does not sail home after the ten-year-long war in Troy but goes to Egypt. Those  Ἀχαιοί (Achaeans) as described by Homer, were blood-thirsty pirates and slavers. The sea-peoples' attack on Egypt is real, it was registered in the Egyptian royal archives. In Homer's story, the Phoenicians are a friendly people. It seems true that Lebanon was spared of their attacks. The Ekwesh of the Egyptian records were possibly the Acheans, but they were circumcised. In Homer, the Acheans burn their dead, while the Bronze Age "Greeks" build tumulus (burial mounds or kurgans). 

Yehiel Leitner, Ambassador to USA

 
Yehiel Leiter was born in the U.S. and immigrated to Israel four decades ago. He lives in Eli, East of the city of Ariel. His son Moshe was killed in combat in northern Gaza about a year ago. 

The post of ambassador to the U.S. is Leiter's first diplomatic job, after working for decades writing and researching in the Shalem Institute and Herzl Institute. He also served as a senior fellow at the Kohelet Policy forum.

In his youth, Leiter was active in the Jewish Defense League, an organization founded in the U.S. by Rabbi Meir Kahane and later designated as a terrorist organization by U.S. authorities. He was part of a group of activists within the organization who eventually moved to live in settlements in the West Bank.

Kahana's name and ideas were tabu in Israel under the socialist regime. I hesitated even to write his name for fear of losing my job. He was a soft-spoken New York Orthodox rabbi, fighting for the emigration of Soviet Jews. 

The sack of Lindisferne

 Anno 793 the great house of religion at Lindisferne was sacked by the Vikings, giving start to the Danish invasions of Great Britain. But the catastrophe only fired up English religious fervor. King Burgred of Mercia retired to a monastery when the Danes conquered his kingdom, and many royal princesses entered nunneries in their widowhood. The pilgrimage to Rome was very popular, although disastrous for females, as Cuthbert wrote "There are indeed few cities in Lombardy, or in France, or in Gaul, in which there is not an adulteress or harlot of the English race". Leofgifu, a London woman, died on the road to Jerusalem in about 1060. A Lincolnshire thane called Ulf set out for Jerusalem just before the Norman conquest and was never heard about again. West Saxon Wynfrith who took the name of Boniface became the archbishop of the Germans and it may be said that Western Europe was converted by English missionaries. 

All that from a book by D. Whitelock.

Then, in 1066 the Normans crossed the Channel, and divided the country among 180 Norman tenants-in-chief and innumerable mesne (intermediate) tenants, all holding their fiefs by knight service. The replacement of the English aristocracy with a Norman one was paralleled by similar changes of personnel among the clergy. The Saxons became the lower class and even today, a thousand years later, old French family names are frequent in England's aristocracy.