Back at Edrey

 According to local news, Zahal has entered Daraa, the capital of South Syria. Daraa dates back to the Canaanites. It was mentioned in Egyptian hieroglyphic tablets between 1490 and 1436 BC, during the reign of Pharaoh Thutmose III, as the city of Atharaa. In the Hebrew Bible, it is referred to as Edrei or Edre'i (אֶדְרֶעִי), the capital of Bashan, the site of a battle in which the Israelites defeated Og. 

Next we turned and headed for the land of Bashan, where King Og and his entire army attacked us at Edrei. But the Lord told me, "Do not be afraid of him, for I have given you victory over Og and his entire army, and I will give you all his land. Treat him just as you treated King Sihon of the Amorites, who ruled in Heshbon."

So the Lord our God handed King Og and all his people over to us, and we killed them all. Not a single person survived. We conquered all sixty of his towns—the entire Argob region in his kingdom of Bashan. Not a single town escaped our conquest. These towns were all fortified with high walls and barred gates. We also took many unwalled villages at the same time. We completely destroyed the kingdom of Bashan, just as we had destroyed King Sihon of Heshbon. We destroyed all the people in every town we conquered—men, women, and children alike. But we kept all the livestock for ourselves and took plunder from all the towns.

Depre

 Unusually cold so I slept till 9.30 AM. Tried to work on a locked DWG file but failed. Claude could not help, it would be illegal to unlock it. Project Zikim came back to life, and they sent me a new survey, the client called me and told me that he worked 4 days with the surveyors and the biuviot, and that he is more depressed than me. He is fighting the bureaucracy for the last ten years to be permitted to invest his money to produce chickens and make a living in Zikim, which borders the Gaza Strip. He told me about October 7, 2023, when the terrorists stole from the kibbutzim cars and drove around shooting dead everybody. For some reason, they passed his moshav (village). 

I pray to l'Être suprême of Robespierre to let me focus and work. He is the god of reason, the god of the French Revolution, and the official god of the State and its hired bureaucracy. Come on Mister L'Etre Supreme lend me a hand. 

The Dosadians

  In this book, McKie meets the Dosadians, who have extreme command of body language and verbally limit themselves to “the nonemotional essentials”, “compressed communication”. The problem is Herbert builds up so explicitly to the Dosadi abilities – they are dangerous monsters with superpowers, if they are let loose on the universe it will be an utter disaster – that when it becomes clear what their powers actually are, the sizzle soon becomes a hiss.

What was the experiment about? An alien species the gowachin finds itself in a universe with many different organisms. Homo sapiens looked dangerous for their survival, the Homo species had exterminated all its competitors on its home planet. So Mrreg organizes an experiment, planting the two species on a toxic planet, and observe the results. After some generations, their tense co-existence explodes and humans start to exterminate the gowachin. Mrreg extracts the terrible conclusion and makes harakiri. 

Deus ex machine arrives as a Bureau agent, and through a complicated legal process, the Gowachin's guilt is absolved, and the Dosadians are liberated. Frank Herbert suggests that the massacre started on Dosadi ends with the liberation of the Dosadians and their integration into the ConSentience universe despite the Dosadians' recognizable superpowers. 

Friends worth millions

... you see it in Musk. Tesla stock, in the two days after Trump won, was up 20 percent or something like that, adding tens of billions of dollars to Elon Musk’s net worth. Nothing fundamental in the economics had changed for Tesla. There was just an expectation, now that he was a friend of Trump’s, that he was going to somehow be showered with federal largesse. You know, there’s a guy in India called Adani who’s Modi’s best friend, and his stocks trade at multiples 10 times that of every other Indian company. Because everyone assumes that at the end of the day, being Modi’s best friend is worth $100 billion or something like that. From Fareed Zakaria

Salvation through pain

Pat Gelsinger was the leader of INTEL, the world's largest computer company. In a mail, he asked people to pray and fast to save the company. He believes that fasting and praying are effective. He could have had himself flogged as religious Jews do on Yom Kippur. Or one of the flagellants.                                                                                                                                                       He destroyed INTEL

Mystery map

A large area undefined in the Syrian Golan is peopled and controlled by the Druze. It could only be an Israeli-protected area. Protectorate?  "There should be no doubt - we will not allow ISIS to reconstitute and take advantage of the current situation in Syria," said General Michael Erik Kurilla in a statement released by CENTCOM. Tahrir al-Sham is, in fact, a mutation of ISIS, although I may be wrong. General Mike Flynn, the former head of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), warned his colleagues in the Obama administration, that supporting terrorist groups to prosecute proxy wars on Washington’s behalf, was a risky business that would eventually backfire leading to the establishment of ‘a Salafist principality in Syria.’ That warning has now become a reality.

Mike Whitney writes: The 13-year-old Syrian campaign is not really aimed at Syria, but Iran. Syria is just the last obstacle on the path to Tehran. Crush Iran and Israel take the ‘top spot’ in the Middle East; it becomes the regional hegemon overnight. Meanwhile—Uncle Sam gains access to the pipeline corridors it has sought for over 2 decades, corridors that will transport natural gas from Qatar to the Mediterranean and then onward to markets in Europe. The gas will be provided by a US puppet, extracted by Western oil companies, sold in US Dollars, and used to maintain a stranglehold on European politics. At the same time, all other competitors will be either sanctioned, sabotaged, or excluded entirely. (Nordstream)

Vomited Out of the Land

The purity system of the Bible chiefly involved the Temple, sacrifices, and priestly gifts, all of which had to be guarded from ritual impurity. The penalty for polluting the Temple is karet, excision from the people of Israel. The Land had to be guarded from moral impurity lest the people of Israel be vomited out of the land as their predecessors had been. Corpse impurity was considered the most severe form of ritual impurity (avi avot ha- tumah), requiring sprinkling with waters of purification on the third and seventh days of the seven-day impurity. Death impurity was transferred not only by direct contact but also through the air of the enclosed tent or building or—according to rabbinic law—by overshadowing and grave fluids. Based on Leviticus 18:25