Common Sense

 
Trump: "Hamas didn't really want to make a deal. I think they want to die…"

“It got to a point where you are going to have to finish the Job…”

The erectus

 

The first hominid to expand successfully from Africa was Homo erectus (see ill.), a large and powerful specimen, formerly called Pithecanthropus erectus. Pithecanthropus is an extinct primate intermediate between man and the anthropoid apes. African humans carry plenty of erectus genes, and the hybrid hominins prospered and spread. Sapiens migrated out of Africa and mixed with Neanderthals already living out there, resulting in Europeans with European Neanderthals and Asians with Denisovan Neanderthals. Thus, we have three different hybrids co-existing today. Evolution continues.  

The eroding support strategy

 Contemporary wars are lost when public support for them erodes and turns pacifist. France lost Algeria not because it lost the war, on the contrary, but because the leftist French media and public opinion turned against it. They became convinced and convinced the nation that the enemy was right and its cause just. The Vietnam War was also lost, not on the battlefield, but on American campuses.

I would say that the international propaganda war against Israel has been won by HAMAS. Yet it is NOT eroding the Israeli public's support for the war in Gaza and elsewhere. The reason is our familiarity with the Arabs and their savagery. We cannot allow ourselves to give up.  Pic: Syrian soldier shaving off Druze moustaches. It reminds us of the pics of laughing Nazis cutting the sidelocks פיאות of religious Jews.

BTW, Zahal moved forces to the Mountain of the Druzes in Syria, and the Syrian army retreated to Damascus. At this moment, Syria is de facto divided, and the South is under Israeli control. For the first time, the frontier was open, and anybody was free to take a tour in the other country. 

Dancing with Khmers

 
Yesterday went to the cinema. A very long film about a dance group that tries to revive Cambodian traditional dance and culture. I never liked Cambodian music and dance; it is highly stylized South Indian culture, slow and delicate. There were stories of Phol Pot and Khmer Rouge soldiers. 

Looking at the British Encyclopedia, it suggests that the emptying of  Phnom Penh (phnom means “hill”; Penh is a woman’s name), which is Cambodia’s single metropolis, had the purpose of destroying the Chinese middle class. Like in Indonesia, overseas Chinese are physically indistinguishable from the natives, so Phol Pot sent to the countryside all the inhabitants of the cities, for their presumed Chinese ethnicity. I see ethnic cleansing everywhere. This insight of mine is probably wrong.

Miracles

 The shekel is strong and is expected to continue strengthening. Two reasons: "The first is Israel’s large balance of payments surplus. The second is that financial institutions will start to reduce their currency exposure. TASE is better than foreign bourses."

Globes: Following the military changes that have taken place in the region, the shekel is now at a new equilibrium level and can only strengthen. 

My daughters have grown up, all have academic degrees, are married, have healthy children, and own property. When arriving in Vienna in 1956, we were so destitute that we had to beg and sleep in a police cell. I still remember the coarse jail blanket and the frozen walls. It was winter. 

Population shortage in Ancient Sparta

 
Rereading about Sparta, they seem to have suffered from massive sexual dysfunction. Men who did not marry were forbidden to attend the Naked Boys Festival. They were forced to parade naked in the agora, singing self-demeaning songs and suffering the jokes of the public. Spartan populations never took off, partly due to pederasty and partly due to the rejection of non pure-blood Spartans. Cruel, racist, military society. 

Sparta was the union of four villages — Limnae, Pitana, Mesoa, and Cynosoura located near the Spartan acropolis (see map). It evolved into the most stable polis (they were most cautious about internal frictions, living in constant fear of their Messenian subjects), well-ordered and secretive. 

My footprint in Nigeria

 

I spent a year in Bauchi, Northeastern Nigeria. Looking back at the place through Google Maps, I discovered the small dam I had planned and started to build for the cattle. The dam was completed, and it is still there, although I don't see that it is being used. The area around it is denuded of vegetation, losing out to the advancing Sahel desert in the last thirty years.