The View from Utter Despair

 

The Cohens bless the people

Shacharit (the morning prayer) began at 8:45 a.m., and its Birkat Cohanim (Priestly Blessing) took place at 9:30 a.m. The Musaf prayer began at 10:15 a.m., followed by the Priestly Blessing ceremony at 10:30 a.m. Anyone called Cohen or considering himself a descendant of Aharon, the brother of Moshe, is a Jewish priest.

And the LORD spoke unto Moses, saying:

Speak unto Aaron and unto his sons, saying: In this way you shall bless the children of Israel; you shall say to them:

May the LORD bless you, and keep you;

May the LORD make His face shine upon you, and be gracious to you;

May the LORD lift up His face to you, and give you peace.

So shall they put My name upon the children of Israel, and I will bless them

The Nobel Peace Prize committee and Machado

 María Corina Machado, the winner of the 2025 Peace Nobel Prize, is an opposition leader in Venezuela, fighting against chavismo (Socialism of the XXI Century) in a moment when Venezuela and the USA are effectively at war. The Latin American left wing supports the dictatorship of Maduro as a symbol of resistance against imperialism. 

The Nobel committee favours left-wing positions, but Maduro's communism was too much even for them. From an Israeli Zionist perspective, President Nicolas Maduro is not a friend, but neither is he an active enemy. His anti-Zionism is confused (Jesus Christ was a young Palestinian unjustly crucified by the Spanish Empire) and informed by conspiracy theories. BTW, the origin of the Maduro family is a 17th-century Jewish immigration from the Caribbean, as he said in 2013, my grandparents were Jewish and converted in Venezuela. 

Re-start

The Jewish religion includes lots of holy days when working is not allowed. Shabbats are sacred. And now it has been almost two weeks since public offices were closed, and I have done little to no work at my desk, drawing plans.  Now it is difficult to restart the routine. Grok advises:

Address Mental Blocks: Reflect on what’s holding you back. If it’s overwhelming, focus on one project at a time. If it’s a lack of motivation, reconnect with your “why” (e.g., financial goals, passion for engineering). Journaling or a quick walk can help clarify thoughts.

Eliminate Distractions: Set up a distraction-free environment. Silence non-essential notifications, use website blockers like Freedom or Cold Turkey, and communicate boundaries to others during work hours.

P.S.: I did not work. I got distracted with AI. Says take low-interest loan from keren histalmut, etc., and Buy State of Israel taxless bonds. 

Deloitte issues refund for error-ridden Australian government report that used AI

Financial Times

@FT

·

3m

Deloitte issues a refund for an error-ridden Australian government report that used AI

The question is whether it used Claude? It needs strict checking and re-checking.  

Reproductive Insurgency

 

A scholarly paper from Duke University describes the insurgency against reproductive racial capitalism. 

"Such protests reveal the persistence of forms of specifically reproductive contestation that were pervasive in the context of forced reproduction in slavery. Here we are thinking about the long history of enslaved women regulating their own fertility through abstinence, emmenagogues, abortifacients, and self-managed abortions (Schiebinger; Schwartz; Fett; Latimer). We are also thinking about how a radical politics of abolition feminism remains to be realized. We have seen the perverse impact of the form of liberal abolitionism that was prevalent in the nineteenth century, which used women’s reproductive capacities to hijack the control of formerly enslaved women’s reproductive labor beyond formal Emancipation (Turner). We have seen the end of the slave trade without seeing the end of slavery (Sharpe; Hartman, Lose). We have seen former slaveowners explicitly building a system of extractive labor based on women’s reproduction after 1807. Likewise, in the present, we can clearly see, if we are willing to think outside the box about the meaning of substantive reproductive freedom, that liberal ideas of “the right to privacy” have not and will not suffice to protect the basic human right to control one’s body."

The authors imagine that they are female slaves in a 19th-century Southern plantation, where the owner is forcing them to have children to increase his capital. So they protest by refusing the capitalist's project. The whole thing is imaginary; they are fighting an inexistent slavery, like toddlers refusing to eat.  

It is childish, to say the least.   

P.S.: In Israel, there is a saying "הם חיים בסרט" they are living in a movie. Now that the internet is an important part of our "lived" life, it is easy to lose contact with reality. The authors above are living in a different reality, with female slaves being forced to breed. Of exploited slave-workers, in an invisible dictatorship. They are discriminated against and oppressed by an inexplicable system. 

The best proof of living in the real world is if they are making money. They are, since a university pays them an excellent salary, and that proves that they are in touch with reality, and the "reproductive insurgency" nonsense is an effective survival tool. They are living in a movie, maybe, but it allows them to enjoy a comfortable existence. Oh boy!

Manteros

 I studied in the city of La Plata, a French planned city built specifically to become the capital of the Province of Buenos Aires. Its public buildings, the University, the Cathedral, all were copies of Paris, irradiating wealth and good taste. The city with diagonals was a success. The local paper El Dia informs that "in 2023, la Municipalidad relevó a más de 1.100 personas ejerciendo la venta en el espacio público, concentradas en lugares emblemáticos como Plaza San Martín, Plaza Italia y Plaza Rocha."  (In 2023, there were 1100 individuals in the informal trade sector, selling second-hand clothing on the streets. They are called manteros.) It is difficult for me to imagine such poverty in that administrative-university city. In this era of universal, fantastic progress, Argentina has sunk to Third-World level. What a pity. 

The pic shows the manteros of Moreno, a suburb.