Bad Year on TASE

I am worth 20% less on the TASE than on January 1st. The sheqel devaluated from 3.4 to 3.7 per dollar, and the portfolio itself lost about 10%. My worst investment was Nvidia and Tower. I should have avoided the NASDAQ and areas I am not familiar with. I was seduced by the hi tech bubble and lost, and it is not the first time.

Rosa Schwartzburg: Occupy Hungary

Article in the New York Times front page: "Occupy Hungary", written by a Jewish sounding student of the CEU (Soros) University in Budapest. The idea follows the "Occupy Wall Street" protest movement, that failed miserably. Rosa's intention is to protest the Hungarian Government's deadline to close down Soros's private liberal institution.

But to write Occupy Hungary is not the same as Occupy Wall Street, specially not for the paranoid, anti-Semitic, nationalist Hungarians, that have experienced bitter foreign occupations in their lifetime. It is not joke for them. They are taking it literally.  No good.

Central European University - Master of Laws in Human Rights (LL.M)

Central European University (CEU) is a graduate-level, English-language University accredited both in the U.S. and Hungary. The Department of Legal Studies provides high quality advanced legal education and education in human rights, comparative constitutional law, and international business law. Its programmes are among the finest in Europe, enabling students to obtain a solid grounding in fundamental legal concepts in civil law and common law systems and to develop unique skills in comparative analysis.

Does music impede studying and thinking?

Studies conclude that it does, and the best working condition is silence. 

Was the Flint Water Contamination a National Disaster?

President Obama declared the incident a National Disaster and channeled very large funds to the City of Flint. For all the scandal and accusations of systematic racism, and the jailing of eight EPA professionals, I am still wondering what was the real damage if any of the whole media carnival. From a professional magazine's comments column:


Dear Ms Jerome, It is not true that hundreds of children had high blood levels/ Please stop repeating that myth and falsehood. Read the CDC and other reports of thousands of blood leads taken before during and after the switch back. About 2 % were temporally raised by about 2 ug/dl. There were no "brain damaged "children! 

The magazine refers to a study that found 5 ug/dl - I am not qualified to evaluate the difference, but seems to me that the differential damage must have been minimal as no follow up studies have been published. According to the Wiki, one in forty American children have more than 5 ug/dl, which makes me think that Flint's lead levels were "normal" in the American context. The fact is that I am not alone in suspecting that the whole thing was made up for political reasons. May be I am wrong. 

Meeting my neighbors

My little daughter has to write an essay on visual messages and sent me out to take pics of her elementary school. In the last ten years, school children became scarce in our neighborhood while the population of lunatics increased. So the school was closed and the building became a Psychological Clinic. I dutifully took pics of the graffiti and sign posts but when trying to enter though the front door with my camera, I was attacked by a Moorish receptionist shouting it was forbidden to enter with cameras and loudly called security. The lobby was full of sad, depressed women looking at the floor. Thanks to my fast reflexes, my camera escaped unharmed.  

Merhavia Investments enters the Marijuana Business

This note is to register my astonishment how things evolve. Having lived long, I can compare the past with the present. The changes - physical and ideological, are incredible.

 Kibutz Merhavia, founded in 1910 or so, in the malaria infested swamps of the Yezre'el Valley, not only did not fail as all utopic initiatives and communist revolutions, but it is prospering and mutating into a Stock Exchange capitalist business that invests in the profitable field of medical marijuana.

The pic is from their website, from the early years when they lived in tents. Merhavia itself is on the Le Fave Cruzader Fort and its surrounding fields, abandoned following the Arab conquest. The only durable stone structures in this country are Cruzader (European) buildings. Since then, nothing. The Arab pastoralists built nothing in 900 years since then. 

The Great American Baby Bust

I am commenting a note by Lyman Stone. He writes about the yet unnoticed baby bust in America: "The important thing to understand here is these are big changes in your friends’ lives, and they happened really fast. This is not some gradual easing into lower fertility, but a pretty speedy change." American population is changing its reproductive behavior to resemble other Western nations. He debates the absurd notion of overpopulation and untypically, he understands the implications of subreplacement and is emotional about his people dying off. 

Bravo!