Rainmaking in Kenya

 In Nilai, Kenya, women make a daily pilgrimage to a reservoir where they spill milk onto the parched landscape as an offering. They will perform this ceremony every day until the rain comes.

They are not more stupid than Honi HaMeagel. 

Arabic Calligraphy

 

In Ramallah, there is an exhibition of the works of a Palestinian artist who spent eight months in Israeli Opher prison. I love calligraphy and I appreciate these works, even if created by the enemy. From Al Jazeera:

Throughout his eight months in an Israeli prison, 26-year-old Palestinian artist Mohammad al-Azeez Atef found refuge in the calligraphy skills he developed from a young age.

With meager tools consisting of paper, black and red pens, a handmade paper ruler, and coffee, he produced what he believes to be approximately 170 pieces of artwork. Some of them were gifts for other prisoners, and 50 others he managed to smuggle out throughout the eight months he was in prison,  between November 2021 and June 2022.

Ukraine War

 

Sputnik webzine analyzes the military situation in Ukraine. Russia has occupied and is defending a large land strip that it considers part of Russia. Putin's original idea was to detach Ukraine from NATO, but it is looking rather difficult to achieve and now, the war's goal is to increase Russia's territory. 

The war is fought with explosive drones and cannons (artillery), After the stabilization of the front, the conflict will continue for months and years. We are selling anti-missile weapons to Germany. The population movements are increasing Germany's population to a new record. 

BTW, watched a BBC report of the Beijing student demonstration 30 years ago, and how it was dissolved with tanks. It was a massacre. Interesting how such large and bloody repression could be denied by the Chinese government all this time - as it never took place. I almost believed it. 

Parched

 
The Yang Tze river is almost dry. Heaven is showing its displeasure with the Emperor. The Chinese people seem to be rather touchy with the long COVID closures and are disobeying. Black rainless clouds all over the planet. 

Credit Suisse Shaking and Quaking

The Swiss Bank giant has lost money and top personnel in 2021 and is downsizing. I have no sympathy for Swiss banks that destroyed the bank accounts of the Jews trapped in Nazi-occupied countries and never tried to find their legal inheritors after the war. Pirates, their reputation is gone. When they lost their secret list of depositors, harming many Israelis and Jews, that was the beginning of the end. When in a fit of wokeness hired a Senegalese to manage the bank, who wrecked the bank, I concluded that they have lost their cold Lutheran minds, and the bank is doomed. So it is. Its shares are collapsing, it lost 21% in the last week, underperforming the S&P 500 by a huge margin. Further, the same trend was observed over the last ten days (-24%) and one month (-22%). This ugly giant is kaputt. The Swiss still are the wealthiest people on Earth and will not starve. 

How the world changes! I wanted to illustrate this note with a caricature of a Swiss Gold-mining Gnome, but they have totally disappeared from the internet. Apparently, the Zurich gnomes became toxic and offensive and google has erased their memory.  

Mythical Weapons?

 

In Quora, someone destroys the myth: nuclear weapons are just big incendiary bombs. Nothing to fear.

"The power of nuclear weapons has been used as a boogeyman for so long that the actual power of a nuclear detonation has almost no relation to their actual destructive power. No nuclear power can afford to actually use one in combat because it would expose the mythical nature of nuclear weapons.

Well then, how dangerous are nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons, if they weren't their own category, would be classified as incendiary weapons. They set stuff on fire. They set a lot of stuff on fire. In fact, they can set things on fire as far as two miles away from the actual detonation. Besides this, nuclear detonations are very bright, and capable of blinding people 20–30 miles away. This is only constrained by the curvature of the earth. They also create hurricane-force winds as the air around the detonation expands and contracts. If you are outside and unshielded and within a mile of a nuclear detonation, you are going to die.

Which brings us to our next point. Modern cities are just not that vulnerable to incendiaries. Modern city centers and industrial areas are made of concrete and steel. Most of the damage in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was done because almost all the buildings were made of wood and paper. The initial blast set the city centers on fire which spread and ended up burning down most of the city.

 This leads to the most surprising revelation about nuclear detonations: If you are not outside, you stand a good chance of surviving even within the blast zone. Nuclear blasts are mainly line-of-sight killers. The vast majority of “radiation” created by a nuclear detonation is infrared radiation, or heat the same as a gas stove or fireplace makes. Unless the building you are in is collapsed by the wind or you fail to leave if it catches on fire or you happen to be in front of a window with a direct line of sight to the detonation, you are probably going to be fine.

Most of the radiation is Thermal or visible; AKA heat and light. This radiation goes out in straight lines (line of sight) for a fraction of a second. This is relevant because this radiation is only there for a fraction of a second and then is gone leaving only its effects. A small amount of alpha and beta particles (hard radiation) are also produced. This radiation is also absorbed by the first solid object it runs into. The amount of energy transferred depends on the distance from the explosion by the inverse cube law. Radiation follows the inverse cube law, which means that the effects drop off very quickly.

the nuclear wasteland around Chernobyl never happened, much less lasted for thousands of years. Some plants and animals did die from the fallout, but not all of them or even most of them. The exclusion zone around Chernobyl has become a de facto nature preserve. The forest is lush and the wildlife is thriving. A few people who owned property in the exclusion zone have moved back in and seem to be doing just fine."

I conclude that our MAMADIM are efficient against nuclear weapons. I am sitting in one. A final comment: nuclear bombs need maintenance, and after a few years, will not explode.  Pic: Aftermath of the Nagasaki attack. Lesson: Avoid building houses of wood and paper. Concrete structures such as the chimneys survived undamaged by the bomb.

Red Heifers Arrive

The red heifer is first mentioned in the Book of Numbers 19:3 when God tells Moses and Aaron:  "This is the ritual law that God has commanded: Instruct the Israelite people to bring you a red cow without blemish, in which there is no defect and on which no yoke has been laid."

The red heifers were actually imported from Texas and they look healthy. Soon the sacrifice ritual will take place somewhere in Israel, and the resulting ashes will serve to purify the priests. 

Tell me we are not going bananas...

On the other hand, Israel's GNP reached 50,000 dollars per year. Source the World Bank. About 5 times the per capita of Argentina, and 10 times the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Bananas or not, but very rich.