Mr Meschugge

 Hundred and twenty years ago in Berlin, a Yiddisch musician was making fun of Prussian love of order and pomp. I don't even know his real name, it was much before my lived experience, but the concept hit a button in my mind. I must have been revolting and degenerate for serious-minded German bourgeois. 

China takes the lead

 

A car factory in China. Not a person in sight.

Buitre Funds keep picking on Argentina

Ever-rising legal costs and the inherent uncertainty of commercial litigation and arbitration create problems for companies that Burford helps solve. 

Burford is a New York legal firm that specializes in commercial litigation, assuming the risks and costs of the process. It appears that they have bought for 15 million USD the rights of Petersen (Esquenazi fly.) in YPF, which in an unthinking moment had been expropriated by the Kirchner Peronist Government. After fighting for a decade, a New York judge has established that the minimum indemnity must be 5,000 million USD, that is - Burford will profit 20,000%.  Burford is demanding 16,000 million dollars, which is more than YPF is worth today.  Pic: David Perla, the inventor of this scheme. 

The Sun is Overheating

 

The outside temperature is near 40 C which kills my mood for work. My clients are furious but the times when I could work 24 hs in summer are gone. The antigovernment demonstrations are continuing on the streets. The government is not falling for the opposition's provocations. From the outside it appears as if Israel is in chaos, yet, paradoxically, my shares are rising.

Next day: Minister Miri Regev (Likud) sent a letter to Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, demanding that an investigation be opened against former Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Forum 555, on suspicion of "criminal gathering, civil disobedience, and an attempted coup d'état."   Forum 555 is an organization of a thousand retired pilots and navigators in Israel. It is getting hotter. 

Mysteries of the Human Female

Read an interesting theory on Twitter about the paradox that all the big apes have open, visible ovulations except the human female, who has hidden fertile days and even herself has no idea of it. The theory says that she loves sex and intimacy but hates and tries to avoid pregnancy and birth and being tied down with the baby for years. So nature "has to trick" her to get pregnant by negating her knowledge of her condition. Those women who learned to avoid pregnancy - had fewer or no children and were out-selected by evolution. Those blessed with ignorance or lack of power did reproduce and became the standard model. 

Primitive societies were organized to encourage or force women to give birth, but modern societies liberated them from this issue. So the problem of population decrease is only partially due to the males that do not want to marry. Females are responsible for much of this phenomenon. And thanks to the pill, now they are able to avoid pregnancy forever. 

Henry

Henry Kissinger meets China's Foreign Minister. He is 100 years old. The pic does not show the Minister, who has not been seen for the last month. Maybe he has some skin disease, who knows? Henry is in good health. Ad mea ve-esrim! Till 120 ! and he intends to!

Patriarchy

 

Veii (pic god) was the Southern City of the Etruscan nation, which was at permanent war with the Latin nation. Rome (16 km) was its nearest Latin settlement. After hundreds of years of hostility, Rome conquered and evacuated Veii. Rome had been burned down and impoverished by the Gaul incursion, so the plebeian population decided to abandon the city and move in mass to the vacant homes and fertile farms of Veii. 

Livius writes that the Senators descended personally to the Forum to beseech them to stay and not forsake the sacred Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol and the hallowed fire in the Temple of the Vestals. The tribes voted and the Senators won by one tribe. Then, the Senate voted to distribute the ager veii among the populace, 15000 sq, m. to each adult male. 

Livius comments that the Senate hoped that having a farm will encourage them to form families and produce children. Rome was engaged in continuous wars and needed soldiers. The government was always promoting marriage with patriarchal legislation (extremely favorable to married men. A Paterfamilias was empowered to the point of selling wife and children into slavery), subsidies to children, and free bread distribution. It did not work. The Greeks before them had the same depopulation problem. Europe today abolished patriarchy and men are almost powerless, yet still, it is fast losing population. The Chinese had their Confucian cult of ancestors. It was discarded as soon as Western ideas reached them. 

What works? 

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