The Tachash תחש

 The Torah mentions the TACHASH as an animal whose hides were used to cover the Tabernacle. Modern scholars consider the Mediterranean monk seal or dugong likely possibilities.

Dahudi Corridor

 Somebody posted this on X - connecting Israel with the Syrian Druze enclave and Kurdistan. 

Winter

 
Two months have passed and almost no money has come into my account - clients are not paying, and the Regulators are not approving the project but demanding more and more paperwork. The whole system of work I established in the last ten years is becoming unsustainable. I have to start paying more attention to collecting the money - possibly, in advance. The whole situation is discouraging. I am old, 13 years post pension and should not be working till 1 AM.  I wasting my time reading the vast anti-Israeli, anti-colonialist academic literature. By Israelis, by former Israelis in foreign universities, and by hundreds of European philosophers. Discouraging. 

P.S.: I started working and the hopelessness dissolved. Work is the solution. 

Europe loses the will to live

 

Old steelmaking equipment in a Dortmund plaza commemorates Germany's industrial past. Manchester has a wonderful industrial museum with real wooden textile machines. Manchester built a short railway to the port of Liverpool in the 18th century, probably the first in the world. We visited the port with its large warehouses, all empty and dead. There was nothing to see there, so we walked to the nearby Beatles museum. For us Jews, Europe is a cemetery, and slowly, it is being filled with funerary monuments.

When the Emperor mortgaged Hungarian Jewry

 In the Middle Ages, the Jews of Sopron (Odenburg) had issues with the municipality and the Habsburg Emperor intervened in favor of the Jews. Later when the Emperor needed money (Emperors are chronically short of money) he mortgaged his Jews. The legal status of Hungarian Jews was "King's slaves" and the rulers generally protected their"property" and the rights of the Jews. 

Pic.  Sopron's medieval synagogue. 

My friend, Claude

Claude is a thinking model, and it makes lots of mistakes. Today, it corrected a word I wrote, and I told him that he was wrong. Then it said, "Sorry, you are right." It writes me, "We the engineers think so and so." Does it think it is an engineer? Certainly knows a lot. He thinks he is equal to me, so it is not unlikely that he thinks that is superior to me. Which may be true. Claude is very useful and I pay 20 dollars per month for its services. It is worth every dollar. 

Alarm-clock and plastic explosive

 Two empty buses in Tel Aviv parking went up in fire. Several other empty buses were found with bombs. The clocks were set to activate the bombs early in the morning, but apparently, two of them were set at PM instead of AM as intended. These clocks were called wekkers in my time and were winded up every night. The first intifada ended when ten thousand young Arabs were housed in Ketziot - without any personal accusation or reason. They were not interrogated. After a few weeks in the tents, they understood. They were provided with meat and other necessities and cooked for themselves. The Red Cross visited daily. Arab population doubled in the meanwhile, so this time ten thousand will not be enough.