Leishmaniasis in Israel

We have this ugly rodent, the rock bunny,   שפני הסלע  that  is a protected animal, cannot be hunted or killed. It carries the bacteria causing Leishmaniasis, a leper-like disease that had been eliminated decades ago. The multiplication of this biting pest means the return of disease.  People is thirsty for "Nature" and believe - from children's books - that it is benevolent and harmless. But Nature is indifferent to us.

When an Inbred Clan ruled the World

It seems incredible that the weak-minded idiot on the picture, with a ridiculous bird on his head, would be the all-powerful Emperor of Germany. Wilhelm was grandson of Queen Victoria and all European royalty were his double-first cousins. This inbred, degenerate clan led humanity to the terrible World War I and to the killing trenches of Verdun. Wilhelm exhibited a violent hate against the Jews: "Let no German ever forget this, nor rest until these parasites have been destroyed and exterminated from German soil!" Herzl vainly tried to convert him into a Zionist, to assist the Jewish People's Liberation by establishing the Jewish State, but he as other monarchs were hopeless.  Wilhelm advocated a "regular international all-worlds pogrom à la Russe" as "the best cure" and believed that Jews were a "nuisance that humanity must get rid of some way or other. I believe the best thing would be gas!"

Hundred years have passed and the criminal Kaisers and Czars are forgotten and their seed is no more. Here am I from those they planned to gas vomiting on their graves. 

IQ Demystified

Already 7% of the differences in IQ can be identified at DNA level.

"We found 187 independent loci associated with intelligence, implicating 538 genes, using both SNP-based and gene-based GWAS. We found evidence that neurogenesis and myelination—as well as genes expressed in the synapse, and those involved in the regulation of the nervous system—may explain some of the biological differences in intelligence." (quoted by James Thompson from Nature).

Intelligence relates to better synapses, generation of new neurons, thickness of the myelin sheath, etc. Nothing mysterious. It is truly depressing.  
 

Excessive Capital Accumulation

The world is awash in savings and there is a disequilibrium between available investable capital and available loan requests and investment opportunities. In special, in Israel we have many individuals with large savings and they have no safe and profitable investment vehicles. The banks are promoting investing in foreign stocks and loans, because the excess money here will inevitably be channeled into the local bourse and real estate (apartments for rent). Since people keep saving, TASE will surely go on inflating, and apartment prices will go on increasing. The State is budgeting much resources toward infrastructure, but the execution capacity of the population has reached a limit, and we have full employment. Importing foreign workers is unacceptable for a country already suffering from dangerous ethnic diversity.

The result is growing foreign exchange reserves that have to be invested abroad in low yielding bonds. Britain a hundred years ago solved this problem by investing in foreign colonies, like Argentine railways and slaughterhouses, or African plantations. Ultimately, there had to be a war to consume excess savings and excess productive capacity. If so, the safest bet is to buy shares in the armament industry.

American Marxist Subversion of Israel

One could not find a more phony occupation for this old Jew than writing an essay on the American Marxist poet Margaret Randall. My daughter had to write on an American contemporary feminist poet and having profiled her professors, we selected Margaret Randall, an American communist poet who lived eight years in Cuba during Fidel Castro and the Che revolution, and then moved to Nicaragua to take part in the Sandinista chaos. Since I was working in Nicaragua then and am well acquainted with Latin American things of those times, I thought I could help my daughter to understand the background. I was on the site when the Sandinista bandits were invited to enter Managua and take over Nicaragua, as Somoza Jr. did following Jimmy Carter's orders. 

Margaret Randall has authored dozens of Marxist/feminist books and maintained extensive correspondence with Latin American intellectuals. She is the only American poet forbidden by Senator McCarthy to return to the United States. I do not know if she is also a lesbian, she looks like one and partners with a woman painter, although she was married (to a man; in our days, one has to specify) and is mother of four children.

Anyway, the proposal to write the essay on her was successful and now we are engaged in ordering books and looking for bibliography. "We" because I am my daughter's research assistant. It is difficult, because her professors and teachers are of the highest quality, all them Ph.D.s in English Literature from Harvard and Oxford, talented Jewish women who married to Israelis and live here. They have absorbed politically correctness from the very source, and indoctrinate their students in spirit of the most extremist Berkeley feminists. The College also has an American Fullbrighter with a Hispanic name, he corrects "our" essays and I have to admit he is very professional and all his comments/criticisms are right. What is he doing teaching English literature in Israel? (The question does not imply any negative sentiments, I am happy to be corrected by him because he is an excellent editor).

But, objectively, he is a cultural missionary converting us to left wing American culture. (I had thought that feminism conquered Israel by imitation, but no, Americans are actively subverting Israeli culture. Meaning political culture, see how our poor President Katzav was defenestrated and jailed for trying to seduce his whore secretary.)

Some of the Fullbrighters are financed by the CIA, at least those in Argentina in my times, were. No doubt we are being actively influenced and subverted by crazy American left wing culture, but I think we - I mean my daughter and I - are in little danger of catching the lunacy. And it seems worth to run the risk of damaging our mental health in order to learn world class English literature. 

Career Advice

Here is an anecdote that any ambitious young professional should read and meditate on for an hour. 

First, how was Navarro recruited? During the campaign Trump told Jared Kushner to find some research supporting his protectionist trade views. Kushner responded by going on Amazon, where he found a book titled “Death by China.” So he cold-called Navarro, the book’s author, who became the campaign’s first economic adviser. Source.

Navarro has been promoted by Trump to the position of Trade Czar, in charge of America's trade relations with the world. But his high position and power did not fill him with hubris and blinded him with pride. Like the Pope who signs as "the servant of the servants of Christ", Navarro sees himself as the first and humblest servant of his boss. 

“My function, really, as an economist is to try to provide the underlying analytics that confirm his intuition. And his intuition is always right in these matters.” 

Here you have a good model, a man with a good attitude. I know nothing about foreign trade and am not sure if reviving the nineteen thirties's "Yellow Peril" phantom is reasonable, but I admire him.

New Semester

I got a lot of teaching hours this semester. Yesterday was a full day and am tired like ... I was about to say like a dog, only that dogs live a most pampered life. The campus is built on two levels and I had to walk up and down in the stairs several times. I am well impressed by the quality of the new class, they look serious and purposeful. I saw only one female in my classes, but the campus is full of religious girls that study psychology and other social work courses. There has been much building in the campus and the infrastructure is better than last year.

My little daughter is the national co-ordinator of some program of the Ministry of Education for exceptional students or whatever. She is in a meeting today. Yesterday was worried about meeting the representatives of Arab and of Haredi and of the settlements colleges. There was a problem how and in what language to write the invitations. I advised Hebrew and Arabic, both languages are official. Will the settlement colleges object? The multicultural age is arrived in Israel with its supersensitivity to pretended "offenses". In the end the only safe subject to write about will be food and pets.