The Diazepam Energy Pill

I am an old obese man. Yesterday we went to the Herzliya beach with my daughter and family. As approached, I was hit by a loud  noise: the sea and the waves. Swimming among the waves tired me to the point that when came to the shore, could not keep my balance and let the waves to roll me out. I had some difficulty in standing up. Later I took 5 mg Oxacepam pill and my strength returned. The mild tranquillizer has no calorie content, why it gave me energy and erased my tiredness? 

The Mystery of WWII

Winston Churchill deserved the Nobel Prize of Literature. His history of WWII is written in the clearest, richest and most readable English. I enjoy reading him.

He says that the First War was basically between Germany and France, a follow up of unfinished former Franco-German wars, and that WWI was won by France, that remained with parts of German territory. The Second War was a revanchist effort by Germany, to free itself from the Versailles servitude and tributes, and to take back its lands. The first war had killed off most of France's young manhood, and by the nineteen twenties France was a demographically declining country, and deadly afraid of the German killing machine.

Hitler re-occupied without military opposition the Ruhr and then the Sudeten and having proved that there was no force opposing German expansion, he attacked France ignoring Holland and Belgium's suzerainty and entered Paris.  After this easy successes, he could not be stopped.

How is that the final losers of this territorial dispute in Western Europe were the religious masses of Poland's Jews? Churchill is busy saving England, has sympathy but little time for the Jews. He must have been more interested in keeping the flow of vital Arab oil than annoying them by increasing the Jewish population of Palestine.  

Kapstadt Reducing Water Pressure

The City is reducing the pressure in the pipes. They call it pressure management. You open the faucet and a sick trickle of urine-like liquid drips down slowly. They say that shedding (one day with water, one day dry) is worse, because people store more water than they need. The rainy season is in, the reservoirs are 50% full (50% empty).

Pic. The solution: Water pressure booster, a small centrifugal pump with electric engine. 

Franciscan Poverty

It’s beyond laughable that a one-bedroom apartment can sell for $1.5 million in San Francisco — and get multiple offers within a day. Or that dumpsters sport satirical “for rent” signs.

A family of four earning $117,000 a year is now classified as low income in the San Francisco area. This threshold, used to determine eligibility for federal housing assistance, is the highest in the nation . From

The Human Race

Humans share 98% of their DNA with chimps, but grown chimpanzees have the strength of five grown men. They're dangerous animals. Pet chimps always attack their owners. Chimp attacks are horrifying, tragic, and downright shocking. When chimps attack humans, it's something worse than your worst nightmare.

The 1937 Meeting of Ribbentrop and Churchill

In his "Gathering Storm", Winston Churchill describes his meeting in 1937 with Herr von Ribbentrop, the German Ambassador in London. Ribbentrop asked for free hand in East Europe, because Germany must have her Lebensraum, for her increasing population. Churchill said no. Then war is inevitable. "When you talk about war, you must not underrate England. She is a curious country and few foreigners understand her mind. She is very clever. If you plunge us into a Great War, she will bring the whole world against you."

That was exactly what followed.

Here too, as with the Nazi concept of work, I find amazing that Nazi thinking was based on eighteen century economic doctrines, totally wrong and obsolete. The fact about Germany is that its population was growing very slowly (and after 1972 it is decreasing) so here was no foreseeable need for more space. The idea that population will increase geometrically is an error conceived by the English cleric and political economy expert Malthus. A very harmful error because it was believed by the Nazis, and with their rigid logic they concluded that they needed more agricultural land to feed future generations. The concept that food production was limited by surface multiplied by fertility of the soil is another eighteen century concept, invented by David Ricardo. That equation had been made obsolete by Liebig, who discovered chemical fertilizers, the Nazi thought did not register the agricultural revolution  and was ruled by long discarded concepts. The had just need to look at the price of cereals (bread): with the opening of the American Middle West and the virgin lands of South Russia, the price of cereals fell to 10% of its former price and Germany could import any quantity wanted. 

Germany in 1937 had no population problems and did not need any living space. They went to war for the wrong reasons. They must have known it. Hitler's real reason to plunge the world into a war was to exterminate the Jews, and he wrote so in his will. All the talk about lebensraum is bullshit. 

Death through Work

One of the commonest accusation against the Jews is that they are parasites, that they do not produce anything material and do not like to work. The idea is so deeply rooted that the Nazis established death camps where the killing was done by over-working and under-feeding the Jewish inmates - a way of dedicated revenge. In Auschwitz, work groups went out each early morning to do some physically demanding labor while receiving very low calorie content soup. Inevitably, they died in few weeks, only the young and healthy survived for a few months, and then they became too weak to stand in the reviews and were sent to the gas chambers.

The concept that Jews were parasites always hit me as absurd, because the Jews I knew were very diligent, and they were paid good money for their services - meaning they were valuable. Why financial risk managing (like lending money at interest), or commerce, without which no economy can subsist, can be considered unproductive? Now I am reading classical economic literature, like the "Principles of Political Economy" by John Stuart Mill, and this nineteen century economist proposes this idea that only those activities that produce physical objects add to the wealth of the nations, while all the others subtract from it. And he is not the author of the concept but reflects the economic wisdom of former centuries.

The Nazis had this primitive and incorrect concept of economics, and felt that the academic economists of their generation - most of them Jews - were developing some kind of bizarre "Jewish economic science" aimed only at clearing the Jews of the crime of economic parasitism. They felt in their guts that something was wrong with those decent German peasants producing food (bread) through hard physical work should be poor while the Jewish intermediaries - pure consumers - were prospering. The concept is so deeply rooted that even today, when less than 1% of the population works the land and less than 5% works in factories producing physical goods, when 90% works in offices and other service jobs, Jews are thought (by honest but ignorant non-Jews) as unproductive.

Anti-Semites hang on to an obsolete, wrong, absurd notion, but one so deeply believed that was impossible to refute in the Galut. Early Zionist built a flowering farming sector which by its very existence refutes the antisemites' arguments. I always felt that Zionism's fixation with the "halutz" the Jewish farmer was wrong, but it answered and refuted a very damaging image, that - under the Nazis - actually was physically killing the Jews.