Bubbles

Mangan was right ab out gold: the metal is becoming more precious. Central Banks are hoarding gold and pushing its price to new heights. Gold production is falling and they are mining ores with a few ppm content of Au. Gold has no exclusive uses, but to serve as ultimate store of value. Everybody is very doubtful regarding the dollar, but no speculator has the resources to speculate against it. The Chinese and the Japanese could try it, but will not. Pity I did not buy gold shares when Mangan said, now it may be too late.

Here in Israel we are having a residential real estate bubble. A four room apartment in Tel Aviv is being sold at one million dollars, and even in Kever Benjamin a similar apt. costs 600,000 dollars. The government is selling public lands at an accelerated tempo, but the permitting takes an average of ten years. So the permitting system is being reformed, eliminating one level (the provincial planning committees) leaving two levels alone. The main time consuming monsters are the "green" members of the committees, demanding total and absolute demonstration of "safety", which of course is impossible. The large military basis in Beer Sheba was paralyzed for three years till the absolute safety of breathing the air was scientifically "proved". The green project killers nest in the provincial committee level, but they may now move to the local committees, where the arguments are even more bitter and personal. Local government tends to be corrupt in Israel, so the REform may increase corruption. Not once I heard contractors and developers saying that they would be ready to pay bribes, only to shorten the permitting process. I always told them not even to try. A false move and they are in jail. Here in Israel everyone is sure in his heart that the other fellow is making millions, so they are always ready to harm the bastard. They would do it for free, but the government has in place a nice monetary reward system too. I commented about the reform with a few colleges and an Arab engineer from Kfar Kassem (with a wide face like Ghengis Khan) resumed the situation: the old woodheads will still sign the drawings, so it will be exactly the same.

Basking in the Che's Glory

I spent an afternoon with Angola's high water officers. Surprise one: They all speak perfect Spanish. Apparently theruling party members had intimate contact with Cubans, were trained by them or studied in Cuba. It gave them pleasure to remember old times in Spanish. Surprise two: They look Argentines. They have the same faces and bodies of my childhood friends in the barrio. I understand that most of the Africans that reached Argentina during the colonial times were Angolans, and they left their features on the working classes of Buenos Aires. The visitors were ink Black, but I felt like meeting friends from old times. Third surprise: They love and admire the Che Guevara, and by extension, all Argentines. Angola is enormous and rich in rivers, so in my honest opinion, they have no need for water recycling nor high tech Israeli agricultural knowledge. They need canal and drainage design, and water management knowledge. They have much money, they have come to the right place to buy the water technology suited to their needs. And I am from the Che's country.

The Protocols of Our Generation

The Occidental comments:

"These puerile charlatans (They are talking about a very small pre-War II German Jewish circle that no one heard about before. j) had set out to destroy traditional values, promote sexual perversion, mock Christianity, and, in general, create ugliness and despair — a sorry situation promoted by an art establishment that has been dominated since the early 20th century by Jewish art critics, collectors and dealers. This Jewish influence on art is of course in accordance with the openly declared aims of the Frankfurt School, a Jewish revolutionary movement dedicated to the destruction of traditional Western values — and indeed to the very people who live by those cherished values.

Unbelievable? Absolutely. If it weren’t unbelievable, it wouldn’t be true."

So that is what they are saying: there is a secret, mysterious Jewish conspiracy called the Frankfurt School, whose openly declared aim is the destruction of the Occident, indeed of the White Race. The Frankfurt School is taking, then, the place of the obsolete and discredited Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Interestingly, the Frankfurt School focuses on the Arts: music, painting, sculpture. By conspiring to hang Albers's Homage to the Square (pic) in an Australian Museum they expect to ... physically exterminate the superior Nordic race ...? I dont quite understand how this diabolic feat will be achieved, but surely the details will be coming out in future publications of The Occidental.

As we say in the Seder Pessach, "generation after generation they rise to destroy us but our God generation after generation rises and saves us".

Is it not a time for truth?

My favorite pundit, Pat Buchanan, writes in Takimag about the decline of American academic standards since 1964. He is horrorized that many of CUNY's students are virtual morons, unable to understand a long sentence or fractions. Buchanan implies that having these people in CUNY is based on a lie, that they can learn something. He thinks that some kind of deception is involved.

I agree that CUNY is not what it was fifty years ago, and that the name of City University is no more descriptive of what it is. CUNY is a mechanism to have the city's moronic, violent youth occupied doing something they are ready to do and quiet. The alternative is having them on the streets organized in criminal gangs. Of course preventing social diseases like street crime costs money, and the fact that CUNY is being financed decade after decade by the taxpayers means that they think it is worth it. I dont think New York taxpayers are being deceived, I know some of them and they are not stupid, they know that having "the barbarians" corraled in some room in CUNY is worth every cent. Currently they are some 3 million young people in jail in America, how many more can you put in jail? That doesnt cost money?

It is possible that some academicians and oldtime politicians ignore that CUNY is what we in Israel call "matnas", neighborhood clubs for drawing young marginal people from the streets. They think that someone is being deceived. But only they are.

Addenda: Some parts of CUNY are bona fide university, like the Math and Physics departments. The African and Puerto Rican Studies are not. It is easy to be confused, which is the purpose of the whole CUNY 2009 thing.

Illustration from CUNY website: Funtummireku-Denkyemmireku
literally: A Ghanian Mythical Two Headed Crocodile With A Common Stomach. Symbol of unity in diversity, democracy or the oneness of the human family despite cultural differences and diversities.

Obama Kowtows to an Arab Chief

... projecting a weak impression.

Weakness of the Palestinians

Mahmud Abbas, the President, is resigning, throwing the Palestinian political system into chaos. The legal status of the Palestinian political system has been in flux since Hamas, the Islamist party, threw the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority out of Gaza in 2007. Hamas had won a legislative election the previous year, but a power-sharing agreement between Hamas and Fatah failed. There are now parallel ministries and security services in the two territories. The official term of Mr. Abbas’s presidency has already ended, and the term of the legislative council is scheduled to end in January. The future is uncertain at best.

America is Corrupting Us

The American Government's campaign ("New national minimum energy efficiency requirements for light bulbs will save more energy") to make their people aware of the need of saving energy has arrived to our shores. Israel's Ministry of Infrastructure closed its Special Fund to finance energy saving projects and transferred the budget, some 3 million US$/year, to a publicity campaign to make people use less electricity.

Instead of financing actual projects, Israeli government will now manage media campaigns urging the population to become "green". Something like the abominable campaign to save water: "Israel has no energy!". Our Minister dreams of growing tall and manly as Barak Obama and advise, with an inscrutable Chinese scientist (standing respectfully one step behind) to replace the light bulb. He envies the color of Obama's sun bronzed skin too, that is considered healthy and beautiful among we pallid Ashkenazi Jews coming from the snow covered swamps and forests of Lituania and Russia.

I dont cry for the investment fund, since it was useless as no one was able to finance any project with it. When I was the manager of a large WWTP, I tried to generate electricity from the methane gas we were burning, but the request forms and the reporting requirements were so onerous that I decided that I had no time for that and let my application to slowly expire on some dusty archive.

I do cry, however, for the corrupt mentality behind the decision to close the fund for projects and spend the money on publicity. It seems to indicate that irreality (the media world of soft "greenery" and "environment") has replaced reality (actual projects to improve energy efficiency).

Epicurus on the Existence of God

God either wants to eliminate bad things and cannot, or can but does not want to, or neither wishes to nor can, or both wants to and can. If he wants to and cannot, then he is weak - and this does not apply to god. If he can but does not want to, then he is spiteful - which is equally foreign to god's nature. If he neither wants to nor can, he is both weak and spiteful, and so not a god. If he wants to and can, which is the only thing fitting for a god, where then do bad things come from? Or why does he not eliminate them?

Epicurus' view was that God has reached the perfect state of ataraxia and was indifferent to good and evil. It is contrary to the Jewish (and Christian) concept of God, who has created the universe with a purpose in mind and continues managing it. The illustration is called the Secret Garden (Epicurus's School was called The Garden).

The Terminator in Israel

I am confident that the Arabs will not dare to start a war while the Arnold is in Israel.

40% Rise in Israeli Water Prices

For along time there was a ferocious debate about the Reform in the Water Sector. Also a Drought Tax was proposed. It all came to nothing, and a simple 40% rise is theprice of water was imposed. The excess income will be absorbed by the General Budget of the Treasury. Not a cent will go to finance water projects. What may one comment? Fifty years from the Water Law. Everything has changed since then, but not a letter could be changed. Mala Lex, Lex Est.