Friday, February 26, 2010
Tower Semiconductors
I made 50% on TSEM in less than a month and it is still steaming ahead. Two years ago I lost money with TSEM and sold it, although I always had faith in its CEO, an imported American mormon professional manager. He took a highly indebted chip fab in a crime-infested little town in Israel and turned it around. Amazing! The case study of TSEM seems to confirm my thesis that we Jews do our best under WASP leadership. They have a kind of solidity that we lack.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
21 comments:
Mormons aren't WASPs. You have to be Christian to be a WASP.
But I agree with your point.
Mormons are from the original New England protestant stock. Arent they some kind of Christians?
No, they have a new book (the Book of Mormon). New book = new religion. They are to Christianity what Christians are to Judaism.
I also thought that most Mormons are not descended from Anglo-Saxons but from Germans and Scandinavians. I don't know how to check this, though.
"Genius" is incorrect on both counts. Mormons are very much a Christian sect. They believe the Bible and the Jesus stuff. Also, the initial group was mostly New Englanders, and they picked up a few Scandinavians on their way to Utah.
WASP = White,Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
Mormon (the original stock, putting aside recent converts)
1. White - check
2. Anglo-Saxon - check
3. Protestant - check, if Protestant means Christian believers who are not Catholic or Orthodox. The official name for the Mormons is "The Church of JESUS CHRIST of Latter Day Saints", so obviously they are Christians, of a sort, though their teachings deviate greatly from the mainstream.
That being said, WASP generally has the connotation of old line, mostly Episcopalian (Church of England) society. They would not have accepted Mormons as "one of their own", not by a long shot. In recent times the Mormons have become more mainstream but in the 19th century they were considered (for good reason) cultists not unlike David Koresh, who had many wives, etc. (some "Old Believer" type Mormons still do) and against whom pogroms were conducted by other Americans and even the US Army.
Salt Lake City (the Mormon capital) is located in the most forbidding and unlikely location I have ever seen a major city - to the northwest, a giant salt lake (like the Dead Sea), to the east, an impassible mountain range, to the southwest a forbidding desert. It was chosen purposely as a place that would be hard for the US Army to reach and which nobody else would want anyway, the Mormons having been chased out of their last several cult capitals (and the founder murdered) by the locals (who probably were not wild about the shortage of women the Mormons were creating).
Come to think of it, the Mormons have a lot in common with the Jews.
K
I think you are overglorifying the WASP group.
This is what Wikipedia says:
" [WASP] initially applied to people with histories in the upper class Northeastern establishment, who were alleged to form a powerful elite. Working class whites in the U.S. are generally not referred to as "WASPs", even if they are Protestants of Anglo-Saxon descent."
By this definition, Brigham Young off in far off Utah with his plural wives was no WASP. The original popularizer of the term WASP (which only dates back to the 1960s), sociologist , Digby Baltzell, meant it to describe an elite power group and not just any white protestant although I suppose in popular use the people who count as "WASPS" has broadened from the original meaning. But to call a Mormon a WASP is to stretch it unless perhaps someone like Romney who is a Mormon but a member of the Eastern elite as well.
K
Mormons are fools. Brigham Young and the other old males wanted to bed as many women as possible but such behaviour was not possible in Christianity, hence they founded a new sect like thousands of others before them and since. Fortunately for the Mormons their unhappy encounters with the US Army tamed their wilder instincts and they are much the better for it. They in turn returned the favour by providing the templates for science fiction and and end-of-the-world books through the zany stories in their Book. Contrary to what some might think, the biggest issue for most Christians is not the abstractness of the Trinity, or the problem of Evil or transubstantiation or any such philosophical difficulties. It is rather the explicit teaching of Jesus that even to look on a woman with lust is to have committed adultery with her.
The question of Anglo-Saxon vs. German-Scandinavian ancestry is simply one of fact that I don't know about for sure, only that some Mormons I've met have English surnames but many more have Germanic-sounding surnames, and almost all tend to be Scandinavian in appearance.
But the question of whether they are Protestants, while much more a matter of interpretation, is one about which I'm far more certain. Go ask 1000 Christians - members of any and every Christian sect you can find - whether Mormons are Christians and, to a man, they will all say No. The No will be most intense when you ask Protestants, especially evangelicals. I've known a lot of evangelicals. The more they know about Christianity and about Mormonism the less they think Mormons are Christians.
Mormonism is a religion based on Christianity in much the same way Christianity is based on Judaism and that Islam is based on Christianity and Judaism. Jews have a book; Christians have the Jews' book plus one of their own; Muslims replaced the Jews' and Christians' book with a different one. Anyone can start a new religion and claim it's a new sect or new interpretation of an old, established religion. Adding J*sus Chr*st to their name does not make them Christians.
Tower Semiconductors's CEO is Russel Elwanger, a Mormon from Utah. Tower was a failed chip fab consuming enormous quantities of money. It had a 600 million dollars debt. In a surprise move the owners brought in this totally unknown and foreign manager, he doesnt speak Hebrew and he is not Jewish. By his looks and name he may be one from those Scandinavians picked up during the Mormon exodus from New England. I dont know. I am following Tower for several years and its turning around and winning large
orders from Taiwan, Korea, etc. seems to me like a miracle. Its share started at 40 - 50 dollars, fell to under 1 dollar, and now is slowly climbing. We are talking about surviving in an industry totally dominated by Taiwan which is undergoing a crisis of superproduction.
Salt Lake City has a very good continental climate. The air is very pure. The people is decent and friendly. I liked it very much.
As for the Salt Lake climate, a chacon a son gout. They have a long snowy winter and a long hot summer - sort of the worst of all worlds. The Mormons are very nice people although they have some strange religious doctrines. The Jews do too, but at least ours are ancient. Smith made theirs up out of whole cloth less than 200 years ago. It gives religion a bad name if you demonstrate that you can just make up a bunch of nonsense and people accept it as the word of their god - makes you wonder if all religions are equally phony.
Elwanger would be a German name. This discussion reminds me that the only Mormon I knew growing up was a classmate whose first name was Karl. He was a nice guy but he looked like a picture book Hitler Youth- very tall with blond hair.
K
After the initial exodus out of Nuavoo, the new Mormon religion picked up a lot of converts in Scandinavia. Many of the Scandinavian converts left their home country and moved to Utah by the most direct route they could find, so not all of the Mormons are descended from New Englanders.
Genius, why did you feel the need to write the name of Christ that way?
...makes you wonder if all religions are equally phony...
Some are more equal than others.
Ronduck - Some religious Jews feel that it is wrong to use the name of God in vain, even if written in English, so they disguise it - they write G-d. Maybe Genius feels the same way.
Some are more equal than others - the Romans felt this way about Judaism vs. Christianity (at first). To them, Judaism was ancient and worthy of respect, while the Christians just invented their religion and to the Romans you just couldn't do that - an invented religion was not a valid religion at all. People argue all the time about what is a religions vs. a cult - a hint is that your OWN religion is never a cult.
K
I asked because Genius is a Jew, and so for him Jesus would not be deserving of extra respect.
"Moved to Utah by the most direct route they could find."
The most insane story is that of the handcart pioneers. We all have images of the pioneers in their covered wagons pulled by oxen but the less well off immigrants were made to walk west from Iowa (the end of the rail line) to Utah (about 2,000 km - longer than the distance from Budapest to Paris) pulling their supplies and belongings over a dirt trail in a handcart, which was sort of like Tevye's milk wagon. A few of the expeditions left Iowa too late in the fall and froze to death in the mountains of Wyoming. They had been warned that they were setting out too late but the church elders told the immigrants that they would be protected by divine intervention and so need not worry.
K
Genius, why did you feel the need to write the name of Christ that way?
Religious Jews don't write the name of the Christian god as a sign of not believing in him. It's a practice I picked up when almost all my friends were religious Jews.
Usually religious Jews refer to Jesus (at least among each other and in speech) by the mocking nickname "Yoshke" or "Yeshu" or "Yemach Sh'mo" (may his name be blotted out). Not spelling out the name is a mark of respect that is only given to G-d.
K
The handcart pioneers poignant story is insane but I find it insanely optimist and courageous. You cannot build a new religion or a new country being rational.
Post a Comment