Fluid Mechanics

Tomorrow's problem.

Answer: A-M = 126 meters of 6" pipe.

Teaching Jews is the Best Remedy

Blogger Al Fin gives us the present of free brain exercises, some of them even will improve IQ and memory. My mother used to work all the time on those things. I suscribed her to Hungarian journals of brain teasers and bought her a Hungarian encyclopedia of crosswords. Her mental acuity was perfect and she managed her bank accounts better than I do. She never did any physical exercise or sport, yet was in good health till her death (except her last two months of advanced liver cancer).

The pic shows an Old Jew, by Rembrandt. What with Rembrandt? He painted too many old Jews. He was greedy and expensive, he had many old and rich Jewish clients. Anyway, should I spend time on brainteasers and crosswords? Maybe. But they are so utterly boring and pointless. The work I am doing requires much thinking, and hope that I will never become mentally flaccid. My most extreme mental effort is in teaching. The math-addicted civil engineering students of Ariel force me to more than human efforts to be coherent. They demand the complicated equations they love, and demand from me to explain in extreme depth those little greek letter - till I reach Newton's Laws and cannot go further. They pressure me mercilessly, they make scenes in class if something is not fully understood by them, they refuse to let me continue, they phone the Decan and send letters. My brain is excercised by teaching in Ariel. I feel mentally younger and focused after a day in Ariel. And utterly exhausted.

Is Israel's Water - Kosher?

Few Israelis have ever stopped to wonder if the water they are drinking is kosher or not. I discovered that the Haredim hadd spent an enormous effort in learning the details of Israel's water supply infrastructure just to be able to debate this issue. In fact, incredible as it sounds, the Haredim know more about water than the average engineer.

The problem is very complex. Most of Israel's water comes from the lake of Galilee, the Kinneret. If an Arab pisses in the Kineret, does it make the water non kosher? The answer is not. You can drink it without violating the Halacha. Now if a Jewish fisherman uses bread crumbs to trap the fish, will the water become Hametz (unfit for the Pessach when leavened bread is forbidden). The answer is, yes. The kashrut of whole the Israeli water supply system will be doubtful. קיים חשש לחמץ = a really pious Jew will not drink water during Pessach.

The solution? Jerusalem water system disconnects itself from the national network for the duration of the Passover. They dont let in even a drop of that suspicious impure water. So Jerusalem's water is fit for a Haredi during the Passover. But what about the poor Haredi who lives in Bney Brak near Tel Aviv? Drink bottled water? Dig a well in the yeshive? Collect rainwater?

It is thus that each year, Haredi families from all over the country move to Jerusalem and spend the celebration in Jerusalem. Now that I think it over, religious Jews always spent the festival in Jerusalem (Jesus Christ and his disciplines moved from the Galilee to spend Pesach in Jerusalem). There must be something in its water.

I Do the Volta Face

Volta face (voltafaccia = turnaround) is what I did. I changed my position 180 degrees around.

I finished my expert witness paper against Israel's largest water corporation. At the beginning I refused to accuse water engineers I am familiar with. I had a good opinion of them. Nice hardworking decent collegues. Zionists too. Actually I rather liked them.

In two days, the lawyers succeeded in changing my mind: Now I maintain that the corporation is a vast, corrupt, technologically regressive monster, overcharging its clients, many of whom are penniless, extremely pious Jews, with large families and totally unfamiliar with the world. All over the world water companies are changing to electronic digital water meters, with no moving parts, with on-line reporting and automatic billing. Not them. They keep playing around with antiquated mechanical meters, hopelessly imprecise and given to brake down with the minimal pressure wave or exposition to the sun.

The lawyers made me write a summary in half a page, which is they say the judges may read. My expert opinion, 100 pages full of equations and graphs, will be used as door stop. The lawyers say they never met someone who invested such amount of research in a paper. I am that like, what can I do.

Funny Water Meters

I spent the weekend working on my expert opinion on domestic water supply meters. The more I study the subject, more becomes obvious how un-accurate they are. For example, I calculated that closing abruptly the neighbor's main water causes a small hydraulic hammer and my meter runs 200% faster, registering triple of the volume of water I received. Moreover, if my meter (they are made of bronze) is exposed to the Israeli summer sun, can reach temperatures of 100 Celsius that will cause the water to boil and it will become a pressure cooker. The trapped vapor will "explode" when one opens a faucet. The high pressure will make to malfunction the meter and make it register ridiculously high volumes. But my funniest discovery is the fact that the rotating pivots of the meters wear out fast and after a few months they start to rotate freely and register crazy volumes that the customer will be charged with. Ha Ha Ha.

Unfortunately the lawyers are uninterested in hydraulics. They ask me to point out laws that may have been violated. After a search, I copied out all the laws about water meters but I cannot make sense of them. Some of them refer to old, antique meters I had long forgotten, others to currently used ones, there is no legislation referring to electronic digital meters, there are endless contradictions and corrections that I am too exhausted/bored to work out in detail. I am rather curious how the lawyers will make sense of the hundred pages of small letter laws and articles I have collected. It is like the Talmud, a monumental mass of contradictory and confused highly specialized legal material. I dont even speak the language. I'll keep you informed.

Sueing for 150 million dollars

"Mey Avivim", Tel Aviv water company has been sued for 150 million dollars for overcharging its clients by 50%. A law firm specialized this line has hired me to write the expert opinion on another big city's water supply corporation - they are sueing them big.

My employer says I am exactly the person they need, intelligent and with vast technical information. But they are very dissatisfied with my attitude: I reject their basic hypothesis that the corporation is knowfully screwing its customers, I am convinced (I am familiar with them) that they are decent hardworking professionals, doing the best they can in difficult conditions. Some of them are heroes, supplying good quality drinking water in the permanent war environment we have here. I told them that the Tel Aviv lawsuit is absurd, because it presumes that the corporation supplies say million cubic meters and gets paid for million and half. The real figure is that it gets paid for 70 - 80% of the water supplied (the rest is stolen, is lost in the infrastructure, is supplied free to people who cannot pay, etc.). The lawyers dont like my reasoning. They say all that is irrelevant in a court room.

Anyway, water meters are notoriously imprecise all over the world. I have no problem testifying that.

Un troussage de domestique

We have the second victim of "Affair DSK". The editor of a French journal called the case a simple lifting of skirts of the chamber maid ("un troussage de domestique"). He was sacked.

The news is that DSK maintains that the maid did the job for money and she was not satisfied with the tip. (This blog expresses its respect for Mr Anon's acuteness.)

Her lawyer's new line is ... racial discrimination.

ZAHAL: No Orders by SMS

In an interview on Galey Zahal, the military radio station, one senior officer was complaining that the eyes of the recruits arriving at the camp wander around as if they were in front of a computer monitor; they dont look to each other nor to the officer. The חניך תורן (the leading soldier), instead of calling the soldiers, sends an SMS : "Appear in three minutes in front of the officer's tent." The officer himself imparts his orders from his tent through his laptop or smartphone.

The man was incensed by the leadership modality shown by the new generation. He demanded that orders be given only face to face and in the manly, high decibel manner behooving to Israeli soldiers.

Another Hebron Wastewater Treatment Plant

I was involved in the Hebron River issue from the beginning. Hebron is a large Palestinian city on the top of Southern Judean mountains, and it sewage pollutes (in fact, is) the Hebron River that feeds the Beer Sheba aquifer. The Germans built a 20 million WWTP for Hebron, that never worked. Israel built the Shoqet WWTP (partly designed by me) that apparently is not fulfilling its aim (the main designer was Arieh Schwarcz). Now the World Bank declared its intention to oversee the creation of a $45 million Hebron Waste Water Treatment Plant.

After lengthy delays to the project, the new treatment facility will “affect the lives of many residents in both Israel and Palestine,” those people who live on the borders of both the Hebron Stream and the Beersheba Stream and are affected by sewage flow from Hebron and Kiryat Arba, according to Friends of the Earth.

Untreated sewage has polluted ground water and led to a growing mosquito infestation in the area. Communities such as Hebron, Yatta, Metar, Omer and Tel Sheva have been badly affected but should gain relief from the new plant.

In addition to the $10m. that will come directly from the World Bank itself, extra financial resources will come from various groups, including $20m. from the French Development Agency, Friends of the Earth said. The European Union and Sweden have also expressed interest in funding the project. “The Hebron Waste Water Treatment Plant is a very important first step in the rehabilitation of the Hebron Stream. However, fair and effective solutions must be agreed on by both Israelis and Palestinians, in full cooperation,” said Gidon Bromberg, Israeli director of Friends of the Earth Middle East, in a statement.

The main problem, when I was involved in the issue, was Palestinian negligence: They did not control industrial discharges in Hebron and they did not maintain the plant. They said they cannot do anything since they were under occupation. I wonder if the solution is to give the Palestinians the present of a brand new plant. It will not be maintained but let to decay as the first one, I daresay.

Death of the Yang Tze

Asia biggest river, the Yang Tze, is dry. The 400 million people that depend on it have a difficult time ahead. Rainfall has halved probably as consequence of permanent climate change. Last week the state council – China's cabinet – acknowledged that Three Gorges faces "urgent problems" ordering energy generation to be stopped and the water supplied for consumption. Also the gigantic south-north water diversion project, which aims to tap the normally moist Yangtze basin to supply arid northern cities like Beijing, is being called into question.

When in China, I told my friends that the Chinese tried to solve their water supply problems by massive civil works, which they have been doing from the early imperial times. They are good at mobilizing massive manpower and building canals and long walls. But the solution was (1) recycling wastewater, (2) desalination and (3) campaign to save water in the cities and in the farms. Irrigation systems have to be improved. May be I should contact my friends in China for a consulting trip. (What is with me? My place is with Kever Benjamin City's "jubilados" who spend the morning conferencing in the Rothschild St. cafeteria).

A White Army On The March

Last night's rocket attack on Tripoli is inexplicable. A civilian metropolitan area of around 2 million people, Tripoli sustained 22 to 25 bombings last night. Why are Europeans bombing and killing and destroying that city? I dont even understand why they are taking part in the rebellion in peaceful Lybia. Are Europeans a race so bloodthirsty that needs to smell blood for its mental balance? My Father thought so. Nietzsche said: A good war needs no cause.

The Russians were right: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is a danger to humanity. Founded in 1945 as an armed alliance of European armies in response to imagined Soviet aggression, it survived the liquidation of the Soviet Union. Organizations dont dissolve themselves, armies dont disband but will find new wars to fight. Like Xenophon's mercenary Ten Thousand that kept fighting as a body even after the end of the Persian crown war. When the pointless army made its appearance in Bizance raiding peaceful Greek cities, whole Greece started worrying and shaking. It was the Spartans who saved Greece, they sent ships and hired them to guard their empire.

Confused by Inflation

In Israel, one has to change tyres every four years. Two cars means that once a year I buy tyres from Cahalon in the Kever Benjamin's Industrial Area. Yesterday I paid 50% more than last year. The prices of some products have rised while other are cheaper. Salaries are about 50% up since last 2006 when I left employment. Prices are changing fast and I am confused. Official inflation figures are worthless. There seems to be no uniform inflation rate but confusing, opposite trends.

The USA and the EU are heavily indebted and it would be natural to inflate their currencies. Greece is broke, but lately there is talk about Spain, Portugal, Italy and Belgium too. Yet interest rates are not in the 10% p.a. range, as should be with broken states and inflation. The shekel is strong and Europe is relatively cheap for us.

Corsica

I am having difficulty to restart my fasting and working regime. I have much work to do. Urgent: write a proposal for water recycling in Corsica. My impression is that Europe is paved with Euros but they will not exert themselves to pick it up. Angelina is right about South Europeans.

Contempt

I watched Obama's speech at AIPAC and noticed his expressive body language. He is a good looking fellow and has an African's natural sense of rythm and warmth. I imagine Barak Hussein was two heads taller than the children in Indonesia. He got used to dominate the school yard. Later, at the university campus, this athletic mulatto subliminally intimidated everybody. Meeting Bibi, the former leader of Sayeret Matcal (Israel's spearhead team) and son of a fanatical Etzel fighter, gives Obama the nerves. We Jews are hard and unbending. At AIPAC, Obama radiated contempt. The man hates Israel.

Be Ready for the Zombie Apocalypse

Plan your evacuation route. When zombies are hungry they won’t stop until they get food (i.e., brains), which means you need to get out of town fast! Plan where you would go and multiple routes you would take ahead of time so that the flesh eaters don’t have a chance!

(If you think it is a joke, you are wrong. The above is from an official US Government site. Dont believe me? Go to HBDchick's blog or the CDC site.) US Government doesnt seem to have a high opinion of the intelligence of the American people. Alternatively, the zombies are a menace and you better start planning your escape route.

A Sinister Turn of Affairs

DSK has chosen the worst time to get arrested for sexual misconduct. Now it appears that the man has been leading the EURO's salvatage operations. Mohammed El-Arian from PIMCO and few other commenters are waking up to the disarray his removal is causing. Greece is unable to pay its debt and is unable to get new loans. Germany's Merkel instead of taking the lead to save the Euro, is pontificating about South European's laziness and the need to exert themselves. Germany will help, she says, but only if you work hard as we do.

In short, Strauss-Kahn has just greatly upped the likelihood that Greece will have to default on its sovereign debt. That will have a double-edged domino effect.
On one side, if Greece falls, other European nations like Ireland, Portugal and perhaps even Spain become much more likely to default as well.
On the other side, the banks in France, Germany and other countries that own Greece’s debt will see massive devaluations of their ledgers – with unpredictable consequences.

The process may have started. TASE and European bourses are seriously down today. I have a feeling that the IMF is leaderless and the EU in disarray. Not good. Some people in Israel is advising to sell the portfolio and wait till October.

A Call for Self-Discipline

I discovered a decade ago that the most productive employments of my time was management of my savings and decided to dedicate two hours each morning to follow what was going on on TASE and NASDAQ. And TO THINK. It has worked well but in the last months I have lost interest and the habit. It was mostly the daily board exchanges with LEVIATAN, NOMAD and other Israeli minispeculators that sustained my interest. They have left and somehow TASE seems to have lost its intellectual stimulus. Reading the endless and purposefully complicated reports is BORING, and trying to make sense of infinite columns of figures requires self-discipline.

For example, this early morning I see that KOOR - a holding company I follow - reports to TASE a paper loss of a billion dollars with its investment in Credit Suisse. Yet CS has paid nice dividends and distributed capital. Where is it? Also the sale of Makhteshim to the Chinese is in doubt because some investors have sued KOOR that intends to keep the profits and not distribute it among the private investors. What is happening?

My Bezeq investment paid off the nice dividend as hoped and I have to reinvest it. Since I am not updated, I bought Clal Biotechnology shares on the basis of a HaAretz article. Not good. A look at Clal Bio shows that already it rised 1000% in the last year! With Protalix I am in 50% loss!

The purpose of this note is to remind myself to read and study at least two hours a day what is going on in the world. That is the most productive work I can do. Discipline and perseverance! Now another daughter has rised to life and got a steady boyfriend. I want to provide them an apartment. I need money! J - to work! Arbeit!

Defficient Water Meters in Israel

Kolbotek TV program discovered that domestic water meters in Israel work on both directions, and register water consumption with pressure changes in the pipeline. So when the neighbor opens the faucet, the pressure in the pipe decreases, which causes my meter to register consumption. The solution is meters that do not work when there is a reflux, and backflow preventer (check valves). Already there have been lodged demands of 120 million dollars against the Water Corporation of Tel Aviv alone. The fun is just starting.

One consequence of this discovery is that municipal water losses have been much higher than the 10 - 15% declared.

Zionism

This is Kiss solist talking. He is a Zionist.

Justice!

To the left of the entrance to the city of Ariel in Samaria we find ABED MARKET, a Palestinian supermarket. Ten years ago, during the Intifada, it was a miserable one room hut with Abed dressed in galabiya sitting expressionless at the door. Soon he sat roadside with cans of powdered milk, Portuguese sardines and Brazilian corned beef, all stolen from UNRHA refugee help. I stop everywhere there is food and may have been his first client. With the years, he added improvements and started to accept Israeli credit cards, then a swarthy fat Palestinian replaced him behind the register and a large sign ABED MARKET appeared above. Yesterday, I met him well dressed arriving on a new Mercedes Benz.

People think Israeli settlements displaced Palestinians, but it is not true. Settlements were planned and built with much care to avoid discomfort and disturbance to the natives. Ariel was built on unoccupied state land and the few miserable (illegal) huts in the surroundings were left unmolested. Abed watching Arab TV in his hut was forgotten. Today, a sui-generis Palestinian commercial center has developed at the crossroad, with a large Palestinian pharmacy (with drugs unobtainable in Israel), a dental clinic (very cheap), two supermarkets (ABED's and larger one on the right side of the road), a furniture shop and so on. They are prospering. They are all getting rich.

But it is poor me who is condemned in the UN, while Abed drives around in Ariel in his blue Mercedes Benz. Where is justice ;-( ??

Competition for Immigrants

With the demographic collapse of Europe, governments are competing for culturally assimilable immigrants. Hungary, with a fertility rate half required for population stability, has extended citizenship to everyone able to prove any Hungarian ascendence. 2.5 million in Romania, Slovakia and other countries have already applied. Germany (pic The Volga Germans), Spain, Poland and other European countries have legislated similar laws of repatriation. Even Japan is trying to bring in Latin American Japanese descendants. In this they are all following the Israeli criterion of offering citizenship to any Jew where ever he is. The next step will be to create organisms similar to the Sochnut, intended to promote Jewish identification and aliyah (immigration to Israel).

The paradox is that this pro-immigration policy is being developed at a time of increasingly harsh anti-immigration policies in Europe. May be it is not a paradox.

Stochastic Calculus Porn

I am still recovering from sleepless night before Tuesday meeting with the frightening regulator "monster", and the Wednesday lecture on a complicated fluid mechanics problem. Yesterday was also a "lost day" of little productivity. One could assume that at my post-retirement age all days would be unproductive and "lost", yet I feel the need to commit public self-criticism for working less than two average persons.

In Steve Hsu's blog I came about to the jewel of an expression "Stochastic Calculus Porn" by Arnold Kling. The complete quote:

But the economics profession for the past thirty years instead focused on producing stochastic calculus porn to satisfy young men's urge for mathematical masturbation.

I teach Fluid Mechanics and other "hard" subjects, and I do feel the students's hunger for problems that can be solved by mechanical manipulation of mathematical objects. Hydraulics textbooks are full of long equations that give the impression of simple linear/mechanical universe, yet they are useless to solve real life problems. I prided myself in bringing real life situations to the classroom, situations I'm forced to solve in my consulting work, but the students and my collegues hate them, feel that they are "unreal". The young Jews that I am trying to teach demand to be fed calculus porn. Therefore I am feeding them textbook problems. I observe how they get high and achieve great satisfaction, I could exaggerate and say a physical orgasm, when they hit on the textbook solution. I think this is what Prof. Arnold Kling refers to. But teaching is a paying job and I have to supply what the market demands.

In addition, DSK may have cought AIDS

The Telegraph (via Steve SAiler) reveals that the maid who destroyed DSK is probably suffering from AIDS. She lives in a residence for AIDS carriers in Harlem. Moreover, it appears that it was her disease that qualified her for residence in the United States. (I dont want to think what Dennis Mangan will do with this bit of information!) Steve Sailer points out the deepest mystery of all: Luxury hotel managements tend to protect fiercely their high paying clients. Usually they "cultivate" contacts in the local police to be able to cover their client's indiscretions. Why they didnt keep the incident in-house but decided to throw poor DSK to the dogs?

Israeli Fund Managers

Israeli fund managers are seldom ranked, as they dont beat the TASE index. Globes grants the paper "Gold Medal" to Noam Pinko who achieved 10% alpha last year. The mainstream invested in "solid" stocks that performed below the index. Stars ignored: Internet Zahav (1,281% in five years), Delek Group (818%), Bi Communications (774%), Rami Levi(526%), Israel Corp.(403%). Once more I conclude that thinking cannot be outsourced; however painful, one is forced to do his own thinking. We did not evolve a brain to manage investments, so we have to do with what we have.

Karsi Akalu

The section of the Bible we read this week contains words we dont understand. One is רכיל (that can be read as "rakil"). What does it mean? Rashi says it is "meragel" = a spy. Is it? Abraham was born in Ur of the Chaldeans, and although a rebel, he couldnt but think with the concepts and the words of Bronze Age culture. The modern interpretation is that רכיל is equivalent of the Accadian expression "karsi akalu" or "akil karsi", meaning a lying person who foments discord. Which we should not be.

Fund Management Mystery

My personal experience with managed funds is disastrous and I am still coming back to learning what happened to me. Falkenblog - an experienced fund manager himself - is my sole source of honest information on the subject. He quotes:

Using factor models of risk and the estimated dollar-weighted performance gap, we find that the real alpha of hedge fund investors is close to zero. In absolute terms, dollar-weighted returns are reliably lower than the return on the S&P 500 index, and are only marginally higher than the risk-free rate as of the end of 2008. The combined impression from these results is that the return experience of hedge fund investors is much worse than previously thought.

I could add a strange experience: I bought a Tel Aviv 75 index fund and forgot about it, following only the index. One day I searched for the fund's price and it was nowhere. What had happened is that the fund had lost two third of its worth and it was liquidated. A new fund instead appeared from nowhere on my records, worth so little that I didnt pay attention to it. This seems to be the standard practice. How is that the fund industry flourishes and pays enormous salaries to its practitioners? One solution to the mystery is corruption: a retirement fund or Keren Hishtalmut (study fund for professionals) needs to contract professional fund management. When I was active in professional associations, in internal meetings one of main subjects how to invest the money. Our engineers fund bought a bank, the Bank of Jerusalem, as an investment, and the commission financed many "seminars" and meetings for us the activists in the best hotels. I think that is the main clients of the funds, and the private saver is marginal.

Yesterday was a lost day. I was called to a high-level meeting at the Ministry regarding one of my largest hotel projects, that already had been rejected once, and could not sleep the night before. Arrived 40 minutes late: The whole department sat in front of me and harshly objected to the marble jacuzzi in the wedding suite (the pic gives you an idea of what they have built). The jacuzzi is - in their eyes - a public swimming pool, and so needs a manager with diploma, a lifeguard, and all kind of registering sensors and alarms. They had expected me to fight vigorously their demand, but I agreed that the law was clear and it was their job to enforce it. They loved my attitude and from then on the tone was friendly. Also the owner took it well and did not sack me on the spot. They always expect their hired hands to fight like demons against the bureaucracy. To relax after the meeting, bought Spanish Tempranillo and went to sleep. My self management is still a failure.

Obama's Jewish Brother in Israel

Dr Ndesandjo (Stanford, Physics) is Obama's half brother, son of his Kenyan father and a New York Jewish girl. He appears in Obama's autobiography as the brother who refused to share Obama's obsession with race. In Jewish Law he is Jewish and he feels one. Came to pray at the Wailing Wall.

Non Violent Invasion

The new tactic against Israel, of non-violent invasion, cought us unprepared. They are fighting us like the ship Exodus vs the British Army in 1947. Like the British, neither we have a good response. They are winning PR victories and in these days, screen-victories are more decisive than "real" victories.

Dr Adato's Law

About 250,000 youth suffer from eating disorders in this country. Dr Rachel Adato submitted a law in the Knesset forbidding the employment of underfed models: A 170 cm tall girl has to weight 53 kg or more, and any slimming down by photoshopping is to be clearly indicated. Does the "ideal body" image affect the eating habits of real life girls? Seems probable. And the models of the fifties sure looked different (pic). Today, those stars would be thought of as very fat. In those days people was slim and the models fat - a paradox. Today we are fighting fat while the models are starving skeletons. Lets hope it works.

Thor

I was exiled from home while my daughter celebrated with her friends, so I went to see "Thor". It is a comic book tridimensional film, many effects but an infantile story and no sex at all. It must be for the 10 years old crowd. It has been years since I saw a serious film.

The Water Lie

A popular investigative TV program, Kolbotek, focuses on the water sector of Israel. The consumers are complaining about the inflated and absurd water bills, and the program went out to investigate. I thought I knew everything about water, yet there were surprises. For example, they discovered that the water use of a neighbor affects the readings of my meter (pic) so even in an apartment closed and empty, the meter registers flows and the owner is billed for them. Since the payment is through the bank, an absent owner may never receive the bill and the bank keeps paying from his account.

(Reflecting on the problem, I think that changes in water pressure and the Venturi effect actuate on all the meters. Since the readings are different according to the direction of the flow, there is a positive reading when pressure in the pipe increases and then returns to normal).

Other problem is the effect of the presence of air in the pipe - the air is being measured and billed!

Thirdly, several neighboring buildings are frequently connected to the same meter but only one building is billed. The people of a Modi'in building decided to disconnect themselves totally from the municipal network for a week to demonstrate that they were billed for water they didnt consume! Later a mis-connection was discovered and their money was returned.

Already I had several phone call of people asking me to check their water bills. I asked for 1,500 shekel + VAT.

Le Directeur Général et la Femme de Chambre

La Directeur General du FMI accusé d’agression sexuelle par une femme de chambre aux Etats-Unis. Merde! Sauvages! Quoting Diderot, "Sans nul doute, la rencontre des Européens et des Sauvages, pour sanglante et destructrice qu’elle ait été, a donné une impulsion très vive à la critique en Europe occidentale. Leur seule existence, avec ce que l’on a d’abord cru être une totale absence de savoir faire ... une vision totalement négative."

The "Burgeois en voyages d'affaires et la femme de chambre nymphomane " is a cliche of French risqué burlesque dramas of the bedroom farce variety. Une jeunne cochonne qui va se faire enculer, est une "light role playing game", nothing serious, but you cannot expect those salauds to appreciate French food or French culture! Excuse my French!

This is New York!

The morning papers say that Dominique Strauss-Kahn has been arrested in New York for trying to rape a hotel maid. According to New York laws, a person is guilty of sexual abuse in the first degree when he or she subjects another person to sexual contact by forcible compulsion. Sexual abuse in the first degree is a class D felony (2 to 7 years of imprisonment.) In French bedroom farses, the maid is always available to fulfil a man's fantasy. But this is New York. He is in trouble.

Water Institute

I am writing a proposal/plan for the Water Institute of Baja California. My model is the SIWI, the phenomenally successful Swedish water institute. But I cant find anything "palpable" in their published materials, it is all so vapid, meaningless and insubstantial.

"SIWI advocates future-oriented, knowledge-integrated water views in decision making, nationally and internationally, that lead to sustainable use of the world’s water resources, sustainable development of societies and reduced poverty."

What is a "knowledge-integrated water view"? Getrost! Mein Herz - Have I ever been lost for inanities?

Not in Israel

Diaspora Mentality

German Chancellor Merkel has been criminally charged for expressing satisfaction at Bin Laden's liquidation. Was she supposed to be sad? Astonishing these Germans, arent they (see pic), but it is not my problem. But Auster cannot keep himself quiet and ignored and reflects on the utter undesirability of allowing the rise of this "humorless, fanatical, strange" people. The fact that Germany is - once more - ruling Europe, while feeling unappreciated and exploited, cannot be but bad for everyone. For two generations now the Germans have behaved very decently. What the hell wants Auster to happen? We have to share the planet with this restless giant, why is Auster provoking it? I know why. Because he is a Galuth (Diaspora) Jew. The remedy for the sick Diaspora mentality is Israel, created expressly to make us a healthy nation living on its land.

Fearless Feathered Fighter

He is everywhere, he is everywhere. (No, the Chicken Man is not a fast food restaurant. He was a Jewish superhero who during weekends engaged the malefactors from STICK. He kept Chicago free of those comical evildoers in the sixties.)

The Gesthunkana is his almost-letal weapon. Its name comes from the Yiddisch root that means "to stink". You get the idea.

Confusion in Mount Meron

Lag BaOmer is the end of the Omer, the growing period of the early cereal crop. Ancient Caananite peasants watched with anxiety the maturation of the grain that would end the winter famine, and the gathering in of the harvest was celebrated in these days of the year. In contemporary Israel it has mutated into an annual outing day on Mount Meron, lighting camp fires and praying on the (patently fake) tumb of rabbi Shimon Bar Yohay. Of course, visiting saints's tumbs is alien to the Jewish religion, but Lag BaOmer on Mount Meron is the most popular religious ceremony in Israel 2011, attracting around 600,000 believers.

This year the festivity has fallen on Sunday and hundreds of thousands are already packing the cars for the outing. But Rabbi Ovadiah (born as Abdullah) Yoseph has declared that holding the celebration on Sunday would force the faithful to travel on Saturday, which is forbidden work and a big sin. So moved it to Monday.

Yoseph (pic in the ceremonial robe of the recognized religious leaders of the Turkish Empire) is considered Sepharadi (Sepharadi means Spanish, although he is Iraqi) and his ex-cathedra pronunciations are not appreciated by the Ashkenazim. He is waging a prolonged power struggle against the spiritual legitimacy of Ashkenazi rabbis. So the Ashkenazim may not heed his opinion and celebrate on Sunday while the Sepharadim will do it on Monday. He has split de facto if not intentionally the two main Jewish ethnic groups of Israel.

As said, Lag BaOmer was not instituted by Moses and we nominally follow Moses's religion. It is a pre-Hebrew harvest festival and no one disputes that. The Ashkenazi/Sepharadi split is bad enough as it is, and hardening it may be dangerous in the current HBD excitation sweeping the Middle East. Thanks God we have ferocious enemies that will not allow us to fight among ourselves. I am not the first to observe that a few years of peace and we are done.

The Haitization of Cuba

Cuba used to be called "La Perla del Caribe", the first and last fortress of Spanish colonization. My last interest in Cuba was 40 years ago, when Fidel came down from the mountains and took Havanna. Then Cuba was the wealthiest country of Latin America, with a prosperous turist industry, with a dominant position in the world sugar and tobacco markets. Cuba was also a cultural center for Latin America, and we in Argentina watched Cuban telenovelas and Cuban literature ("Platero y yo") was our class reading. For Buenos Aires intellectuals, Cuba was the model, home of the first successful socialist revolution in America.

That Cuba is no more. All the Jews have moved to Miami or Israel; I find them working in the factories. Spanish Cubans moved en-masse to Florida a generation ago and they have melted into the vastness of America. Cuban economy is in ruins, Havanna (pic) is terribly decayed. The composition of the population has changed dramatically: from a Spanish outpost in the tropics, the people seen in the streets today are Cuban Africans aka mulatos. Americans tend to think that Cuba sunk into poverty and underdevelopment as a natural consequence of the Communist system, but I have a different idea. Communism and the difficult geopolitical situation of the island certainly are causes of Cuba's catastrophy, but that is not the whole story. The Cuban-Spanish have left - that is what happened. Haiti used to be the richest French colony; when the French left one hundred and fifty years ago, Haiti started its slow decay into the catastrophy it is today. Jamaica, Rhodesia, Kenya, Uganda, etc. are other examples. Cuban decay is now irreversible, another Haiti has been created.

With an effort of imagination, I can see Florida, Alabama, etc. as the next dominoes.

Cairo: Christians Abducting Muslim Females

Cairo: 12 people were killed and more than 200 were injured in clashes in a Cairo suburb sparked by rumours that Christians had abducted a woman who converted to Islam. The army cordoned off streets near the Saint Mina church, where about 500 Salafists massed on Saturday to call on Christians to hand over the woman.

Obviously (to any HDB realist), what we have here is two anthropoid gangs competing for scarce, critical resources such as fertile females. The larger group, called "Salafists" by the Egyptian media, feels that the time is mature for exterminating Christian males and co-opt their females, who already "have converted".

This is not an ironic comment by a civilized European on the savage Natives. We are no less anthropoids than Cairo's Imbamba people, only that we have moved from the brutish physical to the refined cultural or ethical warfare. Our champions are cinema critics and theirs, evolutionary psychology professors.

Signs of American Decline by Pat Buchanan (2004)

Now we don’t make televisions any more. And our trade deficits in cars, trucks, televisions, video cassette recorders, automatic data-processing equipment and office machines added up last year to $218 billion. We retain a trade surplus in airplanes and airplane parts, but, because of the competition from Airbus, that is shrinking.

After airplanes, our No. 1 export in terms of a trade surplus is … soybeans. Corn is next, followed by wheat, animal feeds, cotton, meat, metal ore, scrap, gold, hides and skins, pulp and waste paper, cigarettes, mineral fuels, rice, printed materials, coal, tobacco, crude fertilizer and glass. Airplanes aside, the United States has the export profile of an agricultural colony.

Our largest trade deficit with any country is with China. It has rocketed from $22 billion in Clinton’s first year to $124 billion last year. “The World’s Most Unequal Trade Relationship” is how McMillion describes it.

What were our best-selling items to China, where we ran a $2.8 billion surplus? Oil seeds and soybeans. What was China’s biggest selling items to us? Computers and electrical machinery and equipment, where Beijing ran surpluses at our expense of $50 billion.

Betting Against China

Nissim Taleb writes:

Seeking to restrict variability seems to be good policy (who does not prefer stability to chaos?), so it is with very good intentions that policymakers unwittingly increase the risk of major blowups. And it is the same misperception of the properties of natural systems that led to both the economic crisis of 2007-8 and the current turmoil in the Arab world. The policy implications are identical: to make systems robust, all risks must be visible and out in the open -- fluctuat nec mergitur (it fluctuates but does not sink) goes the Latin saying.

He is talking about the upheaval in Arab countries, but the same is applicable to China. A central power desperate to maintain stability against the laws of Nature (as envisioned by Taleb) will surely generate a Black Swan event. Unfortunately, the Black Swan is unpredictable by definition, so betting for or against it is moot. Pic: Wynn Casino in Macau.

Israel Independence Street Party (Free Entrance, Free Alcohol)

This evening there is a free street party organized by the Florentin quarter of Tel Aviv. Free live music. The pubs around offer free alcohol. The Procreation Society (I just invented it but that is not a reason why it shouldnt exist!) will search and confiscate condoms and chickie pills. Dont drink the water! It will be spiked with viagra.

Invasion

A boat with 500 Lybian refugees arrived at Lampedusa, Italy. North Africa is becoming unlivable and people is running for their lives. The action will really start when the 100 million Egyptians start to move. Just now they are ethnic-cleansing (ten million) Christians, so around late summer the Mediterranean will be crowded. During winter the sea is dangerous. Black faces are becoming very common in Kever Benjamin streets, I presume Erythrean infiltrators are not being expulsed.

Window of Opportunity

Bar Raphaeli is no more with Leonardo Di Caprio. She is free. I am thinking that my daughter needs more private math lessons, although she got 100 in her "matkonet" exam. The teacher lives in her street. I used to station the car and wait for my daughter.

BAZAN turnaround

Valero and Tesoro refining corporations are still losing but saying that they expect higher refining margins in the USA and higher profits in the coming quarters. In the region of interest to me, the Mediterranean, there are limited product supplies and average refining margins managed to creep up in April as a result. With Libyan oil products set to remain absent for the foreseeable future and Middle Eastern demand rising, refining margins in the Med should continue to climb into the Autumn, albeit on low runs.

Saras SpA, owner of the Mediterranean’s largest oil refinery, said refining margins rose in the fourth quarter and will likely improve further. While political unrest in North African countries poses some “short-term bearish risks” for the oil industry, “the underlying trend for refining margins is positive,” the Milan- based company said today in a stock exchange statement. Saras, which swung to a fourth-quarter net loss of 10.3 million euros ($14.2 million) today on depreciation and amortization charges, reported a 60 percent increase in revenue to 2.5 billion euros.

TASE has not noticed this trend and BAZAN shares, the Haifa refinery, is falling. It is time to sell something and buy BAZAN. (Update: I bought a bunch at 250).

Learning about the djinn

Now that Mr Ahmedenejad is being sacked because of his belief in djinns, it is topical to learn about them. The Quran explains that the djinn are spirits created from fire. There are males and females (pic) among the djinn and they have the capacity to procreate and have offspring.

Not like the Jewish dybbuks, the djinn are responsible for their acts. Indeed, Allah will take the day of the last Judgement to them. According to the Imam Ibn Taymiya, the djinn have religious beliefs, too. Like human beings, they can be Christian, Jewish, Moslems or non-believers. Some are pious, others are evil.

Why they did it?

Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which reports to the Pakistan Army chief, has been classified by the U.S. as a terrorist organizations for its support to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. No mystery why Osama Bin Laden was living in the Pakistani army's HQ city. What is this Pakistan? Colonial India broke up and its Muslims invented a name: Pakistan. It is a large subsistance irrigation area. It exports (like apricots, cotton) bring in 20 billion dollars per year. It does not amount to much. To these people, the Quran is Truth and New York, Sdom.

The BBC is not Anti-Israel

Driving home from Ariel the car radio was on BBC Middle East station, reporting British reaction to the death of Bin Laden. Archbishop Williams (pic) condemned the murder of an unarmed human being. Other moral voices lamented the Wild West style execution without due trial, in violation of international law and in front of its family and children. Suddenly, I understood that BBC's ceaseless anti-Israel propaganda, about targeted liquidations and so on, is not specific, but generic, their heart is with our enemies and they simply hate Western civilization.

On the other hand, BBC's American station reported something else.

The Return of the Hidden Imam

It was true. About two years ago there were vague suggestions in the Hebrew press that Ahmedenijad was a critical existential threat to Israel because of his membership in an esoteric sect of the Shia Islam - those actively working towards the return of the Hidden Imam with thunderous eschatological consequences. This return will occur shortly before the Final Judgement and the end of history. Imam Mahdi will return at the head of the forces of righteousness and do battle with the forces of evil in one, final, apocalyptic battle. When evil has been defeated once and for all, the Imam Mahdi will rule the world for several years under a perfect government and bring about a perfect spirituality among the peoples of the world.

Now it appears that those incredible speculations were absolutely true, and Iran's nuclear weapons program was (is?) in the hands of raging lunatics.

The Guardian writes that Khameney, head of the Supreme Religious Council of Iran, is accusing the President Ahmedenijad of using supernatural powers to further his policies. "Several people close to the president have been arrested in recent days and charged with being "magicians" and invoking djinns (spirits)." Ayandeh, an Iranian news website, described one of the arrested men, Abbas Ghaffari, as "a man with special skills in metaphysics and connections with the unknown worlds".

Since religious fanatics reproduce more than balanced agnostics, I foresee that future wars will continue to be fought about the enigma of God's Trinity or whatever.

Adhesive and Cohesive Effects on the Stock Market

Tel Aviv University has discovered that the stock exchange behaves like the brain under an epyleptic attack. I always wondered about its reactions, now we know that it is sick. About the effects: read the paper.