Ben Zion Netaniyahu z"l

He died today at 102. I met Prof. Ben Zion Netaniyahu at the University of Tel Aviv. He took part in several "encuentros" on the history of Spanish Jews, combatting the ideas of Americo Castro, who is even today the authority on the subject. Castro's thesis is that the "limpieza de sangre" exclusion and persecution of conversos was the mirror image of Jewish racism. I helped him to translate to Spanish things although he spoke Spanish. In person, like many of his generation, like Shimon Peres, he was obsessed by the Holocaust and in his mind, the Inquisition was Heydrich's Einsatzgruppen. I read some of his books and felt that his historic research was nothing less than a desperate almost kabbalistic way of trying to undo the Holocaust, to save Polish Jewry. That is the true origin of Bibi's behaviour, I recognize his father in everything he says.

Even Ury Avneri is an Optimist

He writes: I am an optimist. When talking about this, I am always reminded of a certain point in my life. It was October 1942, and the world was shaking. In Russia, the Nazi troops had reached Stalingrad and the titanic battle had been joined. There was no doubt that the Germans would take the city and move on. Further south, the invincible Wehrmacht had broken into the Caucasus. From there, a straight line led through Turkey and Syria to Palestine. Erwin Rommel’s renowned Afrika Korps had broken the British line and reached the Egyptian village of El Alamein, just 106 km from Alexandria. From there to Palestine was a matter of days. Already a year earlier, the Nazis had occupied Crete in the first airborne invasion in history. For anyone looking at the map, the situation was clear. From North, West and South the Veteran Leftist Ury Avnery is an optimist. Nazi military colossus was moving inexorably toward Palestine, with the aim of destroying the Jewish semi-state there. Adolf Hitler’s mad anti-Semitism led to no other conclusion. Our British masters obviously thought so, too. They had already sent their wives and children to Iraq. They themselves, it was rumored, were sitting on their suitcases, ready to escape at the first hint of a German breakthrough in Egypt. The Hagana, our main secret military organization, was making frantic preparations. Like the heroes of Masada some 1,900 years ago, who committed collective suicide rather than fall into Roman hands, our fighters would gather on the Carmel hills, there to fight and sell their lives dearly. I had just turned 19, and was living in Tel Aviv, a town nobody even considered defending. We knew it was the end. After the war ended with the total collapse of Nazi Germany, many books about the course of the war appeared. It transpired that the desperate crisis of October 1942 existed only in our imagination. The Crete airborne invasion, far from being a brilliant victory, was in reality a disaster. German losses were so high that Hitler forbade any repetition. Not knowing this, the British launched their own airborne operation in Holland toward the end of the war, which was also an unmitigated disaster. The German troops that had reached the Caucasus were totally exhausted and could march no further south. Of far-away Palestine they could not even dream. And, most importantly for us, Rommel had reached El Alamein on his last drops of petrol. Hitler, who viewed the entire North African campaign as a wasteful diversion from the main effort — Russia — refused to squander his scarce petrol there. He did not give a damn about Palestine. (Even if he did, there was no way to get the petrol across the Mediterranean. The British had broken the Italian naval code and knew of every ship leaving an Italian port.) The moral of the story: Even in the middle of a completely desperate situation, one does not know enough of the facts to lose hope.

The Water Business

Tahal (former Water Planning for Israel) is fully owned by Kardan Holdings of Joseph Grinfeld (pic). It is one of the largest water planning and enterprising companies in the world, yet it is losing money year after year. One of my students works there and says that all the senior people - some of them my friends - are being sacked. Well, it is only natural that young people is being advanced, but the environment appears to be rather stressed. In 2008 Kardan deleted 20 million dollars from its balance sheet because of Tahal's decrease in value. That year it lost 8 million euro from an income of 63 million. In 2007 it lost 6 million euro. I have no reliable figures for 2009 - 2011 but it appears that income is growing as well the losses. Kardan NV's share price has fallen 23% since the beginning of the year, Kardan Israel is down 40%. Water is a difficult business.

Gaon and Water: Disaster

Moshe Gaon, the son of the founder of Gaon Holdings, ceded his place to Erez Meltzer after only one year of his father's death. Gaon Jr. sold assets and invested heavily in the Israeli water industry, and almost bankrupted the company he inherited. Gaon lost 67 million shekel in last 9 months and its bonds are paying 24% (junk bonds). I always said that the "Israeli miracle" water technology is a PR spin and only suckers believe the BS. Irrigation and desalination may be good businesses, but Chinese competition is ferocious. Three billion people may be thirsty but they cannot pay; the developed world is overinvested in this area.

Shabak Chief Calls for Shit and Blood

Yuval Diskin, ex Chief of the Shabak, is publicly attacking Bibi and Barak saying they are Messianic. He means that they have lost contact with reality. The Shabak is like a Secret Political Police that operates only inside Israel. It is the Mosad that operates in foreign countries and has some idea of what the Ayatollas are doing. Bibi says that Diskin is frustrated and resentful for having been passed over for the Head of the Mosad position. On Friday he spoke in Kever Benjamin and dismissed the last summer's protesters. "When they finished shitting in all Rothschild Boulevar's gardens, they went back to start the semester in the university. The "kakkers" are not ready to die like the rebels in Cairo's Tahrir". (my translation) Diskin is a tough Russian Jew, he is ready to pave his way to power on the bodies of any number of kakkers. He only wishes they would bring their own equipment (pic).

Israel's Torch Bearers

The torch bearers of the central celebrations of Israel's 64th anniversary were selected by the Government Public Relations Office among people they imagined represented Israel's water sector, so I happen to know some of them personally. Alex Viznitzer was my direct boss for two years and today manages Mekorot Water Corporation; Giora Shaham wrote a Water Masterplan that was submitted to me for comments (his salary of 40 000 shekel made me bitter). They are good people but they were selected for symbolizing institutions (like Mekorot) and projects (the Hula agricultural lands re-engineering as a "natural" swamp) more than their personal achievements. Two that deserve the honor are Herzl Naor, a collegue in TAHAL who developed most boreholes in the Aravah valley, a real pioneer (a good fellow, he helped me in my Judean Desert development project), and Prof. Menachem Rebhun, a senior consultant for TAHAL. For some reason, the people from the Technion and the Hebrew University at Rehovoth were unjustly passed over. Also the people who made Israel's desalination revolution were forgotten, and the people from the irrigation sector, probably because they work in the private sector and therefore cannot have any merit. Interestingly, only government employees were honoured. "Greens" from the education and ecology areas took their place: Uri Moran, the manager of a boarding school (a client of mine that I mentioned somewhere in this blog) and Maya Braun, whose high school science project was "Water Purification by Sun Irradiation" - an eternal favorite of green amateurs and of zero applicability. From the PR's diversity angle I understand that a fresh maydele (pic) had to be included among those decrepit "White" men, but then why a suffering Palestinian water-carrier woman and an Ethiopian homosexual waterfall painter were absent? Apartheid, that is why.

DSK Scandal: Calling Solon

Gradually it is becoming more clear that the destruction of Dominique Strauss-Kahn's career was no coincidence: it was orchestrated by his enemies. In the Guardian, he says that long before the Sofitel events, he became convinced that he was being tracked by French intelligence.

Such were his fears, he went to the length of encrypting all his seven phones to scramble his messages, though he removed the software shortly before the Sofitel events after he found that all the devices began to stop working. "I took the threat seriously." He also emphasised that the celebratory dance performed by a couple of Sofitel employees that was caught on the hotel's CCTV footage soon after Diallo made a 911 call to New York police ... "was not a coincidence".

DSK thinks that the French Secret Service did him in. About 40% of the men who suspect nonpaternity are right, so I'd venture that there is a 40% probability that he is right. Basically he fell because of hubris, because he felt too secure. Like Croesus, he thought himself invulnerable to Tyche: "Which man is happier than me?" he asked the philosopher Solon. The answer is disappointing. Croesus ends on the pyre (pic beautiful Greek amphora).

Necrophilia

The new Egyptian Parliament, with its Islamic majority, is preparing the country's new Constitution. Just now they are debating the article allowing husbands to have sex with their “dead wives”. That is, having sex with a corpse. What next? Mummifying dead wives to ensure a willing partner forever. Warm up before serving. I remember reading Mike Waltari that this was legal and usual in Pharaonic Egypt.

0300 AM Reflexions of an Old Jew

I woke up at 0300AM and tried to think of something relaxing. Circa summer 1954 we went with my parents to the beach and I crossed the river Danube swimming with my father. Did it happen or I am just imagining things? I checked on the internet the width of the Danube at Budapest: it is 120 meter. I was a good swimmer even then, so it must have happened. We have never heard of river pollution.

Then my thoughts wandered to the perplexing question why nudes on the internet have no pubic hair. In my times, girls had veritable black jungles hanging down there, and when I found my girlfriend shortening it with a scissor, I couldnt stop laughing. Once I tried to come down, which my friends said was an unearthly experience, I got my mouth full of hair and never tried again. In Africa, their wiry hair used to hurt my member to the point of causing me cuts and bleeding. But I never retreated nor gave up. Was I imagining these things? I checked and oh yes! girls then had lots of hair. In my times, close observation was out of question and the girls remained always somewhat mysterious. Convinced that my memories were real, I went back to sleep.

Scandinavian cuisine

New potatoes with warm green strawberries and arugula emulsion from Relæ.






 Tack, jag är inte hungrig...

Zuma's Victory Dance

Having achieved complete victory over his young rival Malema, SA President Zuma's body was flooded by gallons of fresh testosterone and he was assaulted by an ungovernable urge to marry another fat Big Black Mamma. So he did.

He warned her that she was being received with open doors in the Zuma household, so she is expected to leave the door open for him to look for a seventh wife. Zuma is a potent seventy years old and is not ready yet to settle down and play canasta with his wives.

Why we cant have a President like him?

The Brazilian Solution

It looks like the civil rights marches of the sixties caused a deep change of mind in America. Today, interracial partnering across the USA has become commonplace, and the 2010 Census data reflects sharp increase in the percentage of people of different races who are married or live together. Among opposite-sex married couples, one in 10 (5.4 million couples) are interracial, a 28% jump since 2000. In 2010, 18% of heterosexual unmarried couples were of different races (1.2 million couples) and 21% of same-sex couples (133,477 couples) were mixed. So it appears that 15 to 25% of the American population (specially the younger generation) is intimately involved with someone of a different race. At this point, PC is not enforced by the mysterious Frankfort School of the fifties, but by almost everybody. Mentioning racial differences will inevitably offend someone around. America is now invested in racial equality. America's future looks like Brazil today. A rich industrial country with little social stress, led by a very wealthy White and Japanese elite. I dare to propose a theory for American Jews taking such an active role in the Civil Rights movement. Smart and alert, they saw earlier than most where the country was moving and hurried to seize the front line. From there many Jews were catapulted to high political positions, remember Clinton's administration. I think the effect still holds with Obama.

The Circle of Life

Elton Johns with his son. He is 65 years old and planning a sibling. Elton is homosexual and the mother is a paid surrogate. It's never late.

Never surrender, never retreat, victory is certain

Malema was expulsed from SA's ruling party.

His last message: “At the end of everything else, we will not remember the words uttered by the enemies against us but will remember the silence of our friends during these difficult times. Never surrender, never retreat, victory is certain.”

May be it was a long-term career move. He may return.

Why are you so few?

Why are you so few, you idiots? from front page "Frankfurter Allgemeine"
Long and serious article that proposes to abolish current German legislation prohibiting immigration, to a Canada-type Selection Board to attract young educated workers. If not done fast, Germany will become like Japan, an "ethnically pure old age nursing home."


 "Rural areas in Saxony-Anhalt, Pomerania and Brandenburg need to be re-colonized as under Friedrich II if we want to blow life into the schools and kindergartens, the museums and parks. We need people to cover the maintenance costs of sewage treatment plants, district heating and water pipes. Some provincial politicians already are calling for immigration because without consumers and taxpayers the last light will go out soon." One should not underestimate the difficulties of countries like Germany, Sweden, Norway to adopt an Anglo-Saxon type open-doors policy. The alternatives are to give up some of their national character, or to shrink to insignificance.

Yeshiva

An old yeshiva is planning new facilities and the chief architect invited me to join the team. The place is a religious kibutz founded in 1927 that has been converted into a downtown religious school. The project is financed by foreign donors: every building and every water fountain carries the name of the donor. The school houses 700 students, both sexes, most they live in. Many are Ethiopians and Orientals, but not only. A school like this provides jobs - low paying jobs - to a hundred religious families: teachers, administration, maintainance.

The banality of it all

Not only that the mysteries of life and heredity have been discovered, but chemists have built six alternatives to DNA that can pass on genetic information and evolve just like "life". The fact that all life is based on DNA is dandy (for us) but not inevitable. Any XNA (xeno nucleic acid) or any other similar polymer could just as easily have been the molecule of life as DNA.

We have to get used to the fact that chemists are now working normally with unnatural nucleotides that are mutated and evolved (their words). They have created enzymes that can make long enough polymers with all six XNA types that do encode genetic information, and they have also engineered reverse transcriptases. These enzymes can accurately replicate genetic information from DNA to XNA and back, but with enough copying mistakes for functions to evolve.

Evolution has entered a phase where it is irrelevant.  No somo nada. (the motto of this blog).  How true!

Tramp Stamp

Israeli Model Eve Tzur. Some say the tattoo is to guide the epidural injection.

Usure: How It Works

The Bundesbank is pushing Europe into bankrupcy. Spanish bonds for recycling its debt were sold yesterday at 6% interest rate. The higher rate they pay, the faster they sink into insolvency. The more insolvent they are, they are forced to pay even higher interest rates to recycle their debts. It is the well know vicious circle of the usure. On the other hand, Germany is getting richer and the richer it is, its interest payments are lower and lower, even negative. People is anxious to give their money to Germany, to the point that they are ready to pay for the privilege. Germany, full of money that cost it nothing, buys Spanish debt that pays 6%. Soon Germany will own Spain, Greece, Italy and the rest. I thought usure was a practice reserved for us Jews. We have competition.

Lukas Bärfuss

Lukas Bärfuss, a Swiss dramatist of the new generation, travelled to Kigali, Rwanda, to research the murderous role of the Swiss in the Huti massacres. Ah! You didnt know that there was a Swiss role! Neither did I. The Swiss have some obscene habits like hoarding gold in subterranean caves, but they dont go around clubbing natives. So this rebel sucks his little finger, invents a story and is voted the best playwright of Europe. His first drama, "Die sexuellen Neurosen unserer Eltern" ("Our Parents' Sexual Neuroses") bravely unmasks his old folks, those sex maniacs. His latest is about The Test. 40% of the paternity tests in Germany show that the father is not biological. A monologue from the drama:

(after describing how he will kill and dismember her)"...I'll be a model for all men who’ve been cheated on, a warning sign for faithless bitches who make their husbands take on some other guy’s brood with a smile, with a purr and with lots of hypocritical talk about family. We went to church. For the christening. She stood at the front, do you remember, she had her progeny baptized, with holy water, and I had to buy a light blue suit, it was a light blue moment. She dissembled before God, and a chasm didn’t open to swallow up this whore, and I’ve got pictures, I can show you them, where she’s laughing her cowardly grin, with the child in her arms. And me. Boy did I ever take pleasure in that grin. A happy woman. And who was responsible for that happiness. I was. With my semen and my steady income and with my up-to-date outlook on modern fatherhood. I bought a little bed, and I bought all the equipment, and I bought a new car, because while the old one was elegant, it wasn’t safe enough for the holy cargo, and I bought toys and I bought a stroller and I bought and I bought and I bought, and I played the father, the loving, caring father..." ..."I wanted to see how a child grows up, and that piece of meat, that hunk of flesh got big and fat, and I sat at his bed when the teeth came, the whole night. Didn’t go to work when he got the measles, mumps, chickenpox, I don’t even remember them all. And I was proud when that slut, that black mark of my love came home in the evening at the end of my day of being a dad and found me exhausted because the boy hadn’t slept at lunchtime and hadn’t left me a free minute, just made noise and screamed for daddy non-stop and, idiot that I am, I thought he meant me."

Not bad at all. He looks Chinese to me.

Mangan's Critique of Israeli standards

Dennis Mangan has a point: Israel is dependent on America's good will, so it is only natural that we are expected to meet American standards of behaviour. And we are not meeting it. That famous video clip of an Israeli officer violently pushing away an unarmed Danish demonstrator proves it.

I discount all our protests that we are the most moral army in the world. I am not sure we are better than others. What I can say with certainty is that we are trying very hard to be up to American moral standards. It is so difficult that even the American Army find it very difficult or impossible to avoid daily scandals of improper behaviour. Just now I read about the circus American media is making around a picture of American soldiers in the front (Afganistan) with dead enemy bodies. Or Secret Service young men meeting working girls. Or the worst media-crime of all, the anonymous Guantanamo guard who is accused of having urinated on a book.

I am not American and live forty years in this Middle East inferno, so it is not surprising that I find American media's standards bizarre to say the least. Grotesque is a better word. And if the American armed forces cannot gain the approval of the American media, how could we? The American army is the best of the world by far and it imposes iron discipline on its members. They are trained to follow clear rules and they do. Anglo-Saxon discipline in war, I think of the old British Navy, is legendary. In comparison, the Israeli army is not even an army but a militia, and my experience confirms that. I would also say that the human quality of the professional American army is higher than our conscripted lumpen-proletariat. That we are losing once and again the media battle against our enemies, which is not a Palestinian child playing the heroic film star throwing stones against a tank, but the international leftist media.

Dennis (Ill.: The Severe Teacher, by Dutch Master Jan Steen) is right that we should expect to be judged according American media's standards. We are trying very very hard, but it seems to me a battle lost before it started. I'm not the first one nor alone discovering that something is wrong with the standards of American (and Israeli) leftist media. They hate us at least as they hate American soldiers and policemen and Secret Service bodyguards, and "White Hispano" volunteer neighborhood watchmen.

I Wish the Best to Our Arab Neighbors

Qatar won the lottery of life and is ranked the richest country on earth. The 250 000 Qatari Arabs live a dream life never having to raise a finger, always attended by 2 million imported servants. Qatar is also our least hostile neighbor. We can co-exist with Qatar.

In addition to their fabulous wealth, Qataris hold two other records: they are the fattest people on Earth, and the most inbred. The Saudis are number two.

Greatness

Larry King: What, Professor, puzzles you the most? What do you think about the most?
Stephen Hawking: Women
Larry King: Welcome aboard.

(via Falkenblog)

The Bundesbank is forcing Europe into Recession

European Union's Draghi is trying to pump up Europe's economy applying the Bernanke formula of monetary easing aka printing money. The Bundesbank, out of sheer economic orthodoxy, is actively hampering the success of the policy. May I quote the Vulgata? Omne regnum in seipsum divisum desolabitur, et domus supra domum cadet. " which I translate as "The Euro is surely doomed." God is American.

Israeli Ethnic Cuisine

Last week I had some leisure and read the food supplement of my wife's favorite satirical paper ("HaAretz") and found recipes based on the local thistle or cardoon. This morning I found a lot of them growing wild in the Bney Re'em area. The cardoon is a native Mediterranean plant but also found in Argentina, where it grows to gigantic size. I had never heard of anyone eating it, on the contrary, in Argentina it was considered an invasive foreign weed. The Israeli cardoon (see pic in the
Ramle Shook) is raquitic and tasteless, and one has to be starving to collect it in the fields, to take the trouble of cleaning it and cook it. Its gastronomic and nutritional value is zero, but it has great potential as a basic ingredient of the newly invented Israeli traditional folk cuisine.

Dont Feed the Animals (of the Israel Gorilla Reservation)

Journalist Zvi Barel writes in the execrable anti-Zionist paper HaAretz that Israel should be treated as any other Ugandan gorilla reservation.

Anyone who wants to visit a gorilla preserve in Uganda, for example, knows what the restrictions are. The visitor must provide a certificate showing that he is not sick, and curious tourists are permitted only to visit in small groups and must leave the preserve in less than 24 hours. Tourists who go to the nature preserves in Tanzania know that it is forbidden to leave their vehicles, to throw food in the direction of the animals or get close to them. Anyone who kills a white polar bear in the snow fields will be brought to trial. There are clear, internationally recognized rules that define which species are threatened and how to preserve them.

Israel is a dangerous preserve and responsible nations should have issued a travel warning for this country long ago, or at least published a detailed guide of what is permitted or forbidden to do here. Which words or sentences induce a warning growl... The guidebook would explain what is likely to cause Israel to bite and which sites the tourist is advised to avoid...

For more than 100 years the Arabs have been wondering how this "Zionist Entity" peopled by this kind of twisted mentally ill individuals survives. Neither I know.

Olive Tree Flowering

This morning, Moshav Yesodot.

'We've Gone Mad'

The Israeli left is experiencing an orgasm of self hate: They have found a suitable object of hate, a Zionist-Religious IDF officer, and they are focusing on him. The man (pic.) was filmed reacting violently to a tall Danish anarchist who excitedly invaded his personal space, facing him from a few centimeters, which signals a challenge all over the animal kingdom. The officer, who was leading his soldiers in the confrontation, reacted instinctively pushing him away. The Dane was unhurt and the Jew broke his finger. The clip became a worldwide sensation, showing Zionist brutality. The journalist Yemini, from Maariv, expects the soldier to be declared a war criminal by the Hague International Court of Justice. Denounced by Israeli leftists, that is. We have adopted our enemy's propaganda and we are fighting its war against us. We've gone mad, he writes.

Reverse Osmosis for the Coffee Machine

Coffee shops in Israel have installed reverse osmosis systems to provide drinking water for the coffee machine. Tap water is not good enough for our exquisite taste buds. This machines's by product is a salty concentrate which is forbidden to dispose in the sewage. It has to be collected and disposed in the sea. If properly permitted.

Why is this?

USToday published today a long note on The Talk with a pic of Trayvon as a cute kid (not this pic) instead the pic as he looked when bashed the head of that small Mestizo. Is the paper trying to intimidate white people? Is the paper trying to cause black riots? Or people want to hear this kind of phantasy? Do they sell more papers? There was a time when Communist papers published these kind of articles, showing how bad was America and capitalism. Today American journals are voicing the Communist propaganda of the Cold War.

Comment on Jim Flynn's last paper

Jim Flynn from Otago U. in New Zeland, the discoverer of the Flynn effect, has published a research paper which includes the city of La Plata, Argentina, whose IQ according to the study has gained 24%  between 1963 and the late nineties. As it usually happens with journalistic articles and also with sociology - psychology research papers, the concept seems plausible ("from 36000 feet" as they say) and I would have believed it uncritically except that I lived six years in La Plata - studied in the La Plata National University, so I am familiar with the population he describes. 

Flynn deals with the population of the city of La Plata as a constant. Yet this is a city founded less than a hundred years ago for administrative purposes (as capital of the province) and its population in the 1960s  was quite different from the 1990s not only in numbers but in quality. This was a period of growth of the university and the provincial administration, and the city more than doubled its population attracting middle class bureaucrats and university staff from Buenos Aires (illustration: Fidel Shaposnik) and the "interior". 

The population of the University (on whose IQ results Flynn's conclusions are based)  had no genetic or social relationship with La Plata's stable population. The university attracted tens of thousands of transitory students from Buenos Aires (the capital), the interior of Argentina and from neighboring countries like Bolivia and Peru. It was totally free and admission was liberal with no entrance exams. The courses were structured so that one could graduate in two-three years or ten years. Student life was cheap and easy. In my time, the University even provided free meals to the students and the streets were planted with fruit-bearing trees. La Plata's attractions included a world-standards hyppodrome, a dynosaur-bones museum and enthusiastic girl-volunteers servicing the student population.
  

It is difficult to make long-term comparisons in countries with fluid populations and in Argentina more than most. It is a very mobile immigrant society, even today, and very free (in the sense that the borders are open and the population is rootless and without ethnic identities). 

Should I conclude that the Flynn Effect is non-existent? I dont know. But I sure have doubts about the 24% increase in the IQ of La Plata's population. 

Stealing Zionist Ideas

From The Economist subscription drive:

Plus, tree will be planted for you in The Economist forest.

For a hundred years, The Keren Kayemet (Jewish National Fund) had a monopoly on that spin.  Then the Palestinian Authority came out with a similar idea in 2011 and now...The Economist! I hope that The Economist Forest is in Israel...!

The Critic

Mel Brooks on French Movies.

Ettinger: My Lost Twin?

Yoram Ettinger writes:

"Global economic, social and educational circumstances make Israel an attractive place for 500,000 "olim" (Jewish immigrants to Israel) during the next decade. .. For the first time, Israel is attracting olim due to economic - not only ideological - considerations. Against the backdrop of global economic meltdown and uncertainty, Israel’s credit rating has been upgraded and its GDP growth exceeds any Western country. Unemployment is 5.4 percent; the national debt is less than 75% of GDP; inflation is at 1-3%; no mega-stimulus; banks are managed with fiscal responsibility; all-time high foreign exchange reserves of $75 billion; the flow of overseas investments is robust; exports are sustained at high levels despite global economic insecurity; high-tech industries are expanding; and the economy is energized by the surging secular Jewish fertility rate, increased aliyah, reduced Jewish emigration, accelerated return by expatriates and growing integration of the ultra-Orthodox community in Israel’s workforce. By 2018, Israel is expected to become a major net-exporter of natural gas and a growing producer of oil and, possibly, shale oil.

Rising anti-Semitism in the Ukraine and in Russia, accompanied by shattered expectations of democracy in the former USSR, is producing an aliyah tailwind among the 750,000 Jews there (according to conservative estimates). .. Weak economies, intensifying anti-Semitism and increasingly assertive and growing Muslim communities in France, England and other European countries have increased the number of olim. Economic insecurity and dramatically expanded, but very costly, Jewish-Zionist education systems (mostly Modern Orthodox) have augmented the aliyah potential from the USA. Jewish-Zionist education is provided, almost free of cost, in Israel."

He is wearing the same white cotton T shirt he has been sleeping in all the week. He carries the menu on his shirt. A twin soul.

Unworkable

The debt situation is hair-raising: "The government borrows more than it raises in taxes, and its debt pile amounts to two years' worth of economic output. Half of the country's tax income goes just to service debt."

Japan.

Koko's Early Movies

It is Erev Hag (Pesach) in Kever Benjamin city and no one is harassing me with angry phone calls demanding why I did not finish the project promised a week ago. I'll spend these rare minutes in pleasurable review of Koko's first movies. Since her debut fighting off airplanes from the top of the Empire State Building, her carreer have been unstoppable. Yet Koko is unhappy because she thinks of herself as a talented Shakespearan actress whose her first success (as a ferocious over-sexed male gorilla) condemned her to always play the same "type". Oversexed she was and is, for sure, but vapid blondes have nothing to fear (or expect) from her. In fact, the hundreds of gorilla B films (watch Nabonga!) that followed her King Kong success left her allergic to blondes as well as very wealthy.

I empathized with Koko from first sight. Watching these old films I see why this was fated: Koko, the Talking Gorilla, with perfect English diction and one-in-a-million histrionic talent, made her millions without ever been allowed to say so much as a word on screen. I too was forced by circumstances to play the square engineer without a chance to publish my witty, mordant satires and to give lectures on my theoretical math elucubrations. We both are rather successful in life, but playing roles that deep down we despise. Like that great actor, singer and dancer who was forced by the rude Pretorian Guard to accept the hated job of Emperor of Rome (and the world), I shall depart saying "What an artist the world is losing in me!"

Haiti: The Coming Cholera Epidemy

The primitive paintings in the living room remind me of beautiful Haiti of years ago. The water magazines say that the Artibonite river has been contaminated by virulent Asian strains of Vibrio cholera introduced by UN Nepalese soldiers. The spring is starting and people is already falling like flies, dying in one or two days. Best to postpone the summer holiday you scheduled in Port-au-Prince.

Turkey-Iran War?

The Alawi nation is now fighting for its life. Turkey has set up a sanctuary on its side of the border that is turning into a base for incursions into Syria. Assad Jr may call in Iran and Lebanon's Hezbollah, so potentially this is a regional armed conflict. It will keep them busy for a while, I hope.

Chickens

Limusaurs. They laid limu-eggs.

Kondratieff Waves

Kondratieff was a Soviet economist who discovered the existence of long term, historical price ondulations. For me, cycles confirm Marxist dialectics but the Stalinists judged it subversive and he was condemned to death. Those were the times...!

Anyway, the world 2012 is going through a large increase of government generated credit with low or negative interest rate (Marc Faber says -5%). At the same time, governments are imposing evermore impossible regulations on every industry. The latest is in the water and food industry, one of the safest industries of all, with deaths per year that can be counted in a hand. This is happening not only in America but the European Union and Israel too. Here, it is becoming very difficult to receive a "food-producer" permit, and the minimum time to get it is a year. The economic cost is enormous and the benefit nil.

Now, what happens in an economy with easy and cheap credit and high regulatory costs and barriers? I think it kills small and mid enterprises, and investment tends to flow into large companies. The trend is to oligopolies and higher prices - inflation. Operative conclusion: Courageously assume loans and invest in large established corporations.

Trapped in the Elevator

Derbyshire was sacked from his job for his note on The Talk.

The Talk is a mythical Black father to son advice about the need to be careful in a dangerous world where the KKK would be waiting for him. Derby's Talk is something of a parody about a White father's advice to his son about the dangers of interacting with Black people. Derby's Talk was considered provocative and he was sacked.

The case shows the limits of public debate on race in America. Blacks are a protected group, not to be offended but flattered and their difficulties in coping with modern life explained away. They should be dealt with as if chance had trapped one in a stuck elevator with a large, drunk, aggressive moron looking for a pretext to start a fight. You cannot open the door and exit, and you are terrified of provoking the drunk. I personally have been in these situations.

Once White people did not fear Blacks. There was even affection between them, like in Huckleberry Finn. But relative power positions have changed.

I haven't met a Black American in five years, so for me the issue is theoretical. Local Blacks - Ethiopians and Erythrean refugees - are few, skinny and harmless.

The Jury Protests

The HaAretz fishwrap helps to increase the caloric value of J's household's solid waste, with the added bonus that, now and then, those black stains on the paper convey thinking material.

I had some time during the holidays so I read its literary supplement with the yearly competition of amateur authors. The jury explains its decisions and adds its literary criticism. This year, they expected an avalanche of revolutionary protest literature related to last summer Tel Aviv occupation against Israel's growing social injustice and the suffocating feeling of living under the boot of the fascist military dictatorship. Yet there were none among the two thousand stories (!) received: most were inane stories of eventless, petty occurances of daily life of unimportant people: they go to work, manage faded love affairs, write stories about nothing at all. No one protested against the lack of oxygen to breath, no one described the torture of sleepless nights trembling under the Iranian nuclear menace that the imperialist occupier brought on us. Not one of the stories dealt with the "nakba" (catastrophe) of the Palestinian nation, nothing about being tortured or torturing in the dark underground corridors of the Russian Compound secret police station. In general, to the amazement and dissatisfaction of the jury, there was no revolutionary or protest literature that could be awarded HaAretz's literary prize.

I understand the jury's disappointment. I know what they, exquisite litterateurs, suffer under this repressive, sanguinary fascist dictatorship, and I know how unbearable is the feeling that the rest of the country - the sheep - is rather happy with the situation. The jury lives through an exciting revolutionary drama, a time of complete defeat and destruction of the country, an era of just uprising of the Palestinian freedom fighters, the luminous Arab Spring, yet two thousand asses submit meaningless, inane stories, forcing HaAretz literary revolutionaries to waste their time reading comformist palaver.

The jury's veredict: Israelis are comformist, worthless sheep. To fulfil the jury's revolutionary expectations, they must be replaced by Lybians and Egyptians. They know how to make an Islamic revolution, how to pose with Russian rockets in heroic pictures and how to produce true anti-Israel material worthy of HaAretz.

Marriage as Patriotic Duty

Emperor Justinian enactment against evasion from public service:

"The public service system has become a sink of iniquity. The more we labored on this problem, the more the senators devised every trick to twarth our right and just enactments and the public interest... Most impious of all, they abstain from marriage and choose rather to die childless than to prove themselves useful to their race and to their senate."

(From Moses Hadas" History of Rome. Ill.: Daily life in the Eastern Roman Empire.)

Kol Dor Ve-Dor (In Each Generation...)

The Haggadah (we just finished reading it) says that in each generation they will rise to annihilate us but God will save us.

Ill.: Malmo, Sweden.

Park in the Planet of the Apes

Lead Poisoning in Ancient Rome

Roman emperors were semi sterile and deranged, a condition attributed to lead water pipes and the use of lead in wine and food conservation, in popular skin whitening creams and everyday objects. Contemporary descriptions of the emperors seem to point to lead poisoning: their pallidity, their lack of children in spite of intense sexual activity (Julius Caesar had only one daughter, Caligula had only one child, yet four wives), tremors, hypomania (severe mood swings), and stomach cramps (Germanicus). About their supposed madness, let's mention the slanderous stories of Calligula promoting his horse to senatorial rank, and Nero burning Rome to create suitable background for his performance of Troy's Fall.

Reading Roman history, one is led to question how much of this eccentricity or craziness is literary exaggeration and how much is reality. Emperors seem to have been formidable intellects: Tiberius Claudius Nero - the Emperor Claudius - went down in history as a half-witted idiot, yet he wrote scholarly texts and even a (now lost) book on game theory ("How to play dice"). Another emperor branded as mad, Nero, was an accomplished actor and musician. Romans were aware of the health effects of lead and knew that their hard water prevented lead pipes to leak metal into the water.

One may also question the lead-sterility connection. The fact is that highly intelligent people tend to have few children and this is enough to explain their sterility. Ancient Greeks, Roman patricians, Chinese and European ruling classes, all tended actively to avoid children. Emperor Hadrian, a very talented man, explained that he contrived his wife Vibia Sabina to have no children because he "didnt want to cause harm to humankind". I'm still thinking what he meant. Another version maintains that it was Sabina who took steps to see she never had children by Hadrian because they would "harm the human race". Obviously, these were no unfeeling proletarians but exquisitely altruist people caring for the environment.

German Anorexia

Without sharing Al Fin blog's apocalyptic tone, its writer's talent should be aknowledged. They coined "German anorexia" to describe Germany's selfinflicted energy scarcity (by relying on renovable sources). Their compulsion is infecting everything. Egg prices doubled when the 1999 directives for hen confort became law, requiring producers to switch to "enriched" cages offering chickens more space, bedding and perches. Foods made with eggs are dearer: Even non-anorectic Germans are giving up afternoon coffee with Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte.

Germans are so affected by self-starvation that they are saving water to the point that today, Berlin's sewage flows are insufficient to wash away their excrements. Sewage pipes are designed to ensure the "self-cleaning flow velocity" and today's flow is not enough. Consequences are twofold: excrement accumulates and clogs underground pipes, and the smell above ground level is unsufferable. But resourceful Berlin waterworks are solving the problem: They are injecting perfume into the pipes, and each morning they pump 500,000 cubic meters of clean drinking water to wash away the solids.

Singing the Enemy's Tune

HaAretz's Culture and Literature Supplement. Front page. Poem by Aharon Shabtay. "The Consolation of War."

The coming war is bad
because a child may die
his name is Yohay
he is sitting in the balcony
when it explodes on him
and his mother's arm will be thorn
or maybe she will only be hurt.
But there is consolation in war
with all the sorry for the child Yohay
chances are we shall suffer complete defeat
...
and we shall be once again human beings
...
What can one say? Beautiful sentiments and good wishes, like defeat and killing of Jewish children. Happy Pessach from our poets.

Global Warming: A Program

Fishwrap HaAretz proposes a comprehensive program to reverse Global Warming:
(1) Breed smaller humans. They need less energy.
(2) Implant genetic meat-intolerance in the lactose-intolerance model. Animal husbandry pollutes.
(3) Oxytocin in the drinking water. The hormone makes people more sociable and altruistic.
(4) Electric stimulation of the brain. Free recharging stations in the streets. It will increase IQ, and as the fishwrap notes, higher IQ people has few or no children, unburdening Earth from human pests. so forth.

Ill.: Waterworld, the nightmarish future if we dont follow HaAretz's advise.

Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Faggoths

We know from Roman sources (Caesar, The Gothic Wars) that the Gothic invasions caused Rome's decline and collapse. Yet no text in the Gothic language survived, and we have no authentic statue or picture of a Goth. Prof. G.B. raided with his students a Goth burial mound and extracted genes which he injected into a human oocite. The experiment produced a centaur (a Goth's horse genes were mistakenly extracted) and also two humanoids (pic) identified as belonging to the Fag-Gothic tribe. Interestingly, they pronounced the proto-Indo-European ablaut calling themselves "gute-gute".

Dont Invest in Argentina

Repsol, the Spanish oil corporation, bought YPF when it was privatized. Bad decision. The Argentine government has decided to expropiate YPF because Repsol ... it is not important what it did or didnt do.

No Time for Idle Thoughts

My enemy is depression, despair, sadness. Idleness breeds idle thoughts and depression. You don't want to do anything. You just want to lie in the bed or just sit on a chair.

To fight depression I keep myself very busy, overworked. I accept more projects than I can ever do and the clients keep pestering me. I assume debt and invest in the stock exchange. I manufacture real worries to push the phantoms back.