Shlomi Cohen Recommends TSEM and ORCKIT

Shlomi Cohen is a well known Israeli analyst and columnist. People lost much money following his advice, among them, myself. But he is persistent. Once more he advises ORCKIT a communication hardware company. Once its price was 140 $/share, today is about 3 $. Its sales are about 20 million $, like a small supermarket. Its CEO, Itzik Tamir, is promising (as he did in the last five years) that large clients are just about to buy its products. Lets hope so.

Tower is a chip fab with 600 million $ debt, that continues to lose money - although less than before. Russell Allwanger the mormon CEO says that he only plans but the results come from God. Anyway, the share rised from 0.13 $ to about 1.2 $. Shlomi toured the plant, loved dressing up as an astronaut but observed little except that there were empty spaces in the floor and more machines could be crowded in. Lets hope that they will continue growing.

Follow Up (March 1st.): Orckit up 12%, TSEM up 5%. There are rumors that there is a fight for control within Orckit, and that TSEM is about to make a purchase - another chip company.

Follow Up II (March 2nd.): Orckit up 20%, TSEM up another 4.5%. What can one say?

Unnecessary Crisis

While squeezing my mind to finish this Yedioth Aharonoth newspaper printshop plan, it ocurred to me that the 2008/9 world financial crisis was totally unnecessary. It all started with the realization that house prices in the USA were falling, and in many cases the mortgage was higher then the house's market value. Suddenly there was fear that the mortgage holders, especially the poorer ones, will stop paying their debts. According my calculations then, the amount in question was about 300 million dollars. But fear spread because the mortgages had been packaged and distributed worldwide - suddenly no one knew how much their "packet" was worth. American government forced the banks to declare how much they were about to lose and they could not do it because no one knew how much the "packets" were worth. Any "packet" that had even a minimum of doubtful mortgages was considered lost and billions were put apart to cover those potential losses. Suddenly the banks were considered broke and panic ensued. Wall Street banks lost the faith of the public and the government and giant Merryl collapsed overnight. To relax the stress, American government poured 900 billion dollars into the banks, but people is so full of fear and anxiety that they are buying gold and burying in the garden.

We are two years after the initial panic, and it appears that the fucked Americans whose mortgages are worth more than their houses are different from Wall Street financiers and are paying their debts. The panic was unnecessary, Americans and even the lumpen are basically decent folks that pay their debts. If the government, instead of demanding transparency from the banks, had let them work out the problem in a fog and ambiguity, the thing would have passed unnoticed. Alternatively, if the government would have quietly guaranteed the 300 million dollar doubtful debts, mostly incurred within the framework of government inducement, the banks would have never collapsed. So instead of offering a silent guarantee for 300 million, the government had to pay out 900 billion and sell off the next American generation into lifelong debt servitude to the Chinese. The imbeciles lost from sight the fact that all the banks are in technical bankrupcy all the time, that the thing that makes the world go on is the faith that things are stable and secure, that they are led by smart and honest individuals. When the Government fails to maintain this illusion, chaos and panic follows. unnecessary chaos and panic. Wars have been lost because of these nervous crisis.

Furuike ya

Furuike ya
kawazu tobikomu
mizu no oto



Fu-ru (old) i-ke (pond) ya,
ka-wa-zu (frog) to-bi-ko-mu (jumping into)
mi-zu (water) no o-to (sound)

The old pond;
A frog jumps in –
The sound of water.

This is the most famous haiku (by Basho). Here is another by Shiki:

余命いくばくかある夜短し

yomei
ikubakuka aru
yo mijikashi

My remaining days
are numbered
a brief night

Shiki says we should not give any deep interpretation to haiku, it is simply a feeling. This one was written a moment ago, contemplating the wet streets after the rain:

Angry client
Wants to build.
Finish that plan!

Morning will be dry.
J writing haiku.
The Plan!

The operation succeeded, the patient is dead.

Robert Baer, a former CIA agent, speculates about where the Dubai hit went wrong.

The assassins failed to account for the marked advance in technology. Not only were there closed-circuit TV cameras in the hotel where Mr. Mabhouh was assassinated and at the airport, but Dubai has at its fingertips the best security consultants in the world. The consultants merely had to run advanced software through all of Dubai's digital data before, during and after the assassination to connect the assassins in time and place. For instance, a search of all cellular phone calls made in and around the hotel where Mr. Mabhouh was assassinated would show who had called the same number—reportedly a command post in Vienna. It would only be a matter then of tracking when and where calls were made from these phones, tying them to hotels where the team was operating or staying.

Strange that all these was not taken into account.

How to manage Jews?

I think the most phenomenal success of the Jewish mind in my generation was the atomic bomb, which was developed almost paralelly in the USA and in the Soviet Union. In both cases, it was done by Jews but not for the Jews.

America in the late forties faced the problem of how to get a large group of Jewish geniuses in maths and physics, most of them foreign born and of rather dubious loyalty, much more intelligent and cultured than the loyal native American manpower that the Goverement had, to build a nuclear weapon for the American military. And fast. If one thinks of it, it was a very difficult management problem of creative human resources.

The Americans took them all to Los Alamos in the remotest desert. They choose as project leader an American Jewish physicist, Oppenheimer, supplied them with unlimited resources and let them work. Nominally, the project was controlled by a stolid carreer soldier (Lt Cnel Leslie Groves, pic) and the camp was guarded by soldiers. Soon the main entertainment of the creative talents was to write complicated letters that the censure couldnt understand, they invented fake Communist conspiracies, they organized "illegal" tours in the neighborhood, Richard Feynman took to break in to top secret safes just for the sport of it, in short, they found it innocent and funny to subvert military discipline - they were ungovernable. To Groves, son of a military chaplain, the behaviour of whole bunch must have been absolutely disgusting. Yet he managed the project to its successful completion, there was no sabotage and all the Jews came out in one piece and full of fame and money, and the bomb won the war.

Years after the details are coming out and there we know that there had been several Communist circles inside the camp, that they were conspiracies and rivalries, that secrets were leaked to the Russians. All was known to the military managers, yet they let them work and conspire.

The Russians managed the same problem in a different way. According to Sacharov, they built TWO science cities in the far Siberian nowhere, and they provided all the resources (while the country was suffering famine) and they put all under the civilian secret police. One of the teams was predominantly Jewish, the other one native Russian, The NKDV created an environment of secrecy, fear and terror, people was arrested at midnight and accused of sabotaging the project, and the politically dubious ones disappeared. Details from the Manhattan Project were acquired by Russian spies and were forwarded in a very controlled way. No one knew what the other team was doing. Yet the Jewish team succeeded in completing the project in only two or three years after the Americans.

But no fame nor money awaited the Russian Jews. The legend tells that when Ghengis Khan died, a thousand Mongols dammed a river to bury him in the river bed with his gold, weapons, concubines, servants and horses, and then destroyed the dam so no one will ever find the grave. Returning from the ceremony, the thousand were entrapped and slaughtered, so the secret would never be revealed. In the same way, Stalin made sure that no one of the creators of the Russian bomb would return to civilization. Once I met an old Russian immigrant, an intelligent hunchback like Mendelsohn with many medals from WWII, who lived alone in Israel. His only son had had something to do with the Russian nuclear program and would never be allowed to leave Russia.

No doubt, America is a better country for Jews that Russia.

Engineering Earth's Thermostat

The discovery of the climate change fraud has emboldened the oil industry. Hydrocarbon Processing, a technical magazine I am suscribed to, publishes a ferocious attack by Pierre L. Latour on the idea that anthropogenic CO2 has anything to do with climate change. As a chemical process engineer, used to control closed systems, Latour reviews the concept that manipulating the atmosphere's CO2 concentration will affect its temperature. He says no way. Solar radiation drives CO2 conentration, not the reverse. Sun warms up the atmosphere reducing CO2 solubility in the oceans so there is more atmosphere. Man generates 30 billion tons of CO2 per year, plants consume 7 trillion. At higher temperature, plants are more active and consume more CO2.

Is the hothouse effect, positing that Earth's radiation to outer space decreases as the atmosphere's temperature increases, true? Impossible, he says, that goes against Stefan-Bolzmann Law.

Another article describes the collapse of the ethanol fuel industry in the US and in Europe. The subsidies are being discontinued and the industry cannot compete. Maybe new sources of ethanol like algae or cellulose will reduce its price, but not before.

I sold my BAZAN refinery shares at a 30% loss because I thought that the oil refining business has no future. Since then it is slowly rising. Am I - once more - wrong?

Tower Semiconductors

I made 50% on TSEM in less than a month and it is still steaming ahead. Two years ago I lost money with TSEM and sold it, although I always had faith in its CEO, an imported American mormon professional manager. He took a highly indebted chip fab in a crime-infested little town in Israel and turned it around. Amazing! The case study of TSEM seems to confirm my thesis that we Jews do our best under WASP leadership. They have a kind of solidity that we lack.

Tension in West and Central Asia

Turkey is the leader of the Turkish peoples that control the large strip of land from the Mediterranean to Western China. It is also a key ally of Israel. These days the traditionally Western/secular orientation of the country is being challenged. The Islamic Government is trying to weaken/destroy the Armed Forces, which are secular/anti-islamic. Ex-Navy and Air Force chiefs Özden Örnek and İbrahim Fırtına, and the Special Forces former chief Ergin Saygun, have been arrested in relation to the “Balyoz” (Sledgehammer) coup plot seven years ago. The plot allegedly involved plans to bomb mosques and seems totally imaginary. Many soldiers are already in jail in relation to Ergenekon network, which is accused of planning to foment unrest to provoke a military coup. The probe’s credibility has waned as police began arresting journalists, writers and academics known to be AKP critics, sparking accusations that it has degenerated into a campaign to silence the secularist opposition.

An Islamic Turkey will signify the realignment of Central Asia up to West China, and more problems for the Americans in Afganistan.

Tzuck Tamroor 4: We Hit a Gusher!

So we have oil and I am not invested in it.

: - (

Now the question is: Should we join the OPEC?

Teamwork in Dubai

The Chief of Dubai's Secret Police made his Ph.D. dissertation in detection (a way of saying) on the liquidation of one of Israel enemies, Mah'booh something, and then left to Mecca on peregrination. He published the passport pictures of 26 suspects of being members of the Mossad team that participated in the successful operation (pic: one of them). Two of them left Dubai towards Iran. Iran? I used to think that these things are done by one or two agents, not by large teams, but what do I know? I am glad that we have these people and we are actively fighting (and killing) our enemies.

Caucasian Bakery Closed

I spent the day in Natania. I had an "emergency call" by a bakery of Caucasian bread in the town's central market that has been closed by local Health Authorities. The pic shows the mold on the walls in the flour deposit. The owner had covered the walls with super-antifungus paint but the mold was returning and spreading. The Kavkazi Jew and her daughter were solemn and dead serious, I tried to improve the atmosphere and connect to them, but these people has absolutely no sense of humor and were in no mood of smiling. I called Natalia to translate on the phone: the mold loves darkness and humidity, and the deposit had no windows nor ventilator opening. They had built it without municipal permit, and they feared it would be noticed from the outside. I proposed vents and windows on the ceiling, but it had been built so incompetently that it may collapse if tampered with. He gave me a large Caucasian bread to taste, and I was so hungry that ate it in the drive to Kever Benjamin. It felt like a block of cement in the stomach and I wondered: Was he still secretly baking bread? Was the bread infested by the toxic mold and its spores? Or is it that Caucasian bread always produce that feeling in the stomach? It took a few hours, but by now it has been digested and I feel better. I should never eat outside.

The good thing is that I am starting to be known as a consulting engineer who "has solutions, will travel". I am having much more work than I can do. Also the semester has started and I teach five courses!

The Europeans Want to Enjoy Life

Spanish demography makes it imperative that people retire older. Today, the retirement age in Greece is 63 and in Spain 65. The proposal to make it 67 is provoking street demonstrations (pic.: Barcelona). I see it as a sign of national decadence. Europeans refuse to work, to study Maths, to serve in the army, to have children.

Reality's judgment will be fast and inexorable.

Eggs: The Environmental Issues

This morning I had to change my schedule and find a solution to the environmental issues of a large egg classifying plant. The regulators gave them till the end of the month to produce a mitigation program, and procrastinating as we always do, it is now the last minute. Broken eggs and water produce all kind of aromatic volatiles that stink in summer. The wastewater has very high content of sulphurated proteins, and our regulators demand wastewater of the quality of destilled water. I thought a wetland treatment plant would be necessary, but the owner insists that the plant uses almost no water, ergo, there is zero discharge of wastewater, ergo no need for nothing. Ergo, J is a troublemaker, invents inexistent problems. Let see if the regulators believe the story. Life is difficult.

Hungary Surprises Me

Maybe Hungary has changed and my inherited prejudices against the Hungarian people may be obsolete and wrong. Hungary's parliament has passed a bill making Holocaust denial punishable by up to three years in prison. The bill was submitted by Attila Mesterhazy, the prime ministerial candidate of the governing Socialist Party, by 197-1. This law makes of Hungarian Jews something of a protected ethnic minority. They changed; am I able to change? Yes.

The Slivki Problem

This morning I visited a cake factory that uses enormous quantities of slivki - Russian sweet cream. The grease sticks to the municipal sewage pipes and produces obturations. The owner was unfriendly: I know how to make cream cakes, you are the expert in whatever the municipality wants from me. He hates the very idea of having to spend money in something doesnt bother him. I have to think something, as a regular sized FOG interceptor will not be effective enough. The cream is composed of the higher-butterfat layer skimmed from the top of milk before homogenization. It has about 50% butterfat and has thickening agents and stabilisers added. This malevolent white gooey will not separate from the water and it sticks to the pipes.

This slivki (sweet cream) (and not smetana as I originally wrote) is a headache - and I love it too much. (Thanks to K. for the correction: it is slivki and not smetana, which is sour cream).

Escaping from the Superego

There is this young Russian architect from Ashqelon called Natalia. She is intelligent and hardworking, and calls me when she needs help in some special water problem. We work through telephone and the internet (autocad mostly), and in dozens of projects, we never had the opportunity to meet. In our long phone consultations I tried to turn to personal issues: are you married? do you have children? and so on, but she politely stays focused on the professional matter. On Friday, I sent her a mail with some project drawing and added that I am attaching my pic (above) so she can recognize me if we happen to meet.

She was supposed to call me yesterday but she didnt, so today I called her. Her voice had changed, she sounded inhibited and stammering like a teenager, she was unable to focus her mind and answer me cooly and profesionally as she always does, she was - obviously - under heavy emotional stress. The girl was feeling something toward "me"!

Of course I told her that it had been a joke, the person in the pic is the actor Gregory Peck and not me, I am a fat old fart. I felt her confusion. She murmured something and closed the phone.

I thought I was making an innocent prank, but she was hurt. Why did I do it? I dont know. After an active life, I have left the scene to the young, and I am now retired. My eyes and imagination still may be hungry, but I realize that I wouldnt know what to do if given the chance. Yet, my inner J escapes and makes me do these things.

Jo Reggelt, Salomon Uram

After thirty years living in Kever Benjamin village, I know all the people in my street. I used to greet in Hungarian ("Jo reggelt, Uram", Good Morning, Sir") the owner of an old shop, habitually standing at the door when not bended over a low table engraving medals and trophies. This morning the shop was closed with a note announcing that Mr Solomon will be put to rest tomorrow in the New Kever Benjamin cemetery, called "The Garden of Life". Traditionally, Jewish cemeteries are called "The House of the Living". The next door shop is also closed, its owners died some time ago. They were twins, two small - almost midget - Hungarian women, with tattooed numbers in their forearms, of Mengele's twins. There were old and unfriendly, and I never had a conversation with them. Marinel's watchmaking shop under the staircase is also closed. The neighborhood is changing.

Deflationary pressures

From the press:

The prices of US goods and services, excluding food and fuel, fell last month for the first time since 1982, as aggressive measures to stimulate economic growth failed to inflate the cost of living.

This is bad. The only solution to world indebtness is controlled inflation. If people starts to save instead of consuming, the world may spiral down into a prolonged depression. Then, war will be the way out.

The cost/benefit of Gold

My Austrian bond paid off on Dec. 31 and since then I am working out what to do. Bonds are risky these days, should I go for something linked to gold?

In the very long term, gold is the worst of all investments. If you bought $1 worth of gold in 1801, by 2001 you'd have $14 worth of gold. That's pretty pathetic for an investment of two centuries. If you had put that dollar into a U.S. government bond, you'd have $14,000 in 2001. If you had put it into stocks, you'd be worth $9 million.

So what is the rational of buying gold? It can be profitable as a short-term speculative move in times of intense economic drama like now. Inflation is a certainty. Governments are printing so much money that it cannot but reduce the value of all assets: money (inflation), real estate and bonds. An asset that can't just be created has an upside. Gold meets that criterion.

Gold doesn't generate returns, but in today's environment, forgoing interest payments on bank deposits or dividends on stocks has a rather low cost.

One interesting point in historical series is the silver/gold ratio (how many ounces of silver is equivalent to one ounce of gold). In times of peace and prosperity, one can buy 30 - 50 ounces of silver for one of gold. In times of war and anxiety, like during WWII, you need 70 and more ounces of silver to buy one ounce of gold. We are now, historically, in a period when gold is valued (ratio of 70). Rich people and rich nations are nervious and expect difficult times ahead. Bad omen.

Buying gold implies pessimism: the world we knew has ended and we are facing another cycle of misery and pain. I just cannot accept that. Illustration: Nazi gold.

Moving Forward in the Cloud Field

Increasingly, cloud computing is becoming an Israeli field. Other countries are having problems understanding and making money from it. CA's newly appointed CEO is in Israel looking to buy knowledge and people "to provide us with the capabilities to move forward in the cloud field." Maybe I should try to look at this thing that is happening under my nose in Kever Benjamin Village and its surroundings.

The War in Yemen

America increasingly views the conflict developing in the Saudi - Yemen border as a fight with Iran. In a region mired in conflicts with Iran, Yemen would appear to be the latest battleground. In the coming weeks, the United States is slated to boost its 200-strong Special Forces training contingent already in Yemen. U.S. soldiers be targeted by the Houthis—based on a January 14 fatwa against foreign troops signed by 150 non-Houthi clerics including a member of parliament. Not a dull moment in Middle Earth, sorry, Middle East.

The Gold Ring of Courage

I went to the bank to learn about bonds. They recommended Black Rock (formerly Barclays), General Electric and other large corporation's long term bonds. Sovereign bonds - they said no, it is riskier than large corporations. What about American bonds? They are going to be downgraded. What? Yes, Americans are indebted no less than the Greeks. So now that is official. If Israeli Banks lose faith in American sovereign debt, yields will increase and bond prices will go down. Therefore this is not a good time to buy bonds. What about gold? George Soros is buying gold. It is the ultimate store of value. If American T bonds collapse, what will be still standing? Gold. Fucking pessimists. Should I buy American Corporate A or B bonds?

Black Rock has elaborated lectures for their clients. They write that "fat tails" are only the sum of two Gaussian distributions. Idiots. They identify four portfolio management strategies = the best is the "Prophetic". Oy.

Illustration: The Gold Ring of Courage, with kabbalistic protective inscriptions. I use no rings because I have seen a work accident where a machine cought a ring and the man's finger turned into a naked bone protruding from his hand.

Kanda The Great

With simple binary choices, Kanda the Great, a gorilla in the Dallas Zoo, has done better than a panel of local sportswriters in picking the winners of pro football games.

I feel so humiliated. No somos nada. We are nothing. IQ is a lie, beauty an illusion.

Why not let Greece to go broke?

I dont really understand the preoccupation the Greek crisis is causing. Greece cannot pay its debt, cannot maintain social services nor pay public employees, it is broke. So what? Let it sink till they reform. There will be demonstrations on the street. So what? Why is this bad for the Euro?

Now I understand: European banks hold $235 billion Greek debt. Greek default will lead to another worldwide financial crisis.

Privileged traders

A trading firm put a large sell order on TASE this afternoon, with an upper limit of 0.01 shekel. The prices of the stocks sold suddenly fell to 0.01 shekel (- 99% of the starting price, in some cases) and the stock exchange collapsed. After many millions of shekels changing hands, TASE computer automatically shut down the market. Now they are working on unmaking those trades. I dont know if they have a legal basis to do that. Orders are orders and they should be paid even if the trade was done by mistake. If not, everyone can claim back their losses from unlucky bets. There cannot be so privileged traders in a market.

IQ is a Negative Risk Factor

Having a high IQ prevents heart disease (Reuters). IQ ranked above having ‘healthy’ levels of blood pressure and physical exercise in preventing heart disease. The result is no surprise: low IQ people feeds on fried chicken and Coke while smart people eats roastbeef with the fat and drinks vodka Finlandia.

More Contracts

Yesterday and today I received six new projects. The economy is heating up: the Central Bureau of Statistics today reported that Israel's GDP grew by 4.4% at an annual rate in the fourth quarter of 2009. Also TASE rised today. I bought a large piece of Brasilian beef and boiled it in a pressure cooker. I succeeded in eating a mouthful before my wife returned home and took it away. She hates passionately animal fat.

Update: NASDAQ is exploding. Credit Suisse + 6%, Orckit +5%, Internet Gold +6%. Optimism and faith in the future is returning. The bulls are stampeding.

Slaughterhouse Closed

A large poultry slaughterhouse called Hel Yaska Ltd. in Or Yehuda was closed by the Ministry of Environment. The place was using 1500 ton salt per year, had no treatment facilities so its untreated wastewaters were flowing into the Ayalon River, the one that crosses Tel Aviv. This place is a competitor of the slaughterhouse I advised (and saved) last year. It is a pity they did not hire me; now I am looking for a contact to offer my services.

According to the sentence (that was published), the slaughterhouse's representative is Dr. Chen Saliternik, whom I know for the least twenty years. The slaughterhouse was required to build a manhole on the main pipe connecting the slaughterhose to the municipal sewage network, but they built it on a lateral line. The idea is to allow the installation of a conductivity registering electrode (to measure salinity) but it is useless. Additionally, they were supposed to submit continuous printouts which they never did. Moreover, they were supposed to submit the sea outfall disposal permit, and they did not even start filling the form.

AVATAR from the Palestinian Vantage Point

From the Happy Arab News Blog:

One thing that I would like to address here are claims by some people, clearly made to embarrass us, Israelis, that the Palestinians are the Na-vis of the Middle East oppressed by our hi-tech neo-colonialist mini-empire. These claims are very wrong. Based on my experience with Bedouins, who are the closest approximation the local Arabs have to the alien noble savages of Cameron, I can confirm that these guys have zero appreciation for animal lives and nature and an elevated capacity for cutting through living flesh. I can easily imagine one of these guys, in case he needs a leg of a goat or something, tearing the leg off and going away without even caring to finish off the hysterical animal.

If you really want to see the Na`vis of the Middle East, you should visit one of Tel Aviv's Sushi bars and vegetarian restaurants. There you will find throngs of Na`vis vigorously sharing with each other their wholistic connection to the nature and passionately worshiping their rat sized dogs. They are the Na`vis of the Middle East, and not the Palestinians. In the local slang these people are even called "koksinelim", which is Hebrew for Na'vi.

I find it hilarious.

Global Warming's Demographic Impact

Apparently, global warming is destroying the productivity of the agriculture in vast areas of the world, among them the Middle East. Consequently, the migration to cities is intensifying. Since urban lifestyles are detrimental for human reproduction, and no city is sustaining its population except by continuous reinforcement from the countryside, the implosion of Middle East population is becoming more and more probable. I think that about 2025 Jewish population growth in Eretz Israel will be larger than Palestinian Arab growth.

The operational consequence of that we should be ready to take over the agricultural lands that the Palestinians will soon be leaving. A revealing fact is that the fully developed (water, road, etc. infrastructure) agricultural lands we abandoned in Gaza (Gush Katif), that supplied Europe with fresh flowers and vegetables in winter, have not been settled by Palestinians till now. The type of agriculture I see is extensive winter barley. In the pic above they collecting barley hay for roughage - all at a very unmechanized level of technology. In the other pic a barley field has been burned out because of a lowlying electrical cable accident (I hope no one was electrocuted). Looking at these pictures (from a Palestinian propaganda blog) the contrast with the hothouses and packing barns that were in the same area under Israeli occupation and what it is today is shocking. But what is even more shocking is the emptyness of the land, absolutely incredible when we consider that the Gaza Strip is one the most densely populated area in the world, something like 22,000 persons per square kilometer (about 25 in the US).

America's Cup won by Oracle

The trimaran Oracle-BMW won the traditional Cup of America race. The boat is a fluid dynamics marvel. I'd enjoy designing sail boats instead of water supply networks. I am starting to teach next week. The semester has started.

Relatives

One of my daughters is getting married and I am writing invitations. We have very few relatives so I am phoning and asking for addresses of faraway relatives. We used to be in contact with Zsupa (pronunced something like Djuppah) a nice old couple in a kibbutz. They came to the mandatorial Palestine as young Communist Zionist pioneers, and were living in an old derelict wooden shack in a semi-flooded corner of the kibbutz, with old standard furniture of kibbutzim seventy years ago. They had big blond daughters with doctorates who lived elsewhere. One of the daughters was married to a man who worked in the police or something like that. Later I saw his pic in the paper in some stupid scandal and learned that he had been the top security person in this country. They invited us to lunch some times and the man never said a word. It was rather strange but excentric people are our specialty.

I am coming to the point. I asked for Zsupa's real name and postal address. Zsupa's real name was Mahmood Jabbar Bin Djaldjuliyyah Al-Arabi (that is not the real name, but something very similar, so you get the idea). Doubting my ears asked again and then wondered how come this small Hungarian Jew calling himself Mahmood Jabbar Al Arabi ("Big Mohammed The Arab")? Well, it appears that Third Aliyah pioneers affected Arab folk dress and extra Arabic Arab names, in some kind of declaration of communist universal love among the peoples (see pic. Those ferocious looking Arabs are from the HaShomer Zionist Organization in the early twenties). Like me, he had only daughters, so he will be the sole Al Arabi on my genealogical tree.

Get your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape

Almost. I almost said it today.

Then I realized that it would be unbehooving.

I am no Charles Heston.

KOOR makes money for me

Koor Industries Ltd. (TASE:KOR) holds 35.39 million Credit Suisse shares and will record income in the second quarter of nearly NIS 250 million from a Credit Suisse dividend. J holds X shares of Koor and will record a nice income too. A Chinese cookie said that Ms J may receive a surprise present.

Las Malvinas Son Argentinas

Having attacked the Falkland Isles (Las Malvinas) and been effortlessly defeated by the Royal Marines, Argentina continues compulsively in its self-destruction. Argentina declared sovereign bankrupcy a couple of years ago and paid 30 cents for each dollar of debt. The Holders of about 20 billion dollars did not accept the arrangement and are demanding full repayment. Barclays is one of the banks advising the Argentine Central Bank how to solve this problem. Now, populist movement is building up against the negotiations, because Barclay is an English Bank and English firms are searching for oil in the Falklands, with Barclay being involved in its financing. Argentine nationalist want to boycott British banks that want to help them to manage their finances. Conclusion: Only fools invest in Argentina.

The Scandium Start Up

Tim Worstall thinks that a small scandium extraction plant would be profitable. There are tailings in Australia and Russia with extractable scandium. It is not unobtainium (the Na'vi will not fight for it), and it has growing industrial applications.

Menashe Kadishman

He is a well known Israeli painter. The work is valued at 1500 US$.

Nigerian Oil starting to Flow

The new President of Nigeria Goodluck Jonathan is an Eke Igbo from Rivers State, a deeply Christian people. They are I think the most educated and best looking of the Africans. It has been suggested that Goodluck (married to Patience) is a founding and active member of MEND, the armed organization that is blackmailing oil companies and blocking the country's oil production. In the end, the Ibo are ruling Nigeria and the oil flow. 40 years after the civil war, Nigeria can increase its oil production. The price of oil will go down.

Elisha Kally on God

I spent a few months sharing an office with Elisha Kally after he had been demoted from TAHAL's chief engineer position. At that time, he was marginalized and exiled to the Latin American Dept. He was introverted and I was, as always, super-busy with my personal projects, so we never really had a conversation. In the seventies, he had been the head of the Nicaraguan mission and my boss for a whole year, but he left me alone totally unmanaged. I remember that he was not appreciated by the locals, who said he may be a good engineer (they were not sure) but shouldnt be allowed to have any managerial position. He gave me his short book "The Battle for Water" where he describes Israel's largest and most exciting project - the National Water Carrier - so boringly that I could never finish it. He died a few days ago at 84.

I discovered that on Oct.7, 1995 he wrote a letter to HaAretz, of all things, about the existence of God. I translate:

The God of the Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yoseph created the world in six days during he worked hard day after day creating plants (the Second Day) and animals (Third and Fourth Days). The God of Professor Leibovitch created a mechanism that brought about all the above with no haste (in millions of years) - automatically. Without deciding which of the two is more sensible, Prof. Leibovitch's automatic creation mechanism is more sofisticated, more interesting, and more godly. It has only one problem: it makes God superfluous.

Since Newton we know that God is not necessary in physics, and since Darwin we know that the origination of species takes place without the intervention of God. In other words, if God exists, he set the management of the world on "automatic pilot" making his intervention unnecessary and probably impossible. The question of the existence of God has no practical meaning, it demands no solution and can be left unanswered forever.

Carnaval Time

Montevideo has the best carnaval. It started yesterday and I am here working on AIRMOD. Pfuiia!

The aborted and the unconceived

The mysterious phenomenon of depopulation is starting to worry European governments. Even Richard Hoste writes about it. Vladimir Simkhovich explains the decay of Greece and Rome by agricultural decay, the soil lost its fertility for lack of rotation. I am not so sure that the problem was lack of technical knowledge. Spengler explains the decay by loss of the will to live, the obscure elan vital. Hedonism or return to paganism cannot be the cause, as the childless people I know work not less than the religious ones. It is probable that I will not find the answer to this problem.

Is Compugen Right for Me?

I doubled my investment in Internet Zahav and am searching for the next hit. There is this small pretentious outfit in Herzliya that starts its presentation as follows:

Compugen’s mission is to be the world leader in the discovery and licensing of product candidates to the drug and diagnostic industries under milestone and revenue sharing agreements. The Company’s increasing inventory of powerful and proprietary discovery platforms is enabling the predictive discovery – field after field – of numerous therapeutic and diagnostic product candidates.

Modesty is not their forte. The thingie has never sold anything and has no income at all, and lives on start up money and great hopes. Yet, the market values it in half a billion dollars.

TASE is attracting foreign capital

From Globes and it needs no commentary:

Many Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) traders and investors are undoubtedly asking themselves why the Tel Aviv 25 Index is divorced from its international peers. Representatives of key foreign investors told ''Globes'' that the main reason for the disengagement is apparently activity by two hedge funds, among the largest of mid-sized funds, one US and the other European, which have decided to divert funds to Israel and increase their positions on the TASE. One of the reasons for this is the relative strength of the Israeli economy during the global crisis, and its relatively quick exit from recession compared with other Western economies.

Each of the two hedge funds are investing $100 million a day in TASE-listed securities. The figure is about one-third of the daily active investment in Tel Aviv 25 shares, and the two funds will probably continue this activity in the upcoming trading days. The effect is clear: support for the Tel Aviv 25 Index in the short and medium term.

The Bottom Line of David Meister

David Meister, the guru of professional services firms, decided to retire. He resumes thirty years of giving advice:

First, be someone others count on. Clients come to you because they have a situation they cannot solve on their own. They want you to solve a problem. So solve it, don’t add to their problem by being hard to find, by missing deadlines, or by simply describing their problem back to them.

Second - be an interesting person. Read books, go to movies, be part of politics, go to lectures. You’ll meet people, you’ll be able to talk about things that other people find interesting, and you won’t burn out on your job.

Look out for yourself. Nobody cares about you like you do except maybe your parents, and you won’t be working for them. My late and very wise father used to tell me to not worry about what people were thinking about me, because they weren’t. They were thinking about themselves.

Determination matters. It matters more than intellect. The streets are littered with directionless geniuses with unexecuted good ideas. . Woody Allen had it pretty dead on when be said that 90% of success is simply showing up. You won’t suddenly have a great career. Nobody ever does. The secret is simple- great careers are the result of day after day deciding to do good work and being someone who others count on.

Be enthusiastic. Clients want to do things - they don’t call you so they can not do things. They want to stay in the borders of the law, but they want to be told how to do what they want to do.

Trust yourself. You are a very bright person or you wouldn’t be here today. I think among the most important conclusions I came to as a young lawyer was that if I didn’t understand something, it was because the thing in fact didn’t make sense, not because I was stupid.

Clients will say they want a tough son of a gun to make somebody life’s miserable, a real bulldog, etc. Don’t be that person. Bullies are jerks, they wreck the profession for everyone, and you can beat them every time.

China is Buying Stock

An important information has surfaced: China Investment Corp., the PRC's $200-billion (U.S.) sovereign wealth fund, has been quietly buying shares on the NASDAQ, pushing up prices. CIC has been accumulating stakes in resource firms including Canada's Kinross Gold Corp. and Potash Corp. China is the world's largest commodity buyer and part of the fund's mandate is to invest directly in materials producers to offset China's costs.

This explains the unexplained strength of POT and Israel Chemicals in face of the total collapse of the potash cartel. Maybe I was wrong in discharging these stocks.

Follow Up: Definitely! The potash shares are rocketing! The price of potash fertilizer is 350 $/ton (last year it was 1,000 $) yet potash miners's shares are strong! Because China is trying to buy these companies! How could I know this?

Kevin MacDonald: No Historical Inevitability

Prof. Kevin MacDonald was interviewed in an online radio show called Radio Free Mississippi. In the hour-or-so interview that aired last month, (see link), MacDonald explained that Whites will become a minority in America in thirty years, and predicted a future that was "very dangerous for whites," where they'd be "at the mercy of other people" with "historical grudges" against whites. As that future nears, Whites will feel increasingly in danger and seek protection among their own. In short, they will become White Nationalists. That is a historical inevitability, according to MacDonald.

I think it will not happen. It did not happen in Brasil, not in Saudi Arabia, not in Jamaica not in Costa Rica nor other places where the Whites imported cheap labor and became a minority. The people is imported to fill the lower strata of society and they are never allowed to challenge average whites. On the contrary, the creation of an underclass lifts the relative position of the poorer whites to the middle class, and certainly makes their lives much more comfortable. As I see the future of America, different ethnic groups will negotiate a kind of peaceful co-existence, and Africans will be where they had always been and the Mexicans will dissolve into the great mass of mixed-blood proletarians which already exists. Spanish will be forgotten, they will convert to Protestantism and their children will be called Scott and Taylor.

Art Noveau in the Planet of the Apes

The film was memorable not only for Estella Warren and Tim Roth (pic), but also for the beautiful art noveau decoration of the apes's paraphernalia. I suspect that a voyage to the Planet of the Apes would enrich the folk objet d'art collection hanging on the walls of my apartment. That would be a trip!

Stopping the Stampede

The potential for real trouble in Europe is that a failure to adequately address crisis in Greece may tip a financial system that is still very wobbly back into panic. I dont know why the core European powers are letting this Greece, Portugal, Spain situation to evolve, why they do not stamp out before it becomes seriously distabilizing and people starts to stampede towards safety?

Feb. 9 (Bloomberg) -- The euro traded near an eight-month low against the dollar on concern a European Union summit this week will fail to address Greece’s fiscal crisis, damping demand for assets in the region.

“Investors won’t be willing to take the risk to buy higher-yielding currencies unless organizations such as the European Central Bank and EU speak up to rescue Greece,” said Masahide Tanaka, a senior strategist in Tokyo at Mizuho Trust & Banking Co., a unit of Japan’s second-largest bank. “If investors switch their attention to the fragility of Europe’s economy, euro weakness may accelerate.”

Europe’s currency dropped 1.3 percent last week against the dollar as Greece struggled to deal with its budget shortfall, the largest in the European Union. The country is trying to convince investors that the deficit, now at 12.7 percent of gross domestic product, can be brought down to the bloc’s 3 percent limit.

Follow Up: I didnt know my blog had such power :-) ! Only two hours after publishing the above note, a senior German ruling coalition source called a press conference and said that euro zone governments have decided to help debt-burdened Greece. Wall Street is rocketing.

The Notorious Evil Professor

I think I am among the first readers of Prof. Kevin MacDonald trilogy on the Jews, and among the first to recognize him as evil. Lately, he has left us Jews alone and became a White Nationalist, articulating the unassaultable position that as a White American he has legitimate ethnic interests and he has the same right to promote them as other ethnic groups such as the Africans, Mexicans, Jews, etc. He says that as a White American, he has interest in the ethnic composition of his country and wants a moratorium on immigration and the expulsion of illegal immigrants. He wonders how this position could be constructed as racist, if the stated policy of the American Government is to expulse illegal immigrants?

I know that the Devil should be painted blacker than black, and everything the antisemite professor has to say should be rejected as abominable and blasphemous, yet I am not like that. MacDonald writes very well and his arguments, in this case, are convincing. I do think American Whites have an ethnic interest and they should control the ethnic composition of their country. They always did and I dont know how this elementary right of self determination is being disputed today. It should be obvious.

Yet the argument that he is only "defending" the White race is false. The Nazis were all the time argueing that they were defending Germany against the attack of the scheming Jews, the mulatto French and the Asiatic masses of Russia. In fact, they attacked militarily all their neighbors and enslaved millions - defending their ethnic interests. American White Nationalists's defense of their legitimate ethnic interests translates into attacking everybody else.

MacDonald's enemy is Arellano, who asserts that MacDonald advocates deportation of all non-Whites, including African Americans and every other group, legal or illegal, no matter how long they or their ancestors have been in America. For these crimes, he advocates that MacDonald be fired from his academic position.

Again, I know that in a dirty political battle like this, Arellano is doing the right thing. Quoting that famous Rabbi that was asked if a long dead chicken could be eaten by a pious Jew: Yes, it is kosher, but it stinks.

MA Industries

Wolf from Barkleys wrote a very encouraging analysis of this stock, comparing it to similar industries like Sygenta, Nufarm, United Phosphate, Auriga, etc. It says 2009 was a bad year, but 2010 should be good and values the stock 25% above its price. I am less optimist, because of the Chinese competition.

Disability Discrimination in Israel

Yesterday I submitted ten kilo of drawings, technical description, contracts and dozens of other documents required for permitting a meat factory. Everything was all right and I paid the municipal tax, then the bureaucrat in charge pointed to a large signpost on the wall "No submissions will be processed unless signed by a registered xpert in handicapped access". I had always designed special wheelchair toilets for public places, but this is something new. I protested that no handicapped person will work in a meat factory and the public will not be allowed in, but laws are laws and that it was.

(Later I talked to a friendly higher up bureaucrat, an exception was made and the permit is being processed.)

The point is that Israel is starting to enforce seriously the anti-discriminatory building laws. That means additional large toilets (building space is very expensive in Israel) and long sloped ramps, adding some 5% to building costs. My country club's swimming pool has installed mechanic chairs for the handicapped. There are talking facilities for the blind (new lifts have Braille control panels) and many other related subjects. This is a speciality that slowly is gaining momentum and the reason is different from the American one, which is lawsuits against discrimination. Here, I think, the reason is that simply the quality of the population is worsening fast. In the streets one sees more and more disabled people and I mean old people in wheelchairs with a Phillippine caretaker pushing them, more morbidly obese people circulating on electric cars, and more terribly disfigured people that I have never seen before, and so on. Apparently Israel is preparing itself to a largely handicapped population and that may include expected additions resulting from the coming wars.

Infatuation

Estelle Warren in Sports Illustrated.

Terminal velocity

What happens to the "stuff" falling down in a vertical pipe in a skyscraper? The answer:

The problem with wastewater running downhill and picking up a lot of momentum isn't as severe as it might seem. For one thing, flowing water tends to adhere to a surface, such as the inside of a pipe, and the friction slows things down considerably. There's also the phenomenon known as "terminal velocity," which skydivers are familiar with: after you fall through the air awhile, you reach a maximum speed. For water inside a pipe, this usually comes out to around 10 to 20 feet per second, depending on the diameter of the pipe and such.

I love "and such".

Firemen's Protest

Firemen are protesting against a reduction in their salaries. The Ministry of Finance says they are being overpaid.

The average gross monthly salary of Israeli employees was NIS 7,875 in November 2009. Trend figures for September-November 2009 showed an annualized drop of 2.4% in constant prices, the Central Bureau of Statistics reported today. As usual, Israel Electric Corporation (IEC) (TASE: ELEC.B22) and Mekorot National Water Company employees had the highest average salary, followed by the financial sector, public administration, manufacturing, and transportation.

More culture

Saturday evening and once more, I was submitted to "culture". The place was the Gesher Theater in Yaffo, and it was called "Hate and Love", based on a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Gesher is a professional theater founded by Russian immigrant actors and writers, in Hebrew, and in a few years it has conquered a very respectable place in the Israeli culture. I think it is much better than HaBima and the Kameri, more professional and they try harder.

The story is about a Poylish schlemazl called Herman whose life saved by the family servant Jadwiga. His wife does not come back after the war so out of gratitude he marries her and they move to America. (Pic.: Jadwiga washes Hermann like a baby, it must be a Polish custom). He ghostwrites speeches and books of ethics and religion for a rabbi, and takes a lover on the side, a survivor, Masha. Masha drives him crazy trying to force him to leave Jadwiga and marry her. Jadwiga is pregnant, Masha fakes pregnancy. Hermann is thorn between them, and if the dilemma were not enough, his wife - believed long dead - appears in America and finds him. Three women fight for the soul of the schlemazl, who in the end runs away with Masha to California.

Genius

Thomas Alva Edison was my hero when growing up, a very poor deaf boy inventing and creating new industries. But I didnt know that his father was also exceptional. Samuel Ogden Edison (pic)was born on August 16, 1804 in Digby, Nova Scotia, Canada. He married Nancy Elliott in 1828; she suffered from mental illness. Three weeks after Nancy's death in 1871, Edison Sr. at the youngish age of 67 started a new relationship with his 16-year-old housekeeper, Mary Sharlow. During their twenty years together they had three daughters. Samuel died in 1896 at the age of 92. "I am a master of smoking, drinking and gambling, " he claimed. "I have smoked and drank whisky moderately when I needed it, and have known to let it alone." A genius.