The collapse of insects Well-made and invested piece from Reuters

Is China really leading the clean energy revolution? Not exactly

The country generates more solar energy than all other countries combined, but burns half the planet’s coal. There are lessons here for the rest of us, though.

I talked with D today about the possibility of continuing the Chemin Le Puy in France, from the point that I had left off in 2021, in Moissac. If I want to do that, it's either now or in September-October. But we might want to go somewhere else at that time, such as India. I discovered that there are cheap flights to Barcelona, from where it is possible to take a train or a bus.

So it's a possibility. I'm not sure I actually want to get away just now, because I'm enjoying being at home, but it could be nice. D might join me for part of the way.

My default #search engine is SearX. But what's the story with DuckDuckGo and Firefox? It used to be there as one of the options. When it disappeared, I installed the DDG extension; however this didn't actually do anything. It did not include DDG as a search option and (fortunately) did not succeed to make DDG the default engine. Next I tried to include DDG in what should be the standard way: using FF's OpenSearch option, but it seems that DDG does not play nicely with OpenSearch either. Further, its API no longer works with SearX, so it is not possible to receive DDG's results in SearX. I no longer trust DDG - I also just read about the deal they made (though last year rescinded) with Microsoft.

I pre-ordered The Climate Book, by Greta Thunberg from Kobobooks, for my ereader and it arrived in time for the weekend. It looks promising: a kind of one-stop-shop climate primer with chapters by more than a hundred experts, thinkers and writers.

I enjoyed this Patrick Modiano novel as much as another of his that I read last year. His novels are often short, which suits me, as I read very slowly in French and often need to consult my Kobo reader's French dictionary. I like his particular style of "auto-fiction" and will probably read more of his books.

A similar exercise is watching French TV series on Netflix. It's quite laborious as I need to stop the video often to absorb the subtitles; an hour long show can last a couple of hours, that way. Eventually I will hopefully calm down and stop trying to catch every mumbled throw-away bit of idiom. I tend to approach languages as I did when learning Sanskrit - a mistake, no doubt.

"Lupin" itself is entertaining, though often quite ridiculous. I don't know if it will continue to hold my interest.

During the weekend we were discussing our travels. M said that her impression of India was that, more than in other places, she felt that people were very close to the earth and to the basic realities of life. I know what she means, but I'm not sure that it's true anymore. It seems to me that many Indians are caught up in illusions and frivolities that have little to do with basic needs.

They can apparently now afford to forget all about the "realities of life", and instead promote a toxic blend of nationalism and religious fundamentalism. Here are people trying to trying to persuade the courts that mosques that have been standing for a millenium are actually Hindu temples; or that somewhere in the Taj Mahal is a secret cupboard crammed with the Hindu idols pillaged from an earlier temple. Inspired by the destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, They would like to see thousands more mosques either destroyed or converted into temples.

Fanatics there always are; the problem is that in modern India they are increasingly supported by the government, the police, and sometimes by the judiciary. Fanatics are no longer a small minority but the power in the land. They enjoy popular support. The situation has many parallels to Israel, whose government is also increasingly in the hands of rightwing pyromaniacs. But there are differences. The political agenda here is different and more focused. It's less about religion, more about colonisation. Zionism and Hindutva may both be nationalistic ideologies that seem to hark back to an earlier era, but they are not quite comparable.

I decided to join D for part of her planned trip to Plum Village, so I'll be there for her "Lamp Transmission" ceremony. That meant booking flights. There are less options today, following the pandemic, and many trips to Bordeaux involve travel of 20 - 30 hours or more. I struggled for a couple of hours with Expedia, trying to find something cheap and convenient, but eventually gave up. D came to the rescue with E-Dreams, which, in this case, seemed to have more options with the cheapo companies like Veuling, Wiz and whatever. She was able to find a cheaper flight, which I eventually booked.

One thing I learned along the way is that it is much easier to book a flight to France than to order a rail ticket. (It's true that Air France offers rail arrangements sometimes instead of connecting flights.) I have previously had more success with the SNCF website (and previously have had their telephone app), but this time the experience was awful. First, in order to make any booking, one has to log in. For that to happen, after the password log-in they send a confirmation code by email. After that there's a CAPTCHA. That's already three kinds of verification. But a couple of minutes later, a message popped up telling me that I had been blocked, due to suspicious activity, so I simply had to give up. I was using an up-to-date Vivaldi browser, which uses the same rendering engine as Chrome and matches it for all other browsing features. I have Privacy Badger installed, but nothing that blocks ordinary javascript.

Travel is becoming quite a nightmare in our era. Booking rail tickets in France, India, and no doubt in many other countries, is a horrible experience dressed up in the guise of being sophisticatedly modern. Here in Israel we just had a foreign guest who took a bus from the local junction, only to discover that tickets can no longer be purchased on the bus itself. She managed to reach Jerusalem only due to the kindness of a passenger.

Plane, bus and rail companies, whether private or government-run are guilty of the worst form of ableism. Our modern pretenses against all kinds of discrimination against people with disabilities, are a complete sham. They challenge even mentally fit people with their byzantine arrangements, and only work very well if one is equipped with a smartphone full of surveillance apps. The situation is getting worse, not better. If all of this somehow helped to reduce carbon emissions, by making travel less popular, there might be an advantage, but the ones who travel most are not those who feel challenged by these difficulties. And the relative complexity and inconvenience of public ground transportation favors travel by planes and private cars.

I made good progress today, especially on the matter of file transfers. I discovered earlier that although WebDAV had seemed to work, it actually is only presenting the server folders in read-only format. I cannot change anything. The configuration there is too complex and I gave up on WebDAV just as I've given up on GIT, so it was back to FileZilla. Then I discovered Rsync, which, although I knew about it, had never actually used. It's powerful and amazing. It's also very quick (at least for what I need it for) and simple to use from the commandline, once you get the syntax right. Furthermore, it's something that I can execute from within Emacs (where I'm now composing this blog).

So now, for blog posts, I only need to a) save the file b) publish it locally and c) rsync it to the server. All of this happens within emacs itself. When I grow more proficient, I will probably set up a macro to handle these operations even more quickly. Update: done, easily enough. That's a nice thing about emacs, and probably the Lisp programming that underlies it - that it can be used on a simple level, but provides the opportunity to grow with it. When Stallman talks about the advantage in open source programs that the code is up-front and visible, people like me think that that's all well and good, but the majority of us are completely unable to read code. However when I look at Lisp code, understanding it seems within reach.

I noticed today that the colors in Vivaldi are brighter than those in SeaMonkey or Chrome. The blue color that I have been using in this blog appears purplish in Vivaldi. I tried to find something about this in the settings and it looks like there may be a configuration option for this, but I didn't succeed in changing anything.

Eventually I'm using an old EEEPC netbook for a new home server. It's many years old, but the battery life is still excellent, so it's less likely to suffer the kind of shocks that rendered my previous server disk unbootable.

I've been spending hours and days with this server project, but it's hard to remember what I've been doing. I tried for a long time to get Git to work, but eventually gave up. The explanation why would be too much trouble. I'll focus instead upon what's worked so far.

I was able to set up SSH. Uploading for now is via good old Filezilla, which is both easy and tiresome. Eventually I may try to set up an easier way through emacs or the command line.

Yesterday I searched for a simple web photo viewer. There are many, many of these on SourceForge, but the majority were developed years or decades ago, and development has stopped. The classic web platforms are, I think Coppermine, Lychee and Piwigo. I know Piwigo very well, but wanted something much simpler. I wanted to avoid databases and new programming frameworks where I would be dependent upon experts.

Eventually I settled on Novagallery.org, a PHP program that renders directories as galleries without requiring a database. I've already set one up at https://vikshepa.com/photos/album/the_tabor_stream.

I think Novagallery will integrate nicely into my low tech site. It's lightweight and easily modifiable. Although it's free open source software I've purchased a license for it ($15) in order to support the developer.

That trip to the Lower Galilee shown in the photo album was nice. We went with Rosita from Italy and stayed the night in the Fawsy Inn in Nazareth. I should have taken some photos of that interesting building as well, but I felt rather lazy about photography on this trip.

The visit to the Tabor stream, at the bottom of a wadi that eventually empties into the Jordan river was amazing. We visited only a short stretch of it, descending from Kibbutz Gazit.

In the wadi grow various interesting flora. According to Wikipedia, one of these is asafoetida. But they mean the Ferula communis that grows everywhere in Israel/Palestine. It's a poisonous plant, that is sometimes mistakenly eaten by sheep - to their sorrow. True asafoetida (hing) is derived from other members of the Ferula family (again, according to Wikipedia). There was an interesting Guardian article this week about Sylphium, another long extinct Ferula (apparently), prized as herb in the Roman era, and growing only in one particular region of Eastern Libya.

I wrote a little about this earlier [1]. Eventually we have a statement [2] in English that is well-written and clear, and doesn't sound like propaganda. It represents my view well enough, but I needn't worry about that, since the village leadership take responsibility for it.

My own trivial conclusion from the killing of the journalist, and the violence against the pall bearers at the funeral, is that these are not just a reflection of the brutality and stupidity of Israel's security forces, but of deep-rooted attitudes in Israeli society.

The killing is not a one-off phenomenon but fits a pattern. It is the pattern, rather than the individual event, that demonstrates a complete disregard by Israelis demonstrate for Palestinian lives.

Israelis obsess about their own security but have been led to believe that this increases proportionally with the oppression of Palestinians. When a debacle like the Shireen Abu Akleh killing occurs, the government approaches it mainly as a public relations problem. First, spread doubt as to who fired the bullets, in the hope that the initial outcry will die down. Next, fake a willingness to call for an inquiry. In reality, almost all human rights violations and war crimes go unpunished. [update: now Israel says there is "no need" for an inquiry, and accepts the testimony of the army unit.]

Until basic attitudes change, Israel will continue to commit crimes that poison any hope for a reconciliation. That's not by chance. The Zionist project is not interested in reconciliation but only in dominance and the eventual elimination of Palestinians from their homeland. This is not a program that is ever going to succeed, but pursuing it serves short term political interests.

What most Israeli Jews want in their lives is peace and security, but they readily accept the lie that the best way to obtain these is the use of violence and force. In their world-view, the best defence is offence. Palestinians are primarily seen as a threat. They are grudgingly accepted by the state and into the family of humanity only when they serve in the army or stifle any signs of dissent. It's hard to be hopeful that this situation will ever change.

The Shireen Abu Akleh affair also highlighted the double-standards by which world media approaches such cases, as shown by Gawker's article [2]. But saying so risks drawing fire from right-wingers who will surely find opposing evidence that shows just the contrary. The Middle East conflict is just another arena for strengthening whatever political views you already hold.

As human beings we need to look at the way in which opinions become such an important facet of our identity.

[1] 2022-05-14 - Does my village have a right to express an opinion in my name? https://vikshepa.com/2022-05-16-does-my-village-have-a-right-to-express-an-opinion-in-my-name.html

[2]Statement regarding the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh - Wahat al-Salam - Neve Shalom https://www.wasns.org/shireen-abu-akleh-statement

[3] The Media has a difficult time saying Israeli forces killed Shireen Abu Akleh https://www.gawker.com/media/shireen-abu-akleh-media-coverage