On my morning walk in the woods these machines are sometimes annoying, but with a shift in attitude it’s possible for them to turn them into a subject of interest. Now I wait for them.
Machines
Jerusalem (photoblog)
At the film festival
We saw two films this year: A brighter tomorrow, of Nanni Moretti, and Banel & Adama, of Ramata-Toulaye Sy.
Both are very good. It was the festival’s 40th year, and I guess we have been going to it for most of those years, and usually seeing more films. I used to pick them really carefully, but nowadays we just choose a couple according to whim or time that we are available.
There’s still a festival atmosphere, despite the huge demonstrations. Thousands of people had also walked up to Jerusalem earlier, in the heat of the day in the hope of preserving a semblance of democracy in this deeply divided country.
After the film, we passed through a contingent of demonstrators outside the PM’s house, on our way to Pizzeria Flora, where they have what must be the world’s finest vegan pizza.
The demonstration there passed peacefully. Just in case, a little out of sight on a side street there was a group of mounted cops, so that sitting there at the restaurant, with the demo going on and the men on horses in waiting, I felt like I was in that scene from Dr. Zhivago.
The weather
Daytime temperatures for the coming days are forecast to get up to 36 – 37° C, a bit on the warm side even for here. But as temperatures are on the rise everywhere, maybe this is not so exceptional.
In the daytime, the air-conditioner goes on, usually by at least lunchtime, and stays on till the evening. When I go for a walk, or do any physical activity outdoors, I make sure that it’s before 09:00 or after 18:00. Then it’s fine. Evenings are also cooler, so we normally manage to sleep just with a fan.
Actually, the heat part of climate change doesn’t have me worried so much. The air-conditioner becomes an addiction, it’s true, but I’ve managed to spend many a summer in south India, where it both hot and humid, without any A/C at all. There, it’s the ceiling fan that feels like a necessity – it’s just awful when the power goes off!
The fact is we can adapt; and probably will need to do so.
Adaptation might mean adopting some of the life-style habits and other wise choices made by southern peoples.
In many parts of the global south, during the hot hours, people will just find a shady part of the street, stretch out and enjoy an afternoon nap in situ. Southern Europeans seem sometimes to be skipping the siesta these days, due to the pressures of work, a modern lifestyle and, maybe, just the luxury of A/C.
In South India, buses and houses dispense with the idea of glass windows. Traditional keet (straw) walls allow the least breeze to pass through.
In Palestine, where there is more of a winter, older houses have thick stone walls, high ceilings and are often cooled by a cistern in the cellar, where rainwater is collected. Those houses remain cool even on the hottest days. In addition, the houses and streets of old villages would be arranged in such a way as to maximize shade.
We may not be able to build like that today, but we don’t need to: we are much more knowledgeable about matters like insulation. We just need to put our knowledge into practice and not build, for example, houses with heat absorbing red tile roofs, like this one (what was I thinking?).
Diary
I’ve booked a ticket to Istanbul for August 1. I want to get away for August, and wasn’t sure whether to go east or west. But, from a journey I made almost forty years ago, I know that I like the city, and it serves as a hub, so I will decide what to do when I’m there; either spend a couple of weeks and come home, or, indeed to extend my journey. If D decides she wants to join me, it will probably be to Europe; otherwise I may decide to go to India.
Spent an hour trying to get an old Rapoo bluetooth keyboard working properly in Linux. It disconnected every few seconds, and I was thinking I’d need to buy a new keyboard. But the problem seems to have been solved or mitigated after uncommenting a couple of lines in the bluetooth configuration files.
Demonstrations against the judicial reform shook the country and scores of people were arrested for blocking city streets, highways and the airport. As for me, I was at home, pottering around the house and playing with a new pen that just arrived from China.
The afternoon walks around here are pretty boring actually; maybe even in the best of seasons. A monoculture of pine woods, and fields. But when I go with a camera, I begin to see things that I wouldn’t normally notice. That seems to be the beauty of photography – to help us to train the eye to see what’s out there, and to find new ways of looking at it. I’m having a lot of fun with this.
Not many wild flowers to look at in this season, other than these globe thistles.
More in the photoblog gallery.
Links
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.
“Do you believe in God?”
Sometimes there is a problem with the way that questions are asked. Those are the questions to which our response is sure to get someone upset. Perhaps they should not be asked? Perhaps they need to be asked differently?
When a response clashes with a person’s beliefs, this is guaranteed to create an uproar, because people are highly invested in their belief systems. We tend even to be highly invested in our opinions.
It is as if our whole identity is threatened when these opinions, and certainly our “deeply held” beliefs are questioned.
Why exactly do we feel threatened when these are challenged? Why does it feel so visceral? As if someone is threatening to chop off a finger or wrench out our heart? Indeed, it is as if these are more than material.
If my hand is amputated I can get a prosthesis. If my heart is diseased, I can maybe receive a transplant. I will still be the same person. Will I be the same person if I adopt a different religion or lose my faith?
I think it depends a lot upon what we base our identity.
So, do I believe in God?
I do not believe in a kindly or a wrathful deity sitting somewhere up in the sky, or one bearing similarly anthropomorphic features. I think that most educated, self-respecting contemporary people would probably give this same response whether or not this is really their image of the deity. They will mention a more sophisticated concept of what “God” represents for them.
It is necessary to dig a little deeper. If there really is an entity called God, Allah, Elohim, Siva, Ahura Mazda, Amida Butsu or whatever, this is going to have to be infinitely powerful and all-knowing. Above and beyond everything else. Anything less would be too limited. If our deity does not exceed all limitations, why do I need him / her / they?
Yet even if we think of God as limitless, omnipresent, omniscient and omnivalent, this remains a conception or a concept in our minds. As humans, We understand reality through such concepts, all of which are highly subjective and culturally conditioned. For example, according to Wikipedia, a banana is a a kind of berry produced by a large herbaceous flowering plant. A cucumber is a fruit that grows on a vine and people in some cultures would see it as blue.
Concepts are used to tame our anarchic reality and make it manageable. We take a feature of this reality and assign to it a definition. To define something means literally to place it within limitations, to limit it.
Do we wish to place limitations around God? If there is a God, could we? This is the entire reason that Jews and Muslims refuse to create images that represent the deity. Jews go further and refuse to “name” God. They replace the word with epithets. When pressed for a name in the Biblical tale, God’s response is only “I will be who I will be” (the meaning of “Yahwee”) – and Jews refuse to speak or write even that name. Muslims disallow even the artful representation of God’s creation. They see this as blasphemy.
When religions, such as Hinduism, do allow for such representations, they have highly sophisticated responses to the issue of the implied limitation – they understand the problem very well. This is even built into folk traditions so that not just the savants will understand it.
Ultimately, the question of God’s existence is less important than what it reveals about ourselves and our way of understanding the world.
Links of the day
Israeli complicity in Sri Lanka war crimes must be investigated | Opinions | Al Jazeera https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/6/27/israeli-complicity-in-sri-lanka-war-crimes-must-be-investigated
“During the civil war, Israel sold weapons and backed the Sri Lankan army while it was committing grave atrocities.”
Israel OK’s plans for thousands of new settlement homes, defying White House calls for restraint | AP News https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-settlements-west-bank-biden-49c4788ffc5f5ee41d5c48365ac5395b
“Peace Now, an anti-settlement watchdog group, said Israel has now approved over 13,000 settlement housing units this year. That is nearly three times the number of homes approved in all of 2022 and marks the most approvals in any year since it began systematically tracking the planning procedures in 2012.”
French Government Bans “Earth Uprising” Direct-Action Climate Group
After the banning of [i]Les Soulèvements de la Terre[/i], it seems that George Monbiot did not choose the best possible moment to extoll the French government’s environmental response.
The meaning of purpose; the purpose of meaning
Purpose or lack of purpose is something that exists in the human plane. To escape suffering that is caused by war, famine, climate change, a person risks his life with the purpose of reaching a better place. Purposes relate to cause and effect; to agency. A subject acts and an object receives the action. By virtue of our lived experience, we interpret the universe in terms of separation; we see causes and effects and we look for purpose. If we find it, we decide that there is meaning to our lives, to the universe. If we do not find it, we may decide to believe in a supernatural or an unknowable purpose: “mysterious are the ways of God…” Or contrarily, we decide that there is no purpose, neither meaning. It’s all a blank.
This is all from our human point of view, the perspective of individual subjects existing in a universe of objects. You can say that indeed this is all that matters: whether our experience of reality is valid or not, we are stuck in it. This is what we know and perhaps all that we will ever know. We suffer, we struggle to find meaning, we search for a purpose to our lives.
And yet it is still important to understand the limitation of our manner of looking at the world, and to admit that there is another way of seeing reality, even if this is not currently accessible to us. In this other reality, there are no subjects or objects, because there is no one to stand “outside” or “apart” from the universe and observe it. There is just an all encompassing unity in which every particle of the cosmos is a full expression of the whole, in which everything is in perfect sync. Because it is all one, there is no agency: there is nothing separate to be acted upon. So, indeed, there is no “purpose” and no “meaning” that exist independently of the whole. There is no consciousness that is separate from existence.
The purpose, if you will, is therefore intrinsic.
I am stuck in an inflatable dinghy on the open sea. The craft is losing air and taking on water. I have no life jacket, and am unable to swim. My dreams of a better life, or any kind of life, have ended in failure and will soon end in death. Shall I be thankful for the short time I was able to spend with my mother and siblings? Shall I die with feelings of immense bitterness at the broken promises, the greedy smuggler who betrayed me, the foolishness of my venture, the loss of everything I hoped for, the cruelty of my fate? Shall I look from the dark ocean to the sea of stars, and think that I am one of them; that they are my brothers. That I am somehow a vessel for this cosmic radiance that comes to me across the aeons, and will continue to shine far into the future; a continuum of life. Shall I come to terms with mortality and immortality, perfection, beauty, frailty and power?
Machine translation of Sanskrit
In 2022, Google finally added Sanskrit to its machine translation program: “Sanskrit is the number one, most requested language at Google Translate, and we are finally adding it”
However, copying and moving devanagari script around is not always simple.
Here I tried to copy the following from a textual PDF (a sloka in the Bhagavad Gita) :
and got this:
नयादत्तक कस्यशचत्पयाप श न चवैव सभकवृतश शवभभव।
अजयानकनयाववृतश जयानश तकन मभह्यननत जनतवव।। 5.15।।
which is rather different – letters have been skipped and replaced willy-nilly.
A translation of the original given in the PDF is : The Omniscient neither accepts anybody’s sin nor even virtue. Knowledge remains covered by ignorance; thereby the creatures become deluded.
Google struggles to make sense of the garbled text thus:
There is nothing wrong with the judge and nothing else. Ajay’s daughter is covered with Jayansha’s technique. 5.15.
(Horrible, but convincing on the face of it).
I was more or less able to overcome the problem by transliterating the actual letters back into Devanagari, as in: नादत्ते कस्यचित्पपम् नचैव सुकूतम् विभु which Google rendered as The Lord does not take away anyone’s sin or goodness This seems to be a viable translation candidate – it would be necessary to compare a few translations to see how it is usually rendered.
Recent links
Palestinian shot dead as dozens of Jewish settlers torch homes, vehicles in West Bank
Dozens of Jewish settlers, some armed, set fire to houses and vehicles in the Palestinian West Bank town of Turmus Aya on Wednesday, Israeli security sources said.
On Wednesday afternoon, after the rampage, clashes broke out between security forces and local Palestinians. The Palestinian Health Ministry announced that one person, 27-year-old Omar Ketin, had been shot dead. 
Daniel Ellsberg is lauded in death by the same media that lets Assange rot in jail
What Ellsberg understood most keenly was the desperate need – if humanity was to survive – both for more whistleblowers to come forward to expose their states’ crimes, and for a tenacious, watchdog media to give their full backing.
Watching the media abandon Assange to his persecutors, Ellsberg could draw only one possible conclusion: that humanity’s odds were shortening by the day.
“Once I let go of what was expected of me…”
“… I began to paint like this.”*
artist Hiam Mustafa, at the opening of a new exhibition “Us and Them”, in our village the other day. She’s a Druze artist from Daliat al-Carmel.
*her words, approximately.
“Empire” meets “The Dawn of Everything”
Before going to sleep, listened to another podcast of the excellent “Empire” series of William Dalrymple and Anita Anand. This was the first of a new series on the subject of slavery, and the episode featured, as guest speaker, David Wengrow, author of The Dawn of Everything.
I was interested in this one because I recently finished this book and think it is brilliant – one of the freshest and most original approaches to human history that one can read. Among other things, it reveals the endless possibilities for human governance, and the range of possible alternative frameworks, once we free our minds of rigid pre-conceived ideas.
Actually, I think this wasn’t one of the best Empire podcasts. Anand and Dalrymple are more susceptible to our human tendency to look for heroes and create value judgements about different societies – in this case, mainly the Sumerians and the Egyptians. Wengrow resists these tendencies, both because his approach is more frank and scientific, and because he’s keenly aware of the lenses through which we look at past civilizations. So in the podcast he was like a slippery fish they can never quite catch.
Two Kids a Day (film)
This is a documentary about the detention of Palestinian children. The title, Two Kids a Day reflects the arrest of 12 – 14 year olds by Israeli soldiers. The statistic is quoted by one of the protagonists, a settler in the Civil Administration to say, as it were, “hey, that’s not so many.” (the true statistic is about 1,000 kids per year.)
Minors are arrested from the streets or from their homes in night raids, usually on suspicion of throwing stones. Twelve to fourteen year olds, under the rules of the Civil Authority, may be detained for 6 months at a stretch, in clear violation of the Geneva conventions to which Israel is signatory. They are interrogated under threats of violence (or worse) and pressured into betraying their friends. Many of them are imprisoned more than once, and some of the boys interviewed in the film, who have now reached the age of 16-18, have spent a total of 3 years in detention.
Links
Ancient Britons built Stonehenge – then vanished. Is science closing in on their killers?
This is wonderful. The oldest-found human in Britain was dark-skinned, had black hair and blue-green eyes. But Stonehenge was probably built by later immigrants who had olive skin and may be related to the Basques. But plague may have reduced the population, making them vulnerable to an incursion by modern Brits, who were descended from fair haired invaders from the Asian steppes.
All this should be a reality check for notions of where people are “really” from, and how we measure who is entitled to settle where in the world. The white British population are certainly not the indigenous people of the British Isles. They are the descendants of immigrants who arrived on boats.