Lazy day at home

Went for an early morning walk with my new barefoot-like sandals: crossing through the pinewoods, descending the path that leads down to the vineyards in the valley, then back up through the woods towards home. Surprised that despite the stony paths around here, there was no discomfort in these sandals, except once when I was looking at my phone and banged my toes into a rock lying on the path. That’s the thing about walking without adequate foot protection: you have to be mindful.

While walking I listened to another chapter of The Dawn of Everything, then some beautiful hang-drum and flute music by the Nadishana Trio, and similar tracks on Sound Cloud.

After breakfast, I watched a Frederick Wiseman documentary, High School.

H, a friend of D came to visit, bringing with her a dessert she had made for the holiday known as Layali Beirut (“Nights of Beirut”), which I enjoyed with a cup of English breakfast tea. It’s a kind of firm pudding, made from semolina, cream, orange blossom syrup, sprinkled with pistachio nuts.

In the evening I took some photos of the sunset, from the village entrance (above – more at my photoblog).

Links of the day

‘Farming good, factory bad’, we think. When it comes to the global food crisis, it isn’t so simple – George Monbiot

Real solutions to our global food crises are neither beautiful nor comforting. They inevitably involve factories, and we all hate factories, don’t we? In reality, almost everything we eat has passed through at least one factory (probably several) on its way to our plates. We are in deep denial about this, which is why, in the US, where 95% of the population eats meat, a survey found that 47% wanted to ban slaughterhouses.

The answer is not more fields, which means destroying even more wild ecosystems. It is partly better, more compact, cruelty-free and pollution-free factories. Among the best options, horror of horrors, is a shift from farming multicellular organisms (plants and animals) to farming unicellular creatures (microbes), which allows us to do far more with far less.

I have put Monbiot’s book Regenesis on my reading list.

Practice day / book launch, a film

This morning I took part in a practice day / book launch for the translation of Zen and the Art of Climate Change (the same theme as the book launch that I previously described in Tel Aviv. Here there was maybe a greater effort to describe the common ground between the spiritual approach and the phenomenon of climate change, which Avner Gross managed to describe very well. the event was much smaller (about 40 people) so there was a chance for the audience to express themselves – their remarks were interesting.

In the evening I watched the film The Banshees of Inisherin. I wasn’t expecting to like it, so I wasn’t disappointed. The story seemed weak and phony, as well as being full of overused stereotypes about Irish people and island people. The locations themselves are amazingly beautiful. I recognised some of them from a couple of stays on Inishmor, and it seems that others were filmed on Achill Island in County Mayo – which I haven’t seen.

A film, thoughts about Epicyon and federation, links

Cinema Sabaya

Went with Y and D to see Cinema Sabaya, which is amazing. I didn’t feel like making the effort to see it and D almost had to drag me along – it would have been insulting as Y had already bought us the tickets. But I was immediately caught up in the film, because it’s simply so well done. A mixed group of Arab and Jewish women take part in a video-photography course. From class to class and exercise to exercise they learn about each other and themselves; where they can relate to one another as sisters and where they cannot agree; where they can support one another and where they shouldn’t press too hard. There are layers on layers of complexity. The film is utterly engaging and unfailingly authentic.

Epicyon

I decided to support Epicyon with a modest monthly donation on Patreon, because I like how this software is developing – and developers, especially those who do not have a big support base, deserve to be supported.

I still find lots of problems there, which will need to be ironed out; however, it’s working for me, and I do enjoy its simplicity. The UI looks better on the phone than on the computer.

That said, there seems to be a worse problem with federation itself. I don’t think this is unique to Epicyon, but may be more prevalent the further you move outside the Mastodon scene. I noticed also with Hubzilla that some posts do not seem to federate well, and I’m seeing it now with Epicyon, because I have duplicated my follow lists from fe.disroot to my epicyon instance. When I examine the timeline I see that my posts on Epicyon rarely reach my account on fe.disroot. I also see that not all of the posts from the people I follow on fe.disroot reach my instance on Epicyon. In other words, I cannot depend upon Epicyon (and probably not on fe.disroot) to see everything that someone has posted.

That’s a problem that does not exist in RSS, for example, which works mostly flawlessly.

My interim conclusion is that (a.) If I really want to know what someone is saying, I need either to subscribe to their RSS feed, or to look directly at their instance. (b.) My instance on Epicyon is still a valuable source – I find many interesting posts there. It’s just that I cannot depend upon it as a single news source.

I have yet to try using RSS feeds on Epicyon itself (which seems to be one of its features). That will be my next experiment.

Israelis in Qatar

It’s funny that Israeli journalists are shocked by the way they are being shunned by the people they try to interview during the World Cup in Doha. And it’s good to see that Palestine still finds lots of support in the Arab world. If not from the leaders, then from the man in the street.

I don’t think that these journalists should be shunned: it would be better to use the opportunity to speak directly to Israelis. A message like “Please tell the people in your country that I will be happy to speak to you once Palestinians can enjoy freedom and dignity in their own country. We Arabs are waiting for you to stop the oppression, the apartheid and the occupation of Palestinian lands. When Israelis learn to treat Palestinians as equals, we will welcome you in our countries as brothers.” Something like that. You can’t just boycott people – you have to adopt a carrot and a stick approach and state the conditions under which the boycott can one day be lifted.

Links

‘Extinction is on the table’: Jaron Lanier warns of tech’s existential threat to humanity | Technology | The Guardian

“If you make a dismal prediction and it comes true, it means you’ve failed to have utility. I don’t claim to have all the answers but I do believe that our survival depends on modifying the internet – to create a structure that is friendlier to human cognition and to the ways people really are.”

‘Publishing is not a crime’: media groups urge US to drop Julian Assange charges | Julian Assange | The Guardian

Israeli Filmmaker’s Critique of ‘The Kashmir Files’ Draws Fierce Backlash – The New York Times

This is marvelous. One guy had the courage to tell the truth*, unlike all the fawning diplomats who were left trying to clean up the mess.

(I haven’t seen the film so I should say his truth.)

Fediverse

I am gradually picking up many of the connections I previously had, just because someone ends up boosting posts by one of them, here and there. As a result, my timeline is growing more interesting by the day.

My strategy of interacting very little, posting only sparingly, keeping my follows off-record and, in my bio, discouraging people from following, seems to be working quite well 🙂

I get that Mastohost (which is hosting my new instance) is a poor model for the Fediverse: too much concentration of instances on a single server. Personal instances, such as on Mastohost, is still much better than for everyone to join a few big instances, which then eventually go down, just as the mastodon.technology instance is about to do. The owner/developer of Mastohost has committed not to hosting more than 25% of all Mastodon instances. I think a better plan would be consider not the the total number of instances, but the total number of users. A quarter of all instances already sounds like a large amount, but if those instances are large, it could translate to the majority of users on the Fediverse. It’s also true that lowering the bar (of technical know-how and expense) is what will get more people to run their own instances, which is what the Fediverse needs. Whereas the administrators of large instances can be expected to have greater technical know-how.

The first preference should be to get individuals to run personal instances from home. But the second preference should be to encourage the creation of many small instances. A way to achieve that could be the model of small co-ops renting space on green VPSs. There would be sharing of ownership, administration, costs and maintenance, together with restriction to a handful of users. That way, there is not too great a concentration of instances on one server, and if an administrator quits, the instance can still continue.

Video

We download and stream a lot of video content, but personally I can never watch more than a couple of movies or TV shows per week. Beyond than that just feels like overload. Even if I’m bored I won’t watch more any more. I read, surf the web, listen to podcasts or listen to music. So I haven’t watched anything new in the last few days. I tried watching “The Worst Person in the World”, but it didn’t hold my interest. I watched the latest episode in “The House of Dragon”. But without great enthusiasm.

Music

I am still really enjoying SoundCloud. In Israel/Palestine it isn’t possible to pay for a SoundCloud subscription, which means that much of the mainstream content isn’t available, but, on the other hand, I noticed while in Portugal and Spain that it wasn’t possible to listen to my usual content without taking out a paid subsciption. So this works very well for me, because I practically never listen to mainstream western music, and I’m amazed by the almost infinite supply of free content. I would never be able to discover so much wonderful music without a service like SoundCloud. It’s like entering a secret world with musicians that few people have ever heard of.

Currently listening to the station of Kinan Azmeh, a Syrian musician. Beautiful tracks from musicians from the Middle East and around the world.

Books

I’m reading Ville Triste by Patrick Modiano. I’m reading in French on the Kobo. It’s helpful to be able to click on an unknown word and get the translation. Modiano’s books are fairly short, which also suits me, as I’m a slow reader (even in English). I love Modiano’s prose and the atmosphere that he is able to establish. This book departs a little from the kind of story that he usually tells, but the familiar elements are there. Did he deserve his Nobel? Sure, why not.

Links of the day

The stories that most interested me were:

The revelation of Liz Truss’s influences though I haven’t been able to verify the facts of that story.

Greenwashing a police state: the truth behind Egypt’s Cop27 masquerade

Although the venue is much less important than the success of the meeting.

Pesticide use around world almost doubles since 1990, report finds

It isn’t a pretty picture. Not getting better. The EU is not living up to its commitments to limit dangerous pesticides either.

Saudi Arabia sentences US citizen to 16 years over tweets critical of regime

When you take an average modern nation-state, which is already embarassed and touchy about the exposure of its dirty laundry (see under Assange) and you add to that an autocratic leader who, either for political expediency or due to severe psychological issues, is wary of the least opposition, you get a mixture that guarantees that virtually every citizen lives in fear of criticizing the regime, or maybe even thinking bad thoughts about it.

New walk planned, film

It took several hours today to decide on a flight to Porto, in Portugal, in order to walk again on the Camino trail. Perhaps we will make it to Santiago on this one. Flights are expensive in this season – and increasingly immoral. But the only way to reach the European continent from this country is to fly, so it’s either that or stay at home. At least when we reach our destination, our manner of vacation will be environmentally friendly. The trip is planned for September.

There was one film at the Jerusalem film festival that would not have been D or YS’s cup of tea, but which I found interesting, so I saw it now: “Crimes of the Future”, by David Cronenberg. The genre is somewhere between science fiction, horror and fantasy. Elegant and well acted, it is set in a future when the human body is adapting to the environmental crisis by gaining the ability to make evolutionary changes to itself. There is a political movement aiming to speed this process, while police and bureaucrats fear that humanity will mutate into a new species. At the intersection are two performance artists. One of these is growing in his scarred and mutilated belly new organs of unknown function. The couple exploit this capacity in performances of on-stage surgery where the organs are removed, while a wowed audience snaps away and films them. It’s a fascinating and visually impressive movie, though sometimes difficult to watch.

The film festival

YS invited us this year to see films with her at the Jerusalem film festival. The festival takes place every year in July, and, for many years we have been going to see four or five films. Choosing them has always been difficult, but this year we let YS choose them for us. It was actually at the film festival, one year, that we renewed our connection with her.

So, over the course of a few days, we saw 6 films:

All of the films were international, and of the kind that one would see only at a film festival. YS isn’t into Israeli films, which is fine with me. But, except for “Incredible but True” – a light comedy – most of them were hard-going. “Holy Spider” was the most rivetting, because it works as a thriller. Some of the scenes were quite brutal; not bloody – a series of women are slowly strangled to death. Not easy to look at, and, as they say, not something that you can easily “unwatch”. The action takes place in the holy city of Mashad. A night overlook of the city, shown near the beginning, makes the city itself look like an enormous spider. On my two short visits back in the 1970s, I did find the place a bit discomfitting, as I believe any non-Muslim would.

Eami is 90 minutes of pure poetry, about a genocide of a native people in Paraguay. But it is narrated in a long monologue, in a sleep-inducing voice, unfortunately.

Fighting sleep was a major problem for me during the festival. “Robe of Gems” was almost incomprehensible. Not only to me. D was thinking that it took place somewhere in Argentina (it is set on the Mexican – US border). YS and other people in the audience had difficulty understanding the plot too, and the relation between the characters.

“Decision to leave” was a bit easier to follow, but very long (2 hours 18 minutes). It’s well made, but didn’t draw me in. Now, less than a week afterwards, the memory of the film is already fading.

My favourite among these films was “Pacifiction”, though it was the longest of all of them, at 2 hours and 45 minutes. Certainly it could have been shorter, and the director was playing with our attention, but there was something about its slow pace that suited its story-line and tropical location. Boredom is part of my experience also in South Asia, but isn’t something I grudge. The characterization is interesting, with many enigmatic personas, including that of the French high commissioner at the center of the film. Peter Bradshaw, who also loved the film has done justice to it in his review. I didn’t think about its similarity to the work of David Lynch.

The Sea of Trees

Auroville has a movie theatre which seems to specialize in films no one ever heard of. But the screenings are free, the place is airconditioned, and sometimes there are real gems. Tonight’s offering was “A Sea of Trees”, which is about a man who goes to commit suicide in a Japanese forest that is a popular suicide spot. A special film.

After seeing Bladerunner 2049

All is in God. The reason that God is conceived as the Creator in the Middle Eastern/Western religions is that the Divine Consciousness is a fount of imagination – from the imagination can emerge limitless manifestations. We exist as projections of this Divine Consciousness and, from our position of blindness, try to probe the limits of our existence. We ask whether other planets, other civilizations exist in the universe and the answer is ultimately that they do if God wants them to. We know what God wants us to know. There are no limits to the imagination of the Divine – there are only limits to our human imagination, our human perception, our human understanding.

Hollywood is a kind of metaphor for the Divine Consciousness. Films create a convincing reality that often exceeds the limits of what exists in our current mode. The characters in the Bladerunner, some of them androids or replicants try to come to grips with what it means to have memories and thoughts that may not be theirs but someone else’s. The question of how they differ from humans arises. They question the value of their existence if it is only artificial and temporary. The filmmakers do not answer these questions for us. They themselves are caught in the same Ignorance as we human beings are caught. We cannot see truth from within the prison of our existence as representational beings within the imagination of the Divine.

I, Daniel Blake

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5168192/

We need to exist in alternative support networks of our own, outside State structures: communities, sanghas, churches, tribes, clans, whatever we are comfortable with. Modern nations, whether so-called welfare states or otherwise, are too large, cold, insensitive to the needs of their populations. That this happens is just another sign of the way in which we are losing touch with reality and each other. Our societies are an expression of ourselves – egocentric and alienated. The real remedy is to break out of our separative consciousness that is gradually destroying everything. Smaller societal units project the same ego, but in the meantime people have to live and require empathy. It’s hard for people to feel empathy towards units that are too large and ungainly, therefore they require community. We just need to make sure that the communities that we create are not pawns in somebody else’s game, as often happens with the established religions.

Polanski’s The Ghost (Writer)

This excellent thriller is about a person called to write the memoirs of a fictionalized Tony Blair, who turns out to have been a CIA stooge.

It’s certainly ironic to be watching it today, when we have a new American president accused of being a Russian lapdog.