A good citizen; hamsin; musical performance

airport shuttle bus, view from window of the airport

Being a good citizen

Being a good citizen of the 21st century requires knowledge and awareness so that we can make good decisions on an individual level, about what products to buy, what to do and what not to do.

On the other hand, our individual solutions have very little effect, compared to those of the big companies and climate criminals. What Greta Thunberg points out in her book is that despite the relative insignificance of small individual decisions, when they join together to form a mass movement, such as a mass boycott, they count for more – so we need to be public about them.

But being public about anything reminds me of past instances of moral hypocrisy. So, when someone tells me they are flying to Prague or Paris for three days for a “short getaway”, it’s hard for me to say I’m not sure that’s the right thing to do during a climate crisis. And I can’t say I’m going to set a good example by flying less, or not at all, because that’s not something I can be sure I’ll do, in a country where the only way to reach Europe or the rest of Asia is by flying. So I keep quiet and don’t say anything, which means again, that whatever I do has virtually no effect.

Ein Kerem, showing Brasserie restaurant, Mary's Well.

Hamsin

The hamsin is supposed to let up by this evening or tomorrow. It’s currently 41°C outside. A hamsin is actually a kind of sirocco, which Bedouin colourfully describe as issuing from the mouth of hell. Yesterday afternoon, we were sitting on the balcony of La Brasserie by Mary’s Well in Ein Kerem when a sudden blast of wind surged up the valley, felling huge, stone-mounting umbrellas, which in turn gave one of the diners a nasty blow to the head and toppled her to the floor. She was OK. The restaurant owner apologized profusely and offered the couple a meal on the house. He said he’d been there for 11 years and this was the first time it had ever happened.

Screenshot from SoundCloud page of Marwan Halabi

Musical performance, Marwan Halabi

On Thursday evening Magdalena organized a musical performance at her photo studio in a nearby village. There was only room for about 20 people but we all squeezed in, to hear Marwan Halabi, a young Druze singer-songwriter with a sublime, amazing voice. Accompanying himself, just with a guitar, he sang some of his own compositions; some were traditional sufi songs, and one or two Egyptian. Most were in classical or spoken Arabic, with a couple in Hebrew. He can be found on Spotify and SoundCloud – I include a SoundCloud link because that’s the service I usually prefer – worth a listen!

Links

16 year-old girl murdered in Delhi street; no one even bothered to call the police

There were so many people when the murder took place, but no one helped the girl. Even if they would have shouted, maybe the girl could have survived”

Tags: music thoughts

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.

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.

Urushiol

Poison flowers

It’s the pleasure of finding articles like this that makes the web worthwhile. The non-commercial web. The writer describes the qualities of the oil found in poison ivy, which causes so much grief to Americans, but which is prized in Japan for its use in traditional lacquer-making. He also points out, or claims, that Japanese and native Americans are less susceptible to injury by the oil or the plants that contain it. The plants are related to the cashew and the mango that hail from South Asia, which also cause nasty allergic reactions in those who need to deal with the trees or harvesting their fruit. Only humans, it seems, suffer from the bad effects of urushiol.

Music

Y found music by an interesting artist couple – he sent the link to Spotify but I also found them on SoundCloud: Santi & Tuğçe – I am listening on headphones to their stuff just now, and it is nicely blocking out the lousy music from a hinna party taking place next door, as well as the sounds from the TV. There is so much good and interesting music that is being produced. I don’t know how the artists are making their money, when we can listen to it for free, but the variety is so varied that something must be happening right.

Epicyon

It seems that I made yet another mistake with my server while trying to get Friendica working the other day – the support person claimed that I’d deleted the ETC directory. All I know is that I had attempted to get Filezilla working better, and was trying different configurations – then suddenly nothing worked. I deleted the server, and then created another to try again with Epicyon – this time with nginx. Meanwhile, I’ve put the blog and the photos back on Fastmail.

Thorns

I so love thorns.

Hubzilla | Deezer | Gardening

I updated my hubzilla to 7.2, which was painless, except I discovered that PhpMyAdmin had stopped working. Shrug. Not sure why; hoping it will fix itself through Debian updates. I normally use it to make backups, so I had to do a backup independently.

I have cancelled my Deezer subscription, because I found that I rarely used it. Although Deezer’s audio-quality is superior, I found that SoundCloud does a better job of guessing my musical tastes. Surveillance has its benefits. Here in Israel-Palestine it is impossible to take out a paid subscription to SoundCloud, though for some reason I have never encountered an ad on the service. I use it quite a lot, but hardly ever listen to music that would be regarded as mainstream, at least not in western countries. My wife subscribes to Spotify, but doesn’t listen to it much.

We are having hot weather all week (around 33 C today), as a result of the phenomenon known as hamsin. But fortunately the house is still cool from the winter, so, if we don’t open the windows, it’s nice inside. Outside, the citrus trees are in flower, with their characteristic fragrance. Yesterday I took the brush cutter to the winter weeds, trying to avoid cyclamen and a couple of other flowers. Soon it will be snake season.

Links of the Day

Ibrahim Maalouf – Red & Black Light (Live Au Zénith Nantes Métropole, 2016) https://soundcloud.com/yecine-khmir-1/ibrahim-maalouf-red-black-light-live-au-zenith-nantes-metropole-2016 Live performance, with audience participation – warm atmosphere.

Palestinian baby dies after treatment delayed by Israeli blockade of Gaza https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/01/palestinian-baby-dies-after-treatment-delayed-by-israeli-blockade-of-gaza

‘Publicly, Israel is a boycotted enemy. But behind the scenes, a great deal happens’ – Israel News – Haaretz.com https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.HIGHLIGHT.MAGAZINE-when-mideast-states-treated-israel-as-their-secret-mistress-1.10711812 Missed opportunities, leading to unnecessary wars.

Tumblr Is Everything – The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/02/tumblr-internet-legacy-survival/621419/ Reading articles like this makes me realize how ignorant I am of web culture and history.

Viktor Orbán wins fourth consecutive term as Hungary’s prime minister https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/03/viktor-orban-expected-to-win-big-majority-in-hungarian-general-election Countries should have laws to prevent any candidate – from left or right – from running multiple times.

Russia and Ukraine | Sufi music | Garage Philosophy

Russia and Ukraine

Jonathan Steele in the Guardian has an interesting article about how we ended up with the current situation – as expected, it isn’t all Russia’s fault. Also, according to him, Russia has already won, in terms of denying Ukraine the possibility of joining NATO, because the alliance does not admit countries that do not control their borders.

On the TV news they keep interviewing Ukrainians on how they are feeling. Probably the majority of them understand the issues differently, and with greater subtlety than the average western viewer.

Sufi music

On SoundCloud I have been listening to Sufi musicians like Farida Busemann. Some of it is a little too ethereal, but it is appropriate some of the time. A part of me cleaves toward bhakti; it’s just that I’m constantly being put off by the religious frameworks in which devotion is usually caught-up. Sufism suits me because it has always played the outsider; sometimes tolerated or co-opted, but never really embraced by formal religion; and nowadays positively despised by Islamic puritans like the Wahhabis. It’s also a form of devotion that finds common ground with people of completely different religions, such as Hindus. I think that some of us may be Sufis without even calling ourselves as such, without even knowing that we are so. Going back to music, I think there are songs that embrace the spirit of Sufism without properly being Sufi. I’m just now listening to Zara and Djivan Gasparyan’s wonderful rendition of the Armenian folk song Dle Yaman. Garage Philosophy

In car garages you really meet the essence of Israel’s existential realities. They are places where Arabs and Jews come together and achieve a shaky interaction and cooperation. Often the Jewish mechanics or owners will speak fluent Arabic, though most of them are also right wing. The other day when I visited one to get a new battery for my daughter’s car, I was treated to an unexpected harangue about “left wingers”. The garage owner happened to use the word “Kushi” in describing someone. It’s equivalent to the N word in English (though in Biblical times, Kush was an ancient African kingdom). He said he had no problem about using the word “kushi” whatever people might say about that. He went on to “explain” related phenomena, like how Americans can’t even say “he” nowadays but have to use “they” instead, and how this was all leftwing bullshit. Of course, he obviously took me for one such American, though that was never stated, and he said everything in a friendly way, as if only fools would disagree with such obvious truths. I just muttered the expected words and picked up my credit card and receipt. And now he has lost my custom; I’ll never go back there – not because his opinions differ from those with other such people I need to deal with, but because he made the mistake of talking plainly, to a customer who had only came to get some work done on the car, rather than to benefit from his enlightened views on unrelated matters.

Distraction

On my home server I have, till now, Hubzilla and WordPress. Hubzilla is a good all-round piece of software that does various things, though not perfectly: it is an activity-hub connected social network, a place to store photo albums and files; a content management system for blogs, and a place where you can make static websites.

There are idealistic, practical and economic considerations regarding home hosting. On a practical level, the experience has been much smoother than I anticipated. The system has stayed up most of the time, despite occasional power cuts. There haven’t been so many issues at all. I’m using an old laptop for the purpose, connected to my modem-router. There are still one or two things I have to figure out, but that’s only because I’ve been lazy.

On an idealistic level, I love the idea of being in control of my own server.

Economically, it’s probably cheaper, after the small fee I pay for a permanent IP, and the electricity used, than hosting the site on a server. There were no hardware costs since I’m using an old laptop, which would otherwise just lie in the cupboard.

There is still a question whether the effort has been worth it. Regarding blogging and social networking, it depends a lot on the usage case. Although it is occasionally nice for me to see all the product of 20 years of writing together in one place, actually I could achieve the same by writing off line, on my computer, and then uploading it somewhere – anywhere – perhaps various places – not necessarily a personal website. That’s true because there are no commercial or reputational considerations involved. That would not be true for everyone.

Regarding social media, also there, there are few advantages to be found in hosting your own network. It is easier to become known and discover others by using a commercial network or a popular federated instance. If what you are posting is mainly short posts and links to your own writing, and the service is free, then there is no real need to host it at home.

What would make sense, perhaps, would be to host your own email system. That would be great, if it were not so technically challenging to host email, and if were not so difficult to self-host email without being blacklisted by the big companies who today host email.

It does not make sense to use a home server for a file server, because the main advantage of backing up your files in the cloud is that they are not being stored at home. If the house is burgled or burns down, it’s better that the files are stored elsewhere. It still makes sense to rent a cloud server for that; it is simply better that it isn’t at home. I pay a little money to Disroot in order to store my files on their server.

It would be a good idea to use a home server for storing a photo and video collection. Photos and video take up a lot of space, which is sometimes costly, so a good case can be made for creating a photo gallery on your own server. But that too could be hosted somewhere in the cloud.

SoundCloud

I’m just starting to use it, but I think I like the interface of SoundCloud over that of Deezer, and am finding it easier to find music that I like. I am still listening free for now, but haven’t heard any ads so far. SoundCloud’s paid service isn’t available in Israel, so it will always be free for me.

I don’t feel like hearing any mainstream western songs, somehow, so most of what I’m listening to are “organic house”, “downtempo”* or electronic versions of ethnic music from around the world. And sometimes the original music, without any synthesized sounds. “Quieter than Silence” by Mehdi Aminian and Mohamad Zatari continues to satisfy – I like it more each time I listen to it.

Note: It’s with a bit of hesitation that I write “organic house”, “downtempo”, etc., because I actually have very little understanding of what the terms mean. They are just words that appear next to the titles. My interest in such kinds of music is quite recent. And anyway, I have little understanding of music in general. I only know what I like. And that’s subject to change.

Just now, I’m listening to Jose Solano.

Gurdjieff / de Hartmann Concert

Tonight – a wet and misty evening – we went to hear a concert, “In Search of the Sacred” by the Ensemble Resonance. The venue was a hall by Mary’s Well in Ein Kerem. The audience was made up mostly of people who follow the mystical teachings of the Georgian philosopher G.I. Gurdjieff – it was the Gurdjieff groups in Israel that had brought the ensemble. On an oboe and strings, they played for us Bach, Eric Satie and a piece “The Way to Jerusalem” by a modern composer Philippe Hersant. In the second part they played the lovely, gentle music of Gurdjieff and de Hartmann, which I had heard before only on piano – I used to have an LP of this music by the jazz pianist Keith Jarrett. It’s years since I was able to play it. The music sounds quite different on these instruments.

We emerged from the concert into a fine drizzle, and dipped into a quiet cafe for late night hot chocolate and apple pie.

On emusic

Over-all, I have had a good experience with emusic.com since I joined this music download service in early 2006. At that time it cost $10 per month for 40 downloads. It was the only for-payment legal music service available in Israel, except for some Russian sites, whose legality was murky enough to make me wonder if illegal downloads weren’ t a better option. There may be other possibilities today, though it could be the same: the music industry still attempts to close out competition from overseas. And now a neighbor who tried to follow my recommendation to subscribe to emusic was told by the emusic site that the service isn’t available here.

Songs have gotten more expensive on emusic since 2006, though the service itself has improved quite a bit. I came near to canceling my subscription recently when, without asking, they attempted to move me to a much more expensive plan (which nevertheless gave me fewer downloads than the previous one). After a bit of email prodding, they came clean and even gave a hundred free downloads as compensation. So I was chuffed – though they still got me to pay more for less.

I’m happy with emusic because it specializes in the offbeat material I love – and the service works just as well on Linux as on Windows. All tracks are DRM free, and owned permanently. Still mainstream music fans in North America or Europe have better options.

One thing I learned to avoid was the service’s Conduit.com tool bar. Although not usually classed as malware, it certainly acts like it. Ordinary Google searches start to be routed through Conduit (which is then paid by Google). I did not understand, when installing the tool bar, that it was third-party, and it took me a while to find out what was hijacking my browser. Conduit is an Israeli company, I discovered recently.