Writing in html – imagining a better future

Writing in html

One thing that I like about this composing this blog in Bluefish editor is that I am writing it in the actual html used to publish it online. Not in BBCode, Markdown, some sort of WYSIWYG view, or a word processor. It’s somehow liberating to use the actual code, even if I do find occasional validation errors afterwards. That’s also why I want the code to be as clean and easy to read as possible. For example, I shift long html anchor links to the end of the post.

CSS (cascading style sheets) enables us to separate style from content, so that the code can be as clean as possible. But if you look at the source of most modern web pages (Ctrl + U in the browser), what you will see is an undecipherable mass of code and java script. Hubzilla is relatively tidy, but if you open a single Hubzilla post or article, you need to scroll down through about 2000 lines of code before reaching the post’s title and text, whereas, as you can see from the image below, this is not the case here. desktop with editor open

Not only that, but, because of the WebDav system, I’m also writing it online and saving occasionally, so a visitor may catch me in the middle of an unfinished post.

Solarpunk

Yuval Noah Harari says that science fiction is the most important literary genre of our era. But when an average movie-goer thinks of SF today, they probably think about blockbuster superheroes or post-apocalyptic dystopias. The situation in print is fortunately a little better, but we know from even the greatest writers, going back to Dante and Milton, that it has always been easier to imagine and write about scenes from hell than about heaven.

Some popular authors, like Kim Stanley Robinson [1] buck the trend for doom and gloom by imagining more positive outcomes, based on confronting the issues. This kind of fiction is sometimes called Solarpunk [2]. The SF site Tor has a review of several books in this category [3].

The sense of the upcoming disaster seems to traumatize all those who are not in denial of it, and there is a tendency towards paralysis – which is the opposite of what we currently need. Films like “Don’t Look Up” attempt to shake us out of complacency through parody, but the idea that “anyway, we’re screwed” is not likely to lead to a way forward.

It’s hard. George Monbiot [4], who writes about climate change for The Guardian, has been known to break into tears on live TV, because he sees that what needs to be done is consistently undermined by policy makers.

One thing that we know is that shifting the responsibility to individuals is not going to solve anything. Buying bamboo toothbrushes with bristles made from beans isn’t actually going to save the planet.

Changing our conception of the way the world works, rejecting a vision of the future where humanity loses the planet due to the inaction of politicians and corporate concerns, and galvanizing people to action, on the other hand, could actually help.

As human beings we are always motivated by the stories we tell ourselves, the myths we believe in, and our dreams. Human history can’t be understood or explained without giving sufficient space for these aspects. We live less in objective reality than in our collective imagination. So the only way to motivate people to make a real change is to reach people first on this level.

Solarpunk, which is not just about fiction-writing, but also about hacker spaces and community, could be an interesting way to start. Yesterday I learned of an online conference that is coming up at the end of May, which looks promising.

Olives, loquats | dealing with complexity | web fonts

The olives are in bloom, meaning many people will have allergies. It looks like there are many flowers this year: does that mean there will be many fruits? (Olives are famously biennial bearing).

“Inconvenient complexity”

Manuel linked to the Spanish translation of an article of a Prof. Boaventure de Sousa Santos, a professor of sociology at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. The article is called “the inconvenient complexity” and concerns the situation in Ukraine. In English I was able only to find a different article by him, Europe Is Sleepwalking Into Another World War, which is published in a Bulgarian newspaper.

Unfortunately this is one of those times when people tend to see reality in mutually opposing ways. As with those optical illusions, you can see something as either one way, or you can see it another way, but never both ways at the same time. So everyone is speaking with absolute conviction, and they are being utterly honest. They become extremely angry whenever someone like this professor or Noam Chomsky come along and point out nuance or complexity.

Optical illusions are always manipulative. Someone has worked very hard to create the conditions in which we will see reality in a certain way. That old riddle about newspapers, “What’s black and white and read all over?” still rings true. In times of war, everyone is seeing reality in black and white terms, and the outcome really is red all over.

The question is what to do about nuance. Also known as fud. It’s popular among Israelis to introduce complexity whenever there is discussion about what should be done about the occupied territories or the possibility of restorative justice. Beneath complexity, we look for hard truths. The image of justice is always the scale. Taking all of the complicating factors into consideration, we “weigh” our options.

There will always be people like Christopher Isherwood, who, like his friend W.H. Auden, fled to America with the onset of war. Its usually those who enjoy privilege who are able to evade conscription, though they are not necessarily wrong to do so.

When I was faced with the prospect of being conscripted into the Israeli army, I became so convinced that this is not something that I should do that I worked with uncharacteristic determination to ensure that it would never happen. But I would never argue that everyone should make the same choice. I do not know whether there is a soul, but I do believe in the existence of conscience.

Being aware of the attempts to manipulate our opinion, perceptive of complexity, and bearing in mind concepts like responsibility, of our individual and group roles, and many other things, is never going to be easy. But, at least in societies where the individual is king, that is what we must do. We load everything on the scale, and see which way it tips.

If we are lucky, we may not have to decide whether we personally need to fight. On the other hand, we can’t ignore a conflict taking place on our doorstep. Should we make sacrifices in order to boycott the aggressor?; do we agree that our nation will send weapons? What if it comes to an all-around war such as de Sousa Santos envisages?

Links

Best Font for Online Reading: No Single Answer https://www.nngroup.com/articles/best-font-for-online-reading/

This article is full of interesting information, but is of little practical value to designers. Some people read some fonts more quickly, whereas others read other fonts more quickly, and most are not actually aware of which fonts work best for them.

One of the most often used fonts, Open Sans, seems to have the worst readability. I’m surprised that Garamond tops the list for readable fonts.

Hubzilla | state of the web

Growing this site

I haven’t had much time for blogging lately, but, in my free time I have been tidying up my Hubzilla site and making various improvements. One intended improvement resulted in the accidental deletion of one of my wikis, but it was not such a significant loss. After going back and forth on the question of how to collect web links – such as for comment in blogging. Hubzilla’s bookmarks module looks like it still needs some work, though it is very easy to share bookmarks to it, via a browser bookmarklet. See my channel timeline for a discussion on the pros and cons of the system. In the meantime, I will be using another Hubzilla module.

Along the way, I discovered that sharing from the photos module can result in disaster (by sharing a bunch of uploaded photos from the photos module, each photo becomes a separate status post – eek!)

Chris Trottier has a short article [1] on the imperfections of the Fediverse as a decentralized social network, and why it is still the most viable solution that is currently available. He says that although better protocols exist for decentralized social networking, the Fediverse is currently the only one (other than email – which has become increasingly centralized) that has sufficient engagement and momentum. As for me, while it would be possible for a system like Hubzilla to incorporate social networking via XMPP (the protocol is already supported by Hubzilla), I think it would not be possible to do all that I do in Hubzilla with a protocol entirely based on XMPP.

I too have various gripes with the Fediverse. I was unable to subscribe to Trottier’s Pixelfed account through Hubzilla. And I discovered today that while I am unable to subscribe to any Diaspora account, they can subscribe to me. I have yet to see whether Diaspora posts will show up in my stream. The web

There were a couple of other interesting articles on the web lately. We discovered that DuckDuckGo is filtering out search results that reference the Pirate Bay and YouTubeDL [2].

DDG also announced lately that they will filter Russian “disinformation” from their results. SearX is the engine I try to use, but the Disroot instance that I use seems to depend mainly on results from the other big search engines, which do the same filtering.

There are more search engines mentioned, but many of these are “not supported”. On the Disroot instance, or completely?

Anil Dash has a positive piece, “A web renaissance” [3]

“Thanks to the mistrust of big tech, the creation of better tools for developers, and the weird and wonderful creativity of ordinary people, we’re seeing an incredibly unlikely comeback: the web is thriving again.

“… now, the entire ecosystem has seen that there’s no safety in being subject to the whims of the tech giants. Some don’t like having to pay to promote their content online. Some don’t like being deranked by capricious algorithms. Some don’t like being on a treadmill of constantly trying to optimize for search engines. Some don’t like being on platforms that promoted hate or abuse. Everyone has something that frustrates them.

“On your own site, though, under your own control, you can do things differently. Build the community you want. I’m not a pollyanna about this; people are still going to spend lots of times on the giant tech platforms, and not everybody who embraces the open web is instantly going to become some huge hit. Get your own site going, though, and you’ll have a sustainable way of being in control of your own destiny online.”

Books

I have decided to give George R.R. Martin a rest, or put him permanently to rest, for similar reasons that I eventually gave up on Gene Wolfe. Their world-building and force of imagination deserves praise, but, they demand too much of our time. Though their gift does not fail them, artificial worlds eventually come up against certain limits, like the hero of “The Truman Show”.

I feel a need to spend time with something else. Candidates are the writings of Christopher Isherwood and more Patrick Modiano.

Links

Why I’m all in with the Fediverse even though I have gripes

https://blog.peerverse.space/why-im-all-in-with-the-fediverse-even-though-i-have-gripes/

DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search Results

https://torrentfreak.com/duckduckgo-removes-pirate-sites-and-youtube-dl-from-its-search-results-220415/

A Web Renaissance

https://anildash.com/2022/04/13/a-web-renaissance/

Unlike Dash, who advocates benefiting from new web technologies, here is a piece that speaks out for keeping things as simple as possible, and make sites that are designed to outlast the latest technological whims.

This Page is Designed to Last: A Manifesto for Preserving Content on the Web https://jeffhuang.com/designed_to_last/

Indeed there was a time not so long ago that every site seemed to depend upon Flash. What a horror that was.

Drive My Car | Movies

We watched “Drive My Car” in two sittings… it’s a 3-hour film. A great film. Hey, it’s 2022 and they are still making good films, somehow. I have not read the Haruki Murakami story upon which it is based, although I’ve read so many of his novels and stories. And I have also never seen or read Uncle Vanya, which is enfolded within it. It isn’t the first film to do that – I have the earlier one in my library to watch.

I often wonder why the tears flow so easily when watching movies, though in my ordinary life, it is less common for me to express, or even experience, strong emotions. I prefer not to give myself over to strong emotions like grief because I suspect that once we allow it to engulf us, it only ever leaves us in moments of exhaustion. The characters in Drive My Car eventually find consolation and healing, apparently, whereas this is not something I often see among those who grieve for their loved ones.

Emotion is a lens through which we look at the world. As long as we keep looking through it, the world will always appear in a certain way. If we throw aside the lens, the world already looks different. The consolation of philosophy? Perhaps.

Although I watched Drive My Car to the end – sometimes I will watch a film or a TV series up to a certain point and then decide that that’s enough. It’s not necessarily that I disliked what went before, but only that I am fine with being left with what was there on the screen up to that point. That’s usually the case also in real life. One day we suddenly leave it, with many tasks uncompleted, many knots we never unravelled, many strings that we never managed to tie.

A man who loves movies:

I let my love for cinema destroy my life… but I’m still always eager to see a good film.
It’s not important who made it.
Just seeing it is the important thing.
The cinema lost me my job.
It robbed me of my life… my social identity.
But even now, just one good film and I eagerly turn back to cinema.

Whenever I see a film, I dissolve myself in it… to such an extent that I reach the bottom.
I fade out and perhaps… I get lost in it.
And this has played an essential role in my life.

Hossein Sabzian
https://www.sabzian.be/article/hossein-sabzian

Shelf-hanging fail | links

My daughter sent a photo of the shelf I hung for her a couple of years ago, above the bed where her 6-year old sleeps. The shelf collapsed while he was sleeping, though fortunately, with his head on the opposite side of the bed. Nobody woke up. This could have been serious! Shelves should never be hung over beds.

fallen shelf

Links of the day

A Web Renaissance https://anildash.com/2022/04/13/a-web-renaissance/

Why Germany Won’t Keep Its Nuclear Plants Open https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-germany-wont-keep-its-nuclear

Good arguments for the hated nuclear option.

Russian artist faces jail over peace protest using supermarket price labels – The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/13/russian-artist-faces-jail-over-peace-protest-using-supermarket-price-labels

Some brave people are willing to pay the price, even if governments aren’t.

Framework Laptop review: a modular PC easy to fix or upgrade https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/apr/13/framework-laptop-review-a-modular-pc-easy-to-fix-or-upgrade

Our food system isn’t ready for the climate crisis | Food | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/food/ng-interactive/2022/apr/14/climate-crisis-food-systems-not-ready-biodiversity

A comprehensive, well written and also graphically very well designed article, which, despite all the moving-parts, rendered perfectly in SeaMonkey.

Collective fantasies

I’ve been thinking that, considering the unreality of the world, or worlds, that we inhabit, it may be more intelligent to spend as little as possible time with what seems to be “the hard reality”. Children, when they are given the freedom to be somewhat detached from a need to earn a living or take an active part in their parents’ world, grow wings. They have the ability to dream, to engage in fantasies of their own making. We all think that this is wonderful. Yet, when children “grow up” they are gradually expected to conform to the hard realities of the adult world, where engaging in fantasy is excoriated and shunned. Collective fantasies especially are reviled, such as QAnon, by people who are not part of that, and vice-versa. Half of society is accusing the other half of engaging in fantasy, and there are sub-groups and cults: political and spiritual.

The phenomenon is not as new as we tend to think that it is. Thinking back a little, we remember the “flat earth movement”, Nazism, the Inquisition, and historical cults. So that it looks as if engaging in collective fantasy is fundamental to the human spirit. The world that intelligent, informed, mainstream humanity currently inhabits, where opposition to the exploitation of women, castigation of “war crimes” (by our adversaries only), religious tolerance, LBGT acceptance, concern for the environment, etc. are the norm, is historically abnormal, and artificially constructed. The values we share today may be seen as baneful in the future.

So to what extent should we avoid the “collective fantasies”, when accepting that we already inhabit one ourselves? Collective fantasies contain elements of community that are important for our mental equilibrium. Perhaps the test is when they cause harm to others? For example, if my fantasy involves the genocide of all Jews, of Ukrainians, of the elimination of Muslims from my country, then it can be said to be harmful. If it comes into contact with people who embrace an opposing fantasy, do we greet them with guns, or with tolerance?

Despite the benefits of community found in the collective fantasies, my tendency, at this stage in life is to try to avoid them and to find my own way. I hope I will be strong enough.

Link

‘The lunacy is getting more intense’: how Birds Aren’t Real took on the conspiracy theorists | QAnon | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/apr/14/the-lunacy-is-getting-more-intense-how-birds-arent-real-took-on-the-conspiracy-theorists

A walk | the blog | browsers | Signal messenger | links

I have been feeling a need for a bit of seclusion lately. Maybe because in Israel-Palestine the holiday season with its seasonal tensions is on us again. I went for a walk in the woods and fields today and ran into a battalion of boy/girl scouts. One of them – maybe their security detail – was waiting for me as I approached, with questions about where I lived, whether I was Jewish, how relations are between Jews and Arabs there – he got mostly a stony silence from me as I marched through. Luckily I’m harmless.

Then I found a quiet spot to read Ibn Arabi and do a bit of writing. It’s a lovely season and was a beautiful day; the wild chrysanthemums are blooming and the thistles are starting to flower too. Unfortunately I didn’t have a camera or a phone. Blogging

I have accumulated several issues to handle in the blog, when I find time/feel like doing something about it. I already mentioned making the font sizes larger. Yesterday I found a couple more articles on static blogs, and one of these mentioned Google Lighthouse – a Chrome extension which is an even greater stickler than the tests that I have been using. It discovered a couple of things to improve. the SEO rating – where my blog suffers most – does not interest me, and could never be very high when I have included “No Index, No follow” meta, but there are a couple of other things to take care of. Regarding RSS, either I will learn to write my own, or I will depend on WP, which I have been using for archiving in any case. There may even be a way of using WP solely for RSS, with no front-end blog interface – I will have to check that.

I was looking again at Genesis in Lagrange. Because it is solely text-based, habitually lacklustre textual blogs seem even less inspiring to me when viewed in Genesis. One day I might decide to use it, but not now. Although I’m not a particularly graphic-oriented person, I do find that the likelihood of my reading a blog is somewhat influenced by appearances, and I have an unproven hunch that this is true of many people.

“My stack will outlive yours” https://blog.steren.fr/2020/my-stack-will-outlive-yours/

“My Static Blog Publishing Setup and an Apology to RSS Subscribers” https://tdarb.org/blog/my-static-blog-publishing-setup.html

Browsers

I found a few interesting articles to check out on browsers. One blogger insists that Pale Moon and related UXP browsers are the way to go, for web privacy. I find that I am staying with SeaMonkey except in cases where a website patently won’t work.

Pale Moon Hardening Guide https://blackgnu.net/palemoon-hardening.htmlUXP

UXP Browser Bundle https://albusluna.com/uxp/index.html

UXP Browser https://docs.temenos.com/ndocs/Solutions/Technology/Interaction_Framework/uxp/Browser/uxp/uxp.htm

Signal

I have stopped using Signal, because I don’t trust it; but I see that Russians are trusting it more and more, among other means, to get around censorship.

How Russian citizens evade Putin’s censorship – Protocol https://www.protocol.com/russian-internet-crackdown

Here are a couple of other articles regarding Signal:

Tell HN: iOS Signal eats your disk space | Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30972546

Moxie Marlinspike has stepped down as CEO of Signal – The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/10/22876891/signal-ceo-steps-down-moxie-marlinspike-encryption-cryptocurrency Other interesting links

Leave your shoes outdoors, these scientists say – CNN https://edition.cnn.com/2022/04/11/world/shoes-home-contaminants-scn-partner/index.html

I Liked The Idea Of Carbon Offsets, Until I Tried To Explain It https://climateer.substack.com/p/avoided-emissions?s=r

Ibn Arabi

Reflections after reading a paragraph of Ismail Hakki Bursevi’s translation and commentary upon Ibn Arabi’s “Kernel of the Kernel”

” That is to say, if he has not… drunk the glass of love, and has not found annihilation in the ipseity of God, when he says “He”, he will be speaking according to his own conjecture, imagination, understanding and relativity. He brings the Being of God into imagination, and gives it a form. Because he has not divested himself of being and reached Absoluteness. Consequently, he puts God under a condition, according to his conjecture and imagination and draws around him a limit; thereby he will have immanenced Him and invented Him. And thereby he has worshipped a creator which he himself has originated.”

This is a perfectly vedantic commmentary, relating to the dangers of false understanding and imagination of the Absolute, and the need for complete self-annihilation (nirvana) before approaching or presuming to be absorbed in the divine essence.

Yesterday I watched the documentary, “The Pirate Bay – Away from Keyboard”. The latter phrase is the way, according to Peter Sunde, of saying “in real life”, because for those who spend their lives on the internet, the internet is real life. Well, of course it is. But is playing a game real life? Being immersed in a novel, or in TV, like the character in “Being There”, or in a hallucinatory drugged state? Or in a psychosis?

It is, actually, just in the same way as what we call reality is engineered by our imagination. Reality is there, but it is warped into something different. For example, we could say that, from a position of higher understanding, the universe is all in sync; in harmony; in a state of cooperation. Whereas, in the consciousness of an ordinary, conditioned individual, there is instead, competition and rivalry. The big fish eat the little fish; entailing the necessity for constant defence against adversity. This is not just a matter of seeing the world a little differently. It is a fundamental difference; a night-and-day difference. So yes, by the measure of reality, it is likely that we are in a state of psychosis. And a person who sees the world according to a different paradigm from our mundane perception of it would be labeled psychotic. And who can say who is right? We only know that owing to the strict behavioural rules of society and of the human-created world, it is difficult for a person who perceives and understands in a completely different way to function.

In such a world, where one has little chance of ever seeing the real outside of our human-created mould, we might just as well live in a fantasy that is provided by television, by the internet, by the game-makers, or psycho-active drugs; so long as is does not interfere too much with our ability to function, for part of the day, in the “away from keyboard” world constructed by human society for the purpose of eking out a livelihood, consuming, procreating, etc.

There is, however, the unfortunate fact that our human activities are destroying the biosphere. Here again, we find that humans have found a way of incorporating concern for the biosphere into their carefully constructed world of illusion. They believe that if they live according to certain constraints, they will minimize the damage. Thus the founders of the Pirate Bay, despite their disregard for other human conventions, incorporated vegetarianism into their lifestyle. It is fairly easy to integrate “environmental awareness” and other values into our carefully constructed fantasy world.

Whatever the outcome of the environmental crisis we are facing, it is likely that the omnipotent and omniscient pan-consciousness behind the world of appearances has long ago taken human activity into account, and that all of our actions take place against the background of this consciousness.

The real question for us, for human beings, is whether we must reconcile ourselves to living always and forever in illusion, or whether we can follow Ibn Arabi in seeking a reality that is not conditioned by imagination?

Spread of Autocracy | Messaging | Degoogle resource | Libre-DNS | Sri Lanka

I am thinking to make the font size of this blog bigger. In my browser, I do that anyway, and I find that I like the look of blogs with a large font size.

The trend in countries all around the world, despite reversals, seems definitely to be towards more autocratic leaders. Jonathan Freedland [1] in the Guardian has an article about Putin lovers in the west. Orban was just re-elected. Marine Le Pen is inching towards leadership. Trump is still skulking in the background, as is Netanyahu. I’m not optimistic. Altogether the dunia is in such a sad state, it’s funny.

I looked again at Delta Chat [2], which tries to use traditional email as a secure messenger, and makes a convincing case for it. I think the fragmentation of communications into proprietary services, Matrix, XMPP, etc. is really unfortunate. Email is/was a good format; it is decentralized and amenable to encryption. Why can’t it be fixed and reused also as a messenger? Why do we need so many formats and different ways to communicate? Who profits from this fragmentation? Not us.

Links of the day

Putin still has friends in the west – and they’re gaining ground | Jonathan Freedland | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/apr/08/vladimir-putin-viktor-orban-eu-marine-le-pen
The e-mail messenger – Delta Chat

https://delta.chat/en/

Michael Moorcock: “I think Tolkien was a crypto-fascistâ” https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015/07/michael-moorcock-i-think-tolkien-was-crypto-fascist I think he’s right about that.

Is this how Russia ends? – by Anand Giridharadas – The.Ink https://the.ink/p/is-this-how-russia-ends The title doesn’t do justice to this important article – it’s bursting with incites and deserves to be read.

Sri Lanka facing imminent threat of starvation, senior politician warns | Sri Lanka | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/06/sri-lanka-facing-imminent-threat-of-starvation-senior-politician-warns

‘We’re finished’: Sri Lankans pushed to the brink by financial crisis | Sri Lanka | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/09/sri-lanka-financial-crisis-protesters-call-for-gotabaya-rajapaksa-resignation-please

Sri Lanka is such a dire situation, under yet another corrupt autocratic. I still remember Paul Theroux’s comical description of this tropical paradise, which is so fertile that even furniture comes alive again and starts to sprout leaves. Only a really bad leadership could produce starvation in such a place.

Pakistan is similarly in a state of deep crisis:

Pakistan parliament ousts Imran Khan in last-minute vote | Pakistan | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/09/pakistan-on-brink-of-crisis-as-imran-khan-blocks-no-confidence-vote

La Quadrature du Net https://www.laquadrature.net/en/ an interesting privacy oriented site that I hadn’t heard about.

A fantastic directory of programs and services to help everyone de-google https://githubhot.com/repo/obeho/degoogle

LibreDNS https://libredns.gr/ Publicly available encrypted DNS service, alternative to what Firefox is now offering I wasn’t aware of encrypted DNS services, which some people see as an alternative to VPNs. But the following article argues that they should not be seen as such:

DNS over HTTPS (DoH) – A Possible Replacement for VPN? https://heimdalsecurity.com/blog/replacement-for-vpn/

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.