I have the house to myself as D has gone up to Tabgha on the Sea of Galilee for a personal meditation retreat with Hagit. I was invited but didn’t feel like being in the proximity of thousands of Israeli weekenders. Although Tabgha itself is a more private place; it’s mainly a Christian pilgrimage center.
I do enjoy these weekends home alone though, and if I want to get out, there are lovely walks in this season. We had three days of rain now, which should bring lots more flowers. The poppies were the big surprise this week, and I took lots of photos of them.
Around the house, I have plenty to do if I feel ambitious – trimming hedges, which shoot up quickly in the springtime, and planting some lemon verbena (Aloysia citrodora), which in Hebrew is called “Luisa”. From Wikipedia, I see why: it is named after Maria Luisa of Parma, wife of King Carlos IV.
D also booked a plane ticket yesterday to the UK, to visit neighbours / friends who are spending a year there. I probably won’t be joining her for that trip either. I don’t want to fly frivolously anymore, going somewhere for the hell of it, just for a few days. Unfortunately, the Europeans still seem to be encouraging lots of domestic flights with tickets that are cheaper than equivalent land transportation. Such flights should be taxed to a level that make it less worthwhile to fly. Trains and buses could be subsidized with the income from taxing flights.
I cut the grass and the weeds around the house this morning with the brush cutter. It took about 90 minutes. There’s more to do.
Afterwards we went out to a plant nursery to buy mainly flowering plants for pots + fertilizer for the lawn and the citrus trees. We noticed this year that the skin seems to be growing thicker and thicker on the oranges and gratefruits, and this apparently indicates a need for potassium, in particular. We got some organic fertilizer and resisted the advice to get a chemical to treat the crinkling of the leaves. Similarly for the bit of lawn, I didn’t get the fertilizer that has insecticide built in. I don’t want to be responsible for killing the critters or harming birds.
VPNs
According people who understand these matters better than me, VPNs are becoming almost a necessary feature for privacy on today’s web.
I have been experimenting with some of them lately. I started with Njalla. It worked well with MXLinux, I activated through a script in the terminal. The cost was, if I remember rightly €6 per month for one device, and it was not possible for me to choose a local server.
ProtonVPN has both a free and a premium plan. The premium version costs about the same as Njalla, but is for 8 devices. There are servers all around the world, so I was able to find a local one. Linux support is through a dedicated gui app. However I found the app to be buggy under MX Linux / KDE. After I got rid of it, I had a hard time getting back into the Internet. The app works fine in my aging Samsung phone however – it’s still working there, till I cancel the subscription.
Now I’m trying Mullvad VPN – I came upon it by chance since I have started to use Mullvad browser. This also has a Linux GUI app for Linux, which works well for me, so far (2 days). It costs about the same as the others, and is good for 5 devices, which would be enough for all our computers and phones. Like ProtonVPN, there are servers around the world, including local servers that we can use. The speed seems fine.
Mullvad browser
Mullvad browser is a new browser produced by Mullvad VPN company in cooperation with the organization behind Tor browser. After reading a review on it in The Verge, I am giving it a try. So far it seems quite usable; like a slightly downgraded version of Firefox. One noticeable “feature” is that the actual size of the browser window is smaller (evidently they are trying by this means to standardize the canvas size, which is one of the things that trackers use in order to establish a unique browser fingerprint). There are also no sync options, and the addition of addons is discouraged. I will probably use it in conjunction with my other browsers.
The country
I haven’t been listening too much to the depressing news. My assumption is that it is in the interest of our wise leaders to create a fracas or maybe start a little war in order to distract people from the other harmful stuff they have been up to. Nothing unites the (normally divisive and polarized) Israelis better than a healthy reminder that it is surrounded by enemies. Starting a minor war offers a win-win situation. You can easily start one by sending border police into the Al-Aqsa mosque to beat everybody up, raiding Syria night after night and then bombing Gaza again. Everyone will feel sorry for the Jews cowering in their shelters over the holiday. The people will unite against external threats that are, with a stretch of the imagination, just real enough to be believable. After weeks of warnings about the dangers of Ramadan, it seems that the holy month got off to too quiet a start.
Happy with the photos I took yesterday around the village, and that more of them came out well than did not; a sign that I’m getting a hang of the X10. Just one or two of them were out of focus or poorly exposed.
Problems lingered this morning after uninstalling Protonvpn, which proved too buggy on my Linux box. After the uninstall I couldn’t enter some sites (including this one). This was resolved by restarting the modem. I may have to return to the earlier vpn (which worked fine).
Our resident climatologist Avner Gross has a good article about climate change in the Hebrew version of Haaretz that didn’t make it into English, so I read it today. Together with Greta’s book, through which I’m still plodding, I feel a bit under the weather.
It’s almost impossible to depart this country, at least to Europe, without airplanes, so I think I have hit on a unique plan: Go to the airport and book the first plane with an empty seat. Planes are rarely full, especially out of season. Once in Europe, it is possible to go by trains or buses, which are less harmful to the biosphere.
That won’t help with India. The days of overland travel through Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan have passed. With an Israeli resident stamp, Iran could arrest me as a spy, while India is wary of travelers who have been to Pakistan. I’m not even sure that foreigners can travel through the Wagah border these days.
In the early 2000s when I began to use Linux, a lot of things seemed a bit experimental and iffy. I would install and reinstall distros and software. Nowadays I feel that it is generally more stable, and there are long periods when everything works just as it should.
But occasionally things still go wrong. After installing a new version of Darktable photo editing software in a flatpak, the application started to crash. The problem was with the database – I hate databases; they so often seem to be a source of problems. I’ve now gone back to an earlier version of Darktable and hope that it will be quiet.
In between, I learned a bit about another photo editing program, Lightzone, which seems to be simpler and doesn’t have a database – a plus, from my point of view. But still something wasn’t right – there’s always a learning curve.
I think a better solution to these matters could be not to require elaborate photo editing software at all – my new old Fujifilm X10 is capable of producing good results that do not need editing – other than cropping and rescaling – which I can do adequately and easily in XnView.
I have been having other software issues as well, with both the fediverse servers I use. Epicyon didn’t work for a couple of days, and now the site won’t open again. Hubzilla has suddenly stopped allowing me to add photos to albums that I create – probably a file authorization problem that has come since upgrading to a new version.
I think the solutions to these problems are probably not too difficult – but they will take time to identify, and I ask myself whether this is something I want to continue dealing with. My blogging software is so much more simple and trouble-free. “Simple and trouble-free” is irresistably attractive. Social media software is better for repeating or linking to posts and images that have already been published in my blog, while following others who have interesting posts. I’m not sure that I really need to run a server at all for that.
Figure 1: Seen on the internet
My current blogging software is a simple Lisp program created in and employing emacs. The photo gallery software is another small php program that doesn’t depend on a database. I didn’t create either of these programs, but the possibilities for something to go wrong are slight, and the system is fairly secure, since anyway the whole caboodle is uploaded from local files. Still something went wrong the other day, after a Chromium update. The blog began to use a wrong font. I solved the error by changing the font’s file-name from a *.woff to a *.woff2, if I remember rightly. That wasn’t too painful.
Back from the US to the turmoil of this Jewish-Israeli intifada, which is only getting worse. With this people and government it’s like the cliché about when an irresistable force meets an immovable object. So far neither are giving way though the government is showing more signs of stress than the people on the streets are showing signs of despair.
I’m jetlagged – should be asleep now. Besides the change in time zones, there have been two daylight saving time switches: first in the US and now here.
I went for a walk with my new old camera on Thursday to learn more about it. I’ve posted a few photos. Spring is about at its peak here now and the greenery is lush, with more rain predicted for the weekend.
I am in the US for the last ten days. I came over because my brother was in hospital. He drove himself there just in time, in the middle of a heart attack; collapsing on the hospital floor. They gave him CPR and snapped him back, and, in the following days performed catheterization and angioplasty. However, he suffered another three cardiac arrests afterwards at the hospital, where he also needed CPR. I arrived just before they installed a device called an Implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD), which is considered necessary in order resolve a problem known as arrhthmia, where the heart is not able to maintain its normal rhythms.
After this last operation, he has been all right. He was released a few days later with mainly bruises to show following the various procedures they administered. They sent him home with about 16 medicines, some of which he is supposed to take temporarily for a few days afterwards. He must change lifestyle habits that contributed to his medical emergency. The question, as always, is whether he will succeed.
In the early few days of my stay I stayed at a motel, then at an Air B&B within walking distance of the hospital. Afterwards I came to stay with my brother at his one bedroom basement apartment. We’ve been having long conversations. I think that a person that came so close to death but survived must have a reason to go on living. To place this in a spiritual frame, if someone almost died but has returned, there must be further karma that they need to work out in this life. My suggestion to him is that he will try to discover what more he needs, or desires, to further accomplish.
His life-long interest has been photography, and he has given me an old camera, which I have been trying to study, with the help of YouTube and other sources. It’s a Fujifilm X10.
Anyway, he assures me that this is the kind of camera that I have been looking for. Despite being released several years ago, it still gets excellent reviews. People recommend it for the type of photos I like to take: nature, travel, streets, self-documentation. It’s small and tough enough to take anywhere, which is basically what I want – so I’m hopeful and eager to get out with it. The camera I’ve been using, a Panasonic Lumix DMC ZS45, developed a problem of dust within the lens or sensor, which leaves artifacts on the photos. Fixing it will be expensive, so there is a question of whether it’s worthwhile. But I never really liked the results that that camera gave me. I like mainly its size and tiltable screen. Anyway, I’m glad I’m not buying another new camera, fresh from some factory in China.
Spirituality is an important human impetus. It provides meaning to our lives and helps us to see beyond the horizon of our known world. Without it, existence would be flat and two-dimensional. With spirituality, we regain a sense of wonder at a universe that seems to transcend our finite understanding and diminished view.
Unfortunately, everywhere we look, religion, which often serves as the vehicle for spirituality, appears to be polluted. Churches with dangerous, predatory bishops. Corrupt or violent ayatollas. Murderous hindutwa extremists. Rabbis with hands soaked in blood. Buddhist monks urging genocide; avaricious gurus, vile gun-toting adherents of every creed. Whereever you look, among established faiths and new ones, our sources of inspiration are sullied by these associations. Even putting aside all the extremists, most of our religions are infected with a patriarchal world-view, homophobia and archaic values that need to be left in the trash can of history.
The urge is to shrug off all religion, to throw the baby out with the bath water. If we wish to take the time and the energy, we can do so. We can work through the core material with which religion and spirituality deal and chalk out a way for ourselves. We can ask the right questions, and maybe find solutions that we can live by – perhaps drawing these from an eclectic mix of the world’s spiritual teachings or divining new ones.
However, if we don’t have the time, the wisdom, the capacity or the inclination to follow that lonely route, we may need to adopt a religion or a spiritual guide, and not allow the the obvious and super-abundant pollution to touch the sources of our inspiration: to protect the weak candle of our belief from the foul wind; to let the beauty of a faintly heard bhajan wash our soul; or let the adhan wake us, for “prayer is better than sleep”.
The new woman who is set to replace me when I retire in a couple of months seemed a little surprised today. First of all there was a screaming match going on in the next room over the submission of a fundraising proposal. I wasn’t paying much attention to it as I was busy trying to explain some things about the job (maybe that surprised her too). Then, when I got into explaining about Piwigo (the photo gallery software we use), and kept praising the recent changes introduced by the “developer”, she asked me what I meant by “a developer.” She is used to big companies with hundreds of developers, not free open source software. She said she didn’t feel safe otherwise because “What would happen if the developer goes away?”
So I pointed out that Google (whose software we also use) is guilty of dropping so many applications – just yesterday, I had mentioned another one (Currents) that they are dropping. And I pointed out that if Gmail one day becomes unprofitable, Google could drop that too. “And look at Twitter…” And then, I said, it isn’t so strange to be using something that doesn’t have a powerful company behind it, because the same is true of many essential parts on which the whole structure of the internet is built! Finally, I showed her the Piwigo website, which says that the application has been around for 20 years and is used by numerous universities, etc.
This is really insignificant
I think that most people with the audacity to publish what they write probably think that they have some essential contribution to make, or something important to tell or sell humanity, and usually this is true. So I feel a heavy responsibility to explain that none of this is true here.
Hardly anybody reads this stuff and they have no good reason to do so. This is, rather, a compendium of unoriginal reflections on the life and times of a forgetable nobody. Whatever ideas are expressed here will certainly have been stated more cogently by people with greater intelligence. If you haven’t come across the ideas already elsewhere, you are welcome to restate them in a better way, without credit or, instead, to use them as a prime example of flawed understanding, with or without credit.
Those flags…
With the above thoughts in mind, I listened this evening to a podcast on the Haaretz site by journalist and TV anchor woman Ilana Dayan. She felt that the judicial reform that is going forward is so significant that she had to step out of her usual role as a presenter of content and to analyze its deep negative impact on Israeli democracy. She made me aware both of my extreme ignorance, and of how much of an outsider I am to Israeli society and culture. Her presentation was erudite and informed. But it also had the essential quality of issuing from an insider. Her gut feelings and trust in Israeli society are based on her familiarity with the way things work and the way Israelis think.
I lack all of that. I can’t and don’t feel like an Israeli. I’m not even sure that I know what other Israelis, especially those who are involved in politics, are really feeling. I simply know that I’ve emotionally rejected the reality in which they feel at home. I cannot sympathize with a national group that, on the one hand, is proud of its democratic institutions while, on the other hand, it denies basic rights to Palestinians. Somehow Ilana Dayan, who, as an investigative journalist, has a much keener understanding of how the system works, and how it is skewed against Palestinians, can juggle that, and still come out thinking that she is blessed to live in this country.
There was another Israeli journalist, Yossi Gurwitz, whose early death was discovered on Monday. In his later years, he became an anti-zionist, called for BDS, castigated religion and the state. Yet I somehow feel that even he was speaking out of the Israeli experience; existentially linked to the Israel he rejected.
The rejection of an insider is different from the rejection of an outsider. I’m an outsider to Israel as I’m an outsider to the other countries I have lived. I’m a stranger to the national life of those countries as well as to their institutions, such as their academic life, culture, news media and other facets of civilization. Wherever I go, I live on the outskirts, and without the least regret.
My experience is not unique – it’s surely commonplace. Perhaps even the majority of people, or a growing number of them, are rootless in a similar way. If I’m more aware of my position, or am more self-reflective about it, it is probably because I have lived so long in a country that is like Israel, which places a high value on the nurturing of its national identity.
We went up to the demonstration in Jerusalem yesterday. There were said to be 80 – 100,000 which made some people feel hopeful. “The young are beginning to wake up” was something I heard there. But it’s not clear that even the large show of people had any real influence. The first stage of the legislation went ahead, after all. Politicians have the quality of being able to convince themselves that they are loved by the people even when everybody’s against them.
Of course, of the 100k people only a small faction carried signs against the occupation – MK Ayman Odeh borrowed one of these from my granddaughter to have his picture taken with it. The sign said “No Democracy with Occupation”.
I think a better sign would have been “No democracy under apartheid”, though I only thought about this later.
Because that’s the situation we are currently in, according to most of the human rights organizations. And the majority of Israelis still have an inability to internalize or admit this. No government is saying it. They are all promoting a two state solution” which is never going to happen. Israel is living under the pretense that it is merely administering the Palestinian territories, despite the obvious fact that it is never going to give them up. In the case of the Oslo Accords “Area A” (the Palestinian cities), it does not even admit to administering them, but those waters are muddy.
In fact, this is a terrible limbo to be in. The Geneva Conventions have a key flaw: there should be a maximum time period for what can be considered military occupation, after which the occupation should be considered de facto annexation. And if the occupying country continues to exert differential laws towards the population, then this has to be called what it is: apartheid.
The fact of apartheid is crystal-clear in areas that Israel has formally annexed, such as East Jerusalem. Those areas are, in every way, under Israeli law. But if a terrorist (or a mentally handicapped person) kills people, his family’s home can be demolished with out a shrug. Unless, of course, he’s a Jew. A Palestinian living in Jerusalem can only obtain citizenship with great difficulty. A Palestinian who moves from Jerusalem to the West Bank for a period can be denied the right to return. A Palestinian Jerusalemite who goes to live in another country forfeits their right to return to Israel or the Palestinian territories.
Through protracted military occupation, the granting of limited autonomy and continued settlement, Israel has created a chaotic reality from which it continues to reap both rewards and turmoil. But it is willing to put up with the turmoil forever, or for as long as this is viable and expedient. The focus has to be put on making the status quo inviable, by dropping the pretense of a two state solution and demanding that Israel guarantee full equal rights and citizenship for Palestinians living in Israel and the occupied territories. If it fails to do so, it needs to be held to account.
It’s frustrating to see that people calling for peace in Ukraine can be dismissed so easily as Putin sympathizers. This is a classic move to silence critics and peaceniks, in almost every conflict. Accuse them of working for, or playing into the hands of the enemy. So that’s how we should relate to these statements also today. There are some, like Donald Trump, who aren’t afraid to speak bluntly. Quoting Jonathan Cook’s article of today, Trump apparently said: “FIRST COME THE TANKS, THEN COME THE NUKES. Get this crazy war ended, NOW.” Easier said than done. A stitch in time would have saved nine. But for people with vision and courage, there could also be an opportunity here: to rethink and remake the security arrangements between NATO and Russia in such a way that neither side feels threatened, and ensure peace into the 22nd century. This was something that needed to be done quite some time ago. How much further do we have to go down the road towards annihilation before we realize that this is what was needed? I think the war was, all along, never really about Ukraine.
