” A man who has the knowledge but lacks the power clearly to express it is no better off than if he never had any ideas at all.”

Since the Ukraine war started I have been feeling a bit powerless to express anything. Times of war usually bring out the latent philosopher in all of us, as we try to get our head around the latest atrocities and rail at or reconcile ourselves to them. Some people don’t go much beyond boosting a hearty “Fuck you Putin”s on Twitter. Others are more expansive.

” When one is deprived of one’s liberty, one is right in blaming not so much the man who puts the shackles on as the one who had the power to prevent him, but did not use it.”

There is an urge to do something, to speak out against injustice, and to call up people-power. No doubt leaders around the world are worried how their reactions will be judged during this latest humanitarian disaster – the catastrophe of a generation in fact, and they are in a mode of listening to their plebeians, for once.

” We Greeks believe that a man who takes no part in public affairs is not merely lazy, but good for nothing.”

The mood of the times, both for leaders and ordinary Athenians is to make our opinions heard. Yet in my heart I know no one will hear me. I’m a stateless good-for-nothing with no possible influence on anybody. No one is going to listen to me. Least of all Putin.

“The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

Here is the most famous Thucydides quote of all. I’m definitely on the side of the weak, and have a strong tendency to accept whatever shit they throw at me.

Maybe on account of this weakness, I have a growing cynicism towards nations. I’m not exactly bitter, because I haven’t done so badly by them. But I know that when people group together, the larger their number, the greater their tendency to make stupid, life-altering decisions that affect all individuals in the group. The greater is the likelihood that some out-of-touch leader will arise who will drag everybody into a reckless war. The greater are the chances that huge resources will be squandered or swindled. The more it becomes likely that identity politics will arise and wreck the lives of minorities. It can go differently, no doubt, but these are the usual dynamics.

Smaller groupings have serious problems too; it’s just that they have less power to do damage. I have less difficulty in identifying as a member of my small community than with a larger group like a nation. This may partly be because I am not a citizen of the nation in which I happen to live. In times of war, people of differing ethnicities, weak national allegiances or foreigners are the first to run away. This is what we have been seeing in Ukraine. In terms of defending their domicile, they are worse than useless.

But women, children and old people have been leaving Ukraine too. They are certainly not useless. It is just that those who are most vulnerable drain resources at a time when food calories need to be converted into active defence.

” It is useless to attack a man who could not be controlled even if conquered, while failure would leave us in an even worse position.”

Looking at their history, I have no doubt that Ukrainians will resist Russian occupation even if they are conquered, and that Russia will ultimately fail to subdue them. Like Palestinians, they have the power of sumud. It’s going to get really costly – already has been. Putin has wrought a full-on catastrophe; no half-measures for him. This goes further than a small vengeance at being slighted and ignored by the west all these years. It has a destructive power that can change the world permanently.

Ultimately, I don’t feel as powerless as Thucydides would have me feel. My cynicism extends also to him, with all his manly moralistic heroism that helps to carry us from warfare to warfare, from generation to generation.

It has not been proven that following principles of nonviolence would make the world better. I can’t say for sure whether if I were in Ukraine I would remain a pacifist. Like most people I have been feeling “up-in-arms” about the invasion – if you put me in spitting distance of Vladimir Putin currently I might do more than spit.

Inherently we are free. Whether I take a gun and shoot invading Russians or stay home and meditate on my navel, my enemies can take away everything except my freedom. Freedom has no dependencies. It depends on who we are rather than what we have. We are, and will always remain, free.

In the morning helped D prepare for her Day of Mindfulness at the Spiritual Center. In the daytime, I was at home. My son and his daughter brought the “family cleaner” to clean up the rooms they had been living in before moving into their new house. The mother of M said originally told me that he was from New Guinea, but it turned out he was from Konakri Guinea in West Africa. He has been spending time in Israel on-and-off for years, since 1988, and is now aged 56. He belongs to the Fulani tribe – which is huge – they are spread across more than 20 countries, all across to the Red Sea. Most are Muslim. He says that in Guinea, there are no inter-communal problems, unlike, say in Nigeria. But Guinea has a history of military coups and is currently again run by the military. He is planning to return again soon, as he has been away for awhile. He has one grand daughter, whose picture graces the wallpaper of his phone. They have a house in the city and another, a few hundred kilometers away in a village. He says that he enjoys the village the most; it’s very green there and the family are farmers. We talked a little about music as I like a few musicians from neighbouring Mali – Kandia Kouyaté, Salif Keita, Ali Farka Touré, and he likes these too so I played him some of the music while he worked. He says that also in Guinea they have great musicians and told me a couple of the names to check out. Meanwhile he did a really good job of cleaning. I don’t know if he has a profession besides cleaning, but he is quite a smart guy.

I too have been doing a lot of cleaning lately, at the office, after the arson attack there, so it’s not just dirt, but nasty black soot. Zakariya and Mahmud have meanwhile painted so there is no lingering smell from the fire. It’s been a good opportunity to get rid of a whole lot of material that has accumulated over the years, and I’ve been putting everything else back in order. After tidying up I will check and see if the computers still work and we will also bring in someone to clean windows, doors and everything that wasn’t painted.

In the afternoon I had to take Yael home, as she had overnighted with us since Friday, and fetch the grandchildren. It’s been a while since I was in Jerusalem, and so got a bit mixed up with the way – OsmAnd wasn’t very helpful; it couldn’t find the street, only the neighborhood, and then it wanted to send me off in a completely opposite direction, or, at least a direction that was counter-intuitive, so I ignored it.

In the evening we had a birthday party for one of the grandchildren and D. My daughter gave her a gift of earrings, the stone of which comes from meteorite fragments from the Campo del Cielo site in Argentina. I read about this: it seems that it’s one of the world’s most important meteorite sites, from a fall that happened 4,000 – 5,000 years ago. The meteorites are the heaviest ever found, being composed mostly of iron. The age of the material is about 4,5 billion years, going back to the formation of the solar system.

Once upon a Time in Anatolia (Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da)

I saw this fine movie the other day, by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. We have seen one other film by him, The Wild Pear Tree, but I think that the one I just saw was a more interesting one. Most of the film takes place on a night trip through the Turkish countryside by a team including a policeman, a prosecutor, a doctor and two suspects in a murder to try to discover the site of the body. The real material of the film is the back stories of the main figures. Their stories are not presented visually but emerge in the conversation. There are some surprises along the way, and the film leaves a strong impression.

Links

Forget state surveillance. Our tracking devices are now doing the same job | John Naughton | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/19/forget-state-surveillance-our-tracking-devices-are-now-doing-the-same-job>

On a less mundane level, a German activist, Lilith Wittmann, had a suspicion that a particular mundane government agency was a front for a spy operation, a hunch that was stoutly denied by all concerned. Reasoning that one way of checking might be to see where post addressed to the agency actually wound up, she sent a parcel with an AirTag in it to the agency and watched through Apple’s Find My system as it was delivered via the Berlin sorting centre to a sorting office in Cologne-Ehrenfeld and then appeared at the federal domestic intelligence agency in Cologne.

‘People want to reclaim something pure’: the rise of the urban honesty stall’

I spilled coffee on my Ergo M570 but it was getting pretty worn out anyway. So I’ve replaced it with its successor, the M575. It’s a better mouse. I ordered it from Ali-Express, as it was a bit cheaper. It arrived, after about 3 weeks, in a package that looks like someone had previously returned it. There was no plastic package or manual, but the mouse itself was in perfect condition. The dongle was out of sync with the mouse. Solaar didn’t manage to pair it. Eventually I gave in and downloaded the Logi unifying software to my wife’s Windows laptop and got it in sync. This mouse is more accurate that the M570 and feels better in every way. It has the ability to connect without the receiver, via Bluetooth. But that connection doesn’t work very well, at least not with my computer: its movements are too jittery.

In general I prefer trackball mice to other pointing devices. They work on any surface; take up less desktop space because they don’t need to move around; and are more comfortable to use than other mice.

Going to get it

Ali Express uses all kinds of delivery services for Israel. This time, the pick-up point was a bread shop in Lydda, a journey of about 25 minutes. It was a good opportunity for another adventure with OsmAnd. On my last OsmAnd trip it had made a surprise demand that I leave the highway, earlier than expected and veer off on a dirt track through the hills. I ignored that one. But it was my fault – I had forgotten to exclude unpaved roads in the preferences.

This time it got my to the pick-up point flawlessly, and even knew the street number I should head for. On the way back, there was one error: one of the exits from a round-about turned out not to be a real road, but just an entry to a factory. That wasn’t serious, but I notice that OsmAnd does take rather a long time to reset the journey if the driver makes a mistake.

This was my first proper car journey using OsmAnd through unfamiliar territory, so I’m pleased that it was not a disaster.

Watched Kimi, based on the review in The Guardian. Since I agree with the review, and this Benjamin Lee writes reviews better than I can, there’s not much to add. I too would give it 3 or 4 stars, because it’s enjoyable, well-made, does what it intends to do, and doesn’t try to be more than it is. Films like this feel “transactional”; it feels like we, or the company that purchased the film, have entered into an agreement with the director and s/he has lived up to the agreement and handed over the goods. He (Soderbergh) and the cast may have given it their all, worked really hard, or just had a good time – it doesn’t matter – as the product has been delivered in perfect condition.

I had a journey to a local town today, so I decided to do it with OsmAnd. I already knew the route, so nothing much could go wrong.

There’s a lot to configure in that app. I finally got the navigation working so that the orientation works like Google Maps or Waze, with the direction changing with the movement of the car, rather than according to the compass direction (arrow always pointing towards the top of the screen).

I had the main map source as Microsoft maps, which was probably my main mistake. It should have been OsmAnd. Also, for the alphabet I should have chosen Hebrew, because the Latin transliteration of the Hebrew street names proved to be unintelligible.

The wrong choice of the map source may have resulted in some of the mistakes that the application made. A couple of its inventions were really wild and undo-able. Altogether there were about 5 such mistakes along the route there and back. Since I already knew the route, I ignored the wrong directions.

A second class of mistakes were in the audio directions. When it would want me, for example, to leave Route 3 and get on to Route 1, it says something like “Stay right on Route 3). Then when I got on Route 1, it would say “continue 17 kilometers to Route 1). The map itself knew that i was already on Route 1, of course. There were a couple of odd phrasings like this: if I hadn’t been listening to the audio, it would have been fine, because the directions shown where OK (except for the earlier mentioned unaccountable errors). Next time I follow that route I will see if changing the map source has made a difference.

My OsmAnd speaks to me in Indian-accented English. That probably a result of a choice I made somewhere else in the phone. I actually prefer it to the American voice I hear on Google Maps, though it’s not that I’m against American accents in general. I read somewhere that it is possible, in Google Maps or Waze to purchase celebrity voices such as the voice of Morgan Freeman. But since OsmAnd is attempting to synthesize street names from transliterated gobbledygook, nothing would improve that.

In North African and Middle Eastern countries, Jews traditionally preserve every scrap of paper in storage places called genizot – sometimes temporarily for formal ritual burial. I first learned of this from Amitav Ghosh’s book, In an Antique Land – in which he describes his research in the Cairo Genizah, which is the most famous of them all.

Yesterday evening I spent a few hours at the office clearing the shelves of old files, pamphlets, reports, booklets, books. It is a difficult job, which evokes feelings that are somewhere between book-burning and gleeful liberation.

It came to me that too much is being written. People spend their whole lives writing reams of material that few people ever actually ever read – reports, manuals, guides, position statements and whatever put out by NGOs, religious organizations, academic institutions and governments. When it comes to throwing the material out it hits you. What a waste of time, of life, of energy and the earth’s resources! It makes me ask myself what I am doing here too. Perhaps at least I should put an expiry date on this stuff.

Most of my reading and writing today is digital, at least, so it won’t end up in landfill.