After Jordan withdrew its ambassador, all Israel's neighbors except Egypt officially hate it. Yemen, Lebanon and Iran welcome Iraq in directly attacking the Zionist state.
I'm on with Leila Hartoum in south Lebanon and Steven Sahounie in Latakia, Syria on the Iran attack on Israel
What's the biggest threat humans pose to Nature? War? Mining? Cars/ trucks? Much as they are horrible and threaten Earth with imminent destruction, you're wrong. It's agriculture!! That's Monbiot's latest revelation in Regenesis: feeding the world without destroying the planet (2022), his Long March to a Better World. In our misguided industrial agriculture, we are constantly attacking the thin, delicate membrane that holds the precious substance that allows all living things to … LIVE.
Quran 20:81 Eat of the good things We have provided for your sustenance, but commit no excess therein.
Fasting is good for you. Very good. Josh Mittledorf, in Cracking the aging code: The new science of growing old and what it means for staying young, 2016, estimates he's added a decade, a good, healthy decade, to his life with his regime, which includes a weekly fast from 10pm Wednesday to 8 am Friday, when he only drinks water. He has figured out other ways to trick his mind into operating in its highest metabolic mode, but the main thing is the fast. Fasting has long been a spiritual exercise to quieten the body's incessant desires for petty satisfactions, real world distractions.
It is of course the no-brainer way to lose weight, but the marvel, paradox, is that for all living creatures, reducing consumption to just above starvation guarantees better health and longer life.
I'm on at 17:00 but Peter Koenig on Israeli is great too :)
https://kevinbarrett.substack.com/p/peter-koenig-on-israel-is-an-illegal
I love Naomi Klein. Strong, courageous, principled. In her latest, Doppelganger: a trip into the mirror world (2023), willing to open her life for us to see for ourselves what makes her tick. A world of doppelgangers, shadow selves of many varieties from our repressed inner Other, to an AI construct of who you are in public.
Cosmopolitan -- 'world politics', 'world citizen' -- people of many races under a world empire. The word became a meme in the 1890s as British empire blossomed, supposedly the world now united around principles of the free market. Sounds cool. The market is the proven way to run economies. It is neutral, no favorites, harsh but just, making us work hard, the state ensuring people don't cheat and undermine the sacred system. For if belief in all this wavers, the loss of faith in the market would spell doom for all, equally. We are equal before the law, and we can vote. That's what democracy and freedom are all about, right?
But is the apparent real?
Trying to have a good time without a car is challenging. There are lots of scenic bits in Ontario, in Canada for that matter, but the bike magazines just assume you have a car with bike racks and plan to drive 'there', park and bike. Sorry, but you're still part of the problem. And you should be going somewhere, like Amundsen. You can be the first cyclist to reach the South Pole only in your dreams, but you can find Everests, what's doable and a challenge, wherever you are. We have to reinvent tourism if we are to survive.
GO trains have been a godsend. When they added Kitchener (Berlin till 1914*), armed with my faux sleeping bag, I planned my next adventure: Berlin Paris Brantford Hamilton. Europe, colonialism all wrapped up together. Kitchener/Berlin was newly discovered land for Eric Cyclist, and biking from Berlin to Paris? Cool.
Over time I have accumulated 'my favourite Shakespeare hits' as doses of vitamin, my protein drink, as I ride. I love to find the bull's eyes and implant them, so they can come to my aid. Reciting aloud or in my mind is like playing Beethoven on the piano. Imitating speech (and song) is what makes us humans, gives us the miracle of speech. It's our primary learning engine. Parrots, mocking birds and a few others can, but no primates. It is speech that has turned the world into our world, transforming nature into ... No comment. But there is no wordsmith to rival the Bard. Maybe Dante.
Tolstoy didn't like Shakespeare: irreligious, amoral, teaches that in morality, like politics, you can’t establish any principles because life is too complex. The Devil is the main protagonist in Shakespeare's great tragedies, which suits me fine,
After Jordan withdrew its ambassador, all Israel's neighbors except Egypt officially hate it. Yemen, Lebanon and Iran welcome Iraq in directly attacking the Zionist state.
Even Google is backing off cooperation the monster. Accountability is the EU's new demand.
It took a genocide for Torontonians to commit themselves to the goal of defeating Israel. It turns out Iranian President Akhmedinejad was right after all. 'Israel' must be wiped off the map. It is an ugly cancer that could kill its Earthly host. But it will disappear only by the will of the people, Palestinian, Canadian, Jewish-Christian-Muslim united.
Haroon Siddiqui's 2023 memoir is a dazzling journey through Indian Sufism, pre-partition Muslim-Hindu harmony, the horrors of partition, a leap across the ocean to the middle of nowhere (sorry, Brandon Manitoba), finally finding his home at the Toronto Star, from whence, back to central Asia (Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India during the tumultuous 1979+), hobnobbing with media and political stars, stopping for heart surgery, all the time building and defending his new multicultural faith, adding his own distinct, Muslim flavour to what it means to be a Canadian. A whirlwind tour of the 20th-21st cc, as if by a latter day Muslim Christopher Columbus, one meant to try to undo the five centuries of imperialist horror that Columbus unleashed.
World News with Eric Walberg