Some excerpts; Last month, I was in Dubai for a reporting trip and met a Palestinian American woman named Alaa’ Odeh at a dinner party. In our conversation I did something I’ve never done before: urge someone to vote for a particular candidate. Odeh said she felt genuinely torn. Could she support Kamala Harris given the Biden administration’s unstinting support of Israel, whatever the cost to civilians in Gaza? Surely, As I was leaving the dinner, we exchanged details and promised to keep in touch.

Over the past few weeks, I keep going back to that moment as the horrors in Gaza and Lebanon have escalated. A year into the war, Israel is undertaking a pitiless siege of northern Gaza, halting the already anemic flow of humanitarian aid while relentlessly attacking hospitals, crumbling apartment buildings and schools used as shelters by the displaced, asserting that Hamas fighters are hiding among medical workers and other civilians.

Meanwhile, the gyre widens in the Middle East. A growing number of scholars are coming to share the view that the slaughter in Gaza meets the legal definition of genocide. South Africa was back at the International Court of Justice this week, submitting some 750 pages of evidence to support its genocide claim against Israel.

“The problem we have is that we have too much evidence,” South Africa’s ambassador to the Netherlands told Al Jazeera.

Last week I reached out to Odeh, the Palestinian American woman I had met in Dubai.She told me that in the end she had decided not to vote. Many people in her life, she said, were voting for Jill Stein, but she decided against it.

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The “Forrest Gump” stars were game to reunite with Robert Zemeckis for the technical experiment of “Here.” De-aging? A static camera? They weren’t fazed.

It’s not exactly a “Forrest Gump” sequel, but the new movie “Here” does reunite the stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, and the filmmakers — the director Robert Zemeckis, screenwriter Eric Roth, composer Alan Silvestri — of that 1994 Oscar-winning favorite. Like the earlier film, the new one also travels across decades, with an unheard-of perspective.

In this case, though, the viewpoint is the camera’s: “Here” is filmed almost entirely from one locked-off shot, with a camera positioned in what becomes the living room of a century-old New England home. There are no cutaways or traditional close-ups; no montages or wide-angle transitions. It’s an experiment in cinematic formalism, inspired by Richard McGuire’s ambitious, genre-expanding 2014 graphic novel of the same name.

“It really is about, why do we remember the moments that we remember?” Wright said.

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Vice President Harris has made it clear that she will not change her current policy of blind support of Israel which is causing, with our tax dollars, genocide, crimes against humanity and total destruction of Gaza. She backed up her stand by letting a hostage family speak at Democratic Convention but refused an American surgeon to speak about his experiences at a Gaza Hospital. Harris’s supporters argue that once Harris is elected, they will pressure her to change Gaza policy. But these supporters could not convince Harris for even a small gesture of letting doctor speak at the convention. They further argue that voting for Trump is a mistake as he may be even worse. Which may be true.

Whom to vote for if both candidates may end up continuing genocide and crimes against humanity policy? Both choices are evil and there is no lesser evil here. One should be clear that no matter which candidate, Harris or Trump, one votes for, your vote is also an endorsement of genocide and crimes against humanity, because you do have a choice of third candidate. Vote for third choice may still elect Harris or Trump, but your vote did not endorse genocide or crimes against humanity. One cannot vote for Harris or Trump without crossing this moral obligation.

One may try to fall back on pragmatism and argue that Genocide and crimes against humanity has taken place in past without notice and are still taking place in other places; why make so much fuss about Gaza? All other genocides and crimes against humanity do not make Gaza Genocide and crimes against humanity kosher. Every genocide should be condemned. Additionally, Gaza Genocide and crimes against humanity are enabled by our tax dollars and makes us accomplice in this.

Lastly, neither pragmatism, nor democratic values bless genocide and crimes against humanity.

(Worth reading article explaining how homeowners in rich countries might benefit from government subsidiaries for prohibitively expensive grid storeage, but third world countries cannot afford it).

The dirty little secret is that, at the scale relevant to most people, solar generation’s cost advantage is sort of beside the point. For solar to serve as the backbone of a grid, it needs to be backed with storage. That can come in the form of batteries, hydrogen, or pumped hydro. All of these are expensive; none of them scale. Storing a kilowatt-hour of electricity in a chemical battery costs an order of magnitude more than just generating it in a nuclear power plant. Which is why a 100% solar grid would be insanely expensive, even though generating solar power is basically free. 

Unfortunately, that dirty little secret—a fundamental reality of the operation of the energy grid—is often left out of the energy conversation. The solar hype machine continues to tout the benefits of solar without much understanding of how solar fits into a more complicated picture.

If all the terminology gets a bit confusing, this little fable might help.

Imagine you wake up tomorrow to news that scientists have invented a machine that renders hamburgers both environmentally benign and pretty much free. Environmentalists are delighted! There’s just one catch—the machine makes those burgers at random times, and if you don’t eat them the moment they’re made, they go bad.

Your kid, who is very concerned about the environment, hectors you into buying one of these machines. It whirs into action at 8:47 a.m. and makes three burgers, only you’re doing your school run just at that time. “Bad luck!” you think, as you throw out the spoiled burgers. The machine next springs to life at 2:09 p.m., at which time you wolf down the two burgers it makes only for the darn thing to crank up again at 4:12 p.m. when you’re at the gym. Once, it made nothing for a whole weekend. 

You start realizing that however free those burgers may be, you’re still going to have to rely on the grocery store down the street for a fair bit of your food. Along comes an environmentalist politician who decrees that, since these near-free-burgers are so eco-friendly, the neighborhood grocery store will be required to buy any unwanted burgers from you at a fixed price. This is the Burger Feed-in-Tariff, and I’m sure you can imagine how popular that rule is going to be with the grocery store. 

With the new rules, the grocery store is forced to buy the burgers your machine makes, even at times when nobody wants any burgers. The grocery store has no good options for what to do with these unwanted burgers. It can either buy the exotic, high-tech $3 million refrigerator it takes to store them, or else it ends up paying people to take burgers off its hands. 

At this, your enviro-kid rejoices: negative burger pricing! The future is here! 

But the system means mayhem for the grocery store’s whole business model. What used to be a stable clientele buying a predictable amount of food has turned into a crap-shoot. A system set up to buy food from wholesalers and distribute it to consumers now has to build a whole complicated new infrastructure to buy food from consumers as well: a complicated new “smart grocery store” infrastructure to handle the reverse flow. That’s expensive! 

Worse, when one customer’s machine starts off-loading burgers nobody wants, every customer’s machine starts off-loading burgers nobody wants. The high-tech fridges it takes to store them are insanely expensive and their capacity is limited. At times it gets so bad, the grocery store has to implement burger curtailment: paying customers to unplug their burger machines so they won’t start flooding the store with unsellable, unstorable hamburgers.

The grocery store’s operations are now in constant turmoil. In time, they’re forced to raise prices for their regular groceries to cover the additional costs associated with distributing “free” burgers. 

At which point your kid rolls his eyes at you and wonders how you can be so foolish as to pay higher and higher prices for that gnarly food from that rickety old grocery store when the burgers the machine makes are free. Green activists will scoff at outdated old polluting supermarkets that, absurdly, insist on raising prices in an age of free burgers!

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