Observations from a Hill

Another lovely if slightly cool - at least early on - day here in Fairview Heights, and a largely domestic set of activities have been at the fore: we had a bonfire a day or two ago of the three years or so accumulation of garden cuttings, which amounted to two or three cubic metres of stuff, and which, after the fire had burnt down, left us with a significant quantity of ash to deal with. Six sacks later, we're into  no more than the first quarter of it all, so I guess it will take us another two or three sessions to bag up the rest for disposal. Time was when I would have been able to have gone through the whole lot in a single push, but tempus and stamina fugit concomitantly, so there we are. Also, I've got the next set of shelving up in the studio this afternoon, and so have relieved the workbench of the mountain of stuff that hitherto had no home of its own [pictured]. All good, and as the sun sets over The Heights, I'm going to pour myself another glass of wine and re...

  OK - it's not Sunday - but here is a lazy suppertime post nevertheless: leftover chicken curry and naan: not bad, but not earth-shattering. I was going to plunge back into the morass of politics and economics and the slo-mo train wreck of the Trump's latest fuckwit pronouncements, but I'm tired and can't be arsed and need to rest my brain for a few hours [sub-text; drink more red wine]. However, it has been the most beautiful day here, and it looks set fair for at least a few days more. In this neck of the woods it never pays to exhibit meteorological optimism at any time of the year, but a modicum of solar warmth and a change in the air have lifted my spirits immeasurably from the death-knoll of current affairs. Normal grouchy service will be resumed henceforth. I'm going to veg out now, folks, so nos da 'chi gyd...

If you want to get a flavour of the kind of world Donald Trump would like to usher in, think 1970s Chile, when friend of Margaret Thatcher, Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, in 1973, ousted the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende and ruled as dictator of the country for the next seventeen years, before being given refuge by Thatcher in the UK, after his downfall. In the interim years he 'disappeared' countless Chileans whose views and politics ran counter to his own. It's both a matter of record and a matter of history, there to be viewed by all. Trump's America is careening towards a similar place with his deportation programme, and he's glorifying the results on his 'Truth' Social platform. Almost none of the mainstream media mentions the detail, however, preferring to confine itself to the blandest of number crunching. According to The New European's Matthew D'Ancona in the current issue, the processing of the - so far  261 - Venezuelan a...

Sometimes I chance upon random conjunctions between thought streams, conversations and just stuff that I happen to be reading at the time, that merge succinctly to reinforce the stream of thought I'm currently engaged with. Just now, I was thinking about a friend's current problems at work and how she might go about engaging with them; which led to our usual rant about how shitty the modern world of work is and has been for too long, now. Having grown up in the era when worker's rights were clearly defined and well-defended - I say the era because it frankly was an historical blip in social history thus far - we enjoyed a level of equilibrium and common sense - to a point - between workforce and employer that we've not seen the like of since. This has been on the skids since the start of the 1980s and we have been heading down the pan from then on, with a consistent erosion of worker's rights and the employment of institutional bullying tactics to cow the workforce...

I was intrigued today to come upon the work of Canadian programmer Virgil Dupras, who like many of us, is concerned about the increasing disappearance of basic skill sets from whole generations of people as we enter an increasingly machine-assisted and dependent non-repairing era; from the use of basic hand tools to, as in Dupras' world, fundamental programming skills. His thesis is that we have entered a period of such environmental, political and economic instability that things could unravel pretty quickly at almost any time. I would suggest keeping a close eye on the current chaos that the Trump government in the US has set in motion as a litmus test as to how things might just pan out if we are not mighty careful. Dupras maintains that if it all does go pear-shaped, then we will be left without the basic wherewithal to repair our damaged infrastructure and systems in order to rebuild some semblance of civilised society out of the wreckage. Apocalyptic? It might sound a tad hyp...

Data, Information, Knowledge, Truth, History. Often crassly conflated as one and the same thing by those that seek only to benefit materially from such reductiveness in pulling a fast one when presenting one as equivalent to another for political ends. They are of course increasingly macro divisions derived, each, in turn from the previous. Finer subdivisions obviously can be drawn within each of these categories themselves, but suffice it to say that they are not equivalent, either structurally or conceptually: one follows from the other. Examples of this manner of deliberate distortion can be found daily in the pronouncements of pundits, politicians - and particularly - economists, the press, and sundry others drawing and promulgating conclusions from un-contextualised atomata [ my neologism, I think: apologies, anyway, in advance of whatever ] in service of nefarious doings to further their own agendas. The current US situation is a case in point. They are currently entering the ear...