Observations from a Hill

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...

A thumb-twiddling post tonight as I'm currently trying to rescue my thousands of tunes off of my - to be frank, still serviceable - iPod Classic. As is always the case these days, iTunes seeks to eviscerate and reset such devices if they weren't last synched with the Mac it sees fit, so I go to DropBox, where I had a modest starter account, having abandoned my original account years ago; and proceeded to start the current - ongoing - attempt at rescuing my music from the maw of obsolescent technology. I've had to upgrade, of course, with a concomitant extra financial obligation; and now have three terabytes [!] of storage available for a mere twenty quid a month. How much stuff do we need to file away? And how long will it last anyway? I've got to the stage in life that if my data can last ten years, it's probably good enough to see me out, and then it's someone else's problem if they care to see it as an obligation. So I'll roll with this one for as lon...

The current 'debate' about free speech in the US is a worrying one. The First Amendment to the constitution states: ' Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances'.  There you have it in a nutshell. Unfortunately, the political right in the US these days seems to hold a somewhat twisted view of the First, somehow inserting invisible caveats into it, such that free speech is now actually only available to the government itself, its supporters, and most particularly, its funders. Pretty neat trick, eh? We are actually moments close to Germany, 1933; the Soviet Union under Stalin or Cambodia in the Pol Pot era. All have common traits: racial cleansing, othering, ideological suppression; the rewriting of historical truths to suit the regime, und so we...

I have to comment [yet again] on the absolute farrago that is the current US administration, in the light of the security [Ha! There's a concept] breech that has occurred in the last few hours, with the collective f**k-wits of Trump's inner coterie of incapable misfits broadcasting to the world via social media - geez, won't someone tell politicians to stay clear of this shit? - their war plans regarding the issues at play in Suez. The denials proffered by all and sundry are simply, clearly, the pathetic 'it wasn't me' denials of a young kid in the playground caught with his pants down. And just as with a kid in the playground, the language these so-called adults use in these 'communications' is indeed the language of the playground. I for one find this simple fact alone a tad worrying, considering the power that these people wield and the responsibility they hold for the consequences of their thoughts and actions: the ramifications of which are deep and...

How long before the Trump Bubble explodes/implodes? Anyone's guess, I guess; but he seems to be doing a great job of committing an agonisingly slow and drawn-out act of seppuku at the moment,  seemingly without any awareness of his doing so. So too, his fellow billionaire acolytes and toadies, their fortunes dwindling at pace as a direct result of their collective endeavours under the [mis]direction of Trump and his chosen Lord of Chaos, Elon Musk, whose fortunes are similarly taking a real time beating, with shares in Tesla sitting at the end of yesterday's trading at around half of its all-time high, and down 8.79 on the week. A similar picture obtains across the rest of Trump's frat pack of über-rich co-conspirators and their businesses: they're all losing money, and have done consistently since they all jumped into bed with The Orange One. How long before they realise their glorious leader is a conman and gangster of the crassest ilk, out solely to fleece them and t...

Tonight's Sunday meal is a bit of an improvised twist on some ingredients that might just be familiar to you from past Sunday Roast Posts; however, the lack of any stock with which to make sauce led me to rethink. So, the spuds were pretty much the Greek take, with seasoned olive oil, lemon, garlic and thyme, whilst the belly pork strips were treated to light and dark soy sauce, black pepper, chilli flakes, salt and olive oil, baked alongside small vine tomatoes, to produce the sauce. Steamed veg to accompany the thing and there you go. Very fine, even though I say so myself. Another week beckons, and I'm changing cars: out goes the old small, white Citroën; in comes the new small, white Citroën: pleasantly familiar, but with a new twist, just like supper tonight...

It has long been the habit of the Western mind to deify the entrepreneur and business in general, as if the making of a buck from an idea is the highest form of human achievement. But is it? Really? Agreed, the economic drivers behind human society - given that capitalism is your sole model and modus operandi - depend on innovation and the exploitation of that innovation in largely profit-driven terms: I get it. But what I don't get is the almost religious fervour that the dogma of business and how it relates to society obtains in discussions about regulating business practices through legislation. Take the case of the British woman who has successfully gained a court ruling against Meta's unsanctioned use of her data in targeting her with directed advertising feeds. On Radio Four this morning it was suggested by the interviewer [of this self-same person] that ruling that Meta should cease and desist from using that user's data to target advertising somehow breaks the very ...

Sometimes it's difficult to get started on this self-imposed daily task of mine; not that I am short of potential material: I'm surrounded by a world of pain, confusion, political ineptitude and greed. The news is a constant source of angst: one would imagine that the Weltschmerz would move one into a state of moral confusion precipitating a rictus stasis of total inaction, like a rabbit caught in the proverbial headlights, unable to move. Nah, feck it, as they say in Ireland: me no rabbit. Having said that, there is so much to complain about the nature of this so-called 'modern world' that it's difficult to know where to begin. Considering the current Prime Minister's obsession with AI as the Golden Dawn of the new future - it's not - it's instructive to know that the most basic of 'intelligent' automated interactions such as search filters still fail to come up to scratch, even on reputable and long-standing websites. I am searching for a decen...

This morning at 09:01 hours GMT, we welcomed this year's vernal equinox [here in the Northern Hemisphere, at least] and celebrate the pivot of the seasons toward spring and thenceforward to summer: I can hear The Byrds refrain in my head - 'Turn! Turn! Turn!' - as I write this. This year the old adage of March 'coming in like a lion and and going out like a lamb' has certainly played out so far, but you never know, there's still eleven days left [!]. Still, this my favourite part of the year's cycle, and it always makes me feel good that winter is behind us and the potential of spring and summer are in front. This quarterly mark in our planet's solar cycle is also a time for personal reflection and a reckoning up of the balance sheet of one's life thus far. In the words of Spike Milligan [and I'm sure I've quoted his words many times before, blog posts passim]: 'Spring is Sprung, The Grass is Riz, I Wonder Where the Boidies is!'...

As anyone who knows me knows that I kind of like messing around with audio equipment, particularly loudspeakers. To be frank,  though, I haven't been particularly active in this department - as in so many others - of late, and I feel the need to try something a bit left-field, just for the sake of it. Pictured are some randomly-chosen documents referring to a particularly oddball speaker design; the Karlson. Dreamt up in the 1950s by the eponymous Mr. Karlson, it was a development of several acoustic ideas in tandem. The overall concept was based on the folded pipe idea, usually exemplified by the - in my opinion excellent - quarter-wavelength transmission line; but with a couple of twists, involving a bit of bass reflex loading with - even - an acoustic resistance unit [although not in all instances of the design], thrown in for good measure. In fact, the design seems to have had many possible variants; but all share one main characteristic: the curious exponentially-cu...

Returning to last night's topic of language as the elevator from react to interact - so far as Homo Sapiens is concerned, at least - I offer this thought. One of the key life skills that most of us fortunate to have been born and raised pre-internet, is basic human interaction, unmediated by pretty much anything external that really impacted on it in any real, material sense. We grew up learning how to 'read' people, in groups and as individuals. Now, as I said yesterday, much of human interaction and response is essentially feral: we have certain, survival-based instincts that are simply intrinsic to our animal selves, which makes perfect sense, given our origins and the environment we operate within. The intellectual level of human interaction sits atop this animalistic stratum, and mediates its instinctive-ness, tempering the excesses of the monkey-self  with an introspection afforded only to the linguistically endowed. The affordance of abstraction that language gives u...

Imagine for a moment that you can only vocalise a limited number of discrete sounds due to some unspecified combination of mental and physical constraints. You can only whistle, grunt, growl and bark, albeit with at least the sophistication of varying pitch, tone and volume. You also have the facility to combine these primitive utterances in simple combinations; say to indicate a warning to your fellow species' members that danger approaches and roughly from which direction, or where there might be food to be had. This is a given in most of the animal kingdom, and where Homo Sapiens differs greatly from both the bulk of that kingdom and from our long defunct ancestors, the early humans, in all their variety. We have developed, through a combination of concept of mind and the development of language, an introspective sense of our place in the world alongside our fellow creatures. This has allowed us to break free of our immediate environment and the constraints of merely being able ...

Hey, folks, it's Sunday roast time again! I was going to start some sort of thought experiment into just why Homo Sapiens triumphed in the evolutionary success department over all the other - frankly more successful in terms of their longevity - human species that we eventually grew up beside. But I'll leave that for another day, but - spoiler alert! - it involves language. Tonight we partake of roast garlic chicken, roast lemon and garlic potatoes, token green stuff and, of course, a sauce comprised of my usual shallots, white wine, chicken stock, and the juices from the roast itself. What can I say? Forty-five years ago when we first came to North Wales, I could barely boil water unaided, and now, here we are, many thousands of meals cooked in the interim for all and sundry. Life's good...

Another diary post this evening as it's been a fraught day trying to get the frankly lethal front tyres on the car changed in order to get back home from Lancashire safely. I woke and rose early this morning so I could get on the case of the car tyres before the rest of the population booked everything up first. The only place I could find online that could locally supply and fit the correct boots for may car was a Kwikfit in Lancaster, about fifteen minutes drive from base, so I duly ordered a pair of tyres and booked what seemed to be an appointment for the start of play at 08:30: easily achievable, given that when I was getting ready this morning, the moon was still setting over Morecambe Bay: pictured from the bathroom window. However, after having forked out over a hundred quid, I quickly discovered that the machine had conspired to book me in for the twelfth of April: as much use to me as the proverbial chocolate teapot. So I thought, bugger it, I'll go there anyway at op...

Just a quick diary post tonight as we've had a semi-wasted day through picking up a nail in a tyre yesterday evening, resulting in a flat this morning. We had to wait until the early afternoon for the RAC to get a mechanic to us to have a look at it, only to find out that the spare was unserviceable anyway, so a temporary plug repair it was, which is going to make for a slow journey home tomorrow. Anyway, our lunch turned into an early supper at The Royal Hotel, Kirkby Lonsdale, over the county border, in Cumbria. We've had drinks there many times before, but this was the first time I'd eaten there, and I was not disappointed, opting for an excellent slow-cooked duck leg with onion mash, spiced red cabbage and a duck jus. Spot on, and washed down with a couple of pints of good local ales from The Bowland Brewery, who own the place these days. As to the car, we'll just have to take it easy and hope to find a tyre place en route... 

Currently on a brief trip to Carnforth to pick up Jane from her mother's place. A two-night stopover. For the last few days, our broadband at home has been down, as I mentioned the other day. One replacement router and a port reset later, it still doesn't work as there's no PPP session available, which suggests that a full stack reset is necessary. As we'd already started the process to change providers anyway, it hardly seems worth pursuing the matter for the few days remaining service with the current one before the changeover. The curious thing about all of this of course is that all the protagonists involved; our current provider, Plusnet; our new upcoming provider, EE; and the network infrastructure provider that stitches the whole kit and kaboodle together, Openreach; are all part of BT Group plc: essentially the same organisation. It will be very interesting to see if there is any practical level of cooperation between these interlinked entities. When I retired f...

Just shy of a couple of years ago, I wrote of the non-linearity of time  in our perception. I've just learned something that hitherto I had not even remotely considered, even though I was already aware that gravity distorts space and time. What I hadn't realised was that that distortion could be felt and measured on as small a scale as the Earth's immediate environs. The fact is that GPS satellites' clocks 'see' time differently to the way we do on the surface of the Earth, due to the lessening of Earth's gravitational pull in Middle Earth Orbit; so we have to pre-correct the data we get from them and convert the timebase to suit the passage of time at our level in order for the data to be useful to us. Middle Earth Orbit is between 2,000 and 36,000 km above us: not exactly astronomical in scale: basically within our very immediate neighbourhood; but even at such a short distance away from us, gravitational differences are sufficient to alter time itself in ...

I was introduced to Hank Williams [Snr.] in the eighties by my late mate Alan. I'd hitherto resisted the lure of country music as somehow alien to me, and a bit naff to be frank, although I was already a fan of Willie Nelson by that time [still very much am]. Around the mid-eighties, I'd started to become aware of the New Country movement, which seemed to hark back to genres from the sixties/seventies with which I was already familiar and very fond of: country rock and folk country; so I guess I'd actually liked country music from the outset and was really only prejudiced against the hard core country that dominated certain airwaves in my youth. Alan turned me on to the modern rootstock of American Country Music: Merle Haggard, Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash, et al., and many of the much earlier influences from Appalacia and early white man's blues. But the one artist that stood out for me was Hank Williams [Snr.]: an old school bad boy and rebel who lived fast and died young...

It looks like the fault-lines in the Trump administration are already beginning to widen into nascent crevasses. Aside from the dizzying [often multiple] U-turns on just about every decision Trump has 'taken' thus far, the US stock market is going into free fall as I write, and his 'disruptor-in-chief', Elon Musk is currently denying that he ever threatened to cut access to his Starlink network for Ukraine: jury's out on that one. The fact is that Musk regards the US government as a dysfunctional 'business' in need of disruption, by guess who? He himself of course: the man who built his business success largely on the back of personal inheritance and US government and NASA funding. Now he's taken his infamous chainsaw to the very hands that have fed his successes to date: the state-funded scientists, regulators and institutions that support the developments made by companies such as Space X and Tesla. As to the latter, his customer base worldwide seems t...

Now here's ironic for you: a collection of rare, early editions of Mao Tsetung's 'Quotations...' [I use the rendition of his name into English prevalent at the time: now characterised as Mao Zedong; you pays your money, you takes your choice, folks], ie. The Little Red Book; is to be sold at auction, and it's expected that it will fetch £1m. For those of us of a certain age, the Little Red Book - although the original cover was weirdly actually blue - was a kind of talisman of the counter-culture at a time when class struggle was actually starting to mutate away from whence it came. Socialism in the West by the time of its first publication in 1964 [my first copy - the open one - dates from three years later, at the height of the sixties' 'revolutionary' zeal] had already made great inroads into the class war between worker and owner, and had realised, to a large extent, the social contract that forms the basis of the Welfare State. My dad always said th...

I'll keep it short tonight, as we've had a power cut - why, I've no idea, as the weather is warm-ish and very calm, and has been all day - and the broadband is now off, so I guess the DSLAM that feeds this part of Rachub has failed to reboot itself. Is our tech really so bloody friable? Answer: yes it bloody well is. Don't bode well does it? I'm using my tethered iPhone as my network connection to post this, so I'll get it out of the way before the mobile network dies on me as well. Anyway, this kind of leads nicely into my original intention for tonight's post: exactly why is it that we deem it necessary to overcomplicate the stuff in our lives? The case I was going to bring up was that of coffee makers. I had a push note for  the Zojirushi 5-cup Zutto pour-over [filter-style] automatic coffee maker; the review of which gushed that it had a 'really simple user-interface'. I ask you. So, in order to make a cup of coffee or two, I have to have a mains...

In the beginning was the void, without dimension, without time: no-thing. So starts not only every creationist religion or philosophy, but Taoism, Buddhism, Zen, and modern cosmological physics itself. All agree on the subject, as long as one removes the 'God' or 'Gods' bit from the equation. Anyone who reads this daily scribble from this old fool on the hill, will know that I espouse a reductive form of Zen as my 'belief' system, and always have done since I was in my late teens. One would also have noted from a couple of previous posts that I have had a peculiar fascination with G. Spencer-Brown's book, "Laws of Form", since I discovered it some forty-odd years ago [blog posts passim]; since when I have struggled and failed to come to any real understanding of its contents, whatsoever. Until recently, that is.  A while ago, I found online a paper that sought to elucidate the reasoning and philosophy behind this enigmatic book. As I've said pr...

Tombola  /tɒm'bəʊlə/ . A word fading from the English language I guess because of the fading into history of the entertainment itself. The word derives from the Italian tombolare; 'turn a somersault',  referring to the mechanics of the tombola itself: a [usually hand-cranked] rotating cylinder, as often hexagonal as actually cylindrical, with a closeable door in the side into which tickets, tokens or marked balls can be placed. On turning the cylinder a number of times, a chosen person then blindly selects the [winning] ticket, number or whichever from the thing and announces the winner of the lottery of the day. Once a feature of most village fetes and fairs, the tombola should not be confused with the noun tombolo  /ˈtɒmbɒlʊ/, a rather different entity: ' a bar of sand or shingle joining an island to the mainland ', again from the Italian; literally 'sand dune '. I, being me, of course, see parallels. US politics, as currently 'operated' by Trump a...

What is it about the figure 350? Why is it the go-to pluck-out-of-thin-air figure for politicians when they're lying to their voting public in order to convince the hoi polloi that they can do no wrong? Two instances of the misuse of this particular multiplicand spring to mind, its abusers separated by a decade and the Atlantic Ocean, but who both share some pretty similar characteristics: both are right wing, privileged inheritees, both  are serial philanderers and both have stupid haircuts. That's right, people: Boris Johnson and Donald J. Trump. Johnson famously came up with the entirely fictitious figure of £350mn per week being paid out by the UK to the EU whilst we were still members of the alliance: we weren't. He also, infamously, claimed that his government would divert said amount into the NHS to try and reverse the problems that the Tory government were largely responsible for anyway: he/they didn't, to notorious effect, but they still convinced enough voters...

Arrogance, hubris, paranoia and a ridiculous, spiky signature. The main difference between the two obvious subjects of this description, is that one invaded sovereign territory despite appeasement from those who thought they had no choice and were anyway reassured by the potential aggressor that no such territorial aspirations existed; and that the other seeks invasion by proxy through his own process of appeasement with another nation with blatantly expansionist aims. In both scenarios, separated by eighty-odd years, the ultimate victims were the countries and peoples considered in some way to be disposable by the main protagonists. And so, I'm kind of tired of people who find the Trump/Putin/Hitler comparative to be a trite and lazy truism. It simply isn't. We are as close to another European and possibly even a World War as we have been since the Cold War ended. These are febrile and dangerous times. How Europe and NATO deal with Trump is key to unlocking the death-spiral i...

I think we might - hopefully - be on the verge of a turn in the tide of effluent that has flowed for too long from the maw of neoliberalism and its mentally-challenged acolytes. As I said in last night's scribble, the Trump/Vance creature, in a few short minutes have exposed the Emperor's naked butt to the world on primetime everything, and in a stroke re-unified European thinking and its politics, and stuck it to Reform and sundry other Farage-ist no-marks in the process. Yay, Donald! You've done the job for us! In one fell swoop, you've set the free world against the US/Russia axis you so dearly wanted to foster. Chuck in that you also failed to see and seek to exploit one of the most lucrative business opportunities staring you in the damned face: renewables, stupid(!) and we see you for what you actually are: an old [multiply convicted] crook and a very bad businessman, to boot; more often bankrupt than solvent, and who most of us wouldn't put in charge of a lem...

I was going to post yet another rather boring Sunday dinner post of my impending - pictured - roast chicken, roast potatoes [and steamed greens], but hang it. All I can say is that the Trump/Vance sandbagging of President Zelensky in the Oval Office is probably the straw that breaks the camel's back in the USA's relationship with, and standing in, global affairs. I honestly think he and Vance finally screwed the pooch, with the whole world looking on. They blew it. They blew the United States of America's political credibility in the space of an hour's '...great television...'. Trump has also made the egregious mistake of allying himself with Russia, whose economy and influence are on the wane under the weight of their isolationism and internal corruption: a model that Trump seems only too eager to ape. Anyone with half a brain would see immediately that Russia is pretty much spent economically and influentially, and that the nation to try and win round is China...

1979. Ron Fawcett puts up the first ascent of The Lord of The Flies, E6 6a on the Right Wall of Dinas Cromlech in Llanberis Pass, North Wales. I'm working at the University of Birmingham as a photographer/technician in the Department of Mechanical Engineering; one of the largest departments on the campus. I have recently been offered the chance of teaching a night class in photography in a suburb of Birmingham called Stirchley, arranged for me through a contact of my boss, the Chief Technician, Arthur Burgess. He has also flagged an internal promotion opportunity for me in the Department of Civil Engineering as Senior Technician there, which he is supporting me in applying for and hopefully getting, a significant step up which would set me up for the rest of my working life. Fast forward to the cold, early spring of the following year, and Jane and I are visiting a schoolfriend of mine and buddy of us both, in North Wales, where he is studying the Teaching of English as a Foreign L...