The Drive to Crook Peak.

 A Saturday morning drive to a beautiful spot on top of the Mendips with unparalleled 360° views over Somerset, North Somerset, Wales, Devon, Wiltshire ... you get the picture, and this is just the drive there.

Carbohydrates ... or not.

I don't think carbs are the issue. I think it's specifically bread-related carbs. I can't be arsed to go into detail, but by dint of a little laziness and maybe lowliness (depression), I have consumed two loaves in a fortnight, and I seem to be `puffier', not larger or heavier, just a bit bloaty and not quite in sync with myself.

So, yesterday morning after the pool, and many other things, I sorted out brown rice and quinoa for a week (rather than buying packets), flavoured at the secondary absorption phase with a stir through mix of herbs and spices, then quick-chilled to create the perfect deli-fridge for the working man. Add to that, cooked fresh meats, salads or raw veg and a handful of mixed nuts a day, and I rather suspect that things will be settled by the end of the week.

I tried full keto, but it kept tripping me up. So, I've gone back to balanced flexitarian but cut bread back to an absolute minimum, and we'll see how we go.

How come so many open vacancies?

The problem with getting people into employment has reared its head recently. It isn't just Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset … the Southwest, it’s UK wide and it's endemic. I have a friend who is willing to pay £22k for a full-time person, who he will train to be a Barista. He has been looking for six months.

There are a number of problems it seems. Youngsters don't want to work hard and or don't know what to do, and think the future is uncertain, so, what's the point? That may sound like a generalisation, however, speak to some young people and gauge their responses, it's quite alarming how disincentivised they are while being equally entitled, the contradiction is mind-bending.

Underlying employment locally is the agency ethos, I have made mention of this before. Employers have outsourced responsibility for employees to agencies. So, you end up with an employer paying an agency £15 per hour. The agency, in turn, pays the employee £9.5o an hour (for instance). The employee has no certainty or security of tenure. The employer has no responsibility for the employee -just the responsibility for paying a monthly invoice. The agency can bench employees the employer no longer requires. The employer no longer has any of the hassle of HR, pension admin, payroll etc. Employees (agency staff, on the agencies books alone) jump from contract to contract to move for as little as 5-pence per hour.

The only people making money in this scenario are the agencies, who are providing `bodies', not skills, not assets, not human resources (though if you think about bodies as human resources then I guess the agencies have actually reduced people to things, to be traded).

If employers locally, and nationally woke up from their fugue state, having been painted the picture of a hassle-free workplace, where responsibility for all that ugly tedious expensive employee admin was magically taken away and dealt by a third-party,  and instead "jogged" the agencies on, split the difference in cost to the agency, between the prospective employee, and the incumbent responsibilities for those employees; then in all likely hood, wages would rise for the employee and one would broadly assume permanent, secure, relatively well-paid roles with training and development and a future, would produce loyalty.

But what do I know? I just look in and see the same set of circumstances everywhere, and hear the same gripes from both sides, but apparently, never the twain shall meet as long as the agencies are also agents of fear for employers, who also allegedly have the magic beans that cure the problem, for both parties. Flexibility for employees (read short notice, you are changing jobs on Monday). Hassle-free employment (see lines above … avoided responsibility).

I tend to think of the agencies as the workplace mafia. Disagree: Go and read a Manpower job advert all the way to the end. Then just read some copy and paste job descriptions across agencies on job boards, and you won't be able to make an informed choice, because the words are the same, the salaries are the same, they are just white noise. There are two contradictory issues in the situation: One: there appears to be too much choice among things of equal value (very little value ). Two: There is so little differentiation you can't make an informed choice. People react to this in exactly the same way as they do when presented with bland voices amongst consumer goods .... they walk away.

The core issue isn't jobs. it's agencies, and I could write as many words again about the recruitment personnel and practices as I have about the labour market, but frankly, just read some modern job adverts … the penny will drop soon enough.

Lauren Southern: Why The Media LIE About Ukraine

Agree ... but, it still doesn't justify the full-scale invasion by Vladimir Putin's forces (not the Russian people), or the scorched earth policy being pursued by Vladimir Putin's forces. Levelling a country's cities and displacing millions is just weaponising refugees to overwhelm western Europe's capacity to provide for them all, and is by dint of that action; using refugees as proxies to weaken western Europe financially and socially, because sure as god made green grass, eventually Ukrainian refugees on-mass in other European countries will be seen in the same light as, Kosovans, Ethiopians, Sudanese, Croats, Somalis, Rwandans, Syrians, Afghans, take your pick from three or four decades of conflicts. 

It's all cool when it's fresh but as soon as they start to require the resources of the nation that takes them in, then the people at the and in the places where they are resettled will start to push back exclaiming "what about my benefits, my housing needs, my children's schooling, my doctor's surgery?" and from there, people transition from being people to being a race and we all know what happens next.

Agreed eventually after a couple of generations things settle, but a couple of generations is a long time for elements of and within a society to be abrading each other, wilfully agitated by the elements on the far-left and the far-right that Lauren Southern speaks of.

The Drive to Kilve.

Something on a lighter note, no BMW drivers feeling were hurt in the making of this video, they don't do feelings they just do shit driving and being arseholes behind the wheel.

Antzy antagonistic memes.

A selection from the pandemic ear ... past tense it seems in the Northern hemisphere, its other people's problem now, we're having a war ... or at least watching a war, and hoping Mr Putin doesn't go all in and nuke his way to immortality in a historical sense, a grand claim for a terrible reason. Think that's a bit of an exaggeration. just think about all the fuckers that have gone postal over the years, killing and dying to make their name, their mark on society and history and doing it with nihilism, and now we have one in charge of the largest nuclear arsenal on Earth ... what could possibly go wrong?

For those who ask: “Why does Ukraine matter? “

For veracity, I checked Snopes before reposting this meme in full.

Snopes.com fact-check why-does-ukraine-matter

Snopes summary: 

Conclusion

Much of the data included in the viral “why Ukraine matters” posts were true. Some of the items on the list had become outdated, but more recent numbers still showed that the country had a strong standing in various categories of reserves, production, and exports. However, we were unable to find figures to confirm a few of the claims, and a small number of them were flat-out false. For all of these reasons, the social media posts were neither definitively true, false, outdated, nor unproven, but rather a mixture of all four. That’s why we chose the rating of “Mixture.”

So on balance, we can say Ukraine is still pretty important and we should be mindful of how badly Ukraine's fall would be if Vladimir Putin succeeds.

This is why Ukraine matters.

It is the second largest country by area in Europe by area and has a population

of over 40 million - more than Poland.

Ukraine ranks:

1st in Europe in proven recoverable reserves of uranium ores;

2nd place in Europe and 10th place in the world in terms of titanium ore reserves;

2nd place in the world in terms of explored reserves of manganese ores (2.3 billion tons, or 12% of the world's reserves);

2nd largest iron ore reserves in the world (30 billion tons);

2nd place in Europe in terms of mercury ore reserves;

3rd place in Europe (13th place in the world) in shale gas reserves (22 trillion cubic meters)

4 fact checked false

7th place in the world in coal reserves (33.9 billion tons)

Ukraine is an important agricultural country:

1st in Europe in terms of arable land area;

3rd place in the world by the area of black soil (25% of world's volume);

1st place in the world in exports of sunflower and sunflower oil;

2nd place in the world in barley production and 4th place in barley exports;

3rd largest producer and 4th largest exporter of corn in the world;

4th largest producer of potatoes in the world;

5th largest rye producer in the world;

5th place in the world in bee production (75,000 tons);

8th place in the world in wheat exports;

9th place in the world in the production of chicken eggs;

16th place fact checked false

Ukraine can meet the food needs of 600 million people.

Ukraine is an important industrialised country:

Fact checked false 1st in Europe in ammonia production;

Europe's 2nd’s and the world’s 4th largest natural gas pipeline system;

3rd largest in Europe and 8th largest in the world in terms of installed capacity of nuclear power plants;

3rd place in Europe and 11th in the world in terms of rail network length (21,700 km);

3rd place in the world (after the U.S. and France) in production of locators and locating equipment;

3rd largest iron exporter in the world

4th largest exporter of turbines for nuclear power plants in the world;

4th world's largest manufacturer of rocket launchers;

4th place in the world in clay exports

4th place in the world in titanium exports

8th place in the world in exports of ores and concentrates;

9th place in the world in exports of defence industry products;

10th largest steel producer in the world (32.4 million tons).

Ukraine matters. That is why its independence is important to the rest of the world.

Brent Knoll Thigh Burner

An early morning walk up Brent Knoll to take in the views, and deposit some of my dad's ashes on the western face of the Knoll so he can bask in afternoon sunshine until the hill has eroded away, or the land sinks beneath a future sea or is subsumed by glaciers in some distant epoch ... I myself will be long since gone whatever. I've walked this walk a dozen times or more over the years, in all seasons and at all times of the day. It's a liberating walk, hard enough to get the blood pumping and the bellows blowing but not so hard that you can't do anything else for the rest of the day.

Wikipedia Brent Knoll

Wikipedia Brent Knoll Camp

Wikipedia Bellows (Colloquial ... lungs).

 

Star Treking Across the Memeiverse ... always going forward because we can't find reverse ... etc

Something a little more lighthearted, I love these Picard and Riker memes, endlessly adaptable to the one-liner. And it's the same for Kirk and Spock, and then we have a little crossover meme, Douglas Adams imagined galaxy sending a message to Spock's Tri-Corder. And in a final flourish Colm Meaney's `Miles O'Brien' from various Star Trek iterations taking Riker's place at the table, and the Firms 1987 hit Star Trekkin.

The Mental Toolkit

I think in some ways, the lack of company compels me to talk to myself. I think talking to yourself only becomes a problem when the thoughts end up on a repeating loop. In there lies danger, beware of creating mental loops.

Jordan Peterson would explain that conversation is the way in which we order our thoughts and make sense of the world. 

I think these videos where I walk and talk are in some ways a combination of talking to myself and having a wider conversation, with the aim of ordering my own thoughts, which I can tell you are sometimes like a blizzard of hail. 

However, if you put the video on mute you can just wader with me silently, and in some ways vicariously see some of the things I see. There is no obligation to listen, it is a choice.

 

Memes The Dark Arts

Memes used to just be funny by and large. But over time the meme; a combination of precis coupled with pictures has become more than the sum of its parts. So, if a picture paints a thousand words … a picture with two dozen words actually paints a picture with ten thousand words. 

From the Atlas Society Page on Face 

This first one is a reference to both the pandemic that has savaged liberties and freedom as well as killing millions (though probably not as many millions as directly as the doom-mongers would like you to believe). For us in the northern hemisphere at least (the free west ... I think) it points to how quickly the Russian invasion of Ukraine swept the pandemic news away ... Abracadabra!

I guess it all falls back to the dark art of marketing, it’s not exactly a new discovery, but it is an adaption that is freely accessible to anyone who wants to make a particular point barbed for maximum penetration using very few words. And as we saw with the first set posted, you can take classic themes, character quotes from classic characters, real or imagined and recombine them to your own ends. Or as below just take the words already written and amplify them with a sub-definition.

The interesting part of the process is that when you take an imagined character’s attributes from a fictional narrative (Morpheus from the Matrix in the previous example), then the amplification of the message is exponential in effect. As the emperor clearly demonstrates below. Anyone who doesn't have a `penny drop' moment looking at the meme is likely to be clinically dead or lived in a cave on a desert island since the mid-1970's.

Beyond that is the diversity of uses that an image can be used for, but we will look at that another day … and probably on a lighter note.

Plants a Garden Centre Adventure.

As may have been mentioned elsewhere (I don't track what I write per see), I had a collection of plants at my last home. Of ninety-five plants in that collection (approximately sixty-five separate displays or creations), eighty or more were rehomed by my ex-partner who didn't want to look after them or care for them until I found somewhere to live.

She doorstepped me a few weeks back with a terrarium I made from a broken demijohn, that had (since I left my old home) been over-watered to the point that it was more water than soil, a prayer plant she bought me (it has nice leaves but I don’t feel for it), and a tray of mixed Christmas and Easter cacti I took from single leaf cuttings from my mother (who has just celebrated her eighty-seventh birthday). There are twelve in the tray and they flower periodically.

Yesterday, 12^th of March 2022, I took a trip to the garden centre and spent £36 on a few `tots’ tiny plants, mere infants in the grand scheme of things. I videoed the process, and appended below is the feature-length movie of that day's exploits 😊

Parody Inversion Point

Depressingly true. I reckon we could on the basis of this we could end up in Whoops Apocalypse moment sans hypnotised nuclear submarine captain. I reckon there is likely to be an equation/formula that would prove that this isn't actually a joke and more of a theory accidentally discovered by Dilberts creator while trying to reason on the observable ridiculousness of the world we are currently living in. He felt it, but hasn't done the maths ... but it's there sure as grass is green. The simple mass of collective geopolitical players collapsing in on itself thus imploding, creating a feedback loop, and boom.

Memes

I intend to start posting memes here. Funny ones, sarcastic ones, pointed truth ones, sardonic ones. I have curated quite a collection, and I think it's worth having these snapshots of time and relevance curated somewhere fixed. In years to come they may have lost all meaning, and just be pictures with words, but here they will have small contextual descriptions so they can be placed.

Diffusing the cultural war on meat with humour.

On the brink of potential nuclear war, we find dark humour.

When Covid stopped being a disease among people and became a political tool

When you wonder if you've been given blue and red pills

There are more.

I get the sense that the older I get the more libertarian I perceive myself to be, and yet I wouldn't label myself as such because I believe that well run social institutions do benefit us all and especially if we are all paying into them collectively, and that there is a place for the state. I just happen to think that for the last few years the states have become divorced from the people they should serve.

I also think we need to be mindful of our freedom to share our opinions and alternative facts, points of view, or news the mainstream doesn't report so widely. And I say this because, in the clamour of alternative voices, in the free for all, it's possible for the leviathans to hold the field, by dint of mass and or traditional outlets. It is still possible to be entirely correct, right and moral and still end up being cast as the outlaw.

Beer and Fags

 It's Friday evening. How things change. Where once I would have been having a G&T or a beer, I am now waiting for adult swim time and a gentle extra half-mile. It's also a fast day so, nothing to eat until mid-afternoon tomorrow. These aspects of the new life are ... odd, and even after months, I have to remind myself what I am doing and or what I am going to do, and the reasoning behind it.

Here's an odd thing. I smoked a little for a lot of years, but generally more on the weekend, and particularly on a Friday when I let my hair down (so that includes a few doobies ... he says airily as if it was a passing foible, ahem). There is in my opinion a physiological hangover for all those years. Without exception, Saturday mornings under the new regime of no booze and no fags, involves coughing as if the new regime isn't in place. My body has habituated to coughing on Saturday mornings because it did for so many years. Unconscious muscle memory, and I guess because I was always a light smoker with a propensity for a weekend binge the effect is more noticeable because of the one-off peak.

Video Blogging ... the upgrade.

Me wittering on about this and that ... just like I do here but on video. It explains some of why I haven't written so much. I do need to do a full catch up here, in part to clear my head and in part because I owe it to my reader.