Pete

The approach into La Paz's El Alto airport was quietly dramatic. Mountains rose up around us, level with the plane; we flew over the great bowl of the city; then a very short descent onto the airport on the rim of the bowl. The airport is up in the sky at 13,000ft.

Here we started the fully guided section of our tour with our first guide, Jorge. Jorge was kind of a dude; young well-educated guy with excellent English and good conversation. He took us to the "Valley of the Moon", a strange erosion-generated terrain; Tiwanaku, our first Inca site; and later on the hydrofoil tour of Lake Titicaca. He also took us to lunch at a local stand-up pasty vendor.

Under our own steam we visited the Anthropology museum, which is one of those rambling fusion of buildings that's very hard to gauge the size of from the outside. They had (among other things) a great collection of masks which fascinated Laura, and a small collection of Andean hats which were indistinguishable from those being sold to backpackers today. Except that some of the captions indicated that they were thousands of years old. Astonishing cultural continuity.

Diningwise we had the bizarre deserted theme restaurant Laura's already blogged about, and an unexpectedly good evening in the hotel bar. One of the desk staff was playing the piano, doing various self-arranged medlys of Elton John and the Beatles. His talents were constrained by the instrument, a short Yamaha keyboard, which he jokingly demonstrated by trying to play the opening bars of Rachmaninov's concherto and falling off the end. With the entertainment we had bottle of Bolivian wine, which had a fruity smoothness and quality way above its price bracket. You don't see much Bolivian wine in UK supermarkets - Chilean, yes, but not Bolivian.

This all fitted into three nights, and then we were off to Peru via the lake...

Hello LJ, I'm back from Peru. It was great :)

The pretext/excuse for the whole thing was visiting khalinche in Cochabamba, Bolivia. And that was where we arrived after about 36 hours of flights and waiting in airports. Edinburgh-Gatwick-Madrid-Santa Cruz(VVI)-Cochabamba. She is a most lovely and gracious host; we spent much of our time chatting, drinking tea, eating local food in busy cafes surrounded by happy Bolivian families, and hanging out at the street party. The Sunday we were there was the twice-annual day of pedestrianisation, in which cars are banned from the city centre during the day. So a street fair/party pops up, which was great to walk around in.
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On next week's episode of Mysterious Cities of Gold: La Paz

From the questiony thing that's been going around:

6. Where on your door is your letterbox?

Oddly specific! But shouldn't it also ask what orientation your letterbox is (portrait or landscape)? And how about aspect ratio? I know a lot of people are unhappy with letterboxing. Maybe they have 16:9 front doors instead.

This is really insightful. Unfortunately it's split over several tweets starting from https://twitter.com/JWMason1/statu… , so I'm parking it here for my future reference.

(JW Mason is a reasonably credentialled economist, http://slackwire.blogspot.co.uk/p/… )

"Greece" is simply the label currently put on the underlying contradictions of euro project. Whether Greece "exits" or not, project remains allowing unlimited financial flows based on unanchored expectations of financial markets and then demanding that real productive activity and standards of living adjust to accommodate. And, since this would destroy society, stabilizing system with offsetting public flows, on conditions set by unaccountable authorities.

Something similar was going to be in my "Herald of Free Enterprise" thing that I never got around to writing. The argument was that the "Four freedoms" of the EU (people, goods, services and capital) suffer from both pooling effects (capital accumulates, people and businesses cluster into megacities) and sloshing effects (capital flight, migrations of young people to find work leaving pensions unsustainable). The difference is like that between the open car deck of a RORO ferry and the sealed bulkheads of other ships: useful, but much easier to capsize and sink. While the ongoing Greece discussion is basically that the steerage passengers should not be allowed onto the first class deck despite the rising water levels as they haven't paid for the tickets. The Greek negotiating team have realised that their only negotiating card is a threat to scuttle the ship.

We're several years into "final, final deadlines". Eventually one of them really will be final, but there's no way to know in advance if this will be it.

I've been reading "And The Land Lay Still" on the bus, since I had it recommended as the definitive novel of Scottish nationalism. It's a substantial piece of work, certainly. It has a structure I recognize from science fiction novels, in that the characters exist to give life and motion to a world and a history, but the worldbuilding is the core point of the novel. It just happens to be a real place this time, and has not been done at the expense of warmth and humanity.

It also reminds me of the Tapestry of Scotland, in that it's an attempt to thread disparate history together for presentation to the public as a coherent whole from a series of vignettes. The author is excellent at evocative writing of place and time, although he occasionally leans on the fast-forward button and reels off a list of historical events flying by as we move forward a few years. He writes his Scotland into existence.

Feel like I owe people a catchup, especially my Bostonian friends; last week I was on a "holiday" trip round the south of England which included a Eurovision concert, Tate Britain, a country house wedding, visiting my parents and various old friends, and an awful lot of running around between things.

- political analogy for Europe involving MV Herald of Free Enterprise
- MP's pay and the long-term decline in recruitment quality, qv decline of Scottish labour
- anything about the Scottish ID database consultation, to which I actually managed to submit a letter

At home, more improvements: the solar panels are up on the roof and ticking away. "Build pi-based meter tracking system" has gone on the bottom of the round tuit list. Plans are afoot to put up a shed. I've booked a complex multi-leg travel arrangement to see my family and Colin's wedding over easter, but not made plans for the summer beyond that; maybe we'll make it to Nine Worlds this year.

The weather has just started to turn warm, ready to open the daffodils.

Further to that, we have a new paper up here. Yes, someone launched a daily printed physical newspaper in 2014. It has a frustratingly google-resistant name, the online section is subscriber-only and is some horrible PDFoid thing that's basically unreadable and certainly cannot be linked to. But it's pro-SNP and, unlike almost all the rest of the press, not very prone to fearmongering.

I'm still trying to work out what to make of it, while reading paper copies intermittently at lunch. It's closer to the Independent than the Guardian. They had a piece on Leon Brittan's death that I felt was a carefully written masterclass in libel avoidance; every statement hedged with sources, but the whole quite damning. In some ways it's an odd experience reading a newspaper that contains only reasonable things that I agree with. It lacks outrage fuel. While it's nominally leftwing I've also not noticed significant levels of knit-your-own-quinoa articles, language callouts, privilege checking, and other sorts of Guardian clickbait. Probably the lack of a comments section helps with that. It seems content to follow the news rather than trying to lead or drive it. I can't imagine how that will last; if it remains popular enough to stay in print it will be influential enough to be tempted to run a Campaign. Or someone will start using it as a vector for internal SNP politicking. We'll just have to see.

(not mine, this is from two comments http://crookedtimber.org/2015/02/0…)

It little profits that an idle Greek
By this still economy, among these barren markets
Match’d with an evil troika , who mete and dole
Unequal laws unto our savage race
Who hoard, and sleep, and feed, and pay not debt.
Greatly, we suffer’d greatly, both with those
That loaned us, and alone, on shore.

. . . Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer deal.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The hounding Euros; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the market, and the wrath
Of all the western banks, until I die.
It may be that the Gulf will buy us up:
It may be we shall touch the Cayman Isles
And see the great Onassis, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved oil and cargo; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of expatriate wealth,
Made weak by various new reporting regulations, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to borrow, and not to yield.

---

At the Radical Independence conference in Glasgow were, among many others, speakers from SYRIZA. Following the indyref (lost) and the Catalan referendum (meaningless victory), they've actually managed to get elected. Now they find themselves trying to deliver. The conflict between whether Greece is run by its electorate or its creditors (or its creditor's electorates) is being forced. SYRIZA really don't have a lot of cards to play, and the ones they do have are self-destructive and illegal. French-style straightforward physical violence is not yet on the table, but default-and-exit could be far more expensive than simply burning down a tax office.

I'm following this with avid interest, although nowhere near the level of horrible emotional intensity as the Indyref.

Meanwhile the SNP are looking at the wholesale collapse of the Scottish Labour vote and desperately trying not to have a "return to your constituencies and prepare for government" moment. It's less than 100 days to our own election which promises to be weird and chaotic.

Can't quite work out how to synthesize these stories, but there's an interesting thread:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotl… : Kinloss search-and-rescue closure
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal… and http://www.snp.org/media-centre/ne… versus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAE_S…

The UK designs and builds the first jet airliner, the Comet, back in 1949. A few upgrades and 20 years later the same basic design becomes the Nimrod MR2 recon aircraft. And there it stays for thirty-seven years, until eventually it catches fire and explodes in midair. In a spectacular bit of retroactive judgement, it's deemed to have been defective design all those years ago combined with neglect.

Why was the MR2 not replaced earlier? Well, the plan was to replace it with the MRA4 .. which was the same plane, just refurbished to modern standards. This project had never got off the ground as it was discovered that the original airframes not only didn't match the design drawings but were all subtly different shapes and sizes as they were hand-built to 60s manufacturing tolerances. An approach which may have made sense when there was a need to churn out Wellington bombers in 24 hours from requisitioned furniture factories for an expected lifetime of a few dozen flights, but doesn't work for modern aviation or endurance recon. The MRA4 was eventually scrapped with extreme prejudice once it became clear that it consume money forever without delivering a flyable aircraft.

So, no recon planes at all shall fly from Kinross. So the airbase side has been closed and downgraded to a barracks. The search-and-rescue will be consolidated with the south coast 400 miles away (no doubt losing local knowledge).