A fascinating specimen in Aberdare Park.

From the Wikipedia encyclopaedia, the tree is described as an “evergreen tree growing to 40 m tall and 2 m trunk diameter. Because of species’ great age it is sometimes described as a living fossil. Araucaria araucana is the national tree of Chile.

The leaves are thick, tough and scale-like, triangular, 3-4 cm long, 1-3 cm broad at the base, and with razor-sharp edges and tip. They persist for 10-15 years or more, so cover most of the tree except for the older branches…

It is a popular garden tree, planted for its unusual effect of the thick, ‘reptilian’ branches with a very symmetrical appearance….

The origin of the popular English name Monkey-puzzle derives from its early cultivation in Britain in about 1850, when the species was still very rare in gardens and not widely known. The proud owner of a young specimen at Pencarrow garden near Bodmin in Cornwall was showing it to a group of friends, and one made the remark “It would puzzle a monkey to climb that”; as the species had no existing popular name, first ‘monkey-puzzler’, then ‘monkey-puzzle’ stuck (Mitchell 1996).

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Plans for a Veterans Day were announced in February 2006 by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, who said the aim was to ensure that the contribution of veterans was never forgotten. Every year since then, Veterans Day has provided a focus for the community to recognise the part played by veterans of all ages in conflicts both past and present.

Photos courtesy of John Rees Photography (Aberdare)

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It is a wooden sculpture of St Dogmael in St Dogmaels about a mile west of Cardigan.

The sculpture is by John Clarke and dates from 2002, commissioned to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II.

It is located near the lower end of St Dogmaels’s Abbey.

Watch your step.  There is a duck pond adjacent to the sculpture!

St Dogmaels village has lots to offer the photographer/tourist. According to Dyfed Archaeological Trust it is “a very distinctive historic landscape character“.

Enjoy the Photos in the Gallery here.

Today we experienced something of an epiphanic moment reading the views of Paul A. Baran in his essay entitled “Better Smaller But Better”. It was published in Monthly Review in July 1950, originally under the pen-name Historicus.

Baran discusses ‘Co-Operation on the Left’ in a post-war American society where capitalism seemed unassailable and omnipotent. He discusses the methods used to preserve and strengthen capitalism in America as it was then, 1950.

Here’s how Baran puts it, any emphasis in the text is ours …

“The impotence of the American left cannot be understood without a full appreciation of the ideological stability of American capitalism. We have to understand the ideologically overpowering impact of bourgeois, fetishistic consciousness on the broad masses of the working population. The still-vigorous belief in the possibilities of individual advancement within the framework of capitalist society. The deep-seated acceptance of bourgeois values, especially the desirability of reaching the status of the next-higher group. The supremely streamlined, multi-pronged manipulation of the public mind. The heart-breaking emptiness and cynicism of the commercial, competitive, capitalist culture. The systematic cultivation of devastatingly neurotic reaction to most social phenomena (through the movies, the “funnies” etc.). The effective destruction in schools, churches, press, everywhere, of everything that smacks of solidarity in the consciousness of the man in the street. And finally, the utterly paralyzing feeling of solitude which must overcome any one who does not want to conform, the feeling that there is no movement, no camp, no group to which one can turn.

Is this going to last forever ? Social psychology and political experience alike suggest that the prospects are bleak. Quite possibly major changes will come only as the result of shocks; in the humdrum of slow evolution the status quo reproduces itself continuously with only such changes as the manipulative machine wishes to induce. The outcome may be fascism, but there seems to be hardly a chance of anything progressive growing in such soil. The ruling class knows this. It is aware of the fact that it does not face any serious dangers in the absence of shocks. It knows that the result of shocks is unpredictable. It will do everything within its power to avoid them….

Where does the Left and its cooperation come in ? Not very much, not very broadly, not very obviously. The main avenue of activity is to attack the ideological front - by clarifying the issues, by trying to cut through the cultural fog of capitalist society, by trying to break the notion of the “identity of interests” of the ruling classes with those of the working masses. This is not a program of mass politics, nor should it be the program of a sect. It is blueprint of intellectual activity, of enlightened economic, ideological, political thinking and discussion that should be free of dogmatic fetters and petty political considerations. It is a program of building cadres, of what Marx used to call Selbstversta:ndigung..

There is hardly any room for political cooperation on the Left at the present time because there are no politics of the Left. The time will perhaps come, possibly sooner than we think. But just now the issues are ideological problems, and ideological problems cannot be solved by organizational makeshifts. To the extent that so-called liberals are themselves fully and unreservedly subject to the prevailing obfuscation, to the extent that they serve as faithful soldiers of the Cold War army, to the extent that they debase themselves to the function of informers and stool-pigeons, to that extent “cooperation” with them can only be of the same nature as such cooperation between the murderer and his victim. Nor is such cooperation desirable. What is needed - let us say it again and again - is clarity, courage, patience, faith in the spontaneity of rational and socialist tendencies in society. At the present historical moment in our country - “better smaller but better”.

- Paul A. Baran, this essay is included in the ‘The Longer View’, a collection of Baran’s essays, first published 1969 by Monthly Review Press

HRH Prince Charles the Prince of Wales came to see the new Visitor Centre at the world-famous Welsh Whisky Company distillery in the village of Penderyn, set in the beautiful landscape of Brecon Beacons National Park.

The whole village of Penderyn came to a standstill to greet and welcome Prince Charles.

Prince Charles takes a deep interest in the important things in life : the people, the land and the food we grow. He is a knowledgeable farmer who has championed the environmental cause for many, many years.

Thus we hope this Royal visit will encourage a greater interest in these subjects in Aberdare. We need to grow more of our own food in Aberdare and other former industrial areas and we need to husband and conserve the land and our resources more responsibly.

Enjoy Photos of the Prince in Penderyn on Penderyn Online

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It is located roughly in the centre of Aberdare Park. Enter the Park via the gates opposite the Comin School, head north and it’s on your left.

It looks like a weeping taxus, but until we can find out what variety of tree it is, we shall dub it “the Green Elephant tree”.

I am a garden orb-web spider - Araneus Diadematus.

Now that’s a mouth full… nearly as big as the Fly I ate for lunch today.

I spent a few hours building this web in a greenhouse, and the whole day hanging about on it.

I am surrounded by garlands of nasturtium and other flowers in baskets.

Down below there is a forest of tomato plants.

All these plants help bring me my grub, I’m not complaining!

My meals deliver themselves to me. Can you believe it ?

I’ve just finished supper… a tasty gnat or three.

Life is so good.

Facebook is an American corporation. It exists to make a pile of money. That is the purpose of a corporation. It makes money by providing what is dubbed a ’social networking service’ and saturating users of such a service with advertising.

Nowadays, Welsh politicians of all parties bandy corporate brand names as if they held talismanic political properties. It is an absurd and exploitative relationship.

Why would we surrender our privacy to a commercial proxy to become “involved” with Plaid (or any other Party) ? That is not a means to engage in a political discourse, it is means to become herded like sheep, controlled and exploited.

Technology is being used as if it was value free or neutral, but it is not. The decision to use Facebook, or indeed any other corporate brand, signifies “this is what we value”.

Instead of using small-scale, locally provided technology that ultimately benefits the wider community, Mr Price of Plaid Cymru has voted for large-scale, centralised, corporate-owned technology that benefits only the pockets of the few.

At the local level the same pattern is repeated. In Aberdare, political parties almost exclusively use corporate-owned and highly centralised media like Trinity Mirror, one of the UK’s largest newspaper publishers. The rich diversity of locally produced and owned newsletters, websites and suchlike are ignored and devalued. Small is not beautiful in the eyes of our politicians.

But they are wrong. We are reminded of the advice of farmer and writer Wendell Berry in his essay on local economics and the nature of freedom. Berry writes about economic problems and the use of corporations …

We need to reconsider the idea of solving our economic problems by “bringing in industry.” Every state government appears to be scheming to lure in a large corporation from somewhere else by “tax incentives” and other squanderings of the people’s money. We ought to suspend that practice until we are sure that in every state we have made the most and the best of what is already there. We need to build the local economies of our communities and regions by adding value to local products and marketing them locally before we seek markets elsewhere.

We need to confront honestly the issue of scale. Bigness has a charm and a drama that are seductive, especially to politicians and financiers; but bigness promotes greed, indifference, and damage, and often bigness is not necessary. You may need a large corporation to run an airline or to manufacture cars, but you don’t need a large corporation to raise a chicken or a hog. You don’t need a large corporation to process local food or local timber and market it locally.

- Compromise, Hell! by Wendell Berry. Published in Orion Magazine November/December 2004.

By outsourcing part of the political process, Plaid Cymru are ‘bringing in industry’ and relying on a corporate behemoth instead of solving the problem by simple, effective tools owned by local people.

We don’t need a corporation to raise a chicken and we don’t need one to help us vote.

FOR MOST OF US, HOLIDAYS ARE AN EXCITING TIME. HOWEVER, BLOOD SUPPLIES ARE CONSTANTLY NEEDED. WITH YOUR HELP HOSPITALS CAN BE SUPPLIED WITH THE 600 DONATIONS THEY NEED EVERY DAY. IN THE EXCITEMENT OF YOUR HOLIDAY PREPARATIONS, PLEASE DON’T FORGET TO GIVE BLOOD BEFORE YOU GO!

You never know when you might need us.

Be a horizontal hero - GIVE BLOOD SAVE LIFE!

The Welsh Blood Service will be in Aberdare on Friday 4th July at the Function Room, Michael Sobell Sports Centre, Ynys, Aberdare from 10.00am until 4.30pm