The causes of contemporary political anger, as expressed in the rise of populism in the West, finds all its seeds in the very mechanisms of globalisation. I am not an economist and much that I read on the subject is not retained. But I do know that the kinds of free trade demanded and the chasing down of the cheapest labour unit or cost of production required seems to have a significant embedded flaw. Nations that once produced all kinds of manufactured items and who are now developed and have a high standard of living are in for a difficult time, if they cannot adapt.

I don't really know what adaptation looks like, but I suspect that, as older industries seek greener and cheaper pastures, newer ones should be replacing them with freshly-minted jobs aplenty. The problem with this argument is simple. The old jobs were often done by people with a poorer education and skills that did not transfer readily to the proposed new environment. Coal miners, steel-workers and the like are unlikely to want to sit at a desk in front of a screen. Still less will they be amongst the new technology start-ups.

I'm sure that somewhere, someone predicted this moment. A friend of mine who is an economist tells me that service economies can work, but I am sceptical that the displaced workers will want to be part of it, even if they can. Something of the meaning of work has been lost for these people, and they are understandably not happy about it. Populism, which is full of promises that cannot be fulfilled, is not an answer, though it is often in the van of change for the worse.

Yesterday Ann, Tom and I went with Da and her children (Perry and Lana) to the Australia Day Celebration at Glenbrook. I am not a big one for Australia Day, a national day chosen not uncontroversially on the same day that the First Fleet sailed through Sydney Heads. So it is an occasion of joy for some and of disaster for others. There is no other way of characterising the event from an Aboriginal perspective. It was an unmitigated calamity.

I am not much of a patriot either. Nevertheless, it was pleasant enough to hang out at the low-key celebration in Glenbrook, an event that doesn't take itself too seriously, with markets, music, food stalls and civic displays. There is also a gnome festival, which struck me, if not the organisers, as a subversive element. Ann liked it well enough and the kids had a swell time. And we took a few photos.

Congratulations to Ozeki Kisenosato on winning his first ever Emporer's Cup. The January Tokyo Grand Sumo tournament has been very exciting and we are now at the final day. Even so, events have conspired to give Kisenosato an early win; last night's upset of Hakuho by rank-and-filer Takenoiwa gifted the Japanese Ozeki his maiden triumph. This is a good thing for sumo because, as a Japanese acquaintance told me, there are too many Mongolians winning everything.

Meanwhile across the Pacific, an orange menace slipped into a white house, all the while pretending to be one of the boys. Draining the swamp by sipping champaigne from the slippers of his Goldman Sachs buddies seems an unusual strategy, but it is hardly surprising. Draining a swamp is commonly done to find if there are bodies and where they might be lying. This one won't even release his tax returns, so, I ask you, what are the chances?

Tonight Kisenasato takes on the great champion Hakuho, the sole Yokozuna left standing. Essentially it is a dead rubber, but, oh, what a match!

It has been hot. It has been so hot, that even my lovely wife Ann, who hails from Thailand, has been talking about it. Yesterday she took a photo of a temperature gauge to send her snow-bound sister in Switzerland, which showed it to be 42 degrees C in our living room, which is 107 F on the old scale. It remained 30 overnight, sleep being near impossible. Ann stayed up late working on her visa and I tossed in a pool of sweat before quitting the bed to go for a walk at about 5am.

It was little better today, though a weak southerly is passing through now and the mercury has dropped to the low thirties. Maybe this is good acclimatisation for the trip to Thailand in June, though I am still likely to disappear into a puddle on the pavement.

Yes, there are air-conditioners everywhere now in Thailand, my wife tells me. No longer the ceiling fan above a low mattress in the openly ventilated guest room - now it's all manufactured air and climate control. Strikes me that something is lost in all this.

I couldn't find any pictures of rooms I have stayed in in the past in Thailand, which is some 20 years ago anyway. Digital cameras were still in their infancy. But here is something like what I used to rent.

Yesterday Ann and I booked our tickets for a trip to Thailand in June. Tom and his friend Eddie came along and while we were at Jumpee Travel doing the transaction, they were hard at work at a games arcade above Paddy's Markets. We have been there before and it's a very easy place to spend forty dollars in an hour, but this being the holidays and all, well....

Ann needed to see her agent near Hyde Park, so I rejoined the boys as they were playing some violent martial arts game, taking the following shot. Many thanks to doge for the photobomb.

To anyone who has tried to bring a loved one into Australia (ie: a resident of another country), my sympathies are with you. The process of writing up a visa application to the Australian Immigration is tortuous and doubly so if you choose to do it yourself, without an agent.

Ann has been arduously plowing through her own visa application document online, something which I have had to assist her with from time to time. To a non-native speaker of English, the wordscape of these forms is harrowing. Questions are often repetitive and so framed that even an English native might squint in confusion. This is no criticism of the the document design. Governments of all stripes are universally careful about who should enter and stay and fraud needs to exposed. So rigour is to be expected.

Supplementary materials are an addition to the online application and are an essential support. But I can't begin to tell you how difficult and trans-national the collection of this data is. We are about half-way through the process and I find my head spinning each time I consult the appendix of required documents. It's spinning now as I contemplate photos and testimonials and certified this and that.

But is has to be done.

Hamlet once remarked about the "unweeded garden that grows to seed" in reference to the state of Denmark, and he had good reason for thinking it so. Gardens are often ripe material for creating metaphors from and today I was musing on how the mind might be similarly described. The garden of the mind, which is never the same garden incidentally, is often afflicted by weeds, which if untended, consume it. In this metaphor, the weeds are the unhealthy thinking habits that we all have, comprising negative thinking, cognitive dissonances and the like. Two different people can make a heaven or a hell from the exact situation, depending on their way of thinking about it. Hamlet again, "For there is neither good nor bad; but thinking makes it so."

This got me cogitating about how easy it is to drop practices that are inherently good for rational thinking, such as CBT. When I stop regularly checking in and doing exercises such as ABCD grids, then I lapse quickly into the same irrational patterns. This is dangerous because our emotions are enmeshed with our thoughts, and our health and behaviour is often predicated upon both. So I will start again, finding and removing the same weeds I seized and burned last time. Like blackberry or privet, they just keep coming back.

Speaking of gardens, the Blue Mountains is one huge garden, albeit of the wild and largely unspoilt variety. Ann and I did a walk on the cliff-top track at Blackheath on Sunday. She hadn't seen the Grose Valley escarpments yet, so we started out at Evan's Lookout and made our way to within a short distance of Govett's Leap. She was tired, it was a hot day and there were phone conversations to be had!

I have posted before about the changes to the village of Hazelbrook over time, and now and then an historical photo pops up which provides yet another point of comparison.

Today's example below was taken somewhere around the turn of the 20th Century. The Great Western Highway is a slim dirt road, bounded on the northern side by cottages that no longer exist. The railway station (opened in 1890) sits affably in the background and a horse and cart plies its way towards the photographer.

I cannot find the exact spot where this was taken and to stand in that spot today would invite being crushed by traffic heading for Katoomba, unlike my predecessor, who obviously had all the time in the world. So I did an approximation, difficult because of the changed foliage and road alignment and much besides but nevertheless, giving a sense of just how much change has occurred. I am standing at the corner of the GWH and Beechmount Ave, though I should be standing on the medium strip or in the far lanes.

A different time it was, before two world wars, atomic energy, radio, television, the internet, the discovery of penicillin, I could go on, but you get it.

And yet, I know which Hazelbrook I prefer, romantic that I am.

You will know by now that I like words, even if this blog is the poor cousin of good writing. So it is always with interest when I espy articles about words, their usage, how they change and so forth. Every year Lake Superior State University publishes a list of words that it deems as being worthy of banishment and 2016 was no different. So here goes.....

Last year, especially during the US election season, we seemed to live in a post-truth world. This was particularly the case with Clinton's bete noire, Donald Trump, for whom facts seemed irrelevant and who lied often and then, bigly. The many guestimates about how the General Election would go, from a variety of pundits, proved not only to be wrong, but also demonstrated the echo chamber many Washington insiders inhabited. Even though Clinton was on fleek during her debates with Trump, the latter's skill-set was clearly underestimated. The takeaway from the debates was that Clinton won handily but also that Trump didn't lose by that much. Somewhere out there in blue-collar nation, another audience was taking note and laying plans for a surprise. No matter what the twittersphere was saying, Joe Six-pack was thinking differently and (spoiler alert) ready to hand the mantel on to the orange man. The Clinton team was royally t-boned. We are yet to feel the full blowback from this extraordinary result.

The words in italics, you probably guessed, were candidates for the 2016 list, but I borrowed a few from years just prior, to give the piece more flavour. The only word(s) I would quibble with are bete noire, a very useful and quite old borrowing which nicely sums up a thorn in one's side.

To finish, this quotation(after Plato) from one of the compilers of this list. "We'd like to advocate here(that) the unexamined word is not worth speaking." May it be so.