Veronika Wild

  This is a little experiment - ChatGPT tells me it can now do illustrations too - so here it is. I was telling it that I am not sure if there's any point writing the post below. I don't have a dog and I'm not as pretty as that, but hey that's probably the sort of dog I would have - I am a big fan of border collies, and the grey jumper is exactly right. Should I be worried that it knows me too well? Wonder how many other people use AI as a confessional?  I'm in wombat mode. Have been sick all week. My head feels like cottonwool, so the tax isn't done, the blog post I was going to do isn't finished and it's honestly hard to know where to procrastinate first. I've also lost a lot of readers. It could just be that you don't like what I have been writing lately, that the posts are just much too long and complicated or that I've offended too many people over the last couple of weeks.  Perhaps one should not bite the hand of those who enable ...

  -Image by Alfred Derks from Pixabay   Countering climate denialism requires taking on right-wing populism. Here’s how Richard Calland , University of Cape Town History may in due course record 2019 as the year in which the penny finally dropped about the climate emergency humanity faces. A sense of urgency was triggered last year by both Swedish teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg’s courage in challenging world leaders to take the crisis seriously , and the apocalyptic fires that engulfed large parts of Australia recently. Increasingly, there is an understanding that the climate emergency is not an environmental problem. It has grave ecological implications, but it’s a human development issue above all. And, it has profound implications for technology and infrastructure, for the world of investment and finance, and for global security. To make sense of these challenges and work towards solutions, it is necessary to understand these links, tensions a...

Dolly Parton  -Image  RCA Records , Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons There have been so many good people leaving lately, I am hoping this doesn’t have to become a regular feature. Dolly Parton   I have long been a fan of Dolly Parton who passed away on August 25, not just because of her music which brought joy to millions, but through the legacy she leaves behind. In 1995 she began her Imagination Library  in honour of her father who had been unable to read. By the time she died, it had given away 332 million books, including some in Braille, to children from birth to age five in five countries around the world.  She also created Dollywood, a theme park near her hometown in the Smoky Mountains, Tennessee, so that people would have jobs. In addition, she funded tuition for all her employees as well as many scholarships to encourage students to finish school. In 2016, after wildfires tore through the region, she supported 900 fa...

Not there yet - Consider it aspirational   -Image by Ylanite Koppens  via  Pixabay   The Great Clearout stalled when I got to the books, because I thought I should have a quick look at them before I passed them on. In the meantime my leg has gotten a bit better, so the urgency of getting rid of everything and selling the house has run out of steam as well. As I am starting to emerge from winter hibernation, I thought I would write about it instead. Strangely, the more things I've sold the more there seem to be and the messier the place looks. I did pull everything out of the cupboards. One friend surveying the scene asked me if I was doing Swedish Death Cleaning. I was a bit taken aback. "Hey," I replied, "It's not that bad, I was just having a bit of trouble getting up and down the stairs" and she proceeded to explain what it was all about. It turns out that Swedish Death Cleaning - döstädning in Svensk, isn't as grim as it sounds. It’s something peo...