This post is not about technique, tone, or teaching. It is about a physical risk associated with long, uninterrupted guitar practice that many players may not have considered at all. I have played guitar for decades. Like many serious players, I practised for extended periods, often four to five hours at a time. I play […]
First rule of recovery from a catastrophic medical event: assume nothing from the systems around you. Social, institutional, and community services can offer only a faint outline of psychosocial or emotional support because they understand only a faint outline of themselves — their own roles, goals, and the long tail of unexpected consequences that accompanies […]
Mental health issues are often asserted as neurochemical or physiological malfunction, located in the individual. Yet this framing conceals how distress emerges from larger social systems, which depend upon gradients of exclusion and disaffection to function. Just as unemployment is not an error but a structural feature of employment markets, sorrow and psychic fracture are […]
Bureaucracy is a dissipative structure, built not to solve problems but to metabolise them. Flows of energy, information, and compliance pass through its channels, and in passing they feed its continuity. The structure consumes instability and recycles it as order, but only order of its own kind—recursive loops of policy, paperwork, and oversight. Like a […]
Prohibition, as a policy archetype, emerges from an institutional reflex: control harm by restricting access. At surface level, this seems rational. But the U.S. opioid crisis reveals its flaw with brutal clarity. Decades of interdiction, scheduling, and enforcement have not stopped overdose deaths—they’ve amplified them. Synthetic opioids like fentanyl bypass traditional supply chains, intensify risk, […]
At some point it becomes clear that automation in health and social services is grounded in a discriminating efficiency that neither assures nor necessarily sustains and guarantees affordable or ethically justifiable standards of personal care. We shouldn’t kid ourselves about the commercial motivations and political incentives that drive managerial and policy decision-making in this context. […]
This year I had the opportunity to pursue an aspiration I have had for a very long time. Life of course had other ideas and rolled a very large boulder through my world. I survived and find myself still pursuing my dream, just more slowly and with the considerable trepidation that comes from having just […]
Context: Psychedelic Therapy Is Poised To Create A Revolution In Mental Health, Can VR Accelerate It? It is worth noting, also, that in traditional cultural – often shamanic – contexts these chemicals were used in reference frame of religious or spiritual engagement that positively shaped the perceptions and experiences of those who took them. Beyond […]
Context: Brave new Netherlands: This Dutch AI start-up is changing healthcare Michel Foucault‘s observations on the role and nature of surveillance and knowledge were quite on point in regards to this. The nature of a disciplinary/regulatory and /or cybernetic system of social control is such that what occurs in health quickly permeates and percolates through […]
It is an unacknowledged truth that subjective self-identity is always and already a psychological artefact that exists upon a sliding scale of graduated pathology. A notionally healthy or well-adjusted individual in comparison to a person experiencing some form of dissociative or discontinuous psychological reality represents a difference in degree but not in kind. That is […]
Context: Working More Systemically Towards Sustainable Food Systems: A Co-Inquiry Process A critical issue at the heart of this issue is that we lack a comprehensive, resilient and adaptive systems ontology upon which to build the structural, organisational and sociotechnical or cognitive/intelligent and technological systems we actually require. It is one thing to identify a […]
The things we do to survive in life can lead to the inevitable shortening of our lives and through this almost completely defeat the purpose of doing them in the first place. We have all been there and the truth is, in a choice between just scraping by and low income versus sufficient income or […]
Daedelus Kite 