The Stone Circle

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>>>  Aaaaa-Wwupa-wwupa-wwupwwupwwupwwup-wupa-wupa  <<<

Through a sleep-sticky eyelid I begin to see yellow sow-thistle flowers and blades of grass right up close as simultaneously the chopper blades bludgeon the sky into submission. The machine noise wapa-wapa and the little yellow flowers and the grass dance and swirl in a synaesthetic maelstrom of abstract, yet urgent, contaminated pools of unfathomable - just fathomable? - meaning. Is it that a vast similitude interlocks all things? For a moment, the answer seems graspable - it has shape and flavour, momentum and surface.
But then not; I cannot hold it, I bubble up to break the surface tension from the mind's unknown region through the many fragments of my semi-lucid broken dream, and into increasing consciousness. Sunlight filtering lens-flaring first through treetops, then eyelashes in the borderland edgezone between sleep and wakefulness. Sunlight-warmed shirt material a perfectly cozy mantle, conducting an amelioration of the sun's radiation to my chest - lovely. The perfect warmth. The grass and flowers beneath my head. Oh! - the small tough dog sleeping curled against my hip, her robust muscly trunk, shorthair short legs short tail. Not my dog - I have no dog - but she's content to snooze and dream her doggy afternoon companionably outdoors beside me on this summer day. Heartening. But wupawupawup and I'm awake now. Toes wriggling, shoulders rotating, swallowing. Awake. I tut and lever myself up on one elbow and, seeing that my human travelling-companion (who is my wife) appears to be waking from a similar semi-sleep, I scan the sky for the helicopter which broke me from my indescribable dreaming.

>>>  awup wup wup wup wup  <<<

We've been here about half an hour, maybe? Dunno. I was sort-of asleep. There it is: a dark dragonfly, a dun blot in the baby-blue, blare-farting its way towards us, neither particularly low nor high over the fields of cows and their calves, sheep and their lambs. It's a tiny little four-seater thing. The four seats in its ovoid body leave little room for the audibly straining engine which only just powers the twin rotors suspended atop a skylon above the cramped accommodation. We can make out not only its smirchy chemical trail but also its shimmery heat exhaust above us now. We can't quite make out the crammed-in people on-board, but we know that they can see us, framed as we are within the circumference of a megalithic stone circle - the reason we all are here now, today: I, my wife, our new friend the little dog, and the chopper pilot and passengers - we're all here because of the stones.

On a summer afternoon the ancient stones - exactly ten miles from our door as the mountain-biker cycles - are a secret destination not too far from the edge of the town, but not too near either. Encircled by prominence hills; Fayre, Drum, Beans, Gairn, Kings and West; all hide the stones from our town and its arteries and ribbon-developed dormitory exurbs. Disused railway track-bed, farm access roads and ancient drovers' routes all link together to conduct you to this ancient site if you know how and where to look. The final metalled stretch of road on our ad-hoc route exists solely to allow vehicle access to a valve loop on one of the major gas transmission pipelines which transect the county with their high pressure hydrocarbon cargo, then the road gives out to rutted puddled farm track, and then we are here.

The stones are next plot along to a working smallholding farmyard from where a little dog trots to greet us every time we visit. She is a Jack Russell terrier, and, living the unrestrained outdoor life she does, she seems to exhibit none of the nervous fervour of her city-dwelling kin. If you show an interest, she will show you the stones - little paws scrabbling up the menhirs, jumping one to next - as if she is a keen custodian, eager that you appreciate your location, she shares her territory with you willingly and graciously. If you sit cross-legged on the grass, she will sit in your lap and look into your eyes. If you recline, she will lean against your body. If you lie down on a hot sunny day, she will lie down against you and shut her eyes.

In that earlier hour, after cross-leggedly looking at the stones, drinking coffee from a flask, eating sandwiches from a napkin, I had first reclined Roman-like on elbow while chatting about this-and-that with my wife, then - as the conversation ranged wide and speculative, slower and slower the contemplative comments came - and we both lay back secure in our life-long mutually companionable warmth. Then I shut my eyes, the little dog lay down too - her flank solid against my hip, and my world became the keening of the buzzards mixed with the mewing of the red kites and the buzzing of the dragonflies mingled with the low moaning of the cattle. The dappled sun through the trees played abstract on my eyelids. The warm blades of grass beneath my shoulders and the soft turf beneath my head carried me off...

Until...

>>>  Aaaaa-Wwupa-wwupa-wwupwwupwwupwwup-wupa-wupa  <<<

"It's that fucking helicopter again!" We had been disturbed by it more than once before. Birthday-present flying lessons, touristic treats, real-estate promotional ariel photography, international oil-tycoons indifferently looking down upon the city where they've invested some small proportion of their capital - who knows? One thing's for sure, that little chopper doesn't actually go anywhere. It goes up - it flies around a bit, twenty minutes or so - then it lands back where it started. Theres a little private heliport nearby and the pilots always - always - overfly the stone circle. "Here it comes. Ready...?" I ask my spouse, "Yup." She's on her feet and brushing grass from her long braided hair.

>>>  wwupwwupwwupwwup-wupa-wupa wup wup wup  <<<

Together, as synchronous as the rotors above, we wave one arm each in great arcs, grinning like idiots up at the tiny aircraft, like everso lovely everso middle-class children waving at a train in an everso British Enid Blyton adventure. Then, we bare our teeth and snarl and frown, turning our open hands into the everso British V-sign of pissoffness and flicking them up and down repeatedly.
"Yay! Faaaaak offffff!" we chorus-bellow at the top of our lungs, before collapsing in each other's arms to our knees, laughing until we can't breathe, the little dog circling us and looking up into our eyes.

>>>  wupa-wupa a wwupwwupwwupwwup  <<<

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The Dog in the Manger

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Pic by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jun/20/donald-trump-golf-resort-scotland

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Donald Trump's plan for £750m Scottish golf resort put on hold

US tycoon says golf course will open next year – but complex featuring luxury villas and five-star hotel postponed for now

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The billionaire property developer flew into Aberdeen on Monday on his latest luxury jet, a Boeing 757-200 fitted out with a master bedroom and five kitchens, to announce that his championship standard 18-hole golf course overlooking the North Sea would open for play in July next year. 

But the tycoon said that the full scheme, a £750m complex featuring a luxury hotel, Trump Boulevard, a golf academy, a second course and timeshare apartments, had been bunkered by the recession.

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http://www.aberdeenrenewables.com/

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ABERDEEN RENEWABLE ENERGY GROUP

The Future of Energy - The Future of Aberdeen

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Aberdeen Renewable Energy Group (AREG) is at the cutting edge of the UK race to build a credible and sustainable energy footprint.

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http://www.aberdeenrenewables.com/news/european-offshire-wind-deployment-centre-consent-application-submitted/3334/

European Offshore Wind Deployment Centre Consent Application Submitted

Important milestone achieved for pioneering offshore wind project off Aberdeen Bay

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The application seeks permission for work to commence on the construction and operation of the Centre. It follows extensive consultation with stakeholders and studies which have seen the project significantly evolve over the last six years from an offshore wind farm into a deployment centre to test and demonstrate up to eleven next generation offshore wind turbines, support infrastructure and other related technology.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/05/donald-trump-legal-fight-windfarm

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Donald Trump pledges 'any legal means' fight against windfarm

US tycoon saying proposed offshire turbines will 'compromise' golf resort – and ruin his sea view

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Donald Trump has pledged to use "any legal means" to block the building of an offshore windfarm near his championship golf course in Aberdeenshire, claiming the development would spoil his view.

The proposed windfarm in Aberdeen Bay, about 1.5 miles from the golf resort, would install the next generation of offshore wind turbine technology.

The £200m energy scheme has just been formally submitted to Marine Scotland for approval. It has been cut back from up to 33 turbines to a maximum of 11 after safety concerns were raised by shipping agencies and Aberdeen heliport, the world's busiest, which serves the North Sea oil industry.

Trump, who hopes to open his first course at the Menie estate, near Balmedie, next July, in a development spanning about 500 hectares (1,235 acres), has renewed his long-standing complaints about the project. He believes the smaller proposal is still unacceptable: some of the turbines could stand up to 195 metres in the water, more than double the height of the Big Ben clock tower.

George Sorial, managing director of the Trump Organisation, said the windfarm would compromise the golf resort. "We are here to stay and I don't think it's a good idea to interfere with our investment. We are not going to support a project that compromises what we have done. We will use any legal means in our jurisdiction."

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Hyperreality Update - Strange Loop Potemkin Blight

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http://otheraberdeen.blogspot.com/2011/03/hyperreality-update-taxidermy-for.html

http://otheraberdeen.blogspot.com/2011/02/a-to-z-of-aberdeen-h-is-for.html

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The notion of "hyperreality" is one which popped up in the late 20th century study of philosophy and sociology, notably expounded upon by French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard and Italian semiotician Umberto Eco. Hyperreality can be thought of as the way in which modern life can cause us to seek and experience satisfaction through a "simulated version of reality". A sort of reality by proxy - where the real world or experience has been replaced by a simulation at surface level only: a "real fake" which is thought of as "even better than the real thing". By finding (or believing to have found) satisfaction in simulation, the boundary between the "real" and the "fake" becomes blurred to the point where we cannot perceive the difference. The substitution of the simulacrum for the authentic article or experience is no longer noticed, and, indeed the substituted item (the simulation) is sometimes considered to be superior to that which it has replaced (the original). In this way the artifacts and experiences of our lives become authentic simulations, "real fakes"; "hyperreal".

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http://www.aberdeenbid.org/The-Vision-for-Aberdeen/The-Vision-for-Aberdeen.aspx

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ABERDEEN BUSINESS IMPROVEMENT DISTRICT

"The Vision for Aberdeen"

Richard Noble BSc (Hons) MRICS MCIArb,

Director, F G Burnett Property

Steering Group Member

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It is time to re-invigorate Aberdeen City Centre. A private sector driven BID [Business Improvement District], focusing on tackling specific issues, as identified through consultation with the businesses, can deliver.

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http://www.aberdeenbid.org/The-BID-Themes/Theme-4.aspx

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Theme 4: Attractive City

You are here: The BID Themes > Theme 4: Attractive City

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Ensure that the BID area is attractive to locals, businesses, clients, customers and visitors by enhancing projects provided by the Council or delivering projects in addition to those already provided...

[by assuming] control of the "Empty Shop Enhancement" scheme, some of which will be self financing, others will promote the City Centre and the BID activities.

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At present, "Empty Shop Enhancement" in Aberdeen tends take the form of advertising for events, concerts and the like, or - in the example pictured - an advert for a large brownfield redevelopment shopping mall with a total of 1700 car parking spaces spread over three car-parks, one of which features predominantly in the advert. We conclude that the mall's managers believe that this is the mall's USP. It probably is. What are the implications and consequences of allowing generic shopping malls designed for access by motorcar - difficult and troublesome to access by foot, bus or bike - to draw demand away from traditional shopping zones with unique character?

Is it ironic that the necessity to "enhance" this empty shop front has itself been provoked by the blight caused by the development of the very shopping mall which is now advertised in the window of the vacant shop? It certainly makes us laugh.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_loop

A strange loop arises when, by moving up or down through a
hierarchical system, one finds oneself back where one started.

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When the Aberdeen BID nomenclatura "take control" of the "Empty Shop Enhancement" scheme we hope that they will put a bit of hyperreal dynamism into it, as our south-western competitors have done. That'll give us an even better laugh.

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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-12398371

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Dumbarton uses fake shop fronts to beat downturn

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A town in the west of Scotland is to install fake shop fronts to disguise high street stores left vacant in the economic downturn.

The "shopjackets" in Dumbarton town centre give the impression that the stores are still occupied.

West Dunbartonshire Council believes the £20,000 pilot scheme will "improve the look" of the area and is a better alternative to boarded up shop fronts.

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With thanks to fellow-travelling psychogeographer of Aberdeen "rxpell" for pointing out some of this stuff.

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Entropic Modern

--oo0oo--

With a nod of thanks to the correspondent who recommended the art of Gair Dunlop, and gratitude to Gair himself for the quality of that work, which we enjoy again and again in the variety of projects of his which are online. We're sure Gair won't mind us borrowing the name of his blog - Entropic Modern - for this post.

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>>>>>
As we explore the urban environment of our isolated northern energy-boom town, we encounter modernist buildings and places, spaces and atmospheres designed or otherwise which put us in mind of the observations invoked by Gair Dunlop's art. The sense of a future that never quite got here, the sense of an unfulfilled promise. A feeling that something civilisational peaked at some point towards the end of the 20th century, and - its reach exceeding its grasp - that something, whatever that something was, is now ebbing away...

We remember the 1960 film of HG Wells' 1895 novel The Time Machine in which a time traveller projects himself from fin de siècle into the far future where he finds a society of enervated, illiterate vegitarians - the Eloi - living amid the splendrous ruins of an impressively advanced modernist civilisation. In the film, the Eloi are viciously preyed upon by a degenerate species of de-evolved humans - the Morlocks. But the cold-war exigecies of the day meant that the 1960 film made some significant elisions to the original Wells text and its societal and political implications.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine#Plot_summary

[...]

Time Traveller tests his device with a journey that takes him to the year 802,701 A.D., where he meets the Eloi, a society of small, elegant, childlike adults. They live in small communities within large and futuristic yet slowly deteriorating buildings, doing no work and having a frugivorous diet. His efforts to communicate with them are hampered by their lack of curiosity or discipline, and he speculates that they are a peaceful communist society, the result of humanity conquering nature with technology, and subsequently evolving to adapt to an environment in which strength and intellect are no longer advantageous to survival.

Returning to the site where he arrived, the Time Traveller finds his time machine missing, and eventually works out that it has been dragged by some unknown party into a nearby structure with heavy doors, locked from the inside, which resembles a Sphinx. Later in the dark, he is approached menacingly by the Morlocks, ape-like troglodytes who live in darkness underground and surface only at night. Within their dwellings he discovers the machinery and industry that makes the above-ground paradise possible. He alters his theory, speculating that the human race has evolved into two species: the leisured classes have become the ineffectual Eloi, and the downtrodden working classes have become the brutish light-fearing Morlocks. Deducing that the Morlocks have taken his time machine, he explores the Morlock tunnels, learning that they feed on the Eloi. His revised analysis is that their relationship is not one of lords and servants but of livestock and ranchers, and with no real challenges facing either species.

[...]

>>>>>>>>

http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html

Neal Stephenson

In the Beginning was the Command Line

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Contemporary culture is a two-tiered system, like the Morlocks and the Eloi in H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, except that it's been turned upside down. In The Time Machine the Eloi were an effete upper class, supported by lots of subterranean Morlocks who kept the technological wheels turning. But in our world it's the other way round. The Morlocks are in the minority, and they are running the show, because they understand how everything works.

The much more numerous Eloi learn everything they know from being steeped from birth in electronic media directed and controlled by book-reading Morlocks. So many ignorant people could be dangerous if they got pointed in the wrong direction, and so we've evolved a popular culture that is (a) almost unbelievably infectious and (b)neuters every person who gets infected by it, by rendering them unwilling to make judgments and incapable of taking stands.

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The below-ground life of the Morlocks in The Time Machine makes us think of the recently-published musings of those who would influence the future of the built environment in our town. In their recently published and hubristically titled "Genius Loci" document (beware - direct download PDF), we can read about their obsession with covering streets over, with putting shops and public spaces underground and under domes. We cannot understand this obsession. We cannot understand why these people are afraid of the sky. Maybe, because our town's predominant hydrocarbon industry is responsible for putting the "fear" in the atmosphere, our business community would prefer that we not look at the sky, out of shame for what they are doing to it.

These business interests would plan for us an underground life, just like depicted in  another other sci-fi film of the latter part of the 20th Century - 1976's Logan's Run  in which the population are shown inhabiting a futuristic underground setting (actually filmed in the then relatively new and thrilling underground shopping malls of Dallas and Forth Worth) where they enjoy an orgiastic lifestyle of unrestrained consumption in a consequence-free environment. But then, as we watch, we learn that the consequence they must face is a mandated limited lifespan with compulsory euthanasia administered during the spectacle of a quasi-religious ceremony at age 30. Those who try to flee from the society (the freedom-seekers know as "Runners") are ruthlessly hunted down by paramilitary death-squads known as "Sandmen".

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So now, as we range over the decaying of the modernist dream on the streets of our town - a dream from an era when optimistic people with altruistic visions believed in good faith that they could improve society as a whole from the top down - we detect an interesting parallel decay in the discourse of our time. Whereas once it was believed that the the economy and society could be planned and structured to work for the benefit of all its members with equality and justice, now such beliefs are regarded with more contempt even than fringe cult faiths and are thought to be illiberal and totalitarian in intent. Whereas once it was thought that rationality and the scientific method could iterate a design for life and improve lives, now our faith is in market-based solutions and minimum government intervention - indeed, a minimal state - to allow Hayek's "spontaneous order" to emerge from below.

The message we see in the decay of urban modernism is a message of freedom, written in the dust for those who know how to read it: No-one is going to design our lives for us. Society (if it exists) does not care and will not care. It is up to us as free individuals to choose what we will be.

Eloi or Morlock? Sandman or Runner?

Willingly Afeared in Aberdeen

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http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/2011/07/gates-of-oslo.html

Reader Comment

... the general thrust of fascism is that the rapidly expanding capacity of the bureaucratic state to discipline and regulate its citizenry can and ought to be used to the utmost to create a rigidly hierarchal, homogenized and cohesive populace.

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http://local.stv.tv/aberdeen/news/263734-norway-killer-had-bp-aberdeen-base-as-a-target/

STV LOCAL (TV NEWS)

Norway killer had BP Aberdeen base as a 'target'

Anders Behring Breivik included BP's headquarters in Aberdeen on a list of places to attack included in his infamous 'manifesto' 

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http://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/Article.aspx/2366636

PRESS & JOURNAL (LOCAL MORNING NEWSPAPER)

gunman’s internet manifesto revealed north sea rigs were prime targets

BP’s north-east HQ was on mass killer’s terror hit-list

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http://www.eveningexpress.co.uk/Article.aspx/2367992

EVENING EXPRESS (LOCAL EVENING NEWSPAPER)

Warning to public after Norwegian massacre

Top Grampian policeman says public must stay alert

A SENIOR police officer today warned people across the Aberdeen area to be ever alert to the threat of terrorism following the massacre in Norway.

[...]

Aberdeen terrorism expert Professor David Capitanchik of Robert Gordon University [added] that Aberdeen remained “vulnerable” to terrorist attacks.

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We couldn't help but notice and so be disgusted and sickened by a sort of self-important self-satisfied glee leaking out at the edges of these local reports. A perverse delight in the fact that mention in that madman's 1500 pages of racist paranoid rage somehow puts Aberdeen on the map, and is therefore something to be slyly happy about while nodding sagely and making all the right noises and hand-wringing gestures. 

But these local press and TV reporters are merely sensationalising, and, more seriously and to our great dismay, in doing so are tipping us all into an illiberal trap. Their headlines are only true on the margins, and then with a fair bit of interpretation. To report that the killer Breivik had identified Oilco BP's Dyce HQ as a 'target' is no more true (nor, indeed, false) than to say that 'Paris' or 'Literature Festivals', or all oil refineries everywhere in the EU, were included in an extensive list of infrastructural, cultural, economic, political and social 'targets' which also encompassed every single commercial electricity supply nuclear reactor in Western Europe, all mainstream political parties of both left and right in all EU countries, "Royal Castles" and even Wikipedia.

Our local press, by their willingness to propagate such sensasionalised reportage are acting as 'useful idiots' and delivering us directly into the type of hypersecurity state of which the murderous far-right terrorist Breivik would no doubt heartily approve.

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Saul Newman
The Politics of Post-anarchism


The logic of security itself, which has become so ubiquitous and omnipresent today, has to be seen as a mechanism of depoliticization: it is a way of imposing a certain order on social reality which is self-legitimizing and beyond question.
[...]
Today we have come to think of freedom only as strictly circumscribed by security; freedom and security become part of a binary in which the former cannot be imagined without the latter, and in which the former always gives way to the exigencies and prerogatives imposed by the latter. The liberal idea of an appropriate balance between security and liberty is an illusion. The only vision the security paradigm offers us - with its pernicious technologies and its perverse logic that grips us in a double bind - is an empty, controlled, overexposed landscape from which all hope of emancipation has faded and where all we have left to do is obsessively measure the risks posed to our lives from the ever-present specter of catastrophe. The security paradigm intensifies a micro-politics of fear, producing a kind of generalized neurosis.

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We smiled grimly when we read Newman's warnings of "self-legitimizing" security infrastructure which is "beyond question" because we had noted with the launch of the Aberdeen Business Improvement District (Aberdeen BID) business plan (PDF) that CCTV is regarded as "Baseline Service", with the only indication of the benefit its installation is supposed to confer being the solipsistic "provision of 24/7 CCTV coverage". Yes, they insist that more CCTV capacity be installed, because it will provide greater CCTV capacity.

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Comments on Facebook "Aberdeen" Community Page and STV Local.

• "Scary stuff! My work is just behind the BP headquarters in Dyce!"
• "I work at BP and this is scaring the hell out of me... Hopefully adequate security is provided..."
• "We are all really worried..."
• "We all have to sleep with one eye open now..."

We'd like to point out to these worriers that, what with the UK being the most CCTV surveilled nation in the world (notwithstanding the possible exception of weirdo aseptic totalitarian state Singapore), there's probably nothing to fear. That is, of course, unless they have something to hide...

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Edgeland at Moss of Rotten

In the liminal zone, that edgeland zone of replacement where the town and the countryside fray into each other, scrubland horse-riding centres rub shoulders with smallholdings in a landscape characterised by picturesque benign neglect. This is time's realm and time, given time, blends the mineral into the organic, the artificial to the natural as first-generation barbwire and corrugated iron - beyond aged - flake in transmutative rust, richly endowing soils with their serendipitously ferric fertiliser. Sickly-sharp-smelling brackish standing water silver-mirrors through surface-skating midge-haze the discontinuous summer-showery sky. Fern frond, gorse barb, hogweed stand.
All this on that rarity - unimproved land. Here a bog - a 'moss', as known here - where medieval freemen dug their peat fuel - wealth from the land, continued prosperity and security against a hard winter; there craggy bedrock - last blanketed by topsoil some ten-thousand years hence before glacier's denuding scrape - stands exposed; a convenient landmark, waymark. Property marker.

To the west of our town, the proposed (delayed?) Aberdeen bypass motorway will thunder, heroic high on embankment shoulder-carried through this landscape, claiming this Moss of Rotten, facilitating the motorist as he looks down upon the equestrians, the smallholdings and the unimproved edgeland. Once the motorway comes this edgeland will be replaced, subsumed into a rigidly defined geography of minimum speed limits and theodolite delineated plots; housing-zoned for pleasant-valley detatched and semi.

We don't fear for the edgeland - the edgeland will move on, move farther out. Edgelands are always with us. But the Moss of Rotten will be forever gone.

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http://www.awpr.co.uk/d/Environmental%20Statement/September%202007/Environmental%20Statement%20Non-Technical%20Summary/Non%20Technical%20Summary.pdf

Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route

Environmental Statement

Non-Technical Summary

2007

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Landscape

The road crosses a predominantly rural landscape, which has a range of landscape characters relating to topography, vegetation and land use.

Impacts will typically be associated with the introduction of the road, embankments, cuttings, bridges, junctions, lighting and vehicle movements into the open and wooded farmland, hill and valley landscapes.

Measures included in the scheme proposals to reduce impacts on the landscape include careful alignment of the road and easing of embankment and cutting slopes to blend with existing landforms and allow a potential return to agriculture. Appropriate boundaries, su.ch as drystone walls or planting, will be put in place to reflect existing boundaries and maintain the character of the landscape. The effectiveness of this planting will typically increase over time as vegetation matures.

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Cultural Heritage

There are a number of sites of cultural heritage importance located within the route corridor, The effects on these include direct physical impacts and indirect impacts on their setting.

Where possible, the route of the road has been designed to avoid or reduce direct impacts or impacts on the setting. Where this has not been possible, archaeological recording is proposed for known sites where direct impacts are predicted. Works will also be undertaken to identify and record previously unknown sites. In addition landscape design proposals have been developed to reduce impacts on setting.

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http://canmore.rcahms.gov.uk/en/site/114573/details/aberdeen+north+westfield+house+boundary+marker/

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Alternative Names March Stone; Moss Of Rotten

Site type BOUNDARY MARKER

Archaeological Notes NJ80SW 51 c. 8474 0400

This boundary marker comprises the letter P (285mm high) incised into the upper surface of an area of bedrock about 225m E of North Westfield farmsteading (NJ80SW 52). The bedrock is situated on the S edge of an area of low-lying ground that originally formed the W end of the Moss of Rotten (OS 6-inch map, Aberdeenshire, 1st edition, 1869, sheet lxxxv).

The marker almost certainly indicates a point on the Outer Marches of Aberdeen and is of medieval date, the letter 'P' standing for 'Propertie'.

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Look closely - click for a big version of the pic - and the 'P' is evident proof that, even in pre-enlightenment times, the people of Aberdeen were obsessed with 'Propertie'.