Interesting read. It’s giving me pause.
Author: officially ᗩᑎGEᒪIᑎᗩ
Reblogged: Holding a placard outside court isn’t illegal, judge rules: is that the best British democracy has to offer?
Holding a placard outside court isn’t illegal, judge rules – is that the best British democracy has to offer?
Steven Cammiss, University of Birmingham and Graeme Hayes, Aston University
The UK High Court recently dismissed the case against environmental activist Trudi Warner, who was referred for contempt of court in March 2023. Civil liberties campaigners hailed the decision as a “huge win for democracy”, but is it?
Warner had stood outside the Old Bailey, England’s most important criminal court in central London, with a sign that read “Jurors have an absolute right to acquit according to their conscience”. She did so at the start of a trial of climate activists who had been charged with public nuisance for obstructing traffic. Warner’s sign paraphrased the text on a plaque on display at the Old Bailey itself.
Known as jury equity, the legal principle evoked by this statement dates back to 1670 and is often cited, not least by leading legal figures and in the decisions of the higher courts, as a cornerstone of English democracy: juries can decide according to their conscience, and cannot be bullied into finding as the law dictates.
Indeed, many legal commentators saw the case against Warner as perverse. Since the threat of contempt proceedings was brought by the solicitor general (a government minister responsible for legal advice), Warner’s protest has been repeated outside courtrooms throughout the country at the instigation of campaign group Defend our Juries.
Why have juries became so important for protesters in the UK – and are they any more secure in their right to protest as a result of the High Court’s decision?
Jury equity and protest trials
Among recent protest prosecutions, Warner’s case is unique: as she saw it, her aim was to educate jurors on their rights.
For most non-violent disruptive protests being dealt with in English courts, defendants (like Warner) typically accept they did what they are alleged to have done, but argue they had a lawful basis for doing so. This is the case in many trials, from Extinction Rebellion to Palestine Action.
Over the last five years, this basis has been whittled away through government referrals to the Court of Appeal and decisions by that court which have removed the protection of lawful excuse and necessity defences in protest cases.
Meanwhile, new public order legislation has turned minor acts of disruption (such as occupying the highway) into serious acts of criminality punishable by prison sentences. The Court of Appeal endorsed long sentences for two non-violent activists who closed the Queen Elizabeth II bridge on the M25 in October 2022. Such is the parlous state of the court system following a decade of austerity that judges are under pressure to manage trials quickly.
Warner’s case brings each of these dynamics into sharp focus. Activists now regularly find themselves in court unable to present a defence in law for their actions, but remain committed to justifying them, because being publicly accountable is important to them. The only way they can avoid potentially severe punishments is by persuading juries not to convict them through the sincerity of their arguments and the public utility of their actions.
As such, jury equity is now often their only recourse. But judges, seeking to manage trials, regularly impose limits on what defendants can say in court, and for how long they can say it, particularly when they have no defence in law. In fact, Warner’s action stemmed from the widely publicised rulings of Judge Silas Reid in several Insulate Britain trials, who forbid defendants from addressing the jury on the climate emergency, and imprisoned two defendants for contempt for defying his order.
Restoring faith in British justice?
Does the High Court’s denial of permission to prosecute Warner indicate that the courts now seek to give greater protections to non-violent, disruptive protesters? Warner herself seems to think so, saying the decision “has restored my faith a little in British justice”.
The High Court ruled that Warner’s actions did not meet the threshold for contempt and that it would not be in the public interest to prosecute her. In fact, the court noted it would be “a disproportionate approach to this situation in a democratic society”. This can be read as affirming that protest is central to democratic life, rather than an irritant existing outside of it, and certainly gives some support to Warner’s faith.
But other elements of the court’s reasoning are less supportive. By noting that jurors swear an oath to make decisions according to the law, the court upheld a principle we have seen in numerous climate activist trials: defendants cannot invite a jury to apply the equity principle, nor even to inform them of it. This decision may allow people not involved in a case to do what Warner did, but in the courtroom itself, jury equity is to remain something of a dirty secret to be kept from jurors.
In deciding whether Warner’s actions were sufficient for contempt, the court also made much of her passivity in simply holding her sign; Warner did not attempt to engage with anyone entering the Old Bailey. She was, in both her own words and those of the judge, simply “a human billboard”.
Would the court have decided differently had Warner been more assertive? Where is the line between her permissible actions and those that would be deemed an unlawful hindrance of jurors entering the court?
A closer reading of the judgment suggests that, despite Warner’s victory, little has changed in the law’s view of protest. There is a good chance that Warner’s actions were tolerated for the very qualities that made her case so compelling: through her deliberate passivity, in the eyes of the law, she corresponded to the ideal of how protesters should behave. The court’s decision very much fits with a tolerance only of protest which is not disruptive (and, we might argue, not particularly effective).
It is unlikely then that the Warner outcome signals a return to a more liberal understanding of the role of protest as a democratic right. The court’s decision, if welcome, serves rather to underline how diminished the opportunities for real democratic agency are in Britain today.
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Steven Cammiss, Associate Professor, Birmingham Law School, University of Birmingham and Graeme Hayes, Reader in Political Sociology, Aston University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
FairTrade bites
Links:
https://schools.fairtrade.org.uk/
https://www.chocolatescorecard.com/
https://www.fairtrade.net/news/five-ways-fairtrade-supports-workers-rights
https://www.fairtrade.net/issue/environment
Two things I learned today that I didn’t know yet
- The Rainforest Alliance pays farms a much lower premium than FairTrade.
(But they have – or started out on the basis of – different objectives.) - Tony’s Chocolonely is a very good chocolate brand, in terms of FairTrade.
(It’s Dutch.)
I’ve typed the Dutch below into ChatGPT and asked it to translate because it saved me a lot of time. I’ve edited it slightly.
“Tony” comes from Teun van de Keuken, the journalist who investigated slavery in the chocolate industry in the TV show ‘De Keuringsdienst van Waarde’ from 2002 to 2007. He discovered that there are still (child) slaves working on cocoa plantations in West Africa and tried to initiate conversations with various chocolate companies about this. When they failed to respond, Teun decided to start making slave-free chocolate bars himself. He feels very lonely in his fight against slavery in the chocolate world, hence ‘Chocolonely’. Want to know more about it? Check it out here.
Eleven years ago, journalist Teun van de Keuken conducted research into slavery in the cocoa chain on the TV show ‘De Keuringsdienst van Waarde’. He made the shocking discovery that much of the chocolate found in our supermarkets is made by slaves, often children. Is that acceptable? Teun therefore set out to question various chocolate makers about this situation. Many of them evade the issue. So, he decided to take matters into his own hands. In November 2005, the first Fairtrade Tony’s Chocolonely bars rolled off the production line. In 2006, we registered with the Chamber of Commerce, and Tony’s Chocolonely became a reality: a chocolate company with the goal of eradicating slavery from the chocolate industry.
If you’re on Dutch benefits, expect phishing emails, spoofed phone calls and scammers knocking on your door
Yesterday evening, the news was posted that 150,000 CVs – with DOB, email address, postal address, phone number and all – were illegally viewed and possibly downloaded from the system werk.nl in which people on benefits are required to post their CVs in the Netherlands.
(DOB? Yes. Age discrimination has been illegal in the Netherlands for a long time, but DOBs are still routinely requested in job applications and online CV forms usually force you to enter your DOB.)
It’s happened before. In 2019, 117,000 CVs were downloaded illegally.
Datalek bij UWV: 150.000 cv’s ingezien en mogelijk gedownload (nos.nl)
There’s a lot of stuff people get wrong about autism – until an iPad comes along, sometimes
Household debt assistance the Dutch way
In the news this morning is an item about debts among young people in the Netherlands. There appears to be an annual increase of 1 to 2% and the debts mostly concern the monthly obligatory health insurance premiums.
Ironic – and highly revealing – is that many young adults in the Netherlands do not apply for the related monthly receivable tax credits because they are concerned about having to pay it all back later. That would get them into much greater difficulty.
The Dutch tax authorities messed up big time with childcare tax credits when an algorithm started identifying people, notably those with foreign-sounding names or foreign backgrounds or foreign parents, as scammers. This resulted in huge financial difficulties for many. Families were even ripped apart over it, children sometimes removed from the home.
So here we have another clear indication that how a government rules a country is directly related to the financial challenges that its citizens deal with.
Blacklisting people who apply for exemptions and sharing those details with a range of other organization – both also done in the Netherlands – is another way to deter people whose financial circumstances actually do make them qualify for exemptions.
They rarely need more roadblocks, after all. They’re usually trying to clear roadblocks.
What also often goes wrong is that organizations such as health insurance companies do not inform their customers of threshold they should seek to avoid. The news item states that when health insurance clients are 6 months behind on their obligatory insurance premiums (with or without health care costs payments?), the insurers have to blacklist them and refer them to a government organization called the CAK (a collection agency, basically) and their customers’ health insurance premiums go up.
How is this helpful, Dutch government? Shouldn’t you, by contrast, for example start doing things like waive people’s “eigen risico” – if they have high healthcare costs but low incomes – to help them get back on track instead of push them into greater financial difficulty?
And instead of the tax credits that many people are now too terrified of to apply for, couldn’t you just give them an income-related discount on their premiums, based on the previous year’s income so that there won’t be any fear of a later clawback?
I’m also interested in why the premiums and “eigen risico” went up whereas those healthcare premium tax credits went down this year. Are the country’s coffers empty? Apparently…
The “eigen risico” will be applied differently next year. Instead of it being a one-time reimbursement threshold, there will then be a lower threshold each time someone needs care for which the “eigen risico” applies. Would this mean that people with certain medical condition will end up paying a fortune toward their healthcare? No, because the threshold stays in place. https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/actueel/nieuws/2023/01/19/vanaf-2025-maximaal-150-euro-eigen-risico-per-behandeling-in-medisch-specialistische-zorg
Should these things really be changing all the time? It’s a little bit like the “derdelanders” position among refugees that fled from Ukraine, haphazardly applied and constantly changing decisions that give people little to hold on to. It’s also a bit like future pension amounts being determined by how the stock market is doing instead of how capable the fund managers at the pensions funds are, isn’t it?
Is long-term vision a thing of the past?
Continue readingAquafaba
Update: it’s actually pretty good as it is, what I whipped up today. It wasn’t the vinegar of which I added too much, it was ground mustard seeds. They are pretty good.
In an attempt to lower the number of (plastic) jars of vegan mayo I purchase and throw less stuff away that is actually useful and nutritious, I just tried my first aquafaba recipe.
I didn’t get the proportions right as the recipe was on my computer in another room and I mixed up teaspoons and tablespoons – and I was using cups, anyway. I’m also not using a fridge. Instead, I placed the mixture in the microwave and heated it up; that too thickened it up really nicely. (That possibly was because I had resorted to adding some corn starch, which I may not do next time.)
I used a plain metal whisk, by the way, not a blender. (Bamboo whisks exist too.)
I used olive oil, but I didn’t want to use up all my olive oil because I didn’t see much thickening, likely because I had added to much vinegar.
A tip: If you heat olive oil, it can lose its super healthy properties that help protect your heart and vascular system (according to a BBC program that I watched a few years ago). I don’t know at what temperature that deterioration kicks in, but heating a bowl in the microwave for one or two minutes is probably very okay.
My very first mayo attempt is a little too tart – my fault – and to make up for that, I’ll add some ground almonds. Ground almonds, that’s my shredded cheese.
Next time, I’ll get it right. I can tell. I’m very pleased.
Did you know that you can also use tofu juice and the juice in a can of peas as aquafaba? Can, that’s tin, for Brits.
If I tin do this, so tin you.
What sparked this? I was eating courgettes and chickpeas yesterday and thought “Some mayo with this would be nice.” Chickpeas come with the best aquafaba. Courgettes, that’s zucchini, for Americans. (Ameritins?)
(Also, I am being ravaged by gnats in my sleep. Apparently, they hate the smell of vanilla. I don’t. So I’m going to try that too.)
Need more inspiration for what you can do better in terms of sustainable living? This may help:
I too really wrestle with the fact that the actions of the species Homo sapiens are often so harmful and so thoughtless.
I’ve seen a pigeon realize that mice, no matter how annoying mice can also be to pigeons, need food to survive, to my amazement. I had a pet pigeon who often spilled her food and I had a neighbor with mice who would sometimes venture into my place. It dawned on the pigeon what was happening and she stopped spilling food where she spent most of her time, and where she did not want to see any mice, but I also saw her spill food off a high shelf one day, very deliberately – and then look down to see what would happen.
I’ve seen another bird species have empathy for cats.
The difference may be how secure biological beings are, in terms of food and shelter.
If that is the case, then greater equality and facilities like universal income might make a huge difference in the long run. It’s not easy to have empathy when you are struggling to support yourself, when you struggle to feed and house yourself. It makes total sense, doesn’t it?
The step toward living more sustainably becomes easier too, then.
I’ve also recently realized that my life in the past two decades would have been much easier if I had owned a car. I’m still digesting that. The issue is actually a different one, but today’s world sometimes forces certain choices and limitations on us. Balancing them out is a bit like choosing between local loose apples that are not organic or organic apples or vegan products that are packaged in plastic and can have been shipped around the world. Not easy.
The solution is to find a local grower who does not use plastic to package organic fruits and vegetables in. In some regions, there are apps that make that possible, that allow you to connect with local organic farmers and order products from them.
Legal textbook case! (Titan missile silo fall)
An 18-year-old boy was injured when he fell 10 meters in a Titan missile silo in Colorado.
It is already having legal consequences for the injured adult in the group. The six minors have been passed on to their parents. Whether there will also be legal consequences for them and for the injured young man remains to be seen. That’s according to Dutch news (NOS) and one American source (KKTV).
USA Today, by contrast, reports that the 18-year-old injured person was charged with criminal trespass (3rd degree criminal mischief was how a third news source put it) and that seven minors were handed over into the custody of their parents, with possible charges pending.
When owners of a terrain do what they can to keep youngsters out to protect them against hazards that are present on the terrain, liability can shift. That’s the textbook case this may turn into. It has to do with whether it’s reasonable to hold a party liable for damages if that party has done enough to prevent the damages. These youngsters crossed a threshold.
(What’s more, these eight youngsters may have been on military territory. Doesn’t sound like it, though.)
Just because someone is a little quirky, it doesn’t mean that they’re not super bright
Older adults are getting smarter
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From my own observations as a younger person, I know that the impression that older adults are “slow” can be merely the result of the declining near-sight of older adults. It can take them – us – slightly longer to spot things on screens, for example, just because most older adults’ vision is not as good as it used to be.
I remember making this snap judgement about someone else once, when I was much younger. I am fortunate enough to be near-sighted, so while my near sight has declined with age, I still don’t need reading glasses unless I am wearing contact lenses for far sight.
Are young people smarter than older adults? My research shows cognitive differences between generations are diminishing
Stephen Badham, Nottingham Trent University
We often assume young people are smarter, or at least quicker, than
older people. For example, we’ve all heard that scientists, and even more so mathematicians, carry out their most important work when they’re comparatively young.
But my new research, published in Developmental Review, suggests that cognitive differences between the old and young are tapering off over time. This is hugely important as stereotypes about the intelligence of people in their sixties or older may be holding them back – in the workplace and beyond.
Cognitive ageing is often measured by comparing young adults, aged 18-30, to older adults, aged 65 and over. There are a variety of tasks that older adults do not perform well on compared to young adults, such as memory, spatial ability and speed of processing, which often form the basis of IQ tests. That said, there are a few tasks that older people do better at than younger people, such as reading comprehension and vocabulary.
Declines in cognition are driven by a process called cognitive ageing, which happens to everyone. Surprisingly, age-related cognitive deficits start very early in adulthood, and declines in cognition have been measured as dropping in adults as young as just 25.
Often, it is only when people reach older age that these effects add up to a noticeable amount. Common complaints consist of walking into a room and forgetting why you entered, as well as difficulty remembering names and struggling to drive in the dark.
The trouble with comparison
Sometimes, comparing young adults to older adults can be misleading though. The two generations were brought up in different times, with different levels of education, healthcare and nutrition. They also lead different daily lives, with some older people having lived though a world war while the youngest generation is growing up with the internet.
Most of these factors favour the younger generation, and this can explain a proportion of their advantage in cognitive tasks.
Indeed, much existing research shows that IQ has been improving globally throughout the 20th century. This means that later-born generations are more cognitively able than those born earlier. This is even found when both generations are tested in the same way at the same age.
Currently, there is growing evidence that increases in IQ are levelling off, such that, in the most recent couple of decades, young adults are no more cognitively able than young adults born shortly beforehand.
Together, these factors may underlie the current result, namely that cognitive differences between young and older adults are diminishing over time.
New results
My research began when my team started getting strange results in our lab. We found that often the age differences we were getting between young and older adults was smaller or absent, compared to prior research from early 2000s.
This prompted me to start looking at trends in age differences across the psychological literature in this area. I uncovered a variety of data that compared young and older adults from the 1960s up to the current day. I plotted this data against year of publication, and found that age deficits have been getting smaller over the last six decades.
Next, I assessed if the average increases in cognitive ability over time seen across all individuals was a result that also applied to older adults specifically. Many large databases exist where groups of individuals are recruited every few years to take part in the same tests. I analysed studies using these data sets to look at older adults.
I found that, just like younger people, older adults were indeed becoming more cognitively able with each cohort. But if differences are disappearing, does that mean younger people’s improvements in cognitive ability have slowed down or that older people’s have increased?
I analysed data from my own laboratory that I had gathered over a seven-year period to find out. Here, I was able to dissociate the performance of the young from the performance of the older. I found that each cohort of young adults was performing to a similar extent across this seven-year period, but that older adults were showing improvements in both processing speed and vocabulary scores.
CC BY-SA
I believe the older adults of today are benefiting from many of the factors previously most applicable to young adults. For example, the number of children who went to school increased significantly in the 1960s – with the system being more similar to what it is today than what it was at the start of the 20th century.
This is being reflected in that cohort’s increased scores today, now they are older adults. At the same time, young adults have hit a ceiling and are no longer improving as much with each cohort.
It is not entirely clear why the young generations have stopped improving so much. Some research has explored maternal age, mental health and even evolutionary trends. I favour the opinion that there is just a natural ceiling – a limit to how much factors such as education, nutrition and health can improve cognitive performance.
These data have important implications for research into dementia. For example, it is possible that a modern older adult in the early stages of dementia might pass a dementia test that was designed 20 or 30 years ago for the general population at that time.
Therefore, as older adults are performing better in general than previous generations, it may be necessary to revise definitions of dementia that depend on an individuals’ expected level of ability.
Ultimately, we need to rethink what it means to become older. And there’s finally some good news. Ultimately, we can expect to be more cognitively able than our grandparents were when we reach their age.
Stephen Badham, Professor of Psychology, Nottingham Trent University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
This is not a joke
https://www.theguardian.com/news/article/2024/may/06/netherlands-amsterdam-next-level-housing-crisis
I remember receiving a communication from someone in Florida, asking me “where do you want to live?” when I was about to relocate to Florida. “Where do you want to live? Which neighborhood?” was not an option I was familiar with. You live wherever it is where you find a place to live.
Things have been getting much worse recently, however, and apparently it is the fault of successive Dutch governments.
Don’t dismiss the role that sheer good luck and bad luck play in life
Here is an example.
Decades ago, as I was emigrating to the US in the winter holiday season, a courier I had arranged was supposed to collect the paperwork in the US that I needed for my visa. After several days, nothing had happened.
The university in the US engaged FedEx, their regular courier, and I rented a car, drove to the airport (Schiphol) where FedEx allowed me to collect my paperwork straight from the plane (desk), after which I drove to the American consulate and got my visa right before the consulate shut down early because of new year.
My flight was leaving, pets and all, when the consulate was still closed.
The fact that everything else worked out too… that was great. There could so easily have been a snag on my way back from the airport.)
But if it hadn’t been for FedEx…
So whenever I can, if I need to use a courier, I will use FedEx. (I’ve held an account with them once or twice.)
This is how it’s done
What is gossip?
Some people fascinate me so much that I end up talking about them with others but I sometimes can’t escape wondering whether I am gossiping when I do that. I now try to keep things as vague as possible so that the people in question remain unidentifiable – it’s a small world, after all – but that’s not always easy.
Nice surprises
Those who know me or follow me closely are probably aware that I still get royalties for work that I did before I moved from Southampton to Portsmouth. This concerns books published by “real publishers”, as opposed to “by myself”. I get royalties over the purchases as well as lending fees (libraries).
(I also occasionally get Amazon royalties and Udemy royalties, but that’s still relatively rare and this is not what I am talking about here.)
Through sheer coincidence, I discovered that e-book versions have meanwhile appeared of many of those works. As I was not aware of their existence up to that point, I hadn’t submitted any of those e-books to the Dutch organization that processes and pays out the royalties for those books.
I’ve recently added them to my portfolio. The related payments slowly started to come in after I did that. I just received three more specifications. Particularly the pandemic seems to have made a difference for e-lending.
There’s one book of which I wrote a small portion and that I haven’t added yet. As I don’t remember having made sure at the time that my contribution was going to be mentioned in the book, I don’t think that trying to submit it to my portfolio is going to be worth my while.
Holy cow, has Britain come out of 15 years of hibernation?
Does someone have a problem with who you are?
One exception: If your behavior is hurting others, then you still do not have to sacrifice who you are, but you’ll have to learn how to modulate your behavior. That’s also for your own sake, to stay out of trouble.
This sounds easier than it is. Behaviors can have become part of someone’s identity and when someone’s any kind of artist, the idea of modulating one’s behavior surely has to feel like a potential threat to one’s creativity.
Baby steps is all it takes. No big leaps or major transformations are needed.
I’ve actually been shocked to see how being mistreated – or even merely dismissed – in England started to change me into someone I no longer liked much at all. This began happening to me when I was in my forties. So I understand very well how certain behaviors can come about. We do not live in a vacuum, no matter what people may say, and what happens around us and to us – particularly when it concerns children – can change us. Neural pathways get reinforced; this happens beyond our control, before we know it.
(Just consider how TBIs and brain tumors can change someone’s personality. Then you see how true this is. We are biological organisms, not separate from nature but part of it.)
Some people are lucky enough to be able to reclaim the power to be who they want to be. Others need a bit of compassionate support to be able to do that, a guide. Not everyone can change their behaviors, but there are ways to limit its impact on others.
Poverty policies
If writing off household debts – the government buying the debts and then paying them, which boils down to having the debts written off, for households – is much cheaper than the government providing household debt assistance, isn’t a big part of the solution to shift the household debt amount toward the income of the people who get into household debt?
This was fake news. The video wasn’t.
And then again, it wasn’t genuine either.
Agreed
I used to vote for them. And then I stopped.
“All those posh boys think we’re stupid”
(Posted on YouTube 3 days ago.)
What on earth is going on in Dutch trains?
Last night, two boys aged 13 and 14 attacked a train guard in Purmerend. He needed medical treatment after that.
https://nos.nl/artikel/2518846-twee-jongens-van-13-en-14-jaar-mishandelen-conducteur-in-purmerend
Just a few weeks ago, another train guard was attacked, and even thrown down a staircase by a bunch of youngsters. That happened between Delft and The Hague. The woman broke her arm.
https://nos.nl/artikel/2516813-conducteur-ns-mishandeld-in-trein-van-trap-gegooid-geschopt-geslagen
I have just spent fifteen years in an English town that has a LOT of violence and intimidation and harassment and I’ve stood up against bullies a few times. Fairly recently, I’ve even stopped two people who were high on meth from pulling a driver out of his car in rush hour, for example, but that is very different.
This violence in Dutch trains is really worrisome and I wouldn’t want to deal with that at all.
What is behind this? Is it still an aftermath effect of the pandemic? I don’t think so.
Particularly the trains between Zwolle and Emmen are seeing a large increase of incidents. What is different about that part of the country?
https://nos.nl/artikel/2518815-grote-stijging-van-het-aantal-incidenten-in-trein-zwolle-emmen
This article mentions that it mostly concerns people without a valid ticket and talks about a large number of refugees who got stuck in that part of the Netherlands because the country where they came from is considered safe enough.
Is that the whole story? It’s very hard to talk about this without risking upsetting anyone if you ask about the backgrounds of the youths in question. But if you want to resolve this, you need the context.
- One obvious solution appears to be gates at stations, to keep people without ticket from boarding the trains. Then you shift the problem, however. If the violence is mostly associated with people not having tickets, then the real issue is a lack of enough income.
- So, another solution might be to issue free train passes to for example youths for a while and see how that affects the number of incidents. Free train passes might make a real difference. It might make people feel a lot less defensive. Scared people can easily become aggressive.
Why are so many people needing to travel between Emmen and Zwolle, though?
https://nos.nl/artikel/2496457-nog-altijd-veel-incidenten-in-overlasttrein-zwolle-emmen
The source appears to be Ter Apel, a former military base where my dad had part of his military draft training, which now houses refugees and other asylum seekers.
https://nos.nl/artikel/2481573-politie-mee-op-de-trein-bij-maarheeze-na-overlast-asielzoekers
- A third solution, then, is to employ some of these asylum seekers on some of these trains, in uniform, but also perhaps in plain clothes. You need to bridge that gap. You need people who understand what is happening.
The presence of police agents in uniform can be provocative and does not necessarily increase the sense of safety among the public. I am in my sixties, and I do not consider the sight of police officers reassuring. To the contrary, I associate police with violence (from whatever source). It depends on the situation, however.
Generally, you can’t fight fire with fire (though it’s basically what I did in the case I mentioned above because I needed to distract them from the driver whose wife and kids were also in the car, by the way).
You have to take away the source of the problem, not fight its results.
Continue readingFlying cars, flying homes, flying monkeys
Somewhere, someone may still have a copy of an essay that I wrote in primary school… about the year 2000.
The kids in my class laughed. (No, that didn’t make me angry.)
Now these things are starting to happen, a little later than I anticipated.
I’ve also predicted that we’ll be using CRISPR and fish genes so that we can change the color of our skin like putting on new clothes and be done with so-called racial discrimination. (So-called because race is a cultural concept. There is only one human species and a wide range of diversity, which is the spice of human life.) It’s already been done with cats and other mammals, making them fluorescent in the dark, though the ability to change the color is going to be a challenge.
I’ve been looking back at my life and was astonished to see how often I was hit by sheer bad luck, mere negative coincidences, things that happened, sometimes without me being aware of at the time. I’m wondering what I can still do with that, and what it all means, if anything, whether I could have done some things differently, responded differently.
And then I see this and I despair. What is going to become of the over 50,000 children who disappeared within the EU within a period of three years? The actual number is likely much higher, researchers say.
Then this.
Yes, I know that the news makes us depressed these days. There is so much negative news that people now apparently do things like consider education in their own country very bad – but not their own children’s education – and consider the economy very bad – but not their own situation. (Surveys reveal this.) They seem to be basing their opinions on negative news that they read, not on their own experiences.
Headaches… (and coincidences)
They’d been plaguing me for far too long (a few weeks now) but are slowly starting to go away…
(Yes, they’ve hampered me recently. What can I say? I am merely human.
Having a bad headache usually doesn’t result in brilliant thinking.)
I was – am still – dealing with gallbladder congestion, massive sinus congestion and esophagus issues. (It’s all related and in turn can affect circulation.) I know how to deal with this. We all have our weaknesses. My body needs to be working like a race-horse’s because if it isn’t, it really starts to buck to get my attention. That’s the non-conscious part of the brain kicking in, trying to get through to the conscious part.
Also… I just wrote the following… (see below). Then, when I was looking for an address to send a book to, I discovered that I have a niece who’s just completed a BA in psychology (though her thesis calls it a BSc, likely as per Dutch university instructions). Topic? Bullying in care homes (among residents). That’s an interesting coincidence. (I took a quick look. I suspect that I might really like you, niece, if we ever were to meet.) It’s made me smile.
I think that I should mention now that because of the housing situation and the plethora of regulations and registration requirements in the country that I am currently in, I am living in an actual nursing home – care home – in a small municipality surrounded by agricultural land, miles away from anything, far away from places where I would like to be and need to be.
I thought I’d be content (and resourceful) enough to make it work. I was completely unprepared for the lack of privacy – which I have found some solutions for – and the fact that when nothing is physically wrong with you and you are much younger than most other residents, almost everyone assumes that you either have dementia or must be learning-disabled (“except most of the residents,” I should probably add).
I’d also not at all considered the fact that people who go live in such places go live there to die there. Ambulances are frequent visitors as are undertaker vans (and removal lorries), along with the daily tides of carers. The hopelessness and emptiness is often overwhelming and the lack of respect and consideration with which you get treated is not really cheering me up either.
That’s partly my fault because I feel so out of place here. (That’s for other reasons, too, including having lived abroad for so long.)
At first, strangers who didn’t know that I was living here too even sometimes made remarks along the lines of all people who live here no longer being interested in anything whatsoever, everything passing them by. To almost everyone else, you become a thing when you live in a place like this. You’re seen as frail, by definition.
I had really underestimated how incredibly hard this would be.
(Don’t worry, not everything is bad.)
Hundreds of people – all kinds of staff and other visitors – walk in and out throughout the day and because there are also people with dementia here, you have to go through a set of sluice doors – that’s a lock – of glass doors. After hours, you need to tap in a code to be able to leave. During the day, you have to wait for the other doors to have closed but there is enough staff and a receptionist to keep on eye on wandering dementia patients.
Nonsense!
There’s no such thing as hacking. That’s just something old women make up to hide that they can’t handle modern technology.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/29/devices-with-weak-passwords-to-be-banned-uk
And another productive day
From this bundle, which contains poems and one short story, you can read the short story below.
Berry-picking
(September 2011)
He tiptoed around the toadstool and knocked on the door. “Are you up yet?” “Depends on who you’re asking, the toadstool or me,” she yelled and opened the door in the angled toadstool, tiara in hand. “Yes?”
“I thought maybe we could go berry-picking today.” “You’re right, it’s a marvelous day for it. Let me put some shoes on and I’ll join you.” When she came back to the door, he was no longer at her toadstool’s doorstep. Where’d he gone off to? She looked around and spotted him, when he yelled from the garden around his parents’ toadstool. “My mom wants me to have a decent breakfast first.” “Okay,” she hollered back. “Meetcha in an hour!” And she went back inside, did the dishes, brushed the cat and checked her e-mail because she’d already had breakfast.
“Are you ready?” he asked an hour later, impatiently jumping up and down on her doorstep. “Yes, but let me quickly close the kitchen window,” she replied, and went inside to close the window. When she stepped outside, he was nowhere in sight. Where’d he gone off to this time? She looked around and then spotted him when she heard him yell from the garden around his parents’ toadstool. “My dad wants me to go fly-fishing with him. Shall we go berry-picking this afternoon instead?” “Okay,” she hollered back. “See ya at two!” And she went back inside, posted an update on Twitter, did her bookkeeping, and made a mushroom omelet for lunch.
“Come on, come on!” He was pacing up and down and around her toadstool impatiently while she wrapped up an exchange in one of her Facebook groups, and paused the new track she’d been listening to on MySpace, grabbed her berry-picking satchel and walked toward the door, where she was met with an icy silence. She turned her hands into fists and put them on her hips. Where the devil had he gone off to now? She looked around and spotted him, yelling from the garden around his parents’ toadstool. “My mother wants to teach me how to bake cookies. I suggest we go berry-picking tomorrow.” She grumbled and didn’t holler back “Okay!” but “Enjoy your cookies!” and went berry-picking all by herself. The pattern repeated itself day after day, until one day, her toadstool was gone and the door no longer there to knock on. She had turned the berries into jam, used the jam in cakes, and started selling cakes from her toadstool. But she had remembered the “Location, location, location” chant from her college days and had the toadstool moved to a prime location in town, while preserving its precarious yet precious angle, as it made her toadstool so easy to recognize from a distance. He had to go on Twitter to find her, and found she had thousands of followers, all wanting to go berry-picking with her.
Schrikbarend beeld
Okee, Nederland is officieel kapot. Stuk.
Het goed georganiseerde land dat ik kende bestaat niet meer.
- DIT – medische Kafkaesque nachtmerries – is één gevolg van betalen voor verrichte handelingen en het loslaten van zorg.
- Het schokkende toeslagenschandaal waarvan de klap over de hele wereld echoode.
- De Orwelliaanse vroegsignalering
Hoe dit komt, deels? Technologie dient de mens niet meer maar andersom. De dictatuur van wat kan is ontspoord.
A productive day
I have been plagued by bad headaches for about ten days now and today is no exception. So I am pleased to be able to say that I just wrote 30 pages for a new booklet anyway. Related to inequality and poverty.
By the end of the day, I had published the first version. That gets it into the system. I expect to start expanding on it as of Sunday. In the past, I used to print everything a few times and edit/rewrite on the basis of the printed material. That usually leads to the best results, but is not really doable – or done – any longer. The main thing to do first is getting rid of these stupid headaches.
Also, I am hoping to get my eyes lasered soon; there are three different options for me in theory. This would solve several issues, including looking perpetually exhausted because of the pigmentation around my eyes. That pigmentation is reversible.
Priorities, priorities. (My current challenges all take priority. That forces me to play a game of juggling and gambling and guessing.)
UK leading these developments
I had spotted these or similar headlines on the CNN website a few days ago and was vaguely surprised. They just popped up again and this time, I paid more attention. Turns out that they’re advertisements.
Women and agency
When misfortune strikes strong women, afterward, they will want to process it as soon as possible, reclaim their agency and move on with their lives.
If instead you tell them to do nothing at all for a while, it becomes impossible for them to take you seriously. They will dismiss you and probably never listen to you again.
