Key phrases: Inequality, poverty, violence, cruelty, povertyism, misogyny, diversity, bias, othering, discrimination, sadism, ageism, decision-making, otherisation, marginalisation, ableism, inclusivity, gerontophobia, stranger-stalking, aggression, sadistic stalking, zen approach, misogyny, governance, hate groups, fairness, racism, justice, philosophy, law, hacking, homophobia, contempt, bioethics, health inequalities, cruelty, ELSI, homelessness, politics, public policy, policing, science and biotechnology, conspiracy beliefs, speciesism, light pollution, callousness, security, mechanical pollution, hate, violence, safety, chemical pollution, conspiracy thinking, social security, forensic psychology… and 20+ years of experience in earth and life sciences as well as nearly two decades with what appears to be "sadistic stalking" or whatever. Some of those crazy nihilistic extremist sadistic networks involved, possibly? (This website is currently paid for by hacker Charley H who has full access, without my consent.) (Sorry, Charley, but people should know.)
I just read about your plans for benefits in the Guardian.
I suspect that you don’t realise that foreigners who left their native country a long time ago are considered to be living and at home in the UK by their native countries and often no longer qualify for support there. I have read news items from which I concluded that it works similarly for British nationals who left the UK a long time ago.
I went a little creative with this one. Or is it “rogue”?
START OF MY MESSAGE TO KEIR STARMER
Hi there,
I took part in an online meeting with you and one interviewer once, before you became PM. It was interesting… I was elated when Labour won because it then seemed that at least the British were coming to their senses even if people in many other countries have not yet. I’m so disappointed and also really concerned that you’re making the British feel betrayed because you started emulating the Tories from day 1. That is not what the public had voted for.
And now, instead of looking after the country, you may be focusing too much on doing what Farage et al want.
That said, fair is fair, you do have a knack for handling Donald Trump.
That’s not, however, how British people want and deserve to be treated. They need honesty and transparency and someone who genuinely cares. Some Conservatives seem to care a lot more about the British people than you do. That’s not a good look.
Where are your own LABOUR views? Have you shred them while nobody was watching?
As various forms of digital-only checks are already attached to migrant status and right-to-work checks, it seems to me that this is just another way for the government to spend a lot of money.
This tactic is typical for the Conservatives, not for Labour. The Conservatives spouted a lot of lies about foreign people living in the UK not needing to pay NIC and so on; they were able to because nobody stood up and said “wait a minute, that’s nonsense”.
I don’t think that mandatory DIGITAL ID would help Brits either as FAR too many are living in poverty or in deep poverty. They might not have the required equipment and internet access. Mandatory physical ID with a chip carrying fingerprints is a different matter.
I understand that your plans also undermine certain other groups’ rights; as you are a human rights lawyer, you’re probably well aware of that and don’t need me to spell it out.
In addition, the speed at which you want to introduce this means that you are asking for trouble. You’d risk repeating what MS Windows used to be infamous for. Haste makes waste.
I don’t know if your plans would create something like the Dutch DigiD, but that introduction was riddled with problems. Many people couldn’t get it to work no matter what they tried (even still just a few years ago) and the majority of phones were not suitable for some weird reason.
As it happens, the phone I got for my EUSS application (with NFC so that it could read the chip in my passport) was also the only one on which the Dutch DigiD app functioned. None of my other phones could get it to work; I have no idea why not.
There also was an issue with Dutch people abroad not being able to acquire DigiD. I happened to be able to stop by at Schiphol Airport at the right time so I was lucky enough to be able to go to some desk there and get it sorted.
You will have similar issues for Brits abroad. Those living in places like Amsterdam and Berlin can hop over, just like I hopped over to Amsterdam. It is a different story for those in Australia, Canada or other more distant places.
As another example, the new GOV.UK ID that you’ve recently introduced for us foreigners will require the purchase of yet another new phone because it won’t accept anything under Android 11 at the moment. (Ehm… wait a minute, so you already have that too!)
What ARE you DOING, Keir? Where is your good common sense?
Please reconsider. Thanks.
Angelina
END OF MY MESSAGE TO KEIR STARMER
PS After reading the gov.uk information about this new ID, I freaked. Drop your phone and you no longer can prove who you are! All of my phones malfunction often. All of my equipment suffers from persistent hacking interference. Some apps malfunction often. Some apps I can’t even get on some phones because the app thinks I am in the wrong country even when I am not, on the basis of some coding in the phone.
This new ID scheme sounds like a bonkers waste of money because with your government gateway ID you can also already access more and more services. I had not even mentioned that in the message that I sent.
Argh. What a load of crock. (There is no paperwork related to EUSS, for example. It’s been 100% digital from the start.) (EUSS is the EU settlement scheme, which kicked in after Brexit.)
Okay, so here is the crux (possibly). Who’d be getting the contracts?
A few days ago, someone seemed to suggest that my situation is more or less the result of illegal migrants in the Netherlands putting pressure on the system. (And that the Dutch givernment cares greatly.)
Bollocks.
If you’re illegal, you don’t have access to anything. If you don’t have an official registered address in the Netherlands, you don’t exist.
I don’t exist any longer either. If I needed medical assistance, I would have to go to the United Kingdom. (Yes, I have the Dutch nationality. I was born and raised here and so were my parents.)
I knew nothing about the plight of migrants until I moved from Amsterdam to England.
I’d previously emigrated to the United States and although the restrictions of my visa hampered me and I ran into misunderstandings such as that foreign employees of a State don’t have to file income taxes – plus very occasionally some nonsense about sex and drugs or wooden shoes, tulips and windmills and Denmark – I never felt discriminated against.
When I emigrated to England, however, government politicians and others were spouting so many vicious lies about “my kind” that it forced me to start pondering the situation of migrants in the Netherlands too.
I supposedly was from a poor country called the Netherlands and I supposedly had come to the UK because there were more opportunities there than in the Netherlands or to get its supposedly much more generous social security benefits (which you could not even get in the UK for the first five years and in order to start qualifying, you had to make an appointment and show evidence of your income) and I supposedly was a thieving drug addict and lying about my affiliation with the University of Southampton. It got stale. (Initially, I thought that some people simply behaved in really odd ways.)
And yet, in 2020, Home Secretary Priti Patel called us all “low-skill” and “low-wage” and vowed to reduce our numbers as if we were vermin to be exterminated… I’ve included her in the video below that I put together to call out the utter hypocrisy and nazi-rhetoric of these lying politicians.
Priti Patel is the daughter of Ugandan/Indian migrants. Geert Wilders is the son of a woman from the Asian country that has the world’s largest muslim population (Indonesia) and is, just like his pal Trump, married to a foreigner (Hungary). Some interesting psychology at work there… Do they have a deep-seated wish to get get back at their parents and their spouses for some reason?
Three years later, English newspapers revealed that PM Boris Johnson had planned a military raid on a vaccine plant in Leiden, the Netherlands, to steal vaccines for a disease of which he had previously said that it was just something that those weak foreigners could not handle but that would never affect the British.
(Shortly after this, Johnson stiffed Jenny and Luis and their colleagues. Jenny quit, disgusted.)
And that is how I know that most of the utter nonsense being spouted in the Netherlands about illegals, and refugees and foreigners and people such as myself who have lived abroad for a long time and can no longer be trusted is just that. It is utter nonsense aimed at sowing fear and gaining fearful people’s votes.
Right-wing statements of supposedly left-wing Dutch politicians don’t help.
Globally, I dearly miss the powerful moderating influence of “Mutti” Angela Merkel and also that of Jacinda Ardern.
So when someone said “As-salamu alaykum” to me the other day (peace, shalom, namaste), I replied “Salaam”. (I’d previously asked someone whether it was okay for me to say this, and he smiled and said “yes”. It’s not said in England, you see, at least not as openly, but likely often enough when no semi-indigenous people are around.)
Part of the problem with the Netherlands is that it has made a whopping shift to the right in the past two decades – hence to “not caring” – and that it wants to regulate every sneeze and cough and requires you to have to apply for a license for sneezing and a license for coughing and that if somehow, all license applications are automatically rejected, it comes up with a third and fourth and fifth regulation to regulate the failing regulations instead of simply fixing what’s wrong.
The horrific childcare tax credits disaster STILL has not been resolved. A repeat is around the corner and many victims of this travesty are still stuck, waiting, waiting, waiting for the Dutch state to step up and do what it should do.
(The Netherlands now seems to be pervaded by thought policing, too. How dare you call out the emperor for not wearing any clothes?)
Btw, does anyone know why WordPress.com does not recognize ENGLISH?
STAT: “President Trump announced on Monday that his administration has concluded that some cases of autism may be linked to pregnant women’s use of acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, and said the medication should be used sparingly and only if absolutely needed during pregnancy.
Flanked by the nation’s top health officials at the White House, Trump outlined a dramatic overhaul to health agencies’ approach to autism.”
Tylenol has nothing to do with autism as far as scientists know at this point. Anti-epileptic drugs taken during pregnancy may play a role, however.
Robert Klitzman: “Environmental factors also play roles, including a mother’s obesity, older age, diabetes caused by pregnancy, polycystic ovary syndrome, and exposures to various pesticides and infections. Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection (or “ICSI”), used as part of in-vitro fertilization, injects sperm directly into eggs to increase the odds of fertilization. It was developed and intended for use with men with low sperm counts, but it is now used in most IVF. It turns out to double the rate of intellectual disabilities and autism in the offspring.”Nicolas Joncour: https://i-asc.org/our-team/nicolas-joncour/ (who he is and what he does)Continue reading →
Are you getting really stinky smelly feet, yuck, gross, and are you for example blaming it on your new shoes?
Because you can’t figure out what’s going on?
Perhaps in despair you’ve ordered one of those UV disinfecting wands for your shoes.
Well, if it happens to be the case that you recently moved, ask yourself if you used to have the habit of treating your feet to a nice warm salt footbath every once in a while. Have you lost that habit?
If so, reinstate it. Problem solved, I bet.
(You may need to replace your socks, too. Washing at 60 degrees may make the problem worse. Washing at 90 or 95 degrees is better, but most socks can’t handle that. See links below.)
Look after your feet. They’ll thank you in so many ways.
AI-generated image
How you can tell that this image is AI-generated? Nobody ever places a footbath at height. You place it on the floor. This AI clearly doesn’t know that. It thinks it’s like doing the dishes.
Let me know if you disagree.
Feel free to share your opinion below, please. Cancel reply
Most people wash at 30 or 40 degrees Celsius these days,but that’s rarely enough to get rid of bacteria.
Some bacteria really thrive at 60 degrees C. Stinky feet bacteria are examples of those, if memory serves me right. So you have to get close to boiling to get rid of that “Cheetos to the power of 100” smell or find a different way to disinfect your socks.
Below are some related research papers. I remember that the Guardian or a different major newspaper had an article referring to this type of research too, a few years back, telling us readers that our clothes tend to have remained dirty after a washing cycle.
A quick tip: Using a tumble dryer also helps get rid of bacteria.
Displaced aggression is when a person displays – redirects – hostility toward a different person because he or she feels intimidated by or weaker than the person he or she is annoyed with.
One of my neighbors in Portsmouth did it. He sometimes made angry remarks at me that had nothing to do with me. I found it puzzling until it dawned on me that the remarks applied to his partner. They used to quarrel, in what sounded like a very healthy respectful albeit angry manner, but they had stopped quarreling.
Well, birds do this too.
There is a group of six white geese where I am right now and I connected with them months ago, just by talking with them. They often greet me with softer or louder honks. Hi! Hi hi! Hi hi hi! Hi!
The lead goose is pretty bossy and his eyes speak volumes.
I’d brought them escarole twice over the months (in hot dry weather). The second time, they already knew that I had something for them when I walked up, just from my movements, the way I walked.
One day, he looked at me with undisguised anger. “I thought you had food but all you did was grab a handkerchief to blow your nose!” So I got some spinach, on sale, to make up for it, but while walking back I started wondering about the oxalic acid content. (It can interfere with the calcium metabolism of birds.)
Mr Lead Goose was furious. “Spinach? You brought us spinach!?!”
He was so furious that, yes, I went back to get some escarole.
“I wanted bread!” Yeah, well, the others were happy with the escarole. One of them did eat spinach too, but admittedly, somewhat reluctantly.
Last week, he was in one of his moods again. He sees me as challenging him or eroding his power a little at times. He then picked on one of the other geese, clearly because he didn’t risk pecking me. I interfered. That’s a goose who had a leg injury and was limping but the leg has gradually improved over the months.
So then he diverted his attention to (smaller) Nile geese, a couple and their two kids. He picked on one of the parents.
I stepped between them.
I’ve also previously stepped between a great blue heron and the Nile goose youngsters.
All you need to do is stand between them. (The heron I walked off. He needed to move away just a little. He flew off by a mere meter or so. Message received. Goal accomplished.)
The white geese were all very intrigued by all this.
This morning, the six white geese honked at me and swam with me, to a spot on the shore where the Nile geese already happened to be, to the left of a pedestrian bridge.
I then saw one of the Nile goose youngsters pick on a pigeon. I had to laugh. That one had clearly been watching Mr White Lead Goose.
There’s also sometimes a swan and right now (that is, yesterday), a swan couple with a kid. The geese keep a respectful distance. You don’t mess with a swan.
(The geese also warn each other about dogs, btw.)
If they can redirect anger, then they can also empathize.
Sure enough, I’ve seen quaker parrots look out – step up – for cats. Cats!
I’ve also seen a pigeon understand that mice too need to eat and that you should drop some food somewhere on purpose if you don’t want them to go somewhere else and that you shouldn’t be sloppy with your food there.
If pigeons know how to deter rodents humanely, then so can humans.
And we all know the racket that magpies make to warn everyone else if they see a cat on the prowl (or a bird of prey in the air). They warn everyone, usually perched pretty high up so that they can monitor the cat. They don’t just warn their own kind.
PS Non-human animals sometimes do things, play games, to test a human, to assess how much of a danger you might represent. Humans sometimes do something similar. They can become a real pest just to test another person’s loyalty. “Can I drive you away or will I always be able to count on you?” My youngest sister once told me that she’d done that with a boyfriend. She’s very smart, yes. People with insight in themselves are pretty precious.
For some unfathomable reason, the economic calendar sometimes gives me the wrong times. I sometimes get the wrong number of hours versus UTC.
As I also need to keep the difference with the US in mind and not every release happens at the same time, and daylight savings time doesn’t run synchronously either and I am in two different timezone countries, certainly in my head, I don’t always notice it when this happens.
Today, it happened again, apparently, or maybe this time it was me who got the time wrong. (Probably! Mea culpa.) (Update: Nope, a day or so later I once again noticed that the time of the calendar was off again. After I left Portsmouth, I would still often remain on UK time. When I contacted someone about this, the time started changing 1 hour in the other direction (for Letland).
Today’s data releases (Jolts etc) tripped me up.
It cost me about 7 bucks. Could be worse.
(Ehm, did it? Not necessarily. I closed a short at a loss of 7, but had intended to. It was a trade that I was unable to close yesterday when I wanted to, a pending trade that I should have deleted before it kicked in. I have a long running that I would have closed today, if I had been appropriately alert, but that’s actually all right for now. The day ain’t over yet, anyway.)
I found myself thinking “what’s that rate waiting for, why’s it hovering, stalling? The data aren’t coming in yet, after all.”
Focus…
What can I say? I’m human. My back is troubling me. It’s distracting. I’m focusing on ibuprofen. My circumstances are crappy, too. I do what I can. I’m still ahead. Mistakes are part of it.
Mine was identified by a friend who was in nursing school and wanted to practice her massage skills on me. I was around 20, working at the Amsterdam Tourist Office at the time. “Weet je dat je scheef bent?” she asked. “Whatever,” I thought.
A chiropractor diagnosed it in my middle sister and our uncle Harrie had it too. I don’t know who else had it, but there must have been others. I don’t know whether my youngest sister has it. Probably.
I’d never looked into it before, but did so last night.
“There are strong arguments that human health and life have fundamental value and that incremental gains in health and in years of life will benefit us.”
I agree! For this to be realized, two things need to happen.
Logic says that if lots of people expect something to go up, then they will start buying, with the plan to cash out later when the something goes up. That then drives up its price in advance.
Sometimes that is clearly the case.
However, you can also see this happening when something is expected to go down. Then the price gets jacked up so that the shorts when the thing that is expected to go down goes down – in this case, the US dollar – are able to make a lot more money.
We’ll see which is which. Will I have the patience?
Complication: Trump has ended traditional bullish/bearish predictions for the dollar, but old habits die hard and this is not global but US. (His tariff circus kicked the dollar off its throne as a safe currency, but there’s been some rebound.) The yields story isn’t what it used to be either, relative to the dollar.
(I understand that yields v inflation is what’s currently driving the gold price. Feels like bad news for the dollar to me, but I don’t know much at all about this stuff and that is an understatement.)
People think that these are goofy little dorks, the people who do this. Wrong.
On the basis of my blood test results, people like that tried to make me believe that I had blood cancer. That was in Portsmouth. Someone else might have fallen for it. I didn’t. I didn’t bother telling my GP practice about it.
On the basis of my eye test results here in the Netherlands, people tried to make me believe that something was seriously wrong with my left eye.
This Clinical Diagnostics hack involved Amphia patients. I have known for over a year that Amphia’s systems are not secure. That does not mean that this hack took place via Amphia but it is possible.
I am aware of several other Dutch systems that aren’t secure. I am not going to mention them here as it would signal to other hackers that these systems are vulnerable.
No stupid (hacking etc) crap today, please. I’m EXTREMELY exhausted at the moment and I need all my focus and energy on keeping myself from not falling over. No stupid crap today.
Arabica, 10 April until todayArabica, 1 January 1990 until today (Do you see the effect of the pandemic, when global shipping ground to a halt and prices went up, then came down again? At the time, people were constantly looking which ports had containers stuck in them and which countries that grow coffee had ports from which shipping was still happening.)
Efforts are on the way to create lab-grown coffee. I’ll see if I can find the news about that; I was into coffee futures for a while, but have lost track as my current circumstances are too limiting. The same goes for pharmaceutical developments etc. I can’t do my due diligence, so to speak. My research. Keep up with developments. Keep notes. Be on top of things. (I have to be free from stupid-people crap, too. It’s why they have special tracks for F1 races and don’t hold them or kart races or horse races in the middle of Paris or London. No interference from other people’s cars and bicycles.)
Coffee prices can go down, then, for other parts of the world. So Luckin may get lucky (but I assume that Starbucks in China is not going to be hit by Trump’s tariffs).
Luckin was the very first stock CFD that I traded. I had no idea what I was doing, what was happening The bookkeeping scandal had just hit and the price was all over the place for a while. I kinda liked Luckin but then it went OTC (delisted in the US, at NASDAQ). Some companies have it, some don’t.
What can I say? I’m a coffee junkie… I like dealing with things that I have some affinity with (and preferrably also sufficient knowledge about). I like checking the international news first thing in the morning, too, so that is no added burden either.
I just got a stupid spam message about Kennith Hardin, about my Kennith Hardin order having been accepted or whatever. Something made me google it. It’s a man who murdered his wife. Not funny.
One striking detail among those detained is their age. Half of those arrested at the largest protest yet, in Parliament Square in London on Saturday, were 60 or older. Some said they had taken part to give a voice to younger people who have more to lose by breaking the law, some simply felt they must challenge the government’s stance.
The Guardian has spoken to some of these protesters.
‘This is not a terrorist organisation, it’s a direct action organisation’ Deborah Hinton, 81
There also was a “Free Palestine” event where I am right now. No more than 20 demonstrators but possibly up to 50 police were present. The police took part with several vans, of different types and sizes, and at least 6 horses, plus officers on foot.
532 arrested at this demonstration in London. Quite a contrast.
Sorry, England. I was (often) so wrong about you, in the past. And I think that I’m a lot more English now than I’ve ever been Dutch. I’m sorry. Also about what Labour is doing, being more conservative than the Conservatives in many respects.
I’m currently in a neighbourhood where the residents are all home owners and where lots of people drive a Tesla.
I think that this is fairly representative of the current state of the Netherlands, where people like Rutger Bregman are frowned upon and where looking away from injustice is becoming a favourite pastime.
That a “Free Palestine” protest in Amsterdam draws no more than 20 activists and many more police officers makes this quite clear, too.
I do not have a cognitive impairment, but don’t know what “Ben je bekend met psychische problemen?” is supposed to mean either! It’s like “Have you ever heard of the full moon?” or “Do you have a weird nose?”
Yes, this is a messy post on a messy website. Please bear with me. Perhaps you can picture me as a refugee on the run if you want a framework for the messiness if that makes it easier to digest the content.
In June 2023, I made what may have been the biggest mistake of my life. I moved into an apartment in Purmerend (an isolated small town surrounded by polders, north of Amsterdam). I certainly made a decision that had severe consequences for me. Keep reading and you’ll see.
For starters, I sacrificed 17 years of housing waiting list credits for this. I should have waited one more month and have moved into a nice little place in Amsterdam. Instead I moved into what I later started calling a penal colony for the over-55s.
Feel free to share your opinion below, please.