Author: officially ᗩᑎGEᒪIᑎᗩ
First Person with Down Syndrome to Complete an Ironman Triathlon
I love how people with Down increasingly often are showing the world wrong and teaching us how much it holds people back when you lock them up, isolate them and keep treating them as if they’re useless.
(That video made my day.)
Supply chain problems
Mean-spirited, vengeful landlords versus landlords who have their heads screwed on properly
In England, many landlords do what they can to make the lives of their tenants as hard as possible. That strikes me as stupid, but it’s a consequence of the English class system. Landlords don’t consciously think about such things; they just have this fixed idea that people who rent deserve to be abused in some way.
I used to know a landlord in Southampton, who was a retired builder who took his boat over to France in the summers and who ran into me one day, a scientist (class system thinking kicking in), and showed me a new place that he was building and then blurted out “It does not need to be good as it’s only for tenants” before he kicked his shin when he remembered I was one of his tenants.
I used to know another one who was a friend for a while, who called tenants “bad tenants” if they called him to say that the heating was not working or that the washing machine he provided was not working. He was not a bad dude at all. His train of thoughts was simply pervaded by English class ideas without him being aware of it.
Landlords in England don’t even think twice about deliberately using inappropriate materials that encourage mold development in tenants’ homes. It does not occur to them. They don’t think about it at all. They grab the cheapest or the same tin of wall paint and apply the obligatory 2 tiles because that is what they’ve always done.
They don’t realize that if they don’t do whatever they can to support their tenants’ health and their general ability to support themselves, they are being pretty stupid. It is a mere consequence of the class system that landlords install energy-guzzling heating systems just because those were the cheapest ones on the market.
It does not mean that they are mean-spirited. It’s just how they are brought up. You eat fresh food and you give moldy and stale food to the poor. That’s just the way it is.
My current landlord, by contrast, is vengeful and mean-spirited.
He knows that I have been trapped here for years. He knows that I have made four attempts to escape from my abuse situation here in Portsmouth (while based at this flat) that all failed because I had no money. None. I had three options. Suicide, going homeless without access to financial support or remaining trapped in my sadistic abuse situation.
Over the years, he has made several attempts to evict me. Those attempts always contained stupid little errors that made it easy for me to show up in court and say “Your honor, this eviction attempt is not legal and here’s why”.
Each of these exercises cost him money. They cost me money too, and a lot of time. They sometimes forced me to run around all over town delivering documents and copies of documents, as required by law.
(He was of course also gathering information from me, for example with regard to which documents I had and which ones I did not have, as well as of my understanding of the legal process, but I doubt that he was doing that consciously.)
This guy is into playing stupid little games.
(He has some bad childhood hangups, so I understand.)
Instead of cutting his losses by giving me the money that would enable me to get away and finally establish a new life elsewhere – which landlords in the States commonly do, so I understand – he prefers to sustain bigger losses, take me to court, time and time again, just so that he can play his stupid little games.
Maybe he has a hangup with regard to women who went to university. Maybe his parents were once evicted by a Dutch landlord. I have no idea.
He changed his company’s bank account without informing me (the old bank account ceased to exist), and he later changed his office address without informing me. His new office address has no doorbell and no letterbox. Most of the time, postal mail gets returned or is not acknowledged. He sends letters and e-mails on different letterheads for companies of which at least one does not even exist…
(Remember that I can’t call anyone without needing to travel out of town first, so I no longer have an easy way of contacting his offices. When I still could, my calls and other tenants’ calls, however, also used to be ignored.)
He does childish things like make appointments for inspections and then send someone over on the wrong day just so that he can say that I am a problem tenant.
Maybe his childhood included evictions, indeed. Maybe he now takes joy in seeing bailiffs show up at his tenants’ doors. More likely, I think, he is simply playing stupid eviction games because it helps him get over his childhood hangups.
Whatever it is that is driving his petty vengeful behaviors, the only way you can stop someone who is that unhinged from continuing to play his stupid little games is to stop playing along with these eviction games altogether. After all, if you succeed in blocking the eviction attempt, all you have done is guarantee that you remain someone else’s toy.
It has been suggested on one occasion that he is the one behind my ordeal in this town. I don’t think so. First of all, that ordeal began several years before I moved into my current flat and second, I don’t think my landlord is as stupid as to engage in deliberately sabotaging a tenant’s income and all that. (Go into my flat to take socks from my dirty laundry or break my folding stepping stool, etc?) That would be quite a different ballgame, a much riskier one.
There’s this, too:
Even organizations like Shelter and Centrepoint are pervaded by silly English class ideas. It’s much easier to get support from them if think you are uneducated, not too smart and very poor. They have no problem with causing extra costs for you if they realize you don’t fit that bill. That too is pretty petty.
The same kind of pettiness is at work when homeless people are arrested for “vagrancy” under a 200-year-old law: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/apr/02/thousands-of-homeless-people-arrested-under-archaic-vagrancy-act
By the way, the UK may be the only western country where you can be evicted for no reason, in a so-called “no-fault” eviction, which the UK government has been promising to end for a long time too. Just like that 200-year-old Vagrancy Act.
Are you a mess?
She ain’t making it up
Payment to Chris Packham’s fundraiser
Did not go out of my account but is mentioned on the fundraiser page and was confirmed by e-mail.
About hacking, for the record:
Unless you have a live video feed so that you can see what someone is doing in your equipment in real time, you cannot be sure of who it is who’s in your equipment. There is also always the possibility that someone else has HIRED hackers to hack into your equipment. That could for example be the case if you are dealing with someone who has an antisocial personality disorder.
Also, my HDD is NOT the problem, no. (I should have mentioned that before.)
Things have been pretty quiet and normal since about 2 pm yesterday.
In the Netherlands, city councils are taking over their citizens’ debts
It works as follows. The city councils become the debtors, pay the creditors the amount that the city councils believe that the citizens in debt would be able to pay off in three years.
That wipes the slate clean and makes the debts disappear. The citizens in debt then pay off their city council in the course of the following three years.
Everybody wins.
If it is expected that the citizen in question will have a considerably higher income soon, this option is not available because it will enable this particular citizen to pay off the debts, resulting in larger payments for the creditors.
https://nos.nl/artikel/2469718-bijna-alle-gemeenten-nemen-inmiddels-schulden-van-burgers-over
How otherization of older adults works
The Guardian has a survey about the pandemic, about how it affected those of us who are in our 50s and 60s. I completed this survey and found it to be highly biased.
It assumes that we struggled. Because we were in our 50s and 60s? It assumes that we had trouble coping. Because we were in our 50s and 60s?
Some of us did not experience the pandemic as a burden but as a blessing. It had me sitting on the edge of my seat, for example, eagerly observing it all.
I loved what was going on, with my apologies to those who lost loved ones and those who developed long Covid, and I loved how it gave me access to all kinds of research-related online meetings in the US and how it enabled me to discover that the rest of the world did still exist and still functioned normally and had not gotten into the same bizarre state of disarray as the highly divisive community around me.
I also really liked that people around me suddenly were a lot less aggressive and violent. The lockdowns made me realize how much I hated being in the town that I am in and how badly I wanted to leave this wretched place with its highly restrictive ‘ndrangheta-style culture where I’d already been stuck in an utterly unreal sadistic slavery situation for so long.
Particularly children and young adults were highly impacted by the pandemic. The pandemic not only isolated them and interfered with their normal development, for many of them, it was their first encounter with life not always going the way you expect it.
Why does Ashley of Cash Converters North End Portsmouth want me dead?
If he doesn’t, why is he apparently part of the vicious gang that has been targeting me and sabotaging my life for nearly 15 years now, after all?
I mean, where does his suddenly oh so openly fierce hate contempt for me come from?
It’s the same kind of ice-cold hatred that I have been getting for nearly 15 years now in this bizarre little island enclave where I didn’t even know anyone. It began as soon as I moved to this town.
Where on earth does it come from?
Why did Ashley last week feel that he no longer needed to hide his hatred contempt for me?
What is his relationship to that creepy Portsmouth City Council-employed woman who tried to talk me into taking my own life? I mean: WTF?!
Wtf is going on in this strange island community?
For Jane, who is only manager in name, not in reality. Shame on you, Cash Converters.
When I purchased that iPad from you at the end of 2016, Jane, that was because I urgently wanted to pay two young women who had done some work for me as part of a water management research project. It was nearly Christmas and I had promised them payment before Christmas, but I suddenly couldn’t go online anywhere any longer and other payment methods that I tried such as PayPal weren’t working out either. That iPad had a SIM card slot so it enabled me to go online.
When I returned that laptop that I had purchased from you, that was because it had already been hacked because it had been left on your shop shelves with wifi on and no protection. I figured that if I told you that, you might not want to reimburse me. Sorry. I had selected that laptop because it had no webcam; I had gotten fed up with hackers spying on me and always needing to make sure that cameras were facing wall/ceiling, in a ceramic jar or covered. (The iPad’s camera got accessed too, but I quite liked it. It had a really good camera and it was great for making nature videos. I took it to the Farlington Marshes one day.)
Btw, Ashley, you may want to read this, too: https://angelinasouren.com/2023/03/30/2330/
01:04
Someone entered the flat below. One person. Nobody else. No talking. Some talking outside, however.
19:08
It’s been quite quiet on my equipment since about 2pm, but folks just entered the flat below again. Does that mean that stuff on my computer and phones will start up again? Time will tell.
19:38: left again
20:20: folks entering the flat below again
20:14: I am so fucking angry over what’s been going on here in this fucked-up little island enclave, all the abuse that’s been unleashed at me since I moved here
Watch this, you fucking vile Andrew Tate clones. This was her third solo flight. All you would have done was cut her comms and do what you could to make her crash, because that is how you tick, you stupid incel-flavored script kiddies. You sure as hell could not have landed that plane, had you been the ones flying it. You have none of what it takes.
15:31
Tried to plan two future payments but am unable to log into my NatWest account. Suddenly, whoa has not happened in a long time, am asked for my texted code again, which I didn’t get. Could be a mere hiccup. Will try again. Meanwhile booked the payments in my app.
15:36: I did receive the code when I tried again… on one of my SIM-LESS phones. Checked… The payments are scheduled in my account.
13:56
This is an account for which I changed the password at a Starbucks, using a tablet that at that point had not been interfered with yet. Looks like someone’s just been messing with it…
13:24: FU, Portsmouth
Tried to carry out the payment again, now could no longer access the website. That too has happened before. “Nah nah nah nah nah” Is still in my computer, too. (I can actually see it.)
I then did what I started doing about a year ago. Benefiting other people who became a victim of the abuse directed at me. They were “collateral damage”. If I can no longer do a thing for myself, and cannot escape from Portsmouth either, then I will do whatever I can to remedy that.
I’ve been making all sorts of donations, too, such as to Amnesty International, and even ordered Simon Cowell’s book because the proceeds would benefit wildlife (not that I like Simon Cowell much – compare him against Doug Willen and you’ll see what I mean – but Cowell merely had the misfortune of having grown up in England, I suspect, and he is not a bad guy). In addition, I made one or two donations to them too.
So I just paid £500 into someone else’s account, and that payment DID go out, thankfully. Because she too was horribly victimized by my ordeal in Portsmouth. She has a little kid, and she’s actually only now surviving here and beginning to thrive because of substantial financial support from the Netherlands. I don’t necessarily like her a lot. She bitches too much at and about older women, but I know where it comes from, and I also know that she’s gone through a lot of bad shit too, with (male) partners. I do appreciate her and she certainly never should have been co-victimized by what happened to me in Portsmouth.
Continue reading
13:06
Wanted to shut down the computer and couldn’t. Had to flip the wall switch again.
There is someone in the room under my office.
12:52: looks like my NatWest account is getting interfered with again
I just conducted a little test and exactly what I thought would happen just happened. I am actively being interfered with again. at least on my computer or internet connection. I just approved a payment in my NatWest app. It’s not going out, not arriving.
Why did I want to make that specific payment? Because I desperately want out of my sadistic slavery situation.
This sort of interference has happened a million times before in the past decade.
Example: I want to pay for my internet by bankcard and am being forced to go buy a top up voucher. When I anticipate and buy a top-up voucher in advance, I suddenly no longer have the option to top up by voucher but need to use my bankcard.
So… I didn’t actually fix the NatWest app this morning. The app I have is a fake, somehow. Doctored.
A few weeks ago, an outgoing payment also simply disappeared. Had to enter it a second time.
Zero response
etc etc etc.
I’ve been desperately wanting my life back for so long. I’m not perfect and I am not male, but I deserve to get to live MY LIFE again, like I used to.
There were many more others I could have e-mailed, but then the mail would have been flagged as spam. There are also many others who I can no longer e-mail because quite a few women in science who I used to know passed away in their 50s.
I can’t just roll over and quietly crawl into a corner like I am “supposed” to do, dammit.
I’ve previously contacted my embassy (secretly and anonymously, from a computer at Advice Portsmouth before they got hacked in 2016, but all that embassy and consulate staff can do is potentially visit you in prison if you end up in prison; it’s not the same as when you are stranded somewhere as a tourist) as well as the United Nations (from my office computer, which just got me postal junk mail asking for donations). I had wanted to know if there was some way that I could get refugee status in my home country if I fled from Portsmouth.
11:31
Someone just left the flat under mine. I can’t rule out that someone returned to it last night at 3 am or 4 am or thereabouts. Something did wake me up at around 3 and I later did hear some doors at some point but by then I was more or less asleep again.
11:07
Computer froze, had to flip the switch on the wall again.
10:59
A lot of sudden unexplained HDD activity, computer sluggish.
11:00: It stopped while I wrote this. Does not look like I need to reboot this time.
8:59: What does this tell you?
Remember that I also have a hacked phone that is telling me that my NatWest banking app will stop working within 6, sorry now 5, days and a printer that is suddenly missing its drivers. All at the same time.
This is the kind of nonsense I’ve been dealing with ever since I moved into my current flat, but hey, “I am just an old cow who can’t handle technology”. May I remind you that my webpage about the bit of IT background I have disappeared from this site, too, all by itself?
9:12: the screens have gone back to normal again
I’d switched on the computer at around 8:30. I’d overslept, yes. Deserves the death penalty, I know, Portsmouth.
09:30: NatWest banking app issue resolved. (Meanwhile, made 11 bucks trading, too; am slowly making my way back toward overcoming the experience I had last year, the losses caused by the stupid “football matches” hackers last year, the idiots that left me a message about their experience with betting on football matches, yes, just in case I was not quite sure what exactly was going on. The fact that I had warned them that I was going to put in losing trades and let them run if they didn’t stop fucking with me and then went ahead and did it, didn’t entirely stop them from fucking with me but it did help A LOT. They or he had made the fatal mistake of getting me into the position in which I literally had nothing left to lose, after they had literally taken everything from me that I had achieved or that had mattered to me. I started trading because I wanted to get out of Portsmouth asap – escape! get my life back! – and because I can no longer travel when it’s too cold.)
09:48: now tackling the printer driver issues again. I thought nothing useful had downloaded other than perhaps a tar ball archive, which I just found in my downloads, but which previous versions of the operating system and I never managed to handle, but my current version does seem to know how to deal with it.
10:00: Let’s see if that did the trick…
10:01: yes
But nobody in Portsmouth is fucking with me, right? People in Portsmouth are all sweet little angels who knit and tend to their gardens all day, and do little else but smile oh so sweetly, except when they don’t and give you the full blast of their blind hatred.
23:30
Someone left the flat below at about that time and it’s been empty since. I didn’t bother to go check if my computer screens are working again now.
Btw, posting from this Android is now was briefly getting interfered with too. I was able to use it unhindered at Starbucks for a while, a place where I could work and feel safe, part of the world, feel normal AND… sometimes change passwords, unseen.
I bought that tablet without the locals having spotted it, took the train to elsewhere, paid cash for my train ticket, paid cash for the tablet. It was a steal, at 50% of its market value, just because it was used. I probably have the cost of living crisis to thank for that, because a lot of people here are desperate and all they do is whip up each other’s despair instead of help empower each other.
One day, I walked in and a young blond woman behind the counter greeted me with a shocking level of hate, sort of the same ice cold hate that that guy called Ashley greeted me with last week, at Cash Converters, no idea why. Okay, worse, probably.
The next time I visited that Starbucks, it got interfered with, this tablet. I was gutted. Too fucking crazy for words.
The tablet that I showed you, Ashley, on the other hand, was a decoy. I did sell it to someplace else and lost no money on it.
(I simply got fed up with the bizarre nonsense of needing a decoy tablet in this fucked-up crazy town, Ashley. Have you ever traveled off Portsea Island, dude? Do you know what the world is like outside of this little island enclave off the coast of England? Or course not. You live in a tiny bubble in which any female manager is only the manager in name, for the stats, but has zero power.)
But let’s be fair, these folks – like this Ashley dude – somehow have been gaslighted about me. There’s just no way that complete strangers can hate a person they know nothing about that fiercely completely out of the blue.
(No wonder I have hated Portsmouth so much. No wonder people here thought that I was the crazy one.)
Same thing probably happened when I volunteered at the Covid vaccination effort late in 2021. Why did so many people there think that I was (basically) senile even though none of them knew me? Makes no sense.
I’d seen that John guy before. On his bike. Maybe half a year earlier.
Twice. I noticed him because the first time he saw me, he smiled at me as if he knew me. Or at least knew who I was. Recognized me. The next time he saw me, he ignored me. Maybe he simply hadn’t seen me, that second time. Both times, I had been on my way to Asda.
Don’t know exactly when that was, but it was after I had posted a video about local politics or written about it. Back then, I figured that that is why he thought he knew me and smiled at me.
You know, when someone gets deliberately isolated by some evil person out there, you start noticing certain things much more. Because you have so few interactions. You notice and remember things you would not have paid any attention to whatsoever in a normal context.
Why couldn’t I get anyone to let me volunteer in 2020 and why couldn’t I get access to any of the local Covid Facebook groups back then, only a tiny one for some small village elsewhere? Why couldn’t I reach almost anyone else around here back then?
Everyone around here always whines about how they don’t have enough of this kind of staff or that kind of staff or that kind of services or this kind, but when you think that you can do something about it and make yourself useful, it almost always turns out to be no more than the usual whining that has become part of people’s identity around here. There is no actual need. It’s just whining. It’s just stuff to fill up Facebook and newspaper space with.
For nearly 15 years, I’ve had little more than horrible abuse in this town. It makes no sense. I knew nobody here and nobody here knew me. Where did all that bizarre hate come from? It just makes no sense. None whatsoever.
No matter where I went in this town, no matter what I did. It always reared its ugly head. Even though I wasn’t always aware of it at first, such as at that community leadership course in 2010.
Who had been gaslighting all these people about me? Because that is what must have happened.
Who exactly in this town is that unstable and evil one? That’s for them to figure out. Me, I couldn’t care less.
Because the gaslighting still has exposed this town’s soul to me, hasn’t it. The level of hate I’ve encountered here is beyond belief, after all.
Most people here show no reticence at all when they target someone who they’ve been made to believe is going senile or is learning-disabled or has some other kind of circumstance going on that they think makes it unlikely that the person will fight back.
That’s despicable, Portsmouth, gaslighting or no gaslighting.
Meanwhile, I continue to get lots of emails for how to pay less to unleash my secret genius if only I sign up quickly. Last-minute deals. I don’t need no unleashing of my secret genius. I just want my life back. That’s genius enough for me, thank you very much.
Coincidence, surely
Am getting trolled by lykosss kakudate2k.
About… stalking.
Have told him to go jerk off.
Thatched-roof building fires
I used to be so worried that he’d set that fire, each time I heard of a thatched-roof building going up in flames, all within a decent driving distance. One time, I wondered if he stood there, watching the fire brigade do what they still could.
When a nearby garage or car dealership had a fire, I worried if he had had a hand in that too, because of how he was always going on about cars, about people being like cars.
I stopped concerning myself about such matters a long time ago. If people want to be blind, that’s their choice. Nobody ever got hurt in the fires, I noticed. So there was only material damage and I figured it helped him get rid of anger.
Because it always seemed to follow anger to do with me.
That was in the days before animals started to get attacked and inanimate stuff in my house started getting messed with too. Roughly between 2010 and 2015 or 16.
I have no idea whether that, the fires, was him or not.
(No, I’m not joking. I wish. Somehow, I don’t think that the garage fire had anything to do with him; that was just me jumping to conclusions because it was so close and about cars and because he was always going on about cars. It was around Queens Road or thereabouts, btw. But the thatched roof fires, that may be a different story.)
“Don’t be a victim of his past tense”
15:01
Had to flip the power switch on the wall again. Computer froze.
Am starting to get a little tense again now. It takes up about 10 minutes each time, so it’s not that easy to ignore and I was actually trying to concentrate on a few things.
This is when I will often do something distracting next, such as watch a funny YouTube short, which is like a mini vacation to reset my state of mind or I do something else to relax. Just realizing that I am getting tense helps too.
If it happens a lot, though, I may have to stop what I was doing, for the day, because it’s a little like driving a car and the car displaying a mind of its own and insisting on hitting the curb or insisting on suddenly swerving to the left or right. If it were a car, you’d want to park it too, right?
13:21
Computer increasingly sluggish, froze, had to flip the wall socket’s switch.
Not doing anything in particular.
By contrast, edited a few videos yesterday without problems and had a shit load of browser tabs open without problems.
It suddenly reminds me of young Chris Packham’s determination to own a kestrel.
Dead crows strung up on the doorstep
Chris Packham calls it “hate terrorism” and he is fighting it.
I knew about the arson attacks. I did not know about the dead birds.
(Am I, too, “merely” the target of hate terrorism? I have called it “domestic terrorism” a few times.)
Why are people out there going after Chris Packham? Because they’re old-fashioned yet powerful Tories who won’t give up their privileges such as burying a live fox trapped in a bag so that hounds can dig it up and tear it to shreds during a hunt. I can’t think of anything else.
He can pinpoint a hunting publication that whips up hate against him. They’re basically a British version of the NRA in the US. The Guardian wrote the following about it:
This month, it posted a photograph to its Facebook group of a “Trophy room” it had digitally mocked up, featuring Packham’s head mounted on a plaque, as though he were an animal it had killed in a hunting trip.
(I’m not a BBC presenter, though, and few Tories will ever have heard of me.)
I quite like Chris Packham. Nobody should have to go through the tremendous fear and upset something like an arson attack causes. Finding dead animals on your doorstep is not particularly reassuring either. That Packham has Asperger’s does not mean that his fear and upset aren’t justified. Anyone would be afraid and upset after something like this. You’d have to be very abnormal, psychologically speaking, not to be.
https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/support-chris-packhams-libel-action/
The particular challenge Packham faces is that in Britain, it is seen as whiny, weak and feminine – not manly enough – if you stand up against something like this.
That’s why the hunting publication wrote the following under the “Trophy Room” image on Facebook:
“My three demands. I want pocket money. I want Fieldsports Channel to stop being horrid about me. I want more pocket money.”
But of course Packham should stand up against this! Of course he has to. If he doesn’t, it will be taken as implicit consent to abuse.
