English pilot with universal basic income: Β£1,600 per month
Thirty people, two communities.
Β£1,600. Now we’re talking. Let’s end systemic poverty in England. Let’s end structural inequality.
Everybody deserves to be able to meet basic needs and live without financial worries and the related consequences.
This
This represents how the various animal species, including humans, should get along with each other on the planet.
No human or non-human animal should ever be treated like a dead piece of rock
Autistic children in England deserve your support
Read the report and find out what is needed: https://www.autism.org.uk/what-we-do/news/education-report-2023
Did you know that autism.org.uk also provides training and education?
Continue readingSunny natural beauty
Sunshine, trees, flowers, a calmly preening great blue heron and Mr and Mrs Coot teaching their four toddlers what to do for food.
Very few pigeons here nowadays. Jackdaws have taken up their place.
Before, when I was growing up, sparrows were abundant. So we did what we could to eradicate them, after which the descendants of the pigeons that we once took from their sea cliffs flourished.
Police officers are not health professionals
Ill health is not a crime. Neither is neurodivergence or being deaf or in a fugue state or just plain devastated and exhausted and too worn out to care about who can hear you cry in agony.
That the NHS is badly underfunded is not the Met’s fault.
Illegal rubbish dumps that tenants are forced to live with in Portsmouth
This is what England’s class system looks like in real life.
This is a private patio where people like to sit in the summer and enjoy a barbecue. Yes, literally.
But these are ordinary people without any clout. Lower class.
(This includes people like me too, yes, in England.)
Unable to get any support with this from Portsmouth City Council – including Gerald Vernon-Jackson, the Lib Dem city council leader – I eventually demolished the mattresses myself. Mattresses out in the open not only are an eyesore, they can get really moldy and smelly.
As it had become sheer impossible for me to do much high-end work, tackling the rubbish hands-on gave me something to do, too.
In case you still wonder, yes, Gerald Vernon-Jackson was fully aware of this.
I provided him with copies of photos and with copies of letters sent to Grant Murphy by recorded postal mail or special delivery.
I enquired here and there how much it would cost to get the fridges removed, but I couldn’t afford it, certainly not right away. (A hilarious fairly standard response to “I don’t have the money” is “no problem”. π)
Next, I ordered a bunch of signs and stickers in an attempt to put a stop to the rubbish dumping. (It’s helped.) I also put a webcam in my office window. Below are screenshots of some of my order confirmations.
The rubbish dumping was actually started by Grant Murphy’s people after the police interfered when there was illegal drugs activity in one of the front three dwellings.
Once you dump rubbish, it encourages others to do the same. Everybody knows that.
I had been trying to address this for many years. I repeatedly had offered to help Grant Murphy’s people with this, too. To no avail.
See also
and
https://angelinasouren.com/2023/04/30/my-battle-with-the-establishment-in-portsmouth/
This latter post has more photos of dumped rubbish as well as a screenshot of a communication with Hampshire Fire & Rescue.
Here’s a thought
Legal aspects of the fisheries in the Severn estuary, a tidal river with a magnificent tidal bore
This is a paper by a woman who couldn’t get a pupillage (traineeship), which she needed so that she could become a barrister – not even when a successful business man did his best to arrange one for her – because England’s class barriers ran too deep for both their humble beginnings.
(Until the entrepreneur stepped in and stepped up, she was actually working at a betting shop.)
So she became a legal scholar.
Her field is legal geography.
Pretty colors
(vegan)
Qualities like empathy are becoming more important in the workplace
A good development. A result of the pandemic.
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20230522-how-the-perfect-job-candidate-has-changede
Schools need to look after ALL children: sign this petition, please
Autistic kids in the UK deserve support if they need it. Sign this petition, please.
Sackett v the EPA and the Clean Water Act
An e-mail from John Devine, senior attorney at the NRDC, in my inbox:
https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/sackett-v-environmental-protection-agency/
Some explanation:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/21-454_4g15.pdf
Should coffee be forbidden?
Interesting bioethics research into the distinction between treatment and enhancement:
Brussels urges the Netherlands’ government to tackle the country’s housing shortage
Chris Packham wins his defamation/libel case!
Against Fieldsports Channel Ltd
Congratulations, Chris!
Full judgement:
ThermoFischer and Tibetan DNA
What is the story?
The Intercept:
https://theintercept.com/2022/09/13/china-tibet-police-dna-thermo-fisher/
The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/03/19/us-companies-mass-dna-collection-tibet/
“Bioethicists and health care institutions must act against Florida’s anti-immigrant law”
Disabilities: the other side
When we see someone who has a highly visible impairment, all we tend to see is the impairment. I used to be like that too.
Disabled people are people like anyone else, though. Some are kind, some arenβt, some carry grudges, others have a wealth of wisdom.
Continue readingYep
He’s here
Not-for-profit healthcare
I mentioned that the other day. Here is an example.
https://www.statnews.com/2023/04/26/kaiser-permanente-geisinger-merger/
Who are the people who make up Portsmouth’s – Pompey’s – old-guard Establishment?
Sorry folks, I am not in the habit of “shopping” people but these entanglements are highly unethical, to say the least, and these folks can make your life a living hell. Below are some names and hints to warn you and possibly enable you to protect yourself.
Continue readingShame on you, Obama
That you didn’t shut down this horror factory at the end of your time at the White House. Shame on you, Biden, that you haven’t yet either.
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/may/11/abu-zubaydah-drawings-guantanamo-bay-us-torture-policy
Beauty and the beasts
The beasts are behind me, in the trees, shrubs and water. Bird reserve.
(I had a vegetable samosa for lunch!)
Am tackling things one by one – and making progress – but am hampered very badly by overwhelming allergies. They are even keeping me from sleeping (well). So I will need to tackle that issue first. Conditio sine qua non. Allergy pills aren’t quite the answer in this case. They only have a small effect for a few hours.
Yep, there are many things that I am missing about England and will continue to miss
However, the situation in Portsmouth was completely unacceptable for me. I couldn’t live there, could not breathe there because of forces at work there.
That is completely independent of what exactly was (is) behind it.
Nah, I hadn’t lost the plot. I badly needed out and I did my best to place myself in the best situation for it.
I didn’t want to have to keep fighting back any longer. I didn’t want to fight back any longer.
I’d totally had it with Portsmouth’s perpetual guerrilla wars and I think I wanted a thoroughly clean start, with very little still around me to tie me to the place or perhaps rather to force me to start over in a different area, professionally. This is an area that I had been exploring for a while and really enjoy.
Some occupations are heavily tied to earthly possessions. A few aren’t.
I’ll probably remain a highly guarded and somewhat prickly person for the rest of my life.
What went in Portsmouth shocked me deeply. The hate behind it, the utter contempt with which I was bombarded so often wore me down. All that ugly senseless negativity from folks who did not even know me, the endless misogyny and the rest of it, it ate away at me and corroded my soul over the years. I did not like the way it changed me and it even made me stop liking myself.
Very scary stuff goes on in Portsmouth. Too much of it.
Okay, okay, I admit it.
Blimey, I miss England. The quality of the shops, also in Portsmouth’s Commercial Road area, generally speaking, is much better. TK Maxx is much fancier too, there. Much better quality products.
Primark is more or less the same, though.
There is much less nature here, too. Lots of bricks, asphalt and concrete everywhere I look, with – granted – a lot of green mixed in. A lot of green. Even between the tram rails, nowadays.
In addition, I must admit that have just found some of Amsterdam’s/Amstelveen’s poorer folks. I went to Osdorpplein and found it a bit depressing. That’s probably an understatement. (No, an exaggeration. It’s also where I ate a vegetable samosa a few days later before I realized how English that is. There’s an indoor market area there with a lot of ethnic food.)
I also just ate my last bit of fastfood. No more fastfood for me. I took the opportunity last year to start eating much healthier and catch up on my nutritional deficiencies and it did me a world of good. At my age, eating healthy seems to matter much more. I feel so much better when I eat fresh fruits, fish and vegetables. No more crisps, no more MacDonalds.
That said, I have to keep repeating that I do not miss all the hate, contempt, gossip and dark political intrigue, as well as notably random people in the establishment’s unhealthy obsessive focus on me. Nobody on the street or in the shops here pays any undue attention to me. That is worth a lot!
Occasionally, I get friendly grins from men around my age, but there’s never any kind of aggression or hint of a threat or demand in it, not even when I bump into the person’s cart at the supermarket. Just a friendly grin is all I get. It’s nice. So I am slowly starting to feel human again. π
Looking back, nope, I simply could not be happy just watching YouTube all day and reading library books, while hardly ever having positive interactions with anyone. I need more than that. Also, Portsmouth has become quite a scary place to me now, scary in the sense that what goes on there is pretty spooky and unhinged. Over the top.
Maybe a place like Liverpool or Brighton would have been bliss for me. I wish I’d been given the opportunity to find out, but that’s water under the bridge.
Also, the Dutch banking system means that you have online access to much fewer sites and services, as many don’t accept the Dutch banks’ standard system of online payments. (The market share is too small.) I’ll find a solution for that. No problem.
I particularly also miss English caps. I had a pretty black and white checkered one, by a Dutch brand whose name I have forgotten but it sounded Italian. I liked it a lot. Here in the Netherlands, all the caps are baseball caps! I finally found a proper one, a brown one. By a British brand. It makes me look very British, I’m sure. π
(Of course, I also continue to sign petitions that pertain to Britain.)
I’m very happy with Action, though, so far!
And I had Ouwehand herring for brunch.
Such a nice mix of English, Dutch and French
This alto SINGS – zoom in – and one of the tunes that I recognised was Joe Dassin’s L’Γ©tΓ© indien. Station Zuid. (That is Amsterdam.)
Yes, I have a bad cold. Hence the Dutch licorice. It helps! Initially… Unfortunately, and oh so stupidly, the stuff also contains sulphites: https://www.allergyuk.org/resources/sulphites-and-airway-symptoms-factsheet/ (No more licorice for me, for sure. The stuff ended nearly killing me, so to speak. Holy smokes. Very unpleasant, and lasting for hours. Though I must admit that I’d been coughing very badly last evening too, except not this bad and this long. It’s horrible. I have no N-acetyl cysteine with me; have ordered some now but should have done it before. An dealing with bad allergies, too, at the moment.)
Parsnips are very English. I love their taste and texture.
Amstelveen has changed a lot. I recognise old bits, but there’s been a heck of a lot of construction in the past few decades. I used to cycle a lot there, towards Uithoorn to cycle back along the Amstel river, before I moved to the States, and I used to have a friend there, too. Halte Sportlaan!
So many of my friends and professional contacts have passed away while I was in England.
Where can you charge your phone in the Netherlands?
Nowhere! I’m so used to going to Starbucks, notably, while traveling, or Costa Coffee.
I have not found a single Starbucks yet in the Netherlands where I can charge a phone.
Nothing. Nada. Zilch.
Been looking for options all over.
Schiphol Airport has removed almost all sockets, likely because of the hacking risk they can present. I mentioned that a few weeks ago.
There are supposed to be business desks at Schiphol where you can charge laptops etc but the one location that I was able to find is closed on Saturdays and Sundays and the other airport business desk locations are not recognized when I search for them in the Schiphol airport app.
Dutch public libraries don’t offer charging options either, so I understand.
Some of the trains do.
Portsmouth, by contrast, has charging stations on the sidewalks. I think they’re by BT (British Telecom).
Continue reading