Human rights – diversity – neurodiversity – equality – inclusivity – discrimination – otherisation – speciesism – planet – consumerism – bioethics sensu lato
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”
All’s well that ends well
But I am totally exhausted at the moment… Mentally, too. My concentration is still fine but far from what it normally is.
Forgot to take the heaviest powerbank along with me this morning. It is so heavy that I had removed it from my bag, so I didn’t automatically have it with me.
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 aren’t, 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/
Shame 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. 😌
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. 😁
(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.
Absolutely wonderful – and so awful
I’m in the Netherlands, in the Amsterdam area.
Yes, I miss various English conveniences. The Dutch are very much “no fuss” and “no fluff” which can translate into a service level that does not come near what mainstream British people get to experience.
However, it is also so wonderful, marvellous, absolutely fantastic and great when strangers let each other be and leave each other in peace instead of yelling all kinds of often nasty remarks at each other. I had gotten so used to the latter in Portsmouth.
I still often find myself bracing here, am still very guarded, but unlike in Portsmouth, nobody is gunning for me here. People hardly pay any attention to me, a bit like in London or Bristol.
It is slowly starting to sink in.
Yes, some staff in shops is rather rude (gruff) but this is balanced out by employees who offer me tips for where I can go for a coffee, nearby, and who tell me about what is called a sports school here. Exercise facilities. Fitness clubs.
(My experiences here also show me unserved or underserved market niches that I may actually end up filling one day. Who knows. Here, I’d be allowed to do that. Making it work would be fully up to me and to any team that I might assemble and it wouldn’t upset anyone’s apple carts.)
I have brief conversations in elevators and shops but nobody even glances at me when when I cough a lot while waiting at a tram stop – or anywhere else. People here are far too busy having fulfilled lives of their own. Once, I caught a young man in his early twenties in public transport studying me when I looked up but there was kindness and perhaps even something like admiration in his eyes.
I am getting no hatred. None. No contempt.
Yet I’m told and have read that the Netherlands has become highly polarized since I left.
The situation in Portsmouth is completely out of control, by contrast.
I cringe when I think about what this must mean for people in Portsmouth who are for example highly educated yet autistic, such as my lawyer friend in Amsterdam (she visited me in Southsea in 2009), or who are learning-disabled or have very little education and little awareness of their own legal rights.
Portsmouth’s establishment – politicians and all – applies a divide-and-conquer strategy that continues to pitch just about everyone in Portsmouth against just about everyone else, not for the sake of acquiring the ability to accomplish any good but for the sake of sheer power and control.
It’s akin to a scorched earth approach, with the difference that this one takes place under the surface, almost like a smoldering tundra fire. There are few burned houses in Portsmouth, but many of its homes are “scorched” on the inside. Far too much powerless suffering goes on in Portsmouth. Far too much.
PS
I will post my Tesco clubcard details later, yes. See below. For far too many in Portsmouth, every penny counts, and I do not want those accumulated Tesco clubcard pounds – at least 6, last time I checked – to go to waste. Can I safely assume that someone has already put my recently purchased phone top up voucher to use?
pw Tw3sc08s
May take me a while to notice incoming e-mails, though!
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’été 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 readingInteresting developments
I have detected a second slightly autistic person in my environment!
There have occasionally been puzzling questions, comments, actions and jumps to conclusions as well as a definite rigidity.
The person in question had actually indicated something along those lines, two years ago or so, as a remark from his ex. I didn’t think that it was accurate.
However, I recently started seeing similarities with the autistic friend who I have known for decades. (Since 1982.)
Now everything is clicking into place.
Appearing to be very even-tempered, emotional overwhelm usually remains hidden but gets expressed as baffling actions and changes in decisions that can even cause quite a problems for others.
The rigid attachment to some ideas can come across as forgetfulness, but that is not what it is in this case.
I am seeing too literal interpretations and the lack of perception of there being a judgement attached to some words, missing the emotional context of some expressions, and not always realizing when a remark is intended as a joke.
It really helps to recognize and understand this and then to be able to take it into account.
I actually remember the first time I spoke to this person… because his response was strange. I didn’t know what to make of it.
It’s all making me smile now.
Live and learn.
Plenty of reasons to smile again
A lush 20 degrees C today!!!
I seem to have caught a Dutch cold virus on public transport. The heat helps with that, too.
Not only is the contrast with the widespread misery and poverty of Portsmouth utterly surreal, it’s also wonderfully refreshing to no longer have all kinds of nastiness flung at oneself on a daily basis.
People around here are friendly and normally respectful. They notice me, sure. They don’t obsess over me. Why would they? They have fulfilling lives of their own.
They’re certainly not flinging all kinds of filthy contempt at me.
I’m often still really guarded and I often still subconsciously expect the usual nastiness to rear its ugly head and peek around the corner all of a sudden, certainly now that I know that Portsmouth was far nastier than I imagined, as it turned out.
But there’s no need for that here.
My fairly typically English paranoia – aka insularity – is slowly disappearing. I don’t have to look over my shoulder all the time here, to guard my back.
In retrospect, I have a hard time believing and accepting how vile and vicious Portsmouth is and I’m really taken aback by the realization that it was a far bigger stinking corrupt cesspool than I even thought.
(That is in spite of already having said that it has a ‘ndrangheta-style culture.)
I didn’t want to go on being stuck in that war zone. I got so tired of everyone and their brother and sister always gunning for everyone else all the time, one way or another, there. I got so tired of the fighting. The place is out of control.
So many people there were so tightly wound, so tense, so ready to snap.
I got so fed up with all the crap and the hatred, the abuse, the sabotage, all of it.
Such a vile sadistic shit show of a place, Portsmouth. Far worse than I thought.
I feel so sorry for everyone there who remains stuck there and continues to get screwed by what seems to constitute “the establishment”. Folks who have no shame, no ethics, no morals and in their view, the boundless right to abuse others.
It still makes my stomach turn.
I couldn’t do it any longer. I had to get out. I had to.
The place was killing me quite literally, suffocating me to death in all sorts of ways.
I couldn’t do it any longer.
The way I broke away enabled a clear break, psychologically, even though it may hamper me in practical ways, but, oh well. I’m leaving filth, contempt and abuse behind me.
Never again.
It’s my understanding that they callously killed my pet bird. I’m actually at peace with that. The past three years were the best of her life. She deserved them. She had empathy for other creatures, I noticed.
Portsmouth’s establishment’s so evil that it still makes my skin crawl to think back to it. These people stop at nothing. Quite scary, really.
I used to vote for these cold-hearted scumbags.
I get where all the people who told me that they don’t vote are coming from now.
The level of filth these politicians bathe in is really quite something, but not in a positive way.
This was my pet bird. She would often sleep there, under the fleece blanket, against my chest for around an hour. Then she would wake up and preen her feathers. Next she would fly away, for a sip of water.
Cultural differences
This morning, I experienced a bit of culture shock when I realized that I can no longer pop into Asda or Tesco for anything I need.
Food? Supermarket.
Dust pan? Blokker.
Socks or slippers? A third place.
Phone or tablet? Some other place.
Cup of coffee? Not a Costa in sight.
Etc.
But this afternoon, feeling very tired hence cranky, I stood up to someone after which we peacefully cooperated to replace some gas tubing. I can put an old-fashioned kettle on now. Yes!
If I had done that in Portsmouth, the entire town would be up in arms and it certainly wouldn’t have been followed by peaceful cooperation. I’m relearning how to protect my boundaries. Was impossible to do in Portsmouth, protecting my boundaries.
Respect other people’s boundaries. Don’t walk all over them.
My battle with the traditional, old-guard Establishment in Portsmouth
Code of conduct for councillors at Portsmouth City Council
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Establishment
For those of you heroes out there who would like to (continue to) support me, my old PayPal mail addresses should still work. My new PayPal.Me 🆔 is @SourenAW
It remains the craziest story, in my view, but I was subjected to what often seemed fairly random yet targeted and mostly anonymous abuse in Portsmouth from just about the day I collected the keys to my flat in Southsea in early 2009.
It’s not just the silly, often amusing, rather child-like pranks that I am talking about.
Something really sinister and destructive was going on, too.
Continue readingUnable to access/use various online accounts
No reason for it. The malicious hacking appears to be continuing, then.
It’s costing me a horrible amount of time…
Oh dear! More trouble brewing?
My kind of stalking is the kind that seeks to destroy a person completely. Apparently, these folks very carefully look for a specific type of person and then set out to ruin them.
When people like Gerald Vernon-Jackson, Grant Murphy and Roger Downey express that it’s perfectly normal for a highly educated woman to be stuck in deep poverty for many years, often unable to call or email other people, and when people like Roger Downey openly mock such a woman when the prolonged poverty very clearly starts to affect the woman’s physical health and her powerlessness is also otherwise making her utterly miserable, that’s their misogyny talking. (What else could it be?)
It’s probably that same kind of misogyny that’s seeking to destroy within the stalking context.
For so long, first, only Stephen Morgan’s staff responded to my emails. Made zero sense. The responses were no more than words. No action. No actionable information.
Now, for so long, the only person I can reach is one guy near Amsterdam whose old address continued to be under his emails even though he had relocated to an address that I don’t have?
Once again, everyone else, literally everyone else has dropped off the surface of the earth?
I’m afraid that I just gave out the only bit of information that held a small spark of hope.
You see, Gerald, Grant and Roger, my home country is overregulated and extremely densely populated. Unlike in the UK and the US, you cannot simply go live somewhere in the Netherlands. There’s even a concept called “address fraud”. You need formal permission to live somewhere in the Netherlands and until you have that kind of permission, that official registration that ties you to a specific address, you cannot apply for any type of benefit in the Netherlands and these two things are locked up in a chicken and egg dance.
Folks in the Netherlands cannot simply allow me to register at their address either, because this often has financial consequences for them.
So after all these many years without income, here in Portsmouth, and in view of my inability to reach people through digital means, because of the hacker, unless I had enough money to put myself up in a hotel for two months or so, feed myself and buy a laptop and other necessities so that I could start generating income again I’d be street homeless without access to any kind of income in my home country.
I’ve been through this before. Back then, an aunt and uncle let me register at their farmhouse. That enabled me to get a foothold in my country after I returned from the US after the funding for my PhD collapsed. After 18 months there, I finally had an address of my own again, but up to then, I had been fortunate enough to be able to rent – with formal permission laid down in an agreement, from a woman, a nurse, who was moving to somewhere close to Winchester and didn’t want to give up on her Dutch base right away.
Desperate, I let Roger Downey know some time ago that I was extremely concerned about my situation, and about certain threats that my hacker had issued. But Roger simply merely mocked me. Without a word of explanation.
Last week, Roger expressed that he still believes that I had no reason for concern. He still believes that I was merely being silly when I expressed my concerns?
(He also said that we had never gotten along. That’s rich. I don’t think that he and I have ever even had a conversation.)
I’m better educated than Gerald Vernon-Jackson but Gerald, Grant and Roger consider it perfectly normal that I got stuck in deep income poverty from the moment I moved to Portsmouth.
Given that…
… then why couldn’t they fathom that they’re not the only ones with such a deep-seated hatred for women and that there are unbalanced people out there, men, who deliberately set out to thwart everything that someone like me might want to do?
“I’m coming for you to cut off your nipples” wasn’t intended to flatter me, Roger, or to make me smile.
I’m scared.
No, I don’t think that someone will literally cut off my nipples.
I’m concerned about whoever it is out there who wants to cause as much loss and hurt in my life as possible.
Because he seems to be pretty good at it.
I am scared and concerned because I just stupidly gave someone details of a membership that I still hold in the Netherlands. Because I am still stuck with zero options and grabbed at a straw. I’m scared and concerned that that membership will soon, say, mysteriously have disappeared. Or its details changed.
That’s malicious hacking for ya, nothing to be concerned about. After all, I only have nearly 15 years of experience with it.
Look at the results of it.
When I expressed that I was seriously concerned, Roger, I had damn good reasons to be seriously concerned.
Do you still disagree with me on that?
But then, someone in the US sent me some really reassuring information.
Ms Kay.
Okay.
There’s a male equivalent here near (not in) Portsmouth and also someone else who’s been trying to protect me from him, it looks like? Someone whose thinking is a little different?
True, I had no idea that people like him can really latch on to a person and refuse to let go. That’s not even been about me at all. It’s about his idea of me, I suppose. His view of what people like me are like?
I still wish I knew who exactly I was dealing with here in Portsmouth and I still wish we could have gone for a coffee, beer or pizza a few times and just talk. Because that would have helped immensely and could have led to a much better outcome for me here, I think. I’m not good at these English guessing games.
Can we still do that, now or later?
I suppose that my membership information will be fine then after all. Good to know. I’m not keen on returning to that concrete jungle. Yes, I like the plethora of culture and events there, the networking opportunities, but there’s more to life that other places do have.
The following has been the big problem for me. This.
Unless the person establishes a live video connection with you and shows you what he or she is doing in your equipment, you have no idea really of who exactly it is and what the person’s intentions are. There’s no dialogue.
He’s out of my equipment now, by the way. Off my internet connection.
I’ve always figured that I would likely set up a weekly appointment with a shrink in the aftermath of all of this, once it finally got to that point, to make sure that I was getting back on track again. Moving on. Just someone to watch out for me for a little while.
I think I will also need to sit down with someone to choose a professional direction. (That could be the same person. Some kind of shrink.) The hacking made me focus on anything that would help limit any hacking-related damage. In addition, the immense poverty and misery in Portsmouth often made me focus on ways to alleviate that. That was dumb. I need to figure out why I did that. Because there is something unhealthy about that.
I also think that I was willing to let some people experience the extent of the bizarre chaos that (my) life in Portsmouth was while I was shielding others from it, sometimes even pretending that all was fine and dandy. I need to sort that out too. Why I did that and whether it was the right thing to do. In one case, I did that to shield that person’s mental health but I am not sure if that was the right thing to do.
What do you call this?
If you rent a dwelling that requires you to rent a dwelling or at least a storage space and an office and a hotel room elsewhere where you can keep all your stuff, be safe and live your life, what do you call that first dwelling?
I have no word for it.
“Obsessed and fixated stalkers hide behind mask of anonymity”
YES! That is something most people still do not get, even many stalking victim advocates.
At Portsmouth & Southsea train station, he crossed the road and I thought that that would be the end of the story, but he only did it because there were police officers standing around at the station, laughing.
He crossed the road again a little later. I looked for quite a while after that but once they were around the corner, I could not see him any longer and I couldn’t spot the woman either. This worried me. I looked into a few shops there, but no.
At no point did I bother approaching the cops. They’re way too…
CLUELESS!
They’d have laughed at me and shooed me away.
Detained while waiting to lead the motorcade of the US Secretary of Homeland Security – because this secret service agent was… black
Mouthy = gobby in the local vernacular.
No joke
Only one solution, then, seems to me. Do what you can to leave the country. Do you REALLY want to stay in a place where it is still not done for women to support themselves and where women are still supposed to let themselves be punched around endlessly?
US versus UK versus Canada
Hugs the CEO.
Terrified of the executive.
Hugs the CEO.
Angelina Souren : 🇳🇱 🇺🇸 🇬🇧 Critical thinker / rights advocate and scientific researcher. 