i just asked a security guard at Asda what happens when you steal a sandwich.

Turns out that 95% of the time it’s your ticket out of here for people like me.

Has copies of most/ some of my transcripts and diplomas… for those of you who STILL believe that this filthy foreigner is making up her professional background.

See also the about me page.

I am a stalking and hacking target, have been for 12, 13 years. I have no income, no electricity and very little food. (I am not eligible for Universal Credit – because of my hacking/stalking situation – but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.)

None of this means that my life is over, even if whoever is doing this to me wants my life to be over. (Yes, apparently quite literally, unfortunately. But he or she does not realise that it’s like a mere rain shower. It will pass.)

Where that leaves me? You tell me!

My hacker put the animation on that last bit of video, about Boston. I left it that way. All the other edits are likely mine.

Okay these videos take too long to upload via WiFi. I’ll try again tomorrow.

(Uploaded them to YouTube instead and posting the links here.)

No, I’m not backing down from the local bullies, whoever they are. I want my goddamn life back.

I just sent you an e-mail but most of my e-mails get lost in cyberspace these days.

Re your paper – and THANKS for that! – also see:

https://www.fgcsic.es/lychnos/en_EN/articles/germplasm_and_tissue_bank_in_the_conservation

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3184/175815511X13069389864397?icid=int.sj-abstract.similar-articles.1&

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3184/175815513X13741514051732

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91490-y

Walking back from Lidl, I run into two young people who are screaming their heads off at a family in a car. This is at this notorious spot next to Ma’s in Kingston Road, where you need X-ray vision to be able to turn into the road.

They have a child in a buggy. They walk on, leaving an utterly flabbergasted family behind. “Fucking hell.” the guy says calmly, clearly stunned. Ethnic minorities, by the looks of it, but clearly English. “Just laugh about it.” I tell them.

To my frustration, the young female goes after the car again a few minutes later, and then the male runs after the car. Probably as high as a kite on meth?

I’m not having it.

Worried that he will pull the driver out of the car in busy traffic, I decide to interfere and yell very loudly “Don’t be ridiculous!” and “Hey! Stop it!”

The female turns and runs towards me and I had just spotted that that had distracted the dude before she starts shouting into my face from a distance of about five centimetres.

Good. Because I thought she was going to hit me and I am not feeling well so I can’t run away.

“Nobody tells me in my own country what to do!” Some stuff about her child, which she has just abandoned at least twice. “Go back to where you came from!”

“I’m from Amsterdam!” I yell as she walks away again.

“Go back then!”

I retort “I would love to but you won’t let me.”

“You won’t let me!”

I say sorry to a woman who’s walking by, clearly not happy with this kind of thing that you run into all the time when you live here instead of in Gerald Vernon-Jackson’s pretty little street. She smiles at me. A genuine smile.

I pass the young woman and her child at a bus stop later. I sensed that she was aware of me approaching and I sense that she is not keen on another confrontation. I walk by without paying any attention.

The guy had disappeared somewhere between Ma’s and the bus stop.

I’m exhausted. But I think I achieved my goal.

You will be able to pre-order the book soon and/or sign up as an early bird for the course, which I intend to host on Thinkific and Udemy.

Two posts ago, in which I talk about finally realising what I have been dealing with, I included an ITV program in which “Eamonn and Ruth” talked about the topic with two experts.

Now I see that there was a BBC documentary a few years ago.

In the above video, you can hear this 16-year-old English boy saying that in the west “we cultivate the evil side of women”.

Holy crap, that is seriously creepy. But yeah, England is deeply misogynistic and many boys get fed with a hatred of women at a very young age, before they’re able to form independent opinions. When boys under the age of 10 or 12 can yell “Suck my dick!” at women the age of their grandmothers and grab their penis at the same time, you know that they got this from someone else.

Below is the BBC documentary (requires a TV licence, so it will cost you £159 to watch this legally, unless, lol, you want to watch it in black and white).

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p07fvhmw/inside-the-secret-world-of-incels

This podcast video does not require a TV licence:

The problem with these guys is NOT that women are horrible or that these men are not physically attractive or that that they are “genetically inferior” as many of them seem to believe.

It’s the negative views they hold of themselves. It’s also often their negativity in general.

It could well be that quite a few of these guys have Asperger’s, I thought, but I found it very tricky to say something like that, off the cuff, because of the risk of perpetuating existing stigmas or creating new ones.

However, one of the people interviewed in the BBC documentary mentions “Asperger’s” himself.

Why do these people feel that random women who they’ve never met or interacted with have caused their lives to be so miserable that they feel that they need to take revenge out on these women? It makes no sense.

I have to do some thinking now about what all of this means for my life. It concerns me that these men seem to feel that women like me are responsible for everything that happens and has happened in their lives.

I’ve panicked a few times and I’ve also been ranting and raving about English people a few times in response to what’s been happening to me because it came across as quite quintessentially English to me. But it looks like it wasn’t. It’s merely been a matter of me having been in the wrong spots at the wrong time, it seems, whether online or IRL.

I’ve said a few times before that there is a large group of people out there whose healthcare and support needs are not being met (and who take this out on people like me, which is how I got into all of this in the first place; after all, I am an earth, marine and environmental scientist by nature).

I’m from Amsterdam, and as a migrant in England, I share some of those experiences Laura talks about.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/aug/27/laura-bates-on-the-men-who-hate-women-idolise-murderers

Listen to what Jane Willenbring has to say. She’s a full professor at Stanford now.

I remember reading a more or less similar story by a female scientist when I was in grad school. She wrote something about growing a thick skin and becoming insensitive to pain.

The male geologists around me – there was only one female; she was an associate professor in sedimentology – did not seem to understand. One commented critically and seemed to blame that woman. Said that it was more or less like saying that she was a masochist, then. Maybe I misunderstood, but I remember it because the harsh criticism shocked me a little at the time. I said nothing. I should at least have asked him to explain.

What else do you do, then? Give up? Never.

Does that make you a masochist? No way.

Things have changed. But not enough yet.

She’s a full professor at Stanford now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_K._Willenbring

“your brain is automatically constructing emotions out of a set of ingredients and you have control over seeding your brain with those ingredients to make emotions more automatically in an effortless way@LFeldmanBarrett What are the ingredients ? Are they finite or infinite ?”

Lisa Feldman Barrett:
“Three ingredients are sense data within your body (interoception), sense data from the outside world (exteroception), and your past experience (concepts).”

Here’s how I interpret that, without having looked into it any further.

The first one is for example that if you sit on a chair all day long, you should go for a walk. The third one may require some thinking and perhaps the decision to adapt your ideas. But there may often be very little that you can do about the second. That is not always true. If it’s noise, for example, you may be able to neutralise it with white noise.

It had never occurred to me that there are many people out there who have never even heard the words “autism” and “autistic”, let alone anything more about neurodiversity, or the word “neurodiversity”?

You’d think that particularly educated people or people who call themselves educated would have… But no, not necessarily.

It’s simple. Just like there are naturally taller and naturally shorter and average-height people and thin people and stocky people and people with blue eyes and people with brown and grey eyes and just like some people love beer while others exclusively prefer gin or wine or a martini, and some people become bakers or food scientists, others bricklayers or architects, some people walk in small steps or slowly while others walk fast and in large strides, people’s brains differ too.

It means different people have different abilities because their brains have different neural networks, different specialisations. It’s why some people are artists or mathematicians and others stock shelves or deliver packages or manage businesses.

Creativity and talent often have a lot to do with neurodiversity.

Autistic people are never dull and dull people are never autistic or capable of bringing entertainment into the world. Dull people can be highly efficient and reliable.

Thus we end up with a natural balance in the world that helps keep everyone happy. If only we give each other enough space, enough room to be who we are without being pushed into the tight corsets of the misconceptions put into the world by the idea of eugenics. That there is such a thing as an ideal human being. Like, say, a mass-produced perfectly smooth coffee beaker.

Neurodiversity is not binary. We all occupy a unique spot in this multidimensional space. One of my neighbours is slightly narcissistic, for example. It makes that person look charming, fascinating and interesting to almost everyone.

There is nothing wrong with that.

It can also create a tendency to want to hurt needle or annoy others through the spoken word – out of the unacknowledged vulnerability that underlies narcissism which fuels the need to control others – and that can intimidate others. The person’s partner or the person’s colleagues, for example. An example of what I mean is that, if for example, you are an equality campaigner, such a person may speak in a negative tone about “chavs” to you. For the sole purpose of annoying you… and hopefully drawing you into an argument. Or you may hear such a person talk negatively about you to a complete stranger, within earshot, again for no other purpose than annoying you.

It doesn’t matter.

It’s life. We all have our pluses and minuses. It’s what keeps life interesting.

To my astonishment, there were at least two dozen gulls out here earlier today, if not more.

I wondered what they were after.

When I walked downtown later, I spotted a flying ant. Might that be it? The air certainly had that “flying ant” quality to it.

Do these insects prefer to land or, wait, maybe hatch in grass fields? No. Turns out that ants grow wings when they want to mate. O-kay. There you go. Wouldn’t you wish that you could do something like that?

I just searched on “Do gulls eat flying ants?” and I found…

Yep, gulls love them and they trip on them.

They get slightly tipsy on them!

See? Got more in common with birds than you knew.

I’ve recently been reading up quite a bit and thinking about autism and I am struck by how much better autistic people are off in my home country and how unlucky it is to be autistic and in the southeast of England, or perhaps the entire south of England.

What am I talking about?

Honesty and directness.

The Dutch are so much into honesty and integrity that living in the Netherlands is bound to be much easier for autistic people than in England where many people, generally speaking, see nothing wrong with lying. We see this in the UK government almost non-stop at the moment.

Americans too are “a little bit” more into honesty and integrity than the English – again, generally speaking – and that must make life easier for many autistic people.

The Dutch are very direct and so are Americans, but the Victorian age caused a lot of havoc in England of which we can still see the results today. In the stiff upper lip, for example, and the emotional stunting it has led to.

The often highly convoluted way in which English people communicate is often highly frustrating for Dutch people.

If I understand it more or less accurately how many autistic people tick, then living in southern England has to be incredibly tough on them.

It does not and should not have to be this way.

I think that many English people have forgotten all about integrity and have forgotten what sophistication really is. Insulting people in a convoluted way and lying a lot is merely immature and a sign of weakness. Making fun of foreigners who have trouble wrapping their heads around mysterious England is also not necessarily a sign of great savvy.

Trumpian values are becoming the rule in England.

Such a minefield. So much damage.

PS
Did you know that the Dutch are often called “naive” behind their backs in international settings? Because of their penchant for honesty and integrity (and the resulting high level of trust). But it is appreciated highly too, at times. Remember that MH17 speech by Frans Timmermans?

Sign this petition, please. It’s very important.

https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/embarrassing-the-government-should-not-be-a-crime

https://kennethrobersonphd.com/the-future-of-autism-in-adults/

Dear editor,

I recently came upon an article in your publication that was so biased and irresponsible that it shocked me. I considered reporting it to IPSO right away but decided to contact you first. I am copying IPSO in on this e-mail, however, and I am also copying in the leader of Portsmouth City Council (PCC), the local Green Party and the MP for Portsmouth South as well as representatives of the groups of people who were disadvantaged in the article.

Why was this biased reporting irresponsible? Because it risked whipping up aggression against one of the most abused minorities in the UK, people who are abused merely because they lead a different lifestyle from the majority. That description – leading a different lifestyle from the majority – also applies to the leader of Portsmouth City Council. Would you have written about him in a similarly biased way? I doubt it.

But the way he lives his life was considered a crime until fairly recently. In addition, he has a mild invisible so-called “disability” (according to what he said to me during a conversation we had in 2019). It is often forgotten but all three groups of people (that is, Roma and Gypsies, technically not Travellers, along with gay people and people with disabilities) were also hunted and “exterminated” by the Nazis in WWII. So why don’t you paint Portsmouth’s City Council Leader with the same brush that you used for the Travellers?

I have no choice but to conclude that you engaged in blatant discrimination of an often persecuted minority, a group that Home Secretary Priti Patel essentially plans to criminalise in their entirety, sadly enough, something that various organizations such as Docs Not Cops and MedAct are greatly concerned about.

“Even the mildest otherisation primes people for aggression,” Oxford neuroscientist Kathleen Taylor wrote in her book “Cruelty. Human evil and the human brain.” You did more than that. That makes your reporting irresponsible.

The article in question is this:

https://www.portsmouth.co.uk/news/crime/anger-as-more-than-a-dozen-caravans-set-up-camp-on-milton-common-in-portsmouth-3328524

It was followed by this:

https://www.portsmouth.co.uk/news/people/portsmouth-council-prepares-for-court-hearing-after-beginning-legal-proceedings-to-evict-travellers-who-set-up-more-than-a-dozen-caravans-on-milton-common-3329180

It concerns a small group of Travellers (also known as Pavees or Mincéirs, so I understand) who were parked on a triangle of low-lying council-owned land here in Portsmouth right next to a very busy through-road from which commuters could see them. I had spotted them too. There was no concern in the article as to whether there was any flooding on the land in view of the recent rains. Instead, it mentioned rubbish.

When I went to the site today, I discovered not only that the Travellers are gone, but also that there are very good other reasons why you must publish a balanced follow-up article to retain your credibility as an independent reliable and professionally responsible local news source.

Rubbish left behind (photos enclosed; taken on 1 August 2021)

I spotted three main kinds of rubbish on the site in question:

• Irresponsibly animal-unfriendly rubbish deliberately left behind by the “Stop Aquind” activities
• Small mountains of garden waste
• Packaging of a Bestway Lay-Z-Spa and a metal file cabinet, as part of or deposited before the garden waste

PCC’s amateurish response to the group of Travellers

PCC sent the Anti-Social Behaviour unit over. This is not what a responsible city council does. Even though PCC apparently has no specialised unit for Traveller matters, sending the Anti-Social Behaviour unit over is offensive and not aimed at engaging but a hostile act. The way the majority of us are living is very unhealthy, but nowhere have I read that these Travellers were going around knocking on people’s doors in Portsmouth, telling them to stop living in their indoor environments, often contaminated with a large level of toxic chemical compounds that can come from cookware, cleaning products, candles, their furniture and many other items and also often laden with mould spores. Many Travellers, so I understand, also consider the way we mainstream folks live rather dirty because many of us keep animals inside our homes. They leave us in peace. They cause no problems. They stand on a site for a short while and then they’re gone again, like a flock of migrating birds that lands for a sip of water and a few days of repose before continuing their travels.

If this has not persuaded you yet to change your views and portrayal of Travellers, then consider the following.

It has been mentioned in a TV documentary by ITV and I also know from my own experience of 12+ years in Portsmouth that Portsmouth has a problem with excessive insularity and often presents itself in a hostile manner to strangers. We’ve had many fights in Portsmouth recently, some with up to 200 people. Because of the tensions caused by the pandemic, more of this kind of trouble among young people can be expected throughout the UK for a while, not just in Portsmouth. Perhaps Portsmouth is particularly vulnerable in this area, however. In short, the last thing we need is more hostility. We must not fan these fires.

As the City Council Leader recently stated, he is very happy that we will soon have new cruise ships moor here and he would like to see these cruise ship passengers enjoy Portsmouth. More fights do not fit into that scenario. That said, these cruise ship passengers are often “rich” older Americans who are not interested in keeping up appearances (rich from a UK point of view, where 30% of the population lives in poverty and 90% of the population is not immensely well-to-do either). They are also often scientists, retired or not, which is another group of people who are not very concerned with what they look like, perhaps even more so if they’re slightly older.

These cruise passengers, in other words, are often people who may stand out like sore thumbs to many of the locals and many of the locals may mistake them for very poor people and (illegal) migrants. How do I know that? Because I have friends and colleagues who go on such cruises. When I picked two of them up at a cruise terminal in Southampton a few years ago, I was a little bit concerned that they might get hassled in Southampton, because of the way they were dressed, the way they looked, white trainers and all, something that I too used to be oblivious to, things that people in places like Amsterdam pay absolutely no attention to. I was pleased that these two women, a microbiologist and her aunt, were travelling on to London the same day.

I hope I have gotten your attention now and have made my point sufficiently clear.

Below is a list of random links to articles I found about Travellers. There are other online resources too. I learned a few things from them. I imagine that you may too.

I look forward to hearing back from you.

Best regards,

Angelina Souren

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/06/racism-gypsy-damian-le-bas-travellers-stopping-places

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/16/gypsy-travellers-discrimination-stigma-poster-campaign

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/feb/25/truth-about-gypsy-traveller-life-women

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/photography/article/irish-travellers-uphold-the-traditions-of-a-bygone-world

https://travellermovement.org.uk/

https://www.qni.org.uk/resources/engaging-with-the-gypsy-and-traveller-community-during-covid-19/

We have to be careful not to keep repeating old mistakes over and over and over.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/07/21/interview-aluminum-future-electric-cars

Fully aware of the horrors they promoted?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-57984924

Unless we do what we need to do.

But we didn’t do it back then either, which is why we are now in such a great hurry.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/25/gaya-herrington-mit-study-the-limits-to-growth

You can download the PDF of her report “Limits to Growth” here; it was published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology. That is a “paper”.

Limits to Growth: https://advisory.kpmg.us/articles/2021/limits-to-growth.html

This is a LinkedIn article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/beyond-growth-gaya-branderhorst/

Does the climate and ecological emergency bill (CEE Bill) now start to make sense to you?

PS
Gaya Herrington did not receive her econometrics degree from the University of Amsterdam but from VU University Amsterdam. (Amsterdam has two universities.) LinkedIn instantly alerted me to the fact that we attended the same university. She and I both have a Master’s – both cum laude – from VU University Amsterdam.

Click on the link below.

What the world at large does not realise is that THIS IS SIMPLY HOW ENGLAND TICKS! ALWAYS.

This is what daily life is like for most of us over here. I even once got a letter from BT Business stating that they increased their rates one or two months ago. Oh-kay.

Yes, it can be exhausting to deal with. Yes, it can make planning anything impossible. Yes, it can come across as highly immature and disorganised.

Yes, it tends to give English people the reputation of being “unreliable” within an international professional context and no, they seem to have no idea of this. (Or do they because they actually often like driving others around the bend. I have another item on this, also within the Brexit context, about the deliberate use of “Trumpian realities” for no other reason thaN to drive the EU negotiators up the wall with frustration. I think it was in The Guardian.)

English people who have sufficient international experience can learn to adapt and overcome this.

No, I don’t think it goes for Scots and I suspect that it does not go for Welsh people either and it may not even go for people in northern England.

Analysis (CNN): Why would anyone trust Brexit Britain again? • 7 min read

The way in which England is different is quite similar to how for example autistic people are different and how both English people and autistic people also still differ greatly from one another.

In the end, it all seems to indicate mostly that we have to keep focusing more on what we have in common.

This just popped up in my stream on ResearchGate.

“The Role of Monk Parakeets as Nest-Site Facilitators in Their Native and Invaded Areas“

“Invasive species can be harmful to native species, although this fact could be more
complex when some natives eventually benefit from invaders. Faced with this paradox, we show
how the invasive monk parakeet, the only parrot species that builds its nests with sticks, can host
other species as tenants, increasing nest-site availability for native but also exotic species. This same
pattern is observed in the native range of the species, and when parakeets occupy urban or rural
habitats, although the richness of tenants was higher in invaded areas and rural habitats. Tenants
participated in the cooperative defense against predators, benefiting parakeets with their presence.
As tenants can be both native and invasive species, management plans should consider the complex
network of interactions developed with the invader.”

Oh yeah. If Myiopsitta monachus ruled the world, we would all be better off. I have read that these birds even cooperate with their predators, as tenants, and I have personally seen them stand up FOR CATS.

They build huge condos with separate areas for different activities. Because of the invasion of humans, these parrots have increasingly been forced to build these nests in human-made constructions.

There is another article, slightly older, slightly related, that contains a photo of a quaker parrot and a bird of another species sitting together, the quaker having spotted something (the photographer?) and on alert, the other bird still looking oblivious.

Parrots have been on the planet for around 55,000,000 years. Modern humans only for about 250,000.

We inherited the planet from these more mature species.

I adopted two non-releasable birds of this species in June 1994. I emigrated with them twice. They have taught me so much! We humans are nowhere near as smart as we tend to think we are, as a species. We are quite limited.

And the only thing DEFRA wants to do is kill them all callously. Even though it was not their fault that they ended up in England. They’re a south-american species, after all. They don’t fly across the Atlantic, unless it’s in an air plane, I can assure you.

It’s us humans who spread them around the world, just like we did with Psittacula krameri and Columba livia and so many other species. We particularly introduced a lot of species in Australia, sometimes purely to be able to shoot them (hunting).

The article does end on a slightly negative note, but I reckon it’s quite daring to dare suggest that so-called invasive species can have benefits too. So maybe that’s why. To stave off a wave of criticism, claiming that the researchers overlooked the dangers of invasive species.

Home

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-57867521

This video on the BBC site is where I got it from.