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”
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.
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.
Unable 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…
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?
Stalker arrested!
Just uploaded.
Continue readingUS versus UK versus Canada
Hugs the CEO.
Terrified of the executive.
Hugs the CEO.
Is this going to be my last post? Possibly…
When English judges confirm prejudice and encourage what should not be encouraged
In the UK, people over roughly the age of 45 are widely demonised. In a recent court case, in which Wiltshire traders were jailed, the judge expressed the view that older adults are “vulnerable”, which is often a euphemism for “not right in the head” or “gullible” or worse.
Judge Jason Taylor KC, please refrain from automatically considering all older adults easy targets for abuse and fraud from now on. That’s despicable and it actually encourages targeting of older adults.
Targeting of older adults – mocking and abusing them – has become far too accepted in the UK.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-wiltshire-65251456
On this page, there is a video in which the rogue roofers say “we’re doing some bodging”. Without explaining what bodging is, the nature of the video will largely remain hidden from anyone who does not know what “bodging” is.
What these rogue traders were doing was targeting people who they believed were affluent. These people were living in bungalows, in a position to fork out a lot of money, interested in having a good roof over their heads and who were usually at home during the day.
There is no point in knocking on the doors of people who are not at home but at work.
Affluence often comes with age, too.
A great deal of the British prejudice against older people actually has to do with the massive inequality and widespread deep poverty here, with the resulting health issues. This plays a bigger role later in life. It’s not age that makes a lot of older adults in Britain slow and fragile. It’s poverty (lack of good nutrition) and also lack of good healthcare.
This, below, is a more balanced way of putting it, “vulnerable” likely referring to actual early dementia and mobility problems. (Why not simply say it?) Having for example mobility problems makes it hard to stand up to aggression; if you do, you risk getting beaten up. This is why I would like to see organizations like AgeConcern offer self-defense classes.
Who’s investigating the British royals’ slavery history?
A Dutchwoman whose last name translates into “the King”. Her first name is Camilla. I kid you not.
https://nos.nl/artikel/2470566-nederlandse-doet-onderzoek-naar-rol-brits-koningshuis-in-slavernij
Watch this: it may make your day
Very well handled by both teen and cops and yes, it’s worth watching to the end. That’s when officers even go around talking to neighbors to make sure no weird rumors start spreading and everyone can continue to feel safe.
Boon County officers can teach the rest of the world a lesson. Excellent stress management at that Sheriff’s office. Nobody showing signs of PTSD or any other issues. Remember, they were expecting the worst.
