All of a sudden, I am watching a video by Mentour Pilot. My hacker interfered. Why? Possibly because the person who features in that video is based here? Portsmouth.

(“No,” I concluded when I decided to use the back button in the browser and started watching the video. It’s because it’s so similar to what goes on here in Portsmouth, whatever that is, exactly. There do not seem to be huge amounts of money involved here locally, but other than that, there are striking similarities.)

I’ve had two encounters with Landmark. It is similar to Lighthouse. No, they never got even a tip of a nail into me, let alone their claws.

I’d first been told about it (in an e-mail) by a marine science professor who was always extremely chipper, a very positive and outgoing person. Later, at an LTL meeting in Oxford, someone approached me who also turned out to be connected to Landmark. (The person showed up without having registered for said meeting; I had registered and was wearing a brand-new fancy linen suit, which I had bought at an unbelievable discount.) When we later met again in Oxford, for lunch and browsing books and/or an exhibition etc, I noticed that she seemed to be observing me very carefully, seemed to be looking at what I spent and perhaps also what I spend it on. (I bought Alice in Wonderland in a book shop.) Next, in an e-mail, she asked me to come stay at her home. That struck me as odd. I declined and I never heard from her again. I was a foreigner who had become very isolated in England and was open about that. She and I had things in common and initially seemed a possible good connection for me.

In Florida, I already ran into an undertaking (called Equinox) that advertised environmental jobs in a university newspaper. I rented a car so that I could attend a meeting, which I expected to be a job interview but was not at all. It was a stage performance with an audience. I saw that what they were saying, for example about drinking water, was complete nonsense, was spotted by folks who were studying the audience as someone who was not in awe. I was astonished to see the mesmerized faces around me. I was initially put under pressure to sign up by some men who later walked up to me, after this presentation part was over, but I resisted and when I attended a second meeting, out of curiosity, they decided to ignore me completely and let me go. The law later stepped in, but that was after I had left Florida. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2000/04/equinox-international-settles-case-ftc-eight-states-nearly-40-million-restitution-alleged-pyramid

What’s been said in this BBC video, about things that had happened in the life of Jeff, that’s why it’s so good to be well-grounded and not be embarrassed or feel vulnerable about whatever’s happened in your life. Tackle it. Work through any issues you have. See also this page: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/21938469/very-british-cult-crime-bbc-documentary/

That’s why I now have a page on my site about things that happened many decades ago. It ceased to be important a long time ago, but if people are being told all kinds of bizarre shit about you behind your back – as happened to me in Portsmouth – and if you are open about whatever happened in your past that other people may see as something to exploit you with, and show that you have nothing to hide, then you become pretty immune to all kinds of manipulation attempts and the people who’ve been told god knows what about you can see that something does not quite seem to add up about what they’ve been told about you. (At least, they will, if they have sufficient working brain cells, ha ha; not everyone does, of course, but seriously, when people firmly believe something and then are confronted with something that contradicts that belief, that can be so uncomfortable for them that they reject the new information, particularly if the earlier information came from someone who they trusted.)

Middle of the night. 03:30. In the vicinity of The Hague, in a relatively rural area between Leiden and The Hague. (Thanks, Guardian, for covering this incident on your site’s front page, and posting the Reuters news article.)

People on the train help each other. Emergency services are on location within 10 minutes. (Cause: small construction crane on the track. A freight train runs into “construction materials” too, at about the same time, but that causes no injuries. A fire breaks out, which is extinguished quickly. So far, 1 dead, around 30 injured, 19 in hospital, including the train driver, with fractures.)

People asleep in their beds nearby wake up because of the noise, get up, dress, go outside and start helping crash victims, taking them into their homes, offering them food and beverages. Eleven of the 30 injured people are cared for in people’s homes.

Good.

A few days ago, a 21-year-old student pilot in the US lost her entire nose wheel assembly on take-off on her third solo flight. Her own instructor was not around, so ATC, another instructor and another pilot help her land safely. (She had to land while keeping the nose as high as possible as long as possible, which she did. Eventually, the tail touched the runway surface, which stopped the plane and only then, it tipped.)

Good.

In early 2010, I think it was, or maybe late 2009, there was a lot of snow in England, and many drivers got stuck on highways.

One guy hands out beakers of tea to drivers.

Good.

English newspapers praise him for not charging for the tea.

---

---

In other countries, people do not whine about a pilot’s cost of extra fuel he burns up to stay with a stricken student pilot’s plane or about the cost of the food that people provide to train crash victims.

Leiden train station was closed this morning, by the way, because too many people showed for their trains, unaware of what had happened, leading to an unacceptable, dangerously large number of people at the station. Leiden is a nice place. I lived there for a while, a long time ago. No buses are running to replace the trains that normally travel between Leiden and The Hague because the affected number of passengers is simply too whopping high for that.

Dutch people tend to stay COOL and CALM in this sort of circumstances. Does it make them happy? No, of course not. Do they all turn it all into a big bizarre drama instead of feeling grateful that none of their loved ones were affected or whatever? No, of course not, though a few may. There are always a few.

One Dutch passenger on the train was filming on his phone and even filmed himself putting on his boots or something, too, but at least he was also telling everyone – in Dunglish, not Dutch, showing awareness of his other passengers – to get out of the train asap (“Come! Out!”, indicating that he was near an exit) and asking people one by one if they were okay. He was likely using the light on his phone to provide light, by filming. (Do you know where your “torch” function is located? Does your phone have one?) The lights in the train had gone out, after all. He likely did the first thing that came to his mind to have some light. Maybe even using muscle memory. (17:36: yes, it was pitch black. He’s a Dutch student.)

(17:36: The first thing the train driver said, after weakly calling out “help” and being heard by that student? Asking how the passengers were faring.)

Several injured passengers have meanwhile released from hospital, btw. (17:36: three are in the ICU.)

Yesterday, someone who sounded very English (using English verbiage) tagged me on YouTube and called the pilot who had stayed with the student pilot’s plane a few days ago crazy. It made me furious. It makes me want to yell “FU!” at such a dumb ass. One of the reasons you do that is so that you can direct emergency services to the exact location if something goes wrong, dammit, besides just mere compassion and support for the student pilot, for example because you can see things on the other plane that its pilot can’t or you can tell the student pilot that she’s a little too high or whatever, if needed. You do that so that if the plane goes down, you can observe whether the pilot gets out and whether the plane catches fire or not. You do that so that maybe, you can put your plane down in a nearby field to rush over and pull the pilot out, if necessary.

It is what you do. It simply is what you do. And the airport happened to have the available air space for him to stay close and overfly next to her. What was it? 7R? While she landed on 7L? That’s not crazy. That’s what you do. That’s simply what you do, as a pilot.

That’s what was still on my mind when I woke up this morning.

13:15: Dutch king has visited crash site. (Flies as a pilot for KLM, to keep his license current; his professional specialty is water management, though, and he studied history at university.)

Also, two tracks were in use, two were closed due to work; major investigations have been launched to figure out what exactly happened. The deceased was the crane driver, a BAM employee.

I just spotted one. It was not hate-mongering, but it used incel speak and I’d say that this might need keeping an eye or two on, just in case. (The profile pic was Bill Clinton, btw.) I reported it to YouTube but there was no category for it. I opted for “promotes terrorism” and felt like an idiot for doing that, but I didn’t see much else that might fit.

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.)

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

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.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/30/over-50s-in-the-uk-how-did-the-pandemic-impact-your-mental-health

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.

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.)

This is exactly what I was thinking about when the above popped up on my screen. The way older single female adults in the UK are demonized and often subsequently criminalized, I find that quite shocking.

So here is a book by Victoria Smith and it’s been reviewed in The Guardian, under the subtitle “A compelling account of ageism and misogyny that overemphasises feminism’s generational divide”. Turns out that I got that wrong… I’ll come back to that.

My first thought was that it’s British (or English?) thinking that causes this sharp generational divide. The demonisation of older adults in the UK is well documented.

But no, this is not a book review, but a review of an American film and the review is by Victoria Smith.

A little bit later… No, it IS about a book. WTF? The book is by Victoria Smith and the review is by Fiona Sturges, who must be English because only English folks are able to confuse me this much. Maybe the review has been rewritten and maybe someone else chose a movie scene instead of a book cover to start it with, though. Who’s to say?

So who is Victoria Smith? “a feminist writer, with a particular interest in motherhood and intersections of misogyny and ageism” At least that bit adds up.

I disagree with Sturges’ conclusion, namely that men are women’s biggest and most powerful oppressors. Women oppressing other women versus women empowering each other is a major measure of how balanced a society is in that respect. After I moved to England, from Amsterdam, an Englishman who has not lived here for decades told me that the UK couldn’t be sexist, let alone misogynist, because Mary Beard was also being attacked by women.

Self-hatred is a common symptom of oppression, isn’t? Ask any “battered wife”. Taught contempt for one’s own kind may be another.

If anything, it sounds as if the emphasis in this book is too much on sexual activities and on being considered “fuckable”. Maybe that emphasis was added by Sturges. If so, it is pretty… sexist. There is more to women than their genitalia. Isn’t that the battle we are fighting? To move beyond the emphasis on genitalia and on how different people use them differently?

I sometimes encounter (very) young women who underline over and over again that they’re pregnant, but they are not making me feel “old” or “past my sell-by date”. If the bizarre emphasis on their pregnancy makes me feel anything at all, it’s sad regrets for them, in view of the sacrifices they are making. I usually keep that to myself because we do not all want the exact same things from life, nor should we want to. Sometimes, I even want to say “that’s pretty damn stupid of you, then” if they also get shouted at a lot because in that case, that pregnancy is keeping them trapped in an abusive relationship. That’s tragic. It becomes even less of a cause for celebration or gloating or glee when I next ask myself what is going to happen to that child.

I never say to them what I am thinking for the simple reason that I don’t know their story and because it’s not true that only older women have wisdom at their beck and call. I’m not having a conversation with them. I may actually just want them to go away, nothing more.

Young women are not the problem, though, and neither are men. Misogyny is the problem.

Me, I am familiar with 1960s “school milk”, but school meals? Nope.

The Dutch are introducing them now, free meals, but unlike in the UK, the government leaves it up to the schools how they use the budget.

https://nos.nl/artikel/2469299-programma-gratis-schoolmaaltijden-begonnen-kinderen-kunnen-ook-waardebon-krijgen

Schools with 30% or more pupils from low-income families can now apply for free meals.

The Dutch government has allocated 100 million euros for 300,000 children in primary and secondary education.

“Op is op”, for the schools. First come, first served.

They can then for example, for 9 euros per child:

• Offer breakfast or lunch
• Fill a fridge with healthy food.
• Hire a catering firm

They can also opt for only supporting the poorest families by offering them Red Cross vouchers of 11 euro per child, which can be spent at any supermarket.

Red Cross and Youth Education Foundation school liaison officers are supporting the schools, so that organizing the food won’t burden teachers too much.

The way I see it, this would indeed prevent a great deal of heartache as well as lawsuits, provided the legislation is drafted well.

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/mar/29/intended-parents-legal-status-birth-british-surrogacy-review

You belong to you.

This is otherisation. It is caused by over ten years of Tory rhetoric, which probably started at the time when Theresa May was Home Secretary and launched a policy called “the hostile environment”.

Wasn’t she also the one who suggested that refugees only came here to kill Britain’s beautiful swans? Do you remember cat-gate, too, Theresa May spreading the falsehood that human rights mean that if a terrorist has a cat he cannot be deported?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/28/social-landlord-england-said-mould-acceptable-refugees-homes

Shit. While I was watching a 1993 film about a guy who became obsessed with his colleague Laura Black and shot up the California computer firm where they both worked, apparently leading to the first stalking legislation in the US, someone in Tennessee shot up a primary school. The 129th mass shooting in the US this year and March isn’t even over.

Houston, we have a problem. And it needs fixing. Urgently.

This just popped up in my YouTube stream and I subscribed (unsubbed shortly after, lol). This former CIA dude, or “CI-officer” like he says it, has a tip that can get you out of a lot of trouble should you ever get robbed or held up.

Carry a dummy wallet, with a few bucks, a bunch of expired bank cards (or rather the cardboard credit cards that these companies send you when they want you to apply) and so on. You can literally toss it at the person if you ever encounter someone who demands your money. Great idea! Can buy you enough time to get away safely before they realize that the wallet you threw at them is a decoy.

---

Does not work in all situations. I was robbed in Florida once where someone took off with my handbag with passport, driving license, bank cards and the lot, so it won’t work for that.

(That said, I instinctively instantly started negotiating and I got all my stuff back minus the 5 dollars or so that I had still left in my wallet. Because I had just shopped at my local Winn-Dixie and was walking home with two grocery bags which made me an easy target.)

This too portrays what is behind many cases of men stalking women.

It’s got nothing to do with passion, terrorizing someone.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/hate-crime-victimhelp-move-me-to-a-safe-place

She is in America, in a sundown town, but her experiences were highlighted by The Guardian a few days ago. I am so fucking angry for her.

She is still relatively young, thankfully.

Me, I have set up similar crowdfunding campaigns for myself a few times, but I never got beyond £350, which was not enough to enable me to leave and the worst of the nightmare started happening after 2013 when I briefly had the funds that would have enabled me to escape. But no animals had been attacked yet and I didn’t know yet that my locks were already getting picked for years. I’ve tried four times since in spite of that.

I actually more or less started wrapping up my life a while ago and started making (small) donations all over the place because if my life was over anyway, if I couldn’t get away anyway, then I would do whatever the hell I still could to help others or just generally help make the world a slightly better place. My health has declined horribly after I moved to Portsmouth; things are only getting worse (and I have no access to medical care).

Below is what I would like to say to Angel Pittman.

---

Angel, I am so fucking angry for you. Below I explain why.

I am pleased to see that you’ve already surpassed your goal. That gives me hope, too. It shows that there are plenty of good people.

Here in the UK, there is a lot of this too. A family in Bristol, with their own hostel, suffered a double arson attack, for example. Racism. They are of Asian heritage.

I’m from the Netherlands. I’ve lived in the States (Florida) and am now in England. My dad was his own boss, my sisters are their own bosses and I have been my own boss for a long time, but my life turned into a nightmare when I relocated within England. The hate for me was not racist as I am white, but rather misogynistic, instead, it seems. Slogan on wall, bucket of liquid emptied over me, locks picked, at two addresses, vandalism in my apartment, animal cruelty, lots of hacking etc etc. I don’t want to bore you with more of my story because it is bizarrely similar to yours and you know what that is like. You don’t need me to tell you that. In the previous town here in England, I had actually been attacked, physically. The police here don’t care either, just like in Rowan County. I’ve tried to escape four times already and one day I will succeed.

Stay strong. Keep fighting. Don’t give up. I found your story just now. Me, this morning, I sent a plea for help to various relatively powerful people around the world, folks who know me, because due to England’s bizarre archaic class system, I have zero power here. I’m a migrant, I’m a female, I am not married, am a feminist, am over 45 (in my 60s now) and have been stuck in poverty for so long. That’s SIX reasons for anonymous folks to hate me.

The fear is the hardest to deal with, isn’t it? The fear and the erosion of trust in people. Just like you, I never expected anything like this. I didn’t know how to explain it to folks in my home country either. It was too fucking bizarre for words.

You did something right. You will succeed. I can tell. You have something that I seem to lack or maybe it’s also because I am simply in the wrong country.

You will succeed, I am telling you.

Best,

Angelina

PS For anyone who does not understand where the fear comes from… this level of hate, and to be personally targeted by it, is really scary. Certainly if it’s persistent. It hollows you out, eats away at you, corrodes you inside because you’re surrounded by it all the time. There is almost no getting away from it.

Me, I found a local Starbucks last year to which I secretly escaped from time to time. A little oasis. Then one day, a blond young woman, who I had not met before, greeted me from behind the counter with sheer hate, the Pompey flavor hate, and that place then soon turned into hell too. I often genuinely feel that Portsmouth does not deserve to exist and should be bombed off the map; it is that evil. It’s really scary, the level and extent of the local hate. It’s really really really scary, the Pompey-flavor hate. It makes you wish you were dead because there is no getting away from it and it’s so ut-ter-ly vile.

Simple. Offer them a better alternative next to a railway embankment, one that they find much more attractive for building a sett in.

Use the intelligence of animals. Rely on it to find ways to coexist peacefully with them in the habitats that we share with them.

Because we must learn how to do that.

I’ve only seen a badger ONCE in my life, on a Sunday morning near Loftahammar in Sweden, in 1989, more or less at the center of the image below, near the water.

16:26: I just found that all text had disappeared here!

I originally posted this at 13:33.

I had written that it’s been in the news in the UK before, and that I included the info in one of my stalking-related booklets, namely the one about how to protect yourself against stranger-stalking. Toronto Police Service 22 Division had already addressed Apple Air Tags before:

---

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-65030359

Or is the UK government admitting that life is much easier abroad than in the UK?

Sign, please. Thank you. https://chng.it/v7TpcQhKDZ

People like Anne are British citizens who should simply receive the pensions that they’d built up in the UK, like any other British citizen, without any deductions and with the corrections for inflation etc.

Extradited from the US forty years later, for a case to do with a pub brawl, for a crime for which he was acquitted and of which the judge said “that he did not know why the case had been brought after so many years”.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-64678781

(But “there is no racism in England” either…)

(Source: Article in Dutch, in Dutch “Financial Times”, and you’ll need to be registered for a free or paid account to access it.)

It works both ways, though, and, of course, with a bias. You’re more likely to be a high earner when your parents were high earners and you’re more likely to be earning little when your parents’ income was low.

9.4% who had parents in the highest income group (20%) are poor 25 years later, while 38.5% of them are in the 20% with the highest incomes. 21% of those whose parents had the lowest incomes (20%) are poor 25 years later while under 15% are among the highest-earning 20% then.

Visually, it looks as follows (red = parents with lowest incomes, blue = parents with highest incomes).

The UK Performs Poorly When it Comes to Social Mobility. Here’s How it Can Improve

07 APR 2022

TOPIC: Europe

The article below is from the Goldman Sachs BRIEFINGS newsletter of 07 April 2022.

Compared with other countries, the most disadvantaged in the U.K. are less likely to climb the income ladder and the economically advantaged tend to stay at the top. Covid-19 has increased inequality further, and recent rises in inflation, especially energy costs, are intensifying the problem. In a recent report, Goldman Sachs Research has taken a closer look at the issue, investigating what needs to be done to improve mobility and opportunity for people in the U.K. We sat down with authors of the research, Goldman Sachs’ European Strategist Sharon Bell and Chief U.K. Economist Steffan Ball, to discover more.

Read the remainder of the article – with definitions – on the Goldman Sachs website: https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/pages/from-briefings-07-april-2022.html

Continue reading →

The Welsh first minister has spoken of his emotion at the “contemporary resonances” he perceived in a letter written by a 15th-century Prince of Wales envisioning a country free from the rule of the “barbarous” English.

During a visit to France, Mark Drakeford said he was moved by the Pennal letter sent by Owain Glyndŵr to the king of France, Charles VI, in 1406 asking for help in his fight against English rule.

Drakeford was shown the original of the letter at the French national archive in Paris during a trip aimed at strengthening political, business, cultural and sporting links between Wales and France.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/mar/17/mark-drakeford-pennal-letter-owain-glyndwr-welsh-french-help-fighting-english

The UK has been downgraded in an annual global index of civic freedoms as a result of the government’s “increasingly authoritarian” drive to impose restrictive and punitive laws on public protests.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/mar/16/hostile-authoritarian-uk-downgraded-in-civic-freedoms-index

This obviously erodes the UK government’s credibility when it speaks out against similar ongoings in countries like Hungary and South Africa or even, for example, China.

Report issued yesterday: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/26902/using-population-descriptors-in-genetics-and-genomics-research-a-new

Download free PDF or read the report online.

Why have I off and on had so much trouble WALKING since I moved into this flat? Why did this get so horribly dramatic before the end of last year? And why am I once again suddenly very unwell and can I barely walk? I’ve often blamed it on my gallbladder or on hay fever, but that no longer adds up.

Why did someone once let me know that I had “kidney disease that wasn’t manifesting yet“?

I thought the person was angry about – or making fun rather of – the fact that my GP having left a box (for kidney function which can also an indication of the functioning of other organs such as the heart) ticked in the form when he ordered a blood analysis for me back in 2016 or 2017. But was that really the case?

In fact, I had no idea what it was about until that same woman at my GP practice – you know, that one – made a pretty big fuss about it when I collected the results. (A year later, I discovered that she was part of the gang here in town that had and has been making my life a living hell for so long.)

And why did – with no connection to the above – two people e-mail me to tell me that I needed Mg for my muscles???

In a town in which people literally have tried to get me to commit suicide, I have to ask such questions.

I just discovered that someone today quietly climbed up the stairs to my flat, and slightly pulled out a box on top of my Christmas tree so that I would notice – because of the light above it – that this card below had been left underneath it, folded.

(hacker(s) at it as I am typing this; that is, seem(s) to have reprogrammed an arrow key on my keyboard, which he toggles, ha ha ha. It’s been acting up throughout the day and the fan did its stupid deliberate gearing up – wind – too a few times)

This used to be at my door upstairs. I had stuck it on the wall next to the front door as well but it got removed instantly and very deliberately stepped on. I had found these cards at the local CAB where I got… wait for it… never mind.

When I moved to Portsmouth in 2009, my today and tomorrow went up in smoke. Only yesterday was left from that point onward.

This masterful film was about another war and about what people do to each other in wars, featuring David Bowie, oh, and a few other Brits.

---

---

---