5G irradiated environment ?

We are sensitive to our environments. Sensory issues, unfiltered overwhelms by bright light or a teeming crowd's sound, irritating electronic hums, all that. I have to keep the cable unplugged from my bedside radio to sleep, otherwise the faint hum is annoying as well as a waste of electricity.

One of our members us highly concerned against 5G, the plan to do the web + phones by a stronger level of signal radiation called 5G. Impact details set out in this petition based in New Zealand include:
" If the telecommunications industry’s plans for 5G come to fruition, no person, no animal, no bird, no insect and no plant on Earth will be able to avoid exposure, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, to levels of RF radiation that are tens to hundreds of times greater than what exists today, without any possibility of escape anywhere on the planet. These 5G plans threaten to provoke serious, irreversible effects on humans and permanent damage to all of the Earth’s ecosystems. "

Reflect. Support if you agree with the health concern.

Eugenie Sage: I do not consent to 5G radiation.

26 Apr 2020

social real life justified the gradual wind down

I have been interested to observe this. Every frequently meeting group in my social life has been psychologically reluctant to stop. It was always been irresistible to go on and achieve their next meet so long as folks generally seem well. There is that mismatch, then, between a thinking group's natural instincts and the advice. Folks have stayed active until last weekend before the move to major shutdown from Mar 16, feeling they owed to each other to try not to drop activities, and there was always a next meet that would still be good to get done if folks were still well. Precautions like separately wrapped food started, and Anglican churches stopping their handshakes and shared wine, but knowing there were not yet many cases, folks all seemed to need the week of build-up of threat awareness, before the govt announcements of Mar 16, to get mentally ready to stop their social activities.

That felt right. It's particularly reasonable for support activities. I found that it aligned me against the armchair opinion on Facebook for a sudden instant "lockdown" on the shockingly authoritarian model seen in some countries like Italy. As a report by Robert Peston raised, heavy handed lockdowns put the elderly at risk of unseen neglect inside their homes, which counters the argument that the authoritarian lockdown makes them safer from the virus. I agreed with the government keeping the country active as long as we were still mostly healthy, and being driven by events re when we had to tip over into shutdown. Because it all matched folks' irresistible common sense day-to-day behaviour in my experience, mine included. That has been the real life practicality of folks' social and support lives, during the descent into this health emergency.

So I'm very glad and morally defend, that ELAS met on Mar 14. It was a good success for the 2 folks with ADHD who came to it: one new, so we achieved support by having it for them. That makes it right that we had it. Then it was reasonable that we supported each other into the shutdown period by an outdoor strolling meet of 1 1/2 hours today, around discussing it. An intermediate stage of wind down before stopping meeting. It met a need, it was supportive, but it was supportive about knowing we can't return to keep doing it for the duration, as the outbreak gets worse.

Maurice Frank
21 Mar 2020

diverse language forbidden

Paul Wady is an activist + writer on autism who does an Edinburgh Fringe show on it annually. I have seen a lot of the silly radical language politics he describes going on for several years + getting ever purgier + more factionally radicalised. Today Paul shared on social media:
*******

An ethos has been invented in which the term Neurodiversity Movement means people who reject and ignore the severely disabled and autistic, and won't hear anything negative said about being on the spectrum. Which is of course absurd. This seems to be something we have to address daily.

It was invented by people with different motives such as Anti Vaxxers, ABA practitioners and people who hate being autistic. Also people who just plain hate being. Finally a certain BE CURED OR BE DAMNED attitude?

I might also venture to describe them as 'Wannabe NT's'.

Assertion of this definition of the term, invariably takes the form of people ignoring anyone trying to reason or debate with them and just going around in circles. Saying her and over that they are right. It's not sane.

If you meet anyone on social media who ignores what you say and just replies any way they want, for example when you describe the loose umbrella term autism as anything but a disorder and that's that - you can predict what you get back. It's a disorder and that's that. No amount of reason seems to get through. But the bizarre thing is, they must understand what you are trying to tell them.

Personally I see it all as relative and you have to have the conditions/symptoms of disability to be disabled rather than one condition that always means you are.

So thank you to everyone doing this. Without such facist eugenicist attitudes, I would not have been able to so clearly define my ideas and attitudes in the field of self advocacy. Keep up the good work - because people can spot when someone does not listen to reason or have the ability to engage in a rational dialogue.

12 Feb 2020

we want you to bring someone to your hospital appointment

Consider one of the hospital treatments they can do just in a day visit, without needing any cutting operation or inpatienthood. How it's a weight off our minds, a welcomed good, that space agey technologies, with lasers or sound or microsurgeries, save us trouble.

So, the appointment letter comes. Ever so casually, just by the way, it says: bring someone to acc ompany you home, in case you need the stronger painkiller, because under its effects you can't get home alone.

How the bloody'ell is a spectrumite supposed to arrange that? Many folks who are not autistic would have trouble arranging that, too, so I make the point for them too. For autistics it this request is in obvious conflict with our condition.

You are not going to know the work hour patterns followed by every friend + acquaintance. This is not only for single folks: if you have a partner or offspring who are working or away at the needed time, you are in exactly the same position. A conversationally afflicted spectrumite can't work up the brazenness, first to tell everyone in turn about a physical health condition, which is against privacy too, then to request sacrifice of hours out of that person's own time, for them to sit around in a hospital while you get your treatment.

It's a sharp practice for the NHS to ask folks to achieve something so impractical. It's practical common sense, that if the stronger painkilker will impair for a day your ability to get home, they should keep you in hospital for one night. Or at minimum, take you home in an ambulance. Surely the obvious reason for not wanting to do that, is the pressure from CUTS.

So they try to wing it by asking you for the most they hope you might be able to sort tor yourself.

So with phoning as an autistic difficulty too, you phone them about this. They say you can still come in and we will see how we get on - let's welcome that they have to say that rather than abandon the treatment. But when you are there, they say that because you are alone they can't give the stronger painkiller, so they are more limited in what level they can do the treatment at. Which leaves more question over whether it will work effectively. Clearly the wrong way to organise it. Not equality for us.

Maurice Frank
18 Jan 2020

Citylink's latest shocking consumer standard

CITYLINK has already been a problem for us. The grassroots compilation book by ANS (Autism Network Scotland) that we took part in, An Ordinary Life Too (PDF book link), which became a guide document for the autism strategy, contained an item on Citylink's arrogant period of unilaterally seizing bus passes when they did not work. Giving up the pass is supposed to be a choice, with paying the fare or not travelling on that bus being other choices: yet stories came from No 6 of folks having their passes arrogantly retained by Citylink, then the replacements taking to come in the week validity of the temporary paper one, resulting in the unjustly unplanned cost of days without a pass. We exposed that.

Now look at this, as written to the Transport department. So Citylink now is not even operating with consumer honesty towards folks who book seats in advance, from smaller stops: actually not honouring their travel. So that it can't be used to travel to anything important that is at all time-critical !!

Oct 14 - Most of the Citylink coach routes are a core part of transport, not a fringe part that could be done without, but one of the essentials joining it up. Keeping them in functional existence therefore is an innate part of transport policy, and transport policy would not exist if that was simply left to the operator as a private sector company. If the operation ceases to be to a consumer trustable standard that folks travelling to important things can rely on, then it is a transport policy public matter to arrange that the services are operated by someone else who will follow a consumer trustable standard. That intervention is part of having a transport policy at all.

When folks travel to Glasgow to take part in the work of an organisation like the Autism Network Scotland or any consulting or researching types of work towards social wellbeing or making findings to influence policy, then the transport's reliabliity affects the doing of that work, for all of the sectors of society it concerns. That gets damaged if transport functions without consumer reliability. That combined with how, in work like ANS's on the autism strategy, transport's consumer reliability is one of the topics it includes. Any piece of transport as infrastructurally key as the Citylink routes are, has its reliable existence in any form be an issue of this impacting nature. When a private sector operator abandons consumer reliability, intervention to replace that operator's services becomes a necessity, towards economic functioning, public sector work as described, and public policy.

If what a Citylink driver said on Oct 12 was right, that drivers are ever simply not informed of prereserved bookings by passengers from internediate stops, not informed to prevent a coach from becoming full before if reaches a prebooked passenger and being unable to pick up that passenger, then such a practice places you in that position. According to that driver it applies to stops on the 900 route, Baillieston being the one where it happened. But if it applies there, how much of Citylink's network does it apply to? and can prebooked pick-ups at remote Highland locations where it would be dangerous if not, be relied on safely? Even on the 900, if prebookings are open to dishonouring and fullness can happen, then rightly timed attendance at important occasions, such as impact on public work, ceases to be possible for attenders to plan.

It happened on the 1015 900 from Glasgow. It was full right from starting point. As a result, if no prebookings were known of it was pointless that it still drove via Baillieston, but it did, and found 3 folks there who had prebooked places on this coach, which the driver was now telling them, was full and they could not board.

The driver was fully on their side that they were suffering a wrong: there is nothing against him. But the position he described to them was shocking. That drivers are not told of passenger bookings at its intermediate stops, and can't know to keep seats for them!! Which makes the bookings a consumer falsehood. Those folks had a need to travel at that time, that was why they had booked. That was the product they had bought and relied on honouring of.

My absence from the coach would not have helped a group of 3, but would have helped a passenger who it could not take at Buchanan. As I was travelling to the "Ratho station" stop (to change to a local bus there), there were 2 simultaneous coaches departing at 1015 and I could have been on the AIR instead. As it had a lot of space on it, clearly I should have been on it, instead of occupying another seat on a full 900. When I arrived at Buchanan I actually did board the AIR first. Its driver should have said they were equally good to catch, and taken me. But instead, he told me the 900 was quicker.

If that happens again, I will know from this experience to argue against it. But as I live in the east, it is rare to travel eastward in the morning, so I had no experience to forsee the 900 being full. So I was on the 900 only because I was directed so by the AIR's driver, directing me off a spacious coach and onto a near-full one to other passengers' detriment! Quickness is trivial in that context even if he had been right. In fact he was also wrong about that, as the 900 was the second coach to depart and the incident with the betrayed passengers at Baillieston itself cost all speed advantage over the AIR's detour at Eurocentral, so this 900 was not quicker. I should have been on the AIR by absolutely any argument. The fullness that hit the Baillieston passengers had been contributed to by wrong organising of passengers!

With this of course also complained to Citylink: how does Citylink tell you, and me and those passengers conned by worthless reservations, committally not noncommittally that it is fit to continue to be the trunk route coach operator?

aspies in jam-packed tube trains

We just went to London for a weekend meet-up. It is still aspie unfriendly to travel in. We would be supposed to enjoy its labyrinthine layers of transport modes + its dense frequent services. But the density of human bodies in tube trains, even at weekends, is directly at odds with the autistic problem with crowding. You are jammed in almightily thick dense crowd in a confined space.

We found the buses not a solution to avoiding this tube experience. Despite their nominal frequency they were unpredictable. A 188 caught in Greenwich started with a piece of driver impatience, "you can't walk from here to there?" meaning that when he was backed up behind another bus he had expected us to walk up to him to get on, exactly what they don't let us do in Edinburgh, than himself to have to pull up: even though you must be in the right to await the bus at the stop. Message gone in to Transport For London about that: drivers expecting unannounced things is wrong both for autistics and for folks from other cities!

The info on the stop illogically failed to tell us it went to Canada Water tube, but showed it went to the Elephant + Castle: much further on but on the tube line we wanted. Then an unknown long duration roadworks in Deptford badly slowed it down, it was over by Canada Water so we did not get off there, but straight after there it hit another delay + lane closure because of a mass charity walk that was on around Canada Water/Bermondsey that day. So we had been on this bus over an hour when we abandoned it at Bermondsey tube station, still far from town, had to pick our way through traffic caps + walkers to get into the station, and for a journey in sardine conditions on 2 lines.

Then yesterday, Sunday! We took a 55 successfully from Old Street to the start of Oxford Street for a walk from there which ended up at the Kensington museums, across city from King's Cross where we needed to get our train home. After only 1 other bus use in the day we were still far short of our daily fare cap, in the Oyster fare system, so that tube would cost twice as much as bus. There was no direct bus, but there almost was: 14, to Russell Square, close enough to King's Cross to walk from. But one going to Russell Square never came. In a half hour wait, the only one that came was only going to Piccadilly Circus! So we had to conclude the route was suffering a problem + not running reliably, + to take our tube journey for £3.30 instead of bus for £1.50 - that by TFL's operational failure instead of our choice, causing us a higher fare - and we were in maximum sardines conditions, carriages packed as full as was physically possible to be, the entire way. On a Sunday! and for 9 stops' distance from South Kensington to King's Cross.

We never had it like that in Barcelona. London continues to live with a crazy problem even as it grows its network bigger and bigger. You could not plan to take there and on the tube, any autistic with an inability to cope at all in the presence of big or heaving crowds. As the buses let folks down as we found, they would need the expense of taxis.

A second city centre seems to be emerging by 2022 in the East End, stretching from around the Olympic Park, where some media + Sadlers Wells plan to open bases, to the Canary Wharf which is already the new banking hub. Will it change the transport experience in the older city? Does the tube overcrowding show the city bursting out of itself? Interested by the parallel, that it seems like modern and much bigger scale version, of the history of how Edinburgh added its New Town to its then-overcrowded Old Town.

Maurice Frank
23 Sep 2019

ahead of some curves

In Germany, we have learned from a contact, telling an employer you are aspie is still a no-no, thing to avoid doing. There is still a judgmentality towards conditions that can be read as a weakness in the worker. Yes there is a support scene working on it: but it has not got as far as here with planting an ethic for society to listen to it.

So even after Brexit there will still be pros and cons in favour of either country, and not a one-way case for which is more progressive. In minority needs for workers, we still are. Much as we must look out for erosions of it, and it works more by the motive of good appearances than by any formal fear of employment tribunals, which have already been given legal cost dangers to intentionally weight them against the worker.

Employment coaching in Germany: might help the worker from behind the scenes without the employer being aware of it, or might act as personal development coaches explaining what post will best match the worker's personal needs as they have seen them to be. Workers having such coaches is a thing that seems more familiar in the culture there than here, partly balancing the picture out.