dangerously random ceasing to function by old bus passes

In bus pass renewals, there has continued for years, I found out last time round, an extremely dangerous system for all vulnerable passholder groups. After the renewal application goes in, you don't know in how many days your old pass will stop working, it's supposed to be a few, but happens without any check or confirmation on whether your new pass actually has arrived. Because folks are not alerted to this either, they can be using their old pass in good faith, far from home, when suddenly at any time of day it stops working.

This happened to me, randomly late afternoon in Leith, in my last renewal 3 years ago. That is why at this renewal, to fight this system and not accept this danger I have only put the application in at last minute before my pass expires, meaning I will take some days perhaps a week without a pass. In fact, I was lucky to find out that the council's "One Edinburgh" office, who issue the passes, closes at 3:00 on Fridays, and a decent hub library who would do the renewal by emailing them after that hour. So that it will not yet be seen or acted on during the weekend, hence should not affect my pass until after its expiry. It has still worked this morning - posting this on the bus in for today's ELAS.

Both Transport Scotland and the One Edinburgh office deny any power or say over when old passes stop working, nor do they say or appear to even know exactly who does work it, who there ethically should be public contact details for. According to that council office, the system is even worse now. They are now saying, that from as soon as the application is made, the old pass can stop working at unpredictably any time, and they have encountered cases where it happened immediately. This hammered in with insultingly excessive repeatings of the word "unfortunately" to pass buck and deny having any control over it. But this is while the MyGov site at mygov.scot/disabled-bus-pass/replace still says it takes a few days.

So instead of asserting a worse position than is MyGov's public info, this council office can, and ethically should, hold Transport Scotland or MyGov to that info to be accurate: contest the present unpredictability, on passholders' behalf, and tell passholders also who exactly to challenge as responsible for it. Lobbied to councillor on the transport committee.

Maurice Frank
31 May 2025

Jun 14 -
Councillor Kevin Lang, Almond ward, fine achievement to obtain this more definite info on deactivating old passes 7 days from a renewal application. This is One Edinburgh's answer to him -

NEC bus passes when renewed or replaced trigger de-activation of existing cards as a matter of course. However the timescales vary.

Lost or stolen cards and "hot-listed" as soon as possible after report.

Bus passes that are due to expire and need renewal, are either de-activated 7 days after a new card has been ordered or sooner if the expiry date printed on the card is within the 7 days. New bus passes can take up to 7 days to arrive, but most are delivered within two to three working days after application.

If a cardholder gets in touch about 7- 10 days before the current card expires with the relevant documentation to prove continued eligibility they should not be without free bus during the renewal process.

Bus passes may stop working if they become faulty, this can happen at any time, including during the renewal process.Human error can happen, so for instance if a card requiring renewal was incorrectly recorded as lost, it would cease to work as noted above.

The National Entitlement Card Programme Office in Dundee (NECPO) oversees the issuing authorities on behalf of Transport Scotland. NECPO may be the undisclosed agency referred to. NECPO have a feed back form and information about how to make a formal complaint at https://www.nec.scot/contact

using fresh water

The best type of vindication is when it comes by itself, when there was nothing you could do to make it come. When events for other folks show your idea was right, or when folks who have not heard a controversial thought from you come up with it themselves. Because that is objective evidence for its reasonability. It corroborates your reasoning.

Yesterday's ELAS meet let me see other folks, by themselves, producing and sharing the thought that baths don't feel quite logically clean, because you are covering yourself all over in the same water as the worst of your body. Shit actually mentioned. How the unpleasantness of your body's dirtiest point, the back passage, is in the same water as the rest of you. Added to that they take up more time. This about bath water is against hygienic common sense and makes them a less attractive choice than other washing methods: including, than either showers or strip washes at the sink.

This when I had never mentioned baths, so that it came at no prompting from me. Yet it is exactly the same insight as I argued in teenage to the staff of my adolescent unit, to their great hostility and contrary dogmatic certainty. Harvey Jones Adolescent Unit, Cardiff, 1980s, proved wrong. Proved that thoughts they arrogantly rubbished as personally aberrant and wrong are there in other people's common sense reasoning. following logically from simple factual observation.

Authoritarians towards youth are found wrong again as they always are.

Maurice Frank
17 Jul 2022

WANTING TO HEAR IS OBLIGATORY IN A SUPPORT SCENE

SUPPORT, by definition, includes automatically caring about any perceived-unfair experience anywhere for anyone who you share a support circle with, e.g. fellow member of ELAS. That vulnerabilites are involved and suicidalities could ever be triggered by not following this, rightly forces your hand to agree it - that is the good strong way to hold fairness ethics in place.

Because presumption of innocence matters equally strongly the obligation does not include having to accept at the upset person's word that the place they are upset with is guilty. They have to be simultaneous, and to explain that: observing presumption of innocence towards the upset-with party, and besides that, supportiveness towards the upset party. Holding that their experience MATTERS.

It is always a breach of support to say that any person's social trauma ever matters less than some wider social convenience for yourself. Now, important progress, we can say this also breaches vulnerable groups' safe space. That is a point of law on the honesty of safety + supportiveness in absolutely any aspie organisation. On both counts it illegally risks prompting suicidality. You commit this breach if you ever, ever, tell someone with a grievance against an organisation or service, that your own good experience of that organisation or service makes you upset to hear their angle and that they should not say it. If you tell them that your preexisting belief that the organisation does good work and has done for you, means they should not say anything to you against that organisation.

It is unscrupulous ever to tell anyone that, + if is an abuse crime to do it in a support group. Impacting unfairly on every witness of it as well as the victim. Why is it these things? Because it rejects an unjust experience from getting heard and supported. It's a form of "I'm all right Jack." It announces that your happy good perception shall selfishly kick aside someone else's real situation + suffering, shall annul it from mattering.

Whatever organisation or group you defend when you do this evil, you turn it into a cult. For non-hearing of criticism is a cult situation - and an exploitation relationship, which is another point of the vulnerability law. It does the abuse of making a person feel gagged about their own maltreatment if they want to stay in social favour.

In the Jehovah's Witnesses, members are instructed never to listen to any criticism of their organisation, to automatically believe it comes from Satan! Combined with which, dissension from the leadership's instructions can result in "disfellowshipping", which means complete social cutting off of speaking terms by everyone. To take part in the shunning is itself one of the instructions that it can be a disfellowshipping offence to break! Which set-up obviously keeps their leadership from having any accountability at all from their followers, for anything they decide or do. If obviously works as a social trap upon everyone who has joined JW and complied with its instruction to drop their social ties outside it. Several controlling religions have disfellowshipping, it was the Plymouth Brethren who invented it, Scientologists call it disconnecting.

ELAS in fact has submitted to parliament that there is a public health duty for disfellowshipping to be banned. This was when new science on physical health effects of loneliness prompted a parliamentary consultation on it, in 2015, which ELAS was actually invited to respond to.

So look at the total parallel that is committed, when any aspies declare that their own good experience and opinion of a particular autism service makes them not want the upset of hearing another aspie's bad or critical experience of it. It sets up exactly the same silencing and hiding of any problems at all, as in a cult. It puts the service's managers beyond accountability. But no service, no matter how much good it does, ever deserves that loyal level of character trust. Only with accountability are malpractices + abuses deterred. Compare with the church child abuse scandals where there has been loyal trust in clergy's character. Compare it with patriotism: why is patriotism a discredited nonsense? Because it was the same loyalty to accept, or to refuse belief in, bad things from leaders, and that produced some: produced big wealth disparities and the horrors of WW1. No matter how good a particular government does, democracy always needs to watch out for it doing any bad. Consider whistleblowers, from Chelsea Manning to Peter Gregson's local campaign for them in Edinburgh council. No matter how well an institution is running, blind trust in its character will allow the types of hidden wrongs to happen that whistleblowers are needed to stop. You are a self-endangering fool if you reject the whistleblowing and declare that you would rather comfortably believe your council us above criticism because your own life is okay. When it stops being okay, you will have nowhere to turn, exactly because YOU TOOK AWAY FROM OTHERS ANYWHERE TO TURN.

That is the sheer

• folly for themself,
• maltreatment of others,
• irrationality, of openly announcing a choice to live in fantasy,
• human nastiness,

committed by any aspie who tells another not to speak ill of a particular service or organisation. That is why, on pain of several points of vulnerable groups' law, no ethical support society can ever stand for that wrong.

Maurice Frank
8 Jul 2019

voicing into the autism strategy, so we must stay visibly organised

Facebook link for it coming soon. Already linked from the autism strategy's site by this link, because it is a document attached to the autism strategy. A grassroots sourced guide of what real life situations for aspies it has to address, for effectiveness of all services. Thus is the Autism Network Scotland's compilation An Ordinary Life Too. From many aspies in Scotland as contributors, and the editing team's membership overlapped ELAS.

That is what ANS has been about: grassroots input into the policy system for us. Scotland seems to be where this model is best developed in the world. In the 10 years it has run, it has succeeded as an experiment and a principle: proud to be part of that.

What a contrast with the failure rate, throughout Britain, for independently organised aspie local societies. Their number in Scotland is declining. According to an ELAS member who has observed the trend, "all over Britain AS support groups had started, and folded when their members were tired of one another." To get tired of the countrywide mass and scene of your fellow aspies is a really nasty thing to do and increases vulnerability. You don't get fellow aspies' empathy and understanding in NT society, dammit. Aspie Village keeps a national aspie scene in existence, but a successful networked scene of UNCORRUPT local societies, with constitutions tying them to standards of personal fairness and no instant or arbitrary rejections, and the standard protections of minorities, is what we need to stand up for ourselves at a practical level everywhere, and not be reliant on the arrogant self-interested NAS.

ELAS has just crossed a line of failure as a self-reliant independent group, as a dispute over honouring of ethics and fairness has made it cease to be possible to have an impartial and ethically spotless chair from within the group, and need to have Autism Initiatives workers take the chair. It is a milestone of scene contraction, that underlines the need for conscientious group fairness ethics at all times, to underpin all aspie societies. No excuse for anyone ever to assert toughly spoken brute views of reality and limits to willingness to adhere to fairness, or to claim there ever exists any reason for anyone's personal fainess to be sacrificed for a group's expediency - those are violations of vulnerability. When local societies are proper tied down ethically safe spaces, where all know that nobody, officeholders included, can get away with doing a dirty on you, then there is less motive for anyone to get tired of it. For the aspie scene and nationally networked community to be sustained, much less grown, it needs to be worthwhile, means reliably nice and caring, for the folks taking part in it. That's a no-brainer.

Fibromyalgia can co-occur with autism or in the same families at it, though curiously the gender balance of its prevalence is the reverse of autism's. Liaison with a friend with it has confirmed that its recognition as a disability is accurate and wanted, and brings really practical benefits and helps with establishing practical disability entitlements. So that this petition to class fibromyalgia as a disability picked up from another aspie contact, is worth your support. To share it is an example of practical good from a sustained aspie scene, from us caring not to tire of it !!

NAS slaps aspie grassroots in the face again

The multiple signed letter to the NAS's trustees, just last year, on ordinary aspies' dissatisfaction with NAS's lack of accountability and responsiveness towards us, us on whose behalf NAS supposedly exists, might never have happened. NAS's Scottish director Jenny Paterson has shown, openly in her emailed reply to an enquiry from ELAS, that the big charity culture continues as determined as ever to seek to get away with arrogance.

This is a one-off answer, which an ELAS enquiry on their general standard of responding to contacts extracted. It followed 7 months of total silence from her towards the personal contact previously made. Hence it does not follow a spurt of correspondence. Yet she is rude enough to write a bureaucrats’ closure, a proclamation of final answer:
"this is my final position on our campaigning plans and priorities, and I am unable to offer any further assistance regarding child authorship."

Even nasty bureaucrats usually only do that after a spurt of correspondence when they have run out of evasions. She does it in her one-off late answer to something she had simply sat silent on for 7 months. See how aggressive that is? Hostile to an issue of maltreated aspie kids, an agenda the whole time against them and doing anything for them. Also she does this deviously so as never to actually answer what she was asked! For she was asked simply to mention that wronged child authors exist, in every literature that mentions or advertises successful child authors. That is not campaigning that needs any resources or time priorities allocated to it. She answers only to the practicality of big extra campaigning then rudely shuts down all contact with her on child authors at all, KNOWINGLY LEAVING NEVER ANSWERED THE SIMPLE NO-EFFORT ACTION THEY CAN TAKE!

Even her timing is sneaky: she sent this email on Sep 20, just 2 days AFTER the Autism Europe conference here in Edinburgh, which had NAS involvement, had ended. Avoiding this being out as an issue at conference time.

All autism workers and projects: you can’t ethically afford any connection with NAS, with an organisation that behaves like this.