Irrational hatred.

Maybe the internet has ruined me, like how everything is suddenly the male genitals, no matter how much imagination I have tho project onto it (those smiley emoticons take some work), but some days staying inside with my cold unfeeling appliances is still prefareable to being outside with humans.

It's a cold day here, typical northern hemisphere winter, with clear sky's and that festive cheer we're supposed to feel months before the years biggest anticlimax. It is also a Sunday, so while traffic heading into town is number to number, the local shops parking lots (there's three) are devoid of cars. Without the clutter of cars, it becomes immediatly apparent that there isn't even road side trees to try and break up the stark modern landscape and there must be twenty square foot (if not more) of cold bare Tarmac. 

I'm a big fan of nature, not as this thing that we go and stand in for an afternoon before returning to our boxes or something that can be tided neatly into a square with animals that know their space and not invade our space. For me nature is something we exclude, believing it is easily forgotten until we grow it in parks and gardens, showing our might by controlling it and shape it to our whims. Concret curtains should never hide simple natural beauty. It's like we are slapping make up over a girls face to tell her that without shadow and blush she is ugly. 

The simple truth is that nature doesn't need humans, rather humans need it. Nature invades our neat spaces, breaks windows to flourish and cracks mans imitation ground at spread. Standing in the first of these lots, I was struck by the sheer waste, sure people park but even when full the lots are half empty, more reminiscent of waste land than anything managed or controlled, either by nature or humans. 

It speaks to the shortsightedness of humans. We live for such short times that we grab what we can while we can. We have gone from shaping nature, controlling it, in 18th century royal gardens to running rough shod over it, destroying it beyond reason and tipping the balance from humans being battered to nature taking the beating. We mercilessly strip the ground for rescources, destroy jungles that produce oxygen that keeps the earth a life habitable planet, and play petty politics to gain a resource that is worthless without the very thing we destroy, after all money has no buying power if food is unable to grow or water is poisoned.

Big business and people with money are only concerned with money, the gathering of it, the theft of it from others. They, and we, stand on others to gain what we want. The gap is widening all the time between the have and the have nots, and I am lucky that I am one of the haves (in spades). I run my life like a business, I maximise my profit while trying to minimise my output. It is simple evolutionary drive, we don't see what we have, only that which we don't have. When we where hunting wooly mammoths, this was a useful survival need, something that pushed us to our next hunt when we had a full belly. Now, while it is ingrained into us the same way we see Jesus in toast because we are pattern driven, we are free of the lizard brain and can recognise the basic drive and over come it. This is where today's irrational hatred comes from, my local shop is doing a food drive for a food bank. Ok fair it's a good way for said local shop to make extra money running up to Christmas, but I am also a little dismayed to hear that not only is the drive not doing well, but people are asking if the food in the box is free. My partner suggests that this is because the box is badly labeled but even so.  

Many people and governments have recognised we need to dial back the nature destruction, with incentives for Eco homes and solar panels. My energy provider has green options where a levee can be paid for trees, my work manager has suggested we out together a suggestion for buying a plot and growing a forest, something I haven't had time to do, and from enquires to the forestry commission, you need good money to sponsor a forest. It's a pet project I would love to do, a plot of land and a forest, not for profit but just to put back what we take. The idea that the volcano that in 2010 belched carbon into the atmosphere helped the environment by grounding flights that would do more carbon damage is just insane, volcanos not being known for their subtly (ask your local Pompeii resident). 

As they Michael Jackson song says, we should start with the person in the mirror, charity starts at home. This is why I find band aid 30, or whatever it's being called, galling and worse that singers who didn't take part are being forced to defend themselves. First off, if multimillionaire singers are that worried about poverty let them give away their own money, secondly Africa is not one big poverty hole for us to pour money in so that we can feel better about ourselves while we sit in the warmth with our fidges that shop for us and our phones with GPS in case we get lost on the way to the bathroom (and wind up on the seventh plain of hell), and thirdly (yes I'm going after U2 here) in a countries time of need the proud to be Irish band fled to become tax exiles. While gap year students are much maligned for stealing local jobs, sending money with no focus is just as bad. Audits of the first live aid money shows a lot just lined dictators pockets and shored up corrupt juntas. 

I was feeling slightly hopeful halfway through that, but it ends on a him not, so forget this, I'm going back to bed.

First day

So today is important. First off I have just downloaded the blogger app on my new smart phone. Hopefully it won't give me any surprises like revealing my secret identity to the world at large (although most of my readers are my family and it's hard being anonymous to them).
Second, and the reason I download the app, is today is my first nhs physio appointment since my cerebral palsy diagnosis. The wait of over half a year is not really their fault, I am too well apparently for impatient (in both meanings) treatment and I'm guessing there's a long waiting list to am seen as an out patient.
Just to prove how much paper work is involved this is the appointment that my practice nurse (general practice doctors nurse) made for me about a month ago. I received a letter telling me I would be discharged from outpatient physio as I had not attended the original appointment made for me, the letter for which I had not received.
Anyway enough complaining about letters.

I have a long, complex history with physio. Until diagnosis every physio I saw was at a disadvantage. After diagnosis, I saw a private physio. Guess how Much that worked?

The upside to four physio assessments before today is I know my limits. The downside is I still get surprises.

surprise! I need splints.

Sigh.

Another lazy quick post before work.

http://youtu.be/jQ95xlZeHo8

It's a ted talk about Autism and its various presenting factors. Also anyone who thinks I'm a demon, well done your prize is in the post.

Post better later!

The wheat from the chaff.

Right, NO one is callous enough to use that wording, but having read some things on line, that's how it feels. I had vague ideas about this post, like I do every post, before typing takes over and the million voices in my head spill out and I have to cram them all back in before someone decides I need to visit my GP, again. In the last two months, the Tory party have had two fairly prominent figures say outragious things about the disabled and their worth in society. Researching this topic has thrown up a barrage of professional opinions from all of the main stream media and rebuttals from groups and charities with a much higher profile than myself. So with all that in mind: small time annoyances away!!!

The first is Lord Freud, who according to GOV.uk is the undersecretary for state and responsible for welfare reform, decided that disabled people are only worth £2. Anyone who pays any attention will realise that is delightfully lower than the UK minimum wage, which for anyone over 21 is £6.50 and we need to drop right down to the Appretice grade for anything close to Lord Freuds suggestion with a £2.73, and this only applies to apprentices under 19 or those in their first year, and then it becomes National minimum wage. 

To suggest some one, anyone, isn't worth at least the basic equal dignity and respect is abborant and heads us towards Godwin's law rather rapidly. I would rather avoid making obvious, if a little extreme statements, or conservative opinions, or any political opinions, will be variations of well known extremes. To suggest that people who are valuable, integral, and intelligent parts of businesses, or running their own businesses, people who are emotional, feeling, caring humans, aren't worth a minimum wage, which is supposably a living wage, lowers them to a different class. Class drives British society. I do find that generally it is a fictional construct that no one pays attention to, but I have occasionally been treated as not worth someone's time due to a perception as "lower". This, hilariously, isn't usually people with a title, but those who wish to be part of the "gentry". This is going wildly off topic, before I start discussing how WW1 changed the class system forever I am going to veer back on course.  

Often critics of blanket attacks on Muslims say "replace the word in your argument with Jews, and then watch how uncomfortable and unpleasant your point becomes. That is why your argument is invalid." I would ask Lord Frued to do this. Replace your suggestion that disabled people are only worth £2 an hour and with the suggestion that Jews/Muslim/Christian workers are only worth £2 an hour and we will watch the credibility and validity of your argument crumble.

The second comment came from Mr Andrew Selous, MP for South West Bedfordshire (GOV.uk). He stated that disabled people are grateful so work harder. Yes because companies pick their staff through pity and not ability. My manager does joke that I tick the companies diversity policy when we are inspected, and by saying I am gay too catches every box, but this is just a joke and clearly so. Stating that disabled people are grateful and work harder for it ignores the fact that the economy is still tanked and anyone with a job should be grateful, even if not gushingly so. This statement could be seen as a positive, hire disabled people, they work harder type message. 

Disabled workers, like myself, should be hired and supported based on their merits and abilities, not on medical conditions. Diabetics populate every professional field, asthmatics work every day. Disabled people work without flags signalling them to all and sundry. I know of a severely disabled gent who runs his own business using a light writer and business acumen. I know blind people who can buy and sell my ass with very little trouble. A blind man was an MP. 

Saying disabled people are worth less than others and should work harder to be thankful is ignorant and misinformed.

Nearly a whole month.

Time flies apparently. It's that dad joke where a man throws his watch out the window to see time fly.

I wanted to wait to post anything until I got my interview results. I got them two weeks ago, and since then I've been saying "I'll do it a little later." And then a little later becomes two weeks.  I can't seem to decide on a topic. Some bloggers have stuff happen to them regularly and some create content through baking or something on a regular basis, but even though my disabilities are with me all the time, I genuinely don't have things to deal with. My work accepts me, my partner accepts me, my dad forgets that I have multiple disabilities, I forget I have multiple disabilities (case in point when I went to the practice nurse for an Asthma check up, she refered me to nuero physio, as the practices new goal is to promote nuero care. First she saw my name on the list and wondered why, then when she spoke to nuero disability on the phone in my presence and listed the various interesting abilities, I genuinely wondered who she was referring to. That reminds me, need to book in to see the gp). 

There are many things I want to blog about, primarily the precieved war on the disabled by the current government. Because I do not need a second bedroom for a carer, and do not recieve any government assistance in the form of benefits, I have not been directly affected by cuts that could be seen as a war. This means that while I could write a blog about unchecked personal opinions and what flashes up on my news feed (not that I'm a paranoid conspiracy theorist but some times I like more than one opinion and view point to inform my life), I think a fact checked, if a little biased, post would do more justice to the blog and maybe actually raise some valid points. Don't get me wrong, I would love to be the first, which I won't be because I am late to the party, to raise a shield to defend those who need it, but it needs to be evidence based. 

In my opinion, something that's apparently dangerous on the internet, there has been a subtle attack on those on benefits, through shows like "Benefits Street" and perhaps even "Jeremy Kyle". Any such reality TV through the key hole type show is bound to pick things that score ratings, either by making us feel superior or by simply trying to raise our choler at where our money might be potentially going. It's the same with shows about benefits frauds and migrants. Yes fair, there will always be cheats and frauds and people coming to steal the things we work hard for but on the whole people are not monsters. But we can be convinced they are. During times of war, governments try to convince us the people in the village over the hill eat their children and sacrifice goats to some abhorrent god. Then as soon as war is over, each side has to convince the other that they are just like each other. 

The easiest example is that militant fighters in Iraq where told US marines had to kill a baby to become a Marine. This shows that life is precious to everyone, if an US citizen was told Muslims have to kill a baby to become a militant, they would be outraged. This is simply the reverse. Watch the dash cams from Russia. They help push cars out of ditches and little old ladies to cross the road, just like anyone in the UK would, but thanks to aggressive policy, we need to see them as the "enemy". 

On a more local level, as Nigel Farage put it, "would you want Romanians to move next door to you?". That is the most awful scare mongering, and my honest answer is "i don't really care". That's an awful lot of people to sweep up in one statement. I know loads of Romanians in work and I would say they are decent nice people. It's a bit like asking the Germans would they like Brits living next door? Well maybe or maybe not. Are they the well educated types who are frightfully polite or are they the louts we get on holidays who steal sun beds (it's a recent poll that Germans believe English to hog sun beds). 

And this brings me back to benefits. Sure theres people on TV who get benefits and smoke six packs a day and don't want to do volunteer work for benefits but are they the majority? If you watch the "cat calling" video from NYC there's no white men in it, and this is explained as bad editing, what the white men said wasn't clear, or off camera, so they didn't make the cut. Equally I bet for any sort of benefits Britain trype reality show, they cut twenty people who are  honest down on their luck people who have just been dealt a bad hand and need a bit of support for the one person who has five different baby daddies and smokes like a cigarette factory on fire which will make people upset (rightly or wrongly). It bumps up TV ratings and like it or not promotes the government line of we need to cut benefits because that's where it goes. 

  

 Mean while, in my own life, things are certainly looking up. I got the job, something I have yet to annouce on anything resembling a "public" forum due to there not being ink on paper yet. This is certainly another step forward, even if it's all gone a bit Game of Thornes with the "you win or you die" type concept about the three month probation.

Living on my own is still a struggle to some degree, and my partner came to help me clean again over the weekend. I should have a clean as you go policy but then I come in late from work or something and I make food and it all goes from there. At the moment however, I appear to have carpet.......

So, my lovely viewers, I shall leave you here while I go and try to research interesting and evidence based post about benefits cuts. Thank you for reading.