‘Not Yet Defeated’: 1,000+ March for Climate Justice at COP27

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Republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

People participate in the Global Day of Action Climate Justice March at COP27 on November 12, 2022 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. (Photo: Gertie Goddard/Greenhouse Communications via Twitter)

“COP27 needs to be a turning point for the climate crisis,” said one activist.

KENNY STANCILNovember 12, 2022

Hundreds of people rallied Saturday at the United Nations COP27 summit in Egypt to demand the fundamental political-economic transformations required to achieve climate justice.

“There can be no climate justice without human rights,” declared the COP27 Coalition, an alliance of progressive advocacy groups that planned the protest as part of its push for “an urgent response from governments to the multiple, systemic crises” facing people around the world. “We are not yet defeated!”

“We march today as part of the global day of action,” Janet Kachinga, spokesperson for the COP27 Coalition, said in a statement. “Solidarity is the cornerstone of climate justice.”

https://twitter.com/ActionAid/status/1591409380007858177?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1591409380007858177%7Ctwgr%5Ee407071973c19dd5d7c81054882853c69c37bfee%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2F2022%2F11%2F12%2Fnot-yet-defeated-1000-march-climate-justice-cop27

“We are marching inside the U.N. space to highlight that our movements are unable to march freely on the streets of Egypt,” said Kachinga.

Ahead of COP27, human rights groups denounced Egypt’s repression of dissidents, including hunger-striking political prisoner Alaa Abd El Fattah. Since the conference began last week in the resort city of Sharm El-Sheikh, Egyptian officials have been accused of spying on and otherwise intimidating participants.

“We refuse to greenwash the Egyptian government’s denial of the right to freedom of association, assembly, and speech by marching in a government-controlled march in the streets of Sharm El-Sheikh,” Kachinga continued.

Instead, from inside a designated Blue Zone governed by U.N. rules, activists sought “to lift up the voices and demands of all our frontline communities and movements facing repression because they dream of a better world,” said Kachinga.

https://twitter.com/EarthRightsIntl/status/1591385029166628865?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1591385029166628865%7Ctwgr%5Ee407071973c19dd5d7c81054882853c69c37bfee%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2F2022%2F11%2F12%2Fnot-yet-defeated-1000-march-climate-justice-cop27

“We are at a crossroads of overlapping crises and governments are not on track to stop the worst of the climate crisis,” said Kachinga. “COP27 needs to be a turning point for the climate crisis, and not a moment to silence people.”

The U.N. recently published a series of reports warning that as a result of woefully inadequate emissions reductions targets and policies, there is “no credible path to 1.5°C in place,” and only “urgent system-wide transformation” can prevent temperatures from rising a cataclysmic 3°C by century’s end.

“Solidarity is the cornerstone of climate justice.”

According to the latest data, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide—the three main heat-trapping gases fueling global warming—hit an all-time high in 2021, and greenhouse gas emissions have only continued to climb this year.

Despite overwhelming evidence that new fossil fuel projects will lead to deadly climate chaos, oil and gas corporations are still planning to expand dirty energy production in the coming years, including in Africa.

“The call for greater oil and gas production is completely out of step with climate science,” Jeni Miller, executive director of the Global Climate and Health Alliance, said Friday in a statement. “Presented as a necessity for development, new investments in fossil fuel infrastructure would instead simply lock a new generation into these dirty fuels, at a time when clean energy is viable and ready to be scaled.”

“The rightful need of people in low- and middle-income countries for access to energy—for clean cooking, for healthcare, for education, for jobs, and many other key determinants of health—must not bring with it the health costs associated with fossil fuels,” Miller added. “It is vital that high-income countries provide financial support for the transition in low- and middle-income countries.”

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Among the key demands of the COP27 Coalition is that the rich nations most responsible for causing the climate crisis “fulfill their obligations and fair shares by reducing their emissions to zero and providing poorer nations the scale of financial support needed to address the crisis.”

The coalition argues that “repayment should include adaptation, loss and damage, technology transfer, and factor in debt cancellation for vulnerable countries [that] have been impoverished while dealing with the impacts of the climate crisis.”

A recent U.N.-backed report estimates that poor nations will need a combined total of $2.4 trillion per year by 2030 to fight the climate emergency—including funding for mitigation, adaptation, and loss and damage.

“Unless more urgency is shown, marches will only be the start.”

A separate analysis from Carbon Brief reveals the extent of wealthy countries’ failures to mobilize far smaller sums of money to support sustainable development and enable equitable responses to escalating extreme weather disasters.

Since the COP15 meeting in 2009, developing countries have been promised that rich nations would provide at least $100 billion in climate aid each year by 2020. However, just over $83 billion was delivered in 2020, the most recent year for which data is available. The Global North is not expected to hit its annual target, widely regarded as insufficient, until 2023.

The U.S. is most responsible for the shortfall, providing less than $8 billion toward the $100 billion figure in 2020. That constitutes a mere 19% of the country’s approximately $40 billion “fair share,” or what it should be paying based on its cumulative contribution to global greenhouse gas pollution.

U.S. President Joe Biden has vowed to allocate $11.4 billion per year toward international green finance by 2024—less than 2% of the annual Pentagon budget and still far less than Washington’s fair share—but congressional lawmakers approved just $1 billion in a $1.5 trillion spending bill passed earlier this year.

When it comes to the U.N.-backed loss and damage fund, just a handful of high-polluting countries have pledged a combined total of around $250 million so far, a tiny fraction of the $31.8 trillion that the world’s 20 wealthiest economies collectively owe the Global South, according to the Climate Clock, a recently unveiled display at COP27.

“The science of climate breakdown has never been clearer, and seeing the suffering of my fellow Africans facing drought and famine, the impacts have never been more painful,” said Mohamed Adow, a representative of the COP27 Coalition.

“It’s no wonder that people are rising up across the world to make their voices heard that they will not stand for inaction from their leaders,” Adow continued. “Unless more urgency is shown, marches will only be the start.”

“Today we rise as a people, despite the restrictions, to demand our collective rights to a livable future,” said environmental justice champion Nnimmo Bassey. “We demand payment of the climate debt accumulated by centuries of dispossession, oppression, and destruction.”

“We need a COP led by the people and not polluters,” Bassey continued, alluding to the massive presence of fossil fuel lobbyists at the meeting. “One that rejects ecocidal, neocolonial false solutions that will widen the emissions gap, burn Africa and sink small island states, and further entrench environmental racism and climate injustice!”

Republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Continue Reading‘Not Yet Defeated’: 1,000+ March for Climate Justice at COP27

Carry on Blogging

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Image by Lichty 1994 features – I think – Madonna wearing Micky Mouse ears.
There is a caption embedded in the image reading
‘Fascination is the extreme intensity of the neutral’.

There’s a lot to explain …

My first website / blog – from 1998/9 – is mostly archived at https://geocities.restorativland.org/Athens/Olympus/1833/index.htm. Warning: the link to the ctheory site from the New diary page links to a site concerned with ‘toto’. I had no idea what toto was either. The ctheory<dot>com address was originally the Ctheory site concerned with Frankfurt School philosophy.

There is a page missing, called ‘deep DT’s first statement on race’ or something similar. It was an argument against racism, claiming that races do not exists since genes are so mixed. It’s a snapshot too so that the New Diary page that I claimed changes often but actually only occasionally changed often is a snapshot. I regard it as amoung the earliest blogs (weblogs) because that New Diary page changed i.e. had it’s commentary updated which is the essential element of a blog.

Geocities provided a minimal interface. I would create pages editing HTML before uploading to geocities. There were simple wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) code editors to create webpages then but they were crude and limited. CTRL-U or a similar command (press the CTRL and U keys together in your browser) allows you to see the simple HTML code.

Geocities was a very early part of the web that allowed individuals to crate websites and I think that it was for free. The geocities websites were popular. You can see some of my neighbouring websites at geocities here. Fascinating.

The geocities webpages were purchased by – I think – yahoo and shut down. It is only within the past few years that the historical archives have appeared.

I campaigned against the USUK second Bush-Iraq war that started in early 2003 using the usenet nntp messaging system. It is very similar to the original arpanet system of the earliest internet used by universities and may be an evolution of it. It was very powerful being monitored by governments and big news sites. Many of my posts can be seen in this listing (the first few pages). [13/11/22 I didn’t realise that the ‘Highway’ post was there initially. Google has censored it now, WTF are they afraid of?]

I also campaigned against the Iraq war starting 2003 in person. One of Stop The War coalitions slogans at the time was “Not in my name” and I would often be carrying a poster with that phrase. I was getting harassed by former boss of the Metropolitan Police and Tony Blair’s butler Ian Blair during this time.

I was still using usenet at the G8 protests in Scotland in July 2005. The London tube explosions of 7 July 2005 happened at the end of the G8 events in Scotland. I have produced an analysis of these explosions called the UNOFFICIAL NARRATIVE and there’s a link to the July 7 truth campaign on my blogroll. I concluded that they were dust explosions and that there were no terrrists.

to be continued

12 Nov 2022

So far: First website / blog archived at https://geocities.restorativland.org/Athens/Olympus/1833/index.htm, Then Usenet (NNTP, Network News Transfer Protocol) messages e.g. this listing (the first few pages).

EFF image reads "Liberty waits on your fingers" and "keep on blogging".

I started using a blogging service provided by the Canadian host host cjb in January 2006. The url was blogs<dot>cjb<dot>net/dissident and some archives are available on the Wayback machine. cjb blog hosting was free again worked quite well except that there was a small limit to the size of posts (1kb ?) which I often hit. We’re getting closer to a conventional blog with that classic blog layout which I really like – a sidebar on the right with links to earlier posts. Results from a search on the wayback machine (some of them are quite poor with missing elements).

The very first post of 6 January 2006 is missing from the Wayback machine. It was “It’s an honour to join the dissident bloggers” mostly referring to Craig Murray’s blog.

Some posts disappeared from this blog – I suspect forcibly removed by the UK government or Metropolitan Police under Ian Blair. It’s a political blog attacking Blair’s and Cameron’s later Libservative governments and doing original investigative research into the London explosions and the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes. I appear to have established that Jean Charles de Menezes was murdered. I posted elsewhere and the server was snatched by British Transport Police shortly after my posting. It appears that the posting has resurfaced and accepted by many as proving that JCdM was murdered.

I moved away from this blog to the paid host tsohosts after the pages disappeared and cjb claimed to know nothing about it and no backups. With a paid host I got the domain name onaquietday<dot>org.

I started with this current host in March 2022 because I was disappointed with the service at my previous host. They were bought by a bigger player and suffered with poorer performance and service. I am very pleased with my current host – speed, support and value are excellent.

I moved the content of my previous blog to this one when I moved so please feel free to look about. There’s a search box and categories on the right hand side.

Suppose that I should provide some blogging instruction …

to be continued

14/11/22 One from the archives

EFF image reads "Liberty waits on your fingers" and "keep on blogging".

August 14, 2006 – THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE: Reality is negotiated


A while ago I promised “the truth is out there” series of articles to promote conspiracy theories. Here’s a start.

Everyone has their own truth and their truth will be largely dictated by their perspective and disposition. Individuals with hugely different lifestyles, experiences and motivations will have hugely different ‘truths’ or pattern of beliefs, values, attitudes, prejudices, etc.

Reality is negotiated between different actors. New Labour seem to have incorporated this processs of negotiation into its policy-making and this was explicitly stated in the early New Labour period. This probably applies only to New Labour policies that are not not negotiable e.g. rabid Neo-Conservatism / Neo-Liberalism and Crypto-Fascism. New Labour know fully well that certain outcomes are favourable to themselves, their interests and purposes and they engage using lies and deception. We know that they lie – they have been caught out endless times.

The difference with Blair, Reid & Co is that they’re shameless and so don’t care – or perhaps don’t need to care – when they are caught out lying since they have never been held to account for their actions. This is deliberate – they actively evade accountability and responsibility for their actions.

My approach to reality is that there is one ‘real’ reality that is perceived and interpreted differently by different actors. When things happen, those things really happened but then the process of negotiation starts.

New Labour do not share this approach. They believe that reality can be negotiated, remoulded, renegotiated, reinterpreted or even censored long after the event. Their approach is remarkably similar to Orwell’s concept of ‘doublethink’ and betrays their shallowness and absence of any real values. For Blair, since reality is infinitely renegotiable, lying and deception is just a part of achieving what He wants.

“The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. … To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.” Orwell, George (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Much of this derives from narcissist Blair. Blair has certainty in the total absence of any supporting evidence – even when there is plenty of evidence supporting contrary positions. How is this possible? Does it mean that He has special insight denied the rest of us common mortals? Does it mean that He can ‘feel’ the truth? Does He have powers denied to us mere mortals? Or perhaps He’s simply a sad, pathetic nutjob?

Although much of this derives with Blair, the Labour party cannot escape its responsibilities and blame.

more on conspiracy theories, Blair, New Labour and Fascism soon

EFF image reads "Liberty waits on your fingers" and "keep on blogging".

14/11/22 Another one from the archives. John Reid is saying that suspected terrorists should be killed and Keir Starmer’s current Labour Party has been saying the same recently. So here’s the reality: if John Reid or Keir Starmer want somebody killed … they assign the status of (call them) a suspected terrorist and kill them. [15/11/22 Actually and as in the case of the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes, they murder them and then lie profusely including calling them a suspected terrorist to justify the murder. ]

Angela Rayner: police should ‘shoot terrorists and ask questions second’

September 29, 2006 – Evil Fascist John Reid is just plain wrong

Blair’s speech “The first rule of politics: there are no rules.”

Of course there are rules – they’re called laws. What Blair means is that they have ruled as though there were no laws.

Reid must stand for PM to protect himself and the Blairites from the cells.


Evil Fascist John Reid’s speech

“It cannot be right that the rights of an individual suspected terrorist be placed above the rights, life and limb of the British people.It’s wrong. Full stop.
No ifs. No buts. It’s just plain wrong.”
Even if that suspected terrorist is a suspected terrorist only for his legitimate political activities that should be protected in a tolerant society?
But what about the suspected terrorists you have already killed or shot evil Dr. Reid? They were innocent. Do you undertand what is meant by innocent evil Dr. Reid? That’s one of our values but obviously not one of New Labour’s values.

It’s just plain wrong that evil Dr. Reid put right-wing death squads on the streets of London.
to be continued
EFF image reads "Liberty waits on your fingers" and "keep on blogging".

16 November 2022. Let’s crack on with this. So far we’ve established that I am an experienced blogger. Today I’ll deal with the practicalities of setting up a blog and hopefully tomorrow we’ll discuss this blog post that I did recently. So the rest of this blog post is technical at a below novice blogger level about how to blog. Please avoid if not interested.

What you need to blog

Firstly, you need some sort of computer. You’re reading this so you’ve got access to something.

I have difficulties using a smartphone for blogging but know that some of you are wizards on them. If it’s all you’ve got it will do and you’ll improve with practice.

A tablet will work fairly well. My preference is a laptop or desktop puter running debian Linux. Shared puters are available at libraries, schools and universities, expect that you can find something.

Secondly, you need blog hosting. This is where your blog is kept and served to the internet. While you are able to do this yourself by installing a webserver, I would not recommend it because it will be slow with extremely limited bandwidth and very complex to set up and administer.

Speed, Support, Security

Hosting is free, cheap or more expensive. I would and do go for cheap but there are other considerations. You want a fast host because you lose viewers if your site is slow to load. You want a host with good support because you’re likely to need it. Free 24 hour support is the one to go for. You want a host that has some concern for and regular security practices including backups. More expensive is simply more expensive without any advantages over cheap and good.

I much prefer Linux based hosting because that’s what I’m familiar with. You will eventually need to execute commands on the server host so it helps if you’re familiar with the host system.

The best way to select a blog host is to read reviews and compare and contrast. Make sure it provides everything that you need. Shared hosting is fine. I recommend my current host (and they’ve got a very good offer on atm) – it’s for you to find out who that is ;) Free is probably slow and limited in some ways e.g. no domain name, I suppose acceptable if you just wanted to try at first.

Many web hosts attract new bloggers with a free domain name offer. It’s worth spending some time choosing a name. Onaquietday is not ideal because it clashes with Arundhati Roy’s statement that it pays tribute to — ‘Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.’ You get stuck with a name so give it some thought and decide what extension you want.

Watch out for extras that are sold with webhosting e.g. SSL certificates. You often don’t need those extras and they can be confusing. Try asking the host before signing up: Do I need that? What does it do? and do your own online research.

Costs

Hosting will cost a few $/E/£s a month, year or some other period. You will need to buy a domain name if it’s not included – up to $/E/£20 or so and up to $/E/£20 every 2 years to renew (keep) the domain name. I always used to get charged every 2 years to renew, looks like some hosts are charging every year.

Don’t worry about different currencies – just pay and it will get converted. You will need a credit or debit card and expect that a prepaid debit card will work. If not try elsewhere.

Blogging Platform

Blogging platforms are often a CMS – Content Management System – tweaked to be a blogging platform and this is a further consideration when selecting a blogging host. The most popular and the platform I use is WordPress. Other blogging platforms are available e.g. Joomla, Drupal or Ghost. It’s probably worth searching for a simple blogging platform and see what’s out there.

How to Create a Blog With Joomla

WordPress comes with a default theme – the theme being an interface between WordPress and the creator and between WordPress and how it appears to users. I updated from the default theme to the free (no cost) OceanWP theme because I needed better performance on mobile devices especially phones. I particularly needed reactive text (text that wraps to the screen size as it is resized).

Use a ‘staging website’ before making any changes.The staging website is a copy of your blog that is not publicly accessible. Test changes on it until you learn how to apply those changes to achieve what you want. You then need to apply those changes without any mistakes to the live blog or restore the staging website to the live blog if it’s all there with only the changes you want. You then need to delete the staging website and reload the cache.

Worpress uses plugins to alter it’s fuctionality. I use Akismet – an anti-spam comments filter, a lazy-load plugin that prevents loading of images until the user approaches them, a few extras for the OceanWP theme that I use, Yoast SEO which I tend to ignore and a 2-factor authentication plugin for extra security. I don’t use a caching plugin because I think that caching is already incorporated into the host server. It all seems to work well.

Posts are categorised and possibly tagged to help people search through posts. It essentially just groups similar posts together.

It’s worth watching a few vids and maybe read a few articles to learn how your blogging platform works. Search when you run into a problem – it’s very likely that many people have had that exact problem before. Your blogging platform will take some learning but just publish and get it out there, you’ll improve with experience.

Copyrighted and other content

This is a rough guide, not to be relied on as an authoritative statement of law.

You own the copyright on your own original work. Content on the web is usually owned by the publishing organisation and you’re only permitted to quote short, selected excerpts while providing a clear link to the original source. There is an exception for derived works but it needs to be more than trivial changes.

Content published under Creative Commons licences needs to be copied exactly, clearly attributed with details of the creative commons licence used. You are able to alter CC content to produce derived works, check the details for yourself.

Content published as press releases can be used as you like without attribution although I often do. I suggest that you respect any embargo requested.

As a less experienced blogger I used to quote newspaper articles at length. I got pulled up on it once by the Independent newspaper. As a rule of thumb I quote 3 paragraphs of a newspaper article. I sometimes quote more, especially two sections from different parts of a long article. The source are unlikely to be that concerned – you’re sending traffic to them through a clear link after all and news gets stale. I try to avoid linking to content that is restricted in some way e.g. a paywall or registration needed.

I never used to be concerned about images and just used them. There are many copyrighted images on this blog used without attribution. Image search engines often have an option to search for images under a creative commons licence so I do try to find them.

In the final analysis I am a not-for-profit blogger so that I am not profiteering through using others’ content and don’t have any money. You won’t get sued if you don’t have any money or other assets.

EFF image reads "Liberty waits on your fingers" and "keep on blogging".

16 November 2022

To finish this Carry on Blogging post, we’ll take a look at a recent post of mine Mayor of London Sadiq Khan condems Just Stop Oil, presents a climate change speech in Buenos Aires and claims credit for dispatching Liz Truss. I quite enjoyed doing that one.

First off, it’s a pretty good title don’t you think?

The post starts with Mayor of London Sadiq Khan condemning Just Stop Oil. In the video calls the protests unlawful and unsafe and says:

“I think – you know – stopping ambulances getting to an emergency, stopping fire engines getting to a fire, stopping police cars going to prevent crime isn’t the way to make your case …”

Khan is parroting earlier comments made by UK Labout party leader Keith Starmer on LBC. He said

“I particularly think about the images we’ve seen of ambulances coming down the road, not being able to get through because people have glued themselves to the road.”

“I think it’s arrogant of those glueing themselves to the road to think they’re the only people that have got the answer to this. They haven’t got the answer.”

So I looked for those “images of ambulances coming down the road” and found this one where – despite the title – Just Stop Oil clear out of the way to let an ambulance pass

This one’s more confusing but at the end of the video there’s a claim that Just Stop Oil did let the fire engine pass. There’s certainly not much evidence of Just Stop Oil blocking emergency vehicles.

There are huge traffic jams in London – twice a day actually – so would it be fair to say that London traffic blocks fire engines and ambulances?

The article I quoted in my earlier post Just Stop Oil didn’t delay us getting to M20 crash, says ambulance service refute specific accusations made by The Sun and the Daily Mail that JSO delayed ambulances.

I think that it’s fair to accuse Labour politicians Sadiq Khan and Keith Starmer of supporting the right wing press in unfounded allegations. What Khan and Starmer are also doing is attempting to benefit politically from Just Stop Oil’s actions which have forced the debate.

The next part of the post quotes Sadiq Khan insists world leaders ‘meet words with deeds’ at climate change speech in Buenos Aires… after he and his team racked up 361,146 air miles lecturing the world on going GREEN.

The article and by extension me, are accusing Sadiq Khan of being a hypocrite, travelling all over the World to lecture people to be more green.

The article claims that Khan then proceeds to claim credit for getting rid of Liz Truss. We can’t really trust the Daily Mail and so don’t know whether he did this without making more enquiries.

But still a pretty good blog post, no?

Continue ReadingCarry on Blogging

You may hate Just Stop Oil protestors – but history books will look kindly on them

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‘You are entitled to hate me’: Just Stop Oil activist cries after halting traffic on M25

https://metro.co.uk/2022/11/11/you-may-hate-just-stop-oil-protestors-but-history-will-look-kindly-on-them-17744086/

Nicola Thorp

They’re one of the most controversial groups of 2022 and there has barely been a day in the last couple of months when Just Stop Oil haven’t made the news.

If their campaign’s objective is to grab our attention, it has been a resounding success, with stunts like throwing cake on a waxwork of King Charles, spraying paint on an Aston Martin garage and disrupting traffic on the M25 motorway grabbing headlines. 

If their goal is to win over hearts and minds, then they might not be deemed quite as successful – at least for now.

Regardless of how climate change activists are viewed at present, I have no doubt that history will look kindly on them.

Continue ReadingYou may hate Just Stop Oil protestors – but history books will look kindly on them

What is Dissociative Identity Disorder?

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I was discussing this with Consultant ‘Ed’ at Southfields Hospital on Tuesday. I think but am not really certain whether he was genuinely interested. I think that he was certainly trying to suss me out, see what makes me tick. I didn’t give him the best explanation because he had shouted at me unnecessarily minutes earlier.

It’s worth pointing out to start with that the knowledge domain of medicine is so vast that practitioners specialise in specialist areas. So Ed would probably have been a cardiologist, possibly also a Heart Surgeon. Madeleine McCann’s father was a Heart Surgeon (but I also suspect that he had other relationships with her). So Ed asked me about Dissociative Identity Disorder and then almost immediately moved onto Multiple Personality Disorder.

The American Psychological Society defines and classifies mental illnesses in it’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual(s). Multiple Personality Disorder is the older name for Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) in the DSMs and the change is significant. DID is no longer considered a personality disorder and the emphasis now is about different aspects of one’s identity not being integrated well. It’s also a single identity not plural identities.

There are two main sources of mental illnesses – childhood trauma or battles in warfare. So we’re concerned with childhood trauma here and warfare would typically cause PTSD, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Imagine that you’re a child or even an infant in an intolerable situation. My earliest memory is when I was aged 2 and I’ve had psychologists tell me that it can’t be because you can’t remember that early. It must have affected me so much then to cause me to remember years before anyone is able to.

So if you find yourself in an intolerable situation you employ what is known as a coping mechanism. The coping mechanism in DID is to change yourself so that you’re able to tolerate the otherwise intolerable situation. Then when the next intolerable situation presents itself, you change yourself again. This results in a disjointed, interrupted individual where the pieces are not well joined continuously to each other. There’s your Dissociative Identity Disorder.

ed: This is the brief explanation. I don’t go as far as “… the presence of other identities, each with their own names, voices, personal histories and mannerisms” and that seems to be more like the older meaning. I find that I am sometimes not able to whistle.

12/11/22 8.25am One aspect that I’ve noticed and never seen documented is that I present physical illnesses atypically, as if the normal rules don’t apply. Hope that will be the case since Myocardial infarction is usually quite serious.

13/11/22 I wasn’t thinking straight last week because I was in pain, now I’m on my sixth day of stopping smoking …

Do I experience uncontrollable switches in mood or thinking? Yes, I think far less now that I have insight. Think that I’ve lost at least one job over it.

Continue ReadingWhat is Dissociative Identity Disorder?

Southmead Hospital, Bristol is crap

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I suffered a heart attack at 3am on Monday. I initially thought that I had experienced a severe electric shock. I was left disorientated and confused and rang 111 instead of 999. 111 was crap and didn’t call an ambulance. Instead I got a call-back from a woman doctor at about 4.30am. She hadn’t bothered to wake up before calling me. I tired of her being crap and hung-up and blocked her. I tried to make my own way to A&E by bus but tired and went home.

I attended Southmead Hospital A & E at 10.30 on Tuesday. Southmead Hospital was crap and engaged in prejudice, discrimination, abuse and neglect.

Despite having a heart attack at 3am the previous day, Southmead Hospital A & E didn’t even take my pulse for over 3 hours.

I started having chest pains and was afraid that I was going to have another heart attack.

I told a technician in A & E that I was having chest pains. She told me to sit down.

I told a paramedic in A & E that I was having chest pains. She told me to sit down, I would be assessed soon.

I started phoning an ambulance to fetch me from the A & E section of Southmead Hospital when staff eventually started to pay attention to me after 3 hours.

I am very well thank you despite Southmead Hospital.

Continue ReadingSouthmead Hospital, Bristol is crap
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