Re: The Bigger, Badder, Even More Serious Thread

[Pettytyrant101]

{{ Worse Halfy, this particular asylum centre is for unaccompanied children. Literally kids abanoned and on their own, or whose parents have been killed in conflict or other suffering. To even think of treating them in such a fashion is just horrendous. }}

[halfwise]

To treat such kids like they're automatically under suspicion is horrendous.

[Pettytyrant101]

{{ I do not get why Angela Raynor is not leading Labour instead of boring, passionless posh boy Starmer. With Sunak away, again, PMQ's was Deputy PMQ's again, and Rayner mopped the floor with the Tories. }}

[Pettytyrant101]

{{ This pisses me off. There is a proposal being mulled by the Tories to make individual care workers legally responsible in care homes for ensuring all actions are legal and conform to government guidelines in the treatment of residents. The thinking being as the carer has to perform the actions, it should be their responsibility those actions are the proper legal ones.

This might sound reasonable on the surface, but there is a major problem, under the present way care homes are run and operated its not possible.
Just to be clear IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO DO CARE WORK WITHIN THE LAW.
I put that in bold because its a stark and shocking truth. The job is impossible.

I will give a simple and typical example.

You are a care worker starting your shift, it begins at 7am where you sit in the 'hand-over' where the departing night-shift fill day-shift in on pertinent information they may require about residents. That usually takes you up to about 7.20.

Breakfast is at 8.00. There are 6 care workers, and 36 residents, so each care worker has 6 residents to get up, wash/shower, dress and get along for breakfast, in 40 minutes. Just over 6 minutes per resident.

This would be damn near impossible if all the residents were cooperative, but they are not, half will have dementias of one form or another and may well physically resist attempts to wash or dress them. And then there are the other half of any homes residents who are physically incapable of moving themselves, and often as a result are overweight.
Following the legal rules these residents must be hoisted.

Hoisting is a good idea, on paper, its less physically demanding on the resident, and certainly so on the carer. When I started and almost till I left 30 years later, the normal method of getting a heavy person from a chair to say a wheelchair, was two carers, one under each arm and one swift movement from chair to chair, takes seconds. But it is not the best lifting method for residents, though its only temporary inconvenient, but its definitely bad for carers backs.

However a hoist requires 3 carers to properly operate, 2 on the hoist either end and one to steady the resident as they are swung up. Residents with dementia tend to react very, very badly to being hoisted and can be a danger to all- Ive seen hoists go over sideways with a resident in it from how much they thrashed and panicked due to dementia. And its time consuming, using a hoist, even with 3 carers that are proficient will take a minimum of 10 minutes, maybe 5 or 6 with a fully cooperative resident, up to 20 with an uncooperative one- and you've still got to wash and dress them (and from my own experience I have been punched, kicked, bitten, scratched and spat on by residents with dementia whilst trying to just get the hoist and its straps around them in preparation for hoisting.)

In order to legally perform the job care homes require twice as many staff at least at peak times, which is never going to happen.
This leaves a situation in which its not possible for a care worker to perform the job as legally specified, if the average care home did this it would take so long to get an entire home worth of residents up for breakfast it'd be lunchtime by time they get there.

Other aspects play into this, care homes hire cooks but they only come in at meal times to save money, so residents have to be there on time for meals as if they miss them there is no-one there to make something for them later. So pressure is put on staff to get as many residents up and ready as fast as possible. And there is no way to do this except to do it the old fashioned way of lifting, which is super quick. But no longer legal.

So if they change the law making the individual carer responsible instead of the Home or management they put carers into an impossible situation- following the law makes the job impossible, not following the law risks you being taken to court, fined, sacked or even imprisoned.

Meanwhile the companies that run the care homes walk away scot free from consequences, are under no pressure to ensure staff levels equal to actually achieving the law and can simply pass all the blame onto individual staff members if someone complains about proper procedure or equipment not being used. This is horrendous.

When you consider that Scotland for example has an estimated 10,000 shortfall in needed carers, and England is even worse, and Brexit has made recruitment of carers all but impossible I don't see how this will help the situation in any manner whatsoever. What I can see is how for the average working carer, it will make an impossible job now punishable by law if you don't achieve the impossible. }}

[Pettytyrant101]

{{ Ok no one going to mention the UFO thing? I am finding it odd this is not bigger news, a whistleblower who worked on collating information on UFO's for the government has, under oath, given evidence that claims alien life, materials gained from crashed craft and even 'biologicals' of non-human origin.

The evidence was quite compelling but the choice of words very careful, for that reason I think it's worth watching the full hearing if you can and judging their testimony for yourself.
Unfortunately the main whistleblower could not, or would not answer the most intriguing questions, saying he could not do so in a public setting. The offer being there to give the answers to those questions in a private secure setting.
But among the questions he could not answer this way were if the US government has had contact with alien life and follow up questions on a claim of human deaths related to UFO's. }}

[halfwise]

There are others in the same government who's job it is to investigate UFOs, and refute his claims.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/ufo-congressional-hearing-insulting-us-010604384.html

What is actually going on is anyone's guess.

[Mrs Figg]

I think its because its just too disappointing to think its all a load of guff. Or its just too big to be real. Also we have been inundated with Hollywood alien films and it all seems business as usual.

[halfwise]

If the aliens aren't grey-skinned with big black eyes I don't think we'll be able to cope.

[Mrs Figg]

So Starmer has finally admitted that women are adult human females. whoop-de-woo, it took him long enough.

[halfwise]

What was he saying they were before?

[Pettytyrant101]

{{ I've never understood that particular 'gotcha' question for our politicians. They have, of all stripes, had a very hard time answering the simple question "what is a woman?" Which is odd as the answer is not difficult.

The fear seems to be that if they say a woman is a person born biologically female and who undergoes female puberty in adolescence, they are betraying transwoman.
But this is stupid, nobody is more aware of the real physical differences between trans and biological woman than trans woman, who have to undergo expensive, evasive and no doubt at times painful surgery to try to correct some of those differences.
Trans women are not offended by someone noting they are not biological women. This fact does not come as a shock to a transwoman. They already know.
For the vast majority of trans that's not what it is about, nor is about wanting to compete in sports as a woman, or any of that. Trans make up about 1% of the population, out of that 1% a tiny fraction are going to be involved in competitive sports and such where gender may be a factor for consideration. But the vast majority just want to live in their chosen gender, be left in peace to do so without fear or harassment, and only want government involvement where it already deals in matters of gender (marriage certificates and the like) to legally recognise their chosen gender.
The whole thing is in reality very, very simple and effects a tiny minority of people, but the narratives and media hysteria around it would make you believe at least half the population were trans and the rest were in danger of conversion and won't someone think of the children!! }}

[Mrs Figg]

What was he saying they were before?

He said 99.9 % didn't have a penis.

[Mrs Figg]

{{ I've never understood that particular 'gotcha' question for our politicians. They have, of all stripes, had a very hard time answering the simple question "what is a woman?" Which is odd as the answer is not difficult.

The fear seems to be that if they say a woman is a person born biologically female and who undergoes female puberty in adolescence, they are betraying transwoman.
But this is stupid, nobody is more aware of the real physical differences between trans and biological woman than trans woman, who have to undergo expensive, evasive and no doubt at times painful surgery to try to correct some of those differences.
Trans women are not offended by someone noting they are not biological women. This fact does not come as a shock to a transwoman. They already know.
For the vast majority of trans that's not what it is about, nor is about wanting to compete in sports as a woman, or any of that. Trans make up about 1% of the population, out of that 1% a tiny fraction are going to be involved in competitive sports and such where gender may be a factor for consideration. But the vast majority just want to live in their chosen gender, be left in peace to do so without fear or harassment, and only want government involvement where it already deals in matters of gender (marriage certificates and the like) to legally recognise their chosen gender.
The whole thing is in reality very, very simple and effects a tiny minority of people, but the narratives and media hysteria around it would make you believe at least half the population were trans and the rest were in danger of conversion and won't someone think of the children!! }}

That is a massive massive MASSIVE oversimplification of the case.

[Pettytyrant101]

{{ I don't think it is. I think the reaction to is widely out of proportion to the issue or the numbers of people it actually in reality effects.
In most things it is simple-

Sport, already categorised by weight, skill, and many other factors, so no actual issue here.

Toilets, more of a British cultural issue than a real problem. On continental Europe this has simply not been an issue as unisex toilets are common. A shift towards a similar situation would resolve the problem.

Female safe spaces- the one example we have in the UK where the law has been tested is of a trans prisoner being considered for a female prison, the incident in Scotland that created such a fuss on the right, but the system worked exactly as it was meant to. The case was assessed and their claim found to be false, they were deemed as a risk to biological women and refused a place in a female prison. So there is no problem there. The checks and balances worked as intended.

Education- there is nothing in education in the UK dealing with gender that is inappropriate. We have for generations taught Shakespeare which includes the gang rape and mutilation of a 15 year old girl (Titus Andromeda) a pun in Hamlet where he refers to putting his head in Ophelia's lap and talking to her cunt. And a Midsummers Night's Dream is basically a long series of sex jokes, innuendo, double and single entendres and rude language. And half his plays women are dressed as boys or boys are pretending to be girls. If that's fine for our kids for generations, so is a book about a trans teenager.

And when you bare in mind the percent of people all this would actually effect is miniscule as a percentage of the population, it gives a more realistic perspective on the actual scale of the issue.

What has happened is both sides, left and right have seized upon trans as another issue to throw buns at each over in their pointless, destructive, divisive culture wars (which have in no small measure been stoked for a couple of decades by bots operating on behalf of foreign governments stoking divisions to weaken nations, that's modern warfare for you). }}

[Mrs Figg]

Sorry but you are wrong on all points.

[Pettytyrant101]

{{ In what way? - most major UK sports are already categorising trans sportswoman as separate from biological woman. Cycling for example, swimming also, Athletics, the British triathlon, and its much the same on a global level with the World Athletics Council creating trans categories for example. There are loads of examples now of where trans women compete in their own category within sports. That's just facts.

The toilet is also simply less of an issue on continental Europe and particularly in Scandinavian countries where they are less prudish on such matters and where they don't have a tradition of separating the sexes in those areas as clearly as the British do. But that's our social problem, not trans folks problem.

On the Scottish prisoner - again simple facts. They were held on remand on the grounds of a female prison awaiting review, they were held in isolation, they had zero contact with any inmates, no one was put at harm, and an independent assessment carried out under the law by the Scottish Prison Services determined they were a risk and denied their claim to a female prison place. Again, these are just the facts of what happened. You can go read both the SPS report and assessment itself and the cross-party committee report set up in the wake of the media nonsense around it to investigate it, which found there was no case to answer. The system worked exactly as it was meant to.

Everything Ive said is backed up with facts.

On Education read some of the stuff we got in schools- I got 1984 in school, promiscuous sex as a political act and torture. We don't protect children by trying to deny their natural curiosity to learn and discover about the world. We should, and used to in fact, provoke it by giving children challenging or stimulating subjects to consider. When did we become afraid of that? }}

[Mrs Figg]

This ideology is mutilating thousands of children. effects. facts.

[Pettytyrant101]

{{ Not in UK, its illegal to perform the surgery on minors. You have to be 18 and to have lived trans for a minimum of 2 years. You have to be 16 to get puberty blockers or hormone treatment. Facts. Im not too keen to import America's culture wars. }}

[Pettytyrant101]

{{ On the alien thing, there was a part of his testimony I thought was interesting, as it was as close as he came to putting forward anything hinting at origins for these unknown things. He mentioned the theories concerning higher dimensions, using the notion that we are seeing is like the cast shadow of something in a higher dimension projected onto ours.

And this got me thinking about how we see them, basically as impossibly sophisticated technology.
And I find that suspicious. It fits the Zeitgeist of the times too well.

There's an example I was thinking of. There is a condition, rare but not so rare as to be not reasonably well known these days, it's a condition in which you wake up from sleeping, only you aren't entirely awake, your brain is still in REM sleep and your body is still flooded with sleep chemicals, effectively paralysing you (this is why you don't act out your dreams). People who 'awake' in such a state see reality, but with a dream state imposed over it too. They report being unable to move and a feeling of weight or pressure on their chest. It is common to report a feeling of someone or a presence in the room with you.

Now the first recorded instances of this go all the way back to the beginning of civilisation. Back to Summer about 3000bc. There is a Sumerian demon held responsible for it. It has all the same reported conditions with the exception that Sumerians reported a demon who sat or pressed on their chest and would take them off to a monstrous gathering, and if this happened, after being returned you were sure to die.

Fast forward to the Middle Ages. And we have reports of the exact same condition. Only the Sumerian demon is long gone. Now it's witches who come and press upon your chest and whisk you off to a coven or to the devil himself.

Hop forward a few thousand years more, and it's the 1950's and reports of the same thing again, but no one believes in Sumerian demons or medieval witches any more so now little grey aliens are coming and abducting them to their spaceships.

It's the same physical condition, and the same basic story outline in each case, just with 'insert cultural/time appropriate entity here'. But there is the crux of it, for those who experience it - remembering they are seeing dreams in the waking world - each person, in their own time period, interprets what's going on according to their own societies beliefs and allowances for explanation.

So back to what these UAP things are, they look like sophisticated technology to us, just at the time when our society is going through the exciting early flourish of the new technology age, and are obsessed with it.
That they look and are being seen as exactly what we would expect them to look like and be makes me wonder. Had society not moved on from the Middle Ages would we still just be seeing witches on broomsticks flying about instead?

If they are an impression of something going on in a higher dimension, then how we interpret that would be open to massive scope. Especially when you consider we never actually 'see' what's out there, we just get a bunch of information through our senses that are then organised into a best guess interpretation of what's out there. So whatever we see is perhaps also open to being just that, what we want to see, not necessarily anything related to what's actually out there. }}

[Mrs Figg]

I don't think the pilots were asleep or in bed when they saw UFO though. They were most likely as awake and on high alert as its possible to get.

[Pettytyrant101]

{ I didn't mean to say they were asleep, or even in a similar state, more to point out that the human brain is capable of inserting into reality something if it thinks there is something weird that needs an interpretation. And it tends to take from the Zeitgeist of the time to do it.
There were no demons, no witches and no aliens in those cases, it was just a medical condition, but the people involved nevertheless genuinely saw those things. Their minds, unable to process the information in the normal way as it was too unusual a situation, instead made stuff up. But from their point of view the made up stuff was indistinguishable from the reality.

The problem arises from the very natural assumption everyone makes that what we think we are seeing around us is the universe. All of it. Rather than what it is, a second hand recreation of a limited slice of reality as interpreted by our senses and presented to us by our brains as a 3-dimensional image.
Effectively, our brains are the ultimate cgi machine. They generate in nano seconds entire scenes of intricate detail, but like cgi its just an image, its not the real thing which remains largely outside us and unknown.
And because of this it's quite possible, just like a film to add stuff into a scene that isn't really there in front of camera or the eye, just as its possible for a person to see something unreal whilst fully awake and aware.

In the case of UAP's if we are merely seeing a 'shadow' of a higher dimensional something thats interacting with our reality then we are firstly only seeing the bits of it that fall within the scope of our human senses or our extended senses via our equipment like infrared cameras or radar and such. So it's probable we can't even see the whole thing.

Then there is the problem that we don't how or why our brains choose to interpret the universe in the manner we do, why does a chair look like a chair when from another point of view it's just a bunch of molecules and mainly spaces, not even solid, and from another its just fields of energy and fom another its some weird product of an even weirder quantum foam? So why do we see it as a solid single object as we do?
And therefore if some weird other dimensional intrusion appears how would human brains interpret it? As it really is? Or would we apply our own expectations and beliefs of what we think it is onto it, put it into our picture of reality in that form. Just as the Sumerians saw demons, where middle ages Europeans saw witches, and 1950's Americans saw little grey men.
So to us they look like super technological alien probes. But would they look like that to people of another time with different expectations of their reality?
Reality is a tricky bugger! }}

[Mrs Figg]

wow Wilko goes bust. What next, tumbleweed down the highstreet? What is worrying is they are budget retailers. I used to go there years ago for my supplies they were great.

[Pettytyrant101]

{{ The High Streets in the UK are dying on their arse. My town is now down to one high street bank, ten years ago we had 6.
Bizarrely only thing seems to be thriving is nail salons, we've got more of them than pubs now the UK's women must have the fanciest nails in the world!}}

[Lancebloke]

We are all (society) to blame. Shopping online, supermarkets, out of town malls have all eaten in to the High Street and it is no surprise that those other areas are doing great at the expense of independent shops and the old High Street.

My local High Street is a shit hole and I won't go the unless I really have to.

[Mrs Figg]

Those nail bars are a money laundering and illegal immigrant racket, as are Turkish barbers and those American sweets shops in London.