You know how important facts are sometimes unpublishable?

Facts that don't already have a political consensus on the side of expressing them don't get expressed. They get kept out of the media. Are you familiar with that? It's why alternative theories of money are never heard no matter how big the financial crashes get. It affects everything to do with what happens to kids as a result of adults' powers of decision over them, or abuses in psychiatry. Only what a preexisting interest already wants heard is publishable.

I picked up this quote from a local pamphlet from Edinburgh council on Holocausts (it should be plural) Memorial. This is a quote to remember all your life:

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." - Maya Angelou.

Bob Lawless

freethinking kids diagnosed oppositional defiant

Important article from America confirming what any politically alert mind ahs suspected in the diagnosis of "Oppositional defiant disorder", that it is being used to class all anti-authoritarian personality types as mentally ill. You are likely not even to reach adulthood without his label if you arer rebellious towards school oppression. It is making a difference to the political awareness of the general adult population existing outside mental health labelling, less aware and more obedient folks are getting the more favourable opportunities.

www.madinamerica.com/2012/02/why-anti-authoritarians-are-diagnosed-as-mentally-ill/

hurt at the top

From a voice as far from the bottom of the heap as you can get, a close confidante of a Prime Minister in his innermost team who reworked a party and won 3 elections. No aspie, and whose ability to climb high any of us could envy. Yet so familiar.

From Peter Mandelson's memoirs The Third Man. Quoted from a note he wrote to Tony Blair in 2001:

"I am not a natural politician in certain respects. I do not always mix easily. There are reasons for this, but when you have been on the receiving end of so much personal nastiness, you develop a shell and an insularity as a means of protection."

Differential susceptibility

I came across this theory today, which has great relevance to people who suffer from hurtful experiences.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_susceptibility_hypothesis

chippie, where did it go wrong ?

This was in a chippie in Balloch, near the Loch Lomond shore.

The menu offered a choice of cod haddock or plaice, but I could see they had not many fish ready to serve and all looking the same. I dislike inviting rebuffs in life, asking for things when the answer might be no, but there is a feeling of fairness involved in taking a menu literally and not make do with what turns out to be provided in practice - I had to find out, so I asked which fish they had. Cod or haddock. Okay I chose cod. Haddock is the standard chippie fish and sometimes unpredictably it can have a funny strong taste, so I chose the cod. Oh, that means we'll have to ask the chef to put a cod on and it will take 10 minutes, is that okay? If I had said haddock it would have been served instantly.

Matter of principle concerning choice and not being humiliated, not to back down, even though it was 6:10 and the wait was annoying. I was feeling worn out and hungry, after Balloch's curious layout with not much of a main street and it's invisible from the buses, had caused me to end up in the Haldane housing estate and find the way back. Positive side of the wait, was that at least they were offering service, willing to put this fish on and cook it for you. That sounded good, so I could plan to have a pickle and a slush drink too.

So when it was time to serve the cod, they had run out of chips and this is in a quite crowded shop. So another 5 minutes wait, and more. By the time I got served I had already decided to walk out in a huff at 6:30 if not served by then.

In most places the vinegar would just be a dollop of their own chosen size. Here, no, helpful again: is this enough? Yes. Now, I think my first mistake was to wait politely until she had stopped pouring, which was another few seconds, she obviously not believing it was enough, before speaking up to ask for a pickled egg. I thought it would be annoyingly pushy to go for it while she was still doing the vinegar. As soon as my voice began any sound at all, literally just the first P, she reacted: "Bit more?" She was that irrationally quick to hear what she expected instead of what I actually wanted to say, even quicker than to let me say it. The vinegar is fine - "that enough? More?" - How was this rational?

Now of course we are both sounding defensive because we are no longer gelling when we speak. I had now had to cut across her swiftly proceeding action to get msyelf heard right. The atmosphere was going wrong, as it always does when a pointless collision of meanings happens with a shop server who is jumping to her own conclusions.

Because she had cut across my speech, I had stopped speaking again, and because I had stopped speaking again, she said "I can't hear you." How the hell was I supposed to expect that, logically? Once someone says they can't hear you, you know they have begun to get annoyed with you, which makes it all the harder to get them to hear you, they are less patiently listening.

No, the vinegar is okay, really - she is already starting to wrap the meal up now -"it's a pickled egg I'm trying to ask for." "Pickled egg, okay. Just couldn't hear you." She has clearly heard egg, so far so good. Despite the unfairness of the "can't hear you" muck, keep hoping this will turn out well. Now, can any rational voice in the world please explain what happened next?

She went over to the pickle jars, and looked back at me: "Egg or onion?" Why the hell does a server who has already heard egg, turn back round and ask you egg or onion? "Egg, yes." So she opened the egg jar, looked at it doubtfully for 2 seconds, then closed it again and opened the onion jar !!! Now, unless you believe folks should be dictated to what to eat, what the hell else did you expect me to do than I did? I called across, "EGG!" In a fed up emphasised tone, because it was completely illogical what was happening, and she answered in the same tone, "Calm down!!"

So in no time I now counted as a difficult annoying customer trying her patience, a dangerous thing to be, because I did not let her force onion onto me instead of egg after she had heard egg perfectly clearly. It was now necessary to escape the hell from that shop as soon as she had served the damn egg, dangerous to stay and let the hostility escalate and get into trouble. So I lost the opportunity to get the slush drink, and having never tasted Irn Bru in a slush form before, I never have still. It was obvious that if I had asked that inconceviable idiot for it, she would likely have misheard something and insisted on choosing the flavour for me and treated me as a troublemaker if I argued.

She was the shop, the host, I the customer was only the visitor, the system is not on our side when astounding nonsense like this happens. The system does not assume that a person whose communication is not being heard right is in the right, it favours the mob in not having to understand anything else than they selectively choose to. When you are a man and the idiot is a woman the PC may work against you for that too. There was no other safe option than escape double quick from the idiot's presence, and carrying a meal tainted by the unforseen emotional bruise, no longer to be enjoyed, after wasting 20 minutes on it.

Bob Lawless

Report into David Seagrave’s humiliation and ordeal at the SMART centre in Astley Ainslie hospital grounds 9-3-2010

In Sept 2008 I suffered a soaking south of Oban and the windscreen of my Aixam microcar misted up. I was shivering badly and had to stop frequently to wipe the windscreen in the INSIDE. I inadvertently made an illegal right turn in Oban in driving rain and was spotted then whisked to hospital with exposure symptoms, discharged spent a night in Oban and returned uneventfully to Dunfermline. On another occasion I was BLOWN BACKWARDS at Auchtertool and collided at about walking pace with a car heading up the hill known as Newbiggin Bank. DVLA required me to sit a driving test after police reports about these quite minor incidents where NO tangible harm came to anybody. The original green Aixam was beyond economic repair because of its intrinsic flawed design and bought back in part exchange for the present blue one that was reconditioned and had done only 10,000 miles. Soon after delivery of the blue one ALL the damning flaws of the design were woefully apparent. Though it was driveable in dry summer weather the engine falters in downpours, the windscreen persists on misting up in damp weather and the engine CUTS OUT when I bear right.

I am however bound to declare that when I rode scooters I was frequently obliged to stop so as to restore my circulation even in summer and I can NEVER NOW ride a scooter any distance because of the wind chill factor. For all of my adult life I have gone on strenuous Sunday hikes in beauty spots and this is a crucial element in my personal quality of life. The blue Aixam enabled me to reach Durness and climb remote mountains. Without it I can no longer reach most of the Highlands. It is the MEANS TO REACH the Highlands NOT an end in itself.

DVLA have long contested my right to drive Aixams which are in Britain “heavy quadricycles” but taxed at the same rate as Minis though weighing under 400 Kg and having 450cc GLOWPLUG engines (NOT repeat NOT diesel) which is sadly their Achilles heels. After about 2,000 miles the green Aixam became as much an extension of my body as my artificial leg. Apart from a few misjudgements I have now covered 17,000 uneventful miles at MODEST speeds at 100 mpg. I am acutely cognisant of such matters as the 3.5m turning radius and all that flows from the pig-headed refusal of the British to accept metrication such as misjudging how much fuel is left. We but fuel by the LITRE but it is still MILES from place to place! And yet Government maps are calibrated in km squares!

I was very in edge when I arrived at the SMART centre having been delayed on the bus ride. I was made to play with puzzles of the sort given to very small children. I identified road signs and had to read a passage about a Shrewsbury man as though I was a foreign immigrant required to locate English county towns. I had caused offence by wearing a smart jacket, clean white shirt but khaki home made Gripperbreeks that securely hold my false leg on WITHOUT NHS straps that come asunder. I continued to cause offence with my Daily Telegraph English. I was grilled about my personal habits and why I owned a funny foreign car. I was finally to cause the very utmost offence by saying that I NEVER INTEND to buy a full size car because it is too costly to run!

The Junta who were grilling me acted in a very Kafkaesque manner. One of them had heard about Asperger’s Syndrome and shut me up. I was forced to tell them why I had no job since 1971 and why I had been admitted twice to mental hospitals and something about my father’s constant denigrations that caused them to frown, then I had to admit that I suffer badly from bronchitis and in 1952 was admitted to hospital and in bed through the severe winter of 1953 and also how cigarette smoke and motor fumes made me ill. As thought I was admitting that I had convictions for sex offences! A Levantine-looking man with very badly accented English mixed up ULLAPOOL with LIVERPOOL when I was forced to confess that I had driven twice from Ullapool to Dunfermline taking 14 hours on each journey and they refused to accept that the largest city I had driven through is Dunfermline itself or that 95% of my journeys are to the Highlands. I could NOT satisfy them because I have no intention whatsoever of driving in to cities and all who take to the roads must in their eyes be capable of surviving the ordeal of driving through Edinburgh or London – which is the most squalid city in Europe? Perhaps Edinburgh. Britain is not France where octogenarian grandmothers drive sentry boxes on wheels happily up and down steep hills in Normandy (Not that I would expect my tormentors to know Normandy).

Then came the ORDEAL in a Vauxhall as heavy as a taxi. I was dumped in a seat where I immediately got itching and back pains, nowhere to park my false leg comfortably and above all else the steering wheel was so awkwardly placed that I ad the very utmost difficulty steering the car. The HORN was operated by a thing in the middle and I inadvertently operated it as I turned the wheel. I GAVE INSTRUCTIONS TO MYSELF as my tormentors breathed down my neck and a woman repeatedly distracted me. I soon got hopelessly lost in the hospital grounds which have narrow rutted tarmac tracks as ill maintained as the road to the foot of Ben Hope with enormous potholes. I was soon in a state of acute panic and suffering progressive incapacitation due to the nagging pain in the back and SINISTER sensations of incipient cramp in both legs. My mental compass was spinning as if I was in a strange foreign city and I desperately wanted to stop and lie down as sensations in back and legs – as bad as my sporadic IBS – gripped me.

During the final Inquisition I was told basically that I was quite unfit to be on the road and one reason was that I GAVE INSTRUCTIONS TO MYSELF. This reminds me of equally hurtful interviews where I was made to be worse than bad or mad because when provoked as I was most certainly on that occasion I “GO TO PIECES” and the act of TALKING TO ONESELF marked me out as a madman in the Victorian definition of “maniac”. So I left, shattered and later on Blackford Hill I was assailed by chest pains which have worried me ever since.

The imminent sharp rise in motor fuel prices will price many people off the roads and confine them effectively to corridors served by such public transport that still exists. It will pace large areas of Britain OUT OF BOUNDS unless people have vehicles as thrifty as the Aixam. I must now make observations on the behaviour of the Junta. I am drawing up a Civil Servants Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome in support of the O’Donnell Bill which will deal in depth with the ingrained prejudice so rife in high places.

We Aspies have NO HOPE of ever satisfying authoritarians because out autonomous fear related reflexes take over then confronted with people like the Junta at SMART. No mater how skilled we are at any given task when pursuing it unharassed we will break down sooner or later if people are breathing down our necks. As Debi Brown has explained so eloquently we with AS are readily overwhelmed by everyday input overloads. Consider me proceeding along the Mid-Clacks road even in driving rain. I have a mental map of its entirety which is instantly updated when I spot road works. I flow along it at 60 KPH in daylight or 40 KPH after dark as automatically as I walk down Dunfermline’s streets. I am alert and spot other road users and indeed stray animals. When I encountered football hooligans in Falkirk I assumed that they would deliberately leap into my path to provoke an accident or jump onto the bonnet and smash the windscreen. On that occasion I readily imagined being assaulted by successive groups of drunken hooligans and my Amygdalic Shunt was taking over as I crawled past fearful with every good reason that the hooligans would push the Aixam over and beat me to death. These actual incidents illustrate how I behave in the road. It is acting according to PRESUMPTIONS on the part of other road users in such a way that I an always in full control. When incapacitated by input overloads I show it by such ways as talking to myself and of course involuntary SWEARING. I recall a few incidents of this sort where I was in severe discomfort at the limits of language. My ordeal in the Vauxhall was a bad as these incidents. My tormentors could no more understand my pain than Arab terrorists who torture kidnapped Europeans nor can they accept that AS is NOT a moral failing NOR is it to be equated as they did with MENTAL DEFICIENCY but it is a differentness of brain function that most emphatically gives rise to such fail-safe behaviours on the road as the Falkirk incident where of course I gave the hooligans a wide berth. SO we Aspies are forced into collisions with the Heavy Hand of Authority or rather its steamroller and we are crushed and dumped by the wayside.

I could suggest a fair test whereby I would have been followed in my Aixam along FAMILIAR roads near my home by someone with a video camera. Now I have to underscore the absolutely fundamental difference between thrifty microbars and ordinary vehicles. Microcars will HAVE TO SUPPLANT ordinary cars simply because of their fuel economy! On the Continent NO PROBLEM as they are already ubiquitous. IF I can ONLY regain my licence by passing in a Vauxhall as heavy as a taxi I am doomed to fail and I will be denied access to the Highlands for the rest of my life. Countless thousands of elderly and disabled motorists will be denied access to places without adequate public transport of forbidden to drive thrifty microcars for such insulting reasons as they are TOO SLOW! My Strict Consequentialism states that we have an inalienable right to go wherever we wish in thrifty microcars but of course this logic is as alien to our masters as the principles of flight to unlettered aborigines. We must therefore FIGHT for our right to move thriftily from place to place.

David Seagrave, Dunfermline Library 19-3-2010

Kelvinbridge

The second most hurtful experience of my life happened at Kelvinbridge on Glasgow's Great Western Road soon after I graduated. I was equipped to go climbing and I was waiting for a Glencoe bound bus when I was set upon by plain clothes police who dragged me into a van and dumped me in a cell at Partick police station without ANY explanation. Then driven to Woodilee mental hospital where I was injected with tranquilliser and put into a dormitory. I had fortunately a 10p on me and rang my old university tutor. About 2 days later I was driven back to my lodgings at Mrs Lesko's in Wilton St (Q.V. "Catholic Landladies account") where I promptly changed into my very smartest clothes and grabbed intelligent books but I HAD TO GO BACK TO WOODILEE! So 2 days later I left with a wad of handwritten material about my experiences and was given the bus fare back to Glasgow and a pair of slippers!

I rightly feared that I would be the butt of scorn if I disclosed anything but my father got to know and how he rubbed salt into ancient wounds by his inquisition into every pettifogging detail of the affair and why I wanted to go CLIMBING! As though it was in some way a CRIMINAL OFFENCE for a man of 30 to be dressed as a climber should and be waiting for a bus to Glencoe and be in possession of TWO cameras and the Hikers map of Glencoe!

I later attended meetings of fellow victims after the Herald disclosed that right across Strathclyde people were being picked up by the police and falsely incriminated. There was at that time (and may be still) a Section of the Mental Health Act that encouraged malicious people to get their HATED ONES "put away" in mental hospitals for flimsy reasons and SO BESMIRCHED ever after become disqualified from all but menial work. Now I had quite frequent clashes with Mrs Lesko and it appears that she lied to the police that I was using drugs. When I deal with her I will narrate all the ludicrous things that happened at 143 Wilton St between 1972 and 1975. I learn that in Strathclyde there have been many similar instances of the police abusing their powers. As with the Jews in Nazi Germany people are far too afraid to complain or deceive themselves that they have actually broken the law! This includes all those hapless people who would be very embarrassed indeed to recount pettifogging naughtiness as small children. Like myself they are convinced that they are dangerous sex-maniacs because they were curious about sexual matters whren they were young.

I draw upon "Kelvinbridge" for the Andrew Sinclair Stage Monologue, its narrative version, and a story called Mike Mellor's Mindquake where two men in my storyline are wrongfully detained in mental hospitals. Here the reader or viewer has to feel the leading character's pain and bewilderment whilst the climax disclosures prod the reader into thinking why cruelties meted out to innocent people in Nazi Germany and Communist Russia are permitted to happen in so called free Britain.