The Unlibrary Shelves

Because I miss just hitting a button and it would publish everywhere.

Evidently I can do this with wordpress.com too.

Now that the great Neil has RTd me (thanks!), I better explain how.

WordPress.com is hosted, just like posterous was. If you don’t use it yet, create an account and try it. WordPress.com has a bookmarklet called Press This which can live in your browser’s bookmark bar, and allows you to mark text on a website, hit the button and publish instantaneously. WordPress.com blogs can also be customised with themes just like posterous.

The missing piece so far was something called Publicize, which works just like posterous autopost function.

Sigh. I still miss posterous, but less so now.

Also, the Unlibrary. It was fun while it lasted, wasn’t it?

The transfer of claimants from DLA to PIP is expected to take five years, ending in March 2018, with DLA claimants with indefinite awards being the last to be assessed. The DWP have published a timetable for the transfer, which we have set out below.

From April 2013
The new timetable began with a pilot from 8th April 2013 for new claims for PIP in the North West and part of the North East of England.

From June 2013, all new claims from anyone aged 16-64 will be for PIP instead of DLA throughout the whole of Great Britain.
The only exceptions will be renewal claims from a fixed-term DLA award which is due to expire before the end of February 2014. In these cases the renewal claim will still be for DLA rather than PIP.

From 7th October 2013 the following DLA recipients will begin to have to claim PIP:
•       Children turning 16 will have to claim PIP when their existing fixed-term award is coming to an end.
•       People reporting changes of circumstances which might affect their rate of payment, such as an improvement or deterioration in their condition, but not issues like going into a care home or hospital or changing address.
•       People with a fixed-term DLA award which expires from the end of February 2014.
Anyone who chooses to make an application for PIP, including people who have a fixed-term or indefinite award of DLA, can make a claim from this date. However, you cannot make a claim for PIP if you are in the course of making a claim for DLA and no decision has yet been made on your claim.

From October 2015, all other working age DLA recipients will have to make a claim for PIP. Claimants will be selected randomly rather than by area or age, although the DWP say that they will “invite claims as early as possible from recipients who have turned 65 after 8 April 2013, when PIP was first introduced.”
The DWP does not now expect to complete the reassessment of all existing working age DLA claimants for PIP until March 2018.

This started when I was a teen and fell in love for the first time. I thought a lot of a person and ended up running out of mental images of them. The more I thought of them, and the more they (or their image) meant to me, the quicker I would run out of images. I still experience this. If I think a lot about a person, a few days/weeks after seeing them last I will not be able to recall their face, whatever I do.

I find this interesting.

Does this happen to anyone else?

Source

I was randomly commenting on some fb posts re. the Hare Krishnas and the Native Americans – yes, I know, just two of my weird obsessions – when it suddenly hit me. What the guru did when he came over to America is nothing less but reverse colonialism.

Colonialism in the sense that you go somewhere and make the natives believe that their own culture is dirty, bad, immoral, inferior. You have, in your causeless mercy, come to bring them something higher. Your own values, your social structure, your prayers, your songs, your morals. Of course it’s not your causeless mercy, but by the time they realise that the belief that their own culture is rotten to the core has already sunken in so deep that there is no way to go back to what they were before.

This has stared me in the face in Nigeria (where there are Hare Krishnas, which must be REALLY confusing to the locals. What now? Whatever you white people told us was superior before was all wrong and that’s why we have to pretend to be Indians now? And yes some still go for it.) Colonialism has always been a major cause for social disruption, but there have always been strong voices against this. Fela Anikulapo Kuti being one of them, singing about the madness of people wearing suits in Africa, bleaching their skin, etc. Even from that point of view, going to Nigeria was a major revelation. And there are no easy answers, but in the entertainment industry it was clear that there was such an amazing sense of identity. There is boundless energy and creativity, and they just keep creating with whatever is available.There’s no club that doesn’t play 99% home-made. That’s a major indicator for me.

Look at the world from that perspective. People have always moved around, cultures were there one day and disappeared the next. Mayans, Aztecs are some we know about. Phoenicians, Alans, Sarmatians are others. We have no idea where bits of our culture come from. There is no logic to any of this. And sometimes we go somewhere and transplant our culture, never mind what was there before. Sometimes killing them wasn’t enough, we also needed massive visual statements. (Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills, sacred and central to the Lakota, anyone?) Some cultures are successful in keeping a sense of identity (but seriously, how many Native Americans are Christians?), others get killed off. Some struggle against losing their land in the face of ‘development’ right now. Do we stand up to it, or do we let it happen because that’s how it’s always been?

(And yes I realise it’s kind of a loaded subject for me because national socialism was a movement originally advertising a ‘get back to your own roots’ approach to being German. That’s why they loved Richard Wagner – he went to the old German stories and brought them into popular culture. But never mind, let’s forget all that.)

And then some guru comes and makes us believe our own culture, the prevalent value and social systems where we live are rotten, and gives us a seemingly superior social and moral construct to live by? And has us all follow the diet and lifestyle of some fictional farmers from a long-gone pocket of civilisation? I think it’s partly the kind of steel balls you need to do this, and the fact it’s survived for so many decades now, that makes it attractive for people.

And like all colonialism it only works as long as you believe in it.