The increased dosage of my thyroxine seems to have suddenly kicked in. This morning I woke up without a headache for the first time in weeks; I felt reasonably refreshed, too, in spite of only having slept for about 6 hours. (I’d stayed up late to watch The Sopranos; I don’t get many chances to watch this show, so I didn’t have much idea of who the main characters were, but this was a pretty good episode. A comatose Tony was having his almost-death experience, and one of the younger goodfellas was selling his idea for a horror film involving a a zombie Mafiosa – a hilarious scene.)
It had been getting to the stage where I was sleeping solidly for 8 or 9 hours, waking up feeling dulled and tired and nodding off for an hour in the afternoon; so feeling bright, energetic and wide awake is a novel experience.
Well, better get on with some wurk!

Had a blood test on Monday. Was rather surprised to get a phone call from my doctor this morning, as I’d been told the result wouldn’t be in until the end of this week.
However, it wasn’t anything too alarming. My thyroxine levels are seriously low (which I’d already already guessed, from my continual tiredness and lack of energy) and my med for that will have to be doubled. Plus, my cholesterol is high.
Being a veggie, that’s a somewhat unexpected finding – but Doc G did assure me that it might be due to my thyroid problem. Since all the cholesterol-lowering drugs that I’ve tried so far have had bad side-effects, I shall try to improve my diet; cut down on the eggs and cheese, cut out the fried stuff.
I’ve already downloaded a bunch of recipes from the Vegetarian Society. Doc G will be giving me a month before checking my blood again. So I’ll try the diet approach until then and see what it does for my cholesterol levels. I really don’t want to take any more pills than I absolutely have to; if it means giving up my scrambled eggs and my beloved cheese & pickle butties, than that’s what I’ll have to do.

“Hey, this is Europe. We took it from nobody; we won it from the bare soil that the ice left. The bones of our ancestors, and the stones of their works, are everywhere. Our liberties were won in wars and revolutions so terrible that we do not fear our governors: they fear us. Our children giggle and eat ice-cream in the palaces of past rulers. We snap our fingers at kings. We laugh at popes. When we have built up tyrants, we have brought them down. And we have nuclear *fucking* weapons.”

by Ken MacLeod – the only writer of Scottish Socialist Science Fiction that I’ve read so far. (I’m currently working my way through his Star Fraction series – they’re rather good.)

An excellent and informative interview with Amanda Baggs, who is autistic, talking about how autistics see the world: Amanda Baggs on CNN.

Q: What do you think it will take for our society to accept autistic people as functional?
Yolanda Welch, Shreveport, Louisiana

BAGGS: I have a poster on my wall that says “Are you one of us? Take this easy test and find out. Either every one of us is valuable, vulnerable, and worthy of human respect and protection… Or none of us is, which makes mankind king cockroach on planet Earth. Pick one.” I think it will take a lot more people picking the first option and seriously living by it.

Amanda has a highly readable blog as well.

I’ve only ever deleted three or four posts in the whole six or seven years I’ve been blogging. I’m very reluctant to remove anything from here.
Anyhow, I’ve just deleted the previous post, if you caught it and wondered.
It was too personal, too angry.
I was angry, angry, angry.
I had a long walk this morning, had a long rest this afternoon, and had a relaxing bath. Had a long think.
I’m not angry any more. So – deletion time.

Sarah Kennedy was talking about this proposed faith school scheme on Radio 2. Apparently there is only one month left to register your objection to the ‘Send Your Kid to a Faith School’ law.
The petition is on the 10 Downing St website but they didn’t tell anybody about it. Therefore at the time of Sarah’s comments only 250,000 people had signed it and 750,000 signatures are required for the goverment to at least take any notice.
Once you’ve given your details (you don’t have to give your full address, just house number and postcode will do), they will send you an email with a link in it. Once you click on that link, you’ll have signed the petition.
Tony Blair’s proposal to introduce faith schools for all children will mean every family having to register a religion as part of an overall ID scheme. If you have a child of school age, you will HAVE to register a religion and send your child to the appropriate faith school; refusniks and atheists can probably expect prosecution.
If you are concerned about this Orwellian plan and want to stop this constant bashing of those who believe that religion does not belong in schools, please sign the petition on No 10’s new website(link below) and pass this on to as many people as possible.
Sign up if you value your freedom and democratic rights!
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/faithschools/

Hey, if the same tactic got a million signatures on an anti-road-pricing petition….. 😉

…or at least a million of them.
For the last couple of weeks, emails identical to, or very similar to, this one have been flooding emails lists and forums:

Sarah Kennedy was talking about this proposed car tax scheme on Radio 2. Apparently there is only one month left to register your objection to the ‘Pay As You Go’ road tax.
The petition is on the 10 Downing St website but they didn’t tell anybody about it. Therefore at the time of Sarah’s comments only 250,000 people had signed it and 750,000 signatures are required for the goverment to at least take any notice.
Once you’ve given your details (you don’t have to give your full address, just house number and postcode will do), they will send you an email with a link in it. Once you click on that link, you’ll have signed the petition.
The government’s proposal to introduce road pricing will mean you having to purchase a tracking device for your car and paying a monthly bill to use it.
The tracking device will cost about £200 and in a recent study by the BBC,the lowest monthly bill was £28 for a rural florist and £194 for a delivery driver. A non working mother who used the car to take the kids to school paid £86 in one month.
On top of this massive increase in tax, you will be tracked.
Somebody will know where you are at all times. They will also know how fast you have been going, so even if you accidentally creep over a speed limit in time you can probably expect a Notice of Intended Prosecution with your monthly bill.
If you are concerned about this Orwellian plan and want to stop the constant bashing of the car driver, please sign the petition on No 10’s new website(link below) and pass this on to as many people as possible.
Sign up if you value your freedom and democratic rights –
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/traveltax

It’s all nonsense – there’s no plans to impose any such national driving tax, or force any one to have these devices fitted in their cars. In 2004, the Dept of Transport published a feasibility study into road pricing, which concluded that while nationwide road pricing was a desirable objective, actually implementing it would be a long and difficult project:

Delivering such a system would be a major challenge. Getting the prices and complementary local measures right will need a greater knowledge at the localised level of road use and road users. In developing price structures it will be important to consider the different needs and lifestyles of different road users. The institutional structure used to operate and regulate the charges, including the use made of the revenue from them, will need to gain and retain the trust of road users. Clear objectives and criteria would need to be established for setting charge levels, and some on the Steering Group believed that a more fundamental reform of motoring taxation to establish a more transparent system would be required.

There is no discussion in this study of tracking devices in cars – there is such technology being used in Pay as You Drive insurance schemes, but these are voluntary schemes. For some time, a body called the Independent Transport Commission has been pushing for the government to introduce a compulsory road-pricing scheme utilising such tracking devices; the ITC is a think-tank (with two CEOs of rail/bus companies as members, interestingly) that has no particular influence in government.

I suspect the hand of a clever marketing man – or a politician – in the writing and dissemination of this email. Note the implication in the second paragraph that this petition has been organised by the Government: “The petition is on the 10 Downing St website but they didn’t tell anybody about it.” Yes, the petition is on the No 10 site, but anyone can post a petition there; however, not many people are likely to know this.
And whoever wrote the email seems to have known which button to push with the Great British public – dislike of “Big Brother” government, distrust of Tony Blair, fear of surveillence, fear of extra taxes. It was so in tune with popular opnion that not many people actually bothered to check the facts. They just cried “Yes!!” and obediently trooped off to vote the way they were instructed – over a million of them so far.
Even after I had rebutted the email on a couple of lists, people replied that they had added their click to it anyway, because they thought that compulsory tracking of everyone was was Blair/Brown/whoever was ultimately intending to do anyway. And they wanted to protest about it.
I don’t think many people will have bothered to sign a petition that was just generally protesting against road tolls – which this petition actually is. It was posted by National Alliance Against Tolls, a pressure group that I’ve never heard of before now. But I’m sure we’ll be hearing lots of them now.

And, finally, I have the uneasy feeling that marketing people will be studying this particular email campaign with great interest, expecially with an election looming…..