I have to admit I sceptical of a lot of crime figures. A lot of crime goes unreported for various reasons. I've no idea how much crime goes unreported but I hear about it all the time, and I don't report most crimes to the police anymore. We had £750 stolen from a community group and the police would do nothing but we do know who did it because we had independent witnesses. It was stressful and pointless to report it and the perp still wanders around as if nothing happened. I'm sure this repeats over and over.

I can see why they changed the title! I wonder how many sales has Kanye West nade on account of his controversial views? He fills an unusual niche in the music industry.

Like I say elsewhere I have visited two people in our local psychiatric unit. I haven't encountered any of the shrinks but the nurses vary a lot in attitude. The whole place is underfunded and I believe most people would become more mentally ill by being kept in this environment, which has little more than a TV to keep people motivated. The only view of the outdoors is through windows and almost no one is allowed to smoke even though this causes immense tension.

I have heard that, however there is truth in the assertions. I know two people currently in psychiatric hospital, with one seeming to be relatively sane just now but trapped in there, and another whose mental health is being affected detrimentally by the hospital environment. I've no doubt the latter could have recovered last year but for the fact she is being kept in an environment where her only contact with the outside world or nature is at the behest of hospital staff (who vary a lot in terms of attitude and even fluency in English).

Was rereading that last year. Recommend it to anyone who hasn't.

We are trained to be scared of lone individuals and rural environments, when in fact most abuses occur within a hierarchy and urban settings. I feel the fatal flaw in human nature is so many are obedient to power without question, especially when power has some kind of uniform, but also within gangs etc.

In the hospital environment, power is partly conveyed by the clothes people where and if you do not conform or obey, then you are punished. It is a pattern we are conditioned into from nursery/kindergarten onwards.

I think it comes down to a fear of uncertainty. It's comfortable to believe in authority.

Authority provides the illusion of a sense of control, predictability, certainty and orderliness, and it's like we gravitate toward that even when it leads to bad outcomes for us.

For most of us the fear of being out of control seems to be greater than the fear of being controlled.

I'm not sure it's even uncertainty. Authority carries a bigger stick, and things like witch hunts and burning of heretics and rebel peasants, have deselected independence of mind over the centuries. Society has an unconscious memory of what used to happen when people disagreed. And still does in some places.

People today worship the white lab coat and the military/police uniform in the same way their ancestors honoured witch doctors/shamans and the tribe's warriors. They assume the former groups will dish out good advice and the latter will protect them. The general public experiences this in hospitals and schools, with psychiatric hospitals being the most extreme version of hierarchy. I've mentioned that I currently have two friends who are stuck in a mental hospital, and I have told both of them that they need to be respectful of staff if they want to get out sooner. The woman seems to have had her day passes revoked, and been placed on a more secure ward, after being cheeky to staff. Maybe the staff were awful but she isn't in much of a position to negotiate — she's been in there for nine months. (I've heard rumours of one of the other patients being sexually assaulted by staff, but thanks to the nature of these places I don't know whether it is fantasy or a real crime, since the supposed victim is doped up to the eyeballs much of the time and would not remember it properly.)

It takes me back to a time when I could find a wide variety of websites online. I love this kind of thing... Not something I would deliberately look for but great to stumble across it.

Embellished, maybe, but parts of it ring true. I know from bitter experience that confronting a neighbour about noise rarely works. They can often be drunk or aggressive.

I've been blogging on and off for a number of years but don't do so much nowadays. I think there are several concerns for me:

* It has little audience nowadays, thanks partly to search engines sidelining blogs in their results.

* I was producing a large amount of content without being paid for it. I had set up the blog to promote a book, which has sold reasonably well, but the book also renumerates me for the time I had put into researching the topics. I felt like the blog was work, and it now runs into tens of thousands of words, but people wanted that off me for free.

* Now it also faces the issue of scraping, and while I was delighted to bring certain facts and stories to wider attention, I didn't do so in order to benefit predatory tech corporations.

On the flipside, it has brought me into contact with a handful of other people who provided me with more info on some subjects and were often complimentary. (If I suffered abuse and trolling, it was via social media, often by people who only looked at a thumbnail link.)

I've seen those years ago, long before this Epstein business emerged. While I believe Musk does have a substantial legitimate fanbase, I've seen YouTube channels which are full of dozens of bot-type sycophantic comments about him. Some of them seem to think he is the most brilliant man who ever lived. Personally I think he is a very rich man who can pay others to do his R&D while he takes the credit for it.