Free Learner

The Christmas Truce

The Christmas Truce of 1914 has been called by Arthur Conan Doyle “one human episode amid all the atrocities.” It is certainly one of the most remarkable incidents of World War I and perhaps of all military history. Inspiring both popular songs and theater, it has endured as an almost archetypal image of peace.

The above is from the addendum to an article written for schoolchildren on the truce at Christmas during the first year of World War I.

I knew about the Christmas Truce but had subsequently heard it was enormously exaggerated if not apocryphal.  Apparently, that's not so.  According to the above link, a few historians have verified that it really did happen and was quite widespread along the front line.  Which made me think: Wow -- for a day, or a few days -- they held a war and no one came.

What's more, this is not as unprecedented as people think.  Also from the addendum to the article:

Another false idea about the truce was held even by most soldiers who were there: that it was unique in history. Though the Christmas Truce is the greatest example of its kind, informal truces had been a longstanding military tradition. During the American Civil War, for instance, Rebels and Yankees traded tobacco, coffee, and newspapers, fished peacefully on opposite sides of a stream, and even gathered blackberries together. Some degree of fellow feeling had always been common among soldiers sent to battle.

In more recent times, he points out, cultural and language barriers have prevented informal truces from occurring in many battle arenas.  Nonetheless, their historical occurence, along with estimates that (for instance) soldiers only fired 1 in every 7 times they were ordered to fire during WWII, does suggest that sometimes the common people quietly rebel against war.  The elites, the CEOs, the war mongers, the intelligence mavens-- these are the men who want war, and bring us to war.  The Zbigniew Brzezinskis and Henry Kissingers of the world.  And when they garner the populations' support for war, it is always through false pretenses.  Lies, propaganda, and false flags (such as the non-existent Gulf of Tonkin attack, or the apocryphal Spanish attack on the USS Maine) are used to whip up fear and anger in a domestic population to allow for war. 

There's an anti-war book called War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, that argues that warfare can be exhilirating and addictive to some of its participants, but also to whole societies involved in a war.  I shouldn't comment on a book I haven't read, but I would imagine that this process doesn't work quite so well without state propaganda.  When I watched the old series Upstairs, Downstairs they showed that many British were gung-ho for war against the Germans, at the start of WWI.  But that was on the basis of outrageous propaganda about the evil Huns.  Remember those Iraqi soldiers who knocked over the incubators of premature babies in a Kuwaiti hospital?  It never happened, but it's very much like the WWI anti-German propaganda.  Take all that away, and would the common people feel so inspired by war?  I doubt it.  It's just that war, because it involves death, enemies, and "the Other," provides for the most potent propaganda there is.

We are constantly being told how terrible human beings are, but the worst atrocities are committed not because people run amok, outside the control of any State, but rather, on the orders of the State.

 Except when, sometimes, they refuse.

Quick food update

I feel obligated to say how the "eating more food" experiment is going-- even though, as it turns out, I can't really stomach eating more food.

I do feel better when I eat right after waking up, as Matt Stone recommends.  And I do feel better when I eat more frequently, and when I eat more calories in a day.  And, interestingly, when I'm eating more I'm actually hungrier.  The more I eat, the hungrier I am.  Some days, though, I have no desire to eat anything, period.

After two months of trying hard to eat more food, I have not gained any weight nor do any of my pants feel tighter.  I'm beginning to believe that homeostasis -- your body's ability to maintain the status quo -- is a hell of a powerful force.  If you want to eat more, eat less, lose weight, or gain weight, well... good frickin' luck.  [Edit: I mean while eating healthy food.  And by "healthy" I mean "existed 150 years ago".]  I'll keep trying, because as I said, when I eat more I feel better.  And it seems to have no effect on how I look or how much I weigh, in total contradiction to what's "supposed" to happen.

I suppose I need to try exercising in order to generate more of an appetite, but it doesn't necessarily work that way if you're low on T3 thyroid hormone, as I am.  Unless it's very gentle exercise it runs the risk of actually slowing down your metabolism.  When you're hypothyroid, instead of your catecholamines signaling "Woo-hoo!  Exercise!  Let's speed up that metabolism!" they instead signal "Whoa... let's just slow the hell down here, what is this, the chain gang?  Take that metabolism as low as she'll go."  I oversimplify, but that's the gist.  Since millions of people are low in T3 even though their doctors (who don't look at T3) say their thyroid function is normal, there are thus millions of people who exercise in total misery without losing any weight at all (in fact, they might gain weight).  Additionally, exercise releases cortisol, and plenty of Americans, me included, already have sky-high cortisol levels.  High cortisol exacerbates the thyroid issue.

On a somewhat related note, you know how, stereotypically, virtually all women think they need to lose 5 pounds of fat?  Well, here is an actual picture (courtesy the batty.us site), using an anatomical model, of what five pounds of fat would look like.  It's that disgusting yellow stuff next to her thigh:

Okayyy... that's way the hell more volume than I would've thought.  And it's pretty clear that a lot of normal-sized women obsessed with losing weight are actually losing muscle, not fat, because they don't actually have 5 or 10 extra pounds of fat on them.  (We're supposed to have some fat, obviously; I'm talking about clearly extraneous fat.)  Women who are trying to starve the fat off themselves are facing lost strength, osteoporosis, mineral imbalances, slowed digestion, slowed metabolism, thyroid and cortisol problems, and fatigue.

I think "calories in, calories out" is a very pernicious myth, and particularly harmful to women.  It's not that simple, and if mainstream medicine weren't so zealously puritanical about diet and exercise, they might begin to understand that.

The Middle East feminist revolution

One of the top most-viewed items on al-Jazeera English in the past several days has been Naomi Wolf's article The Middle East Feminist Revolution:

 

[W]omen were not serving only as support workers, the habitual role to which they are relegated in protest movements, from those of the 1960s to the recent student riots in the United Kingdom. Egyptian women also organised, strategised, and reported the events. Bloggers such as Leil Zahra Mortada took grave risks to keep the world informed daily of the scene in Tahrir Square and elsewhere.

. . .

Two generations ago, only a small minority of the daughters of the elite received a university education. Today, women account for more than half of the students at Egyptian universities. They are being trained to use power in ways that their grandmothers could scarcely have imagined: publishing newspapers - as Sanaa el Seif did, in defiance of a government order to cease operating; campaigning for student leadership posts; fundraising for student organisations; and running meetings.

. . .

[T]he historical record of what happens when educated women participate in freedom movements suggests that those in the region who would like to maintain iron-fisted rule are finished.

 

And from another well-read al-Jazeera piece:

 

 

One of the women featured in the photos, Gigi Ibrahim, was quoted as follows:

I started [my political activism] by just talking to people involved [in the labour movement]. Then I became more active and the whole thing became addictive. I went to meetings and took part in protests. I learned very quickly that most of the strikes in the labour movement were started by women [my emphasis].

. . .

I was in Tahrir Square on February 2, when pro-Mubarak thugs attacked us with petrol bombs and rocks. That was the most horrific night. I was trapped in the middle of the square. The outskirts of the square were like a war zone. The more things escalated the more determined we became not to stop. Many people were injured and many died and that pushed us to go on and not give up.

. . .

The women were also taking care of the wounded in makeshift clinics in the square. Some women were on the front line throwing rocks with the men. I was on the front line documenting the battle with my camera. It was like nothing that I have ever seen or experienced before.

 

Tonight protests began in Saubi Arabia, the country which, in all the world, is the most oppressive toward women.  Friday, March 11, is being called a "Day of Rage" in Saudi Arabia, though it's not clear how large such protests might be, considering the medieval sort of control the government exerts over its people.  Those planning the protests, according to Robert Fisk, intend to place women on the front lines, in the belief that Saudi police might be less willing to open fire with live ammunition.  It's not clear to me whether Saudi women would have any choice about taking place in the front lines of such protests, as they have virtually no rights in that country and are treated as their husbands' or fathers' slaves.  However, even if they go to the front lines unwillingly, it will surely change their perception of themselves.  If they are shot at on the front lines, the revolution becomes their own; they become founding members whether they wanted the role or not.  Revolutionary spirit spreads, and not only from one nation to another.  I hope the Saudi women will be safe from bullets and nerve gas, and that they begin to recognize their own power.

 

An incredible 15-year-old

This is a guy who was part of a student march in the UK on November 24, protesting planned cuts in education.  [Britain has gone with an austerity budget which heavily slashes all social spending.]  The police in London "kettled" about 5,000 students, trapping them on one section of a street.  They detained these schoolkids, as young as 13, without arrest, for over 6 hours.  These students were outside in the cold and without food or (for almost the whole time) bathrooms.  And here's what one 15-year-old boy who had been "kettled" had to say about it a few days later -- and it's kick-ass.  I feel like writing fan mail.

 

 

Crash JP Morgan, Buy Silver!

This is the most interesting political campaign I can think of since the 2007 November 5th Ron Paul money bomb (which was a reference to, among other things, V for Vendetta and false flag terrorism generally).  The November 5 money bomb was an opportunity for we the people to use a little bit of money each and do something really big as a group.  This campaign is similar.  The "meme" has been co-founded and championed by Max Keiser, so let's let him explain, in his article in today's London Guardian:

For decades, the world's banking system has been on a fiat currency standard that has led to banks that are "too big to fail". They have overreached their remit of providing loans and have leeched into the political system, using our money to change the political agenda in ways that boost bank management's compensation over the interests of their depositors.

. . .

As part of the ongoing exposé, it has now become clear that JP Morgan is sitting on what is estimated to be 3.3bn ounce "short" position in silver (which they have sold short, meaning they don't own it to begin with) in an attempt to keep the price artificially low in order to keep the relative appeal of the dollar and other fiat currencies high.

. . .

[T]he world is waking up to the fact that they have the ability... to create a new precious metals-based backed currency system by simply converting their fiat paper into real money [i.e. gold or silver].

Let's back up a second.  As we all know, the big banks have behaved fraudulently and criminally, and have been basically insolvent since 2008 (if not 2007) -- but were bailed out... by us.  The big banks are all terrible (most famously The Squid)-- it's just that JP Morgan is a particularly vulnerable target, because JPM has sold off $1.5 trillion worth of silver they never had, and a good deal of this disappeared silver was in "naked short sales," meaning it never existed anywhere.  It wasn't even borrowed from somebody else, which is what usually happens in short sales.  Nope.  In naked short sales, the stuff wasn't borrowed at all, it was simply invented.

I mean of course this is hard to understand.  It makes no fricking sense whatsoever.  How can you -- say -- "invent" a million bushels of corn on paper and sell it to somebody?  Well, you can only do it because Wall St has become all about paper, bought and sold while Wall St collects a commission, and Wall St cares not whether the paper has any backing whatsoever.  Fictional-value paper is traded by banks who are looking for the even greater fool to take this junk paper off their hands.

In this particular case, somebody ostensibly buys silver from JPM, but it's either somebody else's silver that JPM borrowed, or it's totally imaginary, counterfeit silver.  Only-- the buyer doesn't know this, because 99% of the time they never demand the physical silver, so they never find out.  They simply assume that their little piece of paper represents actual real silver in some vault someplace -- but it doesn't.

Recapping:

• The US government cannot fund war and empire without the ability to print money out of thin air.
• This destroys the value of the currency and impoverishes the people.  And -- under normal circumstances -- everyone understands this because "real money" (gold and silver) become more and more valuable compared to the crappy paper.
• The US government therefore has an interest in suppressing gold and silver prices.  They want to have their cake (create new money) and eat it too (have it stay valuable).
• JP Morgan is particularly instrumental in suppressing precious metals prices by "selling" metal that doesn't actually exist, greatly expanding supply in a totally fraudulent manner.
• JP Morgan is, therefore, "short" a tremendous amount of silver.
• Only 1% of silver buyers from the likes of JPM ever take delivery of the real thing.
• If the "real thing" (physical silver) dries up, and that 1% can't be sated, JPM is in default.  They're screwed, and even if they're bailed out, the jig is up and the silver price goes up like a missile.
• Thus: CRASH J P MORGAN, BUY SILVER was born.

There are something like 125 or so short video clips out now under the Crash JP Morgan, Buy Silver banner.  Here's one example.  And here's Max himself.  And even if you don't understand it, you might be inclined to spend $30 to cast a vote against JPM.

By the way, Max & Stacy's Russia Today show is huge -- he recently claimed 60-70 million viewers globally -- and they're always entertaining.  Check out the latest episode (#100 -- woo-hoo!) in which they discuss broadcasting the show during a "bed-in" a la John and Yoko.  RT is the new BBC... and thank god.

CDC deals another blow to its own credibility

Via Washington's Blog, I read that the CDC issued the following statement about the safety of Gulf seafood:

For the seafood to pose a health risk, the food would have to be heavily contaminated with oil, and would therefore have a strong odor and taste of oil.

As Washington's Blog goes through in some detail, this is just a ridiculous statement.  It pretends there is no such thing as Corexit, as if millions of gallons of this toxic (banned in the UK) junk were not pumped into the Gulf, and as if the Corexit never interacted with the oil.

In the same post we read that a NOAA Administrator thinks fish clean the oil out of the water (specifically, they "degrade" and "process" it), miraculously retaining no toxins themselves.  I mean hey, if that's the case, why didn't we just dump fish into that Alaskan bay after the Exxon Valdez ran aground?  Apparently we've been making a fuss over nothing; fish were the answer all along!

*    *    *    *    *

It feels to me like we're at a sort of maximal corruption point, in which every institution imaginable has been captured by the corporatists.  In turn, the people then lose any sense of trust in institutions generally.  Nobody believes anything anymore.  Do the people at the tops of these institutions and corporations not see that they are shooting themselves in the foot?  Does the CDC think it can lie to us again and again and again but if there's a real flu pandemic, we'll still listen to them?  Really?  Because I don't think most of us give a shit what they have to say anymore.  Not the CDC, nor the FDA, nor the USDA.  I see those acronyms and I substitute Pfeizer, Glaxo, and Monsanto; or in this case BP, Glaxo, and Monsanto.  What is the USDA good for except directing SWAT teams to Amish farms to raid their raw milk operations, or bankrupting small chicken farmers?  What is the FDA good for except harassing the makers of herbal products -- really dangerous stuff like dandelion root tea or extract of chamomile -- while refusing to take a frequently lethal medication (Vioxx) off the market?  What is the CDC good for when it ignores even mainstream scientists and scientific publications in declaring Gulf seafood safe to eat?

Regulatory capture, they call it.  It doesn't seem like a big enough phrase for a corruption so ubiquitous that it presages revolution, in whatever form that might take.

More on the criminality of bullying

I actually hadn't read any details about Phoebe Prince, who hung herself as a result of bullying, until today.  So I have to amend my last post, it seems, because a Massachusetts District Attorney has filed charges against 9 teenagers in that case, for criminal harassment, civil rights violations, and stalking.  It seems that in rare cases we do pay attention to criminal bullying.

The spin in this Boston Globe piece is that the DA is making too much of a fuss:

With sharp words and a strikingly aggressive prosecutorial stance, authorities yesterday spelled out a litany of charges against nine teenagers accused of subjecting 15-year-old South Hadley student Phoebe Prince to months of tortuous harassment before she hanged herself in a stairwell at home.

. . .

The nature of the charges... hints at a forceful strategy of taking many legal avenues in the pursuit of convictions, legal specialists said.

“It’s an aggressive approach," said Robert Griffin, a former Suffolk County prosecutor. “They are casting a wide net."

Yeah, you can see how it would surprise people, to suddenly start seeing charges brought against illegal behavior which has been completely ignored up till now.  I can imagine the same sort of whining about "strikingly aggressive" prosecutions for sexual assault, domestic violence, or harassment of racial minorities, in years past.  You know:  Hey, what's she expect if she goes home with him?  Men will be men, and nice girls wouldn't do that anyway.  Or:  Hey, I just slapped her around a little, what do you expect, I had a bad day and she pissed me off.  Or:  What does a black family expect, moving into an all-white neighborhood?  They brought it on themselves. 

That's about where we are in what I hope will be a new campaign against bullying.  We're still in the "Boys will be boys," "They're just kids," "What's the big deal" phase.  (I think some adults don't realize that the hostility of school culture has intensified far beyond what they were used to as kids.)  What this DA is doing will become the example for other egregious cases, and similar actions will be pressed for by parents and others in the community.  Hopefully this is the start of something.

And I hope this puts fear into the hearts of bullies.  Gee, maybe nobody ever told them that much of what they do is against the law, and they can and may be prosecuted for it. 

I was at a site called "Please Fire Me" the other day (recommended!).  A woman reported that her boss had told her to "buy some heels" and take better care of herself because her looks had gone downhill since having the baby.  Commenters immediately pointed out that this is illegal.  One day I hope this legal savvy will exist in the world of teenagers.  If some kids threaten physical violence and block the door, that is illegal.  If they taunt you during class to the point where your ability to learn is impaired, that is illegal.  If they repeatedly follow you home from school or in your car, that is illegal.  And obviously, if they grope you or beat you up, that's illegal.  Maybe we need some teenaged activism here... a stream of them showing up at the police station, asking to file a report.

Criminal offenses

This is Desire Dreyer, who committed suicide at the age of 16 due to bullying and consequent depression.  As her mother describes it:

These girls threw things at her in classrooms (while the teachers turned their heads and walked out of the classroom), chased her into the girl’s restrooms at school and told her if "it" didn't happen inside of school it would outside of school. There were other incidents of a group of girls that followed her home from Homecoming in 2005 and threatened her in front of our house. The bullies even went as far as to be waiting on her one night when the school bus she was on (the cheerleaders had to ride the bus to away football games) arrived back at her High School. They followed her to a local restaurant and surrounded her car. My daughter called the police from her cell phone.

...I was told by the small school principal that the problem was taken care of, only to find out the group of girls did not stop. My daughter did not want to go to school, her grades dropped drastically, she became severely depressed. I did not know that the bullying was the cause; if only I had known then what I know now, if only I had known that all the signs she portrayed were signs of being bullied, which lead her to depression, which in turn led her to suicide.

This is a fate which is reserved for children in our country.  Among adults, we actually pay attention to such legal definitions as:

Criminal harassment is defined as "engag(ing) in intentional conduct which the actor [harasser] knows or has reason to know would cause the victim, under the circumstances, to feel frightened, threatened, oppressed, persecuted, or intimidated; and causes this reaction on the part of the victim. (M.S. § 609.749, Subd. I).

Yet our society feels little obligation to protect children from this same criminal behavior.

NEW YORK (WABC) -- Monday was a heartbreaking day for a local family, who had to bury their 12-year-old daughter.

The young girl took her own life, and her family says she decided to commit suicide because she was bullied at school.

. . .

"They used to beat her up, they used to harass her, curse at her, call her 'train tracks' because she had braces, they used to cut her hair," mother Mercedes Herrera said. "I went to the school, they didn't do nothing about it."

Mercedes found Maria hanging by a belt in a closet of their home last week. She died later at Brookdale Hospital. The family blames bullies for Maria's death, but they also blame the school, PS 72.

"She made a statement last year that she wanted to kill herself to the guidance counselor, and he never got help for her," Mercedes Herrera said.

Mercedes made no fewer than 20 visits to the school to complain about bullying and ask for help, but there is apparently no documentation of those visits.

. . .

"It's hard to understand how there isn't any record of it," father Eduardo Esparra said. "We want justice."

. . .

Research shows that girls who are frequently victims of bullies were 32 times more likely to be depressed and 10 to 12 times more likely to think about or attempt suicide compared to girls not affected by bullying.

Let me say, having worked with many datasets in the fields of social work, public health, and medicine, that a risk or odds ratio of "32 times" or "10 to 12 times" is virtually unheard of.  If I saw such a number in the SPSS or SAS software output my first thought would be that something had gone wrong with the model, that that just couldn't be.  So if this study they're referencing is true, it indicates that bullying is devastatingly harmful to young people.  And it means that we are allowing young people to be killed by crime -- by what would be known as "criminal harassment" or a "hostile work environment" -- if only it were happening to adults.

But children?  Eh, you know.  Whatever.  Can't be bothered, kid.  Roll with the punches.

Susan Boyle sings the blues

A 10-year-old recording of Susan Boyle singing Cry Me a River has surfaced.  She recorded it at a school, for a charity album sponsored by her village newspaper.  Only 1,000 copies were produced, which is a shame, because she does a fantastic job.  I hope she sings it on TV and makes her voice every bit as sultry as it is in the recording; teenaged heads will explode.

And, so I can put this in the "personal politics" category and pretend I've put up an intellectual blog post, check out some of the hand-wringing over Ms. Boyle collected at HuffPo:

There's a Little Susan Boyle in All of Us

Susan Boyle: Talent Without Judgment

What If Susan Boyle Couldn't Sing?

Why Susan Boyle Makes Us Cry

Ashton Kutcher, Susan Boyle, and the Power of the People

Two Reasons Susan Boyle Means So Much to Us

Susan Boyle: Lessons We Still Haven't Learned

Susan Boyle Energizes the World

The Susan Boyle Bubble

Brava

This is my first "random" post.  I thought about dressing it up with some kind of point, such as "Never judge a book by its cover," or "Why did it take this woman 47 years to find appreciation for her talent?"

But really, it's just a wonderful moment on television.  Go watch this uplifting bit on YouTube (and click "more info" for the lyrics).

Addendum, via the San Francisco Gate:

Ms. Boyle cared for her mother until the elder Boyle's passing in 2007 at the age of 91; her father passed away 10 years before. Living alone, Susan attends church each weekend and it was there that her singing talent developed, and where her late mother encouraged her to sing, but Boyle had reportedly stopped singing and did not know how she would do on that Saturday night she shocked the World.

Susan's life has not been one without pain. Sadly, she was abused and starved of oxygen at birth and has a learning disability because of the act. Ms. Boyle says she was teased by classmates, and reportedly the scars of their comments remain to this day.

It's hard not to think of her as the Heroine of the Common People.