Human rights – diversity – neurodiversity – equality – inclusivity – discrimination – otherisation – speciesism – planet – consumerism – bioethics sensu lato
Stalking and the police
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-63745857
Going to the police because you’re being stalked usually aggravates the situation.
I have been warning against reporting stalking to the police for years. I have also written a white paper describing a solution. Cases of stalking and harassment need to be dealt with very differently, not just in England but also in the rest of the world, and there needs to be exchange of information on stalkers.
Currently, a stalking victim can go to the police and not be believed only to find out later that the police were completely unaware that there already was a string of complaints from others against the same stalker.
However, the public at large also bears a responsibility. The otherization of victims that makes it possible for stalking to continue not only often comes from police officers but also from people in the surroundings of the victims. There is a tremendous amount of hate for stalking victims. Many people pounce on them like a proverbial pack of hyenas.
This is because stalking victims upset people’s beliefs, for example, beliefs about their own safety. This can make stalking victims be perceived as a threat. (This is neuroscience.) It is why the only empathy for stalking victims usually comes from women who have been stalked themselves.
(Here in Portsmouth, however, there even seem to be gangs of vicious people who collectively engage in stalking and harassment activities. They often target female business owners and business owners who aren’t local or who aren’t ethnic white English. If you’re based in Portsmouth and have a stalker, you should be aware of this because these other folks can complicate the picture, making it hard to figure out who is doing what to you and why. These local folks may even latch on to you because they notice that something isn’t right in your life, then perceive you as “vulnerable” and easy to target.)
A Scottish business owner in Portsmouth was targeted in 2018 in what the Sunday Times called it a “xenophobic campaign”. It has clear echoes of Pizzagate. The perpetrator was living within a stone’s throw from me. (Cross the street, then go left.)
“Businessman falsely branded a paedophile by online bully forced to close vape shop after losing £75,000 in trade | The News” https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/businessman-ruined-after-false-online-claims-of-paedophilia-dnkddg93x
Time : “What to Know About Pizzagate, the Fake News Story With Real Consequences”
Wikipedia : Pizzagate conspiracy theory
If you have an anonymous stalker and something like this gets added to the mix, certainly if that too is anonymous or starts at around the same time, how can you still tell who is doing what? Chances are that you will quickly lose credibility among those who are not targeting you.
The following was also in the news this morning: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-63669711
I suspect that some with me in it recently started being circulated locally.
Something I want stalking victims to keep in mind is that homelessness can make it much harder for some stalkers to target you remotely. It can even force a stalker to come out of the woodwork if you do not know yet who your stalker is.
(I learned that the hard way. Hindsight, however, is 20/20. I had no idea what I was dealing with at the time, let alone who.)
There are no more locks to be picked, there is no more postal mail to be stolen and there are much fewer hacking opportunities. Get yourself a clean phone and do not communicate via your usual communication channels (use new email addresses etc). Your contacts’ phones may get hacked, though; keep that in mind. Stalkers can be immensely persistent.
If you’re of a certain age, choosing homelessness as an effective solution that helps you get out of the claws of a stalker is not an easy thing to do, though. It’s easier if you’re in your twenties or thirties or perfectly healthy and in great shape. The season also plays a role. It’s not nice to be out there when you’re cold and soaking wet from the rain.
I wrote this in 2011:
Mean-spirited
That was also the term that UN rapporteur Philip Alston used with regard to the UK government.
Author and patron for torture-survivor charity criticises politicians for encouraging ‘mean-spiritedness’
Hilarious? I think not.
Inequality is killing the UK economy | Armando Iannucci | New Statesman
“It’s okay for them to be hungry. Because they’re poor.”
(I’m hearing a lot here that I have been saying for 10, 15 years too.)
“bad gateway” says my hacker
Yeah, you can say that again.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-63680822
These women were “unlawfully killed”? When did the UK reinstate the death penalty?
Women’s health is like poverty
A political choice
I’ve recently read several times that women’s health issues are just as important as tackling poverty and inequality in the UK (for the government).
Very clever Boris putting his foot in it again
Boorish Boris at work again. So infuriating. He has pulled this kind of shit many times before. He’s like a drunken bull in a China shop, pardon the pun.
Sophisticated? Only if you consider mooning sophisticated, but hey, that is our Boris, always putting his foot in it (and oddly enough, perhaps describing England).
After nearly 20 years of this, I have stopped keeping my mouth shut so as not to offend the tender insular English souls. So I put my foot in it very deliberately.
Boris, so I understand, declined to run for PM again this time because giving speeches was much more lucrative. That’s going very well, then.
Boris, go have a chat with Seth Godin. He could teach you a few things. Also about growing up and behaving like an adult.
This is NOT dignity, this is NOT care
This is abuse.
I suspect that the mere therapeutic use of colors, the provision of warm SOFT cuddly materials to decorate the rooms with and the application of nature sounds and music could already make a huge difference.
These kids and adults are locked away the same way wild animals like tigers are kept on concrete or grid floors in bare cages at the facilities where so many people from all over the world are trying to free them from. This is also almost like Yulin, isn’t it?
Nicolas Joncour. He doesn’t speak but he uses a keyboard to communicate, writes and plays the piano. He wrote this article and the above quote in 2016: https://hennyk.com/2016/09/26/the-right-to-an-education-article-typed-by-non-verbal-autistic-piano-student-with-dyspraxia/
This is a wonderful 2018 video about him. He was a university student by that time.
This is him now:
By the way, something similar goes for children with Down syndrome. While countries like Iceland have eradicated Down syndrome from the population (via abortion etc), in the US, more and more people with Down syndrome are graduating from colleges and universities. (So you see, there is another side to almost very story.) Where there is a will to empower people, there is a way.
Surprised? Well, remember that women too were kept out of universities for a long time. Studying would damage their reproductive systems was one of the claims made to accomplish that. Even the length of women’s thigh bones has been thrown in as a measure to prove that women were not suitable for education.
People with Down syndrome used to have short lives because of the medical challenges they are born with, but nowadays, medicine having advanced over time, once they’ve made it into their twenties, they can put that behind them and lead relatively long and happy and even fairly conventionally “productive” lives.
Non-Down people, by contrast, tend to require increasingly expensive medical care the older they get. This goes particularly for women. Because women live longer than men. You don’t eradicate women for that reason, do you? And you don’t talk about the financial cost of constructing highways and homes and office buildings and factories – or of IVF and midwives and caesarians – as a reason for limiting population growth either. So why talk about the financial costs of helping non-mainstream people thrive?
(I addressed such issues in an online course that I made a few years ago after I wrote the first version of my book about the new eugenics.)
PS Henny K also is autistic.
Another judgement coming up
Next week, we’ll have the judgement in the case of the Scottish Independence Referendum. That too was initially expected today, I think; the judges had warned at the start of that case that the judgement might take some time.
Just like with the MH17 case, the judges have had to read through a huge number of pages of documentation in this case (more than 8,000, even).
That decision will be delivered on Wednesday 23 November.
Today is the day the court will rule about four MH17 suspects
Update: One suspect has been acquitted. The three remaining suspects each have received a life sentence (life in prison). The 2-hour court hearing could be watched live online, but it was all in Dutch.
In English:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-63637625
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/17/three-men-found-guilty-of-murdering-298-people-in-flight-mh17-bombing (Is “firing a missile” or “shooting down” the same as “bombing”? That’s the writer in me asking that.)
UK foreign secretary statement: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/flight-mh17-trial-verdict-foreign-secretarys-statement
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/17/europe/mh17-trial-verdict-intl/index.html
Although Canada had one victim on board too, a 24-year-old medical student called Andrei Anghel (pictured in the second video below), CBC (still) has nothing on its front page either, btw, but if you search on MH17, you will find this Reuters item: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/netherlands-mh17-trial-1.6654577
—
Eight years ago, a Russian Buk missile system was smuggled from Russia into Ukraine and shot down flight MH17, which was en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. Then it was smuggled out of Ukraine again. According to the prosecutors, the launcher belonged to Russia’s 53rd anti-aircraft missile brigade.
A large number of Dutch people (196) lost their lives but people in 16 other countries lost loved ones too. In total, 298 people were killed.
The Dutch responded with great dignity to the tragedy, honoring the dead with very impressive sober and respectful ceremonies upon the arrival of the bodies in their home country.
Today, it is a court in the Netherlands that will have its say about Igor Girkin (aliases Strelkov and Pervi), Sergej Doebinski, Oleg Poelatov and Leonid Chartsjenko, three Russians and one Ukrainian (Dutch spelling of names).
The prosecution has asked for four life sentences.
More cases may follow against others who were involved in this tragedy.
The current war in Ukraine is directly related to what happened to MH17. It’s an escalation of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.
A large group of Australians arrived yesterday, to be present during the sentencing. The suspects aren’t there. Yes, it’s a trial in absentia, but you cannot just give in, sigh and say “oh well”.*
The CNN website lists the news about the pending verdict on its front page. The sites of the BBC and the Guardian don’t seem to mention it at all. The Guardian has written about it extensively in the past: https://www.google.co.uk/search?as_q=mh17&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&lr=&cr=&as_qdr=all&as_sitesearch=www.theguardian.com&as_occt=any&safe=images&as_filetype=&tbs=#mmc=1 The BBC does have an item about the pending verdict on its site but you have to search on “MH17” to find it: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-63637625
*I find myself wondering once again whether many English people understand the Dutch drive for justice for the sake of justice. There was no oil or gas to be gained from this trial, and not even any wheat. As some people that the BBC spoke with have said, if the response back then – 8 years ago – had been stronger, we might not have the war in Ukraine now. Atrocities often happen because it is too convenient for people to look the other way and do little or nothing.
Yes, I was highly moved by the way the Dutch honored the victims at the time; I watched some of it live, online. I didn’t know any of them as far as I know but the Dutch response was in such stark contrast to that of the British (who lost 10 people on board that plane). It made me really proud of my home country back then and I know that nothing in Britain England will ever come close to the sentiment those Dutch ceremonies radiated.
They contained a lot of silence.
The hearses were also greeted by the Dutch along the roads when the bodies were driven from Eindhoven to Hilversum.
This first video below is LOUD (but you’ll get the idea of what I mean, if you pay attention) and this was only the first ceremony, concerning the first 40 bodies (of any nationality, I should add).
Dignity for the dead is not something the English do well.
(Neither is sophistication, I should add. Nor hospitality.)
At the same time, they have continued to look down their ridiculous neo-colonial noses at all those “savages” that live beyond Dover and sometimes even dare dirty the English soil and air. Isn’t it weird and so desperately sad that the war in Ukraine served to help get the English to abandon at least some of that barbaric insular nonsense?
No, not literally all of the English did that (look down their noses and so on). I know that. I am not a proverbial savage, am not blind. My country has many faults and it has made many mistakes. I am not necessarily fond of it but unlike England, it has a spine when it counts and it seems to know a lot better what really matters in life when it comes to the crunch. And it has guts. Violence does not equate to having guts.
They thought he was single and living alone
He was married. A so-called family man. An electrician.
Watch this video until the very last frame. What you will see then may shock you.
Not a good look for the police, this
“Police pay woman £40,000 after using unlawful force.”
She says she is still living in fear. I can believe that, yes. The incident happened in 2017 and thoroughly shook up her belief that a person can feel safe in one’s home.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-63177303
What happened here is abuse of power. Sgt Jonathan Flint’s actions have also harmed his colleagues. Behaviors such as his erode confidence in the police among the public and that makes it much harder for police officers to do their jobs.
The force’s chief constable was very unhappy with this too, by the way. To the BBC, Chief Constable Craig Guildford stated: “We will always take these matters extremely seriously and I was very disappointed with the outcome of the appeal.”
He did more. He sought a judicial review.
My middle sister once had a boyfriend who was a cop. This was decades ago. The first time they visited me in Amsterdam, my jaw dropped when he opened the closed door to my bedroom and went inside, just like that, as if he owned the place. (Thankfully, my bedroom was tidy. No dirty underwear or anything of that kind in sight. Even the bed was made.)
It made me aware that many police officers, also in their personal lives, may have no good sense left of other people’s boundaries (and rights).
In this Nottinghamshire case, the bailiff crossed the line when he (apparently) reported a theft from his car that had not taken place, in order to get the cops to show up. As it was his body cam footage that later supported the woman, it appears that he is very aware of it.
Sgt Flint sounds dangerous. He is a risk factor for the police, also because he described the woman as a “fucking loony”. That expresses hate. That’s very worrisome (in view of his public role and his powers).
It was the police officers that breached the peace here.
There should be much more careful vetting of police officers and there also should be much better mental health care for police officers (but I doubt that the latter was a factor here).
Need proof that poverty is imposed?
Here is an excellent example of how the despicable English class system bullshit works out in real life.
In a cranky or dark mood?
Do this.
“he was seen making the ‘I’m watching you’ gesture”
“A bully described by his own daughter as ‘a bad man’ subjected his ex-girlfriend to months of harassment, leaving her isolated, terrified and too scared to go to work, a court heard.”
This is the kind of stalking many people seem to expect when you mention the word “stalking”.
Not romantic, and nothing hilarious about it.
For this type of stalking, I have no answers or insights to contribute other than that fear of abandonment seems to feature among those with borderline personality disorder, but I have no idea whether that has anything to do with this sort of situation. Probably not, actually.
(I ran into this when I did an internet search on something else.)
Violence prevention and policing
On 11 October 2022, in a two-hour webinar, Devon and Cornwall’s Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner and Crest Advisory provided an overview of what Devon and Cornwall’s Serious Violence Prevention Programme has achieved since its launch. They also looked at how this approach could be adopted in other areas that don’t have a Violence Reduction Unit.
Continue readingArrested for resisting arrest without violence?
That’s like being arrested for jaywalking for thinking about the time your cousin got arrested for jaywalking…
As neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett will tell you, the fact that they mistook his walking stick for a gun can be explained.
Once he had shown that it was a walking stick, they should have apologized and left the man in peace.
Is it the adrenaline high that causes police officers to do such daft things? That too would be understandable, but then they should develop the habit of going for a jog around the block after each such instance.
“There must be a reason”
Braverman’s language, says Zosseder, “is what’s causing people to think it’s OK to do what they’re doing, to spray swastikas on bus stops.”
What Braverman and other politicians do, that’s otherization, a term apparently first used by Oxford neuroscientist Kathleen Taylor, for example in her 2009 book “Cruelty. Human evil and the human brain.” People also often call it “othering”.
“…even mild otherization primes people for aggression”
– Kathleen Taylor
“Talking about cruelty makes it easier to be cruel – unless one’s talk incurs swift punishment. Acting out the otherizing ideas, especially in a group whose members compete for status and egg each other on, can push people into extreme otherization with remarkable speed.”
– Kathleen Taylor
“the difference between someone hurling verbal abuse at an immigrant and someone beating an immigrant to death is a difference of degree, not a difference in kind”
– Kathleen Taylor
Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett also talks about this topic in her book “Seven and a half lessons about the brain”.
A“reason why people sometimes fail to to empathize with those who look different or believe different things than they do”
may be that “it’s metabolically costly for the brain to deal with things that are hard to predict”
– Lisa Feldman Barrett
The less familiar we are with a group of people, the harder it can be to feel empathy for them. That’s why inclusivity is so important.
Why do people do something like this?
Challenges for autistic people in the professional realm
How hard it must often be for autistic people to run their own businesses!
(Unless perhaps if it’s focused on working with autistic people.)
From what I have learned, I know that it can be challenging for them to navigate the professional world as employees, too. They often have trouble understanding how the world works, particularly how one approaches and communicates with other people, such as potential new clients. They also tend to be so narrowly focused that this too surely must hamper them at times.
I understand that “Le Petit Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is a rich resource for them, but while certainly useful, it was intended as a children’s book, not as a guideline for how one for example behaves in a marriage. Besides, it was written a long time ago.
If we could make the world a kinder (more empathic) and more inclusive place, the motivation for the kind of stalking behaviors that I have been exposed to in the past 14, 15 years would start to disappear. There is often a lot of anger, powerlessness and frustration – and yes, resentment – behind it, as well as a dogged determination.
Would you have guessed this?
Likely not.
I am pointing this out to show how off-base otherisation is.
Olivier De Schutter (UN poverty envoy) tells Britain this is ‘worst time’ for more austerity
Olivier De Schutter is a human rights law professor at Leuven University in Belgium and, at the UN, the successor to NYU human rights law professor Philip Alston (who’s Australian). The latter has lambasted the UK government before because it pushes so many people into poverty and then keeps them there. (Why? I would say because the poorer people are, the less powerful they are and the more it enables certain very rich people to become even richer. The UK government has a tendency to use the population to balance its books. It sells off the poor and sends them to slaughter, like cattle, when it needs to free up cash. The poor, that’s currently about one third of the British population.)
De Schutter has a human rights law course on EDX, for anyone who’s interested. It’s free. (There is a paid version, which is part of a MicroMasters in International Law. EdX offers financial assistance to motivated learners in need. Leuven University students take this course too, by the way.)
https://www.edx.org/course/international-human-rights-law
(I think a new session actually starts TODAY.)
We must be careful with language on immigration, minister says
Yes, indeed. “Even the mildest otherization primes people for aggression” wrote Oxford neuroscientist Kathleen Taylor in her book “Cruelty. Human evil and the human brain.“
The difference between otherizing language and violence against otherized people, she added, is a difference in degree, not a difference in kind. Otherizing language can escalate into cruelty and violence at an astonishing speed, she qualified further.
See also: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-63466532
Home Office head honcho Suella Braverman’s use of the word “invasion” suggests that Britain is at war with war refugees and other migrants. Isn’t that as ugly as Russia suggesting that Britain sabotaged those Nordstream pipelines?
Is this, too, what you get when a council’s response to Travellers showing up within the city limits is instant, paranoid, over the top (and blatant otherisation and criminalisation on the basis of ethnicity or lifestyle)?
“Now the part-time worker is calling for more community compassion, after both he and his mother were berated over his parking, despite Tony having a Blue Badge and parking permits for his camper van, his work van, and his personal cars.”
Does he have too many cars? Yes, that may well be the case, but it also sounds like only the camper van is parked in Middlesex Road.
So I then googled his name. Looks like he is the owner of “All About Classics vintage vehicle hire”. (Same face in the newspaper photo and in the Twitter account profile photo. Same face in the photos on the business website.) That explains it!
But his business address (according to the website and Facebook) is indeed Middlesex Road… So the problem may be of a different nature than what it looks like at first sight. Cost of living crisis, anyone? His business would already have been hit hard by the pandemic. But there is also the fact that his parents don’t get the practical support that they need. Council cuts, anyone?
I found myself becoming interested in the full story. “I don’t know, of course, but it could be that what he needs to do is register a limited company,” I thought, so I looked at Companies House records. It seems that he had a limited company earlier, but for less than a year, perhaps because the admin side of it was too frustrating. It was registered at a different Southsea address. It appears that the current business is a Limited that he started in April of this year, but it is registered at a Copnor Road address.
Could be that he has posted the address where is currently staying most of the time on his website so that people can find him more easily.
Whatever the background, a little bit of compassion can go a long way. One day, you might need someone else to be compassionate towards you and if that happens, you likely never saw it coming.
How Runaway Algorithms Brought Down the Dutch Government
(Click on the “CC” button for subtitles if the Dutch accents get in the way.)
By the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, New York University School of Law.
- Xenophobic machines: Discrimination through unregulated use of algorithms in the Dutch childcare benefits scandal. October 25, 2021: https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/eur35/4686/2021/en/
This concerns shockingly discriminatory use of self-learning black-box algorithms, designed to discriminate on the basis of factors such as socioeconomic status and nationality in the Dutch tax authorities’ (and other organizations’) scrutiny for fraud. And that’s far from the whole story.
It’s also true that regulation in the Netherlands is often way too rigid. It makes us cloggies abroad often look really strange (OCD-like) because we are so used to having to be super precise and document everything. This can for example lead to people having to pay back 90,000 euro because they made a 100-euro typo in a form or perhaps because they forgot to sign the form or because paid the childcare center one day late or the amount they paid the childcare facility was 10 euro less than it should be.
However, this scandal was about people being labeled fraudsters and being treated as fraudsters mostly on the basis of nationality without them being fraudsters at all and without them having an idea what error they were supposed to have made and beingg unable to obtain any information. It’s destroyed many lives. Some people lost their homes, others even their children (taken into care) or their marriage.
The first signs of the scandal emerged in 2014. It would take until 2018 before some people started waking up and started looking into it. (Do we owe this delay to the phenomenon of conspiracy theorists?)
It’s 2022 now. It’s doubtful that all the people who were harmed in this have already received compensation, so I understand. (I know that several individual court cases are ongoing or will be started soon.)
A problem with the complete opacity of and the secrecy surrounding these black box algorithms is that you wouldn’t even know it if hackers interfered and, for example, inserted their own parameters into the model. They could perhaps, also feed it highly biased learning data, but indeed, the innate biases in the model would also steer it toward concluding that poor people and foreigners are more likely to commit fraud.
How does this work? If you are looking for fallen leaves in parks, but only or predominantly look in two specific parks, you might erroneously conclude that those two parks have high numbers of fallen leaves and that there are no leaves in other parks. As you haven’t looked at all (or well) in those other parks, you found no or much fewer fallen leaves there.
Btw, the term “white-washing” is Dunglish. It’s called “money laundering” in English.
Similarly, “Minister President” is “Prime Minister” (Rutte). Turns out that he (Mark Rutte) was found guilty (by the court) of encouraging discrimination in his role in 2003, when he was not Prime Minister but ran the Dutch version of the English DWP. He had asked for people of Somali descent to be traced and scrutinized for fraud. https://www.trouw.nl/politiek/rechter-rutte-zette-aan-tot-rassendiscriminatie~bc40d2da/ Rutte did not get it at all at the time and expressed surprise. Apparently, he laughed and commented that the law should be changed, then. The reason for this was that some Somalis had committed fraud. That’s like saying that all Dutch people are blond and blue-eyed because some are. It’s nonsense.
(This latter court case ran its course after I had moved to England. I was not aware of it.)
Continue readingThis is heartbreaking to read. It sets people up for failure.
Many refugees are constantly being moved without even being told where on earth they will be taken to. It traumatizes many of them and I fully understand that. This, too, dear Home Office, is a form of cruelty. This powerlessness causes an enormous amount of stress and it also often isolates people from anyone new who they have gotten to know.
https:e//www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/28/asylum-seekers-uk-hotel-moves-home-office
What is gaslighting?
Gaslighting = trying to drive someone else crazy, literally. Because it makes you feel powerful. In control.
Watch this video. When he says that she is 30 minutes late for their first dinner, that’s when it starts. She was not late at all, but he wants her to start doubting herself. That’s gaslighting. Gaslighting also includes telling the people around you lies about you and getting them to abuse you too. Such people are called “flying monkeys”. It’s intended to help isolate the victim because that makes it possible to take the psychological abuse up a few notches. You can see that in this video as well.
Anyone who considers this kind of abuse hilarious should see a mental health professional. Because you may need to learn some techniques for how to modulate your behavior. That could be really helpful.
Crock Pots and other slow cookers (cost of living, climate)
John Lewis reports that slow cookers are now its best-selling electrical item. The Guardian calls them a 1970s favorite, but I don’t think I’d heard of them until I moved to the US in the 1990s.
I bought a 3.7-liter one in June. I’ve also recently stocked up on organic dried beans, marrowfat peas, lentils etc. (from the family business BuyWholeFoodsOnline.co.uk which is not associated with Amazon). I soak the beans etc for 8 hours or so and as I usually cook them on low overnight in the Crock Pot, this can serve as a heating source, too, and as a friend of mine informed me, slow cookers don’t use a lot of electricity. That turns out to be correct.
The soluble fibers in the beans can give you gas, but they also help remove cholesterol from the body, so there’s that too and, besides being a source of iron, magnesium and so on, they’re of course also a good source of protein.
Educate yourself about the presence of phytohaemagglutinin (PHA) in legumes, which requires you to soak, rinse and cook legumes really well. If you eat a lot of beans, you may still end up with some of the effects of phytohaemagglutinin (a substance that can make blood cells stick together and can also for example activate T cells) because there will always be a little bit of the stuff left in the beans.
In my case, it then gives me achy muscles – that’s caused by the T cells – and it makes me yawn like crazy (probably also caused by the T cells, because the muscles will want to relax and you’ll likely notice you’re fidgety and stretching a lot). It can also make me wake up often in the night or generally cause me to sleep less well, probably because of the achiness.
Should this happen to you, simply stop eating the beans. Consider taking a nice warm bath. You should perhaps also look into how you processed the beans; that said, you can even experience this effect if you eat a lot of tinned kidney beans, so you may not have done anything wrong other than having eaten a big fat lot of oh so yummy beans…
The achiness will disappear. You may wonder if you’re falling ill or something, but GPs won’t recognize this as an effect of having eaten a lot of legumes. You may also feel like you’ve overdone your exercise!
Some legumes carry a greater phytohaemagglutinin content than others. Red and white kidney beans contain the highest amounts; the latter are also called cannellini. Marrowfat peas and mung beans are examples of legumes that contain much less of the stuff. Lentils don’t contain much of the stuff either and they cook much quicker.
(Chickpeas contain a great deal of phytoestrogens, by the way. Perhaps particularly if you’re postmenopausal, you may notice some effects if you eat them regularly or eat a lot of them.)
For the record, I use boiling hot water a few times when I process my beans (when I soak them and when I cook them). I’ve never gotten the classic stomach upset symptoms associated with under-cooked beans.
(Anyone who doesn’t believe what I wrote above about these lectins and T cells:
Do a search in PubMed. Yes, I often apply Occam’s razor. Why start looking for a much more complicated and much less obvious explanation, when I have something obvious and logical at hand?
I may be slightly more sensitive and I certainly respond in a less typical manner than most folks. Hay fever also often gives me muscle aches, for example, and so does monosodium glutamate (MSG), but that also affects my energy level for some reason. MSG does not give me a headache at all, the latter supposedly being the standard response in people who are sensitive to it. I am surely not the only one in the world who experiences these effects, though.)
I stopped using my fridge in 2018, but now, after I’ve cooked a big batch of beans or lentils or what have you, usually with garlic and whole black peppercorns, a bit of salt, sometimes also with ginger or onions (all the easy peasy lazy way, not fried first), I fill “recycled” pots (coffee etc) and tubs (ice cream etc) with the beans and switch on the fridge. I normally let the beans sit in the Crock Pot for a day, to let them cool down and to avoid needing to heat them again to eat them on that first day. It usually feeds me for about a week, depending on what else I eat, and what I eat the legumes with. After I take the legumes out of the fridge, I quickly heat a plate or bowl of them in the microwave.
Here are some tips on the BBC site for what else you can do with a slow cooker:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-norfolk-45713490
I’ve also cooked a mix of lentils, mung beans and chana dal (small split chickpeas) and eaten them with curry powder and olive oil, with or without ginger. Olive oil is very good for your heart’s health, provided you don’t heat the oil. The price of olive oil’s been going up a lot lately, though. This has to do with droughts as a result of climate change, so using as little energy as possible will also benefit you and your children and grandchildren for that reason. (Slowing down climate change.)
By the way, if you don’t eat good food and keep fit, staying warm is likely to be harder too. Women often have more trouble staying warm because their veins in the arms and legs have a tendency to contract when it’s cold. The myth that this only happens to “cold” women is misogynistic nonsense. Go for a walk. Do some exercise. It will open your blood vessels. Eating something can do that too.
Wearing fluffy socks to bed can work wonders if you want to stay warm without having the heating on. I discovered that after a friend sent me some for Christmas. Amazing, the effect that has!
Wearing thick socks during the day, by contrast, can give you cold feet if the socks trap moisture that comes from your skin. Some shoes do that too.
Try not to buy lots of new gadgets to help you stay warm etc such as electrically heated pillows and blankets because all the energy used for making these gadgets and transporting them around the world does not help to lower your bills. Use what you already have, such as hot-water bottles and extra plain blankets. Improvise, if you can, like McGyver.
Continue readingFrench Madeleine saves lonely Englishman in Channel (Latest twist: GB News involvement?)
UPDATE 28 OCTOBER, AFTERNOON: HE’S DOING MUCH BETTER NOW.
https://nos.nl/artikel/2450097-gezondheid-geredde-kajakker-verbeterd-urker-vissers-willen-contact (The Dutch fishermen would like to stay in contact with him.)
This morning, the French fishing vessel Madeleine rescued an English man who apparently had left Dover on 15 October in a kayak, which had rolled over. He had been stuck on a marker buoy for days. Fortunately, he was spotted by a Dutchman on the Madeleine. It had three Dutch people and two French people on board.
They gave him a sound signal to let him know that they had spotted him, but the current was strong so they first had some maneuvering to do. Then they threw him a bunch of lifebuoys and he managed to grab one so that they could pull him on board.
The French coastguard sent a doctor and a helicopter and he’s been taken to a hospital. He seems to be doing relatively well but he was very lucky. He was very thirsty, had not slept for days and had scraped mussels off the buoy to eat. Seaweed and little crabs had also been on his menu.
The Dutch news article contains photos of said Englishman (for anyone who knows him and is still wondering what happened, but I am sure his family already knows by now):
https://nos.nl/artikel/2449978-urker-visser-redt-man-na-dagen-van-boei-in-het-kanaal-het-is-een-wonder
I can’t believe that he left Dover as far back as 15 October. He must have gotten way off course at some point or maybe been stuck on that buoy for about 11 days. (How long can you keep yourself afloat in the water after your kayak capsizes before you reach a buoy to climb on?) He was rescued this morning.
Update 30 October: see below.
(The day he left the English coast must have been 25 October, maybe?)
The same day, THREE HOURS AFTER THE MAN HAD BEEN RESCUED by the Dutch-owned French-registered Madeleine and 15 minutes before the company account tweeted about it, GB News (George McMillan) reported that he had been spotted earlier but that he was no longer found on the buoy and was assumed to have drowned and the search was called off by the UK authorities. They (GB News) assumed that it had been a refugee trying to reach England. Is this news item manufactured news? GB News, after all, is one of Nigel Farage’s “vessels”, isn’t it? None of the other news sources mention that the UK authorities had already been aware of the man stuck on the buoy. If they had, they surely would have coordinated with the French coastguard, also because the man apparently was in French or international waters.
GB News (Mark White) had an earlier item about this, published in the morning, but about 30 minutes after the man was rescued.
Apparently, he is 28 and from Manchester? He was in good physical shape when he left, which has helped him survive, but he seems to have had no kayaking experience. I wonder if he was trying to “prove” something about refugees… Unless he’s a nutcase with more money and time than common sense, it’s a strange story, after all.
