The following morning, someone comes in, grabs your head, clamps your mouth wide open and pushes a metal pipe down your throat to force-feed you. It hurts, and you want to gag, but you can’t. Tears spring into your eyes.

You’ve been fed a greasy mixture of grains and fat, and the remains are slobbered all over you. The cell you are in is so narrow you have to keep your arms along your body and can’t reach up to wipe the food off your face.

You’ve barely gotten over the shock of this, when again, someone comes in and repeats the procedure. Three times a day, this revolting greasy mixture is forced down your throat in large quantities.

You start feeling nauseous. You can feel your thighs widening as a result of overfeeding with this calorie-rich mixture. Your thoughts are becoming muddled. You look out at rows of similar cells and notice that some of the others are standing in dirty water.

Your eyes beg for mercy, but none is forthcoming. You remember what sunshine looked like and how the wind felt on your face when you were out on the water. You cling to this memory for hope. The pain is in your eyes, evident to anyone who dares take a look.

You don’t know it but can feel how your organs are becoming diseased. Your liver is becoming more and more enlarged, and maybe your kidneys are starting to fail too. You don’t even want to think about the condition of your heart and arteries.

You can’t walk, but you couldn’t anymore anyway, even if they’d let you out now. You feel so utterly miserable, dirty, filthy and wretched. And so incredibly nauseous! Your throat has hard patches, like bunions or tumors, from the repeated force-feeding.

The necks of some of the others have open wounds, the result of force-feeding gone wrong. Your eyes slowly grow shut because there is this thick layer of caked greasy mixture all over you now.

Your liver has grown to about ten times its normal size. Then someone opens your cell, slaughters you, and sells your liver and some of your other body parts as a delicacy. It’s a very unhealthy delicacy, extremely high in cholesterol and “bad” fat.

Does you find this an appalling story? Then consider the fact that you have just read how foie gras and associated products like duck confit and magret are produced. Only, it’s not you who is in the cell, it’s a duck or a goose.

Understandably, many countries do not allow the production of foie gras. Less understandably, the consumption of foie gras and associated products continues. Some towns have banned foie gras from their council functions, or have banned its sale altogether.

Do you like feeding the ducks? Then chances are that you feel very strongly about the above-described atrocities. Don’t run off to smash the windows of the local deli that sells foie gras or your favorite French restaurant that still has it on its menu.

Talk to the owners of these establishments. Talk to your friends. Talk to your city council and ask what policy it has regarding its lunches and dinners.

In 2004, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law California’s Senate Bill 1520, banning the sale of foie gras and any product that is the result of force-feeding animals. In 2008, the UK’s Prince Charles decided to ban foie gras from all royal menus he has any say over. In 2007, York became the first city in the UK to ban the sale of foie gras.

This is what Roger Moore has to say about it:

This is me in Florida in the mid 1990s, holding a happy duckling, surrounded by pelicans, herons, egrets and cormorants in hospital cages – cleaned daily – at Pinellas Seabird Rehabilitation Center in Tierra Verde, now Save Our Seabirds in Sarasota:

Here are three posters from http://www.gourmetcruelty.com/ that you can use:

• Poster 1
• Poster 2
• Poster 3

You are being stalked and harassed, or maybe it is your daughter who is. The stalker and harasser is now showing up where you live and work, including literally around the corner from where you live. Yet only two days before, the police have reassured you that your stalker and harasser lives at a considerable distance from where you are located and has no professional reasons for being in your town.

To your knowledge, you had not encountered the man for about three years previously. At that time, you only saw him briefly for professional reasons, having no idea yet what he had in store for you.

Imagine that you are having a conversation with a police officer who unwittingly reads some information that your stalker and harasser has retrieved directly from one of your computers.

Imagine that you have already filed a crime report for ID theft, harassment, as well as unauthorized use of one of your credit cards, two years earlier and nothing was done because the police are inundated with cases of ID theft and your case is just one more.

Imagine that a year or so later, you had called the police in a panic in the middle of the night, requesting a restraining order, and again, nothing was done. You have to keep hammering away at the police before you are taken seriously, and you just don’t have the energy or the time or the finances to do that, and it all feels useless anyway.

You can’t even blame the police because you understand very well what the situation must look like on their side of the case. A lonely, sex-starved woman, perhaps? In the throes of menopausal hormone rages, clearly besotted with her stalker?

Or maybe you were sacked from your job and your wife and your kids are at you and it can’t possibly be your still employed colleague who keeps smashing in your car windows and letting the air out of your tires. It’s what you might think too, if you were them, so again, you really can’t blame the police. They are only human too.

You have a bazillion computer files, many of which now say “access denied”, and a considerable amount of paperwork, and no ink, so you can’t print anything. You feel overwhelmed. It drives you nuts. You feel powerless. You end up screaming your head off in sheer frustration and powerlessness in the middle of the night. Because what else can you do? Nothing!

Imagine that, four years ago, someone started a campaign of stalking and harassment against you and it shows no signs of relenting. To the contrary, it is escalating and this escalation worries you. What can you do? Nothing!

The stalker and harasser is likely to know the system much better than you. In a cruel plot, he can turn the tables on you, making it appear that it is actually you who is doing the harassing, namely when you beg the stalker and harasser to leave you alone and get out of your life and the stalker and harasser says “I didn’t do a thing, and I warned you to leave me alone”.

You may even end up with a criminal record as the result of protesting against the criminal activities of the stalker and harasser, which could severely limit your income possibilities.

The day before the police suddenly show up, you may have had a message referring to your presentation skills or telling you that there is no escape, or to run, run, run.

The stalker may appear to be respectable, could be a member of a school board, which makes it even harder to prove your case. He could seem fairly innocent, gentle-mannered and thoughtful, smoking a pipe that he slowly fills with tobacco, while pondering some philosophical idea.

Also, stalkers and harassers do not necessarily work alone, which complicates matters even more. They, certainly if they are sociopaths, are extremely good at playing people and slipping them a fiver or a larger note to do something that is part of the harassment activities. The people who aid the harasser and stalker likely have no idea of what they are actually contributing to. When you disappear, the stalker and harasser comes up with an explanation that makes him appear a well-meaning hero.

Many people think that stalking and harassment are a joke, something that causes them to smile and chuckle and make remarks like “it takes two to tango”. Stalking and harassment are no joke. What may start out as innocent banter – taking two to tango, indeed – and may contain and continue to contain elements of laughter and lightness can be a very serious matter leading to people’s deaths.

It does not even have to be a personal matter, such as stalking and harassment by an ex, but something that started as soon as the stalker and harasser sets eyes on his victim, for reasons even the stalker and harasser may not know.

Curiosity is what can get the victim hooked for a while. What on earth is the person up to? Isolation can do the rest. Stalkers and harassers are often extremely effective at managing to alienate and isolate the victim from the surroundings. The stalker and harasser may have picked his victim because the victim is a single woman, maybe even a foreign single mother with a small child, no one to turn to and little knowledge of the workings of the country she is in.

Online, you are even less safe, as online you can’t see who is really behind the messages that show up on your screen. The stalker follows you around on the web. When you post something, the stalker may reply. He may weave his name into the ID he makes up, or his initials. His ID may refer to his profession, or he may pick a completely random name, pretend to be a woman, use online translation services to pretend to be from another country. So what is left? Nothing! No one!

You no longer have any idea of what and whom to trust. People who can be trusted get annoyed with all this – understandably – and start cutting the victim off too. Some will say “I told you so.” Others will say “stop defending the guy” or become concerned for their own safety.

Getting upset over it helps even less than making fun of it. Making fun of it is in fact a pretty good way of dealing with it mentally, but still offers no solutions for the practical problems.

A victim may be flooded with lots and lots of messages with a sexual content, apparently aimed primarily to intimidate through the victim’s humiliation, disgust and general undermining of self-esteem. This may not have an effect on you at all if sexual matters generally don’t scare you or make you feel humiliated or embarrassed in any way. In some countries, sex is seen as something natural, as natural as sneezing, whereas in other countries, it is still in the realm of the taboos, necessitating the use of a wide range of euphemisms.

You may find that the front of a brochure you had on your desk but you thought you threw out is suddenly being used as someone’s online avatar. You don’t know whether it is a coincidence or not and decide to ignore it. You may find all sort of “nice” objects, such as a bunch of lovely artificial flowers and shiny children’s beads on your doorstep, a pretty flower left here and there. Sometimes, you find not-so-nice objects such as a smashed-up marine slug with the snail still in it, or a dead bird.

The stalker may also be an expert at putting a signal through your radio’s amplifier and play with the volume. The stalker and harasser may have explained to you that he has done that before, so when it happens, you know it is not a coincidence, but you laugh.

You may see your stalker and harasser visiting your downstairs neighbor and you tell yourself it cannot possibly be true and you must be mistaken. You may be under the impression that he pays people to follow you around and take photos of you. You tell yourself you must be crazy to think such a thing, until he refers to how the roots of your hair are showing, online.

Then one evening, you actually see the flash of a camera, when it is stormy and there is no one else around except this one other person seemingly going for a walk. The flash is clearly directed toward you and you no longer feel safe.

Your computers may have been hacked into. You may find all sorts of files on your computer that you didn’t create, for example a Word file stating “The contents of this file folder are completely confidential.” What do you do? You laugh about it. What else can you do?

If you are self-employed, the stalker and harasser may take great joy in diverting your business e-mails. You notice that some of your clients are no longer replying to your mails, and you start having to e-mail them several times. You start getting four auto-confirm messages instead of one.

Your computer starts beeping like crazy when you play certain music. A loud violently sexist rap suddenly bursts out of your speaker boxes when you’re in the kitchen. When you watch a sports match online, canned applause starts kicking in, and someone leaves a blog comment mentioning that you like beer.

Your telephone starts ringing incessantly, and the few times you did get a number, and tracked it down, you ended up at some company that offers virtual office services. The calls may be silent, but most often, they contain prerecorded messages that do not seem to be genuine, but you can’t really tell. They do pertain to something that makes you vulnerable, however.

You apply for a credit card and on the morning of the day that the rejection letter arrives in your mailbox, a message box pops up on your screen referring to the credit card company you had applied to. You can no longer access your bank accounts online. A substantial sum of money gets suddenly diverted.

The stalker and harasser may cause the victim to lose more and more clients, which initially pleases the stalker and harasser because of the control it signifies. Then, the stalker and harasser may become concerned, as he does not want his victim to feel that there is no way out but suicide, which would be game over for the stalker and harasser. So he starts “helping” the victim.

He drops notes alerting the victim to typos and other errors on the victim’s web site, tries to install the idea that yes, the victim will be able to overcome these problems. He simulates site visits, intended to “fool” the victim into thinking the number of visits is going up, people are landing on the site with the right web searches, and the victim is doing the right thing with regard to the web site. Messages may start arriving offering to assess the victim’s web site for free.

Meanwhile, the stalker and harasser continues to isolate the victim, making sure the victim ends up feeling that there is no one else to “talk to” besides the stalker and harasser.

In the end, the only “real” contact you, the victim, still have is the contact with your stalker, and that is a very dangerous situation. After a stalker has interfered with a wide range of your activities, you become convinced that there is nothing you can still do without the stalker interfering with it. You give up. You withdraw more and more from society, possibly also forced to do so by the loss of income you have suffered.

When you find yourself extremely grateful toward your stalker when a torn-off bird’s gets removed from your doorstep, you know you’re in trouble.

An object like that – a torn-off bird’s head – can for instance suddenly be removed after you tweet that you are leaving it right where it was, as whoever dropped it there can also remove it, after all. The torn-off bird’s head could be “punishment” for having mentioned the name of your stalker and harasser in an e-mail to someone you contacted to find out if that Twitter DM you received was really coming from the person in question, who after all you weren’t following.

Indeed, nowadays, stalkers and harassers often have honed their computer-hacking skills to such a level that they might get a Nobel Prize if there were a Nobel Prize for such activities. They are able to insert messages into the victim’s Twitter stream, Blip stream, have windows pop up, play sounds and songs on the victim’s computers, change passwords, delete files, and make files unreadable. They load spy ware onto the victim’s smart phone which may start experiencing strange memory problems.

At some point, you do not know where to turn to anymore and end up calling various help lines. On web sites for stalking victims to which you are then referred to, and perhaps also a few sites that describe sociopaths, you then hit pay dirt so to speak.

One site for stalking victims lists a long list of DOs and then two DON’TS, for what to do if you believe you are being stalked?

DON’T
• Do not think that you are being paranoid or a drama queen. Follow your instinct if you believe you are being stalked.
• Do not allow the stalker to shrink your world down. Do not allow his or her behavior to isolate you from your friends or family or colleagues. Make sure everyone around you is aware of what is happening.

You feel a fist clamp around your heart. You get scared. On a second site you see the following:

• The stalker enforces the belief that the victim cannot choose who is in
their lives – this is a very dangerous belief.
• Do not allow the stalker to shrink your world down. Do not allow his/her behavior to isolate you from your friends/family/colleagues. Make sure everyone around you is aware of what is happening.

You start crying and feeling more and more helpless.

Yet another site gives you five reasons, each of which is a reason to call their stalking helpline and you notice that you are able to answer YES to four of the five reasons.

The advice is to gather evidence and document everything. Keep texts, e-mails, letters, notes, faxes, “gifts”. Preserve any “gifts” or packages that are sent to you. Box them up or if they are perishable, bag them up and place them in the freezer. Record the date and time they were sent or left. This is a task that can take over your entire life! It is also usually a task you realize you should have undertaken when it is way too late, when you have already thrown out all the objects that were left on your doorstep and elsewhere.

Would you think of freezing it when you find a peach that has been cut open and punctured to resemble female genitalia? After all, this is the sort of humor some countries are (in)famous for. It makes you think back to the sort of snickering that boys and girls would do when you were eleven or twelve years old. It’s not worth bothering. You pick it up and toss it in the bin.

You pick it up and toss it in the bin, like you tossed so many other objects in the bin, deleted so many other files, as documenting acts of stalking and harassment takes up much more time than the acts of harassment and stalking themselves. A stalker and harasser can easily spend four hours per day on his activities. You would have to spend at least twice that amount of time – such as eight hours per day – to document the activities of your stalker and harasser, and you would have had to do it from the beginning.

The following morning, you discover that your stalker and harasser seems to fall into category stalker typology 4: Sadistic stalking. Sadistic stalking accounts for 12.9% of all stalking cases.

You realize that you match the victim selection criteria for a sadistic stalker, namely primarily rooted in the victim being, a) someone worthy of spoiling, i.e. someone who is perceived by the stalker at the commencement as being happy, ‘good’, stable and content, and (ii) lacking in the victim’s perception any just rationale as to why she was targeted.

You notice that you also fit:
* Initial low-level acquaintance
* Apparently benign initially but unlike with infatuation harassment, the means of intervention tend to have negative orientation designed to disconcert, unnerve, and hence take power away from the victim

You read that your stalker could be highly dangerous. You start feeling nervous. You hope that it is merely a case of infatuation harassment because you initially liked the guy, but he now seems to think that almost everything you do is fueled by a desire to see him. You know that that is not the case because you know that none of this is real. You also know that the stalker and harasser is not infatuated but obsessed with you.

You read that in the case of a sadistic stalker, the victim is likely to be re-visited after a seeming hiatus. It confirms your feelings and observation that you will never get rid of this guy and you don’t know what to do. It also matches what the stalker once told you about a hobby that is almost like an inner demon, but fortunately limited by the amount of money and time he can spend on it. What can you do? Nothing! Absolutely nothing.

This is exactly what your stalker and harasser likes to hear and he loves it when you put a statement like that online. But what can you do? He has isolated you to the extreme and there is nowhere else to turn.

Then you think about it some more and you suspect that the stalking and harassment could actually be a way to give expression to the negative impulses in your stalker and harasser. Maybe he doesn’t really want to harm anyone, but has this terrible dark drive, which is like a beast that needs to be fed continuously. You hope you are right. You hope that he really doesn’t want to harm you. In fact, you know you are right.

Even people who claim to be experts on these matters often have no real idea of the extreme control a stalker and harasser can exercise over his victim and the victim’s circumstances. As indicated before, the victim may end up feeling that the only person who really listens to the victim is… the stalker and harasser!

The stalker and harasser can play a vicious game of Jekyll and Hyde that wreaks psychological (and emotional) havoc on the victim. It creates a strange bond, certainly when the victim feels nobody else is taking the victim seriously. The stalker and harasser can install the idea that he is doing something good, that there is a purpose, a method to his badness, so to speak.

In rare cases, the stalking and harassment may cause the victim to recover some repressed childhood memories, or emotions. That may seem like a big gain at first, but the benefits may turn out to be completely insignificant when set off next to the damage and harm inflicted by the stalker and harasser. What’s more, the stalker and harasser can then use this information too to taunt and harass his victim, often in ways and means you and I would never conceive.

The stalker and harasser may tell his victim that he “loves” the victim, that his activities are nothing but an expression of love. The stalker and harasser may indeed at times give the victim the genuine feeling that he is the only person who really cares about the victim, certainly when he has managed to isolate the victim to the extreme.

The victim may feel so frustrated and powerless or end up in such dire situations that the victim starts contemplating suicide. Nobody will be as aware of that as the stalker and harasser, as he is after all monitoring his victim closely. He will do whatever he can do to stop his victim from committing suicide. After all, if the victim commits suicide, all the fun ends for the stalker and harasser and he will have to go in search of a new victim. That might take a while and would leave him feeling very frustrated.

The stalker and harasser may therefore give the victim the feeling that he genuinely cares about the victim. After all, he doesn’t want the victim to commit to suicide so he seems to care. The harasser and stalker would not mind at all, though, if the victim were, say, to become homeless or have a stroke and be hospitalized for a short while. Such events would be rewards for him, evidence of his great skills and of his control over the victim.

There is, however, only one real purpose: the total control the stalker and harasser gains and maintains over the victim.

Stalking and harassment are no joke, and who thinks it is, could be just as guilty as the stalker and harasser, as he or she fails to offer the one thing the victim really needs: genuine understanding, and practical support. Solutions, not condemnations or useless remarks or sneers, are what the victim needs.

If you think stalking and harassment are something to chuckle about, and convey that to a victim, you effectively support criminal activities that can lead to a victim’s death. The victim’s death can be the result of starvation due to the victim’s income loss, the victim’s suicide, or the victim’s murder. Yes, some stalkers do kill their victims and a stalker may become bored with his victim and decide to let the victim go ahead and end their life to escape the misery and insurmountable problems the stalker and harasser has caused for the victim.

At what point do you start documenting someone’s activities in the great detail that it takes to capture a stalker and bring him to justice? As soon as you sense something is off. Do not tell yourself that you are being a drama queen, or drama king, do not chide yourself for being so paranoid or untrusting, and do not feel you are being crazy.

When you sense something is off, chances are that something is really off and it’s best to nip it in the bud as soon as possible. Be safe, not sorry.

Here are two very useful web sites:

http://www.protectionagainststalking.org/

Oude studievrienden uit het oog verloren en ben je benieuwd wat er van hen geworden is? Het studiegevoel voor even terugkrijgen?

Kom dan zaterdag 20 november naar de reünie die studievereniging GeoVUsie organiseert ter ere van haar 6e lustrum. Een dag vol ontmoetingen met oude bekenden, het ophalen van herinneringen en kennismaken met al wat nieuw is binnen de gelederen van GeoVUsie. Al bekend met de nieuwe Bacheloropleiding Aarde en economie? De ‘nieuwe’ studentenkamer nog nooit van binnen gezien? Of nog nooit rondgelopen op de onlangs vernieuwde 5e en 6e verdieping van de faculteit der Aard- en Levenswetenschappen?

Op zaterdag 20 november 2010 wordt u tussen 10.00 uur en 10.30 uur ontvangen in de centrale hal (M-0) van het W&N gebouw op de VU campus. Het ochtenddeel van het programma omvat een aantal centrale lezingen en wordt gevolgd door een uitgebreide lunch. Tijdens het middagdeel staat de interactie centraal via workshops, (werk)colleges en een quiz over de Aarwetenschappen. Daarnaast is er natuurlijk veel tijd gereserveerd om oud-studiegenoten of docenten te ontmoeten. Ook zal er de mogelijkheid zijn uzelf met studiegenoten vast te laten leggen op de gevoelige plaat.

De reünie zal worden afgesloten met een borrel (tot 19.00 uur) in Houtzagerij in den Koele Blonde. De eigen bijdrage voor deze dag, inclusief lunch en borrel, is 20 euro en kan worden overgemaakt naar 466866 ter attentie van GeoVUsie Amsterdam onder vermelding reünie 2010 + uw achternaam.

Inschrijven kan vanaf dit moment via de website van studievereniging GeoVUsie www.geovusie.nl/reunie. Meer informatie over de invulling van het programma en deelnemers zal ook op dit blog en op LinkedIn (Alumni Earth Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) komen te staan.

Alcohol deadens feelings, but depression appears to be more common among those who never drink a drop:
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1928187,00.html

“Do you eat foie gras?”

If the person does not answer with a clear NO, you may be dealing with someone with no conscience whatsoever. A very useful diagnostic in business dealings.

Alternatively, the person is uninformed about the nature of what he or she is eating.

Consuming foie gras means feeding off liver disease induced in geese and ducks. It means eating diseased-liver products from birds who have been cruelly force-fed three times per day, sometimes bleeding to death as a result.

Anyone who accepts that has no conscience. Like I said, this is a very useful diagnostic in business dealings, but not just in business dealings.

This is what Roger Moore has to say about it:

If you want to know more, do a web search or start with this PETA page on foie gras.

Associated products are duck confit and magret.

21st-century tasks require creative thinking. Cognitive skills. The carrot-and-stick approach is more suitable for mechanical skills.

Mastery, autonomy and purpose. THAT is the real secret of the gaming approach. It is NOT in the “rewards” themselves, it is in the mastery they stand for.

I’m with her on this.

Also watch this one, by Seth Priebatsch, and other talks.

The talk by Jane McGonigal (PhD from Berkeley) made me pose some questions about the UK, such as “Does the UK have a big gaming culture?” I did a search and found a survey by PopCap, of the US and the UK. Two differences struck me:

“Only 17% of UK-based social gamers chose “connect with others” as a reason for playing, compared to 28% of their U.S. counterparts.”

“U.S.-based social gamers are far more likely to play with strangers than their UK counterparts (41% vs. 29%).”

Told ya! Britons don’t socialize much. I leave it up to you whether you call them antisocial, socially clumsy, shy or just plain boring. Of course, some of you will realize how lucky you are to have run into a few Britons who do socialize! What surprises me, though, is that it is even true of Britons behind their computers and I expect the “real-life” difference to be even larger.

I wonder what Jane McGonigal would say of this difference. Britons (mainly somewhat older ones) seem to have a major issue with trusting strangers and I don’t know how you can change that. Eh… via gaming, of course! Eventually. There’s hope for the UK, then.

Average age of gamers is pretty high, after all. However:

“46 percent of social gamers in the US were older than 50, compared to just 23 percent in the UK.”

Here’s the link to the pdf of the study:
http://www.infosolutionsgroup.com/2010_PopCap_Social_Gaming_Research_Results.pdf

Does this also explain many of the differences between the UK (not exactly the land of plenty) and what I perceive as western culture?

I do seem to run into exactly this phenomenon a lot here in the UK, and had not realized it before, that is, had not realized that this may be yet another reason for the so very different decisions Britons seem to make, from my point of view. (Relationships and beer come to mind, but also behavior, and class distinctions.)

(I really should travel to Ireland one day and see how that strikes me. Why does the UK appear to be so isolated from the rest of the world, but not Ireland?)

“The value of choice depends on our ability to perceive differences between the options.”

Personally, I like the freedom of choice. “And in embracing diversity of human beings, we will find a sure way to true happiness.”

The findings reported in Science matches other reports of “vaseline-like” blobs (see previous post).