INTERESTING TIMES

I read today about the California prisoners who've gone without food for 45 days now to protest the practice of keeping people on solitary for a year or more. A judge decided that the prisons can force feed them. This is barbarism. Their rationale is that some of the fasting prisoners have been mislead. I almost expect to hear the Shrubism: "wrongheaded" applied to the prisoners. But it is our practices of incarceration that are wrong.

First of all, it is entirely inhumane to keep any person locked away in solitary for any time at all. We are not designed to be all alone, and left all alone for too long almost any human will loose their mind. A whole year in isolation is enough to make a very sane and functional person completely mad. It is very reasonable for prisoners to protest against this practice with every tool they have.

Second of all, even prisoners should have the right to refuse food if they want to. Everyone should have the right even to end their life if they so choose, especially adults. After all, if a person cannot decide what to do with their life, is it their life at all? This kind of prison practice makes capital punishment look humane.

Valter Longo has proved this to be true for mice, and now has human trials ongoing to determine if it's true for us too. It worked for the first 10 people, they didn't eat for two days prior to the administration of chemotherapy and felt much better.
( exciting )

read slim book The Fasting Primer (her other book was The Nutrition Bible)
by Internationally Renowned Naturual Food and Health Expert
Dr Alvenia M. Fulton, naturopath
who was also a pastor, first woman to attend her seminary
she died at 92 in 1999 in Chicago
( the rest, sorry I was slow to put it behind a cut )

It seems that no proposition that can be made is so absurd or impossible but that many people, ordinarily regarded as intelligent, will be found to accept it and to aid in its propagation. And hence, when it is asserted that a young lady has lived for fourteen years without food of any kind, hundreds and thousands of persons throughout the length and breadth of a civilized land at once yield their belief to the monstrous declaration.
--William A Hammond, Fasting Girls: Their Physiology and Pathology, 1879
(p102, The Fasting Girl, by Michelle Stacey)