Today was a short day. We only went five hours instead of the customary six. Still, there was a lot going on in those five hours.

1. Gifts and tools – when we arrived we were each given a large binder to keep our paperwork in. Each binder also contained an 8GB thumb drive and a day-timer for 2012.
2. The first section of the day was taken up with the paperwork necessary for registration and for setting up our bank accounts so we could get paid. Since this is a government funded program, there were a lot of papers to fill out and explain. Once that was out of the way we moved on to the exercises for the day.
3. Exercise one was introductions, but with a twist. Instead of going around the table and having each person introduce themselves, which I personally hate with a deep, purple passion, we were asked to interview the person next to us and introduce them. A page of questions was provided so that we all used the same framework for the interview. I think the point of doing it this way was to begin the process of getting us used to interviewing people and to make it easier for us to speak in public. Because we weren’t talking about ourselves it allayed some of the anxiety we might have felt about speaking to the group.
4. Next up was an exercise to introduce brain-storming. We broke up into three small groups. Each group was given a basket of something. My group’s basket contained a bunch of Fir cones. We had to come up with as many novel uses for the contents of the basket as we could in ten minutes. Good exercise because we had to really strain to think outside the box. Our group had a bit of a tough time because our recorder wanted to disqualify some ideas. We were fine once we convinced them that all ideas should be recorded.
5. After lunch we used our brain-storming skills to develop and adopt a set of guidelines for group interaction. That will act like our constitution for the duration of the program.
6. Then came an exercise called scotomas. That’s a medical term, apparently, that is used to denote blind spots in the eye. We were each given a card with a phrase on it. The task was to count the number of times the letter F appeared in the phrase. This seems like a simple task, but nobody got the number right the first time through. The point of the exercise was that, once we had come up with a number we tended to stick with it. Our belief in our first count created a psychological blind spot. This idea was extended to the ways we construct our own outcomes based on the presuppositions that we have, and also how our preconceptions can be passed on to other people.
7. The final activity was watching a video about the book Who Moved the Cheese? The obvious point was that change is constant, whether we like it or not. Worrying about how things should be, feeling sorry for ourselves or railing against fate doesn’t do any good. The goal is to embrace change and move with it. My favorite line in the movie was Smell the cheese often so you’ll know when its getting stale.

That was the end of the first day. One of the things that wasn’t an exercise, but that emerged over the course of the day, was the criteria they used in selecting the participants for this iteration of the program.

Around fifty people applied for the program in the beginning. The narrowed the list to twenty-eight who were invited to an information session. During that session we learned a little bit about the program and played a couple of group games that called for collaboration and creativity. Then there was a final interview process. The final result of all this was that eleven people were invited to take part.

It turns out that that information session was very important. A lot of people got cut because of how they acted during that session. They were looking for people who would take part and contribute without being abrasive, interrupting a lot or starting side conversations. So they were playing one game while we thought we were doing something entirely different. This makes sense, really, because the whole program is based on creating a powerful group dynamic of mutual support, so anybody who didn’t seem to play well with others essentially kicked themselves out of the running without even knowing it. Very interesting.

Tomorrow we have some outside trainers coming in to teach a workshop on personality assessment, the point being to help us discover what kind of environments and activities would be best suited to our way of being in the world. Should be fun.

I’ve been accepted into an employment training program called Vintage Advantage. The purpose of the training is assist people 55 to 65 years old in finding employment or starting their own business.

The facilitators of the program say that it helps you discover hidden areas of interest and forgotten abilities which are in demand in today’s job market. Emphasis isn’t on finding just any job, but the perfect job.

I have high hopes for the program. They claim to have a 100% success rate. My intention right now is to go into the business stream, but, if the perfect job comes along I wouldn’t turn it down.

The program starts tomorrow and runs for three months. I’ll give regular updates here on my progress and the things I learn as the program unfolds.

Watch this space for daily updates!

Today was mainly devoted to cruising the interwebs, reading my favorite blogs and discovering a couple of new ones. Here are today’s picks for thought provoking content and excellent writing. My regular readers, both of them, will really enjoy these articles.

First up is the latest article from Tomdispatch.com. I freely admit that I read and recommend everything that appears on that blog.

Fighting 1% Wars

Why Our Wars of Choice May Prove Fatal

By William J. Astore

America’s wars are remote.  They’re remote from us geographically, remote from us emotionally (unless you’re serving in the military or have a close relative or friend who serves), and remote from our major media outlets, which have given us no compelling narrative about them, except that they’re being fought by “America’s heroes” against foreign terrorists and evil-doers.  They’re even being fought, in significant part, by remote control — by robotic drones “piloted” by ground-based operators from a secret network of bases located hundreds, if not thousands, of miles from the danger of the battlefield.

Their remoteness, which breeds detachment if not complacency at home, is no accident.  Indeed, it’s a product of the fact that Afghanistan and Iraq were wars of choice, not wars of necessity.  It’s a product of the fact that we’ve chosen to create a “warrior” or “war fighter” caste in this country, which we send with few concerns and fewer qualms to prosecute Washington’s foreign wars of choice.

Mr Astore is right on here. One thing that he hints at towards the end of the piece, but doesn’t actually say, is that countries that establish the kind of warrior caste that he is talking about wind up being controlled by that class. The Mameluke empire in Egypt is a perfect example. First you achieve foreign power by using mercenaries. Next you use them to maintain order inside your country. Finally, the warriors wake up and realize that they are the only power in the society. As soon as they realize that, they kick your ass to the curb and become the power on the throne instead of the power behind the throne.

Uncivil Righteousness

Opines Bachmann, allowing gay people to marry somebody of the same sex would be conferring special privileges on a select group based on their (presumed) sexual practices. Because, as I’m sure you all know, gay people only want to get married to each other for the squicky gay rainbow sex and not because they actually love each other and want to commit to spending their lives together like normal people do. It’s totally true and you can look that up.

In replying to Ms. Schmidt, Bachmann gave a total of six responses – and those six paragraphs clearly demonstrate why this ridiculous goof should be kept as far from public office, any office, as is possible.  Not only should voters, allvoters especially including conservatives, soundly reject her bid for president, they shouldn’t even elect her to be the town dog catcher – let alone a United States lawmaker.

I have to say that I haven’t been following American politics at all recently. The last time I paid any attention was when Obama ran against McCain. Look how that turned out. I’ve never heard of Michelle Bachmann, but same-sex marriage interests me and this article does a masterful job of dissecting the issue and exposing the sheer silliness of its opponents.

One of the good things about being a Canadian is that we are ahead of the curve on this issue. Ever since Trudeau said that the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation, we’ve been slowly pecking away and overturning all the outmoded laws against various kinds of sexual expression. Not that we’re perfect. Right now we are wrestling with polygamy statutes, and we have tough time differentiating in the area of cultural norms, but we are on the right track. Of course, all that could change now that George W Harper has a majority in Parliament, but we can hope.

The Lost Art Of Rumination

If you aren’t clear on WHY you want to get rich…

… then, once you get there, you’re gonna be one lost little puppy.

It’s like mobilizing your life to move somewhere you think will make you happy. You can do it, and you can wind up in a gorgeous penthouse in the best part of town… but if your next thought is “now what?”, then you may be left wondering what it all means. With no answer forthcoming.

Again

There are tons of books and coaching programs and seminars available that claim to make planning out your life easy. They’ll help you with the “here’s what I want to do“, and “here’s how I can get that done” processes…

… but every single one I’ve seen is woefully deficient in helping you understand “WHY I want to do that in the first place.”

The “why’s” of life are mostly ignored. It’s taken for granted that big houses, fancy sports cars, better looking spouses, bigger/better/nicer/more expensive everything is of COURSE the preferred goal.

And maybe that’s true for you.

This article really rang a bell for me. I’m in the process of rebuilding my life and I’ve found exactly the situation he talks about here. There are all kinds of resources for setting goals and achieving targets and time management, but damned little about discovering where you really want to go or why you should want to go there. I really enjoyed this little nugget, too:

In my view, you don’t need money to be successful. Money just solves the problems that not having money creates… so having “enough” money, in this culture, can help you stay clear of the time-consuming bullshit of scrambling to keep a roof over your head and food in your gut.

Right on, John. Anyway, those are my top reading picks for today. Hope you enjoy them.

It’s funny to watch all the howling going on among the wealthy and the financial institutions about the transaction tax, as though them being forced to pay anything at all would bring the world to a shuddering halt.

The economy is broken and we need a better one. Pure capitalism simply doesn’t work anymore. Capitalism is touted almost like a religion nowadays, as though it was the only moral and right way to manage an economy. The funny thing about that is that Adam Smith, the founder of modern capitalism warned against its dangers should it become the dominant force in society. He presumed that religion and common sense would act as a counter-force to the sheer unbridled greed of pure capitalism. Sorry, Adam, that dog don’t hunt no more.

The transaction tax wouldn’t be a huge burden. The one being argued about in Europe is only 3 basis points or $3 on every $10,000 traded. It would certainly have an affect on the volume traders, because they make a lot of their money by trading huge volumes.

A financial transaction tax is not a novel idea. Actually, the U.S. had such a tax from 1914 to 1966, when the tax forced investors to pay a small fee every time they executed a trade. It was intended not only to raise revenue for the government, but also to deter excessive speculation. Congress has flirted with the idea of resurrecting the tax in some shape or form ever since it went away back in the 60s, but there has never been enough support for one.

A transaction tax might depress the economy somewhat, but maybe that’s a good thing. The economy as its structure right now is a rigged game that only benefits a few.

We need to come up with some way of decoupling the health of the economy from the health of Wall Street corporations. We also need a new economic model that doesn’t depend on growth. If we can’t achieve a better system we’ll wind up in a situation where a few uber-wealthy people have eaten the world while the rest of us starve in the dark.

The fat cats and the politicians don’t get it. They didn’t understand what was behind the Arab Spring, they don’t understand the Occupy Wall Street movement either. Its a simple matter of inequity.

There’s a famous psychological experiment that revolves around two subjects and a fixed amount of money. If both subjects can agree on how the money is divided up, they get to keep it. The kicker is that one person is in charge of deciding how the money is split, but the other person has veto power on whether the division takes place. If they can’t get together they both lose.

This experiment has been tried with people from all societies and all economic classes and the results are pretty universal. Somewhere around the 70/30 mark people start to dig in there heels. If things go much farther than that, the deal is off. It works both ways, too. If person A says he’ll take 20% and give the other person 80%, person B will protest and try to move things back to something more equitable, even though it costs him. There seems to be a brain structure devoted to fairness in these kinds of situations.

If there is, then the people in power have brain damage. There’s another brain structure in charge empathy. Serial killers have damage in that area and that part of the brain doesn’t light up when they inflict pain on others. Bankers and stock brokers must have similar damage to their equity brain structures.

That’s what the occupy movement is about, basic equity. There’s something they got wrong though. They say “we are the 99%” when actually, they are the 99.9998%. Those are the figures in Canada, anyway, and the same situation is probably true throughout the western world.

The wealthy have privilege but no responsibility. We have 61 billionaires in Canada. Their combined wealth is $162 billion. Our national debt is only 33 billion. If they were all equally wealthy they would each have $2.7 billion and if they gave up 1/6 of their wealth they could clear our national debt. Something is very wrong with that picture.

There’s a myth going around that says we have to leave the wealthy in peace because their investment of their wealth into the economy is what makes growth possible and ensures a healthy economy. Its definitely time to kick that old chestnut to the curb.

Actually, that used to be the case. Corporations used to re-invest almost all their profits back into the economy. That was the situation in Canada until the 1980s. But it isn’t the case any more. Now the profits are paid out in dividends, salaries and bonuses, and very little is actually invested. Long term growth has been sacrificed for short-term dividends. One more problem that arises when the health of the stock market gets confused with the health of the economy.

The most interesting thing about that is the timing of the change. The reduction in re-investment has grown as corporate taxes have been cut. Businesses used to pay taxes of 36%. Brian Mulroney’s government began cutting the tax rate in 1988. That tax rate will be 12% at the end of 2011. Its almost like a disease broke out when government began cutting taxes. The businesses got a taste for extra money, and that demand for more and more short-term payoffs is being reflected in the lack of investment. Whatever the reasons, the trends speak for themselves.

We need to develop some new rules of thumb that guide us in economic issues. One might be that people who have acquired more than a specific amount of wealth have to begin underwriting some of societies expense. Maybe the Labatt family should have to fund education in Canada, or the Bronfmanns have to contribute some percentage of their wealth to child care. Or maybe those 61 billionaires could agree to fund the health system.

We’ve been told that times are tough and that we have to tighten our belts and slash programs. That’s a big cartload of horseshit. There’s more money flowing now than there ever has been. The only reason we’re in trouble is because a few movers and shakers have gotten their grubby mitts on the levers of power and rigged things so that all that flow is diverted into a small number of buckets. Quite simply, if the money wasn’t there, they wouldn’t have it.

Those sixty-one billionaires own twice as much wealth as the rest of us combined. Its not because they are necessarily smarter and it certainly isn’t because they contribute more or have greater responsibilities. Something has to change. It will change. That kind of change isn’t restricted to the middle east.

Here’s a final, possible rule of thumb. Make it illegal for any employee of a company to earn more than 100 times the wage of the lowest paid worker in the company. That would be a step in the right direction.

This post is to introduce the Kermode Bear.

I’ve always liked bears. Bears have been a part of my life since I lived on the Queen Charlotte Islands. Up there, bears were always just around in the neighborhood. We had one big one that had a path through our garden plot that he used several times a year and never deviated from. It was simply his sidewalk to get down the mountainside.

We finally fenced the garden plot with paige wire. The bear showed up the evening after we completed the fence, but before we had the gate installed. He tried to push through the wire but couldn’t do it, or didn’t want to expend the energy it would require, I don’t know which. Anyway, he veered off and walked along the fence line and found a new way down, which he followed from then on. The funny thing about that was that the open gateway was just four feet from the point where he tried to push through the fence. If he had wanted to he could have taken two steps to the right and walked through the garden. But he didn’t. I always thought that was kinda respectful.

Now that I’m living in Courtenay, bears are back in my life big-time. The park where I walk my West Highland Terrier is bounded by a large river on one side and a very high-producing salmon creek on the other. There has been a mother bear with two cubs resident in the park since the salmon started running. We’ve run into her a couple of times without any major upset on either side.

The most recent siting was on Halloween. We were walking down First Avenue. It was close to dusk and the trick-or-treaters were just starting to appear. There was a break in the traffic, and, all of sudden, momma bear and cubs ran across the road in front of us and into the park. They had been cleaning up apples in somebody’s back yard. There were some other people and kids around trolling for candy. Nobody was particularly upset.

The bears we had in the Charlottes were Black Bears, of course. I’ve also had dealings with Grizzlies when I was cruising timber in the interior of B.C. Never had anything to do with Polar Bears, though.

The Kermode Bear is white

One of the most interesting types of bear that we have in B.C. Is the Kermode bear. The Kermode bear is a white phase of the common Black Bear, that occurs in the coastal forests of British Columbia. These bears aren’t albinos. They don’t have pink eyes. It seems that some Black Bears carry a recessive gene for white color. If both parents have the gene they’ll throw white cubs even though both of them are black. You can see that in the photograph. Based on that, if two white bears mated, they would also throw white, so the white variant would breed true if they kept to themselves. If one of the parents was white some cubs would be black and some white. I think that’s how it goes, anyway.

The Kermode bear has become the totem of the Great Bear Rainforest. The white bears have been awarded the title Spirit Bear. I don’t know whether the first nations people called them that, or whether the name was dreamed up by a public relations firm for Greenpeace. You really can’t tell fact from tradition very easily anymore. Cool name, though.

The Great Bear Rainforest is the largest unlogged parcel of temperate rainforest in the world and it stretches from mid-way up the B.C. Coast up into Alaska. Most of this area is protected now, totaling about 7,700 sq miles. The area includes the coastal forests and most of the islands. Vancouver Island and the Queen Charlottes are not included, but that seems to be more political than anything else. Based on habitat they should be a part of the Great Bear.

Anyway, the Great Bear Rainforest is protected because of tremendous efforts on the part of environmental activists. There have been many confrontations with loggers and other developers. Things seem to have settled down into a kind of detente now. Logging is less important to the coastal economy and tourism is becoming one of the big money-makers. As long as that situation holds the area is probably safe.

Even though the Great Bear Rainforest is protected from logging and most development, there is constant pressure on it. The area isn’t safe from environmental disasters. There was a ferry sunk recently that caused a lot of damage along the coastline. The biggest threat to it right now is that oil companies want to push a pipeline through the area. So the fight goes on to protect this area.

The Kermode bear isn’t seen very often. Mostly they stay farther back in the woods than people go. They are reputed to be very shy. There are exceptions, though. There was one Kermode Bear named Gimpy that lived around Terrace for years and was quite ham. He wasn’t shy at all.

There’s an excellent video on the National Geographic site about the Kermode bear. It was made in 2010, by Paul Nicklen. The video runs about 10 minutes and it contains the best shots of the Kermode Bear that I have ever seen. Check it out. Its great.

The Amazons of Black Sparta

This is the fourth, and probably final article about amazons. Unlike the other amazons I talked about in the previous articles, there is no doubt that these girls existed almost up till the beginning of the twentieth century.

Here’s the citation from The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest by Stieg Larsson:

Despite the rich variety of Amazon legends from ancient Greece, South America, Africa and elsewhere, there is only one historically documented example of female warriors. This is the women’s army that existed among the Fon of Dahomey in West Africa, now Benin.

These female warriors have never been mentioned in the published military histories; no romanticized films have been made about them, and today they exist as no more than footnotes to history. Only one scholarly work has been written about these women, Amazons of Black Sparta by Stanley B. Alpern (C., Hurst & Company, London, 1998), and yet they made up a force that was the equal of every contemporary body of male elite soldiers from among the colonial powers.

It is not clear exactly when Fon’s female army was founded, but some sources date it to the 1600s. It was originally a royal guard, but it developed into a military collective of 6000 soldiers with a semi-divine status. They were not merely window dressing. For almost 200 years they constituted the vanguard of the Fon against European colonizers. They were feared by the French forces, who lost several battles against them. This army of women was not defeated until 1892, when France sent troops with artillery, the Foreign Legion, a marine infantry regiment, and cavalry.

It is not known how many of these female warriors fell in battle. For many years survivors continued to wage guerrilla warfare, and veterans of the army were interviewed and photographed as late as the 1940s.

When Khadaffi set up his all-girl bodyguard, he was actually following tradition, not doing something radical. The amazons of Dahomey started out as a bodyguard. Eventually their numbers grew and they made up a third of the army. Wikipedia has a good article on the amazons of Dahomey. The book about these women warriors that was mentioned in the quote is available from, where else, amazon.

Although these female warriors were fierce on the battlefield, its probably incorrect to give them entire credit for Dahomey remaining independent for so long. The kingdom of Dahomey was the chief supplier of slaves to the transatlantic slave trade. This meant that it was more valuable to the european powers as a source of slaves than it was as a colony. Once slavery was abolished the fate of Dahomey was sealed. It took two years to achieve, but France conquered the kingdom in 1894 and kept control of it until 1958. The former kingdom of Dahomey is now known as Benin.

Related articles

• Africa’s longest reigning monarch, Obi James Anyasi II, seeks govt help (vanguardngr.com)
• Women warriors of west Africa (boingboing.net)

It was Stieg Larsson’s book The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest that got me going on this fascinating topic. Each of these posts centers around a quotation from this book and expands on it.

There has been a lot of controversy during the last 20 years or so about women taking an active role in combat. The women’s equality types rail because women weren’t allowed to fight and were restricted to support roles. On the other side were those who believed women to be incapable of actually fighting. Still others believe that women in combat will cause some kind of fundamental, evil change in society.

The simple fact is that there have always been women warriors. At various times in history there have been entire women’s armies, and they fought just as well or better than their male counter-parts.

This series of posts takes a look at several different examples of warrior women, amazons in other words. Interesting factoid: The black sea used to be known as the Amazon. Many of the examples of warrior women come from around the Black Sea. That’s how they got the name amazons.

1. Women Have Always Gone to War
2. Did Amazons Really Amputate a Breast?
3. The Amazons of Libya
4. Modern Amazons

This is the third post in my series about Amazons and Women in war. Again, the quote that follows is from The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest by Stieg Larsson.

The historian Diodorus from Sicily, second century BC (who is regarded as an unreliable source by other historians), describes the Amazons of Libya, which at that time was a name used for all of north Africa west of Egypt. This Amazon reign was a gynaecocracy; that is, only women were allowed to hold high office, including in the  military. Accord to legend, the realm was ruled by a Queen Myrina, who with 30,000 female soldiers and 3000 female cavalry swept through Egypt and Syria and all the way to the Aegean, defeating a number of male armies along the way. After Queen Myrina finally fell in battle, her army scattered.

But the army did leave its imprint on the region. The women of Anatolia took to the sword to crush an invasion from the Caucasus, after the male soldiers were all saughtered a a far-reaching genocide. These women trained in the use of all types of weapons, including bow and arrow, spear, battleaxe, and lance. They copied their bronze breastplates and armour from the greeks.

They rejected marriage as subjugation. So that they might have children they were granted a leave of absence, during which they copulated with randomly selected males from nearby towns.

Only a woman who had killed a man in battle was allowed to give up her virginity.

Queen Myrina seems to be an almost mythological character. All this took place a looong time ago, even before Greek culture solidified. I found a little more detail on Wikipedia, but it still comes from the same source, Diodorus.

Myrina, a queen of the Amazons. According to Diodorus Siculus,^[1] she led a military expedition in Libya and won a victory over the people known as the Atlantians, but was less successful fighting the Gorgons (who are described by Diodorus as a warlike nation residing in close proximity to the Atlantians). During the same campaign, she struck a treaty of peace with Horus, ruler of Egypt, conquered several peoples, including the Arabians, the Tauri and the Cilicians (but granted freedom to those of the latter who gave in to her of their own will). She also took possession of several islands, including Lesbos, and was the first to land on the previously uninhabited island which she named Samothrace. The cities of Myrina (in Lemnos),^[2] Mytilene, Cyme (Aeolis), Pitane (Aeolis) and Priene were believed to have been founded by her and named after herself, her sister Mytilene and the commanders in her army, Cyme, Pitane and Priene, respectively.^[3] Myrina’s army was eventually defeated by Mopsus the Thracian and Sipylus the Scythian; she, as well as many of her fellow Amazons, fell in the final battle.

By the sounds of that, Myrina wasn’t from Libya, but rather was some kind of proto-greek. That means the title of this post is misleading. Oh well…

Two interesting linkages occurred to me. They don’t have anything directly to do with Myrina’s amazons, just random thoughts that popped into my head while working on this.

1. The social structure was a gynaecocracy. I’ve never heard of any other society where women, and only women, were on top. I’ve heard of matriarchal cultures, of course. Here on the west coast of Canada most of the tribes were matrilineal. That means that lineage of a person was traced on the mother’s bloodline, not the father’s the way we do it. One interesting result of this is that they swapped children. Kids were raised by the uncles and aunts. Among the Haida, a boy would be sent to live with his mother’s brother.
2. They regarded marriage as subjugation. In my mind, this ties together with the subject of mature relationships, ie how relationship structures can change after the kids are raised and gone. It also brought to mind something I heard about a growing women’s movement that started in Japan; women leaving their marriages and striking out on their own. This is a real social change, and of course has a special name and customs around it. If anyone can point me to sources that talk about this, please let me know. Its something that came across my radar a few years ago and I didn’t follow up because I was busy with other things.

This is the second in the Women in War series that started with Women Have Always Gone to War. Again, the quote that follows is from The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest , written by Stieg Larsson.

An Irish law from the year 697 forbids women to be soldiers – which means that women had been soldiers previously. Peoples who over the centuries have recruited female solders include Arabs, Berbers, Kurds, Rajputs, Chinese, Filipinos, Maoris, Papuans, Micronesians, and American Indians.

There is a wealth of legend about fearsome female warriors from ancient Greece. These tales speak of women who were train in the art of war from childhood-in the use of weapons, and how to cope with physical privation. They lived apart from the men and went to war in their own regiments. The tales tell us that they conquered men on the field of battle. Amazons occur in Greek literature in the Iliad of Homer, for example, in 600 BC.

It was the Greeks who coined the term “Amazon.” The word literally means “without breast.” It is said that in order to facilitate the drawing of a bow, the female’s right breast was removed, either in early childhood ar wath a red-hot iron after she became an adult. Even though the Greek physicians Hippocrates and Galen are said to have agreed that this operation would enhance the ability to use weapons, it is doubtful whether such operations were actually performed. Herein lies a linguistic riddle-whether the prefix “a-” in their language does indeed mean “without.” It has been suggested that it means the opposite-that an Amazon was a woman with especially large breasts. Nor is there a single example in any museum of a drawing, amulet, or statue of a woman without her right breast, which should have been a common motif had the legend about breast amputation been based on fact.

When I read the bit about the Irish law against women warriors I immediately wondered whether it had anything to do with the arrival of Christianity in Ireland. Sure enough, that was around the time the celtic church was being established. Although Christianity had been introduced earlier, it had pretty much established itself as the dominant religion by that time. It seems that organized religion of any kind frowns on women warriors, while the more pagan societies accept it as a natural part of life.

As far as the story about Amazons whacking one of their boobs off so they could shoot a bow better is concerned, that could only have been believed by someone who has never actually fired an arrow. It takes a lot of upper body strength to draw a powerful bow. Any surgery to remove a breast, especially burning it off with a hot iron, would damage the musculature in the chest so much that the woman wouldn’t have been able to draw a bow. Or swing a sword for that matter. The picture there shows an archer with 2 breasts, and it comes from greeka.com. Check out the article for more detailed info about Amazons.

Statue of Boudicca

I’m reading The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest. Its the last in the series of Stieg Larsson books that started with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. I found these books fascinating. Lisbeth Salander is a great character, and the Swedish background gives an insight into Swedish geography and customs that it would be hard to get from a non-fiction source.

But, that isn’t what this series of posts is about. Its about women in war. Larsson has used short, simple articles on this subject as introductions to various sections of the book. I think they should be shared and expanded on, because womens’ martial side isn’t talked about very often.

Again, what follows was not written by me, its a quote from The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. I encourage everyone to buy the book.

The image of Boudicca is from a website called Brits at their best.

The video is something I came across on Youtube. It was supposed to be search-engine filler, but I’m really glad I found it. There were some ass-kickin’ mamas throughout African history and we never get to hear about them, or much else in the way of African history, because of the white filter that has been cast over the story of how the world got to be the way it is.

Enough rambling. This is post one in a series. Hope you enjoy it.

An estimated 600 women served during the American Civil War. They had signed up disguised as men. Hollywood has missed a significant chapter in cultural history here – or is this history too ideologically difficult to deal with? Historians have often struggled to deal with women who do not respect gender distinctions, and nowhere is this distinction more sharply drawn than in the question of armed combat. (Even today it can cause controversy having a woman on a typical Swedish moose hunt.)

But from antiquity to modern times, there are many stories of female warriors, of Amazons. The best known find their way into the history books as worrior queens, rulers as well as leaders. They have been forced to act as any Churchill, Stalin, or Roosevelt: Semiramis, from Nineveh, who shaped the Assyrian Empire, and Boudicca, who led one of the bloodiest English revolts against the Roman forces of occupation, to cite just two. Boudicca is honoured with a statue on the Thames at Westminster Bridge, opposite Big Ben. Be sure to say hello to her if you happen to pass by.

On the other hand, history is reticent about women who were common soldiers, who bore arms, belonged to regiments, and took part in battles on the same terms as men, though hardly a war has been waged without women soldiers in the ranks.