Redirection

Sunday, November 28, 2021

The Real Housewives Of UK

Tradwives still going strong in England, here are a couple of recent stories:

A CAREER woman with a degree in Japanese has revealed she's quit work to become a 1950s-style housewife - who has her partner's dinner on the table when he gets home from work.

Part of a growing movement of ‘tradwives’ - short for traditional wives - Jayne Hall is very happy letting engineer Allan be the breadwinner, while she stays home doing the cooking and cleaning.

This one isn't technically a housewife, since she works part-time, but her dedication to cleaning is remarkable:

Speaking exclusively to Fabulous, the married mum-of-three said: "I spend a good seven hours-a-day cleaning and tidying.

"My favourite trick on a weekend is to get up early when the kids are asleep, about 6am. That way, I can get a good three hours in before the kids are even awake.

"I've got a carpet cleaner, so once-a-month I'll give the carpet a clean. I sound obsessive talking about it, but it is so rewarding.

"I know it sounds like the most boring thing in the world and there are some bits I don't like, like ironing.

"But I like pretty much all of it, just spraying things, smelling things. When the kids smell nice in the morning, I know I have done my job."

And the younger generation of British women is quite promising, too:

WHEN mum Rebecca Conway heard about the TradWife movement - where wives do everything and their husbands are the main breadwinners - she was all for it. 

The 25-year-old, from Manchester, believes that women should be feminine and obedient for their husbands, take on all the household chores like cooking, cleaning and tidying up, and freely admits her man has never made the bed, emptied the dishwasher or done a load of laundry in the six years they've been together. 

(Her husband is quite a bit older, btw, and has his own business.)

Getting married at an early age appears to be back in fashion, too:

 WHEN Madison Dastrup finished high school she didn’t start filling out college application forms or applying for jobs.

Instead she donned her pinny and grabbed her rolling pin as she embraced the TradWife movement, where wives do everything and their husbands are the main breadwinners.

 Her happily ever after came to life when she got engaged at 18, and was married at 19.

By 21 Madison and her husband had moved into their first home together, welcoming their first daughter Ellie Louise that same year.

Madison now considers herself a homemaker, spending her days cooking, cleaning, sewing, mending, as well as taking care of the family finances and being a mum while her husband goes out to work.

They just escaped the EU and the traditional values are making a comeback. A coincidence???


Friday, November 26, 2021

About Meat Substitutes

 Here is a decent article by Dr Axe, whose book on Aromatherapy I highly recommend, btw.

Best and Worst Meat Substitutes for Your Health

It's quite long, but worth reading. I should add that personally I can't eat soy products whether fermented or not without it wreaking havoc on my system and my husband dislikes them so we never eat them, but beans, lentils and nuts are OK.

Considering his worst substitutes, I tried to make seitan at home several times, and it was just not eatable, but I somewhat disagree about cheese. I think It's OK if you don't go overboard on it. but it's probably the best to combine several different protein sources in one dish, like some cheese and nuts. 

He also doesn't mention eggs by some reason, but the Dutch Veg society suggests that you could substitute 3 oz meat with 2 eggs, which is more or less adequate, in my experience.  

There is a discussion going on about health benefits of eggs, but the general consensus seems to be that 6 or 7 eggs a week is fine, especially if you go easy on red meat. 

(The Dutch Vegetarian society, btw, also recommends about 0.5 lt dairy a day for your b12 and calcium).

Anyway, meals should be built around a protein source, so broccoli and carrots aren't a good meat substitute, they are a side dish:)

Thursday, November 25, 2021

Happy Thanksgiving!

 Happy Thanksgiving to my American friends!

(It's OK to be a non-vegetarian, we don't discriminate over here:)

 

 

Wednesday, November 24, 2021

Vegetarian Meatballs

 Yes, yes, I know, it's an oxymoron:)

But those are really good and they were even better the next day. Of course, they have all the right ingredients, mushrooms, oats, cheese, eggs etc:

Chef John's Meatless Meatballs

And they are probably much healthier than some fake burger from the store! 

Tuesday, November 23, 2021

Shakespeare Is Cancelled, Too!

Othello not woke enough:

 This absurd kind of situation is also happening in Britain, and I’m sure there have been worse instances of ridiculous demands by spoiled students, except that here in America it reflects more of a class struggle than it does overseas. It has nothing to do with moral rights, it has to do with the new elite versus those Middle Americans who were the nucleus of the American republic once upon a time. Now it’s the unholy alliance of the media, the Academy, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley that holds all the cards. This hostile ruling class is new but determined to wipe out that middle who voted for Reagan, Obama, and Trump, among others.

 

 


Friday, November 19, 2021

Acquitted On All Charges

 You read it here first:

Kyle Rittenhouse has been acquitted...

The jury reached their decision after four days of deliberations, which lasted longer than anyone - including Judge Bruce Schroeder, had expected. It came amid two mistrial requests from the defense over high-definition video evidence which was withheld - possibly unintentionally - by the prosecution. Rittenhouse's attorneys claimed that an inferior copy of a potentially crucial video could have affected their defense.

 

Wednesday, November 17, 2021

Bill Gates And The Biology Lesson

 The danger of being ruled by nerds:

Early on in the pandemic, to get a sense of Gates’s views, I watched his TED talks. I began to realize something astonishing. He knew much less than anyone could discover by reading a book on cell biology from Amazon. He couldn’t even give a basic 9th-grade-level explanation of viruses and their interaction with the human body. And yet here he was lecturing the world about the coming pathogen and what should be done about it. His answer is always the same: more surveillance, more control, more technology.

Tuesday, November 16, 2021

Taking Your Daughter To A Pool? Think Twice!

 This is truly a bizarre story:

 An 11-year-old girl caught gonorrhoea from a natural thermal pool in Italy while on holiday, doctors have revealed...

 She is believed to have caught the infection, which is usually transmitted sexually, from the water, which had been used by a person with gonorrhoea. 

Temperatures in the pools can come close to body temperature, and in this case could have provided a way for the bacteria to infect the young girl, experts claimed. 

Of course, there was a discussion on Twitter where I found the story, along the usual lines, but personally I do believe it's possible, even though "experts"" long denied it, just like with the HPV which I had written about on this blog some time before. 

Remember how we were told that in Middle Ages  people were dirty because they supposedly hated bathing? The truth is that they actually used to have public baths before, but then the plague and other epidemics started and they figured out it had something to do with water, so people stopped using them. 

Cholera is spread through water, too. Same was true about polio and some other diseases. My mother was a health and safety  inspector and I remember her controlling water in lakes used for swimming, to check for infections. Sometimes I wonder if the elimination of polio had something to do not only with vaccines, but with the disappearance of open sewer systems. 

For instance, in some rural parts of the Netherlands they still used an outhouse till somewhere in the mid 1960s (!), and they were mostly situated above channels (just read an article about it in Country Life) so that everything dropped into (you guessed it) water, and probably found its way into nearby lakes which the kids then used for swimming in summer.

Of course, commercial pools nowadays are using such amounts of chlorine they'd probably kill anything (whether it's good for your health, is another story), but our modern obsession with swimming in natural waters unless it's a sea/ocean could be something to ponder about...


Tuesday, November 9, 2021

Sweden Vindicated

 Just as we are heading into the new wave of restrictions and lockdowns, comes this article from Daily Mail:

How Sweden swerved Covid disaster 

They actually have less corona deaths than the majority of the European countries:

Sweden has suffered fewer Covid deaths than most of Europe and is still recording lower infection rates, according to figures that suggest its lockdown gamble has paid off. 

The Scandinavian nation became an international outlier last year when it defied scientific advice and refused to follow the rest of the world in shutting down society to curb the virus' spread. 

 Or rather, may be the science wasn't (isn't) settled?

Not only has Sweden's economy bounced back faster than any other country in the EU, latest data shows that it has also fared better than most in terms of lives lost during the pandemic.

Sweden has suffered almost 1,500 confirmed Covid deaths per million people, according to Oxford University-based research platform Our World in Data, which is lower than the European average (1,800).

The UK — which has endured three national lockdowns and several regional fire-breakers — has recorded 2,100 per million, for comparison, while Belgium and Italy both have rates above 2,000.

It probably also has to do with the fact that they have fewer obese people running around, as according to our data the average BMI of those hospitalised is 30 (not you aren't healthy at any size, sorry).

When looking at excess mortality during the pandemic, Sweden ranks just 21st out of 31 European countries with 5 per cent more deaths since March last year than would be expected. Britain, Italy and Spain, on the other hand, have each suffered around 10 per cent more deaths than average during Covid...

 Sweden also has a lower infection rate currently than most EU nations, with just 100 per million people testing positive daily compared to 800 in Austria, nearly 700 in Belgium and Ireland, and 500 in the UK. 

They just basically let the disease run its course, with some common sense measures:

Although Sweden chose not to lock down completely early in the pandemic, it did introduce stricter legally-binding curbs last winter as cases and deaths rose.

These included a ban on groups of eight or more people, limits on numbers in gyms and shops and an 8pm curfew on pubs and restaurants. 

We had gyms closed which probably contributed to the rise in bmi, btw. Children certainly became plumper during lockdown. As of now, you aren't even allowed to practise indoor sports unless vaxxed or in possession of a negative test, which surely won't improve the health situation any further, but who cares?

While Sweden appears to fared done better than continental Europe during the pandemic, it has performed significantly worse when compared to its closest neighbours.

 Norway and Finland, for example, have suffered about 200 Covid deaths per million people since the virus was first seeded on the continent — seven times lower than Sweden's toll. 

In Denmark the rate is around 400. All three nations have had tougher restrictions during much of the pandemic, which are likely to have played a role.

It all depends on your priorities, I guess. (Mental) health and well-being of younger people was probably at least just as important to the Swedish as extending life of (obese) boomers with comorbidities. 

Cambridge University epidemiologist Raghib Ali told MailOnline: 'Whether you think Sweden's strategy was a success story comes down to which countries you compare it to.

'If you think it should have a similar rate [of Covid deaths] to its neighbours Finland, Norway and Denmark or other countries like Germany and the Netherlands?

See above.

Dr Ali said that one takeaway from Sweden's voluntary lockdown system was that it shows the power of people's small behavioural changes.

'Although Sweden didn't have a Government-enforced lockdown, it did have a type of voluntary lockdown that was well-adhered to.

'What we've learned from Sweden - and the UK - is that people's voluntary behaviour can get countries over a peak without mandated restrictions, even though they alone cannot prevent big outbreaks.' 

The takeaway is that people are much more inclined to follow reasonable restrictions/commands than unreasonable ones. Push them too hard and the chance is they will rebel. 

Also the real crisis is obesity. People can't help getting older (we all will) and obviously the elderly are entitled to good care, but you don't have to be obese. 

I wonder if Sweden offers asylum to refugees from Western Europe?

Monday, November 8, 2021

The Biggest Alcoholics In Western Europe

 are Austrians, closely followed by the French:

countries by alcohol consumption

Lack of time prevents me from writing more on the subject of alcohol abuse, but just one thing to consider is the fact that alcohol is one of the very few drugs where withdrawal can cause death. (Google delirium tremens).

Safe dose of alcohol of any kind is zero. 


Friday, November 5, 2021

This Is Funny

 

Found on the internet. Apparently the UK experiences truck drivers' shortage after Brexit. Can somebody enlighten me on this?

Tuesday, November 2, 2021

Western Modesty Standard

This standard was in use in all the Christian countries until about mid-1940s but only fully disappeared in the end of the 1960s.

To begin with, women were supposed to cover their head in public, which was a pretty universal rule and now disappeared completely, unless it's very cold/hot. Sometimes you will encounter it in more conservative churches, but outside royalties and Mennonites hardly anyone is doing it anymore. 

Women were also supposed to wear skirts or dresses, but they started wearing pants during WWII when working in war factories (war situation was used to push a lot of societal change, just like "the war on the virus" now).

In countries like Mexico and some African countries only women of easy morals used to wear pants until about 1980s or even later, btw. 

Skirts had to cover the knee when sitting and not to be extremely tight. You were expected to cover your elbows, too, the standard which gradually got relaxed in the 20th century. The necklines had to be not lower than 2 fingers under the collarbone. 

Of course, we know that the upper class women disregarded the decollete rules already in the early 19th century and earlier, but at least, it was done during private parties in the evening, with bad light, and not in the streets during the daytime.

However, if you look at Medieval or Viking clothes (and we went to many a Renaissance fair), the styles weren't as different as what the Muslim ladies wore, except for the veil, but even those, though never mandatory in the West were more or less in fashion until the 20th century. 

Somewhere along the way pretty reasonable early Medieval clothes changed into high court fashions complete with low necklines, corsets and crinolines and headcoverings into tiny hats, and then it all disappeared completely.

So unless we are Amish, none of us adhere to this modesty standard since we never routinely cover our heads in public as women. I'm adding this to show that I'm not trying to be holier-than-thou since I'm not following this minimal mid 20th century standard, either. 

When I used to read the discussions on this topic, people would mention movie industry and how they would portray hip cowgirls in jeans, but I believe that the 20th century obsession with fitness had probably more influence. Somehow it became fine to run around in underwear if it was for sport or swimming. And then the underwear just kept getting skimpier and skimpier. 

Of course, in Ancient Greece the Olympians competed naked. They were also heathen, and ladies weren't allowed to watch, they had the competitions of their own where men were not allowed in turn. (Free women had to fully cover their bodies in public as opposed to slave girls which indicated their status as sexually available.)

Some call it progress, some call it degeneracy...