The Politics Of A Football Game

 That's soccer for you Americans:)

Last week we had city government elections. In our city we had 16 parties, about the half of them only active at the local level. In the USA you have Democrats and Republicans and that's it. I'm afraid it can create a sort of a tunnel vision, when you are either for Team A or Team B, akin to a football game.

I see it every time I read an online discussion on any issue. Both sides will talk past each other and insult one another, much as football supporters do during a game. It doesn't matter if Team A member suddenly agrees with what Team B says, because it's not about the message but about supporting your team.

An example is Donald Trump promoting the vaccines. His supporters who are mostly anti vaxx will just ignore this message and keep writing fan fiction about Trump being secretly on their side, while his enemies will keep screaming how the whole pandemic was his fault. 

Or the current events in Ukraine. Republican politicians are among the biggest warmongers but the other side keeps accusing them of secretly working for Russia (I mean how ridiculous can you get?) while anti-war Republicans on social media totally ignore it and keep accusing Biden of wishing a WWIII. 

I may be wrong, but the USA strikes me as a very divided country, which I'm sure can't be all that good. It also gives ground to the rise of the most weird conspiracy theories and turns anything, from clothes, to diet, to hairstyles into a political issue where everyone is expected to take sides and fanatically support his chosen team.

Take the diet, for instance. People may have different preferences in what they eat. From the scientific point of view, Med diet with plenty of fruit and vegetables and accent on olive oil, fish and moderate consumption of red wine comes on top year after year. But apparently it's too much common sense, so we now have 2 camps, militant vegans and militant keto/carnivores. Both suggest very restrictive style of eating and both tie it to politics, left wing and right wing. 

While I disagree with vegans, I find the other side just as ridiculous. Vegans will try and interpret any research as calling all animal products a poison (just look into what they are saying about dairy, when it's proven that fermented dairy, especially something like low fat yogurt is good for you), while the keto crowd will flat out deny any connection between high amount of saturated fat and negative health consequences and tell you not to eat carbs even though there is  a huge difference between fast food carbs and something like cabbage or apples.

Many of these online personalities promoting a certain lifestyle are just paid influencers who are making money off you, so it makes sense to research their claims instead of blindly following someone you perceive as one of your team. Obviously, it's true not only about food issues but about anything else.

Street Walking In Tehran

 I became addicted to Tehran street walking videos, like this one:

 

I find them fascinating. I was especially surprised that they have so many blond women out there. 

Fiddling While Rome Burns

 I guess this was the most pressing issue...

The Horrors Of Modern Literature

 Sometimes one gets tired of reading Agatha Christie all the time, so I decided to give modern thrillers a try. Luckily, most of these books came out of thrift stores, so they didn't cost me a fortune.

I won't name any authors except one, it's just a general review, so to say (also some had difficult Swedish names and since the novels ended up in a trashcan anyway, I can't go and check them). 

So book number 1 by a popular Swedish author was really quite interesting and pretty conventional, too. It was a story of a modern family with the husband working in advertising business and travelling a lot, while his wife stayed home with 2 kids and had a cooking blog. Some woman started stalking his family, tried to kidnap his daughter and later killed his wife and son with an axe. There were several suspects. First of all, his half sisters.

His mother was a single mom who later got married but her new husband didn't want to raise someone else's kid and so she dumped him by grandma. Later his mother, stepfather and grandma died, but his two half-sisters cheated him out of an inheritance and there was lots of bad blood between them. Then there was his ex girl-friend who couldn't forget him after like 12+ years and stayed unmarried. 

But the reality was much simpler. The guy constantly cheated on his wife with any moderately attractive female, including her own sister. One woman he met abroad was a psychopath who got a crush on him (he was apparently so good in bed that no woman could ever forget him, lol)

S8x didn't start until the 2nd half of the book, and it was between him and his wife, but then it became worse since we had to read the extracts of the stalker's dairy and her s*xual fantasies in great detail. The book ended with a church service but the preacher was female and instead of telling the husband to repent and convert she told him to concentrate on raising his daughter. It was in any case, an entertaining read, but I didn't appreciate the vulgarity. 

Swedish book n2 was loosely based on the story of Julian Assange with him portrayed as a scoundrel in the pay of CIA. In fact, everybody in this book was pretty much a scoundrel and the tone was dark. The main character was an ex Stasi alcoholic agent, with great detail given to the description of his hangovers including the colour of his vomit. Didn't finish this one (but read the last pages) as it was too depressive.

These two books simply pale in comparison to the masterpieces produced by the modern British authors. Book n1 was ostensibly about the Ottoman Empire. It dealt chiefly with s*xual life or lack of it of eunuchs, transg*nder pr*stitutes and the functioning of br*thels. Plus, the grisly details of various murders, of course.

Book n2 started innocently enough. A child looks back at her Edwardian childhood. It quickly developed into the child relating the details of her father's adulteries, her brother's adventures with his male servants and later, as the said child grows up into one of the most disgusting rape scenes. So much for a "family saga". Am I glad my family aren't like that, it probably goes along with being the British aristocracy, I guess.

Book n3 was by the popular author known for her Harry Potter stories. She also wrote fiction for grown ups. Somewhere in the 1st Chapter she went into detail of m*sturbation habits of 15 year old boys. It was after this I closed the book and threw it away. Pity I couldn't burn it as I have no open fireplace. In some countries, she'd be probably investigated by child protective services. 

And finally, the American literature. I bought a couple of books of a certain author. One was more or less OK though quite politically correct, but I kept it since I enjoyed the story. It was written quite some time ago. It was a breath of fresh air because it had NO s8xual descriptions of any kind and was pretty conventional boy saves girl story though the girl in question was a spirited independent woman, but still. 

His 2nd book though. It's only several years old and it's a story of a suffragette. She flies around on balloons and promotes women's rights. All men love her and despair. They all support women's rights, too, except a couple of creepy idiots. But there is more to the story. The lady leads a double life.

 In her youth, she ran away, dressed like a man and joined the army where she won prizes as a sniper. In the whole of US Army there was not one man as good as her. Girl power extraordinaire. However, she's also a psychopathic murderess who killed her own brother for being a wimp, and among other things, burned one woman alive. In the end, she gets her just desserts at the hands of a man who loved her. 

I don't know if the author was trolling his readers with this story or meant it quite seriously but it was too much for me to bear. So I went and bought a couple of Agatha Christies again and have been happy ever since:)

Well I HopeThis Isn't A Joke...

 To continue with the topic of high benzine prices, our government is apparently planning to lower the taxes, on the 1st of April!!!

If it happens, it will be the first time they lowered the taxes on anything at all...

In other news, Texas abortion ban stays. Thots, beware:)

 

God Is Not Mocked

 The first person to receive a heart transplant from a pig has died, two months after the groundbreaking experiment, the Maryland hospital that performed the surgery announced Wednesday.

David Bennett, 57, of Hagerstown Maryland, died Tuesday at the University of Maryland Medical Center. Doctors didn't give an exact cause of death, saying only that his condition had begun deteriorating several days earlier.

It was probably Covid-19, that's what everybody nowadays is dying from...

Which Way Now?

 Biden Ban On Russia Energy Applies To All New Purchases

I do hope they have a plan, because it sure will do wonders for world oil prices. Brent was trading for 130-smth$ today, I heard. The benzine price at a tank station nearby rose 10 cent from yesterday to 2.33,9euro per liter but I hear that in some places they were asking 2.50. At the very least, the government should think of lowering energy taxes or some other form of compensation...

 

 

Learning From Our Ancestors

 Before antibiotics people had copper:

The use of copper by human civilizations dates back to between the 5th and 6th millennia B.C. It was the first metal used, presumably because it could be found in a native, metallic form which did not require smelting. Its use remained scattered throughout Europe and the Middle East, and the archeological evidence remains scarce. With the invention of smelting, the metallurgic age began and the advantage of combining copper with tin to form bronze was discovered. The earliest bronze artifacts originated from the Middle East and China and date to before 3000 B.C., but it was not until the second millennium B.C. that bronze was used throughout Europe. The ability to smelt and forge iron from about 1000 B.C. marks the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age.

The oldest recorded medical use of copper is mentioned in the Smith Papyrus, one of the oldest books known (8). This Egyptian medical text, written between 2600 and 2200 B.C., describes the application of copper to sterilize chest wounds and drinking water (8). Greeks, Romans, Aztecs, and others also used copper or copper compounds for the treatment of such ailments as headaches, burns, intestinal worms, and ear infections and for hygiene in general.

The Real Story Of Arthur And Guinevere

 There was a certain blogger whom I shall not name obsessed with "chivalry" and the story about King Arthur and Lancelot to quite an unhealthy degree, in my opinion; somehow suggesting that it (and not the cultural marxism) was responsible for the modern feminism.

However, this story is apparently only one version of what really happened, and a more recent one. I'm currently reading a book called The History Of The Kings Of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth which is considered to be the basis of all Arthurian legends and it presents a different tale.

Arthur himself is born of adultery, since his father Uther falls in love with Ygerna, the wife of one of his military leaders, Gorlois, and uses Merlin's sorcery to change into his likeness and seduce her. Gorlois dies in battle and Uther marries Ygerna and gets a son, which is very similar to the story of David and Bathsheba, except that the child doesn't die but grows up and becomes king.

After many victories, Arthur departs to Europe to fight the Romans and leaves the kingdom in charge of his nephew Mordred who then decides to place the crown on his own head and takes Arthur's wife, Queen Guinevere, too. Arthur hears about it and returns to Britain where he kills Mordred but gets mortally wounded himself and is transported to Avalon. Guinevere feeling shame and guilt takes a vow of chastity and becomes a nun.

It's not exactly a story about chivalry and courtly love, is it? More like a cautionary tale about visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children...