Nina

[beanie0597_2.0 @0Beanie05923291]

My husband and I were talking about how little is expected of kids today compared to when we were kids. It’s pretty significant.

Kids used to be responsible for writing down or remembering homework assignments and checking their folders and backpacks for notes and flyers for their parents. Now, parents keep up with school assignments and announcements through apps and emails and often have to remind their kids what needs to be done.

Kids used to have chores like mowing the lawn, taking out the trash, and cleaning the house. Now, many parents pay a service to mow the lawn and kids aren’t even expected to make their beds or put their dishes in the dishwasher.

The lowered expectations in these areas is likely related to the one area where expectations have actually increased for kids–sports.

Kids aren’t expected to do homework or remember what’s in their backpacks because they have to get to practice. They aren’t expected to mow the lawn because they’re out of town every weekend for a tournament. When they are home, kids aren’t expected to make their beds or do their dishes because they’re so worn out from practice or the game that they just need time to relax.

This is not a recipe for creating well-rounded individuals. Kids can and should be taught and expected to fulfill their responsibilities in school and at home before focusing on their sport/activity. This will help them learn to manage their time better and remind them that, while sports are fun and important, there are other things in life that are more important and require their attention.

We need to stop lowering expectations for kids in the areas where it really counts.

[Megha @megha_lilly]

I’ve realized that what I’m experiencing right now is quite rare among my generation of women and for the generation before me.

Most mothers don’t get to see their kids at this toddler stage every day. They miss out on seeing the jokes, the pranks, the mischief, and the personalities that come bursting to the fore between the age of 1-4.

As challenging as babies are, and as vigilant as one has to be, I can confidently say the last few years of my life have also been filled with so much laughter over the silliest things my kids do. And also so much awe and reverence at how cute, pure and innocent they are at this stage.

Every day when my husband finishes work I tell him about all the things they did and I genuinely feel bad that he had to miss out.

But most women in my generation choose to go back to work when their child is at most 1 years old. That’s it. Daycare and then school. Their babies become people they see briefly in the morning and then at dinner time. I humbly insist, that is not enough time!

They never really know their children at this stage of life. My own mother started working when I was only 4 months old and my grandmother looked after me. I’m getting to see a part of motherhood that most women in my generation miss completely!

A lot of people in my personal life think I’m a bit insane for not going to work, and for doing my silly little substack essays and drawings on the side instead. But I am glad that I can be present with my kids during the early years and really know them.

I am not writing this to offend anyone who has chosen or needs to go back to work after maternity leave. But I just want to tell you that there IS SOMETHING PRECIOUS you will miss out on. Something you can never ever experience again if you miss it. Toddler love. I hope you consider this factor with seriousness.

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

The world does not need an artificial intelligence that diminishes humanity; rather, it needs human intelligence enlightened by wisdom, political authority guided by conscience and technological innovation directed by charity. Only then will artificial intelligence become not a rival to humanity but a servant of the common good.

[Vanessa Hunt @meetuatthefence]

My husband traveled quite a bit when our children were younger. He happened to be out of town one week when I got horribly sick. I didn’t realize I was that sick until the night I was up with our infant daughter and I was so feverish that I was struggling to take care of her. I had no one to call as my whole family lived in other states. We also had a four year old at the time who was going to be up in a few hours needing care. I mustered all of the strength I had to get my baby fed, changed and back in her crib before crawling into my own bed. It was one of my hardest moments as a young mother but I did it because it had to be done.

Even that experience isn’t as remotely as hard as what generations of mothers have had to endure throughout history. They just got it done because there was no other choice.

This trend of mothers filming themselves with their babies and the “I am Lindsay” slogan is incomprehensible to me. Most aren’t even talking about PPD but simply complaining about what EVERY mother has had to deal with for all of history albeit without the incredible technology that makes our lives exponentially easier.

Women need more humility and less fragility. We need to stop talking and thinking about ourselves constantly. We need fewer slogans and more scripture.

I’m calling on the older women like myself to step into this space and be willing to hold the younger women to a higher standard. One that places a greater emphasis on sacrifice than selfishness.

[Danny @DjokovicFan_]

Novak Djokovic in his documentary on why he refused the COVID vaccine:

"Because I didn't need it. Why should I get the vaccine? I'm healthy, I'm an athlete. I had corona. I had immunity. I wasn't a threat to anyone. There was no reason for me to get vaccinated. It's my freedom to choose which that fundamental right that you have as a human being on this planet — the freedom to choose — which was taken from a lot of people."

[Nina @_nrusso16]

@Rach4Patriarchy It’s a regional accent. If you’ve never heard it then that explains a lot. AW sure is lucky to have someone keep humiliating themselves to defend his idiocy 😭

[Tallow Twins | Skincare @Tallowtwins]

I honestly think part of the problem is that society has become so lazy, complacent, and self-focused that the idea of a baby actually requiring us is seen as an inconvenience. So instead of tending to them, we look for ways to “fix” the baby so they fit more conveniently into our lives. A baby needing comfort, closeness, contact, and constant care isn’t a problem. That’s literally the job.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The year is 1911. Cottonseed is the rubbish left when the cotton comes off the crop, and it goes into soap and lamp oil because it is inedible. Bitter, cloudy, and it stinks. Procter and Gamble hit it with caustic soda, run it through bleaching clay and steam it under vacuum until the smell is gone, because it is rancid before that. Then they harden it, print a cake on the lid, and call it Crisco.

The year is 1961. The American Heart Association, turned into a national institution thirteen years earlier by a radio contest Procter and Gamble paid for, tells a country to take out the fat it has eaten since it had teeth and put in oil from a press. Your mother changes the tin under the sink. The margarine in it began life in 1869 as churned beef fat. There is none in it now.

The year is 1985. Rapeseed was an industrial lubricant, too bitter and too high in erucic acid to eat. It is bred down, renamed canola, cleared by the FDA, then crushed and washed in hexane, a solvent refined out of petroleum, and bleached and deodorised like all the rest. Cottonseed took fifty years to reach your kitchen. This takes ten to reach everything.

The year is 1988. A businessman in Omaha buys full-page adverts headed The Poisoning of America and names the firms putting palm and coconut in your biscuits. Ralston, Borden, Pillsbury, Quaker, Keebler and Pepperidge Farm all reformulate inside a year. Out goes the lard, out go the tropical oils, and in goes partially hydrogenated soybean oil. Your biscuits, your crackers, your salad cream. Gone in twelve months.

The year is 1990. The same man turns on the fryers, and inside a month McDonald's, Burger King and Wendy's have dropped beef tallow. Every fryer on every high street follows. The oil sits at 180 degrees for eighteen hours, going darker and thicker as the day wears on, and what lifts off it is aldehydes. That catch at the back of your throat outside a chip shop is the oil coming apart.

The year is 1999. Soybean oil consumption has risen a thousandfold in a century, and the linoleic acid in what you eat has gone from under three per cent to over seven. None of it passes through. It is built into the fat on your hips and the wall of every cell you own. Your grandfather's body fat and yours are different substances. Obesity has doubled and diabetes is behind it.

The year is 2015. The regulator rules that partially hydrogenated oil should never have been in food. The tub is not withdrawn. Trans fats out, palm and interesterified fat and more seed oil in, new label, same price, same shelf, same aisle. Eighty years of this, and the men who ordered it are on television explaining that the problem is your willpower.

Now it is today.

It crept in over fifty years and took everything in five.

The bottle in your cupboard was rancid before they bleached it and is rancid again in your pan.

Every step was progress. Every step was settled science.

It has never once been a food.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

If you had trusted the settled science of the day, here is how it would have gone.

1890s: you dose the baby with Bayer's new cough syrup, the non-addictive alternative to morphine, marketed for children. It was heroin. They named it after the German for heroic.

1900s: you rub calomel teething powder on your infant's gums. It is a mercury compound, and it leaves a generation with pink disease. Swollen, peeling hands and feet, screaming for months, and some of them died.

1910s: you cook in Crisco, launched by a soap and candle company, because cottonseed oil is modern and lard is what your mother used. The process that made it solid produced trans fat, banned outright a century later.

1920s: you drink Radithor, certified radioactive water, on prescription. Eben Byers took fourteen hundred bottles for his vitality. His jaw was removed in pieces and he was buried in a lead coffin.

1930s: a chemist dissolves a new sulfa drug in diethylene glycol, which is antifreeze. It kills 107 people, mostly children, and only then does America give the FDA power to demand safety testing.

1940s: your doctor lights a Camel in the surgery. More doctors smoke them than any other brand, and the advert runs in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which sold him the page.

1950s: DDT is sprayed over your kitchen, your garden and your children at school. The man who found its insecticidal properties has already been given a Nobel Prize.

1960s: your wife takes thalidomide for morning sickness because it is remarkably safe. More than ten thousand children are born with missing and shortened limbs.

1970s: the country puts down the butter and picks up the margarine, on the instruction of the American Heart Association. The fat everybody switched to was banned in 2015 as unsafe at any level.

1980s: the fat comes out of everything and sugar goes back in to make it edible. Obesity begins a climb it has never come off.

1990s: your father is prescribed OxyContin, because fewer than one per cent get addicted. The company later pleads guilty to criminal misbranding, and the overdose count runs into hundreds of thousands.

2000s: you take Vioxx for your knee. It is pulled in 2004, and the FDA's own safety officer estimates tens of thousands of excess heart attacks.

Not one of those was fringe. Every one had a professional body, a literature and a man in a white coat standing behind it.

Nobody who followed that advice was stupid. They were obedient, to the most qualified people available.

Settled is a word about money. It means the questions stopped being funded, so they stopped being asked.

So which of today's instructions will your grandchildren read out in disbelief.

The oil washed in hexane and built into every cell you own. The statin that blocks the pathway making your hormones, to prevent one heart attack per hundred people. The injection where a third of the loss is muscle. The infant formula built out of vegetable oil.

All settled. None of it funded to be otherwise.

[Nina @_nrusso16]

Duh

[Toby Rogers @uTobian]

Let me get this straight: anti-vaxxers were the most demonized people on Earth, the only people it was acceptable to discriminate against. Censored, fired, blacklisted, anti-vaxxers were stripped of basic human rights. Then it turns out the anti-vaxxers are right about EVERYTHING

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Your ultimate supermarket translation guide:

"Fat free" means we pulled the fat out and poured sugar in so it still tastes of something.

"Sugar free" means sweetened with a chemical that ends in -ol and empties you by lunchtime.

"Low fat" means high sugar. Always. Check the back.

"No added sugar" means the sugar was already in there, we just didn't top it up.

"Heart healthy" means we paid for the little tick and fried it in seed oil.

"Cholesterol free" means it's a plant, plants never had any, well done for reading nothing.

"High in fibre" means we bulked it with something you cannot digest so chewing it feels like an achievement.

"Made with real fruit" means one grape attended the factory.

"Baked not fried" means same seed oil, different machine.

"Wholegrain" means beige, milled to dust, and it spikes you like the white loaf standing next to it.

"Plant based" means assembled in a factory from things a vegetable once stood near.

"Natural flavourings" means made in a laboratory, legally.

"Beef" means beef.

The front of the packet is written by the marketing department.

The back is written by the legal department, and only one of them is allowed to lie.

[Wall Street Mav @WallStreetMav]

Fact Check: True

[Nina @_nrusso16]

Much respect for the accountability. His teammates’ performances were much more offensive. Where are they? (We know Princess Peach Pulisic is gladly getting her rest.) Hope the others have genuinely reflected.

[Balogun @balogun]

My debut World Cup… it hurts to wait 4 years to compete at the highest level our sport has to offer. I want to say sorry to our fans it was not good enough when it mattered most and we let you down

Soccer in America will only become bigger the belief, the talent, and the passion is continually growing and I know the best days are in front of us, the future belongs to those who never stop believing, this moment will fuel us. We will be back

Why not us?

For the nation. For the flag.
🇺🇸🦅
B

[Geiger Capital @Geiger_Capital]

Whatever gain soccer made as a sport in the United States, our goalie just erased it.

[Matt Binder @MattBinder]

USA went into this World Cup looking better than any USA team before them and leave looking like the absolute worst USA team i’ve ever seen

[Nina @_nrusso16]

And why is Pulisic still the face of US soccer? Was awful in 2022 and equally as bland this time around. Adams, Robinson, among others are MUCH more qualified for that recognition

[Nina @_nrusso16]

@USMNT you owe your coach, the nation, and FIFA an apology. That was by far the most indescribably horrendous performance from #1-11. Hesitation, abandonment of fundamentals, disastrous decision making- unrecognizable performance. Shameful & inexcusable.

[Star Spangled Ballers @SpangledBallers]

Not only is this a totally unforgivable play by Freese, but the utter lack of athleticism by Ream here is astonishing.

This might be THE most embarrassing sequence in US Soccer history.

[vids that go hard @vidsthatgohard]

Team USA goalkeeper during the biggest game of his life

[Jonathan Stoop @jonathanstoop]

Here’s my negatively charged USMNT post-mortem:

I’ve seen the USMNT crash out of many tournaments but this was the most painful and it will take longer to get over.

The 1st and 3rd goals simply cannot happen at this level. Those mistakes transcend any technical or tactical analysis. For that to happen in the biggest game of these players’ lives…

Of course I can say this in hindsight, but all the noise around the game was UNHELPFUL. I think Balo’s red card was the wrong decision but the momentum behind the team was still at an all time high.

The administration getting involved over something with little material impact on the pitch has turned out to be a disaster, a common occurrence when non-soccer people get involved in soccer. That created the momentum behind a Belgium that were completely out of sync up until that point.

The sheer amount of technical errors in that game on the ball was bizarre, it’s impossible to know the cause but I assume something psychological. Basic actions you’d expect players to execute 9/10 times.

My cynical view is that performance undid a lot of the good about the tournament thus far. It was diabolically bad.

I will be ruminating about this for a while.

[Anna Matson @AnnaRMatson]

A woman’s due date is one of the biggest scams in medicine.

The average baby is born anywhere from 37 weeks to 42 weeks - which that is skewed itself because of a high induction rate.

The one day due date leaves women feeling like they are somehow “overdue” and it’s an easy sell for hospitals to schedule them for inductions or c-sections.

More disturbing, women are now being asked at 39 weeks to schedule an induction.

We don’t act this way with any other mammal, we let nature take its course.

Unless there is a medical emergency, let the baby come when they are ready!