Because It's Halloween

 

A Real Life Horror Story

 The organs of a Kentucky donor who had been declared dead were ready to be harvested — but then doctors made a startling discovery: he was still alive...

Earlier that day, the donor had undergone cardiac catheterization, which is used to evaluatethe heart’s health before or after a transplant.

“The donor had woken up during his procedure that morning for a cardiac catheterization. And he was thrashing around on the table,” Martin said. But then, doctors sedated the patient and continued to plan to recover his organs, she added.

“That’s everybody’s worst nightmare, right? Being alive during surgery and knowing that someone is going to cut you open and take your body parts out?” Martin told NPR. “That’s horrifying.”

Read the whole story over here. 

 

Van Helsing 2004

 Since October is a Halloween month, we decided to watch a horror film to celebrate it and chose this one.

The plot is rather simple. Van Helsing who lost his memory many years ago, but knows that he is very old, hunts monsters in the service of a secret order within the Catholic Church. He is sent to Transylvania to kill Dracula, together with friar Carl. There he meets Anna Velkan, the last descendant of a noble family who is on the same mission and whose brother was turned into a werewolf by Dracula. Her ancestor made an oath that unless he or someone of his family destroys Dracula, they won't be able to enter Paradise and will spend the eternity in Purgatory.

Van Helsing kills one of Dracula's brides and forms an alliance with Anna, while Dracula is plotting to conquer the world and is looking for a new bride...

I should say that the movie is not really very horrific but very entertaining. Strange enough, it wasn't a success when it came out, the fact that many commenters on YouTube trailers found surprising. My theory is that it's due to the fact that it shows the Catholic Church in positive light, something which those who run the MSM in the USA don't really appreciate.

It's also quite traditional because it shows that Evil, though seductive, is still Evil. There are no redeeming qualities in Dracula, which is quite unlike the later abominations of shining s8xy vampires courting high school girls. Europeans are played by European looking actors. Girrl power isn't very annoying. Etc etc. Both adversaries are played by the very handsome actors, btw, and Anna is beautiful, too.

On the negative side, the hint that Van Helsing is the incarnation of Gabriel (yes, that one) is bordering on blasphemous, imo. 

If you are into this kind of movies and haven't seen this particular one, I'd recommend it.

Thoughts On Sunscreen

 We had a discussion on this topic in spring;)

My experiences so far. First I tried one with titanium dioxide, as it's supposed to be free of harmful chemicals. Well, may be, it is but it's also a thick paste and I couldn't tolerate it. 

I bought spf30 and 50 from a local brand. SPF30 worked well until we went on a vacation to the south of Germany. The sun was pretty strong there in May and despite using sunscreen royally I still got burned so I had to buy a cap and try to cover myself more.

In high summer (July-August) I switched to spf50 but it was my mistake. The temps were around 30*C and my skin started to itch. I developed some sort of allergy and couldn't use spf30 either. And it was too warm for my sun cap. So I bought myself a sun visor and a long sleeved shirt to wear on top and went with long skirts only. And it was fine. 

I also mostly tried to avoid direct sun during the day and wore a big hat while sitting on a terrace outside. Plus we used awnings. It became cooler in September so i could use spf30 again without any problem. Now in October we have sun strength 1-2 so unless I spend a lot of time in direct sunlight I don't use any protection. 

My conclusion. Spf30 doesn't really help well when the sun is strong and you spend a lot of time outdoors. Mechanical protection (awnings, hats, caps, clothes) and avoiding direct sunlight gives better results + you don't have to use chemical stuff on your skin. Though I wonder if a normal day cream is so much better for you...

Female Education And Society

 It destroys more than just the TFR:

Every society faces a fundamental choice. Either deny men what they observably and actually prefer or deny women what they think they prefer in theory. Across the West, the last 60 years have been an experiment in the latter. Women have been given the red carpet treatment in the corporations, in the universities, and even in the men’s locker rooms. Divorces and custodies have been granted on demand. Pregnancies have been prevented. Babies have been aborted. Obesity and ugliness have been celebrated. The churches have been de-doctrinated and literally neutered. Refugees have been welcomed. The insane have been liberated from their asylums.

And yet, not only are women unhappier than they were before being granted their collective societal bucket list, men are increasingly opting out of every form of participation in society.

Which European Country Will Go Extinct First?

 For some time we thought it was Spain, but there is another contender:

Poland’s ongoing demographic collapse continues, with the once conservative Catholic country featuring high birth rates, now a land increasingly of childless women and men

Only Spain is a match for Poland, according to data from Birth Gauge, a website that tracks demographic trends around the world. In fact, things have never been this bad in Poland.

The data was shared by Andrzej Kubisiak, deputy director of the Polish Economic Institute, in an X post.

“The total birth rate for Poland in 2024 may be the lowest in the whole of Europe (ex aequo with Spain) and amount to 1.12 This is the worst result in our modern history,” wrote Kubisiak.

France seems to be doing better than most. We all know why;)

 

The Ideal Woman Doesn't Exist

 and neither does the ideal man. A good post by VD:

 One of the negative aspects of the digital world is the way in which it permits both men and women to dwell in an imaginary environment in which the opposite sex partners they rate are absolutely unattainable in real life. Just as Tinder and other social media permits women to attract attention from men who will never, ever, consider them as potential girlfriend or wife material, games and movies permit men to indulge themselves in fantasy relationships with the kind of women who would not even notice them in real life.

 

Is There Nothing Sacred In Britain Anymore???

 Or at least in Wales:

The Welsh ruler, who is best known for attempting to find the Holy Grail, has featured in the council's 88BTQ+ timeline as a result of his attire...

The earliest references to King Arthur date back to a time where he was depicted as a successful "dux bellorum" - or warlord.

Mentioned throughout the Welsh mythological book The Mabinogion, King Arthur's sexuality has never knowingly been mentioned in scripture.

It's since been claimed the ruler was included in the timeline because he "wore women's clothing".

 What does it make all the women wearing pants then??? Also, how do they know this King Arthur even existed let alone what he wore?

Loose Lips Sink Ships

 You may have heard about this WWII propaganda:

 

 Nowadays sailors have more reasons than ever to be wary of women:

 Trolls have targeted the female New Zealand Navy captain after a $100million ship sank under her command, forcing the country's Defence Minister to blast the 'armchair admirals' and stress her gender was not to blame.

Yeah, but how do we know? Would they tell us the truth do you think?

 It is the first occasion in peacetime that the New Zealand Navy has lost a ship and a Court of Inquiry has been launched to establish what went wrong.

Many online trolls have taken aim at Commander Yvonne Gray who has been in charge of the vessel since 2022 - her first ship command.

Commander Gray, originally from Yorkshire in the UK, moved to New Zealand in 2012 with her wife Sharon after falling in love with the country during a campervan holiday.

The critics accused Commander Gray of being appointed to the role due to her gender and/or sexuality rather than her qualifications.

Situation clear enough methinks

It happened in New Zealand but should be posted under Britain, yes imo.

BTW, weren't we all taught that if something goes wrong on board the ship it's always the Captain's fault/responsibility???

Father Of The Year?

 A bizarre story out of New Zealand:

A fugitive father and his three children have been spotted together for the first time in nearly three years, along the west coast of New Zealand’s North Island.

Just before Christmas 2021, Tom Phillips fled into the Waikato wilderness with his children Ember, now 8, Maverick, now 9, and Jayda, now 11, following a dispute with their mother.

Phillips has not been seen since last November after he allegedly stole a quad bike from a rural property and broke into a shop in Piopio. CCTV footage showed two figures on a street, believed to be him and one of the children.

You can read the rest over here:

Female Education Or Fertility?

 Apparently, you can't have both:

 "We know rapid economic development in low-income countries has a huge impact on fertility rates," Per Espen Stoknes, director of the Centre for Sustainability at Norwegian Business School and the project lead of Earth4All, said in a statement. "Fertility rates fall as girls get access to education and women are economically empowered (i.e have a career) and have access to better healthcare (abortion and contraception)."

 Norwegian TFR is currently 1.4, btw. Westerners clearly deserve everything that comes our way...

Who Is Really Behind "Family Planning" ?

 Here is a noteworthy article from NY Times (of course;) which decries recent Chinese attempts to improve their abysmal birth rates:

...Faced with a declining population that threatens economic growth, the Chinese government is responding with a time-tested tactic: inserting itself into this most intimate of choices for women, whether or not to have a child...

At the very least, the in-your-face approach makes it harder for women to tune out calls by China’s leader, Xi Jinping, to get married and have babies. To some, it is outright invasive; on social media, women have complained about being approached by neighborhood officials, including some who they said called to ask the date of their last menstrual cycle.

Mr. Xi, who has overseen a crackdown on feminist activism, has said that promoting childbirth as a national priority is one step toward ensuring that women “always walk with the party.” (The country’s total fertility rate, a measure of the number of children a woman is expected to have over her lifetime, is among the world’s lowest. The rate is estimated at around 1.0, compared to 1.62 in the United States last year.) 

 South Korea has an even lower TFR with few attempts to improve it, btw.

The fertility campaign is also a reminder that the Chinese Communist Party has a long history of imposing its will on people’s reproductive decisions. For decades starting in the 1970s, it enforced a one-child policy, sometimes brutally. Officials fined couples who had unauthorized pregnancies and even forced some women to undergo abortions.

Here is something interesting. Some day somewhere on an American discussion forum I read that this policy had a Western origin. I did a short Google search and that it what I found:

In our latest Freakonomics Radio podcast... we describe an academic paper by a Dutch mathematics professor that might have been one of the inspirations of the controversial One Child Policy in China...

He meets Song Jian, a visitor from China with a Ph.D. in engineering from Moscow University. According to Olsder, they went out for beers and talked about population planning. Olsder thought nothing of it.

Song was a ballistics missiles specialist, but by the end of the 1980s he had established a theory of population control in Chinese political and science circles. Susan Greenhalgh, an expert on the One Child Policy who served 10 years at the Population Council, notes in her book that Song formed his theory largely based on ideas from the Club of Rome publication The Limits of Growth — a 1972 Malthusian work that hinted at catastrophe if resources and population were not balanced.

 A conspiracy theory? May be. However, I bet that China was not the only one country influenced. What is this "Club Of Rome" you will ask? Per Wikipedia, 

The Club of Rome is a nonprofit, informal organization of intellectuals and business leaders whose goal is a critical discussion of pressing global issues. The Club of Rome was founded in 1968 at Accademia dei Lincei in Rome, Italy. It consists^{[clarification needed]} of one hundred full members selected from current and former heads of state and government, UN administrators, high-level politicians and government officials, diplomats, scientists, economists, and business leaders from around the globe.

The Limits To Growth was their 1st report, btw. But back to the article. In case you didn't know, the Chinese are now officially allowed to have 3 children:

As China’s economy developed, the party stepped back somewhat, though it never relinquished authority altogether, ruling in 2021 that couples could have three children.

But they don't want to. 

“We’re not like people born in the 1970s or ’80s. Everyone knows that people born after the ’90s generally don’t want kids,” Ms. Yang said. 

Because, you see, women have other concerns now:

For many women, the government’s nagging seemed out of step with their concerns... It failed to address the high cost of raising children and how they would juggle motherhood alongside their careers and other ambitions. (emphasis mine).

Just like in the West, Chinese women find reproducing too much trouble:

Zhang Rongxing, 38, who was walking with her preschool-age son near the artwork on a recent morning, said that local officials had asked both over the phone and in person if she was planning on having another child.

She was not. The two she already had were enough. “It’s too much work,” she said. “Mentally, financially, in terms of time.”

The Chinese government is trying to restrict abortions, too, which genuinely worries the NY Times journalist, by some reason:

Some scholars, activists and ordinary women have worried that the government could move more forcefully to limit women’s choices. The central government has pledged in several recent health plans to reduce “medically unnecessary abortions”...

It's funny that Western MSM are decrying Chinese government's interference into "personal choices" while pushing the fertility reduction measures such as female tertiary education and hormonal birth control combined with feminism everywhere in the world, based on a paper written in 1972 by some unelected "intellectuals.

Women Who Destroy Their Marriages

 Interesting post and discussion:

 It’s pretty clear that the wives are mostly ending the marriages over relatively petty dissatisfactions with life rather than abuse, infidelity, or anything particularly serious. One woman described her regrets five years after ending her marriage; she even says that she’d abandon her current boyfriend and go back to her husband in an instant if he would have her.

The Real Reason For The Female Education

 Let's close in on some countries with a high TFR. Enter Nigeria: TFR of 5.

Age of consent (official): 18. Alphabet stuff: illegal.  

Average age of 1st marriage for females: 19.2

What about their education system?

...there are still many challenges preventing gender equality in the Nigerian education system. There is a significant bias against female involvement in specific academic disciplines, with studies showing the existence of gender-based stereotyping of students by teachers in secondary schools.^[73] The most dominant barriers are currently teen pregnancy, teen marriage, religious beliefs, poverty, and poor school facilities.

Though they probably do marry earlier than the official age in rural areas, please keep in mind that 18 and 19 year olds are still in their teens. BTW, the age of consent in my country is currently 16. Somehow it's OK for girls at this age to "experiment with their s8xuality" as some retarded mother wrote online, but Heaven forbid they marry and get pregnant. No, off to school she goes till the age of 30. 

Wikipedia gives  2 mutually exclusive reasons for this weird Nigerian tradition of marrying and multiplying. It's a) colonialism which imposed 'ideology of domesticity' whatever the heck it is. b) African national customs :

According to work done by Denga, one prominent cultural view is that it is better for the woman to stay home and learn to tend to her family instead of pursuing Western education.

Well, I guess you can't have both a high TFR and female emancipation, and since we are a very enlightened culture, we choose extinction with open eyes.

 

Does The Formerly Christian West Have A Future?

 

Just in case you thought I was joking. Total Fertility Rate Map by country, courtesy of Wikipedia. One could also call it, The Road To Extinction. Afghanistan is doing fine, though. I wonder why???

Birth Control Is Pest Control

 Why do you think they are offering it to your daughters?

New York City’s fight against rats has entered the furry beasts’ bedrooms, with the City Council approving a measure to lace rat traps with rodent birth control...

If all goes well with the plan, rats will ingest the contraceptive and become sterilized — thus preventing them from filling city streets with successive generations of scamperers...

 Back in 1967, then-Gov. Nelson Rockefeller rolled out a program that dosed rats with estrogen-laced food — but their numbers evidently persevered.

They did succeed with women though, especially with White European ones. 

The plan was also a hit with PETA, which expressed hope in a statement that the city was a “whisker away” from resolving its rat issue in a humane way.

“Hats off to the council for taking this big step to save lots of precious little lives. PETA pushed the city and its self-described ‘bloodthirsty’ rat czar to prioritize effective control methods like trash mitigation and birth control over cruel, lethal methods such as poison and suffocation,” the animal-rights group said.

Draw your own conclusions out of this story. 

The Problem Of Weak Men, Part2

 Recently I watched a movie called Speak No Evil. (You can watch the trailer over here). It's a Danish horror film from 2022, though I'd rather describe it as a psychological thriller. (Hollywood made a remake this year, which is now apparently in the theaters. I'm not planning to watch this one. I think the Danish director did a great job, and wouldn't like to see it butchered (though I could be mistaken). 

The plot is simple. A Danish middle class couple with a young daughter goes on vacation to Italy where they meet a Dutch couple with the boy of about the same age who doesn't talk. They become friendly with each other. A couple of months later, the Dutch couple invite the Danish to come and visit them in the Netherlands. They live in a remote place, their house is in the forest and there are no neighbours nearby. Well, you can guess how it goes further. Suffice it to say, someone is not making it out of there alive...

It looks to me like the director spent some time in the Netherlands himself and didn't particularly like it over here, because the Dutch husband and wife repeatedly demonstrate the worst kind of behaviour typical for a certain class of my countrymen (unfortunately). Each of them is like a walking stereotype of a Dutch assh8le, very realistically portrayed at that, so much that you recognise the situations.

This movie is deeply disturbing at many levels, and the guy who recommended it admitted that he couldn't sleep well after watching it. However, I don't believe that the intention of its makers was just to shock the audience. It's not just your average run-of-the-mill horror film. Wikipedia calls it "social satire" and that's exactly what it is. The main character, Bjorn, is a stereotypical modern liberal man. He is in touch with his feelings. He is a sensitive husband. He is what they call nowadays "a good father", i.e. he basically spends more time with their daughter than his wife does.

And yet, when it comes to that, he can't fulfill the fundamental masculine role of protecting his family. He can't stand up to bullying and abuse. He won't fight even to save his life. He ignores his deepest survival instincts to follow social conventions of always being pleasant and polite. In fact, he is so weak he can't even say, "no", to his daughter, which leads to the disaster for all of them. He is a perfect victim, and so is his wife. The evil triumphs in the end because a weak man surrenders to it, instead of fighting. The whole movie is the scathing criticism of what a modern middle class man has turned into. And not only in Denmark.

I highly recommend this movie to anyone interested.

The Problem Of Weak Men

 Recently I finished the book by Ellery Queen (those were actually two male co-authors, not one person) called Losers, Weepers. It came out in 1966 and it's a story about a guy called Jim Morgan who works for an engineering company and has severe financial issues. Then one day he goes to a bar, and while he is using the restroom someone exchanges his bag for the one with 100 000$ in it. Cash. And that's how all his problems begin...

You see, Jim Morgan is married to a very beautiful woman called Anita who is a shopaholic, to use a modern term. She keeps buying things on credit, and as a result, they are deeply in debt. When she learns about the money, she sees is as their only chance to get out of poverty. And Jim is too weak-willed to say, "no'' to her.

The book was written before the American (and Western society in general) radically changed. The woman's place is still in the home. People marry young. Anita is 25 and has been married for several years. She and Jim have no children, but the idea of sending her to work never crosses his mind. He is the breadwinner and has to solve this problem himself. He tries to make her stick to the budget, but unlike modern ''loud and proud'' females, instead of starting to scream about oppression, she uses her feminine charms on him and he falls for it every time.

The story unravels in a rather unpredictable way, but several people will lose their lives and Jim knows that he is partly responsible for it. After I finished reading it, I thought it over. In 1966 America, a breadwinner husband had quite a number of ways to lay down his will on his household, yet he failed multiple times, choosing the way of the least resistance. Apart from this, he also knew what his duty was very well, but failed to act because of the fear of his wife's emotions. The story could have ended quite differently, had he behaved like the man in his position was supposed to, namely told his wife to shut up, stop wasting money like an idiot and start listening to him.

That is something which Western men have failed to do ever since, with predictable results. To sum it up, it was an entertaining book, and if you ever stumble upon it, I highly recommend it.