Just Another Brick In The Wall...

Well, I guess a make-believe job in a make-believe company is preferable to homemaking:

Candelia is one of a number of so-called “Potemkin” companies operating in France. Everything about these entities is imaginary from the customers, to the supply chain, to the banks, to the “wages” employees receive and while the idea used to be that the creation of a “parallel economic universe” would help to train the jobless and prepare them for real employment sometime in the future, these “occupations” are now serving simply as way for the out-of-work to suspend reality for eight hours a day. Here’s The Times again:

...
Ms. de Buyzer did not care that Candelia was a phantom operation. She lost her job as a secretary two years ago and has been unable to find steady work. Since January, though, she had woken up early every weekday, put on makeup and gotten ready to go the office. By 9 a.m. she arrives at the small office in a low-income neighborhood of Lille, where joblessness is among the highest in the country.

While she doesn’t earn a paycheck, Ms. de Buyzer, 41, welcomes the regular routine. She hopes Candelia will lead to a real job, after countless searches and interviews that have gone nowhere.

“It’s been very difficult to find a job,” said Ms. de Buyzer, who like most of the trainees has been collecting unemployment benefits. “When you look for a long time and don’t find anything, it’s so hard. You can get depressed,” she said. “You question your abilities. After a while, you no longer see a light at the end of the tunnel.”

Read the whole article over here:
Europe Has A Solution For The Unemployment Problem: Fake Jobs

The Phantom Of The Opera

The Phantom Of The Opera was written in 1911 but didn't become popular until later when the first film adaptation was made. There were several other movies with the same name based more or less on the original story including a feminist 1940s version where the girl chose career over love. Then came the musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and the famous 2004 movie with Gerard Butler as the Phantom which is my favourite. However, I only read the original book recently and really enjoyed it.

The Phantom Of The Opera was one of the many books of Gaston Leroux, a French journalist and writer who was a very interesting person himself. He claimed that he was one of the direct descendants of William the Conqueror and while I'm not sure if its true, the fact is that he came of an affluent family and inherited a large sum of money after his father's death.

He promptly stopped his law studies and managed to spend his whole fortune in a couple of months in the night life of Paris, after which he was forced to find a job and became a journalist and a very successful one. He traveled around the world looking for adventures and would risk his life, if necessary for an article. When Leroux turned 49 he decided enough was enough and settled in France with his wife and family. He died relatively young from renal failure leaving more than 60 works behind of which only The Phantom is probably known.

I guess we all know what the story is about, however, there are differences between the movie and the original novel. The book gives us much more background information about Christine, Raoul and Erik which is the Phantom's real name. The original story is way creepier than in the movie, while Raoul comes across as less masculine. In fact, when he isn't crying because Christine supposedly doesn't care for him, he's doing all sorts of stupid things and constantly needs help to get out of difficulties.

The original story of his and Christine's love shows such depths of betatude that it's slightly nauseating, however, there is enough suspense, intrigues and humour in  the book to make up for this. The novel gives a lot of interesting historical details and is partly based on real events or at least, rumours which were going around at that time. The author claims that the story is real from beginning to end, which makes it even more fun to read since even I started wondering at one moment if it could really be true.

Another difference is that Erik played by Gerard Butler is hot very attractive, while Erik in the novel is a creature of your worst nightmares (and possibly older). The end is also slightly different, however, the archetypal Beauty and the Beast story stays unchanged. I would recommend the book to everyone who likes (post) Victorian fiction of which the novel is a very fine example.

Here is to Erik:

We All Could Do With Less

In one of my previous posts I mentioned the story in a 1930s Dutch Catholic magazine about a tailor whose fiancee ditched him because he refused to dress decently. The met again later in life and got married. By this time, the lady was 45 years old. In a modern society, she would have some glamorous office career or at least a job selling stuff in some department store, yet in the magazine, she was just content to stay home and do housekeeping for her father.

You'd think that the father was a wealthy upper class (or at least UMC) sort of guy, but he was just a hairdresser (even though he always wore a suit to work) who, btw, kept working right into his eighties. This story made me pause and think. Of course, unmarried women often used to work, even in the "good old times", however, it wasn't seen as an ideal situation, but rather as an unfortunate necessity. Those who didn't have to often stayed home as seen in the example above. How could they afford it?

The story doesn't give much background information about this woman, apart from the fact that she was content to stay home and go to the same church every Sunday. Most probably she didn't go on expensive vacations even though 1930s ladies' magazines are full of advertisements. It also wasn't fashionable for women in those times to go out every Friday and Saturday night and get drunk in a bar.

She probably cooked all her meals from scratch, made at least some of her own clothes and had embroidery for hobby. In those times, people were generally content with little and unless they belonged to the very wealthy, their life was rather simple and centered around home, quite unlike now. Nowadays, home is generally considered boring and you are supposed to spend as little time in it as possible.

Some women do have fulfilling careers, they get to travel or become internationally famous or some such thing, yet most of them spend their days changing diapers in a daycare, cleaning old people's homes, trying to teach a bunch of kids ABC, or sitting behind the cash register. These jobs may be necessary and I don't want to denigrate those doing them (though if more mothers stayed home we wouldn't need daycares and most shops sell tons of unnecessary trinkets made by third world people working for 2 cents per hour), but they are hardly glamorous, intellectually challenging or even very interesting. So why are they seen as superior to home life?

While I don't believe in various conspiracy theories it's difficult not to notice that there is a whole propaganda campaign behind increased female work participation, and on the international level, too. For instance, Israel has been recently criticised for failing to push more women into workforce.
Apparently, it would help them with their inequality problem. Yet the USA has also a great gap between the rich and the poor, and something like 80% of all women work there.

MSM contributes to the problem. Home life is universally presented as boring and housework as disgusting (I'm not exaggerating as recently I was reading a book which mentioned "various disgusting housekeeping tasks"). It's OK for the husband to do it though, after he works full shift. The question is, if housework is really so disgusting why not outsourcing it? Or is the purpose to further humiliate the unfortunate modern husband who is already the butt of all jokes? It's hardly susprising that so many marriages fall apart.

Our society promotes soulless consumerism above family. The good news is that we don't have to participate. And we all could do with less.

Lunch Ideas: Salmon Pasta salad

You will need:

1/3 to 1/2 of a 500g macaroni package, cooked
1 can (ab. 300g) salmon, in chunks, skin and bones removed
1c frozen peas, thawed
1 mozarella, cubed
green onions, to taste
1-2 tomatoes, chopped
salt, pepper, herbs of you choice, to taste

Dressing:

olive oil
prepared mustard
dried parsley flakes
lemon juice (optional)

In a big bowl, combine the salad ingredients, toss. Drizzle over with dressing. Serves 4. The original recipe comes from some cooking magazine, I recreated it from memory.

Pentecost Sunday

My New Dress

It's O.K. to post personal pictures sometimes, isn't it?:) I ordered this dress online and just received it today:

I have been quite busy lately with my decluttering project, the master bedroom is nearly finished, but as we have a long weekend (since it's Pentecost), the next week will be busy as well. Plus, there are visits, birthdays, all the usual stuff. I'm going to post the next installment of my historical research project next week, but I'm not sure yet as to when.

I wish you all a nice weekend!

Do Men Have A Duty To Marry?

There has been a lot of discussion going on lately on whether men have a duty to society to get married and procreate. So far I have never commented on this blog on "men's issues" or MGTOW simply because I think that it's something which men have to figure out for themselves, however, all these debates made me ponder this issue so I decided to try and formulate my thoughts in a blog post.

First, when people talk about "society" nowadays, they mostly mean a particular country, as in "American men have the duty to produce children for their country". It sounds borderline totalitarian to me, as if human beings are nothing better than breeding stock for the government. This idea isn't new, really, since as far back as in the Roman Republic there were laws compelling men to marry at a certain age as to get kids.

In Christian Europe, Catholic Church encouraged procreation, but also celibacy as it admitted certain people weren't meant to be parents. They could then go and join a monastery or a convent and this vocation was as respectable as being a mother or a father, if not more. Partly due to this, partly to the lack of centralisation, European governments mostly stayed away from family affairs, until the 19th century, when the governments decided other people's children were everybody's business. It started with compulsory schooling laws, various welfare programs, laws restricting child labour etc etc.

Not all of these laws were bad and some were desperately needed, however, once the government went into family matters, it stayed there, thus having kids or not from a private decision, suddenly became the matter of national importance.

I do think in a certain sense, a man may have a duty to procreate, but this duty won't be to the government, but to his own family, to continue his father's bloodline, like in the movie I reviewed below. If someone is to put a pressure on him, it must be his own parents or relatives, not the church, community or the state. The problem with present-day conservatives is that they often don't have their own ideas but simply react to whatever progressives are proposing, like in progressives say people shouldn't have (many) children so everybody must go and have ten.

The truth is, the Europeans aren't in any danger of dying out soon. They may be in danger of being overrun in their own countries through unrestricted immigration, but that's entirely another matter. Most people react to incentives. Modern society actively discourages people from creating a family, subsidises all sorts of degenerate behaviour, advertises degeneracy on TV, then turns around and demands people procreate as to keep the welfare state from collapsing. It simply doesn't work this way.

However, even in traditional societies, due to the variety of reasons, not everybody got married and not everybody had children. Some people had ten. Some people had one. Some people had one and he died and they had none. There was no one-size-fits-all mentality. Most people, even nowadays, still eventually want to get married and have children. If some men (or women) decide to forgo having a family by whatever reason, it may be a matter of concern to their families but hardly to total strangers on the internet.

The state and "society", in my opinion, should stop usurping the role reserved for the family. Well, what do you all think? 

P.S. I'd like to clarify that, of course, even in medieval times there were state laws pertaining to the validity of marriage, legitimacy of children and who inherited what, however, that's not what I'm talking about.

Lucy Plays Cupid

Watch it before it is deleted:)

Abraham Davenport

Abraham Davenport was an American politician who became prominent during the American Revolution. He also served as a colonel in Connecticut state militia. He became famous for his reaction to New England's Dark Day (May 19, 1780), when the unusual darkness came on between 10 and 11 a.m. which lasted till the middle of the next night. As Davenport's colleagues suggested adjourning (as they feared that the Judgement Day was approaching) he refused to do it stating that in any case, he preferred doing his duty.

Later John Whittier wrote a poem about this famous incident:

...Meanwhile in the old State House, dim as ghosts,
Sat the lawgivers of Connecticut,
Trembling beneath their legislative robes.
"It is the Lord's Great Day! Let us adjourn,"
Some said; and then, as if with one accord,
All eyes were turned to Abraham Davenport.
He rose, slow cleaving with his steady voice
The intolerable hush. "This well may be
The Day of Judgment which the world awaits;
But be it so or not, I only know
My present duty, and my Lord's command
To occupy till He come. So at the post
Where He hast set me in His providence,
I choose, for one, to meet Him face to face,
No faithless servant frightened from my task,
But ready when the Lord of the harvest calls;
And therefore, with all reverence, I would say,
Let God do His work, we will see to ours.
Bring in the candles." And they brought them in...

... And there he stands in memory to this day,
Erect, self-poised, a rugged face, half seen
Against the background of unnatural dark,
A witness to the ages as they pass,
That simple duty hath no place for fear.

Read the whole poem over here.