Military Museum Soesterberg

I'm sorry for the short posts, but I've had a very busy week and this one is probably going to be quite busy, too, so here are just some nice pictures instead:

It was quite entertaining, though if you'd ask me what I especially liked I'd say that they had some great chocolate-raspberry cake over there!:)

Last Weekend Photos

Reading makes you tired:)

We had some really beautiful weather this past weekend, +25*C with lots of sun.

Hope you are all enjoying summer just as much as we do!

Is This Our Future???

This is some sci-fi stuff for sure!




I find it fascinating and scary at the same time. Imagine turning around and seeing that thing walking behind you:)

On the other hand, one probably grows accustomed to it. May be even attached?

The Wonderful World Of Patricia Wentworh

I think nearly everyone knows Agatha Christie and her Miss Marple. However, few people ever heard about her rival Miss Silver, an Edwardian governess turned private detective, the character created by another English lady author Patricia Wentworth.

She first appears on the scene in 1929, and plays a rather insignificant role in a story called Grey Mask which is not the best one out of the whole Miss Silver series which comprises 31 books, but is nevertheless important since here we  meet Miss Silver for the first time. Her description never varies from book to book though they are stretched over the period of more than 30 years.  She stays a neat, quiet lady wearing old-fashioned, awfully decent clothes and possessing "a good deal of soft mousy hair with only a little grey in it."

Patricia Wentworth, a rather prolific writer, apparently lost her interest in the character she created for nearly a decade, but returned to her in 1937 with the book called The case is closed and kept publishing new books about Miss Silver till her death in 1961. While Grey Mask dealt with a topic of secret societies so typical for the 1920s, The case closed is a story of a man framed for murder by his own relatives and it falls to his wife's niece Hilary and her fiance Captain Cunningham to prove his innocence.

This book was followed in 1939 by Lonesome Road, a novel about a wealthy heiress in her late thirties plagued by her insufferable relatives who in the end finds the love of her life. The theme of "middle-aged" romance is persistent in Mrs Wentworth's  books, with heroines in their early forties marrying and having children which proves that it wasn't unusual in those times. The other theme is post-Victorian UMC family, the disintegration of the old bands between relatives, the intrigues and jealousies between various family members and the changing face of British society after war.

While Agatha Cristie's stories are often unpredictable, in Miss Silver novels it is sometimes evident from the beginning who the criminal is, but it's very difficult to prove it, and here Miss Silver comes in handy, since everybody trusts her and keeps telling her things they wouldn't repeat to the police. She is often described as the person of razor-sharp intellect and she is admired by the police inspectors she works with who are sometimes men of her own circle such as Frank Abbot of Scotland Yard and Randall March, whose love story forms the basis of the novel Miss Silver comes to stay, published in 1951.

The series creates the world of its own as the characters of one book often reappear in others, in some minor role, plus there are Miss Silver's nieces who never  play any active part but their lives are always in the background. One of the nieces, Ethel Burkett is a dutiful wife of a bank manager with 4 children, but her sister has married a man twenty years older for his money and when the money partly disappears after the war and she has to do her own housekeeping, complains incessantly and even tries to leave him because he is "dull" though in the end the family achieves reconciliation between the two.

Herein lies another difference with Agatha Christie. Her books were sometimes rather slippery in moral department, she had a taste for grisly details and even dabbled in occult in some of her stories. Patricia Wentworth usually omits all the descriptions of the agony and death and the books preach unmistakably Christian morals. She makes a clear distinction between right and wrong, especially considering sexual mores. Any sexual relationships outside marriage are sinful (though less for a man than for a woman), and her heroines all go to the altar as blushing virgins.

She also portrays women who use their sexual charms to influence men around them as foolish and wicked and often getting the due comeuppance. Divorce, too, comes in her stories but it's always depicted negatively. Often it's a result of a jealous rival driving the spouses apart and they will reconcile in the end. Good men are invariably chivalrous and will offer financial support even to the wives who abandoned them, but decent women would rather earn their own income than be a gold-digger.

Interesting enough, most murderers in her books are women, sometimes a sort of Femme fatale, sometimes a person nobody would ever suspect. In one story, a formidable old maid is the leader of a criminal gang, intimidating men around her and mistreating her niece.  On the other hand, the author   portrays enough abused wives living in fear of their husbands, mostly among the lower classes of society.

Though Miss Silver is a private detective in her own right, quite unlike Miss Marple, the books aren't at all feminist with one exception where Miss Silver claims that women still don't have enough rights in society. Curiously though, as the series progressed, in the 1950s, the books grew more conservative instead of less. In one of them, Mrs Wentworth even decried the use of contraception as the means for foolish young women to avoid consequences of their actions.

Not all of the stories are equally interesting, at least I didn't find them so, and the last one in the series which I just finished reading yesterday, was particularly vague. Besides those I mentioned, I especially liked Danger Point (an older aristocratic man whose first wife died under the strange circumstances marries a young girl as he needs her money to maintain his estate), The Chinese Shawl (depicting a family feud between a rich aunt and her niece), Miss Silver intervenes (a war time romance), The Key (a WWII espionage story set in a village), Pilgrim's Rest (a family curse falls on anyone trying to sell the family house), Latter End (a man marries a heartless gold-digger and has to face the consequences) and some others.

I could recommend Miss Silver series to anyone who loves detective stories and is interested in mid-20th century Britain, though I should add that women would probably find them more entertaining than men.

R.I.P Munich, 2016

So now it's Germany's turn, I guess:

Munich shooting; 9 victims.

Though I should add there is less clarity whether it was a terrorist attack in the style of Nice or just the actions of a madman of a certain background.

A Curse Of Hypergamy?

Another Game concept is the idea that all women are "hypergamous" which as I understand, can mean several things. Number one, that 80% of all the women only desire (and have sex) with 20% of all men and the rest of the men go without sex which sometimes leads them to commit crimes and atrocities (see my previous post on the topic).

Number two, that all women desire alpha well, sex, and "beta bucks" that is, in their youth they like to fool around with "alphas" who are apparently all penniless losers so that when the women "hit the wall" (at the age of about 30 since they apparently aren't able to reproduce after this age) they suddenly demand bucks from a beta provider.

Number three, after they get married they all desire "to trade up" and will divorce their beta husband at a drop of a hat, to start chasing alphas again (though at the same time we are informed that alphas aren't interested in the "dried up" women after the ripe old age of 35, but whatever).

Now let's look at these claims more closely. The first one is obviously exaggerated as there are plenty of men who could only be described as "gamma" in Gamer terminology who manage to score with women. Of course, these women aren't exactly the "top tier" and I think herein lies the problem because the Red Pill adherents all want to have only 9s and 10s (They rate all women on the scale of 1-10). So the whole 80/20 divide sounds like a projection to me: the men are basically accusing women of trying to get a better deal out of "the sexual market place" while they are desiring the same thing themselves. They also seem to forget that women don't owe strange men sex, either.

Claim number two is somewhat closer to reality, since modern women are taught that they are sexually emancipated  many adopt male mating strategy. It's hardly a secret that it used to be pretty much expected of young men to "sow their wild oats" before settling down with a "good girl". However, this is more complicated than some "feminist imperative" dictating women what to do through their "reptilian brain". In our society, women are encouraged to be financially independent so that they don't need to lock a provider husband as quick as possible. Add to this easy availability of birth control and abortion, and illegitimacy carrying no stigma any more and you get the current situation.

As for number three, you can thank the no-fault divorce for the easy way out of marriage for both men and women.

Now many Red Pill adherents openly proclaim that the "traditional patriarchy" was a much better, stable society while on the other hand teaching men to simultaneously avoid marriage and  try to bed as many women as possible using "Game" for these purposes. They also blame women for the fact that the society has changed so much. Further on, they claim that in the past women weren't materialistic, every man had plenty of sex on demand, his choice of virginal young hotties to marry and so on and so forth.

How true are these claims? Obviously in the past there was less open sexual promiscuity since it was frowned upon and many girls did marry as virgins or had only one sexual partner whom they married later. However, this means one thing: there was less sex to go around. Of course, there was prostitution and some girls "who did it" but they weren't exactly the cream of the crop. So if something, men used to have less choice of sexual partners than they do now. Plus, chasing skirts as the only objective in life was considered caddish and severely criticised. Men were supposed to have a higher purpose in life than that.

Considering marriage, in Northern Europe both men and women traditionally married at a later age than in the USA or Southern Europe as this post of mine demonstrates. The reason for it was that the man was expected to be capable of providing for his future wife and children and unless he was independently wealthy, it took him some time to get established. The women they married weren't exactly spring chickens, either as the graph shows. Also, the idea that all the women (especially of the lower classes) stayed "young and hot" as opposed to now when we have better nutrition and dental and medical care, is hilarious. Have you ever seen the pictures of these ladies after they got 6+ children? They weren't expected to look like MILFs and they didn't.

Now divorce is really a societal scourge but who is responsible for the current mess? As far as I can gather from what I read in UK, for instance, before no-fault divorce was introduced, the presumed guilty party couldn't even start divorce proceedings. So if the woman abandoned her husband he could divorce her if he so desired, but she couldn't divorce him. Of course, she could live together with some guy but if she had a child he couldn't inherit because he was illegitimate. When UN was founded after the WWII they introduced the Declaration on the Rights of the Child, which among other things, demanded to end the difference in status between children born in wedlock and outside it.

Of course, in 1950s UK illegitimate children got the same rights as all the others. The could go to school, they could get medical help, people weren't exactly throwing stones at them, but they couldn't inherit. So erasing the stigma of illegitimacy was more about destroying the traditional family than helping children. And yet, what do Gamers propose? They teach men not to marry mothers of their children as it gives them a "whip hand" over her. They also want to abolish all the alimony and child support but they seldom talk about abolishing "no-fault" divorce or encouraging women to be housewives which gives men economic power in their marriage.

This all makes me think that they aren't really serious about restoring traditional family at all.  Some of them claim that Game used in marriage will stop the wife from divorcing her husband. Divorce is always a disaster so if it can be stopped with some Jedi mind tricks, that's fine with me. However, while it can help some individual man, society on the whole will only change when the laws change. If only all these guys spent so much energy working for a political change as they spend decrying evil Western sluts while simultaneously exchanging tips on how to get them into bed, we'd probably see the revival of Victorian morals by now.

It's really that simple.  If you are serious about restoring traditional family there are some changes to be considered, such as making all divorce fault-based with guilty party undergoing some sort of punishment for the breach of contract, reintroducing the distinction in status for children born in and outside wedlock, encouraging married women to be full time homemakers and reinstalling the provision in the family law which makes the husband the head of the family with the financial obligation to provide for his wife and children. Unless it happens, family disintegration will continue, with Game or without it.

A Goodwill Store Finds

Went there last week and came home with lots of stuff, including this skirt (70% wool and only cost me 10.50):

And 6 teacups and saucers, made of fine English bone china:

They all come from different collections, including Royal Albert, Royal Windsor, Royal Standard and Queen Anne. Here are some close-ups:

Aren't they sweet?

We visited a flea market in Delft on Saturday and I saw similar cups for twice the price, so it was really a bargain! The weather has been unbearably hot for the last couple of days, but cooling off now.

Finally it looks like summer...