In the past three weeks four relatively new devices I own with a combined worth of well over 500 euro broke down, and there’s nothing I am going to do about it. The IKEA alarm clock is probably still under warranty, but it will cost me the price of the damn thing alone to even … Read More

I have seen the future, and it’s bloody confusing. The photo shows a (my) traditional wallet to the right, and three additional ones I acquired in the past 12 months or so. The top two are transport cards. I had to buy the first one because it was the only one way at the time … Read More

Dutch voters who voted against the European constitution, voted for Europe. It’s really not rocket science, but at the time the media seemed to have great difficulty grasping the concept. Here’s how daily Dutch newspaper NRC explains it: It looks like the voter turnout for the elections for the European Parliament will reach an all … Read More

In 2002 Jacqueline de Bruijn, a political scientist from Amsterdam, studied the way news from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was reported in the Dutch press, and found out that the MSM tend to exaggerate the evil of the Palestinians’ violence, and play down the Israelis’ violence. I remember from that time that the press had a … Read More

The British-Dutch mega-publisher Reed Elsevier spent more than 3 million dollars in bribes lobbying fees in the US last year. What the publisher hopes to get back for this money? It probably won’t be a more balanced and more honest form of copyright. The US politicians that were bolstered by this “support” have been bullying … Read More

I’ve been plagiarized! Yes, I know. What happened is that Expactica, a website for expats… Wait, I first have to explain to you what expats are, in case you need to have this explained to you. Expats are people that move to another country. But they are not emigrants. As the name implies, they frame … Read More

The Guardian came up with this headline last week: Bethlehem residents vandalize Banksy graffiti. That’s a very interesting use of the word “vandalize.” Is it too soon to play the race card? What if the graffiti “artist” had been some unknown teenager, and the wall in question the side of the Guardian’s offices? Somehow I … Read More

“Buffer States are just anvil States.” H.G. Wells in his essay “Holland’s Future”, in Current History, A Monthly Magazine: The European War, March 1915.

With the increasing attention being paid to conspiracy theories surrounding the 9/11 attacks, the Studium Generale at the University of Delft decided to have students research some of the claims made by the makers of the Loose Change documentary, which is the flagship of the conspiracy theorists. This drew the attention of the makers of … Read More

Photo: Het Parool, 2005. A while ago the Parool newspaper published a series of books that used to be censored at some point in time. Their list (Dutch): Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses”, “Les liaisons dangereuses”, Brecht’s “Dreigroschenroman”, Alberto Moravia’s “Gli Indifferenti”, Marquis de Sade’s “Les Cent-Vingt journées de Sodome”, Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five”, Anaïs Nin’s “Henry and … Read More