Archive for June, 2010

Eduardo Gold is a Peruvian ‘inventor’ that won no less than 200.000 dollars for a local project he had invented from a Worldbank Finance project for young innovations. The project? Eduardo is going to paint the entire Andes mountaintops white.

If you didn’t fall out of your chair yet, let me help you somewhat. The idea is that ‘by painting the entire mountaintops white’ the glaciers and snow ‘will melt less quickly’ which as we all supposedly know they do really fast now because of Global warming.

Can you picture the bureaucrats at the Worldbank gloating over this brilliant idea? Lets give this guy a lot of money to save the Glaciers! Never mind that you actually cant paint under a thick layer of snow, its the idea that counts! Never mind that paint is highly toxic, never mind that you are destroying the entire ecosystem on these mountains, we have found the solution to the melting glaciers problem! Just paint it! He’s a genius and so are we at the World bank!

Those poor Peruvians will lose their tourist industry, their local ecosystems and their wonderful view because some idiot gets a lot of money form the World bank to pollute the environment. Why? Well maybe the glaciers will melt a day later. An applause please for these brilliant minds, after bio-diesel they found another way to fuck up our environment with incompetent, absurd and highly spurious and costly measures.

Please, please, please get some competent people in control. People that actually have some knowledge about science and the environment. People who can think for more than 3 seconds in a row. People who do not love to waste everyone’s money with totally idiotic ideas.

So I decided that, since these people love to waste money, I’d just as well send them a mail with my own brilliant proposition. If they ever reply, I’ll let you know. Here’s the mail I have send:

Dear Worldbank,

Mr Platinum aka Martijn Benders
www. loewak.nl

Let me, as an original Dutchy, speak a few words about what it really means to me to be Dutch. I means besides having been born in a country you could only point out on a map if you squint your eyes, and where the houses when you visit look like carboard boxes and you are just not sure if the plane didn’t land in Madurodam.

Okay, we do play some nice soccer. I dont know how its even possible that we always end up amongst the final eight countries in the world. Maybe its the milk or the cheese, who knows. But of course as a dutchman I am proud of our boys and I think there must be something about the ‘dutch way’ that actually works.

But there is another side to Holland. A side foreigners know little about, a side so ridiculous a sane person can do nothing else but conclude its sheer manifested evil. It’s the insane overplanned bureacracy of the Dutch I am talking about.

Yesterday on the news: The National Heatplan was now in effect. The National WHAT? Is there an emergency? What’s going on? I read the article. There’s actually a government agency that made a NATIONAL HEATPLAN that comes in effect, dig this, ‘when its over 27 degrees Celsius for more than 4 days’.

Over 27 degrees Celcius? 80 degrees Fahrenheit and a Government Agency starts up an Emergency plan from tax payers money? Is this an episode of Monthy Python? Did we land in an episode of Groundhog day? No, this is the Netherlands, the country where even sexual intercourse would be taxed if they ever had any.

The institute that governs the National Heatplan is called ‘Rijksinstituut voor Volksgezondheid en Milieu’ meaning the ‘State institute for Public Health and Environment’. When the National Heatplan is executed this institute informs all the ‘GGD’ (Municipal Health Services) to start inform everyone about how to behave. And what information does this Municipal Health Service spread?

You should stay in the shadow. You should drink water. A cold shower could also help.

Serious! This is the advice they spread around using taxpayers money when the temperature rises above 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Can you even for a second imagine what it feels like to live in such a country, that according to a recent investigation has 10 ‘advisors’ and ‘consultants’ for every existant journalist? So for every person that asks questions, there are about 10 persons employed to think of possible answers in the Netherlands.

So you wonder why the Dutch are angry? I can tell you why. They are treated like little kids by a totally incompetent elite of mediocre people. And that seems a rather Global phenomenon, but in case of the Dutch its effects are, well, just a tid bit more absurd.

Admirers of bureaucratic inanities can download the National Heatplan here

Spies? Russian spies in the US? Aren’t spies relics of the Cold war? Are there actually people out there trying to find information you could easily find on the internet? Apparently not. The US arrested 10 people yesterday who are accused of being spies.

Now, two of those spies lived together as a happy couple for years, doing the stuff spies do: normalising. Being as normal as possible. Being as American as possible. Their names? Richard and Cynthia Murphy.

Richard and Cynthia Murphy. That sounds almost like my neighbours. Will they still fit into the court seats after Americanizing for years? And as taking a whole range of psychiatric drugs is considered ‘normal’ nowadays we can safely assume they have been swallowing pills like crazy, just to appear normal. They must have been cheating on each other too, just to prevent standing out from the crowd.

Maybe they are not spies but the real Americans, while all the other ones are the spies. Are they on facebook? Hell yes! You cant normalise without having a facebook profile. Let’s see. Here’s Richard Murphy:

Richard Murphy

He’s kind of handsome, so Cynthia should better watch out. He looks like a young sturdy de Niro.
We also read that Richard Murphy has been renovating homes in the exclusive neighborhoods of Los Angeles for years.

Now where’s Cynthia? Well, here:

Cynthia Murphy

Hmmm. Who is the Cynthia? The left one seems rather ‘Americanized’. Or the right one, who is pretending to have studied and pretends to have an American mom?

This is definitely book material. The long romance between the girl who pretends to have an all american mom and the guy who pretends to be renovating homes in the rich areas of Los Angeles. As if we all dont know people do not renovate their homes there, they simply throw it away and buy a new one. We dont buy it, Russian Richard!

See what I mean? Facebook is the perfect tool for would-be-spies and cheap romantic novel writers.

Yesterday there were two items appearing in the Dutch news almost simultaneously: the famous Dutch television host Paul de Leeuw ‘would not be put in court’ for putting the following tweet on twitter when the marriage of Swedish crown-princess Victoria took place:

‘Are you also secretly waiting for the moment a black Saab crashes itself into some sort of monument? Not that I wish for it to happen, but at least something would happen then!’

The OM, the ‘National Prosecutors Office’ (website) the next day said Paul the Leeuw would not be sued for making this tweet on Twitter. Would not be sued? Can you be sued for just saying something, an innocent joke? What the hell has the National Prosecutors Office to do with an innocent tweet? Don’t these people have anything better to do? Are we supposed to feel better now that we know they actually investigate tweets, to see if they can be legally sued? The guy made a joke, for christ sake.

Then, simultanously, this item appears in the dutch news. Dutch Broadcasting Network ‘TROS’ fires Cornald Maas for putting the following tweet online:

‘What nice export products we Dutch have, Sieneke, Joran van der Sloot and the PVV’

Cornald Maas was working for the TROS as a commentator and he also commentated the Eurovision songfestival for the Netherlands. So this guy is FIRED for making a joke on twitter? What is wrong with these people?

Isn’t it obvious that social media are becoming increasingly more dangerous and narrow minded. Yesterday I took a peek at a fake facebook account i created after not having looked there for about two months. Now every post you make there says ‘flag’ under it, so you could be nicely reported for anything you could possibly say.

I am actually glad they threw me out of facebook. It is becoming a very narrow minded instrument of moralistic social control and twitter doesnt seem any better judging by these news items. Think about it, I am a well known dutch author, and they simply deleted all my work ‘because someone complained’ and they wouldnt even tell me what the reason was for deleting my profile!

I dont want weird government agencies to gloat over my family pictures, thank you very much. I dont want ‘prosecutor agencies’ weighing every joke and remark I make on the scale of their legal apparatus. Having such agencies controlling everything you say in your own home is RIDICULOUS and UNACCEPTABLE. Yes, I articulate that, because people somehow seem to start to think this is all normal.

My book was one of the bestly reviewed books of 2008. I was nominated for the Buddingh price and won two other poetry awards. It means nothing to facebook: it simply deletes all my work, all my poems, all my thoughts, because some monkey had some moralistic issue with something I wrote. And they wouldnt even tell me what it was. There was no chance of appeal, nothing. Justice doesn’t exist in their world, just low-brow moralism.

That seems exactly the road we are on: a road that leads to a world where low-brow moralism of the most stupid sort rules and justice is simply a thing of the past. Too complicated, too nuanced, to much maintenance costs.

Facebook and Twitter increasinly are becoming control instruments. I actually started to develop a new social environment, called ‘Soulsat’, because I do like the technology, I just dont like the morons who happen to control it. I will try to get it online in the coming months.

The article (dutch) about Cornald Maas

The article about Paul de Leeuw

Tashi Dhondup is a Tibetan poet and musician that has been sentenced to 10 years of hard labour by the Chinese government. His crime? Writing songs. Tashi wrote popular songs against the Chinese occupation of Tibet. In protofascist states such is considered a crime.

He is by no means the only tibetan writer or artist that has got arrested recently. Reports indicate that the last three months the chinese government has arrested more than 50 writers, poets and musicians. People who were arrested in the middle of the night and taken away, because they wrote poems, songs or made artworks the autorities disapprove of.

China has become the dark underbelly of our capitalist system. They produce almost anything we use in the western world. That makes us responsible for its policies, in a sense, because we have at many levels been economically and politically merged with their system. Slavoj Zizek once said that China proves Capitalism can very well function without democracy and that this is the biggest danger that lies ahead of us. He may very well be right: except that I believe this is already kind of ‘old news’, in the sense that most democracies in the west have become like show trials. The ‘double standards’ people complain about are actually preconditions without which the system wouldnt work.

What can we do to free Tashi Dhondup? I am afraid not a whole lot. We could send mails to the Chinese Embassy or just spread this story around. I have great symphaty for the Tibetan people, who have been the most spirited and warm people I have ever met in my travels. So yes, I am amongst those that keeps saying ‘Free Tibet Now’.

Join Free Tibet

What is wrong with a psychiatric industry that is financed by drug companies? Well isn’t that very obvious: they will try and try to classify more and more mental conditions as ‘diseases’ simply because their financers want them to do so. Nowadays children can’t behave like children anymore or they are ‘hyperactive’ or diagnosed as ‘ADHD’ and pumped full of drugs of which no one knows what the long term consequences of their use are.

At the same time, digg this, there was a recent research into which jobs have the highest suicide rates. Guess what? Yes, doctors and Psychiatrists rank amongst the highest, the most number of suicides take place in that job catagory.

Ask yourself this: why do these rather suicidally depressed people want to drug everyone? Because that’s basically what the new ‘Psychiatric Manual’ named ‘the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

“With DSM-V, American psychiatry is headed in exactly the opposite direction: defining ever-widening circles of the population as mentally ill with vague and undifferentiated diagnoses and treating them with powerful drugs,” Professor Shorter of the University of Toronto writes in the Wall Street Journal.

New diseases in the thick manual include the ‘Psychosis Risk Syndrome’ which is a particular type of ‘disease’ that can be streched to encompass half the world population. Twitch your eye? Behave a little weird? Have a stutter? Well, those might be signs of you having PSR which basically means you have the potential to become psychotic and, according to the manual, must be treated with drugs.

Symptoms of “psychosis risk syndrome” include vague descriptors as “disorganized speech.”

“Minor neurocognitive disorder” describes a reduction in cognitive function over time, such as that normally experienced by people over the age of 50, while “temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria” refers to children who suffer from outbursts of temper.

The psychiatric industry has become a drugdealer culture. All these drugs do not just effect the people that take them but dissapear and mix with the environment. So ALL OF US are effected by these billions of tuns of chemical drugs that are pumped into the various water systems.

You cannot solve a problem with drugs. Psychiatric problems are PROBLEMS, not ‘chemical inbalances’, the people who want you to believe they are physical necessities are idiots. A chemical markup is an endresult, not a cause. Anyone can simply change the chemical balance in their body. Dont believe me? Sport all day and laugh at and greet everyone you see. At the end of the day the chemical balance of your body will be completely different. To put the chemical balance as the cause rather than the effect of a problem is only good for one thing: druglords.

So we have a bunch of drug companies, a bunch of depressed suicidal doctors, a manual and an entire population of ‘chemically inbalanced people’. Is that the result of the last 100 years of psychiatric ‘research’?
Aren’t these people ashamed of themselves?