A random Dutch radio news message: police retirement will outpace police recruitment in the forthcoming years, which will result in police shortages. You can hear/read similar messages about nurses, plumbers, teachers etc. The (predicted) impact of a graying population is - finally - becoming noticeable. My blog's title is a reference to the 1972-1985 British comedy...
Redundancy
Is politiek nog relevant in Nederland?
13 Sep, 2021
Op 17 maart 2021 hebben we gestemd voor de Tweede Kamerverkiezingen (uitslag). Het politieke midden werd verder uitgedund en de flanken kregen er extra zetels bij. Links heeft slechts 26 van de 150 zetels (8x GL+9x PvdA+9x SP). Aan de rechterflank werd flink gewonnen. Nederland verrechtst steeds meer. Een enorm verschil met mijn jeugd (o.a. Joop den Uyl). Een...
Critocracy, dikastocracy, or kritarchy
22 Jul, 2021
More and more, judges in Europe and USA fulfil an additional role in the trias politica or separation of powers. Next to their (original) judicial role, they are adopting a legislative role (eg, Shell verdict, ECB vs German Federal Constitutional Court, ECJ vs Polish Constitutional Court) due to the increasing impotence of the belief system Politics, both in Europe...
We don’t know the things that we don’t know
5 Jul, 2021
We know the things that we know. That knowledge may seem a lot to us. Yet, that knowledge of known knowns becomes very small when we start considering (i) the things we know that we don't know (eg, most foreign languages), and/or (ii) the things we don't even know that we don't know these (no example - by definition). There's also a category of things we don't know...
Decoupling (8): Shell climate verdict
8 Jun, 2021
Recently, Royal Dutch a.k.a. Shell Oil was ordered by a Dutch judge to accelerate its climate targets (eg, Axios, FT, WSJ). The judge argued that climate rights are a part of universal human rights. My blog will not discuss those arguments. It is, however, another example of a decoupling (my blogs) between Business (ie, the belief system Money) and Politics (as a...
Our body is a network and so is everything else
27 May, 2021
Mid April 2018, I wrote my blog Know thyself a.k.a. Who am I? Its first paragraph wonders how 37.2 trillion cells can view themselves as "one". A recent Aeon article - You are a network - sheds some light on this discrepancy and on my implicit question. The article's subtitle reads as follows: "You cannot be reduced to a body, a mind or a particular social role. An...
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