It’s part of what drove me out of the country in my thirties when I still looked like I was barely 20, at most, but was already considered too old on paper. Age discrimination is illegal in the Netherlands, but it’s still considered perfectly permissable to require someone’s DOB for a job application.

When I was in the US in the 1990s, I learned that your DOB and marital status had no place on your CV because they have nothing to do with your suitability for a job. The Dutch were later appalled to find that I had adopted that habit. Thirty years have passed, and little has changed in that respect.

Your way around such biases? Also racism etc? Be your own boss! If you are worth your salt, you can do it. Move abroad if you have to. Go where you are appreciated. Don’t stay where you may be merely tolerated either. You deserve better.

So RIFT (Renewable Iron Fuel Technology), a startup that works on developing the concept of iron fuel as an alternative source of energy, has just won 11 million euros in investments. Previously, it already received financing from Bill Gates’ climate fund.

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For the local flat-earthers: No, it’s not the only thing that I am really worried about but I have been dealing with this stupid issue and its disastrous effects for over 16 years. 😡

In fact, my recently purchased laptop turned out to be running AnyDesk. Why on earth would it be running AnyDesk?! I mistakenly thought it had only the install option sitting on it. I should have known better. (But that is not the point. This relentless pursuit of me, this remote obsession with me, needs to stop. I want my life back.) Maybe there is an innocent explanation for it. I hope so. But I started exploring when seemingly unusual things began happening.

“U ben gewoon aggelijk, mevrouw” does not resolve this. It does not help me in any way.

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The place that I used to call home is pretty much under water, I guess. See the screenshots below from the CNN website. Tampa and St Pete got the worst of it. St Pete looks pretty much wiped out?

It’s rainfall though that’s the problem, not the storm surge (yet). A 1-in-a-1000-year rainfall event. Over 16 inches. That’s over 40 cm.

That said, about an hour ago, the water level in the Bay was dropping. That has to do with which quadrant of the hurricane that the Bay was in. The eye came ashore slightly south of the Bay. That water will slosh back in again.

So I have to assume that my last address there is surely flooded. I was a flight up at my other addresses there.

Ryan Shea. Never heard of him.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Oh, crap: https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/02/01/239624/the-transhumanist-diy-designer-baby-funded-with-bitcoin/

And Sam Bankman-Fried was involved in that transhumanist institute in Oxford that was just shut down, as was Elon Musk. Described as “eugenics on steroids”.

Ryan Shea: https://ryan.shea.io/

Speeds had briefly slowed down. I know that these things can suddenly change track right before they hit land, but this one appears to be so huge in size that it probably wouldn’t matter much.

You have this giant vortex of winds around the eye, so depending in which quadrant of that vortex you are, the wind direction is different. So when it passes, you can also have problems because of this change in direction. You can for example mistakenly believe that you’ve had the worst of it, when it can still push up waters and send a water mass your way, depending on where you are relative to water.

I’ve seen differing reports as to when it is supposed to hit land but apparently it is going to be this night Florida time. (Tomorrow morning, mostly?)

No, I can’t simply ignore this.

Even though I was about to heat some soup last night and then realized that my soup mugs are packed too, of course. I’m making a lot of progress, but I also must take care not to wear myself out physically and continue working on securing my future. Tomorrow is going to be a busy day in that respect.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/what-happened-when-a-man-signed-work-emails-using-a-female-name-for-a-week_n_58c2ce53e4b054a0ea6a4066

Update: I’m not the only earth scientist freaking out (see video at the bottom)

This was the thing that we all feared and planned for but that never happened. Until now.

OMG. OMG.

But apparently, it will be losing energy? Odd. Hurricanes usually do that over land and speed up over water.

I do know that they can change direction at the last minute, and where and how they hit land can make a big difference.

(Remember, I used to live there. I’ve prepared for a few but the only one that I experienced came from land and brought what I considered typically Dutch weather with a lot of rain. The university was closed, though, and so were many other places.)

18:43: CNN agrees

A reminder to innocent readers: Someone DID go into my apartment while I was in a meeting at the civic offices in August. (I had briefly wondered why that meeting had to take place THERE.) I did not dance to their tune – but they had incorrectly pegged me as a pushover, apparently, and had not expected that – and it got people to become so frustrated that they then revealed a little too much of their real sentiments. (Such as wishing me misery and suffering.) See also the essay that I published. It’s available from Amazon.

You can download it here: https://angelinasouren.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/household-debt-assistance-the-dutch-way-paperback-print_proof-23september2024.pdf

(For Stichting Humanitas: This is a later version than what I sent to you.)

They also said that I had not replied to this and that and I said that when I did that, I would either not get a reply, people would simply keep referring to each other and even sometimes say that they were not allowed to reply to me. And then I was told that this was because what I had written online about them (i.e. the Google review) and that I should be pleased that they were now still willing to talk with me.

Among other things, I told them that the way that they tend to treat the over55s is simply not on.

One of my cousins runs a large real estate outfit – worth over a billion – and just out of curiosity, I later checked how they deal with negative Google reviews. Very differently, I can assure you!

(I used to get along very well with that cousin, but I haven’t spoken with him in 30 years. We are not a close-knit family. I think that’s mostly because several of our parents died young, in our family, and it means that you socialize less. There’s a lot of cancer in my family, but it’s all different cancers, so there is not a massive hereditary factor. Or maybe we are not a close-knit family, period. Or maybe it plays and even bigger role that I am like my mother’s cousin Céleste, from the branch of the family that spells its name differently.)

I’ll be gone soon enough. (Of course!) No need to freak out. Stop playing stupid games that cause delays for me.

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This is in essence the same kind of nonsense as is going on here locally, but I doubt that these folks realize it.

Sigh.

Scud missiles. Chemical warheads. My friend who happened to be on a sabbatical working at the university there arriving at Schiphol Airport, the gas mask with her.

When are the Putins and Trumps (and the huppelkutjes met slaapmutsjes op) going to pack it in and pack up? When will they stop their stupid wars that affect real people but barely touch them in their ivory tower castles? When can I stop being angry because I have to, because how can I not be angry?

I’d like to be able to stop thinking of some men and women as ‘huppelkutjes”. Okay, I admit it’s the ring of the word and it’s also quite funny. (Youp van ‘t Hek came up with it?) They’re more like piranhas and snappers and snooks and groupers and catfish. Sharp-teethed civil servants with little real life experience but big agendas.

Agrochemical manufacturers and related companies are focused on maintaining and increasing their grip, according to the first speaker in this video, from Humboldt University. I can accept that. The use of simply more technology is often blindly touted as the roadmap toward greater sustainability. I can accept that too. Yes, that would be tunnel vision.

That said… Below is my running commentary while I was watching this video (so I don’t always know at the time of typing where the speaker is headed, but as you can see below, Angelika Hilbeck’s approach really started to concern me at some point).

Interestingly, I registered for this event, but I couldn’t get access when it took place. I kept receiving emails asking me to provide the organizer with more information, but I had already provided that. This meeting was announced on EventBrite, after all; it was supposed to be open to the public. I attend a lot of meetings, often because I genuinely really want to attend them, but sometimes out of mere curiosity, to see what new knowledge I might acquire from it. Learning that something is not of sufficient interest to me is also valuable knowledge.

20:23 Shouldn’t these lock-ins become regulated – and in part prohibited – as was introduced for for example Windows computers in the past? Why aren’t they?
30:00 Hear hear. More of the same is not the answer. Digital technology has passed the point up to which it helped us speed things up; after that, it started to slow us down simply because of everything that became possible and then humans started to cater to it instead of the other way around.
31:30 There is greater awareness of these complications in particularly the bioethics world and also among others who look at applying technologies like CRISPR on humans.
36:00 You seem to state on the one hand that we don’t know how genome-editing works out in real life, yet then you proceed to say that CRISPR has been around for 10 years and that it is problematic that there is no CRISPR’d food at the supermarkets. That appears to be in contradiction. (You say that we shouldn’t rush this and then you seem to criticize the developments for going too slowly.) There have also been patent battles and decisions and the matter of whether countries allow CRISPR’d foods. (One solution for our exploitation of non-human animals, for example, is lab-grown meat, but some countries and states are banning that.)
In 2018, the USDA said that it was not going to regulate CRISPR’d foods. (Doesn’t that mean that we don’t know whether there are CRISPR’d foods in our supermarket basket, in the US?) https://www.wired.com/story/crisprd-food-coming-soon-to-a-supermarket-near-you/
The European Commission only tabled a proposal for a regulation for NGTs (plants, food etc) as recently as 5 July 2023. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2023/754549/EPRS_BRI(2023)754549_EN.pdf Just a quick web search gives me the impression that most of us are all still in the middle of figuring this out and thinking about how we should proceed.
37:50 Here you are quoting a stock analysis firm… https://seekingalpha.com/ I think it is important to keep in mind that in that world, all sorts of messages get spread that do not necessarily hold a lot of value. I would do my best to find at least one reputable source for the information first, if I found myself contemplating whether it might be a good idea to short – or buy – the stock. (Something similar goes for Bonitas Research at 39:33. Apparently, it’s a short-seller.)
I also find it a little odd that you seem to find it worrisome that Calyxt and Cibus decided to merge and concentrate on what they felt that they were better at. (If you are a hairdresser but then discover that you are not a great hairdresser and are much better at creating shampoos, it could be logical to focus on creating shampoos.) But… I am still listening and I still don’t quite know yet where this is going.
39:17 The phrase “Trait Machine” as used by Cibus is a red flag, in my view, but maybe this kind of language goes with the field of agriculture. At this point, I am taking a look at the transcript, scan a little bit ahead, and it appears that this may be an example of a bad company? (I’m not familiar with Cibus or Calyxt.) Such things happen. There are other examples. I didn’t follow the early developments with Elizabeth Holmes but when the fraud came to light, I was astonished that people had fallen for it, with the benefit of hindsight, admittedly. There also was the case of Nikola and its founder. These are just two examples. (But that is not quite what this was about…)
Okay, 39:33 is the point at which I have serious doubts as to whether I want to listen to the remainder. (I will, later.)

Hilbeck – of whom I had never heard before – had lost her credibility as an academic researcher by this point in the video, in my view, even though she used to be based at ETH Zürich (retired now). I can’t take her seriously any longer. I will listen to the remainder of these presentations, but only later. It is always good to see how seemingly reputable sources can lead to misinformation and even conspiracy theories. this can happen in all sorts of ways.

Update 2 September: I may be having other unusual payment issues too all of a sudden. (Too early to tell.) I’m having trouble accessing PayPal, among other things.

UPDATE 29 August 2024: I just logged into my bank account to check, on my computer, and indeed, that scheduled VGZ payment had NOT gone out. (As you can read below, I decided to make a manual payment, but that usually takes VGZ ten days to two weeks to process, if not longer.)

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I just found a sticker on my electric kettle. On the back.

(See photo at bottom of post. Where does it come from? Does anyone recognize it?)

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It’s related to otherization and also to the focusing illusion.

I think that this is something you often see in small, relatively isolated municipalities but also in certain other situations and organizations. Individuals are no longer supposed to form their own opinions but follow the group think.

Groups like 4chan suffer from it too. They may engage in massive negative action without even spending a thought on the immense damage that it may do. Collectively, they decide on an opinion and take action on the basis of what is often a completely unfounded mere opinion or myth.

If you speak with such people as an outsider, they can come across rather robot-like and it’s almost impossible to have a proper dialogue with them.

Being and a Trolling State of Electronic Hive Mind: (1) Organically Emergent/Evolved Troll Groups and (2) Created/ Instrumented Troll “Armies” (PDF)

In England, an example of municipal group think is the opinion that Travellers constitute a danger and must be chased away asap. Nobody ever questions this in such a setting.