Gerontophobia and povertyism in the Netherlands: Personal experiences with Dutch civil servants

Yes, this is a messy post on a messy website. Please bear with me. Perhaps you can picture me as a refugee on the run if you want a framework for the messiness if that makes it easier to digest the content.

In June 2023, I made what may have been the biggest mistake of my life. I moved into an apartment in Purmerend (an isolated small town surrounded by polders, north of Amsterdam). I certainly made a decision that had severe consequences for me. Keep reading and you’ll see.

For starters, I sacrificed 17 years of housing waiting list credits for this. I should have waited one more month and have moved into a nice little place in Amsterdam. Instead I moved into what I later started calling a penal colony for the over-55s.

I learned a lot from it.

Continue reading

Five months!

Five months of limping around with a completely avoidable foot injury because of the fucking police, fucking GGD and fucking enforcement!

Because of losing ALL YOUR RIGHTS the second you no longer have any money of your own and need to start begging the authorities for assistance in this fucking country.

NOS: Mayor Halsema about people like me AND what police claim, it’s hogwash.

https://nos.nl/artikel/2628973-halsema-leefbaarheid-in-steden-onder-druk-door-dakloosheid-en-drugsgebruik

My own experience is that police only alienate people in my type of situation, with their relentless lying, twisting and bullying, and deliberately chase them out of the built environment (particularly if they dare comment on policy or execution).

Because the housed voters aren’t supposed to know that we exist.

I’ve just been subjected to weeks of bullying again.

Just last week, police accused me of acquiring financial support from the city of Amsterdam, then doing the same in Utrecht, then going to Belgium. The fact that these cities don’t have their shit together is not my fault!

Next, they tried to bully me into doing something that a) was useless and b) I wasn’t in a position to do (go to JvG again) and claimed that having a commercial po box address in Amsterdam entitles me to financial support here.

(They treat us as if we’re dog excrement and at best as if we are 2-year-olds.)

In my experience, how well you survive is currently directly related to whether you are able to stay out of sight of police and handhaving and GGD.

The “verloedering” mentioned by Halsema is the direct result of local policy.

Standard policy is to deny people any kind of support if they have any type of connection to other countries, regardless of whether people are entitled to support. Most EU arbeidsmigranten are entitled to support (but hey, they’re won’t go to court, will they?). This is how the verloedering comes about. It’s a direct consequence of Halsema’s own decisions.

When I getting plenty of donations to my crowdfunder and was still in the built environment, doing laundry was not a problem. My clothes were clean enough (and not smelly as long as they weren’t sitting in a suitcase in the sun for too long).

Halsema mentions that she wants to decriminalize homelessness. She’s been saying that for years! She doesn’t want to, obviously. If she wanted it, she’d have done it ages ago.

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  • Op de (gemeentelijke) website van “Veldwerk” staat politieke kletskoek over mensen die het contact met de samenleving zouden zijn kwijtgeraakt. Het is de politiek – de gemeente – die mensen uit de samenleving drukt.
  • De mysterieuze locatie Transformatorweg (waar je als je mazzel hebt mag douchen and that’s it) evenals JvG-straat zijn voor mensen zonder geld vaak helemaal niet bereikbaar. Een arbeidsmigrant waar ik wel eens mee praat, moet een fiets stelen om er te kunnen komen.
  • In maart 2025 heb ik een half uur over het beleid en de uitvoering gesproken met Nynke Engelhard van de gemeente. Ze leverde niet veel anders dan uitvluchten en schijnt de realiteit niet of nauwelijks te kennen. Ze/de gemeente denkt dat daklozen makkelijk 10, 20 kilometer per dag met hun bagage kunnen lopen. Mogelijk speelt hier iets mee dat in de VS heeft gespeeld mbt zwarte Amerikanen. Die zouden oersterk zijn, etc etc en last hebben van excited delirium. Dat laatste zie je ook bij de aanpak op het CS. Daklozen worden de regen in gejaagd op zo ongeveer de enige locatie in Amsterdam waar je ‘s nachts voor de regen kunt schuileen.
  • Er netjes en schoon uitzien is puur een kwestie van geld cq compleet gebrek aan inkomen.
  • De woningnood, grotendeels het gevolg van het feit dat huisvesting vroeger een fundamenteel mensenrecht was en nu een investering voor mensen en bedrijven die geld willen verdienen, vergt innovatie. Hoogleraar Peter Boelhouwer is dat met me eens, maar daar schijnt in de maatschappij geen draagvlak voor te zijn.
  • Als reden waarom er zo weinig gebeurt, gaf Nynke Engelhard onder meer op dat daklozen ontzettend veel begeleiding nodig hebben (daarmee ook een trap naar mij gevend) en dat die mensen er niet zijn. Krapte op de arbeidsmarkt. Als je mensen de maatschappij uit trapt, wat dus in Amsterdam het beleid is, en ervoor zorgt dat ze statiegeldblikjes moeten verzamelen om eten te kunnen kopen, stompen ze enorm af en gaat ook hun fysieke gezondheid achteruit. (Dat dan voor sommigen drugs en alcohol op de loer gaan liggen verbaast me niet.)
  • De problemen zijn echter voor een groot deel gewoon het gevolg van de aanpak die de gemeente hanteert!
  • Als je mensen haast letterlijk de modder indrukt en ervoor zorgt dat ze statiegeldblikjes moeten verzamelen of bedelen om eten te kunnen kopen, stompen ze enorm af en gaat ook hun fysieke gezondheid achteruit. Ze raken permanent oververmoeid.
  • Sinds ik zelf door de politie en handhaving uit de bebouwde kom ben gejaagd na een jaar lang op één locatie te zijn geweest (en vervolgens twee keer te worden verjaagd), is mijn eigen situatie flink verslechterd. Ik heb door dat gekloot een probleem met voet opgelopen en bleek stevig allergisch voor sommige muggen die buiten de bebouwde kom leven. Ik ben nu bovendien een behoorlijk eind van de AH verwijderd, kan niet meer even een bakje koffie pakken of een uurtje blikjes verzamelen of even teruglopen als ik iets ben vergeten mee te nemen of mijn handgel nog wil bijvullen. Dat, en de was doen, gaat nu gepaard met een expeditie.
  • Dat kou een probleem zou zijn is ook politieke kletskoek. (Dat dit voor sommige verslaafden en alcoholgebruik speelt, geef ik toe, maar dat is eerder de uitzondering dan de regel.) Dat het straks al om 5 uur donker zal zijn op een locatie waar geen licht is, dat er nergens toiletten en oplaadpunten zijn geregeld, en de regen… plus juist oververhitting en dus ook het feit dat de kiezende behuisde burgers je niet mogen zien zijn in mijn ervaring veel dramatischer.
  • De gemeente kan niet 9.000 of 10.000 woningen ergens vandaan toveren en 11.000 matrassen in sporthallen neerleggen, wat Nynke Engelhard lijkt te willen, dat is evenmin de oplossing. Dat is geen reden om dan maar niets te doen. Als de gemeente nou eens iedereen standaard 300 of 400 of 500 euro per maand zou geven en bij 300 gratis ov en op zou houden (met mensen laten opjagen door politie en handhaving en) met de vele tijdsverslindende afspraken met mensen die om financiële hulp vragen en dakloos zijn, dan hebben ze te eten en kunnen ze de was doen (en er dus schoon uit blijven zien, mevroi Halsema), ergens koffiedrinken om hun powerbanks en mobieltjes op te laden en ook af en toe ergens douchen. Dan hoeven ze geen blikjes meer te verzamelen. Dan dek je tenminste een aantal mensenrechten af, ook al zit huisvesting er dan nog niet bij.
  • Dan krijg je een automatische schifting tussen mensen die extra hulp nodig hebben en mensen die zich wel redden.
  • Ik weet niet hoe dit plaatje er financieel uit zou zien, maar wat is de gemeente in hemelsnaam aan het doen met die extra 62 miljoen???
  • Je zou dan bijvoorbeeld elke maand een telefoongesprek kunnen hebben en na drie maanden een grondige evaluatie.
  • De gemeente moet het ook verbieden dat mensen beperkingen worden opgelegd mbt het aantal nachten dat ze in een stapelbed in een toeristenhostel mogen verblijven en daar kunnen douchen als ze daarvoor het geld hebben en zich gewoon normaal gedragen. Sommige hostels hebben geen beperkingen, dus KAN het. Deze beperkingen worden NIET door de gemeente opgelegd.
  • Bovendien moet er veel innovatiever worden gedacht en dan heb ik het niet over de door een stel onwetende kleuters bedachte onzin van Stek Oost oid. Men verschuilt zich voortdurend achter regels. Het lijkt de gemeente aan wil, visie en lef te ontbreken. Sommige oplossingen worden verworpen omdat ze niet binnen de regels passen, bijvoorbeeld mbt brandveiligheid, maar dat was het enige voorbeeld dat Nynke Engelhard gaf. Ipv daarvan moeten mensen dus maar in de modder blijven leven?
  • Mensen komen NIET naar Amsterdam omdat daar hulp beschikbaar zou zijn. Je kunt simpelweg niet overleven in plaatsen die bij wijze van spreken bestaan uit twee straten en honderd sloten.
  • Ik opper al een tijdje het idee dat capsule housing zoals je min of meer ziet in het Diamond Capsule Hotel in Amstelveen een oplossing zou kunnen zijn. De onroerend goed sector heeft een bar slechte reputatie. Ze zouden een nonprofit consortium kunnen oprichten dat leegstaande kantoorpanden te converteren (wat voor conventionele woningen vaak veel te duur is). Je zou modules kunnen plaatsen die makkelijk te transporteren zijn.
  • Housing First is niet de oplossing. Income First. En housing. Zie ook: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/aug/23/finland-tried-to-end-homelessness-what-can-we-learn-from-its-runaway-success-and-recent-failures
  • Met de GGD heb ik eind 1993 toen ik naar Amerika emigreerde heel positieve ervaringen gehad, maar mijn ervaringen van de laatste jaren zijn super negatief. In mijn huidige situatie is er vanuit de GGD Amsterdam geen enkele belangstelling voor mijn fysieke welzijn. Bek houden moet ik. Bek houden en vooral geen commentaar op beleid of uitvoering uiten. Het enige dat ze van mij momenteel mogen is mijn urine checken op tekenen van bacteriële infectie en zo nodig antibiotica regelen.
  • Ik vind het schandalig dat de gemeente het eigen beleid op individuele mensen zoals Fatima Ata wil afwentelen, die puur bezig zijn met beleid uitvoeren, niet met beleid bepalen.

Copy of email that just went out to someone in the US – with update

(Sorry, the whitespace disappeared when I pasted both texts.)

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About Dutch social security benefits…YES, if you go online, there is a lot of information that makes it look like getting basic benefits is easy. What’s lacking is the small print and local policy. People who live in the Netherlands and don’t depend on them are convinced it’s easy and wonderful. That fancy-background Karen woman with the heaps of dough and her deceased dad’s best friend thought so too. She went online, figuring I had suddenly become retarded and concluded that she had it all figured out. She thought that I might even be able to get rent support while living in the bushes. “1400 euro per month. In six months, you’ll have your van.” It’s not easy at all. It’s a frikking nightmare in most municipalities and that includes Amsterdam.I should have known! Because in 2017, after Frank either simply forgot about or reneged on his promises, when he was still living at his previous address – in Amsterdam – without the nasty, now second ex wife, we stopped by at the civic offices and back then, they said that there wasn’t anything that they could do for me. I’d forgotten, frankly. 🫢🙄😬These days, if you have any kind of ties to abroad, including your parents being foreign or having a foreign-sounding name, you’re considered likely to be scheming to defraud the system. So rejecting your application is standard policy in many municipalities. I’ve gotten hassled like crazy again. Some were standing behind me so I couldn’t see how many there were, but up to 6 cops hassled me.This is what appears to have happened. First, a plainclothes dude drove me out of a location that is next to a path so that if they hassle you there, the public witnesses it. He said he had been to prison for 9 years and that he was going to come back and set fire to the whole shebang with me in it. But he talked like a cop!Second, people showed up who said that they were enforcement. In the Netherlands, people in lots of roles don’t need to identify themselves, in order to protect them from the public. You have to take them at their word. I was now at a location where the public just sees a bunch of cops in the distance standing around someone who the public can’t really see.Third, an army of police officers showed up, initially addressed me by a decades old nickname from even before we became acquainted, Julie. Wtf? But they claimed to have been flagged down in their car by a jogger about an unknown woman going haywire (about to brush her teeth and put on her makeup).They stood shouting and lying and twisting my words and their own for nearly two hours (making me postpone an appointment and messing up my planning for the week, taking my injured foot into account). Among other things, they said to me that the previous people hadn’t been enforcement at all. But they later DID refer to them as “enforcement”.They called me an illegal at first, too.And (twice, I think): “You’ll claim benefits here and then you’ll go to Utrecht to claim benefits and then you may go to Belgium.”Later they said that I can get benefits here on the basis of my nearly-10-bucks-per-month postbox address here. That’s utter nonsense. Etc etc.There’s a guy here called frank van der linde who used to be a management consultant, and was in various other organizations/businesses, ran one of them (food-related), then slowly became an activist – as well as a writer and columnist. He wrote about police brutality, racism, arms sales, unhealthy and unsustainable foods etc. He started receiving threats. Neighbors complained that they no longer felt safe. He was told to move out. That’s how HE became homeless.Police declared him both an extremist and a mentally unwell person who should be locked up. (Police here are doing the latter to me as well, not the former as far as I’m aware, just because I dare criticize public policy and local approaches to among other things homelessness, just like that van der linde guy).But the question remains: Why did they address me by that decades-old nickname? I started using that when I was 11 or 12 because of a stupid song by a popular singer called Peter Koelewijn. That nickname started disappearing since 1981 and I dropped it formally in 1994. There’s a local very silly, petty woman who I told about that nickname. It’s possible that it was somewhere in a police computer s

UPDATE

This, below, is what I wrote to the police. They got back to me. It wasn’t them.

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Dag,Ik ben op 26 augustus 2026 rond 8, 9 uur in de ochtend een kleine twee uur lastig gevallen door vier tot zes Amsterdamse politieagenten. Ik heb daardoor een afspraak elders moeten verplaatsen naar een andere dag. Er gebeurde daarbij iets heel vreemds. Dat is de reden dat ik contact opneem. (Dat vertel ik zo.) Dit was duidelijk personally targeted harassment, bleek daaruit. Wat zit daarachter? Drie mogelijkheden: 1) targeted harassment van de politie ivm mijn social justice activisme of 2) targeted harassment van een Belgische mevrouw (An Desmet) met een vreemde obsessie naar mij toe die in maart of april van dit jaar uit de hand begon te lopen of 3) targeted harassment van een Belgische mevrouw (An Desmet) aangestuurd door een vriendin van haar (Sandra) die toevallig heeft gewerkt voor met name één bepaalde gemeentelijke instantie waar ik in het verleden kritiek op heb geleverd. Van die vriendin (Sandra) van die Belgische mevrouw heb ik in 2025 overlast ervaren, maar een en ander was behoorlijk zielig en onbenullig. Ik heb er nooit over gesproken, maar met succes alle contact acuut afgekapt. Ik was destijds wel kort bezorgd dat ik deze dame (Sandra) niet op een afstand zou kunnen houden. Ze schijnt nog twee keer haar hengeltje te hebben uitgeslagen, via haar vriendin mw Desmet. Dat heb ik toen straal genegeerd. Ik heb beide dames na het afkappen van alle contacten met elk niet meer gezien. Mevrouw Desmet heb ik in pakweg mei 2025 voor het eerst ontmoet. Een tijd daarna benaderde ze me op haar werk (OBA) toen ze me daar opeens herkende. Ze speelt geen rol in mijn leven. Haar vriendin is ook voor mij een wildvreemde. Aan u om dit op te volgen.UITLEG De agenten beweerden door een jogger in hun auto te zijn gestopt ivm mij, iemand die ze niet kenden. Ze benaderden me echter door me aan te spreken met een nickname die ik decennia geleden had (sinds zesde klas lagere school, maar vanaf 1981 langzaam verdwijnend en in 1994 formeel vervangen). Heel vreemd. Die Belgische mevrouw (An Desmet) heb ik over die nickname verteld. Toen ik die nickname nog gebruikte, heb ik ooit de politie in Amsterdam gebeld ivm met een diefstal van een auto die op dat moment leek plaats te vinden aan de Gillis van Ledenberchstraat. Eind of midden jaren 80 was dat. Die nickname zou dus ook in jullie systemen kunnen zitten. Hier klopt dus iets niet. Als dat niet duidelijk is, hoor ik het graag. Bedankt voor de moeite.

Does this mean that I should file a crime report for targeted harassment by Ms D?

Crazy Orwellian Amsterdam

About two weeks ago, I increasingly started to get hassled.

  • First there was a wacko nut job. I posted videos about it. Will write it up here later.
  • Then there were people who said that they were handhaving (enforcement). They claimed that their names were Tessa and Léon.
  • Then on Wednesday, a bunch of police officers showed up who first said that the previous folks had not been enforcement but GGD but later did refer to them as “handhaving”.

The main thing that Wednesday’s police officers made clear is that the only thing that I can count on in the Netherlands is getting bullied and terrorised by police officers and similar critters, and that’s because I dare criticise public policy and failing approaches to issues in society created by public policy/political decisions (and the associated human rights violations).

I’ve read – article in Parool – that there’s a guy here in Amsterdam who has been doing something similar and they did what they could to shut him up too.

I now – while writing this post – discover that there is a Wikipedia page about him.

His name is Frank van der Linde. https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_van_der_Linde

What I am reading on that Wikipedia page has also been my experience in the Netherlands since my return from the UK, where I am still officially based.

If you dare to be critical of public policy or astonishingly amateur approaches taken by authorities, municipal civil servants and police officers claim that you’re mentally ill and should be locked up in a psychiatric hospital.

It’s what Dutch police said about him and what Dutch police in Amsterdam and civil servants in a tiny town called Purmerend have been saying about me too. Amsterdam wijkagent Chris claimed that I had been asking the public to take all their guns to Amsterdam’s mayor Femke Halsema. He called in a psychiatric nurse to undermine me.

The civil servants in Purmerend had me swatted by GGD and next tried or threatened to declare me non compos mentis after I dared want to talk about some of their approaches. This is why I went to the city of Maastricht to renew my passport and officially had to leave the Netherlands to be able to do so. I couldn’t renew my passport in Purmerend, obviously.

They declared Van der Linde an extremist, on top of that.

It’s disgusting.

Welcome to the Netherlands. Welcome to Amsterdam.

Back to Frank van der Linde.

“Voor OneWorld schreef hij van februari 2013 tot februari 2016 over extreemrechts, racisme, politiegeweld, wapenexport, ongezond en onduurzaam voedsel, onduurzame kleding, tax injustice, mass surveillance en ander onrecht.”

Translation: For OneWorld (from February 2013 to February 2016), he wrote about the far right, racism, police violence, arms exports, unhealthy and unsustainable food, unsustainable clothing, tax injustice, mass surveillance, and other forms of injustice.

This is what made HIM homeless.

Frank van der Linde became homeless after they (Amsterdam’s mayor Femke Halsema, likely) forced him to leave his home after he started receiving threats, just like other people and businesses that are crime targets (for example attacks with explosives, which is totally normal in the Netherlands these days) are often forced to leave their homes by the Dutch authorities. (Yes, read that again.)

I thought I was probably exaggerating a little with my impression that I am being targeted because I dare criticise notably Amsterdam’s public policy and approaches. Fycking hell. I wasn’t at all.This is a fycking Orwellian police state now. Wtf?!

I thought that the fact that I was constantly seeing police vehicles seemingly following me, driving around me, was probably just a coincidence.Then police showed up, addressed me by a decades old nickname but claimed to have been flagged down by a jogger about a mentally ill woman… “Verwarde vrouw”. A stranger.

Now the police vehicles have stopped constantly driving past me.

One of the Dutch police officers demanded my Dutch correspondence address. Why? Why didn’t he also ask for my UK address?(Because they want access to my postal mail in the Netherlands. They can’t claim access to my postal mail in the UK. What else? They looked at my passport for AGES!!! Ages. The first response when they looked at my pasport was “you’re an illegal”. They contradicted that again later.)

The same guy later also said that I was very demanding. ⬅️⬅️⬅️ He must have been referring to my criticisms of public policy and bumbling approaches.What else?

I have not been making any demands. None.

This wacko guy who showed up the other day to say that he was going to be back and set fire, did he set fire to this Parknest building for the purpose of framing ME? I gotta ask this question now. Can’t afford not to.

In spite of everything that I’ve experienced… Holy cow… I think I am still far too trusting and gullible.

You know what? That’s a GOOD thing. 🙃😌 I’ve got an immensely strong core. Maybe it means that I’m incorruptible to some or that I can not be broken to others.

____

PS

The Purmerend civil servant (Roos Boersma) who went into a neighbouring apartment with a colleague so that they could climb onto my balcony via the neighbours’ had previously sent me a long message in super secure Zivver once just to whine about me.

She used to work at a collection agency, with her civil servant colleague Bodine Timp.

Bodine Timp’s colleague Annica van Rijn was the one who had me swatted. This was after I dared address Annica and Bodine’s amateur approach to very new Dutch legislation (that they had also failed to inform me about).

Nah, nobody is messing with my emails

23 February 2026: Have meanwhile found some more nonsense.


Nah, nobody is messing with my emails. (That’s sarcasm.)

I’m suddenly getting lots of emails from the forum SaxOnTheWeb.net. Haven’t had a saxophone in years and hadn’t had email from this forum in many years either.

This started on 5 August 2025. No, I hadn’t logged into that email for a while.

See screenshot below. The photo dates back to Bristol, 2009 (rehearsal for Andy Sheppard’s Sax Massive).

Me at a rehearsal in Bristol in 2009. I looked much better than I sounded that day, partly owing to a turquoise fiber deftly stuck onto the pad of my A that day. (It made all the notes below play off too of course; the sequence of the main notes is BAGFEDC.)

What narcissistic personality disorder may be about

Possibly, these are people who emotionally got stuck in the quest to fullfill their deficiency needs.

They do crave having a sense of belonging, acceptance of who they are and to get respect and recognition, but there is some kind of instant loop that often shuts the door to it the moment it opens because then their lack of safety and personal security kicks in. Something like that.

This was a thought that went through my mind last night.

I’ll need to toss this around a little more.

Why am I often – okay, occasionally – being pushed THIS particular course?

(Not that I can even afford it at 50% off.)

YouTube pushes this into my stream from time to time and I have no idea why. They seem to think that I’m a clinical psychologist? But why?

I’m not in the business of fixing people. Like I posted before, for about a decade this website was little more than a front under which I plotted so many attempts to get away from the abusive sadistic situation that I was in – which I could not do openly for obvious reasons – while at the same time trying to figure out what on earth I was dealing with while I was stuck inside of it and trying to understand how some people become so terribly broken that they have to control every aspect of other people’s lives and turn them into nightmares out of some deep angry resentment… for what? For not being accepted the way they are.

I certainly don’t want to fix people like Donald Trump. I can’t. (I think that nobody can.)

https://www.nicabm.com/program/fb-narcissism-1/

Oh. LOL. I’ve got it.

My youngest sister Renate: The discrepancy between how she sees herself, how others see her and how the world has changed. It’s not all her fault. Some of it is mine, in fact.

TIP: Download Ray Dalio’s book “Principles for success”, dear sis. Maybe reading that will help.


On LinkedIn, as I just discovered, my youngest sibling wrote something very interesting last year. It was in Dutch, so I asked ChatGPT to translate it for me, which it does in less than a minute, but might take me half an hour. I’m posting the original at the bottom.

Continue reading

Women in the geosciences, geoethics

The Journal of Geoethics and Social Geoscience (JGSG) published two new open-access articles in the Special Issue “Women in Geosciences”, edited by Daniela Di Bucci, Luisa Sabato and Martina Zucchi. ​

Qadir A., Usman M., Artoni A. and Chizzini N. (2025). The role of geospatial training in empowering women for environmental decision-making policies. Journal of Geoethics and Social Geosciences, 3(Special Issue), 1-23. https://doi.org/10.13127/jgsg-85 ​

Fregola R.A., Maiorano P., Micheletti F., Sabato L. and Zucchi M. (2025). Learning from five pioneer women in Geosciences: a long-lasting story. Journal of Geoethics and Social Geosciences, 3(Special Issue), 1-28. https://doi.org/10.13127/jgsg-90

Geese stories – swan attacks

I’ve been hampered by a foot problem so I don’t know what exactly happened when, but about a week ago, I discovered that one goose was missing from a flock of six. The remaining five were depressed and possibly shocked.

What happened?

A day or so later, after I saw what looked like one of the two lead geese trying to drown the other, I started to believe that that’s what happened. I was quite disillusioned. This wasn’t the vibe that I had been getting from them. How could I have been so wrong?

Today, five geese stood tall on the bank, watching me approach from the other side of the water. They seemed to be waiting for me.

Geese Nr. 6 was in the water there. Thin, tired, covered in mud.

The other five geese and particularly the lead goose made clear that they wanted me to look after goose Nr. 6 right now. Not after them.

Goose Nr. 6 already had a bum leg and some grey patches.

I was still at a loss as to what had happened when two swans showed up and one of them suddenly attacked. I was able to tell it off. They have no little ones and were being terrible bullies. I don’t like that. I told them that. They need to go back to their side of the bridge.

The other five geese were clearly trying to lure the swans away from Goose Nr. 6. Lead goose Nr. 2 is currently limping – and hissing a lot, not surprisingly.

I called a friend and also searched the web for what best to feed. I ended up with corn, peas and chicken cheese cat food. The goose liked the cat food.

I’d already given escarole and bread. I hate giving bread but in this case, maybe it wasn’t so bad because the bird needed calories. (Unfortunately, they tend to go for bread.)

I’ll stop by from time to time and I’ll do what I can. It can’t get out of the water; I don’t know why.

Of course, bird flu crossed my mind too, but I didn’t think I was seeing the results of bird flu. When the swan suddenly attacked and the goose went into a panic, everything became clear.

These geese really see me as their friend, possibly because of the story below.

I’d always counted to see if they were all there, but after the incident 👇🏻, I counted out loud, to let them know.

(Humans are the stupid ones. That’s what I have learned from birds. If you work with animals instead of against them, you can achieve a lot more. Non-human animals are “people”. Many birds are incredibly smart, far smarter than humans.)

(That said, I tell swans that are out of line off the same way that I tell humans off when they’re out of line.)


This incident below happened on 5 November.

What exactly occurred here, I wondered?


(written to someone in the US on 7 November 2025)

For the record, I have brought these geese escarole (andijvie) a few times, mostly in the summer when there was almost no grass etc. I’ve known them for about 8 months and I mostly talk with them. On this occasion, I thought that giving them a bite to eat might be good. I brought them escarole the next day.

I tried Google Takeout as part of degoogling my life

“Your total request size is 427.36 GB. This request has been divided into 107 files.”

You can’t see what the downloads are for (which data they contain) and what the size of each file is, but apparently they are up to 4GB large. You can choose 1, 2 or 4GB as file size.

There are 69 types of data, most of which do not pertain to my activities. So, let’s try again.

Now I have one for 17 “products”, excluding Gmail.

Is peaceful protest grounds for deportation? No, rules tribunal judge in Marcus Decker case


Jailed climate activist wins appeal against deportation from UK
Marcus Decker was served with deportation order while in prison for unveiling Just Stop Oil banner over Dartford Crossing




Haroon Siddique Legal affairs correspondent
Mon 10 Nov 2025 18.48 CET


A climate activist who served one of the longest prison sentences in modern British history for a peaceful protest has won his appeal against deportation.
Marcus Decker was jailed for two years and seven months for a protest in which he climbed the Queen Elizabeth Bridge over the Dartford Crossing and unveiled a Just Stop Oil banner in October 2022. He was served with an automatic deportation order while in prison.

If he had been unsuccessful in his appeal, the 36-year-old German national would have been the first person to have been deported from the UK for peaceful protest.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/10/jailed-climate-activist-wins-appeal-against-deportation-from-uk

Dierenambulance Amsterdam issues

  1. When I called them in August, the menu required you to choose between young birds and “meldkamer” (desk). That is done from within their own perspective and does not keep the public in mind. Members of the public often can’t see the difference between a duck, a Canada goose and an Egyptian goose. I suggested the division “birds” and “anything else” to them in August, among a few other things, such as having people all over town who can very quickly walk to a bird and check out the situation.
  2. They should give talks at schools etc. It’s true that many people do not know that for example a gull can have a drooping wing without there being anything wrong with it whatsoever. Pigeons even often use one wing to rest on, as if it is a bed.
  3. A major problem at the location where I found the gull (which, by the way, I think I had already spotted a few days before), is dog owners who allow their dogs to chase birds and give neither a toss nor a rat’s ass. Those dogs can easily surprise a juvenile bird and grab such a drooping wing, for example, causing a dislocation or worse.
  4. In 2018, Dierenambulance wrote the following to me after I saw a duck with a damaged bill. I think it was using a small and shallow pond near an apartment building to feed itself. (Mind you, someone else had already asked me if I had managed to catch it.)

    This is what they should also educate the public about.

    If you do that at schools, the kids will tell their parents and aunts and uncles.

    “Wanneer de eend zichzelf nog weet te redden, dan is het misschien beter hem/haar te laten en de stress niet aan te doen van het vangen en brengen naar dierenarts en/of opvang. De vogel weet niet beter meer, dat zien wij wel vaker. Zo is er een groep eenden bij ons om de hoek waarvan 1 eend een gebroken vleugel heeft. Maar ze laat zich niet vangen, kan in en uit water en wordt niet verstoten door de groep. Ze leeft gewoon zo verder en vind dat prima. En dus wij ook. Een goede graatmeter om te zien of de vogel het gaat redden is of hij/zij zich laat vangen. Wanneer niet, dan redden ze zichzelf vaak (nog) wel. Laat een vogel zich vangen, dan is het helaas goed mis.”

“Dank je wel voor al je hulp Angelina!”

“Wanneer de eend zichzelf nog weet te redden, dan is het misschien beter hem/haar te laten en de stress niet aan te doen van het vangen en brengen naar dierenarts en/of opvang. De vogel weet niet beter meer, dat zien wij wel vaker. Zo is er een groep eenden bij ons om de hoek waarvan 1 eend een gebroken vleugel heeft. Maar ze laat zich niet vangen, kan in en uit water en wordt niet verstoten door de groep. Ze leeft gewoon zo verder en vind dat prima. En dus wij ook. Een goede graatmeter om te zien of de vogel het gaat redden is of hij/zij zich laat vangen. Wanneer niet, dan redden ze zichzelf vaak (nog) wel. Laat een vogel zich vangen, dan is het helaas goed mis.”

Grotendeels helemaal mee eens!

I agree with Dierenambulance that wildlife often adapts, just like humans do. Certainly in an urban environment where there is plenty of food, birds with disabilities can survive. In my previous post, I mentioned that John Chitty told me that birds with a dislocated wing often still manage to fly.


Below a geese story, from the same location as where the gull was left behind in a laundry basket. The poor thing was PARCHED, btw. That happened on 5 November 2025, so just a few days earlier.

What exactly occurred here?

(written to someone in the US on 7 November 2025)

For the record, I have brought these geese escarole (andijvie) a few times, mostly in the summer when there was almost no grass etc. I’ve known them for about 8 months and I mostly talk with them. On this occasion, I thought that giving them a bite to eat might be good. I brought them escarole the next day.

Simyo (and Amazon): Wat nu weer????

I checked in advance and saw that this month’s outgoing payment was scheduled properly. Except… It’s NOT listed as having gone out. It’s completely disappeared? It’s not listed under failed payments either.

I’ve been having SO MANY PROBLEMS with my Dutch direct debits, for two years now. They disappear into thin air (and companies usually don’t allow you to pay from your end, so you incur fines). It’s affected three or four other accounts too.

I do think that the amount actually went out. (On the basis of the balance. I also remember that I checked that day and I think I saw it listed as having gone out, too.)

It was scheduled for the 24th, I think.

🤬😠😤🙄

My bank just merged with (or was bought by) a bigger bank and I hoped that this would put an end to these hiccups. Nope.


Amazon including kdp etc hiccups may be because of that outage they had? (Amazon login hiccups happen often.)!It won’t accept the password reset codes either this time, however. Turns out that it says it will send the code to your email but it simultaneously sends a different code to your phone…. Next it sends one to the alternative number that it has for you.

Odd (let’s call it that)

Update 20 Oct: This was followed by several emails about my “friend Steve”. That is a very common English first name. John and Dave are other examples.

Here is part of one:

(This strikes me as largely nonsense, btw. This particular person isn’t really a friend and not someone who would worry about me. He doesn’t care. It’s someone I last saw in 1996.)

Here’s another one:



Someone in the US just wrote to me: “I receive several emails regarding you from a friend of yours with access to your email — which is how he found me.  That correspondence was brief and has been over for months, but wierd to say the least.”

I’ve asked for this person’s name and to forward me a few of those emails.

I have three names for these hackers now, and two of them are women. One of them is Portsmouth-based and among other things paid for my website for a year.

The other one of the women who contacted me said she was a hacker but I don’t believe her because when she popped up on Telegram, she quickly hid herself but she still popped up on Signal as well and when I sent her angry texts as I have her phone number, one of her responses was really stupid and contradicted what she wrote earlier, basically admitting that she had a reason to be among the “contacts” on my phone. So if she really IS a hacker, she is not a smart one. She speaks Dutch and American English, once arranged to meet with me at a Dutch public library but I found her sitting next to me at a very different public library branch (and drawing attention to herself) months later.

Update 17 June 2026: Ehm, this first woman was Eden Stroet who works at Hadrian in Amsterdam.

THIS SHOWS THE WRONG MINDSET

“I’m still processing all the impressions and experiences from this valuable trip,” says Annemarie van Gils, management adviser at De Alliantie.
“What echoes most strongly are the words of a woman in the women’s shelter: ‘For the first time in my life, I have a home.’
That is so essential, so fundamentally important.
But also striking was the tremendous passion of so many staff members — such as a young woman at the Salvation Army, for example, who beams with joy when she talks about her work for the residents.”

(Translated by ChatGPT, edited by me.)

‘Ik ben alle indrukken en ervaringen van deze waardevolle reis nog aan het verwerken,’ zegt Annemarie van Gils, directie-adviseur bij De Alliantie. ‘Wat het meest naklinkt zijn de woorden van een dame in de vrouwenopvang: “Voor het eerst in mijn leven heb ik een thuis.” Dat is zo van wezenlijk, fundamenteel belang. Maar ook de enorme passie van veel medewerkers. Zo’n jongedame bij het Leger des Heils bijvoorbeeld, die helemaal straalt als ze vertelt over haar werk voor de bewoners. 

From: https://hvoquerido.nl/meedoen-volgens-de-finnen/

Ask me why.

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Thank you for your response. ✨

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Further to my discussion with the City of Amsterdam

29 October 2025: I followed it up with a message explaining that I understand that they probably see me as a pain in the behind. Ms Engelhard didn’t reply to that either.

Let’s face it. A) The city permanently shut its doors to me in December 2024 and B) the fact that the city doesn’t even provide something as utterly basic as toilets probably says it all. They are not interested in remedying issues. They are just into cosmetics.

See also this research done at the University of Amsterdam. It’s a chapter in The Routledge Handbook of Global Perspectives on Homelessness, Law & Policy (pp. 175-187). Published in 2024. People went undercover, pretending to be homeless, as part of this research.

https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003274056-12

https://pure.uva.nl/ws/files/180146235/10.4324_9781003274056-12_chapterpdf.pdf

(copy and paste if you don’t trust links)


This is a follow-up to this previous post:
https://angelinasouren.com/2025/10/14/my-ongoing-discussion-with-the-city-of-amsterdam/
See also: https://angelinasouren.com/homelessnessness-in-the-netherlands/

Note that Ms Engelhard did not deny that the City’s behind the intimidation. (This may be why: Homeless people in Amsterdam are no longer fined, as of 13 June 2025. That is in theory. Have the regulations been updated or was this more empty waffling? https://www.dedaklozenvakbond.nl/2025/06/13/geen-boetes-meer/)

Looks like it: https://decorrespondent.nl/16264/buiten-moeten-slapen-dat-is-geen-overtreding-maar-een-onrecht/7774e412-2a4a-0572-05fd-b77458dbf41f There is still a large number of fines that can be imposed on homeless people (and my sense of what was happening around me was that it was geared toward being able to impose at least one on me; I haven’t stated what has been happening and what else I’ve been observing and that’s on purpose).

No, I am – clearly – no longer in negotiating mode or trying to keep anyone at the City of Amsterdam particularly happy. I am being cantankerous, from their point of view. I get that. Personally, I have very little to no faith left in these municipal circuses and the money-making industry that surrounds it. That’s now irrepairable.

I do understand why the municipality sees me as a pain in the behind but I’ve also contacted a different Dutch municipality about its homelessness challenges and took part in a discussion on the topic for London as well.

If I can help push through some improvements, with or without my cousin* pushing from the other side, then I might be quite happy.

(This cousin runs a large real estate undertaking in the mid-market housing segment – and in investing – so he might need to set up an extra company, which in itself is no big deal but entering a very different market segment would be. However, he could still push without doing that and he could also implement changes to existing practices because his existing tenants can easily be impacted too. I’d like to see him use empty office buildings that are too expensive to turn into “proper” apartments, such as the one in Amsterdam Zuid-Oost that I read about – possibly the former ING building? – for capsule housing. You could have two forms: Pods for currently homeless people – because you don’t sleep much at all in a hall with lots of mattresses on the floor and similar places – and larger capsules for young people who can’t afford a bloody fortune in rent but would like to be able to save. The real estate sector has a crappy reputation. My cousin could do break-even projects as a show of corporate responsibility. I know he would have to convince others too. He’s not Donald Trump. I know that. But where there is a will, there is a way. Maybe he can start a consortium with other real estate firms that would like to change the sector.)

The Netherlands is gridlocked in a crazy mess of regulations. That, too, needs to change urgently.
De volkomen bezopen waanzin van de Nederlandse hokjesgeest en verstikkende regelziekte… Lees dit: De regels versimpelen voor AOW’ers die willen samenwonen, scheelt de overheid potentieel honderden miljoenen. En er komen jaarlijks honderden tot duizenden extra woningen vrij.

No, I had not asked Ms Engelhard for help in March, but I was hungry and had called one of those centers where people in my situation are supposed to be able to get a meal, shower and do laundry (at a small fee). Their opening hours are limited and the need is FAR BIGGER than what these centers are still able to offer in terms of capacity. So far, Mayor Femke Halsema has been adamant that she won’t offer more support.

When I called this center, I was told that it was only available for people who were already registered there.

At the end of the call, I asked Ms Engelhard where I might be able to get a meal and I told her about this. Somehow, Ms Engelhard knew which center (inloophuis) I was talking about. I don’t know how she knew.

She informed me that I would be able to get a meal at a location that turned out to be west of Sloterplas, at about 7 kilometers (from where I was at the time, I think, which was east of Central Station). She mentioned a specific time.

I told her that I would not be able to make it.

I googled it later and it was a center for men, it said online, but I’ve found that the online information as to where and when you can find resources is often non-existent or contradictory.

Anyway, this wasn’t doable for me. I was dragging two suitcases and a heavy underseat cabin bag along with me. I already was exhausted.

One thing that the city definitely has to do if it continues on its course of sending people to the fringes of town all the time is give them (storage facilities, anyway, and) a public transport pass. If the City gives you a registered address, for example, then you’re obliged to go to the far Nieuw West once a week at a specific time, off the top of my head. Otherwise you will lose the address.

There are conditions tied to the benefits too that I can no longer meet. Ms Engelhard said that it would not take me that long to find new living quarters, but I reckon it would take 15 to 20 years.

Below are the two texts I had sent to the mayor. I think that these are the exact same versions, but there might be minor differences.

I was still in the middle of learning how to do homelessness. Sleep deprivation is such a huge factor initially that you quickly realize that it is vital to get enough sleep. (That is not an issue at all for me any longer.) After that, you discover that rain is actually the biggest problem. The worries about people freezing to death mostly concern the image of city councils etc. You can learn how to deal with cold, but rain makes you miserable, wet and muddy and powerless. There is very little you can do about it. Toilets are an issue too. There are almost no public toilets in Amsterdam. Most are for men only and even the ones for men are only for, eh, number 1?

I just also emailed the town of Beverwijk about its homelessness problem, btw. I sent them this link: https://www.lekkertehuur.nl/

Sleep deprivation, hunger and utter physical exhaustion – along with anger about getting treated like trash or like terrorists – are behind the symptoms that get homeless people vilified.


Anyway, with regard to what happened in December 2024: I tend to think of what happened as the result of me having emigrated to England in 2004, but I was in fact informed that the issue was that I hadn’t been staying in a tent or car but on someone’s couch.

Unfortunately, there’s nobody who can sign off as to whether or not you’ve been on the street (and there’s probably no form for it either). It was my understanding that I had to be on someone’s couch, perhaps so that someone could sign off. They said that there was an arrangement with the Amsterdam suburb that I was in at the time. Amsterdam runs over into it; there is no unbuilt environment in between.

I have a feeling that if I’d stayed in a tent, I’d have been told yet some other reason as to why I didn’t qualify.

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I had to, again (my mail to Mel Stride)

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/oct/06/tories-conservatives-benefits-uk-welfare-cuts-public-spending

Dear Sir Mel,

I just read about your plans for benefits in the Guardian.

I suspect that you don’t realise that foreigners who left their native country a long time ago are considered to be living  and at home in the UK by their native countries and often no longer qualify for support there. I have read news items from which I concluded that it works similarly for British nationals who left the UK a long time ago.

Sometimes you gotta (message to Keir Starmer)

I went a little creative with this one. Or is it “rogue”?

START OF MY MESSAGE TO KEIR STARMER

Hi there,

I took part in an online meeting with you and one interviewer once, before you became PM. It was interesting… I was elated when Labour won because it then seemed that at least the British were coming to their senses even if people in many other countries have not yet. I’m so disappointed and also really concerned that you’re making the British feel betrayed because you started emulating the Tories from day 1. That is not what the public had voted for.

And now, instead of looking after the country, you may be focusing too much on doing what Farage et al want.

That said, fair is fair, you do have a knack for handling Donald Trump.

That’s not, however, how British people want and deserve to be treated. They need honesty and transparency and someone who genuinely cares. Some Conservatives seem to care a lot more about the British people than you do. That’s not a good look.

Where are your own LABOUR views? Have you shred them while nobody was watching?

I am actually writing to you about ID, however.
(links for readers: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g54g6vgpdo and https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-digital-id-scheme-to-be-rolled-out-across-uk and https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/oct/01/keir-starmer-labour-collapse-public-support-digital-id-cards)

As various forms of digital-only checks are already attached to migrant status and right-to-work checks, it seems to me that this is just another way for the government to spend a lot of money.

This tactic is typical for the Conservatives, not for Labour. The Conservatives spouted a lot of lies about foreign people living in the UK not needing to pay NIC and so on; they were able to because nobody stood up and said “wait a minute, that’s nonsense”.

I don’t think that mandatory DIGITAL ID would help Brits either as FAR too many are living in poverty or in deep poverty. They might not have the required equipment and internet access. Mandatory physical ID with a chip carrying fingerprints is a different matter.

I understand that your plans also undermine certain other groups’ rights; as you are a human rights lawyer, you’re probably well aware of that and don’t need me to spell it out.

In addition, the speed at which you want to introduce this means that you are asking for trouble. You’d risk repeating what MS Windows used to be infamous for. Haste makes waste.

I don’t know if your plans would create something like the Dutch DigiD, but that introduction was riddled with problems. Many people couldn’t get it to work no matter what they tried (even still just a few years ago) and the majority of phones were not suitable for some weird reason.

As it happens, the phone I got for my EUSS application (with NFC so that it could read the chip in my passport) was also the only one on which the Dutch DigiD app functioned. None of my other phones could get it to work; I have no idea why not.

There also was an issue with Dutch people abroad not being able to acquire DigiD. I happened to be able to stop by at Schiphol Airport at the right time so I was lucky enough to be able to go to some desk there and get it sorted.

You will have similar issues for Brits abroad. Those living in places like Amsterdam and Berlin can hop over, just like I hopped over to Amsterdam. It is a different story for those in Australia, Canada or other more distant places.

As another example, the new GOV.UK ID that you’ve recently introduced for us foreigners will require the purchase of yet another new phone because it won’t accept anything under Android 11 at the moment. (Ehm… wait a minute, so you already have that too!)

What ARE you DOING, Keir? Where is your good common sense?

Please reconsider. Thanks.

Angelina

END OF MY MESSAGE TO KEIR STARMER

PS
After reading the gov.uk information about this new ID, I freaked. Drop your phone and you no longer can prove who you are! All of my phones malfunction often. All of my equipment suffers from persistent hacking interference. Some apps malfunction often. Some apps I can’t even get on some phones because the app thinks I am in the wrong country even when I am not, on the basis of some coding in the phone.

This new ID scheme sounds like a bonkers waste of money because with your government gateway ID you can also already access more and more services. I had not even mentioned that in the message that I sent.

Argh. What a load of crock. (There is no paperwork related to EUSS, for example. It’s been 100% digital from the start.) (EUSS is the EU settlement scheme, which kicked in after Brexit.)

Okay, so here is the crux (possibly). Who’d be getting the contracts?

Ah, so it’s called a wifi sniffer

Saw one in the air in Portsmouth once, very very briefly.

https://nos.nl/artikel/2584076-twee-tieners-opgepakt-voor-spionageklus-voor-pro-russische-hacker

That dad, he sounds like an idiot, frankly.

Dad: “Doesn’t go out, has a supermarket job and shows zero interest in exploring the world. How could Russians hire him for a spying job?”

Others: “He’s a fanatical gamer, good with computers and fascinated with hacking activities.”

Nonsense about illegal migrants

A few days ago, someone seemed to suggest that my situation is more or less the result of illegal migrants in the Netherlands putting pressure on the system. (And that the Dutch givernment cares greatly.)

Bollocks.

If you’re illegal, you don’t have access to anything. If you don’t have an official registered address in the Netherlands, you don’t exist.

I don’t exist any longer either. If I needed medical assistance, I would have to go to the United Kingdom. (Yes, I have the Dutch nationality. I was born and raised here and so were my parents.)

I knew nothing about the plight of migrants until I moved from Amsterdam to England.

I’d previously emigrated to the United States and although the restrictions of my visa hampered me and I ran into misunderstandings such as that foreign employees of a State don’t have to file income taxes – plus very occasionally some nonsense about sex and drugs or wooden shoes, tulips and windmills and Denmark – I never felt discriminated against.

When I emigrated to England, however, government politicians and others were spouting so many vicious lies about “my kind” that it forced me to start pondering the situation of migrants in the Netherlands too.

I supposedly was from a poor country called the Netherlands and I supposedly had come to the UK because there were more opportunities there than in the Netherlands or to get its supposedly much more generous social security benefits (which you could not even get in the UK for the first five years and in order to start qualifying, you had to make an appointment and show evidence of your income) and I supposedly was a thieving drug addict and lying about my affiliation with the University of Southampton. It got stale. (Initially, I thought that some people simply behaved in really odd ways.)



And yet, in 2020, Home Secretary Priti Patel called us all “low-skill” and “low-wage” and vowed to reduce our numbers as if we were vermin to be exterminated… I’ve included her in the video below that I put together to call out the utter hypocrisy and nazi-rhetoric of these lying politicians.

Priti Patel is the daughter of Ugandan/Indian migrants. Geert Wilders is the son of a woman from the Asian country that has the world’s largest muslim population (Indonesia) and is, just like his pal Trump, married to a foreigner (Hungary). Some interesting psychology at work there… Do they have a deep-seated wish to get get back at their parents and their spouses for some reason?

Three years later, English newspapers revealed that PM Boris Johnson had planned a military raid on a vaccine plant in Leiden, the Netherlands, to steal vaccines for a disease of which he had previously said that it was just something that those weak foreigners could not handle but that would never affect the British.
(Shortly after this, Johnson stiffed Jenny and Luis and their colleagues. Jenny quit, disgusted.)

And that is how I know that most of the utter nonsense being spouted in the Netherlands about illegals, and refugees and foreigners and people such as myself who have lived abroad for a long time and can no longer be trusted is just that. It is utter nonsense aimed at sowing fear and gaining fearful people’s votes.

Right-wing statements of supposedly left-wing Dutch politicians don’t help.

Globally, I dearly miss the powerful moderating influence of “Mutti” Angela Merkel and also that of Jacinda Ardern.

So when someone said “As-salamu alaykum” to me the other day (peace, shalom, namaste), I replied “Salaam”. (I’d previously asked someone whether it was okay for me to say this, and he smiled and said “yes”. It’s not said in England, you see, at least not as openly, but likely often enough when no semi-indigenous people are around.)

Part of the problem with the Netherlands is that it has made a whopping shift to the right in the past two decades – hence to “not caring” – and that it wants to regulate every sneeze and cough and requires you to have to apply for a license for sneezing and a license for coughing and that if somehow, all license applications are automatically rejected, it comes up with a third and fourth and fifth regulation to regulate the failing regulations instead of simply fixing what’s wrong.

The horrific childcare tax credits disaster STILL has not been resolved. A repeat is around the corner and many victims of this travesty are still stuck, waiting, waiting, waiting for the Dutch state to step up and do what it should do.

(The Netherlands now seems to be pervaded by thought policing, too. How dare you call out the emperor for not wearing any clothes?)

Btw, does anyone know why WordPress.com does not recognize ENGLISH?