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https://nos.nl/artikel/2610678-opnieuw-waarschuwing-voor-overname-vs-kan-bij-persoonlijke-gegevens-mijnoverheid

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).

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.

(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.)

Oh. LOL. I’ve got it.

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.

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?

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’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.

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.

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 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?

Displaced aggression is when a person displays – redirects – hostility toward a different person because he or she feels intimidated by or weaker than the person he or she is annoyed with.

One of my neighbors in Portsmouth did it. He sometimes made angry remarks at me that had nothing to do with me. I found it puzzling until it dawned on me that the remarks applied to his partner. They used to quarrel, in what sounded like a very healthy respectful albeit angry manner, but they had stopped quarreling.

Well, birds do this too.

There is a group of six white geese where I am right now and I connected with them months ago, just by talking with them. They often greet me with softer or louder honks. Hi! Hi hi! Hi hi hi! Hi!

The lead goose is pretty bossy and his eyes speak volumes.

I’d brought them escarole twice over the months (in hot dry weather). The second time, they already knew that I had something for them when I walked up, just from my movements, the way I walked.

One day, he looked at me with undisguised anger. “I thought you had food but all you did was grab a handkerchief to blow your nose!” So I got some spinach, on sale, to make up for it, but while walking back I started wondering about the oxalic acid content. (It can interfere with the calcium metabolism of birds.)

Mr Lead Goose was furious. “Spinach? You brought us spinach!?!”

He was so furious that, yes, I went back to get some escarole.

“I wanted bread!” Yeah, well, the others were happy with the escarole. One of them did eat spinach too, but admittedly, somewhat reluctantly.

Last week, he was in one of his moods again. He sees me as challenging him or eroding his power a little at times. He then picked on one of the other geese, clearly because he didn’t risk pecking me. I interfered. That’s a goose who had a leg injury and was limping but the leg has gradually improved over the months.

So then he diverted his attention to (smaller) Nile geese, a couple and their two kids. He picked on one of the parents.

I stepped between them.

I’ve also previously stepped between a great blue heron and the Nile goose youngsters.

All you need to do is stand between them. (The heron I walked off. He needed to move away just a little. He flew off by a mere meter or so. Message received. Goal accomplished.)

The white geese were all very intrigued by all this.

This morning, the six white geese honked at me and swam with me, to a spot on the shore where the Nile geese already happened to be, to the left of a pedestrian bridge.

I then saw one of the Nile goose youngsters pick on a pigeon. I had to laugh. That one had clearly been watching Mr White Lead Goose.

There’s also sometimes a swan and right now (that is, yesterday), a swan couple with a kid. The geese keep a respectful distance. You don’t mess with a swan.

(The geese also warn each other about dogs, btw.)

If they can redirect anger, then they can also empathize.

Sure enough, I’ve seen quaker parrots look out – step up – for cats. Cats!

I’ve also seen a pigeon understand that mice too need to eat and that you should drop some food somewhere on purpose if you don’t want them to go somewhere else and that you shouldn’t be sloppy with your food there.

If pigeons know how to deter rodents humanely, then so can humans.

And we all know the racket that magpies make to warn everyone else if they see a cat on the prowl (or a bird of prey in the air). They warn everyone, usually perched pretty high up so that they can monitor the cat. They don’t just warn their own kind.

PS Non-human animals sometimes do things, play games, to test a human, to assess how much of a danger you might represent. Humans sometimes do something similar. They can become a real pest just to test another person’s loyalty. “Can I drive you away or will I always be able to count on you?” My youngest sister once told me that she’d done that with a boyfriend. She’s very smart, yes. People with insight in themselves are pretty precious.

Update: They unflagged my account and apologised.