This week however I almost felt sorry for US citizens. First a lot of them lose their jobs, then they lose their homes and in the end their economy collapses under the weight of consumer and government spending and what does their president (elected twice) do? He comes up with a plan that could have been invented by one of the early economy strategists of the old USSR.

Money gone? No problem. We will just print more.

Because basically that is what it boils down to and you can do that in a virtual economy as long as you own enough clean shaven, nerdy looking economists who show off their optimism in the media in a vain attempt to reassure the people that they are not investing their money in a crapper.

Of course Obama and McCain applaud this free market intervention and Bush may get to finish his second term without too much market mayhem after all. The US tax payers who have lost jobs and housing will soon find new and worse paid jobs so that they will be able to dump their tax money in a bottomless pit that is mainly set up to protect the fattest cats of that same banking system that brought them on their knees in the first place. They are asked to pay twice for the house they lost to the bank. And as good working bees they will do that without too much moaning. Yes sir, thank you sir. As long as they can keep their pitiful jobs. I have said it before; Americans are great workers and lousy philosophers.

Since last week I am all for cultural exchanges between older Russian citizens and Americans. The older Russians still know how it is to suffer under government controlled markets.

You will say I am cynical. This government bail-out of the banking system will prevent us from total market failure and long lasting economical depression. I hope you are right. My worry is not that an orchestrated virtual world economy will collapse sooner or later. Chances are it won’t, just because of its virtual nature but I see a danger lurking in the East. Those nice smiling Asians have been keeping the world money market afloat for some time now. That makes sense too, because you know what they say about Asians; they like to gamble. They have a tradition in gambling, they have become pros in risk management. Professional gamblers don’t blink an eye when they work the numbers until the right one pops up, but they usually know when it is time to leave the table too.

My guess is that the bottom of the market will fall out from under our asses one day, when we in the Western world are still sound asleep — at the opening of the trading markets in the East. After all, they have bailed us out of a large economical depression, not Mr. Bush and certainly not McCain or Obama. Why should the Asians leave the table while the game is still hot and the stakes are high? After all they depend on us, they want to sell goods to us. Well, history has taught these same Asians some very nasty lessons about us in the West. They might dump us for reasons that no economist can foresee. Maybe now we need historians and anthropologists to predict the market.

Or psychologists, maybe? Gamblers can become destructive quite suddenly for no apparent reason. Ask your local addiction specialist.

[update October 10th]
I thought it would take more time, but today in Tokio the market plunged to a four year low at the opening and Europe followed with a less spectacular but alarming drop.

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Those “upmarket sociopaths” as I would call them usually disappeared from my life after they were exposed in one way or another. An intelligent sociopath likes to go unnoticed; they are born winners and concealing their true identity is their strongest weapon. So I am not too scared of the intelligent sociopath; I am more scared of the sociopaths who shoot an old woman’s through the head with a double barrel shotgun, just because she happens to have 200 Euros stashed away in a cookie jar.

My worst fear however is the sociopath who has a cause that is larger than life. Let’s call them sociopaths with a mission. Some of them rule the world. Others terrorize small regions of countries, but they are always there and one cannot live one day in this life without being confronted with the nasty results of their actions.

I have no real clue why I suddenly started Googling for sociopaths. Was it boredom? I don’t know, but if it was; that mood slowly switched to anger when I found the two sites linked below;

Charles Manson’s right hand Tex Watson who was the main killer in the Tate/LaBiancia murders, now has a site called “Abounding Love Ministries”. Needless to say he is now a devout Christian.

http://www.aboundinglove.org/sensational/wydfm/wydfm-001.php

As a young man I was fascinated and horrified at the same time by the Charles Manson family, but I had never seen any pictures of the bloodbath in the Tate/Polanski house, until I visited the link below. I have included the link as a reminder what can happen if sociopaths with a mission are at work, but don’t click on it if you have a weak stomach.

http://www.atwa.info/

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This year the kick-off event of global Christmas madness was when the Nobel *Peace* Prize was given to a man who is a representant of a theocratical system which has repressed and still is repressing any form of environmental awareness to trade it for blazing wars or short term economical opportunities. That gullible Swedish gesture is not just plain dumb, it is dumb *and* sentimental; the exact two ingredients marking the true Christmas spirit. Time’s choice to make Vladimir Putin Person of the Year has a certain Christmas touch too, but at least the editors do not leave us in the dark any longer on the issue of American priorities when it comes to a choice between democracy and economical gain. Now, that is a relief for many and a Christmas bonus above expectation. (I mean, we all know how it works by now, we just want the assholes to admit it for a change.)

Do not get me wrong here; stupidity, hypocrisy and sentimentality do not exclusively belong to the Christmas spirit, but somehow things get worse this time of year. Suddenly everything is green, gold and red. Designers go flaky in a literal sense. Walt Disney, the godfather of ugliness rises from his tomb and spontaneously starts to puke up snowy Java applets. For crying out loud, the web is ugly enough as it is…

The worst part however is that if you complain, people start to ask if you are alone with Christmas. Why? I am surrounded by my loved ones, of course! I will be locked up with them in a room and a bright television set will be splattering those same ugly Christmas colors over the carpet, while I am eating like a pig and drinking until I can not drink any more. These are the two days of the year nobody can blame me for being an outcast or an eccentric, but will somebody please tell me what it is we are celebrating? Peace on Earth with a Nobel committee deviating to an off topic winner, due to a lack of real candidates? Or the ugliness of life in general and the birth of a child we are going to feistily nail to a cross once Easter comes?

So, eh.. Mmm.. My very best wishes for 2008! In all sincerity. Yes..

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I like it that way.

On a community web site one can have 300 friends without sweat. It’s superficial of course, because when these friendships grow into something more elaborate; one immediately has to deal with the complications of virtuality, such as different languages, the usual misinterpretations of e-mail, etc.

In real life having two or three real friends is a considerable investment of time and energy and if I look back, I must admit that my friends often treated me worse than my enemies. Holding on to that thought I must also face that I have probably done the same. I am not the one who sings “Non, je ne regrette rien” or “My Way” under the shower. I have some sincere regrets. By studying my wrongdoings I can easily find good reasons why, but that is beside the point. There is always an excuse and if there is none available; we humans will certainly produce one.

That is what seperates us from animals — more than intellect.

I am sure my friend Sylvaine has a perfectly good reason to describe me on her blog as a person suffering from the Stockholm syndrome. I am fully aware that a lot of people consider me to be suffering from one or two mental diseases and they are absolutely right. For those who are really concerned; I will gladly mail a PDF with the exact diagnosis, based on 20 years of therapy. It is a list of mental dysfunctions, but the Stockholm syndrome is simply not on it and even if it were I would not consider it to be a nice gesture if somebody would post my medical data on his or her blog.

Apparently there is something tricky about friendship. Maybe it is the mirror effect. In our selection of friends we search for common interests, goals, opinions etc. If we become successful at that we find a person who is so much alike that he or she soon becomes irritating. This sounds contradictory, but it seems we do not always like ourselves enough to spend too much time with our mirror image(s).

I may be a medically certified nutcase; but I am not without pride. I am certainly not ashamed of my mental aberrations and I have pretty much learned how to live with who I am after 52 years of struggle. Fighting mental disease is a top sport that requires persistence, endurance and commitment until the last breath.

When I am on the edge of losing this battle I always remind myself of the fact that 80% of the misery on this planet is caused by people who consider themselves to be in good mental health.

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My Spanish is not good enough to fully comprehend what is happening on the following blog;

Piezas de Habacuc

I see a dog roped to an iron thread, looking out on dog biscuits glued to a wall, unreachable for him of course. The dog is so starved and flea infested that he has started to scratch and bite his skin with such vigor that the wounds are horrifying.

It is an art exhibit; a performance.. I think I get the message the artist is sending out; our disgust is enormous, while at the same time we try to ignore what is happening to many if not most Middle and South Americans.

Everybody is a critic of course. Somebody wrote: hijo de puta!! / no eres nada de artista!! / eres un asesino !! That I fully understand: Son of a whore!! / you are no artist!! / you are an assassin!! (I speak Prostitute Spanish.)

I am not confused because the pictures sickened me. Dogs are to me what cows are to Buddhists, so I am obviously upset. I am confused because only a few days ago I posted this video on camdogs.com of Neo Nazis smashing up Andres Serrano’s pictures — and now I feel like slaughtering an artist instead of his art.

Is it because artists make us reflect, or is our competitive society so much out of control that we need another horrifying marketing stunt every week to give some artist his or her (un)deserved media publicity? I think I already know the answer; there is nothing confusing about that. I am so confused because I seem to be part of that process.

PS: I kept following the comments on that blog and found a text of an American who spelled “concentration camp” as “consecration camp”. I am going to file these words as the worst Freudian slip I have seen in my entire life.

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Quite some time ago I stopped celebrating birthdays with the exception of my 50th, two years ago, when I invited a random group of people from the neighborhood bar. I must say that was one of the best birthdays ever. Perhaps it is better to celebrate with a group of strangers.

A year before that I was moving from one apartment to another, like I have done about 20 times in my life and before I left I filled out this postal form to have my mail forwarded to the new address. I had forgotten about the fact that there was another person in the old building carrying the same last name “Van der Kamp”. She was not related to me in any way, but within days I was receiving both her mail and mine on my new address. I apologized in all sincerity and started hand delivering her mail.

That was not enough, of course. The woman kept calling me with her screechy demanding voice, terrified as she was about the possibility that her partner would find out about her little adventures. Without hesitation I took the initiative to cancel the mail forwarding service. It took three months before the bureaucrats of the postal services actually effectuated the change. All these months my phone kept ringing, mostly very early in the morning.

So, when I was finally ready to send out cards to family and friends to inform them of my new address, I was so sick and tired with the whole concept of mail that I decided not to do so. Within weeks I slowly started to relax; it felt really good not to be bothered with mail sent by institutions, companies and – worst of all – people who ring your doorbell just when you are really not ready to entertain. It was such a success that I also changed and unlisted both my phone numbers.

A year later I moved in with Karin/Tangiers and there was a problem with the apartment which prevented me from officially living there, so I lost my registration in the city archives of Amsterdam. Formally I do not exist any more. Urgent messages still reach me through the Internet and if I have missed a few; I think I can live with that.

Have you ever tried not to exist? I would like to recommend it, if only for a year or two. The people who care have long found a way to contact me and the rest simply evaporated and with them a lot of obligations. It is a good test to get to know who your friends are.

Two of the most important people in my life were suddenly gone with the wind and that was tough and confusing, but at the same time my perspective changed. I learned that – within reasonable limits – we can be as charming or as obnoxious as we please. Most people are way too involved with their own objectives to even notice the difference. They see you as they see themselves. If they are not to be trusted; they will not trust you. If friendships have no real meaning to them, they will expect you to act accordingly. It is quite shallow, but very easy to deal with.

There are a few people I do miss, like F. for instance with whom I have fought so many stupid battles in the past. She is also celebrating her birthday on the 17th. I hope she has forgiven me as I have forgiven her. Hopefully one day we can look back on our mistakes without suppressing the good times — or to at least greet each other politely on the sidewalk. F. always liked a stiff drink, so I will drink to her health, hoping she is doing fine.

There is one thing I can count on; these lost friends will thoroughly enjoy the fact that they can skip my birthday, because I am a lousy host. In the beginning of the evening I am always happy to see all these gleaming faces around me, but after a few drinks I start playing music in a very egocentric fashion. Unlike some of my friends I am not into “high culture” when it comes to music. I am more drawn towards the corny stuff.

After a few songs, the first visitors start to find excuses to leave early. Maybe in a subconscious way that is what I want; that they will leave the party before I really get sentimental about life in general.

Especially for those who are absent in real life but who persist in visiting this blog for reasons beyond my imagination, I have compiled a webcast (mp3) with The Best of The Worst Birthday Songs.

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It is summer and business is slow. Usually around this time I am updating server software or redesigning sites, but since I have been incredibly productive all through the year doing just that, I told myself it was time to fool around – with code. Recently I installed the gallery add-on for this blog and I started posting WebFinds until I realized that I still have a lot of drawings from the days when I used to illustrate my own articles in Dutch magazines, so I went through my archive to dig up some of these works. Most of the material is quite old and I do not see myself as a true artist when it comes to drawing or water coloring. I just had an awful lot of fun doing it. Most of the material was published with the exception of a series called Women in Pursuit.

As you may or may not know I have never been the greatest admirer of the female sex in general. I have my own personal reasons, but even from an objective point of view being born in the mid-1950s was not a good start to appreciate women. I can still recall feminists marching the streets of Utrecht, Netherlands shouting “All men should be castrated!” — over and over again. I was waiting for the police to make a few arrests but nothing happened. That was strange, because the Dutch already had fierce laws against discrimination and sexism back then. Somehow, feminists could scream, write or publish any sweeping statement about men without consequence, whereas men were dragged to court for sexist behavior almost every week. Somehow that did not seem right to me. It was not in the best interest of equality either and the turbulance was all about equality, or wasn’t it? Maybe it was about superiority? That would have been just fine with me. Only fools and madmen go for dominance and responsibility. Lately I hear a lot of women claiming that there would be no war if only women were in charge of the world. My response is predictable; “Let’s go for it!” or in the words of the late John Lennon; “Give peace a chance” and while we are at it — let us erase the name of Margaret Thatcher from our history books. You probably remember her as the “Iron Lady” who sent out a complete Armada of soldiers to conquer a few islands inhabited by a flog of sheep and a bunch of farmers who did not know what the hell was going on.

It is easy for women to say that they will bring peace to the world. Generations of women have voted for war without actual participation in the fighting. The author Céline saw his corporal’s head blown off by a grenade only to come home to his girl friend who was complaining endlessly that cooking apple beignets for the soldiers made her hair smell funny.

Many male collegues I worked with in the 1970s were sterilized for contraceptive purposes at the request of their partners. To me that was close enough to castration. Lately I often hear that these same men are undergoing multiple operations to hopefully restore the damage in order to live up to the child wish of their almost middle-aged second, or third wives. It makes me think that Freud was not such a fool after all with his theory on penis envy. To give a somewhat simular example: I was circumcised at age 16 and I still know how sex was like before circumcision. Circumcision is a mutilation of the body; it numbs the sensation in the top of the penis. Great work for kids who come too fast and tough shit for those who have a hard time getting it up. I am fully aware that circumcision narrows down the risk of cancer in the female uterus but good hygiene does the same. To me the whole concept is trivial to start with, because where I come from most women live to be at least 80, while men die a few months or years after their retirement. No excuse is good enough to compensate for the multilation of our bodies.

Most of my life I have lived in this stupid war between the sexes and when I die I do not want my name carved on a stone; I just want it to read “The Unknown Soldier in the Battle of the Sexes”.

Even if you hate this “Women in Pursuit” series; you will have to admit that it is a sincere document of a desperate man.

Women in pursuit – Gallery

Main Gallery Entrance (I am still adding pictures.)

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Since there is no real alternative for democracy, I find politics very depressing, but I am a Dutchman, a European, maybe even a world citizen, so I try to make the best of it by mistrusting information supporting a cause that is too pragmatic or overly nationalistic. I never booked a flight to Iraq to check on the existence of weapons of mass destruction; I just found the story very hard to believe from the start, since Iraq had been under economical sanctions for too many years to become a military force to be feared. So, when the tensions were building up and the Americans on my site(s) started to post derogative remarks about Muslims and started to describe themselves as “patriots”; I spoke up about the matter time after time and I tried to explain that we “in the old world” have always had bad experiences with people who like to call themselves “patriots”.

There was a heated discussion going on – especially on the Hidden Archives forums. I felt I had to warn people and I did so in a language that is not my own: English. It is hard to have a heated debate with people who can use their own language to attack your opinions, while you have to translate everything in your head before you can post it. So I often lost my “cool” and started to randomly insult people. In the end most of the Americans left and my only result was that I lost 30% of my income on the member sites, because I was suddenly considered to be a communist and an anarchist. Please trust me on this; I am neither.

I do not mind the 30% loss on my modest income, because the quality of my life increased with about 60%.

In the end I just kicked out the last few Islamaphobes and went on with life — after being compared to Stalin, Hitler and a few other nasty people in history by the last of the Mohicans. Lately I have noticed that some of these visitors are slowly returning to the sites. I have no idea why, but I like to think that they have altered their opinions on certain matters to an extent that they are quite parallel to mine. More likely however they thoroughly enjoy the fact that I rarely visit my own community site The Hidden Archives anymore.

I am going on about this because there was a comment on my previous piece, posted by a nice American. She had a sane view on the problems we are all in today and somewhere in her text she asked: “But who is going to listen?”

Who is or who is not going to listen, is a question I have never asked myself. A question of higher relevance is: What is the destructive power of all of us being quiet while we know there is yet another genocide taking place? I have always felt that since I was controlling a platform with such an incredible amount of visitors every day, I *had* to speak up instead of being quiet.

I still recall that as a child I asked my grandfather what he had done to prevent the deportation of Jews. “Nothing,” he said and he turned away from me. Later I learned it must have been a very tough question for him, because during World War II he worked for the Dutch Railways and he was driving steam locomotives from The Netherlands into Germany. My father later explained to me that he was transporting cole instead of people, but still… He may have been providing for his family but that did not look too good one decade later.

Lately almost every American assures me that he or she is appalled by what is happening in their country, but I do not see a whole lot of protest marches, do you? And that Democratic majority in congress does not change much for the better either. Or have I missed a lot of news lately? What I do see is tension building up towards Iran and I ask myself what is going to prevent a dictator on the rise like Mr. Putin to lend a few nuclear missiles to Iran so that they can destroy the state of Israel when another invasion takes place. Maybe the fact that Bush has assured Putin that the Cold War is over? I do not think Mr. Bush’s word is good enough to prevent disaster and the Americans are so confused that they make ideal targets for hit and run attacks on a infinitely larger scale than is already happening. No nation or empire can go tear-assing around the world without perishing eventually. Our history books show no exceptions to this rule.

Somehow the responses of “good” Americans remind me of the “good” Germans during World War II. If they are really so appalled, why don’t they act up? Is it because nobody will listen to them while they form 51% of the voters? If that is a fact I can no longer see the US as a democracy. A Theocracy on a rampage maybe, but certainly not a democracy.

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My US visitors keep teaching me that it is wrong to think that average Americans are anything like Mr. Bush. They only voted for the man. Oh no, now I am confused again! Damn, damn, will I ever learn? They did not even vote for him; somebody just tripped over a few boxes with votes and in the confusion Bush became president. Twice.

Whenever I make a statement about previous or upcoming US invasions of countries who are to be freed of their resources, their well-being and their culture in order to trade all that nastiness for the kind of democracy that gives a blind cheque to a recovering alcoholic, I am told that I should keep quiet since my country was liberated by the Americans in World War II.

Forget the irony and my usual sarcasm for a moment and let me repeat once more that I – child of a woman who lost most of her family in this devastating war – have always honored the Allied Forces on Dutch Liberation Day more than our own cowardly population who did so little to stop Dutch Jews from being deported. Whenever I see a war veteran in Amsterdam, which unfortunately has not happened in more than five years; I offer them my hospitality or at least a few drinks. This is the truth. Few other inhabitants of Amsterdam do so and that pains me.

What bothers me is that most Americans seem to think that so many American lives were lost on the beaches of France only to free us, Europeans, from Nazism. That is historically incorrect. This may have been the main reason why Average Joe has fought this war, but that was certainly not the general idea of those in command who sent them to fight giant fortifications with tiny hand grenades. I hate to rain on anybody’s parade but June 6th, also known as D-Day, has a lot of resemblance to another day marked on our calendars; April 1, Fool’s Day.

The main target of the invasion was not to shatter Nazism or to destroy the death camps in Auschwitz, Treblinka, Mauthausen and so many other gruesome places — the main target was to be in Berlin before the Russians. To be in Berlin, or Peenemünde to be exact, where Wernher von Braun, soon to become chief engineer of NASA, was designing missiles. This is no conspiracy theory. If you do not take my (Dutch) word for it, ask the Brits who have been bombed with these missiles night after night, day after day during the Second World War without ever giving an inch. As a rule those who have suffered badly are quite modest.

If anybody should have been hanged by the neck to die in Nuremberg it should have been Herr Doctor Wernher von Braun. It is a good thing that those who directed the Holocaust were sentenced to death, although getting rid of Goering, Hess and their comrades never stopped the attitude that brought them to their crimes against humanity in the first place. Fascism and Anti-Semitism are more alive than ever. Almost nobody I know today can see the difference between the actions of the Israeli government and the basics of Jewish religion.

The Jews were considered a threat by Nazis in the 1930s for the same reason Muslims are considered a threat today. Because they were different and — nobody is allowed to say this in Europe — because they owned a large chunk of the resources. Not oil, but industry and capital, badly needed ingredients to expand Nazism over the continent. *Please* do not send an Israeli or a US rocket to Amsterdam to eliminate me for saying so, but if you must, please *double-check your coordinates* so that you do not hit the Shelter for the Homeless next-door and/or the Child Day-care Center across the street. Thank you for your consideration!

However gruesome; the Holocaust ended but the products of Von Braun’s vivid imagination kill hundreds if not thousands each day on both sides of this so-called war on terrorism. Ironically, the Israelis have an almost sexual fixation with Uncle Werner’s inventions. So, those good old “Happy Days’ Americans who like to zap away from the horrors in Iraq to watch another Shuttle-launch instead, should be well aware of the fact that it was a German Nazi and a mass-murderer at heart, who was in charge of Nasa for decades and it was Nasa/Nazi technology that has made the US Army the most feared military force on the planet. If you find this hard to believe, just ask yourself why most of your friends would rather own an Audi, a BMW, or a ‘Merc’ than one of those fuel-spilling marvels of American engineering.

Enough said for today. My advice: be happy and buy a Mac instead of a car, you will do a lot of good for the environment and the hardware used by Mac software is designed by the friends you had such a great time with in Pearl Harbor back in 1941. World dominance is all about investing your money in the enemy, isn’t it?

Photo insert 2: The house of my Grandparents, mistakenly bombed by the Allied Forces.
Unfortunately it was a large Catholic family who sat behind that wall to eat supper when it happened.

Photo insert 1: Americans marching The Champs-Élysées after the liberation of Paris.

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