Fucking horns.

Whenever some or other age rolls along that they are discussing they drag experts out of every possible hole they could find them. The further away in time the period, the more outlandish the explanations for some things get, mostly ending up with the word “Ritual”.

Now let’s stick that onto our own time. Let’s forget for a moment that we record every time we pass gas. Let’s assume (and in most cases hope) that this does not pass the test of time and that this digital detritus dies a sorry death on a digital midden. Well alright it gets overwritten and eventually discarded without leaving a trace.

Add 3000 years and assume we haven’t blown ourselves to little tiny bits and even if we have that some of our offspring remains to find our archaeological layers of optical storage devices, old car tyres and plastic shell casings. I wonder whether or not they can tell much difference between our current death cults. I can’t and I’m living among them… They will have to resort to the word “Ritual” an aweful lot, that’s for sure.

Where have the days gone when petty thieves just went about stealing train tracks for the metal…

Assuming you’ve read that snippet, should they really be fined? Why bother with it? Should we care what other people think about things that are fairly well established facts?

As far as I’m concerned we shouldn’t. If you want to believe the sky is green, go ahead. If you want to go around and claim that the Earth is banana shaped, I’d love to hear your reasoning. And if you want to go around demanding Earth is 6000 years old well, I’d rather you just shut up and go back to Staphorst but I don’t really care whether or not you believe that, you have every right to. And I have every right to ask you to not talk to me about it if I don’t want you to.

As they’ve not taken out a nation wide advert claiming this fiction, I don’t think they’re bothering anyone else with their little fictonal figment of their imagination… and even if they did, common sense and the general WW2 history education you get in primary school is enough to fight this kind of bull. Let them have their fun and get on with more interesting things in the world like fighting hunger or disease? That sounds like money and time better spent.

Alright, on the one hand that seems a good idea. It has been a problem that lead to ridiculous developments on the ticket sales point. Like entirely dysfunctional online queue systems. The intent of this legislation-to-be is decent enough. But will this be enforced on people? Will trade not just shift to people rather than businesses, and most likely with more and more online sales, non-existant people…

We’ll see.

That’s not the only bad-time aspect to these, by Dutch standard, normal political proceedings though. The new elections are sheduled for may, there are local council elections in march. I think it’ll make the two bodies of government too much alike, even though local parties are mostly incarnations of the national ones in name and logo only. A few rather more interesting topics will have to be dealt with much, much later such as the whole retirement at 67 thing and plenty of other things. Everyone is now happily assuming that a new cabinet can be in place in august or september. That’s not bloody likely though. Last time the formation of the coalition took about seven months. This time around I suspect the vote will be split even more. The formation should take even longer. That’s one way to get out of taking hard decisions half the people of the country won’t like of course.

Here’s article. It’s in Dutch so I’ll briefly recap the main points of it.

At some point the gov.nl said local councils have to have an archaeological survey done of their soil. I don’t know the reason but I’d guess it is to roughly chart what is and what is not particularly interesting to try to preserve. Staphort is one of the more God fearing towns you can find in this country. And the Staphorst council figures that since they have to pay for this survey, they also want the biblical view of the age of things in the archaeological survey. Now here we run into a bit of a mathematical problem. For those of you who need enlightenment on this part. Science claims just over 4.5 billion years of Earth, calculations based on the bible generally say 6 000 years, though the article states that their estimates range from 6 000 to 12 000 years old. That’s a time difference not even Einstein can fix for us.

Now I don’t feel like joking around about this because it’s just too damn easy. Oh ok. The Staphorst council is so dense that their time runs significantly slower than the time the rest of us perceive.

Instead, I think I’m going to feel very sorry for them as well as any soil surveyor they approach. I doubt any real scientist will even do this. Which means, like with other Christian science (documentaries aired by the EO for example) it’ll get tweaked to suit their needs. One thing is for sure while their tweaking will be blunt, the tool they have used will probably not be a flint hand axe!

Now I’m going to agree with them for a bit. Not the age thing, of course not. But their logic makes some sort of sense. They pay for the survey, they want it done they way they want it done. Here is where the gov.nl should’ve paid for it in stead or at least making the higher power (*sigh* gov.nl over local council, not sky-ghosts!) add a set of standards the survey has to meet. You know, to prevent random assholes with dowsing rods from making a bid for such a job.

First off you might be thinking WTF is SIRE. And if you’re not Dutch you would be thinking that. SIRE is basically a non-profit organisation aimed at changing society for the better through advertising. Their most well known advertising campaign runs around december/january about not being an idiot when it comes to fireworks. In short they tell you what you should already know.

And they’ve now taken it upon themselves to teach us how to deal with nice people. Clearly I’m an extraordinary person for not thinking that people should be nicer. According to sire.nl 78% of Dutch think people should be nicer. What they mean of course is act nicer, not be nicer. You can act nice and not actually be nice, hence the word act. Anyway, to me this is up to the individual and that is where it should remain. You can be nice if you want but surely it isn’t a bloody crime to be in a bad mood for a change or to just ignore someone. If you don’t want to deal with people you let them know. Not engaging in their niceness seems the right thing to do. SIRE also claims people find niceness suspicious, and I honestly don’t blame them. When you want a favour, you are nice. This again makes perfect sense but apparently being a little suspicious about niceness doesn’t.

Well thank you SIRE but I’d like to decline with a nod and a nice little smile. I’ll decide when and when not to be nice thank you very much.