via RTLNieuws
Wow! Holland has said enough is enough!
They become the first European country to withdraw sanctions against Russia, without permission from EU.
This is the first example we see of a European country acting in the best interest of their own country.
Now, who is next?
The Dutch government has issued 91 waivers from sanctions against Russia since the country invaded Ukraine late in February, RTL Nieuws reports after talking to the Ministries. The ministries shielded the names of the companies involved, the value of transactions that were exempted, and the business sectors concerned.
The information was “company-sensitive,” according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Economic Affairs, Finance, Infrastructure, and Education are allowed to grant exemptions to sanctions to “allow a degree of flexibility in specific cases,” the spokesperson affirmed.
In April, the European Union banned ships sailing under the Russian flag from European ports. The Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management issued waivers so 34 ships could access Dutch ports, for example, because they carried important cargo like aluminum and food.
“Diplomatic relations” was stated as the reason why the Ministry of Foreign Affairs granted one exemption, the broadcaster reported. In the isolated case, transactions that involved Russian banks majority held by the State were permitted to occur.
The Ministry of Finance granted 13 additional waivers related to frozen assets or goods that fall under the sanctions regime.
The Ministry for Climate and Energy, which falls under Economic Affairs, issued 25 waivers for Dutch organizations to still get energy from former Gazprom companies. The waivers help 150 companies and organizations, including municipalities, schools, and water boards, the Ministry said to the broadcaster.
The Ministry of Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation, which falls under Foreign Affairs, issued 18 waivers to 13 organizations on “humanitarian grounds” for cooperation between the EU and Russia on “purely civilian matters.” Foreign Affairs issued one waiver so a company could receive another payment from Russia. [RTLNieuws, NLTimes]
“The city center becomes an urban jungle at night,” Zuurmond told Dutch paper, Trouw. “Criminal money flourishes, there is no authority and the police can no longer handle the situation.”
Drugs are being sold openly in the streets, pedestrian areas are used for car and bike races, there’s widespread theft and other offenses, the ombudsman said, using the world “mayhem” to describe what’s happening in the city.
Earlier, Zuurmond set up three CCTV cameras at the busy Leidseplein square ringed by bars and clubs, which is located in the south western part of the city center. The facts exposed as a result of his surveillance experiment turned out to be quite depressing.
“One night we counted 900 offences, mainly between the hours of 2:00am and 4:00am. The atmosphere is grim, and there is an air of lawlessness,” the ombudsman told Trouw. “Scooters race through the pedestrian areas. There is a lot of shouting. Drugs are being bought. There is stealing,” he said, adding that police often do not even try to intervene.
“There is violence but no action. You can even pee on the van of a mobile [police] unit and the driver won’t say anything,” Zuurmond said. He also described the situation at the square at night as “intolerable lack of authority.”
The notorious Red Light district streets, which are “packed” with crowds of revelers in the evenings, also witness a high crime rate. Human trafficking has become a particular source of concern for the local authorities as it even prompted the municipality to launch a special project aimed at combating the issue as well as reducing the overall crime rate. However, all the efforts have been largely to no avail so far, the paper reports, citing the assessment made by the Amsterdam city court.
The problems deepen as they continue to spread across the city, Zuurmond warned. He particularly drew attention to the fact that some 2,000 illegal taxis are now roaming the streets at nights for fares. The city also has a flourishing black market with racketeers dealing with wads of cash. “Shadowy money is everywhere in the city center,” the ombudsman said.
The tense situation is partly a result of government policy, Zuurmond explained. “The government has deliberately stimulated tourism after the economic crisis, but [it] has forgotten to… take additional [security] measures.”
According to Dutch media, the problem that currently plagues the capital of the Netherlands might in fact be part of a larger issue. In the Netherlands, there are around 160,000 people who have been “irrevocably convicted” but have managed to avoid punishment, Trouw reports, citing data provided by the municipality of Amsterdam.
According to the ministry of justice, more than 12,000 out of the 160,000 have to serve a custodial sentence. About 10 percent of such convicts fleeing justice reportedly reside in Amsterdam, where they can actually apply for a new passport virtually without any background checks. As a result, hundreds of alleged “street criminals” just “disappear.”
Amsterdam welcomes 18 million tourists every year – more than the total population of the Netherlands. The city has recently been hit by a string of violent incidents. In late June, a motorcycle gang member was arrested after he allegedly fired an anti-tank missile at an office building which houses a magazine publisher in Amsterdam. Just days later, a van crashed into the head office of daily newspaper De Telegraaf in the Dutch capital, in what police believe was a deliberate attack. Neither incident resulted in casualties.
Last week, a Briton was shot in the head outside a café in Amsterdam by a fellow national in what police described as a gang feud. An international manhunt was launched after the incident. The shooting victim remains in the hospital in stable condition.
Professor of Early Modern History, King’s College London
Right now, it’s Bitcoin. But in the past we’ve had dotcom stocks, the 1929 crash, 19th-century railways and the South Sea Bubble of 1720. All these were compared by contemporaries to “tulip mania”, the Dutch financial craze for tulip bulbs in the 1630s. Bitcoin, according some sceptics, is “tulip mania 2.0”.
Why this lasting fixation on tulip mania? It certainly makes an exciting story, one that has become a byword for insanity in the markets. The same aspects of it are constantly repeated, whether by casual tweeters or in widely read economics textbooks by luminaries such as John Kenneth Galbraith.
Tulip mania was irrational, the story goes. Tulip mania was a frenzy. Everyone in the Netherlands was involved, from chimney-sweeps to aristocrats. The same tulip bulb, or rather tulip future, was traded sometimes 10 times a day. No one wanted the bulbs, only the profits – it was a phenomenon of pure greed. Tulips were sold for crazy prices – the price of houses – and fortunes were won and lost. It was the foolishness of newcomers to the market that set off the crash in February 1637. Desperate bankrupts threw themselves in canals. The government finally stepped in and ceased the trade, but not before the economy of Holland was ruined.
Yes, it makes an exciting story. The trouble is, most of it is untrue.
My years of research in Dutch archives while working on a book, Tulipmania: Money, Honor and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age, told me a different story. It was just as illuminating, but it was different.
Tulip mania wasn’t irrational. Tulips were a newish luxury product in a country rapidly expanding its wealth and trade networks. Many more people could afford luxuries – and tulips were seen as beautiful, exotic, and redolent of the good taste and learning displayed by well-educated members of the merchant class. Many of those who bought tulips also bought paintings or collected rarities like shells.
Prices rose, because tulips were hard to cultivate in a way that brought out the popular striped or speckled petals, and they were still rare. But it wasn’t irrational to pay a high price for something that was generally considered valuable, and for which the next person might pay even more.
Tulip mania wasn’t a frenzy, either. In fact, for much of the period trading was relatively calm, located in taverns and neighbourhoods rather than on the stock exchange. It also became increasingly organised, with companies set up in various towns to grow, buy, and sell, and committees of experts emerged to oversee the trade. Far from bulbs being traded hundreds of times, I never found a chain of buyers longer than five, and most were far shorter.
And what of the much-vaunted effect of the plague on tulip mania, supposedly making people with nothing to lose gamble their all? Again, this seems not to have existed. Despite an epidemic going on during 1636, the biggest price rises occurred in January 1637, when plague (mainly a summer disease) was on the wane. Perhaps some people inheriting money had a bit more in their pockets to spend on bulbs.
Prices could be high, but mostly they weren’t. Although it’s true that the most expensive tulips of all cost around 5,000 guilders (the price of a well-appointed house), I was able to identify only 37 people who spent more than 300 guilders on bulbs, around the yearly wage of a master craftsman. Many tulips were far cheaper. With one or two exceptions, these top buyers came from the wealthy merchant class and were well able to afford the bulbs. Far from every chimneysweep or weaver being involved in the trade, the numbers were relatively small, mainly from the merchant and skilled artisan class – and many of the buyers and sellers were connected to each other by family, religion, or neighbourhood. Sellers mainly sold to people they knew.
When the crash came, it was not because of naive and uninformed people entering the market, but probably through fears of oversupply and the unsustainability of the great price rise in the first five weeks of 1637. None of the bulbs were actually available – they were all planted in the ground – and no money would be exchanged until the bulbs could be handed over in May or June. So those who lost money in the February crash did so only notionally: they might not get paid later. Anyone who had both bought and sold a tulip on paper since the summer of 1636 had lost nothing. Only those waiting for payment were in trouble, and they were people able to bear the loss.
No one drowned themselves in canals. I found not a single bankrupt in these years who could be identified as someone dealt the fatal financial blow by tulip mania. If tulip buyers and sellers appear in the bankruptcy records, it’s because they were buying houses and goods of other people who had gone bankrupt for some reason – they still had plenty of money to spend. The Dutch economy was left completely unaffected. The “government” (not a very useful term for the federal Dutch Republic) did not shut down the trade, and indeed reacted slowly and hesitantly to demands from some traders and city councils to resolve disputes. The provincial court of Holland suggested that people talk it out among themselves and try to stay out of the courts: no government regulation here.
Why have these myths persisted? We can blame a few authors and the fact they were bestsellers. In 1637, after the crash, the Dutch tradition of satirical songs kicked in, and pamphlets were sold making fun of traders. These were picked up by writers later in the 17th century, and then by a late 18th-century German writer of a history of inventions, which had huge success and was translated into English. This book was in turn plundered by Charles Mackay, whose Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds of 1841 has had huge and undeserved success. Much of what Mackay says about tulip mania comes straight from the satirical songs of 1637 – and it is repeated endlessly on financial websites, in blogs, on Twitter, and in popular finance books like A Random Walk down Wall Street. But what we are hearing are the fears of 17th-century people about a 17th-century situation.
It was not actually the case that newcomers to the market caused the crash, or that foolishness and greed overtook those who traded in tulips. But this, and the possible social and cultural changes stemming from massive shifts in the distribution of wealth, were fears then and are fears now. Tulip mania gets brought up again and again, as a warning to investors not to be stupid, or to stay away from what some might call a good thing. But tulip mania was a historical event in a historical context, and whatever it is, Bitcoin is not tulip mania 2.0.
This spring, Google is introducing the self-driving bicycle in Amsterdam, the world’s premier cycling city. The Dutch cycle more than any other nation in the world, almost 900 kilometres per year per person, amounting to over 15 billion kilometres annually. The self-driving bicycle enables safe navigation through the city for Amsterdam residents, and furthers Google’s ambition to improve urban mobility with technology. Google Netherlands takes enormous pride in the fact that a Dutch team worked on this innovation that will have great impact in their home country.
OMG, OMG, OMG!
Source: ‘This is no life’: Dutchman allowed to be euthanized due to alcoholism — RT News
RT News
Nov 30, 2016
After battling the disease for eight years and undergoing 21 combined hospital and rehabilitation stints, Mark Langedijk came to his family with some shocking news – he wanted to end his time on Earth, saying “this is no life,” as he sipped vodka to combat the symptoms of withdrawal.
It was a decision which his brother Marcel said was taken “with a grain of salt” by the family, noting that “euthanasia was for people with cancer… people for whom death was already imminent. Euthanasia was certainly not [for] alcoholics.”
But Mark pressed on with his plan, and his request was eventually approved by a doctor from the Support and Consultation on Euthanasia.
Once approved, Langedijk was visited by a doctor who suggested dates for the euthanasia to take place.
“Go ahead [with] July 14,” he said, adding that it was a “nice day to die,” his brother Marcel wrote in an account published in the magazine Linda.
Marcel went on to describe the atmosphere of his brother’s final day, noting that he “laughed, drank, smoked, ate ham-and-cheese sandwiches and soup with meatballs” until the doctor arrived at this parents’ house.
Once the doctor arrived, she explained the procedure before telling Mark to get into bed and stay calm – and that’s when the tears began.
“We cried, told each other that we loved each other, that it would be all right, that we would care for each other, that we would see each other again. We held each other,” he said. “If it was not so terrible, it would have been nice.”
Describing the final moments of his brother’s life, Marcel wrote: “Mark’s eyes turned away, he sighed deeply. His last. Dr. Marijke injected the third syringe. His face changed, lost color. My little brother was dead.”
More than 5,500 people ended their lives under the Netherlands’ euthanasia law last year. The law was passed 16 years ago, making the country the first in the world to legalize the practice.
Although the Netherlands’ euthanasia law initially only applied to those undergoing “unbearable suffering” with no prospect for improvement, it has since allowed for multiple deaths to take place under the label of “psychiatric suffering,” according to a study published in April.
In October, health and justice ministers argued that healthy older people who believe their life is complete should also “be allowed to finish that life in a manner dignified for them.” They hope to draft a law on the matter by the end of 2017.
Tales from the Conspiratum 
