The Dutch Iceland
Time to annex some countries. After all, if you can’t pay your debt, you become bankrupt and all your assets go to your creditors.
Archive for February 28th, 2010
Most-Travelled Man In The World
Interesting article in The Guardian on Charles Veley, who supposedly is the “most-travelled man” in the world, having visited 806 out of 871 “countries”.
Heligoland is number 806 on Veley’s list of visited “countries”. He ticked off all the 193 UN-recognised nations eight years ago, and since then he has been collecting islands and atolls, provinces and protectorates. These days he runs a website called Most Traveled People, which has 8,000 members, mostly, like him, “competitive travellers”, trading stories about Mizoram, Kingman Reef and Rio Muni. He established it, he suggests, in an attempt to bring some rigour to these travellers’ tales, to rationalise the globe’s possibilities (and, you imagine, to advertise his own unprecedented wanderlust).
It hasn’t, he concedes, always worked out like that. The world of competitive travelling is, well, nothing if not competitive. For a start, deciding what is and what isn’t a separate “country” – “a discrete geographical, ethnological or political entity” – threatens to become almost a full-time job in itself. Border disputes are rife. “People put forward nominations and I collect those,” he says. “And whatever has the most nominations becomes a candidate, and then there is a voting process. Spain and France and Italy and several others are now divided into semi-autonomous regions. So it’s getting tougher…” He doubts anyone, not even himself, will ever get the whole list (which currently stands at 871). “We are always adding new places. And there are already some really difficult places out there. Like Scott Island, a New Zealand island toward Antarctica; only six people have ever landed on it.” He says this with a certain frustration.
Also some news about another traveler: Henk de Velde has published a book (in Dutch) on his experiences during the first two years of his “never-ending voyage”.
Metempsychosis
Metempsychosis from Alain Lores on Vimeo.
Obama Signs One-Year Extension Of Patriot Act
This is how “emergency powers” become permanent, creating a new baseline for measures that go even further.
President Barack Obama has signed a one-year extension of several provisions in the nation’s main counterterrorism law, the Patriot Act. Provisions in the measure would have expired on Sunday without Obama’s signature Saturday.
The act, which was adopted in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, expands the government’s ability to monitor Americans in the name of national security.
Three sections of the Patriot Act that stay in force will:
- Authorize court-approved roving wiretaps that permit surveillance on multiple phones.
- Allow court-approved seizure of records and property in anti-terrorism operations.
- Permit surveillance against a so-called lone wolf, a non-U.S. citizen engaged in terrorism who may not be part of a recognized terrorist group.
Obama’s signature comes after the House voted 315 to 97 Thursday to extend the measure.
The Senate also approved the measure, with privacy protections cast aside when Senate Democrats lacked the necessary 60-vote supermajority to pass them. Thrown away were restrictions and greater scrutiny on the government’s authority to spy on Americans and seize their records.
Gemeenteraadsverkiezingen Idiotie 8
De stroom aan achterlijke campagnefilmpjes blijft maar doorgaan. Nu weer één van het CDA. Dit keer op op het nummer YMCA van The Village People. Rare keuze voor zo’n homofobe partij.
Closer To Truth
A PBS series which features conversations with many top thinkers on religion, science, and philosophy. On the site you’ll find a vast number of tv episodes and webisodes on such subjects as God, the cosmos and consciousness.
Subjects include:
What can Science say about God?
Arguing God from Religious Experience?
Does Consciousness Lead to God?
Arguing God with Analytic Philosophy
Lowlands uitverkocht?
Dit gaat nergens meer over. Vorig jaar was het eind april uitverkocht. Terwijl er nog hoegenaamd niets over de line-up bekend is.
Zie http://www.3fm.nl/nieuws/detail/344147/Lowlands-al-uitverkocht%3F
Zie ook http://www.lowlove.nl/nieuws/lowlands-2010-bijna-uitverkocht
- Update: Het is officieel! Zie http://www.lowlands.nl/news.php?page=620
- Update 2: Het is een fout, er zijn nog 10.000 CJP-kaarten over! http://festivalinfo.nl/news_detail.php?news_id=9195
