Don Antonio Magino

Not this bridge, though. I’m from Rotterdam, and the only time it has been dismantled in recent times was for maintenance. After this, the city promised it wouldn’t be dismounted again - as I said, this bridge is considered very iconic by Rotterdammers. Naturally it leads to sentimental reactions when some rich fucker thinks he can just have it dismantled so his big fat private ship can pass through.

He’s also killing young Ukrainians, though, so that doesn’t seem like it’d work at all.

This reminds me of when there were plans to have part of an iconic (now no longer used) railway bridge in Rotterdam temporarily dismounted because Bezos’ superyacht being built elsewhere in the Netherlands wouldn’t fit through otherwise. There were calls to wait for it on another bridge in the city with tomatoes.

Luckily, this didn’t actually end up happening, but that it was seriously considered, was bad enough.

If you’re talking about the tram in the picture, it’s a ’30s RET tram.

This is Rotterdam, though ;p

Reputable German newspaper Die Zeit is also reporting this. Though it’s only a short temporary message.

He’s not an agent. He wants to gain control for his own reasons. It’s why he tried to get his asylum minister to rule by emergency legislation, like Orbán is doing in Hungary. His coalition partners in the end wouldn’t go along with this, though. This was last year.

Israel doesn’t need to pay him for him to be their cheerleader, anyway.

I went to Wuppertal for the Schwebebahn as well; it’s really cool and unique, and when making a turn you really get a floating sensation.

Something surprising to me were the ticket stamping machines on the stations. These are the exact machines we used to have in metro stations and trams in Rotterdam to stamp our strippenkaarten, but we’ve had a digital, ‘tapping’ system since the 2000’s. It was a huge blast from the past for me. They even made the exact ringing sound when pushing in the ticket I remember from my childhood.

Ich denke, dass Musk einfach versucht sich von seinem Trump-Abenteuer zu distanzieren, damit man seine Autos wieder ohne schlechtes Gewissen kaufen kann.

Es würde mich nicht überraschen wenn das sogar klappt.

The book does predate the North Korean utter totalitarianism. Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949, the year after the Democratic People’s Republic was founded. It was based on the Stalinist Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

Actually, I read earlier that they do have a factory in the Netherlands, but it doesn’t produce Happy Cola Fizz.

Admittedly I don’t know much about the actual workings of the asylum process.

However, I have no doubt whatsoever that the primary goal of Wilders is to attain power by whatever (non-violent, for as far as we know now) means necessary. One of the things Wilders immediately tried to do in this cabinet, through his asylum minister Faber, was sideline the chamber by declaring the framed asylum situation an emergency. This was just copying Wilders’ good friend Orbán, who has been able to rule by decree using emergency laws set into motion during covid.

Luckily, this didn’t work. Further, the Dutch political system works in such a way that absolute majorities are pretty much ruled out, always requiring cooperation with other parties. The biggest danger is parties like the VVD taking over PVV talking points and moving ever more to the right.

Actually, the amount of requests for asylum in the first quarter of this year has halved compared to the year before.

But it doesn’t matter whether asylum requests form an actual problem (and in reality it wasn’t problematic at all, except for problems that were caused by earlier VVD cabinets saving on centers for processing asylum requests). What matters is whether it can be framed as one. The PVV (like populists in general) is all smoke and mirrors.

At least now there is a chance again for a de facto cordon sanitaire to emerge.

I’m referring to an earlier Rutte cabinet (conservative-liberal VVD and christian democratic CDA) which relied on a confidence and supply construction with Wilders. Wilders got to go on with his opposition politics while supporting the coalition (not unlike what we’ve had this past year), but when the coalition wanted to save money because of a budget deficit, Wilders dropped his support and the cabinet fell. After this, Rutte was succesful in framing the PVV as unreliable and vowed never to work with them again, leading to the PVV becoming ever more irrelevant.

That was until the new VVD leader, Yeşilgöz, said she didn’t rule out working with the PVV during the last elections.

Vorsicht mit dem Haribo.

I’ve never bought anything there, and I’m not really sure what you’d buy there anyway… Very technical things?

For normal household goods, I buy from bol.com or from the webstore of whatever results come up in an internet search.

Books I buy from De Slegte (secondhand) or Donner, but these are also my favourite (physical) book stores. Especially Donner has a beautiful and impressive store in the center of Rotterdam.

Electronics I buy from Coolblue or physically in a Mediamarkt.

Cheap junk I get from Action, Xenos or other random junk stores. I’ve bought from TEMU twice, but I don’t think I will again. I don’t really need to. I’ve also bought from ebay once.

This is all very Netherlands-centric, of course.