Dirk Gently is the character created by Douglas Adams, famous for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I had almost forgotten I had read about the ‘holitic detective’ in Adams’ book Salmon of Doubt. Only recently I discovered Netflix runs a series on this character. The series is pretty awesome.
The transcription feature in Microsoft Teams works perfectly, as my colleague informs me. He has sent me the transcription of the meeting we just concluded.
OK.
OK. OK.
He used the black from the coop. Stick to you Muslim with with our something. OK, for overhead and he is it document.
AFK Girl California phone and doing the blood. Either get it the document over, so yeah, I’ll need the. Is it a lot?
Yeah, 16.
The meeting was in Dutch.
Yesterday, I stumbled upon Trump’s Project 2025. This project is an astonishing fascist agenda of the ultra-right wing of the Republican party that seeks to overthrow the government and install an autocratic government in which the president has all the power.
The language on the website is so amazingly hateful. What is behind this hate between left and right in the US that led to this extreme divide between the people in the US?
The 180-day playbook describes a swift transition of the entire government. For example, under the term “personnel is policy,” thousands of political jobs are planned to be re-staffed with “dedicated conservatives.”
Under the term “religious freedom,” which they claimed to correlate with poverty, economic growth, and peace, an orthodox Christian policy is promised to be instituted that bans abortion rights, LGBTQI+ rights, etcetera.
The next conservative Administration must champion the core American value of religious freedom, which correlates significantly with poverty reduction, economic growth, and peace. It should train all USAID staff on the connection between religious freedom and development; integrate it into all of the agency’s programs, including the five-year Country Development and Coordination Strategies due for updates in 2025; strengthen the missions’ relationships with local faith-based leaders, and build on local programs that are serving the poor.
We have enough evidence of what an orthodox Christian society will bring. What any society based on an orthodox religion produces: intolerance, oppression, government violence, racism, discrimination, and other extreme outgrows.
We can only hope that the people in the US, especially those typically supporting the Republican party, will distance themselves from this autocratic threat. The alternative is probably not their ideal either, but it seems approachable and rational.
Sometimes, you are telling your story so confidently. How elegantly you solved that solution. Then you get that one question that silences you for a couple of seconds, and all you can say is “… o shit”.
We can become so blind to the omissions in our stories that we overlook the most obvious shortcoming, that question that we overlooked and we should have an answer for.
Today was one of these days. We worked on this for a year and a half, and then this person in the audience asked, “And what if this XYZ widget in your thing here fails?”
… Silence … o shit!
From Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls:
Zijn moeder was van nature meegaand en ze rekende het tot haar voornaamste plicht om geen moeilijkheden te veroorzaken.
His mother was compliant by nature, and she considered it her first duty not to cause trouble.
Such a Murakami sentence.
I would love to see this local shopping guide for Amsterdam, or, say, Randstad.
Great idea!
Awesome video by Epic Spaceman on shrinking to atom level without getting disoriented. (Via kottke.org)
I caught our cat jumping in one of the boxes under my desk. Why do cats do this?
One theory is that they feel safe in a box. But just the image of a square on the ground seems to also attract them.
All recent articles on the topic seem to refer to the same study.
More research is required.
Oh, they jump in other boxes and crates, too.
American-Palestinian Mo Husseini wrote to most sensical thing on the Israel/Palestina situation in 50 Completely True Things.
More than a year ago, I became a vegetarian. Actually, I am a pescatarian; I do eat fish, although I try to limit that, too.
Sometimes, it’s hard to eat vegetarian. When visiting people who are not prepared for it, for example, and also at home, when the rest of the family does want to eat meat. (And I’m not the evangelical type; they have to decide for themselves.)
But it also has advantages. In a restaurant, a vegetarian diet pleasantly limits the choices to no more than a handful of options. Easy, no choice, stress.
Sometimes the choice is limited to a bare pasta, but then you’re in the wrong restaurant anyway.
