BBC One: Cars, Cops and Criminals uncritically showing a huge police “crackdown” on “criminal motorists”. BBC Two: Generation Jihad on how the internet is radicialising British Muslims, full of terrorist experts with yankee accents, lots of scary grainy simulated footage and thudding music. Coincidence? Yes, but that doesn’t make this cheerleading for the database driven, cctv enabled police state any less annoying.
Here is the news
Sheer indulgence
Cuttlefish.
Twenty years ago today…
One of those moments where you knew the world you grew up in had changed. Those two-three years between the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Gulf War were incredible, when it seemed the whole world would be set free. I grew up in the eighties with regular nightmares about nuclear war and all of a sudden not only was the Cold War finished, but the worst oppressive regime in the world had actually freed the symbol of the resistance against it and was negotiating how to end itself. things looked so great and then it all turned to shit again, with South Africa today being the best evidence for the idea that having equal rights is a necessary, but not a complete condition for creating an equal society.
Antifascists are the real terrorists!
With local elections to be held early next month, the AIVD, the Dutch security and intelligence service warns about an insidious new threat in the runup to these elections: the threat of antifascist demonstrations (Dutch). In a letter sent to all mayors in the Netherlands, the AIVD describes the sinister group responsible for this threat: AFA, Anti Fascistisch Actie and its methods. It makes for chilling reason the way this group is in the habit of contacting local governments to advice them on racism, organises counterdemonstrations against nazi intimidation and even organises within local communities to defend against racist aggression! Worse, they even deliberately cause the racists and fascists they organise against to attack them and beat them up.
Ironically, the AIVD even accuses AFA from infiltrating rightwing groups in order to gather intelligence on them — something the intelligence services have never done themselves, at least succesfully.
This piece of fearmongering, silly at it is, does show the mindset of those supposedly guarding us. Rightwing, racist and even fascist intimidation is not a problem, but attempts to defend against it are beyond the pale. This is of course neither new nor surprising, considering the rightwing sympathies of most intelligence services. As long as rightwing violence doesn’t threaten the state directly it’s tolerated, even encouraged, while leftwing activism is always a threat, no matter how legitimite or innocent, even in supposedly democratic states. What is new is how blatant this warning was, something we have not seen in a while. A more paranoid person might wonder about possible connections between this, the economic situation and the way this is used as an excuse for the drastic budget cuts the government wants to force through parliament…
Soup Kitchen
Is one of those quirky hipster Amsterdam restaurants, barely half a stop out of Centraal Station, just follow the five or one, specialising in, well, soup. Nice soup, judging from the way S, is slurping it down at the moment. But really, why should I bring soup halfway through town to her when the hospital is supposed to provide food for her, tailored to her exact requirements?
Because it’s crap. Bad enough the visitors restaurant believes reheating microwave precooked meals is the only way to cook and can be sold at prices more expensive than if you had the same meal properly cooked in a proper restaurant. But infinitely worse the food for the patients, as I’ve now experienced both first and secondhand. Three meals a day: breakfast at eight, supper at twelve and dinner at five, with the one hot meal of the day for some stupid reason in the middle of the day, perpetuating an obsolete Dutch custom long since abandoned by anybody sensible.
Supposedly you’re able to chose what you want for any of the meals, but a) the choices are limited and b) you’re lucky to get what you ordered one time out of five. With breakfast and dinner, the choice is between various kinds of dry sliced breads, your choice of cheese (sweaty anyway you slice it) and/or cold mystery meats (dry again) and/or those little cups of hotel jam/hagelslag/butter, perhaps with some form of soup (if you like the one on offer) or snack (usually deepfried, often egg based). With supper, it’s a choice of boiled or mashed potato or variants on it, with some kind of meat (veal is a favourite, or the Dutch equivalent of chicken kiev), gravy and one of three or four kinds of vegetables. Some form of dessert is also on offer. Theoretically there are also vegetarian and restricted diet versions of the menu on offer as well, but we haven’t seen those yet.
And if there’s anything S. needs it’s a restricted diet. She can’t eat eggs, artificial butter, cheese, deep fried stuff, too much fat or protein, certain vegetables and certainly no grapefruit (apparantly a deadly fruit for kidney transplant patients) and yet she keeps getting offered these fat laden, protein rich deep fried foods she can’t eat. it’s as if there’s a fundamental disconnect between the medical care and the food services, with no thought given to integrate the patient’s dietary restrictions into their meal plans.
Which I suspect is a consequence of the hospital having outsourced the food supply. I’m not even sure it’s made on the premises, but whereever it’s made, by the time it gets to you all the hot food is stone cold and the cold food is all lukewarm or melted, if you’re lucky enough to get ice cream (too fat). It all resembles the worst kind of school dinner service, before Jamie Oliver gets to it, lowest common denominator food purely chosen for cost rather than health reasons.
Worse, the portions are too small.