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The Orchestrated Breakup: How the Musk-Trump “Feud” Was Likely a High-Stakes PR Masterstroke
In the whirlwind world of modern media, where perception is currency and attention is power, it’s naïve to think that billionaires like Elon Musk and political titans like Donald Trump simply drift apart due to personal disagreements. No, when the stakes involve billions of dollars, the idea that such a split could be spontaneous borders…
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Let’s live this shitty life first!
Anything beautiful requires a shithole. Entropy always increases. It’s impossible to have anything beautiful or worth living for without some open or hidden shitholes. Every animal that spends huge sums of energy to be beautiful can do this only by consuming excess energy and excreting waste via its anus or cloaca (and co2 from the…
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Ethnocentrism sucks, Meritocracy rules
The first point to make when writing about meritocracy is that it should be understood as multigenerational meritocracy. By adopting the adagium “my grandchildren can become anything they want and hope and strive for” socialism and communism – and the woke version of “equity” – are ruled out. And even radical feminism, since “mothers as…
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What if we had had Stone Age Cold Wallets?
Homo Erectus roamed the earth for over a million years with as his one and only tool a hand axe, glued to his hand like our mobile phones are today (let’s presume the females were carrying babies around). Then homo sapiens came along with plenty more tools and talents. What if an alien civilisation, let’s…
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Hayek’s idea of a hard fork democracy
It is way to crude to portray Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) as a kind of Ayn Rand style libertarian or anarcho-capitalist. He was not. As an Austrian drenched in German culture he just witnessed the slide of his home culture into abject statism and authoritarianism from across the pond in Great-Britain. He “just” contrasted English classical…
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Tandem paragliding in Zell Am See Kaprun Austria
It would be crazy not to put a post about tandem paragliding on this website bearing my name. Hajo Smit has truly found his calling taking passengers of all walks of life out flying in some of the most beautiful mountain area’s. Recently I have started offering paragliding tandem flights not only in Zell Am…
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Climate change and the “180 degrees fallacy”
When a leader guides a company, a country or even the whole world towards some predefined goal, it’s easy to change course when you realize you are some angle of your bearing. But once for some obscure reason you’ve succeeded in actively moving a whole caravan in the opposite direction of the truth, it becomes…
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Will RF Kennedy jr. drop the hammer?
In an earlier post on the promising candidacy of RF Kennedy jr. I discussed his climate fallacies. Then I realized that there is another area where the last hope for the Democrats is somehow trapped in his own reasoning. When Jordan Peterson asks him about the fact that our young generation is totally demoralized by…
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Podcast Exloo 10 juni 2023
Bij deze mijn eerste “Opa Jan-Ferdel” podcast. Editie 2023. Thema: gronden, wat betekent dat? Allemaal super veel plezier en mooie momenten in Drenthe gewenst vanuit Oostenrijk. Ben benieuwd hoe jullie deze dingen zien. Een mailtje naar hajosmit gmail.com mag altijd. Briska: Wat betekent “gronden” in jouw praktijk met klanten? Veel luisterplezier misschien op weg in…
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RF Kennedy jr is 50% wrong about the climate
Recently Jordan Peterson had the totally admirable RF Kennedy jr on his podcast and it was all marvelous (yet sad about the state of our politics) but predictably the climate was going to be a contemptuous issue between the two. As a lawyer specialized in environmental litigation Kennedy jr is used to roughly follow the…