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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…
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Do we really need a Unifying Story or just “good music”?
The new arcforum.com website as per spring 2022 opens with six key questions possibly to be resolved at the first gathering of the new high level anti-apocalyptic pro-freedom movement in october in London. The first of these questions might prove to be the most fundamental of them all and the answer to it will bear…
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Gender pronouns and the true colors of Energy
Jordon Peterson’s meteoric rise as a public intellectual started with his refusal to accept gender pronouns. To be precise it started when Canada introduced legislation that would make it a criminal act to not use the pronouns a given LGBTQ+ person would want to be addressed with. His particular point was that he wouldn’t mind…
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Climate and Peter Singer’s drowning child analogy
Apparently Peter Singer (1946) is one of the most preeminent ethicists on the globe right now. Applied ethics I might add, and I like that. What’s the use of ethics if it’s not easily applicable. His paper I need to respond to is “Famine, Affluence and Morality” that he wrote back in 1971 as his…