Latest on Fri, 09:25 am
Distinctively Dutch
Christie’s, London, had another auction last week. This one dedicated to Dutch photographers. They were lucky that the financial and economical crises seemed not to have reached the super rich art collectors. Five thousand up to twenty thousands euro’s was not unusual. Most was paid for “the ice cream parlour” from the series “Rain” by Erwin Olaf ( over € 22.000). But Ruud van Empel (“World”), Desirée Dolron (“Xteriors”) and Celine van Balen (Muslim girls) were very much in demand also.
Why?
Newsflash: Arwin van Buuren is the best there is!
News especially for the young and the young at heart.
Sheer bad luck trance DJ’s don’t compete in an Olympic sport. If that would have been the case, the Netherlands would have had an extra gold and silver medal.Read this:
De Nederlandse Armin van Buuren werd vannacht opnieuw uitgeroepen tot beste dj ter wereld, door de lezers van het Britse tijdschrift DJ Magazine. De trance-dj stond vorig jaar ook al op één. Tiësto, die de prijs in 2002, 2003 en 2004 in de wacht sleepte, werd tweede.
So compatriot Armin van Buuren is declared the best trance DJ of the year. The second year in a row. And the winner of 2002 till 2004,Tiësto, ranks number 2 in this list.
I’m sorry that this flash probably isn’t in time for this invitation: The top 100 DJs afterparty is set to rock London’s Lightbox through the early hours of Thursday Morning! .. Doors open at 3am and won’t close until the last man leaves! And admission is FREE!
“Asia is overcome by a tidal wave of common sense”
The quote is from Kishore Mahbubani, a learned and eminent Singapore citizen of Indian descent. He himself is making tidal waves in the media and universities by his books in which he castigates the West for arrogance, geo political incompetence and complacency, while at the same time he proclaims the ascent of Asian progress. While the US and Europe lack the capacity to understand the transformation the world is going through, Asia is marching to modernity with a huge, peace and stability loving middle class as result. In the process an ocean of new Asian brainpower – which always has been wasted- will become available and boost the developments.
As one might expect China is kind of a model to him. According to Mahbubani that country took two major beneficial decisions. One of them is that after the end of the cold war it didn’t copy the political system of the West (= liberal democracy), but only the economical one (free market economy). In that way it profited from the dynamics and vitality of the system, but could prevent the socio-political chaos the former USSR had and has to deal with. The other one is a geo strategic one: China offered a free trade agreement to the Asean and Asian countries and executed it. The outcome of that decision is that the Asian hemisphere as a whole benefits from a remarkable economic growth.
I love mankind, but we are heading for trouble. Big time.
Though I’m in a gloomy mood, I hereby declare I love mankind. But, lets be honest about it, the world would probably have been a better place without the human species.
I love believers. They are my fellow men and women after all. But don’t you think the lot of them wouldn’t be so fucked up, if they never ever had been in touch with their ideology?
Surrounded by friends and family members who are economists of a kind, I can’t but love economists. I do so also because they are part of mankind. And because, as professionals, they are believers. They usually believe economy is a science. The only science with an absolute unshakable truth: the free market. As you know in this ideology the invisible hand is God and Milton Friedman is his prophet. To them there is no economy, but free market economy. There is no alternative.
Quickie 2: Seven Strong Women
What happens when you love literature and strong women? Well, at one moment in your life you are bound to hit upon a selection of books about (fictional) strong women. Well, actually it happened several times. And here is the last one. In this case only about Anglo-Saxon books and strong leading characters. The list was composed by stine jensen , who, I guess, is a strong lady herself. I very much tend to agree with her choice. Some of her “ten best†I never read however, so I’ve no own opinion on them. The rest is, if you would ask me, very good or excellent indeed. But I should confess at the outset that my order of rank and motivation slightly differ from hers.