Willothewisp

Archive for the ‘General’ Category

It was a holiday weekend here in Holland, “Koninginnedag” , which normally is a happy little holiday with a chance for children to sell and swap toys, for teens and youngsters to drink and party and generally let go and for the rest to just meet family enjoy a good meal or two and slightly more wine than is good for us. This holiday we had some friends here to visit with their children for the weekend.

Sadly this year’s holiday was marred by a crazy guy in Apeldoorn trying to attack our Royal Family. Four people were killed on the spot when 38-year-old Karst T. drove his car through a crowd that had come to greet the royal family in Apeldoorn on Queen’s Day. Three others have died of their injuries since including Roel Nijenhuis, a member of the Royal Marechaussee, the Royal Military Police force. Of the ten who were injured, two are still in critical condition.
Traditionally our Royal Family have been pretty open and always ensured that they remained in close contact with the people, including physical contact with people and crowds. On such holiday days as these security has been very low key so we are not used to such horrid happenings here. This is not America with all of its violence and oppressive law enforcement so this has come as a big shock to our little nation.

In this country our ministers ride around on bicycles like the rest of us. Many ministers cycle between meetings in Den Haag with no thought for “security”, no bullet proof, gas guzzling cars here. When I was a child our long serving Prime Minister Vim Kok was well known for packing his whole family into his Austin Maxi car, hitching up the family caravan and touring around without any security people. I know this because on one of the few holidays I had with my parents we ran into him in Devon in England one summer, I recall it well still able to see him and my father talking, Wim in flip flops and grubby chinos!

I hope this attack by a crazy man will not change how we behave in this country, and more importantly how our institutions like the Royal Family behave. It is important that those in high office remain in touch with their people, not cut off an isolated behind bullet proof armour and glass because as we see from other countries this just instils an elitist mentality to those in office and give them ideas above what they should always keep in the front of their minds – they represent us and desreve no more protection than any other citizen.

On Friday at the Grote Kerk in Apeldoorn, thousands of people have took part in a contemplative service to mark the events of Queen’s Day, led by Apeldoorn Minister Rob Visser. In addition to prayers and the singing of psalms, the service also included a minute of silence for the victims. An official remembrance service for the victims of the Queen’s Day attack on the royal bus in Apeldoorn is to be held Friday 8 May in the town’s Orpheus Theatre. The mayor of Apeldoorn, Fred de Graaf, said that members of the royal family would definitely attend.

Author: Nina

Study: Children Exposed To Pornography May Expect Sex To Be Enjoyable

I came across this rather amusing little spoof news piece on “theonion.com” and thought you might enjoy it. I love this little site and I like that it shows us Europeans that Americans can see the perverse side of their society and even laugh at themselves, it was most freshing. Now I would like to find a similar Dutch site, anyone know of one ?

Author: Nina

Our little trip to the UK is coming to an end and tomorrow we head home. I think on balance it has been a pretty good trip with no mishaps and it looks like we are returning with the same number of kids that we arrived with so I consider that a success.

The whole purpose of the trip was for me to give some talks about home birth in the Netherlands and exchange knowledge with other midwives. I got to mix with English midwives and learn about midwifery in the UK and the current struggle for change in the face official obstruction and a barrage of male doctor misogyny that is truly breathtaking. I am leaving with a much more positive view of the future for pregnant women in the UK than I arrived with and that is due entirely to the stubborn persistence of British Midwives who have recognised things have to change and are working hard to drive that change.

I was dismayed at the dreadfully high number of teenage pregnancies in the UK. I saw girls as young as TWELVE, and typically fifteen to seventeen presenting themselves at the practice, this came as something of a shock. I took a quick survey of figures in the UK and came to the conclusion that teenage pregnancies run at a little over six times that of the Netherlands. The reasons for this seem to be several fold. Firstly there is the anglo-saxon reluctance to talk about sex between parent and child, teacher and pupil, this leads to the second issue of extremely poor sex education in school and the home. Also there are the mixed messages about sex from the adult world, this is being compounded by the first. There is an interest in other people’s sex lives, such as celebrities’, to an extent, but people are more able to separate that from real life. In the UK they really into things like Celebrity Love Island, wondering whether these people are going to have sex on TV in an almost juvenile way. In the UK it seems that the young can deal with the fantasy but not what the reality is for young people, again all compounded by lack of thorough sex education at an early enough age.

This lack of sex education also showed up in the pregnant women I saw here. In Holland my job is being made increasingly easier as that generation that benefitted from the full course of sex-ed at school which started in the 1980s has been coming to have their own children. When you have clients who know much more about their own body and how it works reproductively speaking they are better equipped to have babies. It is easier to teach them how to work with what their own body provides them with in order to have better pregnancies, and better births with far less pain and distress. In the UK this knowledge is clearly not there, even in the teens who should have benefitted from the UK Labor Government’s “much improved sex education”.

The British government had a plan to cut teen pregnancies but it was a very expensive flop. In some areas of England and Wales one in 66 schoolgirls conceives. The cornerstone of this policy was providing free contraception and emergency birth control without parental knowledge. Rather than engage in a long term education program that educated children from age eight they went for closing the stable door after the horse had bolted. Talk about stupid!

Statistics from the Department for Children, Schools and Families, reveal that of the 21 girls under 16 who fall pregnant daily, nine go on to have the child. Around 60 per cent will opt for an abortion – meaning that of the 23,371 under-age conceptions in England and Wales in the last three years, 13,555 were aborted. The Government wanted to halve the teenage pregnancy rate– the number of girls in England who become pregnant before they are 18 – by 2010. A reduction of 15 per cent on rates in the base year 1998 was supposed to be achieved by 2004, but that extremely modest, almost pointless target was missed.

The UK needs to get to grips with sex-education in the full, frank and highly detailed way that the Netherlands has and teach both the biology of sex and the personal skills required to allow children to have self respect and self determination (amazingly a recent government edict stated that sex education classes should NOT included any mention of morality without defining what they meant by “morality”).
Britain already has the highest rates for sexually transmitted diseases in Europe and are top of the European league for teen pregnancies, clearly government actions indicate they are aiming to become world leaders! They need to force parents to become involved and talk to their children and it has to be compulsory, no bloody silly opt-outs on religious or cultural grounds because unless British politicians develop the (rather ironically) balls to do this the UK is heading for even more of a social mess.

The other factor in many of these teen pregnancies seems to be drink, but that is a whole other post for another day.

Author: Nina

We have been in England a couple of days and already I believe that the English are truly insane. By this I do not mean that the country as a whole is insane, I mean that the institutions of England are insane, the government is definitely in the grip of some sort of Mad-Cow epidemic and their Prime minister Gordon (I-do-not-know-how-to-say-sorry) Brown is their chief mad heifer. Common sense no longer exists, here it has been replaced with “Health & Safety Culture”, freedom of speech has departed these shores to be replaced with “It has to be politically correct”. I kid you not.

We were in the Grand Arcade in Cambridge, it is a new shopping area that runs between streets, rather like a covered street (much like Mosse in Maastricht). It is quite striking as a piece of architecture, though by no means ground breaking, it is rather what I would describe as pleasantly conservative.  I watched as a man who had been taking some pictures of the interior was pounced upon by three private security guards and after a few moments discussion was thrown out. I asked our escort to ask the guards why they had thrown him out. She returned a couple of minutes later to tell me that photography was not allowed in there in case the pictures were used to plan a terrorist attack. The next logical step is to place black hoods over everyone entering in case they remember what they have seen and use that to plan a terrorist attack. This is crazy on so many levels but to ban photography in a public space on that basis is ridiculous. The man in question was white, very English looking with a large round belly, grey hair and a walking stick, in other words he was so as bout as far from “terrorist” as you were going to get. I then watched as man of middle eastern appearance, complete with beard took a photograph of his burkha covered wife and two children with his camera phone. This time I went and I asked the guard myself there why he was not throwing that fellow out to be told “Its only a camera phone and besides he’s ethnic”. I think you can begin to see why I think this country is off it’s collective rocker!

Later on we were in front of one of the colleges here, I cannot recall which one, with a lot of other tourists. Hilke was getting rather tired so we sat on the low stone wall and open a bottle of water for Jos while we watched the world go by for a while.  Two policeman came walking down the street and our escort commented to me that, and here I quote “British cops are nothing more than lemon coated skin heads with the power of arrest”. Interesting.

It seems that under the current government’s rule the police have been handed ever increasing powers of search, seizure and arrest under the guise of anti-terrorist legislation. If you try to take a picture of a British cops these days you could find yourself arrested under anti terrorist laws, it has happened, go and look in YouTube. Under similar powers the British police have been carrying our surveillance of anyone taking part in a protest, rather ironically filming them, and often making that information and their criminal records available to private companies. This is a clear violation of European Law and also it turns out, English law. Most recently they have been beating the crap out of anyone near a protest regardless of them being a protester or not. One man, a newspaper seller, was recently beaten to death by police in London during the G20 event there. It seems they also beat up numerous other people regardless of them actually doing anything wrong or illegal or even part of any demonstration or protest.  I blame their political masters for instilling a culture that of “anyone who protests is therefore a criminal”.

There is also the distortion on policing brought about by a government obsessed with “performance targets” . They set the police targets for arrests which has had the effect of the British police now preferring to pursue people for petty offences as these require far less effort than going after real bad people. They still count as an arrest  and have the bonus that they are usually far easier to prosecute because the offenders are invariably middle class citizens rather than the hardened criminal class. As a result what used to be the police’s biggest supporters now feel alienated, persecuted and living in fear that they will have their door kicked in by police wielding video evidence of a littering offence (it has happened).

The country  has definitely lost the plot, they give asylum to known war criminals, genocidal maniacs, murderers and rapists while arresting people for non-crimes and stifling legitimate protest by beating people up. The criminals are the ones who are running this country and their lick-spittles in the now highly politicised civil service. It disgusts me that the UK under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have colluded in the USA’s torture of  human beings (not to mention an illegal war), it sickens me that now Brown’s government (if you can call it that) have been proven to have lied and with held evidence of this collusion from their own courts. But it has been the witnessing for myself how far down into every day British society this culture of dishonesty and official oppression has pervaded that has most affected me. I can actually feel the depression bubbling up inside me.

Author Judith

I was amused to read that Bishops of the catholic church in the USA has banned any activity on church properties that have anything to do with the practice of Reiki. Reike is a spiritual practice developed in 1922 by Mikao Usui. He claimed to receive the ability of “healing without energy depletion”. A portion of the practice, tenohira or palm healing, is used as a form of complementary and alternative medicine today. What was funny was that the catholic bishops said the practice is “unscientific” and “inappropriate”, two words that the catholic church is intimately familiar with.

The Committee on Doctrine warns that the practice “lacks scientific credibility” which just about sums up all of religion so I wonder if any day now the catholics will be demanding that no one worships god in their churches, it is a natural extrapolation of their own argument after all. When you read their church guidelines things pass into the surreal; “ he who puts their trust in Reiki would be operating in the realm of superstition”- ARE THEY KIDDING ? They do that themselves every time they pray! It goes on to say that “Superstition corrupts one’s worship of god by turning one’s religious feeling and practice in a false direction” in other words “if your faith does not follow OUR dogma then it must be wrong”. Nothing changes.

Once again we see the catholic church totally misunderstanding what Reiki is really all about, seeing it as a threat it it’s own core business and then managing to make a total ass of it’s self by citing “superstition “ which is exactly what their entire belief structure is built around ! The catholic bishops should stick to doing what they are good at, hiding pedophiles in their own ranks for decades at a time a nd let ordinary people get on with their lives .

Author: Nina.