Hermen Loonstra🎙️

Stille Zaterdag. Verleidelijk om vast vooruit te grijpen, het al licht te laten worden, weg te bewegen van het donker. Ja, het wordt Pasen maar het is diep christelijke wijsheid dat verlossing en opstanding echt kracht hebben als je bewust bent van 't duistere dat je achterlaat.

Heel goed overigens hoe lekvrij de ploeg van Jetten, Bontenbal en Yesilgöz opereert. Samenstelling van het nieuwe kabinet en portefeuilleverdeling is zo goed als rond - maar niets van het gebruikelijke geroddel. Indrukwekkende discipline.

Riveting, extraordinary and brutally honest speech by Mark Carney, Canada's prime minister. God, I wish we would have European leaders like this. Here's an excerpt: In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel, later president, wrote an essay called “The Power of the Powerless,” and in it he asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself? And his answer began with a greengrocer. Every morning, the shopkeeper places a sign in his window: “Workers of the world unite.” He doesn’t believe in it. No one does. But he places the sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists — not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false. Havel called this living within a lie. The system’s power comes not from its truth, but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true. And its fragility comes from the same source. When even one person stops performing, when the greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack. Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down. For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We join its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that, we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection. We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, and we knew that international law applied with varied rigor, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim. This fiction was useful, and American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes. So we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition. Read/listen in full: globalnews.ca/news/11620877/…

De nieuwe quiz van Linda de Mol #indering is een soort kruising tussen 1 Tegen 100 en The Floor. Dat laatste programma lijkt voor John de Mol een duidelijke inspiratiebron want ook The Winner Takes It All is erop gebaseerd.

Bij de exitpoll hebben ze weinig rekening gehouden met de populariteit van Eddy in bepaalde gebieden. NSC kan nog winnen.