February 23, 2014

Quack causes ‘run’ on coffee grinders in bible belt

Filed under: Health,Religion by Branko Collin @ 2:35 pm

coffee-grinder-suzette-pauwelsAfter getting the local press to write about him, Ton van Wingerden, 74, managed to cause a run on coffee grinders at the local Blokker (household goods shop) in Goeree-Overflakkee. An employee told Hart van Nederland they’re “selling six coffee grinders a week, which is a lot for such a device.”

Van Wingerden’s miracle cure is the powder of ground oyster shells. It’s not quite clear from the original article what the powder is supposed to heal, as with all alternative medicine it appears to heal everything the sufferer believes it will heal. Also unclear is why the national press is picking up on this now considering the original story ran last spring. Other methods for crushing oyster shells as reported to Van Wingerden were walking over them in clogs, squashing them between the jaws of a vise or wrapping them in a tea cloth and then hitting them with a hammer.

Goerree-Overflakee is one of the staunchest Christian bulwarks in the Dutch bible belt and is the southernmost part of the province of South Holland. It also borders on Lake Grevelingen where oysters are cultivated.

(Photo by Suzette Pauwels, some rights reserved)

Tags: ,

July 5, 2013

Measles epidemic in Dutch Bible Belt

Filed under: Health by Branko Collin @ 6:33 pm

In the past weeks 230 people in the Netherlands have been infected with measles, Telegraaf reports.

The epidemic is concentrated in the Bible Belt where many Orthodox Protestants live who often refuse to get vaccinated. The RIVM (National Institute for Public Health and the Environment) expects the actual number of cases to be higher because not every sufferer goes and sees a doctor. So far seven people have been admitted to hospital, six of which were children. The RIVM expects the worst is yet to come. A recent measles epidemic in the UK lasted eight months and resulted in 1,219 reported cases and one death.

Municipal health services have started inoculating children ‘on the sly’, NRC reports. The health services have sent letters to Orthodox Protestant parents offering to inoculate their children at home, after school hours. So far a few dozen children have been inoculated this way, only a small percentage of the children of the community.

The Dutch Bible Belt runs from Zeeland in the South West all the way to the topmost tip of Overijssel in the North East, a bit like a spear stuck into the side of country. The Reformed Congregations are the biggest Orthodox Protestant church of the country with 106,002 members. It is the only major church in the Netherlands that is growing, presumably because of a large procreation rate. The largest religion in the Netherlands is ietsism, which accounted for 36% of the population in 2006.

(Public domain illustration via Wikimedia Commons)

Tags: , ,

August 14, 2009

Hacking at Random: hackers in the bible belt

Filed under: Online by Branko Collin @ 2:19 pm

har_09_02Yesterday was the start of the official, lecture-filled part of Hacking at Random, an episode of a Dutch hackers convention that takes place every four years under a different name and at a different location. This year’s HAR is situated at Nunspeet, in the Dutch bible belt, and as always has a strong emphasis on debating the confluence of politics and technology.

Speakers this year include the guy who’s getting a camera planted in an empty eye socket, the people who make prostheses for 50 bucks instead of 250,000 (presumably we’re not talking about eyes anymore), IP/IT lawyer Arnout Engelfriet, and the infamous BREIN organisation, the Dutch ‘RIAA’.

If I have the time, I will report on the activities from the scene of the action in future postings.

Tags: , , , ,

June 1, 2014

Roy Donders banned by Barneveld bible bashers

Filed under: Fashion,Religion,Sports by Branko Collin @ 11:32 am

juichpak-jumboThe king of tracksuits, media phenomenon and self-proclaimed stylist Roy Donders, has gotten himself in a spot of bother over his last name.

Donders is involved in a loyalty scheme for the Jumbo supermarket chain that lets football fans save up for a garish orange tracksuit (dubbed cheering suit) as part of the commercial frenzy leading up to this year’s World Cup and has lent his name to the slogan “We geven ze op hun donders” (‘let’s give ’em hell’, except that ‘donder’ means ‘thunder’).

This, according to Telegraaf, angered shoppers in the bible belt for an as yet unexplained reason. Citizens of Barneveld asked the local supermarket to remove all advertising for the scheme. The store manager gave into their demands.

Ma Donders was furious, Omroep Brabant wrote: “I don’t know what kind of faith these people have, but Donders is our last name. You cannot change that.” Meanwhile the issue has become moot because of a run on the hideous tracksuits—Jumbo claim to have run out. A spokesperson told Omroep Brabant that sales felt like “Christmas in May”.

See also: Tracksuit king Roy Donders quits his house parties

(Photo of Donders holding his track suit’s jacket: Jumbo.)

Tags: , , , ,

August 4, 2016

Small Dutch town revives Medieval beer tradition

Filed under: Dutch first,Food & Drink by Orangemaster @ 8:48 pm

The Bible belt island town of Goeree-Overflakkee, South Holland, has started brewing the first local beer since the Middle Ages. The beer is called Solaes, and it is brewed by Jan-Willem Kramer, inspired by local Medieval artists of those times.

Following what seems to be the religious tradition of goodwill, Kramer was also inspired by a visit to an Amsterdam brewery that notoriously employs people who normally cannot easily find a job – I’m guessing it was De Prael – and decided to do the same thing.

The city sorted out a space to set up the brewery and Kramer learned how to make beer – so far so good. Local entrepreneur of a goodwill shop Cees de Knegt joined Kramer and now they organise beer tastings, but only for a few hours on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

The pair have no plans more than to sell beer to locals and to “stray beer collectors”. If anyone has had some, let us know.

(Link: www.ad.nl)

Tags: ,

November 2, 2015

Religious rural youth more violent than urban youth

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 3:10 pm

drinking2

In his recently published article entitled ‘Taking the Conservative Protestant thesis across the Atlantic’ published in the British Journal of Criminology, Don Weenink of the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences at the University of Amsterdam claims that ‘Conservative Protestant rural youth are more often involved in violent crimes than their counterparts in urban areas, who also use less violence than average’. Less violence is possibly correlated with a total lack of nightlife, which in turn could also explain all the drinking and drugs.

Weenink collected data from 8000 Dutch young people aged 15 to 30. According to him, drinking alcohol is often seen as harmless pleasure by parents and young people in rural areas, whereas in urban areas it is often associate alcohol use with antisocial behaviour. As well, Protestant villages in the Dutch Bible belt have young people taking matters into their own hands in conflict situations. We only know the Bible Belt as a place where quacks suggest grinding oysters shells as medicine and children suffer and even die of measles for ‘religious reasons’.

Religious places like Urk and Volendam, also fishing villages, are often pointed out by many as full of bored kids that drink until they drop and take lots of drugs, usually cocaine. In 2012 quaint Volendam has more people snorting coke than cities like Paris, London and Milan. According to a 2003 Dutch television documentary ‘Fish, drugs and rock n’ roll’, the youth become drug addicts and alcoholics at a very young age and their religious leaders either thump Bibles or suggest they spend Saturdays playing board games with their parents. The documentary tells of Urk youth going to church to take and deal drugs.

(Link: phys.org, image an early 2000 Dunglish advert that wanted to say ‘if you drink more, you will think less, but managed to say the exact opposite)

Tags: , , , , , , ,

June 16, 2013

Dutch working mothers are paid less than working fathers

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 10:34 pm

OK, this is somewhat old news (in fact, Dutch Daily News covered it two months ago), but I still want to write about it because this follows up on earlier stories. Basically what I am trying to find out is how we, the Dutch, define Enlightenment ideals such as freedom, equality and happiness. It is clear that they are important to us, but we have been pursuing aspects of these ideals hundreds of years before other Western nations did and as a result, when looking through a global lens, we seem to do everything exactly different.

As they say, Dutch women don’t get depressed.

Here is the deal. In many ways the Dutch are some of the least gender equal people in the world. Our ratio of men and women in management roles is similar to that of the United Arab Emirates—and the Arabs at least are working to improve theirs. Furthermore, 60% of all Dutch women do not make enough money to pay their way through life—but they like it that way! In fact, men want some of that part-time action too!

So now a new study has come out that adds another piece to the puzzle. It appears that gender inequality is especially strong among working parents in the Netherlands. On the other hand the income of single men and women without children who work full-time jobs are exactly the same. I thought that was interesting. You’d expect at least some old-fashioned sexism to depress even those incomes by a couple of points. Perhaps that in the parts of our population where sexism is still rife (the Bible belt, anyone?) single, childless women with full-time jobs are rare.

If everybody is happy about this arrangement, then who I am to disagree? There is a difference between women being forced into inequality and women choosing inequality. Where things get weird is in relationships. The default Dutch marriage setting is that of community property (for now). The state sees a marriage as a contract between the state and two people. When the partners dissolve the wedding, the state typically demands that the high earner keeps supporting the low earner through alimony. What kind of incentives does an arrangement like that produce?

See also:

(Link: Statistics Netherlands. Photo by ValentinaST, some rights reserved)

Tags: , , , , , , ,

November 7, 2009

Fantasy political map of the Netherlands

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 11:53 am

This map shows the fake island kingdom the Netherlands could be if its geography fully followed its politics. In the real world, top left dogs Nijmegen and Groningen are separated by 200 kilometres, as are right wing islands Kessel and Urk.

Here’s a quick legend: links = left, rechts = right, rood = red, rijk = rich, steden = cities, and midden = middle.

The two regions that in reality do exist as geographical areas are the Bible Belt and the Rode Regio, an area that used to have a lot of communists, basically the Groningen country-side.

The map is one of two made by Weetmeer.nl, the other following more classical coastlines.

I can vouch for the position of Nijmegen, having lived there for ten years. Nijmegen’s and Groningen’s progressive and left-wing attitude may at least in part have to do with a large student body, making up ten percent of the population in the case of Nijmegen. Would the Catholic church have thought that when they started their university there in the 1920s as a bulwark against socialist forces?

(Link: Geen commentaar.)

Tags: , , , , , ,

August 14, 2009

Connected at last! [HAR 2009]

Filed under: Online by Branko Collin @ 7:54 pm

Yesterday I left my home around 8 am, and today around 3 pm I was finally connected to the grid at HAR 2009. During the previous three editions of this Dutch hacker camp (spanning 12 years), I had stayed at somebody else’s tent, and had relied on my host to make sure power, Internet and beer ran right up to two metres from my bed. This year my host couldn’t make it, and I suddenly realized that hooking up all these necessities (except the beer: I’ll live) takes actual work. With the help of Orangemaster as a sort of phone-based TomTom for locating missing cables I eventually succeeded.

The invisible fellow below kept watch over the camp yesterday. The next morning he was gone. Maker: unknown.

Previously: Hacking at Random: hackers in the bible belt

Tags:

May 29, 2008

Christians get knickers in a twist over cereal advert

Filed under: Religion by Branko Collin @ 12:56 pm

In Veenendaal, part of the Dutch bible belt, the local chapter of the SGP is “shocked,” “insulted,” and “hurt” over an ad for cereal which depicts a famous scene from the Old Testament, reports RTV Utrecht (Dutch). The Kellogg’s advert that so outraged the conservative Protestant party displays a prudishly covered Eve amidst a sea of apples, watched by a snake, and under a banner which reads “Meer fruit dan vroeger” (more fruit than before).

The SGP, known mostly for its extreme misogynist stance for which it undoubtedly borrowed heavily from the Old Testament’s Garden of Eden myth, has asked the city’s executive to condemn the campaign to Kellogg’s, which must be rubbing its corporate paws in glee for such a predictive gift of free advertising.

The manufacturer’s campaign features a second ad which also depicts a scene from a fairy tale (Snow White, to be precise), but as far as I know no one has protested that one.

Via Geen Commentaar (Dutch).

Tags: , , , , , ,