Van alles en nog wat (Stuffs)

Well, the Dutch Government has reached a new pre-kindergarden low and this country is yet in another crisis. Tom de Graaf, vice prime minister Democrat resigned last night because a bill he proposed got rejected. Not because of the idea of the bill, but because it was seen as too hasty and not detailed enough. He of course sees it as a defeat and leaves, against the will of a large majority of politians as well as citizens. Our governing coalition is made up of mostly right-winged Christians and a smaller amount of right-winged "liberals" ("the rich people party") and a very small, yet neccessary amount of Democrats. Without the democrats the government does not have a majority in the parlament. So now, after the resignation of Tom de Graaf, the Democrats are putting preassure on the government again and want to talk about the initial negotiations. I mean, I am myself more a fan of the social democrats, that's a different party, they are in the opposition, but in statistics they have th ehighest percentage now, if there were elections. Nevertheless the democrats in the coalition piss me off a lot. They have good ideas but the chicken out on a lot of things, they never push things through against the other two right-winged parties, so they never get their way. But the second it comes to boiling point people resign and the whole party threatens to leave the coalition. Happened before and it's happening again. The entire parlament in this country is a joke. The unwillingness of the christian right-winged and the rich people party to make any sort of concessions towards the rest of the country is ridiculous. The government collapsed in 2002 because of kindergarten-like quarrels and then there were re-elections, where all coalition parties lost votes, however they just re-formed the same coalition and just took the democrats in for the extra couple percent.

So, I'd say, kick ALL of them out, and start over altogether. I'm tired of all that BS and I'm not the only one.

Something different, yet not entirely off subject. The EPO is being treated like shit by the Dutch Authorities. As a result a huge amount of employees want the EPO to move and other countries have already offered the EPO a location and all sorts of priviledges that the Netherlands signed for but just plain ignores. And it's jnot the tax-related priviledges I'm talking about, it's the kind of stuff that concerns family members, residency permits, housing, ID cards, the basics.

Problem is, if the EPO moves, I'm out of a Job, and so would the future Angel. I'm not going to move to Italy, I don't like Italians. I mean I could move to Spain maybe, or to Munich or something, but I doubt that would be an option. So it sucks big time. I hope the Dutch government rethinks their attitude because if the EPO leaves, half the people who work here will lose their job because they are dutch and they cannot just move like that. So that's like another 2000 unemployed dutch people, and don't forget the HUGE and I mean HUGE amount of Money the EPO pays the dutch government every year. Add to that the large amount of rich people who don't earch their money in Holland but do SPEND it here. That's no good for the sick economy. If the EPO leaves, many of the other 20 international organisations will move. It will destroy a lot I can tell you that much.

Okay and thirdly, I wish all of you guys some Happy Easter Holidays. For us it's just 4 days (long weekend) but it's something and if the weather stays like this we might even move out buttocks to the beach or dunes or something. I know we should.