"Passion is more important than ability. You can lean skills, but you can't learn passion." According to Tom Peters, the world's most expensive management guru, who blogs here. The world is desperate for original out-of-the-box thinkers who don't fit the box, but color outside the lines. His presentation slides (free download) prove the point, there's no uniformity.
Saint Nicholas rocks! As a true apostle he even made his way to the desert of Afghanistan, to bring presents to the Dutch peace forces. Horses are no good there, so he took a camel. I guess the Taliban guys were so surprised, that they forgot to fire at such an easy target.
The political landscape is shifting again. The most remarkable thing is that most established and/or middle-of-the-road parties lost seats, while the outspoken parties (SP, Wilders/Party for Freedom, CU and the Animal Farm Party) won. Looks like this time is asking for clear convictions. Of course with more outspokenness on the both the left and right, it's not easy to form a workable coalition. The most likely (but still difficult) option at this moment is CDA-PvdA (centre right and centre left) with the Christian Union, which would be historical because it gives the Evangelicals (who doubled their seats) a first-time leverage influence in the coalition talks.
Election Day. I'm on my way to Copenhagen, but Karolien will vote for me. Over the past five years every election in Holland has been quite uncommon, so I'm curious to see how things will turn out today. To get in the mood, check out this funny movie on YouTube.
Willemijn, who joined us in the SHIFT training, is one of the mail women of passiepost.nl ('passion mail'), a mobile mail service for creative, personal snail mail. Don't you dare to type a Word-letter in Times Roman on your PC, print it and put it in an envelope. Real passion is expressed in a different way, it should be a surprise for the person who receives it. An interesting website where even the menu is different on every page.
In Frisia, the most northern province of the Netherlands, a rescue operation is going on to save a herd of about 100 horses that stranded a few days ago on a tiny patch of ground when a fierce storm flooded the area outside the dikes. Many of the animals have spent two nights knee-deep in water, and 18 have drowned in the area outside Marrum. The owner of the horses will likely be persecuted for negligence, as animals have to be brought to the safe areas by October 15.
Karolien and I went to see Paul Verhoeven's new thriller war movie 'Blackbook'. It's about a young Jewish woman, Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten), who tries to survive in Nazi-occupied Holland. As part of her work for the Dutch resistance she starts a relationship with German SD officer Ludwig Müntze (Sebastian Koch, who also played Albert Speer), to spy out and bug the Nazi headquarters in The Hague, but then really falls in love with him. The movie is less black and white then 'Soldier of Orange', Verhoeven's first war movie that brought him international recognition. The good guys can be bad, and the bad guys good. Interesting detail: the 'Christians' in the movie all have quite distorted personalities. It's an intriguing, fast moving, high quality movie that keeps you glued to the screen from beginning to end.
In the run-up to the elections, GeenStijl weblog published a photoshopped picture of our Prime Minister Jan-Peter Balkenende as a Mao-style 'great leader', while youthful Christian-Democrats printed T-shirts with their hero Che Balkenende. Does this express a latent longing for revolutionaries?
Bram Flippo invited me and a few other guys for a viewing of his favorite movie 'As it is in Heaven'. Set in rural northern Sweden, this moving story is about a famous musician who suffers a heart attack, and - because he needs rest - decides to return to the village of his youth. There he starts directing the local choir, helping everyone to discover their own sound, and bringing this in harmony with others. When this happens, people start to blossom and emotions that have been suppressed for decades surface. This leads to a head-on encounter with the local church pastor who wants to keep people in the system. It's a touching movie of people who discover their god-given potential and fly out.
Intermediair always has interesting statistics. They report that worldwide American individuals give most generously to charity and missions. However, collectively the USA is at the bottom of the list, as the country gives only 0.13% of it's gross national product to aid and social-economic development of nations (and this includes so-called 'economic aid' to Iraq which is not without political interest). In the Netherlands individual giving to charity and missions is on average, but collectively the Dutch give at least 0.7% of their gnp to social-economic development in Africa, South America and Asia. This difference in giving also explains why American missionaries are often doing much better financially than European colleagues, because individual giving is higher, while missions organisations in Europe normally don't get much out of the government's collective purse.
