The Netherlands

Since I mentioned the Netherlands in the last post and how they treat marijuana cultivation the same as we treat cotton and corn I thought I would throw in a few more interesting facts about the Dutch.
But first a couple tangentially related facts about the US. First the Pennsylvania Dutch, creators of some of the most of the distinctly American foods like apple pie are actually German, or Deutsche not Dutch. Second despite the government’s insistence that marijuana has no medical purpose, they maintain a research facility in rural Mississippi to study hemp and marijuana cultivation, and the properties of the plant.
Ok back to the Dutch.

Most of the Netherlands is below sea level, all those pastoral windmills you see in the pictures are not windmills they actually wind powered pumps to stop the country from flooding.

What I find most interesting about the Netherlands is almost nothing is illegal but guns and hard drugs. Squatting is legal so if you build a home someone else can move in and you can’t evict them. Pot is legal, but I already covered that. Prostitution is legal and there is a brothel in the Amsterdam airport. (This is cheap but I can’t resist, that gives a new meaning to the term layover.) The Netherlands was the first European country to legalize same sex marriage, which I have no problem with. However they legalized polygamy last year, which besides being a bad idea is a touch creepy. Among the flat wrong things you can do in the Netherlands is they permit bestiality, and some what look the other way at child pornography.
They have also fully decriminalized doctor assisted suicide, and dealt with a host of other social issues that divide America.
Now you would think that a country that values personal liberty to the point where it borders on anarchy (in my opinion), and hosts the World Court would be peace loving. Alas that is wrong, in the spirit that made the Dutch a world trading power and brought it wealth and power through a level of colonial oppression that England and Japan point to and say see how nice we were compared to them, the Dutch aren’t peaceful people. The Dutch supplied Saddam Hussein with much of the materials he used to make the chemical weapons he used on the Kurds and the Iranians during the 80’s. The Dutch are also among the world’s biggest arms dealers, technically they only resell, but the result is the same. They are truly an interesting people the Dutch, trying to atone for a brutal past by going way far to left. Meanwhile, immigrants from Turkey and Morocco have begun to stretch the very open society and renewing interests in neo-Fascism. Just a subtle reminder that every society has its problems and that even in a Utopia someone will be unhappy because they aren’t are happy as their neighbor.

Now I will leave you with a thought the full name of the Shell Oil is Royal Dutch Shell.