De auteur van "The End of History and the last man", Francis Fukuyama, sprak gisteren in Amsterdam over zijn nieuwste boek ("De oorsprong van de politiek", Contact). Het was een perfect Amerikaans optreden: alles uit het hoofd, geen aarzeling, geen verspreking, hier en daar humor, permanent veel bewijs van kennis. Moderator Frans Timmermans (PvdA, Tweede Kamer) had geen moeite hem bij te houden (evenmin als de zaal, daar zorgde de professor met zijn versimpelingen wel voor) maar wel met het ingetogen blijven. Hoe vaak liet hij, Timmermans, niet blijken...

Journalist Willem Oltmans zou volgens het VPRO radioprogramma Argos hebben geprobeerd te handelen in zware wapens. Hij zou deze samen met zakenman Theodor Cranendonk aan de Surinaamse (leger)leider Desi Bouterse  hebben willen verkopen.  Daarbij heeft Oltmans de hulp ingeroepen van het Oostenrijkse bedrijf  Steyer-Daimler-Puch. (Pikant detail: de joodse fanilie Kahane die daar aan het hoofd staat verkocht ook  wapens aan Iran...

Last Saturday we celebrated the 300th birthday of David Hume, the British philosopher who had such a big impact on epistemology, aesthetics, historiography, political theory and religion. His was the world of books, study, morality and causality. We know little about the man Hume, who seems to have been rather shy and not all too good looking. But he had an appetite for women as he proved with his long lasting and complicated relation with Parisian Hyppolite de Saujon, the estranged wife of the Comte de Boufflers and...

In 2002 Ben Langlands & Nikki Bell spent two weeks in Afghanistan as 'war artists' , commissioned by the Imperial War Museum in London to design the house of Osama bin Laden. They visited a former dwelling of the jihadist at Daruntah and developped a design in which the public can stroll with the help of a joy stick. Osama's house as a computer game called Quake, developed by ID Software. The house they found stands on a promontory over looking a lake in the mountains east of Kabul. It consists of several structures set...

'We got him' , this is what former president George Bush said when Saddam Hussein was caught in his cave. "The world is a better place", are president Obama's words after Osama Bin Laden was killed in Pakistan. Bush the cowboy, Obama the undercooled leader. We can see him and his team watching the raid on video in the White House. Obama saw how Bin Laden was executed and agreed. Eight months of preparation, but the special forces where unable to arrest the terrorist in order to give...

One week a year Milan is occupied by thousands of (would be) designers. The Salone del Mobile attracts everyone who is in some way related to creation in the broadest sense: communication, fashion, food, wine, jewelry, furniture, lamps, packaging, photography, sculpture and what have you. Hotel rates and menu's double in price during this glorious week, but nobody seems to care. All rooms are booked, all tables reserved. Most visitors come for each other, not for the shows, exhibitions, lectures and experiences. Sitting on a terrace and watching...

The Dutch government has decided to close its embassy in Burkina Faso.  Why Ouagadougou? A few years ago it was decided to help this extremely poor country with tens of millions of Euros for educational purposes. The other financial support comes from countries like Germany that have taken up agriculture, clean water projects, infrastructure and logistics, among other themes. All these efforts can only succeed with an educated population to support the foreign initiatives. Now that the Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs has decided to close shop in...

If you think Google Latitude is the only way to share your location with the outside world or that FourSquare is just a nice little game, you are wrong. Cellphone companies know far more than you ever thought, as a German client found out last week. Through a court case he discovered that Deutsche Telekom, his provider, followed almost all his whereabouts and kept a record. In his case the provider recorded and saved 35.000 longitude-latitude coordinates in just six months time. This means one recording every seven...

Twitteritis is the fastest spreading addiction in our world. Talking to users of Twitter I know, under thirty, I found that one of the symptoms is naivity. Another is professional deceiving. And yet another is the quickly rising star of relatively uninteresting individuals. Let me explain. When you Twitter your stuff you cannot expect to think of all the consequences your opinion will have for your family, friends, employers etc. who you might have irritated or embarassed. I am talking not only of today, but about the far future....