Loose ends

Last week and next week most of my time will be devoted to fencing; this weekend I followed a course to become juge, and I passed the theoretical exam. And next week is the annual general assembly of the club and I have to get the financial report in order.

Because of the judge course I completely missed the fabulous new evidence that the biggest problems in Belgium are all invented or created by the government:
The government decided on holding a memorial in Brussels where almost none of the survivors or family members came. Images show the Bozar hall with hundreds of empty seats. This happened because:
- Buizingen/Halle is one of those "difficult" communities in the belt around Brussels. You must speak Dutch over there, so according to the cabinet of Internal Affairs it was impossible to hold a bilingual service there (a lot of French speaking victims) without exploding the language issues between the Flemish and Walloon. Hence, Brussels. Belgians, from both sides of the language barrier, blinked in mute consternation.
- another reason for holding it in Brussels was that the cabinet interpreted the protocol concerning a-religousness very strict. The first plan was to hold the service in the church of Buizingen. The Catholic Church, who has no problem with inviting other religions to join in such services of national import, kindly declined when the cabinet demanded that there would be no praying whatsoever of any kind during the service. Like all Belgians, I'm pretty proud of our strict divide between church and state, but like most Belgians, again: blinking in mute consternation.
- about 700 tickets were sent to family and survivors, and they were invited to come to Brussels by train. A train driver died in the crash; the NMBS (the national train company) got only 25 invites for execs and employees combined. Talk about a cock-up.
- most of the victims found the memorial way too soon: the debate on how and why the security of the train network still isn't up to specs after the last great train disaster in Belgium is still raging, there are still many unanswered questions. I should mention that only last week a train performed an emergency stop after missing a red light: there is a shortage of personnel, for years now, meaning extremely stressed drivers, not enough resting time between trains/journeys, and a witch hunt on tardy trains only adding to the stress of the drivers.

Totally unrelated: time for another query.