{"id":2221,"date":"2009-11-21T11:26:03","date_gmt":"2009-11-21T15:26:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/?p=2221"},"modified":"2009-11-21T11:55:58","modified_gmt":"2009-11-21T15:55:58","slug":"a-president","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/?p=2221","title":{"rendered":"A President"},"content":{"rendered":"

O<\/span>ne surprise this week was the appointment of a European president (EU announcement<\/a>), which went to a former Belgian prime-minister, Van Rompey<\/a>. It appears he’s a pragmatic politician, who has been quoted the following words:\n<\/p>\n

The universal values which are in force in Europe, and which are fundamental values of Christianity, will lose vigour with the entry of a large Islamic country such as Turkey.\n<\/p>\n

On the other hand, the other contestants were Tony Blair and the current Dutch prime-minister Balkenende.\n<\/p>\n

If you’re European, you may not have noticed this in the news: Oprah’s announcement that she’s stopping her show in 2011<\/a>. I have never liked her show and I don’t understand how people like her get to a meteoric rise to fame: the most likely answer to that question is ‘targeted marketing’. Last year, when I saw Oprah stumping for Obama, I thought that was going a bit too far. Maybe Oprah knows more about the Obama presidency.\n<\/p>\n

And finally, the moment we’ve been waiting for, the Large Hadron Colider has restarted<\/a>. Fourteen months ago, a bunch of time travelers stopped the machine from operating, possibly delaying the creation of the Great Black Hole of 2107. Uh. Or something. On a serious note, the next coming years the LHC will help scientists narrow down the search for the Higgs boson, a sub-particle that has been predicted but so far, has not been found.\n<\/p>\n

\n

1. Slightly related: The creation of the universe and that<\/a>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One surprise this week was the appointment of a European president (EU announcement), which went to a former Belgian prime-minister, Van Rompey. It appears he’s a pragmatic politician, who has been quoted the following words: The universal values which are … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2221"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2221"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2221\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2222,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2221\/revisions\/2222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}