Arab mares are fourteen to fifteen hands tall
if we measure by objective standards
Our herd has grown a lot over that last couple of years, so unfortunately, the decision was made to sell a few horses off. Bob, our ranch owner, picked Snowflake and Sandstorm, two of our mares, to be sold off to a stable in the Netherlands. Their names are quite suggestive: Snowflake is a beautiful white American quarter horse and Sandstorm is a brown Arab mare. We’ll miss them over here, but then we know that a few foals are on the way.
Bob was joined by Jack when he filled out some paperwork on the sale along the fence. “Snowflake: 14.1 hands, Sandstorm: 21.2 hands” said Bob as he wrote those numbers into the corresponding fields on the forms.
“Twenty-one hands?!” Jack shouted in bewilderment. “I guess you gotta measure her again. We’ve got no horse that’s twenty-one hands tall on the entire ranch.”
While I overheard their conversation, I also had my doubts. Sandstorm and Snowflake are equally tall. I can see that they’re both about fourteen hands. Bob soon unraveled the mystery, though. “No need to measure them again, Jack” he said. “We legally have to multiply the Arab’s height by 1.5 for export to the Netherlands, since 2024 Dutch law prescribes that Arabs are worth one-and-a half times as much as whites.”
“If that’s true, then the Netherlands has totally gone off the rails” Jack concluded. “How are buyers gonna know what kind a horse they are getting when the seller has to manipulate the numbers? Measurements have to be done by the same standards for all.”
Jack was right. The year 2024 has marked many new lows along an ongoing trend that was described in many of my posts, either directly or indirectly: the very slippery slope of the failure to apply a common set of standards to all persons and all use cases. It is hard to fathom when exactly that trend started, but I can vaguely point to the early 2010s for the origins. More recently, we have seen a drastic acceleration since the spread of COVID.
Jack was also right to state that the Netherlands have derailed. The Netherlands have recently pursued a wild torrent of dubious policies with implicit double standards. To meet climate goals committed at the European level, which also oddly align with the United Nations Agenda 2030, the Dutch government reclassified large swathes of land used for agriculture and grazing, often under the false pretenses of “being close to or bordering fragile habitats.” Farmers who happened to operate on such reclassified lands, would need to cut up to ninety percent of the production. Of course, that effectively meant that many affected farmers no longer had a path to profitability and faced closure. Massive protests ensued and eventually, the European Union stepped in to compensate affected farmers for the loss of their businesses.
However, the bottom line is still that many farms in the Netherlands are closing. This development has been praised by many media, since it would “reduce the nation’s nitrous oxide and methane emissions significantly, would prevent ‘fragile habitats’ from being affected by ‘nitrogen pollution’ and would ‘rewild’ portions of the Netherlands to their original, ‘natural’ state.” However, the same Dutch government also set off on a course to replace all of its jet fuels by so-called ‘sustainable’ alternatives by 2050, which, as we discussed before, are only sustainable because we allow to account for the carbon sequestered when the plants, needed to produce the biofuels, are growing. Obviously, either agriculture is an environmental scourge due to its greenhouse gas emissions, or an environmental blessing for its carbon sequestration, but it can’t be both at the same time. However, the Dutch government, like many other Western governments, will apply double standards to treat agriculture either as an environmental burthen or as a climate solution, depending on which end product it delivers. As usual, the “independent, investigative media” fail to even ask a pointed question on this topic.
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Ecological policies are not the only ones that have recently made the Netherlands stand out infamously. Its justice system and biased interpretation of its own laws is another societal power that continues to reach new lows. Like Britain and other Western European countries, the Netherlands have set off on a course to “eradicate hate.” Hate being an essential constituent of the universe, it is of course absolutely impossible to “root out.” That notwithstanding, the Netherlands is criminally investigating and even jailing citizens for “hateful” comments. For instance, two citizens were arrested for projecting “extremist” slogans, such as “White Lives Matter,” on Rotterdam’s Erasmus Bridge last New Year’s eve. The prosecutors are seeking six months of incarceration for their “promotion of racial hatred.” The slogans were a little distasteful, to say the least. However, I don’t see how the argument that any kind of lives matter, can be interpreted as “hatred,” even less so as “incitement.”
Dutch prosecutors are steadfast in their ambition to “eradicate hate,” it seems. Or not as much. When on November 7, Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters visited Amsterdam to encourage their team in a soccer game, they faced a raging mob of Hamas supporters, who chased them down the streets, beat and kicked them, while shouting pro-terror slogans. It soon became clear that this was an organized “Jew hunt,” since that is exactly what one of the instigators had called for on social media. A handful of perpetrators were arrested and are being tried, although far more participated in the most disgraceful pogrom since Kristallnacht than are being prosecuted. Since, a total of five offenders have been convicted and so far, Dutch prosecutors have not called for a sentence in excess of … six months in prison. Moreover, they neither pursue the events as a hate crime, nor do they see the crimes as motivated by antisemitism, but rather “driven by the events in Gaza.”
You can’t make this up. Projecting slogans that do not contain direct violent rhetoric is treated as a “hate crime” that “incites racial hatred,” whereas calling for a “Jew hunt” word-by-word and then following up on that call by actually carrying it out, organizing a mob and physically injuring Israeli visitors “is not driven by hatred, nor antisemitism” and carries the exact same sentence. Dutch prosecutors still stopped short from regurgitating baseless claims made in some “independent” media that the Maccabi fans had somehow “incited” the pogrom. I wouldn’t be surprised that to happen next, though. Maybe Maccabi fans should just stay home in the future, since their presence alone could be considered to be “incitement,” similar to the charges against Jewish-Canadian reporter Ezra Levant.
In 2024, reason departed from Western European and British authorities, who aggressively implemented a bogus set of double standards. Double standards are prominent on the British Isles and on the European continent, where authorities seem convinced to eradicate “hate” against Jihadis who commit heinous crimes, whereas they do not seem as committed to eradicate the obvious hatred from Jihadi terrorists directed at ordinary citizens who do not commit crimes other than being “infidels.”
Judicial bias is neither contained to Europe, nor to the topic of Jihadism, though. Over in the US, the Biden Administration is taking last-ditched efforts to further bias the justice system too. On the one hand, the Biden Administration’s HHS extended legal protection for COVID vaccine manufacturers for another five years. That move makes it effectively impossible to sue vaccine manufacturers for harms incurred. Given the meanwhile overwhelming amount of scientific reports on severe adverse events, extending their liability shield is very hard to defend morally. Yet the same Biden administration is claiming moral high ground and pressuring the Supreme Court not to intervene in court cases that would penalize the energy industry for “climate harms,” even though there is no credible science that can directly link oil companies’ activities to individual weather or health events. Sure, there are non-profits that perform climate “attribution science” that claim to have established causal relationships between climate change and individual weather events. But such nonprofits were explicitly created with the “courts in mind.” Due to its extremely poor quality, climate “attribution science” consistently fails to pass peer review, even by today’s low standards. So the only conclusion should be that it cannot be used in court either.
We could continue to bring up more examples of areas in society that have been permeated by an unacceptable set of double standards. The year 2024 will go into the history books as a year that has brought some of the most unjust, biased implementation of authority ever. However, in the same breath I will add that 2024 will also be remembered as “peak bias.” The application of double standards has simply become so flagrant that it can no longer stand. We are already seeing that the situation is starting to turn around. For instance, “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) and “environment, social and governance” (ESG) initiatives, which merely are two flavours of institutionalized injustice, are losing traction fast. Several corporations have already scaled down or abandoned their DEI policies and several of the most powerful financial institutions have withdrawn their Net Zero pledges. On the surface, they may have done so in response to public pressure from activists like Robby Starbuck. However, in reality, they have given in to a much deeper truth: the truth that bias is destructive. Institutionalized bias harms the collegial atmosphere on the workfloor and undermines workers’ confidence that doing a good job will lead to being rewarded, such that many will lower the quality of their work. Therefore, codified bias manages to worsen product quality too, which then deteriorates customer reputation. Add to that the negative perception large portions of consumers may have with companies that openly bias by being more proud of their employees’ characteristics than of their products and we have established that DEI effectively destroys business. That is why businesses are giving up on it, much more so than them giving in to pressure from activists. Even academic circles start to wake up to this truth.
My prediction is that we will see a rapid turnaround in 2025. The Return to Reason is well underway and it is unstoppable. Eventually, truth will always prevail in this universe. Therefore, we will see a complete return to objective standards and due process.
We can only hope that we will see it before we no longer have aged Gouda, friendly sports games, or manageable businesses. But I trust we will.
Even if we’d have to sell more horses off to the Netherlands here at the Ranch, I am sure that Bob will not have to multiply horses’ height by 1.5 for much longer either. While that lasts though, let’s hope that we won’t have to sell Crystal, as we wouldn’t know how to fill out the form. She’s a beautiful Arab mare. However, like many human Arabs, she’s white.
I went to elementary school in the Netherlands in the early 1960s and high school in Belgium in the early 1970s. These countries were beautiful and idillic. Now they are FUBAR. what happened?
The debate around nitrogen pollution from farming is heating up again in the Netherlands. The official story: farmers need to reduce operations and cull livestock to 'reduce nitrogen pollution' to the environment. Except, there really is no 'nitrogen crisis:'
https://dailysceptic.org/2026/06/25/the-green-war-on-farmers-never-ends/
The so-called 'nitrogen crisis' is just another government excuse to close independent farming operations and make food more expensive by presenting a 'solution' to a noblem. Likewise, 'Net Zero' is an excuse to deprive populations of their basic needs to 'mitigate' an imaginary 'climate emergency.' It is time to end the environmental and climate charade and move on to true sustainability, which goes hand in hand with economic prosperity.