Warren Buffett: "Be greedy when others are fearful, be fearful when others are greedy."
Below is a written reflection on the
aforementioned antecedents and the facts and circumstances underlying them,
including my own role in them.
A antecedent or legal record is an event or
fact from someone's past that is relevant to assessing their reliability,
particularly in the context of justice, criminal law, and eligibility for
certain positions or positions. In practice, it usually refers to criminal offenses,
such as a conviction, criminal record, or other contacts with the law, but it
can also be financial, tax, supervisory, or employment law.
At the moment October / November 2025 I am
experiencing a bit of cognitive dissonance because I am getting message like
this e-mail from somebody working for Dutch freedom:
Title opkomen voor onze vrijheid
Beste Ansgar John,
Leuk dat we
elkaar ontmoet hebben bij de .... en gaaf om te zien dat je zo voor onze
vrijheid vecht.
… Ik wens je veel
succes met je bedrijf en het vechten voor onze vrijheid.
Onze wegen kruisen
vast nog wel eens bij de ..
Fijne zonnige
dag
Met hartelijke groet,
xxxxx
E-mail xxxx@4en5mei.nl
I am also hosting a talk at the Great Royal
Industrial Club this Thursday evening October 6th with a police officer who
jailed me twice, whilst at the same time having to explain myself to the Dutch
Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM) to be able to get a license for our
fund…
----
The reflections below are based on my
memory, journal (dagboek), our ValueMachinesFund investing logbook, my online
notes on corona starting February 4th 2020 https://sinaas.blogspot.com/2020/02/corona-novel-outbreak-guess.html
as well as newspaper and other
articles.
Some of the things I knew at the time
others I only learnt later based on research.
On Friday, October 18, 2019 the pandemic
preparedness “Event 201” took place in The Pierre hotel in New York. The 130
participants were from multinational companies, the Johns Hopkins Center for
Health Security, World Economic Forum, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The fictional scenario in the tabletop
exercise was the breakout of a novel coronavirus caught from a pig, that spread
to people and eventually killed 65 million people.
Based on the day they jointly proposed
recommendations. They worried that “The next severe pandemic will not only
cause great illness and loss of life but could also trigger major cascading
economic and societal consequences that could contribute greatly to global
impact and suffering.”
They wrote
“Countries, international organizations, and global transportation
companies should work together to maintain travel and trade during severe
pandemics. Travel and trade are essential to the global economy as well as to
national and even local economies, and they should be maintained even in the
face of a pandemic. “
“The
fear and uncertainty experienced during past outbreaks, even those limited to a
national or regional level, have sometimes led to unjustified border measures,
the closure of customer-facing businesses, import bans, and the cancellation of
airline flights and international shipping. A particularly fast-moving and
lethal pandemic could therefore result in political decisions to slow or stop
movement of people and goods, potentially harming economies already vulnerable
in the face of an outbreak.”
I was unaware that Event 201 took place. I
was busy running ValueMachinesFund in October 2019. The fund Unit Price
increased 39% in 2019 and Assets Under Management at the time were just above
EUR 5 million (+/- EUR 120 million end of October 2025). We had a Christmas 17th
Wedding Anniversary at our house with 80 guests.
On February 2d 2020 (02022020) I noted the
quarantine of Wuhan the first time in history a city of 10 million people were
separated from the world.
At the gym I kept a daily track of cases
and deaths on Wikipedia on a piece of paper and noticed the growth was NOT
EXPONENTIAL. I made a prediction:
Update Feb 19th. 2020 The spread was a bit
slower than my guesstimate of February 2nd.
In February we had a good inflow of new
money into ValueMachinesFund. I believed the number of people getting sick from
Covid19 was decreasing.
March 7th 2020 a cousin from
Hong Kong was in Amsterdam and wanted to bump elbows instead of shaking hands..
The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) in Maastricht took place but a lot of people
did not attend.
Elon Musk tweeted “Coronavirus panic is
dumb” and people got angry at him… (Panic is always dumb).
March 19th 2020 Prime Minister
Mark Rutte gives speech explaining lockdowns and the benefits of reaching herd
immunity.
My notes from March 19th: tracking curves
and forecast for Italy and The Netherlands
Worldwide Panic: Euro 2020 has been
canceled and pretty much everything else. Also Berkshire Hathaway meeting in
May has been cancelled. People buying guns in the US. And unexpectedly this has
become the TOILET PAPER PANIC. Heaven knows why...
The good news is that it seems the spread
in China was stopped by immunity as much as drastic government measures. So
Italy (and then the rest of the world) should do fine even without tracing
every case.
I also found an article in the Jerusalem
Post https://www.jpost.com/HEALTH-SCIENCE/Israeli-nobel-laureate-Coronavirus-spread-is-slowing-621145
wherein Nobel Prize winner Michael Levitt described the same curve as I had
noticed. (It turns out that the epidemiologist William Farr had discovered this
phenomenon in 1841.)
Italy showing the same trend as Wuhan /
China earlier: "The 1% drop in the rate of growth of total registered
cases per day: 63%, 37%, 27%, 50%, 20%, 23%, 23%, 25%, 24%, 11%, 23%, 21%, 17%,
20%, 17%, 13%, 13%
Today, in 2025, I think part of the panic
may have been caused by fear amongst virologists who suspected a bio weapon /
lab leak from the start. Kristian Andersen for example had written “I think the main thing still
in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to
have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the
molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario” in early February 2020 during Slack discussions and email
correspondence as part of the deliberations about the origins of SARS-CoV-2
among leading virologists.
March 17th 2020 “The Netherlands in
lockdown” we and the neighbors filmed “Aan de Amsterdamse Grachten”
inspired by Italians singing from their balconies during lockdown. https://www.metronieuws.nl/in-het-nieuws/2020/03/amsterdammers-zingen-tegen-coronavirus/
Record drop of 3 000 points on the Dow
Jones index.
March 19th 2020 my journal: “The great
Toilet Paper Panic of 2020. The level of panic is getting ridiculous. Ringing
the bells of the Nicholas basilica today with Ron Licht. City is deserted. Only
3 000 dead in Italy and nearing peak. With social media and computer software
we have lost our capacity to think.”
March 20th I made a prognosis of the number
of dead we could expect in The Netherlands, the result of the guesstimate is
that it would be similar to the excess deaths during the influenza epidemic of 2017/2018.
I showed it to my colleagues together with
the article in The Jerusalem Post by Professor Michael Levitt who described
what I observed.
All three of us invested more money in
ValueMachinesFund stocks at the end of March. None of our co-investors in the
fund panicked or sold a single share.
On April 4th 2020 we sent an e-mail to the
tens of thousands of investors who receive Hendrik Oude Nijhuis’s weekly
“ValueLetter”.
He concluded the e-mail: Based on
similar assumptions, it's likely that all Dutch COVID-19 deaths occur over a
period of about a month and a half, with an estimated 3,000 deaths in the
deadliest week.
In a normal week in April, approximately
3,000 people die in the Netherlands. Add to that the estimated 3,000 COVID-19
deaths in the peak week, and you arrive at an estimated total number of deaths
in the Netherlands of around 6,000 in the deadliest week.
That comparable number of 6,000 deaths
in the Netherlands in the deadliest week is clearly higher—though not
excessively high—than the number of approximately 4,000 Dutch people who died
in a few weeks in early 2018 (including my own father). The explanation for the
peak in deaths? A severe flu epidemic that hit the Netherlands at that time...”
My prediction / guesstimate above and the
actual RIVM graph below May 2022
On Sundays in March 2020 our church, the
Nicolaasbasiliek, across the street from Central Station in Amsterdam was
closed. I felt it would be good to set 4 folding chairs outside the church
during mass every Sunday. I did this and every week different passersby would
sit down and we would read the gospel of the day together.
April 26th 2020 deaths from
coronavirus down to 66 a day. April 2th Kingsday still in “Intelligent
Lockdown”
April 29th 2020 spoke with
Andreas Voss, member of the OMT (Outbreak Management Team) and married to my
cousin Angela. To my surprise he was very afraid and said herd immunity
(groepsimmuniteit) was no longer a goal.
I went online to find out how to organize
and co-ordinate a demonstration in Amsterdam for May 5th Dutch
Liberation Day. (I had no previous experience organizing protests or anything
like that.)
I was called by the police a few days
before to discuss and on May 5th they called again around 11 am to
say Mayor Halsema had decided to forbid us coming to Dam Square to protest. I
said I would just come with a Dutch flag and was told if I did that I would be
arrested…
Uncomplete list of antecedents:
1.
May 5th 2020 Liberation Day
small freedom protest on Dam Square, Amsterdam with fund manager Selwyn
Duijvestijn and few others. About dozen people in total, socially distanced. We
were sent away / moved away by the police but not arrested.
2.
August 29th 2020 after pictures
emerged of the wedding of Minister Grapperhaus where he and the guests were
behaving naturally (not social distancing, etc) People were understandably
angry about "Rules for thee, but not for me." One Facebook hundreds
of people (and / or bots) said they were going to demonstrate on Dam Square on
Sunday and I offered to help
https://sinaas.blogspot.com/2020/08/defenddemocracy-dam-noodverordening-dam.html
On the Sunday itself dozens of police,
barking police dogs and buses were on Dam Square. I was told the demonstration
was now forbidden and if I did not leave I before 13:00 I would be pepper
sprayed and arrested. I was alone and sat down cross legged on Dam Square and
read my New Testament Bible while my heart was pounding from stress and fear. I
was disobeying orders. Was this a crime? I was not arrested or pepper sprayed
and stayed until 15:00.
3.
Fall 2020 around midnight I was
in an empty train on my way to Amsterdam.
At Utrecht CS when the train stopped a Train Policeman on the platform
knocked on the window and indicated I should put on a mask. I indicated that I
was alone in the carriage, but he was not satisfied, came on board, told me to
out on a mask, which I did, but not quickly enough for his feeling. I was
dragged out of the train while wearing a mask and thrown in jail for the night
(around 5 hours).
4.
December 2020 arrested on Dam
Square together with my neighbor Nel Edens for standing on Dam Square with
signs that said “VRIJHEID”.
5.
January 2021 Museumplein when
stopped by ME police, I stood still holding up the 4 and 5 mei Comite flag of
freedom, was beaten with wapenstok, worked to the ground and arrested. I was
told my bike would be put near the Van Gogh Museum. When I inquired about the
flag of freedom a policemen said: “There is no longer freedom in The
Netherlands and you won’t see the flag again.”
Spent 4 days in jail. Was later found
guilty by a police judge even though the OM Officer said I was innocent. The
higher appeal is still pending today November 2025. My lawyer has been told all
the corona protests will be discussed in 2026.
6.
February 27th 2021 caused too
much noise during at my birthday party, police came around 3 am
7.
March 2021 forced to be admitted to a
psychiatric clinic on Saturday because I refused to promise not to sit on a
chair on Dam Square on Sunday, the next day. Released by a judge on Tuesday.
8.
2021 summer I printed 5 000
copies of my corona vaccination QR code and handed them out to people who had decided
not to get vaccinated. I also shared it online. After a while my QR code was
blocked.
9.
2021
“Vlam op de Dam” arrest. We had lit a flame of freedom
which was meant to burn until the end of emergency law. When a police officer
after a few weeks wanted to put it out I stood before it. The led to another arrest
and several hours in jail.
10.
2022 Het Parket OVJ Den Haag heeft u ter zake
artikel 138 lid 1 Wetboek van Strafrecht (pleegdatum 14 maart 2022 te Leiden)
een strafbeschikking opgelegd van 200 euro geldboete.
I was an attendee of
the Gala of Science “Gala van de Wetenschap”. Hundreds of scientists and their
friends and family were in attendance. During the half time break I stood up
and asked the audience who were ready for the second half this question: “Ladies
and gentlemen, I see no one at this Gala of Science wearing a mask (mondkapje)
at the same time in Germany all people are forced to wear them today and the
next weeks. How scientific is that?” Then
I sat down and watched the second half. Afterward we were told everyone was
welcome at the bar for drinks and discussion. When I went to the bar I was
arrested and spent 14 hours in jail and got fined EUR 200.
11. 1 juli 2025 Strafbaar feit: Niet voldoen
aan aanwijzing van bevoegde en als zodanig kenbare verkeersregelaar. Feitcade 630bn I
don't remember exactly what happened. I think I was cycling on a bike path, and
he wanted me to walk.
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