What the Danish and European media misunderstand (and misrepresent) about America, and vice versa. And other stuff.
An article published on Bloomberg this past Saturday was widely ridiculed—but for all the wrong reasons. Entitled For Americans Shocked by Inflation, Argentines Have Some Advice, the article offers a few tips for Americans coping with inflation from Argentines for whom it’s become a way of life. Number one on the list: “Spend your paycheck…
I lived six years of my life in Chicago. I have many friends who still live there. I have some family there. It’s a one-party town. Has been forever. The last Republican mayor of Chicago left office in 1931. There are a few Chicago precincts in which Donald Trump outpolled Joe Biden in 2020—the Dread…
Apart from a few articles about the Biden-Putin video conference the other day, most of them pretty matter-of-fact recitations of the White House and Kremlin versions of the conversation, Danish media has been very light on American political news lately. I’ll cut the Danish media some slack on this: there’s enough going on closer to…
I’m a Boston driver by nature and nurture, seasoned with additional experience on the expressways of Chicago, the freeways of Los Angeles, and the gridlock of New York, so I tend to mutter a lot while I drive, addressing all the many shortcomings of the drivers with whom I’m forced to share the roads. It…
Late Saturday night (European time), already suspended anchor Chris Cuomo was officially terminated by CNN. CNN confirmed the firing and said that Cuomo had been “terminated … effective immediately” as an outside law firm continues to investigate “his involvement with his brother’s defense.” But wait, there’s more: The station was notified by an attorney representing an…
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) has compelled me to violate my own rule about not embedding tweets. Second time in a week that’s happened. Before we get to the tweet, let’s clarify a few things: the DCCC is an explicitly partisan organization. In their own words (from the “About Us” page of their website),…
It’s the first day of December, and we woke in darkness to a snow that’s still very lightly falling. Intermittently. It’s also already dark again. So maybe it’s not snowing anymore. I worked from home today so was able to sip my coffee while watching Youngest make her maiden attack on her Advent calendars at…
Despite obvious philosophical differences, George Orwell and Ayn Rand had a lot in common as novelists: they both cranked everything up to eleven and whacked you over the head with it to make sure you got their points. Their characters are cartoonish, their plot lines are simple, their morality is black and white. They aren’t…
Joe Biden on Twitter in February 2020, responding to Donald Trump’s travel restrictions on China: “We are in the midst of a crisis with the coronavirus. We need to lead the way with science — not Donald Trump’s record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering. He is the worst possible person to lead our country through…
Mikkel Danielsen had a strange piece out in Berlingske yesterday: Fox News’s big star put a video out on the internet. Then the hosts burst into conflict.Mikkel Danielsen, Berlingske.dk, Nov 25 (“Then the hosts burst into conflict” is a lousy translation of a Danish colloquialism for which there’s no handy English equivalent, so the clunkiness…
Multiple sources, local and national, were reporting on Wednesday than one Vaun Mayes, identified as a leading BLM activist in the Milwaukee area, said in (and of) Waukesha that, “It’s possible the revolution has started.” Vaun Mayes is apparently a troubled soul, currently “on pretrial release on federal charges in the allege (sic) Molotov cocktail…
Most of the posts on this blog relate to Danish misrepresentations of America and Americans. But the Highway of Misunderstandings has always been a two-way street. With multiple lanes in each direction. And heavy traffic. Case in point, a tweet from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution from a few weeks ago (which came to my attention via…
Friday evening Danish time, Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted by a jury of his peers in Wisconsin. I was braced for the worst from the Danish media over the weekend, and TV2 didn’t let me down. Teenager shot and killed two and went free—why the case divides AmericaLaura Byager Rabøl, TV2 News, Nov 20 If you…
Earlier this year I wrote about the Boomerang Principle: what you do to your adversaries today, they will do to you tomorrow. It may be novel to bring a gun to a knife fight—but only once. After that, every knife fight’s gonna be a gun fight. This principle obviously isn’t limited to physical combat: it…
It’s difficult, maybe impossible, to identify the historical moment one occupies. We’re all caught in the swirl of a thousand different currents at any given moment; the idea that we can somehow lift ourselves outside of it seems almost hubristic. But it’s worth a shot. So: in which age of man do we live? That…
Berlingske has a spectacularly wrong headline up right now: Biden said the N-word. Then Twitter went amok: “Where are the woke?”Kalinka Aaman Agger, Berlingske.dk, Nov 12 Biden used the word “negro.” He used it by mistake. He made the mistake because, to quote a Stephen Miller tweet cited in Agger’s article, his brain is applesauce….
There’s a lot going on in the world these days. The Danish media are bubbling over with stories about the upcoming election, the continuing mink scandal, and reactions to the COP26 summit. The prime minister has called a press conference for this very evening to discuss “the corona situation,” and her remarks will surely dominate…
