What the Danish and European media misunderstand (and misrepresent) about America, and vice versa. And other stuff.
DR is taking a long, hard look at election swag. Chewing gum, pens, and roses are important in the election campaignMads Juhl, DR.dk, October 13, 2022 The lede elaborates: “Parliamentary candidates hand out thousands of gifts during the election campaign. And ‘the crap works,’ says the expert.” You can hardly avoid bumping into a parliamentary…
Daniel is a 24 year old Danish university student whose apartment building in Copenhagen is going to be torn down in January. He therefore needs to find a new place to live, but the pricey rents in Copenhagen would eat up nearly his whole allowance. So he pestered politicians gathered at a voter event out…
Yesterday’s post about smiley icons got me scratching at my memories of the 70s—the first decade from which I have any. I remember a lot of smileys—all of them on t-shirts, mugs, and bumper stickers, and most of them accompanied by text saying “Have a nice day.” I was just an akward, acne-bespattered 14-year-old with…
An imaginary reader asks: “Greg, I can’t help noticing that sometimes your post titles are capitalized in standard American title case, and sometimes in the more informal sentence case so common on the internet. And now you’re using shouty all caps. Why?” It’s a good question, and like so many other good questions it has…
Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen called the election on Wednesday. It will be held on the first of November. The first party leader debate was televised the evening of Frederiksen’s announcement: there were fourteen party leaders on stage. Not all of them were ready for prime-time. I was unable to watch the full debate, which ran…
(Think of this as Green Menace Part II.) Okay, they don’t actually say they want a revolution, but they sure act like they do. And by “they” I mean the GLOB. (Not the whole GLOB, only those of its members who’ve been absorbed into the mass psychosis of green hysteria—so, you know, only about ninety-eight…
A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of environmentalism. The most destructive ideology in the western world right now is environmental extremism. It’s going to kill more people and cause more human suffering than any other ideology to have infected the western world since Marxism—and let’s face it, part of the toxicity of the green movement…
It’s still a truth universally acknowledged that nobody knows who sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines earlier this week, but the vaporous fog of ignorance has been coalescing into two general assumptions in the establishment media. The first is something like “We still don’t know who’s responsible, but it was obviously Russia.” The second: “Anyone who…
Things are getting kinetic in the Baltic Sea. On Monday, two underwater explosions caused three leaks in the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines carrying natural gas from Russia to Europe. The explosions and leaks occurred to the northeast and southeast of the Danish island of Bornholm. Quoth Danmarks Radio (DR): According to…
The hot-take out there in the wake of yesterday’s election in Italy seems to be that Europe is turning to the right. (Sweden did it! Italy did it! My god, it’s a pandemic!) I don’t believe any western European electorate ever really turns to the right: they just sometimes turn away from the left long…
The other evening Danish televison aired a news program entitled “the time of the crises.” I don’t remember what channel it was on, who was hosting, who was participating, or even any specifics about what was discussed for the few minutes I gave it attention. It was a panel discussion about all the various crises…
In reading this DR article about Giorgia Meloni, the woman who may well be Italy’s next premiere, I was struck by how freely they referred to her and her party and their allies as neo-fasicsts (nyfascister). I don’t know what to think when I encounter such adjectives in the western press, because when the president…
This is fascinating stuff: Female productivity decreases at lower temperaturesEditorial, TV2 News, Sept 23 …if the Danish workplaces lower the temperature, this could have negative consequences for women’s productivity, writes (the trade publication) Fagbladet 3F. Women are more susceptible when the temperature deviates from their preferred degrees, shows a study from the University of Southern…
First, quickly: In last night’s party leader debate on the energy crisis, Conservative party leader Søren Pape Poulsen actually mentioned the importance of the Tyra Gas Field. I felt like I should mention that, given that yesterday’s post was about our public servants’ unwillingness to address the supply side of the current energy crisis. Credit…
Mikkel Danielsen had a big article about Donald Trump and QAnon at the top of Berlingske’s website this morning. Big image, big headline, big story: The headline says: “A particular song got underway. Suddenly Trump supporters reached one finger into the air—what just happened?” I don’t know what happened. Neither does Mikkel Danielsen. Nor do…
The Little Mermaid was among my daughters’ favorite movies when they were very young. They knew it was a Danish story—they’d been riding “The Flying Trunk” at Tivoli since before they could walk or talk. That’s a very slow, very gentle indoor ride through various semi-animatronic scenes from the works of Hans Christian Andersen, including…
“The bite on which I gagged the most,” writes Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, “is not the knowledge that life itself requires hostility and death and torture-crosses—but once I asked, and I was almost choked by my question: What? does life require even the rabble? Are poisoned wells required, and stinking fires and soiled dreams and maggots in…
Two Quick Notes First, the Martha’s Vineyard immigrant story is all I want to write about. It’s the most perfect distillation of everything that’s wrong with the modern American left, and it just keeps getting better: yesterday, the Governor of Massachusetts requested 125 National Guard members to assist with the transportation of those migrants off…
The phrase “virtue signalling” entered the lexicon several decades ago as a critical description of moral valor being asserted without being demonstrated. The phrase is used often enough these days that everyone knows what it means. The earliest example I can recall of such posturing was probably the “nuclear free zones” declared by liberal municipalities…
