What the Danish and European media misunderstand (and misrepresent) about America, and vice versa. And other stuff.
Yesterday I wrote (here) about the importance of the survival of our species: We have one job as adults: produce the next generation. Given the amount of time it takes for a human child to achieve maturity (about 16-18 years for females and 60-70 years for males), “producing” the next generation goes well beyond the…
The so-called “Law of Unintended Consequences” doesn’t have a definition because the name of the law is the law: there are always unintended consequences. You kick a stone out of your way as you hike up a mountain trail—and inadvertently start an avalanche that buries a small town. You flick a cigarette out the window…
Don’t just stand there: gesture! One of the most iconic moments in 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark comes during a chase sequence through the crowded and colorful streets and alleys of Cairo. Indiana Jones suddenly finds himself surrounde d by a crowd from which emerges a menacing master swordsman. The swordsman brandishes his sword and swishes…
AUDIO NOTE: The audio experiment continues, and there’s always lots of bonus content in the audio—also a lot of fun mispronunciations, word bobbles, and the occassional unexpected background noise. That’s what makes it an experiment rather than a smooth and polished production. Today, for example, keen listeners may detect the occasional background shriek from youngest—even…
Mikkel Danielsen strikes again—with a headline that shouts: “Duck!” The Republicans have Hunter Biden’s dirty hard drive. Now they’re throwing it at the presidentMikke Danielsen, Berlingske.dk, November 18 (The story was published Friday, but it was a busy weekend.) Before I dig into Danielsen’s gaslight-a-palooza, I should state clearly that I’m going to be neutral…
This post is mostly (but not entirely) about small things. Trivial, even. I subscribe to the “Morning Briefing” email of the New York Times. It hits my inbox at around 7:00 weekday mornings, which I find impressive—that’s 1:00 in the morning, New York time. That’s the only impressive thing about it. Otherwise, its only real…
Danish winters are surprisingly mild, weather-wise. I grew up in New York and New England, spent two college years in Pittsburgh, and lived five years in both Chicago and New York City. I know how cruel winter can be. Danish winters aren’t cruel. But they’re dark and they’re gloomy. On days like today, when the…
AUDIO NOTE: No audio today, just ran out of time. Maybe I’ll add an audio version of this post later in the week, after I’ve upgraded the default WordPress audio player to something better—i.e., pretty much anything. Notice what didn’t happen in America this week? Two things. Democracy didn’t die and a second civil war…
First things first: I’m not gonna lie to you—that’s what my journal’s for—the American midterms pissed me off. Conditions could not have been much better for Republicans to take a huge majority in the House and a safe majority in the Senate, thereby putting a brake on the Democrats’ insane agenda. They did neither. As…
This morning—not much more than 24 hours before polling places open in America—Berlingske published a signed editorial entitled “Berlingske believes: The USA is in a death-spiral of mistrust.” There’s plenty of empirical data to support that premise. I touched on a lot of it yesterday and on Friday. Berlingske’s lede states things pretty plainly: The United…
AUDIO NOTE: It’s a long post, today, and therefore a long audio. To save myself some time I did most of it in one take. It’s therefore bubbling over with mispronunciations, self-corrections, improvised riffs, and random musings that aren’t found in the text below. So it’s messy but fun. All you lurkers who come around…
Joe Biden’s still out there telling Americans that Republicans are a threat to democracy. President Joe Biden warned in a speech on Wednesday that the country’s democracy was dangerously close to crumbling, painting the closing stretch of the midterm elections in stark terms. “In our bones,” the president declared at one point, “we know democracy is…
The Danish election was held yesterday. It looks at this point as though for all the drama and intrigue, for all the weirdness and confusion, for all the gains of some parties and all the losses of some others, nothing has actually changed: we’ll still have a red bloc (leftist) government with Mette Frederiksen as…
The rise of the new Moderates (Moderaterne) party in Danish politics is a phenomenon worthy of examination by the citizens of every western republic currently experiencing high polarization—which is probably everywhere. As a public service to all self-governing citizens of the western world, I’ve managed to wrangle an interview with the man behind the movement:…
It’s not all doom and gloom out there. Here’s a chirpy little canary in a coal mine that I came across over at Instapundit: Germany is Dismantling a Wind Farm to Make Way for a Coal MineMichael Kern, OilPrice.com, October 26 The symbolism is intoxicating. A wind farm is being dismantled in western Germany to…
A funny thing happened to Pernille Vermund on the way to the Danish election: Facebook blocked her ability to do live streams or to advertize on their platform. Vermund is the party leader for Nye Borgerlige—literally “the New Bourgeois”—one of the right-of-center parties in Denmark that’s spent most of this election cycle in a circling…
Apparently a memo recently went around Frederiksberg Municipality reminding employees that charging their private devices from office electrical outlets is “on the same level as theft.” I can understand that there are some employees who charge their private electric bicycles, scooters, various batteries for phones, iPads, and the like. This is not allowed—in fact is…
On Sunday, Berlingske published an editorial in which they came out in support of free speech—arguing against the censorship of fake news on the basis of sunlight being the best disinfectant. Here’s the lede: “Instead of censorship, Western democracies should bet on freedom of expression as the best antidote to the information war.” That should…
The forthcoming Danish election is sucking up most of the oxygen in the Danish press these days, for obvious reasons. I haven’t been giving the election a corresponding level of attention in this blog because first of all this isn’t a blog about Danish politics per se, and secondly because the vast majority of readers…
