What the Danish and European media misunderstand (and misrepresent) about America, and vice versa. And other stuff.
(I didn’t even mention it in this space, but last week marked the 20th anniversary of my arrival in Denmark. The milestone was commemorated over on the Nagan Of Copenhagen Substack.) On Saturday, taxpayer-funded Danmarks Radio (DR) ran an article about Russia assuming the presidency of the UN Security Council for the month of April….
The coverage is everywhere. So are the hot takes. I have no coverage to offer and I don’t do hot takes. A New York grand jury indicted Donald Trump yesterday and the indictment is sealed. That means we don’t know what he’s been charged with. We’re told that Trump’s attorneys have been in communication with…
Wait, what? The 8:00 radio news update from ABC News, delivered by the insufferably biased Richard Cantu, included an audio clip of someone lamenting that mass shootings have become so widespread in America that even women are getting in on the act. I found that remarkable. I did a quick search online and found the…
Western governments have gotten very good at doing things they were never intended to do and very bad at the handful of things they were intended to do. Strike that. Western government haven’t been very good at doing anything for decades, but they’ve been squandering our money and reputation on elective absurdities while ignoring what…
A couple of recent opinion columns by Berlingske Tidende’s opinion editor Pierre Collignon offer some hopeful signs that at least parts of Denmark’s thinking class may have begun to realize the depth of the hole we’ve dug ourselves into. . . and may have begun speculating on ways to actually climb out of it. Collignon…
Norman Bates, call your office. If you had “normalization of psychopathy” on your What Fresh Hell Is This bingo card, congratulations! She lives in a way few people know about. Here is Sheila’s life as a psychopath.Anne Funch, Berlingske.dk, March 19 When I tell strangers that I’m a psychopath, I always add: “And on paper….
(I’m back after a week off including a few glorious days in Tallinn, Estonia. There’ll be an article about that trip over on Nagan of Copenhagen soon, if it’s not already there.) We begin (as one must) with disclaimers, disclosures, confessions, and context. I’m grateful for a lot of the things Donald Trump was able…
Denmark has until now been spared the worst excesses of the culture war underway in America, but the Rubicon has been crossed. Fort Sumter has been fired upon. The Archduke has been assassinated. It’s here. I had actually thought Denmark had a stronger immune system. I thought we might have some kind of natural immunity…
The Nord Stream pipeline sabotage is back in the news. Media: German police have located mysterious boat on Christiansø. Was used for attacks on Nord Stream, they claimMikkel Danielsen, Berlingske.dk, March 8 Long story short: five men and a woman using false passports rented a boat from a Polish boat rental agency in Poland. The…
Everyone knows that Joe Biden isn’t up for another full term in office. A majority of Democratic primary voters want someone other than Biden. Establishment news outlets regularly feature items on the back-room chatter of Democratic muckety-mucks still supporting Biden publicly but scrambling behind the scenes for a viable alternative. Those Democrats don’t oppose Biden…
For more than three decades (from 1976 to 2009), legendary American radio newsman Paul Harvey used to have a feature called “The Rest of the Story” in which he’d present short stories on every manner of subject, with one key element left out—usually the well-known name of the person at the center of the usually…
Show me a headline that tells me you’re one of Denmark’s ace U.S. correspondents without telling me you’re one of Denmark’s ace U.S. correspondents. Here’s the best-selling car in Europe and the best-selling in America. Americans are killing each other with giant cars. That’s yesterdau’s Berlingske’s headline over an article by ace U.S. correspondent Mikkel…
On September 26 last year—exactly five months ago tomorrow—a couple of underwater explosions 70 meters beneath the surface of the Baltic Sea caused three leaks in the Nord Stream pipelines. There is no question of the event having been anything but sabotage. Western governments still have no idea who was responsible. Given the resources available…
News of the collected works of Roald Dahl having been edited for sensitivity came to my attention at some point over the weekend. It was impossible to miss on the anglophonic internet. As culture war stories go, it’s a good one, but it seemed less significant to me than the one that was bobbing around…
There are fourteen independent nations in the world today that used to be Soviet states, and many more that were Soviet clients. If we focus on continental Europe, there are six countries that can be counted among the former and even more than can be counted among the latter. This map of 1990 Europe from…
Berlingske’s (ace) US and Asia correspondents, Mikkel Danielsen and Alexander Sjöberg, have joined forces to write an article that dares to ask the question America’s renowned intelligence agencies appear to want them to ask: was the whole Chinese spy balloon thing just a nutty misunderstanding? The question is right out there in their headline: The…
A guest column in today’s Berlingske is a good reminder that when anyone in the politics or media says freedom of speech is important, but we also have to respect religion, they’re full of it. The column is entitled “Jesus thinks whatever you want.” Its author is Anders Stjernholm, identified by Berlingske as a comedian,…
Anyone who’s followed the news this week, in American or in Denmark, knows about the Chinese Balloon spotted drifting over Montana a few days ago. “Spy balloon!” cried America. “Weather balloon!” shouted the CCP. I didn’t follow the story very closely because it seemed awfully trivial and stupid, but that just goes to show how…
