Lies, Damned Lies, and the January 6th Deaths

While going over the Danish news this morning I came across this photo: The caption says “When thousands of people stormed Congress, 138 officers were injured in the fight. Five people died during the storm itself or in the days following, as a result of the fighting.” The caption is a lie. It is an…

STAUNCH!

I’m proud to be a citizen of Denmark. I love my adopted country and I love my life here.  I may have come to Denmark late in life, but I’m even Danish enough to find myself frequently falling into the trap that long ago convinced me that Denmark was a country of little butts: “Sure…

Danish men come to the rescue

In days of yore, when men were men and women were women and the Byzantine Empire was still a thing, it was a truth universally acknowledged that a single viking in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife—so he’d sail off with a raiding party to find one. Husbands, fathers,…

DeSantis’s Big But

I like Ron DeSantis.  I think he has the most principled and consistent approach to politics of any major figure in America right now, but that may just because he seems to be only one operating by principle instead of going whichever way the wind blows. His competence is also refreshing. Berlingske Tidende’s editorial board…

Will (Charles) Atlas Shrug?

An opinion piece in Berlingske Tidende on Sunday raises some interesting questions about the future of the war in Ukraine, some of which are stated directly and some of which are merely implied. Will we still say “Slava Ukraini” if the US pulls the plug?Adam Holm, Berlingske.dk, May 21 The subhead or lede of the…

Apologia pro realitate

I quote it all the time, here and elsewhere, but here once more are the closing lines of G.K. Chesterton’s Heretics: The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a…

Armed and Dangerous

Everybody run, the Dread Tyrant Trump has been handed a gun! Thanks to the Durham report released earlier this week, we now know that the “Russia collusion” accusations against Donald Trump were a fabrication—a lie—engineered by the Hillary Clinton campaign and dutifully leveraged by partisans within America’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies and ultimately enflamed…

The Dogs Aren’t Barking Again

With respect to their coverage of America, the Danish news media continue to treat their readers like mushrooms: they keep us in the dark and feed us shit. As of 7:30 this morning, there was plenty of news about America in the Danish press. Not one of them had a single mention this morning, or…

Delete, Delete, Delete

Eldest came up to me Wednesday evening to show me a Snapchat conversation thread she thought I’d be interested in. It was with a GPT-powered AI avatar. Eldest was appalled at the way it had just suddenly popped itself into her feed. She was irritated, but also very curious—she showed me how she’d peppered the…

Let’s Provoke

NATO comes under new management in September: current Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg will step down and he’ll be replaced with a fresh face. Probably a female face, because, according to Berlingske, “it would look good with a woman to lead the Western defense alliance.” The article by European correspondent Solveig Gram Jensen is entitled “Forget about…

Remember not to forget the war we forgot to prevent!

Tom Jensen is the editor in chief of Berlingske Tidende.  He uses a column on its editorial pages as his “center-right” (borgerlig) newsletter.  I’ve covered some of his previous “newsletters” in the past. Have you almost forgotten about the war in Ukraine?  Be careful with thatTom Jensen, Berlingske.dk, April 27 The upshot of this one…

The Ukraine girls really knock them out

Yesterday—Saturday, April 7—I posted a Substack article about something that had been gnawing at me for a long time: the destructive force of feminization in western politics and culture. It’s not a misogynistic perspective—I bent over backwards to make that clear—just a sense that the stigmatization of masulinity and maleness is wreaking havoc on our…

The Perils of Article 25

(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….

“Gentlemen, congratulations. You’re everything we’ve come to expect from years of J-school training.”

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…

Springtime for the west?

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…

Psychopathic Lives Matter

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….

The Never Ending Story

(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…