Dangerous

In its Sunday opinion section, Berlingske ran a “debate interview” with Alex Vanopslagh, the chairman of Denmark’s libertarian Liberal Alliance party. The first three sentences set the table: On the bookshelf in Alex Vanopslagh’s office in Christiansborg stands a copy of a dangerous book. A book whose author can get both (communist green party) Enhedslisten’s…

More rotten fruit from the same rotten tree

Substack Note: there’s new content over at Nagan of Copenhagen, including a lengthy article featuring a substantive interview with the apparently uber-woke ChatGPT. Anyone who’s followed this blog for any length of time knows that Berlingske Tidende’s U.S. correspondent Mikkel Danielsen might as well be a paid shill for the Democratic National Committee. I’ve chronicled…

The burning question

Rasmus Paludan is back in the international spotlight. I’ll just cite the lede from Danmarks Radio (DR): Rasmus Paludan burned a Koran in Stockholm on Saturday. Now Turkey will not support Swedish membership in NATO. Danmark’s Foreign Minister called that both shaming and shameful—the buring of the Koran, obviously, not a sovereign nation responding to…

New venue, new venue!

Over the weekend I started up a Substack publication. If you’re interested, you can access it here: NaganOfCopenhagen. It was work enough just to get the settings configured, so the only post over there for the time being is an introductory one that’s probably entirely redundant to anyone who’s visited this blog more than a…

Berlingske: Joes woes grow—but no biggie, guys, he gets a pass ’cause he’s old and stuff and he’s still not Trump

I’ll pick off right where I left off yesterday: Analysis: Biden’s advanced age is suddenly a political strength. A frail old man does not look like a criminalKristian Mouritzen, Berlingske.dk, January 18 Kristian Mouritzen, the author of this bizarre piece, appears to be acting as the very personification of Danish media. Everything he gets wrong…

Danmarks Radio and Gell-Mann Amnesia

First, a quick reminder of Michael Crichton’s Gell-Mann Amnesia phenomenon: Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or…

Bad News is No News

The poor darlings don’t know what to do. Here are screencaps of actual news searches I performed on “Biden” on Berlingske.dk and DR.dk at about noon (CET) on Tuesday, January 17, 2023: Berlingske: Danmarks Radio (DR.dk): Berlingske’s most recent news item that’s actually about the American president is already three days old (“Another five classified…

The Great Negation

Danmarks Radio (DR) ran an interesting article over the weekend: You’re being cheated more than you think: here’s how to see through companies’ green liesKasper Madsbøll Christensen, DR.dk, January 14 The ostensible purpose of the article is to help readers recognize when to be skeptical about product claims of climate friendliness. The answer is always,…

Double jeopardy: because fair is fair!

Last year was good to me financially, even if was another annus horribilis (Latin for “shit show”) in almost every other respect. I’m not one of those people for whom money simply materializes out of the blue: I’m one of those unfortunates who has to actually go out and earn it. No work, no money….

Why do the Danish media protect Joe Biden?

The headlines aren’t splashy. DanmarksRadio (DR): Biden after find of secret papers: “I don’t know what’s in them.” Berlingske (using Ritzau): Find of secret papers at previous office surprises Biden TV2 News (using Ritzau): Find of secret papers at previous office surprises Biden Politiken (using Ritzau): Secret Papers from Biden’s time as vice-president found in…

Colonel Jessup and the EU

In the most (and maybe only) memorable line of the movie A Few Good Man, the character Colonel Jessup (Jack Nicholson) lashes out at Lieutenant Kaffee (Tom Cruise) from the witness stand: “You can’t handle the truth!“ In the context of the movie, he’s saying that comfortable civilians are incapable of handling the reality that…

Fungibility for Morons

There’s a lot of stupidity in the Danish news today but a couple of days ago there was a sign of lucidity. That’s worthy of note. The new Danish government—the monstrous red-blue-purple “technocratic” government installed as a consequence of the November election—has made one of its first priorities the demonstration of its economic ignorance. Or,…

Denmark’s Homer

Very few people outside of Denmark have seen or are even aware of the Danish miniseries Matador, which aired in Denmark over four seasons from 1978 to 1981. The series chronicles life in the fictional town of Korsbæk through 24 episodes covering the bumpy years from 1929 through 1947—from the Depression through the occupation of…

The Year in Preview: 2023

I thought 2020 was gonna be a pretty good year. I was dead wrong about that. So I was pretty sure 2021 would be an improvement. Wrong again, on so many levels, but after back-to-back years like that I was sure things could only improve in 2022. Nope. So I’ll tell you what I think…

Cheering on the collapse of republican government

A business article in today’s Berlingske Tidende examines what the spending bill passed by the U.S. Congress means for Denmark. The facts presented by the article are more or less accurate, but they’re served to the reader in a way that raises some interesting questions. When the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, made a surprise…

Ho ho ho, Joe Joe Joe: take your &%#@! unity and—

Language note: This post originally contained such salty language that I thought I should include a warning up front for those turned off by profanity. Against all odds, however, I managed to seize control of my temper and soothe it down to the point where I could form coherent sentences without explosions of Anglo-Saxon crudity….

Happy, Happy Winter Solstice

Danish media have run a lot of stories about the new “technocratic” government’s plans to drop the national May holiday of “Great Prayer Day” in order to raise some revenue for defense.  (For example here, here, and here.) As the name suggests, Great Prayer Day is an old Christian holiday that the decreasingly observant Danes…

Weekend Mush

Saturday we went out to buy our Christmas tree. Eldest couldn’t join us because Eldest always has more important things to do these days, so it was just Herself, Youngest, and Me. We wanted to make it an actual event, as it should be, so the three of us decided we’d try a new place…