The Salonists and the Joes

The fault lines and tectonics responsible for the rattling of western civilization can be seen or described as a right-left conflict, a globalist-localist conflict, or a collectivist-individualist conflict.  Each of those perspectives has its merits and its uses, and at one point or other I’ve used each of them, but none of them seems to…

The Importance of Bearing Swag

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’s Lament

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…

Have a Nice Day

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…

THE CONTINUING CRISIS: FROWNY EDITION

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…

When silver linings are fool’s gold

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…

They say they want a revolution…

(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…

The green menace

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…

“Eliminating the impossible”

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…

Whodunnit?

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…

Giorgia on their mind

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…

Things to avoid this winter

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…

Quick question

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…

TV2 News: Women are different from men

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…

Mikkel Danielsen on Martha’s Vineyard

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…

Shut up and drill

I got an email from our energy company yesterday. Here’s the whole message: Hi GregWe are in the middle of a peculiar time, and Danish gas prices are at a record high level. This can cause concerns for your gas bill for the coming months when it gets colder and we use more gas for…

What we look like when we look like ourselves

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…

A tail of constant sorrow?

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…

How stupid are we?

“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…

Cloudy with a chance of Karens

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…