Denmark

Soda jerks, kitchen violence and a prison cookbook + this day in history w/Brighton bombing and our song of the day by Midnight Faces on your Morning Monarchy for October 12, 2016.

We may have more in common with our ancestors than we think. Archaeologists in Denmark have recently uncovered a 3,000-year-old cooking skillet with burned cheese encrusted at the bottom of it. Whoever committed this kitchen nightmare didn’t think his or her lack of cooking talent would be preserved for the ages. [1]

A 4th case of a superbug that is resistant to antibiotics of last resort has been reported in a Connecticut toddler, and health officials are scrambling to figure out where else the superbugs might be lurking.

Illegally I stepped upon the Royal Family’s castle grass in central Copenhagen during the flag day ceremony (September 5, 2013) honoring Danish voluntary soldiers’ return from their war in Afghanistan. My sign read and my voice shouted: “Stop the War! War Criminal Mercenaries!”

“Do I live in a rogue state?” Mette Fugl’s column was headlined in Politiken, June 4, 2016.
Mette Fugl is a major name in Danish Establishment journalism. She worked for the largest broadcast media, Denmark’s Radio (DR), for nearly 40 years, mainly as foreign correspondent. Many view her as a prima donna in mainstream journalism. So it has special meaning that she implies that her traditionally harmless, cozy country has become unprincipled, a swindler state.
Fugl outlines recent political and legal developments that warrant the “rogue” characterization:

Now that Bernie Sanders is out of a presidential candidate job, some Danes want him to migrate to Denmark. The “Politiken” daily newspaper published a chronicle by Peter Ahrenfeldt Schroeder and Jakob Esmann, on April 28, 2016, heralding a new association, “Sanders for Prime Minister”.

Olof Palme had just won his fourth term as Prime Minister when we spoke in Stockholm in the fall of 1985. Like Denmark’s Anker Joergensen, this stalwart social democrat opposed the “cold, egoistic new liberalism”. Unregulated capitalism threatens the Swedish model of social welfare, he said at his September 15 election victory.

This series sprang from discussions I’ve had with several people regarding the Danish/Scandinavian model of social democracy, or socialism as Bernie Sanders contends. Some well intentioned persons view the Nordic Model as a solution to greedy capitalism, while others view its role as a seditious savior of exploitative capitalism. Many Cubans I knew when living there (1988-96) and visiting since see the Nordic Model as a way out for their failing revolution, gone the way of a bureaucratic state.

(ANTIMEDIA) Crime prevention officers in Aarhus, a small Danish town, are responsible for one of the most effective anti-terrorism operations the world has ever known. Instead of bombs, these officers take a very different approach, offering a chance for redemption to young men and women who previously went to Syria to train under the watch of ISIS militants.

I first met Denmark’s last truly Social Democratic Prime Minister, Anker Joergensen, in his state office, unannounced, in late 1980.
Grethe and I had just been married. We had met the year before in Los Angeles where I had been a “participatory journalist”, and activist for social/racial/gender equality and against the Vietnam War. I wanted to start a new life with Grethe in her peaceful, social democratic land.