More than once I have written that one of the hallmarks of a time of constant crisis is that the global affects one's own life. It may be time to ironically thank Americans. Since so many of them are working to make the world dangerous for liberal democracies, my extremely modest amount of shares in the defense industry are soaring. Here’s to not feeling that poor anymore!


Ps. of course this isn't stock tips, I’m not the person to give that.

I don't know how much of a long shot the following is, but if I'm lucky I got to work on a thesis that includes the words "wild type populus". It also means that I contacted a central European doctor researcher. I was worried if I should call him doctor in an e-mail? We Scandinavians don't tend to be so formal with titles.

Until then I have a very literary period. I have read a lot, books as a primitive escapist. I'm starting to get the impression that it's not worth mentioning local authors here, because I have heard English is a difficult language to get translate into. The authors I might have met, who even might say “Hi” to me if I met them in town, can be translated to Polish or Dutch but are not found on the English market. The English speakers don’t care about us. Haha. Since I have two books on my bookshelf, that are partly written in Scots we can for fun ask if Scots is a less difficult language to be translated into than English? The two books mentioned are Trainspotting by Irving Wells and Moven Caller by Alan Warner.

Here’s one story about how I chose books to read. One of my dad's hobbies is selling books online, he’s selling off all his books. That means the books that are left in my parents book shelfs more or less are books that don't sell. Sometimes I borrow from those unsellable books. Two books I read recently are from that source. Both are by dead, white, men awarded the Nobel Prize: Halldór Laxness and Ernst Hemingway.

The novel I liked most was Laxness’s The atom station. A young woman, in a newly independent Iceland, comes from the rural areas of the country, to Reykjavik, a town with governmental ministers, communists, poets, and American soldiers. The atom station in the title is Keflavik air base (I don’t know if the US ever had nukes on that base).

The Hemingway novel I read was To have and have not. The most Marxist of his books, but the book also includes the n-word and so. Weird since social media is full of people with american accent who dismiss “woke” as being “Marxism” and I don’t think that word is “woke”. Seriously, the thing is that when I grew up politics, or specifically the ideology Marxism, were about things like class, dialectic materialism, who should own the means of production ... things that the chronically online culture warriors of today never talk about.

The third book I want to mention is Engine empire (2013) by Cathy Park Hong, born 1976, Los Angeles. It’s experimental, futuristic poetry. I’m reading her on Google books, and listening to her reading on youtube - futurism and California. Don’t know when it’s time to give a Nobel prize to a poet next time, but I don’t think Hong will get it next year - they can’t give it to an ethical Korean woman two years in a row? Ok, I mentioned politics.

You know what, I could of course write something about American politics besides posing as a know-it-all. The sad thing for us is if the US abandons Ukraine. Then we have to step in and take over, and Make Europe Great Again. We will fail, but we should try. If I can do science, I’ll do my part.

I wonder if I have understood the following correctly, that the US constitution says that the president can’t veto a declaration of war? The three Baltic states are always mentioned as Russia's second target after Ukraine. So one thought is that Russia in Januray will think: “Our boys are in the white house, lets invade, kill, torture, rape, and deport as many Baltic people as we want”. But if it’s the congress that’s declaring war, they still can declare war on Russia, no matter how much the president and the vice president yell about it? The pentagon will say: "No, that's the constitution - time to blow some stuff up and kick some butt!"

Btw in January Sweden will have NATO-troops, in the Baltic state Latvia.

Unrelated, the celebrity death that so to speak has affected me most has been the more obscure celebrities. Now it was the doctor, writer and translator Salomon Schulman who recently died. One coincidence was that Schulman studied to become a doctor simultaneously and in the same classes as my dad. Therefore it became personal for me. Still, one can write some words about Schulman, his mother survived Auschwitz, his father survived gulag. That’s actually connected to the first part of this entry, war and dictatorships.

Also, I haven’t had time to be here. I haven’t read anything here in some weeks.

Video about Russian women actually protesting the war.

 

I live 300 m from a lake in the forest. The lake that happens to be my childhood bathing and fishing lake. Yesterday I could sit by the lake, up here 64° N, and watch swans and also listen to something about Nietzsche on the phone, because that's what the algorithm recommended me to listen to. Ok I gave up on Nietzsche. But poetic words, forest lake, swans, 64° N. Then I went home and consumed digestive with 30% reduced sugar and lotus tea. Yes, oddly enough, I have lotus tea at home.

The day before yesterday I andRobert saw Oppenheimer. Words here I have from the book Einstein's monster by Martin Amis and from a swedish history book. Amis made a point of the the childish names: The gadget, the cradle, Little boy and later Nuclear football and why do I think the first H-bomb was named “My child”? Well, I can’t find that information online so I must remember wrong. The Swedish book had more about Heissenbergs and Niels Bohr’s meeting in Copenhagen, and Heissenbergs claim he had suggest physicists all over the world should lie to politicians and the military and say that an atomic bomb wouldn’t be practical to build. Only that Bohr didn’t remember it that way. That book might not have had the line: "I am become death ..." it did however had Niels Bohrs line "Is it big enought?".

As I often write, I had my formative years in the 1990s. One thing with that is we, the free world, two times during the century had crushed totalitarian states. That's proof democracy should always prevalve. Now, when Russia screw up their genocide invasion. When China has economical problems. And yes, when Social democratic Nordic countries with less draconian covid laws have so much lower excess mortality than the countries that choose illiberal covid laws. Now one can almost hope we were right back all those years ago. But don’t misread me. You don't have to agree with me and I’m far from sure it’s like this. Russia might very well continue throwing death and misery around them until they “win” the war. Still the people who were sure that Russia would take Kyiv. Or that Sweden was a pariah state. At the moment they are the ones who have some explaining to do. It could be the same with the people who were sure China is destined to become the largest economy in the world.

One of the stupidest things I did last year was to start writing, or planning, for a dystopian novel about gangs fighting over rare earth minerals in the north. But it's only a minority of a minority that is born with the talent needed to write a novel. What I can do us play around with AIs drawing on a theme like that. ;

  So Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting ect) wrote an article for British newspaper unherd: The betrayal of white working class men. The article is the most left wing writing I have read in a long time. For example, Welsh makes that old school thing of writing that the working class in the UK wasn’t the enemy of the colonized people, during the age of new imperialism.  However, rationalwiki had a hit piece on unherdand claims it is “right-wing”. Well I will continue reading the left wing writers on unherd, no matter if the champagne socialist over in the US thinks the paper is the devil.