Swedish chef, cont.

— They are going to get that Swedish chef someday.

— Who is?

— The Smorgasbord of Health.

For 20 minutes of guaranteed ruined productivity, click here.

Summers on the Jersey Shore

This is an exception to the two-week no posting promise. I promise.In this week's Prairie Home Companion [RealAudio], a truly standout edition, including:

@ 01:25:30: A tribute by Garrison Keillor to Ray Charles: A wonderful monologue followed by a lovely rendition of "Hallelujah I Love Her So".

@ 01:34:54: One of the best "The News from Lake Wobegon"s in years — a bittersweet remembrance of drinking and smoking days long gone that meanders towards a country song about Richard Nixon and ends with strident political commentary on current affairs. Hilarious and yet quite moving.

The whole show is worth listening to. It was recorded in Ocean Grove, an old Methodist settlement on the Jersey Shore that I once managed to visit with Anna and her Betty, a white 1984 Cadillac Coupe Deville that was then disintegrating gracefullyLater that summer, Anna and Anna manged to drive her all the way to Texas before she perished completely.. We were on a pilgrimage of sorts to Asbury Park, just up the shore, where Bruce Springsteen first played gigs at the now legendary Stone Pony, right by the ocean at the end of a dilapidated parking lot. Anna had spent many a teenaged Swedish winter locked in her closet listening to Bruce, so this trip had a very special meaning to her.

In Asbury Park, we learned that Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes, old pals of Bruce, were playing at the Stone Pony that evening, so we went and listened for a while, but it was getting late and so we left before the end of the show. The next day, the papers screamed how Bruce Springsteen had joined Johnny onstage in a surprise ending, only the second time in 25 years Bruce had played at the Stone Pony. Anna was sick to her stomach. It ruined her summer. She has not listened to Bruce Springsteen since.

The prime of summer

I'm now going to cash in two weeks out of the six annually I have just alotted myself as vacation from long-form blogging on stefangeens.com. When I return, I expect the site to have been redesigned, because site design to me is a bit like gardening — hands-on but aesthetically pleasing in prearticulate ways — and that is exactly the change I need"Whatever information aesthetics conveys is prearticulate — the connotation of the color and shapes of letters, not the meanings of the words they form. Aesthetics conjures meaning in a subliminal, associational way, as our direct sensory experience reminds us of something that is absent, a memory or an idea. Those associations may be universal, the way Disney's big-eyed animals play on the innate human attraction to babies. Or they may change from person to person, place to place, moment to moment." Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style..

I've also been thinking about making changes to the kind of content I post. I've figured out the short essay format now, so I was toying with the idea of forbidding it — all English-language prose, actually — as an allowable form for future postings here. Since blogging should be a learning experience, I figured, I should allow myself to write only in Swedish, Dutch, French, and in English rhyming couplets.

I soon realized that not even I would want to read such a blog, so that would probably be taking things too far. Still, I like the idea of a blog aiming to minimize its readership as a means of staying true to itself, and to that end I think I will write more quirkily in the future, and lie on occassion, and blur fact and fiction when it suits me. I think that writing to the expectations of a readership can increase visits in the short term at the expense of what the author feels might be most important, just like a political party that gravitates towards the center in a bid at popularity loses its soul in the process. So consider this realignment an attempt to avert the fate of Sweden's Folkpartiet.

Quirkiness? Minimizing readership? Here is an example of what I mean: Over the next few weeks I want to read/reread the following books: Lee Smolin's Three Roads to Quantum Gravity; Gödel's Proof; a very well-reviewed book (available free in its entirety online) on the Riemann Hypothesis; and the relevant bits about Rule 30 in Wolfram's A New Kind of Science (available online free as well). The reason? I need all four to explore the idea that there is no randomness, after all, at the quantum level in the universe, but that things are strictly determininistic, the result of unfathomably many simple processes leading to complex states for which there is no precise description shorter than actually running the universe from scratch — hence the ability of scientific equations to describe aggregate properties of systems but not predict exact statesEarlier posts about this stuff:
"Time is Discrete"
My Rule 30 Flash app. Is there something akin to Rule 30 dictating interactions between the smallest possible units of space-time, churning out complexity in the form of particles? Is that the Theory of Everything? I need to repolish my tools for understanding at least a bastardized version of such a possible ToE if and when it is discovered in my lifetime.

From an amazing online tutorial on the distribution of prime numbers.What do Riemann and Gödel have to do with this? For me, prime numbers represent a basic graininess in mathematics — The Riemann zeta function approximates their distribution, but cannot predict precisely when they occur, in my mind providing an analogy to how rule 30 might create grainy results at the quantum level that equations can only approximate in the aggregate. Meanwhile, Gödel mapped — using prime numbers — statements about numbers to statements about logic, and showed that just as there will always be new (prime) numbers that are not the product of smaller numbers, there will always be new truthful logical statements that are not provable using more basic axioms. (At least that's my current layman's understanding of his proof, but I may be off, and hence the need of a reread.) If an eventual Smolin/Makropoulou-Kalamara ToE posits the universe is a huge distributed computer, then Gödel's work, dealing as it does with number patterns, would be directly applicable! It would be a beautiful way of showing how our universe's logic and the basic quantum structure of space-time are inseparable, one the corollary of the other.

During the next few weeks, I will still be blogging away at MemeFirst. Meanwhile, also, check out Anthony Lane's love letter to Ingmar Bergman in The New Yorker, on the occasion of a Bergman retrospective at the Film Forum in New York. It sounds like he actually flew to Stockholm a few weeks ago just to get in the mood:

The weekend before your first Bergman movie, take a flight to Stockholm and, once there, a ferry out to the islands. This will not be hard, the capital itself being composed of fourteen islands, and the archipelago to the east offering twenty-four thousand more. Nowhere in Europe can you quit civilization and find yourself in wilderness with such speed, and that transition alone is a key to the dreams of escape in early Bergman, and to his later nightmares about what we may discover in our isolation. Think of Monika and her beau, the camera pitching slightly on the prow of their boat as it chugs through the city and out into open water; think of the two women, the silent patient and her chattering nurse, who hole up on a stony isle in “Persona”; think, finally, of Bergman, who has based himself since 1966 on that same hideaway, Fårö, a hundred miles south of Stockholm, and who chose it, two years later, as the site of “Hour of the Wolf” and of his coruscating war film “Shame.” Thanks to jet lag, you will have a chance to follow the arc of a Swedish summer evening. All the passages in Bergman, you will realize, where the characters are too hazy and restive, and the heavens too bright, for any hope of repose are not just fanciful conceits or loaded metaphors. They are weather reports, and when the girl in “Summer Interlude” recalls, “There was no time to sleep,” she is referring not only to endless sex, fine proposition though that is, but to the sacramental whiteness of the nights.

Bergman's evocations of Swedish summers have clearly been the catalyst for many a foreigner's fantasies about Sweden, not least Lane's. To see what he means, catch Summer with Monika if you can.

Swedish cleavage!

I think there is an interesting realignment underway in the Swedish party political system. Parties, and even factions within parties, are no longer just positioning themselves along the traditional left-right axis, but also in terms of how global their perspectives are — along a nationalist-internationalist axis, if you will. The result is some interesting similarities in outlooks between parties not traditionally neighbors on the left-right axisJohan Norberg, when trying to choose how to vote on June 13, is in effect weighing which party is the most internationalist among the center-right offerings. (He has no permalinkage: scroll to June 7.), and, more worryingly, opportunities for nationalist parties to conquer terrain on the opinion landscape that is being vacated by larger political parties, whose elites are (albeit slowly) migrating towards global perspectives for policymaking.

This migration may explain the the surge in violence on June 6 [Swedish] in Gamla Stan between what looked like the extreme left and the militant right. In fact, the altercation is better understood as a battle between extreme internationalists and disenfranchised nationalists.

While the left-right axis, roughly, aligns parties according to class loyalties or income redistribution preferences, the nationalist-internationalist axis aligns parties according to the scope of these allegiances. Is it just Swedish farmers whose interests a party should represent, or those of farmers in the rest of Europe or even the third world? Should the workers of Sweden unite, or the workers of Sweden, Poland, the Baltics, and the rest of the world? Where you fall on such questions makes huge differences in policy recommendations, even among people of the same left-right persuasionBoth Gudmundson [Swedish] and Norberg (June 8) link to this just released Timbro report on voting records of MEPs, and while individual voting records vary, among Swedish parties the Social Democrats have the best free trade record. (!).

It used to be very simple, and in many countries it still is: Parties should represent the interests of their voters, and these voters may be left, center or conservative, but they are all, say, French. The resultant political system is one where, ideally, utility is maximized for the greatest number of Frenchmen, without regard for such niggling externalities like policy induced poverty abroad Yes, I'm talking about CAP again, my apologies. or the needs of political refugees from from abroad.

For parties migrating to an internationalist perspective, this is no longer an ethically defensible position. If the value of non-citizens' lives is the same as that of citizens, then an ethical party policy position should try to maximize utility for all "ideological brethren," regardless of where they may live. Defending the rights of unionized labor at home by denying opportunities for fellow working-class members across the Baltic Sea (through restricted immigration, say) becomes problematic.

It appears to me that among Sweden's left-of-center parties, youth wings are the ones keener to adopt this internationalist approach, whereas the party apparats, older and with more union baggage, are resistingCould the pro-free trade voting record of Social Democrat MEPs be explained by their relative youth? Unfortunately, the Timbro report does not have MEP's ages. It would make for an interesting correlation study.. The old guard may also be more pragmatic, electorally: Patronage gets you elected, whether you like it or not, but with it come expectations that have nothing to do with ideological consistency. They may also understand that the electorate is not nearly as inclined to adopt a global perspective on utility maximization: This SvD article [Swedish] from a few days ago reports that a rising trend of Swedes, now over half, want Sweden to take in political refugees at a lower rate than is currently the case.

The irony of this entire situation is that in many cases parties are faced with a false dilemma. With respect to trade, for example, free traders know that their prescription for trade policy leads to the greatest possible utility for both the importing country and the exporting country. Unfortunately, the theory of comparative advantage is one university course removed from being self-evident, and it is in this gap that nationalist protectionists set up camp.

These "napros" do have potential natural allies: While the total utility of a country improves when it embraces solidly pro-globalization policies, individual groups within the country may lose out — auto workers in the US, for example, or farmers in Sweden. These groups, some of them traditionally heavily unionized, are the easiest targets for napros, and nationalist parties will try to coopt their interests. Gudmundson has already nailed one such example: the nationalist SverigeDemokraterna and their Swedish-meat-only-in-schools policy. My guess is that this wins votes with farmers because they empathise far more with fellow Swedes than with fellow subsistence farmers in Senegal.

An example of nationalist protectionism on the left is the reprehensible poster campaign by the Byggnads contruction workers' union a few months back. Their members are also waiting to be captured by a nationalist party.

What are the policy implications of a migration by traditional parties towards global perspectives for policy making? There are lessons to be learned from Flemish politics: In an effort to contain the nationalist Vlaams Blok, all other parties threw up a cordon sanitaire, in effect voluntarily vacating the entire nationalist half of the opinion landscape, and leaving it all to the Vlaams Blok. The result: one third of the vote in Antwerp now goes to Vlaams Blok.

I don't think, however, that the solution is to remain nationalist in perspective, but that preëmptive policies should be introduced which prevent the nationalist option from becoming appealing. In Sweden, concretely, this means redirecting union umbrella group LO's funding, massively, towards retraining those groups at risk of losing their livelihood because of globalization. Whatever happens, a nationalist party should not capture groups like Byggnads union members. Also, let's not forget the average age of the black-T-shirts I saw milling around on the edge of Slussen on June 6: They looked barely out of high school. These people need to get a job in a job-producing economy so they have no time to blame their failures on somebody else.

Venuspassagen 2004

Stockholm is perfectly positioned to see the transit of venus across the face of the sun, currently underway, but a stubborn cloud cover is obliterating every hint of the event. In fact, the weather's been remarkably crappy here for all of May and June.

We don't have to wait too long for the next transit, which takes place on June 6, 2012, but for which Stockholm is not well positioned (I'm sure the weather will be great, as a result). Japan and Australia will be the place to be.Jävla vädret! Venus stannar inför solen för första gång i 122 år och det regnar i Stockholm. Flest av de webcasts fungerar inte, eller inte är live, eller har för många besökare, men här finns en som går: Centro de Observação Astronómica no Algarve har en bild som uppdateras.

Åtminstone behöver vi inte vänta 122 år till. Nästa Venuspassage är 6 juni, 2012, men skall inte ses från Sverige; bara från Australien eller Japan. Därför kan jag göra världens bästa long-range väderprognos: Det ska vara solig i Stockholm 6 juni, 2012kl 11.45: Sol i Stockholm! Och jag har sett passagen. Använda 2 svarta diapositiv och du också får titta på solen. Venus är liten, förresten.. Man kan planera nästnästa bloggpicnic utan bekymmer.

PS. Venuspassagen finns tills kl 13.22 i Stockholm, ifall vädret blir bättre.

Bernard Mengal

If I can stop laughing long enough I would like to offer Swedes who read this an apology on behalf of us Belgians for an item of junk mail that likely appeared in their mailboxes this past week disguised as electoral information for the Sverigedemokraterna, the country's minuscule anti-immigrant party.

Update 2004-06-06: Here is the PDF of the pamphlet.I opened it, of course, eager to see what they thought of a foreigner like myself, only to find a Belgian staring back at me, above the fold of the leaflet, bemoaning "how Sweden's political leaders are subjecting Swedes to racism and discrimination [by foreigners, apparently]."

What a bizarre thing to say, I thought, and what a bizarre person to be saying it. For what possible reason could he be on that pamphlet? My curiosity irked, I googled his name, Bernard Mengal, suspecting he was some Vlaams Blok party member being loaned out in the cause of pan-European xenophobia.

The truth is a lot weirder. Bernard Mengal is a rich property scion from Brussels and a militant pagan. He actually bankrolled this pamphlet, money which the Sverigedemokraterna accepted without asking too many difficult questions (or doing a google search, apparently) late last year. The only condition: His face had to appear on the publication. This obviously provided an interesting challenge to the pamphlet designers: How does one make the mug of an incongruous Belgian look like a perfectly reasonable thing to put on Swedish nationalist propaganda? (He looks just like that infamous pagan bard Cacofonix, don't you think?)

Soon enough, it was brought to the party's attention that they were aligning themselves with a nutcase. One party luminary, Tommy Funebo, quit after making the eminently reasonable point that a party defending solid Swedish Lutheran principles should not find a friend in someone still siding with the Vikings against the Christianization of ScandinaviaHere is Mengal's historical treatise, The Christian offensive against the Scandinavians, alas only in French.. Seeing Christians as freeloading newcomers in Europe takes xenophobia to a whole new level, though at least you can't fault Mengal's impeccable internal logic.

Mengal's name, not surprisingly, shows up in this antisemitism watch, practically by default:

[Neo-pagan Groups:] ... The Association des Successeurs des Ases (ASA), known as the Fils des Ases, for example, has been active since 1992. Based in Brussels this small group which seeks to defend the “Nordic race,” evolved from neo-Nazi groups of the New Right. Recently, publications ascribed to the ASA or to its spokesman, Bernard Mengal, have unmistakably endorsed a shift toward armed combat against the establishment. Mengal was also the initiator of works based on biological racism and an obsessive antisemitism. The main contributor to Mengal’s publications is the Frenchman Pierre Chassard. Together, from June 1998 onwards, they issued the journal Contre-Thèses.

Sverigedemokraterna's leadership says [PDF] it took a good look at the available evidence, two issues of Contre-Thèses provided by Mangel himself, and that while he may be weird, he is not anti-democratic or anti-semitic. (Funebo, who saw those same issues, came to the exact opposite conclusion.) But the most hilarious defence of their actions is this paragraph:

Even the Vlaams Blok leadership was consulted, and they had never heard of Bernard Mengal and could not give us any more detailed information. From this one can conclude that Bernard Mengal is not a well-known person in Belgian politics, and cannot therefore be a renowned antisemite or extremist.Även ledningen i Vlaams Blok har konsulterats, men de hade knappt hört talas om Bernard Mengal och kunde inte ge oss något mer detaljerat omdöme. Av det kan man dock sluta sig till att Bernard Mengal inte är någon känd person i belgisk politik, och kan därför omöjligt vara en känd antisemit eller extremist.

The inevitable conclusion being that the Sverigedemokraterna think it perfectly reasonable to take money from antisemites or extremists as long that they are not well known. Which, in the end, is what they did.

But the Sverigedemokraterna might now be feeling a bit embarrassed by the whole affair. Mengal's name is impossible hard to find on their EU election site (except for in the above PDF press release), nor does he feature on the newest version of the pamphlet. Or maybe they just used up all his money.

Finns caféer med trådlös bredband i Stockholm?

I slutet av min tid i New York brukade jag köpa ett kaffe att ta med från Café Pick-me-up, sätta mig med min dator i Tompkins Square park och surfa via donerad trådlös bredband från grannar.

Jag har inte ännu kunnat göra samma sak här in Stockholm. Det är inte så viktigt i 8 av 12 månader, men just nu skulle det vara härligt att kunna skriva eller kolla e-post i solen på eftermiddagen.

Känner ni till caféer i Stockholm som har trådlös bredband? Var man kan sitta ute i timmar med en bärbar dator? Eller parker där det finns ett öppet wi-fi nätverk? Jag vill inte frilansa hemma när vädret är så fint ute. Tack i förväg!

If on a summer's night...

While walking up the stairs after my run today I thought I might write boastfully here about my first sub-hour circumnavigation of Södermalm, and how I did it solo, without a wheezing bouncing Joachim by my side, after he broke an agreement to come running with me, citing prior children.

But taunting Joachim like that would not be nice, so I won't, though I fear you might be disappointed by what then remains of my post: sage descriptions of jogging Swedes that crossed my path in droves as I squinted into the late evening sunlight, a segue into how healthy Swedes are; how, more generally, duktig they are in everything they do. I'd then have to explain the word duktig to you, and recount how Emma once said there is no accurate English equivalent. It does not merely mean "good, able, capable;" there is an element of relentless self-improvement implied by its use; it is an inner initiative to learn from mistakes that makes Swedes duktigIKEA pitches in with an illustrated example of the word duktig.. At least all those who are not slarvig.

Or I might try to recount the thought processes of an hour-long run, how fragments of a rather good short story I had read just previously came back at odd moments, but I'd just embellish it, and maybe even make stuff up, like for example how some people can look like they are running fast when they are not, and vice versa — I just thought of that now. In any case, such writing would come across as earnest, and we hate that.

Perhaps I should just start a new genre where I do not actually write a blog but just describe imagined blog entries that I have not written. Noncommittal writing, I would call it, and I would engage in it in the more transient phases of my life, when nothing is really certain or cherished notions are in a state of flux, when writing down thoughts would give them more permanence than they deserve, like putting shacks up on the World Heritage List. And there is something wonderfully Calvinoesque or Borgesian to it all. Maybe I should just post reviews of my imagined rants, pronounce them the work of genius, but report back inexpertly and confused, and depend instead on the imagination of readers to construct something of proper greatness out of them.

Heart of Twilight

In my continuing mission to infiltrate the Swedish psyche I managed to finagle my way into a proper Swedish student ball over the weekend. By proper, I mean tails for the boys, ballroom dresses for the girls, white gloves, dinner speeches, toasts, snaps, drinking songs, punsch, a 12-piece orchestra, ballroom dancing, and then, at 2.30 am, as the glow of morning twilight began brightening the proceedings, an ABBA medley.

It's all beginning to make glorious sense.

Favorite drinking song of the evening: A subversive rendition of The Internationale, which now goes like this:

More snaps in the glas,
more glasses on the table.
More tables at the party,
more parties on this earth.

More earths around the moon,
more moons around Mars.
More marching to Skåne (the region),
more Skåne (the snaps) God bless
bless bless.Mera brännvin i glasen,
mera glas på vårt bord.
Mera bord på kalasen,
mer kalas på vår jord.

Mera jordar kring månen,
mera månar kring Mars.
Mera marscher till Skåne,
mera Skåne gud bevars,
bevars bevars.

I mangled it con molto gusto.

For longtime followers of this site, the ball also provided an opportunity to lay to rest vicious recurring rumors that Steffanie and I are one and the same person. The visual evidence is presented on her site.

My long weekend reading list

If you haven't already, first read NYT Public Editor Daniel Okrent's own assessment from Friday on that paper's dealings with Chalabi before and during the war. When are the NYP, WaPo and WSJ ombudsmen weighing in?

Then, read Christopher Hitchens embarrassing and apparently embarrassed defence of Chalabi. His best effort:

As to the accusation that Chalabi has endangered American national security by slipping secrets to Tehran, I can only say that three days ago, I broke my usual rule and had a "deep background" meeting with a very "senior administration official." This person, given every opportunity to signal even slightly that I ought to treat the charges seriously, pointedly declined to do so. I thought I should put this on record.

Such investigative prowess! "Hey Dr. Kissinger, on deep background, is there anything to this Watergate scandal?" "Mr. Weinberger, Sir, Iran-Contra, yay or nay?"

Chase that sad excuse for journalism with Jane Mayer's stunning New Yorker profile of Chalabi. It reads like the addictive middle 10,000 words of a great spy thriller, just around the part where the audacity of the conspirators' machinations is revealed.