Maybe Kerry was thinking of Israel's chemical weapons program... or maybe Lavrov and Kerry talked about this particular option during their meeting in Sweden and Kerry now got the green light from Obama to plant a little nudge as a sign for the Russians that the US is willing to play ball.

Awesome!!

And y'know, the way he's open about his body being fucked up actually makes it way easier to relate to him. Here in Sweden, for example, we've got this cultural tendency to pretend like everybody's essentially exactly the same (because difference, of course, is inherently bad), and that always makes things awkward and difficult when people are obviously different because you have to pretend that they aren't different at all, which really only makes you focus even more on the actual differences.

The European Parliament's Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs had a hearing about NSA/PRISM/etc yesterday, with Jacob Applebaum and Alan Rusbridger amongst others. Greenwald was supposed to be videoconferenced in, but it didn't work for reasons unknown to me.

Two interesting bits of information:

1) Sweden is closely involved in the Fives Eyes program. They have an installation to monitor satellite communications and access to fibre optic cables that the members of Five Eyes don't have access to. No specifics were mentioned, but a quick glance at a map of long distance cables indicates to me that it's Russian communications they are interested in -- those run through Sweden.

2) Nations with access to PRISM/ECHELON besides the Five Eyes: France, Israel and Sweden. Likely to have access, though probably limited: Germany. Potential access, but unconfirmed: a total of thirty nations.

And, as a special bonus, the former chair of the special committee that authored the 2001 report on ECHELON said the following, paraphrased by me:

"If rentention of domestic communications meta data is deemed neccessary, the acquired data should not be stored outside of the respective nation. Normally, I'd say outside of the EU, but that just brings us back to the problem of GB and the GCHQ."

That's a high ranking EU official stating, on record, that GB cannot be trusted.

This guy reminds me of someone I knew back in what I assume must be Sweden's equivalent to High School.

I'd always thought he seemed like a nice, intelligent and well-adjusted guy, and... then I sat down and spoke to him.

To put it mildly, he shattered my expectations of him.

See, apparently, this guy had figured out (through various prophetic texts as well as the Bible) that there was a huge comet hurtling towards Earth, and that it would surely eradicate all life on the planet if we failed to stop it. Luckily, my (absolutely fucking bat-shit crazy) buddy had it all figured out.

He had three plans; either we simply send up four rockets with a great big rubber net suspended between them, or we pile everybody into Russia and cause the Earth to roll out of orbit, or we take a bunch of atoms, squish them all together, and create a kick-ass and completely impenetrable force field. Obviously, I asked him how the atoms were going to be kept together - after all, atoms are notoriously unwilling to cuddle - and for a moment, this gave him pause. He simply sat there with a frown, looking down at the table between us. Then, his face suddenly lit up with self-congratulatory smugness and, with one arched eyebrow and supreme confidence, he proudly uttered two words:

"Computer chips!"

We didn't really talk much after that.

No, the US spends MORE TAX MONEY per capita than, say, Sweden and all those other countries with "free" healthcare.(except for 3 of them) Swedes do pay more taxes, yes, but its not because of healthcare.
ON TOP of all those taxes, Americans pay private insurance or bankrupt themselves in order to actually get healthcare when they need it.

http://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2013/02/23/which-nation-has-the-most-per-capita-government-spending-on-healthcare-france-italy-the-united-states-
sweden-canada-greece-or-the-united-kingdom/

@alien_concept

Thanks! I was struggling to come up with a username, and then I just decided to accept my true nature.

And this is a timeless issue that I think we've all run into at times. A woman comes to a man to talk about her emotions. The man sees that she has a problem, and tries to help her solve it. This frustrates the woman - she only wanted to share her troubles with him, and she feels insulted that he would assume she is incapable of solving her own problems. This, in turn, frustrates the man; after all, why would she come to him if she won't accept his help? He's sincerely doing his best, and he feels that she is being unfair and overly emotional.

A fight ensues, and neither party understands how it even happened, or how to find a way out of it.

And as I have a VERY emotional mother and VERY rational father, I've been on both sides, as well as in the middle, of this conflict many times.

As for Assange, he once said that Sweden is the "Saudi Arabia of feminism," and having grown up here, I can vouch for the veracity of that statement.

It has gotten to the point here that most guys are just too afraid to stand up to even the most obvious acts of bigotry because the one-way sexism has become so widely accepted. We're only left with three choices; we either accept the abuse and join in it ourselves, or we simply give up and take it with a sort of hopeless resignation.

Since I can't stand to be victimized, I favour the third option; pointing out the bullshit and then riposting with facts, logic and righteous anger.

But I've had some utterly INSANE examples of sexism happen in the classroom, including a teacher derailing a lecture right at the beginning of it and instead spending her entire hour to essentially claim that all men are either rapists or potential rapists, and as a guy, it's just difficult to know what to do in that situation.

It's also very hurtful, as I find rape to be one of the most despicable acts imaginable.

And... that's why my reaction to this guy's poem was so strong. It's like he's been abused for so long that he's begun to think that it's actually true.

You gave your son a very good answer! Men and women are different from one another (though this isn't entirely set in stone), and I think that anybody who claims otherwise simply prefers ideology or fantasy (same thing, really) over reality.

And for what it's worth, I think those differences are pretty freaking valuable. I love women, and part of the reason for that is the fact that they aren't men.

@alien_concept

I'm used to people just getting incredibly angry at me whenever I take a position that is in some way in opposition to some facet of feminism, so thanks for not doing that.

And yeah, it's possible that I'm taking it way too literally. It just feels like I've heard this stuff so many times, and it always makes me sad. I mean, I'm Swedish, and here in Sweden, radical feminism is essentially ubiquitous. A bit less than half of all the female teachers I've ever had have been so aggressively feminist that they've made their ideology part of their curriculum no matter what their subject has been, and have passed off doctrinal truths as scientific fact.

And... it wears down on you. Not the stuff about equality or treating women like people because all of that stuff is just FANTASTIC. Rather, it's all the stuff people either won't talk about, or will attribute to some insane radfem groups they'll claim are so small that they almost can't be said to exist at all. In other words, it's all the stuff people usually don't want to admit is there.

What's to explain? Obviously Sweden and Norway have been at War for the last 30 years and it's not reported on because they don't matter.

↺↺↺ Yeah yo man, Swedens' bonkers-*promote
caught the Freudian slippage as well, nice call, cluhlenbrauck

You're not talking about the Sweden that's declining into a dystopia, are you?

If you want the land of the free, try moving to Sweden or something 'cause America ain't.

This is an actual vocal group from Sweden, not just some random fishermen.

The US and Canada are very different. In contrast, every European country has a problem among their Muslim immigrant population with high-crime and low academic scores.

Witness, for example, the famously high rate of Muslim car-burnings across France, same as the recent violence in Sweden.


The best way to create a liberal utopia is to prevent liberals from importing millions of high-crime, low-academic-score foreigners who will be a problem for hundreds of years to come. Witness, for example, the US' intractable problems with its own sub-populations, who don't improve academically in later generations.

In contrast, importing impoverished East Asians increases the nation's average IQ, and lowers the average crime rate. That just goes to show that immigration decisions should be data-based, instead of trying to hide the downsides of our past decisions.


Thanks for the conversation

This video was talking about Norway, and the Norwegian system, and although there are some similarities with Sweden it would be a bit like me suggesting that Canada is unsafe because of crime in the U.S.A.

One thing that does stand out when looking at both countries is that they are very small. Norway has approximately the population of Melbourne (or Los Angeles) and Sweden is approximately New York City (or Melbourne and Sydney combined)... and of course there is more crime in the larger cities like Oslo than in smaller towns.

Thanks for your comment since, despite not entirely agreeing with your original statement because I think the topic is a little more complicated than that, I have learned something (about both Norway and Sweden)