On Covid-19, Sweden has been told what to do
Yesterday I noticed a change in the Swedish news reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic.
Up until now the central figure of the daily reports has been the head epidemiologist of the Public Health Agency of Sweden, Anders Tegnell, who has tried to follow a more scientific line in Sweden's response to the Covid-19 pandemic than his counterparts in other countries.
In the beginning his 'hands off' approach found much favour with the Swedes, but not from other countries with more dictatorial governments. The Swedish method was attacked, laughed at, treated with disrespect, and the same applied to Anders Tegnell. And then, when it was seen to be working at least as well as the more draconian methods this criticism stopped, and Sweden was relegated to the back page of the news, if it was mentioned at all.
Sweden's handling of the problem involved relying on the good offices of its citizens in following the advice of the Public Health Agency. From tighter restrictions on association, the first relaxation was a maximum of 50 taking part in an event - a football match as supporters, a theatre performance as audience, whatever. In October this was increased to 300.
Notwithstanding the medial silence surrounding the Swedish method, people heard about it, heard that it was a success, and asked why their country did not try to follow the same method. In the end, Sweden had to be stopped, brought into line. And then came the second Covid-19 wave. It was nothing more than a tick upwards in Sweden, but it gave the chance for a change of policy.
And yesterday it was not Anders Tegnell who led the reporting. It was Prime Minister Stefan Löven. Gone was the 300 participant rule. Gone, too, was the 50 participant rule. The new limit was 8 participants. Eight, not seven or nine or ten. Advent events, Christmas and the New Year, all would be affected. The indication was that members of the family who did not normally live together should not meet.
Why eight participants, you may ask. Because specifying eight, as opposed to seven or nine, least of all the nice round number of ten, can give the impression that some wise government scientist has worked things out and come to the conclusion that just eight is the right number to prevent an explosive eruption of cases. It is more believable, and thus defensible than ten. At the same time it's enough to include most of a family, Mother, Father, two children and their children.
The change has continued. It is still Prime Minister Stefan Löven who leads the drive to self-isolation. I have not seen Anders Tegnell since the hard-line government take-over.
Some powerful force has told Sweden to toe the line.
My Cato paragraph*:
Additionally, I consider that research into the causes of neuropsychological disturbances in children including gender problems should be encouraged and funded with a view to eliminating them.
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_the_Elder
Cato the Elder was an influential Roman politician with a hatred of the Carthaginians. He used to end all his senate speeches with the words "Additionally I think that Carthage must be laid in ruins".
On crime and punishment
The government of Sweden is reviewing the scale of punishments for certain crimes, a review which they hope will quiet the civilian criticism, if not the criticism of the opposition. Let me add some thoughts to their deliberations.
Rape
From my point of view rape is a far more serious crime than murder. In a murder case there is no going back. The dead person will always be dead. Yes, the period of mourning for the lost person can vary from a few months to most of a lifetime, but hopefully the bereaved will find a way to live without the presence of the deceased.
In the case of rape, the perpetrator is still alive. Even if he is locked up, there is still the thought that he might be released sometime, and come around looking for round two, especially in today's society in which good-will is more often paid to the perpetrator than to the victim. So, no, get the rapist off the streets for as long as possible, so that the victim - and all other potential victims - can feel safe. Metaphorically, lock them up and throw away the key.
I have sometimes thought that castration might be appropriate. Not chemical castration, where the perpetrator receives injections intended to reduce the procreative lust, for suddenly he will not show up for an injection, and you're back to square one. No, surgical removal of a testicle for the first offence and of the other testicle for a second offence. Lock them up anyway, but let them feel when they scratch their ball that there is at least one good reason not to do that again, if they get the chance.
However, there is something objectionable to me in the idea of the surgical removal of an organ as punishment. It reminds me too much of that scene in "The Handmaid's Tale" where a man had his left hand surgically removed as punishment for a biblical crime - I think he coveted his neighbour's wife.
The high incidence of ADHD (and other problems)
As I mentioned in my earlier article on schools, one of the problems facing schools in many countries is the high, I would say pandemic, occurrence of ADHD, autism, Aspergers and PTSD, this last almost exclusively amongst immigrant children. What is the reason for these psychological disturbances?
The hypothesis proposed by those in power is that it has always been so, but that diagnostic methods were not available until much more recently. Ask anyone over the age of sixty, and they will give you their opinion of this hypothesis. It is bullshit. I am nearly seventy-five, and in my young days, yes, there was often a person in my class who was a little too outgoing, prone to disturb the peace of the classroom to the detriment of everyone's education. Such people were sat upon by the teaching staff - not literally, of course, but they were given very short rope for their disturbing behaviour.
Another hypothesis is the exposure of today's children to what may be called 'screen time', to describe television, smartphones, iPads and the like, and other forms of on-line activity, which are all designed for those with a limited concentration ability - what has been called the three minute attention span. This may be a valid hypothesis, but only for the last few years.
It is my admittedly subjective opinion that the problem has been growing longer than the existence of smartphones. I have long suspected the increasing use of chemicals in our environment. Sixty years ago fly spray was almost unheard of. There were no sprays to make the toilet smell fresher. Different medicines tasted differently, especially those intended for children, and the number of side effects were so small that the little booklets which come with every medicine nowadays did not exist. Foods, beer and wine did not have traces of Roundup.
One aspect of these changes which we see about us and which has always surprised me is that research has not been directed to finding out why we are seeing these behavioural changes but instead attention is paid to how to alleviate the problems they cause. No-one wants to find out why ADHD is now pandemic. There is no money in that They merely want to find medicines which make the problem manageable.
my hypothesis has recently received rather more than notional support with the televising of two short articles on local television, and with the publication in January 2019 of articles in British "The Sun" newspaper - admittedly not the most reliable of sources, "The Daily Mail" and "The Telegraph".
The television articles involved research into methods of cleaning water before its release into the environment. Apparently a part of the process makes use of bacteria to absorb some of the alien chemicals in the water being processed. As I understand it, the bacterial process normally used removes about half of the alien chemicals. Researchers at two of Sweden's universities have now added algae to the mix, with the result that the alien chemicals have been reduced not by 50% but by 75%. In other words, 25% remain. The chemicals are found in all humans.
One of the pieces of evidence for the effect of these remaining chemicals was the changing behaviour of fish from shy to bold. I have also seen reports of disturbances in sexual behaviour in fish, though I am not now able to cite the source of this information.
But the most significant statement in these two news items was a throw-away by one of the interviewees. He said that even in new-born babies chemicals can be found which should not be there.
The newspaper reports concern the incidence of sexual disturbance in our time. These are the headlines:
Children as young as 10 are changing their gender by deed poll (The Sun and The Daily Mail)
Number of children being referred to gender identity clinics has quadrupled in five years (The Telegraph)
Now children of ten years are not sexually mature and yet are reacting to a perceived inconsistency between their dress and other sexually determined characteristics and their emotionally experienced sexuality.
I think it is significant that the researchers in the television news reports were fighting to get more financial support to continue their work, which indicates that support was not forthcoming. I can believe it. Think how many companies would see their bottom lines affected if it came to light that many of the products we now use in our everyday life and have been using for decades were causing the behavioural changes we are seeing in society.
Today I heard a comment on morning television, in connection with the pollen report which is now a part of the weather report, another throw-away phrase, about the number of people, especially children, who suffer from pollen allergy, and many of whom also have other allergies. [my emphasis]
Yesterday on morning television there was an interview with a person responsible for the service for psychiatrically disturbed children, who was asked why it took so long for a doctor's referral to result in a first consultation. After pointing out that the service was not dimensioned to cater for the numbers now requiring it, the interviewee said that she was hoping that they would be able to research into the causes of this exponential increase.
Somehow I doubt that she will receive financing for such research. The Powers That Be are probably scared of what such research might uncover.
A contradictory policy
Am I the only one who thinks it a little contradictory that Swedish politicians, and almost certainly those in other countries, are agreed that the age at which one can become a pensioner is set to increase at the same time as these same politicians, if they don't actually encourage the development of artificial intelligence, AI, at least do nothing to minimise its effect on society?
We see daily reports of developments in AI, which have already taken over many jobs in manufacturing industry. There are already driverless cars on our roads, which in an imminent future will make taxi drivers, bus drivers and delivery drivers irrelevant. AI handles much of the sorting we experience when we ring a company and are asked to press 1 for one department, or 2 for another department. In some instances something similar to Apple's Siri actually handles the customer's query.
At the moment it is what one can call manual service jobs which AI and robotics have the most problem with - serving in restaurants, for example, though not fast food places, where the customer is handed his meal or drink. These will be the jobs we will be expected to do from leaving school until our delayed pension age ... except that it is only a matter of time before the robots improve to the level at which they can deliver our order to the table.
In Japan robots are already making an inroad into old age health care, and I have seen on local tv that AI is already better at identifying breast cancer than doctors.
I'd like to suggest that, instead of scaring us with the idea of having to work more years than at present, our politicians should be investigating the idea of us working fewer years.
Turning on solar power
Just suppose that governments issued interest-free loans for the installation of solar panels on non-industrial buildings. Here in Sweden one can apply for a 30%* contribution towards the cost of an installation but the sum allocated for such contributions is limited, so that late applicants run the risk of making their investment and then finding that the fund is empty when it is time for pay-out.
Imagine instead that, instead of a contribution, one could apply for an interest-free loan for a period of, say, ten or fifteen years. The loan could be associated with a particular building so that, if the owner moved, the new owner would take on the loan.
Since the money is a loan and not a contribution, repayments under the system renew the fund itself, so that no limit is necessary on the total sum involved. One could go further, and allow the government to arrange the - duty free - import and sale of equipment through, say, a department of the ministry of energy.
I can imagine that such a scheme would increase the introduction of renewable energy manyfold. And why limit it to solar power? There are, of course, fewer buildings which are suitable for wind power, but why not include this source of renewable energy also.
* There are indications that in 2019 the size of contributions is to be reduced to 15% and the sum allocated for this purpose reduced by half which would be a shame.
A dubious test
Perhaps some of you have seen the attempts by Washington to discredit the Chinese electronics company Huawei, postulating that their equipment may open up computer systems for spying, and demanding that all their vassals choose other equipment for their infrastructure. Of course no proof of the allegations is provided or even thought necessary.
So I was pleased to see that an attempt was to be made to check the equipment for potential spy-holes and a little surprised - not to say suspicious - to find that Germany had undertaken the job. Germany is one of the vassal states of Washington, and its leaders usually react with the opening of their bowels if Washington so much as frowns in their direction, so one is perhaps right to be suspicious at this apparent challenge of their masters. It's a bit like the hens checking on the activities of the fox.
One would have been more confident of the results of the examination if it had been made by, say, Kaspersky Labs, who helped the FBI locate and arrest an NSA employee attempting to steal 50 GB of secret documents. Notwithstanding this co-operative action, Kaspersky Labs is also currently being taken off all government computer systems on similar grounds to the allegations against Huawei, and with as little evidence.
It is also amusing in a sad way that Washington, which routinely spies on everybody in the world with the help of its tech giants, should be making accusations of hypothetical spying by two companies whose products are generally recognised to be far superior to anything their US competitors have on the market at a fraction of the cost. Talk about protecting your own with unethical methods!
Educating immigrants
In my previous article on schools, I mentioned as one of the problems the fact that there are so many immigrant children, most of whom have Arabic as their first, and sometimes only, language. Furthermore, they may be so young as not to be able to read even that language. How, then, to educate these youngsters?
The way not to do it is to do what is being done now: they are put in normal schools and left to sink or swim as best they can through a series of subjects, social studies, science subjects, maths, music, gym and languages. This way they are not going to learn anything of value in any of these subjects.
The only way to handle this is to have schools where the above subjects are taught in the mother tongue of the students, usually these days Arabic. In addition to the above subjects they should be given crash courses in the native language of the country to which they have come. This way, whether they are granted or refused permanent residence, they will be able to go to their next port of call with a knowledge of the subjects roughly equivalent to what they need, and, if they are allowed to stay in the country, a good knowledge of the language there, and the possibility of continuing their studies in that language.
And where, pray, are the teachers to be found to teach social studies, science subjects, maths and all the others in Arabic? Why, amongst other migrants from the same countries; from parents who are also waiting for word of their residence status, some of whom will have been teachers in the home country.
A system like this kills so many birds with one stone, that only an idiot would not be able to see it. The children are usefully occupied; they are continuing their education, the nationals who are used as teachers are also usefully occupied; they can be paid a nominal hourly sum; both students and teachers can earn 'brownie points' towards the decision on their eventual acceptance into the host country. And the biggest advantage of all - it gets these children out of ordinary schools, where, unable to understand what is going on, they can only resort to making trouble for their own amusement. It is a win-win situation.
And if the unions quibble about the low wages of the foreign teachers, they can cough up qualified teachers in the same language to be paid at the going rate for other teachers. If they can't do that, what are they quibbling about?
How much will this cost? If the ping-pong tables in the recreation rooms are moved to one side and replaced with desks and chairs, not so much. Indeed, the ping-pong tables do not need to be moved. They can function as ordinary tables. Teaching materials will have to be paid for, and exercise books, but these are being provided anyway in the local schools.
So what is everybody waiting for?
The slippery slope of PISA
[PISA is the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment.]
When I wrote my last post, “A new start”, I was thinking along the lines of tackling some of the ‘big’ issues, like America’s permanent chasing of weak countries to wage war on, and how, if at all, we can put a stop to that. But something came up, as they say, and I’m going to begin my crusade with something much closer to my heart – schools.
Schools in Sweden, where I live, are a mess. Student misbehaviour in the classroom is pandemic. If one manages to give the students fifteen minutes of education in a forty five minute lesson, the teacher has done well. A class consists of between twenty and thirty pupils, roughly half of whom have some psychic disturbance, most often ADHD, whether diagnosed or not. Autism is common, as is Aspergers. And there are other psychological problems. (Incidentally, the question of why there is such a number of students with psychological problems has not been publicly addressed, but that is material for another blog post.)
Added to this, the avalanche of immigration, which has been going on for several years now, has resulted in a situation where a substantial number of students in a classroom have Arabic as their first, and in some cases only, language. Many of them also have some degree of PTSD. The solution to this problem is also matter for another blog post.
The higher up the school you get, the worse the problems. The absentee rate for teachers at the senior school level in primary schools is a national catastrophe. Imagine trying to control a class of thirty fifteen year olds, pumped up with adolescent hormones, self-trained through six to eight years of disobedience and psychology, and knowing that, in today’s school the student is king and will normally be supported by parents in the event of a conflict.
No wonder that Sweden’s rank in the PISA list is falling, and, believe me, it has not yet reached its nadir.
I must explain here that, in Sweden children begin school at the age of six, in what is called pre-school, which lasts for one year. Then they have three years of junior school, three of middle school and three of senior school, all these groupings being in the first stage of their education, roughly equivalent to the British primary school and a bit of secondary school. So at the end of this education they are fifteen years old, and are supposed to be ready for what the British would call sixth form college, also normally three years.
So what are the causes of the catastrophe I have described?
There is a concept being promulgated called, in Swedish, “inkluderande”, in English, roughly “inclusiveness”. Under this heading its exponents suggest that the pace of the introduction of new material should be geared to the capacity of the least able students, so that they feel "included" in the teaching process. If you have a number of pupils who are incapable of being given three steps in a process, and must have each step treated separately, then the whole class must be taken through the process step by step.
To take an example, if the students are studying nouns, they might be told to find all the nouns in a given text, write them in their exercise books and add first the genitive form and then the plural form. That is four steps. If there are students who cannot handle an instruction in four steps, the teacher must give all the pupils the first instruction: find all the nouns. The bright ones have finished with this in a matter of minutes. The slowest ones will each require the teacher's help, and this will take a much longer time, during which the bright ones are bored out of their minds. And then they must add the genitive form...
Closely related is the question of integration. If all pupils, irrespective of their psychological stability, are not distributed evenly throughout all the classes for a given year, they are not being treated equally. This thinly disguised bullshit is a tool for reducing costs. If you have sixty pupils, you can put them in two classes and only need two teachers and two classrooms. It overlooks the fact that, of those sixty pupils, around twenty will have psychological problems of one kind or another and probably as many again have very restricted abilities in the language used for teaching. The losers are the “normal” students, who have their studies continually interrupted.
All this has been designed by a parliamentary education committee whose members have not seen the inside of a classroom since they were fifteen; by a government body staffed by chair-polishers whose main concern is covering their ass; and happily assisted by psychologists who should not be allowed to practice in a sand box, and who have not realised that there is a substantial difference between a hypothesis designed for an individual patient, and another designed for crowd control. In the words of a C P Snow character, “If I’d been asked to think of something bloody silly, I couldn’t have though of anything half as bloody silly as this”.
On top of all this, some thirty years ago the education minister of the day had the blinding insight to see that the then national school system, which was functioning tolerably well, could be brought crashing down to uselessness if it was taken out of state hands and left to individual municipalities. And now, when the results are obvious to anyone not blinded by ideology, it seems that we cannot return it to state control until the above-mentioned education minister is dead. If I were a praying man, I would pray for his early demise.
Sweden has also fallen into the trap of using digital teaching equipment – computers, iPads or the like, and Chrome books – and digital media, with assignments being sent in electronically using, say, Google Classroom or similar. As a result many pupils will spend time watching Netflix or HBO until the teacher wanders round the room, whereupon they will, with one or at most two clicks, change over to a more or less empty page on which they have entered one or two notes provided by the teacher during the introduction.
But possibly the biggest problem – and here I will make a lot of enemies – was the decision some time in the 1950’s to totally outlaw corporal punishment. Now there is a deal of difference between a cuff on the head and grievous bodily harm, a difference which anybody with a gram of intelligence can determine. Brutality is, and always should be, forbidden, and we do not need a judge to determine where the borderline goes, although we have that option in law. On the other hand, a cuff around the head, a ruler on the hand, these have been used on children since schools first appeared, and no child has taken harm from them. More probably the reverse.
But the total elimination of corporal punishment left grown-ups, whether parents or teachers, with no swift punishment of the breach of societal rules, and, over the course of time, no means of stilling disturbance in the classroom or anywhere else. Indeed the situation has worsened to the extent that, if a student is told to move to another place in order to separate two pupils whose proximity to one another creates disturbance, the result very often is a simple refusal, and a threat to the teacher who moves to enforce his decision by dragging the pupil to his new place that he will be reported for violence.
Furthermore, over a period of time, parents have become so brainwashed by the general acceptance of the negative effects of corporal punishment that they take their children’s side in the event of a teacher being accused of the use of force.
So what is to be done? I’ll prepare a list, and perhaps try to prioritise it.
- Insist that anyone serving on the parliamentary education committee has spent at least a month as a reserve teacher, not one who is assisting a professional teacher, but one who is alone in the classroom for five hours a day, five days a week.
- Streaming. A, B and C classes, as they were a long time ago. Good pupils in A, average pupils in B and the ones with psychological problems including ADHD in C. If there is a shortage of cash, A and B can be lumped together. As long as they are not disturbing the class, a good teacher can keep the bright ones stimulated at the same time as educating the average ones. Class C should ideally have two or more teachers or at least a teacher and two or more teachers’ assistants.
- Make it clear to the parents that the teachers are well qualified for their job, far better qualified that the parents themselves. The parents responsibility in the system is to see that their children sleep well, get up in good time for school, eat a good breakfast, and have everything they will need for the day in their back-packs.
- Make it clear to the parents that they are also responsible for teaching their children good manners, to respect their elders, particularly their teachers, and to respect other people’s property, especially school property. For damage, they will be expected to pay. Teachers will do their best to support this aspect of the students’ education, but it is not their primary responsibility.
- Make it clear to parents that they are expected to come to parents’ evenings. During the early part of the return to normality put a couple of vice-rectors in schools so that the flood of parents being summoned to the school when their children do not live up to societal norms of good conduct can be handled. After a couple of years or so, these vice-rectors can be moved to other duties, such as helping the teachers with the incredible amount of paper-shuffling which the education committee of parliament, comprising mostly paper-shufflers, think is necessary,.
- Remove digital equipment and media from the classroom. I’m sure there is a study which confirms my belief that, if you hand-write your notes with pen on paper in notebooks, the information contained therein will fasten better in your mind and will be easily available for revision. Let the teachers teach. Do not give pupils an online article, which, like the television news, is aimed at people with a concentration limit of less than three minutes. The sole exception to this is teacher equipment so that the teacher can access useful material online.
- If contrary to point 6 a school decides to experiment with digital input, make sure that the equipment has no connection to the internet. It should function as a dumb terminal connected to an in-house server.
- Do not allow any psychologists into the school. If they have to be involved in extreme cases, see to it that this is done somewhere else where they will not be able to spread their theories to other pupils.
- On second thoughts, don’t let psychologists have anything at all to do with school life. Let them practice on their own children. That’ll keep them out of mischief.
- Double the pay of teachers. In the fifties, teachers were paid roughly the same as civil engineers, and nearly as much as members of parliament. Teachers have now fallen dreadfully behind.
We have probably lost a generation of pupils, who will only with difficulty be able to recover from the damage done to their education. But implementing the above suggestions should help to repair the worst excesses of this social experiment with a minimum loss of time.
A new start
I just looked – my last post to this blog was on 08 March, 2018, which, by coincidence, is international women’s day and my bonus daughter’s birthday. Since then I have been so dazed by the incredible, lemming-like stupidity of people in power, and the triviality of the reactions of the rest of us that the difficulty of finding something to write about which stands out as more stupid or trivial has frozen me into inactivity like a rabbit in car headlights.
But now I have woken up – or rather, I have been awakend. I was reading the end-of-year newsletter from Peak Prosperity, an organisation which, as it says on their home page, provides ‘insights for prospering as our world changes’. It is not a financial site, rather a life-style site.
The newsletter this week was concerned with the unravelling of society which we have seen in 2018, and which I touched on in the opening paragraph, and forecasting that 2019 is going to be much worse, as all the signs are that economics, both macro- and micro, politics, and the environment are all headed over a cliff. At one point the blogger, Chris Martenson, pointed out that
“every older person needs to be ready for the day when a younger person walks up to them and asks them two questions:
1. When did you know, and
2. What did you do about it?
When did you know about the many problems and predicaments facing our world today? When did you find out about species loss, and peak oil, the generationally destructive policies of your peers and the unsustainability of our entire economic model?
And what did you do about any of it?”
[Quoted with permission]
This was my wake-up call. And this blog post is my new start.
When did I know? Well, intellectually I knew when I first came to Peak Prosperity some time during the 1990’s, but there was still an element of doubt and a feeling that the looming crisis was sufficiently distant in time so that common sense could prevail before we went too far down an irrevocable road. As time has passed, however, I have become less and less sure about our ability to pull back from the brink of disaster.
What did I do about any of it? I have been sharpening my pen since 2010 with this blog, but not, to be sure, in any structured way, merely picking my subjects as the whim took me, and not consistently. There have been many pauses. But now the world is in such shape that I want to try and help change things, stop the rot.
There are just not enough voices preaching common sense, but the stupidities are increasing exponentially. So I have decided that I must add my voice on the side of common sense, and if I can persuade others to join in, perhaps something may yet be done. At least I have to try.
The Russians are coming!
For this blog note I am breaking my usual rule of only writing in English. This subject is too important to be left to what is a foreign language in Sweden. So I am simultaneously publishing a Swedish-language copy of this article. See below.
I heard it on the news this evening, so it must be true. After conquering the US and placing Donald Trump, the biggest danger to the world, in the position where he can do most harm, the forces of evil with demon Putin at their head have turned their attention, like the Dark Lord in Mordor to the second most powerful nation on earth, Sweden. The Swedish security police, Säpo, said it this time.
A few weeks ago it was MSB, the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency, (although a better translation of their name might be the Department for Societal Protection and Preparedness) who went out with notices on how to prepare for an attack by Russia, how to hamster food and other necessities so that we can survive for a week without outside help. They actually mentioned Russia as the source of the threat to our society.
And just a week or so ago, the defence committee in parliament came to the conclusion that Sweden needs to spend 168 billion Swedish crowns over the next ten years to lift our ability to defend ourselves against the Russian peril. I wonder who the military will buy their weapons from. Could it be US weapons manufacturers? Has anybody realised that this kind of excessive expenditure will bring our defence spending up to the two percent of GNP required by President Donald Trump for members of NATO?
I smell a rat. Hopefully so do the majority of Swedes, but one never knows. If it comes from MSB or Säpo, and is broadcast on the national news channel, it must be true, right? We shouldn’t question it, right? Just dash away to the local grocery store and buy a five kilogram bag of spaghetti, a carton of candles (don’t forget the matches, stupid!) and a few tins of stewed lamb. Oh, and bottled water. Then hunker down under the bed, and wait for the all clear.
Nobody thinks to ask – why Sweden? Why would the Russians have us in their sights, whether it be to steer our choice of government or study our industrial competence? Well, I’m asking. And I maintain that the answer is easily found – we still aren’t members of NATO.
The last time I heard the proportion of the populace who expressed an opinion on the NATO question was still sixty-five percent against. As long as I have lived in Sweden, some thirty years now, the opposition has regularly demanded that Sweden join this criminal agency, and the government, realising that it would be political suicide to join, has refused, perhaps taking an unofficial referendum on the question, and confirming that a vast majority of Swedes are against it. And when the two sides of parliament change sides, government becomes opposition and vice versa, it’s the same again. The new opposition wants to know when the new government is going to join us to NATO. And nobody – nobody – asks the obvious question of the opposition: if it is so important, why didn’t you do it when you were in power?
And now the US is becoming a bit tired of the bull-headed Swedes who refuse to join NATO. The powers that be want to be able to show a united front against the forces of evil with demon Putin at their head, and one nation is balking – Sweden. And what better method than that which has been so successful (!) in the US: Russiagate, that ridiculous hypothesis that Russia somehow managed so to steer the polls that their manchurian candidate, Donald Trump, was elected to the presidency instead of Hillary Clinton. No evidence has been produced. No-one has even made the point that Donald Trump is at least as dangerous for the existence of life on earth as Hillary Clinton would have been. And very few have made the point that, if it was true, the NSA would know about it and have the proof, but the NSA has not come forward.
Because there is no proof. The whole is a bogey-man hunt to justify still more money to the military to buy still more weapons from the manufacturers and to try and hide the fact that the US is bankrupt.
Back to Sweden. If the situation is so dangerous that MSB is warning us to prepare for a week without supplies, they must know something that we don’t. And when Säpo sings the same song, it merely strengthens the uncertainty, because Säpo wouldn’t lie, would they?
It is my hypothesis that the intention is to swing that sixty-five percent, or at least fifteen to twenty percent of them over to the other side so that the government can agree with the opposition and take us into the infamous NATO. Mark my words, there will be a survey soon showing that a majority of Swedes who take a stand now stand on the side of joining NATO.
NATO. In our naivity, we thought of NATO as the good guys, ready at the drop of an H-bomb to come to our rescue from the danger posed by the Warsaw pact countries. And when the USSR bit the dust in 1989, the Warsaw pact was closed down. But not NATO. Why not?
Since then NATO in one gestalt or another has been responsible for every atrocity on the planet. Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and I haven’t even begun to mention the locations the world press doesn’t give a damn about, like the horn of Africa, Yemen, Nigeria and the other nations harrassed by Boka Haram, or South America, where election meddling is a fact of life, not a fairy tale as it is in the US. What kind of war is it that is waged in these countries? You have seen the ruins on television. You have seen and heard about the millions of people displaced from their homes, their jobs, their places of work, their schools and and hospitals, and landing on our shores, since they don’t believe NATO will wreak the same havoc here as it has done in their homelands.
The forces of evil are now at work again, here in Sweden, trying to turn our refusal to have anything to do with the villainy of NATO into support for a Swedish membership. But it is not Russia who lies behind it. The demon Putin is not our enemy. The Dark Lord does not live to the east in the land of Mordor, but to the west in the land of Lothlorien.
Late addition: when I wrote the above, I did not know that Prime Minister Stefan Loven had been called to Washington to discuss ‘business and security issues’. Now what business and security issues involving Sweden could be of interest to the Americans? Can it be that Loven has been called over to report on the ongoing move to change opinion vis a vis a NATO membership by Sweden, and that the business issues are a question of just how many US made weapons systems the Swedes are to buy?