Jacob Christensen

Roger Ebert reviews Il Divo, Paolo Sorrentino’s biopic of Guilo Andreotti. (imdb, Wikipedia, review in Die Zeit) I’m not sure if the film will make it to Danish cinemas, so I’ve ordered the DVD edition from the UK. Looking forward to watching it.

Could any Danish politician be the subject of a similar film? Perhaps Erik Ninn-Hansen, even if he is more of a Dick Cheney figure to follow Ebert’s analysis.

Denmark makes it to foreign media. But for all the wrong reasons.

Food for thought: Imagine how the world would react if the Germans tried the same. But ok: Italian fascism was all fun and games.

If you have an accident in Denmark after surgeries’ closing time, don’t bother calling the emergency doctor. Just get the undertaker.

What politics in Denmark is really about these days: Children’s lunches in daycare centres.

Apparently, this was the explanation given.

If I really wanted to do a decent job, I should trawl through OECD’s and the EU’s statistics. But for now, this is how Italy is placed relative to the other EU countries (and a couple of non-EU countries) when it comes to GDP per capita in PPP in 2007. The numbers are in USD:

Luxembourg – 80500
Malta – 53400
Norway – 53000
USA – 45800
Ireland – 43100
Switzerland – 41100
Iceland – 38800
Netherlands – 38500
Canada – 38400
Denmark – 37400
Sweden – 36500
Belgium – 35300
Finland – 35300
UK – 35100
Germany – 34200
France – 33600
EU – 32300
Italy – 30400
Spain – 30100
Greece – 29200
Slovenia – 27200
Czech Rep – 24200
Portugal – 21700
Estonia – 21100
Slovakia – 20300
Hungary – 19000
Lithuania – 17700
Latvia – 17400
Poland – 16300
Turkey – 12900
Romania – 11400
Bulgaria – 11300

The CIA World Factbook was the Lazy Blogger’s guide to economic data here.

If Tito Boeri is right, it is time for me to brush up my comparative economic statistics:

But Italy is far more vulnerable than the other economies of the Old Continent because it has been stagnating in the last 15 years. Italian income per-capita fell below not only the EU-15, but also the EU-19 average (including also Czech and Slovak Republics, Hungary, and Poland).

This Monday, Gianni Alemanno was elected mayor of Rome. The Guardian reports:

On Monday night, the area around Rome’s city hall rang to chants of “Duce! Duce!”, the term adopted by Italy’s dictator, Benito Mussolini, equivalent to the German “Führer”. Supporters of the new mayor gave the fascist Roman straight-arm salutes.

I remember listening to a Danish radio programme back in the 1990s which debated why Italian Fascism is seen as harmless compared with German Nazism and the participants – who were experts on Italy and Germany, respectively¹ – argued that there is a long history – ranging back to before WWI – of demonising Germans while Italians generally are represented as spontaneous and essentially harmless beings.

You are free to imagine how international media would have reported a similar incident in Munich.

1. In case anybody wonder, I think the participants were Thomas Harder and Per Øhrgaard [↩]

YouTube is good for something: Here is the Great Sartori speaking

Well, who should have thought this: The Sicilians are corrupt!In this case, political patronage in Palermo meant that people without a driving licence got jobs a bus drivers – jobs which also include favorable early retirement benefits.Swedish hospitals aside: There are cases for privatisation that need no further motivation (except that when the political system is fundamentally corrupt, chances of having a functioning market are slim).

In Europe, too, a 50/50 political divide | csmonitor.comJust making a note of an interesting article. Imagine that Sweden gets a 175-174 distribution of parliamentary seats in September.