This is the age of cell-phone cameras, after all.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

19 people were abducted in total. Now, if you are gonna believe that the police didn't have 19 sets of handcuffs available for an operation that they decided to run on their time table, then I have a couple of Bear Stearns shares I'd like to sell you.

Oh, and the 19 people were men and old boys. Women, girls and infants were not taken. It ain't the Met police they've been learning from; it's the fucking School of the Americas.

Banana republic.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

As long as the protest is illegal (is this one illegal?) those two things are the same.

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

"First they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up, because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me."

Yeah, I thought about that too. There's another good poem called Im Herzen Europas, from back when Berlin was still divided. Unfortunately, the title coincides with a fan song for a German football club, so I can't find the lyrics on the 'net.

and "what is to be done?"

We people at home are gonna keep fighting. This ain't over 'till the fat lady sings: Only one of the 19 abductees has actually been deported (that we know of).

You people abroad can do the same things you'd do to any banana republic: Boycott it. Shame it. Sue it. Picket its embassies. Picket official visits. The anti-Apartheid movement wrote the book on those things - no need to reinvent the wheel here.

And you can probably find a list of Danish companies to boycott somewhere on the 'net. A lot such lists were compiled during the Cartoon Jihad. Just make sure to send them a polite e-mail telling them the reason you are boycotting them.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

1. You can't identify the individual cops, because they have tiny little nametags tucked away somewhere out of sight. In the same colours as the rest of the uniform.

2. The people who were going to investigate them for violent assault are... the Copenhagen police.

3. The local police has a day-to-day working relationship with the local public prosecutor.

4. The district court never convicts police officers. You can present it with a still-smoking gun with a cop's fingerprints on it, an intercepted radio call of him bragging about shooting someone and a goddamn signed conviction, and there'd still be a better than even chance that the court would chuck it out. And the public prosecutor won't appeal, no matter how good the case is (see point 3).

5. "Judicial review" is a small town in rural Siberia, as far as the Danish legal system is concerned.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

So Christensen and a team of researchers tried to discover just why Denmark finds itself on top of the happiness heap.

"We made fun of it by suggesting it could be because blondes have more fun. But then we could prove that the Swedes have more blondes than the Danes, and they were not as happy. So we tested different hypotheses," Christensen says.

After careful study, Christensen thinks he isolated the key to Danish anti-depression. "What we basically figured out that although the Danes were very happy with their life, when we looked at their expectations they were pretty modest," he says.

By having low expectations, one is rarely disappointed.

Christensen's study was called "Why Danes Are Smug," and essentially his answer was it's because they're so glum and get happy when things turn out not quite as badly as they expected. "And I was thinking about, What if it was opposite? That Denmark made the worst, number 20, and another country was number one. I'm pretty sure the Danish television would have said, 'Well, number 20's not too bad. You know it's still in the top 25, that's not so bad,'" he says.