The Sun reports on the latest “always something PC out of Sweden”:
A controversial burial method that uses liquid nitrogen to freeze and disintegrate a dead body is being heralded as the future of cremation by its creator.
Dubbed “promession,†the process takes place in a custom-built machine – just slot your dead relative’s corpse into the device, and watch as it removes their coffin, freeze-dries the water out of them, and shakes whatever’s left into dust.
This powder is then popped in a biodegradable bag (the size of a pack of potatoes) and buried in a shallow grave, and any leftover metals (like tooth fillings) are given back to the family.
As BBC Earth Lab notes, liquid nitrogen can cryogenically freeze an object at around -200 degrees Celsius.
This radically changes its internal properties, zapping out all the water and making it extremely brittle.
It can then be shaken or smashed into a powder.
Apply that to a human body, which is around 75% water, and you can imagine the transformation that takes place.
Promession is the brainchild of Swedish biologist Susanne Wiigh-Mäsak, who claims it is more cost-effective and eco-friendly than burial and cremation.
“You are still in an organic form, which means you are not broken down, you are still food for the soil and if you spread it around you will be food for birds, or fish, or whatever,†she told Wired in 2013.
Wiigh-Mäsak said she was driven to create the process through a concern for the damage done to soil by burials.
I may hold out for a Viking funeral, just arrange to be planted in my root cellar sitting in my chair, or have my cremains (or freeze-dried particles) loaded into shotgun shells (like Hunter Thompson) and used for multiple rounds of Trap.
Qaisar Mahmood, a Muslim born in Pakistan, is the new head of the Swedish National Heritage Board. This is an extremely anomalous appointment, since he readily admits that he has not read anything about Sweden’s cultural heritage. But his new job is not really about preserving and protecting Sweden’s cultural heritage and historical sites at all.
Qaisar Mahmood, who once rode his motorcycle around Sweden in an apparently failed attempt to discover what being Swedish consisted of, is using his position as head of the Swedish National Heritage Board not to highlight and celebrate that heritage, but to downplay Sweden’s cultural heritage and history, and to create a false narrative that will help compel Swedes to accept mass Muslim migration. He says he doesn’t want simply to alert people to Viking artifacts and the like, but to use Sweden’s history to “create the narrative†that will make Muslim migrants “part of something.â€
We have already seen how that works. Remember the fake news story about the Viking burial cloth bearing the word “Allah� Last October, a Swedish researcher gained international headlines by claiming that burial costumes from Viking graves dating back to the ninth and tenth centuries had been found to be inscribed with the name “Allah.†The intent of this was obvious: to convince Swedes that Islam had always been a part of Sweden, all the way back to the days of the Vikings, and so they should not be concerned about the mass Muslim migration that was now bringing Sweden unprecedented rape and other crime rates. Islam has always been a part of Sweden! Stop opposing mass Muslim migration!
The Viking burial cloths didn’t really feature the name “Allah†at all, as Stephennie Mulder, an associate professor of Medieval Islamic art and archaeology at the University of Texas at Austin, proved shortly thereafter, but by then the damage had been done. The idea had entered, however dimly, the popular consciousness: the Vikings were really Muslims. Islam is Swedish. Sweden was Islamic before it was Christian. The Muslim migrants are Swedes.
The “Allah†Viking burial cloth propaganda offensive was one manifestation of what Qaisar Mahmood and others like him are doing. There is no Muslim history in Sweden, but Qaisar Mahmood is working to change the very idea of cultural heritage and fabricate fictions about a historical Muslim presence in Sweden in order to advance his political and sociological agenda.
Qaisar Mahmood, as a Pakistani, of course has no Swedish heritage of his own. His admitted lack of knowledge of Swedish heritage and history ought to have disqualified him from his position, but this is how Sweden is obliterating itself and committing cultural and national suicide. After all, Swedes appointed Qaisar Mahmood to this position. It is Swedish leaders who want to destroy Swedish cultural and national identity.
One of the amulet rings from the Iron Age that archaeologists are recycling. Previously, this type of object was saved, says archaeologist Johan Runer.
Rough translation from Swedish language article in Svenska Dagbladet:
While the debate about burning books is raging in the media, Swedish archaeologists throw away amulet rings and other ancient discoveries. It feels wrong and sad to destroy thousands of years of ritual arts and crafts, and I’m not alone in feeling so.
“What you do is destroy our history! Says Johan Runer, archaeologist at Stockholm County Museum.
Amulet rings from the Iron Age, like Viking weights and coins, belong to a category of objects that, as far as Runer knows, were previously always saved.
He tried to raise the alarm in an article in the journal Popular Archeology (No. 4/2016), describing how arbitrary thinning occurs. Especially in archeological studies before construction and road projects, the focus is on quickly and cheaply removing the heritage so that the machine tools can proceed.
He works himself in these kinds of excavations. Nobody working in field archeology wants to get a reputation as an uncooperative “find-fanatic” but now he cannot be quiet any longer.
“It’s quite crazy, but this field operates in the marketplace. We are doing business,” says Runer.
Often, especially in the case of minor excavations, there is a standing order from the county administrative boards that as few discoveries as possible should be taken.
If you think it seems unlikely, I recommend reading the National Archives Office’s open archive, such as report 2016: 38. An archaeological preamble of settlement of bronze and iron age before reconstruction by Flädie on the E6 outside Lund.
In the finds catalog, coins, knives, a tin ornament, a ring and a weight from the Viking Age or early Middle Ages have been placed in the column “Weeded Out”.
Current research about weights and measures focusing on the Viking era is underway, “says Lena Holmquist, archaeologist at Stockholm University.
But one puzzle piece is gone.
At another dig in the millennial culture village Molnby in Vallentuna, several amulet rings from the Iron Age were found. Amulet rings were ritual items used during the Vendel and Viking times.
Johan Anund, Regional Director of the Archaeology Staff at the State Historical Museums who made the thinning, says that archaeologists at all times have to make priorities in order to avoid drowning in objects.
It is the county boards that hire archaeology staffs to carry out archaeological investigations. An easy way to lower the cost is to reduce the number of items to be preserved.
Ceramics require no preservation and are usually saved. However, iron and metal must be treated after perhaps a thousand years in the ground. So if the staff puts funds for conserving two metal objects in its bid but finds twelve then they have to discard ten. To metal recycling.
The historical museum now only deals with objects that have been preserved.
Weeding out typically occurs in the field, usually by an individual who must quickly decide: save or throw away? As a result, familiar objects are preserved.
Last year a sensational little dragon was found in Birka. It looked the more like a lump of rust when it was picked up, but the archaeologists in Birka are among the few who have the time and capabilities to investigate. On a commissioned archaeological dig, the dragon would probably have been thrown away.
Archaeologists do not give away or sell finds because they do not want to create a market for antiquities and encourage robbers with metal detectors, says Runer. Thus: the bin.
“It is troubling when in other countries everything is done to preserve their heritage …,” says archaeologist Lena Holmquist.
Conclusion: If society no longer believes it can afford to take responsibility for Sweden’s history, county councils should stop builders and developers from excavating ancient sites. One alternative is to stop outsourcing the cultural heritage to the lowest bidder with the largest waste bin.
Isn’t it typical of academics and state bureaucrats that they’d rather throw artifacts in the recycling bin than release them into the hands of private collectors? God forbid, some private citizen with a metal detector, lacking a badge and the right university credentials should find anything!
HT: Jean-Batave Poqueliche, at Return of Kings, who found the story and spun it in the direction of deliberate Multicultural malevolence.
What is Swedish culture? A lot of people who still believe in such things would put Astrid Lindgren (1907-2002) at or near the top of that list. During her lifetime, Lindgren was beyond question the most beloved figure in all of Sweden. Her books, about Pippi Longstocking and other characters, were translated into countless languages.
I didn’t grow up on them, but millions of children did, not only in Sweden but around the world. After I moved to Norway, I caught up with the wonderful television series Emil i Lönneberga, based on her novels about a rambunctious farmboy, and came to appreciate Lindgren’s distinctive humor and charm, her skill at handling both the harshly realistic and the extravagantly fanciful, her ability to touch one’s heart without being treacly and sentimental, and her striking combination of delight in subversiveness and respect for moral responsibility.
Lindgren’s influence in her native country was immense. When she revealed in a 1976 article that her income tax rate as a self-employed writer was 102 percent, it brought down the Social Democratic government that had been in power for forty-four years and resulted in an overhaul of the tax system. In 1979, spurred largely by a speech by Lindgren, Sweden became the first nation to make it illegal to strike children.
Despite her role in bringing down the government in 1976, Lindgren was, like pretty much everyone else in Sweden’s intellectual and cultural elite, a committed Social Democrat. And when her books were first coming out, they caused a degree of concern among cultural conservatives.
As the Washington Times noted in its obituary, “Pippi Longstocking was an instant hit among children†but “parents often were shocked by the unruly Pippi, who rebelled against society and happily mocked institutions such as the police and charity ladies.†One admirer, author Laura Pedersen, told the Times that Lindgren’s books had a “wonderful subversion. … She talked about breaking the rules … we often see rules that are wrong, and they should be broken.†But not everyone approved.
In 2017, however, it’s not conservatives who are criticizing Lindgren. The other day came the news that the library in Botkyrka municipality, on the outskirts of Stockholm, had burned older editions of one of the Pippi books, Pippi in the South Seas (1948), because local officials have decided that they “contain racism.â€
After this action came to light, the municipality issued a press release acknowledging that the books had indeed been destroyed because they contained “obsolete expressions that can be perceived as racist†– but that they had been replaced on the library shelves by a 2015 edition of the book from which those expressions have been carefully scrubbed.
Since Lindgren died in 2002, of course, she was not around to grant anybody the right to fiddle with her prose. Her publishers had simply taken it upon themselves to do to her work what a lot of people would love to do to, say, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Like Mark Twain, Lindgren was the very opposite of a racist. But her use of language in Pippi in the South Seas, like that in Huck Finn, violates the Left’s current ideological tests.
Memeorandum’s lead item at 1:15 PM EST on February 19, 2017. (You can look at a later point in time by filling in the correct time and date.)
So at Donald Trump’s rally yesterday in Florida, Trump said anent Muslim immigration:
“You look at what’s happening. We’ve got to keep our country safe. You look at what’s happening in Germany, you look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this?â€
Trump is obviously alluding to extraordinary and absolutely appalling outbreaks of violent crimes and sexual assaults perpetrated by Third World immigrants and refugees accepted into European countries. But those clever journalists on the left play pretend that Trump has to be referring, not to robberies, rapes, and criminal assaults, but (mistakenly, out of his stupidity, confusion, and general inferiority) to some non-existent, entirely fabricated by Trump case of a mass terrorist attack. And they gleefully get to point out that such a mass terrorist attack has not (so far) occurred in Sweden, and therefore: Gotcha! Ho! ho! ho!
How stupid do they think Americans are?
Trump was obviously referring, not to a single terrorist attack, but to the unfortunate state of Swedish public safety with respect to crimes by Muslims against Swedes.
Sweden’s Muslim problem: Half a million women sex attacked in a year
This now puts Sweden in the top position for sex crimes in the world.
Put this into perspective to see how horrific these figures truly are: The total Swedish population is only 9.6 million people. In 2009 a US report stated that there are 450,000 to 500,000 Muslims in Sweden, around 5% of the total population. Out of the 500,000 Muslim migrants in Sweden, half or less are men. In other words, there is roughly an equivalent to two sex attacks to every Muslim male in Sweden. These sex attacks are not committed by the natives.
Scores of Swedes took the streets of Malmo, a southern city in Sweden, on Monday to protest an epidemic of violence that has taken the lives of far too many young people. The last victim was 16-year-old Ahmed Obaid. He was killed last Thursday after an unidentified gunman unleashed a salvo of bullets.
“Our kids should sleep well, play at play parks, feel safe,†Housam Abbas, the victim’s cousin, said, according to the Local.
Malmo, this once quiet city, is now overrun with violence. The culture of fear is so palpable that parents are no longer comfortable sending their children out to play.
“You have to look over your shoulder when you go out at night now. I don’t let my little brother go out at night any more,” said one high school student at Monday’s protest in front of city hall. “I hope that the politicians actually view this as a serious problem and start to solve this in Malmö.”
Trump is obviously right, and the MSM is full of weaselly liars cooking up fake news.
Really, it’s a 9,550-Year-Old root system. Vintage News:
The oldest living cloned Norwegian Spruce can be found in Sweden on Fulufjallet Mountain. It is at least 9,550 years old, sixteen feet tall, and is called Old Tjikko.
This tree isn’t the oldest living tree in the world, but it is the oldest living, clonal Norway Spruce. Umea University geography professor, Leif Kullman discovered this tree and gave it the name “Old Tjikko,†after his dog that had died.
During its life cycle of thousands of years, the tree grew as a stunted shrub (krummholz formation) because of the harsh environment in which it lives and the extreme weather conditions. However, during the Earth’s warming that has occurred over the last century, the tree has now begun a growth cycle of natural tree formation, and its transition to a healthy growth structure is due to global warming.
It has been recorded that during the ice age, the sea level was much lower than today, as much as 120 meters lower. So, what is now the North Sea between England and Norway was at that time barren forest land. And during this period, winds and low temperatures made the growth of “Old Tjikko†similar to that of a bonsai tree; under these harsh conditions, a large tree could not sustain the growth to get this old.
The primary reason for the survival of this tree over such an extended period is because of vegetative cloning; this means that although the part of the tree that is visible is still relatively young, it is a part of an ancient root system which dates back thousands of years.
Johan Norberg notes that the Left loves to point out Sweden as a model of Socialism with Economic Prosperity. The problem is that all the prosperity is a legacy from an economic system which Socialism is determined to change.
Once upon a time I got interested in theories of economic development because I had studied a low-income country, poorer than Congo, with life expectancy half as long and infant mortality three times as high as the average developing country.
That country is my own country, Sweden—less than 150 years ago.
At that time Sweden was incredibly poor—and hungry. When there was a crop failure, my ancestors in northern Sweden, in Ångermanland, had to mix bark into the bread because they were short of flour. Life in towns and cities was no easier. Overcrowding and a lack of health services, sanitation, and refuse disposal claimed lives every day. Well into the twentieth century, an ordinary Swedish working-class family with five children might have to live in one room and a kitchen, which doubled as a dining room and bedroom. Many people lodged with other families. Housing statistics from Stockholm show that in 1900, as many as 1,400 people could live in a building consisting of 200 one-room flats. In conditions like these it is little wonder that disease was rife. People had large numbers of children not only for lack of contraception, but also because of the risk that not many would survive for long.
As Vilhelm Moberg, our greatest author, observed when he wrote a history of the Swedish people: “Of all the wondrous adventures of the Swedish people, none is more remarkable and wonderful than this: that it survived all of them.â€1
But in one century, everything was changed. Sweden had the fastest economic and social development that its people had ever experienced, and one of the fastest the world had ever seen. Between 1850 and 1950 the average Swedish income multiplied eightfold, while population doubled. Infant mortality fell from 15 to 2 per cent, and average life expectancy rose an incredible 28 years. A poor peasant nation had become one of the world’s richest countries.
Many people abroad think that this was the triumph of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, which somehow found the perfect middle way, managing to tax, spend, and regulate Sweden into a more equitable distribution of wealth—without hurting its productive capacity. And so Sweden—a small country of nine million inhabitants in the north of Europe—became a source of inspiration for people around the world who believe in government-led development and distribution.
But there is something wrong with this interpretation. In 1950, when Sweden was known worldwide as the great success story, taxes in Sweden were lower and the public sector smaller than in the rest of Europe and the United States. It was not until then that Swedish politicians started levying taxes and disbursing handouts on a large scale, that is, redistributing the wealth that businesses and workers had already created. Sweden’s biggest social and economic successes took place when Sweden had a laissez-faire economy, and widely distributed wealth preceded the welfare state.
The Visby skeletal collection at the Fornsalen Museum contains the remains of 1185 people who died at the Battle of Visby in 1361 and is the largest battlefield skeletal collection in Europe. Anthropologists from all over the world come to examine these battered bones to study medieval battlefield injuries. Here’s how these bodies ended up in a museum.
In July of 1361 the Danish king Valdemar IV decided to invade the island of Gotland, Sweden because it had a diverse population that included Danes, was populated with wealthy inhabitants, and was strategically located in the Baltic Sea. A legion of Swedish peasants tried to repel the Danish invasion near the city of Visby, but the inexperienced Gotlanders were no match for the Danish soldiers and many of them were slaughtered during the battle. The fallen Gotland soldiers were buried in three large mass graves, with their armor and weapons, near the city walls. After the Gotlanders surrendered, the island became a part of the Danish kingdom for a short period of time, until the Swedish crown reclaimed it in the early 15th century.
In 1905 Dr. Oscar Wennersten exhumed one of the graves and unearthed 300 bodies. Archaeologists Bengt Thordeman and Poul Nørlund recovered more bodies during additional excavations from two mass graves between 1912 and 1928, bringing the total bodies recovered to 1185.
