Nordic Life Quotes

Standing in the nordic nook of the kitchen, I can gaze down at the flimsy-limbed joggers heading south towards the Park. It's nearly as bad as New York. Some of these gasping fatsos, these too-little-too-late artists, they look as though they're running up rising ground, climbing ground. My generation, we started all this. Before, everyone was presumably content to feel like death the whole time. Now they want to feel terrific for ever.

And people should be able to make choices related to their employment without worrying whether they will still be able to receive, say, treatment for cancer.

It was all part of a way of doing things in the United States that, as I would gradually realize, forced you to be constantly on guard, constantly worried that whatever amount of money you had or earned would never be enough, and constantly anxious about navigating the complex and mysterious fine print thrown at you from every direction by corporations that had somehow managed to evade even the bare minimum of sensible protections for consumers.

Education became Finland’s best hope for preparing its population for a new economy based not on agriculture or manufacturing, but on knowledge.

A family will not function well as a team unless it is first composed of strong, self-sufficient individuals.

Fairy tales are about trouble, about getting into and out of it, and trouble seems to be a necessary stage on the route to becoming. All the magic and glass mountains and pearls the size of houses and princesses beautiful as the day and talking birds and part-time serpents are distractions from the core of most of the stories, the struggle to survive against adversaries, to find your place in the world, and to come into your own. Fairy tales are almost always the stories of the powerless, of youngest sons, abandoned children, orphans, of humans transformed into birds and beasts or otherwise enchanted away from their own lives and selves. Even princesses are chattels to be disowned by fathers, punished by step-mothers, or claimed by princes, though they often assert themselves in between and are rarely as passive as the cartoon versions. Fairy tales are children's stories not in wh they were made for but in their focus on the early stages of life, when others have power over you and you have power over no one. In them, power is rarely the right tool for survival anyway. Rather the powerless thrive on alliances, often in the form of reciprocated acts of kindness -- from beehives that were not raided, birds that were not killed but set free or fed, old women who were saluted with respect. Kindness sewn among the meek is harvested in crisis... In Hans Christian Andersen's retelling of the old Nordic tale that begins with a stepmother, "The Wild Swans," the banished sister can only disenchant her eleven brothers -- who are swans all day look but turn human at night -- by gathering stinging nettles barehanded from churchyard graves, making them into flax, spinning them and knitting eleven long-sleeved shirts while remaining silent the whole time. If she speaks, they'll remain birds forever. In her silence, she cannot protest the crimes she accused of and nearly burned as a witch. Hauled off to a pyre as she knits the last of the shirts, she is rescued by the swans, who fly in at the last moment. As they swoop down, she throws the nettle shirts over them so that they turn into men again, all but the youngest brother, whose shirt is missing a sleeve so that he's left with one arm and one wing, eternally a swan-man. Why shirts made of graveyard nettles by bleeding fingers and silence should disenchant men turned into birds by their step-mother is a question the story doesn't need to answer. It just needs to give us compelling images of exile, loneliness, affection, and metamorphosis -- and of a heroine who nearly dies of being unable to tell her own story.

We’re all just broken children covering our guilt with adult clothing. We make peace with our guilt or we don’t but either way, we keep moving on. Please, move on with me. Be with me. I—I can’t do this without you. I have a home in your heart and a love that won’t stop bleeding. I need you in my life, you are my life, you are my sun that I’ve waited too many winters for.

Henrik Berggren—put together their observations on individualism and formulated something they called “the Swedish theory of love.” The core idea is that authentic love and friendship are possible only between individuals who are independent and equal.

In most other modern industrialized societies, including Finland, health care is considered a basic human right.

One of the keys to happiness, experts tell us, is autonomy in one’s life – the luxury of being able to decide your own destiny and achieve the fulfilment of self-realisation. It is no coincidence that the region that is consistently judged to have the highest levels of well-being and life quality, and the happiest, most fulfilled people, also has the greatest equality of educational opportunity and, according to a London School of Economics study comparing the incomes of fathers and sons over thirty years, among the very highest levels of social mobility in the world. The four main Nordic countries occupied the top four places on the list.

Americans often view maternity leave as a time for a mother to recover from giving birth, and anything longer as an entitlement that unfairly gives women benefits that men and their childless colleagues don’t get. Nordic societies see this question differently. For starters, in the Nordic view long leaves for both parents are seen as crucial to allow the child to form strong bonds with both the mother and the father.

Oh, how I wish I were tall enough to go on the sea,” said the fir tree. “What is the sea, and what does it look like?” “It would take too much time to explain,” said the stork, flying quickly away. “Rejoice in thy youth,” said the sunbeam, “rejoice in thy fresh growth, and the young life that is in thee.

The forests were crippled, the wheat fields vanished; in place of the grass there reappeared stone and drifting sand. Men perished and moved on, the cities sank back into the sand, the dust settled over them. Thousands of years later Nordic dreamers dug up the petrified culture from the rubble and ashes. Today, the entire picture of the former paradise stands before our eyes as a spent dream which had once produced life, beauty and strength as long as a superior race ruled. It will live again and it will dream again. But as soon as races of a dreamless kind took over and attempted to realize the dream, reality vanished with the dream.

The law on basic education in Finland specifically states that after school and homework, students should still be allowed time for hobbies and rest.

Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary

For the citizens of the Nordic countries, the most important values in life are individual self-sufficiency and independence in relation to other members of the community.

It’s an unfortunate fact that the United States remains astonishingly backward compared to almost all other advanced Western countries when it comes to education, because in America, what predicts how well a child will do in school is not a child’s aptitude or hard work, but the status of the child’s parents—which is to say, their own levels of education and wealth.

Do not waste your life wishing to be who you are not. Instead, let us continue to find out what kind of hands you were given. There is a reason for every birth. We will discover yours.

Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren put it eloquently: “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there, good for you. But, I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory and hire someone to protect against this because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea. God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

a healthy diet consists of vegetables, fruit, fish, high-fiber grains, nuts, eggs, and quality vegetable oil. These are elements of both the Nordic and Mediterranean diets, known to add healthy years to your life.

Mention the ‘Sarah Lund jumper’ (also known as ‘The Killing jumper’, which sounds less benign) to a certain kind of Nordic noir fan and they’ll immediately enthuse about how much they adore Gudrun & Gudrun’s sweaters.

As I’d worked at my job and traveled and read and lived my life, I’d also decided that a woman is meant to be more than a caretaker for her man and children. She ought to have her own purpose, her own will, her own career,

What I really wanted was to go to Disneyland. There were multiple kids in my grade with annual passes, I remember thinking they were the richest kids in the world, practically royalty. Now I’m with actual royalty. Funny how life works. Standing outside the gates to the Magic Kingdom, with an actual god damn prince by my side, a prince who outshines any of the ones in the park, a prince who would have his own kingdom, his own country, one day. A prince who… Is smoking a joint?

Your business has to be in good-enough shape that it’s not going to crumble just because someone is taking care of their children. If your business can’t handle that, then you have a problem with either your business model or your management.

I need him. This man who showed up into my life today and awoke something inside me. Not a want but a need. A need to feel special, to be desired. A need to be free of my roles and my life and everything that’s expected of me. A need to have a little fucking fun for once.

Mothers in America seemed capable of miracles—returning to work just a few weeks after giving birth, pumping milk between meetings, and working at home on the weekends by managing children with one hand and their BlackBerrys with the other. I was certain I could never function at that level.

According to a UN report from 2014 surveying 185 countries and territories, only two did not guarantee any paid maternity leave; Papua New Guinea and the United States. The United States is also one of only a handful of countries that don’t guarantee their workers any paid time off for illness—others include Angola, India, and Liberia.

But even among the great traditional peoples, the situation is not different: from China to Greece, from Rome to the primordial Nordic groups, then up to Aztecs and the Incas, nobility was not characterised by the simple fact of having ancestors, but by the fact that the ancestors of the nobility were divine, unlike those of plebeians and to which it can remain faithful, also through the integrity of blood. The nobles originated from 'demigods', that is to say, from beings who had actually followed a transcendent form of life, forming the origin of tradition in the higher sense, transmitting to their lineage a blood made divine, and, along with it, rites, that is, determinate operations, whose secret every noble family preserved, which allowed their descendants to continue the spiritual conquest from where it had previously reached, and to lead it from the virtual to the actual.

Yes, Finland and the United States are different. But consider the fact that most American education is managed by the states. Finland’s population of 5.5 million is easily comparable to many an American state. In fact, more than half of America’s states—thirty of them—have populations smaller than Finland’s. Solely on the question of size, there’s no reason any number of states in the United States couldn’t implement a system just like Finland’s.

The main take-home lesson from a careful study of nomadic forager partnership societies, re-enforced by the recent Nordic experience, is that humans are capable of living in egalitarian social systems where neither dominates the other, where violence is minimized, and where prosocial cooperation and caring typify social life. This image is not a utopian fantasy but rather a set of potentials, if not inclinations, stemming from our evolutionary heritage.

To the Finnish, being outdoors in nature isn't about paying homage to nature or to ourselves, the way it tends to be for Americans. We fetishize are life lists, catalog peaks bagged and capture pristine scenes of grand wilderness It is largely an individual experience. For the Finnish, though, nature is about expressing a close-knit identity. Nature is where they can exult in their nationalistic obsessions of berry-picking, mushrooming, fishing, lake swimming and Nordic skiing.

Gradually it dawned on me how much people in America depended on their employers for all sorts of things that were unimaginable to me: medical care, health savings accounts, and pension contributions, to name the most obvious. The result was that employers ended up having far more power in the relationship than the employee. In America jeopardizing your relationship with your employer carried personal risks that extend far beyond the workplace, to a degree unthinkable where I came from.

Those that do best for their citizens in quality of life, from education and medical care to crime control and collective self-esteem, also have the lowest income differential between the wealthiest and poorest citizens. Among twenty-three of the world’s wealthiest countries and individual U.S. states, according to an analysis in 2009 by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, Japan, the Nordic countries, and the U.S. state of New Hampshire have both the narrowest wealth differential and the highest average quality of life. At the bottom are the United Kingdom, Portugal, and the remainder of the United States.

We know that these clashes with Asia and Jewry are necessary for evolution. They give the cue for the European Continent to unite. These clashes are the only evolu-tionary possibility which will enable us one day, now that Fate has given us the Fuehrer Adolf Hitler, to create the Germanic Reich. They are the necessary condition, for our race, and our blood to create for itself and put under cultivation, in the years of peace, (during which we must live and work austerely, frugally and like Spartans), that settlement area in which new blood can breed, as in a botanical garden so to speak. Only by this means can the Continent become a Germanic Continent, capable of daring to embark, in one or two or three or five or ten generations, on the conflict with this Continent of Asia which spews out hordes of humanity. Perhaps we shall also have to hold in check other coloured peoples who will soon be in their certain prime, and thus preserve the world, which is the world of our blood, of our children and of our grandchildren. Now it is just this world we like the best, the Germanic world, the world of Nordic life. We know that this conflict with the advancing pressure from Asia, with the 200 million Russians, is necessary.

Other international organizations—the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the European Union (EU), the World Economic Forum—now encourage their member nations to guarantee their workers paid parental leaves and subsidized day care. They do so because it’s clear that these things are good for economic growth. Studies demonstrate the ways that family-friendly policies tailored to today’s realities benefit a country’s economy. Family leave policies and affordable day care increase women’s participation in the labor force, help employers retain workers, and improve the health of women and children.

Thus, as far as the destiny of the soul after death is concerned, there are two opposite paths. The first is the "path of the gods," also known as the "solar path" or Zeus's path, which leads to the bright dwellings of the immortals. This dwelling was variously represented as a height, heaven, or an island, from the Nordic Valhalla and Asgard to the Aztec-Inca "House of the Sun" that was reserved for kings, heroes, and nobles. The other path is that trodden by those who do not survive in a real way, and who slowly yet inexorably dissolve back into their original stocks, into the "totems" that unlike single individuals, never die; this is the life of Hades, of the "infernals," of Niflheim, of the chthonic deities.

t is discovered an extraordinary similarity between Nietzsche and the Hindu-Aryan Rishi, visionary poets of the Vedas. They also thought the ideas from outside to inside: they 'appeared' to them. Rishi means 'he who sees'. See an Idea, express it, or try to express it. The job of the Rishis has been fulfilled for millennia and the vision of the Vedas was revised, elaborated, in subsequent visions, in scholastics, in doctrinal buildings and sophisticated verifications, through centuries. In any case, he, who preached not to subtract anything that life offers as Will of Power, as possession, increasing its power, lived chaste, like a yogi, always looking for the highest tensions of the soul, climbing always, more and more lonely, to be able to open up to that style of thinking, where the ideas could possess him as the most authentic expression of life, as his 'pulse', hitting him in the center of the personal being, or of the existence there accumulated, and that he called, long before Jung and any other psychologist, the Self, to differentiate it from the conscious and limited self, from the rational self. Let's clarify, then. What Nietzsche called thinking is something else, Nietzsche did not think with his head (because 'synchronistically' it hurt) but with the Self, with all of life and, especially, 'with the feet'. 'I think with my feet,' he said, 'because I think walking, climbing.' That is, when the effort and exhaustion caused the conscious mind to enter a kind of drowsiness or semi-sleep, there it took possession of the work of thinking that 'other thing', the Self, opening up to the dazzling penetration of the Idea, or that expression of the Original Power of Life, of Being, of the Will of Power, which crosses man from part to part, as in a yoga samadhi, or in a kaivalya, from an ancient rishi, or Tantric Siddha. Also like those rays that pierced the Etruscan 'fulgurators', to change them, and that they were able to resist thanks to a purified technique of concentration and initiation preparation. That this is a deep Aryan, Hyperborean, that is, Nordic-polar, Germanic style of origins ('let's face ourselves, we are Hyperborean'), and that he knew it, is proved in the name he gave his more beautiful, bigger work: 'Thus spoke Zarathustra'. Zarathustra is the Aryan Magician-reformer of ancient Persia.

To achieve authentic, sustained happiness, above all else you need to be in charge of your life, to be in control of who you want to be, and be able to make the appropriate changes if you are not. This cannot merely be a perception, a slogan like the American Dream (the United States came way down on the LSE's social mobility scale, incidentally). In Scandinavia it is a reality. These are the real lands of opportunity. There is far greater social mobility in the Nordic countries than in the United States or Britain and, for all the collectivism and state interference in the lives of the people who live here, there is far greater freedom to be the person you want to be, and do the things you want to do, up here in the north. In a recent poll by Gallup, only 5 percent of Danes said they could not change their lives if they wanted to. In contrast, I can think of many American states in which it would probably be quite an uncomfortable experience to declare yourself an atheist, for example or gay, or to be married yet choose not to have children, or to be unmarried and have children, or to have an abortion, or to raise your children as Muslims. Less significantly, but still limiting, I don't imagine it would be easy being vegetarian in Texas, for instance, or a wine buff in Salt Lake City, come to that. And don't even think of coming out as a socialist anywhere! In Scandinavia you can be all of these things and no one will bat an eye (as long as you wait and cross on green). Crucial to this social mobility are the schools. The autonomy enabled by a high-quality, free education system is just as important as the region's economic equality and extensive welfare safety nets, if not more so. In Scandinavia the standard of education is not only the best in the world, but the opportunities it presents are available to all, free of charge. This is the bedrock of Nordic exceptionalism.

Summary: Wheat Belly Detox Supplements Look for the supplements we use in the Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox in health food stores. Because of regional variation in brands, the reputable brands that are available to you may differ from the ones I list below. Where national brands are widely distributed, I will specify a few quality representative ones. High-potency probiotic supplement: 30 billion to 50 billion CFUs per day for 6 to 8 weeks. My favorite brands include Garden of Life, Renew Life, and VSL#3, all of which contain a long list of preferred bacterial species, as well as high CFU counts. Vitamin D: 4,000 to 8,000 IUs per day to start for adults, as gelcaps or drops; long-term dose adjusted to achieve a 25-hydroxy vitamin D blood level of 60 to 70 ng/mL. Excellent vitamin D preparations are widely available in many brands and surprisingly low in cost. Look for oil-based gelcaps (that look like little fish oil capsules) or liquid drops, but not tablets. Even the big-box stores like Costco and Sam’s Club have excellent preparations. Magnesium: Preferably magnesium malate, 1,200 mg two or three times per day, or magnesium glycinate, 400 mg two or three times per day; or magnesium citrate, 400 mg two or three times per day. (If elemental magnesium—i.e., magnesium without the weight of malate, glycinate, or citrate—is specified on your supplement, aim for around 400 mg magnesium per day.) Source Naturals, NOW, and KAL are excellent brands. Fish oil: 3,000 to 3,600 mg per day of EPA and DHA, divided into two doses. Among my preferred brands are Nordic Naturals, Ascenta Nutra-Sea, and Carlson. Iodine: 500 to 1,000 mcg per day as potassium iodide drops or kelp tablets. Like vitamin D, there are many excellent preparations available at low cost. Iron: Look for supplements in the ferrous form and take only if low ferritin levels or iron deficiency anemia is identified; the dose depends on the severity of anemia and the form chosen. Sundown Naturals, Feosol, and Pure Encapsulations are among preferred brands. Zinc: 10 to 15 mg per day of (elemental) zinc as gluconate, sulfate, or acetate. Twinlab, Thorne, and NOW provide great choices.

Let us now assume that under truly extraordinary circumstances, the daimon nevertheless breaks through in the individual, so to speak, and is this able to let its destructive transcendence be felt: then one would have a kind of active experience of death. Thereupon the second connection becomes clear: why the figure of the daimon or doppelgänger in the ancient myths could be melded with the deity of death. In the Nordic tradition the warrior sees his Valkyrie precisely at the moment of death or mortal danger. In religious asceticism, mortification, self-renunciation, and the impulse of devotion to God are the preferred methods of provoking and successfully overcoming the crisis I have just mentioned. Everyone knows the expressions which refer to these states, such as the 'mystical death' or 'dark night of the soul', etc. In contrast to this, within the framework of a heroic tradition, the path to the same goal is the active rapture, the Dionysian unleashing of the active element. At its lower levels, we find phenomenons such as the use of dance as a sacred technique for achieving an ecstasy of the soul that summons and uses profound energies. While the individual’s life is surrendered to Dionysian rhythm, another life sinks into it, as if it where his abyssal roots surfacing. The 'wild host' Furies, Erinyes, and suchlike spiritual natures are symbolic picturings of this energy, thus corresponding to a manifestation of the daimon in its terrifying and active transcendence. At a higher level we find sacred war-games; higher still, war itself. And this brings us back to the ancient Aryan concept of battle and the warrior ascetic. At the climax of danger and heroic battle, the possibility for such an extraordinary experience was recognized. The Lating ludere, meaning both 'to play' and 'to fight', seems to contain the idea of release. This is one of the many allusions to the inherent ability of battle to release deeply-buried powers from individual limitations and let them freely emerge. Hence the third comparison: the daimon, the Lar, the individualizing I, etc., are not only identical with the Furies, Erinyes, and other unleashed Dionysian natures, which themselves have many traits similar to the goddess of death — they are also synonymous with the storm maidens of battle, the Valkyries and Fravartis. In the texts, for example, the Fravartis are called 'the terrible, the all-powerful', 'those who attack in storm and bestow victory upon those who conjure them', or, more precisely, those who conjure them up in themselves. From there to the final comparison is only a short step. In the Aryan tradition the same martial beings eventually take on the form of victory-goddesses, a transformation which denotes the happy completion of the inner experience in question. Just as the daimon or doppelgänger signifies a deep, supra-individual power in its latent condition as compared to ordinary consciousness; just as the Furies and Erinyes reflect a particular manifestation of daimonic rages and eruptions (and the goddesses of death, Valkyries, Fravartis, etc., refer to the same conditions, as long as these are facilitated by battle and heroism) — in the same way the goddess of victory is the expression of the triumph of the I over this power. She signifies the victorious ascent to a state unendangered by ecstasies and sub-personal forms of disintegration, a danger that always lurks behind the frenetic moment of Dionysian and even heroic action. The ascent to a spiritual, truly supra-personal condition that makes one free, immortal, and internally indestructible, when the 'Two becomes One', expresses itself in this image of mythical consciousness.

the overarching ambition of Nordic societies during the course of the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first, has not been to socialize the economy at all, as is often mistakenly assumed. Rather the goal has been to free the individual from all forms of dependency within the family and in civil society: the poor from charity, wives from husbands, adult children from parents, and elderly parents from their children. The express purpose of this freedom is to allow all those human relationships to be unencumbered by ulterior motives and needs, and thus to be entirely free, completely authentic, and driven purely by love.

To meet by reaction that danger of radicalism is to invite disaster,” he said. “Reaction is no barrier to the radical. It is a challenge, a provocation. The way to meet that danger is to offer a workable program of reconstruction, and the party to offer it is the party with clean hands.” He then introduced a crucial phrase: “I pledge you, I pledge myself,” FDR said, “to a New Deal for the American people.” The crisis was existential. “His impulse,” Winston Churchill wrote of FDR in the mid-1930s, “is one which makes toward the fuller life of the masses of the people in every land, and which, as it glows the brighter, may well eclipse both the lurid flames of German Nordic self-assertion and the baleful unnatural lights which are diffused from Soviet Russia.

This morning, outside Nordic Fisheries a couple of delivery guys are unloading lobsters and crabs by the case, pausing in between loads to sip coffee from Styrofoam cups. Across the street, on Penn Avenue, the green grocers are busy stacking crates of vegetables and fruits, arranging them into a still life to showcase their most beautiful produce: heads of red romaine, their tender spines heavy with the weight of lush, purple-tinged leaves; a basket of delicate mâche, dark green, almost black, and smelling like a hothouse garden; sugar pumpkins of burnished gold; new Brussels sprouts, their tender petals open like flowers. At this hour the world belongs to those noble souls who devote their lives to food. Cook, grocer, butcher, baker, sunrises are ours. It's a time to gather your materials, to prepare your mise en place, to breathe uninterrupted before the day begins.

By hunting, I can—in essence—follow the meat from birth to plate. I know the meat is healthy, has had a happier life than much of the meat available in a supermarket, and it’s better for the environment and minimizes waste. I also think it’s important to face the fact that in order for me to eat meat, an animal has to die. It may sound like “no shit Sherlock” but a lot of people are happy to buy crap bacon from a supermarket, but are horrified when they see videos from slaughterhouses and have to face the consequences of buying cheap products.

Nordic societies believe that helping children develop a healthy independence from the random lottery of their parents’ resources, connections, and skills is arguably even more important when children begin to transition toward adulthood.

If you employ an incredibly talented person, it would be a real shame to ruin that relationship because they want to take a leave of one year at some point to see their child grow. In the long term, what difference does one year make, if our goal is to work together for twenty years?

All political discussion is forbidden,” he snapped. “What price our free citizenship now?” said one of the boys to me as the group broke up. Our lively discussions had been the basis of our whole university life. Now a strange paralysis lay upon the great halls, and the aggressive thinking that had characterized our days had no more voice. This silence that had been imposed on us was something so new, so removed from all our tradition, that we hardly knew how to face it. Even the Nazi doctrines were not allowed to be debated. The supremacy of the Nordic race, anti-Semitism, the importance of the state and the unimportance of the individual were not to be discussed. They were to be learned and adopted.

The trees did not reflect the sun so much as glow from within, as though their bark was of parchment, a membrane through which a steady flame was shining. They seemed to have their own light, absorbed from the sun, and retained. When I went past at dusk they were still shining with a strange, almost gaseous, incandescence, a reddening luminosity that only faded, and then quite suddenly, when night came, as though the colder air had frozen it away. The tall pines rose from the heath in complete stillness, unmoved by the wind. The bark of one tree was peeling, and the eye winced from the flayed look it had. Slowly I saw, really saw and did not simply know, that these pines were living things, standing like emaciated horned animals, maned with their dark green or dull blue clusters of narrow leaves. Their deep piny smell was the small of living beings, anchored by their roots, able to move only upward or outward as the sun ordained. They were not dead, but merely prisoners, land-captives, with the sound of the sea in their leaves. ...Nothing disturbed my vision of these ancient Nordic pines, herded together here like the last buffalo, living their own intense life, the slow fire that can never be seen. Cut where you will, you cannot find that flame. It can never be seen, any more than you can see the spirit, or soul, of a man.

the Scandinavians—that is, the Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians—even have a literary phrase to describe this tendency. The phrase is “the Law of Jante,” and it is shorthand for a list of ten commandments created by the Danish-Norwegian writer Aksel Sandemose in his 1933 novel A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks. Sandemose’s ten commandments referred to the mentality of a fictional town called Jante, but the rules were immediately understood to capture the larger disposition of Scandinavians in general. The commandments are: 1. You are not to think you are anything special. 2. You are not to think you are as good as we are. 3. You are not to think you are smarter than we are. 4. You are not to convince yourself that you are better than we are. 5. You are not to think you know more than we do. 6. You are not to think you are more important than we are. 7. You are not to think you are good at anything. 8. You are not to laugh at us. 9. You are not to think anyone cares about you. 10. You are not to think you can teach us anything.

One of the most important policies introduced by Finland’s school reforms was the requirement that all teachers from elementary through high school have a master’s degree

Por qué lo hiciste- pregunté- por qué le salvaste la vida a Iri?" "Porque estábamos muriéndonos. Porque era el final. Y cuando ves el final, la vida se vuelve valiosa.

¡Corred! "De acuerdo"- dijo Halvard- sus ojos revoloteando sobre mi rostro "No trates de ayudarme ni regreses a buscar a Inge, Fiske o Iri. Corres. Te olvidas de ellos.

to live a life of hygge requires kindness: kindness to ourselves in the everyday acts that bring contentedness and pleasure, and kindness to others in a spirit of kinship and conviviality.

He tells me about a word he’s been taught that encapsulates the Danish attitude to work: ‘arbejdsglæde’ – from ‘arbejde’ the Danish for ‘work’ and ‘glæde’ from the word for ‘happiness’. It literally means ‘happiness at work’; something that’s crucial to living the good life for Scandinavians. The word exists exclusively in Nordic languages, and hasn’t been found anywhere else in the world.

Like not a few other Americans, I imagine, I found myself in the evenings nursing a bowl of ice cream in front of the British TV sensation Downton Abbey, fantasizing that I had married a wealthy aristocrat who commanded a vast estate,

1938, Italians from Milan to Naples had opened their newspapers to discover that they were all “pure Aryan Nordics” and that their Jewish colleagues were dangerous aliens. Jews, including die-hard Fascists, were dismissed from all military, university, and government posts. By that fall, Italian Jews were not allowed to have listed phone numbers, presumably because it corrupted the sea of pure Nordic names in the Italian telephone directory.

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automated DM-18 missile system, Von

Navy’s SLBM UGM-27, a 32 ft. high Polaris and UGM-73 34 ft. Poseidon C-3 solid-fuel rockets + boosters. This

resigned Douglas and became President of the new Lockheed Missile Division, where he designed and developed the U.S. Navy’s UGM-278/c Polaris and UGM-73A Poseidon missiles, which were launched from large submerged submarines like the U.S.S. Alaska Class. Many years later, as Oregon State Vice President of the Navy League of the United States, I arranged

appearing in such publications as Aviation Week (McGraw - Hill) and professional notes prepared twice weekly (by Aviation Studies International Ltd, London)

A.F. WS-315A medium-range missile system), Douglas acquired access to several German V-2 Rockets. These were the wonder weapons of the day, notable for their sizable documentation packages. They

design for the Saturn S-IVB Stage

broad-shouldered, hunk

long-range fighter called the XP-45. I

To our progresses with the Apollo S-IVB. I

balloon boat U.S.S. Washington, during the 1862 Civil War, that was just for non-powered balloons.

infrequent Tank

The entire WS-315A program was deployed, in England and Italy, in large numbers during the Cold War. What is most interesting is that two weeks after we won the Air Force contract to design for the DM-18 against the Army’s Missile Development Center at Huntsville, Alabama (headed by Dr. Von Braun, the senior concept designer of the German V2 missile) we also won the contract to build the whole system to deploy

ominously,

These gigantic, silver vehicles were the USS Akron ZRS-4 and the USS Macon ZRS-5 dirigibles. These monsters roamed the skies over America for just five years, being based at the Naval Air Stations at Sunnydale and North Island California.

Ascenta NutraSea and Nordic Naturals.

go ahead and make those changes.     But How On Earth Do You Do This? Well, there are a number of approaches that work and it is certainly just the case of you spending some time figuring out which option is going to be best for you.   Anyway, these are just some great ideas that could very well be worth exploring for you in your own life.   1. Understand what hygge means to you personally The first thing is to really understand what hygge means to you on a personal level. This is key because it

In America the primary factor in achieving the possibility of a stable middle-class existence seemed to boil down to one thing: having proactive, tireless, micromanager parents.

The thesis of Darré’s 1929 essay “The Peasantry as the Key to Understanding the Nordic Race” is that true freedom is realized only in the rural agrarian life of the peasant. In the rural life, one is forced to “rely on one’s own abilities” and be self-sufficient, rather than to be a “parasite,” as Darré argues city-dwellers are.

Behind the shoulders of the Virgin or some bearded Father of the Church, the Italian painter joyfully depicted a miniature town or a well-cultivated landscape, so small that only from a very short distance could all the details be discerned, the walls, towers, churches, streets, the artisans at work, the ships in the river, the ladies on the balcony, the children, the barking dogs, the gaily coloured clothes drying in the sun, the ploughman and the hunter. Many nordic travellers who lagged behind the times apprehensively thought they detected a slight odour of sulphur and brimstone about art and life in Italy, the ‘odour of unsanctity’. They still detect it today. The country was in fact slowly acquiring that pagan, slightly irreverent, sacrilegious reputation which it was never to lose. The reputation did not repel visitors. In fact, the danger of losing their souls attracted as many of them as the hope of gaining everlasting salvation.

In Germany, there was a romantic tradition in literature and culture that took cities to be the cause of social ills, and the countryside as a purifying element. National Socialist ideology took this to extremes: Pure German values were rural values, realized in peasant life; the cities, by contrast, were sites of racial defilement, where pure Nordic blood was ruined by mixture with others. As Hitler writes in the second chapter of his unpublished Second Book:

you have the money in the United States, you absolutely can get world-class care. But here’s the thing that somehow escapes American awareness in this discussion: Everyone else in all the other wealthy industrialized countries—absolutely including all the ones that have universal national health-care systems—

American policy makers have realized. Ultimately, if the goal is to educate a nation’s people, nothing is more important than equity of opportunity, and if the goal is to produce creative, confident, flexible, independent thinkers, nothing is more important than nurturing the autonomy of the individual.

Probably the world’s most popular mobile video game, Angry Birds, was the brainchild of programmers in Finland.

[McMein's] portrait was enthusiastically approved, then unveiled with great ceremony in November of 1936... According the General Mills Historian James Gray, McMein gave Betty "a fine Nordic brow and shape of skull, a jaw of slightly Slavic resolution and features that might be claimed contentedly by various European groups - eyes, Irish; nose, classic Roman - the perfect composite of the twentieth-century American woman.

freedom, slow living, and good health.

The Norse also believed that the spirits of their ancestors were still very much a part of life and that these ancestral spirits could come back in the form of an animal a person may encounter.

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation” ARISTOTLE Philosopher and scientist

Nordic societies recognize that for individuals to give fully to their jobs as employees and as parents, they need time to rest, recuperate, and just enjoy each other’s company. This means giving workers—all workers, at the top and the bottom—substantial paid vacations every year.

American society, despite all its high-tech innovation and mobility, just doesn’t provide the basic support structures for families—support structures that all Nordic countries provide absolutely as a matter of course to everyone, as does nearly every other modern wealthy country on the planet.

Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?

So I admit I was surprised by how much parenting in America is still the woman’s responsibility. In most cases it is the woman who has battled her employers for parental leave, researched day-care options, and arranged work around her children’s schedules. She takes them to the doctor, she prepares school lunches, she stays home from work when they’re sick. American mothers spend about twice as much time caring for their children as do fathers, and when it comes to housework in general, American women spend about triple the amount of time on it that men do. American women spend far more time than men doing such unpaid work

Rather the goal has been to free the individual from all forms of dependency within the family and in civil society: the poor from charity, wives from husbands, adult children from parents, and elderly parents from their children. The express purpose of this freedom is to allow all those human relationships to be unencumbered by ulterior motives and needs, and thus to be entirely free, completely authentic, and driven purely by love.