• Here’s your connection between the two episodes: As Jyllands-Posten reports, the Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, who barely escaped injury in the capital, was scheduled today to be on Utøya to address the young people there at what was after all a summer camp run by the Labor Party, of which Stoltenberg is the head. (That article also has at the top a brief video giving a helicopter-view of the island itself – and of some swimmers desperately trying to get away from it.)
  
• Another Danish mainstream paper, Berlingske, wields the obvious parallel: A Norwegian Timothy McVeigh. It quotes a few experts who maintain that the likelihood for violent incidents of this kind should have been apparent from extreme-right literature, imagining future race-wars and the like, that has been circulating in Scandinavia for a while. And it examines the alleged shooter’s social media trail and unearths his self-description as a conservative Christian fed up with the Norwegian Church’s hyper-modernism, wanting it to get “back to basics.” Right, back to Jesus and his disciples, presumably – a notorious gang of killers . . .
  
• As for a Christian Danish paper, namely the Kristeligt Dagblad . . . well, they get it wrong. Very wrong. Their on-line article Here is why Norway became a target for terror, datelined today (Saturday, 23 June 2011), goes on and on about why Norway is logically a target for Muslim extremists, even as the caption to the picture up top mentions the arrest of “a 32-year-old strongly nationalistic man.” It’s hardly the only media outlet to fall into this trap – frankly, I was hearing a lot about “Muslim terror” on the BBC World Service during its initial coverage – but that’s no excuse. Don’t be surprised if the article is gone, or at least heavily modified, should you decide to click through to see it.
  

                          

But don’t immediately write off Herre Sareen as some sort of pornographic-minded fool. Rather, in his parallel role (to that of politician, not fool) as expert on the question of integrating foreigners into Danish society he has been called upon to react to a proposal from a much more prominent Danish politician, namely Peter Skaarup, who is vice-chairman of the powerful (and immigrant-hating) Danish People’s Party – who actually might be the buffoon here. At issue is the Danmarksfilm, the film shown in Danish embassies abroad to those applying to immigrate to Denmark, intended to give those foreigners an accurate picture of what Danish culture is all about. According to Skaarup, it’s time to spice it up a bit, add a little of the ol’ T&A – because, after all, Danish women do like to go topless on the beaches (heck, even occasionally in city parks) in the summer, and maybe the prospect of having to encounter this will so put off Islamic fundamentalists that they will tear up their immigration applications right then and there in their local Danish embassy!

(BTW I understand that there is already something similar in the video that immigrants wanting to live in the Netherlands have to see when they apply, except that in this case it includes not women’s breasts but men walking around holding hands and kissing, to make clear the much more tolerant attitude to homosexuality that prevails here. As far as I know, the logic behind this is purely along the lines of “Don’t say we didn’t warn you!” and not any misguided strategy to dissuade people from applying to come here in the first place.)

This Skaarup guy may be a much bigger political hotshot, but local counselor Sareen has got his number, in fact two of them, in this matter:

In the first place, they’ve seen enough bare breasts before. In the second, it’s completely foolish to believe that fundamentalists who are so extreme that they want to blow Denmark up can be frightened away by bare breasts.

Here at EuroSavant we’ll try to stay in front of further developments along this line, if any. As for Danish policy, maybe Skaarup’s suggestion is not such a bust after all: the result could turn out to be increased demand in much of the Western world for admittance to the film rooms of Danish embassies, and maybe even to Denmark itself!

                          

The next project will be creating a link ultimately to connect Copenhagen with Hamburg, one that crosses that strait you see there at bottom labeled “Fehmarn Bælt” between the Danish Rødby Havn (North) and the German Puttgarden (South). Right now a couple of commercial ferries serve cars, trains, bicycles and pedestrians for crossing that distance of about 18.6km in about 45 minutes. But that is increasingly not good enough for the requirements of 2010, at least in the eyes of the Danish Transport Ministry which has taken over the project’s leadership – supervised, of course, by the Danish legislature, or Folketing.

Things have reached the stage where construction calculations have been made public and are now subject to Folketing discussion, as we read in a Ritzau news-agency piece (appearing, among other places, in Berlingske Tidende: S and DF [two Danish political parties]: A bridge would be coolest. (That’s the translation I’ve taken of the very flexible Danish adjective flot.) You see, just because they built bridges before, that doesn’t mean they’ll build a bridge again. They could also just make a tunnel. And indeed, as we learn from a parallel Ritzau article (let’s take the one published in Jyllands-Posten), a tunnel would be slightly cheaper to dig/install, namely DKK 37.9 billion (= €5.08 billion) as opposed to a bridge’s DKK 38.5 billion (= €5.16 billion). The point of the JP article is that authorities at first thought the bridge would be rather cheaper than the tunnel, until they factored in the extra reinforcement that would have to be added to its pillars to enable it to stay standing after the inevitable ship-collision happens. But the point of the Berlingske article is that key Folketing members don’t care, they view that monetary difference as minor in the face of how nice and pretty the finished 18.6km-long bridge will surely look. “I don’t have any pictures of tunnels at home in our [family] photo-album,” the Social Democratic Party (“S”) traffic policy spokesman Magnus Heunicke remarked, for example.

Uh . . . and The Germans?

The Germans! Did anyone remember to ask what they want? (I must confess here that I could not find any indication whether those 37.9/38.5 figures are total costs for the bridge/tunnel or only Denmark’s, nor what relative or absolute amount the German government has committed to pay for the project.) It turns out that at least the Christian newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad (they would!) did inquire as to the opinion of the Naturschutzbund Deutschland (NABU), the leading German ecology organization (sort of like the Sierra Club in the US): German nature-folks prefer Fehmarn tunnel.

Actually, they would rather have neither, but if they had to choose, they want the tunnel because of three serious disadvantages to the bridge:

1. As mentioned previously, ship-collisions: you just know that one will happen sooner or later, and in fact the Baltic will surely become a more busy waterway with increased Russian commercial traffic – and some of that traffic (NB!) includes oil-tankers!
   
2. Any huge new bridge (it is planned to be on average 724m above the water!) will severely inconvenience seabirds trying to migrate in that part of the Baltic.
   
3. Actually, a bridge would also disturb the water-currents there in ways that would displease the German naturalists! They’re even sore about how that previously-mentioned Great Belt Bridge of 1998 already does that. (No word of complaint about the Øresund Bridge, maybe that’s far enough away from Germany that they just don’t care.)

Again, they really don’t want a tunnel, either, since it probably be a “sunk tunnel” rather than “bored tunnel,” i.e. a big ditch would be dug in the ocean floor, and then the pre-fabricated tunnel would be laid inside and then covered up with earth. Very traumatic for the aquatic life living in the area, to be sure – and you thought you were inconvenienced when the city tears up the street where you live to lay new sewer lines!

But the Danish are rich enough to prefer pretty to cheap, and also to get their way. Expect to see a stylish – and very long – bridge after about a decade or so.

                          

It was apparently a rather long speech, with a panoply of various points within it that one can choose among to emphasize – also, if desired, the sheer fact that it was delivered from the Oval Office, something that is generally supposed to denote an especially serious occasion, as Viktoria Unterreiner points out writing for the German paper Die Welt. Still, the title of her piece is “Obama declares the end of ‘cheap oil’,” and that is one aspect of the President’s address that certainly has attracted particular attention over here. Namely: Can America – the land of the Chevy Corvette and Route 66 – really wean itself from cheap oil, even while spurred on by tarred beaches and dying pelicans? Unterreiner is herself doubtful; she notes that, after Obama made that declaration, “he however became no more concrete” about how to go about it. Perhaps a start would be his CO2/climate bill – but that’s currently in “suspended animation” (im Schwebe-zustand) in the Congress.

Our old friend, the Danish journalist-in-US-residence Paul Høi – perhaps partly because he did not have to disrupt his sleep-patterns to watch – also has a piece out on Obama’s address: Obama aims high and hits low. He divides the speech into two very different parts and has very little to say about the first, which he characterizes as simply a populist tirade designed to up his sagging poll numbers by demonstrating that he is in charge and is perfectly able to get tough with BP. No, like Die Welt’s Unterreiner, he’d prefer to focus on the second “idealistic” part where the President announced the end of cheap oil and puts developing new sources of “green” energy on par with the campaign in the 1960s to put an American astronaut on the Moon. “Does he seriously mean that?” he asks. After all, Høi knows the math: to get something like that CO2 bill through the American Senate you need 60 votes, and since there are now 41 Republicans, Obama probably does not have them.

Then again – Obama also did not have 60 votes in the Senate for his Health Care Reform bill, which of course did ultimately pass earlier this year. Yes, I realize that that was true only at the end . . . but give the man a break, Høi is just trying to find some sort of silver lining here, some sign that Obama’s talk about “the end of cheap oil” was more than mere words. Actually, he borrows this silver lining from an analysis by Ezra Kline of the Washington Post, who professes to see signs from the language in Obama’s speech that indicate that the President is in fact serious, more precisely indications of an attitude of “Come with what you’ve got, give me what we can agree on, and will pass a law that will lead us in the right direction” – supposedly also the President’s attitude to Health Care Reform, once he got serious about passing it, and supposedly his attitude now about the CO2 stuck in Congress.

Update: OK, that was a couple of foreign commentators. But you’ve got to think they are on to something with their “Was he serious?” doubts when the same stance is taken by the Rude Pundit. (Warning: As usual, profane language.) “So tell us what to do,” His Rudeness implores. “Lead us. That’s what we want . . . not an especially skilled anchor[man] informing us that oil spills are bad.”

                          

Høi turns out to have some interesting things to say, despite the fact that he might as well be describing a space alien, so far apart are Paul’s libertarian political views and those prevailing in Høi’s native Denmark, land of 25% value-added tax and the world’s highest income tax. He sets up the Republican situation in Kentucky as a straightforward struggle between Rand Paul on one side (“pitchfork Republicanism”) and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (he of the “polished floors”) on the other. That’s because Paul is not really of the Republican Party, although he did just win its nomination for Senate in Kentucky – he’s really a creature of the Tea Party, what Høi calls “a fundamentally conservative grassroots movement.”

So the two men are not on the same side, and Paul’s success is a threat to McConnell in two respects, each of which Høi develops clearly:

1. Paul’s political positions are “radical,” even for Republicans, e.g. a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, calling a halt to Congressional budget earmarks, abolishing most cabinet departments (Education, Energy, Veterans Affairs) as not prescribed by the Founding Fathers. But the American people are attached to their veterans benefits, their earmarks, their federal education support; such views may be exciting to hear articulated, but ultimately they do not go over well once voters come to realize someone actually wants to put them into practice. The unpopularity Paul is courting among a wider range of national voters, because of his “Republican” label, threatens to damage Republican electoral fortunes on a wider scale;
   
2. Not only Republican electoral fortunes, Rand Paul also threatens Republican office-holders more generally as the new star of the Tea Party movement. For that movement is, if nothing else, anti-incumbent and so potentially hostile to Democrat and Republican alike. Again, the antagonism between Paul and McConnell, despite their ostensible membership in the same party, can be expected to spread more generally to the Tea Party movement offering its own candidates in opposition to incumbent Republican office-holders elsewhere, as has already happened in Utah where (as Høi notes) sitting Senator Bob Bennett was denied renomination on the Republican ticket recently by a voting groundswell of Tea Party activists.
   

[T]his must have made McConnell tear at his thinning hair, for McConnell has done everything he could to obstruct President Obama, he has used all the tricks in the book, the classy ones and the not-so-classy ones, to thwart him, and then into the bargain he has to hear about being accommodating.

That’s just the fickleness of politics, I guess, and that might now be turning against Rand Paul himself due to his post-election PR problems concerning the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which Høi does not bring up; maybe he’s saving that subject for a future column. He also makes no mention, other than speaking in passing of a “career politician” (levebrøds politiker), of Trey Grayson, who was Paul’s actual opponent – not Mitch McConnell – in that recent Kentucky Republican primary. In other words, the Paul vs. McConnell story-line is probably a bit overblown, even if it is also enormously simplifying – maybe Høi needs to do that for his Danish readers. Still, I like his insight into the new Republican candidate for Senate in Kentucky, the sort of American “space alien” about whom he is paid to go live in the US and report.

                          

Here at EuroSavant we have just the guy, someone whose commentary we’ve followed and commented upon many times before, namely Poul Høj, US correspondent for the excellent Danish daily Berlingske Tidende. And Høj has delivered his verdict on the latest Apple sensation, with a recent entry on his “USABlog” called iPad and machine-fanatics.

Don’t get him wrong: Høj is hardly some anti-tech reactionary. No, the introduction of the iPad certainly makes the world of technology a richer place. (Or at least the US part of it; it won’t be on sale over here in the Old Continent until 24 April.) He’s just finds much of the reaction rather disconcerting, like “Jesus!”, “gamechanger!” and (from Newsweek) “the iPad will change everything!”

Wait a second, he says: should I throw away my laptop now? Of course not. Frankly, in Høj’s eyes the iPad furore is merely something he has clearly seen before – and no, he’s not talking about the iPhone, he’s talking about Facebook, which was also supposed to be the next big thing that transformed everything, but which turns out still to have plenty of competitors (like Google Buzz).

Look, Høj writes, the iPad is ultimately just another gadget, just another machine, with its fans and detractors, its advantages and its disadvantages. The latter, by the way, are considerable and he provides his list:

• No printer;
  
• No USB ports;
  
• Famously, no Adobe Flash-video;
  
• No multitasking;
  
• No camera;
  
• No kitchen sink – sorry, that’s not Høj, I sneaked that one in;
  
• And most of all, no “apps” available that would pose any threat in the least to Steve Jobs or his company, since they all have to be Apple-approved to be available for download/sale in the first place.

It’s good to have the iPad, to be sure, but in Høj’s eyes it’s just another purchase-choice. Is it enough to tempt someone to replace his/her laptop+Blackberry combination? Quite possibly not. So enough with all the hyperventilation, already!

                          

(Absalon – pictured here, photocredit to Uncle Buddha on Flickr – was the “fighting archbishop” of the Danish Middle Ages, who did much to build up Copenhagen towards the city it was to become by building a fort there. His statue is there in the city’s center, mounted on a magnificent rearing horse, in Højbroplads – that’s the square right by the Folketing, Denmark’s one-chamber parliament. The main sort of enemy he fought in his day, it turns out, was in fact Baltic Sea pirates.)

It’s no surprise that the Absalon has already seen some action, and the Danish press is following along to report.

First there was an engagement last weekend with an Indian ship, a “cargo-dhow,” covered in the Jyllands-Posten by an article from Ritzau. There was a problem with that ship: it had already been taken over by a band of pirates for use as a “mother ship” supporting smaller pirate-skiffs, with its regular 12-man crew confined away somewhere on board. That meant that the Danes really didn’t want to actually attack it, and so risk the crew’s lives; the Absalon instead just shadowed the ship for three days, warning other ships away and so preventing it from committing any actual piracy. The dhow finally headed back to the Somali coast – slipping away from the Danes’ observation for a while, it must be said – before it was rediscovered on that coast with the pirates gone and the original crew unharmed and only needing some fuel and food supplies to continue their journey.

You could call that one a stand-off, then. Admiral Rune and his men did somewhat better on Thursday. Among others, Marianne Fajstrup of Berlingske Tidende reports that the Absalon then got a distress-call from a Slovenian-owned, Antigua and Barbuda-registered ship called the Ariella, 35 nautical miles away, that pirates were attacking. The Danish warship promptly set sail in that direction, and also sent out a helicopter, which saw absolutely no one on the ship’s bridge but did find a pirate-skiff moored alongside, with pirates on it, which were driven away by gunfire. When the Absalon itself arrived, Danish sailors boarded the Ariella and ultimately found the ship’s crew barricaded away in a “safe room,” wondering whether it was safe to come out again and take back control of the ship.

There is parallel coverage of this incident from Rikke Faurfelt of Politiken, who adds an interesting wrinkle. Yes, pirates were driven away from the Ariella in their skiff, but there’s no guarantee that that was all of them. Some might still be aboard – and, at 183 meters long and 32,000 tons, the Ariella has plenty of space that needs to be searched before the “All clear” can be given. Interestingly, there is also coverage of this very same incident in the press of the landlocked Czech Republic, from Mladá fronta dnes (Somali pirates strike again, commandos from warship liberate crew), which adds the detail that there was a second pirate-skiff involved in the attack on the Ariella which managed to leave before the Danes could get there but was apprehended by a Russian warhead operating in the area on the same anti-pirate mission, the Neustrashimy (the “Fearless”; note that Admiral Rune cannot tell this Russian warship what to do, since it is not NATO).

                          

Naturally, this is the subject of extensive coverage today in the Danish press. This includes the Danish news agency Ritzau so that, as is usual with a major Danish story, identical articles attributed to that agency make up the core coverage of most on-line papers, supplemented here and there by original in-house reporting.

What better instance of the latter to refer to first than that from Jyllands-Posten, the paper that published the Mohammed cartoons in the first place? “It was tight. It was really tight,” was the 74-year-old Westergaard’s comment to JP reporters in the aftermath of the attack, in which the 28-year-old Somali broke into his house and went after him with the axe and knife. Westergaard survived only by being able to escape into the inner bathroom which he had previously made into a locked-down “safe room”; his five-year-old grandson was also present and also survived unhurt. While escaping, Westergaard was also able to set off an alarm, which brought the police within three minutes. They spotted the accused as he was leaving the house, whereupon he also attacked them with his axe and knive and had to be shot, once in the right-leg and the left-hand. (“A most un-Danish situation!” remarked Chief Police Inspector Bent Preben Nielsen at a news conference afterwards.)

The Jyllands-Posten reporters further write that two more suspects are thought to be involved in the attack, although there was just the one attacker, and he left no bomb or anything of that sort behind at Westergaard’s residence. The Danish Police Investigation Service (PET) was quickly able to link him to al-Shabaab, a Somali-based terror organization with ties to al-Qaeda. Another Ritzau report has him taken into court in Aarhus on a stretcher, just a few hours ago (i.e. midday on Saturday, 2 January), with both areas in which he was shot in a cast. Nonetheless, he pled “Not Guilty” in his preliminary hearing.

Introducing Al-Shabaab

Now, “al-Shabaab”? We get further insight into this new terror organization from another Ritzau piece, appearing in the Danish Christian newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad, among others, citing a terror-expert at Aarhus University, one Prof. Mehdi Mozaffari. That organization is based mostly in Somaliland, the northern part of Somalia that completely lacks any sort of governmental authority, where it has been active for five or six years and probably has received some of its funds from the notorious pirates that operate there to prey on the international sea lanes off the coast. Then there’s a further source in Mohammed Gelle, chief of an organization in Denmark called the Somali Network, who adds that al-Shabaab was formerly just a political organization within Somalia, marked by a blend of nationalism and religious fervor, until it was forced out of a government coalition and took to terror activities. He adds that it only became serious about working together with al-Qaeda a few weeks ago, when the Americans (via the pilotless drones?) killed a highly-placed al-Shabaab leader in Pakistan.

There have already been reactions to the attack among various Danish political figures; strangely, perhaps (at least to any American observers), none has seen fit to use the incident to launch any attack on the current Danish government of Lars Løkke Rasmussen for security-carelessness. Anyway, there’s also a Ritzau article about what political reaction there was – of course – but I’d prefer to consult instead a Jyllands-Posten piece produced in-house on the same subject. Yes, they’re all appalled (rystet), and Aarhus’ mayor Nicolai Wammen is particularly good with his statement of defiance. (An extract: “We in Aarhus will never allow sinister terrorists to set the frame of public debate and the workings of democracy.”) But it’s the anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party (DF) that of course is in the best position to reap political gain. As the statement from DF leader Pia Kjaersgaard reads:

The attack on Kurt Westergaard is very unpleasant and serves as a rude reminder that an earlier time’s naive immigration policy has made it possible that we now have a group of people in the country who are willing to use violence to overturn Danish democracy in its present form. We therefore must make it much easier to expel terrorists and their sympathizers [from the country].

Kjaersgaard went on to demand that the government compile a report on how many “terrorist-related Islamists” are in prison in the country, with a view towards in fact starting proceedings to expel them. Note that the DF is not part of the current governing coalition, but it still a powerful party on the Danish scene, with much influence.

Oh, and if you were wondering, Somalis living in Denmark are shocked over the incident, according to their “Somali Network” spokesman, Mohamed Gelle – in another Ritzau article appearing (among other places) in the leading paper Berlingske Tidende.

                          

Actually, the Ritzau/Berlingske coverage here is really at-one-remove, as they basically pass on original reporting that appeared in the Norwegian newspaper VG. That article you can find here (“Nobel-majority argued against Obama”), and even if you don’t understand Norwegian you really should click through to take a look, because it offers a great prize: there you can see in a photograph, sitting around a table, the actual group of Norwegian notables (“socialists,” “muddled-headed Europeans,” “Obama-groupies,” “Devil’s spawn,” however you want to characterize them) who were directly responsible for him receiving the prize. The three ladies with their heads circled were actually the doubters; in fact, Berlingske quotes the right-most of them (i.e. turning to her left to address the camera) as remarking later to the press “I had expected more debate, especially over the fact that I myself regard as problematic, namely the war in Afghanistan.”

By the way, the committee doesn’t have six members, but five, so that one of the gentlemen off to the right is not actually a voting-member and doesn’t belong there. I’m guessing that the bona fide guy is probably with the red necktie, and that would be the committee chairman, former Norwegian prime minister and current Secretary-General of the Council of Europe, Thorbjørn Jagland. He’s really the one Obama can thank for his Prize (assuming that Obama is actually grateful for the Prize; there are reasons for thinking that he isn’t): despite the three nay-sayers dismissing the President’s candidacy from early in the selection-discussions, Jagland persevered as chairman (with some support from the one lady whose head is not circled, Sissel Rønbeck) and finally got his way. “The rest,” as they say, “is history” – but one can still speculate on what the outcome would have been had the three dissenters been male and the committee chairman female.

                          

- From the Danish Christian newspaper, Kristeligt Dagblad (Obama gives Nobel money to a good cause): Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama intends to give the 10 million Swedish kroner prize-money to a good cause, which he has not yet had time to specifically identify, according to a White House spokesman. He will also travel to Oslo on December 10 to accept the award there; Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg has already discussed this with him. Ah, but you may also be asking: How will this sudden new Scandinavian appointment affect the US president’s involvement at the UN’s climate-change conference in Copenhagen which will be going on at the same time? According to this report, it does not necessarily increase the chances that Obama will actually decide to attend that climate change conference.

(Note: This is a report from the Ritzau news agency, so the identical text appears in several other Danish newspapers as well. But in one of those we get the added detail that the “expert” behind the above calculation that Obama’s appointment in Oslo in December won’t necessary mean he shows up for the climate conference in Copenhagen – which, by the way, I don’t believe for a second – is namely Aarhus University Professor of Contemporary History Thorsten Borring Olesen.)

- The daily Berlingske Tidende offers some commentary in one article (Obama: Both a certain and a controversial choice), but doesn’t bother to credit the journalist(s) involved. Anyway: Awarding the prize to Obama was certain (sikkert): he is popular everywhere on this Earth, the nearest thing to every man’s friend. Awarding the prize to Obama was, however, controversial: Obama has been all about promises so far, not results. Maybe the Nobel committee was impressed with the resolution calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons that he managed to have the UN Security Council pass a few weeks ago while he functioned as its Chairman – on the other hand, in reality none of the nuclear powers, including the US, has done anything to fulfill the promise they made to the rest of the world at the time of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, back in 1968, that they would work to reduce and then eliminiate their nuclear arsenals, in exchange for that rest of the world giving up any idea of developing nuclear weapons of their own. Or perhaps it’s about his efforts to counteract climate change, or to shut Guantánamo – except, again, there actually hasn’t been tangible progress in these areas, either. No, the purposes the Nobel committee had in giving this prize to the President was both to give him “a tremendous moral pat on the shoulder” and to pointedly remind other countries (the exact Danish phrase is “hint with a wagon-pole”) that the American president is going to need some help from them if what he has promised is going to come true – so that that Nobel committee doesn’t find itself embarrassed a few years down the road at what it did today.

- The preeminent Danish opinion weekly, Information hasn’t yet gotten around to providing its own judgment or study of the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama. For now, it presents an analysis (again from Ritzau) from Prof. Peter Viggo Jacobsen, of the Copenhagen University Social Sciences Faculty (Obama is a highly surprising choice). Along with about a billion other people around the world, he interprets the prize as being awarded in anticipation of future achievements, not of past accomplishments since “he has not been able yet to carry out anything at all.” Further Jacobsen:

Normally there should be more then words [behind the award]. There should also be some action. And action is what we haven’t seen much of yet. This has to be in anticipation of something later, that the [Nobel] committee believes that he is capable of realizing some of the good intentions he has.