Pål Jacob Jacobsen

Love the European political game, football and biking

[Le Zelenskyste 🇫🇷🇺🇦 @VolodimirZelen1]

‼️🇺🇦 Raphaël Glucksmann RECADRE Jean-Luc Mélenchon et Marine Le Pen en leur rappelant quelques vérités sur l'Ukraine et le Donbass que les deux soutiens de Poutine veulent cacher. Masterclass à partager 👇

[Josh Barzon @JoshuaBarzon]

A map of Manhattan’s neighborhoods

[Sandro 🇬🇪 @SandroG991]

I don’t think Europeans fully appreciate what is happening to the European Union right now.

The EU is under an extraordinary, multi-front assault, both from outside and from within. And I struggle to think of another period in its history when so many powerful actors had an interest in weakening it simultaneously.

Russia has spent years waging hybrid warfare against Europe. Weaponised migration, sabotage, cyberattacks, coordinated disinformation campaigns, bot networks and political interference. The objective is clear: undermine trust in democratic institutions, deepen social divisions and weaken European unity.

China has different motivations, primarily economic and geopolitical. A fragmented Europe is easier to pressure, easier to negotiate with individually and less capable of defending its economic interests.

And then there is the United States. Perhaps the most disturbing development of all.

Under Trump and MAGA, a country that helped rebuild the old continent and then spent decades supporting European integration now has an administration openly hostile to much of what the EU represents. Its own National Security Strategy even calls for cultivating resistance to Europe’s current political direction.

Think about that for a moment.

Meanwhile, within Europe, parts of the far right and far left amplify these divisions, whether through ideological alignment, political opportunism or outright sympathy for authoritarian regimes.

This doesn’t mean Russia, China and MAGA are all following some jointly coordinated master plan. They don’t have to. Their interests increasingly overlap, and Europe’s internal divisions make their work considerably easier.

What makes this particularly alarming is what is actually at stake.

For all its flaws, the EU remains one of the world’s most consequential projects built around liberal democracy, the rule of law, individual freedoms and cooperation between nations.

At a time when authoritarianism is gaining ground and even longstanding democracies are showing disturbing tendencies, that matters enormously.

Europe is far from perfect. Its bureaucracy, indecision and inability to act decisively are real problems. But the answer cannot be to retreat into 27 competing nation-states, each too small to meaningfully influence a world increasingly dominated by continental powers.

Quite the opposite.

Europe needs deeper integration, stronger common institutions, genuine strategic autonomy and the political courage to defend its interests and values.

Because fragmentation is precisely what so many external actors want.

And perhaps that’s the central irony of our time: people are being deliberately manipulated into believing that the reverse is true — that national identity and sovereignty can only be protected by weakening European cooperation. In reality, a divided Europe is less sovereign, less secure and far easier for outside powers to pressure. Therefore the very thing that will make Europe stronger is the thing its adversaries are working hardest to prevent.

A united Europe is a geopolitical power. A divided Europe is a collection of countries waiting to be played against one another.

[Simon Kuestenmacher @simongerman600]

The Baltic Sea from a different angle. Perspective matters. This looks vastly different and more involved than a standard map of Europe. Source: https://t.co/St6BTQYpW6

[Iain Cameron @theiaincameron]

The tiny Mediterranean island of Malta has a population of over half a million, despite being only 28 kms (17 mi) long and 14.5 kms (9 mi) wide.

However, Malta has no permanent rivers or natural lakes. How, then, do over 500,000 people access fresh water?

1/n

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good.

I know. I know. I think about it on the tram.

We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle.

It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species.

Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate.

287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself.

We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it.

Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name.

A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog.

And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters.

People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all.

So who did we give it to?

An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us.

She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown.

The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him.

Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept.

It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall.

But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for.

That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it.

We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was.

He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him.

Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.

[Pål Jacob Jacobsen @pal_jacob]

@IanSZNian papin

[Bill Johnson @Bill43111]

People that just flat out disappeared:

Mitch McConnell
Melania
Barron
The pilot that got shot down in Iran that had the unbelievable escape.
The Butler, PA shooter
Ivanka
That Trump golf course shooter that was supposedly hiding in the bushes.
Matt Gaetz and his “son” Nestor
MTG

[Pål Jacob Jacobsen @pal_jacob]

@utdmax0 Bobb

[Erland.jpg @ErlandJacobsen1]

La femme de Doku avant le match face à la Nouvelle Zélande.

https://t.co/HtI4Db7mUI

[Rick Wilson @TheRickWilson]

Iran won and Trump surrendered.
Moscow is burning and Ukraine will win.
Treasonous Tulsi is out.
Trumps name is off the Kennedy Center.
The Reflecting Pool is green.
Donald Trump is riddled with dementia and is rotting before our eyes.
MAGA is in a civil war.

Happy Friday!

[The Players’ Tribune @PlayersTribune]

“If you want a good football story, watch a good football match. This is life I’m talking about.”

Amadou Onana owes a lot to Belgium for the beginning of his football career, but he also wants to pay respects to the people who have been with him the entire way. https://t.co/JkmeWkB7EF

[Jack Prandelli @jackprandelli]

Norway and the UK drilled the same North Sea.

🇳🇴Norway got $2 trillion.
🇬🇧The UK got tax cuts.

Same basin,Same era.... Completely different outcomes.

Norway captured $30 per barrel in government revenue. The UK captured $11.

That gap, compounded over 50 years of production, is the entire difference.

Norway's model was simple: tax heavily (78% marginal rate), take direct equity stakes in fields via the SDFI, own part of Equinor, and put everything surplus into a fund invested abroad.

The Government Pension Fund Global now holds over $2 trillion in assets.
That's $390,000 per Norwegian citizen about 1.5% of all listed equities on earth.

The fiscal rule: only spend the 3% annual real return. Never touch the principal.

The UK started producing earlier, at lower prices, with a lower tax rate (40%) and no saving mechanism.

North Sea revenues flowed straight into the general budget.

Economists estimate the UK missed out on roughly £400 billion compared to a Norwegian style regime.

The windfall largely financed tax cuts in the 1980s rather than a fund.

Where things stand in 2026?

Norway's petroleum sector will generate $63 bn in net cash flow this year alone feeding a fund already large enough to cover 10-15% of the national budget from returns alone.

The UK is a net energy importer.
Since 2021 it has paid countries like Norway more than £100 billion for gas.

One country treated oil as a finite resource to convert into permanent financial wealth.

The other treated it as income.

image source:eia

[Historic Vids @historyinmemes]

Göran Kropp hauled all his climbing gear in a trailer, cycling roughly 8,000 miles from Sweden to Nepal. He then solo-climbed Mount Everest without Sherpas or bottled oxygen—before getting back on his bike and riding all the way home to Sweden.

[Bill Madden @maddenifico]

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, with an incredibly thoughtful answer to the smartest person he's ever met. If you listen closely to the words he uses, including "empathy" and "wisdom," you'll realize a certain group of people he's not describing.

[Jon Favreau @jonfavs]

What the fuck is wrong with you?

You have no idea who this woman was. You have no idea what she believed. You have no idea what an actual investigation might show. A 37-year-old American citizen was killed. Her 6-year-old son has been orphaned. Her family and friends are going through the worst moment of their lives. And all you can do is call her a "deranged leftist"?

Seriously what the fuck is wrong with you?

[Jo @JoJoFromJerz]

Something something “unfair advantages in girls sports”…

[Anthony Scaramucci @Scaramucci]

The major problems facing America and what we can do to fix it.

Anything else you’d add?

[Vivid.🇮🇱 @VividProwess]

Douglas Murray left Piers Morgan SPEECHLESS:

"Hamas could have used the billions of dollars since 2006 to build up Gaza. They built a tunnel network bigger than the London underground. They want the death of their own citizens in order to get world opinion turned against Israel"

[Ishaan Tharoor @ishaantharoor]

A senior foreign diplomat posted at the UN texts me: "This man is stark, raving mad. Do Americans not see how embarrassing this is?"