Hm.

That’s disturbing.

Ugh, silly me. What a stupid thing to claim.

Ritual suicide suddenly sounds like a good idea…

I’ll go perform the appropriate ritual suicide now.

Or, no, wait, I’m not deservign of rituals, I’ll just end it.

CHILDRENS. O.o *shudders*

Call me simple, but I don’t think access to the European market is a small thing. For example, according to SSB the Norwegian exports to the EU in 2004 alone was worth more than 64.000 million USD, if I still know how to read statistics.

“We don’t get farming subsidies, we don’t get money to help further cultural projects, we don’t get money to build roads that hold an acceptable standard.”

And why the fuck should we? We’re the richest goddamn country in the world, for chrissakes! Also, it’s called a “free trade agreement”; if we want the benefits of a political union, we should enter into one. Personally, I’m rather fond of our sovereignty — the price we’d have to pay for such “benefits” as the ones you describe above — and I’m a little too ambivalent towards the EU to be entirely comfortable with that.

Besides, the agriculture subsidies are mainly three to keep the French happy.

“The ones that do shoot up a lot of useless firework, have parades to show off their military’s latest tanks, and planes flying in formations. We have childrens going through the streets waving flags and blowing whistles.”

One of my flatmates used that exact same argument earlier today, when one of my other flatmates said he disliked May 17. And it’s a good point, I think. Much better to parade our children than our guns, for the children are the future, and frankly, our guns probably ain’t gonna scare anyone no matter how much we parade them back and forth.

And, actually, I think we should be very proud of the 17th of May as it exists today. There’s not a lot of other nations that both celebrate a national holiday and do it in such a peaceful and, well, I actually think you can also call it admirable, way. The ones that do shoot up a lot of useless firework, have parades to show off their military’s latest tanks, and planes flying in formations. We have childrens going through the streets waving flags and blowing whistles.

(Well, I have to admit that the Wiki-article was fuzzy, it might have been that Norway, Luxembourg and Iceland together had payed 1167 million €, but from the comments in the article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Economic_Area) I interpreted it as just Norway.)

I would very much like to celebrate the fact that I’m living in a nation with democracy and high living-standards. In fact, I do it every day - as I celebrate football every day as well. I do not, however, see the point in taking a whole day off so that people can empty out all their pompous, patriotic “we’re the best in the world” crap. I feel ashamed of the 17th as it exists today, ’cause it could be a good day, and for some, it probably is. Where I live, the whole thing comes off with a grand fart-smelling burp.