Our Nordic Expedition, Part 28 -- Heading for Trondheim

After leaving Bronnoysund we took a slight detour to visit the Torghatten -- this island, which supposedly looks like a reclining fat man wearing a tall hat. There is, of course, an accompanying legend, explaining the distinctive feature. Supposedly this tall-hatted man fell in love with and won the affections of one of the "seven sisters". This angered a troll that also loved the sister so he lay in ambush for the tall-hatted man and shot an arrow into his stomach.

As we proceeded around the island, the reason for the arrow part of the legend became obvious.

Viewed up close you can see a hole running through the hill, supposedly caused by the evil troll's fatal arrow.

Then, as the sun set we wended our way south through the Vikna island group, arriving in the middle of the night at Rorvik, a town of about 1,500 inhabitants. There some of us briefly disembarked and checked out the Norveg museum.

There were a number of exhibits portraying aspects of the local fishing industry. This one, in particular, interested me.

Then we steamed on through the night through open seas heading for one of my favorite cities -- Trondheim. We arrived early in the morning and several of us headed out for a walking tour of the old town. Naturally, I took my camera.

We walked from the modern docks toward the old shipbuilding center of the city.

Much of the old industrial center has been replaced by condominiums.

But across the Verftsbrua [yard bridge], recently renamed the "Blomsterbrua" [flower bridge] for some reason, much of the old shipyard complex remains as an open air industrial museum.

In the background we can see the steeple of the Nidaros Cathedral.

One of the old drydocks, which for my purposes serves as a reflecting pool.

Our Nordic Expedition, Part 29 -- The Trondheim Yards

The port of Trondheim has transformed much of its old extensive shipyards into an outdoor museum where visitors could view remnants of the city's industrial past. We were lucky to be able to view it in the early morning on a day with excellent weather. In fact, our entire trip was blessed with extraordinarily good weather.

As we left the shipyards we entered a gorgeous neighborhood in which twisty little streets opened onto circles garnished with works of art.

This picture is not out of focus. The blurry effect comes from the texture of the wall covering.

What a lovely place to live -- but the best is yet to come, just around the corner....

Our Nordic Expedition, Part 30 -- The Nider River

After our stroll through lovely residential streets we turned a corner and were treated to this vision. That is the Nidelva river. It runs through the middle of Trondheim and we got to it early on a still morning while the water was glassy smooth -- perfect for taking pictures. 

The only disturbances were caused by these ducks and they soon went away.

Warehouses line both sides of the river.

These two boats fascinated me and I took a lot of pictures of them from different angles.

This is the "Old Town Bridge of Trondheim" -- a wonderful place from which to take pictures.

Looking east from the bridge.

Looking west from the bridge. The large structure at the top of the hill is the main building of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology -- an important national institution. Approximately one fifth of Trondheim's population is students, which makes for an interesting local culture.

Stiftsgården, the royal residence in Trondheim.

Walking back to the docks.

Then back aboard our boat to rest up as we headed on to our next destination.

Our Nordic Expedition, Part 31 -- Kristiansund

Our last stop before returning to Bergen and leaving the country was at Kristiansund, a town of about 25,000 people concentrated on four very small islands. Because of the limited land area available for settlement, Kristiansund has the highest population density of any town in Norway and the closely-packed housing makes for some interesting images.

Approaching the harbor...

As you can see, every possible site near the harbor has a house on it.

Bridges connect the islands and allow for easy movement among them.

Entering the harbor...

The waterfront.

Densely-packed, multi-color housing. I like it! It makes for nice pictures.

Walking along the waterfront we encountered this remnant of WWII.

The black freighter was featured in the 1965 film, "The Heroes of Telemark" starring Kirk Douglas.

Kristiansund is a charming place, but by this point most of us were in a hurry to get back to Bergen, get organized, and get on a plane back to the States.

Our Nordic Expedition, Part 32 -- End of the Journey

Our last port of call in Norway was where our journey had begun -- in Bergen. All through the trip we had been blessed by good weather, something that our guide commented on frequently. But when we returned to Bergen we found that, as usual, there was a storm brewing and rain clouds were cresting over the mountains.

We walked around for a while in the damp, reacquainting ourselves with this lovely city. Then after a short rest we headed for the airport and took flight back to our homes.

I hope you enjoyed this account of our Nordic experiences. It took a lot longer to post than I expected -- mostly because a long trip to India intervened in the process. If you are interested in finding out what we saw and did there, keep coming back to this blog. I'll be posting about our adventures in the heart of the subcontinent over the next few weeks.

Iowahawk Slams Bloom's Slam of Iowa

Iowahawk [the funniest writer on the interrwebs] unloads on University of Iowa professor, Stephen Bloom, who published an unflattering profile of the State in the Atlantic Blog. Read Bloom's piece here, then the Iowahawk response here.

The Unsustainability of the Welfare State

Nice piece in the WaPo by Robert Samuelson on the similarities between Europe's and America's financial crises. On both continents mid-Twentieth Century regimes embarked upon a vast expansion of the welfare state that, while politically popular was ultimately economically unsustainable. He writes:

The numbers — to those who don’t know them — are astonishing. In 1870, all government spending was 7.3 percent of national income in the United States, 9.4 percent in Britain, 10 percent in Germany and 12.6 percent in France. By 2007, the figures were 36.6 percent for the United States, 44.6 percent for Britain, 43.9 percent for Germany and 52.6 percent for France. Military costs once dominated budgets; now, social spending does. 

....



The modern welfare state has reached a historic reckoning. As a political institution, it hasn’t adapted to change. Politics and economics are at loggerheads. Vast populations in Europe and America expect promised benefits and, understandably, resent any hint that they will be cut. Elected politicians respond accordingly. But the resulting inertia poses an economic threat, one already realized in Europe. As deficits or taxes rise, the risk is that economic instability will increase, growth will decline, or both. Paying promised benefits becomes harder. Or austerity becomes unavoidable.

The paradox is that the welfare state, designed to improve security and dampen social conflict, now looms as an engine for insecurity, conflict and disappointment.

Read the whole thing here.

History Wars Heat Up

For the past half century and more students in Western educational institutions and indeed the general public have been subjected to an unrelenting stream of calumny and abuse on the subject of "imperialism" -- specifically, the two or three centuries in which Western nation states dominated non-Western peoples around the globe. Imperialism, we were told, was everywhere destructive of native cultures, stultifying them and degrading the populations subjected to colonial rule. Often it was genocidal. The legacy of colonialism included political and economic dislocation, psychological enervation, and a sense of cultural uncertainty against which post-colonial peoples are still struggling, and which accounts for the abysmal performance of many post-colonial regimes. What is perhaps worse, imperialism was in itself a manifestation of deep and abiding defects within Western culture itself, a manifestation of racism, a fear of "the other", a product of predatory capitalism, or a way of exporting antagonisms produced by domestic oppression onto other peoples.

Elements of this critique are drawn from many sources -- from the exuberance of non-Western nationalists, from the propaganda efforts of communist regimes, from the mystical dreams of cultural and religious radicals -- but they lead to a common conclusion:

So poisonous has the experience of Western imperialism been, critics argue, that non-Western societies can only advance by divesting themselves of that heritage. Anti-colonialism has thus adopted anti-capitalist, anti-Christian, and indeed anti-"white" positions and programs while indulging in extravagant visions of a return to the virtues of primitive simplicity, the restoration of a glorious period of past dominance, or a new, indigenous form of social organization.

With few exceptions academics, journalists, and cultural and intellectual elites throughout the West have embraced this criticism. Few, whether from matters of belief or fear of criticism, have stood up to oppose or correct it. It has become the received wisdom of our academic and political cultures. One of those few brave souls who have mad the case for imperialism has been Naill Ferguson, one of today's most prolific and popular historians. In a series of books and articles he has argued that, despite the undoubted abuses and occasional horrors associated with imperialism, many aspects of imperial rule, particularly in the British empire, were benign and beneficial to subject peoples. He laments the great Twentieth Century wars that ended the period of Western domination, and calls upon the United States to pick up the banner of world leadership that Britain no longer is able to carry. For this, he has been viciously attacked and among the most prominent of his antagonists has been Indian scholar Paskaj Mishra, who wrote a blistering critique of Ferguson's recent writings in which he portrayed his subject as a reactionary Atlantic man who writes "white people's histories" rife with unapologetic neoimperialism and more than a touch of racism. Most insultingly, he repeatedly compared Ferguson's views with those of early Twentieth Century racial theorist T. L. Stoddard.

[Read Mishra's review and Ferguson's letter in response to it, and the back-and-forth charges that ensued in the London Review of Books here.]

Outraged by the personal attacks in Mishra's review, particularly the suggestion that he was a racist, Ferguson [who left his Scottish wife to marry Somalian political activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali] struck back with a series of letters which forced Mishra to back away to some extent from the charge of racism [admitting that nobody, not even Ferguson, these days thinks quite like Stoddard]. Not satisfied, though, Ferguson has since threatened to press his case in court stating "If he won't apologise for calling me a racist, I will persecute him until he does." [here] So the controversy stands now. It's a fine dust-up in which articulate spokesmen representing radically different world-views go at it hammer and tongs.

Gad! I love this stuff!

UPDATE:

For a sympathetic review of Prof. Ferguson's book check out Donald Kagan's piece in the NYT here.

Kagan's review earned him this attack by economist Brad DeLong, who wants to write historical villains out of the Western Heritage.

DeLong's rant engendered this response from Ross Douthat in the New York Times. He points out that it is not so easy to separate heroes from villains, that good and evil coexist within the human soul, and that claiming a civilizational affiliation with the good guys necessarily entails a link to the bad guys because both are part of the same culture.

It just keeps getting better and better.

Last Works

Nice piece in Slate by Jan Swafford on the subject of how impending death affected some of the world's greatest composers and their work. Beethoven [my favorite] for instance:

In his late works Beethoven pushed every envelope in every direction. As his body failed, his music became more complex and more simple, grander and more intimate, more spiritual and more comic, more exalted and more nutty. Representing the latter quality is his bizarre, notorious Grosse fuge, Great Fugue, the original finale of the Op. 130 String Quartet. Here is music that will be eternally avant-garde and in some dimensions nearly beyond comprehension.

When Op. 130 premiered Beethoven was quite deaf, so he didn't attend the concert and waited at a tavern for a report. When friends arrived and told him that the fugue had not gone over well, he exploded, "Cattle! Asses!" Only in the later 20th century were players and audiences really ready to contend with it. Beethoven's last completed piece, though, was something of an anticlimax. After his anxious publisher persuaded him to spin off the Grosse fuge as a separate piece, Beethoven, in terrible shape and close to entering his deathbed, finished a new finale for the Op. 130 quartet. The replacement finale is a jaunty little piece, more or less the opposite of the manic fugue.

When his time came, after weeks of suffering—probably from advanced cirrhosis of the liver on top of who knows what other miseries— Beethoven went out with a little joke. To friends surrounding his deathbed he quoted in Latin the conclusion of classical Roman theatricals: "Applaud, friends, the comedy is over." Witnesses said that a couple of days later he emerged from a coma during a storm and died after a thunderclap, shaking his fist at the sky.

Read the whole thing here and follow the links to hear some of the greatest music ever written.

The Climate Cabal

Jim Lacey, over at National Review Online, discusses the dimensions of the fraud perpetrated by a small group of climate scientists and their allies in the mainstream media and government, the full extent of which is revealed in the latest leak of documents the press has titled "Climategate II". These e-mails show that not only was data selectively reported and sometimes suppressed, but the peer review process was compromised, critics were shut out of journals and skeptics intimidated, and false information was fed to and promulgated by media outlets, government agencies, and NGOs. The result has beem a fiasco that compromises not just climate science, but scientific authority everywhere.

Read the whole thing here.

Douthat on the Kennedy Myth.

Oh, and while we are on the subject of JFK, we should note that Ross Douthat, writing in the NYT, uses the appearance of Stephen King's new book to briefly survey what he calls the "Kennedy cult". Douthat notes that few serious historians today consider Kennedy to have been a good president. 

In reality, the kindest interpretation of Kennedy’s presidency is that he was a mediocrity whose death left his final grade as “incomplete.” The harsher view would deem him a near disaster — ineffective in domestic policy, evasive on civil rights and a serial blunderer in foreign policy, who barely avoided a nuclear war that his own brinksmanship had pushed us toward. (And the latter judgment doesn’t even take account of the medical problems that arguably made him unfit for the presidency, or the adulteries that eclipsed Bill Clinton’s for sheer recklessness.) 

 He's not done. Consider:

[I]t would be... accurate to describe the Vietnam War as Kennedy’s darkest legacy. His Churchillian rhetoric (“pay any price, bear any burden ...”) provided the war’s rhetorical frame as surely as George W. Bush’s post-9/11 speeches did for our intervention in Iraq. His slow-motion military escalation established the strategic template that Lyndon Johnson followed so disastrously. And the war’s architects were all Kennedy people: It was the Whiz Kids’ mix of messianism and technocratic confidence, not Oswald’s fatal bullet, that sent so many Americans to die in Indochina.

To this I would add Kennedy's most famous piece of rhetoric: "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country" which is, to my mind, as perfect an expression of fascist sentiment as can be found in the realm of American political rhetoric.

Nonetheless, Kennedy's image remains bright in the minds of most Americans, largely due to an extravagent public relations effort on the part of liberal Democrats, aided and assisted by the Kennedy clan and associated academics, to create a politically useful myth after his assassination. The JFK people remember today bears little resemblance to the man as he was. Rather it, and the entire "Camelot" imagery were, as Christopher Hitchens has recently reminded us [here], a carefully constructed and assiduously defended myth.

And one more thing Douthat points out. JFK was not killed by right wing haters.

Read the whole thing here.

A Conspiracy Theory About Conspiracy Theories

The "London Review of Books", in discussing Stephen King's latest novel, surveys literary versions of the Kennedy conspiracy theories and wonders:

Why have so many Americans been unable to accept the conclusions of the Warren Commission Report, which exhaustively described the circumstances of the Kennedy assassination? Why has the assassination exerted such a hold on the American imagination? Why has it inspired such feats of ingenuity? Instead of there being a single anti-establishment version, dissident theories have proliferated.

 Later on the review article answers its question thusly:

[A]lthough the KGB had nothing to do with Kennedy’s assassination, in its aftermath it did provide covert support for the dissemination of conspiracy theories. According to the defector Vasili Mitrokhin and the historian of intelligence Christopher Andrew, ‘by the late 1970s the KGB could fairly claim that far more Americans believed some version of its own conspiracy theory of the Kennedy assassination, involving a right-wing plot and the US intelligence community, than still accepted the main findings of the Warren Commission.’

Read the whole thing here.

So we now have a conspiracy theory about conspiracy theories. It was KGB disinformation! A bit far-fetched, I think, but certainly preferable to Richard Hofstader's despicable rehash of discredited Frankfurt School theories, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" which is also referenced in the article and for decades has been a staple of liberal/leftist commentary on our nation's political culture.

What if Dr. Seuss Had Written "The Call of Cthuhlu"?

Over at Deviant Art, a contributor who calls himself "DrFaustusAU" is re-conceiving H. P. Lovecraft's horror classic, "The Call of Cthuhlu", as a Dr. Seuss children's book. Mind-shattering concept, eh? The nice folks over at IO9 have collected his efforts here. If you are familiar with Lovecraft's mad imaginings (and who isn't?) check it out and have a chuckle. If you are among the few who have so far been spared the pleasure of reading Lovecraft's original work, you can find it here. If you are completely unfamiliar with the Cthuhlu mythos [is such ignorance possible?!?!?] check out the wikipedia entries here and here.

The Perversion of the Enlightenment

That word..., "enlightenment", I do not think it means what you think it does....

Today, all sorts of people -- from militant secularists to environmental activists -- claim to be the inheritors of the traditions of the Enlightenment, a period of intellectual ferment that culminated in the French Revolution and its aftermath. Tzvetan Todorov disagrees. Instead, he argues, the self-styled "enlightened" thinkers represent a perversion of the basic principles of the Enlightenment.

Prominent among those Todorov denounces are militant secularists who never tire of quoting Enlightenment figures such as Voltaire in their attacks on religion. What they miss is the fact that Voltaire and his cohorts were not attacking the substance of religion, but rather the fusion of religion with the state which they found to be oppressive. Modern secularists, rather than freeing people from intellectual tyranny, are simply substituting secular ideology for religion and, like their Catholic predecessors, are using the power of the state to enforce intellectual dogma.

Tim Black explains:

[T]he current fetishisation of The Science, or as Todorov calls it, ‘scientism’, [represents] ‘a distortion of the Enlightenment, its enemy not its avatar’. We experience this most often, although far from exclusively, through environmentalist discourse. Here, science supplants politics. Competing visions of the good are ruled out in favour of that which the science demands, be it reduced energy consumption or a massive wind-power project. This, as Todorov sees it, involves a conflation of two types of reasoning, the moral (or the promotion of the good) and the scientific (or the discovery of truth). In effect, the values by which one ought to live arise, as if by magic, from the existence of facts. In the hands of politicians this becomes authoritarian: ‘Values seem to proceed from knowledge and political choices are passed off as scientific deduction.’ There need be no debate, no reasoned argument, because the science tells us what to do.

What is at stake, Todorov argues, is nothing less than the freedom of the individual, which he holds to be the fundamental principle upon which Enlightenment thought was predicated. He's right! Today elite and "expert" opinion increasingly substitutes for reasoned argument and moral discourse. The result is intellectual authoritarianism of the worst sort. Todorov has produced a valuable critique of the drift toward intellectual tyranny. Read Black's review of the work [here], or listen to the man himself talk on the subject:

Stories Conservatives Tell Themselves

Betsy Newmark discusses a wonderful piece by Michael Medved in which he demolishes the position taken by many on the political Right that John McCain lost in 2008 because he was too moderate and that the 2010 mid-terms proved that a "true conservative" would mobilize large numbers of voters. It just ain't true, folks, no matter how often Rush Limbaugh says it is. She goes on to predict that Mitt Romney would be a much stronger candidate than any of his rivals.

There are reasons to oppose Mitt Romney, but being unelectable is not one of them. In fact, if electability is your criteria, I have to believe that Romney would be much more appealing to moderates than Newt Gingrich. Gingrich might have taken many moderate positions, but his image among the electorate is as a conservative opponent of Bill Clinton. Most people aren't aware of his more moderate stances and, if they are, regard them as his pandering to elites to resurrect his standing inside the Beltway. And if what people are searching for is someone with executive experience, Mitt Romney has it all over Gingrich whose Republican lieutenants in the House were unhappy under his leadership and are notably missing from his support in this election.

Read the whole thing here.

She's right. The anti-elite bias of many rank and file Republicans, however justified [and it is], is misplaced and should prove to be electoral poison come next Fall. Romney may be all that movement conservatives say he is, but he at least is electable. The "Buckley Rule" still applies -- vote for the most conservative candidate that is electable. Newt, Perry, Santorum, et al. don't fit the bill.

The Myth of Renewable Energy

Dawn Stover has a nice piece in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in which she explodes one of the main pillars of the environmentalist movement -- the idea that there are sustainable, renewable sources of energy. The key point:

"[R]enewable energy" is a meaningless term with no established standards. Like an emperor parading around without clothes, it gets a free pass, because nobody dares to confront an inconvenient truth: None of our current energy technologies are truly renewable, at least not in the way they are currently being deployed. We haven't discovered any form of energy that is completely clean and recyclable, and the notion that such an energy source can ever be found is a mirage.

 [emphasis mine]

Check out the whole thing here.

 

New Perspectives on the History of American Indians

The Browser has a nice interview with historian Colin Calloway in which he discusses important contributions to our understanding of North American Indian societies and cultures. The subject of Native American history has undergone some major revisions in the past thirty years or so and Calloway presents a fair introduction to the subject. If you find the subject interesting check out the short introductions and then read the books -- you could find far worse ways to spend your time.

Check out the interview here.

Obama is Lying and People are Dying

The Libyan revolution, made possible by this administration's intervention, is descending into a Hobbesian state of nature. The Independent reports:

The detention of 7,000 people in prisons and camps by the anti-Gaddafi forces is not surprising. The conflict in Libya was always much more of a civil war between Libyans than foreign governments pretended or the foreign media reported.

The winning anti-Gaddafi militia are not proving merciful. Often they have had relatives killed in the fighting or imprisoned by the old regime who they want to avenge. Sometimes they come from tribes and towns traditionally hostile to neighbouring tribes and towns. Gaddafi supporters are being hunted down. According to one person in Gaddafi's home town of Sirte, they are facing a "continuing reign of terror".

"There is a deep and spreading frenzy, particularly among some of the youth militia and the Islamists, to hunt down anyone associated with the former regime," the source said.

The National Transitional Council, whose control is largely theoretical, is not in a position to stop this purge because many of its members are themselves frightened of being accused of links with the old regime.
Some groups are particularly vulnerable. The then-rebels were convinced earlier this year that many of those they were fighting were mercenaries recruited in Central or West Africa. But when these alleged "mercenaries" were arrested in Tripoli, many turned out to be black migrant labourers without identity papers.
According to Amnesty International, some of those who were put on television by the rebels as mercenaries were later quietly freed because they were migrant workers. Others faced mob justice before they were able to prove their identities.

The international media was overwhelmingly hostile to Gaddafi's regime and tended to highlight atrocities committed by it and disregard or underplay human rights violations carried out by his opponents. An example of this occurred when eight or nine bodies of Libyan soldiers were found who appeared to have been executed. The rebels claimed they had been shot by Gaddafi's men because they tried to change sides. But Amnesty located a film of the soldiers being captured alive by the rebels and it was presumably the rebels who killed them.

The purge of Gaddafi supporters is made more dangerous by the infighting between the militias, and between them and the politicians. Association with the old regime can be used to discredit an opponent. There may also be self-interest since death squads are reported to be taking their property.

 Note the pervasive perfidity and misrepresentation of the situation in Libya on the part of the current administration and the internationalist order it has chosen to serve.The NATO intervention has brought about a reign of terror, but is presented in the American media as a great humanitarian venture.

Faugh!