Europe

Recommended Podcast: Europe From Its Origins

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I recently listened to this fascinating podcast: Europe from its Origins. It provides a unique in-depth review of the history of the Dark Continent from 312-1414 (so far).

Joseph Hogarty, the author, takes the unique tack of using contemporary names of historical people and places rather than the received historical name.

For example:

  • Constantinius vs. Constantine
  • Antiochea vs. Antioch
  • Clodovicius vs. Clovis
  • Fracia vs. France
  • Carolus Martellus vs. Charles Martel
  • Carolus Magnus vs. Charlemagne

Hogarty stresses the strong continuity between Rome and post-476 Western Europe (except poor distant  Britannia). He argues that the great discontinuity between Western medieval Europe and the Western empire of antiquity was not the Germanic barbarian invasions of c. 400 onward but the Islamic conquest of half of the Roman empire after 633. In following this narrative thread, Hogarty’s work slants away from recent scholarship that portrays the Islamic conquest as a welcome breath of desert tolerance warmly embraced by the Christians of Roman Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Africa. Hogarty argues instead that the Islamic conquest was a bloody usurpation that, uniquely in world history, retribalized every complex urban civilization it touched.

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Possibly the Most Negative Theatre Review Ever

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Sometime in the early 1800s, Goethe was walking a secluded, narrow path which led to a mill. There he met an (unnamed) prince, and the two fell into conversation about many subjects, including theatre and particularly Schiller’s play “The Robbers.” The prince’s comment about this work was:

If I had been the Deity on the point of creating the world, and had foreseen, at the moment, that Schiller’s ‘Robbers’ would have been written in it, I would have left the world uncreated.

(from Conversations with Eckermann)

Norway Prices & the US “peso”

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I recently took a trip to Norway. In addition to being interested in a debate about transmission lines strung high above picturesque fjords I was also astounded at how high their prices were (when converted into US dollars).

A drink at the crappiest, “dive-iest” bar in Bergen (Norway’s 2nd largest city) will set you back $11 USD. A drink at a regular restaurant or a hotel will frequently cost you much more. Above you can see one glass of wine and one beer (admittedly a good pour from a local brewer) and 200 Norwegian Kroner. At current exchange rates 200 Kroner is about $35-$40 (let’s say $40, because it makes the math easier and is close enough) or each Krone is worth 20 US cents. That means that these two drinks, with tip (if you leave one, optional) costs about $40.

Here’s another sign of how upside down it is. I saw this cool mini-bar self dispensing fridge in a friend of ours’ hotel room. The prices in the mini-bar in a Hilton were competitive with those of a regular bar! I guess at some point you reach an absolute price ceiling on alcohol and the fact that a hotel mini-bar is competitive with outside prices means that you are there.

There are other factors at play with alcohol in particular; the government levies high taxes in order to deter consumption. The long arctic nights apparently encourage heavy drinking and if nothing else the government is compensated for your sins (it didn’t seem to do much to deter the locals from drinking, but it worked a bit for me).

It isn’t just alcohol that is almost prohibitively expensive when you are paying with the US “peso” (or Euros – the Norwegian currency is punishingly high against everyone unless maybe you were paying in Swiss, Brazilian, Chinese, Canadian or Australian dollars). I split a “Deal Meal” in McDonalds with someone (it was 2 Quarter Pounders plus fries and one drink) because it too was around $20 USD when you did the conversion (I think it was 125 Kroner). Let’s compare that with the US…

There are other odd indications of a currency upside down, or where the local economy has become so un-moored from the rest of the world that things are just “different”. Why not drive a 5 series BMW AS A CAB? I think our trip from the airport to downtown Bergen was something like 700 Kroner… I guess that is about $140 USD or so (we took the bus back when we returned, we can learn). So at that rate you might as well drive a 5 series BMW, which must be brought in country at a prohibitively high exchange rate, as well.

One thing about America; apparently it is very cheap to 1) get drunk 2) buy tons of unhealthy food 3) take a cab. I had a great time in Norway by the way it was a beautiful and exceedingly well-run country with a highly educated workforce. I still don’t know how they can pay the bills, though, unless local salaries are completely outrageous.

Cross posted at LITGM

R2P is a Doctrine Designed to Strike Down the Hand that Wields It

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[Cross-posted from zenpundit.com]

[NEW! Incoming link from Outside the Beltway – see addendum below]

There has been much ado about Dr. Anne-Marie Slaughter’s enunciation of “Responsibility to Protect” as a justification for the Obama administration’s unusually executed intervention (or assistance to primarily British and French intervention) in Libya in support of rebels seeking to oust their lunatic dictator, Colonel Moammar Gaddafi. In “R2P” the Obama administration, intentionally or not, has found its own Bush Doctrine, and unsurprisingly, the magnitude of such claims – essentially a declaration of jihad against what is left of the Westphalian state system by progressive elite intellectuals – are beginning to draw fire for implications that stretch far beyond Libya.

People in the strategic studies, IR and national security communities have a parlor game of wistfully reminiscing about the moral clarity of Containment and the wisdom of George Kennan. They have been issuing tendentiously self-important “Mr. Z” papers for so long that they failed to notice that if anyone has really written the 21st Century’s answer to Kennan’s X article, it was Anne-Marie Slaughter’s battle cry in the pages of The Atlantic.

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