Posts, May 2003:

Son of the Missing Nukes: There's been a few rebuttals of the Vanity Fair interview where Wolfowitz supposedly admits that wmd's weren't an important reason for attacking Iraq. Fair enough - he didn't say that, and the quote was clearly taken out of context. What [...]

Spanking your inner racist: There are two theories of racism: One is that it's a cultural phenomenon that comes and goes, that is strong at times, and weak at others, that there are factors that tend to decrease it and others that increase it. [...]

Jesus wants you to go hungry: Norway's economy has, as I've explained, been significantly deregulated since the glorious days of Old Labor. The massive weight of social democracy is today felt more in heavy state ownership, state employment and high taxes than in state monopolies and [...]

Review - How free a nation?: I'm reading Hvor fritt et land? (How Free a Nation?) by Hans Fredrik Dahl and Henrik G. Bastiansen, on the changing conditions for freedom of speech in Norway through the 20th century. They look not only at official censorship and [...]

Bank unavailable - try again later: Spring is the season not only of long weekends in Norway, but of bitter, pointless strikes. Last year, the journalists shut down most of the Norwegian press for a week, demanding, well, an extra vacation week. Tomorrow, there's a fair [...]

Why do they hate us?: When I mentioned Mullah Krekar in the post below, I thought of him as a possible inspiration for a radical Islamic community in Norway, not the actual cause of the threat itself. I didn't think he was all that important [...]

Tim Sebastian: With all the deserved criticism being directed towards the BBC for its anti-American bias, they do deserve credit for one program: Hardtalk with Tim Sebastian. This guy is a pitbull - when he smells a weakness in his interview subjects [...]

Don't shoot, we're on your side: One of the most worrying aspects of radical Islam is the hold it seems to have on immigrant communities in Europe. The latest example of this was when two British citizens committed suicide bombings in Israel recently. The problems of [...]

Case of the Missing Nukes: What happened to the weapons of mass destruction, the Iraqi nukes, biological and chemical weapons? I've already written about how our doomsday pacifists should admit their numerous mistakes, but they weren't alone in getting things wrong. It's time for us [...]

Mire, can you spare a quag?: Uh-oh, there's that word again. The contect is predictable - a Dagbladet editorial - but the timing is a bit odd, what with the war being over and all. The militarization of the politics of the American hyperpower which president [...]

Arab News "joins" war on terror: Dean Esmay wonders if this editorial in the Saudi-controlled Arab News indicates that the Saudis could be about to join the war on terrorism for real. It goes without saying that those responsible, those who poisoned the minds of the [...]

A nation of Harry's: The Norwegian spring is chock-full of public holidays. There's Easter, Labor Day, Constitution day, etc., and with the curious tendency of these to fall on Tuesday's and Thursday's, and an ever increasing number of vacation days, spring is the season [...]

Rich to get richer, smarter: One subject the coalition parties can agree on is school reform. There's a proposal under way that will make it a lot easier to start private schools in Norway, and it looks likely to pass in Stortinget. The Conservatives and [...]

Two free zones: In the early 70's, a group of hippies occupied and began to settle down in an abandoned military complex in Copenhagen. In the early 80's, a group of youths occupied an empty city-owned building in Oslo. Somehow the Danish hippies [...]

A case of Vietnam addiction: Dagbladet is pretty damn pleased with its own coverage of the Iraq war. A recent poll gives all the major media except VG - NRK, TV2, Aftenposten and Dagbladet - insanely high approval ratings, in the 70's to 80's, for [...]

Peace Prize to Bush and Blair?: Jan Simonsen, formerly from the Progress Party, (now an independent MP), have proposed George W. Bush and Tony Blair as candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize, following the successful war on Iraq. Advantage: Fredrik Norman, who suggested something similar more [...]

Shifting Alliances: Shifting political alliances is a constant challenge in a multiparty democracy. When you're the left and the right wing of one of two major parties, there's an incentive to work together, and do the fighting behind closed doors. When the [...]

Norwegian blogging: Things are happening on the Norwgian blogging front. Possible inspired by the media attention on warblogs during the Iraq war, Dagbladet has started a weblog of its own - and claims to be the first newspaper in Scandinavia to do [...]

The New Labor: The Progress Party keeps slipping out of my fingers when I try to define it ideologically. They're not pure libertarians, (they were kicked out of the party ten years ago), and they're certainly not social democrats, but they have picked [...]