The most expensive villa in Bergen, Norway is on the market because the own no longer can stand the rainy weather. I spent a few years on the west coast of Norway, and two years in Bergen. During one of those years I think it rained 80+ days in a row, and the constant mist and sight of water everywhere is depressing. The initial cost in 2000 was 38 million kroner. Now, the housing market in Norway and prices in general are astronomical, and inflation certainly doesn’t help, but almost all houses now are sold in “million” prices. Still, that’s one very expensive abode.
Category: history (Page 4 of 4)
Rather than fight the unions, baked good manufacturer, Hostess has decided to shut down business.
“The Board of Directors authorized the wind down of Hostess Brands to preserve and maximize the value of the estate after one of the company’s largest unions, the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM), initiated a nationwide strike that crippled the company’s ability to produce and deliver products at multiple facilities,” Hostess said in the statement.
So, around 18,000 jobs vanish.
Even in the era of “more government transparency” it appears the government wants your data. Google has released numbers showing a steady climb in requests. Not even the head of the CIA is exempt from surveillance hunger.
A massive effort is underway to kill around 180 million rats on various Galapagos Islands. Using specially developed bait targeted at the invasive rats, the plan is to completely wipe them out within a decade.
Looks like prices will head upward for new wine soon, with a projected shortage in wine production this year, especially in Argentina.
The building, that is, not the services, even though I’m sure its share of bribes have appeared there, over the years.
I’m currently reading one of the most depressing books ever published, Anne Applebaum’s account of the Russian Gulag system. Entitled simply Gulag, this detailed history covers virtually every aspect of the camps, from conception to dissolution. Many years ago I read Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow, but Gulag covers a more insidious aspect of Soviet history. An aspect few Westerns remember or seem to care much about, or appear to excuse as merely trivial.
The 20th century may well have been the bloodiest and most brutal time in human history, though perhaps I say this because I came of age in that century and thus I am more aware of the detail of atrocities committed by humans against their own kind in those well-document years. I know this has been the case since time immemorial, but I still stand in shock and despair every time I read of such events. The 20th century is full of such instances, such as the Holocaust, the terror of Pol Pot, the rape of Nanking, the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The list goes on and on. If I ever feel miserable about the state of political events in America, I can always turn to books like this one; nothing here is tough compared to what the early Soviets suffered. Nothing.
