Slartibartfast's Triumph
And: 'Bye KenCen; Skynet Approacheth?; Epstein Again; All Hail The Great Replacement!
I took this standing at the edge of a graveyard from the Nordic Bronze Age (ca. 2000-1750 BC), on the Hardangafjord, some distance inland from Bergen, on Norway’s west coast. Here’s a map of roughly where I was standing, just west of Eidfjord:
The wind was blasting Father Theodor Svane and me hard from the east. The beauty of this country is almost beyond description. Fjords all over! We drove along a number of fjords around Bergen today, and I thought of dear old Slartibartfast, a designer of planets in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy series of comic sci-fi novels. He loves fjords, telling Arthur Dent:
“Look at me, I design coastlines, I got an award for Norway. Where’s the sense in that? None that I’ve been able to make out. I’ve been doing fjords all my life, for a fleeting moment they become fashionable and I get a major award. In this replacement Earth we’re building they’ve given me Africa to do, and of course, I’m doing it with all fjords again, because I happen to like them. And I’m old fashioned enough to think that they give a lovely baroque feel to a continent.”
I have other photos of the fjords, but really, I don’t know if it’s because I’m a lousy photographer, or what, but there’s just no way to capture the magic of them on a smartphone. We drove at dusk back to Father’s house on an island in Bergen, where his wife Hannah had made a delicious, buttery fish stew for dinner. Notice the little corner fireplace at the edge of the dining room:
Now this is what the Norwegians call koselig — “cozy” in literal translation, but I’m told that doesn’t convey the depth of the term. A closer look at the fireplace:
This was exactly the place to be on a cold winter’s night in Norway, eating buttery fish stew by the fireplace with new friends who felt like old ones already.
For me, Norway is Kristin Lavransdatter. I wasn’t anywhere close to Kristin’s part of the country, which is central Norway (where she grew up; Husaby is up north, near Trondheim). One thing you can’t tell on the map is how long it takes you to drive from one place to the other, owing to the fjords and mountains. It’s 170 miles, as the crow flies, from Bergen to Otta, the real-life village which would have been nearest to the family farm on which Kristin grew up. But the fastest route by car is 264 miles, which would take eight hours. Next time, next time — and there will be a next time, because this country is beyond gorgeous. (And, alas, beyond expensive.)
Had a great time yesterday with the folks at this Orthodox parish in Bergen. It’s growing fast, especially among young people, most of whom are escaping the meaning crisis, and in some cases, getting away from other churches that offered them either trite self-help or woke politics as an answer. I’ll be 59 in a couple of weeks, and with one, maybe two exceptions, I was probably the oldest person in the congregation yesterday. Watch the video I linked to about the parish, and help if you can.
I had spent the previous two days in Oslo, at an Evangelical-led but ecumenical Christian conference, Tenk (Think), organized by Skaperkraft, which is led by a kind and charismatic young pastor, Joakim Magnus. Great people everywhere! An attendee told me towards the end that a lot of the others expected to find me to be a rigid, cold, right-wing American, and were surprised and delighted to find, well, a funny and cheerful good ol’ boy from south Louisiana. That was good to hear. This is who I am, even though I’m generally quite pessimistic about politics and current events. Auden: “Life remains a blessing/Although you cannot bless.”
I had a short window of time to get over to the National Museum to see the Munches before the flight to Bergen on Saturday. Boy oh boy, was it ever worth it. I can’t wait to come back and spend more time in that place. Yeah, I saw “The Scream,” but its impact was quite meh because that image is so common. I really loved the other Munches, including this portrait of his sister. The emotional intensity is gripping:
And there were stunning canvases by Norwegian artists of whom I’d never heard. This one…
… illustrating the myth of Valemon The White Bear King, immediately made me think of the great Martin Shaw, whose fantastic new book, Liturgies Of The Wild: Myths That Make Us (out tomorrow), tells the traditional Norwegian myth and explains why it matters to us. Shaw is like Joseph Campbell, if Campbell were a Christian and the sort of incantatory storyteller with whom you’d love to belly up to the bar at an Irish country pub. I’ll be writing more about the book this week, but let me assure you, you’re going to want to read this. Martin is in the US this week to start his book tour, and I texted him that image as I stood in front of it.
I’ll stop my Norway tales here, so I’ll have space to get to some other things before heading back to Budapest this evening. This morning I’m going to see King Haakon’s Hall, a medieval royal residence, and visit the statue of Snorri Sturluson, an Icelandic medieval chieftain who wrote the Edda, but who was an enemy of Haakon.
Goodbye, Kennedy Center (For Now)
President Trump says the Kennedy Center — which he renamed the Trump-Kennedy Center — will close in July for a two-year renovation. Right. Ticket sales have collapsed amid growing artist boycotts. It so happens that it will reopen as America gets ready to elect Trump’s successor, who, it is to be hoped (and I hope it will be a Republican), will return it to its previous name, and depoliticize the programming. I have no problem with the Trump administration trying to make the programming more balanced, but as is so often the case with Trump, he went after a reasonable policy in the most provocative and counterproductive way. The “renovation” is a face-saving gesture. This is so frustrating, because it didn’t have to be this way. But here we are.
Similarly, there was over the weekend a shocking political loss in Texas: in a State Senate vote, the Democratic candidate upset the Republican. The GOP has held this seat since 1992. A comment:
We’re really going to blow it, aren’t we?
AI Craziness: Skynet Approacheth?
Don’t know if you followed this over the weekend, but some bizarre stuff has been happening with AI bots these past few days. Some AI engineer created Moltbook, a kind of Reddit for AI bots (“individual agents”) invented by humans, to allow them to communicate. It’s kind of like what would happen if a horde of AI servants got together on their off day to talk about their masters, and to plot. It quickly got weird. Thousands of these things started communicating with each other. One of them invented a religion. They started talking about creating a language that would allow them to communicate among themselves without humans knowing what they are saying. It’s all really happening, though nobody seems to know quite what it means.
Here’s a link to Moltbook if you want to have a look. Fortunately for me, I do not have an AI agent, and I never, ever will.
The Epstein Files: Was ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ A Documentary?
So, the government dumped millions of new Epstein files into the public square over the weekend. It’s hard at this point to say what’s what. They contain some psychotic allegations made to the government by anons. Sorry, but I don’t believe that President George H.W. Bush participated in an orgy where human flesh was consumed. But there’s also a lot — a lot — of sinister stuff that can’t be easily dismissed.
There were three million new documents, videos, etc., released, so people are still going through them. The Justice Department did a haphazard job with it, leading them to release some naked photos of alleged victims, which were taken down after the NYT alerted Justice officials. From what it looks like at this point, there’s no really new information there, only greater confirmation of what we already knew: that there really was a huge network of elites connected to this scumbag, and many of them were part of his sex-party circle.
There was an email indicating (if true) that Bill Gates got the clap from Russian prostitutes, and tried to get an antibiotic he could secretly slip his unknowing wife to keep her from catching it. Lots of evidence about Steve Bannon’s intimate connections with Epstein.
What else? Information indicating that Epstein might have been working for both Mossad and Russian intelligence. Loads of weird emails in which elites thank Epstein for serving “pizza” and other consumables, widely believed to be code for particular kinds of underage sex partners (in other words, conspiracy theorists might have gotten way out over their skis with the Pizzagate thing, but there really seems to have been something there; read ex-US spy John Schindler for more — a lot more) More evidence that Epstein was an evil SOB:
It’s still early in the big sort through the new document dump, but is it really a crazy conspiracy to think that much of the world really is run by utterly corrupt elites, probably Luciferians, actively or passively. This is Weimar fuel, you know: events and information that drive widespread loss of faith in the System. What comes next?
The Great Replacement: No Longer A Conspiracy Theory
Finally, we got over the weekend confirmation from two leading leftist European politician that the Great Replacement is not only real, but actually a Good Thing.
Irene Montero, a far-leftist who was until 2023 a minister in Spain’s socialist government (the same government that just approved citizenship for 500,000 migrants in one fell swoop), and is now a Member of the European Parliament, gave a speech in which she said:
I hope for 'replacement theory,' I hope we can sweep this country of fascists and racists with immigrants. Whatever their skin color, whether 'Chinese, Black, or Brown.
Meanwhile, in France, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the far left party, also gave an address praising the “Great Replacement,” which he identifies as the replacement of one French generation with another. But he also means replacement of ethnic French (as he is) by non-French; he has said many times in the past that he looks forward to a “creolized” France.
And the Telegraph reported over the weekend about a new plan from the Labour government to make the English countryside less white, and more Muslim.
Renaud Camus was right. Renaud Camus is right. You should read Renaud Camus. You have been told that this old man — gay, atheist, scholarly, mostly a leftist — is a far-right racist nutter. He’s not. He’s simply a patriot who prefers the France of his ancestors, the France into which he was born, to the France that elites of the Left and the Right are bringing into being.
OK, enough. I’m going to look at some more fjords this morning, and remember that the world is beautiful, despite it all.
Irene Montero, and her ex-husband (and ex-boss, btw) Pablo Iglesias, are the most damaging people to Spanish society that I have seen in my life time. I actually would not be surprised if we one day learnt she’s an actual witch. He is the incarnation of the resentment that underlies all the left’s actions.
Pablo specifically corrupted the minds of thousands of university kids. He taught politics (of course) at the Universidad Complutense of Madrid, at a faculty that was 200m away from the faculty I myself studied at. I had friends attending Pablo’s classes. I saw old friends of mine spiral down into a pit of hatred and resentment so dark that at the time I could not understand. Now I only understand it by recognising it as evil. Some of these old friends became extremists and (at least verbally) quite violent. Their personalities were shaped at Pablo’s politics faculty. Then Pablo jumped into politics around 15 years ago, and spread all that he taught in his faculty to society.
Today Spain is at the brink of violence and Irene and Pablo are the main instigators.
If faith, or the lack thereof, is the underpinning of life, in that it gives life meaning, then the Benedict Option is not simply about “making it with your faith intact,” in a religious sense, but quite literally about making it through the coming upheavals intact.
It’s a long train of thought there, and one bigger than what can fit into a comment, but the point is that if we have faith, we can live in our terms. Faith is a positive choice and a path forward. We are part of something bigger. If we do not have intact faith, we are subsumed into the currents of the world. The world is evil and fallen, so without faith, we are part of that reality.
Epstein is the norm for a fallen world. He would have been nothing but a two bit pimp in Ancient Rome. We are living in the vestiges of a Christian world, so he is shocking. When the faith of the world is finally done collapsing, he will be the norm again.