Dithyramb

The Race for the North Pole continues

Northern pebbles new pawns in Arctic chess game

"A tiny speck of pebbles found off the northern coast of Greenland could open up a new front in the looming battle for control of the Arctic and the North Pole."

All is not well in Great Britain

Lessons in hate found at leading mosques

"Books calling for the beheading of lapsed Muslims, ordering women to remain indoors and forbidding interfaith marriage are being sold inside some of Britain’s leading mosques, according to research seen by The Times.

Some of the fundamentalist works were found at the bookshop in the London Central mosque in Regent’s Park, which is funded by the Saudi regime and is regularly visited by government ministers. Its director, Ahmad al-Dubayan, is also a Saudi diplomat and was among those greeting King Abdullah when he arrived in Britain last night for his official state visit.

Extremist literature, including passages supporting the stoning of adulterers and waging violent jihad, was also found on sale at many other mosques regarded as mainstream institutions."

Blind Counter-Terrorism...

A blind Sherlock Holmes: Fighting crime with acute listening

"ANTWERP, Belgium: Sacha van Loo, 36, is not your typical cop. He wields a white cane instead of a gun. And from the purr of an engine on a wiretap, he can discern whether a suspect is driving a Peugeot, a Honda or a Mercedes.

Van Loo is one of Europe's newest weapons in the global fight against terrorism and organized crime: a blind Sherlock Holmes, whose disability allows him to spot clues sighted detectives don't see."

...

"The blind police unit, which became operational in June, originated after van Thielen heard about a blind police officer in the Netherlands, and was looking at ways to improve community outreach. He made the connection that blind people could prove more adept than the sighted at listening to and interpreting wiretaps. That idea, he says, was given added impetus after the Belgian government passed a law a few years ago giving the police extended powers to use wiretaps in the investigation of 37 areas of crime, including terrorism, murder, organized crime and the abduction of minors."

...

Amazing!

"The police also recognized that blind officers like van Loo could be particularly valuable in counterterrorism investigations because wiretap recordings - derived from a phone tap or bug placed in the safe house of a terrorist group - are often muffled by loud background noise, requiring a highly trained ear to discern voices. Alain Grignard, a senior counterterrorism officer at the Brussels Federal Police, notes that wiretaps proved instrumental in the recent arrests of a large terrorist cell in Belgium recruiting for the insurgency in Iraq."

ARI press release: Sea Treaty Drowns Property Rights

From the Ayn Rand Institute:

Ayn Rand Institute Press Release Sea Treaty Drowns Property Rights October 29, 2007 Irvine, CA--The Senate will soon decide whether to ratify the Law of the Sea Treaty, which deems most of the earth's vast ocean floor "the common heritage of mankind" and places it under United Nations ownership "for the benefit of mankind as a whole.” "This treaty vests monopoly authority over most of the world’s seabeds in a U.N. agency that issues licenses burdened by complex regulations, fees, royalties, and mandatory land transfers," said Thomas Bowden, an analyst at the Ayn Rand Institute. "Licensees are required to give back half or more of the submerged land they explore, to be mined by the International Seabed Authority using the licensees' technology and know-how, with proceeds going to U.N. members such as Cuba, Uganda, and Venezuela, who contribute nothing to the productive process. "The proposed treaty ignores the fundamental principle that unowned natural resources should become the private property of the people whose efforts make them valuable," Bowden said. "Although the ocean floor is full of potentially valuable minerals, they remain useless until some pioneer discovers how to retrieve them. Under this treaty, however, the deep-sea mining companies whose science, exploration, technology, and entrepreneurship are being counted on to gather otherwise inaccessible riches are treated as mere servants of a world collective. "This treaty is an injustice that will hamper, if not halt, the exploitation of undersea wealth," Bowden said. "Because no self-respecting entrepreneur will work under such conditions, the U.N. regime will attract only the kind of lumbering state-owned enterprises that have historically failed to match the performance of private, profit-seeking companies." The Senate Foreign Relations Committee recently held hearings on the treaty, which has the support of the Bush administration. The treaty, which President Reagan refused to sign in 1982, was submitted to the Senate by President Clinton in 1994 but never ratified. The treaty requires a two-thirds Senate majority for ratification. "Governments have legitimate options regarding how to deal with undersea explorers' need to establish property rights in the deep ocean," Bowden said. "But it would be totally improper for America to declare eternal hostility to private property in the ocean floor by ratifying a treaty dedicated on principle to denying such rights." ###  ### ###

Copyright © 2007 Ayn Rand® Institute. All rights reserved. Op-eds, press releases and letters to the editor produced by the Ayn Rand Institute are submitted to hundreds of newspapers, radio stations and Web sites across the United States and abroad, and are made possible thanks to voluntary contributions. If you would like to help support ARI's efforts, please make an online contribution at http://www.aynrand.org/support. This release is copyrighted by the Ayn Rand Institute, and cannot be reprinted without permission except for non-commercial, self-study or educational purposes. We encourage you to forward this release to friends, family, associates or interested parties who would want to receive it for these purposes only. Any reproduction of this release must contain the above copyright notice. Those interested in reprinting or redistributing this release for any other purposes should contact [email protected]. This release may not be forwarded to media for publication. ARI's media releases are solicitations sent to addresses obtained from individual subscription requests.   The Ayn Rand Institute, 2121 Alton Pkwy, Ste 250, Irvine, CA 92606

Go Denmark!

Hirsi Ali Offered Refuge in Denmark

Nobel Peace Price is absolutely worthless...

Al Gore wins the Nobel Peace Price. Former winners include famous terrorist Yassir Arafat the modern father of Airplane hijacking, famous liar Rigoberta Menchù who changed her lifestory to fit into communistic propaganda, Wangari Maatahai who has claimed that AIDS is biological weapon invented by white people to wipe out black africans, and Jimmy Carter.

Mark Steyn on...

Warm-mongers and cheeseburger-imperialists

Russia sends bomber planes to fly over U.S. Airbase in Guam

Russia resumes nuke bomber sorties

Russia's strategic bombers have resumed the Soviet Union's Cold War practice of flying long-haul missions to areas patrolled by NATO and the United States, generals said on Thursday.

A Russian bomber flew over a U.S. military base on the Pacific island of Guam on Wednesday and "exchanged smiles" with U.S. pilots who had scrambled to track it, said Maj. Gen. Pavel Androsov, head of long-range aviation in the Russian air force.

The Race for the North Pole continues

Canada announces a new military base in the arctic

"The race to secure subsurface rights to the Arctic seabed heated up when Russia sent two small submarines to plant a tiny national flag under the North Pole last week. The United States and Norway also have competing claims in the vast Arctic region, where a US study suggests as much as 25 percent of the world's undiscovered oil and gas could be hidden."

Russians claim land under the North pole by using filmfootage from the Titanic

Ilta-Sanomat reveals embarrasing error in Reuters feed on Russian North Pole sub expedition

"Images presented by the Reuters news agency last Thursday, purporting to show the Finnish-built MIR-1 and MIR-2 submersibles during a recent Russian scientific expedition to the sea bed 4.3 kilometres below the Geographic North Pole, have been shown to be something else again.

     The pictures did indeed show MIR-1 and MIR-2 in action, but the submersibles were actually employed at the time in location filming at the scene of the wreck of the RMS Titanic in the North Atlantic, and not under the polar ice-cap.
     Those who have seen James Cameron's blockbuster movie Titanic (1997) will also have recognised the footage, as Cameron used the same shots in certain sequences of his epic about the 1912 disaster that were set in modern times.
     The images were picked up by numerous media outlets around the world, Helsingin Sanomat among them, and were inserted into news stories as evidence of the successful expedition. Nobody raised any eyebrows.
    
At least, not until one Finnish reader, a 13-year-old boy from Kemi named Waltteri Seretin, made just this "Cameron connection", and contacted the late-edition tabloid Ilta-Sanomat. The newspaper ran the story prominently in its Thursday edition."

Russia humiliated. Or so it seems:

As the story of the faux pictures broke and spread to other countries, there were those who jumped to the hasty conclusion that in fact the entire Russian Academy of Sciences' expedition was a hoax. It was even thought briefly that the planting of a titanium Russian flag on the sea-bed - seen as a symbolic claim on the area, which is rich in natural resources - was the product of clever image manipulation.
     Things are probably not that dramatic: it merely seems that someone at the normally meticulous news agency arrived at a wrong conclusion of their own about the images and they were mislabelled or left without any captions at all.
     The incident is doubly embarrassing for Reuters since it follows on from a case last August in which the news agency published an image by a freelancer of Israeli bombings in Lebanon that had been dramatised using photo manipulation, with the addition of smoke rising from allegedly burning buildings. After that gaffe, Reuters promised to tighten up its controls on material being put out in its name.

Still this is quite a setback for a Russia that is flexing its muscles and trying to regain former "glory" where loosing face is not acceptable.

Neoconservative foreign policy

For some insight into American foreign policy and its faults read A neoconservative foreign policy: an atopsy by Yaron Brook and Alex Epstein

Norwegian Armed forces heading off to Iceland

Norwegian Army heads to Iceland

"After the USA shut its military base in Iceland, Norway has had a special NATO responsibility to defend the island's military interests, through an agreement signed this April. The upcoming exercise is the first concrete expression of Norway's responsibility, and military personnel and planes will this week head to the island nation."

Better to have our forces in Iceland than in the F**k%ng  Sudan (Which is a yet another vicious UN-backed plan for self-immolation).

Expansionist Russia

Russia plants the flag at the North Pole

Christopher Hitchens on...

Why are we so scared of offending muslims?

Mysticism & the royals

Princess Märtha Louise of Norway claims she is able to communicate with angels!

...She is even starting a school to help people get in touch with angels.

The monarchy seems more and more outdated!!!

Agressive Russian airforce

Russia launches bombers!

"Norway scrambled two of its fighter jets this week after Russian bombers got a little too close to the Norwegian coast for comfort. It wasn't clear whether the Russian flights were related to diplomatic tension between Russia and Great Britain, which also sent out jets of its own."

Russia is again flexing muscles.

Sarko wins the election

Sarkozy wins in France and vows to break with the past.

"Mr. Sarkozy has pledged to remake France by, among other things, slashing unemployment, cutting taxes, keeping trains running during strikes, making people work harder and longer, shrinking the government bureaucracy, reforming pension rules and making it easier to create new businesses."

Lecture by John Lewis - "No Substitute for Victory"

John Lewis spoke at George Mason University on the 24th of April. The Leacture was recorded and has been made available by The Objective Standard on their events page.

The lecture is based on his article "No Substitute for Victory" The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism which can be read in its entirety on The Objective Standard website.

John Lewis faces a hostile and disruptive audience, but fends them off like a true intellectual warrior with no real help from the moderator.

For an eyewitness account check out the Rule of Reason weblog:
John  Lewis and the Battle of George Mason
Crass and Class at George Mason

Rush Limbaugh recommends...

Atlas Shrugged

Don't disturb!

Russians warned to stay away from grumpy insomniac bears

US Foreign Policy

John Lewis: America's Sanction of its enemies

The New Importance of the Barents Sea

From Newsweek: Norwegian Gold - The Barents sea could become Europe's natural-gas Klondike—and an alternative to Russia.

Excerpt:

Back during the cold war, the Barents—shared uneasily by Russia and Norway—was best known as a home for the prized Arctic cod and for hide-and-seek games between American and Soviet submarines. Today it's set to become Europe's energy Klondike, a last untapped pool of natural resources. Beneath the seabed lies not only oil but enough natural gas to meet much of the continent's needs for decades. And it's Norway that's heading the exploration race, with a first field due to come on stream later this year. "This whole region is re-emerging as something new on the European radar screen," says Store. "We have to go out with our maps and explain what it's all about."

He can expect an enthusiastic audience with European leaders ever more anxious for access to fresh energy supplies from friendly neighbors. These days Russia ranks as Europe's principal source of natural gas, and evidence of the Kremlin's readiness to use its status for political leverage has become frequent, whether it's in pricing spats with Ukraine last winter or with Belarus last month. "What has changed is that Russia has begun using energy as a political tool," says Dmitry Kisilev of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Strategic Studies Center. "Europeans fear that they will be next."

Mark Steyn on Saddam's Hanging

Mark Steyn has written a piece entitled Blowing a 'hinge moment' of history where he examines the media's use of "the mainstream European view" which he argues is held by very few.

ARI Op-Ed on Terrorist Motivation

From The Ayn Rand Institute
The Terrorist Motivation: Islam by Edwin A. Locke and Alex Epstein

ARI Op-Ed on the need for moral assertiveness in combating Islamic totalitarianism

From the Ayn Rand Institute

Why We Are Losing Hearts and Minds - Keith Lockitch