Bastoy: Norway’s Island Of Freedom For Prisoners
Der Spiegel takes a look at the resort-like island that houses some of Norway’s most hardened convicts — they are given a wide berth to do as they please, but must complete their work and behave civilly, or risk being shipped back to regular prison. Is this how criminal rehabilitation could be done here?
No bars. No walls. No armed guards. The prison island of Bastøy in Norway is filled with some of the country’s most hardened criminals. Yet it emphasizes self-control instead of the strictly regulated regimens common in most prisons. For some inmates, it is more than they can handle.
The warden is a man who deals in freedom. He is also a visionary. He wants the men here to live as if they were living in a village, to grow potatoes and compost their garbage, and he wants the guards and the prisoners to respect each other. What he doesn’t…
Norway’s Low-Carb, High-Fat Diet Fad Has Caused a Butter Shortage
Nick Carbone writes in TIME:
Denmark is trying to wean its people off butter by imposing a hefty “fat tax,” but their neighbors across the Skagerrak in Norway can’t get enough of the golden goodness. A diet fad in the Scandinavian country has depleted the nation’s supply of butter. While we’d use the term “diet” lightly, the newest craze is a low-carb, high-fat feeding frenzy that has put a strain on Norway’s butter supply.
“Sales all of a sudden just soared,” Lars Galtung, head of communications at TINE, the country’s biggest farmer-owned cooperative, told Reuters. “Twenty percent in October then thirty percent in November.” The fat fad coupled with a summer that saw a major reduction in milk production spells empty supermarket dairy fridges. This year’s wet summer ruined animal feed, reducing cows’ outputs to 25 million liters less than last year. As a result, this year’s hot Christmas item isn’t the…
Norway Wants Ship Back 80 Years After Sinking In Canadian Arctic
Photo: Ansgar Walk (CC)
Via Discovery News:
Eighty years after it sank in the Canadian Arctic, explorer Roald Amundsen’s three-mast ship Maud may once again sail across the Atlantic to become the centerpiece of a new museum in Norway.
Canada, however, must still agree to the repatriation plan hatched by Norwegian investors, amid strong opposition from locals in the Canadian territory of Nunavut who want the ship to stay for tourists to admire from shore.
The wreck now sits at the bottom of Cambridge Bay in Nunavut, but its hulk is partly visible above the frigid waters that preserved it for decades.
“The incredibly strong-built oak ship has been helped by the Arctic cold and clean water to be kept in a reasonably good shape,” said Jan Wanggaard, a Norwegian who recently visited the wreck to sort out technical problems with raising the ship as well as to survey the views from locals and officials.
[Continues…
How ‘Experts’ Are Used in News
Charlie Brooker’s take on how news ‘experts’ are doing little more than guessing, which is more or less what we could do, in the Guardian:
I went to bed in a terrible world and awoke inside a worse one. At the time of writing, details of the Norwegian atrocity are still emerging, although the identity of the perpetrator has now been confirmed and his motivation seems increasingly clear: a far-right anti-Muslim extremist who despised the ruling party.
Presumably he wanted to make a name for himself, which is why I won’t identify him. His name deserves to be forgotten. Discarded. Deleted. Labels like “madman”, “monster”, or “maniac” won’t do, either. There’s a perverse glorification in terms like that. If the media’s going to call him anything, it should call him pathetic; a nothing.
On Friday night’s news, they were calling him something else. He was a suspected terror cell with probable links to…
Is Anders Behring Breivik A Dominionist?
Leah L. Burton writes on PoliticusUSA:
In regards to Dominionist linkages to the bloody slaughter in Norway, here are our findings so far:
a) In particular, with a video manifesto (which has been linked on YouTube until it was pulled there, and which has since shown up on LiveLeak) the shooter makes some very specific references that show he has familiarity with, and probably shares terminology with (if not overtly sharing intel with) “Christian patriot” militia groups in the US (including material that has been posted on racist and far right-wing forums in the US, use of particular catch phrases associated with the “Christian Patriot” movement in the US, and others). I’ve just spent nine hours typing up an extensive analysis of the video; he is clearly connected with religious-nationalist groups in Europe and in the US. The degree of references to material originating in the US, in fact, indicate he has…
The Blue Eyes Of Terror Challenge The World To Respond
Move over Osama bin Laden—I know you already have had in the physical sense —because you now have an emulator who borrows your tactics and inverts your ideology.
Anders Behring Breivik, is Norway’s candidate for the new world’s top living evil-doer and terror supremo having admitted to killing 93 young people and blowing up buildings in Oslo.
While Bin Laden castigated crusaders, Breivik salutes them in a 1518 page manifesto of madness. And his lawyer has rationalized his murder spree in a similar way to those who defended Al Qaeda as defending Islam.
The two are almost carbon copies. The Norwegian posted videos on You Tube while Bin Laden relied on TV communiqués.
One was killing in the name of Islam, the other in the name of Christianity.
Foreign Policy reports, ”Breivik’s lawyer said that his client admitted to the killings, but rejected ‘criminal responsibility.’” He described Breivik as being motivated to carry out the…
The Norway Massacre Conspiracy Theories Have Begun
Jonathan Kay writes in the National Post:
Well, that didn’t take long. Less than 24 hours after the Norway killings, Alex Jones’ massively-surfed Infowars site already is fronting with the theory that the tragedy was all part of a conspiracy by European elites to deflect populist disgust at bailouts:
The false flag attack in Norway arrives as populism grows in Germany, Europe’s reluctant paymaster for the contrived debt-based economic crisis. Establishment politicians in Germany have balked at a second bankster bailout … The EU and the European political establishment are beholden to the bankers and their “free market” — as in free to loot and plunder — neoliberal policies and have now pulled out all the stops in an effort to crush resistance to endless bailouts designed to crash local economies and destroy national sovereignty.
It is no mistake the corporate media is comparing Anders Behring Breivik to Timothy McVeigh. Hours after the terrorist…
What Did the Oslo Killer Want?
The author of this document, one Anders Behring Breikviks, has confessed. Blake Hounshell writes on Foreign Policy:
I have just finished reading through what appears to be the 1,518-page manifesto and handbook of the alleged perpetrator of the worst terrorist attack in Norwegian history.
The manifesto, bylined by someone calling himself Andrew Berwick, is entitled “2083: A European Declaration of Independence” and was posted on Stormfront.org, a white supremacist website, and discovered by American blogger Kevin I. Slaughter.
In it, “Berwick” declares himself a “Justiciar Knight Commander,” a leading member of a “re-founded” Knights Templar group formed at an April 2002 meeting in London. He claims the founding group has 9 members, whom he does not name, and that three other sympathizers were not able to attend the original meeting.
“Our purpose,” the document reads, is to “seize political and military control of Western European countries and implement a cultural conservative political agenda.”
In grim,…
‘Jihadi’ Terror Attack In Norway
[Update: This story was posted at a time when some portions of the media were reporting – incorrectly – that these acts were perpetrated by an Islamic group called "Helpers of the Global Jihad."
That was not the case and it's a lesson learned that one should not believe everything one reads on the disinformation website or, indeed, any other news source, including the New York Times, the source of the story. Read as many different sources as you can and then form your own opinion is never bad advice for us or anyone on this planet.]
The big story of the day so far, developing of course via multiple news channels. From the New York Times and CNN (video):
OSLO — Powerful explosions shook central Oslo on Friday afternoon, blowing out the windows of several government buildings, including one housing the office of the Norwegian prime minister. The state television broadcaster, citing the police,…
Mysterious Light Spiral Appears Over Australia (Video)
This is similar looking to what appeared over Norway when President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize.
The informative Phil Plait writing his Bad Astronomy blog is saying it’s some kind of man-made space rocket.
Maybe so, but time-traveling aliens sounds so much fun to me:
Norway Conquers Infections By Cutting Use of Antibiotics
Martha Mendoza and Margie Mason report on the AP via the Miami Herald:
OSLO, Norway — Aker University Hospital is a dingy place to heal. The floors are streaked and scratched. A light layer of dust coats the blood pressure monitors. A faint stench of urine and bleach wafts from a pile of soiled bedsheets dropped in a corner.
Look closer, however, at a microscopic level, and this place is pristine. There is no sign of a dangerous and contagious staph infection that killed tens of thousands of patients in the most sophisticated hospitals of Europe, North America and Asia last year, soaring virtually unchecked.
The reason: Norwegians stopped taking so many drugs.
Twenty-five years ago, Norwegians were also losing their lives to this bacteria. But Norway’s public health system fought back with an aggressive program that made it the most infection-free country in the world. A key part of that program was cutting…
A ‘Nobel Torsion Message’ Over Norway?
Richard C. Hoagland writes on Enterprise Mission:
The scientific evidence behind this growing set of suspicions — that the Spiral somehow caused the Russian missile to fail — lies in the extraordinary geometric structure that Enterprise has discovered within the too-perfect, too-concentric “shell-like rings” … making up the Spiral — A key part of this “impossible” geometry consisted of four, exactly 90-degree darkened “reticle-like” divisions of the Spiral … precisely separating it into four radiating quadrants ….
Geometric behavior simply inconceivable for any “randomly rotating … fuel-spewing third-stage rocket ….” This “too-too-regular-geometry …” can only be explained by the presence of —
Some kind of energy-induced, standing-wave-pattern in the Spiral …. Creating — Narrow, uniform-width concentric striations … ordered in an underlying medium (the leaking third-stage fuel?) by an external “forcing 3-D energy pattern” —
Then, it hit me: “Chladni Figures!”
