The news story headlined Canadian Military Reinforces Arctic Claim had a dramatic lede: "Battling high winds, 25-foot ice walls, mechanical breakdowns and whiteout conditions, a Canadian military team, including Eskimo reservists, last week completed a 17-day trek [across Ellesmere Island] designed to sustain Canada's claim to sovereignty over the high Arctic." Of course, the reporter then had to include a ridiculous global warming spin in a story on Canadian national security: "[Expedition leader Maj. Chris Bergeron] said old-timers among the Eskimos, who call themselves Inuit, told him they had never seen open water and bare rocks so close to the North Pole." Being quite familiar with Ellesmere, Canada's northernmost island, I can assure you the reporter, Barry Brown has never been there and is laughingly ignorant - like most glowarmers. Just as ignorant as the Eskimos - who live over 400 miles away from Ellesmere's northern shore on the Arctic Ocean (which is itself 550 miles "close" to the North Pole).  The only Inuit or Eskimo community on all of Ellesmere's 76,000 square miles is Grise Fiord on the far away south shore.  They have no knowledge at all of the Arctic Ocean. Which brings me to Mars... 

For the sake of a few dollars more, NBC has brought closer the day of the next public mass killing in America. "This was a sick business tonight, going on the air with this," acknowledged NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams of his network's decision to air portions of the "multimedia manifesto" Cho Seung-Hui mailed NBC in the interval between his murder sprees on the Virginia Tech campus. It was indeed a sick business decision.  Mass killings inspire copycats. "School campuses in at least 10 states were locked down or evacuated in the aftermath of a Virginia Tech student's shooting rampage," the AP reported Wednesday. NBC is not alone in its guilt.  Every news organization which rebroadcast portions of the video, or newspapers (like mine, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for which I write a column) which published still photographs of Mr. Cho posing with his weapons is complicit. We say we do this to protect "the people's right to know."  The real reason, of course, is we hope the titillation will increase our number of viewers or readers. But as we fatten our bottom lines, we send a message to every sociopathic loser: Wanna be famous?  Go kill a lot of people.  We'll put your face and your story and your alleged grievances into every home in America.

When I saw the news bulletin that Moslem terrorists had decapitated six hostages on the southern Philippine island of Jolo, I thought of the 1939 movie, The Real Glory, where Gary Cooper plays a US Army doctor trying to protect Christian villagers in the Philippines from a cholera epidemic and Moslem suicide killers - set in 1906!

The leader of the Moslem fanatics is named Alipang.  Cooper breaks Alipang's will by threatening to kill him and bury him wrapped in a bloody pigskin.  Afraid such defilement will result in his not going to heaven but Jahannam, Islamic Hell, Alipang commands his men to surrender.

I thought it ironic in the extreme that this news report about Jolo should appear three days after an obscure item in the business section of USA Today, Squeezing Diesel Out Of Animal Fat.

The story announced: "Oil company ConocoPhillips and meat producer Tyson Foods said Monday they're joining forces to produce diesel fuel for U.S. vehicles using beef, pork and poultry fat."

Biofuel from pig fat.  Does that ring a bell from say, a year ago (April 2006) when you read about Project Jahannam?

With the current spectacle of the corrupt World Bank trying to rid itself of its president who is trying to de-corrupt the place, based on politicized corruption charges against him, it is time to ask: Should the World Bank (WB), and indeed, its sister organization the International Monetary Fund (IMF), be abolished? Both organizations had their annual spring meetings in Washington this past weekend. It is obvious to everyone that both are in deep trouble. 

Both supporters and opponents of gun control are shoe-horning the tragedy at Virginia Tech into their pre-established templates.  Both have ammunition. On the one hand, Mr. Cho was able to purchase the firearms he used in the murder spree -- Glock 19 and Walther P-22 handguns -- lawfully at a local gun shop. On the other, the Virginia Tech campus is a "gun free zone," where students, faculty and staff are forbidden to have firearms, even if they have concealed carry permits.  Mr. Cho lived in a dorm on campus, where he stored his weapons and ammunition.  The school's policy banning guns wasn't very effective in Mr. Cho's case. A fundamental difference between supporters and opponents of gun control is their attitude toward personal responsibility.  Liberals tend to offer excuses for the perpetrators of violent acts (he was poor; his mother drank; his daddy beat him), and to assume that potential victims have no right to play a role in their own defense. Those who think the law abiding should be permitted to carry firearms argue that if some of the students, faculty, or staff had been armed, they could have cut Mr. Cho's murder spree short.

Danny Dietz understood these words of British philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873): "War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things.  The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing that is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept free by the exertions of other men better than himself." Linda Cuesta and Emily Fuchs are among the "miserable creatures" to whom Mill was referring.  They're trying to keep the city of Littleton, Colorado from erecting a statue in honor of Danny Dietz, a Navy SEAL who was killed in Afghanistan in 2005. Petty Officer Dietz was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross, the second highest decoration for valor, because, though badly wounded, he fought on to permit his team mates to escape from an ambush.  Ms. Cuesta and Ms. Fuchs are among a small group of parents who want to keep his home town from honoring Petty Officer Dietz because the statue depicts him with his weapon.

With evil day of April 15 nigh, it is time to demand of the various presidential candidates to show how they propose to lift the unconscionable burden of the IRS off our oppressed shoulders. As is well known, the current U.S. income tax system and the Internal Revenue Service are a huge and unnecessary drag on both the economy and individual liberty. The IRS code and regulations have become hopelessly complex and grown to about 7 million words. No one can possibly understand the present code, including even those at the IRS. Thus no matter how well-meaning, the taxpayer is always at risk for noncompliance -- such laws are characteristics of totalitarian, not free, societies. Such laws need to be abolished.  There are two serious proposals for doing so:  the "Flat Tax" and the national sales tax, better known as the "Fair Tax." (See Flat Tax Revolution by Steve Forbes, and  The Fair Tax Book by Neil Boortz and Congressman John Linder.)