SATURDAY NIGHT LOVE SONGS.

The Yardbirds were a revolutionary British rock band, famous for introducing a string of guitar innovations in the sixties: feedback, backwards echo, distortion, fuzz tone etc. Perhaps not surprisingly, the band offered three world famous guitarists a springboard for their musical careers. I am of course talking about Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, in that order (although for some time Beck and Page worked together in the band). The days of their greatest hist, "For your love", "Heart full of soul" and "Over, Under, Sideways, Down" are long gone, but they still exist (or better, reformed in the early nineties more than twenty years after the 1968 breakup) and even more amazingly, two of the original members, Chris Dreja (rhythm guitar) and Jim McCarty (drums) are still with the band! The following video shows, what is in my not so humble opinion, their greatest hit: "For your love". We're talking 1965 here.





Fast forward 41 years. Dani California, performed by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Great hit from their ninth studio album, Stadium Arcadium. Released on May 2, 2006, it entered the Billboard Hot 100 at #24 and peaked at #6, where it stayed for two more weeks. It won two Grammy Awards, one of them for Best Rock Song of 2006.



Flea will always be a nutter. Hey Scott!!! The guitarist, John Frusciante, uses, a.o., a mellotron. This is what it sounds like. Or this.


MFBB.

TAKUAN SEIYO: "FROM MECCANIA TO ATLANTIS" - PART 11.

The Merciless Chronicler of the West's decline is a literary god. Exerpt, and be sure to read it all:

"Perhaps the classic tale of Body Snatcher regime’s aversion to reality transpired on 11 March 2005 in Atlanta. A 5'2", 51-year-old grandmother and sheriff's deputy, Cynthia Hall, was escorting a 6’1’, 200-lbs ex-football player and career rapist, Brian Nichols, from the county jail to the Atlanta courtroom. The hiring of Grandma Hall for what an idiot would know is a big-man-only position had been a two-fer for Fulton County, for Grandma Hall was both black and female.

As soon as Officer Hall removed Nichols’s handcuffs before entering the courtroom, the big man assaulted her, inflicting critical injuries. He then seized her gun, shot to death a Superior Court judge, a court reporter and a sheriff’s deputy, escaped the courthouse, and then killed another person in the course of a carjacking.

This tale, if not the deaths involved, would make a good Keystone Cops movie. But under the circumstances, it can serve as a metaphor for the suicidal madness that causes Body Snatcher society to self-terminate.

It’s a spiraling madness too. San Francisco, as we relayed in Part 7, has one-upped Atlanta by appointing a 5’ Chinese lesbian as its Chief of Police. It’s a trifecta that shall remain unequalled until some branch of America’s law and security enforcement apparatus recruits a Samoan lesbian paraplegic to serve as the commander of its elite tactical unit.

America is not alone in this epidemic of spongiform diversititis. We have looked previously at the pregnant Spanish Minister of Defense and evoked Fjordman’s sketches of the Scandinavian dhimmi gyneocracy, and Tiberge’s of France receding before the people it used to push back since Charles Martel. Then there is Lord Ahmed, and Antwerp’s deputy mayor who wants to convert unused churches into mosques, and the Israeli academics who see the lack of rape of Arab women by Jews as proof of Jewish racism.

The virus is pitiless and catholic, though limited to the (previously) white West alone. In Sweden, there is a plague of rapes committed by Muslim immigrants. As Muslim immigrants in Malmö increased to 25% of the population, the number of rapes tripled. The Rosengård area is largely no-go even for the Swedish police.

But the authorities blame the rapes on warm weather, alcohol, Internet dating sites and increase in reporting rape. Fjordman quotes a leading Swedish journalist, Helle Klein, “If the debate is [about] that there are problems caused by refugees and immigrants, we don’t want it.”

Muslims immigrants and their unassimilable descendants are projected to become the majority in Sweden in 40 years. Helle Klein is female and Jewish. By the time Ms. Klein wants to debate problems caused by refugees and immigrants, not only her country but perhaps she personally will have already been crash-tested by Reality. Debate will no longer be an option, only submission.

Male-dominated societies like China and Russia aggressively threaten the West’s vital interest, and Islamic patriarchal primitives ravage it from without and within, but the West is busy feminizing itself further, confusing its genders, importing tribal aliens, pussyfooting with jihad, negotiating in good faith with masters of taquiah, enforcing gender and race quotas to elevate non-deserving and incompetent nonwhites or non-males, lying to itself outrageously about innate group differences, and generally ripping itself apart in pursuit of a profound and delusionary fraud."

This week, as I drove back to the office from a job in Hoboken, near Antwerp, I stopped two thirds of the way home in the town of Aalst, pop. 50,000, for measuring up some damage done to a client's installation by some unforeseen event. I get out of my car - in a hurry, 'cause I had to be at 4.30pm tops in the office for a meeting with a fella who's going to draft a financial plan for an enterprise of mine - so like I said, I got out of my car on a parking lot near my client's apartment - and the first one I see is a muslim woman, the second one I see a muslim man, and the first language I hear is arabic.

The day before that I hop in between chores by my barber, and as I sit in the barber's chair I ask his wife whether they aren't bothered by islamic extremists. Her neighborhood, an alley behind the church, now boasts several muslim households and three houses higher up one of their houses sports aggressive posters denouncing the 'genocide' Israel is waging in Gaza. Another poster shouts "Arrêtons la boucherie" (Stop the slaughter). There are also some cartoons depicting jews as killers and exxagerating their ethnic characteristics. So I ask the woman if these nice folks disturb her. She says no. No, they leave everyone alone. No troubles. This family in the house three numbers higher up lives there with their BUNCH OF KIDS [emphasis mine - plus my barber has ONE kid, a son]. But one thing is strange she says. Two years ago, the woman dressed like another western female. Then last year she started wearing a hijab.

.....................


Only conservatism can save us.


But I suppose I get to understand how it feels to stand in a thin red line.


Oh well. At least I still have my pride.



MFBB.

WHY I LOVE MY COUNTRY.

Well, of course, just one of the reasons. Small as my country is - only 30,519 square kilometers - there's lots of incredibly beautiful places; it's just that you must be willing to find and/or see them. I guess my all-time favourite is "Le Tombeau du Géant", "The Giant's grave" in Belgium's extreme south, near the village of Botassart. The river is the Semois.




This photo was taken by Jean-Marc Biehler in November 2006.

MFBB.

BRAVE STAND OF "PRO KOELN" IN COLOGNE, GERMANY.

As has been briefly mentioned in one of the latest posts, this weekend, on May 9, a second Anti-Islamization Congress was held in Cologne, Germany by Pro-Koeln, the citizen movement battling, by democratic means, the growing influence of islam in their beautiful city.

I am sorry to say that with only 200 people showing up, this congress must be considered a failure. The reasons are manifold but I will cite the two most important ones:

1° The cowardness, lazyness and ostracism of contemporary West Europeans. People may see and realize what is happening to their society, but they are unwilling to stick out their neck for it. I have encountered this attitude many, many times in my own Flanders. When confronted with news of the soft ethnic cleansing by muslims taking place in Brussels, the umpteenth case of harassment of young girls by Moroccans, the appearance of veiled women in the streets or news of a foiled terror plot by followers of the prophet, the reaction of most is, curiously, a shrug accompanied by the laconic statement (or variant thereof) "in twenty years it's they [muslims - MFBB] who will rule here". I have witnessed this scenario many times, and indeed, the ruling philosophy seems to be "après nous le déluge" (after us the flood). Europeans have become sheep who care only for their reality TV shows, leisure time and their pension.

2° The overwhelmingly leftist media go to great lenghts to paint Pro Koeln as neonazis and fascists. Again, I have personal experience regarding this phenomenon, as I happened to be in Germany last September, during the weekend the first PK congress took place, and watched German television report on the event. Sadly, these lies are repeated abroad and even across the Atlantic, as we can observe, e.g., from the LGF reporting. Surely it is a sad thing to see this smear campaign unfold AGAIN, when I have seen with my own eyes, here in Belgium, how these tactics were efficiently employed against my party, the Vlaams Belang.

That said, I think it's appropriate to shed at least some light on this Congress. Our friends over at Gates of Vienna posted one video, which happens to feature a speech by the VB's Filip Dewinter. It's not that I expressly want to give the impression that the VB is the only valuable rightwing party on the continent, for that it is too small, but like I said, I did not find other material and Dewinter is ubiquitous. Actually, his strenuous activity baffles me. The video is in German, with subtitling provided by Vlad Tepes.





As I took notice of the disappointingly low show-up, I was reminded of a Mark Steyn article linked to by longtime reader and commenter Mark, "Conservatives always face uphill climb." Some exerpts from OCRegister:

"... In fact, the GOP's tent has many poles: It has social conservatives, libertarians, fiscal conservatives, national-security hawks. These groups do not always agree: The so-cons resent the libertarians' insouciance on gay marriage and abortion. The libertarians don't get the warhawks' obsession with thankless nation-building in Islamist hellholes. A lot of the hawks can't see why the fiscal cons are so hung up on footling matters like bloated government spending at a time of war. It requires a lot of effort to align these various poles sufficiently to hold up the big tent. And by the 2006 electoral cycle, between the money-no-object Congress at home and a war that seemed to have dwindled down to an endless half-hearted semicolonial policing operation, the GOP poles were tilting badly. The Republican coalition is like a permanent loveless marriage: There are bad times and worse times. And, while social conservatism and libertarianism can be principled to a fault, the vagaries of electoral politics mean they often wind up being represented in office by either unprincipled opportunists like Arlen Specter or unprincipled squishes like Lincoln Chafee.

Meanwhile, over in the other tent, they celebrate diversity with ruthless singlemindedness: in the Democrat parade, whatever your bugbear government is the answer. Government is the means, government is the end, government is the whole magilla. That gives them a unity of purpose the GOP can never match.

And yet and yet… Last November, even with the GOP's fiscal profligacy, even with the financial sector's "October surprise," even with a cranky old coot of a nominee unable to articulate any rationale for his candidacy or even string together a coherent thought on the economy, even with a running mate subjected to brutal character assassination in nothing flat, even running against a charming, charismatic media darling of historic significance, even facing the natural cycle of a two-party system the washed-up loser no-hoper side managed to get 46 percent of the vote.

OK, it's not 51 percent. But still: Obama's 53 percent isn't a big transformative landslide just because he behaves as if it is.

To put it in Powellite terms, the general thinks the Republican Party is in the desert, when, in fact, it's climbing a mountain. All things considered, the resilience of American conservatism is one of the most remarkable features of contemporary Western politics. It's up against significant members of its own party. It's up against a media for whom the Democrat positions are the default positions on almost anything that matters. Consider this cooing profile of Secretary Powell from Todd Purdum in The New York Times back in 2002:

"Mr. Powell's approach to almost all issues – foreign or domestic – is pragmatic and nonideological. He is internationalist, multilateralist and moderate. He has supported abortion rights and affirmative action."

So supporting "internationalism," "multilateralism," abortion and racial quotas means you're "moderate" and "nonideological"? And anyone who feels differently is an extreme ideologue? Absolutely. The aim of a large swath of the Left is not to win the debate but to get it canceled before it starts. You can do that in any number of ways – busting up campus appearances by conservatives, "hate speech" prohibitions, activist judges' more imaginative court decisions, or merely, as the Times does, by declaring your side of every issue to be the "moderate" and "nonideological" position – even when, in many cases, the "extreme" position is supported by a majority of voters. Likewise, to Colin Powell, it's Ann Coulter who's "vicious," not Michael Moore, who compares the jihadists who blow up Western troops in Iraq to America's Minutemen and gets rewarded with a seat next to Jimmy Carter in the presidential box at the Democratic Convention.

It's a mountain, and it's getting steeper. Promises of "free" government health care will make more voters susceptible to the blandishments of the nanny state. The Democrats have plans for talk radio and the Internet that will diminish conservative voices. Another retirement on the Supreme Court, and the First and Second Amendments will start getting nibbled away. Obama's buddies at ACORN, already under investigation in multiple states over fraudulent voter registration, will have a prominent say in the 2010 Census.

But, when the going gets tough, you don't, as Gen. Powell advises, "move toward the center." You move the center toward you, as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher did. It's harder to do it that way, but if it's a choice between more government and more taxes, or more liberty and more opportunity, I'll stick with the latter, and so should the Republican Party – however difficult it is. Unlike Colin Powell, conservatism does do mountains."

- Mark Steyn


And that's why we should never give up. We know we are better.


MFBB.