In the early nineties, The Charlatans, a key group of the so-called Madchester scene, had a smash hit, in my opinion at least, with The Only One I Know. Other notable Madchester groups were The Happy Mondays, Inspiral Carpets, The Stone Roses, 808 State etc. They essentially combined psychedelic and indie rock with dance. A good example is e.g. The Happy Mondays' Step On (which is actually a John Kongos cover).
Quite good material from The Pursuit of Happiness, a now forgotten Canadian rock/indie band. Imnsho, this hit, She's So Young, is far, far better than the song with which they made their debut, I'm an adult now. Even though that one was apparently a smash hit in Canada. She's so young is from the album Love Junk, 1989. Singer's Moe Berg. I hope he's been to the hairdresser by now, that long hippie hair sucks as bad as a Christmas tree on a pyramid.
Good night tonight. This was Outlaw Mike from between rolling fields in Belgium.
UNIT 731 was one of around 26 biological warfare and medical experimentation organizations set up by Japans government before and during World War II. Of those 26, Unit 731 reportedly was the worst, but that may only seem so because most info obtained about Japans gruseome experiments on humans comes from scientists from Pinfan, where the unit was set up. Pingfan is an area south of Harbin in Manchuria where the notorious four-square mile compound of the grisly organisation was built.
Japanese "scientists" carried out the most gruseome experiments on humans imaginable, including vivisecting live people (sometimes pregnant women), exploding hand grenades at various distances to tied up children to test their effects, flamethrowing people, cooking them alive, injecting them with deadly germs, freezing and starving them to death, and exposing them to X-rays. Not that you will hear anything from that among the handwringing crocdile tear shedders in Hiroshima.
There's a ton of information about Unit 731 on the Internet, but check each one and sooner or later you will come across the inevitable paragraphs dealing with the near amnesty the US gave postwar to 731's top scientists, most notably to its head, Lieutenant General Ishii.
From a moral point of view, there is indeed little to be brought in against the charge that the US used a double standard, rightly prosecuting nazis but then giving protection to the most abominable war criminals - worse than their worst German counterparts - in exchange for "precious" information on biological warfare (8,000 vials with human tissues of the unit's victims were handed over).
Politics is not about morals alone however, although in a normal civilized state it should be the rockbed of it. Already in 1945, it was becoming clear that the next war would be fought with the USSR. Manchuria had a land border with the Soviet Union, and there was a serious possibility that Stalin's scientists had had themselves access to 731's files on biological warfare, possibly giving the country a lead on the US in that domain so that it would have a stick with which to retaliate in case of nuclear threat from the US.
And if you are fighting a war, you should fight to win it.
But yes, General Mac Arthur himself ensured that Ishii and his staff went free.
All of which does not explain why the spirit emanating from the articles on Unit 731 seems to imply that the US, in trying to obtain horrific data indeed, data which it could itself not gain, is on a moral par with the Pingfan monsters. When I first read about Unit 731, some 25 years ago in a Dutch popular scientific magazine called Kijk, the article ended with the telling line "The Devil had found an ally".
Such is the nature of Anti-Americanism.
Over here at DowneastBlog, we know better of course. While the whole world is shedding crocodile tears over Hiroshima and Nagasaki and secretly - or not so secretly - enjoying another opportunity to bash America, I have decided to dedicate a post to the tens of thousands - some say hundreds of thousands - who died in the most unimaginable agony, whether in Pingfan or deeper in China itself - as a result of Japanese horror that makes Auschwitz seem bearable by comparison.
"...A jovial old Japanese farmer who in the war had been a medical assistant in a Japanese army unit in China described to a U.S. reporter recently what it was like to dissect a Chinese prisoner who was still alive.
Munching rice cakes, he reminisced: "The fellow knew it was over for him, and so he didn't struggle when they led him into the room and tied him down. But when I picked up the scalpel, that's when he began screaming. I cut him open from the chest to the stomach and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony. "He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then finally he stopped.
"This was all in a day's work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because it was my first time." The man could not be sedated, added the farmer, because it might have distorted the experiment.
...
Most of these facilities were combined at Unit 731 so that Ishii could play with his box of horrors. His word was law. When he wanted a human brain to experiment on, guards grabbed a prisoner and held him down while one of them cleaved open his skull with an axe. The brain was removed and rushed to Ishii's laboratory. Human beings used for experiments were nicknamed "maruta" or "logs" because the cover story given to the local authorities was that Unit 731 was a lumber mill. Logs were inert matter, a form of plant life, and that was how the Japanese regarded the Chinese "bandits", "criminals" and "suspicious persons" brought in from the surrounding countryside.
Shackled hand and foot, they were fed well and exercised regularly. "Unless you work with a healthy body you can't get results," recalled a member of the Unit. But the torture inflicted upon them is unimaginable: they were exposed to phosgene gas to discover the effect on their lungs, or given electrical charges which slowly roasted them. Prisoners were decapitated in order for Japanese soldiers to test the sharpness of their swords.
Others had limbs amputated to study blood loss - limbs that were sometimes stitched back on the opposite sides of the body. Other victims had various parts of their brains, lungs or liver removed, or their stomach removed and their oesophagus reattached to their intestines.
Kamada, one of several veterans who felt able to speak out after the death of Emperor Hirohito, remembered extracting the plague-infested organs of a fully conscious "log" with a scalpel.
"I inserted the scalpel directly into the log's neck and opened the chest," he said. "At first there was a terrible scream, but the voice soon fell silent." Other experiments involved hanging prisoners upside down to discover how long it took for them to choke to death, and injecting air into their arteries to test for the onset of embolisms. Some appear to have had no medical purpose except the administering of indescribable pain, such as injecting horse urine into prisoners' kidneys...."
One bombardment you will never be reminded of on an August 6: seventy years after Japanese bomber struck the village of this man's parents with germ bombs, he still suffers from the consequences: the "rotten leg disease".
"...Jiang is one of 15 elderly Chinese men and women whom Zhu is treating in his simple village clinic for what locals label “rotten leg disease.” A definitive diagnosis is no longer possible so many decades after the initial exposure and secondary infections. But Chinese, American, and other Western physicians who have examined the survivors, documented their histories, and photographed their wounds claim that they are victims of the most gruesome biological warfare attacks in modern history.
These attacks, orchestrated by Japan’s infamous Unit 731 between 1932 and 1945, are the only documented mass use of germ weapons in modern times. Scholars say that we will never know exactly how many were killed. Sheldon H. Harris, the late American historian, estimated in a pioneering work that between 10,000 and 12,000 Chinese prisoners perished in the bloodcurdling experiments that Unit 731 performed in Japanese-occupied Manchuria. Another 300,000 to 500,000 civilians died, he wrote, as a result of Japan’s massive germ assaults on more than 70 Chinese cities and towns. China itself has disclosed no official tally. In fact, for many years, Japan’s use of biological weapons in China was largely forgotten. Only recently has a resurgent China begun to remind Japan—and the world—of the atrocities...."
If you have still the stomach for it, watch this video:
Unit 731 was active since before the outbreak of the war in the Pacific. Ever after the 1931 Mukden Incident, used by Japan to annex Manchuria (it made a puppet state of it, named Manchukwo), countless Chinese suffered under the gruesome excesses of Japanese imperialism and militarism. Not even counting the horrors of Unit 731 and its 25 sister organizations (including a poison gas factory near... Hiroshima), China paid a terrible price in lives and property. Hundreds of thousands perished in 1937 in the infamous Nanking Massacre, for instance.
If you have a quiet moment today, please pray for these utterly hapless souls. Pray. for. them.
Now, at the occasion of the 65th birtday of the bombing of Hiroshima, I therefore want to extend my heartfelt THANKS to the country that ENDED a horrible agony that had been going on since the early thirties.
"... The inauguration of a new mosque has become an everyday event in France, but when the Prime Minister is the one doing the inaugurating, it is news. On June 28, François Fillon inaugurated the great mosque of Argenteuil, called the Al-Ihsan mosque. In nº 88 of his weekly newsletter (available through subscription), Yves Daoudal reviews the event in an article entitled "The French Islamic Republic", a title that summarizes in few words the institutionalized dhimmitude of the current French government:
On Monday, Prime Minister François Fillon inaugurated the great Al-Ihsan mosque of Argenteuil. It is the second mosque for Argenteuil, that has, in addition, eight prayer rooms.
It was the first time that a Prime Minister of the Republic inaugurated a mosque. When Sarkozy created the French Council of the Muslim Religion (CFCM), Cardinal Lustiger had noted that Islam was becoming the State religion. By inaugurating the Al-Ihsan mosque, François Fillon confirmed and illustrated that Islam IS the religion of the French State..."
A good two weeks ago, the eastern city of Grenoble was the scene of violent riots instigated by muslims. A young scoundrel, a certain 27-year old Karim Boudouda who had just robbed a casino near Grenoble and who had already an impressive record for felony and armed robbery, was shot dead by the police. Now, among white autochtons, the tale that a white bandit got felled by police bullets, is generally greeted with satisfaction. Not so with muslims. No matter how serious the criminal facts, a muslim who commits a crime against non-muslims is a hero and must be feted. If he is killed, he immediately becomes a martyr and his death must be avenged.
"...The rioting started after a memorial service for 27-year-old Karim Boudouda, who had died 24 hours earlier in a shootout with police after allegedly holding up the Uriage-les-Bains casino near Grenoble.
Shortly before midnight, a group of about 30 youths armed with baseball bats and iron bars attacked a tram in Boudouda's La Villeneuve district and forced the passengers out.
Police intervened and the youths began torching vehicles and attacking police who responded with tear gas.
About 2.30am local time, a youth emerged at the front of the rioters and fired a shot at police, who returned fire, police spokeswoman Brigette Jullien told AFP.
Nobody was injured in the riots, said police, who arrested two men aged 18 and 20 for setting fire to vehicles and three more for attempted looting of shops.
Hortefeux, with a horde of media in tow, made a lightning 15-minute tour of La Villeneuve in the afternoon and promised quick action by the authorities...."
Brice Hortefeux is, apart from a roaring fool, a 200 per cent incompetent, a despicable dhimmi and avid mosque-inaugurator, and a ball-less and spineless creep, also France's Interior Minister. On the last National Holiday, July 14, he refused to make public, for the first time, the numbers of cars torched by muslims in their war to create sole-muslim enclaves in the French Republic, saying that instead those numbers would be included in the yearly total.
As things stand now, by year's end an estimated 300,000 cars will have been destroyed by muslim mobs since 2005...
... and nobody seems to give a damn, and everyone's pretending that Lindsay Lohan in rehab is news far more important.
Autochton Europeans or law-abiding immigrants, no matter their race or religious beliefs - with the exception of islam itself of course - must prepare themselves for open war with muslims on European soil.
To those persons of authority in the militaries of European countries, if you cherish the rights and privileges that our peoples have gained over the centuries, very often at an extremely heavy cost in blood and treasure...
... if you do not want to go down in history as persons who did not take their responsibility...
... then it is your DUTY to plan for using our armed forces in open conflict with the muslim communities on our soil.
This potential future conflict may involve, if necessary, the use of heavy artillery, tanks, and ground attack aircraft. It would be therefore foolish to follow the idiot politicians' lead and cave in to their demands to neutralize - actually rather neuter - your units and materiel, as is currently happening in virtually every western country. You must SPEAK OUT AGAINST THAT.
Lessons should be drawn from the nineties conflicts in the Balkans, and I mean not only from a "technical" viewpoint. It means first and foremost, recognizing the REAL enemy. The catastrophic error of backing the wrong warring party may NEVER AGAIN be repeated.
Over at The Brussels Journal, the splendidly lucid and eloquent Takuan Seiyo has his next installment in the inimitable From Meccania to Atlantis series up - his seventeenth, in the meantime.
It should be noted that personally, I do not entirely subscribe to Seiyo's views, in particular where he denounces the West's efforts to install manu militari functioning democracies in the appalling hellhole that is the muslim world. It should equally be noted that I do not consider these efforts as a magic cure-for-all. It is simply that, unlike Seiyo, I view operations like OIF and OEF/ISAF as the only strategic game that the West has - apart from transforming Mecca in a desolate plain of black glass and obliterating perhaps a dozen muslim key cities.
That said, I have the highest regard for the rest of Seiyo's theses, and I sincerely hope that one day, saner generations, perhaps mulling over his manuscripts on the ashes of our civilization, will give him the recognition he so manifestly deserves.
Exerpt:
"... As the prevailing social fairytales and phantom finance dominoes topple sequentially, the ruling elites that constructed that particular train of hollow pieces engage in increasingly frantic actions to disguise and postpone the effects of the staggered downfall. To paper-over gaping craters in the founding concepts and subsequent applications of the global economy and financial capitalism, they blow up sovereign debts to levels that will cause either sovereign defaults or currency cave-ins in the future. Lipstick no longer adhering to the Muslim jihad and Mexican reconquista hemlock they have planted in the West, they switched from their transparently ludicrous Beautiful Diversity propaganda to totalitarian controls like the Patriot Act in the United States, the Equality Act in Great Britain, Hate Speech laws and Snatcher-orchestrated denunciations of fictive “racism.” They are destroying their peoples in punishment for their own treason and stupidity – and nothing seems able to stop them.
This type of mega-scam that transfers the consequences of foolishness and evil by the few onto the many or by Group A onto Group B has become the main defining feature of Western democracies, as it has always been of banana republics and socialist utopias.
Instead of allowing crooked, incompetent and bankrupt TBTF (“too-big-to-fail”) enterprises to fail, elected oligarchs have socialized the Crooks’ losses by buying their garbage book assets with the people’s money at fictitious face values.
Instead of leaving Greece & Co. to eat the consequences of swindle and socialism, the EU is spending Germans’ and Americans’ (through the IMF) money in a futile attempt to bail out the bail-unworthy.
Instead of leaving spenders and speculators to learn Reality’s lesson, the rulers’ fiat saves the spenders at the expense of the savers and the speculators at the expense of the investors.
Instead of making amends for the myopic madness of exporting the West’s industrial base to China, the captains of everyone’s fate raid everyone’s pocket to support and morally incapacitate the multitudes that have been idled for life by that export.
Instead of properly controlling the criminally violent and insane, the Masters-of-Destiny have disarmed – everywhere but in America (and not for lack of trying) – the law-abiding, peaceful and sane.
Instead of allowing the best to rise to the top, they push to the top the possessors of magic skin tones and preferred orificial parameters. This cuts down the future of the West at the knees.
Instead of dressing the critical wounds they have inflicted on their peoples by seeding among them imported Muslims, the reigning Loons engage in the futile madness of trying to convert imported Muslims into postmodern Westerners and the Muslims’ 7th-century home countries into pluralistic democracies.
First they brought in the Muslims, the Aztecs and the Bantu under the pretext that we are all the same. When the imports turned out not to be the same, they invented Multiculti Diversity. Then the imports started acting out their diversity by destroying the West wholesale by PETN or drunken driving, gang rape or gangster crime, street warfare or endless welfare. So the ruling savants reinvented the Police State, crushing the West’s 800-years of struggle toward natural inalienable right and freedom from state tyranny.
Instead of profiling and discouraging easily identifiable colonizers, the Loons have turned major features of modern life into a nightmare for everyone. Air travel is now a slow and humiliating torture for a billion people who wouldn’t know Allahu Akbar from a name for a new cocktail. Wiring money to your daughter in another country rings investigative bells in three snooping centers around the world. Your face, your car and home are on Big Brother cameras always, but hostile Muslims who live off public welfare demand and get exemptions from the snooping that only Muslim terrorism can even try to justify.
Instead of begging the public’s pardon for their importation of 35 million low-skill soldiers of Allah to Europe, they plan to import 50 million more. Instead of atoning for the incalculable damage to the U.S. wrought by their importation of 35 million low-skill rejects from Mexico et al., they pull out all stops –and that’s the first stage only -- to plant another 20 million on American soil. Including the soil that was once Mexico.
Instead of disowning their Wilsonian madness after the Vietnam fiasco, America’s rulers (at times with NATO’s help) have waged a succession of foolish wars on distant, backward peoples, prosecuted with their unhappy subjects’ blood and money. The wars, the lost lives and limbs, the incinerated trillions in taxpayers’ money are all a monstrous stupidity, for it all unfolds with an eye on CNN, and not on Sun Tzu and Clausewitz. The strategic objective is inherently lunatic too, for you cannot change alien peoples that do not want and cannot change.
Reckoning that autochthons are increasingly bitter about the witches’ brew rising all around them, the rulers have doubled their efforts at population replacement so that the new colonizers -- unskilled, uneducated and poor -- augment the Looters’ Coalition in the 50-50 Neosocialist state on the welfare receiving side. In America in particular, half-suitable foreign colonizers or indigenous minorities are recruited to acquire a quasi-education in dumbed-down colleges, and then offered choice government positions. This streams more “minorities” into the Looters’ Coalition, but on the paycheck receiving side. Furthermore, such positions give them the power that their strong tribal instincts skew toward a further containment and dispossession of the beleaguered founding populations.
America, falling into a Cloward-Piven black hole, deserves a chapter all its own. But in Europe, a former leader of the Communist Party of the Portuguese Workers/Revolutionary Movement of the Portuguese Proletariat is President of the European Commission. Norway’s government offsets its inexcusable Whiteness by its 50% balance of estrogen. Sweden does Norway one better by not only having a Ministry for Integration and Gender Equality, but putting an African woman in charge. Germany, not to be upstaged in virtue, declares via its Green Party, “You are not born a man, you are turned into one."
In Australia, the country’s major newspaper writes approvingly about “The Australian Face of Islam” while exhorting, “Together under the minarets” . In Great Britain, miracles of Loon transfiguration cast rough and stupid socialist women in comedic parts as Cabinet Ministers and ethnocentric Pakistani Muslims in the robes of Peers of the Realm. The assiduous planting of inassimilable Muslims has increased the crop 30-fold in the last 30 years, to 2.5 million now.
White man’s world has gone crazy. Any play written by the Marquis de Sade and directed by him with a cast of fellow inmates at the Asylum at Charenton could not have been more grotesque.
People have had enough. But to return a Western democracy to its rightful owners requires a majority of votes. Such a majority can no longer obtain for any political platform that would tackle even the top three major problems that bedevil the West: bankrupting socialism, nonwhite immigration, and implanted Islam. Not to mention the next dozen grave problems: irredeemable debt, the tyranny of the metastized State, the Looters’ coalition’s chokehold, sham global economy, fraudulent financial capitalism, minoritarian tyranny, shattered social capital, barbaric mass culture, nihilism, democracy turned idiocracy, breakdown of sexual norms and results (i.e. no babies), and falsehoods and self-hate careening through the land like a band of headless horsemen..."
Other concerned westerners often say that we need a new Charles Martel.
A Flemish saying goes "we reizen om te leren" (we travel to learn) and I've always taken that folksy lesson of wisdom to heart.
Pic one is a shot of the GPS display when we were inside the huge Channel Tunnel complex near Coquelles/Calais, northern France. From my neck of the woods there's several ways to get to Wales and from there to Ireland, but I'd never taken "Le Shuttle" before, so I thought this was a perfect occasion. "Le Shuttle" is marketingese for the train concept involving a locomotive pulling a series of containerlike doubledeck waggons through the Channel Tunnel and inside the terminal perimeters on either side of the Channel. I write "uniquely" because the track gauge is wider than the normal European railways gauge. Unlike the Eurostar train which takes you from Brussels to London and vice versa, Shuttle wagons are thus confined to the fifty kilometers between Coquelles and its English counterpart, Cheriton near Folkestone. Don't ask me how Eurostar and Shuttle use the same route then. I suspect the less wide Eurostar rails have simply been laid between the Shuttle rails. As I was unable to get out of the car before entering the shuttle, and neither after getting out of it, I couldn't check it out for myself.
Pic 2 shows yours truly preparing to ride inside a wagon. They are interlinked and act like a gigantic moving tunnel of their own. You drive in (in my case, I immediately went up a ramp to the second level) and proceed through the series of wagons until you can get no further. Just before departure "sluices" close each wagon off, so you cannot park your car right on a junction. You wouldn't be allowed to anyway, there's loadmasters telling you what to do.
Once outside the tunnel on the English side, we first spent some time with the kiddos on the (stony) beach in Hythe, just west of Folkestone, and then it was off to Stratford-Upon-Avon, where we had planned to spend the night and do some sightseeing the morning after before moving on to Snowdonia, Wales. Pic 3 is a photo I took of a gentleman who made Stratford famous. The grave is inside the Holy Trinity Church. Stratfordians can thank the bard on their bare knees. Yearly, about three million people (120 times the town's population) visit Stratford-Upon_Avon and spend about 100 million pounds.
Sometimes I wonder whether ole William would be so enamored with the tourist circus that has been set up around him.
On the way to Wales we halted in Ironbridge, a village near Telford, and the site of the world's first, you guess it, iron bridge. It was built between 1779 and 1781 by Abraham Darby III, whose grandfather perfected the technique of smelting iron using coke. This was the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The bridge, which is of cast iron and about thirty meters long, spans the river Severn. It is not used anymore for rolling transport, but tourists are free to walk over it. This place is now an UNESCO World Heritage site.
A little bit further we stopped in Wroxeter, a tiny village near Shrewsbury (birthplace of Charles Darwin). Wroxeter is special because almost 2,000 years ago it was known as Viroconium, a major Roman city. What you see are the remnants of the basilica, at least that's what the guides here call the complex the Roman bathing house.
If only I had more time, then I'd have marked on the photo below the small area that the bathing complex constituted in Viroconium. I'll give it a try. You see that white building in the centre of the town, just to the left of the main road axis? That's it. That's what my pic show. You now have an idea of how big it was back then. Once, this was the fourth largest Roman city in Britain. More info here. Viroconium Corniovorum (its full name) was excavated in the late nineteenth century by Francis Bedford, who was actually a renowned photographer.
Last pic for today taken when ascending the Snowdon, at 1,085 metres Wales' highest mountain. In Welsh, it's called Yr Wyddfa, meaning "The Tomb". I used the so-called PYG track, the origins of that name are unclear.
Don't want to brag, but it was a piece of cake. I was up in barely two hours. Wanna do it yourself, just be fit and wear good shoes.
Nite. Sorry for the scant info, back to work again tomorrow.
