SATURDAY NIGHT CROSBY, STILLS, NASH AND YOUNG, BLINK.

Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. And of course, it's...





... Our house. 1970.


Blink with Happy Day. Guys are from Ireland. It's 1994.





I hope it was one for you. Good night.



MFBB.

AUSTRIAN MP EWALD STADLER BLASTS TURKISH AMBASSADOR KADRI ECVET TEZCAN.

With so much going on in the world today, it was easy to miss the rant delivered by Turkey's ambassador to Austria a couple of weeks ago. The man, a certain Kadri Ecvet Tezcan, offended his host nation repeatedly in terms not to be misunderstood. Despite the Austrian government having thrown untold millions of taxpayer euros at integration programmes to "reach out" to the muslim minority in Switzerland's Alpine sister land, Tezcan had the heart to blame the failure of muslim integration on... Austrians.

Commenting on the Austrian Freedom Party' electoral succes, he even went as far as to say that "...almost 30 per cent support a far-right party in a city which regards itself as the cultural centre of Europe. I would not stay here as head of the UN, the OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) or the OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries)."

Just a few days ago, this turkish muslim stinker got the reply he so richly deserved. Watch the following video wherein Austrian MP Ewald Stadler blasts the scumbag... and in passing the leftist and green islamization enablers:





Shocked and awed. Got a blog, pass this on.

Hat tip our pals over at Gates of Vienna.



MFBB.

RICHARD WAGNER: PRELUDE TO ACT 1 OF PARSIFAL.

Richard Wagner worked intermittently on his famous opera Parsifal, from its first conception in 1857 to its final draft in 1877. The opera is loosely based on a famous thirteenth century poem by Wolfram von Eschenbach, about Parzival, a Knight of King Arthur's Round Table. But there are also elements from Chrétien de Troyes' Perceval, the story of the Holy Grail. Wagner's Parsifal consists of three acts, and this is the Prelude to the first act.





I find the music simply overwhelming. Of course, you may need a few listens, as did I when I discovered this jewel. Naturally, the tunes must have lingered in my head for about twenty-five years, since there's a whiff of the Prelude in Boorman's movie Excalibur, more precisely when Arthur kneels at dusk between the menhirs and calls out for Merlin.

Anyway - breathtaking beauty. Like if your ears thought that you had died and gone to heaven. At least for me.



MFBB.

BELGIAN 'TOP' NEWSPAPER 'DE STANDAARD' SHILLS FOR BRADLEY MANNING.

It is crystal clear that the 'prime' Belgian newspaper, De Standaard


The Belgian journal De Standaard seems rather sympathetic towards private Bradley Manning, who allegedly leaked thousands of classified documents to Assange's Wikileaks:

'THE REVENGE OF THE LONELY SOLDIER BRADLEY MANNING.

....

But why would Menning have done it?

The chat sessions he held with Lamo [a hacker who once broke into the NYT's computers, befriended Manning online, but finally fingerpointed him - MFBB] and which served as material for The Washington Post in June already, give a beginning of the answer. In any case, they sketch a desillusioned soldier who looks down at the army with contempt.

Military intelligence is an oxymoron, he writes on his Facebook page. The diplomatic telexes he sees, 'are for him proof how the First World exploits the Third World'. It is also clear that Manning feels totally isolated. 'I am a wreck' he tells Lamo. 'I look for escape routes to survive. I am smart enough to realize what's going on, but helpless to do something about it.'

I wonder how sensitive, caring and smart nerd Bradley Manning would have reacted if he had been a military intelligence analyst in the army of Sudan. Or in that of Myanmar. Or in that of Iran. "Dispatch three gunships tomorrow to wipe out villages north of Kabkabiya". "Top KNLA commander lifted off his bed in the Myawaddy District, executed the day after". " 'Zahra Kazemi beaten to death in Evin Prison. Good riddance!!!'

Just why is it that all these econutters - woollen sock wearers - leftozoid LBGT aficionados are always prepared to see and believe the worst of the western society that has sheltered them and provided them with a lifestyle to be encountered nowhere else, while they curiously remain deaf and blind to the havoc that so many regimes out there inflict on their own people and their neighbors, while more often than not absolutely and unapologetically ruining their ecology?


Apart from Manning, there is of course Assange. Fellow commenter on LVB had the following link from American Thinker. It's an interesting POV:

Ask yourself this: Who is the greater threat to America? Is it an Australian programmer or Barack Obama? Assange is merely a website operator. He has no backing or powers to inflict harm on this country. Obama, on the other hand, has been using the powers of his office to systematically destroy the American economy, the dollar, our standard of living, and our standing in the world. He has been stoking racial tensions. He has been taking private property of American citizens and giving it to his friends. He and his people have been destroying the values and fabric of American society faster than you can say "bam."

In reality, it is this regime that is a menace to America. What Julian Assange is doing is merely helping to reveal the duplicity and incompetence. And it could not be more ironic that he is doing so with documents which have been forwarded to him by leakers who themselves are part of the Obama administration.

I tend to agree with the author, Vasko Kohlmayer. Assange merely published the information that was made available to him. Since he is in no way involved with the US or its institutions, it seems hard to charge him for what he did. I therefore think that the outburst from Republican lawmakers to designate WikiLeaks a terrorist organization is not one, but two bridges too far. If any lesson should be drawn from it, it is that the information now made public should be made less available, and less visible.

With Manning it's another matter though. Manning was a soldier of the US Army and therefore sworn to loyalty to that institution. When he signed up, he also signed up to oblige to its professional and ethics standards. Assange in all likelihood is just a narcissist, eager to be in the spotlights. He is also a self-hating narcissist, because he is a Westerner, and somewhere in the back of my mind I know with mathematical certainty that we will not hear anything soon from WikiLeaks with regards to human rights violations in Tibet, although you can bet your sweet ass that there are Chinese government cables about that and that he could lay his hands on 'em if he wanted.

But Manning.... Manning leaked info that could endanger, and in all likelihood has endangered, the lives of American and allied soldiers. Not soldiers sitting on their safe warm asses like Manning. But soldiers out there in the field. In AF's Korengal valley, or in a dangerous Bagdad suburb.

I wrote I tended to agree with Mr. Kohlamyer on Assange.

And I found another author I agree with on Manning:

First of all, the soldier as the source should be given to the military to take care of. The Army needs its best prosecution team on him and should punish him as much as possible in a very public way. Make an example of him. He is and will be drenched in blood. No quarter or mercy should be given to him. Whatever the max is; make is so.

CDR Salamander.

De Standaard will shed crocodile tears for their darling when the verdict comes. I couldn't care less.


MFBB.

RARE VIDEO FOOTAGE FROM INSIDE NORTH KOREA.

Via The Telegraph, in my opinion the best UK journal:





I am currently reading David Halberstam's The Coldest Winter, on the origins of the Korean conflict. It's extremely good and, following a lengthy introductory phase presenting the grounds of the conflict and the key players on both sides, deals primarily with military operations in the first year, summer 1950 to summer 1951. The war would last two more years but after July 1951 warfare on the Korean peninsula eerily began to resemble World War I trench warfare.

The involvement of the US military and the troops provided by a number of UN countries was more often than not received not very well by the citizenry back at home. People simply did not understand what the sacrifices their loved ones brought in an unknown country far, far away were for. This was especially true for the American troops since they bore the brunt of the fighting. The sentiment was not confined to civilians alone, for among the enlisted men too there was great scepticism as to the meaning of their engagement. Few things illustrate this better than a quote by the actor William Holden, playing Harry Brubaker, a US Navy F9F fighter bomber pilot in the 1954 movie The bridges at Toko-Ri. Towards the end, when he has been forced to crash-land his jet and is in a doomed firefight with North Korean or Chinese infantry, he is asked by a rescuing helicopter pilot who himself is now grounded (played by Mickey Rooney) "what the hell he's doing in a smelly ditch in Korea". To which Brubaker responds: "yeah, I'm asking myself that question too". A few moments later both are dead.

It is damn easy for armchair generals - to which I have to count myself too, I fear - to say that today it's clear what US and UN troops were doing in smelly ditches in Korea. Nevertheless, the fact that I can state it from the warmth and safety of my house does not detract from the truthfulness of it. In 1953, at least South Korea was free from the horrors of communism. From there it would go on to become, in time, a model democracy with one of the highest standards of living in the whole of Asia, with a proud and well equipped workforce that would give the world the products of Daewoo, Kia, Ssangyong and Hyundai, to name but a few. Tens of millions of South Koreans have had the opportunity, or are taking that opportunity each and every day - to live happy and healthy lives. There are no young women there eating grass.

There are in North Korea though - and I'm pretty sure the truth is even far more uglier than what can be seen in that Telegraph video.

The war in Korea is sometimes called The Forgotten War. It shouldn't be forgotten, and it's a good thing that currently there seem finally to be a couple of decent volumes around dealing with the war. I hope they find their way to the broader public - people will understand better then that the evil regime which unleashed terror and sowed misery and death on that fateful June day in 1950 - is still there, essentially unaltered. Still as evil as it was then, and not caring a jolt for its own people - the late nineties famine in NK possibly claimed a million lives.

Only now do they have nukes.




MFBB.