SATURDAY NIGHT THE INBREDS, SUPERTRAMP.

The Inbreds with Any sense of time. From the 1994 album Kombinator.




Canadian Indie rock duo, formed in Kingston, Ontario in 1992.



Supertramp with Goodbye Stranger. From the album Breakfast in America (1979).




UK prog rock band. Totally loved the Wurlitzer electric piano. Over here they were relatively successful in the early eighties (Dreamer, Take the long way home, It's raining again). This song was drawn from what turned out to be their most successful LP. And if I'd have to make up a list of the 50 most iconic album covers, the one of Breakfast in America would certainly be included:




Take a closer look at Manhattan and see what it's made of. And you know who the fat waitress (actually Kate Murtagh, an actress) is a substitute for don't you.


Goede nacht.



MFBB.

RECOMMENDED READS: HUMBERTO FONTOVA'S TAKE ON A LEFTIST POPE.

More food for thought about Pope Francis, from Townhall's Humberto Fontova:

“Dear Mom and Dad,

I’ve just received the news that I’ll be executed by firing squad in the morning. I assure you, dear parents, that I’ve never felt such spiritual tranquility as I do now. I feel content knowing that very shortly I’ll be with God, waiting and praying for you, my parents. I realize this news is painful for you, but please have faith in the Eternal Life. I want you all to rise above this and know that God, in his infinite mercy, has given me the grace to reconcile with Him… Hugs and kisses, not tears, for everyone. Goodbye, my dear family. Have faith in God.

Long Live Christ the King!

Alberto Tapia

“Apunten! (aim)” yelled the unnerved firing squad leader the following morning April 18, 1961 …

“Listos! (ready)…………..

…….“Viva Cristo Rey!” (“Long Love Christ the King!”) suddenly yelled Alberto Tapia shortly interrupting the murder process and greatly unnerving the murderers.

“Fuego!!!” (Fire!) finally yelled the furious executioner.

A deafening blast and Soviet bullets ripped apart the head and torso of yet another young Cuban martyr. Albert Tapia was barely 21 years old, typical age for most of Castro and Che’s murder victims.

“The defiant yells (“Viva Cristo Rey!”—“Viva Cuba Libre!”-“Abajo Comunismo!”) from the bound and staked martyrs “would make the walls of La Cabana prison tremble!” wrote eyewitness to the slaughter, Armando Valladares, who suffered 22 torture-filled years in Castro’s prisons and was later appointed by Ronald Reagan as U.S. ambassador to U.N Human Rights Commission.

Given their valiant defiance even during their last seconds alive, by mid 1961 the mere binding and blindfolding of Castro and Che’s young murder victims wasn’t enough. The fine folks who hosted Pope Francis’ in Cuba this week then began ordering that the Catholic youths also be gagged. The shaken firing-squads demanded it. The yells were badly unnerving the trigger-pullers, you see.

So now, as the fine folks who hosted Pope Francis’ in Cuba this week yanked the young Catholic heroes from the cells, bent their arms back, and bound their hands, two more Communist guards came into play. One grabbed the struggling victim’s hair and jerked his head back, trying to steady him. The other taped his mouth shut.

Raul Castro (who hosted the Pope at last week’s Havana Mass) and Che Guevara (whose visage formed the backdrop for the Mass) were the most notorious executioners during the early years of the Cuban Revolution. The orders, of course, all issued from Fidel Castro, who Pope Francis went out of his way to visit and smilingly hob-nob with after the Mass, profusely thanking him for his efforts towards “world peace,” (I am NOT making this up!)




“I am not Christ or a philanthropist,” wrote Che Guevara in a letter to his mother. “I am all the contrary of a Christ--In fact, if Christ himself stood in my way, I, like Nietzsche, would not hesitate to squish him like a worm.”

As mentioned: an enormous image of Che Guevara formed the backdrop to Pope Francis’ Mass in Havana last week.

Castro’s KGB and STASI- tutored regime prepared for the Pope’s visit carefully. Any unsightly protests would obviously mar the occasion, especially for a regime long-accustomed to preening in front of the international media mirror. So Cuban dissidents (especially Catholic ones) were rounded up en-masse by Castro’s KGB-trained police, often brutally.

"The facts and figures are irrefutable. No one will any longer be able to claim ignorance or uncertainty about the criminal nature of Communism," wrote the New York Times (no less!) about The Black Book of Communism. This “irrefutable” study on Communism’s crimes was edited by the head of France’s National Centre for Scientific Research, Stephane Courtois (not exactly an embittered dispossessed Cuban exile) and translated into English by Harvard University Press (not exactly a subsidiary of the John Birch Society.)

This impeccably high-brow scholarly study found that Castro and Guevara’s firing squads murdered between 15 and 17 thousand Cubans, the equivalent, given the U.S. population, of almost one million executions. Some more perspective: the UN, (the same United Nations that proudly features Cuba on its Human Rights Council, by the way) charged former Serbian dictator Slodoban Milosevic with “genocide” for ordering 8000 executions.

And far from any of the repentance the Catholic Church supposedly requires for forgiveness, the Castro brothers have always doubled--and even tripled-down--on their gloating for those thousands of murders, historically denouncing the young victims as “CIA mercenaries!” and “terrorists!”

None of this has prevented the Castro regime from receiving the most papal visits recently of any Latin America nation, equaling the number of papal visits to Brazil, with a population of 200 million, 130 million of them declared Catholics. In contrast, Cuba has a population of 11 million, only a tiny fraction of which are practicing Catholics. Someone’s got some serious “‘splainin” to do for this Papal fetish of constantly visiting Stalinist Cuba and chumming around with her Stalinist rulers.

Interestingly, more Popes (three) have recently visited Cuba–a nation with many more crypto-voodooists (Santeros) than Catholics– than have visited Mexico(with 97 million Catholics.) Hello? Andas Joan Rivers used to ask: “Can we talk?” (about this glaring and –for many—disgusting incongruity.)

For many of us, the Papal motivation for visiting Cuba seems no different from Beyonce’s, Conan O’Brien’s, Jack Nicholson’s, Oliver Stone’s, Sean Penn’s, etc. The Popes get plenty of press and get to poke Uncle Sam in the eye. In this respect, they seem no different from all those loud-mouthed, Castro-hugging celebrity popinjays."

Amen to that.




Also, dont miss Judge Andrew Napolitano's take on the pope over at Fox News.

There is no need for a false prophet who turns self-evident truths about Capitalism on their heads, cozies up to closet or not so closet totalitarians, gives his support to insane leftist dadas, abandons his suffering flock while proclaiming that islam is a religion of peace...

... and perhaps worst of all...

.... cannot even bring himself to mention Jesus Christ in a speech before Congress.



MFBB.

RECOMMENDED VIDEO: BEATRIX VON STORCH (ALTERNATIVE FUER DEUTSCHLAND) ON SUSPECTED BERLIN TERROR MOSQUE RAIDED BY OFFICERS ON SOCKS.

I hope that my pals at Gates of Vienna wont hold it against me that I simply copied and pasted, but I'm pretty sure they care far less about who gets credit for a story than that they care about that story getting out.

Anyway, here's Beatrix von Storch from Alternative fuer Deutschland with a telling video:

Nash Montana translated, Vlad Tepes did the subtitling.




And here's the transcript:

0:00 The Diocese of Essen made headlines recently.
0:04 Bishop Franz Josef Overbeck uttered his opinion on the ‘refugee question’, and I quote:
0:10 “Our prosperity, and our way of living in peace, will change. As refugees had to alter the way they live,
0:18 so do we have to change our lifestyle. And here we need patience,
0:23 and we need clarity.”
0:25 Dear Bishop, with all due respect, but I don’t think that we are the ones who have to adapt our way of life.
0:31 I think that it is those that come here to our country need to do that.
0:36 And I am also not willing to somehow forgo the peace that we live in,
0:41 I don’t want to change that.
0:44 I expected of a representative of the Christian church
0:48 that he would stand in front of his society and help defend their values.
0:52 There are two different news stories that go hand in hand with this story.
0:56 One from Rhineland-Pfalz. The chairwoman of the CDU, Julia Klöckner, wanted to visit a refugee camp,
1:02 and she also wanted to meet and greet the local Imam.
1:06 Said Imam had informed her that he would welcome her, but that he will not extend his hand to greet her.
1:11 As a consequence, Frau Klöckner has distanced herself from the visit.
1:15 Are those the new ways of life to which we supposedly have to get used to, where men will not extend a greeting hand to women?
1:20 I don’t think so.
1:23 And out of Berlin on the same day we hear of a mosque that since 2014
1:27 has been under suspicion of interest for anti-constitutional activities, has now been accused
1:32 of being involved in the planning of a violent terrorist attack on the state.
1:36 The police started to raid the mosque and stepped inside the mosque.
1:41 With shoes.
1:43 The Imam asks that they remove their shoes. The police yield.
1:48 Shakedown in socks.
1:51 Do we have to get used to that, too? I believe not. I think it is time
1:55 that we stand up for our own culture, and that we fight for our way of life
2:00 and that we, too, show clarity in that. It’s not only up to the representatives of our churches,
2:05 but especially from them.

Beatrix Amelie Ehrengard Eilika von Storch, born the Duchess of Oldenburg, is a conservative politician and blogger. This is her site.

A quick search online revealed that indeed, a couple of days back, antiterror units had raided the Ibrahim Al Khalil-mosque in the Colditzstraße in Berlin's Tempelhof Stadteil:




There, its imam, a certain Abdel Qader D., was arrested on suspicion of recruiting jihadists for Syria. Abdel Qader D. asked that the troopers remove their shoes before searching his mosque....

.... and the officers complied....




Y'all can believe THAT?


"Islam is a part of Germany", eh Angela?

I think we can indeed conclude that it is. All the Scheisse of it.


MFBB.

RECOMMENDED READS: THOMAS SOWELL'S "THE LEFT HAS ITS POPE."

His Master's Voice on Pope Francis.

"Pope Francis has created political controversy, both inside and outside the Catholic Church, by blaming capitalism for many of the problems of the poor. We can no doubt expect more of the same during his visit to the United States.

Pope Francis is part of a larger trend of the rise of the political left among Catholic intellectuals. He is, in a sense, the culmination of that trend.

There has long been a political left among Catholics, as among other Americans. Often they were part of the pragmatic left, as in the many old Irish-run, big city political machines that dispensed benefits to the poor in exchange for their votes, as somewhat romantically depicted in the movie classic, "The Last Hurrah."

But there has also been a more ideological left. Where the Communists had their official newspaper, "The Daily Worker," there was also "The Catholic Worker" published by Dorothy Day.

A landmark in the evolution of the ideological left among Catholics was a publication in the 1980s, by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, titled "Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy."

Although this publication was said to be based on Catholic teachings, one of its principal contributors, Archbishop Rembert Weakland, said: "I think we should be up front and say that really we took this from the Enlightenment era."

The specifics of the Bishops' Pastoral Letter reflect far more of the secular Enlightenment of the 18th century than of Catholic traditions. Archbishop Weakland admitted that such an Enlightenment figure as Thomas Paine "is now coming back through a strange channel."

Strange indeed. Paine rejected the teachings of "any church that I know of," including "the Roman church." He said: "My own mind is my own church." Nor was Paine unusual among the leading figures of the 18th century Enlightenment.

To base social or moral principles on the philosophy of the 18th century Enlightenment, and then call the result "Catholic teachings" suggests something like bait-and-switch advertising.

But, putting aside religious or philosophical questions, we have more than two centuries of historical evidence of what has actually happened as the ideas of people like those Enlightenment figures were put into practice in the real world -- beginning with the French Revolution and its disastrous aftermath.

Both the authors of the Bishops' Pastoral Letter in the 1980s, and Pope Francis today, blithely throw around the phrase "the poor," and blame poverty on what other people are doing or not doing to or for "the poor."

Any serious look at the history of human beings over the millennia shows that the species began in poverty. It is not poverty, but prosperity, that needs explaining. Poverty is automatic, but prosperity requires many things -- none of which is equally distributed around the world or even within a given society.




Geographic settings are radically different, both among nations and within nations. So are demographic differences, with some nations and groups having a median age over 40 and others having a median age under 20. This means that some groups have several times as much adult work experience as others. Cultures are also radically different in many ways.

As distinguished economic historian David S. Landes put it, "The world has never been a level playing field." But which has a better track record of helping the less fortunate -- fighting for a bigger slice of the economic pie, or producing a bigger pie?

In 1900, only 3 percent of American homes had electric lights but more than 99 percent had them before the end of the century. Infant mortality rates were 165 per thousand in 1900 and 7 per thousand by 1997. By 2001, most Americans living below the official poverty line had central air conditioning, a motor vehicle, cable television with multiple TV sets, and other amenities."

And then come the killer quotes:

"A scholar specializing in the study of Latin America said that the official poverty level in the United States is the upper middle class in Mexico. The much criticized market economy of the United States has done far more for the poor than the ideology of the left.

Pope Francis' own native Argentina was once among the leading economies of the world, before it was ruined by the kind of ideological notions he is now promoting around the world."

Pope Francis ought to know that there still is not definitive proof of MMGW - actually, evidence to the contrary is growing.

By contrast, there is AMPLE proof that his flock is being persecuted day in, day out.

I've been waiting since June to affirm it, but I guess since Laudatio Si Pope Francis has even more gone out of his way to embrace characteristical points of faith of the leftist church. And I think the last time I heard him address Christian persecution was in July - without identifying the culprit of course, just saying that today's church is a 'church of martyrs'. Big deal. I'm sorry, but Pope Francis lost me. Pontiffs who abandon their flock are unworthy of Saint Peter's Seat.


MFBB.