SATURDAY NIGHT WIM MERTENS, HANS ZIMMER.

First Wim Mertens with Struggle for Pleasure. From the soundtrack of the 1987 movie The Belly of an Architect.





Wim Mertens is a Belgian/Flemish composer, pianist, guitarist and musicologist, who did the soundtrack for this film drama by Peter Greenaway. In The Belly of an Architect, Brian Dennehy - who I first got to know as the ruthless sheriff in the 1982 Rambo: First Blood movie - plays Stourley Kracklite, an architect whose physical decline throughout the movie is a metaphor for the gradually diminishing stature of an 18th century visionary French architect by the name of Etienne-Louis Boullée. Very few of Boullées low-key designs have survived to this day, and none of his grandiose, even megalomaniac projects were actually built. But both in his own times and in the twentieth century, when he was rediscovered, he exerted a considerable influence.



Hans Zimmer with Supermarine, from the soundtrack of this year's blockbuster movie Dunkirk, but applied to shots from the epic 1969 movie The Battle of Britain, starring a.o. Michael Caine.





After The Dark Knight, Inception, and Interstellar, another fruitful collaboration between two immensely gifted professionals.


Goede nacht. For those living in the area to be visited by Irma - or those living in other areas afflicted by atrocious weather, think Nepal, India, or Sierra Leone - I can only offer my prayers. Stay strong.


MFBB.

HOW TO IDENTIFY A RACIST.

Easy as pie, not?




Leftism is a mental disorder.



MFBB.

RECOMMENDED VIDEO: PAT CONDELL'S "EUROPE IS KILLING ITSELF BY IMPORTING ISLAM."

Pat Condell's latest video:





Hat tip Gates of Vienna.


MFBB.

RECOMMENDED READS: MARK STEYN'S "DREAMS, DELUSIONS AND DUPLICITY".

Best read on why DACA should be repealed comes imho from, who else, Mark Steyn:

"Readers will know I strongly dislike the contemporary habit of acronymic legislation: The "DREAM Act" is, more precisely, the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act. The Tea Act that so excited His Majesty's subjects in British North America was, in fact, called "An act to allow a drawback of the duties of customs on the exportation of tea or oil to any of his Majesty's colonies or plantations in America; to increase the deposit on bohea tea to be sold at the East India Company's sales; and to empower the Commissioners of the Treasury to grant licenses to the East India Company to export tea duty-free". If only Lord North had thought to call it the TASTY Act (Telling Americans we're Still Taxing You), the whole unpleasantness of the Boston Tea Party and subsequent events might have been avoided.

But the DREAM Act is not merely an example of fatuous aconyms. It also demonstrates the larger point I've made over the years - of how culture trumps politics. The DREAM Act bombed as politics, but the stupid name took hold in the culture - to whit:

DREAMers Like Me Have Flourished Under DACA. Trump Might Take It All Away

...and a zillion other headlines: "The Dreamers Are Ready to Fight President Trump." "This Dreamer Is Ready to Go to the Army. Will Trump Let Him?" "Congress, It's Up to You to Protect the Dreamers." Etc.

So we have gone from "illegal aliens" to "undocumented workers" to "Dreamers". And Republican voters wonder why they never win anything. Sixty years ago, the US Government was happy to call its "comprehensive immigration reform" plans "Operation Wetback", and President Eisenhower was willing to use the term in public. Now we expect jelly-spined finger-in-the-windy legislators to stand firm against "Dreamers". Yeah, right. As for Europe, if Chancellor Merkel and the EU start calling their legions of sturdy young Muslim "refugees" Dreamers, it's game over."

...

"Imagine one billion inhabitants [of the developing world], imagine they all move north.

I ran his math:

A billion man march, eh? The population of the developed world - North America, the European Union, Japan, Oz, NZ - is about a billion. Of the remaining six billion people around the planet, is it really so absurd to think that one-sixth of them would "move north" if they could?

As we had cause to reflect on Labor Day, no developed nation in the year 2017 needs mass immigration. To judge from the press coverage, the average DACA beneficiary is a twelve-year-old beatific moppet. In fact, Obama amnestied those aged 30 and under in 2012 - which means some of them are 36 now, which means (given that they're either undocumented or using fraudulent documents) some of these dreaming moppets are in their forties. No matter. Those who aren't telegenic infants are, we're assured, serving in the US Army or helping with Harvey relief. As Tucker Carlson scoffed last night, the proportion of Dreamers serving in the military is tiny. And as a statistic it might be more useful if we could compare it to the number of Dreamers serving in, say, MS-13...

Yet Orrin Hatch assures us that Dreamers have to be "of good character". And DACA supposedly requires that a Dreamer...

.. has not been convicted of a felony, significant misdemeanor, or three or more other misdemeanors, and do not otherwise pose a threat to national security or public safety."

...

"And, of course, the minute Dreamers become legal, chain migration will take care of the rest, including their parents, who broke the law in the first place - because, despite the assurances, no one will check that, either.

Nevertheless, in the eyes of the American people, and certainly their media, a Dreamer is a class valedictorian about to sign up for a tour in Afghanistan. So good luck to any Republican legislator minded to argue against that. Thus the power of a single word to frame the issue: "Illegal aliens" are lawbreakers who should face the consequences. But Dreamers are an identity group, like the transgendered or gays or African-Americans: it's as innate as biology or orientation; why blame them?

Perhaps the most depressing aspect of the last 24 hours is the way it has utterly upended the extraordinary events of summer 2015, when Donald Trump did something truly radical for a candidate of either party: He talked about the problem of immigration policy not from the perspective of the Dreamers but of those on the receiving end of their dreams. Back then, several members of the current Trump Administration were outraged by this. In an unprecedented move, Nikki Haley used the official Republican response to the State of the Union to attack not President Obama but candidate Trump and those foolish enough to "follow the siren call of the angriest voices". As I responded:


~ Unfortunately for her, this sentimentalist twaddle is not where the Republican base is. She's looking at immigration policy from the point of view of the seven billion hard-working soon-to-be-vetted Americans-in-waiting around the planet. But one of the changes this election season is that the party base is considering immigration policy from the point of view of the 300 million Americans who are already here.


That was the extraordinary transformation Donald Trump effected two summers ago. Now we're back to all the usual "sentimentalist twaddle" - "hard-working", "family values", "living in the shadows" and (from delusional Republicans) "natural conservatives".

"To be sure, Republicans are still prepared to criticize Obama for his chosen method of immigration "reform" - via executive order, or, as George III would have called it, Royal Proclamation. "We can't burn the Constitution just to do what you want," Sean Hannity told Jorge Ramos on Fox last night.

But why not? We're burning everything else, as one act of illegality leads on to another, and another: The unlawful entry of millions of unskilled immigrants has led to the unlawful corruption of state databases that implicitly accept the use of stolen Social Security numbers, and the unlawful issuance of drivers' licenses by multiple states to non-legal residents, and the unlawful creation of "sanctuary cities" premised on the nullification of US immigration law, and now even the proposed repeal by certain municipalities of the defining privilege of citizenship in free societies - by the introduction of voting rights for non-citizens. Why should the separation of powers be quaintly adhered to when nothing else is?"

...

"The left is quite explicit: Borders are fascist and racist, and thus the organizing principle of the world for the last four centuries - the nation state - is an illegitimate concept. The globalist establishment is not that upfront about it: they're more of the view, publicly, that the nation state is an obsolescent and increasingly irrelevant concept. This is, in fact, "burning the Constitution", and even the very concept of constitutions, and of the Peace of Westphalia - for the two most fundamental aspects of any state are borders and citizenship. If there are no borders, there are no citizens, only competing tribes of identity politics - like Dreamers. And, if , as his name surely suggests, a Dreamer trumps a citizen, and if anyone on the planet is a potential American, then American citizenship is objectively worthless."

At the end of the day, the very fact that there are such large numbers of 'DREAMers' in the country that's the vanguard of the developed world is in itself a sign that the developing countries have failed BIG TIME. I don't feel the slightest inclination to move to Nouakchott or Mogadishu or Sanaa because it SUCKS over there. I am happy to live here, in an as yet somehow democratic state and an environment that is the fruit of unfathomable blood sacrifices with an infrastructure and a heritage that are the result of an frenzied labor effort, technological excellence, and dedication. Sure enough, we have our fair share of lazybones and profiteers and it may, and I fear will, all go to bust in the foreseeable future, but for now "the centre is still somewhat holding."

Now, Europe is confronted by legions of people fleeing hellholes in Africa and the muslim world. The former have post-colonialism now had 60 years plus to get their house in order, and still there are very few hopeful signs from that continent. The latter have had 1,400 years and only those lucky enough to sit with their butts on oil function - somewhat.

The US is assailed by similar cohorts from Latin America. Take Mexico e.g., a dismally functioning country that has seen some 130,000 deaths over the past decade and still tries to pass itself off on the world stage as a 'normal' nation.

I'm sorry, but we in the developed world cannot be held responsible for other people's failures. We enjoy the fruits of our labor and the labor of untold generations before us. Civilizations who preferred to sit under trees and peel bananas have NO F*CKING RIGHT to be envious of OUR still functioning societies.

To import the Third World is to become the Third World.

It should be easy for the GOP to push DACA repeal through. But it's becoming more and more obvious that too many Republicans either simply don't want to win or else should join the democrats.


MFBB.

MERKEL BOOED, JEERED AT IN TORGAU, GERMANY.

Still this monster is set to win in the coming elections. How on Earth is THAT possible?





I only hope they are the same pollsters who predicted a Clinton win.


Hat tip PI News.


MFBB.

OUTRAGE: FAMOUS BELGIAN CHOCOLATIER GODIVA GOES COMPLETELY HALAL.

At age 52 I have become slightly annoyed when being reminded by foreign nationals that my country is only known for it's waffles, Brussels sprouts, TinTin, beer, moules et frites ... and chocolate. That image is a caricature, since all that stuff is not even in the top ten of Belgium's top export categories.

Be that as it may, there's no denying the fact that chocolate is one of those things that will inevitably be linked for eternity plus three days when mentioning our small kingdom at the North Sea. Top brands include Neuhaus, Côte d’Or, Jean Galler, Daskalidès, Leonidas, and ... Godiva.

It now appears that Godiva has gone full throttle for halal. Via Het Nieuwsblad:

"Belgian chocolate maker Godiva announced that it will no longer produce liquor pralines. In 2008 te concern was bought by the Turkish group Ülker.

Production of liquor-filled pralines was stopped in April of this year already. A spokesman for the group argued a "change of strategy" was needed.

In Walloon media the talk is that the purpose of this move is to accommodate an islamic public. "Our strategy is now to offer one and only one range to everybody", says a Godiva spokesman to Sudpresse. "Pralines with alcohol are only aimed at adults (...). We wish to offer our products in a universal manner to a public as broad as possible".

Godiva Chocolatier was founded in 1926 by Joseph Draps. He opened his first store near Brussels' Grote Markt [Grand Square, MFBB]. In 1967 the Campbell Soup Company acquired Godiva. These sold the Belgian company in turn to Turkish group Ülker in 2008."

What a load of steaming hogwash. "Pralines with alcohol are only aimed at adults". B-O-O-L. When I was a kid and there was some event or party (marriage, Xmas, New Year, an anniversary, you name it) there were ALWAYS scores of liquor-filled pralines on hand, and it was kids who ran away with most of them. "We wish to offer our products in a universal manner to a public as broad as possible". Yeah right cowards, and in order to do that you simply dispense with the alcohol to suit your muslim overlords! Cause you reckon the lame Fleming cannot even be bothered to get out of his chair to protest this umpteenth sign that islamization is proceeding not one step at a time but two, sorry, make that three.

Look, as a capitalist I cannot seriously take issue when a company decides to produce goods and stuff aimed at a particular segment of society. I have no business telling company X or company Y that they should cater to this or that segment of the market.

So if a muslim group acquires a Belgian company and scraps alcohol, so be it - alas, but that's how it is.

But for God's sake, PUH-LEEZE!!! DON'T try to sell this as a "strategy" to "offer a range appealing to as broad a public as possible." It's nonsense, it's a outright LIE, and it amounts to yet another muslim intrusion in a country where islam has no business.

Cause it ain't. It's yet another slap in our face by neo-ottomans. And judging by the following ad for stuff they've been offering for some time now, the decision to ban alcohol was but a matter of time:





It's a crying shame and a g*ddam nightmare. But if companies can choose to produce stuff and goods aimed at this or that subset of consumers, so too can consumers choose to not buy products from these or those manufactureres anymore. It's why I exhort my fellow countrymen and -women...

... to never ever buy Godiva anymore. Halal is for suckers.


MFBB.