MULTICULTURAL ENRICHMENT IN BERLIN.

Now and then we have referred to certain muslim-infested areas in Berlin, amongst others Neukoelln. Some may remember how police officers upon rounding up petty criminals had to flee for suddenly appearing muslim mobs lest they not be lynched. Here is another illustration of what life in those neighborhoods has in store for non-muslims. From the Polish site Polskaweb, German edition, January 2010:

"Veiled muslim girls suddenly attacked other, preferably blonde girls. School authorities and the Senate Administration for Schools are deeply concerned.

It happened on the street: "Two times already girls with headscarf beat with their fists on blonde girls without headscarf, pushed them to the ground, and kicked them with their feet" says Volker Steffens, Principal of Thomas More High School in Neukoelln. The number of foreigners among the about 500 pupils is more than 80 per cent from 41 nations....

Rita Herrmanns of the Senate Admininstration for Schools: "Fundamentalistic tendencies are on the rise in Berlin's schools over the past years. More and more muslim girls are wearing headscarves. More and more muslim parents forbid their daughters schooltrips, swimming lessons, sexual education". School Principal Volker Steffens is sitting in the front seat to witness the conssequences: "The islamic tendencies and straight racist attacks by [muslim] girls are remarkable."

The victims are the blonde Polish girls, because they are catholic and at the same time very liberal and therefore embody everything, what the veiled girls hate. The reason for the conflicts is most often envy. Steffens: "In religiously very tight households much is forbidden. The girls see in school other girls, who are allowed far more. They become pissed off, and harass the children of liberal families."

Volker Steffens draws the line: "Cases are talked through with the girls and warnings issued [my translation sucks - dunno what 'geahndet' means. Is there a German in zhe Room? - MFBB]. That goes from a warning over a negative reference to exclusion from school meetings and even the school itself".

Rita Hermanns: "It's good that way, because one thing shouldn't happen at all: look away! This violence must be exposed."

Good luck with that. Better oil up, lock and load grandpa's Schmeisser Madam Hermanns. Better, uncle Willi's Sturmgewehr. A few Panzerfausts might come in handy too.



MFBB.

BUTTGET PROPOSAL.

Just one article among many: Peter Morici on FOXNews.com. Morici is a professor at the Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, as well as a former Chief Economist at the U.S. International Trade Commission.

Obama's Budget -- Straight From La La Land
By Peter Morici
- FOXNews.com

Today, President Obama released his proposed 2011 budget, which forecasts the federal deficit will fall to $706 billion by 2014 or just 3.9 percent of GDP before rising again in 2015.

To accomplish this feat, he proposes letting the Bush tax cuts expire and other spending cuts the Congress has rejected in the past. More extraordinary, though, the document assumes that real GDP grows at better than 4 percent a year over the four years from 2011 to 2014, and the economy does not encounter a serious recession.

If your staff economist tells you that is realistic, fire him.

Rosie Scenario wrote this budget.

The United States is facing deficits greater than one trillion dollars for the foreseeable future, and investing in long-term U.S. government bonds is a very risky proposition. It is not that Washington won't pay, but longer term, an international run on the dollar and inflation are real risks.

Investing in U.S. bonds now entails considerable political risk. A populist government, similar to those that drove Latin American republics into bankruptcy during the 1970s is in charge.

Obama's strategy: low growth policies and assume away the consequences.

This Mark Steyn article's scope is somewhat broader than the "mere" acknowledgement of a budget, and a budget deficit, and a national debt, never before seen in human history, but I thought I'd pass it on just as well:

...That's why Obama is such a job-killer. Why would a small business take on a new employee? The president's proposing a soak-the-banks tax that could impact your access to credit. The House has passed a cap-and-trade bill that could impose potentially unlimited regulatory costs. The Senate is in favor of "health" "care" "reform" that will allow the IRS to seize your assets if you and your employees' health arrangements do not meet the approval of the federal government. Some of these things will pass into law, some of them won't. But all of them send a consistent, cumulative message: that there are no rules, that they're being made up as they go along – and that some of them might even be retroactive, as happened this week with Oregon's new corporate tax.

In such an environment, would you hire anyone? Or would you hunker down and sit things out? Obama can bury it in half a ton of leaden telepromptered sludge but the world has got the message: More Washington, more microregulation of every aspect of your life, more multi-trillion-dollar spending, and no agreed rules in a game ever more rigged against you.

Obama and the Democrats have decided, in the current cliché, to "double down." That hardly does justice to what the president's doing. In effect, he's told embattled congressmen and senators to strap on the old suicide-bomber belt and self-detonate for the team this November.

That's a lot of virgins to pass out, but, with this administration, budget restraints aren't exactly a problem: Untold pleasures will await every sacrificial incumbent in paradise, or at any rate the coming liberal utopia.

What's the end game here? President Obama gave it away in his student-loan "reform" proposals: If you choose to go into "public service," any college-loan debts will be forgiven after 10 years.

Because "public service" is more noble than the selfish, money-grubbing private sector. C'mon, everybody knows that. So we need to encourage more people to go into "public service."

Why?

In the past 60 years, the size of America's state and local workforce has increased five times faster than the general population. But the president says it's still not enough: We have to incentivize even further the diversion of our human capital into the government machine.

Like most lifelong politicians, Barack Obama has never created, manufactured or marketed any product other than himself. So, quite reasonably, he sees government dependency as the natural order of things.

And in his college-loan plan he's explicitly telling you: If you start a business, invent something, provide a service, you're a schmuck and a loser. In the America he's building, you'll be working 24/7 till you drop dead to fund an ever-swollen bureaucracy that takes six weeks off a year and retires at 53 on a pension you could never dream of. Obama's proposals are bold only insofar as few men would offer such a transparent guarantee of disaster: It's the audacity of hopelessness...

You bet.

Jesus Christ. If I ran my family's financial matters like Obama does the US's, my wife would file for divorce. I am NOT KIDDING.


MFBB.

TAKUAN SEIYO: FROM MECCANIA TO ATLANTIS (13/2).

Over at The Brussels Journal, the elusive contributor Takuan Seiyo (a pseudonym) is up to his 14th installment in the breathtaking "From Meccania to Atlantis" series, but before I link to that one, I'd like to call your attention (overdue, admitted) to the previous one, which appeared more than one month ago, on December 18, 2009. For some reason I never found an adequate opportunity to refer to it earlier.

Here it is. This man deserves a readership of tens of millions.

The Left’s strategy has not changed much since the 1930s. They push government spending ever higher, and then define budget deficits as the problem. When fiscal conservatives point out that the overspending causes the deficits, the Left labels that as extremist, supporting slavery and homicidal. When in power, the Left ratchets up the spending on its clients and picks the pockets of the productive citizens out of a faked concern for the “deficit gap.”

The one rule is that expenditures are never reduced, except as a strategic ploy. If an emergency forces a reduction, what’s reduced is the police, the garbage pick-up, the libraries, but never the budget-busting public workers’ pension programs, or the legions of $150,000-a-year deputies of bureaucrat deputies, hired and retained through thick and thin to fulfill the Holy Grail of Body Snatcher creed: “balance” between competent straight white males and quadriplegic black Muslim lesbians.

But there comes a time when the spending is no longer an exercise in cynical egotism or delusional ‘social justice,’ but a deliberate battering ram with which to fell a nation and steal its future. There is no precedent in history to the reckless magnitude and speed of the Obama–Pelosi regime’s spending. It’s impossible to capture concisely all the details of the confetti curtain of $100 bills streaming day and night from ten million Bernanke helicopters, but a few mileposts are worth mentioning:

The Senate of the most indebted nation in history, a country staggering under mountains of debt that it has no viable way of repaying, continues to pass Titanic spending bills that just in the first nine months of 2009 included:

$350 billion Wall Street bailout extension

$787 billion “stimulus” package

$400 billion, earmark-infested omnibus spending bill

$6 billion to federalize charities and pay volunteers

$109 billion loan to the International Monetary Fund

$3 billion for “Cash for Clunkers”

$400 million in corporate welfare to the tourism industry

$4 billion bailout of the Postal Service





In what the New York Post called “a stimulus without the stim", the federal government has spent a half-billion dollars on ten large government stimulus contracts in New York City and Long Island that created 54 jobs. That comes to $9 million per job.

Overall, the government has spent $246,436 per each of the 640,329 jobs it claims to have saved or created so far. That's a pretty costly stimulus, a government Ponzi scheme of printing money and so robbing those who hold previously printed money, then flinging the new money about in order to cover up the sorry effects of the government’s own prior malfeasance and stupidity.

Each buyer of the 690,000 vehicles that were sold during the “Cash for Clunkers program” (gov. propaganda here) received a government subsidy of $3,500 - $4,500, at a total cost to the taxpayer of $3 billion. But since the majority of these beneficiaries would have bought their cars anyway, the 125,000 who were actually induced by the government to buy cost the taxpayer $24,000 each.

Fraud in the “$8000 ‘stimulus’ to each new home buyer” program is currently assessed at $500 million. Thousands of such $8,000 tax credits have been issued to illegal aliens, children, and people who had not bought a house – the latter including at least 53 IRS [Income Tax Bureau] employees. That’s what happens when a government rather than the free market mechanism dispenses money.

Obama has announced a plan to send 78 million American seniors a check for $250 each. That’s a paltry 19.5 billion dollars. In Detroit, thousands line up for “Obama money,” that they believe is a personal gift from The One. In Tampa Bay, millions are wasted to subsidize beauty school tuition for beauticians for whom there are no jobs. Maybe that’s the ultimate Monkey Business haircut.

As if this weren’t enough, the lunatics in the House of Representatives write a 2000+ page bill that nobody has read and pass it at 23:00 on a Saturday night. They propose to spend another $1.2 trillion on health care for the 12.5% of Mexico’s population (3) that prefers free American doctors, in a reform that would actually worsen everything that’s already bad in the American healthcare system (4), explode U.S. debt, increases taxes, and kill jobs. Two Saturdays later, the Senate gives its stamp of approval, in a wheeling-dealing process that involves buying one senator’s vote with a $300 million bribe to Louisiana, twenty times the amount of the original Louisiana Purchase.

I have only one advice for Americans. Get rid of this Fraud and his cronies ASAP. They are destroying your country. But do it in a legal way, of course. Make it a Victory not only of Democracy but also for the commonest of common sense.


MFBB.

SATURDAY NIGHT KULA SHAKER, THE SOUND.

Imho Kula Shaker stood somewhat apart from the whole Britpop phenomenon because of its weirdness, with singer/guitarist Crispian Mills singing top numbers such as Tattva in Sanskrit (!), and the band introducing traditional Indian instruments like a tamboura and sitar. What hits I know of them are highly kinetic, and for a while in the mid-nineties they were really cool. They split up in 99, only to reform again in 2004, but I haven't heard much pottenbrekerij [literally 'breaking pots', Flemish expression for leaving an impression - MFBB] from their reincarnation yet. Trivia fact: frontman Mills is the grandson of the famous actor Sir John Mills, best known for his role in the wartime drama In which we serve (1942, directed by Noel Coward) and the Captain Scott tribute Scott of the Antarctic (1948).





I could smash my head against a wall for ever lending The Sound's debut album, Jeopardy, to a fella whom I even suspected never to give it back to me. The Sound's probably the coolest eighties post punk band you have never heard of. Centered around singer and guitarist Adrian Borland, the original lineup for that essential album was further Graham Bailey on bass, Mike Dudley on drums and Bi Marshall on keyboards. Those were the eighties, in the middle of the Cold War, and it was cool to think in end of the world terms. Both the album's outlook (in austere black and white) and content (with songs like Missiles) reflect that. I suppose the consensus among band members to do other cool things like eschewing making big fat capitalistic profit was big enough to not follow the path of making commercial numbers. IIRC, their third album was even deliberately made to not sound commercial at all. Surprise surprise, The Sound petered away, signing up with insignificant label after even more insignificant label and ingloriously splitting up in 1988. Borland himself, who had been showing signs of depression since the mid-eighties, committed suicide by throwing himself under an express train in Wimbledon station in 1999. As for me... I am glad I knew them. Jeopardy was, and is, okay. Not top material, but... okay. Essential eighties album. RIP Adrian. I pray I will once get your debut LP back.





Nite ladies and gentlemen.


MFBB.

THE ECONOMIST ON BIG GOVERNMENT.

All week long I've been wanting to do a small post regarding an article regular reader Mark formerly from Colorado (and before that from California) linked to in the comments section. Well, it's half past midnight here, it's snowing, my latest Koontz book (The Darkest Evening Of The Year) is out, lovemaking Demand and Supply Economics was yesterday, and tomorrow night is Saturday Music Night so if there's got to be a time to do that post it's now.

Would it be asked too much - providing you have time, of course - to read the article first? It's from The Economist and it deals with the ever growing role of the state. I do not agree with everything, and I have my issues with The Economist (they backed Obama for God's sake, which makes me smarter than them) but all in all it's a good read.

When I still have your attention we could walk quickly back over it, and I got a few quick points to make. Your remarks are welcome. Here goes:

"...IN THE aftermath of the Senate election in Massachusetts, the focus of attention is inevitably on what it means for Barack Obama. The impact on the Democratic president of the loss of the late Ted Kennedy’s seat to the Republicans will, no doubt, be significant (see article). Yet the result could be remembered as a message more profound than the disparate mutterings of a grumpy electorate that has lost faith in its leader—as a growl of hostility to the rising power of the state. America’s most vibrant political force at the moment is the anti-tax tea-party movement. Even in leftish Massachusetts people are worried that Mr Obama’s spending splurge, notably his still-unpassed health-care bill, will send the deficit soaring."

I tend to agree. I must say that I was actually flabbergasted at the Tea Party phenomenon, the motivation of which seems to be a genuinely intellectual one, a deliberate rejection of too much state power. Why do I use the word intellectual? Because , judging by the boards and slogans carried, the mere emergence of the tea parties nationwide was an ideological mass statement, and something ideological is in se intellectual. When people take to the streets in Europe, they do so either for very emotional reasons (e.g. they hold pathetic silent marches to condemn this or that heinous crime committed against children) or they do it for jobs, wages and pensions, in other words for simple basic things. There's of course nothing wrong with that, but in essence it's something on the intellectual level of a toddler: me hungry, must have food. How one achieves what they want, whether it's safe jobs, raised wages, or secure pensions, Europeans don't bother about. And they wouldn't understand it either. Now, you can argue that ultimately the Tea Partiers also want those same things, and that's only normal. But there's a reasoning behind their demands: they send the message they want job security and decent health care but NOT with more state. They not only demand something, they ask it be not done in this or that particular way.

I must say I was very, very impressed by this outburst of concerned, intellectually committed citizenship. Here is a people that recognizes bullshit when it smells it. Not so in Europe, where, oh irony! far too many people [not a majority, thank God] call Americans dumb!

The immediate reason for the rise of the state is the financial crisis. Governments have spent trillions propping up banks and staving off depression. In some countries they now play a large role in the financial sector; and thanks to bail-outs, stimulus and recession, the proportion of GDP made up by state spending and public deficits has rocketed. But the rise of Leviathan is a much longer and broader story (see article). Long before AIG and Northern Rock ended up in state custody, government had been growing rapidly. That was especially true in Britain and America, the two countries in which “the end of big government” had been declared in the 1990s. George Bush pushed up spending more than any president since Lyndon Johnson. Britain’s initially frugal Labour government went on a splurge: the state’s share of GDP has risen from 37% in 2000 to 48% in 2008 to 52% now. In swathes of northern Britain the state now accounts for a bigger share of the economy than it did in communist countries in the old eastern bloc.

Apart from saying again that I tend to agree, I have little to add. The statement about Bush may or may not be true. If a reader can come up with material backing that claim up, that would be very appreciated.

"Demography is set to push state spending up further. Ageing populations will consume ever more public health care and ever bigger pensions. Unless somebody takes an axe to them, entitlements will consume a fifth of America’s GDP in 15 years, compared with 9% now."

Again, a correct assessment. Paradoxically, democracies are at greater risk of becoming unmanageable because there is a very real danger that simply because it has become the biggest voting bloc, pensioners will find themselves in a position, in the foreseeable future, where they might veto any measure the state deems necessary to survive financially. It's a Catch 22 situation. Put in simple terms, a state might be forced to contemplate cutting pensions to be able to keep working the state machinery, including its many and various responsibilities that are not directly related to the elderly (education e.g.). But the Grey Panthers might, twenty years from now, be in a position to block such a move. The end result will of course be that the state will head for financial ruin, after which it will not be able to ... pay pensions at all. It's a conundrum, and one that can possibly only be avoided by adapting different pension systems, e.g. the Pinera system born in Pinochet's Chile, and/or spurring people to take more care of themselves with fiscally attractive pension saving schemes.

"Rising government spending is not the only manifestation of growing state power. The spread of regulation is another. Conservatives tend to blame the growing thicket of rules on unwanted supranational bodies, such as the European Union, and on the ever growing industry of public-sector busybodies who supervise matters like diversity and health and safety. They have a point. But voters, including right-wing ones, often demand more state intrusion: witness the “wars” on terror and drugs, or the spread of CCTV cameras."

Okay for the CCTV cameras, which are an intrusion in our private lives straight out of 1984. Not okay for the War On Terror or the War On Drugs. A state should, and must, have the monopoly for the use of violence. When the state is attacked militarily, it must respond in force. Defeating the enemy is the prime objective. Winning World War II placed the US in a budgetary nightmare of unfathomable proportions. But in a losing situation, I assume that few would have consoled themselves by arguing that at least they had adhered to a sound principle like staying out of the red.

"A further danger consists in equating “smaller” with “better”. As the horrors in Haiti demonstrate, countries need a state of a certain size to work at all; and more government can be good."

Agree. A well-functioning state IS a necessity. If that implies a relatively impressive size, so be it. However sympathetic I might be, intellectually, vis-à-vis libertarianism, I often consider it as a concept that's as outworldish as communism. I do not believe in a skeleton state. Sanitary conditions in seventeenth century London only improved when the town authorities levied taxes, giving them the financial means to process human waste in a hygienic and healthy way. And as appalling as Saddam Hussein's state was, its dissolution in 2003 led to an unforeseen chaos. In my own country, the state has created financial backup organizations that have effectively helped key industries to grow. A state is not inefficient per se. There's got to be a state of a certain size. What size? I don't know. You might want to study Dick Armey's findings.

"In these circumstances, hard rules make little sense. But prejudices are still useful—and this newspaper’s prejudice is to look for ways to make the state smaller. That is partly for philosophical reasons: we prefer to give power to individuals, rather than to governments. But pragmatism also comes into it: there is so much pressure on the state to grow (bureaucrats building empires, politicians buying votes, public-sector workers voting for governments that promise bigger budgets for the public sector) that merely limiting the state to its current size means finding cuts."

What else can I say than that I agree?

"And cuts can be found. In the corporate world, slimming a workforce by a tenth is standard fare. There’s no reason why governments should not do that too, when it’s needed. Sweden and Canada managed it, and remained pleasant countries with effective public services. Public-sector pay can be cut, given how secure jobs are: in both America and Britain public-sector workers are on average now paid more than private-sector ones. Public-sector pensions are far too generous, in comparison with shrunken private-sector ones. Entitlements can be cut back, most obviously by raising pensionable ages. And the world might well be a greener, more prosperous place if the West’s various agricultural departments disappeared."

Ditto.


Nite, thank you for your attention. Tomorrow some lighter stuff.



MFBB.

MULTICULTURAL ENRICHMENT IN THE NETHERLANDS.

Basically every former colonial power has a segment of the population that's composed of natives from those colonies, or descendants thereof. Belgium has its Congolese, Britain its Pakistanis and Indians, France its Algerians. And the Dutch have, amongst others, Moluccans, from the island group the Moluccas in the east of the Indonesian archipelago. They are the descendants of about 4,000 Moluccan troopers of the KNIL, the Koninklijk Nederlands-Indisch Leger (or Royal Dutch East Indies Army), and 7,500 of their family members. They came to the Netherlands after 1950 when the whole of Indonesia became one nation, fearing reprisals since they had been some kind of KNIL elite corps, not unlike the Gurkhas in the British Army. Anno 2010 the Moluccans are an accepted and totally integrated part of Dutch society (despite troubles in the seventies), a fact that in large part can be contributed to the Christian beliefs many hold (the Portuguese introduced Christianity on the Moluccas during their short rule before the Dutch arrival in 1599).

Muslims would not be muslims if on the Moluccan home-islands they would not have tried to impose their rule too. Between 1999 and 2002 the muslim terrorist organization Laskar Jihad unleashed a terrible war on the Moluccas against the Christian half of the population whereby thousands were killed and 500,000 were forced to flee their houses. Naturally, this conflict led to tensions between muslims and Moluccans in the Netherlands too. To cut a long story short, in Holland the two communities are not exactly on best terms.

Around New Years Eve, news leaked out that terrible riots between the two communities had been taking place for a prolonged time already in the town of Culemborg, in the centre of The Netherlands. Things got really nasty when Moroccans in a car deliberately tried to overrun Moluccan youths. From NRC Handelsblad, January 5 2010:

Race riots lead to emergency measures in Culemborg
Published: 5 January 2010 17:16 Changed: 6 January 2010 13:24

Two nights of riots between youths of Moroccan and Moluccan background have led to a police lock-down in the Terweijde neighbourhood. It’s typical of ‘young male syndrome’ says a riot-expert with 25 years experience. New Year’s Eve is a time for feasting and fighting.

Race rioting has led to emergency measures in the Dutch city of Culemborg. The Terweijde district is on police lock-down after two episodes of violence between youths of Moroccan origin and others of Moluccan (Indonesian) background. Yesterday, Terweijde was cordoned off by police and strict security measures installed. A hundred officers are preventing outsiders from entering, gatherings of over three people are banned, and CCTV cameras are monitoring all movements. The measures will stay in place for at least two weeks, officials have announced.

The riots began on New Years Eve when a car drove into a group of Moluccans in the front garden of a house in Terweijde. Several of them were hurt. Two of the five men in the car, all between 18 and 21 years old, were attacked by bystanders. In the rioting that followed, windows were smashed and several people wounded. One girl, the daughter of a Moluccan mother and Dutch father, ended up in hospital with concussion when a stone entered their home.

Police say about a hundred youngsters, fifty of them Moroccan and fifty Moluccan, were involved. Five young men were arrested, four Moroccans and one Moluccan, including the driver of the car, who was charged with attempted manslaughter. On Saturday, a 43-year old man was also arrested on suspicion of involvement. According to a police spokesman, two of the suspects were from other parts of The Netherlands.

The following video shows a Dutch-Moluccan neighborhood that got a visit by Moroccans:





Why is it that muslims cannot live in peace with literally anybody, not even with themselves?


Another topic at random. The mayor of the small town of Zaltbommel, in the East Netherlands, needs polic protection round the clock. The reason? He's been receiving threats from Moroccan youths.

From the Dutch satirical website GeenStijl:

And amidst all the mess a police van stands in front of Mayor Albert Van den Bosch (VVD). Since police earlier this week lifted two Moroccan shoplifters (17 and 18) from class, it's Alarm Phase 1 in Zaltbommel. The duo fled with their booty in the Philips School, whereupon the premises were evacuated on orders of the mayor. The reason? An overwhelmingly Moroccan gang, friends of the two, attacked the police. There was some scolding. A couple of persons were threatened off. Here and there a car window and/or mirror was smashed. Reason enough for Van Den Bosch to sweep the school's premises clean and issue a letter calling the Moroccans' behaviour "totally unacceptable". But the neighborhood knows since long that Moroccan youths are misbehaving systematically in Zaltbommel. Criminals, loverboys and other scum. Even GreenLeft in Zaltbommel is currently worrying. And thus police officers patrol 24/7 in front of the mayor's house. As a precaution. You never know.

Schiphol, near Amsterdam, is The Netherlands' prime International Airport. The fella you see on that still is, of course, the Xmasbomber, Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who was able to board a KLM/Air France flight on Schiphol while possessing 80 grams of high explosive (pentaerythritol tetranitrate). Security scanners would have detected the package containing the PETN, but of the 17 installed at Schiphol, none was operational.





Well, what do you want. Dutch terrorism experts are too busy writing scientific reports telling those dumb Dutch citizens, of which you see a fine collection below:





... that the REAL DANGER is a weirdly coiffed ashblonde guy who for some reason needs to walk around with a squad of bodyguards, has to sleep at different locations, and can see his wife only once a week.

As fate would have it, the guy who overpowered Abdulmutallab was just such a dumb Dutch citizen: 32-year old filmmaker Jasper Schuringa, a white heterosexual male. He's probably a rightwing extremist.

Well, maybe all's not that bad. It looks like the Wilders trial may turn out to become something altogether different from what Hollands PC cabal intended it to be.



MFBB.

CAREFUL WITH THAT PANDA EUGENE.

We are all coping on a daily basis with Al Qaeda terrorists, melting glaciers and anti-racism laws, but 87-year old Eugène Breynaert from Liedekerke, a small town in the province of East Flanders, Belgium, faces his own challenges: his Fiat Panda is 149cm wide; his garage's interior 155cm.





Better not buy a Humvee for his next. Besides, too much CO2 from that one.



MFBB.

"JUSTICE" IN THE NETHERLANDS, USSR STYLE.

First there was Pim Fortuyn, the charismatic and flamboyant sociologist, author and politician who warned as early as 1997 in his book Tegen de islamisering van onze cultuur [Against the islamization of our culture - MFBB] against the rise of islam, actively supported by the left, in western societies. On May 6, 2002, nine days prior to the Dutch parliamentary elections in which his party, the LPF (Lijst Pim Fortuyn) stood to win big, he was assassinated by a Green Left animal rights activist, Volkert Van Der Graaf, who shot several bullets in Fortuyn's head. Van der Graaf was arrested immediately therafter. He had the names and addresses of three other LPF candidates with him, and in his house bomb-making materials were found.





Then there was Theo Van Gogh, a controversial filmmaker, actor and columnist, the grandson of the brother of the famous post-impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh. A flamboyant character like Fortuyn, his criticism spared no one, but unlike Holland's catholics, protestants and jews, its muslims took that criticism a tad too serious. In 2003, together with the Somali refugee Ayaan Hirsi Ali, he made the film Submission, in which the plight of women under islamic rule is highlighted. For using fragments of the koran in it, he was assassinated in 2004 by Dutch-born Moroccan Mohammed Bouyeri, who emptied a gun in him (eight cartridges), slit his throat (almost decapitating him), stabbed his corpse with a knife on which a letter threatening Hirsi Ali was pinned, and pushed another, very long knife through him which almost reached the spine.





A third Dutchman who refused to swallow the multiculti lunacy emerged shortly therafter, the liberal politician Geert Wilders (keep in mind that in Europe the word liberal is still being used to describe a center-right political inclination that favors free markets, but holds progressive views on ethical questions). In the late nineties, as an MP for the liberal VVD, he began to profile himself as a critic of The Netherlands' lavish welfare support for people allegedly unfit for work and, simultaneously, as a sceptic of the multiculti walhalla as propagated by the left and centrists. It should be noted that Wilders as early as 1998 warned in the Tweede Kamer [the House - MFBB] against islamic fundamentalism, and called muslim fundamentalism, in a remarkable session in December 1999, "one of the biggest threats of the coming decade".

As post 9/11 the increasing islamization of The Netherlands became all the more visible, and especially Moroccan youths were, and are, instrumental in the skyrocketing criminality phenomenon in Dutch society, Wilders quickly gained notoriety with his crass viewpoints. In September 2004, after yet another conflict with the weak VVD leadership, he decided to start with his own party in Dutch politics, Groep Wilders. Shortly thereafter a first islamic video threatening his assassination 'because of mocking islam' was issued, and from October 2004 on, PRIOR to Van Gogh's murder, he is being protected by a six-man strong bodyguard and sleeps at a different location every night. Despite the serious limitations on his mobility, Wilders has managed to build his initial one-man fraction into a well-oiled political party, the PVV [Partij Voor Vrijheid, Party for Freedom - MFBB]. In between, he made a short (15 minutes) film named Fitna, which, using koranic verses, explores the inherent inhumanity and backwardness in the muslims' holy book. January 2009 brought the ruling of a kangaroo court which ordered prosecutors to try Wilders "for insulting muslim worshippers because of comparisons between islam and nazism". In November 2009, Dutch Interior Minister Guusje Ter Horst demanded, and got, a "scientific" report "providing scientific basis that Wilders was undermining social cohesion". And on December 4, 2009, Wilders was ordered to appear before the court on January 20, 2010, on charges of "fomenting to hate and discrimination against muslims because of their religion and fomenting to hate and discrimination against non-western foreigners and/or Moroccans because of their race".

And thus happened. That trial... is now going on, as we speak.



In the country that once prided itself for its freedom of speech, a rightwing politican is now ON TRIAL for nothing else than making anti-islamic statements.


(to be continued)



MFBB.

SATURDAY NIGHT SNOW PATROL, THE CALL, SUZANNE VEGA (UPDATE).

Looks like these guys have found the way to fame. I had a post about them a couple of weeks back with their 2007 hit Shut your eyes. This one, Just say yes, is some light stuff from their most recent album, Up to Now, which was first released in the States in October 2009 - I hope that's recent enough for Mr Ghost.





Then a now forgotten 1986 hit from San Francisco quintet The Call. "I still believe", from the album Reconciled. In the mid-eighties, Peter Gabriel was quite wild over this band. The following song was used in, amongst others, the soundtrack of the movie The Lost Boys (1987). Frontman is Michael Been (vocals, guitar).





Hey, nite all. Except YOU Al Zawahiri, Bert Anciaux, David Miliband, KSM & affiliates.



MFBB.

UPDATE: SUZANNE VEGA

Hey Al, Bert, David and Khalid, you arseholes you, just for now I take that back because I am SUCH a Good Person. Listen to this and try to get your miserable pathetic lives back on track. Suzanne Vega with In Liverpool.





She looks very, very much like my very first girlfriend, Nancy. God, what a beauty she was. Alas, it was not to be. Ahh, memories....

WEDNESDAY NIGHT OPEN THREAD... (UPDATE)

Things are looking okay, since some people just make a career of being clueless.


UPDATE: ADOLF LEARNS BROWN BEAT CROAKLEY.





MFBB.

TAX, LIES AND VIDEOTAPE.

Regular reader Joanne linked to this story from Herb Denenberg over at The Bulletin:

Obama, The Emperor, Has No Clothes

We’ve Reached The Tipping Point And His Programs Must Be Stopped
By HERB DENENBERG, The Bulletin
Saturday, January 16, 2010

"Every politician may break campaign promises. But even the most corrupt ones have limits. Mr. Obama has no limits. At the very core of his campaign, he claimed to be the great post-partisan, non-partisan unifier to bring us all together and listen to every side of every issue. He told us a gazillion times there are no Red States and Blue States but only the United States. He claimed a new politics, with openness and transparency in all matters. He was the great courier of hope and change. But that was just campaign rhetoric and even post-election rhetoric. He has demonstrated he is the exact opposite of his basic claims. He is highly partisan, content to shutout, shut up, and ignore Republican ideas and Republican voices. He rejects transparency, and is as secretive and opaque as possible. Other politicians have broken campaign promises, but never on a scale such as this involving the promises most central to their campaigns, and never before so openly and brazenly with so little regard for the citizens who were sold this fraudulent bill of campaign goods.

For proof of Mr. Obama’s breaking all of his core promises, look at what is going on with ObamaCare. Everyone probably remembers his promise, repeated at least eight times, that negotiations on the health-care bill would be televised on C-SPAN and would be streaming on the Internet. Among his statements: “We’re going to do all these negotiations on C-SPAN…We will work on the process publicly … These negotiations will be on C-SPAN.” He constantly explained that putting all negotiations (yes, he said, “all”) on C-SPAN would assure that everyone could see for themselves whether their Congressmen were putting forth arguments on behalf of insurance companies, drug companies, and other special interest groups or making arguments on behalf of most of their constituents. You can hear him make this promise by going to the Internet, where at least eight videos of Mr. Obama making that promise are collected (www.thenakedemperornews.com)..."

Indeed, let's check out:





Denenberg continues:

"This isn’t hope and change. This isn’t politics as usual. This is worse than politics as usual. This is the corrupt Chicago-style machine politics of thugs and intimidators. Recall that Mr. Obama came out of the corrupt Chicago machine and even refused to work with those trying to bring about its reformation. And now we see he has brought the corruption and thuggery of that style of politics to the White House. We not only have that style of politics in control in the White House, but even worse, its agenda is the radical, liberal, leftist, socialist program that runs contrary to American values and the very principles of our Founding Fathers. As we know, right before his election, Mr. Obama said he was going to fundamentally transform America. And that’s what he is doing, but transforming it by destroying its constitutional structure.

He is involved in an unprecedented expansion of government, explosion of spending, national debts and deficits, taxation, and regulation of every aspect of American life. His debt is unsustainable, and his expansion of government is so great that it is going to squeeze out and kill the private sector. That government expansion will also kill American entrepreneurship upon which America’s productivity has always depended. At the same time, it is contracting our liberties. A gargantuan government controls almost everything and that means the private market and the private citizen control almost nothing. His signature legislation on health-care is an attempt to control America and Americans. The Obama agenda is nothing more than the “road to serfdom.”

I have never made a secret of my dislike for the man who is currently President of the United States. 30 seconds in 2004 sufficed for me to see who this man of smoke and mirrors was. But it is not with glee that, six years later, I find my doubts and reservations confirmed. It's not that I can't hear or see the mistakes Republicans made; I tend to endorse the view of another longtime reader, Mark from Colorado who now goes under the moniker Spiral, that 'Democrats are eager socialists and Republicans reluctant ones' - or something like that. It is just that when you are offered the choice between a glass of piss and a glass of stale beer, imho the normal reaction should be to prefer the latter.

Mainstream Media have, to their eternal shame, played a crucial role in getting this Fraud, because that is what he is and I don't care if I hurt people's feelings, in the White House. Always a keen observer of US politics, insofar that was of course possible in pre-Internet times, I cannot remember a single timeframe in my life when the media so openly waged war on the previous President, while at the same time so lavishly heaping praise on the newcomer. Let us just observe how MSM painted the economic performance of the Bush government in midterm, and how this influenced Americans' perceptions of the economy. The following is an exerpt from a Pew Research Center report, dated September 15, 2005:

By two-to-one (37%-18%), more believe the economy will be in worse shape a year from now than believe things will improve. In August 2004, just 9% said they expected the economy to worsen over the succeeding 12 months. That number doubled to 18% in January, and has doubled again (to 37%).

The public's assessments of current economic conditions, while negative, have not declined since May.

About three-in-ten (31%) rate economic conditions as good or excellent, while about twice as many view things as only fair or poor (68%). Opinion was similar in May (32% good/excellent, 67% only fair/poor).

And yet, when Democrats took over Congress in January 2007, average unemployment under Bush had been... 4.5%. In that month, it was actually 4.4%, the culmination of 55 consecutive months of job creation - real job creation that is, and certainly not jobs "saved". Budget deficits had been shrinking substantially for three years in a row, stood at 162 billion US$, and had not the housing bubble burst - for which a nefarious combination of greedy banksters and Democratic legislators bear the key responsibility - it might have reached zero by now.

Three years after the Democrats took control of Congress, and one year after they took control of the White House.... the unemployment has risen to 10%. As for the budget deficit, it has... grown by a factor 10 and stands now at 1.58 TRILLION DOLLARS.

Suppose that Bush would preside over a budget deficit of 1.58 Trillion dollars, would the media still be throwing flowers at him like they do with Hussein? And for those who think that the latter was simply the heir to the former, I can assure you that when a government implements 787 billion dollar "stimulus" bills with money which it does not have, a jump from minus 162 billion to minus 1.58 trillion is rather quickly made. Just look at that graph below. Look how rosy the predictions are post 2010. Honey, I shrunk the budget deficit. Now, of that deep abyss there, almost puncturing this very blog itself, you can be certain. It is real. Of the climb up later on, well, that was drawn by the same guys who assured you unemployment rate would not be higher than 8%, if only the stimulus bill was implemented.





We should no longer mince our words.

This man has to go. He is a clear and present danger not only for the United States, but even for world stability. On the road to busting him out of the White House, Massachusetts voters play a key role today.

I hope they will rise to the challenge.



MFBB.

CREEPING ISLAMIZATION IN BELGIUM.

It's happening in a less obvious way than in our neigboring countries, but it's happening, alright. Via François Desouche, a photo of a commercial panel in a Brussels shopping gallery.





So what you see here is an ad for the 'solden', in French 'soldes', with which in Belgium a particular period in early summer or winter is indicated during which massive discounts are advertised. I wouldn't know the appropriate wording in English but "Bargain Time" is a decent shot. Anyway... this panel is not in Molenbeek, with its 78% muslims. It's not in Kuregem or Anderlecht. No, it's in the commercial heart of the centre of Brussels, in the City2 shopping gallery. Arabic, for God's sake.


This news is already one month old, but I have my reasons for mentioning it now. From Belgian daily De Standaard, December 15, 2009:

Belgium: Mosque asks to allow call to prayer

The alderman college of Beringen (Belgium) will decide this week on the issue of loudspeakers for the Fatih mosque.

The Fatih mosque asked the city to allow them to call the faithful to prayer. They want to hang loudspeakers outside the mosque so that the muezzin - which calls the faithful to prayer - will also be heard out in the streets. The Fatih mosque in Beringen is one of the few Belgian mosques with a minaret.

Mosque chairman Yilmaz Centurk would only confirm yesterday that the request was made. Selahattin Koçak (SP.A), alderman in Beringen: "I hope that we can make a collegial decision with a full alderman college already this week. Until then I will make no comment, although I think that you can guess my point of view."

Beringen's mayor Marcel Mondelaers (CD&V) was not available for comment yesterday, but according to party member Anne Cuypers, second alderman of Beringen, the CD&V hasn't yet taken a stand. "We're first asking the advice of all instances, such as the environmental service and the police regulations relating to sound pollution, and should also look at how often they want to do the call'...

The Turkish Fatih mosque in Beringen. Can you imagine that the pitiful remnant of christianity in Turkey is allowed to build a church this large?


And that is how it goes... inch by inch, they are crawling forward, recknoning on demographics and exhaustion from indigenous locals. We see here a deliberate strategy that is being implemented, a soft ethnic cleansing. If this thing gets through, what do you think the chances are that non-Turkish Belgians will keep living around a mosque of which the minarets' loudspeakers awake them at five in the morning with the appalling, heinous sound of a muezzin calling muslims to prayer?

None.

Flemings will move away.

They will sell their house for a fraction of its worth, since no other Flemings will want to buy it. Guess who will move in? Yes, you guess right. And what is going to be the result? In fifteen-twenty years, Beringen will be "Fleming-rein".

Among true DowneastBlog readers, the name Beringen may sound a bell. Indeed, a little over three years ago, on December 4, 2006, I had a post about this town titled "In Beringen, it was Kristallnacht again". Here are some exerpts:

"BRUSSELS - Last Thursday, November 30, a group of Jewish orthodox youths was pelted with stones and chased away from the youth hostel they were staying in. The agressors were Belgian "youths" of Turkish origin.

On Thursday evening a group of around sixty youths from an Orthodox Jewish school in Antwerp arrived at 8.30 pm in Youth Hostel "De Kompel" in Beringen, an old mining town in the province of Limburg, eastern Belgium. They had been mountainbiking in Valkenburg, right across the border in Holland, and wanted to stay in Beringen for the night, planning to visit Beringen's Mining Museum the next day before resuming their journey.

At 9pm a group of Turkish youths gathered in the vicinity of the youth hostel. They shouted anti-Jewish slogans and besieged the hostel, throwing stones and pieces of concrete through the windows. Police arrived on the scene "to ease the tensions" and by 10pm "the situation was under control". Thereupon a school teacher accompanying the chassidic youngsters decided not to stay for the night in Beringen and fetch the boys back to Antwerp by bus.

Ten youths of Turkish origin, six of them minors, were arrested and led before a Court in Hasselt, where "alternative punishments" were meted out: they must pay for the damage, offer apologies to the jewish youths and were sentenced to 30 hours of community service..."

(continuation of the December 4, 2006 post):

"Beringen is a community with a lot of Turkish immigrants. In fact, during the municipal elections the main contest for the mayor's seat ook place between Marcel Mondelaers, of the Christian Democratic Party CD & V, and a resident of Turkish origin, Selahattin Koçak, of the Socialist Party SP.a. Koçak stood a very good chance of becoming the first mayor of immigrant origin of a Belgian town, but his socialist party was in extremis beaten by the christian democrats with a difference of... 0.3%. Given the fact that indigenous Belgians, with a fertility rate of 1.5 children per woman, are on the road to extinction while the Turkish community with 3.5 children per woman is on the rise, Marcel Mondelaers may very well be Beringen's very last native Belgian mayor. Note, also, that Mr. Koçak preferred to throw in his lot with a socialist party. As I have already mentioned ad nauseam on these pages, it's striking how immigrants from a culture with archconservative views on the role of women in society, homosexual people, abortion and euthanasia and what not, time and again choose the side of leftist parties with views and values diametrically opposed to theirs.

So, although Mr. Koçak narrowly lost, in Beringen he remains the pater familias, so to say, of the Turkish immigrants, who voted massively for him. In my humble opinion, and knowing that this gang of racaille will offer excuses to the Jewish boys the day Eid-al-Fitr falls on Easter, it would have been a proper reaction of Mr. Koçak to apologize for the behaviour of the little stinker buggers.

But instead, it was Mayor Mondelaers who apologized. Again, from newspaper "De Gentenaar":


BERINGEN - "The town of Beringen offers her apologies to the Jewish community... We offer the group of teenagers the possibility to resume the planned visit to the town of Beringen. We want to prove that in spite of this incident the town remains a hospitable and tolerant place." - dixit Marcel Mondelaers, Mayor of Beringen.

Have you got an idea what is going here? Know what I see? I see a christian democrat mayor and a town council who, since December 15, have apparently decided to let the matter of loudspeakers on minarets rest, for it was really not smart of those Fatih guys and Koçak to bring it up right after the Swiss referendum on minarets. I've been checking news from Beringen for one month now, and it's eerily quiet. No coincidence, take it from moi. Remember that the issue would be brought before the town council in the third week of December. We're one month further now, and there are forces at work to keep a low profile for now, that's all. They must have gotten a bit scared from all the commotion the matter raised in the Flemish press. Now, Mr. Mondelaers is at best halfway his term and it's going to be his last... as it is also going to be the last of a native Belgian. So even if the loudspeaker issue is defeated in this town college, what do you think the chances are it will pass when Selahattin Koçak is mayor of Beringen?

Take a GOOD, HARD LOOK at this scoundrel:



Selahattin Koçak, alderman now, Beringen mayor in the future. A guy who couldn't bring himself to utter ONE WORD of an apology for muslim scum, from HIS COMMUNITY, who chased away peaceful Jewish schoolchildren on bikes passing through a town rapidly islamicizing.

Now, that was 2006.

In 2009 they try to sneak loudspeakers on minarets through.

What's it gonna be in 2012? 2015? 2020?

One last thing.

Selahattin Koçak is a member of the Flemish Socialist Party SP.a.

But, I suspect you suspected that already.



MFBB.

HAITI AGAIN - APPEAL FOR HELP.

I actually intended to do a small post on another subject but the urgency of the situation in Haiti trumped that. As it is now crystal-clear what a terrible disaster has befallen the small Caribbean nation I'd like to once again encourage people to donate, even if it is only a small sum. I think this is not the time to hide behind arguments that your support will never reach its intended target. Even if one would know that only 10% of a donation would come through, that's still better than nothing. Now, there ARE organizations out there that are doing prodigious work and where a gift is certainly making a difference. If you are still suspicious, just do some research and take your pick.

In the meantime I'd like to recommend either the Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders. I certainly have my issues with the Belgian branch Artsen zonder Grenzen/Médecins sans Frontières, and especially some of their leadership, but what is clear is that their field workers are doing a hell of a job.

These people need your donation in order to work, so please...





To make it easier for Flemings or our friends the Dutch, click here. Walloons and Frenchmen, click here s.v.p.

Thank you for your gift. You acted like a human being.


MFBB.

SATURDAY NIGHT DAVE DAVIES, AMY MCDONALD.

If you thought Geert Wilders' haircut was weird, how about this one? The Kinks' Dave Davies with Death of a Clown from 1967. Immortal. Priceless song. The adding of the ethereal background vocals was a stroke of genius.





If you were born past 1980, you gotta know these guys were legendary. Although to be sure, this is a Dave Davies single rather than a Kinks single.


Fast forward to 2007. Amy McDonald was born in 1987, but I'm sure she's well aware of The Kinks. Must be aeons since I heard such a beautiful contralto voice. This is the life is the fourth and most successful single drawn from the Scottish singer/songwriter's debut album with the same name.





Good looking chi... erm girl also.



MFBB.

SNAPSHOTS FROM FRANCE, AD 2010...

Marseille, December 24, 2009:



Even Le Monde is noting the extremely ominous fact of the government policy of downplaying the torching of 40,000 plus cars a year:

Alors que l'année 2005, marquée par les trois semaines d'émeutes dans les banlieues, avait été qualifiée d'exceptionnelle (45 588 véhicules incendiés, dont 10 000 pendant les émeutes), la tendance est restée globalement défavorable, très loin des statistiques évoquées en 1999 par le chef de l'Etat. Encore 44 157 voitures brûlées en 2006, 46 814 en 2007, un peu plus de 40 496 en 2008 et probablement plus de 40 000 en 2009, si on en croit les premiers chiffres rapportés par Le Figaro.

Translation:

"While the year 2005, marked by three weeks of large scale suburbian riots, was particularly dreadful (45,588 cars torched, of which 10,000 during the riots), the evolution has by and large remained unfavorable [Le Monde does not seem to realize that in an article dealing with the downplaying of these events, it is itself using soothing language - MFBB], and a long way from the stats made public in 1999 by the Head of State. Still 44,157 cars burned in 2006, 46,814 in 2007, a little more than 40,496 in 2008 and probably more than 40,000 in 2009, if one has to believe the numbers reported by Le Figaro."


These Le Figaro numbers are fairly correct. It don't take geniuses to produce them, they are simply the result of meticulously composing the national total by snuffing out local, confirmed reports from all over France. In short, we have here the appalling fact that in the course of 5 years... mobs composed of muslim youths (Algerians, Moroccans and immigrants from former colonial French West Africa)... have destroyed in excess of 45,588 + 44,157 + 46,814 + 40,496 + 40,000 =

217,055 cars

If you think the "downward" trend of the past two years is positive, think again. While there is an official governmental blackout on the burnings, French Police has been issued orders to try to stifle the hordes' onslaught. So in the course of the past 5 years, there has been a steady evolution in the deployment of police, a fact that has certainly contributed to keeping the tally at least stable. Take e.g. the fact that the number of cars destroyed on Ney Year's Eve, 1,137, was 10 (ten) lower than the previous year... but then there has been a surge of 10,000 police and riot police vis-a-vis last year, 50,000 compared to 40,000. And double the number of arrests was made, over 500. You have to wonder what it would have been if the French authorities had deployed the same number of police as the year before.





The photo above shows part of the cars torched on New Year's Eve 2010 in the eastern French city of Strasbourg. I just wonder what is more scary... muslim mobs taking over French streets... or the French at large seeming to insist nothing is going on.


Then there is the Grand National Debate on French Identity, the brainchild of French Integration Minister Eric Besson. As I have asserted here before on these pages, if a nation needs a national debate so that its citizens can find out what they stand for, you're in deep shit. You're in deeper shit still if the dork who comes up with the idea states that...

"France is neither a people, nor a language, nor a territory, nor a religion, it is a conglomerate of peoples who want to live together. There is no ethnic Frenchman, there is only an ethnically mixed France."

A French blogger notes that...

"...Besson actually said: "There is only a France of 'métissage'", i.e., "there is only a France where the blood is mixed." Besson has written off completely the existence of a white, European France."

However, when you look at the national French soccer team, Besson's statement may not be that far off the mark:




Where have all the whiteys gone? I count only two of them, nos. 23, Gregory Coupet, and 13, Anthony Reveillere.

Anyway, am I the only one to notice Besson looks like an effeminate pansy? Okay, I KNOW judging people by their looks is a tricky thing, but still... Just like I'm wondering where the whiteys in the French national soccer team are these days, I'm wondering where the Leclercs are. Compare this fella's façade with monsieur Besson's:





Général Philippe Leclerc, WWII commander of the French 2ème Division Blindée (2nd armoured division), which post Normandy gave hell to the Germans. Guy was one tough cookie. After the Nazi surrender, Leclerc met a squad of Frenchmen who had fought on the Eastern Front as troopers of the 33rd Waffen SS Grenadier division, the Charlemagne. He asked them what they were doing in German uniform. One of the prisoners replied: "Et vous mon général, qu'est-ce que vous faites dans un uniforme américain?" Leclerc reportedly had the prisoners lined up and shot. To put this colorful character into context, it may help if you know that he was born on the 22nd November 1902 in Belloy (Picardy) as Philippe de Hauteclocque, the fifth of six children born to Count and Countess Adrien and Marie-Thérèse Van der Cruisse de Waziers. Originally from Artois (a formerly Flemish region heh heh, hence the "Van der Cruisse"), Leclercs family came from a long line of nobility dating back to the 12th century, which participated in the crusades, served at Fontenoy and Wagram, and held office as town councillors. The later general spent his childhood in a rural and traditional environment, where he developed an exceptional toughness as well as a passion for hunting. Also, an ardent patriotism and a Christian faith anchored in Roman Catholicism, which was reinforced through his education by the Jesuit fathers of Providence in Amiens.

We can assume that Général Leclerc never suffered from an identity crisis. We can also assume that if he would be in charge of French Police, car insurance premiums in Fwance would drop like the temperature in Iowa in the first week of January 2010. Perhaps we can even assume that if he were alive today and encountered the man who wants to strip the Fwenchmen of the conviction that they gave the world the Cathedral of Chartres, Gay-Lussac's gas laws, Diderot, Proust, Monet and Manet, Brie and Camembert cheeses, fine booze made from particular white and red grapes, and Citroen cars (as long as they last, that is) he would have him put against a wall and shot.

Wait a minute, did I say that out loud?

Whatever. Speaking of identity, here's a video of a couple of chaps who don't suffer from lack of it. Look at them, they are literally tripping over each other in their ardent desire, according to monsieur Besson, to live together with christian whiteys such as Jean, Claude, Laetitia, Alain, Amélie and Brigitte. Barbès neighborhood, Paris, Christmas day:





And check out our pal Galliawatch from time to time.

Bonne nuit à tous et toutes.



MFBB.

HAITI: APPEAL FOR HELP.

After having become aware of the scale of the terrible disaster in Haiti, a post like this one seems appropriate. Close to 100,000 dead, and of course, as bad luck would have it, an epicenter at only 50 kilometers from the capital Port-au-Prince, where the risk of people getting trapped under collapsing buildings was greatest.

Check out your national news sources, you will quickly find a link guiding you to a donation page. If you don't immediately find one, maybe the International Red Cross's site is okay for you.

If you live in Belgium, you might want to donate to Artsen Zonder Grenzen/Médecins sans Frontières. Flemings can follow this link, Walloons this one. I'm pretty sure a gift to AzG/MsF is still rather well spent. I just wired a small amount, please do so too.





People are lying out in the streets. They are desperate, many lost everything. Donate, please. Please.



MFBB.

DREAMING OF SNOWDONIA...

After all the clatter and the buzz and the frantic activities of another working day, I find myself dreaming of walking...




... here.


Snowdonia, or Eryri for Welshmen, is a region in North Wales, and at the same time a national park of 838 square miles (some 2,170 km2). The highest mountain is the Snowdon, 1,085 meters (3,560 ft), which in Welsh is called Yr Wyddfa. What a beautiful name.




Should be a piece of cake. Wait...


MFBB.


P.S.: pics stolen from Wikipedia. Being an outlaw comes in quite handy.

SATURDAY NIGHT MANIC STREET PREACHERS, LIVING COLOUR, ROBERT PALMER, FUN LOVIN CRIMINALS.

Probably the best Welsh band ever, Manic Street Preachers seemed to emerge out of nowhere in 1992 with the smash hit Motorcycle Emptiness. An alternative rock band from Blackwood, Wales, they had been around though since 1986. Members to this day are James Dean Bradfield (vocals, guitars), Nicky Wire (bass, occasional vocals) and Sean Moore (drums, backing vocals, occasional trumpet). A fourth member, Richey Edwards, mysteriously disappeared on February 1st, 1995.





Living Colour is Living Proof (well... perhaps not anymore) that black bands can make great rock. Nothingness, from the 1993 album Stain. Trivial fact: the singer, Corey Glover, had a B-role in Oliver Stoned's Vietnam movie Platoon.





Then a number from the Gentleman Rocker, Robert Palmer. Johnny and Mary, from the 1980 album Clues.





Finally We have all the time in the world, the marvellous Fun Lovin Criminals version from the 1996 album Come find yourself. The original is by Louis Armstrong. This number brings back melancholic memories from a time long past when I used to sit, on saturday night evenings in summer, on a bar stool in my favorite pub, De Drei Deurkisj (Flemish slang for The Three Little Doors), enjoying the Holy Trinity: a Cigarette, a Coffee, and a Humo magazine. And somehow expecting the quintessential female to walk in and surrender herself to me.





At some point I had to forget romantic stuff like that. But no way I was going to surrender. I invaded Poland instead.


Nite all.


MFBB.

GLOBAL WARMING HITTING EUROPE HARD.

NASA's Terra satellite captured the UK on January 7, as it was coping with a shitload of Global Warming:



The clouds you see have a silver lining though: PM Gordon Brown has suggested to cut Britain's carbon dioxide emissions with 42% by 2020. The estimated £500 billion this scheme entails will ruin the UK's economy, but that's a small price to pay for preventing those precious glaciers from melting.

France's famous landmark the Mont Saint-Michel is now also accessible on foot when it's high tide:



Germany expects the Mother of all Snowstorms the coming weekend. 40cm snow is expected in the south and east. Biggest problem's going to be the wind however, which may heap up the white powder in veritable snow dunes.

In Poland, on January 4 the tally of people frozen dead had reached 122, and the country's main stream, the Vistula, is frozen over.

And in Belgium, Outlaw Mike hopes the fuel oil truck can make it up the slippery hill where he lives.


Nite all!



MFBB.

POSITIVE NEWS FROM FRANCE: THIS TIME, ONLY 1,137 CARS TORCHED ON NEW YEAR'S EVE.

Positive trend in France: the number of cars torched on New Year's Eve is only 1,137 this time round. Or, ten down from last year. Those who claim this has something to do with the deployment of a record number of 45,000 police and riot forces and 50,000 firefighters are either incurable pessimists or else RACISTS, for surely the downward trend hints at the greater influence of muslim moderates among France's famous "youths".





France's Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux is certainly not a racist:

“Globalement, nous sommes soulagés. Il n’y a pas eu d’accidents graves, et il y a une rupture de la tendance à la hausse du nombre de voitures brûlées, déclare au Monde le ministre de l’intérieur Brice Hortefeux. La baisse est même très sensible dans l’agglomération parisienne.”

Translation:

"Taking it all together, we are relieved. There have been no grave accidents, and the rising trend of cars torched has been curbed [declared Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux to Le Monde newspaper]. The downward trend is even very discernible in the Parisian region."

A li'l movie from Chalon/Saone:

Incendie véhicules au Stade 01/01/2010, 0h05 Chalon/Saône
door infos-chalon

In Strasbourg the rightwing UMP opposition party is nitpicking, as per usual:

"Alors que les autorités parlaient d'une Saint-Sylvestre plutôt calme, avec 61 voitures incendiées dans la Communauté Urbaine, dont 55 à Strasbourg, l'opposition municipale UMP-Nouveau Centre et indépendants évoque "95 véhicules brûlés, sans compter les feux par propagation, 32 feux de poubelles et 25 feux d'habitations."

Translation:

"While the authorities talked of a New Year's Eve rather calm, with 61 cars burned in the greater metropolitan area, with 55 in Strasbourg, the opposition of UMP-New Center and independents claim that 95 cars were torched, without counting the fires resulting from spreadouts, 32 burned waste bins and 25 fires in houses."

And... what about the indigenous Fwenchmen partying into 2010? Le Figaro writes that this year, there were 200,000 people celebrating New Year's Eve on the Champs Elysées, vs. 500,000 the year before: une nuit de la Saint-Sylvestre calme. You wonder where these 300,000 missing ones partied this time. Stayed at home perhaps, fearing for CO2 pollution from their fireworks?







This is but a small blog, but in years to come... do not say I haven't warned.

MFBB.

ISLAMIC EXTREMIST ATTEMPTS TO HACK KURT WESTERGAARD TO PIECES WITH AXE: MODERATE MUSLIMS SPEAK OUT.

The year 2010 did not really start well for Kurt Westergaard, the Danish cartoonist who became famous for his cartoon of a bomb-turbaned Muhammad. At around 10pm on Friday the 1st, a 28-year old Somali broke into his house, and had it not been for the fact that Westergaard had the time to lock himself up in a panic room with his 5-year old granddaughter, he would have been chopped to pieces by the murderous fanatic.

As it was, the lunatic was unable to smash the steel door of the panic room and all he could do was scream "BLOOD!!!!" and "REVENGE!!!" at the terrified occupants. After about three minutes Danish police arrived, alerted by Westergaard via an emergency button. Before the lunatic was shot in the hand and shoulder, he attacked an officer by throwing his axe at him. The officer was lucky to survive.

Westergaards would-be assassin had been living in Denmark since he was 16. As insane as it may sound, he had a Danish residence permit while the authorities KNEW he was a member of al-Shahaab, Al Qaeda's Somali branch. In September 2009, Kenyan police foiled an al-Shahaab plot to kill US Foreign Secretary Hillary Clinton who was staying in Nairobi's Hotel Intercontinental; one of the five terrorists arrested reportedly was... the Somali who tried to kill the Danish cartoonist. From Kenya's Daily Nation, September 5, 2009:

"The threats were neutralised a week to the Agoa meeting in combined efforts by the military and other security agencies,” the official said. “The operation in Nairobi netted five crucial suspects, one of whom carries Danish identification documents but is believed to be a Somali national. The other four, one of whom is a woman, hold Kenyan identification documents believed to be fake. Investigations into their identity and plan are on.”

I assume that when I state that the very lenient sentence the terrorist received in Kenya - seven weeks in prison - may have had something to do with the fact that Kenya's PM, Raila Odinga, is a muslim and an acquaintance of a certain president who says one should never jump too fast to conclusions, it must be my bad character. Anyway, once a free man the guy was allowed to move back to Denmark where he could roam around freely, undisturbed by the Danish authorities, since, according to an official, "they did not have the means to follow him around all the time, given that, although he was known to be dangerous, he had not committed any actual crimes yet."

The Somali now has a defense lawyer, a certain Niels Christian Strauss. Mr. Strauss matter of factly told journalists outside the court that "he had urged his client to remain silent during the hearing to give him more time to examine the evidence." Sounds familiar, no?

Now, back to the Middle East. More precisely to the modern, "liberal" gulf states. This is how the moderate daily Gulf News reported on the attempted assassination of Kurt Westergaard in its January 3 edition:





From the second paragraph:

"There is no doubt that the cartoon was deeply offensive to all Muslims. For his work, Westergaard is regarded with the greatest possible contempt by all who believe in the true faith of Islam."

...we learn that the issue of the cartoon made by a septagenarian of a murderous warlord who fucked a nine-year old girl as well as the wife of his adopted son is, five years after publication of the cartoon, still far more relevant than the murder attempt. Then:

"Targeting him, however, is descending to the level of a contemptuous and despicable man."

Yeah. Right. So chopping a man to pieces equals drawing an offensive cartoon. Let's continue:

"This revenge attack merely again serves to highlight the insult wrought by Danish newspapers, stoking the embers of insult with the oxygen of hatred. Westergaard and his ilk are better forgotten."

Fair and balanced reporting.


My oh my. Who needs al-Shaheed terrs from Mogadiscio when you can have moderates from Abu Dhabi? I think the last word should go to Thomas Landen in The Brussels Journal, who writes:

"Two years ago, Westergaard’s wife was fired from the kindergarten where she used to work. She was sacked because several parents expressed concern for the safety of their children. It is not hard to understand the worries of the parents of the children Mrs. Westergaard cared for. These parents were afraid that one morning some axe-wielding barbarians would show up at the door, screaming “Heeere’s Muhammed!” Their concern is reasonable, because everyone knows what they are capable of. Nevertheless, instead of kicking out Mrs. Westergaard, as the kindergarten did at the request of the worried parents, the parents should ask themselves whether the time has come to kick out the barbarians within the gates."

Nite all. My God what a madhouse the world has become.



MFBB.

SATURDAY NIGHT WANG CHUNG, MASSIVE ATTACK.

To live and die in LA, eighties hit by the now obscure seeming band Wang Chung. It's from the soundtrack of the movie with the same style, starring Willem Dafoe. While playing an impressing role, Dafoe's real breakthrough would have to wait a short while yet, until Platoon came out.





Then Unfinished Sympathy, a hit by the rather faceless group Massive Attack.





Hey, nite all.


MFBB.

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2010!!!

DowneastBlog wishes all its readers of good will, wherever they may be, a Happy and Prosperous 2010!!!


MFBB.