LAST SUMMER PICS.

Hereafter a collection of pics I took during summer. Tank nutter that I am, I start with a not too good photo of a British WWI tank in the, cough, Royal Museum of the Armed Forces and of Military History, Brussels. I have forever had problems with distinguishing between the Marks I and IX, them looking basically all the same: designed to cross trenches. As I swept past it - my mother-in-law might have been waiting for yours truly in the nearby Museum for Egyptology - I failed to have a good look at the identification plaque. I suspect however this is a Mark V because of the unditching beam and the rails on top of the vehicle. In any case, it's a "male" one, since it's main armament consists of two 6-pounder guns. Female landships had four Vickers .303 machineguns for main armament and also weighed about a ton less (typically 28 vs 29 tonnes). If it's a Mark V, power must have been provided by a 19 litres Ricardo petrol engine developing 150HP. You can imagine that with such a weight, speed cannot have been more than a crawl, and indeed, on good, hard, level going top speed was about 5mph.





In the same museum there's an aeronautics hall, and this is an imho reasonably good pic of a good old Auntie Ju, a Junkers Ju-52, the mainstay of the German Air Transport Arm during World War II.





Very sturdy planes. IIRC, three still served with the Swiss Air Force in the early eighties. Of course, they come nowhere near the record of the Dakota/C47/DC3, of which there's still even piston versions in use. I write "even piston versions" because the Basler company (Basler Turbo Conversions of Oshkosh, Wisconsin) has developed a successful turboprop variant, the Basler BT-67. It's two Pratt and Whitney turboprops develop 1,624 HP each giving the plane a top speed of 403km/h.


View of the Flemish town of Ronse, from the hills surrounding it in the south, more precisely in a hamlet called Hauts Sarts. This is the border region between Flanders and Wallonia.





It had been some time since my wife and I visited the famous classical music festival La Nuit Musicale de Beloeil. It is held every year some weekend in August, in the huge park of the Chateau de Beloeil, in southwest Wallonia. Beloeil Castle has been the residence of the Princes of Ligne since the fourteenth century. Here's an aerial view (not my photo - stole it from GlobalView or something):





But this is a pic of mine. Throughout the evening, they put all kinds of spotlights on the chateau's façade, which makes for spectacular effects.





Actually, this time round, I wasn't that much impressed by the répertoire. The motto this year was "Nature and composers" and the logo a piano with its wing represented by a tree lead. Jesus H. Christ, wherever you look these days econutters seem to be trying to slap you half dead with green themes. I like it more when La Nuit Musicale focused on the oeuvre of one composer in particular. There were however a few good acts around, most notably the top act which as usual took place on the opposite side (to the chateau) of the large water basin, which is called the Bassin de Neptune. There, the Chamber Orchestra "Ars Viva - Camerata del Monte" and the Clerlande Choir performed fragments from Franz Joseph Haydn's famous Die Schoepfung (The Creation). Indeed, the oratorio The Creation, considered by many to be Haydn's masterpiece, is written to be performed by a large classical orchestra, a four part chorus, and three vocal soloists. The soloists were Jasmine Daoud for soprano, Patrick Kabongo for the tenor, and Charles Dekeyser for bass. I am sorry for the absolutely lousy quality of the following video. Next time I'll try to do more my best, even when Sean Connery in The Rock said that losers always do their best and that winners go home and f*ck the Beauty Queen.





Luckily, the booklet guiding us through the park's performances was accompanied by a CD, which contained amongst others the beautiful Vltava part of Bedrich Smetana's Ma Vlast ('My Fatherland').








Vltava (German: Die Moldau, which is the river running through Prague) is the best known composition of Ma Vlast, with which Smetana made his fame. Smetana was an early advocate of Czech(oslovakian) independence. He has gotten somewhat forgotten now - most foreign commentators now judging Antonin Dvorak the most famous Czech composer.


Nice view of the town of Lobbes in the Walloon province of Hainaut. Lobbes grew around its abbey, which was for some time, around 1000 AD, of great importance for the Prince-Bishopric of Liège, like medieval Flanders one of the proto-elements of what became Belgium in 1830.





These are the so-called "Jardins suspendus the Thuin" (the hanging gardens of Thuin), a nice town built on a crest overlooking the Sambre river in central Wallonia.





At the end of August, we spent an afternoon in the historical village of Aubechies. There's well built replicas of Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age houses there as well as several Roman buildings - a villa, a temple, a hospital. I'm a bit puzzled here. As we went there, there was a demo going on of guys re-enacting Roman legionnaires, more precisely chaps from the 10th Legion "Gemina". On one of the pics their shields sport the inscription "Leg X Gemina Belgae". But to the best of my knowledge, 10th Legion was not permanently garrisoned in Old Belgium. Check out the 10th's history here.





Anyways, here's a video, again a rather lousy one, of Gemina Belgae's re-enactors. Hold out till the end, you'll see the quite impressive reconstruction of a Gallo-Roman temple or fanum.







Tryout pic which turned out to be relatively good. A shot over a field of the tiny village of Bassilly, western Wallonia. Bassilly is part of a larger municipality named - I kid you not - Silly.





Well, it's not so bad as the Austrian village of Fucking, isn't it?

And a photo of the ruins of the old Abbey of Aulne, a Cistercian monastery burned by French revolutionary troops at the end of the 18th century. It is beautifully situated in a lush green valley of the Sambre river, central Wallonia.





Nite.



MFBB.

WATCH AND WEEP.

CBN on the islamization of France.




Pat Condell on the Ground Zero mosque.





MFBB.

SATURDAY NIGHT SAVAGE GARDEN, ROXY MUSIC.

In 1996, Aussie soft rock band Savage Garden had a hit with To the Moon and Back.






Roxy Music with Still falls the rain. I first learned to know this beautiful number upon listening to the 1983 collection album The Atlantic Years 1973-1980.





Whoever uploaded this film saw fit to paste a fragment from the 1946 flick Dragonwyck as entry. Fail to understand why.




MFBB.

HOLIDAY PICS WALES/IRELAND (3).

I don't like to do it this way, but I feel I have to post something. If it's just photos plus some scant info, so be it. Ideally, I'd like to flesh this post out thoroughly, since there's a lot to tell - especially with regards to the little monument somewhere down below. But... time. Back in business for only four weeks, and again completely worn out by the time I get home. Anyway, here's:


.... this lovely beach along the N70 between Glanbeg and Brackaharagh, Iveragh Peninsula, County Kerry. Yes, this too is Ireland. The kids had a great time. In the distance, you can see Beara Peninsula, which is partly County Kerry and partly County Cork.





... in Portmagee, only twenty-five or so kloms further north, the weather had turned slightly - it was overcast but still dry - and we crossed the bridge linking Iveragh Peninsula with the small island of Valentia. And there, not far beyond the bridge, stood this humble monument. It commemmorates the departure from exactly this spot, in 1866, of the then greatest ship of its time, the Great Eastern, as it started out on its epic voyage across the Atlantic to lay the first truly successful transatlantic telegraph cable. If you enlarge the picture, you may see what the cross sections of the different cables looked like.





Now, the amazing story of the first transatlantic telegraph connection is also the story of two exceptional men, namely an American, Cyrus W. Field, and a Brit, Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Cyrus Field became active in a New York paper factory at the very young age of fifteen. Barely five years later he's shareholder. At thirty-three he's rich enough to pull out of management of the company and focus on a thrilling project: laying the first Transatlantic telegraph cable. Since neither Washington nor London come forward with money - despite the fact that they full well acknowledge the tremendous benefits of a telegraphic connection between the Old and New World - Field founds a risk capital fund himself. Samuel Morse and Werner Siemens provide technical assistance for the concept and the fabrication of the cable, which is is ready in 1857. One problem though: at 2,500 tons it's too heavy even for the biggest freighters. By then however, both the UK and US governments are willing enough to provide warships, and since neither navy possesses a big enough vessel either, a solution iss found whereby the cable is spooled over several drums stored on two vessels, HMS Agamemnon and USS Niagara. Don't ask me how this worked out in practice, I suppose the cable was partitioned over two drums, interconnected, one for each warship, and it first began to roll of one of the ships. I reckon further that when the drum on that ship was spooled off, the drum on the other one started to feed.

Anyway, it was all to no avail. Starting out from Ireland over the so-called "Telegraphic Plateau" (it got its name, rather optimistically, from US Navy Lt. Matthew F. Maury who first charted the elevated seaback running from southwest Ireland to Newfoundland), the ships come in bad weather after a short time, and a human error causes the cable to break.

In summer 1858 Field launches another attempt, but this time the Agamemnon and Niagara, each with a drum with half of the cable, meet in the middle of the Atlantic. The crews' plan is to connect two ends, and start from there in opposite directions. Bad weather postpones the start till June 26, then both vessels set off. Technicians regularly exchange messages to test the connection. No superfluous luxury, for no less than three times there is a rupture and they have to get back and reconnect. Finally, on August 7, the task seems to have been accomplished. However, signals get through so weak that it takes decoders 16 hours to decipher the Morse of Queen Victoria's 103 words long message to the US President. The chief electrician thinks stepping up the voltage from 600 Volts to 2,000 is a swell idea: the copper wires immediately burn through and this first unsatisfying connection is history, after three months and 732 messages.

I don't know how Cyrus Field did not become a mental wreck, but that did indeed not happen. To the contrary, barely had his bankrupt Atlantic Telegraph Company been buried or he had already another one in the scaffolds. His paper factory, the foundation of his private fortune, burns off. It does not stop him. In 1864 the British company Glass Elliott has a new cable ready, 4,760 kloms long and 4,000 tonnes heavy on three gigantic drums. And finally too, there's the ship that can take that cable: the Great Eastern.





The Great Eastern being built on the launch ramp in Millwall, near London:





The man behind the Great Eastern: Father of All Engineers Isambard Kingdom Brunel.





Fleshing out tomorrow, God willing. Ireland's highest mountain, the Carrauntoohil (1,038 meters). Mind you, NOT my photo, plucked it from the net somewhere. I have photos of course but on them the top was always in clouds.





AFAIK most approaches start from a place called Cronin's Yard, about fifteen kloms from Killarney. There's a memorial plaque there commemmorating the victims of a 1943 plane crash. A USAAF C-47 flew into the flank of, I think, a mountain right near Carrauntoohil, killing all on board. These are their names. God bless. May these men rest in peace.





When gathering info at Killarney's Tourist Office, the guy dealing with me recommended another route to get to the top, since the most common approach climbing up the so-called Devil's Ladder, was considered unsafe due to erosion and a landslide. I should take "Brother O'Shea's Gully" instead. Now I thought, if they recommend this to dumb tourists it can't be bad. Duh. Well, can certainly not say it was very difficult, but it was at times a little tricky. This photo shows you a view staring up the Brother's Gully, about two hours after leaving Cronin's Yard, and having passed Lake Cummeenoughter, which at 707 meters is Ireland's highest lake, although it is rather a pool, actually. If you look closely in the upper right corner, you will see some specks: these were fellow climbers most of whom belonged to the Irish Kidney Association.





Nearing the top. In mist, dammit.





After a short break, back down but now on the other side. Halfway the saddle between Carrauntoohil and the adjacent mountain, Cnoc na Toinne (845 meters) I came across the top of the Devil's Ladder:





... and decided not to descend it. It did look f*cking steep, and with damn loose stones. Better to continue up the Cnoc, since from there there was a narrow but otherwise easy path zigzagging down. The lake you see down below is Lough Callee.


... And this is a photo taken from that path. You now also see Lough Callee's neighbor, Lough Gouragh.





Enjoy the pics and my meagre story. Like I said, will try to flesh it out. I hate posting things half-ready like this, but I felt that this was one way to pushing it - in previous years, I ended up leaving good photographic material unposted because I did not get the accompanying text up to my standards.

If you know this region and climbed here too, feel free to share your thoughts.



MFBB.

SATURDAY NIGHT THE FOUR TOPS, 808 STATE, DON HENLEY.

The Four Tops with Bernadette, a marvellous number from 1967.






808 State with first hit Pacific State (1989). They were a house/techno band from Radcliffe, UK.






Don Henley , ex-Eagles, with The boys of summer. From the album Building the perfect Beast (1984).





Goedenacht.


MFBB.

OMEN OF THINGS TO COME: HALAL TRAINING FOR BELGIAN PRISON PERSONNEL; FRANCE, SWEDEN: MUSLIMS ASSAULTING INDIGENOUS POPULATION.

Via Belgian daily Het Laatste Nieuws, August 26, 2010:

"Belgium's Ministry of Justice will soon organize training sessions to make prison personnel familiar with 'halal' issues. It's a pilot project, writes the journal La Libre Belgique.

According to La Libre Belgique inmates sometimes refuse to take certain medication because they would contain animal fats or because they wouldn't be halal. The training sessions are first and foremost meant for medical personnel such as doctors, nurses and kinesitherapists. It is envisaged that in a later stage they would also be given to the guards and cooks.

For the training sessions the Ministry of Justice has acquired the services of two specialists, the Belgian Bruno Bernard and the Française Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, who have together published a guide with the title 'Comprendre le halal' (Understanding Halal).

In a first phase, training will only be give in the Andenne and Ittre prisons (belga/adb)."

Well of course prisons need halal sensitivity training. After all, around 60%, if not more, of Belgian prison inmates are muslims.



Then, via Galliawatch: "Observe ramadan, or else..."

"... He was having lunch on the terrace of a restaurant in downtown Lyons, during the weekend of August 15, when three young persons assaulted him because he was not respecting the Ramadan fast. This man, a father, of Senegalese origin now residing in Vénissieux, was struck on the head with a glass bottle, then with a chair. Rushed to the hospital, with a skull fracture, he had to undergo surgery. The assault was filmed by a surveillance camera, but the poor quality of the images did not allow for an identification of the assailants. The prosecution has opened a preliminary inquiry. (...)

Three days later, a young Jewish woman filed a complaint after being assaulted in a supermarket in Toulouse. The victim declared that she was attacked by two adolescents who reproached her for buying food during the fast. The young woman then revealed that she was Jewish, which only increased the anger of her attackers who called her "dirty Jew", struck her on the head, causing her to fall heavily to the ground. A guard witnessed the scene without intervening. Questioned by the investigators on the reasons for his passiveness, the man explained that he was respecting Ramadan and that he was in a hurry to leave so that he could eat at sundown...."

François Desouche too reports on the story.


From Sweden reaches us the news that never before so many cars were torched by muslim mobs. Via Swedish daily Friatider and the French blog Bivouac-ID:





Sweden, at least that part of the country where muslims are conducting a very efficient ethnic cleansing, is rapidly becoming a France v2.0. The night of July 8 was particularly hot: more than a hundred cars were torched in Malmö, Helsingborg, Bågfilsgatan, Halmstad... several buildings were set on fire too, plus a waste deposit complex, litter boxes, a container, a hangar...


A gruesome nightmare is descending over Europe. That nightmare is called islam.



MFBB.

SATURDAY NIGHT CURVE, DAVID GRAY.

Once upon a time I used to sit on warm summer nights in pub De drei deurkisj (Three little doors), watching da femalez, smoking a cigarette, reading Humo magazine, enjoying a coffee, and requesting this number.




Curve with Fait Accompli. From their debut album Doppelgaenger (1992).


Dead in the water, very good number by UK singer/songwriter David Gray.





Nite.



MFBB.

SATURDAY NIGHT THE CURE, METRIC.

The Cure with Just like heaven. 1987.





Metric with All Yours. 2010. For some reason we seem to have had more than a few Canadians the past months. Singer's Emily Haines.





For God's sake, close your eyes if you can't stand the video.


Goede nacht. Good night. Gute nacht. Bonne nuit. Dobranoc.



MFBB.

THE BELL, CA SALARY SCANDAL: YES WE CAN (STEAL YOUR MONEY).

A trusted and valued internet acquaintance, a Flemish engineer who goes by the name Traveller, sent me an email containing Ann Coulter's take on the appalling Bell, CA Salary Scandal:

"In the greatest party-affiliation cover-up since the media tried to portray Gary Condit as a Republican, the media are refusing to mention the party affiliation of the thieving government officials in Bell, Calif.

There have been hundreds of news stories about Bell city officials' jaw-dropping salaries. In this poor city on the outskirts of Los Angeles, where the per capita annual income is $24,800 a year, the city manager, Robert Rizzo, had a salary of $787,637.

That's about twice what the president of the United States makes. (To be fair, Rizzo was doing a better job.)

Rizzo was the highest-paid government employee in the entire country, not counting Maxine Waters' husband -- pending further revelations. With benefits, his total annual compensation, according to the Los Angeles Times, came to $1.5 million a year.




Alerted to the Bell situation, the White House quickly added the Bell city manager to the list of jobs saved by its stimulus plan.

Not only that, but Rizzo was entitled to 28 weeks off a year for vacation and sick leave. To put that in perspective, that's almost as much vacation time as public school teachers get!

Reached in Spain, even Michelle Obama was outraged.

Rizzo responded to the anger over his preposterous salary by saying: "If that's a number people choke on, maybe I'm in the wrong business. I could go into private business and make that money."

(If he wants to grab one of those private-sector jobs that pays $1.5 million for 24 weeks of work, may I suggest the entertainment industry?)

Good luck to him. After leaving Bell, Rizzo will be lucky to land a job at Taco Bell. Before being anointed the King Tut of Bell, Rizzo was the city manager of Hesperia, Calif., where he was overpaid only to the tune of $78,000 a year.

The police chief, Randy Adams, was making $457,000 -- $770,046 including benefits. The assistant city manager, Angela Spaccia, had a $376,288 salary, with a total compensation package of $845,960. Being just an assistant city manager, Angela had to pay for her own yacht.

After the Los Angeles Times reported the stratospheric government salaries in little Bell, and the people of the town revolted, the millionaire government employees all resigned.

That'll show 'em! Oops, except upon their resignations, they qualified for lifetime pensions worth, by some estimates, more than $50 million.

These insane salary packages were granted by the mayor and four city council members -- who also set their own salaries. As a result, all but one was making $100,000 a year for these part-time jobs. After the council members' salaries came to light, the four looters cut their salaries by 90 percent.

According to Nexis, there have been more than 300 news stories reporting on the Bell scandal. Guess how many mentioned the party affiliation of the corrupt government bureaucrats?

One. Yes, just one. Now guess if the government officials were Democrats or Republicans? Yes, that is correct. Congratulations -- you've qualified for our bonus round!

The one newspaper to cough up party affiliations, The Orange County Register, admitted that the corrupt officials were all Democrats only in response to reader complaints about the peculiar omission.

Lots of news stories on the scandal in Bell used the word "Democrat" or "Democratic." But that was only to say that the DEMOCRATIC attorney general of California, Jerry Brown, who is running on the DEMOCRATIC ticket for governor, is investigating the Bell officials' salaries.

So we know the media are aware of party affiliations. They just chose not to mention it when it would require them to identify shockingly corrupt government officials as Democrats.
Any day now, the media will start describing Maxine Waters as "the light-skinned congresswoman from California."

(But you might want to vote for that DEMOCRATIC attorney general who is apparently a great crusader against corruption ... despite his years of ignoring the public employee salary and pension looting that has driven the state into insolvency.)

Maybe Obama's Czar of City Managers' Salaries could investigate this.

Unlike political corruption involving sex or bribery, the outrage in Bell isn't a scandal that hits both parties from time to time -- it's how the Democrats govern.

Elected Democratic officials bestow ludicrous salaries and benefits packages on government employees, and, in return, public employee unions make sure the Democrats keep getting re-elected.

The scandal in Bell isn't a scandal at all for the Democrats. Au contraire! This is the governing strategy of the Democratic Party."

See also this video:




Funny how much the escapades of the Democratic Party remind me of those of the Parti Socialiste here.



MFBB.

OUTLAW MIKE EXTENDS HIS BEST RAMADAN WISHES TO WORLDWIDE MUSLIM COMMUNITY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My very best!!!





Cheers!


MFBB.

HOLIDAY PICS WALES/IRELAND (2).

Not much time. I will probably piss off a lot of Irishmen by starting this series with the following pic but I thought this view of rear walls with rain piping and airco equipment, seen from the Powerscourt Center garage in central Dublin, was so positively ugly that I just had to photograph it.






So yes, after only two days in Snowdonia, Wales, we crossed the island of Anglesey off the Welsh coast and boarded a Stena ferry in Holyhead which brought us to Dublin across a smooth Irish sea in a little over three hours.






Having a rather tight schedule we were only able to spend half a day in Dublin. Since we were in Dublin Southeast, we decided to visit the famous Trinity College, founded in 1592 after an order by Queen Elizabeth I, to have a peek at the Book of Kells and the Long Room in the University Library. Highly recommended of course. The statue, just near Trinity College's entrance, is of Edmund Burke, the Irish philosopher who is considered the founder of Modern Conservatism.

Since this is a conservative blog, a few words are in order. Edmund Burke (1729-1797) was, apart from a philosopher, also an author, Irish statesman, orator and political theorist. After he relocated to England, he was for many years a member of the House of Commons for the Whig party. In time, he profiled himself more and more as the leader of the conservative faction within that party, a faction which he himself dubbed the "Old Whigs". It is interesting to note that he was probably the first one to discern the quintessential differences between the American Revolution, which he supported, and the French Revolution, which he spoke out against after he had discovered its inherent flaws. Take e.g. the following exerpt from a speech he gave on 22 March 1775 counseling reconciliation with the 13 colonies:

"...the people of the colonies are descendants of Englishmen.... They are therefore not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas and on English principles. The people are Protestants... a persuasion not only favourable to liberty, but built upon it.... My hold of the colonies is in the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection. These are ties which, though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. Let the colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your government,—they will cling and grapple to you, and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance. But let it be once understood that your government may be one thing and their privileges another, that these two things may exist without any mutual relation,—the cement is gone, the cohesion is loosened, and everything hastens to decay and dissolution. As long as you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority of this country as the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith, wherever the chosen race and sons of England worship freedom, they will turn their faces towards you. The more they multiply, the more friends you will have; the more ardently they love liberty, the more perfect will be their obedience. Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil. They may have it from Spain, they may have it from Prussia. But, until you become lost to all feeling of your true interest and your natural dignity, freedom they can have from none but you."

It must have taken guts to give this speech at the time. At the same time the fact that he was able to give it without being thrown out gives instant credibility to what he claims here about England.


When you read the following you understand why Burke must have despised the French Revolutionaries, who tore everything down, demolishing ancient foundations, while he states that "everything we possess is an inheritance from our forefathers". If you are a conservative and that sounds familiar to you, it's simply because you are reading conservative gospel.

Edmund Burke was the first one of us.

"...The Revolution was made to preserve our antient indisputable laws and liberties, and that antient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty.... The very idea of the fabrication of a new government, is enough to fill us with disgust and horror. We wished at the period of the Revolution, and do now wish, to derive all we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers. Upon that body and stock of inheritance we have taken care not to inoculate any cyon alien to the nature of the original plant.... Our oldest reformation is that of Magna Charta. You will see that Sir Edward Coke, that great oracle of our law, and indeed all the great men who follow him, to Blackstone, are industrious to prove the pedigree of our liberties. They endeavour to prove that the ancient charter... were nothing more than a re-affirmance of the still more ancient standing law of the kingdom.... In the famous law... called the Petition of Right, the parliament says to the king, “Your subjects have inherited this freedom,” claiming their franchises not on abstract principles “as the rights of men,” but as the rights of Englishmen, and as a patrimony derived from their forefathers....

Then it was off to County Kerry in Ireland's southwest, more precisely to Killarney where we had booked a cottage for a week. Killarney is famous for its lakes and National Park.





Having foolishly assumed most of my life that Ireland was basically just flat and green, it came as no small surprise to find some ancient mountain ranges in Kerry, more precisely in the form of grates on the peninsula's sticking out in the Atlantic: Dingle, Iveragh and Beara, although County Kerry has to share the latter with County Cork. These mountain ranges are not high, the highest peaks barely breezing above 1,000 meters; but as they suddenly pop up after the chauffeur has gotten used to the mostly flat Irish interior, they stand out like, say, 4,000'ers in the Alps.

The following pic is called Ladies View, so called because of Queen Victoria's ladies-in-waiting were so enamored by the view upon a visit in 1861. Ladies View is on the N71, perhaps some 15 kloms from Killarney in the direction of Kenmare. You basically see only one lake of Killarney's lakes - the Upper One, plus a portion of the Long Range which lies between Upper and Muckross Lake.





The constraints of timer permit me only to post a handful of pics. This one was taken at the far end of the Dingle Peninsula. The land tongue sticking out into the Atlantic is a mini peninsula of itself, but what you not see are its companions a little bit farther out: the Blasket Islands.




The Blasket Islands are tantalizingly close to the Dingle "mainland" itself, at least the biggest island, but since Dingle in itself is already such a remote corner of Ireland, the little notching up of the isolation on these specks in the Atlanticth proved too much for 20th century people to hold on. Great Blasket's last inhabitants, all 22 of them, left in 1953. Several islanders wrote touching books of what life was there.





A little bit further I came across this ancient church, Gallarus Oratory. It is assumed it was built between the 6th and 9th century. Seamus Heaney, Irish Nobel Prize winner for Literature, wrote a poem about it.





And this is Bantry House as seen from the stairs leading up the terraces behind it. Bantry House is in, well, Bantry, on the north side of the root of Sheep's Head Peninsula (aka Muntervary). Over the House, you are looking out across Bantry Bay towards Beara Peninsula and the Caha Mountains. By the way, when there, be sure to take the Healey Pass across them.




If only I had more time. In Europe, you can drink history from the streets.



MFBB.

"IN THE NAME OF ALLAH, IN A MUSLIM COUNTRY LIKE BELGIUM A HOMOSEXUAL CANNOT BECOME PRIME MINISTER."

Belgium is, after 13 June, still in search of a new government. Tedious coalition talks have been held ever since, and a scenario I dreaded, that at the end of the road Wallonia's top socialist, the openly gay Elio Di Rupo, Chairman of the Parti Socialiste, will become PM, is still a very likely outcome. It's a scenario that all the naives who voted N-VA did not envisage, but it's no use crying over spilt milk. Flemings voted en masse for an incompetent Leterme three years ago and were well rewarded; many catapulted the hypocrite Jean-Marie Dedecker to near-stardom two years ago, and got what they deserved; last June they gave 800,000 votes to a fat idiot in the person of Bart Dewever and he, too, has already proven his "worth": right from the start steering towards a coalition with Flanders' arch-enemy, the Walloon socialists.

But that is not what this post is about.

If Di Rupo makes it Belgian PM, God forbid, he's apt to receive a less than warm welcome from his darlings, Belgium's muslims.

Di Rupo has received death threats already.





Translation: "In the name of Allah, in a muslim country like Belgium a homosexual cannot become Prime Minister".

Note: "in a muslim country".

The message ends with the promise that Di Rupo will be killed by a blank sword. Clear enough for ya, Elio?


MFBB.

SATURDAY NIGHT THE CHARLATANS, THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS.

In the early nineties, The Charlatans, a key group of the so-called Madchester scene, had a smash hit, in my opinion at least, with The Only One I Know. Other notable Madchester groups were The Happy Mondays, Inspiral Carpets, The Stone Roses, 808 State etc. They essentially combined psychedelic and indie rock with dance. A good example is e.g. The Happy Mondays' Step On (which is actually a John Kongos cover).





Quite good material from The Pursuit of Happiness, a now forgotten Canadian rock/indie band. Imnsho, this hit, She's So Young, is far, far better than the song with which they made their debut, I'm an adult now. Even though that one was apparently a smash hit in Canada. She's so young is from the album Love Junk, 1989. Singer's Moe Berg. I hope he's been to the hairdresser by now, that long hippie hair sucks as bad as a Christmas tree on a pyramid.





Good night tonight. This was Outlaw Mike from between rolling fields in Belgium.



MFBB.

AUGUST 6, 2010: JAPAN OFFICIALLY APOLOGIZES FOR VIVISECTION OF PREGNANT WOMEN IN PINGFAN, GERM WARFARE IN CHINA, TESTING FLAMETHROWERS ON CHILDREN.

Just kidding. On Planet Zeist, perhaps.


UNIT 731 was one of around 26 biological warfare and medical experimentation organizations set up by Japans government before and during World War II. Of those 26, Unit 731 reportedly was the worst, but that may only seem so because most info obtained about Japans gruseome experiments on humans comes from scientists from Pinfan, where the unit was set up. Pingfan is an area south of Harbin in Manchuria where the notorious four-square mile compound of the grisly organisation was built.

Japanese "scientists" carried out the most gruseome experiments on humans imaginable, including vivisecting live people (sometimes pregnant women), exploding hand grenades at various distances to tied up children to test their effects, flamethrowing people, cooking them alive, injecting them with deadly germs, freezing and starving them to death, and exposing them to X-rays. Not that you will hear anything from that among the handwringing crocdile tear shedders in Hiroshima.





There's a ton of information about Unit 731 on the Internet, but check each one and sooner or later you will come across the inevitable paragraphs dealing with the near amnesty the US gave postwar to 731's top scientists, most notably to its head, Lieutenant General Ishii.

From a moral point of view, there is indeed little to be brought in against the charge that the US used a double standard, rightly prosecuting nazis but then giving protection to the most abominable war criminals - worse than their worst German counterparts - in exchange for "precious" information on biological warfare (8,000 vials with human tissues of the unit's victims were handed over).

Politics is not about morals alone however, although in a normal civilized state it should be the rockbed of it. Already in 1945, it was becoming clear that the next war would be fought with the USSR. Manchuria had a land border with the Soviet Union, and there was a serious possibility that Stalin's scientists had had themselves access to 731's files on biological warfare, possibly giving the country a lead on the US in that domain so that it would have a stick with which to retaliate in case of nuclear threat from the US.

And if you are fighting a war, you should fight to win it.

But yes, General Mac Arthur himself ensured that Ishii and his staff went free.

All of which does not explain why the spirit emanating from the articles on Unit 731 seems to imply that the US, in trying to obtain horrific data indeed, data which it could itself not gain, is on a moral par with the Pingfan monsters. When I first read about Unit 731, some 25 years ago in a Dutch popular scientific magazine called Kijk, the article ended with the telling line "The Devil had found an ally".

Such is the nature of Anti-Americanism.

Over here at DowneastBlog, we know better of course. While the whole world is shedding crocodile tears over Hiroshima and Nagasaki and secretly - or not so secretly - enjoying another opportunity to bash America, I have decided to dedicate a post to the tens of thousands - some say hundreds of thousands - who died in the most unimaginable agony, whether in Pingfan or deeper in China itself - as a result of Japanese horror that makes Auschwitz seem bearable by comparison.






Via Mail Online, March 2, 2007.

"...A jovial old Japanese farmer who in the war had been a medical assistant in a Japanese army unit in China described to a U.S. reporter recently what it was like to dissect a Chinese prisoner who was still alive.

Munching rice cakes, he reminisced: "The fellow knew it was over for him, and so he didn't struggle when they led him into the room and tied him down. But when I picked up the scalpel, that's when he began screaming. I cut him open from the chest to the stomach and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony.
"He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then finally he stopped.

"This was all in a day's work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because it was my first time." The man could not be sedated, added the farmer, because it might have distorted the experiment.

...

Most of these facilities were combined at Unit 731 so that Ishii could play with his box of horrors. His word was law. When he wanted a human brain to experiment on, guards grabbed a prisoner and held him down while one of them cleaved open his skull with an axe. The brain was removed and rushed to Ishii's laboratory. Human beings used for experiments were nicknamed "maruta" or "logs" because the cover story given to the local authorities was that Unit 731 was a lumber mill. Logs were inert matter, a form of plant life, and that was how the Japanese regarded the Chinese "bandits", "criminals" and "suspicious persons" brought in from the surrounding countryside.

Shackled hand and foot, they were fed well and exercised regularly. "Unless you work with a healthy body you can't get results," recalled a member of the Unit. But the torture inflicted upon them is unimaginable: they were exposed to phosgene gas to discover the effect on their lungs, or given electrical charges which slowly roasted them. Prisoners were decapitated in order for Japanese soldiers to test the sharpness of their swords.

Others had limbs amputated to study blood loss - limbs that were sometimes stitched back on the opposite sides of the body. Other victims had various parts of their brains, lungs or liver removed, or their stomach removed and their oesophagus reattached to their intestines.

Kamada, one of several veterans who felt able to speak out after the death of Emperor Hirohito, remembered extracting the plague-infested organs of a fully conscious "log" with a scalpel.

"I inserted the scalpel directly into the log's neck and opened the chest," he said. "At first there was a terrible scream, but the voice soon fell silent."
Other experiments involved hanging prisoners upside down to discover how long it took for them to choke to death, and injecting air into their arteries to test for the onset of embolisms. Some appear to have had no medical purpose except the administering of indescribable pain, such as injecting horse urine into prisoners' kidneys...."

From CityJournal, Spring 2010 issue:




One bombardment you will never be reminded of on an August 6: seventy years after Japanese bomber struck the village of this man's parents with germ bombs, he still suffers from the consequences: the "rotten leg disease".

"...Jiang is one of 15 elderly Chinese men and women whom Zhu is treating in his simple village clinic for what locals label “rotten leg disease.” A definitive diagnosis is no longer possible so many decades after the initial exposure and secondary infections. But Chinese, American, and other Western physicians who have examined the survivors, documented their histories, and photographed their wounds claim that they are victims of the most gruesome biological warfare attacks in modern history.

These attacks, orchestrated by Japan’s infamous Unit 731 between 1932 and 1945, are the only documented mass use of germ weapons in modern times. Scholars say that we will never know exactly how many were killed. Sheldon H. Harris, the late American historian, estimated in a pioneering work that between 10,000 and 12,000 Chinese prisoners perished in the bloodcurdling experiments that Unit 731 performed in Japanese-occupied Manchuria. Another 300,000 to 500,000 civilians died, he wrote, as a result of Japan’s massive germ assaults on more than 70 Chinese cities and towns. China itself has disclosed no official tally. In fact, for many years, Japan’s use of biological weapons in China was largely forgotten. Only recently has a resurgent China begun to remind Japan—and the world—of the atrocities...."

If you have still the stomach for it, watch this video:




Unit 731 was active since before the outbreak of the war in the Pacific. Ever after the 1931 Mukden Incident, used by Japan to annex Manchuria (it made a puppet state of it, named Manchukwo), countless Chinese suffered under the gruesome excesses of Japanese imperialism and militarism. Not even counting the horrors of Unit 731 and its 25 sister organizations (including a poison gas factory near... Hiroshima), China paid a terrible price in lives and property. Hundreds of thousands perished in 1937 in the infamous Nanking Massacre, for instance.

If you have a quiet moment today, please pray for these utterly hapless souls. Pray. for. them.

Now, at the occasion of the 65th birtday of the bombing of Hiroshima, I therefore want to extend my heartfelt THANKS to the country that ENDED a horrible agony that had been going on since the early thirties.


HAIL AMERICA.



MFBB.

FRANCE TURNING INTO AN ISLAMIC REPUBLIC.

Via Galliawatch, July 31, 2010:

"... The inauguration of a new mosque has become an everyday event in France, but when the Prime Minister is the one doing the inaugurating, it is news. On June 28, François Fillon inaugurated the great mosque of Argenteuil, called the Al-Ihsan mosque. In nº 88 of his weekly newsletter (available through subscription), Yves Daoudal reviews the event in an article entitled "The French Islamic Republic", a title that summarizes in few words the institutionalized dhimmitude of the current French government:

On Monday, Prime Minister François Fillon inaugurated the great Al-Ihsan mosque of Argenteuil. It is the second mosque for Argenteuil, that has, in addition, eight prayer rooms.

It was the first time that a Prime Minister of the Republic inaugurated a mosque. When Sarkozy created the French Council of the Muslim Religion (CFCM), Cardinal Lustiger had noted that Islam was becoming the State religion. By inaugurating the Al-Ihsan mosque, François Fillon confirmed and illustrated that Islam IS the religion of the French State..."

A good two weeks ago, the eastern city of Grenoble was the scene of violent riots instigated by muslims. A young scoundrel, a certain 27-year old Karim Boudouda who had just robbed a casino near Grenoble and who had already an impressive record for felony and armed robbery, was shot dead by the police. Now, among white autochtons, the tale that a white bandit got felled by police bullets, is generally greeted with satisfaction. Not so with muslims. No matter how serious the criminal facts, a muslim who commits a crime against non-muslims is a hero and must be feted. If he is killed, he immediately becomes a martyr and his death must be avenged.

Thus happened. Via The Age:

"...The rioting started after a memorial service for 27-year-old Karim Boudouda, who had died 24 hours earlier in a shootout with police after allegedly holding up the Uriage-les-Bains casino near Grenoble.

Shortly before midnight, a group of about 30 youths armed with baseball bats and iron bars attacked a tram in Boudouda's La Villeneuve district and forced the passengers out.

Police intervened and the youths began torching vehicles and attacking police who responded with tear gas.

About 2.30am local time, a youth emerged at the front of the rioters and fired a shot at police, who returned fire, police spokeswoman Brigette Jullien told AFP.

Nobody was injured in the riots, said police, who arrested two men aged 18 and 20 for setting fire to vehicles and three more for attempted looting of shops.

Hortefeux, with a horde of media in tow, made a lightning 15-minute tour of La Villeneuve in the afternoon and promised quick action by the authorities...."

Brice Hortefeux is, apart from a roaring fool, a 200 per cent incompetent, a despicable dhimmi and avid mosque-inaugurator, and a ball-less and spineless creep, also France's Interior Minister. On the last National Holiday, July 14, he refused to make public, for the first time, the numbers of cars torched by muslims in their war to create sole-muslim enclaves in the French Republic, saying that instead those numbers would be included in the yearly total.

As things stand now, by year's end an estimated 300,000 cars will have been destroyed by muslim mobs since 2005...





... and nobody seems to give a damn, and everyone's pretending that Lindsay Lohan in rehab is news far more important.


Autochton Europeans or law-abiding immigrants, no matter their race or religious beliefs - with the exception of islam itself of course - must prepare themselves for open war with muslims on European soil.

To those persons of authority in the militaries of European countries, if you cherish the rights and privileges that our peoples have gained over the centuries, very often at an extremely heavy cost in blood and treasure...

... if you do not want to go down in history as persons who did not take their responsibility...

... then it is your DUTY to plan for using our armed forces in open conflict with the muslim communities on our soil.

This potential future conflict may involve, if necessary, the use of heavy artillery, tanks, and ground attack aircraft. It would be therefore foolish to follow the idiot politicians' lead and cave in to their demands to neutralize - actually rather neuter - your units and materiel, as is currently happening in virtually every western country. You must SPEAK OUT AGAINST THAT.

Lessons should be drawn from the nineties conflicts in the Balkans, and I mean not only from a "technical" viewpoint. It means first and foremost, recognizing the REAL enemy. The catastrophic error of backing the wrong warring party may NEVER AGAIN be repeated.



MFBB.

TAKUAN SEIYO: PART 17 OF THE 'FROM MECCANIA TO ATLANTIS' SERIES.

Over at The Brussels Journal, the splendidly lucid and eloquent Takuan Seiyo has his next installment in the inimitable From Meccania to Atlantis series up - his seventeenth, in the meantime.

It should be noted that personally, I do not entirely subscribe to Seiyo's views, in particular where he denounces the West's efforts to install manu militari functioning democracies in the appalling hellhole that is the muslim world. It should equally be noted that I do not consider these efforts as a magic cure-for-all. It is simply that, unlike Seiyo, I view operations like OIF and OEF/ISAF as the only strategic game that the West has - apart from transforming Mecca in a desolate plain of black glass and obliterating perhaps a dozen muslim key cities.

That said, I have the highest regard for the rest of Seiyo's theses, and I sincerely hope that one day, saner generations, perhaps mulling over his manuscripts on the ashes of our civilization, will give him the recognition he so manifestly deserves.

Exerpt:

"... As the prevailing social fairytales and phantom finance dominoes topple sequentially, the ruling elites that constructed that particular train of hollow pieces engage in increasingly frantic actions to disguise and postpone the effects of the staggered downfall. To paper-over gaping craters in the founding concepts and subsequent applications of the global economy and financial capitalism, they blow up sovereign debts to levels that will cause either sovereign defaults or currency cave-ins in the future. Lipstick no longer adhering to the Muslim jihad and Mexican reconquista hemlock they have planted in the West, they switched from their transparently ludicrous Beautiful Diversity propaganda to totalitarian controls like the Patriot Act in the United States, the Equality Act in Great Britain, Hate Speech laws and Snatcher-orchestrated denunciations of fictive “racism.” They are destroying their peoples in punishment for their own treason and stupidity – and nothing seems able to stop them.


This type of mega-scam that transfers the consequences of foolishness and evil by the few onto the many or by Group A onto Group B has become the main defining feature of Western democracies, as it has always been of banana republics and socialist utopias.


Instead of allowing crooked, incompetent and bankrupt TBTF (“too-big-to-fail”) enterprises to fail, elected oligarchs have socialized the Crooks’ losses by buying their garbage book assets with the people’s money at fictitious face values.


Instead of leaving Greece & Co. to eat the consequences of swindle and socialism, the EU is spending Germans’ and Americans’ (through the IMF) money in a futile attempt to bail out the bail-unworthy.


Instead of leaving spenders and speculators to learn Reality’s lesson, the rulers’ fiat saves the spenders at the expense of the savers and the speculators at the expense of the investors.


Instead of making amends for the myopic madness of exporting the West’s industrial base to China, the captains of everyone’s fate raid everyone’s pocket to support and morally incapacitate the multitudes that have been idled for life by that export.


Instead of properly controlling the criminally violent and insane, the Masters-of-Destiny have disarmed – everywhere but in America (and not for lack of trying) – the law-abiding, peaceful and sane.


Instead of allowing the best to rise to the top, they push to the top the possessors of magic skin tones and preferred orificial parameters. This cuts down the future of the West at the knees.


Instead of dressing the critical wounds they have inflicted on their peoples by seeding among them imported Muslims, the reigning Loons engage in the futile madness of trying to convert imported Muslims into postmodern Westerners and the Muslims’ 7th-century home countries into pluralistic democracies.


First they brought in the Muslims, the Aztecs and the Bantu under the pretext that we are all the same. When the imports turned out not to be the same, they invented Multiculti Diversity. Then the imports started acting out their diversity by destroying the West wholesale by PETN or drunken driving, gang rape or gangster crime, street warfare or endless welfare. So the ruling savants reinvented the Police State, crushing the West’s 800-years of struggle toward natural inalienable right and freedom from state tyranny.


Instead of profiling and discouraging easily identifiable colonizers, the Loons have turned major features of modern life into a nightmare for everyone. Air travel is now a slow and humiliating torture for a billion people who wouldn’t know Allahu Akbar from a name for a new cocktail. Wiring money to your daughter in another country rings investigative bells in three snooping centers around the world. Your face, your car and home are on Big Brother cameras always, but hostile Muslims who live off public welfare demand and get exemptions from the snooping that only Muslim terrorism can even try to justify.


Instead of begging the public’s pardon for their importation of 35 million low-skill soldiers of Allah to Europe, they plan to import 50 million more. Instead of atoning for the incalculable damage to the U.S. wrought by their importation of 35 million low-skill rejects from Mexico et al., they pull out all stops –and that’s the first stage only -- to plant another 20 million on American soil. Including the soil that was once Mexico.


Instead of disowning their Wilsonian madness after the Vietnam fiasco, America’s rulers (at times with NATO’s help) have waged a succession of foolish wars on distant, backward peoples, prosecuted with their unhappy subjects’ blood and money. The wars, the lost lives and limbs, the incinerated trillions in taxpayers’ money are all a monstrous stupidity, for it all unfolds with an eye on CNN, and not on Sun Tzu and Clausewitz. The strategic objective is inherently lunatic too, for you cannot change alien peoples that do not want and cannot change.

Reckoning that autochthons are increasingly bitter about the witches’ brew rising all around them, the rulers have doubled their efforts at population replacement so that the new colonizers -- unskilled, uneducated and poor -- augment the Looters’ Coalition in the 50-50 Neosocialist state on the welfare receiving side. In America in particular, half-suitable foreign colonizers or indigenous minorities are recruited to acquire a quasi-education in dumbed-down colleges, and then offered choice government positions. This streams more “minorities” into the Looters’ Coalition, but on the paycheck receiving side. Furthermore, such positions give them the power that their strong tribal instincts skew toward a further containment and dispossession of the beleaguered founding populations.


America, falling into a Cloward-Piven black hole, deserves a chapter all its own. But in Europe, a former leader of the Communist Party of the Portuguese Workers/Revolutionary Movement of the Portuguese Proletariat is President of the European Commission. Norway’s government offsets its inexcusable Whiteness by its 50% balance of estrogen. Sweden does Norway one better by not only having a Ministry for Integration and Gender Equality, but putting an African woman in charge. Germany, not to be upstaged in virtue, declares via its Green Party, “You are not born a man, you are turned into one."


In Australia, the country’s major newspaper writes approvingly about “The Australian Face of Islam” while exhorting, “Together under the minarets” . In Great Britain, miracles of Loon transfiguration cast rough and stupid socialist women in comedic parts as Cabinet Ministers and ethnocentric Pakistani Muslims in the robes of Peers of the Realm. The assiduous planting of inassimilable Muslims has increased the crop 30-fold in the last 30 years, to 2.5 million now.


White man’s world has gone crazy. Any play written by the Marquis de Sade and directed by him with a cast of fellow inmates at the Asylum at Charenton could not have been more grotesque.


People have had enough. But to return a Western democracy to its rightful owners requires a majority of votes. Such a majority can no longer obtain for any political platform that would tackle even the top three major problems that bedevil the West: bankrupting socialism, nonwhite immigration, and implanted Islam. Not to mention the next dozen grave problems: irredeemable debt, the tyranny of the metastized State, the Looters’ coalition’s chokehold, sham global economy, fraudulent financial capitalism, minoritarian tyranny, shattered social capital, barbaric mass culture, nihilism, democracy turned idiocracy, breakdown of sexual norms and results (i.e. no babies), and falsehoods and self-hate careening through the land like a band of headless horsemen..."

Other concerned westerners often say that we need a new Charles Martel.

I tend to think more that we need a new Flavius Aetius.






MFBB.

HOLIDAY PICS WALES/IRELAND (1).

A Flemish saying goes "we reizen om te leren" (we travel to learn) and I've always taken that folksy lesson of wisdom to heart.

Pic one is a shot of the GPS display when we were inside the huge Channel Tunnel complex near Coquelles/Calais, northern France. From my neck of the woods there's several ways to get to Wales and from there to Ireland, but I'd never taken "Le Shuttle" before, so I thought this was a perfect occasion. "Le Shuttle" is marketingese for the train concept involving a locomotive pulling a series of containerlike doubledeck waggons through the Channel Tunnel and inside the terminal perimeters on either side of the Channel. I write "uniquely" because the track gauge is wider than the normal European railways gauge. Unlike the Eurostar train which takes you from Brussels to London and vice versa, Shuttle wagons are thus confined to the fifty kilometers between Coquelles and its English counterpart, Cheriton near Folkestone. Don't ask me how Eurostar and Shuttle use the same route then. I suspect the less wide Eurostar rails have simply been laid between the Shuttle rails. As I was unable to get out of the car before entering the shuttle, and neither after getting out of it, I couldn't check it out for myself.





Pic 2 shows yours truly preparing to ride inside a wagon. They are interlinked and act like a gigantic moving tunnel of their own. You drive in (in my case, I immediately went up a ramp to the second level) and proceed through the series of wagons until you can get no further. Just before departure "sluices" close each wagon off, so you cannot park your car right on a junction. You wouldn't be allowed to anyway, there's loadmasters telling you what to do.





Once outside the tunnel on the English side, we first spent some time with the kiddos on the (stony) beach in Hythe, just west of Folkestone, and then it was off to Stratford-Upon-Avon, where we had planned to spend the night and do some sightseeing the morning after before moving on to Snowdonia, Wales. Pic 3 is a photo I took of a gentleman who made Stratford famous. The grave is inside the Holy Trinity Church. Stratfordians can thank the bard on their bare knees. Yearly, about three million people (120 times the town's population) visit Stratford-Upon_Avon and spend about 100 million pounds.





Sometimes I wonder whether ole William would be so enamored with the tourist circus that has been set up around him.



On the way to Wales we halted in Ironbridge, a village near Telford, and the site of the world's first, you guess it, iron bridge. It was built between 1779 and 1781 by Abraham Darby III, whose grandfather perfected the technique of smelting iron using coke. This was the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The bridge, which is of cast iron and about thirty meters long, spans the river Severn. It is not used anymore for rolling transport, but tourists are free to walk over it. This place is now an UNESCO World Heritage site.






A little bit further we stopped in Wroxeter, a tiny village near Shrewsbury (birthplace of Charles Darwin). Wroxeter is special because almost 2,000 years ago it was known as Viroconium, a major Roman city. What you see are the remnants of the basilica, at least that's what the guides here call the complex the Roman bathing house.





If only I had more time, then I'd have marked on the photo below the small area that the bathing complex constituted in Viroconium. I'll give it a try. You see that white building in the centre of the town, just to the left of the main road axis? That's it. That's what my pic show. You now have an idea of how big it was back then. Once, this was the fourth largest Roman city in Britain. More info here. Viroconium Corniovorum (its full name) was excavated in the late nineteenth century by Francis Bedford, who was actually a renowned photographer.





Last pic for today taken when ascending the Snowdon, at 1,085 metres Wales' highest mountain. In Welsh, it's called Yr Wyddfa, meaning "The Tomb". I used the so-called PYG track, the origins of that name are unclear.




Don't want to brag, but it was a piece of cake. I was up in barely two hours. Wanna do it yourself, just be fit and wear good shoes.


Nite. Sorry for the scant info, back to work again tomorrow.



MFBB.

SATURDAY NIGHT LOU REED, NEW RADICALS.

Hi there. Sorry for the hiatus, but I - we - have been on holiday to Wales and Ireland, more precisely in Snowdonia and Ireland's southwest, and though I did intend to post some stuff now and then, technical problems made that impossible. Well - it was great, absolutely. Saw a lot, learned a lot, did a lot. Brought home a stack of books, amongst others biographies from Eamonn De Valera and Michael Collins and Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Climbed the Snowdon (a piece of cake) and the Carrauntohil (a tougher nut to crack). Observed quite a lot in the English, Welsh and Irish societies, and there is much to ponder. If I find the time, will do a couple of posts about it.

But now it's time for Lou Reed with Satellite of Love:





Then the New Radicals with You get what you give:





Good night from Outlaw Mike, back in Belgium. Thank you for tuning in.



MFBB.

TORY MINISTER AND BLUNT CUNT CAROLINE SPELMAN: "BURKA EMPOWERS WOMEN."

There's been a steady drumbeat of appalling news last week, all of it signalling that Europe is steamrollering towards disaster.

I'm short on time, so just two tidbits. The first one is from Galliawatch, on the riots in Grenoble, where muslim mobs are firing automatic weapons at the police:

"It was another wild weekend in France, this time with Grenoble as the center of attention. Eruptions of violence occurred following the shooting by the police, who were acting in self defense, of a repeat offender named Karim Boudouda, age 27. Boudouda and an accomplice led the police on a wild chase after they robbed the casino at Uriage-les-Bains, near Grenoble. The rioting, though, was set off when an imam recited a prayer for the dead man before fifty young people who had gathered in a park..."

The second one does not involve machineguns, but is possibly even scarier:

"... A British cabinet minister has delivered a staunch defence of a woman's right to wear a burka. As debate intensified across Europe on banning the controversial Muslim garment from public places, Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman said late last night women were "empowered" by the freedom to wear the face coverings. Her comments came after her colleague, Immigration Minister Damian Green, resisted demands from within the Conservative party to ban the burka, which critics claim is a symbol of the oppression of women. Green said a ban would be "rather un-British" and run contrary to the conventions of a "tolerant and mutually respectful society".

This is despite a YouGov latest survey which found that 67 percent of voters wanted the wearing of full-face veils to be outlawed. France's lower house of parliament has overwhelmingly approved a ban on wearing burka-style Islamic veils, and Spain and Belgium have similar votes in the pipeline. Conservative MPs who back a ban include Philip Hollobone, who has tabled a private member's Bill that would make it illegal for anyone to cover his or her face in public. Hollobone said that he would refuse to hold any constituency meetings with women wearing burkas. Over the weekend he said, "This is Britain. We are not a Muslim country.

Covering your face in public is strange, and to many people both intimidating and offensive."

But Mrs Spelman made the counter-argument that wearing a burka is important for women's rights. Normally, the burka is defended on the grounds of religious freedom, but the minister made what appeared to be a feminist argument for the face-covering. She said "I don't, living in this country as a woman, want to be told what I can and can't wear. I've been out to Afghanistan and I think I understand much better as a result of actually visiting why a lot of Muslim women want to wear the burka. "It is part of their culture, it is part of understanding that they choose to go out in the burka and I think those that live in this country, if they choose to wear a burka, should be free to do so. "We are a free country, we attach importance to people being free and for a woman it is empowering to be able to choose each morning when you wake up what you wear."

For his part, the new head of the Muslim Council of Britain, a group which is largely made up of people from Pakistani origin, Farooq Murad, said that Britain was the most welcoming country in Europe for Muslims. He pointed to the spread of mosques and sharia, or Islamic law, as positive signs of the greater freedom Muslims are given in this country..."

When I read this travesty I first had to rob my eyes, refusing to acknowledge that they conveyed the printed message correctly to my eyes.

And yet it was true. Again, this is what she said. Mind you, not a Labor Minister. A Tory Minister:

“I don't, living in this country as a woman, want to be told what I can and can't wear. I've been out to Afghanistan and I think I understand much better as a result of actually visiting why a lot of Muslim women want to wear the burka. ”

I have never been to Afghanistan, and I definitely never want to, but I do know for sure that Afghan women have just as much choice to wear or not to wear the burqa as the sun has seawater has choice to rise with the tide or not. To publicly state such blatant nonsense is an insult to the British people's intelligence. Attitudes like that are going to cost us our continent.


MFBB.

SATURDAY NIGHT MARTHA & THE MUFFINS, GRANT LEE BUFFALO.

Martha & The Muffins. Echo Beach. 1980.




This was their only international single, although they seem to have had a degree of success in their native Canada. Actually, they still exist (uninterrupted since 1977). Martha is Martha Johnson, the first Martha to join the band. She was recruited as a keyboardist, but soon did vocals too.


Grant Lee Buffalo with Fuzzy. 1993, from the album (their first) with the same name. Video quality is atrocious, sound's okay.





Guys were from LA.


Good night, and may the farce be with you.



MFBB.

MEET DONALD BERWICK, OBAMA'S ONE MAN DEATH PANEL.

I spotted this about one week ago on Call of the Patriot. I think it is well worth a read. I am talking about Obama's recess appointment of Donald Berwick to oversee Medicare and Medicaid. Berwick, who is advocating strict rationing of healthcare, to be determined by "boards of experts", has been named a "One Man Death Panel":

"...President Obama is now making a recess appointment of Donald Berwick to oversee Medicare and Medicaid. The purpose of the recess appointment is clear; Obama wants to avoid a confirmation hearing on Berwick in which this man's ideas ands previous statements would be brought to the fore; namely, thet Berwick has expressed support for the idea of rationing health care to people based on their age and the whole cost-effectiveness of treating the elderly..."

Yet another czar who, uncontrolled by Congress, will decide what is good for you. Cryptocommunist and Health Care Redistributor Donald Berwick. What a creep.



Americans should be very well aware where you're headed once you let a guy like Berwick decide who "deserves" what treatment. Read this Wesley J. Smith article, Continent Death: Euthanasia in Europe.

"... It gets worse: Repeated studies sponsored by the Dutch government have found that doctors kill approximately 1,000 patients each year who have not asked for euthanasia. This is not only a violation of every guideline, but an act that Dutch law considers murder. Nonvoluntary euthanasia has become so common that it even has a name: "Termination without request or consent."

Despite this carnage, Dutch doctors are very rarely prosecuted for such crimes, and the few that are brought to court are usually exonerated. Moreover, even if a doctor is found guilty, he or she is almost never punished in any meaningful way, nor does the murderer face discipline by the Dutch Medical Society. For example, in 2001, a doctor was convicted of murdering an 84-year-old patient who had not asked to be killed. Prosecutors demanded a nine-month suspended probation (!), yet even this brush — it can't even be called a slap — on the wrist was rejected by the trial judge who refused to impose any punishment. Not to worry. The appellate court decided to get tough: It imposed a one-week suspended sentence on the doctor for murder.

Even such praising with faint damnation isn't enough for the Dutch Medical Association. As a result of this and the handful of other non-punished murder convictions of doctors who engaged in termination without request or consent, the organization is lobbying to legalize non-voluntary euthanasia. Along these same lines — and demonstrating that the culture of death recognizes no limits — the day after the Dutch formally legalized euthanasia, the country's minister of health advocated the provision of suicide pills to the elderly who do not qualify for killing under Dutch law.

Lest we think the Dutch experience is a fluke, let us now turn our attention to Belgium. Only one year ago the Belgians legalized Dutch-style euthanasia under "strict" guidelines. As with the Netherlands, once unfettered, the euthanasia culture quickly began to swallow Belgium whole. Moreover, the slide down the slope has occurred at a greatly accelerated pace. It took decades for the Dutch euthanasia to reach the current morass. But Belgian euthanasia went off the rails from day one: The very first reported killing — that of a man with multiple sclerosis — violated the legal guidelines (not that anything was done about it). Moreover, while 203 people were officially recognized as having been euthanized in Belgium during the first year of legal practice, most euthanasia deaths were not reported (a violation of the law). The actual toll is probably closer to 1,000.

And Belgian euthanasia advocates have already begun agitating to expand the categories of killable people. A just-completed forum attended by hundreds of Belgian doctors and euthanasia enthusiasts advocated that minors be allowed to request euthanasia, as well as people with degenerative conditions, such as Alzheimer's, who are not imminently dying. Not only that, but the chairman of the conference wants to force doctors to participate in killing patients, even if they are morally opposed. If he gets his way, the law will soon require doctors who oppose euthanasia to refer patients who want to be killed to a colleague willing to do the deed. So much for choice..."

And if you are not convinced yet, try Simon Caldwell:

WARNING TO BRITAIN AS ALMOST HALF OF BELGIUM'S EUTHANASIA NURSES ADMIT TO KILLING WITHOUT CONSENT.

By Simon Caldwell

Last updated at 7:48 AM on 10th June 2010

"...A high proportion of deaths classed as euthanasia in Belgium involved patients who did not ask for their lives to be ended, a study found.

More than 100 nurses admitted to researchers that they had taken part in ‘terminations without request or consent’.

Although euthanasia is legal in Belgium, it is governed by strict rules which state it should be carried out only by a doctor and with the patient’s permission.

The disturbing revelation - which shows that nurses regularly go well beyond their legal role - raises fears that were assisted suicides allowed in Britain, they could never be properly regulated.

Since its legalisation eight years ago, euthanasia now accounts for 2 per cent of deaths in Belgium - or around 2,000 a year.

The researchers found that a fifth of nurses admitted being involved in the assisted suicide of a patient.

But nearly half of these - 120 of 248 - also said there was no consent.

‘The nurses in our study operated beyond the legal margins of their profession,’ said the report’s authors in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

It is likely many nurses ‘ under-reported’ their involvement for fear of admitting an illegal activity, the study said.

But it added that many were probably acting according to their patients’ wishes, ‘even if there was no explicit request’.

Last night, Dr Peter Saunders, director of the Care Not Killing campaign in Britain, said: ‘We should take a warning from this that wherever you draw the line, people will go up to it and beyond it.’

‘Once you have legalised voluntary euthanasia, involuntary euthanasia will inevitably follow,’ he added...."

The recess appointment of Berwick to head Medicare/Medicaid encompasses of course far more than the possible falldown from "health care rationing" and the introduction of European euthanasia "mores" in the USA. Nevertheless, in this post I focused on euthanasia in particular because the topic struck a chord with me. In Belgium and Europe, we have seen this before, with the abortion debate.

It starts with "cases". And it ends up with wholesale murder.

It will be JUST THE SAME WITH EUTHANASIA. It is absolutely not that difficult to envisage a society in, say, thirty years time, where death panels, ruling that you can no longer contribute to society, will just get rid of you. Even if you are otherwise perfectly healthy. In Europe, in excess of 3,000 perfectly healthy human beings are murdered daily in the womb. Now these could have been productive citizens. And yet they went thru the meatmill. How much credit do you think you will be given when you're 75, shuffling along and no good for either working and/or paying taxes?



MFBB.

AFGHANISTAN UPDATE.

As per usual, news of the Belgian operations in AF is scarce, and this situation has in fact not very much improved since the introduction, about one year ago, of weekly overviews by the Belgian MoD, available in pdf on the Belgian Army site. Still, it's better than nothing. These are some nuggets found on the report issued on July 2nd, which covers the week starting on June 24th. I omitted paragraph 1, which dealt with the 300-strong contingent securing KAIA.






In short, for the PRT Kunduz, working closely together with the Germans in that region, there's amongst others talk about the EOD unit destroying and neutralizing ammo and two IED's on June 26th-27th. On the 30th the EOD personnel supported a German field unit.



The first photo shows a soldier from the PRT's EOD team neutralizing what seems to be an RPG round. The second one, an EOD member with one of our new Dingo's. When you look at these vehicles, it seems completely irresponsible ISAF soldiers were issued light Bombardier jeeps and landrovers for patrolling in the early years. Even so, I suspect Dingo's are not immune. I have been wondering whether an armored car with a V-shaped belly, not unlike the WWII-era German Sdkfz 222, would not be better suited to withstand IED's exploding right under the vehicle, since the blast would be deflected sideways under a certain ange. Check out the photos on that last link and you'll see what I mean.


As for the OMLT teams, between the 24th and 30th one was mentoring the activities of the staff of an ANA brigade. The other one was supporting a kandak, I assume that's an ANA infantry battalion. From the text, it would appear that the OMLT troop was assigned between the 24th and the 30th a new kandak to monitor ("eerste contacten met het toegewezen Afghaanse bataljon").




Soldiers from an OMLT team somewhere in Afghanistan's north. The Afghan to the right is possibly not an ANA soldier but someone from a village militia - at least that's what his outfit and headgear suggest. Notice the gun of the soldier on the left: it's an FN F2000 assault rifle, the version with the 40mm FN EGLM grenade launcher. The other trooper has the standard issue FNC assault rifle. Would love to have one of those.


To be sure, I have already read at least one complaint of an OMLT trooper suggesting the Afghans are rather lukewarm to ask for advice. Nuggets of info like that jibe with the not exactly flattering news we have received so far of ANA progress. In fact, a disturbingly high number of reports talk about general inefficiency at best, and outright hostility at worst. It is also quite certain the taleban have infiltrated the ANA, a given underscored today, alas, by the murder of three British troops by a rogue ANA soldier.


Most of the action however clearly was with the six F-16 fighter bombers operating from Kandahar Airfield. The overview reads:

(4) F-16 detachment in Kandahar (OGF):

June 25th: two planned missions, no weapons systems engaged
·
June 26th: two planned missions of which one was retasked to support ground troops in contact with the enemy. Two bombs were dropped [GBU-12's - MFBB]. No collateral damage.

June 27th: two planned missions, no weapons systems engaged.
Also on June 27th: two quick intervention missions in support of ground troops in contact with the enemy. A "show of force" sufficed to end the skirmish.


June 28th: two planned missions of which one was retasked to support ground troops in contact with the enemy. No weapons systems engaged.

June 29th: two planned missions of which one was retasked to support ground troops in contact with the enemy. Strafing with Vulcan cannon. No collateral damage.

June 30th: two planned missions, no weapons systems engaged
Also on June 30th: three rocket attacks on KAF. No Belgian wounded nor damage.

Here's a magnificent shot of one of our F-16's over Afghanistan. This time the PANTERA ('sniper') pod is clearly visible. It represents a sea change compared to the 'old' LANTIRN pod. The armament is standard - I actually do not think the Belgian Air Force in AF uses other bombs than the GBU-12. Apart from that, the imho useless Sidewinders.





This is actually a USAF photo, taken in December 2008, by Staff Sgt. Aaron Allmon. Possibly from a KC-135 tanker.



Belgium has currently some 600 personnel in Afghanistan. While the F-16's have a combat mission, and the EOD unit (often embedded in German columns) and the OMLT teams regularly come under fire, no Belgian unit has as yet seen action or experienced the shock of ground combat like the Brits, Dutch, Danes or Canadians did. The cowardness of Belgian politicians who are otherwise very eager to have the new NATO HQ in Brussels, is appalling. It can even get worse. Negotiations for a new government are currently in a stalemate but there remains a solid chance that the next PM will be Elio di Rupo, chairman of the Parti Socialiste. Would this man make it Belgian PM, the Belgian mission in AF would very likely come in jeopardy, or otherwise reduced to a canteen commando.



MFBB.

KILL THE GROUND ZERO MOSQUE.

KILL. IT.



MFBB.

INDIA: MUSLIMS CHOP OFF CATHOLIC PROFESSOR'S HAND FOR USING PHROPET MUHAMMAD'S NAME IN EXAM QUESTION.

Via CathNews India, July 6, 2010:

"Suspected Islamic militants have chopped off a Catholic professor’s hand in Kerala for allegedly insulting Islam in an exam question paper.

Professor T.J. Joseph was attacked on July 4 in while returning home from Sunday mass with his mother and sister, a Catholic nun.

Kochi inspector-general of police, B. Sandya, told ucanews.com that an Islamic extremist group is suspected of the crime and have arrested four people and impounded a vehicle.

She said the attackers used the vehicle to block Joseph’s car before dragging the professor from his vehicle and chopping off his right hand. The attackers then threw the hand away before fleeing.

Church-managed Newman College in Thodupuzha had suspended Joseph, its Malayalam professor, on March 25 for allegedly preparing a question paper with insulting references to the Prophet Muhammad.

St. Joseph Sister Mary Stella said the assailants attacked her brother with an axe and swords.

“They also attacked our elderly mother,” before fleeing, she said.

Her brother had been threatened three times following the question paper row, she added...."

This paragraph was of particular interest to me:

"... Police say officials suspect the Popular Front of India, an extremist group and its political wing the Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI) for being behind the attack.

Thodupuzha, the commercial center of Idukki district, saw angry protests by various Muslim organizations in March when the question paper outcry first broke and several people were injured in clashes with police..."

It seems the lefist/islamic alliance is not merely a European and American phenomenon.

Islam is cancer. Accept it.

Hat tip Patriot's Corner.



MFBB.