Not much time. What follows are three works by an American painter I admire very much, John Singer Sargent. I say "American" painter, since to the best of my knowledge he had an American passport, being the son of an American couple, but I'm inclined to think he thought of himself more as a European. After the death of a sister born earlier, his mother was so distraught that she somehow convinced his father to give up his job as an eye surgeon at the famous Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia, PA, and adopt an almost nomadic lifestyle throughout Europe. It is there that John was born, in Florence in 1856, and it was also there that he died, in London in 1925. You should discover Sargent. He crafted around 900 oil paintings and some 2,000 watercolors - there's an ocean of beauty to be discovered there.
First Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. 1885.
Then The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882).
At some point, Sargent became very enamored with all things Spanish. This painting, the psychological aspects of which deserve closer scrutiny, owed much to a Velazquez painting - at least with regards to composition. The beautiful Japanese vases still exist and have even been donated by heirs of the Boit family to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA. There they flank this painting, which in 1919 was donated to the museum by the four siblings depicted.
None of these girls would ever marry and they would live lonely lives, with only the two youngest ones, those in the foreground, keeping contact with each other. The two oldest would as adults suffer from debilitating mental illnesses. The names of the girls are Mary Louisa, Julia Overing, Jane Hubbard, and Florence.
It is... as if Sargent has painted here a foreshadowing of these lovely girls' fates. Notice how the older girls seem to be withdrawing already in darkness.
Sad. If it's any consolation for the girls' souls - Sargent has made them immortal.
I suppose this is my favourite. Lady Agnew of Lochnaw. Painted in 1892 and 1893.
Classy Lady. Somehow Sargent has captured here sensuality without the slightest hint of eroticism.
We don't let our light shine too often on Oz, but today I came across a marvellous Tim Blair observation in his Daily Telegraph blog:
The insane cost of green appeasement:
- Successive federal governments have spent more than $5.5 billion over the past decade on climate change programs that are delivering only small reductions in greenhouse gas emissions at unusually high costs for taxpayers and the economy.
It’s all been for exactly nothing. The precise cost of the 17 programs analysed is $5.62 billion, which equals the pre-tax average annual wages of nearly 90,000 Australians – every cent of it blown to hell.
• Greenoids and environmentalons who complain about public funding of the Australian Formula One Grand Prix should consider that, at just $50 million per year, the amount spent on green dreams would be enough to secure the event until 2123 – when, on current trends, the race will feature gravity-powered nerf karts.
• Australia’s great green waste is more than double the current insurance bill from the massive Queensland floods.
• It’s enough to pay Tim Flannery’s tax evangelism salary until he is more than 31,000 years old, by which time one or two of his predictions may have come true.
• Hand those billions over to Sydney city council and they’d be able to build 14,800 kilometres of cycle lanes for nobody to use.
• Speaking of wasted money, $5.62 billion would fund the entire ABC for nearly seven years. Or seven and a half years once Phillip Adams retires.
• With that kind of cash, the government could put boaties in hotels for 198 years.
Hilariously, green types are using universal past failures to justify the introduction of a carbon tax:
Andrew Macintosh, the associate director of the Australian National University’s centre for climate law and policy, said: ‘’Market-based measures like a carbon price will be far more effective than this sort of scatter-gun approach.’’
Then again, wouldn’t anything be more effective? So far we’re $5.62 billion for zero. Let’s try putting howler monkeys in an industrial centrifuge, or naming our children after shapes. Maybe interfaith staring contests will fix things. Hey, if you’re really crazy, we could always put a tax on fumes that plants eat.
UPDATE. Terry McCrann:
The “Julia” carbon tax will have to raise at least $10 billion a year and continually increasing. Every year. Forever.
Progress!
Tim Flannery is the quintessential complete nutcase ecobozo, formerly a mammalogist and palaeontologist. He should have stuck with his kangaroo species and his fossil bones, alas, this would be May 68 fossil is now more interested in kangaroo courts.
"Three major phenomena are depriving Australia of its rainfall..."
"The worst case scenario for Sydney is that the climate that's existed for the last seven years continues for another two years... In that case, Sydney will be facing extreme difficulties with water."
"Large cities are the most vulnerable of all structures to water deficit because you've got 4 million people who need water there just for everyday survival."
"If you think there's only a 10 per cent chance that this rainfall deficit's going to continue for another few years, you'd be pulling out all stops to preserve water. Because every litre you use now on your car, or your garden or whatever else, you might want to drink in a year's time."
Quick reality check. Sydney, Colo River, a good one month ago:
More ***EXTREME DRAUGHT*** in Australia:
Econutters. Just how long are we going to keep up with their nonsense?
Between gnarling teeth and a lot of hissing the BBC published this update on the Swiss referendum held today, dealing with tighter gun control in the Alpine nation, population about 7.8 million, who together own between 2 and 3 million firearms kept freely at home. The fact that nobody knows just how many firearms there are at home is a clear indication of the very "liberal" view on keeping and owing guns. Swiss soldiers, upon leaving the army, are even allowed to keep their SG550 assault rifles!
We have already seen that the Swiss have both more backbone and more common sense than your average EU-citizens. In November 2009, a referendum brought up by the Swiss People's Party, despite its name rightwing, led to a ban on the construction of minarets. Today, Sunday 13 February 2011, the Swiss roundly rejected a bill that would have imposed severe restrictions on gun ownership:
SWITZERLAND REJECTS TIGHTER GUN CONTROLS
"Swiss voters have rejected proposed tighter controls on gun ownership, final results show. Twenty of the 26 cantons and 56.3% of voters rejected the plan, meaning the current system allowing army-issue weapons to be kept at home will remain.
Supporters of the tighter curbs wanted to have weapons kept in armouries and were demanding stricter checks on gun owners. Opponents said the move would have undermined trust in the army.
For the proposal to succeed, it required the support of the majority of both citizens and cantons. Geneva and Basel both bucked the trend by approving it, according to the Swissinfo website. But German- and Italian-speaking cantons outvoted the plan's supporters in the French-speaking west.
'Growing awareness'
The result is a blow to gun-control groups in Switzerland, the BBC's Imogen Foulkes in Geneva reports, but supporters of the initiative said they had at least started a debate.
"We achieved a great deal by launching the initiative... There is a growing awareness of the risks of firearms," leading women's organisation Alliance F said in a statement quoted by Swissinfo."
Belgium's "top" newspaper De Standaard wouldn't be the leftist rag that it is if, in the runup to the referendum, it wouldn't have forwarded completely ludicrous arguments as to exactly WHY the Swiss would be better off if they turned their weapons in:
"In Switzerland, some 1,300 people commit suicide yearly; in a quarter of the cases a firearm is used, a staggering figure for Europe".
Fucking BOGUS De Standaard. A quick reality check:
Switzerland has 7.8 million people. As we have seen every year there's 1,300 suicides.
Now for Belgium. Belgium has 10.8 million people. Belgium also has one of the severest gun control laws in the entire world. Citizens are basically absolutely powerless to stop criminals, and every once in a while, if a jeweller DOES shoot a perpetrator, it's the former who lands in prison. Well, the number of suicides in Belgium in 2009 was:
Only one EU country, Finland, does bet, erm, worse. Even if you adjust for the population disparity (7.8 million vs 10.8 million), Switzerland would have around 1,500 suicides compared to Belgium's 5,700 or...
... only ABOUT A QUARTER.
Which is a thought exercise De Standaard won't bother to make, let alone suggest you do it. Instead it adds the completely superfluous "in a quarter of the cases, a firearm is used, a staggering figure for Europe".
Which proves absolutely NOTHING, except for the fact that in a country where so many firearms are at home, and some of those hapless souls who do decide to commit suicide - relatively speaking only 25% of those in the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics of Belgistan - simply grab for the most obvious and most easy way out of this life.
As if these people wouldn't commit suicide IF ONLY there were no firearms at home. The reality is that WERE IT SO, the person involved would simply jump off a bridge or in front of a train. But thinking that through must have required too much brainpower from De Standaard's editors.
Well, maybe they do possess the brainpower, and like always it's just that plain old leftist reflex again, Power not to the People, as they so often claim, but to their self-invented God, the State. Liberals and socialists alike, they don't like people who can think for themselves, can fend for themselves, and can DEFEND themselves.
I'd like to end with two memorable quotes. The first one is from Thomas Jefferson:
"An armed man is a citizen. An unarmed man is a subject."
The second one is from Niccolo Machiavelli:
"The Swiss are the most free and the most armed people of Europe."
Damn right. Congratulations for the Swiss.
Or rather, for the true descendants of Wilhelm Tell.
Danzig with Blood and Tears. This heavy metal band around singer/songwriter Glenn Danzig, saw the light in 1987 in Lodi, New Jersey. The number, imnsho the best Danzig song, is on Danzig's second album Lucifuge (1990).
There's a tremendously good Blood and Tears video out there which is kind of an homage to Elvis. Unfortunately you can't embed it. Check it out here.
Maybe it's the dark winter months. Maybe it's the continuous strain. Maybe it's the gloomy news all around the globe. Maybe it's the fact that I drove thru Molenbeek, Brussels, last week and witnessed with my own eyes what it means if a city turns islamic.
Don't get me wrong - basically, I feel fine and quite healthy. And actually, biz is booming.
Still, recently I thought I could use some more things to cheer you up a little. Especially if the profit percentage of you company, despite backbreaking work and your best efforts, is still measured in a single-digit number.
Well, if I get to read that the daughter of former President George W. Bush speaks out in favor of gay marriage, it's definitely NOT one of those things that cheer you up a little. Déjà vu, if like me you live in Europe. This is what you get if not only the educational system, but also 95% of the media, 99.5% of the idiots from the entertainment industry AND even many supposedly rightist icons have made leftist talking points, cleverly camouflaged as "evident" 21st century common sense, their own too.
As I wrote before somewhere on these pages, the left scored two enormous victories post WWII. It's not that they haven't scored more. They did. But imho, regarding two issues they were astonishingly successful. The first issue is that they managed to label Nazis "rightwing", while in fact it's an heinous extreme leftwing ideology.
The second victory is that they have been able to have the common public accept their pet ideas as accepted wisdom. This is why anno 2010 the UK has a so-called "conservative" PM who's disposed favorably towards gay pride parades, and who is hellbent on neutering Britain's armed forces and reduce them to a size rather fit for Luxembourg or something. It is why Sweden has a so-called "conservative" PM who is prepared to stifle the right to freedom of expression not for the extremist muslims undermining his country, but for that tiny percentage of sane Swedes gathered under the Sverigedemokraterna banner...
... and it's why the daughter of George W. Bush, a girl who thereby publicly distances herself from the politics of her father, is disposed favorably towards gay marriage. SHAME ON YOU, BARBARA BUSH!!!
Via AOL News:
"Former President George W. Bush's daughter Barbara is the latest relative of a prominent Republican to support gay marriage.
In May, her mother, Laura Bush, gave this answer to a question about gay marriage: "When couples are committed to each other and love each other, that they ought to have, I think, the same sort of rights that everyone has."
John McCain's daughter, Meghan, supports gay marriage, though her father's against it, and the lesbian daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney supports it too. Gay rights leaders have seized on the generational split as a sign that support for same-sex marriage can come from either party.
Breaking ranks with her father, Barbara Bush taped a short video supporting the push to legalize gay marriage in New York.
"I am Barbara Bush, and I am a New Yorker for marriage equality," the 29-year-old Manhattan resident says in the video on the Human Rights Campaign website. "New York is about fairness and equality. And everyone should have the right to marry the person that they love. Join us."
As president, her father supported a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage
A Yale graduate, Barbara Bush has started a global health nonprofit group and rarely speaks on public issues. Friends tell The New York Times she was surrounded by gay students at Yale and in the New York City design world in which she worked..."
Barbara Bush, stop fooling around, grow a brain, quit with that ABSOLUTELY LUDICROUS "global health nonprofit group", get to work in the PRIVATE sector, get married (to a man) and put some lovely babies on this world forchrissake.
I... do not want to brag.
But... the REAL brave these days are not the Barbara Bush types. It's EASY to endorse a viewpoint that is already so massively endorsed and hyped up that inevitably the perception arises that those who DO NOT endorse it seem archaic at best, and backward bigots at worst.
No Barbara Bush, no need to put laurels on your head for your stance and the flashy ad you made.I am more brave than you because I dare to speak out AGAINST the travesty that is being made of an institution reserved for a MAN and a WOMAN.
And if you out there, like me, dare to say that out loud and decry this travesty, and the even worse travesty the Leftist Scum and their gullible followers made from PARENTHOOD... because that is the logical consequence if you allow gay marriage...
... then you are a Hero too.
Nite. Poor, poor, poor, poor, poor kid. What a fucked up world.
MFBB.
P.S.: Elton, do something about your looks. You look like SHIT.
I am too f*cked up to translate it myself from either Dutch or French, so I borrowed this from Islam In Europe:
LIEGE: PLANS FOR EUROPEAN HALAL HUB AT AIRPORT.
"The management of Liège Airport (Belgium) is planning to develop a European hub at the airport, dedicated to processing halal foods. The project is supported by the Walloon Region and the Walloon agency for exports and foreign investments (AWEX), La Libre Belgique reported Saturday.
The move is meant to diversify the activities of the Liège Airport partnership. A mission led by Jean-Claude Marcourt, the Walloon minister of Economy and Foreign Affairs, at the end of February or beginning of March to Asia, will clarify the project."
Nothing new under the sun. Marcourt is a prominent member of the Parti Socialiste. Perhaps no other European party is so hellbent on introducing islam in Europe as the Walloon Socialist Party.
The Headstones with When something stands for nothing.
Canadians from Kingston, Ontario. Formed in the late eighties, broke up in 03. Front man's Hugh Dillon. This single came from the album Picture of Health (1993).
Words fail me to describe how OFFENDED I feel by this sooooooooooooooo CHEAP attempt at trying to reap, no, make that steal, some good karma of Ronaldvs Maximvs to make TIME's erstwhile Golden Boy look a little less like simpering almost-roadkill. God, what a bunch of despicable SLIMEBALLS over at Time Magazine, and then especially their "managing editor" Richard Stengel. Good thing I suspended my subscription in 09 already, by then not being able anymore to endure the nauseating leftist bias - I might have choked in my morning coffee had my wife given me the week's issue at breakfast.
Apparently, I wasn't the only one. Over at Stormbringer, Sean Linnane has a good go at Time's disgusting recuperation operation:
"OBAMA LOVES REAGAN"
The managing editor at TIME Magazine, Richard Stengel, attempts to explain their latest cover; an image of Reagan with his arm around Obama:
"The cover is Why Obama Loves Reagan. It's a Photoshopped image of the two men together. They never actually met, but I'd like to think they'd have a good time if they were sitting down at the White House together and it's basically how Obama from even the 1980s started looking at Reagan as a transformational politician - not in terms of substance, but in terms of style with someone he would model himself after, and that has happened over the last 20 years.
GIVE ME A FREAKING BREAK! DEPARTMENT
Obama HATED Reagan - he even wrote about it in his book Dreams From My Father:
"When classmates in college asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn't answer them directly. Instead, I'd pronounce on the need for change. Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds . . ."
Further on, Obama criticizes Reagan for "verbal legerdemain"; accusing Reagan of duplicity in the gap between his optimistic words and the actions of his administration.
This attempt by the Left to repackage Obama as the new Reagan strains the imagination; one of Obama's stated reasons for wanting power was to do away with what Reagan had accomplished. Obama has nothing in common with Ronald Reagan. If Reagan were alive today watching all this, he'd puke at what's being done to his legacy and to the great work he did as President.
Everybody knows that liberals all hate Reagan, they all despise Reagan, to a man. A singular, constant objective of the Left always has been to revise Reagan history; during Reagan's time in office they berated his economic policy - trickle-down; "a rising tide lifts all boats" - their catch phrase for it was 'Voodoo Economics'. Never mind that his policies actually worked, and led to a twenty-eight year economic boom, unparalleled in the history of the entire world.
Reagan fought the Communists when the rest of the world had resigned itself to turning their collective back to the Red Threat, drop trousers, bend over and grab the ankles. He alerted on the arm shipments into the Western Hemisphere from Communist sources, and in Grenada and Nicaragua he did something about it. What did the Democrats do to admire and support this Cold Warrior? They attempted to destroy him for domestic political gain - Iran-Contra - and a lot of good, decent mens' careers were ruined in the process..."
"The only good conservative is a dead conservative.
That, in a nutshell, describes the age-old tradition of liberals suddenly discovering that once-reviled conservatives were OK after all. It's just we-the-living who are hateful ogres, troglodytes and moperers.
Over the last decade or so, as the giants of the founding generation of modern American conservatism have died, each has been rehabilitated into a gentleman-statesman of a bygone era of conservative decency and open-mindedness.
Barry Goldwater was the first. A few years ago his liberal granddaughter produced a documentary in which nearly all of the testimonials were from prominent liberals like Hillary Clinton and James Carville. Almost overnight, the man whom LBJ cast as a hate-filled demagogue who would condemn the world to nuclear war became an avuncular and sage grandfather type. Down the memory hole went one of the most despicable campaigns of political demonization in American history. Even Sarah Palin hasn't been subjected to an ad in the New York Times signed by more than 1,000 psychiatrists claiming she's too crazy to be president (though I don't want to give anybody any ideas).
Then there was William F. Buckley, the founder of National Review, the magazine I call home. For more than four decades, Buckley was subjected to condemnation for his alleged extremism. Jack Paar (the Johnny Carson/Jay Leno of his day for you youngsters) was among the first of many to try to paint Buckley as a Nazi. Now, Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times book review section, who is writing a biography of Buckley, insists that Bill's life mission was to make liberalism better.
But it's Ronald Reagan who really stands out. As we celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth, the Gipper is enjoying yet another status upgrade among liberals. Barack Obama took a Reagan biography with him on his vacation. A slew of liberals and mainstream journalists (but I repeat myself) complimented Obama's State of the Union address as "Reaganesque." Time magazine recently featured the cover story "Why Obama (Hearts) Reagan." Meanwhile, the usual suspects are rewriting the same columns about how Reagan was a pragmatist who couldn't run for president today because he was too nice, too reasonable, too (shudder) liberal for today's Republican Party.
....
On the other hand, what is not welcome is an almost Soviet airbrushing of the past to serve liberalism's current agenda. For starters, if liberals are going to celebrate Reagan, they might try to account for the fact that they fought his every move, alternating between derision and slander in the process. As Steven Hayward, author of the two-volume history "The Age of Reagan," asks in the current National Review, "Who can forget the relentless scorn heaped on Reagan for the 'evil empire' speech and the Strategic Defense Initiative?" Hayward notes that historian Henry Steele Commager said the "evil empire" speech "was the worst presidential speech in American history, and I've read them all."
....
While the encomiums to Reagan & Co. are welcome, the reality is that very little has changed. As we saw in the wake of the Tucson shootings, so much of the effort to build up conservatives of the past is little more than a feint to tear down the conservatives of the present. It's an old game. For instance, in 1980, quirky New Republic writer Henry Fairlie wrote an essay for the Washington Post in which he lamented the rise of Reagan, "the most radical activist of them all." The title of his essay: "If Reagan Only Were Another Coolidge ..."
Even then, the only good conservative was a dead conservative."
Damn right. Stengel, drop almost dead of shame you MORON.
I'm sorry for the light blogging last week, but the work was excruciating. I think I should hire extra personnel, but 1° the insane labor costs imposed by the Belgian government and 2° the difficulty of finding qualified personnel, are holding me back. Otherwise, there were a lot of good topics around last week. Hopefully, next week will allow some more time for bloggin'.
The Levellers with One Way, from their second album Levelling the Land (1991). This single is once again proof that you don't have to be mentally sane to make decent music (the Brighton-based Levellers are some kind of anticapitalist econutters).
John Murphy, British film music composer, is as old as I am but a bit more famous.
This number, In the house, in a heartbeat, is from the soundtrack of the 2002 zombie movie 28 Days Later, which was directed by Danny Boyle and casts a.o. the Irish actor Cillian Murphy (not related to the composer, at least not that I know of). The movie was quite good; Cillian and John Murphy and Danny Boyle would work together on another project yet, the 2007 sci-fi Sunshine, which I also recommend, although the idea of re-igniting the Sun with humanity's biggest H-bomb ever is totally ludicrous imho, given that even a dying Sun, like in the movie, remains a massive fusion reactor itself, that dwarfs anything and anything and anything humanity would ever be capable of.
A couple of weeks back, I posted a Youtube video with Mahlers 5th Symphony's Adagietto. I was not entirely pleased with that version. I found a much better one. Here it is:
Breathtaking. Can you believe these are students???
Designed by Ed Heinemann of Douglas Aircraft Company during WWII, as a successor to types as the Helldiver and the Avenger, the Skyraider, nicknamed Able Dog, would prove so successful that it was still used extensively, and with success, in the Vietnam War.
These aircraft were HUGE. Flying trucks, actually. Had to be, with all that armor, which allowed them to take terrible punishment from the ground and still fly. But, they weren't sitting ducks for enemy planes either. In 'Nam, Skyraiders were even credited with downing a Mig-17:
Ben Folds Five with Battle of Who Could Care Less, from the album Whatever and ever Amen (1997).
They formed in 93 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Singer/songwriter Ben Folds also plays the piano. In spite of their name, there were only three band members.
Brad with The day brings.
Guys hail from Seattle, where they formed in 1992. Five years later, this hit was drawn from the album Interiors. Frontman is Shawn Smith (vocals, keyboards).
It's been some time since we last heard of Mark Steyn, but for the moment he's back. Over at The New Criterion, a thought-provoking essay about our changing times and how a handover of global dominance by, well, you know who said that the dollar was a thing of the past this week...
... how a handover of global dominance might be different from the last time the baton was passed, when Britain lost its Empire and the USA assumed the role of the world's policeman.
"... The baton of global leadership had been passed. And, if it didn’t seem that way at the time, that’s because it was as near a seamless transition as could be devised—although it was hardly “devised” at all, at least not by London. Yet we live with the benefits of that transition to this day. To take a minor but not inconsequential example, one of the critical links in the post-9/11 Afghan campaign was the British Indian Ocean Territory. As its name would suggest, it’s a British dependency, but it has a U.S. military base—just one of many pinpricks on the map where the Royal Navy’s Pax Britannica evolved into Washington’s Pax Americana with nary a thought: From U.S. naval bases in Bermuda to the Anzus alliance down under to Norad in Cheyenne Mountain, London’s military ties with its empire were assumed, effortlessly, by the United States, and life and global order went on.
One of my favorite lines from the Declaration of Independence never made it into the final text. They were Thomas Jefferson’s parting words to his fellow British subjects across the ocean: “We might have been a free and great people together.” But in the end, when it mattered, they were a free and great people together. Britain was eclipsed by its transatlantic offspring, by a nation with the same language, the same legal inheritance, and the same commitment to liberty.
It’s not likely to go that way next time round. And “next time round” is already under way. We are coming to the end of a two-century Anglosphere dominance, and of a world whose order and prosperity many people think of as part of a broad, general trend but which, in fact, derive from a very particular cultural inheritance and may well not survive it. To point out how English the world is is, of course, a frightfully un-English thing to do. No true Englishman would ever do such a ghastly and vulgar thing. You need some sinister rootless colonial oik like me to do it. But there’s a difference between genial self-effacement and contempt for one’s own inheritance.
Not so long ago, Geert Wilders, the Dutch parliamentarian and soi-disant Islamophobe, flew into London and promptly got shipped back to the Netherlands as a threat to public order. After the British Government had reconsidered its stupidity, he was permitted to return and give his speech at the House of Lords—and, as foreigners often do, he quoted Winston Churchill, under the touchingly naive assumption that this would endear him to the natives. Whereas, of course, to almost all members of Britain’s governing elite, quoting Churchill approvingly only confirms that you’re an extremist lunatic. I had the honor a couple of years back of visiting President Bush in the White House and seeing the bust of Churchill on display in the Oval Office. When Barack Obama moved in, he ordered Churchill’s bust be removed and returned to the British. Its present whereabouts are unclear. But, given what Sir Winston had to say about Islam in his book on the Sudanese campaign, the bust was almost certainly arrested at Heathrow and deported as a threat to public order.
Somewhere along the way a quintessentially British sense of self-deprecation curdled into a psychologically unhealthy self-loathing. A typical foot-of-the-page news item from The Daily Telegraph:
A leading college at Cambridge University has renamed its controversial colonial-themed Empire Ball after accusations that it was “distasteful.” The £136-a-head Emmanuel College ball was advertised as a celebration of “the Victorian commonwealth and all of its decadences. Students were urged to “party like it’s 1899” and organisers promised a trip through the Indian Raj, Australia, the West Indies, and 19th century Hong Kong.
But anti-fascist groups said the theme was “distasteful and insensitive” because of the British Empire’s historical association with slavery, repression and exploitation.
The Empire Ball Committee, led by presidents Richard Hilton and Jenny Unwin, has announced the word “empire” will be removed from all promotional material.
The way things are going in Britain, it would make more sense to remove the word “balls.”
It’s interesting to learn that “anti-fascism” now means attacking the British Empire, which stood alone against fascism in that critical year between the fall of France and Germany’s invasion of Russia. And it’s even sadder to have to point out the most obvious fatuity in those “anti-fascist groups” litany of evil—“the British Empire’s association with slavery.” The British Empire’s principal association with slavery is that it abolished it. Before William Wilberforce, the British Parliament, and the brave men of the Royal Navy took up the issue, slavery was an institution regarded by all cultures around the planet as as permanent a feature of life as the earth and sky. Britain expunged it from most of the globe.
It is pathetic but unsurprising how ignorant all these brave “anti-fascists” are. But there is a lesson here not just for Britain but for the rest of us, too: When a society loses its memory, it descends inevitably into dementia. As I always try to tell my American neighbors, national decline is at least partly psychological—and therefore what matters is accepting the psychology of decline. Thus, Hayek’s greatest insight in The Road to Serfdom, which he wrote with an immigrant’s eye on the Britain of 1944:
There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which at the present time provides special food for thought. It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem and which consequently become rarer are precisely those on which the British people justly prided themselves and in which they were generally agreed to excel. The virtues possessed by Anglo-Saxons in a higher degree than most other people, excepting only a few of the smaller nations, like the Swiss and the Dutch, were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, noninterference with one’s neighbor and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority.
Within little more than half a century, almost every item on the list had been abandoned, from “independence and self-reliance” (some 40 percent of Britons receive state handouts) to “a healthy suspicion of power and authority”—the reflex response now to almost any passing inconvenience is to demand the government “do something.” American exceptionalism would have to be awfully exceptional to suffer a similar expansion of government without a similar descent, in enough of the citizenry, into chronic dependency...."
I got the embed code at Breitbart. The caption underneath there drily reads: "President Obama is doing a great job of increasing America's stature and respect in the world."
"... The Harper government sent a diplomatic note to Iran Wednesday, as Heritage Minister James Moore lashed out at Tehran for its part in a campaign that cancelled the screening of a movie critical of the Iranian regime at Library and Archives Canada.
On Wednesday morning, the Minister instructed Library and Archives Canada to show Iranium, a documentary critiquing Iran’s nuclear program, after it cowed to numerous threats of protest and an official request from the Iranian embassy in Canada to not present the film Tuesday night, as scheduled.
In its diplomatic note to Tehran, the government said Canada is a free country and that freedom of expression is a core value that won’t be compromised.
“This movie will be shown, the agreement will be kept and this movie Iranium will be shown at Library and Archives Canada. We will not be moving it to a different facility, we’re not bending to any pressure,” said Mr. Moore on the CBC’s Power and Politics.
“People need to be kept safe, but we don’t back down to people who try to censor people by threats of violence.”
Mr. Moore also called on Canadian authorities to investigate threats made against the Library. He said the potential need for an increased security presence “will be taken into account” when the screening is rescheduled in February.
In a statement to the media, the Library said it had no choice but to close the Wellington Street building around 4 p.m. Tuesday.
“The decision to reschedule will allow [the Library] to take the necessary security measures for the upcoming viewing over the next few weeks,” the statement read.
Fred Litwin, president of the Free Thinking Film Society, said he was relieved to hear the Library will play host.
“Still, the bigger question to me is what really happened this week? What were those threats, what was said?”
The cancelling indeed prompted a sharp and bold rebuke from Canada's Heritage Minister, James Moore. Check out this video:
The reaction was swift and, actually, not entirely expected. From a country like Canada, where it was possible to stage high profile kangaroo trials against Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant - a dhimmi attitude would not have surprised me in the least. Perhaps Moore's reaction is one more indication that people have it had islamic blackmailing. From there to having it had with islam tout court is another matter, but one can always hope.
Be that as it may...
... how long is the West going to pander yet to Iran? For those who are short of memory, read this telling 2008 article by Debbie Schlussel. The hostagetaking in Tehran in 79, the Beirut embassy and Marine Barracks bombing in 83, the Buenos Aires bombings in 92 and on and on and on, over the truckloads of IED materials shipped into Iraq after 2003 to Afghanistan....
... it's always Iran, Iran, Iran.
In 1885, then Governor General of the Sudan Major General Charles Gordon Brown, died a hero's death defending Khartoum against the hordes of Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad. His body was decapitated and the head desecrated. Then, as now, the West was far too slow to realize the intrinsically evil character of an islamic uprising. Still, thirteen years later, at the Battle of Omdurman, the Mahdist Army was all but wiped out by a much smaller British force equipped with Maxim machineguns and artillery. After the battle, Kitchener ordered the remains of Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad (he had actually died but a few months after Gordon) exhumed, burned and its ashes dispersed. Yes, Kitchener knew how to deal with islamic terrorism.
Not so a good century later. 31 years after the beginning of Khomeiny's Revolution, and after countless often very blooded provocations, Iran continues to up the ante... to the point where they think they can dictate what can and cannot be shown to the Canadian public.
Do not miss this extraordinary interview with Melanie Phillips on Israeli TV:
As I heard Mrs. Phillips elaborate so eloquently about the near total lack of an rightwing antiweight to the leftist media juggernaut that is European MSM, I was reminded of an article with a very similar message on the Brussels Journal, by a young Norwegian author, apparently a student no less (!). Come to think of it, the mere fact that I feel compelled to use an exclamation mark in connection with a person who's in his early twenties and who's rightwing, is telling. The author's name is Svein Sellanraa, and his short essay is titled Generation Y Radicals.
Here's an exerpt:
"... I have written before about the cultural hegemony the Left exercises in Norway, and about how it has turned universities and schools into indoctrination camps. The generation of Norwegians born in the late 1980s and early 1990s is the first to have lived its entire life in the shadow of this hegemony. Most every teacher, government official, journalist, celebrity, or family member they have encountered spouts the same leftist talking points; most everything they have read, watched, and listened to to has been carefully bowdlerized to make apparent the wickedness of Western culture, the division of history into oppressor and oppressed, and the goodness of egalitarianism. The members of Norway's Generation Y are not the first to embrace the views of the postmodern, politically correct Left – that dubious honor belongs to their parents and grandparents –, but they are the first to absorb it by osmosis. Given the state of Norwegian schools and culture, most of them have probably never even heard of Lukács, Adorno, or Marcuse. They are not only committed to the Cultural Marxist Weltanschauung, but unaware that there is any alternative to it. The upshot of this is that they are not usually bad or stupid people, just grievously misinformed. None of the anecdotes I give here are intended to mock or humiliate the people they depict, many of whom I consider friends. The fault lies not with them, but with the sociopathoid armchair Berias responsible for their indoctrination.
Norway's Gen-Y radicals are utopians. By this I do not mean that they want a perfect society. They are rarely utopians in that sense, just as they are never radicals in the sense of wanting to overthrow the existing order. Like most of the post-Marxist Left, they have abandoned the pipe-dreams of the first socialists; if they believe in the “end of history” at all, they think of it in terms of managerial welfare-state democracy, not a property-less Eden. No, they are utopians in the sense that they believe social problems to be the result of faulty institutions and social structures, and thus also solvable through the modification of those structures. For them, human society and human nature can and should be engineered. This strips the individual of moral responsibility, promotes a sterile, teleological view of society and an interventionist, utilitarian view of the state, and begets the opinions that hierarchy is always unfair and arbitrary, that crime is never the criminal's fault, and that every social institution hides a Darwinian struggle for “resources” between faceless, impersonal forces.
The radicals also have a hefty sense of entitlement. They do not request things -- they demand them. They are perpetually shocked, indignant, and concerned about something. Their shock, indignation, and concern is most frequently directed at Racism, Poverty (which they are demanding – demanding! – be Made History), War, and all the other Important Causes. These evils, they reckon, are best controlled by expanding the State, dismantling what remains of the European heritage, and empowering left-wing internationalist institutions like the EU and the UN. Like China's Maoists the Gen-Y radicals pursue a perpetual, institutionalized revolution in which all humanity is subsumed into isms, ologies, and bureaucratic duckspeak. Like Italian Fascists they are vitalists who value mass political action for its own sake. (I remember an acquaintance who in December 2009 considered going to Copenhagen and protesting the climate summit; she didn't make it clear why she thought the summit should be protested, and I don't think she quite knew -- the important thing was that going to marches and protests is the sort of thing socially conscious and morally upstanding people do.) And like the Brezhnev era's "conservatives in the Kremlin" they see themselves not as reconstructive radicals, but as defenders of an ongoing revolution..."
It is all true. The key to solving our predicament is re-conquering the narrative. Or, perhaps I should say simply "conquering". Was there ever a time truly rightist ideas were spread out and lauded unhindered throughout Europe? I don't think so.
I have to stop now, for lack of time. It's very late, and tomorrow, like on all other days, there's a tremendous amount of work to do. But I have to say one thing yet, and it is destined for the young readers out there. By young I mean, yes, 18 to 25 years old.
If you are in that age group, and words and meanings like individualism, pride in your country's past, duty, honor, christianity, family values, capitalism and free markets, the desire for knowledge, a strong defense, the will to contribute to society rather than claim entitlements from it... mean much more to you than the endlessly repeated mantras of the leftist church...
... then you should consider yourself part of an elite. Much will depend upon you. Don't get disheartened. Connect with likeminded people. They are out there, I'm sure of it.
I have just returned to London, where, I have lived since I was 11. I have been away for four years, living as an ethnic minority in a monocultural part of the world, amassing a host of stories to tell to disbelieving friends. On the whole, I am glad to return. I shan't miss some locals' assumptions that, being a white woman, if I was outside after dark, as I occasionally was, usually to walk the few metres between my house and the church, I must be a prostitute eager to give them a blow job. I shan't miss the abuse my priest husband received: the daubing of "Dirty white dogs" in red paint on the church door, the barrage of stones thrown at him by children shouting "Satan". He was called a "f***ing white bastard" more than once, though, notably, never when in a cassock. I will also not miss the way our garden acted as the local rubbish dump, with items ranging from duvets and TV sets, to rats (dead or twitching) glued to cardboard strips, a popular local method of vermin control to stem the large numbers of them which scuttled between the rubbish piled in gardens and on pavements. Yes, I am very glad to have left Britain's second city.
...
...As a woman, it was difficult for me to gain many first-hand impressions of the Muslims. I was generally ignored by both men and women, and on the rare occasion that I had to interact, when for example a car was parked illegally and blocking my gate, I was addressed as if inconsequential. My husband, however, faithfully reported conversations which you may find somewhat alarming. One of our favourite dinner-party pieces is this: opposite our vicarage there is a "library" which has some computers, some burkas and occasionally tracts that say offensive things about Jews and Christians. My husband did his photo-copying there, and got on rather well with everybody. One day he was chatting to a man with a passing resemblance to Lawrence of Arabia, who had just arrived from Antwerp — one of an increasing number of Muslims who are arriving here with EU passports. He asked him why he had come to Birmingham. He was surprised at the question: "Everybody know. Birmingham — best place in Europe to be pure Muslim." Well, there must be many places in Europe where Muslims are entirely free to practise their faith, but I suspect there are few places in which they can have so little contact with the civic and legal structure of a Western state if they choose. It seems to be particularly easy to "disappear" if that is their intention. A parishioner once described a lorry pulling up outside his house, the side opening to reveal stacked mattresses full of sleepy, and presumably illegal, immigrants, who staggered out into broad Brummie daylight. We heard tales of how houses are exchanged for cash payments in our area. An untaxed car was once clamped by a frightened-looking official at 8am, but within hours the owner of the vehicle had organised the clamps to be sawn off, and he sped away...
Another instance of separation from the Western world is revealed in the following: my husband frequently chatted to a neighbour who could be described as one of the more questioning Muslims, and who has often provided an insight into the locals' mindset. Even this man, however, believes what the whole community thinks: the 9/11 planes were organised by Jews. Everybody knows there were no Jewish people in the World Trade Centre that day, as they had been tipped off. Oh, and the Mumbai terrorists had been kidnapped and brainwashed by Indian people. The tendency towards denial is strong. When my husband mentioned the "dirty white dogs" graffiti to a local Muslim, the response was, "One of your people did it." I have to say that the police's response was no better when the local Methodists complained about the same thing. They chose not to believe it had happened, since we had removed all sign of it with the buckets of anti-graffiti chemicals we had stocked since we arrived. They asked, somewhat pathetically: "Are you sure it was racist?" ....
When this whole thing blows up, as it will do inevitably some day, no one will be able to say he or she did not see it coming.
The USS John C. Stennis (CVN-74), is the US Navy's seventh Nimitz-class nuclear-powered supercarrier, named after Democratic Senator John Cornelius Stennis, from Mississippi, whose career in the Senate lasted from 1947 to 1989 and who was Chairman of the Armed Services Committee from 1969 to 1980. In this capacity he oversaw 25 major aviation programs and for his prodigious efforts he earned the nickname 'Father of the Modern American Navy'.
The Stennis has a.o. and Air Wing, CVW-9, consisting of eight to nine squadrons, one of them being the famous Strike Fighter Squadron VFA-192, the "Golden Dragons". Erm, I meant, the "World Famous Golden Dragons". Cut the guys some slack, their bragging is more tongue in cheek than actual pride in their military accomplishments. It seems they added the prefix "World Famous" after they became indeed, world famous, in the mid-fifties. The movie The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1955), starring William Holden as Lt. Harry Brubaker, features VFA-192 (in the movie it's actually VF-192), and if you check out the following video you can see the yellow dragons insignia on the F9F Panther's noses:
Yes, the movie was that accurate (although the carrier the Golden Dragons were on, the USS Savo Island, is fictitious). James Michener, the author of The Bridges... spent a lot of time on carriers during the Korean War, attending briefings and interviewing pilots, and it shows. Too bad his zeal ruined his marriage.
Hat tip reader Traveller, a Fleming like me and an accomplished engineer who has seen a LOT of the world.
Over at Storm'n Norm'n, a disturbing article about the islamic practice of cousin marriages.
A HUGE MUSLIM PROBLEM: INBREEDING. By Bryan Fischer
Nicolai Sennels is a Danish psychologist who has done extensive research into a little-known problem in the Muslim world: the disastrous results of Muslim inbreeding brought about by the marriage of first-cousins. This practice, which has been prohibited in the Judeo-Christian tradition since the days of Moses, was sanctioned by Muhammad and has been going on now for 50 generations (1,400 years) in the Muslim world.
This practice of inbreeding will never go away in the Muslim world, since Muhammad is the ultimate example and authority on all matters, including marriage. The massive inbreeding in Muslim culture may well have done virtually irreversible damage to the Muslim gene pool, including extensive damage to its intelligence, sanity, and health.
According to Sennels, close to half of all Muslims in the world are inbred. In Pakistan, the numbers approach 70%. Even in England, more than half of Pakistani immigrants are married to their first cousins, and in Denmark the number of inbred Pakistani immigrants is around 40%.
The numbers are equally devastating in other important Muslim countries: 67% in Saudi Arabia, 64% in Jordan, and Kuwait, 63% in Sudan, 60% in Iraq, and 54% in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. According to the BBC, this Pakistani, Muslim-inspired inbreeding is thought to explain the probability that a British Pakistani family is more than 13 times as likely to have children with recessive genetic disorders. While Pakistanis are responsible for three percent of the births in the UK , they account for 33% of children with genetic birth defects.
The risk of what are called autosomal recessive disorders such as cystic fibrosis and spinal muscular atrophy is 18 times higher and the risk of death due to malformations is 10 times higher. Other negative consequences of inbreeding include a 100 percent increase in the risk of stillbirths and a 50% increase in the possibility that a child will die during labor.
Lowered intellectual capacity is another devastating consequence of Muslim marriage patterns. According to Sennels, research shows that children of consanguineous marriages lose 10-16 points off their IQ and that social abilities develop much slower in inbred babies.
The risk of having an IQ lower than 70, the official demarcation for being classified as "retarded," increases by an astonishing 400 percentamong children of cousin marriages. (Similar effects were seen in the Pharaonic dynasties in ancient Egypt and in the British royal family, where inbreeding was the norm for a significant period of time.)
In Denmark, non-Western immigrants are more than 300 percent more likely to fail the intelligence test required for entrance into the Danish army. Sennels says that "the ability to enjoy and produce knowledge and abstract thinking is simply lower in the Islamic world." He points out that the Arab world translates just 330 books every year, about 20% of what Greece alone does.
In the last 1,200 years of Islam, just 100,000 books have been translated into Arabic, about what Spain does in a single year. Seven out of 10 Turks have never even read a book. Sennels points out the difficulties this creates for Muslims seeking to succeed in the West. "A lower IQ, together with a religion that denounces critical thinking, surely makes it harder for many Muslims to have success in our high-tech knowledge societies."
Only nine Muslims have every won a Nobel Prize, and five of those were for the "Peace Prize." According to Nature magazine, Muslim countries produce just 10 percent of the world average when it comes to scientific research (measured by articles per million inhabitants).
In Denmark, Sennels' native country, Muslim children are grossly overrepresented among children with special needs. One-third of the budget for Danish schools is consumed by special education, and anywhere from 51% to 70% of retarded children with physical handicaps in Copenhagen have an immigrant background. Learning ability is severely affected as well. Studies indicated that 64% of school children with Arabic parents are still illiterate after 10 years in the Danish school system. The immigrant drop-out rate in Danish high schools is twice that of the native-born.
Mental illness is also a product. The closer the blood relative, the higher the risk of schizophrenic illness. The increased risk of insanity may explain why more than 40% of the patients in Denmark 's biggest ward for clinically insane criminals have an immigrant background.
The U.S. is not immune. According to Sennels, "One study based on 300,000 Americans shows that the majority of Muslims in the USA have a lower income, are less educated, and have worse jobs than the population as a whole."
Sennels concludes:
There is no doubt that the wide spread tradition of first cousin marriages among Muslims has harmed the gene pool among Muslims. Because Muslims' religious beliefs prohibit marrying non-Muslims and thus prevents them from adding fresh genetic material to their population, the genetic damage done to their gene pool since their prophet allowed first cousin marriages 1,400 years ago are most likely massive. (This has produced) overwhelming direct and indirect human and societal consequences.
Bottom line: Islam is not simply a benign and morally equivalent alternative to the Judeo-Christian tradition. As Sennels points out, the first and biggest victims of Islam are Muslims. Simple Christian compassion for Muslims and a common-sense desire to protect Western civilization from the ravages of Islam dictate a vigorous opposition to the spread of this dark and dangerous religion. These stark realities must be taken into account when we establish public polices dealing with immigration from Muslim countries and the building of mosques in the U.S.
Let's hope America wakes up before a blind naiveté about the reality of Islam destroys what remains of our Christian culture and our domestic tranquility."
There is such a massive amount of coverage on the Tucson shooting that at first I thought I'd add nothing to it.
But the disgraceful way in which leftist media and leftist politicans have used this appalling incident for their political agenda made me change my mind;
Here's a screenshot of Het Laatste Nieuws Online, a Belgium newspaper. OF COURSE, Sarah Palin and the Tea Party are to blame:
"Although Sarah Palin offered her condolences to the Giffords family via Facebook after the Tucson shooting, the Republican politician is more and more getting in a tight spot. Indeed, Congresswoman Giffords (40) last year was on the 'Democrats to be taken out' list on Palin's website, Palin being one of the thriving forces behind the very conservative Tea Party. It's a movement putting up a fierce resistance against President Obama's Health Care reforms..."
All the tricks in the books are okay. Notice the snapshot, expressly taken, for maximum effect, at the moment of an exxaggerated pose.
It is curious how quick our moral betters are to point out what they perceive as the reasons, when they themselves emerged not so long ago from a veritable eight-year long hatefest. A quick recap, and we start with some pics from lefty sites right after Palin's candidacy for VP became known:
Somewhat more explicit than the crosshairs on Palin's USA map huh?
This is Madonna shrieking 'I will kick her ass!!!'. Listen to the public.
Feel the love, huh?
But no matter how much flak Palin took, it's nothing compared to what the former President of the United States was subjected too. Remember - there were THOUSANDS of placards, photos and effigies like these:
We can't omit the Kill Bush Games...
... nor the Kill Bush T-shirts:
Golly, almost forgot the Kill Bush stamps:
There's also been a lot of love for Glenn Beck the past few days. How about this, leftist hypocrites? Syndicated host Mike Malloy publicly wishing FOX News Channel host Beck commits suicide, and expressing hope it will occur live and on the air:
This was some scant evidence of the appalling double standard the left uses. They think they can get away with anything, and still hold the moral high ground. Leftism ladies and gentlemen, leftism... is a disease of the mind.
Be all that as it may.
I have a daughter who was born on September 4, 2001. Exactly one week before 9/11. Christina Taylor Green was born on 9/11 itself.
The lives of my girl and Christina ran parallel. From her photo, she seems like a happy kid, enormously pleased with life. By all accounts, she was.
Christina was always one week younger than my girl, and will... forever remain so.
I would like to ask people to... pray for this little jewel of a girl. And for the other innocent victims. And for their relatives.
Mahler's well-known Adagietto from his Fifth Symphony. There's several speeds at which to play it, and they are basically open to the conductor's taste, since Mahler did not provide metronome marks. Well, when you listen to it, it's actually difficult to imagine the Adagietto's tempo being dictated by a metronome. When Mahler himself conducted it in 1905, it lasted about nine minutes - since the master himself will have known best I guess every performance should last about this long.
At 7:46 this comes close to the Bruno Walter timing, who was otherwise a conductor quite well 'feeling' Mahler. My personal taste goes out to a performance in a clip from the 1971 movie Death in Venice, and that lasts about 9 minutes. Now that one is absolutely wonderful. I consider it definitely better than the version above, but I wasn't able to find it tonight. Perhaps it's better so, since the clip is somewhat controversial, and my feelings about that movie are a bit ambiguous. Death in Venice has been lauded by most culture popes to such an extent that it's almost impossible to hint you don't feel too comfortable with the homoerotic/pederastic nature of the movie. Our moral bettes will inevitably come up with something like that it's a movie about the discovery of beauty, regret about beautiful things forever gone and the like. I don't know. Perhaps I should see it once in whole and then judge.
Anyway... yes, the Adagietto has been commercialized thru and thru. You will find it on a gazillion "Most beautiful classical melodies EVAH" and so on. Still, that does not detract from it's heartbreaking beauty. Enjoy it. And thank you, Gustav Mahler.
Dambisa Moyo, acclaimed author of Dead Aid, has a new book out. How the West was Lost. When you got to hear it from a Zambian, things must be pretty bad indeed. From The Telegraph, January 9:
"... Dambisa Moyo is that rare type of person – an economist who makes waves. Her first book, Dead Aid, angered many in the charity sector by arguing that foreign aid has harmed Africa and should be phased out.
Her second, which is published in London on Thursday, accuses America and other Western powers of squandering their world economic dominance through a sustained catalogue of fundamentally flawed policies.
How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly – And the Stark Choices Ahead goes so far as to predict that the US will be a “bona fide socialist welfare state” by the latter part of this century.
“Indeed, if nothing else changes it from its current path,” writes Moyo, “it is almost certain that America will move from a fully-fledged capitalist society of entrepreneurs to a socialist nation in just a few decades.
“The trouble is, it won’t be just any socialist welfare state... the US is on a path to creating the worst and most venal form of welfare state [poorly developed and designed] – one born of desperation from many years of flawed economic policies and a society that rapaciously feeds on itself.”
....
Oh yeah... Here's the money quote from the article:
“I think the markets can work in a managed way,” she says. “If they’re left to run rampant it’s obviously problematic, but I think they are the best way of delivering economic benefits and have been shown to be the method to generate the biggest economic benefits to the highest number of people.”
Got that, blistering retarded commie fools in the WH, Venezuela, the Union of Socialist Soviet Repooplicks of Belgistan, the PvdA and elsewhere???
For a long time I considered Every little thing she does is magic the best number on The Police's Ghost in the Machine (1981).
Right now, I tend to think it's more Invisible Sun. Still, here's the other one.
For no apparent reason, here's the theme of the 1976 John Sturges movie The Eagle has landed. The film adapatation of Jack Higgins' bestseller novel.
Despite it being an entertaining movie, it disappointed somewhat - at least that's how it felt to me. There's something bound to screw up if you make war movies with a prodigious cast, I don't know why. And like A bridge too far, the cast was impressive: Michael Caine, Robert Duvall, Jenny Agutter, Donald Pleasence, Donald Sutherland, Treat Williams... Oh yeah, and a fella by the name of Larry Hagman.
Interesting - and telling - article by Eileen F. Toplansky over at The American Thinker:
IBERIA AND THE MUSLIMS - DOWN A DEADLY PATH. By Eileen F. Toplansky
Spain has become a major battlefield between the forces of tyranny and the forces of freedom. In September 2010, La Meca, a popular discotheque in Aguilas (Murcia), southern Spain had to "change its name and architectural design because of pressure from Islamic extremists who found the name and design offensive and insulting to their religion." As a consequence, the Muslims "posted a video on the Internet calling for a boycott of Spanish goods." They also planned "jihad against those who 'blaspheme the name of Allah.'"
The disco's owners capitulated and changed the discotheque's name to La Isla; in addition, the owners modified certain "features of the club's architecture by changing the minaret tower into a lighthouse-like tower."
Currently, at the Instituto Menendez Tolosa, a secondary school in the town of La Linea de la Concepción in Andalusia, a high school teacher is being sued by the "parents of a Muslim student who claims that the teacher 'defamed Islam' by talking about Spanish ham in class." The instructor was discussing the proper conditions for curing Spanish ham.
Oink! Just think of the changes the world will have to make: no more piggy banks; no more pig-outs at parties; no more piggy songs about newborn's toes; no more discussion about trichinosis and pigs; no more fairy tales!
This case is not isolated; it reflects the "increasing assertiveness of Muslims in Spain." In 1990, only 100,000 Muslims lived in Spain. Two decades later, they number around 1.5 million.
Thus, teachers have to watch their very words, the stories they choose to read, and the pictures and puppets that they may use in a classroom discussion. The Islamic world keeps tying the noose tighter around freedom of speech, all under the guise of religious tolerance.
The parents who are suing are "citing Article 525 of the Spanish Penal Code[,] which makes it a crime to offend the feelings of the members of a religious confession." It is an ongoing saga of how the Islamic world continues to blackmail the West by perverting the intent of Western laws in order to advance Islamic ideology.
More Muslim intimidation comes from the Islamic Association of Malaga, which has demanded that a Spanish-language television series called El Clon be banned because it is "not only anti-Muslim, but also [attacks] the basic principles of coexistence and integration guaranteed by all democratic societies." The Islamic Association accuses the television series of "violating the Spanish Constitution for airing a program that criticizes certain aspects of Islam, such as forced marriages and the lack of women's rights in Muslim countries."
Basic principles of coexistence! The Islamic world works against this notion at every opportunity.
Speaking of forced marriages, this month, the "Spanish police raided an apartment in Logrono to free a 25-year old [sic] Pakistani woman who was forced to marry her cousin and was then held captive by her family and sexually assaulted for more than a month." There are many such cases of forced marriages in Spain according to Human Jamshed, president of the Association of Pakistani Women in Spain. And under sharia law, they are perfectly acceptable ..."
The islamization of Spain, while less in the news than the one of France, is indeed continuing unabated. Perhaps the starkest symbol of this is Granada, of all places, where since 2003 a muezzin calls the muslim faithful to prayer.
But the greatest accelerator of Spain's islamization is, of course, that walking manifestation of cultural self-hatred and leftist lunacy: Jose Luis Zapatero, Spain's PM, who, while setting the floodgates wide open for an invasion of around 4.5 million Third World immigrants - an appalling number among them muslim - also singlehandedly destroyed the country's economy. Public debt has soared, and unemployment now stands at a staggering 20%. In the meantime he cozied up to Chavez, bore down on Israel, arranged gay marriage and gay adoption, and greatly facilitated abortion.
In one of those seemingly incongruous moves so typical for leftist, Zapatero introduced, in 2007, the so-called Baby Cheque: a 2,500 EUR (3,300 US$) government incentive for expecting women. The move was intended to turn around Spain's truly catastrophic birthrate, at 1.07 children per couple the lowest in the world.
That Baby Cheque scheme has now come to an end. As of January 1st, the program has been aborted. The reason is, of course, Spain's lamentable economic situation, courtesy ... the Zapatero government. And like all leftist phantasmagoria's, this scheme too has done (far) more bad than good. For the Baby Cheque was an astounding success among muslims in Spain (who did not even have to be nationals), while it hasn't produced any noteworthy effect upon the fertility of indigenous Spanish women. Quite the contrary, they forsaked the cheque, but opted for abortion even more.
This is thus how leftist policies in Spain have worked: first allowing muslims in by the hundreds of thousands, then stimulating them to procreate even faster - and you can bet the birthrate among muslim couples in Spain was even without a cheque far higher than 1.07. Indeed, for a Stone Age muslim family of which the father has no inclination to work and the mother (or mothers) are not even allowed to venture outside, a 2,500 EUR cheque is manna from heaven. But it is not enough to induce Jose Q and Maria Y into putting little Spaniards on the world. However, they apparently favored the gay marriage, gay adoption and abortion measures more. Brilliant all, isn't it?
Europe is digging its own grave.
UPDATE: JIHAD IN SPAIN, GAZETA WYBORCZA'S VIEW. We were in Poland between Christmas and New Year, and the following is a scan from Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza:
Unfortunately, I have no time to translate it, save the title. That title says: "JIHAD IS BORN IN SPAIN".
Look at the photo in the right column. That's Madrid's mosque. So here we are, in the year 2011, and we are literally flooded with devastating news of appalling discrimination of non-muslims in muslim countries. Nowhere are they allowed to build churches or other places of worship, and they are prone to relentless physical attacks or at (the very) best have to endure being second rank citizens. Even in "liberal" muslim countries, like Turkey and Egypt, Christians have enormous difficulties obtaining even maintenance permits for their decrepit churches.
Look again at that mosque's interior. L - O - O - K.
It was financed with Saudi money and... Spanish taxpayer dough.
We truly live in an insane, bigoted , hypocritic world.
Try to imagine the worldwide outrage that would have followed the bombing of a mosque by Christians. You cannot even begin to imagine it because no such a thing is happening, nowhere, anywhere, never.
How terrible is it then to conclude that following the carnage inflicted by muslim bombs in a Church in Alexandria barely a peep was heard in MSM worldwide?
Here are two videos, the first one taken right after the explosions, the second one
22 dead, and 79 wounded, many of them horribly maimed. That's what January 1st was for Copts in Alexandria, Egypt. Sadly, terrorist attacks like this one go hand in hand with appalling discrimination from the Egyptian government, which forbids the construction and even the renovation of Coptic churches, generally treats Copts like second rank citizens, and fails to effectively prosecute known perpetrators. An islamic fanatic who last year murdered five young Copts when they left a church, is in custody, but has still not been charged. Then there was the very suspicious move by the Egyptian government in the midst of the global swine flu pandemic to slaughter around 300,000 pigs, an act that pushed a great many Copts, already living on the brink of absolute poverty on trash heaps, even further into appalling circumstances.
So what does the Egyptian police do when desperate Copts take to the streets to protest their shameful treatment?
Look for yourself:
Islam is cancer, and the cancer is already among us here in Europe. Europes indigenous peoples would do well to learn to handle firearms, because at some point the use of deadly force against the muslim vermin may become necessary to safeguard our liberty and indeed, our very lives. Remember, there are no moderate muslims. There are only muslims with different timeframes for what they see as the Global Califate.
If they fail to do so, then one day autochton Frenchmen, Belgians, Dutchmen, Britons, Germans, Danes et al...
European indigenous demographics, that is. Just a page from a typical booklet issued every quarter by a typical Alumni Association from a typical Flemish High School.
14 elderly dead, one birth. The Departed 14 - The New Arrivals 1. Don't sound like good mathematics to me with regards to continuing da glorious euro welfare state thingy, whaddoyousay?
I don't know what the FUCK is WRONG with the people of my generation, the generation before me, and the one after me. In Belgium, autochton fertility rate is something like 1.37 and it's pretty much the same story elsewhere in Europe. No wait, the Fierce Spanish do better. They're at 1.1. The men seem unaware that the orchestra dangling between their legs can serve another purpose than peeing. And I don't buy it that they all prefer to be studs instead of fathers. I see an awful lot of 'em using daycream and yearning to cook tonight, that's right, the New Man is a cooking prodigy these days. The number of men able to fix a lawnmower is somewhat less impressive though than the number able to prepare a chateaubriand. No sir, I don't believe these sophisticated XY's, even if it's not for procreating, are all such heroes between the sheets. And the women? The women aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaalllllllllll want to, no wait, it's not that they all want to put their career first. In a great many cases, what do I say, it's the overwhelming majority, there's no career involved to speak of, since most professional women I know work part time. So if it's not for the career nor for the kids, what's the extra time for? Ha, "self-fulfillment". Enjoying the good life. Reading books, you know. Though not the Dostoievsky variant, more like vampire stories and stuff. A shopping spree here, a course of Italian there. All very sophisticted, but they don't reach to my mom's ankles if you ask me.
Enjoy the good life while you can, sterile idiots. I wanna see all of you in thirty years time, when you're sitting all alone in a decrepit home for the elderly, all your penis can do will indeed be peeing, and the moroccan wards start thinking of speeding things up a little, and your nonexistent grandchildren are nowhere to be seen to give some comfort, let alone your nonexistent children.
Fucking wussies, and poor Stip. Jesus Christ.
Am I being grumpy? You bet I am. Do I care? Not a jolt.
The numbers are equally devastating in other important Muslim countries: 67% in Saudi Arabia, 64% in Jordan, and Kuwait, 63% in Sudan, 60% in Iraq, and 54% in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. According to the BBC, this Pakistani, Muslim-inspired inbreeding is thought to explain the probability that a British Pakistani family is more than 13 times as likely to have children with recessive genetic disorders. While Pakistanis are responsible for three percent of the births in the UK , they account for 33% of children with genetic birth defects.
"... Dambisa Moyo is that rare type of person – an economist who makes waves. Her first book, Dead Aid, angered many in the charity sector by arguing that foreign aid has harmed Africa and should be phased out.
