HELP THE PHILIPPINES!

Readers of this blog will know that I am against what in the Low Countries is officially known as 'Ontwikkelingssamenwerking' - 'Development Aid', on the grounds that this so-called aid is actually counterproductive. This has been demonstrated time and again - sometimes very eloquently from unsuspected corners by authors like Dambisa Moyo - but for our leftist moral betters feeling good about yourself by taking money away from others and throwing it away in useless projects (filling dicator's coffers in the process) is so much more important than allowing the Invisible Hand of Capitalism to efficiently generate prosperity in third world countries.

I am of course NOT against emergency aid, which is why I urge our readers to contribute money to helping alleviate the plight of so many Filipinos following the passage of the devastating typhoon Haiyan there.

I advise Belgian readers to donate to the Red Cross Flanders, or its counterpart in Wallonia, since donating to the ubiquitously propagated 21-21 HAIYAN initiative is giving money to the same people who in 2004 REFUSED a gift of 12,500 EUR of Vlaams Belang for the tsunami-stricken regions in South East Asia. The reason? Because Vlaams Belang is a rightwing party and the orchestrators of the 12-12 campaign were, and are, hardcore leftists. Yes, you read that right. They preferred missing funds to help tsunami victims because the money came from the Right.

So, again, in my opinion it is preferable to donate to the Red Cross. Doctors Without Borders is also a good choice.




The Red Cross account is BE53 0000 0000 5353. Be sure to mention ‘Hulp in Filipijnen’.


Thank you, and say a prayer for the victims.



MFBB.

SATURDAY NIGHT LENNY KRAVITZ, THE WHO.

Lenny Kravitz opens with Fly Away, a single drawn from his 1998 album 5.




He was named after his uncle, Leonard Kravitz, a Korean War hero who saved most of his platoon from the Chinese wiping it out but who was himself killed in the action. It earned him a DSC posthumously.

I'm very much okay with Lenny. Terrific music, no arrogant brainless fuckface like so many music celebs today, not shy to call himself a Christian.




Okay, then come The Who with Baba O'Riley.




From the 1971 album Who's Next.



Slaap wel.



MFBB.

ANN COULTER AND OUTLAW MIKE TALK HEALTHCARE.

Don't miss, over at Townhall, Ann Coulter's take on Obamacare.

"So now it turns out Obama knew that 93 million Americans would have their health insurance canceled the whole time he was claiming, "If you like your insurance, you can keep it. Period."

Obama lied. Period. "Hope and Change" was actually "A Sucker Is Born Every Minute."

Even without the 2010 Health and Human Services (HHS) report admitting that 93 million Americans would lose their health insurance, anyone with half a brain (which is a pre-existing condition) knew that millions of Americans would be thrown off their insurance plans under Obamacare. Under the law, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is to determine what every health insurance plan must cover -- and any plans that don't are illegal.

As a result, gay guys are now going to be forced to buy plans that cover maternity care. Mormons will have to buy plans that cover gambling addiction therapy. Elderly couples can buy only insurance that includes pediatric dental care. Catholic hospitals will be required to provide birth control and abortions.

Our federal overseers, led by the arrogant and smug gender-feminist Sebelius, know what's best for us. (Which is so nice of her since, as she recently pointed out, she doesn't work for us.) Her idea of flexibility is not requiring Catholic priests to perform abortions. Not yet, anyway.

Obviously, health insurance premiums are going through the roof with all these federal mandates. Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute reports that health insurance premiums will be higher than before Obamacare in at least 45 states -- an astronomical 256 percent higher in some cases. The Los Angeles Times says middle-income families in California will pay 30 percent more for health insurance, even with the subsidies.

Policies are being canceled because your old plan -- the one you shopped for and liked -- is now illegal. It doesn't cover Sandra Fluke's dental dams. Obama is blaming the insurance companies for discontinuing policies that he made illegal. (At least he isn't blaming the cancellations on a guy who put a movie trailer on the Internet this time.)

Isn't it your basic duty as a caring human being to buy an expensive health care plan you don't really want? Because who knows better about the health care needs of 310 million Americans than a smug gender-feminist? Certainly not you."

"The best we can hope for is that influence-peddlers and government bureaucrats make wise decisions about our health care, just as they did with Solyndra, Social Security, public education and the Amtrak food service. Oops! (Only the government could lose billions of dollars with a monopoly.) From the people who brought you the Postal Service ... here's Obamacare!

It's the homework requirement that is the most annoying aspect of Obamacare. Sure, millions of Americans will lose their health insurance and be forced to buy plans they don't want. And many, many millions will no longer be able to go to the doctor of their choosing -- or any doctor at all!

But we've also all been given homework -- mountains of reports, exchanges, insurance plans and mail to study. I'd prefer a 50 percent tax hike to this forced busy-work under Obamacare.

What if Americans don't want to spend weeks online figuring out their new insurance options? What if we don't want to provide the government with reams of personal information simply to be able to buy health insurance? What if we just want to pay our doctor directly for a yearly checkup? Why do we have to examine HHS regulations to find out how much that's going to cost us in fines and taxes?

Under Obamacare, every day is tax day.

And for what? Eighty-five percent of Americans were happy with their health care before Obamacare, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index -- higher than almost any other product or service polled, with even Amazon coming in at 88 percent satisfaction. Even uninsured Americans were as satisfied with their health care as Canadians were with their national health care.

Kausfiles assured us there would be no death panels or benefits cuts under Obamacare because the voters would rise up and punish politicians if they dared cut our benefits!

What about those of us who don't want to be in a constant state of agitation just to get the health care of our choice? Not everyone is better off in a world where the pushy win and the quiet and unassuming die because their rare diseases didn't attract a band of noisy lobbyists.

No group of government bureaucrats can substitute for hundreds of millions of Americans making individual choices about their own lives and their own health. It would be as if the government took it upon itself to tell us whom to marry. Only someone who went to Harvard would think central planners should do that.

The smart people in the Soviet Union tried to plan the nation's agriculture, and the result was 50 years of "bad weather." And they were dealing with inert objects -- land, seeds and crops.

They didn't have to consider whether the fertilizer was a teetotaler who didn't anticipate needing substance abuse therapy or a priest who preferred to skimp on marital counseling insurance.

Our central planners think they can direct something infinitely more complex than farmland: human beings and their individual health needs. Under Obamacare, the pushy and the connected win. Everyone else loses."

And if you don't like Ann Coulter, maybe you're more sympathetic to me, and it that cas you might want to listen to a few observations of mine:



The bipartisan CBO (Congressional Budget Office) predicts that even under Obamacare, the number of uninsured will never fall below 30 million. Check it out here. Now call me a callous monster, but in which respect does 30 million uninsured differ that much, relatively speaking with a pop. of 310 million, from the estimated CURRENT 49 million? And to what degree is the latter number really a reflection of the despised 'heartlessness' of the 'American system'? You will always have uninsured. How many of those 49 million uninsured are really incapable of buying a plan, and how many can, but simply haven't thought of doing so yet? Christ, ten years ago I myself DID NOT HAVE health care coverage!!! Because I was young and healthy and thought that it was something for when I got a little further on the slippery path to old geezerdom.

No honestly, right now almost 90 per cent of the about 255-260 million people with an insurance, or covered by it, are hunky dory with their insurance. That's about 230 million people.

Under Obamacare, not only will you STILL have about, say, two-thirds of the number of uninsured right now, PLUS the majority of those with an O-Care insurance not happy with it. 'What difference does it make'?

Long before Obamacare, the country that spent the most on healthcare, in absolute terms and on a per capita basis, WAS the US already. Take a look at this list e.g.:






According to OECD numbers, the US spent a whopping 8,233 US$ per capita in 2010, for a total of 17.6 per cent of GDP. That's breathtaking, especially when you compare it with, uh, my own Belgistan: 3,969 US$ which translates into 10.5 per cent of GDP.

And yet I'm VERRRY much pleased with our healthcare system, I'm living proof of it.

In other words, it's not a matter of not spending enough, as demonrats and international leftards want the whole world to believe (as a child I was spoonfed the notion that if in the US you fall seriously ill and you can't pay for a cure you are left to die in the gutter) as it is of getting more bang for the buck.

In my opinion, policymakers in the US, and by that I mean not only demonratic policymakers, should actually have taken a close look to how it is done here instead of coming up with an unworkable moloch that will make things only WORSE...

We don't have a scam like the UK's NHS. Our doctors and nurses are not state employees. Most of them work in hospitals and clinics that are VZW's - Verenigingen Zonder Winstoogmerk - or tax exempt entities. Sure, they do receive state funds to make ends meet but by and large the State, until now thank God, does not meddle in how our medical institutions organize their work. There's also state of the art private clinics thanks to the principle of competition. And somehow, somehow, our insurance premiums are fair. I pay around 720 EUR yearly for a plan that covers our family of four. How that is possible when premiums in the States are reportedly so much higher I don't know. Perhaps the staggering costs of litigation for alleged medical wrongdoing has something to do with it.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, looking closely at successful health care systems and modelling the US system after that would have been FAR MORE effective than coming up with a costly monstrosity that in the end will make things WORSE for basically everyone.


Just my two eurocents.



MFBB.

INSANITY: BRITISH PM DAVID CAMERON HELLBENT ON MAKING LONDON CENTER OF SHARIA-COMPLIANT FINANCE IN THE WEST.

A horrifying article from The Gatestone Institute by Soeren Kern:

"I want London to stand alongside Dubai and Kuala Lumpur as one of the great capitals of Islamic finance anywhere in the world." — David Cameron, Prime Minister, Great Britain.

But critics say that British ambitions to attract investments from Muslim countries, companies and individuals are spurring the gradual establishment of a parallel financial system based on Islamic Sharia law. The Treasury also said some sukuk Islamic bond issues may require the government to restrict its dealings with Israeli-owned companies in order to attract Muslim money.

The London Stock Exchange will be launching a new Islamic bond index in an effort to establish the City of London as one of the world's leading centers of Islamic finance.




Britain also plans to become the first non-Muslim country to issue sovereign Islamic bonds, known as sukuk, beginning as early as 2014.

The plans are all part of the British government's strategy to acquire as big a slice as possible of the fast-growing global market of Islamic finance, which operates according to Islamic Sharia law and is growing 50% faster than the conventional banking sector.

Although it is still a fraction of the global investment market -- Sharia-compliant assets are estimated to make up only around 1% of the world's financial assets -- Islamic finance is expected to be worth £1.3 trillion (€1.5 trillion; $2 trillion) by 2014, a 150% increase from its value in 2006, according to the World Islamic Banking Competitiveness Report 2012-2013, published in May 2013 by the consultancy Ernst & Young.

But critics say that Britain's ambitions to attract investments from Muslim countries, companies and individuals are spurring the gradual establishment of a parallel global financial system based on Islamic Sharia law.

British Prime Minister David Cameron announced the plans during a keynote speech at the ninth World Islamic Economic Forum, which was held in London from October 29-31, the first time the event has ever been held outside the Muslim world.

"Already London is the biggest center for Islamic finance outside the Islamic world," Cameron told the audience of more than 1,800 international political and business leaders from over 115 countries.

"And today our ambition is to go further still. Because I don't just want London to be a great capital of Islamic finance in the Western world, I want London to stand alongside Dubai and Kuala Lumpur as one of the great capitals of Islamic finance anywhere in the world."

David Cameron, this blunt IDIOT and sorry excuse for a PM, obviously is incapable of acknowledging that the muslim world is underperforming dramatically economically. Muslim financing methods are sluggish and totally inefficient. By contrast, western financing methods are the unquestionable engine behind the world's economic growth, as they have been copied by basically all other (non-muslim) countries, even China. Genuine drawbacks like crashes in the stock market are in se not unavoidable, as they are often the result of government intervention (read harmful legislation) and when not, their effects are relatively well digested IF, again, government(s) do not interfere.

By contrast, what have islamic financing methods ever produced apart from high-profile infrastructure projects that are basically the result of oil wealth? The following exerpt offers a sobering diagnosis of islam's inability to foster sound economic systems:

"The evidence of dismal economic condition in Muslim world, compared to the other regions of the globe, is obviously staggering. Even a scant examination of the key economic indicators in prominent Muslim countries reveals abysmal results. I put together a table showing the values of a few such indicators for 17 prominent Muslim countries and carefully examined and compared and contrasted them with those for the industrialized nations. These 17 countries all have a population of more than ten millions, at least 88% of which is Muslim. The findings may be appalling but not totally new or surprising. With the exception of Turkey and a couple of oil-rich counties, namely Iran and Saudi Arabia, almost all the other Muslim countries I looked into have a per capita income level of less than $5,000, in most cases even less than $2,000. To put this in perspective, the per capita income for United States is around $47,000, which is currently ranked number seven in the world. The share of population living below poverty line (defined as the annual income of nearly $20,000 for a family of four according to the US Census Bureau) is another telling statistics. This rate in key Muslim countries ranges from 12% in Syria to as high as 63% in Niger, 53% in Afghanistan, and 45% for both Yemen and Bangladesh. This rate is about 18% for Iran.

One can surmise that the percentage of population living below poverty line should be very low for a rich country like the US or really high for the poor nations. Well, it is not necessarily so. This rate, for example, is currently about 13% for the US simply because income distribution is fairly inequitable in this country and the rich and poor gap has been widening during the last three decades. On the contrary, for a poor country with low per capita income, like Syria, the same rate is relatively low, 12%. This is either due to reasonably even distribution of income or because of statistical inaccuracies.

Often, economists use the combined rates of unemployment and inflation for specific year, known as the misery index, to gauge the extent of economic well being for a country or for international comparison. The lower is this index, the better is economic condition. Rising index, on the other hand, signifies economic stagnation. The misery index of more than 10% is considered unacceptable for the United States. For the past 15 years, the misery index has been around 9% for the U. S. economy in average despite the gloomy economic condition in recent years, thanks to very low rate of inflation. The misery index for the major Muslim countries ranges from 57% for Afghanistan, 58% for Iraq, 46% for Yemen, and 17% for morocco. This rate stands at 27% for Iran. One must also be mindful that all economic statistics in these are published exclusively by government and are subject to manipulation and window dressing.

Lagging behind industrialized nations in production of manufactured products and services, many Muslim countries mainly rely on export of oil, raw materials, and basic agricultural products as the primary source of revenues. The total value of exports of the selected Muslim countries is nearly $708 billion a year including the vast amount of money from oil exports. This number is about 50% of the value of the China’s total exports, and is less than the total value of annual exports by Japan. There is evidently no feasible way to calculate the value of the non-oil exports for all the oil-exporting Muslim countries in my sample because they do not publish any relevant reliable data. However, according to a research conducted by some Arab scholars, the total value of non-oil exports by the entire Arab countries is less than the value of exports by the tiny country of Finland!"

But if you though that Britain's flirt with economic disaster was "all", forget about it. It goes further than that:

"In 2012, the British government began offering Muslim workers a Sharia-compliant pension fund in the public sector. A new government agency, the National Employment Savings Trust (NEST), will give Muslims who do not already have a company pension the option of investing in the HSBC Life Amanah Pension Fund, a Sharia-compliant pension scheme. The initial target market comprises some 200,000 Muslims in Britain.

In June 2011, Pointon York, an independent financial services company based in Leicestershire in central England, announced that it will begin offering four Sharia-compliant Self-Invested Personal Pensions (SIPP) products that comply with Islamic law.

Pointon York was the first specialist SIPP provider to receive Sharia-compliant accreditation by the Islamic Bank of Britain (IBB), which has pioneered Islamic retail banking in the United Kingdom. The IBB will supervise the entire life-cycle of Pointon York's pension funds to ensure full compliance with Sharia legal principles.

Muslim families in Britain can already acquire Sharia-compliant baby bonds under the British government's Child Trust Fund scheme. In 2008, Britain's Financial Services Authority (FSA) authorized the establishment of the country's first Islamic insurance company as well as the country's first Sharia MasterCard, called the Cordoba Gold MasterCard.

In addition, takaful, a type of Islamic insurance, reached a new high in 2012, with premiums estimated to have reached around $30 billion, according to The City UK, the financial services lobby group.




PM Cameron told the economic forum that Britain has also taken steps to ensure that Muslims are not discriminated against by implementing measures ending "double taxation" on Islamic mortgages and introducing alternative forms of student and start-up loans to comply with a ban on interest payments. "Never again should a Muslim in Britain feel unable to go to university because they cannot get a student loan simply because of their religion," he said.

But some are saying that Britain should go even farther in aligning its financial system with Sharia law. In an interview with the newspaper London24, Jodie Ginsberg of Demos Finance, a financial services research firm, said: "David Cameron is right to throw Britain's doors open to the Muslim world to showcase our trading wares. But we should also use this forum as an opportunity to consider how the principles of Islamic finance itself, not just the money generated in the Muslim world, might be applied in the UK. Islamic finance is one of the few models successfully to have weathered the 2008 credit crunch and its aftermath."

Absolute lunacy.


MFBB.

COLIN FLAHERTY ON WHITE GIRL BLEED A LOT. PROMOTIONAL TRAILER.

I'm fucked up and can't bring myself to write an original post for the moment, I'm simply lacking the gusto. The company is consuming all my energy. It's not that there aren't sufficient topics, quite the contrary. In Belgium, the disastrous handling of the economy by our very left of center government (and I mean disastrous). The (predictable) trainwreck that's Obamacare. Cameron hellbent on making London the foremost center of sharia compliant banking in the West. The very sad infighting among rightwingers, be it Steyn vs some lesser gods (not that I blame Steyn, it's the others who started it), or between GOP factions. There's a plethora of topics. But sorry, can't. Can't.

Watch this video instead. Colin Flaherty and the trailer of White Girl Bleed A Lot.




More and more I'm beginning to understand why Pam Geller refers to the MSM as the Enemydia.


MFBB.

IN MEMORIAM LOU REED (1942-2013).

It must have been the autumn of 1982 when my pal John D. S. introduced me to a peculiar rock artist by means of showing me an LP cover with a banana on it, and exposing me to some songs on cassette. That album, it turned out, was the debut album of an alternative rock band, the Velvet Underground, with vocal assistance on it by the then as now obscure German singer Nico (that's a she, btw). The two main characters in VU were, so I learned from my friend, John Cale... and a fella by the name Lou Reed. I HAD to know them to be cool.






And right he was. Back in those days, I was a rock illiterate, having to rely on mainstream radio to reconnoitre the musical landscape of the day. Needless to say, if that's your only source of information you'll indeed stay pretty much a novice re the real stuff. Occasionally some good music would come my way, like The Police's De do do do de da da da (from the 1980 album Zenyatta Mondatta), or The Clash's Rock the Casbah. Heck, I'd rate even The Buggles' Video killed the radio star as acceptable. But most of the time it was crap like Bucks Fizz with Making your Mind Up, Super Trooper by ABBA and stuff like that.

In that faraway autumn John all of a sudden changed that, and before long I was acquainted with Rush (Moving Pictures!), Steve Winwood, The Kinks, Uriah Heep, VU and... Lou Reed. Amongst others.


Anyway, here's a triplet of quintessential Lou Reed songs. No, I won't include Walk on the Wild Side, which I do consider his signature song btw. It's just that I figure you'll come across that one on more than enough eulogies. Caroline Says is good, but not accessible enough for this occasion - plus I'm not in the mood for it. Sweet Jane sounds a bit inappropriate for the moment. So here's Real good time together instead.




From Street Hassle (1978).


Satellite of Love comes second:




From another iconic album, Transformer (1972).


And to top it off, what better song than Perfect Day?




The very first Lou Reed song I got to know. From the same album.


Thanks Lou. As I grow older, you learn to acknowledge and appreciate the influences in life that shape, inform, and amuse you. You were one of those man. Thanks again, and RIP.




God bless.



MFBB.

SATURDAY NIGHT DAVE EDMUNDS, MADCON.

It's 1983. Dave Edmunds has a hit with Slipping Away.




Welsh singer/guitarist. This single is from the album Information.



Fast forward almost twenty-five years 2008, when the ethnic Norwegians of Madcon had a huge hit with Beggin'.




Actually a cover of the 1967 The Four Seasons' song.



Las, if you read this, thx for dropping by. Hey, I've never been 'back up again' since I've never been away. It's just that people don't want to listen to me so I've got to keep hammering it in their heads. I'm sorry, but I can't honor your request since i can't decide which background color would be better. Is black really that bad? I got no trouble reading white characters on black.


Slaap wel.


MFBB.

ISLAM, THE SCOURGE OF HUMANITY.

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SATURDAY NIGHT DIONNE WARWICK, TOM PETTY AND THE HEARTBREAKERS.

Dionne Warwick with, what else? Anyone who had a heart.






An immensely beautiful song by a great black diva. Where are they these days? Why do we have to make do with Rihanna?


We should also not forget the geniuses who composed and wrote this song, actually one of many they did for Dionne Warwick. These geniuses were Burt Bacharach for the music and Hal David for lyrics. I assume both names don't ring a bell whatsoever with most persons born after 1980. Bacharach and David are the men behind gems performed by Herb Alpert, Aretha Franklin, Roberta Flack and The Carpenters - amongst others. The photo shows Bacharach in his prime, with his second wife, the actress Angie Dickinson (as a sidenote, I might add that she was a mighty hot ticket, but I think you can figure that out for yourself).



Anyone who had a heart was Warwick's first top ten hit in the States, Canada, Spain, The Netherlands, South Africa, Belgium and Australia in January 1964. Since it was written in 1963, that makes it's right now half a century old. And maybe it's just me (though I don't really believe that), but 50 years later it's still hasn't lost one bit of its attractiveness. I guess that's pretty amazing. We're talking here about a hit written in the era Kennedy was murdered - seems an awfully long time ago, huh? Think of Scott Joplin's famous ragtime hit, The Entertainer, written in 1902. Let's be honest, ragtime sounds hopelessly archaic in a way classical pieces written even two centuries earlier don't. We recognize it's importance, but even in the sixties, half a century ago, it must already have sounded terribly uncool and old-fashioned. Almost as many years separate 2013 from 1963, when Anyone... was written, as 1963 from 1902. But to me it's like Warwick's hit is still as fresh, moving and... actual, as back then. It's a testimony to the extremely lucky hit of Bacharach and David meeting.


Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers with Learning to Fly.




From the 1991 album Into the great wide open.


Nite.


MFBB.

IT'S RAMADAN AGAIN: MUSLIM SCUM ATTACK POLICE IN HOUTHALEN, BELGIUM. SEVERAL OFFICERS WOUNDED, ONE OF THEM WITH A CRACKED SKULL.

On October 11, police officers wanted to arrest a 19-year old criminal suspect of moroccan or turkish origin in the Meulenberg neighborhood in Houthalen-Helchteren, northeast Belgium. They entered the dwelling where the suspect lived, but family and sympathizers ran amok and caused such turmoil that the suspect, already in handcuffs, was able to escape.

In a flying pig moment, the socialist mayor Alain Yzermans, deemed the deliberate obstruction of the neighborhood in the arrest of a criminal suspect strong enough to set in motion a so-called Police Intervention Plan, which authorised the deployment of no less than 80 (eighty) police officers. This relatively massive show of force was met with widespread rioting in the neighborhood, in the course of which several police officers were wounded, one of them suffering a fractured skull.

One of the rioters filmed the events and put it on YouTube. At first everything seems quiet, but from the 5'30'' mark things get interesting. The police vehicles leave the neighborhood and are pelted with stones by the muslim scum. One of the drivers, an officer from nearby Lummen, was hit by a stone at the head and crashed first against a streetlight, then against a house, in the process suffering a cracked skull.

All this accompanied by the jubilant cheers of the followers of the prophet of course.







Here are some blurred but atmospheric stills from the incident:








After the riots, Police Corps Chief Jean-Paul Lucas stated in a press conference that after the police van had crashed and the driver, with a life-threatening skull injury, lay wedged against the steering wheel, the young (turks) tried to get hold of his service gun.

There's several more 'interesting' angles about this story, not least the mind-boggling reaction of Flemish Interior Minister Geert Bourgeois (NVA) to a series of questions posed by Filip Dewinter (Vlaams Belang) in (Flemish) parliament regarding the riots. Bourgeois said - I kid you not - that urban planning in the Meulenberg neighborhood should be studied, since it may have played a role in the 'obvious' segregation there.

Golly, yeah! IF ONLY traffic lights, preferably red all the time, had been installed at the intersection of Bremstraat and Kerklaan instead of a roundabout!!! IF ONLY Wildrozenlaan had been triangular in shape and not like an arc, and IF ONLY Acaciastraat and Gagelstraat had been intersecting at forty-five degrees instead of thirty, THEN there might have been not riots according to Bourgeois!!!




As has been demonstrated time and again, muslim immigrants don't give a rat's ass whether there are criminals among them. On these pages I have several times remarked that when we westerners hear about one of 'our' criminals being arrested, or shot down or whatever, our reaction is invariably 'good riddance'. Not so muslims. They close ranks and clearly consider the perpetrator as one of their own, and when police intervene, as a hero even. It's a simple truth that completely eludes our poltically correct moral betters.

Another simple truth for which we have to thank them is that you can be DAMN SURE that most turkish households in neighborhoods like Meulenberg possess illegal firearms - despite Belgium's stringent anti-gun laws, closely observed by the meek autochton population. If ever things get REALLY HOT, and THEY WILL at some point in the future, we native Belgians will be as defenseless as the sheep the followers of the prophet now slaughter so eagerly - often illegally by the way - in this period of ramadan.

Mark my words.

Will you excuse me now, I have to puke.



MFBB.

ANKE VANDERMEERSCH, SENATOR FOR VLAAMS BELANG, HEROINE OF THE WEST.

Who is the long blonde woman in the centre?




Well, it's Anke Vandermeersch, a leading lady of the Vlaams Belang and a Senator for our party since 2003. She's a former Miss Belgium, though one with brains, as she's a lawyer and specialist in international fiscal judicial matters by formation. Like her male counterpart in the VB, Filip Dewinter, she's always in the frontlines when it comes to highlight the frightening islamization of our country. Since she's a woman, her campaigns often focus on the dreadful future that awaits her sex once islam will have made irreversible inroads into our once free society. She is also a co-founder of the organization Vrouwen Tegen Islamisering - VTI (Women Against Islamization), and in the past VTI made some headlines already with a couple of remarkable campaigns - more on that later.








The ad above is from VTI's website, and this is the latest campaign Mrs. Vandermeersch lent her support to. The campaign, under the slogan Vrijheid of Islam [Freedom or Islam - MFBB] laments the ever growing number of incidents whereby women in Antwerp are insulted by muslims when venturing out on the streets in attire the followers of the prophet deem unchaste. On the close-up above you see a couple of legs - yes, they are Mrs. Vandermeersch's legs - with the scale muslims in Antwerp - and throughout the world, no doubt - use when classifying women. The soles of the shoes are 'Sharia compliant' - read, it's how muslim males view a woman's place in society. Just under the ankles you can read 'Gematigde islam' - 'moderate islam'. Showing an ankle is a provocation. A woman who bares her calves is a slut. If her skirt reveals her knees she's a whore. A couple of inches higher up? Justifies rape. And if she's wearing a bikini, well, showing that much bare flesh is sufficient reason to stone her.

Said Anke Vandermeersch at the launch of the campaign: "In islam a woman is considered inferior. THE symbol par excellence is obliging her to wear certain clothing. 'Whore' and 'slut' are terms we get called when we are walking the streets in Antwerp. We object to that'. 'We', means 'Vrouwen tegen islamisering' [VTI, Women against islamization - MFBB].

Barely had Senator Vandermeersch gotten her campaign underway however, when French shoedesigner Christian Louboutin, the manufacturer of the high pumps Mrs. Vandermeersch is wearing in the photograph, threatened to sue her and VTI for... damaging the image of Louboutin shoes.




This is a screenshot of the Het Laatste Nieuws article dealing with the subject. The caption reads 'Shoe manufacturer Louboutin wants to forbid VB-campaign.'


The photo below shows Louboutin with Blake Lively wearing one of his 'creations'.




Once again, upon reading this story, I had a déjà vu. This is definitely not the first time VB campaigns are being stalled in their tracks for the sole reason that anything having to do with the VB is suspect - courtesy a decadelong barrage of outright lies and defamation by the regime media in Belgium. The dreadful result is that people who should know better immediately react hysterically when their organization, products, ideas or whatever are somehow linked to the Vlaams Belang - and this despite the fact that basically the VB has since a long time become a totally respectable political movement, generating many sensible law proposals. Ironically, quite a few of these have over the years been silently signed into law by the politically correct parties, although the phrase 'give credit where credit is due' has not reached our shores yet. The Vlaams Belang is still treated like a political pariah in Belgium; voter fatigue, its insistence on the unattainable goal of Flemish Independence, and the emergence of a sexier 'VB-lite' party, the NVA, has gnawed seriously at its strenght. However, the VB is still the only party of some weight to seriously make a stand against the creeping islamization of our country. Mr Louboutin, who is openly gay, should acknowledge this. If ever islam gets to rule in the west - God forbid - then dark days will have arrived for him and his partner Louis Benech, a landscape architect.

But no; he prefers to howl with the wolves in the forest. From east to west, in our insane world, anything that's genuinely Conservative in the Western sense, read Burkean Conservative, is treated with sheer and utter contempt and outright hostility as if the ideas and ideals of said movement are somehow inhuman and not worthy of serious dialogue. The likes of Mr Louboutin would never object to a 21st century version of Imelda Marcos wearing his creations, and Dennis Rodman has no qualms of visiting a murderous gnome like Kim-Jong-Un, but a female politican of the Vlaams Belang on Louboutin pumps? The horror!

As if Louboutin's insistence on Vandermeersch and her movement stopping their campaign and destroying the photographic material was not enough, barely one day later our newspapers gleefully ran the story of yet another one threatening with a lawsuit against the VB Senator:




A Canadian student in graphic design at a Vancouver university, Rosea Lake, got wind of VTI's campaign, found it sufficiently resembling her own 'work' 'Judgements' and was reportedly so aghast at the alleged plagiarism that she threatened to sue Vandermeersch if she did not stop the 'Vrijheid of Islam' right away. Het Laatste Nieuws reported that Lake would fly over from Canada this very week to confront Van dermeersch in court.


Here is a comparison of the two photos:




And here is Rosea Lake. Why am I not surprised at her androgynous look?





The Huffington Post had this to write regarding 'Judgements':

Prudish. Flirty. Whore. Proper. Cheeky. Slut. These are just a few of the words that could be used to describe a woman's sexual behavior based on her appearance alone, and 18-year-old college freshman Rosea Lake chose to display them starkly -- on a young woman's legs in a photo that has since gone viral. (Scroll down to see the image.)

Lake, who studies graphic design and illustration at Capilano University in Vancouver, never thought she'd become an Internet sensation when she posted her "Judgments" photo project to her Tumblr on January 5th. But something about the picture struck a chord with those who saw it, and within 24 hours the image had been re-blogged 100,000 times.

The photo, which the student took as part of an AP high school art class last year, depicts the back of her friend Ali MacKenzie's legs, Lake told The Huffington Post. Horizontal lines are drawn up her leg, reflecting various skirt lengths, and next to each line is a description. Lake labelled the longest skirt length "matronly" and the shortest "whore."

Lake got the idea for the photo from looking at graduated cylinders in her science class, she told The Huffington Post. "[I wanted to] take the idea of impersonal, supposedly objective, measurement of things and put it on something that we do measure, but we don't talk about," she said. "We measure women the same way we measure water in cylinders, but no one says it because it's mean."

Lake also expressed that working on the photo project forced her to reassess her own judgments about other women. "I used to assume that all women who wore Hijabs were being oppressed ... and look down on and judge any woman who didn’t express her sexuality in a way that I found appropriate," she wrote on her Tumblr. "I’d like to think I’m more open now."

One everlasting hallmark of people on the left is their astonishing ability to look at a given societal issue and connect hyperbolic conclusions to it which in fact assume a causality as far removed as possible from the real reasons and mechanisms behind the issue. E.g., in Belgium there's a lot of hyperbole going on among our leftist do-gooders about dramatically rising poverty levels, especially in the big cities. Therefore the government must step in! What they do not acknowledge is that the leftist policies of the same government(s) have in fact ensured a steady influx of hundreds of thousands third worlders, the great majority of them muslims. Then OF COURSE importing on a massive scale households consisting of a father with at best a mediocre labor ethic and minimal skills, a mother who is not allowed by her husband to work outdoors, and a bunch of children, will invariably raise average poverty levels!!!

In this related case Lake does not (yet) offer a solution. Having been schooled myself in logical reasoning, I am actually at a loss at understanding her 'logic' in the above explanation. On the one hand she seems to take offense at other people, supposedly men, who judge women by their clothing (or the lack thereof). Given the fact that in general western males' (dare I say white males? I dare) first reaction to a bit of female flesh is rather elation at a chance to helping yourself to an eyeful rather than scorn and calling names, we must assume that Lake, using terms such as 'slut' and 'whore', must have picked them up from a category of males whose first reaction IS using these terms - muslim males.

Take myself for example, a mean rightwing bastard. Each year I welcome the arrival of summer for it offers numerous occasions to peek in a gazillion of décolletés (of course, Rule No. 1 is Never Be Caught). What kind of a dork would I be if my reaction at a beautiful woman letting the world around her partake in some sensuality would be to call her a slut and a whore? You have, of course, women who do dress up like sluts. They are called 'vulgar'. But generally speaking, that's not how I would describe most of the women wearing halter tops or belle soleils on Blankenberge dyke in August.

So then, one would then assume that Rosea Lake would vector her anger against muslim males in particular, and against the muslim world in general, right?

Her reaction is actually the opposite, and you wonder what cogs in her head must have gotten loose, for as an 'explanation' she offers... 'I used to assume that all women who wore hijabs were being oppressed'.

What kind of a logic is that? She seems to be actually defending the muslim world here - and this while it is crystal clear that it's MUSLIM men who will first resort to name calling when women reveal skin above the ankles!!!


In Belgium, Miss Lake will receive help from a not unexpected corner. First, muslim fashion designer Rachida Aziz, upon hearing that Lake also wanted to sue Van dermeersch, offered her support and right away filed a complaint against the VB Senator at the notorious CGKR, the Centrum voor Gelijkheid van Kansen en Racismebestrijding (litterally Centre for Equal Opportunities and Fighting Racism). The CGKR is a perverse initiative by (leftist) governments past, bulking wiht hardcore leftist zealots. It is headed by Jozef De Witte, a notorious leftist asshat who never in his entire life did a genuine job and who only landed in the CGKR top seat because of his political connections (amongst others a brother who is a provincial governor). In its almost two decaded of existence the CGKR has shown clearly that vis-à-vis rightwing political movements it will show about the same neutrality as Lois Lerner's IRS towards the Tea Party, and neither has it actually proven any practical usefulness whatsoever. If anything, racism has actually increased, though not in the way the CGKR commissars would want you to believe. Anyway, here's a photo of our 'fashion designer', Madam Rachida Aziz:




Don't get fooled by her western dresscode. It's deceptive. It's certainly not what she models for her clientele, since, by her own admission, she 'designs clothing for muslimas who want to keep true to their traditions and faith, but at the same time don't want to stand out in western society.' Rachida Aziz, hailed by our moral betters as a 'progressive' muslima, is basically just as much an islamic supremacist as your average mooslim self-detonator. People like her are simply incapable of reaching the very simple conclusion that at the heart of the muslim world's colossal problems... is islam itself. She's a muslim 'progressive' in the way Mona Eltahawy is, the well-known Egyptian 'feminist' who, for all her supposedly tough talk about the problems the muslim world in general and her native Egypt in particular is facing... ultimately remains an incurable bigot and muslim zealot. See Eltahawy here e.g. trying to spray over one of Pamela Geller's ads put up in the NY subway:




Wait, check out how Miss Eltahawy interprets a concept like Freedom of Expression. Audio and video ladies and gentlemen:




Rachida Aziz, Mona Eltahawy, progressive muslims? My ass. The only truly progressive muslims are ex-muslims.



As if this islamic angle was not enough, lookie look at who's gonna be Rosea Lake's lawyer!!! A 'gentleman' by the name of Abderrahim Lahlali. Het Laatste Nieuws quoted Lahlali as: "My client [Rosea Lake - MFBB] is very upset and is heading for Belgium to directly confront Mrs. Van dermeersch".

Who is Abderrahim Lahlali? Oh, you won't get me so far as to pretend he's a 'Belgian' lawer with Moroccan roots, as newspapers like De Standaard are so eager to print. No, like our 'fashion designer' Rachida Aziz he in fact does not care himself a jolt whether he has a Belgian passport, he's first and foremost an islamic supremacist. One of his favorite quotes is 'Justice has no color', but judging by his curriculum Mr Lahlali must be colorblind then, given the kind of cases he has chosen to add to his resume:


a.) The affair Abdelkader Belliraj.

In 2008, Mr Abderrahim Lahlahi tripped over his feet to defend Abdelkader Belliraj. Now, who is Abdelkader Belliraj? On May 30, 2008 I ran the following story on this monsieur:

In early March 2008, Belgian newspapers broke the news that Abdelkader Belliraj (photo), a dangerous terrorist with dual Belgian/Moroccan citizenship, had been arrested in Morocco on February 18 on charges of involvement in an islamist terror circle. The group had links to other islamist and/or terrorist groups such as Moroccan Chabiba Islamiya (Islamic Youth), Moroccan Revolutionary Islamic Movement, the Mujahidine Movement in Morocco, Al Haraka Min Ajli Al Umma (Movement for the Ummah) etc etc. What has this all to do with Belgium? Simple. It appears that Belliraj had been on the payroll of the Belgian State Security for twenty years. In Morocco, Belliraj confessed to six murders he carried out in Belgium between 1986 and 1989. The first was a certain Raoul Schouppe, a grocer who held shop in the neighborhood of Brussels South Station. Belliraj, who frequented this shop, killed Schouppe "because he looked Jewish". Another victim was a 53-year old gay man, Marc Bille, who had apparently tried to proposition Belliraj. The victim's body, with a shot under the ear, was found in Braine-le-Chateau in Walloon Brabant. Then it was the turn of Abdullah al-Ahdal, the rector of the Grand Mosque in the Cinquantenaire Park in Brussels, and his secretary, Tunisian-born Salim el-Beher. They were considered too liberal for Belliraj since they had criticized the fatwa issued by Khomeini over Salman Rushdie, author of 'The Satanic Verses'. They were shot in the head on March 30, 1989. Later that year, on October 3, Belliraj murdered 48-year old Joseph Wybran, the president of the co-ordination committee of Jewish organisations in Belgium (CCOJB) and head of the immunology department at Erasme Hospital in Anderlecht, Brussels. Around the same time, Belliraj killed number 4, said to be the Egyptian chauffeur to the Saudi ambassador in Brussels. Belliraj's motif for the murder: the lukewarm reaction of Saudi Arabia to Khomeinis's Rushdie fatwa. Apparently Belliraj was already an informant of the Belgian State Security while he carried out some of these murders. Following Belliraj's arrest in Morocco, Belgian police interrogated his landlord, Brahim L. Brahim L. rented Belliraj a comfortable house (photo) in Evergem, in the province of East Flanders. The landlord, who is a koranic teacher in Ghent, denies any knowldge about Mr. Bellirajs activities. By contrast, Chakib Benmoussa, Moroccan Interior Minister, said that it was obvious that Belgian authorities "knew about" Abdelkader Belliraj and his activities. He claimed that Belliraj had resided in Afghanistan in 2001, where he would reportedly have met met Ayman al-Zawahiri, the deputy leader of Al Qaeda.

b.) The affair Layla Hachichi:


In 2009, a Belgian-Moroccan girl, Layla Hachichi, was burned alive with boiling water by her own parents while the latter were attempting to 'exorcise the devil' - read, the girl had outed herself as lesbian. Yours truly had a post on the subject on the subject on November 1, 2009:




I posted the following, with a quote by Layla's parents' lawyer:

A Moroccan koranic reader, a certain O.G., has been arrested for the murder of 18-year old Layla Hachichi. Three weeks ago the girl's severely burnt body was found in her parents' house in Antwerps Dam neighborhood. Neighbors say the girl, who was lesbian, was the victim of a ritual murder.

According to O.G.'s lawyer however, NOTHING is wrong:

"Koranic reader O.G. services had been sought by Layla's parents to help her with her psychological problems. He has several times read exerpts from the Koran at the girl's home, but never performed any ritual purification. The man has nothing to hide. Besides, he reported himself at the police precinct."


The name of the lawyer? Abderrahim Lahlali. Koinsidens of course.

And what is the explanation of the parents for the gruesome death of their daughter?

That she had burned herself accidently while showering. In the bathroom an electric waterboiler was found.

c.) The Ghent headscarf affair

In 2007 the Gent Municipal Council voted in favor of a prohibition on public employees wearing visible religious symbols.

(to be continued)



Abderrahim Lahlali. A perfectly integrated muslim according to leftist woolheads. In reality a sinister islamic supremacist, as much a burden to our society - actually, more - as your average grandma-robbing 12-year old mohammed on Molenbeek's streets.


As I mentioned earlier on, the vicious reaction by Louboutin and Lake with the aim of stifling Anke Van dermeersch's campaign, is not a first. In our politically correct world of which the talking heads are forever blathering about the virtues of Diversity, there is very little room for political diversity. Sadly, so long and omnipresent has the barrage of the 'correct' viewpoints been - we are talking about decades here, and the propaganda war has not only relied on the media but to an equal extent on schools and universities - that, alas, a great many leftist dogmas have basically become part of what is called 'accepted wisdom'. Multiculturalism is good. Nazism and Fascism are extreme rightwing political movements. Islam is a religion of peace. Republican presidents are dumb. Abortion is OK. When present at a gay wedding you must look cheerful when cameras are around for gay marriage is a step forward in human evolution. Etcetera etcetera etcetera. Even people who by nature have healthy doses of common sense and/or inquiring and critical minds, feel reluctant and even intimidated when tempted to openly question these 'progressive' viewpoints. In the case of Mrs. Van dermeersch's attempts to challenge the Commandments of the Leftist Bible, the most obvious example of just how far the radical indoctrination of western populations has made inroads in people's thinking was obviously the downright refusal of two well-known Flemish women's magazines to place the VB Senator's ad.

You might wonder, what was that ad about?

Well, given the blunt fact that women under muslim rule are second-rank citizens (at best), to an appalling degree denied the chance to live their own lives and take their own decisions, Mrs. Van dermeersch wrote a couple of years back a book titled 'Hoer noch slavin' ['Neither Whore nor Slave' - MFBB]. The ad consisted of a depiction of the book's cover accompanying a short text decrying the 'societal marginalization' of women under muslim rule, a photo of the Senator, some info on how to order the book, Women Against Islamization's URL, and...

a photo of a girl toddler wearing a tee with the words 'ALS IK GROOT BEN WORD IK WAT IK ZELF WIL'. Loosely translated: 'WHEN I'M BIG I WILL BE WHAT I WANT TO BE'.




Unmistakably nazi-esque huh?

Not.

And yet, this ad was REFUSED by Libelle and Flair, Flander's best-known women's magazines:


'Libelle' - when I was a kid, it was still Libelle Rosita and my mom read it - is your typical women's magazine for the 'mild' womenfolk. The soccer moms, say. Topics covered typically include things like, well, check out the covers below:




'Pay Rise? I dare not even ask it'. '100 women about sex'. 'That's how to make it cozy in home. The Flower Trend'. 'Golly - my décolleté! The 38 most beautiful bras'. 'Autumn Happiness'. 'In 5 steps towards more cuddling'.

Etc etc etc. In short, Libelle is a magazine for hardworking moms with kids. Who like to keep the house tidy and clean. Who prefer perhaps a bit boring, but otherwise safe and comfy sex in a (more or less) traditional heterosexual relationship. Now for Flair:




'Flair' relates to 'Libelle' like Penthouse relates to Playboy, like the Stones relate to the Beatles, or like, uh, Lucy Pinder to Gemma Atkinson. If you don't get the latter comparison, don't worry, I might illustrate my point in some future post (if you're a good boy) (or girl). (whatever). Anyway, the magazine addresses, say, twentysomething and thirtysomething rather 'emancipated' women. There's often articles in it wherein adultery is not only treated as something that is certainly not morally objectionable, but sometimes desirable. I figure these brief descriptions will suffice to situate both magazines.

Well, like I said, both of them refused the above ad. The reason they gave?




Translated: 'Both editors-in-chief refused the ad because they could not reconcile it with the values of their magazines', said Christine Festjens, Director Publishing with Sanoma Media, the publishing company under whose umbrella fall both Libelle and Flair.

Umm... right. I get it. The ad shows a little girl with a T-shirt that says 'ALS IK GROOT BEN WORD IK WAT IK ZELF WIL', and as if that is not bad enough, Anke Van dermeersch says in the same breath that islam suppresses women. There's no hurling of insults, there's merely stating a fact. Yet according to those two editors-in-chief - both of them women, of course - the photo of the girl and lamenting the fate of women in islamic societies 'are not reconcilable with their values'.

Oh really? Let's take a close look at the position of women in the muslim world.

In 2010, the World Economic Forum released its annual Global Gender Gap Report. The WEF's GGGR is a detailed analysis in which 134 countries are screened yearly to see how much they have progressed in closing the gaps between men and women in four crucial ares: Education, Economic Participation and Opportunity, Health, and Participation in Politics.

What becomes clear is that while there are of course non-islamic countries where women's situations are very poorly, the overwhelming majority of the worst-scoring countries are muslim ones, and most of these are arab states.

Of the 20 countries at the bottom of the gender gap scale, 17 (seventeen) are Islamic – Lebanon (116), Qatar (117), Nigeria (118), Algeria (119), Jordan (120), Oman (122), Iran (123), Syria (124), Egypt (125), Turkey (126), Morocco (127), Benin (128), Saudi Arabia (129), Mali (131), Pakistan (132), Chad (133) and Yemen (134). True, the numbers in between (115, 121 and 130) are taken in by non-muslim countries, Nepal, Ethipia and Cote d'Ivoire respectively, but I figure the trend is clear - though probably not so through the rose-tinted fashionista glasses of snotty 'women's' magazines. Oh, by the way, thirteen countries which have a muslim majority appear higher up in the scale. The 'best' one is Kazakhstan at 41.

If you need more reports, there's a UN outfit, so don't say I'm biased, called the Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA). It's also issuing a yearly report on the status of women, and regarding e.g. school enrollment, they have some interesting statistics (the numbers are taken from a 2010 report also). The following percentages indicate the difference between school enrollment between boys and girls, and the seven countries with the BIGGEST gaps are all islamic countries: Chad (22 percent), Yemen (20), Pakistan (16), Guinea-Bissau (16), Mali (14), Iraq (13) and Niger (13).

As for literacy differences between (adult) women and men, once again muslim countries 'excel': of the seven countries with the biggest literacy gaps, five are islamic – Yemen (a 36 percent gender gap), Mozambique (30), Guinea-Bissau (29), Niger (28) and Pakistan (27). The two non-islamic ones are the Central African Republic (28) and Ethiopia (27). Taking a bigger sample of 28 countries, the result is barely better: 20 of them are islamic states.

And political participation? The DESA report offers, for the percentages of women represented in parliaments in 2009, the sobering statistic: the only countries with no female representatives are all islamic, and all of them are arab Gulf states – Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

Finally, muslim countries are also champions with regards to the percentage of women making up the adult labor force: in 27 countries where women accounted for less than one-third of the total adult labor force, 22 are islamic. In the UAE women comprise 15 percent of the workforce, in Saudi Arabia 16 per cent, and Qatar 16 per cent.


But HUSH!!! These facts plus a toddler in a tee ARE NOT RECONCILABLE WITH THE VALUES OF WESTERN WOMEN'S MAGAZINES.



When this girl is big, she won't be what she wants to be. And if she's adulterous, well, I fear the tips and tricks provided by Flair to soothe the husband won't be of great help.


And so, this whole affair boils down to the sobering, depressing dynamic:




A leading lady of Flanders' only truly conservative movement, the Vlaams Belang, has the guts to call a spade a spade and launches (yet another) campaign to warn against the danger an islamized society constitues for women - and a clear and present danger at that.

A high profile gay man, who should actually welcome the fact that his designer shoes are worn for a change by a beautiful woman with guts AND brains - as opposed to brainless bimbettes, chooses to sue that woman instead. He might have supported the iniative, as a way to show his solidarity with untold MILLIONS of other gay men like himself who suffer daily under the yoke of islamic barbarity. Yet Christian Louboutin the Idiot, Christian Louboutin the Fool, Christian Louboutin the Coward does not.

A feminist student, who should actually give a thumbs up to Vandermeersch for so bravely making a stand against islamic oppression of women, chooses to sue her just as well. She might have supported the initiative, as a way to show her solidarity with untold MILLIONS of women like herself who suffer daily under the yoke of islamic barbarity. Yet Rosea Lake the Idiot, Rosea Lake the Fool, Rosea Lake the Coward does not.

To top it all off, Louboutin and Lake find an eager ally in the person of Abderrahim Lahlali. A dubious lawyer whose clients include an islamic terrorist, Abdelkader Belliraj, who, amongst others, shot a gay man; and the parents of Layla Hachichi, who killed their own daughter with boiling water because she had outed herself as lesbian.


This is truly an insane world.



MFBB.

SATURDAY NIGHT TWO DOOR CINEMA CLUB, WALL OF VOODOO.

Two Door Cinema Club with Sun. From the album Beacon. The video is for wussies, but you can always close yer eyes.




Alex Trimble (vocals), Sam Halliday (lead guitar) and Kevin Baird (bass), Northern Irish blokes, formed TDCC in 2007.



Over here at DowneastBlog we are verrrry anxious about Diversity, which is why the follow up gig is by Wall of Voodoo, with Mexican Radio. From the 1982 album Call of the West.




US New Wave band formed in LA in 1977 by Stan Ridgway, he of the unmistakable voice.



Slaap wel.



MFBB.

FEMALE TEACHERS AT DERBY'S AL-MADINAH SCHOOL FORCED TO SIGN CONTRACTS STIPULATING THEY MUST WEAR HIJABS; GIRL PUPILS HAVE TO SIT AT BACK OF CLASSES.

This is the result of spinelessly giving in to every demand of the religion of piss:

"WOMEN teachers at Al-Madinah School in Derby claim they are being told to cover their heads and shoulders with a hijab – an Islamic scarf – whether or not they are Muslim.

This is one of several complaints made by staff to their unions at Al-Madinah School, which is currently under investigation by the Education Funding Agency for alleged irregularities over its grants.

A member of the teaching staff told the Derby Telegraph that women were being told to sign new contracts that say they must wear hijabs and that girls are told to sit at the back of classes.

Two non-Asian women, who refused to comment, were spotted taking off their hijabs as soon as they were out of sight of the school during the lunch hour.
Nick Raine, regional NUT officer, said he was "very worried" about the school and the education of the 200 children there.
He said: "It's one thing to have a dress code which we can challenge and quite another to build it into a contract."




It is understood that the new contracts for staff also include rules about not taking non-halal food into the school and not being allowed to wear jewellery.
Mr Raine added: "There are worries over practices concerning the discrimination between male and female pupils in the school, with the girls being told to sit at the back of the class regardless of whether they can see the board properly."
The school, which occupies space at Norman House, Friar Gate, where primary-age children are taught, and Midland House, Nelson Street, for secondary children, was set up in September 2012.

The then head teacher, Andrew Cutts-Mckay, who has left after less than a year in post, said at the time that the school was being set up so that "the timetable will be flexible with time for Islamic teaching but pupils will be able to opt out of this and there will be a chance to learn about other faiths".
He said the school would "honour all faiths" and that he envisaged a school where 50% of pupils are Islamic and the other half were not.

Sue Arguile, branch secretary of Derby National Union of Teachers, said: "This school was first launched as based on Muslim principles and not as a Muslim school.

"If the school is not sticking to the original reasons behind why it was set up, then it does call into question whether public money is being used properly and for its intended purpose."

Mr Raine said: "The school is publicly accountable so there needs to be greater transparency."

And that's not all. On September 23rd, Mail Online reported:




I wonder how this horrifying evolution of the UK towards an islamic state can be stopped with 'leaders' like David Cameron and Boris Johnson. Both of them FUCKING TRAITORS not only to the conservative cause but also to their very country and everything it once stood for, the birthplace of a landmark document like the Magna Carta, once a beacon of light for democracy, the first state to engage its military to combat slavery, Europes last and crucial bulwark against nazism in the darkest days of 1940, a pioneer for women's rights....

... Believe it or not, but last summer they were basically openly touting their country as Europes prime hub for SHARIA BANKING.


RIGHT INTO OUR FACES.








MFBB.

OBAMA ADMINISTRATION ARMING DOMESTIC AGENCIES, SLASHING REGULAR ARMED FORCES, TRYING TO DISARM ITS CITIZENS. SHOULDN'T YOU WAKE UP?

There is this:

"FORT DRUM — The headquarters of 10th Mountain Division has provided the Army its recommendations for how it could slash a quarter of its budget and manpower.
With the proposal in the hands of the Army, questions remain on what kind of action will happen next and when a decision will be made. The post formally submitted its recommendations before the Army’s deadline Wednesday.

On Thursday, Lt. Col. Tage J. Rainsford, the division public affairs officer, said the post would not release its recommendations until they were reviewed by Army Secretary John M. McHugh and Army Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond Odierno, who ordered the recommendations, and a final decision was returned.

It was not revealed how many people or how much money would have to be cut to meet the Army’s goal. However, Col. Rainsford said, the headquarters has an authorized end strength of about 500 soldiers, meaning as many as 125 soldiers could be facing cuts.




The recommendations on how to make cuts were in response to an Aug. 14 memo from Mr. McHugh and Gen. Odierno to headquarters elements at the two-star level and above, such as the local division.

“Let there be no mistake, aggregate reductions WILL TAKE PLACE,” the memo reads. “The money is gone; our mission now is to determine how best to allocate these cuts while maintaining readiness. We expect Army leaders, military and civilian, to seize this opportunity to re-shape our Army. This effort will take PRIORITY OVER ALL other Headquarters, Department of the Army activities.”

The budget and staffing reduction planning stems from the approximately $50 billion in cuts that the Army must figure out for the 2014 fiscal year, which starts Oct. 1, in connection with the long-term federal budget cuts known as sequestration."

And then I have to read this:

"The recent uproar over armed EPA agents descending on a tiny Alaska mining town is shedding light on the fact that 40 federal agencies – including nearly a dozen typically not associated with law enforcement -- have armed divisions.

The agencies employ about 120,000 full-time officers authorized to carry guns and make arrests, according to a June 2012 Justice Department report.

Though most Americans know agents within the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Federal Bureau of Prisons carry guns, agencies such as the Library of Congress and Federal Reserve Board employing armed officers might come as a surprise.

The incident that sparked the renewed interest and concern occurred in late August when a team of armed federal and state officials descended on the tiny Alaska gold mining town of Chicken, Alaska.




The Environmental Protection Agency, whose armed agents in full body armor participated, acknowledged taking part in the Alaska Environmental Crimes Task Force investigation, which it said was conducted to look for possible violations of the Clean Water Act.

However, EPA officials denied the operation was a “raid” and didn't address speculation about whether it was connected to possible human and drug trafficking.

“Imagine coming up to your diggings, only to see agents swarming over it like ants, wearing full body armor, with jackets that say "POLICE" emblazoned on them, and all packing side arms,” gold miner C.R. Hammond told the Alaska Dispatch.

The other federal agencies participating in the operation were the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Coast Guard, the National Oceanic and the Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Park Service.

The Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management and Park Service are among 24 federal agencies employing more than 250 full-time armed officers with arrest authority, according the federal report, which is based on the 2008 Census of Federal Law Enforcement Officers.

The other 16 agencies have less than 250 officers and include NOAA as well as the Library of Congress, the Federal Reserve Board and the National Institutes of Health."

Our pal CDR Salamander was the first to draw my attention to the apparent militarization first of US Police forces, then of a plethora of federal agencies.

At the same time it seems quite obvious that there is a movement underway to take the teeth out of the regular military.

While I think that it is entirely possible - probable? - that this US Administration - this democrat US Administration - is harboring and implementing schemes in which there is a militarized dimension to its ever growing influence upon, and hold over, American society, I nevertheless doubt that there would be actual blueprints in the bowels of the Obama administration to deliberately and simultaneously also starve the regular US armed forces.

Because I imagine that the power and influence of the "military industrial complex", its lobbying forces, the prestige and traditions of the US military itself .... would constitute a formidable bulwark against any such deliberately planned move.

But it must certainly come in handy that the godforsaken economic mess Obama & Co. have gotten the US in gives them a magnificent excuse to urge drastic cuts in the regular armed forces.

In short:

LIKELY = Obama Administration is deliberately weaponizing its domestic agencies, because it is afraid of armed citizens
COMES IN HANDY = economic crisis necessitates budget cuts, appropriate opportunity to disarm regular armed forces, which in case of an internal conflict are most likely to side with the citizenry


And if you think Outlaw Mike has gone nuts with his conspiracy theory, listen to retired USMC Colonel Peter Martino:




BOOT 'EM OUT, you hear that, Real Americans? BOOT-'EM-OUT. Nasty Pelousy, Dirty Reid Harry, the Creep-in-Chief and the entire shebang of godforsaken lunatics that passes for the democratic party. And don't give their Republican counterparts a free pass either - they have turned into half-democrats already.

Boot them out, if you hold dear everything that made America great. Everything that made it, yes, Exceptional.



MFBB.

RECOMMENDED READS: MARK STEYN ON THE DEMOCRATS' BONFIRE OF VANITIES.

As per usual, an excellent article by Mark Steyn. From his own site, Party Politics:

"...Prowling my hotel room the other night, I discovered a copy of the latest Vogue, kindly provided by the management. So, after bringing myself up to speed on Jennifer Lawrence — a "girl on fire," apparently — I turned to a profile of Susan Rice. She was the girl sent to put out the fire, dispatched by the Obama administration to slog through all the Sunday talk shows the weekend after Benghazi and blame it on some video. In Sir Henry Wotton's famous formulation, an ambassador is a man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country. In the case of Susan Rice, a U.N. ambassador is a broad sent to lie to her country for the good of her man — viz., Barack Obama. Happily, it worked. A year on, the director of the video is still in custody, and Miss Rice is now national-security adviser. So she and Vogue were in party mood:




Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the maker of the 'anti-muslim film'. Supposedely thrown in jail almost one year ago for using false names in violation of a probation order in a bank fraud case. The real reason is of course because the Creep-in-Chief 'the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of islam' needed a scapegoat for the Benghazi murders. It has long since been known that the film had nothing to do with it and that it was an AQ attack. But Mr Nakoula is still in jail nevertheless (though I hear he will soon be released).


"It's a warm evening in June, and guests are assembling for a party she's throwing in honor of LGBT Pride Month at the penthouse of the Waldorf Towers, the official residence of the U.N. Ambassador. Actress turned humanitarian activist Mia Farrow, wearing blue tinted glasses, is one of the first to arrive. Within minutes she's joined by The New York Times's executive editor, Jill Abramson . . ." And soon things are swinging: "They mingle and sip sparkling wine in the elegant living room next to a framed portrait of Oprah Winfrey and First Lady Michelle Obama resting their heads on Rice's shoulders . . ."

....

"...If you're not looking at the world through Mia Farrow's blue-tinted glasses, if you're in Beijing or Moscow, Ankara or Canberra, it's the shadow that everyone sees, very clearly — the sepulchral Habsburgian twilight of a dimming power enjoying its last waltz. Like Vienna exactly a century ago, America retains a certain creative energy, if you're willing to put Jay-Z up there with Franz Lehár. It is at the forefront of therapeutic culture: If Freud had thought to stick his couch on a TV set, he might have made as much dough as Oprah, or at least Dr. Phil. As Vienna sat on an underground "river of sex" (as William Boyd calls it in his recent novel Waiting for Sunrise), so in America the river is overground and its Niagara-like roar the unceasing background din of daily life: A New York mayoral candidate twitpics his penis. A putative successor to San Diego's grope-fiend mayor is caught masturbating in a city-hall men's room. Miley Cyrus in her scanties "twerks" — or is twerked upon (I'm not sure I can reliably say which) — live on TV. Yawn. Next . . .

No one could be further from the octogenarian Franz Josef than our young emperor, but even hip courtiers draw the line at lèse majesté, and so rodeo clowns who disrespect the sovereign are banned for life. On the distant horizon, the contours of the post-American world begin to rise, but the preoccupations of our ruling class grow ever more myopic. One of the world's richest women flies all the way to Switzerland in order to confuse a Zurich boutique selling $38,000 handbags with an Alabama lunch counter 60 years ago, to the consternation of the poor shopgirl who knows nothing of America's peculiar parochial obsessions, has never heard of Trayvon Martin, and lives in a city where pretty much the only black women around are the more fashion-conscious African dictators' consorts in town to visit their safe-deposit boxes. But, as at the Hofbau, the ancient social rituals of our own court permit no diversion from the program: If it's Tuesday, it must be racism.

Alas, in the world beyond the penthouse of the Waldorf Towers, it's harder to tell whom the A-list invites should go to: From Afghanistan to Egypt, a debt-ridden America bankrolls its own eclipse, betraying friends, promoting enemies, despised by both. In the dog days of summer, the new national-security adviser tweets it in from her pad in the Hamptons or wherever, even as the hyperpower readies for its next unwon war: After America's slo-mo defeat in the Hindu Kush, and its ineffectual leading-from-behind in Libya, and its thwarted Muslim Brotherhood outreach in Cairo, Obama is confidently dispatching the gunboats to Syria. If you're Bashar Assad, you must be as befuddled as that Zurich handbag clerk: Hillary hailed you as a "reformer"; no senatorial frequent flyer courted you more assiduously than John Kerry; the guys trying to depose you hate the Great Satan far more than you do, and are the local branch office of the fellows who turned lower Manhattan into a big smoking hole. Yet Washington is readying to take you out — or at any rate, in George W. Bush's unimprovable summation of desultory Clinton-style warmongering, readying to fire a $2 million cruise missile through a tent and hit a camel in the butt. The only novelty with this latest of ineptly rattled sabers is whether Tsar Putin will stand by and let Obama knock off a Russian client...."

You know - or should know - you're in trouble when the National Security Advisor of the soi-disant 'Policeman of the World' is attending - as a contestant? - a 'Glamour Women of the World' soirée. Throw in morsels like that she's the kind of woman to use her official residence as UN Ambassador as a venue for an LGBT Pride Event and you know - or should know - that your 'National Security' is FUCKED big time.

Five hundred years ago that great Renaissance Man Desiderius Erasmus wrote Laus Stultitiae, In Praise of Folly, which basically mocks the self-deception and madness of the ruling elites of his time. When I first learned of this famous book, in high school, I was so naive to think that Erasmus must have been some kind of an old boring grumpy coot, to write a book on what I assumed at the time was a rather limited subject.

When I look at the March of Madness happily undertaken by the entire Obama administration, I now tend to think more that, apart from being the foremost Humanist of his time, Erasmus may also have been the era's Numero Uno clairvoyant.



MFBB.