AD OF THE DAY.

For the Norwegian Armed Forces:





Hat tip CDRSalamander. Notice the almost nonexistent PC character of the ad. Best part of it all are the ending shots, with a white heterosexual couple enjoying a moment of intimacy looking out over a marvellous panorama. Because... in the end... that's what it is all about. Life to the fullest, with a (soul)mate, raising offspring (hopefully) and enjoy the opportunities, security and comfort that a modern democracy has to offer. You gotta be proud of, and love a land that can offer its citizens that, and there's nothing shameful or repugnant to show that love and pride.

The Diversity Nazis, of which I am sure the Norwegian Army has enough, must somehow have been asleep or otherwise involved in yoga sessions in the MoD CryRoom when this was sneaked past them.



MFBB.

WARNING OF THE DAY.

If you are a responsible parent, be forewarned!!!




Hat tip the/pol/principle.



MFBB.

CULTURAL ENRICHMENT IN EUROPE GOING CRESCENDO.

Gang violence in France by Jean-Marie, Louis, Xavier, Marie-Hélène, François, Isabelle, Loïc, Hervé and, whooooooooops, sorry, got that list from the Eurovision Song Festival, forget it okay? Anyway, via Filip Dewinter's twitter account:

Ondertussen in #Frankrijk... Laf etnisch bendegeweld van tien tegen één is beste bewijs van ontbrekend waardenpatroon in multicul-samenleving. Losgeslagen ‘jongeren’ groeien op zonder enig normbesef... pic.twitter.com/CuUQ6StS1w

— Filip Dewinter (@FDW_VB) June 15, 2019

Via NEE TEGEN MSM, London in the Year of Our Lord 2019 under the reliable stewardship of mayor Sad Dick Khan:

‘Jongeren’ proberen scooter van koerier te beroven... Manmanman, dit is de UK mensen.. Londen..... pic.twitter.com/xwgyXDEWMJ

— NEE TEGEN MSM (@NEETEGENMSM1) June 17, 2019

A screenshot from Fouad Boussetta's twitter account showing a cute lineup of muslim first graders on the way to school in the UK:




In The Netherlands, anti-islam activist Edwin Wagensveld from PEGIDA Nederland, was attacked physically when he was distributing flyers near the al-fourqaan mosque in Eindhoven. Watch how our peaceful muslim co-citizens interpret a concept like freedom of expression:

Edwin van Pegida is aangevallen in Eindhoven, shab #brabant 😛 pic.twitter.com/osPIkXpUfM

— 1+1=3 (@Autocorrekt_) June 15, 2019

Freedom of speech, this Turk gets it!!! The future of Europe is bright!!!


Progress!!! More immigration please!!!



MFBB.

PHYSICISTS PROPOSE STRUCTURE FOR FIVE-QUARK PARTICLE.

This is interesting. Via Science News:

"Physicists have finally figured out how pentaquarks are built
Scientists pinpoint the structure of the five-quark particles

BY EMILY CONOVER 6:00AM, JUNE 7, 2019

To make a quark quintet, combine a trio and a duo.

Exotic subatomic particles called pentaquarks contain five smaller particles called quarks and antiquarks. But those particles aren’t a simple clump of five constituents rattling around. Instead, the pentaquarks are molecule-like agglomerations of a pair of smaller particles, each of which consists of either three quarks or a quark and an antiquark, scientists report in the June 7 Physical Review Letters.

First spotted in 2015 at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, pentaquarks were unlike anything seen before (SN: 8/8/15, p. 8). All previous known quark-containing particles were either baryons — particles such as protons and neutrons which contain three quarks — or mesons, which consist of one quark and one antiquark. But pentaquarks, with their five component particles, didn’t fit into either of those categories.

“There was no clear picture how these pentaquarks were built,” says particle physicist Tomasz Skwarnicki of Syracuse University in New York, a coauthor of the study.

Some scientists thought that the pentaquarks’ five constituents could mingle on an equal footing. But detailed measurements from the LHCb experiment reveal that the pentaquarks are made from two known particles, a baryon and a meson, stuck together. That finding makes the particles a bit less exotic than had been speculated.

Still, Skwarnicki says, the result reveals new facets of particle physics: Before this result, it wasn’t clear that baryons and mesons could glom onto one another at all."

A quick recap:


In the Standard Model of Elementary Particles there's up and down, charm and strange, and top and bottom quarks:





Protons and neutrons, which form the nuclei of atoms in varying numbers, are composed of three quarks each. In the case of a proton, of two up quarks and one down quark, whereas for a neutron it's one up quark and two down quarks:





A single proton has one elementary charge, determined as recently as this year as 1.602176634×10−19 C (whereby C stands for Coulomb, the SI unit of electric charge; FYI, the charge carried by a constant current of one Ampère in one second).

Up quarks carry two thirds of a (positive) elementary charge and a down quark one third of a negative charge, so that a proton has an electrical charge equal to 2/3 e + 2/3 e - 1/3 e = 4/3 e - 1/3e = 1e.

Similarly, a neutron is electrically neutral since the charge of the one up quark (+ 2/3e) is neutralized by the negative charges of the two down quarks (2/3e - 2 x 1/3e = 0 e).


Protons and neutrons are baryons, from the Greek word for 'heavy' and quite stable. An electron, with a negative charge of minus one elementary charge (-e) is not a baryon but a lepton, from the Greek word for 'light', and indeed, if Outlaw's memory does not betray him, I still hear my old physics teacher say that its mass is about 1/2000th of the mass of a proton. In the meantime, I think I came across a more specific value of 1/1854th or something but whatever, it is much, much lighter than a proton. Within the current model it is not known whether it can be split up further like protons and neutrons and an electron is therefore truly an elemental particle. Electrons too are inherently stable.

Mesons are quite another matter. They are composed of one quark and one antiquark which stick together because of the strong nucelar force (one of the four fundamental interactions). Since quarks have a size, mesons have size too, in effect a diameter of roughly one femtometer (1 x 10 to the minus 15 meter), which is about 1.2 times the size of a proton or neutron. Mesons are inherently unstable, with the longest-lived lasting for only a few hundredths of a microsecond.

And now there's pentaquarks, composed of a baryon and a meson!


(illustration via CERN)

An interesting resume by Dr Don Lincoln:





Fascinating!



MFBB.

WHEN SEXUAL DEVIANCY BECOMES THE NORM.

A horror story from Brazil, via Mail Online:

By LUKE ANDREWS FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 08:41 BST, 16 June 2019 | UPDATED: 09:23 BST, 16 June 2019


A Brazilian mother and her lesbian lover are accused of ripping off her nine-year-old son's penis before beheading him because he reminded her of her dad.

Rosana Candido, 27, and Kacyla Pessoa, 28, also allegedly sewed a fake female sex organ onto the body because he 'wanted to be a girl' before scraping the boy's skin off his face.

They also tried to gouge out his eyes using a knife after mother Candido stabbed her son Rhuan a dozen times.

The child was killed and mutilated at their home in Samambaia, about 20 miles from the capital Brasilia.

The mother ran away with the boy after her father, who lives in Acre, near Peru, lost custody five years ago.

A few quick points:

* the sheer horror of this crime is probably (hopefully) an indicator of it being a statistical outlier. Nevertheless, as LGBT groups worldwide have gone in the offensive to legalize gay marriage and gay adoption, eagerly assisted by leftist and green politicians, expect more of this.

* Since the father lost custody, it may be safely assumed that in Brazil, as elsewhere, courts are stacked dramatically against men.

* As the boy 'wanted to be a girl', one can only imagine the sheer ferocity of the anti-male sentiment to which the poor creature was subjected on a daily basis.

It is of course true that horrible child abuse happens just as well at the hands of heterosexuals. Nevertheless, these are dangers that are 'known' to a large extent, and subsequently can be 'dealt' with to one degree or another.

It's just that, as if this 'known' spectre of child abuse isn't bad enough, it's simply insane to open up a Pandora box of hitherto even more gruesome molestations at the hands of same sex couples. It may be safely assumed that the existence of a biological bond between parent(s) and child(ren) at the very least provides a modicum of protection - however imperfect in the most terrible of cases - due to the DNA-encoded protective tendencies of parents vs offspring.

When a kind of relationships are promoted whereby even that barrier against child abuse is not present, expect big trouble. Yes, in this horrible case there was a relationship mother-son... but not one between Rhuan and the lesbian lover.

In 2010, the 4th Class of Brazil's Superior Court of Justice of Brazil ruled unanimously that same-sex couples have the right to adopt children. Three years later, the Justice's National Council of Brazil, in a 14 to 1 vote, legalized same-sex marriage in the entire country.

And so, in Brazil as elsewhere, as time-tested unions between men and women - however imperfect in some or even many cases - as the best place to raise children in safety are being demolished by a Left that has completely lost its collective mind, expect more abuse of the weakest among us and, as this case illustrates, sometimes even downright horrors.

Prayers are asked for Rhuan.



MFBB.

SATURDAY NIGHT HANS ZIMMER, BILLY JOEL.

From Hans Zimmer's Dunkirk soundtrack (2017): Two steps from hell - Victory.





Trivia: the Shepard tone.



Billy Joel with Leningrad, from the album Storm Front (1989).





Joel met the Russian clown Viktor Razinov in 1987 while on tour in the USSR. Razinov lost his father during the 900-day Siege of Leningrad.


Good night.


MFBB.

RECOMMENDED READS: RAYMOND IBRAHIM'S "THE 630-YEAR OLD REASON EASTERN EUROPEANS DISLIKE ISLAM."

A telling exerpt from Ibrahim's book Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, via American Thinker:

"Why Eastern Europeans are much more reluctant to accept Muslim migrants than their Western counterparts can be traced back to circumstances surrounding a pivotal battle, that of Kosovo, which took place today, June 15, exactly 630 years ago today in 1389. It pitted Muslim invaders against Eastern European defenders, or the ancestors of those many Eastern Europeans today who are resistant to Islam.

Because the jihad is as old as Islam, it has been championed by diverse peoples throughout the centuries — Arabs in the Middle East, Moors (Berbers and Africans) in Spain and Western Europe, etc. Islam's successful entry into Eastern Europe was spearheaded by the Turks, specifically that tribe centered in westernmost Anatolia (or Asia Minor) and thus nearest to Europe, the Ottoman Turks, so-named after their founder, Osman Bey. As he lay dying in 1323, his parting words to his son and successor, Orhan, were for him "to propagate Islam by your arms."

This his son certainly did; the traveler Ibn Batutua, who once met Orhan in Bursa, observed that although the jihadi had captured some one hundred Byzantine fortresses, "he had never stayed for a whole month in any one town," because he "fights with the infidels continually and keeps them under siege." Christian cities fell like dominoes: Smyrna in 1329, Nicaea in 1331, and Nicomedia in 1337. By 1340, the whole of northwest Anatolia was under Turkic control. By now and to quote a European contemporary, "the foes of the cross, and the killers of the Christian people, that is, the Turks, [were] separated from Constantinople by a channel of three or four miles."

By 1354, the Ottoman Turks, under Orhan's son, Suleiman, managed to cross over the Dardanelles and into the abandoned fortress town of Gallipoli, thereby establishing their first foothold in Europe: "Where there were churches he destroyed them or converted them to mosques," writes an Ottoman chronicler. "Where there were bells, Suleiman broke them up and cast them into fires. Thus, in place of bells there were now muezzins."

Cleansed of all Christian "filth," Gallipoli became, as a later Ottoman bey boasted, "the Muslim throat that gulps down every Christian nation — that chokes and destroys the Christians." From this dilapidated but strategically situated fortress town, the Ottomans launched a campaign of terror throughout the countryside, always convinced they were doing God's work. "They live by the bow, the sword, and debauchery, finding pleasure in taking slaves, devoting themselves to murder, pillage, spoil," explained Gregory Palamas, an Orthodox metropolitan who was taken captive in Gallipoli, adding, "and not only do they commit these crimes, but even — what an aberration — they believe that God approves them!"

After Orhan's death in 1360 and under his son Murad I — the first of his line to adopt the title "Sultan" — the westward jihad into the Balkans began in earnest and was unstoppable. By 1371, he had annexed portions of Bulgaria and Macedonia to his sultanate, which now so engulfed Constantinople that "a citizen could leave the empire simply by walking outside the city gates."

Unsurprisingly, then, when Prince Lazar of Serbia (b. 1330) defeated Murad's invading forces in 1387, "there was wild rejoicing among the Slavs of the Balkans. Serbians, Bosnians, Albanians, Bulgarians, Wallachians, and Hungarians from the frontier provinces all rallied around Lazar as never before, in a determination to drive the Turks out of Europe."

Murad responded to this effrontery on June 15, 1389, in Kosovo. There, a Serbian-majority coalition augmented by Hungarian, Polish, and Romanian contingents — twelve thousand men under the leadership of Lazar — fought thirty thousand Ottomans under the leadership of the sultan himself. Despite the initial downpour of Turkic arrows, the Serbian heavy cavalry plummeted through the Ottoman frontlines and broke the left wing; the Ottoman right, under Murad's elder son Bayezid, reeled around and engulfed the Christians. The chaotic clash continued for hours.





On the night before battle, Murad had beseeched Allah "for the favour of dying for the true faith, the martyr's death." Sometime near the end of battle, his prayer was granted. According to tradition, Miloš Obilić, a Serbian knight, offered to defect to the Ottomans on condition that, in view of his own high rank, he be permitted to submit before the sultan himself. They brought him before Murad and, after Miloš knelt in false submission, he lunged at and plunged a dagger deep into the Muslim warlord's stomach (other sources say "with two thrusts which came out at his back"). The sultan's otherwise slow guards responded by hacking the Serb to pieces. Drenched in and spluttering out blood, Murad lived long enough to see his archenemy, the by now captured Lazar, brought before him, tortured, and beheaded. A small conciliation, it may have put a smile on the dying martyr's face.





Murad's son Bayezid instantly took charge: "His first act as Sultan, over his father's dead body, was to order the death, by strangulation with a bowstring, of his brother. This was Yaqub, his fellow-commander in the battle, who had won distinction in the field and popularity with his troops." Next Bayezid brought the battle to a decisive end; he threw everything he had at the enemy, leading to the slaughter of every last Christian — but even more of his own men in the process.

So many birds flocked to and feasted on the vast field of carrion that posterity remembered Kosovo as the "Field of Blackbirds." Though essentially a draw — or at best a Pyrrhic victory for the Ottomans — the Serbs, with fewer men and resources to start with in comparison to the ascendant Muslim empire, felt the sting more.





In the years following the battle of Kosovo, the Ottoman war machine became unstoppable: the nations of the Balkans were conquered by the Muslims — after withstanding a millennium of jihads, Constantinople itself permanently fell to Islam in 1453 — and they remained under Ottoman rule for centuries.

The collective memory of Eastern Europeans' not too distant experiences with and under Islam should never be underestimated when considering why they are significantly more wary of — if not downright hostile to — Islam and its migrants compared to their Western liberal counterparts.

As Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán once explained:



~ We don't want to criticize France, Belgium, any other country, but we think all countries have a right to decide whether they want to have a large number of Muslims in their countries. If they want to live together with them, they can. We don't want to and I think we have a right to decide that we do not want a large number of Muslim people in our country. We do not like the consequences of having a large number of Muslim communities that we see in other countries, and I do not see any reason for anyone else to force us to create ways of living together in Hungary that we do not want to see[.] ... I have to say that when it comes to living together with Muslim communities, we are the only ones who have experience because we had the possibility to go through that experience for 150 years.



And those years — 1541 to 1699, when the Islamic Ottoman Empire occupied Hungary — are replete with the massacre, enslavement, and rape of Hungarians."

Foolish and immoral Western politicians have allowed, and continue to allow, yet another invasion of our lands by the barbarous and inhumane death cult of islam. Are we headed towards another 500-year occupation by a belief system that is, in fact, a stain on humanity?


MFBB.

FEMALE COMMANDER FOR 40TH INFANTRY DIVISION.

Via Breitbart:

"LOS ALAMITOS, Calif. (AP) — The California National Guard has announced the appointment of the first woman to lead a U.S. Army infantry division.

Brig. Gen. Laura Yeager will take command of the 40th Infantry Division on June 29 at Joint Forces Training Base in Los Alamitos, California.



Yeager currently commands Joint Task Force North, U.S. Northern Command at Fort Bliss, Texas.

Yeager was commissioned in 1986 as a second lieutenant from the Reserve Officer Training Corps at California State University, Long Beach.

She served as UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter pilot, left active duty when her son was born and continued her military career in the California Army National Guard.

Yeager deployed to Iraq in 2011 as deputy commander of the Cal Guard’s 40th Combat Aviation Brigade, then served as a battalion and brigade commander."

I never served, so I think it is more apt to let experts speak. From the relevant comments section:

First one commenter who goes by the name Lycurgus_The_Law_Giver:

"She’s not allowed to fight (and rightly so), she would never win against an actual infantry man in actual combat, but she can command an infantry division? You are out of your mind. Women should never be allowed in the military. It costs just as much to train one woman as it does to train a man. Perhaps more. An army that is half women and half men will lose to an army of all men every time, all other factors being equal. If you don’t believe me, then let’s do a study. Let’s simulate the outcome. Let’s do a full dress rehearsal. Let’s have a full-scale combat exercise with a half woman / half man army versus an all man army, and let’s see what the outcome would be. You’d better be sure this is going to work, commanders, before you get into an actual war and lose, because this really is not going to work, and this is an enormous threat to our national security. All other things being equal, we are going to lose against a near peer adversary with an all man army, unless we are very, very lucky, or unless we are fighting a decisively inferior opponent, which is never guaranteed. A typical nation’s military is 1% or less of the size of its population. There is no reason whatsoever that we would need to draw on the female population to support the military. They can serve as un-armed nurses who do not need actual military training. It is vastly cheaper to train them just as nurses. They cannot be relied on as soldiers, so we cannot pretend that they are soldiers. They can assist with logistical supply lines as civilian contractors. They should never be trained with a weapon or given a weapon, because women are inherently unable to compete with men in combat, and they never will be able to compete with men in combat. I say this as a veteran who served in combat and saw the results of our failed experiment with female soldiers in combat. We lost 75% of our female “soldiers“ during our deployment to pregnancy, because none of them were the least bit interested In going to war, or using deadly force to defend their country. Those who did were usually promoted very quickly if they were pretty, Even if they were incompetent and had very poor judgment, and were probably the worst choice of all the people available for the job, but they had to promote a woman, or else they would be labeled sexist. They were all totally incapable of actually fighting in combat or commanding in combat, and they had a serious negative impact on the unit overall. They should have been wives of soldiers or serving in a purely civilian capacity. No one has a right to serve in the military. The nation decides who will best serve in the military, because the primary consideration is whether or not those who serve will win or not, and how we can best ensure they will win by selecting only the best candidates to serve, as the Spartans did through the Agoge. There is a reason why women have never before served in any military. If you ignore those lessons of history, you will be conquered."

Then, somewhat less nice/less elaborate, some guy named wrench2tc:

"I did convoy security in Iraq. The transportation units had females and every time we would get hit they would freak out and lose their composure. Absolutely worthless."

There are several prisms to look at this development and conclude it won't end well. I recall less than stellar combat records of female units in Israels wars, or the fact that Brig General Yeager as a helicopter pilot has no experience with ground troops (except, so it seems, as a medevac pilot).

But what I also have on my mind is the total bruhaha lately of letting transgender men-to-women athletes compete against genuine females and them clearly having the upper hand. Uh-huh. Thought so. ESPECIALLY in the armed forces, ESPECIALLY in ground combat units, a strong physique is a key issue.

To give just one example, one of the determining factors in the Brits winning the Falklands War, was the fact that post their landing in San Carlos, Royal Marines and Paras covered the 56 miles (90 kloms) to Port Stanley with a full kit in often atrocious weather... in three days. And 'full kit' typically amounts to an 80-pound (40 kilograms) load. They called it 'yomping'.

Your run of the mill ATHLETIC woman couldn't do that. Upper body strength, muscle mass, a pair of very stout legs and su-perb knees are paramount. Women-simply-don't-have-what-it-takes. That's not their fault or responsibility. It's biology. Males can't give birth. Same issue.

Sure, here and there and once in awhile you might come across a yompster. One in thousand perhaps. A statistical refugee. You can't build units with statistical refugees. Also, as a man you prolly wouldn't want to date these examples, although for the moment we won't go down that road.

You may argue that in her position, Brig General Yeager will never be required to do the physical part required of the grunts in the units she commands. And you are correct about that. Some of the most effective generals in world history weren't suited for anything like 'yomping' either. Famous Panzer General Hasso Von Manteuffel had a diminutive physique, yet he gave the Russians hell on the Eastern front and his 5. Panzer Armee advanced the furthest during the Battle of the Bulge, almost reaching the Meuse river.

But that is not the point. This promotion of Brig General Yeager is another dubious 'milestone' in the Diversity Nazis' transformation of the US military, another self-provided argument to usher women of all ranks into combat units, and it won't do the combat effectiveness of these units any good.

Bottom line is, this appointment is another denial of obvious truths, and one that in some near or distant future will inevitably lead to losses that could have been avoided. To unneccessary deaths.

But those insisting on this madness will never be the ones to pay the ultimate price.



MFBB.

SATURDAY NIGHT NIK KERSHAW, RADIOHEAD.

Nik Kershaw with The Riddle. From the 1984 album of the same name.





Just prior to posting this, Mr Kershaw called. He apologizes profusely for the atrocious 80s hairdo.



Radiohead with No Surprises. Album OK Computer (1997).





Some kind of a concept album. Although Yorke denied that. Anyway, prolly their best. Radiohead ruled in the mid and late nineties.


Gute Nacht.


MFBB.

GLACIER NATIONAL PARK OFFICIALS QUIETLY REMOVED "GLACIERS GONE BY 2020 SIGNS".

Uh-oh.

Via Wattsupwiththat:

"GLACIERS APPEAR TO BE GROWING, NOT MELTING IN RECENT YEARS

By Roger I. Roots, J.D., Ph.D.,

Founder, Lysander Spooner University

May 30, 2019. St. Mary, Montana. Officials at Glacier National Park (GNP) have begun quietly removing and altering signs and government literature which told visitors that the Park’s glaciers were all expected to disappear by either 2020 or 2030.
In recent years the National Park Service prominently featured brochures, signs and films which boldly proclaimed that all glaciers at GNP were melting away rapidly. But now officials at GNP seem to be scrambling to hide or replace their previous hysterical claims while avoiding any notice to the public that the claims were inaccurate. Teams from Lysander Spooner University visiting the Park each September have noted that GNP’s most famous glaciers such as the Grinnell Glacier and the Jackson Glacier appear to have been growing—not shrinking—since about 2010. (The Jackson Glacier—easily seen from the Going-To-The-Sun Highway—may have grown as much as 25% or more over the past decade.)

The centerpiece of the visitor center at St. Mary near the east boundary is a large three-dimensional diorama showing lights going out as the glaciers disappear. Visitors press a button to see the diorama lit up like a Christmas tree in 1850, then showing fewer and fewer lights until the diorama goes completely dark. As recently as September 2018 the diorama displayed a sign saying GNP’s glaciers were expected to disappear completely by 2020.





But at some point during this past winter (as the visitor center was closed to the public), workers replaced the diorama’s ‘gone by 2020’ engraving with a new sign indicating the glaciers will disappear in “future generations.”

Almost everywhere, the Park’s specific claims of impending glacier disappearance have been replaced with more nuanced messaging indicating that everyone agrees that the glaciers are melting. Some signs indicate that glacial melt is “accelerating.”
A common trick used by the National Park Service at GNP is to display old black-and-white photos of glaciers from bygone years (say, “1922”) next to photos of the same glaciers taken in more recent years showing the glaciers much diminished (say, “2006”). Anyone familiar with glaciers in the northern Rockies knows that glaciers tend to grow for nine months each winter and melt for three months each summer. Thus, such photo displays without precise calendar dates may be highly deceptive.

Last year the Park Service quietly removed its two large steel trash cans at the Many Glacier Hotel which depicted “before and after” engravings of the Grinnell Glacier in 1910 and 2009. The steel carvings indicated that the Glacier had shrunk significantly between the two dates. But a viral video published on Wattsupwiththat.com showed that the Grinnell Glacier appears to be slightly larger than in 2009.

The ‘gone by 2020’ claims were repeated in the New York Times, National Geographic, and other international news sources. But no mainstream news outlet has done any meaningful reporting regarding the apparent stabilization and recovery of the glaciers in GNP over the past decade. Even local Montana news sources such as The Missoulian, Billings Gazette and Bozeman Daily Chronicle have remained utterly silent regarding this story."

Hat tip CDR Salamander.



MFBB.

LEST WE FORGET...

"Able Company riding the tide in seven Higgins boats is still five thousand yards from the beach when first taken under artillery fire. The shells fall short. At one thousand yards, Boat No. 5 is hit dead on and foundered. Six men drown before help arrives. Second Lieutenant Edward Gearing and twenty others paddle around until picked up by naval craft, thereby missing the fight at the shore line. It's their lucky day. The other six boats ride unscathed to within one hundred yards of the shore, where a shell into Boat No. 3 kills two men. Another dozen drown, taking to the water as the boat sinks. That leaves five boats.

Lieutenant Edward Tidrick in Boat No. 2 cries out: "My God, we're coming in at the right spot, but look at it! No shingle, no wall, no shell holes, no cover. Nothing!"

His men are at the sides of the boat, straining for a view of the target. They stare but say nothing. At exactly 6:36 A.M. ramps are dropped along the boat line and the men jump off in water anywhere from waist deep to higher than a man's head. This is the signal awaited by the Germans atop the bluff. Already pounded by mortars, the floundering line is instantly swept by crossing machine-gun fires from both ends of the beach.

Able Company has planned to wade ashore in three files from each boat, center file going first, then flank files peeling off to right and left. The first men out try to do it but are ripped apart before they can make five yards. Even the lightly wounded die by drowning, doomed by the waterlogging of their overloaded packs. From Boat No. 1, all hands jump off in water over their heads. Most of them are carried down. Ten or so survivors get around the boat and clutch at its sides in an attempt to stay afloat. The same thing happens to the section in Boat No. 4. Half of its people are lost to the fire or tide before anyone gets ashore. All order has vanished from Able Company before it has fired a shot.







Already the sea runs red. Even among some of the lightly wounded who jumped into shallow water the hits prove fatal. Knocked down by a bullet in the arm or weakened by fear and shock, they are unable to rise again and are drowned by the onrushing tide. Other wounded men drag themselves ashore and, on finding the sands, lie quiet from total exhaustion, only to be overtaken and killed by the water. A few move safely through the bullet swarm to the beach, then find that they cannot hold there. They return to the water to use it for body cover. Faces turned upward, so that their nostrils are out of water, they creep toward the land at the same rate as the tide. That is how most of the survivors make it. The less rugged or less clever seek the cover of enemy obstacles moored along the upper half of the beach and are knocked off by machine-gun fire.

Within seven minutes after the ramps drop, Able Company is inert and leaderless. At Boat No. 2, Lieutenant Tidrick takes a bullet through the throat as he jumps from the ramp into the water. He staggers onto the sand and flops down ten feet from Private First Class Leo J. Nash. Nash sees the blood spurting and hears the strangled words gasped by Tidrick: "Advance with the wire cutters!" It's futile; Nash has no cutters. To give the order, Tidrick has raised himself up on his hands and made himself a target for an instant. Nash, burrowing into the sand, sees machine gun bullets rip Tidrick from crown to pelvis. From the cliff above, the German gunners are shooting into the survivors as from a roof top.

Captain Taylor N. Fellers and Lieutenant Benjamin R. Kearfoot never make it. They had loaded with a section of thirty men in Boat No. 6 (Landing Craft, Assault, No. 1015). But exactly what happened to this boat and its human cargo was never to be known. No one saw the craft go down. How each man aboard it met death remains unreported. Half of the drowned bodies were later found along the beach. It is supposed that the others were claimed by the sea.

Along the beach, only one Able Company officer still lives—Lieutenant Elijah Nance, who is hit in the heel as he quits the boat and hit in the belly by a second bullet as he makes the sand. By the end of ten minutes, every sergeant is either dead or wounded. To the eyes of such men as Private Howard I. Grosser and Private First Class Gilbert G. Murdock, this clean sweep suggests that the Germans on the high ground have spotted all leaders and concentrated fire their way. Among the men who are still moving in with the tide, rifles, packs, and helmets have already been cast away in the interests of survival.

To the right of where Tidrick's boat is drifting with the tide, its coxswain lying dead next to the shell-shattered wheel, the seventh craft, carrying a medical section with one officer and sixteen men, noses toward the beach. The ramp drops. In that instant, two machine guns concentrate their fire on the opening. Not a man is given time to jump. All aboard are cut down where they stand.

By the end of fifteen minutes, Able Company has still not fired a weapon. No orders are being given by anyone. No words are spoken. The few able-bodied survivors move or not as they see fit. Merely to stay alive is a full-time job. The fight has become a rescue operation in which nothing counts but the force of a strong example.

Above all others stands out the first-aid man, Thomas Breedin. Reaching the sands, he strips off pack, blouse, helmet, and boots. For a moment he stands there so that others on the strand will see him and get the same idea. Then he crawls into the water to pull in wounded men about to be overlapped by the tide. The deeper water is still spotted with tide walkers advancing at the same pace as the rising water. But now, owing to Breedin's example, the strongest among them become more conspicuous targets. Coming along, they pick up wounded comrades and float them to the shore raftwise. Machine-gun fire still rakes the water. Burst after burst spoils the rescue act, shooting the floating man from the hands of the walker or killing both together. But Breedin for this hour leads a charmed life and stays with his work indomitably...."

Via The Atlantic, NOV 1960 issue.

Hat tip NEC338x over at CDR Salamander.



MFBB.

TOON OF THE DAY.

MFBB.

WELCOME TO THE GREAT SOCIALIST STATE OF CALIFORNIA!!!

First the appetizer. This is America, more precisely democrat-run CA:





Fox News' Tammy Bruce reports:

"One glance at the formerly Golden State is a frightening embarrassment. The latest indictment of liberal leadership is the trash heap of Los Angeles. Literally. Despite the emergence of louse-borne typhus, Los Angeles can’t seem to get its act together.

Steve Lopez of the Los Angeles Times reported a week ago on the obscene condition of downtown Los Angeles, “A mountain of rotting, oozing, stinking trash … stretching a good 20 yards along a skid row alley. Rats popped their heads out of the debris like they were in a game of Whac-A-Mole, then scampered for cover as a tractor with a scoop lurched toward them. … The trash problem is not confined to any one street, but this particular location on the 800 block of Ceres Avenue is surrounded by food distribution companies that sell to shoppers, vendors, stores and restaurants. I counted seven within a block, so you have to wonder — given the colonies of football-size rats — about the potential contamination of the food supply chain and the spread of disease.”

What does the city say when confronted about the slow, or nonexistent, pace of cleanup?



A “spokeswoman for the city Department of Public Works said the backlog on service calls for trash pickup around homeless encampments sits at just under 8,400 currently. … ‘If it’s a homeless encampment, it’s a lengthier process because humans are involved and we have to meet certain protocols,’ she said, including a survey of who’s there, an inventory of personal property and notice of a cleanup,” the Times reported.



That’s right. Their concern for the people who are at ground zero for emerging deadly viruses is to follow protocols involving surveys and inventories. So don’t you worry — big government is keeping itself busy, as it behaves as though it’s normal to have more than 2,000 people sleeping on trash heaps, as potential epidemics lurk.

This is the idiotic disaster brought to you by unrestrained liberal leadership as it creates problems, then births a bureaucracy that will never deal with it.

One glance at the formerly Golden State is a frightening embarrassment. The latest indictment of liberal leadership is the trash heap of Los Angeles. Literally.

In San Francisco alone, as The New York Times reported, one of every 11,600 residents is a billionaire. The state actually has a budget surplus, but as we see, money can’t cure stupid.


Video courtesy Lew Rockwell.

Which brings us to Gov. Gavin Newsom and his plan. He’s outraged, just outraged at the “national disgrace” of California’s homelessness.

The Ventura County Star reported, “Gov. Gavin Newsom called growing homelessness in California a national disgrace as he announced Tuesday that he is launching a task force to find solutions amid a housing crisis in the most populous state.”

Like Los Angeles, instead of dealing with the reality of the problem, Newsom announced the creation of a task force, the members of which will travel around the state and make recommendations. There’s only one recommendation, and they won’t like it, that will change the state’s fate: a plea to all California voters to stop electing Democrats.

Yes, there’s nothing finer in a leader than the effort to blame everyone else for the scourge of homelessness your fellow Democrats have created over the years. California’s disaster isn’t a national disgrace, it’s not even California’s disgrace; it’s the disgrace of every liberal politician in the state who has led that state into medieval crisis.

Speaking of medieval crises, Dr. Drew Pinsky, the addiction medicine specialist, told Brian Kilmeade of Fox News that a deadly epidemic could emerge in Los Angeles during the summer months.



"I live in the great state of California, the utopia that is California, which is a nightmare,’ Pinsky said. ‘I want to give you a prediction here. There will be a major infectious disease epidemic this summer in Los Angeles.’ He continued, ‘We have tens and tens of thousands of people living in tents. Horrible conditions. Sanitation. Rats have taken over the city. We’re the only city in the country, Los Angeles, without a rodent control program. We have multiple rodent-borne, flea-borne illnesses, plague, typhus. We’re gonna have louse-borne illness. If measles breaks into that population, we have tuberculosis exploding. Literally, our politicians are like Nero. It’s worse than Nero,’ Pinsky said,” Fox News reported.



But it’s different now. Every Nero has a task force.

It’s so bad in California, even The New York Times deigned to allow an opinion piece decrying the growing instability of the state..."

Downtown LA under the effective stewardship of our friends the Democrats.


The return of a medieval disease... in California! Via DailyWire:

"The city, with a population topping four million and a broader metropolitan area with many millions more, is awash in massive problems — overcrowding, lack of housing, and high demand for free services among them. But other far more serious problems are lurking, Dr. Drew Pinksy said on Thursday.


“We have a complete breakdown of the basic needs of civilization in Los Angeles right now,” Pinsky told Fox New host Laura Ingraham. “We have the three prongs of airborne disease, tuberculosis is exploding, rodent-borne. We are one of the only cities in the country that doesn’t have a rodent control program, and sanitation has broken down.”

Pinsky said bubonic plague — also known as the “Black Death,” a pandemic that killed off millions in the 14th century — is “likely” already present in Los Angeles. The plague is spread by infected fleas and exposure to bodily fluids from a dead plague-infected animal, with the bacteria entering through the skin and traveling to lymph nodes.


Typhus, which broke out in the city last year, will likely return, Pinsky said. Already, a Los Angeles police officer has contracted typhoid fever, which infects fewer than 350 Americans each year. The various types of typhus are caused by a bacterial infection and spread by body lice, chiggers or fleas. In the 1600s, the disease decimated Germany.

“This is unbelievable. I can’t believe I live in a city where this is not Third World. This is medieval,” Pinsky said, according to Fox News. “Third World countries are insulted if they are accused of being like this. No city on Earth tolerates this. The entire population is at risk.”

Pinsky said the city simply can't handle the demand for services, noting that many homeless are mentally ill and don't want to accept housing.



“[T]he government is somehow insisting that housing is the problem when in fact we have chronic mental illness, we have addiction, we have people who don’t want to leave the streets,” Pinsky said. “They literally won’t take the housing if we give it to them. And that’s the population that’s vulnerable, and is going to get so ill this summer. It scares me for their well-being.”



The famed doctor also said California cities are suffering after allowing thousands of illegal aliens to flow in. He said the liberal politicians running most cities are “disgustingly negligent.”

Homelessness is also exploding in San Francisco — the home district of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat.

“A federal count shows the number of homeless people increased by double-digit percentages in three San Francisco Bay Area counties over two years as the region struggled to tackle the growing problem, including 17% in San Francisco and 43% in the county that includes Oakland,” the Associated Press reported."

Nancy Pelosi's vision for America. Now excuse me while I pick my jaw up off the floor.



MFBB.

SATURDAY NIGHT CROWDED HOUSE, SUPERTRAMP.

Crowded House with Weather with You. Album Woodface (1991).





Crowded House formed in Melbourne, Oz, in 1985, around New Zealander Neil Finn (vocals, guitar, main songwriter) and Aussies Paul Hester (drums) and Nick Seymour (bass). Later on, Neil's brother Tim and Americans Mark Hart and Matt Sherrod would join.



Supertramp with School. From the 1974 album Crime of the Century.





Grrrrreat piano solo by Roger Hodgson, who also wrote and composed School.


Slaap wel.


MFBB.

THE END OF THE CORDON SANITAIRE AROUND VLAAMS BELANG?

The most iconic image of this week was, for me at least, Belgian King Philippe I shaking hands with Tom Van Grieken, Chairman of Vlaams Belang:





As I wrote earlier this week, Vlaams Belang was the big winner of last Sunday's federal, regional and European elections. "The big winner" with only 18 per cent of the vote in Flanders? Yes indeed, in a hopelessly fragmented electoral landscape like Belgium's, gaining that much, up from about 6 per cent in 2014, is a game changer. Consider the fact that in Belgium, post elections, it is customary that the King has a short meeting with the respective party chairmen and/or -women. Never before was a VB president among those invited. The party was founded in 1977; in all those years, neither King Baldwin I, King Albert II, or King Philippe I received the Chairman of a political entity which has as its main stated aim the abolition of the Kingdom of Belgium and the independence of Flanders. It is true that in 1978 Baldwin I did invite then Vlaams Blok Chairman Karel Dillen - Vlaams Blok being the predecessor of Vlaams Belang - but that Dillen flatly refused to meet the King. Communautarian tensions were far harsher than now and Flemish rights trampled far more, and Dillen would not have been able to sell such a meeting to his base, even if he had wanted to go.

As the years passed by and Vlaams Belang steadily grew, so did the resistance of the traditional parties against what they regarded as uncouth newcomers. After an earlier major victory by Vlaams Blok in 1991, dubbed 'Black Sunday' by Belgium's extreme leftist media, Jos Geysels, Chairman of the Flemish Greens, masterminded the so-called 'cordon sanitaire', an agreement between all traditional parties to never enter in a coalition with the Flemish nationalists. This isolation only helped to make Vlaams Blok more popular in Flanders, and after a kangaroo court ruled Vlaams Blok 'racist' in 2004, the party had to change its name in Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest). In the same year it captured a staggering 24 per cent of the vote in Flanders, in all likelihood because Flemings have a sympathy for the underdog but also, as always, because VB was the only party having the guts to address the incessant flow of welfare money from rich Flanders to poor Wallonia, eternally in the grip of the hopelessly corrupt Parti Socialiste.

Unfortunately, post 2004 the VB's appeal steadily declined. This had several reasons. First of all voter fatigue, as more and more militants got convinced that their efforts were for nothing since the other parties would forever keep VB in political quarantine. Then internal strife, as several high profile people with less impeccable conservative credentials joined, inevitably giving rise to tensions and petty rivalries. But most of all the emergence of another Flemish nationalist party, N-VA (Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie, some kind of Vlaams Belang Lite), which was not subjected to a 'cordon sanitaire'.

It was this party that was a key partner in the federal government Michel I, which was in charge from 2014 until DEC 2018, and which collapsed because N-VA refused to sign the UN Migration Pact. It should be very well remembered that actually, it had every intention to do so. But it was Vlaams Belang which, through a spirited intervention by Filip Dewinter in federal parliament last October, threw the issue on the table, drawing attention to the devastating consequences of 'Marrakesh'. Thereafter, N-VA, its top brass knowing full well that the grand majority of Flemings would never forgive them the signing of the Pact if they ever got to know its contents, made a 180 degree turn and in the blink of an eye became hostile to the idea of sending a delegation to Marrakesh to sign the scam. Things came to a head in early DEC, N-VA stepped out, and a minority government, Michel II, continued.

During last Spring, a serious attempt was made by leftist organizations and all parties to convince the general public that the climate should be the No. 1 issue, not mass migration, but to no avail. As we have seen, last Sunday's elections not only signalled the fact that at least Flemings were not fooled re the real threat to our prosperity and safety, but also that more and more people want the 'cordon sanitaire' gone.

In short, this very undemocratic construction, invented by a petty green tyrant, and maintained by all other parties - who over the years had and have morphed in fifty shades of red, is now cracking. Even though all party bigshots with the exception of N-VA Chairman Bart De Wever started their 'working' week by exclaiming - for the umpteenth time - that they would 'NEVER' cooperate with Vlaams Belang, it is clear that their bases disagree. A staggering 85 per cent of N-VA voters, comfortable majorities of Christian Democratic and liberal ones, and even 40 per cent of the Greens, want the cordon to be shelved. The base knows (far) better than the 'elites' that this monstrosity is undemocratic tout court, but our moral betters still won't listen (yet).

So all of a sudden, it seems that the question is no longer whether the cordon sanitaire will disappear, but when. And as much as our King has annoyed me in the past with his predictable PC stances on a variety of issues, he deserves accolades this week for having shown the guts to grant the Chairman of Vlaams Belang, 32-year old Tom Van Grieken, an audience:





I do not think that the cordon will disappear overnight. Elites can be as stubborn as they are stupid. But that their 28 year old construction is cracking can now no longer be denied. They will now in all likelihood cobble together a freak show of a rainbow coalition and do everything they can to keep VB out, and N-VA will be complicit in this scheme, because its leadership is composed of traitors who promise their base one thing and then proceed to do the exact opposite. Case in point their despicable chairman Bart De Wever, who has been so frantically busy to keep the Right in Flanders divided (an alliance N-VA / VB would be an unbeatable combination) that over the past months I have begun to suspect he is, in fact, a leftist plant.

Continuing to shun the VB will only result in things getting worse (criminality, mass migration and population replacement, islamization), and in time VB will reap the rewards of this. In many towns the party was the biggest one last Sunday, a trend already visible in the municipal elections of last autumn, when support for VB reached very huge scores (40 per cent plus) in towns like Ninove and Liedekerke.

Anyway, Mr Van Grieken had his audience, both this young chairman and the King, it must be said, behaved gentlemanly - call me old fashioned, but I actually like Van Grieken's show of respect by slightly bowing to our sovereign - and the King's gesture in all likelihood is a sign of hope that before long...





... the awful cordon sanitaire will belong to the past.



MFBB.

MEMORIAL DAY 2019.

We remember Captain Jesse Melton lll, USMC.

"Captain Jesse Melton lll served in the Marine Corps for 11 years. He died on Sept 9, 2008, while on active duty with the United States Marine Corps in Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom Campaign). He was assigned to HQ Battery, 12th Marines, 3rd Marine Division, Marine Corps Base Hawaii Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii at the time of his death."

God bless...




... and never forget.



MFBB.

VLAAMS BELANG UNDISPUTED WINNER IN BELGIUM'S FEDERAL, REGIONAL AND EUROPEAN ELECTIONS.

Quite some impressive gains for my party, Vlaams Belang, in the federal, regional and European elections held today in Belgium. In Flanders, Vlaams Belang is now the 2nd biggest party, after N-VA, also nationalist (it can best be described as Vlaams Belang Lite). This graph shows the results for the Kamer, the lower house of the federal parliament:





As you can see, all the traditional parties with the exception of the Greens lose, and Vlaams Belang gains 12.8 per cent. These are results from earlier in the evening, with 91 per cent of the votes counted, but the trend was already irreversible. It was pretty much the same story for the EP and the Flemish regional parliament. It is thus indisputable that the big winner in Flanders, Belgium's Dutch speaking northern part, is the Vlaams Belang.

This major gain was possible per the following factors:


a.) Since about 5 years, VB is being led by young, charismatic Tom Van Grieken. He is somewhat of a disappointment to me in that he's okay with gay marriage (not with gay adoption though) and that, outwardly at least, he has not fully adopted the severe anti-islam stance of Filip Dewinter, VB numero uno in Antwerp. But politics is the art of what is politically attainable, and I relucantly agree that in the pussified, feminized Flanders of today a young, somewhat more moderate image is better for gaining votes - which is what counts in the end - than the image conveyed by tough as nails Dewinter.

b.) The successive supposedly center-right "Michel" governments - Michel I from 2014 till December 2018 and Michel II since then until now, failed to deliver on practically all counts. As you may recall, Michel I ceased to exist when N-VA left the government last December over the Migration Pact in Marrakesh. Until then, N-VA had been in a coalition with Open VLD (Flemish liberals), CD&V ("Flemish" "Christian" "Democrats") and the Walloon MR (francophone liberals). Thereafter, Open-VLD, CD&V and MR continued with the smallest government since WWII. It should be remembered that N-VA truly is a Janus party because, until Vlaams Belang exposed the devastating consequences of the Marrakesh Pact, N-VA was very much okay with that monstrosity. In fact, if Flemings knew the extent to which the N-VA leadership talks one way but acts the other, I am sure VB would have surpassed N-VA.

c.) The giant deception effort by MSM to divert attention away from 'Marrakesh' to the climate change hoax failed. In January, two snotholes, Kyra Gantois and Anuna De Wever, began organizing Save the Earth demos by skipping class every Thursday. In the blink of an eye, the demos morphed into mass movements involving tens of thousands of youths paralyzing Brussels one day a week. Practically all parties, especially the Greens and the socialists, jumped on the bandwagon to make the climate the No. 1 issue, eagerly helped by the media, which in Belgium are leftist to a degree perhaps unsurpassed on the rest of the planet. Anyway, by and large Flemings were not fooled by the synthetic attempt to push migration to the background and punished the traditional parties for participating in the charade.

d.) Last but not least, a growing percentage of Flemings no longer accept the cordon sanitaire against Vlaams Belang. Even large parts of the base in many parties are okay with letting VB participate in government, but the elites still refuse to listen. Even after the clobbering they got today.



While today's elections have shown that Flanders is voting more rightwing than ever, the results south of the linguistic frontier show, sadly, another story. There the Walloons lurch ever more to the left. It is no surprise that with each election cycle, heavily socialist Wallonia is poorer and more miserable than before. They just can't help themselves. Some 14 years ago, when confronted with the naked fact that statistically, every Fleming, from the newborns to the centenarians, pays around 2,000 EUR per year in transfers to the south to keep the corrupt Parti Socialiste state afloat, then Walloon Minister President Jean-Claude Van Cauwenberghe famously exclaimed, "Flanders, give us another ten years!". This after they had launched their own 'Marshall Plan' to turn things around, although I suspect that neither of the PS bigshots actually ever read what was in the real Marshall Plan. Fourteen years have passed since then, and not a single socio-economic parameter in Wallonia has improved. And yet, the Parti Socialiste ('Party of 1,000,000 scandals') remains incontournable in the country's south. Not only that, but its political landscape has also seen the powerful emergence of the neocommunists of the PTB ("Parti du Travail de Belgique", litterally Party for Work in Belgium, although "Work" is, guaranteed, the last thing on the PTB militants' minds) and of Ecolo, the Walloon Greens. Predictably for a region run by our moral betters still using economic recipes with a track record of failure from here to eternity, with every passing year Wallonia lags further and further behind, and gives the impression it wants to remain on Flemish life support forever.

If the perpetual haemorrhaging of welfare money from north to south wouldn't be so tragic, it would be hilarious to read Walloon newspapers, where clueless reporters ask themselves again and again - and these elections are no different - "what Flanders wants".


More info tomorrow, time permitting.


MFBB.

GOOD RIDDANCE TO THE WORST BRITISH PM EVER.

I am baffled that it took so long. There must be more than something rotten in the State of Small Britain.


To get some grasp about the kind of creature that PM Treason Maybe was, watch this video:





Good riddance, and let the door of Downing Street 10 hit you very hard on the way out.




MFBB.

ADVICE OF THE DAY.

MFBB.

RECOMMENDED VIDEOS: THE SOCIALIST WORKERS PARADISE AKA VENEZUELA BY THE CATO INSTITUTE AND PRAGER U.

First the Cato Institute video. An excellent comparison between Chile and Venezuela:





Augusto Pinochet was not your ideal grandpa, but he saved Chile the horrible ordeal of Venezuela. Chileans should be grateful for that.



Then a video by Prager University: "How's socialism doing in Venezuela"?





Americans are next year offered the choice between More Winning or 'democratic socialism'. In the UK, the chance that a communist like Corbyn becomes PM is nog unthinkable.

Which begs the question: how many Venezuelas does the world need before people finally begin to understand socialism belongs in the dustbin of history?


MFBB.