Equally immortal Dutch rock. Seasons from Earth & Fire.
Twas a seventies night. It was about time.
MFBB.

"Imagine it’s 1621 in Plymouth and, instead of the Pilgrims and the Indians gathering for the First Thanksgiving, it’s conservatives and liberals. They are sitting down to share their harvests happily and express gratitude for survival.
Yeah, right.
In truth, they’d be fighting over who brought more and who ate more. Those who didn’t get a drumstick would shatter the idyllic scene with shrieking charges of “Turkey Inequality” and wails for “my fair share.”
I jest to make a point. The point being that, 390 years after the first symbol of gratitude created by Europeans on this continent, Americans are locked in a bitter conflict of ingratitude. The tug-of-war over the turkey wishbone is now a polarizing class struggle.
The dividing line is the loaded phrase “income inequality.” It’s all about who eats and who pays.
On one level, income inequality is real, and growing. Yet as a bedrock and urgent political issue, it’s pure hokum, cooked up in the socialist faculty lounges and the back rooms where the government unions pull the strings of puppet pols. The aim is to hijack emotions and grow the government pie so favored voters get a bigger slice.
It has surprisingly wide appeal. People from the vagabonds playing drums in Zuccotti Park to the billionaire mayor of New York who rousted them, Michael Bloomberg, say income inequality is a big problem..."
"Having given up on the meaning of America, which is about expanding opportunity and liberty for everyone, income equalizers are pitting Americans against each other in a fight certain to make losers of us all."

RESOUNDING VICTORY FOR SPANISH CONSERVATIVES.
"This Sunday, November 20, the Spanish Conservative Party (PP) was the resounding victor in Spain's parliamentary elections. This much was clear after counting 75% of the votes. The PP claimed victory.
Mariano Rajoy's People's Party beat PM José Luis Zapatero's Socialist Party with utmost ease and can count on an absolute majority in Parliament.
After counting 75 per cent of the votes the PP could sign up 187 seats in the 350-seat Spanish House of Commons, the biggest score the party ever obtained. The socialists won 109 seats and have admitted their defeat.
The continuing high unemployment in Spain and the gloomy economic forecast in the country led many Spaniards in the voting booths to end Zapatero's premiership, which lasted almost eight years.
Rajoy and his PP now face the difficult task to turn around the Spanish economy and at the same time decrease the budget deficit by enhancing taxes and force through austerity measures."
..."I don't "stand with the 99%," and certainly not downwind of them. But I'm all for their "occupation" continuing on its merry way. It usefully clarifies the stakes. At first glance, an alliance of anarchists and government might appear to be somewhat paradoxical. But the formal convergence in Oakland makes explicit the movement's aims: They're anarchists for statism, wild free-spirited youth demanding more and more total government control of every aspect of life – just so long as it respects the fundamental human right to sloth. What's happening in Oakland is a logical exercise in class solidarity: the government class enthusiastically backing the breakdown of civil order is making common cause with the leisured varsity class, the thuggish union class and the criminal class in order to stick it to what's left of the beleaguered productive class. It's a grand alliance of all those societal interests that wish to enjoy in perpetuity a lifestyle they are not willing to earn. Only the criminal class is reasonably upfront about this. The rest – the lifetime legislators, the unions defending lavish and unsustainable benefits, the "scholars" whiling away a somnolent half-decade at Complacency U – are obliged to dress it up a little with some hooey about "social justice" and whatnot.
But that's all it takes to get the media and modish if insecure corporate entities to string along. Whole Foods can probably pull it off. So can Ben & Jerry's, the wholly owned subsidiary of the Anglo-Dutch corporation UniLever that nevertheless successfully passes itself off as some sort of tie-dyed Vermont hippie commune. But a chain of stores that sells shirts, ties, the garb of the corporate lackey, has a tougher sell. The class that gets up in the morning, pulls on its lousy Men's Wearhouse get-up and trudges off to work has to pay for all the other classes, and the strain is beginning to tell.
Let it be said that the "occupiers" are right on the banks: They shouldn't have been bailed out. America has one of the most dysfunctional banking systems in the civilized world, and most of its allegedly indispensable institutions should have been allowed to fail. But the Occupy Oakland types have no serious response, other than the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by government-funded inertia.
America is seizing up before our eyes: The decrepit airports, the underwater property market, the education racket, the hyper-regulated business environment. Yet, curiously, the best example of this sclerosis is the alleged "revolutionary" movement itself. It's the voice of youth, yet everything about it is cobwebbed. It's more like an open-mike karaoke night of a revolution than the real thing. I don't mean just the placards with the same old portable quotes by Lenin et al, but also, say, the photograph in Forbes of Rachel, a 20-year-old "unemployed cosmetologist" with remarkably uncosmetological complexion, dressed in pink hair and nose ring as if it's London, 1977, and she's killing time at Camden Lock before the Pistols gig. Except that that's three-and-a-half decades ago, so it would be like the Sex Pistols dressing like the Andrews Sisters. Are America's revolting youth so totally pathetically moribund they can't even invent their own hideous fashion statements? Last weekend, the nonagenarian Commie Pete Seeger was wheeled out at Zuccotti Park to serenade the oppressed masses with "If I Had A Hammer." As it happens, I do have a hammer. Pace Mr. Seeger, they're not that difficult to acquire, even in a recession. But, if I took it to Zuccotti Park, I doubt very much anyone would know how to use it, or be able to muster the energy to do so.
At heart, Oakland's occupiers and worthless political class want more of the same fix that has made America the Brokest Nation in History: They expect to live as beneficiaries of a prosperous Western society without making any contribution to the productivity necessary to sustain it. This is the "idealism" that the media are happy to sentimentalize, and that enough poseurs among the corporate executives are happy to indulge – at least until the window smashing starts. To "occupy" Oakland or anywhere else, you have to have something to put in there. Yet the most striking feature of OWS is its hollowness. And in a strange way the emptiness of its threats may be a more telling indictment of a fin de civilization West than a more coherent protest movement could ever have mounted.
©MARK STEYN

Charlie Hebdo Offices Firebombed After It Joked About The Prophet Muhammad (Pictures) Puff Ho (hat tip Paulo)
The Paris office of the satirical French Magazine Charlie Hebdo has been firebombed and its website has been hacked. It follows the announcement that the magazine would be 'guest edited' by the Prophet Muhammad.
It has been reported that the office was gutted by fire at around 1:00am Paris time, but there were no injuries.
Patrick Pelloux, a witness to the attack, told the AFP news agency that a molotov cocktail was thrown through the window.
"Everything was destroyed," he said.
According to the Associated Press the director of the magazine said “the material damages are large”.
On Tuesday the magazine said that the Prophet Muhammad would be editing the magazine in "honour" of Islam's role in this year's uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and other Islamic countries.
"In order fittingly to celebrate the Islamist Ennahda's win in Tunisia and the NTC (National Transitional Council) president's promise that sharia would be the main source of law in Libya, Charlie Hebdo asked Muhammad to be guest editor," the editorial team said in a statement.
On Wednesday morning the magazine's website had also apparently been hacked by an Islamist group.
There have been several cases in Europe of cartoonists, journalists and publishers being threatened or attacked after depicting cartoons and pictures of the religious figure.
Charlie Hebdo was taken to court in 2007 by two Muslim groups for reprinting those cartoons, but the suit was thrown out.



"St George's Church in the village of Al Marinab of the province of Edfu was attacked and burned by Muslim fanatics from the same and neighboring villages. No one was inside the church during the attack. This church was attacked several weeks ago by the same mob of Muslims who demanded to remove its cross. Today, they succeeded in doing so as they have been threatening for several days. They prayed their Friday prayers in front of the burned church. The fanatics numbered approximately 150. Three adjacent homes, a store as well as a building, all of which are owned by Copts, have also been burned.
No arrests were made. Muslim fanatics have prevented fire trucks from coming on the scene. No protection or justice has been promised for the Copts of the village has been pledged by authorities. Copts fear these acts will continue to increase as the government continues to allow these criminal acts to go unchecked. This is the fourth Coptic church to be destroyed by Muslims this year following the revolution."

a.) Permanent REAL PEACE through superior firepower.
b.) The nation's citizens are kept on alert all the time, ensuring they don't become mindless wussies and retirement aficionados like in so much of the world, especially the West
c.) Permanent investments in the Defense Industry will provide countless spinoffs for civil benefit, and the cutting edge technology will make Israeli hitech the envy of the world
d.) No more pointless and costly negotiations
e.) Israel will set an example for the rest of the non-muslim world on how to deal with the adherents of islam

Pestering gays away, a trend in The Netherlands?
In the Netherlands this week, gay couples announced they were moving, bullied away by their neighbors. Geert Wilders asks for an speedy parliamentary debate. Is intolerance against gays growing?
'Monday evening I got a telephone from a lady. She was older than eighty (!), she said, but now she was, together with her girlfriend, busy packing boxes with their belongings. She was desperate. She wanted away, get out of the provincial town. The reason: she and her girlfriend were bullied by their neighbors because they were a lesbian couple. When I heard that, it got too much for me, and I decided to open up a callpoint.'
... says Henk Krol, chief editor of the Gay Gazette. 'Four days later the counter stood on 82 reportings. That's quite a lot. And of the severity of some incidents I was rather dumbfounded. On the other hand, of the about 800,000 Dutch gays and lesbians 82 is an altogether negligible number. Also, I think that the number of reportings will decline after the first wave.'
Still [De Standaard editor now] something seems to be going on in The Netherlands. Last week stories emerged of two other gay couples who were also moving. One couple had been pestered away by schoolkids in The Hague, another couple was leaving Ulft, a village in the Achterhoek. There the bullies would have been between 12 and 22. Attempts to recruit the help of police would for a long time have remained unanswered and when finally a serious dialogue had been organized, the couple had already scrapped its hiring contract, wrote De Gelderlander [east Dutch newspaper - MFBB]. In August, in Amstelveen another gay couple would have given up all hope."



"A fanatical terrorist has escaped being thrown out of the UK because it would breach his human rights.
Hate-filled Siraj Yassin Abdullah Ali, graded the highest possible risk to the public, was released after serving just half of his nine-year sentence for helping the July 21 bombers. He now mingles freely among the Londoners his co-plotters tried to kill six years ago.
Government officials are desperate to deport the Islamic fundamentalist back to his native Eritrea but have been told they cannot because he could face ‘inhumane treatment or punishment’.
Ali was convicted of helping a gang of five Al Qaeda suicide bombers in their bid to repeat the carnage of the attacks of July 7, 2005, two weeks later.
Graham Foulkes, whose 22-year-old son David was killed on July 7, said he was ‘filled with despair’. He said: ‘These people were plotting to commit mass murder - what about the human rights of victims and families?
‘These people had no consideration for the women and children they were trying to kill. How can they claim we should look after and support them?’
The case is the latest to highlight how human rights laws have left the authorities powerless to remove some terrorists and convicted criminals.
Imposed human rights laws have left the authorities powerless to remove some terrorists and convicted criminals. Imposed by unaccountable European judges, they place the rights of the most dangerous wrongdoers above the risks faced by ordinary people.
The five would-be suicide bombers were jailed for life after trying to detonate bombs at Shepherd’s Bush, Warren Street and Oval Tube stations and on a bus in Shoreditch.
Ali, 35, knew about the potentially murderous July 21 conspiracy and helped the fanatics clear up their explosives factory. He was jailed for 12 years in February 2008 for aiding and abetting the Al Qaeda cell. Judge Paul Worsley QC said he must have ‘harboured the hope’ the bombers would ‘destroy society as we know it’.
The sentence was reduced to nine years on appeal and after time Ali spent in jail while awaiting trial was taken into account, he was automatically released on licence several weeks ago. He is now living at a bail hostel on a leafy residential street in north-west London. He has been seen travelling on the Tube and catching buses. With music headphones plugged into his ears and a bag slung casually across his shoulder, he appeared to be caught on camera chatting on a mobile phone. It is understood that Ali is being monitored around the clock and must obey a curfew and other conditions, including a ban on using the internet..."
"He is the second high-risk terrorist linked to the July 21 attacks to win the right to remain in the UK on human rights grounds in recent weeks.
Ismail Abdurahman, 28, who hid would-be bomber Hussain Osman for three days, escaped being deported to his native Somalia after judges feared for his safety. Abdurahman is also living at a bail hostel in London despite the protests of police and Home Office officials."



"The violence cannot be excused, but many Londoners realize that the gap between rich and poor in the [British] capital widens, and this results in tensions."