SATURDAY NIGHT SUNRISE AVENUE, LANA DEL REY.

DowneastBlog's 2,200th post opens with Sunrise Avenue's Fairytale gone bad.




Finnish blokes from Espoo.



Lana Del Rey with Summertime Sadness. From the 2012 album Born to Die.




She is kind of a femme fatale.



MFBB.

BELGIUM: FIVE CASES OF EUTHANASIA A DAY THROUGHOUT 2013.

Throughout 2013, every day 5 Belgians met their end through euthanasia. This is a link to Het Nieuwsblad, but many more Belgian sites carry the news.






Translation:

'In our country, five people die every day through euthanasia. That much is clear from data obtained by VTM News [a private TV network; MFBB]. The taboo is slowly receding, say specialists. At least among patients. Because hospitals and doctors often refuse a request. Instead they propose palliative sedation: they then administer so much narcotics the patient doesn't wake up anymore'.

Makes we wonder: what's the difference?


I hope I'm wrong, but I fear this is just the beginning.

Leftists who pushed through Belgium's euthanasia legislation, one of the most far-reaching on the planet, have such a fetish for laws that they absolutely must have them to regulate even matters of life and death.

Rightwingers believe in People, and trust that in those cases where insufferable pain is involved, competent medical personnel will be available to (help) make the final decision. No laws needed, thank you very much.

We put our trust in basic common sense and human dignity. Not so our moral betters.

I fear that the slippery slope we have entered here in Belgium with regards to euthanasia will develop a dynamic very similar to what we have all been able to witness with abortion. The legislation for that was also meant for 'cases'. Instead it's overwhelmingly being used for murder.

Our attitude, our belief in the sanctity of human life and sound decision making by the experts who are directly involved, cultivates the best that Man has to offer with regards to accompanying our dying brothers and sisters towards the afterlife. Simultaneously it suppresses the worst - the vile greed that may be involved in those cases where an attractive inheritance is waiting.

The Left's attitude is the exact opposite. Their laws will render an inhuman mechanization to the dying process, while simultaneously they will offer a fertile ground for said greed.

So it was five cases of euthanasia a day in Belgium in 2013. Twenty years from now, if you're a seventysomething and in bad health, you might want to check your back.




MFBB.

SATURDAY NIGHT GEORGE HARRISON, THE BLUETONES.

George Harrison with What is Life. From his 1970 solo album All Things Must Pass (actually a triple album).






I know very little of his private life but he always struck me as a very decent man. Quite the opposite of John Lennon The Perv.



Next come The Bluetones with Slight Return. From their 1196 debut album Expecting to Fly. Used to watch this clip about a million times on MTV back in the mid-nineties, when I was a.) Young and b.) Irresistibly Beautiful.




Alas alas alas, these days we must skip the a.) part.



Good night, except if you're an obama acolyte.



MFBB.

RECOMMENDED READS: MARK STEYN'S 'FINDING YOURSELF IN THE HINDU KUSH'.

Mark Steyn's been really outdoing himself these last couple of weeks, what with simultaneously battling Global Warmmonger Michael Mann AND providing striking insight into the Mehdi Nemmouche and Bowe Bergdahl cases.

Horrible as it is, the murder of four people at the Jewish Museum in Brussels is, for reasonable people at least, what Rummy would label a 'known known'. No surprise there, and it pains me that I did not succeed to post the screenshots I took of all the twitter messages the usual suspects - idiots - eunuchs - take your pick -that constitute the crème de la crème of Belgian politics, sent out right after the killer had performed his gruesome act.

Each one of those twitter messages was full of SHIT, and carefully tiptoeing around the crucial, or let's say inconvenient, truth: that the perp was a MUSLIM.

But Elio di Rupo, Gwendolyn Rutten, Kris Peeters et al do actually not even deserve our attention. We KNOW that they are midgets, we KNOW they are clowns, albeit dangerous clowns, alas. But enough of them.

No, far more interesting to me was/is the Bowe Bergdahl case. It keeps on giving and giving. At first, I thought Steyn's splendid June 3 column summed it all up nicely and that would be that:

"On Tuesday morning, and later guest-hosting for Rush, I discussed the deeply troubling case of Bowe Bergdahl, a deserter at best and at worst enemy collaborator. Nevertheless, Barack Obama decided to honor this man in the Rose Garden, and to embrace his parents. In front of the President and the world, Bergdahl's father sent greetings to his son in Arabic and Pashto, and began with the words, "In the name of Allah the most gracious and most merciful..."

This is, to put it at its mildest, odd and unsettling.

And yet millions of Americans don't find it so. For example, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut:

Really sad to watch Obama haters attack this kid who CHOSE to fight to protect the rest of us, just to score political points.

I doubt a US senator Tweets his own Tweets. So this is presumably the considered view of his "office" - the vast Gulf Emir-sized retinue of staffers who sat around and brainstormed and decided this is the way to spin this: Bergdahl's a "kid" who "chose" to serve, and now partisan "Obama haters" are ganging up on him.

Jim Geraghty isn't buying it:

1. The strongest, and certainly most consequential, denunciations of Bergdahl are not coming from "Obama haters" but those who fought alongside him and those who looked for him after he disappeared.

2. The New York Times reports Bergdahl "left behind a note in his tent saying he had become disillusioned with the Army, did not support the American mission in Afghanistan and was leaving to start a new life." So he actually chose to not fight to protect the rest of us.

3. One report indicates Bergdahl renounced his citizenship before disappearing.

4. If the Taliban's claim is correct, Bergdahl helped the Taliban kill Americans — effectively choosing to fight for the other side.






I wish Jim the best, but Senator Murphy's Tweet suggests that these guys have taken the decision to dig in and drag Bowe Bergdahl into the pantheon of American heroes regardless of the truth. In the bad old Bush days, we were told that dissent is the highest form of patriotism. Now Murphy & Co are taking it to the next level: Desertion is the highest form of patriotism.

As I wrote earlier, the Afghan war is going out the way it came in:

In years to come, when archaeologists are prowling through the ruins of our civilization and wondering how it all happened, I would offer this snapshot. Here's the history of America's longest war in two anti-American losers, John Walker Lindh and Bowe Bergdahl, confused young men with a gaping hole at the heart of where their sense of identity should be, stumbling through the Hindu Kush trying to "find themselves".

In the fall of 2001, the first confused anti-American loser trying to find himself, John Walker Lindh was on the enemy's side - and was tried, convicted and jailed for 20 years.

By the spring of 2014, the last confused anti-American loser of the Afghan war, Bowe Bergdahl, was on our side - and was honored by the President with a family photo-op in the Rose Garden and declared by the laughably misnamed "National Security Advisor" to have "served the United States with honor and distinction".

I wrote about John Walker Lindh in my anthology of 9/11 and its aftermath, The Face Of The Tiger, personally autographed copies of which are exclusively available from the Steyn store and whose sales go to support my pushback against a different group of mullahs - the Big Climate crazies. Anyway, here's what I had to say about the first "troubled young man" with a gaping hole where love of country is supposed to be, back when America's longest war was still new:

A fortnight ago two Americans met in the northern Afghan desert, at the Qala-i-Jhangi prison. One was a CIA special-ops man, Mike Spann. The other was a prisoner he was interrogating, a Taliban soldier called "Abdul Hamid", the nom de guerre of John Walker, formerly of northern California. Mr Spann will be buried tomorrow by his wife and three young children in Arlington National Cemetery. He was kicked, beaten and apparently bitten to death in an uprising of captured Taliban, who then booby-trapped his body with grenades. Mr Walker, by contrast, is one of 86 people to survive the four-day prison battle, and the question now is what to do with him.

If nothing else, he's usefully nailed one of the self-serving myths peddled after the awesome intelligence failure of September 11th: awfully sorry we failed to see it coming, said the high-ranking suits, but it's impossible to do any covert deep-cover stuff out in Afghanistan; these fellows are all cousins and brothers-in-law - a guy from Jersey would stick out like a lap-dancer in a burqa.

As we now know, instead of being full of fearsome Pashtun warriors renowned down the centuries, the Omar/ Osama ranks were like a novelty Gap ad, "Losers of Many Nations" - misfit Saudis, Pakistanis, Brits and Californians. Anyone can walk in off the street and be assistant supervisor of the third-floor latrine in Tora Bora by nightfall. The only distinguishing feature about John Walker is that he's such an obvious compendium of clapped-out clichés from America's Left Coast the wonder is the mullahs didn't automatically take him for a CIA plant.

But no, Mr Walker is for real - born John Lindh in 1981, and comes from a bastion of well-heeled pothead progressivism, California's affluent Marin County. Just north of San Francisco, Marin is the kind of place where Taleban are rare and Republicans are rarer, and your average hippy-turned-lawyer can stay true to his Sixties values on property that stays true to its late Nineties values (average house price: just shy of a million bucks). This is the aging of the dawn of Aquarius: a lotta latte, a little dope, environmentalism, multiculturalism, and everyone likes feeling religious, or at least "spiritual" - as a New York Times headline put it: "Religion Makes A Comeback (Belief To Follow)". Following the traditional Marin pattern, his parents divorced, his mother converted to Buddhism, and the children were taught Native American spirituality. John was sent to an "alternative" high school. (In the Bay Area, all the high schools are "alternative". The problem for parents is trying to find any alternative to the alternative.) The set texts included The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and John liked it so much that, like the late Mr X, he decided to embrace Islam and change his name, to Sulayman. His parents, putting their foot down for what seems to be the first and last time, demanded the right to continue calling him John. They had, after all, gone to the trouble of naming him after one of the colossi of the age, John Lennon. To this, he consented. In return, they let him study at the Mill Valley Islamic Center.

In 1998, after an awkward trip to their ancestral Ireland in which John trudged dutifully round the auld sod wearing his turban and white robes, Frank Lindh agreed to let his 17-year-old son spend a year in Yemen, on the next stage of his "spiritual odyssey". Last year, John e-mailed home to say al-Qa'eda's attack on the USS Cole was justified - oh, and by the way he was off to enrol in a Pakistani madrassah. So Dad wired him a couple thousand bucks, which goes a long way in Bannu. Aside from a glowing school report from his imam, that was the last Mr Lindh heard from Junior until he turned up brandishing an AK47 and declaring his approval of the events of September 11th.

John Walker's CV bears eloquent testament to his parents' scrupulous observance of the Bay Area's First Commandment: Thou shalt be non-judgmental. Yeah, man, Yemen. Cool. Whatever's your bag. As one headline put it: "A Product Of Bay Area Culture". Exactly, I thought. But, this being The San Francisco Chronicle, they were applying the label with pride. Rhapsodising about the area's "religious tolerance" and the way children are taught to value "critical thinking about the US role in the world", Louis Freedberg concluded that Walker's only misfortune was that "his search for identity intersected precisely with the World Trade Center attacks". If not for this unfortunate "intersection", Walker might have become an "idealistic doctor". The President, he said, should allow the boy home "and let him get his life back on track. We'd want nothing less for our own children, who could easily have found themselves in a similar mess."

In fairness to the youth of northern California, that last part is an unjust slur. The marvel is that, after labouring under the twin burdens of the education system's multicultural orthodoxies and the preening moral superiority of their boomer parents, no more Bay Area teens have signed on with Mullah Omar. Nonetheless, there is a difference between "tolerance" of other cultures and the moral void inhabited by the Lindhs. We can, in any case, guess the limits of Marin County's much-vaunted "tolerance". Imagine that the Marinated Muslim had instead announced that he was going to do what the late Mike Spann did at his age: enlist in the Marines. Would Marilyn Walker have seen that as a valid part of his "self-discovery"? Or would she have got out her joss sticks and wailed, "Oh, my God, where did we go wrong?"

Read it all, you hear me goddammit?? Read-it-all!!!

SATURDAY NIGHT THIRD EYE BLIND, THOMAS DOLBY.

Third Eye Blind with Semi Charmed Life. From their 1997 titleless debut album.




Blokes from San Fran who formed in 1993. Have been around uninterruptedly since then, but only two of the original members remain, Jenkins and Hargreaves.




Thomas Dolby follows with The Flat Earth.




From the 1984 album with the same name.



Slaap wel.


MFBB.

BELGIUM ELECTIONS: SOLID WIN FOR N-VA AT THE COST OF A CATASTROPHIC LOSS FOR VLAAMS BELANG.

Just a short note to write some of my frustration off me.

As I have been saying for what seems aeons, Belgium is NOT an artificial country.

It should therefore come as no surprise that if one of the main pillars of your party programme is Flemish Independence, your platform will in time crumble. This is what happened to the VB. Flemings are not, I repeat, NOT, interested in independence.

We all love our country, Flemings and Walloons alike. PERIOD.

The VB bigshots have forever been people from Antwerp, who are the furthest removed from Belgium's south, Wallonia - both geographically and in the hearts and minds. Long ago they should have quietly moderated their stand on independence, which is unattainable anyway, even if sufficient Flemings were for it. Very curiously, the VB leadership seems incapable to comprehend that there is a mighty supranational power - the EU - which would smother any viable attempt to split the country in a heartbeat. After all, Belgium is in many respects a mini-EU, and one of its six founding members. Surely Belgium dissolving into two states would seriously undermine the concept on which the much more complicated EU itself is based.

It would however be dishonest to attribute the VB's catastrophic loss solely to its stubborn insistence on independence.

I discern several other factors:

a.) Chief among them is that the party has had to undergo, since its foundation in 1977, a barrage of lies and insults via the media, the educational sector, and the rest of the political establishment, that defies description. The media and the educational sector, per the Gramscian revolution, are inherently leftist. Belgian politics is quintessentially leftist too. The only party that counts, apart from the VB itself, and which would earn a center-right label, is the N-VA (a relatively young party, in many respects a VB-Lite) in Flanders. In Wallonia there is no such thing, and what passes for the right there, the MR, is centrist, actually.

In short, if youngsters are told fom right after Kindergarten that 'progressive = good', 'conservative = bad', you get an electorate in which people with rightist impulses by nature tend to feel guilty for it. Last autumn, my daughter, in her first year of high school, witnessed her teacher Dutch, Stefaan D., lambast the Vlaams Belang. Two weeks ago she overheard a couple of classmates telling each other that the VB is 'racist'. I guess you get the picture.

A forty-year long ugly smear campaign does have results, you know. Another consequence is that when as a party you find yourself attacked from all sides, it becomes very difficult to attract competent people.


b.) Voter fatigue. People KNOW that the VB will be forever held from power by the cordon sanitaire. It was invented by a green scoundrel, Jos Gheysels, and supported by tailor-made legislation. Basically the cordon sanitaire (notice the wording: 'sanitaire', as if being unashamedly right is somehow something filthy) is a covenant between all so-called democratic parties to NEVER work together with the Vlaams Belang.


c.) the Zeitgeist is not favourable. The West is in decline. There's no denying it. The attitude among untold millions of native Europeans is one of 'Après nous le déluge'. Which means that if one of the central tenets of your programme is the preservation of European culture, identity and civilization, you're not immediately arousing great enthousiasm anymore.


d.) The current VB chairman, Gerolf Annemans was perceived too much as a man of the past. And just like his predecessor, the very decent Bruno Valkeniers, he was unable to connect with the electorate - even with his normal constituency.

All the same, I am a bit surprised that the gains made by the VB's 'successor', the N-VA, aren't bigger. Then again, maybe not. Center-right N-VA, while ethically far from being conservative, did profile itself as the party of those who work, those who save, and the enterpreneurs. But in 2014 Belgium, where the public sector is gigantic, and where hundreds of thousands of deliberately imported immigrants AND millions of 'natives' are sucking the government teat every day, a constituency based on those who invest in a new business or work in the private sector is a shaky basis, to say the least.






Belgium's only real rightwing party, the Vlaams Belang, lies wretched and defeated in the mud - partly, but certainly not wholly, because of its own strategy (or lack thereof).

The apparent winner, the N-VA, has made serious gains - amongst others at the expense of the VB - but those gains are not enough to break the stalemate.

The left remains very strong, especially in Wallonia, where the Parti Socialiste still garners around 40 per cent of the vote. The Flemish quislings, the 'liberal' Open VLD and the 'Christian Democrat' CDV (may the names of Alexander De Croo and Wouter Beke be cursed for eternity), who in 2011 made sure Parti Socialiste strongman Elio Di Rupo got the top job as Belgium PM, have NOT been punished. Which is a shame, since the Di Rupo I government's impact on the labor market has been a slaughterhouse.

And as always, while the parties are susceptible to the whims of the electorate, the figureheads planted by the leftists in all the state-run strata of society, the unions, all kinds of institutions... remain in place.

Belgium, as the rest of Europe, will continue its march into the twilight.


And me? I will stick with the VB. I have never been a quitter or an opportunist, and I wasn't today. Filip Dewinter, if it's any consolation for you, my wife and I voted for your daughter.

But change the strategy.



MFBB.

SATURDAY NIGHT STEVE WINWOOD, SKEE-LO.

Steve Winwood opens with Night Train. From his 1980 second solo album, Arc of a Diver. Audio Qty. isn't very good, but at least you've got something to look at.



Steve Winwood - Night Train door jpdc11

On the other hand, Steve's hairdo is a crime against humanity. But because our hero is such a talented multi-instrumentalist, we will forgive him that.

Jawohl indeed, Steve does everything. Acoustic & electric guitars, lead and backing vocals, drums, bass, keyboards, percussion, synthesizers, you name it, PLUS engineering and mixing the whole shebang. Thanks again John D., for getting me to know this remarkable fella in the ole days at Saint Joseph (though it was thru his third album Talking Back To The Night actually). Ah, memories of days gone by!


Antoine Roundtree aka Skee-Lo with his 1995 hiphop single I wish.




One of the very few digestable rappers.



Good night and may the usual scumbags suffer such a bloody defeat in Belgium's Mother of all Elections tomorrow, that they can't even tell anymore which planet in the Solar System they live on.



MFBB.

DINESH D'SOUZA'S CONVICTION: THE OBAMA YEARS ARE TURNING THE UNITED STATES INTO A TYRANNY.

As per usual, a poignant analysis by Mark Steyn that's as witty as it's devastating. Although even Steyn has trouble making me laugh these days, since the direction the Western 'democracies' are taking, under the impetus of leftist, 'progressive' forces and with the deplorable collaboration of what's passing for 'the Right', is offering us a very, very disturbing glimpse of the future:

"...My former National Review shipmate Dinesh D'Souza has pleaded guilty to breaking campaign finance laws. As part of the general sclerosis of the "justice" system, he will not be sentenced until September 23rd. If the judge operates to the sentencing guidelines, D'Souza will serve 10-16 months in jail. He will also be, unto the end of his days, a convicted "felon", and thus, depending upon what sentence he serves, unable to own a gun, and, depending upon which state he chooses to make his home, unable to run for public office and/or vote.

For a $15,000 infraction. (Not 20K, as widely reported - the first five is legal.)

Here's what I wrote about the case four months ago:

The United States Government is corrupt. The IRS is corrupt, the EPA is corrupt, the Department of Justice is corrupt. They use their powers selectively to chastise their political enemies. In a hyper-regulatory state, there are laws against everything, and everyone is guilty of being in breach of at least 300 of them at any hour of the day. I have no use for Dinesh D'Souza, for example, but it seems obvious that he's been set up as this season's Benghazi video maker. There are gazillions of $20,000 campaign-finance infractions across America, but the only guy that's been singled out is the fellow who made a hit anti-Obama movie. As John Hayward puts it, he's been


'...busted for doing 59 in a 55-mph campaign-finance zone in your little compact car, while huge semi trucks full of political cash blast past you at a hundred miles an hour without the cops batting an eye.'

D'Souza's enemies are gloating. As is the habit in the American system, he will most likely be prevailed upon to cop a plea in return for a reduced sentence. And everyone else will get the message: If you make a film or write a book attacking Obama, make sure it's a flop - or anyway not so big a hit it catches the regime's eye.



Mr. D'Souza, convicted not because of the pitiful 15,000 dollar donation he made, but because of making a movie critical of The One. Welcome to the USSA.

As to those huge semis full of political cash, let's just start with the most obvious. In 2008, Barack Obama was elected president with the aid of not two "illegal" donations but thousands upon thousands:

I mentioned earlier that "Della Ware" of "12345 No Way" had managed to make a campaign donation to the fraud-friendly Obama website but not to the McCain site, and that the Obama money was whisked out of her account and into Barack's swollen coffers moments later. "Della" – real name Erika – emailed The New York Times and managed to persuade them to cover the story, if only on their blog. We'll see if the news is fit to print tomorrow morning. The headline is unusually robust – "Obama's Online Site Accepts More Fakes" – although the story continues:

'To be fair to the Obama campaign, officials there have said much of their checking for fraud occurs after the transactions have already occurred. When they find something wrong, they then refund the amount.'

If they'd really wanted "to be fair", the Times would have pointed out that, in order to accept donations from "Della Ware" and "Saddam Hussein" et al, the Obama website had, intentionally, to disable all the default security settings on their credit-card processing. I took a look at the inner sanctum of my (alas, far more modest) online retail operation this afternoon and, in order to permit fraud as easy as that which the Obama campaign is facilitating, you have to uncheck every single box on the AVS system, each one of which makes it very explicit just what you're doing – ie, accepting transactions with no "billing address", no "street address" match, no "zip code" match, with a bank "of non-US origin" (I've got nothing against those, but a US campaign fundraiser surely should be wary), etc. When you've disabled the whole lot one step at a time, then you've got a system tailor-made for fake names and bogus addresses.

So the Times seems to have missed the point – which is that this cannot be an unfortunate accidental side-effect of the unprecedented tsunami of enthusiasm for Barack the Spreader, but has to be something far more calculated. As Jim notes over in Geraghtistan:

'The press has been telling us about Obama's amazing online donations for more than a year now. There is absolutely no excuse for not digging into this story.'


The Obama campaign intentionally disabled all its credit-card security controls in order to accept thousands of illegal campaign donations. Were the D'Souza standards applied to Obama, he'd also be looking at a jail term and ineligible to run for (or continue in) office. Yet, oddly enough, federal investigators declined to look at the case...."

.......

"...America has the most politicized judiciary in the developed world, presiding over a system lacking any sense of proportion. Four months ago I commented on the fact that, for his15-grand crime, D'Souza had been handcuffed, had his passport confiscated, been obliged to cough up half-a-million dollars in bail, and was forbidden to travel beyond New York City without permission from the judge:

The cuffs, the bail, the internal exile: Sick, sick, sick. And Americans should be ashamed of themselves for putting up with it, presumably on the quaint belief that as long as they keep their heads down they're unlikely to catch the eye of their so-called "Justice" Department. I quoted the other day my old boss Conrad Black on federal "justice", so let me do so again:

'Those who do exercise their constitutional right to a defense receive three times as severe a sentence as those who plead guilty; 95 percent of cases are won by prosecutors, 90 percent of those without trial.'

D'Souza has made his first mistake by having the impertinence to plead "not guilty". But it's not so difficult to picture him a year or three down the road belatedly copping a plea in return for only two years in jail instead of the 15-30 or whatever crackpot sentence each individual count commands. And the rest of us will all learn an important lesson in what happens when your anti-Obama tract is too successful.

And so it has proved, although it took a mere four months rather than "a year or three". When you have a politicized judiciary operating a system with no sense of proportion, a l'il ol' thing called "equality before the law" is even more important. D'Souza's monstrous crime supposedly came to light during an FBI "routine review" of FEC campaign-finance filings. These "routine reviews" never stumbled on Obama or Edwards or Corzine's groaning sacks of untold millions, so senators Cruz, Grassley, Lee and Sessions were sufficiently intrigued to write to the FBI asking them to explain what exactly these "routine reviews" are, and what other government entities are involved. As I said at the time:

Once they have these answers, they'll presumably be reassured by the happy coincidence of an entirely random "routine review" just happening to alight on the one guy in the country who made a hit anti-Obama movie.

In the hyper-regulatory state, we are all guilty of something. In the NSA security state, the authorities can easily find the something or other of which we're guilty. And, in a land of arbitrary, whimsical, selectively enforced law, what matters is not guilt or innocence but merely whether you're the guy the feds decide to target.

That was D'Souza's crime: he made the mistake of attracting their attention.

A land with selectively enforced law is a land with no law. It is, in fact, a tyranny.

I'm often asked why I live in far northern New Hampshire. And I usually reply, well, it's only 40 minutes from the border, and you never know when you might have to leave in a hurry. I used to say it as a joke."

Here's the REAL reason of Dinesh D'Souza's conviction:








Godspeed Mr D'Souza. I'm sorry too many on the Right are letting you down.


MFBB.

MIEKE VAN HECKE, TOP HONCHO OF CATHOLIC EDUCATION IN FLANDERS, BELGIUM: "I WOULD ALLOW HEADSCARVES IN SCHOOL". (AND ISLAMIC LESSONS TOO)

Nightmare on Guimard Street. Editor's note: "Guimard Street" is Downing Street 10, so to say, for the still widespread network of Catholic schools in Flanders, Belgium's northern, Dutch-speaking half.

As it turns out, the top honcho of that network is speaking out in favor of headscarves for muslim girls in its schools and for islamic lessons as well.






I'm sorry, I'm too fucked up to continue. I just forced myself to publish the start of a post so as to have to continue tomorrow.

Stay tuned, I'll try to flesh it out.


MFBB.

SATURDAY NIGHT HOLE, JAMIROQUAI.

Hole with Violet.




Die lustige Witwe.




Jamiroquai with Alright.




Ecobozo with some catchy tunes.



Too g*ddam fucking tired for more info. I wonder when we'll finally end up in calmer waters?


Nite.



MFBB.

MORE DATA ON ISLAMIC MOVE TO ISLAMIZE UK SCHOOLS EMERGES.

The Daily Telegraph posted a video of Faisal Khan, one of the masterminds of the islamic Trojan Horse plot to take over UK public schools. He is talking about 'changing headteachers' in Bradford. He is heard claiming it took “a number of years” to “change the headteacher” at schools in the city:

"In video footage, the man accused of being at the centre of the Bradford plot, Faisal Khan, describes how he and his colleagues have worked for a “number of years” to “change the headteacher” at schools in the city, adding: “We have to do that for every single school… we have to be there, on governing bodies, because that’s what it’s all about...It’s time we took these schools back.”
Mr Khan, a councillor formerly for George Galloway’s Respect party, now sitting as an independent, insisted last night that his sole motive in removing head teachers was driving up standards and said he had no wish to “Islamise” schools.
Mr Khan, the BMEF head, is chairman of governors at Carlton Bolling, a large, mainly Muslim but secular secondary school in Bradford. He was also a governor at Laisterdyke, another large secular school in the city, until last month, when he and all Laisterdyke’s other governors were fired by the council.
Staff at both schools said Mr Khan had led both sets of governors in “constant attacks” on their headteachers to drive them out and had succeeded at Carlton Bolling, where two successful non-Muslim headteachers have quit."

More from The Daily Mail Online, May 3:

PRAISE FOR 9/11 AND GIRLS AT THE BACK: SHOCKING CLAIMS OVER ACADEMY IN 'INFILTRATION' PROBE

Pupils at a school affected by the alleged plot freely praise terrorism, are segregated by gender, and are taught women must obey their husbands, it has been claimed. Park View School in Birmingham allegedly failed to challenge the views of pupils who praised suicide bombers in the 9/11 and 7/7 atrocities.

Staff also taught that wives are ‘not allowed’ to refuse sex with their husbands, and that women belong in the kitchen, the Association of British Humanists said. The organisation – which says it was told of the practices by former employees – also said girls were made to sit at the back of classes, and ignored when they tried to answer questions.

Park View denied the allegations, and said the idea it supports terrorism is ‘abhorrent’.

Oh really? If you would have told an Englishman only twenty years ago that a good deal of schools in Bradford would look like this around 2014:




.... he'd think you'd gone totally nuts.


This is Lindsey Clark, Park View's former Head Principal, who resigned around one month ago after she had been reduced to a figurehead without real power by her muslim staff:




Mrs. Clark was a very respected executive head of Park View, one of the Birmingham schools targeted in the muslim "Trojan Horse" coup. She is the fifth non-Muslim headteacher to leave one of the schools linked to the plot since late October 2013. The others are Balwant Bains (Saltley), Tina Ireland (Regent's Park), Bhupinder Kondal (Oldknow), and Peter Slough (Small Heath). There would actually be yet another one, Golden Hillock's Matthew Scarrott, which would make Mrs. Clark actually the sixth executive head forced out by muslims.

Mrs Clark was actually awarded the OBE (Order of the British Empire) in 2013 for her efforts to take Park View to the highest Ofsted ranking, “outstanding,” in 2012. Ofsted, or Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills, is the non-ministerial government department of Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Schools In England (HMCI). She told Ofsted inspectors probing her school in March that she had been marginalised by Tahir Alam, the hardline chair of governors at Park View, and the school’s principal, effectively its number two, Mohammed “Moz” Hussain. Not surprisingly, the school’s leadership and management have now been dropped to “inadequate” by Ofsted in a report expected soon.

A former department head at Park View, Nigel Sloan, says he witnessed Mohammed Hussain giving “mind-blowing anti-Western propaganda” assemblies to pupils at the school, including claims that the Americans were “the evil in the world” and “the cause of all famine.” As of April, Hussain was the prime candidate to replace Mrs Clark.

Here is a recent pic of Tahir Alam, scumbag muslim infiltrator:




And OF COURSE, in my own country, NOT A PEEP. Over at De Standaard, in De Morgen or Le Soir, or in het Laatste Nieuws, or on Belgian TV, whether it's VTM or Eén or whatever, crickets are chirping.

News like this makes a farce of the idiots' multiculti walhalla, you know. And they can't have that. The fiction has to be maintained at all cost.


In other news, last weekend the Austrian 'woman with a beard', Conchita Wurst, formerly Tom Neuwirth, won the yearly Eurovision Song Contest. Conhita's 'hit' was called 'Rise like a Phoenix'. Personally, I stopped watching the Eurovision Song Festival at age, lemme think, 7 or so, so I'm not really up to date anymore with regards to what kind of bands are being sent by their respective countries. But I have it from trustworthy sources that Conchita won not because 'Rise like a Phoenix' is SUCH a tremendously catchy wonderful marvellous number but because Conchita is so goddam COOL, you know, and she's MAKING A STATEMENT...

Indeed, Conchita is battling for 'Love and Acceptance'. Now, De Standaard is doing its very best to not be aware of what's happening in public schools in Birmingham, Leeds, Bradford, East London and whatever, BUT they did pick up a heartwarming statement from Conchita with regards to Putin who recently masterminded 'anti gay laws':




Asked by the moderator what he/she had to say about that, Conchita expressed the hope that Putin would be watching and then exclaimed 'You can't stop us'.



'You can't stop us, Putin!'


In the De Standaard offices, as in those of the state-run Belgian TV (where being gay is something like a conditio sine qua non if you want to join the 'work' force, but I digress), they were swooning and fainting by the dozens.

In the Kremlin, Putin almost killed himself. From laughter, that is. Only when Medvediev managed to ram the neck of a bottle of Stolichnaya Vodka in his piehole, in between hysterical fits, did he slowly regain control of himself.




My. God.

Taking the runaway demographic explosion/immigration of muslims in Europe into account, as well as the apparently irrepressible urge of our moral betters to promote lifestyles that don't produce offspring, it's hard to stay optimistic.

This was Outlaw Mike, reporting from the world's biggest Open Air Lunatic Asylum. Over and out.




MFBB.

SATURDAY NIGHT MODEST MOUSE, ROXY MUSIC.

Modest Mouse with Float On, from the 2004 album Good news for people who love bad news.




US indie rockband from Issaquah in Washington. Formed in 93 around Isaac Brock. In 06 The Smiths' famous guitarist, Johnny Marr, joined for awhile.



Roxy Music with Dance Away. From Manifesto, 1979 already goddammit.




Goede wijn behoeft geen krans. Maf ze.



MFBB.

RECOMMENDED READS: MARK STEYN WITH #BRINGBACKOURBALLS.

"It is hard not to have total contempt for a political culture that thinks the picture at right is a useful contribution to rescuing 276 schoolgirls kidnapped by jihadist savages in Nigeria. Yet some pajama boy at the White House evidently felt getting the First Lady to pose with this week's Hashtag of Western Impotence would reflect well upon the Administration. The horrible thing is they may be right: Michelle showed she cared - on social media! - and that's all that matters, isn't it?

Just as the last floppo hashtag, #WeStandWithUkraine, didn't actually involve standing with Ukraine, so #BringBackOurGirls doesn't require bringing back our girls. There are only a half-dozen special forces around the planet capable of doing that without getting most or all of the hostages killed: the British, the French, the Americans, Israelis, Germans, Aussies, maybe a couple of others. So, unless something of that nature is being lined up, those schoolgirls are headed into slavery, and the wretched pleading passivity of Mrs Obama's hashtag is just a form of moral preening.

But then what isn't? The blogger Daniel Payne wrote this week that "modern liberalism, at its core, is an ideology of talking, not doing". He was musing on a press release for some or other "Day of Action" that is, as usual, a day of inaction:

Diverse grassroots groups are organizing and participating in events such as walks, rallies and concerts and calling on government to reduce climate pollution, transition off fossil fuels and commit to a clean energy future.

It's that easy! You go to a concert and someone "calls on government" to do something, and the world gets fixed.






There's something slightly weird about taking a hashtag - which on the Internet at least has a functional purpose - and getting a big black felt marker and writing it on a piece of cardboard and holding it up, as if somehow the comforting props of social media can be extended beyond the computer and out into the real world. Maybe the talismanic hashtag never required a computer in the first place. Maybe way back during the Don Pacifico showdown all Lord Palmerston had to do was tell the Greeks #BringBackOurJew.

As Mr Payne notes, these days progressive "action" just requires "calling on government" to act. But it's sobering to reflect that the urge to call on someone else to do something is now so reflexive and ingrained that even "the government" - or in this case the wife of "the government" - is now calling on someone else to do something.

Boko Haram, the girls' kidnappers, don't strike me as social media types. As I wrote last year:

The other day, members of Boko Haram, a group of (surprise!) Muslim "extremists," broke into an agricultural college in Nigeria and killed some four dozen students. The dead were themselves mainly Muslim, but had made the fatal mistake of attending a non-Islamic school. "Boko Haram" means more or less "Learning is sinful," this particular wing of the jihad reveling more than most in the moronic myopia of Islamic imperialism.

But moronic myopia goes both ways, doesn't it? If the hashtag doesn't work, maybe we could persuade Boko Haram to trade the girls for these guys:..."

My God. Bring back their balls? Bringing back Elvis would be easier.




MFBB.

SATURDAY NIGHT TEENAGE FANCLUB, RADIOHEAD.

Teenage Fanclub opens with Everything Flows. This song is basically nothing but raw grungy noise. Still, somehow it's a classic.




Scottish alternative rockband around Norman Blake from Bellshill, southeast of Glasgow, UK. A place that has spawned other, similar bands - most notably the Soup Dragons. This number is from their debut album A Catholic Education (1990).



Radiohead with Everything in its right place. Opening track of their 2000 album Kid A.




Radio Deprimo, I know it. But yet another classic in its own way.




Slaap wel en braaf zijn hee.



MFBB.

MAY 2ND, 2014.

Three years ago, on May 2nd, 2011, my father died, after a month-long debilitating illness.

Hail Mary, full of grace.
Our Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among women,
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb,
Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
pray for us sinners,
now and at the hour of our death.
Amen.



Our Father, who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy Name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
and the power,
and the glory,
for ever and ever.
Amen.

Rest in peace, father. We think of you every day.



MFBB.

BIRMINGHAM, UK: MASSIVE MUSLIM PLOT TO ISLAMIZE PUBLIC SCHOOLS REVEALED.

The Gatestone Institute's Soeren Kern has the goods on an islamic plot to take over - read islamize - public schools in England and Wales. And, if you are someone who automatically labels anything that comes from The Gatestone Institute as rightwing fearmongering, think again. When even Nick Clegg shows concern, you'd better pay attention.

"...British authorities say they have widened their investigation into an alleged plot by Muslim fundamentalists to Islamize public schools in England and Wales.

The expanded probe now encompasses at least 25 schools in Birmingham, up from four initially. Investigators are also looking into new allegations that Muslim extremists have infiltrated schools in other British cities, including Bradford and Manchester.

The plot—dubbed Operation Trojan Horse—consists of a strategy to wrest control of schools by ousting non-Muslim head teachers and staff at secular state schools and replacing them with individuals who will run the schools according to strict Islamic principles.

A copy of a strategy document outlining the plot was sent to the Birmingham City Council in November 2013, but its existence did not become known to the public until March 2014, when it was leaked to the London-based newspaper, the Sunday Times.

Although police are still working to determine the authenticity of the document, what remains beyond dispute is that Muslim hardliners are subverting the British school system in ever greater numbers.

Since Operation Trojan Horse came to light, British authorities have been inundated with more than 200 whistleblower complaints in Birmingham alone—including emails, letters and telephone calls from parents, teachers and school leaders—about the imposition of conservative Islamic practices in primary, secondary and community schools, as well as in publicly-funded academies.




A screenshot of The Sunday Times.

Allegations include the takeover of school governing bodies by Islamic fundamentalists, harassment and squeezing-out of non-Muslim teachers, forcing female students to cover their hair, banning sex-education classes, bullying female staff, and segregating boys and girls in classrooms.

Over the past several weeks, Ofsted, the official agency for inspecting British schools, has carried out surprise inspections of at least 18 schools in Birmingham, under orders from the British Department for Education. This is in addition to a separate investigation being conducted by the Birmingham City Council. The initial findings of these investigations are to be published in May, with full reports following in July.

But critics say the schools inspected so far represent only the tip of the iceberg. The problem of Islam in public schools has been allowed to snowball to vast proportions—not dozens, nor hundreds, they say, but thousands of British schools have come under the influence of Muslim radicals—and they accuse the British government of willful complacency driven by blind obeisance to multiculturalism.

One such critic is Michael White, a former teacher at Birmingham's Park View School, which is at the center of the controversy. White recently told the BBC that concerns of an "Islamic takeover plot" were first raised more than 20 years ago, but they were ignored by government officials obsessed with enforcing political correctness.

White said he was "forced out" after he challenged attempts by the Muslim governors of the school to ban sex education and stop the teaching of non-Islamic faiths in religious education classes.

Another critic, Birmingham's Labour MP Khalid Mahmood, says the majority of the governors at the school are Salafists and Wahhabis, Muslim hardliners who are "trying to import their views into classrooms and the day to day running of the school." In an interview with the Birmingham Mail, Mahmood said he believes British education officials have previously resisted getting involved in disputes with Muslim schools for fear of being called racist or anti-Islamic.

Ofsted is now investigating allegations that Muslim hardliners at the school are indoctrinating pupils by—among other tactics—teaching them to praise the anti-Western sermons of firebrand Muslim preachers such as the late Anwar al-Awlaki, who planned terrorist operations for the Islamist group al Qaeda. They are also accused of misusing £70,000 (€85,000; $120,000) of taxpayers' money to purchase playground loudspeakers to call pupils to Islamic prayers."

"[The tactics are] totally invisible to the naked eye and allow us to operate under the radar. I have detailed the plan we have in Birmingham and how well it has worked and you will see how easy the whole process is to get the head teacher out and our own person in. ... Whilst sometimes the practices we use may not seem the correct way to do things you must remember this is a 'Jihad' and as such using all means possible to win the war is acceptable." — Quote from document leaked to the Sunday Times.

"...This is not the first time the Saltley School has been linked to Muslim extremists. Previously, an "achievement mentor" at the school was arrested for his involvement in a terror cell which planned to behead a British soldier. Zahoor Iqbal was jailed for seven years in 2008 for supplying equipment for terrorist acts and supplying money or property for use in terrorism.

Another whistleblower told the Sunday Times that the new Muslim head teacher at Ladypool Primary School in Birmingham stopped Christmas celebrations after her appointment in September 2013.

The teacher, Huda Aslam, who was recruited from an Islamic secondary school near Ladypool, told teachers organizing last year's Christmas party that Santa Claus was banned from the school and that there would be no presents and "no mention" of Jesus being the son of God.

Fresh allegations have also emerged in Manchester and Bradford. At Laisterdyke Business and Enterprise College and Carlton Bolling College, both in Bradford, there are claims that head teachers have come under pressure from Muslim governors to introduce Islamic practices.

Meanwhile, Birmingham's ten MPs have united to demand that Education Secretary Michael Gove launch a full inquiry into Operation Trojan Horse. The MPs from all three main parties presented a united front in a joint letter urging Gove to establish a cross-party review with the city council to build a "full picture" of what has happened."

This is a screenshot of that letter, as it appears on Liam Byrne's website:




As we have been saying on these pages for at least ten years: ISLAM IS CANCER.


MFBB.

SATURDAY NIGHT GORDON LIGHTFOOT, VAN HALEN.

First a Gordon Lightfoot ballad that's as beautiful as it's haunting. The wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.




From the 1976 album Summertime Dream.



Van Halen with Why can't this be love? From the 1986 album 5150.





First album also with another lead singer, as Sammy Hagar replaced David Lee Roth after the latter's departure.


Slaap wel.



MFBB.

RECOMMENDED READS: JACK CASHILL ON THE DARK LEGACY OF KATHLEEN SEBELIUS.

Over at American Thinker, Jack Cashill makes the case that if Kathleen Sebelius is going to be remembered for her part in the disastrous trainwreck that is Obamacare, she's going to be lucky:

"...To be fair, the body count Sebelius left behind in Kansas does not nearly match that of Mao, but the body count is real. During Sebelius’s six years as governor, women came from 48 states and points beyond to have late-term abortions in Kansas.

They came not because Kansas had uniquely liberal abortion laws. They came because Sebelius was uniquely hostile to the law’s enforcement. The state’s most efficient practitioner of this dubious art, the late Dr. George Tiller of Wichita, boasted on his website of having “more experience in late abortion services with fetuses over 24 weeks than anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere.”

What Tiller’s website did not say is that during the six years of Sebelius’s reign as governor, he ended the lives of thousands of healthy babies ready to be born, in full violation of state law. Nor did the website tell how Sebelius personally intervened to let the carnage continue. This was no small task. To succeed, she had to destroy her Republican attorney general, Phill Kline, who was hot on Tiller’s trail.






The story could begin in any number of places, but a likely starting place is 2002, the year Sebelius ran for governor and Kline ran for attorney general. As a state representative five years earlier, Kline had helped draft legislation to check the state’s then thriving late-term abortion business. The new law allowed for a late-term abortion on a viable baby only “to preserve the life of the pregnant women” or to prevent her from suffering “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.”

The new law and the reporting requirement should have put an end to the late-term business of Dr. Tiller and a handful of others, but by this time Tiller had learned to game the system. His first step was to use his influence to finesse a mental health exception. But even Kline’s moderate Republican predecessor insisted that mental health problems had to be "permanent and substantial” to justify a late-term abortion.

Undaunted, Tiller made enough strategic donations to enough politicians to assure that no one enforced the law as written or even as interpreted. When Kline chose to run in 2002, Tiller sensed trouble and responded accordingly. Through a variety of PACs and cut-outs, he invested hundreds of thousands in Kline’s obscure Democrat opponent and turned a would-be landslide into a nail-biter.

Given that the numbers coming out of Tiller’s clinic had increased since the tougher law had been written, Kline began to review the required reports to see just how Tiller had been able to circumvent the law. One thing that Kline quickly discovered was that of the 166 abortions performed on girls under fifteen in the years 2002 and 2003, Kansas abortion clinics reported only three cases to the state department of Social and Rehabilitation Services. They should have reported all 166.

Kline could also see that not a single doctor in Kansas had checked the “prevent patient’s death” box as a justification for the abortion. All checked the “impairment” box.

Tiller, Kline saw, offered no medical diagnosis in his reports. He simply reiterated the wording of the law – namely, “to avoid substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.”

How criminal was this enterprise? Let’s consider the 2003 case of a confused little cowgirl who visited Tiller’s clinic in Wichita. “Horses are my life and having kids would mess that up for barrel racing” – so explained the 15-year-old who hoped to abort the healthy, viable baby whom she had already carried for more than six months.

For the official state record, Tiller interpreted the sadness that might accompany the temporary loss of barrel racing as “substantial and irreversible.” And so the baby was executed with the utmost privacy, and all for only about $6,000.

At Kline’s request, Dr. Paul McHugh of John Hopkins reviewed fifteen case files. McHugh stated publicly that he “saw no file that justified abortion” according to the state’s late-term abortion laws. He openly asked of Tiller’s practice if “any person [is] ever found to be not appropriate on psychological grounds for an abortion[.]”

Tiller spent millions keeping case record statements like “Horses are my life” out of the hands in prosecutors. In the 2006 election alone, he invested close to $2 million. He had to. For the three previous years, Kline had plied an unsympathetic state judiciary to get access to Tiller’s case file, and he was finally poised to succeed.

Tiller and his political patrons, chief among them Sebelius, resisted at every step. To block Kline, Sebelius persuaded popular Republican district attorney Paul Morrison to switch parties and run against Kline on her ticket. The Democrats, Tiller’s paid proxies, and the media then launched a vicious campaign to portray “Snoop Dog Kline” as a “panty-sniffer” with no greater interest than invading the privacy of Kansas women.

So relentless were The Kansas City Star’s attacks on the “anti-choice extremist” Kline that he lost the election, and the Star won Planned Parenthood’s top media honor, the “Maggie Award,” named for its eugenicist founder, Margaret Sanger.

Three months after Kline was forced out, Sebelius hosted an elegant but extremely discreet soirée at Cedar Crest, the governor’s mansion, for Tiller and his staff. What made this event newsworthy was that just a few months earlier, Kline had filed 30 counts against Tiller for performing illegal late-term abortions.




Among the more revealing of the photos taken at the event was one of Sebelius holding a t-shirt presented to her by Tiller, which reads “Trifecta 2006: Sebelius, Parkinson, Morrison.” In the photo, Sebelius points at Tiller as if to acknowledge his contribution to that victory.

A month later, Sebelius joined the “conga line around the concert hall” at a big Kansas Planned Parenthood bash celebrating her birthday. At the time, its abortion clinic was also the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation. The partiers “sure know how to have fun!” enthused the Planned Parenthood newsletter.

I cannot imagine that Ms. Sebelius is having much fun this week, but if she is known going forward only for the humiliation of ObamaCare, she will have a better legacy than she deserves.

In the back of my mind, over the past few years, an idea had begun to crystallize. And when I read that Alan Caruba over at Theo Spark uttered the phrase I knew he had beaten me to it.

The so-called "Democratic" Party has truly become a Criminal Enterprise.

And I don't know for what dark reasons...

... but it is hellbent on destroying America.



MFBB.

HAPPY EASTER 2014!!!

Like every year, DowneastBlog wishes all its readers of good will a Happy Easter!

1 Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand;
2 By which also ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain.
3 For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures;
4 And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures:
5 And that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve:
6 After that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep. After that, he was seen of James; then of all the apostles.

MFBB.

SATURDAY NIGHT TWO DOOR CINEMA CLUB, THE SMITHEREENS.

Two Door Cinema Club with What you know. From their debut album Tourist History (2010).




Hat tip OutlawDaughter.




The Smithereens with A Girl Like You. From the 1989 album 11.




Blokes from New Jersey with a couple of decent hits. Got to know them around the time when I was fruitlessly chasing Da Phemalez in pub De Drei Deurkisj (The Three Little Doors). This was about in Earth's Pliocene Epoch. Or so it seems.


Hey, good night.



MFBB.