Saturday, June 17, 2017

SATURDAY NIGHT ROBERT PALMER, GUNS N' ROSES.

Robert Palmer with Johnny and Mary. From the 1980 album Looking for Clues.





Two years previously, Palmer already had a taste of commercial success with Double Fun, but I guess Looking for Clues was really his breakthrough.



Guns N' Roses with Sweet Child of Mine. From their 1987 debut album Appetite for Destruction.





Formed in 1985 in LA. I read somewhere sometime that William Bruce Rose Jr's stage name, Axl Rose, is an anagram of oral sex. Urban myth?


Nite.



MFBB.

THE GRENFELL TOWER TRAGEDY: A SHOWCASE OF THE THIRD WORLDIZATION OF THE WEST.

An article by Townhall's Cortney O'Brien caught my attention this morning. It's titled:


Londoners can't hide anger in aftermath of 'avoidable' tower fire.


From it, this exerpt:


"...Hundreds are expected to take part in a rally Friday night to express their outrage over all these oversights and demand justice for the victims. Then, on June 21, a “Day of Rage” will be held on Shepherds Bush Green, a district in west London.

Londoners directed more of their anger toward Prime Minister Theresa May, who they say did not visit victims soon enough, instead choosing to meet with fire crews and police. Former cabinet minister Michael Portillo said that decision amounted to a lack of “humanity.”



Some further surfing brought me to The Daily Mail, which has a colourful - no pun intended - collection of photos of angry "Londoners". Here's one, depicting the new subjects of the Queen peacefully venting their frustrations in Kensington Town Hall:


 photo kensington_townhall_zpsfrabcrw2.jpg


So they are "demanding" that May step down? But not Sad Dick Khan, who is right up there in the chain of command? Watching the photos posted at The Daily Mail, I got so incensed that I had to let off some steam in the Townhall's comments section:


Er, no. The title of this piece should have been 'Third Worlders can't hide their anger'.

It's clear that there is a lot of blame to go around and then first and foremost the contractor.

HOWEVER: that tower was a Third World outpost in microcosm, and from what I read there was a lot of combustible material in the public spaces. An emergency exit would even have been blocked by debris.

What I take really issue with is that the reactions of the 'Londoners' are really, truly, what one could expect from people hailing from hellholes. Virtually ALL of them came from countries where you better not drink tap water lest you don't want to die from cholera, where safety standards are a big joke, where infrastructure is rotting and tumbling apart as you are looking at it, where nothing functions, where you can get killed in broad daylight and your murderer can walk free because the police and the judicial system are the epitomes of corruption and inefficiency etc etc etc

They come HERE, in our well-organized states where WE built functioning societies, NOT by exploiting THEM, but by obeying the rule of law, respecting the results of (more or less) democratically held elections, maitaining high standards in education AND working our *sses off.

Then a tragedy happens, and these bozos direct their anger at.... the PM of the First World nation where they chose to flock to??? I mean, WTF??? What these IDIOTS are doing is importing THEIR way of life, and that includes, apart from, say, discarding their rubbish in the elevators, hurling insults at officials who cannot be held responsible for a tragedy like this.

Watching those videos yesterday... it did an awful lot to temper my sympathy for their misfortune, I can tell you that.

Bah. For those wanting to see it, yesterday we could witness the First and the Third World in a nutshell. The First World was that 16 year old WHITE schoolgirl going to do her chemistry exam, for God's sake, in her pajamas. It's THAT indomitable spirit that MADE our civilization the greatest on earth.

The Third World was those angry illiterate mobs storming May's offices, irrationally trying to blame where it clearly does not belong. But why am I not surprised? It's NEVER these *sses own fault.



I made an error there describing the theatre of this shameful scene as 'May's offices' while in fact it was Kensington Town Hall, but you get the gist. These idiots all hail from hellholes from all over the planet which they fled because life there STINKS - courtesy their very own 'culture' or the lack thereof. Now, the brunt of the blame lies first and foremost with the Kensington and Chelsea Borough Council, which rejected the offer for refurbishment of the Greenfell Tower of the first contractor, Leadbitter, instead opting for rival Rydon's offer, which was cheaper because flammable materials for the cladding were proposed.

But Grenfell Tower's multiculti melting pot clearly also has butter on the head. As Mark Steyn notes:


"... As anyone who's traveled the Third World or even parts of post-Soviet Eastern Europe knows, it is easier to put up a tall building than to maintain it. Authoritarian regimes like the prestige of skyscrapers, even stubby ones, but you notice around dusk that there are no lights on the upper floors because the elevators no longer work; the landings in the emergency stairwell are used as "temporary" storage space that has inevitably become permanent. Not all of these problems are yet as common in a First World city such as London, but some are: at Grenfell Tower, for example, the only emergency exit was obstructed inter alia by piles of cardboard, a busted space heater and an old mattress. Other problems not quite seemly in a supposedly wealthy metropolis had also accumulated - so there were no sprinklers, and non-working fire alarms, and "cladding" from a recent remodel helped fan the flames and spread the fire and quickly became, for those seeking an issue in a tragedy, the word of the week. Nevertheless, clad or unclad, Grenfell Tower embodies what has happened to London, Paris and other European cities in their transformation from national capitals to "global cities", as Sadiq Khan likes to call his fiefdom..."



There is a reason why so few 'original' Westerners - yes, by that I mean the White ones, oooooh I'm so racist - feel a burning need to set up shop in Nouakchott or Mogadishu, and it is the same reason that the Med is full of rickety boats heading northwards and not the other way round: we are far, far better at creating healthy, safe and prosperous societies.

It is therefore astonishing to see these unruly mobs, of whom the majority lives on welfare dole, rage against the very same society that for the first time in their hitherto miserable lives gave them a degree of comfort and security. Thanks to the Left, these chaps were taken out of the Third World (to 'rub our noses in diversity', remember?)... but unfortunately, it seems you cannot take the Third World out of the chaps.

As if this whole tragedy was not bad enough, it was lightning quick abused by that same Left for political purposes. here's another photo, courtesy The Daily Mail:


 photo leftist_mob_Greenfell_zpsczo4g5jw.jpg


My oh my what a sad collection of leftozoid losers. What a disgraceful thing to try to recuperate the deaths of some 70 people for political gain. Especially so in light of the fact that situations like encountered in the Grenfell Tower are... a direct result of that very same Left encouraging the population replacement now taking place all over Western countries.

Three points:


a.) Those responsible for the contract, i.e. Kensington and Chelsea Borough Council and the contractor, should be held accountable.

b.) Then it should be pointed out that the inhabitants of the Grenfell Tower are at least partly responsible for their own misfortune.

c.) Finally, Theresa May should not be intimated by vile provocateurs from both the Left and Britain's muslim communities who see this as an opportunity to ask for her head. Mind you, I'm not even a fan of May. But she's got NOTHING to do with this.



I suppose the first will happen. I'm doubtful of the third point, since May has not struck me as a particularly strong leader, to say the least. I'm sure point b.) will happen only in a parallel world.



MFBB.




Thursday, June 15, 2017

BAF F-16'S TO STAY IN JORDAN TILL THE END OF 2017.

Soon the scheduled 1-year tour of the six-strong F-16 BAF detachment, operating since July 2016 against ISIS targets in Iraq and Syria from a Jordanian AFB, will come to an end. But it now appears four planes will stay longer, till the end of 2017. Via HLN:


 photo belgian_f16_stay_in_Jordan_zps9n6vrqlu.jpg


"Four Belgian F-16's will prolong the mission in Syria till the end of the year. An agreement exists, said PM Charles Michel during his visit in Montreal in Canada. The question will be part of the agenda of the next council of ministers. "We have reached an agreement about prolonging the mission of four (of the six, red.) F-16's to fight terrorism in Syria", said Michel. The agreement came after a meeting with Minister of Defence Steven Vandeput (who has been championing prolonging the mission for some time already) and with key ministers.

Since OCT 2014 Belgium deploys six F-16 fighter bombers in the fight against ISIS. The operations, first over Iraq, later over Syria, take place from the Al Azraq base in Jordan.

At the time (in mid-2015, after the first year-long stint during which Belgium and The Netherlands operated simultaneously with six jets each from Jordan), Belgium had agreed with The Netherlands to each intermittently deploy F-16's during six month intervals. This in order to help press down costs per fiscal year. The Netherlands has let it be known however that on July 1st, it will not (yet) take over the baton again. Which is why Belgium was asked to prolong the mission of its F-16's.

Belgium will thus further deploy, from July 1st till the 31st of December, four F-16's, supported by 110 ground personnel (of which around 20 temporarily). A Red Card Holder team of four will operate from Qatar.

The missions undertaken by our jets for the international coalition remain unaltered. Only the number of flying hours will decrease from 400 to 250 per month, Minister of Defense Steven Vandeput said. The cost of prolonging the operation is estimated at 17 million EUR."



Several conclusions and observations:


a.) It is clear that years of pounding ISIS strongholds and infrastructure have taken their toll on ISIS and that from an operational POV, it makes perhaps sense to tone it down a bit, if only for the reason that there are less targets to bomb.

b.) At the same time, it should be clear that in the greater scheme of things, the International Coalition's anti-IS operations are, in fact, but the sideshow. The REAL battlefront is the West, where islamization is in full swing on almost every front, and where the ruling political class is pretending not to see that ISIS and the spread of islam in our countries are two sides of the same coin. Failure to understand this will lead to Europe's doom first, and ultimately also the US's.

c.) Belgium's eagerness to prolong the mission must, alas, be seen against the backdrop of President Trump's lambasting the majority of NATO countries for not doing their part in the coalition, leaving the burden of financing it to the American taxpayer. As we have already noted on these pages, General Delcour, a retired Belgian Defence Chief of Staff, opined in 2015 that the Belgian government sees the deployment of our fighter bombers as a smokescreen to hide our lack of committment and the unwillingness to spend 2% of our GNP on defense as "agreed" on the NATO summit in Wales a couple of years back. General Delcour litterally said that "Belgium is a freeloader on the NATO train."

d.) The Netherlands is more serious on defense than Belgium of course, but even so, the country's failure to find sufficient cash to deploy a mere six jets for its next tour - after all, the Dutch have been away from the theatre for a year now - is troubling, to say the least. Especially in light of the fact The Netherlands's GNP is about 1.5 times that of Belgium. It is clear that a welfare state comes at a great cost.



MFBB.

Sunday, June 11, 2017

SUNDAY NIGHT ART SNACK: THE GHENT ALTARPIECE (ca. 1420-1432, VAN EYCK BROTHERS).

The "Lam Gods", in the Anglosaxon world better known as the Ghent Altarpiece or the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, is a large, late Medieval Flemish polyptych altarpiece in Ghent's Sint-Baafskathedraal (St Bavo's Cathedral), attributed to the Old Flemish masters Hubert and Jan van Eyck.

The polyptych's general design is thought to be Hubert's work and can be situated in the early to mid 1420s, after which the panels would have been painted by his younger brother Jan between 1430 and 1432. The altarpiece was commissioned by the mayor of Ghent, Jodocus Vijd, and his wife Lysbette. The altarpiece was officially inaugurated on 6 May 1432, and after some time moved to the cathedral's principal chapel, where it can still be admired.

Despite having been in very serious danger throughout the centuries (iconoclasm, fire, looting, panels stolen by the Germans during WWI) by the thirties the Ghent Altarpiece could have been said to have survived pretty well. But then, in 1934, the panel visible in the left hand corner, depicting "The Just Judges", was stole, presumably by a certain Arsène Goedertier. He died the very same year and is known to have tried to tell, with his last breath, the location of the stolen panel, but the clues he left were of no avail.

After WWII, Belgian art restorer Jef Van der Veken produced a copy, as part of an overall restoration project. To this day, the real "The Just Judges" remain unaccounted for, although presumably the work is still in Ghent and in the possession of an old aristocratic family.


 photo lamgods_zpsrwikdvwp.jpg


Certainly do not miss to visit this site, Closer to Van Eyck, which allows you to explore this monumental work in the minutest detail.


MFBB.