FIRE CHARLES BOLDEN!

As much as I loathe so many bigwig GOP figureheads who pledge adherence to real conservatism just before elections, then snub their constituencies after, it's clear that even so, a GOP-controlled Congress is a step in the right direction.

One of the things that you believe when you call yourself a Conservative - that you should believe - is that Man is Unique. And that it is his God-given right to make use, to the fullest extent, of the riches of the Earth.

Of course, we should do so wisely. Not only because ruining our habitat would endanger our species, but also out of respect for the wonder that our planet is.

It follows naturally that, as Humanity advances through the ages, our ever enhancing technology compels us to not limit ourselves to this World (no matter how Unique it is itself) and reach for the stars.

Naturally, we should forever cherish Earth as "the place where it all began". But our Destiny is Out There and just like discovering the New World 500 years ago led to Humanity making great strides forward, discovering New Worlds in Outer Space will lead to our species' Next Grandiose Phase. Unrivalled development of technology, unimaginable riches in natural resources, colossal trade volumes, the understanding of hitherto mysterious physical phenomena, and possibly the evolution of the Human Mind towards as yet unfathomable capabilities (mastery of mind over matter, telepathy) may literally lay just over the horizon.

The Left does not see it that way. These wretched creatures want us to stay on this planet and resort to pitiful navel-staring. They have abandoned God and Christianity's vision of Humans as utterly unique beings. The Christian Scripture cites God who, while blessing the first humans, tells them to "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground."

By contrast, leftists have created their own God, the State, and replaced Christian and other religions with their own one, essentially a pagan belief that worships "Gaia" and which makes Man subordinate to Earth. Where Christians are told to "increase in number" - a quintessentially optimistic, hopeful vision - leftists want the exact opposite: they want us to decrease in number. Mainstream leftism has thus far refrained from openly calling for a deliberate reduction of the Earth's population, but the idea certainly lives in their circles. It pops up now and then, sometimes rather explicitly, and has historically had strong advocates among the feminist (Margaret Sanger) and environmentalist (Rachel Carson, Paul Ehrlich) branches of the Leftist Tree. A hint of what these people have in store for humanity was given when rich leftist lunatics erected the so-called Georgia Guidestones and inscribed in them the chilling message "Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature". Given the fact that the most horrible mass murders in history originated from leftist ideologies (70 million dead in Communist China, at least 30 million dead in the USSR, 6 million dead Jews under National Socialism, between 1.5 and 3 million dead by the Khmer Rouge), sensible humans should have every reason to dread the means by which the fine specimen of our Moral Betters who are responsible for that ugly "monument" in Elbert County, Georgia, want to "maintain humanity under 500,000,000". Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a Greenpeace offshoot, once famously said that earthworms are more important than people. Thank God that this lunatic does not hold his finger on the trigger of some doomsday device that would finish nine tenths of the world's population - but by no means do not make the mistake that he's an isolated leftist loony.






We rightwingers think differently. We do see that the Earth's population increases and as such becomes a heavy burden for the planet's resources. We contend however that if more countries had embraced capitalism, general prosperity levels would be much higher than they are today, and as such the population growth would definitely have been much slower. How ironic is it that the main reason for people staying poor in developing countries, and thus having so many children, is because their leadership embraced socialist policies! Post WWII Thailand and Tanzania had comparable levels of prosperity and population growth rates. Tanzania most definitely adopted some form of afrosocialism, best exemplified by their disastrous 'ujamaa' project. Thailand by and large chose for a more capitalist approach. Today, Thailand's population grows at about a quarter of the speed of Tanzania's!

At the same time we know that God was only joking when He said that we should fill merely "the earth". Or if he did not joke, that the unimaginative bloke who translated His Words omitted the 's' at the back end of 'earth'. Indeed, why shouldn't we fill countless other Earths???

At some point a surplus population must and will leave Earth. 150 years ago a substantial portion of Irish left Eire because it could no longer sustain them, and settled in the United States to ultimately flourish to such an extent, that they now outnumber several times those who stayed on the emerald island. In the same manner, at some point in the future a substantial portion of humans will leave Earth bound for other planets, and as time goes by they will one day outnumber those left on the Mother Planet. Irish in the States celebrate Saint Patrick's Day. In times to come, those humans on faraway colonized planets who can trace their ancestry back to a country called the United States of America will perhaps still celebrate the 4th of July.

This is why it's a crying shame that a man like Charles Bolden is still NASA Administrator. A couple of years back, Bolden made an immortal fool of himself when he stated that henceforth NASA's core mission should be an "outreach to the muslim world":




It's been five years since Bolden's NASA Muslim Outreach Program got kickstarted, and imho the results obtained thus far do not exactly warrant continuing the program:




Probably even Bolden realizes this, which is why, being his Master in the White House's sock puppet, these days he argues for a 2 billion dollar NASA budget for "earth science" instead. We all know what that means: Global Warming studies. You see, Obama having identified the Rise of the Oceans as THE challenge facing America, what better use of NASA satellites than to map the enemy's advance from orbit?

Well, here I come back to my intro with there being some use for republican lawmakers in control of the House, since even despite being jelly-spined, their marginally higher common sense at least thwarted Obama's and Bolden's budget plans. American Thinker's Christopher Carson reports:

"Yesterday, the House Appropriations Committee voted for a significant change in NASA's priorities. Instead of the nearly 2 billion dollars requested by President Obama for "earth science" (read: global warming studies), the Republican House cut funding down to $1.68 billion, a merciful change in the right direction and enough to incur the ire of both the administration and Democratic critics like Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), who blasted the bill. (Mikulski claimed without evidence that global warming is damaging Maryland's Chesapeake Bay).

The House Committee also helpfully bumped up funding for planetary exploration at the expense of "climate change" studies. With a total NASA budget of $18.5 billion, NASA has been ordered to spend $4.76 billion next year on exploring the planets, a huge increase from the current level of $4.36 billion. What's special about this increase is that the Committee's budget is ordering NASA to go to Europa by 2022.

Europa is a moon of Jupiter that's covered in ice but has a massive, liquid-water ocean underneath its frozen surface, kept warm by radiation from the moon's inner core. When betting on extraterrestrial life in our own solar system, Europa is near the top of the hand, because on Earth, wherever you find liquid water, you find life. In theory, a mission to Europa could detect signatures of subsurface life and pave the way for a future lander that could melt through the surface layer and "swim" underneath in the ocean. The good news is that the Committee has directed NASA to launch its Europa Clipper mission within seven years with the new SLS launch system.

Congress has also prescribed a separate "Ocean Worlds Exploration Program" to "discover life" in the moons of Saturn – namely, Titan and Enceladus. Titan has a methane atmosphere and lakes, which might be conducive to life of some kind, and Enceladus has water vapor plumes that shoot out from the moon's poles from a Europa-like subsurface ocean. Basically, this new initiative would allow NASA to plan out future missions to the Saturnian system but would not yet authorize a new mission per se.

The search for extra-solar planets also gets a needed boost next year, with new funding for the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) to directly photograph exoplanets circling other stars. The telescope could detect signatures in these planets' atmospheres that might mean that life is present on their surfaces.

This bolder direction toward exploration and away from gazing at the Earth itself from orbit caught some surprising flack from the NASA administrator himself, Charles Bolden, who exclaimed that "the House proposal would seriously reduce our Earth science program and threaten to set back generations [sic] worth of progress in better understanding our changing climate. … [T]his would affect our ability to prepare for and respond to earthquakes, droughts, and storm events." How anyone could ever predict an earthquake, let alone from near-Earth orbit, was left unsaid.

Ultimately, the Democratic Party's current obsession with "climate change" stems from its lack of imagination, lack of adventure, and lack of vision. In 1962, JFK gave a stirring address in which he spoke of mankind's destiny in space: "We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because it is easy, but because it is hard." To this administration and its allies in Congress, the call seems to be closer to "we choose to stare at the Earth from orbit and to wish away the pause in global warming, not because it is hard, but because it is easy."

Indeed.

This is where we should be headed first: Mars. We should be there by 2030.




And no lame, abject failure of a NASA Administrator and Obama acolyte, who revealed more of his inner convictions than he probably wanted to by naming his firstborn son "Che", should stand in the way.


And beyond that?




Who will tell? Let us boldly go where no man has gone before!


Leave it to the likes of Charles Bolden to boldenly stay where we all have been since time immemorial.



MFBB.

SWEDEN TO PROVIDE PSYCHOLOGICAL COUNSELING, BENEFITS TO RETURNING ISIS 'VETERANS'.

From the Stop The World, I want to get off it Department. VDare reports:

News from the world’s most advanced multicultural dictatorship.

When the Islamic State terrorists are ready to retire from beheading, crucifying and burning innocent human beings, they will now enjoy a nice benefits package in Stockholm, Sweden, that includes free housing, health care and financial support.

In fact, Sweden’s own soldiers don’t even get the same benefits.

And some officials are suggesting the law-abiding population pay for the services so ISIS fighters can reintegrate into society.

A program to help ISIS fighters rejoin society is already in place in Sweden’s Örebro Municipality, where jihadists can obtain “psychological help to overcome traumatic experiences they may have suffered while fighting in Iraq and Syria,” according to Business Insider Australia.




Thank goodness: a Swedish government programme is now in place to offer the poor black-clad ISIS grunt to the right psychological counseling, health care, free housing etc. And a job, don't forget the job!!! Marie Harf would be proud!!!


The Swedish newspaper Expressen reported that councilor Rasmus Persson advocates offering terrorists jobs so they don’t feel alienated. Stockholm has released a document outlining its “strategy against violent extremism.”

Persson told the news program Tvärsnytt, “We have discussed how we should work for these guys who have come back, and to prevent them from returning to the fighting, and that they should be helped to process the traumatic experiences they have been through.”

Now the idea is spreading to other parts of the country. Sweden’s official coordinator against violent extremism, Mona Sahlin – a former leader of the Social Democrat Party – advocated using taxpayer funds to pay for the services.


Still, you can’t argue with results. Surely such generosity has at least reconciled “Swedish” Muslims to Western society.


In February, Sweden’s resident expert on “Islamophobia,” a Swedish convert to Islam, joined the jihadist ranks and is now fighting with ISIS.

In November 2014, the Swedish government estimated between 250 and 300 of its citizens have traveled to Syria and Iraq to join ISIS.

Just two months ago, Sweden’s national job agency fired all of its own contracted “immigrant resettlement assistants” because they were recruiting fighters for ISIS.


Oh.

Keep in mind, these kinds of exercises in pathological self-hatred are still not keeping people from calling Sweden a “racist” country.

Mona Sahlin, Mona Sahlin?

Oh yes, I remember! Had a story featuring her once, in 2010 that was.





A couple of other priceless money quotes from Mona Sahlin:

* On October 22, 2000, she explained to Göteborgs-Posten newspaper, that if two people are equally qualified for a job in an enterprise with few immigrants, "the one who is called Muhammad should get the job. It should be counted as a merit to have another background than Swedish."

* She has never hidden the fact that she wants Sweden to become less Swedish and more multicultural. In 2001, she said in a radio interview that, "the Swedes must be integrated into the new Sweden; the old Sweden is never coming back."

Now that we are at it, it doesn't surprise me in the least that Sweden's gonna pamper them poor returning PTSD-ridden ISIS bravehearts. What else can you expect from a two meter long blonde blue eyed Minister of the Interior Ardalan Shekarabi?




Oooooooh I'm being so RACIST again!!!



MFBB.

SATURDAY NIGHT FOO FIGHTERS, IGGY POP.

Foo Fighters with Big Me.




From their 1996 debut album Foo Fighters.



It had to happen one day. Iggy Pop with Lust for Life. Dates from 1977.




James Newell Osterberg jr. aka Iggy Pop because of a band called The Iguanas he played in when in High School. Man can't keep his shirt on, and these days it's really become an embarrassment.


Goede nacht.



MFBB.

GLOBAL WARMING CAUSES MASSIVE HEADACHES IN RESUPPLYING ANTARCTIC STATIONS.

At first I thought this was a Flying Pig moment: The Guardian admitting sea ice around Antarctica being at a record high:

"Sea ice around Antarctica is currently at record levels for May, part of a trend of increasing ice around the frozen continent making it harder to resupply and refuel research stations.

More than 50 scientists are gathering in Hobart in Tasmania this week for a series of workshops on techniques to more accurately forecast sea ice levels in the polar region, aiming to save millions of dollars in shipping costs.

They will also hope to avoid a repeat of the problems suffered by the Akademik Shokalskiy, the research vessel caught in a sudden freeze in December 2013.

Rod Wooding, from the Australian Antarctic Division, said last year ships “couldn’t get anywhere near” the Australian research site, Mawson station, requiring a year’s worth of supplies and fuel to be flown in by helicopter.

“[That] is inadequate for the long-term sustainability of the station,” Wooding said. “Other national programs have had similar problems, the French in particular, the Japanese also....”

Alas for me however, and luckily for The Graudian, Tony Worby was on hand with a bulletproof explanation:

"...Scientists were initially puzzled by the increasing sea ice around the continent, which reached record levels in September 2014, but have concluded it is “very largely driven by changes in wind”, Tony Worby, the chief executive of the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre said.

“Those changes of wind are driven by the depletion of ozone in the stratosphere and the increasing greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.”

The El Nino phenomenon, too, “drives changes in pressure which drives changes in wind which drives changes in sea ice”, he said.

Antarctica is also surrounded by ocean, leaving sea ice “completely free to expand however it wants to”, in contrast to the Arctic region, which is landlocked by Russia, Greenland and northern Canada...."

It's them nasty changes of wind caused by greenhouse gases!!!!!!!!!!! Who would have thunk it???



Dream on people, dream on....



MFBB.

EUROPE IS COMMITTING SUICIDE.

As Christianity is now the most persecuted religion on the planet and Christian churches are disappearing at an alarming rate all over the muslim world, our moral betters are tripping over their feet to grant cheap ground and loans to muslim committees dedicated to building mosques. A project among thousands, via François Desouche:

"As Dalil Boubakeur, Chairman of the French Council of the muslim cult, calls for doubling the number of mosques in France within two years, certain projects are already well addvanced. At Chevilly-Larue, a building of 1,180 square metres with large windows in oriental style, takes form smack in the middle of the Brittany neighborhood.

....

The Association of muslims of Chevilly-Larue [a town of 20,000 near Paris, in the Val de Marne Département; MFBB], or AMC, has criscrossed France, The Netherlands, Belgium and even Sweden to collect money for the project. "We have already spent between 1.2 and 1.4 million EUR on the project", says AMC's Chairman, who does not disclose the estimated total cost of the mosque.

The ground floor offers space for 800 men, the first floor is planned for 600 women. Four study halls (for school support, arab lessons, civil codes, and the koran) as well as a conference hall are also planned. "The goal is to invite non-muslims too for cultural events"."

As time goes by, I am beginning to find it near impossible to fathom why all over Europe our politicians, basically from all stripes, and all the way down from the top national level to town selectmen in small localities, are so hellbent - what else can you call it - to facilitate the installment of islam in our countries. The scale of the building projects, the express inclusion of facilities to help spread the muslim message - clearly elevating the mosques from being "merely" places of worship to cultural centers intended to safeguard and reinforce the muslim "way of life" - all point to a gargantuan scheme of cultural invasion. This is a movement that seeks to DOMINATE.

Two thousand years ago, the Romans conquered Gaul, which encompassed much of today's France. They enforced their culture manu militari, and no indigenous forces could stop the Roman juggernaut. In many places the locals simply submitted, realizing it was better to yield than to be destroyed.

Now, when you have offered the token resistance to save some military honor, there is actually little shame in surrendering to an obviously vastly superior culture which holds the promise - a promise on which the Romans more than delivered - of a better life under its aegis, as measured by countless parameters including some kind of rule of law, better infrastructure, superior education, vastly improved food production and so on. So much better became life for the ordinary European, from Hispania to Armenia Major and from Britannia to Cyrenaica, that the phrase Pax Romana, a period of at least two centuries of peace and prosperity in the Empire's realm unseen until then in human history, has lost nothing of its luster since it was first coined in 55AD by Seneca the Younger, a Roman philosopher and statesman.

It is another thing entirely when it's the other way round - when a superior culture surrenders to a "culture" of followers of an illiterate, treacherous, murderous child rapist.

The "culture" of islam has nothing to offer to us but blood, sweat and tears, without holding the prospect of at least reaping the rewards of the suffering. Islam can give Europe, and by extension the entire planet, only backwardness in a myriad domains, genetic deficiencies, sluggish finances, unjust punishments, destruction of vast cultural treasures, moribund economies, loss of freedom, and ultimately the stifling of what I would label "The Human Momentum". Humanity's advance throughout the ages, spearheaded by technological innovation, will gradually come to a screeching halt. Muslims are no technological innovators, far from. The best and brightest among them can grasp some of the underlying science and use that knowledge to simply use the technology and/or make bad copies. How ironic it is that the most visible exponent of the worldwide muslim 'Renaissance', ISIS, has to rely on western weapons, for they can't produce their own. That for their PR they have to engage blokes raised in London or Paris who, when among the infidels, learned the craft of making flashy videos, for the desert rats among them are capable only of making bad quality snuff movies.

It is actually heartrendering - I mean totally, completely HEARTRENDERING - when in an age where we should actually be able to expect Man to set foot on Mars in the very near future, where nanotechnology holds the promise of making passenger jets with 2 per cent of the material currently used, where widespread use of robotics in the medical/surgical field is becoming a fact, the muslim cavalry with its "centers of learning" in their plethora of new mosques, where pupils will learn NOTHING but the ramblings of a syphilis-ridden murderer, is just around the horizon.

Can you imagine the Roman Empire, with its advanced road networks, superior agricultural production techniques, refined literature, superb armies, and grandiose urbanism, laying down its collective head for a culture of barbarians who live in smoky thatched huts, still rely on merely hunting and fishing for food, and slit each other's throats for no reason in the blink of an eye?

You can't imagine that?

Look at Europe then.

It's happening right under your nose.



MFBB.

SULTAN ERDOGAN VISITS BELGIUM.

Too goddam tired to make this a decent post, but just enough so that you know that over the weekend, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited Hasselt, in Belgium's eastern province of Limburg, to address an enthusiastic crowd of 25,000 Turks in the Ethias Halls.

The purpose of this visit? According to our lamestream media, "to garner votes for the upcoming parliamentary elections in Turkey".

And that was all HUNKY DORY according to De Standaard, Het Laatste Nieuws, Gazet Van Antwerpen, Het Belang van Limburg et al...

Upon learning of this visit, I had a feeling of, WHAT THE F*CK????

For years I have known that Belgians of Moroccan origin are still considered by Morocco as being Moroccan citizens. This goes so far that Morocco even issues lists with approved names to be given to newborns, lists which many a Belgian town has accepted and applied when registering babies, "because it made their work easier".

But that Belgians of Turkish origin are still considered as Turkish citizens was new to me. And I was actually flabbergasted to learn that they are still able to vote for politicians in Turkey. I mean, WTF??? What kind of a travesty does this make of "integration"???


Look, just LOOK, at those flags, at those frenzied crowds:










Belgians? MY ASS. A fifth column, and out in the open.


I sincerely HOPE that one day we will be able to make the bastards who opened our borders for these deranged islamic fanatics PAY. And pay DEARLY.

Too tired, too angry to write more, to flesh it out, to give it some substance.

Jesus.

Were I to immigrate to another country...

... that would most likely be a decision based on rational grounds, and backed up by the intellectual honesty to reward that country with my loyalty, to offer my best services, to be a model citizen.

It's not that I would forget the motherland, my culture, where I came from, what dishes I like.

But first and foremost, once I would have taken the step to go to that other country, I would do my damnedest best to be a loyal subject.

Now look at those asshats in the photos above.

What do you think these traitors consider themselves first and foremost?

Belgians?

Or Turks?

To ask the question is to answer it.



MFBB.

RECOMMENDED READS: MARK STEYN'S "STAY QUIET AND YOU'LL BE OKAY".

Where would the Right be without Mark Steyn? Even being sick he manages to propel a hell of a column onto the web which puts to shame not only the usual suspects from the left and PEN cowards, but also queasy would be rightwingers à la Bill O'Reilly. Sorry Bill, but Freedom of Speech is non-negotiable.

"I'll have more to say about the elections in the days ahead, but for now let me offer a whole-hearted good riddance to Ed Miliband, the now departed Labour leader who, in a desperate last-minute pander, offered to "outlaw Islamophobia". That was the British political establishment's contribution to a rough couple of weeks for free speech, culminating in the attempted mass murder in Garland, Texas.

That's what it was, by the way - although you might have difficulty telling that from the news coverage. The Washington Post offered the celebrated headline "Event Organizer Offers No Apology After Thwarted Attack In Texas", while the Associated Press went with "Pamela Geller says she has no regrets about Prophet Muhammad cartoon contest that ended in 2 deaths". The media "narrative" of the last week is that some Zionist temptress was walking down the street in Garland in a too short skirt and hoisted it to reveal her Mohammed thong - oops, my apologies, her Prophet Mohammed thong (PBUH) - and thereby inflamed two otherwise law-abiding ISIS supporters peacefully minding their own business.

It'll be a long time before you see "Washington Post Offers No Apology for Attacking Target of Thwarted Attack" or "AP Says It Has No Regrets After Blaming The Victim". The respectable class in the American media share the same goal as the Islamic fanatics: They want to silence Pam Geller. To be sure, they have a mild disagreement about the means to that end - although even then you get the feeling, as with Garry Trudeau and those dozens of PEN novelists' reaction to Charlie Hebdo, that the "narrative" wouldn't change very much if the jihad boys had got luckier and Pam, Geert Wilders, Robert Spencer and a dozen others were all piled up in the Garland morgue.






If the American press were not so lazy and parochial, they would understand that this was the third Islamic attack on free speech this year - first, Charlie Hebdo in Paris; second, the Lars Vilks event in Copenhagen; and now Texas. The difference in the corpse count is easily explained by a look at the video of the Paris gunmen, or the bullet holes they put in the police car. The French and Texan attackers supposedly had the same kind of weapons, although one should always treat American media reports with a high degree of skepticism when it comes to early identification of "assault weapons" and "AK47s". Nonetheless, from this reconstruction, it seems clear that the key distinction between the two attacks is that in Paris they knew how to use their guns and in Garland they didn't. So a very cool 60-year-old local cop with nothing but his service pistol advanced under fire and took down two guys whose heavier firepower managed only to put a bullet in an unarmed security guard's foot.

The Charlie Hebdo killers had received effective training overseas - as thousands of ISIS recruits with western passports are getting right now. What if the Garland gunmen had been as good as the Paris gunmen? Surely that would be a more interesting question for the somnolent American media than whether some lippy Jewess was asking for it.

As for the free-speech issues, some of us have been around this question for a long time. I wrote a whole book about it: Lights Out: Islam, Free Speech And The Twilight Of The West - well worth a read, and I'm happy to autograph it for you. On page 123 I write about Jyllands Posten and the original Motoons:


*The twelve cartoonists are now in hiding. According to the chairman of the Danish Liberal Party, a group of Muslim men showed up at a local school looking for the daughter of one of the artists.

*When that racket starts, no cartoonist or publisher or editor should have to stand alone. The minute there were multimillion-dollar bounties on those cartoonists' heads, The Times of London and Le Monde and The Washington Post and all the rest should have said, "This Thursday we're all publishing the cartoons. If you want to put bounties on all our heads, you'd better have a great credit line at the Bank of Jihad. If you want to kill us, you'll have to kill us all..."

*But it didn't happen.


The only two magazines to stand in solidarity with the Danish cartoonists and republish the Motoons were Charlie Hebdo in Paris and my own magazine in Canada, Ezra Levant's Western Standard. Ezra wound up getting hauled up by some dimestore imam before the ignorant and thuggish Alberta "Human Rights" Commission whose leisurely money-no-object "investigation" consumed years of his life and all his savings. But he was more fortunate than our comrades at Charlie Hebdo: He's still alive.

In Copenhagen, in Paris, in Garland, what's more important than the cartoons and the attacks is the reaction of all the polite, respectable people in society, which for a decade now has told those who do not accept the messy, fractious liberties of free peoples that we don't really believe in them, either, and we're happy to give them up - quietly, furtively, incrementally, remorselessly - in hopes of a quiet life. Because a small Danish newspaper found itself abandoned and alone, Charlie Hebdo jumped in to support them. Because the Charlie Hebdo artists and writers died abandoned and alone, Pamela Geller jumped in to support them. By refusing to share the risk, we are increasing the risk. It's not Pamela Geller who emboldens Islamic fanatics, it's all the nice types - the ones Salman Rushdie calls the But Brigade. You've heard them a zillion times this last week: "Of course, I'm personally, passionately, absolutely committed to free speech. But..."

And the minute you hear the "but", none of the build-up to it matters. A couple of days before Garland, Canadian Liberal MP (and former Justice Minister) Irwin Cotler announced his plan to restore Section 13 - the "hate speech" law under which Maclean's and I were dragged before the Canadian "Human Rights" Commission and which, as a result of my case, was repealed by the Parliament of Canada. At the time Mr Cotler was fairly torn on the issue. We talked about it briefly at a free-speech event in Ottawa at which he chanced to be present, and he made vaguely supportive murmurings - as he did when we ran into each other a couple of years later in Boston. Mr Cotler is Jewish and, even as European "hate" laws prove utterly useless against the metastasizing open Jew-hate on the Continent, he thinks we should give 'em one more try. He's more sophisticated than your average But boy, so he uses a three-syllable word:


*"Freedom of expression is the lifeblood of democracy," said Cotler, who was minister of justice under Paul Martin.

*"However..."


Free speech is necessary to free society for all the stuff after the "but", after the "however". There's no fine line between "free speech" and "hate speech": Free speech is hate speech; it's for the speech you hate - and for all your speech that the other guy hates. If you don't have free speech, then you can't have an honest discussion. All you can do is what those stunted moronic boobs in Paris and Copenhagen and Garland did: grab a gun and open fire. What Miliband and Cotler propose will, if enacted, reduce us all to the level of the inarticulate halfwits who think the only dispositive argument is "Allahu Akbar".

Alas, we have raised a generation of But boys. Ever since those ridiculous Washington Post and AP headlines, I've been thinking about the fellows who write and sub-edit and headline and approve such things - and never see the problem with it. Why would they? If you're under a certain age, you accept instinctively that free speech is subordinate to other considerations: If you've been raised in the "safe space" of American universities, you take it as read that on gays and climate change and transgendered bathrooms and all kinds of other issues it's perfectly normal to eliminate free speech and demand only the party line. So what's the big deal about letting Muslims cut themselves in on a little of that action?

Why would you expect people who see nothing wrong with destroying a mom'n'pop bakery over its antipathy to gay wedding cakes to have any philosophical commitment to diversity of opinion? And once you no longer have any philosophical commitment to it it's easy to see it the way Miliband and Cotler do - as a rusty cog in the societal machinery that can be shaved and sliced millimeter by millimeter.

Do what the parochial hacks of the US media didn't bother to do, and look at the winning entry in Pam Geller's competition, which appears at the top of this page. It's by Bosch Fawstin, an Eisner Award-winning cartoonist and an ex-Muslim of Albanian stock. Like many of the Danish and French cartoons, it's less about Mohammed than about the prohibition against drawing Mohammed - and the willingness of a small number of Muslims to murder those who do, and a far larger number of Muslims both enthusiastic and quiescent to support those who kill. Mr Fawstin understands the remorseless logic of one-way multiculturalism - that it leads to the de facto universal acceptance of Islamic law. All that "Prophet Mohammed" stuff, now routine even on Fox News. He's not my prophet, he's just some dead bloke. But the formulation is now mysteriously standard in western media. Try it the other way round: "Isis News Network, from our Libyan correspondent: Warriors of the Caliphate today announced record attendance numbers for the mass beheading of followers of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ..."

On Fox the other day, Bill O'Reilly was hopelessly confused about this issue. He seems to think that Pam Geller's cartoon competitions will lessen the likelihood of moderate Muslims joining us in the fight against ISIS. Putting aside the fact that there is no fight against ISIS, and insofar as the many Muslim countries in the vast swollen non-existent "60-nation coalition" are going to rouse themselves to join the fight it will be because the Saudi and Jordanian monarchies and the Egyptian military understand it as an existential threat to them, put aside all that and understand that Islamic imperialism has a good-cop-bad-cop game - or hard jihad, soft jihad. The hard jihad is fought via bombings and beheadings and burnings over barren bits of desert and jungle and cave country in the Middle East, Africa and the Hindu Kush. The soft jihad is a suppler enemy fighting for rather more valuable real estate in Europe, Australia and North America, so it uses western shibboleths of "diversity" and "multiculturalism" to enfeeble those societies. And it does so very effectively - so that when a British soldier is hacked to death on a London street in broad daylight, you can't really quite articulate what's wrong with it; or that, upon the death of the ugly king of a state where Christianity is prohibited, the Christian ministers of Westminster Abbey mourn his passing; or that, when Australians are held siege in a Sydney coffee shop, the reflexive response of progressive persons is to launch a social-media campaign offering to battle Islamophobia by helping Muslims get to work; or that, when violent Muslims stage their first explicit anti-free-speech attack on American soil, everyone thinks the mouthy free-speech broad is the problem. This soft jihad goes on every day of the week, and Bill O'Reilly doesn't even seem to be aware that it exists..."

Spot on Mark.

As a sidenote, or actually not, I recall that when I was a student in Ghent in the late eighties, Pope John Paul II came to Belgium and all over Ghent you could see those pink posters behind windows of student homes.

Posters with a bare butt on it, and a trumpet stuck in the anus. The caption read: "Welcoming concert for the Pope".

And who can forget that cunt Sinead O'Connor tearing up a picture of, again, Pope John Paul II, while exclaiming "Fight the Real Enemy":




Apparently there were no Garry Trudeaus around to sympathize with the hurt feelings of Christians in general and Catholics in particular all around the world.

But then those students and Sinead Fucking O'Connor knew in the back and front of their minds, indeed, in every cavity and nook of them, that they could do their blasphemy of the Christian faith WITH IMPUNITY. They knew there was NO chance some christian zealot would chop their heads off or blow their brains out.

And that is fine with me! I am a Christian myself, although admitted, not a very good one (though I try). And people are FREE to mock my faith. They have a right to do so. I don't care, and I go my own way while thinking "the deed is the punishment".

Anyway, let's see the sliver lining in the Garland shooting cloud:




Good riddance.


Have fun with your 144 virgins assholes. I hope they are all transgenders with syphilis and halitosis.


MFBB.

BILL WHITTLE ON SO-CALLED DEFENDERS OF FREE SPEECH.

You may have heard about the six PEN (Poets, Essayists and Novelists) members declining to attend a gala where the yearly PEN Award for Freedom of Expression Courage was handed to Charlie Hebdo's editor-in-chief, Gerard Biard, and a cartoonist who coincidentally missed the Kouachi Bros. a couple of months back by showing up late. Said event took place in Manhattan's Museum for Natural History - not that that matters.

This is what one of the six, a mr. Carey, emailed as an excuse, stating that the award "stepped beyond the group’s traditional role of protecting freedom of expression against government oppression".

“A hideous crime was committed, but was it a freedom-of-speech issue for PEN America to be self-righteous about?” he wrote.

He added, “All this is complicated by PEN’s seeming blindness to the cultural arrogance of the French nation, which does not recognize its moral obligation to a large and disempowered segment of their population.”

Reminds me of Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau's view re Charlie Hebdo:

“by attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority with crude, vulgar drawings closer to graffiti than cartoons, Charlie wandered into the realm of hate speech.”

Well, here's Bill Whittle chopping up their arguments:






Bloody Phucking Phools. You got to be absolutely BLOODY-PHUCKING-PHOOLS to classify the mohammed following 10% of France's population as a "disempowered" segment or a "disenfranchised minority"! Knock your head sideways on a table so that the sawdust puffs out you complete idiots. Go tell France's cops who dare not enter the close to 1,000 no go zones that they are dealing with a "powerless minority"!



MFBB.

BELGIUM: MP'S OF TURKISH ORIGIN AWOL DURING COMMEMMORATION OF ARMENIAN GENOCIDE IN BELGIAN PARLIAMENT.

Via HLN Online,




On Thursday April 30, the Chairman of the Belgian Parliament's Lower House [the "Kamer"; MFBB] asked MP's to observe one minute of silence to commemmorate the Armenian Genocide, which historians agree started one hundred years ago last week. Several MP's of Turkish origin were conspiciously absent. "One hundred years ago the Armenian genocide took place", said Lower House Chairman Siegfried Bracke (N-VA). "We have the moral duty to keep remembering this, history may not repeat itself and we have to continue to keep working on this by engaging ourselves for peace and justice".

Alas for Mr Bracke, during the one minute of silence only a few MP's of Turkish origin were present, like Ozlem Ozen and Nawel Ben Hamou (both of them Parti Socialiste). Neither of them are considered bigshots. Actually only one high-profile MP with Turkish roots participated in the commemmoration, and she is Turkish/Kurdish: Zuhal Demir (N-VA).




The other MP's of Turkish origin stayed away from the event, and apart from the 'foot soldiers' they include virtually the entire who's who of their group, among them Veli Yüksel of CD&V [soi-disant Christian Democrats; MFBB], Fatma Pehlivan (SP.a), Emir Kir (Parti Socialiste) and Meryem Almaci (Groen!).

And of course said gentlemen and ladies had the inevitable excuses: Veli Yüksel had already called off that very morning "because of sickness". Almaci had "several important meetings" which had already been scheduled long beforehand, etc etc etc.


With longtime readers of DowneastBlog the name Veli Yüksel may ring a bell. Indeed, three years ago I ran a post with some info regarding, a.) the halal certificate for the Port of Zeebrugge the "Christian" "Democrat" port chief, Joachim Coens, was so proud of, and b.) the top "Christian" "Democrat" candidate for the 2012 municipal elections in Ghent, who happened to be a muslim (!).... Veli Yüksel. Given Ghent's importance in Belgium, that's kind of having a Jew as top candidate for the party of Ali Khamenei in the municipal elections in Qom, Iran, that bastion of democracy according to Bill Clinton, but I digress.

Anyway, Mr Yüksel's slogan at the time was: "VELI YUKSEL HAS A PLAN FOR GHENT - EVERYONE INCLUDED":




Looks like last Thursday the Turks by and large, Mr Yüksel up front, chose not to be included.

Thank you, you well-integrated ladies and gentlemen MP's of Turkish origin, for showing us so clearly where your loyalties and priorities lay.



MFBB.

MAY 2ND.

On May 2nd, 2011, my father died.





His passing left a yawning gap in our family that cannot be filled anymore.


God bless.


MFBB.

THE FIREWALL WITH BILL WHITTLE: EMPIRE OF LIES.

As per usual with Bill Whittle, a rebuttal of "progressivism" that's as eloquent as it is true:




MFBB.

RECOMMENDED READS: DEREK HUNTER'S "THE REAL LESSON FROM THE LIFE AND DEATH OF FREDDIE GRAY".

Townhall's Derek Hunter on the death of Freddie Gray:

"... A who’s who of Maryland Democratic Party politics turned out for the funeral of Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old Baltimore man who died from a severed spinal cord injury that apparently occurred while in police custody. Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake was there, as was the woman she succeeded, Sheila Dixon. Congressmen Elijah Cummings and John Sarbanes were there, as was former Rep. Kweisi Mfume, a former president of the NAACP. The Obama administration even sent two representatives. While all in attendance mourned the loss of Gray, none were willing to address the real problem his short life exposes.

The death of Freddie Gray is a sad end to a sad life that involved everything you’d expect from a life lived in poverty in a major urban area. But his death, and his life, were the result of what far too many big cities are doing to (not for) their residents.

Freddie Gray was raised in poverty, educated in failing schools, thrust out into an economy choked by regulation and taxes, and offered only drugs as a way to earn money.

Baltimore has been controlled by Democrats since the 1960s. The economy, the education system, the business environment and climate of criminality are all pieces of what they built – a machine that churns out Freddie Grays en masse on an annual basis.

Freddie Gray was pushed through the failed Baltimore education system, learning nothing of practical use and not being prepared for college or a trade. He was thrown into an economy hemorrhaging jobs and businesses because taxes and regulations disincentivize the retention and creation of businesses. The only growth industry hiring was drugs.

Freddie Gray made his choices, but the progressive big government machine he was born into limited those choices.

That machine has churned out many of the people who took to the streets of Baltimore to riot on Monday. Many of them will suffer the same fate as Freddie Gray, though at the hands of their peers, not the police.

The answer pushed by progressives, all the way up to President Obama, is to make the machine bigger.

These areas are represented almost exclusively by Democrats and have been for generations. Tax money is collected at whatever rate Democrats want to collect it, spent however Democrats want to spend it, and the rules governing people and businesses are whatever Democrats want them to be. “Business as usual,” as it is, is exactly what Democrats have made it. A bigger government boot on the neck of economic opportunity won’t solve the problem; it is the problem.

We’ve spent $20 trillion in the “war on poverty,” and we still have the same rate of poverty. Because that money was not spent to help those in poverty; it was spent on government bureaucrats to administer “benefits” to those in poverty.





Don’t get me wrong: Cutting a check would have been destructive too, but it is in the administering of those programs that we find the chains that hold people in poverty.

Like the tax code for taxpayers, if you live how the government approves, your “benefits” will continue. Stray from the approved life and they will be cut off. Get a job and you risk losing money you’ve been conditioned to rely on. Get married, forget it.

The president remains a dedicated ideologue to the progressive welfare state. He said, “And there’s a bunch of my agenda that would make a difference right now in that.” He listed early education for children in poverty as one of his “solutions.”

Additional years in the machine would not have saved Freddie Gray, and it will not save any child grinding through its gears. Liberation from that machine is the only hope.

Even if the machine freed kids from the education system and offered school choice, without wholesale dismantling of the progressive machine there will be no jobs awaiting even qualified and well-educated graduates.

In short, without an across-the-board rejection of the hollow promises of progressivism, Freddie Gray’s death will mean nothing. Electing new people to do the same things will yield the same results. It isn’t just the people, the politicians and their false promises of change, it’s the ideology they swear allegiance to.

The worst school districts in the country are controlled by teachers unions and overseen by progressive Democrats. They are also among the most expensive school districts in the country. More money would only make them more expensive, not better. Yet that is the “solution” being offered by progressive Democrats. That’s like the captain of the Titanic ordering his ship to speed up and hit the iceberg faster and thinking that would make it better...."

Amen to that, Mr Hunter.


MFBB.

RECOMMENDED READS: MARK STEYN'S "URANIUM ONE, AMERICA ZIP".

An account that is so sobering you don't even smirk or laugh anymore, even though it's from Mark Steyn's desk:

"... In return for facilitating the transfer to Putin of one-fifth of US uranium, the Clintons were given tens of millions of dollars by Vancouver businessman Frank Giustra (the founder of "Uranium One" in its pre-Putin days) and various of his associates. In 2006, Mr Giustra told The New Yorker:

"All of my chips, almost, are on Bill Clinton," he said. "He's a brand, a worldwide brand, and he can do things and ask for things that no one else can."

Ah.

Oh, my mistake. When I said Giustra and his pals had given over $100 million to "the Clintons", I meant they gave it to "The Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation" - or its Canadian subsidiary, established after Hillary had signed a disclosure agreement for the US foundation with the Obama Administration and, being Canadian, thus exempt from the disclosure agreement. At least as Bill and Hillary's lawyers read it.





I said to Hugh Hewitt on the radio last week:

Well wait, but just a minute, Hugh, there is no 'Clinton Foundation'... The only purpose of this foundation is to enable this family to lead the lifestyle of a head of state after it has ceased to be head of state.

Today The New York Post reports:


The Clinton Foundation's finances are so messy that the nation's most influential charity watchdog put it on its "watch list" of problematic nonprofits last month.

The Clinton family's mega-charity took in more than $140 million in grants and pledges in 2013 but spent just $9 million on direct aid.

The group spent the bulk of its windfall on administration, travel, and salaries and bonuses, with the fattest payouts going to family friends.



For example, Chelsea's chum Eric Braverman was paid $275,000 for five months' work. In Clintonworld, charity begins at home. So, if, like all these big-hearted Saudi princes and Canuck uranium execs, you give money to the Clinton Foundation because you care about starving Third World urchins, for every million bucks you hand over, a full 64 grand goes to the Third World urchins and the remaining $936,000 is the processing fee. Paul Mirengoff cautions:


It's important to note that the Clinton Foundation's status as a problematic charity is distinct from the "Clinton cash" issue that Peter Schweizer and others have highlighted. "Clinton cash" focuses on the fundraising methods used by the Clintons. Specifically, there are substantial allegations that they raise money in part because nations and wealthy individuals hope to influence U.S. policy through their donations, and very possibly have succeeded in doing so.

The problem flagged by Charity Navigator and other watchdogs focuses on what the Clinton Foundation does with the money it raises (whether ethically or not). The Foundation's profligacy and failure to spend a significant percentage of its funds on its alleged mission would be of concern even if there were no ethical problems associated with the Clintons' fundraising.


That's true. But it does undermine the Clinton courties' defense for all the funny money that's rolled in - that all these Saudis are ponying up for Bill and Hill because they want to improve women's rights in Africa; that Kazakh oligarchs are so generous because they want to reduce diarrhea outbreaks in Africa. Which is why Chelsea gets 75 grand a pop to give dull speeches about diarrhea. But, assuming for the purposes of argument that the House of Saud really did want to promote women's rights in the Third World, why would they do it through the Clintons and see 94 per cent of it get sluiced off before it got anywhere near Africa?

What Charity Navigator calls the Clinton Foundation's "atypical business model" is, in fact, the point of the operation. The Saudis, Kazakhs, Canucks et al are giving to the Clintons - and that six per cent to emaciated Africans is merely the equivalent of that moment at the supermarket checkout when the clerk tallies up your $150 of groceries and asks if you'd like to give a buck to Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

But, as I said, let's keep it simple: As Sergei Kiriyenko told the Russian Duma, Tsar Putin now owns a fifth of US uranium - in return for Bill and Hill's slush fund getting a hundred million bucks.

To modify Lady Macbeth, not all the diarrhea in Africa can wash away the stench of the Clinton Foundation.

Pundits often talk about "clothespin" elections, where the voters are obliged to hold their nose in the polling booth and select a malodorous candidate. But never on this scale. If the Clintons are returned to the White House, you'll be holding your nose for the next eight years."

There's the scandals, and there's the incompetence. Forty years present at the pinnacle of US politics, and what has she got to show for it?

Zilch. Zero. Nada. Name one accomplishment that has actually benefited the American nation, the American people. One. I ask you, just one. What - has - she - ever - accomplished?

NOTHING.

Despite that, there's the arrogance. Don't forget the arrogance. Bill Whittle:




Memo to Americans still willing to vote for this gruesome, horrible "woman": YOU - ARE - INSANE.



MFBB.

RECOMMENDED READS: GUY BENSON ON "THE WEEK IN TOLERANCE".

Chilling article, actually, by Guy Benson over at Townhall:

"The coercive Left's End of Discussion mob is emboldened and on the march. Four vignettes from around the country: (1) In New York, a pair gay hoteliers are facing angry boycotts because they dared to dine and chat with Ted Cruz. These men are successful businessmen, they're pro-gay marriage, and their political donations through the years have slanted heavily toward Democrats. But fraternizing with the enemy is now a punishable offense:


The two gay hoteliers whose duplex on Central Park was the site of a small dinner this week with Senator Ted Cruz are facing boycott threats to their properties. Ian Reisner and Mati Weiderpass own the apartment where the gathering for Mr. Cruz, who has been vociferously opposed to same-sex marriage, was the featured attraction on Monday night. The event focused primarily on foreign policy, but the topic of same-sex marriage came up, and during his appearance Mr. Cruz called it an issue best left to the states...Both men, in an apparent effort to play down any outrage in the gay community, put out statements making clear they disagree with the Republican senator from Texas on gay rights. “I was given the opportunity to have a candid conversation with Senator Ted Cruz on where he stood on all issues, foreign and domestic,” Mr. Reisner said. “It was just three months ago that I hosted a ‘Ready for Hillary’ event for a record turnout of 900 people at the Out Hotel.” He added: “Senator Ted Cruz and I disagree strongly on the issue of gay marriage, but having an open dialogue with those who have differing political opinions is a part of what this country was founded on. My tireless support of the gay community and its causes worldwide hasn’t changed and will not change.” Mr. Weiderpass said: “People on both sides of the aisle need to be able to communicate with one another even when they ideologically disagree. I worked tirelessly for the repeal of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ as a member of the board of directors for the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network and needed to reach across the aisle to make that happen. The fact that Senator Cruz accepted the invitation to my home was a step in the right direction toward him having a better understanding of who I am and what I believe in.”


Hey guys, we're gay, we're longtime and generous supporters of gay rights, and we hosted a Hillary event recently -- but we also believe in open dialogue with people who hold differing opinions, because that's what America is all about. Not good enough. Breaking bread with Cruz is a sin, and the impure must be purged. Over to you, courageously anonymous organizer of the boycott campaign:

...

"Shut the place down." For tolerance. The boycott has resulted in the cancelation of a charity event to fight AIDS. Think about that. Because the owners of a venue had dinner with Ted Cruz, an AIDS charity axed an entire event in a fit of pique. Sorry, AIDS patients -- priorities are priorities. One of the hoteliers has now backed away from his initial, laudable defense of free inquiry and exchange, caving to pressure with an abject apology for a "terrible mistake."





(2) A panel of bureaucrats has recommended a fine of $135,000 (!) against a Christian-owned bakery in Oregon for declining to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding. Here are the supposed damages claimed by the "victims:"

Oh, give it a break already. HERE.


(3) The student government body at Johns Hopkins University struck a blow for progress, or whatever, by banning Chick-fil-A from campus. Keep in mind that the construction of a Chick-fil-A had not even been proposed, so this was a pre-emptive strike against hypothetical future "microaggressions:"


Johns Hopkins University has banned Chick-fil-A from its campus saying that the restaurant is a “microaggression” against its students. In an 18-8 vote, the Student Government Association at Johns Hopkins voted not to “support the proposal of a Chick-fil-A, in a current or future sense, particularly on any location that is central to student life.” The anti-Chick-fil-A bill listed seven main reasons why the restaurant should be banned from campus. The first is that “the Student Government Association of Johns Hopkins University aims to provide a safe, supportive environment for all university affiliates now and in the future.” The fourth is that “visiting prospective and current students, staff, faculty, and other visitors who are members of the LGBTQ+ community or are allies would be subjected to the microaggression of supporting current or future Chick-fil-A development plans.”


(4) Elsewhere in Maryland, another institution is covering itself in glory, taking (later-reversed) totalitarian cues from their counterparts at the University of Michigan:

University of Maryland College Park student group pulled "American Sniper" from its spring movie lineup following complaints from a Muslim student group. The group, Student Entertainment Events, announced on its web site Wednesday that it had canceled the May showings of the film...SEE said it was contemplating "an event where students can engage in constructive and moderated dialogues about the controversial topics proposed in the film." "SEE supports freedom of expression and hopes to create space for the airing of opposing viewpoints and differing perceptions," the group wrote. "While not easy, we want to start having these hard conversations." More than 300 people signed a petition started by the Muslim Student Association that describes the film as "war propaganda guised as art reveals a not-so-discreet Islamaphobic, violent, and racist nationalist ideology." "This movie dehumanizes Muslim individuals, promotes the idea of senseless mass murder, and portrays negative and inaccurate stereotypes," the creators of the petition wrote. "This movie serves to do nothing but make a mockery out of such immense pain."

Just remember. They call US fascists.


MFBB.

BELGIAN F-16'S OVER IRAQ: 600 MISSIONS, 107 ISIS TARGETS DESTROYED.

The Belgian Air Force released several videos documenting the strikes:




Via the Belgian Armed Forces site:

"To date, the Belgian F-16 detachment in Iraq has destroyed 107 [ISIS] ground targets. The missions are carried out together with an international coalition in the fight against Islamic State, as requested by the Iraqi Army", says Major General Frederik Vansina, BAF commander. "No collateral damage was inflicted while taking out the ground targets".

The Belgian F-16's operate only over Iraq, not over Syria. In the course of six months, they carried out 600 missions, good for about 5 per cent of the total flown by the entire coalition.

Our country still has about thirty military advisors who are training Iraqi soldiers for the fight against IS. According to Belgian Army commander Major General Jean-Paul Deconinck, those Belgian soldiers work in a "highly secure" location near Baghdad's airport."

Some stills of the strikes:





Now for the bad news. While the Iraq mission, following a nine-year BAF presence in Afghanistan and several hundred successful missions against the Qaddafi regime three years back, prove that the small Belgian Air Force can still pull its weight, it should not be forgotten that in the long term its future - indeed, the future of the entire Belgian military apparatus, looks rather bleak. This is what retired Defense Chief of Staff General Delcour had to say last November:

FORMER DEFENCE CHIEF OF STAFF LASHES OUT AT GOVERNMENT'S AUSTERITY MEASURES.

"Belgium has lost all credibility"

"It has become impossible to efficiently run the MoD", General Delcour claims in an open letter. "What strikes me is that only two months ago, during the NATO summit in Wales, Belgium promised to not further reduce its defense budget, while the government's recently taken austerity measures show the exact opposite. This is incoherent and will have serious consequences for the credibility of Belgium and its defense policy."


"Freeloader on the NATO train"

General Delcour sees several dangers in the new defense cuts. "Absolutely necessary investment programmes threaten to be frozen perpetually, merely functioning on a daily basis and training of personnel will suffer. Moreover, Belgium has now for a long time been a freeloader on the NATO train". "Strong international pressure seems inevitable if the budget will be reduced even more.


"The situation is serious."

"The new government would do well to seriously ponder the Belgian defense policy", says General Delcour. "Because we - Belgium, Europe and NATO - have made very serious errors with regards to the evolution of the [European] security situation", referring to the Russian coup in the Crimea and the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan. "That Belgium, given the circumstances, should not further hollow out its defense budget seems to me to put it too mildly. The situation is serious."

General Delcour's warning must be seen against the backdrop of the measures taken by the new "center-right" government which was installed in Belgium last autumn (under PM Charles Michel, of the Walloon Liberals). A center left government, a center right one, a centrist one... whatever its leaning, a Belgian government actually conducting a responsible defense policy has throughout history been rather the exception than the rule. Sadly this has been a given practically all the time since the country's Independence in 1830. Only at the time of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), when the Belgian Army was one fifth the size of the French Army, or just prior to WWII, when the Armed Forces fielded 650,000 men, and for some time during the Cold War, could defense policy be considered realistic.

The current predicament of the Belgian Armed Forces goes back to the late nineties, when basically all politicians, of all stripes, seem to have read Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man, and taken its message for granted. The collapse of the USSR and the neutralization of the Saddam regime, brought about by two Republican presidents (Reagan and Bush, although few Belgian politicians will ever admit this), seemed to herald a new era in which armies would, in time, become something of the past. This notion was not significantly disturbed by the events in the Balkans or the war in Chechnya, and during the nineties leftist "intellectuals" openly questioned NATO's raison d'être. With Russia's transition to a free-market democracy seemingly mired in endless convulsions, and both its economy and military in tatters, there seemed to be no need anymore for robust defense spending, and especially since 2000, the Belgian defense budget, which during the Cold War had still been over 4 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product, shrank yearly, until by 2009 it represented but a mere 1.2 per cent of GDP anymore.

This was an evolution in fact welcomed by socialists and greens, who never made it a secret that they actually wanted to swap the budgets scheduled for Development Aid (under 0.7 per cent of GDP) and Defense.

Anno 2015 the sad truth is - and this has literally been claimed by General Delcour - that the decade-long deployment of small numbers of fighter-bombers (over Afghanistan, against Gaddafi's regime, and now over Iraq) actually serves as a smokescreen to fool our allies that Belgium still maintains a responsible defense policy. It's quite obvious why F-16's are chosen time and again to participate in the War on Terror - chances of personnel being killed are minimal. I know how the mind of your typical Belgian politician works - he or she is a total military ignoramus and a coward, always whoring for votes. This is of course true for politicians the world over, but even under socialist governments France, The Netherlands and Denmark were willing to send ground troops in harm's way to Iraq and/or Afghanistan, with after some time the inevitable fatalities. In Afghanistan e.g., The Netherlands lost perhaps 20+ KIA. Likewise, Norway, Denmark, and France lost several tens of soldiers killed, and scores more wounded and maimed. Great Britain and Germany took heavier losses. Yet in none of those countries there was a significant outcry "to get the troops back". A single fatality involving a Belgian soldier however would have led to socialist and green bigwigs like a Dirk Van Der Maelen (SP.a) or a Wouter De Vriendt (Groen) hysterically screaming blue murder in Parliament - and I'm not exxagerating.

I do not want to imply that I would have liked the Belgian Army to send a brigade to Afghanistan and would have been happy with body bags returning for the good of our reputation. No, what I want to imply is that these are very serious, even very dangerous times, that, like it or not, the West is at war, and that it has been totally unfair to let our allies pay the blood toll in the theatres in which the War on Terror is fought.

Well... here we are then, with a Belgian Army, Navy and Air Force almost literally starved to death. With less than a shoestring budget, our Armed Forces have done, and are doing, wonders. Ground troops and paras train soldiers in hotspots in Africa; Special Forces have come under fire from Sudanese attack helicopters while protecting refugees in Chad; countless minefields and ordnance have been cleared/neutralized by deminers in Lebanon and Afghanistan. Belgian frigates have done their part in securing naval routes from pirates off Africa's East Coast. As for the Air Force, it has been the only component firing its guns in anger at islamic terrorists from Libya over Iraq to Afghanistan.

The next budget cuts, which will lower the GDP percentage spent on defense even under 1 per cent, may well constitute the final straw. It is highly unlikely that with such meager resources, the means will be found to replace our old F-16 fleet, now down to a mere 60 units (if even that). Gone are the times when the Belgian Air Force fielded over 130 of these sound machines - all of them built under licence in our own country at the SABCA factories in Haren and Gosselies. The most optimistic scenario plans for a successor fleet of 35 jets, and you can bet that socialists and greens will do everything in their might to have the MoD buy the worst candidate.

The world has become a very dangerous place, not in the least because the current US Administration has basically opted for it. In eschewing and even denouncing its own exceptionalism, the US has deliberately created a leadership vacuum - and the natural result is that this vacuum is being filled, though by countries which are far from the benign behemoth that the US basically is. The Russian incursions in the Crimea and Ukraine and the brazen Chinese sabre-rattling in the South Chinese Sea, not to mention a suicidal nuclear deal with Iran are the logical result of America folding back on itself. The world has perhaps become more of a powder keg than we realize, and there's not one, but several fuses smouldering.

Against this backdrop, some European countries do see the sign on the wall: the Baltic Republics, The Netherlands, Germany... All of them have recently boosted their defense budget. The Netherlands intend to pump up the defense budget to at least 2 per cent of GDP, and only weeks ago the German military decided to add some 100-odd mothballed Leopard II tanks to its tank fleet. Both significant measures seem to be to-tal-ly lost on Belgium's political class.

As an example of how deluded the usual suspects among this class are, how about this? Last autumn, the merest mention that a few sane heads in the new government were somehow trying, within extremely tight fiscal constraints, to find a successor for the F-16, evoked shameless demagoguery from seedy characters like the Green's Kristof Calvo:

"AUSTERITY MEASURES FOR FAMILIES, WHILE THE CHEQUE FOR EXPENSIVE JETS IS READY"

Opposition party Groen reacts furiously following the news that federal government negotiators want to invest in a successor for the Air Force's F-16s. "While severe cuts harm families and the man in the street, the cheque for expensive as hell jets has already been signed", says fraction leader Kristof Calvo.

Such shameless demagoguery and utter intellectual dishonesty is common among our moral betters - for the acquisition of new jets (the candidates are the Saab Gripen, the Eurofighter Typhoon, the Dassault Rafale, the F-18, and the F-35) is still meant to somehow being realized without exceeding the paltry 1 per cent or so of GDP. In other words, Calvo is lying. Not more money would be spent, specialists are only looking at means to shifting or postponing certain expenses within the existing budget, in order to at least address the now very urgent need to replace a fighter bomber force of which the youngest planes left the assembly lines around thirty years ago.

Heck, you could abolish the ENTIRE Belgian Army, Navy and Air Force - send all the troops home, sell what few armoured cars, choppers, or minesweepers are left...

.... and you would only end up with a few more bread crumbs more for, say, Social Security - while the country would be defenseless.

The mind of leftists is weird.

I have to end on a positive note - can't allow those bastards to get me depressed. KUDOS for our flyboys!


MFBB.

SATURDAY NIGHT COLDPLAY, HEART.

Coldplay with Square One. From the 2005 album X&Y.




Ten years ago already. Frikkin' unbelievable.



Heart with Barracuda.




The Wilson sisters are blistering idiots but they did produce some good material.


Slaap wel.



MFBB.

ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE STARTED...

A chilling video, courtesy our friends at Gates of Vienna:






Of course, that was "only" the main event. Decades before 1915, there had already been severe pogroms against Turkish Armenians. And between 1913 and 1922-1923, an estimated 350,000 Greeks lost their lives too at the hands of Turkish henchmen, an episode which culminated in the sack of Smyrna:



But the world doesn't learn. As if to emphasize this point, the "president" of the supposedly mightiest nation on Earth just caved in to Sultan Erdogan in refusing to label the massacre of around 1,5 million Armenians what it is... a full-fledged genocide.


MFBB.

BELGIUM: "CHRISTIAN" YOUTH ORGANIZATION HIRES STAFFERS (MALE/FEMALE/X).

From the I want to emigrate to the Ross Ice Shelf Department:



A screenshot from Het Laatste Nieuws Online, Monday, April 20,2015.

Chiro is the biggest youth movement in Flanders and Brussels, with around 100,000 members. The name Chiro simply combines the Greek characters chi (χ) and rho (ρ), being the first characters of Christos, the Greek form of Christ.

Somewhere in the mid-seventies, as a ten-year old, I was briefly a member.

Ten years later, I was a chiro leader myself, again for a short time span - only two years. The 'squad' entrusted to me accounted for about fifteen boys aged between 8 and 12 - boys in that timeframe were/are called 'Rakkers'.

Well - in the Year of Our Lord 2015, it has come to this [translation of the above article]:

Chiro Flanders from now on publishes its hiring ads stipulating they are open for men (m), women (v) and persons not counting themselves to one of these sexes (x). "A conscious and logical choice", says Chiro Flanders.

Chiro is currently looking for an educational staffer (m/v/x) in Antwerp. It's a conscious and logical choice to also mention the 'x', says Merijn Van de Gehuchte of Chiro Flanders to VRT News.

"We see that gender roles in society change: it's not anymore solely about man or woman. As Chiro we would like to reach out to everybody and thus we find it only normal that we also mention the 'x' ".

For crying out loud!!! Back in Outlaw's days we only knew two species! That was, a.) them MALES. They have Balls. Used to, anyway:





and b.) Them FEMALES. They have bigger, um, you see what I mean:




Mr Van de Gehuchte, ANYONE who cannot identify as either a.) or b.) has NO BUSINESS in a youth movement in the first place. I have young children myself, and if they were Chiro members, they'd go to camp during summer. I would definitely NOT want them to sleep under one and the same canvas with a being who's got trouble to identify his or her sex. And having read your nonsensical drivel, I'm certainly not going to encourage them to join this year.





This was Outlaw Mike, reporting from the Biggest Open Air Funny Farm in the Solar System, aka Europe.



MFBB.

PS: okay ladies, if you think Outlaw's second pic is not representative enough, how about this? Conservative sweetie Katie Pavlich:




Better?

A DAY OUT IN THE ARDENNES.

Actually, that day was Sunday, April 12, but posting our England pics came first. Well, Spring has definitely arrived, and as per usual I answer the call of the Ardennes.

Julien Van Remoortere has written a gazillion of walking guides covering the entire country, and I've got several. For this walk, I picked a simple, not very demanding one around an area covering the village of Beausaint and the town of La Roche. I started in Beausaint. The village doesn't offer that much, but upon letting the last houses behind me, I thought this panorama was worth a pic. I suppose the gash in the hills over there is a quarry.





If memory serves, if I'd keep walking this track I would arrive after some four or five kloms in the village of Halleux - walked there two years ago. However - I'm actually at a crossroads here - I took a track to the left.




Coming across a small stream, the Ri de Bronze. View downstream...




And upstream...




Walking further down a wooded valley which would eventually lead me to the centre of La Roche. The cyclists in the distance are but two of around five I saw during the walk. What the heck are people doing these days when the weather is glorious?




The centre of La Roche, with the ruins of its feudal castle:



And if you want to know what the area looks like from its ramparts, follow this link.


After climbing Corumont, a 390 m high hill/ridge outside La Roche, I came upon this nice view. The village over there is Cielle. Pic taken from a spot where parapentes launch.




View of the same valley a little bit further. If you follow this valley you arrive in the village of Marcourt, where, if you climb the hill flank opposite the village, you are rewarded with a magnificent view from the Saint Thibaut Chapel.




Almost back in Beausaint. In that copse of wood over there, there's a cross on a concrete pedestal.




Nite.


MFBB.

SATURDAY NIGHT HENRY MANCINI, THE RIGHTEOUS BROTHERS.

Henry Mancini with Nadia's Theme.






The Righteous Brothers with Unchained Melody.





Good night.



MFBB.

RECOMMENDED READS: MARK STEYN ON GARRY TRUDEAU, WORLD CLASS ASSHOLE.

Mark Steyn rips Garry Trudeau, creator of Doonesbury, a new one, and rightly so:

".... The Polk Award is named after a journalist shot dead at point-blank range in 1948 while covering the Greek civil war. So you might have thought it would be in ever so mildly bad taste to use the opportunity of a Polk acceptance speech to piss on the graves of a group of journalists similarly murdered. Nevertheless, that's what Mr Trudeau did:


* [Trudeau:] Charlie Hebdo, which always maintained it was attacking Islamic fanatics, not the general population, has succeeded in provoking many Muslims throughout France to make common cause with its most violent outliers. This is a bitter harvest.


Ah, so Charlie Hebdo is to blame for provoking ordinary, peaceful, moderate Muslims into supporting the Allahu Akbar guys who killed them.


* [Trudeau:] Traditionally, satire has comforted the afflicted while afflicting the comfortable. Satire punches up, against authority of all kinds, the little guy against the powerful. Great French satirists like Molière and Daumier always punched up, holding up the self-satisfied and hypocritical to ridicule. Ridiculing the non-privileged is almost never funny—it's just mean.By punching downward, by attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority with crude, vulgar drawings closer to graffiti than cartoons, Charlie wandered into the realm of hate speech.



Is Islam, which will be the world's largest religion by mid-century and already controls a 58-member voting bloc at the UN attempting to impose a global blasphemy law, really "a powerless, disenfranchised minority"? Does even someone as blinkered and parochial as Garry Trudeau think Charlie Hebdo was "punching down"?

Apparently so. At The Atlantic, David Frum has done a very thorough examination of the matter, and includes this example of what Mr Trudeau regards as "punching up":


* [Frum on Trudeau:] In 2012, Garry Trudeau drew a series of strips about a Texas law requiring an ultrasound before an abortion. Trudeau's point of view was ferocious: He had one of his characters pronounce, "By the authority invested in me by the GOP base, I thee rape."


Ah, the deft satirical jest for which "Doonesbury" is renowned! But, as I've been saying for over a decade now, if you're going to be provocative, it's best to do it with people who can't be provoked. Whether or not targeting the GOP base is "punching up", they're not going to punch Garry Trudeau up, assuming he ever runs into any of them. "I thee rape" is pretty funny, huh? In Sweden, and the Netherlands, and Rotherham and Rochdale and other unlovely towns of northern England, the fellows doing the raping, and the grooming, and the sex slavery, are young Muslim men. But, if you were to essay "I thee rape" gags about them, they'd kill you.

Best to stick to that GOP base, don't you think? Garry Trudeau doesn't "afflict the comfortable". The preening twerp is "the comfortable", and he's careful to afflict only those who won't discomfort his comfort.

Still, I'm grateful to David Frum's column for drawing my attention to this passage in Trudeau's remarks:


* [Trudeau:] As you know, the Muhammad cartoon controversy began eight years ago in Denmark, as a protest against "self-censorship," one editor's call to arms against what she felt was a suffocating political correctness. The idea behind the original drawings was not to entertain or to enlighten or to challenge authority—her charge to the cartoonists was specifically to provoke, and in that they were exceedingly successful. Not only was one cartoonist gunned down, but riots erupted around the world, resulting in the deaths of scores.


Aside from the other errors in that paragraph, I found myself wondering: Who is this "she" who gave "her charge" to those cartoonists? In the ten years since the cartoons were published, I've met most of the Jyllands-Posten staff involved, and I've been interviewed by the newspaper twice, first in London and then in Copenhagen. The journalist who proposed the idea was Stig Olesen, which even Garry Trudeau must recognize as a male name. The editor-in-chief at the time was Carsten Juste: Did Mr Trudeau think "Carsten" is a bit girly like "Kirsten"? The culture editor, in whose section the Motoons appeared, was Flemming Rose: Did Trudeau accidentally invert the name and think it was Miss Rose Flemming?

Or is it just that a comfortable non-afflicted American celebrity couldn't be arsed even to look up the names of fellow artists and writers living under constant death threats for a decade? It's not just locally resident fanatics: an extraordinarily wide range of persons from Chicago, Illinois to Waterford, Ireland have been arrested for plotting to kill those cartoonists and their editors. While I was in Copenhagen for that second interview with Jyllands-Posten, a one-legged Chechen jihadist prematurely self-detonated in his hotel room while en route to blow up the paper.

A "one-legged Chechen jihadist" sounds pretty funny, right? Maybe Trudeau could put one in "Doonesbury". Oh, no, wait: he's not capable of drawing a one-legged Chechen jihadist, is he? Still, you gotta admit, every one-legged Chechen is pretty much surefire comedy gold ...until one of them gets through. At which point, even as you're lying on the floor in a pool of blood, Garry Trudeau will "punch up" at you, and flatter himself that he's brave to do so.

After my battles with Canada's "human rights" commissions, I wrote a book on free speech (personally autographed copies of which, etc, etc) and its remorseless retreat across the western world. And as a result I get asked from time to time to give speeches in various parts of the Continent. After accepting one such engagement for later this year, it occurred to me upon rereading the invitation that perhaps I was not the event organizers' first choice. But that's because Charb and his Charlie Hebdo colleagues are dead. And the Swedish artist Lars Vilks is living in hiding after the most recent attempt on his life a few weeks ago. And pretty soon the Rolodex is emptying out so fast there's no one to book but some obscure Canadian...

Lars Hedegaard, my host in Copenhagen, was shot at point-blank range, but fortunately by someone far more incompetent than George Polk's killer. My friend the Norwegian comedienne Shabana Rehman had her family restaurant firebombed by pals of some dimestore imam. The Dutch cartoonist Nekschot, who could only appear with me on stage disguised in a burqa lest anybody see his face, has been forced into "retirement". The American cartoonist Molly Norris has vanished from the face of the earth. I write about her in my latest book, but I doubt Garry Trudeau even knows her name. She was a by-the-book Cascadian liberal who discovered that, when you accidentally cross Islam, Trudeau and all the other bigshot "progressives" won't be there for you.

Charlie Hebdo dead, Vilks in hiding, Hedegaard shot, Rehman firebombed, Nekschot vanished, Molly Norris fled, Kurt Westergaard attacked by an Islamic axeman... But Garry Trudeau is on stage congratulating himself on "afflicting the comfortable". You can't "punch down" much lower than sneering at the dead and those no longer able to speak, can you?

It's not often that I find myself too angry to write. But, if Trudeau were to hand, I might be minded to try a little punching up myself. But that's the point, isn't it? When you say to people you can't write, you can't draw, you can't raise certain subjects, what forms of expression are left other than physical violence?

~If Garry Trudeau wants to "afflict the comfortable", the generation that's followed him doesn't want to afflict anybody. At Cracked - which, God help us, is the American answer to Charlie Hebdo - J F Sargent tries to write about why these days everybody seems to get so offended so easily:


* [Sargent:] Now, I'm not saying that offensive jokes are okay or that we shouldn't call them out -- they're not okay and they should be called out when we hear them. Because that's how comedians learn and that's how society stays healthy.


For cryin' out loud: what kind of supposedly funny writer at an alleged humor magazine could type with a straight face such portentous tosspottery? Granted this is the age of what Kathy Shaidle calls millennial beta male faggotry, wouldn't it be quicker just to slice off your bollocks and serve them with spaghetti sauce to the first passing social justice warrior?"

Is there anyone who can actually explain why this pompous ass, sitting in an airconditioned office on his warm, well, ass, has any right to the George Polk Award in the first place? Why didn't the murdered Charlie Hebdo cartoonists get it posthumously?


MFBB.