ISLAMIC EXTREMIST ATTEMPTS TO HACK KURT WESTERGAARD TO PIECES WITH AXE: MODERATE MUSLIMS SPEAK OUT.

The year 2010 did not really start well for Kurt Westergaard, the Danish cartoonist who became famous for his cartoon of a bomb-turbaned Muhammad. At around 10pm on Friday the 1st, a 28-year old Somali broke into his house, and had it not been for the fact that Westergaard had the time to lock himself up in a panic room with his 5-year old granddaughter, he would have been chopped to pieces by the murderous fanatic.

As it was, the lunatic was unable to smash the steel door of the panic room and all he could do was scream "BLOOD!!!!" and "REVENGE!!!" at the terrified occupants. After about three minutes Danish police arrived, alerted by Westergaard via an emergency button. Before the lunatic was shot in the hand and shoulder, he attacked an officer by throwing his axe at him. The officer was lucky to survive.

Westergaards would-be assassin had been living in Denmark since he was 16. As insane as it may sound, he had a Danish residence permit while the authorities KNEW he was a member of al-Shahaab, Al Qaeda's Somali branch. In September 2009, Kenyan police foiled an al-Shahaab plot to kill US Foreign Secretary Hillary Clinton who was staying in Nairobi's Hotel Intercontinental; one of the five terrorists arrested reportedly was... the Somali who tried to kill the Danish cartoonist. From Kenya's Daily Nation, September 5, 2009:

"The threats were neutralised a week to the Agoa meeting in combined efforts by the military and other security agencies,” the official said. “The operation in Nairobi netted five crucial suspects, one of whom carries Danish identification documents but is believed to be a Somali national. The other four, one of whom is a woman, hold Kenyan identification documents believed to be fake. Investigations into their identity and plan are on.”

I assume that when I state that the very lenient sentence the terrorist received in Kenya - seven weeks in prison - may have had something to do with the fact that Kenya's PM, Raila Odinga, is a muslim and an acquaintance of a certain president who says one should never jump too fast to conclusions, it must be my bad character. Anyway, once a free man the guy was allowed to move back to Denmark where he could roam around freely, undisturbed by the Danish authorities, since, according to an official, "they did not have the means to follow him around all the time, given that, although he was known to be dangerous, he had not committed any actual crimes yet."

The Somali now has a defense lawyer, a certain Niels Christian Strauss. Mr. Strauss matter of factly told journalists outside the court that "he had urged his client to remain silent during the hearing to give him more time to examine the evidence." Sounds familiar, no?

Now, back to the Middle East. More precisely to the modern, "liberal" gulf states. This is how the moderate daily Gulf News reported on the attempted assassination of Kurt Westergaard in its January 3 edition:





From the second paragraph:

"There is no doubt that the cartoon was deeply offensive to all Muslims. For his work, Westergaard is regarded with the greatest possible contempt by all who believe in the true faith of Islam."

...we learn that the issue of the cartoon made by a septagenarian of a murderous warlord who fucked a nine-year old girl as well as the wife of his adopted son is, five years after publication of the cartoon, still far more relevant than the murder attempt. Then:

"Targeting him, however, is descending to the level of a contemptuous and despicable man."

Yeah. Right. So chopping a man to pieces equals drawing an offensive cartoon. Let's continue:

"This revenge attack merely again serves to highlight the insult wrought by Danish newspapers, stoking the embers of insult with the oxygen of hatred. Westergaard and his ilk are better forgotten."

Fair and balanced reporting.


My oh my. Who needs al-Shaheed terrs from Mogadiscio when you can have moderates from Abu Dhabi? I think the last word should go to Thomas Landen in The Brussels Journal, who writes:

"Two years ago, Westergaard’s wife was fired from the kindergarten where she used to work. She was sacked because several parents expressed concern for the safety of their children. It is not hard to understand the worries of the parents of the children Mrs. Westergaard cared for. These parents were afraid that one morning some axe-wielding barbarians would show up at the door, screaming “Heeere’s Muhammed!” Their concern is reasonable, because everyone knows what they are capable of. Nevertheless, instead of kicking out Mrs. Westergaard, as the kindergarten did at the request of the worried parents, the parents should ask themselves whether the time has come to kick out the barbarians within the gates."

Nite all. My God what a madhouse the world has become.



MFBB.

SATURDAY NIGHT WANG CHUNG, MASSIVE ATTACK.

To live and die in LA, eighties hit by the now obscure seeming band Wang Chung. It's from the soundtrack of the movie with the same style, starring Willem Dafoe. While playing an impressing role, Dafoe's real breakthrough would have to wait a short while yet, until Platoon came out.





Then Unfinished Sympathy, a hit by the rather faceless group Massive Attack.





Hey, nite all.


MFBB.

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2010!!!

DowneastBlog wishes all its readers of good will, wherever they may be, a Happy and Prosperous 2010!!!


MFBB.

AVATAR IS STINKING CRAP.

No, I haven't seen the movie. There is no need to for me, not after reading this Fjordman review in The Brussels Journal:

The hero is the U.S. Marine Jake Sully who has been sent to the planet-like moon Pandora because humans desire the mineral resources found of Pandora, which is inhabited by a race of tall, blue-skinned aliens, the Na’vi. They have a non-industrial civilization technologically inferior to ours but apparently spiritually richer and in perfect ecological harmony with the natural environment. The hero predictably falls in love with the native culture and connects with a native girl.

“Going native” is in itself not an original theme; it resembles Dances with Wolves, only with aliens instead of Sioux. Neither is the preference for pre-industrial civilization, which was after all shared by a good man such as Tolkien in his The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Tolkien had personally experienced the meaningless horrors of trench warfare during the First World War and this naturally affected his view of industrialized society. What is different about the movie Avatar is how it portrays whites as a bunch of raging monsters, something which Tolkien never did.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEVIL Doorgunner alert!!!!! Marines? Check. Khaki choppers? Check. Doorgunners? Check. Jungle? Check. Gatling gun on steroids? Check. Avatar is not only an anti-white movie. What specific anti-white movie could it be? Anti-Byelorussian? Anti-Slovenian? Anti-Italian? Anti-Norwegian? Anti-Luxembourgian? Come on, what country could it be? The first one who knows it gets a Nobel Peace Prize. The second one a 1 million metric C02 ton carbon offset.

Basically, the white characters are portrayed as brutal, greedy and insensitive beasts who rape the environment and destroy other cultures with a smile in the search for profit. The main antagonist is the white Colonel Quaritch, a brute who hardly possesses a single positive character trait. The final climax of the movie is when he screams “How does it feel to betray your race?” to the protagonist while he is trying to murder him. Although a few of the white characters such as Jake Sully are portrayed in a more redeeming light this is only because they totally reject their own civilization and join the other team in the fight. In other words: the only good whites are the ones who utterly turn their backs on their own destructive and evil culture. As reviewer Armond White put it, “Avatar is the corniest movie ever made about the white man’s need to lose his identity and assuage racial, political, sexual and historical guilt.”

Of course, back in the real world whites are among the most self-critical and least ethnocentric people on Earth, and have been so for a long time. Whites are also disproportionately represented in the environmental movement whereas many “diverse” Third World peoples couldn’t care less about the environment. But why let the truth get in the way of making a good anti-white movie? The fact that quite a few among the predominantly white audience cheered for this movie shows that anti-white hatred and stereotypes have become so widespread and accepted that most people cannot even see it, least of all whites themselves.

I was reminded of the last sentence in Fjordman's review when I read another one, dated December 15, by the NYPress's Armond White, who happens to be black:

Cameron’s superficial B-movie tropes pretend philosophical significance. His story’s rampant imperialism and manifest destiny (Giovanni Ribisi plays the heartless industrialist) recalls Vietnam-era revisionist westerns like Soldier Blue, but it’s essentially a sentimental cartoon with a pacifist, naturalist message. Avatar condemns mankind’s plundering and ruin of a metaphorical planet’s ecology and the aboriginals’ way of life. Cameron fashionably denounces the same economic and military system that make his technological extravaganza possible. It’s like condemning NASA—yet joyriding on the Mars Exploration Rover.

Meanwhile, in the real world... now that we are talking about technological civilizations greedily looting the earth's resources...

IN HIS office in Lusaka, Zambia's capital, Xu Jianxue sits between a portrait of Mao Zedong and a Chinese calendar. His civil-engineering and construction business has been doing well and, with the help of his four brothers, he has also invested in a coal mine. He is bullish about doing business in Zambia: 'It is a virgin territory,' he says, with few products made locally and little competition. He is now thinking of expanding into Angola and Congo next door. When he came in 1991, only 300 lived in ambia. now he guesses there are 3,000..."

[From The Economist, 'China in Africa', Oct 26, 2006]

And from Dambisa Moyo's book "Dead Aid":

"China has invested billions incopper and cobalt, in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia; in iron ore and platinum in South Africa; in timber in Gabon, Cameroon and Congo-Brazzaville. It has also acquired mines in Zambia, textile factories in Lesotho, railways in Uganda, timber in the Central African Republic and retail developments across nearly every capital city. However, oil is the gusher..."

Meanwhile, at the climate fest set up in the white capital Copenhagen, where white heads of states accepted the burden of the (phoney) CO2 guilt, and where the protesters and anarchists in the streets were also white, and where a lunatic Gordon Brown promised to cut the UK's CO2 emissions with 42% by 2020 (at the cost of 500 billion £), those same Chinese wrecked any possible deal... not that I cared much.

Note that the Chinese account for 40% of the total increase in oil demand since 2005, and for nearly the entire increase in global consumption of copper, tin and aluminium since 1998. Would the white girl with the sorry face below, photographed while anxiously listening to Baraka Hussein Mohbama's Copenhagen speech, be aware of that?





I doubt it very much.

But I bet that there's a real good chance she has seen Avatar by now. And cheered.


MFBB.

SATURDAY NIGHT SNOW PATROL, THE ROLLING STONES.

First a 2006 number from Northern Irish/Scottish band Snow Patrol, a group formed in 1994 by Gary Lightbody, Michael Morrison and Mark McClelland. It wasn't until they moved to a major label, Polydor Records, that they started to have a degree of success, with the 2003 album Final Straw. The big breakthrough internationally came with 2006's Eyes Open, from which the hit Chasing Cars was drawn - you may remember it from the Grey's Anatomy series. Totally inexplicably, the number Shut Your Eyes seems not to have ticked in the Anglosaxon world, or else I'm gravely mistaken. Here it is:





Back 40 years in time, when The Rolling Stones released the album Aftermath. The following immortal single, Lady Jane, is unique for the haunting sound of the Appalachian dulcimer, a fretted string instrument of the zither family. It typically comes with three or four strings, and has a body the length of the fingerboard. You can see them here. Not long after Lady Jane, the band member playing it, Brian Jones, would begin his slow sinking away in drug and alcohol abuse, which would end so tragically with his death in 1969.





But they sure had nice décolletés in the eighteenth century. Old Old Old Fogey Time wasn't all that bad.


MFBB.

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL PEOPLE OF GOOD WILL!

Adoration of the Shepherds (1622), by Gerrit Van Honthorst, a Dutch Golden Age painter from the city of Utrecht.

From Luke 2, 1-20:

"In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. And everyone went to his own town to register. So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, 7and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.

And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger." Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests."

When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, "Let's go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about." So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told."

DowneastBlog wishes all its readers of good will a Merry Christmas!!!


MFBB.

ON KANDAHAR AIRFIELD.

The six F-16 Belgian fighter-bombers operating from Kandahar Airfield currently operate low key. It seems that two flights a day suffice given the enhanced US air activity over the whole of Afghanistan. The MoD report for the week of 10-16 December is sketchy, as usual. On December 12, 13 and 16 two missions each without using weapon systems; only on December 15 some target was engaged with GBU 12 bombs.





The photo below, taken over KAF, gives a nice view of the fighter's standard equipment. On the wingtips (in Air Force parlance stations 1 and 9) two Raytheon AIM-9M Sidewinder infrared AA missiles - although the need for those eludes me completely. Then a pair of 500 lbs Texas Instruments GBU-12 Paveway II laser guided bombs on stations 3 and 7 (the bomb pylons of these also contain PIDS, for Pylon Integrated Dispensing Systems, for chaff and/or flares). Sufficient radius of action is provided by the use of two Sargent-Fletcher 370 US gallon (1,400 litres) underwing fuel tanks, on stations 4 and 6. Then there is of course the trusted 20mm General Electric M61A1 Vulcan cannon, now with 520 rounds of the new M70 high velocity/low drag ammunition.





But the most advanced piece of technology in our fighter arms inventory is the pod you see slung to the starboard side: that's the AN/AAQ-33 PANTERA (Precision Attack Navigation and Targeting with Extended Range Acquisition), aka "Sniper Pod". The Belgian Air Force acquired these as a complement to the AN/AAQ-14 LANTIRN (Low-Altitude Navigation and Targeting Infra-Red for Night) pods, already in use since 1997. The PANTERA performs substantially better than the LANTIRN, with its combination of an amazingly effective stabilisation system, a 3G FLIR (Forward Looking Infra Red) and daylight CCD-TV camera, giving it an unparalleled long-range target detection, identification and designation accuracy from altitudes of up to 40,000 feet - 3 to 5 times higher than LANTIRN's. PANTERA is thus also able to operate from outside the danger zone of most ground-based AA systems. Not only that, but it allows for the jet to launch its weapons systems from outside its own noise range, a priceless asset for ground attacks in Afghanistan.

As for the aircraft themselves, they seem older than they actually are. Belgium bought 160 F-16's in the eighties, building them under licence in the SABCA factories in Haren (near Brussels) and Gosselies (near Charleroi), and the "youngest" airframes, four F16B Block 15OCU's date from... 1989-1990, so almost twenty years old! However, a couple of years ago I had the opportunity of a chat with an accomplished BAF pilot, an officer with the somewhat unfortunate initials of P.C., and he stated that there had been so many updates throughout the years that there's possibly only 5% of the original material left on the oldest airframes. I have never been able to verify this info with other accounts, but what is certain is that most Belgian F-16s are now at Mid-Life Update Tape M4 (MLU-M4) software and hardware standard, so I guess that still places them among the world's best fighters.

On Kandahar Airfield (KAF) the air arm with which our pilots cooperate the most are, not surprisingly, our northern neigbours the Dutch. They have four comparable F-16's present. Originally, they had six, but the arrival of two more Belgian planes in addition to the four already present allowed them to call back two of their own, a move also spurred on by budgetary reasons. One cannot blame the Dutch - their ground committment is much heavier than ours, with several infantry units, many wheeled and tracked AIFV's, mechanized howitzers and so on. These are also in the thick of the fight, with regular heavy clashes with Taliban in Aghanistan's volatile Uruzgan province. Anyway, on KAF and in the air a special camaraderie has developed between our nations, with our jets sometimes being refueled in the air by a Dutch KDC-10 tanker, and Belgian C-130's providing mission support for them (e.g. delivery of liqid hydrogen for their F-16s).


MFBB.

ROGER SCRUTON: TOTALITARIAN SENTIMENTALITY.

Roger Vernon Scruton (born 1944) is a British philosopher, author and composer. Rather a traditionalist Burkean conservative, his emphasis is more on ethical issues. In his book "The Meaning of Conservatism" (1980) he sought to divert Tory attention away from free market economics towards moral questions. Must have been a hard thing to do at a time when Thatcher was PM and getting the economy back on track was priority no.1. (personally, I would situate myself between Scruton and Buckley, with a strong belief in Von Mises, Friedman and Hayek on the economical side, but I am not a libertarian - I do not believe in a skeleton state). Currently, Scruton is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. The following exerpts are from a column titled Totalitarian Sentimentality in the December 2009/January 2010 issue of The American Spectator:

"Conservatives recognize that social order is hard to achieve and easy to destroy, that it is held in place by discipline and sacrifice, and that the indulgence of criminality and vice is not an act of kindness but an injustice for which all of us will pay. Conservatives therefore maintain severe and -- to many people -- unattractive attitudes. They favor retributive punishment in the criminal law; they uphold traditional marriage and the sacrifices that it requires; they believe in discipline in schools and the value of hard work and military service. They believe in the family and think that the father is an essential part in it. They see welfare provisions as necessary, but also as a potential threat to genuine charity, and a way both of rewarding antisocial conduct and creating a culture of dependency. They value the hard-won legal and constitutional inheritance of their country and believe that immigrants must also value it if they are to be allowed to settle here. Conservatives do not think that war is caused by military strength, but on the contrary by military weakness, of a kind that tempts adventurers and tyrants. And a properly ordered society must be prepared to fight wars -- even wars in foreign parts -- if it is to enjoy a lasting peace in its homeland. In short conservatives are a hard and unfriendly bunch who, in the world in which we live, must steel themselves to be reviled and despised by all people who make compassion into the cornerstone of the moral life.



Liberals are of course very different. They see criminals as victims of social hierarchy and unequal power, people who should be cured by kindness and not threatened with punishment. They wish all privileges to be shared by everyone, the privileges of marriage included. And if marriage can be reformed so as to remove the cost of it, so much the better. Children should be allowed to play and express their love of life; the last thing they need is discipline. Learning comes -- didn't Dewey prove as much? -- from self-expression; and as for sex education, which gives the heebie-jeebies to social conservatives, no better way has ever been found of liberating children from the grip of the family and teaching them to enjoy their bodily rights. Immigrants are just migrants, victims of economic necessity, and if they are forced to come here illegally that only increases their claim on our compassion. Welfare provisions are not rewards to those who receive them, but costs to those who give -- something that we owe to those less fortunate than ourselves. As for the legal and constitutional inheritance of the country, this is certainly to be respected -- but it must "adapt" to new situations, so as to extend its protection to the new victim class. Wars are caused by military strength, by "boys with their toys," who cannot resist the desire to flex their muscles, once they have acquired them. The way to peace is to get rid of the weapons, to reduce the army, and to educate children in the ways of soft power. In the world in which we live liberals are self-evidently lovable -- emphasizing in all their words and gestures that, unlike the social conservatives, they are in every issue on the side of those who need protecting, and against the hierarchies that oppress them.

Those two portraits are familiar to everyone, and I have no doubt on which side the readers of this magazine will stand. What all conservatives know, however, is that it is they who are motivated by compassion, and that their cold-heartedness is only apparent. They are the ones who have taken up the cause of society, and who are prepared to pay the cost of upholding the principles on which we all -- liberals included -- depend. To be known as a social conservative is to lose all hope of an academic career; it is to be denied any chance of those prestigious prizes, from the MacArthur to the Nobel Peace Prize, which liberals confer only on each other. For an intellectual it is to throw away the prospect of a favorable review -- or any review at all -- in the New York Times or the New York Review of Books. Only someone with a conscience could possibly wish to expose himself to the inevitable vilification that attends such an "enemy of the people." And this proves that the conservative conscience is governed not by self-interest but by a concern for the public good. Why else would anyone express it?

By contrast, as conservatives also know, the compassion displayed by the liberal is precisely that -- compassion displayed, though not necessarily felt. The liberal knows in his heart that his "compassionating zeal," as Rousseau described it, is a privilege for which he must thank the social order that sustains him. He knows that his emotion toward the victim class is (these days at least) more or less cost-free, that the few sacrifices he might have to make by way of proving his sincerity are nothing compared to the warm glow of approval by which he will be surrounded by declaring his sympathies. His compassion is a profoundly motivated state of mind, not the painful result of a conscience that will not be silenced, but the costless ticket to popular acclaim. ..."

Readers might be interested to know that, just as William F. Buckley was the founding editor of National Review in 1955, Scruton was founding editor of a British counterpart, The Salisbury Review, in 1982. Check out Scruton's interesting site here.


MFBB.

SEX, LIES AND PDF SLIDES.

Mark Steyn is his usual self, hacking the Man Made Global Warming Scam to pieces in an aptly titled MacLeans column, 17 December. Although, having spent a nasty two hours to get my car roadborne on snowclad roads and back just for a simple errand around the corner, I tend to think more and more the Global Warming thingy itself is beginning to look like complete and utter nonsense. The people in America's northeast probably agree.

THE EMPEROR's NEW CARBON FOOTPRINTS.

"... Shortly after the leaked documents from Britain’s Climatic Research Unit hit the Internet, there appeared in the European press the news that Danish prostitutes had sportingly offered their services for free to the warm-mongers at the Copenhagen conference. I resisted comment for a week—in part because, while a generous gift, it seemed unlikely to be taken up. For one thing, it’s far harder to “hide the decline” when you’re in a Danish bordello than at the Climatic Research Unit. For another, you have to pay extra if you want a second girl to come in and “peer-review” your submission.

Alas, when Andrew Revkin, the Senior Climate Alarmist of the New York Times, made one brief, bland, passing mention of the free-sex offer, eschewing the leaden Steyn jests above, professor Michael Schlesinger of the University of Illinois fired off an email angrily denouncing his “gutter reportage” and threatening this most co-operative of eco-stooges with “the Big Cutoff” from “those of us who believe we can no longer trust you.” I assume the “Big Cutoff” alludes to access and not anything likely to spoil one’s evening at an environmentally aware whorehouse. Incidentally, in his intemperate missive, professor Schlesinger used the phrase “climate prostitutes,” and it took me a while to figure out that was a reference to the Danish hookers rather than the scientists. Still, given the recent publicity about the Settled Science Syndicate’s bullying of dissenters, this hardly seems the time to threaten a chap with excommunication not for questioning the “science” but for making a joke. Actually, not even a joke, but merely a lighthearted acknowledgement. “There are no jokes in Islam,” declared the Ayatollah Khomeini. And that goes double for us, says professor Schlesinger.

Nor are we allowed to make jokes about Rajendra Pachauri. I always love those experts who go on TV and say you can’t pronounce on this subject unless you’re a bona fide climatologist. Dr. Pachauri, the head honcho of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is a graduate of the Indian Railways Institute of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering. He’s not a climatologist but a railroad engineer. So, if he ever avails himself of a free half-hour with a Copenhagen hooker, I’m sure, like the Bombay to Cochin express, he’ll pull out on time. But it’s hard to see why he should be presiding over a multi-trillion-dollar shakedown of the global economy. For one thing, Dr. Pachauri has one of the largest carbon footprints on the planet. He’s in favour of “hefty aviation taxes” to “deter people from flying,” but fortunately once you’re part of the transnational jet set nothing can deter you. He flew 443,243 miles on “IPCC business” in the year-and-a-half run-up to Copenhagen. I’m not sure whether that includes his two weekend round trips from New York to Delhi, once for a cricket practice, once for a match.

Crook, liar, fraud: the CRU's Phil 'We have to get rid of the MWP' Jones.

... I wrote a couple of weeks back about the corruption of “peer review” revealed by the CRU leaks. But, once it’s got the peer-reviewed label, it’s hard to dislodge. The famous hockey stick graph created by Dr. Michael Mann played a critical role in persuading millions of people we’re all gonna fry. In the National Post of April 2, 2001, after the UN had adopted this graph as the official proof of global warming, I pointed out that the first nine centuries of the millennium were measured by using tree-ring cycles, and the modern era was represented by temperatures. Now I’m not a climatologist. I’m not even a railroad engineer. But, if you show me a graph that looks like a long bungalow with the Empire State Building tacked on the end, I’ll go, “Whoa! That looks pretty serious. We better head for the hills.” If it then emerges in the fine print that the bungalow was created with one unit of measurement and the skyscraper another, I’ll postpone my departure and go, “Er, hang on, what’s the deal with that? If we’ve got tree rings for the first nine centuries, why can’t we stick with the tree rings through the 20th?”

Answer: because after 1960 the tree rings show no express elevator up the thermometer, but in fact a decline. That’s the “decline” that Dr. Phil Jones, in his leaked email, is trying to “hide.” Because, if you don’t hide it, a basic truth emerges—that the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than today, and the planet managed to survive and indeed prosper during it. It took two dogged Canadians, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, to demolish the hockey-stick fraud, and the enraged priests of the Settled Science cult have spent the years since 2006 trying to stick it back together. Dr. Keith Briffa had a crack in 2007 for the IPCC report. As usual, the CRU refused, in defiance of basic scientific etiquette, to reveal its raw data, but eventually the Royal Society ordered them to. And, when they did, it emerged that Dr. Briffa had cherry-picked a few trees from the Yamal peninsula in Siberia to obtain the desired result.

Question: can you measure any tree-ring cycles for the last millennium and get a genuine hockey stick?

Answer: yes. Tree Number YAD061. That’s it. One tree. The temperature records show no warming in Siberia over the last half-century. But you can’t see the forest for the tree, singular. Mr. McIntyre calls it “the most influential tree in the world,” which hardly does justice to what’s being contemplated in its name. YAD061 is the Tree of Life, at least in the sense that millions of lives across the world will, in its name, be transformed by ever greater taxation and regulation....

The Copenhagen circus is over now, thankfully without binding texts forcing developed countries, which care far more for the environment than developing ones, to subordinate themselves to a corrupt "global government", which is what Copenhagen was all about. Such a global supranational authority would basically impose some kind of tax on them for being so successful, in order to finance third world kleptocracies and environmentally irresponsible upcoming industrial players. Paramount among the scientists who warn against this very real danger is Lord Christopher Monckton, Viscount of Brenchley and former scientific adviser to Margaret Thatcher. Below are just two slides from a telling pdf presentation he made:







Alas for Lord Monckton, unlike many other dignitaries the welcome he received at the Copenhagen Summit was less warm than, say, Hugo Chavez's. Monckton was beaten unconscious by the Danish Police. Meanwhile, outright lunatics (we try to forget for a moment they are also cruel dictators) like Mugabe and Ahmadinejad get a free podium to demand the West pays a climate debt.



The guy to the left, a scientist and servant of the British state with an impeccable record, was knocked to the ground - by Danish Police. The guys to the right, who earned a reputation for their decadelong efforts for a clean environment - NOT - got a standing ovation.

I am not sure whether the world is getting warmer. I am however sure it is getting nuttier.



MFBB.


P.S.: Hat tip for the slides Luc Van Braekel.

SATURDAY NIGHT ASH, PEARL JAM, RUSH.

We keep staying in the nineties (this was the time when Mr. Ghost still wet his diapers). First a vid from UK band Ash, actually northern Irish; alternative rock. 'Oh yeah', a typical Britpop hit from their 1996 album 1977. Yes, that's 1977. The video is for swooning teens consumption but you'll have to live with that. Singer's Tim Wheeler.





Grunge hit Even Flow was, IIRC, the third single drawn from Pearl Jam's debut album Ten (1991). At the time I was never able to make out what exactly the singer, Eddie Vedder, was hollering about. That has now been found out:



It don't make much sense to me, but what can you expect from a guy hanging out with a lunatic like Sean Penn? Anyway, the guitar work is good.


And because I am such a kind-hearted character, here's Marathon, from the 1985 Rush album Power Windows.



When it came out, I though there's was almost too many synthesizers. Almost twenty-five years later, I can appreciate 'em more. Like good wine getting better.

That's all for today, nite. Tomorrow we start shooting again.


MFBB.

AIRBUS A400M MAIDEN FLIGHT.

The first Airbus A400M military airlifter took to the air on 11 December for a 3 hour 47 minute test flight. Takeoff was from the Seville airport in Spain where constructor EADS has a facility. This was the start of a testing programme scheduled to involve 4,370 flying hours.



The Belgian Air Force has ordered 7 of these to replace its ageing fleet of Herculeses. Theoretically it makes sence since, with capabilities roughly double that of the C 130, 7 would do as an equivalent to the original 15 Hercs - the A400M is powered by four Europrop International TP400D engines with 11,000 shaft horsepower. Personally, I'd rather see us buy 10, plus two C-17 Globemasters, but who am I to make recommendations. It will be a good thing for Germany too, with the Luftwaffe having ordered sixty or so. It will mark a quantum leap from their 'diminutive' C-160 Transalls.


MFBB.

DR. WALTER WILLIAMS ON THE MINIMUM WAGE LAW.

Very good Walter Williams column over at Townhall, 16 December:

COLLUSION AGAINST OUR YOUTH.

"I've grown somewhat weary writing about the devastating effects of minimum wage laws but The Wall Street Journal's "Black Youths Miss Out on Good Job News," (Dec. 4, 2009) warrants another try. Today's overall teenage (16-19) unemployment rate, at 25 percent, is the highest since World War II. Black teenage unemployment, at 50 percent, is also the highest since World War II.

How do you think the Reverends Jackson and Sharpton would explain the unemployment difference between black and white teens? You can bet the rent money they would say: It's racial discrimination. Let's investigate. Was racial discrimination in 1948 greater or less than racial discrimination today? In 1948, the unemployment rate for white 16-17 year olds was 10.2 percent while that for blacks was 9.4 percent. Among white 18-19 year-olds, unemployment was 9.4 percent and for blacks it was 10.5 percent. During that period, not only were the unemployment rates similar, black teenagers were either equally as active as whites in the labor force or more so.

According to the widely shared Jackson/Sharpton vision of the world, racial discrimination must have been less during the late 1940s than it is today. In fact, as early as 1900, blacks as a group were more active in the labor market, a statistic known in economics as labor force participation rate, than whites. This was true up until the late 1950s. Anyone with one ounce of brains would reject the argument that less racial discrimination accounts for the lower black teen unemployment rate and greater labor force participation during earlier periods..."

MFBB.

WANNA HEAR A MUEZZIN IN THE NETHERLANDS?

Simple. Click:



Reliable information can be obtained from the Dutch website Het Vrije Volk (The Free People):

The Netherlands have deteriorated to such an extent that today, in at least 16 mosques in 13 towns the muezzin calls the muslim faithful to prayer with loudspeakers. In Amersfoort from two mosques (Mevlana and El Fath mosques) on Fridays; in Apeldoorn (where a lunatic last year tried to ram a bus with the royal family with his Suzuki), from the Eyup Sultan mosque, twice a day. In Breda once a day. In Dongen, twice a day from the Isra Camii mosque. In Gorinchem every Friday, and in Heerenveen once a day. In Roosendaal from two mosques. In Rotterdam-Vlaardingen from the Ummet mosque on Friday, and in Rotterdam-Maassluis from the Yeni mosque on Friday too. Every day in Tilburg from the Suleymaniye-mosque, and in Veendam even thrice a day. In Zaandam from the Sultan Ahmet mosque on Friday, and in Zeist from the El Moslimen El Mathhakine mosque and the Eyep Sultan mosque.

This list is far from complete. According to chairman Driss Boujoufi of the Contact Organization Muslims and Authorities there are possibly "20 of the 450" who are doing it. An imam calling himself Anwar Mahfouz of the "Netherlands Islamic Society" in Amsterdam, says loudspeakers are used too in Amsterdam, Utrecht and Ridderkerk. His own mosque calls muslims to prayer with a sound system thrice a day: at 1.30pm, at 4pm and at 9pm. "Thus not at night. And we're doing it very modestly, 64 decibels". Furthermore there are plans to start with the practice in Leiden, from the Al-Hijra mosque. Also in Epe Vaassen. In Hoofddorp the faithful are called to prayer with light signals.

The Turkish suleymaniye mosque in Tilburg, South Netherlands. The mosque is named after a friendly turkish imam who always gave candy to christian schoolchil... erm, I mean after Suleyman the Magnificent, who waged war against christian countries all his life, conquering Rhodes, Belgrade and most of Hungary (and killing its king Louis in the process at the Battle of Mohacs). He also laid siege to Vienna in 1529 and again in 1532, with both attempts failing however. He was still sultan when his troops invaded Malta in 1565, a siege that also failed.

So, this is the nonsenical drivel a LOT of indigenous Dutchmen get blasted into their ears these days:


Allahoe Akbar (Allah is the greatest)

Allahoe Akbar (Allah is the greatest)

Allahoe Akbar (Allah is the greatest)

Allahoe Akbar (Allah is the greatest)

Ashado allaa ilaaha illALLAH (I testify that there is no god but allah)

Ashado allaa ilaaha illALLAH (I testify that there is no god but allah)

Ashado anna MoehammadarrasoelALLAH (I testify that mohammed is allah's messenger/prophet)

Ashado anna MoehammadarrasoelALLAH (I testify that mohammed is allah's messenger/prophet)

[WARNING: it seems that if you read the crap above loud, you automatically become a muslim - MFBB]

Hayya alassalaah (Haste you to the prayer)

Hayya alassalaah (Haste you to the prayer)

Hayya alalFalaah (Haste you to success)

Hayya alalFalaah (Haste you to success)

Allahoe Akbar (Allah is the greatest)

Allahoe Akbar (Allah is the greatest)

Laa ilaha illALLAH (There is no god but allah)



Wait, that's not all.

In Zeist, mayor R.G. Boekhoven stated literally that it was "childish to protest the calls for prayer". Mayor Boekhoven is from the socialist party PvdA. But, I suspect you suspected that already.

Vlaardingen's mayor T.P.J. Bruinsma (Vlaardingen is near Rotterdam, which as a whole is already 50% foreigners, mostly muslims, and which has a muslim mayor, Ahmed Aboutaleb), has bluntly said that he "saw no reason to reject the requests of mosques to call the faithful to prayer with loudspeakers", this despite the fact that locals were heavily disappointed that the Ummet mosque had begun to use loudspeakers for the call to prayer.

T.P.J. Bruinsma is from the socialist party PvdA, one of The Netherlands's two major socialist parties (the other big one is the SP, the Socialistische Partij). But, I suspect you suspected that already.

By contrast, in Ridderkerk a church's locks were once glued closed to prevent the sounding of the clocks, and in Tilburg some culture relativists tried to silence the clocks of the Holy Margarita Maria Church. Former mayor Ruud Vreeman never showed any interest into this matter, saying instead that "the court should look into the matter". Town selectwoman for the Environment Marieke Moorman did show interest... by threatening to fine the priest for 5,000 EUR per "offense" [sounding the clocks - not kidding. MFBB]. Curiously though, or perhaps not so curiously, neither Vreeman nor Moorman think of the daily call for prayers from the huge Turkish Suleymaniye-mosque a little bit further on the Ringbaan-West as an "offense".

Both Vreeman and Moorman are from the socialist party PvdA. But, I suspect you suspected that already.

Meanwhile, in Pakistan...


MFBB.

WE HAVE TO GET RID OF THE IPCC.

Nothing new under the sun. As per usual, leftozoid assholes resort to silencing dissent, as Phelim McAleer, the guy of the Not Evil Just Wrong documentary debunking Gore's scam movie experienced a couple of days ago. Check out how, after McAleer asks a Professor Stephen Schneider of Stanford University about the manipulating of data at Phil Jones' CRU, first a dumb chick tries to rip McAleer's microphone away and then an armed security guard pushes him out of the conference.





Nothing new under the sun, as back in the time when Harold was still King of Britain (in many respects a saner age for the UK) temperatures were as high or even higher than today... without cars, factories, Copenhagen summits, airliners and shitloads of climate alarmists spouting shitloads of CO2 nonsense in the air.





A review of more than 200 climate studies led by researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has determined that the 20th century is neither the warmest century nor the century with the most extreme weather of the past 1000 years. The review also confirmed that the Medieval Warm Period of 800 to 1300 A.D. and the Little Ice Age of 1300 to 1900 A.D. were worldwide phenomena not limited to the European and North American continents. While 20th century temperatures are much higher than in the Little Ice Age period, many parts of the world show the medieval warmth to be greater than that of the 20th century.”


MFBB.

SATURDAY NIGHT SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES, MARK ISHAM.

The video sucks and Siouxsie doesn't look like any broad I'd like to encounter while horny and in the dark, but 18 years after its release, Kiss them for me still sounds good.





In 1988, I was able to grab a seat in the Decascoop cinema where Kevin Reynold's The Beast of War premiered, at the Ghent International Film Festival. What I have never forgotten was the mesmerizing intro music composed by Mark Isham. It don't say that much on a small youtube screen, nevertheless I'll post it here because if not for the music, the movie is worth a see. Of course there's the usual multiculti nonsense, but all in all the story ain't that bad. Afterwards, I had a quick chat with George Dzundza, who plays the character of the evil sergeant Daskal. Reynolds was there too. The subject came, of course, to the tank. I asked Dzundza how it was possible they had obtained a genuine Soviet tank. He answered via the Israeli Army - turned out the IDF had captured it in some war with the Arabs and pressed it into service. Of course Reynolds had then filmed in an Israeli desert. I asked, captured from the Egyptian Army? "No. Syrian". End of story. This was Dzundza's only chance to have a conversation with the famous Outlaw Mike, and he blew it.





Quiz: what Russian tank type do you see here, a T-55 or a T-62? Hint: the former sports a large gap between the first and second pair of wheels, an ingenious feature meant to be able to reassemble a damaged track across a smaller set of wheels. Take it to the bank from me, though not to Lehman Brothers: Ruski injuneers are no fools.

One last note: we all know that when the USSR liberated Afghanistan in 1979, Brezhnev had his move sanctioned by the UN. Nevertheless, in spite of the authorization of this high moral authority, millions of caring people in zhe west took to the streets to protest with banners reading "War is not the Answer" and called that great democrat Brezhnev Hitler. The father of Phil Jones organized a scientific committee named "Afghanistan Body Count", and this despite the Soviet's best attempts to win hearts and minds (see the scene above), kick-start the Afghan economy and install democracy there.



MFBB.


P.S.: just kidding.

AT AL-BEEB, THE SPIRIT OF JOHN REITH LIVES ON....

"Sir" John Reith (1889-1971), a Scot from Stonehaven, Kincardineshire, was the founder and first Director General of the BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation. An extreme leftist, his concept of broadcasting was that of "educating" the "masses", preferably with leftist ideas. It is telling that, upon his appointment to the BBC in the early twenties, when asked if he was going to give the people what they wanted, he curtly replied: "No. Something better than that." Also not surprisingly for a leftist, he absolutely hated Winston Churchill, calling him on at least one occasion "that bloody shit" and in the thirties "seeing to it that he was seldom heard over the BBC", while on the other hand he displayed a not to be misunderstood admiration for archsocialists Hitler and Mussolini. His own daughter, Marista Leishman, notes in her biography of her father that in March 1933, he was "certain that the Nazis will clean things up and put Germany on the way to being a real power in Europe again . . . They are being ruthless and most determined.". And six years later, when the Nazis overran Czechoslowakia, he wrote that "Hitler continues his magnificent efficiency."

But perhaps no other trait characterizes leftist scum like Reith as much as hatred of Christianity. When on 30 July 1954 the Independent Television Authority was created, Reith, characteristically, decried the move since it effectively ended the BBC's broadcasting monopoly. By then a member of the House of Lords, he adressed that legislative body with the words:

"... Somebody introduced Christianity into England and somebody introduced smallpox, bubonic plague and the Black Death. Somebody is minded now to introduce sponsored broadcasting ... Need we be ashamed of moral values, or of intellectual and ethical objectives? It is these that are here and now at stake."

Fifty-five years on, we find that the spirit of Reith still reigns at al-Beeb. It was easy to miss this topic las May, what with US military officials admitting they might have killed Afghan civilians in air raids and North Korea conducting a second nuclear test and what not, but since May 13 of this year, the Head of Religious Programming at the BBC is Aaqil Ahmed... a devout muslim:

...A Muslim TV boss criticised for having a pro-Islam bias has been appointed as head of religious broadcasting at the BBC. Formerly an executive with Channel 4, Aaqil Ahmed has also been accused of dumbing down religious TV programmes.

The BBC has recently appointed a member of the British Humanist Association to its new religion board and a Sikh as producer of its flagship religious show, Songs of Praise.This has led several commentators to say that the BBC is pandering to minority groups at the expense of Christianity. Aaqil Ahmed’s Channel 4 series, Christianity: a History, which consisted of several programmes fronted by figures such as Cherie Blair and Michael Portillo, was dubbed “inaccurate and badly researched”. Channel 4 screened a series of special programmes on Islam last summer, including a feature-length documentary on the Koran, and interviews with Muslims around the world talking about their beliefs. Mr Ahmed has taken part in campaigns for greater Muslim presence in the media and he is a trustee of the Runnymede Trust, an organisation promoting multiculturalism. Church leaders question the BBC’s decision to take Mr Ahmed from Channel 4, accusing the corporation of preferential treatment for minority faiths.

Last year the BBC’s Director General, Mark Thompson, said that Islam should be treated more sensitively by the media than Christianity..."

Mr. Thompson is a worthy successor to Mr. Reith. Hey, what do you expect from a news station heaping praise on Khomeini?



MFBB.

OUTLAW MIKE'S RECOMMENDED READING: EMPIRES OF THE SEA (ROGER CROWLEY).

Our friend CDR Salamander of the US Navy (unfortunately recently retired) suggested I compose a list of five books fit to read or give as a present. I thought it was a swell idea. Here goes:

1.) EMPIRES OF THE SEA. By Roger Crowley.

This rich book deals with a crucial Mediterranean timeframe encompassing the better of the sixteenth century, more precisely from 1521 to 1580. If, like me, you hadn't up until this point cared much for what precisely happened then between the Straits of Gibraltar and the Levant, you'll ask yourself, before you're through, how on earth your knowledge of these portentous events was at best limited to a vague awareness of the first Siege of Vienna and the naval battle of Lepanto.

There was far more than Lepanto, and "our" protagonists, deserve not only our attention but also our unfaltering respect and gratefulness - even half a milennium on. Broadly speaking the book is structured around three pivotal battles: the Siege of Rhodes, the Siege of Malta, and the Battle of Lepanto. Empires of the Sea is a compelling chronicle of the 60-year long assaults the Ottoman Empire hurled at the Christian "West" with the aim of becoming master of the Mediterranean. In the end, they did not. Or only partly, and then only in the east. Much of the warfare consisted of Turkish armies transported by galleys across the sea to conquer isolated Christian fortresses (Rhodes, Malta's forts, Famagusta), while there is basically only one true naval battle, at Lepanto in 1571. The military encounters of the first kind - the storming of the forts - all look alike. Pathetically small Christian garrisons withstand a ten- or even twentyfold strong adversary of Janissaries (Ottoman crack troops) and merciless and incessant bombarding by Turkish guns. Sieges last weeks, months, in the case of Famagusta even almost a year. Sometimes, against all odds, the Christians hold out (the key forts on Malta), most of the time they do not (Rhodes, Fort St Elmo on Malta, Famagusta). A recurring theme is the apalling cruelty time and again displayed by the Turks, culminating in the flaying alive, after his capture at the end of the Siege of Famagusta, of Marco Antonio Bragadin, the garrison's famous Venetian commander. Curious parallels with today's struggle against islam are:

a.) "our" side today, like then, has a hard time tomake a united stand. The lukewarm enthusiasm of most NATO countries to contribute troops in Afghanistan eerily resembles the unwillingness of the Christian nations at the time to come to the aid of the small beleagured holdouts on tiny island specks across the Mediterranean.

b.) Today, like then, muslim troops are no match for western ones in a conventional battle. Even if one discounts the apparently inflated estimates (by muslim and christian chroniclers alike) of Ottoman troops, one cannot escape the fact that the Christian troops were always facing impossible odds. Yet they inflicted horrendous casualties on the Turks. Had there been numerical parity, or even a less severe disparity, the former would have literally smashed the latter. Now the Turkish victories were often Pyrrhic ones, a fact that undoubtedly contributed to the appalling cruelties meted out to the Christian survivors after they surrendered.

Empires of the Sea leaves much to ponder, compelling one to "connect the dots". The treated time frame, give and take sixty years in the sixteenth century, is far too long ago for the average European citizen to see it as anything else than an incomprehensible forgotten conflict. Even if he or she is aware of it - and those are very few - the reflex will almost always be along the line of the famous "Don't mention the war" attitude the British in their seventies sitcoms and comedy shows reportedly assumed whenever meeting Germans. To dwell on the relentless Turkish assaults, especially in the presence of Turks, will be seen as tasteless nitpicking at best, and racist scaremongering at worst. However, Turkey, the successor to the Ottoman Empire, is now being led by a man who has almost singlehandedly turned what appeared to have become a modern secular democracy, into a second Iran in the making. And whereas we have forgotten who La Valette, Bragadin and Venier are, Turks damn well do recall Suleiman, Turgut and Piyale. We would do well to delve some more into this neglected field of study - scrapping some classes of cultural awareness and sensitivity training in favor of history classes for our youths would be a good start. Especially when you consider that:


A.) PRIOR to the 16th century clashes in the Mediterranean there were:

Almost three centuries of incessant incursions in the Byzantine Empire by the Ottoman Empire's predecessor, the Great Seljuq Empire, which greatly reduced Byzantine territory, it losing most of its hold on Anatolia...

... and two more centuries of war with the Ottoman Empire, culminating in the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the annihilation of that great Christian successor to the Roman Empire, after which followed a first, unsuccessful attempt to conquer Rhodes, the island of the Knights of the Order of St. John, in 1480.


B.) THEREAFTER were:

the Long War (1593-1606) between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs, the Taking of Crete in 1669, incursions in Polish-held southern Ukraine and, of course, the Siege of Vienna in 1683. Then there followed a long period of decline characterized by internal strife, a.o. mutinies by the Janissaries Corps, mostly flawed attempts to modernize, the Empire trying to reassert itself in the face of upcoming nationalistic movemements in Serbia and Greece etc... so that towards the end of the nineteenth century the Ottoman Empire had become "the sick man of Europe". Not being able anymore to launch grand scale offensives against powerful Christian nations, it contented itself with the crushing of nationalistic revolts and early pogroms against Armenians. During and after World War I, in which Turkey only found herself on the side of a western nation, Germany, by what would prove to be a stroke of bad luck, the armed hostility against anything Christian continued on its own territory, resulting in a.o. the Armenian Genocide (1915-1917) and the Massacre of the Greeks in Smyrna (1922).

Thus... essentially the history of the land we know today as Turkey can be summarized in a milennium long quasi permanent state of warfare against the Christian Foe, and Crowley's account of the Ottoman Empire at war with that foe on the peak of its power serves merely as a study in microcosm of a 1,000 year War Against The Infidel. Westerners tend to think in timeframes of days, weeks, months and years. How many of us still know what the Falklands War was about? The Suez Crisis??? Instead, our "enlightened" elites who harbor already the thought that Churchill was indeed some kind of warmonger, and who can impossibly be suspected of knowing who John III Sobieski was or what happened in Vienna in 1683, get all warm and fluffy with the thought of incorporating a nation into the EU that has a milennium long history of fighting their more rational predecessors, and congratulate themselves with their statemanship and moral superiority over archaic skeptics.

Turks however think in timeframes of centuries and milennia. In Ankara a clique which has scratched the thin disguising veneer of modernity off the ONLY islamic state which has ever waged war with a degree of success with the Christian West, is preparing itself for a bloodless entry into a continent that hundreds of thousands of Janissaries, if not millions of them, were unable to conquer by force. You can be absolutely certain that THEY know what happened in Vienna, and you can also be absolutely certain that they are far more aware of the historical importance of certain data, for instance that Turkish invasion force was ingloriously chased from the island of Malta in 1565 on a certain 11th of September, and that their Siege of Vienna in 1683 was broken on also a certain 11th of September. WE are being reigned by foolish ignoramuses who think a Trojan horse is a funny accessory in a Brad Pitt movie. THEY are being reigned by a guy who holds the view that Turkish minarets are bayonets and mosque domes helmets... and that democracy is like a bus you take to get somewhere, whereupon, once having arrived, you step off it. If Suleiman the Great would be able to look down from his heavenly harem, he'd nod approvingly.

I am hearing that France is currently holding a Grand Debate about Frenchness. It seems François and Julie are a bit uncertain of themselves and are looking for their inner self.

I would strongly suggest they get themselves a French copy of Empires of the Sea (I don't expect most of them to be very proficient in English, though they seem to make progress in arabic lately) and learn about a famous contemporary of theirs, a certain Philippe Villiers de l'Isle Adam, Grand Master of the Order of the Knights of St. John and last ruler over the Christian stronghold of Rhodes.





Fifty-seven years old, he arrived on his post in 1522 only days before the Turks began menacing the fort. With 600 knights and perhaps three thousand mercenaries and auxiliary troops he held a force of in excess of 100,000 (some sources say 200,000) Turks at bay, and inflicted such enormous losses on them that they were on the verge of giving up. Exhausted, and eager to spare the civilian population of Rhodes further horror, he finally surrendered after a siege lasting half a year. He then led the Order, after several years of seeking for a decent location, to its quintessential homebase of Malta, and henceforth his troops would be known as Maltese Knights. There he died on 21 August 1534. Voilà un homme.

I fear that if Philippe Villiers de l'Isle Adam would be able to look down from Heaven to what has become of his France, he'd shed bitter tears.

Get that fucking book. This applies for non-Frenchmen too godammit.


MFBB.

SATURDAY NIGHT DAG, GAVIN FRIDAY.

What's with the skiing? Nothing, it's just that's when I was looking for a decent video of DAG's Lovely Jane, I stumbled upon this short film of French dudes who used the song as background. Lovely Jane is from DAG's debut album Righteous, released in 1994. The band, from Raleigh in North California, had actually been playing for five years already. And they split five years later, after having produced two other albums. The singer and bass guitarist is Bobby Patterson. Hearing their sound in the nineties left a somewhat anachronistic impression, like if you would be hearing a great Simple Minds hit from the eighties only now for the first time. But it wasn't bad then, and to me, it isn't bad today either.






You, me and World War Three. Relatively unknown hit by Irish singer-songwriter Gavin Friday, ex Virgin Prunes. It's on his 1995 album Shag Tobacco. When I first heard it, I thought I was hearing Bowie. Friday is more active than you think, having worked on the soundtrack of movies like In the name of the Father (that's one you gotta see), Mission: Impossible and Moulin Rouge.





MFBB.

FIVE YEARS ON: VIDEO REMOVAL "THOU SHALT NOT KILL" MURAL UNEARTHED.

More than five years ago, on November 6, 2004, I had a short post about an event which took place right after the murder of Theo Van Gogh by a radical Netherlands-born muslim, Mohammed Bouyeri - a murder which coincidentally took place the day that George Bush was re-elected for a second term. This event was the removal by force, on orders of a Dutch mayor, of a mural in Rotterdam with the text "Gij zult niet doden" ("Thou shalt not kill"). Here is an exerpt from that post:

BAD NEWS FROM EUROPE - PART TWO.



A Rotterdam artist, Chris Ripke, made this simple mural (photo) on a wall nearby a mosque in Rotterdams Insulindenstraat, with a line from The Ten Commandments: "Gij zult niet doden"("Thou shalt not kill"). This in an, imho, very restraint and dignified expression of his disgust at the callous murder. Look at it yourself:
Apart from the text, a pigeon (or angel), a date and a blue triangle not much sock to it, huh?

Wrong.

The mosque’s Imam found the mural offensive and called Rotterdam’s mayor, Mr. Opstelten. Incredibly enough, Mr. Opstelten sent a special utility vehicle to remove graffiti to get rid of the mural. A local reporter of local TV broadcaster Cineac Noord was present. First he was asked not to film "because it would cause too much tension in the neighbourhood". When the reporter saw the utility vehicle arrive and prepare to remove the artist’s piece, he stood in front of it to protect it. When he refused to give up his stand, there was a brush with the police who then arrested him. The mural was removed.

So now, apparently someone was able to film it. And even though we are five years further now and the world has witnessed far more bloodshed in the name of islam and far more dhimmitude, I thought I would just heed the advice of our friends over at Gates of Vienna and Vladtepesblog and spread the link around. Here goes:



It's a rather long video, so you can speed forward around 6 minutes in it, where city personnel is destroying the mural after a request of the local imam.

We are five years further now, and how have things evolved in the meantime in The Netherlands?

Not so well.

All big cities are islamizing at an alarming rate. The photo below shows Stadsdeelvoorzitter Ahmed Marcouch, the mayor of the Slotervaart neighborhood in Amsterdam, at a "Sinterklaasfeest" (he's sitting to the left of Santa). The cross on Santa Claus' mitre has been neatly removed.



Increasing violence everywhere involving the now (in)famous "youths", see this article about the dire situation in Gouda.

Europes biggest port, Rotterdam, has a muslim mayor, Ahmed Aboutaleb. A holder of two passports, he has already made clear where his loyalties lie, a.o. by bypassing the Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhaghen in his relations with Morocco, and by staying away from a Rotterdam commemmoration ceremony, Veterans Day. He preferred a short journey to his homeland Morocco instead.

Dutch Interior Minister Guusje Ter Horst, ordered a "scientific study" concerning Geert Wilders, the chairman of the PVV (Party for Freedom), and the "scientists" concluded that Wilders is "undermining social cohesion and democracy" in The Netherlands. On the basis of the "scientific report", Geert Wilders is now being prosecuted. His trial starts in January. The prospect of this kangaroo court was welcomed by a.o. Alexander Pechtold, chairman of the center-left party D66, with the ominous words:

'Geert Wilders is a racist and on the extreme right. And now finally there is a scientific basis [to prove it].'

Fabricating "scientific" reports to kill off political opponents. You'd think it used to happen in the USSR in the fifties. But this is The Netherlans, 2009. So, and who would be the "scientists" behind the report? These are their names and official titles:

* Radicalization Investigator Hans Moors
* Professor in (Counter)Terrorism Bob de Graaff
* Extreme Rightwing Expert Jaap van Donselaar.

From Radicalization Investigators and Extreme Rightwing Experts you can expect they home in on men like Wilders. But in a world which has seen, oh, around 14,500 islamic terror attacks since 9/11 you'd think a Counterterrorism Professor has better things to do than investigate a guy with blonde hair who has been walking around day and night for several years now with six bodyguards, huh?



MFBB.

PIC OF THE DAY.

Belgian Air Force F-16 being refueled over Afghanistan by a US KC135 tanker.


As old as the F-16 may be, the KC 135 beats it hands down. The KC 135, successor to the piston-driven KC 97, was the USAF's first jet powered aerial refueling tanker, and was derived from the Boeing 707 airliner. When looking at that pic, which still does not project antiquity, it's hard to imagine these tankers have been in service for 52 years now, a feat only accomplished by a handful of other designs. Although maintenance costs are rising steeply (in 2002 it was calculated that one hour of flying time cost 11,000 US$ - that's maintenance cost, not even flying cost), it's still worthwile to keep them in the air - theoretically they could last 80 years (!) - and replace them only gradually. Actually, the whole issue of replacement is a story in itself, with a project of a modified version of the Boeing 767 shot down in 2003 because of charges of corruption in how Boeing was awarded the contract. Yet that company was subsequently able, in 2008, to freeze a possible USAF-Grumman Northrop/EADS deal involving the much-vaunted KC-45A tanker of the latter (in fact a modified Airbus 330). Or, how the feud Boeing/Airbus will never end. Currently, the KC-45A contract seems to be in limbo and USAF may have to rebid it. It all means that the sturdy workhorse above won't disappear soon.



MFBB.