The BNP's Nick Griffin's impending airing on BBC television

There has been a lot of debate about this subject the packets have been flying all over the internet regarding it. First off the BNP have upset the military by using iconography of great British achievements such as the "Spitfire" and struggles that our nation has faced and won through.... the irony is that the BNP are closer to Nazi's than most people realise......


which in turn has upset the top brass. They aren't too happy about the BNP trying to bask in the glory of days gone by......even if it is through a wrongly perceived association and nothing more......

BUT then to add insult to injury they have been invited onto "Question Time" at the BBC.... I can see the BBC's point of view on this that they have to be impartial and they are right in making their decision.... but the decision isn't really in their hands.... The government (pah) should decide if a Fascist and openly racist party should get any airtime....fascism and racism are never acceptable even if they are elected by the voting public.... and Nick Griffin's attempt to alter the perception of his party by allowing ethnic groups into his party is laughable..... first off who in their right mind would consider joining the BNP if they were non caucasian or non British (as they put it), and indeed who in their right mind belonging to an ethnic minority or not would want to join a party that has such disgusting ideals ? ....so opening up the party to the very people they revile proves nothing, except dotting the legal I's and crossing the legal T's...

Personally I think the BNP should be given the same air time as any other party, if only to expose their sinister and racist views to the wider public, because the only public reaction to such obvious hate and revulsion is to marginalise their political standing.... Of course the BNP will always have some kind of following because there are people out there who are so narrow minded and set in their ways to even consider the wider view or the feelings and rights of other people and they will remain that way .....lost in their own ignorance and misplaced fear, I fear..... but that's why we fought the last war to free the world of fascism's grip on some societies, which we succeeded in doing but at great cost.... the flip side of that coin is that in a free and democratic society there is room for everybody even fascists and racists, the trick is in not letting them have any power or the right to exercise their views in public..... EVER !!

I remember once whilst I was serving in Germany my then wife and I had to go to the NAAFI, so I parked up the car nearby and we had to walk through a large crowd to get there, I didn't think anything of it, but once we had finished shopping and we were on our way back we noticed the streets were wet, which was pretty strange for mid summer in Germany, we found out later that we had walked through a pro neo-nazi rally/demonstration and it had been dispersed with water cannon !!! another 10 or so minutes and we would have been in that !! The only other time I noticed a slight tinge of Nazi like tendencies was when a friend called Paddy McGaughy (my ex should remember him...lol) and I decided to stop off for a pint at a lovely gastatte in the woods, we walked in, in our uniform and you know that sinking feeling when you walk into a place and everything goes quiet.... almost along the lines of a western saloon when the honky tonk piano player stops playing and dives for cover ? Well we could see exactly why.... plastered all over the walls were portraits of Himmler, Hitler, Arian figures and yes even swastika's .... needless to say we didn't stop very long and neither did we think we would be served...... ahhhh memories .... ;¬)

addendum :-

I've just seen Nick Griffin being hammered on "Question Time" on a BBC leaked video .....just as I thought the man has no scruples or honour and has the morals of a dog ....

Only four days left !!!

Until British Summer Time officially ends !! mind you with the rate the leaves are dropping off the trees around these parts it ended weeks ago. It's not been a very spectacular summer, we could count on one hand the days in which we had unbroken sunshine.... Global warming it isn't, Global dampening more like... I've read with interest the articles about global warming and how we are entering the beginning of the end and the next stage is the "tipping point" after which there is no going back. I had to laugh at the drowning puppies advert the government placed where a father is reading a CO2 story to his daughter while she is all snuggled up in bed, you can imagine all the 5 and 6 year old's turning lights off to "stop the puppies drowning".... but I guess I wasn't the demographic they were aiming the advert at.... They may as well have said "all the sweet shops will have to close down because they will be underwater" that probably would have hit home harder.... it's a confusing time for kids, they are getting bombarded with "eco issues" what with recycling and CO2 emissions and retreating ice caps.... and although I'm not against cutting back on what we as a nation and species squander in the form of energy, the whole thing seems a little desperate.... The thing is for every eco climate scientist there is another one saying the precise opposite... I've got to be honest here my personal opinion is that yes humans have polluted the planet, but I think it would be very big headed of us to think that because of our industrious nature we're on the verge of collapsing mother Earth's fragile weather systems. There have been far more cataclysmic events in Earth's history which have released phenomenal amounts of pollutants into the atmosphere and oh look ... we are still here.....

The scientists are looking at very recent data such as retreating ice caps, and CO2 concentrations but historical data shows that retreating ice caps are nothing new, and high CO2 concentrations are nothing new either...

But back to the ice caps, historically every 70 or 80 years they retreat then start to come back, it's on the record in black and white on ship's logs taken from Whaling ships and other ocean going vessels ......granted one of the major impacts of this cycle, would be if the Ocean Conveyor current switched off but the Ocean Conveyor has stopped flowing in the past - 8,200 years ago and 12,700 years ago - in an event associated with the start of an ice age. (yes our planet has had ice ages before !!! it's true...) 

but lets explode the "if the polar ice caps melt we'll all drown" myth .....melting sea ice will not have an impact on sea levels as it already displaces its own weight in water, you can test that theory yourself by filling up a glass with ice cubes and pouring hot water on them to a fixed level... come back 20 minutes later and low and behold the ice has melted but the water level hasn't changed ...... but why pay attention to hard provable science, when the world is running around like chickens with their heads cut off saying when the ice caps melt we'll drown all the puppies.... I think not

(ice melting from land masses will effect sea levels, but the major ice sheets which  are already in the sea won't... just to clarify ;¬) )

Helping with homework and Afghanistan

I've been helping my step daughter with one Robert Browning poem

 and one Wilfred Owen poem and their translation  or what the poet was trying to say into more modern English, it's been a while since I've read any Robert Browning but I've enjoyed putting my ten penneth worth in .... it certainly exercises the grey cells putting things into context and turning a poem which at first glance seems distant and boring into something lively and real.... I've got to admit I'm not particularly a Robert Browning fan, but it's interesting eeking out the meaning behind the poems :) Wilfred Owen however strikes a chord with me ......

The only other thing of note besides making raspberry jelly with grapes with Freya today..... was a rather amusing email from a military recruitment agency head hunting for somebody with IT LAN/WAN skills and also with a military background preferably Royal Signals.... they are looking for somebody to head up the technical WAN/LAN side working with the Royal Signals under the ISAF comms group in Kabul.... it pays handsomely at £278 a day (yes that's over £8000 a month salary it's a daily rate so 30 days) .... and they stipulate it's "unarmed" however it comes with accommodation,food, free flights and insurance.... you have to wonder if it's a tad dangerous at £8000 a month salary....(hmmmmmmm.... I wonder who I would be replacing and did he fly back to Brize Norton in a box ...or several boxes ...?)

After all reconfiguring a Cisco router or re-installing a Windows Server isn't "that" fraught with danger...you might drop a server on your finger whilst moving  it, or slice your hand open on a badly machined bit of metal work but that's about it really......

So that only leaves bombs, bullets and IED's.... I've never actually managed an Ethernet network under fire... and to be honest with you it's not up there with swimming with dolphins or spending a night with Angelina Jolie whilst Brad Pitt films on location across the other side of the world.... I did however "think" about it for a short while.... over £8000 a month is VERY tempting but £8000 a month and being brown bread is pretty  much completely UNattractive from a life point of view ;¬) ... and lets face it, you don't get any medals for increasing bandwidth on a WAN in Afghanistan... you just end up being broadcast all over the news as some unfortunate/greedy civilian who is much shorter than when he flew out there and has no need of a hat...or has inherited air conditioning of the skull courtesy of a Russian made 7.62mm round or worse.....

So basically no amount of money would tempt me out there.... I guess I'm simply not greedy .... or stupid enough...  bravery doesn't come into it ...... bravery is going out there on a soldiers pay, which kind of makes the whole thing rather obscene really.... in two months I would have earned an average infantry soldiers entire yearly pay......without so much as putting my life on the line in comparison .......makes you think doesn't it.... the  military are willing to pay obscene amounts of money for civilian contractors but not the men who put their lives on the line out there on a daily basis  ?

The contract is initially for 6 months but has the possibility of stretching to two and a half years, that's 912 days @ £278 a day, which comes to just over 1/4 of a million for just over 2 years work......and I doubt if I had decided to go for the position that I would have been the only IT comms/security specialist out there ......