Georg Hegel

As I am rather busy, today’s blog will be very short, but very powerful. Georg Hegel, the 19th century German philosopher mentioned a very interesting and enlightening fact that, alas, our own leaders will not see as my blog hasn’t gone nationwide… yet!

He wrote: “Experience and history teach that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, nor acted upon any lessons that might have been drawn from it.”

Ampers

A open letter to Jack Straw

I have just read an “open letter to Jack Straw” on a blog at this website.

Well written and well worth the read. Within the letter he lists some of the broader evil machinations of the present government and I list them below.

• ID Cards;
• Ever-increasing DNA and Biometric databases;
• Detailed and centralised database structures;
• ‘Communications endpoint monitoring’, to use your charming little phrase;
• 42-days detention;
• Removal of the right to legitimate protest in the vicinity of Parliament;
• One CCTV Camera per 15 Citizens, plus police ANPR systems and police drone aircraft;
• The arrest of a member of Her Majesty’s Opposition, simply for holding the Regime to account;
• ‘Stop and search’ rules that have seen hundreds of thousands stopped, for no result;
• ‘Anti-Terror’ legislation used to freeze Icelandic funds, to monitor bin collections and covertly monitor school applicants;
• Section 76 of the CounterTerrorism Act, making it illegal to photograph a police officer;
• Every email sent and received in this country to be retained.

I want you all to forget that this is the present British Government, and read through this list again. Imagine what you would be saying if you just read, for the first time, that this was being carried out by Robert Magabe in Zimbabwe. You’d be incensed, right?

Ampers.

So you’re the boss?

A question for you, and to the staff in your company: Who pays your wages?

If you say “The directors” give yourself a minus 50 mark. Your directors do not pay your wages. It is your customer who pays your wages. No matter how nice your shareholders are, if there are no customers, your wages will not be paid. Please believe me here!

What do customers really, really want? They want to deal with someone who is going to be honest with them. They want to deal with someone who will give them attentive service up to the sale, and then reliable support after the sale. They want to pay a reasonable price which will enable you to make a reasonable profit.

When your customer phones up, they detest talking to a computer and hate being placed on hold. If this is the only way you can run your support facility they at least want some facts so they can make a decision, such as:.

How many people are in front of them in the queue and what is the estimated waiting time, this will give them a chance to assess whether they would rather ring off and ring back later. This system is available!

They also want to be able to press a button to go into voice mail to leave their number for a phone-back call – yes, this can be programmed in and a few companies have all these facilities. I have personally experienced them. And I was delighted.

But what a customer really, really wants is for the telephone to be answered on the second or third ring and to have a human on the other end.

And for department stores, more assistants to answer shoppers’ questions and to guide them towards what they are looking for. For banks to have more tellers available to serve customers. You get the picture? A store or bank who advertise they have dispensed with the “new ‘traditional’ lack of available staff” will see their share price double almost monthly.

A customer can do without the message “Please hold, your call is important to us”. If it was so important why feed us poor automatic systems? And such poor service?

This is all your customer really, really wants.

But do you really, really care about their wants or their business?

Ampers.

So you want to vote BNP?

First of all, I have no problem with that. They are an official party in Great Britain so you have every right to do so.

But you will never see me giving them my vote. The secondary reason why is that they are really racist. I mean the nasty part, not the term that the Righteous use to brand everyone who doesn’t agree with everything they do.

No, the real reason is that, like the Socialist Party, the Conservative Party and the Liberal-Democrat Party, they are Statist.

Being left or right of centre is not a problem as such. Being extreme left or right of centre is. But the real picture of politics is not a line from left to right but a diamond. For those mathematically inclined, people not only fall on the political x axis, but are also placed on the y axis.

If you are lower down in the diamond, as the three main political parties are (and the BNP) and you believe that the State should not only rule the economy but also your lives, you are a Statist.

However, if you believe that the State should rule the economy but people should rule their own lives then you are a Centist and you fall… guess where? In the centre of the diamond! Once upon a time the Conservatives were Centists, but that was a long time ago. Now, like Labour, the Tories want to rule everything.

The people “at the top of the tree” or, in this case, the diamond, are called Libertarians. A lot of people think Libertarians are anarchists but that is not true. Libertarians believe in very small governments and total independence should fall to the citizen. Where they differ with anarchists is with their core belief which is “everyone should be allowed the freedom to do whatever they want to do as long as it doesn’t interfere with everyone else’s freedom to do whatever they want to do”.

A small example of this is you are free to play your music as loud as you can at three o’clock in the morning, as long as this doesn’t impinge on your neighbour’s right to enjoy a deep sleep at that time. To put this into simple terms, freedom but not at the expense of others or, “freedom with responsibility”.

What this does mean is that many of the laws which govern our daily life would be dispensed with and very few laws would remain. After all, the above rule covers almost everything.

Here is a short political quiz to see where you stand in the diamond.

Ampers.

I wanna tell you a story

Anyone here remember Max Bygraves? Well, I do want to tell you a story but, before I do, I need to explain “Chatham House rules” as this will crop up if you take the second link offered. The Chatham House rules keeps part or all of a meeting off the record “to aid free-thinking”. However, it also allows decisions to be made in secret with no recourse to the people making the decision or the actual decision itself. It is all very secretive. Wikipedia can explain it in depth if you need to know more.

There is an insidious secretive neo-communist organisation called Common Purpose in Britain run by Fabians who look for a world dominating government controlled by a few, enslaving the many. I have heard of this several times over the last few years but matters seem to be coming to a head and I feel it a duty to bring people’s attention to it.

Personally I don’t care a jot about this as I have no children and am sixty-nine years of age. Once I have gone, I have no interest in what happens to the world. However, if you are younger, or have children or grand-children, then I guess you might. This is why I am even bothering to bring this to a wider audience.

Common Purpose is registered as an educational charity and therefore is run by your (taxpayers) money. It trains leaders, in the police, army, civil service and corporate business amongst others. At the leadership courses these “leaders” are indoctrinated to spread the word and make sure they, in turn, indoctrinate others. If you take time out to mull over how the Police have changed over the last decade you will begin to get a picture of the strength of Common Purpose.

If you really are concerned for those who will be left behind – and you should be, the present generations have already fucked up their lives financially, take a trip over to this website and learn for yourself the future that not only is planned for you but is well in the way to reaching fruition!

Ampers

Do you use Firefox?

If you only use the buggy Internet Explorer from Microsoft then I am afraid this article is not for you.

However if, like me, you are a Firefox Browser user, then I will tell you about a new add-on I have discovered called Scrapbook. This add-on is for anyone who uses the Internet for research. It allows you to copy anything from a few words to entire web pages into a folder of your choice under the scrapbook root folder, and adds the date you captured it, and the URL (website address) you captured it from.

I have a general folder for ideas for blogs, a specific folder for any project I am working on, a politics folder, a “Sayings” folder and so on.

I am only touching on its capabilities here to “whet your whistle” but suffice to say it can do so much more and comes with a 51 page (A4/American Quarto) PDF tutorial. Work through that and you will increase your productivity by 100%.

Other add-ons I find useful include “All-In-One Sidebar”, “Foxmarks Bookmark” and “Googlepedia”.

The All-in-One Sidebar creates the sidebar to open your add-ons, history, sites you’ve visited and lots more. Extremely useful.

Foxmarks allows you to synchronise all your bookmarks with your area on their website each session. This will enable you to download them again if you have an accident with your browser and lose them all. It also enables you to synchronise your bookmarks between your home, work and notebook computer – worth its weight in gold.

Googlepedia is also very useful. When you search on Google, all your search info opens up on the left half of your screen and, if there is anything on Wikipedia that matches your search criteria, then a Wikipedia page opens up on the right hand side of the screen.

I use more add-ons but these are the four which I think may be useful to a greater number of people. The rest are particular to my own needs.

As most of you know, Firefox is open-source which means the raw code is available for anyone to look at and copy. Microsoft has copied the Firefox system of tabs along the top for its V.7.xx of Internet Explorer for example. Anyway, I digress. Because all the code is available, thousands of programmers have written add-ons to make Firefox work in a specific way that is of use to them. And these are all available on the Firefox site for anyone to copy. I use twenty, but have come across people who have used more than double that amount.

The following link takes you to the Scrapbook page. There is a button to take you to the Firefox official add-in page to download the add-on (you should only ever download add-ons from the Firefox add-on page) and underneath this is a link to open the PDF Tutorial.

Ampers

An employer who tells it like it is

To All My Valued Employees,

There have been some rumblings around the office about the future of this company, and more specifically, your job. As you know, the economy has changed for the worse and presents many challenges including trying to renegotiate our loans with the bank. However, the good news is this: The economy doesn’t pose a threat to your job. What does threaten your job, however, is the changing political landscape in this country.

However, let me tell you some little tidbits of fact which might help you decide what is in your best interests.

First, while it is easy to spew rhetoric that casts employers against employees, you have to understand that for every business owner there is a “back” story. This “back” story is often neglected and overshadowed by what you see and hear. Sure, you see me park my Mercedes outside. You’ve seen my big home at last years Christmas party. I’m sure, all these flashy icons of luxury conjure up some idealised thoughts about my life.

Mind you, what you don’t see is the “back” story.

I started this company 28 years ago. At that time, I lived in a small one-bedroom studio flat for three years. My entire living area was converted into an office so I could put forth 100% effort into building a company, which by the way, would eventually employ you.

My diet consisted of Pot noodles because every penny I spent went back into this company. I drove a rusty and defective Ford Cortina. I didn’t have time to go out with girls. I stayed home on most weekends, while my friends went out drinking and partying. In fact, I was married to my business – hard work, discipline, and sacrifice.

Meanwhile, my friends got jobs. They worked 40 hours a week and made a modest £40,000 a year and spent every penny they earned. They drove flashy cars and lived in expensive homes and wore fancy designer clothes.

Instead of shopping in Bond Street for the latest hot fashion item, I was trolling through the charity shops extracting any clothing item that didn’t look like it was birthed in the 70′s. My friends refinanced their mortgages and lived a life of luxury. I, however, did not. I put my time, my money, and my life into a business with a vision that eventually, some day, I too, will be able to afford these luxuries my friends supposedly had.

So, while you physically arrive at the office at 9am, mentally check in at about noon, and then leave at 5pm, I don’t. There is no “off” button for me. When you leave the office, you are done and you have a weekend all to yourself. I unfortunately do not have the freedom. I eat, and breathe this company every minute of the day. There is no rest. There is no weekend. There is no happy hour. Every day this business is attached to my hip like a one year old special-needs child. You, of course, only see the fruits of that garden – the nice house, the Mercedes, the vacations … you never realize the “back” story and the sacrifices I’ve made.

Now, the economy is falling apart and I, the person that made all the right decisions and saved his money, have to bail-out all the people who didn’t. The people that overspent their paychecks suddenly feel entitled to the same luxuries that I earned and sacrificed a decade of my life for.

Yes, business ownership has is benefits but the price I’ve paid is steep and not without wounds.

Unfortunately, the cost of running this business, and employing you, is starting to eclipse the threshold of marginal benefit and let me tell you why:

I am being taxed to death and the government thinks I don’t pay enough. I have income tax. Business taxes. Council taxes. VAT taxes. Payroll taxes. Workers compensation taxes. Taxes on taxes. I have to hire an accountant manage all these taxes. Government mandates and regulations and all the accounting that goes with it, now occupy most of my time. On April 6th, I wrote a cheque to the Inland Revenue for £288,000 for quarterly taxes. You know what my “stimulus” cheque was? Zero. Nada. Zilch.

The question I have is this: Who is stimulating the economy? Me, the person who has provided 14 people good paying jobs and serves over 2,200,000 people per year with a flourishing business? Or, the single mother sitting at home pregnant with her fourth child waiting for her next unemployment cheque? Obviously, government feels the latter is the economic stimulus of this country.

The fact is, if I deducted (Read: Stole) 50% of your pay you’d quit and you wouldn’t work here. I mean, why should you? That’s nuts. Who wants to get rewarded only 50% of their hard work? Well, I agree which is why your job is in jeopardy.

Here is what many of you don’t understand … to stimulate the economy you need to stimulate what runs the economy. Had suddenly government mandated to me that I didn’t need to pay taxes, guess what? Instead of depositing that £288,000 into Alastair Darling’s black-hole, I would have spent it, hired more employees, and generated substantial economic growth. My employees would have enjoyed the wealth of that tax cut in the form of promotions and better salaries. But you can forget it now.

When you have a comatose man on the verge of death, you don’t defibrillate and shock his thumb thinking that will bring him back to life, do you? Or, do you defibrillate his heart? Business is at the heart of Britain and always has been. To restart it, you must stimulate it, not kill it. Suddenly, the power brokers in London believe the poor of Britain are the essential drivers of our economic engine. Nothing could be further from the truth and this is the type of change you can keep.

So where am I going with all this?

It’s quite simple.

If any new taxes are levied on me, or my company, my reaction will be swift and simple. I fire you. I fire your co-workers. You can then plead with the government to pay for your mortgage, your car, and your child’s future. Frankly, it isn’t my problem any more.

Then, I will close this company down, move to another country, and retire. You see, I’m done. I’m done with a country that penalises the productive and gives to the unproductive. My motivation to work and to provide jobs will be destroyed, and with it, will be my citizenship.

So, if you lose your job, it won’t be at the hands of the economy; it will be at the hands of a political hurricane that swept through this country, steamrolled the constitution, and will have changed its landscape forever. If that happens, you can find me sitting on a beach, retired, and with no employees to worry about …

Signed,

Henry Stevenson
Managing Director
Stevenson Co Ltd

Disclaimer
I’m not a Lawyer, this is not legal advice. Nor am I a Brain Surgeon, Pastry Chef or Politician. This communication is private and privileged intended only to those individuals marked “To”, “CC” or “BCC”. To the snoopy government agencies such as MI5, MI6 or MI99, or anyone else this mail isn’t being specifically directed to; with all due respect; cordially invited and instructed to PISS OFF!

Ampers

The EU currency may collapse

The Looming Collapse of European Banking
by Gary North

The banking system of Europe is at the edge of the abyss. A brief story by The Telegraph revealed this last week. The original was almost immediately deleted. A new version was substituted.

You can see the original headline on Google:

European banks may need £16.3 trillion bail-out, EC document warns …

There are dozens of these links. I read the story last week. I saved the link. But, lo and behold, when I clicked my saved link on Monday morning, the story did not mention a specific figure.

There was a reason for this. The editors at The Telegraph had taken out the following paragraphs:

European Commission officials have estimated that impaired assets may amount to 44pc of EU bank balance sheets. The Commission estimates that so-called financial instruments in the trading book total £12.3 trillion (13.7 trillion euros), equivalent to about 33pc of EU bank balance sheets.

In addition, so-called ‘available for sale instruments’ worth £4trillion (4.5 trillion euros), or 11pc of balance sheets, are also added by the Commission to arrive at the headline figure of £16.3 trillion.

Fortunately, web sites around the globe have posted the deleted paragraphs.

Read the full article here.

Ampers

Photography and the Law

It is a sad case but now, when I leave the house with my camera I am afraid to photograph Terrorists, Gangsters, Feral children, child molesters and policemen.

According to new anti-terrorist laws you could, if the police decide to prosecute, be interned at Her Majesty’s pleasure, for up to ten years for photographing a policeman.

It is sad that the general photographing public have to categorise the police with terrorists, child molesters and gangsters but I guess you can blame the present government for this.

Ampers.

Spammers are delinquents

I use Gmail, or as it is known to people in the UK, Googlemail.

I use my address to roam constantly all over the Internet and have had the address for as long as Google have offered email through Gmail. I have six other email addresses, one of them has been in operation for about twenty years. They are all fed into Google.

Why do I do this? Simple, because Google has the most useful anti-spamming software around and although I get in the region of a hundred spams a day, Google traps most of them and I doubt if I get more than one spam a month in my IN Box.

The reason spammers are stupid is that they do not weed out all the Gmail addresses from their lists of addresses. Whenever they send spam to someone with Gmail, the recipient never sees it, but it does give Google extra chances to hone their software to perfection. Surely Spammers must fear Google eventually releasing their anti-spamming software to ISPs all over the world?

If they do, the fact that it is almost 100% accurate will mean the end of spammers everywhere.

Stupid bastards!

Ampers.

The British lose their freedom

Slowly, day by day, the Government is bringing in new laws that insidiously take away more and more of our freedoms. Nobody notices, and it will be too late to fight back when we wake up and there are no more rights left.

I am reminded of Pastor Martin Niemöller who wrote And then they came for me. It is interesting that this man died in 1984. when Eric Arthur Blair’s book, written under the pen name of George Orwell; 1984, describes what we in Britain, and in America, are now facing. The “thought police” add to the loss of our freedoms (Carol Thatcher and Prince Harry). Incidentally, if you are left of centre the darlings of the intellegenzia let you get away with it (Jonathan Ross).

Niemöller’s poem is listed below. There are several versions but this was his favourite and the one he preferred to see quoted:

“In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;

And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;

And then they came for the Jews, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;

And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up.”

The essence of Niemöller’s words were put to music by Christy Moore, an American fold singer, in his song Yellow Triangle–which I append below:

It is unfortunate, but the few who are aware of what is going on are not able to fight it, and those who are unaware are too busy fighting to keep body and soul together in these troubled times, so can only in part be blamed for the loss of their independence and freedom. It’s all very tragic.

I read, many years ago, that the EU have plans for switching riot police to different countries to counteract any reluctance of the police to fire on their own kind. For example, the British police will serve in Spain, The Spanish in France, the French in Britain and so on.

The bad news is, switching to voting Conservative at the next election may slow things down a little, but it will not stop this onwards encroachment of our freedoms. Although most of our laws come from the EU, our politicians, unlike those in mainland Europe, don’t pick and choose what is best for their people, ours obey every single instruction from the unelected commissioners in Brussels.

Anyone for a bent banana?

Ampers

Whitney Houston

I only realised, a little while ago, that my two favourite songs from the Contemporary age (for me, at 69, anything after the sixties is contemporary) were both sung by Whitney Houston.

This video of a song was one of those adopted by the 1988 Seoul summer Olympics on their CD of music of the games. It is called One Moment in Time and although showing the dedication of an Olympic participant, I would think it might have also been an example of her own dedication of reaching the top of her profession. Enjoy:

Apart from the singing, the music, in the middle, is lovely.

Ampers.

Astrology

Now here’s a fascinating subject. People love it or hate it, but first a potted history.

Astrology has been around, on earth, for about 10,000 years. In the days of Alexander the Great, Ptolemy wrote a book on the subject (I have read this but 90% of each page consisted of footnotes so I never really got to grips with it). Several astrologers of renown existed in the middle ages and the fact that it has been around for so long indicates that there must be some elements of truth in the subject. This is very potted but a full history can be found in Wikipedia!

I first got involved when I acquired a TI 59 programmable calculator and the attachable printer (PC100C). The calculator had 1,000 program steps and 100 memories and tiny magnetic cards could be used to save your programmes. A friend suggested I wrote an astrology program after I complained I didn’t really know what to do with it. I laughed, Astrology, no way! He explained that drawing an astrological chart was astronomy and the astrological part only came into being when people tried to interpret the chart. OK I said and set to work. In the end, using twelve magnetic cards, I had built a program to work out the planetary positions, with the help of an American nautical ephemeris. “What do I do now?” I asked.

He suggested I came to a meeting and learned to interpret the chart. “No way!” I retorted. “Astrology is not for me!”. When he explained that, in Astrology meetings, there was a ratio of seven girls to one bloke, I was immediately hooked and came along that every evening.

That was how I became involved in this very fascinating subject. After drawing up my chart, the first thing I learned was that I was a Leo and not a Cancerian. It seems that the uninformed go by their sun sign but that is the secondary sign amongst those in the know. It seems that a sun sign is easy to work out, but that divides the world into only twelve groups. The Ascendant is the most important sign, but as there is a new Ascendant every two hours this is too difficult for most to work out. My Ascendant is Leo so, astrologically speaking, I would be known as “A Leo with sun in Cancer”. This then divides the world into 144 groups. A little more accurate than the original twelve.

The third sign that is important in one’s make-up is the moon. This now divides the world into 1,728 groups. Then we have the Moon’s node, the Mid-heaven, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Pluto. Taking the position of each of these factors now divides the world into 8,916,100,448,256 groups (nearly nine trillion and there are only six billion people in the world).

Then we have the house systems which multiplies the above by another 12, and all the specific angles between the planetary bodies which could then give many dozens of extra amounts to multiply our base 12 by. So the short answer is NO, astrology does not divide the world into twelve groups of people. Only people unaware of the subject do that.

It is my own believe that the main problem with astrology is astrologers or, to put it in a kinder way, I just don’t think the human race is ready for the accurate knowledge that astrology may one day put at our fingertips. Mind you, when I was younger and went to parties, I always had all the woman surrounding me asking me to guess (usually very accurately) what they were like. Alas my knowledge, much to Pam’s relief, has all but disappeared.

There is a group in America called Clairvision who have built a web charting service which is both accurate and free. But bear in mind that you need the place of birth data (town or village is usually enough), your date of birth, and your accurate time of birth. Bearing in mind the moon moving through up to three signs in a day, and the Ascendant moving through twelve signs in a day, the more accurate you can make this the better. Certainly try and get it within at least a quarter of an hour. Go on, build your chart here! Clairvision also run a free on-line astrology course. When downloading the interpretation of your chart, bear in mind that it requires skilful interpretation. However, it will give you an overall picture of yourself. Tip: The tighter the aspects the stronger the trait may be applied. Don’t worry, that will make sense when you start to read the interpretation.

Carl Gustav Jung allowed his counselling staff to use astrology. But only as a guide for asking questions. Nevertheless, a skilful councillor could ascertain as much about the client within an hour’s session as others not using astrology could ascertain in three sessions.

It has to be remembered that the astrological chart is a map of the heavens at the moment of birth only. During one’s upbringing, factors could change through the interaction with parents, siblings, friends, teachers, colleagues and employers. Not to mention one’s physical environment.

Changes can also come from within when one realises they have a trait which they are not entirely happy with. Think of your birth chart as a map, without which you could not find your way to your chosen destination. The chart shows you which traits you may want to change.

Ampers.

Snippets of the day

My blogs are kept short as they are on the Internet and it is not beyond a reader investigating further if my jottings have awakened an interest for further knowledge. So, dear reader, don’t be lazy and as “Sergent Carter” said to “Inspector Regan” in The Sweeny, in the sixties, “Let your fingers do the walking” although in this case it referred to the printed Yellow Pages!

Jacqui Smith’s second home – I will let yesterday’s newspaper tell this story…

Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith has claimed more than £116,000 in Commons expenses for a ‘second home’ while effectively lodging with her sister.

Ms Smith claims the maximum parliamentary second-home allowance, currently a tax-free £24,006 a year, on the detached house in her West Midlands constituency, where her husband and two young children live and which she bought for £300,000 five years ago.

She is able to do so because she has told the Commons authorities that her ‘main home’ is a house in London owned solely by her sister, Sara, where she stays on some weekdays.

Clint Eastwood – has just made another successful film; Gran Torino. Clint, at 78 years of age, is showing no signs of slowing down! Long may he reign! His career spans 53 years of acting and 37 years directing! This film is what Hollywood terms as a low budget film ($30M) and, amazingly, only took 32 days to complete. It almost recovered its cost on the first weekend ($1M short) and its debut was at number one! It has since gone on to make over 300% profit in a matter of weeks!

The film doesn’t make a big deal with continuity, and in one scene there is a doll used for a baby, instantly recognisable. Clint looks, believe it or not, 78 years old! He doesn’t care about much other than making a good, no great, film!

Google and read the reviews, you will see this is a film to go to, and ladies, over 50% of the audience are women. And whenever Clint does something great, just listen to the geriatric audience cheering! I’ll be amongst them soon!

University of the Third Age, or U3A as it is called for short. No, this is not something that Tony Blair thought up with his “third way” ideas! U3A started out in France but has now become international. It is for people who have retired and the general idea is that those who have good knowledge of any particular subject impart their knowledge to others who wish to learn more about the subject.

Pam and I attend the Hampstead U3A group which hires the basement of the old Belsize Park Town Hall. They have dozens of subjects which range from learning languages, to art and drawing, to politics and history and a huge gamut of other subjects. Each class lasts for one hour and classes start and around 10:00 am and go through to 4:00 pm Mondays to Fridays.

A huge lecture theatre is hired on Monday mornings and lectures this year have been by the Alison Weir (author and Historian), Tony Palmer (film-maker) Steve Norris (politician) Peter Shore (writer-critic) Lord Butler (civil servant), Lord Adair Turner (climate change) and so on. There is an old African tribal saying “the death of an old person is like the burning of a library” (Words slightly changed to be more meaningful.)

Authors and Google – Are you thinking of writing a novel? Then why not use Google Maps to portray accurate information if you are writing about a country or a city you have never been to. Google Street Scenes will help you bring your article to life and convince those who have been there that you have as well. Use the Google search engine to find out more about the area you are writing about. Use Google Trends to find out what the masses are thinking on any particular subject. Everyone has one good book in them, start writing!

Racism – I think we make too much fuss about racism. I don’t hate people from the Indian continent because of the Pakistanis hated for Indians, or because of the caste system of segregation both in India and Iran. Or the hatred between the Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims in Iraq. Or the apartheid situation between tribes in Africa, such as the Mashona hating the Matebele in Zimbabwe, or the mass extermination of the Tutsis by the Hutu in Rwanda (500,000 killed in 100 days in 1994).

But if one white Englishman says “damn you” to one militant black in this country all hell breaks loose. Incidentally, was the apartheid in South Africa worse than the one in Zimbabwe or Rwanda? Yes! According to the media.

The Rwandan Genocide was the 1994 mass killing of hundreds of thousands of Rwanda’s Tutsis by Hutu militia. Over the course of approximately 100 days, from the assassination of Juvénal Habyarimana on 6 April up until mid July, at least 500,000 people were killed. Most estimates indicate a death toll between 800,000 and 1,000,000.

Last but not least; Esperanto – Many of you will have thought Esperanto is dead. But it isn’t and the reason why it has never made the mainstream is very much the same reason why Linux has not become more popular as a computer operating system. The reason is quite simple, it is controlled by the Geeks.

The geeks do not want the “great unwashed” to take part. Yes they want it to grow, but slowly so they can keep control.

So if it is not widely used, how do they benefit? The answer is quite simple really. Because it is a small community, people are more friendly. Someone who speaks Esperanto can go anywhere in the world without knowing the country’s language. They contact the local Esperanto group and the attend a meeting when they get there. People at the meeting welcome them and offer to show them around. They only need to know Esperanto which is the easiest language in the world to learn. For example, There are no irregular verbs or having to think if a word is masculine or feminine – remember trying to learn French or Italian?

If you type “Esperanto” into your search engine you will get up to 2,500,000 hits! More than enough to show you the language is alive and well, and living on the Internet!

The umbrella organisation is called Universala Esperanto-Asocio and the British branch is known as Esperanto-Asocio de Brito.

You can learn the language through books, CDs or web courses and once you have learned, you can email like-minded people in every country in the world. And visit them on holiday!

Many years ago an experiment was tried. Two identically bright classes of school children were chosen. One learned Esperanto in their first year, and French in year two and year three. The other class learned only French for the three years. Guess which children could speak French better? Yes, the ones which learnt Esperanto first.

This doesn’t mean that knowing Esperanto helped them learn French better, but by knowing two languages (English and Esperanto) they had more knowledge of language differences to draw from as it is well known that a third language is always easier to learn than a second language.

The age of steam

The train arriving at Kings Cross was thirty minutes late.

But then, dear reader, this was on the 7^th February 2009. Trains are expected to arrive late so there was no point in complaining.

This was “The Talisman”, a £30,000,000

steam train financed and built by enthusiasts from all over and took eighteen years to complete. After the critics said the project would never be completed!

Although the BBC have called it “The Tornado”, readers will see from my photograph above that it is not the name on the front of the train. (I have since received a comment explaining that the train is called “The Talisman” and the engine alone is called “The Tornado”. All very confusing. As the engine arrived pulling the carriages, I will keep the name of “The Talisman”.)

These are just a small amount of the enthusiasts awaiting the arrival of this special train. The crowds stretched from the entrance, where it was the most dense, all the way up both sides right to the end of each platform! There were a lot of people there, believe me! When we decided to leave, it took us ten minutes to get out of the platform entrance! It was bitterly cold but for the onlookers here, I doubt if a single person noticed!

Ampers.

Ampers’ Rants on Google

I was browsing through Google Analytics and asked it for a breakdown of browsers used this last four weeks and received the following which surprised me.

Visits
Windows 56.37%
Linux 37.42%
Macintosh 5.60%
(not set) 0.23%
iPhone 0.23%
PalmOS 0.05%
Playstation-3 0.05%
SymbianOS 0.05%

I was surprised at the number of people who were Linux users as opposed to those using the Apple Mac. I was also surprised to see how many as a percentage over those that used Windows.

Quite frankly, I thought Google had broken down somewhere along the way.

Then I realised that my readers come from (at the last count in December) sixty-one countries throughout the world. A lot of these countries were poorer and it stood to reason that those people would want an operating system that allowed them a choice of nearly twenty thousand free programs to use.

Everybody says Linux is too complex to use, but these are stories put out by people involved with the Windows industry, and from Windows users who were either too lazy to relearn a new operating system, or those who couldn’t admit they were stupid enough to buy all the software they used.

People are also a lot brighter in the third world than Westerners give them credit for. They are willing to learn, especially when it means it will make their life easier. Take South Africa for instance. When I lived there, English and Afrikaans were the two dominant official languages. Most blacks could speak their native dialect, as well as English and Afrikaans, and depending on what part of South Africa they lived, either Zulu or Xhosa. Four Languages, sometimes five! It got them by everywhere they went. And made it easier to get jobs. Even now, in Namibia, Afrikaans is the most widely spoken language as it is the “Esperanto” of fourteen million people there.

Third world peoples will learn Linux if it means real benefits for them. So, yes, perhaps Google isn’t broken. I was approaching my 68^th birthday when I decided to move over to Linux and decided which to use when I loaded all the names into “Google Trends” and found Ubuntu was the main flavour of the day. So its also OK for decrepit old geezers like me.

Ampers

A One-Eyed Scottish Idiot?

… or, would I vote for Clarkson?

For those overseas who have not heard of Jeremy Clarkson, and there cannot be many as his programme “Top Gear” is syndicated throughout the world, You may have heard of the furore in the media today because of his comments about our present Prime Minister, calling him “a One-Eyed Scottish Idiot”. This has upset a lot of the “Righteous” in this country but Gordon Brown has only one working eye. Gordon Brown is Scottish. And, Gordon Brown is an idiot. I cannot see what the fuss is all about.

I will explain why I would vote for him.

But before, I will tell you that there is a group, on Facebook, entitled “Jeremy Clarkson should be Prime Minister” which has 451,647 members at the time of writing this!

Now, dear reader, what do you think is the most important attribute of a Prime Minister? A Prime Minister does not have to really know anything about running a country. He does, however, have to know how to choose the right person for the job and be able to persuade that person to join his team. He has to be able to get on with the team, and he needs to be able to take a majority of the country with him.

Jeremy Clarkson works well with his team. He comes over as a little domineering but Richard and James not only have stuck with him over the years, but they genuinely seem to like him. He calls a spade a spade and does not tolerate the “Righteous”, or their Political Correctness, and their ‘Ealth ‘n’ Safety rubbish.

I am not saying whether he would be great, or even good as a prime minister but if you take a few minutes out to examine the merits of the 646 MPs now sitting I think you will agree that, although Jeremy would not make an ideal choice, he would be better than any one of the others.

This really shows what a sorry state we have come to in Britain – when setting up Clarkson against every one of our MPs, he seems to come out better than any!

It is no wonder that so many English people are emigrating to other countries. I would go as well, if I could afford to.

Ampers

Golliwogs

What a lot of fuss about nothing. It seems Carol did not call anyone a golliwog. All she said in private, was that a tennis players hair reminded her of a golliwog. Hello! I can’t see anything racist about that? Can you?

Those of you who read Eric Arthur Blair’s book 1984 (written under his pen name – George Orwell) will remember it was a lot about “thought police”. Well folks, he didn’t get it wrong… just a little early. The thought police are based in the BBC but are spreading quickly.

And there is a new law coming out on the 16^th February which gives a maximum of ten years imprisonment for photographing an English policeman (amongst other things). I suppose that means they can beat up members of the public with impunity. Come to think of it, if a policeman walks up to a person and pushes a knife in his stomach and rips it open, and you photograph him in the act, watch out – it’s ten years inside for you! Tourists who want to photograph a London Bobby, beware. You do so at your peril.

Too young to know what a golliwog is? Here’s the UK website!

Ampers

The sledge accident

First of all, look forward to a ban on tobogganing in all council parks. It will come I am sure of it.

But this is not what this blog is all about as we are all only too aware of the busy-bodies who try to ruin everyone’s well-being and fun.

I was listening to a young girl who was a friend of the girl who died, and she says she pulled out of going as she was probably too frightened. This led me to thinking about the upper classes seeming to have a death wish back in the days of Empire. When growing up these children would play dangerous games that often got them killed and the strongest survived. This is OK if everyone in a peer group joins in with the rest of them. The strongest and luckiest would survive.

But in the case of our tobogganers, the brave girl died and the timid girl survived. It makes me wonder if the human race may be full of timid ones and the bravest don’t survive.

Britain had already lost the cream of its youth in the First World War where millions died in the trenches. Then there was the Second World War which, although not as deadly as the First World War in numbers killed, did take more of our cream.

Nowadays the Army find recruitment more difficult but there are some brave people around and they get shipped off to Afghanistan to be killed by our politicians who wont spend money for the right type of safety equipment and clothing. I am sure you have heard of soldiers buying their own boots as the army issue ones are crap!

It’s no wonder we are in the mess we are in.

Ampers

PS Just learned a council has banned children in snow filled parks.

0800 v 0845 x 0870 (UK Specific)

If you are not UK based – then I feel sure their are equivalent rip-offs in your country!

Companies who want your business and offer an 0800 (free) number are the one’s I tend to go for. Those who offer an 0870 number are those who really don’t care whether you buy or not – they make money out of people who enquire (cash back on the phone call) and usually give you the run around before putting you through to the department you need to speak to.

Companies who offer 0845 (supposedly a local call charge) haven’t yet worked out that a local call, and a national call for many of us is free as we pay an all-inclusive bill. If they haven’t worked that out, I am unlikely to buy anything from them!

Sometimes these latter companies put up an argument that they need the automatic routing of these calls to their nearest local branch. Absolute rubbish in many cases as you are just put through to a sales call-centre!

I have no problem with help lines using higher cost numbers, as long as that doesn’t also include an annual fee for the help desk, of course.

If a company does offer an 0870 number, and there are no other companies offering an 0800 number and you have to use them, visit saynoto0870.com and see if you can get an 01xx, 02xx or 03xx number for that same company, there are hundreds and hundreds on the site.

Ampers

What does Cloud Computing really mean?

Something I have never been quite sure of, and as Cloud Computing will become more widely spread over the next decade, I thought I would investigate.

The best article has only just appeared on Zdnet and explodes five myths about Cloud Computing. I have copied the beginning here, and you can click on the link below to read the entire article which you may find of interest.

Five cloud computing myths exploded
By Cath Everett ZDNet.co.uk
Posted on ZDNet News: Feb 02, 2009 5:50:03 AM

Cloud computing is one of the most overhyped phenomena to have hit the IT industry in a long time. It is a business model that definitely has its advantages. The trouble is vendors of all sizes and stripes are so desperate for a piece of the cloud action, they are willing to blur distinctions and fudge definitions for their own ends.

Their headlong pursuit has saddled cloud computing with so many misconceptions that it is sometimes difficult for customers to make informed business choices. ZDNet UK has looked at the most common myths, and debunks five of them here. {Read more}

Ampers.

What is banking?

This blog just consists of three quotes.

The first is by Sir Joshiah Stamp. Director of the Bank of England, 1928-1941 (reputed to be the second richest man in England at the time).

“Banking was conceived in iniquity and born in sin. Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create money, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough money to buy it back again.

“Take this great power away from them and all great fortunes like mine will disappear, for then this would be a better and happier world to live in. But if you want to continue to be slaves of the banks and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers continue to create money and control credit.”

A slightly shorter one from a Russian that bears out Sir Joshiah’s remarks is from Leo Tolstoy who said:

“Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal, and there is no human relation between master and slave.”

And finally, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote:

“None are more enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

Ampers

Let go, move on

One of the most difficult things for a human to do is to let go, and move on. In the British Isles, the Irish find this difficult, in the Middle East, both the Israelis and the Palestinians find it almost impossible. In America, the “African Americans” are too concerned with the slave trade which ended nearly two centuries ago and everyone who had anything to do with it are now dead, as are their children and their grandchildren. Let go, and move on.

I also find it sad that the black American cannot let Africa go and just call themselves Americans. The British Americans, the Swedish Americans, the German Americans call themselves plain Americans and aren’t hung up about it. Let go, and move on.

Then when marriages break up, spouses hate each other, some for ever. Neighbours have long feuds over the height of a hedge. And, if I wanted to bore you all to tears, I could go on and on – but by now, I feel sure you get my drift. Let go, and move on!

I can honestly say that one of the major lessons I learned as a young man is how to let go and move on. I hated a cousin very much, but when I learned about letting go from a Tony Robinson seminar I followed his plan. I contacted the cousin and said that, although it would be best to continue our separate ways, I no longer hated him. That unsettled him, but it terminated the hatred I felt, and I felt so much better. And felt even more happy when I imagined what this may have done to him. But that wasn’t very nice of me and detracts from what I am trying to tell you – but I am only human!

Hating destroys one’s life, tenses one up, and consumes one’s time. Let go, and move on.

Ampers.