Obsession - and its' not a perfume

I have lately come across  a book called 'Double Standards - The Rudolf Hess Cover-Up'

And I cannot decide what to make of it. Folk that I hold dear are not apparently interested. My elder son is 'backed up' with his reading, and the only historian I actually know won't respond to me.

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I was vaguely aware of Rudolf Hess. You could argue that his mission dropped him into my back yard. He kind of crash dived barely a few miles from where I live, at Eaglesham. That is not where I live, it is where he crashed.

Winston Churchill admitted that Rudolf Hess was on a peace mission. It is also near irrefutable that the day after he arrived, corresponds to a cessation of the Blitz, the Nazi bombing of British Cities. At least for a few years until they invented the V1 and the V2,

I find that to be odd to say the least.

It is almost saying that Churchill was the the most brilliant strategist the world has ever known, on the basis that both the US and the USSR came to our defence, when neither was there initially. It seems to say that Barbarossa was, perhaps, allowed to proceed by Churchill. That the lack of a mutual blitz was a peace of sorts. That that was a done deal.

Let it be quite plain, as far as I can tell Rudolf Hess kind of co-wrote Mien Kapf. He is not a nice person.

The interesting point about this is that, even in war, politicians discuss stuff by back door methods. And apparently arm wrestle with each other too.

I am left, no wiser than I was before. I, sort of, think that what the authors have to say is reasonable, before they stretch the limits with body doubles and the like. The facts they present are pretty persuasive, the conclusions they reach, a tad less so.

I would have liked the views of others before I posted this, but none were forthcoming.

Idiots

I am sorry to go off at a tangent - part three of 'Thoughts on Extremism' - will follow shortly.

However, tangent it is. And it is the tangent that interests me right now.

I have a genuine difficulty with folk that distance themselves from reality. Almost as much as the folk that twist reality to their own ends - more about them later.

But firstly let us consider comfort zones.

There are two sides to this arguement. There are those that are never happy unless there is an apocalypse just around the corner, and there are those that would deny it until hell freezes over.

It is a dichotomy of human belief. And the idiots are winning.

I doubt that either extreme is mainstream, as it were. There are the libertarians on the one hand, who say we are all responsible for ourselves, and have a huge difficulty in constructing a world that would meet our needs. Or the communists who actually were given the chance and fucked it up.

But, here is the beef. Why does it seem to be the case that the political right wing wants to deny Climate Change?

There is an exceptionally poor comment on Liberal Conspiracy that says this:

So there is a hidden political motive behind these greens, which brings us back to the watermelons – Green on the outside, Red when you look below the surface.

Eh!

I am sort of against global warming. And I do think quite a lot of it is anthropogenic.

Does that entitle someone to describe me as a watermelon?

There is a fairly robust amount of evidence that we are killing ourselves. It seems to me that political dinosaurs are unwilling to even take out an insurance policy against that possibility.

I do not have a lot of respect for idiots. Avoidance of risk strikes me as a 'good thing'.

For they have a certainty that I do not share.

Thoughts on Extremism and 24/7 News Part Two

I am too new to this game of blogging to have sophisticated options. So, this will have to be a mind game, rather than a graphic.

Imagine, if you like, that there was a long standing population in a country. Imagine, if you will it was 100% of that perfect state and contained 100% perfect people.

( "Shut up at the back! You are supposed to be imagining an imaginary Scotland circa 1958.")

But things in that idyll were going a little wrong. How shall we put it? Even in a period of less than complete employment folk were not willing to do the necessary jobs, such as driving buses and suchlike.

And so.

When I was at Primary School, I lived close enough to go home for lunch. I was walking up a busy street when some idiotic bully pushed me towards a bus. I hit my head on the wheel arch - folk say that explains a lot about me - however in that prelapsarian age I bounced off and walked away. The bus conductor - remember them - came rushing after me and introduced me to the driver. He was the first Sikh I ever met and he explained to me, in a genuinely odd English accent, for it was genuinely English, that, and I paraphrase, as I had hit my head on his bus then I, or my mother would perhaps have a claim against Glasgow Corporation, and that if he were to give me advice he would suggest that I proceeded with such a claim, should I suffer at all from the impact of my head against his bus.

I do not know whether I took that in or not, in the detail I have outlined, but it is a reasonable summary of what took place.

Of course, I took it no further.

It was a childhood bruise, and anyway it was the bully what done it.

For a while, the buses and tramcars appeared exclusively to be driven and even conductored by guys in Turbans and rather large West Indian women.

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That was my perception at the time. But it didn't last long. Gradually the drivers became white again, and the conductors, well they disappeared. (Note to self - this is probably your memory playing tricks, conductors were around for ages after that.)

And the assumption that my childish mind made was that they had 'gone home'. If, to be fair, my childish mind thought about it at all.

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But that was not true.

Folk that came here on Windrush and the like came here because in those days even being a bus driver, and I am speculating here, had an LLB Hons, yet it was better than you could do in India and Pakistan, moneywise.

But my chum the bus driver was never going to just be a bus driver. Was he?

There would be opportunities for him in any meritocratic society, whether it was to inspector of buses or QC.

I'd like to know that guys life story, for it touched mine.

And I'd like to think it encapsulates integration.

Open season guys....

Thoughts on Extremism and 24/7 News Part One

It seems odd to me that comparatively minor groups of people are able to manipulate the public psyche as much as they do. There are two groups of people that meet the criteria that I want to discuss.

The first, the subject of this post, is what I would describe as folk that would have been marginalised in a pre-digital world. The second is the 24/7 nature of News, or more to the point, the derivatives of that cycle that are it's bastard children, commentary. The third post will try to pull these two threads together.

So, first things first.

Do you know your BDSM from your BMSD? Do you know who or what Al Majaharoun were? Or how Islam4UK appear to be their new facade? Do you know what the EDL actually stands for? Or what the heck, in terms of absolute positioning, makes the AFL any different from the EDL?

Do you know whether the Euston Manifesto was a claim that liberal intervention in Iraq was entirely justified, or whether it was a request for a plinth for William Stanier FRS who built some rather intersting steam locomotives for the LMS. (And if the latter half of that sentence means you are going, what? You should read the first half again.)

This is, if you like, a journey to the Tir Nan Og of British politics, to a land that sure ain't Kansas.

But, it is an interesting journey into a developing field of exclusives of one sort or another, with a few honourable exceptions.

I am going to try to explain how a flight trip though this miasma left me less sure, less certain than I ever did before.

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The playground, the climbing frame if you like, for all of this marginal political growth is directly traceable back to this lunatic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ramzi_Yousef.gif

And then, of course we had 9/11 and 7/7 and Madrid. Not to mention, because Western media don't seem to see it as the same thing, Mumbai.

And the folk that did these things - and for lack of doubt, these evil fuckers - are supposed to be embraced into a general world conflict between Muslims and the rest of us?

And yet, the arguement between Muslims is now an enormous civil war. The people who committed the crimes against New York, London, Madrid and Mumbai now perpetrate them by killing Muslims in Pakistan and Afghanistan, not to mention Iraq. For the fundamentalists are killers in the name of Allah. And they kill Muslims, almost now exclusively, that disagree with them. I, for one see them not as Nazis, which is the standardised insult for them. I see them as Pol Pot wannabes.

However, leaving my views aside, there are always people that know better than me.

Here is another little groupiscule, another minor member of the body politic, that seems to find it difficult to condemn the murder of fellow Muslims. They are the brain dead mob, and mob it is, that is led by Anjem Choudary:

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/137481/-British-soldiers-are-going-to-hell-

Who exactly is feeding on whom?

So, my question is this?

Why should anyone, you or me or anyone else, care about any of these media inflated nonentities? Why should we care if one idiot says that tommorrow it would be a vast improvement if we became a fascist state or another lunatic said, come tommorrow, said it would be really cool to be part of the caliphate?

I'd suggest to you, dear reader, that neither is a realistic option. It's called democracy, and it is all we have got.