I don’t see myself as a Luddite but something about the obsession for accuracy these days is starting to piss me off. When I was being educated, on the occasional times I deigned to attend that is, there was always some bright spark who could quote Pi to god knows how many decimal places. To my mind, Pi is generally 3.14 - Usually, I am more than happy with Pi being 3.

Bear with me, this is going somewhere.

It’s all the fault of the sodding electronic calculator. See back when I was younger than I ever really was, there were slide rules, and a slide rule looked like this:

I appreciate that many people reading this won’t have ever used a slide rule in anger, but the principal behind them is that most of the time, you more or less guess the answer, as opposed to have it displayed to 9 decimal places in monocolour LCD lettering. Look up a little from here… See the third scale down? Just to the right of the 3? There’s Pi marked. It’s marked roughly between 3.1 and 3.2 - It’s about 3.15 in fact. If you want to multiply Pi by 3 you pop the two numbers together on the correct scales and read off about 9.45 on the result scale; if you want to multiply it by 30, you multiply that by 10 in your head… If you want to multiply it by 3 million, you do the same only with more zeroes and your error rate has gone up considerably, but it doesn’t matter much really, does it?

Why is this annoying me? Apart from the fact that I want to shoot people who can quote Pi to more than 6 places? Well it’s the post office, that’s what it is. They have digital scales now, and when the parcel you are posting weighs 501 grammes, they charge you for over 500 grammes. Generally speaking by that point, I just rip a corner off and make them re-weigh it but even so, when did we become so obsessed with this “down the nearest gramme” accuracy? I don’t like it. Make them stop. I am not even going to start ranting about their new letter size measurement devices which very much depend on the operator’s skill at getting parcels through a little plastic measuring slot - Well I am not going to rant YET, at any rate.

I want markets back where they plonked stuff on scales and weighed it in pounds. If it was 4.4 pounds, and cost 30p a pound, they’d charge you about £1. 30 because that was roughly what 4.4 * 30 is (a slide rule would confirm this to you, if you were to ask it, especially a W.H.Smiths one with the little clear slider thing missing like most of them are these days). These days they pop things on digital scales, tell the scales that the things you want cost 78p per 100 grammes, and when it weighs 264.5g it prints a label that says £2.08 (yes, the bastards round it up too).

I blame the Common Market.

I know I used to have a book and TV section, and I know I merged it into this and thus more or less completely did away with it, so in penance I thought I would briefly babble about a couple of books I read lately. Since one of them is the new Potter book I am going to put one of those read-more thingumys… Read more »

If I were that sort of person, I would be double checking my various calenders to check what century it is; purely for dramatic effect in the introductory paragraph of this weblog post.

The problem is, I know it is the Twenty-First Century; I know this because I am not, as far as I know, insane and have a fairly firm grounding in the real world (some of the time anyway). I just wonder if the same can be said for the Church of England’s Bishops.

As I am sure most people reading this know, England has been suffering from some very major flooding lately. Today’s long term weather forecast indicates that we won’t get a summer this year; in fact the one single day we had with no rain last month was probably our summer. Lots of England is still under water and they are being told to expect more rain, and more flooding.

Obviously, the people who think that the world is just starting another climate change that really has very little to do with carbon emissions (that would be me) are looking rather smug at the moment. If this is Global Warming then Tony Blair is an honest man.

But back to the Bishops. They have another explanation for this unending rainfall and flooding. God is punishing us. I kid you not, in the year 2007, the bosses of one of the most liberal Christian churches in the world have suddenly started to preach Hellflood and Damnation upon these damp isles of ours. God is pissed off with us, and is apparently pissing down on us in bucketloads in His revenge.

I have a few questions.

• If God is annoyed with us, why is he only taking it out in the poor? The people who live on cheaper housing in the flood plains, and the people who cannot afford good insurance or defences for their homes. Why is he denying summer holidays to people who can’t afford to just get onto a plane and have a few weeks abroad.

• If God is annoyed with us, what have I done for it to be nice and sunny where I live, when the rest of the country is being flooded - Why have you spared me, the grouchy farmers, and rich-townie-wankers who want to live in the country; Mister God?

• If God is taking his wrath out on Great Britain, and only on Great Britain, then doesn’t that mean that the Islamic Jihadists who have their own little Holy War raging over here have God fully, and completely on their side? That is what you are saying, right? If this is the case, then I am converting. Just in case. If you want my help Allah, just give me the raisins and I am yours!

I bear witness that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is His servant and messenger.

Amen!

Over the last few months an increasing number of people have told me to go to Google Maps and to plan a route from somewhere in England to somewhere in the US. What happens, is that within the detailed directions given by Google you are told to swim 3,400 miles across the Atlantic Ocean. This is funny. Google have spoken.

For various reasons, it annoyed me at the time but I behaved and kept myself quiet. Unfortunatey, as usual, the trigger for me ranting was a story about it appearing on my Wireless today.

The point is that Google Maps tries to put itself across as a serious route planning system. I assume the “Swim across the Atlantic” thing was either genuinely put in by some wit of a programmer (yes, I did restrain myself from adding a prefix to a word in that sentence) or more likely, it was designed by the Church of Googleology’s Viral Marketing Team to appear that way so that people would talk about it.

Ok, well let’s play this game and have a look at it, shall we? I will go to http://maps.google.com/ and I will select “Get Directions”. I think today I will go from “Cambridge, UK” to “Maryland, US” (I want a cookie, ok?). It tells me that I will have to drive 4,211 miles (about 29 days 13 hours).

The route is roughly: Cambridge to Folkestone, then on a train ferry to Calais (France). From there I do some weird little circular tour of Northern France before reaching Google’s humourous:

Swim across the Atlantic Ocean (3,462 mi) Entering United States (Massachusetts)

Ok, assuming I do that - I get into the US in Boston and then wriggle south by road until I get to Maryland.

… Where do I start? Ok, well how about the initial part of the route - Assuming I am going to make a long swim, I would prefer to head from Cambridge, south-west across the country to Northern Cornwall and then start swimming. What’s all this nonesense with taking me into France, and then putting my swim start 150 miles east of where I want to be? And why did it let me take a ferry into France, but not take a boat over the Atlantic to the US?

Assuming I am going to do the swim, then why does it detour me north to Boston when I may as well swim directly into Delaware and then take a nice little hop by land to my Maryland Cookie shop?

There is also the rather obvious point that nobody has ever done a 3,400 mile plus swim across the Atlantic and even if they were going to, it would be rather impractical. I can hear people muttering “You are taking this too seriously” and you are right, I am but see… There are other routes that are actually possible, and Google Maps hasn’t showed them to me; they’d rather have a silly little viral marketing opportunity than have the program give out a correct result.

Back to Google maps, let’s plan a route from “Cambridge, UK” to “Anchorage, AK” (Alaska). Same old wriggle into France, same old swim to Boston and a long land journey across the US and Canada, into Alaska and to Anchorage. 8,335 miles in all. That’s just plain odd.

Ok, how about “Cambridge, UK” to somewhere in Russia? Google Maps isn’t very hot on Russia so we may as well just go for Moscow. Now look! A change of tack here and it is looking a little more promising. Once more we get a ferry into France (I’d have taken the tunnel, but I won’t argue on this small point but it does mean that in theory, it is a walkable route). The route then takes us through Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Belarus and finally into Russia. We then stroll merrily by land into Moscow for a well earned Vodka and Pierogi lunch. Who needs cookies!

So sit with me a while, sipping our vodkas and let’s have a look at a map of the world. Take a look at that huge great bloody land-mass to the east of Moscow. The land-mass that goes all the way to the Bering Straight, a 90km stretch of water that separates the far east point of Russia from the far west point of the United States. If your atlas is good it may mention that the 90km stretch is quite often frozen so you could actually walk over it. In fact in 2006, a couple of people did ( link ). Even if there is no walking path, a 90km swim is going to be a lot easier than a 5,630km swim, in the sense that it would actually be possible. If you are actually interested then this page has lots of advice on making the crossing. I found the page using Google Search, it was pretty much at the top of the list.

See my point here now? You can get from Cambridge, England to Maryland, USA on foot. Every stretch has been done but Google Maps would rather trade accuracy and quality of information for a cheap viral marketing gag.

Obviously, the Church of Googleology believe in a flat earth and so it is decreed, will users of Google Maps.

I have some advice - I don’t give advice very often, but this one is important, so listen up.

When I was younger, I had a near perfect memory. I could remember 62 character random passwords fairly easily, I could remember passwords from years earlier and having a head filled with god knows how many passphrases seemed to be a fairly normal thing. I didn’t forget them, I didn’t need to keep a note of them.

Then I got ancient, and senile.

I found today that I can’t remember passphrases I set 10 years ago even though oddly, I can still remember passwords I had 25 years ago. The problem is that sometimes I need passwords I set 10 years ago. It’s not that I completely forgot them, I remember it is a passphrase about a sheep and a thunderstorm and I remember some of the words, but I can’t remember the capitalisation nor the punctuation, nor even really the word order. It’s useless, I doubt I will ever actually get it. I also have endless boxes of tape archive that when I contemplate it, I know I don’t actually know the passwords to any more (even if I can find the software).

The point is, I never thought I would forget them so I never thought of making a note of them.

So my advice? Despite everything that grown ups will tell you, and despite everything I tend to teach normally, start making a note of your passwords. Keep them in a heavily protected storage device, and use a passphrase that you will certainly remember and use it every few days to make sure you do remember it. Make it a good one, and you’ll be fine.

Whilst you are keeping the passwords, you may as well keep copies of the software that will allow you to use the encrypted thing, the backup program you used, the weird mailer, the weird key storage utility or ssh program. In 20 or 30 years when you want to read your old mail, you may be glad of it.

Pop to http://www.truecrypt.org/ - Install that and make yourself a disk that you can keep all this stuff on, without having to worry about extra security. Hell on an encrypted disk you can even store your passwords in plain text in a text file. Keep a backup copy of that password file on another encrypted disk and tell a close friend the password to it - Don’t give them the disk but ask them to keep the password safe, this’ll cover you in the event of complete senility too as long as you remember how to use a computer. That’s all, nothing complicated, just do it, and you will thank me one day.

Now, with all that said and done - If anyone remembers the sodding password to my PGP keys, and what on earth those sheep were doing in that thunderstorm, can they please tell me? Quickly? Before I go even more mad?

I finally got around to dragging all of the photos from my mobile phone last night, and found this little shot that I took in a tacky tourist shop in Berlin.

Can I just say… amazing! But then I guess every Revolutionary needs their own lip-balm.

I am not a fan of Ernesto so I don’t think I will be wearing his lip balm. The only thing that amuses me is that it is being sold in what was formerly East Berlin, and his various dodgy causes won’t benifit even slightly by any sales of this, nor do they from the wonderfully Capitalist use of his image on just about anything that will take it.

I don’t like regurgitation in weblogs, so I will simply paste a couple of links:

http://lorry.org/Weblog/che-standard.html

and:

http://www.washblade.com/2005/11-25/view/columns/che-cult.cfm

Actually, thinking about it - I may be wrong. Ernesto Guevara may well have been quite the fan of the capital of Capitalism that is modern America; they are, after all, both huge fans of concentration camps in Cuba.

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breath free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
We’ll watch them carefully, inside our golden doors.
And should they stray, or think aloud,
Thoughts deemed extreme, rebellious or untrue.
So onto Cuba, they will go.
To keep this young land, pure and clean.

(Apologies Ms. Lazarus for not keeping it as a Sonnet)

Something odd has been happening this last few years and even by talking about it, I am in danger of accidentally walking across the front of a religious war.

In computing terms, I probably class as somewhat experienced. Back when I used to do computer things, I used to systems manage whole countries and in my time, I have managed networks with hundreds of thousands of machines on them of all different types. I was almost certainly one of the first systems manager in Europe to be perfectly happy managing VMS and Unix Systems on the same network with no preference to which were there - If I wasn’t the first, then I was certainly the only one who would ever admit it and talk about it at the DECUS conferences.

In terms of systems management, PRIMOS was my first, on a 2250 in the early 80’s, and Unix my second, on GEC 63/30’s in the later part of the 80’s. By the early 90’s I had started managing bigger VAXes and in 1992/93, I started doing DECUS presentations on managing VMS and Unix on the same network. After that I had started writing more on managing large networks as it was becoming commonplace for the old single-flavour networks to be picking up VMS, Unix and various PC Network Operating Systems. At British Rail in 1994 I don’t think I could even count the number of systems and lightly connected networks there were all over the country. In the last few years Unix has got a new lease of life with BSD and Linux going open-source, Sun pushing more and more into various places and now even Apple getting in on the bandwagon. I haven’t really kept up but Unix is Unix is Unix.

I run Windows on all my machines at home. Well that’s not strictly true, I run Ubuntu Linux on my nameserver, but pretty much everything else is on Windows. This seems to shock people and I don’t understand why. Because I have experience with all these other systems there seems to be an assumption that I would run some sort of Unix clone on my PC but I don’t understand why; especially since I learned to hate the thing before most of the people who assume this were born.

So now… For my convenience and so that I don’t have to explain myself once a month, I will write it in here.

Yes. I use Windows (currently XP, I am sure I will go to Vista one day when enough people have told me that it is any good) at home. Yes, I rather like Windows even if I do think the logo has an obvious Swastika in it. On the whole, it does what I want it to do and it does it fairly smoothly and easily. I admit, I have to fiddle. I admit, I swear at it a lot, I admit, I get pissed off with it and blame it all on Bill Gates and yes, sometimes I despise every atom of Windows’ being. It’s not perfect, but for a desktop system it’s the best I have found and for the vast majority of people reading this, I have used a lot more than you to make that comparison. When I want software I can usually find something free that will do what I want; if not I can usually download a trial version that will do it anyway. Stuff I buy in shops (or at carboot sales) usually comes with a Windows Driver on a CD and plug and play no longer seems to be “Plug and Pray” as long as you have decent USB hubs.

I have a whole room full of VAXes, SGI machines, Suns and other odd machines. The operating systems these things run were good for what they did, but I really have no urge to fight with them any more. I am happy to let Windows win. I miss not having a simple command line interface sometimes but then again I have add-ons to Windows that let me do a lot of that now. I have tried to use Apple machines but honestly, I just can’t bring myself to feel “Holier than Thou” enough to be an effective Apple User, my Sanctimony Quotient and available money are too low for me to be an Apple User.

I have tried most of the mainstream BSDs and Linuxes; they annoy me. They are all subtly different and most of them won’t install on most of the (not very complicated) hardware I have. The fact they all seem to want to put the configuration files in different places and in different formats is really irritating. I installed Ubuntu Linux on my nameserver to replace FreeBSD (which as Unixes went, was the most consistent of the new ones) when FreeBSD failed miserably to install on the new machine. Ubuntu worked out of the box and was easy to install and run but I got locked out of the machine for 6 months once because of some ridiculous crapness on its part, and eventually had to reinstall when I needed to upgrade something. It works now, as long as I leave it alone but I really don’t like using it, even with the windows looking user interface it feels like stepping back 10 years.

Just so we are clear here - I am talking about Desktop machines, not servers. Servers I tend to login to once every few months for no more than a few minutes, hopefully. If I can avoid that and have them managed automagically, then even better. I don’t give a toss what operating system a server runs as long as it is the best one for the job and it does it quickly, securely and effectively. I don’t understand why Unix seems to have come out as the modern multi-user server OS. A few years ago, Unix was something that was there to quickly hack something up on, it was quick and dirty but effective. It was a Swiss Army knife as opposed to a Metric only Snap-On Socket Set. For serious stuff, Unix wasn’t much use, everything about it was too general purpose and hacky and all the bigger operating systems had their own specialisms and did their own thing much better. For the last 10 or 15 years a large amount of very clever people have been sucked into trying to make this hacky little operating system something it isn’t; adding more and more functions to the blades on the Swiss Army knife without realising that they are weakening the whole thing beyond belief. They aren’t doing any original research here, I heard them announce clustering a while ago, something which you really can’t beat VMS for. How about virtual machines. IBM anyone? It seems to be that every single little application on a modern Unix webserver needs to have SQL installed but if someone had worked out a decent Record Management System by now, there would be no need for a web counter to suddenly need 2 sources of data management. Don’t get me wrong here, Windows isn’t the thing for this, Windows is a good Desktop System and even though NT was developed from VMS, I have never been at all impressed it as a server. Just think though - If all of these young programmers who have wasted 10 or more years of their lives and seem set to waste another 20 had all collaborated on a project to develop a new operating system where could we be now? The networking, filing system and security of VMS, the virtual machine capabilities of CP, the security models of TOPS and PRIMOS, the Database capabilities of the AS/400 - need I go on? Think of all the things they COULD have done, instead of wasting their time with a pissy little operating system that wasn’t even much good for anything when it came out. Think of it in terms of Microsoft taking DOS, adding a windowing system to make it into Windows 2, adding some networking and multitasking to make it Windows 3.11 and then stopping pretty much there and doing nothing else to it.

Rewriting Minix (an old and obsolete small Unix system) was something that everybody who studied Operating System Design did, that’s what it was for. It was lovely as a teaching tool but about as far from rocket science as you can get in computing terms. When a Finnish chap called Linus Torvalds developed and released something called Linux as a result of one of these rewrites it seems that nobody told him he should be locked up in Luddite Prison for crimes against the development of new technologies. Torvalds and his cronies have naively and unwittingly put us back years in terms of development, especially when they all started taking the ever important commercial dollar. It is an easy and cheap path to fame to work on making somebody else’s wheel a little bit better and a little bit more round but never forget, even though it looks somewhat more hexagonal now than the square it once was, it’s the same old wheel. It’s a dangerous game criticising the historical development of Linux; its many rabid fans often make Scientologists look open-minded. As soon as you say something like “What’s the big deal? All he did was to do what everybody else was doing in school at the time.” you are instantly open to responses like “Yea, you are just bitter because you didn’t think of doing it.” - On my part, no, I didn’t think of doing it. I never for a moment believed that in the 21st century, people would still be using Unix and it would still look pretty much the same. There are people today struggling with Unix clones who have no idea of the wonderful things that older operating systems had in them that that have now all but been forgotten. Oh Brave New World which has such obsolete shit stuck in it. All you clever kids, stop tinkering with somebody else’s rusty old steam engines and get out there and build us some fucking space ships!

To close, and at further risk of mixing even more metaphors and upsetting all the loonies, religious zealots and narrow minded know it alls; I am quite happy to be Windows user. No amount of nagging me is going to change my view on this and I can’t foresee anything else coming along that will budge me from this path until attitudes and religious beliefs change. For my usage, it is the currently best desktop operating system there is and until those days come, I am sticking with it, through bad and good.

When I was younger, thinner and more photogenic, I came home from a cellphone-free holiday in Scotland to find myself all over the newspapers being dubbed as “The Information Superhighwayman”. This was the start of the Harrods vs. Lawrie case which went on for a long time and due to my refusal to talk to the press, put me in a pretty bad light. It was the first domain-name case outside the US and so it was one that would potentially have far reaching implications. At the time it was only the second case in the world and the first was nothing to do with the people who actually registered the name, just people who bought it from them. I was the world’s first “domain name speculator” and paid a high price for it in the press and in the industry as well, which I guess has long since regretted not being more openly on my side. I have since explained the whole Harrods thing to anyone who wants to listen but most don’t and honestly, it’s in the past and I rather like the title “The Information Superhighwayman”. Oddly, since I was in charge of registering customer domains for British Telecom for a few years, I was far more often on the other side of the domain-name trademark legal-war on my customers’ behalf. One of the strangest things that happened to me in my prosecution-years was having a big domain-name trademark case I prosecuted whilst at BT used in the baa.com case as a precedent against me. That one amused me somewhat, I admit.

When it comes to it, I didn’t register any of the trademarked domains I had back then to sell them, I registered them so we could pitch sites at the companies involved and when we’d convinced them of the wonders of the Internet, we would already have the sitenames to build the site on. Way back then in the early 90’s all but one company said “We’ll never want to be on the Internet, we have no interest, sorry chaps”. A few years on when people did want to be on the Internet, my company lawyers acted badly in my interest and when they were approached started insisting on money changing hands. We did later make a claim against the lawyers for acting without instruction or something but again that’s all forgotten in the mists of time.

Yesterday I registered an Indian domain for a small project I am starting, and I had to search out a suitable one. I noticed that a hell of a lot of the ones I was interested in had already been registered and parked on Sedo (a site that sells domain names). When I registered the one I wanted finally, I was offered the chance to put the domain up for sale on the very site I had used to register the domain. This struck me as very weird and a very odd way for the industry to have gone after all the shit I got in the early days for doing what I did.

I have only ever sold two domain names. I wonder if that is surprising to most people? I sold one years ago because of the afformentioned lawyers (I think I made about $5,000 from it of which I got about $1000), and I sold the other because somebody offered me a lot of money for a generic domain name. I have had a lot stolen from me - In the old days it was a lot easier to fake transfer requests and a lot of people did. After the transfer was done it was nearly impossible to get them back without years in court and a lot of money. I have had a few stolen “at source” too. One of the largest and oldest registries (no names) had staff who were all too willing to simply steal a domain from the owner, and register it to somebody else for a suitable bribe. There was no paperwork in those days and the electronic trail would of course be deleted. This isn’t imagination, I believe a lot of this sort of thing came out into the open in the sex.com court case.

One of my favourite domain names was richersounds.com - Again we originally registered this because we wanted to pitch a site to Richer Sounds, a rather good audio equipment company in England. A few years on the domain was up for renewal (they were free when I started registering them, amazing hey!) and I noticed richersounds.com was about to expire. I like Richer Sounds - They used to give lollipops away in their stores and once in Leeds when they had run out and I jokingly wrote a letter to Julian Richer (the owner), telling him to send the store more lollipops. A week or so later, Julian sent me a whole box of lollies. You can’t beat service like that. When I noticed richersounds.com expiring, I contacted Julian and arranged the domain transfer and everything at no cost; just so that they wouldn’t lose it. I guess they will take my Superhighwayman Hat off me for things like that, won’t they.

As I seem to say a lot these days, it’s odd how the world is changing but whatever happens, the lawyers will get richer off the back of it all. I wonder… Ummm.

bash$ whois richerlawyers.com

No match for “RICHERLAWYERS.COM”.

There you go somebody, I am sure that will make you a few dollars somewhere.

Feel free to ignore this, I just wanted somewhere to babble and this seemed as good a place as any. If it makes any grammatical sense at all I will be amazed.

In case you missed it, it’s the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in England. This has caused lots of debate; one of the main ones is about whether we should say sorry and pay compensation for the slave trade. I have been watching this with interest especially every time it gets compared to the Jewish Holocaust during World War II.

I was initially tempted to point a finger at the British and complain bitterly at us for becoming a nation of apologists - For what? For being the first country to actually abolish slavery? For being the good guys here? For having a country where people could at that time stand up in Parliament and say “Look, this isn’t right, we need to do something about it”. The more I think about it though, the more I admire the British for the general opinion that we shouldn’t apologise. Historically we see something is wrong, we fix it and then we move on. Want some examples here? We killed over half a million native Aborigines in Australia in about 120 years; we killed 300,000 of the ethnic Kikuyu in Kenya and tortured hundreds of thousands more; we caused the near extinction of most of the tribes of Native Americans in the US and Canada. In the late 1800’s British policy in India caused the death of between 12 and 29 MILLION Indians and not content with that, we did pretty much the same thing again in Bengal during WW2 killing another 3-5 million. We mustn’t forget of course that 200 million blacks died as a result of the slave trade though not all of those were caused by the British - Just most of them.

Trust me, when it comes to Genocide, the Germans are utter amateurs.

The late half of the last century seems to be obsessed with guilt for history and I am tempted to put forward a theory that most of the hassles we have at the moment in the world are caused by this. Israel is getting away (very literally) with murder simply because nobody dares to say anything against them for fear of being accused of being anti-Semitic. In writing this, I will be accused of being anti-Semitic and a closet Nazi. I am not, I have no issues with Jews at all but I have huge issues with the Israeli home policy. Incidentally, why would I be accused of being a Nazi? The Jews have been massacred many times by many people… In 1270 King Edward the 1st decided that Jews were a threat to England and ordered that all Jews wear a yellow star to identify them in public. After imprisoning or executing all the Jewish heads of household the Jews were finally banished from England from 1290 until 1655 when Cromwell let them back. Sound familiar? As God’s chosen ones, the Jewish people were told to “not fit in” so they are used to persecution from all over the place. It’s not an accident that Israeli Politics labels anyone who doesn’t agree with them these days as a Nazi though.

Central Europe doesn’t seem to be able to let the Jewish Holocaust go. Germany seems to be racked in complete guilt even now about the whole thing. Why? As far as most Germans involved in WW2 were concerned, they were provoked and cleverly manipulated and led into a war in which they sometimes fought brilliantly but eventually lost. The British were very quick to forgive the Germans, I have never seen a single serviceman who has had a grudge against the Germans; the war ended, the Jewish Holocaust was exposed and the world as a whole, including the German people, was repulsed and shocked. It’s over, the people who were responsible for it were rounded up and arrested and tried and hanged or imprisoned. Brits don’t blame modern Germans for all the deaths we suffered, all the cities we lost and the fact the Empire was finally bankrupt and destroyed. Hell I will be silently happy the day that a German has the balls to suggest, without arrogance or guilt, that if Hitler hadn’t stopped his forces at France and decided not to invade England at that time, they’d have occupied us and we’d not have been fighting the rest of the war from England. It’d be an interesting argument, but Germans aren’t allowed to have any historical pride in their own armed forces, most of whom weren’t Nazis at all. It’s weird because after World War 1, German Soldiers did keep that pride, they wore their WW1 Iron Crosses for many years after, some Jews were saved because they had won Iron Crosses in WW1 - The huge majority of German combatants weren’t Nazis, they were just soldiers, like most of the rest of the poor sods killed in combat during that war.

The fact they lost and the fact the Jewish Holocaust came into the open and dragged a whole heap of guilt into Europe and America was the difference here. There seems to be an assumption that the UK and the US were all nice to the Jews at that time. The British had a good reason not to be. Even during WW2, Jews were still fighting the British in Palestine - but the US? The St Louis, a ship with 950 Jewish refugees was turned away from America in 1939 by the Roosevelt government and sent back to Europe. European countries took them in but most then died in the camps anyway when their new countries were occupied. Henry Ford and many prominent Americans were quite openly and publicly anti-Semitic by the start of WW2. The Red Cross admits now that it knew about the Holocaust but didn’t disclose it so that it could maintain its neutrality. There is no black and white here, just a lot of grey but still, Germany seems to get all of the blame.

I am not sure whether to blame Germany for this continued guilt. As a country under permanent “occupation” for the last half century or more maybe it’s been hard to forget the past but one day someone has to draw a line under it all and Germany needs to move on. The Finns, Italians and Hungarians don’t seem to have problems. Do most people under 30 or 40 even know what side they were on in WW2? If it helps, I don’t have a clue what side they were on in WW1. Whilst this guilt exists, it’s impossible to look at the Israel situation without it getting in the way. The Arabs don’t have much concept of this Euroguilt and I would guess they just don’t understand why Western Europe and the US always seem to cringe every time Israel starts to yell. How many years will this carry on for? How many more walls will they build, towns they will bomb, human rights they will jackboot all over before someone has the balls to tell them to stop?

Recently the Germans announced that they would use their presidency of the EU to attempt to criminalise the use of the Swastika within Europe. This is amazing on two levels, firstly in that 50 years on they still seem to want to atone for something and add more and more fleas to their hair-shirt stock and secondly that once more Germany, under the banner of the Swastika, is trying to impose their will on millions of other people. European Hindu groups have used the Swastika as a religious symbol for about 5,000 years and it’s a popular symbol in many religions. It’s fair to say that this decision was taken through stupidity or naivety rather than malice and thankfully, they have now decided it was an ill thought out plan and cancelled it but still - Aaargh!

Back to the original subject of compensation for slavery; there have also been many supposedly clever people saying “Why don’t the Vikings apologise for invading us 900 years ago?” - Apart from anything this annoys me because for a start it was more than 900 years ago and secondly the major Viking invasion was as a result of us, the English, committing genocide on the orders of King Ethelred and killing all the Danes in England on November the 13th, 1002. We’ve forgotten that particular holocaust on our part; thankfully; but it’s another one to add to the already long list of British Genocides.

I decided to measure my personal Carbon Footprint using http://www.carbonfootprint.com today - This site seems just to be some (hopefully) well meaning con to guilt-trip people into giving money to plant trees somewhere in Africa which I am sure will end up being chopped down to make paper or something before they are of any use whatsoever in carbon sinking.

The site is a little simplistic and only provides an un-offset figure - It doesn’t ask the question “How many acres of woodland or forest do you have” which is odd considering that ultimately, their aim is to get you to fork out money so that they can plant trees to offset all the carbon that you are pumping out into the atmosphere.

Anyway, all that aside I put my data into it and my Carbon Footprint per year (before any offsets are applied) is 9,273 Kg compared to the national UK average of 5,013 Kg. Of course, it doesn’t allow me to factor in offsets so I did my own adjustments and apparently my Carbon Footprint is actually -190,700 Kg.

That is over minus 190 tonnes a year - How fucking smug should I feel now? Absolutely, enormously, stonkingly, hugely fucking smug, that’s how fucking smug I should feel now.

Right! Now! Speaking from my absolutely, enormously, stonkingly, hugely fucking smug and very righteous pedestal, I want to express my pissed offness at this new airport passenger tax which has been imposed on us by Blair’s Stasi and backed by the Green Party and Friends of the Earth. When twatty little environmental group spokespeople with their half million quid, solar-aided middle class homes and their £40,000 environmentally friendly cars say that they want to make air travel so expensive that normal people can’t afford it; claiming that this will save the planet for their privately schooled, chinless little offspring Tarquin and Lucretia, then sorry but I want to put an incendiary bullet into them and their methane recycling systems. Cheap Air Travel is a godsend to Europe and is doing a hell of a lot more social good than it is doing environmental bad.

I have never had problems with Friends of the Earth before but now I do and I can’t be the only one. A fluid European population and workforce is a good thing and cheap air travel is vital for this and of course, the people this will most effect are the poor. Go pick on someone else why don’t you?