Category: General

“Drones kill ‘British’ Terror Suspects in North West Frontier

A few days earlier there was another headline about drones killing nine German Terror suspects…then we read that Abdul Jaber/Mohammed Yaseem/ Jalil Al Khalili etc., etc. have been identified as having been wiped out (successfully).
Why does the media persist in referring to these individuals as British/Germans/Europeans, when quite clearly they are Dual Nationals owing their allegiance to a state other than the European state which they seek to attack?
What is the UK government’s position vis-a-vis their continuing to hold British nationality, following evidence of their treasonable activities? Please don’t tell me that their citizenship can’t be revoked and they cannot be returned to their countries of origin, for fear they will be tortured/maltreated/disciminated against.
Whom do we have to thank for that piece of legislative twaddle?

Apologies for the disappearance of my post entitled “Stupid?”

Apologies for the disappearance of my post entitled “Stupid?”

Yes, I deleted it myself. Unusual for me to do so but I felt that some of the comments were not acceptable. I quote the rules of this site below:

Moderation
Boadicea’s Chariot aims to comply rigorously with the WordPress Terms of Service – after all, WordPress will shut us down if we don’t, so it makes sense.   Other than that, Boadicea’s Chariot expects all contributors to adhere to conventional standards of behaviour and debate.   As a general guide, “play the ball, not the man”.   Posts and comments which are ill-mannered or resort to personal abuse will be removed.

Authors
Anyone is welcome to become an author in Boadicea’s Chariot. Authors whose posts do not accord with conventional standards of behaviour and debate will be removed.

I would ask that in future when commenting on any of my posts that these guidelines should be borne in mind.

My apologies to those who made some interesting and pertinent comments on the subject of my post.

What Motivates You?

A couple of days ago someone posted a blog on MyT in which it was claimed that only fools write without being paid. As a compulsive writer for many years, I had to confess to foolery. I was firsts published in 1959, an article in ‘The Miner’, but it was in the seventies that I really caught the bug. From 1976 I had about three articles a year published in various management and academic journals, for the next twenty-odd years. After retirement, I turned my hand to journalism and fiction, short stories mainly. Over all those years I believe I received no more than two, small cheques (The journalism apart). Foolish? Well, that is a matter of opinion, but the blog set me thinking in broader terms.

Throughout my career I cannot remember ever being motivated by money. What drove me was a sense of achievement, and new challenges. I tended to change employers as soon as my job became simply routine. I worked in management and organisational development, establishing the policy and framework, and operating it for a while once in place, but moving on fairly quickly.

My reward now is not financial, although I was not impoverished, but in memories of things done and people worked with. A few months ago I received an e-mail from someone I had not seen for twenty-five years. A mutual acquaintance gave her my address. In the e-mail, she said:  “…I can still remember parts of the training course you ran at ——-, decades ago. You were instrumental in enabling me to have enough confidence to have a career that has taken me all over the place”. “The impressions and impact you made led me onto being a Local Government Chief Officer, then going into freelance consultancy….”  I have received similar remarks from a man whom I influenced in the same period. They are rewards that I value more than a few extra quid on my pension.

In this respect, I don’t believe that I am at all unusual. Most people, in my experience are motivated principally by non-financial rewards. Or am I out of date?

State Department: You may get killed by a terrorist if you go to Europe???

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-10-04/terror-alerts-are-useless

With the USA the most murderous society in the western world (4.3 per 100,000) you are three times more likely to die in a violent incident in the USA, than anywhere in Western Europe, with or without terrorists.

It strikes me that is is simply a massive ass-covering exercise, as in, “We would never be forgiven if there ever was an incident and it was proved we had prior information it was possible”.

“Terrorism hurts us most not when it kills people, but when it uses our own clouded judgment as a force multiplier that inspires us to weaken ourselves in a thousand ways big and small.”

I spent many of my evenings during the first Gulf War, sitting out in our garden, in Bahrain, listening to the bombers roaring overhead every night, on their way to raining death and destruction on Iraq, trying to finish off our liquor stocks with friends, before Saddam Hussein came storming over the causeway, and took it off us!
Of course I was frightened when occasionally a misguided missile, destined for Saudi Arabia, landed a mile or so away. It didn’t help to have an idiot director in Head Office to whom I reported, telling me that they weren’t aiming for me, and it would be an accident if one did take me out! But to scare American travellers under their kitchen tables with “Alerts” that terrorists may be planning an attack on Europe, is idiocy of a far higher order, IMHO.