On Question Time tonight I would like Nick Griffin to comment on proposals in the BNP Policy Statement on Multi-culturism.

It reads:

Different groups can live side-by-side and at peace for generations. They can even enjoy each other’s cultures, but they must stick to their own, or ‘diversity’ will be but a short-lived stepping stone to nothingness.

…we also intend to develop a model of ‘multiculturalism’ which combines peaceful co-existence with the maintenance of cultural and biological separation. In parts of the world where mass immigration is irreversible, the only thing that can prevent human diversity vanishing into an antheap of rootless coffee-coloured consumerism is the celebration of difference.

Seems like the BNP want to end mixed race relationships. And there was me thinking that love making was a great way to celebrate difference.

Don’t they realize is that all humans are an end product of 200,000 years of evolution and it is 70,000 years since the black-later-to-become-white lot left East Africa and headed north to Europe and east to Asia.

What is so special about the gene pool that emerged out of caves in the South of France after the last Ice Age that makes it worth preserving?

This evening, Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party, will appear on TV on Question Time. This will be a further step in his increasingly successful attempts to improve the electability of his party. Mr Griffin has been trying to rebrand the party – from a racist one to an ethnic one. Instead of the goal of creating a whites only UK it is now all about the preservation of an ethnic group and culture that arrived in the United Kingdom after the last Ice Age.

Is the BNP Still A Racist Party?

The BNP have had abhorrent views and practices in the past. Mr Griffin, once convicted of race hate crimes in 1998, says that he and the party have changed. Certainly, their press statements, and their propaganda on the more accessible pages on the website take a different tone – it is no longer talk of ‘blood in the streets’ but instead of immigration controls and voluntary repatriation.

Out With Swastika, In With The Spitfire

Also the imagery and symbols have changed, gone is the swastika, the admiration of Adolf Hitler and it replaced by Winston Churchill and the Spitfire, much to the recent chagrin of a group of British generals, Major-General Sir Patrick Cordingley, former Chief of Defence Staff Lord Guthrie, General Sir Mike Jackson and General Sir Richard Dannatt.

Why a Political Paedophile, not a Political Leper?

Racism is more akin to paedophilia than leprosy. While all these groups tend to cling to their own, preferring isolation, conformity and a mono-culture, the motives of racists are more similar to those of paedophiles than lepers: the lack of compassion or consideration for those they hurt, the absence of morality, and an illogical self-justification of their behaviour. Also racism and paedophilia involve free will and are both more of life-style choices while leprosy clearly isn’t.

Unfair Press Treatment

Are Nick Griffin and the BNP members being treated by the press and the other political parties like paedophiles? Is electing Nick Griffin as your Member Of Parliament like appointing a convicted paedophile as your local school’s headmaster? The press clearly believe that the BNP have not changed and cannot be trusted. Once a sinner, always a sinner.

Freedom Of Speech Should Prevail

We are in a free country that believes in free speech. Everyone has the right to express their views providing there is no incitement or encouragement to commit a crime. So providing no law is broken then he has the right to speak. And the BBC have been kind enough to give him a platform to speak from.

A Polished Performance on Question Time

Mr Griffin has polished his skills and knows exactly where the line is drawn. He will no doubt give a strong performance airing mostly sensible policies on local government, defence, education, health, finance, social services and industry. On immigration he will have a strong policy. He will come across a fairly normal, right of centre, politician, that gets a bad press. The likely outcome is that support for him and his Party will increase.

Questions for Nick Griffin That You Won’t Hear On Question Time

Like an ex-paedophile in an interview for the headmaster role he won’t say why he really wants the job. Nick Griffin is not going to be completely honest about what motivates him and what he would do if he was elected. He will not answer questions on the strategic points of BNP policy which are all about strengthening white/Ice Age descendant ethnicity:

1. How would you reduce the percentage of the civically British non whites (a.k.a. non descendants of the peoples that populated the UK after the last Ice Age) from the current 7% to the target of 2%?
2. Why would do you want to remove the right to political representation from the civically British non whites?
3. How would you remove the property rights of non whites? What impact do you think this would have on international relations and and inward investment?
4. How would you test people to find out if they fall into your preferred ethnic group? How would you establish what the gene pool of the Ice Age ethnic group was? What percentage match with the target gene pool would suffice? 50%? 60%? 70%? 80%? 90%?
5. How would you deal with the children of mixed ethnic group marriages? Potentially a 70% white male marries an only 10% white female and has 40% white children, would the children lose rights of inheritance and potentially be deported? Where would you deported them to? Or would mixed ethnic marriages be made illegal?
6. How do your goals to control the United Kingdom’s ethnic make-up differ from those of Nazi Germany in the 1930’s and 1940s?
7. How far are you willing to go to achieve those goals?

I think the above questions would give Mr Griffin the opportunity to show the public what motivates him, what his vision for the UK is, and how he would achieve it.

Moving an artist’s website onto Wordpress

Last month, I migrated my brother-in-law’s sculpture web site Ronald Rae Sculpture onto the Power Blog Service. Ronnie is a famous sculptor who hand carves enormous granite sculptures. They are awesome.

We have kept the way the site looks pretty much the same as the old site as this was one of the attractions of the original site design. Using the Thesis theme makes it pretty easy to duplicate how the old site looked. We moved the menu across to the right hand side for SEO reasons and moved the telephone number to a more prominent location. Spot the differences below.

Lots More Traffic To The Site

However, what is different is that my sister, Ronnie’s marketing administrator, has the ability to update the site herself and also visitors can make comments, bookmark the site or tweet about the sculptures. And of course, now the platform is Wordpress, we have syndication of content and pinging of blog directories.

The site now enjoys a tenfold increase in traffic over the original site and we have not even started taking any steps to promote the site or improve its SEO.

Innovations with Slideshows

The only real customization we needed was to handle slideshows of sculptures, which were previously created in flash. Each exhibition has it own slideshow of sculptures that are in that exhibition. There were also separate slideshows for ’sculptures for sale’ and ’sculptures in collections’. When sculptures are sold they move out of the exhibition and into a private collection and hence the slideshows are always having to be updated.

I wanted to create a mechanism where my sister could move sculptures between exhibitions herself using standard Wordpress tools. We solved this challenge using tags, the D13Slideshow plugin and a few lines of custom code in the custom_functions.php file.

The D13Slideshow can be inserted into a post using a PHP call. What the code below does is display a slideshow of images for all posts, (excluding the current post) that have a specific tag.

function show_slideshow($slideshowtag) {
if (($slideshowtag)
&& ($postids = pbs_get_posts_by_tag($slideshowtag))
&& (count($postids) >0)) {
d13slideshow($postids);
}
}
function pbs_get_posts_by_tag($tag) {
$thispostid = get_the_ID();
$postids = array();
$posts = get_posts('numberposts=50&tag='.$tag);
foreach ($posts as $post) {
if ($post->ID != $thispostid ) {
$postids[] = $post->ID;
}
}
return $postids;
}

So for example show_slideshow(’for-sale’) will display a slideshow of all sculptures that are tagged as ‘for sale’. If the Lion Of Scotland sculpture is sold, my sister only needs to remove the ‘for-sale’ tag and add the ‘collections’ tag to make the sculpture disappear from the ‘Sculptures For Sale’ slideshow and appear in the ‘Sculptures In Collections’ slideshow. Zero work for me and an immediate result for her.

When it is a blog not a blog?

This case study goes to show that with Wordpress, Thesis and a few plugins you have everything to gain and nothing to lose by moving your site on a blogging platform such as Wordpress even if your site is not a blog. Wordpress is a really cost effective platform for building more visitors to your site and then starting a dialogue with them.

Sunday mornings used to to have an unique appeal.

Back then I spent the working week in London: Saturday was chores day, and Sunday only entailed a 6 mile run and a full English breakfast of orange juice, then local eggs, tomatoes, mushrooms, bacon, sausages and toast, and black coffee. Hence Sunday mornings were easy… ish.

Now I am self employed, Sundays remain the same. But the rest of week has changed.

Unusually this week, Monday was a day off, mainly due to exhaustion. My wife, Elizabeth, had worked on the internet to about 6 a.m., I had packed it in early at 2 a.m. (She’s says I am a part-timer). Having risen at 10 a.m. and checked email etc, we went into town at noon and spent three hours over lunch discussing our marketing strategies.

On a Stompernet call on Saturday our failing marketing strategies has been reasonably trashed by Paul L and John J!

Painful but pertinent.

Our business has five different types of clients and we had a single site with one marketing message that did not speak really effectively to any on them.

So today, at lunch, over a Devon cream tea, we defined our five sales funnels, powerbusinessblogging.com, smartersitedesign.com, simplefastsite.com, wordpresswarning.com, and diywebmastery.com; then we split out our back end hosting service as powerblogservice.com. We have just gone from two websites to six but at least now each site has a better defined audience and purpose.

Basically the ‘blog’ in the our Power Blog Service is now de-emphasised as the majority of our potential customers do not understand blogs. Why would a serious business want with a blog? After all, a blog is a celebrity indulgence, such as that of Paris Hilton (too slutty and depressing) or Lily Allen (too txty).

With our business re-engineered and Stompernet relaunched on 9/9/9 our lives are due to get busier over the next month. We have a Stompernet Local meeting on September 23rd at Bovey Castle. There are not many Stompers down in the South West of England so the meeting is open to the public, so, if anyone would like to find out a bit more about how to make a successful website then you are very welcome to attend the event.

I am back in the UK after ten days in Atlanta; four of which of which at Stompernet’s annual Internet Marketing Conference and six days holiday with family. Still jetlagged, I am now getting back to work with a head full of business strategies, online and offline marketing strategies, web design tips, SEO best practices and thankfully some time management tips to boot.

Stompernet 7 Speakers and Highlights

• Paul Lemberg – a truly awesome approach to generating volumes of content in days rather than weeks – business acceleration
• Dan Thies – SEO specialist – tips on desktop and time management – using an integrated toolset to drive productivity – how iPhone, iMac, MobileMe and iTools rock
• Don Crowther – PR specialist – the power of offline marketing through direct mail, postcards, inserts, classfied ads.
• Perry Belcher – an eye widening explanation on why Twitter can boost your marketing efforts – how to tweet, what to tweet, when to tweet and how to integrate this with facebook, youtube and your blog – best practices for marketing using social media
• Jaime Mintun – copyrighter and consultant – use of competitor analysis to drive consultancy
• David Bullock – the role of social media marketing campaigns in Barack Obama’s election success
• Stephen Pierce – a highly focused and disciplined framework for business planning and execution – probably the best speaker at the conference

Overall, I am left with a sense of confidence in my business plans and a mass of ideas to implement before launch on the 7th April.

Shell Script Syntax Error

Operating System: Red Hat Linux
Click here for the solution without the preamble.

I had just written a 70 line shell script on my PC on notepad before copying it up on to the Linux Server so I could forgive myself for a typo and the resultant error. I googled the error and it indicated I had an opening " without a closing one. I scanned the file but did not see anything amiss. I set on a path to investigate.

Linux Shell Execute Permission

The other main suggestion was about the file permissions. However I had already fixed this by a chmod u+x ./myscript.sh

Linux Shell Script Debugging

Following a Shell Script Tutorial I tried adding some debugging

echo “starting”
set -v on
set -x on
…rest of script
set -v off
set -x off
echo “done”

This printed out the whole file however the echoed statement it did not get past the starting

Simplify The Script

Next step was to collapse the script down to half a dozen lines. It still failed in the same way with a syntax error: unexpected end of file.

#!/bin/bash
if [ $# -ne 4 ]; then
echo “missing parameters – source domain, template domain, target domain, owner”
exit 127
fi
echo “Got here”
exit 0

If you cannot see the problem it is invisible but still present

While digging deeper into shell script debugging I read a later section on the same page that referred to Windows Carriage Returns. By opening the file with vi and using the set list command I was able to see that every line was terminated by ^M.

Convert file from Windows to Unix format using dos2unix

I ran dos2unix ./myscript.sh

And problem solved. No more syntax error: unexpected end of file.

My script then worked first time after that, even the 70 line version.

So the moral of the story is.

Either do your editing entirely on Linux or always remember to convert dos2unix having copied the files on to the server if you are using low tech editors like notepad (as opposed to sophsiticated ones like vi

Tories put shareholders interest before the public’s

Kenneth Clarke scored an own goal by criticising the government in allowing the Lloyds bank takeover of HBOS. What he is forgetting is that with Friday’s declared losses the takeover has saved the taxpayer almost £11 billion (at least in the short term) at the expense of Lloyds shareholders. So what the Tories seem to be doing again is putting shareholders interests ahead of those of general taxpayers.

What’s more he would have complained bitterly if the Government had blocked the deal on the principle of “too much state intervention” and also as it would have meant that HBOS would have been nationalised.

Lloyds shareholders jumped at the opportunity to takeover HBOS

Lloyds’s management went into this deal with there eyes wide open, with the goal of acquiring a large market share of British Banking with the focus mainly of what is a reasonable sound Halifax mortgage portfolio. They must take full responsibility for the lack of due diligence in failing to assess the amount of toxic debt in the corporate division, £7 billion of which was written off on Friday.

Lloyds TSB shareholders voted 95.98% in favour of the takeover. They paid £4.3 billion for the bank in November, having negotiated down for original agreed price of £12.2 billion in September so they thought they were getting a good deal. So did Sir Peter Burt and Sir George Mathewson – the former chief executives of Bank of Scotland and Royal Bank of Scotland respectively, who tried to scupper Lloyds’s takeover of HBOS takeover.

Fear of Lloyds becoming a superbank have retreated

The concern back in November was more about the government allowing a ’superbank’ to be created that would be too strong for the competition. The government were complicit in the takeover because they did not want another Northern Rock, for financial, political and operational reasons. Bending the competition rules was a small price to pay.

Lloyds HBOS do have a commanding share market of the UK banking sector so the Competition Commission will have to take a look at the situation once the recession is over. No rush then.

Today was a typical day in my new, post Barclays life, in Devon.

Having fed the dogs their breakfast of Weetabix (don’t say anything), I sat down at my computer at 08:30. I had neglected my CFA studies for a couple of days this week so decided to catch up on Session 4, Private Wealth Management. This comprises readings on

• Managing Individual Investor Portfolios – using situational profiling and psychological profiling to create a meaningful Investment Policy Statement
• Excerpts from Investment Management for Taxable Private Investors – understanding tax implications – now I prefer death to taxes
• Multiple Asset Locations – how the wealthy avoid tax through various vehicles such as GRATs, GSTs, CTs, VLIPs, Foundations and Intergenerational Transfers
• Low-Basis Stock – about the emotional attachment and letting go as entrepreneur becomes an executive and then finally an investor in his own business
• Goals-Based Investing: Integrating Traditional and Behavioral Finance – setting understandable, meaningful and tangible goals for the client
• Life-Cycle Investing – about how level of wealth supersedes age in setting risk objectives: the wealthy, at any age can invest aggressively while the not wealthy (poor) should always take a conservative approach (i.e no lottery tickets)
• Human Capital, Asset Allocation, and Life Insurance – human capital seemed to be defined as the present value of total future earnings potential and hence declines from start of working life until retirement

At lunchtime I walked the dogs..

From Snowed In

In the afternoon I was doing some website updates for a client who wanted to launch a new pricing scheme that required Worldpay Remote Administration so I was doing some prototyping to check it out. It seemed a little insecure but use of PHP CURL to perform the updates should minimize risk.

$ch = curl_init();

$data = array(’instId’ => ‘123321′, ‘authPW’ => ‘guessMe’,
‘futurePayId’ => ‘$futurePayId’, ‘op-adjustRFP’ => ”, ‘amount’ => ‘$amount’);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, ‘https://select.worldpay.com/wcc/iadmin’);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);

$response = curl_exec($ch);

In his inauguration speech yesterday, President Barack Obama reaffirmed the United States’ government’s vow to uphold its constitution and live up to the lofty ideals that support its claim as the world’s greatest nation.

And what exactly are those ideals which were first proposed by Norfolk’s most influential son, Thomas Paine?

American Ideals

The American Declaration of Independence states the every person is born equal and has inalienable (irrevocable) rights to

• life
• liberty
• the pursuit of happiness

American Loss of Authority under Bush

The USA lost much of its moral authority in the Bush years

• re the right to life: consider the killing on 100,000 Iraqi civilians in the pursuit of a ‘regime change’ that is illegal from the standpoint of international law
• re the right to liberty: consider the imprisonment of up to 625 detainees at Guantanamo Bay without trial or any recourse to justice
• re the pusuit of happiness: this is very tangential but consider the Bush regime’s failure to acknowledge global warming as a threat and the refusal to sign the Kyoto agreement: air pollution (I am a little athsmatic) and the disappearance of the Maldives as the oceans rise are certainly inhibitors to my pursuit of happiness

Remaking America

Obama’s message to the world is the adherence to those American ideals:

• On foreign policy, the expediency of the invasion of Iraq is recognized:
  

  “As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: Know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.

  We are the keepers of this legacy. Guided by these principles once more, we can meet those new threats that demand even greater effort — even greater cooperation and understanding between nations. We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan.”

• One of Obama’s first actions was to address the prison at Guantanamo Bay, the executive order states the closure :
  

  “would further the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States and the interests of justice”

  “..the detention facilities at Guantanamo for individuals covered by this order shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order”

• On climate change:
  

  “With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet.”

One day on the job and the dream is still alive