Author: Mike

Why is this country so bad at looking after its own historic sites?

Surely one of the places that was central to the UK surviving WW II was Bletchley Park with its concentration of Mathematicians and Cryptographers contributing so much to the decoding of enemy messages warrants looking after?

Despite a number of fund raising campaigns in the UK including a group of 97 senior scientists who wrote to The Times to highlight the plight of the museum, it seems that the pockets of UK citizens and companies have been so shallow that Bletchley Park have teemed up with IBM and PGP to try for restoration funds from the USA!

I visited Bletchley Park in May last year and saw some of the work that the Trust was doing, however as with any restoration and preservation project, it requires ongoing access to funds.

I am not sure why the UK Government or Lottery funds cannot be made available help with this important Heritage work. Perhaps its the same head-in-the-sand attitude that lost the UK its position in the emerging computer industry after WW II!

The trust has a donation site, so if you want to help save a fundamental piece of history that,  if Bletchley Park had not been successful with its work, it’s likely that you would not be reading about it now!

So said Boeing when they lost the contract to supply the USAF with a new fleet of refuelling tankers and the contract was awarded to Northrop Grumman to be based on plane supplied by Airbus.

However, Robert Gates, the US Defence Secretary has now cancelled the contract as it appears many US politicians were upset at the contract not being awarded to Boeing. Suddenly, so the so called champions of Free Trade, is not!

It now seems that the procurement will be run again in January 2009 after the new administration has taken office. I’m sure of course, that this will be run as a fair comparison and Northrop/Airbus will stand an equal chance of winning again. I hope so for the numerous European jobs that will be depending on this deal.

I think that Rose McGowan will come to regret her recent remarks that she would have 100% joined the IRA if she had lived in Belfast!

“My heart just broke for the cause and I have a lot of respect for the intelligence and the honour that these people carried.”

I hope that this morning she is regretting her remarks, but not half as much as the Fathers, Mothers, Brothers and Sisters and other family members that lost relatives in the sectarian violence that was Northern Ireland for so many years.

Perhaps she thinks that it was an honourable thing that happened on the 25th August 1998 when all these people were killed by the Omagh bomb planted by the IRA!

It seems that not every women in the USA is enthusiastic about Sarah Palin being the Republicans choice for their VP position. Women against Sarah Palin has some very vocal opposition to her and it’s all from women.

It also seems that if you were a women who suffered a rape when Palin was Mayor of Wasilla, the city charged you for any medical tests that were carried out after the rape as part of any police investigation, as if being raped was not bad enough.

I heard on the news today that during her interview yesterday Sarah said that thinks it’s a good idea to go war with Russia if they invade Georgia again (that is after they join NATO), great to know that we could have another push the button nutcase in charge if McCain’s pacemaker gives out!

Slowly we are beginning to see costs being discussed for a roll-out of High-Speed broadband across the UK. From around £5.1 billion up to a massive £25 billion, it’s not going to be cheap!

But on the other had it is a chance for the UK to leap ahead of its rivals and turn the UK into a truly 21st century country, it could change the way that we would do almost anything, of course a downside would that Big-Brother would have even more ways of tracking what you do.

However, to me the advantages may outweigh the disadvantages.

Here’s the full story so far.

Read this article with interest, it raises some interesting questions about where the UK is going and why we have ended up in such a bad situation.

It seems we have lost control over many things that are influencing what is happen to the UK, even house prices according to HBOS chief Andy Hornby won’t get back to normal until the US house prices start going up.

Whilst I understand the global finance world that we now live in, why can’t we solve our own house price problems. Perhaps we still have too many greedy bankers in the UK that thought that buying cheap paper debt was a quick way of making money – which I am sure many did – and we of course are now learning to our costs, that it was an idiotic pipe dream.

I am not strong on Isolationism, but I think the UK needs to start to look inwards and solve some of our dependencies on outside influences (Gas and Electricity suppliers would a place to start) or we are going to end up being an even weaker country than I think we are already in danger of becoming.

How reality TV became the real world!

Child snoopers in a street near you!

George Orwell would be proud!

That is, for what is turning out to be one of the most incompetent governments that this country has had in recent years. It seems that not a single member of the government is in charge of anything as yet another set of confidential data is lost by another bungling contractor!

When is someone going to go to prison for what only seem to me to an ever increasing amount of incompetence and when is someone in the government going take some accountability and responsibility for these data losses?

Whilst I understand that it’s the contractors/unskilled staff that are making these errors, at the end of the day it is the government that must take full responsibility.

However, as most of the Government Ministers will have their can’t be prosecuted contracts so tightly written, I suppose that there is no prospect of anyone really being taken to task for this latest debacle. I for one will be glad to see the back on them, but of course can any government get back to the days of protecting our sensitive data?

So the BBC has finally woken up to the fact that some food prices have gone up by nearly 40% over the past months. I sometimes wonder why they seem to be so slow at delivering up to date news.

The roles in our house have some what reversed and I  now do the majority of the shopping, prices have not just gone up! They have been going up for years.

For example last year a 1kg bag of UK new potatoes cost £1.00 in ASDA, this year the cost went up to £1.30! That’s a 30% increase. I could go on and on about how expensive it is in the UK, the same amount of potatoes at a small market in southern France in the summer cost me the equivalent of 59 pence!

I’m all for the free market, but somewhere in the UK there are a minority making a lot of money off the back of the high prices that UK residents have to pay for food.

On the other side of the coin, I should not really complain too much, as I am not in the same position as the starving of this world, when I live in a society that throws away such huge amounts of good food and we flush our toilets with cleaner water than many of the worlds poor have to drink on a daily basis.

I was reading through some of the massive coverage of the US Republicans choice for their VP spot in the US elections and came across this story.

I am not generally a follower of the conspiracy theories that abound the Internet today, but if only half of this story is true, then it really calls into question Palin’s judgment when under pressure and John McCain’s vetting process for the VP position.

That said, she does have some interesting points to make ( I wonder what she thinks of China’s enforced one child per family policy) and as a Washington outsider (is this a female slant on Mr Smith goes to Washington?), she might be able to make some changes; though as the VP, like many before her, she will be some what side-lined. That is, except in the case of Dick Cheney where the roles were reversed and he was the  ‘puppet master’ of George Bush.

Time will tell as they say, I sure that the US media/Blogosphere will have a field day as they try to destroy yet another emerging political figure.