Category: Uncategorized

After what many people would say is a good age Robert McNamara has died!

Remembered more for his tenure a USA Defence Secretary and his roll in raising  his countries deployment of  troops to Vietnam from 600 in the early 60’s to over 530,000 by February 1968 than other aspects of his life. Robert McNamara personally guided, some say set, the policies of both Kennedy and Johnson as they tried unsuccessfully to ‘win’ the Vietnam War.

However, after doubts set in about sending so many troops to Vietnam, he fell out with the Johnson administration and after serious disagreements in late 1967, he left to become the President of the World Bank.

Why my interest? I was in the Royal Navy during the latter stages of the Vietnam War and although the UK was not directly involved, we visited a number of the USA coastal bases dotted around the Far-East and saw the effect it was having on the various countries of that region.

Robert McNamara was indeed a controversial person during his time as US Defence Secretary, but later on in life begun to questions some of his decisions about that conflict.

If you don’t know much about him or what he did, here are some interesting resources:

• The Fog of War – The Official Site

• The Fog Of War – What Wikipedia says!

• What the Guardian Says – A good Piece

• Times Online Obituary – Some interesting content

• Robert McNamara – The Wikipedia entry, this is bound to change in the coming weeks

• In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam – Good book to read

• A Grand Delusion: America’s Descent into Vietnam – Probably the most in-depth and accurate political analysis of the Vietnam Conflict.

As part of his review following on from the recent MP’s expenses scandal Sir Christopher Kelly – Chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life – is suggesting that MP’s that need to have a house close to Parliament, adopt the same process that the Ministry of Defence uses for personnel stations in the London area.

Can’t see anything wrong with that to me. The rental money then goes straight from the MOD to the landlord and not into the deep pockets of the MP’s. Of course there would have to be some very good safeguards in place to make sure these rules could not be broken.

It will be interesting to see how this story runs over the coming months, however I bet some of the MP won’t be too happy about this potential change.

The FBI have released transcripts of their final interrogations of Saddam Hussein. The Independent Newspaper have some interesting excerpts here.

Makes some good reading. But I bet that haven’t released all the good bits as yet.

With deaths still on the rise in Iraq, despite various pull outs by some of the forces, Associated Press have collated a detailed list of countries that have lost member of the various Armed Forces in the Iraq Conflict since March 2003.

In order of list of fatalities:

• USA – 4,322
• UK – 179
• Italy – 33
• Poland – 21
• Ukraine – 18
• Bulgaria – 13
• Spain – 11
• Denmark – 7
• El Salvador – 5
• Slovakia – 4
• Georgia – 3
• Latvia – 3
• Estonia – 2
• Netherlands – 2
• Thailand – 2
• Romania – 2
• Australia – 1
• Hungary – 1
• Kazakhstan – 1
• South Korea – 1

Staggering numbers and I’m sure that these won’t be the final numbers as this conflict continues to drag on. Source: AP Report

For those of you interested in images from satellites, NASA has just updated their ASTER image data base. ASTER has been photographing hundreds of locations around the world from cities through to river delta and forests.

This one example is of the volcano on the island of Cape Verde, various resolutions are available if you wish. It might not be as interactive as Google Earth, but you can learn a lot about the world resources from these images. Enjoy!

Looks like government policy is careering off the rails – no apologies for the  the pun – as Labour abandons its sale of Royal Mail.

With the announcements about abandoning part of the National Strategies in education, the scrapping of ID Cards for UK citizens and now the Royal Mail sell off cancellation, I think it’s time for Labour to to face the people in an election, don’t you?

Though I do wonder what the Tories really have to offer.

At last someone is listening. In a massive U-turn, it now appears that ID Cards will not be compulsory for any UK citizen, so says new home secretary Alan Johnson.

However, in line with this governments ongoing love affair with databases, a new national identity database register that captures the personal details of everyone who applies for a passport.

This database will come online from 2011-12 and will be covered by legislation that will allow fines to be issued if ‘you’ don’t keep it updated with personal details such as change of addresses etc.– sounds like another big-brother back door tentacle to keep tracking information on the population to me. – Not much change there then!

One battle against this Big-Brother government may be won, but there are still more to be tackled. Perhaps when the Labour government gets ousted at next year we will be able to get rid of many of the other elements of surveillance Britain.

By the way, well done to the NO2ID campaign.

With today’s crash of an Airbus in the Indian Ocean, it this another Pitot Tube related problem?

Apparently there is one survivor.

What is going on with Airbus planes?

Came across this story in last weeks Telegraph, HMS Poseidon sunk with the loss of 18 crew in 1931 and the Chinese are suspected of salvaging it in the 1970’s to test their recovery capabilities.

Although I did not serve permanently in subs (only had some day trips, not for me I thought) during my time in the Navy.

However, I remember hearing about the history of the incident as it was sometimes used to illustrate that  there was always a chance that people could escape from a sunken submarine using the standard escape apparatus – which had only been introduced two year before – as was the case in this instance.

The big question is why has happened to the bodies of those 18 crewmen?

The Chinese government will have some difficult questions to answer before the truth is extracted from them. Lets hope that make a full disclosure so that any relatives upset by this story can put their memories to rest.

Or does it? Not according to may pundits [1], [2], [3], that have reviewed the plans put forward by the supposed Broadband Czar – Stephen Carter. But as he is soon to head off to other pastures – ITV they say, what should he care if the plans fall massively short on substance – par for the course from this tired government again.

With a general election due next year it is unlikely to me that any but the simplest of the plans have any chance of being implemented.

However, I would think that anything to do with monitoring our activity on the net and getting the proposed £6.00 telephone landline tax in place will be two of the higher priorities!

With regards to the £6.00 tax, what about the person that has satellite TV and Mobile phones with no landline, how will they be taxed? Again another unfair and ill thought out proposal.

Where has all the money gone from selling off the radio frequency spectrum frequencies for Mobile communications and other uses? It’s a bit like Car Tax, how much of that tax goes strength  into the general government pockets and is not spent of the roads!

Will we ever get to reasonable levels of broadband access in this country found in  some overseas countries? I hope so, but it will require a bit more than this report for anything to happen and it will have to be funded the government(s) quickly if we are again not going to fall behind the rest of the world.