From here, former US defence secretary, Robert Gates, has warned:

"With the fairly substantial reductions in defence spending in Great Britain, what we're finding is that it won't have full spectrum capabilities and the ability to be a full partner as they have been in the past," he said.

My response:

Good! Why should the UK want to be a full partner to the every idiotic military action by the US? Every time they've followed the US into somewhere, the casualties have been higher on both sides than anyone estimated, the damage (physical, social and political) has been greater, and the monetary cost significantly in excess of what we can realistically afford.

Enough already! 

A proper apology!

It's a long time since anyone from Holywood actually impressed me, but today Mark Wahlberg gave an apology for some stupid remarks he made in a magazine interview (http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/16627609) and here's the important part: "I deeply apologise to the families of the victims that my answer came off as insensitive. It was certainly not my intention." (my emphasis).

Far too many people's apologies replace the work 'that' with 'if'. They just don't get it. If you've offended someone, you're the one at fault, you're the one apologising... so apologise. Don't imply that the offended party are at fault for being sensitive (as suggested by the use of 'if').

Re-read the above apology with 'if' and you'll see what I mean.

Cancellation of Nimrod MRA4

Wow, a Tory government has actually cut something from the UK defence budget that it actually made sense to cut: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/27/nimrod_scrappage/ (not that that makes it any more likely that I'll ever vote for a Tory candidate at an election should I ever have the misfortune to live in the UK again).

Property developers threaten globally important seed bank

This could be a very bad sign for our future as a species when even the highest authorities in a major country (in this case, Russia), with all the information we currently have on climate change and decreasing global bio-diversity, to put the interests of a property development company (the-scientist.com) above those of a globally significant seed bank outside St Petersburg (BBC).

(Summary: the Pavlovsk experimental station is a seed bank of thousands of unique plant varieties that grows on a 70 hectare plot outside the city of St Petersburg, and Russia's Supreme Arbitration Court has given rights to build on the land to the Russian Housing Development Foundation, which will destroy nearly 100 years of work to preserve this globally significant resource to build houses)

Pass this on, and pass it up ... to your MP, your senator, your governor, to whatever representative you have available at a political level that can apply pressure to the St Petersburg authorities to save the seed bank.

Moving (backwards) with The Times

The Times and the Sunday Times are about to make a seriously retrograde step. They are about to throw up a paywall around their news services. Now the BBC report only says 'charging to access their websites', so there's no direct indication whether News International intend all their content to be behind the wall, or just the articles (as opposed to the headlines), but either way, this is an idiotic decision.

If, and boy is that a big if these days, the Times and the Sunday Times were the only sources of (reasonably) trustworthy news (and thereby hangs a much more complex tale!) on the internet, then moving their content behind a paywall might entice people to spend money getting access to that news, but the reality is significantly different from that. I can state, with a pretty high level of confidence, that I've not needed to go to the Time nor the Sunday Times in many years. I've not wanted to go there either, for just as long. In fact, I don't think I've even bothered going there in at least 12 months, and even if I did, it was only because I found the news somewhere else, and happened to click through to their sites. (So much for the 'aggregators are stealing our content' argument - I'd never have gone to their sites in the first place if it weren't for said aggregators!)

Now, I'm not suggesting that my pattern of usage (or lack thereof) of the News International sites is normal, but I bet there are many, many, many thousands of regular users of the internet in the British Isles that somehow manage to avoid using the Times and the Sunday Times with very little effort, and very little loss to their understanding of the world. In fact, given the nature of some of the other titles in the NI stable (the Sun and the News of the World - two rags that push a particularly atrocious example of the UK equivalent of a red-neck world view), I'm sure many people are better off getting their news elsewhere.

There are so many free alternatives to NI sites, that they are simply wasting their time.

Goodbye, the Times and the Sunday Times, you won't be missed.

Freedom to mis-represent the truth?

If ever we needed proof of the scant regard for the truth as exhibited by British newspapers, here is an excellent example from that bastion of press honour, The Times.

Chew on that, Mr Murdoch!

Are you going to the wedding?

I don't normally do this, but I though this video was so excellent I had to include it: