Progress?? Really??

Sad as I am,

I had the Discovery Channel on in the background in my study today. Subject The SR-71 Blackbird spy-plane. Serving from 1964 until 1998 it was capable of maintained speeds in excess of 2,200 mph. It has not flown for 13 years or so and certainly will never again as all tooling was destroyed as a security measure. It was designed by slide rule, pencil, paper and human ingenuity, not a computer in sight.

It go me thinking about how in technology and engineering terms has the human race really progressed and in other areas regressed with no real vision of reaching such achievements again. You can cite Telecommunications and Computing as areas of progress, however the technology hasn't fundamentally changed, it has just become smaller, lighter, faster and more open to development. Bandwidth and connectivity are constantly increasing with demand but the underlying technologies and infrastructures are developments not blue sky thinking.

However in some areas we have actually regressed. Man last stood on the moon on December 14th 1972 nearly 39 years ago! We are further away from being able to land a man there now than we were in the 1960's and chances are we will not visit there again. There is no viable launch, delivery or landing system in place or in significant development.

In 1976 you could take a scheduled flight from London to New York that took only 3.5 hours on Concorde, no-one has been able to do that for the past 8 years.

Man was able to pilot a re-useable spacecraft into orbit, deliver supplies, instrumentation, build space stations, transport people, position satellites, recover them and repair faulty equipment from 1981 until this year, no viable heavy lift re-useable system is in place to carry on this work.

The land speed record has not been broken for 14 years and the previous record lasted for 14 years too.

I appreciate the reasons that all the technological marvels I have listed are no longer with us and in the interests of progress and development they shouldn't be. My point is, where is the the way forward? Where is the newer, safer, faster, more efficient and all round better Shuttle, Concorde etc.. We seem to have built 'one offs' but not looked further than our noses.

Human beings can now travel slower, visit fewer places in our solar system and worst of all have limits on ambition and engineering knowledge that insure slower if any progression and fewer benefits for mankind as a whole.

Occupy London (Weather Permitting)

Congratulations to the Occupy London mob, you have achieved your aims of preventing people from making money and being successful. Quite what you had against the Paternoster chop house and Birley's cafe is beyond me, but they are obviously symbols of all that is wrong with capitalism and globalisation and as they are laying off staff, you must be proud to know that those 'fat-cat' waitresses and cooks are now out of work.

You stupid f***ers you cannot even protest properly, "ooh I know I'll pitch a tent outside St Pauls cathedral and put up my banner stating 'All day all week, we'll sleep on London's freezing streets' on second thoughts it's got a bit chilly and Eastenders is on, maybe I'll pop back to my suburban home, put my feet up on my hire purchased (finance)sofa, drum up support on Facebook via my pay monthly I-pad (finance) and eat my Tesco's (global) ready meal."

A lot of the Occupy London message and it's criticism of financial institutions and worldwide corporations makes sense, but as usual both feet have been shot to pieces by the very people who started the protest. You will all now blame the 'evil press corporations' for negative publicity but the truth is 90% of the occupiers piss off home each night to get comfy and brain dead in front of Xploitation factor or some other trash.

Strange Day Today

Strange day today, Honest Trader speaks sense At last we hear a brutally honest assessment of the financial climate we are in. More fuel to the fire of the theorists who believe in the illuminati, but also a rational explanation and honest appraisal of who really pulls the strings around the world, certainly not politicians.

Strange day today, BAE Systems lays off 3000 workers predominantly in it's military aerospace division blaming defence cuts even though worldwide defence spending was in excess of $1.63 trillion dollars in 2010, approximately double what was spent in 2000. I guess we become even more dependant on overseas manufacturers (mainly US) and lose our technical lead again. People of a certain age or with an interest in UK military technology will remember what happened to the TSR2.

Either that or BAE Systems needs a better salesforce.

Strange day today, birthday of my first child Thomas, consequently also the day he died. I know that is pretty bleak, but it happens to be a fact. His death was mainly attributed to negligence on behalf of the NHS during my then wife's pregnancy. No hereditary factors or recognised disease, just a million to one shot that meant he could not sustain life due to massive disabilities that should have been detected much earlier.

He did live for a short time and I have shed all the tears and buried most of the scars but even after 13 years I wonder about the effect and what I 'should' feel and also the effect on my daughters. I have not hidden the facts from them when they have asked questions, but I also have not really made a big thing of visiting the cemetery with them or making a big issue of his birthday. I didn't know him so how could they? I think their mother has made a bigger issue of it to them and consequently my eldest is upset today and garnering sympathy from friends at school. This makes me feel angry, and then immediately guilty.

It's almost a perverse form of jealousy I guess, how come she get's all the platitudes and kind words when she wasn't even born then? My parents can't even remember the date so I guess that's the 2 extremes.

I am very lucky to have my two wonderful daughters and even though I have no religion I am thankful every day for their health, love and undisputed talents. If you've got kids, take a moment today to just give them a hug, for no other reason than you love them.

Cyclists, Speed Cameras, Parenthood and The England Cricket Team.

Diversity (not the dance troupe) in the blog today.

Driving down what we of a certain age would call a 'B' Road to my house today, I was yet again confronted by a group of cyclists 3 abreast across the road, freewheeling, chatting and having no intention of falling into single file and letting me past. This happens every day of every week to me unless it happens to snow! I reluctantly, begrudgingly and increasingly angrily admit they have a right to be on the road, even allowing for the fact that they do not pay any form of road tax or levy for it's use. However they should be subject to the rules of the road and ride in a considerate manner not deliberately impede car drivers' progress or create potentially dangerous situations for other road users. The worst part of it is that it is the so called organised clubs that are the worst perpetrators, in my neighbourhood the lycra clad fools causing me the most grief belong to the Solihull Cycling Club. Surely the purpose of an organised club would be to teach it's members to treat other road users with respect as much as every cyclist I have ever listened to demands respect from us. My judicial use of the horn to remind the riders that it was not actually a Velodrome but a public highway was met with derision and a number of hand signals that I do not believe are used in the Highway Code. #epicfail as I passed them eventually and stopped a few hundred yards further down the road and awaited their arrival, they all stopped shouted obscenities from a distance, turned round and fled in the other direction! I don't need tight Lycra to tell me that they have obviously got no bollocks!!

Speed cameras have failed to cut accidents on many roads and have actually led to a rise in casualties on some routes, official figures show today. 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/news/8719263/Speed-cameras-fail-to-cut-accidents.html

Who knew??? Motorists have been persecuted for years by governments, councils and law 'enforcers' as useful cash cows. The arguments have raged for years so there is no point gloating over the fact that we have been proved right, however the principle of speed cameras was always sound, it was just the strategic implementation that was fatally flawed. I would welcome speed cameras outside my daughters' (2 of them so the apostrophe is correct) school for instance, preferably with a 20 mph speed limit, but no, mysteriously the majority of cameras around here are on straight stretches of dual carriageway notable by their absence of crossing pedestrians or sharp corners. Maybe to not completely waste the investment they could move the cameras to areas where speed prevention is paramount. #neverhappen #wishfulthinking

Took my girls back to their mother's house today after a morning of making wholemeal pancakes with strawberries and blazing rows about the pointlessness of computer games. When a 9 and 11 year old are reduced to tears because they cannot finish a certain level on a Nancy Drew game, I begin to wonder about the standard of my parenting. My first reaction has been to ban every game that causes such a reaction until they learn that it is not real and that it means nothing. However on reflection it obviously does, I have had tears of frustration with them in sports and seen that as a positive thing as long as they persevered and eventually overcame (which they mainly do) so how is an animated mystery any different? I constantly question my skills as a parent and worry that I have got it all wrong, then I'm rewarded with 2 girls finishing top of their classes academically, achieving in sports, glowing school reports, healthy, gifted, popular and generally happy. I sometimes wonder who is teaching who here. #smartkids #roundtheirlittlefingers

To finish, heartfelt congratulations to the England Cricket team for mashing India 4-0 and rising to the top of the world rankings by hard work, determination, talent and team spirit. Only in this country would we be the first to criticise and say that the opposition weren't good enough, home advantage etc..etc..I have felt the pain of being an England supporterthroughout the West Indies dominance and more recently Australia, no one questioned the quality of their opposition, just revelled in the quality of their performance. Well done Team England, keep it going.

 

Conspiracies and New World Orders

Unashamedly the bulk of today's blog encompasses a number of exchanges I shared on Facebook with a good friend of mine today. Some would call him a conspiracy theorist, he has strong beliefs regarding 9/11, The New World Order, chemtrails, flouride in the water supply, blue beam, HAARP, MMR jabs, vaccinations and pretty much any of the issues that are debated at length on the internet and increasingly on lightweight investigative TV shows where the surface is barely scratched. (Whatever happened to investigative journalism?)

He is intelligent, well researched, opinionated, articulate and willing to listen to counter arguments or opinions, so why are so many people like this dismissed as crackpots?

I am in partial agreement with some of these ideas, admittedly not to the same extent as him, but enough for us to understand each other and have a balanced debate. However there are some people who automatically attach every single bad event in the world to some mythical 'THEY' that control every single action, this is where their credibility takes a bashing and causes issues for intelligent 'questioners' as I like to call them.


There is a great deal of compelling evidence that points to an overall ruling class/club that manipulates politics and economic situations for overall gain, call them elitists, the new world order, Rothschild, Freemasons etc etc..Profiteering from conflict and unrest is nothing new, just maybe the scale and intricacy of the manipulation.

I don't believe in the whole 9/11 conspiracy but would certainly agree that many behaviours of politicians and intelligence services leading upto and following the tragic events show that not everything was done to comprehensively prevent the attacks and provided a convenient platform for the invasions that followed.

Also as with all these theories and conjectures it is simply not possible to cover up every one of these so called new world order activities or conspiracies, it is human nature to share a secret and you cannot perpetuate such a massive pulling of wool over the eyes without scores of casualties amongst whistleblowers. 

This all makes a great novel but these arguments will not hold water until people get a balance and produce a rational and balanced point of view regarding some of these undoubted truths that are lost in the mire of misinformation and conjecture. 


I welcome the questioners and the debates they provoke, I firmly believe that the more we ask and challenge the better our society will be, but extremism has no part in this and people like my friend are the victims of extremists who believe in every theory and refuse to even listen to a counter argument or a logical explanation. This is when every questioner gets labelled a conspiracy theorist, crackpot or UFO chaser.


Don't dismiss everything you hear by questioners as crap or become a sheep that takes everything corporate journalism throws at you as right, somewhere in the middle is the truth.

Welcome Back and Olympic Joy

Inspired by a friend of mine who has re-started her blog, I thought it time I got off my arse (not literally as am obviously sat at my desk typing) and started mine again. It is weird because you can take a view that who on earth would be remotely interested in my opinions? or do I think I am SO important that I should publish my thoughts, ideas and feelings? or simply (and this is the conclusion I have come to) why not let off some steam and express myself in a way that hopefully may amuse, inform, provoke an opinion or indeed help people go off to sleep quicker.

Surely better than kicking the cat..........unless you don't like cats, in which case why bother blogging? (I don't have a cat)

One year to go until the 2012 Olympics. Yay or Nay? I'm afraid I am and always have been a Nay. Same as I was for the World Cup bid and even as far back as the Millennium Dome (or the O2 to my gig going London based readers) The country's finances are in a parlous state and have been for many years, primarily because our economy has been mismanaged on a criminal scale by government after government, so what would seem to be a logical solution?

I know, let's SPEND £9 billion on hosting a 17 day sporting event that at best will encourage increased visitors to predominantly the London area for about ooh, 17 days. F***ing genius.

To paraphrase Eddie Izzard, I would love to have been a fly on the wall at that strokey-beard meeting! I realise it has created short term employment in the construction industry and other Olympics specific industries (like marketing and management consultants), but overall £9 billion could have been far better used to regenerate areas around the country not just the East End of London. Or maybe, just maybe, and I am being a touch controversial here, providing adequate rehabilitation facilities for injured servicemen and women, or schools, or provision for the elderly who's pensions have been mismanaged and cannot afford proper care.

There is a long list of better ways to spend £9 billion including genuine economic re-generation not a few large and juicy contracts to many firms that were incorporated just prior to the bid being 'successful' and once the projects are completed will no longer need to exist so the directors can take the profits and close the companies down. That's not re-generation that's get rich quick.

I was very telling that the culture secretary yesterday could not even commit to one of the original promises of the 2012 bid was that 2 million people would take up new sports as a result of the Olympic games. That was the only good reason for having them and we will not reach that goal!

Living in the Midlands as I do, I will undoubtedly benefit from the government's proposed high speed rail link, the next white elephant in a long and embarrassing line of white elephants. No wonder Nelly left and joined the circus, it made more sense. As a regular traveller to London by rail I can assure you that the extra 15 minutes cut from my journey will probably change my life for ever!

So what can I do with the extra 15 minutes of my life? Probably get another job to help me be able to afford the fare.