Putins Latest Rumblings

Putin now turns his back away from fighting the bigger boys in the playground who are taking away his friend's pocket money. He has a land grab in the bag, Crimea, where he failed in Georgia before and would fail in south east ukraine if that had been instigated. Now he turns his back on the west, and says he cant be bothered to fight, he is off home to his own boxing ring which is better anyway.

Now he plays again the only trump card he has, the nationalist card of the great bear, the independent, self centered ursula major. But this is all the former KGB officer and buearocrat has to play, that and bashing gay people. It makes him popular amongst the religious, the nationalist and the narrow minded which make up the moral majority it seems at the former USSRs now shrunken ballot box.

His latest stance will however not encourage or even allow the flow of inward investment and intellectual property, and it will slow and reverse trade agreements and willingness to trade over this new Russian iron curtain.

In reality maybe he is playing just more hipocrisy, by being seen to be tough now, while later behind the scenes rebuilding bridges and then presenting Russia again in a few years time as open-for-business to the west.

I expect to see a round of renationalisations of successful foreign companies' russian assets, even brand names, and then redistribution to the oligarchs who have been feeling the pinch over Ukraine.

Memories of the South Atlantic Conflict of 1982.

I have actually very vivid memories from the media and family about the Malvinas- Falkland's - South Atlantic conflict.

Unlike some families my family flowed with the great churning river of  20th C history due to invlovements in the military and clyde shipbuilding. My brother and cousin were down in the Falklands with the task-force, the latter experienced the strafing and bombing of HMS Ardent while my Brother's ship was commandeered from its Bermudan misfortuity of duty, and ended up shipping equipment to replace the Atlantic Conveyor so famously claimed as an air-craft-carrier kill.

Our earlier neighbour had been the late, great Sam Salt, latterly Rear Admiral I believe. He had been commander on the sub Resolution I believe, and the next we saw of him after his transfer in about 1981 was him popping up on ITN news at ten after Sheffield was effectively destroyed by the undetonated exocet missile launched by a super etenda aircraft.

The task force on the one hand could have been seen by the Yanks and other powers as a gallant little band trotting off on an expedition to an uncertain fate. In fact this was one of the most hardened and modern fleets in the world, whose bread and butter was high tech electronic cat and mouse in the cold war, with the technical teeth in weaponry to take on a sizeable part of the USSR's north atlantic surface and u-boat fleet. Britain had actually a vast naval superiority over the "Argies" and this being an Island war, hundreds of miles from the mainland, that was always going to be decisive.

The UK also had  special forces more than capable of knocking out all the Argentinian airbases and the afore metioned AeroSpeciale jets with capacity to attack the UK fleet. Also these forces were willing to conduct one way missions, suicidal in effect against a nation then hell bent on torturing its own democratic dissidents. Lest we also forget that the Argies also took a minor land grab from the then Fascist Chilean territory south of Terra Del Fuego, thus further kindling support for cross border attacks and intelligence sharing.

Even France and the USA provided support , the former in hindring the availability of exocet missiles and parts which could be used to repurpose the missiles for land or air based attack once the submarine threat negated the entire naval operations of the Argies post Belgrano.

Belgrano was an active warship being used to provoke and intimidate the british surface fleet by penetrating the dubious political TEZ , total exclusion zone. Without the TEZ which attempted to both claim on international law while also being a bargaining part of a cease fire agrrement, then the sinking of the Belgrano would probably have been of little controversy. It was used partly as a conscript training ship, but I wonder what proportion of it's 1100 crew were under the age of 21 when compared to the Sheffield or Ardent?  The Argentinians played a double standard, with their admiral ordering a total attack on the fleet while their diplomats were involved in a possible cease fire around May 1.

I remember the nightly BBC updates with some skinny oxbridge apple throated, faun tweed wearing bloke who became famous overnight, and the sinking feeling when the ceasefire was rejected and ground troop assault was ordered.

The lads looked so vulnerable and of course the losses were graphic and aweful, while at the same time in reflection limited. They showed the weakness in neither having air superiority, nor having an effective sub radar AA barrage against jet fighter-bomber attack.

Emotions were all nerves in our household. So far away in the lap of the gods. At no point did the British Command show an arrogance in underestimating the enemy completely, but when they did make mistakes as in the failed bombing of Stanley air base or the bungled landing of the Welsh Gaurds, then the enemy gave the task force a bitter bloody nose. It was a brutal, remote and stark war with much undeserved pain and loss on both sides.

However once the Marines, the Paras and the Gurkhas in particular were landed then there was an inevitability that scared conscripts in their trenches would capitulate to literally blood thirsty psychopaths with grenades and bayonets ready for close quarter combat.

What right did the Juanta have to invade and what right do the UK have to their Falklands on going? 

Ironically we had another neighbour who was argentinian and a friend up the road who was also a national, both wives of brits. They could have both gazed out of the window to see the only nuclear submarine ever to fly the Jolly Roger pirate flag as a sign of a "kill" as she steamed up the clyde after the conflict was over.

Porcshe was one and Estella was the other argie bargie caught in an ideological nightmare of geography. The former was I believe of Italian and German family, Estella was more hispanic but maybe she had some italian too in her blood. What right then did the ancestors of these typical Argie nationals have to a land of Pampas once inhabited by native peoples? Or to the whom should Terra del Fuego belong?

The Falklands/Malvinas were up until then of no strategic value to the UK. Even with the oil under their waters, it would take Argentinian cooperation for commercially viable exploitation. Really to Argentina they are of political capital. Why not claim islands 200 nautical miles west of Terra Del Fuego? The UK is locked into its 'Old England Expects',  faded imperialist self image and there by defending the inhabitants rights and soveriegnty of the isles which offer little more than sheltered sounds and harbours, uneconomic sheep farming and a staging post for possible oil exploitation.

It is only really Argentina or other south american countries who can utilise the resources economically around these Islands, and the islands themselves offer little more than a helipad-airport transfer lounge, and shelter to supply boats and trawlers in those same bays and sounds which echoed to low level jet attacks, ack-ack, sea wolf missiles and 4 inch frigate guns 32 years ago.

Indeed I propose that had it not been for the arrogant Juntas invasion, the islands may have become disinhabited by the british population and oil exploration would have been a joint issue, with even a potential sale of the whole boggy, barren, outcrop with it's waters  once held up as the "TEZ" to the Argies.

War is brutal but not futile, it teaches aggressors that they cannot bully and get away with it. From the Junta in Buenos Aires to Bin Laden's assasination,  these victories show the Putins and other bullies around the world that retrobution will come.

David Cameron Reinvents the Bad Wheel

Pico, nano: the uk will spark the next finance crisis due to the distortions the help-to-own phase two injection of cash will do. Already investors are seeing the glitch in the system , the house of cards, the anarchy , the unstoppable free market which was kept going by socialistic cash resuscitations and now kick starts. The media are already calling it the UK subprime market.

Kids, Mobile Devices and Parent Guilt?

I had a good friend who worked for Edinburgh city council in what I considered at the time a bit a whimsical social workerism. His department was 'play development' which was education and opportunities for developing kids playing. The weight actually on teaching adults how to create a simple environment, encourage kids, vary the content and bring in learning for cognitive and motor functions. This was through structured and unstructured play.

It isnt really laughable at all once you are a parent of this generation, 40 something with 1.9 kids, and sit feeling guilty about the amount of time you allow your kids to use iPads, android nettpads, mobiles and nettflix while you do whatever house work or bbc.com,  facebook and jobbs.net.

Should we feel so guilty about allowing our kids on average maybe two hours on mobile devices per day? Why don't we spend time playing with our kids?

Partly this is a generation inheritance thing, and that is what play-development in Edinb'ra' was trying to break and rebuild. Our parents were kids in the 40s and 50s , mine actually earlier again! They had a very traditional set of life patterns and had not been played with so very much by their hard working fathers and even their home oriented housewife mothers. Kids were left to their own devices and play happened a lot at school or in the summer holidays when kids then had actually free range to wander with fewer cars and no worries about pædofiles on every street corner.

More affluent families had nannies, sometimes playful sometimes tyrants in the post war years. Working class mothers in the 1950s had hard house work to do in the uk, while fathers often worked long hours and my father talked even of working christmas morning and just popping in to see me after mum gave birth.

Back then kids had books for wet winter evenings, listen with mother, scouts and the playpark. Kids have all that now. The point is that kids back then were by in large left to their own devices and given encouragement to read and be active rather than the parents engaging in play very often.

My generation in turn, were then treated the same but by that time first the expansion in childrens tv and then the arrival of the home computer meant that we were the first generation super glued to the flat screen.

However as a child I had a lot of other activity with the cub scouts and with my pals or just the local gathering of kids in the woods or the playparks. I did lack a real sense of structured play, which in fact I beleive to be detrimental to me as a person in terms of being used to going with the flow more than being a team player at work or in sport now.

What i do remember was on the one side being embarressed to have my parents even see most of my playing behaviour. You are in a magical little play act for yourself or with pals, and the fun of fooling and adopting personna and making strange noise, and conducting fantasies along a loose course.

On the other hand i then put a bigger value on times when my parents did play with me or took me out on the boat or for a picnic.

So If my parents had played with me all the time i may have been just as negatively affected by their intrusion, becoming one of those irritating precocious only-child offspring who have little irritating questions or pompous comments on play and dont quite get the point of the free feeling of letting go and being a bit wild and naughty.

For me it is a conscious effort to engage in play and also to get my kids involved in sports. However as a house husband for now, it is getting easier and more natural to throw in half an hour board games or help out at junior gymn' or whatever. Also the wee man gets a very long bedtime story session while his big sister reads with joy on her own accord, after many years of having being read for herself.

So i dont see net-pads as all that negative. In fact there are many positive things , and they are growing up with the technology. In one word to use on this topic, mobile devices with touch screens are interactive.

The amount of time used on them is the issue. Can a parent (their mum) with a candy crush addiction cured only to be replaced by family-farm really comment on mindless game play? Can I complain about social networks for kids, beyond the whole pædo and hacking thing, when i can easily be on facebook oer bloggging for an hour at prime time for joint family activities?

In actual fact i think the real danger area for time misspent on nett-pads is actually not about the parent-child interaction, but a sickness for common play when kids visit each other at home. I cannot remember the last time when i went to collect the 'wee man' and he was not involved with an iPad game , with only one pad between the two. Perhaps worse, an iPad mad family where the two kids then sit and play unconnected games for maybe an hour of a two hour visit.

Teenagers now are into the instant mini high of social gratification on FB and the newer platforms. SMS is dieing ! But with laptops in the class room and mobiles int the playground time is just sucked away into largely unconstructive interaction , "twittering" being an apt name.

There are some arguements for the positive sides of social media for teenagers. Friendships can be sustained when classes are split, people go to college or move away. People learn some social ettiquette and get perhaps more feedback on positive and negative attitudes and opinions. People also know who they have more in common with, and can be more socially included in activities and parties rather than talk of social exclusion, which is a fact of life in what ever social contact for teenagers who have the typical challenges of being a bit different. Indeed gay teenagers, goths, those with acne, those who are a bit childish still etc can reach out to each other and find people in the same situation further a field, helping them know they share problems or just ways-of-being which local school society shuns.

The journalist based trad' media itself is reponsible for the bad press the nett pad and social media youth generation get. Ironic because in order to compete for share of voice they have to publish bluntly negative headlines to catch attention and utilise studies which are loaded to find negativity from outset.

By in large though parents have to set limits on time spent on netpads, and schools have to have rules and also counselling about social media. We have to encourage awareness of a balanced lifestyle and how to use these new platforms responsibly and to positive ends as well as permitting just plane old, time wasting recreation.

Puttin' in the Putin into Crimea...Crime in Crimea or Crying for Crimeans ?

Putin may be an unsavoury character to us in the west> he is after all a KGB shadowmaster, but what is the wests real problem with him effectively annexing Crimea?

The crimea was only given over to Ukraine as some strange post stalin concession in 1954. It remained ethnically Russian with the major black sea naval base there under the USSR. Now there comes a long a Kiev government which immediately tries to ban Russian as an official language , and any other non standard Ukrainian language.

What would the US or Britain, those two well known poorly sanctioned invaders of other countries have done? Fidels son invades Guantanamo? War. Argies Invade Falkands again, War. Porto Rico goes socialist anti america by a democratic vote, now let us call that an insurgency. Belieze and Gibralter?

The precedent is not quite the same as Putins Sileasian style holidays from diplomacy to save ethnic Russians and raise popularity in the great bear vote. However where was any real credence or precedent in the invasion of Iraq? It was an oil-well-grab whereas Crimea is probably going to be a land grab and the destruction of a potentially troubelsome rival black sea fleet.

My point is the allies have all done worse within the last 140 years and within the last decade the insurgencies to Iraq and Afganistan and the continued tacit support for the racist political right in the Holy Land and all their west bank land grabbing have done little for world peace.

Putin is preempting a possible civil disruption crimea vs Kiev, not a civil war, and in many ways he is justified in going in there given the uncertainty of who and howrule from kiev will pan out. If this had been the USA going into a terratory with high allegance to them and many of their citizens,  there would be a big presedential conference with a rough translation of what Putin and his cronies will say over the next few days. Only then it would be right.

WHy No Key Boarded Android Devices ..?

I am not a fan of soft keyboards. Apple have the best out on their products but android leave me reeling in portrait mode.

Hence first I was very pleased with my X 10 min pro from the then Sony/Ericcsson but it is really a kid on android phone in reality. Fantastic for texting and so on , but the keyboard becomes unreliable at high cpu load or memory use or the like.  More useable for long e mails or blogs than my first HTC Desire as a company phone.

A guy at worked turned up with what prove to be the last hard keyboard Android product on the market here period> The rather tasty HTC Desire Z

Any bigger and  it would be a mini lap top or PDA in effect but it is only a bit bigger and heavier than the Desire. The keyboard always works, but the back light has no fix for always on and HTC have chosen not to support such useful upgrades in what they see as a niche, loss making phone no doubt.

Downsides in being discontinued are that the processor and OS are a bit laggy wespecially when exiting apps to go to home screen/ It does the usual dinosaur sub v 2 android call micro black out on incoming calls too.

I have 2.2 and I think that is as far as this phone will go. Maybe there will be an ybuntu for android in future harr harr.

The phone is on the heavy side, kind of nice in my very muscular hands girls, while the screen could be bigger if not for that completely functionless multifunction button. It flashes on incoming calls. It maybe allows you to answer them, otherwise it is a spastic. The keyboard not lighting up in daylight while having quite dark letters designed to shine through those LEDs is another spastic thing.

THe biggest down side is the battery life and we should have guessed that from the availability of a big breeze-block after market battery. The standard 1200 mA is insiuffcient and I hear that allowing the new non memory batteries to fully dishcarge actually erodes the quality of the battery at the matrix to [positive terminal end so I wore mine down to a two hour life time of intense wifi with bluetooth, and even shorter with any calls or low bars to cell sender. I fixed this I thought with a 1500mA Anker battery, Peoples ROC unfortunetly/ This has given better life but with any wifi and bluetooth use on top of calls, it is still pathetic and the worst charged life of any phone i have ever owned.

So what HTC need to do is a version of this phone for their new Desire, their Sensation and their little thingy too. Also a mini pad with a slide and tilt set up like a nano netbook. Sony no longer ericcsson , should get in on this act and stop selling thier volume, low margin, low price efforts they are now punting.

screen keyboards use up space and get all thumbed up , especially in portrait mode where it seems to be a weakness of android to have finger point centering to the right or left of actual.

These are the two companies struggeling most, partly because Samsung does big screen phones better, and partly because they became entrenched in the evenutally low margin business sector. Volume never seemed to come their way with profits to match, while executives cried in their prams for a me-too iPhone. So they need to offer some different products, and hard keyboards integrated to the device are a great way forward.

My Desire is so lovely to type with and use for the screen size that I am loathed to get rid of it. I will uninstall some gubbins soon to see if it goes a tad faster and a tad less thirsty.

Face Book Fatigue Part II

Facebook tired with itself as a serious communications venture, dropped @facebook.com e-mail addresses this week.

I think it is just a sign of fatigue with facebook. It is great, it works, it does what it says on the box, it is full of crap.

We all have folk on ignore. We are all annoyed by people's childrens parties and small accidental comedy episodes which get likes in the 50s or more. We most of all hate glib quotation shares.

The trouble is that we have some difficulty in screening out those trite jpeg messages which talk about what love actually is, or what real men are, or what a sister is, or what the day is in very over simple philosophical terms. Especially when people start sharing them to their other halves' FB homepages then we begin to put them on ignore. Because they are jpegs the text content cannot be blocked out by any algorythm (yet ?)

So we ignore the trite idiots who expose us to this crap. My sister in law is the worst offender, maybe 12 in an average day at one point. When it came to one of her kids birthdays, only six liked out of 300 "friends" . Everyone had her on ignore.

I know too, if I had a bit of a blurbing day then maybe a couple more people fell off my timeline and followed me no more. I think that is a shame. I should have had more shares to relevant groups or screened out or listed in peeps but it wither is fiddly or not possible on FB

FB addressed this with the "importance" algorithm which takes likes and probably rate-of-liking, tags, places, number of comments and some content words from the OP to push the post out to your friends list as being of critical value. Also It seems some very seldom posters get air time. THis helps cut down the spam but kind of messes up my general need for a stream of some attention rather than blushing 10 likes and 10 comments.

It annoys us does it not that some people get instantly dozens of likes and happy comments. Sod that though. They were popular in the first place off-line mostly. It is their real friends lack of picking up the phone or dropping in for a coffee which gives credence, a critical mass to which a little flock of followers like to. Facebook colludes as mentioned. These become big important threads, little jimmy spilling chocolate ice cream in the hotel pool.... a hard day work, wishing it was friday....a wonderful life lifting cabin tour to a luxury mountain resort...

I have so many people on ignore now that I get mostly STV news from the old homeland. If someone likes a post of mine, I usually have to go onto their time line and find something to compliment them on.



The time is ripe for one of the other emerging platforms to offer something new and more controllable. Perhaps Twitter may buy out a smaller player which offers one of the new image-share-reply type set ups. Google plus is spreading but who wants google knowing all about you are serving you spam across its omnipresence?

FB dare not change its little blue magic 2002 look and 2008 live scripting. It cant afford the band width either. However it may as before experiment with something rather more radical than the "time line" replacement to the "wall" of old.

Until that point I judge by this 2014 1st quarter's "likes " on my posts and those of the folk I dont have on ignore or venture on their walls, sorry time line, that in fact facebook fatigue is hitting.

I believe the current 2002 look FB with the current barriers to having sensible, relevant, fun content being served up means that it has reached the end of its product life cycle in western countries and either needs a clever revamp or it will loose out to a superior competitor just as freinds-reunited was killed by FB.