Wynner's Blog – Ross Wynne on Anything and Everything…

I’ve been in the process of writing a robots.txt file for my website when I came across an interesting robots file for the Whitehouse.

For those who don’t know what a robots file is it’s a special file placed in a website’s main directory which tells ‘crawlers’ such as Google, MSN, Yahoo! and others what parts of the website to index and what not to index. This file usually is set to only disallow directories that are private and shouldn’t be publicly accessed.

To my surprise (but really it was fairly par for the course) the whole of the Whitehouse website seems to be deliberately set up so that it cannot be mirrored by such projects as the Internet Archive. Indeed a search of how the Whitehouse website looked over the years shows that the robots file must have been altered sometime after 11th Feb 2005.

So why is this a big deal you may ask… Well quite simply it means that anything published by on the Whitehouse website can be altered without any automated way of tracking the changes. Basically you can rewrite the content history of a website… There hasn’t been a reason given as far as I’m aware of why this changed occurred so I guess we can only speculate with various consperancy theories!

Check out the parts of the website you’re not allowed index with their robots.txt file.

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This week saw the two largest political egos take center stage in the UN. Both Bush and Ahmadinejad spoke about one of the hottest topics in world politics namely Iran’s development of nuclear weapon capabilities. Whatever Iran’s plans are we’ll obviously find out in due course but what about the US?

A little digging shows that the US really isn’t keeping its nose clean in nuclear issues either. A ban on developing small ‘tactical’ nukes was put in place by the US Congress in October 1994 but due to a request by the US DoD in 2003 this research ban was lifted. Since then a development program has started and after some renaming is now being done away from the public eye.

With this comes the rather sinister “Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations” that was brought into force in 2005. This document outlines the eight reasons a military commander can request for a nuclear weapon to be deployed. It certainly has the fingerprints of the hawkish neo-cons all over it with their famous pre-emptive war strategy at the heart of the doctrine.

These are the eight ‘reasons’ for launching nukes (blatantly ripped from Wikipedia):

• An enemy threatening to use or using WMD against US, multinational, or alliance forces or civilian populations.
• To prevent an imminent biological attack.
• To attack enemy WMD or its deep hardened bunkers containing WMD that could be used to target US or its allies.
• To stop enemy potentially overwhelming conventional forces.
• To rapidly end a war on favourable US terms.
• To make sure US and international operations are successful.
• To show US intent and capability to use nuclear weapons to deter enemy from using WMDs.
• To react to enemy-supplied WMD use by proxies against US and international forces or civilians

My particular favourite is the ‘rapid end to a war’ point. It could be argued that the quagmire that Bush and Blair have gotten themselves into in Iraq could be solved by the wiping out of certain countries in the middle east hence giving the US ‘favourable’ access to all the oil and as we all know the US can’t even be slapped on the wrist by the UN due to the terribly undemocratic setup of vetoes. More than that though imagine these rules had been in force during Gulf War II. We were told continually that Iraq had WMD and as we found out they most certainly didn’t (at least in the areas in the particular satellite photographic ‘evidence’ that was presented to the UN) so the question must be asked…
Would the US really launch nukes on Iran and/or North Korea based on American intelligence saying that there are WMDs in those countries?

Jane’s certainly thinks it’s a possibility.

I cower in fear for the last two years of Bush…

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I spent this morning watching alleged-PM-to-be preside at the launch at the new (BMW) Mini in Oxford. Besides the fact that the Mini is now a German owned machine Chancellor Gordon Brown gave a speech as entertaining and dynamic as any budget speech he’s ever given. In fact the two other people I were watching it with enjoyed it so much that they started to snore quite naturally.

My own issue with his speech was not the fact that it repeated itself numerous times but that every one or two seconds he kept reaching for his notes whether he looked at them or not. In fact it was quite addictive to watch and totally had me transfixed.

I was sad enough to double check that I wasn’t being facitious and watched the whole video online. In the first five minutes he touches his notes 54 times. He reaches a hundred touches by 8mins 28secs and the final number of touches is 130 in the 10 mins 25secs speech! That’s a touch every 4.8 seconds!

Seriously go check out the video of the speech!

Is it as annoying as Mary Robinsons bobbing head, Tony Blair’s demonic smile or my ranting?

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