Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader wakes up every day now and wonders what other famous person is going to be found dead, die, or be killed. There seems to be someone new every day…

Today comes the news that Former Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara died yesterday in Washington DC, aged 93. The Washington Post has a comprehensive obituary posted for him.

Your Maximum Leader, starting in the late 1990s, started to feel sorry for Robert McNamara. He was a man condemned to live his life in the knowledge that he engineered the policies of the Vietnam War. Those policies resulted in the loss of tens of thousands of American lives and much treasure. In the end one can say that the statistical know-how that had well served McNamara until 1961 and there after was the key to his failed Vietnam policies. The statistics and analysis that he so wanted to lead to a dispassionate application of a rational policy was in the end doomed to failure for not being able to quantify the human factors of the war.

Your Maximum Leader hopes Robert McNamara has found his peace now. It seemed as though it was too elusive in life.

Carry on.