Blog posts

As has been mentioned here before, one of the main problems with schemes currently offered for international debt cancellation is the conditionality attached to them. That conditionality goes beyond pressure for transparent accounting by adding considerable requirements for privatisation of public services and movement towards a market-capitalist system. Whatever the merits or otherwise of such a system, the application of those conditions can create artificial pressures on economies unprepared for such rapid change and under-resourced to deal with the new challenges they create. ...

It’s been over five years now since the wave of protests around the WTO ministerial in Seattle brought corporate globalisation and its critics into the forefront of popular debate. They’ve been five years of rapid change, that saw a massive increase in protest around major summits, an associated increase in violence and police repression, and then a change of tactics as much protest work was directed into the anti-war movement and work on globalisation took on other forms. ...

The support of Pakistan has been essential to the “war on terror”. That’s clear from the debt relief they were offered and the subtle shift in language from ‘General’ to ‘President’ when referring to Pervez Musharraf. That’s why it comes as quite a surprise that that same General President Musharraf today denounced that war. It appears that Musharraf joins with many around the world in believing that the ‘war’ is at best a short term salve, and that its leadership to date demonstrates a lack of long-term strategy. It’s difficult to say why he has suddenly changed his public statements (perhaps he’s fed up of the under-resourced, to date fruitless search for Osama Bin Laden, perhaps he realises the need to pacify the more radical elements at home) but if he continues with this line, the repercussions could be considerable. ...

While living in Reading, many of us switched our electricity supply contracts to plans that ensured every unit we used corresponded with one sourced into the national grid from renewable sources. In fact, we took it a step further, and succeeded in getting our University to make a similar commitment. Moving to the US I had expected such a switch to be harder, but when a review of A Year Of Living Generously reminded me to investigate again I was delighted to find Consumers Energy’s Green Power Program. There’s a slight premium to be paid, but putting on that extra bit of pressure to encourage investment in renewable energy and associated research seems well worth it, so right now we’re waiting for the next stage after: ...

The NME is carrying a story today about the latest venture on the part of Shawn Fanning, the founder of Napster. Snocap is likely to garner more interest from this than from News.com’s coverage a couple of weeks back, but if you’re wanting detail the latter is a better read. It seems rather likely that Fanning will be seen as a traitor by many P2P advocates. The new service is built after prolonged discussions with the music industry and, we are told, is set to employ sophisticated ‘song matching’ technology (perhaps similar to musicbrainz?) to block the sharing of any music that is also being sold through that network by a record label. It’s in some ways a halfway house between the iTunes Music Store and traditional P2P, and seems to be the first genuinely new contribution to that area of online music in some time. ...

In the same sense that they endorsed John Kerry, are Al Qaeda now endorsing the NRA?

We all know of the debate over whether a war on Iraq supports ‘The War On Terror’ or is in fact a dangerous distraction from it. One thing I hadn’t yet realised was that the fight against the International Criminal Court is also being used as a distraction from that same struggle against global terrorism. That all changed with this press release from Citizens for Global Solutions: The omnibus appropriations bill scheduled for final House approval today contains a controversial amendment that will impose further sanctions on countries that have ratified the International Criminal Court (ICC) treaty. The amendment, originally included in the House version of the foreign aid spending bill in July, would prohibit assistance from the Economic Support Fund (ESF) for countries that have refused to sign a “bilateral immunity agreement” to shield U.S. citizens and certain foreign nationals from transfer to the ICC for investigation or prosecution for atrocities or genocide. The funds affected include support for anti-terrorism activities, peace building, democratization and counter-drug initiatives. ...

On my other hard drive (thanks to the collecting spirit of Tom Wills) I have a film made in the late 40s by the US government to promote the Marshall Plan. It spells out the need for America to support the redevelopment of Europe for fear that otherwise new generations will grow up fueled by resentment, becoming terrorists. I thought it a sadly ironic statement when I first watched it in 2002 and with each viewing that sense has increased. ...

We’ve been working on a complete overhaul of Sarah’s website, the first fruits of which are beginning to show. Apache’s mod_rewrite is used to clean up some URLs, the site no longer uses browser sniffing, and the look of the site has been spruced up.

This one’s probably for serious New Testament studies and postmodernism geeks only, but I couldn’t let NT Wright’s " Taking the Text with Her Pleasure" slip by without mention (okay, so it was originally published in 1996, but I’ve only just found it online). While reserving judgement on its critique of John Dominic Crossan’s “The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant”, I couldn’t help but fall for passages like: ...