Blog posts

A letter sent to Sojourners in response to a piece in their latest Sojomail: I appreciated Adam Taylor’s rallying call (“The G8 and poverty: ‘Beyond empty symbolism’”) in your last issue, but feel that perhaps he overstates what we are likely to receive as an outcome of the summit. Hopefully we will get more progress on debt cancellation, some trade reform, and maybe there will even be movement on climate change, but we are not going to get “real justice and empowerment for the world’s most impoverished people.” ...

Surprise, surprise, there have been clashes between riot police and protestors in Edinburgh in advance of the G8 summit. The BBC have pictures, but if viewing them, it’s worth also checking out the reports at Indymedia.

A couple of weeks ago, the Guardian published a column by George Monbiot entitled " Bards of the Powerful." He accused Bono and Bob Geldof of legitimising the G8’s role in Africa through their cosy relationship with Bush and Blair. His column followed soon in the footsteps of news that criticism of those leaders (it’s never been clear whether that is merely over the Iraq war, or more generally) was to be forbidden at today’s Live 8 concerns. ...

There has been much jubilation since Google announced their javascript-based maps API yesterday. I’ve been playing with it a little and have updated the Grand Rapids WiFi google map to use the new API. The web pages produced this way are much more responsive than those using the old hacks, and it’ll be great to see what people produce now we have official support. I’m hoping to shortly release a new version of the WiFi site which allows search results to be plotted on a map (or viewed as a list as at present). Until then, this implementation remains ’experimental'.

Yesterday saw another major debt cancellation announcement. Not from the G8 this time, but from a shadowy cabal of supposedly democratic governments. One of the many dreadful injustices tied into the current international debt situation is that indebted governments are not allowed to negotiate ’en bloc,’ while creditors routinely gather into groupings to negotiate together. One of those groupings is the Paris Club, a group of creditor governments that meet in private to decide on policies towards bilateral debt. It has long been a hard organization for interested parties to penetrate, and is just one of many institutions that desparately needs to be opened up so that voters can scrutinise its proceedings. ...

The BBC are appealing for messages. Here’s mine: “Who are you and where did you come from? Or rather, who elected the leaders of these eight countries to make decisions that so deeply affect the whole world. But if you’re going to be here, it’s about time you did something useful. Start by bringing about a truly transparent and effective debt cancellation process, that applies to all of a country’s debts (not 100% of some arbitrary portion) and channels funds to its poorest people.”

A couple of months ago I installed Brad Choate’s excellent SpamLookup MovableType plugin to help with the deluge of comment and trackback spam that was hitting some MT blogs that I run. It hasn’t completely stopped the spam for me in the way it has for some friends, but the amount of spam hitting MT-Blacklist is down to about one-seventh of previous levels, which means the amount reaching me is considerably down too. ...

As this blog approaches its third birthday, I’ve decided its time to change things around again. I’m working on a new design which should be a bit cleaner and easier to work with, and I’m going to be emphasising categories more strongly. I’ve also long wanted to use this blog as a place to gather bits and pieces I’ve contributed to other sites — such as reviews of books on amazon and the like — but not wanted to make them front page entries. Today I began doing that. ...

I contemplated reading Hertz’s book a few years ago but passed on it, fearing it would simply retread the same ground as so many others emerging in the wake of the “anti-globalisation” protests. In some ways, I was right, but coming to it four years after publication I found it a useful summary of many of the issues barely-fettered capitalism presents to society, and a fair-handed exploration of the strengths and weaknesses of the corporation-based society we find ourselves in. ...

One last post to wrap up the New York stories… I had been to New York twice before. The first time I was seven years old, and while I remember loving the experience, the memories are rather hazy and it didn’t leave me with much of a sense of the city. The second time was so brief as to barely count: a cab ride between JFK and La Guardia en route to Nashville (and from there for my first visit to Grand Rapids). ...