Blog posts

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). ...

Today was another day that didn’t leave time for much blogging. But I have been wanting to highlight Martin’s ever so appropriate comment (which was in fact his guess as to my response to the Iranian elections): Ahmadinewhatsit is exactly the kind of leader the US has been imagining Iran has for some time now…

For one current project involving the presentation of a program for an arts festival, I needed a way to present ’next’ and previous’ links within the results of a MySQL query. For example, the user might search for all artists who are sculptors and order the results by the artist’s last name. Ordinarily when building next/previous links I’m working without that level of sorting, and I ended up doing quite a bit of searching to find the best way to achieve this. ...

Former US Deputy Secretary of Defence, now President of the World Bank Paul Wolfowitz has recently begun making his first big pronouncements in his new role. Sharing the strong emphasis on Africa that most big players are adopting in the run up to the G8 Summit, he has been touring the continent and making some very promising calls. According to this piece in the Christian Science Monitor, Wolfowitz is keen to support equal rights for women (because of their focal place in many developing world communities and families, women often play a more crucial role in development than do men), and harmonize the bank’s relationship with aid agencies “to reduce the administrative burden.” In other contexts he has been speaking of the need for western governments to practice what they preach in terms of free trade. ...

Juan Cole’s commentary on Middle Eastern issues over at Informed Comment remains essential reading. I was particularly amused by his response to Ayatollah Khamenei’s suggestion that the Iranian public had, by voting for the hardline candidate, “humiliated” Bush: that in some ways Presidents Bush and Ahmadinejad are soul mates. For those of us who have been hoping for a gradual opening up of Iranian society, the election result is rather a blow and, despite the similarities Professor Cole points out, is only likely to increase aggression between Iran and the West in the short-term. ...

Capping off a walking tour of New York, our second night in the city saw us at two concerts: Susan Enan at Rockwood Music Hall, and Bell X1 at Sin-e. Susan moved to New York earlier this year, but the way she greeted almost every member of the crowd assembled in Rockwood Music Hall made it very clear that she’s settled in quickly. Rockwood sits right on the edge of the East Village and has been operating for about six months, hosting intimate musical gatherings in a bar-space that will accommodate maybe 50 people. ...

As I’ve touched on before, one of the areas I’ve been exploring as part of the Social Documents projects is ways of managing document revisions. With a major United Nations summit coming up in September (and the 60th anniversary of the charter on Sunday) I’d like my UN Charter site to be better equipped to handle any amendments to the charter that might be made, but as more and more public documents come online it will be important to be able to look back through their histories and see how they’ve evolved. ...

There was a qualifier clearly missing from my recent posts on the G8 announcement on debt cancellation. It’s not quite so clear what that qualifier should have been, but ‘public’ is probably close to the mark. The G8 announcement of “100% debt cancellation” only applied to those debts owed to a few multilateral bodies which are, effectively, extensions of rich governments. Debts that are effectively owed to the taxpayers in the world’s richer countries. ...

Our time in New York prevented me from following the first round of the Iranian Presidential elections in the detail I might otherwise have indulged, but I’m glad to be able to follow the run-offs a little more closely. It was disconcerting to wake up this morning to hear NPR continually referring to former President Hashemi Rafsanjani as ‘moderate.’ It’s the same sort of political spin that left this European bemused at the attacks on the “liberal”, “left-wing” Democrats in last year’s US Presidential election. When your opposition is quite that conservative, almost anyone can look moderate and liberal. ...