October 2004 Archives

Friday night seemed to go wonderfully, and already the reviews are flooding in. Well, maybe not flooding but Brandon wrote a very kind review.

Photos and such will follow in due course, now to get back to looking up film listings...

When Andy arrived on Monday, he happened to mention that he carried with him a highly valued commodity. Douglas Coupland's latest novel was released in the UK in August, but is not set to reach these shores until January '05.

Needless to say, Andy was kind enough to leave the book here while he ventured over to Chicago for the night. And having nothing more to do this week than read for an afternoon, I pulled my laptop over to the sofa (in case anyone thought of anything else I should be working on) and read.

As with any Coupland, there's plenty to say about the book. His characteristic traits are all firmly in place, but his work has yet to become staid in these eyes. I'm still processing, and am looking forward to getting a chance to read through again, more carefully, when I either get round to ordering it from amazon UK or when the US release finally arrives. In short, he's done it again.

Dear Michael W Smith,

Next time you choose to make a phone call to me--whether that be another pre-recorded diatribe or perhaps a personal call that doesn't seem as much of an abuse of my time--perhaps you would humour me and not presume to know what my values are. I understand that the phrase "our values" doesn't necessarily include the person to whom you are talking, but the implication was clear. And quite frankly, I'm a lot closer to sharing John Kerry's values than I am to sharing yours.

Perhaps in your cossetted world the only issue facing America, or indeed humanity, is that of gay marriage and civil partnerships. Sadly that is not the case in the world I inhabit, the same world everyone I know seems to inhabit. There is, for example, the question of fiscal responsibility, there are issues of honesty and integrity, and there is that thing the faith from which you milk your millions calls for more directly than anything else: loving your neighbour and lifting up the oppressed.

Next time you choose to make a phone call to me, I would be happy to discuss these and any number of other issues with you. I'll even try to avoid referring to your little slip-up last time you played in London where, I am told, it appeared that you thought U2 were British. But if you want my time, I'd be grateful for a little of yours in return, along with an acknowledgement that it's a big world out there, a complicated world, and one that can't be reduced to a single issue.

I look forward to your prompt response.

yours,

James Stewart

(emailed to: fanmail@michaelwsmith.com)

Yesterday, an instant messenger conversation or two led me to take a look at the UN Charter online. And I was rather disgusted by what I saw! The site uses frames, dodgy animated gifs (not only for the flag, but for bulleted lists!) and very poor HTML to make one of the world's key documents an inaccessible mess.

So when I discovered that UNCharter.org had not been registered I thought I might as well do something about the status quo. Twenty hours later I am delighted to be able to announce that UNCharter.org now contains the full (english) text of the United Nations Charter, cross-referenced and searchable.

I've got a couple of ideas of further features for the site, but something tells me I should perhaps catch up on whatever else it was the past twenty hours were meant to be about achieving.

After a couple of weeks where I finally regained momentum, a whole host of projects have been keeping me away from this blog yet again. One that is now public is the relaunch of the sarahmasen.com discussion boards and the beginning of an overhaul of Sarah's whole site. Another relates to the fact that the domain name UNCharter.org was available and now is no longer. Hopefully that (and at least one other) will be ready for previewing shortly.

Of course, another event will probably limit my blogging options for the rest of the month, but I'll try to stop by here occasionally.

One of the saddest facets of Christian involvement in US politics is the string of gross oversimplifications that are made when it comes to the issue of abortion. The fact that the Republican party has a tendency to want to outlaw abortion is alleged to be God's seal on that party's policies, and evangelical and conservative believers find an incredible capacity for tunnel-vision.

So it's more than a little surprising that the Kerry campaign haven't been all over the research of Dr. Glen Stassen, the Lewis B. Smedes Professor of Christian Ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary. In the latest SojoMail Stassen reveals that his research (admittedly based on limited evidence, but still significant) into abortion rates suggests that abortion rates were falling under Clinton and have sharply risen under the Bush administration.

That research needs to be supported and extended. That research needs to be proclaimed from the rooftops. If you want to reduce abortions, if you want to "save babies' lives", you need to invest in a social infrastructure that will allow parents to support those babies. It's time that the rhetoric of "democrats=pro-choice=pro-abortion" get kicked out of US politics. It's not just lacking in nuance, it seems to be bad statistics.

The BBC is reporting that Japan has offered to write off a $200million debt owed to it by the Nepalese government. The loan was made 20 years ago and had yet to be paid off.

This development shows a shift in Japan's policy regarding international debt from the position four years ago when Jubilee 2000 campaigners gathered outside the Japanese embassy in London every Tuesday morning to petition the then-president of the G8 to raise debt's profile on the G8 agenda for their annual summit in Okinawa. That campaigning had little immediate fruit (but the embassy staff enjoyed the attention each week) and Japan was at the time alleged to be threatening countries with cuts in development aid should they apply for debt cancellation.

Now Japan is cancelling a key loan to one of its key debtors. A debtor, in fact, that is not included in the list of 37 countries included in the HIPC program. (To be included in HIPC countries must have a 150% debt:GDP ratio. It is worth noting that the number of countries eligible has increased since HIPC launched). There are a number of countries outside HIPC that desparately need debt relief, I'm holding out hope that this is a sign that the consensus on terms-for-inclusion is cracking.

Joi Ito links to this piece by Chris Anderson in Wired. Dubbed "The Long Tail" it explores the new sales models that the vast catalogues of online services such as amazon, iTunes and netflix are opening up. With their low overheads such services can afford to keep far larger inventories than their bricks-and-mortar equivalents and are seeing significant returns on those inventories with large numbers of sales of items that would otherwise fade into obscurity.

For those of us who tend to make choices of music, film and books that often slip outside the mainstream it is an enticing concept. The suggestion that it is a fair bet that children today will grow up never knowing the meaning of out of print suggests a world of promise. Some of us will certainly miss the hours of searching through used CD shops to find that rare gem, but I suspect we'll adapt (and if the distribution medium changes, then there will for some time be 'antique' dealers whose stock we can search for those antiquated CDs).

Anderson attempts to argue that the current price of MP3 downloads is too high. It is true that the music industry cartel currently controls pricing, and he provides costings to suggest that items could be sold more cheaply, but he apparently fails to take into account for the retailer to make a profit. Certainly their overheads are lower, but that doesn't mean their expectations of profitability are similarly. They are corporations after all.

And that point is also part of the reason I am sceptical about the argument for subscription services which would have unlimited 'streaming' of music replacing the current purchase model employed by iTunes. The idea of paying a limited monthly fee for unlimited monthly music sounds great, but the control that this centralisation of music ownership hands to undemocratic organisations is of concern. This proposal is not about placing the music in a kind of 'cultural commons' of the sort being explored by Creative Commons, and could, as competition increases and with it exclusive licensing deals, see a repeat of exactly the same problems that have dogged artists whose labels have gone out of business consigning their unreleased records to purgatory.

Of course there are also the nagging concerns about the decline of traditional retail, in part selfish. While not all retail outlets will be impacted in the near future, when I end up in a shopping centre/mall it's the bookshops and music retailers that set me at ease. They are the ones under threat. And they are often the focal points of vibrant communities being natural congregating points for creative people. The positive potential is considerable, I hope the urban planners have our backs covered!

UPDATE: Those interested in this topic may like to consider this piece at demos.

When discussing the issue of international debt, the most common question people have is a variant on who controls these debts? The answer is usually a combination of the IMF and the World Bank. These two institutions, funded by a conglomeration of governments, are responsible for lending money to countries for development projects. It is these bodies that are responsible for the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative, that requires countries who desire debt reduction or cancellation to demonstrate their commitment to good economic governance (and, along the way, the privatisation of public services and the removal of trade tarrifs) through the production of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs).

It seems that rich-country governments are finally admitting that the HIPC process has run out of steam. Gordon Brown's pronouncement that the British government will put up significant funds for further debt cancellation, and rumblings within the US government of new policy on debt cancellation, amount to tacit acknowledgement that the programme we were told five years ago would solve the problem of 'third world debt' has done nothing of the sort.

One of the many great injustices of the debt crisis is that the terms of cancellation are decided by the lenders. To use an oft-quoted analogy, if I were to declare bankcruptcy then the process would be arbitrated by independent parties rather than my creditors. In international finance there is no analogue to this and it is the creditors (who naturally have a vested interest) set the terms. Various long term solutions to this situation have been suggested, chief among them the proposals of Jubilee Research, a team within the New Economics Foundation by Ann Pettifor, the former Director of Jubilee 2000 UK.

What was for so long lacking was strong voices from the debt-afflicted nations. With at least one government threatening to withdraw development aid from certain countries were their governments to speak out, or even request debt cancellation, many indebted governments were forced to act submissively. That, at least, is changing. Since the WTO meetings in Seattle in 1999 when poor country leaders managed to stall proceedings (while police gassed protestors outside) and Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria and Thabo Mbeki of South Africa's meeting with G8 leaders in Okinawa in 2000, the voice of the poorer countries has grown louder.

The BBC this week reported that African leaders failed to get more votes on the IMF and World Bank boards. This news initially dispirited me -- it's about time that countries so deeply affected by IMF/WB policies had a strong voice on their boards -- but on reflection I'm taking it as a sign of progress. Only a few years ago there would not have been a group like the G24 to make such demands. Now there is. Maybe soon they'll start making the gains they so richly deserve?

I don't remember first discovering the music of Sam Phillips. I think she was one of those artists whose names I heard somewhere and whose records I subsequently scoured the Greenbelt fringe stalls for. Right now, we're waking up to Martinis and Bikinis. Usually 'waking up records' wear on me quickly, but this one's lasting longer than most.

She's coming to Calvin on October 16th, and in anticipation of that I was delighted to find this article/interview with her. It's a great mixture of personal reflection and substantial interview. It can't hurt that it contains the news that T-Bone Burnett is working on a new record (and I'm taking that more seriously than the rumours of such that have been floating around for at least 8 years now).

There's good, meaty stuff about faith and art. There's reflection on raising their daughter Simone. There are hints of what's to follow A Boot And A Shoe. Well worth reading.

UPDATE: I posted a few notes about the Calvin show here. In short: it was stunning.

It was more work cycling out to Beaner's than I'd been expecting, but I'm sure the exercise did me good. I was here for a meeting with Joel about a project we're working on (on which more later).

Wireless access seems pretty good, even when a guy across the room fired up some peer-to-peer software, though mid-afternoon it did slow down considerably. It seems to be one of the more popular hotspots locally with about half a dozen users at any one time, but even when it is slow the connection seems reliable. I enjoyed my coffee, but wouldn't recommend the club bagel which seemed a little 'plastic'. Maybe I need to be less demanding about cheeses?

The piped jazz works for a while, but I'm glad of headphones, and there isn't the communal atmosphere of some of the downtown/eastown coffee shops. But if you're on this side of town, Beaner's isn't a bad place to check out.

While many of us have been looking the other way, Israel has mounted its largest incursion for some time into Gaza. According to the Guardian, 50,000 people are trapped in Gaza by the Israeli army's renewed strategy of demolishing homes and blocking roads. The operation is being referred to as "Operation Days of Penitence". The irony is palpable and tragic.

It is in this context that Ariel Sharon accused Iran of recruiting Arab citizens for the purposes of sedition. He seems to believe that Hezbollah has been using Iranian backing to support incursions into the occupied territories for recruiting purposes.

It is certainly true that Iran has in the past had, and may today have, links with Hezbollah. They are viewed across much of the middle-east as freedom fighters, a portrayal that ongoing Israeli actions encourage. While groups like Hezbollah commit acts that should cause any right-minded government to withdraw their support, very few governments are free of links with such groups.

What is really clear from Sharon's statement is his own power of denial. If anything is encouraging "sedition" amongst those peoples it's the continuing sense of powerlessness constant incursions cause. And what also becomes clear from the empty rhetoric being used in the US presidential debates is that there is no will from either candidate to really resolve this issue. The current context would have provided plenty of graphic examples for the administration to use in announcing a new resolve, or for Kerry/Edwards to critique the abject failure that is the roadmap.

I promised a change of subject, so here it is. Today, Julie Lee's fabulous new record "Stillhouse Road" is released in the USA (and maybe Canada). Rather than make many comments about the record I will note that the website has audio clips, that the album features such luminaries as Allison Krauss, Vince Gill, and Colin Linden, and that there will be more information about it on the website as soon as possible.

Oh, and amazon has it.

For anyone interested in things so techie, I've just posted a PHP wrapper for the Technorati API over at my work site. Technorati's a search engine for blogs with an interface to allow programmers to use their data on their own sites. It seemed that no-one had written an interface to that for PHP, and I thought it about time they did.

So if that sort of thing interests you, do check it out. If not, I'll try and change the subject tomorrow.

For a while now, it has looked like the Bush administration would do well to distance themselves from Halliburton. It seems they may have missed the opportunity, as the administration's favourite defence contractor seems to want out of some of its highest profile contracts. While the firm's name has come to symbolise all that is wrong with the administration's spending and empire-building policies, this Guardian piece reveals that it itself is facing difficult times.

If Halliburton does indeed sell Kellogg Brown & Root, the division responsible for their ill-gotten Iraq contract, it will demonstrate once again how far short of the promises Bush's Iraq policy has fallen. Involvement in "rebuilding" Iraq has become a liability for those few who looked set to gain and companies are beginning to crumble in much the same way as the country's basic infrastructure.

I must confess that this was one area where I did think the administration just might succeed. But it looks even their attempts at profiteering exploded in their faces. I'm imagining this story could work well as a follow-up to Pirates of the Carribean.

There are a couple of exceptions to the deplorable lack of inquiring, investigative interviewers in US broadcast journalism. Chief amongst them is a man who claims to purvey "fake news". Last week, Jon Stewart was interviewed on NPR's Fresh Air and repeated a thankfully-increasing-refrain that media has been subverted so that it no longer holds truth claims up to scrutiny but instead simply repeats what it's fed.

The interview is well worth a listen. You can do that right here.

So in the end we didn't watch the first Presidential "debate" on Thursday night. If Martyn Joseph hadn't been playing at Schulers there might have been some chance, but ongoing campaign fatigue would probably still have prevented us from breaking our TV fast.

So it was a pleasant surprise on Friday morning to start reading the reports and begin gaining the impression that the next one might be worth watching. Word on the street seems to be that Kerry may have (for the first time) won a verbal victory over his smirking opponent. Let's hope it's a sign of eloquence to come.

Much press attention has been granted to the squaring off of the two candidates on issues relating to North Korea and, of course, Iraq. But some attention was paid to Iran. According to this transcript Bush was the first to invoke that name:

A free Iraq will enforce the hopes and aspirations of the reformers in places like Iran.

Kerry didn't respond immediately but later commented (echoing as he so often does Bush's assumptions):

Thirty-five to forty countries in the world had a greater capability of making weapons at the moment the president invaded than Saddam Hussein. And while he's been diverted, with 9 out of 10 active duty divisions of our Army, either going to Iraq, coming back from Iraq, or getting ready to go, North Korea's gotten nuclear weapons and the world is more dangerous. Iran is moving toward nuclear weapons and the world is more dangerous. 

and:

And Iran and Iraq are now more dangerous -- Iran and North Korea are now more dangerous.

Pressed on strategy, Bush stated that:

On Iran, I hope we can do the same thing, continue to work with the world to convince the Iranian mullahs to abandon their nuclear ambitions. 

while Kerry immediately rejoined with:

With respect to Iran, the British, French, and Germans were the ones who initiated an effort without the United States, regrettably, to begin to try to move to curb the nuclear possibilities in Iran. I believe we could have done better.

I think the United States should have offered the opportunity to provide the nuclear fuel, test them, see whether or not they were actually looking for it for peaceful purposes. If they weren't willing to work a deal, then we could have put sanctions together. The president did nothing.

Both made reference to sanctions against Iran, with Kerry complaining about the hitherto unilateral policy of the United States and repeating his familiar call for internationalising any efforts.

As far as Bush's strategy goes, noted Iranian blogger Hoder would seem to have it right. Bush talks of working with moderate groups in Iran, of strengthening reformers and entering into dialogue, but recent months have seen renewed repression of reformers given license by the invasion of Iraq and hardline western rhetoric.

As so often in this campaign it is disappointing that Kerry so quickly assents to Bush's presuppositions; it is sad that he has not done more to deconstruct the empty rhetoric of the "war on terror". But he does seem to genuinely want to move the boundaries of dialogue. We can perhaps be praying for that small mercy.

I had heard that Michigan Association of Police were running a fund raising campaign at present. I had held out a hope that they'd phone me, but I didn't expect them to. Particularly not on a day when only one in ten calls was for someone who lived here.

Yet call me they did and I got the chance to ask my question. After agreeing with the contention that "in these troubling times" we should support the police force, that it was important that scholarshps be provided for those wanting to pursue careers in law enforcement, and that the families of officers killed in action should be supported, I was asked whether $25 or $50 would be my preferred donation.

Noting that I didn't have any money I was able to give them at present, I asked whether the caller agreed that law enforcement was the responsibility of government. Silence followed. I took that as agreement. I then asked what they were doing to lobby local, state and federal government for more support for law enforcement professionals. He replied that this telephone campaign was statewide. I thanked him for his non-sequitur and asked again about lobbying. I heard some mumbling and then silence.

Yes, the paid fundraisers for the Michigan Association of Police hung up on me. This is, it seems, happening more and more.