Not quite there yet are we Dave?

The Green Avenger aka David Cameron aka Blair Lite's recent goof has proved that he sees "saving the planet" as no more than a velvet coat tail he can ride into power. In January he flew 90 miles (return) by private jet from Oxfordshire to Herefordshire - a journey which would have taken 2 hours 20 by car.

The fridge is open

(Moving house at the moment so no time to write anything)

Comic genius

Adam Buxton provides the voice over to a sign language interpreter on BBC News 24

Friday Matinee Movie

Jaws in 9.23 minutes, filmed on Super8 by a team of twelve year-olds in 1978.

Don't believe the truth

I watched "The Great Global Warming Swindle" tonight on Channel 4. It claimed the truth (that man is having no effect on the temperature of the planet) has been hijacked by political activists and self-interested climatologists. Well argued with lots of graphs and clever people explaining complex subject, it reminded me of the incredible power (and pointlessness) of statistics. Someone has got to be wrong. If the experts on the programme were correct it shows how easy it is to prove the complete opposite with exactly the same set of data.

I agree that there is a real sense of mania around green issues right now and without all the scare stories (papers to sell, people) and catastrophe movies coming out it would never have the momentum it does. But regardless of whether CO2 emissions are harmful or not the consequences of the eco-frenzy created by the issue are wonderful. Would anyone like to tell me how producing less pollution, recycling and generally being more thoughtful of the consequences of our actions is such a terrible thing?

This polarised debate is not doing anyone any good as what cannot be denied is that the general state of our planet is undeniably linked to human activity. We are affecting a lot more than just the air temperature by gorging on its limited resources just so we can try and make ourselves happy by buying mountains of crap we don't need. Unfortunately, this show will give environmental sceptics a warm glow of righteous justification tonight.

The Word Development Movement

I've been interested in the whole globalisation/capitalism debate for quite a while now. I've read a decent amount of books on the subject including the excellent "Globalization and Its Discontents" and am strongly of the opinion that the way we have things set up that make us all so wealthy (and house prices so high *grumble*) is what is keeping the rest of the world so poor. From what I've read and also seen in my last year away there really isn't much going on to even the balance. Unfortunately many charities appear to be sadly misguided in their execution. For example, NGOs in South East Asia have a reputation for driving around in air-conditioned SUVs and living in gated communities. I also get the feeling a lot of the money ends up disappearing in corruption, which is absolutely rife in places like Cambodia and being bled dry by crazy bureaucracy in somewhere like India.

The World Development Movement is different. They're not about funding idealistic projects which are supposed to "empower" poor communities, but pressure "decision-makers to stop policies that hurt the world’s poor". Donating money to them goes towards things like producing campaign resources for protesters and toolkits for parliamentarians. They have been very successful in raising awareness in issues such as the disastrous privatisation of water companies in places like Tanzania and Guyana which are being pushed on developing countries by organisations like the IMF and funded by our government.

What's even better about WDM is that you can actually take part. They have four groups in London alone. This isn't some extreme left wing group (although I'm sure it attracts a lot of weirdos). Its about our politicians and companies paying more than just lip service to all the shit they spout.

Blog 1.0

I'm planning to build my own blog, but its probably going to take a while so I'm using Blogger for now. I'm a Web Developer by trade, using Microsoft's .Net environment, but rather than doing the easy thing and building it in the language I've been writing for 3 or 4 years, I'm going to learn Ruby - an open source programming language which my friend Joerg says has "changed his life". Good, I've said it now so I'll have to do it.

Bienvenidos

This isn't my first blog, but it feels like it.

Sara and I virtually wrote a book in the time we were away, but for some reason that doesn't seem so self-indulgent. At least we were doing pretty interesting stuff. Who wants to read about a life of work, getting drunk, playing footy and complaining about the price of housing? Well you don't have to do you? I'm gonna do it anyway...