A rant about Israel / Palestine and their respective rageposters shitting up my Facebook stream: 1. First of all, everyone stop firing anything at anyone! Fighting for peace makes about …
Human error
This video is worth watching through. It’s a heartfelt statement against nuclear power in a country that has experienced some of the worst effects of our obsession with splitting atoms. …
That petrol emotion: BP’s ‘cleanup’ of the Gulf of Mexico
Originally published in Issue 437 of New Internationalist Magazine. There are two kinds of cleanup operations in the Gulf of Mexico: the real one and the one that allows us to continue …
Popular Articles
A selection of some of the articles and essays I’ve written over the years.
World Wide Web of Change
I can remember clearly the first time I ever used the internet. It was on my Commodore 64 – one of the earliest mass-market consumer PCs – and I had just received my shiny new whizz-bang modem. It was a beastly thing – one of those old-fashioned devices that you had to physically put the telephone receiver into like in the 1983 Hollywood film WarGames. Continue reading…
Guilt Complex
In his thought-provoking essay The Happiness Conspiracy (NI 391), John F Schumaker described the damaging psychological and social effects of a society single-mindedly fixated on the pursuit of personal happiness above all other concerns. ‘No-one is less able to sustain happiness than someone obsessed with feeling only happiness,’ he observed. Continue reading…
Politics with Soul
Creak, creak, creak. tizzle, tizzle, pop! The noisy roof of ‘the club’ is a corrugated-tin chorus of groans and feeble protests against the intense noon heat. Metallic pings punctuate the sleepy midday silence at Kakuma refugee camp in the northwest corner of Kenya. Most of the 60,000 refugees take siesta, under the UN-blue plastic canopy they are given for makeshift shelters. The heat swelters… Continue reading…
