My Blog

With all the senseless killing going on in Palestine at the moment and Western governments' continuing attempt to make terrorism "go away" by the use of military force, it was refreshing to open the Guardian newspaper online this morning (15th January) and read some sensible words on the subject from the British Foreign Secretary. Five days before the Bush Administration, the chief proponents of

 

A couple of events came together this morning that led to some interesting thoughts on the current financial crisis. Firstly, I heard on the radio that people in the new democracies of eastern Europe are becoming quickly disenchanted with American style free capitalism because what they see is a few individuals getting rich and the rest being left behind. Against the background of this week's

I've been suffering with severe post-election fatigue for the last few weeks, incapable of bearing another moment of Maddow or an extra ounce of Olberman, and spending only a minimum amount of time scanning the headlines. But there is one subject that has been hard to avoid even as background noise: the monetary crisis.

I'm one of those people who could never understand the fascination of the

To listen to some media commentators, you would think that the only significance of Barack Obama's election to the presidency on Tuesday is that he is African American. My wife, Mo, who was at the victory celebrations in Chicago, said when CNN commentator, David Gergen, attempted to frame the result in this way, the joyous mood of the crowd watching it on the jumbotron screen temporarily

In Soul Food by Jack Cornfield and Christina Feldman, there is a story by Forrest Carter about his Cherokee grandparents, which is a cautionary tale for our times. Granma, he writes, says we have two minds: the body mind and the spirit mind. The body mind deals with practical matters to do with keeping the body alive-figuring out how to eat, finding a place to live, reproducing and raising