Kester Brewin

Interesting video with Bill Nighy talking about the ‘Robin Hood Tax‘ that would see 50p raked off all financial transactions that didn’t include members of the public. This would raise around £200bn globally each year which could be put into projects helping the poor:

Obviously raising money to help the poor is a wonderful idea, and [...]

Craft:

Kraft:

Enough said.

Occasionally two things from the news catch your ear and resonate together. Today it was the news that Obama has cancelled Nasa’s new moon programme. And [ht Barry Taylor] that Gil Scott-Heron is back with a new album.
The connection? I’ve always loved Scott-Heron’s early, hard-hitting social commentaries. And the lyrics of ‘Whitey on the Moon’ [...]

Says it all. The $100m ‘loan’ from the World Bank to Haiti could be paid off like that by a fraction of the banking bonuses paid out on top of enormous salaries. Sickening.

Peter Brooke’s cartoon in The Times today:

I’d amend one thing, to be honest. The child in the blue shorts is most likely dead.

A few weeks ago I was asked to guest post something on the site for the forthcoming ‘Evolving Church’ conference in Toronto in April this year. The theme of the conference is ‘the Kingdom Economy’ and it is this that I explore a bit in the post, which you can find here.
It connects to the [...]

[ Piracy 1 ]
In the previous post I set out the tension between the godly meditations that St Paul urged us to – whatever is good, and pure etc. – and the raucously popular stories about pirates that outsold everything else in a bookshop around St Paul’s Cathedral. In Captain Johnson’s A General History of [...]

From BBC News:
Justice minister Shahid Malik has gone on the offensive after becoming the latest MP to be singled out by The Daily Telegraph over expenses claims. Mr Malik insists he stuck “a million per cent by the rules“
Perhaps it is not surprising these idiots have been caught fiddling the books and inflating their expense [...]

“A capitalist system that privatizes profits in good times and socializes losses in bad times needs some fixes.“
Milton Friedman
“Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.“
Epictetus