Kester Brewin

…action on climate change; governments will admit it will hurt …reaction against privacy breaches: overuse of CCTV / government data-loss …reaction against the classical liberal agenda: immigration caps / multiculturalism as a worthy but more-difficult-than-we-thought project / communitarianism …serious criticism of democracy as a way of getting things done …the collapse of the emerging church [...]

A couple of weeks ago my daughter broke her leg. Ouch. I have to say, the A&E (ER) department at the local hospital were brilliant, and the treatment she’s received has been second to none. But as for the administration… Today I had to take her for a follow-up X-ray and consultation. We arrived in [...]

I, for one, won’t be buying an Amazon ‘Kindle’, at least for some time yet. I think the prediction of this being ‘iPod for books’ is way off for the simple reason that the media are totally different. Music is not physical. Sure, you could thumb through the album artwork, and that was a great [...]

The Customs and Revenue department announced today that it had somehow ‘mislaid’ discs containing all of the details of 25 million people in Britain claiming Child Benefit. Personal details, bank details, National Insurance numbers and addresses were all part of the records that went missing in an internal mail delivery. And this is within a [...]

Apologies for those of you who’ve been waiting on tenterhooks for the Facebook article I blogged about a while ago (it’s OK – I don’t really believe that It got bumped to December’s issue, so will be out shortly. I’ve led two discussion groups recently, one in a crypt, one in a library – go [...]

In The Shadow Of The Moon is a magnificent movie. No voice-over. No animation. No mock-ups. Just archive footage, and interviews with the Apollo astronauts. It’s stunning as a film, stunning to be reminded of perhaps the single greatest technological feat of mankind, and stunning to be reminded – in a way Gore never quite [...]

Storyquest is the national festival of story-telling and the spoken word, and runs for the whole of November. Alongside many keynote events, the organizers – the Prince of Wales’ Foundation for Children & the Arts – are simply encouraging families to ‘fill their homes with stories, capturing the moment when a story gets inside you [...]

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised by the news today that Virgin Atlantic are soon to announce a free trans-atlantic service. On each flight, a small number of fee-free passengers will simply have to put up with being pinned into their seats having commercials fired at them for the entire trip…

Two stories on two pages in the Independent today: Gaza’s only Christian bookseller has been murdered by the Righteous Swords of Islam. As if Gaza didn’t have enough problems, these fundamentalists think they’re saving the world by killing off Christians. There are only 3000 or so left. While in the US, ‘church groups across the [...]

Manuel de Landa, in his brilliant book A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History writes of the two skeletons that humankind have developed. Our endo(internal)skeleton “made new forms of movement control possible, freeing [us] to conquer every available niche.” Later, around 8000 years ago, we then developed the urban exo(external)skeleton, whereby “bricks of sun-dried clay became [...]