Be angry, be very angry...

I've been doing at bit of homework recently on the development of Hydrogen fuel cells thinking that I might invest a bit of money into a company involved in their development and production - let's face it, the age of oil is over. So I signed up to a few email circulars that promised to offer info about 'CleanTech' stocks. Soon after I got sent a link to a site and innocently clicked through to this:
"The 21st Century's Most Precious Natural Resource is turning out to be the investment opportunity of the decade!
It's history's most illustrious, least appreciated, most essential resource. Without it, manufacturing would cease and the world economy would die. And we're using it up at a frightening pace.
You can bet you'll be hearing a lot about this precious commodity in the coming months and years. In fact, it's already starting to attract attention:
* Already, there are armed conflicts over its control in Sri Lanka, Bolivia, and Yugoslavia... border skirmishes between the U.S. and Mexico... even terrorist threats to halt its supply in Asia and the Middle East.
And now it's about to become the biggest boom industry, one that could make early investors very wealthy! Bigger than railroads in the 1880s. Bigger than aerospace in the 1950s. Bigger than Big Pharma in the 1980s, tech in the 1990s, and petroleum in the 1920s and early 2000s.
Those who take control of this neglected resource will control the world's wealth. And the best news is... the boom is just starting. China is investing billions. Closer to home, the Carlyle Group and Morgan Stanley are committing up to $20 billion.
What is this mystery sector I've been talking about? An essential and irreplaceable product -- drinking water. Potable H2O is the oil of the 21st century, and one would be hard-pressed to find a more compelling investment story. The bottom line is there's a fixed supply of the stuff and demand for it is exploding around the world."

And so it goes on, you can check out the link for yourself here>>>

Now, bear in mind that I'm a James Bond junkie which means I've recently watched Quantum of Solace (and I hope you have too!) The premise of the story is that a company is beginning to monopolise the world's water resources by taking advantage of the fragility and corruption in developing world countries. Now we all know that where Bond goes, the world follows (no really - remember the Space Shuttle!) Anyway, it just beggars belief that in our world, in which 1 billion extremely poor people lack a basic clean water supply and almost 2 million a year die from diseases carried in dirty water, people would want to move in on this as a profiteering venture. Most reports agree that for around £15 billion EVERYONE ON THE PLANET can be given access to safe water. You can quite literally bet your bottom dollar that big corporate interest out there doesn't want that to happen because it would undermine their desire to make a fat profit.

My wife and I will be travelling to Haiti in January with a bunch of friends and amongst the projects we'll be visiting is a clean water facility we're helping to build for a community of thousands of desperate people. Can you imagine us standing there when it's opened and asking people to scrape together the few pennies they do have just so that they can have a taste? The thought is just obscene.

Like I say, be angry, be very angry, it's a greedy new world we're entering.
But don't just be angry, be generous, give some water today:
Water Aid
Tearfund

Sinner?

First taste was in the dark
with the sound of crying echoing off the walls.
Your crying.
You have every right to cry.
You’re only 9 weeks old and the virus in your chest burns like hot coal.
Outline of sleep-deprived parent appears over the cot,
a fierce voice barks hot breath into your face.
Hands grab your little arms a bit too tightly.
There’s a heavy pause, followed by unrecognised words,
“Sorry… I’m sorry… It’s OK…”

Sin and repentance.
Simple and quick.
Sour and sweet.
It won’t always be so.
By the first sound of the school bell sin has struck more times that you can count.
This is the world that makes all Victim.
Worse.
This world turns all Offender.

Close fleshy lids and recall the times you’ve been scorched
by lies and scams,
by names called and rights revoked,
by property taken, identity mistaken,
your body used, trust abused.
Coerced and compromised.
Even if you resist its name you know sin’s forms
the way Adam knew Eve.

Now look about.
This talk of sin occurs on the salt plains where
there is no topography of differentiation.
Dirty fingerprints are on us all.
Beauty and beast find empathy in their scars.
But who invited this?
This life?
This world?
This injustice?

Tell me how an innocent bush-boy becomes a stoned-soldier;
how in a twist of fate the victim becomes the perpetrator.
His broken heart becomes cold and calloused.
And with every crime he tells our story.
For we are all enlisted, young.
Now our grown-up minds store toxic pools,
our tongues razors.
Cats claws have grown in our paws
and the truth sags through lack of exercise.
Actions provoked reactions and it happened.
Sin found a host, a home.
A soul to shame,
a name to blame.

Mike Frost in Oxford

Early this morning a bunch of us drove down to Oxford to hear Mike Frost (author of 'Exiles' and 'The Shaping Of Things To Come'). Mike is one of the world's foremost writers and thinkers on Incarnational Mission so the potential for new learning was very high. It was a long way to go for a day conference but it was well worth the drive. His morning session was basically the best presented case I've ever heard for why and how church as we currently know it must change - and fast.
He summarised church as consisting of 4 basic elements: worship, community, formation and mission. His next observation was that whilst each of these elements is vital, one of them has, throughout the Christendom era, acted as the 'organising principle' of the others. That element is worship. Then, for the rest of the morning he went on to describe what church might look like in our Post-Christendom world if we re-oriented around mission as our 'organising principle'. What really set this session apart were the many examples taken from his own church (or 'faith collective' as he cheekily referred to it) which goes by the name of 'Small Boat Big Sea', as well as a whole bunch of stories from his mission buddies around the world.
Perhaps the one thought that impacted me the most came during his exploration of the Mission Dei, the self-sending God, who he described as having a 'human-shaped hole' in his heart. That possibility had never stuck me before, but I instantly got it.
Nice one Mike, hope you have a safe trip back to Oz ;-)

No Big Bang just yet... but give it a few days....

So despite many idiots out there on the Manchester roads I made it to work safely today. What a relief. And I also avoided being sucked into singularity at the speed of light. Yes, the new Large Hadron Collider (LHC) deep below the Swiss Alps was revved up at 8.33 our time without creating a Black Hole. Phew. Although saying that they haven't actually collided any protons together with 'cataclysmic force' yet. So maybe the world will end next week instead.
One of the things I love about this story is that the journalists reporting on it clearly don't quite know what to do with the basic premise of the experiment. What I mean is, the media with its overwhelmingly secular worldview likes to report science as solid reassuring fact. But the reason £5 billion has been spent on this Scalextric track on steroids is that there is actually a heck of a lot that science still can't tell us about the universe we live in. Now don't get me wrong, I don't roll with the 'science explains all this and God explains the rest' crowd, all that achieves is a shrinking God as science advances filling in more of the gaps. No, all I'm really happy about is the welcome reminder of the essential mystery that remains at the heart of everything, 'Dark Matter' and all that invisible stuff that scientists believe in even though none of them have actually ever seen it or even detected with their clever gadgets. Sorry, I mustn't mock but hey, who knows, maybe in a few weeks the headlines will tell us that they've finally observed the wrly dubbed 'God Particle'. And hopefully we'll all still be here to scratch our chins and wonder if that will get us to work any quicker in future.

The universe around us is not what it appears to be. The stars make up less than 1 percent of its mass; all the loose gas and other forms of ordinary matter, less than 5 percent. The motions of this visible material reveal that it is mere flotsam on an unseen sea of unknown material. We know little about that sea. The terms we use to describe its components, "dark matter" and "dark energy," serve mainly as expressions of our ignorance.
David B. Cline, Scientific American, 2003

Connectedness

Trade justice campaigners will sometimes ask us to pause and think about the question, ‘If your clothes could tell a story, what would that story say?’. And we know that if we shop at Primark the story probably isn’t likely to be a happy one for the producer of the garment. But just the other day I was presented with a new twist on this. I’d taken a day off work to go and visit my elderly Gran over in Yorkshire. We don’t get to see her very often and she likes to see how quickly Izzy is growing up.
When we got to her little council bungalow she was sat outside the front door on her electro-scooter thing (she has very bad arthritis in her feet and can’t walk very well). We went inside for a cuppa and there as usual was a pile of knitting on the sofa. Gran is always knitting, there’s lots of great-grand kids appearing on the scene at the moment so she’s kept busy. But just in passing she said, ‘Oh, they’re for the kids in Darfur.’ I was pretty stunned. Gran has never to my knowledge shown any interest in any sort of charitable work, she’s not churchy either. But there, in her lonely little lounge (Granddad passed away 5 years ago) she is quietly doing her bit to make a difference in the world.
If only those little hats could tell their story. Soon, some tiny little refugee kid, displaced, disconnected, will be given a little wooly hat to keep out the cool evening breeze. And in a strangely cosmic way that kid becomes connected to my aging Gran. That's cool isn't it, 'One World - One Dream', as the Chinese were so keen to stress as the opening ceremony of the Olympics yesterday. Except none of the kids wearing my Gran's wooly hats will ever know about her, which is a real shame. And she'll never meet them, which is a shame too. 

Clothes really ought to be able to tell their story.