Davos Newbies
Lance Knobel is blogging Davos from the inside at DavosNewbies.com.
Lance Knobel is blogging Davos from the inside at DavosNewbies.com.
Did you know?
The WEF is a private member organization comprising representatives from 1,000 of the world's largest corporations including Microsoft, Monsanto, Nike, General Motors and, until recently, Enron. Originally formed in 1971 as the European Management Forum, the Swiss-based group has grown into a major global agenda setter and a leading proponent of corporate globalization. Until this year, the organization held its annual meeting in the Swiss mountain resort town of Davos.Indymedia's Guide to the World Economic Forum
The exclusive meeting is open to members - who pay upwards of $30,000 in annual dues - as well as selected politicians, journalists and academics. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair are both expected to be among the 3,200 in attendance. While the WEF helps set global economic and trade agendas that affect the entire world, the group predominantly includes European and American businesses.
The World Social Forum is a gathering of the international left meeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil this weekend. Indymedia is covering both the WEF and the WSF, and ZNet has backgrounders on some prominent WSF attendees.
The Nation and the Nation website will be featuring reports from the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil; from the expected protests in the streets of New York City; and from the suites of the Waldorf hotel in New York, where the World Economic Forum will be meeting. Watch this space starting January 31.
Wil Wheaton swept the 2002 Bloggies. This is, somehow, appropriate.
Excellent – nay, essential – coverage of the State of the Union over at Craig’s booknotes.
Stop spreading lies about Saruman! It's bad enough the spin doctors led by Galadriel and Gandalf completely rewrote the real history of the War of the Ring.The Tolkein Crackpot Theories Page
Pay attention, for here is the TRUTH!!!
New Lynda Barry comic, how #1! Plus, archives!
“We will starve druggies of education, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place, until there is no refuge or no rest. And we will pursue families that provide aid or safe haven to druggies. Every family, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the druggies.” (Apologies to Mr. Bush’s fine speechwriters.)
Israeli Reservists Refuse Territories Duty (washingtonpost.com)
More than 60 Israeli army reservists, half of them officers and all of them combat veterans, have publicly refused to continue serving in the West Bank and Gaza Strip on the grounds that Israel’s occupation forces there are abusing and humiliating Palestinians.
“We will no longer fight beyond the Green Line for the purpose of occupying, deporting, destroying, blockading, killing, starving and humiliating an entire people,” declared a petition signed by the reservists and published in Israel’s best-selling daily newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth.
I can’t wait to listen to some of these homebrew mp3 remixes, a.k.a. bootlegs.
For God's sake, do not kill us! We surrender!Before dawn in Afghanistan last Thursday, US Green Berets launched a surprise attack on their unarmed allies, storming a disarmament depot with indiscriminate fire, then rounding up survivors only to tie their hands behind their backs with plastic bands and execute them. This according to that America-hating, propaganda-strewn leftist rag, The New York Times. God bless America.
What do you MEAN, reverse racism doesn’t exist?
As white people, we’re all raised to assume that anything in the world is ours by right, and that other people are treated the same way as us. The truth is that as white people we’re given many things that are not given to people of color - anything from jobs to smiling welcomes wherever we go. We come to think of those things as ours by right, and when we lose them, we think we’ve experienced racism or discrimination. Usually what we’ve really lost is a piece of unearned race-based privilege, which we’re not used to being without.
Blather: The Alan Moore Interview features more chapters than Watchmen.
Amazon.com: buying info: Chris Ware Lunch Box “Decorated with popular images from the new serial beginning in The Acme Novelty Library series of picture books and pamphlets, this one is sure to be just the thing to display for a short time, put in a closet, and then eventually throw away.” There’s nothing like cheesedip.
Science Fiction Weekly: Nalo Hopkinson uses SF to probe the inner and outer worlds of alienation
Before I put fingers to keyboard, I must first figure out how to express the race of my characters, if they are non-white, because I have to think about how I’m going to perform that task of wrenching the center over to the margins. I’ve had white writers tell me that they don’t feel they have to think in those terms when they are creating white characters. Often they don’t think about the fact that the characters are white. I suspect that most writers of color in this part of the world are quite aware of the ethnicities of their characters of color.Great stuff. Thanks formica via wood s lot.
When white writers write almost exclusively white characters, that usually passes without comment. When writers of color create mostly characters of color, it’s seen as something remarkable. I try to write from my center. In order to do that in a literary milieu that presumes ground zero to be white middle-class experience, I have to shift the reader’s vision over to the margins. Even if that reader is from a marginalized community, the worldview they will have been used to seeing reified in literature, in popular culture, in the media, is for the most part the “normalized” one. By performing that shift, I’m not moving and I’m not taking over the privileged position; I’m wrenching the focus over to my context. I just tell my story.
"My daughter recently asked me, 'Dad, is your next film going to be about people just talking and talking and talking?' And I had to tell her, 'Yeah, probably.'"The Baltimore City Paper talks with Richard Linklater.
American Gulag - “Infoshop.org announces a new weblog dedicated to news concerning prisoners, prisons and prison abolition. This new service will allow activists to post news and resources and will be managed by a working group of prisoner support activists.”
‘Cantilever olestra’ is a googlewhack with a score of 1,165,500,000 – not too shabby. Have you found any?
In a memo that slipped beneath the political radar, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft vigorously urged federal agencies to resist most Freedom of Information Act requests made by American citizens." And the nation hurtles one step closer to destruction. Sometimes I think that Asscroft and Osama Bin Laden are secretly the same person, in the same way as the seemingly benevolent Senator Palpatine is also the evil Sith lord and future Emperor in Episode I of Star Wars. More poetically, they are like two sides of a knife blade thrust into the heart of democracy and freedom.
"What did it feel like to suspect you'd killed your own husband with your art?" Fresh Air? How about Lurid Speculations? It's like Dr. Laura for people with bachelor degrees. Car Talk has more intellectual content.Curtis White's "The Middle Mind" is a vague sort of diatribe about, I suppose, faux intellectualisme and the tendency of even supposedly highbrow media to acknowledge the fact that lots of people are, well, dumb. Utterly pointless as far as I can tell, but his Terry Gross rant in the middle is somewhat amusing.