randomWalks

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.

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!

Hip Mama Anti-Racism FAQ

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.

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.'"

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?

Donkeymon writes:

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.

Kaz was the first white person my sister and I played with. He was one only white person (besides his parents) who ever came to our house. After a few visits, Kaz developed an affinity for Indian food. My parents had to have a pitcher of water ready for him when the spices hit his taste buds. After being friends with him for a few months, I realized that white people smelled funny...

That's the whitest tie I've ever seen.

Creator Michael Hoerman calls this a “short video-poem” of Jack Kerouac Park in Lowell Massachussetts.

Fornication," he says. "Because you can't hate your own kids. The browner we get as a society, the better off we'll be."

Miami Herald: In bigot versus bigot, white racist is winner

Let’s allow that black folks can, indeed, be racist. Or prejudiced, intolerant, biased, bigoted or any other word that floats your boat. Black people are, after all, members of the human race and, as such, are heir to all the idiocy by which human beings are beset.

But with that established, let’s also say this: It’s an affront to common sense to suggest there is equivalence between black-on-white bigotry and its opposite. As an aggregate, bigoted blacks have much less power to injure whites than vice versa. They also have less history of doing so. These are incontrovertible facts that render hollow the yowling demands that the racism of blacks be accorded a place in the national consciousness commensurate with that of white people.

Hey, when you find a black bigot, feel free to censure and ostracize him or her as the circumstance warrants. Just don’t pretend the transgression is what it is not. Don’t claim it represents a significant threat to the quality of life of white Americans at large.

White America Misuses MLK Day. “For white America, King’s soft-focus image often reinforces white supremacism. " Thanks to beXn for the link.

Michael Chabon’s writing technique is well-suited to word processing.

The Absolute Elsewhere: Fantastic, Visionary, and Esoteric Literature in the 1960s and 1970s.

What’s that in the doorway?