Sunday Reading
- Zanzibar: Re-Searching the “Other Andalus”
- Where Grief Dare Not Go
- Who’s afraid of “The Tempest”?
- Occupy Economics?: A Report Back from the Nerdiest Protest I’ve ever been to.
- A sequence of sonnets
- The obscene profits of commercial scholarly publishers
- Tucson schools bans books by Chicano and Native American authors
- The making of “I melt the glass with my forehead”
Socialism and/or Barbarianism has A Letter to Micky Arison, CEO of Carnival Cruiselines, and Gianni Onorato, president of Costa Cruises (ht Gtiso):
(Photo poached from here, who poached it from here(and altered it))
- Sh!t the Dowager Countess Says
- Trader Joe’s: Real ethics means paying farm workers fairly
- Gluttony Goes Viral
- The awkward moment when you break the law you proposed
- “If a Pulitzer isn’t a guarantee that, at the very least, you won’t get canned tomorrow, then what good is it?”
- “One of the gravest threats the FBI saw in the Black Panther movement was their Free Children’s Breakfast Program.”
- Biography Sideways
- MAKE, DARPA, and teens: A match made in hackerspace
Occupy San Francisco gets down to business:
Act II of the Occupy Wall Street movement, San Francisco version, kicked off on a rainy, blustery Friday in the heart of the city’s financial district. Targeting specific corporations like Wells Fargo and Bank of America and emphasizing real, tangible issues like home foreclosures, affordable health care and education as well as broader ones like the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, several hundred protesters – the exact number was impossible to estimate – fanned out across the city, snarling traffic, getting arrested, holding sidewalk teach-ins, and generally serving notice that after its brief winter hibernation, the Occupy movement was back and kicking.
Occupiers Close BoA, Hold Off Police for 10 Hours:
”It started out small. It was, to be fair, the most miserable day weather-wise in the Bay Area since the Occupy Movement began. Ask yourself this — would YOU get up at 5:00 AM and go out in the cold rain to watch a giant vampire squid and a black blob, or to sit on cold concrete in front of a bank?
By noon there were perhaps 1000 people spread out over the Financial District; by 6:00 PM, there were two or three times that. It was a day of a few rallies, but mostly smaller actions at banks, the courts and federal buildings. Foreclosures and Citizens’ United were the day’s standout villains.”
A Timeline of “Occupy Wall Street West” today, in SF.
Unpacking Homelessness on Occupy Oakland Move-In Day:
On December 28, in the midst of Occupy Oakland’s continuing battle against the city and OPD at Oscar Grant Plaza, another kind of Occupation battlewas taking place in Sacramento, largely out of sight of both activists and media. Homeless campers were experiencing another raid, as police cleared out their encampment. Despite the fact that Sacramento’s shelters are at full capacity already, the city nevertheless used anti-camping ordinances to clear the camp and scatter homeless people to the city’s doorways and park benches. The action by Sacramento’s city government and police parallels the cynical raids on homeless encampments throughout the last decade in Oakland and other parts of the East Bay.
The sensational focus on one Occupation, but not the other, borne of necessity, speaks to some of the artificial borders that have been set up in the mainstream Occupy conversation. After all, Occupy is often represented as a movement of middle class liberals, assuming a symbolic “homelessness” to bring attention to a small range of problems that have become the focus of attention in the last decade—the sub-prime crisis, the failure of elected leaders to address this crisis, the lack of substantive creation of job security and the completion of the co-opting of the Democratic party. For this reason, the active participation of homeless people in various Occupy movements—and especially in Oakland—became a cause of confusion and concern in the early weeks of the Occupy movement. Homelessness remains such an integral part of the American economic and social system, that few progressives or liberals even view it as a political issue.
Emmanuel Iduma has three posts on the Nigerian revolution.
Chika Unigwe on Occupy Nigeria.
- Hand jive
- Black Cinema, Red Tails, and Pariah
- The Idiot’s Guide to fighting Dictatorship in Syria (and avoiding foreign intervention)
- Jeffrey Sconce’s sentences are resistant to excerpting and tweeting.
- Women’s versus People
- Shorter Joseph Stiglitz: “Shit is fucked up and bullshit”
- Bambi meets Godzilla: Higher education edition.
- Should We Really ABOLISH the Term Paper? A Response to the NY Times
When a camera gets in between the cop and the person he’s beating on:
- SMS Holdings: The “Faith-Based,” Anti-Labor Company Behind Oakland’s Private Cops
- The Unholy Alliance of Monetary Expansion and Fiscal Austerity: More for those who have, less for those who don’t
- Mainstream Feminism’s Demand for Realism: On “Fotoshop by Adobé,” aesthetics, and posthuman feminism
- How Reddit went from a second-tier aggregator to the Web’s unstoppable force.
- Kaneezes and Gholooms. “The history of slavery in Iran is long and complex…”
- The Getaway + Other Videos
SOPA, PIPA, MEGAUPLOAD:
- Digital Culture Wars (SOPA, PIPA)
- There Is Nothing You Possess That Power Cannot Take Away
- Sopa and Pipa would create a consumption-only internet
- Internet Regulation and the economics of piracy
- The Internet Should Flex its Muscles More Often
- Megaupload Details Raise Significant Concerns About What DOJ Considers Evidence Of Criminal Behavior
The Workers are Animals. Let’s Replace Them with Robots”:
Among the billionaires at the vanguard of global capital, Terry Gou of Hon Hai (also known asFoxconn) deserves special recognition for his honesty. “Hon Hai has a workforce of over one million worldwide and as human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache,” said the chairman. His company has also begun building “an empire of robots” to replace a whining workforce.
- The Future is Female
- Time-lapse photography over Africa
- Kenya’s ‘Little Italy’
- Sex and Violence in Role Playing
- The Occupations in winter
- The Seen and the Unseen In Pakistan’s Economy
- “How war, markets and judiciously chosen twinsets saved Britain”:PennyRed‘s verdict on The Iron Lady
- Lights, camera, quick backflip: the eloquence of silent films
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on branding, charity, and class in Nigeria’s schools.
Expropriating the expropriated (1983-2009), or, Why It’s the Top 20 not Top 1% That Matter:
Spain’s “Indignados” and the Globalization of Dissent:
POSTSCRIPTS (Since, obviously, the links above are not nearly sufficient, I’ll put all the new links I add today, here, so you can find them in one place if you want to):
- New York Times Tells Us Only Chinese Near Slave Labor Could Handle Steve Jobs’ Demands
- From the Archives: Savage Minds vs. Jared Diamond
- The violence of history: 1971 and the silencing of women
- Paul Simon’s Graceland Reconsidered
- Returning Dignity to Mugshot Victims: Spotlight on Jane Lindsay
- The East offering its riches to Britannia
- “it’s surprising that people haven’t been more surprised by John Ashbery’s decision to undertake a translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations.”
- Martial Tribes and the Pakistan Army: A response to Aakar Patel
- The Return of Inequality: How the Occupy Movement Shifted Electoral Politics