May 19
Seattle Sites of the Day:

Northwest Zydeco Music and Dance Association

"Sunday, May 21 - Cayenne at the Edmonds Waterfront Festival. 2-3:30 PM in the Beer and Wine Garden at the Port marina parking lots (South of ferry dock), 336 Admiral Way. ...benefitting Family & Children's Services. Admission $1 donation."

"Friday, May 26 - Les Femmes d'Enfer...'dat all-women Cajun dance band at the Northwest Folklife Festival! Dance in the Roadhouse (Flag Pavilion West). 9-9:50 PM. FREE!"

Thunderbird League

"The League provides a chance for over 1000 youngsters from ages 5 through 18 to play organized softball and baseball. T-ball, minor, major, senior and big league baseball and softball programs provide instruction through competitive play."

Habitat for Humanity, SW Snohomish County Partners

"Habitat for Humanity works in partnership with people in need to build and renovate decent, affordable housing. The houses then are sold to those in need at no profit and with no interest charged. Volunteers provide most of the labor, and individual and corporate donors provide money and materials to build Habitat houses. Partner families themselves invest hundreds of hours of labor - 'sweat equity' - into building their homes and the homes of others. Their mortgage payments go into a revolving Fund for Humanity that is used to build more houses."

Center for World Indigenous Studies
Fourth World Documentation Project

"Fourth World: Nations forcefully incorporated into states which maintain a distinct political culture but are internationally unrecognized. ... These are the 5,000 to 6000 nations representing a third of the world's population whose descendants maintain a distinct political culture within the states which claim their territories." ...

"Many of the resources which will fall under the aegis of the WTO are in the lands and in the bodies of Indigenous peoples. From our DNA, to our labor, to our water and lands, we have consistently stated that we are not for sale. ... There was no opportunity in Seattle for Indigenous people to speak of their concerns and there was no space provided in the Civil Society Forum. The result of this has been a tacit complicity between the forces of neoliberalism and the Civil Society participants to continue the pattern of exclusion and disenfranchisement of Indigenous people that has existed in the Americas for the past 500 years." ...

"The Fourth World Documentation Project was organized by the Center For World Indigenous Studies (CWIS) in 1992. Its mission is to document and make available to tribal governments, researchers and organizations, important documents relating to the social, political, strategic, economic and human rights situations being faced by Fourth World nations and create a historical archive of the political struggles waged by Indigenous Peoples to assert their rights as sovereign nations."

May 18 - "The critical importance of CPSR's Shaping the Network Society symposium was underscored by the seizure of B292 broadcasting equipment by security forces in the former Yugoslavia. Station manager Veran Matic who was scheduled to discuss the importance of a 'public sphere' to 500 attendees at CPSR's Seattle symposium was compelled to remain at home after the seizure. Matic and other B292 employees are currently working to keep the news flowing using Internet streaming technology. Veran Matic's name card will still be displayed at the symposium in front of his empty chair. A statement from Matic will be read at the symposium and symposium organizers are exploring other ways of ensuring that his important message will not be silenced."
- Doug Schuler

Netwar in the Emerald City

"The Direct Action Network's strategy is a classic example of 'netwar' conflict. Netwar is a concept introduced in the early 1990's by two researchers at the RAND corporation, ... David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla proposed a new framework for viewing conflict in the information age."

"The essence of netwar is ... one or more of the major participants consist of networks, rather than institutions. The central feature... is the struggle for understanding and knowledge, as opposed to more traditional conflicts which focus on controlling territories or resources."

"In the case of the Direct Action Network, the central prize consisted of the understanding that the WTO multi-lateral trade agreements are intensely corrosive to democracy, at least that form of democracy which entails a knowledgeable public participating in policy formation in meaningful ways." ...

"By Monday evening, November 30, the forces had aligned themselves. ... What would happen next was anybody's guess, but the best guessers would win and the others would lose." ...

"Floating above the tear gas was a pulsing infosphere of enormous bandwidth, reaching around the planet via the internet." ...