Welcome to the blog of Johannes Wilm!

If there is one positive thing about the Scandalous handling of the New Orleans tragedy, it is probably the renewed focus that class and race relations have received in the US afterwards. Listening to KALX most of these early fall days (the temparature really went down quite a bit following the elections here) while typing or reading, I can't get the Kanye West remix "George Bush don't like black people" out of my head - and it seems to spread extremely fast - just got a reference to it from my brother in Roskilde, Denmark a few days ago. Probably it's partially cause you can download it for free, but also cause the theme is something people are interested in.

download it!

Of course, blogging has been there for quite a hile amongst average urban internet users. However, in connection with the Norwegain elections, it really has become an instrument amongst the Norwegian left. The first thing was Kristin Halvorsen's blog, (leader of Socialist Left Party SV) but she never had time to write in it so it was taken off air - and has since been replaced by a blog at the worst yellow press newspapers "VG". Then we got the blog from Liv Gulbransen and Erling Folkvord (1st and 2nd candidate for Oslo Red Voting Alliance RV). After the elections, which put SV in the government although they went down from 12.5% to 8.8% and RV outside the parliament, focus has been mounting on the Magnus Marsdal hate blog (leader of ATTAC Norway and co-author of 2 books, not very popular amongst one section of the left mainly due to his high self-esteem and very popular with the rest). During the election campagin, he and his friends had been given the opportunity to keep a blog at one of the major Oslo focused classic conservative newspapers as they were labeling themselfs as a "think tank". And then there are all those blogs with less direct focus on them - but that are still read a lot.

The last thing I talked about as the night before election day, when I chose to go home instead of sleeping outside the parliament. When I wrote those lines, I had just left the camp and was planning to spend the night before the election at home. When I left them, they had my tent, three banners a tabek with five big chairs around it and I thought that the camel woman, the Danish doctor and one grown up Oslo activst would be able to handle it all.

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The last two days have been equally exciting, although less contrastive. The camp still stands, and we were filmed by Danish TV2, Swedish SVTV1, Finish MTV3 and Helsingin Sanomat as well as Norwegian Dagbladet. The plan is now to stay for election night...


Two young punks

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The mobilization for September 3rd (Oslo, but Trondheim's site is better) is about to come to an end. That is pretty much the end of the election campaign for me for this time. With the peace group we had one last stunt yesterday, which was sort of co-ordinated with activists in Germany and Copenhagen, but we still haven't seen any pictures of their actions.

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