There a times when something just punches you in the head.  Some people in this world can just write, the end, they never stop. I need a spark.

Still here and while I’ve had some great times lately I’ve been mostly keeping to myself. I’ll write more later, but I’ve been enjoying the hell out of my holidays. Money? pah who needs it.

หากเป็นปลายทาง vacation ถัดไปของคุณเหมาะแล้วมีบางสิ่งที่คุณควรรู้และเชื่อฉันนี้ก็จะช่วยคุณในการเดินทางของคุณน่าจดจำหนึ่ง. เป็นที่เหมาะสำหรับการไปครั้งกรุงเทพฯระหว่างสิงหาคมและธันวาคมเป็นเมษายนเป็นเดือนที่ดังสุดๆเพื่อหลีกเลี่ยงจะมีในช่วงเวลานี้. เดียวกันไปเดือนระหว่างกรกฎาคม-ตุลาคมเป็นฝนหนักอาจมีผลต่อการเดินทางของคุณ.

ในช่วงฤดูหนาวเป็นไหลที่ท่องเที่ยวสำคัญแต่ถ้าคุณเกลียดการในฝูงชนแล้วคุณต้อง เดินทาง ในช่วงเดือนพฤษภาคมหรือมิถุนายน. นิดๆหน่อยๆของคำแนะนำและการวิจัยจะทำให้ทางของคุณง่ายและประหยัดเงินของคุณ. Dont กังวลเกี่ยวกับอัตราค่าโดยสารของตั๋วเครื่องบินไปกรุงเทพฯตามที่ได้รับในกรุงเทพฯปลายทางสุดท้ายในหมู่เกาะใต้โดยรถไฟหรือรถบัสแทนโดยเครื่องบินคุณสามารถบันทึกได้ถึง 70 $ วิธีแต่ละ. คุณสามารถบันทึกมัดถ้าคุณมาถึงที่สนามบินนานาชาติในตอนเย็น. ในกรณีนี้คุณบันทึกระหว่าง airfare ค่อนข้างแพงและรถไฟหรือตั๋วโดยสารนั้นค่าที่พักคืนแรกคือประมาณ 50 $ – 100 $ ต่อบังกะโลต่อคืน.

อีกสิ่งสำคัญที่จะต้องพิจารณาในขณะที่เข้าสู่สถานที่ใหม่สำหรับครั้งแรกเป็นเรื่องที่ดีและสุขภาพอาหาร. กว่าที่นี่คุณจะได้รับหนึ่งในอาหารที่ดีที่สุดและดีที่สุดของโลก. คุณจะประหลาดใจเพื่อดูคุณภาพน่าตกใจของอาหารและ gourmets. บางส่วนของข้อต่ออาหารที่รู้จักกันดีมีพราชดำริชื่อเสียงอาหารไทยในอิตาลีเรียก Arawy ไทยมังสวิรัติบ้าน Khanitha &แกลเลอรี่คลับเตียงพระกระยาหารมื้ออาหารที่ดีที่สุดจากทั่วโลก. ในกรุงเทพฯคุณจะไม่ประสบปัญหาในการรับประทานอาหารที่มีคุณภาพดีและมีข้อต่ออาหารสิ้นสุดที่นี่. ข้างคุณยังสามารถลองปากรดน้ำอาหารไทยขายบนถนนของกรุงเทพฯและฉันจะเดิมพันว่าจะไปงันคุณลิ้มรสวิเศษของ.

so – i like football.

actually, i LOVE football. there’s something about grown men in shiny pants, muscles all taut and defined (well, maybe not the linemen), crushing each other to the ground in big piles of flesh that just gets me going.

leftist ideologues may strip me of my revolutionary id card/credentials if they ever find this out, but i don’t care. i’ve learned to be okay with contradictions in my life (and foaming at the mouth while watching the cowboys is only one of them).

i was thinking about my love for football as i watched james cameron’s new movie “avatar” today. full disclosure – i have really terrible taste in movies. my favorite movies are cliche romantic comedies, geeky sci-fi flicks, and ridiculous action blockbusters where everything but the half-naked woman with a gun blows up.

i walked into the theater already forewarned that “avatar” was just a not-even-thinly veiled retelling of the same old fucked up story – white man goes off colonizing, falls in love with brown girl (though in this case, she’s blue), realizes he hates being white, turns against his race, who are about to annihilate the peace-loving natives, and becomes instead their savior.

well, in a nutshell, that’s pretty much what happened. and i agree with a lot of the critiques here. but i left the theater thinking and feeling that this movie was more complex than just another “dances with wolves.” yes, the movie was filled with cliches. yes, there was plenty of eye-rolling and giggling, not least during all 1,000,000 of the scenes where the na’vi make love to plants and animals with a tuft of their hair (if you’ve seen it, you know what i mean). and yes, it certainly does play on quite a few white fantasies (savior!) and guilt (genocide!).

but there’s a few (fake chicken, ha!) nuggets i want to chew on from “avatar”:

its anti-war, anti-corporation, and anti-imperialist message

the overall message i left this movie with was, war sucks, colonization is pretty terrible, and all corporations do is destroy the natural world and kill innocent people in the name of the mighty dollar. if this is the main message that people leave “avatar” with, i’d say that’s pretty positive, and it delivers that message in a large scale way that none of us ever could. i left with the question, how can we build upon this message with the work that we do?

cyborgs

this movie not only got me thinking about football, it got me thinking about cyborgs. what is a cyborg, you ask? um, haven’t you seen star wars? robocop? blade runner?!?!?! according to donna haraway,  “A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.” in the piece that i linked to, she argues against biological determinism, against grounding being “female” in reproduction and the myth of motherhood, and for a reimagining of ourselves as cyborgs, as beings who occupy the border spaces between animal and machine as well as contradictory locations, as “potent fusions.”

to haraway, the idea of us as cyborgs “frees us of the need to ground politics in ‘our’ privileged position of the oppression that incorporates all other dominations, the innocence of the merely violated, the ground of those closer to nature, we can see powerful possibilities. Feminisms and Marxisms have run aground on Western epistemological imperatives to construct a revolutionary subject from the perspective of a hierarchy of oppressions and/or a latent position of moral superiority, innocence, and greater closeness to nature. With no available original dream of a common language or original symbiosis promising protection from hostile ‘masculine’ separation, but written into the play of a text that has no finally privileged reading or salvation history, to recognize ‘oneself’ as fully implicated in the world, frees us of the need to root politics in identification, vanguard parties, purity, and mothering.”

in terms of avatar, i see how jake is the stereotypical white savior. but he doesn’t just act like one of the na’vi and wear their accoutrements (which include some pretty hot sunglasses), he physically BECOMES one of them through the means of technology. and in the end, he can’t go back to being jake sully, white dude. now, this may just be a storytelling tactic that’s taking the whole “going native” trope to its extreme, but i feel like it moved the movie in a slightly fresher, more complicated direction, into one that brought up ideas of hybrid beings and the possibility of oppositional consciousness. thoughts, anyone?

it grossed millions of dollars in china alone this past weekend

what does this mean? i don’t know. just thought i’d put it out there. [slightly meaningless observation: interesting that a movie with such an overt anti-imperialist message is shown in theaters around the world in a steroidal display of cultural imperialism.]

in short – i loved this movie like i loved the cowboys beating up on the saints this past weekend, with lots of contradictory feelings. i realize that this whole post might just be me trying to reconcile some cognitive dissonance (ie, my love for the movie and the fact that i started crying during the end), and that 99 percent of what i wrote is bullshit. if that’s the case, feel free to call me out on it!

but i did cry.

Not really a busy busy week but got some things happenning. Tuesday arrive unexpectedly at someones house, I gots permission. Wednesday meet up with a work buddy to start some plotting and play some nerdy video games. Thursday is all about the comics and the work Christmas Party. Somewhere in between submit a resume for a promotion.

Its weird, a while back I resigned myself to the fact I was stuck here in Melbourne, but now I don’t see it as such a bad thing. I do however think about that northern city and I will return. I just have enough going on here to keep me busy and not spend my time pining like a wuss.

from my new favorite website, organizing upgrade. read, think, ask questions, be inspired, act!

[edit: my reflections to be added at a time yet to be determined... damn you holiday party season...]

TERRY MARSHALL: It’s All About Hegemony

Interviewed by Sushma Sheth

These are dramatic times politically, socially, and economically. What do you think are the most significant shifts happening right now, and how do they change the context of our work?

I think that the most significant shift is the intersection between the new media and Obama. I do not mean his election itself, but his campaign that became a symbol for a changing terrain.

Obama’s campaign surfaced what was already in play. It uncovered race relations in the United States and the status of leadership within black communities. The campaign symbolized the changing of the guard from the old civil rights establishment in the black community to a generation of black people who benefited from the civil rights revolution in the US. Obama represents this new black middle class that came up from the achievements of the civil rights establishment, but with a different worldview.

His campaign also symbolized a growing coalition. It brought together different segments of society suffering under the Bush Regime and the stolen election. There has always been talk of the “net-roots”, mostly the white middle class who had careers in silicon valley and became politically active through both the Bush’s stolen election and the falling economy. The anti-Bush stuff was their reaction to it. Obama’s campaign brought those folks, black people and young communities of color a new leadership.

His leadership brought a lot of things to the surface: it’s not the 60s anymore. People from the 60s took for granted that post-WWII, all the imperialist nations economies were weakened. That opened space for communist and revolutionary forces to start having liberation. We have gone through a process now where a lot of people who thought that this was the solution are now stale. We are coming up in the world now, where we have to deal with this. We do not have revolutions jumping off in front of us everyday. The socialist project, in the eyes of many worldwide, has been discredited. The old model does not work.

We are coming out asking what are the new solutions? We are in a stage of experimentation.

There is all this rave about new media, but the key thing about it is its democratic nature. Old media was built for “from one to many” and in new media its about “from many to many”. A large scale or numbers of people can communicate with each other much more easily than in the post. We think about in Karl Marx’s time, it took weeks or months to get the word about something from one country to the next (Us to Europe). Now, no matter where you are there are so many communications devices so that is instantaneous. Time has effectively shrunk. What does that mean for us? How does this change human beings? I think we are just in the middle of this. The new media was produced by capitalism, the main mode of production. The left has not comprehended how to change society and use new media as a liberatory project and not something that just seeks to make a profit.

During the immigrant marches that re-sparked May Day in the US a few years ago, a lot of young Latino folks were using MySpace.com to organize spontaneous walkouts on mass scales. People find difficulty in organizing people in this day and age and yet you have all these examples of people self-organizing. People are using new media technology but in a very organic way because new media has become such a part of their life.

Can we communicate our stories effectively to people? Which of youtube, myspace, Facebook all these social networking and peer to peer networks can we use to communicate more effectively our reasoning and our thoughts and make it a priority to expand the left as we know it.

New communication and new media allow us to share stories and deliver our narrative and which challenges the current hegemonic order and create counter-hegemony, as discussed by Antonio Gramsci.

There are a number of new opportunities for organizing presented by the new Obama administration and the economic crisis. What are the key interventions that the community organizing sector should make in this moment? Are there particular contributions that left organizers should make in this process?

The key interventions right now should be:

FOLLOW OBAMA. What is the most progressive out of what he is doing, even if its limited. What are the loopholes where we can intervene? Personally, I’ve been following Obama’s approach to service. In the US, we do not have a clear national identity. In just about every other country there is a full national identity. In what Obama refers to in his speeches, he seems to think that service is one way we can start to develop that national identity. In a lot of ways, this is like nation-building. (And people can argue with me on this!) Service is an easy way to get people involved in organizing. They are one step away. A person involved in service obviously cares about an issue or cause and is willing to do service around it. This is not that far from connecting them to Mao’s line on mass line and “serve the people” and connect that sentiment to organizing projects. Obama has set up a government site for service to connect service projects nationwide. I am trying to get people to connect into this as a means of recruiting new, young people. We can connect them to organizing in general, as well as to the Left. Its an open opportunity, an experiment.

WE NEED TO CREATE NEW MAJORITIES. There is no Left in this country. When I say there is no Left is this country, there is no phenomenon or force that has impact on a societal scale and identifies with principles we call “left”. There is nothing like that exists like that here, much less a large section of society that abide by these principles. There are only a few scattered individuals in reality. There maybe more people who can benefit from this, but are not aware or are caught up in their lives. We need to grow our forces in general as well as grow the left. We need to think about how to do this in the US context. We need to build new majorities. We can learn some things from the Obama campaign. Obama created a new “we” – a new force, call it a coalition or alliance. He created a new foundation of people, who in many cases were not active. My mother is from Barbados and recently got her citizenship. She’s been in the country since 1968. She voted for the first time, not just because he was black. It obviously excited her, but there was an excitement to vote. His campaign made people feel they were part of something bigger, part of a movement. We talk about this, but he did it on such a massive scale. What can we learn from this? How can we build a left? How can we build new majority? In what ways to storytelling, new media, and technology intersect with that?

USE NEW MEDIA TO AMPLIFY WHAT WE ALREADY HAVE MOVING. What are the key projects we are engaging in? What are the political projects we are engaging in? Organizing projects? How can we see these media tools and technologies as amplifying or adding to what we are already doing? In my studies, I find that these technologies do not create social networks. They only amplify connections that are real or networks that already exist. Offline, we should learn how to build day-to-day connections to everyday working people. How do we build social networks with people? I am not saying anything new. Churches, mosques, etc already do this. They are deeply entrenched in people’s lives. How do we translate this in a secular sense of the left. Also, there is a religious left and (how do we) translate this into a emanicipatory project. These tools are only helpful if they are amplifying something that is already real. How does developing relationships affect people’s connection to ideas? There is a quote from Amilcar Cabral – people do not fight for ideas in the sky, they fight for real things. They fight for real, material things. It does not matter if you come talking about “revolution etc. etc.” but the question is “how will I feed my family? Find work? Life a sustainable life?”

RE-ENGINEER DIRECT ACTION. There are actions around the world where people use GPS and Google Maps that helps decentralize the power that the state has. So many of these things, funny enough, that capitalism developed we can now leverage to use again elite power.

What are old strategies that our sector should turn away from? Which new tools and ideas are you now experimenting with?

A lot of stuff is old now. First of all, there is something about Left culture where we are quick to polarize; where in some cases, it may not be the case. You definitely want to polarize you and your allies from the elite powers that be. The Left has taken this to be cannibalistic towards itself. One small difference within different sects of the Left is polarized – we set a pole, only one of us can be right, and we battle to the death. It has helped kick-in sectarianism. We need to relook at how to have serious political debates and disagreements and not be at war with each other. We can co-exist with different ideologies within the left. The truth will come out in practice. In my organizing work, it was not a concern to me what someone’s ideology to me. At least it was not my primary concerns (we are progressive, revolutionary, etc.) , but when we finally put stuff in practice and we see what works and what does not. Ideology cannot be primary. I am not saying it is not important. But that cannot be the only factor – how can we negotiate, debate and struggle together?

Second, we cannot continue newspaper selling. A lot of sectarian groups call themselves Left but do not represent Left forces. They are very alienating to everyday people. They develop a culture of talking down to people. We are “above and away from the masses.” “We come down and bring you the truth.” This needs to stop.

There is outside knowledge as well as people’s knowledge from their everyday experience (Paolo Friere approach). We need to combine the two. Instead, I think you see one or the other. That there is only people’s everyday experiencial knowledge and you cannot go beyond that or there is only this outside knowledge and we need to bring them the truth. There has to be a combination, a dialectic, and come to a real emancipatory project.

Third, a lot of the tactics we use have gotten old, like marching and so on. We need understand the current conditions and which tactics and strategies need to flow from our analysis of current conditions. We have a lazy period of non-studying or non-analysis studying and we are relying on a lot of tactics from the past. We are stuck in the 60s. The civil rights establishment is stuck in the 60s and the left is stuck in the 60s in this country. We are not recognizing in front of our face what is new, what is different. How do we move forward, study it, move on, and make an assessment and concretize some gains? We rely on a march or a protest, and people do not come out to that. What will pull people out? What do people connect to? At one point, marching was new and came out of new conditions. It was part of the Industrial Revolution where people were coming into cities. There could be a debate now – should we leverage gains from the state or build alternatives? Or a combination of both? This depends on the objective conditions.

Finally, we need some serious study. The left is lazy and does not engage in study. There are pockets of people trying to do that now. This project itself is an attempt to do that.

What is inspiring you these days?

Two things are inspiring me right now. They may not be typical of the left – or at least at first glance, they do not appear to be “left.”

THE ARTIST MIA: If you read her interviews, she talks about how people cannot define her genre. The reality is, she’s produced her own genre. She talks about her experience growing up in a third world country, but more growing up in refugee camps. And then, she talks about moving to the first world and having to live and cope with all this hybridity. Through technology and new media, the world is really connected. When you are an immigrant or refugee, you are at the intersection of this. She wanted to find a way through her music, through her art, to connect. The world is not longer in these distinct silos. This fact really comes out in her music. When you are an immigrant kid, she talks about how, “you do not know what is cool.” You might rock a Michael Jackson t-shirt and some stone-washed jeans. You are this mismatch of things, these excesses of the first-world that get dumped on the third-world. Through mass media, for the most part, the first world used to produce what is “cool”. But with everything as connected as it is now, everyone is sharing. Third world, refugee kids are producing what is up. Her music and message reflect this. Some of her lyrics have revolutionary content. But often people complain that all of her music is not revolutionary, that sometimes it is just about dancing or sometimes too difficult to follow what she is saying! But what I have learnt from her is that we have been transfixed on narrow concept of political art. Some of us believe that when there is a revolutionary era, then all songs will have revolutionary lyrics, quoting from the Communist Manifesto. But is this what moves people? Maybe you can have a song, where they lyrics talk about dancing and partying, but the feeling and effect of the song is more revolutionary. Can a song make people feel something or bring change in people’s lives? Though her lyrics are often political, her fans concentrate on how she blends sounds from Aborigine people in Australia, to folks in Sri Lanka to folks in Jamaica. The sounds come together and become a way to connect people around the world. The song could be about dancing, but people recognize the sounds and start connecting to one another. It makes me think about how are we, as the Left, connecting people? It makes me question how we think about culture, music and what we think is revolutionary.

THE DANCE CREW CRAZE: Dance crews have popped up in the US as well as internationally. Sean Paul came up at the same time that new dances came out in Jamaica. These spread across the Caribbean and through the Diaspora spread to the US, UK and around the world. At the same time, there are dances that come up in hip-hop songs. But the hip-hop artists are not making them up. They are going to the hood where kids are doing this organically in LA, Chicago, Atlanta, Detroit and Harlem. This is very self-organized and organic. What’s amazing is that these kids now have jobs. They are now artists, they teach dances, they tour, and they perform in videos. They are part of the industry now. This is happening in an era where people really question the potential of these young kids. Statistically, the prison population goes up for young black children and unemployment rises for young black men. And yet, these young black kids are creating jobs for themselves. Robin D. G. Kelly talks about people creating jobs out of play. Work out of play. All of these groups organize themselves, dance and have created an international network of dancers. I like looking at the self-organization of the under-class, if you can call them that. The working class is self-organizing through culture. How can we tap into this as a model and help them reach their full, emancipatory potential?
Any closing thoughts?

A lot of what I have been discussing can be traced back to Gramsci. It’s all about hegemony. In the US, we live in an advanced capitalist society. We cannot use pure force to effect change. Therefore, the question becomes: How are we going to have a revolution here? How do we create counter-hegemonic culture?

We need to be more effective in telling our stories and understand how stories affect people. How does the left design a left narrative? This was the key thing that Obama figure out. After Bush, the country was divided.

Sometimes we are closer to crisis than we realize. Elites in this country have an understanding of how close we are to crisis, more than we. Maybe some feared another civil war given the country is so divided on so many issues. Obama was concerned about division. To get elected, he needs a 51% majority. For this to possible, he needed to build unity. He used a story, he retold the narrative of the US to build the unity he needed to win.

His new narrative: The US is an unfinished project. He asked people to look at the founding fathers, and then the civil war. He marveled at US innovation and reminded us all that we are lucky to be here. He took some truths of American mythology and created new myths with a more progressive feature.

The question for us is: Can we do this? Can we create a left myth that is more revolutionary?

I sent the Fall Out eassy to some people and obviously put it up on here. Having lent the series out and the reaction to the final episode has made me go back and watch it and thank Christ it was on my iPod. Watching it and listening to it as I walk makes me think I have another essay left in me. There are things my younger mind left out, things that will add to his argument.

Y’know I took the name of this blog is from my favourite Prisoner episode Dance of the Dead, but the best forty something minutes of televison ever made has to be without a doubt the final episode of the Prisoner, Fall Out

Finished work for the year today and only because I finished a job four days early (single handedly oh yeah!). Met up with E and we talked jokingly about how the universe was smiling upon us. After getting comics, eating dumplings, another work colleague joined us and he invited us to his girlfrields work party by the Yarra for free booze. What was said in jest become serious, the universe wanted us to have a kickass day and we embraced it.

  “For : The Essentials Course Online Worship Course with Dan Wilt“  

The spiritual formation theme for me for this week is – are my spiritual disciplines in line with getting to know more and more of God?  I was so touched by Inner Living Outer Giving by Peter Finch (1).  I shared with some friends my thoughts on this. These disciplines are really teaching me about my spiritual formation as I travel on my spiritual journey.
 
Footwashing – we did this in my home UK church but I thought of it as disgusting but I did it eventually. This article teaches about the humility this brings and the quality of a secret inner life with God. Rather than saying – hey look at what I do, keep the inner devotions strong.
 
Loaves and fishes – the songs and words that I offer up, should be done in a capacity to help set others free rather than ’shine any accomplishments or skills’ I may have.
 
Water walking - I pray that I will learn to be comfortable getting out of my comfy boat and get past the known and familiar zone around me and Finch says – dance the Holy Spirit dance!
 
Cross carrying - I pray I will continually give of myself to others ESPECIALLY when i don’t feel like it.

Raising the dead – there are many people around us – known and unknown – I pray that I will affect others into being lifted out of spiritual death that they will receive fresh new life in Christ and enjoy the freedom that only God, Jesus and HS can bring!!
Can we all honestly and deeply say that in our destiny to be like God, we follow these disciplines? For me, I am not perfect but I know that in Christ I will strive to be like Him. This journey I am on is exciting, can be worrying, seems dangerous, but as long as I am rooted in Him, I will reap the reward of intimacy with my God. I pray, that my goal and motto will also be ‘the change must go deeper than the surface, I must be ploughed up and resown’ (2). 

Do we let Jesus have complete authority in our lives?  Or do we live in ‘the dark night of the soul’ where anxiety and fear dominate, physical pleasure dominates (3). I encourage us all, let God have your imperfections, let go of sin, leave it at the foot of the cross and take pure spiritual delight in Jesus! Amen! Blessings and encouragement to all who read this.

1.Peter Finch, ibid. p141

2. C. S. Lewis, Devotional Classics, ed Foster and Smith (New York:HarperOne,2005), 9 

3. John of the Cross, Devotional Classics, ed Foster and Smith (New York:HarperOne,2005), 35

The weekend was great, got to hang with my buds and yeah be sloths. The thing with me though is I like an out, a chance to escape and be alone. Didn’t really get that on the weekend and I was overwhelmed and I was quieter than usual.

The fire is still there I’m happy to say. Got some plans lined up for the end of year work break and some ideas to write about. I’m going to cut down on my excesses and be more determined with things I want to accomplish.

Got my pay rise today at work and I felt quite proud of that. I never asked for it I earned it, just how I wanted it to happen. To finish the day off I had some great interactions with someone awesome then home for Californication.

Today there was a purpose in my stride and a smile on my face at the end.

i need to take a marxist economics class… or just meet david harvey on the dance floor…

[EDIT: since marxist geographers don't keep blogs, this and this are going to have to do for now.]

November 28, 2009

Dubai Debt Woes Raise Fear of Wider Problem
By LANDON THOMAS Jr.

Of the many economies that gorged on debt in the boom years, Dubai stood out. In the space of a few years the emirate’s investment arm, Dubai World, racked up $59 billion in debt, borrowing to build lavish developments like a giant island shaped like a palm tree to entice celebrities like Brad Pitt, and to invest in glittery properties like the MGM Grand Casino in Las Vegas.

Now that the boom has gone bust, both in Dubai and in the United States, Dubai is stuck with a glut of real estate that no one wants to buy or rent. Creditors and markets had always assumed that when push came to shove, its oil-rich neighbor Abu Dhabi would bail out Dubai. But that assumption was called into question this week, and the resulting fear that Dubai might not be able to pay its bills sent a wave of uncertainty rippling through markets just as investors thought the worst of the global financial instability was over.

The anxiety reached Wall Street on Friday, sending the Dow Jones industrial average down more than 150 points, as investors worried about hidden debt bombs in other countries and institutions — heavily indebted nations like Greece and even Britain, high-flying emerging markets and even European and American banks that had lent Dubai money.

In a worst-case contagion, Bank of America analysts wrote Friday, “One cannot rule out — as a tail-risk — a case where this would escalate into a major sovereign default problem, which would then resonate across global emerging markets in the same way that Argentina did in the early 2000s or Russia in the late 1990s.”

And not just emerging markets. “Dubai shows us that what we are now facing is a solvency issue, not a liquidity issue,” said Jonathan Tepper, a partner at Variant Perception, a research house in London that has been outspoken on the debt problems facing European economies.

On Wednesday, Dubai requested that Dubai World be allowed to skip six months of interest payments on its debt. Before then, Dubai World, the corporate face of the emirate, had commissioned the city state’s flashiest buildings, managed ports around the world and reached far overseas to invest in properties like Barneys in New York.

Now, just as Bear Stearns was a harbinger of a string of failures of overly leveraged investment banks, the concern is that Dubai could be the canary in the coal mine for heavily indebted countries. The debts of everyone, including Japan and the United States, not to mention emerging markets, have risen greatly as the countries have fought the ravages of the global recession.

“You can print as much money as you want, but at the end of the day you have to pay the interest on your debt,” Mr. Tepper said.

Dubai is one of the few member states of the United Arab Emirates that has little oil wealth of its own. It acts as the trading, tourist and financial hub of the emirates. But it was assumed that the U.A.E.’s richest oil state, Abu Dhabi, would always bail out its free-spending neighbor.

Dubai’s announcement on Wednesday reversed that presumption — even as investors fretted that Dubai risked a sovereign default that would ripple to developing nations.

And while Abu Dhabi may well want to make its more exuberant neighbor and its bankers suffer a bit for their profligate ways before it rides to the rescue, that gives little comfort to investors already wary of the region’s growing debt.

“This came as a big shock,” said Fahd Iqbal, an analyst at EFG-Hermes, an investment bank focused on the Middle East. Although Mr. Iqbal said he held to the view that Dubai in the end would avoid default, he acknowledged that the measure had severely rattled confidence in Dubai. “One of the main issues now is of credibility and the potential impact on future fund-raising, which could have knock-on effects on building and infrastructure plans for Dubai and the United Arab Emirates,” he said.

By the numbers, a tremor in Dubai should not necessarily shake the world banking community. According to data from the Bank for International Settlements, foreign banks have $130 billion of exposure to the United Arab Emirates, with Britain having the largest exposure, $51 billion. Banks in the United States have debts of $13 billion.

That is a negligible 0.4 percent of foreign banks’ total cross-border exposure, said Stephen Jen, an analyst at the hedge fund Blue Gold capital management.

In fact, Dubai World’s largest creditors are domestic banks in Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

Still, one concern is that some British banks with large credit exposure to the United Arab Emirates are already troubled. Royal Bank of Scotland, majority-controlled by the British government, was one of the largest lenders to Dubai World, having secured $2.3 billion worth of loans to it since early 2007, according to a report by J.P. Morgan. Standard Chartered and Barclays were also large lenders to the region, with more than $10 billion between them, analysts said. HSBC has $17 billion exposure to the United Arab Emirates.

But while a Dubai default may not provoke a banking crisis, it could well spur a broader crisis of investor confidence in overly leveraged economies.

World markets did not take long to reflect this insecurity.

The Dow Jones industrial average fell 154.48 points, to 10,309.92 Friday, as markets in Europe and Asia closed slightly higher after opening sharply down for the third consecutive day. Crude oil prices fell to a six-week low; gold fell as investors sought havens.

The cost of insuring the debt of economies like Greece and Lithuania spiked 16 percent and 6 percent, respectively, this week. The cost of insuring Dubai’s debt shot up by 67 percent and the British pound weakened against the dollar for the week.

Greece and Britain have historically high budget deficits that exceed 12 percent of gross domestic product, with Spain not far behind and Ireland struggling with the consequences of a devastating real estate collapse.

While no one is expecting an outright default as long as global interest rates remain low — largely due to aggressive government bond purchases by central banks — concerns have been building for months that once these easing measures end, interest rates will spike and investors will become less willing to trust the word of heavily indebted governments.

For now, most of the pain from Dubai is being felt by the holders of the Islamic bonds of Nakheel, the developer owned by Dubai World that is known for the palm-themed islands it built.

On Dec. 14, $3.52 billion in Nakheel bonds come due. One of the largest Islamic group of bonds issued, the deal was snapped up by Western and regional investors. In a reflection of how sure investors were that Dubai would meet these payments, the bonds were trading at a 10 percent premium to face value earlier this week. They are now trading at around half of face value.

Great weekend at the Smoko music festival, but I’m mentally exhausted. Too much people interaction me thinks, I had a great time I just felt a wee bit overwhelmed.

Sometimes I pimp the Prisoner and I’m not sure. This time I knew this person would fucken love it, but then again she’s not seen Fall Out yet. That’s make or break

There are joys in my life. Getting new comics and pimping them out to others, having nights out with work colleagues, seeing the girl at work with the mischievous smile and watching Californication every Monday night with a bottle of red wine.

The week I’ve had was filled with tiny pieces of awesome that made one big tower of awesome. Little moments of cool where I found people know me, but I can still surprise them. I am going to be a union delegate at work, I want more to do at a place I love and from my decision to be a voice I found respect, love and a totally new set of balls. I’ve had criticisms this week as to how I am from a person I respect and comments from others who can kiss my ass. Ultimately I am what I am and the people who dig me and I dig back they know what I’m like and don’t give a flying shit. There’s how I appear and what I’m really like and the people who know the difference are the people who are the awesome sauce. I don’t consider myself disrespectful. I am compassionate I respect the people I like. The way I choose to express myself is a way to keep acquaintances as acquaintances and the ones who look past a dirty word and innuendo have always been the ones that are with me for the long haul. I’m seriously shocked how well liked I am at my place of employment and every chance I get I pay back that love with a joke, a kind word or an awesome gesture. I am Luke Sims I say what I like and I do what I can and what I can do is bring the heat and the awesome sauce and I get it back in spades. I will raise a glass to those people who inspired me to grow a major pair of balls, the people who want to get hammered with me, the ones who see through my mask. I’m not in any way ashamed or embarrassed about who I am and those that are can read the badge. Life is good.

Making excuses for a minute to talk to someone. I feel childish, but it makes me happy. I’m a master of this.

Alright I’ll admit it! I like someone in this damned city I call home, the thought of seeing her on a near daily basis makes me smile and we have so much in common I think I’m imagining her. I do however feel a bit hesitant, I usually fuck things like this up.

It certainly makes my last piece (the one I’ve not put up here yet) seem redundant.

At my work you can find someone with ANY interest you have. A-N-Y.

Fuck I love that.

Woke up did the usual routine and was restless as hell! Get to the city got the next Constatine trade paper back then made a bee line for Errol street and  thought I’d burst. Started plotting, read some comics and had a latte before work. At work while waiting for someone to agree to do a crappy survey tore out what I’d done and replotted till I was satisfied. Caught up on surveys so I wasn’t behind then arranged for drinks with a very cool lady for this Wednesday.

Dancing like a happy loon ensued and decided nah no drinks tonight, I was taken for mad.

The days are tumultuous, feelin up and down, goin through some bad shit and also enjoying so much good shit. The last couple weeks are a mish mash of messed up crazy and through out all of it I’m good. Yup good as mother fucken gold.  No bitchy whinyness, very little (but never entirely absent) woe is me shit, no complaining, I love all my dawgs at work and feel the love back. I’ve finished some pieces finally! I’m constantly reading cool mind blowing shit all sweet sweet comic book nectar. Nothing touches the mediums imagination. I also might maybe very be kinda interested in someone who doesnt live a million miles away. Taken the Michness to the Camberwell fair tomorrow. There is probably more, but the gist of this drunken rant is that a year ago or maybe even less than that, the stuff goin doin with Nan would have broken me, but I’m livin large baby oh so very large.

When bad shit goes down go out and make you’re own awesome sauce.  Put that on a fucken t-shirt.