I hope I got the quotes right...

"This sweet little chalet village was during the WEF packed with about 3000 delegates and press, some 1000 Swiss police, another 400 Swiss soldiers, numerous tanks and armored personnel carriers, gigantic rolls of coiled barbed wire that gracefully cascaded down snow- covered hillsides, missile launchers and assorted other tools of the national security trade.

((I kinda suspected this email was a fraud and forgery, until I read the paragraph above. Because, yep, that's just how the rich have to live, these days.))

And you know this... how?

I suspect that if the home security of rich people were 'tested' all at once, it would be like a run on the banks, and there wouldn't be enough focus to go around. If their weapons of small destruction are too prominant, then that just give rabble-rousers a better shot at spoofng their systems.

"Antiglobalization folks didn't stand a chance.

I love how you can tell where someone's coming from by their interpretation of "anti-"ness. On Feb 15, we couldn't have just been "pro-sanity", we had to be "anti-war". In '99 we couldn't be "pro-fair trade", we had to be "anti-progress" (can't be for globalization and fair trade at the same time, that would cause some sort of meltdown, I imagine.)
 
Nor did Al Qaeda. After all, if someone managed to take out Davos during WEF week the world would basically lose a fair chunk of its ruling and governing class POOF, just like that. So security was the name of the game. Metal detectors, X-ray machines, shivering soldiers standing in blizzards, etc."

((I've always figured that the summiteers and the protesting summit-hoppers would come to an understanding eventually. After all, the protesters are the only group who take Davos, WTO, etc with total seriousness.
Who says that people who protest, take the excuse seriously?
Myself, I treat it like window-shopping, to see and be seen, get a sense of the crowd, and give my paranoid self a chance to whiff out the police deployment playbook. It's a lot cheaper than burning man, though harder to explain to the parents...


 The tipping-point is gonna come when these Seattle '99 street canaille stop waving their anarchist black flags, and start waving light-blue UN flags, because they are all commercially underwritten by billionaire BINGOs (Big International Non-Governmental Organizations). And ladies and gentlemen, we have never been closer to that rapprochement. After 2/15, you can smell it in the wind. People, the war hasn't even started yet.)))
The tipping point is going to be when we're not carrying flags at all, but more specialized tools of the trade. You won't read about it in the newspapers, either, though you might in the history books. (avoid the reader's digest cndndsd version.)

It's run by about 5,000 bickering, sometimes charming, usually arrogant, mostly male people who are accustomed to living in either phenomenal wealth, or great personal power. A few have both. Many of them turn out to be remarkably naive – especially about science and technology. All of them are financially wise, though their ranks have thinned due to unwise tech-stock investing.

 If it's really that few, then a Dream Park scenario seems like the ideal way to go.

(((The ultra-rich: an endangered species.)))Like the Dodo, I doubt they'll be missed that much.

"They pay close heed to politics, though most would be happy if the global political system behaved far more rationally – better for the bottom line. They work very hard, attending sessions from dawn to nearly midnight, but expect the standards of intelligence and analysis to be the best available in the entire world. They are impatient. They have a hard time reconciling long term issues (global warming, AIDS pandemic, resource scarcity) with their daily bottomline foci. They are comfortable working across languages, cultures and gender, though white caucasian males still outnumber all other categories. They adore hi-tech gadgets and are glued to their cell phones.

"Welcome to Earth: meet the leaders."

 Heinlein had a saying about it being easier to raise one's appearant social class, then to convincingly lower it. If true, then the narrative of these humans should be significantly easier to subsume than the narrative of more average folks.