Alan Waldman :
TELEVISION | Excellent Brit cop series ‘Above Suspicion’ is gripping, intelligent viewing

Posted on June 12, 2016 by Thorne Dreyer

Craggy vet Ciarán Hinds and perky young Kelly Reilley lead a squad of detectives in queen of crime Lynda La Plante’s latest white-knuckle thriller.

Above Suspicion

Above Suspicion is gripping, intelligent viewing.

By Alan Waldman | The Rag Blog | June 12, 2016

[In his Rag Blog column, Alan Waldman reviews some of his favorite films and TV series that readers may have missed, including TV dramas, mysteries, and comedies from Canada, England, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and Scotland. Most are available on DVD, Netflix and/or Netflix Instant Streaming, and some episodes are on YouTube.]

All four two- and three-part Above Suspicion stories are available on Netflix and YouTube, and they are well worth discovering. The series aired from 2009-2012 and then was cancelled. Here’s the beginning of an episode.

The series is based on the novels Above Suspicion, The Red Dahlia, Deadly Intent, and Silent Scream by Lynda La Plante, who has won six major awards and three other nominations for Prime Suspect and Prime Suspect 3 but who’s also written Trial & Retribution, The Commander, Bella Mafia, Widows, Framed, Prime Suspect 2, two movies and nine other TV series.
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James McEnteer :
Look ma, no wheels: Weak end at Bernie’s

Posted on June 8, 2016 by Thorne Dreyer

Political bites and random nibbles.

Political shark

Image from Wikimedia Commons.

By James McEnteer | The Rag Blog | June 8, 2016

On September 11, 2001, George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, et. al., were either negligent about or complicit in the terrorist attacks that killed thousands of Americans. There is no third alternative. We require a thorough judicial proceeding to determine which it was. Fifteen years later we still need to know.

Which presidential campaign will promise to find the truth?
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Johnny Hazard :
Protestas contra el nuevo aeropuerto de la Ciudad de México

Posted on June 7, 2016 by Thorne Dreyer

El gobierno federal invade terrenos comunales. Vestigios arqueológicos en riesgo.

No Aeropuerto crp2

Imagen de Atenco FPDT.

Por Johnny Hazard | The Rag Blog | 8 de junio, 2016

Lea en inglés un artículo anterior de este autor: “Crisis de ozono en la zona metropolitana de la capital de México.“

[Este artículo contiene información del periódico mexicano alternativo Surco Informativo.]

Desde el anuncio presidencial en septiembre de 2014 de que se retomaría el proyecto de construir un aeropuerto en esta zona ha habido oposición porque el proyecto amenaza con:

  • Iniciar la construcción de 16 o hasta 19 nuevas autopistas, todas privatizadas desde su incepción. A nivel mundial, la construcción de aeropuertos es la principal causa de transferencia de dinero público a empresas de construcción.
  • Aumentar las emisiones de CO2—de los aviones y de los coches que irían mucho más lejos para llegar al aeropuerto—en una ciudad que ya es de las más contaminadas del mundo.
  • Agravar la tendencia a las inundaciones y a la vez la desecación de los lagos y ríos y el hundimiento de la tierra.
  • Dañar y destruir lo que queda de las zonas agrícolas y ecológicas de la zona metropolitana de la Ciudad de México y de los alrededores de Texcoco.
  • Hacer crecer la mancha urbana. El lunes 23 de mayo, trabajadores del proyecto del nuevo aeropuerto, escoltados por grupos de choque, marinos y policías federales, estatales y municipales, desalojaron a integrantes del Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra (FPDT) de su campamento en el cerro Huatepec. Justo después, se restablecieron en el Cerro de Tepetzinco, que tiene valor ceremonial para los habitantes tradicionales de Nexquipayac.

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Sunshine Williams :
METRO | Muhammad Ali, the Astrodome,
and me

Posted on June 7, 2016 by Thorne Dreyer

We had ringside seats on the second row, and were splattered all night with blood, sweat, and snot!

Muhammad Ali Ernie Terrell

Muhammad Ali fights Ernie Terrell in the Astrodome, February 6, 1967. Image from Flickr / Creative Commons.

By Sunshine Williams | The Rag Blog | June 7, 2016

HOUSTON — News of Muhammad Ali’s death brought back memories from my past. In January 1967, I started work in a construction shack outside the Astrodome with Wayne Chandler, formerly with the Astros publicity office, to form the publicity/public relations office for Astroworld, which was under construction. Just the two of us, plus a photographer named Harold.

We worked in the frigid winter months without heat until my frozen fingers could barely type on the IBM Selectric. Over the next 16 months, we put out an average of 3,000 pieces of mail a week, including news stories, photos, maps, sketches of park rides and amenities to newspapers, radio, television, and travel agents, to get the word out in-state, nationally and internationally prior to the opening on Memorial Day, 1968.
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Dave Zirin :
SPORT | ‘I Just Wanted to Be Free’: The radical reverberations of Muhammad Ali

Posted on June 5, 2016 by Thorne Dreyer

He redefined what it meant to be tough and collectivized the very idea of courage.

Muhammad Ali 1966 sm

Muhammad Ali in 1966. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

By Dave Zirin | The Rag Blog | June 5, 2016

The reverberations. Not the rumbles, the reverberations. The death of Muhammad Ali will undoubtedly move people’s minds to his epic boxing matches against Joe Frazier and George Foreman, or there will be retrospectives about his epic “rumbles” against racism and war.

But it’s the reverberations that we have to understand in order to see Muhammad Ali as what he remains: the most important athlete to ever live. It’s the reverberations that are our best defense against real-time efforts to pull out his political teeth and turn him into a harmless icon suitable for mass consumption.
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Mariann Wizard Vasquez :
Out There: My first dispatch from Belize

Posted on May 28, 2016 by Thorne Dreyer

I’m starting to get a glimmer of the ‘colonial fatalism’ that decrees, ‘That’s just how things are.’

WizardBelize2shot

Changing prayer flags of cleanliness.

By Mariann Wizard Vasquez* | The Rag Blog | May 28, 2016

SAN IGNACIO TOWN, Cayo, Belize, C.A. — It’s the smallest things that begin to impress upon my First World consciousness just what it is to live in the Third World. Take, for example, the lowly clothespin.

In Belize, where sunshine is one of the most abundant (and least exploited) resources, everyone hangs their clothes and household linens out to dry. Porches, verandas, patios, and yards of rich and poor alike ripple with sheets and towels, the mister’s briefs and the missus’ dainties, school uniforms and superhero T-shirts, constantly-changing prayer flags of devout cleanliness. Except during the rainy season, the system works fine.
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Murray Polner :
BOOKS | Charles Glass’s ‘Syria Burning: A Short History of a Catastrophe’

Posted on May 25, 2016 by Thorne Dreyer

As civil wars go, this one is especially unforgiving and brutal, made worse by bitter historic ethnic, religious, and tribal rivalries and proxy wars.

Syria Burning

By Murray Polner | The Rag Blog | May 25, 2016

[Syria Burning: A Short History of a Catastrophe by Charles Glass; March 2016: Verso; 195 pp; $16.95.]

When Declan Walsh, the New York Times‘ Cairo bureau chief, visited war-weary Damascus and besieged Aleppo in May 2016, he concluded and thus verified the findings of the more experienced Charles Glass, who since the eighties has wandered Syria before and during its agonizing civil war.

“Few of the people I spoke to have any appetite for a fight” now that the U.S., Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia have become involved, wrote Walsh. “I didn’t ask if they wanted to fight, but if I had, I imagine their response would have been: Fight whom? And for what?”
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Chellis Glendinning and Omar Alarcón Poquechoque :
ESSAY / VIDEO | ‘Mirando el espejo’: A film-poem about roots and memory in Bolivia

Posted on May 25, 2016 by Thorne Dreyer

Everywhere people are working to keep their cultural identities alive against the brutal but seductive assault of ‘modernismo.’

Mirando el Espejo (english subtitles) Omar Alarcón Poquechoque. Bolivie from Omar Alarcón Poquechoque on Vimeo.

By Chellis Glendinning | The Rag Blog | May 25, 2016

LA PAZ, Bolivia — In this post-postmodern/hyper-hyper-technological age we share, one psychological theme of note is the search for identity. It has become a universal pursuit for, as Edward Said has written, no one — but no one — escapes the multifarious tentacles of globalization with its feelers reaching toward the whole of the world.

The fracturing of the land-based communities that sculpted our human sense of social and psychic assumption during several million years of evolution is the very hallmark of expanding empires. A result is that few of us live in the original place of our ancestors, fewer still practice or even remember traditional ways, and native languages are dying out at a tragic clip.
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Steve Russell :
METRO | Life in the Soviet Republic of Sun City

Posted on May 17, 2016 by Thorne Dreyer

A friend had this priceless comment: ‘It’s just like Cuba, only with money.’

soviet statue

Street corner at Sun City, Texas. Not! Image from
Wikimedia Commons.

By Steve Russell | The Rag Blog | May 17, 2016

SUN CITY, Texas — We just had a crime wave here in Sun City, Texas, and that moves me to explain to my old pals how I wound up living in any retirement community, let alone this one.

Having watched politics go crazy on the national level since the Reagan Revolution redistributed so much wealth from the bottom to the top and the Republican sweep of Texas government turn it into an exercise in meanness as policy, Tracy and I naturally looked first to becoming ex-pats.

Canada would not take us because of age. We had not paid into the social safety net we were on the verge of needing.
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Luis Guerra :
The Return of the Sacred Deer

Posted on May 16, 2016 by Thorne Dreyer

The Huichol Deer Repopulation Project:
I learned that encroachment and poaching had decimated the deer population in Huichol land.

Guerra Deer4

Tangled doe (see below). All photos by Ismael Trujillo.

By Luis Guerra | The Rag Blog | May 16, 2016

Luis Guerra hat sm crpArtist and storyteller Luis Guerra was our guest on Rag Radio Friday, May 13, 2016. On the show, Luis talks about the amazing and ambitious adventure of securing and moving the Huichol deer that he discusses in this report. He also reminisces on his years with the Rag Radio logo small Huichol Indians, with emphasis on shared mystical experiences, and reads three stories about being in the mountains of Jalisco with the Huicholes.

Listen to the podcast of our interview with Luis Guerra at the Internet Archive or on the player below:

In the last few months, the Huichol Deer Repopulation Project completed the relocation of 33 deer from northern Mexico to the Sierra Madre, in Jalisco. I am happy to offer the following report, which includes photographs of the capture, transport, and release phases, as well as of the people involved.

Background

The dream of repopulating the Sierra Madre of Jalisco with deer actually came to me about 28 years ago, when I attended the Huichol Festival of the Drum, the Corn, and the Squash. It was then that I learned that encroachment and poaching had decimated the deer population in Huichol land. Which was truly tragic, given that deer are sacred to the Huichol, an integral and major part of their cosmology.
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Thorne Dreyer :
RAG RADIO PODCASTS | Luis Guerra, Paul Buhle, Tom Hayden and Barbara Williams, Classic Bernie Sanders, Leeann Atherton, and Thomas Grace

Posted on May 16, 2016 by Thorne Dreyer

We visit the Huichol Indians, remember James Connolly and the Easter Rising, revisit Vietnam and Kent State, discuss a gritty new memoir, envision the political revolution, and listen to an iconic blues-rock singer.

Guerra and Dreyer 2016 Studio sm crp2

Luis Guerra and Thorne Dreyer in the KOOP studios, Friday, May 13, 2016.

Interviews by Thorne Dreyer | The Rag Blog | March 31, 2016

The following podcasts are from recent Rag Radio shows with host Thorne Dreyer. The syndicated Rag Radio program, produced in the studios of Austin’s cooperatively-run KOOP-FM, has an international audience and has become an influential platform for interviews with leading figures in politics, current events, literature, and cutting-edge culture.

♦ Mystical Artist and Storyteller Luis Guerra on ‘Repopulating the Huichol Deer’ and More!

Luis Guerra studio2 sm crpArtist and storyteller Luis Guerra talks about the amazing and ambitious adventure of securing and relocating 33 deer from northern Mexico to the Sierra Madre in Jalisco, the land of the Huichol Indians. He also reminisces on his years with the Huicholes, with emphasis on shared mystical experiences, and reads three stories about being in the mountains of Jalisco with the Huicholes.

Read the full show description and download the podcast of our May 13, 2016 Rag Radio interview with Luis Guerra, here — or listen to it here:

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Kate Braun :
This full moon is a time of high energy and power

Posted on May 16, 2016 by Thorne Dreyer

Moon Musings: The Full Moon falls on Saturday, May 21, 2016, but can also be observed on Friday or Sunday.

Flower Moon

Flower Moon. Image from Dreamwalker.

By Kate Braun | The Rag Blog | May 17, 2016

You may celebrate this month’s Full Moon on Friday, May 20, Saturday, May 21, or Sunday, May 22.  Saturday is the Full Moon, a Flower Moon or Hare Moon, and activities that will assist you in reaffirming goals would be most appropriate.

This is a time of high energy and power which may be complicated by current retrogrades: Juno, Saturn, Mars, and Pluto are all retrograde during this full moon and these combined energies will work to slow down thought processes as well as progress. Factor in Mercury’s retrograde, which continues until Sunday, May 22, and you add the possibility of incomplete or inaccurate information. Lord Sun’s entry into Gemini on Saturday is another complication as Gemini influences communications of all kinds, which can be more difficult during a Mercury retrograde.
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