Metro Event Thursday! The Rag Blog presents ‘City of Quartz‘ author Mike Davis on ‘Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster.’
Thorne Webb Dreyer, Editor
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Government evasion continues in Guerrero massacre case
Parents of the ‘disappeared’ warn of more drastic actions if no results in 48 hours.
Enrique Peña Nieto’s “Saving Mexico” Time magazine cover has angered many (a change.org petition has more than 12,000 signatures). “Slaying Mexico” was more fitting for one Twitter user. Image from Fox News Latino.
By Johnny Hazard | The Rag Blog | October 27, 2014
MEXICO CITY — On Wednesday, October 23, after a day of marches including one with hundreds of thousands of participants in Mexico City, parents of the 43 missing education students kidnapped by police in Iguala, Guerrero, on September 26 issued an ultimatum: if there were no real results in 48 hours, they would take more drastic actions.
The 48 hours passed with no governmental action except the apparent resignation of Ángel Aguirre, governor of Guerrero. “Apparent,” because he really asked for a leave of absence, a common tactic for Mexican politicians who want to see if they will be favored eventually by a forgive and forget policy. Carlos Navarrete, president of Aguirre’s (formerly) center-left party, the Partido de la Revolución Democrática, defended the governor effusively till the day before his resignation.
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METRO EVENT | The Rag Blog : Celebrated Author & Urban Theorist Mike Davis in Austin this Thursday
Marxist Scholar Davis, author of ‘City of Quartz,’ will speak on ‘Texas vs. California: Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster’ at 5604 Manor in Austin.
The Rag Blog presents Mike Davis at 5604 Manor in Austin. Photo © Don Usner. Poster graphic by Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog.
“If it’s apocalypse you want — and frankly who doesn’t, because how else to explain the mess we’re in — nobody does it better [than Mike Davis].” — The Guardian
“Davis remains our penman of lost souls and lost scenarios: He culls nuggets of avarice and depredation the way miners chisel coal.” — The Nation
Event: The Rag Blog presents scholar/author Mike Davis
Subject: “Texas vs. California: Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster”
When: Thursday, Oct. 30, 2014, 7-9 p.m.
Where 5604 Manor Community Center
Address: 5604 Manor Rd., Austin, Tx 78723
Benefiting: New Journalism Project
Suggested donation: $10
Subject: “Texas vs. California: Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster”
When: Thursday, Oct. 30, 2014, 7-9 p.m.
Where 5604 Manor Community Center
Address: 5604 Manor Rd., Austin, Tx 78723
Benefiting: New Journalism Project
Suggested donation: $10
AUSTIN — The Rag Blog presents City of Quartz author, urban theorist, Marxist scholar, historian, and political activist Mike Davis — speaking on “Texas vs. California: Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster. A California perspective on Texas-as-the-future” — on Thursday, October 30, 7-9 p.m. at the 5604 Manor Community Center in Austin.
A discussion and informal gathering will follow — with food, beer, and wine available. The event benefits the New Journalism Project, the Texas nonprofit that publishes The Rag Blog and sponsors Rag Radio. Suggested donation is $10.
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Posted in Metro, RagBlog
Tagged City of Quartz, Marxist Scholar, Metro, Mike Davis, New Journalism Project, Political Activists, The Rag Blog, Urban Theory
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Battling Ebola: Cuba leads while U.S. lags
The U.S. has 550 military personnel in Africa on counterterrorism missions while over 5,000 Africans have succumbed to the non-military threat of Ebola.
Cuban doctors on their way to West Africa to fight Ebola, October 2014. Photo by EFE via telesur.
In what a New York Times editorial called “Cuba’s Impressive Role on Ebola” [Oct. 19], hundreds of Cuban doctors and nurses are being dispatched to West Africa to battle Ebola, train medical personnel, and create isolation and treatment centers. The Cubans are playing “the most robust role” of any country in battling the Ebola plague, which has erupted virulently because of a broad failure, according to the Times, “to produce medicines and vaccines for diseases that afflict poor countries.”
The U.S. has 550 military personnel in Africa on counterterrorism missions while over 5,000 Africans have succumbed to the non-military threat of Ebola. Cuba is taking action in part because Ebola, unchecked, will spread to the Caribbean, but also out a consistent sense of humanitarian duty which Washington fails to comprehend.
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METRO | Lamar W. Hankins : The Supreme Court’s irrational Texas voter ID decision
Justice Ginsburg called the law ‘purposely discriminatory’ and said it would disenfranchise ‘more than 600,000 registered Texas voters.’
Political cartoon by Nick Anderson / Houston Chronicle.
AUSTIN — The pre-dawn decision of a majority of Supreme Court Justices on October 18 to deny 600,000 Texans the right to vote in the upcoming election is among the court’s most patently irrational decisions since it declared George W. Bush the winner of the Florida presidential balloting 15 years ago by preventing the state from fairly counting all of the votes cast.
And make no mistake about this latest decision: it, too, is about votes — votes that the Republican majority on the Supreme Court worries will go overwhelmingly to Democrats. But it shouldn’t matter who receives the votes. What matters is that, in our system, the people should be able to vote without unnecessary and unjust interference from politicians in the legislatures and on the Supreme Court.
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METRO | Mercedes Lynn de Uriarte : Are Texas legislators just slow learners?
Texas is not alone in its willingness to restrict its upscale education to a ‘possessive investment
in whiteness.’
Thousands marched on the Texas State Capitol in March 2011, to protest cuts in state education funding. Photo courtesy of Save Texas Schools Texas Public Radio.
AUSTIN — The Texas legislature seems determined to govern with compulsive error repetition. Consider the recurring issue of education budgets and its subtext of directed disadvantage. This issue has ping-ponged between plaintiffs and state defendants for almost a half century.
The latest chapter came in August. District Judge John Dietz ruled that failing to provide enough money to educate all students adequately violates the state constitution. Dietz echoes rulings gaveled out years ago and repeatedly revisited.
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METRO | Steve Russell : Bee Czar News
Central Texas Bee Rescue is dedicated to seeing that bees scaring humans with their natural swarming behavior will help pay for their own preservation.
Walter Schumacher is the “Bee Czar.” Image from The American Honey Bee Protection Agency & Central Texas Bee Rescue.
AUSTIN — Last year, there was an emergency around a public housing project in Georgetown, just up IH-35 from Austin. A swarm of honeybees had ensconced itself in a tool shed and the residents, mostly elders, were scared. One of the residents had an allergy to bee stings, and so for him a mishap could be fatal.
The Fire Department was called, Animal Control was called, and eventually the bees were dispatched with insecticide. Lots of people questioned that action at the time. Time had published a cover story back in 2013 warning that nearly one third of U.S. honeybee colonies had died or disappeared since Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) broke out in 2004. Most people who pay attention to the news have by now heard of CCD, even though the causes of it are still hotly disputed.
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Posted in Metro, RagBlog
Tagged Bee Czar, Bee Rescue, Central Texas, Colony Collapse Disorder, Honey Bees, Metro, Rag Bloggers, Steve Russell, Walter Schumacher
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IDEAS | Mental parasites
Just as a parasitical lancet fluke can direct an ant to climb up a blade of grass, we are unknowingly manipulated by cultural memes.
Ant on leaf of grass. Free will or “fluke” of nature? Image from The Telegraph.
What if your brain were taken over by a parasite and made you want something you would not ordinarily want? What if it took over your second-order thinking and made you want to want that thing? Would your will then be free?
This is not so far-fetched a scenario as it might seem. There are numerous examples of parasites infecting the brains of animals to make those animals act contrary to their own well-being. Here is one:
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Posted in RagBlog
Tagged Bill Meacham, Cultural Memes, Free Will, Ideas, Lancet Fluke, Nature, Parasites, Philosophy, Rag Bloggers, Second-Order Volition
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On democracy: ‘Can we talk?’
The United States’ political system, we are told repeatedly, is the gold standard for the world.
Image from Philosophers for Change.
Through her decades of entertaining on stage and screen, [Joan] Rivers developed numerous classic bits and catchphrases, but three small words stand above the rest: “Can we talk?” (Kelli Bender @kbendernyc, 09/04/2014, also at People.com)
I never liked comedienne Joan Rivers who died recently. But her famous one-line introduction to talk show interviewers and stand-up performances is a powerful reminder that certain subjects might be dangerous to discuss in polite company. Whether the United States’ political system is a democratic one is such a subject.
Everything we Americans have learned since infancy suggests that the United States is a democracy. In fact, the United States political system, we are told repeatedly, is the gold standard for the world.
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Posted in RagBlog
Tagged American Society, Campaign Finance, Democracy, Electoral politics, Harry Targ, Rag Bloggers, Voter Suppression
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Silent rabbis
Arthur Hertzberg believed that the quasi-religious reverence for Israel, right or wrong, tainted the beauty and grandeur of Judaism.
New York Jews say “No!” to the Israeli occupation, August 2011.
One of the smartest, most courageous and provocative rabbis I ever knew was Arthur Hertzberg, raised in a Hasidic family, a congregational rabbi, historian of Jewish life and Zionism, university professor, a member of the Zionist Jewish Agency who once publicly rebuked Prime Minister Golda Meir for her pro-Vietnam War views, and regularly criticized Israel’s occupation and settlement policies.
Hertzberg, who died in 2006, also took on American Jews for their unquestioning worship of Israel, wondering as well if Zionism and Judaism were identical. Judaism, he once told me (he wrote a regular column in a magazine I edited) was a faith of universal morality, not a nationality. The quasi-religious reverence for Israel, right or wrong, tainted the beauty and grandeur of Judaism. Too many rabbis, he wrote (in an article which inspired me to write a book about American rabbis), resembled “institutional executives” and were “entertainers” in sparsely attended non-Orthodox synagogues.
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PODCAST | Author Michael Harris on the Digital Revolution and ‘The End of Absence’
Journalist and editor Harris, our guest on Rag Radio, discusses ‘Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection.’
Michael Harris was our guest on Rag Radio, September 26, 2014.
Our guest on Rag Radio, journalist Michael Harris, is a magazine editor and the author of the critically-acclaimed The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection.
On the show we discuss the nature of the digital revolution in relation to earlier transformative communication events — like the invention of the Gutenberg printing press and the 20th century television invasion.
And Harris recounts a personal epiphany, his “overload moment,” when, sitting in front of his computer, he looked up and realized he had more than a dozen windows open on two computer monitors and was engaged in multiple email conversations and text messages.
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Posted in RagBlog
Tagged Authors, Books, Digital Revolution, End of Absence, Internet, Interview, Michael Harris, Podcast, Rag Bloggers, Rag Radio, Thorne Dreyer
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Thousands of public university students in Mexico City go out on strike
They are protesting the police killings and forced disappearances of students in the Mexican
state of Guerrero.
Thousands of striking university students and representatives of social organizations demonstrate in Mexico City, Wednesday, October 14, 2014. Photo by Mario Marlo / Somoselmedio.org
By Johnny Hazard | The Rag Blog | October 16, 2014
MEXICO CITY — Students at most public universities in the Mexico City metropolitan area are on strike for 24 to 48 hours. The student strike is part of the continuing protests against the September 26 police killings of five and forced disappearance of 43 students from the teacher preparation school in Ayotzinapa, Tixtla, Guerrero.
The students were ambushed — some shot, some kidnapped — by local police in Iguala, Guerrero, on September 25 and 26. On Tuesday, federal officials announced that, based on DNA evidence, at least some of the mass graves — which, according to cops who have been detained in connection with the crimes, contain the bodies of the students — in fact contain other corpses.
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