Brett and Sarah and I are trying to put together a panel for the undergraduate research conference this spring. If you're enrolled as an undergrad and think you'll have a paper to present by April let us know.
Putting together a panel will allow us to create a more coherent and productive discussion following our presentations. No one will be tossed into a panel of unrelated papers, and folks who come to hear us speak will likely stay for all of our papers, instead of hopping up half-way through and not contributing to Q&A.
So. That said, our 'topic' is still rather broad. We're thematizing neoliberalism, public space, and development, especially as articulated through story-telling, feminist theory, and the urban landscape.
Abstracts are do 17 November. 250-350 words. Please contact one of us ASAP if you want to present. mcdougal-webber [dot] 1 [at] osu.edu
Some brave souls are protesting the G20 in Pittsburgh, as we speak. I'm sure you all know all of the problems that tends to precipitate from global economic planning (50,000 people dying every day of starvation, preventable diseases, global economic divide being nearly 72-to-1, over a billion people living on less than a dollar a day, etc etc).
And as you all know, capitalism came by force (Marx's chilling description in chapters 26 and 27 of Capital are classics: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch26.htm), it also remains only through force. When enough people show up to actually challenge business as usual, capital and the state respond with overwhelming force that is otherwise hidden in the millions of everyday compromises needed to survive.
The mass media portrayal has been highlighting the usual trench warfare between the anarchists and the cops. This is an old story, long-drawn out and much expected (and with serious consequences if it doesn't occur). But the secret story are those unexpected casualties.
Let me illustrate a few stories of the unexpected casualties.
Pitt students: caught up in the confusion, riot cops move in on Pitt students because they are scared of any crowd over 50 convening anywhere in the city during the G20. Students were trapped, gassed, beaten, and shot. Here are some videos:
Houseless: in an attempt to find protesters looking for a cheap (read: free) place to stay, cops have run everyone out of the city. the houseless who have usually found temporary housing, whether it be in abandoned homes, places around downtown,
Additionally, the police have rolled out the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) sound cannons. Deployed in international contexts and in military conflicts, they have been brought to protests since Miami FTAA in 2001 but this is their first documented domestic use. These weapons cause extreme audio pain to anyone within 100 yards (football field), disorienting them in an attempt to make them flee. If people remain in the area or are too disoriented to leave, it can cause permanent damage if used for more than a few seconds. There are numerous examples of these weapons being used against regulation (for more than a few second bursts at a time). proper use:
improper use:
here's a tv explanation of the device:
Here's international condemnation over OTHER states using similar "crowd control" techniques:
Our Board of Trustees has authorized our plan to implement cuts in response to an $8.5 million reduction in state funding.
After exhaustive consideration, we believe we have charted a course that will allow CML to provide the best customer service possible under these difficult circumstances and that is fair and equitable to all.
Effective September 6, 2009
All 20 branches of CML will be closed on Sundays. Main Library downtown will remain open on Sunday.
Hours will be cut at all locations. This represents an 18% cutback of hours.
All branches and Main will be open:
Monday through Thursday: 10:00 a.m. – 8:00 p.m.
Friday and Saturday: 10:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Sunday: 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. MAIN LIBRARY ONLY
Materials budget has been cut back to 1988 levels
Hours/pay cuts for staff
I want to personally thank all of you who have shown such incredible support over the last few weeks. More than 30,000 of our customers sent emails to legislators and we’ve seen a considerable spike in volunteers and donations. Without your help, we know our budget losses would have been even greater.
We know that this library is so much more than books. It is about helping people find jobs, helping kids with homework and getting them to read – and so – succeed in life. While these cuts are challenging for us, we have important work to do.
COLUMBUS, Ohio - The former deputy director of Ohio's prison system wrongly steered a $120,000 contract to a college fraternity brother in a deal that cost the state an extra $40,000, according to an investigative report released Wednesday.
Michael Randle, now head of the Illinois prison system, referred an Israeli company that manufactures inmate-tracking devices to Ohio company KBK Enterprises, according to the report by the state inspector general's office.
KBK, a Columbus real estate development company, acted in this situation as the distributor of the devices to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.
Company President Keith Key was in a fraternity with Randle at Ohio State University in the late 1980s. The state purchased the equipment in 2004 for use by seven prison work crews.
The inspector general said Wednesday that the state could have purchased the equipment directly from the Israeli company, called Elmo-Tech, and avoided KBK's $40,000 markup.
The equipment wasn't popular with prison guards, Randle told investigators.
"The product worked," Randle said in a transcript of an interview with investigators reviewed by The Associated Press. "But in terms of implementation, I wasn't really ... comfortable with how our staff kind of took to the product."
The state no longer uses the devices.
"The equipment worked OK, but technology has greatly improved since then," prisons spokeswoman Andrea Carson told the AP. She noted the inspector general's report did not require the Ohio Department of Corrections to change any of its policies.
"As public servants we know our responsibility is to be good stewards and to continue to be transparent in our daily operations," Carson said.
The report also criticized Randle for referring Elmo-Tech to KBK and then failing to tell his superiors about his relationship with Key.
Key and Randle didn't immediately return telephone messages seeking comment.
"While there are no laws expressly prohibiting a state employee from doing this, provided the employee receives no personal benefit from the purchase, the referral and subsequent purchase clearly give the appearance of impropriety," the inspector general's report said.
The report did not find that Randle benefited financially from his actions, which would be illegal.
Andrew Cohen, a former Elmo-Tech representative, said Randle had no involvement in the product's purchase other than suggesting KBK as a distributor, according to a summary of Cohen's interview with state investigators reviewed by the AP.
Y'all may remember the grisly video I posted 30-odd days ago showing the death of Neda Soltan in one of the protests in Iran. Nobody knew at that point what a symbol she would become for Iranians.
Her name means "voice," "calling," or "divine message." It was pretty easy to see why this would soon become meaningful. Her death, or martyrdom, has many more sociopolitical implications than we Americans might realize:
More protests planned in Tehran to mark end of 40-day mourning
Defiant opposition supporters will return to the streets of Tehran today, emboldened by tales of prison abuse and an eruption of hostilities between President Ahmadinejad and his fellow hardliners.
The occasion is the passing of 40 days — the official end of the mourning period for Shia Muslims — since Iranian security forces killed Neda Soltan and protesters during a demonstration on June 20.
A mourning ceremony in the Grand Mosala prayer hall, which can hold 100,000 people, has been banned so the opposition is planning demonstrations in at least nine locations around the capital.
Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi, the defeated presidential candidates, will visit the grave of Ms Soltan whose death, which was caught on video, made her a global symbol of the regime’s brutality.
The 40-day mark has particular resonance for Iranians: when protesters were killed during the 1978-79 revolution, the Shah’s opponents turned commemoration ceremonies into political demonstrations.
They were suppressed, more people were killed, bigger demonstrations were held — and so the cycle continued until the Shah was eventually ousted.
Thousands are expected to take to the streets this evening and the security forces are likely to disperse them forcibly, but the opposition has been heartened by the ruptures that have opened within the regime.
Mr Ahmadinejad has incurred the wrath of conservatives by choosing Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, the father of his daughter-in-law, to be Deputy Prime Minister, defying an order by Ayatollah Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, that he drop him.
Mr Ahmadinejad may have wanted to surround himself with friends to provide a buffer, or to show that he was not Ayatollah Khamenei’s puppet.
Some have speculated that he considered Mr Mashaei as his successor. Conservatives loathe Mr Mashaei, considering him soft on Israel and a liberal.
Several ministers protested at the Cabinet meeting on Wednesday last week. Mr Ahmadinejad relented but dismissed at least two of the ministers and appointed Mr Mashaei as Chief of Staff instead — an act of deliberate provocation that infuriated hardliners.
More than 200 of Iran’s 290 MPs have signed letters of protest over the President’s actions. The conservative newspaper Yalesarat yesterday demanded that Mr Ahmadinejad apologise to the people.
The Islamic Society of Engineers, an influential conservative body, demanded his “unconditional obedience to the Supreme Leader” and warned that he could be deposed.
The problems of the regime have been compounded by accounts of torture and death from the prisons where hundreds of opposition activists were taken after the disputed election.
The stories are redolent of the Shah’s era: one released man told how he was forced to lick a toilet bowl; another prisoner described how guards squashed inmates into a cell, smashed the lights and beat them in the darkness, during which at least four died; others said that they were tortured to make them sign false confessions.
Relatives have described being taken to an improvised mortuary packed with corpses and being ordered to say nothing about how their sons or husbands died.
The death toll is thought to be in excess of the 30 that the regime acknowledges, but the most damaging fatality was that of Mohsen Rouhalamini, 25, who was beaten during the two weeks that he spent in the Kahrizak detention centre.
Mr Rouhalamini was the son of a prominent conservative and his death has shocked even the political elite.
“The perpetrators must be identified and punished,” one hardline MP demanded. “Those who have turned this country into a police state ... have to be held accountable,” said another. “There’s absolute disbelief among many conservatives at what’s taken place,” a Tehran analyst said.
Mindful of the accusations against it, the regime is making some concessions. In the past two days the Government released 140 detainees, Ayatollah Khamenei ordered the closure of the Kahrizak prison and the head of the judiciary has promised that the cases of all detainees will be reviewed within a week.
Even Mr Ahmadinejad has asked that the detainees be shown mercy, but the state news agency said that about twenty prisoners accused of terrorist links and violence would stand trial on Saturday.
Mr Mousavi is expected to press home his advantage by beginning a political front — a coalition of groups seeking justice and democracy — before Mr Ahmadinejad’s inauguration on Wednesday.
Mr Ahmadinejad’s troubles may be only just starting. Ali Larijani, the Speaker of Parliament, has become one of his harshest critics and the President will struggle even to have his Cabinet confirmed.
Mr Ahmadinejad also faces severe economic problems. The funds that he lavished on favoured constituencies in his first term have dried up, ministries have been ordered to slash budgets and projects have been suspended. Oil no longer brings in the revenue that it did before the world economic crisis.
On top of that, a substantial proportion of the population, including many clerics and senior politicians, regard him as illegitimate. “He’s in trouble — not fatal trouble but he’s wounded. He’s damaged goods,” the analyst said.
Here's significantly more information about Neda on Wikipedia, if you're interested: Death of Neda Agha-Soltan
Some cutting and some pasting in the collective memory of Arabs and Jews in Israel and occupied Palestine.
BBC News:
Israel's education ministry is to drop from an Arabic language textbook a term describing the creation of the state of Israel as "the catastrophe". The Arabic word "nakba" has been used with Israeli-Arab pupils since 2007. It does not appear in Hebrew textbooks. Education Minister Gideon Saar said no state could be expected to portray its own foundation as a catastrophe. Israeli Arab MP Hana Sweid called the move an attack on Palestinian identity and collective memory. The passage in question, which occurs in one textbook aimed at Arab children aged eight or nine, describes the 1948 war, which resulted in Israel's creation, in the following terms: "The Arabs call the war the Nakba - a war of catastrophe, loss and humiliation - and the Jews call it the Independence War."
Israel concern at UN use of Nakba
The sentence was introduced when Yuli Tamir of the centre-left Labour party was education minister. Ms Tamir's successor in Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing administration, Mr Saar, said: "There is no reason that the official curriculum of the state of Israel should present the establishment of the state as a 'holocaust' or 'catastrophe'." Mr Saar added that state education for children was not supposed entail the de-legitimising of that state. "Including the term in the official curriculum of the Arab sector was a mistake, a mistake that will not repeat itself in the new curriculum, which is currently being revised," he concluded. Correspondents say most Hebrew-language history books, especially when written for schoolchildren, focus on the heroism of Israeli forces in 1948 and gloss over the mass exile of Palestinians. If it is mentioned at all it is attributed to a voluntary flight, rather than the deliberate expulsion which later revisionist historians claim to have uncovered from archive sources. The term Nakba is usually applied to the loss suffered by millions of Palestinian refugees displaced by the 1948 war and subsequent conflicts; their fate remains a key factor in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Jafar Farrah, director of Israeli-Arab advocacy group Moussawa, told the BBC that removing the word Nakba from textbooks would not stop Arabs from using it, but it would complicate relations. Far-right members of the Israeli government are pursuing legislation to make it illegal in Israel to commemorate the Nakba, as Palestinians and their supporters do every 15 May.
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel has ordered its diplomats to use an old photograph of a former Palestinian religious leader meeting Adolf Hitler to counter world criticism of a Jewish building plan for East Jerusalem.
Israeli officials said on Wednesday Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman told Israeli ambassadors to circulate the 1941 shot in Berlin of the Nazi leader seated next to Haj Amin al-Husseini, the late mufti or top Muslim religious leader in Jerusalem.
One official said Lieberman, an ultranationalist, hoped the photo would "embarrass" Western countries into ceasing to demand that Israel halt the project on land owned by the mufti's family in a predominantly Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem.
Israel captured East Jerusalem in 1967, annexing it as part of its internationally unrecognized claim to Jerusalem as its capital.
Some diplomats opposed Lieberman's move, arguing it could earn Israel stiffer world criticism for seeming to sidestep the wider conflict it faces with the Palestinians who want East Jerusalem as capital of a future state, another official said.
Asked why Lieberman issued the order, a spokesman said: "because it's important for the world to know the facts" and would not elaborate.
The United States and Europe this week protested the plan by private Israeli developers to build 20 apartments on the land which Israel says was bought by an American-Jewish millionaire as well as Israel's threats to demolish Palestinian homes that could leave thousands homeless.
The controversy has complicated an Israeli rift with the U.S. over its refusal to meet President Barack Obama's demands to halt Jewish settlement building throughout the West Bank so that stalled peace talks may resume.
About half a million Israelis live in the settlements built in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, areas that are home to some three million Palestinians.
An official in Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's government accused Lieberman of "political bankruptcy" in ordering the distribution of the Husseini-Hitler photograph.
"It's an old story that has its own circumstances and doesn't apply to the present," Adnan al-Husseini, the Palestinian Authority-appointed governor of Jerusalem, and a relative of the late mufti, told Reuters.
Israel's Yad Vashem memorial to the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust said Husseini supported Nazi Germany to try to win backing for Arab nationalistic goals and that he lobbied for the extermination of Jews in North Africa and Palestine.
(Additional reporting by Mohammed Assadi in Ramallah)
This blog serves as a transparent point of discourse for You Are Here--a Columbus collective that grew out of the Comparative Studies Undergraduate Group at the Ohio State University. It consists of people from all academic and social backgrounds with an emphasis on social theory. Most succinctly put, it is creative scholarship in affect--whether it be from academia, popular culture, art, language, or personal observation. The ideas expressed in this blog are by no means reached by consensus and do not necessarily reflect those of other members. The comments doubly so. Feel free to critique, question, or agree with any views expressed. You don't have to reside in or be familiar with the city of Columbus. As far as we're concerned, you are here.
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