Adventures of a Gonzo Journalist
This is the Winter 2020 edition of the Virtual Gonzo Zine Library.
The VGZL is a zine reading list and miniature zine distro. From time to time, I curate some of my favorite zines — zines that I think everyone should be reading, including myself.
These are the main selections from this edition of my reading list. I’ve selected a few bonus zines as well as some other resources to consider, too.
There’s a lot of tension and anxiety about what could happen in the coming days, including the possibility of serious civil unrest of a type…
Posted in Austin, Creative Commons, and Journalism
Did you know it’s literally against the law to fire Austin’s chief of police?
I found myself tweeting this fact over and over again, each time some new fresh horror surfaced from Austin’s police force. So I thought I should write something too.
It would be an extraordinary fact at any time, but it seems worth repeating at this moment when so many people are demanding accountability from our nation’s police. One of the key forms of accountability under capitalism, firing a bad worker, is actually off limits.
Over at Ministry of Hemp, I wrote about our feelings about the current Black Lives Matter uprising and how it ties to the hemp and cannabis industries:
In this time of extraordinary global protest, hemp advocates and the hemp industry must live up to our ideals by supporting the Black Lives Matter movement and working towards real change.
Going even further, our involvement can’t stop with just the protests. In order to build an ethical and sustainable industry, we need to be active participants in undoing the damage that the War on Drugs caused. We need to lobby to defund police forces which grew out of control during this “war.”
Posted in Austin, Creative Commons, Journalism, and Zines
Along with his collective, Oh Shit! What Now? Kit curated a collection of zines for the Antifascist Days of Unity in October 2019.
Posted in Journalism, and Ministry of Hemp
Police raided a pair of north Texas CBD stores recently, even as policymakers in the Lonestar State began reevaluating the legal status of hemp and CBD.
On March 15, police raided GM Tobacco stores in Duncanville and Lancaster, Texas. These two suburbs are located just south of Dallas, in the larger Dallas-Fort Worth Metro Area of northern Texas. Amy Wazwaz, who co-owns the stores with her husband Houd, told NBC DFW that police seized about $50,000 in hemp-derived CBD, including hundreds of CBD oil products and about 30 pounds of loose, smokable hemp. Police also took cash from the register and the safe.
Dan Sullivan, attorney for the Wazwaz family, told Ministry of Hemp that the stores only sold legal, high-quality CBD products. “They won’t sell anything that doesn’t have third party lab testing” proving its purity and legality, he explained.
