By Lambert Strether of Corrente
Ferguson
Obama holding White House meetings on Ferguson today with “protest leaders” [WaPo], which apparently means “young civil rights leaders” (TFA people?) [New York Times], or “young people involved in civil-rights issues” [Wall Street Journal], or “local and national civil rights leaders” [Politico]. (I’m focusing on composition of the invitees because I’d like to know if there are any locals, as opposed to members of the Black misleadership class, like AL Sharpton.) The initiative draws a “mixed reaction” from people on the ground [WaPo]:
“Where has [President Obama] been all of these months?” said one Ferguson activist Monday. “And now he wants to have a meeting? Please.”
Some of those who had attended the September meeting with the White House also remained skeptical of whether more meetings would yield real results.“They told us they wanted to know how they could help,” said one attendee. “But after that they did nothing. They sent one email.”.
It’s like I said. The same people who launched the ObamaCare website organized this. Sorry to be cynical….
Ferguson Commission also has first meeting today, in St Louis [St Louis Today].
Explainer on Ferguson protest groups [Bloomberg]. More on the movement(s) [Jacobin].
St. Louis Police Officers Association wants Rams players punished for pre-game “Hands up, don’t shoot” protest [Think Progress].
“Darren Wilson: America’s ‘Model Policeman'” [The Nation].
Why black men should take advantage of open carry [HuffPo].
Ian Welsh: “If you really want to make the system work, make all private lawyers for criminal charges illegal, and use only public defenders, chosen by lot” [Ian Welsh].
2016
Six Republican governor’s flirting with running, but undeclared [Time]. “Christie, Ohio’s John Kasich, Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, Indiana’s Mike Pence, and Texas’ Rick Perry.” Perry? Again?
The best date to launch a Presidential campaign [Bloomberg].
Boehner works to put the crazies back in the box on government shutdown [New York Times].
The old “no ideas” trope, which might in fact be true [FT, “Hillary Clinton’s rickety bridge to the White House”].
Riverdaughter thinks a Jim Webb challenge would be good for Hillary Clinton [The Confluence].
Deval Patrick not running, says anointing Clinton premature [Bloomberg].
Michael Tomasky: Whither Democrats? [New York Review of Books].
Conservative media booming. Film at 11 [Bloomberg].
Big Brother Is Watching You Watch
“Uber has become particularly popular among the political class in Washington” [Washington Post]. What could go wrong? Especially when Uber does stuff like give a job applicant access to the rider database for a whole day, which he spends happily looking for records of people he knows.
Hackers with investment background tackle biotech [New York Times].
Police at war with British journalists? [Guardian]. I like the example where the police are mistakenly sent 1,757 Times staff records. Indeed, they file an error report, but only after building a spreadsheet and doing data analysis on it.
Hong Kong
Police break attempted seige of government offices [New York Times].
Class Warfare
Demand for storage units booming, driven by the Four Ds: “death, divorce, disaster, and dislocation” [Bloomberg]. All those factors are driven by the crapified economy. The headline calls American’s “hoarders,” but “eternal optimists” might be a better choice.
News of the Wired
- Today in history: Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus [Time]. And her refusal was not just a random act of heroism, though it was heroic. It was planned for, leveraged, involving a big support network.
- India sisters beat up alleged molesters on bus [Channel News Asia]. “We could not take it any more and started beating them.”
- Stretchy, reusable airtight food-wrap [Boing Boing]. Maybe if I’d used it…
- The value of an electric vehicle is in the battery, and the value of the battery is in the IP, which isn’t owned by the manufactuter [Wolf Street]. Makes you wonder about those Tesla valuations.
- “[V]ehicle-to-vehicle communication systems” run into problems [National Law Journal]. A collective action problem for government to solve?
- MH370: “I have flown these jets, here’s what probably didn’t happen” [Daily Telegraph]
- “Should digital monopolies be broken up? [The Economist]. Or just let them wither on the vine, like AOL?
- SMS shows us what a world without net neutrality looks like [Techcrunch].
- Argument preview: Social media as a crime scene [SCOTUSblog].
- Facebook to make life harder for small accounts [WSJ, “New Facebook Rules Will Sting Entrepreneurs”]. What, you thought your friends were on your balance sheet?
- Stanislaw Lem, Summa Technologiae [Muse].
- The historical roots of the police: “Paddy rollers” and strikebreakers [Hampton Institute].
- Review of Goya exhibit at Boston’s MFA [New York Review of Books]. I always run an etching from Disasters of War on Veteran’s Day.
- Chris Rock interview [Vulture]. Never liked the guy on TV. I thought this was funny and smart.
Readers, feel free to contact me with (a) links, and even better (b) sources I should curate regularly, and (c) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi are deemed to be honorary plants! See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here. And here’s today’s plant (josh):
Talk amongst yourselves!
13 comments
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So, a lovely cucurbit!
The huffpost piece about having African Americans open carry predictably went down the racist road with many of the commenters. Who couldn’t see that coming.
what kind of a cretin doesn’t like Chris Rock?
This kind, apparently. Some of the SNL sketches may have been ironic, but the irony was lost on me. Anyhow, this interview is terrific.
It was a very good interview though he gives Obama too much credit.
it’s because he’s black, isn’t it?
Quite the reverse. Caveat that I haven’t watched SNL regularly since the late 70s, and I’ve only intermittently had a TV since that time. So I can’t even remember a sketch. But I did a quick Google search and found this 2014 headline in the Daily Mail: “SNL in race row over ‘slave draft’ sketch as Ebony editor calls comedian Leslie Jones a ‘big loud monkey,” which is one of those “Well, er” moments. And I have the memory of that feeling from other sketches like that. So, why would I want to watch that? was my basic feeling, and when I’d see Chris Rock on the show, I’d think “Huh?”
But the interview is super. Real old brandy.
Hold on. Chris Rock is inarguably one of the most important black comedians, so to suggest that he presented or affiliated with content that could be remotely construed as “racist” is almost laughable; at the very least, the notion is tone-deaf along these lines:
Ebony magazine isn’t the spokesman for black people, and even at its best has had a considerably lesser influence on black culture than the alums of SNL (eddie, chris rock)
Chris Rock’s interview was very funny and smart. A real pleasure to read.
Obama’s move with the “young activist” remains cynical. He knows he can’t control the older and more experienced activist, but the younger ones can still be reached and manipulated. It’s a standard play.
Stanislaw Lem is a good writer but I find him a bit too cynical for my taste. That arguably makes him a much more accurate prognosticator than most authors, but I find it a bit wearing in story format after a while.
Webb had zero appeal to Appalachia in 2006, why would it be any different now? Webb is not a populist, Webb is the elite’s idea of a populist. His base of support was in Northern Virginia.
“Indeed, they file an error report, but only after building a spreadsheet and doing data analysis on it.” What, police behaving like journalists? Outrageous!