Starbucks racial bias training video

After the infamous incident when police were called on two black men who were at a Philadelphia Starbucks restaurant because they hadn’t ordered anything (they were waiting for a third person to join them), the coffee chain closed all its restaurants for a time earlier this week so that all its employees could have racial bias training. As part of that process, they viewed a video by documentarian Stanley Nelson.

I thought it was pretty good. Will it help change attitudes? I don’t know. But every little bit helps.

Roseanne Barr thought Valerie Jarrett was white?

Roseanne Barr has been running through various excuses for the racist comments that not only got her show canceled, even her management company dropped her, and some of her co-stars and producers condemned her, though I did notice that John Goodman has been silent during all his.

First there was the old standby that what she said was just a joke. Then came the attempt to shift blame by saying that other people have said worse things. Why do people consider that a defense? However bad your words or actions, you can ALWAYS find someone who is worse so it is hardly worth saying.
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Seymour Hersh shows the difference between a reporter and a stenographer

Seymour Hersh is a legendary investigative reporter who has broken many major stories, perhaps most famously the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the torture by the US in Abu Ghraib. He has just published a memoir Reporter and Matt Taibbi says that current journalists could learn a lot from Hersh from the way he describes how he got information. Taibbi points to a story Hersh tells about what happened when he was preparing to write a story in 1999 in the New Yorker about Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard,
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Justice-American style

There were massive protests in Washington DC on the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration and the authorities rounded up large numbers of people. Of course, it will not do to have people protesting in the streets. What do these people think, that they are living in a democracy? So in order to deter such unseemly behavior in the future, the authorities decided to throw the book at the arrested people, charging them with conspiracy to riot, that could have resulted in decades in prison if they were found guilty.
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The US kill list

The US government, through its various agencies like the CIA, murders people on a regular basis. The government actually has what is known as a secret ‘kill list’ of people it seeks to murder. This should not be a surprise to anyone who has any idea of the history of US government actions. What may surprise people is how easy it is to get on the kill list and how hard it is to get off it once you are on because the criteria used are secret and amorphous.
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Mexico will never pay for the wall

The Mexican president Enrico Pena Nieto’s scheduled visit to the US was called off because he refused Donald Trump’s demand that he stop publicly saying that Mexico would not pay for Trump’s beloved wall. One of Trump’s favorite lines to his adoring crowds during his campaign and even after winning the election, is that the wall will be built and that Mexico would pay for it and it irritated him that Nieto would keep denying this.
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The story behind Portugal’s decriminalization of personal drug use

I have mentioned before Portugal’s bold move in 2001 to decriminalize personal possession of drugs and how that led to a reduction in heroin use and deaths in its population that had reached epidemic proportions, not to mention the elimination of all the waste in policing and financial resources that goes into arresting, prosecuting, and incarcerating people who use drugs.

This video explains how it came about that Portugal took this step.

We can’t say we weren’t warned about Alexa

Alexa is the name given to the voice that responds to your commands on the Amazon Echo device. In a recent post, I discussed the creepiness of having someone potentially listen to every conversation in its vicinity. As I understand it (not having one) the device is only supposed to be activated if you first say “Alexa” but apparently that is not the case.
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