Back when I was CEO of NFR, in 1999, I broke labor laws by sending an email to all staff on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, reading, “your assignment today is to listen to the full speech by Dr King (link) and think about it while you take the rest of the day off, or you can come in and work.”
I have added another book to my recommended reading list [stderr] Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. In the last few months, I have gone backward and forward through it, trying to make sense of how the facts it exposes fit with my historical understanding.
If you pay any attention to US history, you know that slavery and racism are one of the supporting institutions that have defined and shaped the United States. You cannot understand the United States without understanding slavery and racism. But, that understanding has always felt incomplete, to me; I knew there was more. Obviously, there are details, but what is the big picture?
The Atlantic has posted a link-farm of their best articles on race and policing.
You probably already know I think the FBI are a bunch of chucklefucks. My perspective was formed by working with them on a few cybersecurity cases, including one back in the early days of the commercial internet, in which I was paired with an FBI supervisory special agent who thought that America Online was the internet.
PS: happy Oligarchy Day!
The stories about George Floyd’s death have changed and morphed, as more video emerges, more witnesses talk to journalists, and the cops lies start to wear thin. What I recommend doing is keeping an eye on the story until the cover-up begins, because you can tell where the interesting facts are, by looking for the holes in the finished tapestry.
This, from Malcolm X:
The FBI announced that they arrested a white supremacist who was planning to blow up a synagogue. [slate]
Most Americans don’t know that reparations for slavery has already been attempted. It didn’t work. But that’s because the US did it wrong.
All of the western nations have been caught in a lie; a lie of their pretended humanism.
James Baldwin and Bob Dylan