Excerpts from September's Harper's Index:
Percentage of U.S. children under the age of fifteen who expect their parents to pay for most or all of college: 53
Percentage of U.S. parents who plan to do so: 29
Average number of hours per week U.S. public-school teachers are required to work to receive base pay: 38
Average number they actually work: 52
Percentage of black public high school students who say they carry a weapon: 14
Of white public high school students: 17
Chance that a U.S. Google employee is black: 1 in 50
Gigatons of cement used in the United States in the twentieth century: 4.4
Gigatons used in China in the past three years: 6.1
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Groups in and around St. Louis have called for nationwide solidarity actions in support of justice for Mike Brown and the end of police and extrajudicial killings everywhere. On Saturday at 1 PM PT Central Time—one week Brown was gunned down by Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson—people will gather at the location where he was shot. Organizers have asked people across the nation to gather at places in their communities Saturday where killings by police have occurred, or anywhere, to memorialize lives that have been lost and to demand justice by ending systemic violence against communities of color.
If you are not in St. Louis, you can find an event near you or register one here.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2007—"MSM" vs. "Traditional Media":
It's become in vogue by progressives to adopt the right-wing acronym "MSM" to refer to the "mainstream media." It's quite common on this site as well as elsewhere (Arianna uses it here).
I've written before about this (too lazy to search for it). It's a ridiculous term to adopt.
First of all, it's a right-wing pejorative, and I'd rather we not adopt their language and frames.
But more importantly, by calling them "mainstream media", we are saying that we ourselves aren't mainstream, and that's not something I'm willing to concede. This site gets far more readers than most "mainstream media" publications, so why are they mainstream, while we are, by definition, the fringe?
Let the right wingers place themselves out of the mainstream. That's where they belong, with Mr. 25% and the dead-enders who believe fairy tales of a pacified, democratic, pro-Israel Iraq and raft-building kangaroos.
We, on the other hand, are firmly on the mainstream on just about every major issue facing our country, and our numbers are growing. We aren't outside the mainstream, we are representatives of the mainstream, and the country is embracing what we're selling. [...]
So if not "MSM" (god, that word is like nails on a chalkboard to me!), then what?
"Corporate media" can work. But my preferred term is "traditional media"—a nice, neutral, non-negative way to differentiate old media versus the newfangled stuff.
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Tweet of the Day
"Nearly 2 times a week in the US, a white police officer killed a black person during a 7-year period ending in 2012"
http://t.co/...
— @billmon1
On
today's Kagro in the Morning show, things calmed down overnight in Ferguson, only to heat up again as the local police released the name of the officer who shot Michael Brown, but then proceeded to implicate Brown in a robbery.
Greg Dworkin rounded up militarization stories, some suggestions for how to dial it back (or make it worse), and what we're hearing from libertarians. And just for variety: "a very cool thing about Robin Williams." That St. Louis Co. prosecutor's gotta go. We watched the Ferguson press conference unfold via Twitter, and heard reports that Ferguson police have some less-than-honest reporting before.
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