marcusgarvey

Google News has a handy feature: when you search for a topic, under the first result is an option to explore in depth, and it shows you the number of additional articles you'll find on said topic. There may be more besides, but let's take this as a reasonable proxy of media interest.

Let's assume that, for any given an event, the height of news coverage occurs the day after the event.

The march was on Oct. 10th, so we would expect "peak news" to be on Oct. 11th. I adjusted your search to focus only on Oct. 11th, and Google News's Explore in depth showed me there were 1,076 more articles about the topic. It's true: not altogether absent.

To the Ferguson riots. Wikipedia pins the start date on 8/9/14, so let's take peak news date as 8/10/14. (However, given this was a multi-day narrative, we know that news coverage did not end after 8/10/14, but continued.)

How many Explore In Depth articles does Google News tell me were available for search term Ferguson riots on 8/10/14? 13,445.

The evidence is overwhelming: the media is far more interested in the riot narrative than in the peaceful march narrative.

You are certainly right about that.

IMO: the riots start out as protests. Then a minority of people choose to cause mayhem. Another minority are criminals and they do what criminals do, which is act opportunistically. And yes, agents provocateur do exist.

But sure, I can understand why people who are directly affected would prefer to have no protests at all out of fear that a riot might happen. They love order more than justice, an attitude which, ironically, has helped to create the very same conditions that people are protesting.

Nary a peep was heard out of the mainstream media about this peaceful march.

Riots, on the other hand, seem to cause the media hordes to descend and at least draw attention to the cause. It's hard to argue the fact that they are at least useful for consciousness -raising.

I wonder how many unicorns lack these criteria. Only Twitter has the discipline of public markets. If it doesn't deliver, public shareholders get burned.

If unicorns don't deliver, private investors get burned, but where do the losses go? VCs, founders, employees, as well as some family offices, banks, university endowments, pension funds...where else? And I sure am curious about the exposure of these last three groups.

-the case of the Kansas mathematician investigating election fraud

-the case of the banking expert pointing out that CalPERS and other large pension funds are being suckered by private equity

make me hopeful that we'll see a new trend of academics and specialists pointing out the fraud in the systems we take for granted.

http://cjonline.com/news/2015-04-01/wichita-state-mathematic...

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/09/the-larger-implicatio...

Well, in fairness, one of the last times a bunch of banking organizations joined forces on some shiny new innovation was MERS, the Mortgage Electronic Registration System...which facilitated the fraud that helped cause the housing crisis. --------- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortgage_Electronic_Registrati...

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2013/04/states-fight-back-again...

"The document [that Hayes points to] instructs Libor submitters to clear their judgements on the rate with certain named traders. Defence lawyer Neil Hawes last week suggested the traders held derivatives positions dependent on Libor."

http://www.risk.net/operational-risk-and-regulation/news/241...

Hear, hear. How can we get rid of the stupid decisions that are so easily taken with Other People's Money?

I'm unsure how the recent slide in oil prices is effecting the comparative competitiveness of fossils vs. renewables. Not helpful, I imagine.

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=...

I don't believe defeatism is helpful, but I got a very Prince "Party Like It's 1999" feeling after consuming this. What should we do? If we pull all the fossil fuels out of our economy tomorrow, everything will crash. Not to mention that there is zero political will to even contemplate this. So what should we do?

The 1,217 deadly police shootings from 2010 to 2012 captured in the federal data show that blacks, age 15 to 19, were killed at a rate of 31.17 per million, while just 1.47 per million white males in that age range died at the hands of police.

One way of appreciating that stark disparity, ProPublica's analysis shows, is to calculate how many more whites over those three years would have had to have been killed for them to have been at equal risk. The number is jarring – 185, more than one per week.

ProPublica's risk analysis on young males killed by police certainly seems to support what has been an article of faith in the African American community for decades: Blacks are being killed at disturbing rates when set against the rest of the American population.

Our examination involved detailed accounts of more than 12,000 police homicides stretching from 1980 to 2012 contained in the FBI's Supplementary Homicide Report. The data, annually self-reported by hundreds of police departments across the country, confirms some assumptions, runs counter to others, and adds nuance to a wide range of questions about the use of deadly police force.

Colin Loftin, University at Albany professor and co-director of the Violence Research Group, said the FBI data is a minimum count of homicides by police, and that it is impossible to precisely measure what puts people at risk of homicide by police without more and better records. Still, what the data shows about the race of victims and officers, and the circumstances of killings, are "certainly relevant," Loftin said.

"No question, there are all kinds of racial disparities across our criminal justice system," he said. "This is one example."

http://www.propublica.org/article/deadly-force-in-black-and-...

So, no I don't think the subsidy argument falls apart.

Funny. I take the exact same anecdotes and conclude, "Wow, black Americans are pretty resilient."

>Federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877. The dream of Reconstruction died. For the next century, political violence was visited upon blacks wantonly, with special treatment meted out toward black people of ambition. Black schools and churches were burned to the ground. Black voters and the political candidates who attempted to rally them were intimidated, and some were murdered. At the end of World War I, black veterans returning to their homes were assaulted for daring to wear the American uniform. The demobilization of soldiers after the war, which put white and black veterans into competition for scarce jobs, produced the Red Summer of 1919: a succession of racist pogroms against dozens of cities ranging from Longview, Texas, to Chicago to Washington, D.C. Organized white violence against blacks continued into the 1920s—in 1921 a white mob leveled Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street,” and in 1923 another one razed the black town of Rosewood, Florida—and virtually no one was punished.

>Having been enslaved for 250 years, black people were not left to their own devices. They were terrorized. In the Deep South, a second slavery ruled. In the North, legislatures, mayors, civic associations, banks, and citizens all colluded to pin black people into ghettos, where they were overcrowded, overcharged, and undereducated. Businesses discriminated against them, awarding them the worst jobs and the worst wages. Police brutalized them in the streets. And the notion that black lives, black bodies, and black wealth were rightful targets remained deeply rooted in the broader society. Now we have half-stepped away from our long centuries of despoilment, promising, “Never again.” But still we are haunted. It is as though we have run up a credit-card bill and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not disappear. The effects of that balance, interest accruing daily, are all around us.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case...

http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2014/sep/25/ohio-shoo...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Azy3OBLXX-g&feature=youtu.be

Ta-Nehisi Coates' landmark Atlantic article, The Case for Reparations [1], helps explain how this segregated society came to be:

> The American real-estate industry believed segregation to be a moral principle. As late as 1950, the National Association of Real Estate Boards’ code of ethics warned that “a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood … any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values.” A 1943 brochure specified that such potential undesirables might include madams, bootleggers, gangsters—and “a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites.”

The federal government concurred. It was the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, not a private trade association, that pioneered the practice of redlining, selectively granting loans and insisting that any property it insured be covered by a restrictive covenant—a clause in the deed forbidding the sale of the property to anyone other than whites. Millions of dollars flowed from tax coffers into segregated white neighborhoods.

“For perhaps the first time, the federal government embraced the discriminatory attitudes of the marketplace,” the historian Kenneth T. Jackson wrote in his 1985 book, Crabgrass Frontier, a history of suburbanization. “Previously, prejudices were personalized and individualized; FHA exhorted segregation and enshrined it as public policy. Whole areas of cities were declared ineligible for loan guarantees.” Redlining was not officially outlawed until 1968, by the Fair Housing Act. By then the damage was done—and reports of redlining by banks have continued.

The federal government is premised on equal fealty from all its citizens, who in return are to receive equal treatment. But as late as the mid-20th century, this bargain was not granted to black people, who repeatedly paid a higher price for citizenship and received less in return. Plunder had been the essential feature of slavery, of the society described by Calhoun. But practically a full century after the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the plunder—quiet, systemic, submerged—continued even amidst the aims and achievements of New Deal liberals.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case...