A Love Letter to Michael

Spike Lee's documentary entitled "Michael Jackson's Journey From Motown to Off the Wall" is wonderful.  It truly is a snapshot into the genius of Michael.

There are several trailers for the film, but I don't think any other them do the film justice.  If I'd seen the trailers, I probably would not have watched the film, and believe me when I say, I would have missed a treat.

So, if time permits and you so desire, check out this masterpiece.

It's currently playing on Showtime.

Do the Right Thing

We all know we should do the right thing, but knowing it and doing it are two very different things.

Do we stand up for what is right, or go along to get along?

Do we turn a blind eye to injustices, or do we take a stand?

Do we give in to the pressures to agree, when we know that we know that in doing that we compromise what is right?  Or do we take a stand and say, "Enough?"

Do we have more courage to stand up when we've reached a certain age, now better able to understand that being able to face ourselves in the mirror is more important than trying to please others?

Every day we have a choice.

Do the right thing . . .

Or not.

Here's hoping that you and I both have the courage to do choose the former.

Quote

By Jeffrey Toobin on Antonin Scalia in The New Yorker - (Bold is mine)

Antonin Scalia, who died this month, after nearly three decades on the Supreme Court, devoted his professional life to making the United States a less fair, less tolerant, and less admirable democracy. Fortunately, he mostly failed. Belligerent with his colleagues, dismissive of his critics, nostalgic for a world where outsiders knew their place and stayed there, Scalia represents a perfect model for everything that President Obama should avoid in a successor. The great Justices of the Supreme Court have always looked forward; their words both anticipated and helped shape the nation that the United States was becoming. Chief Justice John Marshall read the new Constitution to allow for a vibrant and progressive federal government. Louis Brandeis understood the need for that government to regulate an industrializing economy. Earl Warren saw that segregation was poison in the modern world. Scalia, in contrast, looked backward.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/29/antonin-scalia-looking-backward?sid=554654ea10defb39638b510d&wpsrc=newsletter_slateplusweekly

Amazing Pictures

http://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2016/02/smithsonian-magazines-2015-photo-contest/470982/?utm_source=atl-daily-newsletter

Why Teams Matter

From The New York Times Magazine

In Silicon Valley, software engineers are encouraged to work together, in part because studies show that groups tend to innovate faster, see mistakes more quickly and find better solutions to problems. Studies also show that people working in teams tend to achieve better results and report higher job satisfaction. In a 2015 study, executives said that profitability increases when workers are persuaded to collaborate more. Within companies and conglomerates, as well as in government agencies and schools, teams are now the fundamental unit of organization. If a company wants to outstrip its competitors, it needs to influence not only how people work but also how they work together.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html

Black-ish 2x16 Promo "Hope" (HD)

The Long, Winding Road

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/02/24/arts/hollywood-diversity-inclusion.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=mini-moth&region=top-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below&_r=0

This Guy vs Our Front Running Village Idiot (Trump)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/justin-trudeau-pink-shirt-day-canada_us_56ce1bf6e4b0871f60e9ed00

It's Never Too Late

http://www.lifehack.org/364674/its-never-too-late-start-heres-why-infographic-2?mid=20160224&ref=mail&uid=789627&feq=daily

100 Years of Beauty - Episode 18: USA Men

The Blimp-Maker

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/29/a-new-generation-of-airships-is-born?mbid=nl_160224_Daily%20A&CNDID=27124505&spMailingID=8583208&spUserID=MTE0MzE0NDEyNDUyS0&spJobID=862402181&spReportId=ODYyNDAyMTgxS0

Algorithm Bias

From Slate - 

A Tale of Four Algorithms

Each of these government algorithms is supposed to stop fraud and waste. Which works better—the one aimed at the poor or the rich?

By Virginia Eubanks

Algorithms don’t just power search results and news feeds, shaping our experience of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Spotify, and Tinder. Algorithms are widely—and largely invisibly—integrated into American political life, policymaking, and program administration.

Algorithms can terminate your Medicaid benefits, exclude you from air travel, purge you from voter rolls, or predict if you are likely to commit a crime in the future. They make decisions about who has access to public services, who undergoes extra scrutiny, and where we target scarce resources.

But are all algorithms created equal? Does the kind of algorithm used by government agencies have anything to do with who it is aimed at?

Bias can enter algorithmic processes through many doors. Discriminatory data collection can mean extra scrutiny for whole communities, creating a feedback cycle of “garbage in, garbage out.” For example, much of the initial data that populated CalGang, an intelligence database used to target and track suspected gang members, was collected by the notorious Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums units of the LAPD, including in the scandal-ridden Rampart division. Algorithms can also mirror and reinforce entrenched cultural assumptions. For example, as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun has written, Googling “Asian + woman” a decade ago turned up more porn sites in the first 10 hits than a search for “pornography.”

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/02/a_close_look_at_four_government_algorithms_designed_to_stop_waste_and_fraud.html?sid=554654ea10defb39638b510d&wpsrc=newsletter_futuretense

Agree?

A sampling from The Root - 

The 15 most racist Oscar films of all time: Here’s why #OscarsSoWhite is not a surprise 

#OscarsSoWhite isn't just about the absence of Black nominees—it's about the Academy's history of racist narratives 

IBRAM X. KENDI

10. Rocky (1976)

3 Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Film Editing (plus eight more nominations)

If “Planet of the Apes” epitomized racists’ defeated sentiments amid the antiracist movements in 1968, then “Rocky” epitomized their fighting sentiment in 1976. Rocky Balboa—a kind, humble, hard-working, slow-talking journeyman boxer—symbolized the pride of racist White masculinity in the late 1970s. Rocky refused to be knocked out by the avalanche of punches from the antiracist movements—as symbolized by the rich, unkind, cocky, fast-punching Black heavyweight champion. Apollo Creed is a fictional stand-in for the actual heavyweight champion in 1976, Muhammad Ali, the personification of antiracist resistance.

~~~~~~~~~~

7. The Blind Side (2009)

1 Academy Award for Best Actress (plus nomination for Best Picture)

Possibly even more than the interracial buddy film, the #OscarsSoWhite enjoys honoring the White Savior Flicks. In these flicks, paternalistic White parents or coaches or journalists or soldiers or lawyers or educators are portrayed as saving needy Blacks from bad situations, or their inferior selves, or the Black jungle. Of all the White Savior Flicks in Hollywood history—and there are many—”The Blind Side” may have been the most egregious. It shared the “true story” of a White family caring for a homeless boy who they guide into professional football. The contrast between the film’s Black characters hindering and holding Michael Oher’s character back—and Sandra Bullock’s helpful White characters are intense to even the least discerning viewer. Filmmakers enjoy regularly searching out and projecting “true stories” of White saviors, hiding the reality of many Black saviors and White discriminators, reinforcing racist ideas of White paternalism and Black dependence.

http://www.salon.com/2016/02/24/the_15_most_racist_oscar_films_of_all_time_heres_why_oscarssowhite_is_not_a_surprise/?source=newsletter

The Thought of Him Representing Us on the World Stage is Nauseating

From Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone - 

In person, you can't miss it: The same way Sarah Palin can see Russia from her house, Donald on the stump can see his future. The pundits don't want to admit it, but it's sitting there in plain view, 12 moves ahead, like a chess game already won:

President Donald Trump.

A thousand ridiculous accidents needed to happen in the unlikeliest of sequences for it to be possible, but absent a dramatic turn of events – an early primary catastrophe, Mike Bloomberg ego-crashing the race, etc. – this boorish, monosyllabic TV tyrant with the attention span of an Xbox-playing 11-year-old really is set to lay waste to the most impenetrable oligarchy the Western world ever devised.

It turns out we let our electoral process devolve into something so fake and dysfunctional that any half-bright con man with the stones to try it could walk right through the front door and tear it to shreds on the first go.

And Trump is no half-bright con man, either. He's way better than average.

~~~~~~~~~~

That put him in position to understand that the presidential election campaign is really just a badly acted, billion-dollar TV show whose production costs ludicrously include the political disenfranchisement of its audience. Trump is making a mockery of the show, and the Wolf Blitzers and Anderson Coopers of the world seem appalled. How dare he demean the presidency with his antics?

But they've all got it backward. The presidency is serious. The presidential electoral process, however, is a sick joke, in which everyone loses except the people behind the rope line. And every time some pundit or party spokesman tries to deny it, Trump picks up another vote.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-america-made-donald-trump-unstoppable-20160224#ixzz419HnFTGQ
Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter | RollingStone on Facebook

Atlas, The Next Generation

From Wired -



ONE OF THESE days, Boston Dynamics—the Alphabet-owned robot company from Beantown—is going to push its robots too far. I mean, just look at their latest video, in which they shove, trip, and play keep away from a robot named Atlas. Sure, the droid walks funny, but if they keep messing around I swear Atlas is going to flip the script on these guys and next thing you know it’s Judgment Day.

http://www.wired.com/2016/02/boston-dynamics-new-robot-wicked-good-getting-bullied/?mbid=nl_22416

Quote

From Vox - 

Clarence Thomas has now gone 10 — 10! — years without asking a question at a Supreme Court oral argument. Jeffrey Toobin explains why that's a problem. [New Yorker / Jeffrey Toobin]

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/clarence-thomass-disgraceful-silence?platform=hootsuite&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Vox%20Sentences%202/24/16&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All

Note - this article was written two years ago.

Great Articles

Some of the most interesting articles I come across are featured on The New York Times "What We're Reading."

Their blurb:

Get recommendations from New York Times reporters and editors, highlighting great stories from around the web. What We’re Reading emails are sent twice a week.

Take it from me - 

Sign up today and be enlightened, enraged and entertained.

http://www.nytimes.com/newsletters/what-were-reading?nlid=38867499

What Do You Think?

From The American Prospect - 

Prospect Debate: The Illusion of a Minority Majority America

THE EDITORS

FEBRUARY 11, 2016

Four knowledgeable commentators respond to Richard Alba’s argument in the Prospect that America will continue to have a white majority. 

In his Winter 2016 article “The Likely Persistence of a White Majority,” Richard Alba argues that highly publicized projections by the U.S. Census have misled the public into thinking that whites in the United States are destined to become a minority by the middle of the century. That projection is incorrect, Alba suggests, for two primary reasons. First, the census data mistakenly assume that children of mixed marriages where one parent is white will identify as nonwhite. Second, the census sees the white “mainstream” as a fixed category even though the conception of whiteness has changed in the past and will likely change again. As a result, Alba contends, America will probably have a white majority for some time to come.

Is that analysis correct? And what does America’s demographic future say about its political future? Four contributors respond to Alba: Kenneth Prewitt, former director of the Census Bureau and now Carnegie Professor of Social Affairs at Columbia University; William Darity Jr., Arts and Sciences Professor of Public Policy at Duke University; Harold Meyerson, the Prospect’s executive editor; and Frank Bean, Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. Alba has the last word.

Follow the link to read their responses.

http://prospect.org/article/prospect-debate-illusion-minority-majority-america

This Simple Gesture . . .

Means so much.

An excerpt from The Washington Post - 

This photo of Obama and a little visitor at a Black History Month celebration is remarkable

The look in Clark's eyes offers one half of America's current story. A country once determined to import and enslave black Americans is now, indeed, led by one. That is a transformation so profound and complex that when another young black child, Jacob Philadelphia, visited the White House in 2009 and asked the then-new president if they have the same hair. Obama bent down and advised Jacob to find out. The answer -- yes -- said much more to Jacob, the millions of Americans who have seen the Souza photo of that moment since. It said, I am like you. You are like me. The most powerful elected office in the world is mine and is truly possible for all of us. Obama reportedly gave the photo a permanent and special home in the White House.

But then, there is Obama's tender touch on Clark's cheek this week. It is another remarkably familiar gesture between strangers which also reveals something deep and true. It speaks to the other half of America's current story. Obama is our president. Still, this remains a country where children who look like Clark, but are perhaps a decade older, are widely regarded as a menace. They are to be feared and contained. Obama's touch says, this child is precious and valuable because of who he is and what he can become. But when Obama said as much -- telling reporters in 2012 that if he had a son, that son would look like Trayvon Martin -- a good portion of America reacted as if that reminder was itself an extreme affront.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/20/this-photo-of-obama-and-a-little-visitor-at-a-black-history-month-celebration-says-a-lot/

The President and Kids

Fingers crossed that this video works.

Here's hoping because it's adorable.