There are a whole lot of people who are really mad about what happened the other day in Minneapolis when a 20-year police veteran murdered a subdued, handcuffed, unarmed black man who was begging for his life saying, "I can't breathe." Unfortunately many of those really mad people appear to be more mad about the angry reactions of the public to the on-camera brutal violent murder of a compliant, handcuffed, unarmed black man by a police officer than they are about the on-camera brutal violent murder of a compliant, handcuffed, unarmed black man by a police officer. The mainstream media focus on the flaming Target store serves to maintain white privilege by shifting the conversation from the horrific, completely unnecessary death of a black American citizen under the knee of a police officer while other officers stood by and watched it happen. Officers who heard the man beg for his life just like all of us who watched the video of their complicity. The media shift of focus is one part of institutional racism that white America needs to wake up and recognize, like, yesterday.
This reply to a Tomi Lahren's intentionally obtuse post on the subject might be the comment of the year:
The comment itself is brilliant, and the fact that as of this writing it has 675k "likes" while the original post has 15k gives me some hope that despite the media images and focus, the majority of Americans remain aware of what's important here (hint: it's not a store being looted).
Meanwhile President Pandemic finally recognized the obscene coronavirus (not a hoax, not the flu, not something that's going to go away with the warm weather in April) death toll for which he, Fox News, and his COVIDIOT enablers are largely responsible. If only he'd responded to the biggest health crisis the planet has seen in 100 years as quickly and forcefully as he did to Twitter daring to place a link to reality (more on that below) next to his tired, sad, proven-to-be-baseless-by-his-own-investigative-commission excuse for losing the popular vote...to a woman, no less!
Remember how upset he was about Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players taking a knee to protest police brutality? He called on NFL owners to "fire" players who knelt during the national anthem. He called the kneeling players sons of bitches. He Tweeted about that peaceful form of protest dozens of times, as if he didn't have more important things to do in his role as *President of the United States of America. I may have missed it, but I haven't heard him call for the firing or prosecution of the police officer who murdered an unarmed handcuffed subdued man in cold blood.
Of course since we are so close to the election he has addressed the incident, along with the incident where an innocent, unarmed man was chased, hunted down, and murdered by white men for the offense of jogging while black. In that case it took a video of the incident to emerge for the Georgia Bureau of Investigations to take the murderer and his accomplices into custody even though they knew all about the deadly racial-profiling murder for more than two months. Maybe he thinks African Americans have forgotten that he completely ignored all of the other high profile incidents of police murdering unarmed black men during his time in office.
And then he went and did it. Apparently unaware of the Posse Comitatus Act, just before 1 a.m. this morning the blowhard wanna-be-fascist (but is too lazy) tweeted about sending in the capital M Military with the words, "when the looting starts, the shooting starts." The perverse rhyme originated 50+ years ago from a racist Miami police chief. Is he trying to incite nation-wide protests? Is the endgame to start a civil war? First he incited armed white Americans to go out and protest his own lockdown orders, now he's inciting unarmed but righteously angry black Americans? What could possibly go wrong?
I didn't bother arguing with any of the idiots on social media parroting The Orange Menace's whining about his First Amendment rights being infringed by Twitter. In case you missed it, Twitter placed a link fact-checking a Tweet containing his oft-repeated never-substantiated claims about mail-in voter fraud. The company didn't take down the post or kick him off their privately-owned platform, although according to their terms of service, they could have. They didn't alter the post. They did what many people do when some Fox-lobotomized idiot posts something false on social media -- they posted links to the facts of the matter. The perfect part of his tantrum response is that his promised retribution would actually, directly, and literally (not in the millennial sense) go against the First Amendment, which prohibits *the government* from stifling free speech. To no one's surprise he's wrong about the law: his Tweets reveal that he does not understand the First Amendment, and the executive order he signed today reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of Section 230 of the Communications Act, which was intended to incentivize the very type of content moderation on social media platforms Twitter flagged in this case.
As if there wasn't enough to be pissed off about this week, there were a TON of submissions which never got reviewed. Not because we didn't want to review them. Not because there wasn't time to review them. They were not reviewed because they arrived in formats we can't use, or as low bit rate files. A full 5 albums-worth of these useless files came from a single radio promo company I have worked with for 15+ years and that more often than not gets things right. Another 5 albums-worth of useless files were submitted by others. As a result, there will be fewer new additions to the playlist this week, and artists who might otherwise be getting air play, spins, and chart love will just have to wait until the people they pay to get them air play, spins, and chart love do the easy part of their jobs right.
Today's show will be live-hosted from 9am-5pm Eastern U.S. Time and feature new music by The Academy of Sun (Brighton, England, @TheAcademyofSun), The Grizzled Mighty (Seattle, WA, @GrizzledMighty), The Mango Furs (Nashville, TN), Momma (Los Angeles, CA), and Tenci (Chicago, IL, @_tenci_).
The marathon 8-hour show is followed by 2 hours of uninterrupted music and is then rebroadcast in its entirety beginning at 7 p.m. Friday, 5 a.m. and 3 p.m. Saturday, and one final time at 1 a.m. on Sunday. That is followed by a rebroadcast of a Fuzzy Road radio show at 11 a.m. and then a couple of old 480 Minutes episodes from this week in past years, making for hosted shows all weekend long.
Tune in and chat with fellow listeners on Slack. Hanging out and yakking it up with real humans in a virtual conference room is better than not hanging out and yakking it up with other humans.
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e-mail: ted(at)somafm.com
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Videos
480 Minutes / Year 16 - Episode 21/696 - The 480th Amendment
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