You Will Anyway: Ferguson Powder Keg

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Ferguson Powder Keg

A second man has been shot by police in the Missouri city where an unarmed black 18-year-old was shot dead last weekend, according to multiple reports.

Police officials told local reporters that the man was shot in Ferguson by a St Louis County officer after pointing a handgun at him soon after 1am on Wednesday, following fresh demonstrations over the death on Saturday of Michael Brown.

The officer was responding to reports of shots being fired and men wearing ski masks carrying shotguns. The man was in critical condition in hospital, a police spokesman told the St Louis Post-Dispatch, Fox 2 and KMOV, and his gun was recovered at the scene.

A woman was separately being treated in hospital after being shot in the head during a drive-by shooting in the city.

[...]

In the early hours of Wednesday it was reported that a small skirmish had resulted in police again using teargas and a young woman being struck in the head with a projectile.

Guardian

The article reports, however, that there was also a protest in which police commanded people in the streets to go home or face arrest, but did not make any attempt to do so. After about forty minutes, the people simply went home. That, at least, is good news. Apparently (and fortunately) the police are on high orders to show some serious restraint.

The protesters had marched from a church more than a mile away, where earlier in the evening the Rev Al Sharpton, the veteran civil rights leader and TV host, appeared alongside Brown's parents to appeal for calm after two nights in which about 50 people were arrested.

[...]

A series of cars, some of whose drivers seemed to be taunting the officers, also approached the police line. One man drove towards them at such speed, and stopped so short of hitting officers, that several people watching gasped and screamed in anticipation of a crash or a shooting to prevent one.

As the man turned his car around and drove away, he poked his head out of his driver-side window and smiled. "I don't know what's up with them," he said of the police.

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"Terrorism is the willingness to kill large numbers of people for some presumably good cause.” -- Howard Zinn

"What we have is a foreign policy which is essentially a marketing strategy for selling weapons." -- Jill Stein

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"America: just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable." ~ Hunter S. Thompson

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"What matters in journalism isn't politics, which are as universal and inescapable as breathing. What matters -- along with a fundamentally adversarial attitude toward government, without which "journalism" is simply public relations -- is integrity, transparency, evidence, coherence, and principle. These are the principles on which we should evaluate the quality of journalism, and their absence is why some journalists are so desperate to get you to focus on something else." ~ Barry Eisler

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Life, as Explained in "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead"

GUILDENSTERN: What a fine persecution---to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.

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ROSENCRANTZ : The only thing that makes it bearable is the irrational belief that somebody interesting will come on in a minute.

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GUILDENSTERN: But for God's sake what are we supposed to do?!

PLAYER: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life questioning your situation at every turn.

GUILDENSTERN: But we don't know what's going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don't know how to act.

PLAYER: Act natural. You know why you're here at least.

GUILDENSTERN: We only know what we're told, and that's little enough. And for all we know it isn't even true.

PLAYER: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions.

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GUILDENSTERN : We act on scraps of information... sifting half-remembered directions that we can hardly separate from instinct.

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PLAYER: Life is a gamble, at terrible odds-if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.