%1

"If only the real Jackie Robinson could pop up as a public service announcement before Jackie Robinson West plays in the Little League World Series to repeat the words he said about police brutality fifty years ago."

I'm on vacation for the next week, so this is just a quick post to point to something from the print magazine: every so often I write a music column with a couple very short reviews and one slightly longer one.

On Friday, President Obama signed the 2014 farm bill into law, complete with a change to the food stamps program intended to save the federal government $8.7 billion. Republicans wanted much deeper cuts, and some of us liberals thought it was unwise to make any cuts to a vital, extremely effective antipoverty program (crazy bleeding hearts). So, yay compromise. If that’s your thing, you can join the president in praising Congress for being bipartisan, solving problems, etc.

Joe Klein:

Blacks represent 13% of the population but commit 50% of the murders; 90% of black victims are murdered by other blacks. The facts suggest that history is not enough to explain this social disaster.

Matthew Yglesias:

Yet the disturbing truth, according to the FBI's most recent homicide statistics, is that the United States is in the wake of an epidemic of white-on-white crime.

"You don’t get $321 in fines and fees and 3 warrants per household from an about-average crime rate. You get numbers like this from bullshit arrests for jaywalking and constant 'low level harassment involving traffic stops, court appearances, high fines, and the threat of jail for failure to pay.'”

It's August! Time for peaches, tomatoes, and tired critiques of seasonal and/or local eating.

I should take a pass on more of these, but come on, James Ramsden. Ordinarily such articles either quibble with environmental math or laugh off the notion of some unquantifiable value in knowing where your food comes from. Ramsden rehearses both, the scientific critique and the sciencistic one. Then it gets worse:

What’s the best way for white Americans to act in solidarity with black Americans protesting the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson?

I don’t claim any fresh insights on this question. Janee Woods has some good ones.

"We already know that he started out at a time when it was accepted for a Ferguson cop to charge somebody with property damage for bleeding on his uniform."

"It’s a color scheme that is completely useless on city streets — and indeed in any other environment in which any of these cops will ever work. This isn’t self-protection; it's cosplay."

Police overreach has long targeted black Americans. And in Ferguson, cops who don't seem to know what they're doing have massive firepower with which to do it.

It's difficult to imagine police responding to white protesters the way they've responded to black protesters in Ferguson, Missouri.