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Russell Brand says just what's wrong with the way people talk about white cops who kill black men.

What he says is so true.

The U.S. Department of Justice led an inquiry into possible racist tendencies in the Ferguson, Missouri, justice system after the death of Michael Brown, who was killed by Officer Darren Wilson on Aug. 9, 2014. The results of that investigation found evidence of overwhelming racial bias, as reported by Jon Swaine in the Guardian:

Ferguson's population is 67% African American, according to the 2010 census. Yet Justice Department investigators found that between 2012 and 2014, 93% of all arrests were of black people and almost nine in 10 uses of force were against African Americans. In all 14 bites by police dogs when racial information of the person bitten was available, that person was African American.

The problem seems to have been around for quite a while. In The Washington Post, Sari Horowitz reports that a November 2008 email from a Ferguson police officer or municipal court official stated:


President Obama could not be president for very long because "what black man holds a steady job for four years."

The fact that officials in Ferguson might be a little more biased than they should be isn't really surprising to people who feel that race had a lot to do with Michael Brown's killing and the subsequent disparaging of his character by the media.

This recent news sheds a lot of light on the months following the Ferguson shooting, riots, and verdict. Instead of speaking about the riots that happened in Ferguson in 2014 as "protests" or "civil unrest," it was phrased this way on Fox News:

Actor and occasional pundit Russell Brand points out in a video blog from November that the media routinely uses a particular kind of phrasing when talking about racism in Ferguson:

But wait, there's more...

Once Brand pointed it out, I couldn't stop hearing it in a March 4 report about the U.S. Department of Justice inquiry, also on Fox nNws:

Emphasis on the words "accuses" and "scathing" make it seem like a government report of actual facts might not be true. And if I didn't know the truth, that's exactly how I'd think about it.

Watch Russell's full blog below. It makes some pretty great points, even though at the time of this writing, it's four months old.

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Fact Check: Russell mentions in the video that "every 28 hours, an unarmed young black man is killed by a law enforcement officer somewhere in America." That actually isn't true. This number originated with a 2012 report ("Operation Ghetto Storm") from the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. Unfortunately, the study is non-academic and has lots of holes. In addition, the numbers in the report are not based on unarmed black men. The Washington Post explains how it doesn't hold up.

Still, after seeing this, I'll be paying a lot more attention to the kinds of words they're using on the news.

A pitbull stares at the window, looking for the mailman.


Dogs are naturally driven by a sense of purpose and a need for belonging, which are all part of their instinctual pack behavior. When a dog has a job to do, it taps into its needs for structure, purpose, and the feeling of contributing to its pack, which in a domestic setting translates to its human family.

But let’s be honest: In a traditional domestic setting, dogs have fewer chores they can do as they would on a farm or as part of a rescue unit. A doggy mom in Vancouver Island, Canada had fun with her dog’s purposeful uselessness by sharing the 5 “chores” her pitbull-Lab mix does around the house.

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Representative Image from Canva

Let's not curse any more children with bad names, shall we?

Some parents have no trouble giving their children perfectly unique, very meaningful names that won’t go on to ruin their adulthood. But others…well…they get an A for effort, but might want to consider hiring a baby name professional.

Things of course get even more complicated when one parent becomes attached to a name that they’re partner finds completely off-putting. It almost always leads to a squabble, because the more one parent is against the name, the more the other parent will go to bat for it.

This seemed to be the case for one soon-to-be mom on the Reddit AITA forum recently. Apparently, she was second-guessing her vehement reaction to her husband’s, ahem, avant garde baby name for their daughter, which she called “the worst name ever.”

But honestly, when you hear this name, I think you’ll agree she was totally in the right.

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Innovation

A student accidentally created a rechargeable battery that could last 400 years

"This thing has been cycling 10,000 cycles and it’s still going." ⚡️⚡️

There's an old saying that luck happens when preparation meets opportunity.

There's no better example of that than a 2016 discovery at the University of California, Irvine, by doctoral student Mya Le Thai. After playing around in the lab, she made a discovery that could lead to a rechargeable battery that could last up to 400 years. That means longer-lasting laptops and smartphones and fewer lithium ion batteries piling up in landfills.

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A beautiful cruise ship crossing the seas.

Going on a cruise can be an incredible getaway from the stresses of life on the mainland. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t an element of danger when living on a ship 200-plus feet high, traveling up to 35 miles per hour and subject to the whims of the sea.

An average of about 19 people go overboard every year, and only around 28% survive. Cruise ship lawyer Spencer Aronfeld explained the phenomenon in a viral TikTok video, in which he also revealed the secret code the crew uses when tragedy happens.

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Joy

Kudos to the heroes who had 90 seconds to save lives in the Key Bridge collapse

The loss of 6 lives is tragic, but the dispatch recording shows it could have been so much worse.

Representative image by Gustavo Fring/Pexels

The workers who responded to the Dali's mayday call saved lives with their quick response.

As more details of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore emerge, it's becoming more apparent how much worse this catastrophe could have been.

Just minutes before 1:30am on March 26, shortly after leaving port in Baltimore Harbor, a cargo ship named Dali lost power and control of its steering, sending it careening into a structural pillar on Key Bridge. The crew of the Dali issued a mayday call at 1:26am to alert authorities of the power failure, giving responders crucial moments to prepare for a potential collision. Just 90 seconds later, the ship hit a pylon, triggering a total collapse of the 1.6-mile bridge into the Patapsco River.

Dispatch audio of those moments shows the calm professionalism and quick actions that limited the loss of life in an unexpected situation where every second counted.

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Joy

Yale's pep band had to miss the NCAA tournament. University of Idaho said, 'We got you.'

In an act of true sportsmanship, the Vandal band learned Yale's fight song, wore their gear and cheered them on.

Courtesy of University of Idaho

The Idaho Vandals answered the call when Yale needed a pep band.

Yale University and the University of Idaho could not be more different. Ivy League vs. state school. East Coast vs. Pacific Northwest. City vs. farm town. But in the first two rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament, extenuating circumstances brought them together as one, with the Bulldogs and the Vandals becoming the "Vandogs" for a weekend.

When Yale made it to the March Madness tournament, members of the school's pep band had already committed to other travel plans during spring break. They couldn't gather enough members to make the trek across the country to Spokane, Washington, so the Yale Bulldogs were left without their fight song unless other arrangements could be made.

When University of Idaho athletic band director Spencer Martin got wind of the need less than a week before Yale's game against Auburn, he sent out a message to his band members asking if anyone would be interested in stepping in. The response was a wave of immediate yeses, so Martin got to work arranging instruments and the students dedicated themselves to learning Yale's fight song and other traditional Yale pep songs.

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