On April 29, a black family set up their charcoal barbecue in the designated barbecuing area in Oakland, Californias' Lake Merritt, only to have a hostile white woman come and demand that they move on or face arrest, because they were using charcoal in one of the areas designated for gas grilling. Read the rest

Since Donald "Childish Gambino" Glover debuted his single "This Is America" on last week's Saturday Night Live, the song and its accompanying video have raced around the internet, sparking analyses and arguments. Read the rest

David French served as squadron judge advocate for the Second Squadron, Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, stationed at Forward Operating Base Caldwell in Diyala Province, Iraq; he walked patrol with other soldiers, during which he and his colleagues confronted routine armed aggression from insurgents out of uniform, who used IEDs as well as firearms in their fights with US soldiers. Read the rest

Calyx is an amazing nonprofit, privacy-oriented activist ISP (they were the first ISP to successfully resist a secret Patriot Act warrant); they are notable for offering an unlimited, unfiltered, unthrottled 4G/wifi hotspot for a tax-deductible $400 year (mine has repeatedly saved my bacon). Read the rest

If you're lucky enough to be friends with a cop, they may give you one of their get out of jail cards, which you can flash to other cops along with a request for favorable treatment. Read the rest

For years, racist authoritarians in New York City defended the stop-and-frisk program in which primarily black and brown people were repeatedly stopped without any particularized suspicion and forced to turn out their pockets, empty their bags, even strip naked in public on frozen-street corners. Read the rest

Matt Taibbi is one of the best political writers working in the USA today, someone who can use the small, novelistic details of individuals' lives illuminate the vast, systemic problems that poison our lives and shame our honor; his 2014 book The Divide conducts a wide-ranging inquiry into the impunity of corporate criminals and the kafkaesque injustices visited on the poor people they victimize; in I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street, Taibbi narrows his focus to the police murder of Eric Garner, a Staten Island fixture and father, and the system that put murderers in uniform in his path.

A dozen Michigan cops from Grand Rapids broke into a family home and rushed an 11 year old black girl, pointing guns at her and cuffing her while her terrified mother begged them not to shoot her. Read the rest

Ta-Nehisi Coates (previously) is in characteristically amazing form with his new essay in the Atlantic, "The First White President," in which he posits that Donald Trump is "the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president" -- the first president elected by appealing to white supremacy to the exclusion of everything else. Read the rest

The US Department of Defense's 1033 program sends "surplus" military equipment to US police forces ("surplus" in quotes because military contractors lobby for the US military to buy more weapons than they need in order to feed materiel to the program), which has created a situation in which cops show up in their communities literally clad in the armor of an occupying army. Read the rest

After shooting Philando Castile dead during a traffic stop -- a killing that was livestreamed on Facebook by Castile's girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds -- the police obtained a secret warrant for Reynolds's Facebook account, including her private messages and deleted messages, accompanied by a gag order that banned Facebook from every discussing the warrant's existence. Read the rest

It's been more than two years since Harlem Cryptoparty made the connection between the struggle for racial justice in America and access to networks and encryption; the Trump election has strengthened that proposition, with a national network of Digital Security in the Era of Trump workshops where activists train each other on operational security. Read the rest

Donald Trump's racist, perjuring Attorney General, former senator Jefferson Sessions, was signaled that he will reverse Obama-era AG Eric Holder's memo that told federal prosecutors not to bring charges against petty drug offenders, because these crime carry absurd minimum sentences that resulted in America imprisoning a greater proportion of its population than any country in the history of the world, including the USSR and Apartheid-era South Africa. Read the rest

How, you say, could Pepsi have been stupid enough to run a TV ad that trivialized the popular uprising against the official murder of black people by American law enforcement? The answer is obvious: They Live. (via JWZ) Read the rest

For a generation, Americas anti-trust enforcers have walked away from their duties, gripped by an ideology that says that bigger companies mean more profits (which benefit the rich) and lower prices (which benefit everyone else). Read the rest

DBO writes, "A new report by Deflect Labs tracks the complex ways that hackers have sought to take down the Black Lives Matter website. The attacks, which relied on harvesting WordPress sites, increased in sophistication and left a murky, unsavory trail by actors who did everything from try to extort the website to taking it down entirely." Read the rest

It's been one year since the text of the Trans Pacific Partnership was finally released after years of extreme, tragicomic secrecy. Read the rest