Posts tagged rich
How the Boulder Police handle Riots and demonstrations; Jann Scott’s Journal
Aug 15th
We are so lucky to live in Boulder. When it comes to big events, football games, demonstrations and all out riots you could not ask for a better Police Department. I am serious about this. There are those few crazy anarchist who hate all police but forget about them.
Look at any CU Buffs football game day. 50 thousand drunken fans party it up all over our city and and Boulder PD is as cool as can be. When we had Kinetics at the Res. 50,000 people would party all day and never a bit of trouble. When the Mall Crawl was in full blast in the late 80’s , 100,000 people would trash the city and Boulder PD maintained.
In 1995, 96 and 97 CU students rioted for fun, nearly burned the hill down and injured 60 Boulder Police officers. 3 injuries were career ending with zero injuries to students. Unbelievable. Then Police Chief Tom Koby called the 1997 riots so extreme that use of deadly force was required but he would not allow it. Students were trying to kill police officers. It was a student riot all over they wanted to get drunk and burn the hill. Seriously, that is what it was about.
The college kids really went off the deep end that year with alcohol. The tried to burn buildings down, stoned the police, set fires all over the hill, threw molotov cocktails at fire fighters. I was there. It was not funny.
Boulder PD attends weekly protests all over the city by leftist groups and they do a fine job of letting things be.
Of course they have decades of experience and lots of training. In the late 60’s things were rough here when students shut down the city over the Vietnam War, but all and all We do well.
What is interesting is we are a community 95% white and rich by by all standards, yet we have many many civil rights protests all over the city. Some lefty white kids can be pretty Agro, but Boulder PD always holds the moral high ground.
Tesla Motors should find a new spokes person : Elon Musk sucks Jann Scotts Journal
Apr 3rd
Betty Lu on Bloomberg news today. He said you can lease a new Tesla for $500 dollars a month for a three year lease. That is completely false as it turns out. Tesla does not have a payment plan for $500 dollars a month. The closest plan Bloomberg could find was closer to $1000 a month.
According to Bloomberg , “Musk dodged questions, refused to answer questions, was not straight in his answers” and he basically lied through his teeth about Teslas new lease program. At best Musk was devious in his explanations. Musk also announced that the Tesla electric car was the best manufactured car in the world. Well, that is according to him. Most reviewers would rank the car in the middle. Toyota, Honda, Mercedes, Lexus are considered to be the best manufactured cars in the world. Even ford has come a long way. But Tesla ?? Well, Tesla is the darling of the Boulder and Palo Alto social media crowd, but nobody can afford one. You have to be a rich millionaire ap developer with a back up car.
Musk has had his run ins with the media too. Like every time he opens his mouth. He sued a British auto review TV show because they criticized Tesla. He went ballistic over a New York times reporter who accused Musk of lying about the Tesla performance.
He showed up on Bloomberg looking disheveled, acting unprepared and smug. Not confidence inspiring for CEO of the best auto manufacturer in the world. Hah. In fact Musk acts like the arrogant fat cats at GM who appeared before congress just before they collapsed.
Tesla couldn’t have a worse person to be the face of their boutique car company. I would recommend that they hire somebody like hip pr girl Erika Napoletano, but she is a foul mouthed wench who would probably sink the company.
There in lies the problem for Elon Musk and Tesla. He, like Erika come from the hip web developer world where marketing to mass appeal are of little interest. They live in their own narrow corridor and when they stick their heads in to the larger media culture they end up with people like me taking a swing at them. ( yep I live and work in popular culture if you think of being on tv 3 hours a day pop )
Is Tesla a worthwhile car? I have no idea. They didn’t have a display at the Denver Auto show which tells me they are not a player to the American car buying public. I sat in one a few years ago at their show room in Boulder, but I could hardly fit into it. It was built like a space capsule. Has the car improved since then. I dunno. I have never driven one. But since Elon Musk has huge Boulder connections, he’s in my beat to write about. Plus I am the car reviewer of record from these parts.
Anyway, Elon fire yourself as spokes person and put somebody up front who people will like and can relate to like Dennis Haysbert ( the all state actor)
OK That’ll be $10,000 for saving you from yourself.
Jann Scott
from a city with more therapists than electric cars
Boulder Colorado
The Boulder Twitterverse
Dec 7th
Who are they ? Tweeps are 18-34 year olds. 55% female 45% male In Boulder they are all white, rich, educated, Liberal, office workers, house wives or students. They sit in coffee houses, on their phones in their cars, or at work and stay connected to the twitterverse which they see as the universe. Except it isn’t. Boomers except for me don’t use twitter. Xers don’t use it either. the Yers who do represent less than 50%. In Boulder Twitter is reserved for a special group of people who, look, think and act alike. It is a closed culture.
Twitter cyber Attacks If you don’t fit into that culture ( I don’t… 65, white, short , bald, opinionated, not liberal and I have a sense of humor…not allowed on twitter.) At least in Boulder, if you don’t fit the above mold, you will be attacked. Since I have a cable and internet talk show, write this column, have my own thoughts, take risks and question the staus quo , I am often attacked by Boulder tweeps. I don’t answer back on twitter anymore though. I answer back on television for the larger community to see. Boulder twitter is like the Russian mafia: a gang of thugs who want to rule the world. I intend on standing in there way.
Nonsense In the larger scheme of things Twitter does not really matter. It is a good tool for communicating breaking news which eventually gets to the rest of us. But how important is it? Really? The language is so short and curt, it is not only rude, it is idiotic. People are reduced to blithering.
Boulder is so Weird Of course we have our little twitter culture here in #boulder, but other areas are completely different. There is a whole world of Hispanic Tweeps who dominate twitter nationwide. There are popular culture tweeps who make up twitter in the USA. Thye are into popular TV shows, pop music, gossip magazines…. not intelligentsia. In that sense Boulder is weird.
OK it’s gossip Twitter is 100% gossip tot he mass world population. There are occasional pieces of good information that come out. I use it to net cast stories like this. We use it to post news and features from Boulder channel 1. But we also use, Digg, linked in, email, Google, the internet. face book my space, keywords, meta tags, tags and categories 20 times a day by 10 different posters. We use you tube, vimeo, BC1 and finally we use the king of all communications Cable Television. Cable is still king even if 20% of the 18-34 year olds in Boulder (approximately 10,000 out of our 220,000) think they are the community. the truth is most people in our city have know idea who they are or what their scene and they don’t care.