kimi wei blog

People ask me why I won’t let my kids buy an XBox. I explain our family policy: “Our family doesn’t support Microsoft. In any way.” Many hearing this think my view is seriously radical (not to mentioned extremely flawed). After all, XBox graphics are great and the games are cheap. “But, buying a kids’ gaming system? That’s not supporting a company!”

“To you it isn’t, which is completely fine. But to me, it is,” I reply. “Microsoft manufactures XBox, so my boys can’t have one.”

Sometimes this remark sparks off a dialogue about why I dislike Microsoft so much. There’s a bit on this subject at the end of my last blog post, but what really convinces people I may have legitimate grounds as a basis for my opinion is when I ask if they’ve heard that Microsoft sued the Brazilian government for abandoning the use of Windows on government computers in favor of using the free Linux-based operating system – and according to Microsoft (phrased this way when I first heard it) interfering with the company’s ‘g-d given right’ to earn a profit.

Lawrence Lessig, currently Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and formerly at Stanford Law School (where he founded Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society), wrote in this 2004 article

Apparently Microsoft has taken the first steps to filing a criminal defamation action against a Brazilian government official who was quoted criticizing Microsoft in a magazine article. Sergio Amadeu, head of the agency responsible for spreading free software within the Brazilian government, is reported to have accused “the company of a ‘drug-dealer practice’ for offering the operational system Windows to some governments and cities for digital inclusion programs. ‘This is a trojan horse, a form of securing critical mass to continue constraining the country’.”

Online petitions support Mr. Amadeu and Brazil’s “right to choose”

Pedro Cadina in a Linux Journal article comments

The Brazil Free Software Project launched the “Brazil has the right to choose” campaign, backed by a digital petition which, by June 27, had received more than 8,000 signatures from around the globe. His supporters include Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Constitutional Law at Stanford University; and Richard Stallman, head of the Free Software Foundation (FSF); Hipatia, the Italian NGO; and others.

The petition asserts (Portuguese language version here) states

In the middle of the week of the largest free software event in Latin America and one of the most important in the world, the president of Microsoft Brazil, Emilio Umeoka, has begun the attempt at intimidation declaring that the decision of the Brazilian government to support free software on computers in the public sector is being “influenced by ideology”. The salesman with the monopolistic megacorporation, Mr. Umeoka, goes further, afirming that the sovereign decision of our government, legitimately elected, can lead the country in “the wrong direction”. The right one, in the opinion of the salesman, would perhaps be to maintain the “market reserve” for MS in the government, fatten the wallets of the richest man in the world and continue sending, annually, billions of dollars out of the country in the form of royalty payments, in a country where 22 million people go hungry and 46 million live below the poverty line.

It’s so bold for a company to attempt by court action to hold an entire government hostage to its profit motive. Don’t you think?

I’m glad the Brazilian people seem not to be giving in on this one – see CNET’s 2009 article Brazil’s Love of Linux.

An ‘incredibly dangerous concept’

In several articles written in his typically clear style, internet user advocate Lauren Weinstein explains why he opposes the idea of ‘Internet Driver’s Licenses’, which he refers to as an, “incredibly dangerous concept. . . . I’m disappointed, though not terribly surprised,” Lauren comments, “especially in light of Microsoft’s explicit continuing support of Chinese censorship against human rights — to hear a top Microsoft executive pushing a concept that is basic to making the Internet Police State a reality.” He frames his opposition in an earlier article(January 2010).

Even here in the U.S., one of the most common Internet-related questions that I receive is also one of the most deeply disturbing: Why can’t the U.S. require an Internet “driver’s license” so that there would be no way (ostensibly) to do anything anonymously on the Net?

After I patiently explain why that would be a horrendous idea, based on basic principles of free speech as applied to the reality of the Internet — most people who approached me with the “driver’s license” concept seem satisfied with my take on the topic, but the fact that the question keeps coming up so frequently shows the depth of misplaced fears driven, ironically, by disinformation and the lack of accurate information.

On Dave Farber’s Interesting People list, Lauren sets out dangers inherent in we as individual users handing over our controls to what are able to access using the internet to a monitoring organization backed by companies with so much to gain from limiting free access to information as well as users’ ability to benefit from collaboration features. Large corporate backers proposing the implementation of ‘internet driver’s license’ push for this measure to be implemented knowing that its implementation will limit the public knowledge pool by hobbling the power of the free information exchange which the internet era has brought to seekers of knowledge, facts and truth in homes and schools all over the world.

As regards user protection, Microsoft’s track record shows it can’t be trusted

Microsoft is one of the biggest proponents of ‘Internet Driver’s Licenses’. They’re also the people behind a number of other heavy-handed tactics of technology user abuse which limit user options and create vulnerabilities to viruses, worms and trojan horses in every computer Windows runs on.

Bob Latshaw tells how Microsoft invented the strategy of blocking competitor’s software applications from working on computers using Windows – first done to make Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet software useless so every PC user would need to switch to Microsoft’s Excel application. A strategy that worked so well it pushed an excellent product right off the map and has severely limited user options for several decades now.

And Geoffrey James explains,

“Most people don’t know it, but it’s entirely possible to build computer systems that can’t be infected by viruses. In fact, the original computers were specifically programmed so that no application (like a browser or word processor) could make permanent changes in any other application or in the operating system. . . .

Microsoft (which had plenty of trained operating system programmers who knew the score) could have implemented Windows using the same security features that had been in place in the timesharing world for decades.”

But they decided to,

“put their firm’s ability to make money ahead of your right to have a computer that works reliably and keeps your data safe.”

These and other facts about Microsoft are enough to make me very suspicious of any movement it gets behind in the name of “User Protection”. The concept of ‘internet driver’s license”s is clearly something that’s being cooked up to make our internet access much more limited and commercialized, and our lives a great deal less free.

Sir John Sulston, Nobel Laureate, explains a phenomenon which merits thoughtful consideration.

Ownership rights pose a real danger to scientific progress for the public good

The idea of ownership is ubiquitous. Title deeds establish and protect ownership of our houses, while security of property is as important to the proprietors of Tesco and Sainsbury’s as it is to their customers. However, there is a profound problem when it comes to so-called intellectual property (IP) – which requires a strong lead from government, and for which independent advice has never been more urgently required. The David Nutt affair has illustrated very well the importance of objective analysis of complex social issues.

The myth is that IP rights are as important as our rights in castles, cars and corn oil. IP is supposedly intended to encourage inventors and the investment needed to bring their products to the clinic and marketplace. In reality, patents often suppress invention rather than promote it: drugs are “evergreened” when patents are on the verge of running out – companies buy up the patents of potential rivals in order to prevent them being turned into products. Moreover, the prices charged, especially for pharmaceuticals, are often grossly in excess of those required to cover costs and make reasonable profits.

IP rights are beginning to permeate every area of scientific endeavour. Even in universities, science and innovation, which have already been paid for out of the public purse, are privatised and resold to the public via patents acquired by commercial interests. The drive to commercialise science has overtaken not only applied research but also “blue-skies” research, such that even the pure quest for knowledge is subverted by the need for profit.

Jump to full Guardian article.

I admit that my title is misleading. I wasn’t offered a million dollars for junking my car today, but relative to its cash value what one company did offer me seemed like almost that much.

I want to junk my Chrysler LeBaron 1992 auto, or sell it. Several junkyards including reputable places I’ve dealt with in the past offered me modest amounts of money – GI Salvage in Pine Brook, NJ will pay nothing if they come to tow it, Deb & Dot in North Bergen will pay $75 if they tow it or $125 if I drive it over there. A nice guy in Newark offered me $100 guaranteed and up to $150 if original catlytic converter and other features are present.

One Clifton company offered me $50 and a guy who found me through the Craigslist ad I posted to sell the car offered me $100. Then there was the doozy.

Then I called 888-899-5185 and a lady told me that she could buy my car for $50-$75. Or, if I wanted to donate it I would get

1. $500 gas card
2. $1000 tax deduction
3. $1000 in supermarket certificates, and
4. A 3-day free stay at a hotel which I could select from a list of many locations located across the nation.

Did I want to book my 3-day stay?

The lady asked me this about 4 times – she seemed so interested in booking the free vacation for me I immediately concluded she’d get a nice sales commission if I booked that trip.

I replied, “No, I don’t want to go to any hotel. And I’m not listening to any sales pitch to buy a time share either.” Because that is what this is all about. I’ve heard these offers before and they interest me not a little bit. People often have to pay what may be hefty travel expenses to get to one of these “free” vacation spots, and while installed there (and a captive audience) the place’s sales team takes up half of your promised vacation time attempting to harass you into purchasing one of their time share programs.

The booking lady seemed a lot less interested in talking to me after I disclosed my stand on listening to time share sales pitches. I had a question of my own to ask, though. I wanted to know where I could get verification of the other offers she had cited. I was told me to visit THElibraryproject.org on the internet and, “get more information there.” I asked if the website had “the” at the beginning or was just libraryproject.org and was told it was definitely THElibraryproject.org.

It turns out that there is no website THElibraryproject.org (no surprise there). There is a libraryproject.org website. I visited but couldn’t figure out what they do exactly. There certainly wasn’t any visible information on the site about giving $1500 worth of gas cards and supermarket certificates in exchange for the donation of a junk car.

I hope somebody buys my car so I don’t have to junk it. It’s a nice looking little thing – white – with excellent suspension, good tires, a new starter, and its been well maintained. Although it does have a bad transmission.

Today a revolution occurred both in the way millions of web users can receive news and news portals and bloggers can push information out to followers and the web. Dave Winer’s RSS Cloud feed makes the information exchange happen in realtime. Today Wordpress enabled all of its blogs with the technology.

With the installation of a simple plugin available in your Wordpress control panel, your blog can now push content out to the cloud and individual users as fast as you can click, “Post.” In fact, just as fast as Twitter messages go out. The technology used is the same simple RSS used by popular feed aggregators like googlereader, netnewswire and other over the web and computer-resident applications that gather news you’ve subscribed to receive through RSS feeds.

What has changed at this moment from old-style RSS feed mechanics are two elements:

1. The speed at which that content can be delivered to you, and
2. the fact that anyone now has the ability to push out posts at the speed of Twitter to followers without using Twitter. This technology is platform and company agnostic.

Wow, revolutionary.

Now, you can read feeds in real time – Twitter fast

There’s another side to this – you can use River2 software right now to read RSS feeds in realtime. The procedure for installing the software that makes it possible to do this is still not very user friendly for non-geeks, and you’ll be reading feeds you subscribe to on the web at River2’s site – there aren’t any out of the box client side applications developed yet.

It seems pretty clear judging from the widespread interest this development has sparked overnight, though, that many major news aggregation platforms will be eagerly jumping on board to incorporate this revolution into their own applications really soon. After all, Wordpress has made a huge initial commitment to Dave’s newest technology and in doing so put RSS cloud feeds squarely on the map. We can probably expect several brilliant desktop apps to release cloud feed enabled versions, very shortly. I’m so looking forward to that.

INTERVIEW EXCERPTS

Here are excerpts from Dave Winer’s interview today with Jay Rosen about what this change is going to mean to internet users, along with some (clarifying) notes of my own.

What the RSS Cloud feed technology is

Dave: RSS Cloud is a bit of technology – wires that connect up differently to the software, it’s like plumbing. I got an email from Matt, they make Wordpress, and he wanted to meet for lunch. I expected I would be pitching him on supporting RSS Cloud but he said, “No, we’ve already decided on doing that.” What this means is all of the blogs hosted on Wordpress.com have this capability now. And any (privately hosted) Wordpress blog. This means all the blogs are real time (enabled).

It’s all part of what we call bootstrap (step by step advancement). A week ago 1100 used RSS Cloud feeds and now millions (are able to) use it. It supports RSS cloud on the aggregation side, like Googlereader, Tweetdeck and Seesmic. Gets the updates within a second. A feedreader can take up to an hour to get an update – feedreaders can only check (for new content) so often. But, this is like Twitter. It’s real time. I (checked for) a test post (right after it was made) and sure enough, there it was.

One of our developers, Jeremy Fuld, found out that CNN political wire is using RSS Cloud feed now. I subscribed to it and it worked. Now I’m getting news (instantly).

Used to be, you had RSS (with) no company in the middle and it was slow, or it could be fast but then there was a company in the middle. (RSS Cloud feed) gives you news fast with no company in the middle.

Jay: If I want to monitor lots of blogs and news sites, as a reader who wants to keep up with the news, (this is really important for me).

Dave: Are you using a cloud-aware reader? There will be others but right now there’s only River2.

Jay: Because it’s faster, that changes blogging how?

Dave: Makes it like Twitter.

How is it going to change the web experience

To get it to look and behave like Twitter, (look at) clients like Tweetdeck or Seesmic – instead of publishing Twitter (with these tools) you publish one of these feeds. (RSS Cloud feeds are) like Twitter, not different. Well, there is a big difference: there’s no fail whale in RSS. (There’s also no company in the middle between the reader and the content.)

Jay: I can get what I get in my twitter feed and not have to go through Twitter or any other company. And, not have to go through Twitter who now (tracks the links in my Twitter stream that I click on).

(Now we can) implement something like Twitter with just the internet. Don’t need more than the internet to do it. It’s OK to use a company at first to get something going.

(Until now, new services have been) held back because Twitter can’t (move fast enough to implement them). It’s inevitable that (the Twitter-style communication mechanism) get decentralized and that’s what happening here. Today might be the actual day that we look back on and say, “This was the turning point.” We won’t know for sure until later but it sure feels that way right now.

Jay: Doesn’t it all depend on users starting to pick up these tools – like River2? Just like with GoogleReader implementation.

Dave: Before GoogleReader there were two tools: myuserland.com and mynetscape.com were (early) news aggregators. I think Googlereader has to (implement RSS Cloud feed technology), by the way. “Has to” might be too strong a (phrase) for it. But I think they will.

Jay: Here’s how I would use it. I would love to assemble my own list of sources that I know I rely on to I send out information through my Twitter feed . . . a news source alert system. I would put readwriteweb in there, everything James Fallows writes, certain sections of the New York Times, Scripting News. I would keep it to smaller news sources that are likely to contain news that I want to distribute to the 25,000 people that now follow me on Twitter. It would be incredible useful to me because I don’t always remember to check what James Fallows has put up on his Atlantic blog. To have a hand built record of news flow . . . would be great.

What are the feeds going to look like?

Jay: So tell me, how much do I get on an update from RSS cloud . . . a synopsis or 140 characters?

Dave: I give you the first 500 characters. In the case of the New York Times, 500 characters of their synopsis – which is pretty much the entire synopsis. I don’t write a news reader. I write a news skimmer because that reflects the way I subscribe to a huge number of sources. My brain is very good at skimming. People feel they have to read everything on a page but that’s not true. The human brain is capable of recognizing patterns in a lot less time than you that it is . . . if you try it.

I strip out all the html (of a post) and I truncate it at 500 characters and it works, it really works. I fully intend to make it a setting to play with so people can set (their feed) at 700 characters or whatever, but so far noone has asked for it. We’re going to give you a share button in River2.

Freedom to learn and grow

Jay: Yeah, Twitter is much slower . . . to get replies, incoming stream. Links I click on have to go to Twitter first before they go to my destination page.

Dave: Yeah, they want to create some metrics. Want to know which links you click on and tabulate that information. Google does that too – you can see on the bottom, connecting to Google. (That’s when they’re tracking your clicks.)

The wingnuts say I don’t want the government in health care. (What you really don’t want is) you don’t want all these companies involved in your free expression. We’re doing another corner turn and bringing the internet back into things. I think it’s bad that Twitter’s doing this but it’s good because it’s a teachable moment. (People can learn that we can do real-time and short message communication using just native internet technology and freely available tools, without any intermediary company involved in making this level of communication possible).

Jay: When you own your own you realize what freedom is.

Dave: Tradition is not a business model. More is more, there’s no such thing as too much information.

readwriteweb.com’s Marshall Kirkpatrick says

Real time updates could enable several things. Faster distribution of blog posts, more compelling conversations in real-time and a renewed timeliness for blogging vs. services like Twitter are all likely consequences. The list of possible technical developments on top of RSSCloud could be as open-ended as the developments enabled by the core of RSS.

A friend sent me this link to a fascinating and distressing op-ed piece in today’s New York Times on the increasing criminalization of poverty. An excerpt:

“The viciousness of the official animus toward the indigent can be breathtaking. A few years ago, a group called Food Not Bombs started handing out free vegan food to hungry people in public parks around the nation. A number of cities, led by Las Vegas, passed ordinances forbidding the sharing of food with the indigent in public places, and several members of the group were arrested. A federal judge just overturned the anti-sharing law in Orlando, Fla., but the city is appealing. And now Middletown, Conn., is cracking down on food sharing.”

It seems to me that the present is an important moment for the Jewish community to speak publicly on the importance of charitable giving and gimilut hasadim (giving of loving kindness) in the Jewish religion as being of great value for both giver and recipient (more on this topic below). The Jewish community can enter the global and national conversations surrounding these topics and speak out on behalf of kindness and mercy. This may offset the harsh judgments being assessed against the needy and indigent in this time of widespread financial distress, homelessness and hunger. When poverty is allowed to become a crime in the public eye, all people may suffer for this judgment. As a people who believes in the sanctity and benefits of charity and kindness, shouldn’t we attempt to steer public opinion in a different direction?

The face of hunger and poverty in the United States

As of June 2009, less than 100 people have died of swine flu in the US.

However, over 37 million Americans, “lived in poverty in 2007. The number of people living in poverty has increased by almost 6 million since 2000.”

Millions more apply for help to feed their families

“Retail food prices remained stable over the last two decades. But in 2007, grocery prices rose 4.2 percent, the largest increase since 1990. Prices for milk, bread, flour, and eggs doubled in the last year.

Families seeking food assistance from SNAP (formerly the food stamp program) reached a record high in September 2008.

More than one in 10 Americans now receives food stamps.”

Is hunger really a problem in the United States?

When Americans think about hunger, we usually think in terms of mass starvation in far-away countries, but hunger too often lurks in our own backyards. In 2006, 35.5 million people, including 12.6 million children, in the United States did not have access to enough food for an active healthy life. Some of these individuals relied on emergency food sources and some experienced hunger.

Who is going hungry in the U.S.?

Although most people think of hungry people and homeless people as the same, the problem of hunger reaches far beyond homelessness. While the thought of 35.5 million people being hungry or at the risk of hunger may be surprising, it is the faces of those 35.5 million individuals that would probably most shock you.

The face of hunger is the older couple who has worked hard for their entire lives only to find their savings wiped out by unavoidable medical bills; or a single mother who has to choose whether the salary from her minimum wage job will go to buy food or pay rent; or a child who struggles to concentrate on his schoolwork because his family couldn’t afford dinner the night before. A December 2006 survey by the U.S. Conference of Mayors estimated that 48 percent of those requesting emergency food assistance were either children or their parents.

Poor Families Live on the Brink of Disaster

Families in poverty feel like they are always perched on the brink of disaster. . One small thing is all it takes to be blown away. One car accident. One medical emergency. One burst pipe. One robbery. One small piece of bad luck. . It takes stamina to live on the edge and keep going regardless of how exhausted you feel.

Kindness and Charity are Obligations in the Jewish Religion

Tzedakah is derived from (tzedek) – meaning righteousness, justice, or fairness, but has come to mean charity in English.

The words justice and charity have different meanings in English. How is it that in Hebrew, one word, tzedakah, has been translated to mean both justice and charity?

This translation is consistent with Jewish thought as Judaism considers charity to be an act of justice. Judaism holds that people in need have a legal right to food, clothing and shelter that must be honored by more fortunate people. According to Judaism, it is unjust and even illegal for Jews to not give charity to those in need.

Thus, giving charity in Jewish law and tradition is viewed as obligatory self-taxation, rather than voluntary donation.

Giving charity is an obligation in Judaism (Leviticus 25:35-38, Deuteronomy 19:20-24). This obligation means providing charity to both Jew and non-Jew. In many homes one will find a tzedakah box – a box or other container where coins are dropped in and collected for charity. It is a tradition for Jews to give tzedakah on Yom Kippur, Shemini Atzeret, Pesach, Shavuot, and Purim as well as during other celebratory events such as weddings.

[O]ne who helps fulfill the poor person has a letter added to Tzedek, and it becomes “tzedakah (‘charity’).” This is the secret of, “The merciful man does good to his own soul” (Mishlei 11:17). Acts of kindness show that one is under Judgment but has perfected it with Chesed. Then it turns into Mercy.

View expanded text of this essay

America has been transformed by marketing magic and a steady trend away from traditional values (a connection with the land, communities where people know and take an interest in their neighbors, respect for wildlife). We’ve assassinated deer populations and replaced their woodland homes with grass-lawned housing developments named Deer Run and Deerfield.

Many of us think of such wordly trends as being inevitable moves due to some nameless, shapeless “progress”. Doesn’t it bear pondering, though, that many of the most formative progressions of modern times have been merely a result of artificially engineered marketing strategies designed to give us the experiences that will make it easiest for corporations to separate the American people from our money and give up our senses of independence, creation and adventure?

I often think about bits of this National Geographic article on Disneyworld and Orlando. It reveals with completey accessible language and examples the far-reaching propaganda genius behind the Disneyworld empire and shows us how their marketing machine has worked both from within and without to create an America which doesn’t actually exist but which so many millions of people believe in.

A Jewish Orthodox rabbi we know recently commented – “When I was a kid, the people of the United States were citizens and community members. Now, just a few years later, we’ve suddenly become just consumers. How did we get to this point. More importantly, how do we fix ourselves and retrieve our autonomy?

The first step in the fix is understanding. The article is enlightening and its content, worrisome. Here are a few excerpts to pique your interest.

Thanks to a sweetheart deal with the state legislature, the lands Disney purchased were detached from the rest of Florida to form a Magic Kingdom, above and outside the law. Even now, Disney World’s rides are exempt from state safety inspections. Democratic process is excluded, too. Power remains in the hands of a board of supervisors composed of Disney allies. However much you pay for a time-share condo in Disney World, you cannot buy property outright, and therefore establish official residence, and therefore vote for the board. Celebration, Disney’s residential community themed to evoke pre-1940s small-town America, has a city hall but no actual municipal government.

. . . a place whose specialty is detaching experience from context, extracting form from substance, and then selling tickets to it.

Here life is truly a style: You don’t want to live in a mass-produced, instant “community”? No problem. Orlando’s developers, like the producers of instant coffee, offer you a variety of flavors, including one called Tradition. Structurally it may seem identical to all the others. Only instead of vaguely Mediterranean ornamental details, the condos at Tradition have old colonial finishes. . . . lofts are brand-new buildings constructed for those who want the postindustrial lifestyle in a place that never was industrial.

Orlando . . . leads in the . . . transformation of the exotic into the familiar. . . It is growth built on consumption, not production; a society founded not on natural resources, but upon the dissipation of capital accumulated elsewhere; a place of infinite possibilities, somehow held together, to the extent it is held together at all, by a shared recognition of highway signs, brand names, TV shows, and personalities, rather than any shared history. Nowhere else is the juxtaposition of what America actually is and the conventional idea of what America should be more vivid and revealing.

Welcome to the theme-park nation.

Defunct attractions like Splendid China, which featured a miniature Great Wall, went bankrupt because they were too realistic. They failed to provide what all successful theme parks must: fantasies conforming exactly to what the paying public expects to get.

The growth of Orlando’s Hispanic population itself was touched off by a marketing decision. Back in the 1990s, when a real estate company was having trouble selling property in a development called Buenaventura Lakes, their marketing department decided to advertise in Spanish in the major newspapers in Puerto Rico. Suddenly Puerto Ricans were flowing into the Orlando area—creating an alternative to predominantly Cuban Miami for Hispanics in Florida.

Jump to full text of National Geographic Orlando Article

When 60 Black kids from The Creative Steps Day Camp in North Philly got in the pool at The Valley Swim Club in Philadelphia

” . . . all of the Caucasian children immediately exited the pool,” Horace Gibson, parent of a day camp child, wrote in an email. “The pool attendants came and told the black children that they did not allow minorities in the club and needed the children to leave immediately.”

The next day the club told the camp director that the camp’s membership was being suspended and their money would be refunded.

The explanation they got was either dishearteningly honest or poorly worded.

“There was concern that a lot of kids would change the complexion … and the atmosphere of the club,” John Duesler, President of The Valley Swim Club said in a statement.

One camper heard a member say “Uh, what are all these black kids doing here?’ . . . ‘I’m scared they might do something to my child.”

Jessie Daniels posts on Twitter: Want to tell Philly pool bigots how you feel? e: info@thevalleyclub.com/ Tel:215-947-0700

Full article at NBC Philadelphia

Another recent example of racial prejudice being alive, well and publicly acceptable in America today is the case of the Jena 6 who were heavily persecuted by some town administrators, townspeople and schoolmates in Jena, Louisiana following a hate incident in 2006. After three Black students sat under a shade tree in the “White” area of their school yard (there were no trees in the designated “Black” section) three nooses were hung from that tree as threats of retaliation against them.

A National DREAM Graduation solidarity event will take place

Tuesday, 23 June 2009 from 4-5:00 pm
at Johnson Memorial Park, Hackensack, NJ
Map address: 490 River Street, Hackensack, NJ.
(corner of River Street and Cedar Lane/E. Anderson Street)

Local event information:
201-475-1854
kimi@thewei.com
http://twitter.com/kimiwei

Both New Jersey senators, Bob Menendez and Frank Lautenberg, support the DREAM Act but as of today only two (Rush Holt and Steve Rothman) of New Jersey’s 13 Congressmen plan to vote for it.

The DREAM Act (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act) is bipartisan legislation that will provide children raised in the United States, whom are high school graduates but not legal residents, the right to become legal US residents if they earn a college associate’s degree or serve in the military. The DREAM Act will give undocumented students with good civic records the chance to acquire the education, skills and legal status they need to be fully participating and productive members of American society.

Get involved!
Sign the DREAM Act 2009 petition
DREAM Act Twitter
DREAM Act NJ Twitter
DREAM Act on Facebook
dreamactivist.org
DREAM Act Portal

Download flyer (pdf)

From the book Stuff White People Like by a guy who became famous by mistake and says in his Authors@Google interview, “I’m a bigger jerk now than I ever was.” Christian Lander says lots more in his wickedly funny book and blog.

Being in graduate school satisfies many white requirements for happiness. They can believe they are helping the world, complain that the government/university doesn’t support them enough, claim they are poor, feel as though are getting smarter, act superior to other people, enjoy perpetual three day weekends, and sleep in every day of the week!

After acquiring a Masters Degree that will not increase their salary or hiring desirability, many white people will move on to a PhD program where they will go after their dream of becoming a professor. However, by their second year they usually wake up with a hangover and realize: “I’m going to spend six years in graduate school to make $35,000 and live in the middle of nowhere?”

After this crisis, a white person will follow one of two paths. The first involves dropping out and moving to New York, San Francisco or their original home town where they can resume the job that they left to attend graduate school. . . .

The second path involves becoming a professor, moving to a small town and telling everyone how they are awful and uncultured.