All – Page 17 – Kimi Blog

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President, Press and Governor speak out: police brutality must be condemned and controlled

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

– John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions Meditation XVII

This week saw the police murder father of five children Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana not long before school lunch supervisor and student mentor Philando Castile was murdered by a policeman near St. Paul, Minnesota.

New York Times writer Michael Eric Dyson offers a sizzling condemnation of white people for failing to hold brutal police accountable for killing people of color. Because ultimately, they don’t want to see that their greed for privilege has created and supports the social environment in which it is OK for this to happen. What a read: read more

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Powerful coverage of a study on how students and teachers are being affected by the 2016 election hate rhetoric

Trump hates equally — Source: imgflip.com

The Southern Poverty Law Center reports on the results of a casual survey administered online by Teaching Tolerance about the current presidential election. About 2000 teachers responded and submitted 5000 comments.

Students who identify with Trump’s hate rhetoric are using it to justify bullying behaviour, persecution of certain students and threats … while immigrant and ethnic minority students across the country are voicing fear, expressing thoughts of suicide and having meltdowns in class. read more

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Drowning prevention: learn to swim, practice water safety & know what drowning really looks like

The first steps to preventing drowning are learning how to swim and practicing safe swimming habits – in a pool, a lake, a river or in the ocean. To save the life of person who is drowning, though, you need to know what drowning really looks like. Drowning is silent, fast and doesn’t look anything like it is depicted on TV. Slate explains:

There is very little splashing, no waving, and no yelling or calls for help of any kind. To get an idea of just how quiet and undramatic from the surface drowning can be, consider this: It is the No. 2 cause of accidental death in children, ages 15 and under (just behind vehicle accidents)—of the approximately 750 children who will drown next year, about 375 of them will do so within 25 yards of a parent or other adult. According to the CDC, in 10 percent of those drownings, the adult will actually watch the child do it, having no idea it is happening. Drowning does not look like drowning—Dr. Pia, in an article in the Coast Guard’s On Scene magazine, described the Instinctive Drowning Response like this: read more

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Court ruling: New Jersey police must turn over dashcam video on request

The New Jersey Law Journal reports on dashcam ruling handed down 30 June 2016. It’s a win for justice and respectful police conduct:

New Jersey appeals court on June 30 ruled that police video recordings taken from dashboard cameras are documents that must be released under the state’s Open Public Records Act.

Hurrah! I’m happy with this news. NJLJ reports that court case was filed by “open-government activist John Paff.” Thanks for the great work, John.

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Principal Moody suspended for letting Paterson rapper Fetty Wap film music video at East Side High

Principal Zatiti Moody — Source: Urban Renaissance Media

A Paterson principal known for his educating excellence and strict discipline enforcement has been suspended from office by the New Jersey State appointed superintendent known for his attempts to keep Paterson students from experiencing quality education. The ostensible reason for the suspension: Principal Zatiti Moody allowed music phenomenon Fetty Wap to film a music video at East Side High School which contains twerking and portrays drug use. Behaviour that – like it or not – happens to be part of the school experience for many urban students. read more

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NCC’s vocational training programs in Newark are underway – apply today

OSHA training grads — Credit: Essex County

If you know someone looking for a job or seeking new skills, check out New Community Workforce Development Center’s vocational training programs in the fields of:

Academic Enrichment

Allied Health*
(*Home Health Aide, EKG Technician, Medical Assistant, Phlebotomy Technician and Patient Care Technician)

Automotive

Building Trades/Construction

Culinary Arts

ShopRite Partners-In-Training

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A kid created a browser app that shows you who is buying politicians

Greenhouse browser plug-in — Source: allourgreen.us

16 year old Nick Rubin created a browser plug-in called Greenhouse that lets you hover over politicians’ names on any web page to see which donors have given them money, and how much. Vice reports that it works in, “Chrome, Firefox, and Safari and is completely free.” Here’s more:

How does Greenhouse work?
It works by highlighting the name of any member of Congress on any website, and when you hover over these names a little box appears that shows detailed contribution information with amounts and where those amounts have come from. It’s basically a list of the top-ten industries from which they receive their money. My goal was to create something that promotes transparency. It would be great if people used it on sites where they’re reading about politics every day. For example, if you’re reading a piece on Congress votes for energy policy, you might see that a sponsor has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the oil and gas industry. I like to say that Greenhouse allows people to see the money story behind the news story. read more

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Betraying progressive politics to court corporate dollars is what has made Clintons the Dem Party favorites

people before profits — Source: National People’s Action/flickr via CommonDreams.org

Fred Toledo shared this article on Facebook. He commented, “This is the sad, sorry and corrupt state of a party that once stood as the champion of the working class, the poor, the disenfranchised and the marginalized,” and shared excerpts from Bill Moyer and Michael Winship’s article on Wasserman Schultz:

Yet when the CFPB was drawing up new rules to make it harder for payday predators to feast on the poor, Rep. Wasserman Schultz co-sponsored a bill to delay those new rules by two years. How, you ask, could the head of the party’s national committee embrace such an appalling exploitation of working people? read more

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What Bernie & followers face now: thoughtful reporters take a 360º look

candidate didn't win — Source: Suffolk University/USA Today poll

Record reporters Herb Jackson & Christopher Maag take a look at the choices facing Bernie Sanders and his supporters following big end of primary season losses in delegate-heavy states California and New Jersey. I’m quoted in the article:

But some Sanders supporters in New Jersey say they are sticking with him.

“I’ve been a loyal Democrat all my life, but at this point, I’ll tell you the truth, I may resign from the Democratic Party after this election,” said Kim Wei of Fair Lawn, who with her son, Ivan, was on the ballot as a Sanders delegate. read more

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Three short poems I wrote tonight in eight minutes

An exercise in the co-op management workshop I attended tonight put me in charge of motivating a team of poetry writers to produce poems; and then measure our production against the forecasts that I provided before we got started. Happy to say, my team of 7 awesome poem writers produced way above expectations, with many submitting more than one poem in each of two rounds of writing – that were each four minutes long. We had fun!

Here are my submissions. What do you think?

On a cool summer’s eve
I think about politics
I think about Wednesday
I think about going somewhere this weekend
The end of the workweek
Beginning of fun!!!
Oh, I like fun.
But, wait. My job is writing poems ….
So, really, I am having fun all week.
I guess I will need to work harder on the weekend:
To have MORE fun.
Sounds like a job.
Sounds like work.
I love work. read more

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The (famous & myopic) view of the world from the POV of New Yorkers

New Yorker cover NYC center of the universe, by Saul Steinberg

Yesterday somebody mentioned what life looks like to New Yorkers and I realized … so much time has passed since Saul Steinberg drew the famous New York cover showing what the world looks like for New Yorkers – with Jersey a slender line across the Hudson with Japan and China just blips in the far distance … that my 21 year old son may have not ever seen it. So I looked around, found the cover easily on the internet and sure enough, Ari had never seen it before. It’s a doozy, though, isn’t it? read more

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The Wei endorses the Electronic Frontier Alliance Principles

Join us EFA image — Source: Electronic Frontier Alliance

The Wei endorses the Electronic Frontier Alliance Principles. The Electronic Frontier Alliance is a grassroots network of community and campus organizations across the United States working to educate our neighbors about the importance of digital rights. Participation is open to any group that endorses our simple principles.

Electronic Frontier Alliance Principles

As a member organization of the EFA, we believe that technology should support the intellectual freedom at the heart of a democratic society. In the digital age, that entails advancing: read more

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Switzerland you were gipped – your Gotthard Tunnel opening celebration choreography is a hot mess

Performers in bizarre Gotthard Tunnel ceremony — Screen Shot Dark Horse News video

The Swiss government celebrated the completion of Gotthard Base Tunnel, the longest railway tunnel in the world with an extremely bizarre ceremony that included hordes of performers acting like zombies, others half naked on an open railway car slithering around and grappling each other in supposedly erotic movements. Some dressed in sado-masochist paraphenelia swung from the tunnel ceiling and all the while, disturbing, discordant music played in the background and sometimes the foreground.

Excuse me, Switzerland, but the choreographer you hired had a single goal in mind: to make a laughingstock out of you and your tunnel opening ceremony. And he (or she) did an excellent job of that. It manages to be both bizarre and silly. read more

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Dunkin Donuts staffer’s racism wins a Chinese mom international support

This story should be unbelievable: a Chinese mom’s visit to a Queens Dunkin Donut this Monday past crazily took on a nightmarish quality. Before leaving the store, Peiyin Shih and her one year old son’s nanny had received abusive treatment from an employee and when Ms. Shih began filming his bizarre behaviour on her phone another customer approached her menacingly (that’s the guy shown with the crazy expression) and threatened to pull away her phone and throw it out the window.

Ms. Shih feared for the safety of her little family group and afterwards, wrote to Dunkin Donuts about the incident. I can’t find her post on the Dunkin Donuts Facebook page, so I guess it’s been removed but you can see that there is no suppressing this story. It’s well on its way to going viral with over 19K responses, 12341 shares and 3.9K comments already. Plus, the story has been picked up by the social stratosphere and news outlets in Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Asian-American press. Here’s an interview incorporating bits of Ms. Shih’s video. read more

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PoliticalCompass tracks the US presidential candidates & only Bernie Sanders is on The People’s side

Political Compass Screenshot — Source: PoliticalCompass.org

Political Compass tracks the socio-political positions of politicians in democracies and in political races. The above graphic shows where 2016 presidential candidates stand on the left to right scale.

All the GOP candidates are on the far right and are furthermore, committed to Authoritarianism. Hillary stands firmly on the right. Only Bernie Sanders is a progressive candidate with loyalty to the needs of the American public.

The organization describes its mission as:

The enduring appeal of The Political Compass lies in its universality, and the fact that it’s not a fly-by-night election-time survey, but a continually accessible profile of a political personality applicable to all democracies. Although we’d like the time to develop more updates than we can sometimes offer, we remain a tool for comparing the politics of countries and well-known political figures, past and present… read more