The twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre fell this week. I was too young to remember it, but it was in 1989 we were able to see it live on TV, since it was one of only four times in my life I have traveled to Asia. Back then, there were no direct flights from San Francisco or San Jose to Taiwan, so we had a layover in Japan. My ( Read more... )

You have got to be kidding me.

Guardian UK reports: Worse than the Taliban: New Law Rolls Back Rights for Afghan Women.

In 2000 my high school world studies teacher, Mr. Antenore, taught us about the Taliban and its treatment of women. It was a, um, novel idea to me: this idea that had I been born in another part of the world, I would not be ( Read more... )

On Friday, Ken and I went down to Irvine to attend the Irvine High School 2009 Annual Students for Social Responsibility Benefit Concert. This year's beneficiary was Stop the Traffik, an organization, founded in the UK, that fights human trafficking ( Read more... )

This Associated Press news article came out late last night/early morning and gave me the chills: Lesbian's brutal gang rape investigated in Calif.--a lesbian woman was jumped and gang raped by four men in freaking San Francisco, of all places.

Detectives say the 28-year-old victim was attacked Dec. 13 after she got out of her car, which bore a ( Read more... )

Part of my job is to follow media stories and journal articles pertaining to trends in mental health at the state, local, and national levels. Lately, there's been a lot of news coverage about the family murder-suicide that occurred in Porter Ranch last weekend--notable to our community because one of the six dead was a UCLA Rhodes Scholar. The ( Read more... )

Usually I'm comfortable with being of Chinese descent (way, way back, yanno) but sometimes stories like this really piss me off. A middle school teacher in China has been detained for posting images of schools that collapsed in the Sichuan earthquake on the internet.It feels like local Chinese governments are doing everything they can to silence ( Read more... )

Bush is dumb. He is going to veto legislation that would bar the CIA from using waterboarding, sensory deprivation, and other harsh interrogation methods; practices that have already been banned by the military.

Note I didn't say mean. (Even though, waterboarding? Kind of mean. Just a little. Oh, and also? A crime under international lawThis ( Read more... )

eleventh_guard brought this to my attention. Today is January 10th, the day of Nazanin Fatehi's retrial in Iran. When she was 17, Nazanin and her niece were attacked by rapists. Nazanin defended herself with a knife, stabbing one of the men before running away. Nazanin went to the police station to explain that she and her niece had almost been raped, and ( Read more... )

For those of you totally out of the loop, Saddam Hussein was executed by hanging a week ago. Permanently BANNED FROM IRL. Here is my post blah blah blahing about it all ( Read more... )

First asshat is the guy who spilled water all over the printers in CLICC Main Lab. Or the person who left a PEELED orange on the ground in Main Lab. Which was sloshed.

Okay yah, frankly, this is pathetic. Not All Fun, Says Pro Gamer. Dot dot dot okay...

"A lot of people think playing video games isn't a lot of work. It doesn't leave a lot of ( Read more... )