Gaki N Me If you love to talk about the world, love Asian idols, this is the place.

Ha, a detailed student mix in the US public school system has just been released. This is so good to know.  (New York Times article is here) 42% of pubic school enrolments in the US are students of minority compared to 22% thiry years ago due to the influx of Hispanics. You could read the entire table here at the National Center for Education Statistics site and click on indicator lists. But of course I am going to tabulate it quickly.

Racial Mix Year Comparison

Race	1972 %	2005 %
Total minority	22	42
White	78	58
Hispanic	6	20
Black	15	16
Asian	Total	4
Pacific Islander	combined	0.2
Am. Indian/

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I was surprised yesterday to see a full page ad taken by the savedarfur.org in the Wall Street Journal against China's continued commercial dealings with the Sudanese government as a protest to the impending violence in Northern Sudan. China buys more than half of the Sudanese oil and sells $100 million arms and weapons to the Sudanese government. Since 2003, the Sudanese government together with a militia group have been attacking rebels in the north.  Some of the methods include dropping bombs indiscriminately over villages from helicopters (Chinese and Russian) and using rape as a method to silence the opposition since women raped are considered unclean and would not dare come forward.  The UN, without the rich nations' endorsement and support,  left it to the African Union to handle the humanitarian crisis but the government refused any interference. The press is suppressed, witnesses killed.  At the moment, it is estimated that 200,000 to 400,000 people have died of starvation or violence. China has blocked the UN from economic sanctions and now the world is taking China to task.

I think a practical Chinese would see it this way. It's internal affairs and there's nothing the world could do about it. Besides, these African countries have too many poor people anyway, let them kill each other. Besides, it's just business. Oil for weapons, weapons for oil. Fair trade. The catch is that China itself has a large population to deal with. If it has rebels, how else would they react if not the same way.
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This is something I often talk about with my husband and I suppose readers of this blog would be interested in our thought processes. Why are Asian Americans such great achievers?  Are we innately intelligent? From time to time, I ask him to survey his experience at how well college students think in America as he has taught in many places before but he delineated that students in California are totally different breed from students in Washington.  But in any case, he has met many dumb Asians including Chinese, Singaporeans, Malaysians, Koreans, Taiwanese and etc here in Washington (non-Asians are just as dumb up here).  But in California, the majority who could make it to good colleges are smart. However, over his 30 years of experience, he continues to marvel at some of the mainland Chinese, some Vietnamese, some Koreans and most Indians.  But he has also another theory. It depends on which generation immigrants they are.

My husband and I are immigrants. Our children are first generation kids. This is the generation of kids that are top achievers because the parents like us push them harder than anything else. Yep, blame it on the bloody moms who wants to keep bragging about their kids. It is because of her that kids suffer.  But the second generation slacks off. My children may not see the need to push them as much and so with that slackening, the second generation, ie my grandkids, would goof off for a round the world tour before college, or not even finish college. Then the third generation, my great grandkids, may get the squeeze again because their parents realize that they have goofed and they want better life for their kids. So the pressure is turned on again. Guess what happens next? It's cyclical. The next set of kids have it easy again, then by the fifth generation, if you are middle class, you would be middle class. If your parents were rich, you would be rich. If you are a postman, your kids would probably have no more aspirations than being a mail sorter at the post office.
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Today, I have finally found out how many stay at home moms are in the US - a grand total of 5.6 million in 2006.  That is 5.6 million out of 300 million people which is 1.86 percent.  I will have to meet 100 persons before I could meet one stay at home mom. Wow! I'm truly in the minority in the US.

In the meantime, there are a couple of articles about moms opting out and the feminists decrying that moms leaving the workforce is going to harm the women's movement. Man, what's wrong with these feminists. There's only 1.86 percent of us having the luxury to stay at home and they try to make us feel guilty for not joining in the workforce that is intolerant of child raising needs.  These feminists need to look carefully at the statistics before they complain.  Many women could not afford to stay home and they feel guilty for not being able to spend time with kids. Feminists need not worry about us if we become single and could not support ourselves. We have our means. Instead, feminists need to worry about their own kids not making it in school and become burdens of society. In any case, I'm not eager to debate. It's a choice based on values along with economic realities, aspirations, ideals. Why point fingers at one another?
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The Office of the United States Trade Representative is targeting 12 countries for extra scrutiny in the piracy of American movies, music, computer programs and other copyrighted materials: China, Russia, Argentina, Chile, Egypt, India, Israel, Lebanon, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, and Venezuela.  

In this year's Special 301 Report, another 30 countries are included for lower level scrutiny: Belarus, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Hungary, Indonesia, Italy, Jamaica, South Korea, Kuwait, Lithuania, Malaysia, Mexico, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.
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Over last weekend, China has a great display of destroying 42 million pieces of pirated goods and publications showing that they are serious about stamping out piracy. In the meantime, the European Union is open the idea of suing China too as a last resort in anti-piracy case.  But as though these would help, what ires me is that Bill Gates is giving away the Microsoft Student Innovation Suite to the Chinese government which supply computers to students, at the price of US$3.00 each for minimum orders of 10,000 copies.  This package will include the Windows XP Starter Edition operating system, Microsoft Office and Live Mail email software. These packages regularly sell for US$100 and they are trying to give them away cheaply or free as Bill Gates say here to beat the pirated copies at US$1 each.

This is exactly the same case as Hollywood trying to release the Hollywood movies in China first and selling the DVD with features for US$3-5 instead of the US$1 price of pirated goods.

Look, if Hollywood want to give away their DVDs for US$3, I don't really care. But I care if our American kids don't get US$3 package over here in the US. Bill Gates is a rich man and he is vowed by the Chinese engineers and research capabilities of the Chinese Ph.D's.  From the book I read yesterday, The World is Flat, out of Microsofts' UK base, Redmond - US base, and China base, China has the most innovation.  And he thinks the future of the world is in Asia and he seems to more and more forsake America.

Fine, I'll make sure my kids understand which companies care about Americans and create jobs locally rather than exporting them.

In truth, there is a very fine line these days as to where the loyalties of a global company should rest with. Even if the President and CEO is Amercan, the company may be incorporated elsewhere, the manufacturing outsourced all over the world, the CFO Chinese. These companies care only about the bottom line.

Down the road, my ideal for at least one of my kids is that he creates a company that could outsource its jobs to Americans back here in the States much like what JetBlue, the airline,  does, hiring only Utah stay at home moms to do customer service. 

While Bill Gates and many multinational companies believe that globalization is good for America, because the sooner the developing countries catch up, the sooner their wage increase would level making an even playing field with the developed country, I beg to differ.  This would take years just because the population in Asia is tremendous and it will always depress the wage levels. American companies have to protect its own jobs by investing locally R&D, innovation and education. If the government keeps slashing our educational budget, how could we advance? We Asian families are already doing the best we could to brace for the competition from Asia. If even the government doesn't understand the importance of education, what future would there be for our kids.

Posted April 12, 2007:

By now, you should all have heard that US has filed two complaints to World Trade Organization about the rampant piracy of American intellectual property by China. The first U.S. complaint argues that China sets too high a threshold for the value of purloined property before prosecuting the thieves. In China, they would not go after shops selling pirated DVDs, CDs unless it is over 500 units (previously 1000 units).  Oivay...1 unit is still piracy. Why should the world accept 500 units of pirated goods before the Chinese police would move on them?  Who are they protecting? The people who makes money off the pirated goods or the citizens' convenience to buy things cheap and thereby causing losses to overseas artists? The other contends that the Chinese at the same time are far too restrictive on allowing foreign books and movies to be sold in their country.

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I have been reading many books and news about how China and India will overtake us and we Americans will fall behind. Fine. That may happen soon. According to the book The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman, in 7 years, China will have a whole new generation of perfect English college graduates and etc. (I'll highlight his points when I finish his book.)  But basically the later a developing country starts modernizing, the faster it would attain higher levels of sophistication as opposed to the developed nations since the existing infrastructure would try to buck against changes more.

Anyway, I'll dwell on that later on.  But today, let me show you some statistics of internet penetration around the world.
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I don't usually comment on breaking news immediately because sometimes I need time to research on the matter to give you a comprehensive view of things rather than just posting a news link for you. For plain news, you could use any news search engine. But let me talk about the self censorship practices of Google. As you all know by now, Google's Youtube has been blocked by the Thai government because an uploader has created a 44 second clip of a slideshow in which the image of the King of Thailand has been doctored and a pair of legs were put on top of his head. In Thailand, nothing and no one could be above the King. The people reveres him like god.  Thailand was up in arms, the Thai citizens were up in arms about it. Youtube refused to remove the clip because the clip was not in violation of its policy and the spokesman said that it would not assist in implementing censorship. Source However, youtube went ahead to "educate" Thailand how to block one single clip in future. There.  Youtube exercised self-censorship, just like Google did in China.

Of course, Thailand is still fuming mad because Google and the big corporates would assent to self censorship in China but not to a tiny Thailand. After the user eliminated his own clip at youtube, to date, there are another 20 other clips mocking the Thai King.

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This is a good article summarizing the think tank of Washington on why the US has to continue to engage in Asia and why Japan has to be elevated to a strong nation without the knee jerk responses of China and other Asian countries which are wary of Japanese past 60 years ago. The current generation of Japanese has a role to play in Asia to be a stabilizing force to counter China's growing influence. 

And please, let's not conflate the controversy over the true history of Japan's past wartime conduct toward its neighbors (Comfort Women, Rape of Nanking and Yasukuni Shrine controversies) with the issue of Japan's current strategic evolution.

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A member of my forum asked me for some details of China's distortion of their history and I need a place to put these links in as I research on the topic. Not a real posting per se.

Japan Glosses, China Distorts 

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Why We fight by William J. Bennett, the former Secretary of Education during the Ronald Reagan years, was written in response to the 2001 World Trade Center attack and the appalling pacifism of the press, many Congressmen, university faculty and students in promoting peace and negotiations rather than going after the terrorists. Because of the need to be politically correct, America is plunging itself in talk of multi-culturalism and even to the extent of siding with the Muslims that no one could tell a culture that their religion and civilization is not as good as America's.  But Bennett reminded the world that the so called freedom fighters are not fighting for freedom. They were out to terrorize America by hurting civilians. America could negotiate with them if they play by the rules and adhere to what is binding. But if they do not, how else could we respond. 


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Now this got to be the most Asian oriented news in the US for this month. Kenneth Eng, a freelance contributor to a small Asian Week newspaper that has a circulation of about 48,000 in San Francisco wrote a piece called Why I Hate Blacks .  Previously he has written two other pieces but they didn't draw attention as this one. This time, the Asian groups including Leaders of the Asian Law Caucus, Asian American Justice Center, Chinese for Affirmative Action , African American groups decry the piece and even Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, got on the case and Asian Week had to issue a public apology and withdraw the piece from its website. Asian Week is owned by Ted Fang, who bought the San Francisco Examiner 3 years ago from the Hearst Group.

Proof That Whites Inherently Hate Us

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This got to be the hardest thing for a person to admit and come out openly especially if you are a city mayor in the US.  Five hundred voters from Largo, Florida decided that Steve Stanton is no longer fit to represent the city because he wanted to use one year's time to dress up as a woman and try if he would want to do the transexual surgery.  Only the ex-city mayor, an African American, voted for him. The city is now voting for him to leave the job.  In New Zealand, though, a transexual Member of the Parliament has just finished her 7 years service and has resigned and ready for the entertainment industry. Georgina Beye is the first transexual who became a mayor of Wairarapa, New Zealand despite her previous history as a sex worker as a man. Quite a difference, isn't it?

Here are some  video clips of The Rape of Nanjing. I've seen them before in different documentaries so I didn't screen through these few clips. I can't stomach another round of it. But you could see it stirs a lot of anti-Japanese sentiments. This site sells it.

Posted January 28, 2007:
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OMG, I never thought this type of things may happen in the US. Nancy Pelosi, our first female Speaker of the House is sponsoring an amendment to the require grassroot organizations including bloggers with more than 500 readers and who write on policy matters to report to the government 4 times a year or else face civil fines of up to US$200,000 and/or criminal charges including one year jail time.

"Section 220 of S. 1, the lobbying reform bill currently before the Senate, would require grassroots causes, even bloggers, who communicate to 500 or more members of the public on policy matters, to register and report quarterly to Congress the same as the big K Street lobbyists. Section 220 would amend existing lobbying reporting law by creating the most expansive intrusion on First Amendment rights ever. For the first time in history, critics of Congress will need to register and report with Congress itself."

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