Category: Random Stuff

I am not at all familiar with St. Louis so I was wondering if Korean-Americans had opened businesses in the black neighborhoods there like they have in other major cities.  It appears they have which of course has made them targets of the rioters:

The violent protests in Ferguson, Missouri, over a grand jury decision not to indict a white police officer who fatally shot a black teen destroyed two Korean stores.

Among the roughly 20 stores that are run by Korean nationals in Ferguson, two were burned down and another five or six were looted or had their windows broken as of Wednesday, according to the Korean American Association of St. Louis.

The cost of damages has exceeded $2 million.

The stores, most of which sell cell phones and beauty products, were attacked because they are on a road leading to the Ferguson Police Department.

Local police are reportedly blocking that road now, although business owners were recommended to suspend their businesses as people continue to protest the decision over Officer Darren Wilson, who fatally shot 18-year-old Michael Brown in August.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link.

Somebody help, we're running out of ways to stoke violence! pic.twitter.com/3gyTW3G3J6

— John Nolte (@NolteNC) November 26, 2014

Kia unveils X-Men themed Sorento http://t.co/oYpQPzYiUp pic.twitter.com/mOMNXvcSQq

— KEI (@KoreaEconInst) November 21, 2014

A group of prospective Harvard students has filed a lawsuit against the university for discriminating against one minority in favor of another:

The Supreme Court declined to draw a clear line on racial discrimination in university admissions in last year’s Fisher v. University of Texas decision. Now new lawsuits are moving to challenge how far colleges can go in using racial preferences.

A group called Students for Fair Admissions filed lawsuits Monday against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina in federal court. The suits argue that the schools use race preferences to reach a specific racial balance on campus and have failed to abide by the strict scrutiny of racial preferences required by the Supreme Court.

The Harvard challenge concerns what the lawsuit calls a de facto quota on the number of Asian students the school admits. The suit compares its current racial admissions to Harvard’s quotas limiting Jewish students in an earlier era. In both cases, Harvard kept out minorities who would have been admitted based on academic merit.

Over the last eight years Asian students have comprised between 17.6% and 20.7% of students admitted to Harvard. Though the number of Asians applying for admission has increased, the percentage of offers has barely budged. In 1992, 19.1% of Harvard’s admissions offers went to Asian applicants, compared to 25.2% who were admitted to the California Institute of Technology, a school that doesn’t use racial preferences. In 2013 Harvard made 18% of its offers to Asians, while CalTech admitted 42.5% Asian students.

Similar admissions percentages at Harvard have held steady for other racial groups with remarkably little variance. In other words, while schools like Harvard say the goal of racial preferences is to achieve a “critical mass” of minority students, the admissions evidence suggests that the school is reserving pre-rationed pie slices for racial groups.  [Wall Street Journal]

You can read more at the link, but people should be able to get ahead based on merit, but as we all know life is not fair and this situation with Harvard admissions is just another example of this.

#LunarMissionOne is serious about science on crowdfunded mission to the Moon http://t.co/rKQYLDfwFS pic.twitter.com/MffcVTCM5a” via @NatureNews

— neil (@4nks) November 19, 2014

.@timothy_stanley: Matt Taylor's shirt and the day political correctness officially went mad http://t.co/gep6JJuVz7 pic.twitter.com/7XgQQwW2QE

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) November 15, 2014

Via a reader tip comes news that Jesse Jackson is bringing his race hustling enterprise to Silicon Valley:

Civil rights advocate Jesse Jackson brought his campaign for more diversity in Silicon Valley workforces to The Chronicle Editorial Board Wednesday, noting that the racial separation of 50 years ago wasn’t as great as the inequality today. First Google, and then other Silicon Valley firms, released numbers depicting shockingly low racial and gender diversity in their workplaces, stories routinely reported in The Chronicle.

The Rev. Jackson said Silicon Valley companies are operating outside the equal opportunity employment and anti-discrimination laws and should know better. These companies have been created long since those laws were passed, and well after cultural expectations of equal access to jobs had taken root. The most frequent defense from the companies is that these jobs are technically demanding and that there are few blacks or Latinos with the needed skills. “Then why not invest in a plan to produce the engineers you need?” Jackson asks.

Jackson is promoting the idea that Silicon Valley firms, who have billions of dollars in offshore bank accounts that bypass U.S. taxes, could invest some of those funds in education and scholarships to train people of color as programmers and engineers. “Grow your own food, so to speak,” he said.

From Jackson’s view, the workforce should represent the marketplace. If 12 to 20 percent of the technology marketplace is black or brown, then shouldn’t 12 to 20 percent of the technology workforce be black or brown? The companies’ bottom line would benefit from the added value of inclusion, he said. (SF Gate)

You can read more at the link, but I eagerly await Jackson to start a campaign to get more whites and Asians into the NBA to better reflect the population like he wants Silicon Valley to do.

It has been a rough week for commercial space companies:

MOJAVE, Calif. — A winged spaceship designed to take tourists on excursions beyond Earth’s atmosphere exploded during a test flight Friday over the Mojave Desert, killing a pilot in the second fiery setback for commercial space travel in less than a week.
Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo blew apart after being released from a carrier aircraft at high altitude, according to Ken Brown, a photographer who witnessed the explosion.
One pilot was found dead inside the spacecraft, which fell from the sky about 120 miles north of downtown Los Angeles. Another pilot parachuted out and was flown by helicopter to a hospital, Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood. Their names were not released.
The crash area is in the desert north of Mojave Air and Space Port, where the test flight originated. (Associated Press)

You can read more at the link, but this will probably set back commercial space tourism by at least a decade. As we have seen in the development of any space program it is hard to do with many failures. It will be interesting to see if Virgin Galactic can keep getting investment money to support their company after this.

Korea's new KFC Double Down is even more horrifying than the original: http://t.co/R8GH2QwX7W pic.twitter.com/K99aX1eHoU

— Grub Street (@grubstreet) October 23, 2014

For those looking for something to do over the Veteran’s Day weekend, the Imjim Pub is sponsoring a Veteran’s Day Remembrance Ride:

Here are the details:

Saturday 8 November 2014 – Dongducheon
10:30-11:45 Registration Imjin Pub (37.914466, 127.058121)
12:00 – Wheels up – Ride
15:00 (approx) – Dinner, 50/50 Raffle Draw, giveaways at VFW Post 9985
(later) After Party at IMJIN PUB
10USD -or- 10,000KRW per bike (passenger free) – 1x 50/50 raffle ticket
————————–————————–———————–
토요일 2014년 11월 8일 – 동두천
10:30-11:45 등록 @ 임진 펍 ( 37.914466 , 127.058121 )
12시 – 라이드
15시 (대략) – VFW 에서 저녁 식사 , 50/50 복권 추첨 , 경품
(후에) 술집에서 파티 후 임진 펍
모터 사이클 10USD -or- 10,000KRW ( 승객 무료) – 1 배 50/50 복권

You can read more over at this Facebook event page.