Jena 6 rally and vigil

This Thursday (9/27), there will be a rally/vigil/meeting on Middletown's South Green (if you're going down Church Street, it's the big grassy area right before Main St. with a monument and some apple trees). Wesleyan students will be meeting at 4:45 in front of Olin to walk down together. The vigil is from 5-6. Bring signs, ideas, and everyone you know. This is a chance to work together with Middletown folks on an issue that we all feel strongly about, and they're counting on us to show up in numbers.

Details on the Jena 6 case here.

Date: Thursday, September 27th
Time: 4:45pm
Venue: In front of Olin

Maybe China's been reading some Orwell?

Toxic children's toys, dangerous seafood, defective tires, poisonous medicine, incredible amounts of pollution, thousands of shady executions. They've killed your pets. They've got some weird hybrid of Communism and capitalism and a government rife with corruption. They're propping up unstable governments in Africa in exchange for their natural resources. And now they're tracking everything about you. Or, rather, everything about the Chinese in Shenzhen:

Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips [...] will be issued to most citizens.

Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China’s controversial “one child” policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card.

Woohoo, civil rights! Personal freedom! Personal privacy! Communism!

Here's to hoping the Justice Department (or P-Safe) doesn't think this experiment is a good idea.