A blogger describes how the media effeminizes Asian men and masculinizes black women:

Three major stereotypes – that have come into being in history and have since been reinforced by popular culture – inform the perceptions of beauty in Western culture today, says Nitasha Sharma, an anthropology professor at Northwestern University who researches difference, inequality and racism in Asian-black relations. 

The first stereotype is that black men are aggressive and hyper-masculine – “walking penises” – and Asian women are the perfect wives – docile, submissive, obedient, shy and waiting to be saved, Sharma says. Second, Asian men have been de-sexualized as small and weak brainiacs excelling at math but unable to get the girl, while black women have been seen as too aggressive, independent and outspoken to be proper wives. The third stereotype portrays whites in a position of power and “globally desired,” a key to gaining a higher social status.

Love is not colorblind, Sharma admits. However, to claim that height and shape or symmetries of the face make some races more desirable than others is a “complete baloney,” she says.

If you think of Asian men or black women as less attractive than other races, it is because of you, not because of them, Sharma says. Since the day you were born, different influences on your mind – the bedtime stories your Mom read, the cartoons you saw as kid, the school you went to and the wallpaper on your computer – have come together to create a cohesive image of the world.

Popular culture – movies, TV, cartoons, books – aim to reflect reality and end up reinforcing it as well. “This is not a matter of brainwashing,” Sharma says. “It’s how people make sense of their position in society.” Stereotyping puts people in categories and helps us explain a complex world with oversimplification.

Look at those figures:

On screen, black characters use profanity 89 percent of the time, versus white characters who use profanity 17 percent of the time. Blacks are depicted in physical violence 56 percent of the time, while whites play violent roles just 11 percent of the time, according to Robert Entman and Andrew Rojecki’s 2000 book “The Black Image in the White Mind.”

Blacks are further shown as either lazy or hypersexual, while Asian men, to the extent that they are portrayed at all, are either momma’s boys or effeminate computer dorks with no social skills, Entman says.

“If you can come up with an example [in movies] where an Asian man is shown in a sexual role with a white woman, I’d be shocked. Shocked!” Sharma says.

Asian men normally do not take the romantic lead. During its 15-year run, the NBC show “ER” did not star a single Asian in a leading male role. “Grey’s Anatomy” showed the romances of six white characters – exclusively with other white people – and between a black male, Dr. Preston Burke, and an Asian female, Dr. Cristina Yang. An iPhone 4 FaceTime commercial features three couples – all of them white men video calling either white or Asian female mates. There are countless more examples.”

Updated:

Just to clarify, I do not support the intervention of the central government in the treatment of deaf people, except at the level of raising awareness and smoothing the path of private enterprise. The reason is that once the government starts creating programs, the programs inevitably turn into schemes and boondoggles for preferred contractors. Kickbacks enter the picture and costs rise. Private efforts are diverted elsewhere, because of the appearance that “something is being done.”

Activists, instead of focusing on reducing the problem, become comfortable with it, because it becomes a source of income and prestige. Bureaucratic creep and empire-building take over.

From Project Deaf India:

As reported by WHO, there are about 250-300 million deaf people in this world, 2/3 of them live in the underdeveloped nations, of these India has the largest share.

From a recent report in the India’s leading daily newspaper, The Times of India, Jan 23, 2007;

“That one out of twelve (1/12) persons in India has hearing loss. The problem is receiving political attention. The health ministry has launched its project to focus on The Prevention and Early diagnosis of deafness and not the least, treatment of ear infections and other diseases causing hearing loss ………”

And more below about one doctor’s fight against India’s epidemic of hearing loss:

On a 1998 visit to India, from which Rotarian Desai emigrated nearly a half century ago, he read a newspaper article about the discovery of the so-called “deaf village.” He learned that India has one of the highest rates of deafness in the world. Most of the deaf are illiterate and uneducated. Discrimination is rampant.

He began to wonder if he could give India’s deaf children the same opportunities for education and employment that his daughter had received. “Why can’t I bring more Anjalis into the world?” he asked himself.

Almost immediately upon returning home, he launched Project Deaf India. The first phase, a $40,000 project funded partly by a Matching Grant, provided a mobile detection unit and audiometer for early diagnosis of deafness, hearing aids for deaf children, training for local teachers in the Total Communication System of deaf education, and an electronic microscope that enables a rural hospital to conduct corrective surgery on deaf patients.

The project quickly drew interest. O.P. Vaish, RI director; and T. Ramesh U. Pai, past RI director, have been instrumental in supporting Project Deaf India, and six other California clubs have joined as sponsors.

In 1999, a Grant for Rotary Volunteers paid for two teachers from Gallaudet University to provide instruction in sign language to children and their families in Mysore for three months. Few deaf people in India know sign language, both because of a lack of funds and because of logistical problems-India has 38 different languages. Dr. Desai is promoting the use of English as a universal sign language in India. To that end, he also arranged for a third Rotary Volunteers grant from January to March 2001. The grant paid for the head of a prominent school for the deaf in New Mexico, USA, to explore the possibility of teaching American Sign Language and computer skills in India.

Last August, the group received a Matching Grant to assist the “deaf village.” The $20,000 project, funded in partnership with Dr. Desai’s club and the Rotary Club of Hubli Mid-Town, supplied three subterranean wells and a water distribution system. The Rotarians also helped set up monthly health clinics, and supply multivitamins and hearing aids. In addition, they have reduced the incidence of ear infections in the village by curbing a tribal practice of inserting tainted coconut oil in the infants’ ears to prevent “leaking ear,” which generally precedes deafness in the village.

The NIH is still investigating the exact cause of the extraordinarily high rate of deafness in the village. It is likely that malnutrition, heredity, cultural habits and a contaminated water supply all play a role. The local people, however, call it “God’s curse.”

“It is believed there are many more deaf villages hidden in the forests of India,” Dr. Desai says. And just as these villages are overlooked by the rest of society, so, too, are most of the deaf in India.

The unemployment rate is about 50 percent for the hearing impaired. “Deafness is still considered a stigma in India,” he says. “Deaf children are discarded and sent to poorly supported government schools. The schools are old, and the children are taught alongside the mentally handicapped. A large number of deaf adults are beggars, and most of the rest are doing some sort of menial job.”\

 

 

From ActivistPost:

The TSA recently announced they will require a special driver’s license to board domestic flights by 2016.

These ‘Real IDs’ will have already performed extensive background checks on everyone who receives them and will feature stars and other markings to indicate good behavior. No word on markings for troublemakers.

It seems similar to how a scarlet letter was used to indicate adulterers in Puritan societies, or how the Jews in Nazi Germany were forced to wear yellow badges in public so they could be immediately recognized by authorities.

Real IDs are referred to as enhanced IDs and they also reportedly contain biometric security features and RFID chips. Since its inception, civil liberties advocates have had concerns that those without these intrusive new IDs will be excluded from basic human rights like working or traveling.

Rand Paul’s media director cautions antiwar critics not to blame the Chris Kyles of the world for the cynicism and self-interest of the governing class:

” Watching “American Sniper,” I imagined what I would have done if I found myself in the same situation. I really don’t know. My current political beliefs aside—senator and Vietnam veteran Jim Webb once called the battlefield the most apolitical environment he’s ever experienced—I am not confident my behavior or attitude would have been different from Kyle’s.

Kyle, like many Americans, wants to believe his government is right but becomes more confused as the war wears on. He joined the military to do his duty and serve his country. His certainty dampens and then deteriorates, as does his mental state while his family life lies in tatters.

Chris Kyle wasn’t alone. The following is a private discussion with a woman who generally holds antiwar views that helps shed light on what many military members and their families have gone through post 9/11. She wished to remain anonymous and this is used with her permission:

My brother did five tours between Iraq and Afghanistan. He says he did a lot of things we know he didn’t do, and suffers from insane PTSD to the point that he and I hardly speak and when we do he’s irrational to the point of distraction. But he’ll tell you some crazy stories, has some serious violence issues, and probably could be classified as the same type of “jerk, liar, and murderer” that Chris Kyle is accused of being. These guys come back messed the hell up. Some figure shit out, others don’t. Sometimes the bragging is their way of dealing or staying numb or hiding. I’ll pass on making judgment because I sure as hell wouldn’t be able to handle what they went through and I hope one day my brother returns to a piece of who he was before.

How many U.S. military members and their families see their own struggles reflected in the saga of Chris Kyle?

War critics who now attack Kyle and arguably, by extension, the U.S. military, don’t sound much different than hawks who revel in casting all Middle Easterners in the worst possible light. There is an ugly crudeness to being anti-Muslim. The same can be true of being anti-military too.

Many war critics are careful to explain the context of anti-American sentiment made by some in the Arab world, that certain U.S. policies naturally provoke emotion and extreme rhetoric. These critics should approach Kyle and some of his controversial statements with the same depth, consideration, and judgment.

Being antiwar can, and should, also mean being pro-soldier. “American Sniper” should be instructive in this regard, despite attempts by left and right to see only what suits their ideological purposes. Director Clint Eastwood says his movie makes “the biggest antiwar statement any film can.”

Ultimately, “American Sniper” is about what the Iraq War did to Chris Kyle and his family. He wasn’t just some cocksure cartoon. He was a man. And he was a mess.”

The New York Post  and The Washington Post  state that the Kremlin-owned news agency linked to the alleged Russian spy-ring (busted by New York’s grandstanding DA, Preetinder Singh Bharara) is TASS.

It’s not Russia Today, as The Daily Beast insinuated a few days ago, in what seems to have been a desperate effort to smear RT (and ZeroHedge, EPJ) contributor, Bob English.

See my earlier post:

“Bob English: I Am Not A Spy.”

Apparently, The Daily Beast, a popular liberal internet journal, has insinuated that Bob English, a contributor at EconomicPolicyJournal, ZeroHedge, and Russia Today, is  a Russian spy…

or linked to a Russian spy ring….

or  once formulated questions like a Russian spy …

or formulated questions that struck the writers at the Daily Beast as questions that – were they Russian spies – they might have asked..

Or…..well, The Beast isn’t too clear what exactly they’re claiming English is.

Which is very convenient, because it’s tres difficile to deny or refute  a claim you can’t really grasp head or tail of.

Still,  I’m all agog.

D’you mean to say that commenting at EPJ, I might have been rubbing shoulders with a bona-fide SVR (foreign intelligence) operative?

The following exchange was back in 2011, at the start of the Occupy Wall Street operation, when Bob’s career as a spy (sarcasm alert!) was dithering around so much it left him time to post long messages at EPJ:

• Reply
• 
  Lila RajivaOctober 18, 2011 at 9:31 AM

  @Bob English

  I think a French court recently upheld a conviction against Soros. Is there any way to leverage that in the US?

  Reply
• 
  Lila RajivaOctober 18, 2011 at 9:32 AM

  Ellen Brown is for the Toobin Tax…
  She should rethink this, with this information out there.

  Reply
• 
  Bob EnglishOctober 18, 2011 at 10:04 AM

  Nice usage of the word “leverage”, Lila. :->

  Soros is officially out of the trading business (but not really). He’s positioned himself against the big banks and has the activist state AG’s on his side. Who’s going to attack him? Holder? He has his own major problems and can’t afford it. The way to kick Soros in the shin is to take out Schneiderman–a la Spitzer. Unlikely to happen though. Wall St doesn’t have the clout or hootzpah it did in those days.

  I think Soros could come out of the global reset as The Big Winner. It’s really amazing to watch as it unfolds.”

   

And look here, the dastardly editor of EPJ, Bob Wenzel even lists me along with the alleged spymaster in an even more dastardly ring …..of anti-Krugmanites:

And there you have it, very poorly argued comments from the Krugmanites. A really sad group. I’ll match up the EPJ commenters over Krugmanites, any day. I’ll take, Bob Murphy, Bob English, Richard Dale Fitzgerald, Botie, Joe Nelson, Taylor Conant, Hans Palmstierna, Michael Labeit,, Andre Grillon, Joesph Fetz, Melvin Megawitz, Iris Mack, Kaarel Tamm, Christopher Kozlowski, Lila Rajiva, Capn Mike, Vviresh Amin, Zach Bush, Jaison De Montalegre, deft, Skip Oliva, Adam Munter, JFF and many, many more, over the Krugmanites any day

Good Lord.

The dangers I run on this blog…

Getting back to mother-ship Earth, Bob English has denied the rumor/innuendo/sliming/character-assassination  stoutly at EPJ, to wit:

For the record, I, Bob English, am not a spy for the Russian government (or any other).

Monday, Federal prosecutors levied criminal charges against Evgeny Buryakov, one of three Russians alleged to have engaged in espionage against the US.  Several media outlets reported the story, but Shane Harris and M.L. Nestel at The Daily Beast jumped through hoops in a vain attempt to link me and my former employer, RTTV America, to the conspiracy. “

Of course, I needn’t tell Mr. English that any statement beginning “I am not a spy” has about the same ring of conviction to the average ear  as “I am not a crook”.….as Richard Nixon found to his grief.

This is the nature of smearing on the web.

Unless you have a large media presence and hordes of fans or paid hacks to counter the spin, nothing you say can actually undo the damage. It’s more likely to make it worse. That’s been my own dismal experience.

I should add here that I know nothing whatsoever about Bob English (if that is his name) beyond what I read from his pen.

I have never met or spoken to this person, outside the comment section at EPJ.

For aught I know, he  is Putin’s right-hand man and took notes directly from Aldrich Ames.

But since I’ve had many more exchanges with the late Alexander Cockburn (CIA),  Gordon Duff (Military Intelligence), various Bazaar  Inc. (guess who?)  affiliates (some almost certainly working with intelligence),  various blog editors and owners  whom I shall not name (whom I suspect of being Pakistani, Indian, Russian or other intelligence operatives), at least one out-of-control CIA station chief (or near-abouts), and a host of sayanim, hasbara agents, agents provocateurs, trolls, and paid bashers who have plastered their admiration of me all over the net, I’m not about to pass out with worry.

Welcome to virtual reality.

When the entire web is the field of espionage and brain-washing (chiefly by the American, British, and Israeli governments), much of it done via reputable establishment mouth-pieces, corporations, government-funded software programs, spyware, and robots; when foreign lobbyists openly bribe members of Congress for “access”; when any venue of international diplomacy is riddled with bugs and cameras;  when confidential information is passed along in the halls of power like birthday cake; the fact that some writer somewhere echoed some suspected spy’s line of questioning strikes me as underwhelming in the extreme, even if proved to the hilt.

Unproven, it’s just another shade of yellow (belly) journalism.

I am not a purist.

There are too many disinformation agents, intelligence operatives, propagandists, and plain yarn-spinners mixed into the alternative blogs for me to restrict my reposting only to the 100 percent kosher authors.

Which is another way of saying that there isn’t too much in the blogosphere that is 100 percent kosher.

The ones that are pure as mother’s milk are often so tied into knots by ideology or by  habit that they cannot give you compelling interpretations or revealing facts.

That includes all those earnest commies and gender-maniacs who can twist any event into a preformed story-line ending in a rah-rah-rah for their home team.

Then there are the ivory-tower munchkins, too sheltered from reality to even recognize it, let alone shape it.

The ones who do have a grasp, do have the connections, and do have the inside scoop, of course, come tied to the apron-strings of intelligence.

That is, by and large, the way the world works.

So what does a blogger do?

I can be a purist and just quote myself, because I trust no one and nothing else.

Or, I can be a bit smarter and post things from all over the map, as long as the post itself can stand on its own merits.

And that is what I do, regardless of whether the author has slipped up somewhere else, thrown in a pinch of garam masala into a bland tale, regurgitated mainstream cliches, covered his a**, or otherwise been less than a perfect truth-teller.

It’s no secret that conspiracy sites like Alex Jones, Jeff Rense,  Henry Makow, Gordon Duff, many 9-11  sites, and many like them, are rife with disinformation.

Why wouldn’t they be?

Even near-mainstream figures (Seymour Hersh or Noam Chomsky, for example) are laden with disinformation.

Intelligence has a huge budget and dozens of branches, not all at the base of the tree.

It doesn’t mean that the suspect writers don’t also get some things right sometimes.

It doesn’t mean that they can’t voice convincing, powerful, passionate, real opinions.

They can and they do.

And when they do, I will repost their pieces, with suitable caveats.

If there is nothing wrong in them, I will repost  without apology.

As I said, I am not a purist.

In this or in anything else.

Brandon Turbeville at GlobalResearch.ca:

“Kyle seemed to enjoy his torture of the Iraqi people boasting about his number of kills and having a great time chasing them with remote controlled hummers as they screamed, presumably thinking it was some kind of weapon being aimed at them.

Kyle also boasted of his ability to punch cattle so hard back home that he twice broke his hand. It should be noted that, abusing animals, of course, is one indicator of a psychopath.

After his stint in the US military, Kyle moved on to more lucrative pastures – the private sphere of war profiteering. Becoming the president of Craft International, a military tactical firm working with both the US military and law enforcement, Kyle continued to benefit off the wholesale slaughter of innocent people overseas and the increased police state here at home.

War profiteering was not enough, however, as Kyle was then turned loose as propagandist by erroneously claiming that he had once been in a bar fight with Jesse Ventura, whom Kyle claimed had insinuated he was happy about the death of Navy SEALs. Kyle claimed that he became angry with Ventura and punched him in the face. Ventura had been a vocal critic of the war in Iraq and painting him as a heartless criminal that rejoiced in the death of American soldiers served to denigrate both Ventura and other critics of the war. Ventura subsequently sued Kyle, but Kyle was killed before the court case was resolved. Ventura was then painted as a heartless troop-hater that sued a poor soldier’s widow. It cannot be overlooked that Ventura won the case and was awarded $1.8 million by a federal jury.

Now, with the release of American Sniper, Kyle is being portrayed as not only a victim of Ventura, but a genuine hero who exuded honor in his actions that were allegedly solely designed to protect Americans and the lives of his “brothers.”

But Kyle’s representation in the media is not only inaccurate, it is disgraceful.

Kyle was bloodthirsty. He was a murderer. And he was proud of his actions.

But Kyle has now become a symbol of “supporting the troops.” With the use of liberal blowhards like Michael Moore as the opposition, the die has been cast – you either love the troops and are a conservative or you hate them and are a liberal. In the mainstream media and, thus, in the minds of the vast majority of the American public, there is no in between and there is certainly no independent thought.

To see such a murderer glorified by the mass media is nothing new. What is truly disgusting, however, is the reaction given to those who dare criticize the new Christ of killing. The complete rejection and borderline violent reaction to anything that resembles a hesitation to rush to war in his country is both frightening and extremely dangerous.

Much of this reaction has come from blowhard reactionaries and entertainment-based commentators. Yet, many average Americans have fallen prey to the culture of militarism and pro-war propaganda to the point that American Sniper has now become akin to what the Passion of the Christ was for Christians. Americans, so overcome with their worship of militarism and so devoid of the ability to tell fact from fiction are now reportedly standing up and giving ovations when the fictional Kyle kills the “bad guy” of the movie.

It is this grouping of individuals who have been the most vocal in their support for a war based on proven lies and virtually every armed conflict that bankers, corporate interests, and the US government have been involved in as well as those in which it may become involved in  the future…

America’s priorities are entirely skewed. Years of Hollywood propaganda and oligarchical domination have seen to it that certain things are not discussed, people are separated from one another, and dialogue is always stopped short. When the United States is done being used as a battering ram for the world oligarchy, its militarism will come back to haunt it. It has no other choice. It has been the same with every empire..””

UPDATE (JAN 30)

Since I posted this, I’ve had time to go and actually watch a few videos of interviews with Chris Kyle and in all honesty I feel that the label “psychopath,” which I thought was plausible from his excerpted writing, is just not right.

Psychopaths tend to be narcissistic people. The Chris Kyle I saw on those videos came off as a modest and likeable person.

So I’m going to withdraw the label for now.

There’s something amiss here and Mr. Kyle just might not be the monster that at first glance  some of his words (and actions) might make him.

I will be posting more on this,   but for now, I will let the piece stand as it is, along with this note.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

At Alternet, via Salon, Syracuse U. student Zaid Jilani dissects the lies propagated by director Clint Eastwood in his new box-office hit, “American Sniper.”

The movie lionizes the crack  sniper Chris Kyle as a heroic, conflicted, All-American hunter of evil “rag-heads.”

The real Kyle, on the other hand, seems to have been a psychopath in love with killing and even more in love with his image as a killer:

The film American Sniper, based on the story of the late Navy Seal Chris Kyle, is a box office hit, setting records for an R-rated film released in January. Yet the film, the autobiography of the same name, and the reputation of Chris Kyle are all built on a set of half-truths, myths and outright lies that Hollywood didn’t see fit to clear up.

Here are seven lies about Chris Kyle and the story that director Clint Eastwood is telling:

1. The Film Suggests the Iraq War Was In Response To 9/11: One way to get audiences to unambiguously support Kyle’s actions in the film is to believe he’s there to avenge the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The movie cuts from Kyle watching footage of the attacks to him serving in Iraq, implying there is some link between the two.

2. The Film Invents a Terrorist Sniper Who Works For Multiple Opposing Factions: Kyle’s primary antagonist in the film is a sniper named Mustafa. Mustafa is mentioned in a single paragraph in Kyle’s book, but the movie blows him up into an ever-present figure and Syrian Olympic medal winner who fights for both Sunni insurgents in Fallujah and the Shia Madhi army.

3. The Film Portrays Chris Kyle as Tormented By His Actions: Multiple scenes in the movie portray Kyle as haunted by his service. One of the film’s earliest reviews praised it for showing the “emotional torment of so many military men and women.” But that torment is completely absent from the book the film is based on. In the book, Kyle refers to everyone he fought as “savage, despicable” evil. He writes, “I only wish I had killed more.” He also writes, “I loved what I did. I still do. If circumstances were different – if my family didn’t need me – I’d be back in a heartbeat. I’m not lying or exaggerating to say it was fun. I had the time of my life being a SEAL.” On an appearance on Conan O’Brien’s show he laughs about accidentally shooting an Iraqi insurgent. He once told a military investigator that he doesn’t “shoot people with Korans. I’d like to, but I don’t.”