Lara Logan: Bomb Raider

Angelina Jolie in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider

I was going to leave the Lara Logan story alone. After all, whatever happened to her, and not all writers are unanimous that she was actually raped, is still an assault and has left her incapacitated for now, and hospitalized. I'm pretty sure, though, that she will bounce back to resume her Lara Logan: Bomb Raider adventure out in the Orient (metaphorically, at least).

I became suspicious of her (actually, I would became suspicious of any female "war" correspondent, blond and pretty, who goes in the midst of war-mongering, sexually frustrated Muslim men) when I started hearing about her personal behavior right out there in the field. Here's what Wikipedia says about her:

Her husband [Joe Burkett] is a U.S. Federal Government defense contractor from Texas, whom she met in Iraq. They had a son in January 2009. Her previous husband, Jason Siemon, was a professional basketball player in the United Kingdom...Joe Burkett's former wife Kimberly Burkett, accused Lara Logan of breaking up their marriage. She was also said to have been courting Michael Ware, another reporter, at the same time as she became involved with Joe Burkett which was said to have resulted in a brawl between the two men.

While the suddenly prudish Wikipedia uses "courting" to describe whatever was going on between Ware and Logan, The New York Post throws out the word "fling" to describes more succinctly what they see. What she actually had was a fling within a fling. Michael Ware is subsequently (consequently?) divorced, as are both Logan and Burkett from their respective spouses, in order to get married to each other. This sounds steamy and romantic, but is as sordid as it gets. I wonder how long this "fling" at (re)marriage will last?

And why isn't Logan at home taking care of her vulnerable toddler, and instead running off ducking bombs? These points are important to consider. We have transferred tremendous responsibility to these people in times of war. We are depending on them to serve us responsibly during difficult, chaotic times. If they cannot do that, then let them set up their own backdrops for dangerous romances. Casablanca might work, but even those protagonists eventually preferred the good guys to the bad ones.

Fake Conservatives

Ever since I deduced that libertarians are very much libertarians at heart (and not the conservatives some claim to be, albeit sporadically), I realized that their libertarian "audience" is so limited that they have to cleverly sell their ideas (and writings) to conservative journals, or subtly downplay their libertarian politics, in order to attract conservative readers.

I've written about this in various posts:

- Peter Brimelow of Vdare fame:
Vdare's Woes
- Ilana Mercer and her articles on conservative sites:
What exactly  is Ilana Mercer?
- Various Canadian "conservatives" who slowly admit that they're libertarians
Where have all the conservatives gone?

There is an interesting discussion at View from the Right after my post "Where have all the conservatives gone", including a response by Canadian writer Kevin Michael Grace. Grace also sent me an email, and I responded. That was the extent of Grace's denials of his libertarian stance, which he never really disproved in either communications.

Here is the email interaction:

Dear Ms. Asrat:

I don't know where you got the idea I am a libertarian, paleo or otherwise. See this. I may be a pessimist, but I am not a nihilist; the biggest influence on my political and social thinking is Hilaire Belloc. As for immigration to my country (Canada), my position is: end it. I see no need for Canada to take in more than, say, 5,000 immigrants a year for the foreseeable future. As for Muslim immigration, my position is: none, ever.

Cordially,

Kevin Michael Grace

Here are the relevant parts of my response, to which he never responded:

I do apologize if I singled you out incorrectly, or unfairly, but this is how I see what's happening. After a prolonged absence, your first article - your comeback article, if I may say so - was on the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Human Rights Commissions. I have written about your article in this post. Surprisingly, I found that your concern over the HRCs and the CHRA was not to disclose their positions on non-discrimination, but to talk about their attempts at censorship - or as you say "self-censorship."

[...]

So, rather than talk about these societal changes, and the historical reasons for the formation of the HRCs and the CHRA, and what fuels them these days which includes high immigration levels, it seems that you preferred to talk about self-censorship as the overriding factor. As I said before, this self-censorship came out of a specific historical and social context. It seems your concern relates to the narrow focus of individual freedoms (of speech, of expression etc.) that libertarians hold dear, rather than to the broader social issues that conservatives try to address, which certainly also includes free speech and expression as part of the whole picture.

The full article, to which Grace responded with his email is: Kevin Michael Grace's Inadequate Take On Section 13 of The Human Rights Commissions.

One of the reasons I took an interest in these writers is because they have a connection to Canada, so I thought they would give me some wise insight into this country. I was pretty much wrong on that, and I'm not even sure how much good they're doing America. (Grace occasionally has his articles published at Vdare, as do Shaidle and Mercer. Mercer is a regular columnist at World Net Daily. Grace has also published in American journals such as Chronicles and The American Spectator).

I have a couple of "letters to the editor" at Vdare (here and here), and I communicated with Mercer for a while, until she her underhanded rude reply to one of my emails which centered around my disagreements on her libertarian politics.

Here is a recent post at VFR discussing Australian blogger Mark Richard's article on the American Right, where Lawrence Auster writes: "...many conservatives are in fact classical liberals or libertarians ." This has been my view for a while now.

Michelle Ma Belle - Revisited

Michelle Obama at the State Dinner for Chinese President Hu Jintao

[Cross-posted at Camera Lucida]

I had vowed not to do anymore fashion pieces on Michelle Obama. But this takes the cake. The dress she wore to the State Dinner for China's President Hu Jintao looks like some kind of modern tied-dye African costume, clumsily cut as though somewhat was "cut happy" with the scissors, and with parts which look like they were assembled together with safety pins. There is that odd asymmetrical, off-the-shoulder look that Obama seems to like so much. And she's holding some kind of miniature shawl (scroll down to the second image) which has no relation, either in design or in proportion, to the rest of the dress. Bloggers (and Drudge) are calling this her tribute to "China Red", but I don't see that, especially with all the black "tie-dye" criss-crossing pattern.

It always surprises me when Obama comes out with her dresses. I can find no way to relate to them, and their strangeness strikes me each time. Perhaps this really is her, unique, sense of dress. But, I will go further, as I have before, that she has nowhere to pull from that will give her good judgment on her choices. She might be the most visual (yet thoroughly ignored) manifestation of the Obama government. A government which bows down, literally, to foreign leaders, channeling something that is not at all an American tradition. In fact, it is so strangely alien, that it could be why people (journalists, bloggers) are stunned into silence by this behavior.

Just like Michelle's odd, culturally unrecognizable, dresses.

The dress was designed by Alexander McQueen's replacement, and long-time design partner, Sarah Burton. McQueen, a flamboyant homosexual, committed suicide in 2010. Burton designs these amorphous gowns with unrecognizable patterns It looks like she takes some rough shape and simply replicates it through mirroring and repeats

Burton was recently featured in January 2011's Vogue (US). The image below is a spread in the magazine. At first glance, the gowns looks impressive, dramatic even. But, fashion magazine buyers (like me, at least) look at details from shoes to buttons. Add to that my experience with textile design, and all I could say was 'This is fluff."


Look at this dress (it easier to work with) from the Paris Fashion Week (via the Los Angeles Times):


There is no discernible pattern, other than dramatic strokes (which look like flames, or a giant flower, but we're still not clear what it is). And I've added a line in the middle where the image has clearly been mirrored on to the other side.

Such design techniques are rudimentary and basic. This is one of the first things I did when I started my studies. Just quickly draw rough brush strokes, and mirror-copy them with the "mirror" angled at ninety, forty-five, etc. degrees.

Burton also seems to channel some kind of ethnic or multicultural sources. Here is a fashion blog Styling Delux who has posted some of Burton's designs. Two of them look like kimono-type gowns, and there is the dress Michelle wore which looks like an elaborate African-style gown. But, even African fashion is more sophisticated than that.

Burns is British. I seem to want to associate her with that British faux-artiste Damien Hirst, and his famous Butterfly Series, which he did with real live (dead) butterflies, which he also elaborated using mirror-imaging techniques. Burns also has a butterfly dress, replete with 3-D butterflies, which I hope are not real.

More Sino-Muscle Flexing

Nobody is writing about this, so my modest blog may as well tackle the taboo topics.

I've recently been repeatedly struck by aggressive Chinese behavior - whether it is subtly carried out like the narrowing in on white males by Chinese women (immigrant or ethnic), by cracks in Chinese mothering techniques by Chinese living in the West (I'm not interested in what Chinese do behind their own borders), and of course the Chinese going where they've never been before, siphoning off water from poor countries, for example, to alleviate their own disastrous policies. I won't even grace Obama's latest bow to Hu Jintao, in Washington, no less.

One of the effects of this wonderful cultural intrusion is that we get all the pagan and heathen superstitions that used to come in (Chinese) factory manufactured strips found in "fortune" cookies now spoken to us in their fuller versions by Chinese sages.

The Chinese don't like death, they don't like funeral parlors, and certainly not hospices. Residents of a Vancouver building are loudly protesting plans to build a hospice near their "million dollar" high rise apartments. They're appealing to (their) cultural taboos to abort this plan.

Here are some quotes from The Province (a British Columbia publication):

- "We cannot have dying people in our backyard," said rally organizer Janet Fan, Wednesday "It’s a cultural taboo to us and we cannot be close to so many dying people. It’s like you open your door and step into a graveyard."

- One resident says: "We believe that people dying outside will bring us bad luck," she added. "I’m very angry and upset. If I had known it was going to be a hospice, I wouldn’t buy it for half the price."

- Another, clutching her toddler son adds: "It’s very disturbing,”"she said. "My kids and I are going to feel so frightened and angry just to think there are dying people so close to us."

- And the this, in a letter addressed to the University Neighborhood Association:

"'Death is the Yin and 'Live' is the Yang,” it read. "If the Yin and Yang are near to each other, 'Death' will bring bad luck, meaning sickness and even death . . . The ghosts of the dead will invade and harass the living."

- The letter said Asians believe that living next to "death" would "lead to failure of business, the loss of money, the break of marriage and family, and the healthy growing up of children will be affected."

The paper compares this "opposition" to the building with other protesters. Namely, a group of students from University of British Columbia who didn't want to tone down their rowdy drunken parties.

Joe Stott, director of Campus and Community Planning, says: "[T]here’s no evidence that a hospice reduces property values.”

This could be a funny Saturday Night Live skit. But it's not that humorous. In the West, dignity is given even at death. Hospices are a dignified way for families to come to terms with a dying relative, and to have him spend the last days of his life in as much comfort (and dignity) as possible. I keep using the work "dignity" but it is not for lack of other words. I've written about the usurpation dignity that Chinese seem to practice. Of course critics will say that I don't have enough evidence, but we do get Chinese women writing quite explicitly about their lives, most recently Amy Chua's memoir, and in the various semi-autobiographical books that Amy Tan has written, showing has the ways that Chinese mothers humiliate their children (daughters, mostly, it seems).

So, I am not surprised that base desires and superstitious beliefs induce these Chinese (notice how all those interviewed, or at least providing their opinion, are women) Vancouver residents to act out inhumanely (this is what I wrote about Chua's treatment of her daughters) towards the dying.

Like the American Renaissance article titles this piece: Another crack in Canada’s multicultural edifice.

Mercer is at it again

Here are the definitive first two paragraphs of Ilana Mercer's post on Jared Lee Loughner:

… Jared Lee Loughner was both fixated on his representative’s imagined failings, and preoccupied with language and its misuse. These elements combined and then combusted in his head.

As a writer who really loves the English language, I am intrigued by the intrusive, persistent thoughts about grammar and illiteracy to have plagued Loughner.

This is what she writes about a mass-murdering schizophrenic, compare him with her love of (which translates later on in the long-winded article, her expertise on) words. Besides the weird analogy, this is a typically smug Mercer statement. I've already discussed Mercer's uninteresting writing style (see references below), but for her to compare it with the ramblings of a schizophrenic seals it all.

Here's another, where she ties in her libertarian, anti-government ideology with the inner-genius of a schizophrenic:

Perhaps, then, it was not speech per se that inflamed Loughner's febrile passions, but, rather, Orwellian speech; lies that belie reality.

And finally:

"Crazies" know right from wrong.

Brilliant, even by Mercer's standards.

----------------------------------------------
Here are more blog posts on Mercer:
- Round-up of the Blogs and Misconceptions About Islam
- Idiot Libertarians - No Scare Quotes This Time
- "Idiot" Libertarians
- Where Have All the Conservatives Gone?
- Mercer as the Nihilistic Usual (Ultimate) Suspect

A Sino-Draconian Mission

This unflattering portrayal of author Amy Chua
is posted in the the British leftist newspaper the Guardian

The paper labels the image with a quote from Chua's book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother:

"The solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child"

Incriminating imagery of a Western-culture denouncing non-white in a leftist newspaper? Chua is too much even for the Guardian.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Cross-posted at Camera Lucida]

I've noticed (and noted) a strange sinophilism going around these days. It doesn't matter if it is a left-wing or a right-wing commentator, the consensus seems to be that the Chinese (culture, at least) has got it right. One of these manifestations is the white male/Chinese female coupling I see all around me, which I've discussed here. In another post I discuss how Janice Stein, a University of Toronto academic who often appears on news shows as a political expert, excuses China's draconian measures towards its own work force by saying "that's the only way things can get done." Such behavior apparently translates down to family interactions, where Amy Chau, a Yale University law professor discloses her harsh intimidation methods to get her daughters to achieve "perfection" in her memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.

I skimmed through a book review of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother in the January 2011 issue of Elle Magazine, but lost interest (or more like rolled my eyes), and stopped reading after the introductory paragraph:

A hyperachieving law prof and author from a cosmopolitan Chinese clan lays out a fearsome child-rearing philosophy.

Another Amy Tan type of book glorifying abusive Chinese mothers, I though.

Steve Sailer, from the anti-immigration website Vdare, which purports to eschew Western values, has posted a blog praising Amy Chau, and her draconian mothering and child-rearing techniques.

Sailer quotes from the New York Times review of Chua's memoire Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother:

“In retrospect, these coaching suggestions seem a bit extreme,” she writes in the book after describing how she once threatened to burn her daughter’s stuffed animals if she did not play a piano composition perfectly. “On the other hand, they were highly effective.”

In interviews, she comes off as unresolved. “I think I pulled back at the right time,” she said. “I do not think there was anything abusive in my house.” Yet, she added, “I stand by a lot of my critiques of Western parenting. I think there’s a lot of questions about how you instill true self-esteem.”

Sailer adds a one-line comment:

One thing you can say for Ms. Chua is that she’s got guts.

Guts to bully and intimidate her children into becoming classical pianists?

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is getting complementary reviews in many other venues.

- The Wall Street Journal ran an excerpt from Chua's book in early January. And allowed her to rebut the many negative comments she got from readers. Rather than write their own review, the editorial group at WSJ simply left the floor open to Chua. This is not a book review, but an underhanded way of giving a book a "pass".

- The reviewer from Macleans magazine from Canada, a spineless Joan Latmer writes, "I can’t think of a better rehab warden than Chua. The smart money’s on Tiger Mother."

- The Globe and Mail's Margaret Wente goes all out and praises non-white, non-Western parenting techniques which border on child abuse. Here's what she says about Andre Agassi's Iranian father training techniques:

Mike Agassi, a first-generation immigrant from Iran, taped Ping-Pong paddles to his son’s hands when he was just a toddler. At 6, Andre was practising four or five hours a day.

Agassi later confessed that he’s always hated tennis “with a dark and secret passion.”

Wente writes about Chua:

Instead of false praise, [Chua] believes in high standards and criticism. She once rejected a hastily scrawled birthday card that one of her daughters had made for her. “This is garbage,” she said. “You can do better.”

The snarky Wente continues:

Cruel? Maybe. But her older daughter, Sophia, has already played at Carnegie Hall. Your children probably haven’t.

Yes, anything to glorify the glorious non-West, and demonize the West, for these leftist Globe and Mail writers.

Chua relaxed her draconian methods and let her younger daughter give up piano for tennis. But, it's not necessarily generosity (or motherly love) that made her cede, but simply that she couldn't squeeze enough talent out of her unobliging daughter. Instead, she seems to have focused her classical-pianist-for-a-daughter needs on the eldest daughter.

But so far, Chua's promising older daughter has only played once at Carnegie Hall, and she's already eighteen. She's placed high in a couple of parochial competitions: second in a piano competition in the Greater Bridgeport Symphony competition for young musicians in 2010, and first at the Music Teachers National Association piano competition in 2006. She is no child prodigy, and might turn out to be a competent pianist, and end up in her mother's alma mater as the next best thing to a performer - a music teacher.

Part of the joy of perfecting something is because one loves it, or is encouraged to love it. Grueling practice sessions, time away from friends and play, and overcoming jittery nerves before performances are then usually worth the effort. I would wager that artists are willing to spend years of financial and social insecurity because they love their craft, and are willing to sacrifice other comforts to express that love. They could not function with a stick waving above their head.

When I was started to study ballet at a young age, I was so scared of my teacher (a Bulgarian communist who would tap my knee with a stick - "your k-nee, Kidist, your k-nee) that I failed miserably and was further humiliated at being removed from a school pageant. Yet later on, while a slightly older girl in the British school system, my teachers commended my grace (I also won a third-place prize at a local, regional competition). Later still, I joined many other dance groups, including a Mexican folk dance group often as a partner to the dance instructor/leader, an American modern dance ensemble where audience members would search for me to give me compliments, and even a belly dance group (I quit that one finding little art in it). I even organized and choreographed small groups for dance performances in college.

I never became a dancer, since I didn't have enough talent, and who knows what other social reasons excluded me from this art (including an emphasis on academics rather than the arts in my family), but I was never that incompetent young girl doing plies at the mercy of a teacher's stick. And many generous teachers instilled in me a love of dance which effaced the memory of the stick, and allowed me to continue to be thrilled by it all my life. I decided to enter an art-related field, and sometimes use music and dance (pattern) analogies to "compose" my work. Relying on that stick would have killed all of that.

Chua's unobliging daughter chose tennis for her second chance at doing something well. It is interesting that the similarity between her music and her sport is not that the fields are related, but that they are very different. Yet, there is an abstract, psychological similarity between the two (or at least the way Lulu Chua interacts with them). Competition seems to be the overriding factor, to "play" and win. Perhaps it was in her nature to be athletically competitive, and piano playing couldn't give her that. But, perhaps her mother's draconian (evil) methods that art is associated with pain, and even hate, simply clinched her decision.

"Youth, Change the World!"

Liberal/Fascist/Elitist Race-baiter Spike Lee

[Cross-posted at Camera Lucida]

I posted recently on Spike Lee's and his wife's foray into children's books with their newly released Giant Steps to Change the World. "Youth" figure high in liberal and fascists ideology, and Lee is no exception. But Lee, like all black elites, is rife with hypocrisy. Liberal elites, like Lee, don't really want for themselves what they pitch to the masses. Their talk about equality is a blatant lie.

Here is what I wrote about liberal elites at Our Changing Landscape:

[Jim] Kalb writes:

[Facism]'s a nice clear system, and it's got some logic behind it, but it doesn't work very well. It was tried and it lost. For that reason, the liberal solution won out.

That solution is a bit more complicated. It starts by noting that all our purposes are equally purposes, and infers that everybody's purposes equally confer value. Each of us is equally able to make things good or bad just by thinking of them as good or bad. That makes each of us in a sense divine. Our will creates moral reality. Instead of the wonder-working leader of fascism you get the divine me of liberalism. It's every man his own Jesus.

So how do liberal leaders get all these equally stationed demi-gods to follow them? It is still sheer will, I would think, of maintaining a semblance of liberal equality, but working with (and secretly ruling with) brute fascistic superiority, through a lot of lying and deceiving.

My post on Lee's children's books discusses his very white-looking "black" wife, yet all of his career and politics is about the evils done to blacks by whites. The book Giant Steps to Change the World is reviewed by its (liberal) publisher as "an inspirational picture book about activism and taking the big steps to set things right." Setting things right really means getting back at whites who've oppressed blacks for so long. And Lee starts the indoctrination of his brigade at pre-school age.

Lee doesn't seem to have done too badly under white oppression, racking in millions from his white oppressors for books (and films) like this, and marrying what really is his (and blacks') epitome of success - a white woman (or the less painfully hypocritical substitute, a white-looking black woman).

From my previous post on Spike Lee:

[J]ust like Hitler's youth brigade, "youth" is a recurring and important category that liberals love to use, as though they are benign, protective adults. Instead, what they are doing is systematically, through schools and various media including children's books, building their army of fascist children, who are trained to be foaming at the mouth, and to destroy then rebuild society according to the gospel of their liberal/fascist parents.

How a Focus on Culture Might Get at Imperceptible Societal Changes Quicker than Focusing Only on Politics

[Cross-posted at my culture blog Camera Lucida]

Politically-oriented magazines like Frontpage Magazine and American Thinker won't accept my "cultural" articles like The Structure of a Perfume: 5th Avenue by Elizabeth Arden, which I posted yesterday, unless I explicitly focus on politics.

I've tried to write purely political pieces since I understand we have an emergency in our hands:

- Muslim numbers in the West are increasing by the day
- Their actions are getting bolder, where they interject, with impunity, their social, legal, cultural and political structures into our Western societies
- Our streets are changing by the minute
- We have Chinese inundating our neighborhoods, arrogantly and loudly proclaiming their presence in their languages
- They are cleverly allowing their women to marry white men (the strange converse is not Chinese men with white women, but I'm seeing more and more of them with dark, black women).
- Chinese/white and Chinese/black will ultimately side against whites, and Western civilization. The reasons are complex, but I've observed this for many years now.
- All other non-white cultural groups will ultimately fight against Western civilization, however much they give a semblance of alliance for now. They realize the risks they're taking, running dry their water source. But they're willing to take the risk.
-Immigration is one of the reasons for this demographic and social change. And even second and third generation non-white immigrants have refused to adapt to the West. They take what they need, pay lip service where necessary, but continue with their determined (often unrecognized, even by them) task of changing the society to fit them.

But, I think the manifestation of these changes creeps into culture and society in imperceptible ways, at least to the layman. I think that such changes precede political articulations and manifestations. That is why I spend so much of my time assessing our culture and society with seemingly frivolous topics like fashion, design, Hollywood films, television, and so on. They show me that standards are being lowered. Hundreds of years of Western culture is being dismantled in the name of equality and multiculturalism. And no-one is immune. Spending thousands of dollars for what one would consider an authentic Christian Dior is really paying designers to play out their destructive fantasies - just look at John Galliano. And finally we have the real thing, Vera Wang, a Chinese-American designer.

Hitler didn't try to change Germany simply with political manipulations. He dug into the German culture, to destroy it. Then Germans became too weak to defend their civilization. We are getting at such a serious juncture in our era with Islam and Muslims specifically, and immigration in general.

We have now become simply numb to Islam's and Immigration's Transformation of our Society and Culture

A Muslim couple was caught in the biggest tax and immigration fraud in Toronto (Mississauga) and Montreal. Through this, around 300 people were given citizenship of permanent residency. All of these fraudulent immigrants are from Egypt. None of the newspapers or news stations dare say that this couple is Muslim, and that the "immigrants" are coming from Muslim countries. This despite the woman clearly dressed in a hijab, as seen on Canada's national news station, CTV. The couple both having Arabic names.

Even Jason Kenney, our infamous Immigration and Citizenship minister, refuses to use the dreaded "M" word, and instead calls them simply "foreign nationals." Here is an excerpt of what he said:

On January 6, 2011, an investigation by the Immigration and Passport and Commercial Crime sections of the RCMP resulted in criminal charges against three individuals who created the appearance that hundreds of individuals living overseas had met the residence obligation required to retain permanent resident status or to obtain Canadian citizenship...

In this investigation alone, 260 files were implicated and five people have obtained Canadian citizenship.

What is much more accurate than fraudulent immigration in describing this pattern is invasion. This is convenient until a critical mass is reached through this "immigration" and violent eradication of non-Muslims could become another strategy. We are now reaching that critical mass where Muslims can start to enforce their system through violent means if necessary, unless the country capitulates "voluntarily" to Islam. I'm still not sure which way the West will go. Jason Kenney's and other officials' statements indicate that our leaders have not understood this strategy. But, liberals hate religion as much as they love multiculturalism, so it is a toss-up if they will cave in and accept Islam "ideologically" (and become targets if they don't convert), or if they will start to eradicate it in order to promote their organized religion-free society. Still, pockets of violence will be eternally inevitable, since Muslims have to eradicate any dissension.

This invasion through immigration (or Al-Hijra), as originally mandated and practiced by Mohammed, is discussed in Islamic scholar Sam Solomon's latest book Modern Day Trojan Horse: Al-Hijra, The Islamic Doctrine of Immigration, Accepting Freedom or Imposing Islam?