Quote:US soldier ordered to remove Facebook video

12:38 PM Tuesday May 25, 2010



An Alaska-based soldier is under investigation for allegedly posting a video on his Facebook site showing [color="#0000FF"]Iraqi children being taunted.



A soldier's voice on the 30-second video asks two young boys in English if they're gay and if they would grow up to be terrorists. The boys did not appear to understand the questions.[/color]



Army spokesman Major Bill Coppernoll says Robert A. Rodriguez was ordered to remove the video from his site. It wasn't immediately clear if Rodriguez, who is stationed at Fort Wainwright in Fairbanks, shot the video or just posted it.



Coppernoll says the Army will take appropriate action based on its investigation.



He says the video is "disgraceful and clearly inconsistent" with standards expected of every soldier.

[color="#800080"](What standards does Coppernoll mean? More than just this one American soldier of the video has been taking the US army slogan "Be all that you can be" to heart. Being sadistic to children seems to be but another of the US armed forces' Standard Operating Procedures. Seems to be quite consistent with their raping little 12-or-so years old Japanese girls with diplomatic imm/punity - see Chalmers Johns(t)on's book -, raping pretty captured Vietnamese bystanders before IIRC off-ing them (yet more US Army SOP - see article on modelminority.com), etc etc...)[/color]

- AP

Quote:Haley, Jindal and America's new religious litmus test



Last night's Republican primary runoff in South Carolina plausibly clears the way for Nikki Haley to join Bobby Jindal as governors with an epochal distinction: two Indian Americans leading two Southern states. Belonging to a community that makes up less than a percentage of the U.S. population, their accomplishment is momentous, even more so because Haley would be the first female governor of her state. Coupled with President Obama's own astounding win last year--he carried North Carolina, Virginia and Florida--a credible argument could be made that in politics, at least, a post-racial South is emerging Haley endured ludicrous, unsubstantiated allegations of infidelity, and she and Jindal both faced down racial slurs and epithets on their road to victory. But listen to the buzz around Haley's improbable rise and Jindal's electoral success, and what is abundantly clear is that a politically post-racial America does not mean that a pluralistic America has emerged.



As any observer knows by now, say what you will about Haley and Jindal, but don't say that they are not Christian. Ask about the Dharma religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism) of their childhood and their parents--Hinduism for Jindal and Sikhism for Haley--and be referred to Haley's website where she writes of "living for Christ" or Jindal's own striking testimonial on his conversion to Catholicism.



This year, eight Indian Americans, most of whom are Hindu, are running for national or statewide office--a record number--and the questions of faith become increasingly urgent. The media storyline--"Haley and Jindal triumph despite questions about their faith"-- leaves millions of America's adherents of Dharma faiths stone cold: What is so miserably wrong and unelectable in being a Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist or Jain?



American Muslims faced this cruel non-acceptance, of course, as President Obama's keepers, forced to combat disingenuous allegations that he might be a Muslim, put his church-going Christian credentials front and center. The pigment of Obama's, Jindal's or Haley's skin does not seem to matter goes the popular narrative, but Christian faith is a foregone criterion for electability. A religious litmus test is clearly in play.



Of course, demonstrations of faith are now de rigueur for today's politicians. From Sarah Palin's channeling of the church lady to U.S. Rep. John Shimkus's (R-Ill.) daily Bible tweets, and from South Carolina Republican-dominated legislature's failed sponsorship of a Christian themed license plate to Texas Governor Rick Perry's Supreme Court challenge to display the Ten Commandments on state capitol grounds, too many politicians are using their bully pulpits to bully those of other faiths.



When one family member so publicly repudiates his or her religion, especially when culture, religion and traditions are as intertwined as they are for Dharma faiths, painful conflicts arise within families--even communities. Many Hindus and Sikhs may question why Jindal's and Haley's disavowals need be so public and unflinching. Religious conversion should be a personal sojourn, but Jindal's and Haley's capitulation to an evangelical insistence on public religiosity and rejection of their ancestral faiths are galling to many.



Six years ago when Haley first won a state legislature seat in South Carolina, she spoke of a more syncretic embrace of religion saying that her family attended both Sikh services and those in her husband's Methodist church. Under the withering glare of the far-right mandates of South Carolina politics, her Christianity took a recent hard turn with an emphatically evangelical Christian dialect. She gets a perfect rating from anti-abortion groups, she advocates deportation of illegal immigrants--a Tea Party darling winning a coveted Palin endorsement.



Jindal's embrace of Catholicism, meanwhile, occurred in high school, even as his parents were leaders of a nascent Hindu community in Baton Rouge in the 1980's. In the news today for his opposition to a deep-water drilling moratorium, he stands to the right of most Americans in his embrace of conservative principles similar to Haley's, and even in his advocacy of Intelligent Design promoted by the evangelical movement in his state's schools.



The Indian American community may be politically mature enough to realize that Indian Americans in high office necessarily serve their constituency and not the ethnic community from whence they came. But the need to "prove" religious fidelity can be unnerving. In 2007, when 358 Christian, Jewish and Muslim members of the U.S. House passed a non-binding resolution recognizing the historical significance of the Hindu and Sikh festival of Diwali, Jindal, then a member of the House, was one of only a handful of legislators that publicly abstained.



Jindal and Haley, as brilliant and dynamic trailblazers, have thrown open the doors to political office, laying waste to minefields of ethnic slurs and perverse allegations that naysayers put in their way. Race is not an impediment to high office, and that is something to celebrate, no doubt. But in their public remonstrations of their parent's faiths, Jindal and Haley tell well over three million Hindu and Sikh Americans that their time has not yet come as people of faith. And in their absolute denial of their religious heritage, they deny something far greater: a society that privileges pluralism, that no one religion has the monopoly on Truth, and that Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Pagans, agnostics and atheists may invest differently towards the afterlife, but can live in this life with all of the humanity, generosity and yes, frailty of any of those that presume to lead our states or nation today.



Views expressed here are the personal views of Dr. Aseem Shukla, and do not necessarily represent those of the University of Minnesota or Hindu American Foundation.

Quote:

Who are white people and where did they come from? Elementary questions with elusive, contradictory, and complicated answers set historian Painter's inquiry into motion. From notions of whiteness in Greek literature to the changing nature of white identity in direct response to Malcolm X and his black power successors, Painter's wide-ranging response is a who's who of racial thinkers and a synoptic guide to their work. Her commodious history of an idea accommodates Caesar; Saint Patrick, history's most famous British slave of the early medieval period; Madame de Staël; and Emerson, the philosopher king of American white race theory. Painter (Sojourner Truth) reviews the diverse cast in their intellectual milieus, linking them to one another across time and language barriers. Conceptions of beauty (ideals of white beauty [became] firmly embedded in the science of race), social science research, and persistent North/South stereotypes prove relevant to defining whiteness. What we can see, the author observes, depends heavily on what our culture has trained us to look for. For the variable, changing, and often capricious definition of whiteness, Painter offers a kaleidoscopic lens.



Her latest selection examines the history of “whiteness” as a racial category and rhetorical weapon: who is considered to be “white,” who is not, what such distinctions mean, and how notions of whiteness have morphed over time in response to shifting demographics, aesthetic tastes, and political exigencies. After a brief look at how the ancients conceptualized the differences between European peoples, Painter focuses primarily on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There, the artistic idealization of beautiful white slaves from the Caucasus combined with German Romantic racial theories and lots of spurious science to construct an ideology of white superiority which, picked up by Ralph Waldo Emerson and other race-obsessed American intellectuals, quickly became an essential component of the nation’s uniquely racialized discourse about who could be considered an American.



The book's best sections deal with the development of racial attitudes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Europeans, seeing themselves newly dominant over the rest of the world, attempted to find some biological rationale for their preeminence. Painter's descriptions of the bizarre "scientific" theories dealing with hair texture, skull sizes and shapes, height, and so on would be laughably absurd if those same theories had not led to the development of eugenics in the late nineteenth century. In turn eugenics in the twentieth century led to forceable sterilization of the "unfit" and other horrors, culminating in the Holocaust.



Painter writes well, with an occasional wry grimace and shake of the head. Her last chapter is one of the best, for here she gives a summary of the current state of "whiteness" in a world where DNA analysis and the mapping of the human genome have so muddied the waters that one wishes J.F. Blumenbach, William Z. Ripley, and other "scientists" who tried so hard to identify one race as superior to all others could be alive to see their work brought to naught.



At first blush readers may be a bit off-put at a black woman writing a history of white people and the usual questions are likely to arise. But as a historian it is Nell Irvin Painter's job to transcend identities such as race and gender and to remain objective about her subject matter. There are many compelling arguments about the relative pros and cons of writing about a part of your identity or about an identity other than your own. Those arguments aside, Painter sets an ambitious goal of writing a history on the construct of the white race; the who, what, where, when, why and how of its origins, its evolution and change over time, and its greater societal significance and meaning to our present day and age. Rather than an angry diatribe against racism Painter seeks to provide a narrative of the evolution of white identity.



Painter begins in antiquity, a time in which race was not important so much as place; where you were from, a time of social hierarchy and class more so than racial consciousness. The disturbing truth is that class served more to define one's status and place than ethnicity or race for many centuries. Slavery, the great sin of any age, was racially colorblind in antiquity, and even in colonial America it was initially colorblind if indentured servitude is included. Painter guides readers through the evolution and construct of whiteness leading up to the harsh realities of the 19th Century, a time where whiteness took on further nuances, differences, and distinctions owing to increased immigration. It was a time when the Irish, Italians, Jews, and "others" were denigrated for their otherness; for not fitting the Anglo-Saxon ideal of whiteness. These ideas and concepts linger in American consciousness and inform public policy and public opinion for nearly a century, resulting in some of the most egregious sins of the republic, including the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, the exclusion of Asians from immigration, anti-Semitism and more. By the time of the Civil Rights Movement whites felt increasingly under attack, becoming the "other" in their own society. If Malcolm X and James Brown could exhort blacks to proclaim "Say it loud! I'm black and proud!" then why couldn't whites revel in their own racial pride? And here's where it gets interesting. Painter's argument is that a nation, founded by slaveholders with justification for its class system based upon the inherent inferiority of black people a foundational belief, must reach some form of reassessment of what it should be once slavery has ended. That process has hot yet fully occurred in the United States and until such a time remains unfinished business for us to move forward.



The end result is thought-provoking, certainly controversial, and more into the realm of history of ideas than most lay people will be comfortable with. Many will undoubtedly be offended by what Painter has to say, but her point is not to provide a hagiography of a race, but to examine the larger meanings of what race is, what it means, and how it shapes us as a people and a society. The results are meant to be unsettling and to initiate further thought, contemplation and introspection. To that end Painter succeeds wonderfully. This is meant to be a challenging and polarizing book and quite honestly those who make it through will be rewarded for it. Undoubtedly many will find points to contend and debate, but they will miss the larger argument.

Quote:Last year, two Princeton sociologists, Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford, published a book-length study of admissions and affirmative action at eight highly selective colleges and universities. Unsurprisingly, they found that the admissions process seemed to favor black and Hispanic applicants, while whites and Asians needed higher grades and SAT scores to get in. But what was striking, as Russell K. Nieli pointed out last week on the conservative Web site Minding the Campus, was which whites were most disadvantaged by the process: the downscale, the rural and the working-class.



This was particularly pronounced among the private colleges in the study. For minority applicants, the lower a family’s socioeconomic position, the more likely the student was to be admitted. For whites, though, it was the reverse. An upper-middle-class white applicant was three times more likely to be admitted than a lower-class white with similar qualifications.



This may be a money-saving tactic. In a footnote, Espenshade and Radford suggest that these institutions, conscious of their mandate to be multiethnic, may reserve their financial aid dollars “for students who will help them look good on their numbers of minority students,” leaving little room to admit financially strapped whites.



But cultural biases seem to be at work as well. Nieli highlights one of the study’s more remarkable findings: while most extracurricular activities increase your odds of admission to an elite school, holding a leadership role or winning awards in organizations like high school R.O.T.C., 4-H clubs and Future Farmers of America actually works against your chances. Consciously or unconsciously, the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right-wing or “Red America.”



This provides statistical confirmation for what alumni of highly selective universities already know. The most underrepresented groups on elite campuses often aren’t racial minorities; they’re working-class whites (and white Christians in particular) from conservative states and regions. Inevitably, the same underrepresentation persists in the elite professional ranks these campuses feed into: in law and philanthropy, finance and academia, the media and the arts.



This breeds paranoia, among elite and non-elites alike. Among the white working class, increasingly the most reliable Republican constituency, alienation from the American meritocracy fuels the kind of racially tinged conspiracy theories that Beck and others have exploited — that Barack Obama is a foreign-born Marxist hand-picked by a shadowy liberal cabal, that a Wall Street-Washington axis wants to flood the country with third world immigrants, and so forth.



Among the highly educated and liberal, meanwhile, the lack of contact with rural, working-class America generates all sorts of wild anxieties about what’s being plotted in the heartland. In the Bush years, liberals fretted about a looming evangelical theocracy. In the age of the Tea Parties, they see crypto-Klansmen and budding Timothy McVeighs everywhere they look.



This cultural divide has been widening for years, and bridging it is beyond any institution’s power. But it’s a problem admissions officers at top-tier colleges might want to keep in mind when they’re assembling their freshman classes.



If such universities are trying to create an elite as diverse as the nation it inhabits, they should remember that there’s more to diversity than skin color — and that both their school and their country might be better off if they admitted a few more R.O.T.C. cadets, and a few more aspiring farmers.

Quote:Wikileaks founder Julian Assange accused of rape

David Batty and agencies

guardian.co.uk, Saturday 21 August 2010 13.20 BST



Swedish authorities issue an arrest warrant for the founder of whistleblowers' website on suspicion of rape and molestation



Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Photograph: Andrew Winning/Reuters



Swedish authorities have issued an arrest warrant for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange on suspicion of molestation and rape.



The warrant was issued late yesterday, said a spokeswoman at Sweden's prosecutors' office in Stockholm.



She said Assange should contact the Swedish police for questioning about the accusations of molestation and rape in two separate cases "so that he can be confronted with the suspicions".



Assange has denied the charges, which were first reported by the Swedish tabloid Expressen, on Wikileaks' Twitter account.



He implied that they were linked to the release by the whistleblowers' website of a huge cache of US military records on the Afghan war, which were published in collaboration with the Guardian and two other newspapers.



Assange wrote: "The charges are without basis and their issue at this moment is deeply disturbing."



Earlier postings on the Twitter account implied the accusations were part of a dirty tricks campaign against the Wikileaks founder, who has been strongly criticised by the Pentagon.



"Expressen is a tabloid; No one here has been contacted by Swedish police. Needless to say, this will prove hugely distracting.



"We were warned to expect 'dirty tricks'. Now we have the first one."



Last month Wikileaks released around 77,000 secret US military documents on the war in Afghanistan.



US authorities criticised the leak, saying it could put the lives of Nato troops and Afghan informants at risk.

[color="#800080"](Oh, how deeply sad that would be. <- Am I being satirical? I don't know. Am I?)[/color]



Assange has said that Wikileaks intends to release a further 15,000 documents in the coming weeks - a pledge condemned by the Pentagon, which has demanded the deletion of the files from the website.



Assange, an Australian citizen, was in Sweden last week to apply for a publishing certificate to make sure the website, which has servers in Sweden, can take full advantage of Swedish laws protecting whistleblowers.



He also gave a talk about his work and defended the decision by Wikileaks to publish the Afghan war logs.

Quote:Man ignites Quran near Ground Zero: Report

TNN, Sep 12, 2010, 04.08am IST



An unidentified man ripped pages from a Quran and set them alight at a protest near the proposed site of a Muslim community centre and mosque near Ground Zero on Saturday, according to an unconfirmed report in the tabloid NY Daily News .



At the time of going to press, the incident was not reported by any other newspaper or agency. The Daily News quoted the man as saying, "If they can burn American flags, I can burn the Quran." Before being led away by police, he added, "Americans shouldn't be afraid to give their opinion." He was apparently not arrested.



The incident comes after Florida pastor Terry Jones threatened to burn the Quran. Saturday's alleged incident came even as families who lost loved ones during the attacks commemorated the ninth anniversary of the terror attacks at Ground Zero.



http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/Man-ignites-Quran-near-Ground-Zero-Report/articleshow/6538864.cms#ixzz0zQmKacAV