Archive for June 2007

Coming of age in China during the intellectually impoverished period of the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s, Suisheng Zhao is now a leading scholar of Chinese studies, particularly the China-US relationship. Suisheng Zhao currently serves as Professor and Executive Director of the Center for China-US Cooperation at the University of Denver’s Graduate School of International Studies. He is founding editor of the Journal of Contemporary China, a member of the Board of Governors of the US Committee of the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific, a member of National Committee on US-China Relations, and a Research Associate at the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research in Harvard University.

At the invitation of the USC U.S. – China Institute, Suisheng Zhao gave a talk on Feb. 1 to more than fifty enthusiastic scholars, students, and administrators on Chinese nationalism and its foreign policy implications.

Contrary to the traditional view that the ideology of communism is the foundation of the People’s Republic of China, Suisheng Zhao proposed that nationalism is the foundation of the country. In 1949 when Mao Zedong announced the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, he used a nationalist phrase — “Chinese people have stood up ever since” — to restore China’s identity, pride, and its rightful place in the world.

Chinese Nationalism: affirmative, assertive, or aggressive?

With the economic, political, and military development of China in the late twentieth century, Chinese nationalism has been on the rise as communist ideology has been on the decline. Zhao sees no cause for concern in this trend. National interest and national pride are healthy in any state. However, the concern arises when political leaders use nationalism to demoralize other nations in order to promote national interest or to mobilize the people to act aggressively. This becomes savagism rather than nationalism. There are some alarmists who believe that Chinese nationalism is indeed a threat and will lead China to become an international aggressor.

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Students cannot be assigned to public schools because of their race, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Thursday in a significant civil rights decision that casts doubt on integration efforts adopted across the country.

By a 5-4 vote on the last day of its term, the court’s conservative majority struck down voluntary programs adopted in Seattle and Louisville, Kentucky, to attain racial diversity in public school classrooms.

The ruling added to a string of decisions this term in which President George W. Bush’s two appointees — Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito — have shifted the court sharply to the right on divisive social issues like abortion.

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Cathy Salustri, who lives with her dog, Madison, didn’t talk to her friend and neighbor about race until her article was published. She didn’t know what kind of reaction the story would provoke. “There’s this gray area no one wants to talk about,” she says.

Cathy Salustri lives in St. Petersburg’s Bartlett Park, a predominantly black neighborhood. The only white woman on her block, she moved here two years ago, against her real estate agent’s advice. Now she’s ready to sell and move to a safer neighborhood.

ST. PETERSBURG - Cathy Salustri was typing without thinking. She was mad and she needed to get the words out. What spilled across her computer screen would eventually land on the front page of a Gulfport newspaper and spark Internet debate around the bay area. But that night in her living room, doubt filled her mind. Why did I write something stupid like that? Do I feel this way? I can’t possibly feel this way. The words on the screen did not lie:

I’m a white woman living in a black neighborhood, and I’m turning into a racist because of it.

She won’t use racial epithets. She doesn’t go around waving Confederate flags. She had to look up the word “racism” to see if it applied to her:

The belief that race accounts for differences in human ability or character.

She decided it probably does.

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The fallacy of hate-crime laws — the prosecution of which requires a degree of mind-reading not yet available to most Earthlings — has been cast into stark relief the past few weeks following an interracial rape-murder that has bestirred white supremacists and led to death threats against an African-American columnist.

The spark that caused the firestorm was the brutal rape-murder of a young white couple, Channon Christian and Chris Newsom, who were carjacked last January in Knoxville, Tenn. Five blacks — four men and a woman — have been charged in connection with the slayings.

Because the story didn’t receive national media attention, some commentators and others have asserted that the media do not treat racial crimes equally. They point out that when a black stripper charged three white members of the Duke University lacrosse team with rape, the national media grabbed the story by the ankle and wouldn’t let go. Not so Knoxville.

The perception of media bias is understandable — and a credible case can be made that the media rushed to condemn the Duke athletes because it fit a recognizable racial narrative, especially in the South. But while race was clearly a factor in stimulating media interest, other factors absent from the Knoxville case — privilege, town and gown conflicts, politics, underage drinking and the name Duke — also added to the broader “story” appeal.

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When three armed black males stormed a house, beating and robbing it’s inhabitants, residents fought back. One of the attackers is dead, the other two on the run with one of them presumed to be severely injured.

The story and thousands more demonstrate how innocent lives are saved everyday by responsible use of firearms. According to the Florida Sentinel this is the third time in a week that fighting back saved innocent people from violent criminals in Orange County. Florida’s generous firearm laws have save a multitude of innocent lives.

The showdown is the third time this week that intended victims fought back against their attackers in Orange County.

Sunday morning, a man drew his concealed 9 mm pistol, but did not fire, to escape a confrontation with two shotgun-wielding assailants on the east side of Kirkman Road, across the street from the MetroWest neighborhood.

Early Tuesday, a man grabbed for and eventually wrested away the .40-caliber handgun that a carjacker used to hold him up. The gun discharged during the struggle, but no one was hurt.

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Historians often assume that they need pay no attention to human evolution because the process ground to a halt in the distant past. That assumption is looking less and less secure in light of new findings based on decoding human DNA.

People have continued to evolve since leaving the ancestral homeland in northeastern Africa some 50,000 years ago, both through the random process known as genetic drift and through natural selection. The genome bears many fingerprints in places where natural selection has recently remolded the human clay, researchers have found, as people in the various continents adapted to new diseases, climates, diets and, perhaps, behavioral demands.

A striking feature of many of these changes is that they are local. The genes under selective pressure found in one continent-based population or race are mostly different from those that occur in the others. These genes so far make up a small fraction of all human genes.

A notable instance of recent natural selection is the emergence of lactose tolerance — the ability to digest lactose in adulthood — among the cattle-herding people of northern Europe some 5,000 years ago. Lactase, the enzyme that digests the principal sugar of milk, is usually switched off after weaning. But because of the great nutritional benefit for cattle herders of being able to digest lactose in adulthood, a genetic change that keeps the lactase gene switched on spread through the population.

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Sometime between now and July 4, the Supreme Court may hand down the most important decision on racial discrimination in a generation because it could determine whether the diversity movement has legal authority.

The suspense is much less a matter of which way the court rules on the legality of how students are assigned to schools in Seattle and Louisville, than how the decision is written.

Even supporters of the school-assignment plans that aim for certain racial balances in the student populations in those cities’ schools and their allies worry that the court’s new conservative majority will say their plans are unconstitutional.

The suspense - and the thing to watch on when the decision is handed down before the court adjourns for the summer - is how broadly it is written.

Simply put, the question is whether the court will decide to throw out these and other similar racial-balancing plans or - and this is where the decision could be so momentous - get into the basic question of whether diversity is a compelling government interest.

The school assignment plans in question are based on the idea that government can use its power to foster diversity.

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In a move that will surprise — maybe even shock — America’s conservatives, the president has apparently decided to put deportation at the forefront of his immigration policy. This is not window-dressing, but a serious and sweeping national crackdown on illegal immigration. The president has set tough numerical goals for yearly expulsions, and quotas for questioning suspected illegal aliens.

The only drawback here is that I’m talking about the president of France.

Even so, the emerging crackdown on illegal immigration goes well beyond France. The European Union has just proposed a tough new plan, featuring sanctions on employers who hire illegal immigrants. Under the proposed new policy, ten percent of Europe’s companies would be inspected every year, employers would be required to run identity checks, fines would be levied on business violators, and employers who repeatedly or egregiously breach hiring laws would be subject to severe economic penalties or imprisonment.

That’s not all. The European Union as a whole, many of its individual states, and even immigrant destinations outside the EU (such as Russia) are moving to negotiate “readmission accords” with African and Asian nations. In return for financial help and the creation of well-monitored guest-worker programs, the EU hopes to obtain agreement from third-world nations to accept deported illegal migrants.

In short, Europe as a whole is moving toward a sharp crackdown on illegal immigration — with a plan built around deportation and tough employer sanctions.

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A Watertown man is criticizing the Town Council for adopting a program that seeks to curb hate crimes, saying he believes it violates his right to free speech.

Ralph Filicchia, 71, said he’s “not a hater” but believes the town’s participation in the Anti-Defamation League of New England’s No Place For Hate program infringes on his freedom to hold opinions that may go against the grain.

“People should be free to express things without being charged with hatemongering or hate speech,” said Filicchia, who is retired but does some freelance writing on political issues. “Isn’t the whole idea of free speech to protect offensive speech?”

Filicchia hung a Confederate flag outside his Bellevue Road home last week in protest, saying he would leave it up until a “No Place for Hate” sign in front of Town Hall is removed.

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From: Wikipedia: “Christian’s parents found her abandoned Toyota 4-Runner two blocks away from the Chipman Street house on Monday, with the help of her mobile phone provider. An envelope recovered from the vehicle yielded fingerprint evidence that led police to Lemaricus Davidson and 2316 Chipman Street. When police went to the address on Tuesday, January 9, they found the home unoccupied and Christian’s body in a trash can in the kitchen. Christian was strangled to death.[5] According to the grand jury presentment, Christian was raped vaginally, orally, and anally, and Newsom was raped anally.[2] Vanessa Coleman told police that “she witnessed Christian’s mouth being cleaned with a bottle of some type of cleaner,” in an attempt to remove DNA evidence.[6] Coleman also said that she had seen “clothes that were stained with blood and smelled of gas being put in the washing machine at the house.”[6] Newsom was shot three times, “his body wrapped in a blanket, set afire and dumped alongside nearby railroad tracks.”

The American media hold a special place in my heart for their faith in diversity. In the recent Duke case, with which I presume everyone is familiar, a lying black whore (she was lying, she was black, and she was a whore: I suppose I should identify her as Snow White’s sister and a pediatric nurse.) accused innocent college kids of raping her, whereupon the entire complex of media and governments piled on, ruining the boys’ lives. The racial aspect got tremendous attention: White racists in the South abusing a poor black girl. This is a favorite template of the media.

Many see the hooker of Duke as just trying to get attention or money. Perhaps she was, but she was also trying to get the white kids put in the slam for many years (where, incidentally, they would almost certainly have become the sex toys of a heavily black population.) This should be a serious crime with heavy penalties. It doesn’t seem to be.

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