Thursday, May 09, 2013



The allure of 'yellow fever': New documentary explores why so many white American men aspire to marry Asian women

"Asian" is too broad below.  The pattern described below fits women from the Philippines but much less so women from China.  The Chinese ladies are on average much brighter.

Australia's largest minority (about 5% of the population) is Han Chinese and do they have a visible effect!  Chinese-origin women in Australia want one thing and they will forgive a lot to get it.  They want a TALL husband.  So if you see a couple about the place that includes a Chinese lady, the man will be tall, almost without exception. 

He may be a tall Chinese but there are few of them.  He will usually be a tall Caucasian.  He may even be a bit of a dummy but the lady will put up with that in order to have children taller  than herself.  So it is not yellow fever in the men that is at  work but tallness-capturing by the Asian ladies.  They like big men


A new documentary, which airs tonight on PBS, explores the psychology behind yellow fever - the phenomenon that sees white men attracted to, and sometimes even obsessed with, Asian women.

Filmed and directed by Debbie Lum, a fourth-generation Chinese-American from St Louis, Missouri, Seeking Asian Female looks to discover why many men see Asians as ideal wives, a concept that is 'very painful for the Asian-American community,' Ms Lum told ABC News.

According to the filmmaker, there is an overriding perception that women of that particular race are more docile and make for obedient life partners, a stereotype that is offensive and often untrue.

Indeed, according to Goal Auzeen Saedi, a post-doctoral fellow in counseling at Stanford University, the dominant perception is that women from Asia are 'submissive'.

In a 2011 Psychology Today article, Dr Saedi explained that the men who desire Asian women - most of them Caucasians themselves - are sending an 'underlying message about power, dominance and white privilege'.

It is exactly that attitude that Ms Lum sought to expose in her debut feature-length film.

'Every Asian-American woman knows exactly what I am talking about,' she said. 'Men come up to you in a way that really looks like a stare, which lasts a bit longer than it should.  'You can feel it,' she continued. 'It's like they are looking through you.'

In the film, Ms Lum follows the lives of Steven, a twice-divorced 60-year-old on the hunt for an Asian bride, and Sandy, the Chinese woman half his age whom he meets on the internet and ultimately marries.
According to the website for the documentary, Steven first became interested in Asian women after witnessing the success of his son's marriage to a Japanese immigrant.

The 60-year-old, who works as a garage attendant at the San Francisco airport, spent years looking through mail-order catalogs and dating websites, trying to find the perfect mate.

'Over the course of the last five years there must be hundreds of different girls from China that I've been writing to,' he explains in a trailer for the movie.

Finally, Steven meets Sandy - a 30-year-old factory worker who grew up on a tea farm in the remote mountains of China.

He flies out to Sandy's home country to meet her, and two weeks later he returns to California with Sandy in tow, after she agrees to marry him.  'I'm happy as a clam,' he says in the trailer with a boyish grin as he introduces his fiancee to the film director.

But while Steven has fulfilled his fantasy by having a relationship with an Asian woman, the couple soon begins to struggle to communicate, since Sandy's English is basic and Steven doesn't speak a word of Chinese.

The trailer shows them bickering, with neither able to understand the other. 'What?' Steven yells to Sandy at one point. 'Speak in English!'

Ms Lum, who speaks Chinese, becomes a translator and mediator as both Sandy and Steven turn to her to resolve their issues.

Steven admits to the filmmaker: '[Sandy] has read a lot of things to me in Chinese. I feel comfortable with it, but I have no idea what she's saying.'

Ultimately though, their relationship works after Steven realizes that he can love Sandy despite her fiery temper, a trait which contradicts the stereotypical picture of an Asian female. Today, Sandy and Steven have been happily married for four years.

'[Steven's] obsession with any Asian woman has been replaced with a real-live Sandy,' explains Ms Lum, who admits that her own preconception of Steven was perhaps just as bad as those she sought to debunk about Asian women.

Still, Ms Lum said she hopes the film will start a conversation about negative categorizations in general - including those involving men like Steven.

'The story is about expectations and stereotypes, which are very related,' she said. 'Stereotypes about white guys, and expectations going into a relationship.'

SOURCE




Honest Examination of Race

By Walter E. Williams

One definition given for insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results; it might also be a definition of stupidity. Let's look at some cities where large percentages of black Americans live under poor conditions.

Experiencing a violent crime rate of 2,137 per 100,000 of the population, Detroit is the nation's most dangerous city. Rounding out Forbes magazine's 2012 list of the 10 most dangerous cities are St Louis; Oakland, Calif.; Memphis, Tenn.; Birmingham, Ala.; Atlanta; Baltimore; Stockton, Calif.; Cleveland; and Buffalo, N.Y.

The most common characteristic of these predominantly black cities is that for decades, all of them have been run by Democratic and presumably liberal administrations. Some cities — such as Detroit, Buffalo, Newark, N.J., and Philadelphia — haven't elected a Republican mayor for more than a half-century. What's more is that in most of these cities, blacks have been mayors, chiefs of police, school superintendents and principals and have dominated city councils.

You might ask, "What's the point, Williams?" Let's be clear about it. I'm not stating that there's a causal relationship between crime, poverty and squalor on the one hand and, on the other, Democratic and black political control over a city. Nor am I saying that blacks ought to vote Republican. What I am saying is that if one is strategizing on how to improve the lives of the poorest black people, he wants to leave off his to-do list election of Democrats and black politicians. Also to be left off the to-do list is a civil rights agenda. Racial discrimination has little to do with major problems confronting black people.

Today 72 percent of black babies are born out of wedlock. Being born and finding out that your mother is 17 years old, that your grandmother is 35 and that you don't know who or where your father is is not a good start on life. In fact, it's a near guarantee for school dropout, poverty and crime, but such a start in life has nothing to do with racial discrimination.

Law-abiding poor black people suffer the nation's highest rates of criminal victimization from assaults and homicide. More than 50 percent of homicide victims are black. Would anyone claim that this victimization is caused by racist groups preying on the black community? In addition to victimization, the level of lawlessness in many black communities has the full effect of a law banning economic growth. That's because the thugs are equal-opportunity thugs who will rip off a black-owned business just as they'd rip off a white-owned business.

Black education is a disaster, but who runs the violent, disruptive big-city schools, where education is all but impossible? For the most part, it's not white people. Go to a city such as Detroit and you'll find that blacks have been superintendents, principals and most of the teachers for years. Most black high-school students, in Detroit and other cities, can't read, write and compute as well as sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade white students, but is it because of racism?

What the elite teach is not only futile but counterproductive. For example, speaking standard English in an English-speaking country is critical for self-improvement. But that's not the lesson from the nation's multiculturalists, who call for the celebration of native languages and dialects. Sloppy-minded academics and assorted hustlers have taught that poor English, gangsta rap, men wearing pigtails and thug behavior should not be criticized but become a part of the celebration of diversity.

Black people could benefit from an honest examination of the bill of goods they've been sold. Such an examination would not come from black politicians, civil rights leaders or the black and white liberal elite. Those people have benefited politically and financially from keeping black Americans in a constant state of grievance based on alleged racial discrimination. The long-term solution for the problems that many black Americans face begins with an absolute rejection of the self-serving agenda of hustlers and poverty pimps.

SOURCE






Despite The Global Gasping, Niall Ferguson Has (Had!) A Point About Keynes

Harvard financial historian Niall Ferguson has gotten himself into the usual sort of Larry Summers / James D. Watson-style trouble for answering a question about economist John Maynard Keynes’s famous quip—“In the long run, we are all dead”—by cheekily pointing out that Keynes was a childless homosexual. There’s no transcript of his original remarks, but a writer who heard him speak wrote it up on his magazine’s website. [Harvard Professor Trashes Keynes For Homosexuality, By Tom Kostigen, fa-mag.com, May 3, 2013.]

Ferguson commented: “In the long run our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are alive, and will have to deal with the consequences of our economic actions.”

Ferguson has groveled, needless to say, but the Homintern is still pursuing him—see Niall Ferguson: Keynes Was Gay for Germany, by Jonathan Chait, nymag.com, May 7, 2013.

(In contrast to Keynes, the philoprogenitive Ferguson has three children by his first wife and one by his latest, the courageous anti-Islamist activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali.)

Ferguson’s off-the-cuff comments generated a vast global spasm of gasping and tsk-tsking. A Google search of “niall ferguson keynes gay” comes up with over two million  hits.

Why the hysteria?

Because intellectual life has declined to the point where all that matters is Are You on the Side of the Good Guys or the Bad Guys? And the Good Guys are powerful groups of self-proclaimed victims.

Ferguson’s suggestion that family life can influence ideology is, of course, true. For example, Mitt Romney carried only 16 percent of the gay vote in 2012 in contrast to 57 percent of the married vote. Over the last four elections, the rate in each state at which whites are married has been the strongest determinant of the Electoral Vote.

But Ferguson felt it necessary to issue “An Unqualified Apology” [May 4, 2013]because he makes a lot of money giving speeches to financial organizations, so he can’t afford to offend Designated Victim Groups that play a major role within them—such as gays, Jews, and women. At this moment in our culture, gays are particularly dominant, and thus are looking for ways to throw their weight around to intimidate skeptics for good.

What’s more striking, though, are the Voluntary Auxiliary Thought Police who rush in to denounce heretics. As Dennis Dale commented during another recent brouhaha of ridiculous moral outrage:

The Left has routed us and is now chasing us into the weeds to cut us down individually--because they haven't even the capacity to imagine doing anything else.

What are they going to do, declare victory and behave graciously? Where's the fun—or more importantly the influence and cash—in that? They are like a vast standing army with nothing to do and no wish to return to civilian life.

Still, Ferguson was somewhat unfair. Keynes (1883-1946) betrayed today’s conventional wisdom by doing the supposedly impossible: he converted, permanently, from a homosexual lifestyle to a heterosexual lifestyle when—to the shock and dismay of his former Bloomsbury boyfriends—he married the popular ballerina Lydia Lopokova in 1925.

He wasn’t under any particular social or career pressure at the time. He just switched his affections.

Moreover, we can see that Keynes was concerned about the welfare of future generations of the British from his lifelong advocacy of….(wait for it) eugenics!

After all, in 1911 Keynes, along with the great statistician and geneticist Ronald A. Fisher, R.C. Punnett, and Horace Darwin, helped found the Cambridge Eugenics Society. Keynes was a eugenics activist throughout his life, serving as an official of the national eugenics promotion organization from 1937-1944. In the year of his death, 1946, Keynes made a speech citing eugenics as “the most important and significant branch of sociology.”

If Ferguson had excoriated Keynes for pushing eugenics, he would have not heard a peep of criticism. He just forgot who is riding high at the moment and who is not.

SOURCE






What the Left doesn't want you to know about Britain's £200 billion welfare bill

Amid much hand-wringing by the Left-wing Establishment, the Coalition has this month been pushing ahead with long-overdue reforms to Britain’s vastly expensive benefits system. 

Yesterday ministers began piloting a more efficient way of paying state handouts, called the Universal Credit. It follows changes to disability benefits and a trial to cap total welfare payments at £26,000 a year — the income of the typical working family. The cap, which is being trialled in four London boroughs, will be imposed across the rest of England, Scotland and Wales from July.

Most reasonable people might think the changes fair — generous even. Indeed, polls show that three-quarters of the public are in favour of sharp cuts in benefits and stricter rules on entitlement.

However, critics have condemned the cuts by the ‘cruel’ Coalition, and insist that if voters knew the full facts, they would change their opinion.

Here, we reveal the truth behind the claims peddled by commentators on the Left...

THE WELFARE STATE ISN’T BEING SAVAGED

CLAIM: The welfare budget is being slashed in size and scope by the Coalition in a series of ‘cruel’ attacks on the needy.

REALITY: Between 1997/98 and 2010/11, benefit and tax credit spending in Britain increased from £122 billion to around £200 billion. This represents an increase of 60 per cent over the whole period.

As Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith recently admitted, the budget is not being cut at all — despite howls from the Left and BBC. It is just increasing more slowly than it would have under Labour.

At the end of the current Parliament in 2015, the Coalition is forecast to spend £206 billion on welfare. In other words, it will be higher even than at the height of Gordon Brown’s ruinous debt binge.

Working age welfare will fall slightly from £95.3 billion to £91.5 billion over the Parliament, but pensioner welfare will rise from £103.7 billion to £114.2 billion.
At the end of the current Parliament in 2015, the Coalition is forecast to spend £206 billion on welfare. In other words, it will be higher even than at the height of Gordon Brown's ruinous debt binge

At the end of the current Parliament in 2015, the Coalition is forecast to spend £206 billion on welfare. In other words, it will be higher even than at the height of Gordon Brown's ruinous debt binge

HUGE FAMILIES ON BENEFITS ARE NO MYTH

CLAIM: Only a tiny number of jobless families have large numbers of children reliant on the State for support.

REALITY: There are 160 families on out-of-work benefits with ten or more children. This figure was cited by the Left during the debate over the case of Mick Philpott from Derby, who killed six of his 17 children in a house fire and whose lifestyle was subsidised by taxpayers.

However, closer scrutiny of official figures shows that there are huge numbers of large workless households reliant on welfare.

There are 194,000 homes with three children; 76,310 with four; 25,980 with five; 8,760 with six; 3,200 with seven; 1,080 with eight; and 360 with nine.

Some 419,370 workless families have two children — which is the average number of offspring for all homes in the UK.

BENEFITS ARE NOT BEING CUT

CLAIM: Millions of people in and out of work are having their benefits ‘cut’.

REALITY: Benefits, including out-of-work-benefits and tax credits, are increasing by one per cent. This is depicted as a cut because it is less than the rate of inflation. But it follows a period when benefits outstripped average wage increases.

In 2012/13, while average earnings increased by 2.9 per cent, most working age benefits were up-rated by 5.2 per cent.
There are 160 families on out-of-work benefits with ten or more children. This figure was cited during the debate over the case of Mick Philpott from Derby, who killed six of his 17 children in a house fire

There are 160 families on out-of-work benefits with ten or more children. This figure was cited during the debate over the case of Mick Philpott from Derby, who killed six of his 17 children in a house fire

If compared over the past five years, the gap is wider still: with the incomes of those in work having risen half as quickly as those on out-of-work benefits — at a rate of 10 per cent compared with 20 per cent.

Elsewhere in Europe, benefits have suffered real cuts: Ireland has cut unemployment benefits by four per cent a year for two years; Portugal has reduced it by six per cent; and Spain has cut payments to anyone unemployed for longer than six months by 10 per cent.

Much more HERE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICSDISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL  and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine).   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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