Kroeber's View!

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Wherever they go they seem to create a backlash.  Even in Australia:  https://www.youtube.com/embed/yZZlo0WZ_iU?rel=0
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Sowell defends Scalia. (See 1 below.)
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I read a recent op ed by Rich Karlgaard in which he described the message of Alfred Kroeber's: "Configurations of Culture Growth" as it pertained to America.

Based on the analysis of this 68 year old professor of anthropology at University of California Berkley, America is in decline because genius in the arts and sciences rises when a culture is advancing and cultures advance when ethics and values become understood and embraced and, Kroeber believes the candidacy of Clinton and Trump suggests the America's political system is in decline.

The one  bright spot has to do with the fact that American companies are advancing but lack of scientific progress is blunting technology at the leading edge.

Time will tell with Kroeber is correct but certainly it should be evident that America's historical progress has stalled.

What I find interesting is that Kroeber teaches at one of the most radical campuses in America and one where the student body seems to have nothing but contempt for America.

If Kroeber is correct then god only knows what he would be saying about Palestinian culture and Abbas' leadership. (See 1a below.)
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A German Psychiatrist analyzes  Islam. (See 2 below.)
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Dick
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1) Attacking the Truth: Part II
By Thomas Sowell |

The case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court, involving racial double standards in admissions to the University of Texas at Austin, has an Alice-in-Wonderland quality that has been all too common in other Supreme Court cases involving affirmative action in academia, going all the way back to 1978.

Plain hard facts dissolve into rhetorical mysticism in these cases, where evasions of reality have been the norm.

One inconvenient reality is that racial double standards by government institutions are contrary to the "equal protection of the laws" prescribed by the 14th Amendment to the constitution. Therefore racial double standards must be called something else -- whether "holistic" admissions criteria or a quest for the many magical benefits of "diversity" that are endlessly asserted but never demonstrated.

Such mental gymnastics are not peculiar to the Supreme Court of the United States.

I encountered the same evasive language in other countries with group preference programs, during the years when I was doing research for my book "Affirmative Action Around the World." This was one of the sadder examples of the brotherhood of man.

When the courts in India tried to rein in some of the more extreme group quota policies in academia, that only inspired more ingenuity by university officials, who came up with more subjective admissions criteria.

At one medical school in India's state of Tamil Nadu, those criteria included extracurricular activities, "aptitude" and "general abilities" -- as determined by interviews that lasted approximately three minutes per applicant. The ratings on these vague, wholly subjective criteria could then be used to offset some students' academic deficiencies, and thus preserve group quotas de facto.

Another common feature of group preference policies in various countries in different parts of the world is the illusion that these preferences can be confined to some transitional time period, after which the preferences will fade away.

Even in countries where a time frame was specified at the outset -- as in Pakistan, India and Malaysia, for example -- the preferences have persisted for generations past those cutoff dates. Yet the Supreme Court of the United States has repeatedly indulged in the same illusion of transitional group preferences.

Such preferences have not only extended in time, they have spread to more activities and more groups. In India, it was declared that preferential treatment in the academic admissions process would end there, and not extend to treatment of the preferred groups once they were students in the university.

Yet preferential grading of students admitted with lower qualifications became so widespread in India that these grades acquired the name "grace marks." In Malaysia, committees were authorized to adjust grades to enable the preferred Malay students to be -- or to seem -- more comparable to the non-preferred Chinese students.

In the days of the Soviet Union, professors were pressured to give higher grades to Central Asian students. In New Zealand, softer courses in Maori studies achieved similar results. In the United States, easy ethnic studies courses serve the same purpose. When I taught at Brandeis University, many years ago, an academic administrator confided to me that one of his chores was phoning professors to see if they would "reconsider" failing grades given to minority students.

Often the rationale for group preferences is to help the less fortunate. But, in countries where hard evidence is available, it is often the more fortunate members of less fortunate groups who get the bulk of the benefits. These beneficiaries can even be more fortunate than most of the people in the country at large.

India's constitution, like the American constitution, has an amendment prescribing equal treatment. But in India that amendment also spells out exceptions for particular groups. In the United States, the Supreme Court has taken on the role of creating exceptions to the 14th Amendment.

Many lofty verbal evasions are necessary, in order to keep the American people from catching on to what they are really doing when they claim to be merely applying the laws and the Constitution.


1a)

The Price of Unjustifiable Murder

By JONATHAN S. TOBIN 

There are tipping points in history in which trends that were once thought permanent prove to be temporary. Sometimes we don’t even notice when such events occur because we are too caught up in the immediate concerns of the day. Such a moment may be happening now to the Palestinians. Not only do they seem to be unaware of it, but they may be under the mistaken impression that nothing can or will change. They should understand that if they continue to practice in discriminate terror, they may ultimately pay a price, even if mass murder is something their leaders tell them is not only justifiable but think is a smart tactic.

“Justified” happens to be the word that PA leader Mahmoud Abbas used on Monday when he addressed a United Nations-sponsored event. Abbas’s narrative about the conflict with Israel didn’t merely include the usual disingenuous litany about how settlements and Israeli intransigence have victimized the Palestinian people. Abbas isn’t content merely to lie about his own refusal to make peace or the independence and control of territory he eschewed simply because he can’t bring himself to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn.

Abbas has now reached the point where his pose as a champion of peace that earned him the praise of President Obama has become such a burden that he can’t manage to keep it up even part of the time. That his latest bout of incitement came only hours after a Palestinian rammed his car into a crowded bus stop, injuring 14 people including a 15-month-old baby, showed that he long ago stopped caring about trying to cultivate the Israeli left or center that would happily accept a two-state solution.

It needs to be remembered that in the infancy of international terrorism as we know it now, the Palestinians had a difficult time being heard. The problem was that their national movement and its leader, Yasir Arafat, was so thoroughly associated with the most brutal forms of terrorism that few in civilized societies were prepared to listen to their case against Israel. In the decades since Arafat’s followers slaughtered Jews at the Olympics and made plane hijacking fashionable, that has changed. That was largely due to the ability of both Arafat and his successor, Abbas, to play a double game in which they pretended to accept the concept of peace with Israel while speaking to Western and Israeli audiences while simultaneously signaling Palestinians that the long war to eradicate the Zionist entity was just getting started. It was that deception that allowed the Oslo Accords to be signed and celebrated as the beginning of a new era of peace in the Middle East. So successful was this piece of stagecraft that it survived the collapse of Oslo when Arafat turned down the first Israeli offer of statehood and answered it with a terrorist war of attrition.

Arafat lost all credibility as a peacemaker, but his replacement quickly earned the confidence of a credulous Bush administration, as well as other supporters of the peace process. Abbas looked the part of a responsible leader in his suit. That was a good image adjustment for a people that had been led by a man who couldn’t bear to take off his faux battle fatigues even for a peace ceremony.

Though he had the consistent support of the Obama administration as it tilted the diplomatic playing field in his direction in its quest for “daylight” between Washington and Jerusalem, that wasn’t enough to entice Abbas to recognize a Jewish state or negotiate seriously. Despite his antipathy for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his ardent support for a Palestinians state, President Obama has clearly given up on the peace process even if Secretary of State John Kerry still harbors messianic hopes about cutting the Gordian knot.

It’s one thing to have exhausted your friends; it’s quite another to throw away all of your questionable international credibility. That’s what Abbas has done in the last few months as he first fomented a new surge of violence with lies about mythical Israeli plots against the Temple Mount mosques. Since then he’s doubled down on his slurs about preventing “stinking Jewish feet” from polluting Jerusalem’s holy places and treated those Palestinians that attempt to murder random Jews they see on the street as “martyrs” or victims of Jewish persecution and part of a “popular peaceful uprising.” At the UN ceremony, he continued in this vein saying that Arabs that seek to butcher Jews are engaging in “justified” behavior because of the stalled peace process or the canards he’s floated about the Temple Mount.

Though the Obama administration hasn’t specifically condemned Abbas’s incitement, as they should, they’ve grown tired of justifying him. The more inflammatory rhetoric Abbas uses, the less likely it is that Obama would risk his remaining political capital on another confrontation with Israel or by abandoning it at the UN since he knows it will never be enough to get Abbas to make peace. The question now is whether the Palestinians’ European enablers will start to wise up, too. Abbas doesn’t seem too worried about that prospect because many European governments have already moved toward delegitimizing Israel and accepting selective boycotts of its goods.

Indeed, Abbas may believe, as Arafat did, that more violence only generates greater interest in the Palestinian cause. Abbas, Arafat’s longtime aide and the organizer of atrocities, still remembers that it was Arafat’s embrace of terror that put the Palestinians on the political map. Moreover, like ISIS and other Islamist terror groups, Fatah understands that the root of its legitimacy isn’t in peacemaking but in demonstrating the élan that comes with inflicting ruthless terror.

But there may be limits even to what European elites would be willing to do for a Palestinian Authority that can’t really be differentiated from its Hamas rivals. Nothing Abbas does, no matter how awful, would be enough to motivate Europe to embrace the Israelis. But an undeniable embrace of terrorism by Abbas is inconsistent with his carefully honed image as peacemaker, an ideal to which many in the U.S., Israel, and Europe have held. Support for a terrorism double standard that exempts Palestinians from the consequences of their actions is not inexhaustible.

After playing both ends against the middle for so long, Abbas may have made a major miscalculation. He will never have a more sympathetic American president than Obama, but rather than take advantage of this situation, he chose to stall and then start competing with Hamas. Though he and other Palestinians have trained themselves to think that violence always pays, he fails to understand that this time it may actually have the opposite effect on their prospects. With the world distracted from the myth of the centrality of the Palestinians by ISIS and the wars in Syria and Iraq, the Palestinians are on the verge of rendering themselves completely irrelevant. The Palestinians are watching their opportunity for peace and statehood dissolve in the gore of a stabbing intifada that is disabusing even their most ardent apologists. Though the stalemate does neither side much good, it is impossible to imagine anyone caring much about a national movement that cannot even pretend to distance itself from random slaughter. The price of unjustifiable murder may be political oblivion for its practitioners.

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2)A German's View on Islam -

The author of this email is Dr. Emanuel Tanya, a well-known and well-respected psychiatrist.    A man, whose family was German aristocracy prior to World War II, owned a number of large industries and  estates. When asked how many German people were true Nazis, the answer he gave can guide our attitude toward fanaticism. 'Very few people were true Nazis,' he said, 'but many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care. I was one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools.

So, the majority just sat back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come.' 'My family lost everything. I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories.'

'We are told again and again by 'experts' and 'talking heads' that Islam is a religion of peace and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the specter of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam.' 'The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march.  It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout  Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor-kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. It is the fanatics who teach their young to kill and to become suicide bombers.

''The hard, quantifiable fact is that the peaceful majority, the 'silent majority,' is cowed and  extraneous. Communist Russia was comprised of Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. China's huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people. ''The average Japanese individual prior to World War II was not a warmongering sadist. Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across South East Asia in an orgy of killing that included the systematic murder of 12 million Chinese civilians; most killed by sword, shovel, and bayonet.

And who can forget Rwanda, which collapsed into butchery? Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were 'peace loving'?   'History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason, we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points: peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence. Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don't speak up, because like my friend from Germany, they will awaken one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world Will have begun.' 'Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Serbs, Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, and many others have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late.'

'Now Islamic prayers have been introduced in Toronto and other public schools in Ontario, and, yes, in  Ottawa,  too, while the Lord's Prayer was removed (due to being so offensive?). The  Islamic way may be peaceful for the time being in our country until the  fanatics move in .''In Australia, and indeed in many countries around the world, many of the most commonly consumed food items have the halal emblem on them. Just look at the back of some of the most popular chocolate bars, and at other food items in your local supermarket. Food on aircraft have the halal emblem just to appease the privileged minority who are now rapidly expanding within the nation's shores.'

'In the U. K, the Muslim communities refuse to integrate and there are now dozens of "no-go" zones within major cities across the country that the police force dare not  intrude upon. Sharia law prevails there, because the Muslim community in those areas refuse to acknowledge British law.'   'As for us who watch it all unfold, we must pay attention to the only group that counts - the fanatics who threaten our way of life.'

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