I believe there is much to commend Jim Reece's LTE. We have allowed the pendulum of guilt to swing too far considering the tremendous strides we have made in recognizing the mistakes of the past and efforts to rectify.
There comes a point where one must accept some responsibility for their own plight and they cannot forever use the past as an excuse.
I have always believed increased intermarriage will be a part solution as we learn most all aspire to the same things. However, until this happens, it is incumbent upon America's black citizens to alter their behaviour and for white Americans not to succumb to/cower in the face of/allow accusations of racism to drive our every motive and decision.
Black lives do not matter when driven by black hearts and intentions.
Liberals have been highly successful at portraying themselves as more caring when, in fact, hypocrisy is the more appropriate word. Statistics just do not bear out the myriad of progressive programs have been uplifting as claimed. After expending literally trillions of dollars, America's black minority is suffering, their family structure has been destroyed, their dependency upon government has soared and there is little to show by way of measurable achievement.
Something is radically wrong and Reece has exposed, in a few simple paragraphs, the holes in liberalism's solutions. Welfare is more an indictment than a solution.
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If Trump backs down, regarding N Korea, we will have lost the battle and America will no longer be great and/or trusted. Iran will be next to tweak Uncle Sam and the job will be left to Israel to contain Iran.
China will have learned we will do nothing if they expand in the South China Sea area and are free to threaten Taiwan. Russia will have learned Trump is a white version of Obama and they will know they can control and expand their influence in the Middle East.
We will have allowed ourselves to become just another Gulliver.
If the art of diplomacy means placing and leaving all our options on the table then we are sunk along with our depleted navy.
The mass media and Congress were opposed to Bush 41 when he said Sadaam's invasion of Kuwait 'would not stand'. Everyone was ringing their hands and the estimates of casualties mounted. However, the war was over in 100 hours, 30,000 of Iraq's powerful/vaunted troops were killed and 60,000 taken prisoner. Iraq's entire fleet of tanks were decimated. we controlled the sky but we allowed him to keep his fleet of helicopters. Lamentably, we lost 148 of our very best,,
If Trump and Tillerson continue to feed N Korea and Iranian bullies we will pay the price at a later date and they will be even more powerful.
China and Russia are watching and they have to be salivating.
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I believe in free speech and speakers as long as I can be selective. What crap! (See 2 below.)
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There is always a price to pay. It is inescapable. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)
Nuclear Missiles Over Tokyo
Accepting a nuclear North Korea probably means a nuclear Japan.
The Editorial Board
Residents of northern Japan awoke Tuesday to sirens and cellphone warnings to take cover as a North Korean rocket flew overhead. The intermediate-range missile test will further roil the politics of security in Northeast Asia and is another prod toward Japan acquiring its own nuclear deterrent.
Pyongyang tested long-range missiles over Japan in 1998 and 2009, claiming they were satellite launches. The first shocked Japanese and led to cooperation with the U.S. on theater missile defense. After the second, Tokyo curtailed the North’s funding sources within Japan’s ethnic Korean community. Tuesday’s launch is even more threatening because U.S. and allied intelligence agencies assess that North Korea now has the ability to hit Japan with a miniaturized nuclear warhead mounted on a missile.
Much of Japan is protected by its own missile defenses as well as systems operated by U.S. forces in the region. Japan also recently deployed four Patriot PAC-3 missile-defense batteries to the west of the country, but these didn’t cover the northern island of Hokkaido overflown by Tuesday’s missile.
Japan’s ultimate security is the U.S. defense and nuclear umbrella, with its treaty guarantee that the U.S. will respond if Japan is attacked. But the logic of deterrence depends on having a rational actor as an adversary, and rationality can’t be guaranteed in North Korea. Its recent development of an ICBM capable of hitting the U.S. mainland also changes the equation. If North Korea attacked Tokyo and the U.S. responded with an attack on Pyongyang, U.S. cities might then be endangered.
Japanese leaders have long resisted building their own nuclear arsenal, but that could change if they conclude America isn’t reliable in a crisis. Or Japanese may simply decide they can’t have their survival depend on even a faithful ally’s judgment. Some Japanese politicians are already talking about their own nuclear deterrent. And while public opinion currently opposes nuclear weapons, fear could change minds. Japan has enough plutonium from its civilian nuclear reactors for more than 1,000 nuclear warheads, and it has the know-how to build them in months.
This prospect should alarm China, which would suddenly face a nuclear-armed regional rival. The U.S. also has a strong interest in preventing a nuclear Japan, not least because South Korea might soon follow. East Asia would join the Middle East in a new era of nuclear proliferation, with grave risks to world order. This is one reason that acquiescing to a North Korea with nuclear missiles is so dangerous.
Yet this is the line now peddled by former Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who says the U.S. must begin “accepting it and trying to cap it or control it.” Having said for eight years that a nuclear North is unacceptable, they now say that President Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had better get used to it.
But “control it” how? North Korea has made clear it won’t negotiate away its nuclear program. The U.S. can threaten mutual-assured destruction, but Tuesday’s missile test over Japan shows how North Korea will use its nuclear threat to coerce and divide the U.S. and its allies. Accepting a nuclear North Korea means accepting a far more dangerous world.
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2)
Berkeley mayor: I absolutely believe in free speech, but cancel this speaker
Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín wants Cal to cancel a planned appearance by conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos on campus next month.
“I obviously believe in the freedom of speech, but there is a line between freedom of speech and then posing a risk to public safety,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle.
The mayor’s office did not immediately respond Tuesday morning to a request for comment from this news organization. The mayor’s comments come in the wake of clashes Sunday in Berkeley between black-clad anti-fascist protesters known as Antifa and far-right supporters of President Donald Trump. Thirteen people were arrests in the skirmishes that generated headlines across the country.
UC Berkeley, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, has been the focus of controversy in recent months. Yiannopoulos was slated to speak on campus earlier this year, but the school pulled the plug on the talk when his supporters and protesters clashed violently, causing $100,000 in property damage.
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3)
by Amy Wax & Larry Alexander
Too few Americans are qualified for the jobs available. Male working-age labor-force participation is at Depression-era lows. Opioid abuse is widespread. Homicidal violence plagues inner cities. Almost half of all children are born out of wedlock, and even more are raised by single mothers. Many college students lack basic skills, and high school students rank below those from two dozen other countries.
The causes of these phenomena are multiple and complex, but implicated in these and other maladies is the breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture.
That culture laid out the script we all were supposed to follow: Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.
These basic cultural precepts reigned from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s. They could be followed by people of all backgrounds and abilities, especially when backed up by almost universal endorsement. Adherence was a major contributor to the productivity, educational gains, and social coherence of that period.
Did everyone abide by those precepts? Of course not. There are always rebels — and hypocrites, those who publicly endorse the norms but transgress them. But as the saying goes, hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue. Even the deviants rarely disavowed or openly disparaged the prevailing expectations.
Was everything perfect during the period of bourgeois cultural hegemony? Of course not. There was racial discrimination, limited sex roles, and pockets of anti-Semitism. However, steady improvements for women and minorities were underway even when bourgeois norms reigned. Banishing discrimination and expanding opportunity does not require the demise of bourgeois culture. Quite the opposite: The loss of bourgeois habits seriously impeded the progress of disadvantaged groups. That trend also accelerated the destructive consequences of the growing welfare state, which, by taking over financial support of families, reduced the need for two parents. A strong pro-marriage norm might have blunted this effect. Instead, the number of single parents grew astronomically, producing children more prone to academic failure, addiction, idleness, crime, and poverty.
This cultural script began to break down in the late 1960s. A combination of factors — prosperity, the Pill, the expansion of higher education, and the doubts surrounding the Vietnam War — encouraged an antiauthoritarian, adolescent, wish-fulfillment ideal — sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll — that was unworthy of, and unworkable for, a mature, prosperous adult society. This era saw the beginnings of an identity politics that inverted the color-blind aspirations of civil rights leaders like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. into an obsession with race, ethnicity, gender, and now sexual preference.
And those adults with influence over the culture, for a variety of reasons, abandoned their role as advocates for respectability, civility, and adult values. As a consequence, the counterculture made great headway, particularly among the chattering classes — academics, writers, artists, actors, and journalists — who relished liberation from conventional constraints and turned condemning America and reviewing its crimes into a class marker of virtue and sophistication.
All cultures are not equal. Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy. The culture of the Plains Indians was designed for nomadic hunters, but is not suited to a First World, 21st-century environment. Nor are the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-“acting white” rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants. These cultural orientations are not only incompatible with what an advanced free-market economy and a viable democracy require, they are also destructive of a sense of solidarity and reciprocity among Americans. If the bourgeois cultural script — which the upper-middle class still largely observes but now hesitates to preach — cannot be widely reinstated, things are likely to get worse for us all.
Would the re-embrace of bourgeois norms by the ordinary Americans who have abandoned them significantly reduce society’s pathologies? There is every reason to believe so. Among those who currently follow the old precepts, regardless of their level of education or affluence, the homicide rate is tiny, opioid addiction is rare, and poverty rates are low. Those who live by the simple rules that most people used to accept may not end up rich or hold elite jobs, but their lives will go far better than they do now. All schools and neighborhoods would be much safer and more pleasant. More students from all walks of life would be educated for constructive employment and democratic participation.
But restoring the hegemony of the bourgeois culture will require the arbiters of culture — the academics, media, and Hollywood — to relinquish multicultural grievance polemics and the preening pretense of defending the downtrodden. Instead of bashing the bourgeois culture, they should return to the 1950s posture of celebrating it.
Amy Wax is the Robert Mundheim professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. awax@law.upenn.edu
Larry Alexander is the Warren distinguished professor at the University of San Diego School of Law. larrya@sandiego.edu
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