Jerome Yehuda Gellman: This Was From God: A Contemporary Theology of Torah and History

Posted on April 28, 2017 by Luke Ford

Opening graphs:

Increasingly, well-informed traditional Jews may find themselves distrustful of the reliability of Torah as history because of the conclusions of scholarly research from natural science, history, linguistics, Bible criticism and archaeology. And, they may not be swayed by attempts to restore their trust. If they do not have a fitting theology for their new predicament, they may well give up on Judaism altogether or else give up on their traditional Judaism. Or, they may simply repress their difficulty because they see no way of dealing with it that will allow them to retain their traditional religious loyalty. They will carry on as if they believed in the historical veracity of the Torah, when in fact they do not.

As one who has lived with this problem, I want to now propose that a person with prior emunah, belief and faith/loyalty in God and in the holiness of the Torah remain faithful to keeping God and the holiness of the Torah at the center of his or her life. What is needed is a theology that appreciates the force of the challenge to Torah as history and preserves one’s traditional religious loyalty. That is the task of the present book.

Marc Shapiro writes: “I mentioned Gellman’s book to someone and expressed the opinion that even if another ten theologians were to write similar books, I don’t see this as having any real impact on the ground – although it will be appealing for certain intellectuals – because at the end of the day traditional Judaism is a religion of halakhah and its leaders are talmudists and halakhic authorities. If a new theological approach does not have the imprimatur of even one outstanding religious authority – gadol for lack of a better term – I don’t see how it can gain traction in the community at large. In previous years I have made the same point about changes in women’s roles and so-called partnership minyanim. These phenomena are also having trouble making headway because they too are lacking the necessary imprimatur. Interestingly, years ago someone responded to me that my point was not valid because I was operating under an outdated “paradigm” in assuming that changes in religious life, and now we can say in theology as well, needed the imprimatur of a gadol. Yet I would like to see one example of a significant change in theology or religious life that reached wide acceptance without such an imprimatur.”

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Can A Jew Enter A Church?

Posted on April 28, 2017 by Luke Ford

R. Shlomo Riskin wrote:

Question:
Am I allowed to attend my friend’s wedding in a church? Are Jews allowed to enter churches at all?
Answer:
Evangelical churches do not have icons or statues and it is certainly permissible to enter Evangelical churches.[11] Catholic and most Protestant churches do have icons as well as paintings and sculptures. If you enter the church in order to appreciate the art with an eye towards understanding Christianity and the differences between Judaism and Christianity so that you can hold your own in discussions with Christians, then it is permissible.[12] Participating[13] in a church religious service is forbidden unless it is for learning purposes or unless it would be a desecration of God’s name if you don’t attend, as in the case of Chief Rabbi Sacks’ attendance at Prince William’s wedding.

MARC SHAPIRO WRITES: I think that one can make a good case that donating to a church can be a sanctification of God’s name if, as happened in Israel, the church was set on fire by a radical Jew (or Jews). We cannot have the spectacle of Jews burning down churches in Israel, and the damage this can do to Jews worldwide is immense. Would it be out of line to argue that if Jews burn down a church, that at least to prevent enmity Jews should also help rebuild it? It is easy to see how such an action can be regarded as a kiddush ha-shem, even if most poskim would see it as technically forbidden. (I wonder, can something be both a kiddush ha-shem and a violation of halakhah?) In fact, after the church was burnt in Israel, a number of rabbis, including the great R. Nachum Rabinovitch, helped raise money to repair it.

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Steve Sailer: The Rise and Rise of Ethnic Turf Marking

Posted on April 26, 2017 by Luke Ford

Los Angeles Times: “But few of them are aware that the fountain was the centerpiece to a housing development with an ugly side: Midwick View Estates was meant for whites only.”

Do synagogues have an ugly side in that they are intended for Jews only?

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Once communities got rid of that ‘ugly’ policy, their neighborhoods got uglier and uglier in every way.

Also, if preservation of whiteness is so ugly, why do non-whites abandon their own nations and make flight to white?

* Few journalists seem aware that before 1948, pretty much all upmarket property was meant for whites only–or at least, not for blacks. So it’s nothing in particular to do with Midwick View Estates.

* Related: Shea Moisture, a hair care products company heretofore known mostly for marketing to black women, brought down a vitriolic response for a marketing campaign featuring white women.

Apparently, in consumer products, once you go black, you can never go back.

* Somewhat OT, Des Moines, Iowa, has recorded its 12th homicide in 2017. Last year at this time there was just one, with a total of 13 in the whole year.

The 11th victim (#12 was just a few hours later) was a Burmese Christian minority immigrant murdered in front of his wife and three kids. Details on the four killers are wholly lacking in the news reports.

* Kim Stanley Robinson (who lives in Davis, in Northern California) wrote an alternate history novel in which 99% of Europe got wiped out by Black Death, and the Chinese end up discovering and settling California. A decade and a half after he wrote it, our timeline seems to be merging with his fictional one.

* This is redolent of the ‘Arthur Ashe’ controversy in Richmond. Here the black community wanted to put a ( very out of place and ugly) statue of hometown tennis pro Arthur Ashe on Richmond’s Monument Blvd. Here is a photo of what they built.

Compare it to the Robert E. Lee monument.

The problem is modern additions tacked onto a traditional venue seldom work. They never work if the intent of the addition is to vandalize the theme of the existing venue. You don’t ‘improve’ the Parthenon or Pantheon by putting a medieval or modern structure alongside it even if your intent is not political which, in the case of putting a tennis racket wielding black man on a avenue honoring Confederate heroes clearly was.

Not only is the ‘Ashe’ monument out of place, it is puny and cheap as compared to the other grander monuments on Monument Ave.

* A lot of these SJWs are interested in doing stuff to whites that I genuinely have no desire to do to non whites but I would be lying if I said that my ideal society wouldn’t tear down statues of and rename streets named after blacks, asians, and hispanics.

* “Chinese are aren’t dumb. Buying up Hollywood, and playing the Jew game. Destroying anyone who pipes up about them. ”

That’s pretty charged language, designed to press buttons.

But something I’ve always wanted discussed and analyzed here is the possibility of other elite groups deciding they want the niches Jews currently occupy in America.

For all it’s cultural power, Hollywood really is not a large, lucrative industry compared to other things. The Chinese surely have the cash to buy it – if it’s for sale at any price.

Thing is Jews have kind of totally left behind everything they once were, and have only one model now. Blue collar Jews are gone; now it’s Elite College/Pipeline -> Law/Government/Wall Street, with a side order of Hollywood. Heck it’s actually becoming hard to find a Jewish scientist now when you read reports of various projects and research.

Not to mention that Jewish musicians are becoming rarer, at least ones involved in music for the mass market (no idea what’s going on in the classical scene).

Basically the Chinese just love higher education. And eventually they are going to amass sufficient political power (donations, lobbying) to kick in the doors on quota systems at elite colleges.

Also Wall Street has a lot of money. China is comparable. One day they will have a lot more. I think it will become a necessity for Wall Street to become more Chinese, as well as keep them constantly in mind.

Assuming the financial epicenter doesn’t move from NY to China, which I think is the most likely outcome. Then it’s going to be even more important to have a lot of Chinese at Goldman when you talk to the people with the big money.

* Over the years, a lot of rich people from Japan or France or Germany have tried to buy up power in Hollywood, with not all that much effect in the end on who really calls the shots in the movie industry. In general, the talent seems pretty happy the old kind of leadership.

Posted in Blacks, Jews, Los Angeles, Race | Comments Off on Steve Sailer: The Rise and Rise of Ethnic Turf Marking

Women’s Brains

Posted on April 26, 2017 by Luke Ford

James Thompson writes:

Men’s brains are bigger than women’s, even when controlling for bigger body size, which means they should have higher intelligence, though the evidence for that is conflicting. Most researchers find no notable differences overall, saying that different strengths and weaknesses balance each other out, but Lynn and Irwing (2002, 2004) argued that adult males are almost 4 IQ points brighter than adult females. The authors of the present paper have found one of the largest MRI samples available, each scanned person having done 10 cognitive tests, which is what makes this study particularly interesting. The tests included: Penn progressive matrices, Peabody vocabulary, reading recognition, working memory, pictorial episodic memory, spatial orientation, card sorting, verbal episodic memory, and the Flanker task of inhibition and sustained attention…

I recommend that men pay close attention to the largest sex difference, which plays out in their favour: spatial orientation, in which they have a 6 IQ points advantage. I recommend that women play close attention to Episodic memory in which they have an advantage of 4 IQ points, giving women the upper hand when remembering male transgressions. Those particular findings hold up even when you control for g, so they are very real cognitive sex differences, and are mostly across the board of the abilities measured.

…This study supports the minority position of Lynn and Irwing, that men are about 4 IQ points brighter than women, an across-the-board advantage, plus better spatial ability, and that part of this difference may be attributed to brain size.

… 65% of intellectually demanding occupations will be taken by men, if entry to those occupations is based only on mental ability. If the bar is set higher at IQ 145, then 70.5% of such posts will be taken by men…

When will academic publishing catch up with the pace of modern research? In the meantime, the current suggestion is that the biggest study of brain scans supports a sex difference in intelligence of about 4 points, probably due to larger male brains.

Comments:

* The sex difference at the high end is especially notable, keeping in mind that the study does not even address the extent to which the sexes WANT to do high-end work in math and science. Insofar as women, perhaps innately, are not INCLINED to do cold, abstract sorts of tasks, there will, in the absence of affirmative action, be a sharp difference in the number of male vs. female scientists.

* “Brain size has increased about 350% over human evolution, but we found that blood flow to the brain increased an amazing 600%,” says project leader Professor Emeritus Roger Seymour, from the University of Adelaide. “We believe this is possibly related to the brain’s need to satisfy increasingly energetic connections between nerve cells that allowed the evolution of complex thinking and learning.

“To allow our brain to be so intelligent, it must be constantly fed oxygen and nutrients from the blood.

“The more metabolically active the brain is, the more blood it requires, so the supply arteries are larger. The holes in fossil skulls are accurate gauges of arterial size.”

* Carotid arteries are smaller in women even after adjusting for body and neck size, age, and blood pressure.

* Could the combination of a large brain and insufficient blood supply to it actually mean less brain power? Is the ratio between blood supply (carotid artery diameter) and brain size the true determinant of intelligence/brain power? Of course, a big brain plus sufficient blood supply (wide carotid artery diameter) would then likely mean very high intelligence/brain nerve cell connectivity/activity.

* Rushton seems to be operating with a model of cranial capacity as an index of brain power, like the engine capacity of a car. But there is no neurological reason to “correct” for stature and weight because these are irrelevant, even on his neurological model to the “brain power” of a given brain. Women, have brains, on average 15 percent smaller than men. To deal with this “inconvenient truth” scaling occurs so that when scaled against their smaller bodies the brain size difference disappears. But outside of political correctness, why should such a scaling occur if what we are interested in is “engine capacity”? But even though women’s brains are smaller than men’s, the Wernicke area, a key area for comprehending sounds and word meanings is 30 percent larger in women, and the Broca area, important for the ability to produce fluent and expressive speech, is 20 percent larger. Even here we cannot conclude from these size differences that women’s have a greater verbal superiority to men, as men’s Wernicke and Broca areas may be neurologically more efficient, even if smaller. Even though girls are outperforming boys at school (in an anti-male feminist environment), there is evidence that men’s brain cells transmit nerve impulses faster than women’s. The research was done by Professor Edward Reed of Toronto University, and Philip Vernon and Andrew Johnson of the University of Western Ontario. Males were found to have four times faster nerve conduction velocities than females, a significant sex difference in all test conditions in favour of males. […]
Another problem for Rushton’s theory is the considerable neurological redundancy in the human brain. John Lorber, “Is Your Brain Really Necessary?” Science, vol.210, 1980, p.1232, reported on studies of victims of hydrocephalus (water on the brain). One subject had a respectable IQ of 126 and was a maths honour student, but had “virtually no brain”! All that the neurologist Lorber found in this subject’s head was a thin layer of brain cells only a millimetre in thickness. The rest of the intercranial space was filled with cerebrospinal fluid. This, not only raises problems for Rushton’s theory, but also for reductionist neurology. It is sufficient to note that brain size, at best, is only weakly correlated with IQ. What seems to be more important is the degree of neural connectiveness. Otherwise blue whales would be of a super-intelligence level. Further it has been argued that the degree of fissuring and thickness in the frontal cortical brain layers is more important than the sheer size of the human brain. The Negroid brain is generally less fissured than the White and Mongoloid brain. See C.F. Connolly, “External Morphology of the Primate Brain”, (Thomas, Springfield, 1950); F.W. Vint, “The Brain of the Kenya Native”, Journal of Anatomy, vol.66, 1934; H.G. Garrett, “IQ and Race Differences”, (Howard Allen, Cape Canaveral, 1973), p.14.

Sociobiologists have noted that during the last 20,000 years the upward trend in brain size has been reversed. Modern man has a smaller brain than the Cro-Magnons, by about 100-200 cubic cms. It is usually inferred that the Cro-Magnons were more intelligent than modern man: J.W. Jamieson, “Biological Diversity and Ethnic Identity: Changing Patterns in the Modern World”, The Mankind Quarterly, vol.36, 1995, pp.193-199; B. Chiarelli, “Some comments on the Evolution of Hominid Intelligence” The Mankind Quarterly, vol.37, 1996, pp.29-36. Yet could it be that with modern man evolution departed from pursuing quantity and pursued quality? Perhaps evolution pursued the path of neural efficiency rather than sheer brain size? We will never know the answer to that question because we do not have a Cro-Magnon brain to subject to neurological investigation.”

* Women are morons at their core. Then, their moods outrun their meds. Women were an excellent group to have handed unfettered control of our education system over to. Also Capitol Hill, media, news. Examine all the realms of failed society in the West, the beginnings of failure were infusing our systems of education, law, communications and news with women.

Any other conclusion is politically correct white-knighting.

* The interesting question isn’t really overall brain size, but the relative size of different brain areas. Women are supposed to have a larger hippocampus, which gives them an advantage in some memory tasks. Men have larger parietal lobes which gives them an advantage in spatial intelligence. That leaves the frontal lobes – are the frontal lobes bigger in men, and if so does that give them an IQ advantage? So far, the evidence isn’t very clear.

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Not Just Black and White: Peer Victimization and the Intersectionality of School Diversity and Race

Posted on April 26, 2017 by Luke Ford

Is it white kids doing most of the bullying? It seems not.

Is it asian kids doing most of the bullying? It seems not.

From the Journal of Youth and Adolescence:

Although bullying is a prevalent issue in the United States, limited research has explored the impact of school diversity on types of bullying behavior. This study explores the relationship between school diversity, student race, and bullying within the school context. The participants were African American and Caucasian middle school students (n = 4,581; 53.4 % female). Among the participants, 89.4 % were Caucasian and 10.6 % were African American. The research questions examined the relationship between school diversity, student race and bullying behaviors, specifically race-based victimization. The findings suggested that Caucasian middle school students experience more bullying than African American students generally, and specifically when minorities in school settings. Caucasian students also experienced almost three times the amount of race-based victimization than African American students when school diversity was held constant. Interestingly, African American students experienced twice the amount of race-based victimization than Caucasian students when in settings with more students of color.

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Will this be part of that national conversation on race that we’re supposed to be having?

* The ‘bullying’ thing is a tactic being used by the gay community to neutralize criticism of their initiatives. It sprang up out of nowhere a couple of years ago and surprise, surprise it quickly became an issue of national importance.

I have to give them credit, they develop some very sophisticated, effective methods of getting what they want. There are really talented, committed groups of activists on the left that don’t have seem to have any equal on the right.

* This is why I say the focus on IQ totally misses the point.

The real problem with blacks is they are stronger and more aggressive.

Also, this is easier to prove cuz physical differences are more visible and measurable than IQ, the effects of which can be seen but not the thing itself.

* When bullying was “a thing,” it was perfectly obvious the promoters weren’t interested in bullying as such, but in using it as a tool to advance their agenda.

Children are bullied for all sorts of reasons, but with rare exceptions all the activists talked about was the bullying of gay or transgender youths. It’s as if bullying for other reasons didn’t take place.

I was bullied steadily from first to tenth grade, some decades ago, and it had nothing at all to do with sexuality. But it was every bit as painful to endure.

* Like maybe there was a reason for segregated schools?

* This is also one major reason why lighter-skinned blacks always seem to be way more white-hating and black-pride loving than darker skinned blacks. Having been bullied as youths by other blacks for “looking white”, yet perceiving themselves to be too dark to pass for anything other than black, they go whole-hog in hating whitey and screaming about him and othering whitey, trying to get other blacks to accept him/her as authentically black, as, otherwise, they will be othered themselves.

It’s also a neat trick, since eventually when it comes to sorting out mates, the lighter skinned ones will be prime targets as mates. The females from the start, the males a bit later. So long as they are accepted by blacks as “black”, they can end up being the kings and queens among blacks.

Note: this is also why wussier blacks (Tennessee Coates) and gay blacks (see BLM movement) also go to extremes in white hating. Totally about protecting themselves from bullying and beat downs by finding someone else to take black hate.

* I spent A LOT of time in high school fighting against black kids who were attacking my white and Asian friends. So this whole white victimization of the people of color narrative has been a joke to me ever since.

* This is yet one more example of how the narratives as pushed by the media, academia and the Democrats are completely separated from reality. What is the happy ending? Whites can’t get good press (racist!) if they push back so they flee. Hispanics and Asians don’t have white guilt so they can push back, especially if they find a way to blame it on whites. As Hispanic and Asians number continue to multiply will the media finally have to deal with black bullying or will the media continue to bury it with occasional mentions of how it is all white people’s fault?

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Bilderberg = Deep NATO

Posted on April 26, 2017 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes:

In action movies, the American Deep State is heavily black (e.g., James Earl Jones was head of CIA in the Tom Clancy / Jack Ryan movies). So, in case you are wondering, African-American attendees in 2016 included Jordan and George Lucas’s girlfriend, financier Mellody Hobson. Previous years’ attendees include Shirley Ann Jackson, the black lady physicist who headed Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the mayor of Atlanta.

Until about a half dozen years ago, Bilderberg was very hush-hush about who attends its conferences, but it has in recent years been publishing its list of participants, perhaps to compete with more publicity-mad newer conferences such as Davos.

Personally, I find Bilderberg rather reassuring in that there are some grown-ups involved. For example, Bilderberg sometimes invites Charles Murray rather than Malcolm Gladwell.

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Running With the Predators – Liberal elites continue to condemn law enforcement and excuse inner-city crime

Posted on April 26, 2017 by Luke Ford

Heather Mac Donald writes in City Journal:

Starting in late summer 2014, a protest movement known as Black Lives Matter convulsed the country. Triggered by the fatal police shooting of a black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, the movement claimed that blacks are still oppressed by widespread racism, especially within law enforcement. The police subject black communities to a gratuitous regime of stops and arrests, resulting in the frequent use of lethal force against black men, according to the activists and their media and academic allies. Indeed, America’s police are the greatest threat facing young black men today, the protesters charged. New York’s mayor Bill de Blasio announced in December that he worries “every night” about the “dangers” his biracial son may face from “officers who are paid to protect him.” Less than three weeks later, a thug from Brooklyn, inspired by the nationwide anti-cop agitation, assassinated two New York police officers.
The protest movement’s indictment of law enforcement took place without any notice of the actual facts regarding policing and crime. One could easily have concluded from the agitation that black and white crime rates are identical. Why the police focus on certain neighborhoods and what the conditions are on the ground were questions left unasked.
The year 2014 also saw the publication of a book that addressed precisely the questions that the Black Lives Matter movement ignored. Alice Goffman, daughter of the influential sociologist Erving Goffman, lived in an inner-city Philadelphia neighborhood from 2002 to 2008, integrating herself into the lives of a group of young crack dealers. Her resulting book, On the Run, offers a detailed and startling ethnography of a world usually kept far from public awareness and discourse. It has been widely acclaimed; a film or TV adaptation may be on the way. But On the Run is an equally startling—if unintentional—portrait of the liberal elite mind-set. Goffman draws a devastating picture of cultural breakdown within the black underclass, but she is incapable of acknowledging the truth in front of her eyes, instead deeming her subjects the helpless pawns of a criminal-justice system run amok.
At the center of On the Run are three half-brothers and their slightly older friend Mike, all of whom live in a five-block area of Philadelphia that Goffman names Sixth Street. Sixth Street, we are told, isn’t viewed as a particularly high-crime area, which can only leave the reader wondering what an actual high-crime area would look like. In her six years living there, Goffman attended nine funerals of her young associates and mentions several others, including one for “three kids” paid for by local drug dealers, eager to cement their support in the community.
Goffman contends that it is the legal system itself that is creating crime and dysfunction in poor black communities. Young men get saddled with a host of allegedly petty warrants for having missed court dates, violated their parole and probation conditions, and ducked the administrative fees levied on their criminal cases. Fearful of being rounded up under these senseless procedural warrants, they adopt a lifestyle of subterfuge and evasion, constantly in flight from an increasingly efficient and technology-enhanced police force. “Once a man fears that he will be taken by the police, it is precisely a stable and public daily routine of work and family life . . . that allows the police to locate him,” Goffman writes. “A man in legal jeopardy finds that his efforts to stay out of prison are aligned not with upstanding, respectable action but with being a shady and distrustful character.”
Goffman’s own material demolishes this thesis. On the Run documents a world of predation and law-of-the-jungle mores, riven with violence and betrayal. Far from being the hapless victims of random “legal entanglements”—Goffman’s euphemism for the foreseeable consequences of lawless behavior—her subjects create their own predicaments through deliberate involvement in crime.
In 2002, when Goffman began her acquaintance with Sixth Street, the half-brothers Chuck, Reggie, and Tim were 18, 15, and nine, respectively. All had different fathers by the same crack-addict mother, Miss Linda. Their Section 8–subsidized house reeked of vomit, alcohol, and urine; roaches and ants crawled over the inhabitants as well as the furniture; cat feces covered a kitchen corner. Chuck’s and Reggie’s arrest records had begun in their early teens; Tim would graduate from middle school to the juvenile courts when he turned 12. Fatherlessness is a virtually universal condition among the young men in Goffman’s tale, but gradations exist within it. Chuck’s father came around during his early years, which helps explain, says Chuck, “why [Chuck] knew right from wrong and his young brothers did not”—a poignant acknowledgment of the role of fathers in raising sons, even if its premise (that Chuck knows right from wrong) is questionable.
On Sixth Street, drug dealing is tantamount to a bourgeois occupation. Chuck complains that his middle brother, Reggie, lacks the patience for “making slow money selling drugs hand to hand.” Instead, Reggie favors armed robberies, to the admiration of his mother, Miss Linda. “He fearless,” she says. “A stone-cold gangster.” It would be a mistake, however, to think of drug dealing as a peaceful activity. Early on, a disgruntled supplier firebombs Chuck’s car. Chuck responds by shooting at the supplier’s home. In 2007, at the end of Goffman’s chronicle, Chuck is fatally shot in the head while standing outside a Chinese restaurant, one of three shootings that night in Philadelphia. The killer, Goffman writes, was “trying to make it at the bottom rung of a shrinking drug trade.”

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When Amalek Moves

Posted on April 26, 2017 by Luke Ford

Chaim Amalek posts on Facebook:

* As I am not a prosperous man, the day is approaching when I shall have to leave my beautiful White bubble – the diversity embracing upper west side of Manhattan – for some part of America full of dusky folk where people know people who voted for Donald Trump. I will miss this place, and all the shining white faces I see on the street on my way to Zabars, Fairway, and Whole Foods.

* Fiercely pro-Zionist Rupert Murdoch is an old man – 86 years old to be exact. His sons and heirs to the Fox empire are far more liberal, and they appear to be skeptical about having a Jewish ethno-state in the Muslim mideast. So this struggle between father and sons is bad news for Torah Jews who believe that God has given them the Land of Israel to be their own. Very bad indeed.

* Yidden! We must insist on Chinese methods of media control if that’s what it takes to stop this hate!

* Science suggests: your baby is racist. Even if you live in Park Slope, shop at the Coop, or own a coop on the Upper West Side and attend a Unitarian church. Your baby is racist and shame on you for that.

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More Hysterics on Campus

Posted on April 26, 2017 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes:

Lately, American higher education is notoriously prone to tantrums. Two more academic meltdowns last week raise connected questions:

First, are scholars allowed to suggest any explanation for racial disparities other than that White People Are Bad?

Second, if they can’t say anything heretical or interesting, do we really need white scholars anymore, or can they be replaced by Professors of Color?

The American Historical Review, perhaps the top academic journal in its field, got itself in all sorts of trouble for assigning the review of an academic book about the failure of school desegregation in Nashville to a historian who actually has thought long and hard about the subject of why busing hasn’t worked as hoped anywhere or anytime. Raymond Wolters has been a professor of history at the U. of Delaware for the past 52 years. But that means he can actually remember the past—a dangerous capability, as Orwell noted in 1984.

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LAT: ‘How a Montana county became a stage for the national debate over refugees’

Posted on April 25, 2017 by Luke Ford

Los Angeles Times article:

To him, being a Presbyterian meant a life of public service and openness to other cultures. Back in Long Island, he sat on a refugee council at his church and once housed a Vietnamese refugee and her two sons. He joined churchgoers for a trip to refugee camps in the Middle East, and his church hosted a Coptic Christian priest from Egypt and a pastor from Syria.

But in Whitefish, the Presbyterian churches he visited were more interested in the Bible than the wider world and didn’t share his passion for women’s or gay rights.

LeBleu finally found a spiritual home alongside other liberal transplants at the Whitefish United Methodist Church. It was already working internationally to pay the salaries of Christian pastors in Angolan villages.

Its motto — “open hearts, open minds, open doors” — was prominently displayed on its website. To LeBleu, those were words to live by.

He saw an opportunity early last year after a photograph of a drowned Syrian boy went viral and a group of mothers in Missoula, a university town 130 miles down the interstate, were so moved that they launched an effort to take in refugees. Their plan to bring refugees to Montana for the first time in decades ignited a statewide debate and a string of demonstrations on both sides of the issue.

LeBleu’s response was to try to bring refugees to Whitefish.

He put out a call in church for volunteers. There were enough like-minded residents — the town had voted for Hillary Clinton — that he had no trouble finding support.

But it was a different story 17 miles south in the county seat of Kalispell, a blue-collar town of 20,000 known for its gun manufacturers and conservative churches.

Kalispell quickly became a hub of opposition to resettlement — and, on a rainy March morning last year, the site of a tense standoff.

LeBleu and about 70 pro-refugee activists, many from out of town, gathered in a park there with signs reading “Friendship not fear!” and “Stability, opportunity, peace for ALL.” Across the city’s main drag, a dozen or so Kalispell residents stood with their own placards warning of the problems they believed Muslims would bring: “Europe’s murder and rape epidemic is REAL, not ‘fear’” and “Kalispell NEEDS SHARIA LAW.”

Some of the men carried guns.

LeBleu was encouraged by the competing rallies. His side was bigger.

But letters to the local newspaper, the Daily Inter Lake, turned out to be a better indicator of public sentiment.

“Once those refugees are here, all we can do to protect ourselves is hope and pray they do not harbor sympathy for Islamic terror ideals. Beyond that, we are at their mercy,” one Kalispell resident wrote in a letter to the editor.

“Many of the refugees are being planted as representatives of Islamic terrorism. Europe is proof of this,” wrote another.

The Flathead County commissioners took sides last spring, sending a letter to the U.S. Department of State saying they could not “support the relocation of refugees without a legitimate vetting process and an analysis of refugee impacts to our local community.”

A friend says:

The big question is (1) Le Bleu moved from Long Island because he was drawn to the natural beauty and slower pace of life. What is the part that he doesn’t get about coming to some place because he finds it attractive, and then once he is there trying to change its character.

Was he rejected as a newcomer? He was delighted that people would talk to you on the street and ask how you were doing.

He came from a mainline Protestant denomination Presbyterianism which although originally a very severe fundamentalist branch of Christianity (Scottish Presbyterians wouldn’t save someone drowning on the Sabbath) is now another progressive liberal mainstream protestant sect that has seen its numbers drop off over the past three decades as it became more focused on social activism.

The article suggests that the social activism and not the religious part is the main part of being a Presbyterian. The author Jaweed Kaleem probably knows nothing other than whatever Le Bleu told him.

The article does mention that some Congolese refugees (although it is not clear what they were fleeing from ) have moved to Missoula which is a college town and a liberal spot in Montana about 100 miles south of Whitefish. And the father got a job as a greeter at Walmart. Way to import folks with special skills.

Whitefish is also the place that a Jewish real estate agent tried to drive Richard Spencer’s mother out of business (and she may have succeeded) Whitefish is a very affluent town. LeBleu could not have moved there if he didn’t have bucks (although if he owned his home on Long Island he could have used the proceeds to buy a place in Whitefish) the airport at Kalispell is thick with private jets belonging to the rich folks who have second homes in Whitefish.

Posted in America, Immigration | Comments Off on LAT: ‘How a Montana county became a stage for the national debate over refugees’