States Rights
The State of Arizona has a right to protect its borders when the Federal Government will not.
The following quote by James Madison is provided by Founders Quote Daily. VTM
“The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.” –James Madison, Federalist No. 45
Cop Killers Must Die
I will ask you to think about what you would do if one night you awoke and someone was trying to break into your house late at night. You can feel your house shake and tremble with each rapid blow against your back door. Your wife is horrified and is cringing in the in a closet by your bed. Your young children hear her scream at you to call the police. They hear your loud and urgent voice and they run into your room crying as you call the police department for help.
Until the police arrive, you are the only person that stands between and your family and the criminal or criminals who are trying to break into your home. They know your are there, so they must be prepared to harm you. You do not know if they want your possessions or if they want your wife and children. Your children run to hide with your wife in the closet as you attempt to barricade the door. You are praying that the police will arrive soon.
So, how do you think you and your loved ones will feel in that situation? How do you think the police who are rushing to your home to save you from harm will feel? Most of them have left their wives and children to run toward the potentially lethal harm that awaits them, while most folks would run away from that situation.
It has been my honor to serve my region as a psychologist doing candidate selection screening for police and fire departments. I am also called upon to do fitness for duty evaluations for those who are traumatized in the line of duty. I have also done psychotherapy with these public servants after they have been beaten shot, stabbed, or after they have experienced other horrific things. The vast majority of these men and women are outstanding citizens who face the possibility of sudden death or injury daily to protect us.
The hours can be very hard on families, the pay is not great, and the dangers they face have grown way beyond what retiring veterans twenty-five years ago could have conceived of.
USA Today reported in its Nation line (July 23, 2010) that “The number of police officers killed in the line of duty increased nearly 43% in the first six months of this year, marking a sudden reversal from 2009, when officer deaths plummeted to a 50 year low.” Furthermore, “The totals include increases in every category from traffic accidents to fatal shootings.”
Without these brave citizens dedicated to protecting you and I and our loved ones. We would live in communities filled with danger and social chaos. In return, we need to protect them and their families. It is unconscionable to do otherwise.
There is every reason for America to pass laws mandating that those who kill our police officers are themselves put to death swiftly and legally.
Wake-Up America!
V. Thomas Mawhinney, Ph.D. 7/25/10
States Rights vs. The Feds
The Federal Government has increasingly gained control over the states. centralized control of traditional states rights is an anathema to the freedoms envisioned by our Founding Fathers.
The following is presented from Founder’s Quote Daily:
Foundersquotedaily.com
VTM, 7/23/10
“While the constitution continues to be read, and its principles known, the states, must, by every rational man, be considered as essential component parts of the union; and therefore the idea of sacrificing the former to the latter is totally inadmissible.” —Alexander Hamilton, speech to the New York Ratifying Convention, 1788
Killing Our Children
My heart breaks each time I see another of our precious young girls or boys killed by bestial pedophiles.
These events are reported in our media as if they are simple traffic accidents, or raids on beer parties at a frat house.
These are horrendous symptoms of this nation’s state of moral collapse. The causes of which are too many to enumerate here, but you should know most of them…they masqurade as personal freedoms. They are the embodiment of sociocultural chaos and you should hate them because they lead to these kinds of deplorable outcomes.
We can pray to God to save our children, but he will not. That is our job.
With regard to the killers of our children, we must kill them (legally and swiftly)…every single one of them. But we must do much more.
We must sadly learn that it was our own collective cultural design mistakes that produced these killers of children and we must change our ways.
Think about it…and Wake-Up America!
The following article is from the Comcast news page, 7/22/10
V. Thomas Mawhinney, Ph.D.
MORENO VALLEY, Calif. — Parents have been warned to keep an eye on their children and take extra safety precautions after a 17-year-old Southern California girl was apparently abducted about a block from her school and killed.
An autopsy confirmed the identity of Norma Lopez Wednesday, six days after she disappeared and a day after her decomposed body, shirtless and clad in jeans, was found face-down in a grove of trees in the agricultural area on the eastern edge of Moreno Valley.
Investigators would not release the cause of death.
Police and the FBI have not identified a suspect and asked the public for help in the investigation. Police would like to speak with the driver of a green SUV seen speeding from the area the day Lopez vanished.
About 2,000 people gathered around an athletic field at Lopez’s school Wednesday evening for a vigil where friend Moises Michel, 16, remembered how Lopez loved dance, especially merengue and salsa.
“Whenever we were bored we’d just dance with each other, we’d get up and dance,” he said. “I’m used to seeing her every day smiling. I’m just in shock because I can’t believe it.”
Lopez disappeared July 15 after leaving a summer school class at Valley View High School, where she would have been a senior this year. Authorities said she was heading to meet a friend.
When she didn’t show up, her younger sister and a friend went to look for her, found some of her personal items in a field 1 1/2 blocks from the school, and called authorities, said Riverside County sheriff’s Sgt. Joseph Borja.
The field, a well-known neighborhood shortcut, is off a street that dead-ends at the base of boulder-studded hills cut with trails. Homes line one side, but in the blazing Wednesday heat, the expanse of dirt and dry stubble was deserted.
Searchers had fruitlessly covered the area for several days.
The mix of suburban-style residential sprawl and large rural areas is common in fast-growing Moreno Valley, a city of 186,000 about 60 miles east of Los Angeles between March Air Reserve Base and a swath of unforgiving, rugged terrain known as The Badlands.
The teen’s disappearance drew wide attention across Southern California, where the high-profile abduction-murders of two other teenage girls in San Diego County — one jogging alone this year and the other walking to school in 2009 — led to a sex offender who ultimately admitted to the killings and is now imprisoned.
“I believe this has been made personal because we all have children,” Borja said. “It’s probably our worst nightmare that our kids can just be taken from a street and killed.”
He would not provide details on the items found at the site where Lopez was abducted, explaining that releasing further details could hamper the investigation.
“We haven’t caught the suspect who killed Norma so obviously there is at least a murderer out there, and so I would be vigilant, I would be aware,” Borja said. “If I was a parent, I would keep track of my children. I would do everything I could to ensure their safety.”
“Intellectual Honesty”
Brice Petgin wrote the following in response to my last Blog, entitled “Educated Thinkers”. I thought it was a very fine analysis of the reasons why people fail to think and behave with integrity.
Thanks for your contribution, Brice.
You are broaching a very interesting topic, intellectual honesty. Very few people, that does include dem smart folks, actually do very little investigation into their own beliefs. There is little incentive to do so. Confirming our own biases is very self reinforcing. Finding our views to be misguided or flat-out wrong is a very aversive condition. As you so eloquently instructed me, people seek reinforcement. That being the case there is very little driving one to analyze their paradigm.
But we expect more from our smart folks, and we are sorely let down. Academia is fraught with individuals who spend their lives examining the assertions of others, but rarely their own. This does a disservice to the consumers of academic services. This disservice is perpetuated by the academics assuming that those in their class rooms agree with them.
Opposing views are very rarely broached by those who disagree, fearing a bad grade students wish not to upset those with the red pens. I, however am just stubborn enough to not give a damn what my grad school profs think about my politics and I will share with them why I think they are wrong.
What is frightening is that this intellectual dishonesty creates group think among students and instructors alike. This is a dangerous prospect. Great problems are rarely solved by group think, but by dissenting ideas that eventually cooperate (It took some of the greatest engineers to create the first plane to exceed the sound barrier, but it took a dissenting Air Force crew chief to fix the flaw that allowed Gen. Yeager to go that fast).
Our culture is facing great problems from fiscal irresponsibility, terrorism and war, etc. The answers to these problems will not come from academia because of the group think present. But what worries me even more is where the answers will come from then. Politicians do not devise answers, but sell the work of others to the populace. Many solutions in the past came from universities such as Milton Friedman’s Chicago school. SO what is next, how do we fix this?
My answer, political equal opportunity quotas. If a university accepts federal funds then that university must have almost equal representation of differing political views.
I prefer free market solutions, but there is not a free market in academia, so it may require governmental intervention.
I do notice the contradiction between my views and proposed solution, just being intellectually honest.
Brice Petgin, 7/20/10
“Educated Thinkers”
I frequently hear “educated” thinkers discount the assertions of spiritual leaders about morality and ethics as being dogmatic (i.e., ridged, unreasoning, narrow minded, etc.).
There are instances where there is truth to this allegation. But it is also true that many scientist humanistic intellectuals are equally as dogmatic about their assertions regarding morality and ethics. This is particularly true of many social scientists.
At it’s best, the course of scientific investigation is self-correcting. But the values, attitudes and work of many social scientists are inevitably strained through their own histories of social-psychological conditioning and, therefore, their research-based practical suggestions sometimes resonate with the powerful tones of socio-political bias. The fact is that there is no shortage of dogma among social scientist or, for that matter, among any faction of the of the socio-politically articulate intelligentsia.
There is now an anomalous form of discussion making which pervades this culture. Ideas which conform to the dogma of humanism and political liberalism require very little science-based support to be presented and accepted as “truths”. Moreover, among the intelligentsia, this faction of thinkers almost invariably wins the decision whenever conservative or judeo-Christian derived “truths” are not scientifically supported to perfection.
Those who so blatantly impose these uneven standards of proof in matters of such high importance are either naive, or they are guilty of the felonious behavior of intellectual perjury. The meaning or the word perjury, as I use it here, is “the voluntary violation of an oath, either by swearing to what is untrue, or by the omission to do what has been promised under oath”.
To behave ethically, social scientists, the media and other policy makers must transcend the dogma of their own conditioning histories and apply standards of proof evenhandedly. Finally, they must test their own assertions of “truth” against the ultimate criterion: our best current estimates of their “truths” impact upon the future survival of their society.
V. T. Mawhinney, Ph.D.
9/22/91
Can’t Understand Obama?!
I have seen the “talking heads” express puzzlement and an inability to understand why President Obama does what he does.
Most folks I know also are dumbfounded by his behavior.
* Repeated massive stimulus spending that doesn’t stimulate
* Keeping business under the threat of increased expenses
* Resulting in highest unemployment in 30 years
* Forcing unpopular socialized medicine with increased costs
* This resulting in Government run health care
* Forcing Cap and Trade–a further blow to business recovery
* Cap n’ Trade will increase home energy costs $1700/ yr.
* Massive growth of Government with 13 Trillion budget deficits
* Prosecution of Arizona for enforcing its borders and laws
* Shutting down all drilling in the gulf
* Essentially shutting down our space program
* Directing the space program head to reach out to Muslims
* Disallowing prosecution of New Black Panthers intimidating
voters at a poll
* Government take-over of banks and auto-industry
* 32 Non-elected/non-public approved Czars
* Czars with socialist, communist or Marxist ideologies
* Stalling Military and Security decisions
* Attaching the 1st Amendment by muzzling the opposing media
* Apologizing to foreign nations about America
* Calling the U.S. Constitution ‘deeply flawed’
* Championing the ‘redistribution of wealth globally and in the
America
* Stating, “We are going to fundamentally transform the United States of America.”
All of this, and more that is coming, is designed to produce and intensify military, social and economic stressors in America.
Remember, Rahm Emanuel let the “cat-out-of-the bag” when he said that a crisis allows for things previously thought impossible to be accomplished. Historically, around the world, when people are in a terrible crisis they look to a bold, strong, and charismatic leader.
Hello President Barrack Hussein Obama!
How about the transformation of an American Capitalistic Republic into an American Socialist Republic?!
Remember, B.S. walks and Behavior talks. Watch the past behavior because it best predicts future behavior. An individual’s behavior patterns will best tell the intentions behind them.
Wake-Up America!
V. Thomas Mawhinney, Ph.D.
The following article points to an elemental truth. If we do not educate our children in the philosophy and history of our precious American Republic, we will loose it.
It is real simple. If the “elders of any tribe” do not pass the tribe’s historical hopes, dreams, and accomplishments on to their young, just as it was passed to them from the generations before, the essential values and practices of their little socioculture will fade from existance. The tribe may retain its former name, but it will no longer exist in space and time.
Wake-Up America!
V. Thomas Mawhinney, Ph.D.
The following is an article, in its entirity, written by
Joseph C. Phillips. This article appeared on Townhall.com
Who is John Locke?
I am willing to wager my house that not one of my son’s seventh-grade classmates could identify John Locke in a photo. I am then willing to let that wager ride on another gamble that less than one percent of the seventh or eighth-graders in the Los Angeles Unified School District would be able to identify Locke in a photo array of historical figures. Double or nothing that not only would they not know who he is, but they would also have no idea of why he is important. I would then bet my entire stack of chips that a substantially higher number of middle-school students could identify Karl Marx. I anticipate being a very wealthy man.
This venture came to my mind following an end of the year visit to my son’s middle-school.
My wife and I attended a parents’ night at our son’s school. As we entered his English classroom, I noticed that the walls of the classroom were covered with photos of Karl Marx, Joseph Stalin, and Vladimir Lenin. The eighth-grade students had been studying George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.” On every wall was a hand-made poster featuring a photo of Karl Marx, some biographical information, along with some pithy bit of wisdom attributed to him. As we left the room, I whispered to my son, “Tell your teacher that your father wants to know when she will teach the work of John Locke.” My son responded, “Who is John Locke?”
Written by George Orwell in 1945, “Animal Farm” is the allegorical tale of the wickedness and terror of Stalinist Russia. Significantly, the book is not a condemnation of Marxism. Rather it is a cautionary tale about Stalinism. “Animal Farm” is really a commentary on how Russian apathy and political corruption derailed the Marxist utopia. It’s also a rather cynical tale of the inevitability of totalitarianism.
Orwell’s novel also happens to be a fine piece of literature and one that I believe has a proper place in our children’s literary curriculum.
But was the problem with Stalinism only that it corrupted the Marxist ideal? Is totalitarianism the natural end of all forms of government, or are men capable of ruling themselves? Without the foundation of Locke, do American children have the philosophical foundation necessary to understand what is truly evil about Stalin and Marx and conversely, what is good and unique about America? I am concerned when young students can’t identify the source of the ideas upon which their nation was founded, but can easily identify men whose political beliefs are in direct opposition to those ideas.
Locke was a 17th century physician and philosopher and is also known as the father of empiricism—the theory that knowledge is gained through evidence acquired through experience. Locke developed his ideas in his “Essay Concerning Human Understanding.” However, it is the publication of two books–“The First Treatise on Government,” and “The Second Treatise on Government,”–that makes Locke important to the study of political philosophy in general and the American founding in particular. In these great works, Locke refutes the divine right of kings and sets forth the nature of legitimate civil government, based on (what was at the time) the radical idea of natural rights and the social compact. It was the revolutionary ideas of natural rights and government limited to the occupation of securing those rights that influenced America’s founding fathers. Locke is quoted and paraphrased throughout much of America’s founding documents.
Over the years, there has been increasing pressure on America’s public schools to increase the level of math and English education. There has also been a corresponding decrease in the emphasis on teaching American history and civics. For instance, here in California, entrance requirements into the public university system call for only two years of history and government, as opposed to four in English and math.
But civic education is at least as important.
According to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, civic knowledge not only “exerts a broader and more diverse influence on the American mind, but it also “increases a person’s regard for America’s ideals and free institutions.” In other words, the health of our republic depends on a citizenry educated in the history and source of its political ideals and the institutions those ideals produced. Certainly, that is as important as geometry. And if students must study literature, which they certainly should, why not read works that also have the benefit of teaching the source of the ideas of the American Revolution?
Between Karl Marx and John Locke, who is more important to our national political identity? So why are our children hanging posters of Marx on their classroom walls instead of Locke? I am not claiming that there is a Marxist conspiracy to indoctrinate our children. However, I do know that if we continue to neglect educating our children about the men on whose ideas this nation was built, this nation will not stand. The borders may remain the same, but the character of this nation will be lost forever.
The Right Stuff Goes Wrong
By Cal Thomas.
The following is an article which appeared in various newspapers and also on Townhall.com. I have duplicated it from Townhall.com so that you could think about another of Obama’s presidential acts designed to turn America into a shadow of its former self in the world.
Wake-Up America and create a new revolution at the polls!
V. Thomas Mawhinney, Ph.D. 7/12/10
The following are Cal Thomas’ words.
Silly me. I thought America’s unparalleled space program (before the present administration began dismantling it) was a triumph of American ingenuity, technology, vision and boldness. Instead, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden says its “foremost mission” is not returning to the moon, or completing a mission to Mars; rather it is improving relations with the Muslim world. Bolden says President Obama told him he also wants NASA to encourage children to study science and math, but isn’t that best done by applying science and math to a robust space program?
Obama is boldly going where no president has gone before. It is a continuation of the president’s subjugation of himself (bowing to foreign leaders) and the country he is charged with leading by obsequiously kowtowing to a people for whom advancement to the Middle Ages would be a step up.
The president and Bolden think it will improve relations with the Muslim world if we praise them for their work in math and science many centuries ago, but what has the Muslim world done for humanity lately? Female genital mutilation? Beheadings? Stoning of alleged adulterers? Honor killings? Terrorism? Death sentences to religious converts?
Yes, Benito Mussolini was said to have made the trains run on time, so maybe previous presidents should have praised his timetable and overlooked the torture, the censorship, the holding of women and children hostage and the police state.
I’m sure if we searched long enough, we might discover a good character quality or two in Mao Zedong, a world-class mass murderer. But let’s not forget China invented the compass and woodblock printing. What are a few human rights violations compared to these positive contributions?
Perhaps if President Roosevelt had looked for some good in Adolf Hitler, World War II might have been avoided. Maybe it was our fault that Pearl Harbor was bombed. We should have appreciated the Japanese contribution to America (The cherry tree? Sushi?).
What is it about this president of ours? He doesn’t seem to love America, at least not the America we knew prior to his coming to office. He pledged to change the country, but growing numbers think what we have is better than what he wants. Despite its past and current problems, most Americans are justifiably proud of their country and what it has stood for over the last 234 years. Regrets? Sure, we’ve had a few, but then again too few to mention compared to the blessings we have received and the blessing we have been to much of the world.
On April 3, 2009, President Obama addressed an adoring crowd in Strasbourg, France. He told them the United States “has failed to appreciate Europe’s leading role in the world” and that America had “shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive” toward its allies.
Actually, it has been the other way around. America bailed out Europe twice in the last century because it elevated evil men to leadership and they started wars that engulfed the world. And America protected European economies by paying for a nuclear umbrella that protected the continent from the Soviet Union, thus allowing those who refused to pay a price or bear a burden to concentrate on their economies and self-indulgent pleasures.
If America is all that Obama makes it out to be, why do we have such an illegal immigration problem? You’d think these people would prefer Europe, or Iraq, which have contributed so much to our space program.
If NASA’s “foremost mission” is no longer space, but a group-hug to Muslim nations, perhaps Congress should be asked to authorize such a change in purpose and reduce NASA’s budget. Do most taxpayers want NASA to focus on inner space, rather than outer space? I doubt it. They can render their verdict on this and many other Obama policies come the November election.
From a First Class to a Second Class Power?
Paul Kennedy, in his book, Preparing For The Twenty-First Century, sends us a warning from his vantage point. His book was copy written in 1993.
In my view, his warning resonates with increased authority in the year 2010.
What do you think?
Speaking of an economic slowdown that the U.S. has experienced over the past 60 years, he states the following:
Whatever the explanation for this slowdown, the consequences are serious for the United States with its internal and external obligations. With a high, fairly evenly distributed standard of living, a favorable current-accounts balance, and no foreign commitments, a country like Switzerland, perhaps, or Luxembourg, might suffer a long period of sluggish economic growth and the results, although depressing, might not be serious. But the United States is the world’s foremost military power, with commitments all over the globe; its wealth, while considerable, is unevenly distributed, resulting in immense social problems at home; it has a large current-accounts deficit and needs to borrow from foreigners. Given those circumstances, a prolonged period of slow growth compounds its existing problems, making it unlikely that the United States can continue to fund the same level of military security and attend to its social needs and repay its debts. A country where real weekly incomes have fallen steadily since 1973—as in this case—is ever less inclined to fund even the worthiest needs.
Such a dilemma is intensified if other nations are growing faster, leading to changes in economic relationships. The leading Great Power simply cannot maintain its status indefinitely if its economy is in relative decline. Moreover, because this decline is relative and gradual, it is insidious, not dramatic; as one economic historian has noted, ‘a country whose productivity growth lags 1 percent behind other countries over one century can turn, as England did, from the world’s undisputed industrial leader into a mediocre economy it is today.’ It also turned from a first-class to a second-class power. (pps.194-195)
End of Quote.
Wake-Up America!
V. Thomas Mawhinney Ph.D. 7/10/10
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Cultural Survival Skills 