I am working diligently on a book and so my blogs are, to the best of my ability, short and to the point. All the better, when they can be short and to a large number of points!
As is this one.
Wake-Up America and vote accordingly, at every opportunity.
Blessings, Tom Mawhinney, 9/30/22
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The following is a reblog from 2016, with some up-dated information from 2022.
Drug Abuse Contagion in America #I
The word contagion in this title best describes the spread of something within a population. It could be changes in health or genetic make-up (biological); it could be cognitive, emotional, or behavioral changes in individuals (psychological); or changes in the quality of social interactions among individuals, groups of people, agencies or organizations (social/psychological).
It is also important to understand that drug abuse contagion can negatively impact (contage) other individuals who have contact with the drug user (physical or psychological abuse, neglect, job loss, multiple addictions, etc., can lead to legal problems and divorce). All of these outcomes are bad for everyone, and especially children who are involved. Such outcomes are also very bad for America.
Many changes can be good for individuals, populations, and societies. Some changes could increase the likelihood of health, happiness and even the very survival of individuals, populations and societies. Of course there are many changes that could reduce the probability of all of these bad outcomes, and change them to good outcomes.
Considering the realm of drug abuse contagion within our society there are a great many factors that can increase this form of bad contagion. They are too numerous to catalogue here, and some may not yet be identified.
The following are only some of the factors that stimulate bad behavioral contagion in the form of recreational drug abuse and addiction:
This last matter showcases a dramatic change by America’s increasingly liberal/progressive federal, state, and local government’s rules for citizen’s recreational drug consumption in America.
The recreational use of marijuana has now been legalized in seven states: Alaska, California, Colorado, Oregon, Massachusetts, Nevada, and Washington. . ( Note: as of 4/29/22, an additional 28 states have fully, partially, or decriminalized marijuana).
Marijuana has also been legalized for medical applications in 27 states: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington
I will soon deal with the medical use of marijuana in a second blog on that topic. For now, I will simply note that the increased in availability and use of any drug, with pleasurable conscious-altering effects, is likely to lead to even more increased use, legally prescribed or not.
Among all of the reasons for the increases our population’s use of marijuana I have listed above, are the effects of all levels of America’s government starved and desperate for increased revenues.
Beginning in the 1960’s, America’s Governments have successively legalized population behaviors that were once outlawed as vices. These activities are ones that were, and still are, are commonly understood to addict, kill, or produce other behavioral, emotional, or physical problems in large numbers of citizens who engage in them. These activities are ones that attract the involvement of criminal elements of society.
As a result, America’s increasingly progressive governments and their puppet entertainment and main-stream news media have used the language of individual rights and freedoms to propagandistically justify these culturally transforming legalization’s of formerly prohibited vices.
Disguised by this avalanche of propaganda, the driving force of this bad behavioral contagion is America’s government’s dire quest for economic survival.
America’s Gross Federal Debt is expected to stand a near 20 trillion dollars at the start of 2017. America’s governments are going bankrupt due to socialistic mismanagement. (note: as of 4/29/22 our national debt stands at 30 trillion +).
Our governments have taxed citizens to the breaking point and so they have cleverly legalized pornography, gambling and now recreational marijuana use so they can win new sources of tax revenue. I expect that prostitution will be the next target for more wide-spread legalization.
Our governments are now desperately foraging for new revenues and are focused upon further pleasuring and economically predating its citizens.
Can you perceive the faint historical echo’s from the Roman Colosseum in all of this?
Please view the following two articles about the known effects of marijuana on users. Here you will learn some of the reasons why the recreational use of marijuana was formerly made illegal.
Please note that these articles are from authoritative sources.
America is killing itself in so many ways…and the legalization of drugs is just another one of them.
https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/marijuana
http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/addiction/marijuana-use-and-its-effects?page=2
V. Thomas Mawhinney Ph.D., 11/12/16
Professor Emeritus of Psychology
Indiana Health Services Provider in Psychology
The Future: An American Collapse?
No, I do not mean a collapse resembling the Incas in the Peruvian Highlands, or the Vikings in Greenland. The complete disappearance of a society.
I mean the decline and the transformation of America to something virtually unrecognizable from its former Constitutional Republic self. There will still remain a population and a state, likely a socialist state, headed in the direction of an increasingly authoritarian state using more and more coercive means to control the behavior of its population. A population that is increasingly agitated, to counter-aggression against its controlling class and generalized instability.
I beg you to take time to educate yourself about a summary of the current scientific research findings on the matter of the decline and collapse of societies around the world and throughout known history.
Can you identify any of the well-known variables that appear to mediate the historical decline, even the total collapse of numerous other societies, now impacting America’s continuing decline?
America is already well on its way to a tragic future. Can this be avoided?
If you have read the following article, it may not seem likely.
But, only history will know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse
V. Thomas Mawhinney, Ph.D., 1/24/19
The Price of America’s Cultural Decline
The following is a comment to one of my recent blogs. It was sent to me by my old submarine mate Howard Hawkins (Huck).
His comment deserves to be front and center on my main blog page.
V. Thomas Mawhinney (Moe), 3/1/18
____________________________________________
Moe,
The following taken in part from an article,part of an op-ed that appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer dated 8/9/2017.
Titled-“Paying the Price for the Breakdown of the Country’s Bourgeois Culture”:
“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 is 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.
It all fits the left/liberal progressive agenda which has been chipping away at our Constitutional Republic since the 1920’s.”
__________________________________________________
I say beware it is Communism with a new label; the worst scourge in the history of the world causing mayhem and death that is unequaled.
Huck
Guns, Faith and Culture.
It should come as no surprise that traditional morality has declined to pitifully low levels in America. By this, I mean the traditional moral and ethical codes of conduct that are based upon the Judeo/Christian faiths and their derivations.
I have documented the decline of traditional American culture and social conduct in here my blogs since 2009, now approaching 1700 publications. I did the same as a university professor, when I changed my area of research to these matters in the 1980’s.
There are many corrective laws and encouragements that can be promulgated by our various levels of government. Also, there are those of us who are dedicated to showcasing America’s cultural and social decline. We hope to embolden everyone to fight the forces of our undoing in all available peaceful ways.
Yet, I struggle with one great fear. This fear is that, no matter what a secular government and an increasingly secular culture and society may do to reverse its own steady decline…nothing will work.
My grave concern is that nothing will work because there is no compelling reason to forsake the immediate pleasures that a population’s increasingly self-centered (“selfish”) behavior most quickly and most reliably secures.
Without God, and his sacred rules of conduct, there is no compelling reason to abandon our own selfish pleasures in order to only have a chance at securing the long-term benefits to ourselves and perhaps for society at large. What is it that will motivate us all to forestall or give-up immediate rewards in order to benefit others who will succeed us in the distant future?
As a doctoral student, I was trained that there is no such thing as human nature. I now know this is false.
Humans prone to pursue their own short-term rewards. They prefer that these rewards come faster not slower and larger not smaller. They also prefer that they come on a thicker schedule of occurrence, that they come with greater convenience and less pain.
Humans also love to control the odds that their rewards will become bigger and faster, etc., and that means that they will strive to control their physical, social, political and geopolitical environs. Humans are prone to use their powers to reward, hurt or kill others to achieve these ends.
Unless there is some powerful counter-controlling force, they will use whatever methods most immediately provide these things that human animals tend naturally covet.
Within any society, it takes a mighty powerful generally accepted belief system to motivate its inhabitants to conduct themselves accordingly and to acculturate their children to do likewise.
Historically, mighty powerful belief systems have come in the form of a society’s chosen God, who must be obeyed in order that individuals and their society can gain favor and avoid a myriad of terrifying cataclysmic events.
Often this Godly influence has been augmented by political leaders, kings, or dictators who use their God’s rules to control their population through the threat of slavery, banishment, imprisonment or execution. Many kings and dictators have even commandeered the status of a God in order further enhance their mighty powerful control of their subject’s beliefs and behavior patterns.
Since the Founding of America, a particularly pro-social and peaceful God has shaped the development of the United States. The attendant belief system is composed of Judeo/Christian precepts and rules for personal conduct defined good and evil behaviors for the worshiping majority of Americans.
Secular forces and political leftists have relentlessly attacked this undeniable truth and have increasingly lied and propagandized to impose their own religion upon America. This failed religion is secular humanism and its “god” is humanity itself.
Though it has lost much of its power, the Judeo/Christian God-Based belief system has been so interwoven into the fabric of American culture, that it was also woven into the fabric of its Constitutionally based Representative Republic Government.
This assertion is incontrovertible. I hope you will read one, or both of the following two books to understand the undeniable true font of America’s Greatness.
1. Rediscovering God in America, by Newt Gingrich
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rediscovering_God_in_America
2. One Nation Under God, by David Gibbs with Jerry Newcombe
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/350512.One_Nation_Under_God
America’s Founding religious beliefs guaranteed HUGE fairly immediate and also deferred spiritual CONSEQUENCES for engaging in good or evil (bad) behaviors during one’s lifetime. Believers were promised the love and favor of God during their life-times. Also, huge delayed consequences were promised, heaven if one will believe and follow the Ten Commandments; hell if one did not. A strong belief in the personal and social advantages of God exerts, both then and now, strong peaceful and pro-social influences over human behavior.
Even if a strong belief in God begins to fade for the reasons stated above, the behavior patterns learned under this Godly belief system can persist for a time with some strength.
But for the generations that follow, without the sustaining religious belief system that sustains good behaviors and reduces bad population acts…the rate of selfish, short-sighted, hedonistic and corrupt behavior will increase with each successive generation.
This, I believe, is what we are witnessing in America and all around the developing world. The common denominator of these trends appears to be the growth of science-based beliefs and technologies that bolster human’s confidence in the their own ability to increasingly control their environments and other important events in their daily lives.
The majority of us appear to love science-based modern technologies and the amazing advantages and conveniences that we enjoy.
Sadly, these technological “gifts” appear to be powerfully undermining the moral/ethical behavior of America.
The the thing I fear the most is that it is the proliferation of science-based technologies that have led to the growth of secular humanism and socialism leading to destructive forms of narcissism for leaders and extreme dependency and helplessness for followers. All of this correlating with increasing sociopathic/antisocial behavior for all.
I suspect that this self-destructive cycle has, along with other killing influences, spelled the downfall of developing societies (a relative concept), for all time.
All living things are born, they live for a while, and then they die. So it also has been with cultures.
In the past I have fantasized that cultures, particularly America, can teach themselves how to live with increasing health for longer and longer intervals of time.
Now, and I hope I am wrong, my happy fantasy seems to be logically flawed. If it is ever to occur, even temporarily, it may take another of our great national tragedies to bring America again to its vital roots…roots that can only be found on our knees in prayer.
I endorse the importance of the following article and hope you will give it your close attention.
http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=WA18B48&f=WU18B16
V. Thomas Mawhinney, Ph.D., 2/25/18
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Cultural Survival Skills 