POLITICAL CORRECTNESS, WHITE PRIVILEGE, AND BORDERS…

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS, WHITE PRIVILEGE, AND BORDERS…

Phillip Hodges reports on April 15, 2016, in Constitution.com.  

In an effort to raise awareness of the university’s anti-gun policies, a student participated in a protest in which he wore an empty holster, emphasizing the fact that he and his fellow students are defenseless. Two campus police officers confronted him and another participating student, and their encounter was caught on video.   D. J. Parten is president of Students for Concealed Carry in Alabama. He told Campus Reform, “This week is the empty holster protest for Students for Concealed Carry in Alabama to demonstrate that students are defenseless on campus.”   Following Parten’s encounter with campus police, the officers cited the University of South Alabama student for wearing an empty holster, as it was “causing alarm.” While the university prohibits weapons of all sorts, its rules say nothing about empty holsters.   The university’s policy lists the prohibited items, which “includes, but is not limited to, bullets, ball bearing bullets, bullet balls, pellets, firearms, guns, knives, paintball guns, air guns, hunting bows, archery bows, swords, martial arts weapons, and replicas of such weapons. Toy and water guns are prohibited.”   In spite of the policy’s silence on empty holsters, the two campus police officers insisted that students must obtain permission from the university to wear them.   The officers repeatedly asked where Parten’s weapon was. From their perspective, since he was wearing an empty holster, he was obviously hiding a gun somewhere.   Parten tried explaining that it was a protest – an empty holster protest. But the officers said that it didn’t matter. Apparently, someone had called the police when the empty holster was spotted, and because someone was “alarmed” by it, the police had to respond.   At one point in the video, one of the officers even admitted to Parten that wearing an empty holster was not breaking campus rules, nor was it breaking any law. However, Parten was still cited for “causing alarm.”  Folks, where are we going with political correctness?

            Newt Gingrich said, during the Outnumbered program on April 15^th, that the “white privilege” was an industry of idiots, and he certainly hit the nail on the head.  It is not by design that a person is born black, white, brown, yellow or whatever other color there might be.  You are what you are and you make the best of it.   Personally, I don’t think there’s any so-called white privilege, but then, I’m white so maybe I haven’t noticed it.   In my lifetime there have been wars fought over very tiny things…the atom, a drop of pigment and eggs…and nobody mentions that these things have nothing to do with anybody’s privilege.   Maybe I live in the past, but it seems to me that America went through a decade of looking inward, to find out what we were doing wrong, and to fix it.   We were well on the road to human equality and then…what happened?   We lost a great leader in Dr. King, a president in JFK and his brother, RFK.   Top that with the more recent events, like Ferguson and Baltimore, and you have the makings of a great divide in the country.   Abraham Lincoln, who took a giant step to heal the country with the Emancipation Proclamation once said “A house divided against itself cannot stand."

We are a house divided.

            As regards a border, that is what designates a country, and without a border, there cannot be a country.  So, what’s to be done?   Walls, fences, natural borders such as rivers or mountain ranges sometimes serve to define where the sovereignty of a country is, or isn’t.   Recently, at John Carroll University in Ohio, a fence, of sorts, was erected.   The fence, which was actually just two sections of a chain-link fence, had been approved by the university but that didn’t stop the fracas that it brought on.   The fence was supposed to show the students that favored Trump that they were behind him, but it sort of backfired.   Similar and less threatening, at least in my estimation, were the chalk writings for Trump that caused students to seek counseling for trauma.  Getting back to the fence, and apparently the physical presence of a bob-tailed fence also caused great trauma among the students at the Ohio school.   This dovetails right in with what I’ve been saying for years…not only are the students being dumbed-down, they are being spoon-fed a one-sided view of the world, which makes them totally unprepared for the real world that’s waiting.

            A parting shot.  Events taking place in the world now and in the near future lead me, and have led me, to believe that another global conflict is on the way.  Contrary to popular opinion, and to my original thinking, it will not be a nuclear war.  No, that would destroy everything and everyone, which is not what the enemy will want.   Urban warfare is what this country is preparing to fight, and it may very well be our government against our citizens.   Wake up America, your country needs you…desperately.

Dear Member of Congress,

This came to me as an anonymous letter.  It’s good, and I added a few touches of my own.

Dear Member of Congress,

From the time I was able to vote I voted Democrat. About 8 years ago I changed my affiliation to RepubIican because the Democrat party had become something I didn’t want to be a part of, and they had put forth a mystery man to be president.  I am 82 years old, and have a great deal of respect and influence with hundreds of seniors, many of whom are veterans,  who also network with thousands of others around the country.

            I received your questionnaire and request for money and strongly agree with every question, as I have since Obama was elected. Unfortunately the one question that was missing is: “What have the Republicans done for the American people?” We gave you a majority in the House and Senate, yet you never listened to us. Now you want our money.   You should be more concerned about our votes, not our money. You are the establishment, which means all you want is to save your jobs and line your pockets… Well, guess what? It’s not going to happen. You shake in your boots when I tell you we’re giving our support to TRUMP and he hasn’t asked for a dime.

You might think we are fools because you feel Trump is on a self destruction course, but you need to look beyond Washington and listen to the masses. Nobody has achieved what he has, especially in the liberal state of New York.    You clearly don’t understand why the Trump movement is so strong, so I’d like to share with you an analogy to help explain the Trump phenomenon. By the way, it’s not just the Republicans who feel ignored and disrespected, there are plenty of Democrats and Independents who also feel let down by the Washington elite. You seem to have  forgotten about “We The People” and who hired you to represent us.

So here it is, the best analogy I could come up with. Here is the reason so many Americans have boarded the Trump Train, and why your pleas to come back to the party who deserted us, is falling on deaf ears:  Imagine you’ve been on vacation for two weeks, you come home, and your basement is infested with raccoons. Hundreds of rabid, messy, mean raccoons have overtaken your basement. You want them gone immediately…You call the city and four different exterminators, but nobody could handle the job. There is this one guy however, who guarantees you he will get rid of them, so you hire him. You don’t care if the guy smells, you don’t care if the guy swears, you don’t care how many times he’s been married, you don’t care if he was friends with liberals, you don’t care if he has plumber’s crack…you simply want those raccoons gone! You want your problem fixed! He’s the guy. He’s the best. Period.

Here’s why we want Trump: Yes he’s a bit of an ass, yes he’s an egomaniac, but we don’t care. The country is a mess because politicians have become too self-serving. The Republican Party is two-faced & gutless. Illegal aliens have been allowed to invade our nation. We want it all fixed! We don’t care that Trump is crude, we don’t care that he insults people, we don’t care that he had been friendly with Hillary, we don’t care that he has changed positions, we don’t care that he’s been married three times, we don’t care that he fights with Megan Kelly and Rosie O’Donnell, we don’t care that he doesn’t know the name of some Muslim terrorist.

This country is weak, bankrupt, our enemies are making fun of us, we are being invaded by illegal aliens and bringing tens of thousands of Muslim refugees to America, while leaving Christians behind to be persecuted. We are becoming a nation of victims where every Tom, Ricardo and Hasid is part of a special group with special rights, to the point where we don’t even recognize the country we were born and raised in; “AND WE JUST WANT IT FIXED” and Trump is the only guy who seems to understand what the people want.

We’re sick of politicians. We’re sick of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. We just want this thing fixed. Trump may not be a saint, but he isn’t beholden to lobbyist money and he doesn’t have political correctness restraining him. All we know is that he has been very successful, he’s an excellent negotiator, he has built a lot of things, and he’s also not a politician. He’s definitely not a cowardly politician. When he says he’ll fix it, we believe him because he is too much of an egotist to be proven wrong or looked at and called a liar.

Oh yeah…I forgot…we don’t care if the guy has bad hair either.   We just want those raccoons gone. Out of our house, the People’s House. NOW!

IS EVIL REAL?

IS EVIL REAL?

            In the second Ghostbusters film there is a scene where it looks like all sorts of bad things are being drawn into a building.  One of the Ghostbusters says something to the effect that it looks like Evil Central.   That got me to thinking…is evil real?   What would qualify as evil?   In one of the Austin Powers movies there’s a Dr. Evil, and his sidekick, Mini-Me, but they’re more comical than evil.  So, what exactly is evil then?

            William Hirstein, Ph.D., is  a Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Elmhurst College, and has this to say about psychopaths, and it sounds to me like they are evil people…”First a bit of terminological history, to clear up any confusion about the meanings of “sociopath,” “psychopath,” and related terms. In the early 1800s, doctors who worked with mental patients began to notice that some of their patients who appeared outwardly normal had what they termed a “moral depravity” or “moral insanity,” in that they seemed to possess no sense of ethics or of the rights of other people. The term “psychopath” was first applied to these people around 1900. The term was changed to “sociopath” in the 1930s to emphasize the damage they do to society. Currently researchers have returned to using the term “psychopath.” Some of them use that term to refer to a more serious disorder, linked to genetic traits, producing more dangerous individuals, while continuing to use “sociopath” to refer to less dangerous people who are seen more as products of their environment, including their upbringing. Other researchers make a distinction between “primary psychopaths,” who are thought to be genetically caused, and “secondary psychopaths,” seen as more a product of their environments.   The Psychopathy Checklist, or PCL, describes psychopaths as being callous and showing a lack of empathy.”

            Richard Speck, in 1966 tortured, raped and murdered eight student nurses, so he certainly fits into that category.   Ted Bundy assaulted and murdered numerous young women and girls during the 1970s and possibly earlier, and that qualifies him, I believe.

There are other people that would certainly be titled as mass murderers, and for that they can be called evil.  How many did Stalin order killed on his way to the top?   Although he didn’t execute them all personally, he was responsible for many thousands, and may have, in fact, killed some of them himself.   The Nazi soldiers who shot unarmed civilians, and tried to get out of it by claiming they were following orders, they could be called evil, and so could the ones that gave them the orders.   Pol Pot, was a Cambodian revolutionary who led the Khmer Rouge from 1963 until 1997 and, under his “leadership” an estimated 1 to 3 million people (out of a population of slightly over 8 million) died.  

            Some may claim that any American President that orders men into battle could be called mass murderers, but I’d have to dispute that.   Every one of them, even the feckless one that’s in the White House now, had at least a moment’s pause to think of the consequences of his actions…and they knew that what they were doing was right.

American armed forces have never gone into battle to exterminate the people they were fighting…we defeated them, we worked with them and we helped them.   That is not the actions of a psychopathic government.   We think we know evil when we see it, and, of late, in our own country, it has become more and more visible.   Evil isn’t just in mass murderers.   Evil shows up in a person who, for whatever twisted reasoning they’re using, thinks they have to settle a grudge, or make a name for themselves, and they go out and do something evil.   Evil can start at any age.  Children that do bad things to dogs and cats will very likely grow up to do bad things to people.  I believe that’s evil.   People that live by a code of violence and revel in heinous crimes, I believe they are evil.

            To be sure, evil will always be with us…but we don’t have to allow it to metastasize beyond controllable limits.   We have to make sure that “good” will always triumph over evil and that isn’t to say that we all have to begin to be “bible-thumpers”.

Over in the muddled Middle East we have ISIS and they are pure evil in my book…a malignancy that has to be excised from the body of humanity.   You kill the cancer, the evil, before it kills you.  Sometimes, as the saying goes, you have to fight fire with fire, and if you’re a firefighter you will understand that right away.  When you’re fighting evil you do what must be done to eradicate and extinguish the fire.   Brutality on the part of ISIS cannot be met with brutality on our part…that would be just as evil, in my estimation.  However, beating the enemy definitively, to the point where he can never again pose a threat, that’s not just permissible, it’s the only way.

            This is from Haile Selassie, the great Ethiopian leader, “Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.” 

HEY, WHAT’S GOING ON HERE?

HEY, WHAT’S GOING ON HERE?

            Governor Brown of California has made it possible for illegal aliens to get driver’s licenses.  In many places a driver’s license is all that’s necessary to prove you are who you are…and that means you could probably vote.  Extrapolating that it means that thousands, maybe millions, of illegal aliens will be voting in the next election for President of the United States.   They will consider who made it possible and vote for that person’s party…in other words many, if not all, those illegal aliens will be voting Democrat.  That would automatically negate every single vote cast in the state of California, unless and until they come up with a foolproof method of discerning who is and who is not legal.

            As with any estimate of how many illegal aliens there are in this country now, the guess for California is about 3 million…which is a pretty good block of voters by itself, and then when you add in the Democrats already registered there, it presents a very sizable chunk of pre-determined votes.   It could be that these illegals are not permitted to vote in a national election, but I’m not sure that any serious effort would be made to eliminate them.   To the best of my knowledge, no other country allows non-citizens to vote in their elections…so why do we?  The answer is simple, it’s a strategy to build the Democrat base.  A simple-but-effective strategy.

            Immigration is always a hot-button political issue, and no more so than in the months leading up to a presidential election. From sanctuary cities to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) to birthright citizenship, what can and should be done to fix our current system is on the forefront of the minds of many politicians and voters.   . It has long been accepted by many people that the Constitution automatically bestows citizenship on anyone born on United States territory, even if the parents of that child are illegal immigrants. Scholars, however, have questioned whether this is so, and critics of birthright citizenship believe that it encourages foreigners to come to America, legally or illegally, so that their future children can become U.S. citizens, along with all the benefits that citizenship confers, simply by being born here.

The dispute has consequences, because if those who believe that the Constitution provides for birthright citizenship are correct, it would require a constitutional amendment to change it.   If they are wrong, then Congress could simply pass a statute declaring that the children of illegal immigrants who are born in this country are not citizens.   Section 1 of the 14th Amendment, which states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” There is no question that this section was meant to overturn the Supreme Court’s opprobrious and infamous decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), in which a majority of the Court held that slaves were property and that black people (even those who were not slaves) and their children could never be citizens even if they were born in this country. After ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, citizenship would no longer be denied to someone because of his or her race or ethnicity.

The section makes no reference to the alien status of the parents of the child, and many believe that the Fourteenth Amendment enshrines the rule of citizenship defined by birthplace, rather than the rule of citizenship defined by blood; in other words, citizenship defined by the parents’ citizenship, which is still the rule in many countries. There is also the curious phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Some scholars argue that this language excludes the children of aliens from citizenship because they owe allegiance to another nation and are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, at least as that phrase was understood in 1868, a time when, unlike today, there were no restrictions on immigration. Supporters of birthright citizenship contend, on the other hand, that this phrase means only that such aliens be governed by American law when they are in this country, excluding only a small number of discrete categories of people such as the children of foreign diplomats and invading enemy soldiers who are in, but at war with, the United States.

In 1868, this list also included the children of Native Americans living on tribal lands who were considered semi-sovereign people, but in 1924, Congress passed a law granting them citizenship.   In United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), the Supreme Court held that a child of Chinese parents born in San Francisco was a citizen who could not be barred from re-entry into the United States under the xenophobic Chinese Exclusion Act. In that case, however, it was clear that the Chinese parents were lawful, permanent residents of the United States at the time their child was born.   Opponents of birthright citizenship claim that the parents in that case owed their complete allegiance to the United States, not China, but that the same would not be true for the children of parents who are not lawfully present in this country or who are only temporary visitors at the time of the birth.   Which side is right?   My friends, it’s past the time that this business about “anchor babies” is looked at again.