Time to Reach Out

No matter if you are a concerned citizen, community leader or head of a small group. Take any ideas you have to help improve your neighborhood and reach out with it. Attend community meetings, speak up and be heard. Most people have issues concerning their neighborhood and don’t realize just how many others have the same issues. Nothing will be done until each of us take the time and effort to reach out.

We are fortunate to live in an area that has a local community council for each police pct. (contact the community affairs officer at your local pct. for information on local meetings), as well as many local civic groups and block associations. Take advantage of what these groups have to offer and get involved. One voice may not get heard, but spoke in the right place the many followers will be heard. Also keep in mind that every action taken to improve our quality of living started out with one person speaking up. Be that one person. There is also something for everyone to do if they want to get involved. No matter if you’re a business owner that wants to offer your service or a handicapped person that can’t get out of the house much, the right community leader will be able to assist you in finding a way to donate some time and be a part of helping your community.

So, reach out, it really does make a difference.

Written by

A. Wallace

Stop It Now!

Stop it now! Is a national nonprofit organization that fights for the prevention of sexual abuse victims. Their efforts and accomplishments are in my eyes worth making the public aware of. I have been following their efforts via their web site for about a year now. With newsletters, links and publications along with the toll free help line (1-888-PREVENT) they make a notable effort to aid in the fight against Sexual Abuse. Their efforts seam to focus more on the prevention of child abuse, but are geared to all ages. Although their fight is an important one, I would have to say that they avoid a very important part of prevention. Like many groups that have joined this fight over the years, they do not provide much (if any) community training of the importance that communities rehabilitation of offenders. As much as these crimes need to be prevented before they happen, they need to be prevented before they happen a second time by the same person. I understand that most people would not want an offender in their community, but this view also leads to further problems. By running offenders out of communities and not hiring them, we leave them nowhere to turn, but to further crimes and possibly re-offending. We as community members need to be aware of risks and prevention methods, but we also need to be educated and aid in the rehabilitation of offenders. If we do not want offenders to commit more crimes of this nature (or any nature), upon their release from correctional facilities we need to see that they become a “productive and law abiding” part of life. Don’t forget that although the general public only wants to take one point of view, there are always two sides to every coin. I commend the work being done by Stop it Now; I simple think they need to extend their efforts in order to truly help prevent sex crimes.

I am aware of the controversy that these viewpoints will create, but that is why I felt they need to be expressed. Through properly handled controversy and different viewpoints we will not only prevent the initial offender from offending, we will also help prevent the convicted offender from re-offending. Note that depending on your train of thought, you might find this article to be negative or positive, however it was truly written from a neutral angel. It is hoped to help those who read it to look at more then what the average media would have them see.

Please take the time to visit stop it now’s web site at http://www.stopitnow.com ,a lot of the information and services will prove useful to those abused as well as those not abused.

Written by A. Wallace

Resisting the Justice Department

It has been all over the news about Google refusing to give in to the government’s demands for the search engines records. I did not want to comment on the situation until I contacted Google directly.

What some of us don’t know is that almost every major web search service has not only given in to the government’s request for release of data, and will continue releasing that information when requested. And is doing so without a fight. Where does this all stop? With e-z pass, traffic cams, credit cards, metro cards, etc. The government already knows every move we make. America was at one time about freedom, but when we are placed under constant surveillance, that freedom is gone. Security surveillance protects the store from theft, but when it is made available to the government upon request becomes a way for them to monitor us right down to what we are looking at in the stores. Does the government really need to know if we are wearing boxers or briefs? This is not that much different from the records of search services are submitted. What do you look for on-line? Are you looking for clothes, a car, to read about issues that you are concerned about or just some photos of the old neighborhood from when your parents were kids? Isn’t that personal information, and shouldn’t it be kept personal. If the government was restricting their request for information to illegal things, such as search’s for child porn and search’s of that nature. Then that would be different. But the demands are to have all records of searches between dates of their choosing released. Did the government forget about the right that we have to privacy? Each search service has a little thing on their site where you can click on that explains the privacy procedures. Yet none of them state that the privacy terms will be discarded at their whim.

I have to commend Google for respecting the public’s rights of privacy. After contacting Google with my thoughts and requesting a comment from them, I received a response that went on to say, “Google is not a party to the lawsuit in question, and we believe this demand for information overreaches. We participated in lengthy discussions with the Justice Department to try to resolve this issue, but were not able to. We intend to resist their motion vigorously”.

Should you wish to have your rights to privacy remain in tact, consider sending your letters of support to Google, and take additional action by refusing to use any/all services that have submitted their records. The services such as Yahoo, Microsoft and MSN that released the information without a fight have no respect for our privacy or the Privacy Agreements posted on their web sites. To continue using these services shows they can do what ever they wish to us and continues to put money in their pocket. Hit them where it hurts, in the wallet. Then and only then will they have any respect for our privacy and/or any agreements that we used their service’s under.

By Arthur Wallace
With special thanks to Google for their taking a stand-up for our rights

The Transformation Of Political Science And The Rise In Crime Rates


The current field of political sciences is dominated by a multitude of ideas that have never in its history featured so prominently in this discipline. The general belief that it has lost its focus once and for all is from time to time counteracted by different opinions. One of those is that the world has come full circle, that mankind has experimented out all possibilities in terms of ideological thinking and that the liberal democracy as we know it has come out of the process as the prize winner both politically and economically. Some define this as the end of history. It also goes by the name of ultra modernism. Globalization fits in perfectly and all reflects the increasing complexity that we are finding our world to involve us in and which, in order to come to terms with the bigger magnitude of the whole, we are describing in essentially vague terms.

Francis Fukayama who wrote a now famous essay entitled ‘The End of History’, in The National Interest on the subject first launched the idea that history might have died a death in the 1980s. The idea has persisted during the subsequent historic reality-altering events leading to our understanding of the world in terms of security and globalization, even though the liberal ground is under siege from left and right wing ideologies, parts of which are finding their way into the democratic liberal discourse.

However inappropriate it essentially is to define the new ‘winning ideology’ -- the political science discourse is rife with arguments in favor of departing from old fashioned foundationalism and swapping this for a-systemic ideas gathered from all other disciplines— we are at this time almost as happy with any theory that offers a firm grip on reality as the third world would be with a cure for poverty. Much though the world is changing and much though this fast change is reflected in the sciences, the a-systemic ideas making up the political sciences might not necessarily reflect what’s going on in society one hundred percent adequately.

Issues like crime and other ‘anti social behavior’ are significantly underexposed in areas of political scientific studies, say researchers. Our highly developed society and increased sophistication in all the disciplines that results in political sciences being a highly esteemed area for study, delivering no doubt high caliber students to society, does not necessarily guarantee a tangible decline in crime rates. We are missing out something big time. Is this the whiplash of a-systemic thinking we all intuitively fear?

If you may believe studies undertaken by political scientists, in future, we won’t have a lot of room for corruption and evil wrongdoers in our society. Leaf through an average new book on political science and find hardly a line, let alone a chapter, dedicated to the evil side of human nature. What makes us all think that synchronizing everything automatically leads to a better world and therefore a less violence prone society? In the same breath, you might ask, what is the new Left, the new Right, the Libertarian and the other political mainstream thinking on issues such as the Third World? For all our great knowledge and speedy technology-supported understanding of what is going on, we are still not much better at remedying the main problems the world is faced with.

Criminology is part of the exercise of deconstructing the past, deconstructing other disciplines and constructing new ideas from a mixture of all of them which keeps social scientists busy these days. Yet it’s not enough apparently to translate into better thinking on the way safety and society can be organized.

Whether a certain approach to crime really is to blame for its rise is debatable. What is certain is that modern societies have become safer and more comfortable in many areas but that crime has risen in equal proportion. “When it comes to crime, or more broadly stated 'antisocial' behavior, society has actually become less safe. Crime constitutes an insecurity risk which is difficult to control. Many citizens and organizations will at some stage fall victim - usually completely unexpected -to behavior which can harm them, physically or financially”, according to a recent research report by the Foresight Institute of the Netherlands, a semi official consultancy. It is one of the few studies in this field.

The increasingly Old World definition of the nation state was primarily driven by the desire to resist this sort of danger, the researchers say. They continue that the way we deal with crime has evolved too. It is at this point that state organization is likely to really begin to crumble. A prime, if not the prime raison deter for governments is keeping a population relatively safe and free from crime. The more governments are perceived to be failing in providing the desired high level of societal safety, the less justification there is for governments and their imposing taxes on a country’s population.

Changes in the way crime is perceived include treatment of the issue in more scientific disciplines than ever. Yet some, including Fukayama, argue that the social sciences lack a distinct central view on human nature, which stems back from the post Kant era. The only reason that I feel you can raise the human nature argument again is that over the last 30 years in the life sciences there has been a lot of empirical work that has made the concept respectable to scientists. Yet social scientists and certainly people in cultural studies have yet to get that message, says Fukayama. They are very resistant to the notion of human nature.

The issue is grappled with mostly by people who try to integrate crime studies into a whole range of disciplines. “Crime has lost its exclusiveness, the approach to crime and crime prevention is no longer exclusively the responsibility of the police and the judicial authorities”, say the Foresight institution researchers. This coincided with a tangible change in society too. In the early 1980s, there was a sea change in the approach to crime and crime prevention. Inspired by understandable self-interest, individual citizens, and organizations in the community and local authorities started to feel that they bore a responsibility for crime prevention. Nevertheless, the results are not particularly overwhelming and the researchers at Foresight say that for the situation by the year 2010, some areas of research are still vastly underrepresented.

One real life example of high profile people sharing this concern is the situation on the Guernsey islands off the coast of the UK. You’d say this small island offers a perfect case to study the govern ability of a country with a limited population, to try and test the limits of a system to the full. Politicians might well be aware of this. At least, they appear to have a clear idea and are aware of the unique nature of their society and of the effects of the rules they invent. The measurability of crime renders the subject a good target for analysis, sophisticated ideas of governance and societal structures. The self-consciousness leads to frequent interesting debates by politicians on this island. Recently, a senior politician attributed the perceived rise in crime and anti-social behavior the effect of "woolly liberal" thinking. He said the increased emphasis on human rights in particular is to blame for the rise in crime.

The politician said that his government’s human rights act had led to offenders becoming "untouchable" by the authorities. Warning of the dangers of liberal thinking, he pointed out that there’s no common sense in Guernsey’s human rights laws which others believe ensure rights and responsibilities of citizens are balanced out rather evenly. He said the woolly thinking underlying the human rights ideas on the island led to alcoholism among the younger population for one.

This is one of the issues where the argument that improved technology in the hands of police and law enforcers is going to do the trick, won’t do completely. Developments in modern technology and improved understanding of changes in social control are central to ideas about stamping out crime. The foresight researchers recommend that there should be a radical reorganization of how financial resources are made available to this effect, if crime prevention is to bear any fruit.

Research efforts need to be stepped up dramatically if modern society is to develop adequate knowledge in any form or shape. They believe that the demand for scientific knowledge by the institutions, municipalities, government departments and private sector agencies might seem to be a professionalization of the area, but that in fact it does often not mean anything, especially not in the long run.

Fundamental scientific research into issues which are already playing a part at this time needs to be stepped up, the institute believes, in order to keep up with the criminal sector. They predict that by 2010, crime will have changed radically as a result of technological and economic developments and changes in social control and cohesion. There is a great need for fundamental research, for interdisciplinary knowledge and knowledge about long-term, ongoing issues such as criminal careers, say the researchers. In the next ten years there will also be a need for more theoretical research focusing on normative and empirical issues.

The wildly diverging ideas about human beings in the social sciences is exacerbated with a dramatically lowered emphasis on any blatant negative aspects of society in postmodern political science due to the death of positivist thinking. You could argue that this is at the heart of the problem of surging crime despite increased wealth of societies.

The political sciences appear most promising in their capacity for addressing the anomalies. It is the best discipline to do so, because it does not plan at neutrality. And, what’s more, the political scientist’s loyalties and engagements will not necessarily be predictable and stable over time. If it doesn’t yield immediate tangible results, it at least is a start. And it makes for less dry reading of the articles and books describing what’s perceived as the state of play in these sciences. You’d imagine that anyone coming up with a theory involving the axiom that history has ended, would be prone to fantasy.

And that’s somewhat true; academic attention for total fantastic ideas as a means to understand or create is on the rise. It’s much under attack from critics who say this is a foolish activity, especially when keeping in mind the idea that when you walk the streets of your town you can be subjected to a criminal attack at any given moment. Skeptics will imply that much of the storytelling anyway misses out large parts of reality, especially the less attractive features. Which is, however, not to say that blind spots are not being reduced.

But somehow, the rationale itself is changing for the criticism of the ways modern science works. The criticism for instance on the way politicians work, who seem keener to know about the cultural trends, popular culture, the media and power than in the labyrinthine workings of party and parliamentary democracy is that they are not sticking to their own field. Yet the new approaches favored in the political sciences leave more leeway for alternative ways that allow for a greater number of methods to assess reality than many predecessors ever dreamt of.

In stead of a total abandonment of all serious work, modern political science presents us with a mixture of both regurgitated theories of old time philosophers and original, rather broad based ideas. And in new, often surprising, ways.

Skeptical post modernists will contend that as there is no correct method for political research and researching the political, that it might be wise to adopt an anti-rules method, while the affirmatives may adopt something that can be termed ‘anything goes’. But perhaps several methodologies are best blended together to come to a robust approach to researching a problem. Much hinges too on one’s perspective on history.



Written by Angelique van Engelen

Power And Politics
Many of the leaders in our society are guided by unhealthy intentions. Instead of seeking to serve the people and heal our nation’s ills, their actions and decisions are primarily motivated by their desire for power. Many of the people running our country are run by their addictions to approval, sex, power and control.

Unfortunately, few truly healthy individuals want to submit themselves to the necessary abuses inherent to our political races - the verbal abuse both given and received, the huge amounts of money spent, the integrity sacrificed through the concessions, lies and manipulations offered in order to win.

Our system of electing our officials is so corrupt that there is little possibility of attracting a person with a strong, personally responsible, loving inner adult self. This is not to say that none of our elected representatives are honest and caring. Some are certainly motivated by positive intentions but, unfortunately, they constitute a minority.

There is no training required in personal responsibility to run for office. Our leaders are not required to heal their dysfunctional aspects in order to become honest and trustworthy people. The prerequisites for political positions mostly include having enough money, enough powerful people behind the scenes, being male, and being white.

Our political arena is designed to attract wounded people who need approval and power in order to feel worthy and validated. Obviously, such a person, with little or no internally derived sense of self-worth and integrity, is very susceptible to corruption. As the adage says: "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Power corrupts when a person is motivated by his or her desire for power over others, and few people have accomplished enough inner healing to transcend the desire for control over others.

A healthy person in office who is more concerned with serving the people than with getting re-elected could accomplish a great deal. Such a person was depicted in the movie Dave. In this film the actual president is in a coma and the White House officials, seeking to conceal the truth from the public so they can maintain control, put a look-alike into the president’s seat. Dave, however, is a man of heart, and rather than allowing himself to be controlled he sets about making necessary changes - cutting money where it is not needed and allocating it into more crucial avenues, like child care and the creation of jobs. He even takes responsibility for the corruption of the actual president and gracefully "dies" as the actual president is dying so the vice-president, a man of great integrity who was maligned by the power structure, could take over in his rightful place. The movie is, of course, a fantasy. Sadly, we would never elect a man of such integrity - a straightforward, honest, caring, and financially middle-class man like Dave. Our election process does not allow for this.

Revamping our election process would give people like Dave an opportunity to run for office. We desperately need people who care more for the common good than for their own popularity. We need brilliant, creative, honest and caring people to lead our country, but this will never happen with our present election system. We have incredible talent in this great country of ours, talent that could eliminate hunger and homelessness, and heal the internal wounds that create health problems, drug abuse, racism, violence and crime. But this talent is rarely tapped because running our country has been based on the earthly values of greed and power over others rather than the spiritual values of honesty, compassion and caring.

Unfortunately, neither our government nor most big businesses are based on the spiritual principles of compassion and caring about the common good. I have no doubt that if our government was based on spiritual principles we would not have the hunger, homelessness, crime, health problems, and drug abuse that are endemic to our modern society.



About the Author:
Margaret Paul, Ph.D., best-selling author of eight books, including "Do I Have To Give Up Me To Be Loved By You” and co-creator of the powerful Inner Bonding healing process.

By: Margaret Paul, Ph.D