Three Great Grandchildren

by Richard John Stapleton

This past summer my son Jonathan and his wife Renee made a swing trough Statesboro and stayed a few days for the first time in a year or so.  My wife Debbye and I and took them out to eat several times while they were here, along with their three children, Walker, Emmy, and Orion.

Friends of ours who saw them in restaurants with us were impressed with them, especially the grandchildren.  One lady told me as I was walking back to our table after going to the restroom, “You marked every one of them,” which was a high compliment.

A few weeks ago Debbye and I were having dinner at the Forrest Heights Country Club here in Statesboro with our friends Beth Hardy and Lon Carnes.  A lady whom I have known for a long time from our days at Georgia Southern University, Mouse, stopped by our table to chat with Beth.  She told Beth, a former mathematics professor at Georgia Southern, that she took a math course from her forty or so years ago, and she made a “B”, the only grade she made that was not an “A” at Georgia Southern.

Beth did not remember her in the course but as they were exchanging pleasantries Mouse noticed me sitting across the table, and as she was leaving she came around and told me, “I want you to know you have three great grandchildren.”

I told her I knew that but I appreciated her saying that.  Mouse and her husband live near my former wife Ginny, the grandchildren’s birth grandmother, and her husband Bob.  Mouse had seen and talked with the grandchildren during the summer when they stayed overnight with Ginny and Bob.

Jonathan graduated from Statesboro High School in 1990, the Star Student of our congressional district in Georgia that year, and went on to Rice University in Houston, Texas where he met his wife Renee, from Montana.  Jonathan maxed the math part of the SAT and the GRE exams.  They then went to Seattle, Washington where Renee got her MD and PhD degrees from the University of Washington.  Jonathan taught school and invented things, such as his Reptangles toy, now marketed nationally and internationally by the Fat Brain Toy Company, an educational toy that can be assembled into geometric shapes.

Jonathan and Renee went on to Burlington, Vermont where Renee now researches, teaches, and practices pulmonary medicine at the University of Vermont.  Jonathan teaches senior physics and earth sciences at Essex Junction High School, and invents things.

Their children have done well in school.  Walker is now in the seventh grade, Emmy is in the fifth grade, and Orion is in kindergarten.  Walker’s cross country team has won every track race they have raced in, including the state championship; Emmy is supposedly reading at an eighteen-year-old level; and Orion has already been identified as gifted in mathematics.  Walker plays the piano, Emmy plays the violin, and Orion plays the violin.

I know it’s narcissistic but I could not resist posting this post.

Ad Hominem Fake News on Facebook and Elsewhere

by Richard John Stapleton

I had an interesting experience on Facebook Thanksgiving Day 2016.

I had recently shared a post on my Facebook page written by someone other than me containing some negative allegations about the Clintons. I pointed out in my comments about the post that I had seen the post posted on Facebook several times over several weeks by various people. I also pointed out the post could be fake news.

The allegations in the article were egregious and defamatory, although containing what could be real facts, containing numbers and such. I pointed out in my comments about the piece that if it was fake news something should be done about fake news, fake news having been in the news in recent days, as if people had suddenly awakened to the fact such news exists.

Seems to me there should be some sort of fact-checking device that will block Facebook posts containing made-up facts, numbers, data, etc., unless the piece is clearly labeled as fiction or satire.

Someone read the above-referenced anonymous post I made on Facebook and posted a post to me below the post, presumably after reading the article, telling me I am an idiot. I responded with my reasons for posting the piece and let him know I did not appreciate his fake news ad hominem slur about my intelligence.

I did not explain to him what ad hominem is, as perhaps I should have, an attack on the character, past behavior, intelligence, and persona of a person illogically attempting to prove false what the person said in a current argument. I assumed the respondent would look ad hominem up on Google if he did not know what it was. The argument I was making is that it’s difficult for anyone to know with certainty what is fake news in any media, such as the Clinton post I used as an example.

Over the next three or four hours in the Thanksgiving afternoon eight or so other people then entered the fray on my Facebook page replying to what had been said about the post.

Most of the group generally agreed with the first respondent attacking me for being an idiot and a character-disordered degenerate for posting the post about the Clintons in the first place, however many times it had already been posted by others, elaborating other perspectives on why they were justified in attacking me, asserting that anyone but an idiot should have known that something this egregious and defamatory was fake. It was like someone entertaining the thought Bigfoot was real, one of them said. One of them said he checked my Facebook profile and I lacked “legitimacy”, that I was probably just trying to get attention, and I needed counseling. One said if I was really concerned about fake news on Facebook I should have contacted the people who run the Facebook page and talk to them. One said I was inappropriate and did the wrong thing but he wished me well. One said I was a fool. One said I was beyond hope. One said I did it to piss people off while expecting him to believe I did it out of the goodness of my heart in the interest of truth. One respondent, the last one in the thread, a female, said it was not fake news since it was all over wikileaks.

None of them except the last respondent said anything about my basic point in the argument, that almost no one could know whether the post I posted was fake, however egregious and scandalous it was. I told them I did not know it was fake, and they did not know, eliciting not one response to the basic point of the argument, only unleashing more ad hominem drivel. Apparently what really incensed them was that I would not say I knew it was fake. I admitted most likely it was fake, but that was not good enough. They wanted me to say I knew with certainty it was fake, which I do not.

Another respondent, a female, contacted me confidentially outside the feed line thread on my Facebook page, and asked me to please take the post down, telling me it included misleading information; so I took it down, ending the discussion.

She seemed like a reasonable responsible person and I had no desire to piss anyone off. It never occurred to me the post would piss anyone off. Why was I doing this in the first place? I told one of the respondents in one of my responses I did not know why I did it, that maybe I did it just because I felt like doing it (which is my First Amendment right as a US citizen). I told one of them I did it to educate people.

Posting the article did no harm to the Clintons since few people read my posts and the post had been widely posted by others for some time on Facebook. As much as the Clintons have been defamed and slandered in various media for forty or so years my making this post would not make one whit worth of difference, as I told the group. Unlike Socrates however I have no desire to drink hemlock because of pursuing truth inflaming people in philosophical discussions, however bigoted they might be. It’s better to be smarter than martyr. So I took the post down, dispersing the group, which could have gotten much larger.

In the various responses I made to the group I told several they were making ad hominem attacks and were ignoring my basic point, that few people can know for sure what is fake in media of any sort today. What I did not say is that the more general problem is massive lying in all media and institutions, taking both lying by commission and lying by omission into account.

Lying by commission is making up fake news telling outright falsehoods; lying by omission is not publishing relevant facts that people in a free society need to know. The US government has taken lying by omission to a high level, calling omitted facts state secrets and classified information, making truth tellers such as Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning outcasts and criminals, and threatening Hillary Clinton with prison for mishandling emails.

It’s as if US citizens are supposed to be meek obsequious sheeple lapping up whatever they’re told, never questioning what they’re not told, like grade school children.

I have read in the media lately that Hillary now has her own cult. Cult members could care less about the real truth of anything. They believe whatever their fellow sheeple believe and adore and follow their superhuman leader, attacking anyone who attacks her or him. Maybe the post about the Hillary cult is just another example of fake news; but it’s also possible I encountered some of its members yesterday on Facebook, Thanksgiving Day.

You can build the case Trump also has his own cult, and if one of the negative posts I have posted about him had been read by his true believers on my Facebook page their responses would have been even more venomous than were Hillary’s in the above referenced post.

I don’t have to worry much about Trump’s supporters reading anything on my Facebook page though, since Facebook algorithmic robots try to make sure anyone posting anything on Facebook is not read by sheeple not believing the same thing. I still pick up some Hillary sheeple because I used to support Bernie Sanders, which was tacitly OK with the DNC, for a while. After I came out for Jill Stein after Bernie dropped out I was blocked from most Demo groups, and most of her sheeple are blocked from me. It seems some of them however were not penned up by the Facebook robots as my Thanksgiving experience shows.

Don’t get me wrong. I do not agree with Facebook’s computer programming. I think all Facebook posts and responses should be made to the public at large, which you can click off in your Facebook preferences, as I have. The problem is even if you tell them to post all your posts to the public at large you are mostly locked into your own silo mostly preaching to your own choir, since most sheeple probably choose to only post and listen to their own kind of sheeple. Unfortunately, it seems, sheeple get their preconceptions and biases pleasantly reinforced over and over by what they read on Facebook just like they do everywhere else, as in churches and in most schools.

As you can see on my Facebook page I have about 4,864 Facebook friends aboard Spaceship Earth. I used to have almost 5,000 such friends, the arbitrary limit imposed by Facebook for some reason, almost all of whom requested me to confirm them as friends. After coming out for Jill Stein a little over a hundred of them unfriended me.

Why did I post the above post? Why am I posting this post? Why have I posted all posts I have posted? The bottom line is I think I am as qualified to quarterback the US as anyone else, especially Hillary and Trump, as I pointed out on my Facebook page in a comment above a picture of our 1953 Frenship High School football team, which I quarterbacked in 1953 as the youngest and smallest starting Class A high school quarterback in the US, at 13 years old, 5’3” tall, and 110 pounds.

Furthermore, I think you could randomly select a reasonably bright adult well educated in US public education systems off the streets and send her or him to Washington and she or he could do a better job quarterbacking the US than establishment bought and paid for politicians, as I have pointed out on my Stapleton Gallery of Folk History and Conversation on my Facebook page for many years.

With respect to the allegation made yesterday that I lack “legitimacy” and therefore I am unqualified to make posts as a US citizen such as these on Facebook, check out my credentials in detail on this page by clicking on the options above, especially my RJS Academic Vita.

Worker-owned enterprises: A long-term feasible solution?

Economic Update: The Economics of Trump

Friday, 18 November 2016 00:00 By Richard D. Wolff, Truthout | Audio Segment

Editor’s note:  It’s possible the Trump economic plan will add vitality to the US economy in the short run, adding real jobs through massive spending on infrastructure and through tax cuts for large corporations; increasing interest rates for savers, retirement plans, and banks; increasing sales and profits in heavy industry and transportation; maybe bringing back some US jobs from overseas, and preventing some from being sent overseas; maybe even boosting sales and profits in the small business sector.

I (Richard John Stapleton) have advocated much the same plan in my writings for ten years, emphasizing fiscal policy by the Federal Government rather than monetary policy through the Federal Reserve System, with one major exception.  I would increase taxes on large corporations and the elite rich to reduce the budget deficit and debt increase.
Trump’s plan is almost sure to increase the US budget deficit and add trillions more to the total debt.  And it won’t work for more than a few years.  But we might have at least one more economic party for the rich and maybe even the middle class before the whole thing comes crashing down.
Richard Wolffe’s economic update in this radio broadcast presents a feasible plan that might create stability and sustainability for the long run.
Richard Wolffe is a professor of economics at The New School in New York City who has established a national network of supporters, collaborators, conferences, web sites, and social media outlets for educating the US population about economic issues.  Wolffe’s network is one of the best economic education systems available for US citizens, free of charge, providing economic education sorely needed by most voters.

Give his Economic Update: The Economics of Trump a listen now by clicking here http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/38430-economic-update-the-economics-of-trump.

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Both the demo and repub parties are now corrupt, obtuse, and irrelevant

This article tells us the US has been on the wrong path for a long time, at least since JFK’s time some fifty-six years ago.  Whether it will ever get turned around remains to be seen.

No one won the 2016 US presidential election, including repubs jubilant their candidate “won” the election.  We all lost, since we are all on the same downward slope; and there is almost no chance Trump will stop the slide.

The same goes for Hillary.  There is no way to know which one would slow or accelerate the rate of descent the most, taking everything into account.

Death of the Liberal Class? Death to the Liberal Class!

For as long as I’ve been involved with progressive political movements, activists and organizers have been trying to reform the Democratic Party with little to no success.

Unfortunately, none of this is new as activists have tried to reform the Democratic Party since the 1960’s, only to see the Dems lurch further and further to the right over the past several decades.

In America, we don’t talk about history. If we do, it’s either a bunch of watered down bullshit, or outright myths and fallacies. That being said, it might be useful to talk to today’s young activists about the dark legacy of the Vietnam War, a war many consider to be the worst international crime of the second half of the 20th century.

According to military historian Nick Turse, over 4 million Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians were killed as a result of Uncle Sam’s limitless aggression in the pursuit of power. Today, Agent Orange continues to ravage not only U.S. veterans, but most importantly the people in Southeast Asia.

In order to understand today’s Democratic Party, progressives and liberals must come to grips with the history of their party. Consequently, we should never forget who got the U.S. into Vietnam in the first place: namely, JFK and LBJ, two Democratic-liberal heroes, of course.

Read the article in full in CounterPunch by clicking here http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/11/18/death-of-the-liberal-class-death-to-the-liberal-class/

The best thing to do now

by Richard John Stapleton

Here is the best thing to do about the economy now.  Whether Trump and company have enough sense to see it remains to be seen.

There Is a Better Option Than Trump’s $1 Trillion Infrastructure Plan

by Ellen Brown

Thursday, 17 November 2016 00:00 By Ellen Brown, The Web of Debt Blog | News Analysis, published in Truth-Out

Donald Trump was an outsider who boldly stormed the citadel of Washington DC and won. He has promised real change, but his infrastructure plan appears to be just more of the same — privatizing public assets and delivering unearned profits to investors at the expense of the people. He needs to try something new; and for this he could look to Abraham Lincoln, whose bold solution was very similar to one now being considered in Europe: just print the money.

The High Calling of Teaching

November 16, 2016

The High Calling of Teaching

by Winslow Myers

Give The High Calling of Teaching a read by clicking here at http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/11/16/the-high-calling-of-teaching/.

Published in Counterpunch.

This is a great article on how to teach. Let students sit in circles and talk about the assigned content to be learned, be it mathematics, history, economics, stories, politics, religion, or physics, with themselves and the teacher, letting anyone in the class have a chance starting the discussion, by using a Classroom De-Gamer, explained in my books Business Voyages and Born to Learn by clicking here, https://www.amazon.com/Richard-John-Stapleton/e/B001KHS3P6.

We need millions of classrooms such as Winslow Myers describes here scattered around Spaceship Earth.

The major reason most people do not learn as much as they might is because they are rarely given a chance to discuss what they think they know and believe with people who think they know and believe different things, because of having been locked into learning experiences with people who are told the same things by teachers preaching to their choirs prescribing what they call holy writ, dogmas, doctrines, and the like.

If you hear, read, and see the same thing over and over again quite naturally you are not going to learn much about the whole system.

The danger, of course, if you do this you will begin to think you are not only right but morally superior to other people who have been taught different things in the same sort of educational processes, and you will probably eventually hate them.

And you and they may escalate the process to the next level, war and other catastrophes, as history has shown.

 

Some college students are amazingly smart, understanding, and responsible

November 11, 2016

by Richard John Stapleton

Here is a poignant video emailed to me by William John Cox that deals with the aftermath of the Trump election.  Wm and I sat in the same Methodist Sunday School class at Wolfforth, Texas in 1945.

This short video is an interview of college students, very bright and comprehending ones, who honestly say what they think and feel about the election.  Well worth a look and listen.  You won’t be disappointed.

Take a look and listen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLBGL1c6C5I.

William John Cox is the founder of the United States Voters Rights Amendment movement.  I am honored to serve on his advisory board.

Check out the United States Voters Rights Amendment movement at USVRA.US. 

Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations

by Richard John Stapleton

Here is a pdf copy of my article “Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations: A Study of Correlations Between Instructor Excellence, Study Production, Learning Production and Expected Grades.”

Published in 2001 by the Organizational Behavior Teaching Society in the Journal of Management Education, this article by Stapleton & Murkison has now been cited in 61 refereed professional journal articles, providing insights into how to evaluate teaching and learning in colleges and universities, showing how difficult it is to fairly evaluate teaching and why relative expected grades questions should always be included on student evaluation forms to provide a modicum of fairness.

To verify the 61 citations just punch Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations into Google and read the sources.

Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations gets to the heart of intractable problems of the teaching profession, if you want to call it that, the most serious of which is probably teacher evaluations. How can you or a teacher know how well a teacher is doing his/her job? What sort of criteria can you use for making this judgment? Certainly the purpose of teaching is to cause learning to occur in students, but how do you measure this? What kind of learning? How much learning? How much learning relative to what? What percentage of a prescribed content or syllabus a teacher causes students to memorize? Or how much learning a teacher produces in students relative to how much peer teachers produce? In other words are you attempting to measure absolute learning or relative learning?

Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations presents a unique Composite Indicator of Teaching Productivity (CITP), one of the most sophisticated metrics of teaching productivity yet developed in the teacher evaluation literature.

Check it out if interested at

http://www.sagepub.com/holt/articles/Stapleton.pdf

R J Stapleton
Effective Learning Company
Statesboro, Georgia
November 10, 2016
www.sagepub.com

Say it ain’t so, Joe: I’m afraid it is, kid, Trump will be president of the US

by Richard John Stapleton

November 9, 2016

Here are some articles from readers and writers of the New York Times. I agree with most of them.

It’s hard to believe Trump won the election.

I had no idea Trump had this kind of support. I advocated and voted for Jill Stein. I thought she might get five percent or more of the vote. not so. She was nowhere on the map. Never saw what percent she got. Must have been less than two percent. I figured Hillary would win no matter what, since Trump had shot himself in his foot and stuck his foot in his mouth so many times.

Not so.

History repeated itself. It was almost a dead tie in the popular vote. A friend told me a few minutes ago Hillary actually won the popular vote, but they were still counting. If so the problem is our bloody Electoral College, and our voters that do not vote for the right thing, or who do not vote at all. Probably about fifty percent of possible voters did not vote.

As usual Trump and Hillary got about twenty-five percent of the possible vote each. We are being ruled by a tryanny of the minority, as i pointed out in my article on this blog, “Say it aint so, Joe: Why Jill Stein should be elected president of the US.”

Our system of voting for president, senators, and representatives is obsolete and corrupted. Surely a parliamentary system would be better.

Read about Trump’s election in the New York Times by clicking here: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/opinion/election-night-2016/the-unknown-country?smid=tw-share.

This post is an excellent service provided by the New York Times that includes many articles from various writers expressing various perspectives.

 

Say it ain’t so, Joe: Why Jill Stein should be elected president of the US

By Richard John Stapleton

“Say it ain’t so, Joe,” was a headline in the Chicago Daily News written by Charley Owens after “Shoeless Joe” Jackson and seven other Chicago White Sox players were indicted for rigging the 1920 World Series.  The headline was inspired by a boy who asked Shoeless Joe, his hero, one of the best baseball players of all time, who once batted over .500 in a season, if he really did it, saying, “It ain’t so, is it Joe?”.

Joe replied, “I’m afraid it is, kid.”

Joe was subsequently banished from baseball for life along with the other miscreants.  See the full story at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoeless_Joe_Jackson.

During this 2016 US presidential race, the world series of US politics every four years, a costly charade as usual has been played out in mainstream and social media, making it seem we have a real democracy for we the people in this country when we really have an oligarchy for the deep state.

Hillary has raised and presumably spent about $700 million in campaign financing, mainly financed by the elite rich; Trump raised about $300 million; Jill Stein raised about $2 million from we the people, to get elected.

This year, as usual, the establishment political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, were cheered on and rooted for by about thirty-five percent of possible US voters.  The other sixty-five percent of possible US voters have been mostly silent, disillusioned, depressed, dismayed, and disgusted, if not horrified, by the performances of the establishment presidential candidate winners, Trump and Hillary.

There are no real heroes still in this race.  Bernie Sanders was a hero in the early running, but he dropped out and supported Hillary.

Trump got where he is today because of being born rich and doing what made him feel good buying and building buildings,  spending money, hiring and firing people, and renting his buildings out.  Hillary got where she is because of being born poor but reasonably bright, and because of making good grades in school, getting admitted to good universities, and because of marrying Bill Clinton, and not divorcing him because of his out-of-control sexual and manipulative behavior. She leveraged her experience into getting where she is today, on the verge of getting elected the first woman president of the US.

Neither Trump nor Hillary ever achieved anything in their fields comparable to what Shoeless Joe Jackson did in his.  Joe batted over .500 in a professional baseball season, and led his league with doubles and triples almost every year, something only a handful of professional baseball players ever did and can do.

Thousands of politicians have done as well as Hillary and Trump playing as politicians, in terms of actual achievement.  Both of them were able to get their hands on a lot of money to run for president, a lot more than most people could ever dream of, assuming this is an achievement.  Hillary got elected a US senator and got appointed US Secretary of State, achievements I suppose; but Hillary’s record as a senator was mediocre at best, and her record as Secretary of State was poor, in my judgment.  She came across as a blood-thirsty warmonger and a truly incompetent writer, receiver, and keeper of emails, with innumerable observers making allegations her behavior was unethical, and probably illegal, regardless of what Comey and the FBI finally said about the matter.  There were after all 113 emails marked as classified that she let out, which was against the law.

Hillary and Trump have produced the standard political bullshooting, kissing-up, smoozing, brown-nosing, and criticizing to go along and get along playing the game of politics, fighting political enemies with words and speeches, and so forth.  Neither one of them, to my knowledge, produced an original book of analysis, ideas, concepts, or strategies on how to improve the US or the world.  Yes, they produced memory books of their lives, mostly written by ghost writers, that made them some money; but so what.

Unlike Shoeless Joe, unable to read or write, neither Trump nor Hillary, nor their spouses, have ever had to pay a serious price for their unethical behavior, since they were able to pay serious money to the best lawyers to defend them; although most people would probably think the $978,000 that had to be paid to settle Hillary’s husband’s lawsuit with Paula Jones for his philandering was a serious price to be paid for immoral behavior.

Bill Clinton is not the first president to have sexual relations with women not his wife.  John F. Kennedy may have been the world champion in this league.  I saw an Internet that asserted he screwed every single one of his female secretaries and interns when he was in office.  I have read he had a quickie with a famous stripper standing up.  On road trips, according to folklore, groups of women would be arranged to meet him, secret service men would take him to meet them, he would socialize a bit and then make his decision for the night.  The man apparently was a sexual super stud.

But it never came out in mainstream media when he was in office to my knowledge.  I never knew about it until years after the fact, assuming it’s actually true, having picked up information in bits and pieces here and yon over time, sometimes scanning the tabloids checking out at the grocery store.

Jack Kennedy and the other womanizing presidents never got enmeshed in the problems Bill Clinton did because of womanizing.  It appears what Kennedy did was consensual, mostly one night stands, or thirty minute stands, or whatever; and apparently his partners were pleased and satisfied with the experience, having gotten their money’s worth in a sexual deal that was clear from the git-go.  Jack Kennedy and other sexually promiscuous presidents did not wind up sued or impeached because of enjoying themselves sexually with women not their wives.  Not so with Bill Clinton.

On the other hand, one can build the case Bill and Hillary Clinton have excelled all other US and international presidents and dictators and their spouses, excluding perhaps such international husband and wife teams as the Marcoses of the Phillipines and the Perons of Argentina, in terms of being able to set up husband-wife dynasties manipulating and exploiting their countries for decades.  Certainly no other US husband-wife team has done this.  At the same time, the Clinton Foundation, in which the Clintons have installed their daughter, Chelsea, as a director may be a world-class political family business, unprecedented in corruption of a government, as history will let us know ere long.

Trump came across better in the second presidential debate (Sunday, October 9, 2016), Hillary not as well, in my judgment.

Hillary admitted she made a mistake with her email server and 33,000 emails, and Trump clobbered her for having bad judgment, something most people probably suspected.

Hillary clearly came out on top in the third debate, despite Trump hammering her again for her poor judgment and “poor instincts.”

What is judgment?

According to Google on the Internet, judgment is “the ability to make considered decisions or come to sensible conclusions,” “an error of judgment.”

synonyms: discernment, acumen, shrewdness, astuteness, sense, common sense, perception, perspicacity, percipience, acuity, discrimination, reckoning, wisdom, wit, judiciousness, prudence, canniness, sharpness, sharp-wittedness, powers of reasoning, reason, logic; Moresavvy, horse sense, street smarts, gumption

“his temper could affect his judgment”

One can build the case any woman who would marry an out-of-control sexual person like Bill Clinton and stay married to him decades has bad judgment.

But maybe Hillary’s marital decision reflected good judgment, given her goals, ambitions, and proclivities.  It seems to me Hillary being married to Bill Clinton enabled her to achieve her personal political ambitions, regardless how many times he embarrassed her, assuming his escapades and scandals did embarrass her.  She may have found them exhilarating.

Not many women have goals and objectives as lofty as Hillary’s, including, seriously, becoming the first woman president of the US.

Apparently it’s not embarrassing to millions of voters to think we US citizens shall once again have this Clinton couple in the White House, with Hillary overseeing and theoretically managing millions of employees in the US federal bureaucracy as chief executive, directing the activities of millions of employees in the US military as commander in chief, and supposedly psychologically leading all of us—morally, ethically, economically, and politically . . . to who knows where.

Bill Clinton’s bizarre sexual behavior and subsequent scandals in mainstream media enabled Hillary to automatically get millions of dollars worth of free political advertising, enabling her to develop her political brand, while acting in the leading lady role in one of the most successful real life soap operas of all time, The Clintons, watched by billions of people around Earth over twenty-five years—an experience that may enable her to take control of the White House Oval Office, and the White House bedrooms, come February of next year.

Trump said in the debates Hillary never gives up pursuing her goals and dreams, which he saw as a good thing about her.  She has perseverance, for sure, and tremendous energy.

And no doubt about it, Hillary Clinton is abnormally clever, attractive, and sophisticated, with a good education, Yale and all that, as is handsome charming Bill, also a Yale law school graduate.  They are an attractive couple, having movie-star calibre good looks bequeathed by nature, and this alone enabled them to garner millions of votes from gullible adoring fans.

Starting from scratch, they are now fabulously wealthy by most people’s standards, seventy-five or so million dollars wealthy, having made their money after Bill left the US presidency on January 20, 2000, primarily by selling books and giving speeches to large corporations and the elite rich, which were mostly payments made for services rendered while Bill was in office or down payments for future services to be rendered by Hillary after she becomes president.

Regardless of Hillary’s abilities and proclivities, bad judgment is not a good thing to have when a president sleeps with a red telephone by her bed in the White House giving her power to destroy the world with a nuclear bomb, or start WWIII, with one telephone call in the middle of the night.   Nor is bad judgment a good thing to have dealing with greedy aggressive bought and paid for US senators and representatives, banksters, and various types of oligarchs gradually but inexorably undermining the functioning of the US government from the inside seeking and gaining tax concessions and other favors.

Come to think of it, this red telephone system is not good for any president.  Our founding fathers made a serious mistake in my judgment making it possible for any president of either sex to acquire this sort of potency.

Given the problems, conflicts, uncertainties, worries, criticisms, ethical problems, evilness, and unending troubles campaigning for president and doing the job presidents have to do if elected, why would anyone, including Donald Trump,  want to be president of the US after they have become as rich as the Clinton’s have become?

One can build the case making more and more money and gaining more and more power becomes an addiction for successful high-energy entrepreneurs.  If they don’t keep it up they get depressed.  More and more money and more and more risks are necessary to generate enough excitement to stave off serious psychological depression.  I covered this in my book Business Voyages, using some of the conceptualizations and models of Martin Groder, MD, a psychiatrist and a transactional analysis colleague and mentor of mine at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Trump may have better judgment for foreign policy issues than Hillary, and for dealing with banksters and fellow oligarchs, however flawed his judgment is.  We have no way of knowing.  But, Trump said he thought Antonin Scalia was a great Supreme Court judge, showing the kind of Supreme Court judges he would appoint, showing what poor judgment Trump has regarding the judgment of Antonin Scalia, especially Scalia’s judgment in the Citizens United case of 2010, an oxymoron, a case that dis-united citizens, a case that turned corporations into first class citizens with super power to influence elections in their favor, a case that turned people into second class citizens with diminished power. Scalia had to have been one of the worst Supreme Court judges in US history, in my judgment.

Trump and his cronies and minions in the Oval Office, if Trump gets elected, could appoint a thousand or more judges, cabinet members, ambassadors, bureaucrats, etc., giving Trump power to do untold evil—exercising his flawed judgment.

Trump’s family life is about as bizarre as Bill and Hillary’s, an extended family entailing three marriages and several children creating their own TV reality show or soap opera, apparently just for the fun of it.  Daddy Trump as you know if you have read, watched, or listened to any sort of media lately is also an out-of-control sexual person, considering the sexual controls most intelligent people accept.

Both Trump and Hillary are potentially evil presidents.

Unfortunately one of them will probably wind up president of the US, thanks to the mostly intellectually-challenged voters who selected Trump and Hillary in the primaries, and the corrupt rigging of the US primary system, designed to implement the will of the deep state, not the will of we the people.

Polls and posts still show Bernie Sanders could win in a landslide if he were on the ballot in November, as shown on my Facebook page, indicating a large majority of US possible voters are moderate sensible people, however apathetic many of them were in the primaries, if they could have voted and did not.  Many registered Independents who supported Bernie could not vote for him, thanks to the nefarious rigging of the Democratic National Committee.

We ought to do in the US what they do in Australia:  Require all possible voters to vote, and fine them if they don’t.

Hillary and Trump were selected in the primaries by about thirty-five percent of possible US presidential voters, as pointed out above.  This is about seventeen percent of possible voters each, who were mostly credulous poorly-informed ideological extremists on the left and right, who could care less about the facts of foreign and domestic policy issues. They are mostly people who don’t want to be confused by facts, who believe memorizing a few simple dogmas, doctrines, or beliefs one time is all you need to live a successful and proper life.

It seems to me we are now being ruled by a tyranny of the minority composed of lower and middle class ideological sheeple on the right and left and their oligarchic puppet-masters. Jimmy Carter, the most ethical president of my lifetime, agrees we no longer have a functioning democracy, that we now have an oligarchy.  See the full story regarding President Carter’s judgement in this matter in the Huffington Post at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-zuesse/jimmy-carter-is-correct-t_b_7922788.html.

Hopefully the collective judgment of US voters once all the November votes are tallied, announced, and hopefully accepted will be good enough to enable us in the US and all people around Earth to continue muddling through somehow, for a long time, regardless of who “wins” the election. It’s amazing to me we have done as well as we have collectively given the political incompetence and malfeasance we have seen in the US and worldwide in the last fifty-six years.

Some say it really does not make any difference who is elected president anymore in the US, since the country is run by a shadow government of elite bankers, oligarchs, generals, and bureaucrats who actually call the shots, who tell the president what to do.  It sure looks this way in the case of President Obama, who has been a much better president than Reagan and Bush II, and Bill Clinton, but who has not accomplished much, nowhere near as much as he promised in his campaign.  He seems to have caved in to the military-industrial complex, and the banksters in too big to fail banks.  Obama did not lead us into another major war, but he did not significantly reduce our military expenses, activities, and plans.  Using drones to kill people has been an ethical disaster under his watch.  So has spying on we the people of the US.

Hillary has promised US citizens she will cure most of their problems if only they vote for her.  It appears enough possible voters have believed her to get elected president.  It only takes about twenty-five percent of possible votes to get elected president, which has been true for decades now.  The US needs a parliamentary democracy that requires at least a majority of voters for a ruling party to take over a country.  Not only are parliamentary democracies faster and cheaper they are better for electing a top leader of the country.  Our democracy is obsolete as well as corrupted.

The environment, not talked about in the debates, up to now has been very forgiving.  How much longer it can tolerate human folly remains to be seen.

It’s grandiose for anyone to think that her or his personal vote in the November election will make one whit’s worth of difference in the overall outcome for the US and the world following the election. One vote in a secret ballot US presidential vote is like a limb falling from a tree in a forest with no human around to see or hear it. Forget about making America great again with your vote, magically, as Trump mouths to the masses, or keeping America great, as it is, as Hillary mouths to the masses.

On the other hand, if you could somehow magically convince a majority of sensible moderate possible presidential voters that did not vote for Hillary or Trump in the primaries to vote on Tuesday, November 8 for Jill Stein, that might make a difference.

Nothing will change if moderate sensible voters keep voting for the lesser evil selected by the evil Democratic and Republican Parties who started needless wars and squandered for the last fifty-six years a significant portion of our federal tax dollars, borrowed dollars, and digital dollars created out of thin air by the Federal Reserve System.

Enough is enough.

Jill Stein, the Green Party nominee, is the best choice on the November presidential ballot, in my judgment. Vote for her, shake the dust off your feet as you walk away from the voting booth, don’t look back lest you get turned into a pillar of salt, pray for the best, and let the chips fall where they may, if you want to vote for or write in someone that might produce significant structural changes as president.

Jill Stein is a highly intelligent woman with a MD degree from Harvard Medical School, with years of political experience leading the Green Party, which is now on the ballot in forty-four states, with write-in permission in three of the remaining six states, including Georgia.

One can build the case that no feeling, thought, decision, action, article, book, constitution, person, family, group, organization, religion, or nation is all good or all evil, and never has been.

One can build the case that all humans since time immemorial have done what they were caused to do in dog-eat-dog competitions in their environments in which there are always winners and losers, that all humans are inevitable evolutionary accidents, that free will does not exist, that all effects, including feelings, thoughts, and decisions are caused, and all causes and effects are linked in cause-effect chains in infinite regressions; and therefore no human is to be blamed or praised.

I have covered the issue of free will and determinism in some detail in my books. If you ask Google—Does free will exist?—you will find 10,400,000 results. Some of the posts say free will exists, and others say it does not. Most likely there is no proof either way. It’s possible I guess one of the 10,400,000 results might prove it one way or the other, but I have no illusions about reading all of them to find out.

If you click on my Business Voyages Archives option on our Effective Learning Company website at www.effectivelearning.net and peruse some of my posts in the last ten years you will see I have a decent track record making political calls, for a Monday morning quarterback, and if you click on my Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/richard.stapleton.397 you will see I have assembled here lately some posts from my Facebook Home selections posted by people here and yon that support the recommendations made in this essay factually and statistically.

There is a lot at stake in this election, and I am aware that two of the wisest and most successful essayists of our generation, Noam Chomsky and Henry Giroux, have publicly stated voting for Hillary, as evil as she is, is the ethical choice under the circumstances, given the horrendous evilness of Trump, and the evilness of the overall situation in which we are enmeshed, faced with threats of nuclear war, a catastrophic economic depression, and a possible environmental collapse.

But, having almost never done anything just because a wise person told me to, having always been somewhat of a devil’s advocate, it seems to me there is some chance, however low its probability, that if enough wiser folks advocate and recommend Jill Stein she might get elected.

In my judgment, the probability of Jill Stein as president leading the US to structural improvements, and not leading the US to another disaster, such as the Iraq War, is much higher than for Trump or Hillary.

Voting for Jill Stein most likely will not put you on the “winning” team in this presidential race, there being probably at most a .20 probability voting for Stein might result in a “victory”.   But there is some chance voting for Stein will hasten the demise of the evil two-party voting system we have now, a system that rigs our government in favor of large corporations and the elite rich, enabling the elite rich to “win” the world series of US politics every time, enabling them to keep getting richer and richer while the poor and the middle class get poorer, or stay the same, if they are lucky.  Jill needs five percent of the vote to get the Green Party on the ballot in all states in the next presidential election.

No matter how much money the elite rich acquire in the form of tax reductions or other favors from politicians they will always require more and more money to achieve psychological satisfaction.  It’s just the way the the neoliberal/conservative US economic/political system—oligopolistic oligarchic capitalism—one step away from fascism—works.

Unlike Shoeless Joe Jackson, the elite rich of the US, the one percent, will never admit they rigged the game.

The US is being ruled by miscreants.

Nothing will change if voters keep voting for the lesser evil selected by the Democratic and Republican Parties.

Yes, it’s a long shot, but why not take it?  Vote for Jill Stein.  What do you have to lose?

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