When I was a young lawyer in the Chambers of a leading Jamaican lawyer, I was given a research assignment. The matter concerned extradition law. A Jamaican police officer had migrated in the 1970s to the US and there joined and distinguished himself in the military. The then Prime Minister of Jamaica, Mr. Edward Seaga, came to power in 1980 and thereafter made application through the Jamaican Government for an US extradition back to Jamaica to have the man stand trial. On the US defence side was Leonard Bodine ( i.e. the lawyer who had defended Paul Robeson). So, he was well represented. The research was completed and the salient point was that an extradition will not be ordered if the primary reason for seeking the extradition is ‘political’. Thus, the senior Jamaican lawyer travelled to the court in Virginia to provide the Jamaican law and arguments in opposition to the extradition. The team was successful, for indeed the extradition had a political motive and the US Judge, for that reason, refused the Jamaican Government’s application. That central legal principle remains constant – so to the extradition application in the UK for Julian Assange’s extradition to the US.
Assange is the founder of Wikileaks who had obtained large amounts of US Government secrets and other confidential information and he published same on the internet for the world to read. The US Government was most displeased and thus sought Assange’s extradition.
At first instance Assange’s lawyers argued that he would be subjected to inhumane treatment in the US prison to which he would be confined if he were to be tried in the US and sentenced. The Magistrate accepted the argument and the extradition was refused. The US Government appealed to the UK Court of Appeal. The appellate court overturned the first instance ruling and accepted the US Government’s assurances that he could serve his sentence in Australia and that he would not be sent to the high security prison in the US where he would be placed in solitary confinement for 23 hours per day.
The legal issues are interesting on at least three levels.
1. The publications by Wikileaks are highly embarrassing to the US Government. Not least was a video of American military personnel in a helicopter flying over a street in Iraq while randomly shooting and killing Iraqi civilians while joking as if engaged in a video game. Here is the video.
In that regard, the video is factual and well within the confines of needed disclosure in the public and global journalistic interest. The military persons involved were never charged for the offence of murder nor was any other charge ever laid. Piecing this particular disclosure together with several other disclosures it is perfectly logical to submit in court that the US Government’s application is in essence a ‘political’ one for reason of the embarrassment felt by the US Government.
2. The second argument would go towards whether or not there was a breach of the US Espionage Act 1917. The short answer is – yes there was. But, the argument does not stop there. There is precedent on this point in the case of the New York Times publication of the Pentagon Papers. That was the confidential Government papers detailing many unknown facts about the prosecution of the Vietnam War by the US Government. In other words, the New York Times sought to publish the truth. The US Government then obtained an injunction prohibiting publication. The New York Times challenged the injunction on the basis of infringement of First Amendment rights ( i.e. freedom of expression). The Court ruled that while there was a conflict between the provisions of the Espionage Act and the First Amendment, the Constitutional right under the First Amendment took precedence over the Act and it was in the public interest for the public to be informed. The Pentagon Papers were published. Thus, there is precedent for what Assange has done. He has contravened the Espionage Act while at the same time, it can be argued, that through his journalistic endeavours he is acting in the public interest by factually and accurately informing the public.
3. The third point, no doubt, will be contested on appeal to the UK Supreme Court with regards to the assurances given by the US Government. One might cynically but factually question – did Colin Powell as representative of the US Government not assure the UN Security Council that Saddam Hussein had WMDs? But, more to the point. There is the case of David Mendoza, who was a Spanish drug trafficker wanted by the US. The US Government not only assured Mendoza that if he surrendered to US jurisdiction he would be permitted to serve his prison sentence in Spain – and – the agreement was placed in writing. This undertaking was prepared as a formal binding legal agreement and duly signed by a US Government representative. Once Mendoza surrendered to US jurisdiction the US Government reneged on its binding word. Mendoza had his lawyers make two applications in Spain and the Spanish court found in Mendoza’s favour. After six years in US custody, Mendoza’s US lawyer approached the US court on the basis of the signed and binding agreement and it was only then that Mendoza was permitted return to Spain as agreed. There are other similar precedents, so in Assange’s favour, his legal team will most definitely be able to argue that the US Government’s assurances and undertaking cannot be taken at face value nor be too readily trusted.
Put the foregoing all together and one ends up with Assange’s imprisonment in the UK in their top prison designed for the incarceration of convicted terrorists. So, for publishing the truth to the world Assange is designated ‘terrorist’. Interestingly, even if the UK’s Government lawyers argue that Assange breached bail, which then requires his confinement, it could still be contended that since the seeking of asylum is a legal right afforded to all, which the Ecuadorian Embassy did extend to Assange, he could not logically be submitting to UK bail conditions while simultaneously accepting the asylum extended to him by Ecuador. Anyway, all said and done this is a ‘POLITICAL CASE’ writ large in big, bold letters and there will be a lot of politics played behind the scenes between the US and UK Governments and full frontal too in the UK judicial system before the saga is completed.
The American, Anne Sacoolas, left the U.K. shortly after a crash in which Harry Dunn was killed and she claimed diplomatic immunity. Sacoolas had diplomatic immunity which was asserted on her behalf by the US government following the collision – and – she was a US intelligence officer as was her husband. Now, the preliminary evidence suggests that Sacoolas ran into Dunn while he was riding on what the Brits call a ‘moped’ ( his mini bike or scooter). He was a teenager. She was charged with causing death by dangerous driving. So what did Sacoolas do? She fled Britain and the US Government covered her behind diplomatic immunity. She was removing herself totally from British jurisdiction. What then happened with Harry Dunn’s mother and father? They were grieving over the loss of their son and they went all the way to the White House and spoke to then President Donald Trump  (he would presently say that he is still the legitimate President of the US) and Trump declined to use his Executive authority to waive diplomatic immunity. The story worsens – there is no assured happy ending. What the Dunn family, quite intelligently did was to secure a ‘red notice’ from INTERPOL ( i.e. the International Criminal Police Organisation “for fugitives wanted either for prosecution or to serve a sentence.” ). In legal terms, if Sacoolas left the US then she could be arrested pursuant to an international arrest warrant. But, here is the point. President Biden succeeds Trump ( but not in Trump’s mind as internationally professed ) and Biden continued – at least for a while –  with Trump’s policy of not waiving diplomatic immunity to have the UK’s extradition application advance and then bring the matter to trial in a British court. The legal position has now changed and Sacoolas has agreed to an 18th January, 2022 trial by virtual link. So – if she is convicted to a custodial sentence – what then? What upholding and respect for the rule of law – none – yes/no? So, let us then examine the total picture under both international and domestic law. Above – you have seen the clear video evidence of a dozen innocent lives being claimed on an Iraqi street; you are now aware of Harry Dunn’s family’s grief over the loss of their son; and – having over a forty year plus legal career of legal defence in the courts – I can well and truly invite you to ask yourselves – where is the justice? Maybe some ultimately?Â
In how the US has worded its so-called ‘undertaking’, it has imposed a ‘get out of jail free card’ for itself, with regards to Julian Assange. Any lawyer with a modicum of experience would never submit to such an agreement. The system ( both US and UK- where actually I studied) now clearly lack an iota of credibility in Assange’s case and continue to pursue a self-righteous path which denigrates, belies and compromises the best of their own legal principles. Sad to say.
I believe that the implications of this case go well beyond the narrow political minds of the UK Judges who sat and disgracefully ruled in the UK’s Court of Appeal.
We shall see in the fullness of time how this legal saga ends for Assange in particular and journalism in general.
______________________________________
Courtenay Barnett is a graduate of London University. His areas of study were economics, political science and international law. He has been a practising lawyer for almost fully forty years, has been arrested for defending his views, and has argued public interest and human rights cases.
THE EARTHIAN, Number Twenty-Six, December 4, 2021, Effective Learning Publications, https://effectivelearning.net/effective-learning-publications/ 32 East Main Street, Statesboro, Georgia, USA, Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA, Editor & Publisher, The Effective Learning Report.
THE EARTHIAN is a monthly digest of articles written by free-thinking truth-seeking critical-thinking hard-hitting independent writers containing facts, perspectives, theories, models, analyses, and recommendations concerned about psychological, moral, ethical, philosophical, social, economic, political, military, religious, and ecological states of affairs affecting the existential well-being of all species of fauna and flora around Spaceship Earth.
To comment about this issue of The Earthian or any article included as SOURCE READING scroll to the top of this page and click on the prompt for ELR Editor’s Daily Shares. Write your comment at the top of the page or at the bottom of the specific article you want to comment about.
“ASK LESS WHAT YOUR NATION CAN DO FOR YOU—ASK MORE WHAT YOU CAN DO FOR SPACESHIP EARTHâ€
Individuals Are Not to Praise or Blame for How Earthian Economic, Social, and Political States of Affairs Evolve
ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE
By ROUT LOGGER
John Lennon and The Beatles had an international hit with a song titled All You Need is Love that made a lot of Earthian humans temporarily happier listening to it. But almost nothing could be further from the truth. While it’s hard to imagine Earthian humans getting too much love they can live without it, maybe not happily or healthily, but they can live a good while without it. Things like oxygen, water, and food are far more important. According to the existential rule of three, humans can live for about three minutes without oxygen, three days without water, and three weeks without food.
Another Brit, Mick Jagger, used to sing a song lamenting, “I can’t get no sat-is-fak-shun,†which is hard to believe, especially in his case, but there is no doubt a lot of Earthian humans are not satisfied with their lives. By some estimates about half the human population of the US are unsatisfied with their lives, primarily their economic and political states of affairs. They’re probably a majority percentage of the Repug and Dem Parties in the US. They’re angry, polarized, discombobulated, and agitated. An increasing percentage of the politicians they vote for are angry power-mad semi-literate narcissistic egomaniacs like Donald Trump; and some of them like Trump seem to have some money. But no matter how much money they get their hands on it is never enough. Nothing ever seems to satisfy them, even power. No matter how much power they get their hands on it too is never enough.
Success and satisfaction for most Earthian humans would entail receiving love and at least the necessities of life—breathable air, drinkable water, and adequate food, clothing, shelter, medicine, and medical care. In general success and satisfaction are caused by problems getting solved and goals and objectives being achieved. Winner-survivors achieve goals and objectives and loser-survivors do not, regardless of how tough and unfair, uncontrolled, and poorly-managed Earthian states of affairs are, and always have been.
How to help Not-OK Earthian loser-survivors become winner-survivors is one of the toughest problems around Spaceship Earth. How to help Spaceship Earth itself become a winner-planet is a far tougher problem.
One can build a case there is such a thing as existential OKness. How OK are Earthian humans with respect to existential threats such as global warming and climate change, militarization, and nuclear weapons development and proliferation? Most likely Earthian human existential OKness is now at its lowest level since human-like creatures evolved on Earth about one million years ago. Innumerable Earthian human tribes and groups have faced imminent threats of extinction through time, and some did become extinct—the Galapagos Islanders come to mind—but most likely never in their history have Earthian humans en masse faced a probability of total annihilation caused by human-caused forces as high as it is now.
“Editor’s note: Founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein and University of Chicago scientists who helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created the Doomsday Clock two years later, using the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero) to convey threats to humanity and the planet. The Doomsday Clock is set every year by the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes 13 Nobel laureates. The Clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change, and disruptive technologies in other domains.
“Humanity continues to suffer as the COVID-19 pandemic spreads around the world. In 2020 alone, this novel disease killed 1.7 million people and sickened at least 70 million more. The pandemic revealed just how unprepared and unwilling countries and the international system are to handle global emergencies properly. In this time of genuine crisis, governments too often abdicated responsibility, ignored scientific advice, did not cooperate or communicate effectively, and consequently failed to protect the health and welfare of their citizens.
“As a result, many hundreds of thousands of human beings died needlessly.
“Though lethal on a massive scale, this particular pandemic is not an existential threat. Its consequences are grave and will be lasting. But COVID-19 will not obliterate civilization, and we expect the disease to recede eventually. Still, the pandemic serves as a historic wake-up call, a vivid illustration that national governments and international organizations are unprepared to manage nuclear weapons and climate change, which currently pose existential threats to humanity, or the other dangers—including more “virulent pandemics and next-generation warfare— that could threaten civilization in the near future.
“Accelerating nuclear programs in multiple countries moved the world into less stable and manageable territory last year. Development of hypersonic glide vehicles, ballistic missile defenses, and weapons- delivery systems that can flexibly use conventional or nuclear warheads may raise the probability of miscalculation in times of tension. Events like the deadly assault earlier this month on the US Capitol renewed legitimate concerns about national leaders who have sole control of the use of nuclear weapons. Nuclear nations, however, have ignored or undermined practical and available diplomatic and security tools for managing nuclear risks. By our estimation, the potential for the world to stumble into nuclear war—an ever-present danger over the last 75 years—increased in 2020. An extremely dangerous global failure to address existential threats—what we called “the new abnormal†in 2019—tightened its grip in the nuclear realm in the past year, increasing the likelihood of catastrophe.
“Governments have also failed to sufficiently address climate change. A pandemic-related economic slowdown temporarily reduced the carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming. But over the coming decade fossil fuel use needs to decline precipitously if the worst effects of climate change are to be avoided. Instead, fossil fuel development and production are projected to increase. Atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations hit a record high in 2020, one of the two warmest years on record. The massive wildfires and catastrophic cyclones of 2020 are illustrations of the major devastation that will only increase if governments do not significantly and quickly amplify their efforts to bring greenhouse gas emissions essentially to zero.
“As we noted in our last Doomsday Clock statement, the existential threats of nuclear weapons and climate change have intensified in recent years because of a threat multiplier: the continuing corruption of the information ecosphere on which democracy and public decision-making depend. Here, again, the COVID-19 pandemic is a wake-up call. False and misleading information disseminated over the internet—including misrepresentation of COVID-19’s seriousness, promotion of false cures, and politicization of low-cost protective measures such as face masks—created social chaos in many countries and led to unnecessary death. This wanton disregard for science and the large-scale embrace of conspiratorial nonsense—often driven by political figures and partisan media—undermined the ability of responsible national and global leaders to protect the security of their citizens. False conspiracy theories about a “stolen†presidential election led to rioting that resulted in the death of five people and the first hostile occupation of the US Capitol since 1814.
“In 2020, online lying literally killed.
“Considered by themselves, these negative events in the nuclear, climate change, and disinformation arenas might justify moving the clock closer to midnight. But amid the gloom, we see some positive developments. The election of a US president who acknowledges climate change as a profound threat and supports international cooperation and science-based policy puts the world on a better footing to address global problems. For example, the United States has already announced it is rejoining the Paris Agreement on climate change and the Biden administration has offered to extend the New START arms control agreement with Russia for five years. In the context of a post-pandemic return to relative stability, more such demonstrations of renewed interest in and respect for science and multilateral cooperation could create the basis for a safer and saner world.â€
Read “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc,†for some management science ideas on how Earthian humans might eventually evolve and co-construct an economic system that is viable and satisfying for everyone aboard Spaceship Earth, making it possible for all Earthian humans to develop an I’m OK—You’re OK life position.
This might entail Earthian humans peacefully reducing through natural attrition the human population aboard Spaceship Earth, never doing work that machines can do better, and delegating the day-to-day management of systems for scheduling, producing, and distributing the necessities of life to artificial intelligence programs and supercomputers.
This is possible based on the general algorithmic matrix algebra form
Riding aboard an airliner about to land at night moving at four hundred miles an hour at thirty thousand feet with heavy thick clouds, rain, high wind, and lightening below, which would you rather have setting the direction, speed, and angle of descent of the plane, the plane’s auto-pilot, radar, and computer system or the pilot and co-pilot, seeing nothing out their windows below but clouds and lightning?
The main reason why turning over the scheduling, production, and distribution of the necessities of life to AI robots and magnum computers is the best hope for Earthian humans is that they do not get greedy and power hungry and play psychological Games like Earthian humans in high places do. Thus far in human history most leaders running large organizations such as nations, large corporations, and big banks have become corrupt one way or another playing psychological Games and acting out their selfish life scripts, hogging as much power and money as they could get their hands on for themselves and their cronies. Whatever their limitations and possible problems, AI robots and algorithmic computers are not egotistical.
Buckminster Fuller explained in his book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth the airplane-landing metaphor in the above paragraph and planted seeds for other ideas in the essay “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc.,†such as computers being the best hope for mankind and humans not doing work machines can do better, being paid to think instead with what Fuller called mind grants. Fuller said unemployment all around Spaceship Earth could be eliminated overnight with mind grants. Apparently Fuller was the inventor of the appellations Earthian and Spaceship Earth.
The Earthian does not sell subscriptions or advertising or solicit donations for THE EARTHIAN or the EFFECTIVE LEARNING REPORT but it would like to sell more books. If you feel you’ve gained value from THE EARTHIAN and would like to reciprocate, go to Effective Learning Publications and purchase one or more books at https://effectivelearning.net/effective-learning-publications/ .
Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning has not been a best seller but it has had some impact as this review in the Texas Tribune shows at https://www.texastribune.org/2016/10/26/bookshelf-oct-26-2016/?fbclid=IwAR3ctGFk_zCH5QOyvLjqUiulkAcEPUQ4deUq1-tZIS6OuwaYhI-bmrM4Ebw . A German orthopedic surgeon discounted the book with a customer review based on argumentum ad hominem insinuations at Amazon.com at https://www.amazon.com/Business-Voyages-Schemata-Discovering-Co-Constructing/dp/1413480810lowering it from a five-star to a three-star Amazon rating. The orthopedic doctor said the author did not “come across†like a real transactional analyst and the book promised more than it delivered. The Kirkus review in the Texas Tribune in this post is fair and accurate. Both reviews comment on admittedly a debatable issue with Born to Learn: Is the book useful only for teachers and students in classrooms or for all teachers and learners in all kinds of groups and organizations, including parents and children in homes, bosses and employees in businesses, preachers and Sunday school teachers and members in churches, etc.? Is it useful for leaders and members who teach and learn in all groups and organizations—civic clubs, chambers of commerce, street gangs, military units, and governments? The Earthian asserts it can be useful in all organizations and groups and can help increase Earthian human OKness. Read both reviews and write a review of Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning. The more reviews the better.
Read As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases listed below as the first Source citation for this issue of The Earthian, also published by Effective Learning Publications, that shows how transactional analysis can be used in a novel painting a picture of Earthian states of affairs.
FOR A FREE SUBSCRIPTION TO THE EFFECTIVE LEARNING REPORT AND THE EARTHIAN: Email rjstapleton@bulloch.net and type the word Subscription on the subject line.
Feel free to forward, share, post, print, or otherwise circulate this edition of The Earthian any way you see fit.
This experience and research-based novel is a mostly fictional re-ordering and rendering of Earthian human cause-effect situations and processes experienced by the author. Any resemblance between fictional characters cast herein and real humans is coincidental, with the notable exception of Rout Logger, the protagonist of the story. Readers must willingly suspend disbelief here and there reading this book, as it mixes facts with fiction in some passages. Although novels are supposed to be imaginary fake news, Ernest Hemingway said some are “truer than true.”
This novel was written from a third person omniscient perspective as if it might have been recorded, thought up, and written as a case by an alien from outer space who had somehow learned some Transactional Analysis lingo such as I’m OK-You’re OK; OKness; Life Positions; Parent, Adult, and Child ego states; Transactions; Strokes; Games; Time Structuring Patterns; Life Scripts; and Rackets, as first defined and prescribed by Eric Berne, MD during 1957-1970.
If you want to know more about what these TA words signify when used in a passage in this novel you can find definitions of them with an internet search. Just add the words transactional analysis to OKness, Ego States, Transactions, Games, Scripts, etc. in the search bar of a computer browser so Google or any search engine will know what kind of OKness, transactions, games, scripts, rackets, etc. you are researching, although anyone who knows ordinary English can read and generally understand this novel with no researching of transactional analysis jargon.
Two major purposes of this novel are to paint a literary picture of psychological, social, economic, religious, political, educational, and philosophical states of affairs, primarily in the United States of America, but also around Spaceship Earth, that are impeding the creation of necessary changes for achieving Earthian human sustainability, and to sell a story about a new computer-based democratic Game- Free Adult-Adult I’m OK-You’re OK tv and internet live-streaming discussion system that might help save Earthian humans from annihilation caused by global warming or nuclear war.
I used to see a lot of pigeons flying around as a child. A lot of farms had flocks of them that nested in barns and sheds. But no more. I have not seen a flock of pigeons flying around in quite a while. A friend and I used to catch and pet them in a barn on his family farm at night with flashlights. Shine a light in their eyes and you could go right up to them. They were gentle and seemingly unafraid when you picked them up.
Because it has one of the angriest, most hate-filled, most bigoted, most prejudiced, most hubristic, most chauvinistic, and most polarized populations of any country
Not a good sign. Can you believe people are loaning their hard earned or inherited or won or received or bribed or swindled or extorted or stolen money to the federal government for thirty years at the rate of 2.0492 percent per year, a rate that was up dramatically yesterday from its low, caused by fewer ordinary investors wanting to buy treasury bills and notes? If this yield rise was catastrophic imagine what would happen if the yield got back up to six percent or so, a more or less normal interest rate for fixed income investments? How many units of funny money would the USian federal reserve system have to keystroke into their computers to buy US treasury instruments and loan to large corporations to keep USian bond and stock markets at high prices then? Would it be appropriate for the Fed Reserve system to keystroke into its computers this much funny money? If not how far could bond and stock markets fall? And how much would the Fed govt budget deficit swell because of the US treasury borrowing this much funny money, while paying yearly exponentially-increasing interest on its debt, while it meets its yearly military and civilian payroll?
This is not the end of individual reforms for the Dem party, but it is the end of the illusion that Biden will significantly reform the Dem party. Money is talking louder than usual these days in Washington and more and more Dem politicians are being rewarded by the Dem party for being bought off by their rich donors, Senators Manchin and Sinema being the leading examples. Meanwhile rich USians keep getting richer and poor USians poorer. The charade that the US is a democracy, not an oligarchy, is becoming clearer and clearer in the minds of most USians. Is the USian military intelligence complex actually running the show? Earthians need a new and better third political party in the US. This is a must read article by Michael Hudson, the greatest economist alive.
Three cheers for Biden on Afghanistan. Let us grieve for him and Spaceship Earth, and hope he survives his decision to get USians out of Afghanistan, the right thing to do in my opinion. I voted for Biden as the lesser evil and was unimpressed with his character and record. I may have been wrong. He has far more courage and backbone than I imagined. Are we already living in a military dictatorship? And congratulations to Biden on the infrastructure bill, another step in the right direction for USian civilians.
Sad and scary well said right on article by Richard Wolff. Could not agree more in general. Wolff is one of the smartest and best economists alive and an excellent writer. But he still falls into a bit of hubris in the article in a place or two by referring to the USian empire as the American empire. USians are not the only Americans, and America includes far more territory than the Earthian territory included in the longitudes and latitudes conquered from Indians and governed by the US of A in North America. There are three American continents, north, central, and south; and the US comprises only about forty percent of the population of the three continents. On the other hand, empires could care less about what the territory it controls one way or another is called. A more appropriate term for the USian military industrial intelligence money and banking complex would be the USian Empire.
FOR A FREE SUBSCRIPTION TO THE EFFECTIVE LEARNING REPORT AND THE EARTHIAN: Email rjstapleton@bulloch.net and type the word Subscription on the subject line.
Feel free to forward, share, post, print, or otherwise circulate this edition of The Earthian any way you see fit.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
Here’s Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA in his office at Georgia Southern University the year he retired in 2005, the senior professor of the university that year. The photo was shot by Lori Grice, a former student, founder of Lori Grice Photography.
The object under his left hand is a Classroom De- Gamerâ„¢ he invented in 1978.
He would spin the spinner of the De-Gamer in his classes to randomly select a student at the beginning of each class session to lead a discussion of the case assigned for that day, a case taken from a real business prepared by professional casewriters at Georgia Southern, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Alabama. Grades were based eighty percent on class participation; the rest of the final grade was based on two case write-ups. One write-up was either a comprehensive analysis of a publicly-traded company based on published data; an analysis of a local business based on field research; or a business plan the student created from scratch. The other write-up was a comprehensive analysis of a professionally written case about a real business published in a Georgia Southern, Harvard, Stanford, or Alabama casebook assigned as the final exam. Cases used in his courses included all functional areas of business, such as entrepreneurship, finance, marketing, operations management, control, management information systems, and business policy and strategy.
He learned how the case method works teaching with Bernard Bienvenu, DBA and Rexford Hauser, DBA (Harvard Business School doctorates) at what is now known as the University of Louisiana–Lafayette in 1969-70.
He has published refereed journal articles and books explaining how his democratic Game-free Adult-Adult I’m OK—You’re OK case method system works, by banishing Persecutors, Rescuers, and Victims playing psychological Games from the teaching and learning process, first documented in an article titled “The Classroom De-Gamer†he published in 1978 in the Transactional Analysis Journal.
He studied TA with Martin Groder, MD; Graham Barnes, PhD; Vann Joines, PhD; and many others at the Southeast Institute at Chapel Hill, North Carolina (1975-1978).
He has degrees in economics, organizational behavior, and management science from Texas Tech University (1962-1969), and an organizational and educational certification in transactional analysis from the International Transactional Analysis Association (1978).
He had his own case method track at the undergraduate level in the business school at Georgia Southern University taught by him alone in the management department, four or five different elective case method courses offered each academic year (1970-2005), in which he led, coordinated, and graded twenty-five or so students each academic year who took all or most of those case method courses in their junior and senior years, of about two hundred students who signed up for all of his courses each academic year, using a democratic circle or amphitheater classroom layout. He also taught most semesters two sections of a capstone integrative business policy course he added to the business school curriculum in 1970 that was required for all undergraduate business majors that could be elected by any student in any major, in which he used the case method. He was the only professor in the business school to use the case method in any course.
His students agreed to a course learning contract that stipulated they would read the facts of the case before class and would lose a whole letter grade from the course final grade if the De-Gamer randomly caught them obviously not having read the case before class, if they had not slipped a note under his office door before class telling him they had not read the case, which they could do twice during the course without penalty.
About ten percent or so of his students made A’s and about five percent made D’s, and most made C’s, which is about right, since C = Average. There were almost no F’s in his courses. The main criterion for course grades was the quantity and quality of ideas sold by students in case method discussions. He used peer ratings to give students feedback showing what their fellow students thought about the quantity and quality of their ideas sold in class, having made it clear the final decision about final grades was his. He did not believe in Lake Wobegon grading.
No student was ever forced to take one of his courses to graduate, and the most hardened Game-players in the school did not sign up for his courses after he issued his Edict of 1972 in which he clearly spelled out in his syllabi the penalty for getting caught unprepared. His Classroom De-Gamerâ„¢ was roundly discussed by students in bull sessions across campus every year and was labeled various things, such as The Wheel of Fate and The Death Wheel. Most students near the end of his career simply called it The Spinner. He appreciated the fact Georgia Southern honored his academic freedom as a tenured professor, allowing him control of his teaching methods, classroom layouts, grading procedures, and course books, cases, and materials.
He conducted primary survey research in 1992 that discovered longitudinal data (published in “Evidence the Case Method Works†in his book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds, 2008, pg. 475) that showed his case method students during 1972-1982 reported higher yearly incomes in 1992 than students electing the same courses in 1972-1982 taught by professors using the lecture method and the authoritarian row and column classroom layout, who graded students based on how well they memorized “right answers†for so-called objective multiple-choice tests, indicating learners learning in Adult—Adult I’m OK—You’re OK Game- free learning processes graded subjectively became more successful in the real world of business than learners lectured to in Parent—Child I’m OK—You’re Not-OK un-De-Gamed learning processes. Only former students who had worked in the real world ten or more years after graduating from the Georgia Southern business school were included in the study.
For more information on these classroom management ethical issues see Stapleton, R.J. and Murkison, G. (2001), “Optimizing the fairness of student evaluations: A study of correlations between instructor excellence, study production, learning production, and expected grades,” the Journal of Management Education, 25(3), 269-292. He had one of the lowest student grade point averages among professors in the business school and was one of the lowest-ranked professors as an instructor on computerized campus-wide student evaluations up to about 2000; but he was one of the highest-ranked professors in a computerized student evaluation he designed that generated data showing study production, learning production, and relative expected grades data for each professor, published in “Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations.â€
After this research was published, Georgia Southern in 2001 added study production, learning production, and expected grades questions to the student evaluation form used campus-wide.
“Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations†has by now (December 4, 2021) been cited as a reference in 83 refereed journal articles concerned about student evaluations of teachers in several academic disciplines, including eight new citations since April 2021, proving the article is still being read and used by serious scholars, educators, and administrators in higher education.
As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein propositioned, “The case is all there is.â€
If so, everything else said about Earthian human states of affairs is a rendition of what was or might be.
THE EARTHIAN is a digest of articles containing facts, perspectives, theories, models, analyses, and recommendations concerned about existential states of affairs affecting all species of fauna and flora around Spaceship Earth. Recent relevant articles written and published by intelligent hard-hitting truth-seeking writers in Internet journals about psychological, moral, ethical, philosophical, social, economic, political, military, religious, and ecological states of affairs around Spaceship Earth are posted and linked below as sources.
To comment about this issue of The Earthian in general or any article included as SOURCE READING please scroll to the top of this page and click on the prompt for ELR Editor’s Daily Shares. Write your comment either at the top of the editor’s Facebook page or at the bottom of the specific article you are thinking about that has been posted in the last month or so on the Facebook page.
“ASK LESS WHAT YOUR NATION CAN DO FOR YOU—ASK MORE WHAT YOU CAN DO FOR SPACESHIP EARTHâ€
Individuals Are Not to Praise or Blame for How Earthian Economic, Social, and Political States of Affairs Evolve
A DARK DASTARDLY DEED IN USIAN HISTORY
By ROUT LOGGER
What’s on my mind now? I’ll tell you what. For the first time in my life yesterday, October 1, 2021, the United States Postal Service did not deliver or pick up the mail to/from my address on a business day. A cursory check on the Internet showed there have been scattered reports about slow postal service recently on CNN and elsewhere, apparently the result of Trump appointing Dejoy as postmaster general to destroy the US postal service. Does Biden not have the power to fire Dejoy? If not why not? This is one of the worst desecrations of USian democracy in history. It’s one thing to slow down mail delivery; it’s something else not to pick up or deliver the mail at all. Nothing is more democratic than USian citizens being able to write a letter in handwriting at any time expressing an assessment and/or opinion of states of affairs and mail it immediately to others from their own unique mailing address. The US post office has been one of the most sacred and most dependable democratic institutions around Earth, and now it is being destroyed by greedy fascists. Not one major newspaper in the US I checked yesterday ran a page one headline about the shameless USian abomination that occurred on October 1, 2021—the USPS not delivering or picking up the mail at everyone’s address, on a beautiful, bright, clear business day. Shameful indeed.
A bitter pill for most people to swallow postulated in the books Business Voyages and Born to Learn is that everything that happens is either predetermined or accidental and therefore no one, including Trump, is to blame or praise. Believing and acting otherwise will perpetuate the same sorry I’m OK—You’re Not OK life position that has bedeviled humankind since time immemorial.
It’s OK to criticize, condemn, stroke, compliment, recognize, reward, punish, and change deleterious human actions in states of affairs; but it’s Not-OK to blame or praise specific humans for doing what they do, since they were caused to do it.
Read “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc,†https://blog.effectivelearning.net/the-evolution-of-spaceship-earth-inc/ for some management science ideas on how Earthian humans might eventually co-construct an economic system that is viable and satisfying for everyone aboard Spaceship Earth, making it possible for all Earthian humans to develop an I’m OK—You’re OK life position.
This entails Earthian humans peacefully reducing through natural attrition the human population aboard Spaceship Earth, never doing work that machines can do better, and delegating the day-to-day management of systems for scheduling, producing, and distributing the necessities of life to artificial intelligence programs and supercomputers.
This is possible based on the general algorithmic matrix algebra form
Flying aboard an airliner about to land at night moving at four hundred miles an hour at thirty thousand feet with cloudy and rainy weather below, which would you rather have landing the plane, the plane’s radar and computer system or the pilot and co-pilot, seeing nothing out their windows but clouds and lightning?
The main reason why turning over the scheduling, production, and distribution of the necessities of life to AI robots and magnum computers is that they do not get greedy and power hungry or play psychological Games. Thus far in human history most leaders atop large organizations such as countries, large corporations, and big banks have become corrupt one way or another playing psychological Games acting out their selfish ego trips, hogging all the power and money they could get their hands on for themselves and their cronies. Whatever their limitations, AI robots and algorithmic computers, in a word, are not egotistical.
We are indebted to Buckminster Fuller for teaching us in his book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth the airplane-landing metaphor in the above paragraph and for planting seeds for other ideas in the essay “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc.,†such as computers being the best hope for mankind and humans not doing work machines can do better, being paid to think instead with what Fuller called mind grants. Fuller said unemployment all around Spaceship Earth could be eliminated overnight with mind grants. Apparently Fuller was the inventor of the appellations Earthian and Spaceship Earth.
We do not sell subscriptions or advertising or solicit donations for THE EARTHIAN or the EFFECTIVE LEARNING REPORT but we would like to sell more books. If you feel you’ve gained value from THE EARTHIAN and would like to reciprocate, go to our Effective Learning Publications page and purchase one or more copies of our books at https://effectivelearning.net/effective-learning-publications/ .
FOR A FREE SUBSCRIPTION TO THE EFFECTIVE LEARNING REPORT AND THE EARTHIAN: Email rjstapleton@bulloch.net and type the word Subscription on the subject line.
Feel free to forward, share, post, print, or otherwise circulate this edition of The Earthian any way you see fit.
SOURCE READING FOR THIS ISSUE OF THE EARTHIAN
October 1, 2021
Yes, happy birthday. Great photo. Great human being.
Very sad. Greedy humans must decrease their population of the Earth peacefully using natural attrition, natural deaths exceeding births, before they foul the nests of all Earthian species, including theirs.
Of course open borders are not sustainable in rich countries all of whom got rich by commandeering the lion’s share of Earthian resources or by controlling their population growth. Most Earthian humans ought to be able to figure out if open borders happened all around Earth all rich countries would soon be impoverished too, except for the elite rich who might continue to live in luxury while others in the country lived in poverty.
Wrong. The problem is not communism; the problem is fascists getting in control of governments. Stalin was not a communist; he was a fascist. Xi may be becoming a fascist himself. Hitler was a fascist. Any political leader who turns himself into a dictator is a fascist by virtue of subverting democratic processes to make it happen, whether it happens under capitalism, socialism, or communism. Trump and his Repug cult members are trying to install Trump as a fascist dictator under capitalism in the US. A fascist dictator is a fascist dictator, regardless of whether he becomes one under capitalism, socialism, or communism.
Yes, it’s time to make the US more democratic, freer, and better off by significantly overhauling its woefully obsolete constitution and desecrated government.
Japan’s debt is 275 percent of their GDP; the US’s debt, according to this article, is only 103 percent of its GDP. This implies the US still has a way to go before it financially explodes or implodes because of deficit spending and debt.
USian federal politicians are bought and paid for by drug companies, so it’s OK for USian medical patients to get ripped off with drug prices significantly higher than those paid by medical patients living in countries with better governments.
George Soros, the trading master of the world has spoken. Is he right in this case? Probably not. I agree with Michael Hudson, the world’s greatest economist, the author of the article.
Lived in Holland three months in 1983. Was amazed by the place. Especially the transportation system. The Dutch were way ahead of most USians intellectually and philosophically and had a higher quality of life.
Here’s Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA in his office at Georgia Southern University the year he retired in 2005, the senior professor of the university that year. The photo was shot by Lori Grice, a former student, founder of Lori Grice Photography.
The object under his left hand is a Classroom De- Gamerâ„¢ he invented in 1978.
He would spin the spinner of the De-Gamer in his classes to randomly select a student at the beginning of each class session to lead a discussion of the case assigned for that day, a case taken from a real business prepared by professional casewriters at Georgia Southern, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Alabama. Grades were based eighty percent on class participation; the rest of the final grade was based on two case write-ups. One write-up was about what the student observed, researched, analyzed, and wrote about an existing business in the local environment or a business plan the student created. The other write- up was an analysis of a professionally written case about a real business assigned as the final exam. Cases used in his courses were taken from all functional areas of business, such as entrepreneurship, finance, marketing, operations management, control, management information systems, and business policy and strategy.
He learned how the case method works teaching with Bernard Bienvenu, DBA and Rexford Hauser, DBA (Harvard Business School doctorates) at what is now known as the University of Louisiana– Lafayette in 1969-70.
He has published refereed journal articles and books explaining how his democratic Game-free Adult-Adult I’m OK—You’re OK case method system works, by banishing Persecutors, Rescuers, and Victims playing psychological Games from the teaching and learning process, first documented in an article titled “The Classroom De-Gamer†he published in 1978 in the Transactional Analysis Journal.
He studied TA with Martin Groder, MD; Graham Barnes, PhD; Vann Joines, PhD; and many others at the Southeast Institute at Chapel Hill, North Carolina (1975-1978).
He has degrees in economics, organizational behavior, and management science from Texas Tech University (1962-1969), and an organizational and educational certification in transactional analysis from the International Transactional Analysis Association (1978).
He had his own case method track at the undergraduate level in the business school at Georgia Southern University taught by him alone in the management department, four or five different elective case method courses offered each academic year (1970-2005), in which he led, coordinated, and graded twenty-five or so students each year who took all or most of those case method courses in their junior and senior years, of about two hundred students who signed up for all of his courses each year, using a democratic circle or amphitheater classroom layout. He also taught most semesters two sections of a capstone integrative business policy course he added to the business school curriculum in 1970 that was required for all undergraduate business majors that could be elected by any student in any major, in which he used the case method. He was the only professor in the business school to use the case method in any course.
His students agreed to a course learning contract that stipulated they would read the facts of the case before class and would lose a whole letter grade from the course final grade if the De-Gamer randomly caught them obviously not having read the case before class, if they had not slipped a note under his office door before class telling him they had not read the case, which they could do twice during the course without penalty.
About five percent or so of his students made A’s and D’s, and most made C’s, which is about right, since C = Average. There were almost no F’s in his courses. The main criterion for course grades was the quantity and quality of ideas sold by students in case method discussions. He used peer ratings to give students feedback showing what their fellow students thought about the quantity and quality of their ideas sold in class, having made it clear the final decision about final grades was his. He did not believe in Lake Wobegon grading.
No student was ever forced to take one of his courses to graduate, and the most hardened Game-players in the school did not sign up for his courses after he issued his Edict of 1972 in which he clearly spelled out in his syllabi the penalty for getting caught unprepared. His Classroom De-Gamerâ„¢ was roundly discussed by students in bull sessions across campus every year and was labeled various things, such as The Wheel of Fate and The Death Wheel. Most students near the end of his career simply called it The Spinner. He appreciated the fact Georgia Southern honored his academic freedom as a tenured professor, allowing him control of his teaching methods, classroom layouts, grading procedures, and course books, cases, and materials.
He conducted primary survey research in 1992 that discovered longitudinal data (published in “Evidence the Case Method Works†in his book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds, 2008, pg. 475) that showed his case method students during 1972-1982 reported higher yearly incomes in 1992 than students electing the same courses in 1972-1982 taught by professors using the lecture method and the authoritarian row and column classroom layout, who graded students based on how well they memorized “right answers†for so-called objective multiple-choice tests, indicating learners learning in Adult—Adult I’m OK—You’re OK Game- free learning processes graded subjectively became more successful in the real world of business than learners lectured to in Parent—Child I’m OK— You’re Not-OK un-De-Gamed learning processes. Only former students who had worked in the real world ten or more years after graduating from the Georgia Southern business school were included in the study.
For more information on these classroom management ethical issues see Stapleton, R.J. and Murkison, G. (2001), Optimizing the fairness of student evaluations: A study of correlations between instructor excellence, study production, learning production, and expected grades, the Journal of Management Education, 25(3), 269-292. He had one of the lowest student grade point averages among professors in the business school and was one of the lowest-ranked professors as an instructor on computerized campus-wide student evaluations up to about 2000; but he was one of the highest-ranked professors in a computerized student evaluation he designed that generated data showing study production, learning production, and relative expected grades data for each professor, published in “Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations.â€
To read the article in full, go to https://blog.effectivelearning.net/fair-teacher- evaluations/. After this research was published, Georgia Southern in 2001 added study production, learning production, and expected grades questions to the student evaluation form used campus-wide.
“Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations†has by now (October 1, 2021) been cited as a reference in 81 refereed journal articles concerned about student evaluations in several academic disciplines, including six new citations since April 2021.
As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein propositioned, “The case is all there is.â€
If so, everything else said about Earthian human states of affairs is a rendition of what was or might be.
THE EARTHIAN, Number Twenty-Four, July 28, 2021, Effective Learning Publications, https://effectivelearning.net/effective-learning-publications/ 32 East Main Street, Statesboro, Georgia, USA, Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA, Writer, Editor & Publisher
THE EARTHIAN is a digest of articles containing facts, perspectives, theories, models, analyses, and recommendations concerned about existential states of affairs affecting all species of fauna and flora around Spaceship Earth. Recent relevant articles written and published by intelligent hard-hitting truth-seeking writers in Internet journals about psychological, social, economic, political, military, religious, and ecological states of affairs around Spaceship Earth are linked and posted below as sources.
To comment about this issue of The Earthian in general or any article included please scroll to the top of this page and click on the prompt for ELR Editor’s Daily Shares. Write your comment either at the top of the editor’s Facebook page or at the bottom of the specific article you are thinking about which has been shared on the Facebook page.
“ASK LESS WHAT YOUR NATION CAN DO FOR YOU—ASK MORE WHAT YOU CAN DO FOR SPACESHIP EARTHâ€
Individuals Are Not to Praise or Blame for How Earthian Economic, Social, and Political States of Affairs Evolve
By Richard John Stapleton
European immigrants in North America had a natural economic advantage from the 1600s up to about 1980 producing agricultural and industrial products because of where the territory they conquered is situated around Spaceship Earth, at the best latitudes and longitudes, on a Goldilocks spot of Earth, sheltered by two wide oceans from aggressive foreign enemies. Temperatures and fertile soils on that spot of Earthian territory were amenable to growing almost anything, and there was lots of soil to till, after it was expropriated from its native inhabitants by military force.
Excessive population growth in Europe and elsewhere insured a steady supply of land-hungry immigrants willing and able to move farther and farther west to farm new land as it was cleared of Indians, in what became known as the United States of America, however godless, immoral, and unethical this process might have been, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. Surplus production of crops such as tobacco and cotton were in high demand in Europe and elsewhere, generating cash cow exports generating lucrative international trade cash inflows for USian planters, entrepreneurs, bankers, and traders, causing high growth rates in the USian economy, giving free USians of all socioeconomic classes competitive advantages relative to their counterparts in Europe and elsewhere.
African slavery in the South facilitated increased cotton production at relatively low cost. USian slaves had no wages or competitive advantages, giving USian cotton farmers owning slaves a cost advantage in international trade. The westward expansion of agriculture in both the South and the North of the US created demand for industrial products of all sorts, especially tractors after the development of the internal combustion engine around 1900.
USian territory was also advantaged in the Great Lakes region and the Ohio Valley for iron and steel production. Iron ore was plentiful in Minnesota and there was plenty of coal in Kentucky. Heavy loads of iron ore and coal could be floated on barges in lakes, rivers, and canals in the region to iron and steel mills and their heavy output could be floated to factories producing tractors, trucks, automobiles, plows, wheat threshers, railroad rails, train engines and cars, and what have you, at relatively low cost.
The farm land was relatively easy to take from Indians and relatively cheap when bought by farmers. While there were farmers who failed because of bad luck, weather, diseases, and what have you, USian agriculture winning in international markets was almost a certainty because of production and cost advantages.
The advent of trains, tractors, and automobiles by 1900 created enormous demand for gasoline, oil, grease, and coal, and USian territory was well stocked with coal and oil deposits in the ground that was relatively easy to mine and pump out, in coal mines in West Virginia, Kentucky and elsewhere, and from oil fields in Pennsylvania, Texas, Oklahoma, and elsewhere.
Consequently, the USian economy itself was a slam dunk winner from about 1900 to 1980, finding itself in an almost impossible-to-lose position in international trade and competition, thanks to sheer historical geographic good luck, with relatively high wages, salaries, and profits for most USians compared to their counterparts in Europe and elsewhere. Happy Days were here, for most USians considered white, and for some USians considered non-white.
Because of these eventualities, a large percentage of USians began to feel and think they were inherently superior to other humans around Earth, feeling and thinking they somehow caused their incomes to be relatively high by virtue of having superior religious beliefs, morals, ethics, intelligence, and abilities, and because of working harder than others.
USians in 2021 are no longer the luckiest humans aboard Spaceship Earth. They are no longer accidentally and inevitably better off economically than others because of natural geographic phenomena and causes. A higher percentage of Earthian countries have industrialized, creating formidable competition; USian industrial jobs have been sent to low-wage countries; USian factories have been shuttered; USian irrigation wells have been pumped almost dry in several states; USian oil wells have about been pumped dry, no longer guaranteeing USians relatively cheap energy; USian exports of agricultural and industrial products no longer have natural cost advantages in global markets; the US is more dependent internally on relatively expensive car, truck, and airplane transportation systems than other countries, creating a cost disadvantage.
What’s the answer?
USians believing they’re naturally superior and deserving and believing electing fascist political leaders can make the US great again is not the answer. Believing the US will again get its hands on almost limitless supplies of cheap land and natural resources is not the answer. Believing large USian corporations will bring their industrial factories back to the US and pay wages in the US several times higher than those of workers in industrial factories sited in low-wage countries around Spaceship Earth is not the answer. The above is magical thinking with little or no chance of happening.
Some possible survival answers include learning to live consuming less raw material per capita, producing only one child per woman to reduce the necessity for resource depletion, developing green energy sources, constructing housing and transportation systems that require less energy for each human served, humans doing some organic gardening producing some food in their yards, humans sewing some of their own clothes.
A case can be made that most USians past the age of thirty have been spoiled and poorly scripted by inevitable historical accidents, having had no idea how relatively well-off they were economically compared to others around Spaceship Earth, caused by historical accidents caused by inevitable cause-effect evolution.
A case can also be made that Earthians should worry about befuddled discombobulated sad, scared, and mad USians deciding humans different from them living aboard Spaceship Earth are to blame for their lowered social positions and impoverished economic circumstances, since they might blame different others so much they decide to hate, revile, scapegoat, sanction, incarcerate, disappear, and bomb them.
If all effects have causes, and if feelings, thoughts, decisions, and behaviors are effects, then such phenomena were caused, and free will, a non-caused effect, does not exist. If so, as a consolation, Earthian humans can hope inexorable unbroken infinitely-regressive and progressive cause-effect chains, that cannot be changed or stopped by Earthian humans of any country, however superior and/or heroic they might think or say they are, will cause at least minimally OK states of affairs to indefinitely happen for all Earthians.
A bitter pill for most people to swallow postulated in my books Business Voyages and Born to Learn is that everything that happens is either predetermined or accidental and therefore no one is to blame or praise. Believing and acting otherwise will perpetuate the same sorry I’m OK—You’re Not OK life position that has bedeviled humankind since time immemorial.
Read my article “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc,†https://blog.effectivelearning.net/the-evolution-of-spaceship-earth-inc/ for some management science ideas on how human Earthians might eventually co-construct an economic system that is viable and satisfying for everyone aboard Spaceship Earth, making it possible for all Earthian humans to develop an I’m OK—You’re OK life position.
This entails Earthians peacefully reducing through natural attrition the human population aboard Spaceship Earth, never doing work that machines can do better, and delegating the day-to-day management of systems for scheduling, producing, and distributing the necessities of life to artificial intelligence programs and supercomputers.
This is possible based on the general algorithmic matrix algebra form
Flying aboard an airliner about to land at night moving at four hundred miles an hour at thirty thousand feet with cloudy and rainy weather below, which would you rather have landing the plane, the plane’s radar and computer system or the pilot and co-pilot, seeing nothing out their windows but clouds and lightning?
The main reason however why turning over the scheduling, production, and distribution of the necessities of life to AI robots and magnum computers is that they do not get greedy and power hungry or play psychological Games. Thus far in human history most leaders atop large organizations such as countries, large corporations, and big banks have become corrupt one way or another playing psychological Games acting out their selfish ego trips, hogging all the power and money they could get their hands on for themselves and their cronies. AI robots and computers are not egotistical.
I am indebted to Buckminster Fuller for teaching me in his book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth the airplane-landing metaphor in the above paragraph and for planting seeds for other ideas in my essay “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc.,†such as computers being the best hope for mankind and humans not doing work machines can do better, being paid to think instead with what Fuller called mind grants. Fuller said unemployment all around Spaceship Earth could be eliminated overnight with mind grants. To my knowledge Fuller was the inventor of the appellations Earthian and Spaceship Earth.
I do not sell subscriptions or advertising or solicit donations for THE EARTHIAN or the EFFECTIVE LEARNING REPORT but I would like to sell more books. If you feel you’ve gained value from THE EARTHIAN and would like to reciprocate, go to our Effective Learning Publications page and purchase one or more copies of my books at https://effectivelearning.net/effective-learning-publications/ .
FOR A FREE SUBSCRIPTION TO THE EFFECTIVE LEARNING REPORT AND THE EARTHIAN: Email rjstapleton@bulloch.net and type the word Subscription on the subject line.
Feel free to forward, share, post, print, or otherwise circulate this edition of The Earthian any way you see fit.
Born to Learn has not been a best seller but it has had some impact as this review in the Texas Tribune implies at https://www.texastribune.org/2016/10/26/bookshelf-oct-26-2016/?fbclid=IwAR3ctGFk_zCH5QOyvLjqUiulkAcEPUQ4deUq1-tZIS6OuwaYhI-bmrM4Ebw . A German orthopedic surgeon discounted the book with a customer review at Amazon.com at https://www.amazon.com/Business-Voyages-Schemata-Discovering-Co-Constructing/dp/1413480810lowering the book from a five star to a three star Amazon rating. The orthopedic doctor said I did not “come across†like a real transactional analyst and the book promised more than it delivered. Seems to me the Kirkus review in the Texas Tribune in this post is fair and accurate. Both reviews comment on admittedly a debatable issue with Born to Learn: Is the book useful only for teachers and students in classrooms or for all teachers and learners, including parents and children in homes, bosses and employees in businesses, preachers and Sunday school teachers and members in churches? Is it useful for leaders and members in all kinds of groups and organizations, civic clubs, chambers of commerce, street gangs, military units, and governments? I say it can be useful in all organizations and groups and can help increase human OKness. Read both reviews above for yourself and write a review of Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning. The more reviews the better.
Since when was there a real debt limit? More bullshit, smoke, and mirrors in the USian presidency, congress, treasury dept, and Federal Reserve system. The only real debt limit is when the USian govt and the Federal Reserve System can no longer meet the government’s payroll for the govt’s military and civil servant employees, stops making its loan repayments to the USian Social Security System, and stops bailing out the USian deep state by purchasing non-market military products and inflated investment assets in manipulated stock and bond markets.
Right. What is a fair share of taxes, not to mention a fair share of deficit spending for the US military and other budget items paid for by treasury debt purchased with funny money created from thin air by the Federal Reserve system?
Yes, there are side effects environmentally caused by electric cars such as mining for rare minerals to make batteries, but most Earthian humans seem oblivious to the fact electric cars are not a free lunch to solve the global warming problem. Why? Because electricity humans access by plugging a cord into an electrical outlet to recharge an electric car battery probably requires the burning of fossil fuel to generate the electricity fed into the car battery, offsetting any environmental improvements made by not driving fossil fueled internal combustion engine cars. I am not sure about the net result here, having never read a definitive article on it, but there are environmental pluses and minuses of all sorts comparing electric and internal combustion engine cars. If Earthian humans should completely switch from internal combustion engines to electric motors in cars, if new ways of generating electricity are not developed, such as by using hydrogen fusion reactors, it may take as much or more fossil fuel to keep on driving with electric cars as internal combustion engine cars. It takes energy to make energy, and it might take more energy to make enough usable energy to power cars, trucks, and innumerable other internal combustion contraptions with electricity than gasoline. In other words, what are Earthian humans going to burn to make the new electric energy to power cars, trucks, etc. in the first place? Mostly coal? Whoopee. A lot of energy is required not only to make usable energy but to transport usable energy, whether through electric highline wires or by trucks, trains, and pipelines. A lot of energy is lost through resistance in electric transmission wires. Mainstream media are not painting an accurate picture regarding these states of affairs, leaving most Earthian humans as usual to live in their dream worlds. Electric cars are not a panacea at this time.
Does it always happen this way when push comes to shove? Fascists take over regardless of the political and economic system the country professes to use, whether it be monarchy, democracy, communism, socialism, capitalism, or a hybrid?
Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning by Richard John Stapleton was featured in “20 Great Indie Books Worth Your Time,†in Kirkus Reviews, VOL. LXXXV, NO 21, 1 November 2017, Page 130:
“Illuminating if quirky at times; insightful eye-opening observations about the interplay of teachers and students in the classroom. A refresher course in Transactional Analysis emphasizes its application in the classroom.â€
Born to Learn has not been a best seller but it has had some impact as this post in the Texas Tribune shows. A German orthopedic surgeon discounted the book with a customer review at Amazon.com and slowed sales down, lowering it from a five star to a three star rating. The orthopedic doctor said I (Richard) did not “come across” like a real transactional analyst and the book title promised more than it delivered. Seems to me this Kirkus review in the Texas Tribune is fair and generally accurate. Both reviews admittedly touch on a debatable issue with the book: Is the book beneficial only with teachers and students in schools or with all teachers and learners, parents and children in homes, bosses and employees in businesses, preachers and Sunday school teachers and members in churches, and with leaders and members in all groups and organizations, including boy and girl clubs, civic clubs, Chambers of Commerce, military units, and governments? I say Born to Learn applies in all organizations and groups that teach and learn and can increase human OKness in general.
Great grandparents leading up to all four of my (Richard’s) grandparents from Virginia before the American Revolution owned farms and ranches, mostly cotton farms, on land recently conquered from Indians, in South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, North Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Texas. All four of my grandparents were reared on cotton farms owned by their parents in Mississippi and Texas. I had two uncles who were cotton farmers near where I grew up in Texas. My parents owned a cotton farm I lived on up to age four near Wolfforth, Texas in Northwest Texas. One of my ancestors, a distant cousin, Dabney Herndon Maury, a West Point graduate and an army general fighting for the South, published a book titled Recollections of a Virginian in the Mexican, Indian, and Civil Wars. And, yes, some of my ancestors owned slaves, not something to be proud of, but there’s nothing I can do about it now. I am working on another book tentatively titled Evolution of a Professor Surrounded by Cotton Fields.
What little USian and Earthian history I was exposed to in public school in the 1950s was a joke. No discussions, no nothing about why states of affairs happened, just dates of events and names of people in power to be memorized for so-called objective tests. Dull and dry stuff, explaining nothing.
Not weird, but creepy. The USian mainstream media have long decided to back up the narrative of the USian govt that Julian Assange is a bad guy who made them look bad with truth telling about their war crime secrets in the Mideast on Wikileaks leaked by Chelsea Manning, and therefore he deserves to be silenced and/or imprisoned forever regardless of international law.
Xi is possibly the most efficient and effective top leader on the Earthian political stage today, despite his weaknesses mentioned in this post. It seems however he is following the same cause-effect path to ruin of past top leaders on the Earthian stage—getting greedy for personal power and fame, allowing his personal egotism to offset the good he has done, which is why computer programs and AI robots are needed at the top of large political and economic organizations around Spaceship Earth. In a word, computer technology and AI robots are not egotistical.
“In Washington, the dismissal of the justices did not sit well with the White House. Vice-President Kamala Harris, who oversees the working group in migration, which is exploring the causes of Central American migration and the problems of the Northern Triangle (El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala), issued a warning about the Biden administration’s reaction to the undermining of democracy and its institutions by Bukele and his deputies.
“This weekend, we learned that the Salvadoran Assembly moved to undermine its nation’s highest court,†she said on May 4 at a Washington DC conference on democracy in the Americas. “An independent judiciary is critical to a healthy democracy and a strong economy. On this front, on every front, we must respond.†She went on to say, “We are focused on attacking the causes and the roots of migration and among the roots we have identified corruption, impunity, the lack of good governance.â€
Yeah, right, The best way to stop illegal immigration from Central and South America into North America is to help countries down there become decent law abiding countries, and the USian govt cannot do that by undermining the rule of law in those countries.
FOR A FREE SUBSCRIPTION TO THE EFFECTIVE LEARNING REPORT AND THE EARTHIAN: Email rjstapleton@bulloch.net and type the word Subscription on the subject line.
Feel free to forward, share, post, print, or otherwise circulate this edition of The Earthian any way you see fit.
About the Editor
Here’s Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA in his office at Georgia Southern University the year he retired in 2005, the senior professor of the university that year. The photo was shot by Lori Grice, a former student, founder of Lori Grice Photography. The object under his left hand is a Classroom De-Gamerâ„¢ he invented in 1978.
The spinner was spun in Stapleton’s classes to randomly select a student at the beginning of each class session to lead a discussion of the case assigned for that day, a case taken from a real business prepared by case writers at Georgia Southern, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Alabama. Grades were based eighty percent on class participation; the rest of the final grade was based on case write-ups.
He learned how the case method works teaching with Bernard Bienvenu, DBA and Rexford Hauser, DBA (Harvard Business School doctorates) at what is now known as the University of Louisiana–Lafayette in 1969-70.
He has published refereed journal articles and books explaining how his democratic Game-free Adult-Adult I’m OK—You’re OK case method system works, by banishing Persecutors, Rescuers, and Victims playing psychological Games from the teaching and learning process, first documented in an article titled “The Classroom De-Gamer†he published in 1978 in the Transactional Analysis Journal.
He studied TA with Martin Groder, MD; Graham Barnes, PhD; Vann Joines, PhD; and many others at the Southeast Institute at Chapel Hill, North Carolina (1975-1978).
He has degrees in economics, organizational behavior, and management science from Texas Tech University (1962-1969), and an organizational and educational certification in transactional analysis from the International Transactional Analysis Association (1978).
He had his own case method track at the undergraduate level in the business school at Georgia Southern University taught by him alone in the management department, four or five different elective case method courses offered each academic year (1970-2005), in which he led, coordinated, and graded twenty-five or so students each year who took all or most of those case method courses in their junior and senior years, of about two hundred students who signed up for all of his courses each year, using a democratic circle or amphitheater classroom layout. He also taught most semesters two sections of a case method capstone integrative business policy course he added to the business school curriculum in 1970 that was required for all undergraduate business majors that could be elected by any student in any major. He was the only professor in the business school to use the case method in this core curriculum required integrative capstone course for graduating seniors.
He conducted primary survey research in 1992 that discovered longitudinal data (published in “Evidence the Case Method Works†in his book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds, 2008, pg. 475) that showed his case method students during 1972-1982 reported higher yearly incomes in 1992 than students electing the same courses in 1972-1982 taught by professors using the lecture method and the authoritarian row and column classroom layout, who graded students based on how well they memorized “right answers†for so-called objective multiple-choice tests, indicating learners learning in Adult—Adult I’m OK—You’re OK Game-free learning processes graded subjectively became more successful in the real world of business than learners lectured to in Parent—Child I’m OK—You’re Not-OK un-De-Gamed learning processes. Only former students who had been in the real world ten or more years after graduating were included in the study.
He had one of the lowest student grade point averages among professors in the business school. About five percent or so of his students made A’s and D’s, and most made C’s, which is about right, since C = Average. There few F’s in his courses. He did not believe in Lake Wobegon grading.
As the philosopher Ludwig Wiggenstein wrote, “The case is all there is.â€
Everything else in Earthian human states of affairs is a rendition of what was or might be.
The word ‘irony’ sums up much that is probably inherent in human nature and manifest at times in human history, when one considers the on-going conflict between the Palestinians and Israel.
Historical pogroms had been launched against Jews – ‘pogroms’ used in the widest sense of its meaning as violent attack, expulsion, or marginalisations – then the history is a long one.  King Edward 1 in 1290 signed an edict expelling all Jews from the Kingdom of England; Pope Innocent the 111 had issued a decree against Jews, placing them in servitude for the killing of Christ; Czarist Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church pursued an exclusionary policy towards Jews; more recently there is the Holocaust; and other instances which could be cited mainly in and around Europe of anti-Jewish actions being perpetrated. Â
In what can be termed historical Palestine, prior to 1948 Jews, Arab Palestinians and Christians lived peacefully with the Jewish population being about a mere 6% of the total in Palestine. The road to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 might be said to have been signposted with Jewish hopes which followed certain critical stages. Following the end of the Ottoman Empire, there was a new carving out of territories for the ‘Great Powers’ and in 1917 there was the Balfour Declaration announcing an intent to create a national homeland for Jews; in 1920 there was the San Reno Conference and by 1924 the then League of Nations approved the British Mandate for Palestine. Here comes trouble. Between 1936 to 1939 the Palestinians resisted British policy in Palestine. By the Post World War 11 era the world’s conscience had been touched and galvanised in favour of a Jewish state and by 1948 Zionists saw and grasped the opportunity. The on-going conflict had emerged since the inception of the Jewish state, for reasons such as:-
The displacement and expulsion of several hundred thousand Palestinians to make space for the new Jewish arrivees.
The anti-democratic embrace of the idea that one ethnicity can reserve for itself the exclusive right to citizenship at the expense and to the disadvantage of the prior inhabitants of the land.
The need to corral the expelled Palestinians, and deny them the right of return to their homeland.
The list of causes for the conflict could be significantly expanded – but this brief commentary is about the inherent ‘irony’ existing in the state of Israel.
International Law and the mandate
1947, the United Kingdom had relied on Article 10 of the UN Charter:-
“The General Assembly may discuss any questions or any matters within the scope of the present Charter or relating to the powers and functions of any organs provided for in the present Charter, and, except as provided in Article 12, may make recommendations to the Members of the United Nations or to the Security Council or to both on any such questions or matters.â€
Wherein commences a problem ( the problem?). A number of Arab States had opposed the British Mandate being brought to the floor of the General Assembly for reason that under Article 12.1Â of the UN Charter there is express provision that while the Security Council is exercising the functions assigned to it by the Charter in relation to any dispute or situation, the General Assembly must not adopt any recommendation regarding that dispute or situation unless requested to do so by the Security Council. The preexisting system of mandated territories under the law as applied via the League of Nations did not provide for any mandated territory to be transferred via the new UN schema of law. Here is how the problem commenced and continues to this day in point of law.Â
Articles 75 to 79 of the UN Charter address the UN Trusteeship system, which is the successor to that which had existed under the former League of Nations system as mandated territory. Under Article 79, the terms of trusteeship agreements were to be agreed by “…the States directly concerned, including the mandatory power in the case of territories held under mandate by a Member of the United Nationsâ€. Additionally, the agreements had to be approved by the Security Council in the case of territorial areas deemed to be strategic areas (see: Article 83) and note the provisions of Article 85 with regards to the General Assembly’s role.
Before the UN in 1947 adopted a crucial Resolution on Palestine, the UK had made known that it wanted to withdraw from Palestine, terminate the Mandate and avoid the transfer into an international Trusteeship System.
On 29 November 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted a Plan as Resolution 181 (II). That resolution recommended the creation of independent Arab and Jewish States with a Special International Regime being established for the city of Jerusalem.
By 1948 Jewish re-population and de-population of the Palestinian Arabs, throughout the various iterations of the conflict really does constitute – at least the Alpha – if not fully yet the Omega of the issue. A book would have to be written if I were to continue explaining the issue from its root causes. I simply want to lay an adequate historical and legal plinth to afford a credible shift leading logically to the main point of the ‘irony’ of that which was mentioned in the title at the start of this commentary.
Ironies.
Lack of sympathy and/or support for fellow oppressed people
Establishment and perpetuation of Apartheid policies in Israel
The position of the recognition of the 1967 borders under international law as constituting the boundaries for Israel, is simply ignored and greater settler colony expansion is taking place on Palestinian lands.
When the Jewish ‘nation-state law’ was passed in Israel in 2018 the Arab members of the parliament ripped it up and shouted, “Apartheidâ€. Indeed, reservation for a certain group based on ethnicity in these circumstances can, quite accurately, be so termed.
Expulsion of Palestinians from their homes while promoting more illegal Jewish settlements ( contrary to international law)
To say the least, is it not truly ironic, that a group of people, undeniably historically displaced and dispossessed for centuries, would embrace policies such as declaring “Jewish settlement as a national value†while mandating that the state “will labor to encourage and promote its establishment and development.�
Beyond the immediate former proclamation, is it not, within historical context – ironic in the extreme for the Zionists to tell the Palestinians to forget their expulsion as of 1948 – being a diaspora people who kept a dream of return with collective memory alive over 2,000 years — long enough to remove people who historically really never did Jews any harm?
Conclusion
International Refugee Law weighs heavily in favour of the right of return. Which version would you presently embrace Israel – the one before 2,000 years ago – or – from 1948 onwards? Change course Israel – or – continue fighting as Apartheid South Africa did over many years, being truly reflective of what you are doing now – fighting, however ironic the fight may be – to the end.
______________________________________________
Courtenay Barnett is a graduate of London University. His areas of study were economics, political science and international law. He has been a practising lawyer for almost fully forty years, has been arrested for defending his views, and has argued public interest and human rights cases.
America is not a racist country: It was back then, but then is now.
( A tribute to Tim Scott)
A joint venture poem by Courtenay Barnett and George Garwood.
1. There was actual chattel slavery in the US
when human beings at a time
were bought and sold as property –
but that was way back then, but then is now.
2. After emancipation in 1863
there were lynchings –
but that was way back then, but then is now.
3. There was the burning of ‘Black Wall Street’ in 1921
when an entire prosperous town was destroyed
and burned to the ground by a White mob
for the Blacks had committed the crime of improving their lot in life
post-emancipation, and had made themselves wealthy
and that was quite some time ago –
but that was way back then, but then is now
4. After lynchings there was still ‘Jim Crow’ (Apartheid segregation)
but segregation laws on the books actually ended around 1967
when Virginia repealed the last miscegenation statute in the US –
but that was way back then, but then is now.
In the 1950s there was Federally approved segregation
via the housing policy applied
which directly excluded Blacks from benefiting
from these Federal funds as well illustrated on Long Island
and the instance of Levittown*– and that was in the 1950s –
but that was way back then, but then is now.
5. Even in the 1960s there had to be marches to obtain civil rights
and that was some time ago in the 60s –
but that was way back then, but then is now.
6. Up to the early 1970s there was the ‘scientific experiment’ on
Black male prisoners
letting the disease of syphilis run its course
to study and document the full nature of the disease
as the bodies of these ‘human guinea pigs’ were made
knowingly to decay – and this was permitted at
the administrative and governmental level
and that was some time ago in the 1970s –
but that was way back then, but then is now.
7. Oh Timmy – now I just love this last one –
it was the day before yesterday
and home boy George Floyd got his wind-pipe squeezed
with the cop’s knee upon his neck
but that was just regular and standard policing
applied on a Black man
while on the internet we still see postings of White Americans
and some non-white Americans
seeking to justify police action – and that in 2021.
But eyes don’t lie. This wasn’t way back then –
but then is now.
8. So – please Tim Scott – do not disgrace the
struggle and/or sacrifices of Black folks in the US, for
over the centuries, as you know, your mantra is untrue
When you say, “America is not a racist countryâ€-
or when you say: that was way back then, for then is now.
* A clause in the original Levittown covenant prevented tenants from allowing non-Caucasians to use or occupy Levitt houses…. In Levittown, Black veterans were unable to purchase homes, and the Levitts justified the clause by stating that it maintained the value of the properties, since most whites at the time preferred not to live in mixed communities.
COURTENAY BARNETT is a graduate of London University. His areas of study were economics, political science and international law. He has been a practising lawyer for over thirty-nine years, has been arrested for defending his views, and has argued public interest and human rights cases.  GEORGE GARWOOD is a Jamaican writer and professor of world religions. He resides in Florida, USA, but is a peripatetic observer of human affairs as he travels around trying to understand human behaviour. Â
THE EARTHIAN, Number Twenty-Three, Effective Learning Publications, https://effectivelearning.net/effective-learning-publications/ 32 East Main Street, Statesboro, Georgia, USA, May 8, 2021, Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA, Writer, Editor & Publisher
THE EARTHIAN is a digest of articles containing facts, perspectives, theories, models, analyses, and recommendations concerned about existential states of affairs affecting all species of fauna and flora around Spaceship Earth. Recent articles written and published by intelligent hard-hitting truth-seeking writers in Internet journals about psychological, social, economic, political, military, religious, and ecological states of affairs around Spaceship Earth are posted and linked below as recommended sources of relevant reading to help Earthian humans comprehend larger and larger systems to develop consensual answers for dealing with existential problems.
To comment about this issue of The Earthian in general or any article included please scroll to the top of this page and click on the prompt for ELR Editor’s Daily Shares. Write your comment either at the top of the editor’s Facebook page that will pop up or at the bottom of the specific article you are thinking about that was previously shared on the ELR Editor’s Facebook page that popped up.
“ASK LESS WHAT YOUR NATION CAN DO FOR YOU—ASK MORE WHAT YOU CAN DO FOR SPACESHIP EARTHâ€
That object under my left hand in the picture above is a Classroom De-Gamerâ„¢. It has a spinner attached and there are concentric circles of numbers around its circumference to accommodate different numbers of students in classes. Each student got a number and whoever’s number got selected when the spinner was spun got to be the leader of the moment leading a discussion of assigned reading, mostly long factual cases in my courses. I have published some refereed professional journal articles and book chapters attached as references to this issue of The Earthian explaining how learning De-Gamers de-Game psychological Games in learning situations, including an article I published in 1978 in the Transactional Analysis Journal titled “The Classroom De-Gamer” in which I first explained how and why my invention worked. Learning De-Gamers can work in any situation in which there is teaching and learning going on, involving parents and children in homes, teachers and students in schools, bosses and employees in businesses, preachers and Sunday school teachers and members in churches, and leaders and members in groups and organizations of all kinds.
Learning De-Gamers cathect (activate) all Ego States in all participants. I used a Classroom De-Gamerâ„¢ in my classes thirty-five years producing management learning with university students, and I used one with a large manufacturing corporation, dealing with current problems in a plant with several hundred employees from all functions and levels of the plant, lecturing three hours on transactional analysis concepts and techniques to thirty or so plant employees per group in classes at a university setting and spasmodically applying TA to interrelated plant problems over a five year period on-site on an as needed basis with small mixed groups of ten or so members, with each member of a small group having an equal shot at being selected the leader of the group. Whoever got selected by the plant De-Gamer became the leader of the moment to start a discussion about whatever he or she thought was the most significant problem facing the plant. I wrote about this experience in my ebook Recommendations for Waking Up From the USian Nightmare, at https://www.amazon.com/Recommendations-American-Nightmare-Business-Voyages-ebook/dp/B009TOJVPI .
Learning De-Gamers facilitate a democratic way of teaching and learning involving sortition wherein everyone involved is OK with an equal shot at being the leader of the moment, a process ancient Greeks used to create democratic government during one of the more OK periods of Earthian human history. I think Learning De-Gamers based on sortition should be used around Spaceship Earth today in as many teaching and learning situations as possible, including governmental legislative groups, such as the USian House and Senate.
Learning De-Gamers cause more and better learning to happen by causing Adult Ego States to be cathected (activated) in participants and by preventing the learning process from being corrupted by Persecutors, Rescuers, and Victims playing psychological Games. When the Leader of the Moment is randomly selected psychological power struggles do not happen at the start of discussions and participants cooperate from then on.
Following are some transactional analysis terms and concepts that might help Earthian humans think and talk more clearly about psychological, social, economic, religious, and political processes that might help develop consensual answers to bring about salutary feeling, thinking, and doing processes around Spaceship Earth for dealing with existential threats such as global warming, climate change, and nuclear war.
Ego states are states of being including thoughts, beliefs, behaviors, feelings, gestures, body language, and other signals determining how people come across with others in communication episodes that are parent-like, adult-like, or child-like. People switch ego states depending on who they are communicating with and what sort of circumstances they are in, whether they are parenting, working, socializing, teaching, having fun, or playing Games. They transmit messages from three ego states in themselves to three ego states in others in pair vectors, Parent-Parent, Adult-Adult, Child-Child, Parent-Child, Child-Adult, Adult-Parent, or whatever possibility. These transmissions or transactions are especially meaningful in situations in which there is some sort of authoritarian system involved, such as parents parenting children in homes, teachers teaching students in schools, or bosses bossing subordinates in a business, political, religious, or military organization, which normally entail primarily Parent-Child transactions. In most cases the more Adult-Adult transactions there are the better things go in families, schools, businesses, churches, military units, political organizations, and governments.
A life script diagram shows three stacked circles metaphorically representing Parent, Adult, and Child ego states depicting transactions between real parents and children. The solid lines in the diagram denote overt spoken social messages on vectors from ego states in the parent to ego states in the child, and dotted line vectors denote covert psychological unspoken ulterior messages transmitted from the Child ego state of the parent to the Child ego state of the child. Social messages are verbalized overt auditory messages; psychological messages are covert non-spoken ulterior messages transmitted by body language, emotional states, and after the fact positive or negative stroking as people react to situations and feel and do things.
Strokes are units of recognition.
Scripts in families are created automatically when parents transmit various messages to their children from various ego states socially and psychologically, in and out of awareness. Scripts are life plans are generally decided before the age of eight by offspring based on script messages transmitted to them by their parents and others. Since parents by and large transmit the same script messages that were transmitted to them before they were eight years old script messages in families can remain intact for many generations. According to transactional analysts script decisions made before the age of eight have lasting effects determining three general life outcomes: winner, loser, and non-winner. These decisions can be redecided and updated later in life but it’s not easy for most people.
Psychological Child-Child ego state script injunctions are what cause the most trouble for people in their lives. These script injunctions forbid appropriate behavior in the here and now. Script injunctions are caused by emotional and behavioral requirements created by families through time as they adapted to and coped with problems and environmental forces that may have been appropriate in past environments, but which are inappropriate and ineffective in different here and now environments.
Opposing script messages transmitted by parents can put a child in a Not-OK bind in childhood and throughout adolescence, assuming a divorce has not already occurred, causing considerable trouble within a family, since the child cannot please both parents in the presence of both parents, which can put parents in worse Not-OK positions if the child makes a decision about which parent is right, increasing Not-OKness in the family system as a whole.
What many people need is psychological permission to violate and ignore their psychological outdated obsolete family Child ego state script message Injunctions, not only to increase their own OKness but the OKness of all living members of the family system, and the OKness of Earthian humans in general.
Two common family script Injunctions in most cultures are Don’t Think seriously about the true nature and causes of states of affairs and Don’t Feel certain feelings, such as mad, glad, sad, and scared, when certain things happen in certain environments.
Joe Biden at least socially comes across projecting an I’m OK—You’re OK life position. Donald Trump on the other hand comes across socially and psychologically projecting an I’m OK, my buddy is OK, nothing else is OK, and we are going to make the world pay life position.
Here is some writing of mine based on the teachings of Martin Groder, MD, a founder of transactional analysis and one of my TA mentors, published in my book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds, 2011, pp. 148-150:
“The Human Spectrum
“Humans generally give little thought to what kind of human they are and where they fit in the spectrum of various types of humans. Innumerable philosophers, psychiatrists, social scientists, preachers, priests, writers in various fields, and other types have described and categorized humans in various ways. Following is a schema developed by Martin Groder, MD, a psychiatrist, organizational development consultant, and entrepreneur, who also had an undergraduate degree in physics (Groder, 1977). Groder developed this schema while working with maximum security inmates of the federal prison system at Marion, Illinois in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. He was involved in a process of changing hard-core criminals into law-abiding citizens. Such a process would challenge the abilities of the most skillful and powerful of change agents.
“According to Groder, humans vary on two fundamental spatial dimensions. One dimension is Okness, which he estimates on the horizontal axis of Figure 1; the other dimension is the energy level of the individual estimated on the vertical axis of the space.
“People vary in terms of how OK they see, feel about, and experience, (1) themselves, (2) the other individual, (3) their group, (4) other groups, and (5) the world. In Groder’s terms, they are OK or not-OK with respect to I, You, We, They, and It (the world). Groder estimates how OK they are on each of these five existential dimensions on a scale of -1 to +1, -1 being as not-OK as possible and +1 being as OK as possible. Thus people with extremely high self-esteem would exist at the +1 level regarding themselves; someone with extremely low self-esteem would exist at the -1 level regarding themselves. People could exist at any level in between, at -.5, 0, +.25, etc. The same would be true of the positions of specific individuals with respect to buddies on a one-to-one basis, groups with which one belongs, other groups with which your group cooperates or competes, and the world in general. Summing the 5 existential OKness positions for an individual (I, You, We, They, and It), the highest possible OKness rating would be +5 and the lowest possible would be -5. A +5 person would have the highest possible feelings of Okness regarding his or her OKness, the OKness of buddies, the OKness of his group, the OKness of other groups, and the OKness of the world. Such an individual would have very positive feelings and thoughts for self and others. Groder called such people myth-makers. On the other end of the spectrum, a -5 person would have the lowest possible feelings and thoughts for self and others. Very negative people tend to end up in prison. Very positive people tend to end up cultural heroes. Probably the most profitable attitude for an entrepreneur in a capitalistic economic system would be I’m OK, my employees are OK, my company is OK, the world is OK, but my competitors aren’t worth a damn, since this position would motivate his or her sales employees to steal business from competitors to increase the profit of the company.
“Entrepreneurs have higher energy levels than middle managers and normal people. It takes less energy to be a normal person than anything else. Entrepreneurs in Groder’s schema have approximately the same energy level on the vertical axis of Figure 1 as Monsters, the -3 OKness level convict leaders of other convicts. Monsters have the attitude “I’m OK, my buddy is OK, but everything else is not OK, and I am going to make the world pay.†According to Groder, it’s more difficult to change the energy level of a human than the OKness position. In rehabilitation work, Groder attempted to arc people across the gap of Figure 1, and make +3 OKness level entrepreneurs out of -3 monsters, +2 OKness middle managers out of -2 OKness creeps, slobs, lunch buckets, etc. Sometimes people arc across the gap the other way. Honest entrepreneurs can turn criminal. Entrepreneurs are winner-survivors; Monsters are loser-survivors.â€
The trick to it all is setting appropriate goals and objectives, doing what you really want to do, can do, and should do given your natural abilities, scripting, and education, and the requirements and options of your environment that will produce satisfaction for you. How much money you get your hands on in the process beyond a certain level necessary to satisfy needs for food, clothing, shelter, belonging, and good health is irrelevant, if you aren’t addicted to playing psychological Games caused by poor scripting. Most really rich people are playing a psychological Game called BALANCE SHEET, a Parent ego state Game in which the winner thinks s/he wins by piling up more money on a balance sheet than others.
I became a certified transactional analyst in education and organizations, a CTA, after passing written, oral, and experiential comprehensive exams administered by the International Transactional Analysis Association in 1978, after undergoing three years of once-a-month training, all day Saturday and half of Sunday, at the Southeast Institute at Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
I have covered ego states, scripts, Games, and OKness in my books Business VoyagesandBorn to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning, listing common Parent ego state script messages and Child ego state injunctions. All parents do not transmit the same script messages creating considerable variety among family scripts and outcomes. Certain life scripts conveniently fit certain roles, jobs, professions, careers, and what have you more than others, providing fresh recruits already scripted for job openings, slots, roles, and positions in an economy, which is fine so long as the economy does not change very much. In recent years in the United States the offshoring of high wage blue collar jobs to foreign low wage countries and the use of more and more automation has rendered many family scripts obsolete.
A bitter pill for some people to swallow postulated in my books Business Voyages and Born to Learn is that everything that happens is either predetermined or accidental and therefore no one is to blame or praise. Believing and acting otherwise will perpetuate the same sorry I’m OK—You’re Not OK life position that has bedeviled humankind since time immemorial.
Read my article “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc,†https://blog.effectivelearning.net/the-evolution-of-spaceship-earth-inc/ for some management science ideas on how human Earthians might eventually co-construct an economic system that is viable and satisfying for everyone aboard Spaceship Earth, making it possible for all Earthian humans to develop an I’m OK—You’re OK life position.
This entails Earthians peacefully reducing through natural attrition the human population aboard Spaceship Earth, never doing work that machines can do better, and delegating the day-to-day management of systems for scheduling, producing, and distributing the necessities of life to artificial intelligence programs and supercomputers.
This is possible based on the general algorithmic matrix algebra form
Flying aboard an airliner about to land at night moving at four hundred miles an hour at thirty thousand feet with cloudy and rainy weather below, which would you rather have landing the plane, the plane’s radar and computer system or the pilot and co-pilot, seeing nothing out their windows but clouds and lightning?
The main reason however for turning over the scheduling, production, and distribution of the necessities of life to AI robots and magnum computers is that they do not get greedy and power hungry or play psychological Games. Thus far in human history sooner or later corrupt Not-OK leaders atop large organizations such as countries, large corporations, and big banks got control acting out their life scripts playing psychological Games, hogging all the power and money they could get their hands on for themselves and their cronies, ruining everything for everyone. AI robots and computers are not egotistical.
I am indebted to Buckminster Fuller for teaching me in his book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth the airplane-landing metaphor in the above paragraph and for planting seeds for other ideas in my essay “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc.,†such as computers being the best hope for mankind and humans not doing work machines can do better, being paid to think instead with what Fuller called mind grants. Fuller said unemployment all around Spaceship Earth could be eliminated overnight with mind grants. To my knowledge Fuller was the inventor of the appellations Earthian and Spaceship Earth.
I do not sell subscriptions or advertising or solicit donations for THE EARTHIAN or the EFFECTIVE LEARNING REPORT but I would like to sell more books. If you feel you’ve gained value from THE EARTHIAN and would like to reciprocate, go to our Effective Learning Publications page and purchase one or more copies of my books at https://effectivelearning.net/effective-learning-publications/ .
FOR A FREE SUBSCRIPTION TO THE EFFECTIVE LEARNING REPORT AND THE EARTHIAN: Email rjstapleton@bulloch.net and type the word Subscription on the subject line.
Feel free to forward, share, post, print, or otherwise circulate this edition of The Earthian any way you see fit.
Born to Learn has not been a best seller but it has had some impact as this review in the Texas Tribune shows at https://www.texastribune.org/2016/10/26/bookshelf-oct-26-2016/?fbclid=IwAR3ctGFk_zCH5QOyvLjqUiulkAcEPUQ4deUq1-tZIS6OuwaYhI-bmrM4Ebw . A German orthopedic surgeon discounted Born to Learn with a customer review at Amazon.com, causing the book to be algorithmically lowered from a five star to a three star Amazon rating. The orthopedic doctor said I did not “come across†like a real transactional analyst, the book title promised more than it delivered, and he could understand why some students did not like my teaching. Seems to me the Kirkus review in the Texas Tribune is fair and accurate. Both reviews comment on admittedly a debatable issue with Born to Learn: Is the book useful only for teachers and students in schools or is it useful for all teachers and learners, including parents and children in homes, bosses and employees in businesses, preachers and Sunday school teachers and members in churches? Is it useful for leaders and members learning in all kinds of groups and organizations, boy and girl clubs, civic clubs, chambers of commerce, street gangs, political parties, military units, and governments? I say it can be useful in all organizations and groups and can help increase human OKness.
Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning by Richard John Stapleton was featured in “20 Great Indie Books Worth Your Time,†in Kirkus Reviews, VOL. LXXXV, NO 21, 1 November 2017, Page 130:
“Illuminating if quirky at times; insightful eye-opening observations about the interplay of teachers and students in the classroom. A refresher course in Transactional Analysis emphasizes its application in the classroom.â€
Give a shout out to the French Revolution of 1789, but cringe about its aftermath. Let us all grieve together that Spaceship Earth today should not evolve and degenerate similarly. Let us grieve that Biden does not become another Napoleon Bonaparte. Seems to me Earthian humans need no more republic democracies. They need real democracies. This article is by far the best summary explanation of French Revolution stadia I have read.
Grundlach—”Between the stimulus checks, which were supposed to be temporary, and all the expansions of unemployment and other benefits, the percent of personal income comprised of government payments soared, something we also saw in recent spending data when we observed that 34% of household spending last month came from the government.
“A lot of weird things happened once the pandemic hit….it was a steady march to dependency on the government by a larger and larger fraction of the US population went absolutely vertical what this chart represents is what percent of personal income which is a government statistic what percentage of government of of personal income is made up of government giveaways which we call transfer payments back in the 60s it was down near five percent.
“The trillions in Congressionally-approved payments caused the deficit, already blown out under President Trump, to widen further.”
Now here is an interesting read for you. A major irony is that a dictatorial lawgiver is required to install democracy, such as Rout Logger in my serial Internet novel in progress, “Rout Logger’s Group: A Novel Approach for Increasing Human OKness.
Here’s more than you probably wanted to know about what the USian senate is up to regarding China. Read the whole senate bill for yourself.
Pepe Escobar—
“The concomitant wishful thinking envisages a world economy that will “move closer to a cleaner capitalist modelâ€. One of its features is a delightfully benign Council for Inclusive Capitalism in partnership with the Catholic Church.
“As much as the pandemic – the “opportunity†for the Reset – was somewhat rehearsed by Event 201 in October 2019, additional strategies are already in place for the next steps, such as Cyber Polygon, which warns against the “key risks of digitalizationâ€. Don’t miss their “technical exercise†on July 9th, when “participants will hone their practical skills in mitigating a targeted supply chain attack on a corporate ecosystem in real time.â€
“A New Concert of Powers?
“Sovereignty is a lethal threat to the ongoing cultural revolution. That concerns the role of the European Union institutions – especially the European Commission – going no holds barred to dissolve the national interests of nation states. And that largely explains the weaponizing, in varying degrees, of Russophobia, Sinophobia and Iranophobia.
“The anchoring essay in Raging Twenties analyzes the stakes in Eurasia exactly in terms of the Hegemon pitted against the Three Sovereigns – which are Russia, China and Iran.
“It’s under this framework, for instance, that a massive, 270-plus page bill, the Strategic Competition Act , has been recently passed at the US Senate. That goes way beyond geopolitical competition, charting a road map to fight China across the full spectrum. It’s bound to become law, as Sinophobia is a bipartisan sport in D.C.”
If most repugs are unethical enough or gullible enough to believe Trump’s ‘big lie’ that the election was stolen from him then they can believe any lie McConnell tells them.
A paean to serious hard manual work, which a smaller percentage of humans do anymore, because there is less hard human manual work per capita to do anymore, AI robots having taken over more and more hard labor lately.
Sounds too good to be true, but if true, would it be worth it, counting the total cost of the fuel necessary to produce the laser beams, including environmental degradation costs caused by the fuel feedstock production process?
In this well-conducted U-Tube round table discussion some big brains two years ago at Davos discuss what they knew about what’s going to happen. Not much has changed since then economically or politically besides deposing Trump.
During the last five years common sense and good conservative judgment did not pay off in the USian economy. A few unethical reckless fools were the big winners.
Truth is dangerous. That’s why it’s so hard to find in political states of affairs. Better to believe and espouse pleasant falsehoods than to wind up a dead or abandoned hero. Necessary lies they are sometimes called.
Here’s a U-Tube discussion with two of the best storytellers around Spaceship Earth discussing free speech and democracy worldwide. Well worth a look and listen.
The FBI finally admitted it was investigating this case all along, a fact withheld till now. Most likely Hillary is again railing against a vast right wing conspiracy persecuting her and Bill.
“Comply or die: The only truly compliant person in a police state is a dead one,†by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead, INTREPID REPORT, http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/32288.
April 21
Sounds like Dr Strangelove stuff to me. Now we have to worry about what mere “adversaries” might dream up to do to us, so we should give the Pentagon all the money they want to protect us.
This was news to me last night. According to O’Donnell the Minneapolis police department told the public Floyd had died of heart problems while being transported to a hospital in an ambulance before learning of the existence of the video recording showing what really happened.
Won’t be the end of real america. American history should start with native history, including not only the natives of the USian part of North America but also including the natives of the rest of North America and the natives of Central and South America. Hubristic limited European-USians are so mistaught in families, schools, churches, newspapers, and in Internet memes they believe they are the only “americans” aboard Spaceship Earth. All three of the above continents were delineated after Amerigo Vespucci landed in what is now known as Central America in 1497, discovering what he called a “New World,” after sailing west from Europe to reach the east, specifically India, European humans by 1497 having mustered the courage to test the theory Earth was a globe by sailing on and on in wooden ships farther than the eye could see across the Atlantic Ocean, causing the extermination in the next few centuries of most of the millions of native inhabitants of the “new” world, who had been there for over a thousand years.
There never was an “America”. What the author refers to here as “America” is a part of the North American continent now known as the United States of America, maybe one fourth of the land mass discovered by Amerigo Vespucci. However, assuming the author of this post is right, it is sad the USian part of North America is ending. In any event it seems to me it’s about time USian schools, parents, teachers, professors, writers, newspapers, etc. started teaching the truth about the matter of what america is by giving natives that had been in North, Central, and South America more credit and consolation for what they did and what happened to them before and after the Europeans arrived. They also need to stop calling USian History American History. Surely the inhabitants of non-USian territory in the Americas also contributed something to real American History on three continents. Most USians, alas, seem to hubristically think they are the only Americans aboard Spaceship Earth that count.
Another cogent relevant article by Michael Hudson, one of the greatest economists alive. But even he does not seem to know what america is in his title for his article.
Rout Logger’s Group: A Novel Approach for Increasing Human OKness is a work in progress. While settings, plots, theories, objects, and narratives in this novel may be loosely analogous to the same that have happened in various realities, the names, actions, and attributions of characters cast herein are fictional. All parts of this novel will be published in the Effective Learning Report at various intervals on the Internet, subject to revision at any time, hopefully culminating in a final print edition offered to the public.
Copyright 2020 by Richard John Stapleton, Effective Learning Publications. All rights reserved. No part of this Internet novel may be copied or printed on paper without permission. Share on the Internet as you wish.
To refresh yourself about what happened in earlier episodes, go to the following website addresses:
THE EARTHIAN is a digest of articles containing facts, perspectives, theories, models, analyses, and recommendations concerned about existential states of affairs affecting all species of fauna and flora around Spaceship Earth. Recent relevant articles written and published by intelligent hard-hitting truth-seeking writers in Internet journals about psychological, social, economic, political, military, religious, and ecological states of affairs around Spaceship Earth are linked below as sources, following a usual comment by the editor.
“ASK LESS WHAT YOUR NATION CAN DO FOR YOU—ASK MORE WHAT YOU CAN DO FOR SPACESHIP EARTHâ€
OR SO IT SEEMS TO ME RIGHT NOW
By Richard John Stapleton
Hallelujah, we almost got rid of Trump being thrown in our faces daily on computer and TV screens, at least for now, except for a muchly-reduced flow of posts and news reports about the civil and criminal court cases he now faces and what he’s doing to harvest more millions of dollars from his marks and gang members, aka followers and supporters, while playing his usual psychological Games with the Repug party, with an eye toward running again for president in 2024, thanks to his Repug gang members in the USian senate Rescuing him by voting to acquit in his 2021 impeachment trial, insulting common sense and consensual truth, given the exemplary Dem impeachment trial managers proving beyond a reasonable doubt Trump incited an insurrection against the US government on January 6, 2021.
Now that Trump has waned from view we are seeing and hearing more posts about Joe Biden, the new USian president, pop up on our computer and TV screens. He seems to be doing a decent job domestically, getting Covid vaccinations jabbed into the arms of millions in relatively short order, doing a good job compared to what Trump did about Covid, very little.
Biden and the Dems have passed with a party line vote a Covid relief/rescue package worth $1.9 trillion to recipients. The Biden administration has now started bombing Syria again reinstating the neoliberal Dem foreign policies of Obama and Clinton, while maintaining the sanctions Trump and his cronies in the State Department imposed on Venezuela and Iran.
After the end of World War II in 1945, a war the US helped win, rather than lay down its arms and live peacefully with other sovereign nations at war’s end, the US has been since that time up to the present day almost constantly at war with someone, having not won a war in the 75-year interval. While fighting in WWII may have been necessary for defense, the US having been attacked and threatened by Japan at Pearl Harbor, all USian wars since have been discretionary offensive wars designed to create advantages and benefits for the USian military-industrial-intelligence-financial complex and presumably for the USian people, and all Earthian humans, for that matter. The wars have been sold as global do-gooderism, doing things such as spreading democracy; stopping the spread of communism; controlling global oil, scarce minerals, and other natural resources; and maintaining the reserve currency status of the “American†dollar to facilitate global trade.
Up until 1980 or so it appeared these discretionary wars paid off economically for most USians. Real incomes in the US generally increased from year to year after 1945 for all classes, lower, middle, and upper, up until about 1980. Since then however real incomes stagnated or declined for most of the USian lower and middle classes while incomes and wealth of the elite rich, the upper one percent, dramatically increased, creating gut-wrenching inequality. If discretionary offensive USian wars paid off after 1980 it was primarily for the elite rich.
These discretionary wars have entailed the US playing psychological Games internationally such as IF IT WEREN’T FOR YOU, regime change wars, and NOW I’VE GOT YOU, YOU SOB, punitive wars for heinous actions against the US economy and the American dollar. Here of late the US government has developed a new form of warfare known as “sanctionsâ€â€”punishments inflicted on other countries and their people, actions such as freezing foreign bank accounts, and preventing certain countries, such as Iran and Venezuela, from selling their oil in certain markets, creating economic hardships and suffering for their people.
Joe Biden has come across socially in his speeches as president as a compassionate and considerate good guy, speaking courteously in humble tones, espousing desires to work for the good of all USians, not just those who voted for him. This is refreshing compared to Trump who went out of his way to come across socially in his speeches as an arrogant, bellicose, threatening, wise-ass, cocky crime boss, not caring about anyone or anything but himself and his aggrieved loser-survivor supporters, vowing to make “America†“great†again for them.
Psychologically Biden’s historical voting record during his fifty-years-plus in the US congress has not always been compassionate or considerate. When it came time to vote for bombing Iraq or vote for Clinton’s crime bill that greatly increased the USian prison population, Biden sided with his cronies in Congress and the elite rich, not we the people. Nor has his record been psychologically compassionate or considerate for USian people suffering from exorbitant pharmaceutical bills, predatory student loan debt, and predatory credit card interest and special charges.
It would be nice to think happy days are here again, with Biden as president rather than Trump, but for sure that’s not the case. Yes, it’s good there’s light at the end of the Covid tunnel, aided and abetted by Biden. Hopefully the US will get the Covid disaster under control by the end of this year as more and more people get vaccinated and more and more become immune, but the overall Usian plight has not changed much. Biden socially told the deep state before he got elected there would not be any major changes if he got elected.
It’s one thing to change the social and psychological transactions and personalities of egotistical presidents; it’s another to change the policies of neoliberal Dems and conservative Repugs. Both parties are right of center bought and paid for by big money donors in big banks, the for-profit health care industry, the oil industry, the defense industry, high tech, and large corporations of various stripes. Since the Reagan revolution of 1980 the US has more and more become a plutocratic corporate state.
What is normal? Is normal the economic conditions the US had before Covid hit in March 2020, what Trump called the greatest economy in US history, all caused by him of course. Seems to me however the burst of retail sales growth and job growth (mainly gig jobs with no security) at that time was largely due to Trump’s tax cuts and increased military spending that significantly increased the federal budget deficit and debt, now some twenty-eight trillion dollars in piled-up debt and three trillion dollars per year in deficit red ink, which will significantly increase as the treasury borrows new money to fund the new stimulus and/or rescue package. And what will happen after the stimulus money is paid out? Will the Fed govt have to do it again over and over to avert market bubble collapses and social unrest? And how many times can they do it again before the US govt goes bankrupt? According to one of the Sources listed below in this issue of The Earthian the USian Federal Reserve system will keep creating more funny money out of thin air, by punching digits into their computers and calling the resulting numbers money, to buy US treasury bills and notes to fund the budget deficit, knowing full well sooner or later this is going to ignite serious inflation, which is OK with them since all this funny money creation and helicopter money dissemination in rescue packages will make it easier for the US treasury to service their Federal Reserve debt with cheaper funny money dollars that will buy less and less per dollar in the real economy, aka debasing the dollar. Meanwhile Fed overnight interest rates and US Treasury bond and bill rates will stay low, sometimes get below zero, as far as the eye can see, to stave off as long as possible the macro financial process reaching the end of the line. When will that be? Nobody knows.
Seems to me “normal†would mean USians working in stable fulltime jobs that pay a living wage with good benefits, such as health insurance and retirement plans, with only frictional unemployment temporarily caused by people changing jobs or looking for jobs after graduating from high school or college, about four percent per year. This sort of normal started becoming less normal around 1980 when USian corporations started seriously outsourcing high wage blue collar jobs to low wage countries and using more and more robots and automated processes instead of human labor. Seems to me the only way to get back to pre-1980 happier days in the US is to redefine what work is and pay humans to think with mind grants, not to do physical work that robots and machines can do cheaper and better, while decreasing the USian human population through natural attrition, natural deaths exceeding births, to increase the size of yearly economic pie slices for lower and middle class people taken from a smaller and more rational national economic pie baked each year (aka GNP), requiring less resource consumption and less fossil fuel energy to control global warming and climate change, and prevent nuclear war.
Bringing changes such as these about will require significant changes in the way humans feel, think, and behave around Spaceship Earth so as to create new psychological, social, economic, religious, and political systems and processes, creating a “new†normal that has never existed. MAGA-type magical thinking will not get the job done because the US and all Earthian countries have never produced satisfactory jobs and incomes for everyone. Some countries may have made “progress†here and there through time but none have ever been “greatâ€.
No country can be OK unless all countries are OK—not great but OK.
We’re OK—You’re Not OK life positions used to formulate foreign policy by rogue countries (such as the US under Trump) exacerbate Earthian Not-OKness, causing premature deaths, poverty, suffering, destruction, and population dislocations.
Biden’s new crisis on the USian southwestern border caused by thirteen thousand or so unaccompanied children from Central America and South America being left on the USian doorstep in North America exemplifies the problem. The best foreign policy for curing the “immigration†problem is to help all countries become OK, so no one will be forced by necessity to emigrate. Seems to me undermining the OKness of other countries, however Not-OK they might be, with wars, sanctions, and covert intelligence agency operations, will only make the problem worse.
Before presenting in this issue of The Earthian Sources of new perspectives by various authors on current economic, psychological, social, religious, and political states of affairs around Spaceship Earth, I herein present some transactional analysis ideas, variables, and processes that I think might help all Earthian humans make changes in the ways they feel and think about psychological, social, economic, religious, and political processes that might help bring about salutary feeling, thinking, and doing processes around Spaceship Earth for preventing and eliminating existential threats such as global warming, climate change, and nuclear war.
Ego states are states of being including thoughts, beliefs, behaviors, feelings, gestures, body language, and other signals determining how people come across with others in communication episodes, whether parent-like, adult-like, or child-like, in all kinds of situations. People switch ego states depending on who they are communicating with and what sort of circumstances they are in, whether they are parenting, working, socializing, teaching, having fun, playing Games, or whatever. They transmit messages from three ego states in themselves to three ego states in others in pair vectors, Parent-Parent, Adult-Adult, Child-Child, Parent-Child, Child-Adult, Adult-Parent, or whatever possibility. These transactions are especially meaningful in situations in which there is some sort of authoritarian system involved, such as parents parenting children in homes, teachers teaching students in schools, or bosses bossing subordinates in a business or political organization, which normally entail primarily Parent-Child transactions. In general however the more Adult-Adult transactions there are the better things go in families, schools, businesses, and political organizations.
Script messages are transmitted socially and psychologically as I have shown and explained with diagrams in my books. Unfortunately I have not shown one of these diagrams in this article, having not invested time and energy to get jpeg pictures of them made and get them posted to my computer desktop to download into this WordPress program. Ah, the joys of desktop publishing. Yeah, right, I probably am a little lazy. If you want to see what a transactional analysis script diagram looks like right now scroll to the top of this page and click on ELR Editor’s Daily Shares. You can see a picture of a TA script diagram in the assemblage of pictures on the top left of the page that will pop up, having been accepted by my Facebook program in a non-jpeg format.
A TA life script diagram shows the three stacked Parent, Adult, and Child ego state circles representing parent, adult, and child ego states for each parent and child. The solid lines in the diagram denote overt spoken social messages and dotted lines denote covert psychological unspoken ulterior messages. Social messages are verbalized overt auditory messages; psychological messages are covert non-spoken ulterior messages transmitted by body language, emotional states, and after the fact positive or negative stroking as people react to situations and feel and do things.
Scripts in families are created automatically when parents transmit various messages to their children from various ego states socially and psychologically, in and out of awareness. Scripts are life plans are generally decided before the age of eight by offspring based on script messages transmitted to them by their parents and others. Since parents by and large transmit the same script messages that were transmitted to them before they were eight years old script messages in families can remain intact for many generations. According to transactional analysts script decisions made before the age of eight have lasting effects determining three general life outcomes: winner, loser, and non-winner. These decisions can be redecided and updated later in life but it’s not easy for most people.
Psychological Child-Child ego state script injunctions are what cause the most trouble for people in their lives. These script injunctions forbid appropriate behavior in the here and now. Script injunctions are caused by emotional and behavioral requirements created by families through time as they adapted to and coped with problems and environmental forces that may have been appropriate in past environments, but which are inappropriate and ineffective in different here and now environments.
Opposing script messages transmitted by parents can put a child in a Not-OK bind in childhood and throughout adolescence, assuming a divorce has not already occurred, causing considerable trouble within a family, since the child cannot please both parents in the presence of both parents, which can put parents in worse Not-OK positions if the child makes a decision about which parent is right, increasing Not-OKness in the family system as a whole.
What many people need is psychological permission to violate and ignore their psychological outdated obsolete family Child ego state script message Injunctions, not only to increase their own OKness but the OKness of all living members of the family system, and the OKness of Earthian humans in general.
Two common family script Injunctions in most cultures are Don’t Think about the true nature and causes of states of affairs and Don’t Feel certain feelings, such as mad, glad, sad, and scared, when certain things happen in certain environments.
Joe Biden at least socially comes across projecting an I’m OK—You’re OK life position. Donald Trump on the other hand came across socially and psychologically projecting an I’m OK, my buddy is OK, nothing else is OK, and we are going to make the world pay life position.
Here is what Martin Groder, MD, one of my transactional analysis mentors at Chapel Hill, NC in the late 1970s, the best mentor I ever had, thought about life positions in what I called Martin Groder’s People Map, in a passage I wrote and published in 2011 in my book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds, pp. 148-150:
“The Human Spectrumâ€
“Humans generally give little thought to what kind of human they are and where they fit in the spectrum of various types of humans. Innumerable philosophers, psychiatrists, social scientists, preachers, priests, writers in various fields, and other types have described and categorized humans in various ways. Following is a schema developed by Martin Groder, MD, a psychiatrist, organizational development consultant, and entrepreneur, who also had an undergraduate degree in physics (Groder, 1977). Groder developed this schema while working with maximum security inmates of the federal prison system at Marion, Illinois in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. He was involved in a process of changing hard-core criminals into law-abiding citizens. Such a process would challenge the abilities of the most skillful and powerful of change agents.
“According to Groder, humans vary on two fundamental spatial dimensions. One dimension is Okness, which he estimates on the horizontal axis of Figure 1 (sorry, I could not get the Figure 1 image to copy and paste here, so you’ll just have to imagine it); the other dimension is the energy level of the individual estimated on the vertical axis of the space.
“People vary in terms of how OK they see, feel about, and experience, (1) themselves, (2) the other individual, (3) their group, (4) other groups, and (5) the world. In Groder’s terms, they are OK or not-OK with respect to I, You, We, They, and It (the world). Groder estimates how OK they are on each of these five existential dimensions on a scale of -1 to +1, -1 being as not-OK as possible and +1 being as OK as possible. Thus people with extremely high self-esteem would be at the +1 level regarding themselves; someone with extremely low self-esteem would be at the -1 level regarding themselves. People could exist at any level in between, at -.5, 0, +.25, etc. The same would be true of the positions of specific individuals with respect to buddies on a one-to-one basis, groups with which one belongs, other groups with which your group cooperates or competes, and the world in general. Summing the 5 existential OKness positions for an individual (I, You, We, They, and It), the highest possible OKness rating would be +5 and the lowest possible would be -5. A +5 person would have the highest possible feelings of Okness regarding his OKness, the OKness of his buddy, the OKness of his group, the OKness of other groups, and the OKness of the world. Such an individual would have very positive feelings and thoughts for self and others. On the other end of the spectrum, a -5 person would have the lowest possible feelings and thoughts for self and others. Very negative people tend to end up in prison. Very positive people tend to end up cultural heroes. Probably the most profitable attitude for an entrepreneur in a capitalistic economic system would be I’m OK, my employees are OK, my company is OK, the world is OK, but my competitors aren’t worth a damn, since this attitude would motivate his or her sales employees to steal business from competitors to increase the profit of the company.
“Entrepreneurs have higher energy levels than middle managers and normal people. It takes less energy to be a normal person than anything else. Entrepreneurs in Groder’s schema have approximately the same energy level on the vertical axis of Figure 1 as Monsters, the -3 OKness level convict leaders of other convicts. Monsters have the attitude “I’m OK, my buddy is OK, but everything else is not OK, and I am going to make the world pay.†According to Groder, it’s more difficult to change the energy level of a human than the OKness position. In rehabilitation work, Groder attempted to arc people across the gap of Figure 1, and make +3 OKness level entrepreneurs out of -3 monsters, +2 OKness middle managers out of -2 OKness creeps, slobs, lunch buckets, etc. Sometimes people arc across the gap the other way. Honest entrepreneurs can turn criminal. Entrepreneurs are winner-survivors; Monsters are loser-survivors.â€
The trick to it all is setting appropriate goals and objectives, planning to do what you really want to do, can do, and should do given your natural abilities, scripting, and education, and the requirements and options of your environment that will produce satisfaction for you. How much money you get your hands on in the process beyond a certain level necessary to satisfy physical needs for food, clothing, shelter, and good health is irrelevant, if you aren’t addicted to playing psychological Games as compensation for poor scripting, in my opinion.
Without doubt Trump has a high energy level, but his OKness life position may be -3 or lower. Whether he’s a winner-survivor or a loser-survivor remains to be seen. Seems to me he has made his plight worse doing what he has done since losing the 2020 USian presidential race fair and square, such as his scripted telephone performance threatening and demeaning the Georgia Secretary of State and the Georgia Governor, not to mention all the honest hard working public servants who did their jobs well conducting the Georgia election. How seventy million or so USian voters could have voted in the first place for someone with Donald Trump’s kinds of personality and behavioral dysfunctions amazes me. This implies there might be seventy million loser-survivors in the US.
Trump had a hard life psychologically and emotionally undergoing his family scripting in his early years, despite what the billions of dollars he got his hands on could buy, including the USian presidency, resulting from leveraging about four hundred million dollars of family money he inherited.
No kind of economic or political system will work for everyone if bad guys get control of them at the top, which is why Georgians voting for Warnock and Ossoff for the US Senate in Georgia was so important, making it possible for Dems to pass with a party line vote in the US Congress the Covid Relief Act of 2021. One of the worst bad guys still at the top of the USian government right now is Mitchell McConnell, the Repug Not-OK now-minority leader in the USian senate, thankfully no longer the majority leader in control of the US Senate. If Warnock and Ossoft had not gotten elected….
In my opinion it’s not that Dems are paragons of virtue, intelligence, fairness, and compassion for all USians and Earthians but it seems to me right now they really are the lesser evil in USian politics. In my opinion they should have elected Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren as president and vice president nominees in the 2020 primary races. Had they it seems to me Earthian humans would now be living in happier days than they are; but no one could prove that beyond a reasonable doubt. Trump might have beaten Bernie in the general election based solely on personality factors. Kurt Vonnegut once made an an astute comment about how awful it was for him to wake up one morning and realize his senior class in high school was now running the country.
I became a certified transactional analyst in education and organizations, a CTA, after passing written, oral, and experiential comprehensive exams administered by the International Transactional Analysis Association in 1978, after undergoing three years of once-a-month training, all day Saturday and half of Sunday, at the Southeast Institute at Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
I have covered ego states and scripts in my books Business VoyagesandBorn to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning, listing common Parent ego state script messages and Child ego state injunctions. All parents do not transmit the same script messages creating considerable variety among family scripts and outcomes. Certain life scripts conveniently fit certain roles, jobs, professions, careers, and what have you more than others, providing fresh recruits already scripted for job openings, slots, roles, and positions in an economy, which is fine so long as the economy does not change very much. Unfortunately in recent years in the United States the offshoring of high wage blue collar jobs to foreign low wage countries and the use of more and more automation has rendered many family scripts obsolete.
Unfortunately, a bitter pill to swallow found embedded in my books Business Voyages and Born to Learn is that everything that happens is either predetermined or accidental, as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein postulated in his book of propositions, Prototractatus; and therefore no one is to blame or praise. Believing and acting otherwise will simply perpetuate the same sorry I’m OK—You’re Not OK life position that has bedeviled humankind since time immemorial contributing to if not causing repeats of historical abominations such as genocides, wars, economic depressions, famines, mental illnesses, and social collapses.
See my article “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc,†https://blog.effectivelearning.net/the-evolution-of-spaceship-earth-inc/ for some management science ideas on how human Earthians might eventually co-construct an economic system that is viable and satisfying for everyone aboard Spaceship Earth, making it possible for all Earthian humans to develop an I’m OK—You’re OK life position.
This entails Earthians peacefully reducing through natural attrition the human population aboard Spaceship Earth, never doing work that machines can do better, and delegating the day-to-day management of systems for scheduling, producing, and distributing the necessities of life to artificial intelligence programs and supercomputers.
This can be done using linear programming based on the general algorithmic matrix algebra form
Flying aboard an airliner about to land at night moving at four hundred miles an hour at thirty thousand feet with cloudy and rainy weather below, which would you rather have landing the plane, the plane’s radar and computer system or the pilot and co-pilot, seeing nothing out their windows but clouds and lightning?
I am indebted to Buckminster Fuller for teaching me in his book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth the metaphor in the above paragraph and planting seeds for other ideas in my essay “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc.,†such as computers being the best hope for mankind and humans not doing work that machines can do better, being paid to think instead with what Fuller called mind grants. To my knowledge Fuller was the inventor of the appellations Earthian and Spaceship Earth.
In case you might be wondering what the flat circular object under my left hand is in the picture above, it’s a Classroom De-Gamer™ I invented. It has a spinner attached and there are concentric circles of numbers around its circumference to accommodate different numbers of students in classes. Each student gets a number and whoever’s number gets selected when the spinner is spun gets to be the leader of the moment leading a discussion of assigned reading, mostly factual cases in my courses. As you can see in my academic vita by clicking on the ELR Editor’s Academic Vita tab at the top of this page, I have published some professional journal articles and book chapters explaining how Learning De-Gamers de-Game psychological Games in learning situations. They will work in any situation in which there is teaching and learning going on, parents and children in homes, teachers and students in schools, bosses and employees in businesses, leaders and members in groups and organizations. Basically Learning De-Gamers cathect all Ego States in all participants and drastically reduce Rescuing, Persecuting, and Victimizing among participants, focusing Adult attention on solving relevant problems and issues not winning psychological Games. I used a Learning De-Gamer in all my classes for thirty-five years producing management learning with university students, and I used one on an as-needed basis over a five-year period consulting with a large manufacturing corporation discussing current problems with participants from all functions and levels of the plant in small mixed groups of ten or so participants, in a plant with several hundred employees, getting individuals out of their functional silos to discuss with others interrelated plant problems. I wrote about this experience in my ebook Recommendations for Waking Up From the American Nightmare, at https://www.amazon.com/Recommendations-American-Nightmare-Business-Voyages-ebook/dp/B009TOJVPI .
Learning De-Gamers facilitate a democratic way of teaching and learning involving sortition wherein everyone involved is OK with an equal shot at being the leader of the moment, a process ancient Greeks used to create democratic government during one of the most OK periods of Earthian human history, it seems to me. I think sortition and Learning De-Gamers should be used around Spaceship Earth today in as many teaching and learning situations as possible, including governmental legislative groups, especially in the USian House and Senate.
TO RESPOND:
As usual this month’s THE EARTHIAN links and cites as SOURCES recent articles written and published by clear deep-thinking hard-hitting independent writers on various Earthian states of affairs.
Some Game playing goes on in the articles, i.e., a writer is psychologically persecuting, rescuing, or victimizing someone, but it seems to me the writers are generally trying to paint accurate pictures of what they think is really going on.
Unfortunately it seems to me one can build a case politicians spend most of their time playing psychological Games, mostly wasting their time and energy pastiming (bullshitting) and engaging in rituals (shuffling paper, filling out unnecessary forms, attending useless meetings with lawyers and others, and the like), running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Almost everything done in so-called foreign policy is a move in a psychological Game it seems to me.
It’s not easy, impossible some say, to separate relevant from irrelevant focal points in order to comprehend global cases, systems, and processes, while being inundated with fake news and true facts of states of affairs generated daily around Spaceship Earth, made public on the Internet, and elsewhere, to see what’s really going on, using primarily inductive and analogical reasoning, based on probability, not deductive logic. Almost never can anyone prove with deductive logic that a general proposition about psychological, social, economic, or political states affairs is absolutely true. About the best humans can hope for is to develop consensual answers that are generally acceptable and true based on probability.
It’s better to be honestly wrong than dishonestly wrong. Telling someone something you know is fake as if it were true is worse than telling someone something that’s fake because of genuine ignorance. A good case in point these days is most USians calling FICA insurance premium payments “payroll†taxes. It’s hard to know if sayers calling FICA payments payroll taxes really do not know any better or if they really do know better but are overtly lying about it go along with the crowd to get political brownie points for conforming to a group lie.
It seems to me most lying is lying by omission, people not telling people things they know are true that others need to know. Whether lying by omission is more or less harmful than lying by commission, telling people things you know are false and fake, is debatable, as is proving whether it’s getting easier or harder for most people to know what’s fake and what’s not. Political parties, Earthian governments, and Mainstream media lie by omission with alacrity, information about the Julian Assange case being a case in point.
Feel free to respond with comments and criticisms about any of the SOURCES listed below using the RESPONSES post on this blog masthead at the top of this page; but please refrain from making ad hominem attacks. Criticize and correct any of the facts, data, evidence, reasoning, and conclusions in any of the articles; but please refrain from slandering and defaming the characteristics and reputations of the authors illogically using slanderous or defamatory comments trying to prove their arguments and conclusions in their articles are wrong, and yours are right.
I do not sell subscriptions or advertising or solicit donations for THE EARTHIAN or the Effective Learning Report but I would like to sell more books. If you feel you’ve gained value from THE EARTHIAN and would like to reciprocate go to our Effective Learning Publications page and purchase one or more copies of my books at https://effectivelearning.net/effective-learning-publications/ .
FOR A FREE SUBSCRIPTION TO THE EFFECTIVE LEARNING REPORT AND THE EARTHIAN: Email rjstapleton@bulloch.net and enter the word Subscription on the subject line.
Feel free to forward, share, post, print, or otherwise circulate this edition of The Earthian any way you see fit.
Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA, certified transactional analyst, educator, octogenarian emeritus professor of management, writer, editor and publisher.
Might be spot on; but one reason why this would not happen is that Earthian humans would make structural changes in their social, religious, economic, and political systems successfully dealing with the causes of today’s confluence of dire problems. What the probability of this happening is is anybody’s guess. Also gold, however valuable it might be in terms of whatever the Spaceship Earth reserve currency becomes if the Earthian ecosystem collapses, due to global warming and climate change or nuclear war, won’t do you much good if there is nothing to buy with it.
Almost no real stories about immigration to what is now the US have ever been told in any detail in USian schools to more than a smattering of students. The fact is most people in the US are descended from immigrants who came to the USian part of the American continents to escape poverty in the countries they came from caused by individual and collective irresponsibility and malfeasance in those countries, primarily over-fecundity and over-population, but also political and religious corruption, superstition, persecution, and strife.
Probably another sexually frustrated young male gone berserk. The fact this shooter targeted three Asian businesses and killed six Asian women probably proves his motives were caused by sexual and racism problems.
Pretty much what we have been experiencing as time goes by. No USian citizen is smart enough to understand this drug bill crap in detail without spending untold hours trying to figure it out, listening and responding to robots and so-called menus on the telephone, trying to talk with a human about the problem at responsible insurance companies. How much politicians have been bought off by pharmaceutical companies is also hard to fathom. All we seniors know for sure is that our out of pocket pharmacy bills (copays etc.) for glaucoma, blood pressure, and other maladies keep going up, taking ever larger shares of our total disposable income, even if we have health insurance. It appears the pharmaceutical companies have no mercy for those held over a barrel, who have to go blind, get crippled, die early, or pay up, whatever they say.
“The idea that China or Russia pose a threat to you is so self-evidently ridiculous, so transparently absurd, that the only way to make you believe it would be is to propagandize you, writes Caitlin Johnstone.”
More authoritarianism may be inevitable. If so let’s hope it will be a benevolent authoritarianism, which seems possible if humans delegate control of economic and political affairs and operations to computers and artificial intelligence at the top. Given human historical experience I do not have any hope for individual humans making wise and fair economic and political decisions at the top of society. It seems historically all top dog decision makers became corrupt one way or the other given the opportunities and freedom they had at the top of their societies in their lofty positions to gratify their personal human egotistical needs and wants, irrespective of the needs and wants of others. Computers and AI do not have egotistical needs, wants, and human weaknesses.
Denmark is a democratic socialist/capitalist country that works better than the US for all its people. In order for the US to pay its McDonald’s, Walmart, and Amazon workers a living wage those at the top of the USian corporate state would have to take a smaller piece of the total USian economic pie every year. As shown in this picture such workers make $22 per hour in Denmark and have benefits and paid vacations. What gives?
Here’s a way you can learn at low cost how you can improve your performance to increase your satisfactions communicating with others using transactional analysis no matter how bad the economy or the environment might get.
Hedges is the first economic, psychological, social, and political writer I have read other than me to advocate sortition in groups, embodied by my Classroom De-Gamerâ„¢, shown over and over in my social media picture fifteen years, a spinner to be spun, to democratically select a leader of the moment, to democratically discuss three existential questions: what is the problem? what are the alternatives? what do you recommend?
“These flash mobs pose no threat to the elites unless they build disciplined organization structures, which takes years, and articulate a vision of what can come next. (This is why I support Extinction Rebellion, which has a large grassroots network, especially in Europe, carries out effective sustained acts of civil disobedience and has a clearly stated goal of overthrowing the ruling elites and building a new governing system through people’s committees and sortition.)”—Chris Hedges
Here’s an old style windmill with Texas flag colors painted on the windvane. We had a wooden windmill like this on our farm in 1944. We used to sell sucker rods for such windmills in our lumber yard, Stapleton Lumber Company, at Wolfforth, Texas. Wind was a significant power source for drinking water for cattle and people in Northwest Texas in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.
“They should have insisted on calling witnesses when they had the chance no matter the risks or how long it took. Nothing was more important than doing everything Dems could to convict Trump in the eyes of all Earthian humans, to send a permanent powerful message proving that democratic consensual truth can rule when threatened and confronted by the lies, machinations, violence, and crime of gangs.
“In this case two hundred or so of the gang members will be punished with fines and jail time for their crimes, but the gang leader got away with his crimes scot-free, thanks to 43 Repugnant Senators voting to acquit, of 100 Dem and Repub senators voting. Seven non-repugnant Republicans voted to convict.”
Hell of a note. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Destroy Earthian human life if you go to nuclear war or destroy the USian economy if you declare peace, lay down your arms, and cooperate.
Excellent video embedded, a must watch and listen to summary of the situation in Syria. Tulsi Gabbard won the early 2020 Dem primary debates according to Drudge Report polls as I documented in the Effective Learning Report. Now she is no longer in the USian congress.
This exemplifies what’s wrong with the US government. Rules are passed to favor political parties and persons not to cause efficiency and effectiveness of operations. This penchant for rule-making has turned the process of USian government into a process of Game-playing, rewarding connivers and manipulators, Adapted Child and Critical Parent people, who enjoy adapting to and using petty rules and playing psychological Games, such as NIGYSOB, Now I’ve Got You, You SOB, fostering constant competition and conflict, requiring I’m OK — You’re Not OK life positions to function, almost obliterating Adult ego state objectivity performing their duties, causing an incredible waste of time, energy, and money to get anything done resulting in real improvement for we the people of the US or citizens of Spaceship Earth. As shown in the embedded photo in this article what congress people need to do is use a Classroom De-Gamer™ I invented to randomly select members of committees and leaders of the moment to start Adult discussions of relevant issues, a Congressional De-Gamer to cut down on psychological Game playing that is almost destroying the functioning of congress. All you have to do is spin the spinner. The process is known as sortition. Ancient Greeks used it to create real democracy for free citizens.
Amen. It’s even worse conspicuous consumption than what went on during the Gilded Age. We’re living in an age of capitalism run amok enriching the rich at increasing rates, largely caused by computers and artificial intelligence. We need to find a way to make sure computers and artificial intelligence work for all humans not just those owning the copyrights and patents for computers and artificial intelligence programs.
Crimea has always been basically Russian as I understand it. Why antagonize the Russian govt over this? To justify keeping US and NATO troops and bases in the region? What right does Biden have to decree that USians will never accept something?
Corruption of the highest order. Trump was the highest paid non-professional golfer in history, paying himself to play golf with federal money on his own golf courses, over one hundred million dollars over four years. Nice work if you can get it. He did not “make” $1.6 billion while he was president. that was gross revenue generated by all his vanity enterprises, hotels, golf courses, etc., some of it not generated by himself counted as expenses to be paid with his govt expense acct. No individual can really “make” money. only the federal reserve and banks can do that, by punching digits into their computers and calling the resulting numbers they loan out money, whether loaned to the fed govt, corporations, or individuals.
“A large portion of the former president’s Trump Organization revenue came from properties that he would often visit during his presidency, according to the report. Mar-a-Lago, the Trump hotel in D.C. and his golf courses in New Jersey, Florida and D.C. were responsible for over $620 million in revenue for Trump while he was in office, and he visited those properties a combined 399 times, says CREW. In all, Trump visited his properties 547 times over his presidency, CREW found in another report.”
Do you think he did not do any sort of work, make decisions, etc., managing those properties on those visits? If so think again. Being president in the White House was a part-time job for him, counting the time he spent entertaining his “rallies” and making tweets, and visiting his properties and playing golf.
Will Biden become a bigger and better war-mongerer with NATO than Trump, Obama, Bush II, Clinton, or Bush I did with NATO? Is NATO and the US the biggest threat to Earthian peace? Ostensibly doing what they do to control oil supplies and other Earthian resources for their chosen people?
“At the heart of each of these approaches is a commitment to building community safety and well-being by strengthening capacity for solidarity and standing up to/dismantling white supremacist violence in its many social, cultural, political and economic guises. The transformative power of abolition doesn’t pass the buck to someone else to “take care of things.†It asks us to create the world in which we want to live without relying on white supremacist, patriarchal, heterosexist and ableist structures of violence, exploitation and greed to triage the worthiness of anyone.”
Agree. What is needed is more face-to-face dialectical discussion among people from all walks of life about existential questions, especially in the halls of congress: what is the problem? what are the alternatives? what do you recommend?
Convicting Trump would have led to his disqualification from ever again holding a USian political office, and this vampire-like MAGA fascist Nazi authoritarian fantasy of his would have figuratively had a wooden stake driven through its sadistic heart. But, alas, his fantasy can now rise again with him as its supreme gang leader, thanks to 43 Not-OK Repug gang members voting to Rescue him in his impeachment trial.
What are grade school teachers supposed to tell their students about this in history lessons?
Don’t get me wrong. I am not a Marxist, but I do have a degree in economics and I studied Marx’s writings in a history of economic thought course. While I disagree with Marxist thinking less now than I did then for sure I do not advocate any sort of communist revolution. Unfortunately Marx or no Marx there is no doubt that capitalism has not worked for most humans in recent decades, especially in the US where lower and middle income humans have gotten poorer and the rich have gotten richer at an increasing rate, which is a major cause of the social and political unrest and violence USians are experiencing now. Here is what I have been advocating for dealing with Earthian economic, social, and political problems and plights for some time now, in my essays “FreeFairProgressParty” at https://blog.effectivelearning.net/freefairprogressparty/ and “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc.” at https://blog.effectivelearning.net/the-evolution-of…/
Rejected by dim Dems in the 2020 presidential primaries, Bernie is now still hard at work as a senator getting thing’s done for working people. What a pity he’s not now president.
Rout Logger’s Group: To Save Earthian Civilization is a work in progress. While settings, plots, theories, objects, and narratives in this novel may be loosely analogous to the same that have happened in various realities, the names, actions, and attributions of characters cast herein are fictional. All parts of this novel will be published in the Effective Learning Report at various intervals on the Internet, subject to revision at any time, hopefully culminating in a final print edition offered for sale to the public.
Here’s a way you can learn at low cost how you can improve your performance and increase your satisfaction dealing with others in humane relationships.
Transactional analysis is a process of self-discipline, sometimes called verbate, the verbal art of self-defense, a set of concepts and tools you can use to help defend yourself, and others, from stress or loss in interpersonal states of affairs.
Humans transact with one another to get their psychological, social, and economic needs met using ego states. The first thing to learn in a TA tutoring session is what ego states are so you can recognize them in transactional episodes. Then learn how to use ego states and different kinds of transactions to increase your chances of participating in transactional episodes that build confidence and self-esteem that lead to success and satisfaction.
This process entails learning what psychological Games are and how to recognize them, and learning about different ways of structuring time.
For TA tutoring contact Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA, an educational and organizational specialist in transactional analysis certified by the International Transactional Analysis Association.
The transactional analysis tutoring fee is fractional: One-half hour, $25; fifteen minutes $12.50; etc. Present questions in your first tutoring session after reading Born to Learn to get specific tutoring about anything in the book.Most tutorees can gain a working knowledge of TA in one hour of tutoring.
Satisfaction guaranteed: If you don’t think TA will work for you after your first tutoring session you owe nothing for the tutoring.
The Impeachment Managers, especially Jamie Raskin, made excellent presentations to the full Senate, clearly and logically building and analyzing their case; but a few cowardly dim Dems made a poor call in the final minutes of the Game behind closed doors, which cost Dems the Game, assuming they really wanted to win, once again selling progressive Dems down the river.
They should have insisted on calling witnesses when they had the chance no matter the risks or how long it took. Nothing was more important than doing everything Dems could to convict Trump in the eyes of all Earthian humans, to send a permanent powerful message proving that democratic consensual truth can rule when threatened and confronted by the lies, machinations, violence, and crime of gangs.
In this case two hundred or so of the gang members will be punished with fines and jail time for their crimes, but the gang leader got away with his crimes scot-free, thanks to 43 Repugnant Senators voting to acquit, of 100 Dem and Repub senators voting. Seven non-repugnant Republicans voted to convict.
Most of the 43 Repugs voting to acquit did so because they thought it would help them get reelected, and/or they were afraid of violence or sanctions against them emanating from their own voters back home, or from Trump himself. They were cowards afraid of being considered a traitor to the Repug gang and cause. So they made themselves traitors to truthful law-abiding humans everywhere by voting to acquit. Repug senators now resemble gang leaders and members more than they do truthful law-abiding citizens.
In this case democratic consensual truth was overridden by yet one more arbitrary Senate rule, that required a sixty percent majority vote to convict a president in an impeachment trial. Why not require a seventy percent majority? Or just a simple majority? It’s as if US senators through time have tried to minimize real democracy in the senate by adopting arbitrary petty unfair rules.
This is not rule by constitutional law; it’s rule by whim and conniving capricious Game-playing, designed to protect the vested interests of political parties, senators, representatives, and presidents who want to keep their jobs. I was taught in history lessons back in grade school that “our wonderful American democracy” was supposed to be governed by elected citizen representatives who would go to Washington for a few years to use their common sense to vote their consciences on various issues and then go back home to live happily ever after managing their farms and businesses. I never dreamed back then that most of them would want to hang out in Washington for a living the rest of their lives.
This exemplifies what’s wrong with the US government. Rules are passed to favor political parties and persons not to cause efficiency and effectiveness of operations. This penchant for rule-making has turned the process of USian government into a process of Game-playing, rewarding connivers and manipulators, Adapted Child and Critical Parent people, who enjoy adapting to and using petty rules and playing psychological Games, such as NIGYSOB, Now I’ve Got You, You SOB, fostering constant competition and conflict, requiring I’m OK — You’re Not OK life positions to function, almost obliterating Adult ego state objectivity performing their duties, causing an incredible waste of time, energy, and money to get anything done resulting in real improvement for we the people of the US or citizens of Spaceship Earth.
As this televised invasion and Impeachment Trial made clear and obvious, tremendous energy is required to get anything done in Washington because the rules of the Game have been rigged in all sorts of ways to protect the vested interests of various individuals, groups, and organizations, almost destroying real democracy in governmental operations. Consequently what is needed in the US Congress is something that will eliminate most of their arbitrary petty rules and master-servant processes that limit real democracy. Rather than waste time trying to rig committees and elections to give various members unequal power, such as the obscene unfair power possessed by the villainous and treacherous Mitchel McConnell as the Senate “majority” leader, the now-“minority†leader, what they need to do is use a Classroom De-Gamerâ„¢ I invented such as the one demonstrated above. Give each member of Congress a number, and when openings on necessary committees arise or discussions of bills need to be conducted spin the spinner and select new committee members or a member to start a discussion in a group, wherein all members have an equal chance to say what they think about problems, alternatives, and recommendations, using their common sense, after the randomly-selected De-Gamer-selected leader of the day decides to stop talking. That would create real democracy and eliminate most of the psychological Game-playing that wastes untold time, money, and energy day in and day out managing states of affairs of the US Government, which are now in considerable disarray considering all branches around Spaceship Earth.
Based on what I saw and heard on TV in shots of halls, offices, and other rooms in the Capitol Building, and in commentary, watching the insurrection and the impeachment trial start, escalate, and play out, it seems to me today’s senators and representatives plodding about in and occupying the halls, offices, restaurants, pubs, gyms, beauty shops, and other rooms of the Capitol Building ought to enjoy their habitation and its amenities and perks, catered to by hundreds of excellent well-trained servants. The architecture, paintings and other art objects, overall decor, and intricate details of the building are exquisite and awe-inspiring. Several people on TV during the invasion and impeachment trial remarked about how easy it is to get lost in the Capitol Building, containing hallways heading in various directions at various angles, secret rooms and what have you, in a linked labyrinth. It’s no wonder gang leaders needed to take reconnaissance tours of the place allegedly led by senators or representatives the day before the invasion in order to be able to find specific senators and representatives they wanted to capture, once they broke into the building. One capitol policeman was clever enough to trick invaders into following him down a wrong hallway instead of knocking down a door where the invaders were, behind which several congresspeople were hiding. It’s likely the anger of the loser-survivor gang invaders of January 6, 2021 was to some extent caused by envy they felt for winner-survivor congresspeople.
Mark Twain in his time said the US Congress was the largest criminal class in the world. Many of the January 6 gang invaders thought much the same about today’s Congress members, having been primed to hate them by their supreme gang leader, former president Trump. On the bright side, senators and representatives might now have less concern than they did about getting reelected, since they now know violent gangs can break into the Capitol Building in broad daylight. They might now think running a boring farm or business back home might not be so bad after all.
Mainstream TV media generally lied by omission about this white supremacy issue during the invasion during the early stages. I told my wife I have yet to see a single non-white face in the crowd, but they’re not saying anything about it. It’s also interesting that some of the violent white gang members had no compunction about chanting and saying they wanted to do serious harm to white congresspeople, especially Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence, by violent means, including gunfire and hanging. In some ways they resembled a very large lynch mob.
I watched the whole thing, both the insurrection and the trial, on MSNBC, occasionally switching to Fox So-Called News to see what kind of picture they were painting of the invasion and trial for their audience. At times the events were riveting and horrifying; at times the presentations were inspiring and exhilarating, watching the good guys; at times they were disgusting, watching and listening to the bad guys, Trump’s dissembling lightweight lawyers; but the whole psychological Game was sickening and depressing in the end, like watching your team lose an extended days-long Superbowl game by deliberately fumbling the ball on the one yard line as time ran out.
MSNBC did a good job technically showing the Game in real time, the greatest show aboard Spaceship Earth at the time, a massive panoramic extravaganza started, promoted, partially orchestrated, and starred in by one of the biggest con artists of all time, reality-show star Donald T. Trump, surpassing by far the circuses of P.T. Barnum & Bailey. Maybe Trump really is a “stable genius”, a strange and evil genius, a pantomime clown with the vocabulary of a sixth-grader.
Trump also possesses magical Houdini-like skills extricating himself from seemingly hopeless predicaments, and so far he’s been lucky. McConnell and the other 42 Repug senators voting to acquit and Rescue Trump, despite the facts of the case that were clearly and professionally presented and explained by the very competent House Impeachment Managers, proving beyond a reasonable doubt Trump incited an insurrection against the US government, won the Game for Trump at the end with their 43 acquittal votes, thereby insulting human common sense and decency in a display of greedy, thuggish, disingenuous, despicable, cowardly human behavior, which, thanks to an arbitrary rule requiring a 60 percent Senate majority to convict a US president in an impeachment trial, can now result in disastrous consequences for all USian citizens, possibly anarchy and civil war, leading to military states of affairs in the US resembling states of affairs happening in the Middle East and North Africa in the last seventeen years, with war lords and gangs roaming about the country conquering and controlling whatever they can as long as they can.
If so, hopefully the USian military will be more successful fighting a “war on terror” inside the US than it has been fighting a War on Terror outside the US.
Since January 6 internal agitations between political gangs and between political gang leaders and political gang members in the US now resemble more and more the internal agitations of war-torn Game-playing countries in the Middle East and North Africa, aided and abetted in some cases by the Game-playing USian government and its military forces, ostensibly to spread and preserve “democracy” around Spaceship Earth, to control oil supplies for chosen people in NATO countries and elsewhere, and to preserve faith in the “American” dollar as the Earthian reserve currency in international trade.
Regardless of what common sense might tell you, a 57 percent majority of the US Senate voting to convict Trump was not good enough to really convict him. Trump was three votes away from conviction, a very narrow Houdini-like escape from his much-deserved condemnation.
Convicting Trump would have led to his disqualification from ever again holding a USian political office, and his personal vampire-like MAGA fascist gang in the US, containing probably at least thirty million true-believer loser-survivor followers, would have figuratively had a wooden stake driven through its hard heart. Instead, tragically, because 43 Not-OK Repug gang members and leaders in the US senate Rescued Trump with their acquittal votes to win the psychological Game, Trump and his gang members can now continue to threaten, harass, and recruit Victims inside the US, as they try once again to install an authoritarian fascist regime in the US, with Trump as president in 2024, depending on the verdicts of civil and criminal trials Trump faces in the meantime. May the 43 Repug senators voting to acquit Trump, thereby Rescuing him in this monstrous psychological Game, live in infamy for their flagrant discounting of facts, common sense, consensual truth, and human dignity.
What are grade school teachers supposed to tell their students about this psychological Game in Usian history lessons?
_______________________________
Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA, certified transactional analyst, educator, octogenarian emeritus professor of management, writer, editor and publisher at Effective Learning Company.
If you wish to make a comment about this article please scroll to the RESPONSES option at the top of this page included on the masthead of this blog and make your comment there.
