Month: August 2023

EARTHIAN EMPOWERMENT SYSTEMS

 

By Richard John Stapleton

There may be hundreds of dead planets in our Universe that were once inhabited by human-like creatures that lived, learned, and evolved on their planets in learning processes resembling the learning processes of Earthian humans, who through eons on their planets learned how to develop lethal weapons like Earthian nuclear bombs and complex industrial processes requiring burning fossil fuel who became extinct because of what they were caused to learn and develop through natural evolutionary cause-effect chains.

A man sitting in front of a laptop computer.

The same sort of thing could happen to Earthian humans if they do not quickly in cosmic time learn how to satisfy their biological, psychological, social, economic, and political needs in significantly improved social, psychological, economic, political, and military systems that do not require or entail the burning of carbon-based fuel or the decision-making of ordinary and sometimes demented Earthian humans in fascist organizations.

Up to now, overthrowing existing economic, social, and political orders with new economic, social, and political orders in violent revolutions or wars has not been a good idea. Existing dysfunctional orders were torn down or disintegrated and were replaced by new dysfunctional orders.

Earthian humans are now enthralled, manipulated, and in various degrees controlled by their leaders in some two hundred countries aboard Spaceship Earth. Leaders became leaders because of being caused to be leaders by concatenations of infinite cause-effect chains resulting after our universe started evolving some fourteen billion years ago in the infinity of time and space.

Leaders are products of the same sorts of differentiated configurations of cause-effect chains as differentiated followers and members in differentiated countries. All Earthian humans are doing what they were caused to do in their daily lives starting at birth.

Earth as a planet was formed about 4.5 billion years ago and has undergone innumerable transformations in the meantime. Humanoid creatures have been aboard Spaceship Earth for some two million years, and they too have undergone numerous evolutionary changes, as have other Earthian species.

Unfortunately, Earthian humans have now reached a precarious and dangerous stage in their evolution as biological creatures. After slowly evolving more and more accurate, complex, and powerful understandings, technologies, and ways of life for two million years on Earth, during the last two hundred years Earthian humans evolved new technological devices at exponential rates that enabled them to increase the overly-fecund Earthian human population of Earth so much that they now threaten not only to destroy their own existence as a species aboard Spaceship Earth but also the existence of most other species alive on Earth.

Keeping eight billion or so Earthian humans alive on Earth has required so many goods and services to be produced to satisfy human biological and psychological needs and wants and so much carbon-based fuel to be burned to produce the goods that the climate of Spaceship Earth has been altered by carbon dioxide gas released into the Earthian atmosphere in large-enough quantities to cause extra heat to be trapped on Earth causing the mean Earthian temperature to increase at a yearly rate that threatens to destroy Earthian human life as it now exists, within centuries, if not decades.

Unfortunately, Earthian humans cannot determine exactly how long this catastrophic scenario will take to unfold with an Internet search, since Internet information sources show average Earthian temperatures in both Celsius and Fahrenheit and use different base years, different assumptions about causes of rates of change, and changing rates of change in calculating average Earthian temperature.

However, one can build a case based on available Internet data that it will take 35 years or so for the mean Earthian temperature to rise enough to cause the Earthian polar ice caps to melt enough to cause enough sea level rise to displace billions of Earthian humans living on sea coasts and to cause enough decrease in food production to cause billions of Earthian humans to starve–if Earthian humans do not significantly change in the meantime their life scripts, technological processes, and political and economic systems.

At the same time, one can build a case that global warming and climate change (GWCC) has already caused serious reductions in the quality of Earthian life. The recent forest fires covering much of Canada causing New York City and much of the Northeast to be engulfed in a thick orange haze causing serious breathing problems is a recent case in point, as is the recent burning of Hawaii and increased flooding and wildfires around Spaceship Earth in recent years.

Earthian humans have developed technological knowledge that has enabled them to produce over 10,000 nuclear weapons that could destroy human life aboard Spaceship Earth if dropped and detonated on defined enemies around Spaceship Earth, as they have the capability to do.

Dangerous escalations in the Ukraine-Russia War, fomented and aggravated by the United States and NATO, could cause the outbreak of World War III that could cause nuclear weapons to be used.

Earthian countries are dependent on fossil fuel energy in the short run and are pitted in a zero-sum struggle for control of oil and gas supplies around Earth, with the two largest military nations on Earth possessing over ninety percent of the nuclear weapons now threatening one another in a war they started in a minor country, a pawn in their Earthian game of chess, a tissue-tearing psychological GAME called KING OF THE MOUNTAIN by Earthian humans, caused by egotistical leaders and top members of the two countries who are primarily concerned about maintaining and enhancing their personal power, wealth, prestige, lifestyles, and legacies.

Top leaders of Russia fighting in Ukraine with non-nuclear weapons so far have publicly declared they will fire and detonate nuclear weapons if necessary to prevent their being defeated and humiliated in the war fomented in the minor pawn country of Ukraine by the US and NATO and started by Russia. Hopefully this threat to use nuclear weapons is just a bluff in another reincarnation of the Earthian psychological GAME called CHICKEN.

Unfortunately, the USian military-industrial-intelligence-political-financial-media complex needs wars and Russia as an enemy to generate cash flow for their operations and to keep the USian economy functioning as usual. This cash flow is provided by real USian tax dollars and funny money dollars created by the USian Federal Reserve System by punching digits into its computers and calling the resulting numbers money, in a process that through time has raised the USian federal budget deficit and debt to ominous levels.

As dangerous as this psychological high-stakes GAME-playing is, most Earthian humans find it stimulating, interesting, patriotic, heroic, and so forth in their nightly news, a release from the normal grind of their boring and banal daily routines and rituals, and their pastimes, jobs, activities, and intimacies, however much their attention might be diverted by the tiresome and ludicrous antics of former USian president Donald Trump, his buffoonish reality show political rallies, his crimes, and, now, his trials.

The probability of a militarization and nuclear weapons proliferation (MNWP) catastrophe at any time has significantly increased in recent years because of psychological GAME-playing.

All Earthian humans should have an equal opportunity to contribute to Earthian life in meaningful ways and be entitled to the necessities of life, not just watch and obey buffoonish fascist leaders playing Games. Not to recognize different levels of achievement for all Earthians will be disastrous for Spaceship Earth in the long run. The problem is that rewards in society are often not a function of achievement. The wealthy and powerful are often rewarded merely because of being wealthy and powerful.

What is needed is better leading and learning around Spaceship Earth, at all levels, in families, churches, schools, businesses, governments, and political parties. A leader can cause more learning to occur among members in learning sessions by arranging chairs in a I’m OK—You’re OK circle layout than by lecturing in a I’m OK—You’re Not OK militaristic row and column layout, to give one example of an easy way to improve the quality of learning leadership.

Learners passively sitting in their places in militaristic row and column layouts in living rooms, classrooms, sanctuaries, conference rooms, training rooms, and legislative chambers trying to stay awake and remember what the leader said works in some cases if your purpose is to cause members to memorize platitudes, dogmas, doctrines, and procedures. But it is not best for generating discussion and comprehension of complex problems, issues, and systems.

To maximize learning a random selection device can be used to select a member to start the discussion in a circle learning layout as the leader of the moment. The designated leader should remain silent for the entire discussion if it is obvious the relevant points of the discussion material have been discussed and most of the members comprehended it, if members have no questions about something they could not understand on their own.

A tough lesson for Earthian humans to accept is that everything that happens in human states of affairs is either predetermined or accidental and therefore individuals are not to blame or praise for what happens in human states of affairs. This is easier to swallow after accepting that believing and acting otherwise will support and perpetuate the I’m OK—You’re Not OK Parent-Child life position that has bedeviled, sabotaged, and undermined Earthian humans since time immemorial, causing wars, and making losers out of most of those who actually fought in the wars.

The OKness positions of Earthian humans can be changed for the better psychologically and socially in democratic Adult-Adult Game-free I’m OK—You’re OK face-to-face transactions that entail honestly and rigorously reasoning and arguing about facts, cases, and states of affairs using dialectical, dialogical, analogical, deductive, and inductive methods, or sheer imagination, or the scientific method, or any other kind of reasoning or thought process.

The most astounding discovery of users of democratic Game-free Adult-Adult I’m OK—You’re OK learning processes, in which all participants have a right and responsibility to honestly tell the group what they feel and think about relevant facts, cases, and states of affairs, regardless of the quantity and quality of their prior learning, if randomly selected as the leader of the moment by a random-selection device, is that the comprehension and OKness of the whole group is increased in the discussion that ensues, if leaders of the moment and counter-arguers are fully honest about what they say as they transact in the back and forth of the discussion.

The only real sin in such a process is lying, both overt and covert lying, deliberately telling falsehoods, and not speaking your mind about what you know, understand, think, and feel that would be useful for others to know. It’s OK to be honestly wrong; but it’s not OK to be dishonestly wrong. It’s likely that no one is smart enough to increase OKness by dishonestly lying.

On the other hand, thinking the OKness levels and positions of Earthian humans can easily be changed in significant ways through ordinary conversation is a pipe dream, mainly because most Earthian humans do not believe in honestly arguing in Game-free Adult-Adult democratic I’m OK–You’re OK transactions about the facts of cases or states of affairs. The current so-called democratic political system used in the US is a case in point. Yes, USians can vote for the candidate of their choice, a so-called citizen who in almost all cases will not use free will deciding how to vote if elected, who will vote as told by party bosses in Parent-Child transactions who determine the position of a political party. Almost all significant political decisions in the US are predetermined by cause-effect chains emanating from the so-called deep state, rich oligarchs funding politicians, causing party leaders to decide whatever they decide about issues.

What is considered natural, unnatural; normal, abnormal; right, wrong; ethical, unethical; righteous, sinful; worthy, unworthy; or sane or insane by a particular Earthian human is caused by information lodged in her/his brain caused to be lodged there by an accidental or inevitable unique concatenation of infinite cause-effect chains causing her/him to exist and slowly inch through the Earthian worm hole of existence inexorably tunneled out for her or him by her/his specific unbroken unique infinitely progressing cause-effect chains, as s/he is knocked around like a ball in a pin-ball machine, as events inevitably and/or accidentally happen in the so-called real world, and in subconscious and conscious minds, however bad, ok, or good the luck causing his/her cause-effect chains to happen might have been.

Based on this line of reasoning Earthian human free will has little or nothing to do with what Earthian humans are caused to feel, think, decide, or do at a particular moment.

It follows that changing the life scripts of Earthian humans for the better requires changing the course of unique tunnels of existence in which individual humans accidentally and inevitably live, a tall order indeed. Most biological constructivists would consider this notion a pipe dream, while considering the whole process a meaningless drift in the infinity of time and space. A life script is a program based on messages passed from parents to offspring transmitted from Parent and Child ego states in parents to Parent and Child ego states in offspring allowing and forbidding certain kinds of feelings, thoughts, and behaviors determining what an individual Earthian human will do in a particular worm hole of reality, such as a legislature; and the script itself is caused by a unique concatenation of causes as outlined above.

According to biological constructivists, Earthian humans are closed systems that will not or cannot change unless forced to change by force majeure events. They will conserve as long as possible their original sources of biological, psychological, social, religious, cultural, economic, and political satisfactions. As psychiatrists and clinical psychologists know, Earthian humans cannot change their early psychological programming in the short run even if they want to.

Randomly-selecting leaders of the moment in democratic Adult-Adult Game-free I’m OK—You’re OK discussion processes is a way of creating pseudo-free will, a way of causing concatenations of Earthian human cause-effect chains that would not have happened in naturally-evolving states of nature.

What Spaceship Earth needs now are bottom-up Game-free Adult-Adult I’m OK—You’re OK democratic discussion processes that can significantly empower all Earthian humans.

A man with white hair and plaid shirt standing in front of brick wall.

Would you like to increase Earthian human Okness? If so, read the three Earthian Empowerment Systems books shown below and set up an EE discussion group where you live.

EARTHIAN EMPOWERMENT SYSTEMS BOOKS, ARTICLES, AND INSIGHTS

BOOKS

Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds, Effective Learning Publications, 2008, 2010, 2012, 754 pages

This is a comprehensive entrepreneurship and small business management book, must reading for any serious student, professor, or practitioner of entrepreneurship and small business management. Provides tools for ascertaining whether you are cut out for small business, applying transactional analysis concepts and techniques to learn whether you have the right kind of energy level and life script for success in the field. Includes relevant marketing, finance, operations management, and information systems concepts in the field, including a user-friendly computer format for writing a business plan you can use to do what-if simulations to see what will happen in your whole operating and financial system if you make changes in parts of the system. Includes statistical data, cases, and articles to enable you to know more about historical probabilities of success in the field. Provides the data and analysis of a USian-wide survey of successful small business owners using factor analysis that showed how successful entrepreneurs and small business owners will their wealth to their offspring. A major hypothesis of the study was that they would will on an equal share basis. Some did, but not all. The major finding was that they generally treated their offspring in their wills as they had been treated as offspring by their parents in their wills, indicating how the Golden Rule generally works in the real world: Earthian humans generally do unto others as others have done unto them.

Sellers of the Book

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=business+voyages+++++richard+johsn+stapleton.

Seller of the book with the lowest price for readers

https://www.amazon.com/Business-Voyages-Schemata-Discovering-Co-Constructing-ebook/dp/B002GP76TA?asin=B002GP76TA&revisionId=f5d70c98&format=1&depth=1.

Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning, Effective Learning Publications, 2016, 253 pages

Originally titled De-Gaming Teaching and Learning: How to Motivate Learners and Invite OKness, Effective Learning Publications, 1979, 132 pages. Used in over three hundred school systems. Re-titled and updated in 2015 to emphasize its application in various kinds of learning situations. Includes concise definitions and explanations of transactional analysis variables and processes affecting Earthian human feeling, thinking, and behaving enabling readers to better understand what is really going on as they interact and transact with others. The unique contribution of this book is its comprehension of how the physical structuring of the learning environment and the ego states of the leader affect the quantity and quality of learning among members in learning systems, such as families, churches, schools, businesses, and governments. Attention is given to the salutary benefits of random selection of discussants in Game-free Adult-Adult I’m OK—You’re OK democratic learning systems, including data and evidence such systems work. Must reading for learning leaders and members in groups and organizations.

Sellers of the book

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=born+to+learn+++richard+john+stapleton.

Seller of the book with the lowest price for readers

https://www.amazon.com/Born-Learn-Transactional-Analysis-Learning-ebook/dp/B01CJAJOC8/ref=sr_1_1?qid=1692986560&refinements=p_27%3ARichard+Stapleton&s=digital-text&sr=1-1&asin=B01CJAJOC8&revisionId=cd5b63b9&format=2&depth=1.

As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases, Effective Learning Publications, 2021, 350 pages

This book is an analogy, a novel, induced from the author’s experiences as a transactional analyst using the case method in a business school, describing a new kind of seminar invented by the protagonist/seminar leader, Rout Logger, conducted once a month for six months on weekends in randomly selected cities in the US, comprising forty members randomly selected from all walks of demographic life, who were paid five thousand dollars per month to participate. Discussant Leaders of the Moment were randomly selected by a spinning copper rooster, called the Truther Rooster, in the center of a circle learning layout who had to answer three questions if selected. What is the problem? What are the alternatives? What do you recommend? Analyses and dialectical discussions of the members and problems Rout Logger encountered among members are included. None of the members had ever experienced a Game-free Adult-Adult I’m OK–You’re OK democratic learning process such as this one, and there were serious problems requiring the adapting of group imagoes and flexing of personalities. The seminar was financed by rich donors. The seminar was terminated early because of the Covid virus. Rout and the donors were convinced the seminar increased the OKness of members and planned to roll out a computerized version of the seminar using zoom technology around Spaceship Earth to foster Earthian human sustainability.  

Sellers of the book

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=as+the+rooster+crows+earthian+okness+incrreases+++++richard+john+stapleton.

Seller of the book with the lowest price for readers

https://www.amazon.com/Rooster-Crows-Earthian-OKness-Increases-ebook/dp/B09NCF1MDS?ref_=ast_author_dp.

EARTHIAN EMPOWERMENT ARTICLES AND INSIGHTS, published in the Effective Learning Report Since September 2016, https://blog.effectivelearning.net/a-list-of-all-postings-in-the-effective-learning-report-since-september-2016/.

As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein propositioned in his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “The case is all there is.“

If so, everything else said about Earthian human states of affairs is a rendition of what was or might be.

 

 

 

 

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Author pwsbuilderPosted on June 20, 2023Categories Uncategorized

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MY YEAR TEACHING ON USAF NATO BASES

 

By Richard John Stapleton

A man with white hair and plaid shirt standing in front of brick wall.

I think Eve Ottenberg is basically correct in her article, "The World Would be Better Off Without NATO."

I taught systems management in a master's degree program with Troy State University in the US on United States Air Force/NATO bases in Europe during academic year 1982-83 on leave from Georgia Southern University in the US starting in the fall quarter of 1982 at Incirlik Air Base at Adana, Turkey, moving on in the winter quarter to Hellinikon Air Base at Athens, Greece, then to Soesterberg Air Base in Soesterberg, Holland in the spring quarter, and then to Aviano Air Base in Aviano, Italy in the summer quarter of 1983, and then flying back to the States in August of 1983, to spend the rest of my career teaching in my own case method/transactional analysis program in the business school at Georgia Southern University, retiring as the senior professor of the university in 2005.

Since then, I have published four books and over one hundred articles on the Internet, such as this one, dealing with social, economic, political, and military states of affairs, more or less pro bono, considering this work a civic duty in a supposedly democratic country such as the United States of America.

It was quite a ride in 1982-83, the most enlightening year of my life, riding in all sorts of USAF planes, PCSing (PCS stands for permanent change of duty station) from one duty station to another.

I even rode on a general's plane once PCSing from Greece to Soesterberg, Holland after the transport plane I was riding on got laid up for repairs at Torrejon, Spain.

A colonel I was talking with at the base at Torrejon who had the same problem with a transport plane asked me how I would like to ride from Torrejon to Ramstein, Germany in a general's plane. He said they had a few seats left in the back of the bus and he thought he could get us on the flight. We had a great visit and ride on the way to Ramstein drinking beer and eating snacks in the back of the bus while the commanding general for Europe hosted dignitaries in the front of the plane with steak and scotch whiskey.

After about two hours or so in the air an attractive young stewardess walked to the back of the bus and told us we might want to attach our seat belts since we were about to touch down.

A minute or so later we felt a slight bump and we were on the ground. I had no idea you could have an airline flight that smooth, what they called a gradual descent landing. We had been descending for a hundred or more miles and nobody knew it.

This USAF general's plane looked like the USian president's plane, solid white with the words United States of America painted on its sides.

I had a GS-13 civil service rating as a civilian full professor working with the Air Force that gave me officer's club privileges equivalent to those of a full colonel on USian bases. While I had a security clearance, I was not privy to any military secrets, although I was privy to many interesting private conversations with high-ranking officers in officer's clubs.

I had one full colonel in one of my classes, who was also a fighter pilot, a top gun in the system, who was exceptionally interesting and effective in class analyzing and discussing systems management cases with students in the class that ranged from him as a full bird down to enlisted personnel who did maintenance work on the planes. Students in my classes had undergraduate degrees from colleges and universities in the United States, including the Air Force Academy, and undergraduate degrees from colleges and universities in Greece and The Netherlands. A student in Holland about my age, who had an undergraduate degree in marketing and a law degree, drove me around Holland in his Mercedes explaining how the crountry functioned with some its land below sea level using windmills, dams, and locks. It was amazing to see boats floating down canals that were thirty or so feet above us as we rode alongside on a highway.

I had some nationals (mainly local business people working on the TSU-E master's degree in systems management) in my classes in Greece and Holland.

A colonel told me in August 1982 in Ramstein, Germany after I first touched down in Europe (the first time I ever set foot in Europe), having departed the US from Charleston, SC the previous day, over lunch in a German restaurant, giving me my first taste of authentic German food, that the real purpose for US military personnel in Europe in NATO at the time was to serve as hostages if the Russians decided to roll their tanks into Europe to take over new territory, thereby guaranteeing the US would defend Europe in an all-out war.

No one I talked with during my year in Europe with the USAF on NATO bases, 1982-83–USAF officer, USAF enlisted person, local politician, or local national–was seriously worried about a war breaking out anytime soon.

I took Army ROTC for one year at Hardin-Simmons University, a Baptist college with about 1,700 students, at Abilene, Texas in 1958-59 as a freshman on a basketball scholarship. ROTC was required for two years for all males at Hardin-Simmons. I basically detested it, thinking shining brass, saluting, presenting arms, marching on the drill field, etc. was the dumbest thing I ever did. I got out of the second year of required ROTC after finding out I could never be commissioned as an officer in the military because of a spinal fusion back surgery I had when I was a sophomore in high school. All I had to do was show a medical doctor in Abilene the ten-inch scar running up my back and have him sign a form affirming he had seen it. I was called up for the USian draft in 1962 and was required to take a standard Army physical at Amarillo, Texas. As I stood in line naked with other potential draftees during the physical a medical doctor took one look at the scar running up my back and told me, "I'm sorry but you are permanently disqualified from military service."

I thus never had to worry about getting drafted and sent to Vietnam to get my ass shot off, as a lot of not-yet-drafted young males in the States used to say back in those days. I would have volunteered to help defend the US in a war from a serious enemy threatening to invade the US. The USian-Brit War of 1812 was probably the only one.

At a Southern Management Association meeting for management professors in Atlanta, Georgia in 1981 a recruiter from Troy State University asked me at a cocktail party, "How would you like to teach for a year in Europe?" It turned out he was recruiting for the TSU-E systems management master's degree program on USAF NATO bases. Despite my generally negative attitude regarding military organizations I took them up on the deal.

I maintained relations with administrators in the TSU-Europe program for several years after I got back to the States. I was impressed with the USAF–its operations, its efficiency, its personnel, and its culture–and the TSU-E educational program, and I thought about going back over there again for another tour.

Despite all military organizations being authoritarian, with a rigid hierarchy and a strict chain of command, the USAF was a benevolent organization with the best system of guaranteed human rights I had experienced. It had almost eradicated racial and sexual discrimination, and so long as members adhered to clearly spelled-out rules within limits they were free to be themselves regardless of whether they were caused by fate to be straight or LGBTQ, freer than most USians are in the States.

I talked with numerous people on USAF NATO bases who had gotten out of the Air Force after a few years who, after experiencing life in the USian market economy, reenlisted because life to them was more satisfying in the Air Force than it was in ordinary USian life, proving a socialistic benevolent authoritarian organization paid for by USian taxes, investors buying Federal Government debt instruments with real money, and funny money created from thin air by the USian Federal Reserve System can be more satisfying than capitalistic market-driven authoritarian organizations are to some people. For sure job security in the Air Force was greater than it was in market-driven organizations.

In 1989 I casually told the head of the TSU-E management program in a snail mail letter that it was too bad the Russians had declared peace against us by tearing down the Berlin Wall after Ronald Reagan told them to.

I naively assumed there would no longer be a need for USian NATO bases in Europe or the TSU-E program since the Russians were talking about wanting to join NATO themselves at the time.

Another teaching tour in Europe did not happen. The upshot is that I lost contact with TSU-E administrators and have no idea what ultimately happened to the management program I taught in in Europe in 1982-83.

But I do know NATO was not disbanded. Instead it was expanded, moving closer to the Russian border, after the Berlin Wall came down, and no USian bases were closed, to my knowledge, and the Russian-Ukrainian USian proxy war is now a costly expense for USian taxpayers.

It's a shame states of affairs have turned out as they have. I thought we might have peace on Earth after 1989 since we USians had defeated communism in Russia in the Cold War.

Unfortunately, it seems the USian Deep State decided the US could not afford peace.

It's irrelevant that the Russians were fascist communists then and fascist capitalists now. The USian Deep State still needs Russia as an enemy to generate cash flow in a new kind of cold war, even if you can't accuse the Russians now of spreading evil communism.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA would spin the spinner of his Classroom 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 the day, a case taken from a planned or operating business prepared by case writers at Georgia Southern, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Alabama.

This process insured that everyone would be relatively GAME-free transacting in class discussions. They all agreed to a learning contract at the outset of the course that they would read assigned cases and would be graded on the quantity and quality of ideas sold in the class market. Anyone caught obviously unprepared by the spinning De-GAMER would lose a whole letter grade from the course grade. No one could feel or think that s/he was being persecuted or rescued if selected to start the class discussion of the day by the Classroom De-GAMER™. The psychological GAME roles of Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim were largely banished from the course learning process.

Be it noted that Stapleton sat in the same circle in the same kind of chair as students, and the De-GAMING rules also applied to him. If the Classroom De-GAMER™ landed on him he had to lay out the case just like any other student and discuss what was the problem, what were the alternatives, and what he recommended.

A man sitting at a table in front of a computer.

Grades were based eighty percent on class participation in dialectical discussions about what to do about problems and opportunities found in cases; 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 case researched and written by professors about a business assigned as the final exam. Cases used in his courses contained processes, problems, opportunities, and data occurring in all functional areas of business such as entrepreneurship, finance, marketing, operations management, control, management information systems, and business policy and strategy.

Stapleton 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 has published seven books and over one hundred articles in various media containing cases, research data, and essays on teaching and learning, management systems, and business policies and practices.

Stapleton learned and trained using transactional analysis 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 was a Harvard Case Method teacher who never went to Harvard, having learned how the case method works teaching with Bernard Bienvenu, DBA and Rexford Hauser, DBA (Harvard Business School doctorates) at the University of Louisiana–Lafayette in 1969-70.

He has a BS in economics (1962), an MBA in organizational behavior (1966), and a PhD in management science (1969) from Texas Tech University, and an organizational and educational certification in transactional analysis (CTA) from the International Transactional Analysis Association (1978).

He taught his own case method track at the undergraduate level in the management department in the business school at Georgia Southern University offering four or five different elective case method courses each academic year (1970-2005), in which he led, coordinated, and graded about 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 his courses each year. He used a democratic circle or amphitheater classroom layout in all his classes. 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.  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 of his students made A's and about five percent made D's. Most made C's, which is about right, since C = Average. There were few 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-GAMER™ 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 Georgia Southern honoring his academic freedom by allowing him control of his teaching methods, classroom layouts, grading procedures, and course books, cases, and materials, some of which he researched, wrote, and published. He was promoted to full professor at age thirty-six.

He solicited anonymous longitudinal research data using questionnaires in 1992 showing 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 authoritarian lecture method and the militaristic row and column classroom layout, who graded students based on memorizing or calculating  "right answers" for tests, indicating learners learning in Adult–Adult I'm OK–You're OK GAME-free democratic learning processes graded subjectively became more successful in the real world of business than learners lectured to and graded using so-called objective multiple-choice tests.

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. The data are shown, analyzed, and discussed in full 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). The data were also used in several refereed articles.

The ancient Greeks used a similar random-selection democratic process in the Third Century BCE to select leaders of political discussions, learning, and policy formulation in their halls of government. Such a process is called sortition.

For more information on related 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," in the Journal of Management Education, 25(3), 269-292.

Stapleton 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 that weighted only instructor excellence scores up to 2000; but he was one of the highest-ranked professors in a computerized student evaluation system he designed that generated data also showing and weighting study production, learning production, and expected grades scores for each professor, published in "Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations."

To read the Optimizing Fairness article in full, go to https://studysites.sagepub.com/holt/articles/Stapleton.pdf . 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 (July 10, 2023) been cited as a reference in 88 refereed journal articles concerned about the ethics of student evaluations in several academic disciplines, including eleven new citations since April 2021.

As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein propositioned in his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, "The case is all there is."

If so, everything else said about Earthian human states of affairs is a rendition of what was or might be.

Stapleton's latest book is As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases.

https://www.amazon.com/ROOSTER-CROWS-EARTHIAN-OKness-INCREASES/dp/0933594100?asin=B09NCF1MDS&revisionId=e009b06b&format=2&depth=1

For more on Stapleton's cultural, educational, and professional experiences see "RJS Academic Vita."

Feel free to share this article any way you see fit.

 

THE ORDEAL OF TRUMPISM

 

By Richard John Stapleton

A man with white hair and plaid shirt standing in front of brick wall.

It's a case of lying, lying, and more lying, and 91 criminal charges, with no convictions.

i watched them on live TV watching the insurrection unfold on TV ensconced in a tent on a cold day.

Damnedest thing I ever saw.

Some of them looked like they were high on something. Trump junior in the foreground got interviewed along with a female supporter who was gleefully doing the twist in a heavy coat and heels.

Eyes bulging Trump junior looking into the camera shouted Fight! Fight! Fight!.

Trump senior standing in the background never took his eyes off the TV screen, pointing out happenings on the screen while making muted comments now and then to people standing around him, including his daughter.

Napoleon Bonaparte never had it so good drinking brandy in his tent watching his troops fighting for him in one of his battles.

Come to think of it, if only the USian deep state could "find a way" to exile Trump on an island like Elba somewhere ASAP, and bring this frustrating, picayune, pusillanimous, maddening USian Trump insurrection investigation-indictment-trial-by-jury-media-circus process to a screeching halt, to solve the problem before all hell breaks loose, while preserving the functioning of the USian justice process, that generally functions well enough to enable the US to muddle through, however flawed the USian justice process might be, we would all be a lot better off.

If probably not, there is no telling what kinds of absurdities and abominations USians, and all Earthian humans, for that matter, will be seeing and hearing on TV for a long time, caused by the happening of Trumpism.

There have been innumerable cases throughout Earthian human history in which aspiring or successful fascist dictators have been caused to exist in large organizations such as countries by rare concatenations of infinitely-progressing cause-effect chains; but most likely never in Earthian human history has such a concatenation caused the existence of an aspiring fascist dictator who is an emotionally and intellectually deranged crime boss circus clown, devoid of empathy and intellectual honesty and integrity, in an organization such as the United States of America.

To see what the tent, the TV screen, Trump, and his entourage looked like on January 6, 2021 as they watched his insurrection live on TV click here:

https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=317419247453758&set=a.112791747916510.

We no longer have political debates in the USA. What we have now are political lying contests, disconnected from reality, telling us what we saw and heard January 6, 2021 on live TV with our own eyes and ears as Trump's insurrection happened did not happen. According to lyin' Repug politicians and paid essayists, Trump committed a heroic patriotic act with his insurrection January 6, 2021 no matter what US law says or what millions of TV viewers saw and heard live with their own eyes and ears as the insurrection happened.

It's easy for intelligent Earthian humans to be overtaken by feelings of sadness, madness, and scaredness in today's psychological and social worlds.

It's unlikely that intelligent Earthian humans will be overtaken with feelings of gladness when considering Earthian states of affairs.

It's easy to learn how to put Earthian humans to work increasing human OKness for everyone by reading AS THE ROOSTER CROWS EARTHIAN OKNESS INCREASES.

https://www.amazon.com/Rooster-Crows-Earthian-OKness-Increases-ebook/dp/B0B9XY3HKR/ref=sr_1_3?qid=1691166194&refinements=p_27%3ARichard%20Stapleton&s=digital-text&sr=1-3&fbclid=IwAR09eHVds42GD-h43v5SdMcRj5fp2SZ06PD_on2d_urV3h-rqMkmVTgyNFI.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA would spin the spinner of his Classroom 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 the day, a case taken from a planned or operating business prepared by case writers at Georgia Southern, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Alabama.

This process insured that everyone would be relatively GAME-free transacting in class discussions. They all agreed to a learning contract at the outset of the course that they would read assigned cases and would be graded on the quantity and quality of ideas sold in the class market. Anyone caught obviously unprepared by the spinning De-GAMER would lose a whole letter grade from the course grade. No one could feel or think that s/he was being persecuted or rescued if selected to start the class discussion of the day by the Classroom De-GAMER™. The psychological GAME roles of Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim were largely banished from the course learning process.

Be it noted that Stapleton sat in the same circle in the same kind of chair as students, and the De-GAMING rules also applied to him. If the Classroom De-GAMER™ landed on him he had to lay out the case just like any other student and discuss what was the problem, what were the alternatives, and what he recommended.

A man sitting at a table in front of a computer.

Grades were based eighty percent on class participation in dialectical discussions about what to do about problems and opportunities found in cases; 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 case researched and written by professors about a business assigned as the final exam. Cases used in his courses contained processes, problems, opportunities, and data occurring in all functional areas of business such as entrepreneurship, finance, marketing, operations management, control, management information systems, and business policy and strategy.

Stapleton 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 has published seven books and over one hundred articles in various media containing cases, research data, and essays on teaching and learning, management systems, and business policies and practices.

Stapleton learned and trained using transactional analysis 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 was a Harvard Case Method teacher who never went to Harvard, having learned how the case method works teaching with Bernard Bienvenu, DBA and Rexford Hauser, DBA (Harvard Business School doctorates) at the University of Louisiana– Lafayette in 1969-70.

He has a BS in economics (1962), an MBA in organizational behavior (1966), and a PhD in management science (1969) from Texas Tech University, and an organizational and educational certification in transactional analysis (CTA) from the International Transactional Analysis Association (1978).

He taught his own case method track at the undergraduate level in the management department in the business school at Georgia Southern University offering four or five different elective case method courses each academic year (1970-2005), in which he led, coordinated, and graded about 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 his courses each year. He used a democratic circle or amphitheater classroom layout in all his classes. 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.  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 of his students made A's and about five percent made D's. Most made C's, which is about right, since C = Average. There were few 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-GAMER™ 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 Georgia Southern honoring his academic freedom by allowing him control of his teaching methods, classroom layouts, grading procedures, and course books, cases, and materials, some of which he researched, wrote, and published. He was promoted to full professor at age thirty-six.

He solicited anonymous longitudinal research data using questionnaires in 1992 showing 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 authoritarian lecture method and the militaristic row and column classroom layout, who graded students based on memorizing or calculating  "right answers" for tests, indicating learners learning in Adult–Adult I'm OK–You're OK GAME-free democratic learning processes graded subjectively became more successful in the real world of business than learners lectured to and graded using so-called objective multiple-choice tests.

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. The data are shown, analyzed, and discussed in full 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). The data were also used in several refereed articles.

The ancient Greeks used a similar random-selection democratic process in the Third Century BCE to select leaders of political discussions, learning, and policy formulation in their halls of government. Such a process is called sortition.

For more information on related 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," in the Journal of Management Education, 25(3), 269-292.

Stapleton 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 that weighted only instructor excellence scores up to 2000; but he was one of the highest-ranked professors in a computerized student evaluation system he designed that generated data also showing and weighting study production, learning production, and expected grades scores for each professor, published in "Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations."

To read the Optimizing Fairness article in full, go to https://studysites.sagepub.com/holt/articles/Stapleton.pdf . 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 (July 10, 2023) been cited as a reference in 88 refereed journal articles concerned about the ethics of student evaluations in several academic disciplines, including eleven new citations since April 2021.

As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein propositioned in his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, "The case is all there is."

If so, everything else said about Earthian human states of affairs is a rendition of what was or might be.

Stapleton's latest book is As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases.

For more on Stapleton's cultural, educational, and professional experiences see "RJS Academic Vita," at https://blog.effectivelearning.net/rjs-academic-vita/.

Feel free to share this article any way you see fit.