The Truth will make you free, if you can use it to solve problems
OR SO IT SEEMS TO ME TODAY
By Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA
WE taxpayers paid income taxes again for one more year by April 15. Apparently the federal government had a good take, with the budget deficit being lower than usual for the month, albeit with the expected yearly deficit for 2018 left unchanged at about $1.5 trillion, to be added on to the $21 trillion or so of federal debt cumulated through time, a gradual accumulation for 180 years that was explosively kicked into high gear by the Reagan administration in 1981, that tripled the total federal debt in eight years, a record for debt tripling that will probably stand forever, while writing the script and setting the stage for wastrel warmongering profligate presidents ever since, especially Bush II in 2001.
Wars and rumors of wars, and fears and hopes of wars, depending on how your bread is buttered, is the order of the day, reminiscent of the days in 2003 before Bush II invaded Iraq, starting the slaughter or ruining of over one million people in the Middle East and North Africa up to now; and the US is once again in the elected presidential hands of another mentally disordered immoral rich kid maniac, with enough power of office to start something even more disastrous than Bush II’s so-called war on terror, in reality a war of terror.
Mother’s Day is today. People call their mothers and tell them Happy Mother’s Day, and mail them cards, or hand them cards in person with a kiss on the cheek, and a spoken “I love you”. No doubt about it, mothers are important things to have. My wife and I talked about our deceased mothers today, remembering them in various particulars. Debbye thinks she had a great mother. I think mine was a good enough mother.
A preacher’s daughter, my mother, Ida Belle Coston Stapleton, was a very good cook, taught good morals and decision-making to my brother and me, and provided a stable, safe, clean, and orderly home. As the bookkeeper and manager of family businesses she was well respected by customers and employees. Community leaders regularly consulted her informally in her office about local problems and opportunities. My father said she had a memory like an elephant, and she never forgot anything. She told me she never made less than an A in school. A psychiatrist told me she probably was a very brilliant woman.
What is a great mother? Read “Reflections on Mother’s Day” by M. G. Piety about a great natural mother, cited below in the Effective Learning Digest. It seems to me great mothers are born, not made. The lottery that determines the quality of mothering for children and the socio-economic quality of life for children around Spaceship Earth is grossly unfair, and humans should do something about it.
Writers in at least four of the articles cited in the ELD this month allude to or discuss the importance of religion in economic, political and social affairs. One of them, Courtenay Barnett, a colleague living in the Turks and Caicos Islands, writes as if he were a preacher preaching at what he calls the altar of the almighty Truth. Another one, Michael Hudson, perhaps the greatest living economist, implies we need another reformation of the Christian religion, especially in the West. An economic historian, Hudson says Jesus was a Jewish rabbi whose teachings were taken out of context by western culture to serve economic and political ends. He thinks eastern Orthodox Christian churches did a better job of preserving and propagating Jesus’s most important teachings, such as the need for periodic debt jubilees, or the forgiveness of debts. One can build the case some of the teachings in the western Christian Bible written by the Romans were crafted to make it easier to control poor people and to make it easier for the rich to get richer, rather than to encourage and engender equality, love and acceptance among all people around Earth. According to Hudson, Jesus’s original teachings encouraged equality, meekness, humility, forgiveness, love, and sharing among people around Earth, qualities sorely lacking today in the US and in its vassal states such as the UK, France, Israel, and Saudi Arabia.
I come from a long line of Calvinist preachers and teachers. One of my great grandparents, The Reverend Doctor James Maury, a French Huguenot, taught four US presidents, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, in a boarding school in Virginia, documented in “A Synopsis of my Educational Background,” at https://blog.effectivelearning.net/a-synopsis-of-my-educational-background/.
As usual, following in the EFFECTIVE LEARNING DIGEST are some outstanding articles published in Internet media during the last month or so written by outstanding writers, and two audio-visual videos, shining light on current relevant states of affairs around Spaceship Earth. I stuck in this month the Chain of Ego States diagram I invented and published in 1978 showing how organizational life is affected by parents and ego states.
While it’s often true in the short run that ignorance is bliss it’s probably not true in the long run in most cases, and how much ignorance is bliss depends on who you are and what your circumstances are. Some people, especially some children, are just better off not knowing certain things. On the other hand, purposely keeping people ignorant so as to manipulate and exploit them more and better is Not OK in most cases.
I have spent most of my adult life trying to learn and teach something. To see a chronological record of these efforts click here http://www.effectivelearning.net/rjs-academic-vita.html.
Western mainstream media in order to sell subscriptions and advertising have to discount in various degrees the severity of some economic, political, religious, social, and environmental threats playing a psychological Game of GREENHOUSE and participate in a societal Happiness Racket designed to produce feelings of security, dignity, and pride in readers. In some cases they have to make federal and state politicians, their political parties, their rich donors, their locust lobbyists, and their voters look good, or at least make it seem they are doing a better job of governing than they are to sell advertising. For more on psychological Games and Rackets, read my book Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning at https://www.amazon.com/Born-Learn-Transactional-Analysis-Learning/dp/0692584331.
In any case it’s not easy to make a living owning, managing, and writing for mainstream newspapers, as serious layoffs in the industry recently mentioned in various media attest, and as I learned firsthand owning, writing, editing, and publishing a weekly newspaper for two years in my home town at age twenty-two, the Wolfforth-Frenship Gazette at Wolfforth, Texas.
For more on the fallacy of composition as it applies to organizational life, i.e., reducing, damaging, or destroying whole systems by trying to maximize the interests of sub-systems, read my book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds at https://www.amazon.com/Business-Voyages-Schemata-Discovering-Co-Constructing/dp/1413480810.
I am a Certified Transactional Analyst, a CTA, explained at http://www.itaaworld.org/what-transactional-analysis-training.
Please copy, abridge, reprint, share, forward, or otherwise disseminate this Effective Learning Digest any way you see fit.
Just punch on the web addresses and this month’s selection of articles and videos and my Chain of Ego States diagram will pop up.
Richard John Stapleton, Editor & Publisher, 32 East Main Street, Statesboro, Georgia, USA, www.effectivelearning.net.
May 13, 2014
An unusual poignant Mother’s Day story
SOURCE: “Reflections on Mother’s Day,” by M. G. Piety, COUNTERPUNCH.ORG, https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/05/11/101957/.
May 13
… and all those one tenth of one percent richest people earned all their money by doing honest hard work with their minds and hands, don't you know, and there's no reason for them to give you any of it, especially by paying higher tax rates than poor people ... and now it's time to go seepy-seep, so put your pretty head on your pillow, and don't you worry about a thing.
SOURCE: “The American Dream is Dead,” by Georges Abi-Heila, MEDIUM.COM, https://medium.com/swlh/the-american-dream-is-dead-fe9290dd0516.
May 13
My chain of ego states diagram, first published in 1978 in the Transactional Analysis Journal, a refereed professional journal, shows the three chains of command in any authoritarian organization, family, church, school, business, corporation, religion, military, or government, using a unique configuration of three stacked circles, the Parent chain of command, the Adult chain of Command, and the Child command. Take a look at the diagram on my Facebook page. It’s scary to think that Donald Trump is Number 1 in the US Chain of Ego States diagram. According to the transactional analysis theory of the diagram, Trump’s parents, although deceased, are now the most powerful parents of the US.
SOURCE: Chain of Ego States Diagram, by Richard John Stapleton, Facebook post, https://www.facebook.com/richard.stapleton.397.
May 12
Well said, John Davis
SOURCE: “Modernity’s Long Twilight,” by John Davis, COUNTERPUNCH.ORG, https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/05/11/modernitys-long-twilight/.
May 12
Surely Trump is not this bad, even if Fox News does say so. This article is an excellent work of satire not for the tender minded or squeamish.
SOURCE: “Trump’s Penis: Is It Presidential?”, by Douglas Valentine, https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/05/11/trumps-penis-is-it-presidential/.
May 10
Sad but probably true
SOURCE: “David Stockman Warns: Forget ‘America’, “It’s Deep State First”,” ZEROHEDGE.COM, https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-05-10/david-stockman-warns-forget-america-its-deep-state-first.
May 10
A sermon by Courtenay Barnett on international affairs
SOURCE: “Syria’s Plight With the US,” by Courtenay Barnett, EFFECTIVE LEARNING REPORT, https://blog.effectivelearning.net/syrias-plight-with-the-us/.
May 10
Must reading for anyone wanting to know what is now going on in Syria, Israel, and Iran.
SOURCE: “Making Sense of the No-Deal Iran Decision, “ by Courtenay Barnett, EFFECTIVE LEARNING REPORT, https://blog.effectivelearning.net/making-sense-of-the-no-deal-iran-decision/.
May 9
Go for it. Sanders is the most likely candidate I see on the horizon to defeat Trump in 2020, despite his age. During the 2016 presidential running season there was talk at one time that Jill Stein would offer Bernie the presidential nomination of the Green Party with her as his vice president running mate. That still sounds like a good idea to me. If they could get some disillusioned repubs and demos to join up with a sizeable percent of the fifty percent chronically disillusioned nonvoters (who might be enticed to vote for them in 2020) it seems to me they might have a shot at winning, if they could get on all state ballots and successfully navigate the morass and hazards of the antediluvian US electoral college.
SOURCE: “Bernie Sanders reportedly considering 2020 presidential campaign, summoned top advisers over the weekend,” by Chris Sommerfeldt, DAILYNEWS.COM, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/bernie-sanders-reportedly-2020-presidential-campaign-article-1.3779024.
May 9
Sad but probably true
SOURCE: “Two-Faced Trump: Peace in Korea, World War in the Middle East, by John Feffer, COUNTERPUNCH.ORG, https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/05/08/two-faced-trump-peace-in-korea-world-war-in-the-middle-east/.
MAY 9
A positive event all right, but unfortunately most workers do not have this kind of natural power because of the nature of the organizations they have to work for.
SOURCE: “Teachers’ Class Struggle Defiance Inspires Millions,” by Jeff Mackler, COUINTERPUNCH.ORG, https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/05/08/teachers-class-struggle-defiance-inspires-millions/.
May 9
Say it ain’t so joe
SOURCE: “Extremists R Us,” by Tom Englehardt, COUNTERPUNCH.ORG, https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/05/09/extremists-r-us/.
May 9
Another sad bad mistake
SOURCE: “The U.S. Just Declared War on Iran,” by Jan Oberg, COUNTERPUNCH.ORG. https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/05/09/the-u-s-just-declared-war-on-iran/.
May 8
Unfortunately many wrongs do not make a right
SOURCE: “Against Holocaust Denial,” by Paul Street, COUNTERPUNCH.ORG, https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/05/04/against-holocaust-denial/.
May 4
All because of nine eleven? Given the way it was caused? Say it ain’t so Joe.
SOURCE: “How many millions have been killed in America’s post-9/11 wars?,” by Nicholas J S Davies, INTREPIDREPORT.COM http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/24107.
May 3
Here is another article on the subject of global learning similar to another article cited in the April ELD. The upshot is that these authors think the Internet despite the drivel and fake news it makes available is indeed causing normal people around Spaceship Earth to know more about what is really going on in global economics and politics than previously was the case, and therefore there’s hope this consciousness change might cause a major change in the way human affairs happen and are managed, primarily because it will be harder for politicians and deep state manipulators to mislead enlightened individuals with propaganda and fake news. Let’s hope so.
SOURCE: “The Emerging ‘Global Brain’,” by Michael Krieger, LIBERTYBLITZKRIEG.COM, https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2018/05/02/the-emerging-global-brain/.
May 2
There has been more and more talk lately on the Internet about guaranteed minimal incomes for everyone in various countries around Earth. I can’t believe this could come about anytime soon, considering the overpopulation problem, but it seems to me this is the only rational solution for the long run, if there is a long run. For more detail read my article “Toward the Creation of Spaceship Earth, Incorporated,” easily found with an Internet search. The overpopulation problem can peacefully be solved over several generations through attrition, natural deaths exceeding births, by Earthian women gaining full control of their bodies and making sure they produce no more than one child each, of either sex.
SOURCE: “46% Favor Government Guaranteed Jobs for All – Rasmussen Reports”, RASMUSSENREPORTS.COM, http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/april_2018/46_favor_government_guaranteed_jobs_for_all.
May 1
American labor in action
SOURCE: “Organizing Workers Strikes Against War and Repression,” by Jack Heyman, COUNERPUNCH.ORG, https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/05/01/organizing-workers-strikes-against-war-and-repression/.
May 1
Another great explanation by Michael Hudson, the greatest economist alive
SOURCE: “Bronze Age Redux: On Debt, Clean Slates and What the Ancients Have to Teach U,” by Michael Hudson, COUNTERPUNCH.ORG, https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/05/01/bronze-age-redux-on-debt-clean-slates-and-what-the-ancients-have-to-teach-u/.
May 1
Say it ain’t so Joe
SOURCE: “Almost 2/3 Of Americans Have Given Up On Political Parties Citing Corruption in Government,” by Mac Slavo, SHTFPLAN.COM, http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/almost-2-3-of-americans-have-given-up-on-political-parties-citing-corruption-in-government_04302018.
April 30
This video presentation purports to explain how Albert Einstein was wrong about matter being unable to travel faster than the speed of light. The presenter provides reasoning supposedly proving his assertion that matter can travel faster than the speed of light. If he’s right intelligent beings could theoretically travel to planets in various solar systems hundreds of light years away from their origins. It seems to me most likely this notion is scientifically incorrect (you need more physics knowledge than I have to know), but the video is interesting and well done, especially if you enjoy scientific speculations. The presenter, who has considerable experience in the aerospace industry, divulges information about shocking new US aerospace developments that most people are probably unaware of that are probably real.
SOURCE: “Proof Faster than Light Black Budget Antigravity Technology is Real,” a YouTube Video with more than 1,559,588 views, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9CAftwO1x8.
April 30
This well conceived, reasoned, and written article by Jill Stein, of the Green Party, whom I voted for as President of the US in 2016, is well worth a read by any responsible citizen.
SOURCE: “Breaking My Silence on RussiaGate,” by Jill Stein, COUNTERPUNCH.ORG, https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/04/27/breaking-my-silence-on-russiagate/.
April 30
Want to understand the history of Israel today? Here is a good place to start.
SOURCE: “The Real Victor,” by Uri Avnery, COUNTERPUNCH.ORG, https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/04/30/the-real-victor/.
April 30
This great video on US warmongering emphasizes a dramatic statement about putting Iran "on notice" that is one of the most absurd utterances the current Donald Duck US administration has made. Notice how many bases the US has surrounding Iran in the video. The Iranians would have had to be idiots not to have known for a long time the US military is a serious threat to them. It’s amazing how many brave intelligent talented comedians there are out there in Internet media who really know their stuff about what the US deep state is doing around Spaceship Earth.
SOURCE: “The REAL Reason the U.S. Wants War with Iran,” by Lee Camp, Redacted Tonight, Standing Rock News, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65_GcK0g_VU&feature=share.
April 30
Another cogent sermon by Courtenay Barnett
SOURCE: “Racism, Rationalizations and Resentments,” by Courtenay Barnett, EFFECTIVE LEARNING REPORT, https://blog.effectivelearning.net/racism-rationalisations-and-resentments/.
April 29
Anti-intellectualism in action
SOURCE: “America’s Most Popular Politician Is Nikki Haley…Let That Sink In,” by Tyler Durden, ZEROHEDGE.COM, https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-04-28/americas-most-popular-politician-nikki-haleylet-sink.
April 29
Insanity in action
SOURCE: “Yemen War Great For US Jobs: Watch CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Proclaim Civilian Deaths Are Worth It,” by Tyler Durden, ZEROHEDGE.COM, https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-04-28/yemen-war-great-us-jobs-watch-cnns-wolf-blitzer-proclaim-civilian-deaths-are-worth.
April 27
… and you have to vote for him or her because s/he is the lesser evil
SOURCE: “Secret Recording Reveals Democratic Party Boss Ordering Progressive Candidate to Quit Race,” by Tyler Durden, ZEROHEDGE.COM, https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-04-27/decision-was-made-democratic-party-boss-tells-progressive-candidate-step-aside.