Being stuck inside on a rainy day can be a bit boring for students. With autumn and winter keeping temperatures cooler and weather wetter, educators and parents need to be prepared to keep kids busy when they’re stuck inside. Here are some engaging, educational activities you can prepare to keep students from getting bored:
Work on Everyday Math Applications
Math is an essential life skill for children to learn. But for many children, math isn’t always their favorite subject. When it’s raining outside, try coming up with fun and interesting ways to help children work on math applications in everyday life. Use these math lesson plans to help get the fun started. From architecture to space exploration, there are so many ways for students to use math in interesting, practical ways. Kids will learn about real-world applications for math, which will strengthen their academic ability while setting them up for success in their potential future careers.
Engage in Simple Science Experiments
Science is another vital subject for students to learn. Along with technology, engineering and math, science is an important part of the all-important STEM field. Since so many future jobs will be based in STEM (all of which will have great financial opportunity), getting students interested in these subjects is crucial to preparing them for their adult lives. Science experiments are wonderful visual and hands-on tools to teach children. By engaging them in a simple science experiment, like making a glass of lava, you can open up their minds to the wonders of science.
Create Some Arts and Crafts
For busy students, art can be a great way to release stress and calm any anxieties. This is especially helpful for students who may be fearful of storms and bad weather. Create some lesson plans centered on helping children create some colorful crafts and artwork. They can make their own homemade puffy paint or use materials you’ve already purchased to be prepared for these rainy autumn days. Stock up on paper, brushes, markers and any other basic art materials. Be sure to cover floors so they don’t get messy, and provide aprons or encourage children to wear clothes that they don’t mind getting dirty.
Burn Off Some Excess Energy
Kids can get a bit antsy when the weather keeps them from playing outside. Play is such an important part of children’s development that the UN designated it a basic human right for children. You can get kids active while they’re stuck inside by following along with some exercise videos. Exercise videos geared toward kids are set up like play, and allow children to stay active while having fun. If you’re in need of something a bit more calming, try switching on a fun yoga tutorial to help children unwind.
Put on a Concert
Music is an entertaining and engaging way to pass the time during rainy weather. If you have instruments handy, look up some lessons online to help children practice their musical skills. No instruments? That’s not a problem, since children can use some basic materials to craft easy-to-make instruments of their own. Even without any instruments at all, kids will enjoy singing and dancing along to their favorite tunes. There are so many ways to use music to help kids learn and stay alert on those rainy days.
Act Out a Play
The arts, including theatre, are an important part of any comprehensive academic experience. If you need to keep kids busy while stuck inside, why not help them put on a play? This can even be a multi-day activity, where children can build their play from start to finish using online tutorials and resources. You can have them build the sets using practical math skills, put together costumes, write a script, and learn lines for scenes. There are so many elements to theatre that are educational and fun for children to experience.
Rainy autumn and winter weather doesn’t have to keep students from having fun. There are so many resources online to help you plan your rainy-day lessons and activities, so don’t let bad weather get your children down!
Anybody should have known the Trumpies significantly lowering federal income taxes for elite rich civilians would increase the budget deficit, as would significantly increasing military expenditures for poor soldiers, sailors, and airmen, and their staff, and their fat cat civilian corporate suppliers.
According to this article the federal deficit reached about $800 billion for fiscal 2018. It is expected to rise to about $1 trillion in fiscal year 2019, the worst ever, starting October 1, 2018.
As shown here the federal budget is composed of mandatory spending for such things as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for US citizens and discretionary spending for such things as military employees, hardware, wars, and adventures.
Much lying and confusion goes on regarding the funding of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Most of the time in mainstream media people say money ordinary people pay for Social Security from their paychecks and organizational revenues are “payroll taxes,” which is a misnomer, or a lie, depending on the knowledge and intention of the writer or speaker. Those payments are FICA or Federal Insurance Contribution Act insurance payments.
Social Security payments to recipients are not welfare or operating expenses of the federal government; they are insurance benefits paid to people who paid into the Social Security insurance system, a quid pro quo.
I can build a case Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid should not be listed as part of the federal government budget. This whole operation is a large insurance company run by the federal government for the health and welfare of US citizens, producing monetary benefits related to premiums paid, potentially a very successful insurance company, given federal power to determine by law fair prices for drugs, surgeries, and hospital stays charged policy holders.
During various years after the creation of the Social Security system in 1935 social security payouts to beneficiaries were less than premiums paid into the system from deductions from payrolls and organizational revenues, now about 6.2 percent for employees and about 6.2 percent for organizations, about 12.5 percent of yearly income per insured person overall, up to a certain level of income, now $128,400 per year. This formula generated a surplus of about $3 trillion dollars up to 2018, piled up in a Social Security Trust Fund, which the federal government borrowed from in various years to pay its bills for discretionary activities and operations, including dramatic and unnecessary military adventures, and all the rest.
Unfortunately yearly social security premiums paid in are now less than social security payments paid out to beneficiaries, counting Medicare and Medicaid, and the federal government is now having to borrow money elsewhere yearly to pay back what it borrowed/robbed from its Social Security Trust Fund piggy bank through time, robbing Peter to pay Paul you might say, caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.
Unfortunately this borrowing is not reflected in the yearly stated US budget deficit. The US federal government in fiscal 2019 will have to borrow more than $1 trillion, maybe as much as $1.3 trillion, assuming it can continue to find ordinary people, corporations, central banks, and government agencies willing and able to buy its treasury notes, bills, and bonds. For more background and details go here.
A major problem with this article , as with thousands of others, is that social security payments are not payroll taxes; they are FICA (Federal Insurance Contribution Act) contributions to an insurance plan, as shown here. You pay premiums into the insurance plan and you take your chances. You may get more out in benefits than you pay in, as is true with any insurance policy; but you might not. If you die early you won’t get as much out as you paid in. The fact the social security system piled up a surplus of some three trillion dollars from 1935 to 2018 indicates a lot of people have received less than they paid into the insurance plan.
Who was it that came up with the idea of calling FICA contributions payroll taxes in the first place, and for what purpose, to undermine the whole idea of selling and producing social security for all US citizens?
True enough the 1935 social security plan for all US citizens, now including Medicare and Medicaid, needs some calibration with respect to premium cash inflows and benefits cash outflows to remain viable indefinitely, not costing US taxpayers anything if well managed, as was the case for many years, saving many of them thousands of dollars over a lifetime; but even so the original social security business plan has years to go before it exhausts the cash surplus it generated, a surplus that was borrowed from in various years by profligate federal politicians to pay yearly pork barrel discretionary expenses they authorized to get reelected, aggregating a large loan they and their ilk are now begrudgingly having to pay back to the social security system, a legally obligated loan repayment mind you, not a frivolous discretionary pork barrel line item expense, or military expenses.
And for sure Social Security payments paid out to beneficiaries are not an implied unearned handout that caused the dramatic increase in the US budget deficit after the Trumpies took over, called an “entitlement” by bought and paid for politicians, such as Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan.
Writers and speakers of all ilks, from bought and paid for propaganda mouthpieces to sincere truth-tellers, with evil and non-evil intent, on purpose with malice aforethought or inadvertently, generally demean, belittle, and besmirch the enlightened and highly effective US Social Security insurance plan for all citizens by labeling its premium payments the inaccurate, mean-spirited, pejorative, demeaning, rancor-engendering, confusion-sowing term “payroll taxes.”
It’s time to stop this sadistic scurrilous madness once and for all and get back to calling these premium payments what they used to be called, “FICA contributions,” an appropriate label honoring a magnificent piece of legislative wisdom in US history, the Federal Insurance Contribution Act of 1935.
Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA, an emeritus professor of entrepreneurship, organizational behavior, and business policy, is the Editor & Publisher of the Effective Learning Report, and a founder, owner, and operator of a profit-making small business, Effective Learning Company,
Feel free to forward, share, copy, print, reprint, or otherwise disseminate this article any way you see fit.
Effective Learning Publications, Richard John Stapleton, Editor & Publisher, 32 East Main Street, Statesboro, Georgia, USA, www.effectivelearning.net , October 14, 2018
Or So It Seems to Me Today
By Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA
My weltanschauung has not changed much since the publication of The Earthian 3 last month; but unfortunately it does seem to me the Doomsday Clockhas moved several more nanoseconds closer to Midnight.
Earthians are in a Catch-22 damned if they do and damned if they don’t situation; caught between a rock and a hard spot, or the devil and the deep blue sea; up the creek without a paddle; caught behind the eight ball; enmeshed more than ever in a Gordian Knot of rising obscene income and wealth inequality, financial manipulation, environmental destruction, global warming, military hatred, and social misery; sorely in need of rational and benevolent political leadership; being generally ruled at the highest levels by thugs, bullies, and ruffians who have taken over political playgrounds.
Thanks to unbridled sexual urges humans continue to breed children at a geometric rate, adding more and more humans to an already overpopulated Earth, requiring more and more production of goods for humans to consume, requiring the destruction of more and more natural resources, creating more and more pollution of Earth’s atmosphere, creating more and more global warming, which seems to be accelerating more than experts thought it would, creating more and more competition among people and nations for diminishing resources, creating more and more fear and hatred among people and nations, causing more and more production of war materials and military expenditures for military hardware and troops, leading to more and more military tensions around Earth, increasing the probability a madman will shoot off a big nuclear bomb that lands on a big city, setting off a catastrophe that could lead to human extinction.
If nuclear weapons don’t bring on a catastrophe global warming will, as sea levels rise and Earth gets so hot food cannot be grown in most places, assuming significant reductions in atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane do not happen, as seems likely, as humans continue to irresponsibly produce too many new hungry mouths to feed caused by their unrestrained sexual appetites, even assuming abortions are not made illegal by moral extremists in more and more countries, thereby precluding peacefully reducing the human population aboard Spaceship Earth through attrition, natural deaths exceeding births over time, to eliminate the need to destroy more and more natural resources and burn more and more fossil fuel, and on an on, thereby exacerbating and accelerating dangerous global processes and trends causing the Doomsday Clock to tell the time it does.
In other words, the deck is stacked against us.
I have used the word Earthian since encountering it in the 1970s in Buckminster Fuller’s book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. It is my understanding that Fuller invented the word Earthian, and the appellation Spaceship Earth, implying Earth is something that has to be preserved by humans monitoring regular interdependent physical processes in the infinity of airless time and space—such as, for example, trees and other plants emitting oxygen that humans and other animals breath; with humans, other animals, and various processes emitting carbon dioxide that plants ingest, to make new oxygen in hopefully never ending interdependent closed systems. Such systems have to remain in synchronous interdependent regularities, requiring not cutting down and burning too many trees, and not putting too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere burning fossil fuels, as humans should know by now given what they have heard, seen, and read in various media about global warming, evidenced first-hand by anyone merely walking outside these days in broad daylight, feeling the heat coming down as if emitted from a heat lamp three feet away—and by daily posts on the Internet about heat and wildfires burning anything that will burn on various spots of terra firma around Spaceship Earth.
What is an Earthian? The term includes more than humans: it includes all species of fauna and flora around Earth.
The purpose of The Earthian is to advocate preserving all species around Spaceship Earth, not just human cultures and right wing or left wing political extremists, especially rich oligarchs now constructing themselves underground bunkers to survive what they call “The Event” that they think will wipe out most humans. The purpose of The Earthian is not to cause humans to learn something just for the sake of learning it, or something that might make their personal lives better, but to learn something that might help all species aboard Spaceship Earth survive, by encouraging humans to become better stockholders and managers of what I call Spaceship Earth, Inc.
As usual this month’s The Earthian links and cites recent articles written and published by clear and deep thinking hard hitting independent writers in various Internet publications on ecological, economic, social, political, religious, and military affairs around Spaceship Earth. I generally agree with these writers about the overall lay of the land, but each of them brought up facts, analyses, conclusions, ideas, or perspectives that were new to me when I read them during the last thirty days or so, thereby teaching me something, which is why I included them in this issue of The Earthian. I start off this month citing my article, not the deepest or most cogent of those cited, but presenting a fuller analysis of what caused me to write this month’s “Or So It Seems To Me” editorial comment.
SOURCES:
October 14, 2018
In this article I point out some human processes that make it hard to change the course of human history; but I also recommend some processes for dealing with them, however unlikely it is significant changes will be made any time soon—yet hopefully happening before it’s too late.
Are hurricanes getting worse because of global warming and climate change? Pity the poor folks who lost everything they had. Any of us living in the Caribbean, near the Gulf of Mexico, or near the east coast of the US could be next.
To be or not to be a “people pleaser” will bedevil Michael Moore for some time, but probably not Obama, Biden, and Schumer, certainly not Trump, but the facts here show how difficult it is to discern what is really going on, and who is or is not to blame or praise for what. It seems we the people have had it no matter what.
It’s a shame that Trump does not want to stop arms sales to Saudi Arabia because a Washington Post columnist was allegedly killed by the Saudis in their embassy in Turkey; but he is fine with selling the Saudis arms to be used to kill thousands of innocent women and children in Yemen.
Not quite like trying to balance your family checking account, is it? In a case like this if you try enough things sooner or later something just might work, such as running for president of the US.
As mentioned in an email to my friends here is an update for the first Game-free BIG (Business Innovation Group) Business Planning course I have taught at the GA SO Univ City Campus in Statesboro, Georgia, located at https://cob.georgiasouthern.edu/big/.
We have now had two sessions of ten two-hour sessions planned for the course at 7-9 p.m on Monday evenings in the BIG facility. The first one lasted two and one-half hours and attracted four participants; the second one lasted one and one-half hours and attracted five participants.
Learning happened in both sessions. The sessions started off with an opportunity for participants to talk about whatever business planning thoughts they have been having about any problem—personal, local, national, or international—and get feedback from others in the group. The sessions then evolved into discussions of specific business planning issues participants have been working with.
From time to time I offered suggestions for information in my Business Voyages book (furnished free to participants) to learn general business planning concepts, techniques, and procedures.
All people in a capitalistic society such as we have in the US are on a business voyage whether they realize it or not. Their business planning issues are different at various ages and stages of life, but they all have business planning issues.
We expect to gain more participants as we go along. As I have pointed out this is an innovative course with no tests, no grades, and no teacher evaluations, that is non-sequential, i.e., learning in any session does not depend on learning gained in any other session. The course is basically a case method course in which participants learn about whatever business planning issues they happen to have on their minds that night, and the participants are the cases.
So far we have three participants working on specific things to do to make their business plans come true, which we hope they do, who can get feedback from the group in any session about what they think they have accomplished to actualize their plans.
It’s never too late to attend a session. If you cannot make session three, the next one, come to session six, or nine, or any session; if you can’t stay for the full two hours just get up and leave when you need to; join in the discussions if you want to if you come, if not that’s ok; but come and learn and teach something. You’ll be glad you did.
Once again the street address for the Business Innovation Group at the GA SO Univ City Campus is 58 East Main Street, Statesboro, Georgia, USA. The time for the next BIG Business Planning course session is 7-9 p.m. this coming Monday night. Hope to see you then and there.
The course is completely free of charge for all participants.
Feel free to forward, share, copy, or otherwise disseminate this update any way you see fit.
For background about the course, see my website for Effective Learning Company, a profit-making small business, at http://www.effectivelearning.net/.
Here is Henry Giroux in 2008 writing about the possibilities Obama posed for creating a more integrated and powerful progressive intellectual force in US culture. For sure Obama was a vast improvement over Bush II, a low point for intellectualism in the White House. But here we are now in 2018 with Trump in the White House, without a doubt creating the lowest intellectual level ever reached in the White House, a president who goes around the country working his supporters into mob frenzies using simple bigoted vulgar sentences, coming across as an illiterate bully leading other bullies and ruffians who have taken over the playground at recess.
Another nail for the potential coffin, but so what. Our illustrious political hacks in Washington approved him anyway, one hundred percent party line voting. Talk about bought and paid for politicians. This is it.
Generally agree except for his statement about free will. Seems to me people are caused to feel, think, and do what they do, sometimes by preachers and religions.
Here are three great articles by Courtenay Barnett, an international lawyer and Effective Learning Report correspondent living in the Caribbean about problems on the Turks and Caicos Islands caused by UK authorities mishandling mentally ill people, problems maybe worse than what US authorities inflict on mentally ill prisoners in the US.
Want a straightforward answer to this question? Here are some of the best I have seen. My wife told me today she heard on NPR the US is now increasing troops on the ground in Syria. If so this is a horrible mistake, possibly bringing on WWIII by threatening Russia. Why does the warmongering warmaking US keep trying to wipe out all strong regimes in the Middle East and North Africa? To better control the oil supply of course, but also to make it seem spending almost one trillion dollars per year on the US military is doing some good.
Say it ain’t so Joe. The repugs are destroying the US government, knowing full well these tax cuts are disastrous for the country as a whole. They just don’t care. They are stealing everything they can get their hands on while they can with their control of the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives.
I agree. While this sort of thing will make some small business entrepreneurs better off than they otherwise would have been, it will not make much difference in the overall state of affairs; the rich will continue to get richer and the poor and middle class will continue to stagnate or go down. The only things that will make significant change are things like significantly raising the tax rates of the rich, cutting military spending, and funding infrastructure projects to benefit the real US economy, creating aggregate demand for small businesses. In the long run you need to internationalize all large corporations producing the necessities of life and use management science techniques to distribute the output, along the lines of what I recommend in my seminal article, “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc.”
Socialism at its worst. No free market competition here. Everything is managed from the top down based on nefarious trade-offs and negotiations. Nobody knows what a F-35 really ought to cost. According to the Internet the cost might be about one hundred million dollars per plane, some $1.5 trillion for the whole program, per https://www.google.com/search?q=what+does+a+f-35+cost&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-1.
Just for the fun of it, play like you are a virtual Spaceship Earth, Inc. stockholder, owning one imaginary share of virtual stock, which I hereby figuratively grant you, just like all humans around Earth, giving you equal theoretical power to make decisions about how to manage Spaceship Earth, Inc. Tell other stockholders what you think the problems and opportunities are, what the alternatives are, and what you think should be done to better manage Spaceship Earth, Inc.
Also feel free to write what you think pro or con about anything I or any of the authors of the articles have written in this issue of The Earthian.
But, Please, no vicious attacks, no slanders, no profanity. Say whatever you want to say in response to the facts, analyses, conclusions, perspectives, etc. offered by the writers, pro or con, but please no ad hominem attacks, i.e., don’t try to prove you are right in your argument by illogically slandering or demeaning the personal characteristics, beliefs, behaviors, or integrity of the person you are arguing against.
I have no desire to sell subscriptions or advertising or solicit donations, but I would like to sell more books. If you feel you have gained value from this blog or any page on our website and want to reciprocate go to our Effective Learning Publications page , Amazon.com, or any brick and mortar bookstore and purchase one or more of my books.
Feel free to forward, share, print, reprint, copy or otherwise disseminate this issue of The Earthian any way you see fit.
Earthians are in a Catch-22 damned if they do and damned if they don’t situation; caught between a rock and a hard spot, or the devil and the deep blue sea; up the creek without a paddle; caught behind the eight ball; enmeshed more than ever in a Gordian Knot of rising obscene income and wealth inequality, financial manipulation, environmental destruction, global warming, military hatred, and social misery; sorely in need of rational and benevolent political leadership; being generally ruled at the highest levels by thugs, bullies, and ruffians who have taken over political playgrounds.
Thanks to unbridled sexual urges humans continue to breed children at a geometric rate, adding more and more humans to an already overpopulated Earth, requiring more and more production of goods for humans to consume, requiring the destruction of more and more natural resources, creating more and more pollution of Earth’s atmosphere, creating more and more global warming, which seems to be accelerating more than experts thought it would, creating more and more competition among people and nations for diminishing resources, creating more and more fear and hatred among people and nations, causing more and more production of war materials and military expenditures for military hardware and troops, leading to more and more military tensions around Earth, increasing the probability a madman will shoot off a big nuclear bomb that lands on a big city, setting off a catastrophe that could lead to human extinction.
If nuclear weapons don’t bring on a catastrophe global warming will, as sea levels rise and Earth gets so hot food cannot be grown in most places, assuming significant reductions in atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane do not happen, as seems likely, as humans continue to irresponsibly produce too many new hungry mouths to feed caused by their unrestrained sexual appetites, even assuming abortions are not made illegal by moral extremists in more and more countries, thereby precluding peacefully reducing the human population aboard Spaceship Earth through attrition, natural deaths exceeding births over time, to eliminate the need to destroy more and more natural resources and burn more and more fossil fuel, and on and on, thereby exacerbating and accelerating dangerous global processes and trends causing the Doomsday Clock to tell the time it does.
I have used the word Earthian since encountering it in the 1970s in Buckminster Fuller’s book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. It is my understanding that Fuller invented the word Earthian, and the appellation Spaceship Earth, implying Earth is something that has to be preserved by humans monitoring regular interdependent physical processes in the infinity of airless time and space—such as, for example, trees and other plants emitting oxygen that humans and other animals breath; with humans, other animals, and various processes emitting carbon dioxide that plants ingest, to make new oxygen in hopefully never ending interdependent closed systems. Such systems have to remain in synchronous interdependent regularities, requiring not cutting down and burning too many trees, and not putting too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere burning fossil fuels, as humans should know by now given what they have heard, seen, and read in various media about global warming, evidenced first-hand by anyone merely walking outside these days in broad daylight, feeling the heat coming down as if emitted from a heat lamp three feet away—and by daily posts on the Internet about heat and wildfires burning anything that will burn on various spots of terra firma around Spaceship Earth.
What is an Earthian? The term includes more than humans: it includes all species of fauna and flora around Earth.
I made a decision in June of 2018 to encourage the formation of De-Gaming Democracy groups around Spaceship Earth to facilitate relevant face-to-face discussions about ecological, economic, social, religious, and political affairs to hopefully co-construct consensual answers for seemingly intractable problems. It seems to me isolated human individuals spending eight or so hours per day on average looking at TV, computer, and cell phone screens to see, hear, and read fake news, faces, music, stories, gossip, movies, video games, sports, and even some truthful news has not resulted in economic and political progress. Something new needs to be tried.
To paraphrase Albert Einstein, it seems to me it’s insane to do the same thing over and over while saying you want a given result, such as better ecological, economic, and political conditions, and never getting them, which is happening in most organizations and groups, including families, schools, colleges, universities, churches, legislatures, congresses, militaries, and countries, who in reality are only concerned with preserving their status quos and protecting their vested interests, who, like any addict, depend on highs produced by life-threatening economic, political, religious, and military processes and substances they cannot give up.
Supposed experts and power people in organizations and groups often get together in committees or cliques to decide what kind of information, excuse me, party line dogma and doctrine to inflict on their subordinates down the chain of command, usually via the lecture method of teaching with victims, excuse me, subordinates sitting in seats, chairs, and desks in neat rows and columns obediently trying or pretending to memorize what is laid on them for some sort of test or task. Most people enjoy lecturing others standing rigidly erect pointing with their index fingers with a stern look on their faces. Even five-year-old kids can sometimes be seen taking pleasure lecturing other kids.
What I recommend in “De-Gaming and Saving Democracy” is not doing this, but, rather, having learners and teachers of different persuasions sit in circles using a spinner to randomly select a leader of the day to diagnose problems and opportunities, create alternatives, and make recommendations for change, which are then democratically discussed by all group members. This entails everyone being equally ok and having an equal chance to be a leader, which is the essence of democracy. The ancient Greeks used this process, called sortition.
I took my own advice and tried to set up a De-Gaming democracy group in Statesboro three months ago as explained here. I invited 153 people on my Internet list, told them I was hosting a forum in our Stapleton Learning Company offices, what I called the Ogeechee Economic Forum, using principles outlined in “De-Gaming and Saving Democracy,” and announced the time and how to get there.
One person showed up, not enough to democratically de-Game anything, but the discussion was randomly started nevertheless. Something in the person’s mind showing up caused the person to bring up the problem discussed during the assigned hour of the forum, namely the sad state of affairs now bedeviling Georgia Southern University in Statesboro and Armstrong State University in Savannah caused by the University System of Georgia secretly deciding in top down fashion to merge the two universities. It was an interesting discussion and made interesting content for this article.
So, as my experiment during July showed (one person showing up), it will not be easy to set up De-Gaming Democracy groups for bottom-up democratic discussions around Spaceship Earth, the most likely explanation being that many, if not most, humans are afraid of face-to-face democracy. Strange as it might seem, a good case can be built that most people actually prefer being told what to believe and do in authoritarian top-down systems, on TV, on their cell phones, in schools, in homes, in churches, at workplaces, in militaries, etc.
But we should keep trying to foster good democracy, however futile it might be. Otherwise present trends will continue.
I am now teaching a business planning course pro bono, at no cost to participants, at the BIG Building, the Business Innovation Center, at the Georgia Southern University City Campus in downtown Statesboro, Georgia, USA lasting ten weeks, meeting once a week from 7-9 p.m. on Mondays, in which I use a de-Gamed case method process. I furnish free copies of my book Business Voyages to serve as the course bible. The course is conducted much like a Sunday School Class, no tests, no grades, and no teacher evaluations. I have now taught three sessions of the planned ten sessions. Four people showed up the first night, five the second, and three for the third session.
I suggest certain passages from various pages in Business Voyages non-sequentially at various times during the course sessions for group consideration. Most of the time however is consumed by participants talking about their own cases, relating their fact-based cases to passages they find relevant anywhere in Business Voyages, much like a preacher would relate a passage in his/her bible to the topic of her/his sermon on a particular day, except the cases in this business planning course will be discussed by all participants on the spot to help group members make money or achieve other business goals in the here and now. If we add a few more participants I will use a Classroom De-Gamer™ from time to time to randomly select leaders.
Participants may bring up any business planning issue they happen to have on their minds during a class session, personal, local, national, or international in scope.
According to philosopher Karl Popper, it’s possible for humans to know about phenomena in three worlds, as recorded on page 100 of Business Voyages:
“World 1 includes hydrogen and helium, the heavier elements, liquids and crystals, and living organisms; World 2 includes consciousness of self and of death, and sentience or animal consciousness; and World 3 includes works of art and science and technology, human language, and theories of self and of death.”
No one knows right answers for problems that require significant knowledge from all three of Popper’s Worlds. The best hope is to develop consensual answers in democratic discussions that work better than others.
One can build a plausible case that provably true “right” answers do not exist in social, economic, and political affairs.
The problem in most organizations and groups, families included, is that parents and parent-like people—supervisors, CEOs, cops, politicians, prison wardens, FBI directors, managers, preachers, teachers, coaches, sergeants, generals, etc.—enjoy being the boss, and they hog all the power they can get their hands on by precluding one way or another others from participating in democratic discussions, and if this goes on over and over again enough underdogs begin to enjoy it and feel good about it, and begin to withdraw from any sort of dialectical face to face human contact and communication; and if everybody does this a stagnant society will ensue, a society that is only concerned about preserving its status quo, which is about where humans are now around Spaceship Earth, despite mounting evidence significant unplanned changes will soon happen.
As any transactional analyst knows, the most significant human learning is natural script-based authoritarianism. Parents program children before the age of eight to adopt psychologically and socially a unique family life script that lays out the do’s and don’t’s for living their lives.
As recorded on page 159 of Business Voyages, most parents at the social verbal spoken level from their Parent ego states communicate to the Parent ego states of their children over and over helpful things such as:
“Wash behind your ears,” “Clean those fingernails,” “ Study hard,” “Work hard,” “Get along,” “Make something of yourself”, and “Go to church, temple, or mosque.”
As recorded on page 160 ofBusiness Voyages, children are also exposed to psychological ulterior unspoken messages that are frustrating, debilitating, and enfeebling, called injunctions, transmitted from the Child ego states of parents to the Child ego states of children using positive and negative body language signals as children feel, think, and do as events happen:
“Don’t Be, Don’t Be You (the sex you are); Don’t Be a Child; Don’t Grow; Don’t Make It; Don’t; Don’t Be Important; Don’t Be Close; Don’t Belong; Don’t Be Well (or sane); Don’t Think About X (forbidden subject); Don’t Think What You Think, Think What I Think; Don’t Feel; Don’t Feel X, Mad, Sad, Glad, Scared; Don’t Feel What You Feel, Feel What I Feel.”
Some families are relatively free of injunctions and others are relatively contaminated with them, but probably all families produce and experience some of them. Injunctions preclude or forbid feelings, thoughts, and behaviors; what most people need to live fully healthy, productive, and satisfying lives is psychological permission to violate injunctions accidentally and inevitably laid on them psychologically by their parents. Unfortunately most people are unaware of the injunctions they harbor and transmit.
Parent and Child authoritarian messages and injunctions in various combinations stay much the same generation after generation within families as parents pass them down to children like runners passing a baton in a relay track race, while allowing and creating significant differentiation through time between families.
Certain family scripts derived from Parent and Child messages and injunctions fit various kinds of organizational scripts better than others. People with the same kinds of family scripts tend to populate the same kinds of organizations and groups at various levels generation after generation, including political parties and religions, whether liberal, conservative, right wing, left wing, or Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist, of various denominations and sects.
This early script-based teaching in families before humans are eight years old is difficult to change, almost impossible some say, making it even more difficult to change national scripts derived from family scripts. For a succinct explanation of Parent, Adult, and Child ego states and life scripts as they affect organizational learning, development, and praxis, see my book Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning.
According to Eric Berne, MD, a psychiatrist, and the euhemerous of transactional analysis, script messages transmitted to children in families generally produce three kinds of life outcomes: winner, loser, and non-winner, or banal. In my opinion, the process is grossly unfair for humans not scripted to be winners. It’s an unfair process for which no human can be blamed or praised, caused by an unbroken infinite regression and progression of ineluctable inevitable accidental cause-effect chains, in the infinity of time and space. According to Berne, these scripted outcomes occur in recurrent proportions generation after generation in any society, regardless of the political system, religions, or socio-economic conditions in the society as a whole.
Here is a passage on human scripts I wrote on page 157 of Business Voyages:
“As Shakespeare pointed out, the world is a stage and everyone must play a part. While it is theoretically possible not to act out a part or script in life by autonomously making decisions based on the facts of actual cases using Adult ego states in the here and now, it would be difficult to prove whether anyone has ever actually accomplished such a feat. According to Berne, a script is an on-going life plan decided upon by a child before the age of eight—which includes such basic decisions as the life position of the person (whether I’m OK—You’re OK, I’m OK—You’re Not OK, I’m Not OK—You’re OK, I’m Not OK—You’re Not OK), what type of person to marry, how many children to have, the nature of role in life, the nature of life outcome, whether winner, loser, or non-winner, and who will be around when life ends (Berne, 1970). The early influence and programming of parents and the commitment of a child to the influence and programming determine life scripts. Once the child decides to accept the influence and programming it becomes a part of a script that is acted out on the stage of life. In this sense a child less than eight years old determines most lives. Some scripts work out well and some do not. Criminals, entrepreneurs, saints, and sinners are generally what they are because of scripts, not autonomous feelings, thinking, and doing in the here and now. Therefore they are not to blame or praise. People do in the present what they decided to do in the past regarding important matters. According to Berne, only trivial matters are decided by reason in the here and now.”
It seems to me the best approach for dealing with script-based feeling, thinking, and behaving in a society is by getting people with disparate scripts together in Game-free democratic dialectical discussions that enable participants to experience their script messages in relation to the script messages of others in relation to specific problems and opportunities confronting everyone in the shared environment, so as to construct consensual answers that are acceptable for everyone.
This is hard to do, impossible some say, because “birds of a feather flock together,” and humans generally only associate with their own kind, hearing the same authoritarian messages over and over from their elders, leaders, friends, family members, and managers, preaching to their own choirs, creating a psychological security blanket for group members, which, however comforting, causes feelings, thoughts, and behaviors that will, if similarly caused for humans in all organizations and groups, sooner or later paradoxically cause all organizations and groups to become less secure, probably enemies, since differentiated inbred dogmas and doctrines within organizations and groups through time sooner or later clash with those of different organizations and groups, leading to competition and war instead of cooperation and peace.
In addition to this pernicious chickens-coming-home-to-roost organizational process, as organizations become more powerful and successful through time, power-hoggers at the highest levels in political parties and governments, in the US, UK, India, France, Germany, Russia, China, Syria, Japan, Indonesia, Bulgaria, Ireland, Venezuela, South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, Cuba, Chile, Mexico, Holland, Iran, Turkey, or wherever, and in multinational corporations of any national origin, having no Game-free democratic open dialectical discussions among peers generating consensual answers for problems in shared environments have now brought Spaceship Earth to its most dangerous state of affairs in Earthian history, caused by hogged power being greatly magnified, relative to that of analogous hogged power of the past, caused by the collective cumulated learning of humans through time in Worlds 1, 2, and 3 that enabled humans to learn how to generate electricity to power countless devices, and power automobiles, tractors, airplanes, tanks and other mobile instruments by extracting and burning fossil fuel; learn how to detonate nuclear bombs to kill people in wars; learn how to use two digits, zeros and ones, to create words, numbers, pictures, and sounds in computers and cell phones; learn how to use zeros and ones to create data bases, money, and computer programs capable of controlling almost anything that moves; and learn how to do almost anything but cause ordinary humans to communicate and live together in harmony, peace, tranquility, and satisfaction.
Power hoggers at the top of countries around Spaceship Earth don’t cause ordinary humans to live in harmony, peace, tranquility, and satisfaction in their countries because they need underdogs to polarize in their organizations and groups and agitate against one another, thereby weakening one another, so the power hoggers at the top can continue to hog their power, and the money and wealth their hogged power enables them to take for themselves. Yes, the international behavioral system of trade, commerce, finance and war at the highest power level around Spaceship Earth is a system of unregulated expropriation—all countries’ top power hoggers taking and raking off whatever they can lay their hands on from underdogs in their own countries and from underdogs in other countries, ostensibly for the good of underdogs in their own countries. To think these power hoggers earn or merit their money and wealth by producing through hard and skillful work large quantities of something excellent is ludicrous and absurd.
International laws and courts are almost useless for controlling top power hoggers, as is the case to a lesser degree with national supreme courts, especially the US Supreme Court today, where important decisions are split among nine judges along ideological party lines, insuring inbred biases and prejudices determine decisions and rulings, not the facts of cases based on logic, reason, and fair and just legal precedents. Today’s US Supreme Court is not powerless since it still has police power to enforce its decisions within the US, however illogical, inhumane, and unfair they might be. International courts in contrast are powerless because there is no international police force to enforce their rulings, which is why Earthians need some sort of international Game-free democratic government with real power. The United Nations is almost powerless, and it’s ludicrous to think the world’s greatest superpower, the US, would impartially and fairly enforce the legal rulings of a Spaceship Earth Supreme Court.
Human behavior around Earth is largely an existential matter of topdog/underdog struggles for power and domination, wherein topdog power hoggers continue to apply the time-honored and successful strategy of divide and conquer to exploit underdogs in their countries, bribing, paying, and rewarding favored lackeys to satisfy, muzzle, and corral underdogs down the chain of command under their control, much like kings and barons did to underdog knaves and serfs during the Middle Ages, making sure underdogs stay chained in their places, talking only to one another at their level about local gossip, daily chores, illnesses, sports, movies, video games, children, parents, friends, and what have you, maintaining a banal status quo and moral equilibrium at the lowest level that gets so boring that thousands of local underdogs actually look forward to joining military organizations that will enable them to travel around Spaceship Earth, to possibly fight in wars that can cause them to be killed or maimed, but probably not, and maybe come home a hero, with financial benefits.
Figuring out how to eradicate power hogging, the most virulent, vicious, ubiquitous, insidious, pain-causing, lethal, possibly fatal mental illness contaminating the human species, is the best strategy for insuring indefinite life aboard Spaceship Earth, or so it seems to me today.
Like Don Quixote charging windmills I experience irrational satisfaction giving moral support to Earthians in their battles for survival, jousting like a rikety deranged medieval knight in my blogs for noble causes, having survived countless threats and skirmishes in my seventy-eight years of life, having been retired from college teaching since 2005. I got bored with hunting, fishing, playing golf, and traveling some time ago, especially after being forced to kowtow to TSA agents and put up with their arrogant demeanor, attitudes, rules, threats, indignities, and stress to board commercial airliners, thanks to Bush II’s nitwit quixotic decision to fight a “War on Terror” started in 2003, a so-called war that did irreparable psychological harm to the cultural fabric of the US, not to mention the incomparably greater irreparable psychological and physical harm inflicted on millions of humans and other Earthians in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And the harm did not stop there. It continues with operations occurring in whatever it is Obama and Trump are now calling their wars and military adventures, primarily in the Middle East and North Africa, but essentially all around Spaceship Earth, from eight hundred military bases in seventy countries, providing shelter for US troops and flying objects that can shoot on the ground and drop and shoot bombs, missiles, and bullets from the sky, sometimes aimed with precision to hit targets on the ground by expert shooters staring at computer screens in the US, clicking a mouse instead of pulling a trigger to “shoot some people,” as if playing a video game.
Here is an article I published, “Attacks also Assaults on Global Business,” Savannah Morning News, September 23, 2001, The Business Exchange, p. 7, in which I wrote about my thoughts and feelings regarding 9/11 one week after it happened.
Like most people I believed three towers at the World Trade Center had been knocked down by some amateur Arab pilots who had surreptitiously entered the US who had taken private pilot lessons in the US using piper cubs to learn how to fly in who high-jacked four large commercial airliners and flew two of them into two World Trade Center towers and one into the Pentagon, while crash landing one in a cornfield in Ohio.
I no longer believe this story, having by now read and seen dozens of articles and videos by conscientious ethical authors and presenters including expert testimony by commercial airline pilots, architects, engineers, and scientists who unequivocally assert amateur pilots flying nothing but piper cubs could not have developed the piloting skill necessary to fly airliners into two WTC towers and one into the Pentagon at the speeds and angles at which the airliners were flown; and even if they had developed this piloting skill there is no way the two airliners striking the two twin towers could have generated enough heat to cause three twin towers to collapse in free falls. On top of this, there is now a reputable recorded telephone call from firemen who reached the 78th floor of one of the towers who indicated fires they had observed could be put out by two firefighting companies, shortly before the building collapsed. And there is more reputable evidence from observers on the scene who said they heard multiple explosions. And common sense would tell you Building Seven, assuming you believe the airliners did it, not hit by an airliner, would somehow magically fall in free fall just like the two towers hit by airliners; and common sense would tell you an amateur pilot could not fly an airliner into the Pentagon horizontally in such a way as to knock out a side wall while disappearing inside.
Most likely the so-called War on Terror would not have happened had 9/11 not happened. In my Savannah Morning News article I wrote about my feelings for the brave citizens of the US who would take the 9/11 tragedy in stride and overcome the evil forces that made it happen. Now I am not so sure. The country has become increasingly polarized and dysfunctional. For sure 9/11 did not cause it all, but it is a factor. One can also build a case 9/11 was a major factor in causing the military and political changes, and increasing hatred and conflict, since then in the Middle East and North Africa, and elsewhere, regime changes, population disruptions and dislocations, and widespread human, personal property, and infrastructure destruction, pretty much along the lines of what General Wesley Clark outlined in this video.
See my article “Toward the Creation of Spaceship Earth Incorporated,” published in MWC News (Media With Conscience) for some cheering views on how humans might pull Spaceship Earth out of its nosedive into catastrophe.
Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA is a founder, owner, and operator of Effective Learning Company, a profit-making small business, at www.effectivelearning.net.
When you’re young, getting eight hours of sleep per night feels like a chore. There are so many fun things to do and sleep only interrupts the fun! However, sleep has more benefits than giving parents a few hours of quiet time.
According to the Penn State Extension, sleep is just as important to health as diet and exercise. Children who sleep the right amount each night get sick less often, are less likely to become obese or develop diabetes and are better at regulating their behavior and moods. Proper sleep also helps youth perform their best academically: Sleep helps the brain retain information so children remember what they’ve learned from one day to the next. Insufficient sleep, on the other hand, is associated with poor attention span and distractibility.
Of course, understanding the importance of sleep doesn’t make achieving it any easier. From grade-schoolers dawdling at bedtime to college students staying up late to cram for exams, there are lots of obstacles to quality sleep. If you’re ready to overcome them and improve your household’s sleep quality, follow these tips for better sleep through the school year.
1. Be Consistent
When you go to sleep at the same time each night, falling asleep is easier. That’s because a consistent sleep-wake cycle programs your body to feel tired at the same time each day. Aim to go to bed and wake up at the same time every day, even on weekends.
2. Shift the Clock Slowly
When you do need to change bedtimes, like during the switch from a school break, don’t do it all at once. Abrupt changes in a child’s sleep schedule lead to sleep problems and create a sleep debt that’s hard to make up. Craig Canapari, MD, director of the Yale Pediatric Sleep Center, recommends shifting sleep schedules no more than 10-15 minutes per day. If a child needs to get up two hours earlier when school starts up again, that means you need at least eight days to adjust.
3. Create a Healthy Sleep Environment
Getting to bed on time isn’t the only challenge. An uncomfortable bedroom also disrupts sleep. Discomfort may be due to temperature, light, noise, bedding, or allergy-related breathing problems. Use these tips to improve bedroom comfort:
Maintain total darkness in bedrooms. Use blackout curtains or blinds to exclude outside light. If a nightlight is necessary, use a red bulb.
Keep nighttime temperatures between 60-67 degrees.
Limit noise that can be heard in bedrooms. If your home has thin walls, use a white noise machine.
Use air purifiers in bedrooms of allergy sufferers to improve nighttime breathing and indoor air quality. This is especially important if there are any smokers in the home as secondhand smoke can trigger allergy-like symptoms. If you do invest in an air purifier, find one that runs quietly and has carbon and HEPA filters.
4. Limit Screen Time Before Bed
Between doing homework, chatting with friends, playing games and watching TV, screens play a big role in kids’ lives. While there are many benefits to having technology at your fingertips, using electronics too close to bedtime interferes with sleep. Schedule a screen shutdown one hour before bedtime so your children’s bodies can start winding down for sleep. If having devices in the bedroom is too tempting, establish a docking area outside of bedrooms where kids can leave devices to charge before heading to bed.
Kids may initially push back against bedtime changes, especially restrictions on electronic devices. However, with time, kids will adapt to their new routine and head to bed with less of a struggle. With luck, the good habits you shape today will carry into adulthood, leading to adults who are well-rested and ready to take on the world.
Effective Learning Publications, 32 East Main Street, Statesboro, Georgia, USA, www.effectivelearning.net , September 10, 2018
Or So It Seems to Me Today
By Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA, Editor & Publisher
My weltanschauung has not changed much since the publication of The Earthian – 2 last month, so I have reposted in this introduction some of what I said last month. It’s not easy to accept the idea of being Earthians and active stakeholders in an imaginary virtual Spaceship Earth, Inc. So maybe another dose of some of the basic ideas might be helpful.
It seems to me today that the Doomsday Clock is now even closer to Midnight.
The purpose of The Earthian is to advocate for preserving all species aboard Spaceship Earth, not just right wing or left wing political humans, especially rich oligarchs now constructing themselves underground bunkers to survive what they call “The Event” that they think will wipe out most Earthians. The purpose of The Earthian is not to cause humans to learn something just for the sake of learning it, or something that might make their personal lives better, but to learn something that might make for smoother sailing for all Earthians aboard Spaceship Earth, hopefully helping humans become better stockholders and managers of Spaceship Earth.
This issue of The Earthian as usual links and cites recent articles written by clear and deep thinking hard hitting independent writers in various open fearless Internet publications dealing with current ecological, economic, military, religious, and political affairs around Spaceship Earth in the last month or so. Cited again in this issue is an article I recently wrote titled “De-Gaming And Saving Democracy,” in which I assert democracy is waning in the Western World and capitalism has failed to satisfy a majority of Spaceship Earth stakeholders. I proposed in the article a way to rejuvenate democracy. The upshot of the article is that the fate of Spaceship Earth depends on people like you. Read the article and set up a De-Gaming Democracy group in your community.
Humans spending more and more time staring at computer and cell phone screens looking at faces, hearing voices, and reading fake news, gossip, and even truthful news has not resulted in economic and political progress. Something new needs to be tried. As Albert Einstein pointed out, doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result is insane.
And it seems to me it’s even more insane to do the same thing over and over pretending you want a different result that never happens, which is what happens much of the time in groups and organizations that really want to preserve their status quos to protect their vested interests.
To supposedly improve things experts and power people often get together in committees and decide what kind of information, excuse me, rules, algorithms, dogma and party line doctrine to inflict on their subordinates down the chain of command, usually via the lecture method of teaching with victims, er, subordinates sitting in seats, chairs, and desks in neat rows and columns obediently trying or pretending to memorize what is laid on them for some sort of test or task. Most people enjoy lecturing others standing rigidly erect pointing with their index fingers with a stern look on their faces. Even five-year-old kids can sometimes be seen taking pleasure lecturing other kids.
What I recommend in “De-Gaming and Saving Democracy” is not doing this, but, rather, having learners and teachers sit in circles using a spinner to randomly select the leader of the day to start a democratic discussion of relevant problems or opportunities. This entails everyone being equally ok and having an equal chance to be the leader, which is the essence of democracy.
I included a good bit of detail in my introduction to The Earthian – 2 such as my definition of an Earthian and transactional analysis theory as I think it applies to the problem of managing organizations and groups. Assuming you did not read that issue or if you need a refresher you might want to go there and read my August “Or So It Seems To Me Today,” introductory essay, so this essay will make more sense.
I took my own advice and tried to set up a De-Gaming democracy group in Statesboro two months ago as explained here. I invited 153 people on my Internet list, told them I was hosting a forum in our Stapleton Learning Company offices, what I called the Ogeechee Economic Forum, using principles outlined in“De-Gaming and Saving Democracy,” and announced the time and how to get there.
One person showed up. Obviously you can’t have democracy with only one person and no group. But the discussion was randomly started nevertheless. Something in the person’s mind showing up caused the person to bring up the problem discussed during the assigned hour of the forum, namely the sad state of affairs now bedeviling Georgia Southern University in Statesboro and Armstrong State University in Savannah caused by the University System of Georgia deciding to merge the two universities. It was an interesting discussion and made interesting content for this article.
So, as my experiment during July showed (one person showing up), it will not be easy to set up De-Gaming Democracy groups for bottom-up democratic discussions around Spaceship Earth, the reason being most people do not like face-to-face democracy. Most people may actually prefer being told what to believe and do in authoritarian top-down systems, on TV, on their cell phones, in homes, in churches, in schools, in militaries, at workplaces, in political parties.
I held another Ogeechee Economic Forum on the third Saturday of August, and again one person showed up.
The person showing up this time was a former student who took several of my case method courses in the 1970s, having spent a career teaching and consulting in Asia, providing interesting conversation about happenings there, promising to come back for the September forum and bring a friend.
Maybe two people will show up for the September Ogeechee Economic Forum, on the third Saturday of this month, September 15, 10-11 a.m. The public is again welcome, including you.
It looks like I will be teaching a business planning course pro bono, at no cost to participants, at the BIG Building, the Business Innovation Group, at the Georgia Southern University City Campus in downtown Statesboro starting on September 24, lasting ten weeks, meeting once a week from 7-9 p.m. on Mondays, in which I will use a democratic de-Gamed case method process. I will furnish free copies of my book Business Voyages to serve as the course bible. The course will be conducted much like a Sunday School Class, no tests and no grades. I will suggest certain passages from various pages in the book non-sequentially at various times during the course for group reading outside of class which a de-Gamer selected person will analyze in class for some sessions. Most of the time of the sessions however will be consumed by de-Gamer selected participants talking about their own cases, relating their fact-based cases to passages they find anywhere in Business Voyages, much like a preacher would relate a passage in his/her bible to the topic of her/his sermon on a particular day, except the cases in this business planning course will be discussed by all participants on the spot as soon as the de-Gamer selected person tells his/her story. You can take this course if you wish, if it indeed makes. The last I heard five participants wanted to take it.
According to the philosopher Karl Popperit’s possible for humans to know about phenomena in three worlds, as shown in a passage taken from Business Voyages:
“World 1 includes hydrogen and helium, the heavier elements, liquids and crystals, and living organisms; World 2 includes consciousness of self and of death, and sentience or animal consciousness; and World 3 includes works of art and science and technology, human language, and theories of self and of death.”
Writers can only write about what they know about and can imagine. I have formally studied in degree programs economics, organizational behavior, management science, and transactional analysis; and for sure I can recall verbatim only a small fraction of what I read and studied. Hopefully I can remember the gist of most of it, and I shall recall or imagine here what is most relevant for what should be written in this blog. I should know more about these subjects than most people not having my experience and training, but no one knows right answers for problems that require knowledge from all three of Popper’s Worlds. The best hope is to develop consensual answers in democratic discussions that work better than others for all Earthian species.
That said, it seems to me democratic discussion methods generally work better than authoritarian methods, since they produce answers created by more than one person. On the other hand, it is not always true, it seems to me, that consensual answers get better and better as more people contribute to their creation. Sometimes you need completely new answers starting from scratch.
One can build a plausible case that provably true “right” answers do not exist in social, economic, and political affairs.
TO RESPOND:
Do Your Duty! As an equal virtual Spaceship Earth, Inc. stockholder, owning one share of virtual stock, just like everybody else around Earth, tell other stockholders what you think the problems and opportunities are, what the alternatives are, and what you think should be done to better manage Spaceship Earth, Inc.
Go to my Facebook Page and say whatever you want to say in regard to anything I have said above or to anything anyone has said in an article posted below.
But, no slanders and no profanity. Say whatever you want to say in response to the facts of what was said, pro or con, but please no ad hominem attacks, i.e., don’t try to prove you are right in your argument by citing your low opinion of the character, integrity, or personal characteristics of the person you are arguing against.
Just type your response at the top of my Facebook Page where it says What’s On Your Mind? You will start a conversation if no one else has responded that day. I will respond to your post if I think a response is appropriate, as may others. If someone else has started a conversation that day you can respond on that Facebook post for the day, letting people know what you think about that particular conversation in a particular issue of The Earthian.
As I read articles from various publications here and yon on the Internet I post some of them to my Facebook page and then use many of them as sources for The Earthian. After you get to the Facebook page you can find most of the articles listed as sources in The Earthian posted on the Facebook page, and you can respond beneath them with any comment you want to make about the article or what anyone has said about the article.
SOURCES:
September 10, 2018
Paul Street goes where most people fear to tread in their thinking. Here he quotes scientists who assert there are millions of planets in the universe capable of supporting life and posits that human-like life on many of them may have become extinct because of industrializing, that humans aboard Spaceship Earth are in the process of doing the same thing, implying the Luddites and Mennonites were right all along about technology being the work of the devil. Street agrees we are now in an Anthropocene, better, he says, called a Capitalocene, a new era of decay and destruction brought about by human-caused climate change, laying the blame on the advent of capitalism in the 1600s, starting seriously with the burning of coal to power steam engines around 1850, then taking off with a fury around 1900 with the burning of fossil fuels in internal (infernal) combustion engines. He includes a long quote by Noam Chomsky who casts Donald J. Trump as the prime devil now leading us all to hell on Earth. For an alternative scenario, read my article “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc.”
Trump is either a lunatic or he is doing a very good job pretending to be one. Or he may be crazy like a fox, smarter than you might think. What is he really after? Most likely power, recognition, and stimulus, trying to stave off boredom in his life, having done everything he could think of to entertain himself before running for president. He probably would like to be president for life as he has said. On the other hand, if he waddles like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck, well, yes, he probably is a duck, i.e., a mentally deranged human being. But so what you say? Since probably at least twenty-five percent of eligible US voters are mentally deranged, enough to elect a deranged president thanks to the deranged US Electoral College. Trump’s performances before audiences are as fake as professional wrestling matches, but millions of people watch him anyway, most probably thinking it’s real.
There is no such thing as a federal govt payroll tax. There are social security insurance contributions (FICA) (Federal Insurance Contribution Act payments) that can be increased, and the SS system trust fund can also start asking the US govt to pay back more per year of the money it has borrowed from the Social Security Trust Fund, surplus money generated by the SS system since the 1930s, about three trillion dollars, to balance the cash inflows and outflows of the SS system for many years with no sweat. If the fed govt wants to balance its own cash inflows and outflows it can cut the salaries of its senators and representatives and civilian and military employees to compensate for having to increase their loan payment obligations to the SS trust fund. Fed govt congressional politicians and administrative employees, and others, including presstitute media, lying to the public by telling people increasing payroll taxes (which don’t exist) is the only way to balance Social Security Insurance cash flows is unethical and heinous.
Look at the look in humble reverent Trump’s eyes, caught in the act engaging in his favorite pastime, projecting fake body-language messages. The man is full of hate in this picture not reverence, with good reason, if Pence really is the mysterious NYT op-ed writer.
SOURCE: “Freedom Rider: John McCain, Trump Derangement, and false black consciousness,” by Margaret Kimberley and Ann Garrison, INTREPEDREPORT.COM, http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/25041.
Talk about an ill-fated conference, not completely rained out, but almost, by a monsoon, no less, in Kerala, India. As shown here I have been a member of the International Transactional Analysis Association over forty years.
Why can’t the US govt keep its nose out of other nations’ business—always stirring up trouble to justify military activity and sell more US manufactured weapons, even to neo-Nazi governments such as the one in Ukraine? Very sad
One reason currencies melt down is that power hoggers want to discount the price of goods produced in a country in world markets, hoping to sell more internationally at the expense of countries that don’t devalue their currencies in a trade war. Unfortunately if most countries do it almost nobody wins. Trump’s tariffs increased the price of goods produced in other countries sold in the US, another tactic in a trade war. Unfortunately if all countries do this they will all wind up producing and selling less, causing a global recession or worse.
Are the US and the UK birds of a feather joined at the hip? Unable to manufacture consumer goods competitively to produce real employment? Having to make non-competitive weapons of war instead? Needing Russia to serve as a demand creator and rainmaker to sell their war products?
If this is victory I would hate to see what defeat is, which, I would assume, would be worse; but who knows whether in today’s Alice in Wonderland Orwellian world in Washington, where down is up, or any other thing they choose to call anything.
So, time really does fly by faster the older you get. Retiring in 2005 I noticed this was happening to me within two or three years, and time’s elapsing seems to continue accelerating. Although in good health, I’m almost dead already of old age.
Paul Street pulls no punches, including this statistic: the upper one tenth of one percent of the US population own as much US wealth percentage-wise as the bottom ninety percent, which is well documented in this article.
Here is another gripping poignant article by Lihn Dinh, a native survivor of Vietnam during the US bombing spree of the 1960s who lived in the US thirty years who is now living back in Vietnam. Compared to this guy most people in the US are snowflakes. He tells it like it is now in Vietnam. One of his most gripping points about the servant’s tale is that this is what US workers have to compete against now with global free trade, having been thrown to the wolves by US corporations outsourcing US jobs to Asian sweatshops since the 1970s.
Here’s an article about a legal case my longtime friend William John Cox, a retired attorney in Long Beach, California, handled pro bono for Mel Mermelstein, now age 92, that established the Jewish Holocaust as a legal fact under the legal doctrine of Judicial Notice, posted here as a story published in the Smithsonian Magazine a few weeks ago. Events and facts leading up to and including the trial were used for a movie by TNT, Never Forget, starring Leonard Nimoy and Dabney Coleman, with Coleman playing Willian John Cox. This was quite a feat for a country boy who grew up on a cotton farm in Northwest Texas. Wm and I sat in the same Methodist Sunday School class in 1948 at Wolfforth, Texas. The post includes some video footage of the movie. Mel and Wm were real heroes.
Trump won’t give about two million US civilian employees a pay raise but he will give about 1.3 million US military employees a pay raise. The man has little or no respect for context, causes, consequences, fairness, and rationality. What about some 3.7 million independent contractors who feed at the federal trough? Will they get a pay raise? I suppose we are now supposed to believe Trump is seriously worried about the federal debt, after he gave himself and his rich cronies a trillion or so dollars worth of tax cuts, vastly increasing the federal debt. Add one more nitwit decision to Trump’s collection.
Karl Popper has been one of my favorite philosophers, primarily because of his stance against dogmatism and people thinking they know something that is unknowable, having been brainwashed about it in some sort of fascist authoritarian learning process, such as a family, church, corporation, or military unit, asserting you cannot prove any proposition to be true, that all you can do is prove a proposition to be false. In this Scientific American article you get to see how Popper functioned in his last years and learn about a confrontation he had with Ludwig Wittgenstein, another favorite philosopher of mine, who said “The case is all there is,” and “Everything that happens happens by accident.” Apparently Wittgenstein was a bit more dogmatic than Popper. I discussed Popper and Wittgenstein and these issues in more detail in my book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds.
Yes, but the insurance companies, healthcare companies, and pharmaceutical companies don’t, and they have enough money to make politicians vote their way.
I agree with Jonathan Cook’s brilliant summarizing article below about UK politics. I am definitely in his second camp. The elite rich just keep getting relatively richer as everyone else stagnates or declines, maybe throughout the Western World. All the elite rich have to do is count the money their already pilled up money provides them. No work required. Communism failed for the same reason capitalism failed: greedy power hoggers at the top. The US and the UK it seems to me are in pretty much the same kind of political boat and predicament.
Communism failed for the same reason capitalism failed: greedy power hoggers at the top. for more detail read my editorial “Or So It Seems To Me Today”.
It is an established fact that the Jewish Holocaust happened, recognized as a matter of Judicial Notice, established in the Mel Mermelstein case posted above.
There is no justice under the sun, as Solomon figured out in the bible. Have the too big to fail Wall Street banks, and big non-bank capitalistic corporations, bailed out by US charity and socialism in the 2008 financial crisis with US tax money and US funny money created by the Federal Reserve, enjoyed their filthy luchre? Especially the money the big Wall Street banks saved by not having to pay off on their credit default swaps they sold to Greek creditors? Pity the poor Greeks who were sacrificed for the global gods of finance.
SOURCE: “’We are climbing rapidly out of humankind’s safe zone’: New Report warns dire climate warnings not dire enough,” by Jon Queally, INTREPIDREPORT.COM, http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/24907.
This article contains one of the best videos I have listened to on how to get the world, especially the US, out of its ongoing financial predicament. For more detail on how this scenario might sort out read my article,“The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc”.
The anonymous creator/narrator of this video attended Harvard Business School. I hold three degrees from the Texas Tech business school.
Feel free to forward, share, print, reprint, copy or otherwise disseminate this issue of The Earthian any way you see fit.
TO RESPOND:
Do Your Duty! As an equal virtual Spaceship Earth, Inc. stockholder, owning one share of virtual stock, just like everybody else around Earth, tell other stockholders what you think the problems are, what the alternatives are, and what you think should be done to better manage Spaceship Earth, Inc.
Go to my Facebook Page and say whatever you want to say in regard to anything I or anyone else has said herein
But, Please, no vicious attacks, no slanders, no profanity. Say whatever you want to say in response to the facts of what was said, pro or con, but please no ad hominem attacks, i.e., don’t try to prove you are right because the person you are arguing against in your opinion is not OK, or less OK than you are, by virtue of personal characteristics, beliefs, feelings, or behaviors.
Just type your response at the top of my Facebook Page where it says What’s On Your Mind? You will start a conversation if no one else has responded that day. I will respond to your post if I think a response is appropriate, as may others. If someone else has started a conversation that day you can respond on that Facebook post for the day, letting people know what you think about that particular conversation in a particular issue of The Earthian.
As I read articles on the Internet during a month from various publications here and yon I post some of them to my Facebook page and then use most of them as sources for The Earthian. After you get to the Facebook page you can find most of the articles listed as sources in The Earthian posted on the Facebook page, and you can respond beneath them with any comment you want to make about the article or what anyone has said about the article.
Like a reincarnation of Don Quixote I gain satisfaction from trying to give moral support to Earthians of any sort in their battles for survival, giving back a little in my retirement years, having survived many personal threats and battles in my long life, still standing in relatively good shape. I got bored with hunting, fishing, playing golf, and traveling some time ago, especially after being forced to obey and accept militaristic TSA attitudes, rules, intimidation, indignities, and stress to board airplanes, thanks to Bush II’s insane War on Terror, an aggressive offensive war that did irreparable harm to the social fabric of the US, not to mention the incomparably greater irreparable harm inflicted on millions of humans and other Earthians in other nations, caused by dropping bombs on them.
I have no desire to sell subscriptions or advertising or solicit donations for this blog, but I would like to sell more books. If you feel you have gained value from this blog or any page on our website and want to reciprocate please go to our Effective Learning Publications page , Amazon.com , or any brick and mortar bookstore and purchase one or more of my books.
By Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA, Editor & Publisher
It seems to me the Doomsday Clock aboard Spaceship Earth keeps ticking ever closer to Midnight.
I have used the word Earthian since encountering it in the 1970s in Buckminster Fuller’s book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, one of the most relevant books I have read. It is my understanding that Fuller invented the word Earthian, and the appellation Spaceship Earth, implying Earth is something that has to be managed by humans monitoring regular interdependent physical processes in the infinity of airless time and space—trees and other plants emitting oxygen that humans and other animals breath—with humans, other animals, and various processes emitting carbon dioxide that plants ingest—to make new oxygen in hopefully never ending co-dependent systems. Such production systems have to stay in synchronous interdependent regularities, requiring not cutting down and burning too many trees, and not putting too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere burning fossil fuels, as most humans should know by now given what they have heard, seen, and read in various media about global warming, evidenced by the heat and wildfires burning anything that will burn right now on various spots of terra firma around Spaceship Earth.
What is an Earthian? The term applies mostly to humans aboard Spaceship Earth, aka Planet Earth; but it includes more than humans: it includes all sentient species of fauna and flora.
In other words, the purpose of The Earthian is to advocate preserving all species aboard Spaceship Earth, not just right wing or left wing political humans, especially rich oligarchs now constructing themselves underground bunkers to survive what they call “The Event” that they think will wipe out most humans. The purpose of The Earthian is not to cause humans to learn something just for the sake of learning it, or something that might make their personal lives better, but to learn something that might make for smoother sailing for all species aboard Spaceship Earth.
This issue of The Earthian as usual links recent articles written by clear and deep thinking hard hitting independent writers in various open fearless Internet publications dealing with current ecological, economic, military, religious, and political affairs around Spaceship Earth. I included in this issue an article, not the clearest and deepest of this issue by any stretch, I recently wrote titled “De-Gaming And Saving Democracy,” in which I point out democracy seems to be waning in the Western World and capitalism has failed to satisfy a majority of citizens. I proposed in the article a new way to rejuvenate democracy. The upshot of the article is that the fate of Spaceship Earth depends on people like you. Read the article and set up a De-Gaming Democracy group in your community.
A decision was made in June of 2018 to encourage the formation of De-Gaming Democracy groups around Spaceship Earth to facilitate relevant face-to-face discussions about economic and political affairs affecting Earthians. Humans spending more and more time staring at TV, computer, and cell phone screens, now about eight hours per day per human on average in the US, looking at faces, hearing voices expounding and manipulating mostly about gossip, politics, sports, and soap operas, and hearing and reading fake news, and even some truthful news, has not resulted in economic and political success and satisfaction for all. Something new needs to be tried. As Albert Einstein pointed out, doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result is insane.
And it seems to me it’s even more insane to do the same thing over and over saying you want a better state of affairs and never getting it, which is what happens much of the time in institutions, such as schools, colleges, universities, churches, political parties, legislatures, congresses, and corporate and military units, who really want to preserve their status quo to protect their vested interests.
Most of the time supposed experts and power people get together in committees and decide what kind of drivel, excuse me, dogma and party line bullshit to inflict on their subordinates down the chain of command, usually via the lecture method of teaching with victims, er, subordinates sitting in seats and desks in neat rows and columns obediently trying or pretending to memorize what is laid on them for some sort of test or task. Most people enjoy standing rigidly erect pointing with their index fingers with a stern look on their faces lecturing others. Even five-year-old kids can sometimes be seen taking pleasure lecturing other kids.
What I recommend in “De-Gaming and Saving Democracy” is not doing this, but, rather, having learners and teachers sit in circles using a spinner to randomly select the leader of the day to start a democratic discussion of a relevant problem or opportunity. This entails everyone being equally ok and having an equal chance to be the leader, which is the essence of democracy.
I took my own advice and tried to set up a De-Gaming democracy group in my town Saturday July 21, 2018, as explained here. I invited 153 people on my Internet list to what I called the Ogeechee Economic Forum, telling them I was hosting a forum in our Stapleton Learning Company offices, using principles outlined in “De-Gaming and Saving Democracy,” and announced the time and how to get there. One person showed up, not enough to democratically select anyone in a group, but the discussion was randomly started nevertheless. Something in the person’s mind showing up caused the person to bring up the problem discussed during the assigned hour of the forum, namely the uncertain state of affairs now agitating what used to be Georgia Southern University in Statesboro and Armstrong State University in Savannah caused by the University System of Georgia in Atlanta deciding to merge the two universities under one name, Georgia Southern University. It was an interesting discussion and made interesting content for this article.
So, as my experiment Saturday July 21, 2018 shows, it will not be easy to set up De-Gaming Democracy groups for bottom-up Game-free democratic discussions around Spaceship Earth, the primary reason possibly being that most people really do not like face-to-face democracy. They may actually prefer being told what to believe and do in authoritarian top-down systems, on TV, on their cell phones, in video movies, in schools, in homes, in churches, in workplaces, in military units, etc.
But we should keep trying to save democracy it seems to me. I intend to by hosting another Ogeechee Economic Forum at the same time and place this coming third Saturday of August. Maybe more people will show up this time. Read my books Business Voyages and Born to Learn for more data, information, and background on learning, democracy, and the beneficial results of randomly selecting discussion leaders.
Earthians have been on a long business voyage evolving from one-celled amoebas slithering about in the soup and mists of primordial time, dealing with the business of survival as best they could, as long as they could. Some evolved species have survived up to now, most of the originals became extinct, and most of the current survivors may become extinct if human affairs keep trending as they have been around Spaceship Earth.
The smartest specie, homo sapiens, has not only adapted to its environments to survive it has changed its environments, learning how to create ever more sophisticated production and consumption systems in ever more complex organizations.
Early humanoids initially evolved as individuals, soon evolved into family and tribal groups, and later evolved into members and leaders of business, ethnic, religious, political, social, civic, governmental, military, corporate, and cultural groups and organizations. The quantity and quality of learning and knowledge produced in this Earthian evolutionary process is mind-boggling, far too much for any one human to comprehend. Some humans know more than others, but all are dummies relative to everything there is to know now.
According to the philosopher Karl Popper, taken from a passage on page 100 of Business Voyages, it’s possible for humans to know about phenomena in three worlds:
“World 1 includes hydrogen and helium, the heavier elements, liquids and crystals, and living organisms; World 2 includes consciousness of self and of death, and sentience or animal consciousness; and World 3 includes works of art and science and technology, human language, and theories of self and of death.”
Here is a passage I wrote on page 101 of Business Voyages:
“Based on Popper’s schema business knowledge has little to do with most physical aspects of World 1, although it is certainly concerned with living organisms, namely people. How much do you need to know about people to succeed in business? Well, certainly you need some knowledge about people, but not as much as a good psychiatrist would need to know. How can you get such knowledge? Thousands of books have been written about people in all sorts of disciplines. These books are stored in World 3 warehouses, namely libraries, in disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, psychology, economics, history, and others. How much time should you spend exploring this aspect of World 3 if you want to succeed in business? Not too much, otherwise you will not have enough time to produce and sell very much in the World 1 of business.”
Writers can only write about what they know about and can imagine. I have formally studied, taught, researched, and published in degree programsthat focused on economics, organizational behavior, management science, and transactional analysis. Despite the fact I can now recall verbatim only a small fraction of the content I was exposed to in those programs, hopefully I shall recall or imagine here what is most relevant for what should be written in this blog today. I should know more about these subjects than most people not having my experience and formal training, but no one knows right answers for all relevant problems and opportunities that require knowledge from all three of Popper’s Worlds. The best hope is to develop consensual answers in democratic discussions that work better than others for all Earthian species.
For all practical purposes a case can be made that “right” answers for real world problems and opportunities do not exist.
That said, it seems to me democratic discussion methods generally work better in human affairs than authoritarian methods, since they produce answers created by more than one person. On the other hand, it is not necessarily true, it seems to me, that consensual answers get better and better as more and more people contribute to them. It seems to me new tweaks might make consensual answers worse, not better.
Unfortunately, most people are like my father, who tried to teach me, “There can be only one boss.”
It seems to me the most relevant issue is not whether democratic learning methods are better than authoritarian methods, but rather how can humans overcome a natural bias toward authoritarianism and fascism embedded in human nature. Children, after all, have to be controlled and dogmatically taught in their early stages in many cases for their own protection; but what would it hurt to let the child express his or her opinion about what is wrong and what to do in some cases? Most of the time no harm would result, and the child’s self-esteem and confidence would be increased.
It seems to me in most groups, families included, most parents and parent-like people—supervisors, cops, politicians, prison wardens, FBI directors, presidents, managers, preachers, parents, teachers, coaches, sergeants, generals, corporate CEOs, etc.—enjoy being the boss, and they hog all the power they can get their hands on by forbidding one way or another others from participating in democratic discussions, and if this goes on over and over again enough even underlings and underdogs begin to enjoy it and feel good about it, and begin to withdraw from any sort of dialectical face to face human contact and communication; and if everybody does this a stagnant society will ensue, a society that is only concerned about preserving the status quo, which is about where humans are now around Spaceship Earth, despite mounting evidence significant unplanned changes are about to happen regardless of what humans think, wish, or believe.
As any transactional analyst knows the most significant human learning is script-based. Children are programmed by social and psychological messages transmitted by parents and others before the age of eight to adopt a life script that includes the do’s and don’t’s for living their lives in their families and environments.
“Wash behind your ears”, “clean those nails”, “study hard”, “work hard”, “get along”, “make something of yourself” are common verbal social messages transmitted from the Parent ego states of parents to the Parent ego states of children.
At the same time, children are programmed by psychological non-verbal messages, called injunctions, transmitted from the Child ego states of parents to the Child ego states of children. Following is a common listing of script injunctions taken from a passage on page 160 of Business Voyages:
“Don’t Be; Don’t Be You (the sex you are); Don’t Be a Child; Don’t Grow; Don’t Make It; Don’t; Don’t Be Important; Don’t Be Close; Don’t Belong; Don’t Be Well (or sane); Don’t Think About X (forbidden subject); Don’t Think What You Think, Think What I Think; Don’t Feel; Don’t Feel X, Mad, Sad, Glad, Scared, etc.; Don’t Feel What You Feel, Feel What I Feel.”
These authoritarian social and psychological messages cause family scripts to stay much the same generation after generation. Certain family scripts fit various kinds of organizational scripts in society better than others. Thus people with the same kinds of family scripts tend to populate the same kinds of organizations generation after generation, such as various political parties and religious denominations. This early script-based teaching before humans are eight years old is difficult to change, almost impossible some say, making it difficult to change national scripts causing deleterious and disastrous feelings and behaviors, such as fear, greed, hatred, hubris, chauvinism, and aggression, that cause poverty, inequality, war, environmental pollution, and specie extinctions.
According to Eric Berne, MD, a psychiatrist, and the euhemerous of transactional analysis, script messages laid on children in families produce three kinds of generic life script outcomes: winner, loser, and non-winner. If true, this evolved process for determining human outcomes is grossly unfair for humans scripted to be losers and non-winners, an unfair process for which no human can be blamed, caused by ineluctable inevitable accidental cause-effect chains of evolutionary forces, in the infinity of time and space.
Here is a passage I wrote about human scripts taken from page 157 of Business Voyages:
“As Shakespeare pointed out, the world’s a stage and everyone must act a part. It is theoretically possible not to act out a part or script in life by autonomously making rational decisions given actual cases using Adult ego states in the here and now. Whether anyone has ever actually accomplished this cannot be proved. According to Berne, a script is an on-going life plan decided upon by a child before the age of eight—which includes such basic decisions as the life position of the person (whether I’m OK—You’re OK, I’m OK—You’re Not OK, I’m Not OK—You’re OK, I’m Not OK—You’re Not OK), what type of person to marry, how many children to have, the nature of role in life, the nature of life outcome, whether winner, loser, or non- winner, and who will be around when life ends (Berne, 1970). The early influence and programming of parents and the commitment of offsprings to the influence and programming determine scripts. Once the offspring decides to accept the influence and programming it becomes a part of the script that is acted out on the stage of life. In this sense a child less than eight years old determines most lives. Some scripts work out well and some do not. Criminals, entrepreneurs, saints, and sinners are generally what they are because of scripts, not autonomous feelings, thinking, and doing in the here and now. Therefore they are not to blame or praise. People do in the present what they decided to do in the past regarding important matters. According to Berne, only trivial matters are decided by reason in the here and now.”
About the only hope for changing script-based feeling, thinking, and behaving it seems to me is by getting people with disparate scripts together in Game-free democratic dialectical discussions that enable participants to compare their script messages with those of others in relation to particular problems and opportunities confronting everyone so as to construct new consensual answers that are acceptable for everyone.
This is hard to do, impossible some say, because “Birds of a feather flock together,” only associating with their own kind, hearing the same authoritarian messages over and over from their elders, leaders, and managers, and their peers, in a process that creates an addictive psychological security blanket for themselves and their group. This human behavior ironically and unfortunately, when summed internationally, causes all species to become less secure. This happens because the process precludes the development of consensual answers for common problems and opportunities among groups that would have precluded conflict and future problems—and most disastrously the process causes isolated group leaders and members to develop feelings of superiority and self-righteousness that lead to discounting and hating other groups, ultimately leading to serious tissue-tearing wars, global warming, and specie extinctions, possibly also including sooner or later homo sapiens.
Power-hoggers at the highest levels in organizations such as the US government and congress and in most other countries, in the UK, India, France, Germany, Russia, China, Syria, Japan, Indonesia, Bulgaria, Ireland, South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, Cuba, Chile, Mexico, Holland, Iran, Turkey, or wherever, and in multinational corporations of any national origin, having no Game-free democratic open dialectical discussions among themselves generating consensual answers for problems at their level have now brought Spaceship Earth to its most dangerous state of affairs of all time, largely caused by their hogged power being greatly increased, relative to that of their analogous power hoggers of the past, by the collective accumulated learning and knowledge of humans through time in Worlds 1, 2, and 3 that enabled humans to learn, mostly in the last one hundred years or so, how to generate and transmit electricity to power countless electrical devices; learn how to power automobiles, tractors, airplanes, tanks and other mobile devices by burning fossil fuel; learn how to detonate nuclear bombs to kill people in wars; learn how to use two digits, zeros and ones, to create words, numbers, pictures, and sounds in computers and cell phones; learn how to use digits to create data bases, money, and computer programs capable of controlling almost anything that moves; and learn how to do almost anything but cause ordinary humans to communicate and live together in harmony, peace, tranquility, and satisfaction.
Power hoggers at the top of countries around Spaceship Earth don’t cause ordinary humans to live in harmony, peace, tranquility, and satisfaction because they need them to fight one another so the power hoggers can continue to hog their power, and hog the money and wealth their hogged power enables them to steal. Yes, the international behavioral system of trade, commerce, and war at the highest power level around Spaceship Earth is now a system of unorganized and unregulated crime—theft—top power hoggers in all countries stealing and trying to steal whatever they can lay their hands on from underdogs in their own countries and from underdogs in other countries, ostensibly for the good of underdogs in their own countries.
Topdog power hoggers around Earth still use the time-honored and tested strategy of divide and conquer to weaken underdog power hoggers in their countries, bribing, paying, and rewarding them to satisfy, muzzle, and corral underdogs down the chain of command under their control, much like kings and dukes did to underdog barons, knaves, and serfs during the Middle Ages, making sure underdogs stay chained in their places in their groups, talking only to one another at their level about local gossip, daily chores, politicians, sports, children, parents, and what have you, maintaining a banal status quo, a banal status quo that gets so boring from time to time that many local underdogs actually look forward to traveling around Earth to fight in a war, possibly getting killed, yet possibly coming home a hero because of killing others.
Humans throughout recorded history have always been at war somewhere around Spaceship Earth; and the biggest promoters of war today are the power hoggers at the top of the US Deep State.
Figuring out how to eradicate power hogging, the most virulent, vicious, ubiquitous, insidious, pain-causing, lethal, possibly fatal mental illness contaminating the human species, is the best alternative for insuring long term human life aboard Spaceship Earth, or so it seems to me today.
Here is a voting system, The Voters’ Bill of Rights, conceived and written by my long time friend from the 1950s at Wolfforth, Texas, one of the greatest supporters of democracy of our time, William John Cox, a retired lawyer and now political activist, that allows you to vote right now on whether to amend the US Constitution so as to guarantee a right to vote for all US citizens, which, you probably do not know, we do not have now. Take a look at the Voters’ Bill of Rights and cast your vote, now, to amend the US Constitution to include the Voters’ Bill of Rights at
Here’s a new article by Effective Learning Report colleague Joyce Wilson. Sounds like good advice given the nature of today’s world. Back in my day in grade school all it took was a metal lunch box, a pencil, some crayolas, construction paper, glue, scissors, ruler and maybe a protractor. I learned the ABCs while eating Campbell’s vegetable soup at home, and just ran around outside doing whatever I wanted to do with friends after getting home from school. It was a bit of a problem fitting in with the other kids in school for me in the first grade.
Here is a great article by Joan Roelofs brought to you by way of Paul Craig Roberts, one of the greatest truth tellers around Spaceship Earth today, posted by Tyler Durden, editor of ZeroHedge.
It’s a shame we are so dependent on the socialism of what Joan Roelofs calls the military industrial congressional and everything else complex. I too have been a recipient of a lucrative and beneficial contract with the US military, a teaching position with Troy State University Europe, now Troy Univ, in Montgomery, Alabama, that had a contract with the Air Force, to teach management systems to Air Force personnel from all ranks working on a master’s degree, including some nationals of the countries, on US NATO bases at Incirlik Air Base near Adana, Turkey; Hellinikon Air Base near Athens, Greece; Soesterberg Air Base near Soesterberg, Holland; Hessich Air Base near Hessich, Germany; and Aviano Air Base near Aviano, Italy, during 1982-83. I taught three month long courses at each of the locations, Soesterberg and Hessich concurrently.
I admired and was amazed by the operations and culture of the “World’s Largest Airline,” the US Air Force, and did my best to teach my students some things to improve their operations. The Air Force was by far the least racist and fairest organization I had ever experienced. It was a superb example of socialism and meritocracy in action. I expect much the same could be said about internal air force, navy, and army operations today.
It’s unfortunate the MIC’s reason to exist is to kill people in other countries, and it’s pathetic that the US treasury cannot use its copious supply of real tax money, borrowed real money, and funny money—created by punching digits into computers at the Federal Reserve System to buy treasury bonds, thereby putting so-called money in the US treasury to buy things with and to make payrolls—to create and fund non-military meritocratic socialistic systems to improve the internal operations and culture of the entire US economy and society, and Spaceship Earth itself, rather than waste most of it on the military industrial congressional and everything else complex, fostering conflict and hatred around Spaceship Earth, a funded parasitical system shielded and protected from the discipline of free market capitalism, providing good jobs and incomes for only a special, some say heroic, segment of the US population.
I come from a long line of Calvinist preachers, teachers, and military leaders in the US, a militaristic aggressive nation from its inception a little over two hundred years ago. One of my great grandfathers many times removed The Reverend Doctor James Maury, a French Huguenot, taught four US presidents, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, in a boarding school in Virginia. A distant cousin, Matthew Fontaine Maury, a West Point graduate, and a commodore in the confederate navy, taught physics at the Virginia Military Institute and was one of the founders of Virginia Tech. He is the author of the book, famous in its time, Physical Geography of the Seas: The Physical Geography of the Sea and Its Meteorology,” which is still in print. Another distant cousin, Dabney Herndon Maury, also a West Point graduate, was a general fighting for the South in the War of Secession. He published a book titled, Recollections of a Virginian in the Mexican, Indian, and Civil Wars. On the other hand, a great great grandfather of mine, Thomas Sanford Gathright, opposed the South seceding from the Union and was a confederate draft dodger. Despite this, he was the first president of Texas A & M University, recommended for the post by Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America. He was fired after a few years at Texas A & M and was replaced by a retired confederate general. President Gathright wanted Texas A & M to be more or less a liberal arts college rather than a military school.
I took ROTC one year at Hardin-Simmons University at Abilene, Texas, a Baptist college, during 1958-60, which was required for all male students for two years, but got out of it after one year after learning I could never become an officer because three vertebra in my spine had been fused in a surgery, regardless of the fact I was attending Hardin-Simmons on a basketball scholarship. I quit basketball and gave up the scholarship largely because of twisted ankles and blisters caused by the original birth defect causing the back surgery, and transferred to Texas Tech as a junior. The spinal fusion later caused a doctor to tell me during my Army draft examination at Amarillo, Texas for the Vietnam War that, “I’m sorry, but you are permanently disqualified from military service,” which was fine with me, considering how much I detested the bullshit of disassembling, cleaning, and reassembling “my baby,” my M-1 rifle, shining brass, and saluting and marching on the drill field for “inspections,” for academic credit during my one year of Army ROTC. Plus I had no desire to go to Vietnam and “get my ass shot off,” as a lot of kids called it in those days.
This is the first time i have seen something like this, a rich man taking such a stance. I seriously regret the humanitarian trade-off it may entail, but I basically agree. It seems overpopulation is one of Spaceship Earth’s major problems, a major cause of global warming and climate change, and other problems, such as wars and mass killings. To save all of humanity individuals may have to sacrifice some of their parental feelings and needs, and have fewer children. I think we need a one woman one child rule for several generations to peacefully shrink the human population back down to a sustainable level. And capitalism has to change. Unfettered economic growth as a goal as we know it will have to go if the human species is to survive indefinitely around Spaceship Earth.
Seems to me a big problem is that many US citizens are disillusioned or hypocritical. They have learned too much or not enough about how the world really works, thanks to the Internet and psychological defense mechanisms, including learning how vicious US government is and has been in many cases. It’s not that they should not have learned it, since it is the truth; but learning it came at a cost to their mental and physical well being. How can any reasonably intelligent US citizen be truly happy knowing what foul deeds the US and its agents, such as the CIA and the military industrial complex have done to victims in the last two or so centuries? Whether US govt has been too vicious is debatable when you consider a government being vicious may be required for a nation to survive on a planet dominated by aggressive vicious governments, at least until one of them viciously shoots off a bunch of nuclear bombs from missile silos, as if shooting off fireworks celebrating a national holiday.
Now here is an example of free market capitalism if ever there was one, actually socialism, by that great Republican exemplar of capitalism, Donald Trump, who caused the need for the $12 billion rescue welfare handout by starting a trade war. Where is the money to come from? The same place the socialized non market military industrial intelligence people get their money. Funny money of course, if all else fails. All Trump’s US Treasury employees have to do is sell the Federal Reserve System some more treasury bonds, which the Federal Reserve will pay for with digits they call money they will punch into their computers, if nobody else wants to buy the bonds, and the US Treasury will use that so-called money to relieve the distressed farmers. Sooner or later there will be a day of reckoning.
I think trump’s personality and character and most of his actions as president are and have been abominable, but in this case I agree with Paul Craig Roberts: this Russiaphobia media coverage is an insane overblown distraction, primarily to save face for Hillary and the Democrats, and to provide an enemy for the US military security complex to justify their existence and to acquire US tax money and funny money to fund their positions, ambitions and egos. Assuming some Russian subjects did hack the DNC, causing Trump to win, what difference does it make? There is still no proof Trump is the greater evil as president, and Russia is still no threat to the security of the US, except from nuclear bombs, which the Russian govt is smart enough not to shoot off, unless the US shoots at them first with nukes. If what the alleged Russian hackers found out and disclosed about Hillary and the DNC caused her to lose maybe we are better off for it, especially considering her war mongering proclivities disclosed during the campaign. Some of the dirty linen disclosed about Hillary, her husband, and her fund raising during the campaign was seriously egregious, regardless of who was responsible for disclosing it, Russian hackers, Seth Rich, wikileaks, or whomever.
Oh yes it does. It’s necessary for the US Military-Security Complex to get paid $700 billion per year by the US treasury without looking like greedy grown-up boy scouts enjoying jamborees around Spaceship Earth
Excellent Amy Goodman interview of two experts regarding the Helsinki meeting of Trump and Putin. I could not agree more with Glenn Greenwald, a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist
The US constitution has enslaved a majority to the whims and prejudices of a minority, and it should be changed, as Paul Street’s magnificently crafted treatise here shows
Summer seems like it just started, but before you know it, your kids will be heading back to school again. A new school year can be a source of excitement for many children, but for those with anxiety, it can be a source of major stress. You can help relieve your child’s fears of going back to school, by working to ease them into their new routines. From encouraging learning to finding ways to help them relax, here are a few ideas to get your kid started on the right foot for the new school year:
Get the Right Gear
When it comes to getting back to school, helping kids pick some new gear is a good way to get them excited about going to class. One of the easiest ways to take some of the stress out of homework is to pick up a laptop for your kids. Buying your child their own laptop will encourage them to use technology to find information, explore the world and make getting their work done a bit easier. As an added bonus, you can ease some of your own anxiety by not having to worry about sticky hands and spills on your own computers. Refer to this guide to make a thoughtful choice on a kid-friendly laptop to help them take on the next school year.
Start Mornings Right
A smooth start in the morning can reduce your child’s anxiety throughout the day. So if mornings are typically hectic in your house, find ways to makeover your mornings before school starts again. Waking up a little earlier can allow time for you and your kids to get ready at a slower pace. You can even make time in the mornings for some calming meditation, a proven remedy for anxiety and tension. Set up a meditation space in your home and dedicate a few minutes each morning to using it. If your kids are having a hard time getting started, use an app to guide them through their meditation practice and help them breathe with intention. Don’t forget to get in a filling breakfast too, to help boost your child’s focus and concentration in school.
Stick to a Regular Routine
One of the best ways to help your kids beat anxiety about their school schedule is to set up a regular routine during the summer. Keeping kids on a normal schedule can help reduce the stress they feel by a sudden routine shift. A regular schedule can also help children get to bed easier, so they can get the sleep they need to perform well in school and stay in control of their emotions. During summer break, have kids go to bed and wake up as they would during the school year. Fill their days with engaging, educational activities to keep their brains sharp and ready to tackle academic challenges at school. If you work full-time, look into local summer camps that will keep your kids busy.
Help Them Relax at Home
School can be a major source of stress for your kids. From pressure in the classroom to pressures from friends, it can be hard for kids to escape tensions at school. Make sure they have plenty of ways to relax when they are back at home. Create calm in your child’s room by keeping it organized and free of clutter. Encourage your children to talk to you about the stress they experience at school, or have them express their anxiety in productive ways like art or journaling. Journaling is a good way for kids with anxiety to write out their worries and relieve their brains of any stress that is preventing them from relaxing.
Thinking about starting a new year at school can cause tension for many children. Help relieve your child’s anxiety by using these tips to calm their worries and get them ready to face any challenges they may face when they head back to school again.
The first Ogeechee Economic Forum took place Saturday, July 21, 2018, from 10-11 a.m. in the Stapleton Learning Company offices at 32 East Main Street in Statesboro, Georgia, USA.
The day of the forum started for the moderator at eight o’clock with a steak biscuit and a cup of coffee paid for at Daylight Donuts on his way to his office (Lewell Akins’s bookkeeping office in the old Akins Hardware Store), consumed at his desk, which is at the back of the now Parker Realty Building, across a side street from the Sea Island Bank parking lot, which is donated for a Farmer’s Market some Saturday mornings, offering locally grown farm produce, home cooked delicacies, and arts and crafts.
Soothing folk music produced at the Farmer’s Market, heard around the town square and the Bulloch County Courthouse, helped create an upbeat peaceful atmosphere in the early hours of a sunny Saturday morning.
A farmer delivering to the market a full load of ripe watermelons stacked in the bed of his small 1960s-era Chevrolet pickup was reminiscent of a Norman Rockwell painting.
The Ogeechee Economic Forum is conducted free of charge to the public.
The forum is designed to provide open, free, fair, democratic face-to-face discussions of relevant economic problems and opportunities as explained in “De-Gaming and Saving Democracy,” by Richard John Stapleton, the forum moderator and the founder of Effective Learning Company.
Effective Learning Company is a holding company for Stapleton Learning Company, a provider of mathematics tutoring and economic education services, and Effective Learning Publications, an international publisher of economic, entrepreneurship, small business management, business policy, and transactional analysis books, blogs, and articles.
The ventures were started by Richard and Deborah Stapleton at 32 East Main Street when they retired from GA SO Univ in 2005, Debbye retiring as an assistant professor of mathematics and Rick as a professor of management.
The Ogeechee Economic Forum is non-partisan politically and theistically, neither advocating nor opposing any political party or religious denomination. The purpose of the forum is to discuss the causes and cures of economic problems, and related political, social, educational, and military problems in a fact-based manner. On the other hand, forum participants may express their religious beliefs on a first come first serve basis with no interruptions in a collegial manner.
The local Democratic Party had a meeting of their own a few blocks away at twelve noon on the same Saturday as the first Ogeechee Economic Forum meeting at ten o’clock.
The problem discussed in the first Ogeechee Economic Forum was caused by recent events affecting Georgia Southern University, starting with the surprise business decision by the University System of Georgia Board of Regents over a year ago to merge Georgia Southern University in Statesboro with Armstrong State University in Savannah, which has caused considerable consternation, stress, anxiety, and uncertainty in the academic communities of both universities, especially since the unfortunate departure of the well-liked and well-qualified Dr. Jaimie Hebert, the last president of GA SO Univ, who lasted almost two years, and the appointment by the University System of Georgia’s Chancellor’s Office of an acting GA SO Univ president, an employee in the Chancellor’s Office, not holding a doctorate, an MBA in accounting, with little or no faculty input at GA SO Univ.
Faculty at Georgia Southern still do not have their contracts for the 2018-19 academic year and it’s uncertain when they will learn whether they will get a raise for the year.
There is a plan in place involving over one hundred committees to complete the merger of GA SO and Armstrong that was overseen by Dr. Hebert.
Hopefully this top-down corporate-like merger of two universities will be consummated somehow in the near future without seriously increasing the existing levels of stress, uncertainty, consternation, and anxiety in the GA SO Univ academic community. If this peremptory top-down administrative behavior continues unabated most likely fully-qualified competitive GA SO Univ faculty with excellent academic credentials, like Dr. Hebert, will be migrating to more democratically managed universities, if they can find open positions there.
As a two-year member of the GA SO Univ Retirees Association Council, it was obvious to me that retired faculty were not pleased that the traditional GA SO Univ Retiree’s Luncheon, funded by GA SO for decades, was unceremoniously cancelled with no excuses this past spring.
I was also surprised to learn this spring that over one hundred thousand dollars of principal and accrued interest deposited in a bank account by the Georgia Southern Faculty and Staff Club, mostly contributed by the members of the original GA SO Faculty Club, of which I was an active dues-paying member for some thirty years, which had not been active for over a decade, had been recently given by a committee to GA SO Univ for a program that would give the money away in $500 grants to individual GA SO faculty and staff members who experience unexpected hardships in their lives.
No attempt was made to contact the living members of the Old Faculty Club, and younger members who joined after the club was renamed, to explain why it had suddenly become imperative to do something with the accrued Faculty and Staff Club money, rather than let it continue to accrue interest in a bank account as it had been for ten or more years, and secure their input about what to do with it. The committee processes were not made public and the decision about what to do with the money was of questionable appropriateness. While giving the money away in charitable $500 grants to individual faculty and staff members would be laudable in some cases, it seems to me the money would be more appropriately spent in support of the collective interests and activities of all retired faculty and staff of GA SO Univ, or in support of students in the form of merit-based academic scholarships.
It seems to me the principal and accrued interest of the Old Faculty Club, which had been renamed the Faculty and Staff Club, should be returned to the bank account in that name and all living club members that contributed monetarily to building the account balance should have an opportunity to vote on what to do with the existing balance, which at the time it was turned over to GA SO, according to some estimates, was about $140,000.
Unfortunately we cannot know with certainty what is the true state of affairs in this case, as is true in most economic and business cases. Have the University System of Georgia Board of Regents and the Chancellor’s Office acted inappropriately deciding to merge GA SO and Armstrong? Did the Chancellor’s office inappropriately appoint one of its own employees with an MBA the acting president of GA SO? Is the economic situation of GA SO so uncertain that faculty could not be issued contracts as usual, at least by July 1, the start of the new fiscal year? Did administrators at GA SO inappropriately disperse Faculty and Staff Club funds?
There are no provably true right answers for any of these questions since we do not have sufficient facts to know the true state of affairs, and for sure we do not know what are the true causes. Facts are costly and few people have sufficient time, money, and expertise to dig up enough of them to achieve certainty in real world cases. So most of the time we have to admit the higher ups may know more than we do and may have done the right thing. It may be the economic situations of GA SO and Armstrong have deteriorated more in recent years than most people realize and top down austere arbitrary measures are justified to deal with them. It may be the wages and salaries of some faculty and staff people are now so low that GA SO Univ needs a slush fund such as the Old Faculty Club money to help those in dire need. Time will tell in some cases, as more facts naturally come to light.
The next meeting of the Ogeechee Economic Forum will be Saturday, August 18, 2018 at the same location and time, 10-11 a.m., again the third Saturday of the month.
Hope to participate with you then and there face-to-face.
Feel free to forward, share, email, snail mail, print or otherwise disseminate this article any way you see fit.
Richard John Stapleton, Editor & Publisher, Effective Learning Report, Effective Learning Publications, Statesboro, Georgia, USA, July 23, 2018
I argued in my article “Moving Farther West to Escape Problems at Home is No Longer an Option,” published August 29, 2013 in the Intrepid Report, that capitalism and most religions are now almost obsolete; and, given the advent of modern computers, computer programmers, computer software and the Internet, it is now technologically feasible to construct a new economic system vastly more efficient, effective and fair than what now exists on Earth.
Reading Buckminster Fuller’s book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969) back in the 1970s stimulated some of these ideas. He was the first person I read to suggest computers are the best hope for human survival on Earth, that humans should never do work that machines can do better, and that unemployment can be eliminated overnight by governments issuing mind grants to all citizens, paying them to think.
Progressives now argue something must be done about poorly regulated quasi-obsolete economic systems, political systems, religious systems, legal systems, production systems, and distribution systems that have resulted in the richest 20 percent of Earthians, of about seven billion humans now alive on Earth, consuming about 76 percent of all goods and services produced every year on Earth, with the bottom 20 percent consuming about 1.5 percent of all goods and services, while a small free Earthian elite, about 26 million humans own and control about 40 percent of Earth’s wealth, living in luxury with almost unlimited options for travel and entertainment, living cheek by jowl among billions of humans mired in poverty, owning almost nothing, doing almost the equivalent of slave labor day in and day out all their lives, yet living in constant fear of being fired from their jobs for disloyalty or slackness, who are condemned to poverty by their wages, in most cases within miles of where they were accidentally born, where they grew up with little or no opportunity to learn relevant knowledge about how the world works, in some cases not even having had an opportunity to learn how to read.
I am not advocating abolishing capitalism, communism, socialism, theism, atheism, or any religious ism, since I think certain aspects of capitalism and most religions are humane and beneficial in certain ways, such as, in the case of capitalism, the decentralization of production at the entrepreneurial and small business level and people being rewarded for creating new ideas, products and services. On the other hand, I think the inevitable centralizing of wealth and power in large corporations and in the hands of the elite rich caused by capitalism is an abomination, causing many of Earth’s most threatening problems, including global warming. But I do not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Here’s an idea that happened to me that entails using a management science technique to eventually solve the Earthian inequality problem, a major cause of today’s North African and Middle Eastern civil war tragedies. To my knowledge I am the first Earthian to whom such an idea happened, first published in 1970 in my doctoral dissertation, An Analysis of Rural Manpower Migration Patterns in the South Plains Region of Texas, and later in 2008 in my book Business Voyages, a business bible for people who would like to do the right thing for all Earthians.
An Earthian is any individual member of any species of fauna or flora aboard Spaceship Earth.
Buckminster Fuller informed me in his Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth that he believed computers would eventually save humanity; but I, to my knowledge, am the first Earthian to show in some detail how it could be done with computers, computer programming, and the management science technique linear programming. Buckminster Fuller invented the appellation Spaceship Earth and the word Earthian.
Here is my schema for how Buckminster Fuller’s general idea might be brought to fruition to save Spaceship Earth from self-destructing, from my book Business Voyages, first published in 2008, from a passage embarking on page 617:
“It still seems to me Buckminster Fuller in his Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969) that I first read in 1973 had some of the most creative and cogent ideas I have read for getting humanity out of its ongoing mess. One of Fuller’s ideas was that people should not do work that machines can do better. Another of his ideas was that people should be paid to think with mind grants to maintain full employment. Bringing this about in World 1 would require a lot of change, possibly entailing decreasing the human population aboard Spaceship Earth through lower birth rates over time, but it seems to me Fuller’s ideas about the nature of work, full employment, and prosperity for all could be implemented, perhaps within a century or so. According to Fuller (1969), we need more great pirates, modern-day equivalents of world traders of the past who regulated affairs around the globe because of what they learned sailing their trading ships from one world to another.
“I do not think any of the economic ideas I have heard from Republican or Democratic political candidates in the US in the last year (2003-2004) will do anything to solve problems such as overpopulation in poor countries and jobs being outsourced to poor countries. Seemingly politicians of all stripes will not or cannot face up to the fact that wages are low in poor countries because there are billions of poor people in such countries willing to work hard for a pittance compared to wages and salaries in rich countries, and so long as such conditions exist workers in rich countries will experience inexorable downward pressure on their wages and salaries because of the iron laws of economic competition and supply and demand, which can only be temporarily suppressed in the short run by politicians bending the rules of the game for their favored few through measures such as tariffs, subsidies, currency manipulation, deficit spending, tax reductions, interest rate reductions, and money-printing.
“The long-term solution is for all people aboard Spaceship Earth to get rich, free, and friendly, but to reach that happy state of affairs much patience and sacrifice will be required of billions of poverty-stricken people around the globe—social heroes and martyrs who peacefully live their lives knowing they inherited a relatively mean, short, brutish and unfair fate (Hobbes, 1651).
“Although some biological constructivists think humanity is involved in a meaningless drift in the infinity of time and space, it’s possible most people aboard Spaceship Earth could achieve satisfying lives devoid of economic insecurity and threat of terrorism and military attack within one hundred years. It seems to me this is possible with current rates of progress using free enterprise market systems and democratic political processes, coupled with the ongoing evolutionary bottom-up discovery and application of scientific knowledge (Stapleton & Stapleton, 1998), assuming humans do not blow themselves up with weapons of mass destruction or render themselves extinct with environmental pollution in the meantime. On the other hand, it’s possible that new economic, social, and political alternatives can be tried that might accelerate the current rate of progress; assuming human beings are intelligent enough and creative enough to co-construct them.
“Being a good entrepreneur, or any other kind of good human being, is not easy these days. Despite the gathering storm clouds clearly visible ahead and the wind, heat, and choppy water we are now experiencing caused by religious fanaticism, terrorism, overpopulation, energy depletion, and global warming, the entrepreneur remains the captain of his or her ship.
“It’s not easy to remain positive and work hard every day running a tight ship dealing with the problems and details of one’s particular daily existence while one is constantly reminded by news media that the world is going to hell in a hand basket. While the world may be going to hell in a hand basket at some time, it is not going to self- destruct today, this year, or this decade. Despite the problems of World 1, there remain myriad opportunities—right now—for entrepreneurs all over Earth to invent, produce, and sell new products, services, and processes, and get rich, as many are doing.
“The problem is that if everyone should ignore global warming, overpopulation, religious fanaticism, energy depletion, and terrorism, focusing solely on her or his personal life problems, goals, and ambitions, problems of global warming, overpopulation, religious fanaticism, energy depletion, and terrorism are sure to worsen; and if negative trends caused by these problems continue indefinitely, the “world” could come to an end as prophesied by religious fanatics. To help insure this does not happen, the time may come when all conscientious and intelligent human beings, including self-interested entrepreneurs in the process of getting rich, must contribute a significant portion of their time and money to solving the world’s problems if “the world” is to continue to exist.
“Solving problems caused by global warming, religious fanaticism, overpopulation, energy depletion, and terrorism may become the moral equivalent of fighting in world wars, as President Jimmy Carter of the US pointed out regarding the energy crisis of the 1970’s, requiring courageous efforts of mythic proportions and the sacrifices of millions of heroes.
“It seems to me a mathematical formulation exists that one day may develop for Earthians power in economics loosely analogous to the power of E=mc2 in physics. This formulation is Max or Min CjXj, subject to, AijXj ≤, =, or ≥ Bi, which is a general form of the linear programming model, which has been around for many years in management science, operations research, and linear algebra courses. It seems to me Max CjXj, s.t. AijXj ≤, =, or ≥ Bi symbolizes knowledge that gives the human species about as much potential power to perpetuate itself as E=mc2 symbolizes knowledge that gives the human species the power to exterminate itself.
“The upshot of this linear programming discussion is that if computers and computer programs become powerful enough, they might eventually store data in matrices for food, clothing, shelter, energy, transportation, and medicine requirements for every single human living on Planet Earth. These requirements could be summed to develop the total requirement for food, clothing, shelter, energy, etc. for Earth as a whole, per week, month, year, or whatever. An Xj matrix stored in a magnum computer system might contain all the various products required by humans, a Bi matrix in the linear programming formulation might contain all the types of resources available to produce the required goods, which will constrain production below some limit, an Aij matrix in the LP model might contain the amount of various resources required to produce one unit of each necessity of life, or Xj, and a Cj matrix in the linear programming formulation might contain the relative utility of each alternative good, or Xj.
“The Magnum Computer System could then scientifically compute the optimum number of units of alternative products to produce for humans then alive on Earth, once data have been read into the requisite data bases, by someone clicking an icon energizing a “Do loop” of the magnum program to do the processing of the Magnum Production Schedule. Once the goods are produced the Magnum Computer System could then scientifically distribute them among all humans living on Earth using another quantitative management science technique known as the transportation model to minimize transportation costs from raw materials to finished products to consumers. Such a process would insure the world’s resources necessary to sustain human life were used in an optimum manner and were consumed in a generally fair manner.
“Computers can not only store and manipulate data in two dimensional matrices in rows and columns on one plane; they can store and manipulate data in three dimensional matrices that not only go east-west in rows and north-south in columns on one plane, but up and down on different planes. Instead of only having an M x N matrix, you can have an M x N x O matrix, and tell a computer to store data in the cell located at the intersection of the Mth row, the Nth column, and the Oth plane, much like you would park an automobile in a particular space of a multi-story garage. And you can have many more dimensions if you like. You can put M x N x O matrices in larger labeled matrices, and put those labeled matrices in even larger matrices, and so on. Xt,k,c,q,n,p,g, stored in a computer, could be a variable representing the gth good required by the pth person, in the nth city, of the qth state, of the cth country, of the kth continent, of the tth year, entailing accessing data in 7 interrelated matrices, or dimensions. Subscripts attached to variables such as X in this example tell the computer how to track down specific values through the maze of interrelated matrices. Numbers for the subscripts can theoretically increment from 1 to any finite number (the number of cells in the matrix) and entail that many passes through nested do-loops (7 in this example) in the overall computer algorithm (sequence of iterative mathematical steps) to develop aggregate totals. The process is similar to storing data in labeled files on your personal computer, putting those labeled files in labeled folders, and then putting those labeled folders into other labeled folders, etc., and using subscripts to keep track of what value you put in what variable in what file of what folder.
“Writing a computer program to manage a global economy would require many thousands of man-hours of flowcharting and programming time and a magnum computer system. Such requirements for such a project might approximate the man-hour and technical knowledge and skill requirements of the Manhattan project that produced the first atom bomb, or the US space program that put the first man on the moon. Writing such a program would require flowcharting and programming skill many orders of magnitude greater than mine. I have not written a line of computer code since earning my doctorate in 1969, and I learned only one computer language, Fortran IV.
“Using linear programming to schedule world production and distribution of the necessities of life is at present little more than business science fiction, however mathematically feasible this is or shall become as computers and computer software become more powerful and sophisticated. On the other hand, such a system may evolve through time through synergistic learning as more and more humans comprehend what is going on. For more on synergistic learning and comprehension refer back to Buckminster Fuller’s definitions of synergy and comprehension in Chapter 1 of Business Voyages, “Where to Go.”
“It’s possible a computerized global economic system shall evolve for the production and distribution of the necessities of life—food, clothing, shelter, and medicine—with the national identities, cultures, political systems, economic systems, religions, and so forth of the some 200 nations now on Earth remaining intact. Free enterprise might exist for everything but the production and distribution of the necessities of life. I have no idea what are the probabilities of any of these things happening, but it seems to me they are possible, which, it seems to me, is hopeful for all mankind.
“Today in reality the market system, composed of billions of isolated customers voting for the producing of various goods by buying things, is used to decide what to produce and how to distribute the produced items. The market system works pretty well for billions of people on Earth, but poorly for a billion or so, those who go to bed hungry at night. Politicians and bureaucrats spasmodically intervene at various times and places based on impulses, fears, power needs, sympathy, and other motivations to provide charitable aid for fellow humans clearly in need of help, regardless of where the people needing help might have been unlucky enough to have been born on Earth, and regardless of global market determinations, in a loose system of governments and charitable organizations including the United Nations that has enabled the human species as a whole to muddle through.”
“Management scientists using something like linear programming to schedule, produce, and distribute the necessities of life for all humanity as outlined above would prove those in control of the Magnum Computer System truly cared about every single human alive on Earth, creating a World 1 in which every man, woman, and child alive on Earth would know for a fact she or he was truly appreciated and protected by a rational fair global system during her or his infinitesimally short existence on Earth. The implementation of such a system might finally untie the Gordian knot that has kept much of mankind threatened and terrorized by fear, ignorance, poverty, hunger, disease, misery and violence since time immemorial.”
According to the philosopher Karl Popper, quoted in Business Voyages, “World 1 includes hydrogen and helium, the heavier elements, liquids and crystals, and living organisms; World 2 includes consciousness of self and of death, and sentience or animal consciousness; and World 3 includes works of art and science and technology, human language, and theories of self and of death.”
It seems Earthians must make major changes or live with the probabilities of an environmental catastrophe. Better birth control measures are needed to reduce overpopulation, a major cause of global warming; and changes must be made in economic strategies and belief systems that inevitably cause Earth’s resources to wind up in the hands of fewer and fewer humans while most of Earth’s population becomes poorer and poorer, while the environment is polluted more and more, having possibly already passed a tipping point.
Here’s a an idea for dealing with the over-population problem, which would peacefully shrink Earth’s human population from generation to generation until a sustainable population level is reached, by Earthian human females having no more than one child each, of either sex, assuming they were sanctioned to do so.
A solution for the Earthian plight probably entails humans inventing a bottom-up religion and a spiritual god, similar to the god and religion advocated by Michael Adzema and Native American Elders. Adzema defines a spiritual god as the highest moral, ethical and spiritual state individual humans are capable of achieving, becoming an Atman, using pure subjectivity. Native American elders conceive of god as the Great Spirit that exists in all nature, spiritually present in Earth itself, in its waters, mountains, and animals. These gods are not commanding gods ruling from above, but rather exist in the minds of humans who feel their presence here on Earth.
Native Americans worshiped their ancestors, sensing, feeling and reliving the ego states, beliefs and behaviors that had been introjected into their ancestors’ neuronal networks, from first-hand exposure to mothers in their wombs, and continuing outside their wombs interacting with their parents and grandparents who showed and used ancestral ego states, which were passed like a baton between runners in a track race every generation since time immemorial, causing the last generation produced to feel, think and do in the here and now much as their ancestors had, which like all human processes on Earth produced both good and bad effects from one perspective or another depending on circumstances.
Both the old God of the Book and the new US surveillance and drone technological god of computers and the Internet rely on threats, fear and intimidation to cause humans to do the right thing in the opinion of the gods, using top-down quasi-legal systems with built-in punishments for wrongdoers. The old God also promised a fantastical reward in a heaven throughout eternity as his major incentive for sinners who signed up for his program and who met his expectations and requirements when alive on Earth.
One can build the case what humans need now is a non-commanding bottom-up belief system that supports the interests of all Earthians that will produce learning that will cause them to do the right thing for themselves and others, causing them to do what is necessary for all to survive and experience satisfaction during their infinitesimally short lives, simply because the right thing is the right thing for all species on Earth, with no thought of earning a fantastical eternal reward in some sort of heaven.
The old God fostered economic and legal systems that encouraged the selfish acquisition of land and goods, including offspring; the new bottom-up god would peacefully encourage the sharing of resources so as to enhance the welfare and survival of all Earthians, not merely the richest, most powerful, most manipulative, most callous, most hypocritical, most deceitful, and most obedient humans.
From a practical standpoint, a program similar to the one above would probably entail the internationalization of most large corporations and industries so as to produce and distribute the necessities of life in a fair way. This would entail an overhaul of the way people work and live and their human relationships. In this New World all humans would be born free and empowered; and, like those born truly rich today, they would not have to worry about ever having to work for a living as long as they lived.
Under this new regime, everyone born on Earth would inherit at birth the same number of stock shares in Spaceship Earth, Inc., which would pay sufficient dividends to provide a decent life year after year until death.
Some onerous repetitive maintenance jobs in house cleaning, health care, farming, construction, manufacturing, and the like probably can never be fully automated; and some humans will have to do these jobs; but many humans could be motivated to do those jobs by allowing the market system to take care of this much as it does now, if there was no risk of workers doing this work losing their birthright Spaceship Earth, Inc. dividend checks.
Anyone lucky enough to inherit strong fast muscles, height, weight and good coordination and a will to win with a willingness to train and work hard could still make extra money playing professional sports. The same goes for people who might inherit exceptionally sexy physiques and artistic and entertainment talents of all sorts. I suppose it might be fair for some of these athletes and entertainers to get filthy rich as they do now, while retaining their Spaceship Earth, Inc. dividend checks; but the main thing would be to make sure every Earthian born had a good life guaranteed with Spaceship Earth dividend checks.
This, surely, would finally get rid of the need for large expensive military forces and wars to keep people employed and to kill people to reduce human populations to prevent famines.
Most Earthians satisfied with their dividend checks from Spaceship Earth, Inc. could spend their time reading, writing and solving math problems, visiting with one another, communicating on the Internet, doing scientific experiments, mowing their own grass with push lawnmowers, perhaps growing some of their own eggs, milk and vegetables in their back yards, cooking their own food, attending plays and art shows, and traveling now and then on trains and airplanes to see firsthand new, beautiful and inspiring sights around Earth.
For ramifications see Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds, a business bible for people who would like to do the right thing for all Earthians.
Richard John Stapleton is an emeritus professor of business policy, ethics and entrepreneurship who writes on business and politics at https://www.effectivelearning.net. He is the Editor & Publisher of the Effective Learning Report, and The Earthian.
Please feel free to forward, share, print, reprint, or otherwise disseminate this article any way you see fit.
