Why Words, Pictures, and Numbers Cannot “Prove” What the Truth “Is” in Dangerous Cases

 

By Richard John Stapleton

Ben Barnes, a Texas state legislator, was a crony of John Connolly and a major player in Texas politics. Connolly was a Texas governor and a USian Secretary of Treasury under Richard Nixon, who was shot in the front seat of the same car in Dallas, Texas as President Kennedy when JFK was assassinated in the back seat in 1963, and we still cannot “prove” who killed him.

I was working as an expediter and dispatcher in production control with an undergraduate degree in economics from Texas Tech University in a Litton Industries plant in Lubbock, Texas that assembled electronic components for USian military aircraft guidance and control systems one evening in 1965 when Barnes and Connolly came strolling through the plant shaking hands with everybody. The plant was put there by Tex Thornton, originally from Texas, the Litton Industries founder, and an ex-crony of USian president Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam War Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Both Thornton and McNamara were Harvard Business School graduates who worked as whiz kids in production control at Ford Motor Company. They were all flying high back in those days. I was hired at Litton by a Harvard Business School graduate, who fired me seven months later. He told me I was too sensitive to the needs of people for production control work, telling me I ought to get into something like personnel. He was generally right about this, and he did me a big favor firing me when he did from the ill-scripted Litton plant, saving me months and maybe years of wasted time. I learned a lot there in seven months that I did not want to know about how the Earthian economic and social system works. The HBS-educated fellow who hired and fired me left Litton Industries himself a few months later, taking a new job with the international management consulting firm Booze Allen Hamilton.

For more background on this case, go here https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/03/30/reagans-treason-two-bushes-and-the-23-million-payoff/?fbclid=IwAR1tl89rMRyeRhADt2-90ZHKmQUJyyT9e4wC2mAqNcYVFFSc9d1GinuGwcc

I had about decided this Bragg investigation was just another nothing burger like the pusillanimous Mueller, January 6th Committee, and Garland investigations, all sound and no fury. The Bragg investigation and indictment in the Manhattan District of New York have restored some of my previous respect for and faith in the USian rule of law. I had begun to think USian law-enforcers were very good at bullying, arresting, prosecuting, indicting, and imprisoning poor and hapless young black and white males and females for petty theft and drug selling but too cowardly to prosecute a dangerous older white male con artist with access to serious money and good lawyers such as the law-disrespecting playground bully Donald Trump. Hallelujah. Apparently, the Bragg investigators uncovered and developed facts they think prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the hush money paid to Stormy Daniel and at least one other woman was not merely to make sure Trump’s wife would not learn about another act of adultery on Trump’s part but to make sure information about this paid-for sexual act did not become public knowledge before the electors of the nefarious USian Electoral College cast their votes for the new USian president in 2016. If information about the Stormy Daniel case had become public knowledge before the electoral vote it’s possible that Trump would not have become a USian president. Evidently, these facts and this reasoning raised a misdemeanor offense to the level of a felony crime. We will have to wait and see to learn what these facts were as the trial proceeds and eventually learn whether Trump will be declared guilty of committing a felony crime by a jury of twelve Earthian humans who may or may not consider the facts and reasoning of the case real and relevant. It’s hard for Earthian human prosecutors to prove the truth of anything beyond a shadow of a doubt communicating with normal and abnormal Earthian humans and skilled highly-paid defense lawyers in a courtroom who can use all manner of irrelevant, hypothetical, and poorly-defined and misleading words, ego states, and scripts to manipulate fickle and obtuse jurors into voting in their favor. Furthermore, given the incessant broadcasting in public media of “stories” showing Trump’s morals, ethics, and behaviors, that untold millions of USians saw and heard, for over five years now, having had facts, pictures, and numbers poured into their eyes, ears, and minds about what was going on, it seems no rational human would ever dream of voting for Trump again. But, alas, this is not the case. While this indictment will cause Trump to lose voters, millions of his voters will vote for him again if they have the chance. There is no way anyone can prove what the truth is to these Earthian humans in this case. Given that this sort of human behavior has without doubt happened over and over throughout Earthian human history, is it any wonder that incredible injustice and incompetence have always existed in all countries around Spaceship Earth, and that Earthian humans are now faced with the possibility of their imminent extinction as a species, caused by GWCC and MNWP, Global Warming and Climate Change and Militarization and Nuclear Weapons Proliferation?

For more background on this case go here https://www.newzit.com/?ito=facebook_share_topstory&fbclid=IwAR09Q89m7KgE6XxpJK6X0vHAY92UPvB4TQA2FrpfjcmOOP61nqMeVUYGBvQ.

I’m not for “overthrowing” the existing economic and social order. I’m for evolving a better one, peacefully, ASAP. How to bring that about is the question. Violent revolution is not the answer. All violence in the form of all-out war does is temporarily tear down the existing economic and social order, doing no permanent good. Oligarchies just start over again rising from the ashes and evolve the same sort of top-down tyranny as the one that just got torn down, which is in turn also ultimately torn down. Unfortunately GWCC and MNWP in the current age may have made it inevitable that the existing Earthian economic and social order will be torn down one more time, but this time precluding the possibility of a new Earthian human economic and social order rising from the ashes, since Earthian humans will have been rendered extinct by GWCC and/or MNWP.

For more background on this case go to https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/03/31/novel-reflections-on-dickens-marx-bronte-zola-bernie-and-orwell/?fbclid=IwAR0Tr3Cg9IFw7Ztb3w66Mo85BEU3XIV4JsSqK5fjwQH1kQoHqmx3LkRnoYU.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA would spin the spinner of his Classroom De-Gamer™ in his classes to randomly select a student at the beginning of each class session to lead a discussion of the case assigned for the day, a case taken from a planned or operating business prepared by case writers at Georgia Southern, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Alabama.

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

Grades were based eighty percent on class participation in dialectical discussions about what to do about problems and opportunities found in cases; the rest of the final grade was based on two case write-ups. One write-up was about what the student observed, researched, analyzed, and wrote about an existing business in the local environment or a business plan the student created. The other write-up was an analysis of a case researched and written by professors about a business assigned as the final exam. Cases used in his courses contained processes, problems, opportunities, and data occurring in all functional areas of business such as entrepreneurship, finance, marketing, operations management, control, management information systems, and business policy and strategy.

He has published refereed journal articles and books explaining how his democratic Game-free Adult-Adult I’m OK–You’re OK case method system works, by banishing Persecutors, Rescuers, and Victims playing psychological Games from the teaching and learning process, first documented in an article titled “The Classroom De-Gamer” he published in 1978 in the Transactional Analysis Journal. He has published seven books and over one hundred articles in various media containing cases, research data, and essays on teaching and learning and management policies and practices.

Stapleton learned and trained using transactional analysis with Martin Groder, MD; Graham Barnes, PhD; Vann Joines, PhD; and many others at the Southeast Institute at Chapel Hill, North Carolina (1975-1978).

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

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

He taught his own case method track at the undergraduate level in the management department of the business school at Georgia Southern University offering four or five different elective case method courses each academic year (1970-2005), in which he led, coordinated, and graded about twenty-five or so students each year who took all or most of those case method courses in their junior and senior years, of about two hundred students who signed up for all his courses each year. He used a democratic circle or amphitheater classroom layout in all his classes. He also taught most semesters two sections of a capstone integrative business policy course he added to the business school curriculum in 1970 that was required for all undergraduate business majors that could be elected by any student in any major.  He was the only professor in the business school to use the case method in any course.

His students agreed to a course learning contract that stipulated they would read the facts of the case before class and would lose a whole letter grade from the course final grade if the De-Gamer randomly caught them obviously not having read the case before class, if they had not slipped a note under his office door before class telling him they had not read the case, which they could do twice during the course without penalty.

About ten percent of his students made A’s and about five percent made D’s. Most made C’s, which is about right, since C = Average. There were few F’s in his courses. The main criterion for course grades was the quantity and quality of ideas sold by students in case method discussions. He used peer ratings to give students feedback showing what their fellow students thought about the quantity and quality of their ideas sold in class, having made it clear the final decision about final grades was his. He did not believe in Lake Wobegon grading.

No student was ever forced to take one of his courses to graduate, and the most hardened Game-players in the school did not sign up for his courses after he issued his Edict of 1972 in which he clearly spelled out in his syllabi the penalty for getting caught unprepared. His Classroom De-Gamer™ was roundly discussed by students in bull sessions across campus every year and was labeled various things, such as The Wheel of Fate and The Death Wheel. Most students near the end of his career simply called it The Spinner.

He appreciated Georgia Southern honoring his academic freedom by allowing him control of his teaching methods, classroom layouts, grading procedures, and course books, cases, and materials, some of which he researched, wrote, and published. He was promoted to full professor at age thirty-six.

He solicited anonymous longitudinal research data using questionnaires in 1992 showing his case method students during 1972-1982 reported higher yearly incomes in 1992 than students electing the same courses in 1972-1982 taught by professors using the authoritarian lecture method and the militaristic row and column classroom layout, who graded students based on memorizing or calculating  “right answers” for tests, indicating learners learning in Adult–Adult I’m OK–You’re OK Game-free democratic learning processes graded subjectively became more successful in the real world of business than learners lectured to and graded using so-called objective multiple-choice tests.  

Only former students who had worked in the real world ten or more years after graduating from the Georgia Southern business school were included in the study. The data are shown, analyzed, and discussed in full in “Evidence the Case Method Works” in his book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds, 2008, pg. 475). The data were also used in several refereed articles.

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

For more information on related classroom management ethical issues see Stapleton, R.J. and Murkison, G. (2001), “Optimizing the fairness of student evaluations: A study of correlations between instructor excellence, study production, learning production, and expected grades,” in the Journal of Management Education, 25(3), 269-292.

Stapleton had one of the lowest student grade point averages among professors in the business school and was one of the lowest-ranked professors as an instructor on computerized campus-wide student evaluations that weighted only instructor excellence scores up to 2000; but he was one of the highest-ranked professors in a computerized student evaluation he designed that generated data also showing and weighting study production, learning production, and expected grades scores for each professor, published in “Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations.”

To read the Optimizing Fairness article in full, go to https://studysites.sagepub.com/holt/articles/Stapleton.pdf . After this research was published, Georgia Southern in 2001 added study production, learning production, and expected grades questions to the student evaluation form used campus-wide.

“Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations” has by now April 2, 2023 been cited as a reference in 85 refereed journal articles concerned about the ethics of student evaluations in several academic disciplines, including ten new citations since April S2021.

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

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

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