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Effective Learning Report

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Why healthcare should be managed as a natural monopoly

Posted on July 17, 2017

by Richard John Stapleton

In industries in which there is inelastic demand, in industries in which people have to buy a product or service regardless of prices charged, free competition does not work in the best interest of customers. Prices charged are not inexorably driven down by competition to an optimum level for customers and for all stakeholders, to the lowest prices that fairly compensate all factors of production in the industry, including a rational return for the owners of capital. In such industries the price system degenerates in such a way that providers can fix prices about the way they want, as in the case of high priced drugs, and engage in price discrimination, as in the case of medical services and treatments, that is, charging different prices to different customers. This behavior creates chaotic situations in which almost no one knows what many treatments will or should cost. The solution is to regulate such industries by the state as full monopolies, or as what are called natural monopolies, in which prices are set by the state, as in the cases of electricity and water utilities. In such cases, under capitalism, effective and ethical regulators set customer prices at levels that provide competitive market prices for suppliers of raw materials, competitive wages and salaries for workers and managers, and competitive returns on investment for the owners of employed capital. Medicine and health services are basically public utilities, since they are required, like electricity and water, demand being inelastic, caused by people not wanting to die or become impaired or go blind or go crazy and empathetic human beings not wanting to suffer grief and sadness caused by having to observe these things happening to people in droves, unnecessarily. Consequently, if people cannot pay for their medical treatments providers have to treat them free for humanitarian reasons, and this forces and allows providers to set exorbitant uneconomic prices for customers that can pay to compensate for their losses on those that cannot or will not pay, causing chaos and widespread unfairness. Therefore, as Obama pointed out, a decent society must provide affordable health insurance for everyone in order to control medical prices. What Obama did not fight hard enough for, unfortunately, is the solution for the whole problem, the logical conclusion that the federal government must provide affordable health insurance for everyone, aka Medicare for All, as a good natural monopolist, not only setting prices for national health insurance, but also fair and rational national prices for drug and medical treatments, just like good state regulators set prices for electricity and water. The US is the only developed nation on Earth in which medical bills are a major cause of bankruptcy for citizens, a painful and degrading fate, but a fate less painful and degrading, perhaps, than people becoming debt slaves the rest of their lives, harassed by horrendous medical bills hanging over their heads, and bill collectors, caused by avoiding premature deaths and impairments, by agreeing to pay for drugs and medical procedures at the time of service, or die. The only cure for this inhumane mental anguish, pain, and suffering is the federal government regulating the healthcare industry as a natural monopoly, using proven time-honored necessary and rational procedures under capitalism. The federal government should allow insurance companies to sell all the life, automobile, and home insurance policies they want, but it should get them out of the business of selling health insurance; and federal regulators should start fairly and rationally regulating drug and medical prices, while providing rational and fair rates of return on invested capital for all providers, using standard procedures used forever in regulated natural monopolies. Federal regulators probably won’t do this because politicians won’t let them do it, since elected senators, representatives, and presidents need campaign contributions from fat cats running the healthcare industry, one of the most profitable industries in the US, earning exorbitant irrational uneconomic profits because of being allowed to operate as an unregulated monopoly. To verify this just take a look at the stock price increases of healthcare corporations relative to the Standard & Poors index since the Crash of 2007. To consider that satisfying the money, power, and fame needs and drives of one hundred thousand or so politicians, healthcare industry corporate fat cats, and healthcare industry professionals and employees, caused by not having a national health service, would count more in the US than curing the spiritual, economic, and psychological pain and suffering of one hundred million or more ordinary citizens caused by not having a national health service is mind boggling, another sad example of the venality, callousness, corruption, obtuseness, and ethical incompetence now reigning in Washington. Feel free to forward, reprint, or otherwise disseminate this article any way you see fit. Richard John Stapleton, Editor & Publisher, Effective Learning Report, 32 East Main Street, Statesboro, Georgia, July 20, 2017 Richard John Stapleton is an emeritus professor of entrepreneurship, organizational behavior, ethics, and business policy at Georgia Southern University, who writes on business and politics at effectivelearning.net.

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Effective Learning Report Updates, July 2017 July 16, 2017 The cost of not having a national single payer healthcare system in the US I’m not sure the cost is $1.7 trillion per year for US citizens, as this article asserts, but I would be willing to bet the figure is not too far off the mark of reality. Read all about it, right here…

The Cost of Not Having Single Payer: $1.4 Trillion Per Year July 13, 2017 As if people just discovered fake news last year. There have always been lies and rumors of lies, and little certainty about anything economically and politically, thanks to humans lying by commission and omission, not only making shit up but hiding the truth, as in keeping secrets, especially classified state secrets. The problem is worse now because there has never been a professional liar on the world stage like Donald Trump, and there has never been so much to hide. An America paradox: Pillorying fake news while promoting false flags By Matthew Maavak Published in the Intrepid Report http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/21668 July 13, 2017 This article is an eye opener based on serious intellectual comprehension, by Paul Street. The Fourth of July will never be the same after you read it. On American Revolution By Paul Street Published in COUNTERPUNCH “It’s true that slaveowner Thomas Jefferson’s July 4, 1776 Declaration of Independence (DOI) articulated the revolutionary notion that the people have the right to dissolve a government that no longer serves their interests. But the “American Revolution” was a national independence movement led by wealthy landowners, slaveowners, and merchants who feared uprisings from below. They wanted more breathing space to develop further systems of racial oppression, territorial conquest, and class rule. For them national independence was required among other things to prevent social revolution. The last thing the nation’s wealth aristo-republican Founders wanted was a world turned upside down.” Read all about it… https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/07/04/on-american-revolution/ July 13, 2017 Here is a must read article with real intellectual merit by Margaret Flowers, a pediatrician with seventeen years experience, now professionally writing and lobbying for a single payer Medicare for all system. Be sure and read her linked article in this article explaining why the US healthcare system is so inferior to the health systems of other developed nations. To Fix the ACA, We Do Not Need a Public Option, We Need a Private Extraction By Margaret Flowers Published in Truth-Out “2017 is the make or break year for the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Seven years in, the flaws of the ACA are clear — tens of millions are still without health insurance, premiums and out of pocket costs are rising and causing people to either avoid and delay care or go into debt, and the US continues to rank poorly in health outcomes. There is one way to fix the ACA, and I call it the Private Extraction. “What Are We to do?” Read all about it… http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/41191-to-fix-the-aca-we-do-not-need-a-public-option-we-need-a-private-extraction July 13, 2017 Nancy Pelosi Rejects Single Payer Being Added to Democratic Party Platform: By blasting the proposal, the Democratic Party ignores its voters By Michael Sainato “Politico reported on May 3 that House Democrats want Republicans to pass an Obamacare repeal bill in the House, citing that the vote could be used against Republicans in the 2018 midterm elections. “Democrats affirmed this report by chanting “hey hey hey goodbye” to Republicans after Obamacare repeal marginally passed in the House by a vote of 217 to 213 on May 4. This strategy is terrible for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, it reveals that the Democratic Party is willing to sell out constituents just to receive some attack fodder.” Read all about it… http://observer.com/2017/05/nancy-pelosi-rejects-single-payer-health-care/ July 13, 2017 Why Healthcare Should Be Managed as a Natural Monopoly by Richard John Stapleton In industries in which there is inelastic demand, in industries in which people have to buy a product or service regardless of prices charged, free competition does not work in the best interest of customers. Prices charged are not inexorably driven down by competition to an optimum level for all stakeholders, to the lowest prices for customers and prices that fairly compensate all factors of production in the industry, including a rational return for the owners of capital. In such industries the price system degenerates in such a way that providers can fix prices about the way they want, as in the case of high priced drugs, and engage in price discrimination, as in the case of medical services and treatments, that is, charge different prices to different patients. This behavior creates chaotic situations in which almost no one knows what many treatments will or should cost. The solution is to regulate such industries by the state as full monopolies, or as what are called natural monopolies, in which prices are set by the state, as in the cases of electricity and water utilities. In such cases, under capitalism, effective and ethical regulators set customer prices at levels that provide competitive market prices for suppliers of raw materials, competitive wages and salaries for workers and managers, and competitive returns on investment for the owners of employed capital. Medicine and health services are basically public utilities, since they are required, like electricity and water, demand being inelastic, caused by people not wanting to die or become impaired or go blind or go crazy and empathetic human beings not wanting to suffer grief and sadness caused by having to observe these things happening to people in droves, unnecessarily. Consequently, if people cannot pay for their medical treatments providers have to treat them free for humanitarian reasons, and this forces and allows providers to set exorbitant uneconomic prices for customers that can pay to compensate for their losses on those that cannot or will not pay, causing chaos and widespread unfairness. Therefore, as Obama pointed out, a decent society must provide affordable health insurance for everyone in order to control medical prices. What Obama did not fight hard enough for, unfortunately, is the solution for the whole problem, the logical conclusion that the federal government must provide affordable health insurance for everyone, aka Medicare for All, as a good natural monopolist, not only setting prices for national health insurance, but also fair and rational national prices for drug and medical treatments, just like good state regulators set prices for electricity and water. The US is the only developed nation on Earth in which medical bills are a major cause of bankruptcy for citizens, a painful and degrading fate, but a fate less painful and degrading, perhaps, than people becoming debt slaves the rest of their lives, harassed by horrendous medical bills hanging over their heads, and bill collectors, caused by avoiding premature deaths and impairments, by agreeing to pay for drugs and medical procedures at the time of service, or die. The only cure for this inhumane mental anguish, pain, and suffering is the federal government regulating the healthcare industry as a natural monopoly, using proven time-honored necessary and rational procedures under capitalism. The federal government should allow insurance companies to sell all the life, automobile, and home insurance policies they want, but it should get them out of the business of selling health insurance; and federal regulators should start fairly and rationally regulating drug and medical prices, while providing rational and fair rates of return on invested capital for all providers, using standard procedures used forever in regulated natural monopolies. Federal regulators probably won’t do this because politicians won’t let them do it, since elected senators, representatives, and presidents need campaign contributions from fat cats running the healthcare industry, one of the most profitable industries in the US, earning exorbitant irrational uneconomic profits because of being allowed to operate as an unregulated monopoly. To verify this just take a look at the stock price increases of healthcare corporations relative to the Standard & Poors index since the Crash of 2007 at https://us.spindices.com/indices/equity/sp-500-healthcare-sector. To consider that satisfying the money, power, and fame needs and drives of one hundred thousand or so politicians, healthcare industry corporate fat cats, and healthcare industry professionals and employees, caused by not having a national health service, would count more in the US than curing the spiritual, economic, and psychological pain and suffering of one hundred million or more ordinary citizens caused by not having a national health service is mind boggling, another sad example of the venality, callousness, corruption, obtuseness, and ethical incompetence now reigning in Washington. Feel free to forward, reprint, or otherwise circulate this essay any way you see fit. Richard John Stapleton, Editor & Publisher, Effective Learning Report, 32 East Main Street, Statesboro, Georgia, July 15, 2017. http://blog.effectivelearning.net/

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Effective Learning Report Updates June 30, 2017 Nancy Pelosi’s opposition to a federal government single payer system… Seems to me a single payer health system at the federal level is a no brainer for we the people. This Demo gentle lady house leader favors the states trying to do it but not the federal government. This article does not give a single good reason why we should not have single payer at the federal level. What is your real reason for not pushing single payer at the federal level, gentle lady demo house leader? We have a right to know. It appears you only care about the demo party, not we the people. Read all about it… Observer http://observer.com/2017/05/nancy-pelosi-rejects-single-payer-health-care/. June 30, 2017 Ah, the magic of finance at the highest levels Probably the US will eventually do what Japan is doing now. Just punch digits into a computer at the Federal Reserve, call the resulting number money, use it to buy the Federal debt interest free, and then forget about it. Poof the Federal debt is gone. About twenty trillion dollars worth now… Sovereign Debt Jubilee, Japanese-Style by Ellen Brown Japan is selling debt to its own bank, which returns the interest to the government. This is the most hopeful article I have read in a long time, indicating there really may be light at the end of the tunnel for Earth’s economies, written by a brilliant lady lawyer, Ellen Brown, who is also a renowned money and banking expert, who writes at her Web of Debt Blog. Read all about it… Published in Truth-Out, an Internet source of news and analysis http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/41099-sovereign-debt-jubilee-japanese-style. June 30, 2017 Worried about the Federal debt? According to the Congressional Budget Office federal government cash inflows will increase 9.5 percent next year, but cash inflow minus cash outflow will be negative more than one trillion dollars. Read all about it… http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/cbo-income-taxes-95-next-year-debt-climbs-more-1-trillion#.WVWm_C-uxDQ.facebook. June 30, 2017 As much as I never liked Fox so-called News and Hannity this audio interview with Camille Paglia does get to the heart of the matter. Well worth a listen. http://www.breitbart.com/video/2017/06/21/camille-paglia-blames-dems-for-destroying-journalism-it-is-going-to-take-decades-to-recover/. June 30, 2017 If you ever had any doubt that the man lies, his many lies are listed here by the New York Times. Maybe you think lying does not matter, that all politicians lie and so forth, and Trump has his heart in the right place and he will actually be good for the US and the world in the end, despite his lying. Who knows? It may be impossible to prove any president in the last sixty or so years did more harm than good during his time in office, with the possible exception of Bush II, given his lying about and invading Iraq and Afghanistan, and lying about what he knew about 9/11. Read about Trump’s lies… https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/23/opinion/trumps-lies.html. June 30, 2017 Here is an emergency room MD telling a health care story like it is from his perspective. Well worth a look and listen. https://www.facebook.com/richard.stapleton.397. June 30, 2017 Sanders says Republicans should be embarrassed about health care Well worth a listen… https://www.facebook.com/richard.stapleton.397. June 30, 2017 WELCOME! To the Stapleton Gallery of Folk History and Conversation, and the FREEDOM, FAIRNESS AND PROGRESS PARTY. The FFPP. Join now! Here’s how! From a passage I wrote in 2004 on page 645 of BUSINESS VOYAGES: MENTAL MAPS, SCRIPTS, SCHEMATA, AND TOOLS FOR DISCOVERING AND CO-CONSTRUCTING YOUR OWN BUSINESS WORLDS, 745 pages, a business bible I wrote and first published in 2008: “I am not a Democrat, or a Liberal, and for sure I am not a Republican, or a Conservative. I am a member of the FFPP, my own creation, the Freedom, Fairness, and Progress Party. If you would like to join this party, send no money, but act in such a way as to encourage all people to act in truly free, fair, and progressive ways. Most Democratic congress people seem about as devoid of workable solutions for real problems in today’s world as Reagan and Bush II, although I will say I think Democratic politicians in Washington in general have been more Christian-like than Republican politicians in Washington since 1980. At least they did not take from the poor and give to the rich. Most Republican and Democratic politicians have done little in the last 25 years but slavishly vote for their party line, as they were told by their party bosses, to conserve their chances of getting help from their party bosses in their next election.” Vote the rascals out ASAP and replace them with free, fair, responsible, progressive members of the FFPP, who want to do the right thing for all people. Unfortunately, as of this writing, July 1, 2017, it seems most demos voting in the 2016 primaries were not very bright, not having the sense to vote in their own interests, since most voted for Hillary, the establishment candidate, instead of Bernie, who probably could have beaten Trump in the Electoral College. Get rid of the Electoral College. The Electoral College makes the popular votes of voters in red states count more than the votes of voters in blue states, a gross insult to voters in blue states. The last thing we need now are more party-line pandering establishment-financed career politicians, which Trump is not, out to feather their own nests and the nests of their sugar daddies ensconced in their corporate headquarters atop skyscrapers and their favored elite rich few by slavishly voting for bills, acts, laws and rules in their favor, at the expense of we the people on the ground, in the on-going US class war, exponentially increasing the incomes and wealth of the elite rich from year to year, creating ever-widening inequality, inexorably destroying our society from the inside, as climate change destroys it from the outside. Trump is not a career politician. Even worse, he is a troglodyte reared in penthouses atop New York City skyscrapers, who never worked a day in his life at a real job for a real boss, a classic example of the class of people who pay career politicians to vote in their favor. Working and middle class voters in 2016 actually voted for one of the US’s most successful landlords, no doubt somehow expecting him to work in their interests after he gets in office as president. Most local politicians are ethical conscientious citizens doing their best to serve their fellow citizens, but the farther from home the government is located for which politicians are elected the more likely politicians are to be corrupted and bought off by large corporations and the elite rich, causing them to vote in their interests, rather than in the interests of their fellow citizens. Get rid of flat taxes. Large corporations and the elite rich now pay about the same after loophole effective tax rate as the middle class. Reset the top ALETR to above 70 percent where our wisest ancestors set it before 1980, who knew you have to have progressive income tax rates to prevent inequality from destroying society. Use the new tax revenue, borrowed money, and money magically created by the US Federal Reserve (by simply punching digits into a computer and calling the resulting number money) to directly fund infrastructure jobs in green energy, transportation, education and the like to help the unemployed and underemployed and small businesses on main streets, to create a multiplier effect that will create even more jobs as people spend the money the new jobs provide, restoring a semblance of fairness in our society. Reduce military spending. The US now spends some six hundred billion dollars per year on its military, over half of discretionary spending in the US yearly budget, more than the next eight largest nations combined spend on military activities around Earth. We have become an imperialistic war-mongering nation. Most of the military budget is for offense, not defense. Get rid of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. Bring back the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 which was gotten rid of in 1999 by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, signed by Hillary’s husband Bill when he was president, possibly the most unethical and harmful piece of US legislative action of the 20th Century, which gave bankers in too big to fail Wall Street banks permission to gamble with bank money backed by depositors and citizens using derivatives, financial weapons of mass destruction, turning the money and banking system into a giant gambling casino, putting the deposits and pension money of all citizens at risk to this very day, unfairly biasing the economic system in favor of banksters. I used a spinning arrow, called the Classroom De-Gamer™, over 30 years in all my university case method business courses at Georgia Southern University to point out and randomly select the discussion leader of the day, thereby insuring every student in the class had an equal opportunity to be the class leader of the day, thereby teaching democratic leadership behaviors. I am now convinced you could randomly select intelligent knowledgeable citizens off the streets of the US and send them to Washington replacing all sitting politicians and the US government would improve overnight, since these citizens could use their common sense to vote for things benefiting we the people, having not been paid with corporate and elite rich money to fight on the side of large corporations and the elite rich in the US class war. Randomly selecting leaders is not a novel idea. The ancient Greeks had the idea and used it as early as the 6th Century bce. The process is called sortition. Random selection of political leaders would be better than the election systems we now use—for the simple reason randomly selected leaders would not be beholden to vested interests, or corrupted by the money current politicians have to raise from rich patrons to purchase TV and mainstream media print advertising to get elected to federal offices, money that has to be paid back once they get in office, insuring the government is run primarily to benefit large corporations and the elite rich, not we the people. Get rid of Citizens United of 2010. This abominable 5-4 Supreme Court decision affirmed into law by five right wing judges was probably the most debilitating US Supreme Court decision of all time, contributing mightily to the destruction of democracy in the US. It defined corporations as people with free speech and therefore free to bribe politicians with as much money as they wished to enact laws reducing their taxes and bending the rules of the economic game in favor of corporate CEOs and the elite rich, causing an exponential rise in economic inequality and peonage in the US. Join the USVRA (United States Voters Rights Amendment) movement, founded by William John Cox, at http://usvra.us/, to amend the US Constitution to get rid of Citizens United and establish a fair and effective process of democratic voting in the US. Wm Cox and I are long-term friends, having sat in the same Methodist Sunday School Class back at Wolfforth, Texas in the mid1940s. I serve on the advisory board of the USVRA. June 30, 2017 How could this happen? A rural hospital association representative says the Trumpcare bill in the Senate will close hospitals, and people will die… Read all about it… https://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/6/26/1675375/-Rural-hospital-association-representative-This-bill-will-close-hospitals-People-will-die. June 30, 2017 Why Health Care is a Natural Monopoly by Richard John Stapleton Warren Buffett’s got the right idea in the interview below on the cause of the US medical services problem, an inability to control costs. The bottom line is that in industries in which there is inelastic demand, meaning people have to buy something almost no matter what price is charged, free competition does not work for consumers. Prices charged are not inexorably driven down by competition to the lowest level necessary to fairly compensate all factors of production in the industry, including a rational return on invested capital. The system degenerates so providers can fix prices about the way they want, as in the case of high priced drugs, and engage in price discrimination, as in the case of medical services and treatments, that is, charging different prices to different customers. This behavior creates chaotic situations in which almost no one knows what many treatments will cost. The solution is full monopoly, or a natural monopoly, in which prices are set by the state, as in the case of electric and water utilities. Medicine and health services are basically public utilities, since they are absolutely required, like electricity and water, because few people want to die or go blind or go crazy or whatever, and decent human beings can’t just sit back and watch people die, go blind, go crazy, etc. in droves unnecessarily. Consequently, if people cannot pay for their medical treatments providers have to treat them free, and this gives providers permission to set exorbitant uneconomic prices for others to compensate for their losses on those that cannot pay, causing chaos and widespread inequities. Therefore, as Obama pointed out over and over, you have to have affordable health insurance for everyone to control overall medical costs. What Obama did not fight for, unfortunately, is the conclusion that the federal government should provide affordable health insurance with Medicare for all, as a good natural monopolist, setting prices for Medicare health insurance and treatment payments just like good state regulators set prices for electricity and water. The US is the only developed nation on Earth in which medical costs are a major cause of bankruptcy for citizens, an ignoble fate, but a fate less onerous, perhaps, than living the life of a debt slave the rest of your life, with an astronomical unpaid medical bill hanging over your head, that enabled you to avoid a premature death or impairment. Here’s an interview with Warren Buffett on health services. https://news.grabien.com/story-warren-buffett-endorses-single-payer-health-care-we-can-affo. June 30, 2017 God forbid we should be intimidating 10 Signs Your Personality is Intimidating Others (Never Tolerate #7) Read all about it … http://educateinspirechange.org/spirituality/10-signs-personality-intimidating-others-never-tolerate-7/. June 30, 2017 Lake Wobegon Schools More and more schools it seems are becoming Lake Wobegons where all the children are above average and all the women and men are beautiful and brave, according to this article in Zero Hedge at http://www.zerohedge.com/…/high-schools-drop-valedictorian-…. See inside my book Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning for a fuller discussion of these issues at https://www.amazon.com/Born-Learn-Transactiona…/…/0692584331. June 30, 2017 Let’s hope violence in the streets between conservatives and liberals does not continue to increase. Read about the root causes of political violence in my unfortunately prescient article by clicking below. http://blog.effectivelearning.net/conservatives-and-liberals-vs-freethinkers/.

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How to use and perceive this blog page By Richard John Stapleton I have clicked options that coded this article to be what is called by the creators of this software package, WordPress, a “sticky” article, meaning it has been digitally coded to remain where it is geographically on this page for instructional purposes, at the top of the right column, day after day. You can notice pages and articles in the column on the left of this page listed under the heading of EFFECTIVE LEARNING REPORT, the official name of this blog, with a menu for the content of website pages for EFFECTIVE LEARNING COMPANY, with a subheading labeled RECENT POSTS for articles. To access the content of any of the pages or any of the articles in full just click on the name of the website page in the menu or the title of the article or the Read on option at the end of the blurb about the article under the Recent Posts subheading. If you do this, the page will pop up, or the article will pop up in the right column of this page on your computer screen in larger print, where this one is now, that is easy to read, and you will be given the opportunity to forward the article to social media outlets such as Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin, or email it to your friends. To share articles positioned below this article on this page on Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, or email just click on the title of the article and the article will pop up where this one is now with linking options exposed. Please do so. You can notice below the Recent Posts area a section that stores or “archives” articles by the month or year in which they were written. If you click on this you can find articles that were published in various months of years that will pop up in easy reading form where this one is now with social media links. Please read and forward them to your friends. Happy reading. This blog contains thoughts and opinions written as articles by me as they happen from time to time, and essays and articles written by other authors, published in various intrepid Internet journals, and elsewhere, primarily attempting to paint a generally accurate picture of the true state of affairs around Earth and what should be done to increase the satisfaction of human beings individually and in groups around Earth. Opinions in this blog are not political in the sense they were created to further the aims, interests, beliefs, dogmas, and doctrines of a particular political party, or any other type of group or organization. I am not a member of an established political party, but I am a member of a few organizations, including the International Transactional Analysis Association, the United States, and Spaceship Earth. Want a free subscription to the Effective Learning Report? New articles are added to the Effective Learning Report as the muse moves me to write something new. Therefore there is no publishing of new editions at regular intervals, and no way to price a subscription. Regardless, if you would like to receive a new free “edition” of the Effective Learning Report as the muse moves me to write something new, just send me your email address at [email protected] and I will add you to the email list for the Effective Learning Report. Please add the word Subscription in the subject line of the email. Cheers! The purpose of the Effective Learning Report is not to cover current events. The purpose is simply to provide insight into how the world works and what might be done to improve things. I have supported and voted for particular political candidates in the US because I thought the person was the best available person for the job, not because he or she was a member of a political party. I supported and voted for Barack Obama but I did not support or vote for Hillary Clinton. I supported Bernie Sanders until Sanders dropped out of the 2016 race. I wound up supporting and voting for Jill Stein of the Green Party in the US 2016 presidential race. Opinions written and published in this blog are the opinions of me alone, and do not reflect the opinions of clients or visitors at Effective Learning Company, especially my wife’s mathematics tutorees. While I let my wife know my opinions from time to time face-to-face, I make no effort to coerce or cajole her into adopting them, having long since learned such efforts are futile. I rarely discuss my opinions in this blog face-to-face with anyone at Effective Learning Company. As a professor teaching business policy, ethics, and entrepreneurship in a business school, political opinions were sometimes discussed in my classes as issues and students made recommendations, as I did, but no recommendations were ever taught as truth to be memorized for any sort of test. My attitude, believing it’s educational for people to hear, and read, alternative opinions, is “if the shoe fits wear it.” If not, believe whatever you want to believe. This issue was covered more comprehensively in my book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds. See “Inside the Book” Business Voyages by Richard John Stapleton free at Amazon.com to see the table of contents and some of the writing. Unfortunately in today’s Internet Facebook world many members of political parties regard people expressing opinions contrary to their party and personal propaganda, dogma, doctrine, lies, and opinions to be what they call “trolls”. A troll is someone who infiltrates the psychological, intellectual, or physical boundaries of a group or organization, such as a group of Democrats or Republicans, with the mission of changing the minds of members to further the aims and purposes of a competing group or organization. While I am not a troll, I consider contrary honest opinions people are randomly exposed to to be good for them, and for all people and groups aboard Spaceship Earth, since it causes everyone to learn something. We need more dialogical dialectic discussions, preferably face-to-face, however challenging, that might cause all of us to learn something. Otherwise, we are all living in a war zone with no hope of lasting peace. The trick is to learn how to do this in a civilized manner. Read my book Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning for more detail on how to communicate and learn in groups with dialogical dialectical discussion. For more information about the book click on the Effective Learning Publications option at the top of this blog page in the left column. Comments, criticisms, and recommendations from readers are welcome. Please write your comments, criticisms, or recommendations in the block below articles on this page, or email me at [email protected]. In order to write comments, etc. on this page, you have to make sure you have popped the article up at the top of the right column of this page by clicking on the article title or a Read on option to energize the linking options. If you came to the page from Facebook or some other link the linking options are automatically visible and ready to go. While this page is relatively user friendly it forces people using it to become programmed robots to some degree in some ways, as does all computer technology used for any purpose. There are, alas, always tradeoffs, and no free lunches, in any entrepreneurial venture. In order to read free articles from this page, you have to conform to a computer algorithm, paying a price by giving up some autonomy and human dignity. In some ways we increase our freedom and satisfaction by using computers; but in other ways we lose freedom and satisfaction by using computers. As in all ventures we come out ahead only if we gain more than we lose. I sometimes wonder if humanity is actually getting better off because of developing and using computer technology, especially when talking with a robot on the telephone trying to get something straightened out, such as a problem with a medical bill or an insurance payment. Check out my Facebook pages: Richard John Stapleton—https://www.facebook.com/richard.stapleton.397 Effective Learning Company—https://www.facebook.com/www.effectivelearning.net/?ref=stale_email HOW TO EVALUATE THE PRODUCTIVITY OF TEACHERS AND LEARNERS Check out our article, “Optimizing the fairness of student evaluations: A study of correlations between instructor excellence, study production, learning production, and effective grades,” by Stapleton & Murkison, published in 2001 in the Journal of Management Education, by the Organizational Behavior Teaching Society, using Sage Publications. This article presents a new metric I invented, the CITP, the Composite Indicator of Teaching Productivity, which has now been cited in sixty-one refereed professional journal articles in several disciplines, from physics to psychology. Here is a pdf copy of the article “Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations: A Study of Correlations Between Instructor Excellence, Study Production, Learning Production and Expected Grades.” https://studysites.sagepub.com/holt/articles/Stapleton.pdf Published in 2001 by the Organizational Behavior Teaching Society in the Journal of Management Education, this article by Stapleton & Murkison has now been cited in 61 refereed professional journal articles, providing insights into how to evaluate teaching and learning in schools, colleges, and universities, showing how difficult it is to fairly evaluate teaching and learning and why relative expected grades questions should always be included on student evaluation forms to provide a modicum of fairness. To verify the 61 citations just punch Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations into Google and read the sources. Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations gets to the heart of intractable problems of the teaching profession, the most serious of which is probably teacher evaluations. How can you or a teacher know how well a teacher is doing his/her job? What sort of criteria can you use for making this judgment? Certainly the purpose of teaching is to cause learning to occur in students, but how do you measure this? What kind of learning? How much learning? How much learning relative to what? What percentage of a prescribed content or syllabus a teacher causes students to memorize? Or how much learning a teacher produces in students relative to how much peer teachers produce? In other words are you attempting to measure absolute learning or relative learning? Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations presents a unique Composite Indicator of Teaching Productivity (CITP), one of the most sophisticated metrics of teaching productivity yet developed in the teacher evaluation literature. Check it out at http://www.sagepub.com/holt/articles/Stapleton.pdf

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Effective Learning Digest—November 2017

Or So It Seems To Me Today By Richard John Stapleton Getting old is not fun per se but it is interesting. As most transactional analysts believe and think they know, especially certified ones such as I, the human brain is somewhat analogous to a computer. Both are powered by electricity and both store information in cells of various sorts. Stored information is linked in neural networks. A human brain can store almost any kind of information—various types of feelings, visual observations, sounds, smells, tastes, > on Effective Learning Digest—November 2017

Effective Learning Digest—October 2017

So It Seems To Me By Richard John Stapleton Dire things could have happened in October. The stock market could have crashed. Trump could have started a nuclear war with North Korea. They did not happen, yet. What did happen was another hurricane almost destroying Puerto Rico. What could have happened was getting rid of the Affordable Care Act. That did not happen either. What could have also happened was Congress approving anther large tax cut for corporations and the elite rich, aka tax reform. So far that has not happened either. What has happened, apparently, is approval for a large increase for the military budget, and increased US military activity around Earth, including Africa. Unfortunately we had another mass murder in Las Vegas, the worst one yet in terms of people killed. The stock market can still crash at any time, and a deficit increasing disaster for a federal budget can still be passed. On the other hand, there are no signs of major positive things happening, such as Congress creating a single payer health care system or increasing the taxes of corporations and the elite rich to help fund a massive infrastructure program to help the unemployed and underemployed that would decrease income and wealth inequality. There are no signs anything will be done anytime soon to deal with the general dysfunctionality of the US government caused by corporations legally being considered citizens with free speech like people and election rules that cause the government to be run for oligarchs rather than we the people. In sum October it seems to me was a rather do-nothing month for the US as a whole economically and politically, mostly talk and little do, including endless chatter about whether Trump and the Democrats colluded with the Russians during the 2016 election. Much of the so-called news in mainstream media was gossip and chatter about Trump, Mueller, and Hillary, rather than reporting of real news. There was much talk about collusions, with no definition of what the term collusion in this context actually meant. Regardless of what it meant, there was much lying about who did it for what reasons, especially with the “Russians”, whoever they were. Following are some posts happening in Internet media during October I considered relevant. October 31, 2017 The Dumbing Down of Free Speech I (Richard) have noticed the silencing of free speech lately dining with friends in homes, restaurants, and the country club. It seems to me I used to be able to express my views regarding economic and political issues after dinner over drinks with a group of female and male friends and their friends in interesting and stimulating conversations without having to worry about upsetting someone. In the last year or so I have noticed more and more non-verbal messages from supposed friends, apparently worried about my offending their friends, or themselves, to keep my mouth shut about economics and politics; and here lately I have been involved in two angry episodes at the table caused by such conversations. The net effect is that such conversations are being dumbed down it seems to me. More and more in order to get along you have to act like you are participating in a Sunday school class or in a summer camp talking only in obedient respectful adapted child transactions about irrelevant topics. If you withdraw from such groups and only converse with your own kind to avoid the dumbing-down and the frustration you will wind up only talking to your own kind of people about topics you and they consider relevant economically and politically, which will, if everybody does the same thing, insure further alienation and enmity among polarized groups with no chance of developing peaceful workable economic and political consensuses in society as a whole using all ego states and transactional patterns in honest dialectical discussions. More and more it seems to me freely talking about economic and political problems and issues among adults in ordinary society is becoming socially unacceptable. I wonder how much longer we will be able to do it on Facebook? Unfortunately it may be since many of my friends and I are getting older, seventy and up, part of the above problem could be a function of aging. Is it the older people get the less relevant and adult their conversations become? Regardless, the following well-worth-a-read article by Emily Ekins provides good research and statistical evidence shedding light regarding the issue of free speech. SOURCE: “The State of Free Speech and Tolerance in America: Attitudes about Free Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Liberty, and Tolerance of Political Expression,” by Emily Ekins, Survey Reports, CATO INSTITUTE, at https://www.cato.org/survey-reports/state-free-speech-tolerance-america. October 31 Ever notice how white the skin around Trump’s eyes is. I have noticed it in several pictures. Apparently he has to shield his eyes when he has his skin tanned orange in some sort of tanning process, trying to look younger than his seventy years. SOURCE: “Trump’s Approval Rating Drops to Lowest Level Yet in new NBC News/WSJ Poll,” MSN News at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump%E2%80%99s-approval-ratingdrops-to-lowest-level-yet-in-new-nbc-news-wsj-poll/ar-AAucIu0?li=BBnb7Kz. October 31 Here is my platform for my own political party. SOURCE: FreeFairProgressParty at http://www.effectivelearning.net/freefairprogressparty.html. October 31 I just ran across this tonight, the Jimmy Dore Show, a truly progressive show that gets to the real truth in the news. SOURCE: The Jimmy Dore Show at https://www.youtube.com/user/TYTComedy. October 31 Join the revolution. SOURCE: “We Live in Revolutionary Times,” by Michael Krieger, Liberty Blitzkrieg, at https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2017/10/31/we-live-in-revolutionary-times/. October 31 A sad lament. SOURCE: “Requiem for the Promised Land,” by Emanuel E. Garcia, MD, INTREPIDREPORT.COM, at http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/22525. October 31 Say it aint so Joe. Trump as witness, policeman, judge, and jury is executing more civilians using drones than Obama. SOURCE: “Trump is Killing Record Numbers of Civilians,” by Marjorie Cohn, TRUTH-OUT.ORG at http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/42426-trump-is-killing-record-numbers-of-civilians. October 30 Here’s an excellent article with some excellent analysis. It’s absurd to think we could shoot down all ICBMs that would be shot at us in a real nuclear war. Therefore it’s absurd to threaten North Korea or any other nation with nuclear war, or produce any more ICBMs and nuclear bombs. Negotiation is the only hope, as this article points out. SOURCE: “Mutual assured destruction,” by Philip M. Giraldi, INTREPIDREPORT.COM, at http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/22522. October 30 I (Richard) interviewed at Youngstown State Univ in 1982 for an entrepreneurship chair position. The situation was not good. A business professor pointed out to me through a window in his office steel mills in the distance that had been shut down. He told me when he went to his office at night thirty years earlier the whole valley was ablaze with lights in the mills. It had become dark at night across the valley by the time of my visit. I told them they were looking for a professor like superman who would fly around the valley in his cape magically turning all that around. Instead of going to Youngstown State in Ohio I went to Europe for a year and taught with Troy State Univ on US Air Force Nato bases in Turkey, Greece, Holland, Germany, and Italy. I came back to the States after my year in Europe was up and stayed at Georgia Southern Univ where I started in 1970 for the rest of my career. No, the economic calamity in Youngstown and elsewhere in the US Rust Belt was not engineered by self-interested elites. It happened inevitably because of competitive evolutionary forces in global capitalist markets. The net result was worse for US workers than it had to be because of inappropriate responses by US government economic regulators. Self-interested corporate CEOs reacted to the situation to protect their interests and the interests of their stockholders. Unfortunately less was done to protect the interests of their workers. Here’s an article about the aftermath in Youngstown today. SOURCE: “Decline and fall: how American society unraveled,” by George Packer, THEGUARDIAN.COM, at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/19/decline-fall-american-societyunravelled?CMP=share_btn_fb. October 30 Do we really want to know the truth about 9/11? According to this meme/video/study the third building to fall at the WTC that was not hit by an airliner did not fall because of fires started by the explosions of the first two buildings at the WTC that were supposedly hit by airliners. I (Richard) have been convinced beyond a reasonable doubt by various and sundry evidence shared on the Internet that the US government’s story about what happened on 9/11 does not make sense. SOURCE: “New Study Supports World Trade Centre 7 Fell by Controlled Demolition,” a meme/study/video added by Collective Evolution shared to my Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/richard.stapleton.397. For more information see http://bit.ly/2wiEXwP. October 30 Trump impulsively said at first that Puerto Rico’s debt would have to be written off, but as usual he has crawfished away from the statement. How they can possibly pay off their government debt is beyond me. At any rate here is an article about who owns a big chunk of the debt. SOURCE: “Who Owns Puerto Rico’s Debt, Exactly? We’ve Tracked Down 10 of the Biggest Vulture Firms: Financial firms are still fighting to get billions out of the bankrupt island as it tries to rebuild,” by Joel Cintron Arbasetti and Caria Minet, Alex V. Hernandez and Jessica Stites, Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, In These Times, at https://www.alternet.org/economy/who-ownspuerto-ricos-debt-exactly-weve-tracked-down-10-biggest-vulture-firms. October 29 Do we really want to know the truth about JFK? What would happen if we knew for sure covert operators in the CIA and the FBI shot JFK? Maybe we should be careful what we wish for? SOURCE: “This and That Vol 3 – Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire,” by Cognitive Dissonance, ZEROHEDGE.COM at http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-10-29/and-vol-3-%E2%80%93where-there%E2%80%99s-smoke-there%E2%80%99s-fire. October 29 Violence is a waste of time and energy Rather than rationally deal with the root causes of their problems, many humans vilify, demonize, scapegoat, and tear the tissue of their real or imagined antagonists. What Earth needs now is unlearning and new learning. Humans need to learn how to get their needs met without playing psychological Games and resorting to violence, as in wars and acts of so-called terrorism, which might be called desperation, insanity, grandiosity, suicide, homicide, vengeance, or other things. Violence rarely solves anything. It just kicks the can further down the road, where the problem rears its ugly head again, perhaps with increasingly painful consequences. As Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King demonstrated, non-violent action can produce real change. Born to Learn contains ideas and techniques for producing peaceful change. Posted on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/richard.stapleton.397 October 29, 2017 SOURCE: Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning, by Richard John Stapleton, a review by Kirkus Reviews at https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/richard-johnstapleton/born-to-learn/. October 29 Finland supposedly has the best school system on Earth. Look at what they are now doing below. SOURCE: “Finland Will Become The First Country In The World To Get Rid of All School Subjects,” Staff Contributor, at ENLIGHTENED-CONSCIOUSNESS.COM, at http://www.enlightenedconsciousness.com/finland-will-become-the-first-country-in-the-world-to-get-rid-of-all-school-subjects/. October 29 Now here is another innovative educational approach. SOURCE: “Mom Explains Why Her 7 ‘Feral’ Kids Have No Rules and Don’t Even Have To Attend School,” by Ileana Paules-Bronet, LITTLETHINGS.COM, at https://www.littlethings.com/rawnsley-feral-kids/?utm_medium=Facebook_Shared. October 29 Here is the best pie chart I have seen showing how discretionary money is spent in the federal budget. SOURCE: “Look closely at this chart of federal spending: Somewhere within the tiny orange sliver at the bottom is the food stamp program that Republicans blame for our budget deficit,” a meme shared to my Facebook page October 29, 2017 at https://www.facebook.com/richard.stapleton.397. Originally posted on the Internet by The Other 98%, October 24, 2015, at https://www.facebook.com/TheOther98/?hc_ref=ARSfCr9ZRgsPwGxpop0uOi0Ltk8f7eyrgt-_Rn-2cFywsrAWVxXoaC70YZD68TazN8I&fref=nf&pnref=story. October 29 Here’s a pie chart showing the US spends as much on its military activities as the next eight largest military spending nations spend combined. SOURCE: Facebook meme by Robert Reich on my Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/richard.stapleton.397. October 27 Here’s a tale told by a highly-intelligent Earthian who lived on the moon for several years after he got back down to Earth. SOURCE: “1968, Intelligent Life and the Lunar Landing,” by Courtenay Barnett, Effective Learning Report, at http://blog.effectivelearning.net/1968-intelligent-life-and-the-lunar-landing/. October 27 And here’s another tale about a secret conference in outer space attended for two weeks by Earthians interested in observing and learning about business on Earth. SOURCE: “Business Skylab Conference,” by Richard John Stapleton, Effective Learning Report, at http://blog.effectivelearning.net/business-skylab-conference/. October 26 Here’s something about what the US military is up to in Africa. SOURCE: “What’s going on in Niger?,” by Stephen Lendman, INTREPIDREPORT.COM, at http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/22496. October 26 Here’s how Trump really won. SOURCE: “Pew finds increasing percentage of Americans disagree with religion: US political implications,” by Eric Zuesse, INTREPIDREPORT.COM, http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/22498. October 26 A hard-hitting writer John Steppling tells it like is. How ruling class control has increasingly debilitated US Culture. SOURCE: “The Simulacra Democracy,” by John Steppling, COUNTERPUNCH.ORG, at https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/26/the-simulacra-democracy/. October 26 As suspected the FBI and CIA did not come clean and release all the files, and probably never will. SOURCE: “Here’s where you can download the JFK files released by the National Archives,” by Charles Scudder, Staff Writer, DallasNews.com, at https://www.dallasnews.com/jfk/jfk/2017/10/26/can-download-jfk-files-released-national-archives. October 25 The implications of robots and AI seem clear to me: more and more robots and AI algorithms will be written, programmed, produced, and used, which will eventually eliminate the need for humans to do drudge work for corporate bosses, bosses who do no real work as most people think of work. In order for humans to have incomes, they will have to own corporate stock themselves and everyone will have to function like corporate bosses do now, who read reports and sit around BSing and interacting with their colleagues, creating ideas and making decisions. To see how this can be accomplished, read my article “Toward the Creation of Spaceship Earth Incorporated,” easily found at http://blog.effectivelearning.net/2016/12/. Richard John Stapleton, Editor & Publisher, Effective Learning Report, 32 East Main Street, Statesboro, Georgia, www.effectivelearning.net, October 25, 2017 SOURCE: “Robots aren’t taking our jobs, corporations are: They’re creating a robot economy with inexpensive machines that don’t demand wages or health care,” by Jim Hightower, INTREPIDREPORT.COM, at http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/22475. October 25 If only it were as easy to do as the author implies. SOURCE: “How to end crony capitalism,” by Robert Reich, INTREPIDREPORT.COM, at http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/22478. October 25 Once again Paul Craig Roberts tells it like he sees it. SOURCE: “The American Left: RIP,” by Paul Craig Roberts, PaulCraigRoberts.org, at https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/10/23/american-left-rip/. October 25 Not funny at all. SOURCE: “As Trump ‘hysterics’ continue, US moves to put nuclear B-52s on 24-hour alert,” by Jake Johnson, INTREPIDREPORT.COM, at http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/22483. October 25 Surely it’s not this bad, is it? SOURCE: “Sex, scholars and the syphilitic superpower,” by Matthew Maavak, INTREPIDREPORT.COM, http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/22487. October 25 Say it aint so Joe SOURCE: “CIA in Afghanistan: Operation Phoenix Redux?”, by Matthew Hoh, COUNTERPUNCH.ORG at https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/24/cia-in-afghanistan-operation-phoenixredux/. October 25 Say it aint so Joe SOURCE: “The FBI’s Forgotten Criminal History,” by James Bovard, COUNTERPUNCH.ORG, at https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/24/the-fbis-forgotten-criminal-history/. October 24 Say it aint so Joe. SOURCE: “The American War,” by Nancy Kurshan, COUNTERPUNCH.ORG, at https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/24/the-american-war/. August 18, 2015 Say it aint so Joe. SOURCE: “Jimmy Carter’s Blood-Drenched Legacy,” by Matt Peppe, COUNTERPUNCH.ORG, at https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/18/jimmy-carters-blood-drenched-legacy/. October 24 Shame! Shame! Pence just broke a tie in the senate that will repeal a rule that will make it difficult for consumers to receive fair treatment from banks when disputes arise. SOURCE: “Pence breaks tie as Senate votes to repeal banking rule,” The Associated Press, USA Today, at https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/10/24/senate-repeal-ruleconsumers-bank-credit-card-companies/797510001/. October 24 Amazing. Hooray for Senator Flake. Great speech, great decision. If only all sitting senators and representatives, and Trump would do the same thing. SOURCE: Watch Jeff Flake’s Full Senate Floor Speech Announcing His Retirement, NBCNEWS.COM, at https://www.nbcnews.com/video/watch-jeff-flake-s-full-senate-floor-speechannouncing-his-retirement-1080469059837. October 24 More wise words from Noam Chomsky. SOURCE: “Chomsky: Trump is a Distraction, Used by the Deep State to ‘Systematically Destroy America,” by Jay Syrmopoulos, the Free Thought Project, Waking Times, at http://wakingtimesmedia.com/chomsky-trump-distraction-used-deep-state-systematically-destroy-america/. October 24 And then run as an Independent for president in 2020? SOURCE: “Bernie betrays Democrats, announces reelection run as an independent,” by Matthew Rozsa, SALON.COM, at https://www.salon.com/2017/10/24/sanders-betrays-democratsannounces-reelection-run-as-an-independent/#.We_1kf0q2Hp.facebook. October 24 This post shows how vicious, mean, and crazy polarized identity politics can get. SOURCE: “Bitch, get out!!,” by Missy Comley Beattie, INTREPIDREPORT.COM, at http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/22454. October 24 Say it aint so Joe. SOURCE: “Western silence as 20,000 neo-Nazis march in Ukraine,” by Thomas C. Mountain, INTREPIDREPORT.COM, at http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/22462. October 24 Yes, his words do just make you feel so great, nice, and safe. SOURCE: “Capturing the wisdom and the beauty of Donald J. Trump in just one statement escaping from his charming mouth,” by William Blum, INTREPIDREPORT.COM, at http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/22473. October 23 Say it aint so Joe. SOURCE: “Raqqa bombing was ‘barbaric’ – Russia,” by Catherine Hardy, EURONEWS.COM, at http://www.euronews.com/2017/10/22/raqqa-bombing-was-barbaric—russia. October 22 Assuming Trump is not lying about releasing the JFK papers Thursday, October 26, maybe we will finally know for sure what happened. I (Richard) have been convinced beyond a reasonable doubt for several years that a conspiracy was involved. It seems to me this documentary proves beyond a reasonable doubt there was more than one bullet and a conspiracy did it. SOURCE: “We know now who killed JFK,” Mark Wassberg, editor, YOUTUBE.COM, at https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=FFliddXBRi8&utm_content=bufferd26d3&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer. October 22 Speaks for itself. SOURCE: “Fifty-One GOP Senators Just Voted to Cut $1.5 Trillion From Medicare and Medicaid to Give Super-Rich and Corporations a Tax Cut,” by Jon Queally, Common Dreams Report, in TRUTH-OUT.ORG, at http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/42323-51-gop-senators-just-voted-to-cut-1-5-trillion-from-medicare-and-medicaid-to-give-super-rich-and-corporations-a-tax-cut. October 22 Excellent sad but true article. What can be done about it? SOURCE: “Humanity is Being Split into Two Groups: The Privileged and the Billions Who Face Plunder, Trauma and Suffering,” by Vijay Prashad, ALTERNET.ORG, at https://www.alternet.org/division-humanity-war-and-famine#.WezNLUZbC1Y.facebook. October 22 Strong words by one of Earth’s most respected economists, and former finance minister of Greece. SOURCE: “Capitalism is ending because it has made itself obsolete,” by Yannis Varoufakis, INDEPENDENT.CO.UK, at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/yannis-varoufakiscapitalism-ending-obsolete-former-greek-finance-minister-artificial-intelligence-a8006826.html. October 20 How economics works, by Michael Hudson, the greatest economist alive. SOURCE: “Socialism, Land and Banking: 2017 compared to 1917,” by Michael Hudson, COUNTERPUNCH.ORG, at https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/20/socialism-land-and-banking2017-compared-to-1917/. October 20 Say it aint so Joe. SOURCE: “Scientists just said we’re on the verge of ‘ecological Armageddon’,” by Tom Embury-Dennis, INDEPENDENT.CO.UK, at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/flying-insectsnumbers-drop-ecological-armageddon-75-per-cent-plummet-a8008406.html. October 20 Sad and scary stuff here, no matter which evil you voted for. According to this article impeaching Trump for doing what Nixon did may result in the greatest evil of all, a breakdown of the rule of law and the destruction of the US economy, creating chaos and suffering worse than anything US citizens have ever experienced. US citizens and their so-called representatives in Washington are playing a very dangerous Game of chicken. It’s damned if you do and damned if you don’t: If trump did commit treason by law he should be impeached; on the other hand, if he is impeached, however lawfully, there is danger his supporters will ignore the rule of law and destroy society. Which would be the lesser evil in this case, not impeaching trump and ignoring the rule of law, or impeaching him and causing his supporters to ignore the rule of law and destroy society? SOURCE: “If Trump is Impeached, it Might Be the End of America,” by Isaac Simpson, MEDIUM.COM, at https://medium.com/@IsaacSimpson/if-trump-is-impeached-it-might-be-the-end-ofamerica-b7a2243399b7. October 19 Say it aint so Joe. SOURCE: “Napalm Sticks to Kids,” by Mike Hastie, COUNERPUNCH.ORG, at https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/18/napalm-sticks-to-kids/ October 18 Interesting discussion about mental health, making good grades, making it in corporations, winning under capitalism, and other considerations. SOURCE: “Mental Health and Neoliberalism: An Interview with William Davies,” by Jon Bailes, COUNTERPUNCH.ORG, at https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/18/mental-health-andneoliberalism-an-interview-with-william-davies/ October 18 Here’s Richard Wolff again with one of his best economic updates, dealing with one of the most troubling questions of our time: What causes people like Paddock in Las Vegas to do their seemingly incomprehensible deeds? SOURCE: “Economic Update: Economics, Psychology and Mass Murder,” by Richard Wolff, TRUTH-OUT.ORG, at http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/42175-economic-update-economicspsychology-and-mass-murders. October 18 Say it aint so Joe. SOURCE: “3 Horrendous U.S. Mass Shootings Far Worse than Vegas,” by Rachel Blevins, the Free Thought Project, ALTERNET.ORG, at https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/3horrendous-us-mass-shootings-far-worse-vegas#.WdjamCm7jBY.facebook. October 18 What they call “tax reform” in Washington is just another way to enrich the rich even more. Have a gander at how much the elite will save in estate taxes. Here’s what Trump and his cronies would save in estate taxes: Trump, 4 billion; the waltons, 50 billion; the kochs, 38 billion; the adelsons, 12 billion; Wilbur ross, 996 million; betsy devos, 596 million; linda mcmahon, 516 million; steven mnuchin, 190 million; rex tillerson, 136 million; elaine chao, 15 million; ben carson, 5 million; tom price 4.4 million SOURCE: “Trump’s Plan to Repeal the Estate Tax: A Massive Break for His Cabinet & Billionaires,” a Facebook Meme by Maryscott O’Connor at https://www.facebook.com/richard.stapleton.397. October 18 Say it aint so Joe. One of the most devastating hard-hitting economic and political articles I have read. Well worth a read. SOURCE: “The End of Empire,” by Chris Hedges, TRUTHDIG.COM, at https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-end-of-empire/. October 18 This article raises a very relevant point. Why do we need a central bank owned by banks? SOURCE: “How the Elite Dominate The World – Part 2: 99.9% of The World Live In a Country With a Central Bank,” by Michael Snyder, The Economic Collapse blog, ZEROHEDGE.COM, at http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-10-17/how-elite-dominate-world-%E2%80%93-part-2-999-world-live-country-central-bank. October 18 One of the best students I ever had was a graduate student from Iran. She taught me that most Iranians are good people. SOURCE: “The Real Destabilizer in the Middle East is Not Iran But Trump,” by Patrick Cockburn, COUNTERPUNCH.ORG, at https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/17/the-real-destabilizerin-the-middle-east-in-not-iran-but-trump/. October 17 How rich bad guys wearing white hats have worked against the interests of middle and working class ranchers, taking over more and more land and water rights to make their ranches and herds bigger and bigger, and maybe run the whole territory. SOURCE: “Out of Control: A Brief History of Neoliberal Deregulation in the USA,” by T.J. Coles, Clairview Books, Book Excerpt, published in TRUTH-OUT.ORG, at http://www.truthout.org/news/item/42278-out-of-control-a-brief-history-of-neoliberal-deregulation-in-the-usa. October 17 Repealing the estate tax is one of the most absurd and egregious anti-social ideas floated in recent decades. SOURCE: Video created by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, includes various speakers explaining what the estate tax is and why it should not be abolished for the elite rich. Posted to my Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/richard.stapleton.397. October 16 And on and on it goes. Those bought and paid for Repubs never give up trying to pay back their paymasters. SOURCE: “’Robin Hood in Reverse’: Sanders Blasts GOP Budget Ahead of Key Senate Vote,” by Jake Johnston, Common Dreams, Report, TRUTH-OUT.ORG, at http://www.truthout.org/news/item/42271-robin-hood-in-reverse-sanders-blasts-gop-budget-ahead-of-key-senate-vote. October 15 Possibly the biggest rip-off in the US today. SOURCE: “Pharmaceuticals Can be a License to Print Money,” by Pete Dolack, COUNTERPUNCH.ORG, at https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/13/pharmaceuticals-can-be-a-license-toprint-money/. October 15 A great article by a great financial expert, Ellen Brown. This should be required for all US citizens so they can understand how the money and banking system really works. Written in plain English anyone can understand. Ideas in the article can be applied to bankrupt US cities as well as Puerto Rico. In truth almost anything can be bailed out by the US govt and the Federal Reserve System. All they have to do is punch digits into computers and call the resulting numbers money and use it to buy non-performing loans and bonds, such as those in Puerto Rico. Why should only irresponsible banksters in too-big-to-fail banks get bailed out? Trump blurted out during his visit the Puerto Rican bonds would have to be written off. As usual he did not know what he was talking about, or he was just spouting off as usual trying to please his irresponsible poorly informed obtuse voters using the mundane vernacular they prefer. SOURCE: “How to Wipe Out Puerto Rico’s Debt Without Hurting Bondholders,” by Ellen Brown, TRUTH-OUT.ORG, at http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/42254-how-to-wipe-out-puerto-ricos-debt-without-hurting-bondholders. October 14 A lot of smart money people are saying we are due another stock market crash. SOURCE: “Personal Recollections From The Crash of 1987: There Was No ‘Smart Money’ That Day,” by Dana Lyons, LYONSSHAREPRO.COM, at https://lyonssharepro.com/2017/10/personal-recollections-of-the-crash-of-1987/. October 14 The US Federal Reserve System is largely responsible for the so-called recovery since the Crash of 2008. They caused the large banks to recover and the stock market to rise to about where it was in 2008 by giving the US govt new money created from thin air to loan the failed too-big-to-fail banks in New York City, General Motors, AIG, and others and by purchasing nonperforming loans and debts of the banks to be held on the balance sheet by the Federal Reserve System, known as quantitative easing, and by lowering interest rates to near zero, which enabled corporations to borrow money to buy back their own stock, causing the stock market to rise, while central banks also bought some stock in the stock market, causing it to reach its bubble overvalued heights today. All of this is known as financialization, making an economy look good by issuing and purchasing debt, rather than causing more goods and services to be produced. This last so-called recovery has been a real recovery for the elite rich, who had their bond and stock wealth protected and increased, but it did little good for the average middle and working class citizen, who is no better off now than he or she was ten or more years ago. SOURCE: “The Endgame of Financialization: Stealth Nationalization,” by Charles Hugh Smith, OF TWO MINDS.COM, at http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-endgame-offinancialization-stealth.html. October 14 For some reason I decided to come clean about the education I accidentally received by virtue of having been inevitably born in my family. SOURCE: “A Synopsis of my Educational Background,” by Richard John Stapleton, Effective Learning Report, at http://blog.effectivelearning.net/a-synopsis-of-my-educational-background/. October 13 Here are some ways Republican politicians have significantly damaged the US economy and political system. There are many ways Democratic politicians in Washington have too, but two wrongs do not make a right. SOURCE: “How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich,” by Tim Dickinson, ROLLINGSTONE.COM, at http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-the-gop-became-the-party-of-the-rich20111109. October 12 Boy, do we ever need another Jimmy Carter in office now. SOURCE: “Putin, Jimmy Carter, Trump and Mattis on North Korea,” by Stephen Lendman, INTREPIDREPORT.COM, at http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/22367. October 12 Speaks for itself. SOURCE: “The Scale of Pentagon Waste Boggles the Mind, But Congress Keeps Giving them More,” by Harry Blain, COUNTERPUNCH.ORG, at https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/12/the-scale-of-pentagon-waste-boggles-the-mind-but-congress-keeps-giving-them-more/. October 12 This same thing happened to one of my friends in a doctoral program back in the 1960s. The fellow who challenged my friend to an IQ test apparently thinking this would prove who was right on a particular argument dropped out of the doctoral program and was never heard from again. Your IQ score on an IQ test has little or nothing to do with how much you really know about what is really going on regarding a particular problem, and what should be done about it. SOURCE: “Trump Challenges Tillerson to IQ Test After Secretary of State Calls Him a ‘Moron’”, by Travis Gettys/Raw Story, ALTERNET.ORG, at https://www.alternet.org/news-amppolitics/trump-challenges-tillerson-iq-test-after-secretary-state-calls-him-moron#.Wd0PGn0_iFo.facebook. October 6 Say it aint so Joe. Bad politicians and the loss of public trust. A great elucidation by Chris Martenson SOURCE: “Betrayal!: The pervasive & defining crime of our age” by Chris Martenson, PEAKPROSPERITY.COM, at https://www.peakprosperity.com/blog/113319/betrayal. October 8 Join the FreeFairProgressParty at no cost. SOURCE: “FreeFairProgressParty,” by Richard John Stapleton, Effective Learning Company, at http://www.effectivelearning.net/freefairprogressparty.html. October 8 Say it aint so Joe, if you can read this. One thing is for sure about Trump: He is an absolute disaster for the environment. SOURCE: “Trump: Anomaly in Continuity,” by Andrew Levine, COUNTERPUNCH.ORG at https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/06/trump-anomaly-in-continuity/. October 7 Man made hell on Earth. A synopsis of the evolution of current human affairs. SOURCE: “Psych Ward,” by John Davis, COUNTERPUNCH.ORG at https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/06/psych-ward/. October 7 Anybody but me getting tired of hearing about Trump’s or Hillary’s “collusions” with the “Russians” during the 2016 presidential election in mainstream yak-yakking media. Hell, they don’t even know what collusion means in this context or even what they are lying about. SOURCE: “Behind the Matador’s Cape,” by Paul Street, COUNTERPUNCH.ORG at https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/06/behind-the-matadors-cape/. October 7 Here’s an excellent picture showing how the National Rifle Association controls the gun laws. SOURCE: Facebook meme, showing congressmen lined up at the NRA Pay Window getting bags of loot handed out by the president of the NRA on a floor splattered with blood avoiding signs that say Caution: Wet Floor, as their NRA paymaster tells one of them to “Watch your step as you leave, Congressman—we’d hate to see someone get hurt!” at https://www.facebook.com/richard.stapleton.397. October 6 Just for the Fun of It The biggest lie was calling FICA, Federal Insurance Contributions Act, payments “payroll taxes” in the first place. For years they were called FICA deductions on payroll stubs, being honest about the matter. They were never “taxes”; they were and are “investments” for the social security of all US citizens. Seriously cut them and for sure you will destroy the Social Security System. The day Social Security goes down the tube is the day the US becomes a third world country. Some of the rich will win their psychological Balance Sheet Games by destroying the security of all US citizens and the quality of life of the country as a whole by mindlessly trying to reduce their taxes to get more money to win a Balance Sheet psychological Game with their friends and associates, piling up more and more money without limit, already having several times more money than they can ever spend on real needs, trying to satisfy their insatiable ego hungers. Why do you think people like Trump keeping trying to make more and more money? It’s just for the fun of it, or to stave off boredom and depression, or to prove you’re a big man, or that you are “superior”. For sure you are not doing it for anyone but yourself. SOURCE: “Middle-Class Trojan Horse: Trump’s tax plan will destroy your Social Security benefits,” by proudlib, THEPROUDLIBERAL.ORG at http://theproudliberal.org/middle-class-trojanhorse-trumps-tax-plan-will-destroy-your-social-security-benefits/. October 6 Here’s another outstanding Facebook picture pointing out a profound truth. SOURCE: Facebook meme at https://www.facebook.com/richard.stapleton.397, posted by Jodi Neumark, showing a photograph of H.L. Mencken, and a prediction he made in the Baltimore Evening Sun on July 26, 1920: Subject: A prediction, 97 years ago “As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and a complete narcissistic moron.” October 6 Japan has almost no shooting deaths per year because of forbidding their citizens to own guns. SOURCE: “How Japan Has Virtually Eliminated Shooting Deaths,” by May Fisher, THEATLANTIC.COM, at https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/07/a-land-without-gunshow-japan-has-virtually-eliminated-shooting-deaths/260189/. October 6 Our great leader in his wisdom says he will decertify the Iran nuclear agreement, countermanding all of his National Security experts. Surely he is not this dumb. Or is it like Bush II his god is now telling him to do things. SOURCE: “Trump Just Overruled His National Security Advisers, Takes U.S. On Dangerous New Path,” by news.groupspeak, NEWS.GROUPSPEAK.COM, at http://news.groopspeak.com/trump-just-overruled-his-national-security-advisers-takes-u-s-on-dangerous-new-path/. October 6 Here’s to Bernie Sanders, the only senator not taking money from big pharmaceutical corporations, and the only senator willing to sponsor a bill for a single payer, Medicare-for-all-type national health insurance system. SOURCE: “Why healthcare should be managed as a natural monopoly,” by Richard John Stapleton, BLOG.EFFECTIVELEARNING.NET, at http://blog.effectivelearning.net/why-healthcareshould-be-managed-as-a-natural-monopoly-2/. October 6 Most US senators, Democratic and Republican, have been bought off by insurance industry contributions. SOURCE: Facebook meme created and posted by Cindy Barnes McDougal at https://www.facebook.com/richard.stapleton.397. Here is Cindy’s comment attached to her chart of bribe amounts received by various senators: “So I really want you to look at these “contributions”, aka bribes, for a moment. First, these are the bribes these Senators have accepted just from the health insurance industry. Doesn’t include big pharma, medical supply and other relative groups. Take a look. Secondly, these totals do not include the bribes some, most or all received this week! My friend and Bernie Bridge warrior in Chicago, Veronica Wolski, made a good point this morning when she called Senator Durbin’s office. She told him that her little family could live nicely on some of these totals. I’ll go a step further and say that some could help one of you with college tuition. Maybe pay for that new car you need. Or the wedding for your daughter. Or a down payment on your first new home. Or that business you always wanted. Get mad. You should get mad. When these politicians take bribe money as a payoff to keep healthcare the way it is, then they have put a price tag on your health! You should get mad. Mad enough to fight for your right to universal single payer healthcare. Any American who likes paying high premiums and high deductibles WHILE your state representative accepts this kind of money is nuts. Stop settling. Stop be grateful for the crumbs from the table. Stop believing this is the way it should be. Get mad! Get damn mad and fight back! Call your Senators and tell them Medicare For All! Give them notice: The days of them making a buck off your healthcare are over! P.S. To my Florida friends – look at the amount of bribes Senator Nelson has accepted. How does that make you feel about him?? I could live quite nicely on his bribe money.” October 6 Here is Cicero speaking from his grave. SOURCE: A Facebook meme created and posted by Detong Choyin at https://www.facebook.com/richard.stapleton.397. A Two Thousand Year Old Warning about Trump: “A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. For the traitor appears not a traitor—He speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation—he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city—he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared.” Cicero, Roman Statesman, 42 BC October 6 Here is how much money some of the fat cats in the Senate received feeding at the Big Pharma and insurance industry troughs. Orrin Hatch, $471.560; Mitch McConnell, 433,400; Rob Portman, 382,100; Patrick Toomey, 354,616; Lamar Alexander, 228,100; John Cornyn, 180,000; Cory Gardner 151,850; John Barrasso, 149,750; Mike Enzi, 146,600; John Thune, 123,400; Mike Lee, 66,759; Ted Cruz, 58,895; Tom Cotton, 28,941. SOURCE: Facebook meme created and posted by Milan Pokorny at https://www.facebook.com/richard.stapleton.397. Here is Milan’s comment: “Remember the 13 alt-right senators who tried to take away America’s healthcare behind closed doors? This is how much money they accepted from insurance companies and Big Pharma. If you want them all voted out of office, comment yes and share!” October 6 If only we could get the forty six percent non-voters to vote for a truly ok progressive candidate. Here is the turnout rate in the 2016 presidential election, showing how a progressive party running someone like Bernie Sanders could win in 2020: 46.9% DIDN’T VOTE; 25.6% VOTED FOR CLINTON; 25.5% VOTED FOR TRUMP; 1.7% VOTED FOR JOHNSON SOURCE: Facebook meme created and posted by Join the Coffee Party Movement at https://www.facebook.com/richard.stapleton.397. Here is the comment by Join the Coffee Party Movement: “And this is why we can’t have nice things.” October 6 Here’s how our ceo-in-chief deals with money. Spend it like there is no tomorrow. And cut taxes. “Business” might boom a bit in the short run because of this stimulus, but the US house of cards will become more and more flimsy, as corporations and the elite rich plunder anything they can get their hands on. Instead of a $19 trillion federal debt, we will soon have a $38 trillion federal debt, if we last that long as a country. Why is it the elite rich want another tax cut? They have many times more money now than they can ever spend. The answer: they are playing a psychological Game. The name of the Game is Balance Sheet. The objective is to pile up more net worth than anyone else, to become the richest man or woman in the world. The payoff of the Game is a feeling of superiority and being one-up. This Game is a cognate of the TA Game NIGYSOB, Now I’ve Got You, You SOB. Warren Buffet has said that money has absolutely no utility for him. He keeps piling it up just for the fun of it, and to satisfy his ego needs, as he does playing the game of bridge, which he plays after he goes home at night to his modest Omaha, Nebraska house after a hard day’s work playing Balance Sheet at his office, while drinking his favorite drink, CocaCola, fetched by his second wife as he plays bridge on the Internet. Quite likely he is a high-functioning obsessive-compulsive personality type on the autistic spectrum, as are most people in some ways. Most people are obsessed with and compelled to act out over and over the routines, scripts, activities, pastimes, social games, and psychological Games of their unique lives, depending on how they were programmed genetically and socially throughout their existence, from the womb on. The life process produces all sorts of outcomes for individuals. Some become filthy rich like Warren Buffett, Donald Trump, and thousands of others. On the other hand, millions more become poor as church mice. Nobody ever said human life was fair. SOURCE: “Trump and the Great Betrayal – Daily Reckoning”, by Bill Bonner, DAILYRECKONING.COM, at https://dailyreckoning.com/trump-great-debt-betrayal/. October 6 Another telling article by John Whitehead. SOURCE: “Mass shootings: The military-entertainment complex’s culture of violence turns deadly,“ by John Whitehead, INTREPIDREPORT.COM at http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/22311. October 5 Another well reasoned and written article by Ellen Brown. SOURCE: “How to Fund a Universal Basic Income Without Increasing Taxes or Inflation,” by Ellen Brown, COUNTERPUNCH.ORG, at https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/05/how-to-funda-universal-basic-income-without-increasing-taxes-or-inflation/. October 4 An eloquent speech by Oliver Stone at the 2017 Writer’s Guild Awards celebration. SOURCE: A video created and posted by Truth Inside of You at https://www.facebook.com/richard.stapleton.397. Includes a picture of Oliver Stone at a lectern with this comment: “The Most Honest 3 Minutes in TV History, that you can be critical of your government and your society. This is the most HONEST words you’ll ever watch. Listen to what Mr. Oliver Stone has to say.” Click to watch at https://www.facebook.com/richard.stapleton.397. October 3 Great essay by Ishmael Reed. SOURCE: “Black Athletes and the Mother Thing,” by Ishmael Reed, COUNTERPUNCH.ORG, at https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/03/black-athletes-and-the-mother-thing/. October 3 Say it aint so Joe. SOURCE: “Death in a Dead Land,” by Richard Eskow, COUNTERPUNCH.ORG, at https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/03/death-in-a-dead-land//. October 3 Great essay by Jason Hirthler exposing what lies behind Kaepernick’s brave action. SOURCE: “Kaepernick, Patriotism, and the Perversion of Protest,” by Jason Hirthler COUNTERPUNCH.ORG, at https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/03/kaepernick-patriotism-and-theperversion-of-protest/. October 3 Yes, just what we need, a new “people’s party.” Here’s what is going on in the world, by Noam Chomsky, Earth’s best informed human. SOURCE: “Trump’s Quest to Enrich the Richest: An Interview with Noam Chomsky,” by David Barsamian, TomDispatch|Interview, TRUTH-OUT.ORG at http://www.truthout.org/news/item/42136-trump-s-quest-to-enrich-the-masters-of-mankind-an-interview-with-noam-chomsky. October 3 Hooray for humans around Earth; boo to UN delegates voting against humans, including our disingenuous new photogenic UN ambassador appointed by Trump. SOURCE: “US joins Saudi Arabia and Iraq in voting against UN resolution condemning the death penalty for gay sex,” by Tom Embury-Dennis, INDEPENDENT.CO.UK, at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-gay-sex-death-penalty-un-same-sex-relations-human-rights-council-saudi-arabia-iraq-nikki-haley-a7980981.html. October 3 A very sad story. SOURCE: “Great Hunger,” by Kathy Kelly, COUNTERPUNCH.ORG, at https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/02/great-hunger/. October 2 If you listen to this video you will hear this fellow ask the question why should the top four hundred richest taxpayers, who have enough cash to fill shoeboxes reaching to the sky, receive a tax cut? The answer: they shouldn’t. Why will they get one anyway? It’s simple: because the elite rich will give politicians a significant percentage of their loot if they vote them a tax cut. They know how to be generous with their friends to get even richer. They are not penny-wise and pound foolish or they would not have gotten filthy rich in the first place. SOURCE: “The real meaning of tax reform: The super rich vs. everyone else,” a new video created and posted by MSNBC, at https://www.facebook.com/richard.stapleton.397. Here is their introductory comment about the video: “Tax expert David Cay Johnston demonstrates how the Republican plan for so-called “tax reform” would exacerbate inequality.” View the video at https://www.facebook.com/richard.stapleton.397. October 2 If President Carter is right, Trump and our government are insane to treat North Korea as they do and put humanity at increased risk of a nuclear war. SOURCE: “ ‘I Know What North Korea Wants’ – President Carter Warns ‘US Oligarchy Refuses To do It’,” by Tyler Durden, ZEROHEDGE.COM, at http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-0913/i-know-what-north-korea-wants-president-carter-warns-us-oligarchy-refuses-do-it. Feel free to share, post, forward, copy, reprint, or otherwise disseminate this post any way you see fit. If you would like a free subscription to the Effective Learning Digest email me at [email protected] and I will put you on the emailing list. I do this just for the fun of it and to give something back to society in my retirement years at age seventy-seven, living with more pleasure than I deserve in my remaining days on Earth on the proceeds of a generous defined benefit pension and Social Security, not yet incapacitated by dementia or Alzheimer’s, or any other disease. Richard John Stapleton, Editor & Publisher, Effective Learning Digest, 32 East Main Street, Statesboro, Georgia, USA, www.effectivelearning.net. .

November 3, 2017

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1968, Intelligent Life and the Lunar Landing by Courtenay Barnett It was 1968. I had been sent to a Catholic High School and had a number of Jesuits from the Boston area of the US as teachers. One striking contrast between the older and the younger ones, as a general rule, was that the older Jesuits saw the sun shining on most everything that US foreign policy represented, inclusive of the Vietnam war being embraced as a necessity to stop the spread of Communism. The younger Jesuits were far less sanguine and told/taught us totally different lessons about the US use of napalm and agent orange and educated us on the horrors of war. That was the time that was. About then I heard of a planned space trip destined for the moon. So surreptitiously in 1969 I journeyed to the Kennedy Space Centre and slipped on to Apollo 11 (unbeknown to anyone but some select family members and some close friends). I promised myself to remain in contact and fortuitously was able to access a duplicate communications system on board, obviously placed as a back-up in the eventuality of a failure of the main devices. When we landed Neil hopped off first and Buzz followed while I stealthily exited via a hatch. At first I thought of returning with the flight, but with the communication device and the opportunity to explore the Moon I decided to remain with the firm knowledge that what man had accomplished mankind would repeat and I could eventually on a Russian or Chinese or even some other American flight return to Earth at a later date. As the years wore on I kept asking if warfare had ended on Earth and each time the same negative response came in reply. “Why do you keep asking?” my brother eventually inquired. “Well, ever since man landed on the moon it seemed obvious to me that not only the astronauts’ minds, but those of every other sentient being on planet Earth would have come then to the stark realisation that we are actually all ‘earthlings’ and homo sapiens living on one planet. So, with that knowledge, I assumed that the lunar landing would have jolted all the inhabitants of the green and blue planet into immediately accepting that it made far more sense to bond together as one, and weigh the prospects of invading Martians or any other alien species likely to threaten us earthlings, than expend energies fighting each other.” Sadly, all the news I received from 1968 until anno domini 2017 has been about repeated belligerence and armed conflicts between nations and groups on Earth. We, as a species, despite the lunar landing simply never learnt anything by way of aspirations for tranquility and actualising the liberating feeling of freedom from war. Finally, after all these years, I have had to accept that not in my lifetime will there be a realisation of quietude in the human condition on Earth. Having enjoyed these several years here on the Moon, I am now planning my return to planet earth to face the unpleasant discords which constitute earthly existence. Now that I am safely back on terra firma, on the planet of my birth, there has been opportunity to reassess the human condition. This I do, so my fellow humans inform me, with the most advanced intellect possessed among all the vertebrates and invertebrates. Yet, in reflecting on this assertion, I note that other species kill for food to eat; we kill for sport, assertion of manhood and various other reasons amounting to the infliction of gratuitous violence on our fellow beings. The numbers who do this is reflected amongst many humans and is accompanied by the technological capabilities to deliver death and destruction ranging from hand held guns all the way up to nuclear bombs which can assure annihilation of us as a species. Incredible, when you think of it, that we are so smart that we actually have developed weapons that can assure the ending of our existence as a species. So sophisticated we are that the world’s most advanced nation, the United States of America, has a special Amendment in its Constitution making it a lawful right to bear arms. Therefore, as of legal right the weapons used for the various types of killing just mentioned has been elevated to a position of jurisprudential significance that assures that when a decision is made to launch an attack of mass murder it remains a legal right to obtain the necessary weaponry so to attack. Of course, we are also cultivated significantly above other mammals, vertebrates and lesser animals that after the event we have the cognitive superiority to call the attack a crime. We then uphold the attacker’s (if he is still alive) right to another Constitutional safeguard of a trial before his peers. Then, if convicted, the death sentence or multiple life sentences might be the legal penalty. We, of course, are logical in all our doings. A single life sentence is insufficient, for when one is completed there still remain 49 others as a justified measure for the severity of the crime of gunning down 50 faultless human beings who just happened to get in the way of the bullets that the shooter, exercising his Constitutional right, had decided to discharge. Now, the weapons of mass destruction takes our intellectual superiority to totally astounding heights in full confirmation that unlike horses or donkeys ours is par excellence – the crème de la crème above all other known cognitive capacities. We have reached a stage where, again, America can destroy human existence many times over. Thus, rationally, if the level has been reached (which it long since has) of having in hand the weapons capability to destroy human life in its totality one time over, then the added ten or twenty fold that all nuclear weapons combined can now accomplish seems then equally as logical as the multiple life sentences imposed on the mass shooter, as increasing numbers of nuclear weapons keep being produced. The only difference is that nations now possess the capacity with WMDs that a single mass shooter could only dream of having desired to destroy not just some, but all of humankind. Indeed, far exceeding a paltry 50 after so many rounds fired. Believe it or not, I have just described what we actually are doing as a species which calls ourselves intelligent with intelligence on a higher plane than all other species inhabiting planet Earth. Truth be told, since we landed on the moon we seem to think that there are other planets that we can live on so we search for something which sustains life as we know it here on Earth. Not surprisingly so, for as we head towards self-inflicted annihilation as a species, those of us having the material wherewithal already have an exit ticket to Mars and are already booked knowing what is pending. Towards that destructive end we have the excuse to ravage this planet, keep cutting down trees, expand our population, poison the rivers and the seas and destroy the ozone layer. Practise blowing up each other doesn’t really matter much any more; besides, it keeps the rich in power and the wealth where others can’t get to it. The dream of establishing a colony somewhere ‘Out There’ where people like you or I aren’t allowed on it is the great dream of a new paradise pending and is the professed long term goal. This all sounds a bit bleak; but since 1968 predicting the place we are in now would have been called bleak too. And all accomplished with the use and application of a superior intellect. Don’t forget that. Just think about it. Courtenay Barnett is a graduate of London University. His areas of study were economics, political science and international law. He has been a practising lawyer for over thirty years, has been arrested for defending his views, has been subjected to death threats, and has argued public interest and human rights cases.

October 28, 2017

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1 Comment on 1968, Intelligent Life and the Lunar Landing

Business Skylab Conference By Richard John Stapleton (Editor’s Note: This fictional business case invented and written by me was first published in Managing Creatively: Action Learning in Action by University Press of America in 1976; it was reprinted in The Entrepreneur: Concepts and Cases on Creativity in Business by University Press of America in 1985; and it was reprinted again in Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds by Effective Learning Publications in 2008 and 2012. (This case was prepared as a basis for group discussion, not to serve as an example of right or wrong business behavior. (Feel free to forward, share, reprint, or otherwise disseminate this post any way you see fit.) A secret conference was held in the secret Earth Sciences Skylab in 1974 for the purpose of studying business phenomena on Earth. The Carter Foundation for Higher Education funded the conference as a follow-up to the 1958 Gosden and Harper reports on the quality of business education. The 1958 Gosden and Harper research was funded by the Carter Foundation to assess the quality of education provided by Schools of Business in United States colleges and universities. The 1958 reports criticized business schools for being too descriptive in nature, for not emphasizing scientific research methodologies, and for generally fostering a low level of academic achievement. The reports accused the business schools of merely reporting what business was doing and not developing new innovations for improving business. During the 1960’s the study of business became heavily endowed with mathematical and behavioral concepts from the fields of mathematics and social science. Concepts and techniques from the fields of engineering and computer science were also applied to business phenomena and problems in business schools during the period. Many courses in business schools were taught by PhD’s in psychology, sociology, mathematics, and statistics and, in many instances, there were only small differences in teaching methodologies and contents of courses taught in Schools of Business and courses taught in Schools of Arts and Sciences. In some instances, actual business phenomena were completely left out of business courses. During the 1970’s many business scholars and businessmen began to wonder if business courses had not become overly theoretical and too neglectful of actual business phenomena. Many business courses had been structured using courses in mathematics or sociology or psychology or industrial engineering as models. The teaching/learning methodologies of laboratory sciences, such as botany and zoology, had not been generally used as models because of the difficulty of placing business phenomena under microscopes for observation. This difficulty was overcome, however, with the completion of the Skylab Observatory. The Skylab Observatory The Skylab observatory is a satellite that was secretly placed in orbit around Earth in 1971. Work on the observatory was completed in late 1972. The observatory is large enough to accommodate groups of up to twenty people for as long as two weeks. From the Skylab Observatory it is possible for groups of humans to observe humans, business and military practices, and general events on Earth in varying degrees of detail using a specially developed telescope, technically a macroscope, which has not only X-ray power, i.e., the capability to see through roofs of buildings and filing cabinets, but also the power to transmit and receive sound between the satellite and any human at any discrete point on Earth, via laser beams which travel along light waves from the macroscope to points of concern on Earth. The Skylab is available for research by various scientific and research groups from Earth for the purpose of improving the quality of life on Earth. The US government provided funding for the construction of the satellite. Operating expenses for the satellite are provided through revenues received from various groups that lease and use the satellite. The Carter Foundation provided funds for the secret business study in 1973 or 1974. Professors, managers, accountants, salesmen, and promising business students were selected for the membership of the 1973 or 1974 business Skylab conference by a select panel. The members of the conference represented a cross section of cultural, regional, economic, sexual, and ethnic backgrounds. Quarters on the Skylab were not spacious but were comfortable. The quality of food served by the Skylab food services staff was excellent, and the Skylab was well stocked with beverages of all types. Retro-rockets were attached to bags of garbage and waste for disposal. The rockets slowed the disgorged bags so that they re-entered Earth’s atmosphere and were incinerated. Study sessions began at 8:00 a.m., US CST, and continued until noon. The sessions resumed at 1:00 p.m. and continued until 5:00 p.m. Cocktails were served at 6:00 p.m. and dinner was served at 8:00 p.m. The conference members usually chatted over drinks or coffee or read until 10:00 or 11:00 p.m. and retired shortly thereafter. Structuring the Conference There was considerable discussion regarding how the conference sessions should be structured. Some members argued that someone should take charge of the group and be responsible for pointing out relevant aspects or points. Others argued that since they were all adults, and most were professionals, that they should discuss aspects and points on a democratic basis with each member’s opinion being weighted equally. There was also considerable discussion as to what was relevant for study. The Skylab technological breakthrough made it possible for the group to study firsthand almost any business phenomenon on Earth. Since it was obviously not possible to study all phenomena on Earth during the two-week period of the conference, what should they select to study, of all the phenomena at their disposal? Naturally, the interests of the group varied according to past experience, ability, and skill; therefore, what should be selected depended upon who would do the selecting. It was finally decided that the group would try to devote equal time to phenomena in the business functions of production, marketing, finance, control, transportation, and service. A number of organizations and humans in each of the functional areas were selected for observation. The process used was very unstructured. The Skylab macroscope could be focused so as to observe the whole of a continent, a nation, a state, a county, or a human, or > on Business Skylab Conference

A Synopsis of My Educational Background by Richard John Stapleton A great-grandfather of mine many times removed, the Reverend Doctor James Maury, a French Huguenot, taught four American presidents, Washington (a distant relative down the branches of my family tree), Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, in a boarding school in Virginia. A distant cousin, Matthew Fontaine Maury, was a West Point graduate, a commodore in the Civil War, fighting for the South, who published a book still in print, Physical Geography of the Seas. He was a founder of Virginia Tech, retiring as a professor of physics at Virginia Military Academy. Another distant cousin Dabney Herndon Maury, also a West Point graduate, a general in the Civil War fighting for the South, published a book titled, Recollections of a Southerner in the Mexican, Indian, and Civil Wars. My great great grandfather Thomas Sanford Gathright, a Confederate draft dodger who opposed the South’s seceding from the Union, was the first president of Texas A & M University, recommended for his post by Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America. My father’s uncle, Richard Gathright Maury, was a prominent lawyer in his time, the youngest district attorney in Harris County history, the county in which Houston just got flooded, who once served papers in person on a golf course in New York to John D. Rockefeller, indicting him and his Standard Oil Trust for violating Texas anti-trust laws, whose gravesite in Center, Texas, replete with a statue, is now a designated historical site recognized by the Texas Historical Society. As near as I can tell Richard Gathright Maury never went to school at all. Based on genealogical records produced for me by Frank Parker, a real estate developer and investor and a hobby genealogist, here in Statesboro, he was home schooled on a plantation in Mississippi and read law with a law firm to pass the bar exam. His father, my great grandfather, Matthew Henry Maury, attended the University of Mississippi two years and was later killed by an African on a plantation in Mississippi, probably a freed slave, or the son of one. My grandfather, Elbert Harry Coston, a Methodist minister, the son of Isom Alexander Coston, who was blind, according to my grandmother, Darlie Brown Walker Coston, whose father David Montgomery Walker was a cotton farmer and a wagon manufacturer, “never did a day’s work in his life. All he ever did was sit up on the front porch with his brothers and read.” She said most of the work on the Coston farm near Palestine, Texas was done by Africans, freed slaves apparently, managed by her mother-in-law, Mattie Elizabeth Allen Coston, born on a ranch in Texas in 1854, shortly after Texas stopped pretending to be a nation and joined the Union as a mere state. My mother told me in her last days in Willow Pond here in Statesboro that her grandfather Isom would swat each of his five boys on the rear one time with a razor strop when they came in for supper, telling them he didn’t know what they had done wrong that day but he knew they had been up to somethin’. She also said somebody had to read the whole newspaper to him every day. My Coston grandfather took a few courses at East Texas State College before he became an ordained minister, becoming a minister according to my hard-working father so he wouldn’t ever have to work at all. I lived with Moma and Snazzy, my maternal grandparents, for two years while I was working on my doctorate. My aunt Ted, Edna Mae Coston Thompson, at one point had Snazzy examined by a psychiatrist, thinking he was going insane. The psychiatrist said quite to the contrary he had the highest IQ of any man his age he had ever examined. This confirmed my judgment. Snazzy always seemed to understand anything. He had a personal library he had collected through the years containing a thousand or more books. My mother Ida Belle Coston Stapleton took a few business courses at a Draughn’s Business College somewhere after she got out of high school. She told me shortly before she died here in Statesboro, at age 92, that she never made less than an A in school. My father Richard Gathright Maury Stapleton took some courses in agronomy at Texas Tech before he dropped out to become a successful entrepreneur, having never taken a single business course or read a single business book, or a book of any kind after I was born, to my knowledge, except maybe an arcane treatise or two on Free Masonry, to become a third degree Scottish Rite Mason, as I understand it. He saw to it I became a DeMolay in high school but I never had any interest in that sort of thing. All he ever read was the local newspaper, farm magazines, and the US News & World Report. He put me to work in his enterprises when I was eight years old. I made mostly C’s in grade, junior, and high school, but did better in college. I was according to the Lubbock Avalanche Journal probably the youngest and smallest Class A high school starting quarterback in the US in 1953, at age thirteen, weighing 110 pounds, standing five feet three inches tall. I played basketball on an athletic scholarship at Hardin-Simmons University two years before transferring to Texas Tech College (now university). I had a 3.0 in economics in undergraduate school but did better in the doctoral program, graduating with a 3.67 grade point average in a program that included all business disciplines in which A’s were not easy to come by. One of my classmates who became the dean of a business school graduated with a 3.0. Despite scoring 840 on the Graduate Record Exam (GRE), at a time when 1000 was about average, Texas Tech accepted me provisionally into their doctoral program and gave me a part-time instructor position in economics that paid $3000 per academic year, enough for me to pay my way through the doctoral program and write my dissertation in three years. The Office of Manpower Evaluation and Research of the US Department of Labor awarded me a $6500 grant to write my dissertation, An Analysis of Rural Manpower Migration Patterns in the South Plains Region of Texas. Frank Parker traced all four of my grandparents back to Virginia before the American Revolutionary War, in which several ancestors fought. Their descendants, many of whom were cotton farmers, spread out from Virginia migrating into South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, and New Mexico before winding up in the cotton country of Northwest Texas where I grew up. I was working at a full time job in a Litton Industries electronics plant as a production control expediter and dispatcher and publishing my weekly newspaper the Wolfforth-Frenship Gazette when I took the GRE, having stayed up most of the night before the exam putting out the paper. I fell asleep several times taking the exam, not thinking it was important, just something I had to do to get into graduate school, filling in the remaining blanks for the various timed sections without reading the questions. I saw the exam proctor, the head of the psychology department at Texas Tech at the time, staring at me in amazement when I woke up from one of those naps. Considering the GRE computerized grading system took off more points for questions answered wrong than for those left blank, I was lucky to have scored as high as 840. I was hired at the associate professor rank after finishing my doctorate, skipping the assistant rank, at the University of Southwestern Louisiana after completing my doctorate in business administration, management science major, economics minor, at Texas Tech, becoming a full professor at age thirty-six at Georgia Southern College (now university), where I was the senior professor of the business school for about fifteen years, carrying the mace as the senior professor of the university for the spring graduation ceremony the year I retired in 2005. I was the highest paid professor in the business school and maybe the second-highest-paid faculty member at Georgia Southern in 1970, behind Jim Oliver, in biology, maybe third after Fielding Russell, in English, when I started at age thirty, hired by President Pope Duncan. My son, Jonathan Walker Stapleton, was the Star Student for our Congressional District in Georgia in 1990, scoring 1520 on the SAT back in the days when 1600 was the maximum score. He maxed the math part of the GRE when he finished his undergraduate degree at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1994, almost maxing the verbal part. He now invents and makes things in his home workshop and teaches physics and Earth sciences in a high school near Burlington, Vermont. Hunting and fishing and organic gardening in his spare time, in a beautiful environment, he is a smart son indeed. He is the inventor and designer of Reptangles™, a plastic educational toy comprising twenty-four parts that snap together and pull apart to assemble into more than one hundred mathematically identifiable geometric shapes and symmetrical configurations, manufactured in China, licensed to, marketed, and distributed around Earth by the Fat Brain Toy Company, which was demonstrated on ABC’s Good Morning America. Jonathan is married to Renee Doney Stapleton, MD, PhD, who teaches, researches, and practices pulmonary medicine at the University of Vermont. They have three children, Walker, Emmerson, and Orion, each of whom is learning well in and out of school. According to Frank Parker’s > on A Synopsis of My Educational Background

Effective Learning Report Updates—September 2017 THE HUMAN CONDITION By Richard John Stapleton, Editor & Publisher The world has always been a screwed-up place. And there has never been enough food, furs, spears, game, land, water, fish, timber, shoes, shotguns, rifles, fishing tackle, plows, cotton, houses, horses, cattle, clothes, cars, tractors, oil, gasoline, electricity, video games, computers, cell phones, helicopters, Humvees, SUVs, pickups, nuclear weapons, medicine and other goods to go around. There are now some six billion people aboard Spaceship Earth and probably one billion people go to bed hungry every night. Millions of people exist on the brink of starvation every year. The starvation hellhole in 2004 is the Darfur region of Sudan, as usual in Africa, where one million people may die of genocidal ethnic cleansing, starvation, and disease. Only about one billion of us aboard Spaceship Earth are in generally good shape, in the United States, Western Europe, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Iceland, Australia and in a few other places. Among the two hundred or so countries on Earth one finds various levels of affluence and poverty, happiness and misery, freedom and slavery—the poorer the country in general the greater the gap between a rich elite few and masses of poor. In general the poorer the country the more corrupt the government. As bad as things are now, they are probably better than they ever were. Average incomes in recent years have increased worldwide. Although a few countries have become worse off, many of the poorest countries are now less poor than they were. Even so, it is not easy to live on $500 per year, a common income for people in some countries of Africa, South America, and Asia. Compare that with a $30,000 or so median yearly income for employed people in rich countries. It’s no wonder that have-nots are continuing their struggle against the haves worldwide. Numerous rebel groups, communist and otherwise, led by warlords and leaders by various names now roam about in South America, Africa, and Asia raping, pillaging, and skirmishing with right-wing paramilitary groups and other military coalitions; intellectually and morally bankrupt dirt-poor communist North Korea playing with nuclear fire may be the biggest threat at present to humanity; and rapidly-developing communist China with its new variety of capitalism is significantly increasing its production, driving up the prices of raw materials worldwide. Educated information technology workers in poor countries are now able to do computer and information services work, thanks to the Internet, sitting at their computer screens in their poor countries, out-competing similar workers in rich countries without ever leaving home, all part of a new phenomenon known as “outsourcing”. As bad as environmental pollution and global warming are now, caused by burning crude oil and coal, imagine what would happen if all poor countries were to develop the production, transportation, and consumption systems now used by rich countries and were to produce the same output per capita. Politicians have increasingly polarized voters in the US in the last twenty-five years in their quest for personal political power. In general Republicans want to lower taxes for the rich, increase military might, and promote their religious beliefs; in general Democrats want to restore the taxes of the rich and insure Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other social programs. The last two US presidential elections, in which voters were almost exactly divided between Republicans and Democrats, serve as evidence for this assertion. There are now ominous signs in the US that atavistic forces lurking apparently in all humanity such as religious fanaticism and intolerance, military fatalism, ideological magical thinking, racism, sexism, ageism, and disrespect for facts and reason are spreading. Almost every day one can read in newspapers about politicians attempting to enact laws promoting religious belief that will enable religious groups to secure tax money to further their religious agendas. Articles appear almost daily in newspapers about the loss of individual freedom in America and the imposing of increasingly authoritarian measures such as denying due legal process to suspected terrorists and prisoners. Although terrorism is a threat to some people in developed nations, and strong police and military measures are required to deal with terrorists, in the face of such threats we must not allow the darker power-hungry, irrational and fatalistic side of human nature to destroy the blessings of freedom that millions of Americans have worked and fought so hard to achieve in the last 250 years. In the past few years I have had more and more students in my classes with political agendas who seem to think facts are irrelevant and that political propaganda is truth. Apparently they have been taught by authority figures in their lives that they have a right to disseminate their personal dogma and propaganda as truth and others have no right to contest them or point out the deleterious consequences of such thinking and behavior. I am sure Hitler’s empowered brown- shirted youths felt much the same. Just today a page-one story in our local newspaper is about an attempt by a legislator in a midwestern state to pass legislation to force professors to allow students to promote “conservative” dogma in college classrooms without being challenged by the teacher even, apparently, if the dogma is completely out of context. I think this sort of thing is worse than absurd; it is abhorrent. What this move amounts to in transactional analysis terms is an attempt to legitimize by law a Parent ego state contamination of the Adult ego state functioning of the educational process. The move entails an attempt to legally enfranchise an I’m OK—You’re Not OK life position based on political propaganda, dogma, and doctrine in classrooms. Good teaching entails teachers establishing an I’m OK—You’re OK life position among themselves and all students in the classroom, based on an honest attempt using the Adult ego state to discover and teach the truth of the matter based on a rigorous study of facts and evidence. It seems obvious to me the purpose of teaching in classrooms is to teach truth—verifiable truth supported by facts, observation, and reason. Labeling professors as liberal or conservative is an insult to real professors. This assumes professors teach dogma and propaganda and ignore truth based on fact and reason. As far as I am concerned any professor who tells his or her students she or he is liberal or conservative and teaches propaganda, dogma, or doctrine conforming to a political party line in a classroom as actual truth is not qualified to be a professor. Although I abhor labeling people as liberal or conservative, it seems to me “conservatives” are winning the political language game in the United States because the word conservative resonates better than liberal with people en masse. Liberal makes a good smear word whereas conservative does not. The word conservative connotes morality, virtue, hard work, persistence, generally virtuous things; whereas the word liberal connotes immorality, laziness, loose morals, loose standards, generally weak sentiments and behaviors. This past year for the first time in my teaching career I was labeled a liberal by a colleague who tells his students he is a conservative and proud of it. Although I do not think this colleague meant serious harm, his move was a form of attack in the overall context in which the transaction occurred. While the episode was disconcerting, what is more disturbing is to think that more and more people are being subjected to such moves in the US as a whole. I am no more a liberal than the colleague is a fascist, although it seems to me some so-called conservatives advocate behaviors that are fascist in nature. In addition to conservative vs. liberal, the political language game is also about fascism vs. democracy, rational vs. irrational, knowledgeable vs. dogmatic, fair vs. unfair, freedom vs. repression, smart vs. dumb, hopeful vs. fatalistic, courageous vs. cowardly, weak vs. strong, independent vs. dependent and other linguistic bifurcations. There are all sorts of labels one can put on people to put them down. Given the way our culture in the US has evolved in the last twenty-five years, any citizen can be attacked in a war of words on any day. A young chancellor of the University System of Georgia with a PhD in classical literature upon resigning his post a few years ago said Georgia was experiencing “a rising tide of antiintellectualism.” Hopefully right, not might, shall win in the long run. SOURCE: A Passage from Business Voyages, by Richard John Stapleton, written in 2004, first published in 2008, pages 580-583 September 29, 2017 September has not been a good month in my opinion. Bad things are coming to a head. Our clownish seventy-year-old reality show billionaire president who inherited his money who never worked a day in his life at a real job for a real boss has been playing a potentially lethal psychological NIGYSOB Game with an infantilized thirty-three-year-old tryant in North Korea who inherited a whole nation who also never worked at a real job in his life for a boss. The name of the Game, well known in transactional analysis circles, is Now I’ve Got You, You S.O.B. The purpose of the Game is to vent your feelings of anger and frustration. The payoff, if you win, is feeling superior and one-up. It’s one thing for people to play this Game backed up with the usual means of power and punishment in organizations such as those in which most of us live and survive—verbal insults and threats, paddles, fisticuffs, the power to give or not give someone a pay raise, the power to fire someone, the power to sue someone in court, the power to shoot someone with a gun, the power to put someone in jail. Unfortunately, Trump and his North Korean dictator Game adversary, whom Trump calls the Rocket Man, who calls Trump the Dotard, are backed up with armies, navies, air forces, and nuclear bombs that could destroy humanity if their Game escalates to its highest degree. According to President Jimmy Carter quoted in an article in the Intrepid Report, “Trump fails to understand North Korea existential fears,” by Wayne Madsen, this Game with North Korea could be terminated if the US would promise with a new treaty they would not harm North Korea so long as North Korea does not harm any other nation. Seems to me if this is right the US would have to be insane not to sign such a treaty. But, unfortunately neither Jimmy Carter nor I is now president of the US. Why has this insanity and absurdity with North Korea happened? Has our military-industrial-intelligence-corporate complex agitated for it to justify military spending in the US budget to enrich and empower their vested interests even more? Has Trump done it just to play psychological Games attempting to satisfy his gargantuan and apparently insatiable ego needs? Has he done it to distract attention from problems and concerns such as hurricane relief, football players kneeling when the national anthem is played to protest against racism, his personal problems with his congressional investigation, his lawsuits, the US military involvement in the Middle East, the federal budget deficit, rising income inequality and dissatisfaction, his business dealings, and any of the thousands of details such gestalts entail? SOURCE: “Trump fails to understand North Korea existential fears,” by Wayne Madsen, published in the Intrepid Report September 29 Here is a brave analysis with sound conclusions, but what is the probability it could ever happen? SOURCE: “Leftists and rightists agree: abolish the CIA,” by Roger Copple, published in the Intrepid Report. September 28 Here is a video posted on my Facebook page titled “Have You Ever Thought America Has Become One Big Jerry Springer Show,” created by So That’s the Buzz. No, I had not thought that exactly but I have thought similar things. Come to think of it though, calling America a Jerry Springer Show is a pretty good analogy. Facebook itself is somewhat of a Jerry Springer Show in which all sorts of people from any walk of life can speak their minds, however deranged and disordered they might be. Is it educational to expose your mind to this diversity of nonsense? Who would have ever thought the US would ever have a president like Donald Trump—a spoiled rich kid, with at least six bankruptcies and thirteen or more business failures to his credit, five children by three different wives, a supporter of neo-Nazis, a racist, a misogynist, a bully, a tweeter who may never have read a whole book who probably never wrote and published anything by himself requiring more than a few paragraphs, a high-functioning narcissistic who requires constant approval, voted into office primarily by white Christians, who still approve of his lifestyle and behavior, which is contrary to what their bible says is right? While there were rumors on Facebook he snorted some cocaine during his campaign, according to Facebook posts, he does not smoke tobacco or drink alcohol, two good things some people might say about him. And so far on Facebook I have seen only one rumor about his having had some sort of sexual fling with one of his employees in the White House. Regardless, it does seem Trump has turned the White House into a Jerry Springer Show of sorts with on-stage characters expressing mundane off-the-wall ideas. His family members, cronies, and appointees sometimes look like characters in a TV soap opera. SOURCE: “Have You Ever Thought America Has Become One Big Jerry Springer Show,” a video created by So That’s the Buzz, posted on Facebook. September 28 Violence is a waste of time and energy Rather than rationally deal with the root causes of their problems, fears, and frustrations, many humans vilify, demonize, scapegoat, and tear the tissue of enemies. What Earth needs now is unlearning and new learning. Humans need to learn how to get their needs met without playing Games and resorting to violence, as in wars and acts of terrorism such as occurred last week on the campus at the University of Virginia. Violence rarely solves anything. It just kicks the can further down the road, where the problem rears its ugly head again. As Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King demonstrated, non-violent action can produce real change. Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning is full of ideas for producing peaceable change. September 27, 2017 Here’s how our CEO in Chief Trump deals with money. Spend it like there is no tomorrow, and cut taxes. “Business” might boom a bit in the short run because of this stimulus if he can make it happen, but the US financial house of cards will become more and more flimsy, as corporations and the elite rich plunder anything they can get their hands on. Instead of a $19 trillion federal debt, we will soon have a $38 trillion federal debt, if the Trumpster gets what he says he wants for a US budget. SOURCE: “Trump and the Great Debt Betrayal,” by Bill Bonner, published in the Daily Reckoning blog. September 27 It’s worse than I ever thought it would be. I wonder how many of his voters have any conception of what Trump is really doing in the White House? Most of them probably think all he does is threaten leaders in foreign countries and bluster about football players not standing up for the national anthem, or saying white supremacists and neo-Nazis are good people, or crowing about how many people show up when he deigns to observe hurricane disaster results. This article would open their eyes if they were to read it. SOURCE: “The White House as Donald Trump’s New Casino,” by Nomi Prins, published in The Daily Reckoning. September 27 As the rich continue to get richer…. SOURCE: “The growing danger of dynastic wealth,” by Robert Reich, published in the Intrepid Report September 27, 2017 Say it aint so Joe…. SOURCE: “I Just Know I’ll be Rich Someday,” John Giarratana, published in CounterPunch September 27 Many sorries for these people. At least Trump finally waived the Jones Act and real help can be provided by the US. SOURCE: “’This Bankrupt Island’: Debt and Disaster in Puerto Rico,” by Maria Del Pilar Blanco, published in CounterPunch September 27 Say it aint so Joe. SOURCE: “The Preacher and Vietnam: When Billy Graham Urged Nixon to Kill One Million People,” by Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn, published in CounterPunch. September 27 Here’s another great article by John Whitehead, a constitutional lawyer. In a free society patriotism is not mandatory. Going down on one knee when the national anthem is being played is legal under the constitution of the US. This is a form of non-verbal speech guaranteed by the constitution. People arguing football players do not have a right to do this are wrong. The real problem here is that most people have been brainwashed into believing all people have to be obedient to all symbols of national authority, believing they are deprived of their constitutional rights when they are paid to do a job by someone else, becoming de facto slaves, especially when working for the military, or, apparently, when they are paid to play football. This whole hullabaloo is a symptom of the increasing militarization of the US, implying more and more people have been brainwashed into believing they have to obey all authoritarian commands and messages, regardless of their guaranteed constitutional rights. SOURCE: “Patriots and Protesters Should Take a Knee for the Constitution,” by John W. Whitehead, published in CounterPunch. September 27 This is about a fellow named Roger Goodale, who, according to a Facebook post, is the commissioner of the National Football League, a so-called non-profit organization, who was paid a salary of $44.2 million dollars in 2012. This does seem to be a bit much for a salary for a non-profit organization. Think there might be just a little something wrong here? SOURCE: Facebook post by Edward Devine, September 7, 2016. September 27 Why did Hatch and McConnell get so much more than the others? Remember the 13 alt-right senators who tried to take away America’s healthcare behind closed doors? This is how much money they accepted from insurance companies and Big Pharma. SOURCE: Facebook post by Milan Pokorny, September 22. September 26 There are Large Parts of America Being Left Behind…including us. “It is fair to wonder whether a recovery that excludes tens of millions of Americans and thousands of communities deserves to be called a recovery at all…” SOURCE: “There are Large Parts of America Being Left Behind”, by Tyler Durden, published in ZeroHedge September 25 Here’s to Bernie Sanders. Hope it somehow works in our moribund society. SOURCE: “Why healthcare should be managed as a natural monopoly,” by Richard John Stapleton, Effective Learning Report September 24 Say it aint so Joe. “A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. For the traitor appears not a traitor—He speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation—he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city—he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared.” Cicero, Roman Statesman, 42 BC, speaking from his grave. SOURCE: Facebook post by Detong Choyin, September 23 September 23 How to get that 46.9 percent voting for a truly progressive candidate is the problem. And this is why we can’t have nice things. 2016 presidential election turnout rate: 46.9 percent didn’t vote, 25.6 percent voted for Clinton, 25.5 percent voted for Trump, and 1.7 percent voted for Johnson. SOURCE: Posted on Facebook by Join the Coffee Party Movement. September 22 Here’s a particularly cogent economic update by Richard Wolff. SOURCE: Audio podcast, “Economic Update: Capitalism, Revolution and Socialism,” published in Truth-Out. September 21 Last night, the Senate overwhelmingly approved an $80 billion annual increase in military spending. Trump had asked for just $48 billion… As shown here, the US makes thirty-six percent of all military expenditures around Earth, including some two hundred countries, more than the next eight largest nations spend combined. Why is this? SOURCE: Posted on Facebook by Robert Reich September 21 Capitalism won’t be killed by communism. Capitalism will be killed by low-wage workers who can’t buy products, aka lack of aggregate demand. SOURCE: Visual meme posted on Facebook by Matt Matsuoka September 16 More corruption in our government. This should not be happening. Insurance industry contributions to Democratic Senators. Of thirty-five listed, Bernie Sanders was the only one not receiving anything. SOURCE: Posted on Facebook by Cindy Barnes McDougal September 15 It was way worse than I thought it was then when I saw it on TV in the waiting room of the Volvo dealership in Savannah, Ga. I thought it strange at the time that a young woman would walk in the room and tell us with certainty, “Osama Bin Laden!” I had never heard of him at the time. Hunter S. Thompson’s 9/11 Essay is Still Chillingly Accurate 16 Years Later. When terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001 no one knew exactly what the future would hold. SOURCE: “Hunter S. Thompson’s 9/11 Essay is Still Chillingly Accurate 16 Years Later,” by David Moye, published in HuffPost, Sept. 11, 2017 September 15 McDonald’s prices go up regardless of wages. Big Mac cost in 2009, $3.57; Federal Minimum Wage, $7.25 Big Mac cost in 2017, $5.30; Federal Minimum Wage, $7.25 Wages don’t matter. Fight for $15 per hour. SOURCE: Meme posted by Fight for $15 September 14 Why We Need Medicare for All Well said by Bernie Sanders. This is a pivotal moment in American history. Do we, as a nation, join the rest of the industrialized world and guarantee comprehensive health care for all? SOURCE: “Why We Need Medicare for All,” by Sen. Bernard Sanders, published in CounterPunch September 14 Look closely at this chart of federal spending. Somewhere within the tiny orange sliver at the bottom is the food stamp program that Republicans blame for our budget deficit. SOURCE: Meme posted on Facebook by The Other 98% September 13 Declaring peace would be a dangerous thing. Some thoughts and facts on war in this article by David Swanson. Well worth a read. SOURCE: “How Outlawing War Changed the World in 1928,” by David Swanson, published in CounterPunch September 13 Do we really know what we’re doing? One of the major differences between working and middle to upper-class parents, when it comes to their children’s education, and specifically how to best maximize… SOURCE: “Beyond the Class Ceiling: Education and Upward Social Mobility,” by Pascal Blackfoot, published in CounterPunch September 12 Premature disappearance is a terrible thing. Remembering the disappeared. Of the 2,753 victims of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, no physical trace has been found for 1,112 of them. Thus for 40… SOURCE: “Remembering the Disappeared,” by Ariel Dorfman, published in CounterPunch September 11 Say it aint so Joe. The US War on Terror has resulted in over 1 million deaths. SOURCE: “9/11: The Beginning of the End of the US Empire Project,” by Dahr Jamail, published in Truthout September 7 Is North Korea and the US now analogous to Cuba and the US then and is Kim and Trump analogous to Khrushchev and Kennedy? Here is an excellent article pointing out gruesome realities of the relationship with North Korea. We know Trump is not analogous to Kennedy, and we know Kim is not analogous to Khrushchev. Nuclear bombs did not fall from the sky on the US then; will they fall from the sky on the US now? Cold War strategists led by such men as Henry Kissinger, Thomas Schelling and Bernard Brodie believed that ultimately relationships among nations were… SOURCE: “America on the Brink of Nuclear War: What Should We Do?”, by William R. Polk, published in CounterPunch September 6 All this is doing is turning machines into what humans used to be. Humans cannot compete with these digitized machines. The only hope is to turn these machines into the equivalent of human machines and promote former human machines into the elite stockholder manager class of corporations, to live off the work of the robot machines like the elite live off the work of human machines now. A computer scientist at Rice University says that accountants, lawyers and even construction are about to find their work changing substantially, if not entirely taken… SOURCE: “The rise of robots taking human jobs will be ‘painful and enduring’,” by Moshe Y. Vardi, published in the Daily Mail, September 5 David Stockman in my opinion does an admirable job explaining the Federal tax situation. On the other hand, he is being disingenuous regarding what he calls a payroll tax, calling it the major problem for middle and lower income citizens. What he calls a payroll tax of fifteen percent is really FICA deductions for Social Security, absolutely necessary to prevent the destruction of the Social Security system, an investment, not a tax. Pundits, especially good ones like Stockton, calling FICA deductions payroll taxes is a dangerous thing. The day when Social Security goes down the tube is the day the US becomes a Third World country. Former Reagan White House cabinet official, David Stockman levels that Donald Trump’s tax plan is destined for complete failure… SOURCE: “The Donald’s Seinfeld Tax Plan—A Big Show About Nothing,” by David Stockman, published in the Daily Reckoning September 5 Here is a good general overview of climate change around Earth. The author asserts human activity caused it. I say it makes little difference who or what caused it. The relevant point is that climate change is creating hell around Earth, and we better hope we humans did cause it, because if we did then we can theoretically make changes to uncause it; otherwise, if nature caused it, and the trend continues for several decades, humans are toast, since there is nothing we can do about it. We are in the age of climate-caused humanitarian crises. SOURCE: “Greenland is Burning: Wildfires and Floods Surge Worldwide,” by Dahr Jamail, published in Truth-Out. September 5, 2017 Here’s something to think about. Countries ranked by prosperity: Norway, Socialist; Switzerland, Socialist; New Zealand, Socialist; Denmark, Socialist; Canada, Socialist; Sweden, Socialist; Australia, Socialist Welfare; Finland, Socialist; Netherlands, Socialist; United States, number ten SOURCE: Meme post on Facebook by Patricia Dowling September 4 A sad Labor Day indeed. SOURCE: “Trump’s Labor Day,” by Robert Reich, posted in the Intrepid Report September 4 Let’s hope not. SOURCE: “The American military empire: Is Trump its would-be emperor?, “ by Dr. Rodrique Tremblay, posted in the Intrepid Report September 3 Here’s another great audio discourse by Richard Wolff, discussing the financial crises in 1929 and 2008. SOURCE: “Economic Update: A Tale of Two Crises,” by Richard Wolff, posted in Truth-Out

September 30, 2017

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Further Thoughts on Politics by Richard John Stapleton In my immediately preceding Effective Learning Report post I published an article I wrote titled “An Inspiring Educational Meeting in the Country Club near Statesboro, Georgia” in which I said I am an Independent politically and have primarily voted for Republicans in local and state elections, but only one time did I vote for a Republican in a presidential election in my life, voting for Bob Dole in the 1966 Clinton-Bob Dole election. This statement is generally true, on the face of it. However, I had the thought today it could be misleading and I wish I had phrased it differently. It is true I have primarily voted for Republicans in local elections because I knew them personally or someone I knew knew them as good and honorable people who would do the right thing in office and they just happened to be Republicans. I have always voted for Republican State Senator Jack Hill because I knew him personally and knew he was a good politician. I am not sure now however after giving the matter more thought that this would be “primarily voting for Republicans in local and state elections,” especially considering whether US senator and representative races would be considered local and state elections or national elections, since these politicians vote for federal legislation. I have maybe never voted for Republicans in US Senator or Representative races because I disagree with the policies of the Republican Party on macro-economic and political issues, particularly regarding taxation, government regulation of business and the environment, healthcare, education, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and military spending, and it seems to me almost all politicians vote their party line once they get seated in the US Congress, however good and honorable they might have been back home. After giving the matter more thought, I have probably voted for more Democrats than Republicans taking all elections I have voted in into account. Regardless, I think both the Republican and the Democratic Parties in Washington have poorly performed in recent decades, and we need a new third party, a truly progressive party to insure the perpetuation of the human species. Here are some policies for such a party I invented, posted on our Effective Learning Company website, the FreeFairProgressParty, at http://www.effectivelearning.net/freefairprogressparty.html.

September 26, 2017

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An Inspiring Educational Meeting in the Country Club near Statesboro, Georgia By Richard John Stapleton Debbye and I attended a meeting Saturday afternoon September 16 hosted for Dr. Sid Chapman by Bill Herring, president of the local Democratic Party, at the Forrest Heights Country Club in Statesboro, Georgia. My wife Debbye is the star mathematics tutor in our Stapleton Learning Company small business in downtown Statesboro, located in the Parker Real Estate Building right across the street from the Emma Kelly Theater. Dr. Chapman is campaigning for the Georgia State School Superintendent position. He spent about two hours telling about twenty of us in the meeting about his background, policy positions, and recent experiences, and answering questions we had in an open discussion. For more detail about Sid’s background click here. He told us he had recently returned from a trip to Finland where he observed first hand the best public school system around Earth, easily verified by a Google search. According to Dr. Chapman, Finland has the best school system around Earth because of the value Finns place on education as a society. In Finland teaching is a more prestigious profession than medicine. He said it’s harder to get certified as a teacher in Finland than it is to get certified as a medical doctor. Teachers are highly respected in their communities and they interact with local citizens and their children to decide locally what and how to teach. Schools are locally controlled and there is little or no teaching to the test or anything like the No Child Left Behind scheme, hatched by the disingenuous anti-intellectual Bush II administration in the US, which was inflicted on public schools throughout the US. Sid is a high school dropout who got a GED and later a doctor’s degree who is now president of the Georgia Association of Educators, with some thirty thousand members, according to one of the attendees. He said he has taught in public schools almost all social studies subjects, including economics, which was my undergraduate major. He obviously has outstanding interpersonal and administrative skills as evidenced by his success as president of the GAE. He is also a part-time Methodist minister. I told him and the group my granddaddy was a Methodist preacher. I am now a friend of the Statesboro Unitarian Universal Fellowship. Several members of that fellowship were in attendance at the meeting. Dr. Chapman advocates decreasing the use of high stakes testing, fully funding public education, equity for all students, not using public taxes to fund private schools, STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts and Mathematics), Vocational and Technical Education, fostering creative and critical thinking and communication skills, improving incentives to recruit and retain quality teachers and educators, and protecting the current teacher retirement system. Having no experience teaching in grade, junior, or high school, there is no way I could know for sure what it’s like to work day in and day out as a public school teacher or administrator. Regardless, based on what I learned last Saturday, I agree with Dr. Chapman’s policies and ideas on how to do public education, and I wish him success with his campaign. Having no knowledge about his competitors in the race, it seems to me he will be tough man to beat in the state school superintendent’s race and Georgia would be fortunate to have him as its school superintendent. I learned how little I knew about Georgia public school education associations in the meeting. I had no knowledge of PAGE, the Professional Association of Georgia Educators, which has about ninety thousand members in Georgia, about three times as many members as the GAE, the Georgia Association of Educators, the Georgia affiliate of the NEA, the National Educational Association, according to one of the attendees, who told me this after the meeting was over. I have little understanding of the differences in these two education organizations. I presume both of them exist to support grade, junior, and high school students and teachers, while having differences in philosophies and policies. As I scanned the PAGE homepage on the Internet, a link devoted to Teacher Evaluations jumped out at me, rubber-banding me back to some of my experiences as a teacher dealing with faculty evaluations. I understand very well the intricacies and problems of daily life as a college teacher and administrator, having done it for forty years, as my RJS Academic Vita page on our Effective Learning Company website shows. I know very well what it’s like to be subjected to problems of faculty evaluations for merit raises, tenure, and promotion. I got so fed up with the faculty evaluation system used for decades in the business school at Georgia Southern that I cajoled the administrator of our department in the late 1990s to supply me with departmental student evaluation > on An Inspiring Educational Meeting in the Country Club near Statesboro, Georgia

President Trump and past and present cognitive dissonance (with Postscript) by Courtenay Barnett Personal recollections As a student in London, I occasionally marched and protested against that which I thought was unjust or simply wrong. Racism in general and Apartheid in particular in South Africa provided cause to venture into the streets of London. On one occasion in the East End of London, there was a National Front (NF) march (the equivalent in the 1970s of the neo-Nazis and white supremacists in the US today). The NF was permitted to march along the street. The anti-racist protesters stood behind barriers and there was the usual chanting and howling of slogans and counter-slogans for or against the cause. That occasion comes back to mind because a police officer on the street-side of the barrier, with obvious bitterness and contempt, without any disturbance or civil disobedience on my part, just looked me straight in the face and yelled “Black Bastard”. Guess he found himself on the right side of the fence on that occasion. Standing in Trafalgar Square or opposite South Africa House was itself a just and righteous cause being advocated for, I thought then, and think so all the more now. With a background such as mine, it then comes as no great surprise that I have more than a casual interest in the recent events of neo-Nazi, KKK and White supremacist marches in Charlottesville, Virginia, as shown at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1Uao75uM2k. To hear “Jews will not replace us” and “blood and soil” chanted these several years later after the Allied forces defeated the Nazis in World War II, brings a different sort of recollection to mind, such as images of Auschwitz and “sieg heil” chants before and after Crystal night ( Kristallnacht). And A neo-Nazi driving into a group of anti-racist protesters brings back the recollection of the racist police officer in London shouting as he did; but, the conduct of the Nazi attacker in Virginia was at a lethally different level compared to the mild racist outburst I had experienced. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jGgYM2_Zdk Historical context Long before the Allied forces joined to defeat fascism, there had been struggles for equality in America. Most notably there was the American Civil War. The Northern states did not thrive on nor did they need chattel slavery as a means of enriching themselves. The South did. Robert E. Lee was the leader of a Southern insurrection to separate from the broader America to preserve the chattel slavery system. So, the statue symbolises that ‘culture’, those attitudes and values and the racism which slavery was* ( see: Postscript). The forces that defeated Adolph Hitler and his Nazi cohorts had prevented additional egregious wrongs from being inflicted as horrors unto other human beings visited upon humanity by the Third Reich. The Jews in particular paid a heavy price. Hitler was literally trying to exterminate all of European Jews. The newsreels and the barbarous deeds are there for those serious enough, relative to that history, to take an interest, and might then understand what the implications and logical outgrowth of these modern day Nazi ideas imply: see https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=43ZtfL3xqSU. The response of President Trump to Nazi supporters When you listen to all this:

Watch Live: Trump Delivers Infrastructure Statement in NYC | NBC News www.youtube.com. President Trump delivers a statement from Trump Tower after signing an executive order on the environmental review and permitting process for infrastructure. You can be left in no uncertain terms that Donald Trump is: An apologist for racists; and 1.When one argues that some ‘very fine people’ were at the rallies led by the neo-Nazis and the KKK then the question has to be asked:Was it by mere coincidence that these ‘very fine people’ simply arrived and were in the company of neo-Nazis and the KKK without themselves either being neo-Nazis and KKK members or at the very least sympathisers of same? 2. The illogicality of supporting these racist groups arises in this way for Donald Trump:When your former wife is a Jew(ess) and your son-in-law is a Jew then there are some serious contradictions arising here with your apologetic embrace of these groups – isn’t there? If one were to trace being a Jew on the matrilineal or the patrilineal lineage Trump faces a logical conundrum for resolution. The neo-Nazis and the KKK are avowed haters of Jews. Therefore, without knowing them as people, there would be automatic hatred and potentially violence directed at Trump’s former wife and his son-in-law for no other reason than that of those persons’ ethnicity/religious identity. Further, Trump’s family, be that former wife, son-in-law, son, and by blood extension his grandchildren are all the subjects of derision and hatred from the groups Trump finds himself shamelessly defending. Thus, he purports to be embracing the ‘very fine people’ who simply turned up in the company of neo-Nazis and KKK and White Nationalists – but are not themselves to be deemed the disseminators or sympathisers of hatred directed to certain ‘lesser breeds’. Really now? Attempts at rationalization The purpose of comparisons is to equate. Such equation can be used as a means of illustrating or amplifying a point which a person is seeking to make. I am being generous here, because I want to lead into Donald Trump’s rationalisations on the basis of both the historical references and the contemporary implications of support for White supremacist ideas. Trump has expressed his concern that the removal of the statue of Robert E. Lee may logically lead to the rejection of persons such as George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, on the basis that they were slave owners and thus their memory might, by comparison with Lee, be deemed unworthy of national recognition. Trump’s point is, by parity of reasoning, that there is something worthy in Lee’s main conduct and contributions. Therefore, like George Washington or Jefferson, both flawed men, there is a real and imminent danger of damaging the national heritage of America (see: postscript). It seems to me that there is a marked contrast between founding a nation built on high ideals and an innovative and promising form of governance, versus the raw defence in a war for the prolonging of chattel slavery. But, President Trump might not appreciate nor concede the false equivalence that he constructed and posited to bolster his argument in support of the neo-Nazis, the KKK and the White supremacists. Historical memory, itself, should call for more than a cautionary pause when shouts of “sieg heil” being accompanied by “hail Trump” and an embrace from the former leader of the KKK, David Duke, become the root and substance of – acceptance by the supremacists – versus – an unequivocal rejection from the President. While President Trump has opted for an acceptance of those shouts, he is being distanced by all the heads of the military and leaders in industry. A sad indictment against an even sadder, pathetic and pitiful President who finds it impossible to distance and condemn the equation of himself to Adolph Hitler – so – heil Trump: see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVrb4CvOLmk. Cognitive dissonance How does a man whose close and immediate family are designated by neo-Nazis as filth and the dregs of humanity – then fail to condemn, without equivocation or excuses, such racism? Trump is either ignorant of history, or is so enarmoured by the idea of White supremacy, that he fails to comprehend that the ideas enacted under Adolph Hitler being regurgitated in the US in 2017 by persons who see him as President of the United States of America and being equivalently praiseworthy as Adolph Hitler is an affront and not a compliment. So –again – then, “Heil Trump!” Putting the history on the European continent to the side for a moment, then considering the experiences in America of Native Americans and the involuntarily imported population placed to labour on plantations, within a more narrow and specifically American historical context, is an actual march from domination, enslavement, ostracism, and slowly, inexorably – an advancement to full citizenship (however reluctantly so conferred). That version of American history which states that the indigenous populations before the Mayflower and the slaves and the Mexicans and in fact all the non-Whites do have quite distinct histories that fit within the patchwork that ultimately makes the fabric of American society is an honest point of historical view. It is a historical point of view which acknowledges and accommodates and embraces a more expansive appreciation (understanding if you like) of the menagerie which ultimately became America. But, President Trump seems wholly unable to either appreciate or understand that in a diverse society the humanity of all, and not just the humanity of a privileged few, will need to be accepted if that society is to function and flourish. It is this point which the Generals in unison stated to America when they had collectively confirmed a rejection of racism. This, if President Trump cared to notice, mirrored the same somber realisation by the top CEOs that this was the time to split from that which was bereft, coming from Trump, and ultimately was deemed bad for business in America or the wider world. The Generals and the CEOs got that point. They understood that Trump had descended into absurdity in his defending the Nazis – or – even the neo-Nazis, if any fine distinction is to be drawn. For that was what Trump was doing and sensible leaders had no desire to descend to or be associated with the ridiculous place Trump had positioned himself at. They understood incongruity well before rebuffs and rejections descended upon the institutions or businesses that they were leaders of. Stated as succinctly as one can – Trump’s conduct, expressions and positions on race-relations are all dissonant. Cognitively dissonant. Conclusion In being an apologist for Nazism, President Trump, like the KKK members, is displaying a fundamental historical misunderstanding about the genealogy of America. In mentioning Thomas Jefferson to support a line of political reasoning for sustenance of a status quo of discriminatory privilege, Trump has not taken time to think and question the social forces which serve to retard or advance people within the American nation. He could have started instead with knowing and acknowledging a very human fact of Jefferson having a long-standing intimate relationship with and children by, his Black Mistress, Sally Hemmings. It is telling that after DNA analysis served to confirm the paternity of Hemmings’ children then in January 2000, the conclusion was accepted by the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, that such historical reality might not invite alternative Presidential positionings than with Nazism. Donald Trump, if only he read a bit, might arrive finally at a point of understanding as to the demographics of America and the historical realities which led to that demographic reality. President Trump, if he cared to, might read the book entitled, ‘Slaves in the family’ by Edward Ball. It tells the true story of a White American born in Savannah, Georgia, tracing his lineage. He commences with Elias Ball, who in 1698 migrated from England and became a very large plantation owner, acquiring some twenty plantations. Elias, like Jefferson, had offspring with slaves. Over three hundred years slaves and slave masters lived side by side in America. The Ball slave descendants along a blood-line was what Elias’ descendant was documenting. A history previously ignored but very much a part of American historical reality. The figure the book arrived at of ‘Black Ball descendants’ ( so to speak) was in the region of 75,000 to 100,000 in 1998 at the time of the book’s first publication. The interactions between the Cherokee nation and Europeans tells of similar genealogical inheritances. Quite frankly, such stories within America run all the way up from Key West in the South to Alaska in the North. That realisation, that reality, that America which does exist is the one President Trump might be better focused on governing with justice and inclusion, than either apologizing for or embracing ( implicitly or expressly) the Aryan myth within Nazism. President Trump’s style of governance and his incessant ill-advised tweeting has projected him into national and international consciousness as the ‘divider in chief’ rather than the unifier that the American Presidential office invites him to be. President Trump, I honestly believe, has not read, he has not researched, he has not attempted to understand. He does not understand at all the miscegenations within America; he does not understand the diversity of America; he does not understand a multiplicity of different social policy and foreign policy issues which at the core of his role in office as President he is required to. He does not care about detail and in being so disposed he avoids fundamental facts, which if he were cognizant of, might not lead him to the incongruous positions he places himself in. Racism, xenophobia, religious intolerance and bigotry are the hallmarks of Trumpism, for that is the base he has chosen to pander to. Will such an approach help to heal and unite a diverse nation? Well – being a handmaiden ( master if you prefer) of division, alienation of great parts of American society and distancing from the world which Trump gives cause for resentments – then leads where? To a place in Trump’s mind which is well on the way to making America ‘great again’ with his special brand of leadership. A leadership which is increasingly dissonant and disconnected. When Trump’s expressions, his mind’s delivery of his oftentimes unedited thoughts are examined then therein one finds the cognitive deficit accompanied by consequential dissonance. Courtenay Barnett is a graduate of London University. His areas of study were economics, political science and international law. He has been a practising lawyer for over thirty years, has been arrested for defending his views, has been subjected to death threats, and has argued public interest and human rights cases. Postscript: The national heritage of America is Native-American, Euro-American, African-American, Mexican-American and that of many other Americans who have a history and heritage within the United States of America. With that in mind, quite seriously, I propose a rejection of Nazism and an embrace of the higher ideals which the American nation, at its best, represents. The formula is simple. Robert E. Lee represents an embrace of the ‘culture’ of slavery, discrimination and domination. Frederick Douglass as an outstanding orator and abolitionist represents the ‘culture’ of human dignity in the face of adversity, the embrace of freedom, the struggle for justice, in marked contrast to what Robert E. Lee stood for. Thus, since Robert E. Lee’s statue is down and the high ideals upon which America should stand have yet fully to be replaced, then, a suggested understanding as to the depth of economic, cultural and historical contributions to the American nation which the African-Americans over several generations have made, might now begin in earnest to be acknowledged. So, America thus can leave Robert E. Lee’s page of the American history book, without forgetting what was written on it, and turn to a new and auspicious day in American history. That day will be ushered in when the statue of Frederick Douglass replaces the one of Robert E. Lee, removed but not forgotten. History thus shall not be forgotten, but symbols can replace to march on to a more hopeful and propitious day in America.

August 28, 2017

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Racist Games in a Venomous Culture by Richard John Stapleton Some US white supremacists according to Facebook posts are finding out with DNA tests they have some African genes, and some African Americans are finding out with DNA tests they have European genes. I think this is a good thing, showing how people from around Earth are genetically related. Maybe everyone ought to take a DNA test to combat racism and morbid narcissism. One morning in 1959 in the athletic dorm at Hardin-Simmons University, a Baptist university of 1,900 students, at Abilene, Texas, without a single black student at the time, a blue-eyed straighthaired blonde football player on a full scholarship looked askance at me, a brown-eyed wavy-haired basketball player on a full scholarship, in his mirror, as we happened to be shaving next to one another in the dorm shower room, standing with several other athletes who were also shaving, or brushing teeth, combing hair, and so on, facing a wall equipped with ten or so mirrors and lavatories; and for no apparent reason, he said, “You must be part Indian, meskin, nigger, or somethin.” It stung, but what could I do? Try to knock his teeth out with a sucker punch? There was some truth in what he said. I did look different from most white people, and for sure there was a major difference in our reflections in the mirrors we were looking into. A lady friend in Italy in 1983 told me I did not “look” American, that I looked European. I have been subjected in the US to five other racist Games similar to the football player’s in various contexts played by white males and two similar Games played by white females, three of the Games having been started by colleagues at Georgia Southern University during 1970-2005. I ignored the psychological message in these Games that I was inferior and not entitled to the dignity and respect I had, not escalating the Games with retaliatory social level transactions, acting as if I did not understand the psychological level message, knowing there was no way I could win given the social settings in which the Games happened. Why do people play psychological Games? They do it trying to get their human needs met for structure, recognition, and stimulus. Discounting someone in a Game makes some people feel better about their physical appearance and their emotional, mental, and behavioral abilities and achievements. Psychological Games force Victims to recognize and pay attention to the initiating social level Persecuting Game players who see themselves psychologically as Victims, who find the action Games generate stimulating. Psychological Games alleviate boredom, tedium, insecurity, and feelings of inferiority. While most people play Games to some degree, losers start most of them. This goes for US citizens getting violent now in tissue-tearing street demonstrations, and US presidents starting tissuetearing wars against weak governments and their subjects in the Middle East in the last sixteen or so years. I took an ancestry.com DNA test about three years ago and found out ninety-eight percent of my genes are similar to those of Europeans and two percent are similar to those of Western Asians in the Caucasus. Racist Games in the US, the so-called melting pot of Earth, since the first so-called white man set foot on North American soil, have demeaned, devalued, insulted, exploited, harmed, and scarred —emotionally, mentally, socially, and physically—people of various red, brown, black, and yellow skin tones more frequently and in harder degrees than they have so-called white people of various skin tones; but no human on the North American continent has fully escaped their poison and virulence one way or the other in this venomous culture. The United States could be the most Game-infested nation on Earth, having escalated its Game-playing after the election of Donald Trump as president, an expert Game-player, and a highfunctioning narcissistic, who refuses to socially recognize and condemn the grievous harm racial Games cause individuals and groups. He seems to think US citizens have a constitutional right to play racial psychological Games. It’s inhumane to demean, devalue, discount, insult, or physically harm people because of the genes they accidentally or inevitably inherited. It’s insane to hate people because of the genes they accidentally or inevitably inherited. For more on psychological Games, read my book, Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human at Learning. Feel free to forward, email, reprint, post, or otherwise disseminate this article any way you see fit. To see what I “looked” like in 2005 click on my name below. Richard John Stapleton

August 23, 2017

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