Tag Archives: education

Double Sided Sales Slip Customer Copy

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A couple of kids protesting in a church on the other side of the planet taught me that if you want to play with fire, be prepared for the consequences.

A musician who’s part of a corporatised musical group playing officially-sanctioned anti-corporate lyrics taught me that hypocrisy knows no cultural bounds.

You see, I’m all about the power of the people.

But keep in mind that my goal is to move the wealth of many thousands of millionaires and billionaires out of reach of the people.

The “people,” of course, is a meaningless term that can be used positively or derogatorily: “We the people…” or “you people,” and its many forms used to provoke crowds in time for [re]election.

The people get used a lot, don’t they/we?

Keep people distracted while we prepare…

Well, I’m not supposed to tell you what’s being prepared, am I, if I am to maintain this storyline?

Let’s imagine a few possible futures:

  1. It’s clear that changing the habits of billions of people to save themselves from themselves is not going to happen when so much profit is at stake, including just good enough profit to feed the mouths of billions of people.  If you had the opportunity, would you set up a location for your friends and family that is safe from invasion by non-heavily armed people and sufficient to provide you a livable subculture/ecosystem while the rest of the world was experiencing major/negative climate change?
  2. You have great wealth at your disposal and you believe that the global economy is your friend so you spend your billions of dollars trying to improve local economies which, in turn, improve the global economy, increasing not only your chance for survival but the whole world’s, too.
  3. You and your friends in private and public businesses have been testing the theory that living off-world is a sure way to hedge your bets about Earth’s climate change and any detrimental effects it may have on your way of life.  You encourage the use of public funds to affirm your theory while you amass the resources you need to build off-world colonies.
  4. Your family has lived in relative poverty for generations.  You have competed against your peers and created a small empire — it’s time to enjoy the fruits of your labour, cost no object in pursuing a life of luxury.
  5. Your family has lived in the peace and comfort of middle-class living for generations — no reason for you to change the course of history.
  6. Poverty means nothing in your subsistence lifestyle.  Words like “blog” and “computer” do not exist in your language full of nature-based terminology.

All of us are familiar with these scenarios, through personal experience, from someone we know or by popular culture references.

In telling the story of our species in relation to the humongous universe in which we barely understand we live, tying these subplots together is interesting some days and boring on other days.

However, it’s all I have to work with here.

Like going from static cartoon strips to creating animated daily cartoons in writing, if not drawing.

Protestors with machetes will most often lose to security guards with guns, who will always, always, always claim self-defense after discharging their weapons and killing protestors.

My question is this: if the commander in-chief claims credit for killing a notorious villain, does he also take credit for the most number of military suicides of any commander in-chief during his time in office?  If your military has some of the lowest morale on record, then I, in honouring my father’s legacy, have to ask myself why anyone with a military background would vote for you?  Following that train of thought, how many of us benefit from one of the largest peacetime (sorry, I mean “war on terror”) military deployments in history — should we also question re-electing the commander in-chief?  In this case, the Law of Unintended Consequences meets the Law of Diminishing Returns.  What am I missing here?  What am I not telling the reader?  I am not my father so why is there not a viable third candidate for me to elect?

Ahh…the balance of power.  ‘Tis a game that entertains, n’est pas?  Sarkozy and Berlusconi quickly become footnotes in history.  Merkel, like Kohl, is not far behind.  Anyone remember Mikhail Gorbachev or Deng Xiaoping?  Did Greece used to be a country?

It will be no different on the Moon or Mars.  More pioneers, more forgotten history as we scramble to feed, clothe and shelter ourselves from the elements while armchair bystanders question our motives and protest our version of progress that clashes with theirs.

Remember the Golden Rule: S/he with the most power protecting a stash of gold makes the rules.

The Menace From Beyond The Grave Situation

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While we set our supercomputers to analyse processes that heat our CPUs surreptitiously, we give you another list of books added recently to our old-fashioned library of paper-and-ink products:

  • Facts on Aviation For The Future Flyers Of Tennessee, (c) 1944 Tennessee Bureau of Aeronautics, Nashville, Tennessee
  • Submarine! The Story of Undersea Fighters, by Kendall Banning, illustrated by Charles Rosner, (c) 1942 by Artists and Writers Guild, Inc., printed in the United States of America
  • The First Book of Moses called Genesis, translated out of the original Hebrew and with the former translations currently compared and revised, set forth in 1911 and commonly known as the King James version, pocket edition by American Bible Society (instituted in the year 1816), New York
  • Stamp collecting book by Richard Hill, Sunset Trail, Knoxville 18, Tennessee, manufactured by U.S. Government Printing Office
  • History of America, by Carl Russell Fish, Professor of American History, University of Wisconsin, illustrations by Leon D’Emo and Will Crawford, (c) 1925, 1928 by American Book Company, Made in U.S.A., owned by Ralph Eldridge, Knoxville Central High School senior 1932
  • The Kingsport Strike, by Sylvester Petro, (c) January 1967, Arlington House, New Rochelle, NY
  • International Atlas and Gazetteer of the World, containing a new and complete Descriptive Gazetteer of the Principal Countries of the World together with a complete collection of up-to-date Political Maps of the World, Statististical [sic] Tables, Census Figures, Air Line Distances, etc., (c) 1935 by C.S. Hammond & Co., Inc., Map Engravers, Printers and Publishers since 1900

Meanwhile, our staff in the Department of Dastardly Deeds has developed a potential storyline for us to follow:

By experimenting with chemical formulae, scientists have perfected the ideal poison letter.  Soon, they will infiltrate the labs of laser printer cartridge manufacturers, change the ingredients of the cartridge contents and release the newest formula into the homes, factories, offices, Internet cafes, construction trailers and libraries of the world.

Then, when the time is right, they will activate the signal that tells the cartridges to print a special circuit on paper.

The circuit, combined with the special ink that, after being heated and fused to the paper, uses the release of heat as the paper cools to send a strong enough “charge” to a blob of ink in one corner of the paper to achieve a minor goal of the Department of Dastardly Deeds.

The scientists have asked us not to reveal their goal at this time.

We won’t, because we have to figure out if their goal aligns with our major milestones before we decide to increase or eliminate their department budget.

While that’s going on, we’ll let you know that the brain circuit reconfiguration we’re testing on Jesse Jackson, Jr., may work this time.  We have tried similar experiments on other members in the public eye (refrain from referring to our previous work as “lobotomy,” electroshock treatment, drug cocktail service, etc.), in order to keep them in line with our milestones.

Those who haven’t stayed on message have been moved aside (again, refrain from referring to our previous work as  “failing the newspaper test,” “assassination,” “drug overdose,” suicide, not seeking reelection, retiring unexpectedly, etc.).

Managing a planet is distracting, we admit, but, on days when we’re bored, it provides an entertaining respite from looking back at this time period 1000 years in the future while trying to live a fulfilling life 1000 years from now, too.

Domesticated Animals

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What is one gallon (3.75 litres) of water worth to you?

In many parts of the world, a toilet is composed of a seat, a bowl full of water and a reservoir of water.

While your derriere warms the seat, you eliminate waste products (e.g., urine, feces) into the bowl and then use a levered mechanism to flush out the bowl, replacing its contents with the water in the reservoir.

A simple procedure.

Some of us are trained to drain the bowl after every use.

Some of us are trained to conserve water and drain the bowl after more than one use.

Some of us have no idea how to use the toilet, growing up with other means of eliminating waste — a hole in the floor, a hole in the ground (over which a wooden hut is built and then called an outhouse), writing your name in the snow, doing your business on the grass and covering with leaves, etc.

I grew up with unisex toilets in the home and gender-based toilets (bathrooms or water closets) in public buildings.

I don’t know how the people who avail themselves of the facilities designated for women in public places use the toilets.

In the unisex toilet at home, our parents taught my sister and me to flush after every use.

In the men’s room in public places, I have observed over the years a variety of behaviours, from clean, flushed toilets to bowls overflowing with waste and toilet paper.  [We have a toilet in the men’s room called the urinal but that one is eliminated from this discussion to focus on the more universal product for receiving our waste.]

When water is scarce, a gallon of chlorinated/fluoridated water mixed with waste products is as precious as some metals.

In that situation, what is proper is not prudent.

However, where water is abundant and treated water is inexpensive, let’s be courteous to those who’ll use the toilet after us and flush our waste away.

Surely, we’re educated and domesticated enough to handle that simple a task, eh?

There are plenty of other public places of your life to demonstrate your barbarian behaviour to better advantage.

German private industry vs. American military industry transportation choices

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The beauty of a brain in retirement is letting one’s thoughts wander.

For instance, as I was driving back and forth from unrestricted territory down a long road into a restricted American military base, I looked around me.

I remembered when I used to commute via airplane and taxi from the U.S. to Germany on business.

In Germany, I noticed that some companies, such as Fujitsu-Siemens in Augsburg, offered large covered parking areas nearest buildings for people who commuted by bicycle or motorbike.

Here in the U.S., at the local military base called Redstone Arsenal, those who carpool (more than one person per vehicle) are allotted spots to park nearest one of the buildings but motorbikes were allotted uncovered spots in the middle of the carpark.

Which got me thinking…

When are we going to design our infrastructures to optimise the mix of devices we use in our transportation systems?

In other words, if we make token efforts to promote efficient means of transportation, then people will continue to pay for the convenience of inefficient methods.

Only when we make it difficult and/or inconvenient to use relatively expensive transportation vehicles (cars/trucks/SUVs) will we change our habits.

For instance, what if people had to use mass transit to get onto a U.S. military base, with tiny carparks and large bicycle/motorbike storage facilities located at mass transit pickup points throughout walk/bike-friendly [sub/ex]urban neighbourhoods?

Would we encourage people to walk or bike to work rather than the majority piling into their one-person occupied metal-and-plastic contraptions lined up one-after-another in traffic jams morning, noon and night to get on the base?

Would we worry less about the dangers of large carparks full of uninspected vehicles on military bases?

Would we find better ways to spend our time than wait on crowded roads for our turn to drive through traffic-light controlled intersections?

Would we have more time to spend with family before and after our workdays are done?

Makes an argument like the one cited here at wired.com moot, doesn’t it, when you eliminate the need for the motorised/EV transportation devices altogether?

My mother’s valedictorian speech — 60 years later…

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Evelyn’s Valedictorian’s Speech

for Graduation at Everett High School

Maryville, Tennessee

May, 1952

Blount County Schools

Our schools in the past have had an important part in making our county the great county that it is.  You have heard the report from Miss Long which tells us what our schools have meant to many of our professional and industrial leaders.  It is true that we have accomplished much, but we must not be satisfied until we have made our schools meet the needs of our people.

There are many needs, but I shall discuss only a few.

It seems to me that one of the most important needs is to let our schools grow up.  The old ways of living have passed.  We are now in an electrical and atomic age.  Educational facilities of horse and buggy and dirt road days do not meet the need of our motorized and fast moving age.  Our industries have grown into adulthood and our employers are demanding that our employees have more and better training.

We must stop looking at our schools as childish toys and our teachers as baby-sitters.  We must see our schools as institutions where the lives of our youth are being molded to become leaders who will have life’s responsibilities of tomorrow.  Children are not toys to be played with, but men and women in the making.  They must be given the principals [sic] of health, honesty, moral and spiritual living.  The school environment must be such that these principals [sic] can be properly taught.  Children must not only be taught, but must see the things practiced which are taught.

In the pictures which you have seen you noticed that all lunchrooms in the old buildings were in basements where artificial light was necessary and ventilation was very poor.  In the new buildings you noticed that lunch-rooms were modern and the most attractive room in the building.  This is as it should be.  Do you know of any home where the kitchen and dining room is in the basement?  If we practice in the schools the things which are taught, teaching is much more effective.  We are taught that in order to digest our food properly we should have a cheerful and happy environment.  It is evidence of growth in our schools when we take our lunchrooms out of dingy, damp, dark basements and put them in light attractive rooms.

There is a need for school growth in our transportation system.  We teach moral, and spiritual growth in our schools, but when we get on our bus to go home, boys and girls are packed together like sardines in a can.  We have one bus which has a seating capacity of 48.  The driver says that at times he has a load of 86.  Such conditions do not teach moral and clean living.  We need to allow our transportation system to grow up so that boys and girls can ride as our adults ride.

We must see our school needs and have a desire to do something about them before our needs are supplied.

We are able to supply our needs.  We are living in one of the wealthiest and most progressive counties in the state.  In population we rank 9th.  In wealth we rank 6th.  We are rich in industries.  We have excellent farming land.  We have lumber.  We have thousands of tourists.  We have marble.  But our greatest asset is the boys and girls in our schools.  We have the material.  If we have the will we can supply our needs.  There is evidence that we have that desire.  Within recent months our County Court has appropiated [sic] an additional $3,000,000 to meet pressing building needs.  Our school should prepare students for life responsibilities whatever they may be.  We are facing many new and difficult problems which must be rightly solved or our national life, as we know it today will be in danger.  Our educational system is the key to a solution of many of these problems.  In 1941 in Blount County 1124 children entered the first grade.  In 1950 there 1307 entered.  In 1941 we had 359 entering high school.  In 1950 there were 698 entering high school.  Our county superintendent said that he expects 150 more first grade pupils next year than we had this year.  This means that we will need 5 new teachers and of course 5 new classrooms for the teachers in the first grade.  It also means more teaching material and more buses.  This is only an example to show how our schools are growing.  If our schools are to adequately prepare our pupils for tomorrow’s citizenship, these needs must be supplied.

We are building great industries where people are earning a comfortable living.  We are improving our farms so that we may have better crops.  We are building more comfortable and attractive homes and we are furnishing them with the most modern equipment.  We are building larger and more beautiful church buildings where we can satisfy the hunger of our souls with the Bread of Life.

We are making progress, but much needs to be done.  Our school buildings and grounds must be made attractive and kept that way the entire year.  We must pay our teachers so that we can get the best.  Then we must demand of them satisfactory service.  Our transportation system must be modernized so that each youth will have a place to sit in decency and comfort.

God had given us our beautiful country.  He has given our county more than 10,000 school boys and girls.  293 of this number are graduating from high school this spring.  We thank God for His blessings upon us.  We thank you public officials and our parents for your efforts on our behalf, but our work is only in its beginning.

Fellow Classmates!  We have had many difficult problems during the past four years.  But now payday has come.  In our joy let us not forget those who have made this day possible for us.  Jesus healed ten lepers at one time, and only one returned to thank Him.  Let us be like that one.

Parents, teachers, and friends, if it had not been for your patience, thoughtfulness, interest, and love we could not have come to this hour.  We thank you, and we promise to work with you in making our schools the best possible, and our county a better place to live.  We shall do our best to live in such a way that you will not be disappointed in life.

=======

NOTE: My mother’s school advisor for this speech was also a local minister.

Foam Bow Tie

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Would you wager a bet — your life’s savings — to support a project that produced ten results, only one of which was successful, a 10% success rate?

The ROI for your wager is your name and your family’s names on a plaque.

The plaque is attached to a landing craft.

The adult travelers inside the craft all die.

The eggs and embryos survive, grow and carve out a niche in the new landscape, the mini-ecosystem of the landing craft, unable to decipher, let alone pronounce the names on the plaque.

But former inhabitants of Earth have found a way to live on another celestial sphere.

That, alone, was the accomplishment of this current millennial-long civilisation we propagate and perpetuate.

More than any other civilisation before ours.

More than any other species or ecosystem.

The sole goal of life, to reproduce itself in whatever form the environment will tolerate in the eat-and-be-eaten cycle of life.

What if we sent that one-out-of-ten-success craft in a few decades from now, achieving the goal by slowing down global consumption of raw materials for a short period — several years, a couple of decades — until we jumped back into our fast dash for the latest gizmos, gadgets, family gatherings and after-hours parties?

Sure, pretty much most of us will keep supporting the rise and fall of family fortunes, business empires and geopolitical zones (a/k/a governments), because only a few lucky souls will qualify for climbing aboard the ten launch vehicles and only one craft will carry our species’ passengers all the way to another planetary body, acting as couriers.

The survivors of the craft will exist as if they live in a parallel universe, unaware of our continued great accomplishments on Earth:

  • Our medical breakthroughs, such as the extension of a healthy person’s life into a third century of high-quality daily activities.
  • Our flying cars, floating cities and other dreams of days gone by fully realised.
  • Totally-connected thought patterns via new technology, letting those who want no privacy or have no secrets to hide to join the Hive and move our species forward/backward/sideways as one.

Our civilisation will go on for countless decades, business cycles and climate changes, prospering in the ebb and flow of new ideas that counter prevailing ideas.

Optimists and pessimists will support or deny the direction we take, without fail.

In the interim, our celestial cousins are recreating the paradise of Earth elsewhere.

You and I will never know with certainty whether our actions contribute most to the growth of life off this planet or life on this planet, regardless of the perceived benefit/detriment of our actions in the moment.

We are who we are, doing what we do to enhance our survival within the social net we’ve spread over Earth, extending tiny threads outward into space, just in case this net eventually collapses.

We can be plumbers, fashion designers, mechanics, midlevel managers, lab techs, airplane pilots, business angels or primary school students.

We create futures we see and futures we cannot imagine possible.

We may solve mathematical conundrums at age 15 or not be able to balance a checkbook, or both.

But we will find a way to move Earth-based lifeforms, including synthetic beings designed for harsh conditions on other worlds, into and out of our solar system.

The Voyager spacecraft series is one example.

The Beagle 2 is another.

So, too, Venera 9.

Is one of those or a new craft the single container that harbours beings which will adjust to their new environment and thrive?

Would a recent university graduate with a mathematics major be the one who makes a difference in which craft is the one that represents our achievements up to a point in time on Earth but for millions of years later on a different planet?

There’s only one way to find out — live in the moment with an eye on the future, using the collective wisdom of your [sub]culture as a guide, trusting your instincts to know which elders are the ones with you, your subculture, and the future of your species in their best interests.

Don’t forget to have fun.  Wear a giant foam bow tie to a corporate board meeting, your wedding or your child’s secondary school graduation ceremony.

Are you a Venusian or Venetian by trade? Surely not Vitruvian!

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Yesterday, as a temporary volunteer to help the Von Braun Astronomical Society promote the joy of observing the cosmos (in this case, seeing the silhouette of the transit of Venus across the surface of our local star), I observed us.

By the hundreds.

Young, single men and women.  Families.  Divorcees.  Single moms.  Weekend dads.  Widow(er)s.

Dressed in business clothes and casual summer attire.

Using solar filtered, paper framed glasses to look at the tiny orange ball heating the air and ground around us, squinting to see the even tinier black dot traversing the surface.

Thank goodness we had telescopes a-plenty and a video broadcast to the nearby big screen TV to share larger images of the planetary alignment.  A tabletop sun magnifier that showed sunspots on a piece of paper.

Jeff, Debbie and other VBAS volunteers were wonderful.  The teacher who dropped off 50 paper solar glasses we thank, too.  The folks at the Davidson Center on the grounds of the US Space & Rocket Center performed their usual duties flawlessly.

Hopefully, a few young people were inspired to pursue a career in science, technology, engineering and/or math, applying future skills one day in areas as diverse as sewer/chemical remediation and planetary exploration.

I hope it inspires someone to create a kid-safe high-powered telescope because telling children, “No!  Don’t touch the telescope!,” “Don’t lean on the table!,” and “Don’t point those binoculars at the Sun!” probably turned some children off from the fun of looking at stars, galaxies and planets at night rather than grabbing their easily-acceptable, childproof video gaming equipment.

A nod to local news broadcast crews for their remote setups to help promote the Venus transit event.  Without your interest and time on the air, many not have known what was going on — education is a culturewide participatory subject.

A Voice in Anger

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Or, how the goons of Rocket City (the Huntsville Utilities tree trimming crew) ruined my wife’s day and thus mine.

It has been a long year.

First, my wife’s mother fell ill back last March/April and died in November.

Then, immediately following, my father’s health declined rapidly.

Sure, it’s the cycle of life and all that, but it’s also emotionally/physically draining.

Then, to make matters worse, a crape myrtle I have protected year after year from the butchery of power line tree trimmers was nearly slaughtered by the uncaring, untrained hands of those less-educated brutes who attacked my wife’s favourite blooming bush at the end of the driveway this morning.

From a 20-foot tall beauty to a 3-foot stump in a matter of minutes.

All while my mother, sister, niece and I fret over the care my father receives with the caring, trained hands of the medical staff at the local VA hospital.

In addition, an heirloom Rose of Sharon was damaged, along with two smaller crape myrtle bushes.

This, my friends, in the town that helped put men on the Moon!

So, let us serve as a warning to those wanting to move to Huntsville, Alabama, USA.

Yes, it is in the state where George Wallace stood on the steps of the University of Alabama, barring African-Americans from crossing the threshold of higher education.

Butchers still live in this area of the world.

They hide behind chainsaws and cherry pickers, taking out the frustrations of their home lives on the helpless hybrid plants growing beneath the hazardous, humming harbingers of electrical shocks and high monthly utility bills.

They exist to make your life miserable.

They succeeded today.

Where’s a city forester to provide an educated point of view about how to carefully trim trees and bushes for the health of citizens?

Today, I am very unhappy…modern civilisation has let me down.

But then again, based on recent reports of 8th graders, science is not their best subject, which leads directly (through misunderstanding a tree’s anatomy and human psychology) to why government tree trimmers have a lack of understanding the need to aesthetically please the people who pay their salaries.

Maybe I ought to lobby to fire a few tree trimmers or heavily reduce their income to balance the local government budget?

Or at least educate today’s kids to become better qualified tree trimmers in the future.

Even after writing this blog entry, I still don’t feel better.

There’s a stump in the yard where a majestic myrtle once stood and there’s not a single thing I do about it from here, except shoot pictures and ask questions later about Huntsville Utilities departmental budgets and personnel files (nothing like an inside job to build a paper trail and get revenge the cold, hard way — expense report abuse and timecard fraud are common offenses, for starters — local government officials failing the newspaper test right before fall elections).

We may be on the verge of populating space habitats, making a lot of us very busy, but there’s still time to play games with people’s lives who cross my path and upset my wife in the process…

Are you ready to improve your education?

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Have you considered a career in Slope, Terrain and Elevation Management (STEM)?

In today’s world, there’s always another hill to climb, another mountain to conquer, another variation in topography that’s getting in the way of progress.

In STEM school, we’ll teach you how to navigate inclines on the way to creating a plateau of easy living, where even ground allows you to set the foundation for your future factory.

Don’t hesitate!  Call now!  Lorry drivers are crowding the registration office wanting to get in on this exciting career of mudslinging and offroad fun!

Photo courtesy of Ned Jilton II (njilton@timesnews.net)