* The Wind-up Aladden's Lamp of Knowledge

News' View: Great expectations, unfulfilled

Rachel Plattus could have been a great advocate for Yale and New Haven. Instead, as her term expires, she leaves an empty legacy.
By The Yale Daily News
Published Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Shortly after Rachel Plattus ’09 announced her candidacy to represent Ward 1 on the Board of Aldermen, she held a meeting in Jonathan Edwards College for those interested in discussing ideas to improve the city’s public schools. At the event, which was attended by more than 50 students, Plattus said she hoped New Haven could offer pre-kindergarten schooling to all its children and said she would work to create an Elm City Family Center, a kind of shelter for adolescent girls and a resource for families in need.
These were both good ideas that would have made New Haven a better city...


Education Revolution: Give every deserving person the Wind-up Aladden's Lamp of Knowledge




I don't want to tell Alderperson Plattus what to do. It's rude. But I was born in New Haven, my grandmother lived in a ghetto apartment with no hot water two blocks from the palaces of Yale, and when I went to Yale Divinity School I was an apartment superintendent in a low income housing complex which had its share of poverty, drugs and violence. I myself was mugged in the parking lot of St. Thomas Moore Church at night.

In other words. I ain't naive.

And there's one thing I know for sure : The Alderpersons can fiddle with education from now till doomsday and it won't change a thing. What WILL change something is GIVING THE INSTRUMENTS OF POWER TO THOSE WHO DON'T HAVE THEM.

Why not give every low income kid (indeed every low income person) in New Haven, a $100 Negroponte wind-up computer once a year and teach them how to use it. If they lose it or sell it during that year, they are out of the loop. No new computer till next year.

Children --indeed all humans---are born with cerebral softwear that says LEARN, LEARN, LEARN.

I couldn't stop a child from learning if I TRIED.

The only thing I can do is discourage, demoralize and disenfranchise the kid along the way with an elitist testing obstacle course which says: X kid is smart and Y kid is not smart. (BTW: Do we say a Daisy is smart and a Rose is not because they bloom at different times and in different soil? Then WHY do we say that about children?)

EVEN THEN, no one can't STOP a kid from learning. The kid will learn whatever interests him/her and at her/his own pace.


AND GUESS WHAT: There is a portable WORLD INTEREST MACHINE called a wind-up laptop computer available for a hundred bucks ($100) which could develop, facilitate, accelerate, enhance, multiply, synergize and solidify that built in cerebral learning softwear every kid is born with.

For God's sake take some of the taxpayers' money and give the kids those machines.

How hard is that?

And if the New Haven bureaucrats are too fat-headed to hear the idea, go to the GATES Foundation and propose a pilot program in New Haven. I think you can apply on-line. (OOPS! Sounds like I'm giving the Alderperson advice!)

Where there's a will there's a way.

I "learned" that, all by myself-----without any fancy curriculum tinkering by adults.

PS:
I know: There are a million reasons bureaucrats will say
this can't be done. (Would we have to wi-fi New Haven?) Blah, blah, blah.................

* The Quest, The Questor, The Question: Albert Schweitzer 1875-1965

Dr. Albert Schweitzer at his hospital in Lambarene, Gabon, where he is buried today.









































When Giants Still Strode the Earth: the Twentieth Century

(Schweitzer, Freud, Einstein, Churchill, Franklin/Eleanor Roosevelt, DeGaulle, Picasso, Stravinsky, Horowitz, Marian Anderson, Helen Keller, Mother Teresa, King)

It has been said that if you dropped Albert Schweitzer into a jungle with nothing but a pen-knife he could construct an entire organ from scratch. He gave organ recitals throughout Europe every few years to raise money to support his hospital in Lambarene. In addition to being a medical doctor, he was a scholar and theologian:("He held Doctorates in three major subjects - theology, philosophy and medicine and was an accomplished organist and world expert on Bach"). He practiced medicine in Africa until his death at 90 in 1965.












































One of my relatives insists that I wish him a “Merry Christmas” and nothing less. “What’s with this ‘Happy Holidays’ crap?” he says. “Its Jesus’s birthday. Say the word ‘Christmas' ”.

Well, my relative would be unhappy to know that Jesus’s birthday was more likely in March or April than December. And he’d be even more annoyed to find out that Jesus wasn’t Jesus’s name: His name was Joshua ben Joseph (Joshua, son of Joseph). Finally he would really be ticked off to learn that Jesus (Joshua) wasn’t even Christian: he was Jewish, from the day of his birth to the day of his death, and that he never intended to start a new religion.

He never uttered a word except in his native Galilean tongue, Aramaic, or his synagogue professional tongue, Hebrew. (Maybe a Latin or Greek word here and there for flavor.) He definitely NEVER uttered a word of King James's elegant and luscious English!

And then my relative would really flip out when he heard that scholars can’t even decide how many words spoken by Jesus in the New Testament can actually be traced to his mouth. Some scholars say as few as 31 words, others as many as 10,000 words.(The theological argument has a name---the ipsissima verba jesu: the very words of Jesus) None of them would declare, like some untutored lay folk do, that every word in the New Testament must have been written by God or his son, the god Jesus.

What would really drive my relative over the edge is that Jesus, like most middle easterners, was probably short, oval faced, greasy haired and brown-skinned, at LEAST as brown-skinned as Barack Obama, if not more so. (Even the forged Shroud of Turin outlines such a figure, so the forgers must have believed it historically accurate, unless they wanted their forgery discovered.)

Let's not even begin to raise the questions Albert Schweitzer asked in The Quest of the Historical Jesus.


Let's definitely not.

Merry Christmas.


.

* The Serenity Prayer: Play it again, Sam

Yale Daily News

Briefly: Yale librarian recants doubts of “Serenity Prayer” authorship
By Ilana Seager
Staff Reporter
Published Monday, November 30, 2009
Yale librarian Fred Shapiro, who last year questioned whether Reinhold Niebuhr ’14 GRD ’15 truly authored the Serenity Prayer, has been persuaded to retain Niebuhr as the author in the next edition of The Yale Book of Quotations, which Shapiro edits. The decision came after a researcher at the Duke University library found a Christian student newsletter from 1937 that explicitly cites Niebuhr as the writer of the prayer. Shapiro first suggested that Niebuhr was not the author after finding newspaper articles and pamphlets that cited the prayer as early as 1936, while Niebuhr’s family said...
#1 By http://theantiyale.blogspot.com on November 30, 2009Here's one time authorship is almost irrelevant (except to the Niebuhr family) since plagiarism made this the second most famous prayer in the Christian world, one which is even used by atheists and agnostics by simply omitting the first word ("God") and starting with "Grant". The "Grantor" could be "Cosmic Tranquility" or any number of acceptable non-anthropomorphic , non-deistic amorphous "forces"

NB: Agnostics accomplish the same end with the first and most famous prayer in Christendom by turning the "Lord's prayer" into two question[s]: Our Father? Who art in Heaven?

PK

* Gaming The Yale/Harvard Game

Yale Daily News

FOOTBALL Yale blows lead in final minutes
Williams: 'It hurts'

By R.J. Rico
Staff Reporter
Published Saturday, November 21, 2009

#81 Gatsby Old Sport (PK) Monday, November 23, 2009

Eighty comments in eight [days]!
You outdid the "Mr. Yale" gender puckersnatch which ended after a week at 68 comments.

What are sports FOR?
To soak up all this mindless energy?

What is Yale FOR?
Sports?

Ohhh.

http://theantiyale.blogspot.com/

* The Academic Industrial Complex (Killing Huck Finn Once and for All)

"It is a rare person who is naturally inclined to sit still for sixteen years in school, and then indefinitely at work, yet with the dismantling of high school shop programs this has become the one-size-fits-all norm, even as we go on about 'diversity' ". (Crawford, p. 73)















SHOP CLASS AS SOULCRAFT: AN INQUIRY INTO THE VALUE OF WORK
by
Matthew B. Crawford



Matthew Crawford ( Ph.D from the University of Chicago and a motorcycle mechanic), reminds us several times in his brilliant ---alternatingly dense and coarse --- book, of the words of Anaxagoras: "It is by having hands that man is the most intelligent of animals."















He raises the spectre of America becoming a nation of disembodied brains, skilled in reading the social cues of a managerial culture, but divorced from the joy of knowing things empirically from the process of "analyzing" them with our hands.

He does not raise the spectre of a nation which seems to be handing its children's education over to a monolithic Academic Industrial Complex, which devises brain measurements and instruments to test those measurements, instruments which require no more use of the hands than keyboard choreographies.


















In his last speech as president, Dwight D. Eisenhower addressed the nation in 1961 and warned of the dangers of a Military Industrial Complex, dangers we have seen, and see now, in dubious military proposals for Iraq and Afghanistan.
















Ike forgot to clean his glasses and see what was else was boiling on the national stove: The Academic Industrial Complex which is about to drain the Huck Finn joy out of American childhood forever.


When I was a child in the 1950's and hung around the livingroom on an afternoon watching TV, my mother would issue her hated but wise command which I can still hear even today: "Go outside and play and don't come back until supper."

























There are no such commands being issued in homes or even in the recess-free, obesity-prone school populations today.


Instead, eyes are rivetted to screens, ears to earphones, and hands to keyboards.

And we wash our hands of it as we post the standardized test scores of our standardized children on our standardized refrigerators with our standardized magnets.

". . . all made of ticky tacky . . ."

___________________________________________________

Hands:

* Melting on Health Care: My Half-a-Loaf Reversal

Strike It Rich!






After watching the Dr. Oz Houston Free Health Care Clinic on television the day after Thanksgiving I have renounced my opposition to President Obama's health care legislation despite months of publicly opposing it, beginning with my "interview" with Senator Bernard Sanders (Senator Sandbag)on the issue: http://teleturkey.blogspot.com/

Dr. Oz's Houston Free Health Care Clinic saw over 1700 patients in one day, a new national record. Several of those patients he presented today on his program and offered them free surgical help.

I melted.

It reminded me of the early 1950's television program Strike It Rich with Warren Hull (1951-58).
















On that program three different contestants would appear and tell their hardship story. At the end of the program a large heart with three windows would register audience applause. The window with greatest applause won the cash award to relieve the contestant's hardship.

Directors of the show would have to take Warren Hull by the arms and walk him around the block after the program to steady him from the ordeal of not only having to listen to the hardships stories, but the agony of having to bait and discard two contestants.

Luckily, Dr. Oz (a creation of Oprah Winprey and her day time talk-show which began featuring him two years ago) did not discard any candidates for help today.

At least, not in front of the cameras.

And even if he is the Oprah conglomerate's mouthpiece to help President Obama sell the urgent need for universal health care in the country, I have no objection. No one should be without health care in the richest country in the world.

Even if I think Obama's health care plan might have killed me a year ago (which I do so think)I have melted after this Dr. Oz presentation. Just grab me by the arms and walk me around the block a couple of times and I'll sign on the dotted line (or my president will).

The most chilling of Dr. Oz's beneficiaries was a 42-year-old man from Texas with an entire lower lip swollen into a black cancerous tumor. Dr. Oz offered him surgery and made him pledge to stop smoking.





















Some hard headed, stubborn, independent Yankee types might object to paying for such a person's surgery, saying, "Nobody forced him to smoke."

As someone whose mother and father died at 73 and 78 repectively of smoking related illness (emphysema), I say HOLD ON A MINUTE.

Smoking is an addiction.

And addiction is an illness.


Both of my parents were intelligent and middle class. Both were as addicted to cigarettes as an alcoholic is to alcohol.



















(Golden Anniversary Photo: Robert and Barbara Keane, 1983)

We do not punish people for being ill.

The illness is punishment in itself in many cases.


When I think of my mother, fully consccious, unable to get off a ventilator in an Intensive Care Unit for 118 days before she died because her emphysemic lungs were not strong enough for her to breathe on her own, I have no doubt that the illness
is punishment.

Cast my vote FOR health care legislation, no matter how inadequate the legislation may be. Half a Loaf is better than none.















Walk me around the block please.

* Bring Hell Back (on Steroids)

I don't know who invented Hell AKA eternal damnation. An underworld called Sheol is mentioned in the Old Testament, but no concept of eternal punishment is associated with it.

The New Testament obviously gets the blame for this happy idea. And it is one of the reasons Bertrand Russell rejects Christianity in his essay Why I am Not a Christian. If I recall correctly, he says something like this (only more eloquently): Any religion which introduced the idea of eternal damnation into the world is evil and I cannot subscribe to it.

Well, if he didn't say that, he should have.

Around the time the music of the Beatles began saving the world from hypocrisy (1960), secular American society began ignoring hell until today when no one ---except very old and literal-minded Christians (Ted Kennedy writing the Pope?)--- is actually frightened by hell any more as a real, potential destination on the lower floor of a triple decker universe where evil doers spend eternity being savagely punished.


Or if they do, they believe in it as a place OTHER people are going to wind up in, or as a psychological state in THIS world which can be worked out of by improved behavior AKA contrition and rectitude.


The trouble with the trivialization of hell is that it was a good Skinner Box technique for training socially acceptable behavior. Like an electric shock, the fear of hell would keep others from transgressing too much, at least in personal issues. (Except for Huck Finn who decided to go to hell for lying rather than betray his slave friend Jim. Good choice, Huck!)


Unfortunately, that Skinner Box didn't seem to work in war (the one exception allowed to the "Thou Shalt Not Kill" one-way-trip-to-hell-violation). Read these statistics for the Twentieth Century from a book by one of our former National Security Advisors:

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the Twenty-first Century (1993)

"Lives deliberately extinguished by politically motivated carnage":

167,000,000 to 175,000,000

Including:
War Dead: 87,500,000
Military war dead:
33,500,000
Civilian war dead:
54,000,000
Not-war Dead: 80,000,000
Communist oppression:
60,000,000




Even Abraham Lincoln, in the century prior, cooked up a way to justify the killing he ordered and escape the Skinner-Box of hell: "For every drop of blood from the lash, a drop of blood from the sword." Thus he came to believe that the Civil War deaths of both Union and Confederate soldiers were Providence's way of balancing the scales of divine justice for the evil of slavery.

















Who knows. Sounds pretty. But it's rather blood-thirsty of the deity, don't you think?


Dead is dead. And those statistics above are MILLIONS not THOUSANDS.



I say, bring hell back and make it twice as bad and totally inflexible: You kill (or order others to kill): you go to hell and suffer in flaming torture forever.

For Ever.

PS:
That would have included Honest Abe, Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Eisenhower, Churchill, Kennedy,McNamara, Johnson, Nixon, Bush, and perhaps now, Obama. (Notice they're all males? Maybe we need to give a few more women the power to kill, besides Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher.)