pazooter Blogic

Whence Poop Hangs      I'm going to say some good things, positive things about Christianity. But not yet.      A while back I sat and listened to a sermon in a Christian church. I am not a Christian so it was a unique opportunity, one spanning from my long-ago Methodist upbringing in rural Indiana.      A friend of mine had died and so I attended his funeral out of respect — and wanting to see him officially sent on from his recent life here on this beautiful but often miserable Earth.      This was not some out-there evangelical cult; this was a mainstream American small-town Lutheran church. I sat there quietly in the pew on an inside aisle near the middle of the sanctuary, unable to not listen to the Protestant minister as he used the event of my friend's passing to preach his passionate message which was essentially, "Get lost."       Seriously; no joke. He said, "Lose yourself to Jesus." He...

I've been doing some research on "the" stock market, i.e., publicly traded shares of corporate ownership. A few thoughts: It's an "everybody knows" that fear drives the market. But that's not quite right and pretty much backwards. Rather, It's confidence that drives the market , along with its obvious corollary, and the lack thereof . Confidence is an interesting subject all on its own. Peculiarly it's not rooted in actuality or even truth. Ask any con man. It's just believing in something or someone. When it comes to having confidence that a corporation will continue to be viable and return a profit there are several areas to consider. Chief among these is confidence in a company's CEO. Perhaps the best exemplar of this could currently be Elon Musk, fearless leader of Tesla Corp. His "Think Big" insouciance and managing to remain prominent in the public eye has much to do with the billions spent to finance his operation...

Teachers in the Corner by pazooter Everybody seems to know now; it's the teachers' fault. And it doesn't seem that anything can be done to persuade the public mind to view it otherwise. After all, in the business world it's fairly written in stone: If you want higher quality products, get higher quality, better-skilled workers. It's obvious. To improve our national failing in education we must first and foremost improve the quality and skills of our teachers! And what do we hear from our teachers about all this? Grumbling! Oh? Members of the same profession who educated this untamed, unexplored, back-woods country and turned it into a land of innovation and invention, who inspired and trained the scientists who went on to send man to the moon and back, who are responsible for developing the finest, most envied university system in the world, are complaining about becoming better trained? There are those who would have us believe all this grumbling is simply an...

Righting Rote by pazooter Rote learning has acquired a bad name in the United States. But is learning by rote , the process whereby students are made to memorize without consideration for comprehension, the baby that got thrown out with the bathwater? Historically, it's the Chinese who perfected the talent for rote learning . The master would give the statement to be learned and the entire class, in unison, would chant back the exact statement. Again and again and again until they had it memorized. Over the centuries it generally served them well. The downside was that, while Chinese students became highly knowledgeable and skilled in their cultural arts and professions, creative thinking was not, with some important exceptions, a common forte. It appears that in the United States, rote learning went the way of knuckle-whacks and butt-whumpings. Well-financed experts (i.e., not teachers) determined that comprehension was lacking and targeted most forms of force-fe...

It doesn't matter much which news source you listen to, they're all addicted to the, “ Experts say.... ” gimmick. “Security experts say malicious hackers have....” (CNN) “...what some experts say is a growing fear....” (FOX) And on and on ad nauseam. Undoubtedly they have well-explained reasons for doing this. One excuse is that much of their audience does not particularly care to be bothered by such details as sourcing. Much of their audience prefers to believe that the news personalities they read or listen to are themselves the experts who say.... The corporate news industry is very aware of this. “The most trusted name in news” is a CNN slogan often repeated. To their credit, they don't falsely advertise that they can actually be trusted to report honest facts. Instead they, like all other major news networks, have invested accountant-scrutinized monies into promoting their talking heads as celebrities. And they've hired the best stage designers, graphic artists, an...