Category Archives: Coop

Climate Change Policy: Brookings is Right, We CAN Do Better

     Reparations in various forms can address climate change and the needed cultural changes which must come before and during these redressments.   This is precisely what Project Do Better advocates, particularly during Phases II and III, although communities may opt to edit their editions of the Do Better manual, freely available in editable form from me, to start that phase of the Project sooner.  Any community may decide to update their own Project Do Better community manual,  as distinct and derived from the current #ProjectDoBetter manual, which  starts by emphasizing free forms of intensive community and self-education, in Phase I, before emphasizing greater housing, reparations, and land-related advocacy in Phase II:

A reparative stance for climate change policy begins with granting reparations for Black Americans and advancing land reclamation for Native Americans as a moral responsibility to minimize climate change impacts for the most vulnerable…”

ManannanAD and Perry

(from The Brookings Institute …)

     While not all of our problems can be fixed immediately, education and collaborative advocacy are the common denominators for solving them,  and working together across issue interest divides to connect all of our work together is crucial:
  cropped-dobettercover.jpg
     We really can Do Better

Shira

Action Items:

1.) Thoughtful Readers, share your ideas for long term climate change related solutions, please.

2.) Write a story, post or comment here, that uses those thoughts.

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Click here for:

Learning through story:

                                                   Babylon5, Hakan: Muhafiz/The Protector, Sihirli AnnemLupin,  La Casa de Papel/Money Heist, or El Ministerio del Tiempo Reviews

Learning via Holistic College Algebra & GED/High School Lesson Plans,

Thoughtful Readers, please consider reading about #ProjectDoBetter.  This work is my personal way (as opposed to founding the Project, overall) of contributing to building tools that can help increase empathy and compassion in our world.  Story, as part of how we see our world, helps us make sense of and define our actions in this world.  And remember how important story is also as part of this project. Let’s Do Better.

Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BSCS

ShiraDest

Shira Destinie Jones’ work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#LanguageLearning for Global Learning and Fraternal Community?

This was one of the introductory lessons, with your basic verb set, and a very pleasant surprise:

Anyone can learn to conjugate every verb in Esperanto in 5 minutes.

Esperanto is a very simple language to learn, by design.   No sets of verbal endings for different persons, just one per time, and only three sets of times.   Simple, right?!  And a great way to help others learn a language that can help the world become more cooperative.

Given the interest readers have expressed over the years, I thought I might share some of my newest language learning journey here on my blog.  Once I have found others to help with Project Do Better, I will rework my notes in French and Turkish, and then the Greek as I go back to working on it (and maybe the Hebrew, if I am asked to teach Biblical Hebrew again).

Any thoughts on how your previously learned languages help hook the new material?
More soon,
and
        Hopefully, the empathy that studying languages builds, and a little more good example via story, will help all of us learn to be more open to the needs, feelings, and happiness of others.
Hoşça kalın!  Saluton!  !Nos Vemos! 

Shira

*****************

Click here to read, if you like:

B5, Hakan:Muhafiz/The ProtectorSihirli AnnemLupin, or La Casa De Papel/Money Heist Reviews,

Holistic College Algebra & GED/HiSET Night School Lesson Plans,

           or My Nonfiction  & Historical Fiction Serial Writing

Thoughtful Readers, please consider reading and sharing, or even writing a guest blog post here, about #ProjectDoBetter.  Phase I aims to build empathy for public goods (libraries, transit, healthcare, and education) via language study and story, among other tools.

Shira Destinie A.  Jones, MPhil

Creative Commons License
Shira Destinie Jones’ work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

SoL Saturdays Update, Context, PTSD, Homelessness & Debt: Project Do Better

What we still need our children to prove, for recognition of Service Adulthood (Phase II of Project Do Better…), is not their prowess in battle or the hunt, not their virility, not their adeptness at social maneuvering, but their ability to contribute meaningfully to society by teaching another person, from level 0, how to do something that is both difficult and absolutely necessary in our society today. By requiring our pre-adults to teach some other person a needed life skill, over the course of at least a year, that pre-adult shows persistence, perseverance, discernment, and of course, the skill in question.

Thus we provide an esteem building exercise and respect building accomplishment which we then reward with full adult status, whatever the age of the pre-adult in question. This obviously assumes that the person has had opportunity to prove his or her good judgement in other ways as well, prior to seeking adulthood recognition. This might help as one step of a series of steps implemented by and through local communities which could lead to more long-term thinking in society at large, given a critical mass and good faith in the ability of humankind to rise above our instincts, and learn to cooperate.  Certain pre-requisites should apply: knowledge of emotional, financial and physical self-defense.

Tying into emotional challenges like PTSD, pre-adults must learn how to communicate non-violently, manage their own emotions and prevent emotional manipulation, which eases the recognition and treatment of difficult past traumatic disorders.   Homelessness and debt both relate to issues of financial self-defense, by which I mean the ability not only to balance a check book and write up a home budget, but also to avoid falling victim to scams of all sorts, as well as the ability to plan for long-range problems like job-loss, or illness, etc.
Hence the post I mentioned developing the idea of an Adulthood Rite of Passage:

 

Then the prerequisites which are essentially being able to defend oneself physically, financially, and emotionally:

 

(A useful side effect of this idea is that it would effectively increase the number of available tutors, and also lead to every adult in our society coming away with an understanding of the challenges involved in teaching anyone anything non-trivial.)

ShiraDest
May 7th, 12017 HE  cropped-dobettercover.jpg  

1.1.12018 update:  and scans of my long-term project (The Adulthood Challenge project) to build a movement in 4 parts toward Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms…) replaced with above link to Project Do Better book (free downloads in multiple formats).   Here is some of how I conceptualized Phase II, the Service Adulthood Challenge:    ConceptualizingAdulthoodChlg  

 

 

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Click here to read about:

Learning Empathy Through Film and TV Reviews,

Independent or Classroom Learning via Holistic High School and College Algebra Lesson Plans,

           or Learning With Long Range Plans, & Historical Fiction Serial Writing

Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BsCs

Shira Destinie Jones’ work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#LanguageLearning for Global Empathy and Fairer Linguistic Community?

Here are four more sets of grammar points, from a very nice video maker to be filled in…  🙂

   This video really impressed me for what I wished I had known before I took a job teaching English in Turkey.  This person does a lovely job of explaining how the logical suffixes in Turkish correspond, or not, to those in Esperanto, with the occasional comparison to English.  So, it seems to be a common assumption that many of us who are learning Esperanto come to it after having learned the more ‘practical’ languages in the countries where we may have lived and worked, but now wish to learn the potential international language that could make this world a more fair place for everyone.

Many in the Esperantist community point out that having English as the defacto international language gives native English speakers an unfair advantage in many ways and situations (and I was quite resented in several countries for this reason alone), which would be leveled out by the adoption of Esperanto as an international/common second language.

Esperanto is a very simple language to learn, by design.  Given the interest readers have expressed over the years, I thought I might share some of my newest language learning journey here on my blog.  Once I have found others to help with Project Do Better, I will fill in the French and Spanish, and then the Greek as I go back to working on it (and maybe the Hebrew, if I am asked to teach Biblical Hebrew again).

Any thoughts on how your previously learned languages help hook the new material?
More soon,
and
        Hopefully, the empathy that studying languages builds, and a little more good example via story, will help all of us learn to be more open to the needs, feelings, and happiness of others.
Hoşça kalın!  Saluton!  !Nos Vemos! 

Shira

*****************

Click here to read, if you like:

B5, Hakan:Muhafiz/The ProtectorSihirli AnnemLupin, or La Casa De Papel/Money Heist Reviews,

Holistic College Algebra & GED/HiSET Night School Lesson Plans,

           or My Nonfiction  & Historical Fiction Serial Writing

Thoughtful Readers, please consider reading and sharing, or even writing a guest blog post here, about #ProjectDoBetter.  Phase I aims to build empathy for public goods (libraries, transit, healthcare, and education) via language study and story, among other tools.

Shira Destinie A.  Jones, MPhil

Creative Commons License
Shira Destinie Jones’ work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Reposting on Black Women, Leadership, and Adulting, Turkish Tuesday Style — Learning Through Story with Eda…

Shirley Chisholm was a role model for many Black women, and the first black person, male or female, to run for president of the United States. Eda, of Sihirli Annem, also teaches, through her growth in the series. Legal & Financial Pro-Bono and continuing education (aka Adulting Education) is easier when there are strong role models for all of us, and helping to build those new role […]

Black Women, Leadership, and Adulting, Turkish Tuesday Style — Inspiring Critical Thinking and Community via Books, Lessons, and Story

#LanguageLearning for Empathetic International Community?

Here are four sets of grammar points, from a few different sources, to be filled in, still…  🙂

   Esperanto is a very simple language to learn, by design.  Many of the words, you will notice if you speak French, are quite similar to or even simply borrowed from French, and many also from Spanish as well.  Those familiar with Turkish or even Hebrew will notice that the suffixes and prefixes give roots (the concept of a shoresh, in Hebrew, as I made a few shoresh/word trees for my students when I taught Hebrew school… ) a great deal of flexibility.  Given the interest readers have expressed over the years, I thought I might share some of my newest language learning journey here on my blog.

Any thoughts on how your previously learned languages help hook the new material?
More soon,
and
        Hopefully, the empathy that studying languages builds, and a little more good example via story, will help all of us learn to be more open to the needs, feelings, and happiness of others.
Hoşça kalın!  Saluton!  !Nos Vemos! 

Shira

*****************

Click here to read, if you like:

B5, Hakan:Muhafiz/The ProtectorSihirli AnnemLupin, or La Casa De Papel/Money Heist Reviews,

Holistic College Algebra & GED/HiSET Night School Lesson Plans,

           or My Nonfiction  & Historical Fiction Serial Writing

Thoughtful Readers, please consider reading and sharing, or even writing a guest blog post here, about #ProjectDoBetter.  Phase I aims to build empathy for public goods (libraries, transit, healthcare, and education) via language study and story, among other tools.

Shira Destinie A.  Jones, MPhil

Creative Commons License
Shira Destinie Jones’ work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Updated repost: Parashat Mishpatim, “Na’aseh VeNishmah” as Do First and Buy-In Later, via Education?

This week’s Torah portion is Parashat Mishpatim (פרשת מִשְׁפָּטִים),  the 6th in the book of Shemot/Exodus, and the 18th weekly Torah portion in the annual cycle.    This year, 5783, we looked at last week’s parashah, Parashat Yitro from a Public Health point of view.    As with last year, this week, traditional congregations (and maybe a few Masorti/Conservative Movement folks) will read of the inter-generational (in theory, or at least in Midrashic legend) acceptance of […]

Parashat Mishpatim, “Na’aseh VeNishmah” as Do First and Buy-In Later, via Education? — Inspiring Critical Thinking and Community via Books, Lessons, and Story

Review: Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880, by W. E. B. Du Bois  

   I was a bit surprised to see the point of view taken by the author in analyzing the Reconstruction, but apart from a few areas in which I disagree with the framing, but not with his conclusions, I found this book spot on.  web_dubois_1918

     I had mixed feelings about the lens through which Du Bois writes this book, starting about halfway through. Every word he writes is correct, and his conclusions are all compelling, but to view the Reconstruction as he does, to me, gives more power than actually existed at the time, to both the freed slaves, and also even to the labor movement and the North. Nevertheless, to see all of the facts gathered at a time when history had just moved on enough to give a bit of perspective to the war, and also to see how little the actual situation had advanced, was almost shocking. That he had to defend an entire group of people from pseudo-scientific balderdash heaped upon us merely for not being white still angers me, and that we continue to need to defend ourselves is still worse.

     I agree with his assessment that the endgame was always economic, as he says on page 399/767:

“The free admission of such testimony in all cases would not have involved the surrender of power by the whites since they were to be the judges and jury. The occupational restrictions, instead of tending to restore order, created the impression that the dominant race desired to exclude the blacks from useful employment.”

and the saddest part is

“Democracy died save in the hearts of black folk. Indeed, the plight of the white working class throughout the world today is directly traceable to Negro slavery in America, on which modern commerce and industry was founded, and which persisted to threaten free labor until it was partially overthrown in 1863.”

     And of course, education remains the key lever for change. One note on literacy: if all work contracts had to be in writing, how could the newly freed slaves not have had free schooling immediately?

     So he recorded, at the same time, interestingly enough, that the PWA was creating the Slave Narratives, a crucial set of events that were being distorted as fast as possible by those who would keep everyone in the erroneous belief that race existed, and that this concept of race made those of us who fall on the wrong side of an arbitrary line to be inferior, by our very natures, to those defined as white. The charges of corruption and stupidity leveled only at Colored voters and legislators were often simple inventions and always distortions, with the effect of continuing a labor monopoly that harmed absolutely all workers and small business owners, merchants, etc. And Du Bois essentially points out that events at this time paved the way for the large industries, from the railroads to Standard Oil, to form monopolies that would eventually have to be broken up, but after making a few men very rich, and tilting the economic structure of this country almost irreversibly in favor of those very ultra wealth who fixed the system. He points out again and again how all workers, Black and White, in the South, and even the Planters, were denied education, or educated only in the superficial fineries of life, and never really looked much below the surface. The culture of living on the subservience of another creates classes of people who only appear to benefit from that service and degradation of the other. But it takes an outside observer to help those inside of a closed system, as the South tried to be, to see that, and to step into a new perspective just long enough to understand how to change, and why change would benefit everyone. Du Bois points out that very very few people of such clarity of vision even existed at that time, let alone had any effective voice. That is the great tragedy of all of this, the terrible waste of human potential that continues even to this day, due to those ingrained ideas that so many have trouble putting aside, even for the moment that it takes to imagine a different perspective.

Education, and the ballot.

Du Bois was right, then, and remains right, now.

Shelved
October 20, 2016 – Shelved
December 19, 2022 – Started Reading
       Just found a #PublicDomain copy (from The Internet Archive) on a backup hard drive, never copied to my new Reading folder after I downloaded it years ago! Glad I check my backup files before deleting them! Librivox does not have an audio of this one yet, I imagine because of the length of this book, but it starts off, in the “To The Reader” section with a heck of a blast, leveled directly at racists!
“…the reader … If he believes that the Negro … under given environment develops like other human beings, then he will read this story and judge it by the facts … If, however, he regards the Negro as a distinctly inferior creation …he will need something more than the sort of facts… I am assuming the truth of the first…”
As w/cities L’Orient, & Bath?
            “…land, added to cheap labor, and labor easily regulated and distributed, made profits so high that a whole system of culture arose in the South, with a new leisure… Black labor… foundation stone not only of the Southern social structure, but of Northern manufacture and commerce… English factory … European commerce… buying and selling…new cities were built on the results”
and
“…a special police force and such a force was made possible and unusually effective by the presence of the poor whites.  This explains the difference between the slave revolts in the West Indies, and the lack of effective revolt in the Southern United States.”
  “It was the Supreme Adventure, in the last Great Bate of the West, for that human freedom which would release the human spirit from lower lust for mere meat, and set it free to dream and sing. And then some unjust God leaned, laughing, over the ramparts of heaven and dropped a black man in the midst. It transformed the world. It turned democracy back to Roman Imperialism and Fascism; it restored caste and oligarchy…”

   “#teaching #racism:

“… schools and pedantic periodicals repeated these legends, until for the average planter born after 1840 it was impossible not to believe that all valid laws in psychology, economics and politics stopped with the Negro race.””

page 52 6.97%:

      #DivideAndRule works, sadly:

“…but it was not until war time that it became the fashion to pat the disfranchised poor white man on the back and tell him after all he was white and that he and the planters had a common object in keeping the white man superior. This virus increased bitterness and relentless hatred, and after the war it became a chief ingredient in the division of the working class”

Enslaved, free colored, and poor white workers had a common problem, but:

“… the whites, accustomed to having all their affairs managed by an aristocracy which was then ruined, seemed powerless.””

and even
“…Sumner sent in a second substitute declaring that the cause of human rights and of the Union needed the ballots as well as the muskets of colored men. He offered another amendment imposing equal suffrage as the fundamental condition for the admission of the seceded states.”
“Here comes the penalty which a land pays when it stifles free speech and free discussion and turns itself over entirely to propaganda. It does not make any difference if at the time the things advocated are absolutely right, the nation, nevertheless, becomes morally emasculated and mentally hogtied, and cannot evolve that healthy difference of opinion which leads to the discovery of truth under changing conditions.”
How did the North let states get away with this:
“Mississippi provided that “every freedman, free Negro … have a lawful home or employment, and shall have written evidence thereof . . . from the Mayor… or from a member of the board of police . . . which licenses may be revoked for cause at any time by the authority granting the same.””
Interesting: #solidarity might have made that happen:

“The workingmen of Europe felt sure that as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendency for the Middle Class, so the American Anti-Slavery war will do for the working classes.””

And coming back to recent current events:

 “So, lies, land, and racism were used to keep Black and White poor divided against each other, while “A black skin… has never, therefore, created any civilization of any kind.”

     This is part of why the return of the Kingdom of Benin art work is so important.

“When Northern and Southern employers agreed that profit was most important and the method of getting it second, the path to understanding was clear. When white laborers were convinced that the degradation of Negro labor was more fundamental than the uplift of white labor, the end was in sight.”
Poor whites were
“… desperately afraid of something. Of what? Of many things, but usually of losing their jobs, being declassed, degraded, or actually disgraced; of losing their hopes, their savings, their plans for their children; of the actual pangs of hunger, of dirt, of crime. And of all this, most ubiquitous in modern industrial society is that fear of unemployment.””
#Racism was used effectively to divide, back then, but we can learn to Do Better, now.
“Yet we are blind and led by the blind.”

But it doesn’t have to continue this way.”

Thank you again, Internet Archive.

Let’s Do Better, please.

Shira

Action Items:

1.) Share your thoughts, please.

2.) Write a story, post or comment that uses those thoughts.

*****************

Click here to read, if you like:

B5, Hakan: Muhafiz/The Protector, Sihirli AnnemLupin, or La Casa de Papel/Money Heist, and El Ministerio del Tiempo Reviews

Holistic College Algebra & GED/High School Lesson Plans,

Thoughtful Readers, please consider reading about #ProjectDoBetter.  This review is my personal way (as opposed to founding the Project, overall) of contributing to building tools that can help increase empathy and compassion in our world.  Story, as part of how we see our world, helps us make sense of and define our actions in this world.  And remember how important story is also as part of this project. Let’s Do Better.

Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BSCS

ShiraDest

Shira Destinie Jones’ work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Who is a Humanist, and Does It Matter?

  Back when I lived in Izmir, one day, a neighbor angrily said to me:

  I was so stunned that I did not know what to say.   My Turkish was advanced enough that I had understood her immediately, but I still wanted to reflect on her words, both the literal sense, and the meaning, because I felt disturbed by her anger with me.  First, because I had no recollection of claiming to be a humanist, and second because I was not even sure what a humanist was.  Her sister rushed to change the subject, while I reflected on what could have prompted this comment, seemingly out of the blue, from my neighbor.  We spoke often of my concerns, back in 2005, that the world was not the kind and safe place that it could and ought to be, but that there were certainly ways to make our world kinder and safer for everyone, especially for vulnerable people.

   After she left the room, her sister, a much nicer person, sat down with me to apologize.  My way of seeing the world, of not spending money, of asking questions, of wondering how we could do things differently, was a source of confusion to many people, who felt that I should be concentrating on making money.  They also seemed to be offended that I did not want to make lots of money, buy nice things, and live like a rich person, or wear makeup.  Things that I tried to explain felt forced on me, unnecessary, and even degrading, since women are forced to use cosmetics and shoes that actually damage our bodies for no good reason.  So, why are so many people upset by my refusal to follow these customs?  And where she got the idea (not entirely incorrect, in fact) that I have no particular love for ‘bad’ people, I am not sure, but I was at a loss to understand why I should be obliged to like or love those who actively harm others.  I do feel that every girl and even small-ish boy should be trained from the earliest age in the arts of psychological, emotional, and physical self-defense.  Perhaps my personal indifference toward this neighbor had something to do with it, as she very much valued money, power, and ways of getting both.  I went from going along with her much of the time, to actively resisting (especially once she had me sit with her to translate during online dates with men from Spanish-speaking countries, as she claimed to be younger than she really was, and wore a long hair-extension).  But her anger with my general outlook puzzled me.

Comments, Thoughtful Readers?

Shira

*****************

Click here to read, if you like:

B5, Hakan: Muhafiz/The Protector, Sihirli AnnemLupin, or La Casa de Papel/Money Heist Reviews

Holistic College Algebra & GED/High School Lesson Plans,

Thoughtful Readers, please consider reading about #ProjectDoBetter.  This work is my personal way (as opposed to founding the Project, overall) of contributing to building tools that can help increase empathy and compassion in our world.  Story, as part of how we see our world, helps us make sense of and define our actions in this world.  And remember how important story is also as part of this project. Let’s Do Better.

Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BSCS

ShiraDest

Shira Destinie Jones’ work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Stand Together?

   These verses are the first to have come to me in a long while, so bear with me, please:

Too many people in this world suffer,

Can’t you feel the weight of it?
Too many people in the world lack,
Can you feel their hunger?
Too many people live in silence,
Can you feel the fear?
Too many people stand alone,
Let’s Do Better.

   They remind me of my Brolly Lady incident, in Bathbath_uk

     Cooperation would make a vast difference.  This is why Project Do Better proposes a plan.    DoBetterCover

Shira

Action Items:

1.) Share your thoughts, please.

2.) Write a story, post or comment that uses those thoughts.

*****************

Click here to read, if you like:

B5, Hakan: Muhafiz/The Protector, Sihirli AnnemLupin, or La Casa de Papel/Money Heist Reviews

Holistic College Algebra & GED/High School Lesson Plans,

Thoughtful Readers, please consider reading about #ProjectDoBetter.  This work is my personal way (as opposed to founding the Project, overall) of contributing to building tools that can help increase empathy and compassion in our world.  Story, as part of how we see our world, helps us make sense of and define our actions in this world.  And remember how important story is also as part of this project. Let’s Do Better.

Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BSCS

ShiraDest

Shira Destinie Jones’ work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.