Improve the World??

——a/k/a Get it off my chest——(Maybe they’ll be the Grist for a Posthumous Book)

§  Get a Sony Digital Voice Recorder with Dragon Naturally Speaks software to efficiently dictate & transcribe to facilitate all this writing.

§  Hire a research associate to unscramble dictation and find citations of sources.  ü

——For my loved ones: Family, Friends, Acquaintances, and Strangers——

§  My not-yet-finished struggle to sort out individualism vs. familism.

§  How sweet it was to hear my Mom, on her deathbed, finally say “I love you.”

§  How it hurt to hear my Mom joke that when she first saw me she remarked, “Well, there’s a face only a mother could love.”

§  Why I love my Mom very much.

§  Why I love my father despite the problems we had. Why I know he loved me.

§  The evening my father, the ultimate non-violent scientist, punched a man in the nose because he had cussed me, his 11-year old son.

§  Long-lasting effects of being raised euphemistism-free. NB: I urinated, had bowel movements, etc., and was confused at school when I first heard somebody talk about #1 or #2.

——Education——

§  In spite of doing 7 things right, the 10 Mistakes I made in the school I founded, Pioneer Christian Academy (1991-1993 RIP)  ü

§  Student-directed teacher-guided conflict resolution: It worked at Pioneer Christian Academy (and could anywhere!)

§  Self-selection: Key to Successful Cooperative Learning Groups?

§  Colombia’s Escuela Nueva Are Copying a Fatal U.S. Mistake: Common Schooling  ü

§  My friend Barry’s concept of “Christomundo Schools”

§  My friend James Tooley’s discovery of 1000s of dime-a-day for-profit schools serving poorest of the poor in India, Africa, and China.

§  How a California Public School Principal Tells a Dad that his Daughter is Having a Secret Abortion—Without Breaking the Law Against Such a Revelation”

§  How Parents Can Practice “Safer School” when Circumstances Demand Use of Public Schools.

§  My not-yet-finished struggle to find a synthesis of Classical Learning ala Dorothy Sayers and Unschooling ala John Holt.

§  What I did when told to ask ten women, “How many thousands in a million.”

§  How Un-government Schooling can Restore Sanity to Our Culture  ü

§  “How Bill Spady and Peg Luksik were both half-right re. ‘Outcome Based Education’—But not the half you expect!” (Includes fantasy joint speech titled, “Peg and Bill Praise Each Other and Create a Harmony of Seeming Opposites.”)  ü

——Health——

§  Why tell your doctor—pronto!—if your stools float and smell worse

§  The Odd Heresy that Appeals to Christian Cancer Patients

§  Choosing a cancer therapy using evidence and reason rather than superstition  ü

§  My search for credible scientific evidence for liver-, kidney-, and bowel- “cleansing” and “parasite removal”  ü

——Worldview/Religion——

§  What is better than natural anger when informed of someone majorly messing up, e.g., a drunk driver causing a death?

§  Zeit-Heist: A Layman’s Historiography of the Catholics and their Church—sans Apologetics  ü

§  My Top Five List of Anti-Catholic Whoppers.

§  Donut-Doorbell-Pizza Saturday: A way to improve the preparation of Catholic teens for their Sacrament of Confirmation. Discuss this with Fr. C. John McCloskey of Opus Dei.

§  What I learned from Herbert Butterfield’s “The Whig Interpretation of History.”

§  What I concluded from the 30 minor “ecstasies” I experienced the last two weeks of December, 1996.  NB: Ecstasies in its Catholic theological meaning.

——Other——

§  My Top Five Jokes

§  The two riddles I invented. NB: I don’t like to solve riddles, but I very much enjoy telling the two I invented with their seemingly endless hints that are true but near useless.  ü

§  Submit to First Things Magazine the only poem I wrote not under the duress of a schoolteacher:

Lauds to 4th-Century African bishop Optatus,

who refuted the heresy of bishop Donatus.

While 300 bishops said “Donatus taught us,”

the populous—thanks to Optatus—cried “Not Us! Not Us!”

NB: Truth is, I co-wrote it. Much of the credit (sic) goes to my close friend, the late Kevin McCready.  ü

§  How to prevent a clever person from scamming a 9-month cumulative duplicate contract bridge game the way I did.

§  Searching for a fusion of Attachment Parenting (e.g., Greg Popcak) and Authoritative Parenting (e.g., John Rosemond).

§  The hidden killer in my marriage (and many others)

§  Why the politically incorrect should limit themselves to live radio and TV and decline requests from edited shows, i.e., Oprah, 60 Minutes, 20:20, Dateline, Good Morning America, Today Show, etc.

§  Why from grade 1-10 I never had a friend in my class and what I deliberately changed when our family moved from Los Angeles to Karachi, Pakistan when I was age 15.

——Miscellaneous——

§  Publish “GreenRiders” NB: a way to reduce traffic congestion by half and vehicle-caused pollution by 60 percent. See SafeNiki for preview.

§  Why I changed my mind—twice so far— about the “need to drop an A-bomb on Hiroshima.”

§  Should anything else be done lighten the injury to the Japanese-American internees of World War II?

§  Find out how the background sound (music??) in casinos was developed and tested. Does it promote higher gaming, longer gaming, both, other?