America doing the Dysfunctional Family number

Even the nation itself, at least in the ongoing spats among our nation's directors, seems to me to be doing the Dysfunctional Family number.

Figuring out why that is going on, might well help us in the future.

(You know the old saying about those who don't learn from their mistakes, get to repeat them until they do?)

Figuring out just how to figure that out, seems like a necessary first step, too. It is that difficult.

And that technique needs to be unbiased, accurate, and insightful, to be useful. Perhaps proposed techniques could be evaluated for functionality along each of those three parameters.

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In retrospect, that probably sounded like inviting a big finger-pointing contest - fingers pointing away from themselves. "You dunnit!" kind of stuff. Same old Dysfunctional Family kind of stuff. Useless. Purpose is just for those who are meanest and loudest to get bigger pieces of the apple pie. Hopefully we have matured more than that at this time.

Actually, what I was thinking about was more abstract. Some kind of computer program or several of them combined. Input data running through the three filters "unbiased", "accurate" and "insightful" on the way to being integrated into the whole pattern being assembled.

Puzzling more over how this might be done, I have found some of the Mind Mapping software helpful in putting together more things than my mind can handle by itself at any one time. Much like typing in a word processor, thoughts can be initially put down in approximate order, then go back and fix typos and add and subtract and fill in, getting it to look more and more like what the probable overall pattern will be like. (An example can be found on my page http://www.kestsgeo.com/1techconcepts/kestsgeobook/kestsgeobook.html about a book I plan to write someday.)

The basic principles of learning

Thinking of making a response on a writer’s group forum, to a fresh asking of the old question of what is the effect of people watching such things as grisly WWII documentaries and Star Wars brutality, I have gathered what seems to me to be the basic principles of learning. It also applies to some of the posts re education I have made in recent times.

Compiling what seems to me to be the five basic principles of learning:

1. The protoplasmic moving toward that which nourishes, and away from that which causes pain.
2. The basic educational process: “Monkey see monkey do.” Watch me write on the blackboard, then write the same on your paper. Watch me pounce on him, so you know how to do the same.
3. “Those who do not learn from the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.”
4. “Half the solution of a problem is first the full and correct description of the problem.”
5. And “People are ruled not by force but by their imagination.” This principle is also used abusively from schoolyard bullies to world dictator wannabes.

- We as writers also seek to rule the imagination of the reader, if only for a little while. As do movie producers. And as do spin-masters of politics, business, advertising, and the news media. We as writers hope to make it more fun and interesting; but the arena is the same, that of the imagination.