Reasons Why We Need To Disrupt Aging And Retirement: Fill & Download for Free

There are many things that need to change.1) We need to go back to “tracking”. One of the reasons we have expensive charter schools and trendy Montessori schools is because we got rid of “tracking”. In the old days, you got a series of tests in grammar school that determined what academic path would be your future. In my school, for example, there were 18 tracks. The top six were for the highest scoring students who were college-bound. The lower 12 were the students were not going to be the masters of the universe but would instead probably be blue collar workers. This worked well. We didn’t have bored, incapable students disrupting French class because they were frustrated and incapable of learning French. We cannot continue to integrate the people who are incapable with the people who are capable. All we do is drag down the best students when we should be nurturing them. This doesn’t mean we treat the incapable as lesser people, but we teach them in a different way.2) We must fund schools from a state pool of taxes instead of a local town pool of taxes. The current situation allows the local taxation scheme to fund schools such that rich public schools such as the one near me have programs like “dressage” where the students get to learn how to ride horses for show competitions while the people in Roxbury 10 miles away have to wear their winter jackets because there is no heat in the building and they share the total of three text books for the entire class. It is a ridiculous funding situation and totally inequitable.3) There absolutely must be a way go get rid of old, useless teachers. The teacher’s union is so powerful that drunken, passed out useless fogeys who are completely unable to teach are still commanding classrooms of cheated, bored, frustrated students. Yes, it’s sad when we have to get rid of dysfunctional and incapable teachers who can no longer impart knowledge but we are talking about crippling and entire class of students every single year. They have to go. There has to be a way to jettison this dead weight before they destroy yet another class.4) Teachers need to be paid a lot more. A LOT more.5) We need to cut the number of administrators by 2/3s AT LEAST. As time has gone on, education has morphed into a monster where it becomes nothing but a do-nothing job factory for burned-out teachers who are tired or unable to teach but still want to work, so they are simply put into a make-work job in the Administration building for some enormous taxpayer-funded salary where they can huff White-Out and magic markers for a few years before retiring with an enormous pension. This shit has to stop before it hoovers down all the money we need to teach students.6) We need to hammer the custodial staff. The unions have screwed down the job so tightly that every year custodians have to do less and less until now all they do is sit in the boiler room playing cards now. Specialized firms come in to clean the bathrooms and wax the floors. Do your fucking jobs you lazy custodians! And by the way, as a retired guy I have taken a job as a custodian SO I SEE THIS EVERY FUCKING DAY. I have literally been told to stop vacuuming because it makes the other custodians who don’t like to vacuum “look bad”. So if we need vacuuming (and what building doesn’t) custodians are hired to double overtime to come in after hours and vacuum. It’s insane.7) Provide all the materials students need. When I was in grammar school, at the start of every year each student received a box of pencils, a box of Bic pens, a box of crayons, a ruler and a protractor. I was always distressed at the end of the year when there was an orgy of desk cleaning and all this stuff ended up in the trash. I would take home dozens of wooden rulers and boxes of crayons. Now, however, students can’t even get a scrap of paper to do their work on. That’s because some useless drunk ex-teacher is now an overpaid Administrator huffing White Out and magic markers in a warm cozy office somewhere while some new teacher, fresh out of college paying 30 grand in college loans and signing up for food stamps also has to pay for the materials the students need out of his/her pocket.8) Take textbook purchasing out of the control of those fucking worthless Republican morons in Texas. Those idiots are the mass buyers of text books for much of the nation and have worked assiduously to corrupt the minds of children by inserting ideology into text books; in one history text book they referred to “slaves” in America as “imported workers”; a Republican Congresswomen tried to get as much of the Book of Proverbs snuck into any textbook possible, even in small chunks; Creationism is constantly snuck into Science books as if it were real science and so on. This kind of ideological nonsense has got to stop. We have to stop teaching children moronic non-sense.9) Let’s do away with the Pledge of Allegiance and any semblance of prayer and that sort of bullshit. I would much rather have students spend the first day of school doing 15 minute of mindful yoga. Students would be allowed the opportunity to Pledge Allegiance at the age of 16, when we allow any other minor to enter into a binding contract. At least at that point they would have the ability to judge whether or not they even WANTED to take the Pledge rather than be peer-pressured or forced or tricked into saying something so essentially meaningless that they cannot even understand.10) Reward excellence whenever possible. We must strive to get the best and brightest into the best opportunities. The world is full of winners and losers - too bad. The people who have the best opportunity to win need to be positioned to win. No one is putting a one-legged guy on an Olympic track team. Why would you put you NOT put your best students in a position to win? In addition, the top 10 percent of students should be allowed into ANY state college. We need to find ways to stop the increasing segregation of college by race and the culling out of students of color from college11) College needs to be highly subsidized or even free, at least at the state school level. No where in the world are students so purposefully disenfranchised as in America where a genius can end up selling fries at McDonalds merely for want of money to go college12) We need to make trade and vocational schools as attractive as any college track. There needs to be a real focus on the trades and shown that they are esteemed. It is critical that “white collar” is not at war with “blue collar” and the goal isn’t to always drive students to “white collar”. We need electricians, welders, carpenters, plumbers, and all the other trades as much as we need web developers and accountants.13) We need to return Civics education to the curriculum as a critical course. It’s become apparent that we have raised a nation of ignoramuses who believe that when Twitter takes down a post they don’t like that if violates the Constitutional right of “Free Speech”.14) New schools need to be designed to support multi-purpose activities such as Night School, satellite college classes, emergency hospitals in a pandemic, shelters and with security doors that can be closed remotely like watertight doors on a ship to trap shooters. Since we can’t seem to do anything about guns in this country we need instead to design building that will lock off wings, sections and classrooms. Even my new high school in 1977 had automatic fire doors that would slam shut across the corridor. It is ridiculous that in my home town a 100 million dollar junior high school was built without any air conditioning because the building isn’t used in the summer. Why isn’t it?15) I would extend the school year significantly. It’s ridiculous to have summers off, something that reverts back to a time when students were needed in the fields. While the rest of the world races ahead academically, we let the brains of the next generation of leaders molder for the entire summer. It’s a recipe for mediocrity.16) PTA would no longer be a voluntary thing. Parents would be required by law to attend, get reports and interact with teachers and their own children. It is not just the job of the teacher to teach - it is the job of the student to learn and the parent is a key part of that. You cannot dump a student off at school as if it were daycare and then forget about them. Parents must be forced into their role if they refuse to do it voluntarily. Schools are not social service centers.17) We have to eliminate these expensive requirements for integrating seriously ill special needs students into classrooms. Yes it is nice but it is detracting from educating the most capable students who are going to be the next leaders of America. If we are going to have seriously crippled special needs students in classrooms then the parents, not the school, should be bearing the cost. The current situation is like taking an Olympic runner and then attaching a ball and chain to his foot and telling him to win the Gold Medal. In this country we do everything we can to sabotage public education and deliver excellent students.It is so funny to me when you look at the evolution of education in this country, we see that the founders highly valued it and believed that a well-education population was key to the success of the nation and yet the local farmers and craftsmen built the schools themselves at no expense to the town; the students brought the firewood to the classes and the teacher lived in an apartment above the school. A roving superintendent would inspect the class and teacher on a random basis and there were a few secretaries to prepare reports. Now we have hundred-million dollar school houses with bloated Administration staff who are overseeing frustrated teachers who can barely do their jobs.

You have a deeply held trauna which up to now you have not been ready to faceSadness has been your coping skillThe text that your are for answers is a sign that your are finally ready to heal your demons.I am an energy healer and I'd like to share with you if that is OKThere are a number of things your can do to take back control of your well beingDid you know, your subconscious mind(SM) is always watching out for you.In every moment of everyday,it takes in 2million pieces of information. It is believed that in one day it takes in a minimum of 40million pieces of informationWhen your retire at night, it sifts through all this information.The stuff that is unimportant(all the people, places,things, colors, sounds, etc..in your periphery) it discards.All the stuff your need to go about your business the following day( coping skills, motor skills, names, faces, things to do, etc..) it transfers to your conscious mind(CM) so that on awakening you can go about your day.All your trauma or demons that your are not strong enough to cope with right now,it stores away until you are stronger and replaces them with coping skills suitable for you.I suffered my trauma at age 12 and not capable of processing it, my SM stored it away and gave me :Anxiety,Depression & Disassociation as my coping skills.For a long time they worked very well, but 20 odd years later they turned on me.I needed to become aware of this,I wasn't suffering from a condition, i had a coping skill that doesn't work anymore, i was suffering from a memoryThis perspective changed my life, as i realised i was ready to face my demons and once i did, there would be no need for these broken coping skills and i would learn over time how to release them like a bad habit.Did your also know that our trauma and these coping skills are energy.They are not physicalThey are not mentalDoctors are trained to heal the bodyPsychiatrists/Cognitive therapists are trained to heal the mindWhat we suffer from us a disruption in our energy bodies.You know that feeling when you are one with the universe?That isn't mental or physical, that is emotional energyWhen our energy is blocked we feel low, when our energy is flowing we feel goodNew studies show to heal what your suffer from, it is time to use Holistic and Spiritual techniques.You need the best therapist to treat you and that can only ever be You.We need to teach you how to heal yourselfFor too long your have been dependent of other people, places and things and that just invests in your sense of brokenness and being damaged.There are ways that you can change all this.The fact that you are on here,asking strangers for help, shows me that your are ready and strong enough to face your demons and release them.How do i know?You are no longer hiding!You are feeling the pain and saying 'enough is enough!'I combine EFT,Acupressure,Reiki methods with Logotherapy and this combination had enabled hundreds of my clients heal their energy and win back their peace of mind.There are other things you can do, right now.All medication are toxic and poisonous.We are not poison deficientWe are not toxin deficientWe are vitamin deficientWe are nutrient deficientReview what your are putting into your bodyDecide whether you want to suppress your ability to embrace life,or truly be alive to the good and the badChange to a plant based dietCut out all processed meatsCut out all dairyFinally, find a higher power and give Him/Her your troubles and needsMake a decision to be of serviceGo down to your local community center and volunteer for something/anythingI pray this helps youKind regardsRichard Tauthor: Your Energy Works

As a medical professional, what is your biggest concern about the COVID-19 coronavirus?I am not a medical professional. I have a scientific background, I am in public health. And what terrifies me the most was the utterance of the words “The cure can’t be worse than the problem”, and the potential for this particular point of view to start gaining traction.Listen, there is no way that this pandemic can be anything less than hugely disruptive. It is going to take the lives of many of our loved ones, it is going to impact the economy, lots of people are going to lose their jobs and face economic uncertainty. We HAVE to acknowledge this. There is no single scenario in which this is going to get going back to normal in two months. None. So just stop it already. Don’t give in to the allure of the words of people who have shown a clear disregard for their fellow human beings before. And all for what? so that capital markets and wealth can be protected?FUCK THAT. #NotDying4WallStreetIf we ease off on social distancing and revert to even a half of current measures, we will be undoing hard-won gains and face a runaway epidemic that will clearly overwhelm the medical system of every nation. We know this. We are ill-equipped in terms of testing capacity, ICU capacity, ventilators, PPE, medical professionals. And now, the investor class is trial-ballooning the concept that we should ease off on the only measures that have shown any evidence of effectiveness hoping to capitalize on the rightful unease that fills your heart with dread as you see thousands upon thousands losing their jobs.But consider the alternative.One in which easing off on measures scarcely instituted a week ago (and not even adhered to by a large proportion of entitled individuals that have been engaging in non-essential travel and non-essential socializing) inevitably leads to a huge spike in the number of infected individuals requiring medical assistance. Sure, maybe the initial estimates of 20% complication rate are much too high since the denominator, the number of infected, is still an unknown. We are primarily testing those with a travel history, a contact history and with symptoms.We simply do not know who else could be infected.And maybe the case fatality rate is equally inflated for similar reasons. Even so, the numbers are going to be sobering. In the USA, even if the rate of complications isn’t 20% but rather 5%, even if the case fatality rate isn’t 2.5% but rather 0.5%. And even if the denominator only rises to 50% of the population being infected over the next year, even then, that’s a lot of people: over 8 million with respiratory distress and requiring medical care — including nearly 1 million requiring an ICU bed and ventilation; over 800,000 dying of COVID-19 complications. The medical system has nowhere near the capacity for that. We know this. This means that many people requiring other forms of emergency medical treatment because life, may be at greater risk when every single ICU bed is already occupied by a person infected with this novel coronavirus.Oh, most of the people who die are “elderly-types” with several co-morbidities? Sure, those are the people who die. And certainly age is a huge, maybe the largest, risk-factor for death:Courtesy of ATAndyBiotech on twitterBut.The people who end-up recovering still require weeks and weeks of supportive treatment. A surprisingly large proportion. It varies by country and region so I won’t even pretend to know the number. Early numbers in NYC were in the 35% range. Recent CDC estimates for the 20-44 age cohort are 14.3 percent hospitalized, 2 percent in the ICU, and 0.1 percent fatality rate. As you move up the age pyramid the risk for each of these things (hospitalization, ICU, fatality) keep rising. But the point is that nobody is infallible and the entire age pyramid will be cramming into overstretched medical facilities.Meanwhile, as we overwhelm the medical system, we will be putting the entire membership of medical professionals (nurses, doctors, first responders, respiratory therapists, etc.) at increasing odds of personal danger by sending them to fight a fight that we are unwilling to support wholeheartedly by what is a rather insignificant amount of personal sacrifice. That shows a callous disregard for their commitment to doing the right thing. It’s amazing to see these folks, many of whom entered their profession out of a sense of public good, give it their all on our behalf, retired doctors and nurses rushing back to get recertified so that they can lend a helping hand to their brothers and sisters in arms even as they discover that we don’t have their back, that the federal government is too slow to react to their increasing need for supplies.Our callous disregard for their safety is not what they deserve.Scarcely less than two decades ago, we sent young men and women to die in foreign lands without the necessary body and vehicle armor to at least provide them a modicum of safety. In the age before GoFundMe, their loved ones were already deep into crowd-sourcing in order to raise funds to buy needed equipment so that their loved ones would be better protected. The worst? Sure, you may not recall Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous words: “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”. Those words would be true, were it not for the fact that it was a war of choice. A war that we entered at a time of our own choosing. That was a fucking shocking abdication of responsibility and a grotesque disregard for common decency. It was only last summer that the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act passed congress. You know the one. The one that ensured proper funding to provide for the medical needs of the brave first responders who rushed to help on 9/11 at great personal sacrifice. Sure, James Zadroga only passed away from his 9/11-related ailments 15 years ago but who’s counting anyway?A less than responsible response to this pandemic threatens to do the very same. How shameful that some in the highest echelons of power are contemplating a similar course of action. We have had months to prepare for this pandemic as the situation deteriorated in Hubei and signs of a chain of international transmission trickled out of China with increasing intensity. We are seeing Italy, Iran, Spain, France toppling under the crushing weight of an unrelenting wave of infection. We even got an early trial by fire in Kirkland. And here we are, weeks later, still unable to assure our front line responders that we can provide timely access to PPE, to testing kits, to ventilators. That we are contemplating running headfirst into an incomprehensible number of casualties, one which will certainly include many of the medical professionals that are trying to save us and our loved ones, by relaxing social distancing efforts is beneath us.For me? All I have to do is look to history to see that when humanity is presented with a fork on the road, generally, we split into two tribes sure in the knowledge that we are choosing the correct course. Sometimes, it’s like in The Poseidon Adventure, and neither group really knows what’s going on and who is going to be right in the end. But at the very least, ask yourself this question. The last time that the shit hit the fan and we were at the edge of disaster, were the people leading your group the ones responsible for the debacle? Are you being led by a gang of sociopaths looking out for number one and seeking your tacit approval as means of empowerment? The same people floating out this particular trial balloon of insanity and grotesquerie are the very same people that barely more than a decade ago were “the smartest guys in the room”, fucking the world over through their sheer hubris, incompetence, and greed. They’re the same sociopaths that sold garbage dressed up as AAA-rated financial instruments and then also made money when these instruments, which were designed to fail, began to fail.People make mistakes, all of the time. But making the same critical mistake twice in a lifetime? Why should we seek guidance from them in a time of crisis?Stay sane, stay safe, #StayHome. Don’t be a #COVIDIOT.And remember, #NotDying4WallStreet. #LloydBlankfeinWasBadAtIvestmentBankingAndIsAnEvenWorseEpidemiologistPost-Script added on 2020–03–25:I had a thoughtful exchange with Dan Rosenberg, in which he made some valid arguments about the economy, ones that I wholeheartedly agree with. I do not mean to give the impression that there is no merit to the saying that the cure cannot be worse than the problem. Far from it. The health and welfare of people is intricately linked to their economic situation and I know this. As Dan correctly pointed out as well, this isn’t just about Wall Street. The economy isn’t an abstract thing; it employs people, provides their livelihood, it contributes to their welfare. I may be a bleeding heart liberal, but I don’t mind capitalism and enjoy its trappings. I just don’t think that we need to kneel at its altar and I don’t think that we need to bow to its high-priests. And I certainly think that we have to be extremely skeptical about a bunch of investment bankers telling us that the economy “must go back to normal” in two weeks, or that it would be ruinous for the Federal government to borrow too much money in order to protect the American worker. And we sure should be skeptical of a president who is involved in the hotel and hospitality business wanting for things to get back to “normal” as soon as possible.I don’t want my embracing of the #NotDying4WallStreet hashtag to distract from my main argument, which is that we cannot possibly be considering that the economy gets to go “back to normal” in two weeks, while we are going to be in the middle of an exponential rise in infected patients and fatalities, with hospitals being overrun and our medical professionals struggling to cope with the horror. The heroes in our medical and first response system are running out of PPE, out of ventilators, out of ICU beds in NYC right now.And this is still the relative calm before the storm.In two weeks' time, there may be between 10 and 30 times the number of people seeking medical attention, requiring ventilators; this is how exponential growth works. Over the weekend, I had a discussion with a Quoran who will remain unnamed. They were touting America’s response to the pandemic because of the apparent rate of growth in case fatalities, which at the time looked to be smaller than that observed at a similar point in time in Italy. The flaw in their reasoning? they were using “time since first fatality” as an arbitrary marker to perform the comparison. The projections were based on looking at the quasi-linear part of the graph that we call the “lag-phase”, right before shit gets real and rates skyrocket at an exponential rate. Moreover, the key point is that although you can move the curve around and it may delay or hasten the time of arrival at the crisis point it does not make the crisis point go away.In terms of an epidemic, the number of casualties always lags behind the number of confirmed infections and the number of confirmed infections always lags behind the number of actual infections. Why? because of the incubation period, the number of asymptomatically infected, and the lack of comprehensive testing. The numbers we are seeing today are a reflection of people that were being infected one to two weeks ago. Now I dare you to think about Mardi Gras and the current explosion of rates in the New Orleans region (the highest rate of new cases in the world) and then all those kids that spent spring break asses to elbows in Florida beaches and then flew home. We are sitting on a goddamn time bomb.Do you think it brings me joy to point out that in four days we have overtaken that person’s rosy projections? At the time, we were sitting at just over 400 fatalities. They thought we would be at 700 deaths by the end of April. Tonight we surpassed 900 deaths, 5 days later. Let me reiterate: the casualties more than doubled in 5 days. Exponential growth.Some of you doubt my motives. That I’m some socialist or communist that hates the free market or, ironically, that I’m arguing for the shutdown of the economy because “fuck the poors”. I mean, it’s fairly rich (pardon the pun) for defenders of capitalism to all of a sudden show so much compassion towards the poor or working poor now, in the midst of a pandemic. But I digress. My solution to this whole thing, such as it is, is for the government to borrow huge amounts of money and to invest it in the safety and welfare of its people. This will wipe out a generation’s worth of wealth. Sorry to be a realist. But this buys us the time to come up with an action plan for the eventual resuming of economic activity. It buys us the time to keep infection rates manageable until we reach herd immunity through natural infections or a vaccine without overwhelming the medical system. In time, those that were infected with this virus and live to tell the tale get to go back to work and resume normal activities.I will share with you something that I wrote to Dan:“I would be happy to regale you with my thoughts on how to get out of this mess in the least disruptive way possible. Note that I say “least disruptive way possible” because I am a realist. Something that I hope you share with me. This is a war that we are fighting. We may lose more people than we have lost in previous conflicts that qualify as war. And the president himself wants to be considered a wartime president. I cannot imagine that I’m about to quote Liz Cheney, who at times has shown herself to be a monstrous individual:"There will be no normally functioning economy if our hospitals are overwhelmed and thousands of Americans of all ages, including our doctors and nurses, lay dying because we have failed to do what's necessary to stop the virus".She’s right.p.p.s. I want to again, turn the focus on the heroic healthcare workers that are currently having to go to work in the face of scarcities in personal protective equipment and the gear that they need to treat their patients. If America “goes back to normal” in two weeks' time, how about if they refuse to go to work and treat you and your loved ones until we can assure them that we are sending them into battle with everything they need?