Kalispell Gathering 2006, Part 30

Audience female member: Well, yes but keep in mind medicine is a business and as far running a business goes between the medical community and the pharmaceutical community they are doing a really good job that business is very profitable and that is what they are in business for. They are supposed to be profitable. I applaud the work that they are doing.

JJ: Instead of putting all this money in prescription drugs for people my age, if they would put it in preventive medicine, herbs, organic foods, and encourage people to go toward prevention this would cut down our costs tremendously.

Audience female member: That would not help business.

JJ: The pharmaceutical companies would really fight against this of course. Instead pumping our kids full of drugs we could have them get some exercise, get the blood flowing, get correct hormones in the brain, encourage them to eat right with buying the right foods when they are young.

Audience female member: People have become more sue happy too and they want to sue doctors for everything and the malpractice insurance costs have now gone way up.

JJ: This sue happy trial lawyer society not only forces medical costs to rise but also forces the price of everything else to go up. Back when I was young you could not sue major corporation because they had so much power that there was no way you could even begin a law suit with them. Now, all the big attorneys are going after the big boys and consequently are driving our costs up and our selection down.

Some of the products are no longer produced because the companies making them were sued out of business and no one will make them anymore out of fear of being sued. So, this not only causes prices to go up but also causes shortages. A while back we had a shortage of flue vaccine and the reason was that our companies are afraid to make them because of lawsuits. There have been lawsuits over vaccines in the past and so we have shortages of them because of this.

Everyone was blaming the government over that but it was really for the wrong reason. The government in the past had not stopped the lawsuits and this caused the problem. We’ve had an amazing number of lawsuits, and the point is this; we have all kinds of problems developing in our society that in a better society that could be built, such problems would not even exist.

We should not be a people that are sue happy, the ones that sue everybody to win the lottery. For instance, this smoker a while back sued Phillip Morris, and received a reward of $10 billion for one guy! Now let us suppose that a jury wants to reward $10 billion for a large amount of people who got lung cancer. That wouldn’t be quite so bad, but why give it to just one person?

The attorneys program into the jury that they should send a message to the other tobacco companies and all companies for that matter and of course the attorneys receive a big chunk of the money anyway. They try to sue restaurants over unhealthy food when it is the individual’s responsibility to eat right and take care of our selves. In the ideal society there is no reason why the people should be sue happy.

John Stossel did a story on a house he built in a flood zone and he did not have insurance on it because they would not insure him. A big storm blew up and destroyed his place and FEMA gave him the money to replace it. So you can build a home in an area that is known for floods, mud slides, or what have you and if something happens the taxpayer will reward you for your own stupidity. For those of you not familiar with FEMA it stands for Federal Emergency Management Agency, a government run agency. He said he really felt bad about taking the money but they just dumped the money in his lap and he said well, I guess I will take it. He said that he deserved to lose the place because it was a bad decision but “if the government wants to come in and give me money to replace why shouldn’t I take it!”

People are disgruntled about a lot of things in our government and much of it is not because people are bad. It is because when people are in a certain system they will take what is given them. John Stossel really did not believe in the government doing that but when the it comes and dumps money in your backyard it is pretty hard to wrap it up and send it back at them knowing that if you do not take it then some other person who made a bad decision would take it or it would just be wasted somewhere else.

So it is the society that we have created that is the problem, not the people. About two thirds of the money that goes to the government is wasted. I have heard a statistic a few years ago that it costs about 60 or 70 cents on the dollar to give out food stamps and welfare money. So you spend 70 cents to give away 30 cents and the rest goes to administration. Look at the teachers, many school districts in the U.S. spend $10,000 per student, which is pretty close to average. This means that in an average class of 25 students, $250,000 is spent to educate those 25 students. How much of the $250,000 goes to actually teaching the students? Maybe $40,000 if they are lucky – the rest goes to all other costs, say bus drivers, health insurance for teachers unions, and compensation, and a large portion goes to administrative and to pay for exotic vacations and conferences, bonus’s and so on.

Just of how simpler it was in the old west, they put up a school building that the locals built themselves, hired some gal to teach the kids, paid the teacher x amount and 100% went right to the teacher to teach the children. That is what you call effective. Let’s say she was getting $20 a month back in those days. That was the town’s only expense. When you read some of the tests that they gave back 100 or so years ago it is amazing how hard some of them were. They really learned what was going on in the world. They were pretty good at math, they all learned to read and all they had was one teacher, teaching in a one, room schoolhouse teaching all the kids from miles around. No big overhead of administrators and things like that, it was very, very simple.

Today’s education could be vastly improved if they used computers to teach the kids, but teachers and their unions are resisting this. You could have an entire course taught on the computer with the teacher acting as a guide and making sure they go through it. By having the computer teach you to read, and math and science and things like this under the encouragement of the teacher, and with the teacher answering difficult questions that computer that cannot handle, one teacher could about 50 or more students. As a matter of fact when I used to go to school I did not like being in a class with less than 30 students, I thought the larger the class the better because I could have more friends, and I felt it did not interfere with the teaching at all.

I remember when I was a young child they were talking about the idea of small classrooms and I hated the idea. Yet they are making classrooms smaller and smaller. When I was kid going through school I could not see the advantage in having a class under 30 students. Of course it does it make it less work for the teacher the fewer students they have in a classroom. There are so many trouble makers now and this explains why the teachers want smaller classrooms and if you have a smaller class you have less trouble makers and this probably one of the big reasons that teachers are pressing for smaller classes. When I was young my average class was around 32 and I personally liked that number because there was about one cute girl for every ten students (Laughter) and if you had a class over 30 you got at least 3 really cute girls in the class! (Laughter) That was how my math worked when I was young student.

Audience Female member: plus you could get away with more things because the teacher did not notice it.

Audience Female: When I was a kid they had an experiment that they call charter school now but there was an open class and basically all the kids were in that one classroom and you worked at your own pace. When you were ready to do the math, you went and got your math work and you kept track of where you were so you could move on.

Kind of like self-educating, because the teacher was always in the room if I had a question on any subject. We were all in the fourth grade. They have a classroom now that is similar, and it is called, I cannot remember but it is self pace and you educate yourself, I think it is one teacher for 50 kids and this way the kids learn at their own pace.

JJ
We need to experiment and one of the things we will do to lay the foundation of a new society is to experiment without worrying that we are going to offend some authority that is going to be out of a job. The problem with experimenting today is that legal problems hold us back. We have the beast of authority being offended and clamping down and saying no you cannot do that. And this creates a major problem for any kind of change that would bring about a better society.

Audience Wayne:
Two points on teaching regarding something I wrote years ago. I reasoned out that the best form of teaching is one on one. I figured out two ways that one on one could be applied in public schools and one of those ways would be to invite older retired people as teacher assistants and let them tutor a child, the other is to have children teach children. The children could be rewarded in two ways, the child learning and the child teaching. By doing this you intermingle two grades say, third and fourth together. The other thing is to teach learning principles to students and to have the older kids help the younger.

JJ: Yes, they do that in colleges today, many of the professors get their students to a lot of the teaching and they sit back and relax. The point is the biggest problem we have in our society today to improving it is that we do not have enough experimentation. We get in a rut and no one wants to make a change, the guy who does want to try and experiment to see what works, gets jumped on and shut down.

People have an automatic resistance toward change. Especially if it is going to affect their power or their paycheck in any way or they may loose their job. Let us look at the oil companies again. If Susan over here developed a new energy source that could run a car say for a penny a mile do you think oil companies would say, hey that is really great! No, they would try to do everything within their power to stop her and put her out of existence.

The trouble is that if there is no way to make a lot of money on it then they will be totally against it. It is not so much that the oil companies are bad for doctors and other professions are the same way. There are people out that claim to have a cure for cancer, I know one guy who says he has a cure for cancer and has cured a lot of people, so he tells me, and what did the medical establishment do to the poor guy? They put him in jail. He has been in jail a number of times. But, he keeps plugging away and now he is in his older years and works under the radar. He has learned his lesson, but in the beginning when he created his cure he was quite open with it and naïve, and boy did he learn his lesson.

Many people claim to have cures for diseases but we cannot use the word cure. If anybody just uses the word cure the beast will rise up and come after him and seek to destroy him. So it is not that the oil companies or medical establishment that is evil. It is just part of human nature that we have to understand that is what exists among humans in the society that we have. So what we would need to do if Susan created an alternative energy source is to introduce it very slowly so it is not a threat to the oil companies. Let us suppose oil companies were destroyed tomorrow because of a free energy source that was discovered. We have some drops here that we can put into water and it will make it just like gas and Susan is going around selling these drops. Believe me, her life is going to be in danger.

So what we need to do is to develop some type of system where the big oil companies are not going to be destroyed over night, maybe she charges a lot of money at first for these drops and then as time goes on she charges less and less. Now maybe she will be accused of being greedy but she will be competing with the big oil companies on price and would not be destroying the big oil companies. Susan really wants to give it away almost free though. She wants to sell a bottle of these drops for 10 cents. Well she is going to destroy the big oil but what will happen is big oil will raise up and destroy her and then nobody will get it. They will suppress the invention so no one will wind up getting it.

So what she needs to do is price her invention so that it does not destroy the oil companies. What happens if the oil companies were destroyed by this overnight? Millions of people would loose money overnight, millions would not be able to retire because there stocks are now worthless. Millions would loose jobs and there would be an increase of the homeless all because she is giving away stuff for free. So in the short run it would create a big upset, and this is one of the things that DK tells us, He says one of the big mistakes that disciples make is they get over enthused and tackle the powers that be and become a threat to them.

They get over zealous. The disciple needs to learn to interject his ideas in the most non-threatening way as possible to the powers that be. When I read that it made a lot of sense to me and I thought, you know, look at some of the great scientists and innovators. They have had tremendous difficulty because they threatened the powers that be. Galileo, Nicolas Tesla, are just a couple of examples where they got just a little over zealous, but sometimes there is nothing they can do and thankfully some have risked their lives and many have become martyrs.

There have been times like in the Middle Ages if you even did one small offensive thing you were often burned at the stake or something like that. We are fortunate that we live in an age where torture for innovative ideas is not done as much. You know some of the powers back in the dark ages had torture chambers in their basements. Imagine eating breakfast upstairs and some poor guy being tortured downstairs, it is really sad when you think about it.