I used to think that teachers lounges were particularly good examples of backbiting, hypocrisy and dishonesty. But as I learned more about the world, I found that almost every organization I came across exhibited this very same behavior. I used to think 90% of people were honest--but that might be because I spent 27 years of my life teaching elementary school.
But in 2001 I was introduced to the real world, and I've gotten to know the layers of society that have some power. Now I think that 90% of people are dishonest. I came to this conclusion after doing a series of depositions of elementary school teachers, administrators and lawyers, and examining the actions of administrators and board members.
I now think that 90% of organizations are corrupt. I happen to be personally familiar with corruption in schools. When our schools and our clergy fail our children, it's more shocking than when some faceless corporation violates the law.
The thing that bothers me most about the clique in the Vatican is the hypocrisy and dishonesty. It's become very obvious over the past twenty years that the Church would be a better institution if priests were allowed to marry, and if women were allowed to be priests. After all, this isn't the first time in history that the Catholic Church has behaved in a heinous manner.
The world has changed, and the inability to marry has become a deal breaker for too many of the people who would be wonderful priests. Also, many of the people who would be wonderful priests are female.
I was talking to a female Episcopal priest in San Diego, and she told me how she had felt unworthy to be a priest.
I said, "But then you read about all the priests who abuse children, and you quit feeling unworthy, right?
She smiled and nodded her head.
Scandals and Intrigue Heat Up at Vatican Ahead of Papal Conclave
By RACHEL DONADIO
New York Times
February 23, 2013
VATICAN CITY — As cardinals from around the world begin arriving in Rome for a conclave to elect a successor to Pope Benedict XVI, new shadows have fallen over the delicate transition, which the Vatican fears might influence the vote and with it the direction of the Roman Catholic Church.
v
In recent days, often speculative reports in the Italian news media — some even alleging gay sex scandals in the Vatican, others focusing on particular cardinals stung by the child sex abuse crisis — have dominated headlines, suggesting fierce internal struggles as prelates scramble to consolidate power and attack enemies in the dying days of a troubled papacy.
...The volley of news reports since appeared to underscore the backbiting in the Vatican that Benedict was unable to control, and provided a hint of why he might have decided that someone younger and stronger should lead the church...
Showing posts with label authority figures. Show all posts
Showing posts with label authority figures. Show all posts
Saturday, February 23, 2013
Sunday, February 17, 2013
Can teachers take a lesson from this traffic cop?
Click title to see Video about Los Angeles Sheriff's deputy Elton Simmons.
On the Road: Cop with record number of complaints
September 21, 2012
As part of our continuing series "On the Road," Steve Hartman ran into a cop who holds the record for civilian complaints...
On the Road: Cop with record number of complaints
September 21, 2012
As part of our continuing series "On the Road," Steve Hartman ran into a cop who holds the record for civilian complaints...
Saturday, July 21, 2012
Tony Robbins event ends in 'wails of pain' as attendees walk on hot coals
UPDATE: THE SCIENCE OF WALKING ON COALS
(SEE ORIGINAL STORY AT BOTTOM OF POST)
Burning Question: Why Do People Walk Across Hot Coals? By Piper Weiss Yahoo News July 23, 2012 In 1986, motivational speaker Tony Robbins explained his fire walking ritual to a captivated audience: "People have gotten first, second and third degree burns . . . Some have had skin grafts and three people have died...None of them attended my seminar." As of Thursday, that's no longer true. During a four-day seminar in San Jose, California entitled "Unleash the Power Within," 21 participants in Robbins' famed "fire walk experience" suffered injuries, including second and third degree burns. ...But physicist Bernard Leikind, who tried Robbins' fire walk years ago, has a different theory of why walking across burning coals is often less dangerous than it seems.
..."You're walking on things with poor thermal conductivity and poor heat capacity," he says in a Scientific American video. "Even though the coals are at a high temperature, they don't have as much energy as you might think and aren't good at putting it into your foot."
According to Leikand, you don't need confidence or a heightened mental acuity to fire walk successfully, you just need science and a little bit of luck. "Throughout the course of the walk, energy moves from embers to feet, then the walkers' blood carries some away," Leikand tells Yahoo! Shine. "If the energy carried away doesn't equal the energy moving in, then the tissue's temperature will increase... The degree of a burn arises from a combination of temperature and time...If they make it to the end before any damage occurs, the fire walk was successful."
As to why so many weren't successful, Leiklind speculates: "Some people may have walked slowly. Some people may have stepped out of the path of earlier walkers into deeper, hotter coals. Some people may have jammed embers between their toes. The organizers may have built their ember beds differently than they had before, perhaps on a different surface. Gusts of wind might have increased the rate of combustion. It's really hard to say." He does believe other participants who suffered less severe burns may not have even reported injuries. "They just would have headed for home and visited their physicians or the emergency room later."...
Walking on hot coals is not something I can imagine myself doing, but I think I understand how people do it. (Oprah succeeded!) The feat is accomplished, I believe, through concentration, confidence and relaxation. I suspect that those who succeed are able to maintain a steady transfer of weight, keeping a fast, even rhythm and steady pressure of their feet on the coals. If you don't believe it will work, it won't. Maybe it's also a bit like the old English legal test for truth in which a hot coal was placed on the tongue of an accused person to find out if he was innocent or guilty. Theoretically, an innocent person would be relaxed (hmmmm--not necessarily!) and would have a normal, wet tongue, but a stressed, guilty person would have a dry tongue. The innocent would not be burned.
Twenty-one people in California tried walking on coals, and wound up the unhappy victims of old-fashioned peer pressure.
Did twenty-one people suddenly forget all they had learned from Tony Robbins about mind-over-matter control of their bodies? Yes, I think they lost faith (and concentration!) when they heard other people screaming.
So why didn't they back off and say, "I think I'll pass this time. Maybe another time."
That's where the peer pressure came in. It seems that herd instinct took over when mind control was lost.
People stayed in line, kept walking, and ended up miserable. Let's not laugh at them. Normal people do exactly this every day. (We suffer economically, but we don't even institute banking regulations, much less put some bankers in jail. It's business as usual.)
And why didn't somebody step in and stop the catastrophe at the Tony Robbins seminar? Because our normal, everyday culture tells us not to question authority, to keep a low profile, to keep quiet. Lately we've had a lot of books calling this "girl culture", but boys are taught the same thing, just not to the same degree.
Whistle-blowers are too often ignored, and too often punished. If one of the supervisors had stopped the event, would he or she have been fired? If one of the participants had tried to stop it, would he have been thrown out?
Tony Robbins event ends in 'wails of pain' as attendees walk on hot coals
Over 20 people treated for burns after multi-day motivational event encourages attendees to take a leap of faith on coals
Matt Williams in New York
guardian.co.uk
21 July 2012
Burnt soles rather than cleansed souls awaited attendees at motivational speaker Tony Robbins's latest life coaching seminar, with 21 people needing treatment after a painful walk across coals.
During a four-day gathering in California entitled Unleash the Power Within, the famed lifestyle guru encouraged participants to take a leap of faith and test their luck on the red-hot surface.
Emergency services were called to deal with the fall-out, as many in the group suffered second- and third-degree burns. Three needed hospital treatment, the San Jose Mercury News reported.
"I heard wails of pain, screams of agony" one witness told the newspaper.
"First one person, then a couple minutes later another one, and there was just a line of people walking on that fire. It was just bizarre, man," Jonathan Correll, 25, said.
The injured fire walkers were among thousands who attended the Robbins event. As part of the multi-day seminar, a crowd were led to a park where 12 lanes of hot coals had been laid out.
A brochure for the Unleash the Power Within event suggests that once you overcome the fear of walking on coals of between "1,200 and 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit" you can "conquer the other fires of your life with ease".
A spokesman for the San Jose fire department told the San Jose Mercury News that it does not recommend that people undertake the endeavour.
Robbins has used fire-walking throughout his career as a motivational speaker and life coach.
In a statement, the Robbins Research International told the newspaper: "We have been safely providing this experience for more than three decades, and always under the supervision of medical personnel … We continue to work with local fire and emergency personnel to ensure this event is always done in the safest way possible."
(SEE ORIGINAL STORY AT BOTTOM OF POST)
Burning Question: Why Do People Walk Across Hot Coals? By Piper Weiss Yahoo News July 23, 2012 In 1986, motivational speaker Tony Robbins explained his fire walking ritual to a captivated audience: "People have gotten first, second and third degree burns . . . Some have had skin grafts and three people have died...None of them attended my seminar." As of Thursday, that's no longer true. During a four-day seminar in San Jose, California entitled "Unleash the Power Within," 21 participants in Robbins' famed "fire walk experience" suffered injuries, including second and third degree burns. ...But physicist Bernard Leikind, who tried Robbins' fire walk years ago, has a different theory of why walking across burning coals is often less dangerous than it seems.
..."You're walking on things with poor thermal conductivity and poor heat capacity," he says in a Scientific American video. "Even though the coals are at a high temperature, they don't have as much energy as you might think and aren't good at putting it into your foot."
According to Leikand, you don't need confidence or a heightened mental acuity to fire walk successfully, you just need science and a little bit of luck. "Throughout the course of the walk, energy moves from embers to feet, then the walkers' blood carries some away," Leikand tells Yahoo! Shine. "If the energy carried away doesn't equal the energy moving in, then the tissue's temperature will increase... The degree of a burn arises from a combination of temperature and time...If they make it to the end before any damage occurs, the fire walk was successful."
As to why so many weren't successful, Leiklind speculates: "Some people may have walked slowly. Some people may have stepped out of the path of earlier walkers into deeper, hotter coals. Some people may have jammed embers between their toes. The organizers may have built their ember beds differently than they had before, perhaps on a different surface. Gusts of wind might have increased the rate of combustion. It's really hard to say." He does believe other participants who suffered less severe burns may not have even reported injuries. "They just would have headed for home and visited their physicians or the emergency room later."...
Walking on hot coals is not something I can imagine myself doing, but I think I understand how people do it. (Oprah succeeded!) The feat is accomplished, I believe, through concentration, confidence and relaxation. I suspect that those who succeed are able to maintain a steady transfer of weight, keeping a fast, even rhythm and steady pressure of their feet on the coals. If you don't believe it will work, it won't. Maybe it's also a bit like the old English legal test for truth in which a hot coal was placed on the tongue of an accused person to find out if he was innocent or guilty. Theoretically, an innocent person would be relaxed (hmmmm--not necessarily!) and would have a normal, wet tongue, but a stressed, guilty person would have a dry tongue. The innocent would not be burned.
Twenty-one people in California tried walking on coals, and wound up the unhappy victims of old-fashioned peer pressure.
Did twenty-one people suddenly forget all they had learned from Tony Robbins about mind-over-matter control of their bodies? Yes, I think they lost faith (and concentration!) when they heard other people screaming.
So why didn't they back off and say, "I think I'll pass this time. Maybe another time."
That's where the peer pressure came in. It seems that herd instinct took over when mind control was lost.
People stayed in line, kept walking, and ended up miserable. Let's not laugh at them. Normal people do exactly this every day. (We suffer economically, but we don't even institute banking regulations, much less put some bankers in jail. It's business as usual.)
And why didn't somebody step in and stop the catastrophe at the Tony Robbins seminar? Because our normal, everyday culture tells us not to question authority, to keep a low profile, to keep quiet. Lately we've had a lot of books calling this "girl culture", but boys are taught the same thing, just not to the same degree.
Whistle-blowers are too often ignored, and too often punished. If one of the supervisors had stopped the event, would he or she have been fired? If one of the participants had tried to stop it, would he have been thrown out?
Tony Robbins event ends in 'wails of pain' as attendees walk on hot coals
Over 20 people treated for burns after multi-day motivational event encourages attendees to take a leap of faith on coals
Matt Williams in New York
guardian.co.uk
21 July 2012
Burnt soles rather than cleansed souls awaited attendees at motivational speaker Tony Robbins's latest life coaching seminar, with 21 people needing treatment after a painful walk across coals.
During a four-day gathering in California entitled Unleash the Power Within, the famed lifestyle guru encouraged participants to take a leap of faith and test their luck on the red-hot surface.
Emergency services were called to deal with the fall-out, as many in the group suffered second- and third-degree burns. Three needed hospital treatment, the San Jose Mercury News reported.
"I heard wails of pain, screams of agony" one witness told the newspaper.
"First one person, then a couple minutes later another one, and there was just a line of people walking on that fire. It was just bizarre, man," Jonathan Correll, 25, said.
The injured fire walkers were among thousands who attended the Robbins event. As part of the multi-day seminar, a crowd were led to a park where 12 lanes of hot coals had been laid out.
A brochure for the Unleash the Power Within event suggests that once you overcome the fear of walking on coals of between "1,200 and 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit" you can "conquer the other fires of your life with ease".
A spokesman for the San Jose fire department told the San Jose Mercury News that it does not recommend that people undertake the endeavour.
Robbins has used fire-walking throughout his career as a motivational speaker and life coach.
In a statement, the Robbins Research International told the newspaper: "We have been safely providing this experience for more than three decades, and always under the supervision of medical personnel … We continue to work with local fire and emergency personnel to ensure this event is always done in the safest way possible."
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Police officer punches jaywalking teenage girl: sometimes police (and teachers!) allow issues of control to distort their perspective
The teenage girl detained in this story clearly broke the law by jaywalking and then ignoring a police officer. My question: what is the best way to deal with teenage girls who violate the law by jaywalking and then ignoring a police officer?
How do police and teachers maintain respect and authority? I'm not an expert on police, but I would like to suggest that as teachers we do so by sometimes letting things go, by recognizing when a confrontation will actually damage our authority.
In the grand scheme of things, there are important problems that require the use of physical force. A teenager jaywalking is not one of these things. The officer allowed several jaywalkers to leave; why not one more? Why get physical with a teenage girl? If I'd been in this officer's situation, I might have called after the departing girl, "We're worried about the possibility of an accident at this intersection. Please cross in a safer place next time."
I'm afraid we give young people the wrong message about the proper use of power when police (and teachers) overreact to young people who don't comply with our directives. The goal is to mold young people into responsible citizens, right? The specific goal in this case is to prevent a traffic accident.
Somehow I don't think this is the way to do it. It just makes kids think that the adults are abusive and can't control themselves when they get angry. Some adults can't identify a situation in which a confrontation will damage their own authority. This officer did not enhance his own authority by using physical force in this situation.
Police: Officer reassigned after punching incident caught on camera
(Includes video)
By Gabriel Falcon, CNN
June 16, 2010
A Seattle police officer who was recorded on a cell phone camera punching an alleged jaywalker in the face has been temporarily reassigned, a department spokesman said Wednesday.
Ian Walsh has been taken off patrol duty and placed in a training unit to review police tactics, Detective Mark Jamieson said.
Walsh, who joined the force in November 2007, has not been disciplined in the Monday incident, which remains under investigation, Jamieson said. The event has been referred to the police's Office of Professional Accountability for review, he said.
According to a police statement, Walsh was on patrol and in uniform Monday afternoon when he stopped a young man for jaywalking.
While interacting with the man, Walsh observed four women jaywalking at the same location and ordered them to step over to his cruiser, police said. The department described the women as being "verbally antagonistic toward the officer."...
How do police and teachers maintain respect and authority? I'm not an expert on police, but I would like to suggest that as teachers we do so by sometimes letting things go, by recognizing when a confrontation will actually damage our authority.
In the grand scheme of things, there are important problems that require the use of physical force. A teenager jaywalking is not one of these things. The officer allowed several jaywalkers to leave; why not one more? Why get physical with a teenage girl? If I'd been in this officer's situation, I might have called after the departing girl, "We're worried about the possibility of an accident at this intersection. Please cross in a safer place next time."
I'm afraid we give young people the wrong message about the proper use of power when police (and teachers) overreact to young people who don't comply with our directives. The goal is to mold young people into responsible citizens, right? The specific goal in this case is to prevent a traffic accident.
Somehow I don't think this is the way to do it. It just makes kids think that the adults are abusive and can't control themselves when they get angry. Some adults can't identify a situation in which a confrontation will damage their own authority. This officer did not enhance his own authority by using physical force in this situation.
Police: Officer reassigned after punching incident caught on camera
(Includes video)
By Gabriel Falcon, CNN
June 16, 2010
A Seattle police officer who was recorded on a cell phone camera punching an alleged jaywalker in the face has been temporarily reassigned, a department spokesman said Wednesday.
Ian Walsh has been taken off patrol duty and placed in a training unit to review police tactics, Detective Mark Jamieson said.
Walsh, who joined the force in November 2007, has not been disciplined in the Monday incident, which remains under investigation, Jamieson said. The event has been referred to the police's Office of Professional Accountability for review, he said.
According to a police statement, Walsh was on patrol and in uniform Monday afternoon when he stopped a young man for jaywalking.
While interacting with the man, Walsh observed four women jaywalking at the same location and ordered them to step over to his cruiser, police said. The department described the women as being "verbally antagonistic toward the officer."...
Sunday, December 21, 2008
The Holocaust couldn't happen here...or could it? 70% of ordinary citizens willing to administer 150 volts if told to do so
How many Americans are capable of critical thinking at a critical time? About 30 per cent, according to a new study. Do schools and parents put too much emphasis on automatic obedience to authority figures?Shocking revelation: Santa Clara University professor mirrors famous torture study
By Lisa M. Krieger
Bay Area News Group
12/20/2008
Replicating one of the most controversial behavioral experiments in history, a Santa Clara University psychologist has found that people will follow orders from an authority figure to administer what they believe are painful electric shocks.
More than two-thirds of volunteers in the research study had to be stopped from administering 150 volt shocks of electricity, despite hearing a person's cries of pain, professor Jerry M. Burger concluded in a study published in the January issue of the journal American Psychologist...
The study, using paid volunteers from the South Bay, is similar to the famous 1974 "obedience study'' by the late Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram. In the wake of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann's trial, Milgram was troubled by the willingness of people to obey authorities — even if it conflicted with their own conscience.
...The haunting images of average people administering shocks have kept memories of Milgram's research alive for decades, even as recently as the Abu Ghraib scandal.
The subjects — recruited in ads in the Mercury News, Craigslist and fliers distributed in libraries and communities centers in Santa Clara, Cupertino and Sunnyvale — thought they were testing the effect of punishment on learning.
"They were average citizens, a typical cross-section of people that you'd see around every day,'' said Burger.
In the study, conducted two years ago, volunteers administered what they believed were increasingly powerful electric shocks to another person in a separate room. An "authority figure'' prodded the volunteer to shock another person, who was playing the role of "learner." Each time the learner gave an incorrect answer, the volunteer was urged to press a switch, seemingly increasing the electricity over time. They were told that the shocks were painful but not dangerous.
...participants were told at least three times that they could withdraw from the study at any time and still receive the $50 payment...
Like Milgram's study, Burger's shock generator machine was a fake. The cries of pain weren't real, either. Both the authority figure and the learner were actors...
Burger found that 70 percent of the participants had to be stopped from escalating shocks over 150 volts, despite hearing cries of protest and pain. Decades earlier, Milgram found that 82.5 percent of participants continued administering shocks. Of those, 79 percent continued to the shock generator's end, at 450 volts...
The experiment shows that people are more likely to comply with instructions if the task starts small, then escalates, according to Burger.
...Finally, they had been told that they should not feel responsible for inflicting pain; rather, the "instructor" was accountable. "Lack of feeling responsible can lead people to act in ways that they might otherwise not,'' said Burger...
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