AFRO-NETS> Supercourse Newsletter - May 29, 2002

[Ron LaPorte <super1+@pitt.edu>]

Supercourse Newsletter - May 29, 2002
-------------------------------------

http://www.pitt.edu/~super1/

Dear Friends,

A Gift Meant to be given:

"Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest 
abilities, because in each of us there is a private home and dream 
which if fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone" - 
JFK

It is now the 29th of May, John F. Kennedy's and my birthday. We re-
ceived some of the greatest gifts ever received, your knowledge. 
These were in the form of beautiful, elegant lectures, these are the 
wisdom of prevention given by many of you to the teachers of the 
world. It is a warm feeling. On March 15, when JFK, Latoya Jackson, 
the Spice Girls and I asked for lecture gifts, little did we know 
that they would come pouring into the Supercourse. On Mar. 15, we had 
650 lectures, on May 29, 76 days later, we had 792 lectures. This is 
1.9 lectures a day!! Extraordinary!!! This means for my 54th birthday 
we May 29ers will have 1460 lectures. The wisdom will soon be proc-
essed so that they can be used by teachers across the globe. Eugene 
and Julia Shubnikov in Noversbrisk will process these new lectures in 
the next few weeks. 

What we are doing is radical and new - a way to make a global differ-
ence in health. It is not the same old thing, or as Kennedy had said:

"Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth" - JFK

Thank you our dear friends. The Supercourse is a wonderful collection 
of prevention knowledge, which continues to grow.

Putting the Supercourse into Every Classroom: 

We have a simple plan to bring the Supercourse into every kindergar-
ten to 12th grade classroom. We would love to have you join.

"We can say with some assurance that although children may be the 
victims of fate, they will not be the victims of our neglect" - JFK

The concept is to build 3 of the BEST PowerPoint lectures on terror-
ism and make these available to the world. The first lecture will be 
on Sept. 11, the second on bioterrorism, the third on school terror-
ism, the fourth on natural disasters. Joshua Lederberg, Noble prize 
winner, has consented to work with us to develop the bioterrorism 
lecture, we will construct the rest. These will the top epidemiology, 
and risk assessment we can develop and of course, a-political. These 
will be constructed in two formats, a PowerPoint presentation, and a 
"comic-book" format.

In the US 90% of the schools are wired. We have discussed with sev-
eral national organizations about sending the lectures to the over 
100,000 schools in the US, before Sept. 11 for the first lecture. The 
first lecture is thus a Supercourse memorial to those who have died 
on Sept. 11, and in fact all who have died from Terrorism worldwide. 
The first anthrax attack in the US was on Oct. 5, therefore the 
bioterrorism lecture will sent at this time. The killings in schools 
in Columbine, US, was at the end of April, as was the recent shoot-
ings in Germany. We will send the lectures at this time through 
email, to trickle down into all the schools.

These lectures will be distributed globally to some of you, to dis-
tribute to your schools. In many countries the schools are not wired, 
however, they can be reached with our comic book format. In addition, 
Tom Songer has 2 wonderful lectures on the Supercourse on the risks 
of air travel, and disaster epidemiology. Should an airplane crash or 
earthquake/hurricane/volcano eruption/ etc. occur this year, we will 
be able to send out these lectures to the schools in that country 
within an hour of the event.

We will prepare 2 versions of the lectures for teachers, one for K-
6th grade, and the second for 7-12th grade. We will prepare the lec-
tures and the comic books in the following languages, Arabic, Chi-
nese, English, Hebrew, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish, as the people 
who are working closest with us speak these languages. After we se-
lect the people who we are to work with, we will send them the files. 
The files can be changed based upon local conditions, e.g. an earth-
quake in Bolivia, or a Sarin attack in Japan. We are also discussing 
the possibility of linking this work to a major international paper 
so we can get even broader coverage.

If we are successful, this will establish the pipelines of prevention 
into the schools across the world. We would love to have your com-
ments. Please send a note to ronlaporte@aol.com

Initially it seemed impossible to be able to reach the children of 
the world with a prevention message, now it has moved from impossible 
to "it could work".

Thanks again for your wonderful, wonderful gifts to the students of 
the world. Sharing your wisdom worldwide is one of the best things 
you could do. We in Pittsburgh are very pleased to work with all of 
you.

We are planning for the future, and the future is evolving in front 
of our eyes.

"The goal of education is the advancement of knowledge and the dis-
semination of truth"- JFK

"Never before has man had such capacity to control his own destiny, 
to end thirst and hunger, to conquer poverty and disease, to banish 
illiteracy and massive human misery. We have the power to make this 
the best generation of mankind in the history of the world-or make it 
the last"- JFK

Best regards,

Ron, Akira, Faina, Mita, Eun Ryoung, Fan, Rania, Abed, Luciza, 
Beatriz, Tom, Deb, Julia, Eugene
mailto:super1+@pitt.edu

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