Montana my daughter is growing up a lot during this process of putting on her own wedding by getting a job as a housekeeper as a hotel having to wear a turtleneck under her uniform to cover her tattoos. I never programmed her to want to do this so at least I know it is her free will but I also am trying to help as much as possible. It will be small and all that but the groom is having 6 or 8 friends standing which means that many bridesmaids will be require one of which is a man. She is also not being "given away" because that is BS and they aren't doing the whole "obey" hoopla either and are having the wedding and reception at the Elk's lodge. She paid $40 for her dress and $20 for the shoes two days ago, 100 for peacock feathers, $40 bucks for a cardboard cupcake stand which we and some of her friends will be making cupcakes for. I'm making mango salsa (I make a mean mango salsa I'm told) and whatever other finger food for the thing and have solicited $1000 for her from male relatives to be used too. She hasn't figured out what to do for the tables or the little gift things much less got the materials to make them, and no one is RSVPing so knowing how much food and seats are needed is a mystery. No honeymoon now, etc. If it wasn't for her wanting it on 11/11/11 we might have done it better but I still think it is going to be beautiful and meaningful and even her dad gets a pass from his rehab to attend. :)

Traditions can start new.
Love
Bette

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All That Is
what is?
Consciousness.

ahhh, but this violates the MBTOEian principle of openness! ; - )

"This is wrong too" (there are no absolutes) => rather, "my data does not suggest this"

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Does this PMR make my butt look big?

Thanks. My data suggests your data is based on beliefs which are based on misinformation and are not "true" in the larger view. I don't think there is a principle that says pointing out when something is wrong is against being outwards intended though. Too change old assumptions one must be able to show how they are wrong, correct?
Love
Bette

_________________
All That Is
what is?
Consciousness.

I generally look to the Jewish tradition for guidance on practical matters

just say its a kosher wedding...tradition is that the couple gets fed at a different house each night for a week following the wedding

reading up on this this afternoon, apparently there is also the mystical belief that three generations back of relatives attend any person's wedding, either from this world or the next

I think for life in the realm of AUM, the male effectively submits to the will of the better half, and this becomes part of his spiritual practise

when two relatively disorganized entities (which would equally describe most people and myself at that age) submit to the structure, discipline and other-centeredness of the marriage contract, this is a great great thing, and taking that job is the cherry on the cake...and the wedding is not the thing, the marriage is the thing, one decade, two decades, three decades and so on...blessings to the departed at the first funeral and ashes waiting on a shelf.

its this sacred evolution from disorder to order, entropy to less entropy

I also carry an intent that you fully reconcile with her father and that he moves back in with you at some point.

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Does this PMR make my butt look big?

He's Arthur's father too and he and I are friends. He could live here if he could get off parole but I refuse to have my children subjected to gun toting parole agents bursting through their home at any time. He comes around when he is out of jail and helps clean around there but that isn't often. We are friends. There is no romance at all and it is not there at all. Artie likes it when he is around too and we just saw him the other day. Thanks but no thanks.
Love
Bette

_________________
All That Is
what is?
Consciousness.

I've done exactly the opposite! Perhaps partly because I've never liked to be seen agreeing with the majority in my circle - mass movements always carry a risk of being mindless movements. At school, when most of my fellow 6th-formers (16-18 yr olds) were sporting Young Socialist badges and mocking then (UK) Tory PM Ted Heath, I kept schtumm, and felt sorry for ole Ted. Now those same YS supporters, those I'm still in contact with, are outright capitalists and social conservatives. Some, who became successful entrepreneurs in the US, are also fanatical Tea Party supporters. Sorry to y'all over there for that ;)

Arthur

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"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."

Arthur,

Being in opposition to and pointing out whatever mass mindlessness is in the wind seems a very familiar position to me. The problem is always that mass mindless part. No, you can't borrow money forever. But you can't borrow money and refuse to tax to pay it back either. And if the reason you have to borrow it in the first place is because you destroyed the tax and income structure in place when it was not necessary to borrow, that is doubly mindless. I always thought that the politicians worked best when in a balance of ineptitude and a state of stagnation. The problem comes when the mass mindless part works to the real damage of society in the form of those who cannot help themselves and the elderly who depended upon the 'rug' which the mass and mindless are attempting to pull out from under their feet after building their lives on its presence. Very non+MBT.

This should really be in Wud I Say rather than here however.

Ted

I do not think that These judgements have anything to do with age. Whether or not people have a "soul" or "common sense" has nothing to do with the advancing of years, and "gaining sense", but more to do with the quality of choices (intent and QOC) along the way, the developement of "belief traps", and what is called "high entropy" or "low entropy" behavior. More often it has to do with "conformity", and the tendancies that people have, of developing and maintaining "BELIEF TRAPS". Our choices can lead to growth (LOVE) but can also lead to decay (FEAR). It is in this manner that we can make "progress" (spiritual growth) by making "low entropy choices". but we can also lose whatever progress has been made because of new (high entropy) choices, and the building up of belief systems that can seem more "profitable", but are, in fact, impediments to true progress, and barriers to the process of "becomming LOVE".

As we get older there is a tendancy towards conformity ("buying in" to the system, or "SELLING OUT" the radical, idealistic views of ones youth) as a way of advancing our own position and it may be a matter of Courage (love), or the lack of it (fear). Or it could be just a matter of "comfort" as opposed to inconvenience. But if something is "wrong" at the age of 20 then, generally, it is still "wrong" at the age of 50. But we find out that by supporting the "wrongness" of a system and accepting it, we can avoid complications and inconvenience in our own life, and sometimes we can actually profit (short term) by the inequities of a HIGH ENTROPY system. Even if the system is causing many others to suffer. It is usually the people that have benefited from an "unjust" system that are the most resistant to the changes that may be inevitable. But in my humble opinion it is not the change itself that is painful, it is resistance to change that causes pain.



Notice how he compares FRICTION to the problems of a high entropy system?
I have always considered that friction was comparable to ENTROPY.
How far are you willing to go to support a system that is "predatory", "Highly entropic" in nature?


Some more thoughts from Henry Thoreau and 'Civil Disobedience' , here ...

http://thoreau.eserver.org/wendy.html

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LOVE is the answer

peace
patrick

but, being friends is 99% of marriage, the other stuff is just there to give you something to do while you are getting to know each other

to go through that process and come out the other side friends, is increasingly rare, and very very valuable

from here it looks like you have gold and don't realize it

if you are still addicted to the emotional drug of infatuation and new lover sex intensity, consider just having an open marriage or some other creative arrangement

look down the road to when your daughter might leave town and what if you get sick? you will need him around to help with Arthur as well as yourself.

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Does this PMR make my butt look big?

sure....my comments regarding political point of view is very much PMR-centric and driven by the reality that most passionate leftists are not engaged with the creative process of paying the rent, they are usually students, welfare or social assistance recipients, professors or unionized public servants (that be me), or sometimes the working poor who take more out of the tax pot than they put in. Normally, a persons politics is derived by how they earn a living.

I think QoC unfolds on a separate track, like, there is the British squatter "traveller" who famously stole a guys wallet while pretending to help him, vs protestors who try to protect others and property when things get out of hand.

The left confuses the two tracks in the belief that left is good and right is bad, whereas the right believes you help people by giving them a job, not a handout, and believes that left is bad because the approach destroys motivation and is contrary to human nature, and it is unsustainable.

The right is also bifurcated into genuine red neck high entropy types vs convergence conservatives who are right on economic policy and liberal on social policy (a friend of mine is founder of the Canadian version of the Log Cabin republicans). The left also has its hating fringe. Both sides, and most people, believe they are the good and the other is the bad.



the right would say this is waking up to reality, and this process has a normally natural linearity from the dreams of youth to being adjusted by being mugged by reality. My data suggests there was more lelief based conformity in highschool and university, and less as people gathered more experience and real world data.



not the system - its the people. Tom addressed this issue directly in NC with his talk on how most people grab the most they can for the least effort they can get away, and we are just angry that they are better at it.

The message was that our entire attention should be focused on improving ourselves - changing the system will not impact anything important, changing our own QoC is the best way to improve overall QoC, which is what is important.

what is hard is living within our income, paying down debt, building savings, learning how to make money from money, learning entrepreneurship, learning how to hold onto money - Rich Dad, Poor Dad covers this territory well. QoC is the manner in which one's pursues this path of capitalistic maturation.

that being said, it may be a good thing to outlaw political donations from corporations as well as unions and wall street, the latter two who both disproportionately support the Dems, which is kinda ironic. This of course if based on the assumption that the collective wisdom of voters is better than the collective mosh pit of lobbyists in Washington...which is far from certain.

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Does this PMR make my butt look big?

Randy,

The problem with economics seems much like the problem with so much else. There are many schools and they amount to belief systems rather than true understanding. Otherwise, there would not be so many contradictions. This is a problem with soft sciences as opposed to hard sciences that have more clear results as in the building stands or it collapses, the airplane flies or it does not, etc.

You have never responded to postings regarding Joseph Stiglitz's articles. Here is another about why we are in the economic mess that we are in: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/feat ... #gotopage1 He managed to convince the Nobel Prize committee that he was onto something once. Why is he wrong. He seems to say what I and many others have pointed out elsewhere and I have not seen a convincing rebuttal. But then I am not an economist.

Tom would rather we kept this in Wud I Say, by the way, so I will end up transferring these off subject for this thread items to another separate thread there. What would you like it to be called or where put if already existing as a thread?

Ted

Probably a thread called "Contemporary Civic Issues" would be too broadly named, but a whole forum section devoted to such like might be okay,... depending pretty much on how broadly topicked you and Tom want the whole set of discussions to be.

Just a suggestion, but it might be best to keep the Fukushima, economic, gulf oil spill, etc etc issues separate in any case.

(PS: I started a thread a week or so ago about 'Thought Forms and Belief Systems' but mis-spelled 'form' as 'from' .... is there a way to fix that? TIA!)

-Montana

What will it take to show the citizens that "government meddling and incompetent regulation" is what led to the Real Estate bubble and subsequent financial meltdown? Wall Street Bankers at first refused to play along with the high risk loan plan, but the Fannie/Freddie gang made them an offer they couldn't refuse. They had to play along or their share of the banking pie would shrink to levels that would be difficult to explain to stockholders.

We can see that the Government pumped $2.4 Trillion into the real estate market creating a bubble that had to eventually burst when the NINJA loan holders started defaulting in otherwise predictable fashion. (And the government spending was all recorded and transacted as "mortgage backed securities" thus budget neutral and never showing up as deficit spending, and the program dollars themselves kept pumping up the real estate values that were used to back the securities! -- the perfect scam....)

The government wrote the laws that allow the Corporations to exist in the first place. The Government SEC allows the corporations to keep merging into gigantically huge, monstrous operations that make kickbacks... er.. "campaign contributions" to corrupt politicians who continually increase the favorable conditions for the corporations that fuel their corrupt power engines.

The government is corrupt and rotten to the core.

*That* is the problem.

The "Occupy" movement is a red herring meant to divert attention from the real cause of the problem.

The politicians could just force the mega-banks to directly give them million$ to spend on private jets and yachts, etc. but then the corruption would be obvious. Instead they create complicated corporate, multi-national megaMonsters that then "donate" million$ to their "campaign" accounts. A paper thin ruse but it seems to be working great for the corrupt politicians so far.

Rudolph,

All of that sounds correct as I see things with probably a few tweaks. I don't however think that the Occupy movement is a red herring. I think that it is potentially in danger of being coopted just as the Tea Party movement was. The impression that I am getting is that the Occupy movement is potentially international and potentially truly based upon a large part of the populace, here and elsewhere, coming to learn something of the failures of government and the greed of financial institutions and the über wealthy. The Tea Party is supposedly being irritated when parallels are drawn and claiming that the Occupy movement members are uneducated and unemployed. I would like to know the truth of the situation but what I have seen based upon surveys indicates that the Occupy movement is much more broad based in its membership from ordinary workers to Ph. D's and unemployed students to well employed (for now days) middle to high income people. If you have definitive data from a trusty source that you can point to as a link, it would be welcome.

Don't be surprised if this part of this thread gets moved to a new thread in Wud I Say to meet Tom's preferences that we corral the politics. I'm working on it. If you have a suggested name for the thread, please post it.

Ted

Maybe call it "is it the government, the man, or myself that is responsible for my unhappiness?"

Spent some time with this article and looking into his biography. His basic premise is that markets are imperfect so you need government to step in and fix things, spend borrowed Chinese money on teachers unions and have bureaucrats pick new technology winners.

The thing is, when you see how the sausage is made and eaten, this thinking is laughable.

Government is power hungry know nothings who could not extract a margin from a hot dog cart, with no real world experience arm wrestling with politicians who are trying to keep their jobs and pay off political supporters, with actual results or policy effectiveness being something naive recruits raise in meetings, marking them as unsuitable for promotion and Leading the true purpose of governmental agencies, which is maximizing their own departmental power and kicking problems down the road.

The thought that government can fix anything is absolute and complete utter nonsense, and the only solution is to have less of it...this is likely the only thing I am close to 100% sure of in PMR

Of course, if you have never been involved with policy development, program design, implementation and evaluation, I am not going to be able to convince you.

Ineffectiveness and low QoC have no constraint in government, but are eventually constrained by shareholders and customers in the private sector, albeit with imperfect efficiency

Bad results are certain with government, productive results are more likely than not in free non coercive exchange.

When all is said and done, you still come in and assist the disabled and geriatric, even more than is currently done, but you have to let markets seek out and fill the natural profitable voids.

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Does this PMR make my butt look big?