I think we should be focusing more on lowering taxes for the middle class, or giving tax incentives for real productivity before we get our panties in a wad about the upper tax brackets. We should really reform the whole thing but to do it solely for the reason that the rich don't pay enough is pretty ego driven(In my opinion). I think that a big reason the government is so easy on the very wealthy is because they pay off the politicians for favoritism in return(Through various things;Not necessarily a short term or direct payoff). All to often people are quick to point out the faults of human nature(Consciousness) when dealing with individuals in the private sector, but fail to overlook that the same faults apply to individuals in power within government as well.

_________________
I eat ego's for breakfast!
Sincerely, Ego.

Lumpy,

Where have you been during the other 30 odd pages?This has been repeatedly pointed out.So you missed the whole past year where the ideologues on the right say that we have insufficient governmental income but rather than tax the rich, they would prefer to shut down government and cut off services to those that need them? Not of course to reduce the military in any way. You prefer to cut taxes even further and produce even more debt or shut down the government even more?

Are you secretly a 1%er with vast income you wish to protect or have you simply not thought through these things? How do you believe that the things you suggest should be implemented. Shall we, to put a face on it, cut off Bette's government services for her autistic son because we cannot afford them and have her and her son Arthur start living on the street? My friend who has been unemployed so long, then cut off from unemployment on a situation created by the unemployment office and who is now declared disabled by his doctor until he first gets his sciatic nerve problem fixed so he can then get his heart problem fixed should instead just go lie down on the street corner and wait to die? Other board members have described situations similarly dire for people they know, or perhaps family.

Should we adopt a national policy of '65 then euthanize' to replace Social Security and Medicare unless you are so wealthy that you can pay for everything on your own from a guaranteed adequate trust fund? We could also examine all children at birth and if they are 'sub standard', just cull them and save the expense to the state that they will represent during their life times? To put a face on that, what about Tom's grandson? Is the solution required to confiscate everything that Tom and the rest of their extended family owns to pay for the medical treatments that the child has received? That is surely the order of magnitude of expense that they are getting into with multiple operations and long neonatal critical care.

How do you do anything other than the above if you not only refuse to raise taxes to historical levels on the very rich but want to further cut taxes on the remaining shreds of the middle class? How do you correlate this approach to the principles of My Big TOE? Not to be mean to you, but think through this and tell me where the miracle is hidden that will let taxes be kept as they are and reduced even further without doing things that I described above. Don't suggest the churches and charity. That has never provided for more than soup kitchens and dire poverty. In today's world, that falls even further as a believable option.

Ted

Ted it seems to me the Republican right wing mentality is that they don't really care about the things you bring into question. I say this because I had a business for 30 years in a predominate Republican town. That is a big part of why I sold it 4 years ago. Mention war to these types and you can see there fangs come out, even ready to send there boys off marching for big business. It just made me ill, in 4 years I have not watched the news, counseled my health insurance expect for my 18 year old. It is like a weight has come off me. I really think this country is going to have to fall hard,very hard! financially, before any lasting change comes into play. I guess all I am doing now is just being the object of change, what ever that may be. Fred searching for truth

Actually, Fred, something like that may be possible... but there are already so many other choices out there. My best guess is that this particular world is going to get brutally ugly and stay that way... the cretons that brought this about and maintain it will cycle through again and again, murdering each other and visiting every form of brutality they can think of on each other. The rest are leaving, going to other places. Some of these are as like parallel to this world; They are really refreshing just to visit: there is not nearly the fear and repression or crime we have here: Theft, petty or otherwise, is no more of an even thinkable problem than, say, snot eating is here: something that toddlers brainlessly do and no more. In some, electricity has not been discovered, in others it has, but has not even been considered for application to information transfer and storage. Some don't have movable type or even written language. And yet it is apparently possible to have fairly large and extensive societies with fairly developed skill sets at low tech applications and division of labor.

There are beyond that, almost certainly, all kinds of indescribably wild or different places, but I know very little about them. They would be almost impossible to talk about in any manner that would convey much about them.

Montana

Came across this paragraph on education, Ted, thought you might relate to it:

Critical Thinking/Trivium – The most vital lesson that has been removed from our education system is not made up of a list of facts like one may believe, but is actually a step-by-step process in critical thinking called the “trivium”.

The trivium allows one to become autodidactic, which simply means “self-taught”. This process was removed from the public education system because, as I mentioned, the people who were in charge of the curriculum were not interested in teaching our children how to think, but rather what to think.

This time tested learning process is still taught in many elite universities but has been intentionally removed from government schooling for social engineering purposes.

One of the main proponents of modern “education” (indoctrination) was President Woodrow Wilson. He admitted very plainly that “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”

When he mentioned a “liberal education” he was most definitely referring to the trivium and quadrivium, most specifically the trivium. Logic and critical thinking were considered to be useless or dangerous skills for the working class to be developing, so these studies were occulted from the mainstream and reserved for the ruling class.

Without learning the proper critical thinking skills the general population is left vulnerable to psychological attack and manipulation. This is especially apparent when one class of people is given these tools and everyone else is not, it allows those who have the information to easily prey on those who do not.

Today the trivium is unknown to most, but thanks to the excellent work of sites like triviumeducation.com, Gnosticmedia.com , tragedyandhope.com, whatonearthishappening.com and others, this lost tool is now becoming available to anyone with an Internet connection.

...from a much longer general interest article: http://theintelhub.com/2012/02/02/9-way ... d-freedom/

When I went to school, high school specifically, that was still available in classes although not placed under the terminology of trivium. I had something of this kind of classes as our high school was considered as predominantly college preparatory although there were classes like shop, home economics, shorthand and typing available to teach skills. I took typing and only made a C. We also had algebra, geometry and trigonometry available but not calculus. Also took 3 years of Latin if I remember correctly. Pretty much all at a low college level. Geometry was basically logic, proof of theorems. I was in the band so I got the benefit of the Quadrivium, in effect. Our band won superiors at state contests as a concert and sight reading band and not just a marching band, year after year. What is available now, I do not know. College now seems much the equivalent of high school, back then. Certainly a junior college is at old high school level.

I never took anything like rhetoric however but had to do a lot of writing. Had a few pretty good teachers that required critical thinking, although it was not stressed as such. The band was the critical thing in terms of learning discipline, working towards a perfect performance and we never played the 'easy stuff' unless it was a required piece. We always played the optional pieces for AAA division high schools with perhaps 5 times as many students as we had rather than play the pieces selected for our division. Professional musicians around here still seek out copies of the recordings of our state band performances.

Eliminating critical thinking was a very specific part of the destruction of our school systems. The purpose was indeed the production of employees prepared to and qualified only to do as they were told, not to think for themselves nor capable of doing so. Bread and circuses, also known as Sex, Drugs and RockNRoll. Respect means stay out of my face because I'm going to do what I want to do and if you don't like it, I'm going to cut you up you bad. It no longer means a feeling of deep admiration for someone or something elicited by their abilities, qualities, or achievements.

Sic transit gloria mundi. The United States is now a third world country with delusions of grandeur. Our soldiers are taught from comic books as training manuals. Our politicians commonly demand baksheesh. Graft and corruption in government and business is as universal as in any other third world country.

Ted

The state of CA is garnishing my wages for the tax I couldn't pay on my wages last year. My wages are from taking care of my adult son with autism as his In Home Support Service worker and he also get 15 hours a month respite and 50 hours a month day care used for me taking the dog for two 15 minute walks a day and to keep my son from nocturnal binge eating at night respectively. I am the vender and my daughter and son in law are the workers for those hours giving it back to the house expenses but it comes in my name. They don't take taxes out (they are now doing so paying a for profit "Financial Management Service" and cutting my sons hours to cover that) so I couldn't pay the taxes on this last year so they are garnishing the day care and respite monies. As the rich get richer...
Love
Bette

_________________
All That Is
what is?
Consciousness.

Your last statement really sums up not thinking for yourself.The power hungry mongers who are behind the third world invasions are not in delusions of grandeur.They are raking it in with the expense of the fear controlled delusional pawns. Who really don't know what to think, Big picture views are cut off from fear control. Tom calls it believe traps,What ever you want to call it it sure is an effective way to control. Maybe Montana is right about the path of this reality, I am still going to try and be part of the creative solution one NUDGE at a time. Fred searching for truth

Could be worse: be happy you don't live in Chicago:

Family Furious After Calumet City Police Shoot, Kill Boy With Autism
http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2012/02/01/ ... umet-city/

CALUMET CITY, Ill. (CBS) — Police in Calumet City were defending their actions Wednesday after officers shot and killed a 15-year-old boy, who has a form of autism, after he threatened them with a knife.

Stephon Watts’ family said he suffered from Asperger’s Syndrome — a high-functioning form of autism — and attention deficit disorder.

As CBS 2′s Susanna Song and WBBM Newsradio’s Steve Miller report, they claimed the boy was only holding a butter knife. Police would only describe it as a “kitchen knife.”

(truncated)

5 friggin cops and they can't handle a kid with a butter knife without killing him?

One of the reasons we live where we live Montana. They'd have been killing me next in that situation unfortunately. I do consider myself lucky yes. The tax thing though, it's ridiculous.
Love
Bette

_________________
All That Is
what is?
Consciousness.

Thanks Montana for the very descriptive feed back. Fred searching for truth

Thanks for this data it sure seems to explain a lot, makes a lot of since. Fred searching for truth

I had meant, and forgot, to explicitly state that I wasn't meaning to contradict Ted.

Just as in some lesson dreams, where you go through the same scene over and over again, until you get it right, there is no reason (that I can think of, at any rate) why an old scene can't be revisited for further exploration and learning. The old scene, of course, remains exactly what it was. The new scene would be a variation, but entirely new, simply using the old construction as a base from which to start.

It all gets pretty complicated quickly though. Take a currently popular historical scene: the US Civil War. This includes the entire set of scenes of which it was composed, both central and peripheral, it wasn't only about this bullet and that piece of flesh and so on. So, lots of raw material there, even at a strictly physical level where you talk about displacement of objects, velocities and vectors. Then for each scene, there are the individual experiences of each witness, incarnate and otherwise. These are going to be vastly different. THEN you have the set of after-the-fact reflections on those events and sheer revisitations of memory ... each time a thing is remembered, it is recreated afresh, so to speak, and the memory then changes over time. So all that adds to the pile, making it very difficult to sort out just what was what.

All that to say: If I went flapping off into the Enpmerlands and said to the void "Say! I'd like to go back to the civil war and start from there, just to see!", I would have only the most remote and hazy idea of what I was talking about. The granted request might turn up nearly anything, there being so much to choose from, unless I were very very very specific. ... say, the Lincoln's demise in Ford theatre as seen from a certain individual in the house, say. It is not uncommon for non-participating entities to slip in and 'watch' from these perspectives, so to speak, but I recall very few references in the literature to actually having the experience of going there and then having agency as well.

Though, in total contradiction to what I've said above, I vaguely recall a tale, from TMI I think, where two women, doing the first week workshop there ("Discovery?") happened to go flapping off together from F12 and wound up visiting Marie Antoinette in her garden. There was a brief chat and then they came flapping back. The odd thing was that there was also a reference, in the story, to their later discovery of a passage in the history of MA that one day, a couple of foriegn women showed up in her garden out of nowhere, exotically dressed, chatted, and then evidently left the same mysterious way that they had arrived. FWIW. Maybe someone else will remember the story better than I have here. Bizzarro data point, if true.

-Montana

I never thought you were contradicting Ted. I am saying it is possible to go back in time in the in- actualized history thread and live out another path with the free will players of your acquaintance. with the exact replica of the VR PMR that we experiencing now. I think for what ever reasons this is possible, And I intend on doing so, system willing when the time is right. Like I say maybe this is wishful thinking, but it seems much more to me than that. Remember this is just organized data in a data field that we are apart of. In our constrained state of mind here it is really hard to know what is possible in the limits of conciseness. What ever the limits are I think we have access to when the time is right. Fred searching for truth

So are you saying you think you have more than one actualized historical thread Fred per time vector considered? If you lived a path other than the one collapsed it would be a non-actualized historical thread since I think there's one actualized historical thread and the rest for that time vector are non-actualized but accessible. As I understand it it would seem as real as the actualized thread.
Love
Bette

_________________
All That Is
what is?
Consciousness.