Is this site accurate?

http://www.ifamericansknew.org/

Israeli and Palestinian Children Killed
September 29, 2000 - Present

124 Israeli children have been killed by Palestinians and 1,441 Palestinian children have been killed by Israelis since September 29, 2000. (View Sources & More Information)

Just made me think.  I'd appreciate feedback if anyone has it.  It is the sort of thing I'd expect to see talked about at http://volokh.com/ and have not.  Of course I've been pretty busy these days.

On immigration issues

I don't know the answers, though I know the issues are multifaceted and that there is a great deal of human suffering.  I also know that sometimes the side-effects are unthought of (e.g. Mexico has less pressure for internal change because the United States provides some relief -- enough to make a difference, I'm not sure).

I've a post on the topic at http://mormonmatters.org/2010/09/23/am-i-my-brother%E2%80%99s-keeper-undocumented-workers-and-illegal-aliens/

Of all things, I'm curious in what solutions people are proposing these days.

Tornado at work

This is a picture of where my wife works and the tornado that hit yesterday. I'm so glad it did not get any closer.

From: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=31548241&id=1004262512&ref=fbx_album&fbid=1519224812945

Worst things heard at church ... Primary edition

I still remember a meeting where the speaker said "I was never part of your organization and knew nothing about it until I was called to be in charge of it, now I appreciate how important it is" followed up by a couple tone deaf comments about the organization.  She quite successfully got the point across that (a) serving in the organization was insignificant insofar as any leadership position in it mattered and (b) understanding the organization was not necessary either.

The only worse thing that happened was when one of the women complained about it, an elders quorum president said "You can ignore her, she is a woman and doesn't have the priesthood and so doesn't have any authority at all."

What is the worst thing you've ever heard anyone say?

My father died a year ago

Just finished up the one year anniversary of his death.  Now I can go to sleep.

The girl whose fire went out,

http://www.amazon.com/review/R1B35A3CC0FZCV/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

Mockingjay (The Final Book of The Hunger Games)

This book finishes up the trilogy as the girl on fire becomes the girl whose fire went out. At the end, there are two children born to a thirty something woman who symbolize the human race guttering out as it fails to increase its numbers to a sustainable biomass.

I started reading the series because my ten year old was entranced with it. When it came in the mail from Amazon she grabbed it and read the final book through in one setting. I asked her how it was and she was more "meh, ok, but not as good as the first books." The collapse in direction into fading coals from fire is clearly handled. Perhaps Brokenjay would have been a better title.

Well written, tightly plotted, minimal sex (a few kisses on screen), the violence is not detailed or pornographic, the writing is adult (rather than the adolescent tripe that is listed as "adult") and mature.

Honestly, I wish Amazon had a filter to let me filter out books with excessive sex or overdetailed violence. I'd find more like this series, which has gotten press as teen literature, but which is actually more mature.

Regrets? I wanted to see the mayor revealed as a major resistance figure and his daughter, who insists that Katness take the Mockingjay pin as the one who would marry her "cousin." I hoped for an action scene where Katness rescues Prim and in the process has her Mockinjay armored costume destroyed. I wanted one last scene of fire blazing against the threat of dictatorship rather than guttering out.

So, the book and the series will end up at the used book store eventually, not quite a keeper, but very good.

At least this book (Mockingjay) lets me skip the movies ...

RIP John Tison

John was in a practice group with me in Wichita Falls.  He was 63 years old and used to come down once a year and stay with us while working at the Masters.  This year he wasn't feeling well, seemed like a touch of the flu, so he did not come down.  A month ago he contacted some judges and took himself off the referral lists.

He had some tests done because he seemed a little sickly and not recovering or snapping back.  They discovered mets cancer.  He was immediately scheduled to enter M.D. Anderson, which would have occurred Monday.  I attended his memorial this morning.

I need to share the story of how he heard we were digging in another french drain on our house in Wichita Falls and wanted me to hire his kids to handle it to teach them that they wanted to go to school and avoid lives of hard labor.  It was a success (and he tried to return the money I paid them).

So many memories.

---

I saw a lot of people that were dear to me, judges I respected and attorneys who I wish well.  One asked me why I left, I was honest.  We buried three children in four and a half years, just could not live there any more.

My wife remarked that everyone was older and they said the same about me (when I left, my hair was honey blond, now it is silver).

I also got asked about H. Deloyd Bailey, all I could suggest is the internet for those looking for him:

• http://www.lawlink.com/attorney/101331
• http://www.countyofupshur.com/2008%20CCourt%20Minutes/061608%20CCourt%20Minutes.htm
• http://www.martindale.com/H-Deloyd-Bailey/1714227-law-firm-office.htm
• http://www.scribd.com/doc/33984030/Texas-Court-of-Appeals-Chief-Justice-District-6-candidate-Hubert-Deloyd-Bailey-2010-ethics-form

But it was good to see everyone, and to think about everyone I missed. I got the discussion back on track and we talked about John, who left us so suddenly, his love of his children, wife and Chinese food, his playing golf and all of his kindnesses.

Surviving v. Recovering

I was recently talking with someone about grief and they said “Steve, you aren’t surviving, you are recovering.” What my friend meant was that I had passed the stage of being in grief and surviving the experience, holding on and weathering it, to healing. We don’t have good language for that part of the process, that transformation. But he recognized it.

Part of the problem is that recovering and healing are often seen as putting something completely behind us. I’ve deposed witnesses who broke a leg when young. It healed, they recovered, they can’t remember which leg it was now.

Survival is often thought of as “lived through” something. It is now often used to describe someone who experienced something, but refuses to let it make them a victim. There is strength to claiming survivorship. To say I’m a cancer survivor, not a cancer victim; a rape survivor, not a rape victim – that empowers people.

Survival is important. It is the stage of not being a victim, of realizing that something might be happening to you, but it is not you, and that you will still remain when it concludes. It might be overwhelming, but only for a while, the event is history, not destiny.

Recovery is a different stage, a return path, of sorts, to normalcy. As a friend who survived Hodkins Disease expressed, it is what you do when you realize you have a life to live after chemotherapy is over. Rehabilitation is a good word for many in this state. Some things really do heal, some experiences are just history. Life is nothing but a series of adjustments and history.

But, some times it is more complex. When a child dies, there is a permanence to the grief, but not to the disability the grief creates. In the period of severe disability the grief causes, you survive. Then you rebuild. At some point you begin to make progress in an adjusted world.

I have friends whose grief is old, who told me about this stage long ago, and who are in it now. They did not have a good word for the stage of making progress while rebuilding. Neither do I, but I am experiencing it, just as they told me I would. I miss my deceased girls. I love them still. But I have something I can best describe as recovery, a sort of healing and progress, a sort of love.

Other links on topic

• Affliction (final post in the series)  
• Life and Affliction (part two with another to come)  
• Trials   
• Living Beyond Loss: an essay. 
  
  

---

Note that coming up in Sunday School: the book of Job, or how in every tragedy you can expect people whose idea of “comfort” is to come tell you it is all your fault, that if you were just as holy as they are, God would not have needed to punish you and misfortune would have missed you.

When they do, remember that at the end of the book of Job, God shows up and tells the “friends” that they are wrong, in strong terms (Job 42: 7-8). When you meet people like that, Christ’s comments should come to mind, see Matthew 23: 13, 27-28; 32-33. Feel free to circulate both for the lesson.

A great post on beggers

Below is a short clip.  Click on it to read the entire essay.

[I originally wrote this when I was then in the throes of bipolar disorder, on the depressive end of the poles, unable to function without leaning hard upon my dear husband.]

Letter from a child to a parent

This was shared with me and is the best father's day present I have ever seen. Used with permission.

Reflecting on my roots, my blog posts from 1997, what I had to say at Sunstone

My blog, as blogs are now understood, began in 1997.  My first posts are at:

http://adrr.com/living/one.htm

Back in the day comments were not like they are now.  My comment thread for my posts is at:

http://adrr.com/living/guest1.htm

I got to thinking about that when I spoke last night. I really do not write the same sorts of posts any more.  I've shied away from that ever since I dealt with someone who was constantly attacking me over posting about my life and experience.  Changed my topics, changed my sub-title to my blog, and withdrew.

I admit, they succeeded in causing me personal harm, in withdrawing not only on my blog, but in my life from dealing with grief and recovery. 

But speaking in public last night on the story of my life got me to thinking and realizing that I still have a long way to go.  Last night I was asked to introduce the topic and the other speakers, which I did (of all things it was a panel based on a blog post I had written:  http://mormonmatters.org/2009/10/22/the-stories-we-tell-2/).  I was then asked to tell my own story, so I did.

So, what have I learned from my personal story?

I have learned that for me, in my patience I keep my soul.

I have learned to keep the commandments because it pleases God, with no other expectation.

I have learned that Jesus Christ is the only begotten Son of God. I have learned that nothing can separate me from the love of God that is in Jesus Christ.

So, how in my story did I learn these things once again?

Hmm. I have to admit that I began blogging in the 1990s (first on paper people spread around, then on-line), before it was called blogging, in order to avoid talking in public. But here I am.

So, my story.

About Christmas our six year old came down with the flu. Her last night at home I held her all night so she could sleep. Then she was admitted to the hospital, spent thirty days in various ICUs and died on January 26, our wedding anniversary.

Eleven months later, just before she turned two, our youngest daughter died on December 26. Again we were left with unopened Christmas presents, neighbors who took down the decorations for us and a home teacher who avoided us.

But, we remained engaged in the community. Win went back to school for a second degree and graduated as co-valedictorian. I rebuilt my legal practice.

I was approached by a group to run for office against an incumbent they were desperate to beat. Since it was a tipping point seat they were willing to spend a million dollars or so. The current office holder responded by announcing his retirement.

My wife spoke at the BYU women's conference. She was seven months pregnant and I had promised myself that with the birth of this child, who we decided to name Robin, that we would heal.

I had also continued to publish, and unknown to me there were groups who would be contacting me in a couple of years to interview for tenure track positions.

Edited that way it sounds like a triumphant happy ending, doesn't it.

So, Robin was born, my dad beat the skin cancer that was going to kill him in six months.

But. Robin had a heart defect. She survived the surgery when 40% of the children with the problem die. She reached a safe place and we took her home. Then she developed a hidden arrhythmia.

If you know us, you know the rest of the story. Win came home from work to see an ambulance and the first responders. They took over from me, but the CPR still failed. Four and a half years, three burial services. We also had some miscarriages as well during and after.

And here I am. I have two children I adore and a wife who is my life. My youngest has Tourrette's and needs time. Instead of a thirty-something guy who was in windsurfing focus groups and building a reputation in a breaking academic area, I'm in my mid-fifties with an interest in a new area that is, honestly, dead stone cold.

But, I have learned lessons because, much to my surprise, God sustained me. I've learned that in life or death that Jesus is the Christ. That life is in Christ, not in other things. That virtue is its own reward because virtue itself is the true goal -- we seek God, not to trade God in for the things of this world.

That is my story. Now tell me yours. The floor is open to the audience to share with us your stories and ask any questions you might have.

08/04/2010 -- funny comics

08/04/2010

I liked this one. 

This one too (it is an advertisement for a web comic -- but one that fits ADR)

Class, politics and modern America, looking inward

I was reading a post at Mormon Matters that linked to the following:

in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.  

That is a fascinating observation, that the Republicans and Democrats have become less different from each other as they have again become more strident. 

I know, I should make a political point from this, but the truth is, my interest is in conflict resolution, and the most emotional conflicts are ones where the difference is not about methods or goals, but about control and power.  One would expect that if the core governing members of a party are becoming more alike, that the dialogue would become more emotionally driven.

Emotionally driven clashes are a way to work backwards to what conflicts are about, though not an infallible one.  I need to think more on the specific conflicts we have now, but the general rule is one that you can apply to your own life. If it applies to the United States is a different question, and not one I can answer.

Win's camp recipes

Win wanted to put her camp recipes on-line so people who were asking for them could just download them.

They are now up at: http://adrr.com/recipe/

An interesting trend line analysis of a diet

http://www.astrocyte-design.com/shangri-la-diet/

I am quoting the core of the post below.  Well worth a visit to the original (above) if you are interested in dieting or losing weight.

The graph covers the 321-day period ending on July 6, 2010.

Two-month pre-diet baseline:	Aug. 22 to Oct. 21, 2009
Shangri La diet:	Oct. 22, 2009 to July 6, 2010
Weight immediately prior to start of diet (ten-day avg.):	222.4 lbs. (100.9 kg.)
Weight as of July 6, 2010 (ten-day avg.):	193.6 lbs. (87.8 kg.)
Total weight lost during this period:	28.8 lbs. (13.1 kg.)
Average weight loss per week:	0.78 lbs. (0.35 kg.) / week

Summary

I lost about 29 pounds / 13 kg. (as of July 6, 2010) by following a diet that was developed by psychologist Seth Roberts.  Briefly, the Shangri La diet involves appetite suppression via the ingestion of flavorless calories in the form of oil and/or sugar water.  The diet is described here and here, among other places.

Background

I first heard of the Shangri La diet when I read this article in the New York Times back in September, 2005.  The diet seemed so bizarre that the idea of it stuck with me—until, about four years later, I finally decided to try it.

Being 5' 10" tall and weighing 222 lbs. (1.8 m / 100.7 kg.), I wanted to lose weight, and I was looking for a diet that would satisfy the following five criteria:

1. It wouldn't require me to change the types of foods that I eat.  I'm a vegan for ethical reasons, and I did not want to stray from that philosophy.  (Note, for example, that it's very difficult, if not impossible, to eat a low-carbohydrate diet without consuming animal products.)
2. The diet wouldn't depend on willpower, at least not heavily.  Knowing myself, I would not be able to adhere to a diet that could be sustained only by exerting an iron will (which is, essentially, almost all diets).
3. The diet did not have any obvious characteristics that might cause one to believe that it would be harmful to your health.
4. The diet wouldn't require regular exercise.  I've hated exercise my whole life, and I don't have time for it, anyway.
5. The diet could be continued indefinitely.

The Shangri La diet met all five criteria, so I tried it—to some success.

Enabling comment moderation

I hate to do this, but the spam comments from Chinese child p-rn sites has gotten too heavy.  I can't think of another solution, so I've now enabled comment moderation.  My apologies to anyone whose comments get delayed.

Three Rules

I came up with my rules after reading about mission statements that work and those that don’t, and trying to communicate with small children, but wanting rules that would be ones that can follow-through as children become adults and my peers and friends.

My three rules are:

• Be honest
• Work hard
• Love others

There are a number of different types of rules to give children.

First, guidance or mission statement rules. Those should be direct, action oriented, simple and clear. You have my three.

Second, safety/practice rules. Don’t talk to strangers. Look both ways before you cross the street. Take your medication daily. These are obviously circumstance driven (if you don’t have medication you are taking, then you don’t need a rule about taking it; if you are diabetic, food rules are much more strict and important).

Third, procedural rules. We often don’t have enough of those. My wife bought our youngest daughter a book about the rules of friendship. Suzette Haden Elgin has pointed out a number of times that in talking, you should limit yourself to three sentences and then stop (there are two kinds of conversationalists, those who will break in at three sentences, those who expect you to stop at three sentences so they can speak if you want to. If you stop at three sentences you will make both types comfortable). They are all things you need to know.

Fourth, boundary rules. Don’t call your eight year old friends after 10:00 p.m. to invite them over to play. Only twelve hours a day on the computer. Don’t leave the house without your clothes on. Dress in a way that does not bear false witness by the messages the clothing communicates about the community you belong to.

Sometimes a rule crosses several realms. I’ve never drunk alcohol, but I’ve had relatives with serious problems. I’d advise my children to avoid alcohol as a boundary measure (the WoW is a marker of our community), as a safety issue (a genetic prediliction to alcoholism is a risk), etc.

Some times a rule changes meaning over time. If your culture has wine that is 2% alcohol and that you mix 4-1 with water (so that the final drink is 20% wine, or less than .4% alcohol) your risk from alcohol is much less than a society that has (a) much more wine and (b) wine that is 11% alcohol. You have to drink about ten or more drinks of the primative wine flavored water to get about the same alcohol as a modern glass of wine.

My post I linked to above had to do with how there are different sets of rules that have come with the gospel at different times. Ours are different from those of other times.

Why rules are significant, how they are significant and when we are “better” than the general society that needs to follow those rules so we don’t have to, that is a huge question.

After all, at 2:00 a.m. at an open intersection where you can see for miles in every direction, how complete of a stop you come to might be different than at 2:00 p.m. with a hedge blocking your view.

Anyway, this is the applied version of the same thoughts I had at http://mormonmatters.org/2010/05/17/sets-meta-sets-and-an-incomplete-world/

Son, he said, with pity in his eyes ...

"Just how many coats of paint has that wall gone through?"

Well, it was painted when we bought the house last year, painted bisque with the rest of the house, then light brown, which really worked, but needed some constrast.

"Yes, and you were in earlier this week matching and buying paint ..."

Ok, the pale blue-green, and the pale greener blue-green, the yellow, and the salmon, but this bolero red will be the last paint of coat.

The salesman looked at me. "Son, if you don't mind some advice ... " You will need to give it to my wife, I said with a twinkle, she is the one who has been doing all the painting. Suddenly he smiled. "Nevermind, you don't need any advice after all."

Ok, the furniture needs to be moved back, the paintings straightened out, but that is how the wall looks, you can see the original brown to the right (with the picture that was so bland with the bisque and just pops out with the light brown). The artwork is either some pictures by Suzette Haden Elgin or one by Rachel (our ten year old) that we really liked (depending on which of the three pictures on the now red wall you are looking at).

But I'm very pleased with how the house looks.

Truth and Treason movie trailer

Obviously I'm going to see this when it comes out. I've got the play in my bookshelf, had a photocopy of the Lawrence of Arabia play (and had the author as a guest once). Tom Rogers was an incredibly spiritual man.

There was a lot of concern about the play causing trouble in Eastern Europe; Communist readers theaters took it up for a while; it remains with us. I'd love to see the play undergo a revival now.

Margaret Young's comments




Sunstone article: http://www.sunstonemagazine.com/pdf/024-20-29.pdf

One of the survivors died, late last month. I saw a link to this trailer in an article about him.

God bless them all, may we draw courage from them.

We can't all be Jeff Green

Not too long ago a person I knew well expressed trouble about an issue they had. It turned out their model was Jeff Green, who once sent out seventeen resumes and got thirty job offers. My response was "We can't all be Jeff Green."

My second was to discuss the thousands of hours of preparation he had put in, the years of effort, the attention to obtain crucial certifications and the breadth of knowledge he had at that point in time.

Which means if someone is willing to take the time, do the work, pray the price, they may not be able to be Jeff Green, but they can be like him in the ways that matter. The person I was talking to decided to try harder and smarter and to be like Jeff.

Adversity, evil and metaphor

For a time I designed myth structures and commented on them, worked on heroquests, was published a little, have some credits. I worked on developing metaphors for evil and for adversity.

Saturday morning I came up with another one: tangled. In fiction and simulations things were "incomplete" with the emotions, patterns and motivations twisted. But too often, in real life, things are tangled.

Much of what we deal with, much of what afflicts us is tangled and misdirected. Not so much our evil self as our real self, only misguided, with cognitive shifts warped around the misdirection.

Loving ourselves is essential to unraveling these tangles that block and bind us. To allow self preservation to preserve us rather than harm us (as it does when it goes wrongly directed or focused) we have to accept it.

So, we acknowledge and accept what we currently are. Our strengths and our weaknesses, our inventory of what we are, how we have come together in a pattern of coping and survival that has flaws -- defects -- that make our lives unmanageable. Then, if we accept and love ourselves, we can look at how each defect interacts with our motives and lives, what it seeks.

At that point we can seek God's help to do what we can not do for ourselves, and untangle one more knotted area, unwinding, untangling and releasing. I had started thinking of tangled fishing line, but tangled muscle knots being massaged out also fits.

Stretching, trigger point release, massage -- all of these are efforts to restore a muscle that has knotted up by mistake to proper function. Releasing a muscle knot does not make you any less, it merely lets you do more with what you are, with less pain. But the muscle that is knotted up is not a part of you to reject or cut out of yourself, instead it is something that just needs release to function as a better part.

Anyway, that was my thought, my metaphor for the day.

so I just picked up the baby and told them to go back to bed, stating that he was only four days old and had not yet read the book

Recently read books:

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson (Paperback - Mar. 2008)

Buy new: $15.00 $10.20

And

The Seven Signs of Ethical Collapse: How to Spot Moral Meltdowns in Companies... Before It's Too Late

Also, just having been reminded of it in a thread I just read, an important book:

NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman (Hardcover - Sept. 3, 2009)

On the movie 8 (better, see Facing East)

Better than the movie, I would recommend Facing East as this report discusses.

However, because it is topical ...

You would never know from 8 that many famous Mormons — Harry Reid, Steve Young, Bill Marriott — spoke out against Prop 8 publicly. There’s no hint that many faithful Mormons created activist groups and websites against Prop 8.

For more, visit this review:

http://www.patheos.com/community/mormonportal/2010/06/28/

Add these all together and you have a package designed not just to NOT attract faithful Mormons, but deliberately offend them. Even the Mormons who can (and should) consider the secondary theme of the film about charity and Christ-like behavior towards gays aren’t going to watch 8: The Mormon Proposition because they’ll hear about it being merely an anti-Mormon polemic.

And for the most part, they’d be right. Unfortunately, it seems the filmmakers of 8 think “tolerance” is something only other people need to do.

and his conclusion:

It’s really too bad that the important messages here are going to be lost. If I was asked by another Church member if they should see 8, I would say, honestly: “20 minutes of it should be required viewing for all Church members…and the other 60 minutes are an intellectually dishonest framing of a serious issue that is probably a waste of your time to watch.” You can decide for yourself how many members would end up seeking out the documentary based on that “recommendation”.

For comparison:

THE advertisement warns of speculative financial bubbles. It mocks a group of gullible Frenchmen seduced into a silly, 18th-century investment scheme, noting that the modern shareholder, armed with superior information, can avoid the pitfalls of the past. “How different the position of the investor today!” the ad enthuses.

Enlarge This Image

Mary F. Calvert for The New York Times

It ran in The Saturday Evening Post on Sept. 14, 1929. A month later, the stock market crashed.

“Everyone wants to think they’re smarter than the poor souls in developing countries, and smarter than their predecessors,” says Carmen M. Reinhart, an economist at the University of Maryland. “They’re wrong. And we can prove it.”

This time is different

Taking a class in two months

I was thinking of how hard it would be to finish a class like statics (two hours of credit) in two months when I thought of a group of post-graduate students that finished a three hour class in two months. That meant six hours of lecture a week, projects and a comprehensive final.

http://adrr.com/smu/health/index.htm is a link to the class notes and other materials.

I was lucky enough that the group of mixed professionals (including M.D.s, hospital administrators and others) gave me a higher feedback rating than anyone else teaching in the program, and I survived putting the class together on about ten days notice. I was working full-time, down town in the city when I taught the class.

But the key point is that the students were also all working, 50-60 hours a week much like I was, in demanding jobs, and they all finished the class and earned As (admittedly, the projects were more important than the final, which was a test of concepts vs. application).

They read hundreds of pages of material, participated in class intelligently, completed projects and passed oral and well as written exams. Without significant prior academic exposure to the focus area of the class.

Think what they could have done if they were working fewer hours or had more preparation.

Misc links

Dave Berry in Japan:

http://books.google.com/books?id=Mmd9cE9YOrcC&lpg=PA50&ots=kLQZAJiLOK&dq=%22dave%20barry%20does%20japan%22%20%22vice%20president%22&pg=PA49#v=onepage&q&f=false

Tuba charm bracelets:

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=tuba+charm&aq=f&aqi=g1&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=CdzHufuQTTOSnOIuugATnu7y-CgAAAKoEBU_Q45tp&fp=4defc8a0deb73daa

Shamus plays LOTR on-line:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/shamusplays/7667-Shamus-Plays-LOTRO-Part-21

Steven R. Boyett has a sequel to Ariel out, about twenty years later, and answers questions about it on his forum:

http://steveboy.com/forum/

Comment and suggest a link.

Grief

• It is not a contest.
• You don't control it, but you can survive it.
• Loss is not personal. "Why me" often has no answer

Reflecting on grief today.

Jessica's Tree

Karen Sarcione planted a tree in memory of Jessica.

No Excuses -- Brian Tracy

Every-so-often I get review books. Some I really like (I know, everyone I bought copies of Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else can remember my thoughts on that book), others I give to other reviewers who sometimes can't believe their luck to get a copy of the book I thought was a step below trash. (True story about one book).

I liked No Excuses!: The Power of Self-Discipline by Brian Tracy enough that I caught myself doing the hesitate and rewrite the review again.

There was once a kid whose artist parents believed in "free range" raising of their kids -- the one time the truant officer caught up with them they sold the kid into indentured servitude to a street magician for a year to get their pre-teen son out of going to school. When he was twelve, he and a neighbor kid taught themselves to read by breaking into a neighbor's house and stealing books (which they returned so as not to get caught) and then reading them as they herded goats.

When I knew him (as my client) he was almost thirty -- but he was starting to study engineering at Duke. His sister started from scratch, taught herself to read, went to college, and got an MBA at age 28.

There are people who start from nothing and create themselves.

Which brings me to a manual laborer named Brian Tracy, in a dead end job, no education, no skills, just hands and a back. Who woke up one day and rebuilt himself from scratch. Then, after a number of things (and making a lot of money) he wrote this book on how to rebuild yourself from scratch.

Most of those books are either too simple or too complex, and they are not "tangible" -- they don't connect the dots and the steps. This book does. Each chapter discusses and approaches a set of principles. Each chapter ends with checklists and action exercises. You can work through what he has to say a step at a time, a bite at a time (as a secretary of mine once said "I'm not doing this one day at a time, I'm doing this one hour at a time" -- and she found success in remaking her life).

What Rhadi Ferguson is to Judo and "chump repellent" (taking people from third class competitors to the Olympics -- so he is not hot air, but real results) Brian Tracy is to remaking your life.

The essay of his I posted, and the one below, are good, but they don't do the book justice.

I can recommend this book to a lot of people, though I'll probably end up buying more copies of it to give away. A down side to reviewing books (maybe I can get a credit from the guys who send me review copies towards buying more copies of them?).

The following is used with permission:

Building Your Network
By Brian Tracy,
Author of No Excuses!: The Power of Self-Discipline

We live in a society, and as a member of that society, it is likely that every change in your life is strongly influenced by other people in some way. The courses you take in school that shape your career are often at the instigation of a friend or counselor. The books you read, the tapes you listen to, and the seminars you attend are almost invariably the result of a suggestion from someone you respect.

The occupation you select, the job you take, and the key steps in your career are largely determined by the people you meet and talk to at those critical decision points in your life. In fact, at every crossroad in your life there is usually someone standing there pointing you in one direction or another.

According to the law of probabilities, the greater number of people you know who can help you at any given time, the more likely it is that you will know the right person at the right time and in the place to give you the help you need to move ahead more rapidly in your life. The more people you know, the more doors of opportunity will be open to you and the more sound advice you will get in making the important decisions that shape your life.

Dr. David McLelland of Harvard did a 25-year research study into the factors that contribute most to success. He found that, holding constant for age, education, occupation and opportunities, the single most important factor in career success is your "reference group." Your reference group is made up of the people with whom you habitually associate and identify. These are the people you live with, work with and interact with outside of your work. You identify with these people and consider yourself to be one of them. They consider you one of them as well.

When you develop a positive reference group, you begin to become a member of the in-crowd at your level of business. The starting point in this process is to develop a deliberate and systematic approach to networking throughout your career.

People like to do business with people they know. They like to socialize and interact with people with whom they are familiar. And they like to recommend people they trust. Fully 85% of the best jobs in America are filled as the result of a third party recommendation. The best networkers are never unemployed for very long.

One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they begin networking is scattering their time and energy indiscriminately and spending their time with people who can be of no help at all. Even if they attend organization meetings, they often end up associating with people who are neither particularly ambitious or well-connected.

When you network, you must be perfectly selfish. You want to become all you can over the course of your career. You want to rise as far as you can. Any success you could ever desire will require the active involvement and help of lots of other people. Your job is to focus your energies and attention on meeting the people who can help you and the only way you can do this is by staying away from the people who cannot help you at all.

When you network, your aim is to meet people who are going places in their lives. You want to meet people who are ahead of you in their careers and in their organizations. You want to meet people you can look up to with pride. You want to meet people who can be friends, guides and mentors. You want to think ahead and meet people who can help you move into your ideal future more readily. For this reason, you must sort people into categories: helpful vs. non-helpful, ambitious vs. non-ambitious, going somewhere vs. going nowhere. Remember, your choice of a reference group in your networking will determine the success of the process.

You begin your networking process at your place of work. Look around and identify the top people in your organization. Make these people your role models and pattern yourself after them. One of the best ways to start networking is to go to someone you admire and ask for his or her advice. Don't be a pest. Don't tie up several hours of their time. Initially you should ask for only a few minutes and you should have two or three specific questions. When you talk to a successful person, ask questions like, "What do you think is the most important quality or attribute that has contributed to your success?" and, "What one piece of advice would you give to someone like me who wants to be as successful as you some day?" You could also ask, "Can you recommend a particular book, tape, or training program that would help me move along more rapidly in my career?"

There is a law of incremental commitment in networking. It says that people become committed to helping you, or associating with you, little by little over time. In some cases the chemistry won't be right and the person with whom you would like to network will really not be interested in networking with you. Don't take this personally. People get into, or out of, networking for a thousand reasons. However, if there is good chemistry, if you like the person and the person likes you, be patient and bide your time. Don't rush or hurry, just let the networking relationship unfold without over-eagerness on your part. If you try to go too fast, you will scare people away.

Instead of asking your superiors for more money, ask for more responsibility. Tell your boss that you are determined to be extremely valuable to the organization and that you are willing to work extra hours in order to make a more important contribution.

There is nothing so impressive to a boss as an employee who continually volunteers for more responsibility. Many people have the unfortunate goal of doing as little as possible for as much money as possible. But not the winners. The winners realize that if all you do is what you're being paid for today, you can never be paid any more in the future. The person who continually volunteers for extra assignments and does more than is expected gains the respect, esteem and support of his or her boss.

Whenever you do something nice or helpful for others, they feel a sense of obligation. They feel like they owe you one. They have a deep subconscious need to pay you back until they no longer feel obligated to you. The more things you do for people without expectation of return, the more they feel obligated to help you when the time comes.

We have moved from the age of the go-getter to the age of the go-giver. A go-giver is a person who practices the law of sowing and reaping. He or she is always looking for opportunities to sow, knowing that reaping is not the result of chance. You will find that successful people are always looking for opportunities to help others. Unsuccessful people are always asking, "What's in it for me?"

The surprising thing is that the more of yourself you give away with no direct expectation of return, the more good things come back to you in the most unexpected ways. In fact, it seems that the help we get in life almost invariably comes from people whom we have not helped directly. Rather, it comes from others who have been influenced by people whom we have helped directly. Therefore, since you can't control where your help or assistance is coming from, you must establish a blanket policy of giving with complete confidence that it will come back to you in the most wonderful ways.

Whatever your job or occupation, there are trade and industry associations, business associations and service clubs that you can join. Excellent networkers are among the best known and most respected people in the community. To reach that status, they followed a simple formula. They carefully identified the clubs and associations whose members they can help and support and who can help and support them in return. And then they joined and participated.

When you look at the various organizations you should join, you should select no more than two or three. Target the ones with the people that can be the most helpful to you. When you join, your strategy should be to look at the various committees of the organization. Volunteer for the committee that engages in the activities that are most important to the organization, such as governmental affairs or fundraising. Then get fully involved in your chosen responsibilities.

You will find that the members of the key committees are usually key players in the business community as well. By joining the committee, you create an opportunity to interact with them in a completely voluntary and non-threatening way. You give them a chance to see what you can really do, outside the work environment. And you contribute to the committee as a peer, not as an employee or subordinate.

Remember, in any committee 20% of the people do 80% of the work. In any association, fully 80% of the members never volunteer for anything. All they do is attend the meetings and then go home. But this is not for you. You are determined to make your mark and you do this by jumping wholeheartedly into voluntary activities that move the association ahead. And the key people will be watching and evaluating you. The more favorable attention you attract, the more people will be willing to help you when you need them.

Networking fulfills one of your deepest subconscious needs -- getting to know people and being known by them. It fulfills your need for social interaction and for the establishing of friendly relationships. It broadens your perspective and opens doors of opportunities for you. It increases the number of people who know and respect you. It makes you feel more in control of your career. And it can be one of the most exciting and fulfilling experiences of your life.

© 2009 Brian Tracy, author of No Excuses!: The Power of Self-Discipline

Author Bio
Brian Tracy, author of No Excuses!: The Power of Self-Discipline, was born in eastern Canada in 1944 and grew up in California. After dropping out of high school, he traveled and worked his way around the world, eventually visiting eighty countries on six continents. His extensive personal studies in business, sales, management, marketing, and economics enabled him to become the head of a $265 million company before he turned his attention to consulting, training, and personal development. He is now the president of three companies with operations worldwide. He is married, has four children, and lives in San Diego, California.

For more information, please visit www.briantracy.com and follow the author on Facebook and Twitter.

Applied Behavioral Economics

Really neat stuff.

I'm doing a fair amount of reading on this topic in connection with ethics readings I'm doing.

More later.

Revisiting the Past, Pondering

http://timesandseasons.org/index.php/2004/11/can-a-good-mormon-be-a-meritocrat/ Made me think, especially reading the comments.

Again. Revisiting what was said there and the perspectives and thoughts I had six years ago in response to the article made me realize that there are still areas of life where I am unsettled.

Also made me think of my aunt Nike. My daughter Heather Nicole was named (in part) after her.

Guess that is how it should be. Thought and reflection.

No Excuses

It is terrible. I have this book I got a review copy of. I really like it and have drafted a review that I have not quite been able to finish. So I find myself thinking of excuses for not getting a review done of a book titled "No Excuses." I'll probably end up buying some copies to give away.

Until then, I have an article, used with permission:

Accessing Your Inner Guidance
By Brian Tracy,
Author of No Excuses!: The Power of Self-Discipline

You've heard of Murphy's Law, which says that whatever can go wrong will go wrong. Well, there's another law, which says that left to themselves, things have a tendency to go from bad to worse. When something is making you unhappy, for any reason, the situation will tend to get worse rather than better. So avoid the temptation to engage in denial, to pretend that nothing is wrong, to wish and hope and pray that, whatever it is, it will go away and you won't have to do anything. The fact is that it probably will get worse before it gets better and that ultimately you will need to face the situation and do something about it.

There's an old saying that you can't solve a problem on the level that you meet it. This means that wrestling with a challenge is usually fruitless and frustrating. For example, if two people who are in a relationship together are constantly fighting and negotiating and looking for some way to resolve their difficulties, they're attempting to solve the problem on the wrong level. Dealing with the problem on a higher level, those people would ask the question, "In terms of being happy, is this the right relationship for us in the first place?" As soon as you begin to use happiness as your measure of rightness, you begin to see a situation entirely differently.

Many people work very hard and experience considerable frustration trying to do a particular job. However, in terms of their own happiness, the right answer might be to do something else, or to do what they're doing in a different place, or to do it with different people -- or all three.

Ask Yourself

Following are a few questions for you to answer in this arena of happiness. Many people refuse to even consider these questions because they're afraid that if they do, they won't like the answers. But nevertheless, have the courage to clearly define your life in your own terms. Here are the questions; write them down at the top of a sheet of paper, and then write as many answers to each one as you possibly can.

The first question is: "What would it take for me to be perfectly happy?" Write down every single thing that you can imagine would be in your life if you were perfectly happy at this very moment. Write down things such as health, happiness, prosperity, loving relationships, inner peace, travel, car, clothes, homes, money, and so on. Let your mind run freely. Imagine that you have no limitations at all. Write everything down whether or not you think you have the capacity to acquire it or achieve it in the short term. Your first job is always to be clear about what it would take for you to have your ideal life.

The second question is a little tougher. Write down at the top of a page this question: "In what situations in my life, and with whom, am I not perfectly happy?" Force yourself to think about every part of your day, from morning to night, and write down every element that makes you unhappy or dissatisfied in any way. Remember, proper diagnosis is half the cure. Identifying the problematic situations is the first step to resolving them.

The third question will give you some important guidelines. Write down at the top of a sheet of paper these words: "In looking over my life, where and when have I been the happiest? Where was I, with whom was I, and what was I doing?"

By asking and answering those three questions, you begin to delve deeper and deeper into yourself and your feelings. You begin to accept your own happiness as a legitimate standard by which to evaluate everyone and everything in your life. You begin to develop the wisdom, the courage, and the foresight to organize your life in such a way that you become a much happier person.

Once you have the answers to those questions, think about what you can do, starting immediately, to begin creating the kind of life that you dream of. It may take you a week, a month or a year, but that doesn't matter. Every single thing you do that moves you closer to your vision of happiness will be rewarding in itself. You'll become a more positive and optimistic person. You'll feel more confident and more in charge of your life.

Happy vs. Right

And now here's the most important exercise of all. It is from the advice of Dr. Gerald Jampolsky, who asks, "Do you want to be right, or do you want to be happy?" He recommends that you set peace of mind as your highest goal and that you select and organize around it all your other goals in life. You hold up each part of your life to this standard of peace of mind, and you either get into or get out of anything that adds to it or detracts from it.

The most important part in this process of getting in touch with your feelings is to begin to practice solitude on a regular basis. Solitude is the most powerful activity in which you can engage. Men and women who practice it correctly and on a regular basis never fail to be amazed at the difference it makes in their lives.

Most people have never practiced solitude. Most people have never sat down quietly by themselves for any period of time in their entire lives. Most people are so busy being busy, doing something -- even watching television -- that it's highly unusual for them to simply sit, deliberately, and do nothing. But as Catherine Ponder points out, "Men and women begin to become great when they begin to take time quietly by themselves, when they begin to practice solitude." And here's the method you can use.

Method of Solitude

To get the full benefit of your periods of solitude, you must sit quietly for at least 30 to 60 minutes at a time. If you haven't done it before, it will take the first 25 minutes or so for you to stop fidgeting and moving around. You'll almost have to hold yourself physically in your seat. You'll have an almost irresistible desire to get up and do something. But you must persist.

Solitude requires that you sit quietly, perfectly still, back and head erect, eyes open, without cigarettes, candy, writing materials, music or any interruptions whatsoever for at least 30 minutes. An hour is better.

Become completely relaxed, and breathe deeply. Just let your mind flow. Don't deliberately try to think about anything. The harder you "don't try," the more powerfully it works. After 20 or 25 minutes, you'll begin to feel deeply relaxed. You'll begin to experience a flow of energy coming into your mind and body. You'll have a tremendous sense of well-being. At this point, you'll be ready to get the full benefit of these moments of contemplation.

The incredible thing about solitude is that if it is done correctly, it works just about 100 percent of the time. While you're sitting there, a stream, a river, of ideas will flow through your mind. You'll think about countless subjects in an uncontrolled stream of consciousness. Your job is just to relax and listen to your inner voice. At a certain stage during your period of solitude, the answers to the most pressing difficulties facing you will emerge quietly and clearly, like a boat putting in gently to the side of a lake. The answer that you seek will come to you so clearly and it will feel so perfect that you'll experience a deep sense of gratitude and contentment. You may get several answers in one period of quiet sitting. But in any case, you'll get the answer to the most important situation facing you every single time.

When you arise from this period of quiet, you must do exactly what has come to you. It may involve dealing with a human situation. It may involve starting something or quitting something. Whatever it is, when you follow the guidance that you received in solitude, it will turn out to be exactly the right thing to do. Everything will be OK. And it will usually work out far better than you could have imagined. Just try it and see.

That brings us to the final point on getting in touch with your feelings: You must learn to trust yourself. You must learn to take time to listen to your emotions and your feelings as to what makes you happy or unhappy, as to what feels right or wrong. You must absolutely trust that what is right for you is the right thing to do. You must never compromise on what your inner voice tells you to do. You must never go against what you feel to be correct. You must develop the habit of listening to yourself and then acting on the guidance you receive.

When you listen to yourself and act on what you hear inside, you are setting out on the road to personal greatness.

Read "Accessing Your Inner-Guidance Part One".

© 2010 Brian Tracy, author of No Excuses!: The Power of Self-Discipline

Author Bio
Brian Tracy, author of No Excuses!: The Power of Self-Discipline, was born in eastern Canada in 1944 and grew up in California. After dropping out of high school, he traveled and worked his way around the world, eventually visiting eighty countries on six continents. His extensive personal studies in business, sales, management, marketing, and economics enabled him to become the head of a $265 million company before he turned his attention to consulting, training, and personal development. He is now the president of three companies with operations worldwide. He is married, has four children, and lives in San Diego, California.

For more information, please visit www.briantracy.com and follow the author on Facebook and Twitter.

A mother's day letter

From the letter from my oldest to her mother on Mother's Day:

I was just thinking about you and wanted to thank you for teaching me how to
raise a garden
patch dry wall
walk in high heels
vaccinate small animals
lay tile
remove a wall
wear makeup
listen to and help someone in pain
stand up for myself
compromise
work hard
flirt
and to succeed and fail with grace.
I couldn't ask for a better teacher or example.

Dealing with painful emotions

It is not a matter of whether or not you “should” feel something. In severe grief you feel emotions you can not control, urges that are foreign. The pressure and pain of grief forces everything to be reconsidered, at a primal emotional level, regardless of what you want.

It is not a matter of what you feel, but what you do and what you linger on. Denial only makes it worse. Acceptance of your feelings is part of acceptance of life and of moving on from what you are feeling now to what you want to feel.

Your survival is not found in fighting or denying feelings. Honesty, not denial, acceptance and then surrender to God’s will – not surrender to the feelings – that moves you to healing.

You take inventory of yourself, accept reality and create a foundation of truth to build recovery. The pain, the emotions, assimilate with time and honesty. You can’t avoid the tempest, but you can survive through it to tomorrow. Just like you had these emotions and feelings before you knew what feelings were (everyone cycles at a very young age) and they passed as you grew, so that can happen again as an adult, if you let it happen.

I’m not sure this puts it right. Basically, the principals are: (a) in grief there are uncontrollable surges of emotion and feelings, often ones a person has outgrown, never felt, or that just don’t fit, because the force of grief subconciously causes you to cycle through everything trying to find a solution that works; (b) you can’t deal with them by denial, but you don’t have to embrace them; (c) instead you accept that you are feeling painfull or inappropriate emotions, don’t linger on them, and honestly work towards building recovery.

"Shoulds" are toxic. "What is" is only the past that creates a lesson learned, upon which recovery follows.

In my personal life I had a time when I wished I had spent more time on my career, more time focused on the office and writing. My work was still there, three of the children I had given my heart to had died. Was that painful? Of course. Was it appropriate? No, but it was what I felt. Only by accepting the pain and the reality of what I felt could I move forward (and back at the same time) to feeling that my children should come first, that family was more important than career.

There are lots of other examples, better than mine, from other people's lives. But that is my story.

On climate

Temperatures since the last ice age. From which the individual who did the graph concludes:

In other words, we’re pretty lucky to be here during this rare, warm period in climate history. But the broader lesson is, climate doesn’t stand still. It doesn’t even stand stay on the relatively constrained range of the last 10,000 years for more than about 10,000 years at a time.

Does this mean that CO2 isn’t a greenhouse gas? No.

Does it mean that it isn’t warming? No.

First analysis to make sense of both the global warming and global cooling materials I have read.

Bottom line, "In fact for the entire Holocene — the period over which, by some odd coincidence, humanity developed agriculture and civilization — the temperature has been higher than now, and the trend over the past 4000 years is a marked decline. From this perspective, it’s the LIA that was unusual, and the current warming trend simply represents a return to the mean. If it lasts"

I've wondered. The solutions I keep seeing for the current problems don't match the predictions. They are all "deck chairs on the Titanic" sorts of things.



That is the temperatures that include the medieval warm period -- note that the current rise is still well below those temperatures.

That doesn't mean that there are not potential problems, etc. It just puts them into a different scope. Read the article for the graphs and the fact summaries.

The loss of childhood

From Suzette Haden Elgin's Lonesome Node:

"A University of Michigan study found that from 1979 to 999, children on the whole lost 12 hours of free time a week, including eight hours of unstructured play and outdoor activities. . . .One consequence of these changes is the disappearance of what child-development experts call 'the culture of childhood'. This culture, which is to be found all over the world, was best documented in its English-language form by the British folklorists Peter and Iona Opie in the 1950s. They cataloged the songs, riddles, jibes and incantations ('step on a crack, break your mother's back') that were passed on by oral tradition. Games like marbles, hopscotch and hide and seek date back hundreds of years. The children of each generation adapted these games to their own circumstances. Yet this culture has disappeared almost overnight, and not just in America. For example, in the 1970s a Japanese photographer, Keiki Haginoya, undertook what was to be a lifelong project to compile a photo documentary of children's play on the streets of Tokyo. He gave up the project in 1996, noting that the spontaneous play and laughter that once filled the city's streets, alleys and vacant lots had utterly vanished."

There is no way for us to know what the effects on our society of a cultural change as extensive as this one might be. It's disconcerting. The article is at http://tinyurl.com/yzoy7e6 .

Sobering.

My Mother the Beggar ... thoughts about ...

My Mother the Beggar is a post about an adult child of a mentally ill drug addict who went through multiple relapses. Very similar to another story that kind of begins

“I WAS SITTING IN a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through”

From The Glass Castle: A Memoir

The story is usually in books from the perspective of the child, blogged about from the perspective of the parent of the disabled child. The anguish that parents feel as they struggle to find a way to help their children find a semblance of a normal life, to get them past the mental illnesses and issues that afflict them, the desperate efforts to intervene in the lives of grandchildren, often so far removed from what the grandparents can do.

In my own life I think of my mother's parents, certain that she had thrown our lives away by joining the LDS Church and not seeing sense and coming home. From my perspective, that was the greatest thing she could have done for me, to bring me to Christ. From their perspective, it was the worst.

The lines between mental illness and transcendence are sometimes hard to draw. As I struggle to help my children, to find what they need to see them safely home, I feel such sympathy for everyone in these stories, and for everyone in my own story, as mild as it might be.

No Gi Harai Goshi

Neat stuff. I used to wrestle and used to practice Judo.

The dog food story

Everyone has heard the story about the little girl who was given a present and when she opened it up it turned out to be dog food. Lots of different points are made from it. Just realized my dear child had gone through that (except in her case the girls at her school just gave her an empty box -- they were too cheap to buy a can of dog food to put in it).

My youngest lives with Tourette's. She also lives with kids in her school who are both jealous and intolerant of her. There is a parent on our block who just thinks if we beat her she would get over it. Others think she is being spoiled because she is so bright. The teachers are wonderful, though taxed, and their kindness makes kids who are not as smart more jealous and more upset (though I obviously would prefer that they be kind to my daughter than not).

It helps that my daughter is kind. When others do not understand, she helps tutor them. If someone falls, she rushes to help them up. She shares what she has. She is extremely cheerful and very bright.

But she has the OCD, extreme ADD and is hyperkinetic as well as the rest of what Tourette's implies. She is lucky in that it appears that much of it will resolve with age, and for the rest, we keep trying different blends of medication and treatment. Unfortunately, what helps with one problem makes the rest worse. Somethings just make everything worse. Every time she ages a little, the blend that works right for her changes.

I talk with parents whose children have had multiple in-patient stays. I know my situation is not as demanding, heartbreaking or painful as theirs. But, it is my situation, and more, it is my dear daughter's life.

And to find out last week that it was replicating stories I hear in church, and from the harsh end of the story, that was difficult, even more so when someone told the story again this Sunday in a talk. A very good talk, mind you, but still, it made me think of my daughter.

It is hard to tell if I'm happier that the box was empty or not. I just feel so helpless. It would be easy to teach her to respond to every slight and hurtful encounter with "You are just stupid and jealous, get over it lamesauce." She could do that and it would insulate her some. They would not hate her any more than they do now.

But, it would change my kind, sweet daughter into someone else, someone who says those things. I don't want to lose her to that kind of person either. But to have her day after day, week after week, month after month beg for a place to hide from the other kids, always respond to questions about her day with pain as to any social interaction (though she is excited when she learns something new, she got far enough ahead on her own they talked with us about skipping her ahead another grade), I feel like I'm failing her.

I'm glad she was able to go to camp, and be in a place where no one stared, no one hated.

To quote from the essay at the second link (way down the page, that is why I'm quoting):

Good Evening. My name is Joshua Perez. I am 12 years old from San Antonio. I am the face of Tourette's. I was diagnosed 3 years ago. Having Tourette's is very difficult every minute of the day. People don't understand, they stare and make nasty comments. Tourette Camp is very important to me. I can tic and no one stares. I have friends from the support group that go to camp with me. I make friends while I am there. 58 more days until camp. Thank you very much for coming tonight and helping Tourette of Texas. I am Joshua Perez, the face of Tourette's.

Those moments come so seldomly. Much too seldom.

An excellent series of posts on social classes, etc.

Just ran across them today.

• The Class Project 1: Defining Terms
• The Class Project 2: Who I Am
• The Class Project 3: Attitudes & Money
• The Class Project 4: On the Job
• The Class Project 5: Mine!
• The Class Project 6: The Status Civilization
• The Class Project 7: Playing by the Rules

A great quote:

A lot of people misjudge class conflicts because they fail to recognize this difference in rules. Marxists often assume that the working class must and should hate the upper classes because the upper classes have an unfair share of the world’s wealth, but this simply demonstrates that such Marxists are middle class in their attitudes — neither the working class nor the upper class considers money to be the most important thing going.

and another:

If someone plays by different rules than yours, that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.

and also:

Class isn’t inborn, it isn’t destiny, and it isn’t just money. It’s attitude, belief, and the rules by which you determine your status and decide whether you’re a success or a failure. Most people learn those from their families while they’re growing up, and never fundamentally change. Others rebel against their upbringing, with varying degrees of success.

People too often do not understand or appreciate the effects of class in America.

For a good book:

A Framework for Understanding Poverty by Ruby K. Payne


As for me, most recently ordered:

Learn Judo with the Gokyo Gang - DVD#1 (DVD - 2009)

Should be fun. Copyright is 2009 but it was released this week ;)

Dealing with tangible miracles

A while back I spoke with someone who had been through some terrible things. They had significant post traumatic stress, including forceful nightmares. But, if they read their scriptures in the evening until they felt the Spirit, they did not have nightmares that night.

There was a direct, tangible, cause and effect. They said it was disquieting in some ways, that in a way, having a vague "do the right thing, it will be good for you" was easier than "do this and this will happen." But they had prayed for help, and this is where they had been guided.

Gave me thought.

---

I've continued to read twelve step materials, though for the most part they do not have much to do with grief recovery, they offer insights into God and life. Right now I'm reading the Al Anon Paths to Recovery. I don't have an alcoholic in my life (at least that I know about), but I find valuable comments.

Part of twelve step programs is taking an inventory, and they all offer advice and comments on things to look for and evaluate in your life. Al Anon asks the question:

Do I have a God of love or a God of fear in my life?

An interesting question to consider, as treating God as a God of fear is something they see as a barrier to recovery and spiritual healing.

How do I think of God? I need to ask myself that again.

Naked Badu in Dallas

By now most people have heard about a pop star stripping naked in downtown Dallas while shooting "guerrilla" video.

What most people don't know is that in order to find an audience of people to offend, it took her some work. I used to work right next to the plaza she used and would cut through it often.

Generally it is empty and abandoned. To find a time when there were some people (including the child and the offended mother), must have taken some work as I never encountered that many people in several years of cutting through the plaza.

Someone had asked me why the video could not have been shot in the middle of the night and avoided the problem. My response: heck, usually you could shoot the video in the middle of the day without any problem either.