[Ibon]

You haven't seen nothing yet. Wait till climate change really gets a hold of us. Don't worry there will be plenty of blame to go around.

Lore,

There is a Garamus Swallowtail Butterfly here in the cloud forest, it is an amazing butterfly of the forest canopy and it rides thermals of warm air just above the canopy and can soar like a raptor effortlessly. It is one of the truly remarkable insects here, endemic to the highlands.



The only thing that will bring this butterfly down from the loftly heights is when a male butterfly confronts another male and they end up doing this spiral dance circling ever tighter around each other until they fall almost to the dark forest floor.

This is exactly what your dialogue with KJ resembles, an ever tighter circling around each other losing perspective of the upper canopy and falling into the foolish darkness of the understory where it is all about sparring and not about any real constructive sharing of information.

Lore, there is never going to be a moment when blame will go around. When that point arrives when climate change consequence reach the severity we can expect, we will no longer be playing at these petty ideological arguments. We will be pulling together to adjust.

So you will never convince anyone who doesn't want to hear at this time before we descend into consequences and afterwards arguing will be replaced with collective adaptation. So what is the point of engaging in these useless debates?

I am somewhat on a mission now on this site and in my life in general to start to cultivate a communication style that engages with folks in a more constructive manner, less confrontational, less engaging in petty arguments, extending more compassion, not contributing to the dumbed down polarity of talking past each other.

I think we should all make an effort to not feed into this empty conflict style of communication and reach beyond the cynicism and petty anger and cultivate a more loving and mindful approach. We are all going to be drawn together as consequences unfold. Imagine how much you can be ahead of the curve if you start now in cultivating a more compassionate intelligence in how you share information here and in your daily life.

[Lore]

Peace be with you Ibon. May your journey to the infinite be swift and rewarding.

[KaiserJeep]

Well said, Ibon. I am too nervous to spar anyway. My daughter was hospitalized yesterday and is now hooked up to three monitors - one for her and one for each kid - and was dilated to 5cm as of this noon. Guessing that the birth is about 10 hours away, I am finally going out to do today's errands.

[Ibon]

Well said, Ibon. I am too nervous to spar anyway. My daughter was hospitalized yesterday and is now hooked up to three monitors - one for her and one for each kid - and was dilated to 5cm as of this noon. Guessing that the birth is about 10 hours away, I am finally going out to do today's errands.

Best of luck to your daughter and her babies.

[Cid_Yama]

KJ, you didn't meet the challenge, name these other programs. What are their requirements and what do they provide.

You seem to have a problem with the USDA food distribution programs that were established to provide price supports for Agricultural surplus commodities. So I'll help you with this one.

Although the two programs I referred to are what is traditionally considered 'welfare', I could see how you might want to lump these in there.

WIC - Women, infants and Children - provides limited food assistance for families with children under 6. Must be on TANF.

CSFP - the Commodities Supplemental Food Program - The Commodity Supplemental Food Program (CSFP) works to improve the health of low-income elderly persons at least 60 years of age by supplementing their diets with nutritious USDA Foods. Must meet income requirement of being below 130% of Federal Poverty Guidelines. Administered under Aged and Disabled Services.

NSIP - The Nutritional Services Incentive Program - Better known as 'Meals-on-Wheels', provides 1 meal per day to home-bound elderly and access to nutritional information and advice. Must meet income requirement of being below 130% of Federal Poverty Guidelines. Administered under Aged and Disabled Services.

The National School Lunch Program / Summer Food Service Program - provides 1 meal a day to children of families who meet income requirements of below 100% of Federal Poverty Guidelines. Donated USDA foods must be of domestic origin, and nearly 60 percent of the foods purchased for the Child Nutrition Programs must be determined by the Department to be in surplus at the time of purchase.

TEFAP - The Emergency Food Assistance Program - Provides surplus US Agricultural commodities to States for non-profit food banks, food pantries, and soup kitchens.

KJ, perhaps you would prefer that US Agriculture dump it's surplus on the ground or let it rot in the fields as they did before the inception of these programs. These programs were created as part of the Farm Bill to provide price supports for US Agricultural products.

We could put the hungry children living in poverty in workhouses and the old people out on the ice. Perhaps that would be more to your liking.

How much corporate welfare and farm subsidies are included in your figuring on percentages of federal expenditure. I'll bet none, since you probably got your figures from your favorite right-wing 'think tanks'. They
fudge their statistics to show whatever your agenda demands.

The right-wing agenda is to redirect anger towards the poor and away from the Elite who are harvesting the wealth of America and lining their own pockets. The Elite are sucking the working class dry, not the poor.

The poor, by definition, have no power. They are not out there lobbying congressmen for laws in their favor. They do not have the power to take money out of your pocket, but it's obvious who does. Fool.

No one in the US is living on welfare, except maybe corporations and agriculture.

[KaiserJeep]

Cid, the only two problems I see are 1) The ever-increasing number of Federal, State, and Local government handouts is creating a new and expanding underclass of non-working drones. 2) The government agencies need to be shrinking their budgets, not growing them.

I am moving from one expensive area (Silicon Valley) to another (Wisconsin) where I will have to live on my pension, my 401K, and Social Security. Based on the real rate of inflation, I'll go from comfortable to poor in about a decade - but I'll probably live two decades.

This is the 21st Century, and you just may not be able to live in your hometown and never move. At last count my former company moved me three times to jobs of ever increasing responsibility and with good pay increases. (After I had worked and lived several places, and earned an Engineering degree hundreds of miles from home.) So now I am comfortably retiring. But every time I visit my hometown, I see increasing numbers of people collecting handouts of all types, because they have been unemployed or underemployed their entire lives. In six decades, this Central Illinois town has grown from 15,200 people to 16,750 or so. Most people that still live there have never been 50 miles from where they were born.

The Homies are not making it in the Digital World. We (primarily the Democrats) are enabling the creation of an underclass, quite deliberately so in my book - I refuse to believe in so much incompetence from so many people, there is some underlying strategy at work here. But I do not understand why having so many living in Poverty is a good thing for anybody.

We saw the results of the welfare culture at work in New Orleans after Katrina. The black neighborhoods did not evacuate, the nearest they came was forming gangs to loot the wealthier suburbs. They hunkered down in their hovels and died in great numbers as they waited for the government to come and care for them. Then after being evacuated to the SuperDome, they preyed on one another.

When the Peak Oil crisis comes, be it slow or be it fast, these people don't have a chance, the underclass will all die.

[onlooker]

thanks Cid for that thorough and factual presentation putting the record straight. It is disgusting how people in the US vote against their own interests. Not that their is much difference between the Republicans and Democrats but at least it would be comforting that in places like in the South people would know who at least nominally is on their side. This country has sucked up the life of the planet, so how much more the "Middle Class" Americans. Middle Class what a joke cause you have your nice car and nice house. Still paying the payments on those uh ( not yours!). The elite have the last laugh cause we have always been debt slaves to them nothing more. Time to wake up your no longer in Kansas Dorothy. Nope just in the US of A, land of drugs, guns, debt, corrupt politics, corrupt government,and of crumbling infrastructure and defender of the elites and monied interests around the world . Oops should have said Democracy . Oh by the way I send out a warm hello to NSA as I know full well they are spying my post. Yeah nice ideals we started this country with. All men are created equal just some more then others. Founding fathers were slave owners. Finally, US equates to the most wasteful and consuming entity this world has known or will ever know. I guess we should be proud of our contribution to messing up this planet. Oh and do not get me started on humans rights abuses galore. Intervening in every country and in that way unleashing misery on a grand scale as most of these tyrannical governments we had a hand in putting them in power. Why tyrannical cause you have to be that when what your doing is going against the interests of most of your citizens. Now for the icing on the cake. 9-11 and drone assassinations worldwide. Guess the US in becoming kinder and gentler.

[Plantagenet]

Guess the US is becoming kinder and gentler.

Your're seven years behind the times. Nowadays the US is supposedly becoming more transparent and fairer.

[PrestonSturges]

We saw the results of the welfare culture at work in New Orleans after Katrina. The black neighborhoods did not evacuate, the nearest they came was forming gangs to loot the wealthier suburbs. They hunkered down in their hovels and died in great numbers as they waited for the government to come and care for them. Then after being evacuated to the SuperDome, they preyed on one another.

Jesus titty fucking Christ, how many times a year do you trot out the campfire stories about Katrina, and that's just here? In you everyday life, how many times a day do you bring that up? Those news reports were 95% BS, and probably any number of people have explained that to you, over and over and over again.

https://youtu.be/bCDJ3vxMHdo

[ennui2]

cultivate a more loving and mindful approach. We are all going to be drawn together as consequences unfold. Imagine how much you can be ahead of the curve if you start now in cultivating a more compassionate intelligence in how you share information here and in your daily life.

It would be nice if it were possible, but I think something vaguely "failed state"-ish sort of like what's become of Mexico is what most of us has to look forward to, where an individual life is cheap and violence is epidemic. I'd like to believe in some sort of peaceful slide into a back-to-the-land victory garden style transition, but I just have too low an opinion of human nature to think it will happen that way. Thinking happy thoughts won't change the overall trajectory.

[Cid_Yama]

...is creating a new and expanding underclass of non-working drones.

No they are not, that's the point. No one is getting a free ride. The is no work free dole to ride on. The only program that provides cash, averaging less than 2 hundred dollars a month, is TANF, and they have work requirements and they are limited to 60 months in one lifetime, and only if you have children in the home.

You would make more money working the required # of hours at minimum wage than you get from TANF. It is temporary assistance for the extremely poor.

SNAP (Food stamps) will not feed a person by itself. It is a supplement for buying food, nothing else. And if you don't have children, you are eligible for 3 months out of a 3 year period. That's it. It also has work requirements.

You don't have a clue. I have been trying to educate you so that you will.

Go ahead, pretend like you are a lazy bum who doesn't want to work and see if you can find programs that would cover you and your needs. You won't find them because they don't exist. Not unless you want to go to the soup kitchen for your one meal a day and live in a cardboard box. IF you can find a soup kitchen, and a place for your box.

You want to shrink government budgets, cut off the Agricultural subsidies, the corporate welfare. Increase corporate taxes, to the point that the government isn't giving money to GE, it's actually getting some.

You want to shrink the number of people needing assistance, insist on a minimum living wage. One in which a person working 40 hrs a week no longer falls below the Federal poverty guidelines. Can afford a roof over their head, clothes on their back and food to eat. That's all you need to do. Won't cost the government a penny. Will actually make them money as tax revenues will increase. People will have money in their pocket, so the economy grows, and more people get hired. The spiral spins upwards under it's own momentum.

Don't be a fool. The opportunity to know the truth is right here.

[ennui2]

The Homies are not making it in the Digital World.

So your prescription is to cut their entitlements? I bet you could pay a living wage (plus job training/retraining) to every unemployment/welfare recipient a few times over with the total amount of over-inflated CEO pay which would be comical if it didn't feel criminal.

[Ibon]

cultivate a more loving and mindful approach. We are all going to be drawn together as consequences unfold. Imagine how much you can be ahead of the curve if you start now in cultivating a more compassionate intelligence in how you share information here and in your daily life.

It would be nice if it were possible, but I think something vaguely "failed state"-ish sort of like what's become of Mexico is what most of us has to look forward to, where an individual life is cheap and violence is epidemic. I'd like to believe in some sort of peaceful slide into a back-to-the-land victory garden style transition, but I just have too low an opinion of human nature to think it will happen that way. Thinking happy thoughts won't change the overall trajectory.

It is more about living than thinking. If what you forecast about a "failed state" does create more violent responses than this is actually all the more reason to cultivate a more compassionate intelligence.

If the environment becomes more volatile, both environmentally and socially, rest assured the this will create a cohesive force, quite powerful actually, among those who choose to renounce this violence with compassion, non violence, and cultivating a sense of the sacred toward our mother earth and toward our fellow men. The spiritual movements that will be born out of social chaos will be powerful.

[PrestonSturges]

... I just have too low an opinion of human nature to think it will happen that way. Thinking happy thoughts won't change the overall trajectory.

Well watch out for KJ because the first time the lights flicker he is likely to start killing his neighbors.

[Cid_Yama]

KJ, you want to find someone sitting on their ass while you're working to be mad at? They're called the leisure class. You can probably find them right now down at the club sipping on a brandy, bought with the money stolen from your pension fund.

[ennui2]

The spiritual movements that will be born out of social chaos will be powerful.

What kind of spiritual movement do we see in the middle-east right now, for instance? ISIL? It's powerful alright, but in a destructive way. How about Mexico? Technically it's a catholic country, but you'd never know it based on how casually people kill each other in the drug trade.

I just fail to see how any sort of positive spiritual development is gonna be happening in the middle of a sort of permanent state of siege due to dwindling resources. When people feel threatened, their level of empathy goes DOWN, not up, in all but their immediate social circle. That's why it's called fight or flight. That's what powers death squads and Hatfield vs. McCoy style back and forth skirmishes. It really brings out the worst in human nature, not the best.

[PrestonSturges]

Go ahead, pretend like you are a lazy bum who doesn't want to work and see if you can find programs that would cover you and your needs. You won't find them because they don't exist. Not unless you want to go to the soup kitchen for your one meal a day and live in a cardboard box. IF you can find a soup kitchen, and a place for your box.

I used to hear all this stuff and nonsense about how illegals get everything but a personal jet courtesy of the government, and I'd tell people "If that's true, tear up your driver's license, call yourself Jose, and get on that endless gravy train of benefits for illegals!"

[onlooker]

haha, yeah you can find Jose in those quasi jail systems now existing for illegals. Or maybe back in his native country deported.

[Keith_McClary]

The Roman Empire was Authoritarian .... yet none of them went on whole sale killing sprees.

????

Of course the Romans went on killing sprees.

The Romans created their empire by conquering and killing various peoples. Once people were conquered and added to the empire any sign of rebellion was ruthlessly put down by.......a killing spree. Perhaps the best known of these is the Jewish rebellion in the first century, during which the Romans almost totally extirpated the Jews in Israel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Jewish–Roman_War
[EDIT: PO's software doesn't like hyphens in URLs.]
About a million Jews were killed, another 100,000 enslaved, Jersusalem was sacked and destroyed.

That's according to Josephus, but he tended to spin stories (and especially numbers, but you can't blame him since he had to use Roman numerals ).

1st century Jerusalem
The population of Jerusalem in the time of Josephus has been estimated to be around 80,000.[4] The total population of Pharisees, the forerunners of modern Rabbinic Judaism, was around 6,000 ("exakischilioi"), according to Josephus.[5]
During the First Jewish–Roman War(66–73 CE), the population of Jerusalem was estimated at 600,000 persons by Roman historian Tacitus, while Josephus, estimated that there were as many as 1,100,000, who were killed in the war.[6] Josephus also wrote that 97,000 were sold as slaves. After the Roman victory over the Jews, as many as 115,880 dead bodies were carried out through one gate between the months of Nisan and Tammuz.[7]
Arguing that the numbers given in historical sources were usually grossly exaggerated, Hillel Geva estimated from the archaeological evidence that the actual population of Jerusalem before its 70 CE destruction was at most 20,000.[8]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demograph ... _Jerusalem

The Romans stomped the Zealots, but there were plenty of Jews in Palestine for centuries after these "wars".

Wikipedia is only as good as it's sources. They have very low standards for "reliable sources".

[KaiserJeep]

Amazing how this thread went from half sensible to batsh!t crazy as I was having dinner. No longer worth the time.

Goodbye.