January 9, 2014

They want that and believe they'll be the winners:

Here's a snippet from an anonymous libertarian I stumbled on while doing a search on Rand's gleeful hopes for defaulting.

Wasn't sure what it was about, really. But this stuff gets them very excited:

Shut the government down for good! Who needs them????

...the "real billionaires and trillionaires" of the world are coming together now, bypassing the traditional banking system, and starting their own thing!

...the "old" system will be saddled with the debt, and fade away. The new system will be able to expand unhindered.

That is what one sees here! The fading away of the old and the beginning of the new! It's a very exciting and fulfilling thing!

When you see beyond what they are mad about, you find out what makes them happy.

It's a gleeful, messianic fervor for the end of democratic government, to be replaced by a corporate heirarchy.

They see the elderly, disabled and poor as liabilities to be swept away. They think they will be spared, or become part of the ruling elite.

Billionaires and trillionaires don't have a good track record as far as being inclusive and granting freedom to anyone but a small group. .

January 9, 2014

Beware of any Republican approaching you to offer a pat on the back in sympathy for you:

January 9, 2014

I got nothing. While we're waiting for a photoshopper, here's something for you. May be useful:

January 9, 2014

They will hold onto power any way they can. See this thread of 500 years of Brazilian history:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1017168493

The video and the newer events remind me very much of your thread:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/110221430

Do you see the similarities?

See you tomorrow!

January 9, 2014

Brazil: An Inconvenient History (BBC)

We don't hear much from the nation of Brazil. It's older than the USA.

Slavery and its effects have been the major force of life there for 500 years according to this BBC documentary.

The video is a mindblowing exercise of how a minority continues to rule a country and how the people appear to be winning in the end, despite all.

I've heard some very good and very bad things about Brazil. I'm not sure when this was put out or if things have changed.

It says a lot about how Brazilian society has evolved, and how inequalty has been maintained - but there may be changes.

YES! the online magazine reported this move forward:

The City that Ended Hunger


A city in Brazil recruited local farmers to help do something U.S. cities have yet to do: end hunger.

“To search for solutions to hunger means to act within the principle that the status of a citizen surpasses that of a mere consumer.”

by Francis Moore Lappe - Feb 13, 2009

In writing Diet for a Small Planet, I learned one simple truth: Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy. But that realization was only the beginning, for then I had to ask: What does a democracy look like that enables citizens to have a real voice in securing life’s essentials? Does it exist anywhere? Is it possible or a pipe dream? With hunger on the rise here in the United States—one in 10 of us is now turning to food stamps—these questions take on new urgency.

To begin to conceive of the possibility of a culture of empowered citizens making democracy work for them, real-life stories help—not models to adopt wholesale, but examples that capture key lessons. For me, the story of Brazil’s fourth largest city, Belo Horizonte, is a rich trove of such lessons. Belo, a city of 2.5 million people, once had 11 percent of its population living in absolute poverty, and almost 20 percent of its children going hungry. Then in 1993, a newly elected administration declared food a right of citizenship. The officials said, in effect: If you are too poor to buy food in the market—you are no less a citizen. I am still accountable to you.

The new mayor, Patrus Ananias—now leader of the federal anti-hunger effort—began by creating a city agency, which included assembling a 20-member council of citizen, labor, business, and church representatives to advise in the design and implementation of a new food system. The city already involved regular citizens directly in allocating municipal resources—the “participatory budgeting” that started in the 1970s and has since spread across Brazil. During the first six years of Belo’s food-as-a-right policy, perhaps in response to the new emphasis on food security, the number of citizens engaging in the city’s participatory budgeting process doubled to more than 31,000...

And when imagining food as a right of citizenship, please note: No change in human nature is required! Through most of human evolution—except for the last few thousand of roughly 200,000 years—Homo sapiens lived in societies where pervasive sharing of food was the norm. As food sharers, “especially among unrelated individuals,” humans are unique, writes Michael Gurven, an authority on hunter-gatherer food transfers. Except in times of extreme privation, when some eat, all eat...

A lot more details and pictures:

http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/food-for-everyone/the-city-that-ended-hunger

So, we will see. This is liberating to individuals, giving them freedom to make personal progress and it is unifying several social groups.

Some are working to do this here, but forces opposing rely on right wing ideology and division to keep it from coming forth.

January 8, 2014

Someone who spoke about ripples:

It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

~ Robert F. Kennedy

Hope requires belief. It can move mountains.

January 8, 2014

Yeah, it can be a turn off. I don't think people realize how they sound to others.

January 7, 2014

And when the dog grew up, he did this:

January 7, 2014

It's an excellent article. There is another version with even more links, see here:

Mother Jones link:



http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2014/01/did-global-warming-get-arctic-drunk

Which also had this link, like the grist piece with many graphs that make it very clear:

https://skepticalscience.com/jetstream-guide.html

And the video from yours:

The melting ice and warming waters contribute to this and the only thing that I've heard worse are the predictions about the underwater conveyor belt in the ocean.

It's said to be slowing. It would stop doing what serves to moderate land temperatures and just make things worse.

A video in the V&MM forum, of rhe many changes over time of Earth's global temperature and chemistry:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1017168029

It explains how huge this will be.

January 7, 2014

Their eyes say a lot when they look at you:

I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don't trust that conventional idea.

Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance, any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.

~ Charles Dickens