Big Island Organizations & Programs Losing Funding

[ironyak]

Tang - When you  we back way out, and come to grips with your  our complete cosmic insignificance, and then factor your our extraordinarily outsize, long-term impact on Mother Earth, then it becomes easy to accept this Gaian biotic reckoning as humankind's due comeuppance.
Apparently I've got to get my dictionary updated as mine doesn't translate "Mālama 'Āina" as "f' it - all pointless on a long enough time scale". People don't live in geological timescales, they live in generational ones, and so must act with the time they are given if they care about the people, places, and life around them now.

Even Octavia Butler's "God is change" mantra is balanced against "The essentials ... are to learn to shape God with forethought, care, and work; to educate and benefit their community, their families, and themselves"

All this Ecological Nihilism or Millenarian Apocalypsis just seem like attempts to espouse any belief that avoids taking on any responsibility or obligations for the state of the world and the work needed to make tangible improvements in it for those alive today and those to come in the future. May be more healthy and positive for everyone to live in relation with the world and try to dance with the creative forces of Pachamama as humanity has done throughout time, instead of writing off all efforts at understanding and stewardship as meaningless.

[Punatang]

Tang - When you  we back way out, and come to grips with your  our complete cosmic insignificance, and then factor your our extraordinarily outsize, long-term impact on Mother Earth, then it becomes easy to accept this Gaian biotic reckoning as humankind's due comeuppance.
Apparently I've got to get my dictionary updated as mine doesn't translate "Mālama 'Āina" as "f' it - all pointless on a long enough time scale". People don't live in geological timescales, they live in generational ones, and so must act with the time they are given if they care about the people, places, and life around them now.

Even Octavia Butler's "God is change" mantra is balanced against "The essentials ... are to learn to shape God with forethought, care, and work; to educate and benefit their community, their families, and themselves"

All this Ecological Nihilism or Millenarian Apocalypsis just seem like attempts to espouse any belief that avoids taking on any responsibility or obligations for the state of the world and the work needed to make tangible improvements in it for those alive today and those to come in the future. May be more healthy and positive for everyone to live in relation with the world and try to dance with the creative forces of Pachamama as humanity has done throughout time, instead of writing off all efforts at understanding and stewardship as meaningless.

Seem like? I guess everything seems like something to someone and anyone can put words in anyone's mouth.  

It seems to me like you don't want to be forced (something something imprisonment) to pay for others' ideas that you disagree with. Makes sense to me.

You may wish to worship your God and practice your new fictional "Earthseed" religion but would you ask middle class folks in Idaho to finance that? 

I mean, with our fantastic track record of dealing with invasive species, it's a great investment right?  If we could just get the mongoose to eat all of the coqui frogs it would all make so much sense.  When was the last time you had a LFA in your armpit?  Me? Yesterday. Earthseed hates stupidity and inefficiency.  They don't seem (oops) like they would have a single solitary cent for the clown show we have put on so far.

On the lighter side, Lauren's Earthseed disciples seem (there's that word) much like Bill Mollison's permies. If you ever make it to Papaya Farms Road, Noni Farms Road, etc. (Kapoho, Big Island) someday, there are a bunch of like minded folks around.  Tangs align with them and we steward on the daily. We just don't ask you to pay for our land dance, under threat of imprisonment. Seems like that might harsh your mellow. Then again, things are not always as they seem.  ¯_(ツ)_/¯

[HiloJulie]

It seems to me like you don't want to be forced (something something imprisonment) to pay for others' ideas that you disagree with. Makes sense to me.
We just don't ask you to pay for our land dance, under threat of imprisonment.

Don't forget Tang, "If it is brown, turn around."

[ironyak]

Tang - Seem like? I guess everything seems like something to someone and anyone can put words in anyone's mouth.  
Yes "seem like", recognizing the inherent subjectivity of textual interpretation, but when three at least semi-competent readers all reply with some variation of "sounds like do-nothing nihilism", it doesn't seem like anyone is putting words in your mouth, just reacting to those that came out of it.

It seems to me like you don't want to be forced (something something imprisonment) to pay for others' ideas that you disagree with. Makes sense to me.
Um, I don't want to pay for thousands of innocents, including hundreds of schoolgirls, to be killed. I would hope that makes sense to everyone, but there are some...

You may wish to worship your God and practice your new fictional "Earthseed" religion but would you ask middle class folks in Idaho to finance that?
"fictional ... religion" - redundant? Every good story has something to learn from it, it's part of why we humans keep writing and reading them:
- "Do to others as you would have them do to you" (Luke 6:31)
- "However many holy words you read, however many you speak, what good will they do you if you do not act on upon them?" - Buddha Siddhartha Guatama Shakyamuni
- "Hinduism insists on the brotherhood of not only all mankind but all that lives" - Gandhi
- "For you is your religion, and for me is my religion." (Quran 109:6)
- "Create no images of God. Accept the images that God has provided. They are everywhere, in everything. God is Change— Seed to tree, tree to forest; Rain to river, river to sea; Grubs to bees, bees to swarm. From one, many; from many, one; Forever uniting, growing, dissolving— forever Changing. The universe is God’s self-portrait.” - Octavia Butler
- "The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of the mountain, or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha - which is to demean oneself." - Robert Pirsig

Can likely find most of that at the local library, so yeah, maybe folks in Puna and Idaho are already funding those ideas? Seems to make sense along with funding some science ideas and practices as well, like those Forest Research folks in Hilo, which also expand human understanding of the world.

I mean, with our fantastic track record of dealing with invasive species, it's a great investment right? If we could just get the mongoose to eat all of the coqui frogs it would all make so much sense.
Ah yes, so less or even no funding will lead to better outcomes. Sorry preach, you haven't ended world suffering so not giving anything until you do, given your "fantastic track record" on the matter.

When was the last time you had a LFA in your armpit?  Me? Yesterday.
Yeah, part of the near daily experience of working outside in the jungle. I'm sure you know to carry a small bottle of hand sanitizer/rubbing alcohol to quickly neutralize the bite (a'int science wonderful!) Or maybe the bites are part of "Gaian biotic reckoning as humankind's due comeuppance" so you we deserve to suffer and should do nothing, maybe even welcome our new insect overlords.

On the lighter side, Lauren's Earthseed disciples seem (there's that word) much like Bill Mollison's permies. If you ever make it to Papaya Farms Road, Noni Farms Road, etc. (Kapoho, Big Island) someday, there are a bunch of like minded folks around.  Tangs align with them and we steward on the daily. We just don't ask you to pay for our land dance, under threat of imprisonment. Seems like that might harsh your mellow. Then again, things are not always as they seem.
I'd come down but I'd have to use those communally funded roads that everyone chips in for and you don't want me supporting socialism right? That would set a bad example, paying for things that mutually benefit everyone. Maybe when the Disciples of Galt stop whinging and get their act together they can offer some market-based solutions in the real world, but until then, I guess I'll just have to stick it out alone, free from any obligations or responsibilities towards other people, as God and Ayn Rand intended (right after I send this message along a communications backbone built and paid for with taxpayer dollars over the last 60 years ;)

[Punatang]

So many strawmen. No one ever said that all of these things folks are whinging about should not exist.

Funding is good.  Many things that are funded here in Puna, should, IMO, be funded. The question is by whom.  You and other whingers here feel the need for a huge Federal Government to fund and decide everything for everyone. That's how we end up with a massive standing military and dead little girls.

The majority of us, think financing and decision-making are better done closer to home. Centralization vs. decentralization. Simple.

It is genuinely heartening to witness your spiritual awakening.  It is happening all across Puna and America - especially among young men.

Upon returning to Earth, Artimis II Commander Reid Weisman also seems to have experienced a transformation. He sought out a Navy Chaplain and broke down in tears just at the sight of the cross.  He said, "There was just no other avenue for me to explain anything..."  Maybe he caught the bug from his devout Christian crewmate, Victor Glover.

Psalms 19:1 "The Heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims His handiwork."

"The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass, God is waiting for you."
                                                                                                                              - German Physicist Werner Heisenburg

[ironyak]

Punatang - You and other whingers here feel the need for a huge Federal Government to fund and decide everything for everyone. That's how we end up with a massive standing military and dead little girls.
Right... so we can't have a Federal Government that funds the Forest Research Station in Hilo without also bombing school girls (although we did have such a government before), but somehow the administration that you and the majority voted into power can cut funding for Forest Research in Hawai'i, while still bombing school girls, and asking for an additional $1.5 trillion in non-locally controlled funding to do so...

To paraphrase Heisenburg, I have some uncertainty about these principles.

[HiloJulie]

You and other whingers here feel the need for a huge Federal Government to fund and decide everything for everyone.

I don't want the Federal Government EDITED
The majority of us, think financing and decision-making are better done closer to home. Centralization vs. decentralization. Simple.

Here is a suggestion. YOU fund people who want to fly into space and find a God. I'd rather see our tax dollars fund the Tutu and Me program, the US Forestry Service here in Hilo, Medical Research that could maybe cure cancer, you know, humanitarian things that can help everyone.

That's how we end up with a massive EDITED

As I have always said, once God, or religion, enters the realm of the discussion, reason gets tossed out the window.

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

financing and decision-making are better done closer to home. Centralization vs. decentralization. Simple.

Yes.
Simple.
With Puna’s close-to-home tax base what exactly do you think we could fund? Perhaps one community picnic table cobbled from fallen ohia branches and placed on a newish lava flow overlooking the Pacific?

[MyManao]

The majority of us, think financing and decision-making are better done closer to home. Centralization vs. decentralization. Simple.

I'm curious, how did you determine that it's the "majority" you speak for here? 

But hey, if decentralization is the ticket, why be a part of the Union at all? Why pay federal taxes? Why send our youth off to fight their wars?

And, as Edge points out, decentralization means we ain't got zip. Not enough to eat, not much to export, no way to keep the hospitals and healthcare services staffed, nada brah. So, what are you really saying?

[MyManao]

Centralization vs. decentralization. Simple...

Heynow 'Tang, I'm still wrangling with this concept of yours and have another question about your centralized verses decentralized approach to governance..

Have you ever considered how doctors end up in little ol’ Puna, Hawaii, and, what role our federal, ie centralized, government plays in it?

A case in point…

We all know that becoming a doctor takes a long time and for the most part leaves the new doctor fresh out of the process deep in debt. So, with that in mind, most of them are compelled to seek employment in communities that can afford them. And, as I am sure you can appreciate, we, rural lower income Hawaii, can’t. So where do our doctors come from? I had no idea until an experience with one of mine taught me more than I ever wished to know.

A long while back I got my doctoring done at the Pahoa branch of the Bay Clinic, now known as the Hawaiʻi Island Community Health Center. At the time I had some serious medical issues, but I was fortunate, my doctor was Dr E. (whose name is shortened, but some will know who I am speaking of nonetheless), who is as sincere and competent a doctor as I have ever encountered. In no small measure I credit the care I got from her as one of the reasons I am still alive today.

As I learned, during the time I was in Dr E’s care, the Bay Clinic staffed its clinics with doctors through a national program whereby new doctors contract for three years to work in rural America at a greatly reduced rate of pay in exchange for the feds paying off their student loans. The goal of the program is not only to get doctors temporary assignments in rural clinics like our’s but in the long term to get them to fall in love with those communities and invest in them during that time so as to decide at the end of it to stay, and as such actually build up an inventory of competent doctors more evenly distributed across the country.

Dr. E fell in love with Pahoa. She and her husband bought a home in HPP, her children were entering our charter schools, and at the end of her three year stint she was convinced she would continue working here. So, she set out to renegotiate her contract with the Bay Clinic. She even went so far as to start working with the entire staff to reorganize themselves to be more productive, and show to the board of directors how they could deliver the same level of healthcare to their patiences in a more effect way and a such afford to keep her on. 

But the Bay Clinic would have nothing to do with it. Their model is predicated on that three years commitment at the greatly reduced level of salary, period. They, at least at the time, had no intention of ever keeping a doctor on after that period. So Dr E moved back to the mainland.

So, I gotta ask, ’Tang, with that situation in mind, where, in your decentralized model of how we should run our affairs, do we get doctors?