All posts by nedhamson

Activist, writer, researcher, addicted to sharing information and facts.

FOTD – July 14, 2024 – Columbine – Cee’s Photo Challenges

Source: FOTD – July 14, 2024 – Columbine – Cee’s Photo Challenges

Barmherzigkeit und Gnade / … Mercy and Grace – Stella, oh, Stella

Statue of Julian of Norwich by David Holgate, west front, Norwich Cathedral
Foto: Wikipedia

Was unsere essenzielle Natur betrifft, sind wir vollkommen, aber in unserer physischen Natur scheitern wir. Gott wird diesen Fehler jedoch beheben und uns durch Barmherzigkeit und Gnade, die aus der Güte seiner Natur zu uns strömen, vollständig wiederherstellen. Auf diese Weise ermöglicht seine natürliche Güte, dass Barmherzigkeit und Gnade in uns wirken, und unsere natürliche Güte, die wir von ihm erhalten haben, ermöglicht es uns, sie zu empfangen.

Ich sah, dass unsere ganze Natur in Gott ist und verschiedene Aspekte davon aus ihm hervorgehen, um seinen Willen zu erfüllen. Die Natur bewahrt sie, und Barmherzigkeit und Gnade stellen sie wieder her und vervollkommnen sie. Keiner wird zerstört werden, denn unsere höhere Natur wurde mit Gott verbunden, als sie geschaffen wurde, und Gott wurde mit unserer niederen Natur verbunden, als er unser Fleisch annahm.
― Juliana von Norwich, Offenbarungen göttlicher Liebe

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As far as our essential nature goes, we are perfect, but in our physical nature we fail. However, God will repair this failure and completely restore us by mercy and grace which overflow to us from the goodness of his nature. In this way his natural goodness enables mercy and grace to work in us, and our natural goodness, which we have received from him, enables us to receive it.

I saw that our whole nature is in God, and different aspects of it flow out from him to accomplish his will. Nature preserves them, and mercy and grace restore and perfect them. None will be destroyed, for our higher nature was bound to God when it was made, and God was bound to our lower nature when he took our flesh.
― Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

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Mir kam dazu gerade in den Sinn, dass unsere Welt, das Universum, nicht unsere Schöpfung ist; wir sind ein winziger Teil von ihr. Daher ist es in meinen Augen lebensnotwendig für die Menschheit, einige Schritte zurückzutreten und mit dem blinden Handeln und automatischem Reagieren aufzuhören. Wir sind verbunden mit Gott, aber wir sind nicht Gott in seiner Ganzheit. Wir müssen aufhören, seine Schöpfung zu verpfuschen. Auch Panik wäre dann prinzipiell nicht nötig.

… The thought came into my mind that our world, the universe, is not our creation; we are a tiny part of it. Therefore, it is in my opinion necessary that mankind steps back for a moment and stops with the blind actions and automatic reactions. We are connected with God, but we are not God in his entirety. We have to stop to tamper with his creation. In principle, even panic would then not be necessary.

Source: Barmherzigkeit und Gnade / … Mercy and Grace – Stella, oh, Stella

Thousands march to Jerusalem demanding hostage deal – UPI.com

Families of hostages held in Gaza were joined by thousands of protesters in a march from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem trying to force Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to agree to a hostage deal.

The four-day march, which set out from Tel Aviv, was expected to reach Jerusalem by Saturday evening. Organizers planned to assemble in front of the prime minister’s house, coinciding with other mass demonstrations throughout the country…

Source: Thousands march to Jerusalem demanding hostage deal – UPI.com

Ex-Netzah Yehuda soldier tells CNN he saw ‘collective punishment’ against Palestinians in West Bank | The Times of Israel

A whistleblower who previously served in the IDF’s Netzah Yehuda battalion, which has been at the center of several human rights controversies in the past, tells CNN that he witnessed “collective punishment” by the military against Palestinians in the West Bank.

“There were some kids throwing rocks in a small village, that normally isn’t a big deal. But the company commander decided, let’s throw them a party. So they took the emergency response team and 20 soldiers. They walked door to door, throwing flashbangs and gas grenades into people’s homes as a punishment for the kids throwing rocks,” the unnamed former soldier tells CNN.

Source: Ex-Netzah Yehuda soldier tells CNN he saw ‘collective punishment’ against Palestinians in West Bank | The Times of Israel

Bernie Sanders backs Biden and urges Democrats to ‘stop the bickering’ | US elections 2024 | The Guardian

Bernie Sanders in Washington in April. He wrote in the New York Times: ‘A presidential election is not an entertainment contest.’ Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

Bernie Sanders has offered his backing to Joe Biden, dismissing calls for the man he described as the “most effective president in the modern history of our country” to stand down in the upcoming US presidential election.

Sanders, the totemic progressive US senator, used an opinion piece in the New York Times to endorse Biden, who has come under increasing fire from fellow Democrats over his ability to beat Donald Trump following a disastrous televised debate between the two.

“Despite my disagreements with him on particular issues, he has been the most effective president in the modern history of our country and is the strongest candidate to defeat Donald Trump – a demagogue and pathological liar,” Sanders wrote.

Source: Bernie Sanders backs Biden and urges Democrats to ‘stop the bickering’ | US elections 2024 | The Guardian

Heather Cox Richardson: Do We Really Want to Roll Back Civil Rights for Women and Blacks? | Diane Ravitch’s blog

Heather Cox Richardson points out that the Republican Party has been captured by its most extreme members, who hope to roll back the laws to enshrine the power of white men. At the same time that they vote against Biden’s legislation, they take credit for what it does for their states. She watched Biden’s rally in Detroit and was impressed, as was I, by his slashing critique of Trump and his vision for the future.

She writes:

Representative Glenn Grothman (R-WI) said yesterday that if Trump wins reelection, the U.S. should work its way back to 1960, before “the angry feminist movement…took the purpose out of the man’s life.” Grothman said that President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s War on Poverty was actually a “war on marriage,” in a communist attempt to hand control of children over to the government.

Grothman was waxing nostalgic for a fantasy past when laws and society discriminated against women, who could not get credit cards in their own name until 1974—meaning that, among other things, they could not build credit scores to borrow money on their own—and who were forced into dependence on men. The 1960 date Grothman chose was notable in another way, too: it was before the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act with which Congress tried to make the racial equality promised in the 1868 Fourteenth Amendment and the voting rights promised in the 1870 Fifteenth Amendment become real.

At stake in Grothman’s erasure of the last sixty years is the equality of women and minorities to the white men who previously exercised virtually complete control of American society. That equality translates into a struggle over the nature of the American government. Since the 1870s, during the reconstruction of the American government after the Civil War, white reactionaries insisted that opening the vote to anyone but white men would result in socialism.

Their argument was that poor voters—by which they meant Black men—would elect leaders who would promise them roads and schools and hospitals, and so on. Those public benefits could be paid for only with tax levies, and since white men held most of the property in the country in those days, they insisted such benefits amounted to a redistribution of wealth from hardworking white men to undeserving Black Americans, even though poor white people would benefit from those public works as much as or more than Black people did.

This argument resurfaced after World War II as an argument against Black and Brown voting and, in the 1970s, against the electoral power of “women’s libbers,” that is, women who called for the federal government to protect the rights of women equally to those of men. Beginning in 1980, when Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan called for rolling back the government regulations and social safety net that underpinned society, a gap appeared in voting behavior. Women, especially Black women, tended to back the Democrats, while men moved toward Republican candidates. Increasingly, Republican leaders used racist and sexist tropes to undermine the active government whose business regulations they hated.

For the radical extremists who have taken over the Republican Party, getting rid of the modern government that regulates business, provides a basic social safety net, promotes infrastructure, and protects civil rights is now gospel as they try to replace it with Christian nationalism. But that active government remains popular.

That popularity was reflected today as Republicans continued to take credit for laws passed by Democrats to maintain or expand an active government. In Tennessee, Republican Governor Bill Lee boasted that the state had “secured historic funding to modernize Memphis infrastructure with the single-largest transportation investment in state history.” All the Republicans in the Tennessee delegation opposed the measure, leaving Democratic representative Steve Cohen to provide the state’s only yes vote. Indeed, Tennessee senator Marsha Blackburn posted on social media that “Americans do not want [Biden’s] ‘socialist Build Back Broke’ plan.”

In Alabama, Senator Tommy Tuberville boasted about a bridge project funded by a $550 million Department of Transportation grant, writing: “Since I took office, I have been working to secure funding for the Mobile bridge and get this project underway.” But as Representative Terri Sewell, an Alabama Democrat, pointed out, Tuberville voted against the bill that provided the money.

Like Governor Lee and Senator Blackburn, Tuberville knows such government policies are enormously popular and so takes credit for them, even while voting against them.

Union workers also historically have supported a government that regulates business and provides a social safety net and infrastructure investment, but those workers turned to Reagan in 1980 and have tended to make their home in the Republican Party ever since. Now they appear to be shifting back.

Today the president of the 600,000-member International Association of Machinist and Aerospace Workers urged Biden to stay in the race, writing: “For the first time in decades, we have an Administration that has leveled the playing field for workers trying to organize. The IAM is one of the fastest growing unions in the labor movement because we have a President who goes toe to toe with corporations on behalf of working people.”

Union president Brian Bryant noted that Biden “saved hundreds of thousands of our members’ jobs” and thanked him for “strengthen[ing] the Buy American regulations that have helped to create millions of jobs, including nearly 800,000 in manufacturing.” Bryant also credited Biden with helping to save 83 pension plans that covered more than a million workers and retirees. Bryant noted that “[i]n the IAM, we value seniority.”

United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain told Netroots Nation today that “humanity is at stake” in the 2024 election. “This has everything to do with our shot at life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Our wages. Having health care. Our retirement security, and our time…. Those are the four core issues that unite the entire working-class people in a fight against the billionaire class as we saw in our contract campaign last fall when 75% of Americans supported us in that fight, for those reasons.”

“The dream and the scheme of a man like Donald Trump is that the vast majority of working-class people, who literally make our country run, will remain divided. That’s how they win. They want us to not unite in a common cause to take on the billionaire class…. They divide us by race. They divide us by gender, by who we love. They divide us by what language we speak or where we were born….”

Today, in Detroit, in a barnburner of a speech, President Joe Biden pitched his plan for the first 100 days of a second term with a Democratic Congress. He promised to restore Roe v. Wade, eliminate medical debt, raise the minimum wage, protect workers’ right to organize, ban assault weapons, and to “keep leading the world” on clean energy and addressing climate change. He also vowed to sign into law the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would end voter suppression, and the Freedom to Vote Act, which would protect voter rights and election systems, as well as end partisan gerrymandering.

Biden forcefully contrasted his own record with Trump’s. He reminded the audience that he was the first president to walk a picket line, because “when labor does well, everybody does well.” “When Trump comes here to tell you how great he is for the auto industry, remember this: when Trump was president we lost 86,000 jobs in unions. I created 275,000 auto jobs in America. In fact, what’s been true in the auto industry is true all over America: since I became president, we created nearly 16 million new jobs nationwide, 390,000 of those jobs right here in Michigan. We’ve created 800,000 manufacturing jobs nationwide, including 24,000 in Michigan.”

Biden hammered Trump, saying “no more free passes.” He reminded that audience that Trump is a convicted criminal and that a judge had found him liable for sexual abuse. Biden quoted the judge: “Mr. Trump raped her.” Biden reminded the audience that Trump lost his license to do business in New York state and is still facing criminal charges for retaining classified documents and trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, as well as charges in Georgia for election interference. Biden said: “It’s time for us to stop treating politics like entertainment and reality TV.”

Today the European Union charged Trump donor Elon Musk’s social media company X, formerly Twitter, for failing to curb disinformation and illegal hate speech.

Also today, a judge ruled that Trump ally Rudy Giuliani is not entitled to bankruptcy protection. The judge cited Giuliani’s “lack of financial transparency” and noted that Giuliani “has engaged in self-dealing.” This decision means that election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, as well as other creditors, are free to collect what they can of the $150 million he owes them. A lawyer for the two said: “We’re pleased the Court saw through Mr. Giuliani’s games and put a stop to his abuse of the bankruptcy proceeding. We will move forward as quickly as possible to begin enforcing our judgment against him.”

Meanwhile, Trump appeared to be trying to recapture attention by teasing an unveiling of his vice presidential nominee at next week’s Republican National Convention. He compared the selection process to “a highly sophisticated version of The Apprentice,” the reality TV show in which he appeared before he became president, and which centered around firing people.

Source: Heather Cox Richardson: Do We Really Want to Roll Back Civil Rights for Women and Blacks? | Diane Ravitch’s blog