Monday, December 25, 2017

As We Forgive Our Debtors

Forgiven,

Professor Michael Hudson says the version I grew up saying every night, "Forgive us our debts , as we forgive our debtors", was right all along.

”The Christianity we know today is not the Christianity of Jesus,” says Professor Hudson... The Lord’s Prayer, ‘forgive us our sins even as we forgive all who are indebted to us’, refers specifically to debt. “Most religious leaders say that Christianity is all about sin, not debt,” he says. “But actually, the word for sin and debt is the same in almost every language.” 
”‘Schuld’, in German, means ‘debt’ as well as ‘offense’ or, ‘sin’. It’s ‘devoir’ in French. It had the same duality in meaning in the Babylonian language of Akkadian.”...
People tend to think of the Commandment ‘do not covet your neighbour’s wife’ in purely sexual terms but actually, the economist says it refers specifically to creditors who would force the wives and daughters of debtors into sex slavery as collateral for unpaid debt...
Similarly, the Commandment ‘thou shalt not steal’ refers to usury and exploitation by threat for debts owing.
The economist says Jesus was crucified for his views on debt. Crucifixion being a punishment reserved especially for political dissidents.
”To understand the crucifixion of Jesus is to understand it was his punishment for his economic views,” says Professor Hudson. “He was a threat to the creditors.”
Jesus Christ was a socialist activist for the continuity of regular debt jubilees that were considered essential to the wellbeing of ancient economies...
Jesus’ first reported sermon in Luke 4 documents his announcement that he had come to revive the enforcement of the Jubilee Year. The term “gospel” (or ‘good news’) was used specifically to refer to debt cancellation which became the major political fight of the imperial Roman epoch, pitting Jesus against the pro-creditor Pharisees, (a political party and social movement that became the foundation for Rabbinic Judaism around 167 BC).
The Pharisees, Hillel (the founder of Rabbinical Judaism) and the creditors who backed them decided that Jesus’ growing popularity was a threat to their authority and wealth...

”Over the last 1000 years the Catholic Church has been saying it’s noble to be poor. But Jesus never said it was good to be poor. What he said was that rich people are greedy and corrupt. That’s what Socrates was saying, as well as Aristotle and the Stoic Roman philosophers, the biblical prophets in Isaiah.”

Neither did Jesus say that it was good to be poor because it made you noble.
What Jesus did say is that say if you have money, you should share it with other people...

”When you have a massive build up of debt that can’t be paid, either you wipe out the debt and start-over like Germany did during ‘the 1947 Miracle’ when the Allies forgave all its debts except for minimum balances, or you let the creditors foreclose as Obama did in America after the 2008 crisis and 10 million American families lost their homes to foreclosure,” he said...

”Today’s world believes in the sanctity of debt. But from Sumer and Babylonia through the Bible, it was debt cancellations that were sacred.”

”If you want to be like Jesus then you become political and you realise that this is the same fight that has been going on for thousands of years, across civilisation – the attempt of society to cope with the fact that debts grow faster than the ability to pay.” 

The Great Unraveling: We are coming undone, all of us, all life forms here. A nonliving intellegence commands us, based upong aggressive growth, making machines to burn, dig, chemically corrode, pollute and kill, because it works so very well, one it gets started. It can't stop until it is done, with all of us, amoeba and blue-green algae to redwoods, whales who once lived for centuries, humans and pigs in filthy, tight cages. We are all together in a global cooperative web of life. Humans realized this until recently, and pretty much everywhere, because it was so obvious. it's not obvious in big cities. Not at all. That's where corporate rules of profit and ownership govern our thoughtless actions. 
The same central tyrranny-for-profit cannot save us. We must each become a stewrd of the life we touch, and act in that role. 
Wazzat mean? I'm finding out bit by bit as I go.

New research suggests that the hidden cost of developing nuclear weapons were far larger than previous estimates, with radioactive fallout responsible for 340,000 to 690,000 American deaths from 1951 to 1973.

Space, The Final Capitalist Growth Frontier: 
"Space is not a 'global commons',  not 'the common heritage of mankind", says US National Space Council Director, Scott Simmons. "These concepts are not part of the Outer Space Treaty, and the United States has consistently taken the position that these ideas do not describe the legal status of outer space.” Pace says the Trump administration will work with other governments and international organizations to develop fair rules for space, but that the goal is for the US to become “the most attractive jurisdiction in the world for private-sector investment and innovation in outer space…the task for the United States, if it wishes to influence how space is developed and utilized, is to create attractive projects and frameworks in which other nations choose to align themselves and their space activities with us, as opposed to others.”

Nature: "Now, for the first time, climate researchers are reporting that some weather events would have been outright impossible without the warming influence of humanity’s greenhouse-gas emissions." 

It's that time. Louisiana is making all the preparations to permanently evacuate the coastal plains. They are often and badly flooded, and getting worse. This is just like what we keep hearing will happen some day...

"California, The Flood That Could Change Everything"
This sounds speculative, but is not. The Sacramento flood of 1860 was the most recent of this kind of routine flooding that the land area called California has gotten regularly throughout the geologic epochs we can trace. The flat areas of California, where almost all the people live, become vast great-lakes, filled by Atmospheric Rivers, a new thing science discovered recently, but has always been around. We have filled California with people since that last one. It's ok. Modern science can give us about 3 days warning ahead of one of these, but can't tell us exactly how big it will be, or exactly how many people to evacuate. California's 1960s and 1970s infrastructure, much of it never tested, would be of some help buying some time in some places, like the old Oroville Dam was in it's first test.

Russia prepares for year round opening of Arctic Shipping Lanes with order for 60 Arctic Ice-Class Ships. Tankers, freighters, icebreakers. 
This changes global power dynamics.
"Only Russian vessels should have the right to carry oil and gas along the Northern Sea Route," proposed Vladimir Putin today.

The Pentagon has announced carrying out ground combat missions in Yemen through all of 2017. No comments about 2016. 
It's OK, they were just attacking ISIS, not Al Qaeda, who are now our friends. I'm sure they didn't harm any civilians.
“U.S. forces have conducted multiple ground operations and more than 120 strikes in 2017,” U.S. Central Command, Centcom, in Tampa, Florida, said in a statement, with the aim to “disrupt the ability of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and ISIS-Yemen to use ungoverned spaces in Yemen as a hub for terrorist recruiting, training and base of operations to export terror worldwide.”

Market Reforms with North Korean Characteristics:
It's not all a central command economy over there any more. It has quietly adapted. Interesting article.

North Korea's 1000 mile border with China is their main trade zone. Smugglers are respected middle class professionals, bribing soldiers to help carry loads across rivers. This has provided an unofficially permeable border to control trade, while officially being a closed country. This has benefited Koreans and Chinese at all levels. It has come upon hard times with the latest sanctions. The small smugglers are getting cut out. Fewer consumer items and rabbit pelts are crossing the border now. More good insight.

New Zealand has now declared the Mount Taranaki ecosystem bears the same rights as a human (prob'ly still short of corporate rights, though, huh?)

Repenting

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