Monday, September 25th, 2017
Mark Brolly, - The Tablet - The International Catholic News Weekly
Stephan: In an age when the entire issue of gender and sexuality is undergoing radical change in the West, the millennia old sexual dysfunction created by mandatory celibacy, combined with a culture shift in how priests are viewed, has stripped away the protection pedophile priests have enjoyed for centuries. Pedophilia in the Roman church is an ancient cancer, it is just in the spotlight now. Here's the modern perspective.
An extensive survey by two former Australian priests says mandatory celibacy has been and remains the major risk factor for child sexual abuse and warns of an impending wave of abuse cases in India and Italy, which have a significant proportion of the Church’s remaining 9500 orphanages.
Professor Des Cahill and Dr Peter Wilkinson, in their 384-page survey entitled ‘Child Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church: An Interpretive Review of the Literature and Public Inquiry Reports’, also found that a lack of the feminine and the denigration of women within Church structures was one key, underlying risk factor in abuse.
The survey, published by the Centre for Global Research at RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) University, found that the response of bishops to clerical abuse across the world had been “remarkably uniform”.
“The bishops worked strenuously to keep the problem of clerical child sexual abuse in-house in order to protect the Church’s reputation and its financial assets, hoping that the problem would eventually go away,” it said. “The problem was further exacerbated by an almost incomprehensible refusal to see that it was a […]
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Sunday, September 24th, 2017
STUART LEAVENWORTH, - McClatchy News
Stephan: For those who are interested it is easy to see how at the federal level climate change information is being deleted and suppressed while, in the Red value states like North Carolina, they are doing everything they can to keep people on the coasts from fully understanding what is coming.
Why is all this being done? In my opinion it is to preserve as long as possible the value of real estate in order to allow the uber-rich to work out a strategy that will preserve their wealth before the value of coastal real estate collapses.
NAGS HEAD, NOTH CAROLINA — All along the coast of the southeast United States, the real estate industry confronts a hurricane. Not the kind that swirls in the Atlantic, but a storm of scientific information about sea-level rise that threatens the most lucrative, commission-boosting properties.
These studies warn that Florida, the Carolinas and other southeastern states face the nation’s fastest-growing rates of sea level rise and coastal erosion — as much as 3 feet by the year 2100, depending on how quickly Antarctic ice sheets melt. In a recent report, researchers for Zillow estimated that nearly 2 million U.S. homes could be literally underwater by 2100, if worst-case projections become reality.
This is not good news for people who market and build waterfront houses. But real estate lobbyists aren’t going down without a fight. Some are teaming up with climate change skeptics and small government advocates to block public release of sea-level rise predictions and ensure that coastal planning is not based on them.
“This is very concerning,” said Willo Kelly, who represents both the Outer Banks Home Builders Association and the Outer Banks Association of Realtors and led a six-year battle against state sea-level-rise mapping in North […]
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Sunday, September 24th, 2017
Annie Waldman, Reporter - ProPublica
Stephan: The Republican Party in service to its corporate masters is on a drive to privatize prisons, and schools. They are trying to duplicate the profit potential of the lousy privatized healthcare we have in the U.S.. It is all driven by one thing — greed.
The desire of the few is to structure public institutions so that the wealth of the many is siphoned off for their benefit. They milk the populace like cows. It always results in the degradation of society because its purpose is not to foster wellbeing -- although that is almost always the justification for what is proposed.
Betsy DeVos has been given the job of gutting public education and privatizing schools. Quite predictably it isn't working, but that doesn't mean the greedheads are giving up. Here's their next move.
The Orange Park Performing Arts Academy in Orange Park, Florida, on August 15, 2017, the day it opened as a private school. It was previously a public charter school, but after it received two failing grades from the state, its charter contract was terminated.
Credit: Charlotte Kesl/ ProPublica
This past June, Florida’s top education agency delivered a failing grade to the Orange Park Performing Arts Academy in suburban Jacksonville for the second year in a row. It designated the charter school for kindergarten through fifth grade as the worst public school in Clay County, and one of the lowest performing in the state.
Two-thirds of the academy’s students failed the state exams last year, and only a third of them were making any academic progress at all. The school had had four principals in three years, and teacher turnover was high, too.
“My fourth grader was learning stuff that my second grader was learning — it shouldn’t be that way,” said Tanya Bullard, who moved her three daughters from the arts academy […]
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Sunday, September 24th, 2017
Dedrick Asante-Muhammad and Chuck Collins,, Director of the Racial Wealth Divide Project, Director of the Programs on Inequality, Institute for Policy Studies - USA TODAY
Stephan: I notice that when I do stories about wealth inequity a smaller than usual number of readers read them. If the point of the SR drill were the highest possible readership I guess I would stop doing them. But that isn't the point. SR covers trends that are shaping the future, good or bad, and this trend is not only going to shape the future it is like a fire alarm going off in the night.
History is very clear: when wealth inequity gets seriously out of whack society goes into crisis. You can't say we weren't warned.
Credit: University of Chicago News
No savings, investments or home equity. This economic dystopia looms for minority families, and so does a choice: Do we want America to be more like Brazil or Canada?
What would U.S. society be like if a majority of families had no wealth – no savings, no home equity, no investments of any kind?
That is exactly where the country is headed if we continue on our current path toward economic dystopia for black and Latino families.
While we celebrate a modest reduction in poverty rates and an encouraging uptick in median income, as disclosed in this week’s Census report, the stagnation and decline of wealth remains a troubling indicator.
Between 1983 and 2013, median black household wealth decreased by 75% to $1,700 and Latino household wealth fell 50% to $2,000. At the same time, median white household wealth rose 14% to $116,800.
If this trend continues, an African American born in 2013 will see her household wealth hit zero by the […]
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Sunday, September 24th, 2017
Stephan: This is a complementary piece to the one I ran yesterday about the decline of tourism in America. What's going on here is having a big effect on how people view the U.S., and whether they want to live here, or even to visit. Nothing good will come of this.
The reputations of the U.S. and U.K. as good places to live and work are in free fall among some of the world’s most mobile and cosmopolitan people.
Since last year’s presidential and Brexit votes, both the U.S. and Britain are perceived as less friendly to foreigners and less politically stable, according to a survey of almost 13,000 expatriates of 166 nationalities. Expats also say the two countries’ quality of life is declining by other measures, especially the affordability of child care and health care in the U.S. and housing in the U.K.
The Expat Insider survey is conducted each year by InterNations, a network of 2.8 million expats based in Munich. It aims to capture the views of millions of executives, skilled workers, students and retirees who live outside the country where they grew up. There are about 50 million expats worldwide, according to market research by Finaccord, and the number is expected to hit 60 million over the next five years. They often have a choice of where they want to live, and their opinions matter to countries that want to attract talented and affluent people.
The top-ranked country in […]
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