Steve Osunsami and Sean Keane, Reporters - abc News
Stephan:
Something very interesting and important is happening to religion. As this report says, “In the late 1940s, nearly 80% of Americans said they belonged to a church, synagogue, mosque or temple, according to Gallup. Today, just 45% say the same, the analytics company noted, and only 32% say that they worship God in a house of prayer once a week.” What I see is a schism. Christofascism is thriving; traditional Christianity is withering away. Why? Because one is about power and satisfying resentments, the other at its heart is about opening to nonlocal consciousness.
Churches around America and the world are struggling as attendance drops Credit: ABC News
During the final Mass at the All Saints Parish in Buffalo, New York, on a warm Sunday in July, the priests encouraged the few parishioners who came to take comfort in holy scripture.
“For everything, there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven,” the passage read.
On Earth, many parishes are accepting that it’s time to sell their properties. As the person leading renewal and development for the Diocese of Buffalo, Father Bryan Zielenieski is one of many religious leaders across America who have closed houses of worship in recent years.
“We essentially went to half of what we used to back in the early 2000s,” he told ABC News. “We lost about 100 parishes.”
Zielenieski expects he’ll need to shut down another 70 churches in what the Diocese is calling its “road to renewal.” It’s a very biblical name for the challenge facing churches: People just aren’t going as much as they used to.
On average, more than half of the diocese’s churches today are baptizing fewer […]
Tom Homan looks like a thug and, I suspect, has been chosen by Trump because he has no qualms about behaving like one. I fear that on 21 January Homan will start the trend Trump has constantly promised, and that it is going to provoke a civil uprising in Blue states and in Red states it may become so intense that, as in the Kent State killing during the Viet Nam era, the National Guard may become involved.
Incoming White House ‘border czar’ Tom Homan speaks during Turning Point’s annual AmericaFest 2024 in Phoenix, Arizona, on December 22, 2024. Credit: Josh Edelson / AFP / Getty
Adding to alarm over U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s immigration plans, his “border czar” toldThe Washington Post in an interview published Thursday that the administration plans to return to detaining migrant families with children.
Tom Homan, who served as acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump’s first term, said that ICE “will look to hold parents with children in ‘soft-sided’ tent structures similar to those used by U.S. border officials to handle immigration surges,” the Post summarized. “The government will not hesitate to deport parents who are in the country illegally, even if they have young U.S.-born children, he added, leaving it to those families to decide whether to exit together or be split up.”
Since Trump beat Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris last month, migrant rights advocates have reiterated concerns about the Republican’s first-term policies—such as forced separation of families—and his 2024 […]
What few know today is that civilian nuclear power came about because Admiral Hyman Rickover figured out how to create nuclear-powered ships and submarines, and General Electric and Westinghouse which he was working with wanted a civilian market so they could develop a large enough corps of engineers and civilian nuclear reactors so that the whole effort would be as profitable as possible. What no one in GE or Westinghouse had thought through was what do so with a waste that was massively lethal, would last for centuries, while requiring constant meticulous storage control. No one has ever solved this problem and as Fukushima showed when something goes wrong the results are catastrophic. But greed never cares about anything but profit and there is now a growing movement to expand nuclear electric energy generation.
Dry cask storage is used to store spent fuel at the Entergy Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon, VT on Oct. 20, 2015. Credit: Don Ramey Loga
There’s a field in Wiscasset, Maine (Population 3,742) protected by armed guards. On the field is a chain link fence surrounding a pad of concrete. On the pad are 60 cement and steel canisters that contain 1,400 spent nuclear fuel rods, the leavings of a power plant that shut down almost 30 years ago.
The containers are full of nuclear waste. The locals don’t love it, but there’s nowhere for it to go. The issue of what to do with America’s nuclear waste is a problem that’s solved in theory but stalled in practice thanks to a decades-long political fight. The country needs more power, and faster, and tech companies such as Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon all announced this year that they’re moving forward with plans to go nuclear.
That means there’s going to be more nuclear waste than ever before. Where will it go? If the current system […]
Damian Carrington, Environment Editor - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan:
I agree with Danilo Brozovic in the sense that we are coming up on a civilization threatening calamity in 15 years. I have been doing a remote viewing project for 45 years asking people to remote view specific dates in the future. The one constant is that between 2040 and 2045 a combination of trends coalesce that utterly change the United States. By 2060 a new culture has emerged. I am writing a paper and, then, a book on this project. But I am afraid the next 15 years are going to be very difficult. First, because we are losing our democracy, and second, because we are not doing anywhere near enough to prepare for what climate change is going to do. Third, because I think the criminal Trump administration is going to severely damage our society and social wellbeing.
Can we learn from Rapa Nui? Credit: / Getty
For someone who has examined 361 studies and 73 books on societal collapses, Associate Professor in Business Administration – University of Skövde, Sweden Danilo Brozović’s conclusion on what must happen to avoid today’s world imploding is both disarmingly simple and a daunting challenge: “We need dramatic social and technological changes.”
The collapse of past civilisations, from the mighty Mayan empire to Rapa Nui (Easter Island), has long fascinated people and for obvious reasons – how stable is our own society? Does ever-growing complexity in societies or human hubris inevitably lead to oblivion? In the face of the climate crisis, rampant destruction of the natural world, rising geopolitical tensions and more, the question is more urgent than ever.
“More and more academic articles are mentioning the threat of collapse because of climate change,” says Brozović at the school of business at the University of Skövde, Sweden. The issue of collapse hooked him after it was raised in a project on business sustainability, which then led to his comprehensive review in 2023.
Jesse Coburn and Andy Kroll, Staff Writers - ProPublica
Stephan:
Homelessness, as I reported in SR yesterday, is up 18%. Tens of thousands of Americans, live on the streets, and eat whatever they can beg, find, or be given. All of this results from the fact that fostering wellbeing is no longer a priority in the United States, only greed and power shape our social policies, and we are about to have a President who cares nothing for the poor or disadvantaged and has appointed to his government people who think as he does. We are about to enter what will probably be the worst period of our history since the Civil War.
Scott Turner and President Donald Trump in 2020 Credit: Evan Vucci / AP
As Donald Trump’s nominee to run the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Scott Turner may soon oversee the nation’s efforts to build affordable apartments, protect poor tenants and aid the homeless. As a lawmaker in the Texas House of Representatives, Turner voted against those very initiatives.
Turner supported a bill ensuring landlords could refuse apartments to applicants because they received federal housing assistance. He opposed a bill to expand affordable rental housing. He voted against funding public-private partnerships to support the homeless and against twobills that called merely to study homelessness among young people and veterans.
Behind those votes lay a deep-seated skepticism about the value of government efforts to alleviate poverty, a skepticism that Turner has voiced again and again. He has called welfare “dangerous, harmful” and “one of the most destructive things for the family.” When one interviewer said receiving government assistance was keeping recipients in “bondage” of “a […]
