Reflecting On 2018 Quotes

As the year comes to a close, let us reflect, plan and rejuvenate for Chapter 2018.

As the year comes to a close, let us reflect, plan and rejuvenate for Chapter 2018. P.S. Remember the harvest you reap will depend a great deal on the type of seeds you sow.

The changing trends reflected evolving user preferences, but they were also a reaction against the burnout-inducing standard of the peak influencer era. “We all know the jig is up,” said Matt Klein, a cultural strategist. “We’ve all participated in those staged photos. We all know the stress and anxiety it takes. And we can see through it. Culture is a pendulum and the pendulum is swaying. That’s not to say everyone is going to stop posting perfect photos. But the energy is shifting.” For the reigning influencers, the shift was disorienting and even catastrophic. “What worked for people before doesn’t work anymore,” said James Nord. In 2018, a creator could post a shot with manicured hands on a coffee cup and rake in the likes. By 2019, people would unfollow. According to Fohr, by the end of that year, 60 percent of influencers in his network with more than 100,000 followers were losing followers month over month. “It’s pretty staggering,” he said.

This terrifying experiment has already been set in motion. Unlike nuclear war—which is a future potential—climate change is a present reality. There is a scientific consensus that human activities, in particular the emission of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, are causing the earth’s climate to change at a frightening rate.7 Nobody knows exactly how much carbon dioxide we can continue to pump into the atmosphere without triggering an irreversible cataclysm. But our best scientific estimates indicate that unless we dramatically cut the emission of greenhouse gases in the next twenty years, average global temperatures will increase by more than 3.6ºF, resulting in expanding deserts, disappearing ice caps, rising oceans and more frequent extreme weather events such as hurricanes and typhoons.8 These changes in turn will disrupt agricultural production, inundate cities, make much of the world uninhabitable, and send hundreds of millions of refugees in search of new homes.9 Moreover, we are rapidly approaching a number of tipping points, beyond which even a dramatic drop in greenhouse gas emissions will not be enough to reverse the trend and avoid a worldwide tragedy. For example, as global warming melts the polar ice sheets, less sunlight is reflected back from planet Earth to outer space. This means that the planet absorbs more heat, temperatures rise even higher, and the ice melts even faster. Once this feedback loop crosses a critical threshold it will gather an unstoppable momentum, and all the ice in the polar regions will melt even if humans stop burning coal, oil, and gas. Therefore it is not enough that we recognize the danger we face. It is critical that we actually do something about it now. Unfortunately, as of 2018, instead of a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, the global emission rate is still increasing. Humanity has very little time left to wean itself from fossil fuels. We need to enter rehab today. Not next year or next month, but today. “Hello, I am Homo sapiens, and I am a fossil-fuel addict.

Who is going to save our Church?” asked Archbishop Sheen. “Do not look to the priests. Do not look to the bishops. It’s up to you, the laity, to remind our priests to be priests and our bishops to be bishops.” If the dismal summer of 2018 is to produce any good result, it will be by underlining that message. The loyal Catholic laity, stirred by anger into action, will demand an end to the corruption of the Church and a full return to her evangelical purpose. At the turn of the seventh century, Pope Gregory the Great spoke in a homily about a failing of bishops that “discourages me greatly.” Accusing himself of the same weakness that he saw among his brother bishops, he said, “We abandon the ministry of preaching and, in my opinion, are called bishops to our detriment, for we retain the honorable office but fail to practice the virtues proper to it. Those who have been entrusted to us abandon God, and we are silent. They fall into sin, and we do not extend a hand of rebuke. … We are wrapped up in worldly concerns, and the more we devote ourselves to external things, the more insensitive we become in spirit.” The mistaken belief that bishops always have the power to speak on behalf of “the Church” plays into the popular misconception that bishops could, if they wished, change unpopular Catholic doctrines. The perception of the Church as a multinational corporation, with bishops (and ultimately the pope) wielding executive control, encourages secular critics to argue that the hierarchy should tailor dogmas to match popular styles. Even the notion that doctrines should be established by public opinion reflects the clericalist mentality. It derives from the assumption that the Church is our possession, operating under our guidance. The truth, which bears constant repetition

Although he was known as a scholarly and deeply reflective officer, Trump latched on to Mattis’s reputation and, uncomfortably for Mattis, a nickname that he deeply disliked: “Mad Dog.” When Mattis was introduced to a crowd for the first time as Trump’s nominee, Trump delighted in the fact that the crowd started chanting, “Mad Dog! Mad Dog!” Almost from that point forward, the mismatch—the oil-and-water personalities of the superficial, glib, impetuous Trump and that of his intellectual, measured, deeply principled secretary of defense—began to slowly fall apart. For Mattis “it was just a matter of time.” The split finally occurred in 2018, following President Trump’s decision to withdraw US troops from Syria and abandon America’s long-standing and courageous Kurdish allies.

In his paper, Dr Davis referred to the infamous 1980 Cash-Landrum UFO case, covered earlier in this book, where the Landrum family reported a massive diamond-shaped UFO hovering over their car in the road near Dayton, Texas. As well as the trio reporting terrible burns from what experts declared was ionising radiation, one of the weirdest claims in the Cash-Landrum sighting was that they said they saw 23 helicopters, including massive CH-47 Chinooks, closely following the object. The US military denied any of its choppers were in the air nearby that night, and 23 of them in one place does sound implausible. Dr Davis’s paper gave an explanation – that the helicopters were ‘mimicry techniques employed for the manipulation of human consciousness to induce the various manifestations of “absurd” interactions or scenery associated with the UFO encounter. This in combination with the mimicry of man-made aircrafts’ (helicopters) aggregate features were prominent in the Cash-Landrum UFO case’. There is no explanation for how Dr Davis reached this conclusion. No known science describes the capacity to manipulate human consciousness to induce hallucinations as described. Modern science would say it was science fiction. However, an answer may lie in extraordinary PowerPoint slides we know now were prepared for a briefing of senior officials at the US Department of Defence, detailed online by The Mind Sublime. The individual behind that site told me he found the intriguing PowerPoint slides in early August 2018 while he was trawling through former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence Christopher Mellon’s personal website.4 (This was shortly after The New York Times had revealed the existence of the previously secret Pentagon UAP investigation program.) The Mind Sublime researcher screenshotted his discovery to prove the slides came from Mellon’s website, and, importantly, because the document was stated to be a PowerPoint for a briefing of the Deputy Secretary of the Department of Defence. Perhaps it was these slides that prompted Senator Harry Reid to ask the Department of Defence for Special Access Program protection for the investigation – because what the slides said was momentous. If the unredacted slides accurately reflect the Defence Department’s knowledge of the UAP phenomenon, they are explosive. They reveal how the Pentagon’s UAP investigation unit advised the Defence Department not only that the mysterious craft were a ‘game changer’ but that the US military was powerless against them.5 One of the slides, headed ‘AATIP Preliminary Assessments’, shows that Elizondo’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program privately advised the Defence Department that ‘Preliminary evidence indicates that the United States is incapable of defending itself towards some of those technologies . . . The nature of these technologies and the fact that the United States has no countermeasures is considered Highly Sensitive’.6 The document, prepared for the Deputy Secretary of the Department of Defence, pushed for further investigation ‘in order to determine the full scope of the threat and their capabilities to be either exploited or defeated’.

In 1973, 29 percent of all U.S. jobs required postsecondary education. In 1992, 52 percent did. And in 2018, a projected 62 percent of all jobs will require postsecondary education. At the same time, many students and their families came to believe that a college’s cost directly reflected the quality of the education it offered and the long-term value of the degrees it granted. Rankings like those in U.S. News & World Report reflected this biased perception and encouraged the public to think that way as well.

A primary factor in this shift is, as The New York Times wrote, “Mostly white and politically conservative counties have continued to send more drug offenders to prison, reflecting the changing geography of addiction. While crack cocaine addiction was centered in cities, opioid and meth addiction are ravaging small communities” in largely white locales. The “pathology” long ascribed to urban communities as integral and immutable characteristics of Black life (drug addiction, property crimes to support a habit, broken families) has now moved, with deindustrialization, into the suburbs and the countryside. By 2018, an estimated 130 people were dying every day from opioid overdoses, and over 10 million people were abusing prescription opioids.

A forecast from SpaceWorks in 2019 further predicted 2,000–2,800 nano or microsatellites will launch in over the next five years between the military, commercial, and civil sectors. This segment of satellites already increased in launch and production by 25 percent from 2017 to 2018; in 2018, 253 of the planned 262 nanosatellites actually launched, reflecting “Greater launch consistency and better execution on the part of small satellite operators.”5 Factors like the Internet of Things (IoT), demand for communications data, and increased need for Earth observation are all helping to drive this market.

This is for people that don't know me and are in mystery of my thinking process. I see they are just programs. I see how much they think to specific formulas and never break the boundaries toward original thoughts for themselves. They are machines which can be calculated and arranged and de- programmed and re-programmed and then made a blank slate with nothing at all on their brains making them virtually UNDEAD ZOMBIES! No thoughts, no personality, just a husk of skin with a program that is not a reflection of their own design. I on the other hand, am ME! July 4, 2018

in the 2018 Anderson, et al. study, researchers tested microdosers and found them to score higher on “open-mindedness,” which they hypothesized considering recent findings on increased openness with higher-dose sessions.120 They also found microdosers to score higher on tests of “wisdom,” which they defined as being able to “reflect learning from one’s mistakes, consider multiple perspectives when facing a situation, being in tune with one’s emotions and those of others, and feeling a sense of connection and unity.

Regardless of when Advent begins, every year the same Scripture readings are used for weekdays from December 17-24. The Gospels on those days describe events leading up to the birth of Christ: December 17: The genealogy of Jesus (Matthew) December 18: The annunciation to Joseph (Matthew) December 19: The annunciation to Zechariah (Luke) December 20: The annunciation to Mary (Luke) December 21: Mary’s visit to Elizabeth (Luke) December 22: Mary’s “Magnificat” (Luke) December 23: The birth of John the Baptist (Luke) December 24: The “Benedictus” of Zechariah (Luke)

In these moments during Christmas Mass when we breathe the air of liturgy, the true colors of Christmas come out. This is what liturgy is meant to do. These songs we are singing, these symbols all around us, these prayers we say, these believing people we are with, all express the heart of Christmas . . . That God would love us so, that God would want to be loved so by us (for who could not love this baby), that God would rescue us from our worst, or the worst that others have done to us . . .’ – Bishop Ken Untener

At the beginning of 2018, during a briefing meeting with lawmakers in the Oval Office discussing the protection of immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries, U.S. president Donald Trump asked, “Why do we want all these people from shithole countries coming here?” 37 The question shocked people around the world, but in truth, his comment was reflective of what is often thought but not overtly said about BIPOC.