Society's ChildS


Water

Flint water crisis could cost US $300bn in infrastructure upgrades to replace all lead pipes

Flint water crisis
© Jim Young / ReutersVolunteers distribute bottled water to help combat the effects of the crisis when the city's drinking water became contaminated with dangerously high levels of lead in Flint, Michigan, March 5, 2016.
The Flint water contamination scandal could result in stricter rules and potentially cost water utility companies nationwide some $300 billion in infrastructure upgrades to remove all lead pipelines to insure the quality of H2O provision for American households.

Fitch Ratings study said that the Flint, Michigan water mayhem could potentially force water utility companies to replace an estimated six million lead service lines across the country if the Environmental Protection Agency enforces stricter regulations because of the crisis. The cost for such an overhaul is estimated by Fitch to exceed $275 billion.

"The EPA currently regulates drinking water exposure to lead based on its Lead and Copper Rule, which seeks to minimize lead in drinking water primarily through corrosion control of lead pipes. If corrosion control is not effective the rule can require water quality monitoring and treatment, corrosion control treatment, the removal of lead lines and public education," Fitch said

Comment: Crimes against humanity: Government bickers over cleanup costs while Flint, MI lead poisoning continues


Yoda

There is a God!: After Baron David De Rothschild indictment, Rothschild Bank is now under criminal investigation

David De Rothschild indictment
Last year, Baron David de Rothschild was indicted by the French government after he was accused of fraud in a scheme that allegedly embezzled large sums of money from British pensioners.

It has taken many years to bring this case against Rothschild and his company the Rothschild Financial Services Group, which trapped hundreds of pensioners in a bogus loan scheme between the years of 2005 and 2008.

One by one the pensioners lost their money and pressed charges against the notorious banker, beginning a case that would take many years to get even an indictment.


Comment: One has to ask who - with so many hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth behind him - would seek to do such a thing? It could only a be a psychopath; it's the only answer that makes any sense.


In June, Paris-based liaison judge Javier Gómez Bermudez ruled that Rothschild must face a trial for his crimes, and ordered local police to seek him out in his various mansions that are spread throughout the country.

Comment: This is very big news indeed. The Rothschild family, as the article suggests, has been near the very apex of world financial power for a very, very long time. Did some rival monied faction pull some strings here? Did the recent alignment of planets in our solar system somehow affect things? Did the devil call in a debt? Or is it actually just the prosaic explanation we've been given in the article? Whatever the reason, it would be nice to see the criminal investigation go the distance. But in this blackmailed, ponerized and demented world in which we live, that would just be too much to ask, wouldn't it?


Books

Best of the Web: The cult of ignorance in the United States: Anti-intellectualism and the "dumbing down" of America

dumb down
© reddit.com
There is a growing and disturbing trend of anti-intellectual elitism in American culture. It's the dismissal of science, the arts, and humanities and their replacement by entertainment, self-righteousness, ignorance, and deliberate gullibility.

Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason, says in an article in the Washington Post, "Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture; a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism."

Comment: Professor Patrick Deneen explains how kids have become a generation of know-nothings
We have fallen into the bad and unquestioned habit of thinking that our educational system is broken, but it is working on all cylinders. What our educational system aims to produce is cultural amnesia, a wholesale lack of curiosity, history-less free agents, and educational goals composed of content-free processes and unexamined buzz-words like "critical thinking," "diversity," "ways of knowing," "social justice," and "cultural competence."

Our education system produces solipsistic, self-contained selves whose only public commitment is an absence of commitment to a public, a common culture, a shared history. They are perfectly hollowed vessels, receptive and obedient, without any real obligations or devotions.



Fire

Pasadena Texas oil refinery blast: At least one injured

pasadena texas oil refinery explosion 2016
© James Nielsen | Houston Chronicle
Blast at the Pasadena Refining System in Texas wounded at least one person, according to local media.

At least one person was injured Saturday in an explosion at oil refinery in Pasadena, the southern US state of Texas, local media reported.

The KTRK ABC News affiliate cited Pasadena police as saying a fire was burning at the Pasadena Refining System, Inc.

Bad Guys

Crimes against humanity: Government bickers over cleanup costs while Flint, MI lead poisoning continues

governor rick snyder poisoning flint michigan
Governor Rick Snyder, who has mysteriously not been arrested yet for his crimes against humanity
As people continue to succumb to lead poisoning after one of the greatest mass poisonings in US history, the government bickers over whether they should lift a finger to save lives.

The fight over who is responsible for Flint, Michigan, once a proud factory town and a former headquarters of American car manufacturing, became a leaded wasteland continues to go on. Worse yet, the fight over whether to fix the problem has become a hot topic of debate with members of Congress stopping an aid package for the mostly ethnic-minority city.

It's been five months since the state of Michigan switched Flint's drinking water source to the Great Lakes after a lengthy and disastrous experiment using the Flint River to provide water to Flint's roughly 100,000 residents that started in 2014.

Comment: This is a crime against humanity and while people continue to suffer with poisoned water, the government debates who's going to pay for it. In a government that actually cares about its people, the problem would be fixed and costs would be dealt with later (like simply removing a tiny fraction of the military budget to cover the costs, for example). Furthermore, Governor Snyder, who knowingly ignored the problems while people were being poisoned by lead, would be arrested.


Cell Phone

Propaganda alert: Apple iPhone criminals' 'device of choice' due to encryption

Apple black flag
© Christian Hartmann / Reuters
Criminals have been favoring Apple iPhones in their criminal activities because of the strong encryption the devices have, three US law enforcement groups said in a court filing.

The groups said they knew about "numerous instances," in which criminals switched from burner devices to iPhones, but didn't name any specific examples.


Comment: That's a nonsensical claim, because it's dirt simple to add strong encryption to Android-based phones too, and Android phones are cheaper, easier to obtain, and have better features than iPhone. Therefore to think criminals favor iPhones over other types of "burner phones" only due to Apple's encryption is ridiculous.

(Note that a "burner phone" is simply a phone not intended to be kept and used for any significant amount of time; they're typically discarded by the user after brief use to avoid being tracked and monitored).


Their brief, however, cited a call intercepted by New York authorities, in which a criminal branded the iPhone encryption system a "gift from God."

Health

Continued humanitarianism: Russia delivers 3.5 tons of aid to Syria's Latakia province

russia delivers aid to syria latakia
© Sputnik/ Ali Abrahim
The specialists of the Russian center for Syrian reconciliation delivered food and drinking water to the residents of the settlement of Latakia as well as provided them with medical treatment, according to the Russian Defense Ministry.

The Russian center for Syrian reconciliation has delivered 3,5 metric tons of humanitarian aid to the settlement in Syria's northeastern province of Latakia, the center said in a newsletter published Saturday.

"Russian Centre for reconciliation of opposing sides in the Syrian Arab Republic has transported 3.5 tons of humanitarian aid in al-Suria (Latakia province)," the newsletter published in English on the website of the Russian Defense Ministry said.

Comment: Russia continues to show its decency, good nature, and concern for others with its many humanitarian aid deliveries.


Cut

Alabama lawmaker proposes bill to have pedophiles pay for their own castration

scalpel
© Nicholas Rigg/Getty Images
An Alabama lawmaker is seeking to offer pedophiles an alternative to prison: castration. Since 2011, State Rep. Steve Hurst has proposed that sex offenders be either chemically or surgically castrated, but now he wants them to pay for it too.

Hurst has filed legislation that would legally require offenders convicted of sexually assaulting a child under the age of 12 to be surgically castrated before being released from prison. HB 365 is something of a passion project for Hurst, but this year he added an additional twist, requiring sex offenders pay for the operation.

Surgical castration removes a man's testicles and could become the harshest penalty for sex offenders in the country.

Internationally, laws regarding physical castration have received severe pushback. In 2009, the Council of Europe's Anti-Torture Committee criticized the Czech Republic for surgically castrating sex offenders. The committee called it, "invasive, irreversible and mutilating."

Comment: Can a sex offender still have sex after surgery?
...
How can someone who's been castrated still commit rape?

He can still have an erection. In general, castrated men experience a much-diminished sex drive, because their bodies have very low levels of the male hormone testosterone. This lowers the frequency, strength, and duration of erections, and can cause hot flashes, vertigo, loss of body hair, and breast growth. But depending on the individual, it may be possible for him to become aroused and even to ejaculate, although his erection may be modest and there won't be any sperm in his semen. Even if a castrated man can't maintain an erection, he can temporarily reverse the effect by taking testosterone. Also, rapists aren't necessarily driven by sexual desire; a lower sex drive won't prevent attacks that are motivated by a desire for power.

Surgical castration, also called orchiectomy, involves the physical removal of the testicles, which produce 95 percent of a man's testosterone. However, the small amount still produced by the adrenal glands could be enough to allow some sexual function to remain. According to one study from the 1960s of about 1,000 German sex offenders who had been castrated, 65 percent men immediately felt their libido plummet, but 18 percent were able to have sex 20 years later. Based on the small amount of data that exist on this subject, it appears between zero and 10 percent of sexual offenders who are surgically castrated repeat their crime.



People

Don't shoot the messenger: If you don't warn the people, their blood could be on your hands

Apocalyptic
Why are so few voices warning the people about what is coming? We stand at the door of a period of distress that will be unlike anything that any of us have ever known before. And even though the signs are all around us, very few individuals appear to be willing to stand up and sound the alarm.

Instead, there seems to be a large number of people that are quite eager to criticize the watchmen. Earlier today, I was having a conversation with a very prominent voice in the alternative media, and we were reflecting on this. There are so many individuals out there that love to shoot arrows at those that are sounding the alarm, and yet they are doing so little to make a difference themselves.

Arrow Down

Monsanto's dirty dealings — chemical reform bill could grant the evil empire legal immunity for PCB pollution

Monsanto
Facing a surge in lawsuits across the United States, chemical giant Monsanto has been given a gift of sorts from the government — one that could let the corporation off the hook for its role in decades of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) pollution, effectively saving the company millions of dollars in settlements.

Pay no mind to research that demonstrates PCBs are exceptionally toxic to humans, wildlife and the environment. Also turn a blind eye to the fact that Monsanto knew for decades the chemical was extremely poisonous. And ignore that the corporation not only continued to manufacture the chemical after recognizing its toxicity, but decided it was a good idea to dump tonnes of raw PCBs into a creek adjacent to the chemical plant, essentially poisoning an entire community over the course of 40 years. For the grand finale, lets add a provision into a chemical reform bill, which protects Monsanto from lawsuits concerning said PCB contamination.

Comment: See more: Inside the church of pro-GMO activism: Genetic engineering, twisted science & altered truth