Society's ChildS


Sheriff

Nearly 4 dozen Georgia officers arrested in massive FBI drug sting

corrupt georgia cops
As part of an investigation and crackdown on extensive contraband smuggling, drug dealing, and other criminal activity within the Georgia Department of Corrections, 46 people — mostly current and former corrections officers — were arrested by the FBI on Thursday.

Indictments for those arrested have been handed down over the last three months. So far in the FBI's sting, around 130 people have been taken into custody by authorities, reported local ABC affiliate, WJCL.

U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, John Horn, said the charges represent "staggering corruption within Georgia Department of Corrections institutions."

Comment: The cops don't want drugs out of the prisons, not when there's good money to be made.


House

UK welfare cuts responsible for record high number of home repossessions

US house, home repossession
© Leon Neal / AFP
More than 250 tenants were evicted from their homes for every day in 2015, according to figures released by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ).

The figures, released on Thursday, revealed that 42,728 renting households in England and Wales were evicted by county court bailiffs in 2015, a two percent increase on the previous year and the highest number on record since the MoJ started collecting data on home repossessions in 2000.

Comment:



Phoenix

Patriotism & the transformation of the Russian tradition

Russia Moscow children
The author is a prominent Russian journalist, part-time conservative politician, who coined the term "Russian Spring" during the 2014 anti-putsch movements in the Crimea and Donbass.
The Russian President recently said patriotism is a Russian national ideal. But Russia is a country of paradoxes: pro-Western ideology has been a no less important but much more powerful ideology than patriotism. Westerners thought Russia didn't have the right to exist as an independent nation. Our only job was to self-destruct by dissolving into the West.

Several hundred years ago, patriotism was not an obvious idea in Russia. The political class was divided into radical Westernizers and cowardly ones. Radical Westernizers thought, and still think, that Russia should be occupied by a foreign country. Cowardly ones suggest that if Russia can't be destroyed quickly for historical reasons, they will do so by slowly erasing its identity.

The conflict between pro-Westerners and Patriots is not a conflict over liberty and progress, it's about whether a Russian identity is possible and appropriate.

A patriot is someone who is convinced of Russia's independent historical role. Amazingly, among both Russian intellectuals and bureaucrats they were a minority in the XIX and the XX centuries, forced to stick together in small, close-knit groups, using intrigue to at least partially limit the power of the pro-Western bureaucracy and bypass the influence of the almighty opinion factory.

Handcuffs

Migrant-Phobia: 'Masked gang' of 7 men arrested near a French city for attacking Iraqi refugees

Running migrants
© Pascal Rossignol / Reuters
Seven masked men mostly from Calais have been arrested by French police on suspicion of attacking Iraqi Kurds with iron bars in a nearby refugee camp. The victims were reportedly waiting by the road to board trucks traveling to the UK.

The alleged perpetrators, aged between 22 and 44, are accused of attacking four migrants from the Grande-Synthe migrant camp with a mainly Kurdish population near the town of Dunkirk, in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie region.

According to French media reports, the refugees were waiting by the road, preparing to board vehicles bound for the UK.

Network

Washingtion DC schools posted private data of 12,000 students on public website

private data
© Dado Ruvic / Reuters
For several hours on Tuesday, around 12,000 students in the District of Columbia Public Schools system had their personal information publicly available online. This marks the third time the school district has experienced such a security breach.

It happened by accident, according to an internal memo from the DC Office of the State Superintendent of Education, the Washington Post reported. An office worker uploaded the students' identification numbers, race, age, disabilities, and other sensitive data to a public Dropbox account managed by the DC Council.

"I am deeply disappointed by this situation," state superintendent Hanseul Kang wrote in a letter to colleagues, the Post reported. "Our families deserve to know that their students' personal information is being kept confidential and secure in the education system."

Black Magic

Mexicans worshiping skeletal 'Death Saint' a challenge for Pope

Death Saint Mexico
© Yuri Cortez/Agence France-PresseDevotion to the Grim Reaper-like Santa Muerte (Holy Death) in Mexico is growing fast despite the Vatican's rejection of the figure as blasphemous.
Two weeks after baptizing her at a Catholic church, baby Adriana's parents put her in a white gown again for a second sacrament: This time, with Mexico's skeletal "Death Saint." As they held the sleepy three-month-old child, a priestess sprinkled holy water infused with rose petals on her in front of 300 people under a 22-meter (72-foot) statue of the Grim Reaper-like "Santa Muerte" in a Mexico City suburb.

When Pope Francis arrives in Mexico for a five-day visit on Friday, he will find a country where devotion to Santa Muerte is growing fast despite the Vatican's rejection of the figure as blasphemous.

Comment: Mexican culture has a much healthier relationship to death than its North American neighbors.

Dia de los Muertos, Celebrating the Day of the Dead


Sherlock

Federal investigation underway for Chipotle sabotage

chipotle
© www.thefrisky.com
On Monday, February 8, 2016, Chipotle's two thousand restaurants closed their doors for the day to customers, in order to hold special employee meetings regarding last year's outbreak of E. coli, a bacteria often associated with food poisoning.

You may remember that last year Chipotle was the first restaurant chain to announce that it would phase out the use of genetically modified foods, also known as "G.M.O.'s". Shortly thereafter, and quite mysteriously, an E. coli outbreak was reported, across fourteen states, from Washington to Pennsylvania, and only in Chipotle restaurants. According the "Centers for Disease Control and Prevention" (C.D.C.), the odds of an E. coli outbreak crossing a single state line is only three percent, as restaurants generally buy their produce and meat regionally for freshness. The likelihood of an E. coli outbreak crossing fourteen state lines, coast to coast, is probably a small fraction of one percent. Additionally, as many restaurant chains use produce and meat from the same sources, it is probably a fraction of a fraction of one percent that such a nationwide E. coli outbreak would only affect one restaurant and not any others.

After six months of thorough investigation by the Food and Drug Administration (F.D.A.), the C.D.C., fourteen state and local Health Departments, as well as scientists hired by Chipotle themselves, all have independently concluded that there is not a single traceable source of E. coli from any Chipotle restaurant, in any food ingredient, preparatory surface, or piece of equipment. Literally thousands of individual tests were conducted on the all the foods, on all the kitchen surfaces, and on all the appliances at the suspect Chipotles, and no trace whatsoever of E. coli was found in any restaurant or food ingredient. The C.D.C. being unable to trace the source of a restaurant's food poisoning, after thousands of tests and half a year of effort, has never happened before in the entire history of the organization.

As employees of Chipotle enjoy free meals after a shift, it is also noteworthy to report that Chipotle was the first restaurant chain to announce that it would phase out the use of genetically modified foods, also known as "G.M.O.'s". Shortly thereafter, and quite mysteriously, an E. coli outbreak was reported, across fourteen statesnot a single employee suffered an illness, although customers did. Furthermore, with the advent of precise D.N.A. testing, there were two, specifically different, strains of E. coli discovered, when there should have been just one, though they both "coincidentally" appeared simultaneously in different locations, one type for eleven of the states, and another type for the other three states, the latter being a very rare strain of E. coli, normally found only in food research labs. There was also an additional "coincidence", in that the C.D.C., known through their own interdepartmental memos and former employees as a submissive servant and propaganda arm of the G.M.O. food industry, "just happened" to have federal officers on a "random" visit to the very local Seattle Health Department lab, at the very time, where and when the Chipotle E. coli bacteria was first analyzed, so as to immediately report the incident nationally, even though this was quite the opposite of standard operating procedure, which was suddenly changed in Chipotle's case, as normally the release of information about an outbreak is withheld until an in-depth investigation.

Megaphone

Iranian newscaster speaks out about sexual harassment, emboldens others to break silence

Sheena Shirani/Facebook
© Sheena Shirani/FacebookShirani said there was nobody she could seek help from.
Allegations of sexual harassment at an Iranian TV station are emboldening Iranian women to break their silence and share their experiences of a problem traditionally not acknowledged inside the country.

Sheena Shirani, a news reader at Press TV, the state broadcaster's English language news channel, broke the taboo by speaking out about sexual harassment she says she endured from two of her managers over a prolonged period of time.

Her allegations went public in spectacular fashion when she posted online a recording of a phone conversation in which a man believed to be her boss, Hamid Reza Emadi, repeatedly asks her for sexual favours.

Following the incident Shirani quit her job and left the country and later published the audio file, which has been listened to more than 120,000 times on her Facebook page and an Iranian news site based outside the country. She also shared what appeared to be a screengrab from a text exchange in which Emadi asked her to take the audio down.

Comment: This same sexist and women-denigrating culture can, unfortunately, be seen throughout the world. And in this respect, Iran is certainly not unique - and some other countries most probably far worse:

Ex-Air Force lawyer: Victims of rape in the military face revenge, backlash from superiors for coming forward


Book

Flashback Texas mother teaches textbook company lesson on accuracy

The page in a McGraw-Hill Education geography textbook that refers to Africans brought to American plantations as “workers,” rather than slaves.
© Coby BurrenThe page in a McGraw-Hill Education geography textbook that refers to Africans brought to American plantations as “workers,” rather than slaves.
Coby Burren, 15, a freshman at a suburban high school south of here, was reading the textbook in his geography class last week when a map of the United States caught his attention. On Page 126, a caption in a section about immigration referred to Africans brought to American plantations between the 1500s and 1800s as "workers" rather than slaves.

He reached for his cellphone and sent a photograph of the caption to his mother, Roni Dean-Burren, along with a text message: "we was real hard workers, wasn't we."

Their outrage over the textbook's handling of the nation's history of African-American slavery — another page referred to Europeans coming to America as "indentured servants" but did not describe Africans the same way — touched off a social-media storm that led the book's publisher, McGraw-Hill Education, to vow to change the wording and the school's teachers to use other materials in the class.

Gold Bar

Lines around the block to buy gold in London while banks placing 'unusually large orders'

This is the best quarterly performance for Gold in 30 years...
Gold price chart
And as Mike Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg blog details, physical demand is soaring...
First, let's look at the improved fundamentals. Gold bugs will exasperatingly proclaim that fundamentals have been great for the past four years yet the price plunged anyway, so who cares about fundamentals? To this I would respond with two observations. First, large institutional investors and sovereign wealth funds have been anticipating a rate hike cycle for a very long time now. They didn't know when, but they expected it. The fact that the gold bugs never believed this is irrelevant; what matters is that big money believed it, and it was perceived to be very gold negative. In their minds, this anticipated rate hike cycle would confirm that things were getting back to normal, and if things are normal you don't need to own gold, right?

The problem is that this assumption is quickly being called into question. Sure the Fed hiked rates once, but it is starting to look more and more like a policy error. Meanwhile, other major central banks around the world are going in the opposite direction, toward negative rates. I am a huge believer in market psychology, and the psychology dominating the minds of most institutional investors over the past few years has been that things were slowly getting back to normal. This has weighed on institutional demand for gold in a big way, and been a meaningful factor in the bear market (manipulation aside). If this psychology shifts, the shift back into gold could be very meaningful.

While that backdrop is interesting in its own right, what may make the move into gold that much more explosive is the lack of alternative investments...
- From the February 3, 2016 post: GOLD - It's Time to Pay Attention