Society's ChildS


Rocket

NASA rocket bound for International Space Station explodes just seconds after takeoff

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An unmanned rocket exploded shortly after takeoff Tuesday evening on Virginia's eastern shore. Orbital Sciences' Antares rocket was carrying thousands of pounds of equipment to restock the International Space Station.

The launch was supposed to be the third of eight planned Orbital missions to ferry gear and food to astronauts aboard the ISS. The rocket had some 5,000 pounds of food, supplies and science experiments, which all were engulfed in a fireball just above NASA's Wallop's Island facility.


House

Here's why US home ownership rate dropped to 1983 levels

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The last time US home ownership declined down to 64.4% (which the Census Bureau just reported is what US home ownership declined to from 64.7% in Q2), was back in the fourth quarter of 1983.
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It goes without saying that this is about the bearishest news possible for those few who still believe in the American home ownership dream.

Of course, those who have been following real-time rental market trends would be all too aware there is no rebound coming to the home ownership rate. The reason is simple: increasingly fewer can afford to buy, instead having no choice but to rent, which in turn has pushed the median asking rent to record highs. In fact in the past two quarters, the asking rent was just $10 shy of its all time highs at $756 per month.

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But capital allocation preferences aside, while explaining the disparity between rental and home ownership in a world where Renting is the new American Dream, what the charts above don't explain is why there is no incremental demand from all those millions of young Americans who enter the population and, eventually, the workforce. At least on paper.

Comment: This article clearly shows how the current economic conditions are unsustainable and cannot continue without a serious reset of some kind.


Handcuffs

Hunger will tame the fiercest animals: Engineered poverty in the UK

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© Matt Kenyon
What would you do to keep your baby from starving? Perhaps the same as Lucy Hill. At the start of October, the 35-year-old mother from Kidderminster was broke. After missing an interview at the jobcentre, her disability benefits had been stopped - which left her, her partner and her toddler of 18 months without anything to live on. So she went to the local Spar and stole a chicken and some soap powder.

Two weeks later, Hill was up before the magistrate. Her police interview noted that she said "sorry to the shop ... but had no money ... and was in a desperate situation". She was ordered to pay compensation, a fine, costs and a surcharge: a total of over £200 to be taken off someone who'd only committed a crime because she had no money. Her solicitor John Rogers remembers that the mother's chief worry was that the social services might find out and take away her baby.

After running me through the details, Rogers sighs. Cases like this keep coming his way, he says: "They miss an appointment so their benefits are sanctioned [docked or stopped altogether], so they have no money, so they steal." His local office now handles "at least half a dozen" such cases each month - up from almost nothing a year ago.

He's just one lawyer in one post-industrial town, describing a national policy: of starving the poor into committing crime. Nothing is accidental about this regime.

Pistol

'A cop tried to kill my dog last night': Tales from the police state

police chase
Why bother sharing stories about police shooting our pets? I hear: Aren't these just a few isolated incidents from a few bad eggs? Shouldn't people learn to keep their pets safe - it's the owners' fault. It's just incompetence and paranoia... Officers need more training to handle dogs! Pass a law for training! They shoot people too, of course they would shoot dogs... By highlighting these acts of terror you are further propagating fear...

What prompted those concepts?

Did it ever occur to the folks above that the very problem lies in the training? Although I only suspected, but could never provide concrete evidence for, the idea that officers are specifically trained and encouraged to shoot or kill pets (outside of SWAT raids where they are unfortunately always the first casualty) - a few incidents point in that direction.

First, do you remember the officer who was shot and killed after he tried to shoot a homeowner's dogs? He was instructed to do so by the police chief. (See the Daily Mail link therein)

Comment: True. It's not incompetence nor a lack of training. (What type of sick person needs training to know that killing family pets is wrong?) Could it be that police work attracts psychopaths who enjoy wielding power over others?


Arrow Down

Exhibiting no symptoms, New Jersey woman forcibly quarantined in 'prison-like' conditions

Kaci Hickox
© Steven J. HymanKaci Hickox in quarantine.
Newark - A humanitarian worker says she is being detained against her will and "treated like a criminal" after selflessly working to provide health care to the people of Africa. The quarantined nurse has not tested positive for any disease and has exhibited no symptoms of illness.

Kaci Hickox, 33, recently returned from the West African nation of Sierra Leone, part of an assignment from Doctors Without Borders to help the poverty and disease stricken natives deal with the recent ebola outbreak.

What she returned home to in the USA, she said that she "would not wish on anyone."

Ms. Hickox said that even though she tested negative for ebola and never felt ill, she was forcibly detained by armed police and state health workers and confined as part of a mandatory quarantine instituted by Governor Chris Christie.

The "prison-like" treatment has included locking her in an unheated tent in a parking lot, without a flushing toilet, while being deprived of legal counsel.

When Ms. Hickox first arrived at Newark International Airport from Sierra Leone, a federal agent smiled at her and told her, "No problem. They are probably going to ask you a few questions."

Black Magic

Brainwashing methods designed to promote acceptance of the coming genocide

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© © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc.Scene from the classic 1962 film, 'The Manchurian Candidate' where behavior modification through operant and classical conditioning is employed to create a mind-controlled assassin. The brain-washing process depicted is more overt than this article's descriptions, but the dynamics are the same.
Americans have been conditioned to lose the war for freedom through a set of psychological techniques designed to brainwash an entire nation and promote the belief that there could never be any such thing as a conspiracy theory. This all starts with controlling the mechanisms that dispense the "truth" about today's world.

The Corporate Controlled Media

Six, count them six corporations control 98% of the media. They virtually control everything you read, see and hear. These six corporations are intertwined with controlling forces of big oil, the military industrial complex, the Federal Reserve and Wall Street. They control who gets elected through campaign donations and more importantly, they have brainwashed an entire nation to accept serfdom at the hands of their corporate masters.

The corporate controlled media uses specific psychological techniques to control. This article is a brief example of how the nation is brainwashed to question the abject criminality coming out of Washington DC.

Comment: Actually seeing how all of this is true, and how we have been subject to different types of mind-control for most of our lives is the first step in freeing one's mind, and learning to think critically about what we are being told. Once that is done, one has to get over or process the sheer magnitude of lies that have been fed to us through the media, religion, government, education, etc. It's a huge endeavor, but we at SOTT believe that working to live in truth is worth the effort. Indeed, what hope is there for humanity unless people come together to do this.


Bad Guys

Indiana town moves to seize over 350 homes to make room for private developer

 resident mows his lawn
© FacebookA resident mows his lawn in the Pleasant Ridge neighborhood of Charlestown, Indiana.
Charlestown , Indiana - A town is working to "demolish a working-class neighborhood" by seizing 354 homes and passing the land off to a private commercial developer. Using federal dollars and the highly-abused power of eminent domain, the city intends to evict multitudes of families to make way for economic progress.

The community under fire is called "Pleasant Ridge." It contains hundreds of small homes that were built during World War II as military housing. Today the homes are privately-owned and contain working-class and poor families, many of which have owned their homes for decades.

The City of Charlestown intends to demolish the community in order to allow new commercial and residential real estate to be built in its place - privately-owned real estate. The city declared its intentions in June 2014, when it applied to the state for permission to use eminent domain and for $5.3 million in "Hardest Hit Funds," a federal grant program administered through Indiana's Blight Elimination Program (BEP). The land grab might not have been economically feasible if not for being directly subsidized and incentivized by the federal government.

Protests against the looming seizure have persisted for months, and Pleasant Ridge formed its own neighborhood association this summer to coordinate opposition. The government's decision on the project is supposed to be made in November or December.

The perilous power of eminent domain has been in use for as long as governments have existed, but it was traditionally (and constitutionally) constrained to projects involving "public use" of the land. These might have included roads or government facilities.

In 2005, however, the U.S. Supreme Court egregiously ruled that it was "constitutional" for a city to seize homes for the benefit of private developers (see: Kelo v. City of New London). The benefits of "economic development" have been henceforth recognized to trump private property rights in the USA. In other words, people can be involuntarily kicked off land they own free-and-clear, if government bureaucrats believe another private party could use it to bring in more tax revenue for the city.

The City of Charlestown has been further justifying its authoritarian maneuver by claiming that the Pleasant Ridge community is "blighted" and full of drugs, crime, and "transients." Officials claim building retail stores and new homes would be an improvement to Charlestown.

Residents contest these allegations, striking blows at the city's credibility. And, even if the claims were found to contain shades of truth, they would not morally excuse the wholesale violation of any family's right to be secure in their own private property.

Sherlock

Mexico's missing students: Yet another mass grave uncovered

Mass grave Mexico
© AFP Photo / Jesus GuerreroForensic personnel arrive at the scene where a new mass grave has been discovered in a trash dump on the outskirts of Cocula, Guerrero state, Mexico on October 27, 2014.
A new mass grave was uncovered in the same Mexican state as the one found after the September 26 disappearance of 43 students at a protest. The police were led to the site by four arrested gang members.

The news of a suspected fresh grave was shared with local press by a police official not authorized to share details of the new find.

Although Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam announced Monday's arrests at a press conference, news of the fresh mass grave hadn't been made official.

Those arrested are thought to belong to the Guerreros Unidos - the gang connected to the initial disappearances and believed to have ties with the highest echelons of the police force.

According to Murillo Karam, two of the gangsters claimed to have come into contact with a large group of people around the time of the September disappearance. This information is currently being confirmed.

Comment: What hope is there for a country so far advanced into the process of ponerization that the government and police of a state are indistinguishable from local gangs and drug dealers - all of whom have no problem in making dozens of demonstrating students 'disappear'? It seems that the time for Mexico's population to change the situation they are in is long passed, and things will not go anywhere but down.


Pistol

Environmental activist killed as French government stamps on anti-dam protest

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© ReutersA fire burns as riot police clash with opponents of the Sivens dam project in Gaillac
A 21-year-old activist named Remi Fraisse was killed yesterday October 27th during clashes between police and protesters at the site of a controversial dam project near the town of Albi in southwestern France.

Around 2,000 people had attended the protest against the Sivens dam project in woodlands near the city of Albi, about 30kms north east of Toulouse.

Local residents and environmental activists have been protesting against the deforestation of the area for the past couple of months, with some staging hunger strikes. An independent experts' report released on Monday supported the argument of the environmental campaigners by pointing out that the proposed dam was too large for the purposes of irrigating about 20 farms, and that ecological concerns had been neglected.

In a hurry to clear state security forces of any wrongdoing in the death of Fraisse, the French prime minister Manuel Valls said the investigation would 'under no circumstances' investigate allegations that gendarmes instigated the violence during which Remi Fraisse was killed.

The local public prosecutor stated today that 'traces of TNT explosive similar to that found in grenades used by the Gendarmerie' were found on the activist's corpse.
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Protesters across France voiced anger at the death of Remi Fraisse

Whistle

Update: Hunt for killer bear in Poland is cancelled after autopsy discovers its 'victim' had actually been murdered

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Stanislaw Puchala, 61, was found dead with marks of having been mauled by a bear in southern Poland
* Polish man found dead and mauled by a bear in the woods

* Autopsy finds man had been killed before bear attacked the body

* Police in south Poland believes Stanislaw Puchala, 61, was murdered


A bear has escaped by the skin of its teeth after it was found not to be responsible for the killing of a Polish man.

Stanislaw Puchala, 61, was found dead with marks of having been mauled by a bear near the village of Olszanica in the Bieszczady Mountains, southern Poland.

The village hunting party sent out to shoot the bear was called off when an autopsy revealed Mr Puchala had been murdered.