Society's ChildS


Handcuffs

Police detain man who threatened to blow up entire block in East London


RT
Wed, 21 Aug 2019 16:20 UTC
london police
© Facebook / Metropolitan Police Service
It took police around three hours to defuse a "critical incident" in a suburban neighborhood in East London after a man barricaded himself inside a flat and threatened to blow up the building.

Residents residing in Earlsdown House in Barking have been told to return to their flats after police managed to detain a male suspect who threatened to burn down an entire block.

Police began clearing the building of residents at around 10.20pm local time after a man barricaded himself on the 7th floor of the 12-story tower block, threatening to "blow the flat up and burn the block down."

The force spent the next few hours negotiating the surrender of the suspect as the fire department and ambulances stood by. By 1:30 am, everything was cleared. "The male has been safely detained by police and is now receiving medical attention," Barking and Dagenham Police said in a tweet, without providing further details.
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Eye 1

First they came for the bots: US academics make case for 1984-style silencing of any dissent

Helen Buyniski
RT
Wed, 21 Aug 2019 16:15 UTC
fake news
© AFP / Miguel Schincariol
With the "Russian meddling" theory of Trump's victory on life support heading into 2020, US academic researchers have heeded the patriotic call and put forth a new definition of "disinformation" that includes inconvenient truths.

Social media platforms must expand their definitions of "coordinated inauthentic behavior" beyond the usual bots-and-trolls model to include conversations about topics harmful to the state if they hope to curb the spread of disinformation on their platforms, a trio of University of Washington researchers insist in a paper released ahead of the 2019 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. To help in this quest, the researchers have redefined "disinformation" to include truths arranged to serve a purpose.
Evaluating disinformation is less about the truth value of one or more pieces of information and more about how those pieces fit together to serve a particular purpose.
Such an Orwellian redefinition would include the lion's share of journalism, especially opinion journalism, and sure enough, the researchers have their knives out for those who become "unwitting agents" in the spread of disinfo by writing based on anonymous tips - otherwise known as "reporting."
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Cult

Flashback Reporter whose research into Savile pedophile network was censored by BBC drops dead of sudden stroke

Paul Revoir
The Sun, UK
Sat, 19 Aug 2017 12:14 UTC
The investigative journalist left the public broadcaster in 2013 after bosses closed her investigation into Jimmy Savile

liz mackean
© Getty
Former BBC reporter Liz MacKean has died of a stroke - aged 52.

Her 2011 Newsnight report exposing Jimmy Savile's sex abuse was shelved by BBC bosses, sparking a huge row and the resignation of the director general.

The decision to drop the report sparked one of the biggest crises in the corporation's history causing the director general to resign.

MacKean left the broadcaster in 2013 following the row. She felt uncomfortable about the "ongoing coldness" towards her over the scandal and took voluntary redundancy.

Mum-of-two MacKean left the BBC in 2013 to join Channel 4's Dispatches.

BBC director of news James Harding said: "In Northern Ireland, she won the trust of all sides and produced some of the most insightful and hard-hitting reporting of the conflict.

"It was as an investigative reporter that she really shone, shining a light on issues from the dumping of toxic waste off the African coast to Jimmy Savile, the story for which she is probably best known."

Comment: MacKean wasn't the first high-profile female BBC reporter to die suddenly when exposing the high-level pedophile network linked to the BBC. Jill Dando was shot to death on her doorstep just over a decade earlier, in 1999. That crime remains 'unsolved'.

Murdered presenter tried to expose pedophile culture within BBC but 'No one wanted to know'

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Sherlock

The Chinese company that sold fentanyl ingredients into the US

Ben Westhoff
The Atlantic
Sun, 18 Aug 2019 12:00 UTC
Yuancheng
© Ben WesthoffYuancheng's headquarters in Wuhan, China
Ye Chuan Fa works in a cubicle. His small station is indistinguishable from those of the hundreds of employees at his chemical company, Yuancheng, which translates roughly to "extended success." Founded in 2001, Yuancheng employs about 700 people and has branch offices all over China.

While most of his workers appear to be in their 20s, Ye is in his 60s, thin with a sagging face. He's a self-professed workaholic. "I get sick the minute I stop working," he said in a 2007 Wuhan Morning News profile, which also referenced his great wealth without putting a number on it. His main focus today is Yuancheng, which sells chemicals both to the general public and to other businesses. It offers more than 10,000 different compounds, a vast and head-scratching list, everything from food additives (including synthetic versions of cinnamon) to pharmaceuticals (including the drugs used in Viagra and Cialis) to collagen, pesticides, veterinary products, anabolic steroids, and precursor chemicals used to synthesize drugs, including fentanyl.

Comment: See also:

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Biohazard

US chemical spill kills hundreds of fish, beaches closed - ArcelorMittal waited 3 days before they told the City


Sputnik
Tue, 20 Aug 2019 21:57 UTC
chemical spill
© Screenshot/Courtesy of Portage Indiana Municipal Page
Parts of the Indiana Dunes National Park, including some beaches, have been closed after a steel plant's recent chemical spill sent cyanide and ammonia into the east branch of the Little Calumet River, near Lake Michigan.

In a statement released Friday, the steel and mining company responsible for the spill, ArcelorMittal, said the incident was caused by its steelmaking plant in Burns Harbor, Indiana, after the plant's blast furnace water recirculation system experienced a failure.

"This isolated event resulted in the release of wastewater containing elevated levels of ammonia and cyanide," the statement reads, also noting that ArcelorMittal accepts responsibility for the incident and is currently working with state and federal regulatory agencies to prevent similar accidents from taking place in the future.

Comment: See also: 'Mystery' chemical incident leaves people vomiting at Worthing pier, UK

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Info

Pepe the Frog has emerged as the face of the Hong Kong protests

Nicole Einbinder
Insider
Wed, 21 Aug 2019 00:00 UTC
hong kong protesters pepe the frog
© Billy H.C. Kwok/Getty ImagesProtesters gather next to graffiti of "Pepe the Frog", outside the Central Government complex after a march during a demonstration on August 18, 2019 in Hong Kong, China.
Pepe the Frog is getting an image makeover this summer.

The cartoon frog with the bulging eyes and wide smile has, for years, been associated with America's alt-right — a symbol of racism and hate as the country continues to grow more divided. In 2016, Pepe the Frog was officially listed as a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League, as the character gained prominence on sites like 4chan and became increasingly associated with anti-Semitism and bigotry.


Comment: The Western press, along with the ADL, the SPLC and any number of other leftist organizations, have never understood Pepe the Frog. Pepe is a meme, used by thousands, if not millions of people for any number of jokes or political commentaries. Just because a small percentage (vanishingly small at that) of memes featuring Pepe are used by the alt right doesn't make the meme itself alt right. If the alt right started featuring Superman in their memes, would that make Superman alt right?


Matt Furie, the artist behind Pepe the Frog, went so far as to "kill off" his creation in a 2017 comic strip, in an attempt to rebuke the far-right's transformation of the character. In a Time magazine essay, Furie wrote that "a once peaceful frog-dude from my comic book," was morphed by racists and anti-Semites into "an icon of hate." He concluded the essay arguing that "I, the creator, say that Pepe is love."

Comment: Here's Jordan Peterson talking to Joe Rogan about the wider implications of the Pepe meme:

See also:

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Red Flag

SOTT Focus: Conspiracy Theories From The Elders of Zion to Epstein's Youngsters

Gilad Atzmon
gilad.online
Wed, 21 Aug 2019 07:44 UTC
conspiracy theory epstein 9/11
Following Jeffrey Epstein's alleged suicide last week we have been deluged by a tsunami of narratives that do not adhere to the shifting official reports of his death. Presumably a few of the intimate secrets of the most powerful people on this planet will be buried with Epstein. While it is rational to believe that people powerful enough to impoverish continents or launch world wars that kill tens of millions could easily arrange the death of a single registered sex criminal in a NY prison cell, anyone who advanced such a scenario, however plausible, was immediately denounced as a 'conspiracy theorist.'


Comment: As with 9/11 and Russiagate, Epstein's 'suicide' is yet another instance where the official story is the whackiest tinfoil hat conspiracy theory of all. This essentially proves that the term has no actual explanatory power other than to identify and smear theories that are not sanctioned by the 'reality-creators'.

See also:

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Arrow Down

Although confidence in colleges is in decline, young Americans still trust profs more than police, military

Celine Ryan
Campus Reform
Tue, 20 Aug 2019 20:22 UTC
college library books
American adults have a rapidly declining opinion of the value of a college education, but young Americans still trust college professors more than the police, military, and religious leaders.

Data released Monday by Pew Research Center reveals that the perceived value of a college education is declining among American adults. This comes just days after a separate Pew Research study revealed that American adults under the age of 30 trust college professors more than religious leaders, military personnel, and police.

According to the recent study, while most adults indicate they believe a college education is valuable, only half say that American colleges and universities are positively impacting the country. In fact, more and more Americans are signaling the exact opposite, with 38 percent stating that institutions of higher education are actually having a negative effect on society, a figure that has increased by 12 percent in just the last seven years.

This 12 percent increase can be attributed almost entirely to adults who identify as Republican or right-leaning independents. In just the past four years, the number of Republican or Republican-leaning adults who believe colleges are negatively impacting the country jumped from just 37 percent to an overwhelming 59 percent. Democrats' answers to the same question have shown little to no change.
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Display

Twitter's advertising ban of 'state-controlled' news is ideologically motivated and anti-democratic

Neil Clarke
RT
Tue, 20 Aug 2019 13:14 UTC
Twitter
The news that Twitter is to ban 'state-controlled news media entities' from advertising on its platforms raises several worrying concerns which urgently need to be addressed.

Repeat after me (with robotic hand movements): "state-controlled news media entities bad; 'state-subsidised' 'private' news media entities good!"

This seems to be the logic that Twitter is working from in light of its announcement on Monday.

The move seems to be a reaction to criticism of the social media platform for accepting advertising buys from the Chinese press agency Xinhua, which has been critical of the anti-government protesters in Hong Kong.

But underlying the new policy is some very muddled thinking. The premise seems to be that 'state-controlled news media entities' are inherently biased, and so should have their social media activities curbed whereas as 'privately-controlled' media entities aren't. It elevates the 'state' as the most powerful actor there is.

Comment: Twitter is becoming progressively more biased by the day and, ironically, seems like IT is being controlled by the worst elements of the US state propaganda machine.

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Car Black

Thousands of unsold new cars are abandoned and left to rot in lots around the world


Epic Dash
Tue, 20 Aug 2019 21:48 UTC
unsold new cars
Acres of unsold new cars in Port of Sheerness in Kent, England.
This is insane

This is what the car manufacturers DON'T want you to see. Since overproduction peaked in 2009, thousands of cars have been left in lots to waste away. Many of these photos go back to just post-recession, yet the problem of surplus still exists today.

People are not buying new cars at the rate they were pre-recession. How many families do you know who boast a new car every year? Thus, millions of brand-new are left to die in parking lots.
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