Society's ChildS


Stock Down

South African agricultural bank warns land confiscation could trigger defaults costing economy $2.8 billion


RT
Wed, 22 Aug 2018 07:50 UTC
Vineyards Stellenbosch South Africa
© Mike Hutchings / ReutersVineyards sit beneath hills at a farm near Stellenbosch, South Africa
Seizing privately-owned land without compensation could be costly for the South African economy. The government would be forced to bail out banks as farmers stop investing and paying off debts, warns state-owned Land Bank.

The government's new decree on land reform could trigger defaults that would cost the economy 41 billion rand ($2.8 billion) if the bank's rights as a creditor are not protected, according to the lender. Land Bank is an agricultural bank guided by a government mandate to provide financial services to the commercial farming sector and agri-business.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa announced this month that his government is enforcing a change in the constitution to allow the expropriation of land without compensation. According to the ruling Africa National Congress party (ANC), the white minority in the country still own most of the land more than two decades after the end of apartheid.

The ANC wants to redistribute the land confiscated from white farmers to the black citizens of the country. Land Bank chairman Arthur Moloto said expropriation without compensation would immediately cost the bank 9 billion rand (about $620 million).

Comment: The ANC appears determined to get the results it wants but it's likely it will get more than it bargained for in terms of economic and societal disruption:

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Heart - Black

Georgia cop suspended for allegedly kidnapping and raping 15y.o. girl, then stalking her at the hospital

Matt Agorist
The Free Thought Project
Tue, 21 Aug 2018 00:00 UTC
cop abuse teenager
A disturbing case of police sexual misconduct has been reported out of Georgia this week involving the alleged kidnapping of a 15-year-old girl, her sexual assault which lasted for hours, and stalking and intimidation at the hospital after the girl sought treatment for the injuries sustained during the abuse.

According to Thomas Reynolds, an attorney for the family, the cop stalked the 15-year-old girl after her and her friends left a Waffle House. Reynolds said the group of teens then stopped at Sykes Park in East Point.

When the cop approached the group, he told the three friends with the girl to leave while keeping her, according to Reynolds. The cop said he was detaining the girl because she was out after curfew.

According to the attorney, the officer then took the young girl to the Village Highlands apartment complex and sexually assaulted her for hours. Before he finally brought the girl home, the officer had kept her for a total three hours, according to Reynolds.

"She just broke down and was crying," the girl's mother told Channel 2 Investigative Reporter Mark Winne.
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Newspaper

Trump: "I would rather have fake news than have anybody - including liberals, socialists, anything - stopped and censored."


RT
Wed, 22 Aug 2018 13:02 UTC
Trump
© Leah Millis / Reuters
Despite being constantly at odds with liberal mainstream media - often calling them 'fake news' - Donald Trump has told his supporters that even having to tolerate CNN is a much better alternative to censorship.

Talking to his supporters at a rally in Charleston, West Virginia, President Trump firmly warned them against embracing censorship of opposite viewpoints no matter how much opposite they are.
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Black Magic

Majority of Russians believe "secret groups" are conspiring to undermine their 'traditional values'

Tyler Durden
Zero Hedge
Wed, 22 Aug 2018 11:22 UTC
Majority Of Russians Believe
© EPA via Al JazeeraMajority Of Russians Believe "Secret Groups" Conspiring To Undermine Their 'Traditional Values'
No, this isn't necessarily about 'Russiagate' or NATO encroachment per se, but a new poll has found that almost two-thirds of Russians surveyed believe there's an organized plot afoot to undermine their traditional national values and society.

Recently the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTSIOM) published the results of a survey of 2,000 Russians which suggests the majority of the Russian public believes there's a broad anti-Russian conspiracy targeting the 'old values' - namely things like family, heterosexual monogamy, and patriotic history.

Comment:

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Bizarro Earth

What about his Italian? Jamie Oliver is accused of 'cultural appropriation' over Jamaican jerk rice


RT
Wed, 22 Aug 2018 11:03 UTC
Jamie Oliver
© Henry Browne/REUTERS
After Jamie Oliver was accused of cultural appropriation by a Labour MP over his 'Punchy Jerk Rice' product, supporters leapt to his defence, one man admitting he cooked a 'Lancashire hotpot' despite not hailing from Lancashire.

TV chef Oliver, famous for his documentary series highlighting the poor nutritional value of British school dinners, was probably hoping that his microwavable jerk rice would go down a treat with the general public.

But Labour MP Dawn Butler led a salvo of outrage against the TV chef by accusing him of appropriating Jamaican culture in his new business venture. She also asked if he really knew about traditional Jamaican jerk, which is a cooking style where meat is rubbed and marinated with a mixture of spices.

Comment:

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Stock Down

Paul Craig Roberts: The EU and IMF genocide of Greece and the media coverup


paulcraigroberts.org
Tue, 21 Aug 2018 12:00 UTC
greece imf
The political and media coverup of the genocide of the Greek Nation began yesterday (August 20) with European Union and other political statements announcing that the Greek Crisis is over. What they mean is that Greece is over, dead, and done with. It has been exploited to the limit, and the carcas has been thrown to the dogs.

350,000 Greeks, mainly the young and professionals, have fled dead Greece. The birth rate is far below the rate necessary to sustain the remaining population. The austerity imposed on the Greek people by the EU, the IMF, and the Greek government has resulted in the contraction of the Greek economy by 25%. The decline is the equivalent of America's Great Depression, but in Greece the effects were worst. President Franklin D. Roosevelt softened the impact of massive unemployment with the Social Security Act other elements of a social safety net such as deposit insurance, and public works programs, whereas the Greek government following the orders from the IMF and EU worsened the impact of massive unemployment by stripping away the social safety net.

Traditionally, when a sovereign country, whether by corruption, mismanagement, bad luck, or unexpected events, found itself unable to repay its debts, the country's creditors wrote down the debts to the level that the indebted country could service.

Comment: Greece was probably a test case to see how brazen the financial institutions could be without their being all out civil unrest. Similar robbery of public wealth is happening elsewhere, like the UK, where under guise of 'austerity', public services have been decimated, the economy has gone into freefall, and homelessness and poverty have skyrocketed:




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Cut

2 men sentenced to death for gang-raping and slitting throat of 8 year old girl in India


RT
Wed, 22 Aug 2018 03:54 UTC
Mandsaur rape case
© Stringer via ReutersFILE PHOTO: Police officers escort one of the accused in Mandsaur rape case
Two men convicted of abducting, sexually assaulting and attempting to kill an eight-year-old girl in Mandsaur district of India have been sentenced to death under the country's newly toughened anti-rape legislation.

It took less than two months for the Special Investigation Team of the prosecutor to build a case against Irfan Mewati, 20, and Asif Mewati, 24, and to prove without a reasonable doubt that, on June 26, the pair brutally raped and tortured a schoolgirl before attempting to slit her throat.

The 350-page case, based on 92 witness testimonies and over 100 pieces of evidence, including CCTV footage and DNA samples, was enough for Sessions Judge Nisha Gupta in Mandsaur to sentence the duo to death, under the revised Indian Penal Code and under relevant provisions of the Protection of Children against Sexual Offences Act, which mandates capital punishment for persons committing rape on victims under 12 years of age.

Comment: India needs to look at what is so rotten within its society that horrors like this are such a regular occurrence:

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Padlock

Facebook has a secret "user-reputation score" and you don't get to know what it is

Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge
Tue, 21 Aug 2018 07:49 UTC
facebook
In a hideous reflection of China's already-prevalent 'Social Credit' system - which is a rating assigned to each citizen based on government data regarding their economic and social status - The Washington Post reports that Facebook has begun to assign its users a reputation score, predicting their trustworthiness on a scale from zero to one.

Under the guise of its effort to combat 'fake news', WaPo notes (citing an interview with Tessa Lyons, the product manager who is in charge of fighting misinformation) that the previously unreported ratings system, which Facebook has developed over the last year, has evolved to include measuring the credibility of users to help identify malicious actors.

Users' trustworthiness score between zero and one isn't meant to be an absolute indicator of a person's credibility, Lyons told the publication, nor is there is a single unified reputation score that users are assigned.

"One of the signals we use is how people interact with articles," Lyons said in a follow-up email.
"For example, if someone previously gave us feedback that an article was false and the article was confirmed false by a fact-checker, then we might weight that person's future false news feedback more than someone who indiscriminately provides false news feedback on lots of articles, including ones that end up being rated as true."

Comment: RT also reports:
[...]

Lyons said the ratings are not meant to be "an absolute indicator" of credibility, but that it is merely "one measurement among thousands of new behavioral clues" used by Facebook to understand individual behavior, which is hardly any more comforting.


The Facebook rating system was quickly compared online to the invasive "social credit" system being developed by the Chinese government which will become mandatory from 2020 and will use social media to analyse the online habits of its citizens, giving each a score. Under that system, individual citizens' scores will even be used to determine whether they can take out a loan or use public transport.

Asked to divulge any of the other indicators Facebook uses to rate users' credibility beyond how they interact with articles, Lyons declined, saying that it could lead to the system being gamed.

But concerns abound over Facebook's ability to properly determine what constitutes 'fake news' and credibility on its platform and what does not. The platform has been criticized, for example, over its teaming up with the Atlantic Council think tank, which is funded by a number of NATO governments and arms manufacturers, as part of its efforts to fight inauthentic content.

The social media giant was forced to restore one of the pages belonging to Latin American news channel Telesur last week, after uproar followed an unexplained deletion of the page.
See also:

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Pirates

Thought-enders: 3 terms currently being used to trigger a stop in critical thinking

Sigmund Fraud
Waking Times
Thu, 16 Aug 2018 00:00 UTC
critical thinking
It's a strange world of newspeak we live in. What was once a society devoted to logic and progress is now being herded in echo chambers of thought control and anti-critical thinking. Without the ability to examine an issue impartially and completely there is little hope of maintaining liberty and freedom, as history repeatedly demonstrated.

Today, we find that thinking is a diminishing art, and in its place, sound bites and stop-thought terms are used to put the brakes on the mind. These terms are widely used as signals to prevent minds from looking too deeply at a topic or issue.
"Thinking critically means making reasoned judgments that are logical and well thought out. It is a way of thinking in which one doesn't simply accept all arguments and conclusions to which one is exposed without questioning the arguments and conclusions. It requires curiosity, skepticism and humility. People who use critical thinking are the ones who say things such as, "How do you know that?" "Is this conclusion based on evidence or gut feelings?" and "Are there alternative possibilities when given new pieces of information?"" [Source]
The three terms most widely used today to this avail are detailed below.
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Eye 2

Syrian jihadists refuse offer of dialogue, begin preparations for offensive against govt troops


Sputnik
Wed, 22 Aug 2018 01:27 UTC
jihadists syria
© Reuters / Ammar AbdullahFighters of the Syrian Islamist rebel group Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, the former al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, ride on a pick-up truck in the 1070 Apartment Project area in southwestern Aleppo, Syria August 5, 2016
The leadership of radical groups in Syria openly declares the preparation for an offensive against Syrian government forces and refuses to hold any sort of dialogue on political settlement, Maj. Gen. Alexei Tsygankov, head of the Russian Center for Syrian Reconciliation, said Tuesday.

"The command of 'National Liberation Army' [Organization for the Liberation of the Levant, formerly Jabhat Fateh al-Sham or the Nusra Front, a terror group outlawed in Russia] 'National Front for the Liberation of Syria' and 'National Front for Liberation' openly declares preparations for an offensive against government forces and rejects any dialogue on political settlement of the conflict," Tsygankov said at a briefing.
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