Society's ChildS


Oscar

Want to laugh?: Hollande honors Saudi crown prince for 'fighting terrorism and extremism' with Legion d'Honneur


Middle East Eye
Sun, 06 Mar 2016 16:02 UTC
Francois Hollande greets Mohammed bin Nayef in Paris on Friday
© AFPFrancois Hollande greets Mohammed bin Nayef in Paris on Friday
President Francois Hollande has awarded the Legion d'Honneur, France's highest honour, to visiting Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the president's office confirmed on Sunday.

The office had released no statement on the visit that took place Friday, but it was reported by the Saudi news agency SPA, which said Nayef was cited for his "efforts in the fight against terrorism and extremism".

A Hollande aide said Nayef, who is the Saudi interior minister, received the honour as a "foreign individual, a common protocol practice," noting that Hollande himself received Saudi Arabia's top honour during one of his visits there.


Comment: So its essentially meaningless? They're giving each other top door prize medals for selling and buying boatloads of arms to each other?


Bilateral ties are strong, sealed by major arms deals as well as Riyadh's participation in the fight against the Islamic State (IS) group.

Comment: What a bunch of sycophantic, hypocritical, and despicable criminals.

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Attention

'Japan's existence was at stake': Fukushima meltdown almost prompted Tokyo evacuation


RT
Sun, 06 Mar 2016 00:31 UTC
Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Okuma town, Fukushima prefecture, Japan February 10, 2016
© Toru Hanai / ReutersFukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Okuma town, Fukushima prefecture, Japan February 10, 2016
The fate of Japan hung on a "paper-thin margin" due to the government's inadequate performance and the unprofessionalism of TEPCO's executives after the Fukushima nuclear meltdown in 2011, which almost caused the evacuation of 50 million people.

Total chaos in operations and decision making reigned at the highest level in Tokyo, when the 2011 earthquake and tsunami forced the meltdown of three nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, Naoto Kan, a former Japanese prime minister told The Daily Telegraph ahead of the fifth anniversary of the tragedy.

Comment: Doesn't seem like the Japanese leaders have learned much from this disaster, like maybe eating some crow and making friends with their closest neighbor, China. They'll be needing somewhere to evacuate those 50 million people one day. For more information:

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Family

The Orwellian destruction of language is happening right now


Truthstream Media
Sat, 05 Mar 2016 19:11 UTC
destruction of words
We're socially engineering generations of mentally neutered, entitled, self-centered adult children who can only get angry at inconsequential bullshit instead of critically thinking about what's really wrong with the world happening all around them. Part of this includes the PC destruction of language for not being "inclusive" enough, turning otherwise harmless words into weapons of mass distraction. The entire reason for Orwell's destruction of language was to literally narrow the person's ability to think certain thoughts. It's beyond thought crime, and it's happening right here, right now. Doesn't matter what year your calendar says, it's 1984.

Comment: For more on this madness see:

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Nuke

Greenpeace report on Fukushima: 'Forests cannot be decontaminated', mutations abound


Yahoo News
Fri, 04 Mar 2016 18:04 UTC
radiation detector
Conservation group Greenpeace warned on Friday that the environmental impact of the Fukushima nuclear crisis five years ago on nearby forests is just beginning to be seen and will remain a source of contamination for years to come.

The March 11, 2011 magnitude 9.0 undersea earthquake off Japan's northeastern coast sparked a massive tsunami that swamped cooling systems and triggered reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

Radiation spread over a wide area and forced tens of thousands of people from their homes -- many of whom will likely never return -- in the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl in 1986.

Comment: See also:

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Arrow Up

Furious Judge throws out case against a homeless man begging for 10 pence

Kerry-Anne Mendoza
The Canary
Fri, 04 Mar 2016 15:10 UTC
Homeless Man
A furious Judge has thrown out the case of a homeless man arrested for begging just 10 pence, saying it is 'not in the interest of justice' to proceed with a prosecution.

Ashley Hackett is a familiar face among the homeless community of Brighton, East Sussex. The 34-year-old is one of around 90 people who sleep rough in the seaside town on an average night, a figure that is on the rise. But while services to support people who find themselves in poverty and unable to find shelter are being cut, Sussex Police have launched a plainclothes sting operation that is responsible for jailing at least one homeless person a week.

As per the usual sting, one plainclothes officer (PC Andrew Platt), and an un-uniformed off-duty officer (Sergeant Richard Siggs) approached Ashley Hackett on the Western Road, and arrested him for asking a passerby for 10 pence.

The case of Ashley Hackett was picked up by local and national campaigners as the perfect example of the wrong-headed approach to dealing with poverty, addiction and homelessness in UK cities. More than 30,000 people signed a petition demanding the charges against Ashley Hackett be dropped. This produced additional media attention and even a debate in parliament.

Comment: Criminalizing poverty and homelessness is antithetical to any sort of sensible approach to actually dealing with the issues involved. Thankfully, there are other more sensible and effective approaches to helping keep people off the street:

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Water

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


RT
Sun, 06 Mar 2016 04:40 UTC
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

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Yoda

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

Matt Agorist
Free Thought Project
Sat, 05 Mar 2016 00:00 UTC
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?

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Books

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

Ray Williams
psychologytoday.com
Sat, 07 Jun 2014 14:57 UTC
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.


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Fire

Pasadena Texas oil refinery blast: At least one injured


Sputnik
Sat, 05 Mar 2016 21:19 UTC
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.
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Bad Guys

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


Sputnik
Sat, 05 Mar 2016 22:29 UTC
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.

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