Society's ChildS


Stock Down

UK food bank demand up 54% in 2013, during economic "recovery"

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Anything wrong with this picture? Note that things have gotten much worse since 2007.
There has been a dramatic increase in demand for food banks and charitable help in the UK, with more than 20m meals provided in 2013 - a 54% increase on the previous year.

A joint report Monday from Oxfam, Church Action on Poverty and the largest operator of food banks, the Trussell Trust, says that much of the increased demand is coming from poor people in affluent areas including Cheltenham, Welwyn Garden City and the northern part of the Lake District, where some food banks report user numbers doubling or even trebling. The Trussell Trust said it was helping to feed 300,000 children, a situation it described as a national disgrace. The report's authors said the poor were caught in a perfect storm of food prices soaring 43.5 % in the past eight years, while over the same period the disposable annual income of the poorest 20% fell by an average of £936.

Low and stagnant wages, zero-hours contracts, benefit sanctions and energy costs are among the factors driving people into food poverty.

Comment: As government spokesmen spew their completely meaningless words, the people of the real world are still faced with Rising food prices, zero hour contracts, benefit sanctions, and forced labour.


Cult

St. Louis Archbishop: 'I didn't know sex with kids was a crime'

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His Holiness, telling it like it is.
St. Louis Archbishop Robert Carlson testified last month that he wasn't sure whether it was illegal for priests to have sex with children while he served as chancellor of the St. Paul and Minneapolis archdiocese.

The former chancellor gave a deposition last month in a lawsuit that claims the Minnesota archdiocese and the Diocese of Winona created a public nuisance by keeping information on abusive priests secret, reported Minnesota Public Radio.

The 69-year-old Carlson also faces a massive clergy abuse lawsuit in the Archdiocese of St. Louis, where he's served as archbishop since 2009.

One document made public in that case shows more than 100 priests and church employees have been accused of sexual abuse, and the Missouri Supreme Court ordered the archdiocese to turn over their names under seal.

Comment: Make no mistake, these creeps are still at it. Religious institutions are a playground for degenerate psychopaths.
Catholic Church sex abuse scandals around the world
Secrets of the Vatican - Catholic Corruption


Magnify

Stories from an occupation: The Israelis who broke silence

A group called Breaking the Silence has spent 10 years collecting accounts from Israeli soldiers who served in the Palestinian territories. To mark the milestone, 10 hours' worth of testimony was read to an audience in Tel Aviv. Here we print some extracts.

Israel, IDF, Palestine
© Mohamad Torokman/ReutersIsraeli soldiers arrest a Palestinian after clashes at a protest against a Jewish settlement in the West Bank near Ramallah, January 2014.
The young soldier stopped to listen to the man reading on the stage in Tel Aviv's Habima Square, outside the tall façade of Charles Bronfman Auditorium. The reader was Yossi Sarid, a former education and environment minister. His text is the testimony of a soldier in the Israel Defence Forces, one of 350 soldiers, politicians, journalists and activists who on Friday - the anniversary of Israel's occupation of Palestinian land in 1967 - recited first-hand soldiers' accounts for 10 hours straight in Habima Square, all of them collected by the Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence.

When one of the group's researchers approached the soldier, they chatted politely out of earshot and then phone numbers were exchanged. Perhaps in the future this young man will give his own account to join the 950 testimonies collected by Breaking the Silence since it was founded 10 years ago.

In that decade, Breaking the Silence has collected a formidable oral history of Israeli soldiers' highly critical assessments of the world of conflict and occupation. The stories may be specific to Israel and its occupation of the Palestinian territories but they have a wider meaning, providing an invaluable resource that describes not just the nature of Israel's occupation but of how occupying soldiers behave more generally. They describe how abuses come from boredom; from the orders of ambitious officers keen to advance in their careers; or from the institutional demands of occupation itself, which desensitises and dehumanises as it creates a distance from the "other".

Handcuffs

U.S. police forcibly strip, lock up, and pepper-spray Indiana woman


A Louisville attorney says one of her clients was stripped naked and left for hours inside a Floyd County Jail cell and she said she has reason to believe it happens all the time.

Attorney Laura Landenwich represents Tabitha Gentry of New Albany, who was arrested and booked into the Floyd County Jail on March 30. After reviewing surveillance video that captured the actions of staff members during Gentry's incarceration, Landenwich says what happened inside the jail during the next few hours should be discussed in front of a judge.

Pistol

74th school shooting since Sandy Hook: Oregon high school gunman kills at least one student and is shot down

high school shooting
© Faith Cathcart/The Oregonian/APTwo people comfort each other in Troutdale, Ore., after a gunman killed one student.
A lone gunman armed with an assault rifle invaded an Oregon high school Tuesday and opened fire, killing at least one student.

The gunman was also later killed, police said, although it was not clear if he was felled by police bullets or by his own hand.

What was clear is that once again an American school where kids are supposed to be safe was transformed by a gun-toting maniac into a crime scene.

It was the 74th shooting at a school since the December 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. - and the 37th just this year, according to a tally by Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.

"This is a very tragic day, one that I hoped wouldn't be part of my experience," schools superintendent Linda Florence said. "We feel very sorry for our parents."

Books

The myth of meritocracy

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© Independent
What do you want to be when you grow up? I remember a careers advisor asking me just that question shortly before my sixteenth birthday. Like most of my peers I had very little idea as to what I wanted to do with my life when the seemingly endless horizon of school came to an end. Drink beer, smoke cigarettes and chase girls was about the sum of it.

Looking back, though, the question was a strange one. We insist on asking children what they want to do with their lives when most of the time it's set in stone when they pull on their first school uniform. If they are born poor they will almost certainly stay poor; if their parents have money then it's likely that they will too. The more unequal a society is the truer this statement becomes.

Yes we insist on telling children that they can be 'whatever they want to be', knowing full well that crushing disappointment lies further in their future. Every nation relies to some extent on fairy tales. In Britain we cling to the idea that you can be or do anything in life so long as you put your mind to it. In the process we hand our politicians the one thing they can use to justify the obscene privileges at the top and the revolting squalor at the bottom: the indomitable myth of meritocracy.

Comment: The psychopathic politicians don't care about the poor and care even less about equitable distribution of education and wealth. Worldwide, we have a pathological social and educational control system designed to benefit those at the top of the food chain:
"As we observe the world we live in, the cause-effect consequences of humanity's actions have become quite apparent. With the Occupy Wall Street movement now a global phenomenon, we can see that the unrest, due to systemic and institutionalised greed for material wealth and social power, is a consequence of extreme inequality and indifference to the state and condition of all beings. The systems and institutions of civilisation do not uphold, sustain, or uplift the process of life and cannot so long as they remain focussed on upholding, sustaining and uplifting some forms of life while actively suppressing and destroying others.

This state of inequality, bias for some and indifference toward others is the result of an empathy deficit within the institutions and systems that man has established to govern and direct civilisation. We have, in effect, man-made laws that undermine, suppress and destroy both the forms and the process of life. And while we might be tempted to suggest that equality and empathy are merely choices of morality, our knowledge of physics and physiology is revealing that our environment and our bodies are naturally designed for equality and empathy, but that brain disorders in a small segment of humanity have led the whole planet down a dead-end road toward self-destruction."
Equality, empathy and psychopathy

Further reading:
Political Ponerology: A Science of Evil Applied for Political Purposes
The Pathocrats


Dollar Gold

Perspectives: Fiat Angst--Rejecting the System (FARTS)

Is this a happy Tuesday? Well... probably not, so let's talk about other stuff.

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Early in 2012, with gold soaring, and a key restriction lifted off my retirement account as I switched jobs, and with a severe case of fiat angst, we decided to reject the system and convert our fiat into precious metals (FARTS) (I love acronyms). So we withdrew it, paid fiat tax, paid a fiat penalty (about 20% total) and took the remaining fiat to the LCS. I had figured gold was headed higher shortly and would creep even higher in the days beyond. Wait, that shows my ignorance; gold doesn't creep anywhere, it is fiat that changes in value. Well, you know what happened in April as gold approached 1700. A month later, I was 47% poorer, if I count wealth in fiat.

I was not happy, yet I did not despair, but I was feeling something. And "poorer?" Really? Was I poorer? No, I was more stable than ever and the angst was gone. Hmmm...

Bad Guys

Thousands of Irish orphans were used as 'drug guinea pigs'

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© adoptionrightsalliance.com
Over 2,000 care-home kids were secretly vaccinated against diphtheria in the 1930s in medical trials undertaken by international drugs giant Burroughs Wellcome, Irish media reveal. Among the testing sites was a recently discovered mass grave.

The medical records cited by the Irish Daily Mail show that some 2,051 children and babies across several Irish care homes may have been subjected to the practice.

Michael Dwyer, of Cork University's School of History, found the data after foraging through tens of thousands of archive files and old medical journals. What he did not find is whether any consent was gained for these alleged illegal drug trials or any records of the effects on the infants involved.

Dwyer discovered that the tests were carried out shortly before the drugs were made readily available in the UK. The homes involved included Bessborough, County Cork, and Sean Ross Abbey in Roscrea, County Tipperary.

Comment: The Irish people have been exploited by psychopathic institutions for centuries, this too would need to be aired ( and studied with the lens of Political Ponerology) before coming to terms with a shattered Irish identity. For example the sanitized history of the Great Famine could be more realistically framed as the 'Irish Holocaust', or something alike. Not to start an identity industry of victim-hood or hatred, but to spread awareness of ponerology in all its stages.


Airplane Paper

Now it's Europe's turn: Jet fighter crash in Spain: pilot killed

Eurofighter crash in Spain
© Youtube
Eurofighter jet crashes killing its pilot at attemt of landing at air base in southwestern Spain on Monday, defence ministry said.

The sole pilot of the plane, 30-year-old air force captain Fernando Lluna Carrascosa, was killed in the accident, which happened at around 2 pm (12:00 GMT), the defence ministry said in a statement. Carrascosa, who was married with a young daughter, had over 600 hours experience flying Eurofighter jets, the statement added.

The cause of the accident is still unknown, the ministry said. The Moron air base, located about 35 miles (55 kilometres) southeast of Seville, is shared by Spain and the US Air Force, but only Spain operates the Eurofighter jet. The Eurofighter, a multi-purpose twin-engine fighter jet introduced in 2003, is built by a consortium made up of British defence group BAE, European aerospace group Airbus and Italian defence contractor Finmeccanica.

It is designed as a highly agile multi-role aircraft, capable of ground attack as well as its primary air defence role. The Eurofighter consortium, Europe's largest defence programme, is in fierce competition with other fighter-jet makers such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Dassault Aviation.

Last month the head of Airbus' defence division, Bernhard Gerwert, said the consortium would stop making the Eurofighter jet in 2018 if it did not win new export contracts for the fighter jet. Talks were under way to sell Eurofighter jets outside of Europe, to Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Malaysia, he said.

Comment: Was a little sabotage involved to make sure that production of the Eurofighter jet would stop in 2018, as the head of Airbus had announced, in case of no new contracts?

It is only a few days ago that two fighter jets crashed in the U.S. within a 24 hour period.

Is U.S. military technology falling apart? Second jet crashes off California coast in 24 hours

And the French also suffered a crash a few weeks ago:

French Fighter jet crashes into field


Hourglass

Pepe Escobar checks Brazil countdown: Get me to the World Cup on time!

Street busker in Rio de Janeiro
© Reuters/Paul HannaA street busker throws a soccer ball in the air outside the Maracana stadium in Rio de Janeiro ahead of the 2014 World Cup, June 6, 2014.
It's high fever time in Sao Paulo. The Dutch are chilling in Ipanema, right in front of the beach. The Italians are in their own Riviera 100 kilometers from Rio.

The Germans are in a sprawling beach bunker along the coast were Brazil was "discovered" in 1500. The English team is visiting a favela this Monday. The whole country is slowly being draped in green and yellow. One hell of a party is about to begin.

And yet, all across the planet, the nagging question remains; will Brazilians set this World Cup - literally - on fire? Is this show worth over $11 billion? Well, that's actually a non-issue, picked up by those who don't know how football - it's not "soccer", it's "football", as the English invented it - is embedded in the Brazilian psyche.

Emerging from a bulletproof SUV into a trendy Japanese restaurant where she is greeted like Madonna, my good friend Barbara Gancia - arguably Brazil's top social critic - went for the jugular: "There will be protests until Neymar strikes the first goal. Everybody, no exceptions, will root for the national team. And then, even if Brazil wins the Cup, the protests will pick up again."

Comment: Listen to SOTT talk radio interview with Pepe Escobar on many geopolitical topics:

Dissecting Globalistan: Interview with Pepe Escobar