This story broke almost a week ago, but it was so inflammatory that I decided not to run it immediately. I wanted to be sure it was accurate. Nearly 800 dead babies found in a septic tank on the grounds of a Roman Catholic home for “unwed mothers” was just too damning. As time as gone on however the story just gets worse. Here is the current state of the situation. This is part of the trend of the imploding Catholic Church. And I suspect there will be more revelations to come.
It gets worse. One week after revelations of how over the span of 35 years, a County Galway home for unwed mothers cavalierly disposed of the bodies of nearly 800 babies and toddlers [3] on a site that held a septic tank, new reports are leveling a whole different set of charges about what happened to the children of those Irish homes.
Foreign Policy Research Institute, June 10, 2014 – 10:03am
PBI Executive Summary: Significant fraud in first round (at least one seventh of the total votes); 3,000 election staff fired, Afghan government indicted for forbidding polls (the major fraud detection measure) and allowing repeat of massive fraud. New polls indicate Ghani wins easily on demographics alone. If normally standard measures do not counter fraud, election will be polarizing, civil war the outcome, and all investment to date made moot.
Over half of Americans (52%) have had to make at least one major sacrifice in order to cover their rent or mortgage over the last three years, according to the “How Housing Matters Survey,” which was commissioned by the nonprofit John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and carried out by Hart Research Associates. These sacrifices include getting a second job, deferring saving for retirement, cutting back on health care, running up credit card debt, or even moving to a less safe neighborhood or one with worse schools.
And the surveillance state just keeps oozing out across our lives like a toxic smog. It will soon be possible to track any person, almost anywhere. There is already no problem turning on your phone's camera, or microphone. Moving through any public space will result in multiple images, which are keyed to every electronic interaction you have.
The National Security Agency is reportedly capturing millions of images per day to feed facial recognition programs. Citing top-secret documents obtained by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the New York Times reported the agency ‘s reliance on such technology has grown in recent years.
New software allows the NSA to “exploit the flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences and other communications,” the newspaper said. “The agency intercepts ‘millions of images per day' – including about 55,000 ‘facial recognition quality images' – which translate into ‘tremendous untapped potential,'” the newspaper reported, citing documents from 2011.
Phi Beta Iota: There is no lack of substantive information about what needs to be done, nor is there a lack of integrity among those who actually believe our veterans should receive the best of which America the Beautiful is capable. What we lack in Washington is the integrity to spend on behalf of the humans in our system instead of the financial system commoditizing and disrespecting our humans.
This is a very good interview with Matt Taibbi discussing what has happened to the American justice system. One of our myths is that we have the fairest justice system in the world but, like our fantasy that we have the world's freest press, it is a delusion. As with the press we aren't e! ven in the top 25. It is very hard to maintain a healthy democracy if both the government and the people insist upon lying to themselves.
Morally, it doesn’t work anymore. You just cannot have a society where people instinctively know that certain people are above the law, because it will create total disrespect for authority among everybody else. And that’s completely corrosive. You need to have people believing in the system to some degree – even if it’s just an illusion, you need to have them believing. And that was … another thing I was trying to get to in this book, the difference between what happened in the Bush years, with the scandals with Adelphi and Enron and Tyco, and what happened now, [when] they just stopped seeing the necessity of keeping up appearances. They didn’t even make a few symbolic prosecutions, and so it leaves the entire public with this glaring statistic that there were no prosecutions and there was massive crime. How does that make anybody else feel? How does it make you feel when you pay a speeding ticket, you can’t write that off, but HSBC can write off its $1.9 b! illion fine for drug trafficking? People start to think about these things, and they start losing their faith in the system and it doesn’t work anymore. It’s funny, because when they talk about income inequality on the campaign trail and in these elections … They always talk about it in this unthreatening, antiseptic way, and it’s just so much more extreme than that. It’s much broader and more disgusting problem than the way they typically present it in our political debate. So that was another thing I was trying to do, was to try to bring out the grotesque nature of the whole thing.
