People were always dying around Grandma—her children, her husbands, her boyfriend—so her lifelong state of grief was understandable. To see her sunken in her high and soft bed, enshrouded in the darkness of the attic, and surrounded by the skin-and-spit smell of old age, was to know that mothers don’t get what they deserve. Today, when I think back on it, I don’t wonder whether Grandma got what she deserved as a mother; I wonder whether she got what she deserved as a murderer.
Tag: crime
Why no broadband
US consumers pay broadband prices for sub-broadband performance; ISP business relationships at the root of the problem
Shocking, i know.
Destroy Red Cross
time to shut these clowns down. if you’re donating to the red cross, you might as well burn your money, for all the good that does.
IN 2012, 2 MASSIVE STORMS pounded the United States, leaving 100Ks of people homeless, hungry or without power for days and weeks.
Americans did what they so often do after disasters. They sent $100Ms to the Red Cross, confident their money would ease the suffering left behind by Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Isaac. They believed the charity was up to the job.
They were wrong.
2015-06-03: the red cross is an utter failure and is giving nonprofits a bad name.
many of the Red Cross’s failings in Haiti are of its own making. They are also part of a larger pattern in which the organization has botched delivery of aid after disasters such as Superstorm Sandy. Despite its difficulties, the Red Cross remains the charity of choice for ordinary Americans and corporations alike after natural disasters.
why you shouldn’t donate to the red cross
the best charities are 100s of times more effective at improving lives than merely “good” charities
Neighborhood appraisal
a new algorithm consistently outperformed humans at a variation of the task in which users are shown 2 photos and asked which scene is closer to a McDonald’s. To create the algorithm, the team trained a computer on a set of 8m Google images from 8 major US cities that were embedded with GPS data on crime rates and McDonald’s locations. They then used deep-learning techniques to help the program teach itself how different qualities of the photos correlate. For example, the algorithm independently discovered that some things you often find near McDonald’s franchises include taxis, police vans, and prisons.
Regulatory Capture at the NY Fed
an unsurprising story of regulators being captured by banksters.
A confidential report and a fired examiner’s hidden recorder penetrate the cloistered world of Wall Street’s top regulator—and its history of deference to banks.
Libya Blew Billions
Another failed state in the making.
“Libya is a monkey box. You see the chairman of the National Council or whatever it’s called appearing on television wearing slippers and holding a Kalashnikov. They have no idea what they have, and what they have, they steal.” The game of wildly overstating the personal wealth of Middle Eastern dictators, and then stealing national assets under cover of civil conflict and social chaos, is one that Western governments and financial institutions and their co-conspirators in Arab countries play hand-in-glove. “They said Hosni Mubarak and his family were worth over $20B. The real number turned out to be a few 10s of millions. Meanwhile, when Mubarak was removed from office, the foreign currency reserves and national investments of Egypt were $54B. Now they are below 0. You tell me where that money went.”
Airborne surveillance
We have witnessed 34 people being murdered within our imaged areas and been able to track people to and from those scenes. The people who confessed on being captured with assistance from our imagery confessed for a total of 75 murders.
Selling classified information
“Disclosing or misusing classified information for profit is, as Mr. Alexander well knows, a felony. I question how Mr. Alexander can provide any of the services he is offering unless he discloses or misuses classified information, including extremely sensitive sources and methods,” Florida Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson wrote one of the business groups, the Security Industries and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), which holds it down for Wall Street in Washington. “Without the classified information that he acquired in his former position, he literally would have nothing to offer to you.”
Supermarket slave trail
Slaves forced to work for no pay for years at a time under threat of extreme violence are being used in Asia in the production of seafood sold by major US, British and other European retailers
The food4patriots scam
The interesting innovation in Reboot’s Patriot Alliance is that they’re not selling a product wrapped in ideological garb; they’re selling ideology itself. “I’ve never been so passionate about anything in my life,” the Bates character promises, pitching what’s essentially a conservative newsletter with scattered survivalist tips. Judging from the writing in the letter, it seems like Baler has struck gold again. “Bates’” fearmongering about Obama’s America is nearly indistinguishable from some of the red meat that frequently appears in the respectable kind of conservative outlet.
reminds me of the health section of whole foods
Gregor J. Rothfuss 