Yet Another Reason to Not Give to the Red Cross

In addition to killing off most of the hemophiliacs in the United States because of their unwillingness to test blood for HIV and discard HIV tainted clotting factor, of course.

It turns out that the America Red Cross raised $½ Billion for post earthquake aid to Haiti, and built just 6 homes:

The neighborhood of Campeche sprawls up a steep hillside in Haiti’s capital city, Port-au-Prince. Goats rustle in trash that goes forever uncollected. Children kick a deflated volleyball in a dusty lot below a wall with a hand-painted logo of the American Red Cross.

In late 2011, the Red Cross launched a multimillion-dollar project to transform the desperately poor area, which was hit hard by the earthquake that struck Haiti the year before. The main focus of the project — called LAMIKA, an acronym in Creole for “A Better Life in My Neighborhood” — was building hundreds of permanent homes.

Today, not one home has been built in Campeche. Many residents live in shacks made of rusty sheet metal, without access to drinkable water, electricity or basic sanitation. When it rains, their homes flood and residents bail out mud and water.

The Red Cross received an outpouring of donations after the quake, nearly half a billion dollars.

The group has publicly celebrated its work. But in fact, the Red Cross has repeatedly failed on the ground in Haiti. Confidential memos, emails from worried top officers, and accounts of a dozen frustrated and disappointed insiders show the charity has broken promises, squandered donations, and made dubious claims of success.

The Red Cross says it has provided homes to more than 130,000 people. But the actual number of permanent homes the group has built in all of Haiti: six.

After the earthquake, Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern unveiled ambitious plans to “develop brand-new communities.” None has ever been built.

Aid organizations from around the world have struggled after the earthquake in Haiti, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country. But ProPublica and NPR’s investigation shows that 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. [They f%$#ed up Katrina and 911 too, and my father's recollections of their help during the Anchorage earthquake in 1964 is similar.  He remembers the Salvation Army outperforming them by all metrics] Despite its difficulties, the Red Cross remains the charity of choice for ordinary Americans and corporations alike after natural disasters.

One issue that has hindered the Red Cross’ work in Haiti is an overreliance on foreigners who could not speak French or Creole, current and former employees say.

In a blistering 2011 memo, the then-director of the Haiti program, Judith St. Fort, wrote that the group was failing in Haiti and that senior managers had made “very disturbing” remarks disparaging Haitian employees. St. Fort, who is Haitian American, wrote that the comments included, “he is the only hard working one among them” and “the ones that we have hired are not strong so we probably should not pay close attention to Haitian CVs.”

The Red Cross won’t disclose details of how it has spent the hundreds of millions of dollars donated for Haiti. But our reporting shows that less money reached those in need than the Red Cross has said.

Lacking the expertise to mount its own projects, the Red Cross ended up giving much of the money to other groups to do the work. Those groups took out a piece of every dollar to cover overhead and management. Even on the projects done by others, the Red Cross had its own significant expenses – in one case, adding up to a third of the project’s budget.

The American Red Cross has a long history of over promising, excessive fund raising, and under delivering.

This is not a well run organization in my lifetime.

If you want to give blood, find a local non profit blood bank.

If you want to donate money to the victims of a disaster, find a bit less ponderous and self-aggrandizing organization.

^*http://articles.latimes.com/1994-05-29/news/mn-63591_1_blood-banks

Pat Robertson is a Pathetic Excuse for a Human Being

What a sorry excuse for a human being

He can always be counted on to say something hurtful and stupid, and this time, it's the earthquake in Haiti.

He's saying that the Haitians made a pact with the devil to drive out the French, and so they are cursed, which is why their country is poor, wracked with violence and instability, and struck by natural disasters.

What he is really saying, and I need to credit Juan Cole for this insight is that the Blacks of Haiti, much like the Blacks of New Orleans that he also attacked, are defying god because they are revolting against God's will by refusing to be slaves.

It's the Curse of Ham, a and comes from the story of Noah in Beresheit (Genesis) and was used by evil men who took up the role of clergy to justify slavery and the slave trade in pre Civil War days, because one of Ham's sons Canaan, was cursed to be a slave.

It's clear that in his heart of hearts Robertson believes this story: He thinks that black people in general are cursed because they have rejected the role that God has given them, that of a slave.

A transcript of what he says: "

And you know Christy, something happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French, uh you know Napoleon the third and whatever. [Actually, you moron, it was Napoleon the first] And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. [No, local priests who practiced african religions issued a blessing] They said we will serve you if you'll get us free from the French. True Story, and so the Devil said OK it's a deal. And they kicked the French out. You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since they've been cursed by one thing after the other desperately poor. That island is Hispaniola is one island. It's cut down the middle. On one side is Haiti on the other side is the Dominican republic. Dominican Republic is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, etc.. Haiti is in desperate poverty. Same island.

(H/t Username4242 at Daily Kos for the transcript)

He also studiously ignores the history there, where both the US and France conspired to keep their respective boots on their neck, starting with Thomas Jefferson, because as a slave holder, he was terrified at the prospect of a successful slave revolt.

To quote Christopher Hitchens, as much as it pains me, "If you gave him an enema you could bury him in a matchbox."

Haiti Will Shortly Free Last Two American Kidnappers Missionaries

This is not an exoneration. It's an acknowledgment that the courts in Haiti are a shambles, and that they are getting a lot of pressure from the US.

It's clear from the back story that something very wrong was going on:

A judge in Haiti has said the last two Christian US missionaries being held on suspicion of abducting children after the earthquake may be freed in days.

Bernard Sainvil told Reuters the case, which involves 33 children, should be closed this week because there were no criminal grounds to pursue it.

A lawyer for the two said he thought they would be freed by Thursday.

Eight fellow missionaries were released last week but their leader and her assistant were kept in custody.

The other 8 are claiming that they had been scammed by Silsby and Coulter, and I am inclined to believe that something more than inattention to the finer points of Haitian immigration law is involved.

8 of 10 Jailed Haitians Released

The two apparent ring leaders remain in custody, and as a condition of their release, they must return later to Haiti to answer investigator questions:

While Judge Saint-Vil’s ruling allows eight of the Americans to leave Haiti on the condition that they return to the country to answer further questions in the case, it requires that Laura Silsby, the Idaho businesswoman who led the group, and her live-in nanny, Charisa Coulter, remain in jail to answer questions about traveling to Haiti before the Jan. 12 earthquake.

Some of the freed Americans had already contended this month that they were misled by Ms. Silsby, who had faced more than a dozen legal complaints connected to her online shopping business before she persuaded fellow Baptists from Idaho to assist her in setting up an orphanage for Haitian children.

“We are disappointed that all in the group are not being released,” said Terry Michaelson, a lawyer for Central Valley Baptist Church in Meridian, Idaho, where five of the detainees, including Ms. Silsby and Ms. Coulter, attended church.

The church mission’s lawyer had put forward about $7,000 to help pay for the first month’s rent for the orphanage that Ms. Silsby planned to establish in the Dominican Republic.

…………

Some of the freed Americans had already contended this month that they were misled by Ms. Silsby, who had faced more than a dozen legal complaints connected to her online shopping business before she persuaded fellow Baptists from Idaho to assist her in setting up an orphanage for Haitian children."

(emphasis mine)

This is beginning to sound like something written by Dashiell Hammett.

Speaking of Bill Ackman

You may recall that Bill Ackman led the charge to get Harvard president Claudine Gay fired.

In my not so humble opinion, it was because at least in part because it fit in nicely with his anti-DEI Jihad.

Because she is black, and her parents immigrated from Haiti, he thinks that she was an affirmative action hire.

She's not.  Her family owns the largest cement factory in Haiti, and she went to high school at very exclusive, and very expensive, Phillips Exeter Academy.

Still, he, and his merry band of jack booted thug racists went after, and found misattributions in some of her parers, most notably her PhD thesis, and eventually the furor forced her out.

They do not appear to rise to the level of deliberate plagiarism, but appear to be some sloppy work.

Well the good folks at Business Insider started looking around Ackmanand they discovered that his wife, Neri Oxman, had a similar pattern of sloppiness and misattribution in her PhD thesis.

What we are talking about here largely things like missing quote marks, or footnotes, things in both case that are typically addressed by public announcements of corrections, and not disciplinary proceedings.

BTW, if you want to understand Oxman's work, you could check out her TED talk to see what she got her PhD for, but I only made it through 5 minutes, and as near as I can tell, she is in the bullshit bingo business.

Bill Ackman, lost it completely, see my earlier post, and started threatening the staff of Business Insider, and later he threatened  the entire faculty of MIT, because, this was like using nuclear weapons, and bad, as he had learned from The Barbie Movie Oppenheimer.  (Mr. Ackman, I believe that the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki want a word with you.)

Well, BI dug deeper, probably because when someone loses their shit and starts issuing threats over a story, it often means that there is more to come, and they discovered that Oxman had, among other problems with her sources, had cut and paste entire paragraphs from Wikipedia.

That is not sloppiness, that is middle school level fraud:

Neri Oxman, a former MIT professor and celebrity within the world of academia, stole sentences and whole paragraphs from Wikipedia, other scholars, and technical documents in her academic writing, Business Insider has found.

Oxman is married to billionaire Pershing Square Capital Management founder Bill Ackman, who has been vociferously campaigning for numerous university presidents to resign over what he perceives as their mishandling of student protests related to Israel's war in Gaza. Ackman has termed plagiarism a "very serious" offense.

………

On Thursday, Business Insider identified four instances in which Oxman had lifted passages from other scholars' work in her doctoral dissertation, completed at MIT in 2010. Three of those were passages where she should have used quotation marks but did not, and one included language from another author without any citation. In a post on X, Oxman admitted the plagiarism, apologized, and said she would review the primary sources and request corrections as needed.

………

In her response, Oxman described her mistakes as instances in which she "omitted quotation marks for certain work that I used." The cases she apologized for were similar in character to some cases that the Washington Free Beacon found in Claudine Gay's academic history — failures to use quotation marks around passages from works that were otherwise cited.

But a thorough review of her published work revealed that Oxman's failure to cite sources went beyond that — and included multiple instances of plagiarism in which she passed off writing from other sources as her own without citing the original in any way. At least 15 passages from her 2010 MIT doctoral dissertation were lifted without any citation from Wikipedia entries.

The instances of plagiarism BI found on Friday are closer to a more common definition of plagiarism — the use of someone else's words without any indication that you are passing them off as your own.

"Both warp and weft can be visible in the final product," Oxman wrote. "By spacing the warp more closely, it can completely cover the weft that binds it, giving a warp faced textile. Conversely, if the warp is spread out, the weft can slide down and completely cover the warp, giving a weft faced textile, such as a tapestry or a Kilim rug."

The passage is presented in the dissertation as Oxman's original writing, without reference to any source for the sentences.

………

Oxman's cribbing from the "Weaving" article was one of 15 examples that BI found Oxman plagiarizing from a Wikipedia article in her dissertation. The articles she pulled from were primarily technical, covering topics like "Functionally graded material," "Manifolds," and "Constitutive equation."

(emphasis mine) 

It goes on from there, and it gets uglier and uglier.

It appears that Mr. Ackman has had a change of heart now though, and says that making errors in citations is almost inevitable in academe, so we should give his wife a break.

Glass houses, dude.

Bill Ackman is a whiny little bitch.

Deep Thought

Click for full size

---

Reminds Me of a Certain Super Bowl Ad

Hillary Clinton has just announced that it's now official US policy for countries to allow their internet access to be free and uncensored:

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton unveiled on Thursday a new U.S. policy that encourages the world's governments to ensure their citizens have open access to the Internet.

The speech comes a little more than a week after Google's blunt declaration about Chinese censorship and illegal electronic intrusions, and the company's assertion that it will pull out of China if it can't reach a reasonable understanding with the Beijing government.

9:54 a.m. EST Clinton took the stage here at the Newseum, a museum dedicated to the news industry, and appealed to the audience to think of the communications networks that have been destroyed in last week's massive earthquake in Haiti. She also noted how a mother and daughter in Haiti enabled their rescue by sending a text message. Clinton called communication networks a "new nervous system" for the world.

"In many respects, information has never been so free," Clinton said. She referred to the way that virtually anyone can broadcast information to the Internet at any time. But governments can also use Internet and communications technologies to repress their people, she said, "just as steel can be used to build hospitals or machine guns."

My first thought was, "Good for her," and by extension, Barack Obama.

My one, and the the one that falls into the "Deep Thought" category, is that picture really looks like that "1984" ad that an Obamanite put out during the primaries.

Of Course They Were Trying To Steal Children

For a few days, the Baptist missionaries currently detained in Haiti for trafficking in children has been in the news, and I have been marinating on this.

At its most basic, I think that this was a deliberate attempt to abduct these children, though I think that money was at the root of this evil.

These people weren't just missing paperwork, they were moving children out of the country for a purpose: to save souls.

They believed that these children would go to hell unless they were raised as, and became, Baptists, so they were breaking the law to "save" these children, some of whom were probably actually had living relatives.

So, much like William Calley, they likely, "destroyed families to save them".

You must understand, notwithstanding all the stories about Voodoo in Haiti, the populace there is overwhelming (80%) Catholic, and these people were not rescuing people from Voodoo, but from Catholicism, which they see as not Christian, and hence a road straight to hell.

This is the evil that true believers do: Stealing children from the families.

As to the disposition, should it be determined in court that they are guilty, they should go to jail for a very long time.

Any consideration in terms of sentencing on the of the sincerity of their faith will just encourage more people with similar world views to do similarly evil things.

FWIW, I chose the Al Jazeera link just because it f%$#s with these people, here is the Google news link.

Best, Satan

A letter to the editor from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

Dear Pat Robertson,

I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I'm all over that action. But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I'm no welcher.

The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished. Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth -- glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle.

Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake. Haven't you seen "Crossroads"? Or "Damn Yankees"?

If I had a thing going with Haiti, there'd be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox -- that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style.

Nothing against it -- I'm just saying: Not how I roll.

You're doing great work, Pat, and I don't want to clip your wings -- just, come on, you're making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad.

Keep blaming God. That's working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need to renegotiate your own contract.

Best, Satan

(line breaks are mine, the LTE had none)

Props to Charles Grassley

Yeah, I cannot believe that I said this either.

He has gone on mdeieval on Red Cross efforts to stonewall a GAO investigation:

Sen. Charles Grassley is demanding more information about the American Red Cross and its “apparent unwillingness to fully cooperate” with a government investigation into its disaster relief work.

Grassley asked the head of the Government Accountability Office for a list of material the Red Cross refused to provide to investigators, as well as the names of officials who didn’t cooperate and any communications in which the charity explained why it was not cooperating.

“The lack of transparency is cause for concern as the Red Cross is a federal instrumentality created by Congressional charter and receives millions of dollars every year from donors across the country,” Grassley, an Iowa Republican, wrote in a letter today to the head of the GAO.

The GAO report, released earlier this month, explored the Red Cross’ government mandated role in responding to disasters. It found that there is no regular oversight of the Red Cross despite a string of flawed disaster responses. It also recommended Congress find a way to fill that gap.

………

The head of the GAO inquiry said earlier this month that the Red Cross had not given “unfettered access” but that investigators were able to get the information they needed “to sufficiently answer our research questions.”

Seeing as how the American Red Cross seems to have a long history of inefficiency in the execution of large scale disaster aid, as well as bait and switch in their fund raising,^* there seems to be some justification in heightened oversight, particularly given their federal charter.

This sort of crap has been going on since the late 1980s, when Red Cross refusal to properly test their blood products killed a significant portion of the US hemophiliacs.

^*And there is that whole thing in Haiti, where they took in nearly ½ billion dollars for Haiti aid, and built a grand total of 6 homes.

When Discussing the Lab Leak Theory, Remember,

"There is no lab leak theory," as Jonathan M. Katz so ably notes.

When you look at the various lab leak theories, which is that the there was an accidental leak of the virus, strengthened by gain of function experiments, from the Wuhan Institute of Technolgy, it turns out that there really is no coherent theory.

First, people conflate the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was about 15 km from the wet market, and the Chinese CDC lab, a few hundred meters from the wet market where the first 2 (at least) outbreaks occurred.

The thing is, if it did leak from the latter lab, it would have been a natural virus, because the CDC lab does not do gain of function tests.

Of course, that would not explain why the first TWO outbreaks (the first one did not "take") occurred at the wet market, as opposed to, for example the households of CCDC or WIT staff.

As an FYI, Mr. Katz, has some significant priors in reporting about disease outbreaks, as he is largely responsible for the revelation of the source of the introduction of Cholera to Haiti by UN troops.

It goes on from there:

………

Given that experience, you might think I’d have been among the first to buy into the allegations of the “lab leak” origin of COVID-19. Indeed, I’ve heard through the grapevine that some of my old Haiti cholera crew are buying the hype. But I’m not. At least not yet. That is because the lab leak is still missing the key element of the U.N. cholera story that made it more than just a bunch of rumors: an actual, coherent theory of the case that could be refuted or confirmed.

When you peel back the label, it seems “lab leak” is a jaunty alliteration that papers over a variety of wildly different, often mutually exclusive, ideas. It isn’t a theory but a bundle of loose hypotheses that contradict each another on basic facts: the nature of the virus in question, the timeline of introduction — even the identity of the lab at which the alleged leak occurred.

………

So first, let’s get something out of the way. A pair of incontrovertible facts underlies most of the lab leak narratives: SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, was first detected in the city of Wuhan. And there is at least one lab that studies coronaviruses in Wuhan.

But that is not a theory. It isn’t even a hypothesis. It’s just a vibe: two facts, possibly correlated, possibly not, that are a good jumping-off point for formulating a question. And, to be clear, it is a valid question! Though it is a question that has been asked, repeatedly.

On Friday, the Wall Street Journal spurred the newest round of question-asking when it published a front-page story headlined: Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, Energy Department Now Says.

………

I probably don’t have to tell you that was all bullshit. But I will anyway. For one, there is nothing in there about a “Chinese military biolab” in the WSJ story. In fact, the WSJ flatly refuted that entire line of speculation, noting: “the update reaffirmed an existing consensus … that Covid-19 wasn’t the result of a Chinese biological-weapons program, the people who have read the classified report said.” 

………

The WSJ had no idea. The reporters did not actually see a copy of the five-page report; the unnamed officials who told them about it “declined to give details.” (FBI director Christopher Wray repeated his agency’s conclusion in a Fox News interview Tuesday, also refusing to provide details.) But CNN claims to have the goods:

Three sources told CNN that the Department of Energy’s shift was based in part on information about research being conducted at the Chinese Centers for Disease Control in Wuhan, China, which was studying a coronavirus variant around the time of the outbreak.

Take a closer look at the name of the lab in that quote. If you have been reading anything about the lab leak for the last three years, or even just looking at the pictures, you will no doubt recognize the name Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Well, it may interest you to know that the Chinese Centers for Disease Control [and Prevention] is not the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It is, in fact, an entirely different institution — nine miles away, on the other side of Wuhan, across the Yangzi River. To put it in American terms: If the CCDC was near the White House, the WIV would be somewhere in Falls Church, Virginia.

………

As it happens, switching the lab at the center of the story would solve one big problem the lab leakers have been struggling with for three years: that the earliest known cluster of COVID cases was nowhere near the WIV. During the initial wave of unexplained pneumonia, doctors immediately identified the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, on the west side of Wuhan, as the common link. That was why, to the chagrin of investigators since, Chinese officials immediately closed and sanitized the market on January 1, 2020. Since then, evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey and his colleagues have provided even more detail for the case that the market was the “epicenter” of the pandemic. 

………

The irony is that the very DOE story Carlson was piggybacking off of fits better with the market being the first major site of contagion. That’s because, while the Huanan market was far from WIV, it was very close to the CCDC. So, points for the lab leakers, right?

Maybe, maybe not. While switching out the lab does solve the distance issue, it creates bigger problems for the lab leakers. That is because it would probably invalidate their most cherished idea: that the virus not only escaped from a lab, but was engineered in one.

The problem here is that, while WIV does have a history of doing potentially dangerous gain-of-function research, all indications are that the CCDC in Wuhan does not.………

………

Is the theory that the reported three sick WIV workers carried the virus to a nearby hospital? Or are they irrelevant, which is why they don’t even bear mentioning in the Republican House Intelligence report? How can Chan and Ridley — who wrote an entire book implicating the Wuhan Institute of Virology — shift seamlessly to offering evidence that a totally different facility was at fault? Does Carlson think the FBI and DOE are lying deep staters when they say COVID wasn’t a bioweapon, but telling the truth when they say — for apparently different reasons! — that they think it is most likely that it came from … some lab? Somewhere?

Contrast all of that to the parsimony of the market hypothesis: In a city of 11 million people, bigger than all five boroughs of New York City combined, the first known cases were clustered around a single market. That market housed caged mammals capable of contracting and spreading SARS-CoV-2: animals farmed in areas suspected of being a source of the virus. The samples taken from the surfaces on the area where the animals were housed tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. Vendors and customers at the market got infected, they brought the virus home and to jobs elsewhere, and soon it spread across Wuhan, and then the world.

That story is not without holes: most notably, researchers haven’t yet produced the intermediary species needed for it to work. But it is coherent, clear, and more importantly, testable. (It also happens to be a story that resembles the way nearly every other viral epidemic in human history began, including the original SARS-CoV-1 in 2003.)

It's not just that there is little if any evidence of the outbreak originating from labs, it is that there are many conflicting lab leak theories, and none of them have little if any evidence backing them up.

Major Earthquake in Haiti

It's tentatively a 7 on the Richter scale.

Considering the fact that casualties in earth quakes are buildings collapsing on people, and this fact, when juxtaposed with the abysmal quality of construction in Haiti, casualties will no doubt be high.

There have also been aftershocks.

This will not be pretty.

My Brain Just Broke

Haiti is about 200 miles from Cuba. If they reach our shores, most Haitians are deported. Most Cuban refugees are granted asylum. Suspicion has long been that it is a function not of race, but of Florida politics. Most Cubans will vote Republican. Most Haitians become Democrats.

— Geraldo Rivera (@GeraldoRivera) September 21, 2021

The statement is fairly anodyne, and it certainly explains a lot of the politics around the issue, but look at the author.

The fact that Geraldo F%$#ing Rivera is saying it is a sign of the apocalypse.

If You Want to Help With Haiti

Here is a good starting point.

Engineer, Meet Petard

'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.

— Adrian Bott (@Cavalorn) October 16, 2015

A MAGAt restauranteur is facing the lost of his business as a result of Trump's revocation of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians.

Trump said that he would do this.  He accused Haitians of eating dogs.

Now you are surprised that he has done this.

As they say in Japan,  "バカにつける薬はない." (There is no medicine for stupidity)

Wilkinson "Ken" Sejour, who owns Miami Chef Creole, says customers and others in the community are scared, and he might have to shut down two of his restaurants.

The effects of the Trump Administration's ending of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitian immigrants are already starting to affect Miami's Little Haiti neighborhood.

At eateries such as Chef Creole, a well-established restaurant that famously serves comfort food inspired by traditional Haitian and Bahamian dishes, the end of TPS has led to confusion, with rumors spreading about potential raids and arrests. Wilkinson "Ken" Sejour, who told CBS Evening News that he voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 election, says the end of TPS for more than 350,000 Haitians might effectively end his career in the hospitality space.

………

"The end of TPS means for me that my future in the hospitality business is almost gonna be non-existent," he added. When asked why he voted for Trump, Sejour admitted that Trump "sold to me that he was a businessman and that he would make business decisions."

You mess with the bull, you get the horns.

Final Child Trafficker Released in Haiti

Laura Silsby, the leader of the "missionary" expedition to rescue Haitian "orphans", wasconvicted on charges related to human trafficking and sentenced to time served, so she has been released, and I assume that she is heading back to Idaho:

All 10 of the Americans were initially detained by the Haitian authorities, but only Silsby was charged.

Prosecutors first accused her of abducting the children, but the charge was downgraded to one of "irregular travel" - a crime which covers people smuggling.

Prosecutor Jean-Serge Joseph said she had been sentenced to three months and eight days in jail - the exact time she had spent in custody waiting for her trial.

IMHO, she used the tragedy, as well as the fervor of her fellow church members, who believed that they were rescuing from Catholicism and damnation by raising them as Evangelicals, to get the ball rolling, and I think that at least part of her motivation was money.

Considering her own problems with her failing online shopping business and her association with a man under investigation for sex trafficking, there is a strong stench of corruption and the profit motive.

Older posts are here.

Formal Charges of Child Kidnapping in Haiti

Let's be clear about this: There is sufficient evidence for formal charges to be filed against these "missionaries" attempting to "rescue" the children.

Now that they have been officially charged with a crime that can result in 5-15 years in prison, we can see some truth seeking.

As I have said before, I think that they were kidnapping the children with the goal of raising them as Evangelical Christians, and so I welcome the fact that they have been charged.

There has been all to much in the way of prosecutorial discretion cutting in favor extremist religious fundamentalists, and the realization that they can charged, tried, and sent to jail when convicted makes for a good deterrent.

Much of the problem with violent religious extremists throughout the world has been an outgrowth of authorities ignoring the "little things", because it is seen that their hearts are in the "right place".

So Not a Surprise

Houston City Councilman Dave Martin is telling people not to donate to the Red Cross:

Houston City Councilman Dave Martin, who represents hard-hit Kingwood, had a message for the public about the American Red Cross.

"I beg you not to send them a penny," he said at Wednesday's council meeting. "They are the most inept unorganized organization I've ever experienced."

………

"Don't waste your money," said Martin. "Give it to another cause."

Martin is not the only public official to go after the Red Cross' response to Harvey.

Harris County Judge Ed Emmett has said he asked local nonprofit to set up a shelter at NRG Park in large part because he did not trust the Red Cross to do so.

"The Red Cross could not have done this. They wouldn't have had the wherewithal to do it," Emmett said. "Don't get me wrong, they're out there on the front lines, but I had already seen the difficulty and we needed to get this set up quickly."

The organization also has been faulted for failing to ensure supplies reached area shelters quickly enough. By sunrise Sunday, when much of the Houston area awoke under water, one of the city's two Red Cross shelters could not accept evacuees due to high water and the other had only 200 cots for what turned out to be more than 2,000 people. Cots did not arrive to the George R. Brown Convention Center downtown until after dark Sunday, and shortages there persisted for days.

This is a recurring theme with the American Red Cross.

They raised hundreds of millions after storms Sandy and Isaac, and f%$#ed it all up, and it raised half a billion dollars for Haiti, and built 6 houses.

Then there are its deceptive claims about overhead and serviced delivered.

The Red Cross is a broken organization. The management is driven by "the appearance of aid, not actually delivering it."

The organization is not just dysfunctional, it is completely broken, and without a top to bottom revamp of its management, it will remain broken.

What's more, the problems predate the current management, my father recalls an inadequate response to the 1964 Good Friday earthquake in Anchorage, and in the 1980s and 1990s, it gave AIDS to most of the hemophiliacs in the United States, because it refused to screen its blood supply properly.  (Liddy Dole was a part of that clusterf%$#, dragging her feet for years over changes to the program)

The Red Cross, and its charter from Congress, need to be fixed.

Welcome to Hell, Here is Your Accordion

Pat Robertson has died at the age of 93.

Just a brief rundown of his greatest, hits. 

• Gay people and abortion caused 911.
• Haiti deserve the earthquake that devastated the country.
• Feminist force people to become lesbians.
• Feminists kill babies.
• Feminists practice witchcraft.
• Abortion caused Hurricane Katrina.
• Gays and Muslims are Nazis.
• Towels in Kenya transmit AIDS.
• Called non-Christians, "Termites." 
• Called Hindus "Demonic."
• Supported war criminal Charles Taylor.
• Established charities that were for his personal benefit.
• Called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro.
• Accused gays of deliberately spreading AIDS.

After 93 years, he has finally done something to make the world a better place, by leaving it.

Rule #1 of Giving Disaster Aid Is Not to Give to the American Red Cross

Rule #2 is to refer to rule #1.

Pro Publica has some quick tips for donating after a disaster in response to the massive flooding in the Houston area from hurricane Harvey, and the lede paragraph mentions the American Red Cross mismanagement in Haiti.

The comments mention their mismanagement of the super storm Sandy.

On a more personal level, I was in the Good Friday earthquake in Anchorage in 1964 (No memories, I was less than 2), and my father has vivid recollections of the general uselessness of the Red Cross, he was involved on some of the (ultimately ignored) after incident analysis and recommendations.

He recalls that the Salvation Army did a much better job than the ARC.

Just don't give to them.  It will end up going to new carpets in their Washington, DC offices.

Perspective on the Late Night Kerfuffle

Craig Ferguson on the late night shenanigans at NBC, and on Haiti, and on Rush Limbaugh's drug driven paranoid delusions. (3:37)

Brilliant!