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He came from a respectable family
That counts for a lot under the system.

all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others

2 and a half years seems very lenient. Judge said "its hard not to  feel sorry for him" 

Fintan O'Toole: The corruption of Irish banking goes back 30 years

The betrayal of basic ethics goes so deep only the criminal law can root it out

We really should have a parade. It may not be quite up there with the centenaries of the Easter Rising or the Battle of the Somme, but surely the 30th anniversary of the corruption of the Irish banking system is worth marking. It is, after all, living history, a part of what we are. The word of the moment regarding Irish banking is "culture", but it is a euphemism for the systematic abandonment of basic ethics, of right and wrong. That started in 1987. In the previous year, the State had introduced deposit interest retention tax (Dirt) – as it went into force, the banks discovered that they could attract more deposits by allowing the local farmer and shopkeeper and doctor to sign a form claiming to be resident outside the country and therefore exempt from Dirt.

It was the most blatant of frauds – bank staff in rural towns had to pretend people they saw every day were not there at all, that they were really in Boston or Berlin or Birmingham. The lies had to be lived out as intimate, ordinary, mundane things. And they spread from the top: the great and the good of Irish life, the Jesuit boys who filled the boardrooms and the executive suites of the banks decided that these frauds were just business. They eyed each other and thought: "If we don't do this, the other crowd will." A rot set in and it has never been stopped.

Mark Hely-Hutchinson was chief executive of Bank of Ireland from 1983 to 1990. He was perhaps the last gentleman in Irish banking. He treated everyone who worked for him with dignity and respect. He could give a sincere Christian answer to the question of what he thought corporate government to be: "I think that very simply, that corporate governance includes behaving to your customers and to your staff and to the public the way you would like other people to deal with you." And if we want to understand the abysmal ethics of Irish banking, we might recall the fate of one of the great lost documents of modern Ireland: Mark Hely-Hutchinson's abortive code of conduct for bankers.

Hely-Hutchinson drew up the code shortly after he took over Bank of Ireland. It was an attempt at an ethical charter for the industry, an effort to ensure that if one bank behaved properly (by not opening bogus non-resident accounts, for example), its competitors would not undercut it. But crucially it also required the support of the Revenue Commissioners, the Department of Finance and the Central Bank. If a code of ethical conduct was going to work, these powerful State agencies had to give it serious backing.

Hely-Hutchinson had his first discussions about the code with the Revenue in 1983. As he later recalled before the Public Accounts Committee: "We produced a draft code of conduct for our own staff, discussed that further with the Revenue and with the Department of Finance and eventually we stated that we were going to do it, we were going to implement it unilaterally anyway, and we hoped that the Revenue would do something about making sure that other organisations followed suit."

"The Dirt scandal was the great alarm bell. But the State went back to sleep. It woke up in 2008 with an existential crisis generated by a banking system with no moral compass

But as far as pretty much everyone else was concerned, Hely-Hutchinson was a naive do-gooder. He got nowhere with the Revenue. When the Dirt fraud was being implemented through most of the banking system, he pressed the Revenue again about the code of ethical conduct. They told him "everybody had written them a nice cosy letter saying 'of course' but they hadn't got any means of policing the situation and they weren't very optimistic that it would actually happen; in other words, that other people would adopt the code of conduct." And the Central Bank? When Hely-Hutchinson pressed it about the code of conduct, "Oh, it would have been a very, sort of, warm polite response, 'What a pity these other people don't have the same ethics as you do.'"

This is not ancient history. We're still living with it. The Dirt scandal was the great alarm bell. In its report the PAC pointed to be the collective betrayal of the public interest and of basic ethical values by the boards of the banks: "Given the eminence of many of the members of the boards... it is surprising that they did not bring a greater weight to bear on the enforcing of ethical standards either within their organisations or the banking sector generally." But when this alarm went off, the State threw the clock at the wall, turned over and went back to sleep. It woke up in 2008 with an existential crisis generated by a banking system that had no moral compass, that knew no boundaries.

And we'll do this again and again – frauds followed by vague wailing about "culture", followed by more frauds. The only culture that really matters is the culture of impunity. When a system has no ethics, when it does not know right from wrong, it has to be educated. There might have been a time when a code of ethics would have imparted the necessary lessons. Now, the only code that will make a difference is the criminal code

I went to school with the Vegas shooter

Friday, October 13, 2017
By Greg Palast

[Los Angeles] When we were at Francis Polytechnic High in Sun Valley, Steve Paddock and I were required to take electrical shop class. At Poly and our junior high, we were required to take metal shop so we could work the drill presses at the GM plant. We took drafting. Drafting like in "blueprint drawing."

Paddock. Palast. We sat next to each other at those drafting tables with our triangular rulers and #2 pencils so we could get jobs at Lockheed as draftsmen drawing blueprints of fighter jets. Or do tool-and-dye cutting to make refrigerator handles at GM where they assembled Frigidaire refrigerators and Chevys.

But we weren't going to fly the fighter jets. Somewhere at Phillips Andover Academy, a dumbbell with an oil well for a daddy was going to go to Yale and then fly our fighter jets over Texas. We weren't going to go to Yale. We were going to go to Vietnam. Then, when we came back, if we still had two hands, we went to GM or Lockheed.

(It's no coincidence that much of the student population at our school was Hispanic.)

But if you went to "Bevvie" - Beverly Hills High - or Hollywood High, you didn't take metal shop. You took Advanced Placement French. You took Advanced Placement Calculus. We didn't have Advanced Placement French. We didn't have French anything. We weren't Placed, and we didn't Advance.

Steve was a math wizard. He should have gone to UCLA, to Stanford. But our classes didn't qualify him for anything other than LA Valley College and Cal State Northridge. Any dumbbell could get in. And it was nearly free. That's where Steve was expected to go, and he went with his big math-whiz brain. And then Steve went to Lockheed, like we were supposed to. Until Lockheed shut down plants in 1988. Steve left, took the buy-out.

And after NAFTA, GM closed too.

Land of Opportunity? Well, tell me: who gets those opportunities?

Some of you can and some of you can't imagine a life where you just weren't give a fair chance. Where the smarter you are, the more painful it gets, because you have your face pressed against the window, watching THEM. THEY got the connections to Stanford. THEY get the gold mine. WE get the shaft.

This is where Paddock and Palast were bred: Sun Valley, the anus of Los Angeles. Literally. It's where the sewerage plant is. It's in a trench below the Hollywood Hills, where the smog settles into a kind of puke yellow soup. Here's where LA dumps its urine and the losers they only remember when they need cheap labor and cheap soldiers when the gusanos don't supply enough from Mexico.

I'll take you to Sun Valley. It's in my film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. In the movie, a kind of dream scene, the actress Shailene Woodley takes me back to my family's old busted home in the weeds and then down San Fernando Road, near Steve's place. Take a look, America. Along the tracks that once led in to the GM plant, you see a bunch of campers that the union men bought for vacations. Now they live in them.

No, Steve's brain was too big to end up on the tracks. He lived in empty apartments in crappy buildings he bought, then in a barren tract house outside Reno. I laugh when they say he was "rich." He wanted to be THEM, to have their stuff. He got close.

It's reported that Steve was a "professional gambler." That's another laugh. He was addicted to numbing his big brain by sitting 14 hours a day in the dark in front of video poker machines. He was a loser. Have you ever met a gambler who said they were a Professional Loser?

It's fair to ask me: Why didn't I end up in a hotel room with a bump-stock AR-15 and 5,000 rounds of high velocity bullets?

Because I have a job, a career, an OBSESSION: to hunt down THEM, the daddy-pampered pricks who did this to us, the grinning billionaire jackals that make a profit off the slow decomposition of the lives I grew up with.

But I'm telling you, that I know it's a very fine line, and lots of crazy luck, that divided my path from Paddock's.

Dear Reader: The publication that pulled this story at the last moment was plain scared — that they'd be accused of approving murder.

Paddock slaughtered good people, coldly, with intense cruelty, destroying lives and hundreds of families forever. If you think I'm making up some excuse for him, then I give up.

But also this: The editor of the Beverly Hills-based publication, a Stanford grad, could not understand that, just like veterans of the Vietnam war who suffer from PTSD even today, so too, losers of the class war can be driven mad by a PTSD that lingers, that gnaws away, their whole lives.

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it ...fester like a sore? Does it stink like rotten meat? Sag...like a heavy load?

Or does it explode?

Steve, you created more horrors than your cornered life could ever justify.

But, I just have to tell you, Steve: I get it.

For anyone who missed it - Dubya's speech yesterday.

How far removed the sentiments expressed in that are from what passes as GOP policy today

You gotta wonder how these guys are involved in any part of a country's govt activities

A pastor who took part in a "laying of hands" prayer on President Donald Trump in the Oval Office last summer claims Hollywood is full of devil-worshippers who engage in human sacrifice and drink the blood of children.

"These people are full of the devil. These people can't even be reasoned with," Rodney Howard-Browne said in a sermon over the weekend. "They have already given their soul to the devil. Are you with me? These people go through seances, these people drink blood, these people sacrifice children."

"They sacrifice children at the highest levels in Hollywood. They drink blood of young kids. This is a fact. That's why the next thing to be exposed will be all the pedophilia that is going to come out of Hollywood and come out of Washington, D.C. The human sacrifice and the cannibalism has been going on for years."

When someone told Howard-Browne that "they don't do that," he insisted that "it's worse than what you think."

Howard-Browne then described the supposed satanic rituals that go on in Hollywood.
"Many of the Hollywood actors that you go see on a screen, what you don't know, they bring a witch, they do a big seance right there on the set and they worship devils and they allow devils to come into them before they take the part of what they're going to act," he said. "It's a fact what I am telling you."

The South Africa-born pastor and his wife, Adonica Howard-Browne, are founders of the Tampa-based Revival Ministries and its River church. Howard-Browne is also known for "Holy Laughter" ― when he touches his faithful, they collapse into laughter ― as well as his on-stage antics.

Some serious damage being done in Meath and Dublin. Loads of trees down and lots of places with no electricity. Fairly howling it outside now

and now this

Sky News‏
@SkyNewsIE

Kite Surfers in Dundalk threaten to make complaints about Emergency service personnel for stopping them Kite Surf in Ophelia.

https://twitter.com/rtenews/status/919918030024527872

Video of Douglas community school roof

Be careful out there folks

Turners Cross - Cork City ground

Comedian Sean Hughes dies aged 51

Paul Howard's line about him was good

"I saw my brother fight at the National Stadium. It was at a Depeche Mode concert." Remembering all the laughs Sean Hughes gave me today.

See Kevin Cadle passed away. Always enjoyed him on the TV

Who's not allowed on OTB?

Gerry Thornley not allowed on the Rugger section he's been doing for 12 years -

Gerry Thornley‏ @gerrythornley · 18h18 hours ago 

Yup, in reply to all the queries, I will not be on Wed Night Rugby on Off the Ball tonight. After 12 years! Gotta admit, feels strange.

What do folks think of IT contributors not being allowed on OTB now? Silence from Messrs Gilroy. Molloy etc deafening presumably under instructions from he who cannot be named?

I presume he means Jim Beglin?

I must admit I find him so annoying as co-commentator - makes me want to put my boot though the TV

I'm told he and Gilroy get along well together and Gavin now knows he can get along without him and Connolly knows this and doesn't seem to happy about it if you go by his antics during the warm up in the final.

I've been told the exact opposite re himself and Gilroy