Ed Miliband's Statement On UK Riots

Can I thank the Prime Minister for his statement and can I thank him for his decision to suggest to you, Mr Speaker, that Parliament was recalled. Whatever we disagree on week by week, month by month, today we stand united, condemning the violence and vandalism we have seen on our streets.
The victims are the innocent people:
Who live in many of our cities;
Who have seen their homes and businesses destroyed;
Their communities damaged;
And their confidence about their own safety undermined.
There can be no excuses, no justification.
This behaviour has disgusted us all.
It cannot be allowed to stand.
We will not allow it to stand.
I want to join the Prime Minister in mourning the loss of life we have seen, including those killed in London and Birmingham.
Our thoughts are with the family and friends of those who have died.
With Tariq Jahan whose son was murdered.
We stand with him.
He is the true face of Britain.
The Britain we are proud of.
I want to also thank our brave policemen and women throughout this country for the work they have been doing on our behalf.
And all of the emergency services.
We salute them for their courage, their dedication and their willingness to put themselves in harm’s way to keep our communities safe.
Thanks to them a degree of order has been re-established on our streets.
But from all sides of this House we know what the public want, and are entitled to.
A return to normality, as well as order.
Normality does not mean shops having to shut at 3pm because they fear looting.
Normality does not mean rushing home because you are scared to be on the streets.
Normality does not mean feeling fearful in your own home.
They want to have back the most fundamental of liberties: the ability to go about their business and lead their lives with security and without fear.
They have a right to expect it.
And we have a responsibility to make it happen.
To do this, Parliament needs to do its job.
Uniting against the violence.
And being the place where we examine and debate, frankly, all of the issues involved:
How we have got where we are;
What it says about Britain;
And what the response should be.
First, on policing.
Can the Prime Minister confirm that the additional operational costs the police are now facing will be funded from the Treasury reserve, and not place additional pressure on already stretched budgets?
Can he also confirm that the increased presence on our streets will remain in place as long as it takes, even beyond the weekend, until the police can be confident that the trouble will not recur?
The events of the last few days have been a stark reminder to us all that police on the streets make our communities safer, and make the public feel safer.
Given the absolute priority the public attach to a visible and active police presence, does the Prime Minister understand that they will not think it is right that he goes ahead with the cuts to police numbers he is planning?
Will he now think again?
Secondly, on criminal justice.
The public are clear that they want to see swift, effective and tough action to send a message about the penalties and punishment that follow from the violence we have seen.
We must see swift progress from charge to trial in these cases.
Can the Prime Minister confirm that there is the capacity within the courts and among our prosecutors to deal with cases swiftly, not just for first appearance but throughout the trial process?
It is right the Crown Prosecution Service is taking into account the aggravating circumstances within which the horrendous criminal acts we have seen in recent days took place.
Does the Prime Minister agree that magistrates and judges need to have those circumstances at the front of their mind so that those found guilty of this disgraceful behaviour receive the tough sentences they deserve and the public expect?
The Prime Minister mentioned the importance of CCTV in catching those responsible.
So will he undertake to look again at his proposals on CCTV to make sure they in no way hinder bringing criminals to justice?
Thirdly, we need all of our cities back on their feet and operating as normal.
That work began with the thousands of volunteers who reclaimed our streets and showed the true spirit of those cities and our country.
I welcome what the Prime Minister said on a range of support being provided.
Can he reassure us that the help that is provided will be genuinely needs-based without an arbitrary cap?
And can he assure us that these funds will flow straightaway so that people can get on with rebuilding their lives and communities?
Fourth, on the deeper lessons we need to learn.
The Prime Minister said in 2006 “Understanding the background, the reasons, the causes. It doesn’t mean excusing crime but it will help us to tackle it”.
To seek to explain is not to seek to excuse.
Of course these are acts of individual criminality.
But we have a duty to ask ourselves why there are people who feel they have nothing to lose, and everything to gain, from wanton vandalism and looting.
We cannot afford to let this pass, to calm the situation down, only to find ourselves in this position again in the future.
These issues cannot be laid at the door of a single cause or a single government.
The causes are complex.
Simplistic responses will not provide the answer.
We can only tackle these solutions by hearing from our communities.
What the decent people I met on the streets of London and Manchester told me, and will tell the Prime Minister, is that they want their voice to be heard.
They want us to go out and listen to them.
And before saying we know all the answers, or have simple solutions, we should all do so.
Can the Prime Minister explain how those in areas affected will have their voice heard?
Will the Prime Minister agree that there must be a full independent commission of inquiry, swiftly looking at what has happened in recent days, and what lessons we need to learn.
Not an inquiry sitting in Whitehall hearing evidence from academic experts but reaching out and listening to those affected by these terrible events.
They deserve and need to be heard.
We need to look at and act on all the issues that matter:
The responsibility we need from top to bottom in our society, including parental responsibility.
The take what you can culture, that needs to change from the benefits office to the boardroom.
A sustained effort to tackle the gangs in our cities, something we knew about before these riots.
And of course, Mr Speaker, questions of hope and aspiration.
The provision of opportunities to get on in life which don't involve illegality and wrongdoing.
When we talk about responsibility, we must not forget ours: above all, to the vast majority of law abiding young people.
They are a generation worried about their prospects and we cannot afford to fail them.
We cannot afford to have the next generation believe that they are going to do worse that the last.
They should be able to do better.
That is the promise of Britain.
Let me say in conclusion:
Successful societies are built on an ethic of hard work, compassion, solidarity, and looking after each other.
Ours must be one society.
We must all bear our share of responsibility for it.
It is right that we came back to debate these issues.
It is right that public order must be paramount.
But it is also imperative that even after order and normality are restored, we do not ignore the lessons we must learn.
We cannot afford to move on and forget.
For all the people who have been in fear this week, for those who have lost loved ones, homes, and businesses, we owe a duty to ensure no repeat of what we have seen.
This is our responsibility to the victims.
It is our responsibility to the country.
And we on this side will play our part in making it happen.
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peterfainton peter fainton 

staggering - Cameron 'simply doesn't accept that economic poverty leads to increases in crime.'

Sir Hugh Orde: Water cannon make for good headlines – and bad policing

Marck Ferrari - No Fun In That (Featuring William Burroughs)

J.G. Ballard on 'Naked Lunch'

A Must Read: Let's cut the bullshit and start some serious debate shall we?

I'm sick to death of the partisan bollocks spewing forth from the usual cabal of out-of-touch opinion creators, both left and right, regarding the causes of the riots.  Actual reasoned analysis is thin on the ground, little diamonds in a sea of bile, ignorance and cliche.
This is a question of morality.
I have yet to see a philosopher interviewed on the subject.
Moral regard is determined by who and what you identify with, which is itself comprised of the culture through which one grows up. A large number of youths clearly have no moral regard for the police or for their communities.  Ergo, we can deduce that a situation has developed whereby large numbers of youths are growing up devoid of the kind of influences that generate shared cultural identity.  This is clearly evident; conforming cultural appearance (as suits are to businessmen), a shared dialect (much like that shared between politicians and the business world, not a coincidence and yes, the same applies regarding the moral concern...) etc; natural examples of divergent cultural evolution of separated groups (just like genetic evolution does).  This has made them so alien to the rich and powerful that they have zero chance of making it, no point in aspiration and through no fault of their own.  It is a mighty rare person who can buck the human instinct to conform in groups... do we then demand it of those who have the least instead of addressing the real causes?  Who has created the walls? Who has caused the segregation in the first place? Why is there such a huge gulf of worlds between the haves and have-nots?
There are no jobs. That's where most of us are forced to mix, forced to expand our moral concern by taking in structure, responsibility, exposure to people you would never normally mix with. What jobs there are do not pay enough, not to deal with the sheer volume of advertising generating needs and desires through a process of saturation (and now smart) bombing.  Whereas before one person could work and still happily sustain a family, now both parents (where there are two...) have to work just to survive, members of the ever growing working poor. There are no pools, there are no clubs, there is no chance of ever buying a house, ever going to university. There is nothing but corruption in their eyes, foolishly looking directly at the Sun much too often; the greed and dishonesty of the haves (politician's expenses, Ian Tomlinson, phone tapping, bailouts) acting as convincing rationales for simply doing whatever they want to do.  And why shouldn't they?  They have no moral concern for us. Imagine if the Right's dreams came true, and all the people on benefits suddenly worked really hard, doing everything they possibly could to get ahead. What would change? Nothing, except they'd look like chumps instead of scroungers.
Yet despite this, they still have to be seen to be responsible even if they are victims of the system (in the same way that we have to assume free will, even if science tells us it aint so).  Those kids have had little choice over their lives - that responsibility falls on the parents.  Unfortunately they may be just as excluded has the youth. Either way, society progresses with the aid of law and justice, and in this case restorative justice HAS to be the way to go. Until these youth are forced to face their victims, until they are forced to spend time working in the communities they trashed, how will they gain the experiences to help them break out of this limited group identity?
It isn't a choice between "It's poverty, leave them alone!" and "use live ammunition, that'll teach the bastards!". Criminality isn't some ontological entity, some insidious cloud that infects people... it has a cause like everything else in existence.  Neither is it a question of a bad soul which can be redeemed if broken first.  It is a reaction; a reflection of parts of society that our leaders are blind to; a warning sign of severe cognitive dissonance.  These youths and Politicians Inc are more alike than they realise:  both are closed systems and both have moral regard for their own groups first and foremost.  Society at large needs to realise this, because I fear the former will not be saved until we deal with the latter. Ben King @'Grime and Reason'

'Nail On The Head' Dept #2

The London Riots – On Consumerism coming Home to Roost

tom_watson tom_watson

Daily Mail: "Britain's liberal intelligentsia has smashed virtually every social value" http://bit.ly/nQFlUG

Rupert delivers the profits, analysts dodge the hard issues

Roger Ailes and the rise of Fox News

Scion A/V Presents: Omar S. - High School Graffiti

(Thanx PH!)

UK riots: This vigilantism is the very embodiment of 'big society'

Cameron’s Broken Windows

Our son lives next to a Turkish mosque on Kingsland Road in Hackney, where some of London’s worst mob violence has occurred. When looters rampaged through Hackney last weekend, there were few police officers to stop them and residents had to chase them off with butcher knives, truncheons and baseball bats. Vigilante action succeeded where normal policing failed.
Kingsland Road resembles the bustling, ethnically mixed streets of Brooklyn. During the day, it is a home of sorts for unemployed young men with nothing to do; Britain’s youth unemployment rate is currently over 20 percent. During the economic boom a decade ago, though, nearly as many were out of work, and they did not all turn to crime.
To counter the risk that they might, there were storefront drop-in centers for young people in the neighborhood; these places are now shutting down, as are other community services, like health centers for the elderly and libraries. Local police forces have also been shrinking.
All are victims of what people in Britain call “the cuts” — the government’s defunding of civil-society institutions in order to balance the nation’s books. Before the riots, the government had planned to cut 16,200 police officers across the country. In London, austerity means that there will be about 19 percent less to spend next year on government programs, and the burden will fall particularly on the poor.
The rioters in London appear to be young men of varying races — despite reports of a monolithic mob of alienated “black youth.” But there is a racial dimension to this drama. The wave of riots began with protests against the police killing of a young black man, Mark Duggan. While initially peaceful, the demonstrations soon descended into violence. When the unrest spread to Manchester on Tuesday, many of the rioters there were apparently white.
An old-fashioned Marxist might imagine that the broken windows and burning houses expressed a raging political reaction to government spending cuts — but this time that explanation would be too facile.
The last time Britain saw widespread rioting, in the 1980s, street violence came after a long and failed political struggle against the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, which suppressed trade unions and decimated social services. Today, the rioters seem motivated by a more diffuse anger, behaving like crazed shoppers on a spree; while some of the shops looted are big chains, many more are small local businesses run by people who are themselves struggling through Britain’s economic slump.
There has been a change in national temperament that has affected decent citizens as well as criminals. The country’s mood has turned sour. Indeed, the flip side of Britons’ famed politeness is the sort of hooliganism that appears at soccer matches and in town centers on weekend nights — an unfocused hostility that is usually fueled by vast quantities of alcohol. Fears of anarchic urban mobs date from Shakespeare’s time, and Prime Minister David Cameron has summoned these old fears, describing the present conflagration as “senseless.”
Mr. Cameron was good at selling people on the idea of cutting costs, but he has failed to make the case for what and how to cut: efforts to increase university fees, to overhaul the National Health Service, to reduce the military and the police, even to sell off the nation’s forests, have all backfired, with the government hedging or simply abandoning its plans.
In attempting to carry out reform, the government appears incompetent; it has lost legitimacy. This has prompted some people living on Kingsland Road to become vigilantes. “We have to do things for ourselves,” a 16-year-old in Hackney told The Guardian, convinced that the authorities did not care about, or know how to protect, communities like his.
A street of shuttered shops, locked playgrounds and closed clinics, a street patrolled by citizens armed with knives and bats, is not a place to build a life.
Americans ought to ponder this aspect of Britain’s trauma. After all, London is one of the world’s wealthiest cities, but large sections of it are impoverished. New York is not so different.
The American right today is obsessed with cutting government spending. In many ways, Mr. Cameron’s austerity program is the Tea Party’s dream come true. But Britain is now grappling with the consequences of those cuts, which have led to the neglect and exclusion of many vulnerable, disaffected young people who are acting out violently and irresponsibly — driven by rage rather than an explicit political agenda.
America is in many ways different from Britain, but the two countries today are alike in their extremes of inequality, and in the desire of many politicians to solve economic and social ills by reducing the power of the state.
Britain’s current crisis should cause us to reflect on the fact that a smaller government can actually increase communal fear and diminish our quality of life. Is that a fate America wishes upon itself?
Richard Sennett & Saskia Sassen @'NYT'

Uncontacted Amazon tribe may have fallen victim to drug traffickers

We are allowed to ask questions

So... Why are all those kids rioting in London, Manchester and Liverpool?
Why are global stock markets plummeting again? Didn't the people on TV say everything was OK now? Why has the USA's credit rating been downgraded? How could they have possibly gotten into such a mess? And what about European countries? Why are they suddenly needing IMF bailouts?
What's happening to that former IMF leader who was accused of rape? Did he do it or was he set-up, and if so by whom? Why is his replacement also in trouble? What does the IMF actually do, anyway? Why is there another famine in Africa? Isn't that why we set up the World Bank?
What's happening in the Middle East? Why is Iraq still such a bloody mess, after all these years? How many people have died there? Why are the Taliban still so strong in Afghanistan? When are our soldiers coming home? What exactly are we trying to achieve over there? Why are the local warlords still allowed to profit from heroin crops? Why are we propping up president Karzai, if he doesn't even like us?
Why is Pakistani turning against the USA? Why were they hiding Osama Bin Laden? Weren't they supposed to be helping us? What's happening to their nuclear weapons? Are we going to support India instead now? What about China? Is it true they hold the global purse-strings these days? How does that work, if they are all supposed to be communists?
And what about Saudi Arabia? How can they be opposed to violence in Syria, when they invaded Bahrain to attack protesters? Why didn't the USA say more about that? Is it because Fifth Fleet is stationed in Bahrain? Why don't Western leaders speak up against Saudi mistreatment of women, and their repression of the ethnic Shiah community? Is it because the Saudis have so much money invested in Wall Street, and buy so many arms?
Why is Gaddafi still in power? And why is NATO fighting Gaddafi in Libya, but not standing up to Assad, or North Korea, or Burma? Is Mugabe still running Mozambique? Whatever happened to him? Why don't we care anymore?
Whatever happened to that UK Iraq War enquiry? If Blair lied about Iraq WMDs, why didn't he go to jail? Why do so many people believe Dr David Kelly was murdered? Who would do such a thing? Did Blair really sex up the intelligence? Is that why Cheney set up his Office Of Special Plans? Has he released the minutes of his pre-war energy taskforce meetings with oil executives...?

Continue reading

Gary Lord @'The Drum'

Jackie Leven - Defending Ancient Springs

(Thanx Tony!)

HA!

(Thanx Son #1 & Stan!)

Over 1,000 Arrested in U.K. as Anger over Inequality, Racism Boils Over into 'Insurrection'

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WTF???

"A few well-placed rifle rounds, and the rioting would end in an instant. A more sustained attack on the rampaging mob might save England from itself, finally removing shaved-head, drunken parasites from the benefits rolls." - Ann Coulter

InjusticeFacts Injustice Facts

98% of 18-35 year old males stopped and searched by police officers in London are of African or South Asian descent.

Aidan Moffat & Malcolm Middleton - Two Cousins 1999

Not a new Arab Strap track but...

A message:

Hello thar FBI and international law authorities,

We recently stumbled across the following article with amazement and a certain amount of amusement:

http://www.npr.org/2011/07/20/138555799/fbi-arrests-alleged-anonymous-hackers

The statements made by deputy assistant FBI director Steve Chabinsky in this article clearly seem to be directed at Anonymous and Lulz Security, and we are happy to provide you with a response.

You state:

"We want to send a message that chaos on the Internet is unacceptable, [even if] hackers can be believed to have social causes, it's entirely unacceptable to break into websites and commit unlawful acts."

Now let us be clear here, Mr. Chabinsky, while we understand that you and your colleagues may find breaking into websites unacceptable, let us tell you what WE find unacceptable:

 * Governments lying to their citizens and inducing fear and terror to keep them in control by dismantling their freedom piece by piece.

 * Corporations aiding and conspiring with said governments while taking advantage at the same time by collecting billions of funds for federal contracts we all know they can't fulfil.

 * Lobby conglomerates who only follow their agenda to push the profits higher, while at the same time being deeply involved in governments around the world with the only goal to infiltrate and corrupt them enough so the status quo will never change.

These governments and corporations are our enemy. And we will continue to fight them, with all methods we have at our disposal, and that certainly includes breaking into their websites and exposing their lies. 

We are not scared any more. Your threats to arrest us are meaningless to us as you cannot arrest an idea. Any attempt to do so will make your citizens more angry until they will roar in one gigantic choir. It is our

mission to help these people and there is nothing - absolutely nothing - you can possibly to do make us stop.

"The Internet has become so important to so many people that we have to ensure that the World Wide Web does not become the Wild Wild West."

Let me ask you, good sir, when was the Internet not the Wild Wild West? Do you really believe you were in control of it at any point? You were not. That does not mean that everyone behaves like an outlaw. You see, most people do not behave like bandits if they have no reason to. We become bandits on the Internet because you have forced our hand. The Anonymous bitchslap rings through your ears like hacktivism movements of the 90s. We're back - and we're not going anywhere. Expect us.

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Discerning Britain's smoke and fire

abcnews ABC News

Former NSW Crime Commission investigator Mark Standen guilty of plot to import drugs.

Bass and Treble - Some Detroit Shit Mix

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Tracklist:
1. Kyle Hall “Create Your Own Existence” (Moods & Grooves, 2008);
2. Bostro Pesopeo “Basic” (Permanent Vacation, 2010);
3. Stereociti “Water Strider” (Mojuba, 2011);
4. Scott Grooves “Crash” (Not On Label, 2011);
5. The Smith Hall Project “He Said” (Undertones, 2009);
6. Oasis “Thirteen” (FXHE Records, 2007);
7. Steffi “Arms” (Ostgut Ton 2011);
8. Omar S “Sarah” (FXHE Records, 2011);
9. Orlando Voorn “The Truth” (Finest Blend, 2007);
10. Brian Kage “Salmon Fishin’” (Beretta Red, 2011);
11. Los Hermanos “The Very Existence” (Submerge, 2005).

BBC Apologizes To Darcus Howe For Calling Him A Rioter In Testy Interview

Breaking: Civil unrest spreads to Scotland

(Thanx DJ Pigg & Stan!)

Sign o'the times...(Ealing)

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♪♫ John Cale - Heartbreak Hotel (Myer Music Bowl Melbourne October 23, 2010)

Three killed in crash on night of Birmingham riots

[PIAS] announces temporary plans for distribution clients

[PIAS] has announced interim plans for its physical product distribution clients, following the previously reported fire started during riots on Monday night which destroyed the Sony DADC distribution centre in Enfield, north London. The [PIAS] distribution business, which was housed in the facility with various other companies from across the entertainment industry, held stock for over 150 independent labels. It was confirmed yesterday that the building and all of its contents had been destroyed in the fire - Beggars Group alone losing 750,000 CDs. In a statement yesterday, [PIAS] announced that temporary plans to keep what stock was still available in the distribution chain were already in motion. The company said: "Sony DADC have actioned their Business Continuity Plan and are back up and running from a new control room in Enfield. [PIAS] continue to work with them to minimise the impact on the business, a number one priority for all labels and clients. Sony DADC have identified a temporary distribution partner and it is envisaged that they will be in a position to pick, pack and ship orders in the course of next week".
Martin Mills told Music Week yesterday that it would take Beggars ten days to replenish its CD stock and three months to completely replace lost vinyl, and the company expected to recoup losses through insurance. However, he added that the main issue for all affected labels (especially those which may struggle to replenish stock as quickly) was what happens "while they don't have anything to sell".
Sunday Best owner Rob Da Bank told the NME: "Nothing's going to be sold for months, and I don't know what will happen. There's no way of distributing records. My back catalogues are all gone. I can't afford to get another run done for older releases. Everyone's going to have to think about the next few months. It's a reminder of how on a knife edge these things are - some labels and shops are going to be really affected by it. It just shows how precarious the indie thing is".
It's also not clear at this stage if all labels are covered by insurance, and what sort of payout they would get if they are.
Yesterday, the Association Of Independent Music has issued a statement calling on music fans to help the independent labels affected by purchasing records both digitally and physically - independent record shops are also faced with uncertainty as they do not know when they will be able to buy in new stock from affected labels.
In its statement, AIM said: "What music fans can do to show their support for the indie label community, and help them survive this disaster is to buy a digital download of an album from any one of the digital retailers in the UK, as well as going to their local record store while stocks last. This way, the labels will be able to remanufacture their CDs and vinyl more quickly, to resupply the record shops who are also affected by the riots".
The organisation's CEO and Chairmen, Alison Wenham added: "This is a disaster for the music community, but with the fans' help, labels and artists will survive. Please show your support for the music community by buying a digital album from an independent label today".
Writer and musician Fion Chadd has also begun organising a fundraising event for affected labels, details of which can be found here: cognitivedissonancerecords.com/labellove/
@'CMU'

The UK riots: the psychology of looting

Liverpool riots: I remember the buzz of mob mayhem from 1981

Firefighters hosing down a burning building in Liverpool, 1981. Photograph: Sipa Press / Rex Features
By the second night of rioting you could see the flames from miles away. A phosphorescent glow backlit Liverpool 8, adding a weird beauty to the madness unfolding. My pals and I watched the smoke pluming upwards and outwards, each one of us wild-eyed with excitement at the hue and cry. "Come on," I said. "Let's see if we can get a bit closer …"
That was 30 years ago, but it could just have well have been last night – with one hugely significant difference. The events that unfolded in Granby, Liverpool 8 in July 1981 (nobody called it Toxteth in those days) were triggered by the groundless arrest and manhandling of a local man, Leroy Cooper, by the loathed Special Patrol Group. That was the spark that ignited the simmering resentment that had brewing in Granby, and which developed into the most prolonged and destructive riots ever witnessed on the UK mainland. Toxteth 81 was not so much a race riot as an uprising against longstanding police malpractice. The troubles that have revisited the area these last few nights are nothing of the kind, though a similar kind of wild-eyed youth are once more in the thick of it.
In all the hours and pages of reportage since rioting returned to our cities last weekend, not one commentator seems to have touched upon the sole unifying factor that fuels and drives such unrest – excitement, fun, teenage kicks. In 1981 I could have cited unemployment (check), low-income, single-parent family (check), experience of police brutality (check) as factors in my participation, but none of the above even remotely came into my thinking then and I doubt it is stoking today's unrest, either.
I went along in 1981 because I was swept away by the mind-blowing buzz of mob mayhem. There's no justifying that – in the crudest terms such behaviour is quite simply wrong – but try telling that to a 15-year-old on a mountain bike. To him or her, it's like a Wii game come to life – a hyper-real version of GTA. You taunt the police until they chase you, then you leg it and regroup. Some of the more radical kids will throw rocks and set cars and wheelie bins alight to get them going, but sooner or later the "bizzies" (police) will charge.
About 7.30pm on Tuesday evening I walked from Smithdown Lane on the fringes of Toxteth all the way down the hill to the city centre. There was barely anybody out on the streets. The city centre, suddenly the subject of blanket media coverage in the expectation of further rioting, had closed down early and people were battening down the hatches. As darkness fell, the first police sirens of the evening could be heard, and then the relentless whirring of the surveillance helicopter. Mobs began to assemble, but what was noticeable were the groups of youth workers and community leaders quickly on the scene to reason with youngsters.
In spite of isolated incidents and the now symbolic sight of purple wheelie bins ablaze, there was nothing one could describe as insurrection. The police were visible when necessary, but seemingly content to work in tandem with the youth leaders, too. If it hadn't have been for the phalanx of reporters, no one would have known anything out of the ordinary had happened.
Speaking to reporters, one of the Toxteth youth workers, Jimmy Jagney, said that while he and his colleagues had been able to quell and disperse kids they knew well from around and about Liverpool 8, they had also identified two large gangs of youths, none of whom they recognised. His assumption was that the youths had assembled in the hope of opportunistic looting, and his team quickly advised them to take off, and take their ambitions for notoriety elsewhere. Just as myself and my mates did in 1981, they felt a bit foolish when confronted and slunk away home.
We live in a time of instant news. Whether it is camera crews sitting in medieval European squares as they wait for football hooligans to get drunk and provide rowdy footage, or plucky frontline reporters with pinhole cameras in their lapel as they maraud with the youth, our media suppliers are fanning the flames. They're making a case, and making a story that doesn't – or needn't – exist. If our politicians wants to know what's really going on, they should give Jimmy Jagney a call. In the meantime, nothing to see here – move along.
Kevin Sampson @'The Guardian'

The Secret History of Guns

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s criminal history and her hypocrisy with WikiLeaks and Julian Assange

theQuietus theQuietus 
Who thinks Michael Gira of Swans is being serious or sarcastic here? Shall we ask him? http://d.pr/8Rap

HA!

Sign on the door of Subway in Manchester.
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Cutbacks force retreat in war on meth

IQ2: Is Wikileaks a Force for Good?

Info & Download

Also well worth watching:

Raimond Gaita: WikiLeaks: Power and Consent

Plan B: 'Why do time for nicking a pizza? It's stupid'

I can't give material things to the general public as a way of giving something back for the success I've achieved, because I don't have enough to give everyone.
If I even attempted to I'd be poor and I'd be doing this all for nothing. But I deserve the things I have because I work hard for them.
Kids on the street aren't going to see that. They're going to see I've got more money than them, they're going to feel like they deserve to take it.
The real thing that's going to help these kids is some knowledge and some education about how to live, because what's the point of getting arrested and put into jail for a pair of new trainers or a fucking microwave?
The kind of places these kids are attacking, they're like retail shops. Lidl? They broke into Lidl because they want to get some frozen food, some frozen pizza for free?
What did you break into Lidl for? And you are going to do time for it? It's stupid.
And you've got people like me who are trying to change the way middle England look at the underclass, have a bit more compassion for them - how can I stand up for that any more?
No one is going to have sympathy for these guys no more.
They're just ruining the good work people are doing within the communities to change things.
It's scary because they're not attacking the Government. If this was about high taxes, things costing too much money in this country, why are you attacking the working class, the retail shops?
Some of them are big companies, corporate companies - I get that. But Greggs the bakery? This is all just an excuse for young angry kids to take their anger out and steal stuff.
This is definitely because of the way the Government and this country - us as a society, as a nation - have treated the underclass. Not giving them the support they need.
I don't think they're doing this as anger towards the Government. I don't think they're smart enough to even realise that could be an excuse.
I think they're doing it because they want some free stuff because they ain't got any and they're angry at that.
They're angry at not being able to buy the things they want to buy because they can't integrate into society properly, so they feel stuck and alone, with criminal records, no future in the white man's world.
"Everybody is out in the street rioting, everybody is looting, let's do the same." It's a free-for-all, it's a buzz and let's get some free stuff out of it. That's what they're thinking.
But it's madness because people are going to get hurt and they're messing up this country's economy.
You think about all the insurance companies who are going to go bust now, that means banks are going to go bust. I don't know and maybe I don't know what the hell I'm talking about, but surely there's a chain reaction going to happen - and why? To make everyone as poor as them?
Again, they're not even thinking about that. They're not even conscious of that.
Would they like to live in a world where everybody was poor and everybody was selling crack and everybody's mums were on crack?
Then there's no way out. At least before there was always a way out.
If you could see a way out of the underclass environment, the estates, if you could see a way out, it was there.
What are these riots in aid of if they make everybody poor? Then there's no way out, there's no other option.
The thing is, every kid who sells crack or robs another kid or commits a violent crime, they always have a choice. Right now, they don't know, but they're trying to change all that.
If people keep doing this, and destroying our economy, that's the way it's going to go.
Like communism and poverty - everyone is poor. But it won't go like that, of course not. This always picks up but as a nation we are going to be very weak.
We already have all our troops overseas, got a lack of police, we're sitting ducks. If any terrorists were to hit now we're be at our weakest.
I think it's messed up, man.
Anyway, that's all I wanted to say. If felt it needed to be said.
That's it. I'm Plan B
Via
(Sorry for linking to The Scum!)

Rothchild Kid - UK Riots

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(Thanx Fritz!)