Riots in England - Rats who sh#t in thier own nests...

[tonyz]

Inflaming British sensibilities may land this gentleman in the clink.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pAC0...ature=youtu.be

[Pete]

He needs to edit it a bit to include all the upper class folks who were rounded up.

But that just goes to show the upper class does not have the street smarts to participate in a street riot and looting.

[tonyz]

True dat…”…the root cause is stupidity…” and that is an equal opportunity characteristic - transcending every social strata.

[tonyz]

Open link and hover over messages to read. A neat feature.

U.K. riots: Messages of support in Peckham

CBC News Last Updated: August 10, 2011

Residents affected by rioting in London's Peckham neighbourhood have posted their thoughts on a 'Peace Wall' on a boarded up window of a discount store. Hundreds of positive messages calling for peace and tolerance appeared on the board in the hours following four days of violence and looting across the city and in other parts of the country.

Hover over the image on the left to zoom in on a section of the photograph and see what people have written.

Select the smaller thumbnails to bring up other photographs of the boards.
(Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

http://www.cbc.ca/news/interactives/uk-riot-wall/

[JJ_BPK]

I found some AP pictures of the London rioters.. Looks bad,, hope the UK get's their act together.. It's pictures like these that will destroy their tourist business..

[tonyz]

A couple of developments that may generate discussion stateside, too, I suspect.

British PM proposes social media ban for rioters

By Doug Gross, CNN

August 12, 2011 -- Updated 1159 GMT

EXCERPTS:

(CNN) -- British Prime Minister David Cameron thinks he's found some culprits to blame in the recent riots that have rocked London and other cities -- Facebook and Twitter.

Saying the "free flow of information" can sometimes be a problem, Cameron's government has summoned those two social-networking sites, as well as Research In Motion, makers of the BlackBerry, for a meeting to discuss their roles during the violent outbreaks.

Cameron said that government officials are working with authorities "to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality."
More than 1,200 people have been arrested nationwide, Cameron told lawmakers. One estimate found that UK retailers lost more than than £100 million ($161 million) in stolen goods and property damage over four nights of rioting.

"Free speech is central to our democracy, but so is public safety and security," said Ivan Lewis, the shadow secretary of culture in the House of Commons, according to London's Guardian newspaper. "We support the government's decision to undertake a review of whether measures are necessary to prevent the abuse of social media by those who organize and participate in criminal activities."

Home Secretary Theresa May has called for meetings with the three companies in the coming weeks, according to British media.

Many UK rioters reportedly used BlackBerry Messenger, a free, private instant-messaging tool, to organize. A recent survey found that 37% of British teens prefer BlackBerrys to other smartphones.

Twitter and Facebook have been used as well, although those sites also have been used to organize cleanup efforts and calls for peace in the wake of riots that started in London's Tottenham district on Saturday after police shot and killed a man.

Representatives of Facebook and Twitter said they're happy to meet with the government, although both would presumably object to being censored or shut down in the UK.

Twitter has said it has no intention to block accounts or delete posts, while Facebook has said publicly that it already shut down pages that explicitly incited violence.

Research in Motion's Inside BlackBerry blog was hacked Tuesday after the Canadian smartphone maker suggested it would cooperate with London police to help identify rioters who may have used BlackBerrys to plan mayhem.

Open-Web and free-speech advocates immediately objected to Cameron's language.

"It may be tempting to smother that kind of speech when a government feels it is under siege, as Britain seems to feel that it is," wrote Matthew Ingram of tech blog GigaOm. "But doing this represents nothing less than an attack on the entire concept of freedom of speech, and that has some frightening consequences for any democracy."

Ingram questioned whether the government would be cracking down on telephone use or people talking about the unrest at their local pub if social media didn't exist. "That seems unlikely (although not impossible). But the British government's apparent willingness to consider shutting down or blocking access to Twitter and BlackBerry's BBM falls into the same category."

On ReadWriteWeb, writer Curt Hopkins said Cameron "joins the long line of powerful men who totally miss the point of social media."

"Banning those convicted of crimes from accessing social networks (the idea being that they used such access to organize criminal activities) is no different than banning the same criminals from accessing goose quills and ink pots," Hopkins wrote. "It will have zero effect on crime, aside from criminalizing social media itself.

"[/I]http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/soc...dia/index.html

BBC - online

13 August 2011 Last updated at 09:07 ET

US 'supercop' Bill Bratton says riot arrests not only answer

Bill Bratton: "My assignment is to focus on the American experience dealing with gangs."

Communities cannot "arrest their way out" of gang crime, the prime minister's new crime adviser, US "supercop" Bill Bratton, has warned.

The former New York police chief meets David Cameron next month to discuss violence in English cities and says the issue is for society as a whole.

Embedded video and full story at link below:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14514429

[dennisw]

Interesting editorial which appeared in our local paper today.


http://www.creators.com/opinion/linda-chavez.html

The riots that have wracked England in the last week should be a sober warning to the United States: This is what happens when a country breeds a generation of welfare dependents who are happy to bite the hand that feeds them. For days, roaming gangs of young people have engaged in looting, setting fires, intimidating citizens, even killing innocents.

Speaking to a special session of Parliament, Prime Minister David Cameron said, "This is not about poverty, it's about culture, a culture that glorifies violence, shows disrespect to authority, and says everything about rights but nothing about responsibilities."

He's right.

Liberals in England and the United States have tried to explain the riots by pointing to the Tory government's proposed austerity plans. But it's not the cutbacks in social services that are the problem but the welfare state itself that has taught generations that society owed them a living; that the government — not parents — were responsible for raising children; that those who worked hard were either suckers or exploiters; that those who didn't work were entitled to the fruits of other people's labor.

Cameron pledged his government would "address our broken society, we will restore a stronger sense of morality and responsibility — in every town, in every street and in every estate." But it's a tall order.

In many respects, Britain is in worse moral decline than the United States. About half of all children in the U.K. are born out of wedlock — a number that has been growing rapidly in recent years. When the Labor Party took control in 1997, the out-of-wedlock birthrate was at 37 percent. It has grown about 1 percent per year ever since and will exceed half of all births in the next couple of years.

In the U.S., out-of-wedlock births are now at 41 percent of overall births, but there is tremendous variation in illegitimate births by race. Such births now are the norm in both the black (72 percent) and Latino (53 percent) communities, but less than a third of white births (29 percent) are illegitimate.


In England, however, race accounts for less of the difference in births outside of marriage, with whites having higher illegitimacy rates than some immigrant groups, most notably South Asians.
More than a decade ago, the social scientist Charles Murray warned that the U.K. was fast developing an underclass similar to the one that plagued the U.S. in the 1960s and '70s. In the Sunday Times in 1996, Murray wrote, "Britain has a growing population of working-aged, healthy people who live in a different world from other Britons, who are raising their children to live in it, and whose values are now contaminating the life of entire neighborhoods — which is one of the most insidious aspects of the phenomenon, for neighbors who don't share those values cannot isolate themselves."

Proof of the validity of Murray's thesis was evident on the streets of Tottenham, Manchester, Birmingham and other neighborhoods and cities this week. Thankfully, the U.S. has not yet succumbed totally to the lure of the welfare state. But the class-warfare rhetoric coming from the White House and liberals in Congress encourages the same kind of entitlement mentality that has infected the U.K.

It is not impossible to imagine an American future with a majority of children growing up in fatherless homes, dependent on government to provide for all of their needs, resentful of the rich and insistent on a larger share of wealth than they have earned. The phenomenon is rampant throughout Europe.

While the American people have, to date, eschewed fully embracing the welfare state, President Obama has tried his best to expand it under his tenure. The only thing that has stopped him has been a weak economy.

The riots in England should be a wake-up call, a reminder to Americans that their instincts in rejecting the welfare state are sound. But the only way to ensure that what has taken place in England and elsewhere in Europe won't happen here is to vote out of office those American politicians who embrace the welfare state.

Linda Chavez is the author of "An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal." To find out more about Linda Chavez, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

[tonyz]

Originally Posted by dennisw

Interesting editorial which appeared in our local paper today.
The riots that have wracked England in the last week should be a sober warning to the United States...

Good post. The truth is that rewarding unproductive idleness - whether it be through government sponsored social welfare programs or just "rich", uninvolved mommies and daddies - breeds an entitlement mentality reflected in the recent riots and maybe even the flash mobs.

Unfortunately, it can also be argued that the street rioters at the “bottom” are merely mirroring the parasitic political elite that are all too common today. Both are grabbing all that they can, while they can, to the detriment of the rest of us.

I fear that the worst is yet to come, here.

[Richard]

I was listening to the BBC report on this and they offered the following:

Extremely high youth unemployment (under 25 crowd) + lengthy on-going severe economic recession + govt reducing unemployment benefits combined with newly enacted tax increases which have hit those occupying the lowest rungs on the economic ladder the hardest + opportunity = the current mayhem.

UK unemployment = 7.7%
UK youth unemployment = 21%

It will be interesting to see what happens next.

Richard

[rdret1]

Originally Posted by tonyz

I fear that the worst is yet to come, here.

I will second that!

[PSM]

After the '92 riots, here in L.A., the cops caught a lot of the looters on trash pick-up day.

Pat

[nmap]

Let's see now....social media use an account of some sort. So first, implement strong authentication of identity, thus connecting the account to a particular person.

Require those providing social media communications to retain copies of those communications for a year. With terabyte drives, this shouldn't be too terribly difficult.

When riots break out, do a simple search of the media...probably with a PERL script...redirect into a file...match IDs with real people...then prosecute and prosecute hard. Put them into tent cities in very uncomfortable places with the only entertainment consisting of counting the weevils in their bread ration. (Evil grin).

I suspect the nonsense would end rather quickly.

That said, we won't do it. We'll try to buy off the barbarians, ala Rome. It won't work. The debt will remain, the economy will languish, and lots of innocent people will be hurt.

[The Reaper]

Originally Posted by Richard

I was listening to the BBC report on this and they offered the following:

Extremely high youth unemployment (under 30 crowd) + lengthy on-going severe economic recession + govt reducing unemployment benefits combined with newly enacted tax increases which have hit those occupying the lowest rungs on the economic ladder the hardest + opportunity = the current mayhem.

UK unemployment = 7.7%
UK youth unemployment = 21%

It will be interesting to see what happens next.

Richard

Hmm.

I suspect that most of the people I saw looting and robbing wouldn't do an honest day's work if it ware handed to them on a silver platter.

Liberal justification for the welfare state.

TR

[PSM]

The orange ticks:

Alex: (v.o.) Then we headed west, what we were after now was the old surprise visit, that was a real kick and good for laughs and lashing of the ultra-violent.

[GratefulCitizen]

"The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as
sacred as the law of God, and that there is not a force of law and
public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence."
-John Adams

Willing to bet that riots like those in England will never be seen in Texas.
The difference:

Texas Constitution and Statutes
Sec. 9.42. DEADLY FORCE TO PROTECT PROPERTY. A person is justified in using deadly force against another to protect land or tangible, movable property:
(1) if he would be justified in using force against the other under Section 9.41; and
(2) when and to the degree he reasonably believes the deadly force is immediately necessary:
(A) to prevent the other's imminent commission of arson, burglary, robbery, aggravated robbery, theft during the nighttime, or criminal mischief during the nighttime;
or
(B) to prevent the other who is fleeing immediately after committing burglary, robbery, aggravated robbery, or theft during the nighttime from escaping with the property;
and
(3) he reasonably believes that:
(A) the land or property cannot be protected or recovered by any other means;
or
(B) the use of force other than deadly force to protect or recover the land or property would expose the actor or another to a substantial risk of death or serious bodily injury.