London Riots

[skyhook77sfg]

They say that man is mighty,

He governs land and sea,

He wields a mighty sceptre,

O'er lesser powers that be,

But a mightier power and stronger,

Man from his throne has hurled,

For the hand that rocks the cradle,

Is the hand that rules the world.

[Demon of Undoing]

[skyhook77sfg]

You should let the video footage of the wild violence that just took place in London burn into your memory because the same things are going to be happening all over the United States as the economy continues to crumble.

All over the United States we are already seeing some very troubling signs of the violence that is coming. The following are 10 signs that economic riots and civil unrest inside United States are now more likely then ever....

#1 Going to the state fair used to be such a fun thing for American families to do. But now no place is safe. The following is how one local ABC News affiliate described the "flash mob" attacks that took place at the Wisconsin state fair recently....

Milwaukee police said that around 11:10 p.m., squads were sent to the area for reports of battery, fighting and property damage being caused by an unruly crowd of "hundreds" of people. One officer described it as a "mob beating."

Police said the group of young people attacked fair goers who were leaving the fair grounds. Police said that some victims were attacked while walking. They said others were pulled out of cars and off of motorcycles before being beaten.

One eyewitness said that the flash mob attacks at the Wisconsin state fair absolutely overwhelmed the limited police presence that was there....

When I saw the amount of kids coming down the road, all I kept thinking was, 'There's not enough cops to handle this.' There's no way. It would have taken the National Guard to control the number of kids that were coming off the road. They were knocking people off their motorcycles.

#2 According to a new Rasmussen survey, 48% of Americans believe that reductions in government spending are "at least somewhat likely" to result in civil unrest inside the United States. Unfortunately, perception often greatly influences reality.

#3 U.S. consumer confidence is now at its lowest level in 30 years.

#4 Joblessness among young Americans is at an epidemic level, and when rioting does break out it is usually young people that are leading the way. That is why the following statistics from an article in The Atlantic are so troubling....

One in five Americans are between 15 and 29-years old. And one in five of those Americans are unemployed. For minorities and the under-educated, the picture is much worse. Black teenagers have an unemployment rate of 44 percent, twice the rate for white teens.

#5 We are starting to see mindless violence in a lot of areas that used to be considered safe. In Kansas City on Saturday night, three young people were hit with bullets as they walked the streets of the Country Club Plaza. Mayor Sly James was about 50 yards away when the gunfire erupted. Authorities in Kansas City are considering a stricter curfew for that area.

#6 "Flash mobs" have become such a problem in Philadelphia that the mayor has imposed a strict curfew on young people. Now all teens between the ages of 13 and 18 must be indoors by 9 o'clock at night. The mayor also says that teens need to start pulling up their pants....

"Pull your pants up and buy a belt ’cause no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt."

#7 All over the United States we are seeing that many struggling Americans will do just about anything for money. For example, in Detroit recently three masked men crashed a vehicle through the entrance of a gas station and took off with an entire ATM machine.

#8 Desperate people do desperate things. Many of America's "forgotten poor" are trying to survive any way that they can. For instance, a group of vagrants recently set up "a makeshift camp" near Prospect Park lake in Brooklyn. According to the New York Post, many nearby residents have been disturbed by what these "drifters" are doing to survive....

The drifters have been illegally trapping and cooking up the critters that call the park home, including squirrels, ducks and swan-like cygnets.

They used crude tactics to hunt their prey, including barbed fishing hooks that ripped off the top half of one poor gosling's beak. They then cooked the meat over illegal fires. Some of the animals were eaten raw.

#9 According to CNN, sales of safes and vaults are absolutely soaring right now. One store owner told CNN that she believes that she is selling a lot more safes now because people are scared that civil unrest could be coming....

"Folks are worried about the decreasing value of the dollar, burglaries on the rise in their neighborhoods ... and even the possibility that the unrest we are seeing in other parts of the world slipping over to our country."

#10 Over the past 100 years, the American population has moved steadily into our big cities and the surrounding suburbs. This has created virtual "ghost towns" in our rural areas from coast to coast. Back in 1910, 72 percent of Americans lived in rural areas. Today, only 16 percent of Americans live in rural areas. But when you crowd huge masses of people close together that makes riots and civil unrest much more likely.

Most Americans are already fed up, and the economy is not even that bad yet. One recent survey found that 73 percent of Americans believe that the nation is "on the wrong track". Another recent poll found that only 17 percent of Americans now believe that the U.S. government has the consent of the governed.

Millions of very frustrated young people believe that the economic system has failed them and that the political system no longer holds any answers.

America is rapidly approaching a breaking point.


http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/arch ... -than-ever

[Ibrahim]

I was out of communication for all of this London riots business, and when I got back to civilization I was reassured to see that everybody had already said pretty much what you would expect them to say on the subject. I'm not talking about posters here or elsewhere, but broad political groupings. This was either poorly-raised brats stealing sneakers or the cry of the poor against racism and injustice, or somewhere in between. All you needed to know was whether or not somebody was in the BNP, the Communist Party, or posted at SpengFor and you pretty much knew in advance what they were going to be saying.

Like many others, it just reminded me of the L.A. riots of the 90's. Which is to say some rational basis for outrage quickly subsumed by opportunistic looting. The harder one tries to come up with something new to say about it the more stained the arguments become.

[Demon of Undoing]

[AzariLoveIran]

[Endovelico]

[Tinker]

[Simple Minded]

[Demon of Undoing]

Tinker, you have instead of denying that life is suffering affirmed it and rolled on past to a rationale for dealing with it.

The first of the four noble truths was not authored in the West. The suffering of life is the first and primary issue of humanity. Tech ameliorates it but does not allow us to transcend it. Life is currently not so miserable only as long as it can be ignored.

[Azrael]

[Simple Minded]

[Simple Minded]

Demon,

its been a while, but was not a big part of Buddhism that suffering exits, but can be reduced thru mindfulness?

ie: half full glass or half empty glass, or count your blessings or I complained cause I had not shoes, then I met a man who had no feet..... kinda mindframe

[Tinker]

[Simple Minded]

Après le Déluge, What?
Riots and flash mobs have root causes that government can't reach.
Peggy Noonan

The riots in Britain left some Americans shaken. In the affluence of the past 40 years, and with the rise of the jumbo jet, we became a nation of travelers. We have been to England, visited a lot of those neighborhoods. They were peaceful; now they're in flames. But something else raised our unease as we followed the story on TV and on the Net. I think there was a ping on the national radar. We saw something over there that in smaller ways we're starting to see over here.

The British press, left, right and center, was largely united in a refusal to make political excuses for the violence. Almost all agreed on the cause and nature of what happened. The cause was not injustice; this was not a revolt of the downtrodden masses, breaking into stores looking for food. The causes were greed, selfishness, a respect and even lust for violence, and a lack of moral grounding. Conscienceless predators preyed upon the weak. The weak were anyone who happened to be passing by, and those, many of them immigrants, who tried to defend their shops and neighborhoods. The iconic scene was the 20-year-old college student in East London who was beaten for his bicycle and fell bloody to the ground. His tormentors, with a sadistic imitation of gentleness, helped him up. Then they rifled through his backpack to get his phone and wallet. It was cruelty out of Dickens. It was Bill Sikes with a million YouTube hits.

The denunciations were swift and fierce. Max Hastings, in the conservative-populist Daily Mail: "The depressing truth is that at the bottom of our society is a layer of young people with no skills, education, values or aspirations. . . . Nobody has ever dared suggest to them that they need feel any allegiance to anything, least of all Britain or their community. . . . Not only do they know nothing of Britain's past, they care nothing for its present."

In the left-tilting Guardian, youth worker Shaun Bailey called the rioters opportunists. "Young people have been looting the shops they like: JD Sports and mobile phone shops have been hit, yet Waterstone's [a bookstore] has been left alone. These young people like trainers [sneakers] and iPhones; they are less interested in books. This is criminality in a raw form, not politics."

View Full Image

ZUMAPRESS

A well known local gang in Normanton, Derby wears scarves and hoods to protect their identity.
.In the right-leaning Telegraph, Allison Pearson asked: "Where are the parents?" She told of a friend who'd called a mother to tell her her son was out and acting up. The mother yelled at her for calling at 2:15 a.m. "The adults are afraid and the children, emboldened by adult timidity, are fearless."

More stinging and resigned was the brief essay by Theodore Dalrymple in the intellectually bracing City Journal. The subject—the decline of Western society—has been his for 20 years. He has written what he saw as a doctor working in British prisons. "The ferocious criminality exhibited by an uncomfortably large section of the English population" in the riots did not surprise him. "To have spotted it required no great perspicacity on my part; rather, it took a peculiar cowardly blindness, one regularly displayed by the British intelligentsia and political class, not to see it and not to realize its significance."

At fault in the riots were the distorting effects of the welfare state and a degenerate British popular culture: "A population thinks (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class) that it is entitled to a high standard of consumption, irrespective of its personal efforts; and therefore it regards the fact that it does not receive that high standard, by comparison with the rest of society, as a sign of injustice." Much of what they have is provided by others, but they are not grateful: dependency doesn't encourage gratitude but resentment.

***
What does this have to do with America? What we're seeing on the streets in Britain right now is something we may be starting to see here. It hasn't come together in a conflagration, but it is out there, and I think it's growing. And as in Britain, it doesn't have anything to do with political grievances per se.

Philadelphia right now is under curfew because of "flash mobs." Young people send out the word on social media, and suddenly dozens or hundreds of them hit a targeted store, steal everything on the shelves, and run, knowing no one will stop them or catch them. It's happened in other cities, too. Sometimes the mobs beat people up on the street and take their money. There are the beat-downs in McDonald's, where the young lose all control and the old fear to intervene. There were the fights and attacks last weekend at the Wisconsin State Fair. You've seen the YouTubes of fights on the subways. You often see links to these stories on Drudge: He headlines them "Les Miserables."

Some of these young people come from brokenness, shallowness and terror, and are bringing those things into the world with them. Here are some statistics of what someone last week called a new lost generation. In 2009, the last year for which census data are available, there were 74 million children under 18. Of that number, 20 million live in single-parent families, often with only an overwhelmed mother or a beleaguered grandmother. Over 700,000 children under 18 have been the subject of reports of abuse. More than a quarter million are foster children.

These numbers suggest the making—or the presence—of a crisis.

More Peggy Noonan
Read Peggy Noonan's previous columns

click here to order her new book, Patriotic Grace
.Some of these youngsters become miracle children. In spite of the hand they were dealt, they learn to be constructive, successful, givers to life. But many, we know, do not. Some will wind up on YouTube.

The normal, old response to an emerging problem such as this has been: The government has to do something. We must start a program, create an agency to address juvenile delinquency. But governments are tapped out, cutting back, trying to avoid bankruptcy. Which means we can't even take refuge in the illusion that government can solve the problem. The churches of America have always helped the young, stepping in where they can. That will continue. But they too are hard-pressed these days.

Where does that leave us? In a hard place, knowing in our guts that a lot of troubled kids are coming up, and not knowing what to do about it. The problem, at bottom, is love, something we never talk about in public policy discussions because it's too soft and can't be quantified or legislated. But little children without love and guidance are afraid. They're terrified—they have nothing solid in the world, which is a pretty scary place. So they never feel safe. As they grow, their fear becomes rage. Further on, the rage can be expressed in violence. This is especially true of boys, but it's increasingly true of girls.

What's needed can't be provided by government. When the riot begins or the flash mob arrives, the best the government can do is control the streets, enforce the law, maintain the peace.

After that, what? Britain is about to face that question. We'll likely have to face it, too.

[Torchwood]

Cameron has been going on about the need to restore discipline and policing, and Milliband for Labour about the bad example set by bankers and MPs fiddling their expenses. All clichéd, predictable and rather depressing.

Excellent article by Harriet Sargeant in this week's Sunday Times. . She has actually spent a lot of time with the sort of hoodie youth that went on the looting spree. Can't link as it is behind the Murdoch pay wall, but the following two which predate the pay wall give much the same flavour:





What these kids need is jobs and discipline, the latter they do not get from broken/non-existent families which means they never acquire the education and self discipline to be employable - unless they get it from the education system, which they most certainly don't. Gangs in practice provide the only socialisation and discipline they get. In fact the indictment of state schools here is dire. Even bunking off most of the time, to come out of 11-13 years of formal education functionally illiterate is spectacular.

The lives she describes are amazingly circumscribed. Many of them never leave their estates because they would expose themselves to danger from other gangs - and she quotes one sad example of a youth who has never caught a bus because he cannot read the destination signs. Curiously, that has contributed to London still being a pretty safe place despite this underclass, but it means the problem was out of sight until you get eruptions like this.

Teachers would reply that trying to impose discipline you risk violence from the kids and from Mum's latest boyfriend - but nevertheless, there are some exceptional schools who take kids like this and work wonders. Usually they have an exceptional head teacher who imposes very old fashioned discipline by sheer force of personality (and I would pay people like this a damn sight more than bankers). Given how much these people cost the state, it would be cost effective to lock them up in the sort of (amazingly uncomfortable) boarding school which built the Empire, and which even today middle class parents scrimp and save to send their kids to. In fact that is exactly what Young Offenders institutions should be instead of training grounds for prison. The one institution which has done this to some extent is the Army

Meanwhile 80% of all jobs created in the last decade have gone to immigrants (partly created by some of the immigrants themselves, admittedly) because employers prefer them.

To address these issues you need a Guardian readers compassion for these kids (who would love a way out, but don't know how) but mainly Daily Mail solutions. Few people have both. Meanwhile my contempt for the exponents of progressive education knows no bounds, we have a generation of useless teachers as well as kids.

[Tinker]

Simple Minded What's interesting about that is the gentleness wasn't an 'imitation'. I have seen cruel thugs be incredibly gentle. It's very interesting. With my friend and I when we play chess I watch his movements and pay attention to my own. During the game we will often move boldly and quickly, strong arm movements with tense muscles. Then when checkmate comes, particularly when it wasn't noticed by the other, one relaxes, picks up the piece and moves it slowly, gracefully, almost femininely across the board to place it gently.

I think that's what is so interesting about that video. The gentleness wasn't fake or insincere, they were being gentle, they had no more reason to hurt him outside of their desire to rob him. After knocking him off the bicycle and bloodying him, they'd already won, he was in their power, so there was no reason not to be gentle.

I have heard from women that some of the thuggiest biggest, most macho men are actually some of the gentlest lovers.

[Colonel Sun]

[Torchwood]

Latin far niente and Anglo-Franco tendency to riot and street crime get a deservedly bad press. Japan may be a case, like Germany, of perhaps too much ordnung. Fine if the orders from above/social consensus is sensible (1868-1905 and 1945-80, roughly, in the case of Japan) but not if the ordnung is crazy (as in 1930-45), feedback and ignoring the rules does not correct it.

[AzariLoveIran]

[Ibrahim]

[Hoosiernorm]

Have they run out of things to steal and burn yet?

[Mr. Perfect]

I think maybe we should just look at this as Darwinism, nature taking it's course. Can't fight nature.

[AzariLoveIran]

[skyhook77sfg]

you have already heard my unqualified condemnation of those whose association with and use of these criminals makes them criminals themselves...

shameful immoral and just plain wrong

as is the following:




SOME SHARP WORDS FROM THE ONLY MAN IN THE KISSINGER REALPOLITIK CROWD WORTH READING

For all the talk of this being Barack Obama's worst week, David Cameron has certainly given him a run for his money. Cameron's response to the riots in Britain has gone from being rhetorically over-the-top to being politically tone deaf to flirting with authoritarianism.

What is it about the right wing, those supposed champions of "small government" that when the going gets rough or their "values" are threatened, they become the champions of much bigger, more intrusive government, constitutional principles be damned?

Cameron's week included the latest illustration of this phenomenon with his suggestion that Britain consider curtailing social media at times of crisis because it can be used to stir up crowds.

What could possibly violate fundamental principles of free speech, free association and free press more?

Does anyone else see the ugly paradox in the fact that the right would have big businesses unregulated or self-regulating even to the point that they wreak havoc to the lives of millions but that the moment a crowd of the angry, disenfranchised poor take to the streets, they are willing to discuss suspending their inalienable rights?

http://rothkopf.foreignpolicy.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

QUITE WELL SAID DAVID