Mark Duggan Shooting

[Joe Hillshoist]

That red penny piece was good.

The march on New Scotland Yard (that no one heard about) was to protest deaths in custody.

[solace]

But in what was by far the most serious incident of the night three men, two of them brothers aged 30 and 31, died in Birmingham after they were hit by a car...

A relative of one of the dead men victims told Sky News this morning: 'They were not in the way or blocking the road. The car swerved towards them.'
He said that the three had been on the street protecting their business - a car wash - after violence the previous night, when two cars swerved on to the pavement and struck them.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z1UdHHqv6R

Violence is rarely mindless.

[seemslikeadream]

GlobalRev's Arrival
As we've been expecting, the headlines on sites like Drudge, and so forth, are proclaiming what we've been framing for you (thanks to www.halfpasthuman.com 's rickety time machine and Shape of things to Come reports): GlobalRev is here.

Backing up the heads like "Riots Break Out Around Globe Amid Economic Anxiety" are backed up with more in-depth reports like CNBC's "Economic Uncertainty Leading to Global Unrest."

Quick, look surprised - not like we haven't seeded the language with the right terminology, so one of these days GlobalRev is sure to go mainstream, but as it does, we've already zipped last that into the part when markets are puking, so this is just the run up to the top of the roller-coaster. The really awe-inspiring stuff will come in late October, but no point getting ahead of the libretto.

A reader email sums the view up this way:
"George, your comments and link Tuesday to the UK riots spreading and other stuff is right out of Clif's Web-bot . He talks about the GlobalPop exhibiting "maniacal behaviour patterns", and also for a really direct hit on his part - under the heading Tea Crazy - he writes:..."data sets have celtic isles as..center/focal point...of global revolution...British experience..provide emotional springboard...new subsets geographically tied to British Isles...long struggle against oppression/repression...challenges of mass national contention...fighting..displays as emotion...uncharacteristic of the national British character."

I don't want to give too much away in his Shape of Things To Come v0i11, since he experienced that attack on his computers which wiped out a lot of his anticipated work in June, meaning he had to go back and rebuild a lot of it. So your readers might want to go to his site and pay the paltry $10 he charges to download his latest which he published July 1, 2011. Wish I had acted upon his comments about the markets being more or less in free-fall early August. Another superb hit. As you said in today's Urban Survival, there are so many middle class, average citizen's losing their life savings, etc., in this joke called "the Free Enterprise System" it is sickening."

It's a kind of open-secret that the spiders were launched onb July 15-16 and there is a chance of another Shape of Things to Come report in September-ish, so we shall see.

Fall of the Internet
What's key to watch going forward, per the rickety time machine's outputs, is the coming demise of social media. (Which may answer why I continue to write in old-fashioned HTML and though I do post on the UrbanSurvival blog cite, the disposal of social media would not disrupt things here, although it would maybe cause the the "data gap" in 2013.

The word in the British Guardian that a "Glasgow boy arrested for 'inciting riots' on Facebook" may be viewed as just another foundation block in coming changes in mass (unfettered/licensed) access to social media.

Suite101's post "UK Riots 2011: Facebook arrests in Social Media Battleground" should be seen in similar light.

One hopeful sign about the rickety time machine: There may be life on the other side of March-June 2013: Without going too deeply into it, the problem may be that (using radio receiver technology as an analogy here) the "front-end" may simply be overloaded in the period by high immediacy values. If we can cut through the high immediacy value overload problem, there may be a way to "tunnel through" the language and sniff out long-term values on the other side.

Not sure whether it will work - although when Clif is not dinking around with designing carbon fiber composites for the [fleet] of catamarans, he's noodling on code that might penetrate.

Or, to put the two concepts in simplest terms: The internet, like Radio which was regulated by the Communications Act of 1934, may change dramatically (like Radio did in the last Depression).

And then further, as the change happens, and we get into a kind of Kurzweilian Singularity where [yo shits on fire] is global, the swamping/.last minute stuff could be monstrous data behavior.

Pies and ponder to that.

[MacCruiskeen]

Various links in the original:

Wednesday, 10 August 2011
The riots and our selfish society

http://orwellsmemoryhole-tony.blogspot. ... ciety.html

"She is ruthless. She'll walk over and tread over anybody. She'll eat them up and spit them out for her breakfast. That's what I like about her, really" – Alan Sugar* talking about a candidate on The Apprentice (Series seven, Episode eight).

Over the past several days riots have spread across Britain. The scenes of violence and looting are distressing to watch. How did modern Britain reach this point? Who is responsible? How can we ensure that things improve? The rioters are selfish, lack discipline and respect for others, cry David Cameron and his ideological bedfellows. If this is true, it surely has something to with the fact that these conservative values have been allowed to thrive for a very long time. Sue Gerhardt elaborates:

"For most of the period since the rise of industrial capitalism in the early nineteenth century, collective values such as solidarity and co-operation have been unwelcome to the authorities, although they were sustained by the socialist and trade union movements until the late twentieth century. Eventually, however, such values were eroded by rising prosperity and the pursuit of material security above all else - a project that spread from the middle class downwards as wealth increased. The new culture developed the 'I' at the expense of the 'We' (Gerhardt, 2010, 'The Selfish Society', P.25).

The claim that parents are to blame seems plausible, but Gerhardt is quick to point out that

"Although it is largely parents who convey many of these unconscious messages to their children, our moral behaviour - selfish or unselfish - is not just about the values of individual parents. Parents themselves are heavily influenced by their social relationships. Without being aware of it, they pass on the culture in which they are immersed. Just as children don't choose the family they are born into, so too parents don't choose their society. They respond to it and adapt to its norms, often unwittingly. If everyone around you is behaving selfishly, it is difficult not to join in" (ibid, p.9).

What do we see when we look around? Soldiers being sent to fight in wars for oil, rapacious politicians claiming false expenses, immoral journalists hacking the phone of a murdered child. It is also impossible to ignore the media's obsession with celebrity and ostentatious displays of wealth and privilege.

We are not born with a burning desire to wear Nike trainers and Rolex watches. We want them because we are encouraged to believe that having expensive consumer goods will make us happy. Thus, it is no surprise that designer stores were looted by those who are excluded from consumerism due to their lack of economic resources.

Excessive consumption has become ubiquitous in Western societies, but it does not make us genuinely happy. It provides an illusion of happiness when the values we really crave, such as kindness and co-operation, are not allowed to flourish. This suits the capitalists just fine because they can only continue to make huge profits if people want and buy more goods.

It is very easy for politicians to be sententious about the riots. However, if they really want to build a society that is less selfish, they must stop pandering to the narcissistic demands of the super-rich and start meeting the real needs of the poorest socio-economic groups.

http://orwellsmemoryhole-tony.blogspot. ... ciety.html

*Baron Sugar:

Alan Michael Sugar, Baron Sugar (born 24 March 1947) is a British entrepreneur, media personality and political advisor. From humble origins in the East End of London, Sugar now has an estimated fortune of £770m (US$1.14 billion),[3] and was ranked 89th in the Sunday Times Rich List 2011.[4] In 2007, he sold Amstrad, one of his large business ventures.[5]

[...]

The Apprentice
Main article: The Apprentice (UK)

Sugar became the star of the BBC reality show The Apprentice which has had one series broadcast each year from 2005, in the same role as Donald Trump in the US version. Sugar fires a candidate each week until one candidate is left, who is then employed in his company.

As a condition for appearing in the third series, Sugar placed a requirement that the show be more business-orientated rather than just entertainment and that he should be portrayed in a less harsh light, to counter his somewhat belligerent reputation.[46]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Sugar

[Searcher08]

In case you have not seen this, Sir Alan Sugar in all his glory

[Stephen Morgan]

But in what was by far the most serious incident of the night three men, two of them brothers aged 30 and 31, died in Birmingham after they were hit by a car...

A relative of one of the dead men victims told Sky News this morning: 'They were not in the way or blocking the road. The car swerved towards them.'
He said that the three had been on the street protecting their business - a car wash - after violence the previous night, when two cars swerved on to the pavement and struck them.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z1UdHHqv6R

Violence is rarely mindless.

Not to question the veracity of the police or the Daily Mail (!), but if I may highlight differently:

A relative of one of the dead men victims told Sky News this morning: 'They were not in the way or blocking the road. The car swerved towards them.'
He said that the three had been on the street protecting their business - a car wash - after violence the previous night, when two cars swerved on to the pavement and struck them.

[Searcher08]

[tazmic]

Following his recent tweets and statements on the London riots, The Independent will no longer be taking blogs from Jody McIntyre.

[MacCruiskeen]

An admirably succinct analysis of this mass outbreak of free private enterpr deregulated shopping deplorable selfishness & opportunism, from the Manchester writers' co-operative, A Fine Lung:

Sheer criminality

Submitted by Neatneatneat on August 9, 2011 – 8:36 am

11 Comments

You start with a society in which material wealth is the only way to get ahead. You follow with a culture in which fame and money dominate. You bombard people with images of luxury goods that you tell them they must have. You create a society in which the wealthiest 1% own 20% of the country’s wealth whilst the least wealthy 50% own just 7%. You make that gap wider. You tantalise and take away.

You remove educational allowances from the young. You put a higher percentage of them out of work than at any time in the last century. You tell them that they must sustain £30,000 of debt to go to college to get a degree that isn’t even likely to get them a job. You spend ten billion on a sports event a few miles down the road that they cannot afford to even attend. You talk of Olympic Dreams (TM) as you close their sports facilities. You cut local services and their parents’ jobs to pay for the debts and disasters of your banks. You condemn their lives through your economic ideology as you sit in your cabinet of millionaires. You criminalise them for socialising in groups that you say are ‘anti-social’. You stop and search them over and over and over again and when they react you punish them. You turn one against another. You individualise and marginalise and alienate them from their neighbours. You talk of community but make it an illusion. You give no hope.
You do all this.

And when they come out of the estates to which you confine them, to take the goods they cannot afford, from the shops that won’t let them in, on streets denied to them by the police who harass them, in defiance of the politicians who condemn them, organised on social networks and media from which you have made millions, filmed by your cameras for your corrupt media companies for our consumption; when they do all this, all you can say is: ‘This is sheer criminality’.

You bet it is.

http://www.afinelung.com/?p=3109

[Searcher08]

I start with a family in which material wealth is the only marker of success. I follow with friends in which fame and money and entitlement dominate. I demand brands as a badge of my cool. I perpetuate a society in which the wealthiest 1% own 20% of the country’s wealth whilst the least wealthy 50% own just 7%. I make that gap wider.

I remove myself from education because I dont give a shit about learning anything. I find out how to operate outside the 'system' and game it whenever I can. I know the rules of credit card applications and income support as well as the people who work there.
I spend £100 on new trainers and let my family go hungry. I think reading is stupid, women are bitches to be fucked and gamed, adults fought with unless they are my parents, in which case ignored. I will complain about having nothing to do and will never ever initiate anything, never organise myself, because there is always, always a reason why not. I demand that someone pays for me, because EVERYONE OWES ME. If anyone ever speaks against me, I am being oppressed. I demand respect - and give none. I demand to be listened to - and never listen.

Politics only interests me if it will help me get an iPhone or trainers or Meow-Meow.
If I dont have enough money, I enact 'taxation' on others older, younger, weaker or random.
You could spend billions on me and it will NEVER EVER be enough and I will burn it down or fuck it up just because I can.

I like to intimidate and create fear, but feel safer in a gang, as I am a coward on my own. If my gang steals or fucks people over and you object, I say you are oppressing me.
I get stopped and searched by racist cops whose every action towards me convinces me of my righteousness. I have my gang and if you are somone from another gang who wanders into my district by accident, I will try and cut you for 'disrespecting'.
I dont give a shit about my neighbours and will happily steal from them and do, because they OWE ME. I talk of community in cliches but have none except my some mates.
My dreams are for who I am going to fuck... or fuck over... or be fucked over by.
My values are what my group thinks about me.
My head is so stuffed full of shit there is no room for anything else.
I do all this.

and when I come out of the battleground estates in which I confine myself or fight over, to take the goods to which I AM ENTITLED, by FORCE, from the shops that won’t let us in except in ones, because we nick stuff from them, on streets with aggressive cops whose harrassment validate our self-image as oppressed, loving the condemnation of politicians who we see as authority figures, organised on social networks which are free, filmed by our mobiles for our Youtube consumption cos we love to see ourselves on media as we crave fame more than anything else; when I do all this, all you can say is: ‘This is sheer criminality’.

You bet it is.

[MacCruiskeen]

You're missing the point, Searcher. Neither I nor the writers from A Fine Lung are defending the mentality you describe. On the contrary (surely obviously). We're saying that that shabby mentality is neither incomprehensible nor does it come from nowhere. Greed, selfishness, opportunism, smug bullying and an unshakeable sense of entitlement are precisely the values that have been embodied, boasted about, and encouraged in young people by the very same greedy, selfish, bullying, anti-social, entitled shits pictured above - the very same people who are now complaining sanctimoniously about a generation that's allegedly sadly lacking in values of any kind.

Those looters have values all right - precisely the values they've been taught ever since Thatcher smashed the unions and declared that there was no such thing as society. So now it's every man for himself, right?

Right. Too right. For nearly four decades now (That's two generations). And it's not as if the British Broadcasting Corporation have failed to supply Britain's young people with admirable, values-driven role-models:

"She is ruthless. She'll walk over and tread over anybody. She'll eat them up and spit them out for her breakfast. That's what I like about her, really"– Baron Alan Sugar, talking about a candidate on The Apprentice (Series 7, Episode 8 ).

Our values, embodied.


"Walk over and tread over anybody".

[Searcher08]

Actually, my response was about positionality - I didnt disagree with anything the writer described - it was more of a "Here is another blind man's description of the Elephant" .

Personally, I think a defining moment was more when a couple of million of us marched past 10 Downing Street before the Iraq War
and Blair said "Fuck you!" and he did -
and we let him.

[MacCruiskeen]

This amazing passage from a UK Defence Ministry prognosis published in 2007 demonstrates that they knew exactly what to expect. It's quoted in a very good piece on the English riots (Things fall apart, by William Bowles, blogged yesterday):

[...]

The DoD’s report, that I am so fond of quoting from, so I might as well do it again, reasoned that rebellion would come from a newly invigorated middle class, replacing Marx’s industrial proletariat (that no longer exists in any appreciable numbers):

“The Middle Class Proletariat — The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx. The globalization of labour markets and reducing levels of national welfare provision and employment could reduce peoples’ attachment to particular states. The growing gap between themselves and a small number of highly visible super-rich individuals might fuel disillusion with meritocracy, while the growing urban under-classes are likely to pose an increasing threat to social order and stability, as the burden of acquired debt and the failure of pension provision begins to bite. Faced by these twin challenges, the world’s middle-classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest.” — ‘UK Ministry of Defence report, The DCDC Global Strategic Trends Programme 2007-2036’ (Third Edition) p.96, March 2007 (my emph. WB)

I am not saying that the MoD got it wrong, far from it, if anything it reinforces my belief that the state was well prepared for events. [...]

http://williambowles.info/2011/08/10/as ... -bowles-2/

[semper occultus]

....precisely the values they've been taught ever since Thatcher smashed the unions and declared that there was no such thing as society....

too one-eyed...isn't it obvious we have gene-spliced a vile social aids virus by combining the most noxious destructive elements & side-effects arising from the 1960's radicals' aim to smash traditional structures of authority - esp. in the education system - with the 1980's radicals' efforts to unleash Friedmanite capitalist revolution, with all the debilitating secondary infections which follow it , dumbed-down education, moronic consumerism, sleb-"culture", gangsta-"culture"..all of which hit hardest the bottom-most socio-economic tiers of society

if these parasitic scum are to be blamed on Thatcher's corner-shop mentality than she is also due the credit for the heroic self-reliant & self-organised shop-keepers who stood out in Dalston ready to fight those looting fuckers poised to come in & smash everything they've grafted for & built for years whilst the so-called police "service" stood idly by watching it happen for 2 nights running....them & the Sikhs down in Southall & even the Millwall supporters in Sth london are my absolute fucking heroes - that pathetic wasrte of space Theresa May isn't even fit to lick the soles of their shoes......brilliant article about them - says everything that needs saying...

www.guardian.co.uk

When the rioters came to attack the premises of Kurdish and Turkish businesses in Hackney's Stoke Newington High Street and Kingsland Road on Monday night, the owners were waiting for them.

"It was between about nine and 10 at night," said Yilmaz Karagoz, sitting in his coffee shop next to a jeweller's shop that has been shuttered since Sunday when the rioting began and a pharmacy that closed a day after.

"There were a lot of them. We came out of our shops but the police asked us to do nothing. But the police did not do anything so, as more came, we chased them off ourselves." The staff from a local kebab restaurant ran at the attackers, doner knives in their hands. "I don't think they will be coming back," Karagoz said.

On Green Street in East Ham a similar-sized group of rioters was chased away by several hundred Asian residents. And in Bethnal Green local shopkeepers came out to defend their property.

Tuesday night there were further reports of communities taking steps to defend themselves. Dozens of men were guarding the main Sikh temple in Southall, west London.

Around 200 people were walking around the centre of Eltham, south-east London, following rumours that the area was going to be the latest place to be hit by disturbances. The group, predominantly men, had been congregating in pubs since the rumours began to circulate in mid-afternoon. "This is a white working-class area and we are here to protect our community," said one man. In Enfield, north London, about 70 men were seen chasing a group of youths.

Further anecdotal evidence also suggested that in other cities hit by Monday night's violence, communities were also remaining vigilant. On Amazon sales of baseball bats and truncheons rocketed overnight. Sales of one aluminium bat increased 65-fold in a day, albeit from low initial sales, while a truncheon jumped from a sales rank of 5,973 to 136.

Deputy assistant commissioner Stephen Kavanagh had already said it was not baton rounds or water cannon that would defeat the rioters – it was communities themselves. "We are already seeing a community kickback. People are angry. This is their neighbourhoods that are at stake," he said.

Before Monday evening's events there were warnings that Turkish shopkeepers in Tottenham were forming "protection units" to stop their businesses being looted, while retailers in nearby Wood Green were said to have equipped themselves with crowbars and other weapons after holding emergency meetings.

When the trouble came, hairdressers, sales assistants and butchers were among the scores of Turkish and Kurdish workers who stood outside their businesses in Green Lanes, Haringey, from 8pm having been warned by police to expect trouble.

The Guardian filmed others – some armed with baseball bats – on guard outside shops and restaurants in Kingsland Road, only a mile away from Hackney's burning high street. Three workers from Re-Style Hairdressers were among those out in Green Lanes, after word spread that an attack was imminent at about 4pm.

"I was here with my brother and my boss waiting for them until about midnight," said 16-year-old Huseyin Beytar. "If some guy ever breaks a window in this street, all the Turkish Kurdish people come down to protect the shops. We're like a family."

"We have to do things for ourselves," said Huseyin. "We have to look after each other. If they come here tonight there will be a fight, a big fight."

"We were outside ready and expecting them," said the manager of Turkish Food Market, who asked not to be named.

"But I felt very panicky because we are not safe from either the rioters or police.

"We put all of our efforts into this shop. It took 20 years to get it like this. But we do not know about our rights.

"I'm scared that the police and the government will attack us if we defend our businesses.

"We are being squeezed between the two."

Debbie Mumdy, 41, who lives nearby, said: "Most of the residents are really relieved that the Turkish community has been protecting the area. It's thanks to these guys that Kingsland High Street wasn't attacked."

And Nick Smith, chairman of a charity fundraising business based near Dalston Junction, said: "It's brilliant. These guys are obviously going to keep the trouble down. I don't think this particular area is going to be attacked."

But a 23-year-old council worker, who had just been evacuated from Hackney town hall due to fears of further rioting, said he was concerned tensions between communities could increase.

"It is just going to make matters worse. I would hate to see this turn into a generational or racial battle."

In his coffee shop in Stoke Newington, Karagoz tried to explain another feature of these riots – why Turkish and Kurdish youths had generally not joined the looting.

"We have businesses and work hard for what we have. As parents we want our children to work, earn money and be able to buy what they want, not steal it. Our young people know we would be ashamed of them if they were doing this."

[Searcher08]

An unspoken tragedy of the riots was what happened to Dave

Having to... come back from holiday in Tuscany


Mrs Milliband