There's a hockey stick lying around here somewhere.

Snag with weapons in untrained hands though is that they can very very easily be taken off you and used against you by a determined attacker...and then you've just given the guy (or girl) something to beat you into a bloody pulp with.

In this case...if I was in London, I'd have spent today getting wooden boards and boarding up my windows and doors. Metal shutters would be preferable, but not cheap, alas. A fire extinguisher wouldn't go amiss either...and if I had anything in the garden I didn't want smashed up then I'd bring it indoors.

Batten down the hatches, stock up with some good food, and watch it all on TV. It's the best thing to do, it's the safest thing to do, and you're not getting in the way of the police doing their work outside. :salute:

IF and I mean IF it flares up here in Sheffield i'm taking me,my mother and my brother in the car and 'digging in' in the nearby hills.
Food,blankets,a good baseball bat,air rifle,erm,couple of decent books,and some sleeping pills may be a good thing to stock up on.

Also,using Spartan tactics could help here,I mean,become an immovable object in your doorway wildly swinging your bat around like a viking berserker,that way only one can attack you at one time (unless others are throwing missiles at you from a distance),like the spartans at Thermopylae against the Persians,they held an area between two mountains (valley?) forcing the Persians into an attack on an equal frontage with the Spartans,even though the Persians massively outnumbered the Spartan defenders. :arrgh!:

Lastly,whats it like where you are?

Amen. It for some reasons seem to be the tough guys with knives who get stabbed most often.

It's interesting reading the posts from Betonov, etc.

The Eastern European media have been pretty open in their efforts to report these as "race riots" and then croon about the failure of "multiculturalism. The E. European states that are now part of the EU have been bricking it at the possibility of having to take in asylum seekers of the "tinted persuasion" and are shamelessly using the events in London as scare-mongering. As for the Russians, so many of them are inveterate, unredeemed racists and hyper-nationalists that this is just standard fare for them.

So, here's the script for anyone in those countries who might have been "misinformed" by their domestic media. These are no race riots. In any way or shape. It's just brain-damaged, mindless thieving and vandalism that is highly contagious amongst undisciplined adolescents and young adults because the breed likes free stuff and smashing things. Why do you think they robbed so many Carphone Warehouses? To spread the message of Dr King? Yeah right. You're pulling my plonker. The criminal gangs you can see on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, the TV, everywhere, are almost always of mixed racial makeup. There are blacks, whites, mixed-ethnicity, etc. in those crowds. The only thing they have in common is a desire to steal, destroy, and cover their faces.

Moreover, it's appalling to see the same kind of scare tactics from the usual suspects in the US right creeping in on the boundaries. You expect this kind of **** from Russian sources, not from people who should - despite constant efforts to the contrary - know better.

What is that....British intifada?
Ahmadinejad will deploy peacemaker forces soon:D

They're talking about this on the radio (in the US). So now I gotta read through all this.

You can skip a lot of it.

Anyway, back on topic. I just watched a few videos showing looting and persons being robbed. Sad sight really. Reminds me of LA. For some reason there is a mob mentality generated. Usually spurned by, of all things, a sporting event.

I think we will see this type of rioting more and more. Here in the states the mob will enter stores and steal. It is normally young kids doing it from the videos I have seen. With an economy as it is lawlessness is more prevalent.

:haha: I noticed.

Damn, I noticed that after posting the picture, wanted to explain it now to make myself look smart :O: You beat me to it

^^

:arrgh!:




I'd guess in part social funding cutbacks, jobs (though not directly attributable to government). There's been a lot of local amenities closed down near me - libraries and community centres, not to mention all (and I mean all) of the non privately run training and vocational opportunities at job-centres on a national level.
There are places like Learn Direct and Intraining, but they have an agenda all of their own - in order to secure training with them, you end up doing something totally unrelated to what you need experience in in order that their subsidy from the government last long enough before you complete your training course so that LD makes a profit. There are many many companies and private businesses who make a lot of money in this way, by exploiting the unemployed for government cash, more often than not they are sanctioned by the job-centre itself who know that they are just doing it for the money and are not interested in the candidates on their placement schemes. :o

Add to that the recent changes to disability benefit (now called 'employment support allowance') honestly some of what I hear about that is awful... try imagining making a terminally ill cancer sufferer work for his benefit, just because he can 'sit in a chair without discomfort' for 40 minutes, or making someone with osteo-porosis apply for a manual working job in warehousing.
These are not anecdotal incidents. I know the people involved, and the way the system is being run is absolutely shocking. The government agenda for 'reform of the benefits agency' is simply a blind to save money across the board because of the deficit.

Unfortunately this recession and its impact on ordinary people is much more insidious than a few banks loosing money - business refuses to grow, jobs are not created and those who fall through the employment market gaps are persecuted as scroungers because they cannot secure jobs that actually pay enough to live on in an economy that refuses to grow. By all accounts it is a vicious circle.

It's a god-awful mess imo. Not that freebooting and random thuggery really reflect these aspects of our damaged economy and social communities, they are more indicators of how bad things are in some places that the yobbos who had no respect for anyone to start with think they can openly do what they try and hide the rest of the time.

I said once that you cannot borrow your way out of a recession, but there's a good argument against cutting government spending too far during a recovery from a recession - it's liable to stall the recovery, leaving it stagnating. This is exactly what I think has now happened to the UK economy. As I said, it's a bloody mess; Likely as not to get worse.

Sunny, with a little high cloud. Pretty nice for august.

Sir your conduct here leaves me no option to get involved. :doh: Whilst Paul postings may be slight, and his composure less than apt when on the ropes, does that mean he should suffer? Insisting he provide you better? You find fault which indeed are far removed from elegance, and in some respect not of proper conduct. Whilst you pin him, you are unloading low blows. :nope: Will you not be so good or kind as to avoid and excuse the menial inaccuracies of others ? Must you really bear sheets of comment to injure, and provoke more ? I find you sir of sound mind, but of bad performance. :doh:

And then add in stuff like the ending of the EMA (Educational Maintenance Allowance) which allowed young people from disenfranchised backgrounds a slight financial aid to staying in education, the HUGE and sudden rise in tuition fees for higher education, the growing resentment to the blind eye this government has given to tax evasion by corporations and rich individuals and the continuing and simmering anger over the leniency shown to the banks, the recent disgust with the way MP's were creaming money from the public purse...

People are angry about a lot of different things just now. It's not just young, black kids.

I could not have said it better. As I posted, riots like this will be more prevalent in the near future.