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Before the election we had this and this. After it, you were expecting what, exacty?

See EFF's https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/07/politics-surveillance-erosion-privacy-latin-america - The Politics of Surveillance: The Erosion of Privacy in Latin America. Reminds me of Microsoft Coffee (http://cryptome.org/0001/ms-cofee.htm), and makes me wonder what effects the Pentagon's sockpuppet programs are having as well: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks *New Microsoft eugenics program leaked: Controversial "Just Click [HERE] to Send Drones" has many concerned* - maybe

oh really? http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2007/jun/06/microsoftdeadl

no, I don't have access to microsoft desktops, for some reason the schools and libraries around here all run Macs. At home, I've wiped the MS-Windows from every (used) machine as soon as unboxed. poor me

I can whine and warn about potential Microsoft traps, including Miguel de Icaza's MONO. we don't need that kind of shit in the open source world.

http://dpreview.com/news/1109/11090205toshibawificard.asp
Its a first as in "fully comply with the SD standard" i.e. no drivers needed for a unique very small subset of units.
For law enforcement and rent a spooks (or ex special forces) it means your very public photography/movie clip is safe from a software or "hard"ware deleting.
From a Guardian story having its images removed ... http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/14/bilderberg-charlie-skelton-dispatch
"One of the policewomen smiled. "Delete photos and you can go, no trouble.""
The "London Street Photography Festival" shows some sides of image/movie making in public places http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJH9F7Hcluo or
the parts of the world where police know to look around and 'remove' all cards/devices after a beating/death.

Nice the way we don't bother to give the context and at the same time cut off the statement at the point that it's about to claim part of reducing tens of thousands more deaths (looks even worse when we see the way you've done it twice)

The leak exposed massive corruption by Daniel Arap Moi, and the Kenyan people sat up and took notice. In the ensuing elections, in which corruption became a major issue, violence swept the country. "1,300 people were eventually killed, and 350,000 were displaced. That was a result of our leak," says Assange. It's a chilling statistic, but then he states: "On the other hand, the Kenyan people had a right to that information and 40,000 children a year die of malaria in Kenya. And many more die of money being pulled out of Kenya, and as a result of the Kenyan shilling being debased."

Selective quotation does not help your credibility. By the way, which of the the Founding Fathers would you charge with war for their involvement in the American Civil War?

Actually, this article has more details on the response, or lack of one. This is still a "known" event and the cable provides another second hand account of what allegedly happened.

Here's the latest one.

The following is taken from Desmogblog

  Spencer and the “Interfaith Stewardship Alliance”
Spencer is listed as a “scientific advisor” for an organization called the “Interfaith Stewardship Alliance” (ISA). According to their website, the ISA is “a coalition of religious leaders, clergy, theologians, scientists, academics, and other policy experts committed to bringing a proper and balanced Biblical view of stewardship to the critical issues of environment and development.”

In July 2006, Spencer co-authored an ISA report refuting the work of another religious organization called the Evangelical Climate Initiative. The ISA report was titled A Call to Truth, Prudence and Protection of the Poor: an Evangelical Response to Global Warming. Along with the report was a letter of endorsement signed by numerous representatives of various organizations, including 6 that have received a total of $2.32 million in donations from ExxonMobil over the last three years.

  Satellite Research Refuted

According to an August 12, 2005 New York Times article, Spencer, along with another well-known “skeptic,” John Christy, admitted they made a mistake in their satellite data research that they said demonstrated a cooling in the troposphere (the earth’s lowest layer of atmosphere). It turned out that the exact opposite was occurring and the troposphere was getting warmer.

“These papers should lay to rest once and for all the claims by John Christy and other global warming skeptics that a disagreement between tropospheric and surface temperature trends means that there are problems with surface temperature records or with climate models,” said Alan Robock, a meteorologist at Rutgers University.

  Spencer and the Heartland Institute

Spencer is listed as an author for the Heartland Institute, a US think tank that has received $676,500 from ExxonMobil since 1998.

The Heartland Institute has also received funding from Big Tobacco over the years and continues to make the claim that “anti-smoking advocates” are exaggerating the health threats of smoking.

Spencer and the George C. Marshall Institute

Spencer is listed as an “Expert” with the George C. Marshall Institute, a US think tank that has received $630,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998.

Naomi Oreskes, who wrote Merchants of Doubt has quite a bit to say about the George C. Markshall Institute and their anti-science "scientific research."

The Gardian was used as the patsy to start this little mess. They start by giving the Gardian a "Temporary" password which just happened to be the Root/Master password for the server. I mean really. Who gives out the Root password to the server to anyone other than the SysAdmin. When the password was published back in February did they do the sensible thing and change all the passwords? No, instead

WikiLeaks then published a series of increasingly detailed tweets giving clues about where the password might be found as part of its attempts to deny security failings on its own part. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/sep/02/wikileaks-publishes-cache-unredacted-cables

This was planed to go down this way.

And it shows, of course, that wikileaks can't be trusted to protect lives. It further shows that extreme measures are justified to protect potentially damaging secrets.

Besides, It unfortunately shows US politicians, sadly, are not that bad, compared to others ...

If the claims against the IMF head were a CIA operation, surely the US prosecutor would've actually done his fucking job and brought charges

The goal was never a conviction. The goal was to discredit him long enough to get him booted as IMF head. Look at the timeline if you don't believe me. The prosecutors first admitted that their case was a joke literally TWO DAYS after a new pro-American IMF head was appointed.

Let me help you:

February 11, 2011: Dominque Strauss-Kahn, International Monetary Fund head, makes a speech in Washington calling for the establishment of a new global currency that would devalue the U.S. Dollar

May 14, 2011: Dominque Strauss-Kahn arrested in New York City on rape charges. Prosecutors make him take a very public "perp walk" (with press in tow), and claim an ironclad case.

May 14, 2011: Dominque Strauss-Kahn resigns as IMF chief

June 28, 2011: New pro-American Christine Lagarde appointed IMF chief, with the U.S. cheering her on.

June 30, 2011: Prosecutors meet with Strauss-Kahn attorneys and admit their "ironclad" case is a joke, later drop all charges.

All just coincidences of course, the rantings of a tin-foil hat enthusiast.

Not sure how this plays into the recent bevy of activity in the CIA's shattershot attempt to sabotage and discredit Wikileaks, but I suspect someone is getting played here. First you have Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a guy with a shady and rather thin past, come into Wikileaks and immediately start stealing documents and attempting to sabotage the operation--later participating in the discrediting campaign too by writing a book bad-mouthing Assange (and starting his own competing honeypot site to boot). Then rape allegations (the same kind that Dominique Strauss-Khan suddenly found himself facing just weeks after he began questioning the value of the U.s. dollar). Now all this recent uproar.

The CIA is really throwing everything at the wall here. Looks like some of it is sticking. Well played.

Some will laugh at me for saying all this. But, let's face it, this is hardly the first time they've used similar tactics.

Sorry, the first part was meant to be funny... As for the second, according to the Guardian at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/01/unredacted-us-embassy-cables-online

"The embassy cables were shared with the Guardian through a secure server for a period of hours, after which the server was taken offline and all files removed, as was previously agreed by both parties. This is considered a basic security precaution when handling sensitive files. But unknown to anyone at the Guardian, the same file with the same password was republished later on BitTorrent, a network typically used to distribute films and music. This file's contents were never publicised, nor was it linked online to WikiLeaks in any way.

"Our book about WikiLeaks was published last February. It contained a password, but no details of the location of the files, and we were told it was a temporary password which would expire and be deleted in a matter of hours.

So 1) WikiLeaks knew the password was out there many months ago, 2) if they were TOLD the password was temporary they didn't misunderstand anything...

You're right, it's methane and ethane. Gasoline has octane. It's possible to convert methane to octane and other hydrocarbon chains.

The interesting part is that the hydrocarbons could be used for plastics production as well as fuel. There's also a nearby source of oxygen and jets of water in space. The Saturn system is much more interesting than Mars.

I think you and him are talking about different people.

You're talking about the people who did figure out new methods of healing through the years, whilst ignoring those who did manage to fuck up and kill more people than they helped.

He's talking about the shit crazy "witch doctors" who still exist in places like Africa who claim they can produce cures, but first they need the limb of an albino African...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/16/tanzania-humanrights

You're both right- you're right about the people you're talking about, but you're not talking about the people he's talking about- the people who, to this day, think they can cure people through things that have quite the opposite effect, they do exist, and they have always existed- not every "witch doctor" through history has been good or sensible. Humans are quite good at believing their own bullshit, and many such healers through history will have decided "Yes, this'll cure it" and stuck with it no matter how badly it went wrong, using the age old excuses of "Oh, god must've just wanted that one to die", or "He was too far gone, there was nothing that could be done for him" and the like.

There is any number of documented tragic cases in Africa still going on right now where people claim they can heal through things that are far more harmful to the "patient" and others around him.

What about cases like this where he's claiming he can cure AIDs, the people beleive they're cured, and then go and spread it? -

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/6323449.stm

Or this:

http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/a/aids-virgins.htm

I don't think his view of many third world "healers" is particularly mistaken. Many are just people making up false claims to elevate their status in society, to make people look up to them. Just like faith healers in fact.

no way to block OpenVPN without blocking every single TLS connection

Um, I got the impression from the article that that's exactly what they're doing.

This article seems a little clearer: it appears to only be VPNs that are to blocked. And it doesn't sound like (as some are assuming) it will become illegal to use them, just a requirement is being placed on ISPs to take steps to block them. So, yeah, VPNs that produce traffic that is hard to distinguish from regular encrypted traffic will be the way forward.

"piracy free" not. See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2011/mar/17/android-market-pirated-games-concerns and http://eightyeightgames.com/2011/03/25/iphone-piracy-rate/

Very soon when after the article came out, I searched "on the internet" to see if I could find that file, and I couldn't. The article mentioned the name of the file, "all-cables.csv", the size 1.73 GB, etc. No matter what I tried, the only hits I got fit in one page of results, which listed Der Freitag obviously, and a few blogs and message boards which were already referencing Der Freitag. The only file which contains all the cables freely available out there is the one from the Guardian, but only the date, origin and the tags are listed.

If you have the apparatus to infiltrate criminal organizations, you have the apparatus to infiltrate political organizations too.

You CAN do a lot to criminal organizations without infiltration. Infiltration has a high cost, in the form of increased paranoia, tribality and possibly brutality in the infiltrated groups. This worsens crime, and lessens defection.

Also, infiltration has a cost in the other direction - what it does to police departments and infiltrators themselves. When the police get used to betraying people's trust as part of their job, they start doing that in other ways, too. Adopting such means really is a slippery slope.

Well, we know plants frigging *LOVE* the stuff... so if we don't we can probably anticipate higher crop yields. Which isn't a bad thing considering the population growth on the planet.
Curbing it will further restrict of things like vaccines, health-care, education, and advanced agricultural adoption in developing nations so that's a bad thing.

CO2 may be a greenhouse gas, but we animals sort of, you know, *exhale* the stuff.

Lots of people die and starve because they don't have access to GM crops and coal powered electricity. So Unless we know *with certainty* I'm not OK telling anyone they are expendable in the name of CO2 reduction. Who knows, if they were afforded the same 1st world luxuries we are currently using, one of them might invent the next affordable green tech.

As of right now, I don't see a way to get it done without developing nations paying an extremely heavy toll.

We are all anti-nuclear now (stupid, IMHO) after Japan. The technology doesn't exist for us to have a zero CO2 impact. At least, not one we can afford (even in the 1st world).

What really hurts this whole debate is the stupidity like trying to ban Chlorine, which just so happens to be on the periodic table. CO2 is plant food - we exhale it - *fish* exhale it - the planet belches it out - it occurs naturally. Combine that with the war on GM crops and the hard-core environmental movement folks' moral authority seems to be perched on mountain of human bones and reeks more of a fascist political ideology than trying to keep rivers clean.

Does industrialization increase CO2? Probably. But so do volcanoes.

And ultimately - we get into this whole "denier" vs "believer" debate with both sides trying to dismiss everything the other side says in its entirety. Which is abject stupidity, IMHO.

The "we must do something, anything because the toll of inaction will be too high" argument seems hollow and overtly reactionary. They said the oceans would rise by 2009. Now they say they have *NO FUCKING IDEA*. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/21/sea-level-geoscience-retract-siddall

I've come to the conclusion that nobody really knows for sure. Data indicates something is happening and there could be a correlation with industrialization. But so far, the models created based on the presumption of the association keep breaking down and their predictions don't play out as expected.

Therefore, IMHO, this reaffirms that we can't predict the future. Making changes now seem sort of pointless in regards to CO2 because a) we don't have an affordable alternative and b) what alternatives we do have are "not allowed".

So What will it cost if we don't? You tell me.
Until we are able to accurately model what will happen, we're just shooting randomly and the costs are so incredible and the prediction accuracy is so poor, credibility alone doesn't justify it.

The U.S. should be looking to how other countries with better educated children fare - here are the rankings from 2010 - how does the education system in South Korea and Finland work? Why are the kids there ranking better than kids in the rest of the world? How do their weekly work timetables compare? What about those long holidays?

Good questions. The first thing that visitors notice in those schools is that teachers are highly respected.

The Republicans right now are demonizing teachers, with calls for the end of unions, calls for pay cuts, high-stakes testing where they blame teachers for the results and fire the lower 10% (like Jack Welch at GE), vouchers, charter schools and privatization.

Finland has strong unions, so unions aren't the problem. There's strong evidence (NAEP scores) that charter schools are slightly worse overall than public schools. There's no country in the world with a successful universal privatized education system. Michelle Rhee, the conservative school reform darling, got caught cheating. High stakes testing leads to widespread cheating.

There is no evidence that a 4-day school week makes education worse. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. It would be an interesting task to figure out the optimal hours for children to be educated - it may be that less daily hours may be helpful or not, and it may be that cutting the long holidays may be beneficial or not. Perhaps a 7-day school week would be optimal. But this kind of research should be done as controlled experiments with the aim of figuring out the best way to educate children. Doing it in a haphazard way because of lack of funding is not useful.

The U.S. should be looking to how other countries with better educated children fare - here are the rankings from 2010 - how does the education system in South Korea and Finland work? Why are the kids there ranking better than kids in the rest of the world? How do their weekly work timetables compare? What about those long holidays?

For the past 14 months the S.R.R Special Reconnaissance Regiment has been in Libya assisting the Rebels, along with CIA operatives on the ground, Canadian SAS, British SAS and SBS (Special Boat Service) and French Special Forces etc.

This uprising was actually engineered well before what you have seen unfolding over the last 7 months. Covert operations saw uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia etc and being ex-forces we laughed that you cannot get the right trained soldiers anymore when 21 and 22 SAS got caught http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2011/mar/06/arab-and-middle-east-protests-libya (6th March 2011).

I have not been in the forces now for over 14 years and I specifically quit out of protest of illegal wars and the political motivated bullshit plundering another Countries wealth with fake propaganda.

The Rebels in Libya are highly disorganized and are volatile. Getting them to form a government will see corruption, suicide bombings and further unrest in the Middle East, but that is what world leaders want...... chaos as a means of continuing with the New World Order political machine. If you want to see what is NOT in the news just google "Iraq Today". Nothing but chaos left behind whist stealing oil.

I am sat on the fence regarding the rebels and Gaddafi. It would have just been better to have left things as they stood instead of poking our noses in where it did not belong. All you will see is Guerilla Warfare for years to come and more terrorist attacks, which will add to the New World Order political control and more anti-terrorist laws. Besides it is within the "Public's Best Interest"....... "Choke".

Yes?

Not really, no.

Pope Benedict says that condoms can be used to stop the spread of HIV

In 2006, the Pontifical Council for the Health Care Pastoral, led by Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragán, was asked by Benedict to report on the use of condoms as a way of combating HIV.

"The pope is saying that if you can prevent disease, the use of condoms could be permissible," said John Allen, senior correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter. "But this has been in the mix for a while," he argued. "I think Benedict has been thinking this way since 2006, which is why he asked for the commission to look into it.

"The problem was not Benedict, it was others in the Vatican who argued that if you said using condoms was OK in certain situations, it would send out the message that they were approved. This was a PR problem."

The Catholic Church, Condoms and ‘Lesser Evils’

Speaking to Mr. Seewald, Benedict said the news media had misconstrued his remarks. Condoms are not the sole answer to the AIDS epidemic, he said, but, “There may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as perhaps when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility, on the way toward recovering an awareness that not everything is allowed and that one cannot do whatever one wants.”

Later, a Vatican spokesman said the pope’s words were meant to apply broadly — beyond gay sex workers. “This is if you’re a man, a woman or a transsexual,” the spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, said. “The point is it’s a first step of taking responsibility, of avoiding passing a grave risk onto another.”

Except of course when it does:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/punctuated-equilibrium/2011/jul/25/1

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/punctuated-equilibrium/2011/jul/28/google-open-letter-google

Except of course when it does:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/punctuated-equilibrium/2011/jul/25/1

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/punctuated-equilibrium/2011/jul/28/google-open-letter-google

They've admitted it: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/12/mark-duggan-ipcc-misled-media

There were already over 1000 arrested 2 weeks ago.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/10/london-riots-spark-copycat-birmingham

There are cameras everywhere, they just have to follow the masked guys from camera to camera on their way to and from the crime until they remove or have not yet put on their masks.
Takes some time but you get there.

"gettin their taxes back"

Let's not forget these lovelies http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14458424

contains:

London rioters: 'Showing the rich we do what we want'

This seems to be a better attempt to try to explain what was happening:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/09/london-riots-who-took-part

Definitely a mix of motives

China hasn't really figured out how to build their own aircraft carrier, either. Sure, they just announced that they built one. But that's really just refurbishing an old Soviet aircraft carrier and not designing and building one from scratch. Of course, if other nations keep giving China access to our stuff, it won't be long before they start building their own airplanes and aircraft carriers. Nonetheless, it's still not exactly Chinese innovation; it's Chinese copying.

Possibly true but what you are advocating is basically just paying the American poor...less. So great we get to keep the jobs here but we make sure that in order to keep them we keep people more poor than they are now. I suppose something is better than nothing but I'm not sure how much better it would be. Hey all those safety standards are costly too lets get of those (works for China: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/22/vinegar-contaminated-antifreeze-china-ramadan, lead paint, etc). Heck worker safety should go too so we can save more costs. Damn worthless unions and their creation of that waste of space middle class. If we could just turn back the clock and get back our upper and lower class system.

Regarding cats and planning: most likely not.

Regarding training: we're exposed to the idea of mass murder in a comprehensible form due to exposure to it in culture. We are exposed to sources that make us aware of the mental states and motives for such an action, even if we could not previously understand it. By having these experiences, we build up an idea of what circumstances under which one would go on a mass murdering spree, and what one would hope to gain from it. This provides us with the tools to, for example, make jokes about it. If an individual is exposed to the concept of mass murder but is told solely that it is a reprehensible, incomprehensible act, and never given the tools to investigate the problem on their own terms, it will remain reprehensible and incomprehensible to them. Remember that newborn children don't even know they exist as a thing; they're just interacting with the world around them and not even cognizant of themselves as individuals within that world. You can leave just about anything out.

How's that whole using-your-real-name-on-Facebook working for ya?

Perhaps if you were mindful of the Nym Wars going on you might not have been caught up in the dumb war going on in the streets of London.

The "it was a joke" line has already been tried and failed here in the UK, in a case where it was actually more obviously a joke.

Yet the "Summer of Rage" campaign orchestrated by police in conjunction with the UK press remains unprosecuted.

You said one problem. Yet I had linked to an article which described multiple problems on that day, and linked back to the stabbing of two weeks before. That isn't "one".

Nine people... in one location... in Hyde Park... and you're getting your information from The Sun 'newspaper'.

There were hundreds of these across the country every year! You've picked one place that had trouble THREE YEARS AGO, in arguably the second worst newspaper in the country?

I'm sure you're right. The police just overstepped the mark, and decided to hack an innocent man's messages JUST IN CASE he decides to murder under the guise of being in a water pistol fight.

I think you need to calm down. There's no evidence of "hacking"

TLDR; keep yourself up to date: MI5 joins social messaging trawl for riot organisers, Riot inquiry to go ahead as MI5 helps investigations and Prime Minister David Cameron said last week that the government would investigate shutting down social networking platforms like BlackBerry Messenger and Twitter if they were helping to "plot" crime. The police recently called on MI5 to crack encrypted messages sent through BBM..

No evidence of hacking, eh? Why are MI5 involved?

This is a annual water fight, it's meant to be a bit of fun, ffs!!

Next up: North Korea praises your foreign politics.

More likely, North Korea praises your criminal retributions law, expelling families from their homes because one of their members is accused (not convicted) of participating in the riots - http://m.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/aug/13/england-riots-coalition-response?cat=politics&type=article.

Intelligence agency asked to crack encrypted messages – especially on BlackBerry Messenger – to help police

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/15/mi5-social-messaging-riot-organisers-police

Actually, the main reason why CCTV doesn't have much of an effect on conviction rates is because the police can't be bothered going through the footage.

For high profile cases like the recent riots they'll make the effort.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jun/20/ian-tomlinson-death-officer-trial
Hopefully this won't be a whitewash.

Oh no, fantastic job you're doing ignoring the fact that many arrests, not for incitement, have already been made!

Facts. They are arresting people who were actually at the riots and committing crimes. Is it wrong to also follow other leads to apprehend others? The rioters used Twitter, Facebook and BlackBerry Messaging to organise themselves. Fact. The police are investigating social networks to try and track down the looters and rioters.

Taking down people for organizing some store-burning though, no. Many of the rioters seem to be cowards who were only smashing and stealing because they assumed they could get away with it, or they were going with the crowd. I suspect a few arrests will send most of the rioters to cover.

It's more than that. The rioters are the first generation of young people to come of age after the News of the World inspired pedophile hysteria campaign, which made every adult in the western world afraid of children.

All these young people have ever known from adults is a cold apprehension. Even their teachers are afraid to discipline them or be too friendly. Hearing of millionare undergraduates and Olympic representatives taking part in the riots, I wonder if part of the cause of these riots is an entire generation of Social Genies, with the riots being some demented form of collective attention seeking.

I still think that the main cause is the public following the example from the top, but as the list of those accused becomes ever more bizzare, I can't help but wonder if these spontaneous riots are some form of emergent social response by an ostracised generation? How did these young people become feral anyway?

Taking down people for organizing some store-burning though, no. Many of the rioters seem to be cowards who were only smashing and stealing because they assumed they could get away with it, or they were going with the crowd. I suspect a few arrests will send most of the rioters to cover.

It's more than that. The rioters are the first generation of young people to come of age after the News of the World inspired pedophile hysteria campaign, which made every adult in the western world afraid of children.

All these young people have ever known from adults is a cold apprehension. Even their teachers are afraid to discipline them or be too friendly. Hearing of millionare undergraduates and Olympic representatives taking part in the riots, I wonder if part of the cause of these riots is an entire generation of Social Genies, with the riots being some demented form of collective attention seeking.

I still think that the main cause is the public following the example from the top, but as the list of those accused becomes ever more bizzare, I can't help but wonder if these spontaneous riots are some form of emergent social response by an ostracised generation? How did these young people become feral anyway?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/mar/28/china-us-publisher-scientific-papers

China is second. I realize many Americans think they produce all of everything, always have and always will, but being second in the world in academic output strongly suggests China produces intellectual property. If you look instead at Chinese researchers, as opposed to research done in China, they may well already outrank the US.

When Egypt shut down their network to deal with protesters, the west was quick to say that's the response of a dictatorship and that it was morally wrong. Likewise when other countries shut down their social media to deal with protests.

And yet, a few rioters in London and suddenly we're more than happy to do exactly the same thing. I saw a headline where Iran was asking the UN to intercede on behalf of the UK rioters. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/10/uk-riots-iran-un-mahmoud-ahmadinejad Isn't this hilarious how we were angry at how Iran cracked down on protesters during their election, but we are more than happy to do exactly the same thing for a few looters. Ahmadinejad must be laughing like a madman.

You appear to have quite a sense of entitlement. You think society, via taxpayers, should pay policemen to arrest these people and a justice system to house them in jail just to accommodate for your particularly Daily Mail brand of anger.

You're the only one bringing up the Daily Mail, says something about you and your prejudices I suppose, but it really is not the stinging rebuke you seem to imagine.

I say that society should, via taxpayers and voluntary schemes and good example, give these people a part to play so they are productive and contributing rather than unhappy and a burden. I don't think that anyone is entitled to anything, but it's what you've got to do if you want to live in a functioning, comfortable, happy environment.

You really do seem completely divorced from reality - have you ever lived on an estate? Have you any idea what life is like? If not I suggest you do and see how far your 'good example' gets you - it really would be an education for you. Some people are selfish, violent and beyond redemption (at least in the short term) - to deal with them we need prisons and the force of law, or there will be no public space left in which to build a functioning, comfortable and happy environment. Among those people I would class looters - perhaps you'd like to have them as neighbours, but personally I would not.

Encouraging people to lead a happy and comfortable life (by providing opportunities and education) comes after society's rules have been enforced by the rule of law. We can argue over the benefits and costs of both, but one cannot function without the other, and stealing playstations and attacking innocents are not an acceptable form of expression, no matter how frustrated or downtrodden teaching assistants are feeling.

Don't forget about the old woman in Georgia who took out most of the internet for Armenia when she was digging for scrap metal to sell.

Yes massive cost cutting and "positional asphyxia" over the years "Deaths in police custody since 1998: 333; officers convicted: none"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/dec/03/deaths-police-custody-officers-convicted
http://cryptome.org/info/totten-protest/totten-protest-01.htm
The Darcus Howe interview with the BBC is very telling too.

You said there is no question that the girl threw a stone. I say there is a question that there was a girl and that she threw a stone.
Maybe there was a girl but maybe it was a fabrication. Maybe instead of a stone it was an incendiary. You assume without proof that this happened when it was reported by one unnamed witness that claims to have been hiding ten meters away.
You are taking the view point that this was caused by oppression of a minority group in the area. I see very little proof of that and none in the data you presented.
You say the gun was in a sock. I see not verifiable source that says that it was in a sock. I see lots of unverified reports that it was in a sock but none that it was.
I have also heard that it wasn't a real gun and couldn't shoot. Now it has been verified that it was loaded and abile to shoot.
The facts we have right now are this.
A man that was suspected of dealing drugs was being arrested by police. He as armed with an illegal fire arm. He was shot.
BTW I promise you that I can put a pistol in a sock and shoot it at a target without taking it out of the sock. Do you know what effect passing through a sock would have on a bullet? None.

Really? You keep saying that it isn't about this or that but yet you present rumor as fact to justify the actions of the mob. From http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/07/police-attack-london-burns
"The latest developments come as one community organiser suggested the handgun recovered was found in a sock and therefore not ready for use. It is likely to fuel anger on the streets of Tottenham and elsewhere in London if it provides evidence that officers were not under attack at the time they opened fire on Duggan."
Really? You are say that this is a fact? I mean really?
I will give you a counter suggestion. Maybe that gang the he was a member of is spreading false information. They are showing the police that if you come after them that you will pay. Spread a few rumors that a poor father of three was shot without reason by the police. Get a protest going of only a few hundred people and mix in. Stir the pot and let here rip. Get the gangs in other cities to join in and you have a lovely looting fest. The result is you depress the area even more, cause more misery, cause the police to tip-toe around because they do not want to cause another riot, and you spread you power base even more and increase your crack cliental.
Of course you would say that is tin hat stuff because gangs are not that organized or think that far ahead. I mean gangs never start riots so then can carry out crimes right?
I personally think it is the gangs taking advantage of the situation. They may not have planned the protest but it is easy to spread a few half truths to get people going. What is worse is when other people repeat them as fact.