Meenzer

A few weeks ago they were saying all over the news that Al Qaeda had attacked Norway. They'll repeat any old gubbins to fill the hour out. What do you think is guiding all these louts around the police to vunerable locations? 'The power of the people mannnnn' You need a rubber bullet firing up your arse; hippies are of no use during a crisis. What's remotely hippy about wanting to clarify the truth of a claim? I don't know why you'd doubt that technology allows these people to communicate and concentrate attacks better than if they didn't have it. It seems a pretty axiomatic conclusion. But no, "Hey mannnn, I aint buyin' your crap mr. polititian mannn, power to the peoplee." Blackberry messenger isn't really "social media" though is it? It's not as if the mainstream media are clued-in enough to know the difference though. I half expect the "information superhighway" to get blamed soon.

You're incorrigible.

Genius. Years supply. Agreed. Maybe they're planning on selling all the $10 Chinese electricals and investing the profits in gold.

"As far as..." without a closing "...is concerned" (or similar). I assume it's an Americanism as I always hear it in my head in a whiny Yank accent.

Genius.

Good on them, I say. Show these low life scum the true meaning of community. Our council's been in touch via the various cleanup Twitter feeds, blogs etc. to say "thanks, but we've already sorted everything overnight". I've never seen the bastards be so efficient.

Well, the first ones may have been. A lot of the places it spread to later in the night aren't. But that was likely just opportunism and copycat behaviour once daft kids saw (including on rolling TV news) that the police were massively overstretched and adopting a policy of controlling rather than clubbing them.

FYP. And no you're not. Though the Ladbrokes comment was all right.

Certainly. Actually reports just in. It involved 49 white people, 49 black people & two people of mixed race. You bloody racist! That means there was no majority participation by any one group, so the riot didn't actually happen. Win!

Reasonably willing to suggest the ethnic breakdown of that confrontation will be somewhat different, too.

Canny. I could have been telling you anything there.

Someone change this lad's location to "Holzweg".

Did they loot an off-licence and a branch of Schuh?

That footage is from Woolwich. Sky News have just been showing it and talking about it being from Liverpool. Quality reporting.

The Met might be completely incapable of stopping this from happening, but at least they know which places they should be protecting first and foremost.

Cock pic or stfu

Almost inevitably:

Seen that on NO. The kid in the blazer is mint. "Errr. Guys. Yah, hi guys. Do you have anything in a longer leg?"

Always assumed it was canny affluent. The Beeb seem to think it is anyway. In the 80s and 90s the riots were very localised, this seems very different. I think it's just pockets of kids all over the place seeing pictures of the looting in Tottenham and Enfield, seeing the police adopting a policy of containment rather than reciprocal violence, and thinking "fine, we'll have a bit of that too".

Off for a three-day break on the banks of Lake Geneva this weekend, so looking forward to catching up on some serious reading. Mostly books the fella's got out of the library. The way things are going round here tonight, there's a decent chance we might get to keep them.

Is Ealing nice or something? I must confess to knowing absolutely nothing about that side of town.

Excellent, cheers. I was about to say we're rarely close enough to that part of the world, but then we go to Babur in Honor Oak often enough (also excellent btw) and that's not too far away by London standards. Will be sure to follow your tips once things have quietened down a bit.

They just showed some shots of the earlier "standoff" in Birmingham on BBC News. Which basically amounted to one bloke ambling away with a boxed electrical item stuffed up his tracksuit top.

This is all over the internet already, but it's worth posting here: http://www.twitvid.com/4JTZH

Hey, with apologies for hijacking this thread for something similarly middle-class and utterly irrelevant - since you live in the vicinity, have you ever been to/had takeaway from a restaurant called Omrith on Forest Hill Road? Only we got their delivery leaflet through the door recently and the food sounds bloody awesome. Obviously won't be expecting them to be able to deliver for the next few days, but still...