Park Life

Would have started Kluivert.

No. None of that. I'm not going to smoke and that's it. ParkyJnr has a little chart where she ticks off the days.

See Mandigobi was arguing with Pards earlier about where to stand.

I have an ecig to hand but will not be using it. Slippery slope. I've convinced myself that smoking is madness. Leave it at that.

Should cane this lot.

Grumpy. Day5 no fags. They say that after the first 3 days the nicotine is out of the system and the urges start to reduce - that's clearly bollocks! Think about a fag every 10-15 min. Had a smoking dream last night where my ash burnt a hole in a picture of my dads old house. Strange stuff.

There were a numnber of things with Patreus, but I feel the abiding concern was that he was 'off reservation'. The problem the military career guys have when they brush up against the real cut throat wallahs ie politicians is that they aren't good at reading the tea leaves. They've spent their entire lives in rigid chains of command and surrounded by 'stand up guys' and round table desicision making - none of which prepares them for the lions mouth that is Washington and its skirt of lobbies, focus groups and think tanks. Think the admin was aware of the scandal but waited till after the votes were in. Drop into the mix the Benghazi investigations, the proposed presidential run and the ongoing intercene war between the cia and the fbi (blowback from 9/11 and funding drives against Homeland security) the mix was too potent and the outcomes unfathomable. These kinds of scenarios make the nightstalkers nervous.

Here. This is the crux of the matter. "As a candidate in 2008, Obama supported reinstating the assault weapon legislation that expired in 2004. Among other restrictions, the law limited the ammunition magazine capacity of these heavy-duty rifles. But a renewal fell by the wayside, and the president received a dismal review from the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, one of the most visible gun-control advocacy groups. “President Obama’s first-year record on gun violence prevention has been an abject failure,” the group wrote in a 2010 report, adding, “his campaign promises have gone unfulfilled and a year’s worth of opportunities to bring sanity to the gun issue have been lost.” Should he want to bring forward legislation now, Obama faces a major obstacle: Congress. Even the Democratic-controlled Senate has shown little appetite to touch the controversial issue" The wider context and my stance in this thread is that tougher gun legislation is not in the interest of the ruling groups wether they be business, politicians or infact the media (Obama doesn't even really have the power to change the status quo). That's why the debate dies till another tragedy occurs. American culture is too violent and edgy about giving up guns...It's a culture where paranoia and perpetual war, combined with a society at grave risk from economic failure and unemployement just isn't self-aware or informed enough (by the media) to make rational choices. I have a daughter and this tragedy hit me very hard the other day and I got to thinking about how violence is gloryfied as a money making tool by Hollywood (kill counts and lone warriors taking revenge) to gurantee profits. How there is little in depth coverage of poverty or mental health issues on american television - just silicon tits and plastic fox news. It's not just about gun control (that's part of it) but the whole culture is sick imo and by that I mean vulernable. Vulernable to this self-perpetuation of solving things all around the planet by training young men to kill and gloryfying it. In time social scientist will look back at this period and probably see that the whole culture was sold on some kind of killing myth...Some kind of self-justification through brutal and final acts. http://politicaltick...ningful-action/ Good article here...Bit heavy reading. (America living in a state of fear and paranoia since 9/11) http://books.google....r media&f=false

"Violence defines American culture. Turn on kids’ cartoons or any “drama” show and we see and hear the images and sounds of aggression against others. U.S. foreign policy advocates violence as the solution to problems. Bomb Kosovo, Libya. Invade Iraq or now Syria. Bomb Iran. Hollywood films, professional football and hockey, video games all squeeze the display of violence to attract audiences to their primary medium of entrainment. Brutal masculine domination has become the aesthetic in American “entertainment.” The media sells violence just as the language of violence shapes political discourse. In Hollywood barely a film heads for theaters without the fight and sound of a fist hitting a face, a bullet ripping through a body or a car pushing another car off the road. Our ever-growing prison system, with its industrial cousins, parallels the militarization of local police forces. The President heads the “assassination abroad committee” deciding on which people get “droned” today. Since we invade and occupy other countries routinely we have grown accustomed to permanent war, and our young people know guns and have used them against others in the Middle East. Staff Sgt. Robert Bales mowed down some 15 Afghanis, we suppose as a result of his war traumas. It’s easier to attribute war stress as a motive for mass killing than it is to figure out why every couple of months someone starts shooting down others in the street, in a mall or a movie theater. The state’s violence gets cloaked in legitimacy. We kill people for our security via video drone games in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia as we continue to exercise our violent will abroad. In the era of perpetual war, with targeted assassinations, an assault on basic liberties and the use of drones to protect our security we also undergo national mourning every time a “loony” kills “innocent” civilians – unlike those that die abroad as collateral damage. High U.S. body counts seem to occur as a parallel statistic to the violent acts initiated abroad. American soldiers kill Afghan civilians. U.S. “Kill teams” walk the countryside and we might wonder why some of this killing culture might rub off back home. Our military budget literally ties the country to war and a war economy. Violent crime gets blamed on minorities. We read daily of prisoners (mostly black men) receiving the death penalty. But nothing happens to the people who design automatic weapons, except they get rewarded for doing a good job. Their bosses, the ultimate cultural moguls, create violence for profit. They provide the inspiration for modern U.S. culture. Now let us pray, but keep your side arm ready in the movie theater where you may need it the next time someone imbibes too much of our violent culture and decides to play the Joker role during a Batman screening or takes cartoon violence to the streets."

Signed. Good luck with it.

The assualt weapons thing is ridiculous. They bent the regulations over the years to make out that in some way they were for hunting and so on.

No you really are a cunt.

BTW FUCK OFF!!

FUCK OFF YOU THICK IRRITATING CUNT If you read any of my posts on the media and its treatment of this tragedy you clearly didn't understand any of it.

Fuck off.

Real or not real they are planning to make money from it. Things don't have to be real to be lucrative - tech boom, housing boom, various big house (investment banks) driven bubbles - credit and so on...None of those had any real longterm value for anybody (not us anyway - the public) and it ended up taking down the very banks that were making it all 'seem real'. Climate change is real or can be made to look real (depends who you belive). For me there is enough data that points to the fact that there might be issues with the climate/weather, I just don't happen to believe it's man made. Goldman don't care either way, as it's looking like a goldmine to them. And I'm not sure the key player is totally onboard: NY Times "Though the evidence of climate change has, if anything, solidified, Mr. Obama now talks about “green jobs” mostly as a strategy for improving the economy, not the planet. He did not mention climate in his last State of the Union address. Meanwhile, the administration is fighting to exempt United States airlines from Europe’s new plan to charge them for CO2 emissions when they land on the continent. It also seems poised to approve a nearly 2,000-mile-long pipeline, from Canada down through the United States, that will carry a kind of oil. Extracting it will put relatively high levels of emissions into the atmosphere."

Seems strange I agree. There's already a lot of data and concerns on the impact it will have on the viability of business (energy dependent) and jobs. On the other hand the think tanks (Soros and so on) point to the fact that re-tooling and new green products will offset the old economy. He even went as far as to say that it would replace the downturn in the american economy if it was played right. It almost seems like there might be a divide in amongst the agendas of different arms of big business and Govt and others who stand to lose and some gain. Although if this agenda serves some higher purporse, then national Govt is out of the game. But what? nb Of course in recent history the financial markets (stock exchange and banking) has taken precedence over industry. If as Chez shows Goldman Sachs and so on are ready to go on it...Losing jobs in the UK isn't really gonna come into it.

Renton the vanguard of the Socialist Scientific Dictatorship of the Future.

Better in a fight tho.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204301404577171531838421366.html

Yes I've been rattled by an internet crybaby.

You need to read up on the different approaches of say Bp as against Esso.