Up from Fœtid Comment Sewers & CRUMMY OLD WINE DEPT: Duck & Cover Club, and Atomic Mutant Party / Youtube and Happy Slapping

Click if you dare.
"Itchy and Scratchy" Copyright (c) Matt Groening

pat the turtle schriebe ...

I just saw this little film again and the image of your Geiger Counter popped up in my head and I could not resist to post the link. Bert rules. Be aware. Look up to the skies. Believe everything you see on TV

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It's taken me a few days to work up the courage to click onto Youtube. At this moment Youtube is the 8th most popular site on the WWW, and Warner Music just made a revenue-sharing deal so kids (or old people) can make their own videos for songs in the Warner catalog and show them on Youtube.

Everybody's clicking on Youtube. And I mean Everybody.

I really hate it when the world ends, and nobody tells me.

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Added July 01, 2006
From Ahrisss
funny ass shit
in category Comedy
Tags slapping school

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from Wikipedia:

Happy Slapping is a fad in which an unsuspecting victim is attacked while an accomplice records the assault (commonly with a camera phone or a smartphone). The name can refer to any type of violent assault, not just slapping. Within the UK, where the term is much more used than the US, it is associated with the chav sub-culture.

Happy slapping filming attacks seem to be common in modern bullying, and not unique to happy slapping. The core defining feature of happy slapping is an effort by the attacker to make the assault seem like play [citation needed], though some happy slappers have indulged in extreme violence.

Often those found performing such activities will say they were just "happy slapping", asserting that they were just kidding [citation needed].

Use with video technology

Although the concept of filming a crime is an old one, the ease and general availability of video cameras in mobile phones means that such attacks need not be planned carefully beforehand and are more easily watched and circulated for comedy purposes afterwards. Some political and media commentators have accused Jackass and Dirty Sanchez of inspiring slappings. Happy slapping can be more violent than a mere slap (causing criticism of its name) and may include a strike or even actual bodily harm. Sometimes the assault is performed with other crimes, such as mugging and rape. At least two incidents have resulted in the death of the victim.

History

Happy Slapping is known to have started in South London [1][2], in a format known as "Slap TV", where a happy-slapping video would be recorded, and then watched over by dozens of people like a TV show. The first newspaper article to ever use the phrase 'happy slapping' was "Bullies film fights by phone", published in The Times Educational Supplement on January 21, 2005, in which reporter Michael Shaw described teachers' accounts of the craze in London schools.

Media-reported incidents

By necessity, the incidents are listed by the time of media attention rather than the time of the attacks themselves.

* England, UK, December, 2005: The manslaughter of David Morley. A 15 year-old-girl, Chelsea O'Mahoney (initially not named in the media for legal reasons, this later changed at the sentencing to name and shame her.[3]) and her co-defendants Reece Sargeant, 21, Darren Case, 18, and a youth, David Blenman, 17, were all found guilty of the manslaughter of David Morley near Waterloo Station, in London. Barry Lee, 20, and another 17-year-old were cleared of all charges. According to press reports, "The 15-year-old girl had told Morley that she was making a documentary about 'happy slapping' before her gang of friends kicked him to death." [4] [5]

* Northern Ireland, UK, 2005: Groups of youths filmed vicious attacks on firecrews. Two were convicted for setting fire to a man during such an incident.

* England, UK, 8 June, 2005: A 17-year-old girl was shot with an air rifle and filmed in Wortley area of Leeds.

* England, UK, 18 June, 2005: Police arrested three 14-year-old boys for the suspected rape of an 11-year-old girl who attended their school. Authorities were alerted when school staff saw footage from the students' mobile phones.

* Denmark, March 2006: Newspapers reported that a 16-year-old girl had been arrested for participating in an episode of "happy slapping." She was standing with a good view of the scene, filming the incident on her mobile phone. Witnesses told the police that the attack looked planned. The attacker is still at large (no serious injuries or deaths have yet been reported as a result of such activity in Denmark).

April 5, 2006: The two attackers were sentenced 6 and 8 months in jail for this attack. The two kids said it was a spur of the moment attack, but the judge did not believe them. He sentenced them using premeditated attack laws, where a non-premeditated attack only carries a 40 day prison sentence.

* Denmark, 6 March 2006: Two young boys aged 7 and 10 years old were attacked by older boys, who hit and kicked them. The assailants filmed everything on their mobile phones.

* Hungary, 22 March 2006: Six young boys attacked another boy in a classroom by pulling him into a corner, then punching and kicking him. This attack has been filmed on one of the boy's mobile phone two weeks before the report.

* Belgium, 24 March 2006: A 15-year-old handicapped boy was beaten up by 10 pupils from the same school.

* Belgium, 3 April 2006: The news program Telefacts broadcast a documentary about "happy slapping" in the country. It mentioned two cases: one with a 15-year-old victim, another about a 37-year-old mentally handicapped person who was held hostage for a few days in his house while being beaten and tortured. In the latter case, one of the "gang members" was threatened by the others that if he informed anyone about what was happening, he would become a victim, instead of a participant. Telefacts also mentioned that the imprisoned gang leader still threatens his victim.

* France, 24 April 2006: A teacher was beaten up in class by a 18-year-old pupil, because she reproached him for being late. This was recorded by another pupil in the class with his cellphone. The man was arrested and released the following day.

* Denmark, May 10 2006: Yet another case was reported in the newspapers.[1] Two men aged 17 and 19 attacked a woman in Copenhagen, one kicking the victim while the other filmed the incident using a mobile phone. Two plain clothes police officers saw the whole incident, and the assailants were immediately arrested and the mobile phone confiscated.

* Slovakia, September 1 2006: A 54-year-old homeless man was beaten to death by pair of 24-year-old and 17-year-old boys. Attackers filmed his dead body on a videocamera.

* Sweden, September 1 2006: After a 16-year-old African boy hospitalizes a 15-year-old Balkanese boy in the city of Örebro, the latter's 17-year-old sister stabs and kills the former with a hunting knife and claims self-defense. The killing is filmed and distributed online. [6][7]

External links

* Happy Slapping (Italian)
* Reporting about happy slapping - France
* Concern over rise of 'happy slapping' craze
* Happy slapping increasingly slap-happy?
* Does 'happy slapping' exist?
* Mother rages at 'slap attackers'
* Happy Slaps: A London View
* Happy Slaps: Fact and Fiction
* How I unwittingly helped to start the Happy Slaps panic

References

1. ^ "Mænd sparkede tilfældig, mens politiet så det", Jyllands-Posten, May 11, 2006

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The Guardian (UK)
Tuesday 26 April 2005

Concern over rise of
'happy slapping' craze

Fad of filming violent attacks on mobile phones spreads

by Mark Honigsbaum

In one video clip, labelled Bitch Slap, a youth approaches a woman at a bus stop and punches her in the face. In another, Knockout Punch, a group of boys wearing uniforms are shown leading another boy across an unidentified school playground before flooring him with a single blow to the head.

In a third, Bank Job, a teenager is seen assaulting a hole-in-the-wall customer while another youth grabs the money he has just withdrawn from the cash machine.

Welcome to the disturbing world of the "happy slappers" -- a youth craze in which groups of teenagers armed with camera phones slap or mug unsuspecting children or passersby while capturing the attacks on 3g technology.

According to police and anti-bullying organisations, the fad, which began as a craze on the UK garage music scene before catching on in school playgrounds across the capital last autumn, is now a nationwide phenomenon.

And as the craze has spread from London to the home counties to the north of England, so the attacks have become more menacing, with increasing numbers of violent assaults and adult victims.

In London, British Transport police have investigated 200 happy slapping incidents in the past six months, with eight people charged with attacks at south London stations and bus stops in January alone.

The Metropolitan police have no overall figures but recorded a number of attacks in London boroughs earlier this year.

Following a spate of random attacks last December on pupils at Godolphin and Latymer girls' school in Hammersmith, west London, police posted extra officers in the area as a deterrent.

But as police have become more vigilant, so the gangs have become more sophisticated, seeking victims in parks or public areas where their crimes are unlikely to be spotted by the authorities or captured on CCTV.

Liz Carnell, the director of Bullying Online, a Yorkshire-based charity set up to combat bullying in schools, said that since the start of the year she has heard of increasing attacks both on children and on adults. But she fears many incidents are not reported.

"In most cases the worst that happens is a minor scratch or a bruised ego," she said.

"What the people behind these attacks have to understand is that technically they are committing an assault. And if they then upload the images on to the internet or a phone system they could be prosecuted for harassment."

What makes the attacks all the more bewildering is that many victims do not realise they have been happy slapped until after the event.

Earlier this month James Silver, 34, a freelance journalist, was attacked while jogging on the South Bank in London. While one youth blocked his path, another hit him with a rolled-up magazine.

When he spun around another teenager -- who had been hiding behind nearby scaffolding -- leapt out and hit him hard in the head. When he staggered to his feet he noticed the rest of the gang were jeering and pointing their mobile phones at him.

Silver admits that while the attack left his "ego smarting" he did not think it worth reporting. "At the end of the day I was unharmed but it was pretty shocking at the time," he said. "The worry is that while the bulk of the attacks are trivial, some of these youths could be carrying knives."

Earlier this year, schools in Lewisham, south London, and St Albans banned camera phones because of worries that the fad was leading to an increase in playground bullying.

In a comment recently posted on a London community web forum, "Happyslapper2" described the craze as a "joke," writing:

"If you feel bored wen ur about an u got a video phone
den bitch slap sum norman, innit."

However, in a sign of a gathering backlash, other forum members disagreed.

"It's hardly a joke ...
it's fuckin rude and pea-brained,"

wrote "slappersidiots".

"If this happy slapping fad continues it will only be a matter of time before someone is seriously hurt," predicted another.

- 30 -

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06 April 2005
Duck & Cover Club, and Atomic Mutant Party

Well, okay, finally I'm getting around to the Duck & Cover Club. From 1957 to 1959 I was a student at Ben Murch Elementary School in Northwest Washington DC, a big stone and brick two-story ur-Leggo sort of edifice, probably built around 1930. Nothing fancy, nothing modern, entirely orthogonal and rectangular, not a curved surface or line in the whole joint. A very military-style building for us Little Boy and Girl Soldiers, probably about 400 of us. It was a very solid and efficient processing plant for teaching us everything from fingerpainting to the multiplication table. Like Madeleine and her friends in Paris, we went from place to place in two orderly straight lines.

From Murch, it's about a 12-minute car ride to the US Capitol building or the White House, about 20 minutes to the Pentagon. The more we learned that we lived in a very special place -- the capital city of the United States of America -- and the more we learned about the fierce struggle between the USA and its allies, and the Soviet Union and its allies, the more it began to dawn on us that if the Cold War ever got Hot, we were living on the bullseye of the premier target of an H-bomb missile and bomber war.

It wasn't as if anyone was trying to keep all this a secret from us. The Cold War was an extraordinarily expensive kind of war, and in a democracy, it needed massive public and voter support so that people would be willing to pay for it and keep military hardware at the top of the democracy's national priorities (rather than education or health or nutrition).

So there was a constant stream of television news and images about ICBMs, B52 bombers, nuclear missile-launching atomic submarines, and H-bomb testing. At that time, the testing was above-ground, in the Pacific and in the Nevada desert, and it was filmed and broadcast on the nightly news. Kids saw plenty of it.

At age 11, did we truly understand what an H-bomb was and what it would do to us on the Murch playground if it landed on the US Capitol or the Pentagon or the White House?

You better believe it. The kids of South Park get lots of the little details wrong, and adults think that's funny. But kids know the Big Picture roughly as well as most adults do; kids love to watch television. They know What's Out There that can kill them, or rip their arms off, or give them cancer. That's every kid's job, to have some good idea of what's out there that can kill them.

At Murch, we might not have been able to give a good scientific account of nuclear fusion, but we knew how big those mushroom clouds were, and we could see the movies of trees and ships and houses and buildings and water towers and dummies being blasted all to hell when the mushroom cloud went off.

Twice a year a special alarm bell went off in Ben Murch Elementary. It was our Civil Defense drill in case of nuclear attack.

The teacher told us to stand up and walk out of the classroom and into the big hallway. Then the teacher told us to line up and face the wall. Then we were told to get down on our elbows and knees, still facing the wall. Then we were told to put our heads down on the floor, and put our arms over our heads. We were supposed to pack ourselves tight next to the next kids, butt-to-butt. Then we just waited in that position for about five minutes. No talking.

Then the alarm stopped and we were told to get up and go back into the classroom.

I remember my teachers being very agitated, very short-tempered with any of us who dawdled or made noise, as if they were being judged on how quickly, quietly and orderly their classes could get into Apocalypse Position. We were given a very brief, curt explanation that this was what we were supposed to do in case of a nuclear attack. (A fire drill was very different, and we practiced that much more often.)

It was perfectly clear to me what the object of the drill was. It was so all our little charred corpses would be easy to recover when they came sifting through the debris of Ben Murch Elementary School a few days later.

Usually in old archival documentaries I see schoolkids being instructed to duck under their desks in their classrooms and cover their heads with their arms. Sometimes they sing the "Duck and Cover" song. In this link, you can see a short government cartoon with a catchy jingle for kids starring a turtle in a thick shell who knows just what to do in case of atomic attack.

It seems obvious that any government facing this kind of threat should spend all it can spend and do all it can do to protect all its civilian citizens, starting with the kids, from a bomb or missile attack. Britain went all-out during World War II to build public shelters and make everyone take cover in them when enemy bombers or rockets were spotted heading for the cities. Later, when the Allies started to attack German cities, the Germans did the same.

But the Cold War evolved a little differently. At the same time both superpowers were threatening one another with pushbutton thermonuclear annihilation, from launch to detonation in less than one hour, their diplomats and scientists were also desperately negotiating limits and nuances and fine print and quirks and loopholes to the nuclear standoff and the "brinksmanship."

The first negotiated agreement was for both superpower enemies to move all nuclear bomb testing underground, into caves, so the tested A-bombs and H-bombs would no longer dump tons of radioactive material into the atmosphere which everyone had to breathe. (The bomb product isotope strontium 90 -- something never in the natural environment -- was particularly feared for its cancer-causing and long-lasting effects. I think that once ingested, it accumulates in bones.)

If there was a nuclear war, how could anybody tell who won? Well, it was going to be a matter of counting survivors. Which superpower would have more citizens still left who were healthy enough to carry on the nation's industrial and agricultural activities? That would be the winner.

And one way to insure your side would have more survivors would be to start now, before the war, to build a vast nationwide network of very effective civilian bomb shelters. You could take this Victory Census, both sides could get a pretty good idea of which side would win, before the war ever began.

That scared the crap out of both sides. If Side A succeeded in building effective shelter space for 50 million more civilians than Side B, and they knew they were winning the Shelter Race, their strategy hawks would start calling for a First Strike -- they knew in advance they'd "win," so let's press the button now, and get it over with.

So in treaties the USA and the USSR negotiated and signed, both sides promised NOT to build shelters for civilians and schoolkids. The idea was that the political leaders of both sides knew their civilians would always be vulnerable, so they'd all be Crispy Critters in case of war. There was no big national shelter network, so neither superpower would think it could "win."

So back at Ben Murch, our safety was provided by our pudgy little arms wrapped over our heads while we knelt down on our knees in the school hallway. That, by international treaty, was as safe and protected as we were going to get.

By the late 1960s, parodies of Civil Defense posters began appearing that instructed you on what to do

IN CASE OF NUCLEAR ATTACK

1. DROP TO YOUR HANDS AND KNEES.
2. PLACE YOUR HEAD BETWEEN YOUR THIGHS.
3. KISS YOUR ASS GOODBYE.

During the Cold War, this was how the adults and parents of the world went about protecting the children of the world.

At higher strategic levels, both sides were evolving a strategy called MAD -- Mutually Assured Destruction. The hundreds of thermonuclear missiles could hit the enemy's cities in less than an hour, everybody was fucked, immediately or within weeks or months. So there was no strategic advantage to a sneak attack: If one side pushed its button, there'd be plenty of radar and satellite warning to give the other side time to push its button.

Variations of these strategies, some designed unilaterally, some agreed to by both enemies, went on for decades. As Nephew Kwak mentioned, a great deal of the Fanciest Strategic Thinking was computed using the rules of the newest brilliant mathematical tool, Game Theory, invented by John von Neumann, and by John Nash, whose sad story was told in the movie "A Beautiful Mind." The first public introduction to this very brilliant and powerful mathematical tool was "The Compleat Analyst," published by the RAND Corporation, the nation's most prestigious private Think Tank.

Meanwhile, around the mid-50s, private American homeowners began buying their own backyard family fallout shelters. (That wasn't forbidden by international treaty.) I knew somebody in our neighborhood who built one. It was a prefab job sort of like a gas station's underground gasoline tank, lowered into a big hole which a backhoe dug in a corner of the backyard. They stocked it with canned water and canned food (Spam undoubtedly), enough for Mom, Dad, Junior and Sis for maybe a month. Charcoal filters scrubbed the air coming in through the air intake pipe. It had a chemical toilet and lots of toilet paper, and they had an emergency battery-powered radio, and maybe a cheap Geiger counter to measure the radiation levels up above. "The Twilight Zone" had a famous episode about a family using guns to keep their neighbors from getting into their shelter.

Most people in the neighborhood thought the family was weird. But we didn't exactly think they were crazy or stupid. If we thought they were crazy or throwing their money away, we knew we'd change our minds very quickly after the mushroom clouds started popping up around the city. We knew we'd wish we had a fallout shelter in our backyard.

This was all before Prozac, all before schools had psycholgical counselors to help kids with their fears and dreads and anxieties and worries. Kid fear of being blown to radioactive smithereens was not recognized or acknowledged during the Cold War in and around Washington DC.

Your best bet, adult or child, was to ignore as much of it as you could, and just assume that somehow, the smartest men in America had bubbled up to the top defense and diplomatic and political leadership positions, and they knew how to handle this whole nuclear defense thing.

Of course it would also be nice to assume that somehow, the smartest men in Russia had bubbled up to the top defense and diplomatic and political leadership positions, and they knew how to handle their end of this whole nuclear defense thing. That was a little harder to do, because we were always hearing our national leaders accusing the Soviet leaders of being sneaky lying atheist Communist untrustworthy bestial maniacs who had promised: "We will bury you."

In 1973, after I got out of the Army, I went back to a community college in the DC suburbs to study geek stuff. I didn't like something the student government was doing, so when the next election came around, I ran for Student Senator. I invented a political party, the Atomic Mutant Party. I figured I was born just about the same time atomic weapons were invented, so I was probably an Atomic Mutant, and it was time for us Atomic Mutants to introduce our own viewpoints to the world. The voters thought that made sense in sufficient numbers, and I was elected by a hefty margin.