Agreed. I visit 4-5 times each year, and I’m still only scratching the surface and starting to explore the less well-known areas. Go.
Same with Paris. Allez.
That’s the ‘overspill’ office space for 213 (of 650) Members of Parliament and their staff. Like many of the Gothic spires of Parliament the ‘chimneys’ are part of an unpowered air conditioning system, not attached to fireplaces or furnaces.
Visit Parliament, too. UK citizens can get in free by invitation from their MP, but anyone (most obviously non-Brits, but Brits can too) can pay to join a tour. Well worth it (and security is of at least airport level!).
I was living there for a bit when the IRA were blowing shit up every other week (or so it seemed).
Fuck those guys.
Fuck these guys.
Go visit. It’s a top place.
I know someone who thinks she was set up, because sexism.
Her order was to take Jean Charles de Menezes alive, which if it had been followed would have meant that he would have been released as soon as the Met police realised he was the wrong guy.
/Off-topic
Cressida attempted to get the transphobic people who attacked my friend tried in court when she was at Thames Valley Police, and made a personal appeal to the Crown Prosecution Service. The case was dropped because of institutional transphobia in the CPS.
Meanwhile, more senseless slaughter. The Guardian reports -
"An airstrike by the US-led coalition against Islamic State on a school west of the Syrian city of Raqqa has killed at least 33 people, many of whom had fled nearby fighting, sparking further concerns that new rules of engagements may be causing an increase in civilian casualties.
The attack follows a separate US strike on a mosque complex in the north-west of the country last Saturday that killed at least 52 people."
I guess the major media outlets can’t give saturated media coverage to every group of people wrongfully killed.
Vale to all victims of this endless war.
Given the sheer amount of FUD that the Met put out in the days immediately following his killing (“he jumped the barriers”, “he was behaving suspiciously”, “he ran when told to stop” etc etc ad nauseum) that was directly contradicted by witness statements or video evidence, I’m inclined to treat the uncorroborated testimony of the officer in charge of that shambles with the scepticism it deserves.
A train full with people all said that there was no warning, the police failed to identify themselves and that de Menezes was rugby tackled to the ground and then shot repeatedly in the head while being restrained. The officers involved (who were allowed to be alone together with pens and paper for a significant amount of time before they were required to give their accounts of the murder) all agreed with one another and directly contradicted everyone else who witnessed the events.
The inquiry said their testimony carried more weight as they were “expert witnesses” and essentially threw out any evidence that they had committed any wrongdoing.
Until Cressida Dick can show some actual evidence that she ordered him taken alive, I’m going to assume she’s a lying murderer like the rest of the officers involved.
I’m curious to hear what kind of conversations you had with the locals if at all about “world affairs” especially given how… bizarre things have been since November.
I enjoy listening and talking to people in other countries and hearing their perspective on things. We were last in Europe in 2014 - we were going to go to Spain this year, but we’re delaying till '18.
“True, you’re not a slave. You’re worse off than that by a long, long way. You’re a predatory beast shut up in a cage of which the bars aren’t fixed, solid objects you can gnaw at or in despair batter against with your head until you get punch-drunk and stop worrying. No, those bars are the competing members of your own species, at least as cunning as you on average, forever shifting around so you can’t pin them down, liable to get in your way without the least warning, disorienting your personal environment until you want to grab a gun or an axe and turn mucker.”
― John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar, 1968.
[quote=“sdmikev, post:52, topic:97506”]
I’m curious to hear what kind of conversations you had with the locals if at all about “world affairs” especially given how… bizarre things have been since November.[/quote]
Only came up twice:
Clerk in a game store grumbled about British politics and wished he could move to a branch in Colorado. He wasn’t happy about Trump but I guess was disgusted by Brexit more.
Clerk in Harrods joked with us obvious-Americans, saying he only served Canadians. He started to say something about Trump; my sister had to hush him up because a friend of my niece who was shopping with us was a Trump voter. (My family, OTOH, would have gladly groused with the guy.)
I was just mentioning my friends beliefs based on the Met police canteen culture at the time. She may have not wanted to believe that the person who had tried to help her could be behind the murder though.
Sounds about right…
I have a friend that lives in the UK - born and bred - and he’s very politically involved and a very much anti-brexit. He’s also horrified by Trump. When someone on FB in February asked why he cares so much about that he replied with the following long and excellent (IMO) comment -
"Many of us Brits and Europeans admire the US; we admire its ethos, we admire the fact that it has a written constitution that enshrines the rights of its citizens and codifies the limit of a governments power.
We admire that a relatively young country can go from having a civil war over slavery to having a black president in just under 200 years. Britain - or its constituent parts at any rate - has [have] been around as a nation for over two thousand years and yet we’ve not got anything like a written constitution and as for a black PM, not on your life…
We admire the US’s advancements in science, we admire that through NASA it achieved the greatest achievement in our species history so far - the Apollo 11 moon landing - and we admire the lead it has taken on environmental protection laws and statutes.
Trump’s presidency threatens all of the above.
The most pertinent issue of our lifetime (I think we’re about the same age and we both have children) is climate change. It threatens our continued existence on this little blue rock. Trump’s attitude toward - and stated aims of dismantling the EPA and the Paris Accord - in the face of the undisputed fact of man made climate change is highly disturbing.
His attitude toward education is also troubling; the Dover Trial from a few years back established that Creationism cannot be taught in US schools; Trump has proposed the installation of a creationist billionaire into the position of Secretary for Education, a post she is patently unqualified to hold. Again, for a nation that, arguably, drives the international agenda on all things scientific, this is a concern.
As a parent of a beautiful daughter, his attitude toward women is troubling, and his block on of the federal programme on NGO funding for international abortion advice and counselling is, to be frank, a disgrace. The global gag rule threatens the lives of millions of young women around the world.
Next, his militaristic posturing toward China, Iran, North Korea etc., again something that, as a parent and as a citizen of a country that has just turned its back on the EU and ran blindly toward this new administration, frightens the life out of me.
It is true to say that we live in a global world where the actions of one affect the rest. As head of the worlds only superpower and a country who’s influence reaches into the homes of every person around the globe, the US has a responsibility to lead and lead well. With Trump at the wheel, with a republican majority in the senate and house, it appears that we will be lead toward a path that could spell disaster for all and sundry."
Fortunately in my view. As the Greek saying goes, a great book is a great evil (mega biblion, mega kakon) and the US Constitution, being an 18th century document treated almost as a religious artefact, has resulted in great mounds of legal pilpul and a glut of lawyers.
The London attacker just seems to have run amok, much like the driver who killed people in the Melbourne CBD a few months back. Hard to reconcile this frenzied attack on pedestrians with a chain of obfuscated messages.
