Reviews Category
We don’t just report off-beat news, breaking news and digest the best and worst of the news media analysis and commentary. We give an original take on what happened and why. We add lols, satire, news photos and original content.
In 1958 the Lumbee Indians introduced the KKK into the gun debate
IN 1958, the Lumbee Indians faced down the Ku Klux Klan:
The rally was scheduled for the night of January 18, 1958, in a field near Maxton, N.C. The stated purpose of the gathering was, in the words of Catfish Cole, “to put the Indians in their place, to end race mixing.” The time and location of the rally was not kept secret, and word spread quickly among the local Lumbee population.
Reports vary about the number of people gathered on that cold night, but there were thought to have been around a hundred Klan members. They brought a large banner emblazoned with “KKK” and a portable generator, which powered a public address system and a single bare light bulb. When the meeting began, the arc of the dim light didn’t spread far enough for the Klansmen to see that they were surrounded by as many as a thousand Lumbees. Several young tribe members, some of whom were armed, closed on the Klan meeting and tried to take down the light bulb. The groups fought, and a shotgun blast shattered the light. In the sudden darkness, the Lumbees descended upon the field, yelling and firing guns into the air, scattering the overmatched Klansmen. Some left under police protection while others, including Catfish Cole, simply took to the woods.
Captured banner worn by Charlie Warriax and Simeon Oxendine, Lumbee.From Life Magazine, the captured banner worn by two Lumbee Indians, Charlie Warriax and Simeon Oxendine.News photographers already on the scene captured the celebration. Images of triumphant Lumbees holding up the abandoned KKK banner were published in newspapers and magazines throughout the world. Simeon Oxendine, a popular World War II veteran, appeared in Life Magazine, smiling and wrapped in the banner. The rout of the Klan galvanized the Lumbee community. The Ku Klux Klan was active in North Carolina into the 1960s, but they never held another public meeting in Robeson County.
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In 1980 the US Military use Atari games to train troops for battle
COREY Meads look at how the US military has been using video games to train its fighters. He writes:
The military’s interest in the kinds of video games popular today dates to 1980, when Atari released its groundbreaking Battlezone. Not only did Battlezone evoke a three-dimensional world, as opposed to the two-dimensional worlds of such previous arcade hits as Asteroids and Tempest, but players viewed the action from a first-person perspective, as if they themselves were tank gunners peering through their periscopes at the battlefield outside — in this case, a spare moonscape with mountains and an erupting volcano in the distance. This first-person element made Battlezone a direct ancestor of today’s enormously popular first-person shooters.
Soon after Battlezone took off, the army’s Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) requested Atari’s help in building a modified version of the game that could be used as a training device for the then-new Bradley infantry fighting vehicle. General Donn Starry, the head of TRADOC at the time, had recognized early on that soldiers would be more responsive to electronic training methods than to print-and lecture-based ones.
You can play Battlezone here.
Of course Pac-Man was a game that followed US military fighting procedure, notably in World War 2 when little pills kept the troops sharp…
Other Atari games that have inspired the US in war:
Berzerk
Golf
Xenophobe
Posted: 22nd, September 2013 | In: Flashback, Technology | Comment
Derby state school ‘makes all teachers wear hijab’ and ‘girls sit at the back of the class’
“FUMING women teachers at a Muslim school have been ordered to cover their heads in class — no matter what their religion,” reports the Sun in an article headlined “Teachers ordered to wear Islam scarves”.
The story goes that four of the 20 teaching staff at Derby’s Al-Madinah free school are not Muslim.
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Baba Ramdev: Keith Vaz supports India’s celebrity swami who says gays are a sickness to be cured by yoga
WHY was Swami Ramdevji detained at Heathrow Airport for eight hours as he tried to make way to Glasgow?
Also known as Baba Ramdev, Ramdevji was scheduled to lead a 1500-strong yoga class in Glasgow this Monday. Immigration stopped him. After hours in limbo, the spiritual leader who is said to be idolised by tens of millions, was handed a 24-hour visa and instructed to return to Terminal Five today. He did so. He was not deported. He was allowed to stay. The yoga class is on.
Leicester East MP Keith Vaz, who backed Ramdev, was there to tell media:
“…it is still a matter of concern to his many supporters and thousands of people who couldn’t be here today that he should have been treated in the way he was treated when he arrived at Heathrow. No Indian citizen with a valid visa entering the UK for lawful purposes should be held in this way. This is a very serious situation that occurred.”
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Posted: 21st, September 2013 | In: Key Posts, Reviews | Comment
Old school hop hop megamix 1 and 2
TIME for an old school hop hop megamix. Remember how good this music was when you first heard it. Then the suits polished it into a pop-sized turd.
OldSchoolScholar writes:
This video’s theme is about the culture and music of Hip Hop vs Rap. What we hope you will identify is the enormous amounts of artists, flavors, aesthetics, crews, personalities, and competition that truly made the culture of real Hip Hop. Mainstream Rap, thanks to the corporate recording industry, has essentially stripped the pillars of Hip Hop away from what they call music. Hip Hop is for and from the streets as a true life form. Mainstream Rap is for and from controlled commercial marketing practices to sell products and brands.
We are simply demonstrating the greatness of the Old School and Golden Age of Hip Hop due to its tremendous growth and trailblazing thanks to style wars and battling by being “fresh” out the box every time. Thanks to Mainstream Rap, or Hip Pop, the current market only sells “clones.”
They all sound alike, dress alike, speak alike, deliver alike, and pose alike. Same content. Same gimmicks and artificial flavors.
This is the real Attack of the Clones. We thank the real emcees and artists in the streets for delivering the real Hip Hop like People Under The Stairs, JabberWockeez, East 3, DJ Craze, and Charlie 2na.
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Posted: 21st, September 2013 | In: Flashback, Music | Comment
Kickstarter needs to you to help book that says Obama is the Antichrist!
CARTOONIST Rick Geary has launched a Kickstarter campaign we can really get behind. He wants fans to fund a book called ‘A is for Antichrist: Obama’s Conspiracy Alphabet’.
Of course, everyone loves a conspiracy theory (and the more outlandish the better) and he wants to get the weirdest rumours around about the American president put them all together in one glorious alphabet book.
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Posted: 21st, September 2013 | In: Money, Politicians, Reviews | Comment
Musical Youth return to place Welsh children under heavy manners
PUPIL’S at Bryngwyn Comprehensive School have Musical Youth to remind them to pass one another on the left hand side.
Head teacher Paul Jones explains:
“The concept was an innovative and imaginative idea from pupils coming out of a school council meeting. The purpose was to improve the smooth and effective transition, as pupils and staff travel around school between busy lesson changeovers.”
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Posted: 21st, September 2013 | In: Flashback, Music | Comment
Nina Davuluri stars in the second-stupidest racist beauty pageant controversy of the decade
IT’S not every day you think “The Internet’s main problem is that there aren’t enough antiquated old farts posting on it”, but such was my reaction to the idiotic Twitter controversy spawned by racists griping because the new Miss America is named Nina Davuluri and has ancestors who hailed from India, which is nowhere near Arabia and doesn’t even have the same religion, but this was too fine a distinction for the jackholes tweet-ranting about Miss America’s being an Arab Muslim terrorist to discern.
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Posted: 20th, September 2013 | In: Reviews | Comment (1)
South African schoolboy attacks teacher with a broom – Wackford Squeers is away
IN this video – taken by the Glenvista High School film society – a South African student attacks his teacher with a broom. The teacher does not retaliate.
If only Super Nanny were here to analyse the situation and tell the parents of this Johannesburg eighth grader that it is all their fault:
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Newcastle United scout Ajax keeper who moonlights for PSV
ARE Newcastle United looking to sign a new goalkeeper? The Daily Mail says Newcastle are looking at Jeroen Zoet. He plays for PSV in the Dutch Eredivisie. But the Daily Mail is uncertain, delivering the headline:
Newcastle scout Ajax keeper Zoet as competition for No 1 Krul
Graeme Yorke ads:
Newcastle United scouts watched 22-year-old PSV Eindhoven keeper Jeroen Zoet in their 2-2 draw with FC Twente at the weekend.
Well, they do all look alike…
Such are the facts…
Chelsea want to win Champins League, says newspaper expert
FOOTBALL Pundit of the Day: the Daily Mail’s tame former Arsenal, Everton and England player Martin Keown has inside news on Jose Mourinho’s Chelsea in the Champions’ League:
Both Jose and his players have won the Champions League now, just not together — and I think that is something he will want to achieve with this group of players.
Yer think he wants to win, Martin? Well, if you say so…
Spurs: Erik Thorstvedt gets AVB’s praise for bootlegging Garth Crooks’ Beatles and a dead Elvis
AT the end of August, former Spurs player and current Match of the Day pundit Garth Crooks opined that Gareth Bale will be no great loss to Tottenham:
“Spurs have sold Elvis and signed the Beatles. Of course, the players now have got to go out there and do the business this season. But Daniel really has done the business for the club this summer.”
Nice line. But while some of the Spurs newboys wonder who gets to be John Lennon and who gets to be Ringo Starr, others were ignoring Garth; like Express journalsit Matthew Dunn, who writes today:
The summer’s longest saga needed to be ended in one satisfying punchline. Somebody, somewhere, was bound to provide it, but who would have thought a Norwegian would? During an on–pitch interview at half–time, former Tottenham keeper Erik Thorstvedt said: “We have sold Elvis and bought the Beatles!”
But he’s not the only one not listening to Garth:
Andre Villas–Boas reddened visibly at the observation, as embarrassed by the compliment of the way he has reinvested Bale’s world–record fee in a number of talented stars as he was tickled by it. “Erik is very creative,” he chuckled. “I like it… it sounds good!”
Tonight, AVB, Garth Crooks is Pete Best…
Posted: 20th, September 2013 | In: Reviews | Comments (2)
The Guardian cheered when tabloid journalists were arrested but now laments Leveson
QUOTE of the year: The Guardian’s director of editorial legal services Gill Phillips was specking at the Protecting the Media conference in the City of London. Said she:
“What Leveson has come up with is the worst of all worlds…. If anything demonstrates why we do not want a government regulating the press, David Miranda is that. We live in a democratic state and they still did what they did to David Miranda for no good reason at all. It goes back to the whole debate about why we shouldn’t have the state regulating the press.”
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Brilliant man invents the McEverything
WASTING time is a glorious endeavour and one writer has done something that is of zero use to anyone, but brilliant all the same.
He’s gone and invented the McEverything, which is basically the ultimate McDonald’s burger which has every sandwich on the menu contained within.
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Watch the $1 Million FAIL
LIFE isn’t fair and no-one promised you a damn picnic.
With that in mind, one Wheel of Fortune contestant missed out on the chance of winning $1million after an unfortunate case of his mouth falling asleep.
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The celeb hunter: does CPS prosecutor Nazir Afzal target the famous?
COMPARE and contrast the words of Nazir Afzal, chief crown prosecutor of the Crown Prosecution Service. When Coronation Street actor Michael Le Vell was cleared of child sex offences, his aunt, Pat Gallier, opined:
“The police seem to be arresting celebrities and accusing them of child sex offences without seeming to check if there’s enough evidence. Michael’s been caught up in this witch-hunt.”
Afzal was aghast:
“I absolutely detest this word ‘witch-hunt’. It is not a witch-hunt… The vast majority of child sex abusers are not your public figures… and they cannot be allowed to get away with it because of some discourse about ‘This is some kind of campaign’ that is following what happened with (Jimmy) Savile or Cyril Smith or whoever it may be…”
Is he a celeb hunter?
“I don’t even know what a ‘celeb hunter’ is. Nobody should be above the law in this country.”
So what did he man when he said back in March 2013:
“This is a growing industry. More arrests are scheduled over the next few weeks. Some are very high profile figures. They are people whose names have come forward because of the high profile of child abuse in recent months. There are people you will be interested in.”
Bring your autograph book…
Why Aaron Alexis did it: Islam, Noodles, Call of Duty and every other reason on one page
WHY did Aaron Alexis murder 12 people on a US naval base?
The Daily Mirror knows. He was:
“DRIVEN TO KILL BY CALL Of DUTY”
After the stupid headline, the Mirror’s Christopher Bucktin strafes the page with other facts as to why a man murdered a dozen people:
Nuts: He was “Crazed”.
Games: He had been “treated for mental illness after playing violent video games for up to 18 hours day and night”.
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Posted: 18th, September 2013 | In: Key Posts, Reviews | Comment
Full-kit wa*ker Jeremy Browne avoids Google cameras by wearing full veil in public
JEREMY Browne MP, minister for crime prevention at the Home Office, has been captured by Google Street View walking along a street in Paddington. He calls it “unnerving“. The Liberal Democrat MP for Taunton Deane, is not emerging from a massage parlour nor eating a kebab and smoking. He is suited, booted and holding his bright red ministerial box. He is the political equivalent of the Full Kit Wan**r, a title used to explain a grown man who is happy to be seen striding around in public wearing a full football kit; shirt, shorts, socks, even shinnies – the whole kit and caboodle. Professional footballers have been FKWs too, notably a former Spurs and Manchester United player who used to wear his full England tracksuit to walk around parts of urbanised Essex.
Says Browne of the bright red box:
“I think there is an issue about the intrusiveness of modern technology,” he said. “It is why the government is right to be alert to the public concern about excessive use of CCTV. We need to get the balance right with using technology to prevent crime and people not feeling that every time they enter a public space their movements will be potentially permanently recorded.”
“Campaigners are always most alert to the threats to individual liberties that can be caused by the state. But we also need to be guarded about how the evolution of technology means that private organisations can also intrude into individual privacy in a way that many people would find unsettling. Quite often the state is more regulated than private organisations.”
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Posted: 18th, September 2013 | In: Politicians, Reviews, Technology | Comment
The abortion-fearing gay-hating Gastonguay family are making one more bid to drown in Kiribati
HANNAH Gastonguay, 26, and her husband, Sean, 30, took a “leap of faith”. They would “see where God led us”.
With their two young children (newborn Rabah and Ardith, 3) and his father, the family left Arizona. They would aim for Kiribati, a place free of abortion, homosexuality and “the state-controlled church”. They would get there by Boat, sailing from San Diego.
Not far into the mission, storms lashed their boat. They drifted. And drifted. Supplies of milk and honey ran low. The boat was braking up. For 91 days they bounced around the ocean. Then a helicopter (surely, singed angel? – ed) spotted them. were saved by Venezuelan fishermen. Then a Japanese cargo ship took them to Chile. There, the US State department paid for them to fly home.
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From the annals of drug addled stupidity we present Melissa Kite
MELISSA Kite has managed to pen one of the most ridiculous columns ever about drug legalisation. Worse even that Peter Hitchen’s usual efforts where at least he is open about the idea that he wants them to be illegal because he’s a moralist who doesn’t think that people should be allowed to enjoy themselves.
One part of the stupidity is here:
I even listen sympathetically to what the “give-a-spliff-a-chance” brigade say about not criminalising “recreational” users who are, apparently, perfectly normal, functioning citizens who should not be labelled criminals.
What I don’t understand at all is what decriminalisation of drugs will do for addicts. I mean not only active addicts who are locked in compulsive drug use, but also those millions of potential addicts, most of them children, who have not yet picked up their first drug and could go either way.
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Pie and Mash saved the world: the stars who love the traditional cockney staple
PIE and Mash, the traditional cockney staple, is under threat. An ageing fan base, coupled with a shortage of eels, has accelerated the decline of the traditional eel and pie shop.
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Posted: 17th, September 2013 | In: Celebrities, Flashback, Key Posts, The Consumer | Comments (3)
Police recruit has ‘F**k The Police’ tattoo
Hendon Police College made history on this day in 2002, by agreeing to admit a former punk with a tattoo that had previously been deemed offensive and inadmissible. The decision was greeted with dismay in some quarters, as this report, from the Independent, clearly shows…
Kyron Horman: Dede Spicher cleared and Kaine’s steroids to boost the police plot
KYRON Horman: Anorak’s look at the missing child in the news:
Kyron disappeared from Skyline Elementary on June 4, 2010. A month later, law enforcement informed the boy’s father, Kaine Hormah, they had uncovered an attempt by Terri Horman, his wife and Kyron’s step-mother, to hire a hitman to kill him. That led to Kaine deciding he wanted a divorce. No plot was ever proven.
In the days after the child vanished, Terri was seen with her friend DeDe Spicher. The police noticed.
DeDe Spicher has spoken to Blink On Crime. Spicher is the woman media have sought to implicate in a crime by dint of her association with Terri, who has not been charged with any offence and maintains her innocence. Christina Stoy writes:
DeDe Spicher…revealed that after over 3 years of attempting to provide Multnomah County Sheriffs Office as well as Assistant Deputy Attorney Norm Frink with the necessary information they requested to clear her from any suspicion in the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of Skyline second grader Kyron Horman; she has finally been cleared after passing a polygraph as part of her requirement under an immunity deal that has been sealed with the court. Unofficially cleared, that is.
Spicher and her attorney Chad Stavley, who have since refused all local media requests, would very much like the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office and current District Attorney Rod Underhill to clear her officially and publicly.
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