RandomlyEvil.org.uk

Today saw the launch of the Women’s Aid Cut Movie video campaign on the World-wide-web and Television. Featuring Keira Knightley, it seeks to raise awareness of domestic violence.

Having worked previously with the Amnesty International:UK Stop Violence Against Women campaign, I’ve seen the rather shocking statistics surrounding domestic violence in the UK (Women’s Aid have compiled some here) and heard first hand the accounts of its victims.

The film is quite shocking, and it certainly does ram the message home. In the classic newsman voice, some of you may find this quite distressing: Cut Movie – The Video in Full.

B

I figured it was high time to get back into the habit of writing regular blog-posts. I wish I could proffer any form of reason or excuse as to why I’ve not been doing so, half the battle for me seems to be finding something worth writing about.

Recently, I was invited to join the team putting together the Freenode Podcast – Free as in Node as one of the guest presenters. It’s been an interesting departure for me, as I usually prefer working behind the scenes. Those who know me won’t be surprised to find me reciting a bad joke at the end of the two episodes we’ve recorded so far.

During an idle afternoon on the web, I began clicking through the Twitter pages of people I follow for anything particularly interesting. One of the things that grabbed my attention was the Welsh music tweeters. I’ll confess at this stage that I’ve been horribly out of touch with the whole thing since I left Bethel for Aberystwyth. I’d had passing contact through various friends whilst at Aberystwyth (as well as the rather fabulous Castell Rock festival). I resolved to try and catch a few more live music events.

With that in mind, I ventured out last night to see The Mams play live at The Telfords Warehouse in Chester. The band, a 4 piece music combo from Llanelli in South Wales, had quite a decent mix of tracks on their MySpace page, which meant I felt slightly less of a prat going there on my own.

The set seemed to start a little quieter than I’d expected, which I think explains the rather muted response from the crowd. It did however build up quite quickly, getting on to tracks such “Respect your Elders”, “I’m not a work in progress” and “Never say never but no”. The tunes seemed to get a bit more anthemic, which drew in a few more people onto the dancefloor. The encore “No Fun Anymore” was a fine finish to a very good set. Definitely one to see live if you get the chance, had quite bit of an 80s feel, quite lively and certainly a lot of fun to watch.

The Mams – Telfords Warehouse 28th March 2009 – Set List:

1. Better Opening
2. I was fine until I met myself
3. A Bridge (in Betws y Coed)
4. You’re no fun anymore
5. I’m not a work in progress
6. Never say never but no
7. Respect your Elders
8. Neighbourhood Watch

Encore:

1. No Fun Anymore

Adam Walton (BBC Wales) wrote a rather more comprehensive review on his personal blog – Wham Bammed by The Mams.

Bryn

Prague Panorama,
originally uploaded by Bryn_S.

I decided to get a photo of the view from my room during my recent stay in Prague. It’s been stiched together using the Hugin panorama tool. If you look, you can see the same van twice on the road on the right hand side of the picture.

I was slightly puzzled yesterday when I spotted the above message from PC Suite. You might wonder why, as it’s just saying that Ratbert (my phone) has connected via bluetooth. The problem is, Ratbert was in pieces infront of me (battery out, SIM out).

I did a scan for bluetooth devices using my Blackberry, then using my Nokia and found only one device had active bluetooth (my coworker’s phone), and that was named something completely different.

Given PC Suite was using Windows’ bluetooth stack, I worked on the premise that the fault lay at the door of Windows, so I gave it a little poke.

A search for active devices revealed:

You may ask “what’s wrong with that scan?”. Well…

• The Blackberry had its bluetooth disabled at the time of the scan.
• Wally (my old phone) is off, in a drawer, 25 miles away.

Clever that…

It gets weirder, I removed Wally from list of trusted devices and scanned again:

It seems to have picked it up again and implies it can be paired with.

Anyone else experienced simmilar oddities when dealing with Bluetooth?

B

I had the misfortune of catching the first two episodes of [Spooks] Code 9. I thought “well, Spooks was amusing enough, maybe this’ll be alright”.

It starts out with a decent enough premise, Terrorists detonate a nuclear bomb at the start of the Olympic Games in London (killing hundreds of thousands of people). The south coast of England is reduced to a desolate waste ground. The Government is relocated to the North of England along with the population (some now dying of radiation poisoning).

Sounds like a decent setup doesn’t it?

Well, it goes downhill shortly after it becomes a cross between Hollyoaks, Spooks and Skins.

The first episode centres on a plot to kill the Prime Minister. Throughout the show, the Scooby gang go around shaking down their sources, shooting arms dealers in the foot and tracking down the world’s most dangerous hitman through his favourite food order. The most dangerous hitman eventually turns out to be a 15yo hoodie armed with an AK-47 sniper rifle (yes, I know, the AK-47 isn’t a sniper rifle, I’m just telling you stuff from the show).

It eventually turns out that the Prime Minister wasn’t the target after all, the head of this new MI5 unit was! Shock! You didn’t see that coming did you?!

It’s unclear why they felt the need to do this (possibly some ham-fisted attempt to do replicate the effect of killing Lisa Faulkner in the second episode of the grown up version) beyond setting up the series story arc of some big conspiracy.

To be fair, the warning signs were there at the start. One of the main characters says during a selection interview that the reason she wants to be in MI5 is because the terrorists are getting younger. It gave me the rather silly image of two parents discussing pre-school:

“oh Darling, shall we send little Timmy to Osama in Diapers Nursery or the Security Crèche?”

I did also wonder how in this dystopian future, the defenders of freedom looked like they’d just finished a fashion shoot. Defeating terrorists whilst waiting for next season’s clothes to be made.

Watching the characters, none of them seem to be able to deliver any of their lines with any conviction. Paris Hilton could act as a quantum physicist with greater aplomb. The only convincing piece of acting I saw was when the maths geek was put in charge and froze in fear after being confronted by an emergency. I imagined a little voice in his head saying “OMG… they’re wanting me to act! What do I do?!”

My prediction is that by the end of the series, it’ll turn out that there’s a shadowy conspiracy which knew about the nuclear bomb and did nothing so they could subjugate the masses and make money (or something as equally cliché).

All in all, it served to be a pretty rubbish waste of potentially good airtime and concept. It left me wondering “Has BBC 3 actually delivered anything worth watching?”. I couldn’t think of any original programming it’d done which was any good.

*storms off*

B

We learn today that a computer was stolen from the constituency office of Hazel Blears (who looks to me like she’s permanently trying to suck the seeds out of a lemon). This in itself wouldn’t be big news as such, except for the fact we’re told that some classified Government papers were on them.

It is unclear at this stage whether or not Hazel Blears had employed any form of disk encryption, or had secured the documents in any meaningfully secure fashion. We’re told that the computer was password protected, by which I assume she’d bothered to set a password to log into, becasue we all know how hard it is to bypass that. There appears to be confusion as to whether this was her own personal machine or a government issued laptop that was stolen.

Within the last 10 months, there have been at least two other major incidents involving the Government losing sensitive information (Child benefit disks, Secret documents on the train – twice) within the last 10 months. It seems to indicate an apparent disregard for the nature of the information being held and a fundamental lack of understanding of the risks involved in its transport and storage. Back in the days of Station X (Breaking the Enigma), everyone understood the significance of the data being handled, and what it would mean if it were lost. It seems now that we have little or no idea of what data we have or how easily such things can go missing.

Do I expect anything to happen? No. We’ve seen it plenty of times before, a high level Civil Servant will get their wrists slapped and some low level Civil Servant will probably get the boot for sending her the documents without following procedure. There’ll be another review, and another new raft of data guardians appointed at great expense, no senior person will be held responsible. There’s speculation that Ms Blears may face action under the Official Secrets Act for failing to secure Government documents. What, if anything will happen on that front is anyone’s guess.

One would hope that the Government should at the very least be able to secure its own paperwork. If it can’t manage that, how can it expect us to have confidence in their assurances that everything else is going well?

B

Revisited after a re-read, tidied up to make a little more sense… hopefully

Yes, I know. I’ve gone from posting five times in as many months to posting three times in three days.

Speculation is mounting that voters in Ireland may have decided to vote No in the referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. What this will mean for EU expansion remains to be seen. As I understand, all 27 EU members have to agree to its terms for it to proceed. Will the Irish Government listen to the voters and go back to the EU and say “sorry guys, let’s look at this again” or will they do what they did last time and tell the Irish public “er, sorry… could you vote again on this?”

I don’t quite know where I stand on this issue of the Lisbon Treaty. I’m sure the UK has benefited from closer cooperation with Europe, but on the other it seems like we’re drowning in EU legislation about all manner of things, even down to how much time we should spend working.

It seems that we’re handing over more and more power to this body in another country, one in which we’re increasingly marginalised in favour of the German-French bloc. The Lisbon Treaty hands over another large chunk of powers from Westminster to Brussels, we’re reassured however that we have our “red lines”, which give us opt-outs in key areas like defence and criminal justice. Whilst defence was never going to enter the equation, our criminal justice system is increasingly deferring to the European Courts and to European Laws. I do wonder if these “red lines” would work when tested.

We were told that when the EU Constitution was due to be voted on that we’d have a referendum on it, as it was a substantial change in our relationship to Europe. That fell by the wayside when the French and the Dutch voted “No”. The Lisbon Treaty we’re told though is completely different (it used different sized font and everything…). From what I’ve read, it doesn’t seem a whole lot different. What I wanted was to be treated like an adult, to be presented with the facts and allowed to make up my mind. I guess that doesn’t fit in with the Government’s apparent desire to turn us all into meek clients of the state.

David Davis News

Reaction to David Davis’ resignation yesterday appears to be mixed. Most of the commentators in Westminster are following the “Er… what the hell is he playing at? are the Tories divided?” line. The Public (Well, the ones the BBC seem to be able to find) are behind him and admire the man for making a stand on principle.

It seems also that the ex editor of The Sun (Kelvin Mackenzie) intends to stand against him in the event of Labour not fielding a candidate. He argues that locking up terrorists is no bad thing (which I’m pretty sure everyone would agree with). He seemingly misses the point that the powers granted to the Police won’t be used to lock up terrorists, they’ll be used to lock up terrorist suspects (as in, people the Police are investigating but don’t have enough evidence to charge with anything). Meaning potentially innocent people could be locked up for 6 weeks.

It’s sure to be an interesting few weeks as the debate unfolds. The Campaign team is already up and running, if you want to help (and are on Facebook), have a look at the Facebook Group Fight for Freedom – Support David Davis.

Yours,

B

Updated after Jon pointed out that the Banana rules were infact a gross mis-interpretation of what was in the document. I’ll do more research in future…

Following on from yesterday’s piece on the vote for 42-day detention without charge, a follow-up piece seemed in order.

The media is in an absolute frenzy following the narrowness of the Government’s victory over 42 days. Many are describing it as a pyrrhic victory, that Brown has given so much away in order to win, he’d have been better off not trying.

During his monthly press conference, Brown sought to ridicule those who opposed the Anti-Terror bill as not understanding the threat faced by the country, the complexity of the evidence that needed to be processed and the determination of those who would do us harm.

I don’t claim to be an expert in International Terrorism and I am not privy to the intelligence gathered by the security services. I do however think that it’s ludicrous to try and beat this enemy we face by dismantling the legal protections that allow us our liberty. I find it repugnant that Government ministers claimed to be all knowing entities over the Conservatives, several of whom have faced the far more menacing spectre of Irish Terrorism back in the day. A point rammed home by David Cameron yesterday:

Increasingly in this country, we’re told that we face the very real threat from an enemy out to destroy our very way of life, an enemy who hate us for the freedoms we enjoy and the way in which we live our lives. Surely by extending detention without trial and allowing coroner’s inquests to be made secret on national security grounds (a rule which could have been applied in the de Menezes case) does the work of the terrorists for them? The country I fear is a lot further down the slippery slope and is sliding further down with each passing day. We learnt during The Troubles that we beat terrorists by not letting them get to us. We carry on, we taunt them by showing we’re not going to change our way of life to suit them.

David Davis (the Conservative standard bearer on the 42 day detention issue) resigned today in order to fight a by-election on the issue of 42 days. He intends to make a stand against the erosion of the liberties many have fought for over the years.

I had always viewed membership of this house as a noble endeavour, not least because we and our forebears have for centuries fiercely defended the fundamental freedoms of our citizens. Or we did, up until yesterday.

He went on to say:

And because the generic security arguments relied upon are ones that will never go away, this government will be tempted again in the future to try for 56 days, 70 days, 90 days.

But in truth 42 days is just one albeit perhaps the most salient example of the insidious, surreptitious and relentless erosion of fundamental British freedoms under this Government.

I admire the stand he’s taking on this issue, but I fear that it may backfire. The Lords still haven’t voted on it and Davis was a formidable opponent to a whole raft of useless Home Secretaries. I fear that by resigning, he’s giving Labour the opportunity to paint a picture of discord within the Opposition. So rather than being able to focus their attention on getting the Lords to put this heinous bit of legislation down, the Conservatives will be fighting a rear-guard action, denying rumours of splits in the party line.

A dark day.

B