Ed Brayton's new podcast

I was delighted yesterday to discover that Ed Brayton, who used to host one of my all-time favourite political podcasts, Declaring Independence Radio, has recently started hosting a new show: Culture Wars Radio.

Declaring Independence was a show predominantly about American law and politics. It was constantly fascinating, with episodes being mostly interview with experts in constitutional law, civil liberties, police misconduct and such; interspliced with commentary and lighthearted discussion of current events. What I liked most about it was that Ed Brayton never shied away from getting right down to the tiniest details of case law and history, discussing the minutiae of various cases with his guests and drawing on his huge knowledge of American civil liberties law to get the best out of his guests. Also his staunch non-partisanism, hatred of hypocrisy and demagoguery, and willingness to harshly criticise Obama and the Democrats (while still poking fun at right-wing loonies).

Ed Brayton is an American political journalist, editor and development director of the American Independent News Network, and seems to specialise in civil liberties law. He seems to get particularly fired up about education, separation of church and state, and transparency and accountability in government. He has a general left-libertarian viewpoint. I don't agree with him on everything, but he's very knowledgable about law, and hella smart. To quote erstwhile acquaintance of mine, Seth Manapio, he is "a goddam genius".

I looked hard for somewhere online for old episodes of Declaring Independence to link here, because they're all really worth a listen, but it seems to have evaporated. I've got 74 old episode as mp3s if anyone's really keen. [Edit: find them here.]

The new show, Culture Wars Radio, only has a few episodes out so far, and I've only listened to the first two of them, but it looks to be much along the same lines as Declaring Independence, which is fantastic as far as I'm concerned.

I strongly recommend checking it out, if you've any interest in civil liberties law, American politics or just deep and informed yet intelligible political discussion.

Police suppression of peaceful pro-NHS protest, March 17th 2012

Here's what happened when me and a few friends went to London to show our opposition to the atrocious Health and Social Care Bill 2011. The one currently being forced through parliament with a middle finger to all who look on.

I feel it's important to document what I witnessed at this demonstration since, as many have noted, there has been little-to-no coverage of this protest by the BBC and other UK mass media. A deeply worrying trend for anti-government protests, but one others are better placed to comment on than me.

The bottom line is: this was a completely nonviolent, unaggressive protest. The police action was hostile and totally unprovoked. There is no way we could have been seen as a threat to anyone.

The goal of the police did not seem to be to confront the protest or get into a fight. Each time a kettle was formed, it was dropped after a short time on some signal. The police were acting in a coordinated fashion, and their only goal seemed to be to suppress and disband the protest. By kettling and separating any big group which formed into smaller groups, they prevented the the crowd coordinating, communicating or decision-making properly. At its start, the protest was self-motivated, passionate, and made up of citizens trying to make a (last) stand for something they believed in. Through their action, the police successfully reduced it to separate groups of disconnected, scared, angry people who didn't know what to do and felt unable to continue.

The way the police acted was, while not actually violent in any cases I saw (grabbing, shoving and restraining, but no beating), extremely intimidating. They incited the crowd to run for safety on multiple occasions, though there were many elderly and disabled amongst us (this was a pro-NHS campaign after all). I did not see anybody get hurt, but if the crowd had been any denser, larger or had any rogue elements, things could easily have kicked off — if they had it would have been completely the fault of the aggression and intimidation tactics of the police. No attempt was made at dialogue, or even megaphoned monologue to warn the protest that action would take place. Instead, the riot police acted quickly and unpredictably, communicating with shouted codes, avoiding eye contact with the demonstrators.

There are other accounts online. Important points to note from my view of events that may contradict or corroborate other points of view:

  • All aggression I saw was on the part of the police.
  • All the protesters I saw were completely nonviolent, and not even aggressive.
  • I saw no signs of police firearms, though there have been alarming reports of this (including photos of police with automatic weapons within sight of the demo) from elsewhere.

Below the fold is my account in full, to the best of my recollection.

Edit: still no mainstream attention, but a great roundup of social media coverage by Steven Sumpter can be found here.

Edit: Since I complain here about a lack of media coverage of the protest, I should acknowledge that the Guardian's NHS Reforms Liveblog has just made mention of the protest and included a link to this post. I'm flattered that it's "worth a read" and delighted that they explicitly "don't endorse it's view" :P

Continue reading Police suppression of peaceful pro-NHS protest, March 17th 2012

Letter to the government: drop the Health and Social Care Bill 2011

Everyone knows the shocking scale of the Tory-led coalition government's proposed changes to the NHS and degree to which they disregard public and expert concerns.

If you care about public healthcare in the UK, write to your MP. NOW.

Below the fold is the letter I have sent to my MP and to various members of the House of Lords, complete with references.

Continue reading Letter to the government: drop the Health and Social Care Bill 2011

"Designing to reveal the nature of the universe" — Jonathan Blow and Marc ten Bosch at IndieCade 2011

I watched this interesting talk on game design by Jonathan "Braid" Blow and Marc "Miegakure" ten Bosch. They espouse and explore a particular design aesthetic where the designer essentially plays the role of a mathematician.  "Good design" then becomes a selection of orthogonal mechanisms (axioms), and an exhaustive-yet-minimal mapping-out of what's derivable (theorems), and then demarcation of the boundary. Since it needs to be fun, the real art has to come from crafting surprise and tweaking axioms to capture exactly what you want. They both make some very interesting points, and I thought this comparison with mathematics was a particularly cool and apt way to frame the ideas.

This aesthetic is particularly apparent in the examples they use in the talk, including Braid, VVVVVV, Ikaruga and the as-yet-unreleased Miegakure.

Watch it here:

Pork chops

Read this recently. From the article:

Beginning September 1 ... helicopter hunters can fly over Texas ranchland, rifle in hand and shoot as many hogs as pass through their scopes. While hunting from helicopters was previously outlawed, the "pork chopper" law makes it easier and more cost effective for land owners to fight Texas' wild hog over-population problem from the air where low-flying, fast-moving helicopters can keep up with the 400-pound animals, which can run as fast as 35 miles per hour, over terrain that is often inaccessible by vehicles.
...
"flying below 50 feet at high speeds and shooting semi-automatic rifles from helicopters" is "inherently dangerous" [said the president of Vertex Helicopters].

Top of the food chain, baby!

SaveSave

How to remove "+1" icons from Google search results

Having apparently abandoned former principles of simplicity and unintrusiveness, Google now punishes account holders by sticking coloured icons next to every Google search result and, worse, animating them on a mouse-over of the result.  Obnoxious!  There currently seems to be no setting to remove these that I could find, but I figured a way to use AdBlock to hide them away.  If you have AdBlock installed on your browser, simply add:

www.google.com##[class="esw eswd esws"]
www.google.com##[class="esw eswd eswh"]
www.google.com##[class="esw eswd"]

to your custom filters.  There, somewhat cleaner search results!

Edit: Now you also need to add:

www.google.com##BUTTON[class="gbil esw eswd"]
www.google.com##BUTTON[class="gbil esw eswd esws"]
www.google.com##BUTTON[class="gbil esw eswd eswh"]

Edit: OK, I found another way to fix this.