Posts by Russell Brown
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This Knowledge Ecology International paper, Evolving Copyright and the Relationship With the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, offers a detailed and highly useful update on the copyright/IP elements of TPP negotiations.
It's notable how the USTR position tramples not only on existing US law, but on explicit White House positions. You have to ask who is running this thing.
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Hard News: Squatting in the Square, in reply to
I envy you that party…I’ve met a couple of the Mutoid Waste people, and got to stay on their land near Rimini in Italy. One of them is Emma who’s been a part of NZ’s festival scene and is a fantastic aerialist – hopefully she’ll turn up for Splore.
Oh, wow. I'd like to meet her if she does.
The Mutoids gave me some amazing times - most notably staying up till dawn at the Carhenge up on the hill at my first Glastonbury. Drumming wildly on a mutated car with two bits of metal, Awesome industrial paganism.
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Hard News: Squatting in the Square, in reply to
What you lost on the hipster party swings, you exponentially made up on the relationship roundabout. You’re still enjoying the ride, aren’t you? :)
Indeed. And I do love being able to say: "I missed out on the Party of the Decade -- and it was totally worth it!"
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Hard News: Squatting in the Square, in reply to
One great thing was a huge night celebrating something momentous (I have no idea what ) “under the arches” at a railway station.
The Mutoid Waste Company party I went to in a squatted annex to King's Cross Station in 1988 was one of the best nights out of my life. Squatted venues were just the best for parties. Oddly enough, I missed the one in an old school building that The Face called "the party of the decade" because I'd promised my friends at 62 Bonnington Square I'd go to their party. I was grumpy about that, but that ended up being the night that Fiona walked back into my life. So it really worked out pretty well, all up.
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Cracker: Lundy and Me., in reply to
“got worse”? Really, Tom? Really?! You mean, it’s worse now with an actual, statutorily-independent oversight body, than it was when the police literally investigated their own? Actually, really, got worse?
Agreed. It’s empirical fact that formal oversight of the police has improved in recent years. It needed to.
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Hard News: Squatting in the Square, in reply to
I don’t know if anyone remembers the squatted nightclub at no 37 Bonnington Square, where they sawed away a lot of the first floor to create a mezzanine effect? A pretty amazing venue,
No! That does sound amazing.
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Hard News: Squatting in the Square, in reply to
I ran into both in London. The grimness was awful, reinforced by the Thatcher years. Then I went to work at CND, where the political correctness astounded me. Many wonderful people there but I couldn’t be that doctrinaire. And I found, to my amazement, I was put in the “colonial” box.
British “alternative” political scenes could be bloody awful like that. I’ll never forget my well-meaning flatmate bringing home one of the socialist chappies who touted newspapers outside tube stations, along with his two female acolytes. He was an out-and-out sexist prick.
I remembered the good times – and how the alternative London “vibe” charmed me – and that’s not my usual recollect of those years.
I loved some of the music around the squatting scene -- there were some simply amazing parties.
Fond memories of these guys:
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Hard News: Who Guards the Guardian?, in reply to
But what about Greenwald’s interview with Newsnight? He wiped the floor with her. And justifiably so, at face value.
Yes, that's the one embedded in the post. Terrible work by Kirsty Wark.
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Cracker: Lundy and Me., in reply to
Legal question: If/when this goes back to court, does the prosecution have to stick with the 7pm murder theory or are they allowed to put forward the alternative late night murder story?
IANAL, but I presume they could with something of the order of "but IF the time of death is presumed to be later, our evidence still shows Mr Lundy is guilty."