Illegal Search and Surveillance

The police have been doing a lot of it. More specifically, they were called on this by the Supreme Court, and now want a bill passed to declare everything that they've done legal, with no oversight, retrospectively.

But you can tell the Government what you think about it! http://www.parliament.nz/en-NZ/PB/SC/MakeSub/5/0/e/49SCJE_SCF_00DBHOH_BILL11056_1-Video-Camera-Surveillance-Temporary.htm

What I said:

1. I oppose the Video Camera Surveillance (Temporary Measures) Bill and ask that it not be passed in its present form.
2. This bill is a kneejerk attempt to counteract a decision of the Supreme Court. As such, it is a challenge the entire legal system, in which Parliament creates laws and the courts enforce them. This is a dangerous precedent to create.
3. This bill is unnecessary. The NZ Police claim that it is needed to protect 40 current investigations of serious crimes in which they have acted illegally to obtain evidence - the Evidence Act already permits the admission of illegal evidence where the crime is sufficiently serious. Where the crime is not sufficiently serious, it is clear that the NZ Police's failure to obtain appropriate warrants is egregious.
4. The speed with which this bill has been presented is unnecessary. There has been a Search and Surveillance Bill being debated by Parliament for over a year; if it were truly urgent the Government would have brought it up the order paper as they have done for other bills. Issues of surveillance, particularly how to deal with changing technology, are significant and need to be properly examined before being passed into law.
5. This bill is retrospective and thus immoral. Acts that occurred in the past should not be declared either legal or illegal for the sake of convenience. As a country, we would condemn this behaviour in any other nation.
6. The court case which raised this issue, Hamed & Ors v R [2011] NZSC 101, found that the Police had knowingly broken the law while obtaining evidence - this bill attempts to reward them for their appalling behaviour. It will serve to encourage them in further abuses of power.
7. I note the NZ Police's past history of paid informants to report on legitimate and legal political protest, particularly the Rob Gilchrist case, where the informant sent prurient photographs of the protestors that Gilchrist was spying on to the Police. This is not an institution which has moral high ground - encouraging the NZ Police to break into people's house and leave hidden video cameras with no oversight is an invitation to more abuse.
8. This bill lacks any requirement to prove necessity. It encourages the Police to embark on 'fishing expeditions' to find evidence of a crime caused by someone simply because they hold unpopular opinions. I note that most of the human rights advances that New Zealand currently holds were brought about by people who held 'unpopular opinions.'
9. I respectfully suggest that this issue be shelved until after the General Election - whatever government is elected will need to live with the outcome, it is only right that they make the decision.
10. I do not wish to make an oral submission.


More info from No Right Turn here: http://norightturn.blogspot.com/2011/09/submit.html

It's 7 in the morning...

...the day after Chimera, and I'm wide awake and have been for some time. Not really what I expected, given how tired I was last night. Also not what I expected: sleeping in the spare room and wandering around the house disinfecting doorknobs and cleaning the toilet at 11 o'clock at night. Best Beloved has come down with some kind of stomach bug and is looking miserable. Poor Repton...

Chimera was great. The game I ran with Cat went well, barring a few technical hitches, and we got an Honourable Mention in the awards for best game at the end which is total egoboo. Thank you very much for coming and giving your all in the game, guys. (And again, apologies to the two players that it didn't work out for.)

I also had much fun running around in the forest as a witch queen, manipulating my family (including sizing up Asterix the Gaul as a potential son-in-law) and collecting marriage proposals, being Very Silly in Monty Python, and coughing over everyone as the very artistic embodiment of Tuberculosis. Heh heh.

Snow Photos

View from the car at a rest stop. I was trying to show the valley, not the fence, but it got flattened out in the picture.

Me, in styley construction orange and steel cap boots.

General prettiness.

Snow in Taihape

So everyone's got a snow story, right?

Mine was driving up to Taihape yesterday on a work trip. And there was some snow in the trees, and a bit in the flowerbeds, enough to do a token snowball and that. By this morning there was a heavy blanket everywhere, and soft falling flakes all over, which means a lot when you're out and about at 6am talking to people, and driving around hanging out in the rail corridor, and stopping by the road just so we could kick about in the snow - so light and fluffy! It really did feel like a fairy tale, and being just a bit out of time.

Oh yes, and second leg of my trip got cancelled because the roads were closed out to Taihape, so I ended up back in Palmerston North for the rest of the day. Seriously. Worst Week For Site Visits. Ever. On Friday I go to Christchurch, I hope things are a bit more passable then.

Photos to follow when I get them off the guy with the camera.

The bottom of my house is fluffy

With some occasional wisps caught on rose bushes in the garden to boot. (We had people come in to install insulation on Thursday.) It's a bit soon to tell how much of a difference it will make, owing to the weather suddenly coming on unseasonally warm...but I notice that I haven't been wanting to turn on the heater as soon as I get home, so there might be something in it.

In other news, today I went for a bike ride for the first time in months, and quite enjoyed it, although getting home was rather a chore. And visited the Affordable Art Show with Ivan and Repton - always a lot of fun.

Oof

Today I spent a lot of time crawling around under the house, hauling stuff. (Repton got to crawl even more, and drag things out from the bowels of the house for me to take the rest of the way outside.) People leave the cruddiest things behind them, when they move, don't they?

There is actually a goal in sight - underfloor insulation, once the nice people can get access and a smooth surface to put down polyethylene and all, but right now I have the most astonishing headache (stooping + dehydration + unspecified fungus?)

Best to all.

Huzzah!

Just spent the weekend being one of the editors for a 48 Hours team. Really like how our film turned out (road movie called "Sunset Road"). Now very tired. [yawns hugely]

Self Publishing is Fun

I've just turned a couple of live roleplaying games that I wrote with Cat into published PDFs on an online roleplaying store. First sale went through about 5 minutes ago. Yay!

Adventures in Fairyland

My long term roleplaying group has been playing a campaign that was billed as "brightly coloured fantasy reminiscent of Narnia and Castle Waiting". We started off as a bunch of refugees sent to deepest darkest Devon going through a portal to a fantasy world called Carinthia, had a bunch of adventures, skipped forward in time 25 years to have a look at What Happened After, and have now picked up a set of alternate characters who were slaves in a factory on the fairies' side of the river (Bessie the Changeling, Aster the Cat, Bludo the Troll, and Greengage the Griffin (Greengage was named after his father's favourite kind of jam. He has five siblings, and they're all named after their father's favourite kind of jam.))

Last week, we were a gang of desperadoes staging a jailbreak, creating vast amounts of mayhem, and discovering that Bludo has an oral fixation (quite good for intimidating hobgoblins, we found. Particularly when he spits them out.) This week, we ended up deep in enemy territory with the goal of assassinating the enemy queen. First steps: go to school, and set Bludo up with a date.

Omigosh!

Yesterday I got a new pair of glasses. Before New Glasses Day, I was figuring that it would be nice to have a new set of frames with yellow racing stripes. After New Glasses Day, I'm really really really noticing the change in prescription.

See, I have one eye that's somewhat longsighted, and another that's very longsighted, and my previous pair only corrected the good eye slightly to make reading easier - the optomotrist I saw back then, and I guess the one I saw as a child figured that correcting the bad eye would give me double vision. This new one, however, declared that my brain was already turning off that visual feed enough anyway, and amped up the lense as much as she could. This means that I can now actually read a normal print book with just that eye if I have to (still not easily, but at least possible), and another little soupcon that the optomotrist didn't warn me about:

Walking home yesterday was very much being in an Imax theatre, or looking at a Gustave Caillebotte painting. I'm suddenly looking at things and realising that they're farther or nearer without having to calculate from relative sizes. It's great. I spent most of my walk home yesterday poking Repton to prove that I could do it without having to guess and adjust like I normally do. I'm still not going to rush off and play frisbee or go for long drives yet (moving my head quickly makes for a feeling of vertigo right now), but still -

Omigosh.

Things not to do when sealing a raw edge:

Sewing through your finger.

It actually didn't hurt that much, but y'know, leaving a ritual libation of blood in things you make is only cool when you're a blacksmith.

I have the most astonishing headache

I'd be trying to sleep it off, except lying down makes it worse.

Ow ow, oh, ow.

[poor posture, you come back to punish me]

In much better news, my Super Sparkle game ran on Saturday and seemed to go well. My favourite line: "Don't do drugs - they make you ugly." "And they shorten your calves!"

Death by Gelatinous Cube

So today I tried a new cooking experiment - marshmallows.

The results were ... well. They're basically a heap of suger boiled in water with some gelatine, and then having the snot beaten out of them before they set. Then you get to add some flavouring and roll them in coconut or icing sugar or whatever takes your fancy. The problem is the gelatine which turns the mixture into something, well, gelatinous (which gives me mouth feel issues in spades.) This was the first time ever that I haven't wanted to lick out the bowl when I was baking. There's also this point when you're beating the mixture when it suddenly changes colour into this bright unnatural white colour. I think ultimately it tastes OK, but the final texture is just gooey and I'm going to stick with bought ones - assuming that I haven't been put off for life.

On the other hand, I have enormous respect for all the people that prior to the mechanisation of food production, used to do this by hand, all the time. Give them all a cheer!

Happy New Year!

And now we're moved

Huzzah!

All the heavy stuff got shifted back on Saturday, thanks to help from Repton's parents and Mashugenah, plus little stuff and Lots of cleaning. Seriously, I don't think our old flat looked that nice at any time in it's life before. There's more unpacking still to do at this end, but we're going to spend the night for the first time instead of visiting with ReptonMum and ReptonDad, and the cat's moved in, and we have internet, so I'm calling it done on points. And with any luck I won't have to do this again for Very Many Years. :-)

Merry Christmas everybody!

Habemus aedem!

Money has been paid, keys handed over, and a kindly chap has gone round measuring the rooms. Repton is fiddling round with floorplans as we speak, and the move starts tomorrow.

Oh god.

Making things go Boom!

We just got back from Guy Fawkes Night, which happened to be going out with PurpleSparkler, her husband, and a bunch of miscellaneous geeks to light a bonfire on Petone beach and let off fireworks. We got rained out from the bonfire, but perservered into setting off one defiant firework that morphed into half the box, much to my joy. :-)

Then we ran off to a pub, I had my first ever Irish Coffee, and a smaller subset of the miscellaneous geeks realised that it had stopped raining and was 3 minutes to the big display that WCC was putting up from their barge in the harbour so we sprinted back out to the beach to watch. My conclusions: I'm very unfit; and making things go boom is fun.

G'night!

Super Sparkle

I am doing a rerun of my Chimera larp, Super Sparkle Action Princess GX!

Thrill to the gripping cliffhanger!
Gasp at the horrors of the script!
Laugh at your friends' horrible horrible acting!
Will they get the episode done in time? Find out, in the next installment of Super Sparkle Action Princess GX!

(It's all Catherine's fault, really.)

Damn you, Stephen Moffat!!

I finally watched the last two episodes of the latest Doctor Who series.

Gah!

Things I never thought a National government would consider supporting...

Introducing a compulsory savings plan.

I can't wait to hear the howls from the libertarians and the Property Party (ie Act).

The start of a new campaign

My long term roleplaying group got together tonight to do character creation and the opening session of our new campaign, described by our GM as 'brightly coloured portal fantasy kind of like Thieves & Kings, Castle Waiting and Narnia.' (Our previous campaign was truly made of The Awesome, and included the most heroic character I've ever played, a severely delusional 10 year old girl. It made sense in context.)

We started off playing evacuees climbing on to the train to leave London and after a very long day realised that we'd been forgotten about in a siding - or had we? And then we went looking for our teacher, found a man with no shirt, a helmet with horns on and very furry trousers (clearly a gypsy), another man in a dress, a talking cat, and some nice people who took us in for the night. Devon is a very strange place, but it's much more interesting where the cats aren't as stupid as they are in London.

There are however some warning signs:
- we defaulted to an angsty backstory for at least two characters
- our backstory is the Evacuation and our first encounter includes a satyr (I kept expecting the Secret Police to turn up and arrest everybody for being humans)
- the final scene showed NishaTalitha switching awareness back to Mundane World, then flicking back to Fantasy World when she got scared by a rat. In our last game, the delusions of our children characters turned out to be very scary and very important to the overall plot. Eep.