Comtesse de Monte Crisco

Okay, so it's taking shape a bit more now. I can now encrypt an integer, and decrypt it. Now I just have to write some sort of handler to convert a string to manageable message chunks, encode them, decode them, and recreate the message

( More codey stuff )

Sharing this because I'm dead proud of myself for having managed to get back into learning to code. I stopped because of a mixture of things including lack of time, and whilst I'm still pretty short on time learning to program (and through programming re-reading a lot of maths that used to fascinate me at uni) is making me really happy with myself right now. So I'm halfway through my textbook on learning which is an introduction to computer science through the Python programming language. It's a weird one because Python isn't much like C or Java (the languages I've coded in quite a lot previously) so I'm coming at it pretty fresh having forgotten quite a lot of general programming things anyway. And halfway through my textbook comes an exercise which modestly says

Exercise 11.7: Exponentiation of large integers is the basis of common algorithms for public-key encryption. Read the Wikipedia page on the RSA algorithm and write functions to encode and decode messages.

with fuck all else by way of hints or support. This is of course quite fun (having been hand-held through the rest of the book so far with "design a function checks a list of words to see if it contains 'blah'. load the word file like this into a dictionary structure to make searching faster..."

At last, a chance to put together all the other bits in the book so far without being babysat!

First hurdle (which took me most of the day in between other things around the house that needed doing) was going "YAY MATHS!" and spending a lot of the day getting distracted re-reading results in Number Theory and abstract algebra. Most of the issue was thinking to myself I'm sure I could write functions to encode and decode and test them with some small known prime numbers but that wouldn't really be RSA would it? Even classic RSA that's vulnerable to cracking unless you do some fiddling with your ciphertexts. And they *did* say "large numbers" in the exercise description. So first if I'm going to test it for real, I'm going to need some big prime numbers. And so far in the book they haven't mentioned any libraries that generate big prime numbers so I'm gonna need to go hunt me some!

After a couple of pretty major errors (I didn't understand relatively obvious bits of algebra in the Rabin-Miller test at first, and apparently Python is more than happy to let you try to calculate using numbers bigger than you have RAM to store -- expanding random numbers in the range 2^(512^511) was a mistake) I managed to throw together this probably inelegant and/or inefficient prime hunter. It spits out probable (around 99.98% likelihood) primes. Could add rounds for higher probability. Is sluggish at 512 bit (about 1.5-3.5 seconds) and downright slow at 1024bit(around 17-18 seconds, obviously less if you get lucky). I strongly suspect that the slowness is just a result of juggling big numbers though rather than the messiness of my logic loops, unless I could calculate and then re-use some coefficient (a^s possibly?) somewhere for a marginal speed boost. Other possibility would be generating less random ints (not one of the most intensive parts of the calculation necessarily, but it might do something). When searching for candidates I could step +2 for a new candidate (on grounds that n+2 has just as good a chance of being prime as n for odd n). I'm not sure if there are problematic implications for stepping the random "witness" variable in a similar way, regarding the assumptions involved in deriving the probabilities, but that could mean that at most you generate 2 random numbers instead of probably "rounds+log(bitlength)" random numbers.
( cut for code )

PSA: I'm going to be blogging political stuff in future via http://fobix.wordpress.com

Got quite a good one today.

Dear name.
My name is Flossie Blades and I'm an HR manager with IDS Ltd.
I would like to take this time to welcome you to our hiring process and give you a brief synopsis of the position's benefits and requirements.
If you are taking a career break, are on a maternity leave, recently retired or simply looking for some part-time job, this appointment is for you.
The successful candidates shall possess excellent organizational skills as well as the ability to efficiently multi-task. The ideal candidates shall have a strong focus on day-to-day operational excellence , and a personal style that builds trust and inspires loyalty.
The candidate shall be self-motivated, proactive, able to learn and adapt quickly.
Occupation: Flexible schedule 2 to 8 hours / day. We can guarantee a minimum 20 hrs/week occupation
Salary: Starting salary is GBP 1500 per month plus commission , paid on a four-weekly basis.
Business hours: 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, MON-FRI, (your local timezone).
Region: United Kingdom.
Please note that there are no startup fees or deposits to complete your paid training evaluation period.
We offer team members flexible schedule, accommodating telecommuted and in-office assignments, and accessible entry-level positions for recent graduates and those looking to start a new career with a stable company with foreign capital. Working for us provides employees with a challenging and fast-paced work environment that is sensitive to the needs of its workforce.
If you are interested in learning more and taking this position with us, the next step in our process is to fill out our application form and to make out an interview.
To request an application form, schedule your interview and receive more information about this position please reply to this email with your personal identification number for this position IDNO:-Z7YZ4IJS1P.
If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me. I look forward to reviewing your application paperwork.
Sincerely,
Flossie Blades
HR department IDS Ltd.

__________
Top News: tribunal in calabar denies petitioner access to election materials.

Of possible interest is that though this purports to be a job in the UK, it refers to "dealing with foreign finance". The "Top News" link at the bottom of the e-mail is actually small time Nigerian news, probably indicating the Hotmail account was registered from Nigeria.

Quick look at the header data and Flossie's IP address is in Tehran

X-Originating-IP: [93.110.140.213]

Sorta curious where to send this information to. The subject line refers to my Amazon user name, and other speculation around the blogosphere suggests that AmazonUK e-mail accounts are being targetted.

I also wish I had the sense to call myself Flossie Blades when I transitioned instead of Phoebe. Flossie Blades is a way cooler name.

Crossposted at http://fobix.wordpress.com/2011/05/09/the-hardest-hit/

The Hardest Hit march against cuts to funding for disabled people's services is happening tomorrow. It basically represents a hijack of disabled people's interests, liberation struggle and energy into protecting the wallets of major "disability" businesses laughably described as charities (they are private sector service providers whose services are paid for by government/taxpayers - it is wholly unreasonable to consider them "charitable" in any meaningful way).

Many people haven't cottoned on to how dangerous this is, but that's because many people aren't aware that many of these businesses that they normally consider to be charitable, good for disabled people, providing important services to the population, actually have sucking up public resources and controlling finance allocated to supporting disabled people as their business model. They have no interest in supporting independent living, in decommissioning the institutions they earn money from that are used to warehouse disabled people. They're even seeking to make further in roads into bidding to social services to take over control of Direct Payments schemes (somewhat successfully), so whilst Direct Payments/Individual Budgets had as their main 2 positive aspects the fact that care is commissioned and managed by the person who needs it (and is therefore flexible to their needs) and there is a reduced financial overhead (because disabled people recieving direct payments can hire care staff directly without paying fees to agencies), Disability Businesses are still working on taking a slice of the money (and ultimately independence) away from disabled people brought about in that scheme.

Don't support this action. If you go, challenge Scope, Mencap, Leonard Cheshire, RNIB, RNID, and all of the other bastards selling the idea that paying their organisations is a substitute for disabled people's free, equal and independant living in the community, selling the idea that they're meaningfully some sort of "campaigning body" for the needy pathetic disabled people who don't have a voice of their own.

Tell them to go fuck themselves, drag a tangent off the march, delegitimise them, undermine them in any way possible. Like the slogan goes, RISE RESIST AND REVOLT!

Miss Dennis Queen (long time campaigner with the Disabled Deople's Direct Action Network (DAN) and occasional advocacy and support worker for fellow disabled people having difficulty getting their needs met, as well as being my wife) said everything that needs saying about the sort of hijack that is going on of disabled people's struggle here

Please go read it. For more of the history of the disabled people's movement, I'm sure I can hunt down references to what Dennis is referring to (regarding the movement being born in institutions) if anyone is interested.

Further Reading: Edward Crookham reminding us of what the charities have done for us. (only have a facebook link for this one, sorry)
Bob Williams-Findlay What Unites and What Divides Us - a case against collaborating with the disability charity industry against the cuts.

Apologies for not having written in anything earlier on this one, have been pretty swamped.

The "Transgender: time to change?" RCPsych conference on 20th of May has been cancelled. Earlier this morning, West London MHT GIC (aka Charing Cross GIC) pulled out of sending speakers to this event, citing concerns about a shift in the conference emphasis towards discussing "the validity or otherwise of gender diagnoses as medical and psychiatric phenomena", as well as "engaging in what is essentially a clinical discussion with a predominantly non-trans panel, which, moreover, features a non-clinician whose personal opinion is already well known" and mentioned "a great deal of disquiet around this event within the trans community".

It's particularly of interest to me to note their bringing up the question of the lack of trans community participation in the event as a concern, particularly since historically we have been excluded and treated in many cases with a great deal of distrust in fact (some professionals going so far as to blanketly label us habitual liars). It's a very exciting thing indeed to see the oldest practicing GIC in the world (by it's own reckoning) come so far as to publicly state an interest in trans participation in conference/academic level medical discussions about trans issues, especially in the light of a past history of leaked memos indicating grumblings amongst senior members of that GIC (some of whom are still current and still senior) against needing to use more appropriate terminology to refer to patients and implement an approach of "patient centred care", and a general (but diminishing) perspective of the GIC as holding a highly conservative approach to providing care to transgender patients.

This is good stuff.

Back on topic, shortly after the press release from WLMHT GIC was circulated the organisers of the conference announced there wouldn't be a conference after all. They say that this is due to a lack of ticket buy-in, a claim which has been mocked by a number of commenters from the trans community as some attempt at saving possible. Though this is possible, if their claims are true then this indicates that not only did they lose key speakers at the conference over the controversy, but that there aren't enough health professionals in the country around interested in paying actual money to allow this bullshit to happen.

So, double win, in that case.

(reposted here, from my comment at Gender Trust blog -- I suspect it's gotten stuck in a moderation queue that noone is looking at, unfortunately)

My concern, and possibly this is to some degree where actually meaningful similarities to Blackface (and less well known critiques of "cripping up", the near constant playing of disabled characters by non-disabled people who are then applauded for their "realism" and "sensitivity" in the portrayal of impairments that are completely mundane for the people who actually experience them), goes a bit deeper than just discussing trans roles as a matter of territory (is it ours, or is it free for any actor to occupy).

Bear with me, I recognise that I don't have a study to hand to prove this, although there has been some circumstantial research that hints I'm not necessarily a million miles from the truth here, as well as some of my own anecdotal experience.

Trans people are discriminated against more than usual in public-facing jobs, as a result of perceptions of our different "appearance". This probably goes several times over for acting (where being considered able to "look" the part is an essential characteristic, as much as playing it).

FURTHERMORE even for those trans people who manage pass effectively for "cis" people, when others find out we're trans, they end up reading physical differences from the average *into* our appearance in various ways, as if to sure up their understanding of who that person is and reconcile themselves over the fact that they didn't "spot" a trans person in their midst. Millions of minute physical differences that lie well within one average body shape or another (or both, or several) become the "signs" of being trans, rather than just a difference in shape from a statistical average that doesn't say a whole lot about specific individuals.

Within the context of that, we have these ideas of "looking" trans, or cis for that matter. Cis actors are free to play trans parts, because all they have to do to look the part is modify their appearance/posture/delivery somewhat from their state of "normality" or "average personhood". Trans people on the other hand (and a few have managed to break this rule), are liable to be subject to a belief that they are ONLY capable of playing trans roles. For trans people it's mysteriously not a matter of twisting around gender markers, and spending a little bit of time getting to know what it's like to be a cis person. There are no rewards for gritty and sensitive portrayal of a cis person by trans people. Mostly because noone wants to see it. The people are comfortable with cis actors. They get a bit of a fright when they find out that bond girl they were cracking one off to was trans.

Trans people navigating that industry are therefore probably best off hiding their trans status and taking cis roles because it's the best chance of getting jobs. Noone much wants a trans person to play trans roles because they've got "proper" actors for that and it's deadly important that you don't just hire any old actor like they do for so many other minor roles. Gay actors have recently said very similar stuff about how coming out as gay has affected their careers.

My point of view on all of this is that it's not about territory. It's about jobs and employment discrimination, hypocritical barriers to our full and equal inclusion in public places. Blackface minstrelsy didn't just come out of racist stereotyping, mockery and parody of black people (much as that's plenty offensive enough in itself). It came from a massive and widespread culture of racial segregation, and from White people making money out of selling a fake Black culture to other White people in the context of that. One convenient area to focus that fight is on giving the media industry stick for handing trans roles to cis actors, if nothing else, because of the hypocrisy inherrent in it. On the other hand it's always important to remember, we're not fighting over turf, we're fighting for equality.

edited to add: following a suggestion by Juliet I'm carrying on my discussion about this on her blog here.
edited again to add: Apparently blogspot lost the comment. And I didn't save the text elsewhere. Doh. Oh well. In any case, I made reference below to the "tragic but brave" notion of trans people and disabled people and other subjects of public human interest. The last song on this page (titled "tragic but brave") gives a pretty good idea of disabled people's movement politics on this. Unfortunately some of the songs it looks like it's crediting the lyrics as being written by people who definitely didn't write them ("Freedom", original title "Ella's Song) although I'm guessing looking at it it's actually a lyrics sheet from an album, and the credits are for the people who were singing it on that album.

Juliet Jacques has written a new Guardian blog as part of her "A Transgender Journey" line. I've been feeling a little bit weird about various of the stuff she has been covering so far.

Other blog articles in the series so far have dealt with things like gamete storage ('I hated the thought of a child I'd raised struggling with my history'), transition journey information ("Juliet Jacques returns to the Gender Identity Clinic, hopeful of a long-awaited hormone prescription. Will she get the answer she wants to hear?" asks the breathless soap opera Guardian subtitle) and nitty gritty of voice therapy ("starting to look like a woman, but she still sounds like a man" says the Guardian, helpfully).

Quite a lot of people I know have been reposting her blog articles excited about what they contain. I've been excited myself about some of the issues touched on. And yet there's this lump growing in my throat of bits of it that I find hard to swallow.

I wish I'd commented directly to her in the past but I've just sent this in on her latest entry (being actually pretty light on the offensive editor interventions this time around).

Juliet, you've been writing for quite a while here in the Guardian, on various things, mostly about how different aspects of transsexual life feel for you.

How do you think this helps (or hinders) transsexual people, bearing in mind the extensive criticism that has gone on amongst trans activists over recent years about how stories about us in the media serve to reinforce our status as objects of scrutiny, there for the public to make pervert pests, wicked patriarchal villains, tragic-but-brave sufferers of a condition, sadly deluded but harmless nutters and other fairly narrow archetypes out of.

How much does the wider (non-trans) public need to know about our experiences, the difficult decisions we make, the issues we have with our bodies, and so on?

I don't want to come across as too challenging. I know a lot of other trans people who love what you've been doing here, and am aware that there is often a great deal of reactionary abuse that gets targetted towards any trans person who steps up and shows their face in the media (mostly from a fear that somehow raising public awareness that we exist is itself some sort of liability and a crime against other trans people, or in the mistaken belief that by standing up and talking a person is seeking to represent every other trans person in existance). I don't want to do that.

I am curious about what your aims are in writing though, and if you're aware of wider arguments around the way media encourages the public to treat trans people (and people of other unusual backgrounds, a classic example would be media coverage of disabled people and it's focus on impairment and the same "tragic but brave" narrative) as a sort of public property freakshow full of drama and tragedy and happy endings and whatever else for their entertainment.

I think it's important that we talk to each other and that without jumping on each other and being mean (which has been a routine of past incarnations of the trans community) that we discuss widely and criticise openly the way that trans narratives continue to exist as a form of entertainment for the public, not just as fiction but as a "real lives" goldfish bowl format too. I think there are some important and cool things talked about in Juliet's articles but I'm finding it really difficult how little anyone seems to be discussing the fact that having this stuff in a mainstream (ie: primarily cissexual targetted) media space fosters the idea that we're there to be stared at, projected narratives upon, treated like we're each an episode of bodyshock (which is also pretty shit, let's be honest) for random cis people to think about mostly because their own lives are so boring that they need to vicariously soak up the freak factor from soap fiction and True Life bullshit.

A while ago there was some criticism of Jane Fae for doing a one-off piece in the Daily Mail along similar lines. Have attitudes changed, or is it just okay this time because the Guardian has a better reputation amongst trans people. The latter possibility should be a bit shocking given the Guardian's history on trans people, but recently they've been printing writing by Juliet Jacques, Natacha Kennedy, and for a fair while back Roz Kaveney, so obviously that waves the magic wand and turns the paper into something respectable all of a sudden.

The new year is on it's way and with it comes a new pile of Web2.1 bullshit. What's new?

Various sorts seem to be talking about Social Buying as the next big web business revolution. The conceit of it seems to be that by clubbing together consumers can get cheap deals on Stuff, with much emphasis on how many other people have already chipped in their £30 for a night out in Town or whatever, and a false sense of collectivity.

The actual business model of it is pretty much the reverse. Businesses offer products at cut prices to "Social Buying" services listed in the articles above. The social buying networks then spam everyone who has signed up to them with their "Daily Deal" telling people that they've only got 24 hours to get in on the deal. The social buying business takes a cut of the consumer buy-in (effectively a fee paid by the vendors in the background for accessing new customers through this service in order to offer them a cheap introductory offer on a routine product which they hope will get people to use their service again). For obvious reasons this doesn't work much as a marketing model for everyday goods (like groceries or toilet paper). Much of that stuff is already available at a fairly minimal price and is bought as part of a major weekly shop in most households, and most people won't so much return to the business they used because of some website, as they will be likely to routinely go to whichever place is cheapest, or closest to home, or sells the most of preferred brand ranges of a given customer.

The cut prices aren't a result of wholesaling goods out to a wide customer base (ie increased buying power)- in fact a quick review of the social buying networks available suggests that what's being made available at low prices through these services isn't cheap goods of any sort as it is cheap luxury services (e.g. beauty treatments, "experience" trips, and so on). The obvious reason for this is that whilst people tend to get attached to branded products the most devout Heinz baked beans fan will be as happy buying their preferred foodstuff at one supermarket as they would at another (for the same price), whereas people do build personal attachments to people providing services. People develop (shallow and mostly business promoting) social relationships with their hairdressers, people who pamper them, with hang-gliding instructors and the person who takes them up on their first parachute jump. People build relationships of trust and dependancy on the person they know they're okay with, so selling services like that for less than market rate on a gamble that many people will prefer to come back for a repeat at some point makes business sense.

The other aspect of it is this: when you mailshot a bunch of people with catalogues and vouchers and "new deals" information on what's going on with your business, mostly it gets thrown in the bin. When you mailshot a bunch of people believing that they are being empowered by bulk buying power (in some mysterious way that doesn't explain in the slightest how a speedboat trip up the thames becomes cheaper through bulk buying lots of individual sessions valid for up to a year in advance collectively) you persuade people that they're getting an awesome bargain somehow on your fairly un-necessary shite. And when it's done via a social media format, you also effectively have access to everyone the trendy bastards share it with on Facebook and Twitter.

It's quite an amazing form of advertising on the cheap.

It'd be nice if someone did actually set up a genuine "Social Buying" enterprise. I'm not entirely sure how it would work. Possible option could be a bunch of people bidding in on getting a closer to the wholesale price for a particular expensive good of interest in a group based format with a target number of members for each item before the cut price unlocks somehow. Just what is being sold as social buying right now is social in no means other than people are being encouraged to socially market products through their FB walls for free.

There's a split a mile wide appearing down the country and it's the line being drawn between those facing sweeping debilitating cuts to vital services and welfare, and those looking to stick the knife in further.

For several years now we've had an rapidly developing rhetoric associating disabled people with laziness, work avoidance, and social burden, some news outlets completely falsifying estimates around welfare fraud (suggesting that 75% of incapacity claimants are fraudulent when actual figures suggest only a tiny minority may be).

This is all obviously completely counter to the campaign work the disabled people's movement have been doing, fighting for jobs to be made accessible to people who are in the meantime stuck in poverty with wasted skills and abilities, who have been fighting for inclusive education so that disabled people aren't segregated out of proper opportunities to excel, for flexibility in employment and welfare so that it's not merely a matter of "go on benefits or starve when you find you can't work later due to a fluctuating impairment".

Real Jobs For Real Pay is an old old slogan.

The government is refusing to pay for the "burdensome" survival of disabled people, but refusing to engage with them outside of a model of "burden". There is no question of targetting inaccessible employers, no question of how this gap between "recipients"/"economically inactive individuals" and tax payers can be bridged.

The same attitude is now being brought to bear upon other recipients of state funding and, perhaps because there hasn't been such a concerted campaign of character assassination, there has been significantly greater outcry against significant cuts planned for University education subsidies, and a lifting of caps on top-up fees (which will have predictable effects on which people can afford to get degrees and which universities will be financially accessible by whom). Nevertheless there does seem to be a swathe of people ready to step in and say "look, if you want an education go get a job" as if it's that easy, and to spread stories about university only existing as a place for workshy (yep that one again) young people to go, get drunk and eat pot noodles for three years, delaying their entry into the working world. And when peaceful protestors get beaten up or abused by cops, they deserve it.



Somehow this is all turning into very much more of a class war than previous cuts have. We have rhetorical, financial and physical attacks by the state, the state media, the rich, on poor people, disabled people, people who can't access higher education without financial support, kids who can't access further education without EMA, people who will be made homeless by housing benefit cuts.

I don't think the class war has been so visible in my memory, in terms of a concerted drive by those in power to disenfranchise people, push social equality and justice BACKWARDS, defend justice by the police baton rather than by democratic process.

We must fight not just for justice for Alfie Meadows (although he bloody deserves it), for Jody McIntyre, Tahmeena Bax. This war being fought against us isn't just about isolated incidents of police violence. It's a massive campaign to rewrite the economic and social face of this country from the health service, to housing, to independant living (AKA "care"), to education, to welfare, and the end result of it will be the creation of an underclass the likes of which hasn't existed in most of Europe for a very long time. Such a complete revolution against the poor can never be considered a fair or reasonable consequence of "drawing the pursestrings in" during a temporary period of economic distress, and goes directly against all progressive measures that have been suggested to reduce dependancy and unemployment.

So far on the disability-relevant side of things there's:

- Scrapping the mobility component of DLA for institutionalised disabled people. This will mean that affected claimants will be prevented from using it to get out of the institutions from time to time. Many people also use it to cover their Motability vehicle contributions (giving them independant accessible transport, often the only accessible transport readily available to people with complex positioning and transport needs).

- Swapping of DLA for Personal Independant Payment. DLA is a payment made to eligible claimants to cover the higher cost of living that comes with disability (split between care and mobility components). The reason for doing this is because the government have decided the caseload is too high, although fraud estimates for DLA, Carer's Allowance and Attendance Allowance (all linked benefits) are recently at only 0.8%. So PIP will focus instead on thsoe with the more severe impairments, regardless of the fact that people with lower-level impairments still often need to find that money to pay for accessible transport, or low level care nees somewhere in order to survive. Supposedly the target for excluding people from DLA is 20% of current recipients.

- Independant Living Fund is going to be axed completely by 2015. The ILF exists to fund disabled people with high care needs to live independantly in general (ie: outside of Disabled People Storage facilities such as care and nursing homes) although after a previous run of cuts I had heard that they were revising that to only taking new claims from disabled people in employment. In any case it's going in 4-5 years, and after that, if we don't stop it happening, even more disabled people than are now locked up and waiting to die will face being incarcerated in these centres of institutionalised abuse and neglect.

- Housing cuts. Lots of them. Jobseekers who fail to find a job within a year will have their housing benefit cut by 10%, with an estimated 200,000 people facing homelessness as a result. Overall the government plans to cut housing benefit NATIONALLY by 50%, to the great concern of many of those on unemployment/incapacity benefits or low incomes dependant on it to keep a roof over their heads (myself included).

- Local government cuts and care funding: Day to day independant care funding is ordinarily paid by Social Services social care sections of local councils. Money has been paid to them to "guarantee" care budgets aren't affected by the cuts, but the government isn't prepared to "ringfence" this money, so local government are likely to use this money to plug funding gaps elsewhere, and disabled people who rely on care money to pay staff for assistance in day to day existance/independance are going to suffer for this.

Please feel free to add anything I've missed. I think we need to have a complete list of the cuts that are happening with analysis of their targets and outcomes.

I guess anyone who's been watching the british news has seen some pretty disturbing scenes of what went on yesterday. Many people argue that the protests have gone too far*, or that the protestors are doing it wrong as a result of a lack of maturity or strong leadership.

Personally my experience is that trying to stick to a plan en masse in such situations is impossible. The police suddenly change march routes (or try to), they suddenly kettle people at what they think is a strategic point, protestors refuse to be suppressed and all hell breaks loose.

Now over a series of such events activists get a lot smarter about this and learn ways of turning the chaos into an asset. After a few anti=war and anti-sweatshop protests as a teenager I'd been knocked around enough to learn that when someone's getting arrested, you grab hold of them and drag them back inside your group, then a bunch of people swap t=shirts or hoodies or whatever with them. If someone tries to snatch you, and you're wearing a face covering it's a good idea to take it off and hide it, or vice versa. I learned dearresting on the street, rather than in action training. And I learned from the people I met that day after the demo sipping my non-alcoholic drink in the pub about wearing bike armor under your clothing to mitigate the beatings and the stomping from the cops.

I learned a few protests later at a mayday that if we move and keep moving and stick together and keep an eye otu for each other and charge every police line whenever it forms cops run. Making cops run isn't just about a buzz factor from turning the tables either. It's about disrupting the police's ability to contain and prevent a protest from happening, to build tortoise lines of shields and batons they can charge into us and beat the crap out of us. Plenty of times that mayday, cops got stuck in the middle of us. All of a sudden the police were non=violent. So far as I saw that day none of us touched a one of them who got caught behind our lines. We just laughed.

What I'm saying is that these tactics and behaviours are learnt as a direct response to police abuse, and are some of the best ways of surviving this sort of protest.

There is a wider point to the chaos that happens on these big violent demos fruahgt with bad behaviour, police brutality, broken windows and the rest of it.

1) First of all, the police can't win with chaos. Chaos is the one thing they're not ever to allow to happen, and when chaotic situations arise, chinks appear in their ability to form a human barrier around parliament (or whatever their mission is). It's impossible to have intelligence that will help pre=empt chaos either. Once a protest is directly physically trying to force it's way into parliament, in numbers more than a few people with some flour and eggs, chaos significantly hinders the police's ability to stop it happening. Riders fall off horses, police can't figure out which front they're supposed to be targetting their batons at. This doesn't take throwing flares at police lines (although for obvious reasons, things like that help distract them) but it does require having a pretty mobile crowd. Downsides include the fact that it's not very accessible (although getting beaten up with sticks rarely is). Random property damage contributes to the chaos because the police divert their resources to protecting windows or cars or whatever instead of dealing with the crowd control problem. Splattering the cops with paint distracts them (albeit briefly) and makes it difficult for them to have their visors up until they've cleaned it off. From a protesting point of view, protestors are going to get beaten up anyway once a significant mass of people want to be somewhere the police want to stop them from being, whether they're trying to set fire to the police on the way through or just trying to walk forwards through police lines. A significant sight of the news yesterday was that of people using oversized textbook placards as rudimentary shields to facilitate pushing through police lines without necessarily having to be all-out aggressive, with some effect (given footage of police lines crumbling).

2) In Britain, since the outset of the Iraq War despite massive protests (in the range of 2 million people marching peacefully past parliament) it's difficult not to look back to the last time mass protest caused a meaningful turnaround in government policy, the Poll Tax Riots**. A few days ago, the Lib Dems had gotten commitments from all their members that they would be voting in favour of the increase in university fees. As it turns out, significant numbers of them changed their mind yesterday. Not enough to entirely swing the vote it seems, but following the example of the poll tax riots, it only has to carry on long enough that the government feel they cannot sustain their position without the situation getting untenably bad.

This is of course a sad thing for democracy, but as plenty of people are aware, the cuts are only just beginning and there are more people to get angry than just the students movement over these cuts. The government should be scared because unlike the anti-war protest, it's the livelihoods of people here doing the protests that are at stake, not some poor bombed out foreign country that our taxes go on slaughtering, and people will be angry and if the government requires them to turn the country over before it has a change of heart, there are people who *will* do that, whether anyone else likes it or not.

It's worth noting that a major complaint amongst terrified fluffy liebrals at the marches has been that teenage chavs have been ruining "proper" student demonstrations ("they don't look like students"). This coincides significantly with the fact that this protest movement has seen large numbers of working class 2ndary school kids walking out of school and onto the streets, getting radicalised at the end of a truncheon. It is them, not the current crop of undergrads, who are actually going to have to pay these hiked up fees (as the hike only comes in 2012). A lot of people seem to hate or disregard the young or think they shouldn't be there (or that it's irresponsible for people to let them be on the protests, as if anyone has the capability to stop them somehow) but it is their future on the line, and they're fighting as hard and as best as they can for it, and in my mind deserve only our unconditional support. They have no vote, no democratic rights, no legal right to be out without an adult looking after them, and very little meaningful control over anything except through this channel.

* Actually less and less people seem to be arguing this the more police horse charges appear on tv, the more people become aware of what's going on. But there're still a lot of people who feel this way.

** Arguably council tax isn't that much different to poll tax, except council tax is charged on a basis of house value and split between adult occupiers (much like the council tax that existed before the "poll tax" brought in by Thatcher) as a measure of wealth, whereas poll tax was charged "per head" the same regardless of wealth. Thatcher was equalising things for the rich, in effect, and a lot of people didn't like it and forced the government to turn back on this policy, returning to the prior system.