Lots of talk around about the G8 meeting about to be held up in Gleneagles. Quite a bit of scaremongering too…people that think democracy and capitalism is great as long as the thinking goes their way, but as soon as someone disagrees it’s time to shut down the voice of dissent.

Combine this crap with this shitty idea and this one and you start to wonder why people who argue about democracy, freedom, liberty, yada, yada yada all turn out to be so fucking authoritarian?

If you don’t want to see protest, move to a country that doesn’t permit it. Otherwise, STFU. Hypocrisy really grates.

I had a play with some Linux based tools such as Ethereal and Mplayer and managed to grab this (small) video of Reg Keys’ speech from the BBC news web site. I might feel guilty, but seeing as I’m a fullly paid up licence owner in the UK, such feelings are moot. Feel free to download it if you’re a UK licence payer too, but not otherwise (it’s only ~550kb) Apologies for the sheer smallness of the window, that’s the only size the the BBC offer – all the ‘double size’ window give you is the same video with the same quality but enlarged. The promise of broadband is still yet to be fulfilled.

Download Reg Keys speech

It appears to kill my version of RealPlayer (Version 10 for Linux), but plays nicely in mplayer and on a Windows 2000 PC using an older Windows Media Player. If you need it converted to something more accessible for your setup, drop me a line.

Now we wait for the BBC Cease and Desist letter

For the record, I used Ethereal to watch the interaction between my PC and the BBC when playing the video in the standard window and found this…

rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk:554/news/media/avdb/news_web/video/9012da68000c428/nb/09012da68000c50b_nb_16x9.rm
?title=”BBC”&author=”"&copyright=”(C)%20British%20Broadcasting%20Corporation”/streamid=0

Then I took the URL above and downloaded it with this command,

mplayer -noframedrop -dumpfile out.rm -dumpstream rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk:554/news/media/avdb/news_web/video/9012da68000c428/nb/09012da68000c50b_nb_16x9.rm

So just drop out the Copyright stuff from the URL, trim it back to the .rm and save the whole incoming stream to an out.rm file. Rename it and you’re in business.

Thanks to Thomer for the mplayer command line.

I caught the arse end of a speech last night by Reg Keys on the telly last night. Wish I’d seen the whole thing but I was channel hopping to find out if our local MP had survived (he hadn’t, see prevous post). Watching telly this morning I didn’t see the speech anywhere, which surprised me as it was so honest, emotive and real. Maybe it’s because Tony and Cherie had to stand there looking like idiots while this man poured out his soul – exposed as they should have been as frauds. That kind of image doesn’t do well for the our Presidente, hence the difficulty in finding a video of the speech. Luckily, I found a transcript at Talk Politics of what Reg Keys said, then discovered that his speech had been posted on his own site. Here’s a transcript – I just wish I could post a video of Blair looking as humilated as he did last night when Mr. Keys made this speech…

If this war had been justified by international law I would have grieved and not campaigned. If weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq — again I would have grieved, not campaigned.

Tonight there are lessons to be learned. I hope in my heart that one day the prime minister may be able to say sorry. That one day he will say sorry to the families of the bereaved. And one day the prime minister may be able to visit wounded soldiers in hospital.

Then our campaign will not be in vain and all the people who have given me their vote tonight have sent a clear and resounding message about the Iraq war. Thank you for all the people that voted for me tonight.

I would like to thank my wife and my son, who have supported me tirelessly through this campaign. A remarkable campaign.

I do not claim to be a professional politician, fighting this campaign has not been an easy task for me but I had to do it for my son, Thomas Keys, royal military policeman, killed in Iraq four days short of his 21st birthday. Sent to war under extremely controversial circumstances.

If I were a serious blogger, this would be be point that I’d order you to ‘read it all’. I won’t, wouldn’t and can’t – that was all that was said. Good luck to the man and his family in the future, he did an important service last night.

The Tories scored another victory over Labour in Peterborough and won Newbury from the Liberal Democrats.

There you go, the local tory chinless wonder has won himself a seat, against most civilised human’s wishes. You can bet I’ll be harassing him in the future on the big issues.

For a bloke that campaigned on his lack of chin, his weed pulling ability (I kid you not) and his willingness to support fox killing, he had better tread carefully in the next few months – there are 23,311 people in this area who think he’s a shit. Two of them live in this house.

The people have spoken, the bastards.

..does Peter Snow do the rest of the time?