Bletchley Park gets a £4.6m grant, financed by government pro-innumeracy programme

Bletchley Park, the birthplace of modern crypto and the home of the WWII codebreaking effort, has received a £4.6m Heritage Lottery Fund grant to fund restoration efforts and new exhibits. Bletchley was broken up after the war and its work was literally buried as part of the Cold War climate of secrecy that prevailed. In the years that followed, neglect and time led to the near-destruction of many of the historic sites. The Bletchley Park trust has since done amazing work on a shoestring budget to restore and preserve Bletchley, creating a fabulous museum and rebuilding some of the most beautiful electromechanical computers I've ever seen.

But there was only so much the Trust could do with no money. This grant is sorely needed, and this news fills me with delight.

Ironically, the money to restore Bletchley has come from the lottery, a government-run system designed to reinforce and exploit statistical innumeracy of the sort that Bletchley's cryptographers overcame in order to help win the war.

The investment will enable the restoration of key codebreaking huts and create a world-class visitor centre at the Buckinghamshire site.

The HLF said new exhibitions and interactive displays will bring Bletchley's story to life...

A spokesman for the Bletchley Park Trust said: "The ambition of the Bletchley Park Trust is to complete the restoration of the site, and to tell its story to the highest modern standards."

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Battle for the California desert: Why is the government driving folks off their land?

[Video Link] Nick Gillespie says: "Thought you might find this new Reason.tv doc about homeowners in one of the world's great godforsaken places, the Antelope Valley, being hassled by LA County officials. Includes footage of the great "Phonehenge" house out that way."

The Antelope Valley is a vast patch of desert on the outskirts of Los Angeles County, and a segment of the few rugged individualists who live out there increasingly are finding themselves the targets of armed raids from local code enforcement agents, who've assembled into task forces called Nuisance Abatement Teams (NATs).

The plight of the Valley's desert dwellers made regional headlines when county officials ordered the destruction of Phonehenge: a towering, colorful castle constructed out of telephone poles by retired phone technician Kim Fahey. Fahey was imprisoned and charged with several misdemeanors.

But Fahey is just one of many who've been targeted by the NATs, which were assembled at the request of County Supervisor Mike Antonovich in 2006. LA Weekly reporter Mars Melnicoff wrote an in-depth article in which she exposed the county's tactic of badgering residents with minor, but costly, code violations until they face little choice but to vacate the land altogether.

"They're picking on the the people who are the most defenseless and have the least resources," says Melnicoff.

Reason.tv collaborated with Melnicoff to talk with some of the NAT's targets, such as retired veteran Joey Gallo, who might face homelessness if he's forced to leave his house, and local pastor Oscar Castaneda, who says he's already given up the fight and is in the process of moving off the land he and his wife have lived on for 22 years. And, while Antonovich declined an interview, we did catch up with him at a public meeting in order to ask the big question at the center of all this: Why the sudden enforcement of these codes against people living in the middle of the desert, who seemingly are affecting no one?

Battle for the California Desert: Why is the Government Driving Folks off Their Land?

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