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What did Parliament do? – politicalbetting.com
What did Parliament do? – politicalbetting.com
It was not the Commission which changed the law allowing the Post Office to prosecute subpostmasters on the basis of flawed unreliable evidence. But MPs. Parliamentary scrutiny should mean something, shouldn’t it? Let’s see what it actually meant here. How did MPs discharge their function? Many are lawyers. One of the much touted benefits is meant to be that they can properly scrutinise such legislation and understand its implications. MPs also get expenses to pay for researchers.
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He assimilated well into the host country, was hard working, did two jobs at the same time, Secretary of State and National Security Advisor.
Section 69 notwithstanding, is a prosecutor tried to take advantage of it today could an individual judge require them to prove their assertion or does the judge have no discretion in this?
Except, possibly, sunrise and sunset!
And a Good, if rather chilly, Morning to everybody!
This is a masterclass in bureaucratese from Gen Robert Porter (wiki) on Condor’s objectives:
in order to facilitate the coordinated employment of internal security forces within and among Latin American countries, we are ... endeavoring to foster inter-service and regional cooperation by assisting in the organization of integrated command and control centers; the establishment of common operating procedures; and the conduct of joint and combined training exercises
https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=code+over+country&adgrpid=137339391547&hvadid=587160842329&hvdev=m&hvlocphy=1006886&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=18377449744563161551&hvtargid=kwd-1036270491066&hydadcr=17346_1802382&tag=hydrukspg-21&ref=pd_sl_22gu0xte0p_e
* not especially picking on Sunak here
Which has always been there, which is why humility, checks and balances are so important. See also the ongoing Ruth Perry inquest;
Firstly, it was pointed out to Mr Derry that much of his evidence regarding his interpretation of events during the inspection was given as witness testimony, and that this interpretation neither matched his written evidence nor the notes he’d taken during the inspection…
This elicited a fierce response “Why am I here then? If my word is not to be believed.” Similarly, when facing questions from the family’s lawyer about his “unpleasant and mocking tone”, about how he’d shut down discussion by raising his hands in a ‘stop’ gesture and…
HMI Derry was given other instances of behaviour that school business manager Nicky Leroy described as “intimidating” whereas, on day one, he was contrite and expressed regret that other ‘colleagues’ regarded him in this way…
https://twitter.com/Edmund_B_W/status/1730110526510829814
Rosalynn Carter died a few days ago. Henry Kissinger died today. A greater contrast spanning the two extreme ends of human good and human wickedness cannot be imagined.
https://twitter.com/curiouswavefn/status/1730121807670452295
Gove had just received a “briefing” from an apparent academic expert. Who had no actual qualifications in the domain. The briefing had been a demand for a vast increase in spending. What on and what the results might be, the expert in question was rather vague about.
Edit: the entire PO scandal was created, engineered and maintained by experts. One of the problems with the dismissive, reflexive ignorance of the elite, is the inability to detect the difference between bullshit artists and real experts
The header's reference to a nurses' trial in South Wales makes very familiar reading to us PBers who have been following the PO scandal, though in that instance with rather different results (so far):
https://journals.sas.ac.uk/deeslr/article/view/4891/4841
"The judge excluded some evidence from the jury as being prejudicial under s 78 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. Evidence was derived from flawed data, flawed IT, and flawed management of IT. Nurses were blamed for these failures. As this paper explains, the underlying causes must be properly understood as basic software issues that should have been taken seriously as and when they originally happened. Indeed, it is baffling that the hospital failed to detect and addressthe corruption of the databases that had been in continual clinical use over a period of years.
It is to be speculated as to how many other cases —internally or reaching the courts —inappropriately blame and pursue clinicians caught up in fallout from hospital IT chaos, with nobody recognizing or wanting to admit or check whether IT can cause the problems. Poor IT, and poorly managed IT, can induce clinical7and other error, contribute to error, exacerbate error, cause huge costs,8and make it hard to disentangle true causes.[...]
There must be many other cases where clinicians have been blamed for hospital IT chaos, where nobody recognizes or admits, or checks that IT can be the cause of such problems. Hospitals spend a greatdeal of money on IT, and they have IT staff to manage it; there is a significant financial and personal investment in this being right, so it is psychologically very satisfying to blame the users (nurses in this case)."
https://twitter.com/NKingofDC/status/1730064031669522661
I’ve no doubt this is a massive scandal and I find @Cyclefree a decent writer with interesting opinions and I’m glad some people are angry enough (unlike me) to take an interest in this grave injustice blah blah blah blah
But personally I shall go and read Reddit for a bit
https://twitter.com/EndWokeness/status/1729992193463521685
The comments below are (ahem) somewhat blindly pro-Elon. It's almost as though there are troll farms pumping out content...
PB leans very heavily towards STEM.
A de facto reversal of the burden of proof in criminal cases ought to worry all of us a great deal.
The self declared first amendment absolutist doesn't seem to appreciate that his advertisers also have first amendment rights, which they are exercising.
Whether he was good at his job is another matter.
Yet you only want to post about nonsense.
Which is it?
He would be better running TwiX as an ad free site dependant entirely on subs. But getting there will be tricky if not impossible
They can be fooled just as easily, willfully ignoring warning signs in their confidence, and this can be compounded by egos the size of a beached whale.
Just look at the success of fraudsters and idiots in getting smart people to back things like FTX and WeWork for a start.
GOOD RIDDANCE
Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/henry-kissinger-war-criminal-dead-1234804748/
As it is it gets pointed out and because he has such thin skin he throws tantrums, throwing in a swear to look edgy.
That's the bit I find weird - how people make billions with such thin skin. I'd assume you need to be a little tough to be a ruthless businessman, but he's so fragile, and not alone in that.
"My sister lives in Knightsbridge now and when I go to visit her
I buzz three times on the intercom and say Lulu, it's your solicitor
I once walked in and caught her sitting naked on top of Henry Kissinger
Take my word or take this Polaroid picture
Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Henry Kissinger!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e581YeP0g7k
(The song is nsfw, like pretty much all of Momus's 1980s output...)
I don't think Gates has thin skin, either, given all the stuff that's been thrown at him, rightly and wrongly, over the years. Did Steve Jobs? At times, earlier on, perhaps. Later on, in his prime, no.
(Worth nothing that 'actual experts' this includes 'lay' experts, such as subpostmasters, patients/families of patients with extensive experience of NHS etc etc. actual experience can be much more valuable than a piece of paper)
Rolling Stone’s take on foreign affairs is no more attractive than Kissinger’s.
A friend of mine's wife works in publishing. About 30 years ago, when she was a pretty slip of a lass in the PR department, she was told to go and collect him at Heathrow and bring him into town - for some launch of one of his books
So she met him at LHR and they got in the limo and she confessed she found him weirdly attractive, and had to actively restrain herself from climbing on his lap. She was probably about 23 at the time, he must have been around 70
Wasn't it Kissinger himself who remarked on power being the ultimate aphrodisiac? It is powerfully alluring, to some, and he had it
Where is this mega IQ you are so famous for? Eh where?
PS Much of the systemic failings also apply to the Asian rape scandal. You might like to reflect on that as it appears to be the only scandal you care about.
Where something minor like a speeding fine is involved, I'd be inclined to trust the system, and wouldn't expect a court to assume that every speed camera is faulty unless proved sound. Where criminal prosecution is being undertaken, clearly a higher standard is needed. What would a fair system involve? Perhaps an *independent* IT analysis of whether there is a way that the apparent fraud could have been caused by a bug in the system?
And we focus on so few subjects - Tories still in the 20s, 2024 presidential pre-pre-election second guessing - that introducing another hobbyhorse into our agenda is not unwelcome.
I wouldn't have heard about the Post Office scandal at all if it weren't for Cyclefree. I certainly wouldn't have understood it - I'd have just classified it as a highly regrettable error and moved on.
Personally I don't find the subject exciting - not unimportant, but unexciting. I understand why this is a big issue, but instinctively my brain wants to classify it as a 'computer says no' error. But I'm very pleased that someone DOES care about it. Because it clearly deserves more caring about than its getting.
"Henry Kissinger should have spent his last days in a prison cell. His carpet bombing of Southeast Asia killed hundreds of thousands. He was pivotal in Pinochet’s murderous coup, and genocides in East Timor and Bangladesh. One of the great monsters of our time."
Had South Vietnam turned out like South Korea ( and Rhee’s regime was considerably nastier than the South Vietnamese), the war would be viewed in the same light as the Korean War.
The USA is neither The Shining City on the Hill, nor The Great Satan. But, I sleep safely in my bed, due in no small part to US firepower, and for that, I am grateful.
To start with, the Horizon system had no internal self-audit.
The system I am working on currently, writes logs and creates database entries for *everything* it does. This is to create a deliberate audit trail, so that you can follow every transaction as it moves through the system. A timeline of actions.
The relationship between state and citizen is the very essence of politics. If you can't see that what on earth are you doing on a politics site?
(And it is shorter than yesterday's.)
https://www.amazon.com/Age-I-Our-Human-Future/dp/0316273805
Simple, short, lucid, brutally honest. It is typical Kissinger realpolitik - but this confronting the robots, not the commies
AI is gonna change the world, very profoundly, and it will often be painful. He doesn't pull punches
That would be an interesting article.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-we-forgot-about-pol-pot/
https://archive.ph/g77U1
Not sure I can do better than that, so I shan't bother
(Incidentally @Cyclefree, although my review is the same as usual - interesting, well written,
too long, nothing to do with betting - this is obviously of interest to many. Have you thought of writing a book?)The way that Horizon swallows evidence is quite suspicious to me.
Perhaps it’s just to downgrade the standing of IT evidence to corroboration. Ie - not sufficient to convict *in the absence of other evidence*
AIUI one of the mysteries in the PO scandal was “what happened to the cash”? The sub-postmasters weren’t living extravagant lives and their bank accounts weren’t inflated. The PO said “they are just skimming cash and hiding it somewhere - the computer says it’s missing and the computer is right”
If they had actually had to prove the first part of the proposition would that have provided sufficient protection?
The IT stuff is a red herring. There is complexity in almost everything, whether it's the engineering of railways, financial services, environmental protection. We can't expect the courts to understand it all, nor us.
The error was not with an ignorance of the IT, but with the broader legal system that could see hundreds of these prosecutions go forward without someone checking the victims' bank accounts/beds/spending behaviour and thinking "huh - where is all this stolen money going?".
@NickPalmer was suggesting a full independent review of all the code if there’s an accusation it’s false. Is that really feasible or is it a (retired) politician just suggesting something that sounds good (even if he has a background in IT)
But for, say, ATM transactions, the system should be previously audited and signed off by regulators as good/bad/shit.
It should be -
1) The system is audited and verified, on a regular basis
2) The system is audited and certified as part of the court case
In banking, there is already quite a lot of audit of systems, and more is coming.
Examples: With the internet and social media, the laws, courtesies and rules of defamation, libel and slander do not really exist. Ditto bullying.
No parent can reliably protect their young children from accessing, or having accessed for them, material which no sane adult would wish to see, whether of a sexual or violent nature. (Listening to people like Clegg defending, denying or explaining this is vomit inducing).
Yesterday on PB a post described how a scammer could pretend to be contacting from a genuine bank phone number. (BTW if that is possible, how can any call or text etc be taken by a criminal court as coming from the alleged source?)
No filter at all exists to assist those who struggle to distinguish between fact and fiction. The growth of belief in conspiracy theories is truly alarming.
Similarly the problem we are discussing here arises because IT is involved in a way which even our fairly sophisticated criminal system has proved itself entirely unable to deal with fairly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoSsalkkW98
Though yes that can be interpreted loosely and include discussion of what Parliament does or did not in this case do
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Order_(book)
https://www.businessinsider.com/henry-kissinger-xi-jinping-old-friend-chinese-people-snub-biden-2023-11?r=US&IR=T
He deliberately and successfully prolonged a war which cost tens of thousands of American lives to get Richard Nixon elected...