Meanwhile, under the radar but well worth a watch if you missed it, this week’s Panorama with the scandal of how a government owned organisation covered up its failings, leading to the suicide, bankruptcy and false imprisonment of entirely innocent people:
The government is currently under pressure from all sides to concede a judicial inquiry.
There is also a very good series on Radio 4 by Neil Wallis the journalist who covered the story, available on BBC iPlayer.
The story - and there is much more to come out, I expect - is an absolute scandal.
Who would be the Minister responsible for this scandal?
I would have said the people responsible were
(1) the software company who provide the crappy accounting program to Royal Mail (Fujitsu)
(2) the people running Royal Mail who ignored the evidence (the Chief Executive).
POL was a separate subsidiary - and eventually an entirely separate company - and it is hard to see that Royal Mail would have had much if anything to do with it.
Agreed -- but surely the software company have some blame here?
Ultimately -- if I understand right -- it was poor software that was the root cause.
So, surely there is a claim against Fujitsu, provider of IT solutions ?
For sure. A small unnoticed detail in Thursday's lengthy ministerial question slot on the scandal was the minister mentioning that files on a batch of people involved have been sent to the CPS for consideration of prosecution. I'd bet that includes some at the suppliers, who may not have been entirely honest with the PO.
Nevertheless it would appear from the evidence that the company from the top down was trying to cover its back rather than facing facts, and even people who didn't know should responsibly have been digging into the matter rather than simply assuming that hundreds of their long serving postmasters had suddenly turned into thieves.
I worked at Royal Mail HQ at the time, and, while I heard nothing specific about the losses scandal, it was common gossip within the company that Horizon had turned into an implementation mess, over budget, behind timescale, and beset with problems. As with many government IT projects.
Yep, from listening to the quite brilliant programmes on R4, it seems to me that the PO missed almost every opportunity to turn this around and do the right thing. They had a new Chief Executive come in who had clean hands and who instigated an external independent enquiry and then, just before it was about to produce a damning report on the scandal, they shut it down and released their own report saying everything was fine.
People died because of this. Many people had their lives ruined. If ever there was a case for a proper independent enquiry it is this.
Worse than that; senior management were apparently in open and public denial until the last moment.
Speaking as an epidemiologist - and also one of the brightest and best and so disproving your theory
First, you're expecting miracles. The information early on was poor, it's still not very good. Poor information leads to imprecise or plain wrong predictions. Take a good look at the imperial paper and exactly what was modeled. The detail is quite impressive, some of the assumptions were probably wrong, but not unreasonable at the time (even the conservative doubling time given they were showing a situation much worse than previously thought). The main problem we've had is bad data.
I think the problem is that other countries were working with bad data. And they did a much better job.
(And of course, scientists have evolved methodologies for dealing with lousy data -- I work with lousy data all the time).
The Imperial paper should be retracted. By April 1, Ferguson's model predicted 50 daily death. On April 1, there were 670 actual deaths. Ferguson's model was out by over an order of magnitude.
Even by March 25th, the actual deaths were 186, Ferguson's prediction was under 10. He was out by an order off magnitude even within a week of his model being published.
I am sorry for Ferguson. But he screwed up, & there was (it seems) no critical thinking of his model at SAGE. His reputation as the expert seems to have meant he was not seriously challenged.
I am very grateful that when I make mistakes, and they are buried in academic journals.
You do however need to appreciate that the imperial paper does not predict what is going to happen. It compares different levels of non pharmaceutical intervention under different (all quite conservative) assumptions. The point is that under these conservative assumptions it challenged the planned policy of action short of a lock down. It was valuable in doing that.
Meanwhile, under the radar but well worth a watch if you missed it, this week’s Panorama with the scandal of how a government owned organisation covered up its failings, leading to the suicide, bankruptcy and false imprisonment of entirely innocent people:
The government is currently under pressure from all sides to concede a judicial inquiry.
There is also a very good series on Radio 4 by Neil Wallis the journalist who covered the story, available on BBC iPlayer.
The story - and there is much more to come out, I expect - is an absolute scandal.
Who would be the Minister responsible for this scandal?
I would have said the people responsible were
(1) the software company who provide the crappy accounting program to Royal Mail (Fujitsu)
(2) the people running Royal Mail who ignored the evidence (the Chief Executive).
POL was a separate subsidiary - and eventually an entirely separate company - and it is hard to see that Royal Mail would have had much if anything to do with it.
Agreed -- but surely the software company have some blame here?
Ultimately -- if I understand right -- it was poor software that was the root cause.
So, surely there is a claim against Fujitsu, provider of IT solutions ?
For sure. A small unnoticed detail in Thursday's lengthy ministerial question slot on the scandal was the minister mentioning that files on a batch of people involved have been sent to the CPS for consideration of prosecution. I'd bet that includes some at the suppliers, who may not have been entirely honest with the PO.
Nevertheless it would appear from the evidence that the company from the top down was trying to cover its back rather than facing facts, and even people who didn't know should responsibly have been digging into the matter rather than simply assuming that hundreds of their long serving postmasters had suddenly turned into thieves.
I worked at Royal Mail HQ at the time, and, while I heard nothing specific about the losses scandal, it was common gossip within the company that Horizon had turned into an implementation mess, over budget, behind timescale, and beset with problems. As with many government IT projects.
Yep, from listening to the quite brilliant programmes on R4, it seems to me that the PO missed almost every opportunity to turn this around and do the right thing. They had a new Chief Executive come in who had clean hands and who instigated an external independent enquiry and then, just before it was about to produce a damning report on the scandal, they shut it down and released their own report saying everything was fine.
People died because of this. Many people had their lives ruined. If ever there was a case for a proper independent enquiry it is this.
The more than an hour of parliamentary questions on Thursday is well worth a listen (on parliament.tv). The minister was pressed from all sides for a judicial inquiry, but argued that a non-judicial independent review will be cheaper and quicker. A lot of MPs, including Tory ones, said that this will end up being judicially reviewed anyway, sooner or later, and the government may as well face that fact now.
The government also doesn't look good for having clearly been involved in lining up the departing CEO with plum new jobs, including one in the Cabinet Office (since terminated), and a number of MPs said that they now wanted her removed from the London NHS Trust.
"That almost certainly means there won’t be a deal."
I hold the opposite view.
Two things can be ruled out. (i) An extension. (ii) An overnight move from frictionless trade to WTO. The first being politically impossible (for Johnson) and the second being utter lunacy on every level and from every perspective.
Therefore there almost certainly WILL be a deal. And given the negotiating realities it will be largely on the EU's terms. So in the parlance of the Header, "Submission or No Deal" - the answer is Submission.
But Johnson (as he did with the Withdrawal Agreement) will brand it otherwise. Submission will once again become triumph. I predict the phrase "Flexible Future Divergence" - or perhaps "Dynamic Democratic Alignment" - will be much heard. I know! But that's what we have come to with all this "leaving the EU" nonsense.
Brexit. A great big sack of stupid, quite frankly. Total waste of time. Always was.
As the great military theorist Mikhail von Goveitz once opined, 'Brexit is the continuation of war by other means'...
I agree. The 'Culture War' aspect is the only prism through which it makes any sense.
I'm sorry but this is ridiculous, the referendum said Leave and Boris was elected with a clear mandate to get us out after May prevaricated and paid the price.
Any talk that Brexit may not happen is utter bollox.
But I'm beginning to realise that some on here aren't too fussed about democracy.
That's not the case, Mr C. We suspect that we are living through, if not the end of 'democracy', a time when the process has become corrupted. It's easy, and understandable, to say the public was 'informed' before they voted, but with majority of the popular media being against the EU, and in many cases quite prepared to publish blatant untruths...... straight bananas anyone ....... many of us are concerned that, as the saying goes, the country is going to hell in a handcart.
And we're worried. In my case, I don't suppose it'll make an enormous difference but I have grandchildren who are young people in this country, and what does it hold for them? I grew up in the 50's, in the shadow of WWII and in the greyness of those times. I saw, and still see, the European project as providing the opportunities for development and creativity. I don't see Brexit Britain as a land of opportunity, but one hedged about with restrictions. Opportunities for the wealthy perhaps, but not for ordinary people.
Yes yes yes I've heard it a million times.
And what you have to do now is have another vote and campaign to rejoin and we'll all decide again.
See what I mean about democracy, you're not too keen on it are you?
Pinhead. This country is not and never has been a direct democracy, and either you have never noticed or you don't mind (because I don't hear you complain on a weekly basis that the government has decided something for itself *again* instead of putting it to a plebiscite). And for good reason; the average voter is as well equipped to decide on complex matters of state as my horse is.
Yebbut dimmocracee innit, you reply. No, it's ochlocracy.
@IshmaelZ Ishmael, excellent new word of the day there, first time I have ever seen it.
Agreed. New one on me too.
Short for ochamnovotingforthattosserJohstonlocracy I believe.
Speaking as an epidemiologist - and also one of the brightest and best and so disproving your theory
First, you're expecting miracles. The information early on was poor, it's still not very good. Poor information leads to imprecise or plain wrong predictions. Take a good look at the imperial paper and exactly what was modeled. The detail is quite impressive, some of the assumptions were probably wrong, but not unreasonable at the time (even the conservative doubling time given they were showing a situation much worse than previously thought). The main problem we've had is bad data.
I think the problem is that other countries were working with bad data. And they did a much better job.
(And of course, scientists have evolved methodologies for dealing with lousy data -- I work with lousy data all the time).
The Imperial paper should be retracted. By April 1, Ferguson's model predicted 50 daily death. On April 1, there were 670 actual deaths. Ferguson's model was out by over an order of magnitude.
Even by March 25th, the actual deaths were 186, Ferguson's prediction was under 10. He was out by an order off magnitude even within a week of his model being published.
I am sorry for Ferguson. But he screwed up, & there was (it seems) no critical thinking of his model at SAGE. His reputation as the expert seems to have meant he was not seriously challenged.
I am very grateful that when I make mistakes, and they are buried in academic journals.
You do however need to appreciate that the imperial paper does not predict what is going to happen. It compares different levels of non pharmaceutical intervention under different (all quite conservative) assumptions. The point is that under these conservative assumptions it challenged the planned policy of action short of a lock down. It was valuable in doing that.
IMO the government's principal failing has been focusing almost exclusively on one metric - avoiding the collapse of NHS hospitals along the lines they had just watched happen in Italy - doing everything they could to maintain hospital capacity (hence shoving patients back to care homes without tests, etc.) and not paying enough attention to the many other strands of what is a very complex interconnected web of challenges.
Tories have fucked up a sensible Brexit Tories have fucked up the economy Tories have fucked up Covid 19 and left us with the most per capita pandemic deaths of any major Nation
Still lead 43% to 38% though.
The 4th sentence suggests the first 3 aren't entirely true
Disagree. They are all statements of fact.
The fourth sentence merely suggests other factors are at play.
Edit - although that said, we can’t be sure of the third one yet. And it will take time before we have reliable statistics that tell us who comes where in this grim table.
But on the information we have, it’s a reasonable statement. We’ve certainly suffered very badly when we had every advantage of geography.
Every advantage of geography?
We are an interconnected globalised nation with one of the highest rates of urbanisation and population density of major developed nations. That certainly has a role to play.
Utter bollox, more like a disunited inward looking shithole of a union
You think the idea that we are urbanised and high population density is utter bollox?
I know you can't see past Scotland but I didn't realise you were so blinkered you couldn't see past the Scottish Highlands alone.
The overpopulated urbanised England part was correct , the remainder was utter bollox.
That was half of it. So you already half think it was right.
The other half was interconnected and globalised. Do you really think that's bollocks? You think we aren't an interconnected or globalised nation?
Would you agree that the world is a different place to 2016 and that the relationship between the world's largest trading blocks has deteriorated since 2016.
I ask that because my answer would be that we are less interconnected and / or globalised then we were then, the world has moved against our globalised nation plan.
Prior to this year? No I wouldn't agree the UK was less globalised than in 2016.
PS there's a difference between globalisation and regionalisation.
Meanwhile, under the radar but well worth a watch if you missed it, this week’s Panorama with the scandal of how a government owned organisation covered up its failings, leading to the suicide, bankruptcy and false imprisonment of entirely innocent people:
The government is currently under pressure from all sides to concede a judicial inquiry.
There is also a very good series on Radio 4 by Neil Wallis the journalist who covered the story, available on BBC iPlayer.
The story - and there is much more to come out, I expect - is an absolute scandal.
Who would be the Minister responsible for this scandal?
I would have said the people responsible were
(1) the software company who provide the crappy accounting program to Royal Mail (Fujitsu)
(2) the people running Royal Mail who ignored the evidence (the Chief Executive).
POL was a separate subsidiary - and eventually an entirely separate company - and it is hard to see that Royal Mail would have had much if anything to do with it.
Agreed -- but surely the software company have some blame here?
Ultimately -- if I understand right -- it was poor software that was the root cause.
So, surely there is a claim against Fujitsu, provider of IT solutions ?
For sure. A small unnoticed detail in Thursday's lengthy ministerial question slot on the scandal was the minister mentioning that files on a batch of people involved have been sent to the CPS for consideration of prosecution. I'd bet that includes some at the suppliers, who may not have been entirely honest with the PO.
Nevertheless it would appear from the evidence that the company from the top down was trying to cover its back rather than facing facts, and even people who didn't know should responsibly have been digging into the matter rather than simply assuming that hundreds of their long serving postmasters had suddenly turned into thieves.
I worked at Royal Mail HQ at the time, and, while I heard nothing specific about the losses scandal, it was common gossip within the company that Horizon had turned into an implementation mess, over budget, behind timescale, and beset with problems. As with many government IT projects.
Yep, from listening to the quite brilliant programmes on R4, it seems to me that the PO missed almost every opportunity to turn this around and do the right thing. They had a new Chief Executive come in who had clean hands and who instigated an external independent enquiry and then, just before it was about to produce a damning report on the scandal, they shut it down and released their own report saying everything was fine.
People died because of this. Many people had their lives ruined. If ever there was a case for a proper independent enquiry it is this.
The more than an hour of parliamentary questions on Thursday is well worth a listen (on parliament.tv). The minister was pressed from all sides for a judicial inquiry, but argued that a non-judicial independent review will be cheaper and quicker. A lot of MPs, including Tory ones, said that this will end up being judicially reviewed anyway, sooner or later, and the government may as well face that fact now.
The government also doesn't look good for having clearly been involved in lining up the departing CEO with plum new jobs, including one in the Cabinet Office (since terminated), and a number of MPs said that they now wanted her removed from the London NHS Trust.
She's a lay preacher or minister of religion isn't she? Or have I got the wrong one.
In The Ten Commandments (No 4) we are told to avoid "graven images". If you visit a synagogue or travel to Israel you will notice that there are no statues, and this is why. I believe the same applies to the Islamic world, although I am not an expert. In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
Quite right, and a strong tradition in Non-Conformist Churches too.
I'm sure Tim Farron's never been in trouble for interposing his personal religious beliefs in areas where people have no interest in nor need of them...
Given our cancel culture and once one has ever held a view the mob disagrees with, Tim is now banned.
In The Ten Commandments (No 4) we are told to avoid "graven images". If you visit a synagogue or travel to Israel you will notice that there are no statues, and this is why. I believe the same applies to the Islamic world, although I am not an expert. In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
Islam is the same, I believe. It's down to Allah to create man, not man. Or something like that!
If you think that the current events are an “orgy of cultural destruction” the Byzantines say hello -
Yay - idiotic vandals destroyed cultural treasures in the past, so it's fine to do so in the present. A brilliant argument indeed!
You really are not very bright are you? The point is some isolated incidents of minor vandalism are not an “orgy” of destruction. Seriously, you are so blinkered by your paranoid delusions of Marxist insurrection and determination to preserve your own comforting version of history you wouldn’t know an argument if it bit you in the arse.
Not very bright? I can't imagine the depths of benighted ignorance I'd have to plumb before I celebrated the destruction of cultural heritage the way you and other leftists do.
I don’t celebrate the destruction of cultural heritage neither am I a “leftist” (whatever that is) so multiple fails there then. As for ignorance, can you point to any cultural heritage hat has been destroyed? Because I can’t see any. If any cultural heritage actually had been destroyed you would have a point. The illegal removal (not destruction) and minor damage to a statute of no cultural importance whatsoever is not the destruction of cultural heritage. Graffiti is damage, not destruction. You are building straw men, and badly at that.
You’re fine with silencing people demonstrating racial prejudice by highlighting some minor examples of vandalism on one or two occasions and hysterically speaking as if your culture is being destroyed. It must be hard to be that fragile
You seem to think that redefining your terms in a manner that defies common English usage is enough to make your case, which it obviously is not. Let's suppose a mob of violent right-wingers had uprooted a statue of a culture that meets your approval, dragged it around cheering, and chucked it in the river. Let's suppose they had vandalized several others up and down the country, and planned to vandalize many more. Let's suppose their intentions were so clear that the most prominent public statues in the land had to be encased in metal to protect them from the mob.
Would you be totally minimizing their actions as 'minor damage' then?
No, of course you wouldn't. It must be hard to cope with that level of cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy, but you do so quite easily.
Amazing how fast we have got from tearing down statue of a slave trader to people seriously considering Churchill having to go because he is now considered as the BBC likes to say divisive.
"That almost certainly means there won’t be a deal."
I hold the opposite view.
Two things can be ruled out. (i) An extension. (ii) An overnight move from frictionless trade to WTO. The first being politically impossible (for Johnson) and the second being utter lunacy on every level and from every perspective.
Therefore there almost certainly WILL be a deal. And given the negotiating realities it will be largely on the EU's terms. So in the parlance of the Header, "Submission or No Deal" - the answer is Submission.
But Johnson (as he did with the Withdrawal Agreement) will brand it otherwise. Submission will once again become triumph. I predict the phrase "Flexible Future Divergence" - or perhaps "Dynamic Democratic Alignment" - will be much heard. I know! But that's what we have come to with all this "leaving the EU" nonsense.
Brexit. A great big sack of stupid, quite frankly. Total waste of time. Always was.
I think you're underestimating the will to avoid any form of rule-taking from the EU on pretty much anything except exports into the EU. Not only in No 10, but in the Tory party and country at large.
I think the need to avoid WTO trumps that. Ending FM is imo the one thing that Johnson must demonstrate occurs on 1st Jan 2021. The rest he can get away with fudging for now. And indeed forever, in my view, but certainly for now.
I think he probabaly knows that even with a majority of 80, there are insufficient votes on the back benches for a treaty that ties us to taking EU rules forever.
Right. So it will not be written that way. The wording will need to be finessed so Johnson can sell it. I visualize "Phased Future Divergence" with some target areas and perhaps even some new deadlines. In practice, an extension but not technically an extension. Sellable to his MPs imo so long as FM is ended. I can see Steve Baker and a few others not happy but it should pass OK.
I think this will be it. We will go and start talking trade deals with America and elsewhere. The EU will permit us a continuation of the status quo until any trade deal is implemented. We will negotiate deals. Which will take a number of years. The deal America will offer us is significantly inferior to the one they gave the EU because of our size and import post departure. So we will never implement the deals we go and negotiate because who swaps a good deal for a worse deal?
The *right* to do deals. All the while whilst loco UK is buffered to the front of the EU train. We do what they do. Whilst negotiating with potential replacement trains. But still choosing of our own free will to go down the same track they are on at the same speed.
IMO the government's principal failing has been focusing almost exclusively on one metric - avoiding the collapse of NHS hospitals along the lines they had just watched happen in Italy - doing everything they could to maintain hospital capacity (hence shoving patients back to care homes without tests, etc.) and not paying enough attention to the many other strands of what is a very complex interconnected web of challenges.
Stopping the collapse of the Health System is important, but at the cost of neglecting the patients? It seems to be like having a perfectly maintained bus that refuses to let any passengers on...
Meanwhile, under the radar but well worth a watch if you missed it, this week’s Panorama with the scandal of how a government owned organisation covered up its failings, leading to the suicide, bankruptcy and false imprisonment of entirely innocent people:
The government is currently under pressure from all sides to concede a judicial inquiry.
There is also a very good series on Radio 4 by Neil Wallis the journalist who covered the story, available on BBC iPlayer.
The story - and there is much more to come out, I expect - is an absolute scandal.
Who would be the Minister responsible for this scandal?
I would have said the people responsible were
(1) the software company who provide the crappy accounting program to Royal Mail (Fujitsu)
(2) the people running Royal Mail who ignored the evidence (the Chief Executive).
The Postal Affairs Minister and the Secretary of State for Business are ultimately responsible for the Post Office.
But there are lots of people responsible:
1. Those commissioning the new IT system and testing it 2. Those dealing with the complaints from sub-postmasters. 3. The internal investigators. 4. Those responsible for misleading sub-postmasters about how widespread the issues were. 5. Those making the decision to prosecute. 6. The internal lawyers responsible for how the litigation was conducted. 7. The Chief Executives and senior members of the management team. 8. The Chairman. 9. The Ministers who were ultimately responsible.
And doubtless plenty more. That’s why a thorough-going inquiry is needed.
Meanwhile, under the radar but well worth a watch if you missed it, this week’s Panorama with the scandal of how a government owned organisation covered up its failings, leading to the suicide, bankruptcy and false imprisonment of entirely innocent people:
The government is currently under pressure from all sides to concede a judicial inquiry.
There is also a very good series on Radio 4 by Neil Wallis the journalist who covered the story, available on BBC iPlayer.
The story - and there is much more to come out, I expect - is an absolute scandal.
Who would be the Minister responsible for this scandal?
I would have said the people responsible were
(1) the software company who provide the crappy accounting program to Royal Mail (Fujitsu)
(2) the people running Royal Mail who ignored the evidence (the Chief Executive).
POL was a separate subsidiary - and eventually an entirely separate company - and it is hard to see that Royal Mail would have had much if anything to do with it.
Agreed -- but surely the software company have some blame here?
Ultimately -- if I understand right -- it was poor software that was the root cause.
So, surely there is a claim against Fujitsu, provider of IT solutions ?
Bugs are inevitable in software. What's important is that you have a process and culture that can identify bugs and get them fixed. Then you have fewer bugs in the future (until you introduce new ones when modifying the code to add new functionality).
The failure was not accepting the possibility that there could be an error in the software. That is a management failure at the Post Office, unless there's evidence that they went to Fujitsu and received a reply saying the software was working perfectly.
And why would Fujitsu do that? Granted, if there is a bug you may have to fix it at your own expense, but failing to fix once you have been notified of it opens you up to professional liability claims. Besides, all programmers and software companies know there will be bugs, it is part of the profession as is hunting down bugs and eliminating them.
Personally I blame the whole "Agile" culture which seemed to degrade into a cost-saving mindset of "Slam out some code, if there are bugs the users will find them". I was interested to see that the creator of the Agile concept has since denounced it and declared it not fit for purpose.
Agile is based around ship something early so the users can start using it.
As you stated in your first paragraph bugs are unavoidable so you may as well get code out the door as your desires within the second paragraph (that code will be bug free) is impossible.
Oh and agile should be attached to something like test driven development. Where tests are attached to identified use cases for the software, with additional tests added as bugs identify new use cases.
Unless firms are complete cowboys (HMRC I'm looking at you here as well) agile should when done properly deliver a viable albeit incomplete system far quicker than waterfall.
I predict the phrase "Flexible Future Divergence" - or perhaps "Dynamic Democratic Alignment" - will be much heard. I know! But that's what we have come to with all this "leaving the EU" nonsense.
The adjective "Australian style" will be in there somewhere. That focus groups very well with the Stage 2 Hypertension crowd that constitutes leavers.
Yes, FM replaced with an "Australian style points system".
And on the trade deal, Canada + a fee + ECJ + LPF.
Which I make to be a Canada PLUS PLUS PLUS.
And people don't think "Muscles" can sell that? - C'mon. It sounds ruddy brilliant.
In The Ten Commandments (No 4) we are told to avoid "graven images". If you visit a synagogue or travel to Israel you will notice that there are no statues, and this is why. I believe the same applies to the Islamic world, although I am not an expert. In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
If of course you read a bit further, it says this in the Book of Deuteronomy (19:14):
Thou shalt not remove thy neighbour's landmark, which they of old time have set in thine inheritance, which thou shalt inherit in the land that the LORD thy God giveth thee to possess it.
Speaking as an epidemiologist - and also one of the brightest and best and so disproving your theory
First, you're expecting miracles. The information early on was poor, it's still not very good. Poor information leads to imprecise or plain wrong predictions. Take a good look at the imperial paper and exactly what was modeled. The detail is quite impressive, some of the assumptions were probably wrong, but not unreasonable at the time (even the conservative doubling time given they were showing a situation much worse than previously thought). The main problem we've had is bad data.
I think the problem is that other countries were working with bad data. And they did a much better job.
(And of course, scientists have evolved methodologies for dealing with lousy data -- I work with lousy data all the time).
The Imperial paper should be retracted. By April 1, Ferguson's model predicted 50 daily death. On April 1, there were 670 actual deaths. Ferguson's model was out by over an order of magnitude.
Even by March 25th, the actual deaths were 186, Ferguson's prediction was under 10. He was out by an order off magnitude even within a week of his model being published.
I am sorry for Ferguson. But he screwed up, & there was (it seems) no critical thinking of his model at SAGE. His reputation as the expert seems to have meant he was not seriously challenged.
I am very grateful that when I make mistakes, and they are buried in academic journals.
You do however need to appreciate that the imperial paper does not predict what is going to happen. It compares different levels of non pharmaceutical intervention under different (all quite conservative) assumptions. The point is that under these conservative assumptions it challenged the planned policy of action short of a lock down. It was valuable in doing that.
IMO the government's principal failing has been focusing almost exclusively on one metric - avoiding the collapse of NHS hospitals along the lines they had just watched happen in Italy - doing everything they could to maintain hospital capacity (hence shoving patients back to care homes without tests, etc.) and not paying enough attention to the many other strands of what is a very complex interconnected web of challenges.
so closing down from mid March would have been largely pointless (you might have flattened the peak a bit)
It's a point of the human condition that a small gain of say 0.01 seconds for the 100 metre world record would be celebrated the world over, yet taking a late action on flights on say March 12th that saves perhaps a thousand lives would be lost in the noise of pandemic statistics. I expect the thinking extends to Gov't spending where saving a million quid on a big project such as HS2 isn't even given a second's consideration if it means challenging some shiboleth in a key meeting..
"That almost certainly means there won’t be a deal."
I hold the opposite view.
Two things can be ruled out. (i) An extension. (ii) An overnight move from frictionless trade to WTO. The first being politically impossible (for Johnson) and the second being utter lunacy on every level and from every perspective.
Therefore there almost certainly WILL be a deal. And given the negotiating realities it will be largely on the EU's terms. So in the parlance of the Header, "Submission or No Deal" - the answer is Submission.
But Johnson (as he did with the Withdrawal Agreement) will brand it otherwise. Submission will once again become triumph. I predict the phrase "Flexible Future Divergence" - or perhaps "Dynamic Democratic Alignment" - will be much heard. I know! But that's what we have come to with all this "leaving the EU" nonsense.
Brexit. A great big sack of stupid, quite frankly. Total waste of time. Always was.
I think you're underestimating the will to avoid any form of rule-taking from the EU on pretty much anything except exports into the EU. Not only in No 10, but in the Tory party and country at large.
I think the need to avoid WTO trumps that. Ending FM is imo the one thing that Johnson must demonstrate occurs on 1st Jan 2021. The rest he can get away with fudging for now. And indeed forever, in my view, but certainly for now.
I think he probabaly knows that even with a majority of 80, there are insufficient votes on the back benches for a treaty that ties us to taking EU rules forever.
Right. So it will not be written that way. The wording will need to be finessed so Johnson can sell it. I visualize "Phased Future Divergence" with some target areas and perhaps even some new deadlines. In practice, an extension but not technically an extension. Sellable to his MPs imo so long as FM is ended. I can see Steve Baker and a few others not happy but it should pass OK.
I think this will be it. We will go and start talking trade deals with America and elsewhere. The EU will permit us a continuation of the status quo until any trade deal is implemented. We will negotiate deals. Which will take a number of years. The deal America will offer us is significantly inferior to the one they gave the EU because of our size and import post departure. So we will never implement the deals we go and negotiate because who swaps a good deal for a worse deal?
The *right* to do deals. All the while whilst loco UK is buffered to the front of the EU train. We do what they do. Whilst negotiating with potential replacement trains. But still choosing of our own free will to go down the same track they are on at the same speed.
Huzzah!
Yes. That is imo the most probable future. Which is not at all terrible, let's be fair, but oh gosh what an utter waste of time and energy and all the rest of it.
Meanwhile, under the radar but well worth a watch if you missed it, this week’s Panorama with the scandal of how a government owned organisation covered up its failings, leading to the suicide, bankruptcy and false imprisonment of entirely innocent people:
The government is currently under pressure from all sides to concede a judicial inquiry.
There is also a very good series on Radio 4 by Neil Wallis the journalist who covered the story, available on BBC iPlayer.
The story - and there is much more to come out, I expect - is an absolute scandal.
Who would be the Minister responsible for this scandal?
I would have said the people responsible were
(1) the software company who provide the crappy accounting program to Royal Mail (Fujitsu)
(2) the people running Royal Mail who ignored the evidence (the Chief Executive).
The Postal Affairs Minister and the Secretary of State for Business are ultimately responsible for the Post Office.
But there are lots of people responsible:
1. Those commissioning the new IT system and testing it 2. Those dealing with the complaints from sub-postmasters. 3. The internal investigators. 4. Those responsible for misleading sub-postmasters about how widespread the issues were. 5. Those making the decision to prosecute. 6. The internal lawyers responsible for how the litigation was conducted. 7. The Chief Executives and senior members of the management team. 8. The Chairman. 9. The Ministers who were ultimately responsible.
And doubtless plenty more. That’s why a thorough-going inquiry is needed.
I would, as before, suggest the Sub-Postmasters Union, around whom appears the stench of corruption. I also wonder about anyone who gave evidence in Court on oath that 'nothing like this had happened elsewhere'. If of course there some so ill-advised. That, surely, is perjury.
Speaking as an epidemiologist - and also one of the brightest and best and so disproving your theory
First, you're expecting miracles. The information early on was poor, it's still not very good. Poor information leads to imprecise or plain wrong predictions. Take a good look at the imperial paper and exactly what was modeled. The detail is quite impressive, some of the assumptions were probably wrong, but not unreasonable at the time (even the conservative doubling time given they were showing a situation much worse than previously thought). The main problem we've had is bad data.
I think the problem is that other countries were working with bad data. And they did a much better job.
(And of course, scientists have evolved methodologies for dealing with lousy data -- I work with lousy data all the time).
The Imperial paper should be retracted. By April 1, Ferguson's model predicted 50 daily death. On April 1, there were 670 actual deaths. Ferguson's model was out by over an order of magnitude.
Even by March 25th, the actual deaths were 186, Ferguson's prediction was under 10. He was out by an order off magnitude even within a week of his model being published.
I am sorry for Ferguson. But he screwed up, & there was (it seems) no critical thinking of his model at SAGE. His reputation as the expert seems to have meant he was not seriously challenged.
I am very grateful that when I make mistakes, and they are buried in academic journals.
You do however need to appreciate that the imperial paper does not predict what is going to happen. It compares different levels of non pharmaceutical intervention under different (all quite conservative) assumptions. The point is that under these conservative assumptions it challenged the planned policy of action short of a lock down. It was valuable in doing that.
You keep on saying "conservative assumptions ..."
Ferguson's paper of 16th March assumed the number of cases was increasing by a factor of 2.4 every 6.5 days. This is equivalent to doubling every 5 days. He based this on the Wuhan data.
The data from Italy and the UK showed that at the time, cases were doubling every two days.
Ferguson assumed the pandemic was spreading much more slowly than it actually was, and the peak would be later.
In The Ten Commandments (No 4) we are told to avoid "graven images". If you visit a synagogue or travel to Israel you will notice that there are no statues, and this is why. I believe the same applies to the Islamic world, although I am not an expert. In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
Islam is the same, I believe. It's down to Allah to create man, not man. Or something like that!
If you think that the current events are an “orgy of cultural destruction” the Byzantines say hello -
In The Ten Commandments (No 4) we are told to avoid "graven images". If you visit a synagogue or travel to Israel you will notice that there are no statues, and this is why. I believe the same applies to the Islamic world, although I am not an expert. In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
If of course you read a bit further, it says this in the Book of Deuteronomy (19:14):
Thou shalt not remove thy neighbour's landmark, which they of old time have set in thine inheritance, which thou shalt inherit in the land that the LORD thy God giveth thee to possess it.
If we are going down that route then we should be stoning adulterers and not wearing modern fabrics.
so closing down from mid March would have been largely pointless (you might have flattened the peak a bit)
It's a point of the human condition that a small gain of say 0.01 seconds for the 100 metre world record would be celebrated the world over, yet taking a late action on flights on say March 12th that saves perhaps a thousand lives would be lost in the noise of pandemic statistics.
No, I'm just saying it should have been done at least three weeks earlier and preferably (for the practical reason of not stranding people abroad) before half term. By the time the government was thinking about locking things down - Boris's work from home and start social distancing speech on 16 March - it was probably too late to implement anything effective. Certainly if it had been done from lockdown day it looks like it would have been ineffective. Returnees from Italy, France and Spain were being asked to self-isolate on arrival but I am not sure from what date or if that was in any way effective.
Meanwhile, under the radar but well worth a watch if you missed it, this week’s Panorama with the scandal of how a government owned organisation covered up its failings, leading to the suicide, bankruptcy and false imprisonment of entirely innocent people:
The government is currently under pressure from all sides to concede a judicial inquiry.
There is also a very good series on Radio 4 by Neil Wallis the journalist who covered the story, available on BBC iPlayer.
The story - and there is much more to come out, I expect - is an absolute scandal.
Who would be the Minister responsible for this scandal?
IIRC, from the Private Eye story, several were involved, mostly Conservatives, but one or two LibDems in the Coalition years. Another IIRC, Jo Swinson doesn't come out of it well. They all seem to have accepted the PO's Chief Exec/Chair's assurances without asking why the same thing was happening time and time again.
One of the most scandalous details is that postmasters up in front of the PO for apparently missing money were told they were the only person reporting such big losses, when they were happening all over the place. The managers concerned must have known they were hiding the truth at the time.
I am afraid this is quite normal. I am involved in a scandal that I won't go thru' here so as not to bore you all, that has been fought since 2012 regarding an event that occurred 24 years ago. The ministers rely on the information from the civil servants and they rely on what they have been told and nobody has time to look at the details and they don't want to open a can of worms. Inevitably that results in statements being made that are just twaddle.
I will give one example. A letter from a minister (and a FOI request revealed the exact wording came from a civil servant briefing) stated that the ombudsman found that x hadn't been negligent during y.
This statement was in fact true, although completely meaningless as the person the reply went to was not complaining about x or the event y, but a different organisation during a different event some 12 years earlier than the event y. So the reply was utter nonsense.
A reply pointed this out to the minister. The minister not only ignored the point being made, but repeated the same bizarre statement (it was obviously a template response)
An MP wrote to the minister pointing out the nonsense. The reply that came back was that the question had been answered!
The group I am involved in has had 8 years of this twaddle.
Just in case you think we may just be useless in what we are doing, this has involved barristers, 2 debates in parliament an attempted bill to rectify the situation (and probably a 2nd one soon) and several ombudsmen. It has cross party support. An ex minister told me they have not a clue what they are doing regarding this. It is not high profile so it is not in the media.
And another point worth noting as a reflection on the type of response someone involved in one of these scandals might get is their ability to defend themselves and complain. That shouldn't matter, but a barrister will do better than a Post Office worker.
In our case (and again without declaring the issue at hand) those impacted happen to be probably the most intelligent group of people you could identify. All have science phds and include a significant number of professors.
In the early days during a telephone conversation with the head of communications in a Govt Dept I was told 'we (the Govt) should have been more aware of the people we were responding to when sending out the initial letters'.
I had to bite my tongue as I was looking for support, but my thought was 'So it is ok to send out a crap letter to a dustman brushing him off then, but we deserve a more considered response because we are brighter than you'.
All people complaining should be treated equally. Or in fact it could be argued those less able to represent their argument coherently should be given more leeway in the understanding of the issue.
The thought should not be 'we can brush this lot off easily'.
I imagine with the PO issue that was the initial thought - Everything is fine, brush of the complaints, prosecute the crooks.
In The Ten Commandments (No 4) we are told to avoid "graven images". If you visit a synagogue or travel to Israel you will notice that there are no statues, and this is why. I believe the same applies to the Islamic world, although I am not an expert. In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
Islam is the same, I believe. It's down to Allah to create man, not man. Or something like that!
If you think that the current events are an “orgy of cultural destruction” the Byzantines say hello -
"That almost certainly means there won’t be a deal."
I hold the opposite view.
Two things can be ruled out. (i) An extension. (ii) An overnight move from frictionless trade to WTO. The first being politically impossible (for Johnson) and the second being utter lunacy on every level and from every perspective.
Therefore there almost certainly WILL be a deal. And given the negotiating realities it will be largely on the EU's terms. So in the parlance of the Header, "Submission or No Deal" - the answer is Submission.
But Johnson (as he did with the Withdrawal Agreement) will brand it otherwise. Submission will once again become triumph. I predict the phrase "Flexible Future Divergence" - or perhaps "Dynamic Democratic Alignment" - will be much heard. I know! But that's what we have come to with all this "leaving the EU" nonsense.
Brexit. A great big sack of stupid, quite frankly. Total waste of time. Always was.
I wouldn't rule out the second option, Boris and co are stupid enough to think it's wouldn't be a problem because we won't be enforcing checks on imports...
Don't get me wrong, if he thought it would work for him politically I would expect him to do it, lunacy or not. But imo it's just the immigration control he needs to satiate most Leavers (esp the Red Wallers). They would not thank him for the disruption and job losses arising from an overnight "frictionless to WTO"
So I think No Deal remains the red herring it has always been. It's just needed for the dialogue and the rhetoric. We will all play along - talk about it for a few more months as if it might happen and then it won't. You need the spectre of No Deal in the discourse in order to present the "Surrender Deal" when it comes as a triumph. You need 'relief' working its magic on your side at that moment.
A later extension is of course possible right up to the last minute, just as the earlier ones were. The artificially self imposed July deadline can simply be amended out of the law by rushing something quickly through parliament in December.
Yes. But that would surprise me. Far too prosaic and vanilla. It appears to be "do or die" and "dying in ditches" again. All so very juvenile and silly. But it works for his domestic Leaver audience, I guess.
In The Ten Commandments (No 4) we are told to avoid "graven images". If you visit a synagogue or travel to Israel you will notice that there are no statues, and this is why. I believe the same applies to the Islamic world, although I am not an expert. In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
If of course you read a bit further, it says this in the Book of Deuteronomy (19:14):
Thou shalt not remove thy neighbour's landmark, which they of old time have set in thine inheritance, which thou shalt inherit in the land that the LORD thy God giveth thee to possess it.
If we are going down that route then we should be stoning adulterers and not wearing modern fabrics.
WEll, the first is easy enough. Just legalise cannabis.
Meanwhile, under the radar but well worth a watch if you missed it, this week’s Panorama with the scandal of how a government owned organisation covered up its failings, leading to the suicide, bankruptcy and false imprisonment of entirely innocent people:
The government is currently under pressure from all sides to concede a judicial inquiry.
There is also a very good series on Radio 4 by Neil Wallis the journalist who covered the story, available on BBC iPlayer.
The story - and there is much more to come out, I expect - is an absolute scandal.
Who would be the Minister responsible for this scandal?
IIRC, from the Private Eye story, several were involved, mostly Conservatives, but one or two LibDems in the Coalition years. Another IIRC, Jo Swinson doesn't come out of it well. They all seem to have accepted the PO's Chief Exec/Chair's assurances without asking why the same thing was happening time and time again.
One of the most scandalous details is that postmasters up in front of the PO for apparently missing money were told they were the only person reporting such big losses, when they were happening all over the place. The managers concerned must have known they were hiding the truth at the time.
I am afraid this is quite normal. I am involved in a scandal that I won't go thru' here so as not to bore you all, that has been fought since 2012 regarding an event that occurred 24 years ago. The ministers rely on the information from the civil servants and they rely on what they have been told and nobody has time to look at the details and they don't want to open a can of worms. Inevitably that results in statements being made that are just twaddle.
I will give one example. A letter from a minister (and a FOI request revealed the exact wording came from a civil servant briefing) stated that the ombudsman found that x hadn't been negligent during y.
This statement was in fact true, although completely meaningless as the person the reply went to was not complaining about x or the event y, but a different organisation during a different event some 12 years earlier than the event y. So the reply was utter nonsense.
A reply pointed this out to the minister. The minister not only ignored the point being made, but repeated the same bizarre statement (it was obviously a template response)
An MP wrote to the minister pointing out the nonsense. The reply that came back was that the question had been answered!
The group I am involved in has had 8 years of this twaddle.
Just in case you think we may just be useless in what we are doing, this has involved barristers, 2 debates in parliament an attempted bill to rectify the situation (and probably a 2nd one soon) and several ombudsmen. It has cross party support. An ex minister told me they have not a clue what they are doing regarding this. It is not high profile so it is not in the media.
And another point worth noting as a reflection on the type of response someone involved in one of these scandals might get is their ability to defend themselves and complain. That shouldn't matter, but a barrister will do better than a Post Office worker.
In our case (and again without declaring the issue at hand) those impacted happen to be probably the most intelligent group of people you could identify. All have science phds and include a significant number of professors.
In the early days during a telephone conversation with the head of communications in a Govt Dept I was told 'we (the Govt) should have been more aware of the people we were responding to when sending out the initial letters'.
I had to bite my tongue as I was looking for support, but my thought was 'So it is ok to send out a crap letter to a dustman brushing him off then, but we deserve a more considered response because we are brighter than you'.
All people complaining should be treated equally. Or in fact it could be argued those less able to represent their argument coherently should be given more leeway in the understanding of the issue.
The thought should not be 'we can brush this lot off easily'.
I imagine with the PO issue that was the initial thought - Everything is fine, brush of the complaints, prosecute the crooks.
'I had to bite my tongue as I was looking for support, but my thought was 'So it is ok to send out a crap letter to a dustman brushing him off then, but we deserve a more considered response because we are brighter than you'.
All people complaining should be treated equally. Or in fact it could be argued those less able to represent their argument coherently should be given more leeway in the understanding of the issue.'
Doesn't this apply to the Windrush people? See the recent TV docudrama about Anthony Bryan.
Just been taking a delve in the detailed tables of the latest full-sample Scottish poll. The breaks are even more depressing for Unionists than the headline 52% pro-independence, 48% pro-subjugation.
The young are overwhelmingly pro-independence, especially younger women (under 35): 69% are pro-sovereignty.
Astonishingly, 40% of SLab voters (2019) are pro-independence. This confirms my theory that the Labour block is absolutely key to winning back our independence.
8% of Yes voters from 2014 have now changed their minds and would vote No today, but a whopping 20% of 2014 No voters have switched in the other direction.
60% want Scotland to re-join the European Union, and that is the baseline before the shit has hit the fan.
The fact that Nats can only get to 48% including Don't Knows, just 3% higher than 2014, despite Brexit is not depressing at all to Unionists. The only people who should be depressed with that are Nats.
Of course the government has also ruled out indyref2 for a generation anyway, respecting the 'once in a generation' 2014 vote
So, in May next year:
1. if Scots vote Conservative there will be no independence referendum 2. if Scots vote SNP there will be no independence referendum
So, what is the point of voting Conservative? According to you, there is not going to be an independence referendum irrespective of who voters choose to vote for. If you are correct, the Scottish Conservatives have lost the USP so assiduously built up by Ruth Davidson.
Sir Humphrey had a word for that: “brave”.
Also HYUFD is still (a) forgetting the Greens, and (b) arguing that English MPs should always override the democratic wishes of Scots as a fundamental principle.
In The Ten Commandments (No 4) we are told to avoid "graven images". If you visit a synagogue or travel to Israel you will notice that there are no statues, and this is why. I believe the same applies to the Islamic world, although I am not an expert. In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
Islam is the same, I believe. It's down to Allah to create man, not man. Or something like that!
If you think that the current events are an “orgy of cultural destruction” the Byzantines say hello -
Meanwhile, under the radar but well worth a watch if you missed it, this week’s Panorama with the scandal of how a government owned organisation covered up its failings, leading to the suicide, bankruptcy and false imprisonment of entirely innocent people:
The government is currently under pressure from all sides to concede a judicial inquiry.
There is also a very good series on Radio 4 by Neil Wallis the journalist who covered the story, available on BBC iPlayer.
The story - and there is much more to come out, I expect - is an absolute scandal.
Who would be the Minister responsible for this scandal?
I would have said the people responsible were
(1) the software company who provide the crappy accounting program to Royal Mail (Fujitsu)
(2) the people running Royal Mail who ignored the evidence (the Chief Executive).
POL was a separate subsidiary - and eventually an entirely separate company - and it is hard to see that Royal Mail would have had much if anything to do with it.
Agreed -- but surely the software company have some blame here?
Ultimately -- if I understand right -- it was poor software that was the root cause.
So, surely there is a claim against Fujitsu, provider of IT solutions ?
Bugs are inevitable in software. What's important is that you have a process and culture that can identify bugs and get them fixed. Then you have fewer bugs in the future (until you introduce new ones when modifying the code to add new functionality).
The failure was not accepting the possibility that there could be an error in the software. That is a management failure at the Post Office, unless there's evidence that they went to Fujitsu and received a reply saying the software was working perfectly.
And why would Fujitsu do that? Granted, if there is a bug you may have to fix it at your own expense, but failing to fix once you have been notified of it opens you up to professional liability claims. Besides, all programmers and software companies know there will be bugs, it is part of the profession as is hunting down bugs and eliminating them.
Personally I blame the whole "Agile" culture which seemed to degrade into a cost-saving mindset of "Slam out some code, if there are bugs the users will find them". I was interested to see that the creator of the Agile concept has since denounced it and declared it not fit for purpose.
Agile is based around ship something early so the users can start using it.
As you stated in your first paragraph bugs are unavoidable so you may as well get code out the door as your desires within the second paragraph (that code will be bug free) is impossible.
Oh and agile should be attached to something like test driven development. Where tests are attached to identified use cases for the software, with additional tests added as bugs identify new use cases.
Unless firms are complete cowboys (HMRC I'm looking at you here as well) agile should when done properly deliver a viable albeit incomplete system far quicker than waterfall.
I know what Agile is supposed to do. I also know that the bean counters looked at the cost of Agile compared to Waterfall and then ran with the ball, so to speak, morphing a development process into a delivery mechanism.
If you strip away all the faddy b*ll*cks then the simplest, most effective software development process is small focused systems developed with the users the whole way through the process and then communicating with other systems through effective APIs
In The Ten Commandments (No 4) we are told to avoid "graven images". If you visit a synagogue or travel to Israel you will notice that there are no statues, and this is why. I believe the same applies to the Islamic world, although I am not an expert. In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
Islam is the same, I believe. It's down to Allah to create man, not man. Or something like that!
If you think that the current events are an “orgy of cultural destruction” the Byzantines say hello -
I predict the phrase "Flexible Future Divergence" - or perhaps "Dynamic Democratic Alignment" - will be much heard. I know! But that's what we have come to with all this "leaving the EU" nonsense.
The adjective "Australian style" will be in there somewhere. That focus groups very well with the Stage 2 Hypertension crowd that constitutes leavers.
Yes, FM replaced with an "Australian style points system".
And on the trade deal, Canada + a fee + ECJ + LPF.
Which I make to be a Canada PLUS PLUS PLUS.
And people don't think "Muscles" can sell that? - C'mon. It sounds ruddy brilliant.
Rightly or wrongly if it has the ECJ involved he will not be able to sell it.
Meanwhile, under the radar but well worth a watch if you missed it, this week’s Panorama with the scandal of how a government owned organisation covered up its failings, leading to the suicide, bankruptcy and false imprisonment of entirely innocent people:
The government is currently under pressure from all sides to concede a judicial inquiry.
There is also a very good series on Radio 4 by Neil Wallis the journalist who covered the story, available on BBC iPlayer.
The story - and there is much more to come out, I expect - is an absolute scandal.
Who would be the Minister responsible for this scandal?
I would have said the people responsible were
(1) the software company who provide the crappy accounting program to Royal Mail (Fujitsu)
(2) the people running Royal Mail who ignored the evidence (the Chief Executive).
The Postal Affairs Minister and the Secretary of State for Business are ultimately responsible for the Post Office.
But there are lots of people responsible:
1. Those commissioning the new IT system and testing it 2. Those dealing with the complaints from sub-postmasters. 3. The internal investigators. 4. Those responsible for misleading sub-postmasters about how widespread the issues were. 5. Those making the decision to prosecute. 6. The internal lawyers responsible for how the litigation was conducted. 7. The Chief Executives and senior members of the management team. 8. The Chairman. 9. The Ministers who were ultimately responsible.
And doubtless plenty more. That’s why a thorough-going inquiry is needed.
I hope they use PB to recruit the enquiry head, there might be an obvious candidate with extensive experience in getting to the bottom of dodgy numbers.
First the Trump team indicate that he will make a "unity speech" this week, to take the form of an "address to the nation".
Then they say he will deliver the unity speech at the end of next week, 19 June, at a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
(The location of the rally had already been changed because Democratic administrators considered it to be a major health risk.)
Then they say all who attend the Tulsa rally must agree not to sue in the event that they catch Covid-19 there.
Now they say they've postponed the rally for a day out of respect for the celebration of the liberation from slavery that is usually held on 19 June, "Juneteenth".
In The Ten Commandments (No 4) we are told to avoid "graven images". If you visit a synagogue or travel to Israel you will notice that there are no statues, and this is why. I believe the same applies to the Islamic world, although I am not an expert. In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
If of course you read a bit further, it says this in the Book of Deuteronomy (19:14):
Thou shalt not remove thy neighbour's landmark, which they of old time have set in thine inheritance, which thou shalt inherit in the land that the LORD thy God giveth thee to possess it.
If we are going down that route then we should be stoning adulterers and not wearing modern fabrics.
WEll, the first is easy enough. Just legalise cannabis.
Karl Pearson was a socialist. He declined an OBE. He was a prominent free-thinker. He supported the suffragettes. He admired Karl Marx.
He was a famous applied statistician at University College, London.
He was a eugenicist (as were many early twentieth century socialists).
So, he is joining statisticians Galton and Fisher on the naughty step.
The Pearson Building at UCL is being renamed.
Some would say your first paragraph contains enough reasons for the renaming...
But you are right: eugenics was an idea of its time and retrospectively condemning people for not anticipating how far a bunch of nutters in Germany would take the idea is as sensible as condemning him for not anticipating what others would do in the name of Marxism.
I think that lets people off too easily. Eugenics is not a bad idea simply because the Nazis took it too far. It was a bad idea long before then because it was based on the idea that humans had no intrinsic value qua humans but only to the extent of their usefulness, intelligence etc. In short it saw humans as a means to an end rather than as an end in themselves. It denied people their essential humanity but simply saw them as an animal to be bred. It was not, at heart, faulty science but faulty morality. Eugenics was a moral failing and that moral failing was there - for those with eyes to see - long before the Nazis did their grisly work.
I don't disagree.
Surprising though it seems now, eugenics was thought to be a progressive movement at the time. It was the movement of the woke for the early twentieth century.
Other prominent eugenicists are ... Darwin, many famous Liberal & Labour MPs from the late nineteenth century/early twentieth century, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Harold Laski, John Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf, TS Eliot, DH Lawrence, Julian Huxley, Marie Stopes, George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells and William Beveridge.
My only point is that -- if we are renaming buildings because they carry the name of an eugenicist -- there is an awful lot of renaming to be done.
It's a fashion thing. Eugenics is out of fashion at the moment.
Meanwhile, under the radar but well worth a watch if you missed it, this week’s Panorama with the scandal of how a government owned organisation covered up its failings, leading to the suicide, bankruptcy and false imprisonment of entirely innocent people:
The government is currently under pressure from all sides to concede a judicial inquiry.
There is also a very good series on Radio 4 by Neil Wallis the journalist who covered the story, available on BBC iPlayer.
The story - and there is much more to come out, I expect - is an absolute scandal.
Who would be the Minister responsible for this scandal?
IIRC, from the Private Eye story, several were involved, mostly Conservatives, but one or two LibDems in the Coalition years. Another IIRC, Jo Swinson doesn't come out of it well. They all seem to have accepted the PO's Chief Exec/Chair's assurances without asking why the same thing was happening time and time again.
One of the most scandalous details is that postmasters up in front of the PO for apparently missing money were told they were the only person reporting such big losses, when they were happening all over the place. The managers concerned must have known they were hiding the truth at the time.
I am afraid this is quite normal. I am involved in a scandal that I won't go thru' here so as not to bore you all, that has been fought since 2012 regarding an event that occurred 24 years ago. The ministers rely on the information from the civil servants and they rely on what they have been told and nobody has time to look at the details and they don't want to open a can of worms. Inevitably that results in statements being made that are just twaddle.
I will give one example. A letter from a minister (and a FOI request revealed the exact wording came from a civil servant briefing) stated that the ombudsman found that x hadn't been negligent during y.
This statement was in fact true, although completely meaningless as the person the reply went to was not complaining about x or the event y, but a different organisation during a different event some 12 years earlier than the event y. So the reply was utter nonsense.
A reply pointed this out to the minister. The minister not only ignored the point being made, but repeated the same bizarre statement (it was obviously a template response)
An MP wrote to the minister pointing out the nonsense. The reply that came back was that the question had been answered!
The group I am involved in has had 8 years of this twaddle.
Just in case you think we may just be useless in what we are doing, this has involved barristers, 2 debates in parliament an attempted bill to rectify the situation (and probably a 2nd one soon) and several ombudsmen. It has cross party support. An ex minister told me they have not a clue what they are doing regarding this. It is not high profile so it is not in the media.
And another point worth noting as a reflection on the type of response someone involved in one of these scandals might get is their ability to defend themselves and complain. That shouldn't matter, but a barrister will do better than a Post Office worker.
In our case (and again without declaring the issue at hand) those impacted happen to be probably the most intelligent group of people you could identify. All have science phds and include a significant number of professors.
In the early days during a telephone conversation with the head of communications in a Govt Dept I was told 'we (the Govt) should have been more aware of the people we were responding to when sending out the initial letters'.
I had to bite my tongue as I was looking for support, but my thought was 'So it is ok to send out a crap letter to a dustman brushing him off then, but we deserve a more considered response because we are brighter than you'.
All people complaining should be treated equally. Or in fact it could be argued those less able to represent their argument coherently should be given more leeway in the understanding of the issue.
The thought should not be 'we can brush this lot off easily'.
I imagine with the PO issue that was the initial thought - Everything is fine, brush of the complaints, prosecute the crooks.
'I had to bite my tongue as I was looking for support, but my thought was 'So it is ok to send out a crap letter to a dustman brushing him off then, but we deserve a more considered response because we are brighter than you'.
All people complaining should be treated equally. Or in fact it could be argued those less able to represent their argument coherently should be given more leeway in the understanding of the issue.'
Doesn't this apply to the Windrush people? See the recent TV docudrama about Anthony Bryan.
Absolutely.
I was so angry when I heard it. It was a throw away comment. I don't think he had a clue as to the consequences of what he was saying.
He was the head of communications of one of our major Govt Depts!
Meanwhile, under the radar but well worth a watch if you missed it, this week’s Panorama with the scandal of how a government owned organisation covered up its failings, leading to the suicide, bankruptcy and false imprisonment of entirely innocent people:
The government is currently under pressure from all sides to concede a judicial inquiry.
There is also a very good series on Radio 4 by Neil Wallis the journalist who covered the story, available on BBC iPlayer.
The story - and there is much more to come out, I expect - is an absolute scandal.
Who would be the Minister responsible for this scandal?
I would have said the people responsible were
(1) the software company who provide the crappy accounting program to Royal Mail (Fujitsu)
(2) the people running Royal Mail who ignored the evidence (the Chief Executive).
POL was a separate subsidiary - and eventually an entirely separate company - and it is hard to see that Royal Mail would have had much if anything to do with it.
Agreed -- but surely the software company have some blame here?
Ultimately -- if I understand right -- it was poor software that was the root cause.
So, surely there is a claim against Fujitsu, provider of IT solutions ?
Bugs are inevitable in software. What's important is that you have a process and culture that can identify bugs and get them fixed. Then you have fewer bugs in the future (until you introduce new ones when modifying the code to add new functionality).
The failure was not accepting the possibility that there could be an error in the software. That is a management failure at the Post Office, unless there's evidence that they went to Fujitsu and received a reply saying the software was working perfectly.
And why would Fujitsu do that? Granted, if there is a bug you may have to fix it at your own expense, but failing to fix once you have been notified of it opens you up to professional liability claims. Besides, all programmers and software companies know there will be bugs, it is part of the profession as is hunting down bugs and eliminating them.
Personally I blame the whole "Agile" culture which seemed to degrade into a cost-saving mindset of "Slam out some code, if there are bugs the users will find them". I was interested to see that the creator of the Agile concept has since denounced it and declared it not fit for purpose.
Agile is based around ship something early so the users can start using it.
As you stated in your first paragraph bugs are unavoidable so you may as well get code out the door as your desires within the second paragraph (that code will be bug free) is impossible.
Oh and agile should be attached to something like test driven development. Where tests are attached to identified use cases for the software, with additional tests added as bugs identify new use cases.
Unless firms are complete cowboys (HMRC I'm looking at you here as well) agile should when done properly deliver a viable albeit incomplete system far quicker than waterfall.
Yes but in practice it means that QA departments have been significantly downsized, documentation and version control goes out the window, and the product is never actually finished!
Amazing how fast we have got from tearing down statue of a slave trader to people seriously considering Churchill having to go because he is now considered as the BBC likes to say divisive.
Still, we apparently have the prospect of Combat 18 and the BNP patrolling the streets this afternoon to prevent attacks from lefty scum on the grey metal box that saved us from the Nazis, which is nice.
I predict the phrase "Flexible Future Divergence" - or perhaps "Dynamic Democratic Alignment" - will be much heard. I know! But that's what we have come to with all this "leaving the EU" nonsense.
The adjective "Australian style" will be in there somewhere. That focus groups very well with the Stage 2 Hypertension crowd that constitutes leavers.
Yes, FM replaced with an "Australian style points system".
And on the trade deal, Canada + a fee + ECJ + LPF.
Which I make to be a Canada PLUS PLUS PLUS.
And people don't think "Muscles" can sell that? - C'mon. It sounds ruddy brilliant.
Rightly or wrongly if it has the ECJ involved he will not be able to sell it.
If this is the case some creativity will be needed. I'm sure they will come up with something that squares the circle. I will be utterly amazed if "WTO" happens. I wish there was a Betfair market on it. I'd lay at anything up to 5 and would need 10 to back.
First the Trump team indicate that he will make a "unity speech" this week, to take the form of an "address to the nation".
Then they say he will deliver the unity speech at the end of next week, 19 June, at a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
(The location of the rally had already been changed because Democratic administrators considered it to be a major health risk.)
Then they say all who attend the Tulsa rally must agree not to sue in the event that they catch Covid-19 there.
Now they say they've postponed the rally for a day out of respect for the celebration of the liberation from slavery that is usually held on 19 June, "Juneteenth".
"That almost certainly means there won’t be a deal."
I hold the opposite view.
Two things can be ruled out. (i) An extension. (ii) An overnight move from frictionless trade to WTO. The first being politically impossible (for Johnson) and the second being utter lunacy on every level and from every perspective.
Therefore there almost certainly WILL be a deal. And given the negotiating realities it will be largely on the EU's terms. So in the parlance of the Header, "Submission or No Deal" - the answer is Submission.
But Johnson (as he did with the Withdrawal Agreement) will brand it otherwise. Submission will once again become triumph. I predict the phrase "Flexible Future Divergence" - or perhaps "Dynamic Democratic Alignment" - will be much heard. I know! But that's what we have come to with all this "leaving the EU" nonsense.
Brexit. A great big sack of stupid, quite frankly. Total waste of time. Always was.
I think you're underestimating the will to avoid any form of rule-taking from the EU on pretty much anything except exports into the EU. Not only in No 10, but in the Tory party and country at large.
I think the need to avoid WTO trumps that. Ending FM is imo the one thing that Johnson must demonstrate occurs on 1st Jan 2021. The rest he can get away with fudging for now. And indeed forever, in my view, but certainly for now.
I think he probabaly knows that even with a majority of 80, there are insufficient votes on the back benches for a treaty that ties us to taking EU rules forever.
Right. So it will not be written that way. The wording will need to be finessed so Johnson can sell it. I visualize "Phased Future Divergence" with some target areas and perhaps even some new deadlines. In practice, an extension but not technically an extension. Sellable to his MPs imo so long as FM is ended. I can see Steve Baker and a few others not happy but it should pass OK.
I think this will be it. We will go and start talking trade deals with America and elsewhere. The EU will permit us a continuation of the status quo until any trade deal is implemented. We will negotiate deals. Which will take a number of years. The deal America will offer us is significantly inferior to the one they gave the EU because of our size and import post departure. So we will never implement the deals we go and negotiate because who swaps a good deal for a worse deal?
The *right* to do deals. All the while whilst loco UK is buffered to the front of the EU train. We do what they do. Whilst negotiating with potential replacement trains. But still choosing of our own free will to go down the same track they are on at the same speed.
Huzzah!
Yes. That is imo the most probable future. Which is not at all terrible, let's be fair, but oh gosh what an utter waste of time and energy and all the rest of it.
Sort of like how Boris's triumph with the Withdrawal Agreement was an Ulster Veto which was set up so it could be used, but never would?
Speaking as an epidemiologist - and also one of the brightest and best and so disproving your theory
First, you're expecting miracles. The information early on was poor, it's still not very good. Poor information leads to imprecise or plain wrong predictions. Take a good look at the imperial paper and exactly what was modeled. The detail is quite impressive, some of the assumptions were probably wrong, but not unreasonable at the time (even the conservative doubling time given they were showing a situation much worse than previously thought). The main problem we've had is bad data.
I think the problem is that other countries were working with bad data. And they did a much better job.
(And of course, scientists have evolved methodologies for dealing with lousy data -- I work with lousy data all the time).
The Imperial paper should be retracted. By April 1, Ferguson's model predicted 50 daily death. On April 1, there were 670 actual deaths. Ferguson's model was out by over an order of magnitude.
Even by March 25th, the actual deaths were 186, Ferguson's prediction was under 10. He was out by an order off magnitude even within a week of his model being published.
I am sorry for Ferguson. But he screwed up, & there was (it seems) no critical thinking of his model at SAGE. His reputation as the expert seems to have meant he was not seriously challenged.
I am very grateful that when I make mistakes, and they are buried in academic journals.
You do however need to appreciate that the imperial paper does not predict what is going to happen. It compares different levels of non pharmaceutical intervention under different (all quite conservative) assumptions. The point is that under these conservative assumptions it challenged the planned policy of action short of a lock down. It was valuable in doing that.
IMO the government's principal failing has been focusing almost exclusively on one metric - avoiding the collapse of NHS hospitals along the lines they had just watched happen in Italy - doing everything they could to maintain hospital capacity (hence shoving patients back to care homes without tests, etc.) and not paying enough attention to the many other strands of what is a very complex interconnected web of challenges.
It is interesting - and unfortunate - that Brent, one of the councils that put in place the very best system for protecting care homes and which should serve as a model for other councils, is also the council with the highest incidence of Covid in the country. It is perhaps a sign that, no mater what you do or who well you do it, sometimes things are just out of your hands. Brent deserves great credit for its actions but it is not really reflected in the bare statistics.
Amazing how fast we have got from tearing down statue of a slave trader to people seriously considering Churchill having to go because he is now considered as the BBC likes to say divisive.
Still, we apparently have the prospect of Combat 18 and the BNP patrolling the streets this afternoon to prevent attacks from lefty scum on the grey metal box that saved us from the Nazis, which is nice.
Yes but in practice it means that QA departments have been significantly downsized, documentation and version control goes out the window, and the product is never actually finished!
I did say viable albeit incomplete. As we all know once the first solution is delivered chances are the developers will be shunted to the next project rather than finishing the current one.
so closing down from mid March would have been largely pointless (you might have flattened the peak a bit)
It's a point of the human condition that a small gain of say 0.01 seconds for the 100 metre world record would be celebrated the world over, yet taking a late action on flights on say March 12th that saves perhaps a thousand lives would be lost in the noise of pandemic statistics. I expect the thinking extends to Gov't spending where saving a million quid on a big project such as HS2 isn't even given a second's consideration if it means challenging some shiboleth in a key meeting..
Usain Bolt’s 9.58 100m is one of the most astonishing human performances of all time, and his Berlin 2009 mark is still more than 1% faster than any other athlete has ever achieved, more than a decade later. http://www.alltime-athletics.com/m_100ok.htm He even eased off and looked at the clock as he crossed the line! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ol9fiOAditk
Amazing how fast we have got from tearing down statue of a slave trader to people seriously considering Churchill having to go because he is now considered as the BBC likes to say divisive.
Still, we apparently have the prospect of Combat 18 and the BNP patrolling the streets this afternoon to prevent attacks from lefty scum on the grey metal box that saved us from the Nazis, which is nice.
Meanwhile, under the radar but well worth a watch if you missed it, this week’s Panorama with the scandal of how a government owned organisation covered up its failings, leading to the suicide, bankruptcy and false imprisonment of entirely innocent people:
The government is currently under pressure from all sides to concede a judicial inquiry.
There is also a very good series on Radio 4 by Neil Wallis the journalist who covered the story, available on BBC iPlayer.
The story - and there is much more to come out, I expect - is an absolute scandal.
Who would be the Minister responsible for this scandal?
I would have said the people responsible were
(1) the software company who provide the crappy accounting program to Royal Mail (Fujitsu)
(2) the people running Royal Mail who ignored the evidence (the Chief Executive).
POL was a separate subsidiary - and eventually an entirely separate company - and it is hard to see that Royal Mail would have had much if anything to do with it.
Agreed -- but surely the software company have some blame here?
Ultimately -- if I understand right -- it was poor software that was the root cause.
So, surely there is a claim against Fujitsu, provider of IT solutions ?
For sure. A small unnoticed detail in Thursday's lengthy ministerial question slot on the scandal was the minister mentioning that files on a batch of people involved have been sent to the CPS for consideration of prosecution. I'd bet that includes some at the suppliers, who may not have been entirely honest with the PO.
Nevertheless it would appear from the evidence that the company from the top down was trying to cover its back rather than facing facts, and even people who didn't know should responsibly have been digging into the matter rather than simply assuming that hundreds of their long serving postmasters had suddenly turned into thieves.
I worked at Royal Mail HQ at the time, and, while I heard nothing specific about the losses scandal, it was common gossip within the company that Horizon had turned into an implementation mess, over budget, behind timescale, and beset with problems. As with many government IT projects.
Yep, from listening to the quite brilliant programmes on R4, it seems to me that the PO missed almost every opportunity to turn this around and do the right thing. They had a new Chief Executive come in who had clean hands and who instigated an external independent enquiry and then, just before it was about to produce a damning report on the scandal, they shut it down and released their own report saying everything was fine.
People died because of this. Many people had their lives ruined. If ever there was a case for a proper independent enquiry it is this.
The more than an hour of parliamentary questions on Thursday is well worth a listen (on parliament.tv). The minister was pressed from all sides for a judicial inquiry, but argued that a non-judicial independent review will be cheaper and quicker. A lot of MPs, including Tory ones, said that this will end up being judicially reviewed anyway, sooner or later, and the government may as well face that fact now.
The government also doesn't look good for having clearly been involved in lining up the departing CEO with plum new jobs, including one in the Cabinet Office (since terminated), and a number of MPs said that they now wanted her removed from the London NHS Trust.
She's a lay preacher or minister of religion isn't she? Or have I got the wrong one.
Correct.
But there is no connection between religiosity and virtue. Just look at America
Karl Pearson was a socialist. He declined an OBE. He was a prominent free-thinker. He supported the suffragettes. He admired Karl Marx.
He was a famous applied statistician at University College, London.
He was a eugenicist (as were many early twentieth century socialists).
So, he is joining statisticians Galton and Fisher on the naughty step.
The Pearson Building at UCL is being renamed.
Some would say your first paragraph contains enough reasons for the renaming...
But you are right: eugenics was an idea of its time and retrospectively condemning people for not anticipating how far a bunch of nutters in Germany would take the idea is as sensible as condemning him for not anticipating what others would do in the name of Marxism.
I think that lets people off too easily. Eugenics is not a bad idea simply because the Nazis took it too far. It was a bad idea long before then because it was based on the idea that humans had no intrinsic value qua humans but only to the extent of their usefulness, intelligence etc. In short it saw humans as a means to an end rather than as an end in themselves. It denied people their essential humanity but simply saw them as an animal to be bred. It was not, at heart, faulty science but faulty morality. Eugenics was a moral failing and that moral failing was there - for those with eyes to see - long before the Nazis did their grisly work.
I don't disagree.
Surprising though it seems now, eugenics was thought to be a progressive movement at the time. It was the movement of the woke for the early twentieth century.
Other prominent eugenicists are ... Darwin, many famous Liberal & Labour MPs from the late nineteenth century/early twentieth century, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Harold Laski, John Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf, TS Eliot, DH Lawrence, Julian Huxley, Marie Stopes, George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells and William Beveridge.
My only point is that -- if we are renaming buildings because they carry the name of an eugenicist -- there is an awful lot of renaming to be done.
It's a fashion thing. Eugenics is out of fashion at the moment.
Yet there were still over 200,000 abortions in the U.K. last year...
Karl Pearson was a socialist. He declined an OBE. He was a prominent free-thinker. He supported the suffragettes. He admired Karl Marx.
He was a famous applied statistician at University College, London.
He was a eugenicist (as were many early twentieth century socialists).
So, he is joining statisticians Galton and Fisher on the naughty step.
The Pearson Building at UCL is being renamed.
Some would say your first paragraph contains enough reasons for the renaming...
But you are right: eugenics was an idea of its time and retrospectively condemning people for not anticipating how far a bunch of nutters in Germany would take the idea is as sensible as condemning him for not anticipating what others would do in the name of Marxism.
I think that lets people off too easily. Eugenics is not a bad idea simply because the Nazis took it too far. It was a bad idea long before then because it was based on the idea that humans had no intrinsic value qua humans but only to the extent of their usefulness, intelligence etc. In short it saw humans as a means to an end rather than as an end in themselves. It denied people their essential humanity but simply saw them as an animal to be bred. It was not, at heart, faulty science but faulty morality. Eugenics was a moral failing and that moral failing was there - for those with eyes to see - long before the Nazis did their grisly work.
I don't disagree.
Surprising though it seems now, eugenics was thought to be a progressive movement at the time. It was the movement of the woke for the early twentieth century.
Other prominent eugenicists are ... Darwin, many famous Liberal & Labour MPs from the late nineteenth century/early twentieth century, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Harold Laski, John Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf, TS Eliot, DH Lawrence, Julian Huxley, Marie Stopes, George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells and William Beveridge.
My only point is that -- if we are renaming buildings because they carry the name of an eugenicist -- there is an awful lot of renaming to be done.
It's a fashion thing. Eugenics is out of fashion at the moment.
Also because the understanding of multifactorial genetics and the interaction of genes and the environment has greatly improved. Ditto the sociology of education and attainment.
What strikes me is that genetics badly lagged behind evolutionary thought and until the C20 the environment was often seen as directly impacting on actual heredity so that acquired characteristics became fixed (an example of this thing being Lamarckism). Darwin had terrible trouble with this sort of question.
So 'eugenics' would not mean what it does today. It could include an entirely laudable effort to improve genes by improving the environment, never mind breeding selection. B-P for instance would have thought that he was improving the British race right then by marching slum boys up hill and down dale in the Boy Scouts. Was he therefore an eugenist? Did he also think he was improving the race permanently in its genetics? I don't know. It wouldk be interesting to hear from any PBer who has specialist knowledge of this issue in the history of eugenics.
Of course, you and I are familiar with the effect of parental environment and upbringing on their later children which is in a sense inherited if only through 1-2 generations. But sucvh a thing woiuld also have been very visible in the slums - malnutritiion, foetal alcohol syndrome, syphilis, etc. etc., and easily confounded with more specifically DNA-coded inheritance. So that may also have had a bearing on eugenic thought.
However, the story is further complicated by the fact that modern genetics developed during the early 20th century by the genetics and evolutionary thinkers such as Fisher and J. Huxley. And as finally confirmed by the Central Dogma of Watson and Crick that DNA codes fpr proteins. And some of those early C20 thinkers (not W&C) were eugeniicsts at least by common repute.
Karl Pearson was a socialist. He declined an OBE. He was a prominent free-thinker. He supported the suffragettes. He admired Karl Marx.
He was a famous applied statistician at University College, London.
He was a eugenicist (as were many early twentieth century socialists).
So, he is joining statisticians Galton and Fisher on the naughty step.
The Pearson Building at UCL is being renamed.
Some would say your first paragraph contains enough reasons for the renaming...
But you are right: eugenics was an idea of its time and retrospectively condemning people for not anticipating how far a bunch of nutters in Germany would take the idea is as sensible as condemning him for not anticipating what others would do in the name of Marxism.
I think that lets people off too easily. Eugenics is not a bad idea simply because the Nazis took it too far. It was a bad idea long before then because it was based on the idea that humans had no intrinsic value qua humans but only to the extent of their usefulness, intelligence etc. In short it saw humans as a means to an end rather than as an end in themselves. It denied people their essential humanity but simply saw them as an animal to be bred. It was not, at heart, faulty science but faulty morality. Eugenics was a moral failing and that moral failing was there - for those with eyes to see - long before the Nazis did their grisly work.
I don't disagree.
Surprising though it seems now, eugenics was thought to be a progressive movement at the time. It was the movement of the woke for the early twentieth century.
Other prominent eugenicists are ... Darwin, many famous Liberal & Labour MPs from the late nineteenth century/early twentieth century, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Harold Laski, John Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf, TS Eliot, DH Lawrence, Julian Huxley, Marie Stopes, George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells and William Beveridge.
My only point is that -- if we are renaming buildings because they carry the name of an eugenicist -- there is an awful lot of renaming to be done.
It's a fashion thing. Eugenics is out of fashion at the moment.
Yet there were still over 200,000 abortions in the U.K. last year...
"That almost certainly means there won’t be a deal."
I hold the opposite view.
Two things can be ruled out. (i) An extension. (ii) An overnight move from frictionless trade to WTO. The first being politically impossible (for Johnson) and the second being utter lunacy on every level and from every perspective.
Therefore there almost certainly WILL be a deal. And given the negotiating realities it will be largely on the EU's terms. So in the parlance of the Header, "Submission or No Deal" - the answer is Submission.
But Johnson (as he did with the Withdrawal Agreement) will brand it otherwise. Submission will once again become triumph. I predict the phrase "Flexible Future Divergence" - or perhaps "Dynamic Democratic Alignment" - will be much heard. I know! But that's what we have come to with all this "leaving the EU" nonsense.
Brexit. A great big sack of stupid, quite frankly. Total waste of time. Always was.
I think you're underestimating the will to avoid any form of rule-taking from the EU on pretty much anything except exports into the EU. Not only in No 10, but in the Tory party and country at large.
I think the need to avoid WTO trumps that. Ending FM is imo the one thing that Johnson must demonstrate occurs on 1st Jan 2021. The rest he can get away with fudging for now. And indeed forever, in my view, but certainly for now.
I think he probabaly knows that even with a majority of 80, there are insufficient votes on the back benches for a treaty that ties us to taking EU rules forever.
Right. So it will not be written that way. The wording will need to be finessed so Johnson can sell it. I visualize "Phased Future Divergence" with some target areas and perhaps even some new deadlines. In practice, an extension but not technically an extension. Sellable to his MPs imo so long as FM is ended. I can see Steve Baker and a few others not happy but it should pass OK.
I think this will be it. We will go and start talking trade deals with America and elsewhere. The EU will permit us a continuation of the status quo until any trade deal is implemented. We will negotiate deals. Which will take a number of years. The deal America will offer us is significantly inferior to the one they gave the EU because of our size and import post departure. So we will never implement the deals we go and negotiate because who swaps a good deal for a worse deal?
The *right* to do deals. All the while whilst loco UK is buffered to the front of the EU train. We do what they do. Whilst negotiating with potential replacement trains. But still choosing of our own free will to go down the same track they are on at the same speed.
Huzzah!
Yes. That is imo the most probable future. Which is not at all terrible, let's be fair, but oh gosh what an utter waste of time and energy and all the rest of it.
Sort of like how Boris's triumph with the Withdrawal Agreement was an Ulster Veto which was set up so it could be used, but never would?
In The Ten Commandments (No 4) we are told to avoid "graven images". If you visit a synagogue or travel to Israel you will notice that there are no statues, and this is why. I believe the same applies to the Islamic world, although I am not an expert. In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
Islam is the same, I believe. It's down to Allah to create man, not man. Or something like that!
If you think that the current events are an “orgy of cultural destruction” the Byzantines say hello -
And? I condemn it as a stupid and destructive act that robs future generations of valuable historical material.
Why do you have so much difficulty condemning other stupid and destructive acts that do the same?
I don't think you can have had much training as a historian if you think the Colston statue had any significant historical value. Let's put it this way: if you had to write a history of the slave trade, or a history of Bristol, can you explain how the removal of the statue to a different venue would make your job any harder? Whereas, if you were writing a history of the British empire, the destruction of documents detailing the administration of that empire would, presumably, be pretty useful (which is why, of course, they were destroyed). The Colston statue was put up 170 years after he died by a business elite who were concerned about workers striking for better pay and wanted to create a patriotic myth for them to rally around. He wasn't the most generous philanthropist in Bristol's history, his statue wasn't put up by popular subscription, it was a deliberate act of myth making by the elite who know, as now, that a bit of flag waving is a great distraction when you want to shaft the working class. It's not even a good statue.
Karl Pearson was a socialist. He declined an OBE. He was a prominent free-thinker. He supported the suffragettes. He admired Karl Marx.
He was a famous applied statistician at University College, London.
He was a eugenicist (as were many early twentieth century socialists).
So, he is joining statisticians Galton and Fisher on the naughty step.
The Pearson Building at UCL is being renamed.
Some would say your first paragraph contains enough reasons for the renaming...
But you are right: eugenics was an idea of its time and retrospectively condemning people for not anticipating how far a bunch of nutters in Germany would take the idea is as sensible as condemning him for not anticipating what others would do in the name of Marxism.
I think that lets people off too easily. Eugenics is not a bad idea simply because the Nazis took it too far. It was a bad idea long before then because it was based on the idea that humans had no intrinsic value qua humans but only to the extent of their usefulness, intelligence etc. In short it saw humans as a means to an end rather than as an end in themselves. It denied people their essential humanity but simply saw them as an animal to be bred. It was not, at heart, faulty science but faulty morality. Eugenics was a moral failing and that moral failing was there - for those with eyes to see - long before the Nazis did their grisly work.
...and yet here we are, oh enlightened ones, killing unborn babies because they're a bit inconvenient
Speaking as an epidemiologist - and also one of the brightest and best and so disproving your theory
First, you're expecting miracles. The information early on was poor, it's still not very good. Poor information leads to imprecise or plain wrong predictions. Take a good look at the imperial paper and exactly what was modeled. The detail is quite impressive, some of the assumptions were probably wrong, but not unreasonable at the time (even the conservative doubling time given they were showing a situation much worse than previously thought). The main problem we've had is bad data.
I think the problem is that other countries were working with bad data. And they did a much better job.
(And of course, scientists have evolved methodologies for dealing with lousy data -- I work with lousy data all the time).
The Imperial paper should be retracted. By April 1, Ferguson's model predicted 50 daily death. On April 1, there were 670 actual deaths. Ferguson's model was out by over an order of magnitude.
Even by March 25th, the actual deaths were 186, Ferguson's prediction was under 10. He was out by an order off magnitude even within a week of his model being published.
I am sorry for Ferguson. But he screwed up, & there was (it seems) no critical thinking of his model at SAGE. His reputation as the expert seems to have meant he was not seriously challenged.
I am very grateful that when I make mistakes, and they are buried in academic journals.
You do however need to appreciate that the imperial paper does not predict what is going to happen. It compares different levels of non pharmaceutical intervention under different (all quite conservative) assumptions. The point is that under these conservative assumptions it challenged the planned policy of action short of a lock down. It was valuable in doing that.
IMO the government's principal failing has been focusing almost exclusively on one metric - avoiding the collapse of NHS hospitals along the lines they had just watched happen in Italy - doing everything they could to maintain hospital capacity (hence shoving patients back to care homes without tests, etc.) and not paying enough attention to the many other strands of what is a very complex interconnected web of challenges.
It is interesting - and unfortunate - that Brent, one of the councils that put in place the very best system for protecting care homes and which should serve as a model for other councils, is also the council with the highest incidence of Covid in the country. It is perhaps a sign that, no mater what you do or who well you do it, sometimes things are just out of your hands. Brent deserves great credit for its actions but it is not really reflected in the bare statistics.
In some cases it might just be good luck - you might just have been lucky enough to not having a local NHS consultant wanting to discharge his patient into your care home. And, as you say, some care homes may have very well despite a high level of infections in the community which the bare stats might not show. But I also suspect tat a lot of the "outbreaks" are limited to one or two people and have been controlled effectively. Some care homes seem to have managed to shield their residents and presumably to impose effective infection control. Certainly something that needs to be looked into. Everyone is (probably rightly) blaming the Government/NHS for discharging infectious patients into care homes, but I doubt this is the whole story.
Karl Pearson was a socialist. He declined an OBE. He was a prominent free-thinker. He supported the suffragettes. He admired Karl Marx.
He was a famous applied statistician at University College, London.
He was a eugenicist (as were many early twentieth century socialists).
So, he is joining statisticians Galton and Fisher on the naughty step.
The Pearson Building at UCL is being renamed.
Some would say your first paragraph contains enough reasons for the renaming...
But you are right: eugenics was an idea of its time and retrospectively condemning people for not anticipating how far a bunch of nutters in Germany would take the idea is as sensible as condemning him for not anticipating what others would do in the name of Marxism.
I think that lets people off too easily. Eugenics is not a bad idea simply because the Nazis took it too far. It was a bad idea long before then because it was based on the idea that humans had no intrinsic value qua humans but only to the extent of their usefulness, intelligence etc. In short it saw humans as a means to an end rather than as an end in themselves. It denied people their essential humanity but simply saw them as an animal to be bred. It was not, at heart, faulty science but faulty morality. Eugenics was a moral failing and that moral failing was there - for those with eyes to see - long before the Nazis did their grisly work.
I don't disagree.
Surprising though it seems now, eugenics was thought to be a progressive movement at the time. It was the movement of the woke for the early twentieth century.
Other prominent eugenicists are ... Darwin, many famous Liberal & Labour MPs from the late nineteenth century/early twentieth century, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Harold Laski, John Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf, TS Eliot, DH Lawrence, Julian Huxley, Marie Stopes, George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells and William Beveridge.
My only point is that -- if we are renaming buildings because they carry the name of an eugenicist -- there is an awful lot of renaming to be done.
It's a fashion thing. Eugenics is out of fashion at the moment.
Also because the understanding of multifactorial genetics and the interaction of genes and the environment has greatly improved. Ditto the sociology of education and attainment.
What strikes me is that genetics badly lagged behind evolutionary thought and until the C20 the environment was often seen as directly impacting on actual heredity so that acquired characteristics became fixed (an example of this thing being Lamarckism). Darwin had terrible trouble with this sort of question.
So 'eugenics' would not mean what it does today. It could include an entirely laudable effort to improve genes by improving the environment, never mind breeding selection. B-P for instance would have thought that he was improving the British race right then by marching slum boys up hill and down dale in the Boy Scouts. Was he therefore an eugenist? Did he also think he was improving the race permanently in its genetics? I don't know. It wouldk be interesting to hear from any PBer who has specialist knowledge of this issue in the history of eugenics.
Of course, you and I are familiar with the effect of parental environment and upbringing on their later children which is in a sense inherited if only through 1-2 generations. But sucvh a thing woiuld also have been very visible in the slums - malnutritiion, foetal alcohol syndrome, syphilis, etc. etc., and easily confounded with more specifically DNA-coded inheritance. So that may also have had a bearing on eugenic thought.
However, the story is further complicated by the fact that modern genetics developed during the early 20th century by the genetics and evolutionary thinkers such as Fisher and J. Huxley. And as finally confirmed by the Central Dogma of Watson and Crick that DNA codes fpr proteins. And some of those early C20 thinkers (not W&C) were eugeniicsts at least by common repute.
One thing we do know that Darwin did not is that evolution can happen very fast, even for large animals. There are examples of speciation happening within a human lifetime for animals such as reptiles
Karl Pearson was a socialist. He declined an OBE. He was a prominent free-thinker. He supported the suffragettes. He admired Karl Marx.
He was a famous applied statistician at University College, London.
He was a eugenicist (as were many early twentieth century socialists).
So, he is joining statisticians Galton and Fisher on the naughty step.
The Pearson Building at UCL is being renamed.
Some would say your first paragraph contains enough reasons for the renaming...
But you are right: eugenics was an idea of its time and retrospectively condemning people for not anticipating how far a bunch of nutters in Germany would take the idea is as sensible as condemning him for not anticipating what others would do in the name of Marxism.
I think that lets people off too easily. Eugenics is not a bad idea simply because the Nazis took it too far. It was a bad idea long before then because it was based on the idea that humans had no intrinsic value qua humans but only to the extent of their usefulness, intelligence etc. In short it saw humans as a means to an end rather than as an end in themselves. It denied people their essential humanity but simply saw them as an animal to be bred. It was not, at heart, faulty science but faulty morality. Eugenics was a moral failing and that moral failing was there - for those with eyes to see - long before the Nazis did their grisly work.
I don't disagree.
Surprising though it seems now, eugenics was thought to be a progressive movement at the time. It was the movement of the woke for the early twentieth century.
Other prominent eugenicists are ... Darwin, many famous Liberal & Labour MPs from the late nineteenth century/early twentieth century, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Harold Laski, John Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf, TS Eliot, DH Lawrence, Julian Huxley, Marie Stopes, George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells and William Beveridge.
My only point is that -- if we are renaming buildings because they carry the name of an eugenicist -- there is an awful lot of renaming to be done.
It's a fashion thing. Eugenics is out of fashion at the moment.
Yet there were still over 200,000 abortions in the U.K. last year...
Abortion is not out of fashion at the moment.
So the theorising about how to improve the population is out of fashion, while the practicalities of actually doing it are more popular than ever?
Karl Pearson was a socialist. He declined an OBE. He was a prominent free-thinker. He supported the suffragettes. He admired Karl Marx.
He was a famous applied statistician at University College, London.
He was a eugenicist (as were many early twentieth century socialists).
So, he is joining statisticians Galton and Fisher on the naughty step.
The Pearson Building at UCL is being renamed.
Some would say your first paragraph contains enough reasons for the renaming...
But you are right: eugenics was an idea of its time and retrospectively condemning people for not anticipating how far a bunch of nutters in Germany would take the idea is as sensible as condemning him for not anticipating what others would do in the name of Marxism.
I think that lets people off too easily. Eugenics is not a bad idea simply because the Nazis took it too far. It was a bad idea long before then because it was based on the idea that humans had no intrinsic value qua humans but only to the extent of their usefulness, intelligence etc. In short it saw humans as a means to an end rather than as an end in themselves. It denied people their essential humanity but simply saw them as an animal to be bred. It was not, at heart, faulty science but faulty morality. Eugenics was a moral failing and that moral failing was there - for those with eyes to see - long before the Nazis did their grisly work.
...and yet here we are, oh enlightened ones, killing unborn babies because they're a bit inconvenient
Bloody hell, the culture war has a second front. Things must be looking bad at CCHQ (notes 60,000 excess deaths, 20% drop in GDP and £300bn fiscal deficit. Ah...).
Karl Pearson was a socialist. He declined an OBE. He was a prominent free-thinker. He supported the suffragettes. He admired Karl Marx.
He was a famous applied statistician at University College, London.
He was a eugenicist (as were many early twentieth century socialists).
So, he is joining statisticians Galton and Fisher on the naughty step.
The Pearson Building at UCL is being renamed.
Some would say your first paragraph contains enough reasons for the renaming...
But you are right: eugenics was an idea of its time and retrospectively condemning people for not anticipating how far a bunch of nutters in Germany would take the idea is as sensible as condemning him for not anticipating what others would do in the name of Marxism.
I think that lets people off too easily. Eugenics is not a bad idea simply because the Nazis took it too far. It was a bad idea long before then because it was based on the idea that humans had no intrinsic value qua humans but only to the extent of their usefulness, intelligence etc. In short it saw humans as a means to an end rather than as an end in themselves. It denied people their essential humanity but simply saw them as an animal to be bred. It was not, at heart, faulty science but faulty morality. Eugenics was a moral failing and that moral failing was there - for those with eyes to see - long before the Nazis did their grisly work.
I don't disagree.
Surprising though it seems now, eugenics was thought to be a progressive movement at the time. It was the movement of the woke for the early twentieth century.
Other prominent eugenicists are ... Darwin, many famous Liberal & Labour MPs from the late nineteenth century/early twentieth century, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Harold Laski, John Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf, TS Eliot, DH Lawrence, Julian Huxley, Marie Stopes, George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells and William Beveridge.
My only point is that -- if we are renaming buildings because they carry the name of an eugenicist -- there is an awful lot of renaming to be done.
It's a fashion thing. Eugenics is out of fashion at the moment.
Yet there were still over 200,000 abortions in the U.K. last year...
Abortion is not out of fashion at the moment.
Ethics is not a matter of facts but of feelings. Widely held feelings are the basis of current morality. These widely held feelings can change over time. If you share the currently widely held feelings (current morality) you will feel that it is "right". It is only right for the moment. It is hard to abstract yourself.
Looking back fifty years, many things appear shocking.
In fifty years time, looking back on current morality, what will appear the most shocking? "How could they have killed and eaten animals?" "How could they have insisted that people in extreme pain could not have had an assisted death?". "How could they have aborted viable babies?" "How could they have allowed people with serious genetic deficiencies to have children?" Or something that seems perfectly OK and natural to us now but will be anathema to future generations.
Amazing how fast we have got from tearing down statue of a slave trader to people seriously considering Churchill having to go because he is now considered as the BBC likes to say divisive.
Notwithstanding Emma Soames' rather surprising comments, it is no more a pretty small minority who actually think that.
I predict the phrase "Flexible Future Divergence" - or perhaps "Dynamic Democratic Alignment" - will be much heard. I know! But that's what we have come to with all this "leaving the EU" nonsense.
The adjective "Australian style" will be in there somewhere. That focus groups very well with the Stage 2 Hypertension crowd that constitutes leavers.
Yes, FM replaced with an "Australian style points system".
And on the trade deal, Canada + a fee + ECJ + LPF.
Which I make to be a Canada PLUS PLUS PLUS.
And people don't think "Muscles" can sell that? - C'mon. It sounds ruddy brilliant.
Rightly or wrongly if it has the ECJ involved he will not be able to sell it.
If this is the case some creativity will be needed. I'm sure they will come up with something that squares the circle. I will be utterly amazed if "WTO" happens. I wish there was a Betfair market on it. I'd lay at anything up to 5 and would need 10 to back.
I must admit I have absolutely no idea what the outcome will be so I am betting no money beyond the bet I have in place with Richard N.
The UK won't be on the hook for funding the EU post Covid recovery and will be able to invest where needed to build recovery without the bureaucrats in Brussels directing things in the way that helps Germany and France the most.
In The Ten Commandments (No 4) we are told to avoid "graven images". If you visit a synagogue or travel to Israel you will notice that there are no statues, and this is why. I believe the same applies to the Islamic world, although I am not an expert. In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
Islam is the same, I believe. It's down to Allah to create man, not man. Or something like that!
If you think that the current events are an “orgy of cultural destruction” the Byzantines say hello -
And? I condemn it as a stupid and destructive act that robs future generations of valuable historical material.
Why do you have so much difficulty condemning other stupid and destructive acts that do the same?
I don't think you can have had much training as a historian if you think the Colston statue had any significant historical value. Let's put it this way: if you had to write a history of the slave trade, or a history of Bristol, can you explain how the removal of the statue to a different venue would make your job any harder? Whereas, if you were writing a history of the British empire, the destruction of documents detailing the administration of that empire would, presumably, be pretty useful (which is why, of course, they were destroyed). The Colston statue was put up 170 years after he died by a business elite who were concerned about workers striking for better pay and wanted to create a patriotic myth for them to rally around. He wasn't the most generous philanthropist in Bristol's history, his statue wasn't put up by popular subscription, it was a deliberate act of myth making by the elite who know, as now, that a bit of flag waving is a great distraction when you want to shaft the working class. It's not even a good statue.
Thank goodness you are not the arbiter of either historical or cultural or aesthetic value and what is and is not allowed to exist and remain in the public sphere. I have little interest in this specific statue, although I do think it possesses more merit than you grant - indeed, the myth-making aspect of its creation is arguably its most interesting quality.
The most important point is that the principle that cultural artifacts may be destroyed by a mob for ideological reasons must never, ever be conceded - because that is one of the most slippery of slopes, and its end the most ugly.
Speaking as an epidemiologist - and also one of the brightest and best and so disproving your theory
First, you're expecting miracles. The information early on was poor, it's still not very good. Poor information leads to imprecise or plain wrong predictions. Take a good look at the imperial paper and exactly what was modeled. The detail is quite impressive, some of the assumptions were probably wrong, but not unreasonable at the time (even the conservative doubling time given they were showing a situation much worse than previously thought). The main problem we've had is bad data.
I think the problem is that other countries were working with bad data. And they did a much better job.
(And of course, scientists have evolved methodologies for dealing with lousy data -- I work with lousy data all the time).
The Imperial paper should be retracted. By April 1, Ferguson's model predicted 50 daily death. On April 1, there were 670 actual deaths. Ferguson's model was out by over an order of magnitude.
Even by March 25th, the actual deaths were 186, Ferguson's prediction was under 10. He was out by an order off magnitude even within a week of his model being published.
I am sorry for Ferguson. But he screwed up, & there was (it seems) no critical thinking of his model at SAGE. His reputation as the expert seems to have meant he was not seriously challenged.
I am very grateful that when I make mistakes, and they are buried in academic journals.
You do however need to appreciate that the imperial paper does not predict what is going to happen. It compares different levels of non pharmaceutical intervention under different (all quite conservative) assumptions. The point is that under these conservative assumptions it challenged the planned policy of action short of a lock down. It was valuable in doing that.
IMO the government's principal failing has been focusing almost exclusively on one metric - avoiding the collapse of NHS hospitals along the lines they had just watched happen in Italy - doing everything they could to maintain hospital capacity (hence shoving patients back to care homes without tests, etc.) and not paying enough attention to the many other strands of what is a very complex interconnected web of challenges.
It is interesting - and unfortunate - that Brent, one of the councils that put in place the very best system for protecting care homes and which should serve as a model for other councils, is also the council with the highest incidence of Covid in the country. It is perhaps a sign that, no mater what you do or who well you do it, sometimes things are just out of your hands. Brent deserves great credit for its actions but it is not really reflected in the bare statistics.
In some cases it might just be good luck - you might just have been lucky enough to not having a local NHS consultant wanting to discharge his patient into your care home. And, as you say, some care homes may have very well despite a high level of infections in the community which the bare stats might not show. But I also suspect tat a lot of the "outbreaks" are limited to one or two people and have been controlled effectively. Some care homes seem to have managed to shield their residents and presumably to impose effective infection control. Certainly something that needs to be looked into. Everyone is (probably rightly) blaming the Government/NHS for discharging infectious patients into care homes, but I doubt this is the whole story.
If they hadn't given up on testing so early, they could have tested them first
Karl Pearson was a socialist. He declined an OBE. He was a prominent free-thinker. He supported the suffragettes. He admired Karl Marx.
He was a famous applied statistician at University College, London.
He was a eugenicist (as were many early twentieth century socialists).
So, he is joining statisticians Galton and Fisher on the naughty step.
The Pearson Building at UCL is being renamed.
Some would say your first paragraph contains enough reasons for the renaming...
But you are right: eugenics was an idea of its time and retrospectively condemning people for not anticipating how far a bunch of nutters in Germany would take the idea is as sensible as condemning him for not anticipating what others would do in the name of Marxism.
I think that lets people off too easily. Eugenics is not a bad idea simply because the Nazis took it too far. It was a bad idea long before then because it was based on the idea that humans had no intrinsic value qua humans but only to the extent of their usefulness, intelligence etc. In short it saw humans as a means to an end rather than as an end in themselves. It denied people their essential humanity but simply saw them as an animal to be bred. It was not, at heart, faulty science but faulty morality. Eugenics was a moral failing and that moral failing was there - for those with eyes to see - long before the Nazis did their grisly work.
...and yet here we are, oh enlightened ones, killing unborn babies because they're a bit inconvenient
Bloody hell, the culture war has a second front. Things must be looking bad at CCHQ (notes 60,000 excess deaths, 20% drop in GDP and £300bn fiscal deficit. Ah...).
Form a cordon round Baden-Powell or picket an abortion clinic, decisions, decisions!
Tories have fucked up a sensible Brexit Tories have fucked up the economy Tories have fucked up Covid 19 and left us with the most per capita pandemic deaths of any major Nation
Still lead 43% to 38% though.
Not in Scotland.
SNP lead 30 points for Westminster VI, and 32 points for Holyrood VI.
Why can Scots see through the charlatan Johnson and his cronies, but the English are caught like bunnies in the headlights?
It is odd, isn't it? I will never understand these people.
The UK won't be on the hook for funding the EU post Covid recovery and will be able to invest where needed to build recovery without the bureaucrats in Brussels directing things in the way that helps Germany and France the most.
I predict the phrase "Flexible Future Divergence" - or perhaps "Dynamic Democratic Alignment" - will be much heard. I know! But that's what we have come to with all this "leaving the EU" nonsense.
The adjective "Australian style" will be in there somewhere. That focus groups very well with the Stage 2 Hypertension crowd that constitutes leavers.
Yes, FM replaced with an "Australian style points system".
And on the trade deal, Canada + a fee + ECJ + LPF.
Which I make to be a Canada PLUS PLUS PLUS.
And people don't think "Muscles" can sell that? - C'mon. It sounds ruddy brilliant.
Rightly or wrongly if it has the ECJ involved he will not be able to sell it.
If this is the case some creativity will be needed. I'm sure they will come up with something that squares the circle. I will be utterly amazed if "WTO" happens. I wish there was a Betfair market on it. I'd lay at anything up to 5 and would need 10 to back.
I must admit I have absolutely no idea what the outcome will be so I am betting no money beyond the bet I have in place with Richard N.
Karl Pearson was a socialist. He declined an OBE. He was a prominent free-thinker. He supported the suffragettes. He admired Karl Marx.
He was a famous applied statistician at University College, London.
He was a eugenicist (as were many early twentieth century socialists).
So, he is joining statisticians Galton and Fisher on the naughty step.
The Pearson Building at UCL is being renamed.
Some would say your first paragraph contains enough reasons for the renaming...
But you are right: eugenics was an idea of its time and retrospectively condemning people for not anticipating how far a bunch of nutters in Germany would take the idea is as sensible as condemning him for not anticipating what others would do in the name of Marxism.
I think that lets people off too easily. Eugenics is not a bad idea simply because the Nazis took it too far. It was a bad idea long before then because it was based on the idea that humans had no intrinsic value qua humans but only to the extent of their usefulness, intelligence etc. In short it saw humans as a means to an end rather than as an end in themselves. It denied people their essential humanity but simply saw them as an animal to be bred. It was not, at heart, faulty science but faulty morality. Eugenics was a moral failing and that moral failing was there - for those with eyes to see - long before the Nazis did their grisly work.
...and yet here we are, oh enlightened ones, killing unborn babies because they're a bit inconvenient
Bloody hell, the culture war has a second front. Things must be looking bad at CCHQ (notes 60,000 excess deaths, 20% drop in GDP and £300bn fiscal deficit. Ah...).
Try to make it partisan if it pleases you, I have voted for four different parties in the last decade and have no loyalty to any of them
Bloody hell, the culture war has a second front. Things must be looking bad at CCHQ (notes 60,000 excess deaths, 20% drop in GDP and £300bn fiscal deficit. Ah...).
You were praising "What the Butler Saw" the other night -- & I agree it is a masterpiece.
But, Joe Orton's plaque on Noel Rd, Islington could also be considered rather contentious, no?
He was by his own admission, a sex tourist, who liked to go to Morocco and take advantage of the poverty of underage Arab boys to ...
A nasty case of racial and sexual exploitation. I think his diaries would be much more heavily criticised now than was the case at their publication in the 1980s.
FWIW, I think Joe was .... a complete shit ... who exploited many people (including Halliwell) -- but WtBS is brilliant.
In The Ten Commandments (No 4) we are told to avoid "graven images". If you visit a synagogue or travel to Israel you will notice that there are no statues, and this is why. I believe the same applies to the Islamic world, although I am not an expert. In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
Islam is the same, I believe. It's down to Allah to create man, not man. Or something like that!
If you think that the current events are an “orgy of cultural destruction” the Byzantines say hello -
And? I condemn it as a stupid and destructive act that robs future generations of valuable historical material.
Why do you have so much difficulty condemning other stupid and destructive acts that do the same?
I don't think you can have had much training as a historian if you think the Colston statue had any significant historical value. Let's put it this way: if you had to write a history of the slave trade, or a history of Bristol, can you explain how the removal of the statue to a different venue would make your job any harder? Whereas, if you were writing a history of the British empire, the destruction of documents detailing the administration of that empire would, presumably, be pretty useful (which is why, of course, they were destroyed). The Colston statue was put up 170 years after he died by a business elite who were concerned about workers striking for better pay and wanted to create a patriotic myth for them to rally around. He wasn't the most generous philanthropist in Bristol's history, his statue wasn't put up by popular subscription, it was a deliberate act of myth making by the elite who know, as now, that a bit of flag waving is a great distraction when you want to shaft the working class. It's not even a good statue.
Thank goodness you are not the arbiter of either historical or cultural or aesthetic value and what is and is not allowed to exist and remain in the public sphere. I have little interest in this specific statue, although I do think it possesses more merit than you grant - indeed, the myth-making aspect of its creation is arguably its most interesting quality.
The most important point is that the principle that cultural artifacts may be destroyed by a mob for ideological reasons must never, ever be conceded - because that is one of the most slippery of slopes, and its end the most ugly.
Efforts had been made to have the statue moved for years, met with total bad faith on the other side. I don't blame people for getting frustrated and taking the law into their own hands. The poetry of having a slaver thrown into the harbour just like his slaves were thrown from his ships was great. The violence meted out to his statue was nothing as to the violence done to innocent children in his name and for his profit. He has been fished from his watery grave intact and can now be placed in a museum with a plaque detailing his crimes. It should be a wake up call to the authorities everywhere, a welcome kick up the backside to recognise the reality of our history and remove these scoundrels from their ill-deserved pedestals.
In The Ten Commandments (No 4) we are told to avoid "graven images". If you visit a synagogue or travel to Israel you will notice that there are no statues, and this is why. I believe the same applies to the Islamic world, although I am not an expert. In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
Islam is the same, I believe. It's down to Allah to create man, not man. Or something like that!
If you think that the current events are an “orgy of cultural destruction” the Byzantines say hello -
And? I condemn it as a stupid and destructive act that robs future generations of valuable historical material.
Why do you have so much difficulty condemning other stupid and destructive acts that do the same?
I don't think you can have had much training as a historian if you think the Colston statue had any significant historical value. Let's put it this way: if you had to write a history of the slave trade, or a history of Bristol, can you explain how the removal of the statue to a different venue would make your job any harder? Whereas, if you were writing a history of the British empire, the destruction of documents detailing the administration of that empire would, presumably, be pretty useful (which is why, of course, they were destroyed). The Colston statue was put up 170 years after he died by a business elite who were concerned about workers striking for better pay and wanted to create a patriotic myth for them to rally around. He wasn't the most generous philanthropist in Bristol's history, his statue wasn't put up by popular subscription, it was a deliberate act of myth making by the elite who know, as now, that a bit of flag waving is a great distraction when you want to shaft the working class. It's not even a good statue.
Thank goodness you are not the arbiter of either historical or cultural or aesthetic value and what is and is not allowed to exist and remain in the public sphere. I have little interest in this specific statue, although I do think it possesses more merit than you grant - indeed, the myth-making aspect of its creation is arguably its most interesting quality.
The most important point is that the principle that cultural artifacts may be destroyed by a mob for ideological reasons must never, ever be conceded - because that is one of the most slippery of slopes, and its end the most ugly.
Efforts had been made to have the statue moved for years, met with total bad faith on the other side. I don't blame people for getting frustrated and taking the law into their own hands. The poetry of having a slaver thrown into the harbour just like his slaves were thrown from his ships was great. The violence meted out to his statue was nothing as to the violence done to innocent children in his name and for his profit. He has been fished from his watery grave intact and can now be placed in a museum with a plaque detailing his crimes. It should be a wake up call to the authorities everywhere, a welcome kick up the backside to recognise the reality of our history and remove these scoundrels from their ill-deserved pedestals.
In The Ten Commandments (No 4) we are told to avoid "graven images". If you visit a synagogue or travel to Israel you will notice that there are no statues, and this is why. I believe the same applies to the Islamic world, although I am not an expert. In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
Quite right, and a strong tradition in Non-Conformist Churches too.
I'm sure Tim Farron's never been in trouble for interposing his personal religious beliefs in areas where people have no interest in nor need of them...
Brilliant argument. Outstanding,
Once we start on 'graven images' as a whole, we might just end up biting off more than we want to chew. Could I be allowed to keep the graven images of Mona Lisa, The Girl with the Pearl Earring and maybe a few Rembrandts for old time's sake?
Caravaggio's "The fortune teller" will have to go for portraying a negative stereotype of gypsys I'm afraid.
In The Ten Commandments (No 4) we are told to avoid "graven images". If you visit a synagogue or travel to Israel you will notice that there are no statues, and this is why. I believe the same applies to the Islamic world, although I am not an expert. In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
Islam is the same, I believe. It's down to Allah to create man, not man. Or something like that!
If you think that the current events are an “orgy of cultural destruction” the Byzantines say hello -
And? I condemn it as a stupid and destructive act that robs future generations of valuable historical material.
Why do you have so much difficulty condemning other stupid and destructive acts that do the same?
I don't think you can have had much training as a historian if you think the Colston statue had any significant historical value. Let's put it this way: if you had to write a history of the slave trade, or a history of Bristol, can you explain how the removal of the statue to a different venue would make your job any harder? Whereas, if you were writing a history of the British empire, the destruction of documents detailing the administration of that empire would, presumably, be pretty useful (which is why, of course, they were destroyed). The Colston statue was put up 170 years after he died by a business elite who were concerned about workers striking for better pay and wanted to create a patriotic myth for them to rally around. He wasn't the most generous philanthropist in Bristol's history, his statue wasn't put up by popular subscription, it was a deliberate act of myth making by the elite who know, as now, that a bit of flag waving is a great distraction when you want to shaft the working class. It's not even a good statue.
Thank goodness you are not the arbiter of either historical or cultural or aesthetic value and what is and is not allowed to exist and remain in the public sphere. I have little interest in this specific statue, although I do think it possesses more merit than you grant - indeed, the myth-making aspect of its creation is arguably its most interesting quality.
The most important point is that the principle that cultural artifacts may be destroyed by a mob for ideological reasons must never, ever be conceded - because that is one of the most slippery of slopes, and its end the most ugly.
Efforts had been made to have the statue moved for years, met with total bad faith on the other side. I don't blame people for getting frustrated and taking the law into their own hands. The poetry of having a slaver thrown into the harbour just like his slaves were thrown from his ships was great. The violence meted out to his statue was nothing as to the violence done to innocent children in his name and for his profit. He has been fished from his watery grave intact and can now be placed in a museum with a plaque detailing his crimes. It should be a wake up call to the authorities everywhere, a welcome kick up the backside to recognise the reality of our history and remove these scoundrels from their ill-deserved pedestals.
So when you can't get your own way by going through normal channels you should just break the law?
Meanwhile, under the radar but well worth a watch if you missed it, this week’s Panorama with the scandal of how a government owned organisation covered up its failings, leading to the suicide, bankruptcy and false imprisonment of entirely innocent people:
The government is currently under pressure from all sides to concede a judicial inquiry.
There is also a very good series on Radio 4 by Neil Wallis the journalist who covered the story, available on BBC iPlayer.
The story - and there is much more to come out, I expect - is an absolute scandal.
Who would be the Minister responsible for this scandal?
I would have said the people responsible were
(1) the software company who provide the crappy accounting program to Royal Mail (Fujitsu)
(2) the people running Royal Mail who ignored the evidence (the Chief Executive).
The Postal Affairs Minister and the Secretary of State for Business are ultimately responsible for the Post Office.
But there are lots of people responsible:
1. Those commissioning the new IT system and testing it 2. Those dealing with the complaints from sub-postmasters. 3. The internal investigators. 4. Those responsible for misleading sub-postmasters about how widespread the issues were. 5. Those making the decision to prosecute. 6. The internal lawyers responsible for how the litigation was conducted. 7. The Chief Executives and senior members of the management team. 8. The Chairman. 9. The Ministers who were ultimately responsible.
And doubtless plenty more. That’s why a thorough-going inquiry is needed.
I hope they use PB to recruit the enquiry head, there might be an obvious candidate with extensive experience in getting to the bottom of dodgy numbers.
In The Ten Commandments (No 4) we are told to avoid "graven images". If you visit a synagogue or travel to Israel you will notice that there are no statues, and this is why. I believe the same applies to the Islamic world, although I am not an expert. In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
Islam is the same, I believe. It's down to Allah to create man, not man. Or something like that!
If you think that the current events are an “orgy of cultural destruction” the Byzantines say hello -
And? I condemn it as a stupid and destructive act that robs future generations of valuable historical material.
Why do you have so much difficulty condemning other stupid and destructive acts that do the same?
I don't think you can have had much training as a historian if you think the Colston statue had any significant historical value. Let's put it this way: if you had to write a history of the slave trade, or a history of Bristol, can you explain how the removal of the statue to a different venue would make your job any harder? Whereas, if you were writing a history of the British empire, the destruction of documents detailing the administration of that empire would, presumably, be pretty useful (which is why, of course, they were destroyed). The Colston statue was put up 170 years after he died by a business elite who were concerned about workers striking for better pay and wanted to create a patriotic myth for them to rally around. He wasn't the most generous philanthropist in Bristol's history, his statue wasn't put up by popular subscription, it was a deliberate act of myth making by the elite who know, as now, that a bit of flag waving is a great distraction when you want to shaft the working class. It's not even a good statue.
Thank goodness you are not the arbiter of either historical or cultural or aesthetic value and what is and is not allowed to exist and remain in the public sphere. I have little interest in this specific statue, although I do think it possesses more merit than you grant - indeed, the myth-making aspect of its creation is arguably its most interesting quality.
The most important point is that the principle that cultural artifacts may be destroyed by a mob for ideological reasons must never, ever be conceded - because that is one of the most slippery of slopes, and its end the most ugly.
Efforts had been made to have the statue moved for years, met with total bad faith on the other side. I don't blame people for getting frustrated and taking the law into their own hands. The poetry of having a slaver thrown into the harbour just like his slaves were thrown from his ships was great. The violence meted out to his statue was nothing as to the violence done to innocent children in his name and for his profit. He has been fished from his watery grave intact and can now be placed in a museum with a plaque detailing his crimes. It should be a wake up call to the authorities everywhere, a welcome kick up the backside to recognise the reality of our history and remove these scoundrels from their ill-deserved pedestals.
Well, that's the difference between those who believe in illegal violence to solve their political problems and those who believe in peaceful, legal means.
I will always be on the latter, civilized side - and proud of it.
If you had an ounce of foresight, you might also wish to consider the terrible precedent it sets. What will you say if protesters from the other side of politics get violent, and start destroying monuments, buildings, texts, art etc etc that they dislike for ideological reasons? You won't have a leg to stand on.
Not getting any coverage but just looked at new covid.cases across US. Quite interesting. No uptick in NYC, but lots of other cities that has seen big protests, numbers up (in sone to record highs)...Miami, Portland, Seattle, LA, San Francisco, to name a few.
The west coast cities were initially credited with not been hit hard, because early and hard shut down.
No uptick in NYC, makes you wonder about this idea of when 20-25% of your city has had it, seems to drop right away.
In The Ten Commandments (No 4) we are told to avoid "graven images". If you visit a synagogue or travel to Israel you will notice that there are no statues, and this is why. I believe the same applies to the Islamic world, although I am not an expert. In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
Islam is the same, I believe. It's down to Allah to create man, not man. Or something like that!
If you think that the current events are an “orgy of cultural destruction” the Byzantines say hello -
Yay - idiotic vandals destroyed cultural treasures in the past, so it's fine to do so in the present. A brilliant argument indeed!
You really are not very bright are you? The point is some isolated incidents of minor vandalism are not an “orgy” of destruction. Seriously, you are so blinkered by your paranoid delusions of Marxist insurrection and determination to preserve your own comforting version of history you wouldn’t know an argument if it bit you in the arse.
Wrong (and rude) because if these were really isolated acts of vandalism then, first, they'd be isolated, which they plainly aren't because the vandals have an explicitly shared agenda, and secondly they'd have all the usual consequences of minor acts of vandalism. that is, the police would first try to prevent them and secondly identify, arrest and prosecute those responsible, the damage would be repaired and the property restored to its position. None of that is the case.
Meanwhile, in ludicrous demo watch: petitions both for and against pulling down statues of Sir Robert Peel, 5,000 in favour of destroying a monument to Mahatma Gandhi in Leicester, and several rival demos planned to converge very close to one another in central London today. The likely efficacy of the Met police in keeping them, at a minimum, out of missile range of each other is questionable at best.
As politics becomes more tribal, and based upon values rather than class, I'm starting to think this debate about statues is more about poking the other tribe in the eye, rather than debating history.
British police are absolute geniuses, a vast international protest movement sprung up ready to stage pitched battles with police everywhere and anywhere and they somehow managed to redirect it against inanimate objects
In The Ten Commandments (No 4) we are told to avoid "graven images". If you visit a synagogue or travel to Israel you will notice that there are no statues, and this is why. I believe the same applies to the Islamic world, although I am not an expert. In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
Islam is the same, I believe. It's down to Allah to create man, not man. Or something like that!
If you think that the current events are an “orgy of cultural destruction” the Byzantines say hello -
And? I condemn it as a stupid and destructive act that robs future generations of valuable historical material.
Why do you have so much difficulty condemning other stupid and destructive acts that do the same?
I don't think you can have had much training as a historian if you think the Colston statue had any significant historical value. Let's put it this way: if you had to write a history of the slave trade, or a history of Bristol, can you explain how the removal of the statue to a different venue would make your job any harder? Whereas, if you were writing a history of the British empire, the destruction of documents detailing the administration of that empire would, presumably, be pretty useful (which is why, of course, they were destroyed). The Colston statue was put up 170 years after he died by a business elite who were concerned about workers striking for better pay and wanted to create a patriotic myth for them to rally around. He wasn't the most generous philanthropist in Bristol's history, his statue wasn't put up by popular subscription, it was a deliberate act of myth making by the elite who know, as now, that a bit of flag waving is a great distraction when you want to shaft the working class. It's not even a good statue.
Thank goodness you are not the arbiter of either historical or cultural or aesthetic value and what is and is not allowed to exist and remain in the public sphere. I have little interest in this specific statue, although I do think it possesses more merit than you grant - indeed, the myth-making aspect of its creation is arguably its most interesting quality.
The most important point is that the principle that cultural artifacts may be destroyed by a mob for ideological reasons must never, ever be conceded - because that is one of the most slippery of slopes, and its end the most ugly.
Efforts had been made to have the statue moved for years, met with total bad faith on the other side. I don't blame people for getting frustrated and taking the law into their own hands. The poetry of having a slaver thrown into the harbour just like his slaves were thrown from his ships was great. The violence meted out to his statue was nothing as to the violence done to innocent children in his name and for his profit. He has been fished from his watery grave intact and can now be placed in a museum with a plaque detailing his crimes. It should be a wake up call to the authorities everywhere, a welcome kick up the backside to recognise the reality of our history and remove these scoundrels from their ill-deserved pedestals.
This is completely wrong.
There were two consultations with the public, both of which said the statue should remain and that further explanatory plaques should be added to explain the context. Of course the left wing council didn't like this result and so have done bugger all about this in the hope that exactly what has happened would happen. All the bad faith has been on the side of the council who have looked to the mob to achieve what democracy stopped them from doing.
Bloody hell, the culture war has a second front. Things must be looking bad at CCHQ (notes 60,000 excess deaths, 20% drop in GDP and £300bn fiscal deficit. Ah...).
You were praising "What the Butler Saw" the other night -- & I agree it is a masterpiece.
But, Joe Orton's plaque on Noel Rd, Islington could also be considered rather contentious, no?
He was by his own admission, a sex tourist, who liked to go to Morocco and take advantage of the poverty of underage Arab boys to ...
A nasty case of racial and sexual exploitation. I think his diaries would be much more heavily criticised now than was the case at their publication in the 1980s.
FWIW, I think Joe was .... a complete shit ... who exploited many people (including Halliwell) -- but WtBS is brilliant.
Meanwhile, under the radar but well worth a watch if you missed it, this week’s Panorama with the scandal of how a government owned organisation covered up its failings, leading to the suicide, bankruptcy and false imprisonment of entirely innocent people:
The government is currently under pressure from all sides to concede a judicial inquiry.
There is also a very good series on Radio 4 by Neil Wallis the journalist who covered the story, available on BBC iPlayer.
The story - and there is much more to come out, I expect - is an absolute scandal.
Who would be the Minister responsible for this scandal?
I would have said the people responsible were
(1) the software company who provide the crappy accounting program to Royal Mail (Fujitsu)
(2) the people running Royal Mail who ignored the evidence (the Chief Executive).
The Postal Affairs Minister and the Secretary of State for Business are ultimately responsible for the Post Office.
But there are lots of people responsible:
1. Those commissioning the new IT system and testing it 2. Those dealing with the complaints from sub-postmasters. 3. The internal investigators. 4. Those responsible for misleading sub-postmasters about how widespread the issues were. 5. Those making the decision to prosecute. 6. The internal lawyers responsible for how the litigation was conducted. 7. The Chief Executives and senior members of the management team. 8. The Chairman. 9. The Ministers who were ultimately responsible.
And doubtless plenty more. That’s why a thorough-going inquiry is needed.
I hope they use PB to recruit the enquiry head, there might be an obvious candidate with extensive experience in getting to the bottom of dodgy numbers.
Meanwhile, in ludicrous demo watch: petitions both for and against pulling down statues of Sir Robert Peel, 5,000 in favour of destroying a monument to Mahatma Gandhi in Leicester, and several rival demos planned to converge very close to one another in central London today. The likely efficacy of the Met police in keeping them, at a minimum, out of missile range of each other is questionable at best.
As politics becomes more tribal, and based upon values rather than class, I'm starting to think this debate about statues is more about poking the other tribe in the eye, rather than debating history.
Of course it is...see Owen Jones massive hypocrisy where vandalism of Marx is horrendous, we shouldn't be destroying monuments to important historical figures vs promoting his team pulling down ones he doesn't like.
In The Ten Commandments (No 4) we are told to avoid "graven images". If you visit a synagogue or travel to Israel you will notice that there are no statues, and this is why. I believe the same applies to the Islamic world, although I am not an expert. In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
Islam is the same, I believe. It's down to Allah to create man, not man. Or something like that!
If you think that the current events are an “orgy of cultural destruction” the Byzantines say hello -
And? I condemn it as a stupid and destructive act that robs future generations of valuable historical material.
Why do you have so much difficulty condemning other stupid and destructive acts that do the same?
I don't think you can have had much training as a historian if you think the Colston statue had any significant historical value. Let's put it this way: if you had to write a history of the slave trade, or a history of Bristol, can you explain how the removal of the statue to a different venue would make your job any harder? Whereas, if you were writing a history of the British empire, the destruction of documents detailing the administration of that empire would, presumably, be pretty useful (which is why, of course, they were destroyed). The Colston statue was put up 170 years after he died by a business elite who were concerned about workers striking for better pay and wanted to create a patriotic myth for them to rally around. He wasn't the most generous philanthropist in Bristol's history, his statue wasn't put up by popular subscription, it was a deliberate act of myth making by the elite who know, as now, that a bit of flag waving is a great distraction when you want to shaft the working class. It's not even a good statue.
Thank goodness you are not the arbiter of either historical or cultural or aesthetic value and what is and is not allowed to exist and remain in the public sphere. I have little interest in this specific statue, although I do think it possesses more merit than you grant - indeed, the myth-making aspect of its creation is arguably its most interesting quality.
The most important point is that the principle that cultural artifacts may be destroyed by a mob for ideological reasons must never, ever be conceded - because that is one of the most slippery of slopes, and its end the most ugly.
Efforts had been made to have the statue moved for years, met with total bad faith on the other side. I don't blame people for getting frustrated and taking the law into their own hands. The poetry of having a slaver thrown into the harbour just like his slaves were thrown from his ships was great. The violence meted out to his statue was nothing as to the violence done to innocent children in his name and for his profit. He has been fished from his watery grave intact and can now be placed in a museum with a plaque detailing his crimes. It should be a wake up call to the authorities everywhere, a welcome kick up the backside to recognise the reality of our history and remove these scoundrels from their ill-deserved pedestals.
Well, that's the difference between those who believe in illegal violence to solve their political problems and those who believe in peaceful, legal means.
I will always be on the latter, civilized side - and proud of it.
If you had an ounce of foresight, you might also wish to consider the terrible precedent it sets. What will you say if protesters from the other side of politics get violent, and start destroying monuments, buildings, texts, art etc etc that they dislike for ideological reasons? You won't have a leg to stand on.
It may have escaped your attention, but the other side got violent years ago. I am on the side of peaceful legal stuff about 99.9% of the time, but if you think direct action is never effective then you've not been paying attention to history. The more I read about the Colston statue, the more I am convinced that what the protesters did to it was entirely justified.
Meanwhile, under the radar but well worth a watch if you missed it, this week’s Panorama with the scandal of how a government owned organisation covered up its failings, leading to the suicide, bankruptcy and false imprisonment of entirely innocent people:
The government is currently under pressure from all sides to concede a judicial inquiry.
There is also a very good series on Radio 4 by Neil Wallis the journalist who covered the story, available on BBC iPlayer.
The story - and there is much more to come out, I expect - is an absolute scandal.
Who would be the Minister responsible for this scandal?
I would have said the people responsible were
(1) the software company who provide the crappy accounting program to Royal Mail (Fujitsu)
(2) the people running Royal Mail who ignored the evidence (the Chief Executive).
The Postal Affairs Minister and the Secretary of State for Business are ultimately responsible for the Post Office.
But there are lots of people responsible:
1. Those commissioning the new IT system and testing it 2. Those dealing with the complaints from sub-postmasters. 3. The internal investigators. 4. Those responsible for misleading sub-postmasters about how widespread the issues were. 5. Those making the decision to prosecute. 6. The internal lawyers responsible for how the litigation was conducted. 7. The Chief Executives and senior members of the management team. 8. The Chairman. 9. The Ministers who were ultimately responsible.
And doubtless plenty more. That’s why a thorough-going inquiry is needed.
I hope they use PB to recruit the enquiry head, there might be an obvious candidate with extensive experience in getting to the bottom of dodgy numbers.
Just give me the chance .......
Scully is looking for a non-judicial chair right now...
Meanwhile, in ludicrous demo watch: petitions both for and against pulling down statues of Sir Robert Peel, 5,000 in favour of destroying a monument to Mahatma Gandhi in Leicester, and several rival demos planned to converge very close to one another in central London today. The likely efficacy of the Met police in keeping them, at a minimum, out of missile range of each other is questionable at best.
As politics becomes more tribal, and based upon values rather than class, I'm starting to think this debate about statues is more about poking the other tribe in the eye, rather than debating history.
I'm surprised that you're only starting to think it.
In The Ten Commandments (No 4) we are told to avoid "graven images". If you visit a synagogue or travel to Israel you will notice that there are no statues, and this is why. I believe the same applies to the Islamic world, although I am not an expert. In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
Islam is the same, I believe. It's down to Allah to create man, not man. Or something like that!
If you think that the current events are an “orgy of cultural destruction” the Byzantines say hello -
And? I condemn it as a stupid and destructive act that robs future generations of valuable historical material.
Why do you have so much difficulty condemning other stupid and destructive acts that do the same?
I don't think you can have had much training as a historian if you think the Colston statue had any significant historical value. Let's put it this way: if you had to write a history of the slave trade, or a history of Bristol, can you explain how the removal of the statue to a different venue would make your job any harder? Whereas, if you were writing a history of the British empire, the destruction of documents detailing the administration of that empire would, presumably, be pretty useful (which is why, of course, they were destroyed). The Colston statue was put up 170 years after he died by a business elite who were concerned about workers striking for better pay and wanted to create a patriotic myth for them to rally around. He wasn't the most generous philanthropist in Bristol's history, his statue wasn't put up by popular subscription, it was a deliberate act of myth making by the elite who know, as now, that a bit of flag waving is a great distraction when you want to shaft the working class. It's not even a good statue.
Thank goodness you are not the arbiter of either historical or cultural or aesthetic value and what is and is not allowed to exist and remain in the public sphere. I have little interest in this specific statue, although I do think it possesses more merit than you grant - indeed, the myth-making aspect of its creation is arguably its most interesting quality.
The most important point is that the principle that cultural artifacts may be destroyed by a mob for ideological reasons must never, ever be conceded - because that is one of the most slippery of slopes, and its end the most ugly.
Efforts had been made to have the statue moved for years, met with total bad faith on the other side. I don't blame people for getting frustrated and taking the law into their own hands. The poetry of having a slaver thrown into the harbour just like his slaves were thrown from his ships was great. The violence meted out to his statue was nothing as to the violence done to innocent children in his name and for his profit. He has been fished from his watery grave intact and can now be placed in a museum with a plaque detailing his crimes. It should be a wake up call to the authorities everywhere, a welcome kick up the backside to recognise the reality of our history and remove these scoundrels from their ill-deserved pedestals.
This is completely wrong.
There were two consultations with the public, both of which said the statue should remain and that further explanatory plaques should be added to explain the context. Of course the left wing council didn't like this result and so have done bugger all about this in the hope that exactly what has happened would happen. All the bad faith has been on the side of the council who have looked to the mob to achieve what democracy stopped them from doing.
Tory councillor objected to the wording in 2018 and suggested "if this partisan and nauseous plaque is approved, I can not find it in my heart to condemn anyone who damages or removes it,”
I am thinking, can The Wire stay? It might be the best tv show of all time, but its sterotyping of ethnic minorities and immigrants as drug dealers and widespread use of racist language, surely means it has to be verboten these days.
I predict the phrase "Flexible Future Divergence" - or perhaps "Dynamic Democratic Alignment" - will be much heard. I know! But that's what we have come to with all this "leaving the EU" nonsense.
The adjective "Australian style" will be in there somewhere. That focus groups very well with the Stage 2 Hypertension crowd that constitutes leavers.
Yes, FM replaced with an "Australian style points system".
And on the trade deal, Canada + a fee + ECJ + LPF.
Which I make to be a Canada PLUS PLUS PLUS.
And people don't think "Muscles" can sell that? - C'mon. It sounds ruddy brilliant.
Rightly or wrongly if it has the ECJ involved he will not be able to sell it.
If this is the case some creativity will be needed. I'm sure they will come up with something that squares the circle. I will be utterly amazed if "WTO" happens. I wish there was a Betfair market on it. I'd lay at anything up to 5 and would need 10 to back.
I must admit I have absolutely no idea what the outcome will be so I am betting no money beyond the bet I have in place with Richard N.
What is that bet?
There were two between myself and Richard Navabi. The first was £100 that Leave would win the referendum. I backed Leave in the bet even though I really didn't think we would win. I just thought with this being a betting site I ought to have the courage of my convictions. Clearly I was delighted to be proved wrong. If I remember rightly the winnings went to PB.
The second and still open - although on its last legs - is that the end result of leaving would be the UK in EFTA. Again this is me betting on my desired outcome and fully expecting to lose. And again it is for £100.
A couple of months ago I posted that I felt it was only fair to offer to close the bet and pay Richard as it looks impossibly unlikely that we will end up in EFTA now. But when I posted at the time I didn't get a reply. The offer still stands.
I am thinking, can The Wire stay? Its sterotyping of ethnic minorities and immigrants as drug dealers and widespread use of racist language, surely means it has to be verboten these days.
Superb series. Seem to recall the N word used liberally by the African-American characters.
Comments
The government also doesn't look good for having clearly been involved in lining up the departing CEO with plum new jobs, including one in the Cabinet Office (since terminated), and a number of MPs said that they now wanted her removed from the London NHS Trust.
PS there's a difference between globalisation and regionalisation.
Would you be totally minimizing their actions as 'minor damage' then?
No, of course you wouldn't. It must be hard to cope with that level of cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy, but you do so quite easily.
The *right* to do deals. All the while whilst loco UK is buffered to the front of the EU train. We do what they do. Whilst negotiating with potential replacement trains. But still choosing of our own free will to go down the same track they are on at the same speed.
Huzzah!
But there are lots of people responsible:
1. Those commissioning the new IT system and testing it
2. Those dealing with the complaints from sub-postmasters.
3. The internal investigators.
4. Those responsible for misleading sub-postmasters about how widespread the issues were.
5. Those making the decision to prosecute.
6. The internal lawyers responsible for how the litigation was conducted.
7. The Chief Executives and senior members of the management team.
8. The Chairman.
9. The Ministers who were ultimately responsible.
And doubtless plenty more. That’s why a thorough-going inquiry is needed.
As you stated in your first paragraph bugs are unavoidable so you may as well get code out the door as your desires within the second paragraph (that code will be bug free) is impossible.
Oh and agile should be attached to something like test driven development. Where tests are attached to identified use cases for the software, with additional tests added as bugs identify new use cases.
Unless firms are complete cowboys (HMRC I'm looking at you here as well) agile should when done properly deliver a viable albeit incomplete system far quicker than waterfall.
And on the trade deal, Canada + a fee + ECJ + LPF.
Which I make to be a Canada PLUS PLUS PLUS.
And people don't think "Muscles" can sell that? - C'mon. It sounds ruddy brilliant.
Thou shalt not remove thy neighbour's landmark, which they of old time have set in thine inheritance, which thou shalt inherit in the land that the LORD thy God giveth thee to possess it.
I expect the thinking extends to Gov't spending where saving a million quid on a big project such as HS2 isn't even given a second's consideration if it means challenging some shiboleth in a key meeting..
If of course there some so ill-advised. That, surely, is perjury.
Ferguson's paper of 16th March assumed the number of cases was increasing by a factor of 2.4 every 6.5 days. This is equivalent to doubling every 5 days. He based this on the Wuhan data.
The data from Italy and the UK showed that at the time, cases were doubling every two days.
Ferguson assumed the pandemic was spreading much more slowly than it actually was, and the peak would be later.
https://twitter.com/foxinsoxuk/status/1271742164268130305?s=19
In our case (and again without declaring the issue at hand) those impacted happen to be probably the most intelligent group of people you could identify. All have science phds and include a significant number of professors.
In the early days during a telephone conversation with the head of communications in a Govt Dept I was told 'we (the Govt) should have been more aware of the people we were responding to when sending out the initial letters'.
I had to bite my tongue as I was looking for support, but my thought was 'So it is ok to send out a crap letter to a dustman brushing him off then, but we deserve a more considered response because we are brighter than you'.
All people complaining should be treated equally. Or in fact it could be argued those less able to represent their argument coherently should be given more leeway in the understanding of the issue.
The thought should not be 'we can brush this lot off easily'.
I imagine with the PO issue that was the initial thought - Everything is fine, brush of the complaints, prosecute the crooks.
Why do you have so much difficulty condemning other stupid and destructive acts that do the same?
All people complaining should be treated equally. Or in fact it could be argued those less able to represent their argument coherently should be given more leeway in the understanding of the issue.'
Doesn't this apply to the Windrush people? See the recent TV docudrama about Anthony Bryan.
If you strip away all the faddy b*ll*cks then the simplest, most effective software development process is small focused systems developed with the users the whole way through the process and then communicating with other systems through effective APIs
Looks like there's only one person left defending indefensible cultural destruction now.
Then they say he will deliver the unity speech at the end of next week, 19 June, at a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
(The location of the rally had already been changed because Democratic administrators considered it to be a major health risk.)
Then they say all who attend the Tulsa rally must agree not to sue in the event that they catch Covid-19 there.
Now they say they've postponed the rally for a day out of respect for the celebration of the liberation from slavery that is usually held on 19 June, "Juneteenth".
What might go wrong next?
I was so angry when I heard it. It was a throw away comment. I don't think he had a clue as to the consequences of what he was saying.
He was the head of communications of one of our major Govt Depts!
He even eased off and looked at the clock as he crossed the line!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ol9fiOAditk
But there is no connection between religiosity and virtue. Just look at America
What strikes me is that genetics badly lagged behind evolutionary thought and until the C20 the environment was often seen as directly impacting on actual heredity so that acquired characteristics became fixed (an example of this thing being Lamarckism). Darwin had terrible trouble with this sort of question.
So 'eugenics' would not mean what it does today. It could include an entirely laudable effort to improve genes by improving the environment, never mind breeding selection. B-P for instance would have thought that he was improving the British race right then by marching slum boys up hill and down dale in the Boy Scouts. Was he therefore an eugenist? Did he also think he was improving the race permanently in its genetics? I don't know. It wouldk be interesting to hear from any PBer who has specialist knowledge of this issue in the history of eugenics.
Of course, you and I are familiar with the effect of parental environment and upbringing on their later children which is in a sense inherited if only through 1-2 generations. But sucvh a thing woiuld also have been very visible in the slums - malnutritiion, foetal alcohol syndrome, syphilis, etc. etc., and easily confounded with more specifically DNA-coded inheritance. So that may also have had a bearing on eugenic thought.
However, the story is further complicated by the fact that modern genetics developed during the early 20th century by the genetics and evolutionary thinkers such as Fisher and J. Huxley. And as finally confirmed by the Central Dogma of Watson and Crick that DNA codes fpr proteins. And some of those early C20 thinkers (not W&C) were eugeniicsts at least by common repute.
The Colston statue was put up 170 years after he died by a business elite who were concerned about workers striking for better pay and wanted to create a patriotic myth for them to rally around. He wasn't the most generous philanthropist in Bristol's history, his statue wasn't put up by popular subscription, it was a deliberate act of myth making by the elite who know, as now, that a bit of flag waving is a great distraction when you want to shaft the working class. It's not even a good statue.
Looking back fifty years, many things appear shocking.
In fifty years time, looking back on current morality, what will appear the most shocking? "How could they have killed and eaten animals?" "How could they have insisted that people in extreme pain could not have had an assisted death?". "How could they have aborted viable babies?" "How could they have allowed people with serious genetic deficiencies to have children?" Or something that seems perfectly OK and natural to us now but will be anathema to future generations.
The most important point is that the principle that cultural artifacts may be destroyed by a mob for ideological reasons must never, ever be conceded - because that is one of the most slippery of slopes, and its end the most ugly.
But, Joe Orton's plaque on Noel Rd, Islington could also be considered rather contentious, no?
He was by his own admission, a sex tourist, who liked to go to Morocco and take advantage of the poverty of underage Arab boys to ...
A nasty case of racial and sexual exploitation. I think his diaries would be much more heavily criticised now than was the case at their publication in the 1980s.
FWIW, I think Joe was .... a complete shit ... who exploited many people (including Halliwell) -- but WtBS is brilliant.
The poetry of having a slaver thrown into the harbour just like his slaves were thrown from his ships was great. The violence meted out to his statue was nothing as to the violence done to innocent children in his name and for his profit.
He has been fished from his watery grave intact and can now be placed in a museum with a plaque detailing his crimes. It should be a wake up call to the authorities everywhere, a welcome kick up the backside to recognise the reality of our history and remove these scoundrels from their ill-deserved pedestals.
I will always be on the latter, civilized side - and proud of it.
If you had an ounce of foresight, you might also wish to consider the terrible precedent it sets. What will you say if protesters from the other side of politics get violent, and start destroying monuments, buildings, texts, art etc etc that they dislike for ideological reasons? You won't have a leg to stand on.
The west coast cities were initially credited with not been hit hard, because early and hard shut down.
No uptick in NYC, makes you wonder about this idea of when 20-25% of your city has had it, seems to drop right away.
There were two consultations with the public, both of which said the statue should remain and that further explanatory plaques should be added to explain the context. Of course the left wing council didn't like this result and so have done bugger all about this in the hope that exactly what has happened would happen. All the bad faith has been on the side of the council who have looked to the mob to achieve what democracy stopped them from doing.
I am on the side of peaceful legal stuff about 99.9% of the time, but if you think direct action is never effective then you've not been paying attention to history. The more I read about the Colston statue, the more I am convinced that what the protesters did to it was entirely justified.
Tory councillor objected to the wording in 2018 and suggested "if this partisan and nauseous plaque is approved, I can not find it in my heart to condemn anyone who damages or removes it,”
The second and still open - although on its last legs - is that the end result of leaving would be the UK in EFTA. Again this is me betting on my desired outcome and fully expecting to lose. And again it is for £100.
A couple of months ago I posted that I felt it was only fair to offer to close the bet and pay Richard as it looks impossibly unlikely that we will end up in EFTA now. But when I posted at the time I didn't get a reply. The offer still stands.