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State of the Union – politicalbetting.com
State of the Union – politicalbetting.com
Welcome to the first in a strictly limited series. Every Monday [1] for the next 9 weeks, I’ll be doing a rundown of the forecasts from the main poll aggregators and analysts [2] for the 2024 US elections. Hopefully this will be useful as a baseline and a reference point for everyone.
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I see the Russian stock market is tanking again today. Not that I'm suggesting we can afford to relax. More a sign that we should keep our foot on the accelerator.
Dude! Nice article!
Also big thanks @Andy_Cooke for his recent piece on FPTP at GE24.
These Ukrainian drones look like unsophisticated V1s except that they know where they are going. How on earth are they getting through Russian air defence (yes, I know there is a meme here)? Either there is some sophisticated radar mapping going on or they've run out of missiles.
The closest were IDP (investors thing) with 4% and Zogby and Axios/SurveyMonkey with 5%
Harris does seem to be doing better than Hillary Clinton did in 2016 in the EC though, when she got just 227 EC votes even if doing not much better in the popular vote than the 48.2% Hillary got. The Senate and House elections look close too
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Abmm85aqeWk
Stand-up maths guy in a follow-up to his Count Binface count agent experience.
(See, for example*, Nate Silver, 2008.)
*And any successful predictions I have made.
https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/david-davis-lucy-letby-trial-innocent-conservatives-b2605544.html
Not only did I nearly DIE this morning after being hurled from my canoe into the notoriously lethal class 834 “borovi” rapids of the world’s third deepest river canyon I have just this minute found THESE
The Accursed Mountains are behind me and the stupefying Piva Gorge opens ahead, but right in front of me are these. The “stecci”, mysterious 13-15th century warrior tombs that no one quite understands, often engraved with pagan and pre-Christian symbols (swastikas, wheels, running deer) and placed in awesome noomy spots - like this - all of which says to some scholars the tradition of the stecci might actually stretch back to Eurasia’s megalithic past, to Stonehenge, Ggantija and even Gobekli Tepe
Now, a beer
We must have had under 10 days of actual summer weather this year.
I blame the Labour government.
When Stealth tech came in, this reduced the radars with a detection range of 300 miles to a detection range of barely 20 miles. Which meant that instead of complete coverage, there were just small dots of coverage on a bi, big map.
At that point the end of the Soviet Union came and there was no money to replace everything. So the old radars soldiered on, with less and less belief in their usefulness....
The Russians still haven't really got a top end AWACS system going - especially in the look down area. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beriev_A-50 has a very limited number of airframes. And serviceability is terrible.
They did spend a lot on interceptors with look down capability - such as the Mig-31. But there are serviceability issues there and they've been using them, a lot, for lobbing missiles *at* Ukraine.
Colour me sceptical.
And as we know, an awful lot of wrongful convictions occur.
https://pressgazette.co.uk/media_law/new-yorker-lucy-letby-reporting-restrictions-contempt-of-court/
Which would have been "indefinite detention of Muslims, without trial", given the prevailing terrorism threat of the day....
But, hey, it must be good - all suspects are guilty. Obviously. Otherwise, they wouldn't be suspect!
Just like the Forrest Gate chaps.
In the words of a recent survivor of a life threatening existence - enough. Time to move the UK south by 500 miles. We have enough engineers on PB - there must be away?
Or if not relocating the UK, lets roll back on our climate change mitigation. I keep being promised a warmer UK with a mediterranean climate - bring it on! Fire up the wood burners, tear down the wind farms and solar parks and burn that coal.
Enough.
Seems as much of a toss up as last time to me, and the polls are closer than they were then, too....
Ie lots and lots of dreary cool greyness, all year, but the odd blasting week of hot hot hot. Except we won’t get the fun Alaskan snow
It helps that I am typing this in balmy 26C on the Montenegrin plateau with a cold Niksicko beer
David Cameron gave him wide latitude on the Home Affairs brief and he could have achieved much but he chose to quit.
Did you read the article?
In general we have terrible recall of weather from the past. I've been going on holiday to North Devon since I was born. My childhood memories are of sunny days on the beach, every day for a week. And yet that cannot be true (and asking my parents confirms it as not true). There was also the notorious bank holiday weather of 1986 - the Birmingham Superprix was on. We sat in the car at the beach and watched the rain lash down for hours.
And yet this summer has been so dire that even I am downhearted...
What I've found from living here is that my definition of what qualifies as wet weather has shifted. We had an enjoyable day out at Fota park a week ago. Perhaps half an inch of rain fell in the three or four hours we spent wandering around watching the big cats, giraffes, etc. It certainly wasn't dry, as such, but it wasn't so wet that it would keep you indoors.
And today it's roasting. 19.1C and I'm melting it's so hot.
Any idea of letting the Guilford 4, The Birmingham 7, Sally Clark etc out of prison is disgusting. In fact, let's hang them.
All suspects are guilty. Otherwise they wouldn't be suspect.
Blooming autocorrect.
If you read weather geeks then quite a few are saying this is genuine climate change. Britain is shifting into a worse wetter greyer climate
Paradoxically it will be warmer - or appear to be warmer - but that will come from milder but greyer winters and from greater warmth overnight due to more cloud cover
We will get the worst of all worlds. Or, I should say, YOU will
Probably the best place to live in Britain will be northern Scotland which might gain from more clear skies
Lots of posts here on the theme of "Trump is deranged, again. Kamala normal, so wins"
The 45% behind Trump are voting for a fictional Trump. Their Saviour. They manage to turn any negative into a positive for him - convictions prove he is being persecuted etc. The actual real Trump is almost irrelevant in this, except by existing, to keep the self generated cult going.
It’s been best the further East you go. Like today. 24 degrees and sunny skies at my vineyard weather station in East Kent, 21 here in London.
It's just in the case of Stephen Lawrence, it really shows what they are about.
I suppose the @Stark_Dawnings of PB would have been applauding the sub-postmaster convictions.
The AMOC (the Gulf Stream) is breaking down and - perhaps - the jet stream is veering south more often
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a46989602/amoc-collapse/
Looking back to the 1980s, better an engineer than a scientist, too.
But:
1. The rise has been greater in winter than summer
2. It’s still awful by international standards. Unutterably awful. Almost Aleutian levels of awfulness. Even down here in the South.
But they perhaps can be explained away. And she would make a very convenient scapegoat for systematic failures in a hospital. Who would want another Stafford case, if you can just blame one convenient nurse?
The UK has still not recovered from the global financial crisis or more generally from the effects of Labour’s last term of office.....
Worth a read, I think if only for the giggles:
https://conservativehome.com/2024/09/02/danny-kruger-only-jenrick-is-serious-about-the-challenges-facing-our-party-and-country/
You need to start with the 56 page court of appeal judgment, see if anything in that is properly open to precise criticism.
You then have to guess why the defence didn't call its experts (see para 5), using the obvious explanation unless you have a better one.
Then draft, in ordinary English, the precise (not vague or hand waving) ground or grounds which you argue render the convictions unsafe either because of fresh evidence (be precise), or that the evidence for the prosecution was in precise ways false, or failed to give scope for a jury to convict. Note there was corroboration of the evidence.
Then ask and explain why the defence didn't use your grounds in their appeal.
General and imprecise points about stats, rotas, other reasons for dying etc won't do.
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/R-v-Letby-Final-Judgment-20240702.pdf
The diaries seem to be relating to guilt and self-hatred that I imagine might (might) come with presiding over, but not necessarily being responsible for an undoubtedly large number of infant deaths.
"I'm not swimming in the rain!" I thought.
Then I realised how utterly stoopid that was...
*I was going ice skating, if you must know. Followed by Nando's.
Juries make decisions to the best of their abilities depending upon the evidence they are given. One party to the trial in this case was the NHS. Ponder that for a moment.
Nor the 45% on the other side who are excited by a Harris presidency etc.
It's the 10% who are undecided or persuadable that matter now.
Edit: here it is, the original seems no longer to be available.
https://londonletter.substack.com/p/special-edition-the-lucy-letby-new
Edit: I mean there wasn't any evidence that she killed anyone but that doesn't seem to have mattered. Is that ever a factor in such trials? That there needs to be evidence for the crime. Perhaps not. Read the article and get back to me.
How did one honorific colonise our language?
By Michael Duggan"
https://thecritic.co.uk/march-of-the-guys/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c24p2l11y12o
As I understand things the prosecution expert witness cold approached the police in the first place & was involved in the building of the prosecution case before appearing on the stand as an expert witness. He also had previous history in the courts where an appeal judge described him as “tendentious and partisan”. Unfortunately for Letby’s defence, it turns out that, even if you convince a jury that a witness might be biased, if you don’t give them any alternative explanation for the facts of the case the jury may well decide that the only story they have been given is most probably the correct one.
Having failed to call their expert witness in the original trial none of their expert evidence can be used at appeal, leaving any appeal dead in the water without any new evidence.
In this interpretation the legal strategy decided on by her defence completely undermined whatever case they might have had & made it impossible to appeal afterwards.
It does seem that, whatever else one might think of this case, the presentation to the jury of an “expert witness” as an independent third party bringing their neutral opinion to the court was completely at odds with reality & the wider context of the use of expert witnesses by the court in this fashion needs to be looked at.
You’d lose your shit if I labelled every pro Israeli as pro genocide for Israeli’s actions in the occupied territories ?
a few participants absolutely loved his voice which they compared to David Attenborough and suggested he ought to have a career in Audio Books.
https://www.moreincommon.org.uk/media/r4hodhtk/conservative-leadership-election-focus-groups-media-briefing-2-sept-2024.pdf
There was <20mm rain last month and the second half of July was completely dry with no rain at all.
No complaints from me (except when it was a bit too hot).
Montenegro is one of the wettest countries in Europe, if not the wettest, BTW.
Do PBers listen to that prog btw? It's kind of a Centrist Dad heaven. You get the elegant (although slightly self-regarding and infused with class privilege) lilt of Rory Stewart interspersed with the pungent throb of Alastair Campbell, the both of them highly articulate, rational, animated by a deep dislike of populism. You listen to it for an hour or so and come away feeling calmer and more cheerful and grounded than when you started. Not many political podcasts do that but this one does.
A quibble though. There's a nice mix of centre left and centre right sentiment but this doesn’t map across to objective neutrality on the parties. Stewart is not a partisan tory. He finds it easy to criticise them and to say positive things about Labour. Campbell otoh is the definition of tribal. He can’t say anything good about the Conservatives or bad about Labour (now it’s his sort of Labour again under SKS as opposed to the Corbyn version) without choking. This (imo) rather unbalances the show.
But yes, I do occasionally listen to RiP...
TL;DR: there's currently a gag order on Lucy Letby reporting because she is due to face trial again on one of the counts the original jury was hung on.
I was confused why the New Yorker (and other magazines) were unable to report, and now I know.
Firstly, if there is no evidence that Letby killed someone, then she can't be convicted. I think you may mean there is no smoking gun or video of the events. There usually isn't. Evidence is often a series of threads of connecting evidence about time, place, opportunity, motive.
The article. It's journalism. Thus far I cannot piece together, from this article, enough fragments to draft a short paragraph to describe why there are grounds to think the conviction is unsafe.
Like Private Eye, it relies on an utterly desperate suggestion about the defence and why it called no expert evidence when it is known that they had expert reports:
"Perhaps it had seemed that the prosecution's case was so weak that defence experts weren't necessary".
I have a bridge to sell them if they believe any counsel, with a client who is going to get a whole life order on conviction, would fail to call scientific evidence that would help their case. (And do the same on the retrial).
One small further point. I am keeping an open mind. The strongest case were the insulin cases, which were not the subject of the appeal specifically, unlike the embolism ones. I have not yey noticed even generalised hand waving about those. IIRC correctly it is not disputed by the defence that these babies were murdered. Worth keeping an eye on that element of the case.