Quotulatiousness

January 14, 2024

Tristin Hopper imagines the thoughts of the Toronto Police Service

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Every week, Tristin Hopper helps us understand an element of the week’s news by “imagining” the diary entries of the people or organizations involved. This week, it’s the turn of Toronto’s police department:

The Toronto police have not had a good week. After receiving widespread criticism for refusing to disperse an anti-Israel blockade targeting a north Toronto Jewish neighbourhood, video emerged this week of officers delivering coffee and donuts to the blockaders.

And so, only after a cross-section of local politicians and Jewish leaders had expressed bafflement at police inaction, did Toronto police announce plans on Thursday to actually put a stop to protests at the Avenue Road bridge. They even charged one protester with incitement of hatred for allegedly carrying a hate group’s flag at a protest in downtown Toronto.

Monday
I’m sorry — is that the sound of people wanting us to enforce the law? As in, “hey there, sworn peace officer, get in your car, go identify some criminality and use force to stop it?”

Are you sure about that, Toronto? You sure you don’t want us to instead try fixing this with a solidarity flag raising? Or maybe this is something that could be diffused with one of those equity roundtables you keep forcing us to attend.

After all, enforcing the law is a messy business. People could get hurt. This isn’t like handing out a traffic ticket or a jaywalking citation: You’re asking us to confront people who may not care that their actions are illegal, and may employ additional illegal methods to dispute that.

Tuesday
I’m still trying to get my head around this new paradigm. So to refresh: when people break laws, you want us to stop that? The Criminal Code. The Highway Traffic Act. The Controlled Substances Act. You want our officers to read up on contemporary legislation, seek out violators of said legislation, and then apply appropriate sanctions?

This is a minefield, frankly. We’re talking raised voices. Mean tweets. People in handcuffs. Unflattering videos. Outraged Toronto Star columns. This is how we board an escalator that may soon make us pine for the days when our only problems were an easily ignored minority demographic having their overpass shut down.

Wednesday
When we’re enforcing these laws, are you absolutely sure you want us to do this without first checking if they’re politically acceptable? I mean, it would obviously streamline everything if roadways were only ever blockaded by white supremacist cannibal pedophiles, but that’s rarely the case.

And what if they’re doing an illegal thing that is tangentially related to something you like? I had our legal guy look into it and he said that any laws broken as a result of a public protest are still illegal – the right to protest only covers legal things, it turns out. So bear with me; this could result in a city in which graffiti, blockades and vandalism OF ANY KIND could end up banned. It’s a slippery slope.

Soviet and American Massive Attacks – Week 281 – January 13, 1945

Filed under: Asia, Britain, France, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 13 Jan 2024

In the East, the Soviets launch a massive series of new offensives. In the West, Monty holds an ill-judged press conference about the Battle of the Bulge. Operation Nordwind, the German offensive in Alsace, continues. In Hungary, there’s house to house fighting as the Red Army besieges Budapest. In Asia, the Allies wrestle with the Kamikazes, begin their landings on Luzon, and advance in Burma.

00:54 Intro
01:12 Recap
01:22 Montgomery’s Press Conference
05:53 Operation Nordwind
07:07 The battle for Hungary
09:38 The huge Soviet offensive begins!
12:22 American landings on Luzon
15:29 Anti-Kamikaze tactics
18:11 Slim’s advance in Burma
21:11 Conclusion
(more…)

The insane miscarriage of justice in Britain’s Post Office and the courts

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Law — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The British Post Office (formerly the Royal Mail) has spent the last several years prosecuting many of its own staff for financial skulduggery uncovered by the Post Office’s computer system. Many people have been convicted and punished, yet it now comes to light that the real culprit is the faulty accounting methods used in the Post Office’s Horizon software:

“Atten-SHUN! EIIR Red Pillar Boxes” by drivethr? is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

What went wrong at the Post Office over that Horizon computer system is being described as very difficult, complicated, we’ll never really find out and Whocouddaknowed?

This is not correct. The Post Office knowed, ICL knowed, Fujitsu knowed.

Therefore and thus, as I’ve said before, just Jail Them All. There will be some who will be able to argue their way out on the basis of their innocence and that’s fine, even great. But let’s start with everyone on the right side of the bars.

It’s long been — as I’ve said — common gossip among programmers that the base problem really was pretty base. The Horizon system counted incompletes as a transaction. So, a transaction is going through and it doesn’t quite make it. Communication problems, something. A sensible system looks at incompletes and ignores them. Only completes, fully handshaken and agreed, change the accounting ledgers. Horizon did not do this. It would count the incomplete as one transaction, then when the full one came through count that as an additional, extra, transaction.

This is how a branch thought it had one number, the centre another. Because the branch regarded the incomplete and the resend as only the one transaction, the centre as two.

But common gossip among programmers isn’t enough, obviously.

It’s bad enough that glitchy software could cause such human tragedy, but it’s worse: Post Office management knew and chose to cover it up.

Inside Pz II Luchs | A WW2 Time Capsule

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published 13 Oct 2023

A remarkably rare vehicle, with just 100 built and just two still in existence, the Panzer II Ausf.L “Luchs” is a reconnaissance variant of the Panzer II and this is one of the most intact and original vehicles we have in our collection. Join Chris Copson as he looks inside this Second World War rarity.
(more…)

QotD: The misleading wisdom of the ancient world

Filed under: Europe, History, Quotations, Science, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It is difficult for us, today, to take some of the teachings of the ancients seriously. The ancient Greeks believed, for example, that peacock flesh did not rot, and that various small creatures — think mice, maggots, and clams — spontaneously generated from inanimate matter like wheat, meat, and sand.

These seem, today, to be so obviously wrong that our ancestors seem stupid. But they were not. Have you, for example, ever actually observed a mouse being born? And if you’d never seen a peacock, might you not also believe that its flesh really does not rot? We generally do, even now, take our facts on authority, trusting that somebody, somewhere, has observed them or performed the relevant experiments and found them to be true. In fact, things can get all the more convincing when we try the experiments ourselves. I described last week how the rapid “growth” of metals in certain solutions seemed to confirm the theory that they also grew, albeit much more slowly, underground. Or take Jan-Baptiste van Helmont, who in the early seventeenth century reported that, having placed some wheat and a sweaty shirt in a barrel, lo and behold, a few days later there appeared some mice. Spontaneous generation confirmed! (He also, somehow, found that small scorpions spontaneously generated from placing basil under a brick in the sun.) In fact, the persistence of spontaneous generation as a theory should give us pause — although it was tested from the seventeenth century onwards, it was only finally completely debunked by Louis Pasteur in the 1860s.

How could the authority of the ancients be so potent for so long? Well, consider the context. Today, in a world of skyscrapers, indoor plumbing, and the widespread use of horse-less metal chariots, we rarely think that the ancients were in any way more advanced than us. We would, automatically, question them. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, in a world of wooden houses, dirt floors, and carts, then the still-standing achievements of the ancients must have been mind-blowing: centuries-old pyramids, aqueducts, amphitheatres, and arenas, not to mention the written accounts of technologies long lost. Archimedes had allegedly set fire to Roman ships at the siege of Syracuse in the 3rd century BCE, using only mirrors focusing the sun’s beams. Archytas had apparently made a flying pigeon out of wood, and Daedalus had achieved human flight. Perhaps Vulcan’s legendary army of iron men might have been real automata.

Anton Howes, “Trusting the Ancients”, Age of Invention, 2019-10-10.

Powered by WordPress