Home » 2017 » August

Monthly Archives: August 2017

An article by Lindsey German of the Stop the War coalition

28/08/2017 10:18 / Leave a comment

Afghanistan: There Is Only One Solution | The Bullet No. 1474

Peering into the pit

25/08/2017 08:52 / Leave a comment

From julijuxtaposed

Juli's avatarjuxtaposed

What?
It’s more complex
Than you’d assumed;
Than you’ve reduced it to?
Well: who knew..?
And whatcha gonna do, now?
Back down, gracefully,
Run away
Or fetch a bigger spade?

Law of holes

View original post

fire and fury

11/08/2017 09:41 / Leave a comment

From julijuxtaposed

Juli's avatarjuxtaposed

Fire and fury blazing,
Skin in the game schemes,
Glazed, flaming orange,
Power frankly keen,
As though it burned,
Mid-circles, in a furnace
Fit to raze,
With an arsenal, he swore,
The likes of which this world
Has never seen before

”And as I said they will be met with fire, fury and frankly, power… the likes of which this world has never been seen before.” ~ Donald J Trump, 8/8/2017

View original post

EXCLUSIVE #Disability Discrimination means Son is removed from Home?

09/08/2017 10:47 / 1 Comment on EXCLUSIVE #Disability Discrimination means Son is removed from Home?

A new series by Jayne Linney:

jaynel62's avatarjaynelinney

The following true tale is the introduction into what will be a series of posts regarding a seeming miscarriage of justice and potential disability discrimination; names have been changed to protect the identities of these involved. The purpose of this post is to help the family concerned achieve real justice; please share as widely as possible.

Alison is a single parent of14 year old Adam, both live with various diagnosed and pending diagnosis health disorders including Fibromyalgia and Elhers Danos; Alison is also Autistic and symptoms suggest Adam is as well.

Due to Adams health, he found it difficult to cope with school from the beginning and despite special educational needs intervention, including one to one lessons he struggled experiencing bullying which resulted in him developing depression. These experiences became worse during Adams transition from junior to senior school, so much so that in 2015, Alison began to home educate…

View original post 343 more words

“Rapidly improving” technology may be bad for your health

05/08/2017 17:46 / Leave a comment

I’ve just seen this newspaper report (below). “Police will use facial recognition software”, it says, “to scan the faces of tens of thousands of revellers at this year’s Notting Hill Carnival” (a multi-ethnic, multicultural, multi-everything annual festival). The people who go to the carnival go there to celebrate all those multi-type things. But that’s not how everybody sees it apparently: the police seem to have told The Guardian that for them it’s “the biggest annual public order test for the Metropolitan police”. So they must look forward to it, mustn’t they?
    The police have explained how their software works: overt cameras will
scan the faces of those passing by and flag up potential matches against a database of custody images. The database will be populated with images of individuals who are forbidden from attending carnival, as well as individuals wanted by police.
They’re doing it again this year because they tried it last year. So it was successful then, was it? Er, no: last year “it failed to pick out any suspects”. But the technology is said to be “improving rapidly”. Now, there’s a worry. Anybody on a computer, a phone or a tablet who updates regularly knows that “improvements” are not all good news. So last year’s technology that failed to pick out suspects could by now have developed an even more useful ability to pick out people even if they’re not “suspects” at all, people who are not “wanted offenders”, not “individuals wanted by police”, who don’t match a “custody image” because they’ve never been in custody. They just vaguely look like, and so are a “potential match” for, somebody in a blurred photo buried in the file of an unsolved case back at the police station. “Picking out”, in fact, some of the perfectly innocent people who make up the vast majority at the Notting Hill Carnival and rendering them guilty.
    Of course, the police don’t need rapidly improving technology to do this – they already do it as part of their ordinary day-to-day and night-to-night activities. But the technology will help, we can be sure of that. And for the police, the Carnival is an ideal testing ground. I once knew a young black man in Hackney, East London, who was arrested and charged with throwing a brick at a policeman’s head. After being bundled into a police van, he heard one officer express doubts that they had the real culprit. “No, it’s him,” said the other officer. “Anyway, they all look alike, don’t they?” The young man was convicted, even though witnesses said the brick-thrower was tall – this man was short; and even though the police said they had to chase him through the housing estate because he had run away from them and up a flight of stairs to his flat – which he couldn’t have done because he was disabled. He got 6 years in jail, but luckily it was shortened because lots of people made a fuss. But he never got his conviction quashed. There were no cameras in the Hackney case and no facial recognition technology. Just 2 policemen who were “just doing our duty, sir”.
    Gawd ‘elp us all, now they’ve got “rapidly improving” technology.
Here’s the article: