Letby Appeal Denied

And in other news...

I could start this post by saying ‘I told you so’ but… oh wait, I sort of just did, didn’t I?

Sorry about that!

So many questions, so few answers

All anyone is allowed to say is that Dame Victoria Sharp, in session with Lord Justice Holyroyde, has announced that Lucy Letby has been unsuccessful in her bid for appeal. Let’s be frank here - while the language of criminal courts and court reporting always seeks to attach everything directly to the defendant, it should never be forgotten that it means now that the current legal team acting on her behalf are batting 0 for 2. KC Myers failed to persuade the court to allow Lucy to appeal. Lucy, as is normal for these situations, very likely said nothing at all during the entirety of proceedings.

We are not allowed to discuss the four grounds that were raised in requesting the appeal because, and until, the further prosecution of Lucy for the baby, Baby K, that was not prosecuted during the original trial (and any others the police investigation and Dewi Evans can bring forth). As a society we need to discuss whether it is necessary, cost effective or, as the legal parlance would say, in the public interest, to conduct further litigation against Lucy. What is it in aid of? It isn’t possible to increase what is already a whole-of-life sentence. In many cases the parents of the babies will have moved on with their lives and so all you are doing for many of them is opening an old and best left alone wound. That leave that the only reason for litigation beyond police and prosecutorial vexatiousness to be that the NHS want to be able to move the babies off of one part of their mortality spreadsheet… to another. Not really a valid reason for spending yet more millions and definitely not in the public interest.

We should also be discussing the fact that while Lucy has been castigated in court, the media and in parliament for not attending the final sentence hearing to be told what was already a foregone conclusion (which resulted in new criminal procedures mandating attendance by the defendant), while several of Lucy’s accusers were and continue to remain anonymous. Lucy was not even allowed to face her accusers. Her accusers could say anything they wanted on the stand without fear for their own lives, positions or potential retribution from the NHS, insurers or the families of the babies. The way it has been described sounds as though they were unwilling to give their testimony unless they got anonymity, which in and of itself is incredible. If you are telling the truth and are as beyond reproach yourself as you claim to be… why do you need anonymity? Could it be that you have some potential involvement in events that means you don’t want to possibly come into future question yourself? Or do you have some skeletons in your closet that you are afraid someone in the general public might ferret out?

I wonder…

We should not forget that the judge in Lucy’s case gave what I like to call an inference instruction. He effectively instructed the jury that even though there was no direct evidence at all to convict Lucy, they could infer her guilt based on what the prosecution presented to them. To my mind this is an instructed verdict in all but name - but let me explain why…

For those that don’t know, there is a legal construct called an instructed verdict which is when the judge effectively takes the case, or decision, away from the jury because the evidence presented only allows for one reasonable verdict. It is usually used when some piece of evidence presented either tends to completely rule out guilt for the defendant, or in situations where the evidence is so unreliable as to be unable to support a guilty verdict. I contend that where a judge in such an egregiously circumstantial case like Lucy’s tells the jury they can infer that the defendant did something or that the defendant performed acts or that the defendant was present or any number of other possible things the evidence didn’t show her doing, what that judge is doing is: (a) signaling to the jury the direction that judge’s mind has or is taking, even though the judge is supposed to be impartial and, in a jury verdict, not involved in the guilt-or-innocence decision-making process; and (b) creating a situation whereby the jury, whose ability to give a judgement beyond reasonable doubt is already in question, is corrupted. I would argue that there is no way a jury can have made the decision beyond reasonable doubt if they had to infer (essentially imagine) culpable events that the evidence never spoke to. In this way I believe inference judgements are a deceptive form of instructed verdict that completely bypasses the rules, checks and balances necessary to an instructed verdict process.

The sad truth is that this ruling is exactly the result I predicted and, as I also foresaw, it has consumed the primary appeals process for Lucy. Given what happened in the trial new counsel with very significant appeals process experience should have been engaged - and either (or both) of two grounds argued: (i) trial counsel competence - given that the defence case in chief during trial was severely wanting; and/or (ii) that where it wasn’t trial counsel competence but related to judicial decisions during voir dire, these judicial decisions should hav been investigated and appealed. In any event, new counsel and a thorough review was a necessity. But alas, it never happened.

The Politisphere

You would have to be living in a cave somewhere to not have seen images of Rishi Sunak, Britain’s unelected Prime Minister, standing in the spitting rain to announce his resignation by way of calling a general election on our American cousins Independance Day (July 4th). Several comentators have pointed out that rushing to election at the moment strongly supports two assertions, that: (i) Rishi doesn’t want to be a war-time Prime Minister and we are effectively throwing pebbles at Russia sufficient to suggest we are or soon will be at full-blown war; and (ii) this is not so much a contested election as a covertly designed handover of power to the globalist’s next pick - Kier Starmer. That the government also started fearporning to us this week to stock up on at least three days supply of essentials in case there was another pandemic, solar coronal mass ejection, bird flu, war or [insert apocalyptic event here] was little more than the icing on the cake. Distraction politics at its best.

Strangely, one of the more notorious self-appointed lord-it-over-us globalists, WEF leader Klaus Schwab, also publicly announced he was stepping down. It will be interesting to see which similarly egocentric megalomaniac will take his place and, whether just like at the WHO, it will be another Gates-controlled puppet figure.

As countries like Australia, Canada and the UK all double-down on policies to demonstrate their adherence to the WEFs wet-dream net-zero-carbon-tax-15-minute-ghetto-digital-ID future, we all should be concerned about what is happening in this part of the politisphere.

It’s not paranoia if Big Brother IS watching you

Implementation of online harms and digital ID laws in western countries has expanded the already existing surveillance state. It was already true that traffic cameras (speed cameras and red light cameras) were already tracing every car that passes them - not just those committing an offence. And it was true that bliptrack bluetooth tracking on motorways and in government and public buildings has been tracking our motor vehicles linked to the devices (smartphones, watches, tablets and computers) in them, and those devices when we enter buildings. And it has been true for some time that automated number plate recognition and facial recognition and other imaging technologies have been used to identify us and our vehicles when we enter malls, supermarkets and even walk along public footpaths. Supermerkets and other commercial entities have been collecting our personal details, bank card details and shopping habits… blah blah blah. The online harms laws increase internet surveillance and make every person that interacts with you or your posts online a potential snitch - whether simply policing and censoring each other or, more likely, because they get to pretend something you said harmed them in some way with so-called hurty words. That said, and as I have said before, the digital ID laws are the icing on the cake. They help the government to ensure they have some way to link everything you do online to you. The ostensibly ‘voluntary’ but guaranteed to become mandatory if only by necessity and ‘your choice’ to participate in society digital ID laws put the government in between you and every person you conduct financial transactions or electronically interact with. What better way to make sure you pay tax, and more tax, and never get away with doing anything that doesn’t allow the government to collect their tax. The digital ID laws will allow the government a new and extremely powerful way to link you with actions performed online - if, no matter how tenuously, they can link your digital ID to that action. You will have little ability to defend yourself because it’s their system, their surveillance data, and they will certify it reliable even if you have strong evidence you didn’t do it.

And the digital ID is possibly the final step in the process to implement CBDCs.

Cloud was never better

Over the course of his week I have assisted technicians and clients to deal with an issue that sadly is going to become more common. While many large institutions and organisations have outsourced services such as web-hosting and email to ‘the cloud’, there are still a good many sensible companies operating their own in-house email systems. Microsoft (Outlook365) and Google (GMail) have created policies and processes that could fairly be described as being increasingly hostile to anyone not using their particular flavour of platform. From technical requirements that are little more than duplication of effort (SPF and DMARC?) to deliberately incorrectly identifying other service providers as sources of spam, even when they are not. Each of these things adds to the workload of IT technologists who manage independant systems. This week we saw a new issue that I wasn’t expecting.

IT administrators of independant email systems have been discussing online the fact that email sent to their users from users or domains hosted on the dominant Microsoft and Gmail platforms has been randomly bouncing. Or rather, that users of the Microsoft and Gmail platforms are telling them that they receive a bounceback randomly when sending email. Over the last week I have had such Microsoft platform users send me the technical data from the bounceback emails and, surprisingly, actually learned something from it. Whilst the email to their users makes it appear that the email was bounced by the recieving ‘independant’ (i.e. non-Microsoft) server, the technical data shows the bounce actually occurs when Microsoft’s own datacentre servers pass email between each other.

Let me explain: [ALERT: boring explanation follows]

Within Microsoft’s platform there are several ‘types’ of email (known as Exchange) server. Some, known as mailbox servers (or MB) store the mailbox data. There are others known as Client Access Servers (CAS) that Microsoft platform users connect to (whether via the outlook web access web pages or by syncing using a smartphone or outclook mail client). And then there are Transport servers that receive messages from and transmit messages to the people you communicate with. The Transport servers are often run as services on CAS servers, but can also be run independant of the CAS services.

The email bounceback logs showed that Microsoft’s own CAS servers were passing user emails to other Exchange servers that were performing the external Transport function, and that the second server would contact the “independant” email server. The independant server would advise Microsoft’s Transport server that it was on a DNS blocklist (Sorbs, Spamhaus or similar) but, based on rules we had configured after we saw what was happening, to send the email anyway and that the recieving server would arbitrate whether to deliver it to the recipient mailbox.

The surprising error was that the Microsoft server appeared to be ignoring the ‘send anyway’ (an ACK or ‘ready to receive’) and was self-censoring (bouncing) the email internally back to the initiating CAS server. This explained why we could see nothing in the independant server’s logs after it told the sending Microsoft server to proceed to explain why nothing happened, no email was received and the connection simply timed out.

As a further check, we collected the IP addresses of the sending Microsoft Transport servers from Microsoft’s Sydney datacentre where our clients were being told their senders had received a bounceback and checked them in DNS blacklists and, every time, found the IP addresses registered as on automatic temporary block. This is the part that is going to become more common. Effectively, Microsoft and GMail’s own servers host hundreds of thousands of domains and tens of millions of users. Some of those users act improperly and abuse them to send spam. When they do it is the sending (transmitting) server’s IP address that is registered on the blocklist, and only sometims the user email account. This explains why one user from a Microsoft- or GMail- hosted domain will bounce, while another user whose email sent minutes later that gets randomly assigned to and sent from a different Transport server gets through.

The strange thing here was that in each case it looked as though the reporting server (the server making the automatic report to the blocklist host) was also a Microsoft server IP address - so effectively, Microsoft’s servers were ratting themselves out and while their own servers would then exchange emails internally okay, they were actually refusing to send emails to external servers that identified that they were aware the Microsoft server was on a blocklist - even those that were configured to ignore the blocklist and receive anyway. It is not surprising that the email sent to the users when their message bounced made it seem like it was the independant receiving email server that was causing the problem. Microsoft are famous for making their issue someone else’s problem.

Technology sometimes gives me a headache.

So there we have it.

On a week where several rich globalists signalled their retreat from the limelight before the brown stuff hits the rotating air spreader, and where digital ID laws made their first jack-booted step onto the necks of Australian citizens, a young nurse had her appeal against circumstantially supported convictions and an inference ‘instructed judgement’ refused.