Paul Davey

Un-populist, catmatic & possiblist
Believer in universal human rights & cats
(Here since 2004 and still unverified)

[Florence Lox 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 @floboflo]

The far-right hear about a kid being thrown into a crocodile enclosure and their first thought isn’t is the kid okay but was the perpetrator black.
This is a mental illness.

[Lawfare @lawfare]

The Justice Department quietly deleted thousands of press releases about the Jan. 6 insurrection
So Lawfare restored them: more than 5,700 pages recovered and publicly archived.

@TylerMcBrien, Michael Feinberg, and Benjamin Wittes explain how. https://t.co/qtcxOnOmfa

[Mary Aspinall-Miles @MAMBarLife]

If you believe in fate, here lies the person to answer the question: how can #DrWho saved (again)?
An icon.
“We are gray. We stand between the darkness and the light.”

[Joanna Hardy-Susskind @Joanna__Hardy]

David Lammy’s proposals to restrict the right to jury trial have been examined by the Justice Committee of the House of Commons.

And. Well. Um.

It’s *quite* the report.

I think it’s actually worse than politely scathing.

It’s embarrassing 👇🏼🪡🧵

[Paul Davey @pauldavey]

@DrSarteschi cf the British cop when someone quoted Magna Carta
"And are you are a baron sir?"

"Is the Amnesty Coalition a signatory to the Vienna Conventions sir?"
"Are you accredited by the State Dept?"

Expel him without Persona Non Grata 😀

[Paul Davey @pauldavey]

@davidyelland @VirginAtlantic @Virgin #FirstClassWorldProblems?

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Ring paid somewhere between $8 and $10 million for a 30-second Super Bowl spot to tell 120 million viewers that their cameras now scan neighborhoods using AI.

The math is wild. Ring has roughly 20 million devices in American homes. Search Party is enabled by default. The opt-out rate on default settings in consumer tech is historically around 5%. So approximately 19 million cameras are now running AI pattern matching on anything that moves past your front door. Today the target is dogs. The same infrastructure already handles “Familiar Faces,” which builds biometric profiles of every person your camera sees, whether they know about it or not.

Ring settled with the FTC for $5.8 million after employees had unrestricted access to customers’ bedroom and bathroom footage for years. They’re now partnered with Flock Safety, which routes footage to local law enforcement. ICE has accessed Flock data through local police departments acting as intermediaries. Senator Markey’s investigation found Ring’s privacy protections only apply to device owners. If you’re a neighbor, a delivery driver, a passerby, you have no rights and no recourse.

This tells you everything about Amazon’s actual product. The customer paid for the camera. The customer pays the electricity. The customer pays the $3.99/month subscription. And Amazon gets a surveillance grid that would cost tens of billions to build from scratch, with an AI layer activated by default, and a law enforcement pipeline already connected.

They wrapped all of that in a lost puppy commercial because that’s the only version of this story anyone would willingly opt into.

[Ladies Who Like Baseball @LONTDC1]

May the ghost of Katharine Graham haunt Jeff Bezos for the rest of his life.

She had the backbone & balls @JeffBezos will never have.

[(((Charles Fishman))) 💧 @cfishman]

Detail from inside the gutting of the Washington Post:

300 journalists or so will be fired this AM at 8:30 AM (right now…).

They’ll be cut off from newsroom computer access at 9 AM.

Word got out about this yesterday afternoon.

Dozens of reporters & journalists worked late last night & early this AM to finish stories they had in process before being shut out.

That’s who works at the Post. No surprise.

<I interviewed these people — this is a good, valuable story. Let me just get it done…before I lose my job & worry about how to pay my rent.>

One last story.

— 30 —

[Paul Davey @pauldavey]

@TomChivers Every mass communication technology seems to inspire a generational panic about its alleged effect on young people.
Internet 1.0, video games, videos, TV, comic books, radio, movies, and pulp fiction.
All the way back to Socrates and the written word.

https://t.co/ivec4C6hnM

[Paul Davey @pauldavey]

@DanNeidle @herrvonari76181 I recall a local government official speaking about the challenges of replacing rates with the poll tax in the 1990s.
As he said, the easy thing about taxing property is that IT DOESN'T MOVE.

[Michael Weiss @michaeldweiss]

Kash Patel wanted to go jet skiing with the head of MI5. He then tweeted a photo taken at Windsor Castle with the intel heads of Five Eyes, even though some of them are non-disclosed. This is Henry James written in finger paint. https://t.co/il7que8hX1

[Led By Donkeys @ByDonkeys]

BOARD OF PEACE - Season 1

[The Lancet @TheLancet]

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has made the decision to forego federal funding in order to maintain the integrity of their evidence-based work on maternal health, preventive care, and more.

Find out more in a new letter: https://t.co/vX4Gor0clH

[Larry the Cat @Number10cat]

@reformparty_uk @nadhimzahawi He's taken my advice and deleted it. Too late:

[Paul Davey @pauldavey]

@HarryScoffin They tried to introduce condominium style shared ownership as "Commonhold" in 2002, but its use by developers has been miniscule so far.
Hopefully set to change soon.

https://t.co/ZlVvNr9n6t

https://t.co/sAtap0egZ9

https://t.co/qM2VdiS5ek

[The Secret Barrister 🦋 @BarristerSecret]

It is disappointing that, in his effort to “cut through disinformation”, James has disabled replies to his thread, which itself is, erm, full of disinformation.

Juries were not the cause of the backlog.

Restricting jury trial is not the solution.

Opening the courts is.

[Paul Davey @pauldavey]

So mismanaging COVID caused not only many avoidable deaths, wasted cash in PPE graft &amp; furlough payments, AND growth is still low.

“East Asian states suppressed their epidemics within two months, had no further national lockdowns, and maintained healthy economic growth.” 7/13

[ChrisO_wiki @ChrisO_wiki]

1/ The US Government has quietly removed a memorial to Black soldiers who died in World War II from the Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten, South Limburg. The move follows a complaint from the right-wing Heritage Foundation to the American Battle Monuments Commission. ⬇️

[Gabriel Pogrund @Gabriel_Pogrund]

EXCLUSIVE w/ @ManuMidolo⁩

Prince Andrew made £15m selling a property he neither bought nor paid rent on courtesy of an opaque trust structure created by Queen Elizabeth and today administered by the King

Newly obtained docs show how he did it https://t.co/4UpYbwHdQS