Folly of the DayRecorder Is Caught Speeding Three Times by the Same Newly Installed Camera on His Own Commute — a Judge Who Could Not Learn from Evidence Presented to Him Three Times
A man whose entire professional function is to sit still, receive evidence, and revise his understanding of the facts drove past a brand-new camera at speed, received documentary proof of the fact through the post, and then drove past it at speed again — and then, having now been furnished with two independent items of evidence, did it a third time. Fifty clean years is not a mitigating circumstance here; it is the explanation. Half a century without consequence teaches a man that the road he drives every morning is a road he understands better than the people who set its limit, and that the camera is not an argument but merely furniture. The whole apparatus of a courtroom exists to compel human beings to update their beliefs against their inclinations. It emerges that the man at the front is exempt from the process he administers, at least between the hours of eight and nine.
Source: Judicial Conduct Investigations Office
The WireMagistrate Is Removed from Office for Never Once Turning Up to the Training That Would Have Told Him What a Magistrate Does
There is a species of man who wants the office and not the job, and this is the purest specimen the public records have yielded in some time: willing to be sworn, willing to be addressed as Your Worship, willing to sit in judgment on his neighbours, but not willing to read the emails explaining what any of that entailed. The induction exists precisely because the power is real and the man wielding it is not born knowing how to wield it. He appears to have concluded that he was.
Source: Judicial Conduct Investigations Office
The WireSenior Solicitor Lies to an Unrepresented Opponent, Then Emails a Newly Qualified Colleague Instructing Her to Repeat the Lie — Signing Off with a Smiling Emoji
The emoji is the whole case. A solicitor who believed she was doing something wrong would have written that email carefully, or not written it at all; a solicitor who believed she was doing something ordinary adds a little smiling face, because it is a working afternoon and this is simply how the job gets done. She had arrived at the point where dishonesty toward an unrepresented man felt collegial. The most junior person in the exchange, qualified about ten minutes and possessed of every professional incentive to do as she was told, was the only one left in the building who could still see it.
Source: Legal Futures
The WireAdvertising Regulator Rules That a Company Selling 'Unlimited' Data Ought to Have Mentioned the Limits
Every large company keeps a marketing department, a legal department and a compliance department, and the settled equilibrium between the three is that marketing writes the word 'unlimited', legal writes the fair usage policy contradicting it, and compliance files both without reading either. No individual in this arrangement is precisely lying; the lie has been distributed thinly enough across the organisation that nobody has to carry more than his own share of it. The regulator's actual function is to gather the pieces back into one room and invite the company to look at what it has built.
Source: ISPreview UK
Black-Robed EgomaniaKing's Counsel and Sitting Recorder Collects Nine Penalty Points for Speeding, Then Crosses a Red Light, and Is Formally Warned After Losing His Licence for Six Months
Nine points for speeding is not a lapse of attention; it is a settled habit, three times documented and three times ignored, and it takes real application to reach a disqualification one fixed penalty at a time. What the red light adds is the shape of the thing: a man who has already been told in writing, on three separate occasions, that the rules of the road apply to him personally, arriving at a junction and making a private determination that a second and a half is close enough for a man of his standing. A recorder spends his sitting days weighing whether other people's accounts of their own conduct are honest or merely convenient. The remarkable feature of this case is not that he broke the law repeatedly, but that the fact had to be brought to his attention by a camera.
Source: Judicial Conduct Investigations Office
The Siren LedgerRetiree Wires More Than $500,000 to a Woman Who Does Not Exist, Having First Been Warned by His Son, the FBI, the Police, the Secret Service and Adult Protective Services
The son did everything a son can do, which included assembling the evidence and delivering it to four separate agencies of the American state, and the effect upon his father was precisely nil — because the proposition actually under examination was never whether Annie was real. It was whether a retired man in San Francisco is the sort of man to whom a beautiful stranger might, at last, happen. Everyone who loved him was arguing about a Facebook account; he was defending an estimate of himself, and he was prepared to spend half a million dollars rather than revise it downward. The bubble did not pop when the evidence arrived. It popped when the money would not come out.
Source: ABC7 San Francisco
LazyTownLorry Stopped Displaying Another Company's Operator Licence Discs, with a Tachograph Last Downloaded 706 Days Earlier; the Director Explains That the Discs Were Left There by Mistake
Seven hundred and six days is not an oversight; it is a policy. Downloading a tachograph takes a man with a laptop roughly four minutes, which means that across very nearly two years somebody actively declined to spend about the length of one lunch break establishing whether his own lorry was legal — and, in the same period, also declined to glance at the two large discs in his own windscreen bearing a stranger's company name. The defence offered was that these things had been left there by mistake, which is true in the sense that a house one never enters has been left unswept by mistake. What the record shows is a man who understood the entire regulatory apparatus to be a formality being observed, somewhere, by other people, on his behalf.
Source: trans.INFO
The VillagesActor Announces That Nobody Cares About Ballet and Opera Any More, and Discovers That the People Who Do Care Have Access to the Internet
Two art forms that have outlasted plague, revolution, bombardment and the invention of the phonograph were pronounced finished by a man whose own medium is younger than the electric light, on the apparent evidentiary basis that he has not personally attended one lately. The error is not philistinism — it is the specific modern conviction that the boundaries of one's own attention are the boundaries of the culture. And the press carried it dutifully as a provocation rather than as what it plainly was: a young man announcing that he does not know very much, and being handed a microphone for the trouble.
Source: Yahoo Entertainment
Campus WatchUniversity Gives Its Own Newspaper Thirty-Six Distribution Points and the Independent One Four, and Declines to Call This Censorship
No administrator in any of these cases has banned a single word, and each would be genuinely wounded to be told that he had. He has merely adjusted a budget line, revised a distribution policy, and centralised media enquiries in the interests of institutional consistency — four discrete acts of housekeeping which, taken together, produce a campus where only the authorised account of events is physically available to read. This is the characteristic modern form of the thing: the university has not suppressed the student press, it has optimised it. And the young are being taught, by the very institution charging them to learn otherwise, that speech is a facility one is allocated rather than a right one holds.
Source: Poynter