Strawberry Cat
Thanks to AI we now have cats that look like strawberries. Or strawberries that look like cats:
Daisley's Precious Union is in Danger
Scotland- and democracy- hater Stephen Daisley warns that the UK is in danger from "separatism":
The forces pulling Britain apart are greater than the forces holding it together [...] An error that some Unionists make is not reading polls past their headline voting intentions. Take the most recent poll to ask the independence question. The headline result: No 53%, Yes 47%. That might look encouraging for the Union [...] But we need to study not only the headline numbers, but also the breakdown by age, which offers hints as to where public opinion might stand in the future.
And the age breakdown says what it always says: support for the Union is concentrated among older voters. Among the young, independence is the way forward.
Men aged between 16 and 34 back separation by almost two to one. Among women in the same age bracket, it’s a narrower but still commanding 58 to 42%. Those aged 35 to 54 are split down the middle. You have to cross into the over-55 column before you start to see majorities for No.
This is the demographic time bomb ticking away underneath the constitutional status quo. Unionists are only getting older and the strength of their opposition to independence is not replicated in younger cohorts.
This has not come out of the blue. The warning signs have been there for years, not least in changing national identities. While 65% of over-65s describe themselves as some combination of Scottish and British, that figure falls to 40% among those aged 16-24. Forty eight per cent of young Scottish adults explicitly call themselves ‘Scottish, not British’.
Daisley summarises:
The challenges to the Union are more formidable than they were a decade ago, when 55% of Scots rejected independence.
Daisley is right here. Time is on Scotland's side. And when we do win our independence I will play the smallest violin ever for the demise of Daisley's precious Union. The UK is an idea that has outlived its usefulness: It's true that Scotland would benefit from being part of a larger union, but that should be a European Union, not the British Union it is currently trapped in.
Renew Europe wants stronger defence
Renew Europe wants stronger European defence and to end national vetos in foreign policy:
Two very necessary developments.
Details on Israel's Lavender AI
Israel's +972 Magazine has details on Israel's Lavender AI which is being used to bomb suspected Hamas operatives:
The Lavender software analyzes information collected on most of the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip through a system of mass surveillance, then assesses and ranks the likelihood that each particular person is active in the military wing of Hamas or PIJ. According to sources, the machine gives almost every single person in Gaza a rating from 1 to 100, expressing how likely it is that they are a militant.
What information is used to generate the targets?:
“hundreds and thousands” of features can increase an individual’s rating, such as being in a Whatsapp group with a known militant, changing cell phone every few months, and changing addresses frequently.
“The more information, and the more variety, the better,” the commander writes. “Visual information, cellular information, social media connections, battlefield information, phone contacts, photos.” While humans select these features at first, the commander continues, over time the machine will come to identify features on its own.
(via HWFO)
Most Americans don't like Biden or Trump
60% of Americans don't like Biden, and 55% don't like Trump, according to YouGov:
No surprise there then.
Most Democrat supporters think Israel is committing genocide in Palestine
From the same YouGov survey:
It is perhaps for this reason that Democrat-supporters have more sympathy with Palestinians than Israelis, by 34% to 12%:
Robin McAlpine on the SNP change of leaders
Robin McAlpine writes:
I won’t go into all the detail of Yousaf’s fall, but as he and his wife grew more and more warm to the idea of a simple deal with Alba as Greens’ intransigence seemed to make any other option impossible, so Team Sturgeon (the legacy establishment in the SNP) became more determined to stop him.
A series of escalating interventions to try to bring the Greens round failed (right up, I’m told, to Nicola Sturgeon phoning Patrick Harvie personally). It was Alba-or-nothing for Yousaf, a choice his staff wouldn’t let him make. They tried to persuade him out of it, to take a fall rather than give an inch to their mortal enemy.
He wanted to press on, heading off to bed that night still believing he had a clear route to clinging on. What he didn’t know was that the second he left the room, a senior member of his staff phoned the Times and told them to switch their front page because Humza would be resigning the next day and John Swinney would take over.
I’ve seen some pretty brutal moves in politics before, but there is something inhumane and simply wrong about the way the current SNP operates. There is an honourable, humane way to do these things. If you are a leaders’ team and he’s lost your confidence, you look him in the eye and you tell him he’s lost your confidence. In the circumstances the outcome would have been the same.
What I’ve never known is for a senior member of staff to take it upon themselves to act against the instruction and interests of the leader they nominally work for. Frankly what was done should have resulted in immediate dismissal for gross professional misconduct on the part of those involved.
I agree. If this account is true (and I suspect it probably is) then there is something rotten at the top of the SNP.
If [the SNP] couldn’t bed-block the pro-independence space in our democracy it is difficult to see what real relevance it would have.
I agree with this too, sadly.
The Eight Sleep Pod Cover
Is the Eight Sleep Pod Cover the most ridiculous scam on the internet?
It's a water-filled mattress that goes on top of your ordinary mattress, connected to to an electronic box that is supposed to regulate the temperature of the mattress. A snip at only £2295.
For added shittiness it comes with a smartphone app -- compulsory for the first year -- that costs £14 per month.
It also has problems with water leaking, if the subreddit is anything to go by.
Social media contra humanity
Freya India says social media is taking away our humanity, making us worse people:
Our loss of empathy, our lack of regard for others, our neurotic obsession with our own image—it’s taking a toll. Maybe subconsciously. But I think deep down we know it. We know when people are using their dying relatives for Twitter likes, filming their private moments of “quiet reflection”, all the way to posing on the train tracks at Auschwitz for their Tinder profiles, that the conversation can no longer just be about how bad social media is for our mental health. It has to be how bad it is for our humanity.
I'm inclined to agree.
Britain number 1 in increasing child poverty!
The Tories sometimes complain that people ignore their achievements. So I thought I'd rectify that.
Out of 39 EU and OECD countries, the one with the biggest increase in child poverty rates is...
...the United Kingdom! (source):
More details at UNICEF's report Child Poverty in the Midst of Wealth.
It is undeniably the case that the Tories have been very good at increasing child poverty, while lining the pockets of their rich friends.
Russia attacks Britain
The BBC reports that Russian agents are committing arson attacks in Britain:
Two British men have been charged with helping Russian intelligence services after a suspected arson attack on a Ukraine-linked business in London. Dylan Earl, 20, from Elmesthorpe in Leicestershire, and Jake Reeves, 22, from Croydon, were investigated following a fire at a warehouse in east London in March.
Mr Earl is accused of planning to target the business, as well as attempting to recruit individuals to materially assist a foreign intelligence service, undertaking fraudulent activity and arson. Mr Reeves is accused of accepting money knowing that it was from a foreign intelligence service.
It's well past time Britain got serious about Russia, who've been fighting an undeclared war on the West for decades now.
Sunak and Starmer want to raise defence spending from 2% to 2.5% of GDP "when the economy improves", a pathetically weak response, which demonstrates exactly why Putin thinks he can get away with attacking the West. Instead they should raise it to 3% immediately, with the vast majority of that increase going on things to help Ukraine, or things that the Russia-Ukraine war has shown to be deficient, such as stocks of ammunition. At the same time we should pass a law saying that Russia is a hostile country and that supporting them, in word or deed, amounts to treason.
The British ruling class, in this as in everything else, have demonstrated that they are utterly inept and contemptible. They refuse to stand up to Russia, despite the fact that we could very easily do so as we have a larger economy than them.
Will Eugene choose STAR voting?
The city of Eugene in Oregon is having a referendum on 21 May 2024 to decide whether to elect its mayor and councillors by STAR voting. Ballotpedia says:
Eugene, Oregon, Measure 20-349, STAR Voting for Mayor and City Council Elections Initiative (May 2024)
A "yes" vote supports this ballot initiative to replace the existing electoral system with STAR voting, in which: voters score each candidate on a scale of zero to five; the two candidates that receive the highest scores are known as finalists and enter an automatic runoff; and during the automatic runoff, a voter's ballot counts as one vote for the finalist that the voter scored higher.
A "no" vote opposes this ballot initiative to replace the existing electoral system with STAR voting.
STAR is a much better voting system than FPTP, however Eugene currently uses a two-round system: an all-candidate primary, and then the top two go ahead to the general election. While STAR is a better system than this, it's not vastly better, as it still only elects one winner. A better system to elect council members would be STV which elects multiple winners in multi-member districts; this is better because candidates representing more different points of view will be elected.
The Equal Vote Coalition has a video on it:
Postscript: Eugene voted against star voting.
For years, Russia's foreign activities seemed to centre on infiltrating small powerless left wing groups. Putin noticed that the wealthy right wingers who actually hold the power are totally for sale and really don't care about the countries they notionally belong to. So he bought them, lock stock and barrel, and now they are spreading misinformation in the UK and the US, undermining democracy (which they've always done, but now they're doing it for him). Added to that, the activities of Russian troll farms, and we are going to face a perfect storm. Which also ties into your social media feature.