Scottish independence not "anti-British"
According to Sam Heughan:
Outlander star Sam Heughan has insisted that support for Scottish independence should not been seen as being âanti-British.â
The Scot, one of the most high-profile actors to support the independence cause, said he was âvery proudâ to be British.
"Certainly going to London and America...I never felt Scottish till I went to other places and people start seeing you as Scottish. But I tried to do what I think all actors try to do and immerse myself in another country and try to fit in. But then coming back (to Scotland) to work on Outlander I just realised what an incredible country it is and how much I love it.
Independent Scotland will be based on the island of Great Britain, so it will be a British country. It will be just as British as the other country on that island, the residual United Kingdom (I expect they will call it the "United Kingdom of England Wales and Norther Ireland").
So it will not be anti-British.
Genghis Khan "greatest eco-warrior"
Genghis Khan was the greatest eco-warrior of all time:
His empire lasted a century and a half and eventually covered nearly a quarter of the earth's surface. His murderous Mongol armies were responsible for the massacre of as many as 40 million people. Even today, his name remains a byword for brutality and terror.
Genghis Khan, in fact, may have been not just the greatest warrior but the greatest eco-warrior of all time, according to a study by the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Energy. It has concluded that the 13th-century Mongol leader's bloody advance, laying waste to vast swaths of territory and wiping out entire civilisations en route, may have scrubbed 700m tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere.
10 reasons Scotland should never be independent
From Reddit:
Medieval Europeans deliberately drew cats as ugly
They did it because they hated cats and thought they were evil:
In Ypres they even threw cats from the belfry of the Cloth Hall:
Though now they celebrate cats instead. Progress!
EU contra AI surveillance
The EU wants to ban AI surveillance:
The European Union is poised to ban artificial intelligence systems used for mass surveillance or for ranking social behavior, while companies developing AI could face fines as high as 4% of global revenue if they fail to comply with new rules governing the software applications.
It's a start, although 4% is nowhere near enough. It should be 100%, and they should be permanently banned from the EU market.
Wokeness as camouflage for morally questionable actors
Glenn Greenwald notes that intelligence agencies and corporations use woke ideology as camouflage:
Who could possibly be opposed to an institution that offers such noble gestures and works behind such a pretty facade? How bad could the GCHQ really be if they are so deeply committed to the rights of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and trans people?
Itâs so sweet that one is tempted to forget about, or at least be more understanding of, all the bombing campaigns and all the dictatorships they install and prop up that repress and kill the very people that they purport to honor and cherish. [...] how menacing can an intelligence agency be when it is so deeply and sincerely supportive of the rights of the people they routinely spy on, repress and kill?
Large corporations have obviously witnessed the success of this tactic â to prettify the face of militarism and imperialism with the costumes of social justice â and are now weaponizing it for themselves. As a result, they are becoming increasingly aggressive in their involvement in partisan and highly politicized debates, always on the side of the same causes of social justice which entities of imperialism and militarism have so effectively co-opted.
In other news, the Pope is a Catholic and bears shit in the woods.
Ukraine may seek nukes
Al-Jazeera reports that Ukraine may seek nuclear weapons if denied NATO membership:
A Ukrainian diplomat has reportedly warned Kyiv may be forced to acquire nuclear weapons to safeguard the countryâs security if NATO does not accede to its membership demand amid spiralling tensions with neighbouring Russia.
Andriy Melnyk, Ukraineâs ambassador to Germany, suggested to national public radio network Deutschlandfunk on Thursday that President Volodymyr Zelenskyâs administration was weighing up all possible options as fears mount over a possible escalation of hostilities in the countryâs conflict-stricken east.
âEither we are part of an alliance like NATO and also make our contribution to strengthen this Europe, or we have only one option; to rearm ourselves,â Germanyâs DPA news agency quoted Melnyk as saying. âHow else could we guarantee our defence?â
I expect Ukraine is mostly doing this to pressure NATO into giving it membership.
But if NATO won't, then nuclear weapons would probably make Putin think twice.
Xi contra Ma
China has silenced Jack Ma.
Chinaâs most outspoken billionaire has gone silent. No one has seen Jack Ma at the business school he founded. Nor at his tai chi studio. His raucous speeches headlining an annual meeting of entrepreneurs in his home province of Zhejiang have been put on hold.
Since Chinese President Xi Jinping unexpectedly called off the blockbuster public offering of Ant Group, Maâs payments and lending business, five months ago, Ma has made a single public appearance.
On a cold Sunday in January, he arrived unannounced at a small, out-of-the-way elementary school in rural Tonglu. Shortly after his trip, the visit was cut into a video clip that made global headlines: Ma had reappeared. Alibaba, the ecommerce behemoth he founded in 1999, regained $47bn in market value and the groupâs plan to sell billions of dollars of bonds to foreign investors was put back on track.
A warning that no matter how rich you are in China, you're not allowed to get in the bad books of the paramount leader.
US private schools and wokeness
Bari Weiss has done a series of posts on how expensive ($40k+ a year) US private schools have gone woke and how some parents and teachers aren't happy about it:
UK exports to EU halved
RTE reports that EU imports from UK have slumped:
EU post-Brexit imports from UK down 47%
The European Union's imports from Britain almost halved in the first two months of the year following the UK exit from the EU single market, data showed today.
The figures also showed that the 27-nation bloc's trade surplus with Britain rose as exports fell by less.
The European Union's statistics office Eurostat said EU imports from Britain dropped 47% year-on-year in January-February to âŹ16.6 billion while exports to the UK declined only 20.2% to âŹ39.8 billion.
As a result, the EU's trade surplus with Britain rose to âŹ23.2 billion in the first two months after Britain's Brexit transition period expired.
The Brexshiteers always said that Britain's trade deficit with the EU was our trump card against them. "German car manufacturers etc will want to buy our goods", they said, implying that will force the EU to do a deal with Britain on Britain's terms.
For example, see this Sun article:
Needless to say, it didn't quite work out like that. Britain has gained nothing from Brexit; it was never going to.
And thatâs all for this weekâs links post.