Handaxes as status symbol
Stefan Milo speculates that Homo erectus females were turned on by males who were good at making handaxes:
Is the UK breaking apart?
George Monbiot thinks the UK is breaking apart:
Any residual argument for Scotland to stay within the United Kingdom meets its counter-argument in Boris Johnson.
In Westminster, a hereditary elite treated the pandemic less as a crisis than as an opportunity to enrich its friends. By granting unadvertised, untendered contracts to favoured companies for essential goods and services, many of which were either substandard or never arrived, it actively encouraged the sort of profiteering during a national emergency portrayed in The Third Man.
Keir Starmer seems scarcely interested in Scotland as anything other than an electoral calculation [...] That’s what Scotland is to Westminster: a backdrop.
Boris baffled by Boris's Brexit policy
EU Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier has written a book. Apparently Boris Johnson didn't understand his own Brexit policy:
At one point at a Brussels dinner on December 9 last year, as talks hung in the balance, Johnson stunned Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, and Barnier by seeming not to know his negotiating position.
Amid deep disagreements on fishing and EU demands on “level playing field” regulatory alignment, the prime minister suggested a minimal deal on areas of existing agreement, with a new pact on defence and security to take the sting out of a “no deal” outcome.
“We could even, in the event of disagreement, show a willingness to co-operate with a treaty on foreign policy and defence,” he told them, according to the book, to “general astonishment”.
Barnier replied: “But, Boris, it was you who refused to open a chapter on defence, co-operation and foreign policy in the negotiations.”
Johnson looked at his officials as he replied: “What do you mean, me? Who gave this instruction?”
Barnier's memoir is entitled La Grande Illusion.
Gates contra marriage
The Babylon Bee has the real reason Bill and Melinda Gates are getting divorced:
Report: Melinda Gates Filed For Divorce After Discovering Windows 95 Launch Video
MEDINA, WA—According to anonymous sources, Melinda Gates filed for divorce from her husband Bill after discovering a shocking video of him dancing on stage to "Start Me Up" by The Rolling Stones during the Windows 95 launch.
"Oh my gosh- my husband is a total dork," said a shocked Melinda Gates, according to one witness. "How could he have hidden this from me for so long? How could I have been so blind? Why did Bill hide this dark secret from me?"
Here's the launch video:
Grey contra education bureaucracies
CGP Grey (who used to be a teacher) is against education bureaucracies banning snow days:
Stoller contra Big Pharma
Matt Stoller notes that it is not supply chain shortages, but monopolies and patents, that limit vaccine production.
The shortages certainly do exist...:
One of the main arguments from the pharmaceutical industry against waiving certain intellectual property rights in the pandemic is that supply chain shortages, not patents, are the limiting factor in vaccine production.
...but monopolies and patents are what cause the shortages:
First, it’s important to recognize these industry commenters are certainly correct when they identify supply chain shortages as a significant barrier limiting production. But these libertarians and pharmaceutical industry defenders don’t attempt to explain why these shortages are so pervasive. Vaccine manufacturing supplies, including single use bioreactor bags, are not only in short supply because of exceptionally high pandemic demand, but also because there’s been a classic monopoly rollup of the bioprocess supplies industry in recent years. That consolidation is fortified by extensive intellectual property barriers that prevent new entrants from manufacturing these now crucial bioreactor bags and filters.
Wings contra Scottish justice
Stuart Campbell notes that Craig Murray has been sentenced to 8 months imprisonment:
Craig Murray was today sentenced to eight months in prison for the crime of “jigsaw identification” of one or more of the complainers in the trial of Alex Salmond, despite the supposed existence in Scotland of a presumption against prison sentences for any crimes attracting a penalty of less than 12 months.
Campbell asks why was the unusual step taken to give Murray a custodial sentence, when others weren't:
At least 10 Scottish newspaper journalists have also published information which by any empirical measure enables the identification of complainers. Two separate independently-conducted opinion polls have found that far more people claim to have identified complainers via these newspaper publications than from Craig Murray’s blog. All the articles in question remain online, yet none of their authors have even been questioned or warned by the Crown Office or police, let alone prosecuted.
Craig Murray is only one of a long list of people supportive of Alex Salmond to have been prosecuted in connection with his trial – others, including this site, have been threatened – while absolutely nobody hostile to Mr Salmond has faced any criminal action. The official in charge of prosecutions in Scotland, the Lord Advocate James Wolffe, is a minister of the Scottish Government directly answerable to the First Minister. We are sure these matters are unconnected.
I have no evidence that a cabal in the Scottish government, including Nicola Sturgeon, conspired to make false allegations against Alex Salmond. But I cannot help suspecting there is something fishy going on.
Murray's defence fund
Craig Murray asks for money:
UPDATE I today received a prison sentence of eight months for my reporting of the defence case in the Alex Salmond trial. I have a three week stay while we apply to this same court for permission to appeal to the Supreme Court. My appeal will be based on the simple fact that I did not identify anybody. It will also be based on the right to report the defence case being denied by an extraordinary, impossibly strict application of “jigsaw identification”, and on fair process not having been observed.
I am afraid I find myself once again obliged to ask you for funding for the appeal. We have raised about £70,000 but are likely to need, at the least, double that.
China's feminist eugenicists
Li Jun writes:
What if there was a program allowing the government to go around collecting sperm from good-looking, smart, healthy men — celebrities, scientists, athletes, etc. — and put it in a bank where any woman could access it? The bank would be state-run, held to tight scientific and ethical standards, and provide a wide range of benefits for its single clients, including day care and health care. Would that be finally enough to stabilize China’s free-falling fertility rate?
It may sound like the plot to some absurdist “Brave New World” knockoff, but in some corners of the Chinese internet, radical, self-proclaimed feminists are serious about what they call zigong daode — “uterine morality” — and they’re not willing to accept anything but the very best genetic material.
Smith on copying ideas
Noah Smith says countries should copy ideas from other countries:
In 1793, when Britain sent a diplomatic mission to China that displayed examples of new industrial technologies, China’s emperor haughtily sniffed that “I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country's manufactures.” Almost two centuries of national decline followed. But in 1853, when Japanese leaders beheld the sight of American steamships, they knew their country could no longer afford to resist foreign ideas; the most rapid technological and social modernization the world had ever seen followed shortly thereafter.
I’m sure there are other ideas from many other countries besides Japan that would also benefit America, if only we could dispense with the notion that “that’s not how we do things around here.”