Snowdon

Dawkins is more intelligent than 99% of the people making fun of him and ‘if AI can be just as capable as us without being conscious, why did we develop consciousness in the first place?’ is a great question

This would be desperately sad and destructive of centuries of history for no good reason.

🇪🇺 European Central Bank considers new banknotes featuring Leonardo Da Vinci and other prominent figures

Hold on - what? If police officers think someone might be carrying explosives, protocol is to kick them in the head repeatedly like this? Is that actual police protocol? If so, how is it a wise police protocol? Can someone explain the reasoning?

Yesterday's edition of the Financial Times carried a lengthy interview with Lord Hermer KC, the present Attorney General of the United Kingdom. If you haven't seen it: oh, boy. The interview was part of the FT's fluffy "Lunch With" feature, a sympathetic profile format whose previous subjects have included most of the 'grown ups in the room' of the British establishment over the last 40 years. The Hermer instalment was, by the FT's own pitch, an opportunity for the Attorney General to "open up about the Keir Starmer people don't see," and to explain the merits of the Chagos deal. The piece appeared. The comments section opened. And in those comments, you could see a country on the precipice of major change. The Financial Times's readership is not, to put it as politely as the situation will allow, known for its raucous lower-class anger. It is the readership of senior partners at City firms, central bankers, retired civil servants, retired ambassadors, and the broader metropolitan managerial caste of Britain at the fatter end. It is, on almost every available political question, the most reliably establishment-tarian readership of any newspaper in the United Kingdom. The comments, before they were closed, were so brutal that readers were openly asking for the article to be withdrawn and threatening to cancel their subscriptions in numbers the FT had not seen before. When the FT readership turns on a Labour Attorney General, the Labour Attorney General has a problem. If you were wondering what caused such an outbreak of fury from the terribly polite class, here's a summary of the last three decades of Lord Hermer's career. Lord Hermer, before he became Attorney General, made his name and his living as a human-rights barrister whose principal practice, for a meaningful slice of the relevant period, was the prosecution of civil claims against the British state. Suing his own country. He got particular mileage out of pursuing claims against the British armed forces, on behalf of foreign nationals alleging mistreatment by British servicemen and women in the field. The most notorious of these matters is the Al-Sweady litigation. Lord Hermer was lead counsel for eight Iraqi claimants who alleged that British soldiers had murdered, mutilated, and tortured Iraqi prisoners after the Battle of Danny Boy in May 2004. The claims occupied the Ministry of Defence, the Royal Military Police, and a public inquiry for the better part of a decade. The inquiry, at its conclusion, found the claims to be "wholly without foundation," and the result of "deliberate lies, reckless speculation and ingrained hostility." On 22 April this year, the Daily Telegraph published more than 25,000 pages of contemporaneous emails and legal documents from Lord Hermer's chambers' handling of the Al-Sweady litigation. Among the documents was an internal communication in his own writing, advising on how to "get the big story out there" and noting the need for "wriggle room if the killings did not in fact happen." Today's edition of the same paper carries further documents from the same info dump showing Hermer privately criticising serving British soldiers, in correspondence with his legal team, while praising publicly the Iraqi lawyers whose own clients the inquiry had found to be lying. Hermer has, rightfully, been formally referred Lord Hermer to the Bar Standards Board for serious professional misconduct. Lord Glasman, a Labour peer who knows him personally, has called him "an arrogant...fool." Boris Johnson, the former Prime Minister, has said directly that Hermer "aided false war crimes claims against British troops." (Fancy losing a moral high-ground to Boris Johnson...) This is the Attorney General. He is the chief legal officer of the Crown. The man whose entire constitutional function is to ensure that the legal interests of the British state are properly defended in the highest forums is a man who, before assuming the post, made his career attacking the British state on behalf of liars, liars whose lies were specifically calibrated to destroy the reputations of British servicemen and women. There is a word for this kind of legal practice when it is done at scale and in a particular direction. The word is "lawfare." The deployment of judicial mechanisms as a substitute for politics by other means. The systematic use of human-rights frameworks, judicial review, and aggressive litigation to constrain the actions of one's own state, to attack one's own armed forces, and to advance a worldview that the elected institutions of one's country have repeatedly declined to advance through the ballot box. It is, at its outer edge, a form of treason that wears a wig. And Hermer, who practices it, is an enemy of our state.

How the British monarchy deals with assassination attempts: in 1994, Prince Charles, now King, was shot at during a visit to Sydney, Australia. He was unfazed, adjusting his cuffs as security reacted.