Best Of

Thoughts and non-ecumenical prayers for a particular community in Glasgow.

BBC Breakfast
@BBCBreakfast
1h
'It's not since 1534 that a British monarch will have prayed next to a Catholic Pope'
Mark Lowen spoke to #BBCBreakfast from Vatican City where King Charles will take part in a service with Pope Leo, the first time this will have happened since the Church of England split from the Catholic Church

https://bbc.co.uk/news/articles/

They keep trotting out the line about it being the first time an English King has prayed with pope since 1534 as if it’s something that used to happen all the time but I can’t find any English ruler who has prayed with a Pope anyway. I think one Scots king did.

Alfred went to Rome didn't he?

Two Kings of Scots - Macbeth and James VIII. Admittedly debated at the time.

Yes, but he wasn't king at the time.

Also was he really King of England rather than King of Wessex?

King Hywel the Good went on pilgrimage to Rome, and there was a Pope Leo at the time. I fear he was less virtuous than his modern namesake. This was at the height of the Roman pornocracy.

On the immigration law ghastliness

- a British Passport may help but isn’t 100% solid. Why?
- The Home Sec. can withdraw citizenship from any “dual national”
- From the Begum case, a dual national is someone who *is eligible* for another passport
- Renouncing another nationality might well not be enough. Most countries that allow renunciation allow reacquiring citizenship.
- So a future Home Sec. issues an order cancelling the citizenship of x hundred thousand people in one go.

In Ancient Athens, the Thirty Tyrants used the cancellation of citizenship to get round a law on trials for citizens.

It’s all been done before

As a Jewish person theoretically eligible for an Israeli passport this precedent has always been a little worrying.

Irish people, including those born in NI, too.

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What's the weather like in Caerphilly today?

Bad enough to affect the result, and if so- who benefits?

Lower turnout and I would expect Plaid to be the beneficiaries. Labour voters have no reason to turn out and how many Reform voters actually plan to vote rather than just say they will?

Council by-election turnouts are up and that appears to be favouring Reform. I don’t see why a higher profile Senedd election would be that different.

The Reform people I know are *angry*

Especially at the Conservatives and Labour.

Don’t know any Welsh Reform types - but I wouldn’t be surprised if they include Plaid in their “The existing parties are a conspiracy against The People” schtick.

They have a right to be angry - the economy and the country have gone to shit. But wait to see how angry they will be when the "just do x" policy promised doesn't materialise. They can't blame others for long before it becomes clear that x is laughably unworkable.

On the immigration law ghastliness

- a British Passport may help but isn’t 100% solid. Why?
- The Home Sec. can withdraw citizenship from any “dual national”
- From the Begum case, a dual national is someone who *is eligible* for another passport
- Renouncing another nationality might well not be enough. Most countries that allow renunciation allow reacquiring citizenship.
- So a future Home Sec. issues an order cancelling the citizenship of x hundred thousand people in one go.

In Ancient Athens, the Thirty Tyrants used the cancellation of citizenship to get round a law on trials for citizens.

It’s all been done before

As a Jewish person theoretically eligible for an Israeli passport this precedent has always been a little worrying.

History tells us that things done to the “undesirables” at breakfast are done to the Jews by mid-morning, to blacks at lunchtime and everyone else by afternoon tea.

“Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”

Deporting people who have a legal right to be here has been done to black people multiple times already - hence the Windrush scandal.

Thoughts and non-ecumenical prayers for a particular community in Glasgow.

BBC Breakfast
@BBCBreakfast
1h
'It's not since 1534 that a British monarch will have prayed next to a Catholic Pope'
Mark Lowen spoke to #BBCBreakfast from Vatican City where King Charles will take part in a service with Pope Leo, the first time this will have happened since the Church of England split from the Catholic Church

https://bbc.co.uk/news/articles/

They keep trotting out the line about it being the first time an English King has prayed with pope since 1534 as if it’s something that used to happen all the time but I can’t find any English ruler who has prayed with a Pope anyway. I think one Scots king did.

IIRC Macbeth went to Rome and met the Pope. Its not a big leap that they might have prayed together.

Duh, Macbeth isn’t real, he’s a character in a film.

And Japanese as any fule kno.

On the immigration law ghastliness

- a British Passport may help but isn’t 100% solid. Why?
- The Home Sec. can withdraw citizenship from any “dual national”
- From the Begum case, a dual national is someone who *is eligible* for another passport
- Renouncing another nationality might well not be enough. Most countries that allow renunciation allow reacquiring citizenship.
- So a future Home Sec. issues an order cancelling the citizenship of x hundred thousand people in one go.

In Ancient Athens, the Thirty Tyrants used the cancellation of citizenship to get round a law on trials for citizens.

It’s all been done before

This for me is in the category "it may need to be there, but minimal use is even more important".

Compare with Royal or Presidential Pardons. In the UK we have typically had from zero to a few for each decade. Similar numbers apply in other European countries afaics. *

Compare to the USA where Presidential Pardons are a wired-in part of political corruption, and part of the mechanism for wealthy people to carry out organised crime without consequences. Plus are used as a sticky plaster on a broken system for those who can get attention or have powerful friends.

The important feature is to have it firewalled away from daily politics. That's a problem - MAYBE - with the decision still being with the Home Secretary. But OTOH we have the Conservatives saying they will abolish the Sentencing Council, which is a structure it has taken us half a century to develop to get such decisions away from day to day politics.

* Though there is a risk of this becoming an expected rubber stamp for success of tabloid media campaigns around "historical injustices" which need no intervention eg in the current witch trial campaigns, in the same way

Fascinating Tesla Earnings Call overnight.

Musk is a moron. He is All In on AI and autonomy. To be fair to xAI (which is X, not Tesla) they went from Zero to leading edge in a couple of years. But on vehicles? Even their CFO said that fleetwide takeup of Full Self Driving is 12%. That isn't helped by Tesla selling a lot of vehicles incapable of FSD - Europe, Japan, older vehicles. But even with cars capable of running it takeup is c. 20%. Why? Because people like to drive.

So what is the big plan? A fleet of wheeled robots which will put Uber et al out of business. And then Optimus robots which supposedly can replace surgeons and Elon describes as a "robot army"

Elon Musk - the man calling for the violent overthrow of governments like here in the UK - thinks these governments will license him to sell a "robot army". Which will utterly destroy jobs and crash economies. If the likes of him want to start talking about UBI then maybe, but they never do.

Just build cars man. The best selling car in the world which is also the safest car ever tested. Which makes a GM profit. Why on earth would you not want to out-think and out-compete legacy dinosaur manufacturers who make serious negative GM on their EVs and keep going bankrupt?

The self-driving cars are only useful once they are allowed to drive empty and/or pick you up from the pub.

Self-driving where the liability is on the driver to stay alert and take over when it goes bong, is the worst of all worlds.

It’s probably a couple of years away, but it’s been a couple of years away for the best part of a decade so far.

Here's the problem. Getting UBER licensed has taken effort, because it puts cab drivers out of a job. Now Muskybaby wants to destroy the taxi industry as a whole. If you are a European government or even a city, why would you license that?

And the "robot army" (and he used those exact words to describe scaled production of Optimus). Which can take jobs in vast numbers. The same - why would you license it?

This is the reverse industrial revolution. People complained then that the machines would take their jobs, but for much of the time the expansion in economic output meant more jobs. AI and Robotics means the literal decimation of jobs, likely many times over. Unless governments are prepared to give money to the newly unemployed the rollout of these technologies will be a socioeconomic disaster...

May I refer you to the Caves of Steel published in 1951 where Asimov forecast riots that involved the destruction of robots who had "stolen" jobs.