An op-ed in Haaretz recently discussed Israel’s unconscious drive for self-destruction. There doesn’t seem much that’s unconscious, however, in an article that appeared recently on its use of AI to direct the bombing in Gaza, which must be the most horrifying article on AI this year. +972 Magazine, an independent site run by a group of Palestinian and Israeli journalists, reports that Israel’s Lavender targeting system has been deployed with “little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties”. What oversight there is typically involves “twenty seconds to authorize a bombing … just to make sure the target is male”.
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21 April 2024
I hadn’t meant to watch the Coronation, but a few minutes before 11 a.m. yesterday idly looked up what was happening when and realised that the ceremony in the Abbey was about to start. So I switched on the TV out of curiosity, and we all marked the hour or two of history that otherwise would have passed us by.
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7 May 2023
While the UK succumbs to self-imposed political, economic and regulatory destruction, the Armed Forces of Ukraine continue to repel Russia’s increasingly desperate attempts to bring literal destruction to their country.
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2 October 2022
Click through for a gallery.
I was in at the office today, with its view onto Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. As we approached the starting time of the procession of the Queen’s coffin to St Giles, I ducked downstairs to take some photos, joining some colleagues behind the locked gates of Moray House. After twenty minutes the chatter died down and a sea of arms pointed their phones downhill; members of security walked past, followed by two officers on horseback, the hearse, and the King and his siblings walking slowly behind; then a string of cars, one with Camilla, the rest all Range Rovers; and then it was over.
Apart from a barking dog and a crying baby, the crowd was hushed at our part of the Mile. A few moments earlier, though, a protestor had let Prince Andrew know what he thought.
This procession only took place because the Queen died in Scotland; otherwise the focus would have remained on London. I don’t expect to see another like it in my lifetime, even if I’m around for another king.
12 September 2022
The speed of the Armed Forces of Ukraine’s advances over the past 48 hours has been breathtaking. They appear to be retaking cities in the Donetsk oblast. Izyum has been liberated. Partisans in Mariupol have raised the Ukrainian flag over key buildings. There are reports that Ukrainian forces were 15 kilometres from Kherson city yesterday, and of explosions in Melitopol. Retaking the latter would put the AFU within missile range of the Kerch bridge connecting Russia and Crimea.
It’s slightly frustrating to be surrounded by wall-to-wall royal news in the UK when one of the most spectacular counteroffensives in history is underway.
10 September 2022
Our local corner shop yesterday.
Electronic billboards across the land are displaying pictures of the Queen against a black background, making it look like we’re hosting the world’s biggest philately convention. Paddington has sent his condolences. The royal beekeeper has informed the Queen’s bees that the Queen (though presumably not their queen) has died. Even the Cromwell Museum has retweeted the local mayor’s condolences.
Any understandable sympathy one might feel for the human beings at the centre of all this is going to be stretched to the limit by this marathon of mourning. Twelve days is longer than some overseas trips.
At some point in the next day or so, Edinburgh residents will have the chance to file past the Queen’s coffin in St Giles. Given that we’re here, it would seem a missed historic opportunity not to add to the throng, and so despite having exceeded my annual royal threshold I imagine we will. Please adjust your estimates of the scale of monarchist grief accordingly.
(I’m reliably informed that “telling the bees is a tradition in many European countries in which bees would be told of important events in their keeper’s lives such as births, marriages and departures and returns in the household”. Feeding the workers’ obsession with the lives of their keepers, eh—more relevant than I thought.)
10 September 2022 · 2 Comments
I really couldn’t be bothered posting about the inevitable ascent this week of Liz Truss, fourth in a line of decreasingly appealing and increasingly appalling Conservative prime ministers, but I suppose I’d better mark the day when we woke up as subjects of Queen Elizabeth II and will go to bed as subjects of King Charles III. It’s my first experience of the death of a British monarch, and provided I stick around for the average lifespan won’t be my last.
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8 September 2022
Western coverage of Ukraine receded in recent weeks as Russia scaled back its attacks in the East. With the loss of Sievierodonetsk over the weekend, and a Russian missile attack on Kremenchuk, eighty miles from the front line, on Monday, that’s changing.
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29 June 2022
The Davros-like Henry Kissinger has declared from Davos that Ukraine must give Russia territory (archived) and that the West must “stop trying to inflict a crushing defeat on Russian forces in Ukraine, [as] it would have disastrous consequences for the long term stability of Europe”.† President Zelenskyy’s response was masterly, as always:
Mr. Kissinger emerges from the deep past and says that a piece of Ukraine should be given to Russia. So that there is no alienation of Russia from Europe. It seems that Mr. Kissinger’s calendar is not 2022, but 1938, and he thought he was talking to an audience not in Davos, but in Munich of that time. By the way, in the real year 1938, when Mr. Kissinger’s family was fleeing Nazi Germany, he was 15 years old, and he understood everything perfectly. And nobody heard from him then that it was necessary to adapt to the Nazis instead of fleeing them or fighting them. … “Great geopoliticians” are always unwilling to see ordinary people. Ordinary Ukrainians. Millions of those who actually live in the territory they propose to exchange for the illusion of peace. You must always see people. And remember that values are not just a word. … We must do everything possible for the world to get a permanent habit of taking Ukraine into account. So that the interests of Ukrainians are not overlapped by the interests of those who are in a hurry for another meeting with the dictator.
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27 May 2022
