Peter murrell

Wednesday

Charles Moore

Devolution makes corruption likelier

Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, stands explicitly in the tradition of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum 135 years ago. Both seek to uphold the dignity of human work in the age of the machine. The present Leo warns eloquently against building the Tower of Babel rather than, like Nehemiah, rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem by cooperation. He does not, however, engage fully with the discussion of what AI – and particularly AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) – might be. The Pope proposes his ‘civilisation of love’, but the promoters of AGI themselves claim to be conducting ‘a civilisation experiment’. If AGI can discern patterns in an infinity of data which the human mind cannot, will it produce a new understanding of nature, a theory of everything?

Douglas Murray

When did Sturgeon first notice her husband’s kleptomania?

What would you say if your spouse bought a luxury campervan? I know what I would say – something along the lines of: ‘Get that thing away from me. I refuse to spend wet weekends campervanning around the Highlands, and I don’t care whether the bathroom facilities are “luxury” or not.’ In other words, any spouse of mine would get a tongue-lashing. But then I have a spiritual aversion to campervans, having spent many a childhood summer stuck behind them on single-track roads in the Highlands, watching their foul residents bespoil many of Scotland’s best beaches. We cannot know what Nicola Sturgeon’s reaction was to this luxury monstrosity. She would have us believe that when Peter Murrell took receipt of his top-of-the-range campervan she had nothing to say.

Wednesday

Henry Hill

Why the SNP fraud allegations matter

A common refrain from opponents of the Scottish National party is that ‘the SNP is not Scotland’. But it often seems they haven’t got the message, especially when Nationalist activists take it on themselves to stand guard on the border against the plague-ridden English. This week, the people who may really wish they’d done more to police the borders between themselves and the SNP are none other than grassroots separatists in the ‘Yes movement’. If you missed this story, the long and short of it is that a few years ago the SNP went on a fundraising drive. They secured hundreds of thousands of pounds in donations on the basis that the cash would go into a ring-fenced fighting fund to wage the next independence referendum.