More exceptionalism.

Always has been. If you believe that you are intrinsically superior to everyone else - the "lesser breeds without the Law" - naturally you resent anything they have or do. And you are constantly frightened that they might suddenly pop up and deprive you of your vast entitlements.

That's the logic that was used to justify the Korean and Vietnam wars. The "domino theory" - "if they win in Korea, they will win in India and Africa and eventually reach New York and take away some of the billionaires' assets to give to the poor".

Which would obviously be the end of civilisation.

Very true. It seems quite unlikely that the UK government has any information that China doesn't already know or couldn't easily obtain.

'“What I’m saying is that some Strap stuff was compromised and vast amounts of data classified as extremely secret and extremely dangerous for any foreign entity to control was compromised.

'“Material from intelligence services. Material from the National Security Secretariat in the Cabinet Office. Things the government has to keep secret. If they’re not secret, then there are very, very serious implications for it"'.

Every time I hear about such very, very secret "material from intelligence services", it turns out to be something embarrassing that the government wants to keep from its own citizens. And of course we can never be told what the terribly secret information is, because it's so terribly secret. Possibly some dirty inside knowledge about who blew up Nord Stream (obviously the USA) or all the help given to the Kiev mob (with untold billions of UK taxpayers' money but without their permission).

It's safe to say that the UK government does not have any military secrets that would matter to China - or Russia. A sardine does not frighten a whale.

Before the bots, it was troll farms. Now the troll farmers have lost their jobs, replaced by software. Plus ça change, plus c'est le même chose.

MAGA types cherry-pick past forecasts to paint all forecasts as extreme. Being Evil With Data

...screw the UK. Even Eskimos wouldn't visit.

Blaspheme!

Maybe they're merge into a single person: Xump!

"We now have the best pandas, everyone says so! All the other countries have ugly smelly bears that eat people and get into trash, but pandas are peaceful and cute, like me!

Only Australian koala bears can compete, but we're gonna buy Australia, and they'll thank us! Pandas and koalas will have babies together to make the Master Race of bears, just like Crypto Christ strongly asked for while I was taking a shit on my Golden Flushy Throne. MBGA!"

Overhaul English to not require gender'd pronouns; problem solved! Auto-tagging people's gender in everyday speech is obsolete, it serves no purpose other than making religious troglodytes happy, the same fools who tried to jail Elvis for dancing sexy. F 'em! They can move to Afghanistan if they still crave Gonad Cops.

...almost nobody would qualify. Besides, I have bone spurs, my bribed doctor said so.

In the old days one either vented mental issues by beating the shit out of their own family, and/or becoming a babbling religious nut.

Easier is relative, though. All the nuclear weapons on Earth would still be two orders of magnitude too little to get an adequate atmosphere. As I understand, you'd need several thousand gigatons to get a low single-digit percent of Earth's atmospheric pressure.

And for humans to survive for more than about a minute even with external oxygen (the Armstrong limit), you'd need to reach about 40% of Earth's atmospheric pressure. There's probably not enough CO2 ice on all of Mars to pull that off. Best guess is that you'd need four or five times as much just to reach that limit, though the best-case estimates would result in exceeding that limit by a factor of two, so there's a lot of uncertainty here.

Whether releasing a lot of that CO2 would cause enough of a greenhouse effect to melt more polar ice is unclear, but one would assume that if this were possible, the planet would not have cooled, so that seems unlikely. Chances are, you would have to melt *all* the ice and periodically add energy from some external source to re-melt it as it forms, or else built planet-sized mirrors in Mars L4 and L5 to increase how much sunlight hits Mars.

Pondering the 2nd...

Trying to kiss up to Dictator Xi and Dictator Donnie at the same time, that's a tricky dance.