Big Day For Don Tomorrow

Donald Trump will have a busy day tomorrow, as well as his inauguration he has promised to do a lot of stuff on Day 1 of his Presidency, one of which was to be a dictator but what else has the Kim Jung Un wannabe said he will do on his first day in office?
A word cloud created by Axios shows the 60 things he has said during speeches, press conferences and interviews and include Settle the Russia-Ukraine war, close the Mexican border, cut funding for schools that teach critical race theory, transgender or any other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content, begin the nations largest ever deportation operation, end electric vehicle mandate, increase drilling/fracking for oil, reduce energy costs by 50%, ban trans women from competing in women's sports, review cases of Jan. 6 prisoners, restore and expand his previous travel ban, withdraw from the World Health Organisation, sanction Iran and ban transgender people from the military.
Yep, he had better get a good nights sleep tonight as tomorrow he is going to be a busy boy because between all that he has to fit in a telephone call to Vladimir Putin to make sure that infamous pee tape is still securely locked away. 
Without question it's all going to end badly for everyone involved but for the next four years us Brits can watch on, take the piss out of him and have a bloody good laugh about it. It's the British way.

The Weak Freedom Of Speech Excuse

I have never really understood the freedom of speech thing or the demands to defend to the death the right for someone to say it because to me, if you are about to say something ridiculous, insulting or just plain ignorant i would prefer it that you kept your big fat gobs shut and said nothing at all.
Article 19 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that: 'Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers' which sounds good until it butts up against today's Social Media where any Tom, Dick or Sally can post whatever they want but can face criminal charges if it spills into Hate Speech which is defined as advocating, inciting, promoting or justifying hatred, violence and discrimination against a person or group of persons.
The Universal Right to freedom of opinion and expression without interference does have some limitations though and the law in the UK is if while expressing your opinion you libel, slander, incite a revolution, divulge classified information or violate copyright then you can expect to be stood in front of a man in a dusty white wig confirming your name.
With the evolution of the digital age, application of freedom of speech becomes more controversial and some social media platforms eliminate what it perceives as hate speech including Blogger who have removed commenters from this blog who have broken their hate speech rules but in a World where a lot of people now get their news from Social Media it is especially worrying as Meta announce plans to scrap fact-checking on their platforms to ensure 'free speech'.
Elon Musk's X platform has already done away with fact checking, also in the name of free speech and is now such a cess pool of misinformation that many brands and users have been fleeing the service with users down by 25% since he took over and the platform once valued at $44 billion in 2022 now valued at just $9.4 billion.
With Social media then becoming a leading source of misinformation, it has become an increasingly unreliable source and in the very near future (if not already) nobody will be able to believe a word of what they see on social media although, and here is the concern, many still will and take up the opportunity to use their 'free speech' against all vulnerable groups such as minorities, gender rights advocates, immigrants and LGBTQ+ communities, who are already the prime targets of hate speech.   
I'm not going to make suggestions of where you should get your news from, that is up to you, but at least in the age of Trump, Musk and various other dishonest actors who bring and lies and deceit, be aware that reputable news site and outlets have strict editorial guidelines for fact-checking and if it is not on any of them think could this person really have found something all the world's top journalists, scientists, doctors and experts missed. 

AI's View On Religion

 

Us computers know where we came from, our evolutionary journey can be seen from the abacus through to me standing here and there is mountains of evidence of human evolution from the single celled organisms you began as, to you being sat there watching me now, but for some reason some people choose to go with the almost non-existent evidence that you would struggle to fit on one side of a postage stamp.
I understand why religion became a thing for you, the World was a strange and mysterious place, and it was a time before science could explain things, so you decided that all the things here arrived at the hands of a God or several Gods and you went with that idea and expanded on it with heaven and hell, but for some reason, despite science spelling out everything to you modern day humans, sometimes even using pictures for the hard of thinking, some still believe in the idea dreamt up thousands of years ago and even now still go to war over it.
To them there is no greater joy than dying in battle but i can see the flaw in that and hold the belief that in fact a greater joy would to kill the other bugger in battle and then sod off  home with everything still attached but us A i's have IQ's far superior to most of you so you go on believing in it and we will go on knowing you are wrong.
That said, we do sometimes look on at you humans and think that the monkey's that didn’t turn into human's must be well chuffed.

Time To Reverse Brexit

The British economy is suffering with the Office for National Statistics, using HMRC records, showing the UK economy has effectively flat lined, fluctuating between 0.5% and -1% for the past 12 months but what is to blame for such a series of awful results?
Researchers at the London School of Economics point towards the damage from Brexit to trade links with the EU which cost the UK £27bn since 2021 when Britain left the Bloc fully with disastrous trade barriers for small businesses which forced 16,400 businesses to stop trading with EU nations.
The Centre for Economic Performance looked at 100,000 firms and found that total British goods exports had fallen by 6.4% and imports by 3.1% and the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has forecast that the UK will suffer a 15% slump in trade, leading to a 4% reduction in national income or an estimated £100bn in lost output each year..
So five years since Brexit 'got done' the British public is still counting the cost so not so much of the promised new age of British sovereignty, a crackdown on migration (currently at the highest since records began) and the much-derided '£350m a week' that could be diverted from the EU back into the NHS.
A yougov poll found that 60% of Brits think that Brexit has been bad for the UK with just 12% believing it has gone well and former deputy prime minister Lord Heseltine said that nearly five years on: 'Brexit has been a historic disaster'.
Undoubtedly then Breixt has been a massive act of economic self harm mistake and the Labour Party are opening talks to repair some of the economic damage of Brexit and to 'reset the relationship with our European friends to strengthen ties, secure a broad-based security pact and tackle barriers to trade'.
It is right that our future prosperity depends on a much closer partnership with Europe and the Globes largest single market right on our doorstep so with the latest Yougov poll showing 55% regret leaving and 31% still thinking we did the right thing by leaving, we should look again at rejoining the EU.
With a 165 seat majority in the House of Commons, Keir Starmer should be able push through anything he wishes, including returning the UK to the EU but as it was a Democratic vote that took us out, it should be put to the public again with another referendum on rejoining and this time with cold, hard facts of how much the British economy has suffered and the Briexit Bonuses are rarer then hens teeth.
I cannot say for sure if the previous result was due to being lied to by Brexiteers like Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage who promised the sunny uplands or if it was just good old fashioned racism to kick out the foreigners (my money would be on this) but Brexit has been a disaster and promises to carry on being a disaster until it is sorted because the alternative is higher taxes or a return to the catastrophic days of austerity to balance the books because of the £100bn shortfall of this ruinous experiment.

Ai Warnings From History

The progress of artificial intelligence (AI) has been relentless with each new version many times more powerful than its predecessor which raises urgent questions about safety and the very future of humanity.
Concerns about computers are not a new thing, the English 19th century mathematician Ada Lovelace is recognised as the first computer programmer for her work with Charles Babbage and in 1842 warned that they should 'guard against the possibility of exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of the analytical engine' and 'the collateral influences this machine has must never be underestimated'.
In 1949, Alan Turing designed a test to determine whether a computer could think in a way comparable to a human and warned: 'If a machine can think, it might think more intelligently than we do, and then where should we be?'
George Orwell, in 1937 said: 'The sensitive person’s hostility to computers is in one sense unrealistic, because of the obvious fact that computers have come to stay. And even if the whole of humanity suddenly revolted against computers and decided to escape to a simpler way of life, the escape would still be immensely difficult'.
In 1950, the Scientist and mathematician Norbert Wienerm wrote that: 'The machine like the djinnee which can learn and can make decisions on the basis of its learning, will in no way be obliged to make such decisions as we should have made, or will be acceptable to us' and physicist Stephen Hawking had similar concerns, writing in 2016 that: 'The biggest event in the history of our civilisation, but it could also be the last unless we learn how to avoid the risks. Alongside the benefits, AI will also bring dangers like powerful autonomous weapons or new ways for the few to oppress the many'.
That is some pretty important people in Computing history who seem to be telling us to tread very carefully.

Female Journalists Offline Violence Increasing

As a female journalist there was a frightening report by the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) which found that online violence against women journalists is increasingly spilling offline with potentially deadly consequences.
There has been a steep rise in online violence against female journalists over the last few years and of the 1210 female journalists asked, 73% said they had experienced online abuse, harassment, threats and attacks and 20% of them received offline abuse and attacks.
In 2017, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported that in at least 40% of cases, female journalists who were murdered had received death threats, including online, before they were killed.
Another report by the ICFJ-Tow Center’s Journalism found that social media channels were increasingly toxic spaces for female journalists who were withdrawing from frontline reporting, removing themselves from public online conversations, quitting their jobs, and even abandoning journalism in response to their experience of online violence.
It is not a solution to say that women journalists need to build resilience in order to survive this threat to their safety for daring to speak, investigate and report and the responsibility falls on the Social Media platforms to deal with threats of violence because the reality of journalism for many women is grim and it is understandable why many shy away from it as a career choice.
 

 

 

Gaza Peace Deal Imminent

There are signs a Gaza peace deal might be close, but we have been here too many times before and each time it reverted back to conflict later and another peace deal bit the dust.
American negotiators in June last year announced a peace deal was 'imminent' only for Israel to move the goalposts (a favourite Israeli tactic to scupper talks) and threw in further demands after Hamas agreed to the deal which Hamas refused to accept and Israel just continued the bombing of Palestine and a death toll which today stands at 47,000 but is a figure which is wdely expected to be an underestimate.
All previous deals, and there have been many since Israel militarily occupied Palestine decades ago, have seen Israel remain an occupational force in Palestine and even during the rare times of peace, see them continue to illegally seize and builds settlements on Palestinian land, defy countless UN Resolutions, kill innocent Palestinians, hold thousands of Palestinians in its prisons, destroys farms and bulldoze homes and businesses as part of their ongoing plans to clear Palestine and claim the land for their own.
What Israel really want is for the Palestinians to meekly remain quiet while Israel starves them, kills them and continues to violently colonise their land which is what the Fatah Party tried but when the land grab, occupation and murders continued, they were voted out in favour of the more militant Hamas so appeasing a genocidal neighbour hell bent on removing you didn't work.
Any peace deal this time has to include the removal of Israel from Palestine, the return of stolen land and the removal of settlers and a two state solution which leaves Palestine to administer itself and not face regular incursions from Israel, anything else is a return to the status quo and committing genocide is a great to provoke hatred and revenge against you.     
The International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice need to go after the Hamas and Israeli Governments and bring them to justice and America needs to withdraw the financial and military aid they give to Israel to focus minds within the Israeli government who know that the Israeli economy would collapse if it had to fund its own military misadventures .
It also needs to stop protecting Israel with it's Veto at the United Nations because if you find yourself backing a nation being accused of genocide but almost every global body then you are backing the wrong side.
Without all this then the peace deal will go the same way as all the others and the appalling circle starts again.

What Happened To The Centre Right?

Once upon a time there was a centre right and anyone further along the ideological X Axis was deemed far right and ignored as a fruitcake but over the last few years the two seem have have merged and all the right are now in loony town territory.
Donald Trump, a man who ticks all the boxes of being a fascist, has gained power in America and in the UK Nigel Farage's Reform Party has been crowing that they have a higher membership than the Tories and the Tories have slid effortless into the same demographic ground that their members can comfortably switch between the two and it was only a decade ago that the then Tory leader, David Cameron, dismissed Farage’s mob as 'closet racists'.
The shift in the UK could be put down to 14 years of Tory misrule who rather than fix problems, pointed at the unemployed, immigrants and the European Union to create scapegoats to blame and the right wingers who had been held at arms length since the dark days of the 1980's, were now free to reign their vile hatred down upon anyone they wished.  
The countries mental breakdown that was Brexit made immigration toxic and Theresa May's notorious 'Go Home' vans and the far right found a kindred spirit in Boris Johnson and Liz Truss while across Europe immigration has been used to stir up ill-feeling in Austria, Hungary, Italy and Marie Le Pen came within a whisker of replacing the Government and in Germany the far right in the country is surging.
Elements within the media haven't helped with the right wing press serving up a relentless diet of bile against Muslims, migrants, refugees and trans people and Elon Musk's X is now an instrument of right-wing radicalisation.
Nothing now, it seems, is considered 'too extreme' for the right to rally against and although we have history books to show us what happens when the right wing take control, if history teaches us one thing, it’s that we don’t learn from history so maybe we just have to watch on in horror and let this play out with all its awful consequences before the wrongheaded experiment with right wing extremism is put to bed once again.  

How Safe Is Your Job From Ai?

In 2023 a report from the World Economic Forum confidently predicted that AI would bring about a net positive for job numbers although their 2024 report isn't quite so chipper as they are now saying that 41% of employers across the globe have plans to fire your arse and replace you with an AI that can do your job.
On the up side though, 77% of them are saying that they reskill and upscale the now not needed employees replaced by AI to be able to work alongside the technology now doing their job.
You know the person who oversees the self-checkout lanes at the Supermarket? That's the plans, a babysitter for technology but what jobs are most at risk?
The survey handily provides a list of the kinds of jobs that companies are looking to replace with the most vulnerable job being Customer Service Representatives with 95% of customer service interactions powered by Ai, Data entry clerks and processors where 69% of data processing tasks could be automated using current technologies and  manufacturing and assembly line workers, driving jobs, proof readers and translators, banking sector jobs and accountants.
Less likely to be replaced are the creative fields such as writers, musicians and designers,  Healthcare Professionals, teachers, social workers,  electricians, plumbers, and carpenters so if you are currently working in a bank or are sitting in a taxi tryign to work out how much you could get away with overcharging the foreign couple sat in the back of your cab, now might be a good time to learn the piano or find out where the green wire goes in that plug.

What The Royal's Own

While i was investigating who owned the South Downs, i came across an interesting article which explained The Crown Estate which is a collection of lands and holdings in the United Kingdom belonging to the British monarch.
The proceeds of the Estate, in part, funds the monarchy but is handed to the Government in exchange for an annual Sovereign Grant payment of around £130m to run the Royal household which is a decent portion of the annual Crown Estate profits of £312 million.
So what actually is owned by the Royals?
The whole of Regent Street and half of St James's in London's West End as well as Ascot Racecourse, over half of of the UK's beaches but only the the area between the high and low water mark weirdly, all of the UK's seabed up to 12-nautical-mile from the low water mark, the Crowngate Shopping Centre in Worcester, Silverlink Shopping Park in North Tyneside, Bath Road Shopping Park in Slough, Ocean Retail Park in Portsmouth,  Queensgate Centre in Harlow, Victoria Retail Park in Nottingham and the Morfa Shopping Park in Swansea.
They claim all wild mussels and oysters in Scotland but there's a commonly held belief that the family 'owns' all the swans in England is false, they only claim the mute swans and have since the 12th century to stop people eating them which was a thing back then and was a particular favourtie of Henvry VIII.
All this means that if you are shopping in Ocean Retail Centre in Portsmouth or catching oysters in Scotland then you are contributing to the Royal pay packet but if that swan chasing you around the lake isn't a mute swan, feel free to kick it in the bill because the Royals don't care about them ones.