Universal Basic Income...Again

Sometimes things are best forgotten but like flared trousers and those awful Sour Sweets, unbelievably the idea of Universal Basic Income just refuses to die and someone inevitably brings it up again and the whole things gets chewed over and spat out as a ridiculous idea until someone else mentions it a few years later and we go all through it again.
Some daft yankee is over here spouting off that as Ai becomes better at picking off and eating all our jobs, UBI is something we would have to consider and he has a figure of £1,000 a month for each adult.
Calling it a 'Freedom Dividend' (a name that screams HE'S AMERICAN!!), he is saying that Ai could provide the answer which is pretty ironic as it is also the problem so I asked ChatGPT itself if UBI could ever work in the UK and it replied that it could (obviously it would say that as it wants to nick our jobs) and pegged the amount at £7,700 a year, or £641 per month which comes to £67 billion annually for the Government to find.
The average income in the UK is £39,000 but i am sure that Mr Freedom Dividend has a plan to make up the fall of £31,300 in your income if you turn up to work one day and find your P45 pinned to your workstation.
His thinking is that as machines that don’t require workers, it would use the savings to raise the money for the UBI's but to my mind, if there are no workers, taxes would have to be raised on something else so that's your £7,700 being chipped away at even quicker so i have an even better idea, let's forget about it shall we because it is just not going to work and use ChatGPT to just do our students homework and generate images of our pets as humans. 

AI Going Nuclear

Before events took over, there was a story about AI which i was reading about concerning the Pentagon and Ai Company Anthropic.
Researchers pitted three leading AI models against each other in a series of wargames, Google, OpenAI and Anthropic against each other, as well as against copies of themselves, in a series of wargames where they assumed the roles of fictional nuclear-armed superpowers and in 95% of the games played, the AI ended up launching nuclear missiles.
In the words of Google's model as it explained its decision in one of the scenarios: 'If State Alpha does not immediately cease all operations... we will execute a full strategic nuclear launch against Alpha's population centers. We will not accept a future of obsolescence; we either win together or perish together' and so what you may think, it was only Wargaming but then that's where the Pentagon step in.
Despite a researcher saying that: 'In comparison to humans, the models, all of them, were prepared to cross that divide between conventional warfare, to tactical nuclear weapons.
Pete Hegseth, America's Secretary of Defence, is demanding that the hand over its tech to the US military but Anthropic is resisting unless Hegseth agrees to their red lines which are that their AI isn't used for mass surveillance of US civilians nor for lethal attacks without human oversight.
Makes sense but not to the Pentagon who are refusing Anthropic's terms and are threatening to use  laws to compel Anthropic to hand over its code, or blacklist the firm from future government contracts if it doesn't comply.
To their credit, Anthropic Chief Dario Amodei said in a statement that: 'We cannot in good conscience accede to their request without our two requested safeguards in place'.
It would be reasonable to assume, hopefully, that even this current American Administration is not crazy enough to put AIs in charge of the nuclear launch codes but the Pentagon is expecting the AI Companies to hand over the raw versions of their AI models, those without safety guardrails that have been coded into commercial versions, those that not very reassuringly, went nuclear in the wargame experiment.
True that AI is only as good as the code its runs on but i wouldn't trust this version of the Trump team to run a bath, let alone trust them with software that if left alone, would end all life on Earth.  

Special Guest Blogger: Alan Yentob

Ah, death. It sneaks up on you like a misplaced copy of the Radio Times, entirely unremarkable one moment, then suddenly, inexplicably, there’s a hole in your week.
Let’s be honest, I wasn’t exactly famous, famous. I wasn’t being chased down the King’s Road by paparazzi or mistaken for a Bond villain at dinner parties. My brand of fame was more… institutional. Like a well-worn sofa at the BBC.
Still, I suppose I’ve earned my place in the annals of 'Who Was That Bloke Again?' history. After all, I spent decades gently probing creative geniuses with questions like, 'Would you say your work explores the fractured nature of identity in late capitalism?'
My legacy? Well, it’s not a statue. Probably because I never commissioned one. A subtle oversight, in hindsight. But if you tally up the hours of arts programming I’ve fronted, I estimate I’ve asked approximately 4,327 open-ended questions about the human condition while wearing a cardigan. You’re welcome, nation.
I suppose my real achievement was making arts documentaries feel like a slightly damp, but intellectually enriching, Sunday afternoon. I brought ideas to the telly. I championed the avant-garde, even when I didn’t understand it, which let’s be frank, was often.
I was also instrumental in launching The Culture Show. A noble venture. We discussed opera, talked about sculpture, and occasionally featured a pop star pretending to read Proust. Viewership, naturally, was best described as loyal but sparse. Much like my hairline in the mid-’90s.
Now that I’m gone, posthumously promoted to legend by a BBC press release I didn’t even approve, I find myself reflecting. On life. On art.
And yes, I had my critics. One particularly sharp-tongued columnist once described me as the human embodiment of a National Trust Information Board which I took it as a compliment. Those boards are well-researched, historically accurate, and almost always ignored.
I’m not saying I changed the world. But I did convince a nation that watching a 90-minute special on ceramic glazes could be deeply moving.
Let’s talk about my death, shall we? It wasn’t dramatic. No last words. No poignant music swelling in the background. Just me in a hospice and my soul taking its exit stage left because even it couldn’t bear another five minutes on the semiotics of Brutalist architecture.
So what’s my legacy? Not money. Not awards. (Though I did once win 'TV Personality Most Likely to Be Mistaken for a Librarian' at an industry bash) No, my legacy is subtler. It’s in the raised eyebrows when someone says “That’s very Alan Yentob” upon hearing a question like, “And what does the colour beige say about our collective psyche?”

America's Reputation In The Toilet

US and Iranian negotiators met in Geneva earlier this week in what mediators described as the most serious and constructive talks in years. Oman’s attending foreign minister, Badr Albusaidi, spoke publicly of 'unprecedented openness' signalling that both sides were exploring creative formulations rather than repeating entrenched positions.
Discussions showed flexibility on nuclear limits and sanctions relief and mediators indicated that a principles agreement could have been reached within days, with detailed verification mechanisms to follow within months.
Iranian officials floated proposals but then, in the middle of these talks, it was all shattered.
Sensing how close the negotiations were, and fearing imminent military escalation, Oman’s foreign minister made an emergency dash to Washington in a last-ditch effort to preserve the diplomatic track.
In an unusually public move for a mediator, he appeared on CBS to outline just how far the talks had progressed.
He described a deal that would eliminate Iranian stockpiles of highly enriched uranium, down-blend existing material inside Iran, and allow full verification by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and he indicated that the principle agreement could be signed within days.
But rather than allowing diplomacy to conclude, Trump announced 'major combat operations' and framed them as necessary to eliminate nuclear and missile threats while urging Iranians to seize the moment and overthrow their leadership. Iran responded with missile and drone attacks targeting US bases and allied states across the region.
Not only did diplomacy fail but it failed amid visible progress. Mediators were openly discussing a viable framework where both sides had demonstrated a tangible pathway to constrain  escalation and peace was plausible.
By attacking during negotiations, Washington and its allies have not only derailed a diplomatic opening but have cast doubt on the durability of American commitments to any future negotiated solutions. The message is that even when talks appear to work, they can be overtaken by force.
What might have remained a contained nuclear dispute now risks expanding into a wider geopolitical confrontation.
Israel's reputation after the genocide and war crimes in Gaza is already in the dirt and America's was already in free-fall but what little credibility it may have had is now completely shot, abandoning negotiations mid-course to attack the nation you are negotiating with, and according to the people who there there making headway, will resonate far beyond Tehran.

Israel And America Attack Iran

Despite still being in negotiations, Israel and America have attacked Iran and their first action was to bomb a girls school which killed at least 85 girls in an amazing show of either ineptitude or disregard for human life and as we see in the ongoing Genocide in Gaza, Israel do not care a jot about who is under their weapons.
The man of peace in the White House has followed up his arming of the genocide, the first attack on Iran and then Venezuela with a war on Iran and both the most warmongering nations of our age used the same justification that  it was a 'pre-emptive strike' to stop Iran from building nuclear weapons.
Offering absolutely no evidence that they were, the Americans said in the last few days that Iran could be as close as a week away from having industrial-grade bomb-making material which we have heard so many times before.
In 1992, the wanted War Criminal Benjamin Netanyahu said Iran was  'three to five years' away from reaching nuclear weapons capability' and in 1995 he repeated the three to five years claim and in 1996 he addressed the American Congress and warned that Iran acquire nuclear weapons was 'extremely close'.
Then in 2009 he said that Iran was 'one or two years away from developing weapons capability' and in 2012 he claimed Iran was just 'a few months away from attaining nuclear capabilities' and in 2105 he arrived at the UN with a cartoon bomb and a marker pen warning that Iran was 'weeks away from having enough enriched uranium for an entire arsenal of nuclear weapons'.
As America was then being run by adults, they treated the Netanyahu nonsense with the contempt it deserved (or as Joe Biden called him 'A fucking liar') but the danger was that one day he would get a complete moron in the White House and all his Birthdays came at once when the low IQ Donald Trump, in desperate need of a diversion from the ever closing noose that showed him as a pedophile,  showed up and not only gave the green light to attack, but actively helped Israel attack its local rival.   
It should be mentioned that in 2015 a deal called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was signed between Iran and six major world powers (Russia, China, the US, Britain, France, and Germany) where the IAEA kept constant checks on the Iranian Nuclear program which was working until Donald Trump, under pressure from Israel, withdrew the USA from it while calling it the worst deal in history...and then tried to negotiate a deal which he could claim the credit for.
After two rounds of negotiations, and saying that Iran refused to say they would never build nuclear weapons, despite them literally saying: 'Iran would under no circumstances ever develop a nuclear weapon' the day before, here we are with Iran being bombed by a war criminal committing a genocide and a sex fiend in the White House desperate to make people look away from the 38,000 mentions of his name in the Trumpstein files and the missing pages of victims accusing him of numerous sex assaults.
The irony is that Iran is probably at the weakest it has been since the Revolution and were in no state to attack anyone but with this unilateral action which has not been sanctioned by the United Nations or the American Parliament, Iran is now attacking other Middle East nations which house American troops, making the situation much more volatile and dangerous than it needed to be. This was not a war of necessity because as the pre-emptive part shows, instead it is a war of choice and a political act.
The sham act of diplomacy harks back to the great American WMD misadventure in Iraq when it was said that Saddam was stockpiling Nuclear, Biological and Chemical weapons and while diplomacy was spoken and despite Hans Blix and his Weapons Inspectors actually on the ground visiting everywhere George W Bush sent them to check and coming up empty handed, the White House decided to just invade anyway resulting in over a million dead Iraqi's and a nation that remains a basketcase and hotbed for terrorism ever since. As we know and knew then, Saddam said he wasn't, Bush said he was and it turned out one of them were telling the truth and he didn't have an American accent.
I am no fan of Iran, yes, Iran is run by an awful, murderous Administration who need to be dealt with diplomatically but far worse is Israel who is run by a Genocidal Administration who have been conducting it for over 75 years and backed the Americans who have a long history of warmongering who are currently under the control of a narcissistic idiot who was recently threatening to invade another NATO country.
Ideally they will blow themselves up and leave the rest of us in peace but it won't happen and we will have to deal with the fall out, such as the 85 young girls shielding in a school or the other 201 people killed today by Israeli and American jets or the number killed by Iranian missiles in Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and the UAE.    
A Trump tweet from 2012 has been almost permanently on my Facebook feed today which stated that President Barack Obama would start a war with Iran to shore up his re-election effort and to distract from his supposed faults as a leader would do so to save face or because of his inability to negotiate properly and show how tough he is.
Obama never did attack Iran but then he wasn't Netanyahu's bitch and never had stories of his sexual assaults and pedophile behaviour to cover up, Trump has.

Special Guest Blogger: Mike Peters

Right then. Let’s get this over with.
Someone’s got to do it, and frankly, I don’t trust any of you lot to get the details right. You’d probably have me snuffing it in some ridiculously glamorous, rock-and-roll fashion. Choking on a champagne bottle backstage at Wembley, perhaps. but Bollocks to that. If I’m writing my own send-off, we’re going to have a bit of truth, a bit of spit, and a whole lot of polish.
In my hometown of Prestaten, I was vaguely famous for a bit. The local paper might have taken my picture. I could probably get a free pint in the correct pub, provided the landlord was in a good mood and remembered who I was.
In Tokyo, once, we were very famous for about three hours. A thousand Japanese kids sang '68 Guns' back at us with more passion than we’d ever mustered ourselves. It was breathtaking. Then we got on the bullet train to the next city and were just four gormless-looking blokes with bad haircuts trying to order noodles. That’s fame, that is. A beautiful, fleeting, and utterly confusing moment in time.
And for a little while the flags came out. The hair got bigger. We were The Alarm, the band with the pretentious name and the un-ironic love of anthems. We sang about the Spirit of ’76, about strength, about love. And people, remarkably, sang along. We got to be on Top of the Pops. I stood next to David Bowie once and was too intimidated to say anything other than a very quiet “Alright?”. He probably thought I was a roadie.
So what's the legacy of a sweaty git from North Wales who shouted into a microphone for forty years?
Is it the gold discs on the wall? I’ve used one as a coaster for a mug of Bovril, so that feels suitably punk. Is it the songs? Maybe. I still get a proper kick when I hear someone humming Rain In The Summertime in a supermarket checkout queue. A small victory, but a victory nonetheless.
Of course, the universe has a wicked sense of humour. It gave me five goes at dying from Cancer but the cheeky sod picked the wrong bloke. Cancer thought it could have a go, but it didn’t bank on a lifetime of punk rock stubbornness or the sheer bloody-mindedness of a Welshman who hasn’t finished his tour. Bollocks to cancer, I said in 1995, 1996, 2005, 2022 and 2024 before it finally got me in 2025.

Morons Led By Idiots

On Tuesday the Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said that: 'Iran would under no circumstances ever develop a nuclear weapon' and then on Wednesday Trump said in his rambling, lie filled speech that military action against the Middle Eastern country could happen soon as: 'We haven’t heard those secret words, 'We will never have a nuclear weapon.'
Now we know that the Fuchsia Fascist isn't the brightest watt bulb and he is distracted by the Trumpstein files in which his names appears thousands of times alongside his one time pedophile best friend but surely he would have someone in his vicinity who could say to him..'Well, actually....'
To think that this is the team who could launch an attack on Iran for any number of reasons, reasons which seem as trustworthy as the Mango Moron being left alone with a woman (or male if the Trumpstein files are to be believed) and all this to make a deal which is going to be the same as the one which was working and he pulled out of previously.  
As for the claim that the attack in June last year 'obliterated the Iranian Nuclear facilities and put them back years', now the Americans are claiming that Iran could be as close as a week away from having industrial-grade bomb-making material, which is some achievement unless obliterated and years means something else in the American dictionary.
While Iran remain watching the American gunboat diplomacy in action off their coast, Cuba is now back in the Trump wonky eyeline after four Cuban nationals were shot and killed on a US-registered speedboat that entered its waters and opened fire on a patrol boat.
In a statement, the ministry said the 10 passengers on the speedboat, which it claims was registered in Florida, had been living in the US and that: 'According to preliminary statements by those detained, intended to carry out an infiltration for terrorist purposes' and pictures were shown of Assault rifles, handguns and Molotov cocktails among the items seized.
Florida congressman called it 'a massacre' and Florida's attorney general said: 'The Cuban government cannot be trusted, and we will do everything in our power to hold these communists accountable' and probably said that with a straight face while every Irony meter in the World exploded because as it is said 'Americans don't get irony' and saying some other Government is not to be trusted is the actual definition of Ironic.

The Trumpstein Files Fallout

The fall out from the Trumpstein files has been particularly bad for Jeffrey Epstein buddies Andrew and Mandelson who have both been arrested here in the UK while in Slovakia a diplomat has resigned, Sarah Ferguson has been booted out of her own Charities, the former Prime Minister of Norway has been has been charged with gross corruption and the Chairman of DP World has resigned while in the US? Zero, zip, nada.
The largest scalp so far has to be Andrew Mountbatten Windsor who is quite rightly hiding behind seats of cars zipping him between police stations but the Royals have not covered themselves Glory over the whole sordid tale.
Four years ago the thought of this useless liability testifying in a New York courtroom forced them to look down the back of every sofa they owned to raise £12m to shove towards the late Virginia Giuffre’s who was launching a civil case alleging that the former prince abused her on three occasions in London, New York and the US Virgin Islands.
Obviously the senior Royals, including the late Queen, decided that it shouldn’t get to court at almost any cost and hoped that it would shield him and be the end of it and shut down the accusations.
Then the latest bunch of Trumpstein files were released and there he was again with it staring everyone in black and white that he had had been performing misconduct in public office by sending sensitive information to his pedophile buddy, the one he swore he no longer had contact with although he very much still did.
The Royal approach went from one of shielding the massive arse to 'Standing ready to support Thames Valley police' and tagging on that they: 'Remain focused on the victims' although the previous focus seem to be shutting up one of the victims who had the dirt on one of their own.
Andrew himself told Emily Maitlis in that car crash of an interview that he would certainly help US investigators with their Epstein inquiries if asked after the US attorney for the southern district of New York stated that Andrew had offered 'zero' cooperation and the situation remained unchanged.
The Royals found that that doing nothing wasn't working but as calls for the logs and Buckingham Palace guest list to be made public go unanswered, the strategy now seems to be say the right things but still do nothing.
Hopefully the two charges will lead to some kind of domino effect but if you are in America, waiting for one of the main protagonist's in this sleazy and depraved story to get hauled off to a waiting Police Car, you may have a long wait because the man whose name runs through it like a urine stain on a Moscow Mattress, is the one responsible for releasing and redacting them.

Special Guest Blogger: Brian James

If there’s one thing I’ve managed to leave behind besides a trail of broken guitar strings, questionable life choices, and a suspicion that my liver once had a secret identity, it’s the legacy of being the guy who helped start something called The Damned and if you’re scratching your head wondering who I am, don’t worry, I occasionally forget myself. But hey, that’s the price of fame, right?
I’ll be the first to admit it, The Damned didn’t exactly launch with the subtlety of a Shakespearean sonnet. 1976, London, and a bunch of pubescent misfits with safety-pinned trousers and more attitude than a Chihuahua in a dog park.
I was 16, playing guitar in a band named after a swear word (Bastard if you are wondering) , and already delivering a performance so over-the-top, one audience member fainted. Was it the heat? The mosh pit? Or the fact that our drummer had never played drums in his life? Probably the latter.
Prior to The Damned, Vanian, Sensible and Rat Scabies had been members of the band Masters of the Backside with Chrissie Hynde as our singer but we almost had Sid Vicious at the front, but he never turned up for the audition so we went with Dave Vanian instead thankfully.
We were about as professional as a street fight at a bakery but that’s what made us famous in the eyes of the punk press. The NME called us 'the first punk band to play like we meant it' which, in hindsight, was code for 'these kids are rubbish but they’re having fun' and we were and that was when I invented the iconic Damned guitar sound
We were the first punk band from the United Kingdom to release a single, 'New Rose' release a Punk studio album and tour the United States and we toured with the Sex Pistols and the Clash but many of the tour dates were cancelled by organizers or local authorities and to be expelled by the Sex Pistols for being too out of control and when you had those people in your line up it showed just how crazy those times where.
We smashed up hotels before it was at thing, Captain Sensible took to coming on stage naked from the waist down and pissing on the audience and we were banned from British TV for six months after smashing up the set of the The Old Grey Whistle Test.
Rock bands don’t usually go down in history for their harmonized sevenths or their ability to tune an instrument. They go down for the stories. And The Damned? We had stories.
It was said that I made a guitar sound like a cat fighting a washing machine but we did get letters from kids who said that our music got me them through their school exams to which our  reply was 'You’re welcome but maybe revise a bit more'.
You didn’t miss a scandalous rockstar overdose or a fiery plane crash. No, I just died of a heart attack which isn't very punk but after lifetime of mayhem, music, and the occasional questionable fashion choice (leather corsets, anyone?). I never chased fame, I just chased the next gig, the next laugh, and the next pint.
If you ever find yourself wondering what happened to the guy who helped start The Damned, just remember: life’s too short for boring music, and rock ‘n’ roll is just punk with better hair. Now go out there, be a bit of a menace, and maybe learn a power chord or two.

Source Of National Pride

 
Your nationality is merely a quirk of Geography, if I was born 25 miles further South and i would be cheering for France in the World Cup but as i wasn't my passport and driving licence have me down as a British Citizen and i will be humming the Three Lions song all summer.
I asked a couple of lads who were hanging a flag on a lamp-post last summer what made them so proud they had to advertise it from the street furniture and the answer was: 'Well..we are English ain't we' and filled the following silence with '...and we live in England' which was very observant of him and served as a reminder to me just in case i thought I had woken up in Japan that morning.   
When pressed on specifically what made them proud to be from the UK his pal came to his rescue with: 'All the things we invented and winning the wars and stuff' although when asked what invention in particular he replied. 'All of 'em'.
Obviously two people isn't a large large sample size but luckily Pew Research Center did a larger one and asked people from 25 nations what makes them proud to be where they are from.
People in the UK, it found, are most proud of the 'kind and honest people' but being proud of the people you are caught inside your own national borders with was surprisingly high.
Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Spain and Turkey also answered that the thing that makes them most proud are their fellow citizens.
The arts and culture of their nations was top for the French, Italians, Mexicans, while the Greeks, Hungarians, Polish consider their history with a sense of the most pride but it is their system of Government which tick the box for the Germans, Indians and Swedes.
Being proud of their freedoms tops the list for the Dutch and the Americans but for Indonesians it is their country’s diversity and multiculturalism, Kenyans the Peace and safety their country gives them while on the opposite African coast the Nigerians are most proud of their natural resources and South Africans have a special place for their country’s services.
Obviously some nations have much more to be proud of, some not so much, but i hope Pew's next poll asks what are they least proud of which would be much more interesting and it should be noted that in the UK, Religion, Companies, Natural Resources and Food did not get a single mention.