Clare Haughey, SNP candidate for Rutherglen and Cambuslang, and an NHS mental health nurse, said: “Under the SNP, our NHS has a record number of staff employed to provide mental health support and our mental health budget for the year exceeds £1.5 billion. Source link
Authored by Paul Homewood via notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, This is frightening. Indeed it is truly Orwellian… From the Guardian: A U-turn by the UK’s broadcasting regulator Ofcom means it will investigate complaints of climate change denial on television and radio for the first time since 2017. The move marks a victory for campaigners who have accused the regulator of allowing some broadcasters “to spout dangerous climate lies” and “flout” rules on accuracy and impartiality. Complaints about programmes on TalkTV and TalkRadio were assessed by Ofcom, which then decided not to investigate, the same result as more than 1,000 other climate complaints since 2020. However, after a letter from the Good Law Project (GLP) in January, requesting an explanation for the rejections, Ofcom said it had withdrawn its original decision and would “consider afresh” the complaints. One complaint was about comments from a Talk guest who said in November that climate change “was a deliberate effort to create fake anxiety … out of something that is false”. In the second case, also in November, another guest said the Labour government’s energy policies were …
One of the first courses in medical school is gross anatomy. We pay respect to the person who donated their body—someone with a life, loved ones, a history. We are grateful. It is also a complex emotional experience—existential, personally challenging, an abrupt shift from academics to life-and-death. At some point during that course, we dissect the head, and hold the brain, reflecting on the person’s life. For many physicians, that moment changes something. The mind, whatever else it is, has a brain. The brain has a mind. These two conceptualizations are much closer to one another than many people—including many therapists—would prefer to acknowledge. Does the Brain Matter in Therapy? In psychoanalytic circles, I’ve often observed a remarkable resistance to neuroscience—not healthy skepticism, but something closer to avoidance, though the discipline of neuropsychoanalysis, pioneered by Mark Solms and colleagues, represents an important counterpoint. I’ve been told flat-out by esteemed colleagues that they don’t care about neuroscience or think it has any relevance—an expression, perhaps, of personal philosophies, ways of coping with life’s travails, or inexperience …
Nevada gaming regulators have taken their fight with Kalshi to court, filing a civil enforcement lawsuit just hours after a federal appeals panel declined to pause the dispute. The move came Tuesday, shortly after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejected the company’s emergency request for an administrative stay. The Nevada Gaming Control Board said it lodged its complaint in the First Judicial District Court in Carson City on February 17. Through the filing, regulators are asking a judge for “a declaration and injunction to stop Kalshi from offering unlicensed wagering in violation of Nevada law.” "Nevada Gaming Control Board Files Civil Enforcement Action Against Kalshi" Press release from NGCB: (Links to court filings in thread) pic.twitter.com/XojQHc8cYu — Daniel Wallach (@WALLACHLEGAL) February 18, 2026 At the center of the case is Kalshi’s online marketplace. According to the complaint, the company “operates a derivatives exchange and prediction market, which offers products referred to as event contracts for sale,” and those contracts “are offered for sale on Kalshi’s website and mobile app, and are …
Philosophers Stephen Nadler and Lawrence Shapiro open their book When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People with a dire warning. “Something is seriously wrong,” they write. “An alarming number of citizens, in America and around the world, are embracing crazy, even dangerous ideas.” These ideas include the beliefs that vaccines cause autism, that the scientific consensus on climate change is a hoax, and that 5G cellular networks contributed to the spread of COVID-19. According to Nadler and Shapiro, the problem with those who hold such beliefs is not that they are unintelligent or uneducated. Rather, it is that they “think badly”—they should be “perfectly aware that they are forming and holding beliefs irrationally and irresponsibly, and even doing so willfully.” Nadler and Shapiro are not alone in thinking that liberal democracies are experiencing an epidemic of willful ignorance. In the last decade, many observers have lamented the advent of a “post-truth” era, an era in which a growing number of citizens have little or no interest in the truth and would rather believe what is …
Sign up for Big Think Books A dedicated space for exploring the books and ideas that shape our world. Excerpted from The Healing Power of Resilience: A New Perspective for Health and Well-Being. Copyright © 2026, Tara Narula. Reproduced by permission of Simon Element, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. You may think that denial can be harmful when encountering a challenge. But let me tell you about Richard Cohen. When I was struggling with my eyesight, I read a book called Blindsided: Lifting a Life Above Illness, by Richard Cohen. Cohen, who called the book a “reluctant memoir,” was diagnosed with MS at 25, survived two bouts of colon cancer, was legally blind for much of his life, and yet had an incredible, award-winning career as a war correspondent and journalist. He was married to journalist Meredith Viera for almost 40 years and was the father of three children. Sadly, he passed away in late 2024 after a struggle with pneumonia. I had the chance to speak with Richard 20 years …
On November 14 the Guardian reported, on the basis of internal military documents, that the United States was “planning for the long-term division of Gaza.” Reconstruction of the devastated territory, according to the report, would begin in the Israeli-controlled half of the Strip, east of the “yellow line,” which dozens of Palestinians have been killed for crossing since a cease-fire went into effect this past October. Last month CNN reported that on November 29 an Israeli drone had killed two children, eight and ten years old, who had crossed the line to gather firewood for their paralyzed father. “Quiet is not the absence of conflict,” Sara Roy wrote on October 25 in the NYR Online. “Nor is it peace.” In her essay Roy, an associate at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard, surveyed several of the most prominent plans for the “day after” in the Strip, among them Donald Trump’s twenty-point proposal, which was approved by the UN Security Council soon after. All of them, she concluded, “impose forms of governance that exclude …
Three years ago, ChatGPT was born. It amazed the world and ignited unprecedented investment and excitement in AI. Today, ChatGPT is still a toddler, but public sentiment around the AI boom has turned sharply negative. The shift began when OpenAI released GPT-5 this summer to mixed reviews, mostly from casual users who, unsurprisingly, judged the system by its surface flaws rather than its underlying capabilities. Since then, pundits and influencers have declared that AI progress is slowing, that scaling has “hit the wall,” and that the entire field is just another tech bubble inflated by blusterous hype. In fact, many influencers have latched onto the dismissive phrase “AI slop” to diminish the amazing images, documents, videos and code that frontier AI models generate on command. This perspective is not just wrong, it is dangerous. It makes me wonder, where were all these “experts” on irrational technology bubbles when electric scooter startups were touted as a transportation revolution and cartoon NFTs were being auctioned for millions? They were probably too busy buying worthless land in the …
Is that too extreme a statement? Consider the recent approval given at top levels for citation justice (citing sources on the basis of equity, not usefulness) and suppressing uncomfortable research findings (presumably to advance various causes). Just recently, a demand has arisen for accuracy in data to take a back seat to what makes people feel more comfortable. Then there are the paper mills, the impersonation scandals, the refusal to publish politically sensitive corrections, and the big time fraud. And yet science bureaucrats, moan that trust in science has cratered over the years. Some commentators ascribe the loss of trust to mere acceptance of myths. Cynics will respond that most people don’t even know about most of this. So how can corruption be a reason for loss of trust? Fair enough. But when an enterprise is becoming dodgy, there often starts to be, shall we say, an odor about it. People who can’t do research may still smell the odor. Looking everywhere but inward for the causes of loss of trust A scattering of recent …
