Answers to this seem to be split according to whether people are currently in receipt of a pension or not. Almost like every other tax issue, in fact.

NEW: Nigel Farage says X is now becoming “a very unpleasant place” due to a rise racist accounts and content Reform leader says that many of his ethnic minority candidates are experiencing huge levels of abuse

BRB, just telling my stockbroker to go big on Hot-Dog man memes

First report I saw of this was the bombing of Gaza. The targets were being identified far faster than humans were able to keep up, and there was no desire to really check that hard.
Industrial scale AI kills rubber-stamped by a human is where we're at right now.

Browsing this company's website and the only way I can describe what I'm seeing is imagine a school shooter was a management consultant

Research Communications Assistant - DEMENTIA RESEARCHER Alzheimer’s Society seeks a Research Communications Assistant to share dementia research through engaging content, events and stakeholder engagement.

Alzheimer’s Society is recruiting a Research Communications Assistant to share dementia research through engaging content, events and stakeholder engagement. Closing date: 4th May

www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/job/research...

1. The paper with the implausibly large effects of Omega-3 fatty acids on mental health was now retracted. A little thread on the process where @ianhussey.mmmdata.io and I was involved.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Yes, autocorrect. I did mean to say ‘furless’ rather than ‘fields’. That makes so much more sense.

Q for anyone who knows about these things: can you build solar farms a bit higher and a bit more spread out so you can grows meadows around them and have hedges around the fields? If so it would be infinitely better than the furless around my way.

Kind of nice on a sunny Spring morning. But other than a few pests it has zero ecological value. Please fill it with cheap, renewable, politically autonomous energy producers that don’t cause wars
and make our grandchildren’s world uninhabitable.

Also, all the arable farms are owned by foreign investors already! They’re financial instruments more than they are sustainable businesses - and certainly not an integral part of the local community.

I live in Norfolk surrounded by fields of monoculture arable crops with zero ecological value. I’d love to have a solar farm near my house. If you don’t like the look, get them to build a hawthorn hedge. The UK is crippled by high energy costs more than almost any other systemic issue.

Arthur Holquin • Follow 9h • 0 When the Neophyte Corrects the Vicar of Christ On JD Vance, Theological Hubris, and the Gospel He Has Yet to Learn There is a particular arrogance that takes root in the newly converted - the zeal of the autodidact who, having just discovered the tradition, mistakes enthusiasm for mastery. JD Vance, who received baptism into the Catholic Church in 2019 at the age of thirty-five, has now committed the singular error of instructing the Bishop of Rome to "be careful when he talks about matters of theology!" We should sit with the full weight of that sentence. The Vice President of the United States - seven years a Catholic, formerly an evangelical, before that a self-described atheist - stood before a Turning Point USA audience in Georgia and publicly admonished Pope Leo XIV about theological precision. "If you're going to opine on matters of theology," Vance informed the successor of Peter, "you've got to be careful, you've got to make sure it's anchored in the truth." The audacity is breathtaking. The irony is almost comic.

While Vance was dispensing theological warnings from a stage in Georgia, Pope Leo XIV was standing at the archaeological site of Hippo in Algeria - the episcopal see where St. Augustine served as bishop until his death in 430 A.D. Vance, who claims Augustine as his patron saint and frequently invokes him in speeches, was lecturing on Augustinian just war theology to a political rally audience. The pope he was lecturing - who served as Prior General of the Order of St. Augustine for more than a decade and holds a doctorate in Canon Law from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas - was planting an olive tree at the very ground where Augustine lived, prayed, wrote, and died. If God governs history with a sense of irony, this moment surely pleased Him. The occasion for Vance's correction was Pope Leo's statement that "God is never on the side of those who wield the sword." Vance responded by invoking the thousand-year tradition of Just War theory as if the pope were unaware of it. But Leo did not say war is never permissible. He said God is not simply enlisted as a combatant on any nation's side. That is not a negation of Just War doctrine. That is its foundation. The Catechism at §2309 is unambiguous about the conditions that must all be simultaneously met for a war to be just. Archbishop Broglio stated plainly on Easter Sunday that the war against Iran does not meet those criteria. Cardinals Cupich, Mcelroy, and Tobin, along with Archbishop Coakley, have spoken with notable unanimity. Cardinal Tobin put it plainly: Pope Leo "will continue to speak clearly against war and other offenses against human dignity and to call for authentic dialogue, because the Church's witness is grounded in the peace of Christ, not in partisan interests." That is episcopal fidelity. What Vance offered was its precise opposite.

The deeper problem is not merely that Vance is wrong about just war. It is the ecclesiological framework he is importing from American Christian nationalism into a tradition that explicitly rejects it. Vance told Fox News that "in some cases it would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality, to stick to matters of what's going on in the Catholic Church, and let the president of the United States stick to dictating public policy." Let that formulation stand naked for a moment. The pope — who holds a universal pastoral office precisely because the Gospel speaks to every dimension of human life — is being instructed to confine himself to the sacristy, while the president is assigned the role of "dictating" the political world. This is not a Catholic understanding of faith and public life. Catholic Social Teaching from Rerum Novarum onward has always insisted that the Gospel is not a private spiritual comfort but a public moral claim. When Vance tells the pope to stay in his lane, he is not defending Catholic doctrine. He is betraying it.

JD Vance's forthcoming book on his Catholic faith is titled Communion. Its cover features a United Methodist church. I do not say this merely to mock. Symbolism matters in Catholic theology, and the symbolism here is telling. A book about Catholic unity, bearing Protestant ecclesial architecture on its cover, written by a man who publicly contradicts the pope on Just War doctrine - this is not communion. This is confusion dressed in piety. Archbishop Coakley said it plainly: "The Pope is not Trump's rival, nor is the Pope a politician. He is the Vicar of Christ who speaks from the truth of the Gospel and for the care of souls." Communion, in Catholic theology, is not a feeling of spiritual warmth. It is a participation in the Body of Christ that carries radical obligations — to the poor, the stranger, the enemy, to peace. It is a table the powerful do not preside over. They are guests at it, like everyone else. A seven-year Catholic who tells the pope to watch his theology, while defending an administration that posted an Al image of the president as Jesus Christ and refused to apologize, is not in communion with the tradition he claims to be writing about. He is in communion with power. And that, as Augustine himself understood deeply, is a very different thing.

A pretty comprehensive takedown of JD Vance by a Catholic priest, Msgr. Arthur Holquin

open.substack.com/pub/liturgya...

The Rhodesia Solution - Yes Minister YouTube video by damo2353

A wonderful clip I have seen being shared recently. www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGJH...

My phrase of the year so far is "I'm glad you pushed back on that", which seems to be AI's way of admitting it's just made shit up.

Me: [idly looking up info on popes]

Wikipedia: This list is incomplete; you can help expand it.

Me: wut?

Wikipedia: [lifts eyebrows suggestively]

India hits 150 GW solar milestone The country added around 44.6 GW of new PV capacity in fiscal year 2026, according to new figures released by JMK Research.

With 150GW solar, India achieved its target of having 50% of its total installed electricity capacity from non-fossil fuel sources in June 2025, reaching this milestone 5 years ahead of its original 2030 deadline set under the Paris Agreement www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/10/i...

I tried Old Man's War recently as an audiobook and couldn't get into it. The narration was fine but I couldn't relate to the character or immerse myself into the story at all. So I bought the book instead, read it myself, and loved it. Some books read so much better with an internal narrator.

For nearly a century, we believed the therapeutic effect of ECT is the seizure. Our latest research suggests we may have been looking at the wrong event.
A thread on why cortical spreading depression (CSD) might be the driver of therapeutic benefit.
Work led by @therehugolad.bsky.social

Thank you compiling this. It would be great to get more Uk clinicians on the list too, or those doing clinical trials. I know there aren’t many who have come over from the other place though, which is a shame.
Suggest @drjudeharrison.bsky.social and @goniah.bsky.social to be added.

I was attacked by members of the PayPal Mafia, Auerenheimer, Yiannopoulos, Breitbart, 4/8 Chan in 2014-2015, after I criticized Marc Andreessen in the MIT tech review, ultimately resulting in me closing one of the only independent tech critical magazines that existed at this time.

Doe had broken up with the user in 2024, and he used ChatGPT to process the split, according to emails and communications cited in the lawsuit. Rather than push back on his one-sided account, it repeatedly cast him as rational and wronged, and her as manipulative and unstable. He then took these AI-generated conclusions off the screen and into the real world, using them to stalk and harass her. This manifested in several AI-generated, clinical-looking psychological reports that he distributed to her family, friends, and employer.

For months, her then-fiancé and partner of several years had been fixating on her and their relationship with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In mid-2024, she explained, they’d hit a rough patch as a couple; in response, he turned to ChatGPT, which he’d previously used for general business-related tasks, for “therapy.” Before she knew it, she recalled, he was spending hours each day talking with the bot, funneling everything she said or did into the model and propounding on pseudo-psychiatric theories about her mental health and behavior. He started to bombard the woman with screenshots of his ChatGPT interactions and copy-pasted AI-generated text, in which the chatbot can be seen armchair-diagnosing her with personality disorders and insisting that she was concealing her real feelings and behavior through coded language. The bot often laced its so-called analyses with flowery spiritual jargon, accusing the woman of engaging in manipulative “rituals.” Trying to communicate with her fiancé was like walking on “ChatGPT eggshells,” the woman recalled. No matter what she tried, ChatGPT would “twist it.” “He would send [screenshots] to me from ChatGPT, and be like, ‘Why does it say this? Why would it say this about you, if this is not true?'” she recounted. “And it was just awful, awful things.”

Shortly after moving out, the former fiancé began to publish multiple videos and images a day on social media accusing the woman of an array of alleged abuses — the same bizarre ideas he’d fixated on so extensively with ChatGPT. In some videos, he stares into the camera, reading from seemingly AI-generated scripts; others feature ChatGPT-generated text overlaid on spiritual or sci-fi-esque graphics. In multiple posts, he describes stabbing the woman. In another, he discusses surveilling her. (The posts, which we’ve reviewed, are intensely disturbing; we’re not quoting directly from them or the man’s ChatGPT transcripts due to concern for the woman’s privacy and safety.) The ex-fiancé also published revenge porn of the woman on social media, shared her full name and other personal information, and doxxed the names and ages of her teenage children from a previous marriage. He created a new TikTok dedicated to harassing content — complete with its own hashtag — and followed the woman’s family, friends, and neighbors, as well as other teens from her kids’ high school. “I’ve lived in this small town my entire life,” said the woman. “I couldn’t leave my house for months… people were messaging me all over my social media, like, ‘Are you safe? Are your kids safe? What is happening right now?'”

A woman sued OpenAI last week alleging that ChatGPT reinforced the obsessive, violent delusions of her stalker (her ex-boyfriend.)

This woman's claims (as detailed by TechCrunch, left) are chillingly similar to those of a completely different woman whose story Futurism reported on in Feb (right):

So glad he brought up Just War doctrine. Let’s take a look at how the current war meets those criteria, shall we?
🧵1/300

I hate to tell you my fellow porkers but all of our thighs look this by 62 unless you’re physically active. Big contributor to frailty in old age. Use it it lose it.

'I was kicked out of nightclub because of my wheelchair' Maddie Haining, 18, says she was told she was a safety risk and escorted out of a Manchester nightspot.

For every time this makes it into news there are countless other instances where the wheelchair user ends up shouting into the wind as their world gets ever smaller.
Society much prefers if you don’t make a scene and just go to your activity group instead. 😡

That would make him Evil Obelix! Fell into a cauldron of magic potion when he was a baby and has been intolerable ever since.

Ah, the Millennium Development Goals. They were going so well until suddenly the UN suddenly fell down a well and was never heard from again -around 2016 or so.

To be fair, 'not great politically in the short-term' is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

China is governed by a horribly repressive regime, but at least they don't say stupid shit like this.
I sometimes very sadly wonder whether Chinese hegemony and renewables tech might be the only realistic solution to global warming. Not great politically in the short-term, but 100 years from now?

Imagine dedicating your life to incel looksmaxxing so much that you've smashed yourself in the face with a hammer only to have a regular reporter from 60 Minutes Australia completely outmog you.
(Clavicular eventually walked off the interview)

Video ‘They didn’t even know what we did’: Former official on DOGE cuts that gutted USAID ABC’s Jonathan Karl spoke with former USAID official Nicholas Enrich about his new book, “Into The Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower’s Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID,” out Tuesday.

"And the chief of staff looks at me, stunned, and says, ‘Wow, I had no idea that USAID did this kind of work. When I think about what USAID does in global health, I just assumed it was just, you know, abortions'.” abcnews.com/video/131975...