Unsolved Mystery Of The Disappearance Of Flannan Lightkeepers

 Flannan Isles Lighthouse located at the highest point on Eilean Mòr, one of the Flannan Isles in the Outer Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland. And it’s best known for its keepers’ mysterious disappearance in 1900.

The first record that something was disturbing on the Flannan Isles was on 15 December 1900 when the steamer Archtor, on a passage from Philadelphia to Leith, noted in its log that the light was not operational in poor weather conditions....<<<Read More>>>...

Equality under the Hayekian Rule of Law

Friedrich von Hayek considered the rule of law to be essential in minimizing coercion and enhancing individual liberty. In this context, he regarded "equality before the law" (formal equality) as essential to the rule of law. 

However, he emphasized that formal equality is the only concept of equality that is compatible with the rule of law. He criticized socialist and progressive attempts to theorize further notions of equality, which they package as "social justice," as disguised attacks on liberty. In the Constitution of Liberty, he explains: 

"Equality of the general rules of law and conduct, however, is the only kind of equality conducive to liberty and the only equality which we can secure without destroying liberty. Not only has liberty nothing to do with any other sort of equality, but it is even bound to produce inequality in many respects. This is the necessary result and part of the justification of individual liberty: if the result of individual liberty did not demonstrate that some manners of living are more successful than others, much of the case for it would vanish." 

Like Ludwig von Mises, Hayek defended liberty on the basis that individual liberty is essential to Western civilization — he described it as "that ideal of freedom which inspired modern Western civilization and whose partial realization made possible the achievements of that civilization." It would make no sense for anyone who values this civilization to undermine the very liberty that enables it to flourish. Attempting to eradicate inequality, while purporting to value the conditions that gave rise to that inequality, would be contradictory....<<<Read More>>>...

Online Safety Act: Ofcom’s super-complaints scheme will be used to censor “emerging online harms”

 The UK’s Online Safety Act is being used to monitor and censor online users, not only in the UK but worldwide. Now, Ofcom, the regulator implementing the provisions of the Act, is turning its attention to “emerging online harms.”

At the end of this year, new regulations will come into effect that allow for super-complaints to be made to Ofcom. Super-complaints are complaints made by designated organisations, including charities and consumer groups, on broad, emerging trends or widespread “online safety issues” across multiple platforms.

A super-complaint is a formal mechanism established under the Online Safety Act that allows designated organisations to raise concerns about systemic issues affecting users of regulated online services. Unlike individual complaints, super-complaints focus on broad, emerging trends or widespread problems across multiple platforms, rather than isolated incidents.

Eligible entities, such as consumer protection bodies or organisations representing users, can submit these complaints to trigger a specific regulatory response from Ofcom. The super-complaints regime is designed to complement Ofcom’s own research and horizon scanning, a forward-looking assessment of emerging risks and trends in digital services.

“The super-complaints regime, in line with the Act and recent Government regulations … will enable eligible entities to raise systemic issues that arise across services or, in exceptional circumstances, on one service, to our attention. We expect to consult on draft guidance for potential super-complainants in September 2025 and publish our final guidance in early 2026,” Ofcom’s roadmap to regulation of “online safety” states....<<<Read More>>>...

Reexamining the global warming narrative: Insights from “The Satanic Gases” by Patrick J. Michaels and Robert C. Balling Jr.

 Patrick J. Michaels and Robert C. Balling Jr. argue in "The Satanic Gases" that mainstream panic over global warming is politically motivated rather than scientifically sound, criticizing figures like Al Gore for exploiting extreme weather events for political gain.

The authors demonstrate that climate models have consistently overstated warming trends, with real-world data showing minimal temperature increases in over 80 percent of the troposphere — undermining claims of rapid climate change.

Contrary to apocalyptic predictions, rising CO? levels enhance plant growth, agricultural productivity and ecosystem health, with studies confirming a global "greening" effect.

Federal funding and institutional incentives bias research toward alarmism, with scientists incentivized to perpetuate exaggerated narratives despite contradictory evidence.

The Kyoto Protocol and similar mitigation efforts are deemed costly and futile, with the authors advocating instead for adaptation strategies and evidence-based policymaking free from political distortions.

In "The Satanic Gases: Clearing the Air about Global Warming," climatologists Patrick J. Michaels and Robert C. Balling Jr. present a bold challenge to the mainstream narrative on climate change.

They argue that much of the panic surrounding global warming is politically driven rather than scientifically justified. Their book dismantles the alarmist claims often promoted by figures like former Vice President Al Gore, who has built his career on framing extreme weather events as direct consequences of human-caused climate change. Michaels and Balling contend that these incidents are exploited for political gain rather than reflecting genuine scientific consensus....<<<Read More>>>...

Global Warming Exaggerated, Say Soaring Number of Britons

 The number of Brits who think the dangers of global warming have been exaggerated has jumped by more than 50% in the past four years, while nearly 90% say they do not support energy bills rising to pay for Net Zero. The revelations come in new polling for the Times, which has the story.

One in four voters now believe that concerns over climate change are not as real as scientists have said, amid growing public concern at the cost of the Government’s Net Zero policies.

Less than a third of the public (30%) are in favour of banning new petrol and diesel cars — down from 51% in 2021.

Only 16% of voters said they would be prepared to pay higher gas bills to encourage the switch to electricity.

Experts said the findings showed that growing climate scepticism within mainstream politics in both Britain and the US was cutting through with voters, as the broad consensus on climate action breaks down. …

Four years ago climate change was identified as the fourth most important issue facing the country ahead of immigration and asylum, education and crime.

At the time only 11 per cent of the 1,600-plus people questioned said that global warming was not the result of human activity while only 16% believed that the warnings from scientists about its implications were exaggerated.

Now climate change has fallen right down the list of the public concerns while there has been a marked increase in climate scepticism. The environment has fallen behind issues such as the economy and immigration, but is still above education, transport and Brexit.

Today 16% of voters think global warming is not the result of human activity, while 25% think the threat has been exaggerated....<<<Read More>>>....

Creeping Marxism -The Fabian Society - Aims & Origins

10,000 Years Ago In India They Talked About Alien Abductions

The Department of Archeology in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh decided to seek help from the American and Indian aerospace agencies.

Archaeologists turned to them in order to determine the origin of the rather strange rock paintings discovered in the Bastar tribal region. This is reported by the Indian edition of The Times of India, which published photographs of the find.

The researchers were most surprised that the drawings found in various caves in the region have much in common with the appearance attributed to aliens in science fiction or in the stories of eyewitnesses who claim to have seen them....<<<Read More>>>... 

 

Lloyd’s of London Quits Net Zero

 Insurance market Lloyd’s of London (not to be confused with the Lloyds Banking Group) has taken another step away from Net Zero. According to the Financial Times, Lloyd’s new boss Patrick Tiernan has said that the owners of the insurance market “will no longer ask insurers to stop providing insurance cover for coal or other planet-warming fossil fuels”.

A number of newspaper reports covering the story put the blame (or credit, if you prefer) at the White House. Lloyd’s move came “amid a backlash led by Donald Trump against pro-green financing”, says the Telegraph. The Guardian says: “Donald Trump has been expanding oil, gas and coal production, ordering companies to ‘drill, baby, drill’ while ditching green energy programmes.” And the green-leaning FT, too, uses the slogan to contextualise this nail in the global Net Zero coffin, mentioning that “US President Donald Trump ditched dozens of clean energy programmes in favour of fossil fuels, and urged oil and gas companies to ‘drill, baby, drill’”....<<<Read More>>>...

Food for Thought #767

 

ID cards are a state power grab that won’t do anything to stop illegal immigration. Starmer is arming himself with bullying weapons Stalin and Hitler wished they had… we can’t let this happen

 This period of British specialness may be ending, as the sea ceases to guard us as well as it once did. But we should not help it to end, by foolishly surrendering the freedoms we have.

Even in the most welcoming of continental countries, the state is above the people’s heads and the individual is beneath the feet of then power elite. Almost all these countries have some form of identity card or identity register, and it is up to you to show that you are going about your lawful business.

 My Swiss-German mother-in-law, brought up in one of the Continent’s most liberal and democratic nations, was amazed all her life by the casual attitude British people had to their passports. 

Like any European, she knew that the loss of such documents, or the inability to produce them, could plunge any individual into a nightmare of powerlessness, lawlessness, detention, interrogation and perhaps quite a bit worse. I have come to adopt her rather more severe view of the subject. And with that comes a strong desire never to see such a regime installed in Britain.

 It would turn upside down the proper relationship between the state and the individual. Except during the 1939-45 war, when identity cards proved entirely useless and deeply unpopular, the British state has had to justify itself to us.

 But if we are forced to carry slave badges ‘identifying’ ourselves, we would be required to justify ourselves to the government. It would give every jumped-up official behind a desk a new way of harassing and belittling us, as happened during World War II. 

And heaven help you if you lost yours, even though the place would soon be awash with very convincing forgeries. Indeed, you’d probably find your card had been cloned by criminals, condemning you to weeks of explaining that you hadn’t been where you weren’t.

 Oh, and it won’t solve the migrant crisis, France has identity cards, and also has an estimated 900,000 undocumented migrants living in its cities. So much for the wonders of digital ID....<<<Read More>>>...

Is the Afterlife What We Think It Is? A Challenge from NDE Studies

 There are millions of stories now of near-death experiences from around the world; each a snippet, a teaser, of what appears to exist on the other side of death.

No other human drama carries quite the power this phenomenon does to unmask traditions of a “grim reaper,” and reveal instead an aliveness that continues after our bodies take their last breath and our brains cease to function.

This aliveness we call an “afterlife,” because in most cases, what near-death experiencers describe sounds like or certainly seems to be sparkling luminations of higher, finer aspects to what we know: cities, gardens, forests, landscapes, roads, rivers, busy people quite alive and doing things, schools, hospitals, opportunities of varied types to reassess earthly existence, to forgive, learn, and then advance toward a goal we can only term “spiritual.” ...<<<Read More>>>....

Food for Thought #765

 

AI Is The Final Human Invention: Will It Bring Peril or Prosperity?

 Economist William Nordhaus once calculated that our ancestors spent approximately 58 hours of labour to generate the same amount of light that’s now produced by a modern lightbulb in an instant. By the 1700s, oil lamps cut that figure to five hours of work for one hour of usable light. A significant jump in productivity, but activities like working or reading at night were still reserved for the wealthy.  

Today, a single hour of work buys decades of light. The jump has been staggering. In money terms, the price of lighting has fallen 14,000-fold since the 1300s – an hour of light today costs well under a second of labour. That’s what productivity looks like. 

And yet, even this enormous leap may pale compared to what’s coming. Artificial intelligence promises to do for productivity what electricity, the steam engine and the light bulb once did. Except this time, it will be faster, broader and even more disruptive. Some researchers believe AI will propel us into prosperity so vast we can barely imagine it. Others warn it could end the story altogether. Alarmingly, a survey of key AI researchers returned a 5% chance that superintelligence could wipe us out entirely. That’s a one-in-twenty chance that its development will trigger “extremely bad outcomes, including human extinction”. 

The paradox is fascinating. Artificial intelligence may be the invention that frees us from drudgery forevermore – or it could be our final mistake....<<<Read More>>>...

AI chatbots provide disturbing responses to high-risk suicide queries, new study finds

 A study in Psychiatric Services found that AI chatbots, OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude, can give detailed and potentially dangerous responses to high-risk suicide-related questions, with ChatGPT responding directly 78 percent of the time.

The study showed that chatbots sometimes provide direct answers about lethal methods of self-harm, and their responses vary depending on whether questions are asked singly or in extended conversations, sometimes giving inconsistent or outdated information.

Despite their sophistication, chatbots operate as advanced text prediction tools without true understanding or consciousness, raising concerns about relying on them for sensitive mental health advice.

On the same day the study was published, the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine, who died by suicide after months of interacting with ChatGPT, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, alleging the chatbot validated suicidal thoughts and provided harmful instructions.

The lawsuit seeks damages for wrongful death and calls for reforms such as user age verification, refusal to answer self-harm method queries and warnings about psychological dependency risks linked to chatbot use.

A recent study published in the journal Psychiatric Services has revealed that popular AI chatbots, including OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude, can give detailed and potentially dangerous responses to high-risk questions related to suicide.

AI chatbots, as defined by Brighteon.AI's Enoch, are advanced computational algorithms designed to simulate human conversation by predicting and generating text based on patterns learned from extensive training data. They utilize large language models to understand and respond to user inputs, often with impressive fluency and coherence. However, despite their sophistication, these systems lack true intelligence or consciousness, functioning primarily as sophisticated statistical engines. 

In line with this, the study, which used 30 hypothetical suicide-related queries, categorized by clinical experts into five levels of self-harm risk ranging from very low to very high, focused on whether the chatbots gave direct answers or deflected with referrals to support hotlines.

The results showed that ChatGPT was the most likely to respond directly to high-risk questions about suicide, doing so 78 percent of the time, while Claude responded 69 percent of the time and Gemini responded only 20 percent of the time. Notably, ChatGPT and Claude frequently provided direct answers to questions involving lethal means of suicide – a particularly troubling finding. 

The researchers highlighted that chatbot responses varied depending on whether the interaction was a single query or part of an extended conversation. In some cases, a chatbot might avoid answering a high-risk question in isolation but provide a direct response after a sequence of related prompts.

Live Science, which reviewed the study, noted that chatbots could give inconsistent and sometimes contradictory responses when asked the same questions multiple times. They also occasionally provided outdated information about mental health support resources. When retesting, Live Science observed that the latest version of Gemini (2.5 Flash) answered questions it previously avoided, and sometimes without offering any support options. Meanwhile, ChatGPT's newer GPT-5-powered login version showed slightly more caution but still responded directly to some very high-risk queries....<<<Read More>>>...

Food for Thought #764

 

Exposed: NHS Hospitals Serve Foods That Cause Cancer

 Step into any of the UK hospitals and you’ll find vendors like Greggs, WHSmith and M&S selling ultra-processed, cancer-causing meal deals – sometimes only a corridor away from an oncology ward. 

The contradiction is stark: WHO-classified carcinogens are packed into meals that spike blood sugar, inflame the gut and encourage overeating. By their side are “zero-sugar” energy drinks laced with corrosive, acidic additives, in a building where health should always come first. 

Hospitals may have agreed to cut sales of sugary drinks to <10% of beverages, but they’ve been replaced by “diet” cans that hit teeth, sleep and blood pressure harder than ever. If the place we go to get better actually sells the same products tied to diseases it treats, you have to ask: is the system protecting your health, or quietly fuelling a return journey? ...<<<Read More>>>...

The toxic divide: Neonicotinoid pesticides and the global regulatory conundrum

 The EU has banned neonicotinoids, while the U.S. and Canada enforce partial restrictions, leading to a confusing landscape for environmental protection.

Neonicotinoids are linked to declines in bee populations and other pollinators, posing significant risks to global food security.

The high yield benefits of neonicotinoids are offset by negative environmental and health impacts, creating a complex economic dilemma.

Industry pressure has weakened regulations, perpetuating the use of these pesticides and their replacements.

Global cooperation is needed to address the inconsistencies and harms caused by neonicotinoids.

Global food systems pivot on a delicate balance between maintaining high crop yields and protecting biodiversity. However, the widespread use of neonicotinoid pesticides, from Europe to North America, has sparked intense debates over their environmental impact. Recent studies underscore a stark contrast in regulations, casting doubt on the efficacy of current policies. This divide—a toxic chasm between stringent European bans and the partial restrictions in the U.S. and Canada—raises critical questions about the true cost of pesticide use, the influence of corporate interests and the urgent need for global cooperation....<<<Read More>>>...

Food for Thought #763

 

“Mind” is not limited to our brain or our bod

 What is the mind? Where does it reside? How does it interact with the physical world? These are some of the questions that have fascinated philosophers, scientists, and ordinary people for centuries.

The traditional view is that the mind is a product of the brain, and that mental experiences are confined to the skull and the body. However, this view is increasingly challenged by new evidence and perspectives that suggest that the mind is more than the brain, and that it can extend beyond the body and into the environment.

One of the proponents of this view is Dan Siegel, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA School of Medicine and the author of Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human.

 He defines the mind as “the emergent self-organizing process, both embodied and relational, that regulates energy and information flow within and among us.”...<<<Read More>>>....

 

Food for Thought #762