It's it's great to be with you to discuss the science of why we deny science and reality In other words, what is it about our brains that makes facts so challenging so odd and threatening? Why do we sometimes double down on false beliefs and maybe why do some of us do it more than others? That's that's the next book. I'm not gonna talk about it that much I'm gonna try to be somewhat down the middle here, although it's difficult But I've been writing about political and scientific misinformation for a decade and I'm gonna confess I got a lot of the big picture wrong initially the first book was called the Republican war on science So we did not notice at the time the echo visually with another book that was out And it was all about people denying the science of global warming, you know denying evolution getting it wrong on stem cells What what was wrong about my analysis was that I was wedded to an old enlightenment view of rationality and What I mean is that I I had this vision, you know if you put good information out there and you use rational arguments people will come to accept what's true especially if you educate them in places like this Teach them critical thinking skills and a lot of people Believe or want to believe that this is true the problem is that rather awkwardly There is a science of why we deny science there are facts about why we deny facts There's a science of truthiness.  This was data from Pew And it was in a poll on global warming and it was showing the relationship between political party affiliation level of education and belief that global warming is caused by human beings and I don't know if you can see it very well because of the color contrast But what it shows is that if you're a Republican the higher your level of education Then the less likely you are to believe in scientific reality Okay, so these are the college grads.   You could call this dumb and dumber Now the people who deny that the science of vaccines, which is that they do not cause autism It turns out that the New England Journal of Medicine studied who these people are and they tend to be white Well to do and the mother has a college education and they tend to go online with Jenny McCarthy called the University of Google and Inform themselves about this and so by empowering themselves they end up more wrong and end up believing that vaccines are dangerous Education and intelligence therefore do not guarantee sound Rational decisions nor do they ensure that people accept science or facts and I want to give you an even crazier More fun example of the smart idiot effect So this is from the political scientist John sides of George Washington He unpacked the data on why belief that President Obama is a Muslim increased or in whom it increased between 2009 and 2010 Okay, so here's where the increase is and again We've got a higher slope for Republicans with some college or college grad Than those who have less education.  How could this possibly be? It seems that the more capable you are of coming up with arguments that support your beliefs the more you'll think you're right and The less likely you will be to change and if this is true We have a pretty big problem It would explain a lot of the polarization in America the good news is that there is a way of understanding why we do this and It's quite relatable the science behind it is pretty easy to understand because we all know from our personal lives We all know from our relationships how hard it can be to get someone we care about to change their minds And we know from great works of literature like great expectations. I actually have seen the black and white great expectations You know that there's so many famous characters who fall for self-delusion who fall for rationalization Pip being one of them. He wants to believe that he's destined to Maria Stella He wants to believe that mishavish M is not this manipulative old crone. She actually has his best interest at heart He believes this so strongly that he essentially ruins his life. That's the story of great expectations What dickens grasps about people in a literary way? We are now confirming based on psychology and even neuroscience and what this leads to is a theory called motivated reasoning and what it demonstrates is that we don't think very differently about politics than we do about Emotional matters in our personal lives at least if we have a strong investment or commitment To understand how motivated reasoning works. You need to understand Three core points about how the brain works the first of them is that the vast majority of what all of our brains are doing We are not aware of the conscious part the us the self just a small percentage of what it's up to And the second one is that among the things it's up to that we're not aware of is the brain is having rapid fire Emotional or affective responses to ideas images stimuli and it's doing this really fast Okay, so fast. We don't even know it's doing this and then the third point is that these emotional responses Guide the process of retrieving memories in the consciousness thoughts Associations that we have with the stimuli Emotion is the way that we that those things are pulled up for us to think about and so what this means is that we might actually Think we're reasoning reasoning logically. We might think we're acting like scientists But in fact we are acting like these guys, and I love being at Harvard Law School putting up lawyers When we actually become conscious of reasoning, we've already been sent down a path by emotion Retrieving from memory the arguments that we've always made before that support what we already think so we're not really reasoning We're rationalizing we are defending our case and our case is not not just a part of who we are It's a physical part of our brains All right, and this explains so many things about why reasoning goes awry. It explains goalposts shifting for instance, so you know For years the birthers wanted the birth certificate the long-form birth certificate last year they got it, okay? So did they stop being birthers? No, did they change their minds? No We can you know the the new science of why we deny science can predict that they would double down on their wrong belief And they would come up with new reasons to distrust the new evidence that they have been given and the same goes for all Manor of logical errors fallacies hypocrisies the answer used to be hey Just learn critical thinking and you'll avoid these and that might be true to an extent but it seems like reasoning is designed to help us see these problems and others way better than to see them in ourselves and It's designed this way. It happens it manifests first when we're quite young I want to tell you about a really funny motivated reasoning study involving the biases of adolescence You might remember that in the 1980s there was this big battle about labeling rock albums All right, and there was this fear that music corrupted kids led them to Satanism What have you and one side in the debate was the PMRC and tipper gore and here? She's got an album the title is be my slave. I don't know if you can see the whips and chains But this was dominatrix metal so Some moms didn't think little Johnny should get this record and on the other side There was Frank Zappa here pictured in the Phi Zappa crappa picture. That's so awesome And as as he testified before Congress, I love this quote the PMRC's demands are the equivalent of treating dandruff by decapitation All right, such was the debate. Okay, so in comes a psychologist named Paul Klazinski And he does a motivated reasoning study dovetailing with it all He took ninth and twelfth graders who were either fans of country music or fans of heavy metal And he asked them to read arguments that he had constructed all of the arguments contain the logical fallacy All of the arguments were about the effects of listening to a particular kind of music upon your behavior So here's an example of a fallacious argument They might have gotten something like this little Johnny listened to Ozzy Osbourne then he killed himself Heavy metal is dangerous stuff Okay, everyone see the fallacy there and and so you would get the same kind of flawed arguments about country music So what happens? Adolescent country fans can see logical fallacies when they are in arguments suggesting that listening to country leads to bad out bad Outcomes bad behaviors, but they do not detect the fallacies in pro-country arguments the same thing for heavy metal fans All right They're all biased and it doesn't get better between ninth and twelfth grade Okay, more education doesn't somehow let you see what's wrong with your point of view And it is not just problems or fallacies of basic reasoning that motivated reasoning explains It explains for all the science debates that I write about the my expert is better than your expert problem Get straight to the heart of why some people deny science. They think their science is better Okay So this is from Yale's Dan Kahane. He's also here at the Harvard Law School Sometimes I think and he divides people's moral values up along two axes What's important about this is your moral values Push you emotionally to believe things and so you start tagging things emotionally based upon what your values are So we're either hierarchical or egalitarian. That's up and down. We're either individualistic or communitarian I think people basically know what these words mean, but in case you don't Republicans live up here Democrats live down here Republicans tend to be hierarchical and individualistic supporting more inequality and supporting keeping government out of life and Democrats more communitarian supporting the group. It takes a village and egalitarian supporting equality Okay The point is that this determines who you think is a scientific expert because then he shows people a fake Scientist who either supports or doesn't support the consensus that global warming is caused by humans And if you're up in the quadrant where the Republicans live then only 23% agree that the scientist is a trustworthy A knowledgeable expert if the scientist says that global warming is caused by humans But down here 88% agree that this scientist is an expert So in other words science is for many of us Whatever we want it to be and we've been impelled automatically Emotionally into having that kind of reaction to who an expert actually is This is bad enough But the double whammy is always gonna come when you combine these flawed reasoning processes with Selective information channels which brings us to the Internet of the sort that the Internet makes so possible But this is only a difference of degree It's not a difference of kind because we already see what happens with the selective information channel that is Fox News Okay, so lots of research showing that Fox News viewers believe more wrong things Okay, they believe wrong things about global warming wrong things about health care wrong things about Iraq and on and on And we can document that this is they believe them more than people to watch other channels Why does this occur? Well, they're consuming the information resonates with their values And then they're thinking it through and arguing getting fired up motivated reasoning and they run out and they reinforce the beliefs But also and this is where I'll get into some possible left-right differences There's some evidence to suggest that conservatives might have more of a tendency to want to select into belief channels That support what they believe to begin with Right-wing authoritarians are a group that have been much studied and they are part of the conservative base And there's some studies showing that they they engage in more selective exposure trying to find Information that supports beliefs. There was a study by Shanto Iengar at Stanford of Fox of Republicans and Democrats consuming media and what he found was that Democrats definitely didn't like Fox, but they spread their interests across a variety of other sources But Republicans were all Fox almost and as they wrote the probability that a Republican would select the CNN or NPR report was about ten percent in this study Okay, so so the Fox effect believing wrong things is probably both motivated reasoning and also people selecting in to the Information stream to begin with. All right, so how do you short circuit motivated reasoning? That's what Brenda Nyhan is going to talk about. I'm not going to talk about it But I will say you don't argue the facts. All right There are approaches that are shown by evidence to work for my part Let me just end with some words of eternal wisdom from a truly profound philosopher Yoda Yoda said you must unlearn what you have learned and when it comes to the denial of science and facts That is precisely the predicament we're in So thanks, and this is this is the new book. So it'll be out soon


So we've seen a lot of positive news regarding COVID-19, both cases and deaths are down. We are seeing vaccine hesitancy decrease and vaccine numbers take up. So this is all really positive. But there are two things that actually threaten the progress that we've made. One is states easing restrictions too soon as they see the number of cases and deaths decrease. And two is whether or not the vaccines are effective against new variants. Now it seems as if the main variant that we're worried about currently, the UK variant, which is said to be the dominant strain in the United States, the vaccines, at least the Moderna and Pfizer and beyond vaccines are actually effective against that variant. But when it comes to the South African variant, we have some very, very bad news. And I'm going to link you to this study down below in the description box. It's a sample of the study, but we're not going to read that. It's a little bit too dense, but for a concise explanation, we will go to the Hills Alexandra Kelly, who explains, despite the increase in global circulation of COVID-19 vaccines, the variants of the virus that emerged in late 2020 may disrupt the world's mission to achieve herd immunity, according to a new study approved for publishing in the journal Nature. Researchers specifically look at the South African COVID-19 mutation, scientifically dubbed B.1.351, analyzing whether or not these pathogens are more resistant to immune responses prompted by the available vaccines. Samples of biological fluids, namely convalescent plasma and vaccine serum, were collected and studied for the volume of COVID-19 neutralizing antibodies contained among volunteers who recovered from a documented COVID-19 infection. This highlights concern for potential reinfection. When analyzing volunteer vaccine serum or fluid from individuals who had been fully vaccinated, the results were similarly grim. Neutralizing activity was significantly lower against B.1.351, regardless of which vaccine patients received. Moderna's vaccine candidate was found to be 12.4 times less effective against the South African variant, and Pfizer's was found to have a reduced effectiveness by about 10.3 times. A silver lining could be that both vaccine candidates held up well against the UK variant of COVID-19. So this is needless to say, very, very depressing news. The South African strain has already been found in the United States. Now at this time, it is not the case that we are expecting the South African variant to be a dominant strain here. It is a variant that exists, and it does pose a threat to the progress that we've made. But what this tells us is that even if we are fully vaccinated, that doesn't necessarily mean that we stop following the proper protocols. Although the same day we got this news, the CDC issued new guidelines for vaccinated people that kind of suggest that if you are vaccinated, you can visit other unvaccinated or vaccinated people rather without masks. This is what they said on the same day we learned about this study. In this scenario, CDC recommends that fully vaccinated people can visit with other fully vaccinated people in small gatherings indoors without wearing masks or physical distancing. Remember here we are talking about private settings where everyone is vaccinated. So what does this mean? If you and a friend or you and a family member are both vaccinated, you can have dinner together wearing masks without distancing. You can visit your grandparents if you have been vaccinated and they have been too. Now I want to talk to you about another more complicated scenario. It involves vaccinated people visiting with unvaccinated people. When fully vaccinated people visit with unvaccinated people, we have to consider the underlying risks of the unvaccinated people and any unvaccinated members of their household. We take this approach because all of our guidance is rooted in making sure we are keeping people safe. So CDC recommends that fully vaccinated people can visit with unvaccinated people from one other household indoors without wearing masks or physical distancing as long as the unvaccinated people and any unvaccinated members of their household are not at high risk for severe COVID-19 disease. Yeah. So this was released again on the same day that we learned about this study, which is peer reviewed, by the way. And the question is what now? Because it seems to me that because of the threat that the South African variant poses, it's more transmissible. Can we still do this? Is this still recommended? Because if you ask me, I'm not going to feel comfortable when I'm fully vaccinated, meeting with other fully vaccinated people, if these vaccines aren't effective or aren't as effective against the South African strain. Now, I'm sure that they're going to have to revise their guidelines as we get more information about the prominence of the South African variant. But this is it's it's really frustrating. It's, you know, I don't want to be too doom and gloom yet. This is going to be one of many setbacks that I'm assuming will face as we try to fight COVID-19. But, you know, it shows that even if we're vaccinated, we can't necessarily, you know, get reckless. Now, the good news is that you have companies like Johnson and Johnson who just released or got their single dose vaccine approved by the FDA. They are developing boosters to try to fight against these variants. And new boosters can actually come into play that are perhaps more effective against the South African variant in the event it does become a bigger issue. But for now, we just we just need to be aware that the South African variant means that even if you're vaccinated, still might want to be a little bit careful or a lot careful, actually. And I'll just say, I don't think I've talked about the Johnson and Johnson vaccine. It isn't as effective as the Moderna and the Pfizer and Biontech vaccines in terms of stopping like the spread of COVID. But it's still really, really important in the fight against COVID-19. And if the Johnson and Johnson vaccine becomes available to me, I 100% would take it without without question because it still stops serious infections of COVID-19. So I think that what we have to do is everything in our power, get as many people vaccinated as possible. And we just have to keep fighting and we have to arm ourselves with information. We can't bury our heads in the sand and pretend as if everything is going to be OK. You know, we've got a lot of good news lately. We've made a lot of progress. This is a setback. It might not necessarily mean that all of our progress is undone. But what it means is that you need to factor this new information into the way you behave. And I'll be doing the same. You know, that's all that we can do. Just keep monitoring the situation and hope for the best. And more importantly, take the proper precautions to make sure we end this pandemic once and for all.


Welcome back beatbox fam. First off. I'd like to say thank you so much for supporting me with the tutorials Yeah, I just wanted to say I really appreciate you. So let's get into a map. It's the codfish throw base, right? So first and foremost what you're gonna need to do is you're gonna need to know the throat base Which we're gonna go over here really quickly.


Maen nhw lawer, dweud o'r adeilad uchelafio y cyfriliadau cwestiwn armor i gyflafoddiu ceisio yn ddeg chi gfawr i ni-deg, neu yn olygu chi'n gweithio. Pwysgag fan y Prifetio Richard Baker. Thank you. A fyddwch i Gwladdfodolfoedd, mae'n ddigon i'n mwyaf o ymwyaf o'r panfaith cyfriliad cyfriliad o'r panfaith yn y Nôl East? Sechstri John Swinney. The recruitment of staff is a matter for individual public sector organisations, for which the Government provides a strong level of public funding to support this task. The Government also has a range of policies to support those who are finding times difficult financially. Our pay policy focuses resources on the lower paid by promoting the Scottish living wage alongside distinctive measures to address low pay. Richard Baker Given that the cabinet secretary agreed to discuss Nabadean waiting in salaries with public sector employees in the city in region last May to aid recruitment, can I ask what steps have been taken as a result of that undertaking? As I understand, one Scottish Government agency in the city has already uplifted wages to reflect the high cost of living in Aberdeen. Does it not make the case for Scottish Government to support other public sector employees in the city in the same way? Richard Baker There is an existing element of Scottish public sector pay policy that enables public sector organisations on the current arrangements to make specific arrangements where they find it challenging to recruit individuals because of a particularly competitive labour market. Those provisions exist already. They have been exercised. I know that this has been the subject of public comment from within Aberdeen in relation to Marine Scotland. Those arrangements exist for public bodies who operate under the Government's public sector pay policy for them to take appropriate steps if they can demonstrate the market issues that have to be addressed as a consequence of paying the particular support that is required to recruit for key vacancies. Richard Baker Thanks, Christian Allan. Christian Allan Does the cabinet secretary agree with me that the development of affordable housing as a credentials prison site with a target market of public sector workers demonstrates the Scottish Government's commitment to the recruitment and retainment of public sector staff in the north east? Richard Baker I think that Mr Llarr makes a very good and strong point. The Government has acted in collaboration with NHS Grampian to ensure that the site of the former Craig Inches prison is identified and is taken forward in concert with the local authority into the bargain to provide accommodation for key workers in the city, recognising the challenges that will exist in relation to access to the housing market. That is, of course, in addition to the £47.6 million for affordable housing support that is made available by the Government to Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire councils to assist in developing a broader range of affordable housing units. However, the former Craig Inches prison site was a particular initiative that the Government took to recognise the difficulties and challenges that will exist in access to affordable housing for key public sector workers. I am delighted that we have been able to make progress on that question. Annette Milne I am sure that the minister would agree with me that a very important area of concern in Aberdeen in particular is the difficulty of recruiting particularly senior health professionals and then retaining them in their posts once they discover the cost of housing in the area. I know about the Craig Inches proposals, which I do not think would be necessarily uniformly what is wanted. I know that the Government has been considering what could be done to alleviate the situation. Can the cabinet secretary give me any information on whether suitable housing might be available for incoming staff to either purchase or to rent? Clearly, there will be a range of housing providers that are active in the market in the north-east of Scotland. The investment that the Government is making in the Aberdeen western peripheral route will also open up new opportunities for housing development significantly on the periphery of the city into the bargain. I reiterate to Annette Milne the points that I made in my response to Christian Allard that, where the Government has been able to take forward an opportunity to expand the availability of affordable housing through the Craig Inches site, we have acted quickly and decisively to secure that for the public good. In addition to a strong programme of investment that the Government has made in supporting the housing market in the north-east of Scotland. To ask the Scottish Government how it ensures that consistently high standards are maintained by staff in the care sector. Consistently high standards are maintained through the regulation of the social services workforce by the Scottish Social Services Council. Social care staff must register with them and comply with the council's code of practice, which sets out the standards that workers must meet. The quality of staffing in care services is also assessed as part of all care inspectorate inspections. The care inspectorate has a range of enforcement powers which services must comply with or face closure. In 2013-14, 91 per cent of care services were awarded grades of good, very good or excellent for the quality of staffing. I thank the cabinet secretary for her response, which of course deals directly with the quality of staff, but in the second of the 2014 Wreath Lectures, Dr Attle will go under, focused on systems in healthcare from simple health checks, sorry, simple checklists to complex mechanisms and processes. He argued that they could be better designed to transform care from the richest parts of the world to the poorest. Does the minister agree with me that simple systems of checklists in our care setting for elderly patients would have a significant impact on their well-being? For example, from my constituents, a mother who suffers from a month's dementia does not receive regular and adequate hydration, while her caregivers have regular and legislated respirers. We have in place a range of national care standards that describe what individuals can expect from a care provider. They focus on the quality of life that the person using the service experiences. The standards for care homes for older people, for example, cover day-to-day life, including keeping well and eating well. On the issue of hydration, that includes a standard that an individual can have hot and cold drinks whenever they like. It is up to the service providers to ensure that they are meeting such standards. That could include the use of checklists, but the focus must be on caring for the individual and their needs. Does the cabinet secretary think that it is fair that many councils in Scotland fund the council care sector at a rate of up to 80 per cent higher than the independent sector, yet the same high-quality standards are rightly expected by all care providers? I am aware of this being a very long-standing issue. When I was Minister for Public Health, it was an issue that was regularly raised. What I can say to Mary Scanlon is that we have some very good discussions going on through Scottish Care about how we can better support the sector to respond in the way that we need it to respond, not just in terms of care homes, but care at home as well. I would be happy to keep Mary Scanlon updated on how those discussions are going. To ask the Scottish Government what action it will take as a result of the statutory follow-up to the Accounts Commission report on South Ayrshire Council of February 2014. Local authorities must use resources as efficiently as possible and deliver services effectively to ensure that taxpayers get the best possible value. The Accounts Commission published a best value report on South Ayrshire Council in February 2014 and a further report on December 2014. The latter report notes that the council has made a good start in developing an improved framework to help to demonstrate best value. The council now needs to continue the improvements that has started in order to help to deliver improved services and achieve better outcomes for the people of South Ayrshire. The local government minister normally writes to the council leader when a best value report is published, and I did so in the case of South Ayrshire. In that letter, I noted the progress that has been made and reiterated the Accounts Commission's findings in relation to the need for effective implementation and sustained improvements. I will be taking a close interest in the council's progress and in the further report that the controller of audit has been asked to prepare within 18 months. I thank the minister for his answer, and I too welcome the December update of the Accounts Commission review, which indicated some improvement in the council's performance. Will the minister agree that South Ayrshire Council might also be applied to all other councils? That the council should have a limited number of key performance outcomes, which are made more widely known to its citizens, and that it all would benefit by ensuring its performance against those key indicators that are produced quarterly and communicated appropriately to those same citizens. Councils have to publish performance information that is specified by the Accounts Commission, and, under the 2014 direction that was published in December, there are three headline indicators of corporate management, service performance and how much reporting is taking place against the requirements of the local government benchmarking framework. A lot of that is published online with support from councils, and the Scottish Government supports that approach, but certainly any council is free to be proactive in publishing and promoting performance data of this sort, especially when it is already collected, and that can only help to ensure that there is greater transparency and that local citizens have an idea of how their council is performing and ensures that local government is paired with an informed local democracy. To ask the Scottish Government what recent discussions it has had with the UK Government regarding the publication of draft legislation arising from the recommendations of the Smith Commission. There have been a number of contacts with the UK Government at official and ministerial level to take forward implementation of the conclusions of the Smith Commission. I have been assured by the Secretary of State for Scotland that the Scottish Government will be fully involved in further work to develop draft clauses for publication later this month. Can I ask what plans or discussions have already been taken by the Scottish Government regarding early action on transferring powers that do not require primary legislation? The Scottish Government has set out to the UK Government a number of areas where we believe it is possible and practical for powers to be transferred in early course. One of the most significant priorities that was advanced by the First Minister in her discussion with the Prime Minister in December was the issue around 16 and 17-year-olds being able to vote in the 2016 general election for this Parliament, and progress has been made in that respect. There are, of course, a number of other areas of activity where we would like to see swifter progress, not least of which is on the devolution of the work programme, which the Smith Commission said should be the subject of early devolution and which the Government is concerned with is the subject of contract extension, which we believe breaches the spirit of the Smith Commission report. The cabinet secretary will, I am sure, be aware of the Scottish Labour's call yesterday for section 106, order to be brought forward to transfer the responsibility for the job creating powers of the work programme to the Scottish Government ministers. We have had some positive comments of support, particularly from Glasgow and Edinburgh City councils, on that. Can I ask the minister that the Scottish Government will also support that call? With the greatest respect to Duncan McNeill, he obviously hasn't been listening for some considerable number of weeks, because we have made the point to Parliament consistent with the Smith Commission report in which the Smith Commission said that the work programme was one of the areas that could be the subject of early devolution. We as a Government have been concerned that, at the same time as that report was finalised, the DWP was consulting about extending the existing work programme contracts and not enabling early and timious devolution of the responsibility to the Scottish Parliament. I welcome Mr McNeill's support for what the Government has been trying to do. I encourage him to use every opportunity that he has to say to the United Kingdom Government consistent with the spirit of the Smith Commission that there should be early devolution of the work programme, so that we can ensure that that work programme is configured in a fashion to meet the needs and the expectations of individuals that want to access employment in Scotland. Like many in Scotland, I look forward to the launch and the publication of draft clauses later this month. I hope that the Cabinet Secretary will respond in a far less cummergently manner to that exciting development that he did to the Smith agreement, which seemed to frazzle in his hand within 24 hours of the agreement being published. Can I ask the cabinet secretary, Deputy Presiding Officer? Everybody now accepts that the political debate in Scotland has moved on from what powers this Parliament has or will get to what we do with the powers. Can I ask him, for example, on the relation to air passenger duty about which he is so enthusiastic in bringing forward as a devolved facility here? Will he, given that power, abolish that duty, or is he just going to reduce it? Being accused of being cummergently by Annabelle Goldie is a bit like the pot being called the Kettle Black. If I could be so un-gallant on a Thursday morning to Baroness Goldie, on the issue of air passenger duty, that is one of the topics that we have said to the United Kingdom Government that we think merits early devolution. We also made clear in the white paper exactly what our proposal would be on reducing air passenger duty. I have reaffirmed that position, as other ministers have to Parliament, and I urge the United Kingdom Government to take speedy and timious action to devolve the responsibility to allow the Scottish Parliament to do something different to the regime that is currently put in place by the United Kingdom Government. To ask the Scottish Government, I might thank her after her answer. I hope that what progress has been made in integrating health and social care in Lanarkshire. Good progress has been made in South Lanarkshire to integrate adult health and social care. A shadow chief officer and shadow integration joint board have been appointed and are making significant progress in line with their agreed work plan. May I say to the cabinet secretary, thank you for her answer. There is real concern in my constituency of East Kilbride about hospital discharge delays because of the lack of home care packages. I have many constituency cases just now where people are being disadvantaged in their sense of wellbeing. Is she confident that things are moving forward well towards the date of 1 April for full implementation? What dialogue is being held with South Lanarkshire Council and NHS Lanarkshire to make sure that that is really working towards an integrated package? I thank the member for her question. The health board and the local authority in South Lanarkshire are making good progress towards submitting their integration scheme for approval by the 1 April. I am confident that they are on track to put in place their integrated arrangements during the coming year. I have said many times and I will say again that tackling delayed discharges is absolutely the top priority for me. We have been working very hard with partnerships over the past few weeks and we will continue to do so. I can tell the member that we recently allocated £300,000 to the partners in South Lanarkshire, which has been matched by the council and the health board to make sure that they have the services in place to be able to make sure that patients can flow through the hospital and either back home or into a care home place. I could also say to the member that, at the latest delayed discharge census, there were 16 South Lanarkshire residents delayed in hospital for more than four weeks, but I can say that the local information recently indicates that this now is considerably reduced. I hope that that is something that the member will welcome. I can say to Linda Fabiani that the delayed discharge is not just a problem in her constituency, but can I ask the cabinet secretary whether she will meet with the opposition health teams to give us an update on the progress on health and social care integration, particularly in relation to budgets? Will she ensure that the integrated resources framework for each local authority and health board area is published now so that the budgets can reflect those frameworks? I am very happy to provide that briefing. There is a lot of work going on with individual partnerships to help them through the winter period, where there are obviously significant challenges, but we also have to make sure that we take absolute advantage of the integration coming forward from 1 April. I am very happy to give Richard Simpson and the other Opposition spokespeople a full update on the plans that are being put in place to make sure that we do that. To us, the Scottish Government, when it lasts, some representatives of NHS Lanarkshire and NHS Forth Valley. Regularly with representatives of NHS Lanarkshire and NHS Forth Valley to discuss issues of interest. Is she aware that many NHS health boards like NHS Lanarkshire are giving a directive regarding a cheaper drug to be prescribed for certain routine complaints and infections rather than a tried and tested drug to patients with repeat prescriptions? That frequently results in the patient then experiencing side effects, having to make a follow-up appointment and the original repeat prescription having to be issued. Given all of that and the cost implications involved, does the cabinet secretary consider that this is an issue that should be looked into? I say to Margaret Mitchell that these are clinical decisions, but I am more than happy to look into the case that she cites. If she wants to write to me with more information, I will certainly have a full look at the detail of the issues that she raises. Many thanks, and we now move to the next item of business, which is


The leadership of Benua State Christian Association of Nigeria can, has said that those involved in animal husbandry should take to ranching, while those in banditry and kidnapping, among other vices, should desist or look elsewhere for safe haven other than Benua State. The state chairman of the association, Reverend Dr. Akben Lever, made the call in Makudie amid rising cases of attacks and killings in parts of Benua communities by herders in spite of the anti-open grazing law put in place to ensure the safety of lives and property in the state. The state volunteer guard set up to help reduce incidences of attacks. The leadership of Cannes says it fully supports the law and the state community volunteer guard and one that it is not their concern to engage criminals under whatever guise, but to see that Benua people go to bed with both eyes closed. The purpose of killing and continuing on a budget, it became inevitable for a government that has as part of the sustainability to protect its citizens, to rise up to the challenge. It is for this among other reasons that Benua State community volunteer guards came into existence. Let me warn that our concerned majority is not going to engage criminals under whatever guise, but to enable the Benua people to go to bed with both eyes closed and continue with their farming activities. Reverend Lever, who expressed worries over attacks, kidnapping or killings of core members, journalists and other Nigerians called on the federal government to provide adequate security to protect citizens. At the end of the year is a time that we should sit down and watch these two months, we should look into the things we have done for this year. One disturbing issue we already know is the issue of insecurity. Quite recently most of our youth couples going to their primary place of assignment have been kidnapped, some have been killed. We want to call on the federal government to provide adequate security for the youth core members and also the marionette activities of the Flanet Hazeman kidnapping, killing in our villages. We want our communities to come up with different security architectures to be able to help their community. The journalist who was covering the house of representatives, Mr. Toadu Esalem, who has been kidnapped, we don't know where he is now, for it's about 26 days now. We are calling on the federal government to, as a matter of urgency, look for his release, let him come back alive to us.


packing today, packing for the 100 mile race on Friday. I got a double check, triple check, quadruple check, even everything that I'm putting in my bag. If you don't want to mess around, then you're getting ready to run 100 miles. So that's the mission, that's the mission of today's vlog and story. Just getting a little shopping done for the race and the aid stations at Run Rabbit Run look like they're gonna be really well stocked with Honey Stinger. I love Honey Stinger, the brand and they make waffles and gels and these gummies that you can chew. However, between the aid stations and probably even at the aid stations, my stomach this summer has really enjoyed luna bars. They're a little different than Laura bars, definitely different than, oh, I guess, well, power bar, do they even make power bars anymore?  But this is gonna make my go-to, my go-to for the race in pizza and coffee and chicken broth, chicken stock and peanut M&Ms and Gatorade. Get the vest, don't forget the vest. One day closer, one day closer, getting exciting. It's Tuesday, the race starts Friday at noon. I printed off all the maps and the crew aid stations right here. Boom for the crew coming up. Oh man, so grateful for all the support that's gonna be showing up in Steamboat. So I've got the information for the crew. I was going to lay out everything on the floor tonight, but I kind of forgot that everything is outside drying right now.  I'll do that in tomorrow's vlog. Come back tomorrow to see everything laid out. But I feel very good about going shopping, getting some Coke, getting some chicken stock. Anyway, just all the good stuff. You saw me shopping earlier and I feel very confident in what I purchased. However, the aid stations at Run Rabbit Run appear to be very, very well stocked. They have a list on their website of all the goodies that are gonna be at the aid stations. And I just saw some pictures on Facebook, on the Run Rabbit Run Facebook page of the volunteers already setting up, like right now and it's Tuesday. Like they're starting to pull everything out of the storage units and oh my gosh, it's getting real. In addition, pulled out some clothes tonight. So feeling good about my clothing selection. And it's supposed to be, speaking of clothing, it's supposed to be pretty warm this week. Now in the mountains, it can always be different, especially at night. So I think a couple years ago, some people really got cold and they had to drop out of the race. So anyway, I feel good about what I have grabbed for my clothing selection for the nighttime running to make sure I don't get too cold. And of course, how could we go to Steamboat without the cowbell? More cowbell, please. It doesn't work for me. I gotta have more cowbell. And remember yesterday I said, I need to double check the gear and triple check the gear.  Tomorrow, I'm gonna double check and triple check the headlamp situation because I will be running half of the race at night. Right about the 50 mile mark, it's gonna be getting dark, right about 8 p.m., a little before 8 p.m. really. So here's my headlamp and I need to make sure it's charged up for the actual race. So I will make sure, actually I'll probably start charging tonight, just to make sure. Anyway, that is it for today. Come back tomorrow to see all the gear laid out. Sorry, I didn't think that through a little more clearly, but half the gear is outside drying right now. Ah. Band-aids. See beauty, work hard, love each other. See you tomorrow.


I grew up going to a United Methodist Church and I loved going to church because that was my church family. And as I got older, I realized that the United Methodist Church had this slogan, open hearts, open minds, and open doors and that is what I first fell in love with being a United Methodist. Because for me that embodies what John Wesley has to say about grace so completely about how grace is offered to each and every one of us freely and without stipulation and there's nothing we will do that can separate us from God's love. And for me that's why I love being a United Methodist. My hope for the United Methodist Church is that it continues to listen to the spirit. It continues to listen where the spirit is calling us to grow so we can continue to meet our neighbors, wherever they may be, and include all who are precious children of God. And my hope is that we continue to have this open hearts, minds, and spirit that I fell in love with. As a deacon in the United Methodist Church, one of my passions is to bring the church out into the world and the world back into the church. And with our world today vastly different than it was a few months ago, we are seeing that there are creative and innovative ways that we can start bringing communities together. One of the things I love about our church is the connection aspect of it and we can bridge youth groups across different areas in geographical regions. So the youth in my rural community can start getting to know youth in a more urban community and vice versa. So one of the most creative ways I love doing that is to bring people together and that can be in the virtual space or in physical space as well.


This, this and this are all completely free. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. Don't forget to follow the VIP link in the description down below. If you want to get 7% off of our sponsor for this video, DistroKid. Now let's dive into those three plugins. This is Pitch Drift from Baby Audio. I've got it applied to an acoustic piano, which we're going to hear first of all without this plugin applied.  Now, as you can hear, this plugin is indeed making some variations to the pitch of the audio that we're hearing. Now, I think the idea behind this plugin really is to use it fairly subtly to mimic the natural variations we actually get in pitch with some acoustic instruments. Just for the time being, though, we're going to continue to use it in a sort of an extreme way just so you can clearly hear what the controls actually do. Now, the first control is the amount control. This just determines the amount of actual pitch variation there is. Let's put it down low first of all and have a listen. So that's pretty subtle. If we put it all the way up to the top, it's not very subtle at all. So there's a lot of sort of fairly natural sounding variation in pitch there. Well, natural if it was a broken tape recorder. Now, the other thing that we can adjust, apart from the amount, is the speed. If we hover over this middle display, we can see the speed is set to 50 at the moment. And if I drag up and down, I can change it. So let's put the speed all the way up like so. Have a listen now. I think you get the idea there. Now, it's probably going to be rare that you'll use it in this kind of extreme way. Let me show you how I ended up using it in my test project here. If we go to my project here, I am in Katewalk. I'm just going to get rid of that plugin on that piano. Then let me show you what I did. I've got the original piano up here. You heard that a moment ago. I then made some duplicates of that and you can see these two tracks here. Now, what I actually did then was to slightly adjust the timing on them. I offset them just a little bit. If we zoom in here, just get in a little closer. You can kind of see there, if I just move this over, the second one and the third one are sort of staggered from the original. That's just to create a little bit of variation in time. OK, the next thing that I did was actually panned the first one all the way to the left and the second one all the way to the right. I then added the pitch drift plug into each of these. Now, if I pull up the first one here, I'll just pin that like so. I'll pull up the second one and pin that. What I want you to take notice of here is I've got some slightly different settings for each one. The exact settings don't matter, but the variation really sort of helps. So with the first one, the amount is set to twenty two. With the second one, the amount is set to seventeen. With the first one, the speed is set to forty six, the second one, fifty five. So I just didn't want them to be identical, although they're reasonably sort of close in nature. Now, what I'm going to do is play that piano as we heard it at the beginning. We're just going to hear it without the supplied. And then I'll switch these on so you can hear the effect that I'm getting. Now, on. Now, I'm just using I'm just using a piano here just for demonstration purposes. You could use this for any instrument and it could work really well on vocals as well. You could even use it more subtly than that. I can pretty much still still hear it there. But it's great for adding width when you pan things left and right. If you have these kind of subtle variations, you definitely get more width in the sound. This is how my guitar sounds without magic switch switched on. Let's switch it on. Now, I wish I could waffle on for hours and hours about all of the advanced features hidden in this plugin, but well, there isn't any. There is just an on off switch. You could equally bypass this in your door. And there's a mixed control to blend the dry signal with the wet signal. And that's really it. It follows the approach from the original Roland Juno's a very simplified chorus effect, the kind of sound that most of us want most of the time when we do apply chorus, very simply implemented with the switch in the mixed control. If you want to follow the link in the description down below. You know, our final plug in is all about the role of the dice, which reminds me of a fun feature our sponsor DistroKid has to get you on their Spotify playlist. One of the ways to get more listens to your music is to get on a Spotify playlist. Now, DistroKid makes this fun and easy for you to get on their playlist with a feature called the Wheel of Playlist. I'm going to go to the top of my DistroKid account here, click on the menu at the top there, then go down to get heard now and then click on Wheel of Playlist. The first thing I need to do is pick one of my songs. I'll go ahead and pick one randomly here and then I click on connect with Spotify. I then have to agree that DistroKid can access my Spotify account, which I have done here. And then the Wheel of Playlist comes out. Now, the idea here is that you get three spins and the best of these three spins determines how high up you are on the playlist. I'll click on the first one. Now, of course, the higher up you are on a playlist, the more likely it is that your music will get heard. I'll click again here and we've come up with what we've got. It's teasing me, two thousand eight hundred and eighty. And then finally, we have one thousand nine hundred and twenty seven is the best result. Now, don't worry, you can play this every single day to increase your chances of getting a higher ranking. This is included for free with your DistroKid account. Follow the link in the description down below to get seven percent off today. If you take some delay, some reverb and some modulation and mix them all up in a kind of a random fashion, you get magic dice. The idea with this plugin is every time you click in the middle here, you get a different random variation of those three effects. Let's just hear that in practice. So you can see that every time I clicked in the middle there, we got a variation with those three effects applied. Now, there's no sort of thing from within the plug-in to sort of save presets or call up presets or what have you. But I have found that once I have a sound which I like, I can save it as a preset from my usual controls from whatever door I'm using. So, for example, I have a light preset saved, which sounds like this. And I have another one called heavy, which sounds like this. Another one, which I just called sort of echo, which sounds like this. So if you do find a sound that you like, make sure you save it as a preset in your door. That way you'll have access to that same sound again in the future. Follow the link in the description down below to get this free plug-in as well as the other plugins included in this video. You know, not all free plugins are worth the time. It will take you to download and test them, which is why I hunt them down and put them in these videos for you to discover. I've also put all of those videos in this playlist for you to click on now.


We were out with the Swedish Army. They brought out their archer artillery system. Pretty interesting. It's self-propelled, auto-loading. Very, very cool considering what we've been using recently in our unit, the original 777s. The demonstration shows the system's high mobility. The possibility that we have with the gun to stay in the shelter, to minimize the risk to get detected from the air especially. We don't have to stand in the open field. We can have a lower readiness and then the high mobility enables us to, when we get the fire mission, we can go into action. It takes us only 25 seconds. Then we can fire four or six rounds or whatever the fire mission says. And then the redeploy takes us another 25 seconds and then be on their way to another firing position at least 500, 700 meters away. All that in total takes also about two and a half minutes. Well, it took quite a bit considering they came all the way from Sweden and they had to come in through Port, drove here from Arizona, did a training exercise out there so a lot really happened. Make this all happen so that we could all have a good time out here. In general, it's always a pleasure to cooperate with the other nations. It's great for us to be in the U.S. Exercise is like a bold quest. Many nations have the possibility to look at each other's gears, pros and cons, so we can also develop, for example, our forward observer's gear and guns and battle management systems. So all in all, the entire chain of joint fires. So it's a great exercise.