Ministry of Truth

NHS Does Not spend £1M a week on ‘repeat abortions’

Unity — Mon, 14 May 2012 08:15:28 +0000

From the file marked 'Why journalists shouldn't do statistics' we have a new front page entry from the Daily Mail. As per standard Ministry policy, I'm not going to link to the Mail's article but I will quote from it as I tear it into little tiny kibbles - and as your starter for ten we'll be tackling the headline claim that the NHS spends £1 million a week on 'repeat abortions'. The first thing to not is that the article does not provide a clear source for this claim straight away. All we get at the beginning of the article is a series of general claims and statements, as follows:

The Health Service is spending around £1million a week providing... Read more »

Cranmer vs ASA – How very dare you!

Unity — Sat, 12 May 2012 02:42:52 +0000

As a general rule of thumb anything that winds up Cranmer is usually a good thing so it's with some amusement that I have report that 24 people including a 'Jewish Gay and Lesbian group' have reported his blog to the Advertising Standards Authority over an advert he ran on behalf of the 'Coalition For Marriage'. So far as the substance of these complaints are concerned, the advert included a claim that '70% of people say keep marriage as it is' giving the source of this claim as poll conducted by ComRes on behalf of Catholic Voices, a semi-official Catholic propaganda and astroturfing operation, and this is being challenged under rules 3.1, 3.3 (Misleading Advertising) and 3.7 (Substantiation) of the CAP code. To add... Read more »

Do women need pre-abortion counselling?

Unity — Thu, 10 May 2012 14:39:12 +0000

While we're waiting for the Department of Health to launch its consultation on the future of pre-abortion counselling, a new study has been published by the Guttmacher Institute which sheds some interesting light on women's needs and choices at the point at which they make contact with abortion service providers. The study, 'Attitudes and Decision Making Among Women seeking abortions at one US clinic' shows, unsurprisingly, that the vast majority of women have very firmly made up their mind about having an abortion before making contact with an abortion clinic:

For 87% of the abortions sought, women had high confidence in their decision before receiving counseling.

Although only a single centre study, the paper is based on data extracted from the... Read more »

Dorries vs Mensch

Unity — Thu, 10 May 2012 09:03:36 +0000

There's a comment that's popped up on the #Dorries hashatg that merits a little clarification...

Beginning to think Louise Mensch is an #Dorries. Better clothes, similar relationship to reason.

Seems a bit harsh on Louise Mensch for reasons that are perhaps best explained by way of a couple of analogies. As far as Mensch is concerned, my own impression is that her main problem is that she has a habit of putting her mouth into fifth gear while her brain is still idling in neutral, and that's not that uncommon a problem amongst some backbench MP and other public figures - in fact its pretty much a prime qualification for a job on a daytime talk show. Dorries, on the... Read more »

The Old Lies are the Cruelest

Unity — Tue, 08 May 2012 20:29:17 +0000

I didn't see the first episode of the BBC's new documentary series on Great Ormond Street Hospital, but I did pick up the post show chatter on Twitter, from which I discovered that one of the patients featured in the show was shown receiving treatment from the Burzynski Clinic. From Twitter I also picked up a link to this child's fundraising website and found a diary section which gives quite a bit of information about the treatment they received from the clinic and the effect it had on them, all of which made for some very disturbing reading. I'm not going to link directly to the site or give the child's name but I am going to repost a number... Read more »

Porn Filtering: A Trojan Horse for the Copyright Tax?

Unity — Tue, 08 May 2012 07:38:32 +0000

Over the weekend an incoming link to the Ministry led me to a very interesting comment on the Daily Mail's campaign for 'opt-in' porn filtering by the British porn producer/actor Jim Slip...

Personally, I have no problem with "Opt in", because its just rids us of millions of freebie hunters, 14 year old boys and general bandwidth wasters. However my question to the panel is this: Doesn't it seem a bit coincindental that this hysterical anti-porn campaign has been re-resurrected so soon after our Mr Bendover won the right to demand names and addresses of people who own routers that had been used by persons unknown to download/upload porn? I have always been of the opinion that it is wise... Read more »

Are 11 years olds viewing porn?

Unity — Sat, 05 May 2012 15:50:46 +0000

Coming back to the Christian-sponsored 'parliamentary' report on children and online pornography that I wrote about yesterday, one of the thing that both intrigued and amused me was the inclusion of Psychologies magazine as a reference. Despite the sciency-sounding title, Psychologies magazine is nothing more than a women's lifestyle magazine and its 'psychological' content is strictly of the 'pop' variety, e.g. personality quizzes, etc. In short, citing Psychologies as credible source of evidence go, its somewhere on a par with citing Viz's Millie Tant as a serious treatise on feminist politics. Nevertheless, as its included in the report, as follows...

Smaller scale and more anecdotal studies suggest four out of five children aged 14-16 regularly access online porn at... Read more »

God wants an opt-in porn filter

Unity — Fri, 04 May 2012 17:58:12 +0000

I've just been reading through Clare Perry's 'Independent Parliamentary Inquiry into Online Child Protection' which, of course, recommends the introduction of opt-in porn filters on internet connections in the UK, and its fair to say that I've spotted one or two problems with the report that need to be flagged up. Problem number 1 can be found in the title of the report and the use of the words 'Independent' and 'Parliamentary Inquiry'. 'Independent', in this case, translates into the following branding on the back page of the report. For the avoidance of all doubt, Safer Media's charitable objects read as follows:

The protection of good mental and physical health, in particular of children and young people, by working in accordance... Read more »

David Stevens, Chirokinetic Therapy and Cancer Quackery

Unity — Wed, 02 May 2012 12:25:58 +0000

I've been getting a bit bored lately, due to all the downtime at the Ministry arising from my webhost undertaking a series of major upgrades, but when its comes to shaking off the ring rust there's nothing quite like having an unfamiliar form of quackery to play with and trust me this one's a doozy. It's called 'Chirokinetic Therapy' and it was dreamed up by a quack named David Stevens as recently as 1997. As for what it is, well I will explain in more detail in a moment but its also fair to say the the name contains some pretty strong clues. 'Chiro' derives from the Greek word Khier, via Latin and means 'hand'; so Chiromancy is the practice of... Read more »

Neurozan – A Conundrum for Countdown

Unity — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 09:29:31 +0000

Channel 4's Countdown is one of the longest running TV gameshows in the world and by any measure the raw 'statistics' are pretty impressive. In the UK it's been running for almost thirty years and has racked up - to date - sixty-five series and more than five thousand episodes. In France, where the show originated under the name 'Des chiffres et des lettres' ('Numbers and Letters') it's been running continuously since 1965. I'm not by any means an avid viewer of the programme, its the kind of show that I might occasionally have on in the background if I've got the day off and if there's absolutely nothing else on TV, so its only very recently that its come to... Read more »