Skeptic faces threat of 3 year sentence for exposing weeping statue scam

India prides itself on being the world’s largest secular democracy but when you scratch the surface of that claim just a little that claim starts to look rather shaky as Indian skeptic and rationalist Sanal Edamarku recently discovered after he investigated a ‘weeping statue’ at the Catholic Basillica […]

Lansley’s NHS funding plan will make it even grimmer up North

According to Andrew Lansley, speaking at an NHS Clinical Commissioners conference in April, “age is the principal determinant of health need” from which it follows, logically, that the NHS should devote a greater proportion of its resources towards providing health care services is those areas of the country […]

Celebrity Toast Images for Fun and Profit

I’m feeling creative today, so I thought we’d do a bit of a Blue Peter style ‘make’ and show you how to create your own celebrity toast images. Materials/Equipment. To begin with you’ll need to get the follwing list of materials and equipment together… A loaf of thick-sliced […]

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

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 […]

Cranmer vs ASA – How very dare you!

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 […]

Do women need pre-abortion counselling?

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 […]

Dorries vs Mensch

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 […]

The Old Lies are the Cruelest

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 […]

Porn Filtering: A Trojan Horse for the Copyright Tax?

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 […]

Are 11 years olds viewing porn?

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 […]