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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

The starting point for much of what I write here at the Ministry tends to be the kind of stuff that bugs me because, when I think about it in detail, it doesn’t quite make sense. Take, for example, the very recent rape conviction of a Sheffield United […]

As regular visitors to the Ministry will appreciate, I’ve got a bit of unfinished business with Chris McGrath, the idiot who unsuccessfully tried to sue Amazon, Richard Dawkins, the Richard Dawkins Foundation and a blogger named Vaughan Jones over comments made in a review thread on the Amazon […]

I have nothing but admiration for the good folks at Full Fact and the time and effort they put into monitoring the accuracy of factual claims as they appear in the media, but even they sometimes miss a trick or two and their analysis of the media coverage […]

My previous dealings with Chris McGrath, who unsuccessfully tried to sue Amazon, Richard Dawkins, the Richard Dawkins Foundation and Vaughan Jones over a book review, and subsequent flame war, are detailed in the following posts: Shades of Kaschke: Christopher McGrath aka Scrooby In which I get a nastygram […]

No, I’m not going to add any more fuel to an unnecessary fire, my question here is actually very simple… Why has no one bothered to do the most basic background research on this whole non-story? The name ‘Samantha Brick’ is unusual enough that simple News Archive search […]

It’s been widely observed that, since it was taken over by Barclay Brothers, The Daily Telegraph has noticeably shifted downmarket and has come to resemble a broadsheet version of the Daily Mail. What perhaps a little less obvious is that The Telegraph’s religious outlook has shifted at the […]

As regular visitors to the Ministry will know, I written a couple of posts on the thorny subject of rape statistics in the last 18 months, one looking primarily at prevalence and under-reporting, the other at data relating to the overall performance of the criminal justice system, which […]