Update #2 – 15:20pm, 8 June 2012 The Rationalist Association have now updated their petition to reflect the information in this post and the discussion we had this morning, so the comments below are now moot other than serving as a record of the RA’s willingness to respond […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

If you’ve ever read Richard Dawkins’ book ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’ or seen his Channel 4 series ‘The Genius of Darwin’ then you may readily recall the rather surreal interview that Dawkins conducted with an American creationist named Wendy Wright. If you’ve not seen the series or […]

It would be extremely easy to poke fun at the utterly idiotic and opportunistic letter that three Christian MPs, Gary Streeter, Gavin Shuker and Tim Farron, have sent to the Advertising Standards Authority in an effort to persuade/pressure them to overturn a recent ruling on the contents of […]

I’ll hold back on making a detailed commentary on the latest development in the Tory Party’s ongoing war an abortion rights, but I cannot let this empty-headed comment from Andrew Lansley pass without comment. “The rules in the Abortion Act are there for a reason – to ensure […]

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 […]