Ministry of Truth

It hasn’t taken Tory MP David Tredinnick long to start spitting out dubious EDM’s in defence of homeopathy. The new parliament is only a little over a month old and he’s already tabled four such motions, including a generic attack on the British Medical Association and three EDMs […]

To most people Fiona Phillips is just a former GMTV presenter who, on Strictly Come Dancing, demonstrated to the world that she has two left feet. On the evidence of her latest column in the Mirror, she’s also a raging crank who makes piss poor excuses for quackery… […]

If the furore surrounding the hacking of a webmail server at UEA’s Climate Research Unit has achieved anything at all it’s been to push the issue of scientific probity and integrity firmly into the spotlight. By far the most damning, but still unproven, allegation levelled at the CRU’s […]

Much has already been written on the subject of the first two oral evidence sessions in Science and Technology Committee’s investigation of  homeopathy, more than enough, in fact, to allow me to point you in the direction of a couple of articles by Ben Goldacre and Skepticat’s excellent […]

There is only one thing I enjoy more than exposing junk-science scams and that exposing junk-science scams where the perpetrator is dumb enough to try it on. This morning, three comments were posted on my recent exposé of the ‘dowsing for explosives’ scam in the space of 20 […]

I learned a new word this week – EmoTrance. EmoTrance is the new name for bullshit. In the last week, its received no less than two articles worth of coverage in The Times’ educational supplements; one, a vomit inducing piece of brainless advertorial by Adi Bloom, an arts […]

The row over the sacking of Professor David Nutt is, it seems, rumbling on nicely with this exchange between Evan Harris and Alan Johnson in regards to the accuracy, or otherwise, of comments made by Johnson in his statement to the House of Commons: The exchange contains this […]

Arthur C Clarke once famously noted that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’. Were he still alive today he might also have observed that magic, when dressed up in sufficiently advanced technobabble, can be readily mistaken for science. Tuesday’s New York Times carried this quite staggering […]

If you complied a list of all the people you wouldn’t offer a column on drugs policy to then Ann Widdecombe would surely be in the top ten and not too far away from Melanie Phillips, but no, in its infinite wisdom the Guardian has handed Widdie the […]

If you’ll excuse the bad pun, Alan Johnson has made a complete hash of his handling of the sacking of Professor David Nutt. No, that’s unfair – the government has collectively made a complete hash of things. Johnson is just the poor sap who’s having to field a […]