A couple of days of ago, the travel sections of the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail – or, as I prefer to think of them, Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber – both ran what were essentially advertorials for the same new product; “Harmonized H20 UV“, which is being marketed […]

Of the many variations on Martin Niemoller’s famous ‘First they came for…’ speech I’ve seen kicking around the Internet none, so far as I can recall, has ever started with the line ‘First they came for the sex offenders”. As population sub-groups go, it’s difficult to think of […]

There are many things in this world that I really, seriously dislike. I don’t like racists. I don’t like bullies – and naturally it follows that I really don’t like racist bullies. But more so even that racists and bullies I really, really dislike people who try to […]

If you’re guessing that the correct answer to the title question is ‘nothing’ then congratulations, you have the correct answer but please permit me to elaborate a little further. At the beginning of May I wrote about David Stevens, a Leatherhead-based quack who trades under the names Vital […]

Although the Internet is, today, positively swimming with consumer review websites, the online consumer review model has its flaws. One can never be entirely certain about the personal motives or degree of experience that product reviewers bring to the table nor how robust a review sites’ systems when […]

If you’ve been following developments in the ongoing case of the skeptical blogosphere vs Dr Stanslaw Burzynski then you’ll probably be aware that, yesterday, yet another branch of mainstream media joined the growing list of professional journalistic enterprises that have recently been drawn into, perhaps unwittingly, promoting his […]

Before getting to the meat of this post, I want to kick things off with some eminently sensible pictorial advice Believe it or not, this particular poster, by Max Plattner, dates to the period from 1936 to 1938 and yet, as the events of this week have shown, […]

I was, to say the least , slightly perplexed the other day when, according to my internal site stats, a couple of visitors turned up at the Ministry by way of a link from a quack website called Positive Health. I’m getting citations from quacks..? What the hell […]

If you’re in any doubt at all as what top-notch science blogging looks like then let me direct your attention to three new articles by Orac, Steven Novella and David Gorski, all of which tackle a new paper, published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, under […]

From the Torygraph: The Duchess of Cornwall yesterday launched an outspoken defence of freedom of the press in Britain, describing it as a cornerstone of democracy. In a surprise intervention, set against the backdrop of the debate over privacy and the courts, she said that she “passionately” believed […]