calling all bloggers: olympic sponsors come before olympic security?

This sounds like it should be a bigger story, so let's see if we can get some momentum behind it.

Davey Winder, writing over at ITPRO (via BoingBoing/Schneier) describes a meeting on IT security with Derek Wyatt, the Chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Olympic Group. Wyatt revealed - apparently incidentally - that only technology produced by major sponsors of the games can be used.

So, both during the event and during the construction phase, the technology used to secure identities, for example, will not be chosen merely because it is the most suitable or the most fit for purpose - regardless of who manufactures it. It'll be whatever Visa, the lead sponsor, decides to create.

Winder concludes:

Wyatt readily admits it is nothing to do with him, his committee or indeed the Government as the deals arrangements are between the IOC and their sponsors. He also readily admits he doesn’t see why the UK should have to foot the £1billion cost of security in that case.

But again, he misses the point. Security in this case should not be about money, or who foots the bill, but about preventing lives from being lost and terror winning a gold medal on the world stage.

Can anyone flesh out any more details?

a lying bastard, but apparently our kind of lying bastard

A recent YouGov survey for The Telegraph after 10 years of Blair has found that a majority of those polled think Blair is an uncaring, ineffective, untrustworthy, incompetent, unprincipled leader who is only concerned for himself and his party.

Similarly, a majority felt he had played "fast and loose with the truth," that he has "lost touch with ordinary people," is too fond of the trappings of power and has failed in his pledge to clean up politics.

Naturally, a majority also found him to be likeable as a person.

a note of clarification on behalf of the independent: wi-fi may or may not kill you as you sleep

The report in The Independent that potential health risks posed by Wi-Fi technology should be investigated as "the research hasn't been done" should in no way be seen to contradict the earlier and seemingly baseless report in The Independent declaring that Wi-Fi is dangerous.

Similarly, the admission that "no one is really aware of what we are dealing with" and the current absence of any real evidence of a health risk does not mean that anyone has to stop using the alarmist phrase "electronic smog" - smog which may or may not exist in the first place.

Therefore, the phrases "children at risk," "radiation threat from new wireless computer networks" and "could cause cancer and premature senility" from the original Independent on Sunday "exclusive" are not misleading and scaremongering, but merely "potentially" accurate. We look forward to reporting the conclusions other bodies of research which do not yet exist in the future.

Also, ZOMG, mobile phones kills butterflies.

blair: turn that failure frown upside down

Did Blair just accuse NHS workers who object to his "reforms" of being irrational?

Tony Blair has admitted his NHS reforms have been "really tough" for staff but said waiting list cuts, new hospitals and more staff were a sign of success.

He said he did not think there would be a reversal of the "essential course" of more choice for patients and greater competition between health providers.

And he said he expected NHS staff to make a "more rational assessment at the conclusion" of the reform process.

Yes, he did. It's actually an incredibly unfair and inaccurate judgment - junior doctors are already coldly rationalising the situation: given that my career is totally fucked, what exactly am I doing with my life working for the NHS?

It's the return of Messianic Blair - only he knows what's good for us, and is able to predict the future, too. It's a return likely triggered by a degree of anxiety over legacy - a legacy which seems to involve a large number of NHS trusts in deficit (with other managers holding back funding for non-essential things like, oh, training and treatment, in order to break even).

This might be a good time to explain the relationship between the slogan "things can only get better" and horrible, horrible irony: let's call this week two of the little campaign strategy that couldn't.

when organised religions attack

The Scottish Daily Mail pulls out all the stops today to provide the Catholic Church with a platform to attack MSP Patrick Harvie, accusing him of being a "fascist" and "gay rights extremist" for refusing to distance himself from comments made by GALHA (the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association), of which he is honorary vice-president.

Last month, GALHA said in a statement that Catholic "homophobia" meant the Church should not be educating children. GALHA official George Broadhead said: "We've seen homophobia in Catholic circles raising at a terrifying rate over the least few months. The Pope is almost hysterical on the topic.. what chance have gay pupils in schools run by an organisation that hates them?"

This, by the by, is the Church that says gay people are intrinsically disordered and has repeatedly refused to address the issue of homophobic bullying in its schools - or even admit that the problem exists. So while the comments might be a little impolitic, they have the virtue of accuracy.

Amongst Harvie's other supposed crimes are campaigning for gay adoption (which was overwhelmingly supported and passed by the Scottish parliament, so hardly the sign of extremism) and campaigning for election under the plan to make homophobic abuse a hate crime.

All of which makes the Catholic church's press office completely lose it and start making things up:

A spokesman for the Catholic Church attacked Mr Harvie's beliefs. He said: "The Greens' mentality on education - that parents should be paced on the substitute bench as the state takes over their role in educating children - is literally fascist."

Wrrrrong. It's the role of religion in education, not parents, that the Green party object to on the grounds that public money should not subsidise any religion.

"There is something sinister behind these attacks on diversity in education - a sense of Catholic-phobia."

Ah, the old phobo-phobic defence. How dare you refuse to accept our intolerance of others?

"Behind the attack on Catholic schools and the Trojan horse of homophobic bullying is the idea of sexual anarchy."

The claim that confronting bullying is a cunning front for sexual anarchy is probably the most ironic response available to the idea that the Catholic Church is hysterical when it comes to the deadly deadly homo. Maybe next time the Church can accuse the Danger Queers of baby-eating, or bringing down the price of property.

The only thing that Harvie has actually done is to campaign openly for election with policies that the Catholic Church doesn't like, some of which have widespread support - which apparently is the grounds for a full page declaring that he's an "extremist" and a threat to society as we know it. Damn that liberal press, eh?

scottish christian party: liars

And lo, the Scottish Christian Party did covet my vote. Here we go:

From NEXT MONDAY, 30th April 2007, the Sexual Orientation Regulations (SORs) will make it illegal to teach schoolchildren that the bible is the ultimate written authority over all matters.

In other words, we don't live in a theocracy. So far, so good.

Specifically, it will be illegal to teach a schoolchild, who declares himself or herself homosexual, that homosexual practices are an "abomination" to God. (Leviticus 18:22).

Ah, no. Not specifically at all, as Leviticus isn't mentioned - even in the slightest - in those regulations. Fans of reading will also note that Leviticus 18:22 reads:

"Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination."

It's a problem solved by the absence of vaginas when two men get together. Similarly, even if you really try, two women can't lie together as a man might with with a woman.

But that's nothing compared to the total fucking lies of this:

800% Increase of Breast Cancer if you have an early abortion at a young age and have a family history of breast cancer.

There is no proven link between abortion and breast cancer. In case you're still wondering, there is no proven link between abortion and breast cancer. It's not a distortion, or a clever bit of selective word play. It's a lie. Even Fox News agrees. A story published as recently as 24th April 2007 (that's three days ago) reports:

Abortions and miscarriages do not raise the risk of breast cancer, despite claims by some groups and some studies that suggest they do, researchers said yesterday.

A study of more than 100,000 US nurses found that those who had an abortion or miscarriage were no more likely to have breast cancer than any other woman in the study.

The findings fit with a 2003 report from an international expert panel put together by the US National Cancer Institute.

"If you look at the high-quality evidence, it does not support an association between induced abortions and breast cancer," said Karin Michels of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston.

While I try not to tell people to do with their votes, I'm going to break that rule and suggest that you don't vote for the authoritarian, hatemongering total fucking liars.

iain dale: shepherding women's votes

Iain Dale joins the list of pundits who have decided they know What Women Want. It's an above average effort that just about recognises that not all women want the same thing, but it still depends on the standardised banal summary of the sexes:

In this increasingly presidential age, [Cameron's] softer approach will be judged against the aggression of Gordon Brown. Women do not like great clunking fists. They don't like the confrontational approach adopted by Brown. [...] Women like the fact that Cameron and his family are proud to use the NHS. They relate to his experience of sleeping on the floor of his young son Ivan's hospital bedroom. His experiences are their experiences.

His experiences are their experiences? Grown a vagina, has he? Actually, don't answer that - but do note the reluctance amongst pundits to create even the smallest narrative where fathers might identify with Cameron's dedication to his family. Because we don't like to think that men might vote like that - emotional identification is for chicks.

While Dale argues that women are interested in policy, he ends up arguing that Tory strategy should reflect a more essential female desire - "to feel secure in their family, in their home and in their community" - a position so stripped of any political colour as to depoliticise the female vote.

The detail or ideology of the policy doesn't really matter, this kind of thinking seems to suggest, so long as soccer mums feel safe. While the declaration that "women will decide the next election" sounds like a clarion of empowerment, the way in which that kind of campaigning views the political life of women looks more like the pragmatic shepherding of votes.

nhs data breaches worse than thought

On Wednesday, Channel 4 discovered that anyone could access the personal information of doctors and students through the NHS Medical Training Application Service website. The BBC reported that the NHS claimed to have closed the breach by the end of the day.

Yesterday, Channel 4 discovered that the website was still wide open:

For the second day in a row there has been a breach in the security on the MTAS computer system - used by 32000 junior doctors to apply for training posts. [...]

All it took was a simple changing of a number on the URL. Personal messages and details could be found. Initially we thought it was just MTAS applicants who have their own registration number who could do this.

Now we have learned that if an email was sent with the URL to anyone - not just an applicant - they could access the private sites without even logging in.

And the "short period of time" of the breach wasn't so much a couple of hours as several days - most likely since Monday afternoon, right up until Channel 4 contacted the department of health.

By this morning, Friday, the website is dead in the water.. uhm.. "closed for routine maintenance".. with serious questions raised about other data protection breaches on the Connecting for Health system - such as the leak of personal information of a number of doctors who attended a conference hosted by Connecting for Health.

What a great day to make the NHS the heart of some kind of Labour election campaign.

EDIT: The NHS blogger mentioned obliquely by Channel 4 is naturally none other than Dr John Crippen. Would it have killed them to give him a direct credit?

round-up

There's a mid-week Scottish blogging round-up that needs you to read it. Though I see the rule of thumb for people who blog about sex is in play - that I'm the "And finally.." feature. :) Thanks to Mr Eugenides for putting this edition together..

Oh, and for anyone reading Mediawatchwatch's post on the Scottish Christian Party might also be interested in this pair of  posts seen here a few weeks ago.

very very deadly deadly homos

Having decided it's not enough to give a platform for intolerance but also determined to provoke homophobic anxiety, the Mail reports on plans by the BBC to broadcast a mass from the Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Church.. in San Francisco.

Can you possibly imagine where this is going? Maybe this picture, reproduced from the Mail's website, will help:



The caption reads "The BBC is to relay a 'gay Mass' from San Francisco the first time such a service has been broadcast. Above, Members of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence."

You'd be forgiven for thinking that the glittering Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence were in some way connected with the service. But they're not. The service is going to be led by Father Donal Godfrey, a U.S. Jesuit priest, and the preacher will be the British Catholic theologian, James Alison.

And given that it's going to be broadcast on radio - you won't be able to tell who's in attendance, even if the church is packed to the rafters with glittery-bearded transvestite nuns in full make-up.

The game at play here is an attempt to present gay people in the demonised form that social conservatives tend to hate and fear the most - the bearded, glittery trannie deadly deadly homo. It's why the Mail finds time for some back-story to introduce the Sisters:

Its parish priest, Father Stephen Meriweather, blesses participants in the San Francisco's annual gay pride march.

But it has also infuriated many Catholics in the U.S. who have complained about such activities as transvestite bingo nights during which sex toys and pornographic DVDs were handed out as prizes.

The argument that a transvestite bingo night run by an outside group might form only the tiniest part of the church's work (and which was stopped when it was discovered that inappropriate prizes had been given out) is irrelevant. That there might be far worse things in the world than the occasional free dildo in church is beside the point.

The fact that the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence aren't characteristic of the church, or of GLBT positive Christians is also irrelevant, as is the fact that the Sisters have nothing to do with the BBC recording. They're in the story because they're intended to trigger a knee-jerk reaction.

And one of the usual suspects obediently rise to the bait:

Last night a media watchdog said Sunday's radio broadcast was "bound to cause offence" to mainstream Christians.

John Beyer of Mediawatch UK, an organisation which campaigns for standards in the media, said he thought it was a mistake to broadcast the service.

"Religious broadcasting, apart from Songs of Praise, tends to focus on the out-of-the-ordinary and having this particular service I think will cause offence to people who feel that such practices are wrong and are taught as such in holy scripture," Mr Beyer said.

Leaving aside Beyer's belief that he thinks he can speak on behalf of all Christians, his comments frame the Mail's story perfectly: telling Christians that they should be offended and threatened, that their faith is entirely homogenous and defined by one thing: a rejection of the deadly deadly homo.

It's a convenient ignorance that disguises the truth that different congregrations of even non-homo Christians read the Bible in different ways. But to admit that would be to open the door for a form of Christianity which isn't defined by intolerance.

fun with bar charts: election 07

I've been on the receiving end of a pile of election communications - and done the one thing that wasn't expected. I started reading them.

And there's something a little odd about some of the illustrations. Let's start with this chart from Siobhan Mathers of the Liberal Democrats:


After a few seconds I started wondering why the gap between the bars representing the Lib Dem and Labour result (9%) was smaller than the gap between the bars for the Lib Dem and SNP results (5%).

Hmm.

Then there's this bar chart from Shirley-Anne Somerville, SNP candidate, under the banner "only the SNP can beat Labour in Edinburgh Central" - and showing support for the SNP substantially ahead of all other parties:



The source is listed as a Populus poll for The Times. For a second I wondered why a national newspaper would have gone to time and considerable expense of compiling polling data for individual constituencies.

Then I visited the Populus website and discovered that it's actually a national poll, and not a local one - and not exactly proof that "only the SNP" can beat Labour in Edinburgh Central.

While no-one's really telling any direct lies, it's almost as though increasingly anxious parties are using pretty pictures to stretch the truth as far as possible - which, more than any bar chart, tells how close the result in this constituency is going to be.

the universe doesn't care what's in the box

The Times' report that contestants on Deal or No Deal are dependent on luck rather than magical vibrations and positive thoughts to win the big prize is best summarised as "well, duh."

possibly the best election strategy in the world

Another day, another celebration of the NHS as the heart of Labour's election campaign:

The Department of Health last night named 17 NHS hospital trusts across England which are mired in debts worth hundreds of millions of pounds and cannot survive without a fundamental reorganisation.

[The] announcement was the first official confirmation of a Guardian inquiry in December which found at least a dozen trusts were technically bankrupt, with no prospect of repaying debts.

Golly, this election strategy really can't be beat.

british attitudes to illegal immigrants and work: polling data for fair play?

Here's a poll suggesting that public opinion and tabloid hysteria over illegal immigrants and asylum seekers have even less in common than you might think :

Two in three (66%) UK adults support getting as many of the 300,000 – 500,000 asylum seekers and those that have overstayed their visa into work.

Our poll also reveals that there is widespread support (67%) for allowing those that have worked for four or more years and that have paid taxes to be allowed to stay in the country. The same proportion (67%) agree that any asylum seeker should be allowed to work legally in Britain if they want to.

The poll questions are fairly transparent and do explicitly reference the estimated number of illegal immigrants given above; I'm wondering whether the favourable response to illegal immigrants is tied into this sense of a secure and limited number, rather than a feeling of unrestrained migration (as in the narrative of open borders and floods of foreigners favoured by the tabloids). 

Yet any change in law to allow long-term illegal residents to become legal migrants would not be tied to that figure, which is an estimate of illegal immigrants thought to be in the UK right now. It would be interesting to see how well the idea of allowing 20,000 (or whatever) illegal migrants to become legal citizens each year would poll. 

The Independent covers the poll - and the associated campaign for a pathway from illegal to legal status for workers - over here. Is this polling data for the supposedly famous British sense of fairness?

some uncivil discourse

For your perusal, a short list of bastards:

Senior ministers are backing a controversial bill to exempt parliament from the Freedom of Information Act as a second attempt is made on Friday to push the legislation through the Commons.

The bill has the support of several ministers, including Tessa Jowell, the culture secretary; Tom McNulty, police minister; Andy Burnham, health minister; Ian Pearson, climate change minister; John Healey, financial secretary to the Treasury; and Keith Hill, parliamentary private secretary to Tony Blair.

Last week they voted to ensure that no more additional details of MPs' expenses are disclosed and to insist that both houses are exempt from the bill.

There is no evidence of the need for an exemption to the freedom of information act; there is, in contrast, an abundance of evidence why parliament is in need of the accountability offered by transparency.

on "outing" (dead tories)

One of those incidental claims that end up being far more interesting than the main event:

A GAY Conservative politician last night claimed Ted Heath was told to stop "cottaging" prior to becoming prime minister.

Crusing *ahem* over to the New Statesman website where we find Brian Coleman's column *ahem* where he writes:

The country has managed for decades with gay men holding a significant number of public offices. The late Ted Heath managed to obtain the highest Office of State after he was supposedly advised to cease his Cottaging activities in the 1950s when he became a Privy Councillor and in recent times the Leader of one of the best Local Authorities in the Country only came out having received his Knighthood and after a scurrilous campaign by "Private Eye".

New rule: you can only claim that dead Tories are closeted; live Tories must be discretely veiled. If he came out after having been knighted, why so coy? And what was so scurrilous about the Private Eye's campaign?

All of the above takes place as part of a discussion about the practice of "outing" - with Coleman and Peter Tatchell offering alternative views. It's not a great debate: Tatchell focuses on the need to reveal hypocrites; Coleman argues "there is no place for hypocrisy in public life" .. and then avoids the issue of hypocrisy almost entirely entirely.

However, Coleman's recognition that "outing" has become a tabloid tactic of intimidation (and a means of forcing public individuals to give sales-friendly exclusives) rather than political progress is important - the merit, or otherwise, of outing is strongly related to the relative power of the person doing the outing to the person being shown the closet door.

Oh, and via the comment section at the New Statesman, here's a big list of openly gay elected politicians in the UK.

a clarification for idiots

A letter challenging the accuracy of a documentary on global warming (with examples of how research has allegedly been misrepresented) is not - definitively not - the same thing as an attempt to "ban" the sale of the dvd of the documentary.

the time to reform sex education in the uk is right fucking now

Gaaaaah!

Many university students in the UK lack basic understanding about condoms, a survey suggests.

A third of those polled thought latex condoms had holes in them large enough to allow HIV to pass through.

For fucking - and I mean this literally - fucks sake. That puts supposedly educated people on the same level as the fringe of the Catholic church. For the record, condoms do not have holes that allow HIV to pass through, okay?

I've tried to be tolerant and persuasive, but from right now, I have a zero tolerance policy towards those who think sex education in this country is too explicit. So, listen to the nice people from the Terence Higgins Trust:

The Terrence Higgins Trust is currently campaigning for sex and relationships education to be compulsory in schools.

They argue that many young people are only taught the biology of conception and miss out on information around negotiating safer sex, how to use condoms and how to deal with relationships.

The first person to suggest abstinence eduction should be reminded that it doesn't work at all.

the vatican: so moderate it hurts

So, to quickly summarise the Catholic church (in a speech largely ignored by the mainstream UK media), gay marriage is "evil," and giving equal rights to gay people is also, by consequence, a form of evil. Similarly, abortion and euthanasia are "terrorism with a human face."

To hold on file for the next time a journalist writes a profile of the pope as "suprisingly" moderate, I think.

further nhs "success" stories

Dude, ixnay on the honestay. The NHS is the suppurating.. uh.. gleaming heart of the Labour election campaign, remember?

The government's massive investment in the NHS has not delivered all the improvements hoped for, a former health minister said today. [...] Developing training and administrative systems was an issue, along with an unwillingness to "embrace" the government's £12bn IT upgrade for the NHS, according to Lord Warner.

I can't actually find fault with the reluctance of NHS medical staff to embrace what looks to be a great big pile of steaming Patricia Hewitt that's over-cost, over-due and untrusted to hold secure medical records for which they will ultimately be responsible.

debunking the "failure of boys in education" meme

Found what I've been looking for - an old post of mine from last June, beginning to debunk the "failure of boys in education" meme, of which I'm sure we'll see more when A level and Higher results come out in a few months. Hey, while I'm linking to myself on education you can also read Stupid Girls and Clever Boys.

more false panic over the "feminisation" of education

For about the hundredth time, the press spin applied to the perceived gender divide in education is largely nonsense:

The apparent underachievement by boys in school tests is a distortion caused by a feminised examination system and a higher number of boys suffering behavioural problems, according to research. [...] Alarm over the academic performance of boys has been mounting.

As has been discussed in detail before, more boys and young men are getting higher grades than ever before. Academic achievement amongst men (and entry amongst young men into higher education) has never been higher. The concern stems from the fact that male results are not increasing as rapidly as female results, a distinction which escapes a worrying number of writers on education.

To be clear, there is nothing "feminine" about the exam system; there is nothing instrinsically "feminine" about essay writing. What the research referenced by the Times has apparently shown is that there are some activities at which young men and boys show a greater spread of aptitude than young women and girls. In the words of one of the report's authors, "more gifted and talented boys, but also more with special needs."

Get it? There are young men and boys who have no problems whatsoever with the supposedly "feminised" exam system - and indeed some do very well, as witnessed by the steadily increasing number of men in university education. The fact that the exam system does not serve all young men well suggests - gasp - that not all young men are the same.

However, bandying around terms like "feminised" only adds to the false expectation that all girls and all boys can be fitted into neatly segregated categories, and serves to stigmatise those who don't fit.

For a great post on gender stereotypes in education, see Dave Hill from last June.

postcode lottery of (labour's re-election) morality rates

So, to recap, we're making the NHS the heart of the Labour election campaign. The distended and in-need-of-a-bypass heart of the NHS. From the willing to please Daily Telegraph:

Patients are twice as likely to die in hospitals with the highest mortality rates than in those with the lowest, according to a report from Dr Foster Research, the independent health information company.

It found that despite the Government pouring billions of pounds into the NHS, a postcode lottery exists with standards of care varying widely across the country.

Oops.

One of the traditional weaknesses of this kind of statistical snapshot has been that it doesn't necessarily reflect the kinds of patients being treated. However - unfortunately for Labour, and slightly more unfortunately for patients at George Eliot Hospital NHS Trust, 43% above the expected mortality rate - this piece of research claims to have standardised the data "to take into account a range of risk factors, such as the age of patients, sex, social demographics, the level of deprivation in the area and whether a patient has any other illnesses."

With a refreshing awareness of how NHS trusts are seen to "succeed," there's this quote:

George Eliot NHS Trust said its high mortality rate had been caused by "deficiencies in the hospital's recording of information regarding a patient's diagnosis and is not reflective of the quality of patient care".

Dr Peter Handslip, the trust's medical director, said: "We have undertaken a thorough review of the trust's mortality data over the past year. This has resulted in a dramatic improvement in our standardised mortality rate since July 2006."

See? You don't have to improve the level of care: just improve the level of administration of the data collection and collation regarding the care.

To get back to the original point, I'm still not sure how a focus on the NHS is going to benefit Labour: it's certainly going to give a lot of ammunition to their critics.

no evidence of need for MP's exemption from FOI act

The attempt to introduce an exemption to the Freedom of Information Act for MPs - or rather, the second attempt - deserves a little more attention. The BBC supplies both sides of the argument:

[Former Tory chief whip] Mr Maclean says the law is needed to protect constituents [...] "When we write on behalf of constituents... we must be able to look them in the eye and say that in all circumstances what they tell us will not get out," Mr Maclean told MPs.

"It is like the relationship with a priest. We will write to an authority with their problem, but we guarantee that that information will not be leaked by us, or get into the public domain."

But critics say these are already exempted under the act, unless there is a strong public interest case and that data protection laws provide extra protection.

It's hard to read either the Freedom of Information Act or the Data Protection Act without seeing that Maclean's priestly defence is a more than a little thin, given that letters explicitly identifying individuals would be precisely the kind of thing which both Acts protect.

Take a look at part two of the Freedom of Information Act, which describes how the disclosure of any personal information that would breach the principles of the Data Protection Act is prohibited.

Or read the first part of the Data Protection Act which details various rights that protect personal personal information, including both how consent must be given before personal data is "processed" (a definition which includes disclosure) and how an individual has the right to prevent processing likely to cause damage or distress.

Given that, in practice, even the most specific statistical information is masked to prevent the identification of individuals by indirect headcount, it's hard to imagine a general circumstance in which MP's could be forced to reveal details of personal correspondence. Debate in the Commons even pointed to the absence of evidence of cases where MP's had been involved in the disclosure of sensitive information.

Exemptions to laws intended to provide greater transparency and accountability should be functional, pragmatic and driven by necessity - not by imagined problems for which preventive measures are already in place.

re: melanie phillips, unreliability of

Of course, all that stuff about single mothers spreading rabies pales into insignificance when put next to her WMD conspiracy theories - which can be most charitably described as hearsay based on hearsay without any evidence to support it but instead involving a conspiracy stretching from the Republican party across to China. For whom John Negroponte is apparently some kind of secret agent.

My favourite piece of "evidence" of WMD bunkers is this:

This was in the first place because of the massive size of these sites and the extreme lengths to which the Iraqis had gone to conceal them. Three of them were bunkers buried 20-30 feet beneath the Euphrates. They had been constructed through building dams which were removed after the huge subterranean vaults had been excavated so that these were concealed beneath the river bed.

Because there's nothing quite so inconspicuous to spy satellite imagery as the temporary diversion of a major river and heavy construction work in an area of high strategic interest. In fact, a single unverifiable source known for his paranoid fantasies told me he'd been told by other unverifiable sources that a series of massive and temporary dams are treated with the same suspicion as chinchilla farms and routinely ignored by US intelligence. It's kind of wonderful that - even if an elaborate transnational conspiracy were to exist - Phillips' account of it still fails to make any sense.

Phillip's piece is crowned with this cautionary note:

Of course we don't know whether any of this is true.

Still, that's no reason not to write a series of alarmist and unsupported articles on the basis that it is, though? No?

melanie phillips: for lack of a penis, the kingdom was lost

Still on the "thankfully this tragedy also serves my own personal agenda" front, Melanie Phillips decides that a woman who abused her children (herself the product of several generations of abusive relationships) is proof that "there are tens of thousands of such women the length and breadth of the country giving birth to children who will repeat the same patterns of gross inadequacy, neglect and abuse."

That Phillips appears to have pulled this figure wholly from her bottom in order to rage at single mothers - many of whom are "bitter, truculent and aggressive" - while giving absent fathers a largely free pass should probably be ignored. Apparently, men were just so strong and essential that they were unable to stop themselves from becoming weak and useless and it's like so totally the fault of women. And the government. But not men.

If you were to accidentally spot that she's taken one admittedly horrible case to imagine an entire society poised at the point of "cultural suicide" you might think she was using hyperbolic, alarmist rhetoric. You might then start to suspect her assertion that "generations of women-only households" often produce "hopelessly inadequate mothers who abuse and neglect their own children" for lack of a supervisory penis is thin on fact and rich in wide-eyed speculation.

But hopefully none of that will happen.

labour pins election hopes on nhs: some kind of joke, shurely?

I've been reading and re-reading this headline and it reads like some kind of horribly elaborate suicide note:

Labour puts NHS at heart of election campaign

There's even a new website - Better With Labour - featuring "an interactive map of new NHS facilities," with the promise/threat of a national tour by ministers. Yes, you too could throw something at Patricia Hewitt from the comfort of your home town.

The website is a pink and purple landslide of impressive sounding if largely meaningless numbers. For example, the boast of 6.5 millions calls to NHS Direct for "free medical advice" tells us nothing about whether this is a cost effective or medically sound method of delivering health-care. It's a large number, and that's about it.

Even the more specific fragments of data are showy rather than informative: 1400 extra dentists recruited to work in "areas with the greatest access problems"? Well, which areas are those? And what about the areas who don't have the "greatest problems"? And how many people are still without an NHS dentist? Stripped of context, the figure means very little.

It's a matter of asking (or determinedly avoiding) the right question, a strategy embraced wholeheartedly by the "Play the Jeopardy Game" feature - the answers to each round miraculously being "Yes, Labour is the saviour of the NHS and the Tories are trying to poison your gran right now."

All of this rests on the dual spires of smugness and deniability: yes, we take full credit for decisions made by independent NHS trusts, and no, we can't be held responsible for decisions made by independent NHS trusts. Postcode lottery? Sorry, not our problem.

Meanwhile, over at The Telegraph:

Patients will have to pay far more for more private health care to make up shortfalls in the NHS, a group of doctors says today in a damning report. Faced with long waiting lists and postcode lotteries, the doctors say that patients are increasingly paying extra private payments to upgrade the treatment they receive.

The report was written by three doctors, including Karol Sikora, a leading professor of cancer medicine at Imperial College School of Medicine. [...] "It is commonly said that health care in the UK is free at the point of delivery; in fact this mantra is now a political mirage rather than a day-to-day reality," it says.

The short version being that focusing on the NHS is, at best, a risky strategy for Labour come election day.

bullhitch

I hate to disrupt Peter Hitchens' sweeping and silly claim that "liberals find it very difficult to think" but his rush to blame "vile pills" for gun crime (and consequent absolution of absent gun control laws) is an ugly example of "this recent tragedy proves everything I've been saying" journalism of the last few weeks. At least, that's what I "think."

Hitchens decides that the most significant common factor amongst a number of spree-killers is that they were on prescription drugs for depression which drove them to act - rather than recognising the more obvious situation: that a common factor was mental illness. He also ignores (or forgets) that the vast, vast majority of people receiving drug treatment for mental health do so without incident and even experience an improvement in their lives.

It also helps to remember that ADHD - and the treatment for it - is rather different from the diagnosis and treatment of depression or bi-polar disorder. To roll them all together with the suggestion of "fictitious diseases" is a mix of misleading and irresponsible posturing.

Oh, and the fact that Hitchen's scaremongering focus on "vile pills" as a cause mirrors the focus on easy access to guns he decries in "almost every Left-wing commentator in this country" is probably too ironic to mention.

a rational argument against the HPV vaccine?

After months of "it'll turn girls into sluts" arguments against the HPV vaccine, I've finally found a potentially rational objection: the money spent on a nationwide innoculation programme would have a greater impact on women's health if it were spent instead on improving the baseline level of gynecological health-care.

Now: where do I look for the numbers to start to prove or disprove that?

voting is like totally cool

The absolute best thing about the French presidential elections? The 84% turn-out.

The not-quote-so-cool comparison is to my local constituency of Edinburgh Central, who managed 46% at the last Scottish Parliamentary election. Hmm.

the invisible father

Some more coverage of those amazing invisible men. Headlined "Why one woman graduate in three will never be a mother," the Mail declares

A third of female university graduates will never have children because they choose career over motherhood, research suggests. [...]

While some are making a conscious decision not to have a family, others are simply leaving it too late after taking years to build their careers, buy a home and find the right partner.

"Find the right partner"? Oh, that's right. Most women on the road to motherhood need access to one of those penis-mabob-things - not that the role of men in the decision of women to have children features anywhere in this story, or in The Sunday Telegraph version to which the Mail's bears a cut and paste kind of resemblance.

And even though the research suggests that there might be multiple reasons why fewer women are having children, the story focuses on careers - because it fits the increasingly popular narrative of stupid/selfish women who leave it too late to have children/want to "have it all."

That's not to say that the person with the vagina isn't going to end up being the pregnant one, but rather to note that "Why one male graduate in three will never be a father" is a story that rarely, if ever, seems to be written (even though it might hold the same rich opportunities for sniping at women for the choices they make and lives they lead). The idea that thousands of childless men might be roaming the country by choice or accident of fate never seems to cause the same kind of alarm.

minimal statistical variation makes headline news

Today's favoured media narrative - that a Freedom of Information request has shown an increase of primary school age exclusions, and a "tripling" of expulsions of under-fives - deserves a little closer attention.

The first thing to note is that the total number of exclusions as a proportion of the primary school population is miniscule. Checking with figures from the ONS, 43,720 exclusions in 04/05 is about 0.87% of the total primary school population; 41,300 in 03/04 is 0.81%.

The next thing is consequently that the tripling of reception class expulsions from 20 to 60 cases refers to an even tinier proportion of the school population: something like 0.0012% of primary school children as a whole in 04/05, and far less than half of one percent of children aged five and under in education.

Neither the change in the  total number of expulsions, or merely those involving very young pupils, suggests an explosion in numbers. While the individual cases are obviously a concern for the families and schools involved, the gasping headlines can probably be ignored.

speech, as in free

It's curious that this story is being presented as an issue for bloggers, rather than anyone involved in statements in the public domain, oh, I don't know, like newspaper journalists:

British bloggers said yesterday that free speech on the internet is under threat from draconian new laws, which could see them jailed for up to three years.

Europe's justice ministers have agreed genocide denial and race hatred legislation that will outlaw remarks on the internet "carried out in a manner likely to incite violence or hatred".[...]

Chris Mounsey, the 29 year old behind The Devil's Kitchen blog, said: "There is potential for this to have worldwide application. Free speech is at the centre of blogging. Part of the reason bloggers can tell the truth is because it is difficult to pin them down. This law tries to do it."

DK? In The Telegraph? Without a sweary health warning? It's official: Chris Mounsey is the new Tim Worstall.

On important thing missing from The Telegraph's brief report and slightly mangled quote (though not from DK's recent posts) is that opposition to the legislation comes from across the political spectrum of the UK blogosphere.

so very moving day

Moving office today so no posts until this afternoon at the earliest. Seen anything you think I should read?

further adventures of the invisible father

A Daily Mail feature on "smother love" and the grown men who claim to be unable to escape their mother's attentions - and a swift rebuttal from Zertie in Paris in the comment section:

Here we go again; Just one question, while the mothers are (supposingly) turning their sons into "mummy's boys" where are the fathers and what are they doing? Since Eve ate the apple it always comes down the the same thing doesn't it? It's always the women's fault (and men apparently have no will of their own).

The dominant-mother meme is also a popular variant on the "men are too weak to resist being turned into weak men by perfidious feminists" argument that keeps circling pundit-land.

For a refresher course, see The Metrosexual is Dead: Long Live Manliness, Apparently and Harvard Professor Talks Cock: Feminists to Blame, Apparently.

the haunting of the tivo

I almost don't have the will to mock... but there's nothing like a self-proclaimed psychic who tries to get ahead of the game by declaring:

I accept the cynics will label me as deranged..

With nothing left to lose, let's try this:

Born in 1926 in Llangollen, South Wales, of Irish-Welsh mining heritage [my mother] gave great credence to all types of paranormal behaviour, whether it was the TV suddenly switching off or a door slamming shut.

Where to start? Should it be that a door shutting isn't exactly compelling evidence of the after-life? Or should it be wondering why - given all of the possible ways of influencing the material world - the deceased feel the need to hog the remote?

I've been accused of being a fantasist and an attention-seeker.

Stop it - you're taking all the fun out of this.

No, I am not psychotic. Neither have I suffered a brain injury. I am reasonably intelligent and educated (up to degree level) and I am studying the scientific discipline of psychology. Which, for the most part, has little time for things that can't be observed or measured.

I'm not sure making claim to a background in scientific discipline really works if you're simultaneously claiming to have proof of the after-life via the existence of levitating CD racks:

One evening, as I was packing cases to move home, a wooden CD rack which was leaning against the wall set itself straight in front of my eyes and raised itself a foot or two into the air. Then it sank down to the floor and rose up again before coming to rest on the carpet.

By then I was beyond being shocked. I didn't feel threatened by it, and it was almost as though someone was helping me with the moving.

Yes: the next time someone asks you to help with the moving, you'll only need to lift one of the boxes before putting it down where you found it. This is now "helping."

I'm not sure "deranged" is quite the right expression, at least not when "delusional" and "paid to write nonsense for a national newspaper which has no shame" are also available.

rowan williams: your hatred of the deadly deadly homos is due to poor reading skills

The attempt to tell homo-hating Christians that they've been misreading the Bible is a nice idea, but Rowan Williams should probably realise that the selective emphasis of hate wielded by religious conservatives isn't going to yield to logic or theology.

If the only problem was reading comprehension skills, we'd be able to resolve Leviticus right now:

Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is an abomination.

Not a problem, as the absence of vaginas in male-male sex means that you're prety much forced to lie with man in a different way than you would with a woman. For lesbian couples, see "absence of penis" to the same effect.

Arguing for alternative or contextual readings of the Bible is a positive exercise, but it ignores how many evangelical and fundamentalist christians have fixed on one interpretation of a particular edition of a singular translation of an edited text transcribed by multiple authors as the unchanging, literal and immutable Word of God.

In other words, God Hates Fags, and no amount of word-play is going to change a religious movment that has discovered that demonisation of the deadly, deadly homo is a great way to rally the faithful, scare the young and raise money at the same time.

blame the flirt

Another fishing expedition email from a friendly London PR, this time on behalf of LBC Radio's Nick Ferrari:

I am looking for a woman who will happily admit to flirting with co-workers/ bosses in order to further their career. I am not talking about actually starting relationships, just being flirtatious and perhaps sexually alluring in the work place. Nick Ferrari would like to have a conversation about flirting in the workplace and would like a good case study to start with.

"and perhaps sexually alluring"? Being sexually attractive should be a cause for a suspicion? The chance that a woman might be both alluring and flirtatious at work without a promotion doesn't seem to find daylight.

I note that the discussion is going to start with outrageously flirtatious women, and not the men who respond to them. Maybe it's this: poor, unwitting men are tricked by boobies into promoting women who use their sexual wiles because they don't have the abilities or experience to get promoted.

Isn't it fun when you can't work out which sex is about to be insulted more?

blair winning unpopularity contest

Tracking through MORI's poll archive I see that Blair's "satisfaction rating" with the general public is now down to 25% of those polled, with 68% dissatisfied with the job he's doing as PM.

Given that this follows a downward trend that started the year after he was re-elected - and that his monthly rating has hovering around or below the mid 30s for over a year - when will the mainstream press start talking about Blair as an unpopular prime minister? While these numbers could be described as part of a historic trend towards public dissatisfaction in the second and third terms of an administration (made worse by the uneven representation of "first past the post") I'm not sure the problem with Blair isn't a little more personal.

Support for Labour expressed in voting intentions has also diminished, Labour is still managing to retain a tiny 2% lead - down from a more respectable 10 to 15% last summer. While voting intentions might demonstrate a reluctance to dump Labour (or a reluctance to pick an alternative) the general public has shown no hesitation in expressing how they feel about Blair.

young people turn to magazines for lack of sex education at home and in school

Here are a few of the conclusions from the Ofsted report on sex education, via The Scotsman:

"Parents often seek to approach personal, social and health issues with their children tangentially, if at all"

"As well as failing to provide the information themselves, some parents express concern about the suitability of information that young people receive from other sources, such as magazines, even when these could be useful.

"For example, the increase in the number of magazines aimed at young men, while at times reinforcing sexist attitudes, has helped to redress the balance of advice available to young people."

"While many magazines now stress the importance of safe sex, some communicate, inaccurately, the perception that all young people are sexually active. Nevertheless, the problem pages in magazines remain a very positive source of advice and reassurance for many young people."

So, a reluctance to talk to young people about sex (for fear that this will somehow "encourage" them) drives young people to magazines which - though carrying valuable information about safe sex - may also communicate unhealthy attitudes about sex, alongside the idea that "everyone's doing it," which translates into peer pressure to have sex.

Get it? A refusal to talk about sex (either at home or in school) drives young people to sources that are more likely to do the very things that conservative opponents of sex education fear.

Rather than rehashing the discussion about whether the information in magazines is suitable or not, can we at least admit that it would be better if they were not the primary - or even sole - source of advice and reassurance for young people?

Download and read the full report here; I'll try and post something more when I get a chance to read it through.

nirpal dhaliwali: we're all misanthropists now

Nirpal Dhaliwal's main theory in life seems to be "I am terrible at relationships, therefore men and women have nothing in common." The key to this theory is assuming that all of his interactions with women are proof of larger, even universal truths about sex and gender.

If you're at all concerned that Dhaliwal might lack the necessary egotism, take a read of Dhaliwal's classic "How feminism destroyed real men," where he ended up arguing that "the female orgasm is the natural mechanism by which men assert dominion over women" and that it was his ability to force his wife to call him "the boss" during sex which saved his marriage after his unfaithfulness. He also claimed he was a "true feminist" because he was prepared to tolerate strong women.

In today's addition to his theory that women only put up with men because they liked being banged into submission, Dhaliwal lists the ways in which he is a terrible husband and marvels that his wife puts up with him. It's a little like watching a very stupid man dancing on very thin ice for hour after hour.

Bracing his explanation with misogyny (women generally trick men into getting them pregnant) and dismissing his own sex drive (even though he's the adulterer) Dhaliwal concludes that "a woman's body is made for sex" and that the female orgasm is proof that women enjoy sex more than men - and only put up with men because they want to be shagged senseless.

It's unclear how this sits with his opening anecdote about a young man who's prepared to put up with a woman's "mind-numbing anxieties" articulated in a "grating, whining voice" in the hope that he'll get to fuck her afterwards. Presumably it's supposed to illustrate his central idea - that the only thing men and women have in common is sex, rather than to demonstrate how unpleasant, shallow and manipulative some men ( i.e. Dhaliwal) can be.

While the only thing Dhaliwal might have in common with women is sex (either his own desire for them, or his wish-fulfilment fantasy of their desire for him), it's hardly proof of the misanthropy of the species. But then in pundit land, one person's inability to form emotional attachments - or to recognise them in others, or even in your long suffering wife - is crystal clear proof of.. well, just about anything you'd like to imagine.

choice (and mandatory religious education)

The one-man army of the Scottish Christian Party has revealed his/their election manifesto, which seems to be gloriously confused when it comes to adults making choices. The Herald helpfully explains:

The party cites the biblical injunction to "train up a child in the way he should go" and rails against the "rising tide of humanist secular fundamentalism". The manifesto argues that greater choice is required for parents when it comes to educating children.

But what if that choice involves.. uhm.. surfing the wave of humanist secularism?

Still on the " free to choose providing you don't choose the things we don't like" front is the demand for the re-introduction of Section 28 to ban discussion of homosexual relationships in schools. Then there's the "I Can't Believe This Is Choice" call for the introduction of compulsory readings from the Bible in all Scottish state schools, with mandatory religious education in Christianity. This presumably involves brave new alternative universe where the ideas of "parental choice" and "mandatory religious education" don't directly contradict each other.

Timed nicely to coincide with new research compounding the reality that abstinence education doesn't work, the Scottish Christian Party has also committed to "fight[ing] for the promotion in school of chastity before marriage, and faithfulness in marriage, as the safest sexual practice, as and when sex education is taught." No mention of any other safe-sex practices, you'll note.

Almost chokingly hypocritical is the dual demand for the criminalisation of discrimination on religious grounds (it's currently a civil offence) and for the Sexual Orientation Regulations to be revoked. So that's stronger legal protection for the religious, and none at all for gay people - who, we discover, God loves even though their lives are ungodly, "catastrophic" and comparable to those of drug addicts and alcoholics. And the deadly, deadly homos love you, too.

Yet bizarrely, and quite brilliantly, the Scottish Christian Party also believes that civil partnership law is:

inequitable, partial, and thus unfair.  The Scottish Christian Party will seek to widen the scope of the Civil Partnership to include all people who have committed to live together as a single household.

Dude, you're like totally undermining the institution of marriage.

it would depend on the meaning of the word "respect"

The Scotsman on Sunday is trailing a "debate" feature with Cardinal Keith O'Brien, the fun-loving head of the fun-loving Catholic Church in Scotland. Send your questions to onthespot@scotlandonsunday.com ahead of April 22nd: maybe he can explain why treating gay people "with respect" is the same thing as lobbying against the right of gay people to have the same rights as the religious.

the sound of silence

It's nice (if weird) to come back from a few days of enforced non-posting to find my daily traffic stats have climbed slightly in my absence. You must really like it when I just shut up, dammit.

abstinence-only education doesn't work

Abstinence-only education doesn't work. It doesn't work at all.

A survey of more than 2,000 teenagers carried out by a research company on behalf of Congress found that the half of the sample given abstinence-only education displayed exactly the same predilection for sex as those who had received conventional sex education in which contraception was discussed.

Because abstinence-only education doesn't work.

In the Mathematica survey, which was released by sex education activists after the health department sat on it, the mean age at which the control group, that had been taught about contraception, lost their virginity was 14.9 years. That seems strikingly low, until you look at the mean age of first sexual experience for the abstinence control group - 14.9 years.

In the context of findings like this, health workers and statisticians conclude that it is far better that children have safe sex, with knowledge of and access to contraception, than that they are preached a message of abstinence only to ignore it.

The only thing that abstinence-only education does for young people is to leave them ignorant about safe sex - and therefore at risk from STIs and unwanted pregnancies. To most people, this would sound like a bad thing.

However, there's a vocal minority of social and religious conservatives who still prefer abstinence-only education because it means that sex remains as dangerous and consequential as possible: in short, unwanted pregnancies, HIV and cervical cancer are kinda good because god really hates people who have sex outside of marriage or before the age of 16; they are the just (if indirect) punishment of a nebulous deity.

Sure, it might sound crazy but it's worth saying out loud before taking advice from the people who hold those kind of opinions, because it's stupid to trust them when it comes to public health for the same reason it's stupid to trust flat-earthers when it comes to map-making.

"miracle festival" : total bollocks

I  have a "no mercy" policy for people who use the comment section to advertise. Anyone hoping to get me to write nice things about "A Miracle Festival with the Master Teacher of A Course in Miracles" has particularly bad luck.

I'll start by letting the organisers speak for themselves:

QUANTUM MINDFULNESS
IS IT POSSIBLE? INDEED IT IS!

Is it possible to change your mind so completely about yourself and the Universe you seem to inhabit so as to alter in a quantum instant the entirety of your apparent space time location? The answer is Yes! How? Through the Mind Training of A Course In Miracles.

Oh, goody.

QUANTUM MINDFULNESS
IS IT BOLLOCKS? INDEED IT IS!

It's juvenile, I know, but also entirely accurate.

At last, a long awaited systematic way for you to enter a new more rapidly alternating continuum of time that is all around us.

Yes, those non-systematic methods for entering alternating continuums of time were totally fucking useless. FSM be praised for supplying us with systematised nonsense.

But it's not just entertaining babble: there's a rather more deluded and unpleasant streak.

No one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. No one suffers pain except his choice elects this state for him. No one can grieve nor fear nor think him sick unless these are the outcomes that he wants. And no one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose.

That's right. People who suffer or die in car crashes, of cancer or from famine just brought it on themselves. Stupid, stupid land-mine, murder and rape victims: if only you'd had more strength of will.

"Quantum mindfulness" seems to be the majestic fraud of "The Secret" but Now With Extra Jesus. For anyone unfamiliar with The Secret, see Sceptico's pair of posts here and here which crunch the claim to a "law of attraction" - in other words, you become or receive the thing you think about most often. The "Course in Miracles" goes one step further in adding an abitrary layer of religion ("Heal with the power of Christ Mind through direct application of the divine instructions of Jesus Christ..").

Quite why Jesus needs to get involved if you're using the power of your own mind to offset pain, fear, grief and death and create a utopia of your own choosing. Jesus even starts to sound a little redundant if you've saved your own sins, healed the sick and imagined into reality yourself an electric-ice orgy palace of supreme lovin' before breakfast.

I do not endorse or recommend this event.

horrified by the prospect of protecting his daughter from cancer

Another father who would apparently prefer his daughter to have cancer rather than to have sex:

So if medical advancement has brought us a way of preventing this cancer taking hold, who wouldn’t jump at the chance for their daughter to have the vaccine, provided there is scientific proof that it is safe?

Well, Paul Dean — Freya’s father — for starters. When his wife broke the news that she wanted Freya to be one of the first in line, he was horrified.

Why? Well, more for sociological reasons than medical ones.

And we all know that cancer pays careful attention to nonsensical social taboos before deciding in which body to replicate. What? It doesn't at all?

Paul, 41, initially believed that protecting Freya against a sexually transmitted disease — when she has only the loosest concept of what sex actually is — was simply irresponsible.

He worried that by sending the message that she was ‘safe’, at least when it came to cervical cancer, he was somehow giving her the green light to experiment sexually: while this jab will not stop a young girl getting pregnant, it may make her feel somehow immunised against the perils that go with adolescent sex.

How utterly, utterly fucking stupid. Protecting your daughter from a disease that could kill her is irresponsible?

For any other concerned fuckwits, one of the ways to stop your daughter from mistakenly thinking that the HPV vaccine protects her from all diseases would be to TALK TO HER.

Oh, and the muddled claim that "[t]here is a theory that the younger they can have it, the more efficacious it is" misses the chance to explain the point of vaccinating pre-teens - which is that the vaccine is only effective if administered before the person gets the viruses which the vaccine protects against.

As the viruses which cause the majority of cervical cancers are sexually transmitted, this means you have to give it before sexual activity.

Long-term readers will recognise that this is a return to the Mail's original position - having first gone from repeating the unfounded claims of social conservatives that the vaccine will encourage sex to deciding that that vaccine was actually better than dying of cancer after all, and that it was an outrage that it wasn't free on the NHS and that parents had to go private to protect their daughters.

public sector blogging

The Guardian carries a mini round-up of public sector blogging - nurses, parents of patients, doctors, council workers, oh my. Worth reading, though my favourite excerpt is from mentalnurse.org.uk:

Let's face it, getting yourself sectioned and locked up on a psychiatric ward is a pretty unpleasant experience. Bad food can only compound the misery. It also doesn't help if you're trying to encourage, say, a deeply depressed person or someone with anorexia that they really need to get some food inside them.

Nurse: "Go on, eat some food. It'll make you feel better."

Patient: "Really? Would eating this make you feel better?"

Nurse: "Er, no. Actually it makes me feel rather ill."

Daily Mail contradicts self twice in under 100 words

I find it helps when a headline isn't completely, utterly and absolutely contradicted by the story underneath it. And then if the story doesn't then contradict itself in the first paragraph.The headline:

Classroom thugs told: Disrupt school and win an iPod!

The story:

School tearaways are to be offered mountain bikes and iPods in return for good behaviour.

If they're being rewarded for good behaviour, then that's the opposite of what the headline suggests. But wait, there's more. The very next paragraph reads:

In a government campaign against soaring indiscipline, teachers are being told to reward disruptive pupils with prizes and privileges.

What? So is it a reward for good behaviour, or disruptive behaviour? Does this story make any sense at all?

The story seems to be about - and I use the word "seems" in a Hamlety kind of way - the fear of unfairly rewarding formerly disruptive students, while not rewarding students who were well behaved to start with. The Mail seems to think that it's improvement in behaviour that will bring rewards, rather than good behaviour in itself.

Excepting, of course, that's not what is being proposed, not even slightly.

*sigh*

everyone hates gordon

The Times provides two lovely stories about Gordon Brown, either of which could have run for a few days if the press weren't obsessing over the ban on Armed Forces personnel accepting money for interviews. The first fits quite nicely into the control-freakery meme that's been popular for the last few weeks:

Gordon Brown rejected questions on mundane matters such as the Treasury staff handbook being made public; whether he had visited any defence establishments; sums spent entertaining guests; numbers of staff working on the Olympics; and when his council of economic advisers last met.

He even refused to state whether he personally uses e-mail — and whether he had been asked by the Leader of the House to give clearer responses to parliamentary questions.

While there's a hint of fishing expedition about the questions, that's just tough. If you're an elected official, then the demand for transparency and accountability is part of your job.

The second story is much more "outrage" friendly:

Gordon Brown published a scrounger's charter while at university, offering students tips on how to freeload and claim benefits. His 200-page survival guide, Alternative Edinburgh, openly encouraged students to "use and abuse" the Welfare State.

"If you're British and can give an address, free money is available from social security, basic £5.80 per week," he wrote.

Whoops. The Mail provides more elaborate quotes:

"For the experienced parasite the Edinburgh Festival is a gift."

He's not wrong. It's getting hard to open any newspaper without finding a story that gently but firmly puts the boot into Gordon.

Tee hee.

tufty the squirrel vs. william wordsworth (lonely cloud mix)

A rap version of I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud, sung by a squirrel:

Must have been 10,000 I saw in my retina
No more than a glance then I register they're beautiful etcetera
I never knew in advance but they were tossing up their heads like a pogo dance

Not quite sure it's going to bring in the tourists, though.

busy busy busier

Posting is probably going to be a little light this week, as I'm chasing various deadlines and traveling quite a bit for work.

For real-world acquaintances, I'm in Cardiff for a few nights at the end of this week and back in Edinburgh by Saturday night, and then in London on the following weekend. Drinky?

danger: single women

The Mail's apparently alarming news that "one in three women is still single at the age of 35" manages to leave out one fairly important detail. Leaving aside the idea that there's anything necessarily dire about the prospects of "a majority of women unmarried in their mid-thirties," it's worth remembering that the majority of women are getting married to single men.

Yet somehow it's only worrying that there are so many unmarried women hanging about - even though the print edition of the story admits "fewer than a third of men marry by 30 and only 44 per cent of women." While there's an attempt to explain the decline of marriage through various economic factors (including the rise of women in work, gasp), the klaxon of alarm is primarily reserved for singleton women.

Finally, the argument from the think-tank Civitas that the increase in the average marriage age indicates that there is "a huge and growing gap between what people want in their lives and what they are getting" conveniently ignores that idea that getting married later in life (or not getting married at all) is actually what many people want, and not just something they've been forced into.

Re: the objectification of women

I see we've moved past headless torso shots in favour of dismembered breasts:


You'll probably need to click to see the larger image..

charles moore: moist and filling

Here's Charles Moore in The Telegraph demonstrating that the Easter message is apparently "It's okay to lie through your teeth."

First, there's a rather curious defence of religious belief:

When you hear or read people like Richard Dawkins, you have to admit the force of many of their arguments. Religious people do often say extraordinarily indefensible things about their faith, and can be astonishingly evasive or confused. Very few of us (certainly not I) can competently maintain the standard arguments for the existence of God against a determined onslaught.

An observation supported by the talk Moore attended which triggered this screed - a debate on the motion "We'd be better off without religion":

[A]t the beginning of the evening, there were 826 votes for the motion, 681 against, and 364 don't knows. At the end, there were 1,205 for, 778 against and 103 don't knows.

Having established that atheists and assorted secularists can make a very persuasive case, Moore switches to arguing that atheists should not be trusted because they are so persuasive. Their persuasive arguments are a dire and alarming demonstration of thinking:

And yet the Dawkinses and Graylings, the Hitchenses and the Parrises, seem somehow to be missing the point. What they say is dry and unnourishing. I think one reason for this lies in their underlying conception of what it is to be human - they think that the highest quality is to be clever.

Not that any of them have made this claim, or indeed that you need have any kind of stellar IQ to be an atheist. Moore seems to be confusingthe idea of being clever and merely being rational. Still, if what they say is "dry and unnourishing" why is it so very, very convincing? And, in contrast, what about religious teachings are supposed to be, uhm, "moist and filling," even though those who make them are often "evasive or confused"?

Moore seems tries his hand at the claim that only religious people have access to the full range of human experience - leaving secularists as emotionless Daleks:

It therefore matters not only how we reason, but how we feel, how we act towards others, how we speak, sing, dance, laugh, cry, eat and wash, how we die, how we pray and how we love.

That secular people are able to do all of the things on that list (with the exclusion of prayer to no detectable detriment) seems to have escaped Charles Moore. Singing, dancing, laughing, eating and yes, washing, are all available to the godless; there's no part of atheism which discourages any of the above. There have and continue to be religions which try to stop you from doing some of those things, though.

Having invented his straw-man - the secularist who prides high IQs above everything else, an argument which doesn't actually deal with any of the substance of a secular, humanist philosopy - Moore moves to accuse secularist of hating ordinary people:

And what sort of a belief system is it that asserts the superiority of Richard Dawkins, Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, over the woman who toils in paddy fields, or the child who begs in the dirt, or the prisoner in his chains?

Again, a total and dishonest fabrication. Never heard the secular argument that non-believers are better than children who beg in the dirt? No? Not suprising given that it doesn't exist.

Wait, there's time for one more smear:

The Crucifixion and the Resurrection are just as distasteful for Richard Dawkins as for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, because they subvert the idea that man is at his greatest when he is most strong, masterful and clever.

No. Just plain not true. The Islamic faith teaches that the Jesus - who is revered as a prophet - was not crucified, but replaced by another: a religious narrative that has nothing to with Moore's wholly fabricated schtick about the cold superiority of the rational mind.

pundit knows best

Amateur military strategist and newspaper pundit Richard Littlejohn, April 6th:

They looked like a Vauxhall Conference football team being led out at Wembley by Nora Batty before the final of the Leyland DAF trophy.

Fourteen men kitted out in ill-fitting suits from the local branch of John Collier, John Collier, the window to watch, and a dumpy bird in a Les Dawson headscarf. [...]

The international image of Britain as Churchillian bulldog has for ever been replaced by this bunch of hapless stooges grinning and waving for the cameras like contestants cosying up to Leslie Crowther in the final frames of The Price Is Right. [...]

The game's up. Look, I don't blame the unfortunate human ingredients in this pawn cocktail. They were only obeying orders - which, ludicrously, amount to 'surrender first and apologise later'.

The rules of engagement these days have been rinsed in so much fabric softener that I'm astonished our troops are even allowed to carry weapons any more.

Captain Chris Air, April 6th:

Let me be absolutely clear, from the outset it was very apparent that fighting back was simply not an option. Had we chosen to do so then many of us would not be standing here today. Of that I have no doubts.

Such a shame they didn't open fire (dying in the process and possibly triggering a war with Iran) in the hopes of sustaining Littlejohn's erection.

nursery study: cumulative length of child-care more significant than "full-time" hours

Some details plucked out the head-line grabbing DfES study that has been routinely summarised as finding that "children who go to nursery full-time 'become antisocial'."

As you've no doubt come to expect, it's not quite as simple as "full-time nursery bad." So, here we go:

- the length of day (the number of hours children attended) did not appear to be detrimental: there were no significant differences between children who attended for long periods each day and those who attended for shorter days in terms of co-operative behaviour, peer sociability, anti-social behaviour or worried/upset behaviour.

- duration of child-care had a statistically significant effect: the longer a child had been attending their Neighbourhood Nursery, the more likely they were to display anti-social behaviours.

- the age at which children started did not have an impact (positive or negative) on their behaviour.

- it is not the age at which children start at their centres which is important, but the cumulative number of months they attend, and the amount of time they spend in centre-based provision each week.

So it's not merely a simple issue of "full-time" nursery provision - but rather the effect of full or part time hours over a long period of time.

My favourite un-reported finding is that attending centres with a high proportion of working families had a positive impact on children from non-working families in terms of both redudcing anti-social behaviour and encouraging co-operative behaviour. The report even suggests that the positive effect of working families might form the basis for "encouraging parents to return to work."

I can't possibly imagine why that detail has been overlooked. Could it be that it doesn't sit well with the favoured media narrative - which is that working mothers are harming their children?

your friendly blogging sub-editor

Unless the man prosecuted for infecting his past lovers with HIV had been using some rather unusual ingredients in his kitchen, he is not the "HIV chef."

Yes, The Times, I'm looking at you.

it's just friday

A Professor of Historical Theology writes in The Telegraph:

Religion, Professor Grayling rightly observes, is resurgent, and has become "more assertive, more vocal" in the public domain.

and

Grayling's concerns are triggered in part by the reversal of the trend towards secularism in Britain.

While there is indeed a loud and assertive religious minority - almost exclusively on the conservative/evangelical/right wing - noise should not be mistaken for support, particularly not in the UK.

Despite the size of the US religious right, the claim of a wider resurgence of religion or a reversal of the trend towards secularism at home is highly suspect (and offered without evidence) when, in fact, there's plenty of evidence to show that the exact opposite is more likely.

Church attendance is down as part of along-term trend and even amongst those who identify as Christian, two-thirds of those recently polled by Christian charity Tearfund said they had not been to church in the last year, except for baptisms, weddings or funerals.

That's on top of an overall drop in the proportion of the UK who identify as Christian at all - down to 53% from almost three-quarters who had in the last census in 2001.

You might also note that marriage - the issue over which so many Christian spokesmen have been called upon to comment in the last few years - is no longer a primarily Christian event in the UK. As mentioned in previous posts, the ONS states:

Since 1992, there have been more civil marriage ceremonies in England and Wales than religious ceremonies. In 2005, 65 per cent of marriages were solemnised by civil ceremonies.

The flawed claim of a religious resurgence aside, there's the odd request that secularists consider the "true meaning of the crucifixion," which is apparently that

The crucifixion of Jesus thus points to a God who does not condone violence in his name, but works to transfigure suffering and pain. The very idea of a "suicide bomber driven by religious zeal" acting in the name of Jesus of Nazareth seems utterly incongruous in the light of Good Friday.

Christian groups down the ages have found it easy to collude with the world's use of violence to advance power and consolidate influence. They need to be challenged, and reminded that the Jesus whom they seek to serve demanded that an over-enthusiastic follower put down his sword, rather than use it in his defence.

So the true Easter message is a reminder for Christian churches to reform and shape up?

And how is this a defence of religion over secularism?

charlatan - next question?

"Psychic or Charlatan?" asks the Daily Mail, helpfully adding:

She was ‘discovered’ by the same person who brought us the formidable Gillian McKeith..

No further questions, m'lud.

busy busy busy

Apologies for an absence of posts today: new job, new design commission and travel plans to London for a production meeting. Something later tonight, I think.

one of those coincidence things

Eleanor Mills, one of the Times' Alpha Mummy bloggers:

Rather than giving her daughter a good model about what women are capable of, she's denying her the only thing that children really need: the sense that their mother is there for them 100 per cent, putting their own desires and ambitions on the back burner for those precious years while children are small and vulnerable.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of the Islamic Republic of Iran:

The lady is the mother of a little child! Why should such a difficult task of searching the sea be given to a mother thousands of miles from home? Why don't they pay some respect to a mother's love? Why are family values in the west about to collapse?

EDIT: dammit. Someone in the Alpha Mummy comment section beat me to the punch. Hat tip to "Tom".

ha ha

Let's start with the rage-inducing headline:

ASDA forced to withdraw 'date rape' t-shirts... designed by women

First, and before I forget, fuck that. Fuck that attitude completely. Since when do the actions of one or two women remove the right of other women to object? How in the name of all fuckery is that supposed to be hypocrital, or contradictory?

Secondly, Asda weren't "forced" to do anything; Rape Scotland complained and Asda took their own decision to withdraw the t-shirts from sale under threat of precisely nothing.

While Asda have defended the t-shirts as "just a bit of fun," the only real value of the design is something quite different: anyone who buys a "comedy" t-shirt that jokes about getting women drunk in order to sleep with them is clearly a douche of the highest order who should be denied all access to the chance to breed.

Oh, and it turns out that this is one of those things that I'm entirely happy to have no sense of humour about.

nursery education: accentuate the negative

Wow - here's a lesson in selective emphasis for the purposes of scaremongering. The headline:

Nurseries 'turning our children into yobs'

The lede:

Nurseries and daycare groups are creating "anti-social" children, a major report warns today. Researchers found that toddlers become more disruptive the longer they attend, particularly over 35 hours a week.

The research to which this story refers:

Today's report concludes: "Long hours in the nursery (more than 35 hours a week) had both positive and negative effects on children's behaviour : they were more confident and sociable, but also more antisocial, and more worried and upset."

And where does this story appear? As if it could be anywhere other than the Daily Mail.

so macho: evangelical minister targets pro-gay rights msp

The evangelical campaigner George Hargreaves is campaigning against the Green MSP Patrick Harvie in an attempt to win a seat for the Scottish Christian Party at Holyrood. Apparently, Hargreaves is planning to expose Harvie as "a secularist fundamentalist gay rights activist."

It's a little bit of a puzzling aim given that Harvie is openly bisexual and campaigning under the Green manifesto that includes the integration of state-funded religious and secular schools. Hargreaves probably doesn't actually have to do much more than give out copies of Harvie's own campaign material.

Hargreaves is mildly infamous as the composer of the songs "So Macho" and "Cruising" before living as a tax exile in the Isle of Man, finding god and then returning to Scotland to let everyone know. Hargreaves does actually have a record of putting his money where his mouth is, though seemingly not with any great degree of success.

In October of last year, he donated £50,000 to an appeal by nine firefighters from Strathclyde Fire Service after they were disciplined for refusing to leaflet a gay rights event. The appeal failed.

Hargreaves also stood at the 2004 election in the Dunfermline and West Fife seat - but lost his deposit after receiving only 411 votes (though admittedly more than UKIP's 208). He later described the outcome as "a very encouraging result." While there's something to be said for determination, a religious man might think his god was trying to tell him something.

Presumably Hargreaves believes that going up directly against an openly (and happily) non-heterosexual man will give him more fertile ground to raise a fundamentalist base; brace yourself for some ugly campaigning.

damage control over IVF coverage

After a weekend of misleading stories (discussed at the start of the week) the press office of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority has seeded a second round of coverage - this time emphasising the desire to reduce the number of IVF twins and cut the risks associated with multiple births. The Guardian and the BBC have obligingly picked up the story - though neither correct the inaccuracies of their earlier reports; there's nothing but stony silence from the Independent or Daily Mail who led the charge in the wrong direction.

Still, someone in a press office just proved they know a little about damage control.

patricia hewitt: expletive almost deleted

A quick summary:

1. The Modernising Medical Careers (MMC) reforms have been decried by the British Medical Association, with the British Medical Association's Junior Doctors Committee abandoning talks over the laughable offer of one guaranteed interview (having been promised two or more).

2. The head of MMC, Professor Alan Crockard, resigned at the weekend over the widespread problems caused by the introduction of the Medical Training Application Service.

3. Those problems include badly worded forms which do not ask pertinent questions, do not allow them to set out relevant qualifications and experience, and have no facility for attaching a CV.

4. There are 32,000 junior doctors chasing something like 18,500 specialist training posts available under the new system (and not the 22,000-23,000 indicated by the government).

5. Patricia Hewitt's response:

Ms Hewitt said she regretted the failures in implementation of the Modernising Medical Careers (MMC) reforms.

"There's been terrible anxiety caused which shouldn't have happened to junior doctors.

"The new system of MMC I think everybody supports but the actual implementation in this first year of transition was nowhere near what it should have been."

But she said she didn't accept that there were faults with the system.

6. What the steaming fuck?

listen to boris

One of those moments of Boris Johnson clarity:

"And the problem is particularly acute," I announced - and I inwardly cringed as I prepared to uncork the gaffe - "in top universities. Is that OK?" I asked them desperately. "Is it OK if we talk about top universities?"

It was not OK. A murmur of protest went around the room. There were several shouts of "no". Thankfully Mike Baker of the BBC was on hand, a man well versed in the euphemisms that might please a conference of educationists. "You could try saying 'research-intensive' universities," he suggested, "or you could try saying 'selective' universities, as opposed to 'recruiting' universities."

Why am I told to banish this kind of language? How can we possibly dispense with ideas of academic hierarchy when these concepts - first, second, third; good, better, best - are at the heart of higher education, and the whole £45bn university economy depends entirely on rank, prestige and reputation?

And how can you have rank and prestige unless you accept that there is differentiation, and differentiation must mean the use of concepts like "top". Mustn't it? Or are we really to believe that all Britain's universities are equally top in their own sweet and special way?

Anyone know who he was speaking to?

Johnson seems to be describing the collision of two judgments of value colliding here. There are indeed different kinds of universities which have different priorities which we might label differently. However, the ability to tell the difference between kinds of education doesn't mean giving up on the ability to tell the difference between qualities of education. The very fact that we have league tables for universities and schools - encourage by successive governments in the name of competition and choice - shows that we have a sense of some institutions being better at their jobs than others.

The discomfort with the phrase "top universities" arises because it draws attention to the gaping hole in the debate about higher education - that the nonsense target of 50% into university has been pressed forward without much discussion of what people will do when they get there. That some universities will offer less academic, or even non-academic programmes, is a subject that has been avoided for fear of getting caught in a debate about relative value of different kinds of learning and qualification.

But, even allowing for different kinds of learning and different roles, we're still probably going to want to know which are better than the rest in their particular field. If not, then we're going to want to have a fundamental debate about how universities are funded, and how we allocate places within them.

christian, but not so you could tell

Given that no-one will dare write the headline, I'll say it: new figures suggest that the practice of Christianity is in decline in the UK. From the BBC:

One in 10 people in the UK attends church every week and one in seven goes once a month, according to research. Christian charity Tearfund's survey of 7,000 people puts the UK among Europe's four least observant countries.  

Two-thirds of those polled had not been to church in the last year, except for baptisms, weddings or funerals - but 53% identified themselves as Christian. [...] Tearfund said 53% of people identified themselves as Christian, compared with almost three-quarters who had in the last census in 2001.

Kudos to the BBC for having comment from the National Secular Society. Something to have to hand the next time a pundit lectures us on how the UK is an overwhelmingly Christian country whose religious beliefs (including the abhorence of teh deadly deadly homo) must be respected.

new anti-rape campaign for scotland

The Scotsman reports on a drop in convictions for rape in Scotland and details funding for a new campaign to challenge attitudes towards women and consent:

Even in Los Angeles, these ads proved shocking - and now they're heading here. Driving down the boulevards of Los Angeles, a billboard comes into view depicting the bare midriff of a young woman.

Over the sexually charged image, just above the model's waist, are the words: "this is not an invitation to rape".

The hard-hitting campaign, which has been credited with driving down sexual assaults in the city, is set to be introduced in the streets of Scotland. Rape Crisis Scotland has been given funding from the Scottish Executive to develop a campaign similar to the one running in LA since the 1990s.

This sounds like a good idea (other than adding that fully dressed women who don't look like models also get raped), though quite why the Scotsman finds this advert is "shocking" is unclear. Is challenging the idea that a woman's choice of clothing is the same thing as consent really so radical? Or is it just the public confrontation of the issue of rape?

new study on drug-facilitated assault

The Guardian reports on a new study suggesting the scale of drug-faciliated sexual assault may be far greater than previously thought:

The belief that reporting rates for such [drug assisted] attacks are lower than the already poor reporting rates by victims of serious sexual assault generally undermines studies last year which concluded the media had overblown "date rape drugs".

The Forensic Science Service found that 46% of 1,014 alleged drug-facilitated sexual assaults between 2000 and 2002 were actually down to alcohol. Illicit drugs were detected in 34% of cases, mostly cannabis or cocaine. GHB, banned in 2003, was used in only two cases in the sample.

Some careful reading needed here: we're talking about proportions of alleged drug-facilitated sexual assaults - and not percentages of assault allegations overall.

It's also important to note that last year's studies - which led to a minor festival of victim blaming ("Drug rape myth exposed as study reveals binge drinking is to blame") - were based on extremely small sample groups. Unlike the study detailed by the Guardian above which examined over 1,000 cases, the Wrexham Hospital study only considered 75, and the Association of Chief Police Officers' report covered 120 cases. Straightforward comparisons of these studies - as is the case in every paper that's covered this story - is at best misleading.

Perhaps unsuprisingly, the Mail's coverage of the exact same report emphasises women's conduct (don't go out alone, don't let anyone buy you a drink) and repeats the claims of the earlier studies in extensive detail, without mentioning the comparatively tiny sample groups.

One of the ways in which the media has handled the issue of rape has been to compound a narrow and inaccurate view of rape (that allegations of rape mainly involve alcohol and strangers) with a narrow view of drug-faciliated assault. So the fact that GHB - the so called "date-rape" drug - was found in a very small number of cases was used to dismiss the entire notion of drug-facilitated assault. The speed at which portions of the press dropped the "myth" of drug-facilitated assault is comparable to the speed at which they wrote scare stories in the first instance.

"magic cure" actually science (earth also still not flat)

An international group of scientists may have discovered a means of converting blood from one type to another by using bacterial enzymes - and they've published their detailed research in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Biotechnology.

The Mail's headline? "Magic cure for blood shortages."

no, IVF still not rationed: the times goes stats mining

The Times joins the dog-pile of bad reporting:

IVF treatment could be rationed under new rules to be considered by the fertility treatment regulator.

Except it won't be, because that's not what is being proposed, or what rationing means. We also now have some quote mining to go with our stupidity:

Fertility specialists say that it will severely reduce the odds of successful conception.

How severely?

Last year's report said research had found that implanting only one fresh embryo in the first IVF cycle for women under 34 cut pregnancy rates to 38 per cent from about 75 per cent when two were implanted at the same time.

That's from page 34 of the report (pdf) - which goes on to say that the pregnancy rate for single-implantation is equivalent to or better than couples with normal fertility. The report then details two others studies where the margin between single and double implantation rates is much smaller or not statistically significant. There's also a table showing a significant gap between randomized and cohort studies, where cohort studies show a much smaller gap between success rates.

Perhaps most interestingly of all, there's comment that to compare single and double implantation is misleading because the two groups are not comparable: good prognosis women receive single embryo transplantation, poor prognosis women receive double implantation. Consequently, there's a graph comparing the increase in single egg transplantation with the overall pregnancy rate due to IVF in Sweden - which suggests that an increase in single embryo transplantation has no effect on the ability of women to conceive.

So it's curious that the Times would simply and misleadingly emphasis the study which found the drop in pregnancy rates.

Finally, remember that professor quoted in the Mail, concerned that doctors should make the judgment as to whether a woman gets one or two embryos implanted?

It has been suggested that under the revised rules, doctors should still be able to use their clinical judgment to decide if a woman should get two embryos..

Amazing. That's the last post on this subject. I almost promise.

further media inaccuracies on IVF "rationing"

The Daily Mail jumps onto the IVF "rationing" story, compounding the errors from yesterday's coverage in the liberal broadsheets:

Thousands of women could be denied the chance of becoming mothers under restrictions on IVF designed to cut the number of multiple births. Britain's fertility watchdog wants those receiving fertility treatment to be implanted with one embryo at a time instead of the current two. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority says the policy would cut the number of risky multiple births.

Again, this is not rationing in any sense of the word. So what about the Mail's critics?

Critics yesterday said the final decision should lie with the doctor in each case.

Professor Ian Craft, of the London Gynaecology and Fertility Centre, said: 'It is going to be a relatively efficient way of reducing multiple pregnancies but you'll be paying the price for it in some women who will not be able to have babies.

That the public consultation is expected to recommend that more than one embryo be used in the most difficult cases seems not to count. You'll also note that Professor Craft doesn't actually seem to disagree with the scientific rationale for limiting implantation - and concurs that it would reduce riskier multiple pregnancies

Desperate to make it sound as though cruel, unthinking management types are denying babies to childless couples, the Mail rolls out the language of entitlement - of women "robbed" of the chance to have a baby.

Yet the fact that the Mail isn't agitating for more than two embryos to be implanted - to be crammed full of embryos to further increase the chances of pregnancy - tells you that they (alongisde their colleagues at the Guardian and Independent) have ignored any medical reasoning or evidence that might guide good practice.

It certainly doesn't help that the Mail presents two, entirely contradictory and sourceless claims about the relationship between the number of embryos implanted and successful pregnancy rate:

But critics say it will cut the chance of conception by as much as three-quarters and rob many of the 30,000 women who undergo IVF treatment each year of their chance to have a baby.

and

Research shows that when at least two cycles of IVF are given to a woman under 40, the rate of successful births is almost the same whether one or two embryos are transferred.  

Finally, none of the stories - even those that mention there is a public consultation - give any indication of how those this policy might affect can get involved and make their feelings known.

Ten seconds with google reveals that the details of the policy review are here, along with contact details for the policy manager. Given that the formal consultation process will involve the views of patients,  I'd make your interest known if you are undergoing or about to undergo IVF treatment in the near future.

"rationing" and IVF treatment

The Independent and The Observer lead with stories on the plans to limit the number of embryos implanted during IVF treatment - and both manage to use the same misleading language about "rationing":

Women unable to conceive naturally will be limited to a single egg transplant under new "rationing" plans for fertility treatment.

Thousands of women may be denied the chance of having a baby because of the moves to limit to one the number of embryos implanted.

Tens of thousands of women are to have their fertility treatment rationed because of fears that a surge in the number of multiple births is putting babies' lives at risk.

To limit the number of embryos for health reasons is not the same thing as "rationing," which as anyone with a dictionary knows refers to the control of the purchase or use of an item when demand outstrips supply. It refers to the distribution of scarce supplies.

The decision to limit the number of embryos is not being taken because they are in short supply, but - as both papers manage to report - the Human Fertility and Embryology Authority (HFEA):

claims this will limit risky multiple births following a huge rise in the number of twins born because of women undergoing in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment. [...] The HFEA warns that multiple pregnancies can cause health problems in mothers such as fatal haemorrhaging during birth and cerebral palsy in the babies they are carrying.

So, as both stories actually recount, it's not "rationing" in any actual sense of the word. So why use it?

This is a entirely separate issue from that of the patchy availability of IVF across the NHS and between different NHS trusts, whose different spending priorities might be described as "rationing" - in that only a fixed number of women can receive treatment. But that's not this story, not even slightly, even though the language being used tries to suggest otherwise.