Category: Bullshit

  • Mummy duck said “Quack! Quack! Quack! Quack!” and all the MMR crap came back

    The other day, LBC broadcast a breathtaking programme where presenter Jeni Barnett used her expertise as a parent to pooh-pooh the entire medical and scientific community. MMR is dangerous. There’s no evidence for it, but it’s a scientific fact. You know the kind of thing. That first link is to the audio; there’s a transcript…

  • BadScience.net in MMR quack attack

    When Bad Science’s Ben Goldacre had the temerity to criticise an LBC radio broadcast by Jeni Barnett, lawyers sent him a nastygram. Bad Science is currently offline. As Goldacre writes: It is my view that in this extended broadcast Jeni exemplifies every single canard ever uttered by the antivaccination movement. “It’s a conspiracy by the…

  • No, the government is not forcing rock venues and clubs to install sound limiters

    This online petition is doing the rounds of music forums: It has been brought to attention that the government wish to consider it a legal requirement in the new tax year to introduce laws insisting anyone applying or re-applying for an entertainment license must have a noise control device fitted to the venue. This will…

  • Who’s behind the ban on cigarette displays?

    An interesting – and typically angry – post on Devil’s Kitchen by the Filthy Smoker takes a hard look at the new ban on cigarette displays. The extraordinary support for the Department of Health (DOH)’s recommendations can only be explained by looking at the “stakeholders” who got involved. Of the 96,000 responses, only a handful…

  • Columnists on the Shannon Matthews case: fun with selective statistics

    Suzanne Moore in the Daily Mail: Twenty-five years ago almost three-quarters of those who lived in council housing worked full-time. Now fewer than a third do. This is something that’s come up again and again in regard to this case, and it’s been used to prove that there’s a growing problem of child-abducting maniacs living…

  • “If this is the future of journalism, I don’t think CNN has anything to worry about just yet”

    Interesting post by Alan at Broadstuff, reacting to the “Twitter is the future of news!” stuff going round the internet at the moment: the bulk, the 90%, was pure cr*p, with stuff such as: – Wild surmises to gain attention – Re-tweeting mainstream media in an endless circle jerk – Mediawhores jumping on the bandwagon…

  • iPhone bug automatically emails photos of your genitals to women

    Oh yes it does. I took my husband’s i-phone and found a raunchy picture of him attached to an e-mail to a woman in his sent e-mail file (a Yahoo account). When I approached him about this (I think that he is cheating on me) he admitted that he took the picture but says that…

  • Wi-fi, mobiles still don’t eat brains

    Sense About Science has published Making Sense of Radiation for the tinfoil hat brigade and newspaper journalists to ignore. In summary it says: Speculative stories about health risks and RF radiation often go uncorrected, leaving a trail of confusion that prevents public discussion and policy from moving forward. To counter this they wanted to share…

  • Silicon Alley Insider on *that* Steve Jobs rumour

    SAI spots an uncorroborated, anonymous post that says Jobs has had a heart attack. Publishes it, causing an immediate drop in Apple share prices. O noes! Uncorroborated, anonymous bollocks turns out to be bollocks! Time for some retrospective justification: We viewed it as significant, however, both for those who care about Apple and Steve and…

  • State-sponsored punching

    Hurrah for Ealing Primary Care Trust, which has decided to liven up people’s cigarette breaks by providing people you can punch. At least, I think that’s the idea. ‘Smoking police’ will target people at betting shops, bus stops and shopping centres to shock them into giving up cigarettes… A team of 11 young people have…