Bad Reason

Fingerprints on Trial

2011-11-16T11:10:00.011Z

Science, pseudoscience, and the curious case of Shirley Mckie

Next month, a “Public Judicial Inquiry” - announced by Kenny MacAskill MSP, the Cabinet Secretary for Justice, in the Scottish Parliament on 14 March 2008 – into the case of H.M Advocate v McKie will finally report its findings. (ref)

This report (about a case which seems to have faded into media obscurity) may have profound implications for legal systems (north and south of the border if not worldwide) and potentially for (a topic very much in the news) border control.

It all began back in 1997 when, a police woman, Shirley Mckie, was arrested and charged with perjury over a (left thumb) fingerprint – identified as hers by four experts from the Scottish Criminal Records Office (SCRO) – found on a right door jamb inside a house where a police team were investigating the vicious murder of one Marion Ross in Kilmarnock, Scotland.

The authorities insisted that Shirley must have been present at the crime scene at some stage during the investigation and was now lying about it. She insisted she had never entered the house.

In the end, Shirley Mckie was acquitted of perjury (though the case did go to trial) and (in separate developments) David Asbury – the man jailed for Marion Ross’s murder, also on the basis of a disputed fingerprint[1] – was exonerated and freed from jail.

You can read Shirley Mckie’s version of events here.

Now if the four experts at the SCRO had simply admitted they had made a mistake, that would have been the end of the matter. In fact, they stuck to their guns and have been supported by a number of outside experts. Meanwhile, many more experts – including several international experts - have supported Shirley Mckie and insisted that the fingerprints in question were not hers or Marion Ross’s.

The balance of findings of various court cases and inquiries thus far has tended to support the Mckie camp, but the fact that a number of profound questions remain open and are still disputed by different experts has led to the current Public Judicial Inquiry. The evidence presented to that inquiry is available online and, probably most interestingly, this evidence includes that of fingerprint expert Peter Swann – who was originally consulted by the Mckie family but who is now very much in the opposing camp and who still insists to this day that the identifications of Shirley Mckie's and Marion Ross's prints were unequivocally correct.

I have no idea what the findings of the Judicial Inquiry will be but, whatever they are, profound questions will be raised about the use of fingerprinting.

Let me say at the outset that I know nothing (other than what I have picked up in the course of reading about this case) about the science of finger printing. I do, however, know quite a lot about scientific methodology in general.

The Professor of Logic and Scientific Method Sir Karl Popper is often quoted (and often misunderstood) both by defenders of the “scientific method” (something harder to define than many scientist admit or realize) and by defenders of all sorts of pseudo-scientific nonsense. What is less often pointed out is that many of Popper’s ideas have been found wanting, but one of his insights stands up rather well. Popper realized that one of the key things that distinguishes true science from pseudo-science is that pseudo-scientists look (by and large) only for verification of their theories. True scientists test their theories by looking for falsification.

To give a simple example: it is very easy for an astrologer to go out and find 16 (or more) people born under the sign of Capricorn who are extremely capricious (or whatever Capricorns are supposed to be). The true scientist, however, looks to see if there are any Capricorns who are un-capricious. The finding of just one such person falsifies the astrologer’s claim – regardless of how many people the astrologer has lined up in support of his claim.

Of course claims like this are more often expressed in probabilistic terms: “Capricorns are more likely to be capricious”. The same basic principles apply however. The true scientist starts counting un-capricious Capricorns and capricious non-Capricorns and performs a statistical analysis. The astrologer simply goes on saying: “look at all these people who are Capricorns and who are extremely capricious”.

So what has all this got to do with finger printing? At the time of the original events, the website of the SCRO used to boast that “in order to comply with the existing standard in Scotland” they insisted on identifying sixteen characteristics, in sequence and agreement, before concluding that a match had been found (unfortunately I have no cache of this site but I assume that the exact wording will be available somewhere in the inquiry evidence).

I should be interested to know how widely this “standard” is (or was) used in the world at large – my understanding is that the former SCRO (now, I understand, part of the Scottish Police Services Authority Forensic Service) now use a “non-numeric” standard.

The potential fallacy implicit in the “sixteen points in agreement” approach (to anyone who has read Popper) is plain to see. Let us assume (as fingerprint scientist claim) that every fingerprint in the world really is unique (an un-testable hypothesis, but one that there are good reasons for accepting). It does not follow at all from this that every fingerprint in the world is unique with respect to sixteen (or however many) carefully selected characteristics. After all, I am pretty confident that (just considering the topology) I could find at least sixteen “points of agreement” between the London and Paris underground maps if I set my mind to it.

No matter how many points of agreement there are between two fingerprints – 16, 45, or 145 – logically speaking, one single point of disagreement clinches the matter: the two prints are not the same.

Of course, in the real world, things are never quite so clear cut. Points of agreement and disagreement will be a matter of judgment by experts - often working with less than perfect images – and several points of disagreement may have to be found to really clinch the matter. But the basic principle holds: Any true scientist comparing finger prints will look not just for points that confirm his hypothesis that two prints are the same, but for any points that falsify that hypothesis.

So does this mean that fingerprinting is or was or often is a pseudoscience? I am really not qualified to say – though I can think of research programmes that could clinch the matter and I shall certainly read the coming report with a great deal of interest.

Two alternative conclusions seem hard to avoid however:

either

1) UK fingerprinting was (and possibly still is) riddled with incompetent and/or dishonest and/or deluded “experts”.

or

2) Fingerprinting really is not a true science and different “experts” will honestly reach different judgments when presented with the same evidence.

Again, I have no idea which of these conclusions is correct (perhaps a bit of both?) but I would find either of them profoundly disconcerting.

[1] In this case, the print (on a tin in David Asbury's possession) was identified - by the SCRO and later by Peter Swann - as belonging to the murder victim Marion Ross.

POSTSCRIPT

The report has been published:
summary
full report

The Chairman, Sir Anthony Campbell, would seem to have come down very firmly in support of suggestion "2" above: "Fingerprinting really is not a true science and different 'experts' will honestly reach different judgments when presented with the same evidence."

Why there is no simple relationship between immigration and the rate of unemployment

2011-10-16T09:52:00.006+01:00

Background to this post

This post arises from an ongoing Twitter conversation with a rather unpleasant tweeter who was trolling @DAaronovitch on the subject of immigrants causing unemployment and who seems to have shifted his attentions to me. I’m not sure this particular individual is amenable to rational persuasion – his tweets are sprinkled with insults – but the position he seems to hold – that jobs in a particular country are a bit like spaces in a car park – is common enough, and I think is worth challenging in the hope that some people may revise their opinions.

Full Employment

First of all a definition: "full employment" does not, as some people assume, mean that everyone has a job. This terminology is used to describe a state of affairs where the number of vacancies is on a par with the number of unemployed. Of course neither the number of unemployed nor the number of vacancies are things that can be measured particularly accurately, but it was pretty clear that during the Thatcher years - when we had about three million officially unemployed and about a hundred thousand official vacancies - that we did not have full employment. During the 1960s and again for a time in the 1990s we did.

So why do we still have any unemployment during periods of full employment?

Well there are essentially two forces at work here: "frictional" unemployment and "structural" unemployment.

Frictional unemployment occurs simply because the world of work is fluid and dynamic. Jobs are being destroyed and created all the time and people leave jobs and begin new ones. At any one moment in a country of sixty million or so, there are, at any one moment, certain to be significant numbers of people "between jobs" - even if everyone concerned is destined to begin a new job in the near future.

Structural unemployment is a more serious problem. This occurs when vacancies require skills that are in short supply or workers who are in short supply in the area of the country where they are needed. Thus, even during full employment, you may have (say) lots of unemployed bricklayers in the North alongside a shortage of hair stylists in the South.

What can we do about structural and frictional unemployment?

Well frictional unemployment is not necessarily such a bad thing. It provides a pool of workers who can be recruited quickly and contributes to a certain degree of fluidity and flexibility in the labour market, but, to the extent it is a problem, efficient dissemination of information is the key. Structural unemployment can be addressed - though not always successfully - by retraining and help in relocating. Such measures cannot, however, address the underlying problem during periods of less than full employment - a point that often seems lost on politicians and journalists:

Fallacy #1: The problem of unemployment can be solved by education or training

During the abovementioned Thatcher years I remember regularly shouting abuse at my wireless set as commentators repeatedly advanced the argument that, in a situation where there were about three million officially unemployed and a hundred thousand official vacancies, those with the best qualifications and the best interview skills were the most likely to get any jobs that were going (that bit’s true so far) therefore (this is where the reasoning went wrong) all we had to do was train everyone to be good at interviews and to raise educational standards and everyone would get a job. The fallacy behind this argument is so obvious that there does not seem to be any need to point it out, but I still hear versions of it repeated even to this day.

So why don't we always have full employment?

The key fact here is that employees, as well as being suppliers of labour, are consumers of goods and services. Ignoring the effect of imports and exports (or, alternatively, assuming that there is an equal balance of imports and exports) if the demand for goods and services from the population as a whole is roughly equal to the ability of the entire workforce to produce those goods and services we will have full employment; if the demand for goods and services from the population as a whole is greater than the ability of the entire workforce to produce those goods and services we will have an overall shortage of labour; and if the demand for goods and services from the population as a whole is lower than the ability of the entire workforce to produce those goods and services we will have net unemployment - ie unemployment that would still be there even if we could fill every vacancy.

So why don’t we always have enough demand for labour

This is the point where those of different political persuasions tend to part company. It could be argued (and indeed I should argue) that high unemployment was a deliberate policy for a while under Margaret Thatcher since this policy tipped the balance of power against working people and (especially) their trade unions. But let’s assume most governments of whatever political persuasion will usually seek to maximize employment. Left wingers tend to argue that the problem is that pay is too low. “Increase pay” they argue “and demand for labour will increase”. Right wingers tend to argue that the problem is that pay is too high. “Decrease pay, and thus the cost of labour,” they argue “and demand for labour will increase”.

I don’t wish to enter into that debate here, but given what has been said thus far, you can see where both sides are “coming from”.

But what about immigration?

We need to start using some figures now, but I’m going to make up some nice round numbers – it’s the principle I want to get across, not the real UK numbers. What I present here is a series of thought experiments:

Let’s assume there’s a country, not unlike the UK, with 60 million in habitants and a workforce (ie all the people in work plus all the people seeking work) of 20 million.

Immigration to a country with full employment and no unemployment and no vacancies

If we assume that all 20 million of the workforce are in paid employment, we can easily calculate that each inhabitant of this country generates an average demand (to produce the goods and services he/she consumes) of 20m/60m = ⅓ of a worker.

Or, to put it the other way around, each worker produces (on average) goods and services for 60m/20m = 3 consumers.

Now let’s assume that a million people extra people arrive from a country (not unlike, say Poland) and let us further assume (for the moment) that those people have similar profile of demand for goods and services as the “indigenous” population and a similar profile of working ability – ie a third of them are of working age and intend to seek work in the UK; the rest are children or other dependents.

What would happen?

The population of our imaginary country would increase to 61 million. These 61 million people would require the services of 20 and ⅓ million workers. The demand for labour would therefore increase to 20 and ⅓ million and ⅓ million extra jobs would be created to supply the new demand. This would soak up the ⅓ million immigrants who were looking for work and there would be once again full employment and 0% unemployment.

Old population:	60000000
New population:	61000000
Workforce required to supply new level of demand from increased population:	20333333
Old workforce:	20000000
New workforce:	20333333
Old total in work:	20000000
New total in work:	20333333
Old total unemployed:	0
New total unemployed:	0
Old unemployment rate:	0%
New unemployment rate:	0%

Immigration to a country with unemployment and no vacancies

So let’s now consider what happens if we don’t have 100% on the workforce employed. Let’s assume that 18 million of the workforce are in paid employment and 2 million (ie 10%) are unemployed.
Again we can calculate that each inhabitant of this country generates an average demand for 18m/60m = 0.3 of a worker or that each worker is produces (on average) goods and services for 60m/18m = 3 and ⅓ consumers.

Now again let’s assume that a million extra people arrive with a similar profile of demand for goods and services and jobs. The Population of our imaginary country will increase to 61 million. These 61 million people will require the services of 18.3 million workers.
Unfortunately, since 20333333 workers are now chasing 18300000 million jobs, there will not be quite enough jobs created this time round to soak up all the new immigrant workers. Unemployment will rise (in absolute terms) by 33333, the unemployment rate will, however, remain at 100x2033333/20333333 = 10% - just as it was before the immigrants arrived.

Old population:	60000000
New population:	61000000
Workforce required to supply new level of demand from increased population:	18300000
Old workforce:	20000000
New workforce:	20333333
Old total in work:	18000000
New total in work:	18300000
Old total unemployed:	2000000
New total unemployed:	2033333
Old unemployment rate:	10%
New unemployment rate:	10%

Immigration to a country with unemployment and no vacancies where the demand profile of the immigrants does not match the demand profile of the host country

A reasonable objection to the thought experiments presented so far would be to point out that the demand for goods and services among the new immigrants may be lower than that in the host community (the new immigrants may, for example, save more or send money back home) and the demand for jobs among the new immigrants may be higher than that in the host community (the new immigrants may, for example, have a significantly higher proportion of people of working age).

So what happens to the figures when we consider such factors?

Again for simplicity, let’s consider what happens if a typical immigrant consumes only half what a typical non-migrant consumes and is twice as likely to be looking for work (and all other assumptions remain the same as in the previous example).

Old population:	60000000
New population:	61000000
Workforce required to supply new level of demand from increased population:	18150000
Old workforce:	20000000
New workforce:	20666666
Old total in work:	18000000
New total in work:	18150000
Old total unemployed:	2000000
New total unemployed:	2516666
Old unemployment rate:	10%
New unemployment rate:	12%

So in this highly improbable scenario (in which the demand for goods and services halves in a population where twice as many are seeking jobs) there is a slight increase in the rate of unemployment of 2%. If you think this sounds high, then you need to consider that during periods of economic crisis, the rate of unemployment may increase 2 or even 3 fold. But we are also leaving a number of factors out of the picture:

Firstly (partially lifting my self-imposed ban on considering imports and exports) money sent abroad is likely to result in increased demand for imports from the county to which the money is sent and some of that demand is likely to be filled by the country that has received the immigrants.

Moreover, if such monies are held in host country savings accounts pending (or instead of) being repatriated, then the host country banks will have more money to lend to host country businesses and this again will lead to the economy growing more quickly and more jobs and more demand being created as a result.

One possible reason for lower demand for goods and services which has not been considered is the fact that immigrants tend to be paid less for their work and therefore have lower incomes. This fact is, however, balanced by the fact that such workers are cheaper to employ and jobs are more likely to be created for cheaper workers. (Someone with a chip in their bath enamel may call in a plumber to replace the bath if he or she can get a plumber to do this for a reasonable price. If the price of a plumber is prohibitively high, the potential customer may just touch up the blemish with gloss paint and leave his/her money earning interest in the bank.)

All these considerations are likely to mitigate (potentially to a considerable extent) the 2% rate increase suggested by this thought experiment. But a far more important factor that needs to be considered here is the fact (excluded thus far) that, whether we have full employment or high rates of unemployment, there are always significant numbers of vacancies in the economy – for the reasons described above.

Immigration to a country with unemployment and vacancies where the profile of the immigrants does not match the profile of the host country

So bringing in progressively more features into this imaginary example (and thereby making it progressively more realistic but also more complicated) let’s now assume that there are - despite the 2 million unemployed – 1 million vacancies. Let’s ignore frictional unemployment and assume that this is all due to structural unemployment – shortages of the right skills at the right prices in the right places.

Migrants tend to travel to other countries looking for work precisely because they think they have skills to offer, that there will be a call for, in those destination countries. They will also (almost by definition) be prepared to travel to places where labour is required. Given what has been said about structural unemployment we only need to assume that the new immigrants (with their highly improbable demand profile) take up 450000 of the one million existing vacancies which the host population have failed to fill, and the overall unemployment rate will remain unchanged.

Old population:	60000000
New population:	61000000
Workforce required to supply new level of demand from increased population:	18150000
Old workforce:	20000000
New workforce:	20666666
Old total in work:	18000000
New total in work:	18600000
Old total unemployed:	2000000
New total unemployed:	2066666
Old vacancies	1000000
New vacancies	550000
Old unemployment rate:	10%
New unemployment rate:	10%

Conclusions

Of course none of these thought experiments prove anything for certain. It is, for example, logically possible that immigrants always burn 80% of the money they earn, or always so demoralize the host community that everyone else suddenly halves their consumption rates.
There are also more plausible things we’ve left out of the thought experiments - such as birth and death rates amongst the host community and the new immigrants and the timescales over which immigrants arrive and leave and over which jobs are created and destroyed. There is the fact that changes in productivity may allow an economy to produce more (or indeed less) per worker in response to changes in demand - though, again perhaps counter intuitively, there is no simple relationship between productivity and unemployment either. We might also wish to explore a greater range of hypothetical figures.

We have seen that there are highly contrived and improbable sets of circumstances that could (in principle) lead to small increases in unemployment rates following immigration but, in general (as I think the above thought experiments convincingly demonstrate), there is no simple relationship between changes in population size and changes in the rate of unemployment and many people's intuitions here are highly misleading. After all, if there were such a relationship there would be a consistent correlation between population growth/decline and employment rates around the world. We could have never have had full employment during the baby boomer years here in the UK, and Germany would always have higher unemployment rates than (say) Italy.

Clearly the solution to world poverty is not for all the poor people to move to the rich countries. Clearly a population (whether arrived at through high birth-rates or through migration) can be too large for the resources (and ultimately the land mass) of a particular country to support. There are all kinds of issues to do with migration that people might have views on. (I certainly have views: I was an immigrant to another country and am married to an immigrant to this country.) But the notion that the influx of immigrants to a country inevitably causes concomitant rises in unemployment rates is economic illiteracy.

What is a Gene?

2011-09-09T17:33:00.004+01:00

Alongside their usual “UNICORNS CAUSE CANCER” style headlines, the tabloid press are also quite fond of “BOFFINS DISCOVER THE GENE FOR BELIEVING IN UNICORNS” style headlines. I think it kind of goes without saying that most of those who write such headlines have only the vaguest idea of what a gene is. To be fair, the more we discover, the vaguer the scientific notion of what a gene is has become, but the basics are very well established.

So what is a gene?

There are all sorts of useful analogies, similes, and metaphors we can use here. I think my favourite is the story of the pilgrim who asked for an audience with the Dalai Lama.

He was told he must first spend five years in contemplation. After the five years, he was ushered into the Dalai Lama's presence, who said, 'Well, my son, what do you wish to know?' So the pilgrim said, 'I wish to know the meaning of life, father.'

And the Dalai Lama smiled and said, 'Well my son, life is like a beanstalk, isn't it?'

“In Held 'twas In I” by Procol Harum

But I’m going to try here to describe what a gene (the real secret of life) really is instead of what it is a bit like.

Now we’ve all heard of the “chromosome”. Say this word to most people (and indeed Google images) and it probably conjures up an image like this:

Now there’s a good reason why the word “chromosome” conjures up an image like this. Basically, it’s when chromosomes look like this that we can see them under normal microscopes. But chromosomes only look like this (all bunched up and double) when they are getting ready to divide. Most of the time, and in most organisms, chromosomes look nothing like this.

Most people (even journalists) who’ve heard of chromosomes have also heard of “DNA” and are aware that it comes in the form of a double helix:

This is basically what you are looking at (ignoring all sorts of caveats that we can sweep under the lab bench for now) when you look at a length of chromosome (or at one of the strands of the chromosome in the doubled up chromosome in the chromosome picture).

So there you have it, chromosomes are (caveats aside) basically long strands of DNA.

But we haven’t mentioned “genes” yet I hear you cry.

Well a gene is a short(ish) bit of chromosome (or DNA strand if you prefer). Now (returning to analogies) “genes” are often compared here to beads on a string. But, since there isn’t really any “string” (just molecules and links between them) popper beads maybe provide a better analogy …. except that there aren’t really any beads either.

Let’s look at the DNA molecule in more detail:

DNA is made from Nucleotides – which is what the “N” stands for in “DNA”. There are just four different nucleotides involved Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine, and Thymine - which are often denoted by their initial letters: A, C, G and T.

If we un-twist the DNA and look at a short bit of it, it looks a bit like this:

But that’s already a bit complicated, so let’s simplify things still further:

(For any pedants reading, each box here represents a nucleotide together with a phosphate deoxyribose; but let's keep things simple.)

Now the more astute among you will have noticed that these two strands are complementary – the sequence of Gs, Cs,As and Ts in the strand at the bottom can be inferred from the sequence of Gs, Cs,As and Ts in the strand at the top (and vice versa).

As this implies, we only really need one strand and, indeed, we are only really interested in one stand today: the” sense” strand. The complementary strand is “anti-sense” and we can ignore it until we come to DNA duplication – which we’re not going to come to in this post.

Going back to analogies again for a second, it’s a bit like every time Guardian journalist Ben Goldacre (@BenGoldacre / http://www.badscience.net) writes a sensible sentence in his blog, Daily Mail journalist Melanie Phillips (@MelanieLatest / http://melaniephillips.com) writes a completely irrational and nonsensical sentence in her blog, and the two kind of cancel each other out.

Anyway, this leaves us with:

These are a bit like popper beads I suppose, but they are nucleotides not genes. There may be, not billions and billions and squillions (said in a Lancashire accent), but certainly hundreds or thousands of these in one gene.

So what use is that?

Well these for nucleotides form a kind of code – a code comprising only four “letters”, but a very powerful code for all that.

But if a chromosome is just a long series of nucleotides and a gene is a simply a part of that series, how do we know where one gene ends and the next one begins?

Well I suppose (and here I’m going to resort to a serious(ish) analogy) it’s a bit like the old style telegrams where you were restricted to twenty-six capital letters and that was it. You had to write stuff like ….

LEAVE THE CAR STOP JACK WILL PICK YOU UP FROM THE STATION STOP BILL WILL BE THERE TOO STOP LATE ON FRIDAY NIGHT WELL MAKE OUR WAY UP TO KATES STOP BUM A LIFT IN THE MORNING TO CHARLIES STOP AUNT DORIS WILL ALSO STOP STOP

…. in order to avoid misreading (try it without the STOPs).

It’s like that with the genetic code. There’s no punctuation, it’s all in the sequence of “letters”, but, as has been noted, we don’t even have twenty-six, we only have four. These make up three letter “words” called “DNA triplets” and each triplet codes for one amino acid.

Just as a DNA strand is a string of nucleotides, a protein is a sequence of amino acids and each gene coded for the string of amino acids that make up a particular protein. Like this:

So the sequence of nucleotides CTA codes for the amino acid “aspartic acid”, AAA codes for the amino acid “phenylalanine” and ATG codes for “stop making protein”.

Since this “protein” only has two amino acids in it, I’m not sure you can really call it a “protein”. It would more usually be called a “dipeptide”. But you’ve almost certainly eaten some of this (give or take a methyl group); it is the artificial sweetener called “aspartame” or “Nutrasweet”. I doubt that there are actually any real genes out in the wild for making aspartame, but I suppose there could be, and it’s a nice simple example of what a very short gene could do.

Conclusion

So now you understand what a gene is. It’s a sequence of nucleotides that codes for a protein (or at least part of a protein – some proteins are made from more than one amino acid chain).

I suppose, armed only with the understanding presented above, you could (naively) begin to imagine that if you have lots of genes for (say) muscle protein (or genes that produce extra good quality muscle protein) you might be more likely to make it as athlete, but how does it all get so complicated and how can you have a gene for believing in unicorns?

Well part of the answer (the full answers really are complicated) is that proteins, as well as being structural like muscle proteins, can be regulatory, like enzymes – which control all sorts of things that go on in our bodies.

Once you consider that the products of some genes can control what other genes do (in all sorts of complicated direct and indirect ways that we don’t need to go into here) you begin to realize that genetics is very sophisticated and subtle and complex.

Your computer is not really built from transistors any more (and still less from valves) but the principle is the same. A transistor is a switch that turns another switch on and off. Once you start putting a few transistors together, you rapidly start to get quite complex behaviour. Put shedloads together and you get something that can do stuff like decide to stall my Ford Galaxy just before I want to set off from a junction (while producing a fault-code which my garage insists doesn’t exist).

Anyway I digress. My point is that even simple feedback mechanisms (and the feedback mechanisms in genetics are far from simple) can produce really really complex behaviour.

Some species of bird are genetically programmed to build very sophisticated nests to lie in. My cats are genetically programmed to catch birds (fortunately for the birds they’re both rather crap at it) but are not genetically programmed (and not bright enough) to even move a twig out of the way before lying down on an otherwise perfectly comfortable and sunny patch of grass in the garden.

These complex behaviours require lots of genes (and maybe lots of so called “junk” DNA) working in harmony. On the other hand, the colours of my cats (one is black and the other is tortoiseshell) arise from the actions of just one or two genes (though even here – especially in the case of the tortoiseshell – things are a bit more complicated than you might imagine).

So while you probably can’t really have a gene for believing in unicorns, you probably can (for example) have a genetic makeup that makes you more susceptible to superstition and irrational views.

At heart, however, a gene is simply a code for making a protein.

For the Love of God: David Allen Green, Captain Mainwaring, and the Catholics

2011-08-17T09:32:00.008+01:00

I suppose the background to what I am about to relate is the fact that, even at the height of the recent looting and arson attacks, the lawyer, journalist, and prominent tweeter David Allen Green was enjoining us all not to panic. Since the disturbances he has expressed the view (a view with which I concur) that we should not overact. (David can speak for himself here, and has indeed done so here).

Commenting on the above facts, the Telegraph columnist and staunchly Catholic commentator Damian Thompson ("@holysmoke") offered the following tweet late yesterday (2011-08-16) evening:

@holysmoke

Is it just me, or is there a touch of Captain Mainwaring about @DavidAllenGreen?

Now I can only assume that Damian is confusing Captain Mainwaring with Corporal Jones here, but even then the joke doesn't really work very well. In "Dad's Army" Corporal Jones ran about shouting "don't panic, don't panic" as a way of compensating for his own rising panic. I've not seen any signs that David Allen Green has conducted himself in anything other than the calm and collected manner he urges on his readers.

Anyway, David saw fit to respond with this:

@DavidAllenGreen

@holysmoke It is just you.

Some exchanges then ensued in which @holysmoke claimed that 12 of his 6000+ followers had DMed him in agreement, but not all @holysmoke's Catholic followers were as reticent. One of the public responses from "@Patriccus" went as follows:

@Patriccus

@holysmoke Well, they are both about 5'2 tall, and speak like they've been constipated for the past 3 years @DavidAllenGreen

Now when I last encountered David Allen Green, he was an impressive public speaker (albeit an impressive speaker with a rather endearing Brummie intonation) and (though I did not actually get out my tape-rule and measure him) did not strike me as being unduly short in stature (I'm 6'1" tall). But even if he had a voice like Donald Duck and the stature of Frodo Baggins, it would seem rather unchristian to point this out - especially if you believe (as I assume @Patriccus does) that we are all created by god in his image.

I sent the following (public & obviously ironic) message to David:

@Schroedinger99 - that's me on twitter

@DavidAllenGreen such charming caring compassionate considerate people the catholic faithful

I had intended to construct a further observation on the back of this alliteration but thought better of it. I soon had cause to regret even what I had sent.

Before going further, I should add that Damian himself later saw fit to issue an apology (of sorts):

@holysmoke

Sorry to have raised the @DavidAllenGreen Capt Mainwaring thing. But, to be fair, @PennyRed made the same point.

[NB I added the above tweet a couple of hours after the original publication of this post]

I'll let the other tweets speak for themselves:

@dolphinmaria

RT @Schroedinger99: @DavidAllenGreen such charming caring compassionate considerate people the catholic faithful > aww *sobs*

@dolphinmaria

I don't fink @Schroedinger99 likes us :-(

[A valid observation and I was beginning to lose my restraint by this juncture:]

@Schroedinger99

@dolphinmaria No I don't suppose I do. I think you are evil, bigoted, & nasty; but I wish none of you the kind of harm you intend for me.

@dolphinmaria

@Schroedinger99 *syrupy voice* : we don't intend any harm for you on the contrary we desire the sweet salvation of your soul.

@Schroedinger99

@dolphinmaria "salvation of my soul" oh, I understood I was heading for eternal torment in a lake of fire

@dolphinmaria

@Schroedinger99 Indeed I have already embarked on a novena for that very intention *begins hocus pocus chanting*

[NB It occurs to me now that the order of the previous two tweets may be wrong. @dolphinmaria may have have embarked on a novena for the salvation of my soul rather than for the lake of fire treatment. If that's the case, I apologize for suggesting otherwise - see also note below]

@Patriccus

Well I for one don't wish @Schroedinger99 any harm. Only that he would grow a chin. @dolphinmaria

[So it's not just short people they disapprove of.]

@Schroedinger99

@Patriccus well perhaps if DAG & I pray to your imaginary friend or visit Lourdes he will correct our physical defects that so offend you

@Patriccus

@Schroedinger99 No need - your physical appearance is outmatched by your debonair wit and independent thinking

[I urge you all to admire @Patriccus's finely chiseled features, Adonis like physique, and debonair wit on twitter.]

Meanwhile:

@dolphinmaria

@Schroedinger99 No, dear. You're mixing your fate up with mine. Do keep up!

@dolphinmaria

@Schroedinger99 Don't sound so bitter. Not everybody can be an example of delectable pulchritudinous like me.

@dolphinmaria

@Schroedinger99 Plus you more than make up for it with your blinding personality.

@dolphinmaria

Fabulous one from @Schroedinger99 there on us Cafflicks "I think you're evil, bigoted and nasty". What, all of us?

{I thought I should respond to that:]

@Schroedinger99

@dolphinmaria No, not all of U. Chiefly the more doctrinal among U. I concede that most notional Catholics R far more open minded & tolerant

{For example I follow at least one Catholic on Twitter who is not in the least bit evil, bigoted, and nasty, but that's precisely because she does not go along with much of the doctrine of the church to which she notionally belongs. (Not sure she would put it quite like that of course, but that's how I see it.)]

@dolphinmaria

@Schroedinger99 *Scratches head*. Ok, so we've narrowed it down somewhat. D'you think orthodox Jews/Moslems/Gellis evil, nasty, bigoted too?

@Schroedinger99

@dolphinmaria usually yes

@dolphinmaria

@Schroedinger99 Is this based on intimate personal experience of significant numbers of Catholics. orthodox Jews etc?

@dolphinmaria

@Schroedinger99 Hurry up!

@Schroedinger99

@dolphinmaria no, it's based on the doctrines they preach & the inference that being orthodox they fully subscribe to those doctrines

@dolphinmaria

@Schroedinger99 Ok, so you don't actually know m(any) Catholics, Jews etc etc to say they are evil, nasty, bigoted. You just assume they are

@Schroedinger99

@dolphinmaria no, see previous tweet

@dolphinmaria

@Schroedinger99 Yes, see my previous tweet. You have no meaningful personal experience on which to base yr sweeping statement.

@Schroedinger99

@dolphinmaria U've lost me; ok I insist U go round all the atheists & ask us 1 by if we believe in a deity B4 pronouncing on such matters

@dolphinmaria

@Schroedinger99 Surely not? I merely demonstrated that your sweeping statement was wholly irrational.

@Schroedinger99

@dolphinmaria my point is that religious doctrine is evil nasty & bigoted so it follows that those who strongly subscribe to such R too

@dolphinmaria

@Schroedinger99 Yes, I knew what your argument would be before you articulated it, so to speak.

@dolphinmaria

@Schroedinger99 The more interesting question is why you hold such irrational prejudices about Catholics, Orthodox Jews, Moslems and Gellis.

@dolphinmaria

@Schroedinger99 Wild guess here - I think it's something to do with sexual politics. Just a wild guess.

[Yes it is to do with the attitude of most religions towards sex in general and women and homosexuals in particular, but also the indoctrination (and worse) of children, the promotion of mumbo jumbo, the insistence that our real human corporal lives are somehow lacking in worth - just a kind of trial run for the (un)real thing .... I could go on, and on....but I held my tongue.]

@dolphinmaria

@Schroedinger99 But I'm not sure that you've thought through your argument at all.

@Schroedinger99

@dolphinmaria I'm not making an "argument"; I merely expressed an *opinion* about ppl who hold certain types of belief

@dolphinmaria

@Schroedinger99 I was being kind when I referred to it as an argument.

And I was being kind (or at least restrained) when I referred to @dolphinmaria and her ilk as evil, bigoted, and nasty, but I let matters rest there .... until this morning.

I now invite you all to judge these exchanges for yourselves!

[NB These tweets were flying thick and fast last night. I've done my best to interleave the tweets and order them in the most logical fashion possible - not always the exact order in which I saw them. I've not left any out or put any in, but these tweets are all in the public domain and you can judge for yourselves whether you think I've misrepresented the exchanges in any way - as I have just been accused of doing ;-)]

Cold calling and the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) - another regulator who doesn't

2011-06-21T09:27:00.019+01:00

It is perhaps unsurprising that the bodies who "regulate" quack medicine are as bogus as the "medicine" they purport to regulate (see previous blog post). What is more difficult to explain is why so many others - of the dozens of regulators responsible for different domains of commerce and everyday life - are so utterly ineffectual.

Below I reproduce my recent correspondence with the Information Commissioner's Office - which is supposed to regulate data protection and online and telecoms based marketing.

After a couple of cold calls from a firm with whom I have never had dealings and who specialize in conning vulnerable people out of their meager savings on the pretext of taking claims forward or sorting out debt problems, I decided to track them down and report them to the ICO.

All my phones are registered with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) and the ICO is responsible for enforcing the law against firms that ignore TPS registration.

I am still waiting to hear about this specific case, but in the meantime, I put in a a Freedom of Information (FOI) request:

Please could you inform me exactly (since the ICO was formed) how many criminal prosecutions, cautions, enforcement notices, monetary penalty notices, injunctions, or enforcement orders* have been successfully sought or applied by the ICO against UK firms that, in violation of the relevant law, repeatedly call numbers that have been registered with the TPS.

* “Forms of regulatory action” listed at http://www.ico.gov.uk/upload/documents/library/data_protection/detailed_specialist_guides/data_protection_regulatory_action_policy.pdf

I received the following response:

Information Held

Before answering your specific request, it may help to explain that since November 2007 the ICO and the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) have had a procedure in place for complaints about the receipt of unsolicited ‘live’ (as opposed to automated) telephone calls to be referred to the ICO for investigation where the person receiving the call has previously complained to the TPS and, after the TPS have written to the offending organisation, further calls have been received. This constitutes a breach of the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003, known as ‘PECR’. These ‘repeat breach’ complaints are notified to the ICO on a fortnightly basis and on receipt are set up on our electronic case management system in the same way as complaints made directly to the ICO. All of these ‘repeat breach’ cases referred by the TPS are also recorded on a separate spreadsheet.

Since this arrangement began in 2007 the TPS has, to date, referred 665 complaints to the ICO in this way. Each complaint referred to us by the TPS is individually pursued by the ICO until it is resolved. Depending on the organisation that is complained about the outcome may be that we write to the organisation and seek their assurances that the complainant’s telephone number is suppressed from their marketing lists. Alternatively, in some cases we may use an individual complaint to determine that formal action is appropriate, which would usually be either a formal undertaking (which requires the organisation concerned to commit to a particular course of action in order to improve its compliance), or an Enforcement Notice.

Because a breach of PECR is not a criminal offence we cannot initially instigate a prosecution against an organisation for a breach of the regulations. Instead, where appropriate we can take enforcement action requiring the data controller to cease their practices. Failure to comply with an Enforcement Notice is a criminal offence, so if an organisation fails to comply with a notice served by the ICO we can then consider whether prosecution is appropriate.

You may find the following link to our website helpful, which gives information about the way in which the ICO considers complaints made under PECR:

http://www.ico.gov.uk/tools_and_resources/document_library/privacy_and_electronic_communications.aspx

The following link also explains about the amendments which have recently been made to PECR, and the new powers which have been given to the Information Commissioner as a result of these amendments:

http://www.ico.gov.uk/what_we_cover/promoting_data_privacy/~/media/documents/library/Privacy_and_electronic/Practical_application/enforcing_the_revised_privacy_and_electronic_communication_regulations_v1.pdf

In response to your actual request I can confirm that since PECR came into effect the ICO has issued 8 formal undertakings and served 9 enforcement notices against organisations for breaches of PECR in connection with live telephone calls. The details are as follows:

Details of all undertakings and enforcement action taken against organisations since August 2009 (including copies of the relevant undertakings and enforcement notices) can be found on the ICO website via the following link:

http://www.ico.gov.uk/what_we_cover/privacy_and_electronic_communications/enforcement.aspx

When regulatory action is taken against an organisation, it is usually as a result of a number of complaints being made to the ICO from individuals directly affected as well as those referred to us by the TPS. The two enforcement notices which are available on the ICO website (relating to SAS Fire & Security Systems and Direct Response Security Systems) have both been served on the basis of complaints received by the ICO from members of the public direct and via the TPS.

I can confirm that the ICO has not prosecuted any organisation for failing to comply with an enforcement notice relating to unsolicited live telephone calls, nor has it issued any cautions, monetary penalty notices, injunctions or enforcement orders for the same reason.

Summary: we have taken meaningful action against zero firms and served "enforcement notices" against nine.

I wrote back:

Since signing up all our phones with the TPS a number of years ago (and checking regularly to make sure we are still registered) I have been plagued by nuisance calls on my home and office phones. I have complained occasionally to the TPS and the ICO about these calls, but beyond asking the companies concerned to stop - which they usually do anyway after speaking to me (only to have their place taken by another firm) - it seems there is nothing you are prepared to do.
I realize most of these companies are based overseas and/or withhold their numbers (quite why they are allowed to do this I fail to understand) but some of them (such as the firm who rang me twice recently) are UK based and didn't even bother to hide their number.
In addition to reporting this firm to you (and not holding my breath) I also did a bit a research. It seems that this firm have a long history of ignoring TPS registration, are a bunch of fraudsters, and had an "Enforcement Notice" served on them several years ago by the ICO[*]. I also disocvered that the ICO has a range of penalties at its disposal that it can impose on firms that repeatedly and wilfully break the law in this way.
Armed with this information I decided to put in a FOI request to the ICO and discovered that, since the ICO began regulating in this area, exactly zero firms have been prosecuted or subjected to finacial penalties or cautioned or penalized in any meaningful way. I suggest that this fact entirely explains the problems I describe above.
So to come to the subject of my complaint: This is not about any specific case, it is about the ICO's manifest failure to regulate cold calling and punish firms that ignore TPS registration.
If your complaints department is not able to deal with general complaints of this nature, please advise me to whom I should redirect my complaint.

[*] I have since realized that the firm who rang me has a slightly different spelling from the firm listed above as under an "enforcement notice" and so (I assume) this firm has not previously been served with such a notice. I suppose the corollary of this is that I have no reason to assume that any of the above firms are fraudsters - though they are lawbreakers and pests. Sorry for mistake. The firm who rang me are, however, a bunch of fraudsters.

I received a paper reply which "appreciate[d] my frustration" but made it quite clear that the ICO has no intention whatsoever of regulating firms who ignore TPS any time soon.

I have just replied:

Dear ######

Thank you for your letter, but I’m afraid it entirely fails to explain what goes on (or, more accurately, doesn’t go on) behind the scenes at the ICO.

You say you can’t consider prosecution unless an organization fails to comply with an enforcement notice. Fine, so why not issue some enforcement notices to more than nine of the hundreds of firms involved? And why not prosecute the firms in this list of nine who have failed to comply with the enforcement notices they have been given.

You say you can issue civil monetary penalties of up to £500,000. Why not issue civil monetary penalties of up to £500,000 to more than zero of the firms who ignore TPS?

You suggest it is difficult to gather evidence, but this seems to be a matter of policy on your part rather than an obstacle to your policy: Why not:

1) Collect the evidence in one place rather than two (ie the TPS site and the ICO site – you could put in a through link)?
2) Use a simple web form instead of requiring complainants to fill in a Word form and then email it to you?
3) Receive complaints where only the number is known rather than requiring the complainant to track down the owner of the number (you could use the internet to trace the numbers yourself or even ask Ofcom who happily hand out the numbers to the spammers and scammers and presumably keep records).
4) Prohibit the use of CLI withholding by cold callers (OK you might need to involve Ofcom here).
5) Solicit the submission of evidence by engaging with sites like http://whocallsme.com/ and http://www.the-scream.co.uk/forums/f30.html?

I realize that you couldn’t possibly comment on what I am about to say next, but I also realize that you must know it to be true:

The firm “######” is clearly as bent as a £6 note. You would be doing everyone a favour (the victims of their frauds and the victims of their illegal cold calling) if you fined them £500,000 and put them out of business for good. Then publicized what you had done in the media!

In closing, should like to point out that I completely fail to understand whose interest you think you are serving by turning a blind eye to the spammers and scammers. It goes without saying that you are not serving the interest of the public. But nor are you serving the interest of commerce. I work for a private company and I know we all complain about “red tape”, but the deregulation and decriminalization of telecoms fraud (in all its forms) is resulting in a situation where normal commerce is becoming impossible. Every time I receive a phone call or an email or an SMS message these days I have to devote precious time and energy to making sure it is genuine. Ninety per cent of the time, it is not. I realize you could never fully eliminate telecoms fraud, but at the moment, you are not making the slightest attempt to even curtail it.

If your letter to me represents your final position, please inform me so I can take this matter to the Ombudsman.

Yours sincerely

Mike Ward

I await a response!

And here it is:

The response begins by pointing out that the company XXXXX who called me twice recently are not the same firm as the firm with a similar name against whom an Enforcement Notice was served - something I had already worked out for myself and corrected in a follow up message to the ICO (see [*] above).

The response goes on to say:

The TPS regularly updates the ICO on the ‘Top 20’ companies complained about and where they receive repeat complaints, we are notified and a case is created at the ICO.

Civil monetary penalties

The use of this power is limited to circumstances where:

• there has been a serious contravention of PECR; and

• the contravention was of a kind likely to cause substantial damage or substantial distress; and

• the contravention was deliberate or the person responsible knew or ought to have known that a contravention would occur and failed to take reasonable steps to prevent it.

The circumstances in which it is appropriate to serve a monetary penalty will be limited. The Commissioner does though take the view that the requirement to demonstrate the potential for “substantial damage or substantial distress” can be met by contraventions where the damage or distress to any one individual is more limited but large numbers of individuals are affected. Thus there is the potential to impose monetary penalties for serious contraventions of the PECR provisions relating to the sending of unsolicited marketing messages.

The Commissioner is required to issue guidance on how he proposes to exercise his powers to impose civil monetary penalties. Now that the power has been extended to contraventions of PECR he will have to revise his existing guidance. The revised guidance will follow broadly the same approach as the current guidance. The revised guidance has to be approved by the Secretary of State and laid before Parliament before it can be issued. In addition the Commissioner will consult those likely to be affected by the revised guidance. This means that the revised guidance is unlikely to be issued before October 2011.

The Commissioner does not intend to impose any civil monetary penalties for PECR contraventions until the revised guidance has been issued. In any case he is not able to impose penalties for breaches that took place before the coming into force of the 2011 Regulations on 26 May 2011. The Commissioner may nevertheless start to gather evidence of non compliance from 26 May 2011 onwards for future use in connection with the imposition of civil monetary penalties. Furthermore, and subject to the provisions of this note, there is still the possibility of the Commissioner using his existing enforcement powers in connection with PECR contraventions. His new third party information notice powers will be available to assist him with this.

What Next?

This letter marks the end of our internal complaints process.

If you believe we have provided you with a poor service, or if you believe we have not treated you properly or fairly then you may be able to complain to

The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, Millbank Tower, Millbank, London SW1P 4QP

All complaints to the Ombudsman must be made through an MP. I would advise you to first call the Ombudsman’s Helpline on 0345 015 4033 or visit her website at www.ombudsman.org.uk to see if she is able to assist you further.

If, however, your complaint relates to the way in which we have interpreted the law then the Ombudsman cannot help you. If you want to challenge our interpretation of the law, you should consider seeking legal advice.

Yours sincerely
etc.

So there you have it. Cold calling people who are registered with the TPS is (like phone hacking) illegal, but no action is ever taken against firms who break that law - though it might one day if one of them causes "substantial damage or substantial distress".

This is rather like saying: "it's illegal to drive at 100mph in a 30mph limit, but we'll only actually fine you if you knock someone down".

[NOTE I don't of course suggest that being called by these fraudulent scumbags is equivalent to being run over by a car, but if one of them ever stood in front of my car I'd be sorely tempted.]

Next stop the Ombudsman. As the ICO point out, he will reject my complaint: "if [...] your complaint relates to the way in which we have interpreted the law then the Ombudsman cannot help you", but perhaps something deep inside him will squirm slightly as he composes his refusal to do anything.

....... another postscript (I expect there will be many):

An email from the ICO about my specific complaint about the specific "claims management" firm that rang me up twice in spite of my TPS registration:

Dear Dr Ward

Thank you for your complaint form regarding the unsolicited marketing calls you have received from XXXXXX.

What we do
The Information Commissioner’s Office regulates the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 (PECR). The PECR are concerned with the way organisations send marketing material by fax, text, email and telephone. Marketing can include the promotion of goods, services, aims or ideals.

Direct marketing calls
Regulation 21 of the PECR says that unsolicited live direct marketing telephone calls cannot be made to a telephone number if:

• that number has been registered with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) for 28 days or more; or
• the organisation has specifically been asked not to make marketing calls to that number.

Next steps
You have not advised us that you have already contacted the organisation to ask them to stop calling you. In addition you have not advised us of the telephone number on which you received the call. Telephone number xxxxx xxxxxx does not appear to be registered with the TPS although [my mobile number] does appear to be registered.

Unfortunately if the number is not registered with TPS we cannot pursue a complaint about these telephone calls under the PECR at this stage.

If the number is not registered we would strongly recommend that you now consider registering the telephone number with the TPS. TPS registration is free and takes 28 days to become fully effective.

The TPS’s contact details are:

Telephone Preference Service
DMA House
70 Margaret Street
London
W1W 8SS
www.tpsonline.org.uk
Registration line: 0845 070 0707
Complaints department: 020 7291 3320
Alternatively you could write to the organisation that is calling you to ask them to stop. We would suggest that you retain a copy of any correspondence you send as evidence. We would expect the organisation to act on this instruction within 28 days.
If the number you received the call on is registered with the TPS please advise us of the number. To help us deal with your complaint as quickly as possible, please reply to this email, being careful not to amend the information in the ‘subject’ field. Please quote the above case reference number in all future correspondence about this matter.

As we cannot progress your complaint without the information we have asked for it will now be closed until we hear from you again.

Yours sincerely

etc

Of course telephone number xxxxx xxxxxx does appear to be registered with the TPS if you enter it into their website (which I do at least once a year to make sure it is still registered) and I have sent Mr "etc" a link to the relevant confirmation message.

I shall post any responses!

Chiropractic: A Pain in The Neck

2011-06-06T15:43:00.051+01:00

Cast your minds back if you will to May 2009 when I wrote my very first blog post: Bogus science and bogus law about the fact that the British Chiropractic Association had declared war on science and reason in general, and Simon Singh in particular, by suing him (in person rather than the paper that published his article) for the following:

The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments. ref

You can find almost everything you might wish to read on this sorry saga (and then some more ;-) ) here and here (thank you to @Blue_Wode for these links).

I don't want to spoil the ending too much, but Simon won eventually when the BCA caved in.

Anyway, to come back to the point of this post .....

When the BCA declared war on a fellow scientist and rationalist, some of us decided to fight back. With the help of @Simon_Perry's IT skills we were able to generate (and then post) the paper letters required to report every Chiropractor in the country who was making bogus claims (rather a lot of them as it turned out) to local Trading Standards offices. We then set about reporting the same miscreants to the General Chiropractic Council ("GCC") which is the official regulator for the "profession".

My first email went as follows:

Dear Sir/Madam

I note that your CoP contains the following entry:

"C1.6 Chiropractors may publicise their practices or permit another person to do so consistent with the law and the guidance issued by the Advertising Standards Authority."

As you may be aware, the ASA recently declared in a ruling against Chiropractors "Dr Carl Irwin and Associates" (ref) that

"We considered that, whilst some of the studies indicated that further research was worth pursuing, in particular in relation to the chiropractic relief of colic, we had not seen robust clinical evidence to support the claim that chiropractic could treat IBS, colic and learning difficulties.

On these points the ad breached CAP Code clauses 3.1 (Substantiation), 7.1 (Truthfulness) and 50.1 (Health and Beauty Products and Therapies)."

It has come to my attention that ***the chiropractic practice I complained about*** make the following claim on their website:

"Birth and early infancy can sometimes be a very difficult and traumatic time for both mother and baby. After the baby's head has engaged, usually during the eighth month of pregnancy, there can be a lot of stress on its head and back as it continues to move within the womb. This stress can increase further during the birth process, particularly if it is prolonged or involves breech presentation or forceps delivery. As the child grows up, and starts to walk, climb and run, the inevitable falls and bumps can affect the still-developing bones of the spine and skull. Once at school, the child carries heavy bags, sits on badly-designed chairs and participates in a variety of sporting activities.
These stresses and injuries can result in the tightening of muscles in the neck or back, so causing the bones of the spine to lose their normal motion or position. This can irritate or put stress onto the nerve roots that branch off the spinal cord to the organs and tissues of the body. In babies and young children this may lead to symptoms including:
* asthma
* colic
* hyperactivity
* bedwetting
instead of treating the symptoms with drugs, or assuming that the child will 'grow out of it', the chiropractor will gently adjust a child's spine to remove the nerve stress and return his/her body to healthy healing."

Unsurprisingly, the cited Danish research is not regarded as "robust clinical evidence" by the ASA - it would seem to fall well short of the standards applied in conventional medical research.

The claim concerning "colic" would seem to be in breach of the ASA Code. While this is not an advertisement in the sense defined by the ASA, ***the chiropractic practice I complained about*** are publicizing their practice and would, therefore, appear to be in breach of your code.

Please could you inform me whether you consider ***the chiropractic practice I complained about***'s claims to be appropriate and whether you intend to take action against this company.

Yours faithfully

Dr* M A Ward

*non-clinical

I initially received the following response:

Dear Mr [sic] Ward

Your email of 4 June has been brought to my attention because it refers to the recent ASA adjudication against a chiropractor – Carl Irwin. I thought you might be interested to see that the GCC’s patient information leaflet (copy attached) includes the following statements

Chiropractors mainly treat
• back, neck and shoulder problems
• joint, posture and muscle problems
• leg pain and sciatica
• sports injuries
You may also see an improvement in some types of
• asthma
• headaches, including migraine; and
• infant colic

It’s important to emphasise that the GCC doesn’t claim that chiropractors 'treat' asthma, headaches (including migraine) and infant colic. It is possible that chiropractic care may help to alleviate the symptoms of some of these conditions. Chiropractors are trained in differential diagnosis and should refer any patient for appropriate care from another health professional when necessary. It is important that, where appropriate, there is good co-management of patient care. But the statement about the possibility of improvement has been included on the basis of the currently available evidence.

I'm not sure what level of detail to go into but as you may know there are a number of ways of measuring, or rating, evidence levels. One relevant example is Brønfort G. Efficacy of Manual Therapies of the Spine, Amsterdam: Thesis Publishers, 1997. This study rates the levels of evidence available at the time and provides a measuring tool to do it - I've cut and pasted the 'ratings table' below for your information. If there's anything that's unclear please do get back to me.

The available evidence of the efficacy of the chiropractic contribution to the management of some types of asthma, migraine headache and infant colic is inconclusive (i.e. level D in the measuring tool used by Brønfort).

Further, with regard to some types of asthma:
• Brønfort concluded in 1997 that there is moderate evidence (Level B) that SMT is a non-efficacious therapy for chronic to moderately severe asthma in adults. There was insufficient data (Level D) to draw conclusions about the efficacy of spinal manipulative therapy (SMT) for other respiratory diseases (including childhood asthma)
• In 2001, Brønfort et al ( see c. below) concluded that after three months of combining chiropractic SMT with optimal medical management for childhood asthma, the children rated their quality of life substantially higher and their asthma severity substantially lower. The observed improvements were thought unlikely to be as a result of the specific effects of chiropractic SMT alone, but other aspects of the clinical encounter that should not be dismissed readily.

So although some clinical trials had positive results there is insufficient data to make strong statements about efficacy. There is a higher level of available evidence (i.e. level B) with regard to some types of headache (such as tension-type and cervicogenic headache) and there appears to be a clinical advantage, of both SMT and exercises, both of which chiropractors use, compared to placebo and at least equivalence with commonly used therapies.

Other studies which appear to echo the evidence levels outlined in the paragraphs above are:
a. Nielsen NH, Brønfort G, Bendix T. et al 1995. Chronic asthma and chiropractic spinal manipulation: a randomized clinical trial. Clin Exp Allergy Jan;25(1):80-8
b. Balon J, Aker PD et al 1998. A comparison of active and simulated chiropractic manipulation as adjunctive treatment for childhood asthma. NEJM 339 (15): 1013-1020
c. Brønfort G , Evans RL, Kubic P, Filkin P 2001. Chronic pediatric asthma and chiropractic spinal manipulation: a prospective clinical series and randomized pilot study. JMPT 24(6):369-77
d. Brønfort G, Nilsson N, Haas M, Evans RL, Goldsmith CH, Assendelft WJJ, Bouter LM. Non-invasive physical treatments for chronic/recurrent headache. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2004, Issue 3 Art. No.: CD001878. DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD001878.pub2
e. Wiberg JMM, Nordsteen J, Nilsson N. 1999. The short-term effect of spinal manipulation in the treatment of infantile colic: a randomised controlled clinical trial with a blinded observer, JMPT 22 (8): 517-22.
This isn’t an exhaustive list but I do hope that this level of detail is helpful.
Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.
Yours sincerely
***name redacted***
Chief Executive & Registrar

Levels of evidence (one definition of evidence ratings – there are others – but this one was used by Brønfort)
A Strong evidence of efficacy or inefficacy Must include two or more randomised clinical trials (RCTs) with a validity score of > 50 as well as clinically important and statistically significant results
B Moderate evidence of efficacy or inefficacy Must include one RCT with a validity score of > 50 as well as clinically important and statistically significant results
C Limited evidence of efficacy or inefficacy Must include one RCT with a validity score of 21-49 as well as clinically important and statistically significant results; or
Must include two or more RCTs with a validity score of > 20 as well as clinically important and statistically significant results
D Inconclusive evidence of efficacy or inefficacy Minimal standards for classification as limited evidence were not met or the evidence was conflicting

Levels of evidence which do not form the basis for efficacy determination
a. One RCT with a validity score of > 20 and absence of statistically significant results
b. Non-randomised comparative studies between current patients who did receive the experimental intervention and other patients (e.g. historical controls) who did not or who received another form of therapy and where otherwise incomparable
c. Clinical case series without controls. These studies provide information about the outcome of a treatment, and if promising, may form the basis for other studies that can address efficacy. These studies may contain useful clinical information, although they constitute the lowest level of evidence since favourable treatment responses are often based on biased interpretation by the clinicians that provide the therapy and collect the data.

I got straight back:

Dear Ms ***name redacted***

Thank you for your email, but I do not feel that you have addressed the complaint I raised.

To summarize:

the GCC’s CoP states that chiropractors “may publicise their practices or permit another person to do so consistent with the law and the guidance issued by the Advertising Standards Authority.”

The ASA have made it clear that it is not acceptable for chiropractors to claim that they can treat infant colic – a judgement which you appear to endorse in your email to me.

***the chiropractic practice I complained about*** claim that they can treat infant colic.

I suggest, therefore, that ***the chiropractic practice I complained about*** would seem to be in breach of your CoP and I am requesting that, in view of this, you take action against them.

Yours sincerely

Dr M A Ward

I then received this:

Dear Dr Ward,

Thank you for your email of 4 June 2009. With regard to the final sentence of your email, the Investigating Committee of the General Chiropractic Council investigates complaints relating to the fitness to practise of individual chiropractors, rather than complaints against companies or organisations. In this respect please contact us if you wish to make a complaint about a chiropractor or wish to receive a copy of our complaint information pack.

As your email refers in part to a ruling made by the ASA against a chiropractor, I have referred your email to the Chief Executive & Registrar, ***name redacted***, who will provide a separate response to your email.

Yours sincerely

***name redacted***
Specialist Officer (Regulation)
General Chiropractic Council

I received a very polite phone call later from the Chief Executive & Registrar during which we both essentially restated what we had both said earlier.

I resubmitted my complaint naming the individuals practicing at the firm:

Dear Ms ***name redacted***

I should like to resubmit my complaint to you this time naming Dr ***name redacted*** and Dr ***name redacted*** of ***the chiropractic practice I complained about*** as the individual chiropractors responsible for making the claims that would appear to breach the ASA guidelines.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely

Dr Ward

Over the next year I received about a dozen packages of paper from the GCC - often recorded delivery - but containing nothing of any substance - well apart from trees that would have been better left standing.

The other day I finally received the two adjudications I had been waiting for (both the same so I'll only post one:

Act 1994 (“the Act”)
and
The General Chiropractic Council (Professional Conduct Committee) Rules 2000 (“the Rules”)
and
The consideration of an allegation by the Professional Conduct Committee
NOTICE OF FINDING BY
THE PROFESSIONAL CONDUCT COMMITTEE OF THE GENERAL CHIROPRACTIC COUNCIL
Name of Respondent: ***name redacted***
Address of Respondent: ***address redacted***
Registration Number of Respondent: 00927
In the week commencing 18 April 2011, the Professional Conduct Committee (“the Committee”) of the General Chiropractic Council (“the GCC”) met to consider the following Allegation against you, referred to it by the Investigating Committee in accordance with Section 20(12)(b)(ii) of the Chiropractors Act 1994 (“the Act”):
THE ALLEGATION:
That being a registered chiropractor you are guilty of unacceptable
professional conduct.
_____________________________________________________

PARTICULARS OF THE ALLEGATION:
That, whilst a registered chiropractor:
1. On or about 10 June 2009 and for an unknown period prior to that date, you practised at ***address redacted*** (“the practice”).
FOUND PROVED
2. On or about 10 June 2009 and for an unknown period prior to that date, you caused or permitted the website ***name redacted***, which advertised the practice to contain the statements highlighted in the website extract in Schedules 1-2.
FOUND PROVED
3. The statements highlighted in the website extract in Schedule 1 were not supported by high or moderate positive evidence from randomised controlled trials.
FOUND NOT PROVED [sic]
4. The statements highlighted in the website extract in Schedule 1 were potentially misleading.
FOUND NOT PROVED [sic]
5. The statements highlighted in the website extract in Schedule 2 had the potential to put pressure on members of the public viewing the website to seek chiropractic care for pregnant women, and babies and children.
FOUND NOT PROVED [sic]
In accordance with the provisions of Rule 18(1) (a) of the General Chiropractic Council (Professional Conduct Committee) Rules 2000 (“the Rules”), notice is hereby given of the decision of the Committee.
DECISION
In accordance with Rule 3(1) of the General Chiropractic Council (Professional Conduct Committee) Rules 2000, the Professional Conduct Committee had previously determined not to hold a public hearing to deal with the Allegation as notified to (“the Respondent”) on 25 June 2010.
The Respondent agreed to waive her right to attend and accepted that, if the Committee found the Allegations proved, it could impose a sanction of Admonishment at the meeting without considering any further written or oral representations from her.
The Respondent has made submissions in written form, that the Allegation brought by the GCC should be stayed on four separate grounds that, individually and cumulatively, amount to an abuse of the process. However the Respondent has indicated that she formally reserves her position. The Committee’s understanding is that she is content for this meeting to proceed without considering the abuse of process arguments.
The Committee therefore decided to proceed and considered the Allegation on the basis of documentary evidence with neither party present.
The Committee considered all of the documentary evidence provided by the Respondent and by the GCC. It has borne in mind that the burden of proof on facts is on the GCC and that the standard of proof is the civil standard, which is the balance of probabilities. This Committee has decided to receive in evidence under Rule 17, a copy of the Bronfort et al report on the effectiveness of manual therapies: the UK evidence report (“the Report”).
This Committee has taken account of the decision of the Professional Conduct Committee made on 17 November 2010 in relation to the status and scope of the Report. It agrees with that Committee that the Report is an academic report and not an expert report.
This Committee regarded the Report as a comprehensive statement of those conditions for which randomised controlled trial (RCT) evidence for the efficacy of manual therapy exists, subject to the limitations set out in the Report. The Report provides a summary of the scientific evidence regarding the effectiveness of ‘manual treatment’ in relation to a number of conditions.
The Committee considered each of the Particulars of the Allegations and in doing so it was mindful of the provisions of C1.6 of the Code of Practice (effective from 8 December 2005).
Particular 1
On or about 10 June 2009 and for an unknown period prior to that date, you practised at ***address redacted*** (“the practice”).
This Particular was admitted and the Committee found it proved.
Particular 2
On or about 10 June 2009 and for an unknown period prior to that date, you caused or permitted the website ***name redacted***, which advertised the practice to contain the statements highlighted in the website extract in Schedules 1-2.
The Respondent admitted “permitting” the website to contain the statements highlighted in Schedules 1 – 2 and the Committee found the Particular proved on that basis.
Particular 3
The statements highlighted in the website extract in Schedule 1 were not supported by high or moderate positive evidence from randomised controlled trials.
The GCC advised the Committee that it was not pursuing Particulars in respect of infant colic, asthma, sciatica, tension headaches, menstrual pain and digestive disorders. The GCC submitted that it recognised that patient information leaflets published by the GCC in the past made reference to these conditions. It accepted that chiropractors may have relied on information published by the GCC, as their regulator, about these conditions in preparing their websites. The Committee accepted the GCC’s submission that it would have been reasonable for chiropractors to have relied on the GCC’s leaflets in relation to claims made on their websites in respect of these conditions. [sic]

In relation to the outstanding matters, the Committee considered the submission made by the GCC that “there is not high or moderate positive evidence from RCTs to support such statements. The Respondent has not, in responding to the allegations against her, produced any RCTs showing that there is high or moderate evidence to support the statements in question.”
The Committee reminded itself that the burden of proving the Particulars rests with the GCC and the Respondent does not have to prove any fact.
In reaching its decision in relation to this particular the Committee has taken into account:
1. That the purpose of the Bronfort report was to “provide a summary of the scientific evidence regarding the effectiveness of manual treatment for the management of a variety of musculoskeletal and non-musculoskeletal conditions”. However the report acknowledges that a number of other non-invasive physical treatments and patient education were identified. Further, the Committee accepts that chiropractic is not limited to manual therapy and that chiropractors may and do utilise a package of care that can include a range of interventions, advice and information. The GCC submissions do not address whether or not high or moderate positive evidence from RCTs exists for non-manual therapies. [sic]
2. That there were limitations to the Bronfort Report in that “Search restrictions were human subjects, English language, peer-reviewed and indexed journals, and publications before October 2009”. The Committee accepts, as does the Report, that it is possible that there are RCTs undertaken and reported in other languages. The Committee has received no evidence from the GCC of the absence of RCTs in other languages regarding manual therapy. [sic]
3. That some of the statements highlighted by the GCC were general in nature, such as statements about the usual practice of the Respondent, the types of patient normally treated or generic headings and labels used to delineate sections of the website.
In order to find Particular 3 proved, the Committee had to be satisfied that the highlighted statements were not supported by high or moderate positive evidence from RCTs.
In relation to general statements, such as “Chiropractic treatment” the Committee observed that RCT evidence is inapplicable. Such statements are incapable of being verified by RCTs and hence Particular 3 cannot be found proved in relation to a general statement of this kind. [sic]
The Committee noted that the GCC had highlighted a number of more specific statements that did represent claims about the effect of chiropractic care on named conditions or symptoms. Such statements are, in principle, capable of being verified by RCT evidence.
However, where the statements refer to (or could be taken to refer to) the effect of nonmanual as well as manual therapy, the Committee was unable to determine whether or not that they were supported by RCT evidence. This is because the evidence submitted by the GCC relates only to the effect of manual therapies (the Bronfort Report, see paragraph 1).
In the present case, the Committee concluded that all of the specific statements highlighted by the GCC could be seen as relating to the effects of a package of manual and non-manual interventions. Accordingly the effectiveness of the care package could not be assessed solely by means of the Bronfort Report, and the Committee could not be satisfied that the GCC had proved its case in relation to these statements.
The Committee found Particular 3 not proved.

Particular 4
The statements highlighted in the website extract in Schedule 1 were potentially misleading.
In relation to this Particular, which alleged that statements were “potentially” misleading, the Committee was of the opinion that the word “potentially” added nothing material to an allegation that statements were “misleading”. The Committee considered that a statement can be misleading whether or not someone has actually been misled by it.
The Committee reminded itself of the responsibilities of chiropractors to comply with section C1.6 of the Code or Practice (effective from December 2005) which states that: “If chiropractors, or others on their behalf, do publicise, the information must be factual and verifiable. The information must not be misleading or inaccurate in any way.” The Committee is mindful that the Respondent had an obligation to comply with this requirement.
The Committee also notes that at the time of the complaint in June 2009 the GCC had not issued its advertising guidance providing more specific clarification for the profession as to the basis on which they could make claims about their services. This guidance was not issued until March 2010. The Committee accepts the Respondent’s submission that RCTs were not the only acceptable form of evidence for making advertised claims at the relevant time.
Furthermore, the Committee recognises and accepts that at the relevant time chiropractors relied on information provided during their training and issued by professional associations and the GCC.
The GCC submitted that the statements were misleading in that they were not verifiable by reference to the material considered by, and the conclusions reached by, the Bronfort Report and that they were not appropriately qualified or limited as to the effectiveness of the treatment being advertised. The GCC has not put forward any limitations that should have been expressed, other than by reference to the Bronfort Report. The Committee does not accept that lack of support from the Bronfort report automatically makes a statement misleading. The Committee has already concluded that (i) the Bronfort Report does not exclude the possibility of non-manual therapies that might constitute effective treatment for the conditions referred to in these statements and (ii) there may be other evidence that would justify the statements. [sic]
Although the Committee did not consider that the failure to meet the Bronfort RCT criteria was sufficient to demonstrate that a statement was misleading, the Committee did examine the relevant statements to determine whether they could be regarded as misleading on other grounds.
The Committee found no such misleading statements and has concluded that Particular 4 has not been proved.

Particular 5
The statements highlighted in the website extract in Schedule 2 had the potential to put pressure on members of the public viewing the website to seek chiropractic care for pregnant women, and babies and children.
The Committee noted the word ‘potential’ in the allegation. The specific wording of C1.6 of the Code of Practice states that the information must not “put pressure on people to use chiropractic”. In this case, the people referred to were members of the public viewing the website. It concluded that there could be a breach of the Code of Practice even if only a section of the public might be pressurised. The Committee considered that a website that had the potential to put pressure on certain members of the public would be in breach of the Code of Practice whether or not there was evidence that anyone had actually been pressurised.
Reading the statements in context, the Committee concluded that they were informative statements and did not have the potential to put pressure on members of the public viewing the website to seek chiropractic care for children by arousing ill founded fear for their future health. [sic]
The Committee, therefore, found Particular 5 not proved.
UNACCEPTABLE PROFESSIONAL CONDUCT
The Committee considered whether the Allegation of Unacceptable Professional Conduct was well founded by reason of its findings in relation to the Particulars found proved. The Committee decided that Particulars 1 and 2 could not amount to Unacceptable Professional Conduct as they were merely factual Particulars.
Therefore the Committee found that the Allegation of Unacceptable Professional Conduct is not well founded.
That concludes the matter.
Chair of the Professional Conduct Committee
In accordance with provision of Rule 18(1)(a) of the General Chiropractic Council (Professional Conduct Committee) Rules 2000, we must remind you of your right of appeal under Section 31 of the Chiropractors Act 1994, as amended by Section 34 of the National Health Service Reform and Health Care Provisions Act 2002, to the High Court of Justice in England and Wales against this decision of the Committee. Any such appeal must be made before the end of the period of 28 days, beginning with the date upon which this notice is served upon you.
Please note that the decision of this Committee is a relevant decision for the purposes of Section 29 of the National Health Service Reform and Health Care Professions Act 2002.
As of 1 January 2009, the Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence has a period of 40 days, in addition to any appeal period provided to the chiropractor, in which to lodge an appeal.
Signed: Dated: 05 May 2011
***name redacted***
Specialist Officer (Regulation)
On behalf of the Professional Conduct Committee

Explanatory Notes:
1. The Allegation: This section contains the full allegation as drafted by the Investigating Committee and as considered by the Professional Conduct Committee.
2. The Decision: This section contains the findings of fact reached by the Professional Conduct Committee on the allegation and the reasons therefore. In particularly complex cases the reasons may be given separately from the findings of fact for purposes of clarity.

[my emphases and "sic"s]

So to summarize: The two chiropractors I complained about were claiming on their website that that they could treat infant colic by "adjusting" a child's spine. As Simon Singh has noted, there is not a jot of evidence to support such claims and the Advertising Standards Authority would not (and did not) allow such claims to be made in adverts or (since 2011 March 1) on websites).

(NB This is not to say, of course, that there is no evidence whatsoever (what little the BCA could come up with is demolished here thank you Alan @zeno001 for link). There is, after all, some evidence for unicorns, but none of it is credible or stands up to scientific scrutiny. It's just the same with chiropractic claims about colic - though I can quite believe that the chiropractors I complained about honestly believe this nonsense, and perhaps in unicorns as well.)

The "Professional Conduct Committee" seem to accept that neither they nor the GCC nor the chiropractors concerned are aware of any evidence that any "therapies" provided at this practice can treat infant colic but console themselves by noting that there may be some evidence somewhere (perhaps in another language) of which none of these parties are aware. The PCC also notes that the GCC was, at the time in question, itself making the same bogus claims as the "professionals" it purports to regulate.

This is risible!

In short, the claim that chiropractic is a "regulated profession" would seem to be entirely as bogus as the claims (now removed from almost every chiropractic website in the land) that chiropractic can treat infant colic.

(Oh and I never did get an answer to my question as to whether the chiropractors were, in publicizing their practice in a way that was inconsistent with the guidance issued by the Advertising Standards Authority, in breach of the GCC CoP.)

The Age of Consent: Slutwalk, Strauss-Kahn, and Secretary Clarke

2011-05-19T09:29:00.015+01:00

Three stories have scarcely been out of the news this week. All three involve the issue of sexual consent and all three have elicited or involved the same category mistakes:

Slutwalk

After a Toronto police officer reportedly told a group of women at the local Osgoode Hall Law School that they should 'avoid dressing like sluts in order to not be victimised' a series of demonstrations have been held across the world to challenge such attitudes. [ref].

The subject even came up on Radio Four’s Moral Maze[1] programme and some commentators on the programme (especially Melanie Phillips) repeatedly made the point that women who “dress like sluts”[2] are thereby advertising their “sexual availability”. Now I suppose there is some truth in this claim but, as ever, it misses the point. A young woman may well go “out on the pull” and advertising her “sexual availability” but she is not thereby necessarily advertising her “sexual availability” to me. She is almost certainly out hoping to meet somebody she is attracted to herself.

Even more to the point, just because a young woman is advertising her potential “sexual availability” (if you insist on putting it like that) to men she might encounter and take a shine to during her evening out, this in no way constitutes and advertisement of availability to sexual assault. Arguably, a young man who successfully strikes up a conversation with a young woman “dressed like a slut”, and ends up spending the rest of the evening with her, is entitled to assume he might be “in with a good chance”. He is not, however - if at the end of the evening the young woman decides that she would on reflection rather go back home and spend the night catching up on sleep on her own – entitled to assume that – because she was wearing a short skirt – he is entitled to force her to the floor and rape her.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn

The former IMF head accused (let us not forget[3]), of sexual assault and attempted rape, by a woman who was employed to clean his hotel room.

The media can scarcely report this story without bringing up the issues of French attitudes towards politicians who have lots of extramarital affairs. Why on earth is this relevant?

A case in point is Jeremy Paxman on News Night on 2011 May 17. He seemed to be explicitly suggesting (as I recall his remarks) that relaxed attitudes to consensual sex between adult public figures, in the French press and amongst the French general public, may have somehow contributed to Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s alleged behaviour.

This is nonsense. The woman that President Mitterrand had a long affair with consented to sex. The woman, who claims that the head of the IMF attacked her [4], did not.

Ken Clarke

And so to Ken Clarke.

Now the main point Ken was trying to make in the interview I heard is, I would argue, a perfectly valid one. The legal penalties for rape do vary according to the “seriousness” (in the court’s eyes) of the offence. There is a excellent summary of this issue here (though I disagree profoundly with the conclusions at the end of the article and have no particular interest in whether the Labour party are being opportunistic about Ken’s blunders).

It is also perfectly reasonable to suggest, as Ken did, that people accused of rape might be offered deals in order to persuade them to plead guilty rather than subject the victim to the ordeal of a trial. We can argue about the details, but I can see how this might be the lesser of two evils.

It also needs to be pointed out that Ken Clarke was wrong on some matters of fact about the law. An eighteen year old man who has consensual sex with a fifteen year old girl is guilty of unlawful sex, he is not guilty of rape and such cases do not, pace what Ken said, contribute to the rape case statistics.

But the key issue here is what Ken had to say about “date rape” versus “proper rape”. Now it’s not entirely straightforward to piece together Ken’s actual words because they came out in dribs and drabs in a series of interviews and various commentators have picked out various bits and made various comments on them. There’s the Channel 4 news report here and I’ve listened to the original interview throughout (though I have so far been able to track this down on the WWW).

It is, however,(even allowing for the fact the he rather fluffed his words) pretty clear that Ken shares (with many members of the public) the notion that “classic” rape involves a stranger jumping out from behind a bush and grabbing someone. In fact, in the vast majority of rape cases, the attacker is known to the victim [ref].

It is also clear that Ken Clarke also shares (with many members of the public) the related notion that so called “date rape”[5] is often somehow not “proper rape” (though, to be fair, he did concede when pushed that “date rape” can be just as serious as any other kind of rape).

What this episode reveals is that Ken Clarke is prone to exactly the same category mistakes as have occurred in relation to the two previous examples.

As the old slogan goes “Whatever we wear, wherever we go, 'yes' means 'yes' and 'no' means 'no'."

It really is that simple.

[1] I normally find it difficult to listen to the Moral Maze and my GP has advised that it;s not good for my blood pressure, but given that (the currently one-eyed) @DAaronovitch had struggled from his hospital bed to chair the episode I felt duty bound to at least switch on my wireless and stay to the bitter end.

[2] Not a turn of phrase I have ever used myself.

[3] Something Mayor Bloomberg of New York already seems to have forgotten "if you don't want to do the perp walk, don't do the crime" [ref].

[4] Again, assuming her claims are true.

[5] So called "date rape" may of course be harder to prove in a court of law, but that's a completely different issue.

Postscript:

Since this post was written, the credibility of Dominique Strauss-Kahn's alleged victim has been questioned and charges against Strauss-Kahn have been dropped. We may, of course, have serious reservations about the balance of power between a rich white man and a poor non-white female in a case like this, but I think we have to conclude that there was no real prospect of the case succeeding (there's an intelligent article here that covers many of the legal issues). None of these developments impact on anything I said in my original blog post, but I suppose it will be interesting to see how Strauss-Kahn's reputation in French political circles fares over the coming months.

Spiked

2011-05-10T19:19:00.008+01:00

Earlier today (2011 May 10) Spiked editor Brendan O'Neill published another of his presposterous Daily Telegraph articles entitled: Far from being a bastion of freedom of speech, Twitter can be a remarkably conformist, elitist and intolerant arena.

The article begins with a picture of the "liberal overlord of the Twittering set" Stephen Fry, a reference to the super-injunction outing nonsense (which personally I haven't even bothered to look into) and then the following gem:

it’s worth asking if Twitter really is a freedom-loving entity in which you can express whatever’s on your mind or in your heart. Because actually it depends. It depends on what you have to say and whether it passes muster with the shabby and incoherent yet surprisingly influential liberal overlords of the Twittering set.

He notes that twitter tends to give Daily Mail bigots like Jan Moir a hard time and that a celebrity called "Kenneth Tong", who apparently promotes anorexia on his website, was also the object of a great deal of Twitter rage.

Brendan goes on to note that twitterers (or rather tweets - which is not necessarily the same thing) were mainly in favour of AV and only 23.9% were anti.

These startling facts lead him to conclude that:

The liberal consensus, and its corresponding intolerance of consensus-breakers, has been fairly successfully transported into Twitter, making this social networking site a surprisingly conformist and uncritical arena.

It almost goes without saying that all this is complete bollocks. I encounter a huge range of opinions on every possible subject everyday on twitter - I've certainly had a huge number of discussions and arguments about AV. Even groups of people on Twitter who kind of coalesce around themes like scepticism or atheism or interest in science tend to disagree about almost everything else.

I suppose there are some areas of consensus on Twitter. The twitterati do tend to take a dim view of racism, homophobia, misogyny, and paedophilia (though I've also come across BNP supporters and a number of apologists for the Catholic Church). I rather tend to the view that these "intolerances" are entirely justified.

But I didn't really want to talk about the article as such .....

Having read it (and a number of other contributions to public debate by Brendan O'Neill) I offered the following tweet:

Couldn't the US Navy Seals just take out Brendan O'Neill? http://bit.ly/kFVlEI - I'm sure even Noam Chomsky would go along w that

Which elicited the following riposte:

@Schroedinger99 That's hilarious - your response is a paradigm example of the kind of intolerance shown by Twitter users he's criticising.

For a moment I thought this tweet was in the same spirit of my original tweet and a continuation of the same joke. I took the "That's hilarious" literally and "your response is a paradigm example of the kind of intolerance shown by Twitter users he's criticising" as irony. But then I noticed that the tweet came from @P_Hayes who is, like Brendan O'Neill, a fully signed up member of the Frank Furedi Fan Club and a writer for it's mouthpiece "Spiked". In Necker-Cube-like fashion, @P_Hayes's tweet suddenly reversed its meaning in my brain.

So let me explain my tweet just in case anyone else from Spiked is reading. I realize this endeavour will leach all remaining humour from my 140 character essay, but it may reveal some of the true nature of Twitter:

1) I have no hatred for Brendan O'Neill.
2) I often find his views ridiculous, but I do not find them abhorrent.
3) There are a number of journalists (especially on the Daily Mail) whose views I do find abhorrent.
4) Because of 1, 2, & 3 above, I probably would not make a similar joke about certain journalists because it might almost seem as though I meant it and I think that would be in poor taste because, as a member of the aforementioned "liberal consensus", I don't really go only with the view that killing people I disagree with is a proper way to behave.
5) Because of 4, the highly illiberal suggestion that Brendan O'Neill be "taken out" was an example of irony.
6) In spite of the "liberal consensus", there has, in fact, been a very healthy debate on Twitter about whether the US assassination of Osama bin Laden was legal or justifiable - and very little "consensus" at all.
7) Noam Chomsky has famously (on Twitter at least) expressed the view (in this article) that the US assassination of Osama bin Laden was illegal and unjustifiable.
8) Almost nothing provokes heated debate on Twitter like the mere mention of "Noam Chomsky".
9) The final irony was that Spiked is a kind of reincarnation of a former publication known as "Living Marxism"*. The politics have changed, but the cult-like adherence to a set of ideas has not. I'm never quite sure how to characterize this set of ideas but, at least in part, it seems to involve being a contrary as possible - on every subject that crops up. In other words, Brendan O'Neill belongs (quite unlike the twitters he castigates) to "a surprisingly conformist and uncritical arena".

If interested, you can read more about this group (who really do have an "overlord") here.

* "Living Marxism" bit the dust because of a fiendishly complex and highly disputed saga involving ITN, the Bosnian war, and a successful libel suit against the Magazine. Chomsky actually supported "Living Marxism" in respect of this specific case - at least to some extent - and I'm one of the few people on Twitter who has tried to defend Chomsky here (though I think he's wrong about the bigger Balkan analysis). As I say it's very very complicated.

Twitter, Sarfraz Manzoor, and blocking

2011-05-04T09:03:00.011+01:00

I've been a fan of Sarfraz Manzoor's journalism for many years and have always enjoyed his appearances on BBC 2's Culture Show (which otherwise often hosts some of the most irritating people on the planet). He has also written movingly about his own family - one piece he wrote inspired a post on this very blog a few months ago: Why I’d be more than proud to have Sarfraz Manzoor in my family.

I began following Sarfraz Manzoor a few months ago on Twitter and tweeted the odd mention, RT, or comment on something he'd written. As with most journalists I like I don't necessarily entirely agree with everything Sarfraz writes, though I've certainly never been consciously rude or unpleasant about anything he's written.

For, I suppose, a number of weeks now (I wasn't paying much attention) I had not noticed any tweets from Sarfraz Manzoor and had vaguely assumed he'd gone quiet on Twitter. The other day, however, I tried to RT something he'd said - my attention to which had been drawn by an RT or mention (I can't remember which) from a third party and found that my twitter client wouldn't let me do this. At first I thought there was some kind of Twitter glitch but, to cut a long story short, I realized that I had been blocked by Sarfraz Manzoor.

Now the only accounts I've ever blocked on Twitter were spambots and a BNP supporter who began following me - as a result (I can only assume) of a misunderstanding as great (though in the opposite direction) as the one the led to Sarfraz blocking me.

Anyway, to come to the point, and to something that might be of interest to a wider audience, this experience of being blocked by someone on Twitter enabled me to gain a deeper understanding of what blocking on Twitter does and does not achieve. This may be of particular interest for those who have suffered from bulling, harassment, or stalking on Twitter (as a couple of people I follow have been).

NB all these finding relate to Tweet-Deck, but I assume other Twitter clients behave in a similar way.

Blocking prevents the blockee from seeing the blocker's tweets in his/her timeline, but the blocker's tweets can still be followed in a separate column.

Blocking prevents the blocker from seeing the blockee's normal tweets in his/her timeline, but un-following (or not following in the first place) would achieve the same thing.

Blocking prevents the blockee from RTing the blocker's tweets using the normal mechanism provided by the Twitter client, but if the blockee simply types in "RT @blocker whatever the blocker said" this gets round the block.

Blocking prevents the blockee from replying to the blocker's tweets using the normal mechanism provided be the Twitter client, but if the blockee simply types a new tweet with a mention (eg @blocker) in it, this gets round the block - though I'm not sure whether the blocker would see this in his/her mentions.

I am also unsure as to what happens once third parties start RTing or replying to the types of tweet mentioned above, but that's not so significant.

Finally, blocking un-follows the blockee and prevents him/her from re-following the blocker. The curious thing is, however, that the blockee has no explicit indication that or when this has happened and, therefore, no way of discovering what his/her offence was (though I suppose this will often be more obvious than it was in my case).

The upshot is that blocking on Twitter achieves much less than I had (vaguely) assumed - though I confess I had never given the matter much thought until now..... oh and (in the unlikley event Sarfraz Manzoor ever reads this blog post) I'd like to apologize unreservedly for any insult I might have caused, but I genuinely don't know what that insult was.

PS Funnily enough, there was some relevant discussion of these issues on Sarfraz Manzoor's timeline yesterday (04-05-2011) - not (unless blocking is even less meaningful than I suggest above) occasioned by anything I tweeted. Sarfraz complained that he gets lots of people he doesn't know tweeting him (which makes me wonder if he's quite got the point of Twitter) & if those people annoy/bore him he blocks them (which seems a bit like taking out an injunction against Jehovah's Witnesses rather than simply politely asking them to go away - albeit while secretly thinking "and while you're at it, stick your fucking Watchtower up your arse"). It also emerged from Sarfraz Manzoor's timeline that he is easily offended by people who make jokes about his hair. I have to plead guilty here - though, in my defence, I feel inclined to point out that when I made jokes about Brian Cox's and Jim Alkhalili's hair they both re-tweeted it. perhaps, flushed with my success, I got carried away.

Anyway, you live and learn. I shall, henceforth, read Sarfraz Manzoor's articles with a slightly different perspective ...... and try and console myself that I was one of the people who annoyed him rather than one of the people who bored him ;-)

The not so earnest Adam Rutherford (no relation) on genes rather than physics

2011-04-19T10:48:00.007+01:00

There will inevitably be silly comparisons drawn between Brian Cox’s big budget Wonders series and Rutherford’s somewhat lower budget Gene Code, but we should treat all such comments with the contempt they deserve. There’s room in the modern digital schedules for science programmes of every genre and cost from 1970s OU style chalk and talk lectures (though preferably without the big ties) through to the cinematic grandeur of Brian’s efforts [my take on #wonders media coverage].

We should rejoice in all of these attempts to use the medium of television to educate us – while, one also hopes, entertaining us.

While I also love considering the profound questions thrown up by quantum theory, relativity, and cosmology, you have to admit that modern physics is a bit fucking weird. My original background was in genetics and biochemistry (though both sciences have come on a lot since I studied them and I can’t claim to have studied them very hard) and I had been really looking forward to being entertained by Adam’s Rutherford’s series safe in the knowledge that he was not going to come on and open with something like: “Ever since scientists first started looking at chromosomes they have wondered whether chromosomes go on for ever or if the two ends join up again in the 57th dimension”. You know that genes, at least, are something you can try get your brain around without giving yourself a migraine. But that is not to say there’s anything easy about genes. If physics is like an old fashioned library (albeit an old fashioned library stocked with some pretty queer books) genetics is like the internet.

Whether you know a little or a lot about genetics (providing you have a sense of curiosity about the worlds within us and without us) you will enjoy The Gene Code and I urge you to watch it.

Here (if anyone’s interested) is what I took away from the first episode……..

First a bit of basic genetics: The master tape of instructions for what goes on inside our cells is (as most are probably aware) a series of long strands of DNA (AKA “chromosomes”). From these master copies, our cells make lots of RNA copies (a bit like the building contractor keeping the approved drawings safe in a locked draw and making lots of slightly dodgy photocopies to hand round to the builders on site). From these RNA copies of the genetic code, our cells make proteins. Proteins serve two main functions in our bodies: they can be structural (like the proteins that make up our muscles) or regulatory (like the enzymes – which are also proteins – that make things happen inside – and sometimes outside – our cells).

The understanding described above gave rise to Francis Crick’s “central dogma of molecular biology” [see here for eg] which is that (though there are different formulations) “information flows from DNA to RNA to protein”.

Information flow:
DNA -> RNA -> Protein

Now here’s the wonderful thing about science: Almost before the ink was dry on the first statement of this “dogma”, scientists (including Crick himself) begun to make discoveries that (kind of) challenged it. Contrast this with what happens vis-à-vis the central dogmas of any religion or “alternative” medicine one might care to think of.

Proteins (called “polymerases”) can duplicate strands of DNA and RNA, so information can flow from DNA to DNA and from RNA to RNA.

Other proteins (“reverse transcriptases”) can make DNA from RNA – a mechanism used by some viruses such as HIV - so information can flow from RNA to DNA.

With the emergence of “Mad Cow Disease” and the flurry of research into prion proteins that episode prompted, came confirmation (long suspected – arguably from as long ago as the 1930s) that information can flow from protein to protein.

Proteins can also, it has been discovered, bind to chromosomes and “switch” sections of DNA on and off and those switch positions can be inherited. This is not quite information flowing from protein to DNA, but it’s pretty damn close.

What made me sit up straight in my chair watching The Gene Code was Adam Rutherford’s report of recent discoveries concerning a gene that is (or was) responsible for changing the positions of recombination “hotspots” (the points at which, as Adam splendidly demonstrated using only a pack of cards, chromosomes from each parent break and join with one another to swap sequences of DNA) from the positions where those hotspots existed in the human/chimp common ancestor.

It turns out (Thx @AdamRutherford on Twitter) that the gene in question produces a protein that helps to cause DNA mutations that lead to the hotspot position changes. But these are permanent changes to the DNA sequence that are occasioned by the protein product of another gene.

So is this a case of information flowing from protein to DNA? Not sure myself. It’s an essentially philosophical question and I would need to think about it some more. But it’s certainly fascinating – well at least to a nerd like me.

So next time you read that “boffins have discovered the gene for Daily Mail allergy” (or whatever) please bear in mind that it’s almost certainly a bit more complicated than that – and more interesting too.

Oh and watch next week (2011 April 25) at 09:00 pm on BBC4, and let’s have even more science on TV.

[show times for the gene code]

Is Melanie Phillips racist? Judge for yourself.

2011-03-28T13:52:00.000+01:00

On 13 March 2011 Melanie Phillips published an article entitled "Armchair Barbarism" in which she wrote about the brutal massacre of an Israeli family in the West Bank.

On 18 March 2011, the Guardian reported that Melanie Phillips had been referred to the Press Complaints Commission over this article.

Today,28 March 2011, Melanie Phillips defends herself: How I became a hate 'suspect'

So I thought I'd try a little experiment. I've taken Melanie Phillips's article and reversed it: swapping "Jew" for "Arab" and "Israeli" for "Palestinian". I've also had to change a few other details (see especially numbered annotations) to make the "reversed" "article" make sense.

NB1 I would never have written an article like this myself.
NB2 I do NOT mean to suggest that any of the substitutions I have inserted in this "article" are equivalent to the items I have replaced.

Armchair barbarism

Today the massacred al-Badoui[1] family was buried in Jerusalem. And as anticipated, the moral depravity of the Jews is finding a grotesque echo in the moral bankruptcy and worse of the British and American ‘liberal’ media – a sickening form of armchair barbarism which is also in evidence, it has to be said, on the comment thread beneath my post below.

Overwhelmingly, the media have either ignored or downplayed the atrocity – or worse, effectively blamed the victims for bringing it on themselves, describing them as ‘hard-line land thieves’[2] or 'extremists'. Given that three of the victims were children, one a baby of three months whose throat was cut, such a response is utterly degraded.

The New York Times blamed Palestinian ‘defiance’ over renewed ‘illegal Arab sector construction’[2] in the wake of the massacre for throwing already shaky peace efforts into a new tailspin.

So to the New York Times, it’s not the Jewish massacre of an Arab family which has jeopardised ‘peace prospects’ -- because the Palestinians will quite rightly never trust any agreement with such savages -- but instead Palestinian policy on building more homes, on land to which it is legally and morally entitled, which is responsible instead for making peace elusive. Twisted, and sick.

Both CNN and the BBC, meanwhile, along with Harriet Sherwood in the Guardian, gave the impression that this was not a terrorist attack but the actions of an ‘intruder’ -- for all the world as if this was a burglary that got out of hand. CNN said:

Five members of an Palestinian family were killed in East Jerusalem early Saturday morning in what the Palestinian Authority is calling a ‘terror attack’...According to a spokeswoman, an intruder entered the Palestinian neighbourhood of Beit Hanina near the Israeli settlement at Neve Ya'akov around 1 am, made his way into a family home and killed two parents and their three children.

The BBC similarly reported:

The family - including three children -- were stabbed to death by an intruder who broke into their home, Palestinian media reported...

Honest Reporting finds the BBC treatment of this massacre, all but burying the details of the attack on the al-Badoui family beneath a story about those wicked illegal builders, the most shocking and callous of all this dreadful coverage.

For those who don’t appreciate the role played by the ‘moderate’ Israeli Government in glorifying terrorism and inciting the mass murder of Palestinians, Israeli Media Watch has assembled some recent examples here – including the praise by Netanyah of a soldier who attacked and tried to kill Palestinians two months ago.

(Graphic pictures of the bodies of the slain al-Badoui family are circulating on the net and on YouTube. The relatives of the massacre victims have made them publicly available in order to show the world the full horror of the Jewish barbarism in Beit Hanina. However, I have decided not to link to these pictures. The reported wishes of a distraught family cannot in my view justify what is inescapably a gratuitous invasion of the privacy and dignity of the dead. But read this, and weep.)

What is being deliberately ignored through this travesty of reporting is not just the human tragedy of this terrible massacre. It is the politically crucial fact that it was apparently carried out not by Irgun[3] but by the IDF, the official army of Israeli's Likud government. Likud is the party of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Nakba[4] denier who is the allegedly ‘moderate’ Prime Minster of the Israeli Government – and who not surprisingly couldn’t even bring himself to express unequivocal horror at the atrocity.

This diabolical deed therefore gives the lie to all those who have been supporting, promoting and funding the Israeli Government as ‘moderates’ who deserve to keep the land they have annexed and settled. The fact is that America, Britain and the EU have been not only promoting this bunch of neo-Nazi fanatics and baby murderers. They have also been forcing their putative victim, the Palestinians, to offer them their own throats to be cut, along with that of Arab babies. And these craven governments in turn are being egged on by the bigots, useful idiots and worse of the British, European and -- it has to be said loud and clear -- Palestinian ‘liberal’ intelligentsia.

Truly, this is beyond desolation.

If I had read the above "article", I would have described it as "revoltingly anti-semitic". Over to you Melanie.

[1] This Arab name is taken from one of the victims of the Qibya Incident where Israeli troops under the command of Ariel Sharon massacred 69 Arabs [Ref].
[2] The notion of Arab "land thieves" is take from this article on "illegal Arab construction" in areas of Jerusalem annexed by Israel [Ref]
[3] Irgun was an Israeli terrorist organization responsible (inter alia) for bombing Arab buses [Ref]
[4] The "Nakba" or "Catastrophe" is the term Palestinians use to describe the episode when approximately 725,000 Palestinian Arabs left, fled or were expelled from their homes, during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. [Ref]

NB3 For the avoidance of doubt, I do NOT assert any sort of moral equivalence between the Nakba and the Holocaust.

Talking Bollocks about Cox

2011-03-24T12:14:00.001Z

Physicist Brian Cox's current Wonders of the Universe series seems to have set off a chain reaction amongst UK journalists. I can't be arsed to link to all the articles I've read (one exception below) but some common themes emerge. I think the claims made in the press should be subjected to some rational (and empirical) scrutiny..

1) "This mop-topped stargazer revels in the insignificance of mankind"

This from Brendan O'Neill of the Frank Furedi Cult writing in the Telegraph. Brendan continues: "In contrast, today’s cod-Copernicans in the Cox lobby are drawn to the cosmos because its weirdness and bigness feeds their drab, down-to-earth belief that there isn’t much point to life." Hmmm, there must be some more words beginning with “c” one could insert into this sentence to help the alliteration along …. Hey, I’ve just thought of one!

I suppose Brendan would prefer it if Brian revised modern physics and cosmology in order to recognize just how important Brendan O'Neill really is. In any case, the claim that Brian "revels in the insignificance of mankind" is simply false. Utterly false! Brian repeatedly and enthusiastically revels in the fact that mankind is around to witness this stage of cosmological evolution and award it the significance it deserves – read his books!

2) Brian wears GoreTex

The “most expensive GoreTex money can buy” in some accounts. Indeed! He’s on top of a fucking mountain. You don’t need to spend long looking at what Brian normally wears to notice that he is not the sort of chap who gets off on sporting expensive designer clothes. I’m sure he has a mucky old cagoule with rips in it in his wardrobe, but I’m guessing the film crew thought it best if he wore something that would look better on camera. I dread to think what the hacks would have said if he’d worn his own cagoule.

3) Brian is standing with his legs apart

Again, he’s on top of a fucking mountain. There’s a sheer drop of several thousand meters on all sides. It’s windy. He’s being buzzed by a helicopter that has rotor blades and a down-draft.He’s talking about gravity which, I expect, kind of concentrates the mind in such circumstances. Of course it’s possible, in spite of all this that Brian’s just trying to pose in the style of Joe Strummer on the original Clash album but, on the other hand, Brian (as again we are constantly reminded in the media) was in a rock band. In fact he was in two. If he’d wanted to “pose” with his legs apart, he really has had his chances before. He really didn’t need to wait until they put him on top of a fucking mountain.

4) Brian is standing on top of a fucking mountain

I’m sure they’d have preferred to film him on the surface of the planet Zog in the constellation of Hyperbole but I think that was probably beyond the budget.

A lot a science education is about relating weird and wonderful concepts to stuff with which we earthlings are familiar. There’s an interesting and instructive analogy between the 4D geometry of space-time (versus the 3D geometry with which our intuitions are more familiar) and the 3D geometry of a mountainous landscape (versus the 2D landscape you’d see on a map).

Moreover, there are any number of (more subjective) analogies between the grandeur and scale and beauty and longevity of a mountainous landscape and the cosmos as a whole.

Putting Brian on top of a mountain got all this across succinctly and poetically and cleverly in a televisual way which (I hope we all hope) will inspire young people watching to appreciate the wonders of science and consider science as a career.

Nuff said.

5) Brian was dumbing down

A tricky area I admit, but are we really suggesting Brian should have stood in front of a white- board detailing the differences between Mesons and Leptons? In any case, many of the most baffling puzzles of modern physics and cosmology can be appreciated (though, of course, not solved) without understanding the details.

When they are engaging with the general public, it’s the job of scientists to and stay interesting and comprehensible for long enough to inspire that general public. It’s easy to be snobbish about Brian writing for the Sun or appearing on popular radio and TV, but as long as he does not misrepresent his subject through oversimplification (which he is careful never to do) it’s highly laudable that he makes the effort to appeal to a wider audience.

6) Brian has an ego the size of a planet

Bollocks!

Watch his body language! He walks on stage looking as self-conscious as any of us, less used to the limelight, would. He is self-deprecating and always ready to laugh at himself. All this slips away completely, however, when he starts talking, not about himself, but about the ideas that interest him and move him. At such moments he oozes confidence and (yes) shines like a star. He becomes Pete Towshend. Get him back on to the subject of Brian Cox and he reverts to John Entwistle (with a hint of Tommy Cooper thrown in). Funny sort of egotism.

7) Me

You could, I suppose, call me a “fan” of Brian Cox (though my respect for him predates his current TV star status). I do not, however, fancy Brian or have a “man-crush” on him or regard him as some kind of saint. I am sure he has all the failings and annoying habits that the rest of us mere mortals have. All this said, I get deeply pissed off when journalists (who typically understand about as much about science as I understand about the rules of American Football or the plot of Emmerdale Farm) traduce a fellow geek as a substitute for doing something that would – if they were capable of doing it – actually be interesting: Engaging with the fucking ideas!
/rant

Blackwell's bookshop and the art of deception UPDATE

2011-02-20T08:57:00.001Z

UPDATE

Just had a very apologetic phone call from manager of Blackwell Art and Poster Shop at 27 Broad Street, Oxford, OX1 3BS and had my £2 refunded. They were in the wrong, I was in the right but they are very honourable people and have put things right and if you are ever in Oxford you should visit their splendid shop.

Dear Sir / Madam

I visited your store in Oxford yesterday and bought about £40 of goods. I came away feeling I had been cheated out of £2 – a relatively small sum I concede, but I’m not the sort of person who simply lets such things go.

Let me explain the problem as follows (using prices rounded up do the nearest pound for simplicity):

If I had gone into your shop and bought 3 prints at £4 each under the “3 for 2” offer I would have paid £8, saving £4.

If I had then gone back into your shop five minutes later and bought another 3 prints at £6 each under the “3 for 2” offer I would have paid £12, saving £6.

So far so good. I would, by this time, have saved £10.

What I did yesterday, however, was (ignoring my other purchases) to buy exactly the same items as above under exactly the same offer, but all in one go. I only saved £8 - £2 less than I should have saved.

The reason (explained when I complained) is that the computer grouped my purchases thus: (£4+£4+£6) + (£6+£6+£4) and I saved 2 x £4. I was told that this policy was explicitly stated on the offer signs which explained that the cheapest item goes free.

I find your policy here misleading to the point of dishonesty. Either your computer should employ a more sophisticated (and fairer) algorithm or you should inform you customers in advance that they would be better off making separate purchases if making multiple “3 for 2” buys.

I suppose I could have taken this further within the shop, but I was too taken aback to complain further at the time. (Your staff were perfectly civil but quite convinced they were in the right.)

Upon further reflection, I feel as though I have been cheated out of £2 and I should like to have this money returned.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours faithfully

Mike Ward

PS Blackwell Art and Poster Shop at 27 Broad Street, Oxford, OX1 3BS is a simply wonderful shop which I frequent and which I would encourage you all to visit. They should, however, refrain from these (I assume unintentionally) misleading promotions!

AV - not my first preference

2011-02-18T09:14:00.001Z

The best electoral system, without doubt, is STV in multi-member constituencies. Since AV is all that's on offer in the coming referendum and since (at least in some scenarios) it's an improvement on FPTP I shall, albeit with a heavy heart, probably vote in favour. I worry that a "no" vote will be taken as a "no" to any attempt at electoral reform. (There's a reasonably good guide to the different systems here: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/2010/05/12/the-lses-simple-guide-to-voting-systems/)

Having said all that. there some serious flaws in the proposed AV system and I wish to focus here on one of them.....

Most critiques of AV focus on its main drawback, which is that it is not a proportional system. There is no guarantee that it will not produce barmy national results (such as the party with fewer votes winning the national election) just as the current FPTP system sometimes does (twice in my own short lifetime!).

I've constructed an highly contrived but simple example which shows one way in which AV can go wrong even within a single constituency:

Let us assume we have a very small constituency with 9 voters and 3 candidates: the usual Labour, LibDem, and Tory. Let us further assume that the preferences of these 9 voters are as follows:

*	Lib	Lab	Con
voter1	1	3	2
voter2	1	3	2
voter3	2	1	3
voter4	2	1	3
voter5	2	1	3
voter6	2	1	3
voter7	2	3	1
voter8	2	3	1
voter9	2	3	1

Where "1" = first choice, "2" = second choice, and "3 .... okay you get the idea. ;-)

The problem with the current system (FPTP) is clear: Labour wins with 44% of first preferences even though the other 56% didn't have Labour as their first choice and both the Labour and Conservative voters could clearly live with a Liberal victory.

So what does AV give us?

There would need to be 2 rounds:

In the first round, the results would be: Labour 44%, Lib 22%, and Con 33%. Since the LibDems come out last, they would be eliminated and the second preferences of those who voted for the unsuccessful LibDem candidate would be taken into account. This would give final totals of: Lab 44% and Con 56% - a Conservative victory.

This is a rather unsatisfactory result since, just looking at the figures in the above table, I think most fair minded people would conclude that the Liberal candidate was the best compromise given the range of preferences expressed.

The problem here, with the straight AV system, is that it gives second (and lower) preferences (once they are counted) the same weight as first preferences. Straight AV also ignores the second preferences of those who vote for the most successful candidate in the first round.

Why not simply weight each preference (in the counting system behind the scenes I mean - I'm not advocating a more complicated voting system)?

If a first choice got 3 points, a second choice got 2 points and a third choice got 1 point, the results in the above table would give: Lib 37%, Lab 31%, Con 31%. A LibDem victory.

This would be almost as easy to count as FPTP (only a single round required) and (in this example at least) produces a result which accords with our intuitions of "fairness" and the "best compromise".

I have made this example as small as possible and chosen the figures carefully to illustrate the point, but the example is not particularly far-fetched and could (in its fundamental features)easily be repeated in a real election on a larger scale.

In Which Melanie Phillips Refuses to Outline her Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem

2011-01-17T09:19:00.001Z

Dear Melanie

I read your Address to Ariel Conference on Law and Mass Media with interest. It is clear from this document – and the large number of other articles you have written on the subject of the Middle East – that you do not support the creation of a Palestinian state alongside an Israeli state. You believe that people of Jewish faith or ethnicity* have the right to settle anywhere within the biblical land of Israel as citizens of Israel, but you do not believe that people of Christian or Muslim faith and Arab ethnicity currently living outside the currently internationally recognized borders of Israel have the right to settle within those borders or, indeed, much in the way of rights as to where they settle outside those borders but still within the biblical territory. You do not accept that the Arab population within the biblical land of Israel but not living within the currently internationally recognized borders of Israel should be given the right to become citizens of a future Israel with expanded borders. (Please correct me if I have any of this wrong).

So now my question:

What is your proposal for what should happen to the non-Jewish inhabitants of these territories when you (and people who think like you) eventually get your way and Israel is expanded to include much or all of the biblical territories?

I have tried to make no judgements about who is right or wrong here and have tried to avoid opening any arguments about the historical background to the current situation. I am genuinely intrigued as to what your proposed solution is to the question I have raised. I cannot find the answer to this question in any of your extensive writings on this subject.

Yours sincerely

Mike

*I separate out these two facets of “Jewishness” because a number of members of my family have the right to go and live in Israel (or the areas Israel currently controls) under the “Law of Return”, but none of them are actually religious. Their recent ancestry is German rather than Middle Eastern.

Melanie's reply:

Your message displays a quite astounding degree of ignorance; virtually every one of your assumptions is based on a false factual, historical or moral premise. I have no intention of wasting my time answering you. There is ample information on my website already, were you able to understand it -- which clearly you are not.

Do not bother me again.

Melanie

Interesting that Melanie took the time to reply to me but did not use that time to correct any of my "assumptions" about (I'd call them "descriptions" of) her views or to answer my question.

I have read Melanie's website in some depth. I have read her forthright views on evolution, abiogenesis, and climate change and her descriptions of the various conspiracies amongst the world's scientists to keep us all misinformed in these areas. I also have read her extensive writings on the situation in the Middle East. While there is a great deal of material advanced in favour of Israeli policy - past and present - I have searched in vain for any proposals as to what should happen to the non-Jewish inhabitants of the territories in question under any future scenario that would be acceptable to Melanie P.

I think Melanie owes (not necessarily me but) her general audience a response here.

Why I’d be more than proud to have Sarfraz Manzoor in my family

2011-01-05T09:16:00.001Z

Reading Sarfraz Manzoor’s moving article about the reaction of some members of his family to his marriage (to Bridget, who is white and not a Muslim) I began to muse on what sort of circumstances might prompt me to refuse to speak to my brother. I suppose that if I heard that he had disowned a member of his family because that family member had fallen in love with someone of the ”wrong” colour or the ”wrong” religious tradition*, that would do the trick.

After all, if someone cannot see for themselves that this kind of “not like us” view of other sections of humanity is morally repugnant, it is hard to think of any common starting point for any sort of discussion about ethical matters, or indeed about anything at all. As Ludwig Wittgenstein put it: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

I think Sarfraz Manzoor’s relatives who continue to oppose his marriage and who continue to refuse to talk to him are very lucky indeed that Sarfraz still seeks reconciliation with them. I find it hard to imagine that I could ever be so forgiving in similar circumstances.

I have not broached this with my daughter, Sarfraz is already spoken for, and if I were to meet him personally on a regular basis I’d probably break down and suggest he refrain from using a Van de Graaff generator to style his hair; but, these minor caveats aside, I’d be very proud to have Sarfraz Manzoor as my son in law.

Telling anyone in my “community" about this would not be a problem, since the only community I belong to is humanity.

*I use the term religious *tradition* advisedly since neither my brother nor I believe in any sort of supernatural overlords, but we are both, I suppose, “cultural Christians” who celebrate Christmas and Easter albeit in a largely (though not completely) secular fashion.

The Students are Revolting

2010-11-25T16:39:00.000Z

Of course there’s always the argument that high fees will discourage talented poor students from applying to university; but that argument is a non-starter because Conservative politicians don’t care about poor people – that is, after all, why they became Conservative politicians.

No, any successful arguments here have to concern themselves with the only thing Conservative politicians actually do care about:

Money!

Raising student fees will, we are told, “save money”.

This, of course, is bollocks. No money will be saved, the money required will, ceteris paribus, be exactly the same. The only real questions are about who should pay this money.

In the past, the tax-payer paid.

Now students pay for their own education by borrowing money and paying it back later – when they become tax-payers – and, in future, we may move to a “graduate tax” where students pay for their own education - by borrowing money and paying it back later when they become tax-payers - but they pay the money back through the tax system.

Now, one of the things about PAYE tax is that everyone in the country is essentially means-tested each year to make sure they are paying the right amount of tax. Low earners pay less tax. High earners pay more. We used to use some of this money for paying student fees.

Instead we now means-test students before they apply to university to see if they are entitled to a loan, then we means-test them in a more detailed fashion to see how much of a loan and what types of loan, they are entitled to. Once they leave University and get a job we means-test them regularly to see if their income has passed the required threshold for starting to pay the money back and then we calculate – on an on-going basis- how much they have paid, how much interest is due, whether they are still earning enough to continue paying back, how much they still need to pay, and what size the instalments should be.

All this alongside the normal means-testing conducted by the Inland Revenue on all its PAYE “customers” (as I believe we are known these days) each year (though perhaps there is some pooling of information).

I think it goes without saying that the infrastructure required to make all these calculations and to police the loans system is enormously expensive. Far from saving money, this system devours money as Eric Pickles devours pies.

“But making the tax-payer pay for other people’s education isn’t fair” bleat the Conservative politicians and newspapers - for whom fairness is and always has been the very scourge of the earth. Even the esteemed @DAaronovitch (for whom I have a lot of admiration and who does care about social justice) has presented versions of this argument.

The only people I can see who were “unfairly” treated by the system we had before student loans were high earners who did not go to university. They, though their higher taxes, were paying for education from which they themselves never benefited.

Except, that they did benefit. They benefited because everyone benefits from a highly educated workforce; and they benefited because they spent three years earning money when their peers were living in relative poverty in order to acquire an education.

So we need to save money and rescue the Liberal Democrats from the dreadful bind they now find themselves in.

Simple!

Abolish student loans and pay all university fees by raising income tax for the better off.

Let's just fucking do it!

Template letter to MP regarding the #TwitterJokeTrial

2010-11-15T09:18:00.001Z

I have sent an email based on the template below to my local MP using http://www.writetothem.com I hope as many people as possible will do the same.

In spite of what I say in this letter, I strongly suspect (though I pretend no legal expertise) that the real problem is not the 2003 Communications Act itself, but the perverse interpretation of that Act by the CPS and the lower courts. It will, however, take a huge amount of time and money to get this matter before a high-court judge. In the meantime I think we should press our MPs to clarify the law to prevent it being mis-used in this way.

NB It is always better if you write to your MP using your own words rather than someone else’s, but please all feel free to use whatever you like from the example I provide below - I assert no copyright!

Please be polite and avoid making personal attacks on any of individuals involved!

Dear Ms/Mr/Dr MP

I write to express my grave concern at certain provisions of the Communications Act 2003.

As you may be aware, a trainee accountant called Paul Chambers was successfully prosecuted in May this year for “sending a menacing message”. His conviction was recently upheld at appeal.

Paul Chambers’s “crime” was to vent his exasperation at a travel delay by making a (perhaps somewhat ill-judged and tasteless) joke about blowing up a local airport on the “microblogging” site known as “Twitter” – much as our former Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman vented his exasperation with modern architecture and town-planning by calling for the bombing of Slough.

What is worrying about the law here is that:

there was clearly never any intention by the author of the offending joke to menace anyone;

no message was ever sent to the airport or anyone connected with that airport; and

nobody who read the joke – Paul Chambers’s “followers” on Twitter (at whom the joke was directed), the staff at the airport who found the “tweet” (by searching on the internet for mentions of their airport), or the police (to whom the tweet was passed on) – felt menaced.

If Mr Chambers really had sent a menacing message to an airport designed to make them fear he intended violence he would have been, quite rightly, charged under the Criminal Law Act 1977.

Instead, the CPS decided to prosecute using the 2003 Communications Act and the court decided that a tweet can be a menacing message under Clause 127 of that Act regardless of whether the person writing the tweet intended menace or anyone actually reading it felt menaced.

This is absurd.

There are, literally, trillions of passages of text on social networking sites and on the internet in general that could, if taken completely out of context, conceivably be found menacing by somebody somewhere. It seems that the 2003 Communications Act puts anyone who publishes anything on the internet at risk of criminal prosecution if any of his or her words (stripped of their original setting) could be misinterpreted as threatening in some fashion.

This does not only impact private individuals like Paul Chambers, commercial users of the internet are obviously impacted too. If we are all forced, when publishing things on the internet, to avoid any form of hyperbole or metaphor or figure of speech that could, if taken literally in some imaginary context, imply “menace”, we are clearly an intolerable situation.

The 2003 Communications Act obviously needs to be amended as soon as possible. I hope you and your colleagues in parliament will give this matter your urgent attention.

Yours sincerely

etc

The Pope and paedophilia - are we being fair?

2010-10-02T09:53:00.000+01:00

Pope Benedict XVI's opening salvo during his recent visit to these islands was a blatant attempt to link “aggressive secularism” in the UK with Nazism in Hitler's Germany.

Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live.

I also recall the regime's attitude to Christian pastors and religious who spoke the truth in love, opposed the Nazis and paid for that opposition with their lives.

As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a 'reductive vision of the person and his destiny' (Caritas in Veritate, 29).

[...]

Today, the United Kingdom strives to be a modern and multicultural society.

In this challenging enterprise, may it always maintain its respect for those traditional values and cultural expressions that more aggressive forms of secularism no longer value or even tolerate.

(ref)

Now I (like the Founding Fathers in the USA) am proud to be an aggressive secularist and, as an aggressive secularist, I rather took exception to Pope Benedict's remarks. [Of course - unlike many of the Founding Fathers - I am also an atheist - though I hope not an aggressive one - but this distinction seemed to be rather lost on his Holiness.

Had I had the honour of an audience with Pope Benedict, I might have pointed out that Hitler was brought up as Catholic. He never renounced his faith and indeed claimed he was "fighting for the Lord’s work" in "warding off the Jews" (ref). I would have then seen fit to mention Pius XII and the Reichskonkordat (ref). And finally I should have pointed out that (although we all know the circumstances at the time and if he had not brought this up I should not have mentioned it) POPE BENEDICT REALLY WAS A FUCKING NAZI HIMSELF!

Having said all that, I do feel slightly uncomfortable with the way in which the following list of Catholic sins is constantly repeated by people on my side in this matter: opposing contraception, misogyny, homophobia, spreading AIDs, opposing science, promoting woo, opposing measures to relive poverty, wasting the lives of millions by filling their heads with guilt and mysticism and demanding their adherence to a barmy worldwide cult, and (finally) buggering children.

Spot the odd-one-out!

On all except that last item I say “guilty as charged”. But that last item is slightly different. Of course the Catholic church are guilty of the sexual abuse of children on a massive scale and they are guilty of covering this up and allowing it to flourish and continue. You can also see how the insistence on priestly celibacy and a cult of secrecy facilitated such practices. Nonetheless, while the Catholic Church really does preach that the use of condoms and oestrogen/progesterone pills (not, as far as I am aware, much discussed in the Bible) is evil and really does preach that women are lesser beings and homosexuals are an abomination, the Catholic church has never actually preached paedophilia.

I can see why people might think I am splitting hairs here, but I don’t think I am. After all, if Hitler really had been an atheist rather than a Catholic, I think I should still have objected just as strongly to the Pope's comments.

I have yet to read a single book by an atheist in which it is claimed that genocide is a good thing – still less a book in which it is claimed that the goodness of genocide is a necessary consequence of an atheist perspective.

Pope Benedict hates gay people because of his professed beliefs. Pope Benedict tolerates child abuse in spite of his professed beliefs (presumably on purely pragmatic grounds - albethey miguided pragmatic grounds). While we should accept neither child abuse nor homophobia, we should accept this important distinction.

Job Application for Speciality Doctor in Homoeopathy

2010-08-15T23:42:00.000+01:00

re NHS Tayside’s decision to sack 500 staff, but still advertise a £68,000 per year post for a homeopath.

Dear Sir / Madam

I think I have exactly the personal qualities, skills and attributes you may be looking for the post of Specialty Doctor in Homoeopathy.

I have an honours degree in biochemistry and genetics. I studied in the 1970s so I was out of my head on drugs most of the time and didn’t really take much in when they talked about the Avogadro constant and dose dependent effects and all that shit. I don’t think my science studies would present any obstacle to my carrying out the duties of this post with a straight face.

Later I did a BA in philosophy and a PhD in the philosophy of science. I realize that this does not really make me into the kind of Doctor you are looking for but you could put “Dr” in front of my name and lots of letters afterwards on the plaque on the door and nobody would really know the difference – after all Gillian McKeith got away with it and she got her doctorate from the American Holistic College of Nutrition which isn’t ever a real university. She’s into all that alternative medicine stuff and none of the people who consult her seem to notice anything wrong with her qualifications.

While my original science studies might be thought to disqualify me from believing that disease can be treated with sugar pills sprinkled with pure water, I think I can assure you that my doctoral studies make me uniquely qualified for the post you are offering.

One thing I learnt in my philosophy studies was that a lot of science is based on inductive reasoning. As Karl Popper has pointed out, however, just because a treatment has been repeatedly shown to work (in randomized controlled trials) does not provide any logical guarantee that the treatment in question will continue to work in the future. In my thesis I develop a line of argument that is a corollary of Popper’s insight: just because a treatment has been repeatedly shown not to work (in randomized controlled trials) does not provide any logical guarantee that the treatment in question might not start working next time it is tested.

I think you will agree that the credibility of homeopathy hinges on the plausibility of this line of argument.

How about it?

PS You can obtain details of the post from the above link and send your applications in to recruitment.tayside@nhs.net. @zeno001 on twitter is maintaining a list.

Conspiracy Theories and the Strange Case of David Kelly

2010-08-15T15:33:00.000+01:00

While the Daily Mail is busy trying to persuade us that there was all kinds of skulduggery behind the death of David Kelly, David Aaronovitch (@DAaronovitch) and others are busy trying to persuade us that this is the latest example of a loopy conspiracy theory (I can’t provide a link because David now writes behind the Murdoch paywall - see below – but you can buy his book which devotes a chapter to this issue here.

While David A talks a great deal of sense on conspiracy theories, he does, at times, come dangerously close to using the inductive fallacy and presenting an argument something along the lines of: “all conspiracy theories so far advanced have turned out to be a complete load of bollocks therefore all conspiracy theories are bollocks.”

Of course his actual arguments are more subtle and presented more articulately than that that, but there is more than a whiff of the style of reasoning employed by Simon Jenkins in the Guardian when he argues that because BSE and various flu pandemics turned out to less catastrophic than many had feared, nothing scientists ever warn us about will ever really be dangerous (again I paraphrase slightly).

In fact, conspiracies are commonplace in the legal system – especially when it comes to terrorism. It was conspiracies to pervert the course of justice that resulted in the conviction of both the Angry Brigade and the Birmingham Six. Sadly, in the case of the Birmingham Six, those convicted had not actually committed the crimes for which they were “fitted up”.

It is, it might also be noted, not completely unknown for our security forces to engage in murder and torture – though it is more common for them to outsource such tasks to others; and more common still for them to distance themselves still further, while turning a blind eye to what they know or suspect is going on.

And finally, there are all sorts of strange unanswered questions about Dr Kelly’s death.

So is the Daily Mail right here and has David Aaronovitch got it wrong?

Well of course, there is no way to know for certain, but I think we can usefully apply a bit of rational speculation here:

Real conspiracies in the justice system typically involve a handful of police officers who become convinced that someone or other is guilty (or conversely that one of their own ought not to be found guilty) and set about manufacturing evidence or hiding evidence or lying in order to further their cause. These conspiracies may occasionally involve prosecution lawyers (a bit) but they do not typically involve judges or politicians. If they did, these conspiracies would unravel much more easily than they do. Of course (as in the case of the Birmingham Six) the judges and politicians may realize (or come to strongly suspect) that there has been a miscarriage of justice and attempt to keep a lid on the matter for as long as they can. But such misguided individual attempts to avoid embarrassment and avoid bringing the legal system into disrepute hardly constitute being part of a conspiracy.

Such considerations are, I submit, something to bear in mind when considering the Kelly case.

Kelly may not have died from haemorrhage alone (of course he may have died as the result of other actions he took to try and end his own life and/or from coincidental natural causes); it may have been a mistake to halt his inquest and hand the matter over to the Hutton inquiry; there may be a number of anomalies about his case that were not properly addressed at the Hutton inquiry; but to suggest that the security services and Blair’s government and the police and the coroner’s office and Hutton were all part of some baroque plot - to murder Kelly, make it look like suicide, and nobble subsequent inquiries in order to cover all this up - is simply bonkers.

I can’t establish beyond any reasonable doubt that the murder theory is wrong of course. Only more evidence and empirical investigation might be able to do that. But the murder theory is a bit like the alien space craft theory used to explain UFOs, it raises a hundred times as many difficult questions as it purports to answer.

I therefore make the following bold conjecture: When it come to the Kelly case. David Aaronovitch has got it right and the Daily Mail is talking twaddle. If I’m wrong, I’ll eat my tin-foil hat.

PS David Aaronovitch article now available here

Should we pay to read the Times online?

2010-08-12T22:56:00.000+01:00

(Random thoughts on a tweet sent to David Aaronovitch)

I have never quite bought the argument advanced by some bloggers and fellow tweeters that there is something intrinsically immoral about charging for online content. In fact, it would probably be much better from the point of view of promoting journalistic integrity if newspapers relied less on advertising revenue and more on income provided by sales of their products.

Market forces will, I suppose, decide whether the new pay-to-view arrangements adopted by Murdoch’s flagship UK newspaper survive. As far as I can see, there are no great issues of principle here at all.

I have, nonetheless, thus far refrained from subscribing to the new “pay-wall” protected Times – even though I often read the online version in the past. A major attraction, in my case, was David Aaronovitch’s column. Not that I, by any means, agree with everything David has to say. In fact I often disagree. But, in my old age, I easily become bored reading articles I entirely agree with. Far more interesting to read intelligent coherent stuff from someone like David A and have my assumptions and opinions challenged. (Of course the newspapers – even the Times on occasion – are also full of reams of imbecilic incoherent stuff which I also disagree with, but I derive far less pleasure from reading that than I do from reading David Aaronovitch.)

So why – apart from being a cheapskate – do I refuse to hand over any money to continue reading David’s excellent journalism?

Well there are many reasons to despise Rupert Murdoch and his empire. My late father was fond of citing all of these reasons and his ashes up on the summit of Ilkley Moor would begin turning little pirouettes if his first born son ever handed over a penny to his favourite bête noir.

This is not, of course, to suggest that David Aaronovitch is doing anything terrible by working for Murdoch. Many of us end up working for firms and institutions we do not entirely feel happy with. I think I would baulk at being asked to write software for the design of (say) a cluster bomb, but I would - in the highly unlikely event that the Murdoch empire offered me some money to write something - be happy enough to accept the commission. While Murdoch’s business empire is responsible for many crimes against humanity – such as inflicting the soap opera “Neighbours” on an undeserving world - I’m not quite sure that the moral issues thereby raised are of quite the same magnitude as those raised by nasty weapons.

It is also a rather pointless gesture on my part to head a movement, of which I am the only member, which boycotts the Times. The boycott of Apartheid South Africa – though essentially symbolic in its effects – made sense. It enjoyed widespread international support and was directed at a regime that was a pariah in the eyes of every remotely reasonable person* - regardless of his or her general political views. There was a clear goal for the boycott and it ended when apartheid was dismantled. It is not at all clear what, if anything, would end the boycott of Murdoch’s Sun newspaper on Merseyside. Even though this boycott enjoys a great deal more support than my one-man Times boycott, it has, like my boycott, no real goal. It may be doing something for literacy skills in Merseyside (well unless they all read the Daily Sport instead) but it is hard to see the point of the thing.

Let me instead take a different tack: Just imagine you were a really big fan of “I'm the Leader of the Gang (I Am)”. Hard to imagine I concede, but some people must have been. It was top of the charts for four weeks after all. Would you buy it if you saw it on sale somewhere? (Let’s assume for the sake of this thought experiment that you can be sure that no royalties from the sale will actually reach the pockets of Gary Glitter and all the money will go to charity for poorly kittens) You wouldn’t, would you? This would not be a rational decision that you could justify to someone else, but you simply wouldn’t be able to do it would you?

Now I realize that this is a rather poor analogy on all sorts of counts, but it illustrates the point I wish to make. In the end, I suppose, I have to concede that my stance is not really rational; it’s just a matter of deeply held feelings.

Perhaps I should try and overcome those prejudices and start forking out £2 a week. If the Times were owned by someone nice and honourable and non-megalomaniacal who was not trying to take control of every media outlet in the world I probably would. As things stand, I shall probably just wait to see if the subscription model fails. I suppose I rather hope it does.

•Not, of course, in the eyes of Margaret Thatcher. I rest my case.

Does Israel have a right to exist?

2010-06-03T15:40:00.000+01:00

Lest anything that I am about to say be misinterpreted, I should like to lay my cards on the table and reveal that:

A) I do not believe in any god or gods and I should be disinclined to worship a god even if I had been satisfied by some kind of evidence as to the god in question's existence. I am also of the opinion that the world would be a much better place without religion.

B) I find racism (in all its forms) not just morally repugnant but intellectually incoherent.

Since ethnicity and religion are at the heart of the conflict in the Middle East (which has been brought into sharp focus once again by the recent deadly Israeli attack on the aid flotilla for Gaza - or, as the journalist Melanie Phillips prefers, the "Turkish terrorist flotilla attack on Israeli naval commandoes[sic]" ref) I think it is worth stressing that my opinions here (unlike, say, those of Melanie Phillips) do not flow from the fact that my religion or perceived ethnicity are different to those of any of the participants in this conflict.

It is virtually impossible to even begin to discuss the history of the Middle East or the legality of any actions taken during the conflict because every facet of that conflict is contested by the various parties. Even the terminology used to refer to the participants or the key historical events or the various patches of ground they are fighting over are loaded with assumptions and cannot be used without already entering into the debate about who is right or wrong.

It’s rather like it was trying to discuss freedom of travel from the former German Democratic Republic (or "East Germany") with someone who insisted on calling the Berlin Wall “The Anti-Fascist Protection Barrier”.

So let's try to ignore history and the question of who did what when and focus on one aspect of the situation now:

A key phrase that recurs in discussions of the Middle East is “Israel’s right to exist”. Search www.melaniephillips.com for "right to exist" and you get 50 hits.

I am always puzzled by this.

Israel does exist - it is internationally recognized (not that it shows any inclination to stick to the borders of the country that is internationally recognized) – but does it have a right to exist? Does the UK have a right to exist? I have absolutely no idea what such questions mean.

Like nearly all nations, including the UK, Israel was founded on the back of a good deal of theft, violence, and murder - by no means all of it emanating from the winning side. I don’t think any reasonable person would suggest that any good would come of subjecting the people who now live in the patch of land called "Israel" to the sort of treatment that the people who used to live there were subjected to. Of course, I willingly concede that there is no shortage of unreasonable people in this world. It is a characteristic of these unreasonable people that they tend not share my views on religion and ethnicity.

Since the Israeli government shows no inclination to negotiate any kind of settlement even with their more reasonable enemies, I wonder what on earth they are going to do?

They certainly have the military might to lay claim to the entire territory between Jordan and the Mediterranean and supporters of the Zionist cause (e.g. Melanie Phillips again) often do assert such a claim and insist that "Jews" have an inalienable right to set up home anywhere in this territory. But what on earth is to be done with the people who do not meet Israel's exacting ethnic/religious standards?

Should the Israeli army shoot them all? Drive them over the borders into the surrounding countries? Wall them all off in lots of little pockets and occasionally throw food over the walls?

While, there are clearly some who would applaud any or all of such measures (again people who tend not to share my my views on religion and ethnicity) I think even the US government (not to mention a substantial body of opinion within Israel itself) would baulk at this. But what are they going to do in their “democracy” where (as in the original “democracy”) everyone can vote - as long as they have the right credentials? I don’t think they know themselves – which I why, I suppose, they resort to repeating phrases such as "Israel's right to exist" than engaging in rational debate.

As it happens, about half my remaining extended family have the right credentials to go and live anywhere in Israel proper and lots of places outside Israel proper (the "settlements" in the occupied territories and the areas that Israel has "annexed") while still retaining the full rights of Israeli citizens – such as the right to vote in their “democratic” elections. None of my family believe in any kind of god, so their qualifications to enter Israel and settle there (a qualification not met by large numbers of people who were actually born there and who have been displaced or have fled) would be based purely on their supposed ethnicity (or marriage to someone with the right ethnicity).

This “ethnicity” is conferred by maternal inheritance – so through mitochondrial DNA I suppose. Except that genetic analysis of “Jewish” populations has shown that whereas Y chromosomal DNA (passed more or less unchanged from father to son) tends to point to Middle Eastern ancestry for “Jewish” men, mitochondrial DNA (passed more or less unchanged from mother to son or daughter) tends to point to disparate ancestry for “Jewish” women. Normal autosomal DNA points all over the place of course – just as it does for all of us.

In other words, there is no reliable genetic test the Israeli’s could apply to distinguish between ”Jews” and “non-Jews” – especially if the non-Jews are Palestinian men and thus fellow “Semites”.

So how do they know that my family members have the right credentials? Well my sister in law’s mother escaped from the Nazis on the Kindertransport. Her mother came to a grisly end. Though she does not seem to have been religious either, the Nazis just “knew” she was “Jewish” and categorized her as such under the Nürnberger Gesetze. This fact is the only verifiable criterion of her Jewishness and is, funnily enough, the very criterion that would be applied by the Israelis if they granted citizenship to one of my female family members.

Given that allowing Palestinian refugees to return to their former towns and villages in Israel would, we are often told, "threaten Israel’s right to exist” we can, I suggest, only conclude that the "right to exist” is really a euphemism for the “right to use Nazi laws to decide who gets to live in the area between Jordan and the Mediterranean with the full 'democratic' rights of an Israeli citizen, and who doesn’t".

I apologize to anyone who finds this statement offensive, but I'm afraid that I find the notion that citizenship of a country should depend on someone's ethnic or religious origins offensive. I think this needs to be said.

Remember: God was NEVER on your side!

Paul Chambers, PhonepayPlus, and Perverse Interpretations of the Law

2010-05-10T12:58:00.001+01:00

.... specifically the 2003 Communications Act

If you follow the Excellent @JackofKent on Twitter, you will be aware that a man called "Paul Chambers" (@pauljchambers) has just been prosecuted for sending a tweet which read

"Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You've got a week... otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!"

Read the full story here and here (as provided by legal blogger JackofKent) or read one of the inaccurate accounts published by the mainstream media eg here (provided by paid journalists).

Now, unlike @JackofKent, I pretend no legal expertise, but I gather that the authorities originally wanted to try Paul Chambers under legislation designed for dealing with bomb hoaxers. Now while Paul Chambers's tweet may have been in poor taste, he clearly did not intend to threaten anyone or cause them to believe he really had a bomb. Nor did anyone at Robin Hood Airport understand Paul's tweet as a serious threat or even a hoax threat. These facts seemed to rule out a prosecution under the 1977 Criminal Law Act (which actually covers bomb hoaxes) so the authorities (not to be thwarted in their attempts to serve the public interest) decided instead to prosecute Paul under the 2003 Communications Act - designed to provide powers to the regulator body "Ofcom" and thus protect the public from suffering at the hands of unscrupulous people engaged the provision of electronic communications networks and services.

Funnily enough, this is by no means the first time that perverse interpretations have been put on this act in order to achieve ends which would seem to me (as a legally naive observer) to be the exact opposite of what those who drew up this act would seem to have intended.

A few years ago tens of thousands of people across the country suddenly discovered that they were running up huge phone bills. The problem, it transpired, was rogue software that was dialling up premium rate telephone numbers (this was before the mass adoption of broadband). Meanwhile, BT blithely continued collecting money from scammed customers and passing it on to the organized criminals who were operating the premium-rate numbers and distributing the malware which rang the numbers. You can read the full story here (bbc) and here (financial-crime fighter Jeffrey Robinson).

Faced with this huge scam, the body which was supposed to be regulating this industry "PhonepayPlus" (then called "ICSTIS") whose "helplines" were "in meltdown" did absolutely nothing for about eighteen months. It finally introduced a scheme whereby firms wishing to run legitimate dialler "services" had to seek prior permission from ICTIS. Strangely, for an industry which PhonepayPlus repeatedly insists is "99% honest", exactly zero honest dialler services emerged from the new prior permissions regime.

But to return to the point of this post, PhonepayPlus has its powers delegated to it by Ofcom and is, by virtue of that fact, the body responsible for implementing the 2003 Act - insofar as that act relates to the premium rate industry. Here's what the Chair of PhonepayPlus Sir Alistair Graham (always ready to criticize MPs accused of dishonesty) had to say about the 2003 Communications act and the rogue dialler fiasco:

The investigation undertaken by ICSTIS at the time was quite lengthy due to the complex nature of the technologies involved. In the interim not withstanding the existence of complaints, BT and other Network Operators were obliged to allow them to continue operating. This obligation is set out in the Communications Act 2003.

[letter to Rt Hon Margaret Hodge MBE MP, Minister of State for Industry and the Regions September 2006]

So, according to the body charged with regulating the premium rate industry by administering the 2003 Communications Act, that act does not protect the public from the scammers, it protects the scammers from the public. Of course Sir Alistair Graham may have got the wrong end of the stick here (I strongly suspect he has) but since he is responsible for administering this act, he (I suppose) has the final say on how the act is to be used.

Sadly, rogue diallers are not the only example of PhonepayPlus's failure to regulate the premium rate industry. Anyone who has your mobile number (ie has illegally bought a list of real numbers or has simply generated a block of random numbers) can send you an unsolicited reverse charge premium rate text message and your network will charge you for it - again blithely handing the proceeds on to the scammers. PhonepayPlus insists that the onus is on the "customer" to prove he or she did not request the text (something that PhonepayPlus acknowledge would be virtually impossible) and refuse point-blank to force the networks to allow consumers to opt out of these "services".

So we now know that the 2003 Communications Act does not protect consumers against rogue diallers. Does it protect us against unsolicited reverse charge SMS? The Rt Hon Margaret Hodge MBE MP, Minister of State for Industry and the Regions certainly thinks it does. But she's wrong! According to PhonepayPlus, unsolicited texts are only illegal under the 2003 Act if they are (normally free) "promotional" texts - unsolicited reverse charge "services" (typically jokes and tarot card "readings") are merely "misleading".

But fear not. Let no one say that the "Law is an ass" (to quote Dickens) or that "when I use a law it means what I want it to mean" (to mis-quote Carroll). The 2003 Communications Act may not protect the public against premium rate crime, but it can be use to prosecute people who make poor jokes on Twitter.

I'm sure we can all sleep soundly in our beds tonight knowing that!

PS Much better MSM article from @SamiraAhmedC4 now at: Man fined for Twitter airport 'bomb threat'

PPS

On the Paul Chambers front, there is an appeal on 2010 September 24 _ I'll post the result.

On the premium rate front, PhonepayPlus have written to me to confirm that not only does the 2003 Communications Act (under which Paul was prosecuted) oblige them to allow rogue diallers and forbid PP+ from declaring the activities of unsolicited reverse charge SMS spammers to be "illegal", the 2003 Communications Act actually prevents PhonepayPlus and Ofcom from mandating the networks to allow their customers to opt out of premium rate "services" - even if the customers are minors. It would be interesting to learn which clauses of the Act PP+ rely on when they make these extraordinary claims. I may ask them.

Goodbye Fred Halliday

2010-04-26T15:17:00.000+01:00

Fred Halliday died today

You can read more about him at Wikipedia. I am not an expert on his life or work and I have (I am somewhat ashamed to admit) never read a single one of his books. Nonetheless, Fred Halliday is someone who, in a small way, had a profound influence on my life.

I saw him speak once at a public lecture in London in the 1970s. I have no recollection what the event was or how I came to be there, but I do remember his lecture - or at least some parts of it - and those memories have stayed with me to this day.

He was an imposing and articulate speaker. I remember disagreeing with some of what he had to say that day but being struck - possibly for the first time in my life - that there were people like him out there in the world who were intelligent and well informed and shared many of my values but who, nevertheless, held different views to my own. Not everyone I disagreed with was a kind of comic book villain like Richard Nixon.

He spoke, as I recall, about international affairs in general and international conflict in particular. He went on to speak on the horrors of political violence and the dangerous attractions of political romanticism. There were, Halliday insisted, a number of quite stringent conditions which ought to be met before anyone considered launching an insurrection against those in power. These was, in should be remembered, at a time when the RAF ("Bader-Meinhof") campaign was in full swing as was, closer to home, that of the Provisional IRA.

We had all watched "Bloody Sunday" (where British troops opened fire on unarmed civilians taking part in a civil-rights demonstration) unfold on our black and white TV screens a couple of years earlier and the Catholic population of Northern Ireland still did not enjoy the same democratic and civil rights as the Protestant majority. A lot of people, even on the left of Labour Part at that time were prepared perhaps not to explicitly condone the IRA but to extend a certain degree of sympathy towards them. These attitudes were, Halliday argued, misplaced. One argument he supplied, the one that has always stuck in my mind, was that the IRA had not exhausted all democratic avenues before taking up arms. Even in complete tyrannies and certainly in less tyrannical states such as the United Kingdom there are almost always avenues for protest that do not involve violence. We all, Halliday insisted, have a moral duty to make every possible use of those avenues (however limited they are) before reaching for the AK47s.

Now what I am going to go on to say in the following paragraphs may seem absurdly bathetic, but I decided, after seeing Fred Halliday speak that day, that I would, thenceforth, be more tolerant of and open to different ideas. I also determined that, whenever I found myself in any kind of conflict with authority, I should explore every opportunity for putting my point of view across before abandoning democratic peaceful struggle. I was, I should point out, at no time inclined to armed uprising and all the "struggles" I have been involved in have been far more prosaic than anything Fred Halliday talked about that day.

I am, these days, an older and wiser and less idealistic man, but my blood still boils when I encounter evil, stupidity, and official indifference or connivance.

After a succession of cars had ended upside down in the field next to our house I decided to petition for a "give way" sign at the blind bend before the T-junction opposite the field. When my pleas were ignored, I remembered Halliday's talk and simply stepped up my efforts and petitioned more people. After two years or so the sign was put up and no one has ended upside down in the field since. A small achievement, I admit, but I may have saved someone's life.

When a number of Premium Rate mobile phone companies stole £50 from my family using reverse charge texts (against which there was and still is no general protection if you have a mobile phone) and I subsequently discovered that the most polite thing any informed person could possibly say about the body charged with regulating premium rate, "PhonepayPlus" (then "ICSTIS") is that they are about as much use as a chocolate teapot, I could have simply shrugged my shoulders and got on with life. Instead I remembered Halliday's injunction to explore every possible avenue and began waging (peaceful, polite-ish, and legal) war against this "regulatory" body and the firms it pretends to regulate. Several years on, "La lutte continue", but T-mobile and Vodafone now allow their customers (and, more importantly, their kids) to block incoming unsolicited reverse charge text messages and PhonepayPlus are about to begin insisting that every company in this "industry" has to register with them and satisfy some basic requirements - like having a real address, a bank account that is not in the British Virgin Islands, a company registration number, a named director who does not live (notionally) above a dodgy estate agency in Mauritius etc. One day Virgin, O2, Three, and Orange will capitulate! I like to think that my efforts have played a role, however small, in these changes.

And so it was too when the British Chiropractic Association decided to sue the science writer Simon Singh. I was sorely tempted to help organize a pitchfork and blazing torch wielding gang and head round to their offices, but I recalled Halliday's advice. I'm not a lawyer and couldn't contribute to the legal battle (see Jack on Kent on this side of things here et seq) but I could, and did, help to explore many other avenues (See Nick Cohen on this here).

Life often seems to be an unremitting battle against utilities, banks, and commercial companies in general in order to ensure that one is treated honestly and fairly. Again, I never give in. I remember Halliday's words and simply carry on writing letters and sending faxes and emails and making phone calls until they give in. They always do. I have only ever had to go to the Small Claims court once. I won.

Perhaps all this makes me a bit of a sad git who you wouldn't wish to sit next to at a dinner party, but perhaps it also means that I shall leave the world a very slightly better place than I found it.

As Edmund Burke once said "Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little". Fred Halliday did a great deal in his life but, unbeknown to him, also played a small but essential role in my life and in my attempts to avoid the mistake described by Burke.

Cherie Blair, religion, and the broken jaw

2010-02-04T13:44:00.000Z

Cherie Blair gets a hard time from all sides. Daily Mail reporters hate her because she is a dungaree wearing communist feminist who wants to take all the money away form the deserving rich and share it out amongst gay asylum seekers, gypsies, and black people. People like me hate her because she promotes woo, worships a god who has all sorts of really bigoted and backward views, is married to a lying warmonger, and whenever she smiles she makes me think the aspect ratio on my TV has gone wrong.

Not all these criticisms are entirely fair or justified.

As I go to press, Cherie Blair stands accused of discriminating against atheists. The story (taken from the above link) is that:

Shamso Miah, 25 — described as a devout Muslim — went from a local mosque in East Ham, London to a bank where he became embroiled in an argument with another man about his place in the queue. He grabbed Mohammed Furcan and punched him in the face. Miah ran outside but Mr Furcan chased after him and demanded to know why he had been attacked.

Miah then punched him again, knocking him to the ground and fracturing his jaw. Mr Miah said he had acted in self defence but the bank’s CCTV showed clearly that he was the aggressor. He then pleased guilty to occasioning actual bodily harm.

Yet despite saying violence on our streets “has to be taken seriously” Ms Blair/Booth QC let Miah walk free from court, telling him: “I am going to suspend this sentence for the period of two years based on the fact you are a religious person and have not been in trouble before. You caused a mild fracture to the jaw of a member of the public standing in a queue at Lloyds Bank. You are a religious man and you know this is not acceptable behaviour.”

Now, as the splendid @JackofKent (http://jackofkent.blogspot.com/) has noted, there is precious little evidence of discrimination here. We all, I hope, go along with the notion of mitigation and we have no reason to believe that had Shamso Miah declared something along the lines of "look, I don't believe a word of this religion horse-shit, but I've always been kind to animals and children, I help old people across the road, and I'll never do anything like this again" he would not have been treated just as leniently by Cherie Blair.

Having conceded that point, there is, nonetheless, something distinctly curious about our attitudes towards religion and morality.

If I avoid drinking and driving because I might kill or injure someone and I would rather avoid doing that, that is moral behaviour. If I avoid drinking and driving because I might get caught and be punished, that is not moral behaviour. It may be prudent behaviour, but ethics don't really come into it. (It is, of course, perfectly possible, and probably just as well, that many people entertain both lines of thought when wondering how to get home after an overenthusiastic night out.)

The traditional religious approach to persuading people to not do the "wrong" things has been to say something along the lines of: "you may think that's a good idea now, but just wait until you die and god puts you on the barbecue or brings you back as a mollusc" (depending on the specifics of the religion). I have never been persuaded that going along with this sort of thing constitutes moral behaviour.

But, especially in recent times, god seems to have become less draconian (at least within the Anglican church) and we are invited to believe that, even if we are not destined for the fiery pits of Hell, we should still go along with god's wishes.

The problem (apart from deciding what god's wishes are especially when it comes to stuff - like helicopters, internet porn, and contraceptives - that simple weren't around last time he gave us the benefit of his thinking) is deciding whether we should agree with him.

So for example, if god simply says "I think women should wear bags over their heads at all times" why can't we say in response "well I'm sorry god, but I think this is a bit bonkers". Why do we have to accept that such a pronouncement somehow constitutes a valid ethical judgement? After all, some people are quite convinced that it is god's wish that they should blow themselves up on crowded tube trains.

In reality, although people do claim that they are forced to take a particular line (for example when Iris Robinson claims we have to hate gay people because the Bible says so) they soon change their tunes when the relevant religious texts say something they don't actually agree with (for example when the Bible says the adulterers should be stoned). As a number of thinkers from Jean Paul Sartre to Dawkins have pointed out, you can't really evade moral responsibility in this way.

Some religious people are good people. Some religious people are bad people. Both groups contain moral actors who cannot, without disingenuity, claim that their goodness or badness depends on their religious persuasions.

Shamso Miah broke another man's jaw. Cherie Blair decided that, all things considered, Shamso Miah did not deserve to go to jail. Her judgement may well have been the right one. But I firmly believe that Shamso Miah must take full responsibility for all his actions (good or bad) and that his, and Cherie Blair's, various allegiances to invisible sky fairies have no place whatsoever in this matter.

Ignorance of the Law and the Paul Clarke Case

2009-11-16T08:21:00.000Z

I do not pretend to have any legal expertise and you can read the opinions of someone who has over at @jackofkent's excellent blog.

The "facts" of the case (as reported)suggest that Mr Clarke found a shotgun and ammunition in his garden, took these items to his nearest police station, and handed them in. He was then arrested, charged with possession of a gun, convicted in court, and now faces five years in prison.

Now there are many reasons to suspect that the story I summarize above may not be the whole story, and, at the very least, may be incorrect in some of the details. Certainly, anyone who knows anything about almost anything that is reported in the newspapers will attest that the newspapers have got vital details wrong. If shy ten year old Priscilla breaks the record for winning coconuts on the tombola for the third year in a row at the local fête; the local rag will report that "Three year old Priscilla broke the tombola during her ten goes on the coconut shy". I have always presumed that this sort of thing happens because journalist take notes in shorthand, forget all about the original events, and then try to construct a story (using their own imaginations) from what is essentially a list of phonemes. Sometimes, of course, there are more sinister forces at work.

But let us suppose the Paul Clarke story is entirely true and as reported, and let us suppose that the authorities, in spite of all the mitigating circumstances, decided to press ahead with a case like this and apply the full rigour of the law. Within such a thought experiment, many of the concerns that have been raised in the comments on @jackofkent's blog (which we may be able to dismiss once we know the full facts of the actual case) raise their ugly heads and do, I submit, require a reasoned response.

These comments raise a general problem with the law that is rarely discussed: the problem that most people (myself included) simply do not know what the law is (in all sorts of areas).

Recently I found a purse full of money and credit cards on the ground in a car-park in a part of town where I could reasonably expect that the purse might quickly be discovered by someone with less integrity than I pretend to. I had my mobile phone on me so I rang one of the relevant banks (there were no phone/address details for the owner inside the purse). The bank recommended that I take the purse to the local police station - which I did. But suppose I have not had my mobile phone on me and I had been stopped by the police on my way to the station. Is there a risk that I could have been charged with possession of stolen property? I have no idea. Even though I had been following the advice of a bank, banks are not reliable sources of legal advice - or even financial advice (but let's leave that to one side). Even if I had rung the police first, we all know that the police themselves are not necessarily a reliable source of correct legal advice - as in this case where (again, if the press story is to be believed) a man was instructed by the police to walk the streets with a loaded gun.

If I found what appeared to be a quantity of drugs (say) in a children's playground and did not have a phone on me and could not see any passers by, should I take the drugs and hand them in at the nearest police station or leave them in situ while attempting to report my find. I think I am right in believing that (in a case like this) I should have a defence if found in possession of drugs. But I don't know for sure.

On the subject of drugs, I recently attended a drugs awareness talk at the school my kids attend. During the course of the evening, it became apparent that the vast majority of the attendees had absolutely no idea what the laws were concerning the purchase and consumption of alcohol and tobacco by minors in different environments let alone what the laws were concerning illicit (though not necessarily illegal) drugs. And these were educated (often highly educated) grown-ups.

Given that we expect laws to serve as a deterrent and given that politicians are forever making new laws (often to "send a message") I think we, as a society, need to be aware that the messages are often not getting though. I realize that ignorance of the law could never be allowed to stand as a defence argument (for obvious reasons) but this does not absolve the people who make our laws from responsibility to use the historically unparalleled opportunities for the dissemination of information to educate people as to what the laws are and are intended to achieve.

Suppose I found a loaded gun in a park frequented by children (though deserted at the time of my discovery) and did not have my mobile phone on me. What should I do? Leave it there? Hide it? Take it to the police and rely on the good will of the CPS?

I did not know the answers to these questions before the Clarke case and I don't know them now.

######################################

Postscript:

Allen Green ("@jackofkent") has carried out some sterling investigation and research on this story and written up his conclusions in a cracking blog entry at: Anatomy of an Injustice.

As I have also mentioned below (in a comment), pace my light-hearted digs at the quality of a great deal of journalism, I have every reason to believe that Holly Thompson's piece (which broke this story) is an accurate and balanced report of the facts available to that journalist and that that Holly Thompson (@h_thompson) is a journalist of integrity.

Drug Classification: Why David Nutt and the Government are Both Wrong

2009-11-01T07:22:00.000Z

The government is clearly in the wrong because it appoints scientists to look at evidence and then ignores the evidence when it doesn't suit; in this case then shooting the messenger for good measure.

But David Nutt is wrong too. He apparently endorses the notion that there is or should be (the distinction is no always made clear) a sliding scale of criminal penalties according to the harmfulness of drugs. His only gripe with the government seems to be on the question of where certain drugs should be on this scale and the government's insistence on relying on prejudice rather than science in assessing this.

This question is discussed regularly in the media. The question of whether the sliding scale makes any sense seems never to be discussed at all.

First of all, is there currently a sliding scale of penalties corresponding to the harmfulness of drugs? No! Not in any meaningful sense.

Heroin is a class A drug (most severe penalties). Which health problems does heroin cause? Constipation! That's about it. Heroin is, of course, addictive but that does not mean that it damages the health of people who keep taking it. Street heroin does cause all sorts of health of problems, from infections to death by overdose, but these problems occur, by and large, precisely because heroin incurs criminal penalties and arrives in unknown strengths mixed with unknown substances in dirty syringes.

At the other end of the scale, solvents, which can cause all sorts of health problems (eg liver damage) are perfectly legal.

Just up into the scale at "C" are various tranquillisers and sleeping pills which, like heroin are addictive and like heroin have a high overdose potential.

The drugs that cause the most health problems of all - alcohol and tobacco - are, like solvents, not on the scale at all.

So should there be a sliding scale of penalties corresponding to the harmfulness of drugs? Could the scale be adjusted and made coherent?

I submit not.

Part of the problem is that the harms caused by drugs are simply too complex to represent meaningfully on an ABC scale. Some drugs, eg tobacco and cannabis (when smoked), have long term cumulative health effects on the respiratory system. Others, eg alcohol and heroin can easily cause the very short term health effect of sudden death by overdose. Despite this, and the fact that alcohol also causes lots of other long term health problems, moderate social drinking can be a life long pursuit for most people without them coming to very much grief. Cannabis (assuming some of the more worrying research turns out to be indicative of real effects) may be a particular danger for young people whose brains are still developing and less of a problem for older people. The question of how drugs are taken is also highly relevant. If you obtain your nicotine high from smoking cigarettes you stand a significant chance of contracting lung cancer. If you obtain your nicotine high from chewing gum. you don't.

But a more fundamental objection here concerns the very principle that criminal law should be used to inflict criminal penalties on people who do things that may cause them harm. We all know that drinking bleach and standing too near the edges of cliffs are extremely hazardous, but we don't feel that it is necessary or appropriate to make such activities illegal. It would be very foolish of me to begin smoking cigarettes or injecting myself with heroin every day, and I accept that it is quite appropriate for the state to discourage me from such pursuing such activities. In the end, however, it should be up to me - providing I don't inflict my smoke on others or sell my spare heroin to minors or whatever.

The only argument for making drugs illegal that seems to hold any (a priori) merit whatsoever, is the argument that illegality is likely to discourage use. The evidence for this contention is, however, thinner than a Rizla paper. Cannabis use is higher in the UK than it is in the Netherlands where users and retailers of the drug incur no criminal penalties and when the classification of cannabis was lowered from B to C here in the UK, use actually declined. The 30 odd year long war on drugs in the USA has seen an unremitting growth in the availability and use of all types of drugs whereas experiments with decriminalization in many countries have not led to explosions in use. Even if legalization led to a slight growth in consumption (which I doubt would be the case) there is still a strong argument in favour of legalization if this massively reduces the harm cased be drugs overall.

So, what should be done?

Nobody is suggesting that we put crack on the supermarket shelves. A well thought through programme of legalization would see clean drugs with regulated potency supplied in a controlled fashion to adults and an end to the black market and the huge international criminal enterprise it supports.

Meanwhile, we should increase the supply of accurate and believable information about the health (and other drawbacks) of all drugs - including the ones which are currently legal.

We have been remarkably successful at reducing the incidence and social acceptability of tobacco smoking in this country and we have achieved this without imprisoning a single smoker or tobacconist.

There has to be a lesson in that experience somewhere.

Clive James on knowledge, scepticism, and climate change denialism

2009-10-25T20:03:00.000Z

Clive James on knowledge, scepticism, and climate change denialism

.... and my email to him:

Dear Clive

I have derived a great deal of pleasure from your writings and broadcasts over many years but your broadcast this morning on Radio 4 filled me with dismay.

I’m afraid that your assessment of the climate science debate was profoundly mistaken – on a number of counts.

Don’t worry, I don’t intend to bombard you with the scientific evidence that counters the claims of the denialists (you can read this for yourself if you wish at sites such as http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11462) but I do wish to explain why the climate change deniers really are on a par with Holocaust deniers.

First of all, most of the science is about what has already happened and what is happening now. Nobody (except the scientifically illiterate - I think here of “journalists” such as Melanie Phillips) disputes the figures for the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and the growth of those figures in response to the burning of fossil fuels. Nobody (except the scientifically illiterate) disputes the claim that CO2 in the atmosphere leads (ceteris paribus) to a “greenhouse effect”. This much is basic physics and chemistry.

Of course scientists also claim that there has been a long term increase in average global temperatures and here they are on slightly shakier ground. The written records only go back so far and many of the figures have to be inferred from all kinds of other disparate evidence. The accuracy of historical records and the validity of such inferences may be disputed (on perfectly reasonable scientific grounds). Nonetheless, there is a very very wide consensus amongst scientists that there has been a warming trend in average global temperatures since we began burning lots of fossil fuels.

The claims of many denialists that climate scientists are engaged in some kind of conspiracy to delude the rest of us are belied by the fact that those same scientists have reported a slight cooling trend in very recent years. Of course, the assumption is that this is a short term blip in an otherwise relentless upward trend…

…which brings me to my final point; and your most serious error:

None of the science described above is based on “modelling”. Computer modelling of the climate is designed to predict what might happen in the future. Of course, nobody knows for certain what will actually happen in the future. For example, the super-volcano under Yellowstone Park may blow and plunge us all into a decades long winter. But computer models can provide educated guesses as to what is most likely to happen given certain assumptions about continuing trends. There is far less scientific consensus here (especially when it comes to the details) but there is a very widespread scientific consensus that (assuming current trends do continue unabated) some pretty dreadful things are very likely to happen over the next couple of hundred years.

There are some who have genuine scientific concerns about things like the measurement of average sea temperatures and the rate of ice sheet melting and so on; but they are in a minority. Most of the “scientists” who tend to get quoted by journalists seeking to discredit the theory of global warming are scientists in the same sense that David Irving is an historian.

Striking a "fair balance" between sense and nonsense

2009-09-25T18:22:00.000+01:00

I wrote to the BBC the other day objecting to the fact that their article "Autism rates back MMR jab safety" provides (alongside links to perfectly sensible bodies like the NHS and the National Autistic Society) a link to the "JABs" website that promotes mis-information about vaccines and supports Dr Andrew Wakefield's discredited notions about a link between MMR and autism.

My initial salvo (in the form of a completed BBC web-form):

Re: the link to the "Jabs" website from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8268302.stm

{Complaint:} The "information" on this site has been thoroughly and repeatedly discredited. The BBC should not include a link as though the Jabs site had some kind of valid contribution to make to scientific debate.
Children are dying because of the low uptake of MMR. This is a direct result of misinformation peddled by the Jabs site and other anti vaccination media.
This is not balance, it is gross irresponsibility.

Dr Schroedinger99

I had a reply (which is always nice even if the reply is full of nonsense):

Dear Mr Schroedinger99,

Many thanks for your message, and interest in the site.

All our coverage of the debate on the safety of MMR for many years now has emphasised that the jab is perfectly safe, and is backed by the medical and scientific establishment.

However, there are still people who remain unconvinced, arguing that there is no conclusive scientific proof, only epidemiological studies.
That is why, until their concerns can be disproved with absolute certainty, we link to the Jabs website. As you say, we are committed to a fair balance.

Kind regards,

Richard Warry
Health editor
BBC News website
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/

I have replied:

Dear Mr Warry

Thank you for your email - which I find rather extraordinary.

I take it then that, although you are the health editor for BBC News website, you do not have a science background?

If you did have such a background, you would be aware that things in science and medicine are never proved or disproved "with absolute certainty". This can only happen in mathematics and logic.

Nobody can "prove with absolute certainty" that the phlogiston theory is false or "disprove with absolute certainty" the theory that measles is caused by demonic possession. Indeed, I am sure there are some websites out there promoting such "theories". Perhaps, in the interests of "fair balance", you should link to them too.

There are limits to the notion of "fair balance" - otherwise whenever you included an item on the "Holocaust" you would also be duty bound to include a link to some nutty neo-Nazi website where the whole thing is dismissed as a hoax; and whenever you had an item on moon exploration, you would have to include an equally preposterous link.

There is not a shred of credible scientific evidence that the MMR vaccine causes autism and (while there may be contexts where it is appropriate for the BBC to link to sites promoting barmy conspiracy theories - such as in news items about barmy conspiracy theories) it is grossly irresponsible of the BBC to present the link to the JABs site alongside a link to an NHS information site as though the two were somehow on a par with one another.

I am extremely disappointed by your response.

Dr Schroedinger99

Not as restrained and polite as I often try to be, but I was in a bad mood when I received the BBC response and my mood then took a turn for the worse.

TEA CUTS RISK OF DIABETES

2009-09-20T07:14:00.000+01:00

From the Daily Express (aka "Tits By Christmas" - though this epithet was coined several Christmases ago and now, I suppose, has to be regarded as undeserved).

This all began when I tweeted on this headline. I had not, at that stage, actually read the article. I had simply walked past a news-stand with my son Max in tow. "Is that really true?" he asked as our eyes fell on the banner headline.

Now I don't think I've ever actually explicitly said to Max "Never believe anything you read in the Daily Express - especially if it's to do with science" (nor would I entirely go along with this bald statement); but I have obviously, unconsciously transmitted this sentiment to him over the years.

I remarked on the fact that Max seemed to be developing a healthy scepticism towards journalism in general and scientific journalism in particular in one of my tweets. Since then several people have kindly re-tweeted my original tweet, but the original context has been lost and I thought it was time I looked at the text below the headline - before the Express lawyers see one of my cropped tweets in a new context and begin libel proceedings against me.

The first thing to note is that the article concerns Type 2 diabetes (which is typically - though not exclusively - a problem for older people and is much more strongly associated with lifestyle factors than Type 1 diabetes). Although Type 2 is far more common that Type 1, it is Type 1 - and its associated treatment regime of insulin injections - which pops into many people's minds when the term "diabetes" is used.

Even if the research reported in the article is "kosher", there is no suggestion here that forcing your kids to drink tea will help protect from developing "insulin dependent diabetes" (as it used to be called) or that drinking tea will help your kids if they already have this condition. The same considerations apply to adults with Type 1 of course, but they can make their own decisions. In either case, I think the article - though it does say that the findings apply to Type 2 diabetes - ought (to be on the safe side) to say explicitly that the findings do not apply to Type 1.

To move on the research itself, there is (and this is, unfortunately, the rule rather than the exception in science articles in newspapers) no link the the original paper(s) or conference proceedings on which this article is based. Looking at what is reported, this was a "study of more than 40,000 people whose consumption was monitored for 10 years". This sounds impressive, but there is no indication of how the 40,000 people were recruited. Further down we read "They got participants to fill in a daily food questionnaire".

There are several potential problems here. Were the original recruits randomly chosen? Haw many of those approached agreed to take part? How many dropped out? How reliable were their recollections of what they had consumed? None of these considerations should be regarded as damning, but (depending on whether and, if so, how they have been addressed - something we are not told) we need to make (and above all report) inferences from research like this with caution.

Another more fundamental problem with research programmes of this kind concerns the direction of the causal relationship. If, as the reported research seems to suggest, there is a correlation between tea drinking and failure to develop Type 2 diabetes, this may be because drinking tea provides protection, or it may be that Type 2 diabetics (or those going on to develop the condition) drink fewer cups of tea. Such issues can, of course, often be settled by further research. But we are not told whether or how the second explanation was excluded. Again, this consideration does not necessarily damn the research in any way, but it does mean that we have to be circumspect in our conclusions.

A few lines further down comes an even more worrying bit: "Dr Carrie Ruxton, of Britain’s Tea Advisory Panel, said". Forget what he said (which was about black versus green tea), why is his opinion being reported here at all? Did the "Tea Advisory Panel" commission or fund this research? Did they bring it to the attention of the Daily Express? No suggestion of impropriety even if they did, but I think we should be told.

The article ends with some perfectly good stuff:

A spokeswoman for campaign group Diabetes UK gave the research a cautious welcome, but stressed there was much more that people could do to prevent developing type 2 diabetes.

She said: “This is interesting research, however it does not prove that coffee and tea protect against type 2 diabetes...It is impossible to know what other factors might affect a person’s risk of developing the condition.

“The best way to prevent it remains keeping active and eating a healthy, balanced diet that is low in fat, salt and sugar with plenty of fruit and vegetables.”
Earlier this week it emerged that drugs to treat type 2 diabetes caused by obesity were costing the NHS £600million a year, the biggest drug bill it faces.

And you can see why "The best way to prevent Type 2 diabetes remains keeping active and eating a healthy, balanced diet that is low in fat, salt and sugar with plenty of fruit and vegetables." would not make a great headline; but "TEA MIGHT HELP CUT RISK OF TYPE 2 DIABETES" is reasonably snappy and would actually reflect the information cited.

I think, on balance, the last word on Daily Express journalism should go to John Cooper Clarke.

More thoughts on Lockerbie, Compassion, and Truth

2009-08-25T09:57:00.000+01:00

I came across a rather thought provoking article directed not at the question of Megrahi's guilt but at the wisdom (or not) of freeing him on compassionate grounds and at the hypocrisy of some of those who criticise this decision.

I tweeted a link to this "interesting" article and a number of fellow tweeters kindly re-tweeted my link. One re-tweeter, however, prefaced her re-tweet with the words: "The right decision". This is not a phrase I should necessarily go along with.

If I thought Megrahi were guilty beyond reasonable doubt of murdering 270 people, I think my feelings about releasing him on "compassionate" grounds would be (at the very least) equivocal - especially given his complete failure to exhibit any remorse or repentance.

The problem is, I am not convinced beyond reasonable doubt that Megrahi is guilty. Nor, I suspect, is Kenny MacAskill or anyone else in the higher echelons of the Scottish or British governments. Even if they are (or at one stage were) the impending second appeal - referred back by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission - must have been concentrating minds.

In a rather silly (for him) article and even sillier follow up comment, Michael White of the Guardian suggests that we should put our trust in the judges (NB not a "conviction by jury" as FBI chief Robert Mueller claims) who originally found Megrahi guilty and that anyone who suggests otherwise is some kind of conspiracy theorist.

In response to Michael White I think it should be pointed out that miscarriages of justice have (historically) been the rule rather than the exception in high profile UK terrorist trials (even going back to the days of the Angry Brigade trials after which one of those convicted said that at least, in his case, "they framed a guilty man") and that the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission do not immediately strike me as being the sort of people who would concoct some kind of "it was all done by the CIA in league with the Martians" scenario.

As this article also argues, it is reasonable to assume that Megrahi was freed in order to avoid an appeal that. at the very least, would have raised serious questions over the Scottish justice system and the Lockerbie inquiry.

I tend to find that what politicians avoid talking about is more instructive than the things they do talk about. It is interesting that there is no mention whatsoever of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission in Kenny MacAskill's statement on Megrahi.

Odd that, is it not?

Lockerbie, Compassion, and Truth

2009-08-23T08:00:00.000+01:00

On 1986 April 15, the USA bombed a number of targets in Libya killing 40 people (including Gaddafi's 15-month-old adopted daughter Hanna) and injuring many (including two of Gaddafi's sons). This attack was in retaliation for terrorists attacks such as the Achille Lauro hijacking of 1985 October 7, the Rome and Vienna airport attacks of 1985 December 27, and the 1986 April 5 bomb attack on a West Berlin disco, "La Belle", that killed two American servicemen and a Turkish woman and wounded 200 others. Libya (it was alleged, though this is denied by Libya) had a hand in each of these outrages (ref).

In 1993 October Margaret Thatcher (the UK prime minister from 1979 to 1990 and thus PM during the events related above) published her memoires: "The Downing Street Years". In this book she indicates her support for the bombing of Libya saying that, following this bombing raid "Libya never again mounted a serious attack on the West". Now this is a rather odd thing to say, because in 1988 December 21, flight Pan Am 103 was blown out of the sky half an hour after take-off by a suitcase-bomb (with - according to the "official" account - a long delay "Mebo" timer) allegedly sent from Malta to Frankfurt to London by Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi. This action resulted in 270 deaths - including that of Jim Swire's eldest daughter, Flora.

When Dr Swire wrote to Margaret Thatcher to ask about this apparent contradiction in her book, he "got a pompous letter back saying she had nothing to add." (ref).

Why has Margaret Thatcher "nothing to add"? The only possible explanation is that she knows something that she is reluctant to talk about.

Since she will not tell us what she knows, we shall have to speculate.

I speculate that she knows that Libya was not behind the Lockerbie attack.

If she knows this, then, I further speculate, so does Gordon Brown.

Let's look at the curious choreography of events: The withdrawal of al-Megrahi's appeal - an appeal that could have continued in spite of al-Megrahi's compassionate release or (alternatively) al-Megrahi's death in custody - followed by al-Megrahi's compassionate release; followed by a deafening silence from Number 10.

Forget "compassion" for someone who supposedly murdered 270 people; forget "oil deals"; the British and Scottish governments (I submit) know al-Megrahi is innocent and they fear that the appeal would have established this - with all the embarrassing consequences that such an outcome would imply. They have chosen the "least-worst" way out.

(Anyone inclined to dismiss all this a some kind of nutty conspiracy theory needs to bear in mind that any skulduggery practised by British and US intelligence was not intended to frame al-Megrahi in a trial that nobody (at the time) thought would ever take place, it was simply intended make Libya look bad. This sort of thing - spreading misinformation for geopolitical ends - goes on all the time. You can read what the chap who played the main role in setting up the al-Megrahi's trail (Robert Black QC) now thinks about the whole thing here: THE LOCKERBIE CASE.)

Should the scientists counter-sue the chiropractors?

2009-08-19T22:32:00.000+01:00

Let's just remind ourselves, the British Chiropractors Association is suing science writer Simon Singh because he wrote that the chiroprators don't have any evidence for many of their "treatments" but go ahead and use them anyway. (read Simon's side of the story here)

The BCA insisted that they did have evidence and went on to publish it. This "evidence" was promptly demolished by various bloggers: (see here for one of the demolition jobs and links to others)

But here's the thing:

Simon Singh also pointed out that chiropractic manipulation is not risk free and may, for example, be a cause of stroke

Worse still, manipulation of the neck can damage the vertebral arteries, which supply blood to the brain. So-called vertebral dissection can ultimately cut off the blood supply, which in turn can lead to a stroke and even death. Because there is usually a delay between the vertebral dissection and the blockage of blood to the brain, the link between chiropractic and strokes went unnoticed for many years. Recently, however, it has been possible to identify cases where spinal manipulation has certainly been the cause of vertebral dissection. (ref)

The BCA did not sue Simon over this, but if you go the the site of the General Chiropractic Council, you find a letter from one of their board members to Dr Miriam Stoppard (who had mentioned this danger in a Daily Mirror article):

There is no evidence that examination or manipulation of the neck causes stroke. Journalists, and a few others, routinely confuse association with cause but as a registered medical practitioner you will be aware of the distinction. (ref)

The bit about confusing association and causality is itself confused. Consistent association between A and B does imply causality - it's just that the causality may be from A to B; from B to A; or from C to both A and B.

Moreover the statement that there is "no evidence" is untrue (see for example: here, here, here, and here - Thanks to @Blue_wode for these!)

Perhaps some pro-chiropractic bloggers might like to demolish these references.

But to come (finally) to the point (and leaving aside the question of who is right and who really has evidence) we have here a strange asymmetry:

Scientist accuses chiropractors of having no evidence and chiropractors sue.
Chiropractor accuses scientist of having no evidence and scientists don't sue.

Perhaps we should ;)

Jack?

At the very least, we should expose their hypocrisy - which I hope I've just done.

How I survived the Aporkalypse

2009-08-16T16:18:00.001+01:00

I could be pretentious and describe this as a "case-study", but it is really more a rambling anecdote and, as "eni fule kno" (apart, of course, from the BCA and other assorted purveyors of woo) anecdotal evidence is not the sort of thing you should base health policy on.

The subject of this blog was suggested by @carmenego and, since I am quite incapable of resisting flattery from attractive young women, here it is:

I can only assume that I picked up the H1N1 virus at Manchester Airport when dropping off my wife and kids. They were bound for three week in Germany with my parents in law. I was bound for three weeks of peace and quite back home and chance to get a few things done – like building a garden wall.

First sign that anything was amiss was a slight sore throat a few days later. A couple of days after that, the sore throat was much much worse and accompanied by fever, headache, coughing on a scale I’ve never previously experienced, and those aches and pains and chills that go though every bone and joint in your body.

I got up to feed the cats and myself every so often, but for five days I could do little more than lie in bed. Couldn’t really enjoy TV (though that could have been to do with the fact that 90% of TV is utter rubbish) or reading or anything. I just didn’t have the concentration.

Of course the same flu can affect different people in different ways: anywhere on a scale from not noticing you have it to being dead. It all depends on your immune status and what else might be wrong with you. I am in my early 50s and, like most men, suffer from hypochondria. I wasn’t always a hypochondriac. When I was young, I thought I was invulnerable; but then I started getting all sorts of nasty things wrong with me and this made me start to worry about things like my health.

One thing I had wrong with me was sarcoidosis. I won’t bore you with the gory details, but sarcoidosis is not great for your lungs and the fact of getting it rather suggests that something is awry with your immune system. So I worry about things like flu and new insults to my lungs.

I went on the internet and checked the list of symptoms. Of course, I had all of them and several more besides. I have an encyclopaedia of "Family Health" on my book shelf. I have the symptoms of everything in it. I am just like Jerome K Jerome in this respect, except that I have house-maid’s knee too. As I said, I’m a hypochondriac – though I never go near a doctor unless forced to by my wife.

Of course I have not been tested for the H1N1 virus, but H1N1 seems to be the only virus currently doing the rounds whose constellation of symptoms matches what I had.

Anyway, if you tick all the right boxes on the website, and fill in your details, they give you a reference number to pick up a supply of antivirals from your nearest distribution centre. They also said I should ring my GP, but certainly not go there. So I rang my wife for instructions. She also said I should contact the GP (I decided against this; what would be the point? In any case you can never get through to my GP) and that I should collect the Tamiflu. Max (aged 14) suggested that I re-sell the Tamilflu on the US eBay site (I hope he was joking). I decided to go and lie down instead. When I woke up I felt much worse and I decided that I needed something to supplement my diet of analgesics and tap water – and the occasional rum toddy.

Now it ought to be easy to kill viruses. It’s easy enough to destroy nucleic acids and that’s (by and large) what viruses are made out of. Trouble is, nucleic acid is also what some rather vital bits of us are made of too. Viruses can only work if they get inside your cells. Once they are inside a cell, that cell is basically buggered, but to move on to another cell, each virus (having made squillions of copies of itself inside the cell) has to build itself a new protein envelope and escape from the dying host cell. One of the ways of trying to stop viruses (none of which work terribly well) is to try to interfere with the process I’ve described. This is what Tamiflu does …… a bit.

So I rang up my "flu buddy" (she didn’t actually know that she was my flu buddy until I rang her up but she very kindly "stepped up to the plate") and sent her off with my reference number, my photo driving licence (swabbed with CD cleaner); and her photo ID to collect my Tamiflu.

My flu buddy "@fiftynotout" came round, posted the Tamiflu through the letterbox, left me a bag of groceries, and painted a black cross on the door. She has been keeping me supplied with groceries all week since she drives out each day with her daughter who is learning to drive. I gather that if you don’t have anyone who can collect the anti-virals for you, you can arrange for somebody from the NHS (or "Death Panel" as Sarah Palin and co would have it) to drop you some off at your home.

(BTW @fiftynotout does not tweet very much. I think she joined because she had a crush on @StephenFry – though I gather she may have transferred her affections to @ProfBrianCox)

Did the Tamiflu work in my case? Impossible to say of course; it’s like the old joke about the man sprinkling elephant powder. But I did get better after taking it: post hoc but not necessarily propter hoc. The first two doses did seem to make me feel very queasy for while, but I did not actually vomit. From the third dose on, I had no problems – they give you ten doses to last five days.

Of course, given that Tamiflu is not terribly effective, can (like any drug) cause side effects (though these seem to be minimal), and will (sooner or later) almost certainly promote the emergence of resistance in the HIN1 virus, there is still an ongoing debate as to the wisdom of mass distribution. On the other hand, H1N1 can be fatal, Tamiflu may already be saving lives, and H1N1 may suddenly mutate a get a lot worse - if we did not have a working distribution system in place we'd be stuffed when this happened. Also, scientist are busy developing a vaccine - which will be very effective in preventing infection. The use of Tamiflu is just a stop-gap.

How bad is swine flu? Well again, I can only report my experience – which may not be yours. Apart from the coughing, I’d say that the acute symptoms get 8/10 – where the worse flu I ever had gets 10/10. The duration of incapacity and general malaise – eight days and counting – and the coughing are, however, much worse than anything I’ve experienced with normal seasonal flu.

Tweeting certainly helps with flu. It provides the vicarious sensation of having lots of people around expressing concern and interacting with you – not to be sneezed at (hah!) when you are stuck at home on your own. Also, though you can’t concentrate (or, in my case, even stay awake) for long enough to read a chapter of a book or watch a TV programme, you can sit up in bed with your laptop for five minutes and fire off the odd flurry of 140 character messages.

Of course I can’t offer medical advice but, I stayed in bed, drank lots of water and took paracetamol (2x500 mg) every eight hours alternated with ibuprofen. (NB Paracetamol is extremely safe if you stick to the correct dosages and extremely dangerous if you don’t!)

In conclusion: Thanks to my family for their frequent concerned phone calls, thanks to the Death Panel of the NHS for supplying me with free anti-viral drugs, thanks to everyone on Twitter who kept my spirits up during this experience, and a really big thank you to @fiftynotout – the best flu buddy anyone could have had.

The rest of you: Keep washing your hands!

One the most ridiculous pieces of "journalism" I have ever come across

2009-08-14T18:03:00.000+01:00

Heroin laced cannabis heading to Brighton streets, police fear
8:53am Thursday 13th August 2009

By Naomi Loomes

Dealers are lacing cannabis with highly addictive heroin to get users hooked on the deadly drug.

Secret off-the-record discussions between police and a supplier in London have revealed how recreational drug users are being tricked into becoming addicted to Class A drugs.

Officers fear it could lead to a surge in addicts in Brighton and Hove, which is already known as the drug death capital of England.

They believe cannabis users are becoming accidentally dragged into heroin use.

It follows the discovery that potent, paranoia-inducing cannabis, known as skunk, was being sold in large quantities in Brighton and Hove last year.

Detective Sergeant Hari McCarthy, of Sussex Police, said: "People buy it thinking it’s just very strong weed."

"It’s not being sold as skunk, just good weed, but it’s an easy way to get users hooked on heroin."

She added that dealers mixed various chemicals with cannabis before selling it, including tranquillisers and even urine.

There are believed to be 2,300 heroin addicts in Brighton and Hove.

The revelation was made during an inquest in Brighton into the death of 34-year-old electrician Lee Donlan from a heroin overdose.

Clinical and forensic toxicologist Peter Sharpe confirmed that taking mixtures of drugs was becoming more and more common in Brighton and Hove, in particular the highly dangerous combination known as speedballing.

He said: “There’s a mixture called speedballing – it’s heroin with a bit of cocaine, usually injected into the arm or ankle.

"People like the mixture of heroin and cocaine because the cocaine reduces the low that comes after the heroin."

Okay, lets take the first claim:

"Dealers are lacing cannabis with highly addictive heroin to get users hooked on the deadly drug" - an urban myth that I can remember doing the rounds as far back as the early 1970s.

Let's think this one through: I am a cannabis dealer (I'm not BTW, I'm just pursuing a thought experiment). I start somehow mixing heroin (usually a brown powder) with my cannabis (a brown or black resin or - more likely these days - a green herbal substance). I do this in such a way that my customers don't notice the extra brown powder. Because heroin is quite expensive in relation to the profit I normally make on my cannabis and because I am not telling my customers about the heroin and therefore can't charge for it, I am now selling my cannabis at a loss .... but I have a cunning plan. Providing my customers don't notice that the cannabis I'm selling them has a completely different effect from normal cannabis and keep coming back to me to buy their cannabis for several months, I shall, one day be able to say to them: "Ha! I've been giving you heroin all these months and now you are addicted so you will have to keep buying heroin from me now." Okay, they had been regular customers in order for me to get this far, but this will absolutely ensure their continued customer loyalty .. unless, of course, they beat me to a pulp with my bong and go and buy their heroin elsewhere.

I'm sorry, but this is complete and utter nonsense.

Second claim (part of the first one in fact): "heroin is a deadly drug" - at least I assume this is what the author intended to imply. The claim is worded as though she believes that cannabis is the deadly drug.

Heroin causes constipation. That's about it. It's addictive and street heroin (cf the legal kind that addicts could get if we did not have such crazy drug laws) is full of crap. I suppose that the point being made here is that you can overdose on heroin, but, again, much of the problem here arises from the fact that heroin is traded on the black market and there are therefore no controls on strength and purity. Heroin is certainly not a deadly drug in the sense that tobacco is.

I'm not suggesting anyone takes heroin by the way. It's much better to do something worthwhile with your life.

Third claim: "Dealers mix various chemicals with cannabis before selling it, including tranquillisers and even urine"

Tranquillizers usually come as white pills these days. They are far less readily available than they used to be since it was discovered that they can lead to addiction. They are sold on the black (or "grey" - as it is sometimes called) market in their own right as recreational drugs. But, according to this article, some dealers are crushing them up and mixing the resulting white powder with cannabis. I'm not sure what effect the cannabis smokers (who are presumably too stoned to notice the white powder) are supposed to derive from inhaling the smoke from burning valium and lactose, but I can't imagine it's a very peasant effect.

And as for urine.....

So the dealer urinates over his cannabis supply - which he then has to dry out again. To what end? To increase the weight of the weed with a few milligrams of urea? I think I'd just reach for the oregano and sprinkle a bit of that in.

Claim three: "People like the mixture of heroin and cocaine because the cocaine reduces the low that comes after the heroin."

The effects of heroin wear off after several hours. The effects of cocaine start wearing off after about twenty minutes. Hard to imagine cocaine injected at the same time as heroin would help much with any come-down after the heroin wore off.

The rest of the article (which I've not reproduced) goes on to list the names of various people who have died from drug overdoses and includes some confused nonsense about dosages. The correct information is that the LD50 for heroin is between 1 and 5 mg/kg of body weight.

I suppose that there is an argument that, because we all wish to see (especially young people) taking as few drugs as possible and suffering as little harm as possible, it's perfectly okay to write complete nonsense about drugs. Anything that puts people off! But this argument only holds water if we assume that everyone is as stupid as the author of this article. In fact, most young people will read this sort of thing, and fall about laughing. While this would be the most appropriate response in this case, there is always the danger that other articles on the dangers of drugs (written by people who actually know what they are talking about) will elicit a similar response.

There is growing evidence that cannabis in general (and skunk in particular) may have long term deleterious effect on young people whose brains are still developing. (By the way, the problem with skunk is not really its strength - high strength, leads to less being smoked and therefore less lung damage - but the particular balance of psychoactive compounds it contains; though more research is required on this.)

How on earth are we going to get this genuine science across to young people who have grown up on the diet of tripe provided by newspapers like the Brighton & Hove Argus?

Harry Patch, War, and Human Nature

2009-08-08T22:10:00.000+01:00

I caught part of "Any Answers" today (2009-08-08) on Radio 4. They were discussing Harry Patch’s misgivings about war – something which had presumably been discussed in the antecedent edition of "Any Questions" which I did not hear.

The first caller opined that the propensity to engage in war was a fundamental part of human nature and that the hope for a future without war was futile. Other callers took the view that human nature was not like this at all.

I think the first caller, rather than the others, was actually correct (at least partially) in his analysis of human nature; but I think his conclusion was false. I think he was making an mistake analogous to one of the mistakes people make when discussing Richard Dawkin’s "selfish gene".

The warlike disposition of groups of hunter-gathers (ancient and modern) is discussed by (inter alia) Stephen Pinker in his excellent book The Blank Slate. I do not agree with every thing Pinker says in this book and I think that he somewhat overstates his case when it comes to his forthright rejection of the notion of the notion of the "noble savage". Nevertheless, I think that Pinker is probably right in concluding that humans almost certainly do have an innate disposition to declare "We are tribe X; tribe Y are over there and they are not tribe X; let’s go and kick the shit out of them all".

Variations on this theme have played out throughout human history and we see examples of this disposition even in modern times: in Rwanda; in the behaviour of the (Gentile) German population during Kristallnacht; in Northern Ireland; in the behaviour of football hooligans; and in many other situations.

The good news is that humans are also capable of deciding that, actually, the members of tribe X are members of “our” tribe after all; and the communication age has made this easier then ever. Of course we still have vile organizations like the BNP, but most British people today cry as many tears over the TV picture of a dying child, with a different skin colour, on the other side of the world as they do over the TV picture of a dying child, with the same skin colour, in the next county.

It is these considerations (and others) the make the segregation of school children along religious lines so utterly pernicious.

Anyway, back to Harry Patch. Does our innate warlike nature (assuming this is our nature) make war inevitable? Let’s take a recent example: the Iraq War. Did the Brits all work themselves up into frenzy and decide: "Let’s go off and kill the Iraqis, they’re not a bit like us."? Urm, "No!". That’s not how it happened. Tony Blair decided to go to war. Okay, he had the support of the Cabinet, but (so far as one could tell) not one single Cabinet member really thought it was a good idea. Tony Blair then got the support of Parliament but, again, one had the impression that most MPs were thinking about their careers rather than baying for Iraqi blood.

Did Tony then lead his tribe into battle with the other tribe? No; he stayed safely at home and made vacuous speeches on TV.

Did the troops behave like a bunch of hunter gatherers intent on murder and mayhem in the enemy "tribe’s" camp? Well actually, in one or two cases, they may have done. But these really were isolated incidents. Bay and large, they went off to war because they had been ordered to do so and were not driven by a sense of hatred towards the Iraqi people or by a sense that the Iraqis were "other" and therefore worthless.

We could say the same (concerning the gap between the decision makers and the people going off to do the actually fighting) about almost any large scale modern conflict.

In other words, while it may well be true that humans organized in small groups of hunter gatherers - which have little contact with other groups – are genetically predisposed (because of the way we evolved) to violence in certain circumstances; the notion that the genesis of modern wars is somehow an expression of that propensity is highly questionable.

It is rather like the wrong-headed argument that because genes are (metaphorically) selfish and because human behaviour is (to a large extent) determined by our genetic make-up, humans must be innately selfish.

There are lots of reasons why "selfish" genes lead to altruistic behaviour in humans and there are many reasons why an innate propensity for violence toward "the other" in individual humans does not lead inevitably towards war between nation states.

Perhaps Harry Patch’s vision of a future without war will one day be realized.

Let us hope so.

Using Paypal: A cautionary tale

2009-08-03T11:26:00.000+01:00

Executive summary:

1) Paypal is a convenient way of transferring money to people who are not set up to receive credit card payments (eg eBay sellers).

2) Paypal purports to be “safer than using your credit card, but this is highly misleading. For payments over £100 you are protected if you use your credit card by something called “Section 75”. You lose this protection if you pay using Paypal – even if your Paypal account draws from your credit card account. (Paypal does offer some protection on purchases within ebay however).

3) Paypal have poor customer service, are not interested in discussing questions about whether their sellers may be engaged in fraudulent activity, and may unilaterally close a dispute thereby preventing further buyer communication with Paypal or the seller complained about.

4) Paypal state that they do not “tolerate fraud or illegal activities”. Judging by my experience, this claim would appear to be untrue.

Our story:

My wife and daughter bought two pairs (a pair each) of “UGG” boots from http://www.australia-ugg-boots.com/ and paid using Paypal. The domain “australia-ugg-boots.com” is registered in Australia:

Whois Record
Registrant:
Jackie Beament
PO Box 3950
Joondalup, Western Australia 6027
Australia

Domain Name: AUSTRALIA-UGG-BOOTS.COM
Created on: 28-Feb-09
Expires on: 28-Feb-10
Last Updated on: 01-Mar-09

Administrative Contact:
Beament, Jackie
PO Box 3950
Joondalup, Western Australia 6027
Australia
894048411 Fax --

Technical Contact:
Beament, Jackie
PO Box 3950
Joondalup, Western Australia 6027
Australia
894048411 Fax --

Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.AUSTRALIA-UGG-BOOTS.COM
NS2.AUSTRALIA-UGG-BOOTS.COM

And the site makes the following claim:

Australia-Ugg-Boots.com is a family business manufacturing ugg boots here in our home town Melbourne, Australia since 2007. We manufacture high quality sheepskin footwear made from first grade double faced Australian Sheepskin. Australia-Ugg-Boots.com has been successfully wholesaling and retailing to many satisfied customers within Australia and Overseas. Our website was established in 2007 successfully providing customers all over the world with our great product, cheap prices and fast, reliable, friendly customer service.

A complication here (it should perhaps be noted) is that "UGG" is not a protected trade mark in Australia, but it is in the UK and other countries outside Australia.

When we received the boots (we did receive them) the parcel came not from Melbourne but from Shanghai. The boots were perfectly well made, but clearly counterfeit (with counterfeited "UGG" "trademarks" all over them) and lined with synthetic fur rather than sheepskin. The main problem, however, was that both pairs were each a couple of sizes smaller than ordered and than stated on the sewn in labels. Apparently this is one of the features of counterfeit UGG boots – quite why these firms can fake the boots so expertly and yet fail to size them correctly is, to say the least, puzzling. As we have real UGG boots at home we are able to compare like with not-like.

So we raised a dispute on Paypal.

AUSTRALIA-UGG-BOOTS (of China) got straight back and said we could return the boots and get a full refund. Trouble is that this costs rather a lot of money and they take no responsibility if goods are "lost in the post". The Royal Mail will only cover you up to £39 – unless you pay them shed-loads of money first.
Forgive my cynicism and scepticism, but I do not have a great deal of confidence that, if I sent these boots back to Shanghai, I would ever see my boots or my £130 again.

On to Paypal, the "safer" alternative to using your credit card.

It would by an understatement to say that Paypal have been unhelpful. They simply refused to help and then closed the case without consulting me further. This means that I can no longer communicate with them or the seller about this case. More worryingly, Paypal are (it would appear) continuing to trade with this company (which would certainly seem to be committing offences under UK law) and refusing to warn other potential buyers about the pitfalls of buying from the website in question.

As our experience illustrates, the fact that Paypal accepts a seller onto its books is no guarantee (or even indication) that that company is "kosher". In fact, the fact that a company only accepts Paypal and does not accept direct credit card payments may well be an indication that further scrutiny of that company is required before buying from it.

If you make payments over £100 using your credit card– even to companies in China – you enjoy buyer protection. If you use Paypal you lose that protection – it is not "safer" at all.

I shall, in future, use Paypal (if at all) only as a means of last resort to pay for goods and services and I suggest anyone reading this does the same.

My response to a pro chiropractic response to Simon Singh's article

2009-07-31T09:46:00.000+01:00

A critique of Simon's article by Richard Lanigan can be found at: chiropracticlive.

I address some of the points Richard Lanigan makes below:

Beware the spinal trap
by Simon Singh

Simon: This is Chiropractic Awareness Week. So let’s be aware. How about some awareness that may prevent harm and help you make truly informed choices? First, you might be surprised to know that the founder of chiropractic therapy, Daniel David Palmer, wrote that, “99% of all diseases are caused by displaced vertebrae”. In the 1860s, Palmer began to develop his theory that the spine was involved in almost every illness because the spinal cord connects the brain to the rest of the body. Therefore any misalignment could cause a problem in distant parts of the body.

Richard: If I was going to criticise a health care profession, I would say it was important to have all my facts and provide accurate information. DD Palmer was 15 in 1860, worked as a teacher in the mid 1860s, worked as a bee keeper and small famer in the early 70s. The first mention of DD Palmers involvement in “healing” was in 1885 when he became a magnetic healer. It would seem he was in fact developing “developing his theories” in the 1880s rather 1860s, I suspect Simon Singh has confused DD with Andrew Still who founded Osteopathy and was developing his theories about manipulation in the 1860s.

DD Palmer's hypothesis was that interfering with nerve function would affect optimal well-being, he explained his theory around “displaced vertbrae”. Palmer’s understanding of the effects of spinal manipulation should be viewed in its time (the late 19th century) when surgery had a mortality rate of 76%. I know of no 21st century chiropractor who would explain chiropractic as Palmer did, or a surgeon who would operate in his street clothes without a mask. To define chiropractic along these lines is like defining medicine the way Harold Shipman practised.

In fact, Palmer’s first chiropractic intervention supposedly cured a man who had been profoundly deaf for 17 years. His second treatment was equally strange, because he claimed that he treated a patient with heart trouble by correcting a displaced vertebra.

Stranger things have happened. Here we have a news report in 2008 stating a chiropractor restored a mans [sic] sight. I think its fair to say if Palmer had observed Harvey Lillard getting his hearing back he may have thought that he had discover the holy grail of healing. Look at the competition at the time 1895??

Me: Daniel David Palmer was born in 1845 (according to Wikipedia at least) so Richard my be right here and Simon may be wrong. On the other hand, the BCA is not suing Simon for getting his date wrong so I'm not sure how relevant this is. [By the way, "magnetic healing" had nothing to do with magnets and was rather a cross between massage and meridian therapies (according to this source; so Richard's suggestion that Palmer was thinking about magnets rather than manipulation at this stage is misleading.)

As for anecdotal claims that sight or hearing was restored in particular individuals by chiropractic, there is a even a name for this kind of fallacy: The "post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy."

Simon: You might think that modern chiropractors restrict themselves to treating back problems, but in fact they still possess some quite wacky ideas. The fundamentalists argue that they can cure anything. And even the more moderate chiropractors have ideas above their station. The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying.

Richard: Whether sceptics want to believe it or not, I have helped children with all these problems. Lets look at “Ear infections” and I will try not to let my “ideas rise above my station”. For many years ear problems have been misdiagnosed by medics and treated ineffectively with grommets and antibiotics.

So what is a clinician to do. Angela Peel White my anatomy tutor at The Anglo European College of Chiropractic was a qualified GP. I never held it against her because she was a brilliant tutor. She told us know the anatomy of the region you are examining. If you look at the inner ear it has “drain” called the eustachian tube. Its narrower at the top, children with small little necks have only a small gradient and the tube does not drain very well. The blockage causes pain due to the discrepancy of the air pressure outside the ear drum and inside. This can also be a problem for inexperienced divers. Who are not able to “equalise” ear pressure as they decent in water.

The biological explanation as to why “manipulation” could help a child with otis media is very similar to how experienced divers equalise when the eustachian tubes are blocked and unable to relieve the pressure on the inner ear as they descend in the water. They crack their TMJ as if blowing rings smoking dope (I am a child of the 60s), this helps open the eustachian tube and equalise the pressure on the ear drum.

There is also a neurological explanation, I will spare the details suffice to say when Professor Ernst or chiropractic sceptics say there is “no biological reason why spinal manipulation should with help ear Infections” the anatomy shows clearly they are talking through their collective arses.

I have four children, young children cannot crack their jaw themselves, the adjustment requires skill and practise, not all chiropractors can do it and that’s a problem when chiropractors enter these clinical trials. I am not an academic, I am just a clinician.

Me: Not quite sure how to respond to this. Yes, "cracking" your jaw can (temporarily) relieve pressure in your inner ear. There are other ways of doing this, and I am not qualified to say whether jaw cracking is the most appropriate strategy for children, but what has this got to do with neurology? Also, what has Richard's claim that he can crack kids' jaws, and some chiropractors can't, got to do with anything? Any sensibly designed clinical trial would address such considerations.

Richard: Then Simon continues to the bit that upset the BCA

Simon: ……..even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments.

Richard: First I would question whether the BCA leadership is the respectable face of chiropractic. No One would dispute that the “scientific evidence” is weak for these conditions, which account for a very small part of my practice 5% and I probably see more children than most chiropractors. However if we look at Professor Ernsts own “Hierarchy of Evidence” at the bottom there are “case reports” and “observational studies”. Yes the chiropractic evidence is at the bottom of Ernsts pyramid however “not a jot of evidence” would only be accurate statement if Professor Ernst were to remove the bottom of his pyramid. In addition anyone with a limited knowledge of the politics of the chiropractic profession would know that the BCA leadership with rather stick to musculoskeletal pain syndromes and probably puts childhood disorders on their website to prevent more members from leaving the association. If Simon had directed those comments at the UCA or the McTimoney association the BCA leadership would have been leading the applause.

Me: Here we start to get to the heart of the matter. What Richard omits here is the consideration that real medicine is expected to move up the pyramid of evidence.

If a treatment or observation about a certain existing treatment or lifestyle is novel then “case reports” and “observational studies” do constitute a jot of evidence. If, after a hundred years plus of chiropractic, we still only have “case reports” and “observational studies” as evidence and nothing at higher levels in the pyramid (thinking here of the conditions over which Simon is being sued) then it is perfectly reasonable comment for Simon to say that there is not a jot of evidence.

There is, after all, some annecdotal evidence for almost every nutty thing that can be thought of. Are we to conclude that the phrase "not a jot of evidence for X" be banished from the language?

Simon: I can confidently label these treatments as bogus because I have co-authored a book about alternative medicine with the world’s first professor of complementary medicine, Edzard Ernst.

Richard: What does that prove? Margaret Thatcher was the first women prime minister we can only pray the second one is better. The chapter on chiropractic in “Trick or Treatment” has only three chiropractic references all by the co-author Professor Ernst which should have set alarm bells ringing in a science journalist with a PhD. To pad out the chiropractic chapter they finish it talking about homeopaths and vaccines. I told Simon I did not believe he had written that chapter and it was all Ernsts [sic] work but he says he did write it.

Me: The fact that Simon has written a book proves nothing, it does, however, suggest that Simon has researched the matter thoroughly and that (given that we know that Simon is a highly respected science journalist) his views and claims are worth investigating.

Simon: Ernst learned chiropractic techniques himself and used them as a doctor.

Richard: I can carve a joint, this does that make me a surgeon? Chiropractors spend five years learning to adjust spinal joints. Simon has not visited the Anglo European College of Chiropractic to see how chiropractors develop their skills and Guardian readers are expected to believe professor Ernst thought himself these “chiropractic techniques” over a few weekends and it would appear he was not very good at it, many failed practitioners end up in academia.

Me: The fact that Edzard Ernst learned chiropractic techniques is interesting background information. As, I suppose, Richard indirectly implies, this is of little ultimate relevance to the question as to whether what Ernst says about the generally efficacy of chiropractic is true.

Simon: This is when he began to see the need for some critical evaluation. Among other projects, he examined the evidence from 70 trials exploring the benefits of chiropractic therapy in conditions unrelated to the back. He found no evidence to suggest that chiropractors could treat any such conditions.

But what about chiropractic in the context of treating back problems? Manipulating the spine can cure some problems, but results are mixed. To be fair, conventional approaches, such as physiotherapy, also struggle to treat back problems with any consistency. Nevertheless, conventional therapy is still preferable because of the serious dangers associated with chiropractic.

In 2001, a systematic review of five studies revealed that roughly half of all chiropractic patients experience temporary adverse effects, such as pain, numbness, stiffness, dizziness and headaches. These are relatively minor effects, but the frequency is very high, and this has to be weighed against the limited benefit offered by chiropractors.

Richard: Arthritis is a chronic condition suffered by millions of British people often it has developed because it was not managed properly when it was just a small ache ( Pain killers and anti inflammatory medication to mask a mechanical problem). In May, the National Institute for Clinical Excellence in the UK published its guidelines for the management of Low back pain http://guidance.nice.org.uk/CG88 . What was extraordinary about these guidelines is that they were stating that doctors should no longer offer; Spinal injections, Traction, Lumbar Supports, Ultrasound, Interferential, Laser and should consider a course of spinal manipulation by a chiropractor or an osteopath or acupuncture instead.

In effect NICE is stating that the orthodox methods for treating back pain has not worked and the evidence is suggesting that it would be cost effective for the NHS to pay for complementary treatments like chiropractic and acupuncture in the future.

Me: First of all we are back to back pain here - not the subject of the libel action or of Simon's more derogatory statements concerning chiropractic. Moreover, the argument used here: "There is growing evidence that many accepted medical treatments for chronic back pain don't really work therefore we should replace them with treatments for which there is no real evidence at all" does not really hold a lot of water - even if some people at NICE are using this argument too.

To those who say that there is real evidence, I say: "show me it" - a test which the BCA have spectacularly failed (again talking of the claims which are the subject of their libel action against Simon.

Simon: More worryingly, the hallmark technique of the chiropractor, known as high-velocity, low-amplitude thrust, carries much more significant risks. This involves pushing joints beyond their natural range of motion by applying a short, sharp force. Although this is a safe procedure for most patients, others can suffer dislocations and fractures.

Worse still, manipulation of the neck can damage the vertebral arteries, which supply blood to the brain. So-called vertebral dissection can ultimately cut off the blood supply, which in turn can lead to a stroke and even death. Because there is usually a delay between the vertebral dissection and the blockage of blood to the brain, the link between chiropractic and strokes went unnoticed for many years. Recently, however, it has been possible to identify cases where spinal manipulation has certainly been the cause of vertebral dissection.

Laurie Mathiason was a 20-year-old Canadian waitress who visited a chiropractor 21 times between 1997 and 1998 to relieve her low-back pain. On her penultimate visit she complained of stiffness in her neck. That evening she began dropping plates at the restaurant, so she returned to the chiropractor. As the chiropractor manipulated her neck, Mathiason began to cry, her eyes started to roll, she foamed at the mouth and her body began to convulse. She was rushed to hospital, slipped into a coma and died three days later. At the inquest, the coroner declared: “Laurie died of a ruptured vertebral artery, which occurred in association with a chiropractic manipulation of the neck.

This case is not unique. In Canada alone there have been several other women who have died after receiving chiropractic therapy, and Professor Ernst has identified about 700 cases of serious complications among the medical literature. This should be a major concern for health officials, particularly as under-reporting will mean that the actual number of cases is much higher.

Bearing all of this in mind, I will leave you with one message for Chiropractic Awareness Week – if spinal manipulation were a drug with such serious adverse effects and so little demonstrable benefit, then it would almost certainly have been taken off the market.

Richard: Which drugs, Viox, Celebrex, statins etc,etc. In 1998 Lazarou et al estimated that 106,000 people die each year from adverse reactions to prescribed medications. Thats [sic] the equivalent of a jumbo jet crash every 2 days and no public enquiry? Professor Ernst has spent the last ten years trying to convince the British and Irish public that chiropractic is more dangerous than medicine.

The tragic story of Laurie Mathiason who suffered a stroke ten years ago while receiving chiropractic treatment in Canada is not convincing “evidence” that chiropractic is dangerous. Every five minutes someone in England will have a stroke(National Audit Office), there are no epidemiological studies that would even hint that this finding has anything to do with chiropractic, yet Professor Ernst goes on repeating his opinion.

I have practised in the same area for almost fifteen years, I adjust the cervical spine of the vast majority of my patients and I don not recognise the “dangerous” practise Simon describes. I have never had a complaint or hurt anyone, occasionally a patient feels worse after the first visit, but thats about it. If patients were having strokes surely I would have heard something and the fact Ernst wont let poor Laurie Mathiason rest in peace because he needs this anecdote to bases the theory on which has created his media profile, dont kid youselfs Professor Ernst is not well known for his research he has become the Jordan of the EBM community, I wonder what David Sackett makes of Ernsts evidence base? The inconsistencies in these arguments by the sceptics are staggering, something happens after a vaccine and its coincidence, anything happens after a chiropractic adjustment and its the chiropractors fault. For a small profession we must be good at hiding our bodies, perhaps thats [sic] where Harold Shipman learned how to kill his patients without anyone noticing.

Me: All medical interventions (both conventional and so called "alternative") have potential risks and benefits. That's why we need to base medical interventions on real evidence. Real evidence is collected when researcher's move up the evidence pyramid cited above. The notion that we can have one kind of evidence to conventional medicine and another "alternative" kind of evidence for "alternative" medicine is simply nonsense.

The real difference between science and woo (in all it's forms) is not that science is all true and woo is all bollocks; the real difference is that (true) scientists (of course individual scientists can be just as irrational as anyone else) constantly revise their ideas and practices in the light of the ever growing body of evidence.

When they found out that Shipman had killed lots of people, the medical profession investigated the evidence that the case provided, concluded that administrative practices had been woefully inadequate, and changed their administrative practices to try and prevent this happening again in the future. Similarly, when the medical profession discovered that Cox-2 inhibitors had an unacceptably high risk for the (far from insubstantial) benefit they were providing, the medical profession changed their practice and stopped prescribing these drugs.

Where are the clinical studies documenting the risks and benefits of chiropractic for infant colic? where are the stories of the chiropractic "profession" changing its treatment of infant colic in response to such clinic studies? Chiropractic just doesn't work like that.

There is some evidence that (non-cracking) massage and manipulation provided by an osteopath, chiropractor, or physiotherapist might help a bit with back pains and aching joints. All the rest is woo!

Simon Singh: Beware the Spinal Trap

2009-07-29T07:41:00.000+01:00

Edited version (the "libellous" bit about chiropractic being "bogus" has been removed)of the Simon Singh 2008 Guardian article for which Simon is being personally sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association (please re-blog):

BEWARE THE SPINAL TRAP

Some practitioners claim it is a cure-all, but the research suggests chiropractic therapy has mixed results – and can even be lethal, says Simon Singh.

You might be surprised to know that the founder of chiropractic therapy, Daniel David Palmer, wrote that “99% of all diseases are caused by displaced vertebrae”. In the 1860s, Palmer began to develop his theory that the spine was involved in almost every illness because the spinal cord connects the brain to the rest of the body. Therefore any misalignment could cause a problem in distant parts of the body.

In fact, Palmer’s first chiropractic intervention supposedly cured a man who had been profoundly deaf for 17 years. His second treatment was equally strange, because he claimed that he treated a patient with heart trouble by correcting a displaced vertebra.

You might think that modern chiropractors restrict themselves to treating back problems, but in fact some still possess quite wacky ideas. The fundamentalists argue that they can cure anything, including helping treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying – even though there is not a jot of evidence.

I can confidently label these assertions as utter nonsense because I have co-authored a book about alternative medicine with the world’s first professor of complementary medicine, Edzard Ernst. He learned chiropractic techniques himself and used them as a doctor. This is when he began to see the need for some critical evaluation. Among other projects, he examined the evidence from 70 trials exploring the benefits of chiropractic therapy in conditions unrelated to the back. He found no evidence to suggest that chiropractors could treat any such conditions.

But what about chiropractic in the context of treating back problems? Manipulating the spine can cure some problems, but results are mixed. To be fair, conventional approaches, such as physiotherapy, also struggle to treat back problems with any consistency. Nevertheless, conventional therapy is still preferable because of the serious dangers associated with chiropractic.

In 2001, a systematic review of five studies revealed that roughly half of all chiropractic patients experience temporary adverse effects, such as pain, numbness, stiffness, dizziness and headaches. These are relatively minor effects, but the frequency is very high, and this has to be weighed against the limited benefit offered by chiropractors.

More worryingly, the hallmark technique of the chiropractor, known as high-velocity, low-amplitude thrust, carries much more significant risks. This involves pushing joints beyond their natural range of motion by applying a short, sharp force. Although this is a safe procedure for most patients, others can suffer dislocations and fractures.

Worse still, manipulation of the neck can damage the vertebral arteries, which supply blood to the brain. So-called vertebral dissection can ultimately cut off the blood supply, which in turn can lead to a stroke and even death. Because there is usually a delay between the vertebral dissection and the blockage of blood to the brain, the link between chiropractic and strokes went unnoticed for many years. Recently, however, it has been possible to identify cases where spinal manipulation has certainly been the cause of vertebral dissection.

Laurie Mathiason was a 20-year-old Canadian waitress who visited a chiropractor 21 times between 1997 and 1998 to relieve her low-back pain. On her penultimate visit she complained of stiffness in her neck. That evening she began dropping plates at the restaurant, so she returned to the chiropractor. As the chiropractor manipulated her neck, Mathiason began to cry, her eyes started to roll, she foamed at the mouth and her body began to convulse. She was rushed to hospital, slipped into a coma and died three days later. At the inquest, the coroner declared: “Laurie died of a ruptured vertebral artery, which occurred in association with a chiropractic manipulation of the neck.”

This case is not unique. In Canada alone there have been several other women who have died after receiving chiropractic therapy, and Edzard Ernst has identified about 700 cases of serious complications among the medical literature. This should be a major concern for health officials, particularly as under-reporting will mean that the actual number of cases is much higher.

If spinal manipulation were a drug with such serious adverse effects and so little demonstrable benefit, then it would almost certainly have been taken off the market.

Simon Singh is a science writer in London and the co-author, with Edzard Ernst, of Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial.

Woo in the Telegraph - a response (of sorts)

2009-06-24T12:14:00.000+01:00

24 June 2009

Dear Dr [Schroedinger99],

I am writing in response to your email concerning Annabel Croft article, which appeared in the Telegraph.

Your comments have been passed on to our editorial team for their future reference on this topic and I would like to thank you for taking the time and trouble to write to us on this matter. We value your readership and appreciate our readers' comments.

I hope you shall continue to enjoy The Daily Telegraph.

Yours sincerely,

Andy King

hmmm........

Well, let's just say that if I ever hear that someone has died because he/she relied on ingredient-free homoeopathic remedies rather than seeking the medical intervention he/she required, I shall remind Andy King of this email.

Woo in the Telegraph

2009-06-22T09:25:00.000+01:00

Someone may die after reading this tosh!

Article about treating ovarian cysts with magic water

Sir
It is grossly irresponsible of the Telegraph to publish an article like this without any accompanying opinion from a genuine health professional.
If people choose to “treat” their hay-fever using “homeopathic medicines” (i.e. “medicines” with no ingredients) that’s fine by me. If people choose to treat their ovarian cysts using “homeopathic medicines”, they could die.
Yours faithfully
Dr Schroedinger99

Footnote to anyone reading this who might be inclined to believe that there is something in homoeopathy:

Let’s take one of the remedies mentioned: Nux Vomica. This is an extract from the Strychnos Nux Vomica tree which contains a number of highly poisonous alkaloids – none of which, to my knowledge, have any useful role in the treatment of hangovers. Fortunately for Annabel Croft, homoeopaths do not supply this extract in its pure form. They dilute it first. They really really dilute it:

As you will find if you follow the http://www.healthroughhomeopathy.com/ link for this article: “Over the counter remedies tend to come in 6c and 30c potencies. A solution labelled as '6c' has been diluted six times at a ratio of one part substance to 99 parts alcohol and water, whereas a solution labelled as '30c' has been diluted 30 times at a ratio of one part substance to 99 parts alcohol and water. 6c potency is typically used for long standing conditions, such as rheumatic pain. 30c potency is typically used for first aid or acute situations, such as the onset of a cold or bruising after a knock or fall.”

What this means is that homeopathic Nux Vomica with a potency of 6c has one part Nux Vomica to 100 to the power 6 parts alcohol and water – eg 1 ml Nux Vomica in 1000000000000 ml of alcohol and water; homeopathic Nux Vomica with a potency of 30c has one part Nux Vomica to 100 to the power 30 parts alcohol and water – eg 1 ml Nux Vomica in 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 ml of alcohol and water (which won’t even display on my calculator).

(I hope I've got these figures right, but, hey, I could be out by several million and still make the same point)

This alcohol and water is sprinkled onto pillules (typically containing lactose) and these are then dried – ie the alcohol and water is allowed to evaporate. The pillules can then “be dissolved in warm water” (I am not making this up) which the patient can (presumably) either drink or dilute 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 times and begin the whole process again.

Anyone who believes that these remedies could possibly have any effect is, IMHO, in serious need of clinical help.

I suppose, to be fair, I should at least consider the possibility of "water memory":

It has been suggested that one way to explain the alleged efficacy of homoeopathic remedies may be that water somehow "remembers" what used to be in it. There is, in should be noted, no scientific evidence for such a mechanism or for the efficacy of homoeopathic remedies, but I think it is also worth pointing out that the notion of "water memory" is inherently implausible.

For example:

* The tap waster we all drink has had all sorts of things removed from it and would be extremely hazardous if it "remembered" those constituents in the sense suggested by homoeopathy.

* There are (I suppose) chemicals that "remember" other chemicals (in a certain sense) like antibodies; but injecting someone with rabies antibodies will not produce a similar effect to injecting someone with rabies antigens.

* Even if we allowed water to "remember" what had been in it, how are we to explain the transfer of that memory to pills (which may be made of lactose or calcium carbonate or almost anything and which have lost all the water put on them to evaporation) and from the pills back to water?

Who would you rather have move in next door to you?

2009-06-08T14:45:00.000+01:00

Sir Trevor McDonald OBE Newsreader & TV presenter

Freema Agyeman BA Actor

Dr Simon Singh Science jounalist & author

Shami Chakrabarti CBE Lawyer & Director of "Liberty"

Stephen Fry BA Jewish homosexual TV presenter, actor & author

Konnie Huq BA “Relaxed Muslim” TV Presenter

Nick Griffin Fat white bog-eyed racist bigot, Holocaust denier & leader of the BNP

Shami Chakrabarti in Bradford

2009-06-07T08:04:00.000+01:00

My wife I took my teenage daughter to see Shami Chakrabarti of "Liberty" (formerly the National Council for Civil Liberties) speak at Bradford University last week (2009 June 03).

It was, in many ways, a wonderful experience. The "Great Hall" at Bradford was full to bursting, and it was nice to see that so many people were prepared to drag themselves away from things like Big Brother and Britain's Got Talent (not to mention their computers) to simply listen to someone speak in a hall. Shami was eloquent, entertaining, and self assured. A superb role model for my daughter.

Shami spoke movingly about the battles fought and won over the years, and the battles (e.g. on "rendition" and torture) still playing out today. She reminded us that the European Court of Human rights is not some kind of arm of Brussels's EU bureaucracy that forces us to eat straight bananas (as the Daily Mail might have it) it is the result of a process began, after the horrors of World War II, by Winston Churchill's brain child: The Council of Europe. Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe (who oversaw the drafting of Convention and whose moniker hardly conjures up an image of Johnny Foreigner) said at the time that it was designed to incorporate a traditional civil liberties approach to securing "effective political democracy", from the strongest traditions in the United Kingdom, France and other member states of Europe.

But then Shami said a few words about religion .......

First of all she contrasted states where a single compulsory state religion that permeates all aspects of life (citing Afghanistan under the Taliban and England under the Tudors as examples) with states where religion was more or less outlawed (the French Republic and Soviet Russia) and indicated that her position lay somewhere between these extremes. Fair enough! Shami then went on to suggest that (Professor) Richard Dawkins (who she insisted on referring to as "Mr Dawkins") was an advocate of the Soviet approach to religion and that he denied the contribution of religion to art, culture, and music. This is quite simply false in every respect and a gross calumny against Richard Dawkins.

Shami went on to provide an example of how Liberty had helped forge a righteous path between these two extremes by (for example) championing the case of Sarika Watkins-Singh who wished to wear her kara (Sikh bracelet) to school that had rules against the wearing of any jewellery.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not generally against people wearing karas or crosses round their necks or any other symbols and I don't really understand why the school thought it necessary to ban jewellery - other than (perhaps) in the laboratories and on the playing fields - but the judgement in this case (endorsed by Liberty) seems just plain barmy.

The judges ruled that though it was perfectly okay for schools to impose general bans on jewellery, they have to make exceptions for individuals who claim that their jewellery is religious in character. In other words, the judges and Liberty have endorsed the principle of different laws for people of different faiths.

As we have seen in many parts of the world, this is the road to tyranny not the road to liberty.

Writing to the The General Chiropractic Council

2009-06-06T07:41:00.000+01:00

Me first:

Dear Sir/Madam

I note that your CoP contains the following entry:

C1.6 may publicise their practices or permit another person to do so consistent with the law and the guidance issued by the Advertising Standards Authority.

As you may be aware, the ASA recently declared in a ruling against Chiropractors “Dr Carl Irwin and Associates” (http://www.asa.org.uk/asa/adjudications/Public/TF_ADJ_46281.htm) that

“We considered that, whilst some of the studies indicated that further research was worth pursuing, in particular in relation to the chiropractic relief of colic, we had not seen robust clinical evidence to support the claim that chiropractic could treat IBS, colic and learning difficulties.

On these points the ad breached CAP Code clauses 3.1 (Substantiation), 7.1 (Truthfulness) and 50.1 (Health and Beauty Products and Therapies).”

It has come to my attention that Huddersfield Chiropractic (http://www.huddersfieldchiropractic.co.uk/BCAD02_Babies.asp) make the following claim on their website:

"Birth and early infancy can sometimes be a very difficult and traumatic time for both mother and baby. After the baby's head has engaged, usually during the eighth month of pregnancy, there can be a lot of stress on its head and back as it continues to move within the womb. This stress can increase further during the birth process, particularly if it is prolonged or involves breech presentation or forceps delivery. As the child grows up, and starts to walk, climb and run, the inevitable falls and bumps can affect the still-developing bones of the spine and skull. Once at school, the child carries heavy bags, sits on badly-designed chairs and participates in a variety of sporting activities.
These stresses and injuries can result in the tightening of muscles in the neck or back, so causing the bones of the spine to lose their normal motion or position. This can irritate or put stress onto the nerve roots that branch off the spinal cord to the organs and tissues of the body. In babies and young children this may lead to symptoms including:
• asthma
• colic
• hyperactivity
• bedwetting
instead of treating the symptoms with drugs, or assuming that the child will 'grow out of it', the chiropractor will gently adjust a child's spine to remove the nerve stress and return his/her body to healthy healing."

Unsurprisingly, the cited Danish research is not regarded as "robust clinical evidence" by the ASA - it would seem to fall well short of the standards applied in conventional medical research.

The claim concerning “colic” would seem to be in breach of the ASA Code. While this is not an advertisement in the sense defined by the ASA, Huddersfield are publicizing their practice and would, therefore, appear to be in breach of your code.

Please could you inform me whether you consider Huddersfield’s claims to be appropriate and whether you intend to take action against this company.

Yours faithfully

Dr* Schroedinger99

*non clinical

The first reply - which came straight back:

Dear Dr Schoedinger99,

Thank you for your email of 4 June 2009. With regard to the final sentence of your email, the Investigating Committee of the General Chiropractic Council investigates complaints relating to the fitness to practise of individual chiropractors, rather than complaints against companies or organisations. In this respect please contact us if you wish to make a complaint about a chiropractor or wish to receive a copy of our complaint information pack.

As your email refers in part to a ruling made by the ASA against a chiropractor, I have referred your email to the Chief Executive & Registrar, Margaret Coats, who will provide a separate response to your email.

Yours sincerely

XXXXX
Specialist Officer (Regulation)
General Chiropractic Council

Ths was quickly followed up by another response:

Dear Mr Schoedinger99
Your email of 4 June has been brought to my attention because it refers to the recent ASA adjudication against a chiropractor – Carl Irwin. I thought you might be interested to see that the GCC’s patient information leaflet (copy attached) includes the following statements

Chiropractors mainly treat
• back, neck and shoulder problems
• joint, posture and muscle problems
• leg pain and sciatica
• sports injuries
You may also see an improvement in some types of
• asthma
• headaches, including migraine; and
• infant colic

It’s important to emphasise that the GCC doesn’t claim that chiropractors 'treat' asthma, headaches (including migraine) and infant colic. It is possible that chiropractic care may help to alleviate the symptoms of some of these conditions. Chiropractors are trained in differential diagnosis and should refer any patient for appropriate care from another health professional when necessary. It is important that, where appropriate, there is good co-management of patient care. But the statement about the possibility of improvement has been included on the basis of the currently available evidence.

I'm not sure what level of detail to go into but as you may know there are a number of ways of measuring, or rating, evidence levels. One relevant example is Brønfort G. Efficacy of Manual Therapies of the Spine, Amsterdam: Thesis Publishers, 1997. This study rates the levels of evidence available at the time and provides a measuring tool to do it - I've cut and pasted the 'ratings table' below for your information. If there's anything that's unclear please do get back to me.

The available evidence of the efficacy of the chiropractic contribution to the management of some types of asthma, migraine headache and infant colic is inconclusive (i.e. level D in the measuring tool used by Brønfort).

Further, with regard to some types of asthma:
• Brønfort concluded in 1997 that there is moderate evidence (Level B) that SMT is a non-efficacious therapy for chronic to moderately severe asthma in adults. There was insufficient data (Level D) to draw conclusions about the efficacy of spinal manipulative therapy (SMT) for other respiratory diseases (including childhood asthma)
• In 2001, Brønfort et al ( see c. below) concluded that after three months of combining chiropractic SMT with optimal medical management for childhood asthma, the children rated their quality of life substantially higher and their asthma severity substantially lower. The observed improvements were thought unlikely to be as a result of the specific effects of chiropractic SMT alone, but other aspects of the clinical encounter that should not be dismissed readily.

So although some clinical trials had positive results there is insufficient data to make strong statements about efficacy. There is a higher level of available evidence (i.e. level B) with regard to some types of headache (such as tension-type and cervicogenic headache) and there appears to be a clinical advantage, of both SMT and exercises, both of which chiropractors use, compared to placebo and at least equivalence with commonly used therapies.

Other studies which appear to echo the evidence levels outlined in the paragraphs above are:
a. Nielsen NH, Brønfort G, Bendix T. et al 1995. Chronic asthma and chiropractic spinal manipulation: a randomized clinical trial. Clin Exp Allergy Jan;25(1):80-8
b. Balon J, Aker PD et al 1998. A comparison of active and simulated chiropractic manipulation as adjunctive treatment for childhood asthma. NEJM 339 (15): 1013-1020
c. Brønfort G , Evans RL, Kubic P, Filkin P 2001. Chronic pediatric asthma and chiropractic spinal manipulation: a prospective clinical series and randomized pilot study. JMPT 24(6):369-77
d. Brønfort G, Nilsson N, Haas M, Evans RL, Goldsmith CH, Assendelft WJJ, Bouter LM. Non-invasive physical treatments for chronic/recurrent headache. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2004, Issue 3 Art. No.: CD001878. DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD001878.pub2
e. Wiberg JMM, Nordsteen J, Nilsson N. 1999. The short-term effect of spinal manipulation in the treatment of infantile colic: a randomised controlled clinical trial with a blinded observer, JMPT 22 (8): 517-22.
This isn’t an exhaustive list but I do hope that this level of detail is helpful.
Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.
Yours sincerely
YYYYYY
Chief Executive & Registrar

This all seemed rather irrelevant, so I worte back again:

Dear Ms YYYYYY

Thank you for your email, but I do not feel that you have addressed the complaint I raised.

To summarize:

the GCC’s CoP states that chiropractors “may publicise their practices or permit another person to do so consistent with the law and the guidance issued by the Advertising Standards Authority.”

The ASA have made it clear that it is not acceptable for chiropractors to claim that they can treat infant colic – a judgement which you appear to endorse in your email to me.

Huddersfield Chiropractic claim that they can treat infant colic.

I suggest, therefore, that Huddersfield Chiropractic would seem to be in breach of your CoP and I am requesting that, in view of this, you take action against them.

Yours sincerely

Dr Schroedinger99

I then received a very polite phone call from Ms YYYYYY from which the following emerged:

1) As XXXXX indicated, the Investigating Committee of the General Chiropractic Council investigates complaints relating to the fitness to practise of individual chiropractors - not chiropractic businesses.

2) XXXXX did not pass on my complaint to YYYYY for her to deal with instead. XXXX passed on my complaint so that she could advise me on the sort of evidence the GCC use and how they assess that evidence.

3) If I wish my complaint to be considered, I shall have to resubmit it naming the individual chiropractors who work at the firm I am complaining about.

I note that the GCC seem to be very professional (unlike other "regulators" I have dealt with - e.g PhonepayPlus) and obviously take their role seriously.

I hope this helps others making complaints to the GCC about chiropractors who make bogus claims on their own websites.

The War on Reason (the fight back begins)

2009-06-04T09:17:00.000+01:00

More on "faith schools"

2009-06-02T14:20:00.000+01:00

On the Government's Teachernet site, we find the following:

Faith schools: working for cohesion
Examples of how faith schools' contribute to community cohesion through their inclusive admissions

The trust deed for Nottingham Emmanuel, a secondary school with a Church of England religious character, explicitly states that 33% of places are for local community children plus places for other faiths. As a result, of the published admission number of 180 places, 60 places are for the local community, 15 places for world faiths and 30 for Church of England primary schools. The remaining places are general places under the school's admission criteria.

Sir John Cass School, a secondary school with a Church of England religious character in Tower Hamlets, offers 20% of its places under its religious admission criteria; 10% as 'language' places; and the remaining 70% as 'open' places. As a result around 80% of pupils at the school are of Muslim faith.

Church of England schools in Norwich have the proximity of the pupil to the school as the first criteria for admissions rather than the faith of the pupil.

The admission policies for the Guru Nanak Sikh Primary and Guru Nanak Sikh Secondary Schools in Hayes give some priority to children of any faith, who attend worship regularly with their parents/carers. The schools' (sic) also gives (sic) priority to pupils with a sibling at the school, regardless of faith, and to children with acute medical needs. Currently the schools' student community consists of Christian, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh students.

Further information on school admissions.

Return to Faith schools: working for cohesion

Published 15 February 2005

Now leaving aside the curious use of the apostrophe in the title, what are we to make of the logic here? Let's try replacing "faith" with "race":

Racially segregated schools: working for cohesion

Examples of how racially segregated schools contribute to community cohesion through their inclusive admissions

The trust deed for Nottingham Whites, a secondary school with an ethnic European character, explicitly states that 33% of places are for local community children plus places for other races. As a result, of the published admission number of 180 places, 60 places are for the local community, 15 places for coloured children and 30 for white children. The remaining places are general places under the school's admission criteria.

John Bull School, a secondary school with an ethnic European character in Tower Hamlets, offers 20% of its places under its racial admission criteria; 10% as 'language' places; and the remaining 70% as 'open' places. As a result around 80% of pupils at the school are coloured.

Black schools in Norwich have the proximity of the pupil to the school as the first criteria for admissions rather than the race of the pupil.

The admission policies for the whites only Primary and Secondary Schools in Hayes give some priority to children of any race, who attend Aryan meetings regularly with their parents/carers. The schools also give priority to pupils with a sibling at the school, regardless of race, and to children with acute medical needs. Currently the schools' student community consists of whites, coloureds, and black students.

Further information on school admissions.

Return to Racially segregated schools: working for cohesion

Published 15 February 2005

The Government, promoting sense through nonsense.

(I look forward to a Government report on how criminality promotes social morality because some crooks sometimes give back some of what they have stolen…… actually, thinking about it, that’s exactly what Ofcom & PhonepayPlus do say when it comes to premium rate crooks..hmmm)

Faith in Schools - a dialogue

2009-06-02T11:50:00.000+01:00

This began with my filling in some kind of comment or feedback form on the Department for Children, Schools and Families website expressing my dismay at the current Government's policy of encouraging the segregation of school children in accordance with their parents' religious beliefs.

I received the following reply:

Dear Dr Schroedinger99

Thank you for your email of 31 March about faith schools.
I acknowledge that some people may have concerns about the contribution of faith schools to community cohesion, but we know that the faith school providers are fully committed to a diverse school system and take the various requirements of maintained status very seriously.
I believe that all schools – whether they have a religious character or not – play a key role in fostering understanding, appreciation and shared values amongst their pupils. That is why section 38 of the Education and Inspections Act 2006 places the governing bodies of all maintained schools under a duty to promote community cohesion, with this element of what they do to be inspected by Ofsted from September 2008.
A key component of schools' work on community cohesion should be to provide reasonable opportunities for children, young people, their friends and families to interact with people from different backgrounds and build positive relations. One way schools can provide these broader experiences to their pupils is through developing links with other schools in the UK. The DCSF is supporting schools to make these links by providing £2m to roll out the work of the Schools Linking Network into a national school linking programme with pilot projects in local authorities.
It is not right to draw comparisons with Northern Ireland, because the histories of our two countries have been shaped by very different circumstances. Ministers do not accept that the existence of faith schools inevitably leads to segregation by race or that faith schools are any less committed to inclusion and community cohesion than other schools.
Schools that are more than 75% of one race are generally no more likely to be faith schools than schools without a religious character.
Taxpayers’ money does not fund religious indoctrination. All maintained schools, including faith schools, must deliver a broad and balanced curriculum, including the National Curriculum, and are inspected by Ofsted accordingly.
All maintained schools must provide Religious Education for all their pupils, and some categories of faith school have additional freedoms around the teaching of RE, as RE does not form part of the National Curriculum.
RE encourages respect for those holding different beliefs and helps promote pupils' spiritual, moral, social and cultural development. In partnership with national faith organisations and the British Humanist Association, we have introduced a non-statutory framework for RE.
The Framework places inclusion, tolerance, diversity and interfaith dialogue at the heart of children's learning. These principles are shared both by the Department and faith communities.
In February 2006, the faith communities renewed their support for the framework in a joint statement making it clear that all children should be given the opportunity to receive inclusive religious education, and that they are committed to making sure the framework is used in the development of religious education in all their schools and colleges. This is an essential part of enabling young people to develop their own informed views on moral and ethical issues.
In maintained faith schools, as in any maintained school, parents have the right to withdraw their children from all or any part of RE. They do not have to give a reason for withdrawal and the schools is expected to comply with the request.

Yours sincerely
XXXX
Public Communications Unit

I replied:

Dear Ms XXXX

Thank you for your email.

To summarize: you argue that the negative effects of segregating children in accordance with their parents' religions are nowhere near as bad as people like me think; and you assure me that the government is putting all sorts of measures in place to mitigate these effects.

What is missing from your email, however, is any argument whatsoever in favour of the proposition that segregating children in accordance with their parents' religions is a good thing in itself. It does not really surprise me that such arguments are missing from your email, since you are clearly a reasonable person and it is impossible to imagine how any reasonable person could argue that it is a good thing to segregate children in accordance with their parents' religions.

By the way, I did not say that segregation along religious line leads to segregation along ethnic lines (though, pace your carefully chosen statistic, it very often does). I simply pointed out that the suggestion that segregation along religious lines leads to community cohesion is as coherent as the suggestion that segregation along ethnic lines leads to racial harmony. Or put it a different way: Why is religious segregation in education considered to be a good thing whereas racial segregation in education is considered to be a bad thing?

I find both types of segregation equally distasteful - as, according to the opinion polls I have seen, do most of the population of this country.

I hope that, sooner or later, reason will prevail in government and I look forward to a day when all schools (at least all state funded schools) will open their doors to all children, teach understanding of and tolerance towards all religious traditions, and leave the question of whether any particular set of supernatural beliefs is true to bodies outside the education system.

Yours sincerely

Dr Schroedinger99

the correspondence continued:

Dear Dr Schroedinger99,
Thank you for your email dated 17 April about faith schools.

I note your comments.

Further to my colleague's, Ms XXXXX, response I would add that faith schools are a long-established part of the school system with the involvement of the Church in education predating that of the state, and with a focus on the most disadvantaged. The dual system of voluntary schools supported by faith organisations and schools without a religious character is at the heart of the school system in England.

The Government will continue to develop a diverse system in which institutions work together, learn from each other and thereby drive up quality across the board. Faith schools make an important contribution to this diverse system and in Faith in the System, the Government and faith school providers have confirmed their commitment to continue to work together.

As explained previously, the Government recognise that people do have concerns about the contribution faith schools make to community cohesion and Ministers expect all maintained schools with and without a religious character to improve the life chances of children, to build bridges to greater mutual trust and understanding and to contribute to a just and cohesive society with all schools being inspected by Ofsted from September this year on the duty to promote community cohesion.

Yours sincerely,
YYYY
School Commissioning and Supply Division

and continued:

Dear Ms YYYYY

I realize that the segregation of children in accordance with their parents' religions is a long-established part of the school system. The same could be also said of bullying, sexual and physical abuse, racial discrimination, the illicit consumption of nicotine and any number of other practices. The fact that these practices are long established has never been considered a "knock-down argument" in favour of the notion that the government of the day should support and encourage such things. If fact, a series of governments has had considerable success is tackling or even eliminating the practices I have listed.

If the government wishes to justify its policy of promoting and increasing the segregation of children along religious lines, it really needs to come up with some convincing reasons why this policy, despite all the indications to the contrary, might be seen as a "good thing". I am afraid that the arguments you have presented thus far: "It's not as bad as you think" and "It's been going on for years" really do not do the trick.

And I am sorry, but I think you would struggle to get your proposition - that the segregation of children along religious lines can contribute to community cohesion - past the population of Salt Lake City let alone the population of the UK.

Yours sincerely

Dr Schroedinger99

and continued:

Dear Dr Schroedinger99,

Thank you for your email dated 01 May 2008 about maintained faith schools.

Ministers do not share your view that faith schools foster racial and cultural divisions and tensions in our society. Schools are well placed to become a focal point for the local community and to foster better relationships between diverse communities. Many Church of England schools have a high proportion of Muslim pupils and are very popular with Muslim parents.
The Commission on Integration and Cohesion’s report ‘Our Shared Future’ recognised that there are faith schools which have pupils from many different backgrounds and faiths, as well as largely single background schools which are not faith schools. Ministers believe that all schools – whether they have a religious character or not – play a key role in fostering understanding, appreciation and shared values amongst their pupils, thereby helping to promote community cohesion and equipping them to be active, responsible citizens in an increasingly diverse UK society. That is why, as mentioned in previous correspondence, section 38 of the Ed ucation and Inspections Act 2006 places the governing bodies of all maintained schools- faith and non-faith schools alike- under a duty to promote community cohesion, with this element of what they do to be inspected by Ofsted from September 2008.

I acknowledge that some people may have concerns about the contribution of faith schools to community cohesion and about whether faith schools' admissions policies may sometimes contribute to selection or covert selection, but I must reiterate that the faith organisations are fully committed to the school system and take the various requirements of maintained status very seriously.

Yours sincerely,

YYYYY
School Commissioning and Supply Division

and continued:

Dear Ms YYYYYY

You wrote:

"Many Church of England schools have a high proportion of Muslim pupils and are very popular with Muslim parents."

You obviously think this is a good thing. So presumably you also think it would also be a good thing if many Christian parents sent their children to Muslim schools; and you think it would be even more of a good thing if more Christian and Muslim parents sent their children to the "wrong" schools.

Carry this argument to its logical conclusion, and you end up with desegregated schools.

So now in addition to the two arguments:

1) Religious segregation is schools is a good thing because, in England and Wales, its negative effects are unlikely to be as severe as we have seen in Northern Ireland and other divided communities around the world.

and

2) Religious segregation is schools is a good thing because, it has been going on a long time.

you have added a third:

3) Religious segregation is schools is a good thing because, it does not always result in complete segregation.

As for the "views of Ministers", I do not say that faith schools foster racial and cultural division; I say that faith schools are a racial and cultural division. Whether this will lead to greater tensions, is a matter not for anyone's views but for empirical research. All the evidence of history and from around the world points to what the results of such research are likely to to be. Why, given that you don't have a single coherent argument in favour of religious segregation, take the risk?

Dr Dr Schroedinger99

and then finished:

Dear Dr Schroedinger99,

Thank you for your email and observations about faith schools.
I cannot add anything further but I note the points you have made.

Yours sincerely,

YYYYY
School Commissioning and Supply Division

I think I won all the arguments, but the Government carried on segregating kids anyway.

Nick Cohen on Chiroquacktic

2009-06-01T08:33:00.000+01:00

Excellent article on the #singhbca case here; and Nick is a splendid journalist whose articles I always enjoy reading; but why oh why oh why does he insist on inserting his view - that anyone who questions the wisdom of the Iraq war or expresses any concern for the plight of the Christian and Muslim (and other?) "Semites" living in Israel or the occupied (or encircled) territories is a raving Islamo-fascist anti-Semitic leftist Nazi - into each and every piece he writes?

(Okay, Nick does not quite put it like this, but if you read his stuff often enough, you come to realize that this is what he thinks.)

If you are reading this Nick (and I don't suppose you ever will) please note that, for some of us at least, exactly the some sentiments that tell us that we would never ever wish to live in a country controlled by Hamas also underlie our concerns about the notion of a state whose criteria for citizenship and equal rights derive from ethnic and religious considerations.

What if alternative medicine really worked?

2009-05-21T19:57:00.000+01:00

Generally speaking, fans and purveyors of so called “alternative” medicine insist it works. Rationalists and scientists generally insist that it doesn’t, or - more circumspectly – that there is no real evidence that it works. But just suppose it were found that a particular unorthodox treatment did work. Would this really strengthen the case for the notion of an “alternative” approach to healing?

Rather than take a real example, let’s take a fictional one. I don’t want to get bogged down in claims and counter-claims over the facts of any particular “treatment”, and I certainly don’t want anyone suing me.

Lets us pretend that there is an alternative therapy called “chrysanthemum therapy” or “CT” and that, it is claimed, CT (having a bunch of chrysanthemums in a vase in your bedroom) helps to treat the dreaded lurgi. Let us further suppose that CT has been ridiculed for many years by the medical profession who have their own orthodox treatment for the dreaded lurgi called “Lurgidium”.

Now finding out whether a treatment like Lurgidium really works is not as straightforward as many people believe. You can’t just try something out and say “oh yes I feel better now” and let that clinch the matter. Very few, if any, treatments work for everyone who tries them and you have to exclude the placebo effect and the nocebo effect and sampling errors and statistical artefacts. You have to make sure that you test a large enough sample of patients and that you test them for long enough and consider all sorts of other things you might not think of at first. This is all explained in terms any intelligent person can easily understand in @bengolding’s excellent book “Bad Science”. Scientists and clinicians have been working out whether stuff really works for a long time and have got the testing of medical treatments down to a fine art. Even so it sometimes goes wrong. One study provides one result; another study provides exactly the opposite result. Scientist then have to try and figure out why one study might be flawed and may have to come up with an even bigger and better study to clinch the matter.

Even if a treatment is shown to be effective, it might turn out to have unacceptable side effects (think of Thalidomide and – more recently – Vioxx). Scientists have to do a lot of testing before they can safely allow a drug onto the market.

Let us now suppose that some scientists decide to investigate chrysanthemums and find that these flowers release a gas comprising molecules that are a close analogue of the Lurgidium molecule and that inhaling small quantities of this gas really does help to treat the dreaded lurgi.

First of all, does this development vindicate the proponents of CT? Well that depends. If the proponents of CT have been simply saying something of along the lines of “CT has been used for many centuries in folk medicine and there is a lot of anecdotal evidence that suggests it works and is safe”, then fine. One could argue that the proponents of CT have been vindicated.

If, however, the proponents of CT have been saying all along that “CT works because it aligns the energy channels in your auras with the rings of Saturn” then I think we have to conclude that the CT people have just managed to hit it lucky.

And what would happen following the discovery that CT really works? (Let us suppose that CT proves to be even more effective in dreaded lurgi patients than Lurgidium and turns out to be safer. ) The big pharmaceutical companies would immediately start to produce chrysanthemum extracts in the form of tablets and sprays and creams and sell them to lurgi patients and/or their doctors. Okay, there might be some resistance at first. The big pharmaceutical companies might have patents for Lurgidium and put a lot of money into Lurgidium’s development and testing. But, given a competitive market, if a better, cheaper alternatives came along they would be forced to start marketing products based on that alternative (at least until they could develop and patent something even better). It should be borne in mind that, as Ben Goldacre points out, many of the biggest purveyors of questionable “health supplements” are the big pharmaceutical companies, and many of CEOs of these firms would gladly sell their own grandmothers if they could make a few bob from it.

So where would that leave CT? Could it any longer be called “alternative”? It comes from a plant, but so do many orthodox medicines. It has a history of use going back a long way before modern medicine, but so does the use of opiates as analgesics.
The supposed dichotomy between “alternative” and “orthodox medicine” does not exist. The only real dichotomy is between treatments that have been shown (scientifically) to work and those that have not.

Perhaps some treatments that are currently considered to be alternative really do work and will be shown to work once they have been investigated thoroughly enough (though, surveying the “alternative” treatments on offer, it is hard to imagine that many of them will ever get over this hurdle and many of them, e.g. homoeopathy, have been conclusively refuted) . But if and when this happens, those treatments will immediately cease to be, in any meaningful sense, “alternative”.

In short, the very notion of “alternative” medicine is simply incoherent.

Can religion be a source for morality and ethics?

2009-05-18T12:02:00.001+01:00

My parents were both atheists, but, like all state school kids in those days, I had religion rammed down my throat from an early age – and certainly whenever I put anything down my throat. My primary school was not a faith school, but we had to pray when we arrived in the morning, before and after milk break, before and after lunch, and before we went home in the evening. There were times when I wondered whether there might really be a God, but as soon as I became capable of some degree of independent thought I began to judge that religion was about as plausible as the Easter Bunny story.

Although, since childhood, I have never wavered from this position, I have, as a rational “atheist”, to concede that I am really a flying-teapot-agnostic sort of atheist (If you have no idea what I’m talking about here, you need to read Bertrand Russell . or listen to Gong). I have to admit, therefore, that, when I die, it is just about possible (sort of) that I shall be confronted by a man with a long white beard who will announce:

“See! Jerry Falwell, Cliff Richard, Ian Paisley, and that Bin Liner chap were all right. I really do exist.”

If this happens, I shall be forced to eat my hat and concede that I have been wrong all my life.

But let’s suppose the chap in the white beard continues as follows:

“And not only do I really exist, I really do hold the view the protecting yourself from getting AIDs by using a condom is a sin; and I really do think that a woman should only ever walk about outside with a bag over her head, and that all homosexuals should be drowned at birth; oh and that it is immoral to use electric toothbrushes on Tuesdays – though I note that none of my followers down there on earth seem to have picked up on that last one.”

Shall I be forced to concede that I have been wrong all my life on these points too? Of course not! I shall say:

“Well I’m sorry God, but I disagree with all your views; moreover, you seem like a complete fruitcake to me.”
(Actually, I shan’t say this because he will then cast me straight into the fiery pits of Hell and I’m quite a coward when it comes to the choice between enduring extreme pain and standing up for what’s right; but I shall think this.)

In other words, while the mere existence of a deity is irreconcilable with my ontological viewpoint and forces me to change my views; the existence of a deity with different ethical opinions does not force me to change my views at all.

Belief in a deity is, therefore, neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for ethical beliefs. And I should go even further, ethical beliefs - views not about what is the case but about what ought to be the case – are not at all like a set of rules that someone (or some deity) has commanded us to observe. Ethical beliefs are beliefs we hold dear in spite of whatever the laws (of whatever type) force us to do or not do.

The so called “morality” that religions impose is not morality at all.

Bogus science and bogus law

2009-05-18T09:31:00.001+01:00

For the avoidance of doubt, when I use the word "bogus" I do not (like Humpty Dumpty and Judge Eady employ it to mean what I want it to mean) I employ the OED definition:

adj. not genuine or true

I do not say (or believe) that most chiropractors intend to deceive.
I do say (and believe) that most chiropractors genuinely believe in the treatments they offer.
I even say (and believe) that chiropractic can help some patients sometimes with some conditions - though like all treatments that (cf say homeopathy) actually include some real treatment, chiropractic is not risk free.

(You can read all about chiropractic here)

I do however say (and believe) that most of the theories of chiropractic and most of the claims made by chiropractors are unsupported by scientific evidence.

For this reason, I stand shoulder to shoulder with Simon Singh and declare:

"Chiropractic is bogus!"