No moon in Iquique, Chile
Just going through the moon sighting reports on this page (it may still be giving virus warnings when you try to load it; it doesn't affect me as I use Linux) and one negative...
Author: Matthew Smith
M.E. and the ethics of testing on sick kids
This past week, two major British M.E. organisations, the Young ME Sufferers Trust and the ME Association, issued a joint statement ([1], [2]) condemning as "unethical" a study, scheduled to start in September, of...
Let them eat halaal meat
Yesterday the Daily Star (the Black Hole to you and me), a London tabloid from the same pig-sty as the Daily Express (AKA Daily Spew), ran a story about the “scandal” of the borough...
Christina Patterson again: London’s human zoo
Since my last entry on the bigoted ravings of Christina Patterson in last week’s Independent, Patterson herself has written a follow-up piece on all the demented people who have written to her and blogged...
The Court of Little Protection
Yesterday, the BBC station Radio 4 ran a feature on the so-called Court of Protection, the body set up to manage the financial affairs of those who are incapable of doing it themselves, such...
Haredis and FGM: like a newly caught fish
I was alerted to an article by one Christina Patterson (former director of the Poetry Society and literary programmer at the South Bank Centre in London) setting out what she considers the “limits of...
Crime victims’ groups round on crime victim
Yesterday it was reported that Ian Huntley, the man convicted of the murder of schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in Soham (a village near Cambridge, in England) in 2002 and who was attacked...
Tabloid feeding frenzy over Venables
The past few days have seen one ghoulish story about Jon Venables (or the person formerly known as such), one of the two boys who murdered a toddler, James Bulger, on Merseyside in February...
Rape by deceit is rape, but …
BBC News – Israeli Arab who 'raped' a woman says verdict 'racist' How did this man manage to deceive an Israeli Jewish woman that he was Jewish? Surely, as a native Arabic speaker, he...
Doctors scare chronically sick patients too
Dr Rob, an American primary care doctor (or GP), recently published a “letter to patients with chonic disease”, quite an interesting article in which he informs them that doctors are actually scared of them...
Muslim country bans niqaab shock!
This didn’t quite come too late for yesterday’s entry on niqaab, but that was dragging on too long and I had an appointment this morning that I should have been preparing for while I...
Nessie allows bigoted ‘debate’ about niqaab
This morning Vanessa Feltz, the host of the BBC London morning phone-in show, had among her topics the question of whether the so-called burqa should be banned (you can listen to it, if you’re...
Raoul Moat: just a thug
Last week I heard an awful lot of nonsense in the media about why there were so many people willing to sing the praises of the murderer Raoul Moat, who killed his ex-girlfriend’s partner...
Jon Gaunt: gatekeepers and free speech
Yesterday Jon Gaunt, the talk show host who used to run the morning show on BBC London, lost an attempt to appeal against a censure by Ofcom, the British broadcast media regulator, against his...
Why no compromise on rape anonymity?
Last week it was reported that the coalition government is to go ahead with plans to change the law to give men accused of rape the right to anonymity up to the point where...
Which of these women looks sick?
ButYouDontLookSick.com is a website by a woman with lupus (she wrote the Spoon Theory I referred to in a previous post). In her biography, she says that, despite suffering a wide range of symptoms...
DeenPort in decline
For anyone reading this now: DeenPort is being moved to a new server, which is why you may not be able to access it. I have found it works on some mobile networks, but...
London bombings: fifth anniversary post
I refuse to call them 7/7. The first time I saw that was on the front page of the Times the next day. It seemed quite clear to me that this was their way...
Why I don’t use Windoze
I have two Dell computers (one laptop, one desktop) and they both have Windows Vista and Linux (currently, the latest version of Ubuntu) installed on them. I use Ubuntu the vast majority of the...
A new light on the harms of porn
A few months ago I read a book called Living Dolls by Natasha Walter, who argued that the "new feminism" she thought was emerging in the 1990s had given way to a culture in...