The English libel law is particularly dangerous for bloggers, who are generally not backed by publishers, and who can end up being sued in London regardless of where the blog was posted. The internet allows bloggers to reach a global audience, but it also allows the High Court in London to have a global reach.

You can read more about the peculiar and grossly unfair nature of English libel law at the website of the Libel Reform Campaign. You will see that the campaign is not calling for the removal of libel law, but for a libel law that is fair and which would allow writers a reasonable opportunity to express their opinion and then defend it.

The good news is that the British Government has made a commitment to draft a bill that will reform libel, but it is essential that bloggers and their readers send a strong signal to politicians so that they follow through on this promise. You can do this by joining me and over 50,000 others who have signed the libel reform petition at
http://www.libelreform.org/sign

Remember, you can sign the petition whatever your nationality and wherever you live. Indeed, signatories from overseas remind British politicians that the English libel law is out of step with the rest of the free world.

If you have already signed the petition, then please encourage friends, family and colleagues to sign up. Moreover, if you have your own blog, you can join hundreds of other bloggers by posting this blog on your own site. There is a real chance that bloggers could help change the most censorious libel law in the democratic world.

We must speak out to defend free speech. Please sign the petition for libel reform at
http://www.libelreform.org/sign

Well, he’s done it again.The warning signs are there: the labelling of a multitude of scientific professions and people as a sinister, elitist cabal working behind the scenes like lab-based illuminati; the relentless and paranoid derision of anything remotely science-based; the palpable fear that ‘scientists’ have evil designs against the human race… It’s pure Jenkins by numbers. He even managed to get his own twitter trend this time around. Last Monday was “Spoof Jenks Monday“, when people used the hashtag #spoofjenks to post exaggeratedly anti-science comments, such as “Computers would work just as well powered by Ballet as Electricity”. The idea started with Jennifer Rohn at her blog and snowballed from there, as these twitter-things tend to do. You can read all the #spoofjenks comments at said blog.

So what’s got Jenkins’ luddite goat this time? The title of his latest rant is:

“Martin Rees makes a religion out of science so his bishops can gather their tithe.”

Hurrah! Already we have the accusation that science is just another religion and that scientists are its blinkered bishops forcing their worldview on the plebs! This idea that science is just another worldview (despite not even being a worldview – it’s a method) is a familiar form of dopey thinking usually espoused by religious apologists, and creationists especially. Make everything seem relative and it renders your position unassailable, no matter how asinine. Not that I think Jenkins is approaching this in a pro-religion way. I don’t think he’s doing that at all. He just doesn’t like scientists. I suspect he had a bad experience watching Frankenstein as a child. Either that or his opinion pieces have just been one long joke for the purposes of skeptical research. I live in hope…

Next, we have this sub-heading:

“The BBC’s reverence for genes, space and bugs gives its Reith lecturer a claim to public money based on faith, not reason.”

The religious accusations just keep flying. No ‘reason’ here, claims Jenkins, just ‘reverence’ and ‘faith’. He seems to think that if he throws enough of these words around then maybe reality will rearrange itself in response to suit him. Well, it worked for Neo, I suppose… The article proper begins by mentioning a bio-medical centre due to be built in London, which will cost £600m and house about 1,250 “cutting-edge” scientists. The inverted commas are Jenkins’ own. Not sure why he’s put them in there; maybe he thinks there’s no such thing as a “cutting-edge” scientist, or that these particular scientists are only “flat-middle”. All that’s clear is that Jenkins thinks you can’t trust those damn scientists. Also, if we were to question the value of this building, science would apparently ‘jeer at the idea’, because, of course, biomedicine has no concern with value, nor provides any benefit for the human race. Jenkins then claims that this building has been dubbed:

“… a cathedral of science, justified by faith, not reason.”

I think he’s quoting himself here. There’s no way to tell. I am lost in an emotive soup.

I don’t know how employing 1,250 people and providing important advances in biomedicine lacks reason, but then I’m just a deluded lamb due to be sacrificed on the altar of science. However, none of this matters because Jenkins then forgets about this building. Having informed us that science is a religion and got us suitably frothing at the mouth about an apparent expensive waste of taxpayers’ money, Jenkins then pulls a bait-and-switch and moves on to his real concern (did I mention that Jenkins has a knighthood for services to journalism?).

Jenkins’ beef is with the Reith lectures, particularly this year’s involving Martin Rees, astronomer and president of the Royal Society. The lectures are a yearly event, broadcast on the BBC, where known faces in the world of science give public lectures. This is Jenkins’ description of the lectures:

“Each year the BBC gestures towards high seriousness by getting a celebrity intellectual to muse in public for four hours. Ennui is relieved with a chatty preamble from Sue Lawley, followed by safe, hand-picked questions and no nasty supplementaries. The whole thing has the air of a Soviet academy.”

So the Russians are the bad guys again? It must be ‘old Bond movie week’. I love the way that the BBC showing a science program can only be ‘gesturing’ towards seriousness. I wonder at what point the BBC is actually allowed to be genuinely serious. Is there a numerical rule at play? One science programme a month: not serious enough. Two science programmesa month: serious. Three to a hundred science programmes a month: gesture towards high seriousness.

I love Jenkins’ seeming objection to the idea of people ‘musing’ in public. Maybe he’s worried that some of those dangerous thoughts might leave the stage and take root in the minds of the science-worshipping acolytes in the audience. He also objects to the ‘safe, hand-picked questions’. Maybe every audience member should get the opportunity to ask a question then, Simon? Unfortunately, that would make the programme last about a week, and Jenkins already doesn’t like it at four hours. I suspect Jenkins is just upset because he’s not hearing the questions that he would like to hear asked (probably due to the fact that poorly-informed anti-science questions don’t make it through screening). The next paragraph would seem to suggest that this is indeed Jenkins’ stance:

“He [Martin Rees] spoke of the BBC’s current craze – anything to do with science. The airwaves are crammed with science quizzes, science chatshows, science magazines and science feedback. News must have science stories, the Today programme science items, all reverential. No scepticism is admitted to this new orthodoxy.”

Well, here’s some skepticism, Simon (albeit with our usual ‘k’), and it’s the proper stuff: not your denialist, contrarian excuse for it. Skepticism isn’t about deliberately disagreeing with whatever the scientific consensus is on an issue. It’s about objectivity, or getting as close to it as you can get. Saying that climate change, BSE and swine flu aren’t that big a deal, as you have done in the past, simply because that’s the opposite of what your boogeymen, the ‘scientists’, are saying, is not skepticism. Skepticism is about dealing with facts, and there’s nothing to suggest this ‘religion of science’ that your are so worried about. The only faith on show here seems to be your own in the duplicity of science.

He continues:

“Rees is shameless. After a brisk, familiar canter through the wonder of science – internet, genomes, bugs, space travel – his last lecture brought him to the matter in hand. Science, he said, should “engage more broadly with society and public affairs”. In other words, it should get more money. There is nowhere better to plead for this than on the BBC.”

The only direct quote he gives from Rees here, is that science should “engage more broadly with society and public affairs”. The stuff about Rees trying to grab money for science is purely Jenkins’ speculation. So it’s a bit sad to find that the rest of the piece is about this supposed religious crusade of the ‘scientists’ to get money and waste it. Then he has the gall to blame it on Rees right in the piece’s title, despite the poor bloke simply having had the bad luck to be name-dropped by a man with a chip on his shoulder about men and women who wear lab coats.

The rest of the piece has such Jenkins gems as:

“Science gives us an exaggerated fear of risk.”

“Scientists do not do priorities, they just want money.”

“The £7bn spent on the LHC would have been better spent on energy research.”

“The science lobby is a religion, and Rees is one of its archbishops.”

“The BBC lavishes it [science] with favours against less-fashionable claimants.”

Ok, so maybe science is enjoying a bit of a renaissance in the public eye at the moment. Good. It is not a faceless religious cult intent on stealing public money and throwing it away on frivolities. It encompasses a multitude of disciplines, knowledge areas, and has many different uses. Above all, it is already intertwined with society and public affairs. It is important. Planes, television, medicine, space travel, it is all science. It moves us on as a species, it helps us live longer. It is not a waste of money. The money spent on science does not spiral down a black hole: it employs thousands of people in labs and in the field, it employs thousands more to build those labs and the technology that goes in them. The discoveries that come out of said labs lead to new uses and technologies. So the LHC is a waste of money? I read Jenkins’ piece on the internet. The internet started out as a databank for CERN.

Science is an essential part of the world. It needs money, just like anything else, and asking for money does not make it religious. Once again, Jenkins has simply let his dislike for scientists skew his interpretation of the facts. He has repeatedly done this. I think this is a bad thing for science journalism, which is already suffering neglect in the mainstream press. So often are scientists portrayed as distant boffins fiddling about in labs with no concern for the human race, making mistakes and making it up. The reality is that scientists are part of the human race not seperate from it, and until certain strains of journalism grow up a little and treat science subjects more rationally, then the public at large is going to keep getting fed this blinkered and false view of the reality of science.

It is not good enough.

However, alongside the honest, up-front, god-fearing quacks and charlatans, we’ve had to fight the homeo-forces on another front: the media. Almost universally, when homeopathy is discussed in the media, they ask a homeopath. At best, they also ask a healthcare professional, or (failing that) me, to represent the other side, while leaning the conversation in the favour of the water-wizard. The homeopath gets the first and last word, and the balance of the debate is very firmly on terra homeo. That’s when they’re not just outright selling homeopathic treatments, or allowing homeopaths to wax lyrical about how ‘it worked for me’ and ‘it can’t be placebo as it works on my baby/animal/etc’. This is the battle ground, and it’s this fight we choose to fight – so be it.

But it still pisses me off when it’s the BBC drinking the homeopathic Kool-Aid.

I mean, I love the BBC – they’re meant to be fair, unbiased by commercial concerns, free to investigate and report, educate and entertain, and all that good stuff. Sure, they may spend a little too much money giving Graham Norton a career, or padding out Saturday night’s with Dr Who and fancy dancing (neither of which I particularly care for), but they’re still ace. Except, when they do this:

The view of the regulatory body for pharmacists, who are consulting their members about how the products are currently marketed, is that people who buy homeopathic products should be advised that they do not work and only have a placebo effect.

But according to homeopaths, the real issue behind the consultation is the threat complementary medicine is posing to the highly lucrative relationship between the drug companies and the Health Service.

Face – meet palm.

The Newsline report featured here is really one of the most shockingly-biased, intellectually-dishonest and factually-bereft pieces of reporting I’ve ever seen. In 2 minutes, it manages to squeeze more logical fallacies, outright and long-debunked inaccuracies (the placebo effect DOES work on babies) and Big Pharma innuendo than I thought possible, and serves it up with a huge helping of the kind of smug-snark that only comes with CAM. If you want a summary of what I felt was utterly unprofessional about the report, check out below, where I’ve included the full text of the complaint letter I sent to the BBC yesterday (if you’re equally offended by the report, please feel free to complain to them too, and you can use my complaint as a template if you like. Please do, I urge you, the actually listen to these). Needless to say, the report followed the classic media pattern of interviewing homeopaths, rather than healthcare experts, and allowing their countless statements and facts to go unchecked – with the added bonus of backing their claims of Big Pharma conspiracy to keep the poor homeopath down, and topping off with an appeal by the ‘Health correspondent’ to find a way of accepting homeopathy into the bosom of actual healthcare. Based on nothing more than anecdote, rumour and conjecture, naturally. What do you want – proof? Evidence? Journalistic integrity?!

The BBC should not be behaving like we’d expect the Daily Mail to behave – they’re meant to be better than this. This is the organisation who gave us Brian Cox, Simon Singh and David Attenborough, yet – as was pointed out to me on Twitter yesterday – for insiders in the corporation, anti-science is rife:

“Producer on BBC series on alternative medicine told me he enjoyed “taking scientists down a peg or two”, hence his pro-woo film”

“…Full stand up row in the office with him. But scientist who presented show also at fault”

‘Taking scientists down a peg or two’ – I couldn’t have summed up the feel of the Newsline piece any better myself. We expect this of the Daily Fail, and we expect it of crackpots and quacks like Dana, Nancy and Greg. We don’t expect this of our BBC. You’re better than this. Start acting like it.

Dear BBC

The article entitled ‘Health Focus: Homeopathy’ contains a large number of issues which are great cause for concern:

• The tone and bias of the article leaves a clear impression that homeopathy is effective, given that the case for ineffectiveness is not stated (it’s merely stated that the regulatory body advise it be considered ineffective), whereas the counterarguments to this position are detailed, with language leading the reader towards believing the claim as being likely correct (‘real issue‘, ‘threat to the highly lucrative relationship‘)
• The videos are clearly supportve of homeopathy, starting with ‘it’s an alternative way of treating and illness, but more and more people are turning to homeopathy‘. This lacks both balance and scientific/factual insight.
• The interview puts forward that babies do not experience the placebo effect – this is factually inaccurate, but goes uncorrected – leaving the viewer under the false misapprehension that this statement is true, and that placebos really are not active on babies.
• ‘It has worked for my family for years‘ – again, this is a factually unproven statement that the viewer is not encouraged to question, despite being demonstrably implausible
• ‘Once frowned upon by conventional doctors‘ implies it’s now accepted – it is not, and conventional doctors are still aware that the evidence proves homeopathy does not work
• ‘here, there are only 5 (homeopathically) registered doctors‘ – clearly the implication from the journalist is that there should be more homeopathy in Northern Ireland – this is blatant editorialising, and is not supported in the views of healthcare experts
• ‘house of commons reports raised questions about its effectiveness‘ – in fact, the report examined the evidence and concluded homeopathy was not effect – no questions were raised, they were demonstrably answered
• ‘…unreliable… cannot for the basis of any NHS treatment‘ – this is a cynically-selected quote – in actual fact, the report concluded comprehensively that homeopathy can be reliably shown not to be effective, as the authors will gladly attest to (please contact me if you’d like me to demonstrate this)
• The balance of the whole piece is entirely lop-sided, interviewing a pharmacist for 15 seconds on the issue of labelling, before returning to a pro-homeopathy stance with an interview with a homeopath
• ‘some feel there’s more behind this current debate…’ – here, the journalist (and by extension, the BBC) are clearly and implicitly adding weight to the unfounded accusations of collusion and conspiracy between doctors and pharmaceutical companies. This is disappointing in the extreme, and in my view is deeply irresponsible journalism.
• ‘In Europe, there are over 100million people for whom homeopathic medicine is their first choice of treatment‘ – an unproven claim, not supported by the data in the video, and disproven by even a cursory level of research
• The statment regarding the growing ‘success’ of homeopathy is misleading – this success is not clinical success, nor scientific success, nor is it a growth in usage; the clear implication is that the opposition to homeopathy is financially based, rather than based on the paucity of evidence for this unproven treatment. This goes unchecked, again, by the report.
• ‘Where the real challenge lies is for the homeopaths and the pharmacists to work together, to provide a service that’s safe, productive, and cost-effective‘ – again, this is biased and baseless. There is no challenge in getting homeopaths to work with pharmacists – the challenge is in proving homeopathy has a place in healthcare, and it has failed this challenge consistently. Further, the implication from the reporter is clearly that only homeopathy is ‘safe, productive and cost-effective‘ – again, this is baseless and irresponsible editorialising, and is not supported by data.

Having watched this video, and the supporting extended pro-homeopathy interview, a number of times, I must conclude that it’s one of the most biased, one-sided and evidence-free pieces of reporting I’ve witnessed by the BBC. Not once is the lack of evidence for homeopathy addressed, indeed there’s not even a qualified medical professional involved in the whole report. Facts supporting homeopathy are not questioned (if they were addressed even in passing it would be clear that those presented here are simply false), and no facts regarding the continual failure of homeopaths to show any efficacy of their pills and tinctures are presented.

In short, I find this to be an irresponsible, biased and potentially very misleading article, which does nothing to add clarity to the public understanding of healthcare.

Yours dissapointedly
Michael

PS – it’s not all bad news on the homeopathy front, of course: not with the closure of the Price of Wales quackfest FIH; the BMA Young Doctors going on record with ‘Homeopathy is akin to withcraft; and a little-birdy-style rumour regarding some pretty interesting developments with NHS Primary Care Trusts here in our very own Liverpool… more of which to follow soon I’m sure…

I really can’t get to grips with the psychology at work here. Maybe the newspapers just get bored:

Journo 1: I’m sick of this abuse stuff…

Journo 2: Let’s drown the readership in a load of inane crap about a civil service memo then instead!

Journo 1: Yeah! Woohh! *types on keyboard enthusiastically*

This kind of thing pisses me off. Now, my lack of knowledge about newspaper offices aside, something dodgy is going on here. I don’t care who is responsible, but all I know is that right at the moment when something serious and important is happening in this country, right when popular opinion finally comes into line with reality, suddenly everyone seems to take a left turn and run down the “I can’t cope with this serious stuff anymore” alley of shite:

Citizen 1: Wow, the Catholic Church is really fucked up and corrupt isn’t it? I am so disgusted and angry. They need to do something about it.

Citizen 2: I agree. It is an ancient and unaccountable institution that is completely morally bankrupt, and it is about time that society as a whole woke up to the situation and did something about it.

[pause]

Citizen 1: Being serious has made me tired and uncomfortable.

Citizen 2: Hey, some civil servant made a rude joke about the Pope!

Citizen 1: What a fucker! Someone should do something about this disgusting event!

Citizen 2: I’m going to write an obnoxious letter to the Telegraph… *types on keyboard enthusiastically*

It depresses me, it really does.

For those who don’t know, this “disgusting” memo was circulated through Whitehall by a group of civil servants brainstorming ideas for the Pope’s upcoming four day visit. To me, it seems like a tongue-in-cheek joke, but it could be a genuine result of a “blue-sky thinking” session, where they were trying to come up with as many off-the-wall ideas as possible. Either way, to take genuine offence at the memo requires a serious dysfunction in the reality centre of the brain. And the humour centre. Hell, it requires a serious dysfunction in the brain in general. (I feel I’m really nailing my colours to the mast in this one)

Here’s some of the suggestions in the memo for your reading pleasure:

1 – Starting a helpline for abused children

2 – Opening an abortion ward

3 – Sack ‘dodgy’ bishops

4 – Preside over a civil partnership ceremony

5 – Perform forward rolls with children (?!?)

6 – Apologise for the Spanish Armada

7 – Meet Susan Boyle

8 – Start up his own range of Benedict-brand condoms

9 – Sing a song with the Queen for charity

Now, as I’ve already indicated, the main problem with this whole debacle is that the memo is obviously silly. There should be no “disgusted” response. Even for those suggestions which people may feel skim too close to the Catholic bone, if you look at them objectively without the Catholic overtones they’re quite reasonable suggestions for a high profile and supposedly moral figure such as the Pope: starting helplines for the abused, raising money for charity, preventing unwanted pregnancies… All good things. They’re only bad to the warped priorities of the institution of the Catholic Church. We don’t have to kowtow to those priorities, even if we’re Catholic. Reality is outside the window. Let it in.

I am just angry at the level of offence some people seem to take at this memo, like they’ve forgotten the last few months of abuse revelations. This is not a serious issue: this is diplomats making a gaffe. They didn’t firebomb the popemobile, just their careers. I can understand the Foreign Office making an official apology after the memo was leaked, which they did, but beyond that it’s simply shrug your shoulders time as far as I’m concerned.

But no: Malcolm McMahon, bishop of Nottingham, said the memo reflected: “appalling manners… I think it’s bad that we invite someone into this country – a person like the Pope – and then he’s treated this way.”

What way? The Pope was never supposed to read the memo. Plus, I’m sure he’s got a thick skin. He’s still coming to Britain for his visit, anyway.

Jim Murphy, the cabinet minister overseeing the Pope’s visit, and a practising Catholic, said the memo was: “absolutely despicable. It’s vile, it’s insulting, it’s an embarrassment.”

No, it isn’t. It’s a joke. I think Mr Murphy seems to be confusing irony about an institution’s pisspoor response to the systematic abuse of children with the abuse itself. Even if the letter was meant seriously, there’s nothing remotely at the level of “vile” or “despicable” there. Get a grip. Opening a childline for abused victims of the organisation you are supposedly the figurehead of is “vile”? It’s the least he could do! Especially as he’s done fuck all so far except write an insultingly weak letter which did nothing to address the reality of the children raped under the care of his Church. If the Pope had been the head of a company or a government minister, he would have had to resign by now as a matter of course, as a symbol of the organisation’s shame and its willingness to do something in response to a serious situation. No-one would dispute that decision to resign.

Speaking of the Pope’s letter – a far more “disgusting” document than the memo – in that letter the Pope suggested that the victims of the abuse should seek the comfort of Jesus. That’s all the response he bothers to give them, other than “well, we at the Catholic church will try to do better in the future, honest, guv, we feel really bad about the whole thing… ” The abused children didn’t find the comfort of Jesus in the Church where it’s supposed to be mediated, so how are they going to find it elsewhere? Passing the buck much, Pope Benedict? The letter also makes no suggestion of the abuse victims who killed themselves. Presumably as suicide victims they’re not eligible for Jesus’ love. Now, I think it’s worth pointing out that the Pope is quite literally supposed to be Jesus’ representative on Earth. So shouldn’t he be comforting them himself to start with? Or is he just going to sit there?

I wonder.

The Pope could actually step down if he wanted. There’s nothing in the Church’s rules that says he can’t. No Pope has stepped down in 300 years, but that would just make it a more profound gesture. Considering the gravity of the situation, it would be perfectly appropriate. Any gesture would do, really, considering the lack of them so far. To go back to the memo’s suggestions, opening a childline would be a minor act of kindness, not something “vile”. It would be a charitable act. It would make Jesus proud. Maybe the Pope could man the line himself, being Jesus’ representative.

To me, the daftest thing to have come out of all this is the Foreign Office’s response to the staff involved in writing the memo. It sent them on ‘diversity training’. Diversity training. What for?

A Foreign Office spokesperson said:

“The idea is to instill in people the need to treat others with respect, whatever their background.”

This isn’t about background, it’s about ideologies. The memo took the piss out of  what are dangerous and morally bankrupt views held by the Catholic Church. It did not disrespect the Pope’s background. If this is an issue about background, then so is any joke about anyone ever: everyone with an opinion has a background.

Ultimately, my concern is with perspective. If something so serious can be deflected by something so trivial, then something is very wrong with our collective sense of perspective. Hopefully, the real issues will come back to the forefront and not just float away. I don’t know, but I hope.

Apparently, Croatian doctors are baffled after a teenage girl who fell into a mysterious coma woke up speaking fluent German. The teenager has been unable to speak Croatian – although can understand it when it is spoken to her – and now communicates only in German.

Pretty off-the-wall I think you’ll agree. This is the kind of thing that would have steadfast believers in past lives screaming “Proof!” in very loud voices, particularly if this unfortunate teenager didn’t speak German beforehand. Going by the tone of the article, you would think that this is what had actually happened. That would be a bona-fide miracle. However, despite it’s ‘mysterious event’ tone, the article is quick to point out that the girl in fact did know ‘a bit’ of German, although apparently her usage of the language following the coma was far superior to the mastery of the language she had when she was intially taken ill.

Apparently. (I’m getting used to that word, now.)

The parents of the girl, a thirteen-year-old from the Southern town of Knin, said that their daughter had only just started studying German at school and had been trying to read German books and watch German television – but had never been that good at german.

Yes. She was ‘studying’ it, ‘reading’ it and ‘watching’ TV programs in it, but despite all that she was, you know, a bit rubbish…

Excuse me while I prop up my dying sense of hope in a rational world and try to shake it violently awake.

The article is filled with references to the “mysterious coma” and “the unusual case”, and speaks of “getting to the bottom of the mystery”. It really tries its best to make it all seem as mystical and impossible-seeming as it can. Despite this, they are forced in their final paragraph to point out that the coma only lasted twenty-four hours and was probably caused by extremely high body temperature. So it seems as if the doctors aren’t quite as baffled as the Daily Fail/BellyLaugh axis of evil suggests.

In fact, the hospital director, Dujomir Marasovic, said:

“You never know when recovering from such a trauma how the brain will react. Obviously we have some theories although at the moment we are limited in what we can say because we have to respect the privacy of the patient.”

I like to think that the girl was a secret foreign languages junkie, staying up late in her room at night with a torch under the covers, speaking fluent German to herself.

Of course, the case is still unusual. A psychiatrist involved with the case, Dr Mijo Milas, wisely pointed out that:

“In earlier times this would have been referred to as a miracle; we prefer to think that there must be a logical explanation – it’s just that we haven’t found it yet.”

Fair enough, and about as skeptical as you get in the Daily Fail/BellyLaugh. Unfortunately, the wise Dr Milas then goes on to say:

“There are references to cases where people who have been seriously ill and perhaps in a coma have woken up being able to speak other languages – sometimes even the Biblical languages such as that in old Babylon or Egypt – at the moment though any speculation would remain just that – speculation – so it’s better to continue tests until we actually know something.”

Damn right it is! Personally I’d love to see ANY evidence of people suddenly speaking ancient languages following a coma, because I’m willing to bet money that if anyone ever did, they were probably students of ancient languages!

Gaahh…

That was the last gasp of my hope in a rational world.

Now, to the girl’s condition itself. The brain does funny things. People with brain injuries can lose short term memory, forget their own families, forget how to speak, all kinds of bizarre and unusual things. Severe stutterers can sometimes sing and speak their second languages fluently. Aphasia sufferers speak the wrong words because they simply can’t access the right ones, even though they’re attempting to make perfect sense, and grammatically they do. If this coma affected the parts of the girl’s brain which dealt with speech and language, I see no technical reason why something like this couldn’t happen. You don’t even need to be personally ‘fluent’ in the language as such. There is a gap between the amount of information you absorb and how efficiently and capably you can use that information. This girl may very well have read and heard more German words than she could personally recall consciously in a conversation. Somewhere she will have taken in that information, but just not immediately processed it for her conscious mind.

In addition, I would probably dispute the supposed high level of German she purportedly now speaks. That to me sounds like simple exaggeration, provided by those around the girl and then amplified by the reporters themselves. However, I can’t know that for sure, so I’ll leave that.

This story is fascinating and amazing on its own. Even if she woke only speaking the five words of German she knew and none of her first language, that would be fascinating enough on its own. It infuriates me when newspapers feel they have to portray stories like this in almost mystical terms, as if they’re reporting on a miracle. No: give us the facts, we’ll decide whether it’s a miracle or not. This tends to happen a lot with stories from abroad. I suspect it is because it makes it more difficult for readers and other journalists to verify the truthfulness of those stories. Indeed, I tried my best to find a source for this story outside of the identical articles in the Daily Fail/BellyLaugh but found absolutely nothing.

In fact, I’m not sure it even exists. Maybe it’s all just made up.

What a miracle!

Enter our hero of the hour, Ms/iss/rs(?) Beverley Turner, and her little excursion into something one or two of you will recognise…

“Even though I have this feeling, I deeply and completely accept myself.”

Got it yet?

*Taps Karate Chop Point 7 times*

“This Feeling” – including this wonderful comment by helloish123:

“Thank You…. This really works… I did this tapping today, $1200 cash all in $100 bills came to me unexpectedly. I had others ask to borrow money from me and I paid them both cash of what they asked me for and SOLD a house as well… I focused on releasing blockage of money flow. This works….enjoy jamie”

Yes, that’s it…  I can see the wide-eyed look of incredulity spreading like across your face like warm butter across hot toast:  The one and only – the 100% totally not “woo-woo or anything new-agey like that”, oh no – Emotional Freedom Technique and its merry entailment of gobshitery, insanity (“It could be long line in the fast food restaurant (sic) and I would feel like ripping slow people’s heads off – straight to EFT I go.”) and outrageous claims of efficacy over anything ranging from feeling a bit under the weather, to a lack of mathematical ability, to headaches, to short-sightedness (with added, extra quantum-woo) and, of course, the big one that they have to be able to claim:  Cancer.

Yes, this article – no relation to “This Feeling” – published in the Telegraph-ing horseshit to the masses – and penned by that presenter off of ‘Taste’, apparently, on Sky3 (does that channel really exist, or is it a barely noticed apparition in our collective subconscious?), is married to an Olympic gold medal winner, apparently, and now, apparently, qualified to flood the national psyche with healthcare advice which, in her own words, makes you “feel a bit of a wally” undertaking it.  I know, Bev, you must have felt a bit of a wally picking up that cheque as well…

Still.. It’s only about a bit of tapping, giggling and sticking it to The Man and his pesky Treatments-That-Actually-Work-But-I-Don’t-Understand in London’s LaLaLand of  well-monied, but missing-a-screw-or-two set, isn’t it?  No harm done, eh?  Of course not.

Apart from the harm you’re doing in directing people towards a nonsense non-treatment that, with a laugh and a joke, a nod and a wink, tells the credulous mass who have been conditioned to taking all manner of advice from ‘celebrities’, even homeopathic celebrities (almost certainly no celeb…  you see where I’m going), that they can stop taking their medication, because “…it (EFT) may may (sic) substantially reduce or eliminate diabetes symptoms….”

This insane article doesn’t, in itself, promote the use of EFT for severe physical conditions, but it does recommend this treatment for severe psychological trauma, with nothing but scant, ridiculously biased and credulous anecdotes as ‘evidence’.  The person doing this promotion has absolutely no right, no qualification and no hard facts to fall back on in defence of this piece.  It reeks of advertising dressed up as journalism, written with the force of semi-celebrity behind it, and immediately creditable via its publication in a broadsheet with a circulation close to 1.9 million readers per day.

Beverley Turner writes silly, trite books about her terrible time in the really, terribly machismo, anti-feminist world of F1 (dog bites man, news at 11); presents a terribly pro-feminist, err, middle-class TV cookery show and comments on healthcare that a good portion of almost 2,000,000 readers/day will ingest uncritically.  This person has a dream-like life, apparently untouched by the heinous tragedies that she then uses as pseudo-evidence for this PR piece, or to give it the old-fashioned name ’propaganda’, for people who want to sell 21^st Century Snake-Oil-as-Talk-Therapy to the masses.

I wonder if she’s happy to Telegraph credibility towards EFT for diabetes as promoted by its founder, Mr Gary – Slugbrows – Craig?

She, and the Telegraph are living in fantasyland, but not everyone can join them.  Most of us are stuck in the real world.

And what is it to have your middle-class, fashionable food fantasies brought, nodding and winking into the real world?

As most of our attempts at recreating Delia will testify:  A Nightmare.

A week later, the article began to surface from the sea of my subconscious and I grew increasingly irked. I gradually came to realise that it was a much more frustrating article than I had initially given it credit for. The article basically accuses scientists and the government of effectively making up the scale of the swine flu threat in order to scare and distract the public, for reasons seemingly pulled from Jenkins’ nether-regions. At first, I thought: ‘So what? It’s just his opinion’. The whole point of an opinion piece is that it is an opinion, and if people disagree they can leave a comment. But I couldn’t shake it off. What good is an opinion if it’s not informed? Surely if a newspaper is going to print an opinion, it should be more than a knee-jerk reaction? Jenkins was basically using facts to support an already formed opinion. For me, journalism should be a bit more thoughtful than that. Eventually, I couldn’t take it anymore and felt that I had to respond in some way. I’m not the only one. Tom Sheldon responded with his own piece, “Swine Flu Wasn’t Overhyped – Research Meant We Had to Play It Safe”, in the same section of The Guardian a week later. But here’s my belated tuppence-worth anyhow.

Let’s go through it piece by piece (don’t worry, I’ll leave out the boring bits so you won’t abandon me). The secondary headline reads:

“Remember the warnings of 65,000 dead? Health chiefs should admit they were wrong – yet again – about a global pandemic”

Then, in the first paragraph, we get:

“Six months ago… Swine flu was allegedly ravaging the nation. The BBC was intoning nightly statistics on what “could” happen as “the deadly virus” took hold. The chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, bandied about any figure that came into his head, settling on “65,000 could die”, peaking at 350 corpses a day.”

The inverted commas are Jenkins’ own.

Ok, first things first: health chiefs should admit they were wrong about a global pandemic. Already, Jenkins is misrepresenting the issue as well as just being plain wrong. Swine flu ‘is’ a pandemic. It ‘is’ global. What exactly is he wanting the apology for? That not enough people died? He then goes on to complain about the BBC and the chief medical officer telling us what could happen due to the Swine flu outbreak, as if informing the public of possibilities is somehow dishonest. I for one want to know how serious Swine flu could be. If it turned out to be extremely deadly, like some flu epidemics throughout history have been (to a terrifying degree), I would be very angry and upset if the government had not informed me of this very real possibility. Knowing the potential threat means we can prepare for that eventuality. If it doesn’t happen, that’s a cause for rejoicing, not attacking government language. Plus, Jenkins seems to forget the grilling the government took when they didn’t respond thoroughly and quickly enough for a BSE outbreak several years ago. A few years later, there was another outbreak of BSE and this time the government responded immediately and comprehensively, with plans already in place. Maybe the outbreak wouldn’t have spread far this time, but they couldn’t take the risk again. Governments prefer to have as easy a ride as possible at the hands of the voters. Of course, they were lambasted for a supposedly disproportionate response, but for them it was a case of choosing the lesser of two evils. One can’t help but think Jenkins would have slammed them either way.

Misusing language seems to be Jenkins’ secret weapon in this article too.  Aswell as the constant inverted commas implying dishonesty without any qualification, we have phrases such as allegedly ravaging, which instantly implies deceit; we have the BBC intoning nightly statistics, which gives them an aura of some kind of street preacher preaching the end of the world, or of the Grim Reaper himself pointing his finger at us through the TV screen and saying “Come with me…”. Sir Liam Donaldson apparently bandied about any figure that came into his head, although how Jenkins managed to get access to the inside of Donaldson’s head, I don’t know. Maybe he has a journalist’s pass? It’s enough to make a Daily Mail columnist blush, let alone a Guardian one. Take away all of Jenkins’ assumptions and emotive language and we’re left with no trace of an argument: it exists only in what Jenkins himself suggests, not in the reality he claims to convey.

The whole article is written in the same way. Paragraph two:

“Donaldson knew exactly what would happen. The media went beserk. The World Health Organisation declared a “six-level alert” so as to “prepare the world for an imminent attack”. The happy-go-lucky virologist, John Oxford, said half the population could be infected, and that his lowest estimate was 6,000 dead.”

Donaldson knew exactly what would happen. Implying what? That Donaldson was lying? That the government deliberately created the scare? Grand claims, especially as Jenkins never once provides any evidence to support them throughout the entire article. His description of John Oxford as happy-go-lucky is simply an attempt to malign him in the minds of the readers. Warning of the potential risk is hardly happy-go-lucky, but courtesy of Simon Jenkins we now imagine John Oxford as this glib monster, casually terrifying the public with offhand comments without caring of the consequences. Cheers, Simon. Nice to know you’re treating us like adults.

What is starting to come through quite clearly by this point is the conspiracy theory mentality behind Jenkins’ thinking. He has quite obviously already decided that the BBC and the government have worked together to create the Swine flu ‘scare’, and doesn’t seem remotely interested in providing any proof. He even complains that:

“If anyone dared question this drivel, they were dismissed by Donaldson as extremists.”

So: what the government is saying is drivel, and the good, concerned public are being misleadingly labelled as extremists. No argument or proof here, just assertions; Jenkins is unconcerned with persuasion, preferring instead to hoodwink us with rhetoric. How closely the government and the BBC are supposed to be working together is left a bit vague, as Jenkins often seems to confuse the two as one organisation. They have become the faceless ‘them’ pulling the strings from behind the scenes to scare the public. Maybe it’s just anyone who wears a suit and appears on television that fits the bill for Jenkins. Look out, it’s an authority figure! Beware! Scientists, on the other hand, seem to confuse Jenkins; it is never quite clear whether he blames them as well, or sees them as duped by the same rhetoric. Certainly Jenkins is not a fan of scientists, as he spends most of his articles in the Guardian slagging them off; but he seems to be leaning more toward a buffoonish caricature of them in this one. At one point, he says:

“The “Andromeda Strain” was stalking the Earth, and its first victims were clearly scientists.”

For an article about the government trying to scare people with language, Jenkins certainly loves trying to do it himself. He’s the one referencing science fiction novels about killer viruses, not the Chief Medical Officer. Only a few paragraphs in and we’re already in a state of fear that the government, the BBC and maybe scientists are all out to terrify us to death. Who else can we throw into the mix?

“The government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies sails gaily on, still graced by the presence of Sir Roy Anderson, who happens also to draw a six-figure salary as a non-executive director of GlaxoSmithKline, which made hundreds of millions from the government’s panic.”

Heeeeeeeere’s Big Pharma!

So why all this paranoia and accusations? Does Jenkins just hate everyone? Of course not…

“I accept that anyone can make a mistake, and authority has some duty to err on the side of caution. As Alastair Campbell implied on Tuesday, Iraq might have had weapons of mass destruction, so Blair was right to go to war just in case. But it is reasonable to ask, as the Chilcot inquiry is doing, why precaution on such a colossal and potentially destructive scale was justified when those who questioned the need for it have since been proved right. Is anyone asking about flu?”

I had to grit my teeth to write that. It is probably the most idiotic part of the entire article. So it’s okay to overreact when bombing unseen foreigners, but scaring the public by giving them information on the ‘potential risk’ of Swine flu is somehow out of order? Jenkins’ linking of the two is inane and offensive. Thousands of innocent civilians died because of the Iraq war. No-one died because they got a little frightened about a potential pandemic. Reality seems to have seeped out of the article at this point, and I’ve said all I have to say on this particular piece of stupidity.

After all this scaremongering – on Jenkins’ part, not anyone else’s – we are left to wonder: why? Why would it benefit the government/BBC/big pharma/the lizard people to scare the public? Jenkins references the BSE and SARS outbreaks and implies that the government likes to regularly scare its people in order to distract from other issues:

“The Blair government, and now Brown’s, have proved adept at using scare politics to divert attention from other troubles.”

Okay, cool, Jenkins has stopped preaching and is now putting forward a hypothesis. Great, now we can get to the meat. I wonder what troubles he means, and what his evidence is? Let’s find out…

Ah. It’s just that one sentence. That’s it. That’s the whole argument there. Sorry, I got excited for a moment.

It’s a baseless claim. It’s also worth pointing out that these ‘scares’ Jenkins refers to happened at the time of actual infectious outbreaks. There’s nothing suspicious about them on their own. You have an outbreak, you have a response. The absence of responses would have been much more of a concern. I also can’t imagine what things Jenkins thinks the government was distracting from – and judging by his omission of them in the article I doubt he does either. Governments are always mired in controversy, and there was nothing specific to the times of these outbreaks that needed to be distracted from then than at any other time. Maybe he’s suggesting that the government just responds to whatever’s there at any one time in order to just distract from government in general? If he is suggesting that, maybe he should have let the readers know. What I think he actually is suggesting, however, is that these scares are completely engineered. He constantly quotes statistics throughout the article in an attempt to downplay the severity of the various infectious outbreaks we’ve had over the years, comparing them to government statistics regarding how severe they ‘may’ have been, and pointing out how less severe the reality was. Every time, he seems to forget that the government figures represent the ‘potential’ possibility. The point isn’t that the figures in reality should end up being the same as the prediction. The point is that the prediction COULD have come true, and we need to know these things.

I mentioned earlier about how the government was criticised for not reacting swiftly to the first BSE outbreak. I don’t blame the government for acting differently from then on. It is better that we are scared and live, than the government reacts poorly and people die, leaving a government mired in shame. Lives are at stake. The government cannot afford to understate risk to the public. These are decisions that have to be made regarding risks. They are not nice decisions, but we have a government precisely so that those kinds of decisions CAN be made.

The consequences of understatement can be disastrous. We know what epidemics and pandemics can do from history. Jenkins is simply making stuff up that isn’t there in order to attack the government, the BBC and whoever else grabbed his goat that week. It is pure conspiracy theory mentality. In reality, this isn’t about Blair or Brown, or the BBC: this is about practical decision making. He’s criticising the government for doing their job.

The article ends with:

“This is why people are ever more sceptical of scientists. Why should they believe what “experts” say when they can be so wrong and with such impunity? Weapons of mass destruction, lethal viruses, nuclear radiation, global warming … why should we believe a word of it? And it is a short step from don’t believe to don’t care.”

The problem, Simon, is that the “experts” weren’t wrong with such impunity. They weren’t even wrong. This is all in your head. You don’t seem to understand the nature of risk, and of caution based upon that risk. Just because things did not turn out to be as bad as they could have been, does not mean that the wrong decision was made. That is the basic error at the heart of your article.

I can only hope that most of Jenkins’ readers are more discerning than he is.