Virtual Methodist

This is Virtual Methodist's electronic equivalent of those glossy supplements you get in weekend newspapers that take a full week to get through... at least in this household... Its a few of the more developed stories I've come across this week which are too long for a FB post and which I haven't had time or inclination to post on myself. The first involves story of Mary Bale, a 45-year-old bank clerk, and former church choir singer,dropping a cat into a wheelie bin... Now given what happened to our cat while on holiday (and I'm not blogging about that yet... still too angry) I can understand some of the outrage, but I'm with Will Crawley who is bemused by the wholesale hue and cry in the media given the other, bigger issues in the news. One of those issues has dominated Will's blog, and the Northern Ireland news this week, that being the Northern Ireland Police Ombudsman's report into the Claudy bombing back in the very darkest days of our most recent Troub...

I'd never read one of Ben Goldacre's "Bad Science" column in the Guardian on a Saturday before, but will probably seek it out in future and his blog has now been duly entered in my blogroll. I had been recommended this book , however, by a couple of friends who, I think, saw that I and Dr. Goldacre are of a similar mindset. Nothing sets me off in a "white flecks of foam flying from my mouth" kind of way, as much as the incompetent handling of science in the modern media... Not even the incompetent handling of theology in the modern media, which is almost as bad. The book should really be called "Bad Bio-Medicine" as it is largely about evidence based medicine and the modern world's/media's total inability to understand how it works. Actually my casual observation is that many doctors don't know how it works either, leading to them blindly jumping onto bandwagons along with everyone else, but then, in my more annoying moments I remind ...