Spinners get to work

How will they incorporate the Detroit event into the fiction that justifies the continuing impossibilist war in Afghanistan?

Why wasn't  the alleged Al Qaeda bomber deterred by the NATO's war in Afghanistan?  Isn't that why we are there? 

Will NATO now invade the Yemen where  the alleged bomber was trained?

Was he more or less motivated to kill because of Britain's presence in Helmand Province?

Why did the UK spend £3.5 billion last year and sacrifice 106 lives to deter  the crumbling Al Qaeda  organisation that has twice proved it lacks the skill to construct a working bomb?

How will the war fantasists invent a link between the would-be alleged bomber and the Taliban?

Whatever the answers to these qusetions, it is certain that more propaganda will be spun by the infinitely inventive war apologists. Top politicians of all parties will carry on lying. Our soldiers will carry on dying.

Still-born conspiracy theory

The Redtops have conditioned the weak brained into neurotic gullibility.

 

Tiny non-typical instances of slights to Christianity are magnified into conspiracies of cataclysmic significance. The Daily Mail is the most hysterical. But still some of their readers treat them seriously and believe what they write. I hope I have managed to destroy one Newport incipient conspiracy fantasy at source.

Last year. Newport's Christmas decoration included the words 'Nadolig Llawen - Merry Christmas' in a street wide banner of lights in the High Street. One excited  constituent detected a plot because the words are not visible this year in the High Street.  The myth makers  have invented a new martyrdom for Christianity as an explanation.

It's all cobblers, of course. The same banner has been moved a few hundred yards to more prominent site near the railway station.

Bad science

The highly questionable Dore 'cure' for dyslexia appeared to have sunk into bankruptcy. It has been resurrected. 

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) told the Dore Programme to remove a Google-sponsored link which read: “The DORE Programme... Need help with dyslexia, ADHD, dyspraxia or Asperger’s?” following a complaint. The ASA said evidence used to back up the advert’s offer of help was not “sufficiently robust”.

In its adjudication, the ASA said evidence offered to back up the company’s claims was not “robust” because the research did not contain a control group to compare with the group receiving treatment from the programme. It said: “We considered that it was not possible to determine whether any reported improvements resulted from the DORE programme itself, or were a consequence of other factors, such as the development of the children over time or the results of other support they may have been receiving at school and at home.”

It also pointed out that neither study had followed anyone being treated for Asperger’s and only one had seen someone treated for dyspraxia.

This is a past EDM I put down about Dore.

 

That this House is appalled at the gullible uncritical promotion by the media of Dore, a claimed miracle cure for dyslexia, in the absence of scientific proof of its value; notes that there were five resignations from the editorial board of the journal Dyslexia in protest at false claims published in that journal on the efficacy of Dore; welcomes Ofcom’s finding that Dore’s television advertisement was in breach of its rules on evidence,; calls on the Jeremy Vine Show, Channel Five News, Radio Five Live, BBC London, ITV Central, ITV Yorkshire, the Daily Mail, the Daily Record, Scotland on Sunday, Tonight with Trevor McDonald and You and Yours to correct the false impressions they broadcast on an unproven treatment; and congratulates the bloggers and journalist Ben Goldacre for exposing this bad science and other exploitative snake oil salespeople.

Comments

[HolfordWatch]

Thanks for the post about Dore (it was my complaint which led to the ASA's decision). It's hard to know what to do when programmes such as Dore can be resurrected like this (and continue to get much positive media coverage). I wonder if giving ASA, PCC and Trading Standards more teeth might help?

[Zeno]

Holfordwatch said: "I wonder if giving ASA, PCC and Trading Standards more teeth might help?"

I think that giving these bodies more teeth (and resources) would help with all sorts of problems with quacks misleading the public and conning them out of their hard-earned cash with claims they cannot substantiate.

[HuwOS]

"How will they incorporate the Detroit event into the fiction that justifies the continuing impossibilist war in Afghanistan?"

The same way they do with the war on drugs.
That is, "the situation would be so much worse if we weren't doing what we're doing"

The opposite of the truth, in other words, they will lie.

It has been well used and has been utterly successful for decades, why try any other tack?

[Paul Flynn]

Thanks Huw. You are probably right. The source of this act of terrorism as the Yemen seems now certain. Will anyone acknowledge that the British lie that we are fighting terrorism in Helmand. Other European countries.

How will we deal with threat from the Yemen and Somalia. Another couple of wars?