After an earlier incident she was told that the ‘Nursing & Midwifery Council code’ states that ‘you must demonstrate a personal and professional commitment to equality and diversity’ and ‘you must not use your professional status to promote causes not related to health’.

These are amazing statements, both sinister and self-contradictory. She must promote Left-wing politics, but she must not mention Christianity.

Equality (alias Marxism) and Diversity (alias political correctness) are contentious and highly political aims, not at all ‘related to health’. Yet she ‘must’ be personally and professionally committed to them.

At least it seems that way when “equality” legislation is applied to justify the withdrawal of funding from a Brighton care home because its Christian ethos might deter gay people from applying.

Update 9 Feb 2009: Funding restored to Christian care home.

JB: But when you make a value judgement don’t you immediately step yourself outside of this evolutionary process and say the reason this is good is because it’s good, and you don’t have any way to stand on that statement?

RD: But my value judgement itself could come from my evolutionary past.

JB: So therefore it’s just as random in a sense as any product of evolution.

RD: Well, you could say that. But it doesn’t in any case – nothing about it makes it more probable that there is anything supernatural.

JB: Okay, but ultimately, your belief that rape is wrong is as arbitrary as the fact that we’ve evolved five fingers rather than six.

RD: You could say that, yeah.

(HT: Tom Price)

It is often trumpeted that HIV and AIDS affect all kinds of people. That is true. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, it affects more women than men, and 24.5 million people are infected. In some countries, over 20% of adults are living with HIV. Worldwide, nearly 3 million will have died of AIDS in 2006 [1,2]. These are staggering statistics.

In the UK, of all those adults living with HIV (estimated 63,500 by end of 2005), about 44% are men who have sex with men [3]. The rest are not. So it is clearly wrong to think of HIV as something that affects only gay men.

However, after playing around with a few numbers [4,5], the figure above suggests that around 5-10% of practising homosexual men are HIV positive [also 6,7]. That’s a staggering statistic too.

Virtually all HIV cases could easily have been avoided. So much suffering and death due either to ignorance or to deliberate lifestyle choice! How tragic!

Now I’m not a blogger so I have no intention of joining in with this exercise. But I will share with you one part of my daily routine. This

is a cafetière, similar to (okay, much nicer than) the one I purchased recently in my quest to discover the delights of coffee. And what a delightful cup I consumed earlier! (Note for pedants: “cup” is used synecdochically for “cupful of coffee”.) Apparently the coffee was grown on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro and brought to me direct from the growers. Mmm.