Undiluted astrology bollocks in Sunday Tribune

Here's a useful rule of thumb: any publication with an astrology column shows thereby that it is willing to print utterly unwarranted bullshit. It should make you worry about the editors' ability to distinguish evidence from rubbish elsewhere in the publication.

The Economist and The New York Times don't have horoscopes. Cosmopolitan and Hello magazine do. Go figure.

Daily newspapers might try to excuse themselves by saying that an astrology column is like a crossword, or a bridge column - only some readers like it, but they like it enough to care, and it doesn't do much harm. That strikes me as a weak excuse, but to invoke it the astrology rubbish needs to be carefully ring fenced.

The Sunday Tribune (South Africa, January 4, 2009) shows that it respects no such boundary.Page 8 includes an article under the headline "2009, Year of the ox, will be more stable". The article includes a bunch of the usual nebulous waffle, presented in a totally uncritical register. Key claims are asserted as fact, rather than opinion of an astrologer, for example that "The Chinese calendar moves in 60-year cycles, meaning the world will experience similar events in the new year to those that took place 60 years ago."

There is nothing in the article (zero, not a bit, bugger all) about whether there is any evidential basis for the claims made. Garbage is simply presented as news.

(For non-SA readers, the Sunday Tribune is not a generally nonsense publication. No alien abduction stories, relatively little superficial tosh about celebrities, and astrology generally coralled next to the funny pages. So this is a serious own goal.)