Yes, Messrs Amis and Hitchens, you're right. It is their culture that is 'mediaeval'...

Huzzah! All of our sketches are now up at ComedyBox, you can find them hidden in my 'comic profile', here. Please go, watch, and give them many stars, and add them to your Favourite Things, if you feel so inclined. Thank you all, and we'll see you soon...

For those whom I have not yet pestered to so do, please watch this. Then click on lots of stars and watch it again. Then tell your friends.

If you'd like...

***Update - All references in the post below to John McDonnell MP are actually to John Hutton. I feel an utter fool for having written in haste without having bothered to go back and check to see if I remembered the facts correctly, particularly as I quite like Mr McDonnell. I apologise to Mr McDonnell, and wish him nothing but good things. Sorry, all.***

I think the most dispiriting thing I saw during a thoroughly disheartening conference season was Andrew Neill's interview with John McDonnell at the Labour Party conference. Andrew Neill - who looks more like an inflamed testicle with every week that passes on This Week - pressed Mr McDonnell on why there were 'still' 5 million people on incapacity benefit.

Mr McDonnell responded by pointing out, with some pride, that this was 1 million fewer people than had been receiving it in 1997. These exchanges continued for some time, one suggesting that too many people were on incapacity benefit, and the other saying that there were fewer than there used to be, and that the government was working to ensure that there would be fewer in the future.

Did I miss the moment at which it stopped being the correct response to Andrew Neill's question to tell him that there might be 5 million people on incapacity benefit, because there are 5 million people in need of incapacity benefit. The fact that a Labour minister accepted the implications of those questions - that no one really needs incapacity benefit, and it is government's job to not give it to people - without question is a worrying sign of how far we have drifted into a neo-liberal dreamworld over the last 30 years.

The fact that it has become taboo for Labour ministers to suggest that some people need to receive incapacity benefit because they are ill, or because their family circumstances do not allow them to work; to suggest that the welfare system in Britain was established precisely because some people needed to take advantage of it, and the rest of society decided that one should not be penalised for being unfortunate became more and more depressing as it sank.

There will always be the ill, those whose families are breaking up, those who have been made redundant, the disabled. Government cannot solve all of a society's ills. What it can do is support those in need, help them when they need help, and to try to ensure that misfortune does not become lasting misery.

That's what he could have said. Adding: "...you brutal, callous millionaire, Andrew."

Johann Hari: Yes the BBC is biased - but to the right - Independent Online Edition > Johann Hari

Johann Hari: Yes the BBC is biased - but to the right - Independent Online Edition > Johann Hari

Oddly, this is the second time in as many months that I've liked one of Johann Hari's articles. Maybe I shold lie down...

Leck mich im Arsch - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Leck mich im Arsch - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ha ha! Mozart! Pfffft!

Kilogram has lost the weight of a fingerprint - Boing Boing

Kilogram has lost the weight of a fingerprint - Boing Boing

Congratulations! You now weigh more, in kilograms, than you did before. The kilogram itself (and, by which I mean 'THE kilogram') is getting lighter. Will we see athletes worrying if the metre starts getting longer? If seconds start getting shorter?

Who knows, I've got to go and run off those extra fingerprints...

Ministry of Truth » Blog Archive » The novelty soaks in

This, as Ministry of Truth almost always is, is just spectacular blogging. Highlights include:

"If, as a society, we were just that bit smarter and more observant, just that bit more inclined to be sceptical, think for ourselves and question people’s motives, then maybe the question we’d be asking ourselves is just exactly what the media coverage of the McCanns tells us about how the media operate and what that, in turn, says about the pernicious effect they have on the nature of the public discourse in this country."

and:

"I’m not shocked or horrified by anything that’s happened and I don’t particularly sympathise or empathise with the McCann family at anything more that the completely superficial level of thinking that losing a child in these kinds of circumstances is a pretty shitty thing for anyone to have to go to. I don’t know them, they don’t know me and, so far as I know, our respective lives have never crossed paths so nothing in this has the slightest personal dimension for me at all and I’m not about to pretend otherwise."

New Yorker Confirms What You Know: Colic Is A Form Of Torture -- Daddy Types: "Sheila Kitzinger, a British social anthropologist who studies pregnancy and childbirth, has written, 'The sound of a crying baby...is just about the most disturbing, demanding, shattering noise we can hear.' The United States military has reportedly used the sound of wailing infants as an instrument of psychological stress, piping recordings of their cries into cells of detainees at Guantanamo Bay."

Good. Now I know my child is torturing me. Huzzah.