The darkness of this house has got the best of us

Browsing the morning press, I come across this gift-to-satire headline.

David Gray Warns On Torture Music

What, has he got a new album out?

It's writing itself, as me and m'colleagues keep saying. Actually, fair play to the useless twunt. I know I usually say "BabylOFF" when I hear mention of him and his irritating music, but I can always switch channels. If I had a bag over my head, a rottweiler growling at my nuts and a bunch of half-wit marines making me wank off over the Koran, I'd probably even welcome a bit of James Blunt, such would be my despair.

When I was a kid, torture was something Germans in black trench coats in movies did to elicit information from the brave soldiers who would never talk. The fact that we (Britannia) were doing it in Long Kesh kind of passed me by, what with me only being six in 1981 and that. Now, thankfully, it's again safely removed, to big metal containers in the middle of the desert, and being visited on un-people on our behalf, not our fellow countryfolk.

As Michel Foucault observed in 'Discipline and Punish', "The right to punish, therefore, is an aspect of the sovereign’s right to make war on his enemies". Torture is not about what you know but making you not matter. Like a David Gray record I can switch off.

Let go your heart...

Amnesty International site

...not you two though.

I was scurrying across town to attend to some optometrical business on my lunch just there - being a cubicle gopher has ruined my eyesight, official! - and up and down the escalators of the tube there were the usual little posters advertising shoes, finance, West End musicals, sexy underwear, etc. In fact in some of the more modish stations they have electronic screens, which sweep expensive looking graphics across the retina in a full spectrum dominant manner YOU CANNOT TURN AWAY FROM...

There were some examples from the recent Amnesty International campaign, where celebrities are photographed holding up signs saying 'Protect the Human'.

The two examples of placard carrying humanity at Chancery Lane: Russell Brand and Dom Joly.

Human Rights be damned - I don't give Amnesty £6.00 a month to protect those shitehawks.