They said it wasn't our fault? Must be some mistake!

The Michael Stone report is finally with us. Startlingly, it fails to say that mental health services, having met him, should have cured him of being a bastard with a wave of their magic therapy wand and taken away all his responsibility for not killing people! This seems rather wondrous, given the way this case has been reported over the years. We have bright shiny new personality disorder services in purpose built buildings at Rampton Hospital, thanks to Michael Stone. I wonder how this report - which essentially says that his mental health care was appropriate - will impact on all the service changes that were instituted to make up for his supposed lack of care?

What's not stressed in the BBC report linked to above, but was stated on the radio, is that the report suggests that the criminal justice system needs to be taking more responsibility for managing people like Stone. This is a huge statement; the trend of the last ten years, from this observer's perspective, seems to have been putting more and more pressure on mental health services to bear responsibility for all the behaviour of those who come into contact with them. To say that the criminal justice system is the appropriate agency is the same, surely, as to say that psychopaths must bear the responsibility for their own behaviour.

Speaking of which, I hear that Cherie Blair has been "accidentally" - and deniably - overheard calling Gordon Brown a liar. Whatever happens over the next year, we can be sure that Tony and cohorts will be blaming Gordon and his posse for spoiling it all. This is a crying shame, because it is another reason why Blair will never face up to the horrific disaster that his foreign policy has been.

"How very stupid not to have thought of that" part 308,972

"The president of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. If he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ridiculous or offensive."

-Sam Harris

Nice.

Calling anyone who ever thought guitars were cool...

Just have a look at these! Quite possibly the most beautiful guitars I've ever seen. One of the guitarists from Mastodon has one of these in Silverburst, which may well be the loveliest single guitar I've ever seen; trying to figure out what exactly it was led me to these. And they only made 40! The swines!

If I can find a link to a decent pic of Mastodon bloke's one I'll pop it in.

Honestly, I care about stuff other than religion, but...

Tony Robinson turned up a prodigous crew of swine tonight in the tediously, but understandably, named "The Doomsday Code". This was all about the Book of Revelation, and the people, some of them hugely influential, who believe in a "literal" truth derived from it, and why we should hate them, fear them, and throw mud and poo at them.

One delightful preacher was deriding those who would believe in evolution, when all the time there was a God telling them that he had had his son tortured to death for them, and they only had to take Him into their hearts, so it was their own fault they were going to BURN and have their livers drawn out and there was going to be a river of blood up to HERE, wow, and isn't God infinitely merciful. Another one, or it might have been the same one, condensed this unconscious irony in beautifully compact form; it ran along the lines of "all you (atheists and agnostics) had to do was accept my grace and love and infinite mercy, but you didn't and so you're fucked forever!" (Without the swearing and probably more elegantly put.)

And so, for the morally inept amongst you, here it is. Any creature which defined the worth of a human being by their attitude towards that creature, rather than by how they behave towards other human beings, would be an egotistical excrescence, even if it did make them in the first place. Anyone with the remotest approximation of a moral sense would have a duty to oppose it.

And that's just one of the reasons why if God existed He, She, or It would be a scumbag of, ahem, biblical proportions. Good job there's no sensible reason to do so, isn't it.

Eight legs good.

I haven't posted for a little while - clearly not enough to complain about. So today I shall complain that it's bloody hard to take pictures of spiders with an autofocus camera. Still, I think these came out OK - I found these two beauties apparently hanging in midair the other day.

'Ang on, I've changed me mind...

Last run before, er, the run, tonight. It felt really good, actually. I've had a nagging pain in my right thigh for a while now, but it's given me less trouble each time for a the last few runs, so I take that to mean I'm judging something right. I have my number - 879 - so I know I'm really in it. Well, this will certainly be different from anything else I've ever done...

Creeping Americanisation... It gets everywhere.

I said assholes! I, of course, meant arseholes. Some heritage is worth preserving. Apologies.

The fact of the matter is, some people are downright wrong, and we don't want them.

Yes, I'm still here. It seems that a vaccine for HPV will soon be here; HPV is the virus which causes cervical cancer. It also seems that the voices of hate and fear have to have their say on this, as on so much else. The Catholic Church, as well as "family campaigners", according to Zoe Williams, for starters. There's reference to more assholes to be found if you follow this link. Let's be quite clear on this - if you think ten year old girls will suddenly want to have sex because they've been given a jab, you're a twisted old pervert. And if you think that thousands of deaths are preferable to giving people the tools to make their own moral choices and to offering them protection when it will be the most effective, then you are the sodding Taliban, and no civilised country deserves you.