I always enjoy Angry Harry’s podcasts, but I can’t recall when I last enjoyed one quite as much as this, published today. He’s packed a lot into 25 minutes.

A few minutes ago we launched a campaign to raise £39,500 to pay for posters and other materials in support of our campaigning in the months leading up to the general election, on 7 May, 2015. Details of the campaign are here, along with the first two poster designs we plan to employ, and ‘mock ups’ showing how they will look in situ on hoardings, near shops, on buses etc.

Thank you for your support, as always. The campaign will be ‘live’ until 23:59 on Sunday, 9 November.

AVfM will be publishing our article on this matter in the next 24 hours, and appealing to their many supporters to donate to the campaign.

More ‘equal pay for work of equal value’ lunacy – our thanks to Ian for this. Take a minute or two to checkout (ahem) some of the perceptive comments.

At Asda, 60% of checkout operators are women, while 80% of warehouse operatives are men. A law firm is claiming the work of the former is equivalent to the latter, and seeking equal pay.

This is sheer lunacy. I break my groceries shopping into two or three weekly shops, often at a local Tesco. I scan the items through myself, because (a) there’s rarely a queue to use the self-service machines, and (b) I find it’s quicker. The latter is an indication of how ‘skilled’ the work of a checkout operator is.

My first job after leading university, in 1979 – the same glorious years Margaret Thatcher was first elected, the first of three general elections in which I voted for her – was as a manufacturing graduate trainee with Beecham, at what was then the largest toiletries factory in Europe, in Maidenhead – known locally as ‘The Brylcreem Factory’. The programme lasted over two years. and over that period I spent time in a wide variety of departments including Goods Inwards and Despatch. The work in those departments could involve taking goods from lorries (or putting them onto lorries) in the depths of winter or the height of summer. The managers of those departments always relished putting their graduate trainees to work outside in the coldest weather, I recall. It could be physically demanding work, and often entailed unsocial hours. Many of the workers operated fork lift trucks and similar expensive bits of equipment, both a skilled job, and one where great care had to be taken not to injure (or kill) people.

The idea that such jobs are equivalent to those of checkout operators is absurd beyond belief. If women want the higher pay that warehouse operatives get, then they should do those jobs. It really is that simple. Nobody is stopping them. It won’t take them long to realise the jobs are a damned sight more demanding and skilled than sitting on their backsides, passing bags of crisps over a sheet of glass, and checking that a ‘beep’ has registered a sale. Hell, it took me one minute to learn how to do that job, and I manage to do it standing up.

Our thanks to the good people at World4Justice for this piece. If you don’t already subscribe to the site, we recommend you do so now.

I haven’t seen the original video of which Julie Borowski’s short video is a parody, but it really doesn’t matter. As always, she’s a hoot. Enjoy. She could – and should – make a living as a comedienne.

A lengthy (82 minutes long) but always interesting interview of Paul Elam. Enjoy.

Another impressive piece by William Collins, the author of our recent report submitted to the Home Office consultation on strengthening the law on domestic abuse – Herbert Purdy’s improved version of which is here.

Our thanks to Doris for pointing us to this. I doubt many women will either read the article or respond intelligently to it, however. Too many of them have become addicted to bolstering their self-esteem by belittling individual men – usually their partners – as well as men in general. For many years popular culture has been feeding their addictions. I no longer watch drama on television, because so many of the characters are utterly unbelievable.

Yesterday evening I was at Waterstone’s in Hampstead, where Laura Bates was due to give a talk and sign copies of her whine book, Everyday Sexism. I arrived 15 minutes early, bought a ticket, and noted the staff had put out 50-60 chairs. Half were already occupied, mostly by women in their late teens or 20s, the remainder by older women and a few hapless-looking men.

I’d taken along 50 copies of a flyer to hand out, containing the proof that Bates’s repeated claim that, ‘Over two women per week are killed by partners or former partners in the UK’ was false, and that her dogged repetition of the claim after we’d sent her contradictory evidence (government statistics) made her an indisputable liar, and a worthy winner of our latest Lying Feminist of the Month award.

The front row was fully occupied by young women, so I walked along the row, saying:

Hi! Big fan of Laura Bates! Can I give you one of my handouts?

The reaction was positive, and it wasn’t until I’d handed out a number of flyers that the penny started to drop. I handed out flyers to other people, and before long the whining started. In one row of seven 20-something women, one of them said, ‘You claim Laura Bates is a liar. What proof do you have?’ I replied, ‘Well, the proof is in the flyer, but I have a copy with me of the ONS report which proves she’s a liar. Would you like to see the relevant section of the report?’ She replied, ‘No thanks!’, handed the flyer back to me, and the women with her did likewise, in a suitably anxious sheep-like fashion. It was the phenomenon we’re so familiar with, feminists being unwilling to engage with facts which prove their narratives to be lies. For these women, feelings trump facts every time. They might as well have said to me:

Laura’s nice, she’s on the telly and the radio all the time, so she can’t be lying, you’re a bad man for saying it’s even possible! I’m grateful to her for explaining why my life is a complete mess – sexism!!!

One cackling young crone claimed loudly that I had no evidence Bates was lying. I offered to show her the proof – the ONS report – and her cackling became louder. I asked her why she was cackling, a question which appeared to confuse her. I was reminded why we’d presented Laura Bates’s defenders our latest Gormless Feminists of the Month award. Some of these women aren’t… er… let’s be kind… well. Bats in the belfry, and all that.

I got a warmer reception from others, including a 30-something French woman who was prepared to engage in a rational discussion, to my amazement. The men in the audience were predictably hopeless. Those who were with their female partners looked like rabbits dazed by car headlights when I offered them the flyer, while two of three men sitting on their own refused to accept one. I said to one of them, ‘Aren’t you interested that the person you’ve paid to hear talk tonight has been shown publicly to be a liar, but won’t retract her lie?’ He was at a loss for anything to say, and shifted on his seat uncomfortably.

Just before the scheduled start time, two young female members of staff came to me and asked me to leave, saying Laura Bates was nervous, as she’d received death threats. I said I was the last person in the world likely to threaten Laura Bates, as she’s such an asset to J4MB – a feminist who lies publicly, then lies publicly about having lied publicly. But they were politely insistent, so I left. I couldn’t see Bates, who was presumably keeping out of the way lest my shadow fall on her, leading to her instant collapse and death.

We look forward to attending other public events where Bates and other prominent feminists are appearing. No longer can they expect to attend events without being publicly exposed as liars.

Our thanks to Doris for pointing us to this. When will successive governments understand that mothers of young children don’t want to engage in paid employment, and with good reasons?