Overnight Australian time a young Los Angeles resident was jailed for 23 days after a series of minor driving offences. This is bigger news than China’s reluctance to pursue some sort of solution to its contribution to global warming and thus save the planet.

According to Media Monitors, the incarceration of Paris Hilton has received 485 broadcast mentions across all Australian electronic media in the past 48 hours. Chinese emissions policy, by comparison, has been referred to 71 times.

Are we there yet? Have we finally arrived at some point at which the public imagination has at last been saturated by the low-life likes of Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Richie, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton? Who are these people? Why are we obsessed with intellectually malnourished, semi-starved, over-coiffed, hyper-indulged air heads? Why on earth does anything that they could conceivably do matter? They are like a cancer of the collective bowel.

The great pity is that only one of them is behind bars. A zoo if it has to be. Just take them away.