The lights are going out

Yes I know I've not been keeping my blog up to date. I haven't abandoned it just not had anything much to say that couldn't fit into a pithy 140 characters on Twitter which is my ranting outpost of choice these days.

Mind you it's not just me; I've noticed a lot of blogs have fallen by the wayside of late. Old Holborn gets paid to blog on blottr (sensible man), Steve over on Natural Yoghurt has hung up his blogging boots and I'm wondering if we might be coming to the end of an era when it comes to blogging. Some might say its because in the spate of a few well-publicised cases we've all become more aware that a careless, throwaway remark will have The Dibble kicking your door in at 3 in the morning and hauling you off for "hate speech" or some other trumped up charge under a law some NuLabour twat farted out of her arse a few years back. Certainly there's little in the way of those whistleblower / what really happens at work blogs left as employers have got wise to that and subtle and sometimes not so subtle pressures get applied; I can understand that having pulled my work blog some time ago

Maybe for some people keeping blogging day after day is hard going for no reward, and it's impressive some blogs have lasted this long.

I'm not closing the blog as I'm sure something will either tickle me to amusement or get me into an incandescent rage that I can't express in a little box on Twitter so keep an eye on the Grumpy Dragon from time to time as I'm sure I'll be back.

Disposable

I bought a new printer the other day; nice little wifi HP job that has a scanner built into it and a cute colour touch screen on the front.

I needed a new printer because my old one (which I blogged about getting) has started putting random splodges of colour on every printed page, even after running the cleaning routine. Now back in the old days printers were quite pricey pieces of kit that if it broke would probably be worth repairing. Not so now; if I were to even try and get the old printer fixed it would cost me almost as much as a new one just in postage to send it off and 58 quid gets me a brand new faster, shinier printer delivered so it's a no-brainer.

But I looked at the old printer this morning, sat in the "must take this crap to the tip sometime" along with the coffee machine that started leaking scalding arabica over the kitchen work surfaces, and wondered how much longer this consume - dispose - consume can continue. I'm no eco-weenie but it's galling to see that this lump of plastic and glass is going to end up in a landfill somewhere (it's probably not even cost effective to recover any metal from it) when it's probably just a tiny cheap part that needs replacing.

I am consuming less and I certainly don't go in for this "must have the latest shiny iToy" nonsense but even if I wanted to Hewlett Packard have made sure I'll not be fixing my own printer as it appears to have been glued together. The same goes for Apple's impenetrable products where you can't even replace the sodding battery.

The message is clear. Buy a new one. "Make do and mend" is dead.

There but for the grace of the angels go I.

So if you have a RBS, NatWest or Ulster Bank account you probably don't need telling that something went very, very badly titsup last week. Stories of people being stuck in jail as their bail could not be paid, people temporarily homeless as solicitors couldn't hand over keys on house transactions and so on and so forth.

It appears the cause was a screw up in operating the software which schedules the processing of the various software programs that makes up the bank's "books" as it were. When I first started in IT I was a junior programmer writing those kinds of programs on a Burroughs mainframe for what was then The Midland Bank. The overnight suite must have been over 150 discrete programs all of which had dependencies on others and the RBS suite is almost certainly no different and probably much more complex and relies on a lump of code called "CA7" to ensure everything runs when it should. Now it seems some change was made within CA7 that didn't work and needed to be "backed out"; this sort of thing happens all the time in software releases and before releasing any change to a production environment you always, without fail, have a backout plan. Regrettably for RBS a junior numpty, hired on the cheap and operating out of Hyderabad  (RBS having saved money by sacking all the UK based very experienced staff) rather than removing the change removed everything, completely wiping the schedule database.

Oops.

This fiasco will probably end up costing RBS, in other words me and you the taxpayers, upwards of 500 million quid when everything is taken into account. How's that cost saving working out for you RBS?

I do feel sorry for the junior numpty though; that must have been the longest stomach-churning "Oh fuck. What have I just done" moment in history. And I defy anyone in IT to say they've never had one.

Mine was back in those junior coder days, wrangling COBOL on the overnight batch systems. Late on friday there was some urgent patch needed to a part of code that handled automated cheque book issuing (back when people used cheques our code worked out when you were running low and ordered a new book to be printed and sent). I made the change but didn't really have time to test it but it was a two line change and I told my supervisor this.

"Are you sure it's OK? You sure you put that full stop in the right place?" she said whilst putting her coat on. Clearly she didn't intend to check it.

"Yes, definitely" said a supremely confident dragon and uploaded the code and clocked off.

I woke on Saturday morning with the gnawing feeling something was wrong. I could see the code in my head. I could see that full stop. It was in the WRONG FUCKING PLACE!

I'd terminated an "If... Then... Else" structure too early.

I have ordered every single Midland Bank current account customer a new sodding cheque book at a cost to the bank of tens of thousands of pounds.

After regaining control of my stomach I started to contemplate what my new career would be because it certainly wasn't going to be computer programming. Maybe herding yak in Tibet would be more my line.

Monday came and I went in to face the music. All the team looked at me as I walked in. I waited for the hammer to fall.

It never did. In inadvertently screwing up that if/else structure I'd caused some other part of the subroutine to fail and so no books got ordered at all. The code could be patched (and I did the patch) so the missing sends would get picked up on the next run. I'd dodged a bullet and, 25 years later, I'm still wrangling code and not yak.

Don't think that chap in Hyderabad is going to get that chance.

How to win at business (or not)

From: Dracunculus Draco
To: Landscape Gardener X

Hello Landscape Gardener X

Thank you for your visit this morning.

On reflection and with discussion with my partner we are writing to ask  you not to quote on the garden work we require. It did seem to us that you did not really understand what we wanted from our garden, in fact you rather seemed to wish to impose a solution that would be the simplest for you to implement (or were competent enought  to implement), rather than what we actually wanted; in particular despite telling you that we did not want a patio you could park a 747 on numerous times this was the "solution" you repeatedly returned to.

I understand you will be disappointed at not securing this contract but as a businessman may I possibly offer you some advice when dealing with prospective clients, based on our interactions this morning:

1) Arriving 45 minutes late for an agreed appointment without any apology or explanation does not a good impression make.

2) Generally speaking demanding a coffee from your prospective client's wife with the words "I guess you're in charge of the kettle" does not endear you to said clients wife. Normal procedure is to at least introduce yourself and ask the name of your client's wife (not 30 minutes later when asking me sotto voce "What's her name?")

3) Sparking up a cigarette without asking first on a prospective's client's property is really quite unprofessional. Both Mrs Dragon and myself have breathing problems and therefore issues with cigarette smoke; causing a severe asthmatic reaction in your clients is rarely the basis of a long and successful business partnership.

I trust you will find this email helpful


Dracunculus.

And yes, an email very similar to this one was sent to the individual in question.

The Bloody Olympics

I don't suppose it's too late to give the Bloody Olympics to France is it? I mean they did seem to want it at the time.

I mean it's all very nice for the athletes and I'm sure they are all fine and dedicated people (although probably a tad obsessive) but I am failing to see why I should stump up a huge amount of money via my taxes just so you have a place to run around very quickly. I mean when you add everything up the total bill is probably going to come to the best part of twenty billion dollars and you can do a lot with that kind of cash, one blogger worked out that for the price of four Olympic games we could put a human on Mars; and that's a damned sight more of an achievement than watching a lycra clad berk run about and chuck a spear.

And this is before all the other shite that seems to come as part of this wonderful sportfest that's bebeen vomited into our laps. I'll leave aside the idiocy of putting missiles on people's roofs in East London, the utterly over the top security that stops people taking a picture of a fish tank at one of the venues because of "terrorism concerns", the fact that we might as well have painted a huge target over London for every hacked off member of the "Religion of Peace"^TM to have a go at and the creepy, deformed mascots that look like they were designed by the kid on the short bus whist going through Ritalin withdrawal.

What really tweaks my tail is the corporate bollocks and the way us poor schmucks who paid for the bastard thing are treated. My station are handing out "walking maps" and have a 'get ahead of the games" website which is basically saying "the transport will be fucked, the buses are being forced into the rest of the clogged traffic to make sure the Zil lanes for the corrupt parasites in the IOC can whizz up and down unimpeded so you bastards can walk everywhere" And if you're going to any of the actual events (which I am definitely not) which we made you pay for the tickets (even though you funded everything) then you WILL pay by Visa card and no other method, you WILL NOT take in any soft drink of your choosing, you WILL only eat Mc Fucking Donalds as no other "food" will be on sale and you will be prevented from bringing your own ¹ and most likely you'd better be bringing a Samsung compact camera because god forbid you're carrying a Ricoh the "Brand Police" will probably stamp on it before laying into you with the rubber hoses.

Quite frankly the bloody Olympics can go and screw itself. I'd scrap it tomorrow in a heartbeat if I could. However having built all those stadia it would be a shame to not to use them so I propose we hold the show trails and executions of all the pompous, self aggrandizing politicians and IOC members who spent our money on this vanity project.



¹ and yes the irony of the world's largest purveyor of junk food sponsoring an elite athletics event is not lost on me.

O tempora! O mores!

There's been a lot of 1977 retrospectives on the tellybox recently, what with it being the jubilee. Also a lot in the news has been lots of talk about marriage equality, "Gay Marriage" if you prefer, especially since St. Obama has played his hand in favor.

It got me thinking as to how much things have changed in 25 years. I was 12 years old back in '77 and I can still vividly recall that the very, very worst insult in the playground was to call someone gay, puff, bummer or any other word indicating that the target of the insult was a fan of musical theatre. Even though I'm pretty sure that 90% of the time we really had no idea what the words really meant it was certainly a cause for an immediate punch up. Certainly actually being gay was I am sure at the time social death and certainly not something spoken of in a positive light where I grew up. I recall my dad, commenting on an article in the paper about a police raid on a gay-friendly pub in the town, saying something along the lines of "they should all be strung up" which was a bit of a shock as he was normally a pretty tolerant guy. I think the mindset back then was very much gay = child molester or at the very least that being gay was some deep, dark perversion and only vagely acceptable if you were a "comedy" gay like Danny LaRue or John Inman's character in "Are You Being Served"

It's really quite strange how quickly things have changed and how far. Now it seems that if you're opposed to marriage equality you're the one that's the deviant. Looking across the pond to North Carolina it's quite surprising the opprobrium that's been directed towards the people of the state who voted in favour of denying gay couples even a civil union with many calling them "hicks" and "backward" at best. On a political note it's a shrewd move by Obama to come out in favour of gay marriage; a lot of the shine has gone off his presidency and he failed to deliver all that "hopey, changey" stuff in the storm of a recession and he's aligned himself with the "progressive", younger vote ahead of the presidential elections later this year.
 
Over this side of the shining big-sea-water we can see that it's mainly the religidiots who are hanging onto the "it's one man one woman" like a drowning man grasping at a straw, swimming against the tide of history and sinking their antediluvian beliefs further and further into irrelevance. Politically again Camoron really has no choice but to push this forwards, despite the grumblings from the blue-rinse wing of the party; he's in deep political crap as it is and scrapping his proposed gay marriage bill will just pin the "nasty party" label back on the Tories and right now that's the last thing they need.

Still, maybe in another 25 years we'll be twittering (using our neural interfaces whilst on a day trip to the moon) about "do you remember when gay people couldn't get married?" in the same way as we'd talk about mixed-race marriages now.* One can only wonder what'll be perfectly socially acceptable then.



* To be fair as far as I know the UK never had a race bar on marriage but they certainly did in the USA

Do you want porn with that sir?

So kind of as predicted earlier on this blog there's a growing head of steam around this "Opt in for porn" thing with your ISP. The Daily Fail has got its panties in a bunch and started a campaign and Labour, always quick to spot a rolling bandwagon particularly when it comes to nanny stateism, have jumped on board

"Block online porn!" screams the banner, which without a trace of irony is placed right next to a photo link about someone called Kim Kardashian "Vehemently denying nude photos whilst stepping out in very tight trousers" because that right, isn't porn yeah and doesn't objectify women, right?

You would have a better chance of blocking the tide coming in Canute style. The majority of internet innovations were driven by or became mainstream because of porn. Grumble, I read somewhere, accounts for the majority of the web's traffic. Hell back in the day the video recorder war was won by the technologically inferior VHS system mainly because all the "adult titles" were released on that format.

And you are up against one of the most powerful forces in the universe, the raging hormones of a 14 year old boy. It cannot be bargained with, it cannot be reasoned with and it absolutely will not stop until it's found a way into wobblybigjugs.com and had one off the wrist. I know, I was one once; of course back then it was the magazines passed furtively around your mates and on one memorable occasion we managed to hire Ai No Korida from the video shop and it wasn't out of any desire to explore and critique Japanese cinema I can tell you. And have you met kids lately? They grew up with computers and probably have forgotten more about configuring anonymous proxies than I've ever known and will probably end up helping their dad's bypass the filters.

Its all utterly pointless gesture politics of the "something must be done" type as per usual. It's surely up to parents to bring their kids up, police their internet use and yes, accept that their teenage sons and daughters are a seething cauldron of hormones and talk to them about it, explain what porn is and about the difference between what's depicted in  porn and what real relationships are about.

What's that Mr Government? Ordinary people taking responsibility for their lives and children? That'll never do will it, after all, we're not qualified.

Free speech isn't so free any more

If limits are placed on what can be said can we still say that we have "Free Speech"? I've been thinking about this over the weekend in the wake of "The Twitter Cunt Trail". You won't have heard about it in any of the mainstream media probably for the very reason that it involves "The C word" but in essence what happened is that someone who goes by the name of Olly Cromwell was convicted, in effect, of calling someone a cunt on Twitter. You can read the background to this here and some more on Max Farquar's blog here.

I'll leave to one side for a moment the fact that this does appear to be a vindictive, politically motivated prosecution intended to shut up a individual who certain people in power find to be "troublesome" for actually holding them to account and just look at are there "limits" that can be placed on free speech.

I do not believe that there are, any restriction on what can and can't be said or written means speech is not free. That's not to say that there are repercussions from that freedom. The famous example is shouting "Fire" in a crowded theatre; you have the right to but you would have to suffer the consequences of that action. Also if I were to start making untrue allegations in the intent to slander a person, say by starting a blog that makes post after post insisting without any evidence that Councellor Whatsisface enjoys the intimate sexual company of farmyard animals, then it is only proper that Councellor Whatsisface would be able to seek some form of redress.

However that's a very long way from someone having an opinion on Councellor Whatsisface; in this case a crudely worded opinion that he's a cunt but that's as valid an opinion as any other. Sure if someone called me a cunt I'd be somewhat upset but I'd just call then a goat sperm gargling cockwomble back. What they said was probably just a heat  of the moment throwaway remark and I certainly would not go running to the law because I was "offended". Likewise if I was to say something on Twitter like "White people are smarter than black people so we should have no black politicians" the correct response to me would be to say back "Bollocks, you're wrong and stupid and this is why...", not go off screaming for the tumbrils to haul me to the guillotine for "racially aggravated hate speech"  On that latter point it's worth bearing in mind that for many years that was the prevailing orthodoxy and it took brave people to stand up and using speech and the written word to challenge that false assumption and I am sure those in power at the time found the idea that all men are of equal talents regardless of the colour of their skin "offensive"

And it's this "offence" that's the problem here. The law in question (2003 Telecommunications Act I think) makes in illegal to cause offence. Now I'm sure that this piece of NuLabour control freakery was conceived with the nobler motive of being able to go after the worst kind of cyber-stalking but with "I was affronted" seemingly now meaning "I was offended" and people being dragged to court for saying "cunt" and "Dead black footballer. LOL" by what appear to be the "professionally offended"

And this is a problem, a big one. These laws and judgements put the dead hand of fear onto free speech so speakers and writers are constantly checking themselves, not entirely sure if what they are going to say will see them thrown into jail and their lives destroyed because someone found their idea "offensive".  At the very least this idea that seems to have seeped into society and is now enshrined in statute that any person has the absolute right not to be affronted needs to go lest we all fall slowly into the perpetual silence of fear.

Panopticon

So our dear government, not 18 months after stopping the last lot of authoritarian fuckwits bringing in the same law, are going to track all our emails, texts, web site visits and, if they could get away with it, trips to the lavatory.  We've just seen a week when a young man was locked up for two months for tweeting a racist remark as apparently it would seem that putting "LOL" after saying a black footballer was dead now "incites hate"^* and now all our words pushed out into the ether will be checked by the ever-loving state, all for our own protection of course. I'm fully expecting our four internet horsemen: terrorism, pedophiles, extremists and whoever they have decided the bete noir is today to be trotted out by Dishface today.

It's utterly pointless of course as I will now demonstrate.  I live in a NUCLEAR family and I'm sure we're all going to have a BLAST at this year's London OLYMPICS. Whoops did I just set off your alarm bells Mr Government Person?  And as for tracking the websites I visit well I'm sure its fascinating that you're keeping up on my reading of the winemaking forum and that scambaiting site I visit but do you really think when I visit throbbingdonkeybondage.com  ^** I am going to do so without using a couple of proxies?  And you can be sure that Mohammed Al Suicidebomber is going to be doing the same as well when he visits his jihadist bomb making and hate preaching sites. For anyone who is a bit tech-savvy this is really simple now; proxies are point and click, you can download the TORBundle and be browsing completely anonymously (but rather slowly) in seconds, if you're getting really paranoid you can downloads Tails to a USB stick and leave no trace of activity on your computer at all.

Of course the government know this and know this is bugger all to do with security. At the least its security theatre from the "something must be done" school but at worse is pure state terrorism; watch what you say little people, watch where you go because this is the new Panopticon and we are watching you. Always.




^* I think we can agree it's tasteless, crass and stupid but if we locked people up for those things there would be nobody who wasn't in jail.

^** I'm thinking of getting that domain but I'll bet its already gone.

Water, water everywhere...

... but if you dare run any down a hosepipe that's 1000 quid fine,matey.

Within the next couple of weeks the people who supply my water will be making it an offence to use a hosepipe. Now in my innocence I thought that this simply meant "don't use a hosepipe irresponsibly" such as leaving your lawn sprinkler on but no, it's anything. Got a bit of a bad back (like me) and you'd like to fill your watering can up from a hose so you don't knacker yourself carting the can back and forward to the tap, sod you dragon, you're not doing that!

Oh you can have a dispensation if you're disabled but, get this, the qualification for "disabled" is you have one of those disabled parking badges! Well what fecking use is that! You have to be virtually immobile before you can get one of those these days and if you're that screwed up physically I would posit that your hobbies are unlikely to include vegetable gardening.

And as regular readers of this blog know, I have horses; how exactly am I going to get water to their paddocks and stables without a hosepipe given your average hoss will neck down up to 30 litres of water on a hot day?

The best bit though came when I saw the water companies are encouraging people to rat on any of their neighbours who dare get the hose out to fill the kid's paddling pool. I can only assume that it is only a matter of time before we have self-appointed wasser blockleiters who will be prowling the district looking for any evidence of "hose crimes". Maybe for every three people they report they get to run a bath?


Look we all know its been dry and there's not so much of the H₂O to go around but how about for once treating us like intelligent, responsible adults rather than naughty children and just telling us "Look, it's been dry, be sensible with water please. Here are some things you can do to help." You could use some of that740 million quid in profits you made last year to run a few TV ads.

Oh and speaking of Anglian Water's 740 million profits; .given we lose 25% or more through leaks and unrepaired busts maybe you could attend to that first rather than encouraging people to frogmarch their friends to the police station for daring to water the parsnips.

Keep on ranting cardinal

Over the weekend it seems that someone has poked one of those funny little men who wear a dress and a silly hat who believe in an invisible sky pixie. This one is called Cardinal Keith O'Brien who has got his thurible in a twist over of course the one thing above everything else that seems to get the religidiots riled and that's bottysex.

Apparently letting people get married who happen to have the same configuration of junk between their legs is a "grotesque subversion of a universally accepted human right". OK well let's just set aside the fact you are a high-up in an organization that seems to exists solely to facilitate its staff members' sexual abuse of minors and pick the bones out of that sentence you regurgitated.

Universal
Human
Right

Yep, a universal right for all humans. If you like someone and they like you and the pair of you want to commit to each other you can do this thing where you stand up and say a few words and get a bit of paper with your names on it. We call it "Marriage". Nowhere does this "universal human right' mention anything about your reproductive plumbing. 

Honestly of the guy had any sense at all he's just shut the fuck up as all he's done is make himself look a complete foaming-at-the-mouth religious extremist in a Taliban stylee,  and if anyone was wavering on the "gay Marriage good thing / bad thing" fence they certainly won't want to be associated with you.

So keep on ranting cardinal because you're doing the cause of marriage equality a metric fuckton of favours. Plus, when you get found out shagging rent-boys, it makes it way more amusing for the rest of us if we can tag 'hypocrisy' onto your list of personal failings.

I need a drink

So as expected and blogged about previously here comes Dishface Cameron and his tight lipped, clenched buttocked puritans and bansturbators determined to grind any bit of pleasure out of our lives and wielding a 45p per unit minimum price for alcohol.

It's all for our own good of course as they keep banging on about in those awful Keith Haring-esque animated propaganda ads; we're all naughty boozers killing ourselves and costing the NHS a fortune. But  I fail to see why ending the three for a tenner wine offers in Tesco is going to stop the arseholes getting shitfaced on jaegerbombs and lambrini in every town centre in the land as I can bet your average town centre aircraft hanger sized theme pub will be charging a shitload more than 45p a unit.

No, this is an attack on, well, me to be honest, your middle age hacked off working guy who likes a drink or three in the comfort of his own home when he gets in from the office or factory. We're the problem you see, drinking ourselves into an early grave and if we're not being wage slaves we're a drain on the state; quite ignoring the fact that the duty I've paid on booze over the years could probably equip a medium sized intensive care unit.

By my back-of-a-beer-mat calculations your average 11 unit bottle of wine will have a minimum price of just shy of a fiver and to be honest if you're paying less than a fiver now for wine in the UK you're likely drinking shite. But given you can at the moment get bulk buys of a 6 or 7 quid bottle for 3.50 or so then kiss those kinds of deals goodbye. And remember this is just the introductory rate. You know that above inflation rises will follow on swift wings and that bottle of cheap but cheerful midweek Barolo that makes your pizza slip down a treat will start setting you back eight, nine, ten quid in a couple of years.

If you're a gin and tonic fan it's worse. You get punted right in the bollocks from the get-go. A bit of googling shows me you can get a litre of Sainsbury's Taste the Difference export strength (43%) gin goes for 14.49 a litre, it's got 43 units in it so under the new puritans that's going to cost you 19.35. Ouch. You might as well buy Tanqueray No. 10 and be done with it.

Well I for one am not going to play. You're not going to get a single red cent in duty from me because I'm going to make my own. To be honest as part of my downsizing and off-grid plans I was going to start making most of my own wine anyway but this has just sped things up. The equipment is cheap as chips, about 35 quid and the better kits cost around the same for 30 to 36 bottles. Two batches and your kit is paid for.

Sure you're not going to knock out an '07 Malbec in your attic but from all the reviews I've read these kits have come on a long way from the crap you got in the 80's and with a little aging stand up well to stuff you'd pay 6 to 8 quid for. And the best thing, not a single penny in duty to the government.  As for the good stuff, well an annual trip to France and pleasant week trundling round Gascony gets that sorted.

OK so what if you like a G&T. Ah well they have kind of got you there. You see whereas right now it's perfectly legit to brew your own beer and wine you can't distill any kind of spirit without a licence from HMRC, not even for your own use and not even if you're trying to make ethanol for fuel from your home grown spuds.. There's no health reason for this, they are not trying to stop Mr Average brewing up a batch of what he thinks is vodka but turns him and his neighbors blind because he cocked up the distillation, this is purely a revenue raising scam.

OK so I'll apply for a licence. Ah no, no you won't Little Dragon. Because HMRC have rather kindly put together "Notice 39" which tells you everything to know about getting a licence to make your own hooch and you aren't getting one because...

2.3 Can you refuse or revoke a licence?

We may refuse to issue a licence, or revoke an existing licence, where:

    the largest still to be used has a capacity below 18 hectoliters

That's a minimum still size of 18000 liters, the size of a medium sized road oil tanker. 

However just like there's nothing that says you can't own, say, a bong and a packet of hemp seeds there's equally nothing that says you can't own a still. You can and what's more you can buy them online for around 100 quid for a simple one or 350 for something a bit more flash. The days of miles of bent copper tubing and fretting about fusil oils are long gone as these things are semi automated and judging by the demo videos a piece of piddle to operate. You could be knocking your own, admittedly illegal, gin out for a couple of quid a litre in no time.

Now am I going to get into home distilling, Well no, I really don't drink enough spirits to make it economically viable and when I do have a drop of the hard stuff it tends to be of the more expensive range and only available directly from the distillery or more specialist retailers.. However if you're a bit of a gin hound or a bit of a chancer on some estate with a ready market I could see it being more attractive.

But as for wine there's no excuse. Starve the beast and stick up a hearty English two fingers at the puritans. I'll let you know how I get on. Mine's a large one.

The Religidiots are Rattled

Let me lay my cards on the the table here. I think that anyone who professes any kind of religious belief is delusional and should not hold any form of public office whatsoever.

However it amuses me to see that those who profess a faith in their imaginary friend are getting increasingly rattled at the ever increasing sidelining they are getting. Of course they are upset that they can't exercise power over us, what politician wouldn't be, but for these fools the pain is even greater because it's what their god wants and of course their brand of sky fairy has a perfect plan for us, if only people could see it (and if they can't it gets imposed on us anyway). You want to marry whoever you want regardless of the collection of dangly objects between your legs? You have a painful terminal illness and want to end your suffering? Tough, I make the rules and my invisible pixie friend says no.

Now it seems the majority of us who can, you know, use logic and reason, and even those who might culturally have some lingering belief in a bearded bloke in the clouds are saying "Actually, we would like a government which makes rules based on logic, evidence and doesn't privilege one set of people because they happen to share the same delusion please". However to the religidiots like the unelected bishops who get to make laws and their fellow travellers like the odious Baroness Warsi we are "militant secularists" bent on destroying religion, throwing anyone who prays onto a big file and probably making devouring babies, buggering livestock and executing anyone over 60 with a mild sniffle into the bargain.

Well I say to Warsi, Carey, Pickles and their ilk, do please carry on. The more you rant and rave the more attention it draws to the special privileges you have and the more pressure will come to bear to have them removed.

Have a free tent

If you've been reading this blog for a while you know I refer to my employer as "Banko Di Haggis" (just to keep the HR police from finding it in the search engines) but it's pretty obvious who I'm talking about; the national pariah and politician's whipping boy bank.

And as it happens favourite target of those lovely Home Counties trustafarian protesters and on Monday, whilst our CEO caved in to political pressure from the left and 300 million quid got wiped off the value of the company we all own one crusty arsehole taking a break from his media studies and nail care degree pops up with a tent in front of the office.

Much to my amusement when I left for the day I noticed he (I assume it was a he, didn't want to get too close because of the smell) had a placard pinned to his tent reading "My tent for your bonus".

I should have gone up and walked off with his tent. Because my bonus this year is the same as last year, and the year before that, a big fat nothing. Zero. Zilch. Da Nada.

Oh and no pay rises either. Sure I've built a computer system that made a several million quid and helped save the department from the recent axe and has won industry awards as the best in its class but I don't even get a pat on the tail for being a good dragon. And I can tell you that for the vast majority in the building our crusty class warrior was squatting outside the same is true.

Sure I'm a little pissed, everyone wants more money right? But I get paid pretty handsomely for doing what I do so what the hell, I just won't bother going that extra mile any more (as if I ever did!) and if a better gig crops up I'll probably take it if for no other reason I really can't be arsed with the shoeing we keep getting from the political class and cockwallets like our "99%" friend camping out on the doorstep and tarring us all with the same brush.

And it won't be just me, anyone who can get a job elsewhere will slowly but surely slide away and that pisses me off more than ever because having stumped up the cash to bale out Banko Di Haggis* you would think the government would want it to succeed, turn a profit and pay back all that money rather than turn it into some unprofitable extension of the treasury staffed effectively by civil servants too talentless or idle to get a gig anywhere else.

But then why should the politicians care, it's not as though they put their hands in their own pockets for the bail out money.

They put them in your pockets.




* For the record I think it should have been allowed to fail, even though I'd have been out of work

Do you wanna be in my gang?

If you're on Twitter you can't help but have noticed last week the Twitterati throwing what I like to call a "twitfit", an outpouring of sturm und drang in 140 characters because former glam rock musician and convicted pedophile Gary Glitter had popped up on the popular microblogging site to announce a comeback tour.

As you would expect there were plenty of your standard neanderthal "Kill all peedofils they is scum, innit" tweets the majority were of the "Ew, throw this man off Twitter. Why doesn't somebody do something!" flavour... which as it turns out was exactly the point the troll who created the fake account was aiming for. In a statement this person, whoever he is because with a sense of irony he posted his manifesto anonymously, said he'd created the stunt to highlight that "OK you know Glitter is a pedo but how many more are there on the net that your kids are talking to that you don't know about" and calling for anyone on the sex offenders register to be disallowed use of the internet in perpetuity and an end to anonymity on the net.

And so yet again we see that leader of the four horsemen of the infopocalypse, the eevil nasty peedofil, being trotted out into the arena and performing a few half-passes and 20 metre circles at canter for the benefit of the sheeple who all cheer when some scumbag politico then pipes up "You see there, peedofils! That's why we have to take away internet anonymity!".

Of course on a fully registered internet we know what you read, where you go, what you say. Back in your pens sheep, we wolves in Parliament know what's best for you and if you dare to say different well, off to market with you.

Another thing that got me thinking as a result of this was do we actually believe in a rehabilitative justice system? Now I hold no brief for the kiddy fiddlers (and quite frankly can't bloody stand children) but do we as a society believe that old canard about "having paid your debt to society" and once a criminal has served his sentence he is a free man with a clean slate? It would seem to me that in the case of one faded rock star in particular, we clearly don't.

When I want your advice I'll ask for it

Oh what fun. Just when you thought we actually had got rid of the NuLabour nanny state do as I say bollocks up pop BlueLabour with a tick-the-box-your-government-knows-best bullshit scheme where all NHS staff have to lecture you to promote "Good Health"  every time you have the misfortune to come into contact with you.

Now we all know this is going to be a box ticking exercise like the last lots' "Quality of Outcomes" shit. As an example of what will happen here I give you Mrs Dracunculus. She was at the doctors today, routine visit for a long standing complaint just to review, make sure its not getting worse, check the ongoing medication and tweak as necessary. Now she gets five minutes of the doctors time in which he has to do this and she informs me that five minutes was fully used. But in the future three of those five minutes is taken up with a stern lecture from Dr Mopp about how the glass of Sauvignon she likes of an evening will make her sodding tail fall off so what's he going to miss about the actual problem he was being consulted with in the first place?

What we have here is the underlying problem of the NHS. It was set up with the noblest of motives; free at the point of use so all citizens would be able to have their serious medical needs attended to and we would be free of the spectre of people dying for want of seeing a doctor. But since its founding its grown to way, way more than that simple basic service, and we're all partly guilty of making it suck. Over the generations we've demanded more, more, more from the NHS. We want every sniffle and cold treated, every illness given immediate and the best treatment, the treatment of ridiculous conditions (you can get a sex change on the NHS for fuck's sake) and the system simply can't cope. Accordingly the government step in to lecture, harangue and bully us into whatever bullshit they can come up with to try and keep us "healthy" and out of the doctor's surgery. We allowed the NHS to change from a backstop into a state monolith that seeks to control our "healthy choices" because they feel they have to just to stop the whole edifice collapsing in a mountain of debt and unpaid bills.

I'm quite aware that the Cuban Habaneros and that bottle of Malbec aren't good for me thanks. It's my choice and when I want your health advice I will ask for it. Oh, and I have BUPA so, state, kindly sod off.

Hard Cases Make Bad Laws

Yesterday as you all read Steven Lawrence finally achieved some measure of justice with the conviction for murder of two of his killers. From what I have seen of the evidence and the trial it seems that the beyond reasonable doubt the right people have been jailed for this crime and two violent, racist thugs have been put behind bars where they belong.

But I'm not entirely happy.

In order to put these two on trial an ancient principle of natural justice was torn up by the former Home Secretary David Blunkett, that of double jeopardy, the principle that you cannot be tried twice for the same offense. This is a right that has been part of English common law for centuries and it even enshrined in article 50 of the European Convention on Human Rights (although conveniently a part of the convention our craven politicians didn't sign us up to whilst signing us up to all the other bullshit parts).

Double jeopardy defences are fundamentally important in protecting the individual against the machinery of the state; they stop the state bringing prosecution after prosecution until they get the "right" result - kind of like those EU referendums. Their removal by the previous Labour government weakens the individual and was wrong and its generally accepted that it was done primarily with the Lawrence case in mind.

Yes in the Lawrence case the police and CPS made a series of huge cock ups and maybe even were willfully negligent leading to the acquittal of the defendants. Many things went wrong and under double jeopardy they would have literally got away with murder; but hard cases make bad laws and unpalatable though it may be to have the likes of Norris wandering around as a free man* I would rather that than yet another erosion of the fundamental rights of the citizen by a politician trying to look "tough" and trying to patch up the cock ups of the police and Crown Prosecution Service.


* although I believe he was already in the nick on another offence

The problem with PR is always the other guys

I was in The Netherlands over the new year and one evening went out for dinner with friends. Our walking route to the restaurant took us past a small concentration of what the Americans quaintly term "Adult Bookstores" (although books are about the one item you're guaranteed not to find in them). Now you can't walk past without having a quick look in the window can you and I noticed something seemed to be missing.

"Hey," I asked my Dutch mates, "Where's the horseporn gone?" for indeed there appeared to be a dearth of magazines depicting, as Bill Bryson once put it, "A horse receiving a certain oral service a horse would not normally expect to receive, not even from another horse.

"Oh it's been banned. It's illegal to sell it or even possess it now."

I was rather shocked. Not because I have any fondness for horseporn beyond its comedy and shock value, it's about as erotic as a wet weekend in Whitley Bay, but it, along with similar "on the edge" forms of porn, are to my mind a good bell-weather of how free a society is; a measure of a state saying "You know what, this is not hurting anyone so its absolutely none of our business." and it saddened me to see a country I'd rather admired for its socially liberal values take a lurch towards the kind of blue nosed "we know best" shite we have to put up with here.

Not only that, but my friend told me that they have made any representation of bestiality illegal, so I suppose the Rijksmuseum will have to had taken this down.

Now the reason for this is down to a small political party, the PvdD (Partij voor de Dieren, "Party for Animals") who, thanks to proportional representation, gained a couple of seats and this rather ridiculous law was their price for playing ball in the coalition that was formed (and subsequently collapsed as it happens).

Now you might think that not being able to legally buy the collected DVD box set of Bodil Joensen's barnyard movies is no big deal in the grand scheme of things* but just for a moment swap "Party for Animals" with "Party for Sharia in the UK" who, with PR, win three or four seats in a hung parliament.

What would their blood price be?

Now PR has been kicked into the long grass here thanks to Nick's university fee U-turn and some clever play by the tories but it'll come around again and you'll be asked again to vote on its introduction. Before voting ask yourself whereas you might be happy with your little party getting some power all those other little parties will as well and you might just find the pork gets banned along with the piggy pr0n.





* especially as Teh Interwebs has more or less made all forms of censorship moot.