Church of England "Threatens" on porn.. oh noes!

I think being "threatened" by the C of E must be like being savaged by a half dead chinchilla; bizarre, not dangerous and you just end up feeling sorry for the chinchilla.

So what are the men who go around wearing frocks getting all hot under the dog-collar about today? Well if that bastion of accurate and unbaised reportage the Daily Fail is to believed "War on web sleaze: Church of England threatening to withdraw millions invested in ISPs over rise of internet porn. OK so you have "invested" these "millions" how exactly? That would be largely through shares sold in the open market I would expect, so you sell your holding and lose all that lovely dividend income, depress the share price which provides a buying opportunity to other investors who purchase these shares and raise the price. Your net contribution to "stemming the tide of these sick and depraved images" is the square root of fuck all.

Look, we have had porn forever, and "extreme" porn at that; there is a cave painting in southern France that is tens of thousands of years old, well before any form of civilisation existed, it depicts a crude stick figure of a human shagging some kind of animal. Porn isn't going to go away despite what you think your sky fairy would want. Rather amusingly and sticking with animals for a moment the much heralded "Extreme Porn" laws introduced last year get a mention along with the fact that hardly anyone has been proscecuted under these laws; well that's for a reason, it's nigh on impossible, with the exception of bestiality, to mount a case as to what is "grossly offensive... and realistic" (and you only get bestiality under the wire because it's pretty obvious its an animal and not a human) so all the cases have been for possession of bestiality images, and even there one case got dropped as the video clip in question was a CGI render (and cartoons don't count - so all you Furry and My Little Pony rule 34 fans are in the clear).

Of course the reason why this has all come to the surface is the recent Vincent Tabak conviction for murder where it transpires he'd been looking at "violent porn". The usual suspects in the Daily Wail and elsewhere start their knee jerk "It was the porn what made him do it" blissfully ignoring the fact that presumably these websites were not solely set up just for Vince and therefore tens if not hundreds of thousands probably paid these left handed mousing sites a visit and then didn't go on to strangle their neighbor. If you're the sort of person who would take someone's life I would posit that you're that kind of person and watching some S&M porn isn't going to make a blind bit of difference if you are going to act on your impulses - in fact I would say and the studies bear out that having a safety valve of knocking one out over some staged smut might just act as a safety valve*

The bishops might want to consider that before they sell their ISP shares and buy cassock futures and tofu bonds.


* incidences of sexual assault have decreased in countries such as Denmark and The Netherlands after the legalisation of porn.

10 Billion Elephants in the Room

I had a play on the beeb's "work out your human sequence number" gizmo the other day and apparently I am the 77,191,204,131st person to have existed. All a bit silly really but the truly scary number comes when I saw that since I hatched in Blackpool back in the mid 60's the population of the world has doubled.


Now I am no Malthusian. Thomas Malthus, as you may recall, predicted that population growth would outstrip food supply which to be fair to him and the mathematics of the day did appear to be the case. However population didn't grow in quite the way Malthus' models had predicted and, being clever monkeys, we cam up with new and improved ways of food production. We continue to do that today and there's no reason to think that we can't support the predicted 10 billion peak population; sure the meat you're eating will probably be being grown from stem cells in a tank and your wheat and veg will have been highly genetically modified but at least we'll be spared from Charlton Heston yelling "Soylent Green is made of people" to anyone who'll listen.

No that's not the issue, the issue is one which the warble gloaming alarmists seem to have been rather quiet about, the 10 billion elephants in the room. Even if we cut out carbon emissions all those new people will still be consuming resources that'll need producing and transporting , they'l all be breathing out carbon dioxide and, at the risk of being crude, breaking wind and releasing tons of methane into the atmosphere. Sure we may be able to feed everyone but at what cost?


And I was just, you know, curious as to when the Global Warming lobby was going to start to calling for mandatory sterilization, people culls, and yes maybe the opening of a few centres where Edward G Robinson can commit suicide whilst watching deer frolic to Beethoven's Pastoral symphony.


Just asking.

The Devil is in the details.

So our lovely leaders are all patting themselves on the back having "saved" the Euro and if you believe the hyperbole from the German Chancellor, saved Europe from hearing the ring of marching jackboots again.

What they have done of course is merely kick the can a bit further down the road. There's still no way even a trillion Euros can prop up the failing economies of Europe who bought into the idea you could buy prosperity with other people's money.

A couple of details behind the headlines that your average layman would most likely miss, if they could find them at all, point to what a fudge this is and which will, in all likelihood, make the problem worse. Firstly not only do the banks take a 50% hit on any Greek debt they own they are being asked to "Recapitalise" to the tune of 160 billion Euro in the next 8 months. Essentially this means the banks have to hold cash or other highly liquid asset classes on their books and they can't lend it. Get that bit, they can't lend this money. Now cast your mind back to last year and the credit crunch which was caused by, right, banks not being in a position to lend money.

The other little weasel word I spotted is the real person-of-colour in the woodpile, that word is "leverage"...

The firepower of the main euro bailout fund - known as the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) - is to be boosted from the 440bn euros set up earlier this year to 1tn euros. There is about 250bn euros left available in the EFSF, which the summit statement said could be leveraged 4-5 times.

Put simply this means that this much trumpeted 1 trillion Euro is not actually there, what they are going to do is put up the 250 billion they do have (from your and my taxes) and basically borrow 4 or 5 times that amount, that's essentially what leverage means. And of course if you borrow money, you have to pay interest on it.

So they have commited us to, yet more and more borrowing. An endless cycle of debt backed up only by the promise it can be paid back through future tax revenues, that's money out of our pockets.

All Merkel and Sarkosy have done is put us and our children in hock to the Chinese for years and years.

How long will this madness go on because as sure as I have wings and a tail it's gone on too far and too deep for it all to end in sweetness and light and I fear all Merkel and friends have done is make those jackboots even more of a racing certainty.

The Lads from Lagos don't miss a trick

Was wondering when I was going to see my first Gaddafi trunk box 419 scam...

Sir,

I got your info from a diary to one of my fathers aide.You understand my father (Muammar Gadaffi) is dead. I would need to secure some of my funds overseas to enable me get a good legal defence in the coming months,as I anticipate I and my brothers shall face.

I have some money safely kept in a vault somewhere in Europe.I ask you to be my TRUSTEE to retrieve this fund.Basically you will take care of ALL the necessary expenses to formalize the papers in your name to secure the fund,as i am presently incapacitated to do so.

Please,if you do not have the capacity to secure such large amount as it,do not bother replying.Be sure You will also take back whatever you have spent afterwards.

If you have our sympathy on this,please contact our attorney in UK immediately.

Name: John Gerspach
Email: gadaffiaffairs@johngerspach.info
City: London
Country: United Kingdom

Thanks,
Saif al-Islam Gaddafi

Feel free to email him and mess him around... safe scambaiting tips and tricks can be found here, tell them that the Grumpy Dragon sent you.

... And I Feel Fine

Remember Harold Camping? He was the American preacher who said the world was going to end back in May and convinced a whole bunch of fools to spend every penny they had on advertising the fact and trying to get us heathens to convert.

As the world didn't end he had to come up with an excuse and as I recall it was something along the lines of Gawd had actually ended the world and decided who was going to get to sit on a cloud playing a harp and who was going to be toasting marshmallows and singing camp-fire songs with Beelzebub but the actual demolition squads would roll up later in the year.

Today in fact, the 21st of October. Due to some oversight The Almighty has neglected to inform Harold of what time he's going to kick off on his smiting binge.

I'm actually really looking forward to what his explanation is this time. I'm betting it'll be along the lines of "Actually the world has been destroyed and you are now in hell, which just happens to look exactly like where you were before. Those of you who are residents of Basildon will be perfectly aware of this already".

Whatever his excuse such is the depth of human stupidity is that he will still have followers and there will remain millions of people who really do believe that the world will literally end in their lifetimes....

Professor Farid Esack, head of the religious studies at the University of Johannesburg, likened Rapture believers to "those who stockpiled food on the eve of a new South Africa", but warned against dismissing them as "fanatical loons"

Actually he's right, we should be medicating them as dangerously delusional mental patients. Regrettably I don't think we could physically manufacture the volume of anti-psychotics we'd need

And a new bunch of lefty cunts

Ah, a lovely morning, bright, cold and crisp. But what's that disgusting smell? Ah that would be the launch of another left wing hand wringing pseudo-charity, this one going by the name of "The Intergenerational Foundation" bleating on about "fairness" and "equality" by which of course they mean the usual Fabian bullying, fucking around with your life and, of course, taking your money.

This lot are coming for your house. You have worked hard all your life, brought up your children and have got yourself a nice house with three or four bedrooms; maybe like me you have a spare room for when relatives stay over and have converted one former bedroom into an office / study. Ah but now you are a " clinging to your home long after it has outlived its usefulness" citizen. You are hoarding resources that need to be "reallocated". It's all in the interests of "fairness" of course so just pack one small suitcase, that's your cattle truck over there grandad, kommen Sie bitte mit uns. Raus Opa! Raus!.

Of course they are using very soothing words at first; it's all about encouragement...

IF suggested encouraging older people to downsize by exempting over-60s from stamp duty when they sold to move to a smaller home

... but pretty much in the same breath as they wave a small carrot they go on to wield a fucking big stick...

The campaign group also urged the government to consider replacing council tax with "a proper land tax, to reflect the social cost of occupying housing, particularly housing that is larger than one's needs".

 
And it seems that founder Angus Hanton has previous, here's an interview he did with Pravda The BBC recently...

“Let’s take my own house [which] I bought 16 years ago for £160,000. It’s in south-east London. It’s now worth about £1.15m.”
“So I’ve gained a million pound windfall to which I do not feel entitled, and that windfall, at the moment, is tax-free. Were I to sell [the house], there’s no tax on that gain.”
“It may appear very lucky for me, but the reality is when I sell, it will probably be to a younger person who’ll be getting a mortgage and spending most of their working life paying off that windfall which went to me. I don’t think that’s fair.

Well if you don't feel entitled to it then maybe I suggest you sell up and donate the money to a soup kitchen or whatever charity assuages your disgusting middle class white male guilt. Don't for one fucking second presume to tell me what I can and can't do with my money you odious collectivist shit.

And just in case you think this bunch of twats are pissing in the wind ask yourself why this is the second story on the BBC's website this morning, the lead article on the Today programme and why the inaugural speakers at their launch are shadow minister Tessa Jowell, and Labour life peer Baroness Bryony Worthington?

Bastards the lot of them. 

Having some fun with the recruitment consultants

Recruitment consultants are one of those necessary evils in my line of work. Sure there are some good ones out there but there's a lot of them that seem to think that the way to do their job is essentially by using the same method as a Nigerian 419 scammer. You have a list of email addresses and you simply fire whatever role you happen to have at everyone on that list regardless of suitability, location or anything else for that matter.

I have one company that does this about three or four times a day. However one of them has got smart and titled his email as "This is a personal email..." rather than "Here's a Java gig you're going to ignore"...

Dear Grumpy Dragon,

Thank you for registering with us even if it was a while ago. I am the .Net specialist (not technically like you) within the Thames Valley area solely working on permanent placements. I expect to be speaking to you all in the near future.

I currently have a number of exciting opportunities in Guildford, Reading and their surrounding areas. If you haven’t already sent this message to your junk folder then I would love the opportunity to find out your current situation and interest.

If you could drop me a quick email stating whether you’re looking (or not) and location then I can make sure that I focus my attention to relevant opportunities that would be good for you.

"Exciting" and "Guildford" don't go together in my book. 


Hello Recruitment Consultant

Thanks for your mail.

Yes I did register on your site some time ago and with what must have been quite an old CV as I keep getting offers of 25k coding jobs in Portsmouth from a variety of agents at your company.

Quite frankly I wouldn't get out of bed for 25k, and certainly not if I had to work in Portsmouth.

And to be honest a similar gig in Slough or Reading isn't exactly going to be getting me champing at the bit either.  I mean have you actually been to Slough? It's like having the will to live sucked out of you with a striped bendy straw.

All in all I think it would be best if you could either remove my profile from your database or point me in the direction of a link on your website where I can do this myself. Whereas it's been amusing to hear the likes of Ceris and Melanie trying to big up a 30k J2SE job in Southampton every week, the novelty factor is starting to wear off and I find myself increasingly tempted to hit the "junk' button.

I know you'd like me to send in a current CV but I'm not going to as I know you and your colleagues would simply then start firing equally irrelevant 50k C++ development team leader in Guildford jobs at me with all the enthusiasm and accuracy of an artillery crew at their first day on the job.

Thanks

Grumpy

 I'm fully expecting a phone call from him this morning. They are like The Terminator these people, completely unstoppable.

Thinking of the chiiiildren, again.

Ah yes, the Tories. Just like Labour always ready with their ban-hammer when it comes to the thought that someone out there is having a good time. Following on from a report from that bastion of all things blue rinse and prudery the Mother's Union (whose leader appears to be a bloke called "Reg" for some unfathomable reason) your lovely nanny state will insist that the main broadband providers will offer a block on "adult content" to all subscribers.

Of course there's no detail on this but I would imagine it'll be some sort of BT Cleanfeed and so easily subvertable by any moderately tech savvy twelve year old (and they all are) who can configure a proxy.  In  other words this is a fig leaf, a sop to those members of the party faithful bluenoses who wander around with a disapproving expression and looking for all the world like someone has just rammed a pine cone up their arse.

And how is this going to work in terms of opt in or opt out? The Daily Fail is saying "opt in" whereas everyone else reporting the story is non-commital on that point.  Mind you opt in is going to make for some amusing conversations in PC World.

"Do you want porn with your new Dell laptop?"
"Er, yes please."
(Turns on tannoy) "Mr Verity to the checkout please. Can you bring a porn opt-in form. Gentleman wants internet filth on his PC. Now sir, what sort of porn do you want? Straight, gay, midgets, horses, horses with midgets..."

And who, exactly, is going to administer this list of what is "adult material"? Sure so it's a fair bet that a website with a name like "HotSexyDragonsDoingItWithAnythingThatMoves.com" will end up on the list¹ but how about some gay advocacy sites that offer advice to to teenagers struggling with their sexuality? What about stuff that's not actually sexual or illegal in any way but maybe you really would not want your kids looking at such as these "pro anorexia" sites?  What about "dangerous" political sites that you find distasteful such as those from extreme right and left wing parties or Muslim extremists?

See where as it's nice an easy to block something obvious that we can pretty much all agree on a definition of such as child porn² it starts to end up like a quagmire of The Dead Marshes proportions as soon as you try to categorise what's "adult" and what isn't.

And as ever, with politicians in charge, they are bound to monumentally fuck this up.

¹ memo to self: register that domain name ASAP.
² and even there, if the spam I get in my mailbox inviting me to come to sites with names like "hot-teens.grubbysmut.org" is to be believed, where I am sure the models are of legal age but are pretending not to be so, where do we stand with the ban-hammer on this one?

What do we want? Unicorn sex slaves! When do we want them? Now!

You might have noticed that over in the US of A a bunch of the usual eco-weenies, lefty dreamers and, well anyone who wants to "stick it to The Man" has taken a leaf from our home grown crusties this side of the pond and have "organised" (for a given value of "organise") "Occupy Wall Street" to, well,  just have a grumble about the "eeeeevil nasty bankers" and get the opportunity for a ruck with New York's finest as far as I could work out.

But as it happens they have a set of demands, or rather a proposed list of demands that will no doubt be decided on after a good circle drumming session and a couple of herbal jazz cigarettes.Go and have a laugh at the utter naivete on display over here.

A couple of my favourites

Demand two: Institute a universal single payer healthcare system. To do this all private insurers must be banned from the healthcare market as their only effect on the health of patients is to take money away from doctors, nurses and hospitals preventing them from doing their jobs and hand that money to wall st. investors.

I think you'll find that those insurers actually, you know, use the premiums and shit to kinda build hospitals, buy medical equipment and pay the salaries of those doctors and nurses.

Demand one: Restoration of the living wage. This demand can only be met by ending "Freetrade" by re-imposing trade tariffs on all imported goods entering the American market to level the playing field for domestic family farming and domestic manufacturing as most nations that are dumping cheap products onto the American market have radical wage and environmental regulation advantages. Another policy that must be instituted is raise the minimum wage to twenty dollars an hr.

Yea, and with a minimum wage at twenty bucks an hour causing production costs to spiral and hobson's choice about where you get your goods from as you don't have any imports your average citizen is going to be able to afford anything how, exactly?

And anyway, who is going to bother working because:

Demand three: Guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment.

everyone's going to be sat on their arse and getting $20 to do so.

But the best one has got to be this:

Demand eleven: Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all. Debt forgiveness of sovereign debt, commercial loans, home mortgages, home equity loans, credit card debt, student loans and personal loans now! All debt must be stricken from the "Books." World Bank Loans to all Nations, Bank to Bank Debt and all Bonds and Margin Call Debt in the stock market including all Derivatives or Credit Default Swaps, all 65 trillion dollars of them must also be stricken from the "Books." And I don't mean debt that is in default, I mean all debt on the entire planet period.

Awesome. Truly awesome. This stands as a shining pillar of "What the fuck?" in an already sparkling sea of cuntwittery.

I am going to demand a unicorn sex slave¹. I want it here, and I want it now.




¹ Not fussy about gender, I'm an enlightened 21st century dragon.

Vade retro, Satana

Now I don't watch the X Factor, come to think of it I doubt the buttons "1", "0" and "3" have ever been pressed in that sequence on the Sky remote so until this morning I had never heard of someone called Jade Richards.

Anyway I stumbled on a little story in the freebie paper The Metro about Miss Richards who has apparently been thrown off this talent show, not because she can't sing or anything but apparently because she's a Satanist.

Apparently wearing black lacy clothes and posting stuff like "I'm so goth I fuck bats" on your Faceache page makes you a Satanist these days.

I will put good money on her never having heard of Anton Szandor LaVey, showman and inventor of the actual Church of Satan (and even that's not really what you could call Satanism, more a sort of night out for your more extreme libertarians). No this is just another nauseating adolescent who had dabbled in a spot of occult lite and is trying to be "edgy"

If she ever met any real theistic Satanists (as I have back in my misspent youth) she would not be fucking bats she'd be squeaking like one; those guys are proper full on scary.

However she's missing a trick here. You've been discriminated against because of your religion love, start kicking off about "respect my beliefs" and shit and haul the producers of the show up before some human rights tribunal. I'm sure that bunch who pay the legal bills of uppity Christians who won't stop wearing crosses or won't marry gays will be happy to fund a religious person like you.

So you actually don't want to solve the problem.

So climate change, what we used to call global warming, or was it cooling (I recall in the 70's we were all going to freeze to death "Day After Tomorrow" style), lets call it climate wobblyness just for fun.

Look I'm not a "denyer", you shove a load of CO₂ into the atmosphere and it will have an effect - and you can trust me on that because I have a BSc Hons in Earth Sciences^* - as to exactly what that effect is we're rather unsure but one thing is for certain the science is not "settled", as the whole sodding point of science is that it's never settled, and I certainly don't buy into the catastrophic alarmist crap which would mean that I'd have to be equipping the ponies with flotation devices in a couple of years. We also know that most of the alarmist pundits don't believe it either as otherwise Al Gore wouldn't have bought himself a beachfront property would he.

But anyway, lets for now accept there's a problem, so wouldn't you like to come up with a fix for this? Well it turns out someone has done here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15132989 basically by making little volcanic clouds. Not sure how you'd scale this up to planet size but one step at a time.

Only we're not making that step. Why?

"We are certainly not ready to carry out experiments, and this project should not just be delayed, but should be cancelled immediately," [Eco weenie who wears batik dresses and has probably named her kid Galadriel Moonbeam, Helena Paul] told BBC News.

"This is particularly important because while the scientists involved keep saying that reducing emissions is the primary necessity, they risk distracting attention from that necessity at a crucial moment."

Because there's only one solution isn't there. That's the one that involves us giving up on the material benefits of progress, turning our societies into some agrarian collectivist monstrosity the very idea of which gets Helena moist and chasing after a small green dragon because he drives a 4x4 and lit up his patio heater this weekend.

You don't want a solution because actually solving global warming doesn't fit your agenda.



^* OK so I specialised in what mud does and how water flows through rocks but I'm a damned sight more qualified that 99% of the people spouting off of the subject.as I have at least done some climate modelling.