Clucking Hell

Rejoice chickens! From midnight tonight all throughout the EU you shall be free as the European Union has banned battery hen cages.  Well. Kinda.

Now I am all for an end to all intensive farming and battery hen egg production in particular. I keep chickens and they are all ex-battery hens that I get from the folks at the British Hen Welfare Trust. When you get your hens they look bloody awful, weak legs, most of their feathers missing and looking like the inhabitants of some avian Bergen-Belsen. The good news is that with a bit of feeding, running around and time they get back most of their feathers and soon start pecking, scratching, having dust baths and generally doing that chickeny thing. Oh and the eggs taste better than anything you'll get in the supermarkets too so they well pay you back for your £5 a bird donation.

Soeven though I'll probably have to source my chucks from elsewhere in the future I'll be a happy dragon if I know there aren't going to be any more fucked up featherless chickens, so (grits teeth) well done EU.

Ah, no, actually strike that... not so well done after all:

[Jane Howarth, from the British Hen Welfare Trust] said: "The British egg industry has really stepped up to the mark and they are ready. But at the moment we're looking at a situation where there could be 80 million hens still in illegal cages in Europe."

...

Agriculture Minister Jim Paice said: "It is unacceptable that after the ban on battery cages comes into effect, millions of hens across Europe will still remain in poor conditions.
"We have all had plenty of time to make these changes, but 13 EU nations have not done so. The UK egg industry alone has spent £400million ensuring hens live in better conditions.

So as ever the UK has rolled over to the mighty EU and done everything our master in Brussels have told us to do but 13 countries out of 27, nearly half the EU,  have just gone "fuck you" and carried on just as they bloody well please.

And do you know what the EU will do about that? Sweet fuck all, that's what.

And do you know what the EU will do if we have the temerity to ban egg imports from those 13 countries? Fine the shit out of us for daring to break trading rules no doubt.

As millions will be saying at new years eve parties throughout the land tonight "Do you think we can just leave yet?"

"Cluck, motherfucker"

... and by the rulers as useful.

You would have thought that politicians in the country would know to steer well clear of religion by now wouldn't you; I might not have liked the last incumbents of No. 10 but they were at least wise enough to "not do God". But nope, here comes Dishface at the weekend banging on about Christianity and "[calling] for a revival of traditional Christian values to counter Britain's "moral collapse"."

I cannot helped be reminded of the words of Seneca:

“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.”

 as yet again one of our leaders who by his own admission is ""full of doubts" about big theological issues" (read "Of course I don't believe in this twaddle") tells all the little people what's good for them; in this case they have to believe in the big fairy in the sky who, if you riot and steal TV's from Comet, will put you on the naughty step when you die. I mean it truly is pathetic isn't it that he could even attempt such a pitch. And what's equally annoying is that maybe he really does think you can't be "good without god" - failing to realize that what we call "good", compassion, altruism and so on, come about because we are social animals and we get this kind of thing from our evolution. Sure we are still savage little monkeys not very well equipped to live in together in the huge numbers we do since Civilization* kicked off 6000 odd years ago so we need policemen and jails but even in the most religious countries you'll find those institutions. 

But with that said he is right in that we do for better or worse, and even as an atheist I am prepared to say generally "better', have a rich heritage of Christian tradition in this country. It has given us art, music, architecture, jurisprudence and the poetry of the King James Bible. I would hate to see this country turn into a place where I have to start wishing people the anodyne "Happy Holidays" rather than a hearty "Merry Christmas". We do "do God" here, but Britons tend in the main to regard overt displays of religiosity rather suspiciously. As an example there American Football player who is famous for doing a full kneel down hands together prayer whenever he scores a touchdown; a display like that from a rugby or football player here would be quite rightly regarded as crass. That's why all Cameron pontificating about "what the proles need is a good dose of the Fear of the Almighty, fire and brimstone style" is going to cost him, despite how well it plays to the blue rinse brigades in his ranks.



* i.e. "Living in cities"

Canada spots naked emperor

I read today that Canada has gone "Hey, that guy's not wearing any clothes!" and withdrawn from the Kyoto Treaty

Good for them. Now Dishface, how about we do the same? Kyoto was always a complete crock of shit in my opinion. I mean what use is a treaty that the biggest CO₂ emitters (China and the USA) don't agree to and that actively hampers actually finding a solution. All Kyoto was was a bunch of eco nutters and white liberals wringing their hands about mummy planet and feeling guilty that we had shit and poor people in Shitholestan didn't and the General Mwombawomba's of places like Shitholestan holding out their hands asking for more money to develop low carbon economies buy more gold bathrooms and Lear Jets.

Now regulars will know I'm not a "climate change denier" but I can see that fucking up your economy and lifestyle by impossible to obtain carbon reduction targets isn't going to work. Our climate has always changed, that's what it does with or without our input and it's no use at all trying to keep it the same like some museum exhibit. We need to do what we've always done in the face of changing climate and that is adapt and mitigate. We are at a stage in human evolution where we don't just have to migrate in the face of changing crop growth and sea levels, we can do things about it. By all means cut waste and pollution as much as you can but we need to harness the power of industry, science and technology to give us solutions. Better flood defenses, crops that can tolerate drier (or wetter) conditions better, more advanced power generation systems, tank-grown meat made from stem cells, tiny pet unicorns that can live for a week on a lettuce leaf*.

Sure the planet gets a little warmer (or is it cooler, I keep getting mixed messages) and maybe the cutesy polar bears might have to be fitted with water wings and some species may even die off but they will be replaced by other species. That's what happens in a biosphere, they are not static, they adapt and change. 

Taking billions out of a first world economy and shoving it to some third world bottomless money pit will not and could not save a single bloody life, human or animal.

And as I see that the Durban conference (bet all the delegates flew there rather than paddled down in canoes made from recycled tofu) seems to be realizing this and has kicked the can down the road a few years much to the howling and gnashing of teeth of the usual suspects.   Maybe the message is getting through that we need an new approach.

Not holding my breath, mind you.


* top of my list, that one.

How Long is a Piece of String?

I was chatting to some of my Dutch and German friends on IRC last night (well it was that or watch that bloody singing competition) and the subject of the Euro came up. "You're in finance Dragon," someone said, "How long do you think the Euro will last"

Well just to be clear I may work for a financial organization (thanks for all that taxpayer's money guys!) but I'm not a trader, I just work with the shouty braces types and the bespectacled chaps with Aspergers and maths PhD's* to come up with clever trading and risk management applications. I'm quite good at it too, my systems have won industry awards.

What I'm not good at is divination. To be honest I have no idea if the Euro will survive or if not how long it will live and what will be the manner of its demise. But I'm not alone, nobody does. My own belief is that the markets (well equity** markets at least) will just in the end get fed up with looking at bond rates and endless politicos preening themselves at crisis conference after crisis conference and Nick Clegg throwing his rattle out of the pram and having a tantrum and will go back to doing what they do, looking at company fundamentals, share price relative to earnings, that kind of thing.

Personally I hope the Euro goes and the EU with it. I am no wrap myself in the Union Flag and parade with a bulldog little Englander, far from it, I am very pro-European. I've worked all around Europe, speak four European languages (two of them well enough to do business in) and am all for co-operation that brings us peace and mutual prosperity. However the EU has become none of these things and is seems obvious to me that it is becoming more and more of a tyranny of oligarchs and apparatchiks, unelected, remote and hostile to the liberal ethics which made Europe's nations great in the first place. It needs to go.

And my Dutch and German friends agreed. And they said they would still be able to sell me Stollen and Grolsch perfectly well without the EU and could I bring some PG Tips and Tiptree's marmalade when I come over at New Year. 



* Come on, when did you ever meet a quant who was in any way or shape normal!
** Shares to you and me

For now we see through a glass, darkly

Last night's Channel 4 drama "Black Mirror - The National Anthem", written by Charlie Brooker, was quite superb; by turns hilarious, suspenseful, horrifying and illuminating. It certainly lived up to its title, holding up a dark reflection of ourselves in the age of 24 hour rolling news, social networks and the hive mind.

I don't want to spoil the plot too much if you haven't seen it (you can get it from 4OD) but the story revolves around a Kate Middleton figure who has been kidnapped; the kidnappers don't want money, their demand is that the Prime Minister has sex with a pig, live on TV.

What we see is a government, and it could be any government, utterly at a loss at how to cope with the new world that's been created under their feet, unable to control their citizenry empowered as they are with the new tools of the social network age. "Why haven't you taken it down" says the PM when informed the ransom demand video is on YouTube. "We have," says a Whitehall mandarin "but every time we take one down ten more spring up in its place". This is a world where government can issue as many D-Notices and super injunctions and subtle (and not so subtle) leaning on journalists and it makes no difference. In the past the saying was that a lie could be half way round the world before the truth got its boots on , in the Twitter age an embarrassing truth can be three times round the world and have nipped down to the pub for a pint before the government censorship machine has even woken up.

In the drama even when the story leaks with Fox News and Al Jazeera (who,lets face it, wouldn't give a shit about a UK Government D notice at the best of times) broadcasting first the networks are coy, referring to "an indecent act'. "What indecent act" says a drayman to a barmaid as he makes a deliver "'e's got to do it wif' a pig" says the landlady's kid, hardly looking up from his BlackBerry. Now not only is it impossible to hide the story it's impossible to edit out the gory details.


I believe Charlie Brooker's main point he was trying to make is make us ask "well if this did happen, would you watch it, would you really watch, on live TV, a man utterly humiliating himself in a depraved spectacle... of course you would you sick fucks, we all would, we're human, this is what we do" and we see deserted streets as the minutes tick down to the deadline, crowds gathering round TV's giving lecherous cheers and "go on my son" encouragement which morphs into a sort of horrified cross between revulsion and fascination; a worldwide "Two Girls One Cup" reaction video*

But for my money what is more interesting is the what this drama says about the power we, the common man, the sixty million to their six hundred, now carry around in our pockets. We have seen this year that this shit can bring down governments in the so-called Arab Spring. Our lords and masters must be truly afraid.




* for the love of Fafnir if you are at work and you don't understand the reference  DO NOT Google that!