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.

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.

Shush, don't tell the government

For various reasons I found myself in the market for a 3G broadband dongle last week to replace the ancient Vodafone PCMCIA card version I have been using for years* and a look at the coverage maps showed my best bet was Three and a pay as you go would work out fine instead of a contract.

So off I flapped down to the Three shop and just out of curiosity I wondered if in out surveillance society you could still buy communications equipment anonymously. And it turns out that, yes, you can. Picked up a dongle pre-loaded with a 1Gb allowance for 20 or so quid cash, no names, no registration, nothing. You can buy top-up allowances at a tenner a time again for cash in plenty of places so I have an anonymous internet connection, and it's pretty fast too.

This got me thinking what would you have to do to be virtually undetectable using this, and its not that hard. There are location services, you might have seen these advertised as "find where your kids are" services that use data from mobile phone masts and triangulation to identify the location of a mobile device and the networks will of course give this information to the police but a bit of research indicates that they are not that accurate. Plod would have you believe that they could go "Yep, Dragon's on his 3G searching for ocelot porn again, he's at his house behind the water pipes, in the back bedroom" but they can't. Even in a city with a dense collection of masts it's only accurate to 100 meters at best, in rural areas that drops to kilometers.

Traffic analysis would be a way to work out its you of course. If anyone really was interested in finding me they would be able to work out the dongle gets used most mornings on a particular train into London just by watching what masts it connects to so you would probably need to use it in one space or adapt a usage pattern that makes no sense and can't be attributed to you.  Dumping the dongle every 3 or 4 months as well and getting a new one, ideally on a different network, would probably be prudent as well.

Combine this with strong encryption and the use of proxies like TOR and darknets and you're as undetectable as an undetectable thing.

I'm amazed we can still get away with this, really amazed. I would have thought that our lords and masters would have pointed at those modern horsemen of the apocalypse, Terrorist and Peedofils, and gone "waaaah! all communication equipment must be registered for your own protection citizens".

Of course all the information presented above is just a thought experiment, if you choose to act on any of this I take no responsibility. But here's a link so you can find your nearest Three store...



* "Tiamat" - my lovely old T60 is laid up awaiting repairs and the Compaq 6720 (named Voliatus as it's not the smartest lappy in the world) I've borrowed doesn't like the old card it seems.

Strangled at birth

Rather unwittingly the last spendthrift Labour government thew the middle classes a nice little bone in their bid to be all green and cuddly. This was something called the Feed In Tarrif (FIT) which basically meant that if you generated your own electricity from a solar photovoltaic array on your roof you would get paid to do so and at a very generous rate of 43p per kWh as well. That's guaranteed for 25 years and index linked.

Oh and as there's no way to actually measure how much you generate gets back into the grid, you get 3p per 0.5kWh on top of that.

And you get to use all the electricity you generate too, so a household bill like mine of around £800 a year would come down to around £200 a year.

So with a 4kW array costing around £14k to install it works out that over the 25 years you'll make around 10 to 12% return and break even around the 8 year mark. And with my current investments making 2 or 3% at best its an absolute no-brainer. So last month some men crawled over my roof and I now have my own little power station that's  generated over 100kWh of nice clean energy and enriched me to the best part of fifty quid in the couple of weeks its been running.

What's that Mr Government? Middle class people with disposable income making a profit? Oh no, that will never do, never never never! You're there Mr Middleclass to pay your taxes that we will spend on services you'll never use and give your money away to those poor developing nations with space programmes and nuclear weapons like India and China. We can't have you doing that, you're supposed to be installing solar because you can afford it and to make us in government look all green and answer the problem of Warble Gloaming! You're not actually supposed to treat this as an investment!

So in six weeks time the coalition are going to cut the FIT to 22p, and that's only if you've got a "C" energy rated house already (which is nigh on impossible to get if your house is more than 20 years old) . I did a quick back on an Excel spreadsheet calculation and the ROI on a 4kW rig like mine drops to around 2% and the payoff period almost triples to 21 years.

Now a small but significant industry has grown up in this country over the last 2 years to service the demand for Solar PV; it's estimated that it employs around 25,000 people. This is not to mention the ancillary services it supports like the team of scaffolders who shoved a load of metal poles round my house (and then took 2 weeks to come and take them down again!) - I was chatting to Mr Scaffolder and he said solar PV was around half their work these days.

Well Mr Scaffold is probably going to have to lay off some of his staff and there's going to be 25000 people heading for the dole office come December because nobody is going to want Solar PV now. A new industry, supporting thousands of people has been strangled at birth because oh my god we can't have people making money out of Eco-Wibble can we. Those people on the social are going to cost way fecking more than the feed in tarrif money ever would.

Sure, the high rate was to kick start the solar business in the UK and it was unsustainable at 43p but why the hell didn't you cut it back slowly and on the dates you promised? All the hoons in Whitehall have done by cutting the FIT in half is to strangle one of the very private enterprises that was supposed to hoover up all these public sector jobs at birth.

Fucking idiots.

Mind your own business.

You might remember that back in 2001 there was a national census and for the first time it asked you what religion you were and many of us went "feck you arseholes" and wrote in "Jedi" just for the lulz.

This time around there's a campaign I think I'll be supporting. Basically you just say "None of your business" on the optional (so far) question about religion. The original census was in 1801 and was for the purpose of finding the number of men of fighting age (we were fighting Napoleon at the time) but governments of all stripes just love information about their citizens, knowledge is power. And the more they know about us, and this information extracted at the barrel of a 1000 pound fine, the more powerful they feel.

I would be tempted, sorely tempted, to write "FUCK OFF" in nice big red letters on the whole form and let them see if they could get their database to accept that. However not having 1000 quid to burn I guess I will stick to saying "None of your business" on the religion question and see how many others I can tick "Other" on or just simply "forgetting" to answer some questions.

I would urge you to do the same.

Sums all done

Well so much for getting back into blogging. My excuse has been my Open University degree course with a couple of exams that needed doing, the last of which was yesterday so that's it for a while now so I can come back in here and whitter on about nothing in particular.

Anyway can you all hear that screaming noise up and down the country? Yes? Well that's the sound of thousands of useless council employees being torn from the state's teat and thrown into the street as the crushing realisation dawns on them that the real world really doesn't need a "children's play diversity co-ordinator" or a "street furniture compliance officer", hopefully one of them is that utter twat of a "refuse officer" at a certain Norfolk borough council who unilaterally decided that I now have to traipse half a mile to the main road with my binbags as they can't get the bin truck to my door because of "health and safety" of the fucking binmen!

Well quite frankly good fucking riddance to the lot of them and all those media luvvies at the Beeb who are going to get the boot as well. Anything that basically gets government pared back to the absolute essentials only is a plus in my book and making up a load of non-jobs is no way to warehouse the surplus population. After 13 years of ZaNu Labour throwing cash at anything to shore up their vote we're bust, borassic, broke and other things meaning we have no money starting with "B". However I would be neglectful in my duties as a dragon if I did not come up with a few more draconian suggestions of my own.

Overseas Aid Budget to be cut to, oh lets say £0. If people want to help out the little brown babies then there are plenty of charities out there to give money to. I don't want to help the little brown babies and I definitely do not want to assist President Mwumumumumba of Corruptionland fund new marble lavatories for his presidential palace.

TV Licence Fee. New fee is £0. The Beeb will survive, you make all those nice costume dramas that you can sell. Why should I fund a left-leaning monolithic broadcaster. Pay your own way and stop raping my wallet of 150 quid a year you bastards.

Those banks you bailed out: Sell them. See I'm prepared to take my chances as well. I noticed that shares in Banko Di Haggis are around 50p these days so UK PLC might even turn a profit.

And finally - leave the EU. Keep the money we send to these bastards and cut VAT to 0 (want to know why Darling only cut VAT to 15% - the EU rules said it couldn't be any lower as that would disadvantage the Froggies). The VAT cut will hugely stimulate the economy, get businesses flooding in here and generating jobs (and tax revenue) plus a whole layer of administrative arseholes who collect this regressive tax are now no longer needed.

Oh and Mr and Mrs Vatman? Don't think your new job is sitting on the sofa watching Jeremy Kyle. Here's a shovel and there's some sea defences that need shoring up, come on, put your backs into it.

Next Week: Fixing the incapacity benefit problem by releasing a hungry leopard into the room. Anyone who can manage to run away from the leopard does not need incapacity benefit and anyone who doesn't won't be needing any benefits any more.

Police State, we has it.

These two stories appeared side by side on the front page of the Beebs new site at one point this afternoon...



... and I think that it says everything you need to know about ZaNuLabour's Britain.

We are now a police state. The state can and will ban you for stating a point of view and you can and will be tried by the Star Chamber and not before a jury of your peers.

This is how it starts people. No-one is going to kick up too much of stink about Abdul Al-Weirdybeard and his gang swivel-eyed gang of loons getting banned - despite the fact that as far as I can see from their website (yes I had a look) and what's been reported I can't see that they have incited hatred (well no more than the BNP do) or been shown that they have associated with terrorists - and if they have bring that information into open court so we can all see that they have done so and not just on the whim of some ex-postman expenses junkie who's trying to look "tough" with an election coming up. Ditto our alleged criminal friends up before a juryless court. Sure the are probably a bit handy with the shooters (but they love their mothers) but the excuse for not having a jury trail was that it would cost "too much" to protect the jury - about 86 million they reckoned. Fucking hell how many BILLIONS did we stump up to bail out my employer? How many millions do we pour into the cesspit that is Africa every year straight that ends up in General Mwomomomoba's back pocket?

Oh sure the cockwallets in government will all be "oh these are extremes, very rare occurrences, don't worry these powers will hardly ever get used." Yes, and at the risk of falling foul of Godwins' Law I'm sure when the Nazis started passing those laws just to sort out "a few anti-social troublemakers who we know none of you like" nobody kicked up too much of a fuss or ever thought that one day the Sturmabteilung would be kicking down their door for daring to say something not so complimentary about the beloved leader and being hauled off for a quick show trial followed by a bullet to the head.

We do not live in a "creeping police state" - we are in a de facto police state where you can be imprisoned for expressing a view following a trail with no jury.

This is just going to get worse and worse. And I can't see CallMeDave making any moves to change it soon.

Your tax dollars at work

Apparently at the same time as John Sargeant is utterly taking the piss out of a dance competition the only people who take seriously are the four pompous arseholes on the judging panel* there is some sort of glorified karaoke and talent show over on ITV.

Turns out that there was a "shock eviction" last week and somebody who might have won it got kicked out of the show. OK so just another night of lowest commen denominator celebretoid dogshit for brain-dead proles to watch on their 46" plasma cunt-tubes before the bailiffs reposess them (and I get to pick one up piss-cheap at an auction)

So why the fuck do I read this...

Even the Culture Secretary, Andy Burnham, had something to say about the show in Parliament. He said White, who lives in his constituency of Leigh in Greater Manchester, was "wonderful and talented" and the decision to axe her was "very harsh".

Excuse me, excuse fucking me!! The fucking culture secretary, his second home, expensed travel and kickbacks to his family for "secretarial duties), paid for out of my fucking taxes, thinks it is important enough to vomit up his opinion on some cuntsnotting "talent" show aimed at epsilon minus sub morons? So what now - is a ZaNuLabour comittee going to have to scritinise every eviction from one of these shows now? You know what even the most brain dead of chavs is going to sodding notice when the next season of "Strictly Come Maria X-Brother Can Do" starts and Bruce/Davina/That Camp One comes on and says "You know what, all twelve of you have won, after all that's only fair".

I dispair, I truly do.




* I only watch it waiting for "Merlin" to come on - I have the serious hots for John Hurt's Great Dragon - would not be chucking him out of bed**.

** The dragon, not Mr Hurt, obviously.

Entertaining Mrs Sunshine

Just when you thought ZaNuLabour fuckwittery could not get any more stunningly fuckwitted they pull stunts like this.

Cat and dog owners are to be told to provide "entertainment" and "mental stimulation" for their pets under new government advice.

Jesus fucking Christ on a pogo-stick! I swear not even in some kafkaesque fever and LSD dream could I come up with something this freaking dreadful. These people truly are world class twunts.

Of course these are just "advice" and "guidelines"...

Owners will not be fined for breaking the rules

and

DEFRA said it wanted to remind pet owners of their responsibilities under the 2006 Animal Welfare Act.

...but you don't have to dig very far into this report to see the state's goon-squad kicking in your door at 4 in the morning because you failed to take Fido for walkies one evening last week...

failure to comply may be used in animal cruelty prosecutions.

and

"It is your responsibility to read the complete Code of Practice to fully understand your cat's welfare needs and what the law requires you to do."

Ihr Katze ist nicht in Ordnung. Kommen Sie bitte mit uns.

So I guess we can look forward to some council Stazi wannabe snooping round our houses checking that our cats are not bored in the very near future, all paid out of my taxes, natch.

Wonder if they will want to check my ponies too?

There are similar guidelines for horse owners under the proposals, which are subject to an eight week consultation period.

Yep, thought there might be. How do you entertain a horse exactly, show it carrot porn?

But what are these orders and dictats guidelines and reccomendations from ZaNuLabours ministry of fucking over the middle classes? Well it turns out that you should feed your cats properly, ensure they have somewhere to have s shit and maybe consider letting it wander around over your shelves kocking over your picture frames. You know all the things that normal, responsible people who have animals in their homes do already without being ordered to do so by Central State Command.

Now what about the pond scum on the Nelson Mandela estate, what do you reckon to their chances of reading 28 pages of Pussycats For Dummies is? Yes probably about the same as their chances of cleaning up after Tyson their pitbull takes a dump. Do you think that our lords and masters will be going after them - course not, but you can bet that a nice soft easy prosecution of some frail old dear who can't really walk the pooch so well any more will be following on swift wings following the "consultation period".

And what about the *real* cruelty that happens. The pikeys who drown their horses, the muslim halal slaughter of conscious animals, the racehorse industry that cripples hundreds if not thousands of horses each year by riding them hard when they are too young for all their bones and joints to have fully formed. Any chance of tackling those instead of going for a nice soft option of putting the jackboot into the ordinary Joe? Let me see: ethinic minority (violent), religious ethnic minority (insanely violent), organisation with lots of money and bought-off politicians. Thought not.

Incidentally if you go over to the Defra website good luck on finding the document. There's no link so you have to search for it. I'm currently pulling down the horse welfare one as I fancy a bit of "consultation" with Hilary Benn, the current minister of state for picking up dogshit. I'll try not to use too many swear words.

Civil Servant Dragon

As I work for Banco Di Haggis, one of the formerly proud and independent Scottish banks ZaNuLabour are about to nationalise, does that make me a government employee; a civil servant if you will.

If so can I have a copper-bottomed final salary pension, Nelson Mandela's birthday off as a holiday, 5 Whitley Days* a year and, if I feel like it, a couple of years on full salary sick pay sitting with my feet up at home because I have "stress". Oh and a straight 9 to 5 with an hour for lunch. And being able to go on strike at the drop of a hat.

I guess there will be some extra forms to fill in but otherwise it sounds like a sweet gig.



* Unrecorded sickness days - named after the brewer Greenall Whitley as they were used when you had a 5 star hangover and work was simply not an option.

Anti Dhimmitude reqested

Now we all know that the government takes about as much notice of those online polls they host as they do for, well, any opinions expressed to them by the British public who by and large just want them to fuck off. However some fuckwad islamist has stuck a petition up to make Mohammed's (piss be upon him) birthday a UK national holiday.

Fortunately someone with an ounce of sense has launched a counter-petition which is here.

Of course the chances of a holiday on Big Mo's birthday happening are about the same as there being 72 virgins waiting to give me a blow job when I get to my office this morning but just to put the raghead's noses out of joint do go along and sign.

Drop that pencil!

Ok so I was given to understand that photos and videos of child abuse were illegal because, well, quite simply chidren are abused to make them and even a libertarian dragon such as I realised that a person's freedom has to be restricted when it impinges severely on the freedom of another, and the freedom not to be killed or raped comes pretty high up that list. So, no problem banning kiddy porn videos from me.

Now what if someone takes an application like Bryce or RenderMan, creates a wire-frame model, renders it and it just happens to look like a small girl in a swimming pool of lard getting it on with a lizard-creature from the planet Zod? Ok so that someone has not so much got a few nuts and bolts loose but rather is missing Screwfix's entire fixings inventory but, get this, NO ONE HAS BEEN HURT. There is no victim, just a bunch of pixels pushed into place by software, therefore there can be no crime, no matter how personally appalled you might be by what the person behind the computer just did.

Well if the rabid control freaks in Za-NuLabour get their way, and they will, it will be a crime. Indeed it would seem that at least one police force during the recent "Extreme Porn" debacle wanted not only sexually suggestive drawings of children banned but also writing.

So everyone of you who has a copy of Nabokov's "Lolita", 3 years in the nick. Guess that's why they have just let out all those muggers and burglars early, they need room for you. Oh and The Koran, The Bible and Shakespeare (Juliet was under 16)... all you lot as well.

No people, I hold no breif for the kiddy fiddlers but this has gone way too fucking far. We need not to be voting these twats out of office we need to be throwing them out, via a twelfth floor window and into the paths of speeding fuel tax protesters in 18 wheel trucks.

This goes way beyond "protecting children", indeed there is evidence that this will actually put more children at risk,¹, this is pure and simple "We will control what you imagine and think. You may think of Government Approved topics only" and puts us in the shameful company of Saudi Arabia, Iran and China when it comes to freedom of expression.

Kill them. Kill them all. (and don't forget to bring lots of crimson Prismacolors so you can draw the fountains of blood accurately).




¹ There are a number of studies that show that where porn is freely available the rates of sexual assauts and sex crimes generally are lower than countries where it is not. Not conclusive proof but certainly strong evidence for a direct causation.

Soma

Well after a brief break from blogging I'm back at work (although not in the saddle) and so coming into contact with the usual plethora of morons in the big wide world so, grumpiness revived, I'll start stomping and breathing on random fuckers once more.

One thing I noticed whilst I was off was that our lovely nanny Labour are getting all het up about supermarkets selling ultra cheap lager which is supposedly cheaper than bottled water, so cheap in fact that they must be making a loss on every tin they sell.

Now you don't need to sample this product to know that it is going to taste something like chilled horse piss and therefore not something that'll find its way into the shopping trolley of anyone who reads this august journal. No this is chav-fuel, own brand shit for the lower orders so they'll have some money left over after buying 24 tins of Tesco Value Horse Urine for scratch cards and Silk Cut. But no doubt lulled by the soma of cheap beer the estate scum flop around in front of their widescreen tellies and don't cause any bother apart from to their equally slimy neighbours on the sink estate.

Now although NuLab are a bunch of lying, mendacious cunts they are not uneducated and I cannot believe that none of them have read Aldous Huxley's novel "Brave New World" - hey they made a movie out of it if they can't be bothered to actually sit down with the book. The lower orders, the "Epsilon Minus Sub-Morons" were kept quiet with their daily doses of "Soma".

So take the soma away from the pond scum and I wonder what will happen. Can't imagine that they will be very happy about it and I bet the resultant riots as the morons start to think a bit and see the shit they are in without the happy fog of booze will make for great TV viewing. Hint to any aspiring right wing politician: you may want to latch onto this and blame the muslims because they hate alcohol, right?

They don't like it when it happens to them, do they.

Aw diddums. Some raghead of an MP thinks that he has been bugged whilst visting a terrorist "constituent" who is in prison awaiting extradition.

Let's leave aside for a moment the fact that muslim MPs are consorting with muslim terrorists and the matter of treason for a moment and have a look at what this fellow colleage fucktrumpets in Westminster are saying...

Mr Straw said it was "completely unacceptable" for an MP to be recorded while talking to a constituent.

"I think there will be deep concern on all sides of the House of Commons if these allegations prove to be founded."

"...what has happened is highly questionable."

Thurrock MP Andrew McKinlay said it was "wholly unacceptable" for MPs to be under surveillance.

But it is perfectly acceptable for my progress to be tracked on CCTV cameras everywhere I go, for me to be forced to hand over the passwords for my encrypted communications under threat of 3 years in jail, for me to have to carry around a biometric ID...

One law for them, one law for the rest of us. Shoot the fucking lot of them.

And as for Sadiq Khan, he's a traitor and should be swinging from a lamp-post.

Gordon Brown's Kidneys

Apparently the state want to own your corpse after you die. Well rather they wish to strip it of any useful bits to give to whomever they choose once you croak. So now even when you die the taxes don't stop as they literally take a pound of flesh from you.

Now I've no problem with organ donation. I carry a donor card and am on the register as "help yourself to any bits that might be handy, I'm not going to need them any more." and it's nice to think that physical bits of me will live on when I'm not around - and to whoever gets my willy you are going to have a *great* time with that, but probably best not to ask where it's been.

What I do think whiffs though is that the state just thinks it can do whatever the sweet fuck it wants with our bodies. This is yet another example of how governments, this government in particular, has got it's relationship with citizens arse first. Let me explain this to any politico reading this in nice simple terms. We appoint you to do things which are best accomplished collectively rather than individually: enforcing property rights, defence, that sort of thing. In order for this to work we give up a minimal set of liberties to you. What we have not done is hand over all our liberties to you for you to hand back to us piecemeal as and when you see fit.

So my body remains my property and once I have breathed on my last moron or one of those pesky knights manages to land a lucky shot my body will pass on to whomever I fucking well want it to. It does not and never will be the property of the state.

Maybe I should add a clause in the organ donors register that nothing of mine may be given to anyone who has stood for political office.

Back on the chain gang

Right, the tinsel is down, the tree is lying by the woodshed and awaiting dismemberment into kindling and logs and everyone can go back to eating proper food instead of one of Bernard Matthews' flavourless turkeys ("now with added H5N1!")

And as it is the new year our lords and masters crawl out from under their slimy rocks and try to persuade us with their "new and fresh ideas" that they know what they are doing and to trust them with yet more of our money which they will "spend wisely" and you know that they are just going to piss up the wall just like they did the last lot.

We'll just skip right over anything spewing out from the gob of any Labour party politician as you know it's going to be elephant shit of the first order by default but instead let's have a look at the latest idea from TheBoyDave which you can read about on the beeb's site here

Well it's a start I guess but it doesn't go nearly far enough which is par for the course really. Doing a bit more of a dig into the story it looks as though what is being proposed is the same model as was used in New York and which did take a goodly number of people off the dole but didn't save a whole lot of money in the end - and remember the USA has a system where your unemployment benefits end after a fixed time; no sitting on your arse in front of the Jeremy Kyle show in perpetuity over there. In the end when you look at it what the Tories are proposing is a bit of window dressing which is probably going to cost more than it saves but we might get the occasional tidier park and some favourable headlines in the Daily Mail¹ but you know, you just fucking know, that the workshy cunts who this is aimed at just won't turn up or if they do won't do any work or it will be of such abysmal quality that some other poor fucker will have to fix it later and there will be no sanctions or penalties against them - this is after all a government operation.

So here is the Grumpy Dragon solution to unemployment...

You get three months to find a job and you must prove that you are looking (records of letters sent to employers, notification letters for interviews, etc.) and after that if you want money from the state (i.e. me) then you work for that money and you are made to work properly, in other words you are treated as a proper employee and if you fuck up too often, don't turn up for work or consistently do a shoddy job then you are "fired" and your money is cut off. You'll get a couple of days off every other week to apply for jobs and attend interviews and, trust me, after a few days working on what I have in mind you will be applying for anything at all to get off the state dole.

Draconian? Yes of course it is, I'm a dragon.

Next week - fixing the disability benefits system by shouting "Pull yourself together you fuckwit" at people.




¹ Or not... today's headline is some cack about that dead airhead princess we used to have before she got in a car with a pissed up frog.

Then they came for the drinkers

Well as predicted our nanny-knows-best rulers having done for the smokers are turning their guns on the drinkers. And are they going for the pissed up morons who turn our towns and cities into battlegrounds every Saturday night? Nope they are going for your law abiding dragon who drinks three or four bottles of wine a week which apparently makes me a "harmful drinker".

What makes me harmful is shite like this emanating from a government I pay for and you are going to find out just how harmful several tons worth of screaming, flaming dragon can be should you come round my house looking for my vote. But what are they going to do... well they are "working hard to change attitudes." How about working hard to keep your fucking nose out of our business. Look you fuckers, we are talking about well off middle class people here, we're not a burden on the NHS because we've all got BUPA and if we want to float into an early grave on a lake of Chianti then that's up to us and not fucking you so just go and give yourself a vodka enema.

But who is working hard to "change our attitudes" (and if you won't change them we'll force you to)?

Public health minister Dawn Primarolo said

Ah, you would be the same Dawn Primarolo who decimated the IT contracting industry trough IR35 then. Yes Dawn I'm really going to take notice of everything you say you utter, utter cunt. Now just chuck a bottle of sambuca over yourself would you¹, I find the blue flames it produces when I breathe on you most pleasing to look at.


¹ you can stuff a coffee bean up each nostril to complete the effect if you like.

We all need to be cypherpunks now

Hello dear reader, please take a look at the text below:

#èØüÈâ[òš9þ³4máÑ#g€ò£§úùÞ¡5QÛ
¯d1P4 Kh@‚׶cÅ'iÛ±DOç#‘·+[Ña-3~w}¸GekuÊcT
…ÔëÔ+FJGŒl^Þ©¨Ç5KÛ+üdOìP/ÛTÞèˆo)Ȥ~–Ì5}²9
°§±×¡"ƪ_Y_’¯†…æ(pãPÙãùEç4ÿöÝ2é>mqŠ=h-¼ù
b&Xæ¹xkú'ù¡‘ BsûÑ„_:x‡”M×ýõœC´ÄžBfëÝJá–xÃ
‘;¯v

What has just landed in your computer is a block of cyphertext encrypted using a Serpent serpent, 256-bit key, 128 bit block cypher with a RIPEMD-160 hash.

And you do not know the decryption key.

So, as of this Monday just gone, when PC Plod comes round to your house and finds this on your computer and demands you decrypt it and you say you can't because you don't have the key then that is no longer a defence and you can get two years in the nick. Welcome to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2007 and the overturning of the principle of innocent until proven guilty. Also remember that you are deemed to have "made" that piece of cyphertext too because having downloaded it, albeit unwittingly when you opened my blog on your browser, you have made a copy and that counts as "making" - you know all those people they get for child porn and they get done for x counts of "making images" that's what it means, it doesn't mean they got their cameras out.

Ihr papieren ist nicht in ordnung. Kommen Sie bitte mit uns.

So what to do. Well you could do worse than get yourself a copy of TrueCrypt which is a free, open source encryption utility that's really easy to use and has one killer feature that'll keep you safe from Brown's Geheime Staatspolitzei. What it does is you can tell it to create an encrypted disk drive within an encrypted disk drive; that way you can have an encrypted drive with a key you can reveal to the plod in which all they see is a bunch of files with your bank details and other mundane stuff in them that any normal, prudent citizen would want to keep safe in the event of their PC being stolen. However hidden on that drive is the second secure drive that unless you type in the right passwords doesn't even appear to be there, nor is it possible to prove their is a second drive and of course it is on this second drive that you store all your bomb making instructions, plans for setting fire to the Labour front bench and of course your dragon porn.

I've been using it for a couple of days now and it's supplanted my previous software (DriveCrypt) as hiding things tool of choice. Go get a copy, even if you have nothing to hide (but trust me that you do), just to stick two fingers up at the fascists we call a government

The Government - Fucking up an InterWeb near you soon

There there little person, you can't look after yourself, you see you're not clever enough, just let your big brother the state look after you.

The government must do more to protect internet users from the threat of e-crime... "You can't just rely on individuals to take responsibility for their own security. They will always be out-foxed by the bad guys."

Just fuck off will you. Look if I go out and leave all my doors and windows wide open and some scrote makes off with my TV then I'm culpable. I'm responsible for the security of my computer in the same way.

The Lords Science and Technology Committee said the internet was now "the playground of criminals". The report criticised the government's current "Wild West" approach of leaving internet security up to the individual as "inefficient and unrealistic".

This is the government whose statist policies of disempowering the individual to act against criminals and emasculating the guardians of law and order have made the whole fucking country the playground of every sort of thug and criminal; don't believe me - go down to any town or city centre of a Saturday night if you dare. What the fuck makes you think that the government could do a better job of protecting individuals on the net that the individuals themselves? You can't protect us in our homes and on the streets, why is cyberspace any different.

Incidentally if we did have a bit more "wild west" citizens empowerment to protect their lives and property, say I could wrap a pickaxe handle round the head of anyone robbing my house, then we'd have a bit less fucking crime let me tell you.

The committee suggested that a kite-mark should be set up that would identify internet service providers that guaranteed a secure service.

How the hell do you "guarantee a secure service" if you're an ISP? That's like saying "My telephone company guarantees that I'll only ever hear good news on my phone when someone rings me up." This is the level of utter misunderstanding these wankers have and they have the temerity to tell me they are going to protect me on the net. Mind you I bet to get a "kite mark" you'll have to install government approved filtering and snooping systems; won't make you safer but the Department of Citizen Surveillance will be happy.

This was important in cases, such as happened in March this year, when hackers stole the credit card details of 45 million TK Maxx customers. "Potentially any one of these cards, belonging to innocent individuals, could be used online for illegal purposes in transactions relating to terrorism, or to purchase child abuse images," the committee said.

Yep, I was wondering when "terrorism" and "child porn" were going to be wheeled out. You say those words and you become immune from any form of criticism; you're against our reccomendations? Ah you must be in favour of terrorism and kiddy fiddling then. Ihr papieren ist nicht in ordnung, commen Sie bitte mit uns. You can guarantee that anything that invokes those two modern demons to scare people into compliance is morally bankrupt and its authors candidates for a good dragon ass roasting.

Look you cunts, it works like this. I work for a bank and all we have is our reputation and a half way decent savings rate. If people lose confidence in our reputation for keeping their pennies safe online then they'll take their custom elsewhere to someone who can. It is this which drives internet security forwards, not this...

It also said that steps should be taken to establish legal liability for damage resulting from security flaws found in hardware or software.

... which just stops software development in its tracks as we're all petrified of getting sued to Christmas and back.

You've fucked up my country now leave my fucking internet alone you wankstains, you'll break it.