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!

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.

Dragon's Magic Pianos - The Korg 707 - an occasional series

I know a lot of my visitors come here from Old Holborn's Blog and expect a bit of right of centre libertarian politics (or just a dragon stomping around and swearing at stuff) but just for a change here's a little piece on what might become an occasional series on old synthesizers which, since Mrs Dracunculus bought me a Yamaha DX7 for my birthday last year I have become an occasional collector of.

The first one I'd like to tell you about is a real little gem of a keyboard, the Korg 707. Made in the late 80's it was very much aimed at the budget synth market with a 49 key keyboard and a rather cheapy looking plastic case. Its an FM synth with 4 operators and 8 voice polyphony and like all FM and digital synths of that era its a git to program (although lots easier than the DX7) although Korg, with an eye to live performance, put three sliders on the front so you can tweak the two envelope generators and the "Timbre" (basically the resonance Q) in real time. Play this little puppy and you start to use these controls a lot and very nice they are too.  If you really want to go for that 80's synthpop band look you can run it on batteries and it comes with studs on the side so you can sling a guitar strap on it and wear it over you shoulder for that "I am an utter cockwallet" look.

This is my beast, its a bit tatty and the bottom C doesn't sound but as I picked it up for 35 quid on eBay I really can't complain.

Like any FM synth its very good at metallic and bell tones and I have to say although most of the presets suck donkey balls there are some real gems in there, especially the "Tine Piano" which you can hear in this little bit of music I composed.

November 707 - Dracunculus


All that is recorded directly from the 707 on the presets (no sequencing) and fiddling with the performance sliders (and a bit of reverb and compression in Reason) - yeah I know I'm about a good a musician as I am a blogger.

One of the nicest things about it is that the keyboard has full size velocity sensitive keys and, amazingly for something in this price range, full aftertouch, so it works surprisingly well as a MIDI controller and given that these go for 50 to 70 quid on eBay if you're in the market for a 4-octave  controller you could do a lot worse than get one of these.

I like mine so much I'm thinking of getting a tidier one.

Happy birthday to Grumpy Dragon

Happy birthday to my blog, which turned 5 yesterday, which means it should be forming sentences of a few simple words and can ask to go to the toilet.

According to Google the stats are 13205 pageviews - 479 posts and 1,247,419 gratuitous uses of the word "fuck".

Thanks for reading my drivel over all these years and here's to another 5 years.  It may have learned to spell and use punctuation correctly by then.

My liver, not yours.

Here we go again. Having demonised the smokers out of existence The Righteous are, as we have come to expect, training their guns on anything else that, heaven forfend, might give us some kind of pleasure and of course the next demon to be slain is the drink.

Latest on the block are pseudo-charity the British Liver Trust. Pseudo charity? Well when did you last see these people rattling a tin on the street or were accosted by a cheery Aussie chugger demanding you sign over your children yea unto the seventh generation to them? You didn't because they are funded largely by the Government, this from their most recent filing at the Charities Commission:

Key fundraising successes of the year include a three year grant amounting to a total of £489,506 from the Big Lottery Fund’s Reaching Communities Programme to expand our support group network ...

OK so not funded out of taxes but its a reasonable supposition that they're not going to be wanting to piss off Whitehall any time soon or no Lottery cash for you Mr Hepatitis.

But look, you could say, they are having a go at the government, it's all over the BBC...

Government-led policies on alcohol throughout the UK have been branded a joke by the chief executive of the charity the British Liver Trust.

"We need to see direct action to prevent the daily death rate from liver cancer increasing," said Mr Langford. "At the moment all we are seeing are weak policies or no action at all. However, there are so many solutions to the problem."

And rather conveniently, up pops a government spokesman to say...

"We will shortly be setting out how we will tackle all the health and social impacts of alcohol in our alcohol strategy," he said.

 Well wasn't that convenient?

And you know, you just know, that "our alcohol strategy' will be "tax the fuck out of the dragon because he's got the money and he likes glass or two of wine when he gets home". But all for my own good of course, see the Liver Trust says we have to do these things to help you; you're only a dragon, you can't possibly be trusted to make your own descisions about your health. Trust us, we are The Worthy, we are The Righteous.

Well you can all go and fuck yourself with the biggest dildo Bad Dragon make*  Look it's not as if I don't know what alcohol does, you tell me often enough. Do I drink more than your reccomended 21 units a week? You bet on Fafnir's scaly tail I do, but that's my call, not yours. I will take that risk.

And it's not that much of a risk when you look at it...

In 2010, an estimated 3,788 people died from liver cancer across the UK, equating to an average of 10 people each day

... to put that into perspective that's 0.006% of the population.

"But the problem is growing!' screams Dr Liver...

Mr Langford said the condition seemed to be the poor relation to the other big killers, but was the only health problem out of the big five - cardiovascular, respiratory, circulatory and general cancers are the other four - showing an increasing trend.

Well how about the reason for that is that people are surviving some cancers and dying from others, that and we are all living longer so we're more likely to get rarer cancers, plus the rise, since 1977 which is their baseline in the report, of HIV/AIDS and associated conditions such as Hepatitis? You can't just point at the booze and say "that's your cause, right there, outlaw that and you'll see liver cancer rates drop" - that's just bad science.

Look I'm sure the British Liver Foundation do good work supporting people with liver disease and the like but will you please stop using dodgy statistics and cozying up to government giving the po faced arseholes an excuse to demonise and tax the fuck out of one of the few affordable pleasures we have left.

Or I could come round to your place, douse you in a fine XO Armagnac and sneeze in your direction; up to you.



* it's the Sea Dragon in aquamarine with the integral spooge-tube in case you're interested

"Remember what happened to Anjem Choudary" they whisper

I see over at Max Farquar's blog everyone's favourite uppity mussie Anjem Choudary has been frothing at the mouth again, this time inciting his fellow rugbutters to kick off at armistice day parades and bad-mouthing the military as muslim baby killers, etc, etc.

Well quite frankly that's his right and good luck to him. In a working democracy all the voices of the demos should be heard, even if, particularly if perhaps, what they have to say is unpopular.

Where of course the likes of Chowdray and his ilk cross the line is of course they don't just talk and seek to persuade. There is always the implicit, and more often explicit, threat of violence pointed at anyone who "upsets muslim sensibilities"*... "Remember Theo van Gogh" they whisper, "Look what happened to Charlie Hebdo's offices" they write.

Well Anjem and your pals, maybe you should remember that with your right to free speech comes your responsibility to bear the consequences of that speech and I would point out that you are upsetting an awful lot of people and in particular a lot of people who are trained at great expense to fuck you up in 197 ways before you even realize its happened. Of course I am not advocating violence against you, that would be stooping to your level, I am merely making an observation. But maybe you and your ilk had better take a good hard look at yourself and have a serious think about what you're before you flap your gob in public again, because if you carry on as you are I fear that what will be being whispered in your "community" is "Remember what happened to Anjem Choudary"



* pointing out that their prophet was a pedophile is always a good way to do this.