Longrider

I found this over at cynica’s blog I’m a sucker for dragons and this one is me to a tee.

Take the quiz: "What dragon species are you? (Stunning pics)"

Shadow Dragon

Dark, evil, you are the evil breed of dragon. You lurk within the shadows of the night and attack with surprise. You prefer to stay alone, solitude is your best friend within your deep, dark cave or den.
—–

So Shakespeare maligned Macbeth according to members of the Scottish parliament. They want to rescue him from the Shakespearean propaganda and restore his reputation as a good king who may have killed Duncan in battle rather than murdered him and took his throne. According to the SMPs signing the motion, history portrays a very different man to the one Shakespeare presents. Well, that comes as no surprise - after all our impression of Richard III is tainted by Elizabethan propaganda enthusiastically provided by the bard. If recent historical evidence is true, far from the misshapen hunchback who brutally murdered his way to the throne, Richard was the rightful heir; his brother Edward IV was illegitimate and therefore had no right to the succession. Shakespeare is similarly liberal with the other subjects of his historical plays, effectively rewriting Plantagenet and Lancastrian history for the benefit of his royal benefactor.

Whether Shakespeare played fast and loose with the truth is neither here nor there for me - the plays endure because they have all the right ingredients for good drama; believable characters, sound plotting, rich dialogue and wonderfully wicked villains. Writers have always been liberal with facts when they get in the way of a good yarn and the suspension of disbelief is one of the exchanges entered into between writer and consumer. After all, all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.

I was trying desperately to resist commenting on this, but found that I just couldn’t. Now I despise negative campaigning so I dislike the poster on those grounds, just as I deplored the Tory poster a couple of elections back that depicted Tony Blair with demon eyes. Such posters lower the tone of the election to silly name calling that appeals to the critical mass of voters who are too idle to spend time and effort thinking through the issues. The poster is not, however, anti-semetic. Stupid, purile and thoughtless, maybe, but not anti-semetic. You could argue as they have over at Samizdata that New Labour is in some way getting its just deserts - after all, it is they who have championed the hyper sensitive ” toxic identity politics” and are now being bitten on the bum by it. What are we coming to when everyone is just so ready to take offence where none was intended (although in this case it was, but for a different reason)?

Only recently Rodney Marsh was sacked for an indiscreet comment about the tsunami. Tasteless, yes. But a sackable offence? Certainly not. I recall standing alongside police officers looking at the remains of a suicide on the railway line. We cracked several equally tasteless and macabre jokes while awaiting the arrival of the doctor who had to declare that the body parts were indeed dead and the coroner’s henchmen to collect said parts. Such black humour is a part of what we are. A survival mechanism for those who have to deal with the gore of violent death on a regular (if not daily) basis. Also, how can we have taste if we do not have the opposite? And why are people so ready with their politically correct fascism to demand heads on a platter in the event of indiscretion?

I try to avoid causing offense, as I suspect most people will do naturally. But we all at sometime put our foot in it. If we get it wrong and do indeed cause offense, a simple apology should suffice. The over-reaction to these two incidents says more about those who cry foul than those who committed the offenses in the first place. Political correctness is a disease that corrodes our society with its purse lipped puritanism, stifling free speech and expression.

There’s been much palaver about the analysis of Tony Blair’s doodles in the papers and BBC today. Except, of course, they weren’t his. So red faces all round for the graphologists. According to the BBC’s article, employers are starting to use this faux science to filter out potential recruits. It is a perception that neat handwriting is a sign of a neat and tidy mind - someone who understands the rules, their place and knows how to stick to both. Or something like that. (Although as I understand it, this is not necessarily how a graphologist would analyse it).

Neither applies to me - I am rebellious, strong willed, ambitious and prepared to stick to my guns when I know I’m right. My mind is anything but tidy, having a tendency to take lateral leaps when problem solving. I also have appalling handwriting. There is simple explanation for this. My hand has difficulty keeping up with my brain - so as my thoughts race away, the pen is gainfully struggling to keep up with the end product looking as if a spider crawled across the page following a riotous night on the town. It says absolutely nothing about my personality. Indeed, if I was asked at an interview to submit to one of these tests, I would walk out. A company that is prepared to judge its prospective employees on the basis of “science” that is about as scientific as astrology is not a company I would want to work for.

While graphology may be a bit of fun as a leisure pursuit, on the whole, I treat it with the same degree of scepticism as the Telegraph.

So Kilroy finally ditched the odious little Englander party UKIP. Now he has set up his own version Veritas. He chose this name because it is the Latin for “truth”. You would have thought someone who believes “our country is being stolen from us by mass immigration” would have come up with a good old English word for his new party. Anyway, so when is he going to the decent thing by those folk foolish enough to vote for him and resign his seat? That way he can recontest it under his new colours and give those same voters the right to decide whether they want him or his former party to represent them.

Ah, but that would be risking losing his seat in the European parliament, wouldn’t it?

Germany - along with other European Union countries - has been struggling with high unemployment for some while. With between 4million and 5million out of work, the economy has been suffering so the long term unemployed are “encouraged” to take jobs that they are offered by prospective employers or suffer a cut in their benefits. Something similar happens in the UK and for the most part, is not such a bad thing. After all, it is taxpayers’ money being handed out and if there is suitable employment out there and people turn down jobs because they don’t like them, then they must expect consequences. Certainly when going through a period of unemployment I took anything that brought a wage in - even if it was less than I had been earning and the job was of a menial nature. I looked upon it as a temporary solution.

Two years ago, prostitution was legalised in Germany. This has a number of benefits; it brings the sex industry out of the black economy and with it tax revenue. Also, STDs are more likely to be effectively managed with screening programmes for sex workers. All in all, it is probably a good thing. It works for Germany and it works for the Netherlands.

You can see where this is going, can’t you? This week a German job seeker was told that a prospective employer was interested in her profile . When she contacted them, she discovered that it was a brothel. An IT professional, she was prepared to take work in a bar (much as I once did). However, she was not happy about prostitution. When she sought redress, she discovered that the job centre was acting within the law - brothels are legal employers with the same rights of access to job seekers as any other employer. There is no exception on moral grounds because, as prostitution is now legal, it is by default, not immoral.

Now you can see how this happened - two streams of legislation have come together to produce an unexpected outcome. Unless the German legislators really meant to send unemployed women out on the game to get their unemployment figures down?

Beware of those who will try to part you from your hard earned cash. The Guardian has a handy list of the most popular scams.

Don’t get caught.

I see Julie Birchill is is having a go at the Royal Family. She joins the “Prince Harry in the Nazi uniform” debate discussed at some length over at Red Baron’s Blog last week. In a curious way, Julie Birchill is disagreeing with the Baron in that she was not upset by the event, while agreeing vigorously with him over the implications of it.

She makes some interesting points. Not least when she draws comparisons between the monarchy and the BNP (British National Party) as she lambasts those entertainers who claim on the one hand to be anti-establishment rebels yet trip over themselves to grovel and debase themselves at the feet of the House of Windsor:

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - any entertainer who is not prepared to offer their support and/or services to the BNP shouldn’t offer it to a monarchy, for the simple reason that most monarchies believe that an EVEN SMALLER GENE POOL OF WHITE PEOPLE are fit to be above all others than the BNP does. You can work your way up in the BNP; under Nick Griffin, even being less than 100 per cent Wasp doesn’t rule you out any more. Neither of these is true of the House of Windsor.

Now I hadn’t thought of it like that before, but it’s a fair point - they are exclusive and that exclusion is based on birthright. I’ve never been impressed by our monarchy - they have always come across as ignorant and buffoonish, stumbling fluidly from one gaffe to the next with embarrassing regularity. Okay, so other countries have their embarrassing heads of state - step forward George - but at least the electorate get to choose. If they choose badly, well, they can only blame themselves. We in Britain have no such choice. Oh, we are told that the monarchy provides stability and that it is a good thing (tourism usually get trotted out with tiresome predictability at this point) and that they are the counterpoint to the excesses of the prime minister. Yeah, right. So why did we still engage in an illegal war?

However (and back to the point), as Julie Birchill points out, Harry’s forebears and the Nazis rubbed along pretty well. Indeed, these are the same people that in different circumstances would have been the head of a puppet government had the Nazis succeeded where Napoleon failed:

Because looking at his family history, we should be thanking our lucky stars that Harry wore only a toy Nazi uniform, not a real one. And that he wore it in public, for open japes, because then the chances are that he won’t be wearing it in private, for secret thrills. For the sad, surreal fact is that during the Second World War his grandfather had four sisters who were all married to Germans, at least one of them a rabid Nazi. Before the war, his great-grandfather considered Churchill a “warmonger” for standing up to the Nazis, and wanted to write a cosy, conciliatory letter to that nice Mr Hitler, “from one soldier to another”. His great-uncle, the kinky abdicator, was a fan of Adolf. And his father, Prince Charles, wrote That Letter about that clever young black lady, her utterly reasonable ambitions, and her refusal to know her place — picking cotton on the Highgrove estate, no doubt. With family like this, who needs bigots?

Long live the Republic.