Well isn't this an odd time to be alive? Some crazy shit is happening in politics and the world in general at the moment and nobody seems to notice. How very worrying....

Where to start. Well I guess the first thing should be that Iraq is on the brink of civil war. I have been saying for a long time now that we, no, the government has fucked Iraq up and will have to tread very, very carefully if Iraq is to get back on its feet and not tear itself apart. I can only imagine what will happen if it does break out... it will be an absolute bloodbath. It is already terrible with people getting bombed every other day but if a whole damn civil war broke out we could have a big, ugly Northern Ireland type conflict on our hand. But worse.

I mean Jesus. What was Blair et al thinking 3 years ago? I mean Bush is an arse under the control of his Texas oil buddies and everybody knows that he is corrupt (queue FBI check on this blog lol) so you would expect him to go chasing oil rather than think of some alternative fuels to use. But Blair.... WHAT WERE YOU THINKING YOU FUCKING IDIOT?!

I think that it was more of a tactical alliance than anything. The world superpowers are rising once again and Britain needs to show alliance with the USA if we want to keep our options open but.... to come up with the audacity to manipulate teeny shreds of possible evidence for some country having maybe a little bit of weapons that the USA and UK has piles of for an excuse for war takes the biscuit! A million people march against the government which are found to be plain fucking wrong in the end and not a single head roles besides the handful of decent Labour MPs that refused to go along with the idea!

Right from the start I had a bad feeling about the whole thing. I was like "Hmmm. Why does Blair want to go to war? The guy may or may not have weapons. He has been nothing but completely compliant with our requests, he even let the inspectors in his palace and they found nothing. Even if he did have some weapons, you can't attack somebody because they have some weapons that they may or may not use in the future. If we did that the whole damn world would be at war with Pakistan and Korea and the USA." The fact that the British government wanted to remove "Mr Evil" himself wasnt ever presented as an issue. Besides. He is an odious and most dislikable man that did terrible things to those who didnt agree with him, but as a whole he wasnt a bad leader. He ran a secular state with pretty liberal laws by Middle Eastern standards. He even let the Kurds have their own peaceful part in the North which suited everybody. Sure he was a horrible man, but compared to others that exist (might I mention the ignored segregator and practical genocidal Mugabe?) he really is not out of the ordinary at all.

I was part of the anti war camp from the start - in the minority I was. Everybody was just like "Stupid, idealistic girl, what do you know you are only 14". Well sometimes us youngster hooligans are right ladies and gentlemen. Please would you value our opinions for a change?

I am not entirely sure why our leaders decided we should go to war, either they are incredibly stupid, incredibly naive, incredibly cold and driven or know some MI6 national security conspiricy theory crap that nobody else does. I tend to favour the naivity theory.

Well. Whatever, Iraq is in a terrible, terrible state. If some other guy decides to blow up another mosque in "revenge" then I guess that will be it. The west fucks up the world again. People who are angry over what one guy did will get them back, and they will get them back and before you know it, the two sides will hate each other, eventually forgetting why and no side can let go and make the first move. I guess thats what happened in Northern Ireland. After all they are all Irish Christians even if they do disagree over how they worship Jesus or whatever. So stupid when you get down to it...

Well thats Iraq. How about what happening in our country?

Frankly I am starting to agree with all of the paranoid, outraged-at-everything Daily Mail readers I used to label everybody as when they said "ooooh we are becoming a police state". It is really staring to look that way if I am frank.

ID cards are practically at stage go-ahead. A very, very worrying idea indeed. "Oh you are just paranoid" a lot of you will say. Well that is what I kindof used to think but let us think about it a little more. You have a card with every piece of vital data of yours on it: Passport stuff, DNA maybe, Thumb print, Iris scans possibly. I am told the total of info is around the 30 pieces mark. Ok. So you have a car with your details on it, what is the big deal? Well, for a start have you any idea how time consuming and caostly that will be? Estimations are anything between £600 million (the government stats so very likely they are not accurate) and £19......billion! £19billion squid?! Just £1.5billion would give everyone in the world cclean water to drink! Why dont we give them a friggin drink?! We are going to squander our money on this hair brained scheme to (and I quote) "combat terrorism". What complete and utter shit.

The people who come from abroad to supposedly bomb indiscriminate places WONT HAVE ONE ANYWAY you idiots. People who are from abroad wont have them dur. Of course the terrorists that are British will have one. What the hell is that supposed to do then? Even if they were supposed to have one and didnt, what help is that going to be? "Alpha Tango to Bravo four, we have a suspect with a bomb about to kill us all, please look at his ID card." It gets on my fucking nerves when politicians think they can do what the fuck they like by uttering the magic word "terrorism". Are you scared yet? Maybe I should say it again. Terrorism.... TERRORISM.... TERRORISM!!! Run for your lives! Terrorists are everywhere and we are all going to die! Big scary men are coming to eat your children because they are evil and have no feelings! Arrrrggghh! What utter nonsense.

Did you know that you are 9 times more likely to kill yourself that be killed by a terrorist? Terrorism has always existed and probably always will do. Frankly the risk we face now is not really any greater than during the IRA bombings of the 80s and 90s. Of course things like the London bombings can and will happen and they are terrible. But we cannot all tiptoe around allowing our laws to be made less and less just for albeit awful but pretty unavoidable attacks by people alienated by western capitalism.

Suddenly we are going to have ID cards that can be stolen and our identities downloaded onto some criminals databse to use at his leisure at an obscene cost to taxpayers. There is talk of putting a grain sized chip in all products and possibly (but rather unlikley) people so that their whereabouts can be tracked at all times. People can be locked up for 28 days just beacuse they might be a terrorist. Suddenly the rules about charging people in custoday are thrown out of the window. There is talk of removing the right to trial by jury for some offences, the one thing that assures us that the powers that be cannot single handedly decide the fate of peoples lives. There are CCTV cameras everywhere. The details we give to the government like driving liscence details are sold to commercial companies that send me jumk through the mail. What happens our ID information is sold to other companies? Random Joes in offices are going to be able to read all about my DNA thats what! I shudder to think of what that knowledge could do whe coupled with the technology that will probably exist by then. Scientists are debating whether we should keep an embryonic clone of ourselves to 'use' to grow extra body parts. People are having face transplants. Oil is getting sparse and Russia is gonna pull the strings on the world soon along with the massive superpower China.

If I am honest. The future is looking neither bright or orange. It looks like a fucking Orwell novel.

Oh dear.

I wonder what this era in history will be remembered for in the future. I guess it is just a scare phase like the cold war. New Labour are not looking too new any more. Or indeed Labour. They are trying to allow "choice" into the education system. I.E: choice for the affluent people that already have an institutional advantage over the working class in education. Who is going to be able to afford which school to go to? Who is going to be able to afford tutors for their children so that they can get into the semi-private businesses that will be selective schools? You do the maths.

At least they made a smoking ban in pubs. Maybe it was a little extreme. You already know how much smoking irritates me [see the sensitively titles "I HATE CHUFFIN CIGGARETTES"]. Maybe it would have been better to let the businesses run themselves how they saw fit. Many already catered for non smokers with designated areas (although as one comedian put it "having a no smoking area in a restaurant is like having a no pissing section in a swimming pool"! hehe).
I dont know. Its a bit like the freedom debate about free speech. Can you be imprisoned for saying something offensive? It is essentially thinking out loud. Can you be imprisoned for having the wrong opinions? Hmm. On the other hand, is it right to have nutters like that BNP leader running around telling us to hate black people? I dont know. There is no such thing as a perfect society. As Durkheim said, devience is an inevitable part of society. Maybe we should just learn to accept certain levels of it and not try and force everybody to conform.

I dont know. Maybe I am just paranoid and like the millenium bug, this will end up being a silly and paranoid period that the people of the future will laugh at us for.

Time will tell I guess....

Hope I havent gone on too much, I just needed a bit of a vent for my opinions. Maybe in years to come I will look at this post and laugh, or maybe I will nod and think "yep, idealistic youngster does it again...."