The Importance of Being Idle

Abuses of Power

I take it you've all heard about the British Army flattening an Iraqi jail to rescue a couple of SAS soldiers who'd been arrested after a shoot out with local police? Wow, what the hell was that? I mean, okay the full story isn't out yet, and probably never will be, but the spin my government are putting on it is truly frightful to behold; apparently the Iraqi police were "about to hand the soldier s over to local militia". Of course, given the total lack of respect they have for their own people, I hardly find it surprising that they're prepared to demonise the Iraqi police & people like that, but still... It's scary how quickly we fall back into our colonial ways isn't it? We've got the bigger guns and therefore we are right at all times... What I really want to know is what the hell were a couple of SAS guys doing in disguise anyway, let alone firing on the legitimate local police service? Sending a tank in to flatten the jail (and thereby releasing about 150 criminals) is just compounding one error with another, bigger and more stupid error.It's exactly this sort of flagrant abuse of power that makes people want to blow us up, and I wonder if it's now possible to charge whoever is responsible for this debacle under our new "promotion of terrorism" law, cos they've certainly stirred up some hate there... Hell, I'd bomb us, and I live here.
In a much lesser but more personal abuse of power, the local council have decided they want to see my bank statements for the past six months, just to make sure I don't have an income and aren't trying to defraud the system. Frankly, that just makes me angry, to be treated like a criminal purely because I'm asking for help. Hell, I know there are people who abuse the system, and to be honest I know some of them, but dammit with a system this bureaucratic, impersonal, unresponsive and just plain irritating, I don't blame them, I think we should all take the bastards for every penny we can get. I've become very anti-authoritarian in the past couple of weeks for some reason, probably because the people in authority have a track record of making spectaculalry stupid decisions for no readily apparent reason.
We're going to the moon! And by 'we' I mean somebody else, and by going to the moon I really do mean going to the moon, just not any time soon... apparently NASA are aiming to have someone on the moon by 2018 which seems like an awfully long time away. I mean, yeah, okay we all like to prepare for a long trip, but blimey, it didn't take that long to get there in the 60s and the technology is just a little better now...

posted by BadMonkey @ 10:30 AM