Simply Unfair

The ConDem government has announced its plan for tuition fees: at least £6,000 per student, with the option for universities to demand up to £9,000. So now students will be saddled with almost double what they were having to pay before, at least! There are some caveats saying that universities will be monitored to ensure that students from poorer backgrounds are being given ample opportunity to enrol, but in general the policies will simply further the economic repression that is so fundamental to right-wing greedy capitalism. Even students who wish to pay off their debts early will be financially punished with an extra repayment in return for not repaying the full amount of interest on their loan - talk about malicious!
This coalition has previously said it would be too time consuming to means-test everyone, but I reckon most students would be willing to give a bit more of their time if it meant a much fairer system was implemented where only richer students would have to pay the maximum tuition fees while poorer ones actually received financial help to attend the university of their choice and receive a worthwhile education. As for the expense of means testing? Well, we could take it from the overblown ‘international aid’ budget which seems to make clear that other countries are considerably more important than our own in these difficult economic times! The ConDems, as usual, should be ashamed; before young adults even have the opportunity to get involved with the property market, they are already carrying a huge pecuniary burden.

Chilean Overkill

So, all 33 of the trapped Chilean miners have now been rescued. But of course, you already knew that, because it’s been shown everywhere! Perhaps the producers of 24-hour news channels need reminding that the purpose of those channels is to be able to give a detailed overview of all the world’s main news, thereby preventing the need to cram everything into a half-hour TV slot; the purpose is not so that one story alone can be turned into a 24 hour documentary!
Yes, I know it was a dramatic event that the rescue was finally taking place after the miners had been trapped for so long; and yes, I know it was refreshing to have a story in the news that was reporting something good and heart-warming; and yes, I also know the rescue was a tribute to both human ingenuity and the philanthropic spirit of humanity. But just because these miners have been trapped for 69 days doesn’t automatically make them celebrity idols! I don’t need to know the back story of each of their average lives to date; I don’t need to see every single family reunion as they’re all pretty much the same; and the guy who proposed to his girlfriend perhaps shouldn’t have needed a life-threatening situation to convince him that he was in love!
Unfortunately, by the time the rescues were a third of the way over, news channels had become so mind numbingly boring with their blanket coverage of the story that I was beginning to hope that something bad was going to happen! It would almost have been entertaining if the cable had broken on the rescue pod, shooting the capsule back down the tunnel at 100mph to a colossal explosion at the bottom. Now that would have been worth covering! Or is that just my repressed rage showing through a bit too much? Either way, news channels need to realise what they are there for, and it’s not to bore people to tears.

The Greatest Movie Speech Of All Time: Network

I don't have to tell you things are bad, everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth; banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter; punks are running wild in the streets and there's nobody anywhere seems to know what to do and there's no end to it! We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat. We sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes as if that's the way it's supposed to be! We know things are bad, worse than bad, they're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in a house and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster, and my TV and my steel-belted radios and I won't say anything, just leave us alone." Well I'm not gonna leave you alone! I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest, I don't want you to write, I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime on the streets. All I know is that first, you've got to get mad! You've got to say, "I'm a human being, goddamn it! My life has value!" So, I want you to get up now, I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now, and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell, "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not gonna take this anymore!"

Splitter!

David Miliband is a crybaby. Just because he doesn’t win the leadership election, he proceeds to throw all of his toys out of the pram and refuses to be a member of the shadow cabinet. Even though I don’t like David’s ‘New Labour’ politics and was very happy to see him lose to his brother, I still would have liked to see some party unity; David received almost half the votes and could have rallied everyone to a unified cause if he had wholeheartedly placed his support behind Ed. But no, David has put his own ego before ideological success; and because the party is having a change in direction, he’s throwing a hissy fit until he gets his own way. What a child!

Congratulations To Democracy

Finally, something good to report. Ed Miliband has become the new leader of the Labour Party. It would have been disastrous if his big brother David had won the election as all three leaders of the main parties would have been virtually identical. But now we have a distinctly different leader in Ed; someone who is principled rather than consumed by spin. It's unfortunate that it took the trade unions to get him the job - if it had been left to party members or MPs they would have handed it to David, the Tony Blair wannabe - but at least the right result was achieved in the end. And even though Ed would never admit to this himself, I hope he throws New Labour in the dustbin and goes back to a time before Blair changed the whole concept of what the Labour Party was meant to stand for, i.e. the working class. Incidentally, the voting system used in this election was the Alternative Vote, so let's hope people take that into consideration next year when we get to decide in a referendum on our general electoral system; AV is much fairer than Proportional Representation. But that issue can be discussed another time; for now, well done Ed!

Incredulity

On a recent gameshow, one hundred people were given one hundred seconds to name as many axis powers from World War II (that is, countries who the Allies fought against) as they could remember. More people remembered that we fought Italy than those who recalled Germany or Japan. How is that possible?!

Improper Finances

Okay, so I said that I probably wasn’t going to write this blog anymore, but sometimes the world just pisses me off so much that I simply have to put it out there!
George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, has recently announced that four billion pounds will need to be cut back from the annual welfare bill. His reasoning behind this is that it will stop people from seeing living on benefits as a ‘lifestyle choice’, and of course it will help to reduce the overburdening national deficit. But there are some significant flaws in his reasoning. From a social perspective, people who are currently suffering long-term unemployment after having only just got out of the worst recession in a generation can hardly be condemned as choosing that lifestyle; redundancy is something which is inflicted, not asked for!
Yet even if your political ideology does condone Osborne’s applications of the deficit reduction, it cannot understand the hypocrisy of other overspending. One and a quarter billion pounds in contracts has just been awarded to the building of two new aircraft carriers. So apparently it’s okay to take pauper’s benefits away from them as long as we’ve still got the capability to bomb little foreigners out of existence! And let’s not forget that in just a few days from now the Pope will be visiting the UK at a cost to the general taxpayer of anything between eight and twelve million pounds. This is the same Pope who condemns contraception regardless of the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, and believes homosexuality is a mortal sin. As I am a liberal minded person, I’d rather not have to pay for him to visit my country. Hasn’t the Vatican got it’s own supply of finances? And what about Christian charity? Can’t churchgoers foot the bill to chat to their leader?
So, Mr Osborne, if you are going to take money from generally hard working people, then at least attempt to make it morally justifiable.

Probably...

This will probably be my last blog. My lifelong ambition of becoming a full-time freelance writer has singularly failed. I am about to lose my flat through dwindling finances, and my inspiration is giving way to depression. Don't get me wrong, I'm not suicidal or anything, but I just don't think that I will ever find my place in this world and can't be bothered to eloquently rant about it anymore. Therefore, for the final time I will leave you with a short diatribe.
As far as I'm concerned, this world is going to the dogs ... guaranteed. It started before I was even born; whether by institutionalised economic repression, corrupt capitalist greed, or the religious right to persecute, the damage has been done. And it's irreversible.
My hope for possible change has gone.

Simple Immorality

The Pope has condemned the UK's proposed Equality Bill for being in violation of natural law and for imposing "unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities", saying that these communities should fight the Bill with "missionary zeal"! He has stated his opinion so strongly because the Bill, in its current form, would take away some of the Church's liberties to deny employment rights for homosexuals. Even though priests and ministers will still be allowed these archaic homophobic rights, no other position of employment within the British Catholic Church will be. Archbishop Vincent Nichols, the head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, has stated that the Pope's reasoned voice has been "formed by the treasures of the Christian heritage". So not only are these two highly influential religious voices failing to understand that there's no such thing as 'natural law' - a socially constructed concept with no basis in fact as there are plenty of examples of homosexuality in other animal species - but they are also blatantly proving that Catholicism (and probably Christianity by default!) is discriminatory, prejudiced and wholly incapable of producing a morality that is compatible with modern times.
Staunch Catholic Ann Widdecombe MP has also felt compelled to contribute, saying that this is a debate about religious freedom rather than homosexuality. But what about the freedom of homosexuals to not be repressed in a democratic society? At which point does it become okay for anyone, regardless of their religious viewpoints, to say that a person is not allowed to fill a position of employment based purely on their sexual orientation, which shouldn't even have to be disclosed in the first place?! By a simple application of logic, if anti-discrimination legislation is open to exemptions, then it is still allowing discrimination; and religious freedom cannot be labelled as free if it is repressing others who are trying to be free.
Even though the disappointing opinions were hardly surprising from the decadent pontiff, I hope that most UK politicians will not listen to the simple immorality that has been spouted. Sadly, Gordon Brown has said it would be inappropriate for him to comment ... Coward!