I haven't logged in to GS for a few weeks now, in part because for the past week I was on the very highly enjoyable Hampshire County Youth Orchestra Bryanston easter residential course (with some very cute cellists ), and partly because I am being snowed under with the massive revision load that I need to deal with in preparation for my summer A-level exams. In brief: life is good, but there's a helluva lot of work to be done to keep it that way. As much as I love you guys, I may be very inactive on both the forums and the union from now until the summer. I crave your understanding and patience.

Peace, I am as always your humble servant,

OSCURO

First, I get my  January module results and find out I got full marks in the postmodern novel module, then my dad tells us he's got a new job 40 miles closer to home, and then, just half an hour ago, the head of the Hampshire Music Service phoned me up and said that I've been promoted to the full Hampshire County Youth Orchestra from the Strings!!! Rock on!!!  I'm joining as soon as the SO have done our annual Andover concert (when I'm leading a piece for the first time ) and I'll be going on the Italy 2007 tour in the summer. WOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Oh yeah, and I got Rad Racer as well .

Over the past few weeks, I, along with most of the rest of the world, have been keeping a close eye on our colonial cousins over the great pond. It has come to my notice over the last month that the true reason for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq is now perfectly clear. I suppose I must stress that this is my opinion, but still, it is obvious now (to me, anyway) that we did not invade Iraq for weapon of mass destruction, Saddam Hussain or, even, as the cynics would have you believe, the purely economical benefits of oil. Nor did we invade Afghanistan purely to rid it of the undeniably horrid Taliban as the first stage in George W. Bush's global crusade, his "War on Terror".

I would put it to you that all these official reasons for Middle East action are but smokescreens, short-term objectives that are vaunted as the ultimate purpose of the operations, when in fact they merely hide the truth. This sort of thing is going on all the time, most of you will probably already have noticed how certain news stories seem to disappear from the mass media's distorting fish-eye lens at convenient moments for the governments of certain countries (one notable example being the loans for peerages debacle in the UK, knocked off the front pages, or indeed any pages, by the H5 N1 outbreak in Suffolk). Whilst not exactly propaganda, this "selective focus", as I call the media's penchant for appearing to change their main stories when Blair gets uncomfortable is facilitated, but not necessarily caused by, our showbiz-oriented society. This is not a modern concept, though, ever since the middle ages, rulers have been having subtle words in the ears of those who are in the public domain, diverting attention away from themselves.

It is my theory that such a smokescreen operation is now in place, has been for at least the last four, perhaps as many as the last twenty, years and has no forseeable ending. The reason that America and the UK have been invading Iraq and Afghanistan is so that in the (now uncomfortably near) future, the people of these "liberated" countries will somehow owe them something, and they can be used as staging areas for a fullscale assault on the real target of this middle-eastern war: Iran. Iran's recent provocative actions certainly make this course of events more likely, such as today's report of an Iranian missile test in 2005, during the development stage of space-capable warhead-delivery systems. That was two years ago, how much R & D have they achieved by now, I wonder? A working system which just needs appropriately prepared radioactive material for war-readiness? In conjunction with this release on the Iranian state news website (the source admittedly changing the credibility of the news, at best, to threatening propaganda, at worst an understatement implying that they aren't as advanced as they, in fact, are) the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

"...said on Sunday Iran had no reverse gear on its way to mastering the technology to make nuclear fuel, voicing fresh defiance before major powers meet to discuss the dispute.

[My italics]

America's response has been predictable at best, their recent, stupidly named, "Son of Star Wars" project betraying their fears over the Iranian region and the Russian collaboration implied by the Iranian use of one of their rockets causing diplomatic shockwaves around the world. This could easily heat up the long-running Cold War (those of you who thought it had long been over, I would suggest, are wrong), especially with the current White House actions such as the creation of

"...a Pentagon panel...to plan a bombing attack that could be implemented within 24 hours of getting the go-ahead from President George W. Bush."

If the UN and German contingents currently meeting in London do decide on a resolution which Ahmadinejad deems unacceptable, then the Iranians, and the rest of the world, may be forced into yet another conflict with no end in sight. One of the Iranian deputies to their foreign minister had this to say of the situation: "We have prepared ourselves for any situation, even for war."

I'll finish with a phrase which is often misunderstood: "May you live in interesting times." I'm unsure as to who said it first, but as Terry Pratchett asserts, it is most definitely a curse. Who would wish to live in times as interesting as these?

Apologies, the linking thing's not working properly, so I'll have to give the URLs of this news to anyone who requests it personally, or you can google it yourselves.