"Since Pig-type people have more peaceful lifestyle than others, they are therefore luckier."

yesterday, new year of the pig. I don't know if my secret animal gets along with the pig, so i don't know if only being a pig is really going to help this year. I mean, aside of what the others may think of me, because I look like a lucky pig to them.

Today I realized that I have to get me a new chipped biometric passport and I have only three weeks left to get it. The sheer idea of having to be biometrically scanned makes me want to cancel my trip. It is creepy, to use a teenagerly word. It's fascist, to use a enraged one. It's dark, to go with Philip Dick. I can't stand the idea. It's disgusting the way my government caved in so easily and already adopted the biometric electronic passports.
I thought of it as something shameful that was going to happen in the future, but as far as shameful things go, evidently the future is today. I was so naive to hope somehow that these changes weren't really going to happen.

So today we're in the year of the pig. Yeah I believe in astrology, why not? I only wish I knew how to handle it.

Seriuosly, Kundera was right. We are so living in the age of the terminal paradoxes. They say 'globalization', and yet never like today to travel is a challenge, and a limitation to your liberty. Until 1914 you could travel everywhere in the world, except maybe for Russia, without a passport. All you had to do was to put enough money together to buy yourself a passage on a ship. Any destination. Then came the age of the plane, the radio, the atomic bomb, the television. The rhetoric and propaganda went on bragging how small the planet was becoming and how traveling was now so easy when it was all the contrary.
The peak of this process, stemming from the two world wars, is supposed the be the globalization of present times, the borderless world etcetera. As with any good terminal paradox though, never before globalization and large scale immigrations borders, and difference of cultures, have been so relevant, and dividing. Not even in Italy during the middle ages, when banners dived city from city.

So the real point is not being favorable or not to 'globalization'... but to understand what the hell 'globalization' is supposed to be. As far as my understanding goes, is not 'globalization' --as in: freedom to travel and be whatever you want-- if A and B and C citizens are formalized on papers, if the flow of money keeps going upward and upward, if you have to acquiesce to fingerprinting and biometric scanning to take a trip across the atlantic on your own planet.