LIFE IN SPAIN
Efficiency:- My old
bank – Citibank – was taken over last year by Banco Pastor. And
since then it's been one long calvario of changing account numbers, missing monthly reports, erroneous IBANs, new bank-cards, even newer bank-cards and numerous
visits to the bank for face-to-face chats. It's not as if I'm new to
phone and internet banking; I've been doing is it for more than 20
years with First Direct, with no cause for complaint whatsoever. The
latest problem is the refusal of the bank's page to accept what I
know are my correct ID and card numbers, meaning yet another visit to
the bank on Monday morning, to make a simple transfer. At times one
is overwhelmed by inefficiency here.
THE EU:
President Juncker. A
merchant banker, I've noted. See here and here, for example. The
inimitable Rod Liddle has now eloquently fleshed out my bones in an
article at the end of this post.
Banks: Click here for a Don
Quijones article on Italy's very sick banks. Here he is on 2 of
these: While the downfall of MPS would be enough to cause serious
damage to Italy’s already fragile financial system, the collapse of
Unicredit, which has vast, sprawling operations across Germany and
Eastern Europe, would threaten the stability of the entire Eurozone.
No doubt the EU will find a solution. Possibly one which costs
mountains of taxpayers' cash. The standard rescue model. Although . .
. New EU regulations make it almost impossible for Eurozone
governments to bail out domestic banks. But not the ECB, I guess.
All in all, says DQ, Italy faces an impossible mission in trying to
stabilize its financial sector.
ELSEWHERE
Russia: Hard to believe. Or perhaps not, after months of watching RT News every morning.
DOMESTIC STUFF
You'll all wanting to
know about:-
- My worm farm: Is it successful yet? Well, yes, it is. To my astonishment, there were several earthworms(lombrices) in it yesterday.
- My wifi: Am I finally happy with my 30megas via cable? Well, sort of. I've had to buy a booster to get a signal upstairs and I regularly have to switch it off and on. But it seems my neighbours on both sides have even bigger problems. No idea why.
PUBLIC SERVICE NOTICES:
Mac computers: I've
recently advised about the SMC re-set trick for Mac owners. Now the
trackpad: If it starts doing odd thing, check which options are ticked in System
Preferences. Possibly as a result of the SMC manoeuvre, every one of
the 14 options were checked on my laptop. As a result, I only had to breathe on
the trackpad for my Mac to go haywire.
Visiting the UK?: Here
are some tips from the very rich Hayley Bloomingdale:-
- Eggs are inexplicably not refrigerated and are often hidden in a regular food aisle
- Don’t try to order any fancy drinks at a pub, just play it cool, order “a pint” and drink whatever is in there
- Military time is very popular. If someone says to meet at 18:30, you will have to get out your calculator to deduce that they’d like to meet at 6:30 p.m
- If you look confused and/or scared when crossing the street, drivers will often speed up instead of the opposite
- Do not speak ill of the tube system. The British people love their public transportation—“transport,” if you will—even those who don’t actually use it
- If you are meeting someone on the “first floor,” you will need to go up a level because first floor means second floor in this country
- Don’t even bother talking about herbs with anyone because every single one is pronounced differently. [Actually, so is the word 'herbs', which Americans pronounce, a la francaise, as 'erbs. But not phrases taken from French such as en masse and en route. Which they pronounce phonetically. Hate to think what they do with chacun à son goût.]
THE GALLERY
More examples of
Finnish/British nightmares:
ARTICLES
Jumped-up Juncker is
Europe’s best cure for Bregret
Cometh the hour, cometh
the great man: the statesman. Many of us who voted for Brexit back in
June did so tentatively and have subsequently been prone to the
occasional attack of collywobbles. Did we really do the right thing,
we agonise. And there are those in the “remain” camp who, while
disappointed with the referendum result, wish only the best for our
country — rather than spending their time cheering every possible
indication of chaos and turmoil as a vindication of the fact that
they are educated and clever while the leavers are pig-ignorant
untermensch. For all these people, the vast majority of the country,
succour is at hand. Yes, yes — Jean-Claude Juncker has made a
speech again. And suddenly you know we were right.
The European Commission
president was one of the main reasons I voted to leave. This
unelected, dwarfish panjandrum — who has recently confided that
while he may appear perpetually pissed as a newt, it is only because
he has a unique gait that forces him to sway from side to side,
garble idiocies at people, slap them about the face and stagger like
a Geordie slapper from bar to bar — was a more compelling reason
for me to vote “leave” than the EU’s bureaucracy, the
immigration stuff, the byzantine financial affairs of the south of
our continent and so on.
An avowed anti-democrat
who uses his office to punish entire nations that do not see the
world as he does. Poland, for example, and Hungary — and now the
UK. A politician from the might of Luxembourg. Hell, sometimes in
this political world of ours things get bad and the tail wags the dog
rather than the other way around. With Juncker, it’s a flea on the
tail of the dog that is wagging the dog.
In his
state-of-the-union speech, this man warned that the UK “might”
not get access to the single European market, post-Brexit. Well, OK,
Jean-Claude: run that by the German manufacturers (and indeed
government) and see what they think. He pledged his support for
ever-greater union and an EU military force with expensive
headquarters in some unyielding martial redoubt of the EU —
Luxembourg or France, perhaps — contrary to the views of about 75%
of EU citizens, and to what I presume was unconfined hilarity in the
Kremlin, not to mention Raqqa. And he then blamed British politicians
for telling 40 years of “lies” about the EU and invoked the
murder, in Essex, of a Polish man as being a consequence of this
British disease, this illiberal Brexit mindset.
This last little
rhetorical flourish was the most nauseating and self-serving. A
Polish man called Arkadiusz Jozwik was indeed killed in Harlow in
Essex and the police have arrested the suspects: let’s hope that,
if convicted, they get the sentences they deserve. But that
particular killing occurred as thugs went on the rampage across
Europe — and especially Germany — in acts of violence against
migrants, the utterly unmanageable number of migrants forced upon
Europe by Juncker’s diktat and Angela Merkel’s consent (now at
least partially withdrawn).
The EU’s
unsustainable and calamitous commitment to free movement of everybody
to everywhere — in order to service the needs of capitalism — is
being rejected across the continent by one country after the other.
You can gauge this new and visceral disaffection by the acts of
carnage perpetrated by continental extremists and the rise of that
thing Juncker particularly loathes: populist politics — that is,
politicians who say stuff with which voters agree. That’s a
reasonable definition of populism, isn’t it?
And all this is evident
most especially in what we used to call eastern Europe — but also
in Germany and, of course, France. Before his eyes, the EU is tearing
itself apart. You think the UK leaving is a problem, Jean-Claude?
Wait until next month’s vote in Hungary about how many refugees
they should let in, or the French presidential elections.
But Juncker cannot bear
to be gainsaid, which is why Hungary is threatened with being kicked
out of the community and Poland suffers threats and bullying from
Brussels and Strasbourg. Juncker’s state-of-the-union address was a
well-lubricated howl of desperation for the passing of a hugely
flawed and deeply unpopular vision of what the EU should be. We got
out right on time.
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