Lavengro in Spain

68% a man

GenderAnalyzer says:

We think http://lavengro.typepad.com/lavengro_in_spain/ is written by a man (68%).

Perhaps I should get a new photo.

Nobody loves Bush

We know that George Bush is loathed around the world -- but see what other world leaders think of him.

Venezuela

It is a curious fact that the most dubious political. leader can find support in Britain. And in a country whose one and only military dictator is lauded as a hero by much of the Socialist left it is not all that odd perhaps that a military man who resorted to seeking power democratically after the failure of the coup d’état that he led, a caudillo, a strongman leader of his people who likes his followers to wear the same colour shirt as himself, should receive so much support. In Spain, where Latin American affairs are reported more widely, and where people have a closer awareness of a what a dictatorship is, the view is rather different.

Has Chávez done a lot for the poor of Venezuela? Yes he has. But the problem is that he has done it in a spirit of pure populism, buying easy support by handing out cash without keeping proper public accounts. That would lead to corruption anywhere, and in Latin American more so than usual. What is more, the money he has been handing out has come from oil revenues, which leads to two problems: it has not been reinvested in the maintenance of the oil industry, which is suffering, and he was doing so at a time of high oil prices and strong demand. Now that the recession has brought the price of oil to a third of what it was a year ago, his national income has fallen correspondingly. There is also the problem that the State-run oil company is not only being used as a direct source of funds but it is being used as a management agency for the social programmes that Chávez is running – a task for which an oil company is not obviously fitted.

It is true that there are worse leaders than Chávez, but that does not make him a democrat and it does not mean that if he becomes President for life, which is unquestionably his intention, he will not become very nasty indeed. It was reported in Spain after the referendum last year, when the announcement of the result was delayed far longer than the count required, that Chávez had had to be forced by the head of the army to accept his defeat; and that, after lengthy overnight negotiations with the opposition, the announced result was considerably closer than the actual one.

What does the ineffable Guardian have to say about all this?

[Chávez] has threatened to cut off national funds and send tanks on to the streets of those states that end up in the hands of opponents. He has called for the imprisonment of the main opposition leader, Manuel Rosales, whom he has accused of corruption and even plotting his assassination. He has used the country's secret police and Cuba's G-2 spy agency to bug Rosales's telephone calls, and broadcast his conversations in television advertisements. He has abused his right to cut into live programming with emergency announcements that turn out to be his latest speech. Even given Mr Chávez's penchant for speaking at full volume, this is desperate stuff … When Human Rights Watch published a damning report in September accusing his government of taking over the courts and cowing the media, trade unions and civil society, Mr Chávez's response was to kick its authors out of the country. He should instead take the criticism and think back to those days, a decade ago, when he pledged to uphold a constitution that guaranteed basic rights. His revolution would be longer-lived for it.

And the Guardian’s overall verdict?

Venezuela is a vibrant democracy.

Well, I suppose that it depends what you mean by democracy.

A matter of national importance

Never mind the BBC’s independence, when vital matters are facing the nation the Labour Party will fearlessly ensure that it stays on message.

A cabinet minister has called for the judges of Strictly Come Dancing to be sacked following John Sergeant’s decision to quit the BBC One show.

Neighbours

 

When I was in Britain earlier this year, I took this photo from my bedroom window. My idea was to capture 1950s suburbia as it is now, but I knew that the white pole slightly above right of the centre of the photo (click to enlarge it) was a flagpole that had sported a Union Flag the day before. A bit eccentric I thought.

Now I find that that address belongs to a BNP member.

Needled

For reasons that we needn’t go into here, Jane has been prescribed drugs to boost her vitamin K level. This has been done privately, through a health insurance scheme. The prescription, as is usual, is a simple printed paper with the doctor’s details at the top, on which she has written by hand the drugs to be prescribed. The paper is printed with a notice that it is not valid for psychotropics. This paper is shown to the pharmacist, who dispenses the relevant drugs and returns the paper to the customer, for future use if necessary.

It happens that one of the drugs that have been prescribed is to be administered by intramuscular injection; the presumption is that that patient will do this herself. Unfortunately it was all a bit of a mix-up, this prescription was made just before she went to the UK for a weekend and she ended up with the drug but not the needles to inject it because she didn’t want to take them through the airport ‘security’ check. Once there, she found a friendly retired nurse who would have been happy to do the injections for her – but she didn’t have the needles. And she couldn’t get them. And of course Jane obviously couldn’t go to Boots and ask for 5 x 100 ml hypodermic syringes. We are talking, after all, of the country where you need a doctor’s prescription to buy surgical tape; and where you can go to a Boots pharmacy counter, fully stocked and with an MRCP in attendance, and be told that they won’t dispense a prescription because – if you please – there is another Boots within a mile’s radius.

She got back yesterday. This evening I went to the pharmacy and bought five needles for the princely sum of 2.50 euros, so that Jane can do her injections. The pharmacist was astonished when I told her the background to this situation. ‘Thank heaven it’s not like that here,’ she said.

Independent currencies

The Independent likes to think of itself as a pro-European paper. Today it tells us:

Pound sinks to record low against the euro

In July, £1 would still buy $2; lower than its recent record of $2.11 set last November, but healthy enough for shopping trips to New York to make sense. Yesterday, sterling was trading at about $1.48, a six-year low. Macy's and Sachs of Fifth Avenue may soon notice a sharp decline in the number of British accents at the tills.

Our currency has also been bouncing along the bottom against the euro, which is now worth about 84p, its highest since the single currency was launched in 1999.

Suddenly the idea of parity – £1 = €1 – hoves into view…

All good stuff, and true. But then we read:

It may be many years before a shopping trip to Manhattan or a Swiss skiing break seems quite the bargain it used to be.

What, I wonder, does Switzerland have to do with anything? The Swiss franc has not been mentioned. Has the currency been edited out of a longer article? Perhaps, for the alternative, surely impossible, is that the pro-European Indie thinks that fiercely independent, non-EU Switzerland uses the euro. Perish the thought.

Iraq War ends - NYT

OK, it’s a spoof of the New York Times. But it has a real web site with links to full articles.

There is hope

Eight years ago, when George W. Bush took over the White House, many, very many indeed, of us who understood politics and history lost hope and foresaw disaster. We were told complacently that Bush was an amiable cipher whose unpleasant character and history didn’t matter because he would appoint competent advisors and ministers.

Four years later, when George W. Bush was elected President of the United States of America, disaster had already happened and no hope was to be seen: within a year the highest-ever worldwide approval ratings for the USA had been turned by him, and his frighteningly incompetent advisors and ministers, into the USA being regarded as a pariah by the civilised people of the globe. But still the people of the USA voted for him.

Now we finally see just what catastrophe has been wished on the world by Bush and his NeoCons. In a sense they go back to Reagan and Reaganomics, but in a real sense the last eight years have seen Bush bring the USA lower than at any time in its history – deep into the moral gutter no less; and we are all, all of us in the global American empire, paying the price for the Americans permitting, and later electing, such a disastrous President.

Now there is hope again. Hope is not certainty, and no man could fulfil all the hopes and expectations that have been placed in Obama. But at long last, after eight calamitous years for the world,there is hope that something that good will happen and that some things will change for the better, which is the precise opposite of what would have been the case of a McCain victory. I am too young really to remember Kennedy (I was twelve when he was shot) but I do know that he was not quite all that he was cracked up to be. Nevertheless, after a dubious initial support for Obama I came to realise during the campaign that McCain, far from being a maverick Republican, would have been largely a continuation of Bush’s imperialist warmongering; his appalling choice – as bizarre as it was terrifying – of Sarah Palin as a running mate shows how poor his judgement is while his statement that he would not receive Zapatero in the White House because Spain supports terrorism shown how tenuous is his vaunted grip of foreign policy. Obama on the other hand gained immensely in stature during the campaign to the extent that he is immeasurably the better statesman and the better hope for the future of the world.

Or he will be if the Republicans don’t shoot him in the next two months. And if Bush doesn’t use those two months to nuke Teheran, thereby presenting Obama with World III as a fait accompli. Nether of those scenarios is at all to be ruled out.

If the candidates were trains

OK, it’s a bit hard on Thomas.