Dawn

Dawn

Sunday, May 11, 2014

The EU; Eurovision; & Borges on football.


It's fair to say that Christopher Booker is a true eurosceptic. For the reasons why, you need to read his authoritative book, "The Great Deception". Meanwhile, here he is on Mr Barroso's recent speech: "One of the greatest assets of the 'European project' is that it is so stupendously boring that few people bother to understand how it really works. This was exemplified by the almost Soviet-length speech on “the future of the European Union” given in Berlin last week by José Manuel Barroso, before he steps down from eight years as president of the European Commission. One cannot imagine that all his audience were still awake as he neared the end of his 9,000 words. . . One of the few points in this fog on which he was explicit was that the EU must now use its common foreign policy to extend its “power and influence in the world”. But we currently see a perfect demonstration of what this means in practice in the shambles it has brought about through extending its “soft power” into Russia’s backyard, by provocatively moving to absorb Ukraine as yet another member. This has been as telling an illustration of how the EU’s make-believe must eventually hit reality as that other monument to Mr Barroso’s years in office, the chaos created by the euro.

Late last year I received - with a degree of shock - a water bill of €615, almost 10 times my norm. The cause was an underground leak which I hadn't detected. As neither my insurance company nor the water company would reimburse me, I've initiated a 12-point program to reduce my consumption of water. The problem, though, is that such is the fixed-variable cost bias in our utility bill, I figure it'll take me at least 10 years to recoup my loss. The other problem, of course, is summer visitors, who can't be expected to be as abstemious as me.

I caught the middle bit of Eurovision last night but wasn't too surprised - given the voting pattern - to see this morning that the bizarre Austrian entry had won. Perhaps the most interesting comment I read was that "A person who is sick of Eurovision is either lying to themselves or in the midst of some kind of nervous breakdown". Hmm. There might just be a few people around with better things to do. Sticking needles in their eyes, for example.

That vast, ugly symbol of corruption and administrative/judicial incompetence - the Algarrobico Hotel - has been been painted black, at least in part, by Greenpeace. Our local correspondent, David Jackson, has more on this here.

Finally . . . Jorge Luis Borges wrote some lovely stuff but you may not have see this sentiment of his before: Football is popular because stupidity is popular. Of course, he didn't tend to go round saying this back home in Argentina.

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