Dawn

Dawn

Sunday, December 06, 2015

Modelo 720; Spain's Population; Death in Greece; The Middle East; & Liddle's hates.

THE CRIMINAL MODELO 720: Here's a follow-up to yesterday's comment on this. If you're thinking of becoming resident here, you might want to look at other options for achieving Spain's quality of life without the minor complication of finding yourself among the Tax Office's low-hanging fruit and with a massive debt to these lovely people. For not doing something they'd never bothered to tell you you had to do. Even though they wrote to you every year about your looming income tax submission. Presumably they just forgot to add a paragraph about the new overseas assets reporting requirement in their standard letter. Easily done, I imagine. One hand, other hand, etc.

SPAIN'S DWINDLING POPULATION: And here's a follow-up on this.

GREECE: One of the few thriving industries there is the funeral business. This, of course, is a monopoly. Owned by the government. The cost of a burial is high but, worse, it rises hugely after 3 years, forcing most relatives to exhume the body and then rent space (from the government, of course) in which to lay the bones. Why? Because Greece is the only EU country to ban cremation. Guess which powerful organisation supports this? No, not a trade union but the Greek Orthodox Church. Unlike its Orthodox colleagues elsewhere, this argues that God won't be able to fulfil his promise to resurrect bodies if they're burnt. So, he can put flesh on bones and cure all diseases but can't re-recreate a body from its ashes. Some 'omnipotence'. Is there anything worse than a money-driven conspiracy against the poor based on collusion between a state and its official religion? Astonishingly, more than 90% of Greeks are active members of their greedy, grasping, dishonest, immoral church. But they're not exactly trend-setters in this.

THE MIDDLE EAST: Here's a few of my suggestions on how to solve the problems there. Possibly not universally popular:-

  • Get out of oil asap.
  • Let the successors to the Safavid and Ottoman empires fight it out to the death. Supply arms whenever wanted so that they can do this more quickly. What irks the former (Iran) is that it was once defeated by and became a part of the latter (Syria, Turkey, etc.). It wants revenge and has a long time frame in mind, backwards and forwards.
  • Do something about the appalling ignorance about a part of the world we are militarily immersed in. Propagate some history for a start. Stop thinking of the (Shiite) Iranians as ignorant towel-heads. Their culture goes back thousands of years. They deserve some global status. As do the Turks, I guess. But under a leader who isn't a crazy Sunni megalomaniac.
  • And possibly: Nuke Saudi Arabia. Or at least crucify all the Wahabis.
FINALLY . . . BARBRA STREISAND: If you're a fan, don't read these comments from one of my favourite columnists, Rod Liddle: Neither Richard Nixon nor I could abide the woman. A caterwauling, third-division, middle-of-the-road singer; a worse actress; and the absolute personification of terminally gobby, leftie-liberal luvviedom. Is it possible to hear her murder a song or lecture you about gay rights without wishing to reach for one of those clubs they use to dispatch seals?. 

I also liked this comment today: Looking at photographs of cute kittens on the internet can turn you briefly into a psychopath, say researchers from Yale. They made people look at big-eyed, fluffy little animals and noted that, after simpering for a while, the viewers became unaccountably aggressive. The cuter the creature and the longer the simpering, the nastier the participants got. This is apparently “cute aggression”: the mind returning to equilibrium after a burst of “positive emotion”. The scientists say the aggressive phase doesn’t last long. It does with me. It lasts for ages. Show me a cat and I start growling and reach for my Extreme Feline Dispersal equipment, which I keep in the garage, by the weed killer. And every time Hitler stroked his dog, Wolf, he immediately ordered another invasion.  

And now the foto still demanded by FB's stupid computer, killing 2 birds with one stone. It's the On/Off switch of my Humax digital recorder. The company says it can't help with a new one. Does any genius know where I can get one, or a suitable alternative? I don't care about the aesthetics; it doesn't need to fit where the defunct one went.

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