Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spanish Life - These are the most profitable radar traps in Spain. The two I drive past regularly are these:-
- The AP-6 at Km 49.2 north of Madrid. In 2107 it garnered €5.6k in fines. This year so far, €28.6k.
- The A-8, R Km 371.2 in Asturias. 2017: NIL. 2019: €12.2K.
- And these are the most beautiful railway stations in Spain.
- As in most Spanish cities, the Pontevedra bus and rail stations are close together, usually - and inconveniently - on the edge of the town/city. There's been talk for some time of improving them and linking them via a 300m overhead passageway. The way is now said to be open for this but, as with the AVE high-speed train link to Madrid, I'll believe it when I see it.
- M Draghi has retired from the ECN midst many plaudits. But some think he's been a failure, because he leaves the eurozone in recession, with a gaping wealth divide and on the brink of renewed systemic crisis. The ECB’s monetary policy is firmly “through the looking glass” – with interest rates marooned deep in negative territory and the Frankfurt-based institution’s governance structure in turmoil. . . Since 2011, Draghi has kicked the can down the road again and again, using “extraordinary monetary measures” to keep eurozone stocks reasonably buoyant and debt-soaked banks afloat, helping much of the Continent’s financial and political establishment to continue ignoring reality. Hence the plaudits. Yet the true legacy of this former investment banker – for the eurozone and the world – is nothing short of disastrous.
- Bill Maher has some wise advice for Democrats.
- Fraud experts have criticised Apple and Google for approving a mobile phone app that lets users “spoof” their caller ID — allowing them to pretend they are calling from a bank or another safe number. SpoofCard, also known as Incognito Caller ID, markets itself as a tool for protecting privacy and making prank calls. As well as masking a user’s real number by displaying a caller ID of their choice in calls and texts, the free download also has a convincing voice-alteration feature. The app was removed from Apple’s store last week after it was found to be in breach of the company’s guidelines banning prank and anonymous call apps. It is still available on the Google Play store. Fraud investigators believe it and similar apps may be linked to a surge in scams, used to defraud British victims out of tens of millions of pounds every year. Con artists, often calling from overseas, can dupe victims into thinking they are representing a UK-based company, bank or government agency.
- Niall Ferguson says the mass protest is one of history’s hardy perennials but adds that it's hard to identify a unifying theme for the various revolts around the world. However, he's risen to the challenge, while commenting that the theme tune - Baby Shark - is a fitting anthem for our times, being vacuous, repetitive, inane, and infantile. See his article below.
- A Sunday Times columnist claims that the phrase “Get a grip!” isn't used anywhere else in the world. Not being able to get a grip, he adds, is like being really fat. It’s the sign of a weak mind. It’s an indicator that you aren’t able to control yourself and that you may be French.
- When you're already an hour ahead, it's not good being in the UK when the clock goes back an hour. For it means I'm now waking at 5am, not 6am local time. And this will go on for quite some time.
THE ARTICLE
Baby sharks are feeding a global protest frenzy: Niall Ferguson, the Milbank Family senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford
Today’s overeducated rebels have diverse goals but common tactics.
‘Baby Shark, do do, do-do, do-do, Baby Shark, do do, do-do, do-do...” I am not sure how reassuring I would find that song if I were 15 months old and sitting in a car surrounded by a crowd of political protesters. However, credit to them for doing their best to soothe the Lebanese lad whose mother made the mistake of driving into their demonstration last weekend.
As revolutionary anthems go, Baby Shark is unusual. The bloodthirsty Marseillaise it ain’t, nor the once stirring, now threadbare Internationale. When the late-1960s hipster radicals took to the streets, their soundtrack was classic rock’n’roll: the Beatles’ Revolution or the Rolling Stones’ Street Fighting Man. And yet Baby Shark — vacuous, repetitive, inane, infantile — is in many ways an apt anthem for our times.
The great revolutionary waves of the past had common objectives. Liberty, equality and fraternity in 1789; the nationalist springtime of the peoples in 1848 (and 1989); peace, land and bread in 1917; make love, not war in 1968. You will look in vain for such a uniting theme in the multiple protests that have occurred around the world this year.
In Hong Kong, the trigger was an extradition bill that threatened to subordinate the semi-autonomous region’s common law legal system to the Communist Party, which rules the mainland with scant regard for individual rights.
In Barcelona, by contrast, protesters took to the streets after harsh sentences were handed down to the separatist leaders responsible for 2017’s illegal referendum on Catalan independence. Beirut’s protests are said to have been triggered by a plan to tax WhatsApp. In Quito, the Ecuadorean capital, it was austerity measures required by the International Monetary Fund. In Santiago, Chile, it’s all about bus and metro fares. In Cairo, it was corruption.
Meanwhile, central London suffers intermittent traffic chaos because of a millenarian sect calling itself Extinction Rebellion, which believes that the end of the world is nigh, as well as opponents of Brexit who still haven’t got over their defeat in the 2016 referendum.
There have been some valiant attempts to find a unifying thread to all this. According to the BBC, everyone is protesting against inequality and climate change, as well as corruption and repression. The American economist Tyler Cowen dismissed the importance of inequality (it’s been falling in Chile), pointing instead to the role of higher consumer prices. Bloomberg’s John Authers took a similar line.
Yet none of this convinces. “We are not here over the WhatsApp,” a Lebanese protester told the BBC. “We are here over everything.” That seems about right. What the protests of 2019 have in common is their form, not their content.
Superficially, mass protest is one of history’s hardy perennials. Thousands (you need at least quadruple digits) of mostly young people take to the streets of a big city, usually but not necessarily the capital. They carry placards with pithy slogans. They chant or sing. If they (or the authorities) are belligerent, they end up clashing with police, lobbing bricks and erecting barricades. Very occasionally, they succeed in overthrowing the government. More often than not, the protests are crushed or peter out. Isn’t that the pattern throughout recorded history?
Well, not quite.
For one thing, the protests of 2019 are the first to be organised via smartphone, which is fast becoming a truly universal gadget. Smartphones enable today’s protests to function with minimal leadership. Yes, there are individuals whom the media elevate in importance to give the crowd a face and a voice. But the reality is these movements are acephalous — leaderless — networks. They are collectively improvised, rather than conducted. They are jazz, not classical.
In Hong Kong this summer, for example, the protesters used a Reddit-like forum, LIHKG, where ideas could be “upvoted”. They crowdsourced supplies of umbrellas and rides to and from Central, the focal point of the protests. The organising principle of this adaptive mode of operation was martial arts icon Bruce Lee’s phrase “Be water”.
Second, acephalous networks are inherently hard to defeat, as Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, has discovered to her cost. When the messaging service Telegram suffered a cyber-attack by Beijing, protesters switched to Apple’s AirDrop feature and sent messages over Bluetooth. They even used Tinder and Pokémon Go.
At the same time, the internet has made it easier than it has ever been for protest tactics to be disseminated. Every wannabe revolutionary understands that disrupting the airport is like taking the urban economy hostage. In one key respect, however, the form of today’s protests is familiar.
When I taught history at Oxford 20 years ago, one of my favourite articles about the 1848 revolutions was “The Problem of an Excess of Educated Men in Western Europe, 1800-1850” by Lenore O’Boyle. O’Boyle’s argument was that European cities had been swept by revolution in 1848 because “too many men were educated for a small number of important and prestigious jobs, so that some men had to be content either with underemployment or with positions they considered below their capacities”.
Something similar happened in the 1960s, as the late lamented historian Norman Stone described in his magnificently mordant book The Atlantic and Its Enemies. “In all countries, new universities . . . were crammed with students; taught by men and women appointed all of a sudden in great numbers, without regard for quality. The expansion with relatively new subjects, such as economics, sociology and psychology, meant that there were young men and women aplenty who imagined that they had the answer to everything. It was a terrible cocktail.”
Guess what? We’ve done it again, but now on an unprecedented scale. In every country where large-scale protests have been reported in the past year, higher education is at an all-time high.
Compare the World Bank’s 2016 figures for gross enrolment in tertiary education (as a percentage of the total population of the relevant five-year age group) with those for the late 1980s. In Chile, the share has risen from 18% to 90%. In Ecuador, it’s up from 25% to 46%. Egypt: 15% to 34%. France: 34% to 64%. Hong Kong: 13% to 72%. Lebanon: 32% to 38% (the smallest increase). Top of the class is Turkey: 12% to 104% ( it must have a lot of mature students).
These, then, are the baby sharks: the excess of educated young people currently taking to the streets in cities around the world. It does not help that so many professors fill their students’ heads with incoherent notions of “social justice”. But I suspect the real issue is the mismatch between the unparalleled glut of graduates and the demand for them.
At some point it will sink in that creating economic mayhem is the opposite of creating jobs. Until then, expect more traffic chaos. At least you now know what to sing when the baby sharks surround you.
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