Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.
Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain'*
Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain
Our Covid restrictions were duly tightened yesterday. So, as of midnight tonight, I again won't be able to cross the river to go into Pontevedra city. But members of the tennis club in Poio can come the other way. And Members of the golf club up in Meis are also permitted to ignore the travel restrictions. I guess it can't be simply because, on average, they're richer than the rest of us. But who knows?
Anyway, today I'm setting up a Yoga club in my attic flat, a table tennis club in my basement, a wine club in my kitchen and an athletics club in my garden. I believe this will allow people who are federados/as to come and visit me, so long as not more than 4 of us sit round a table. In so far as there'll be any sitting at all. IGIMSTS.
Talking about houses . . . An odd survey suggests - rather surprisingly - that these are the percentages of European folk living in 'homes that are too large for their household needs’:-
Malta 73%
Cyprus 71%
Ireland 70%
UK 56%
Spain 55%
Luxembourg 54%
Belgium 54%
Netherlands 53%
At the other end of the scale:-
Romania 7%
Latvia 10%
Greece 11%
Bulgaria 12%
Croatia 12%
Slovakia 14%
Italy(!) 14%
Details here.
The UK
I've been known to claim the concepts of customer orientation and genuine customer service are not well advanced here in Spain. This week I've had the example of service at the other end of the spectrum - from the UK subsidiary of the German company, Miele. About a vacuum cleaner I bought in the UK in late 2019. So rapid, helpful and personalised was the reply (from Amanda) to my email, that I was too shocked to respond immediately. A Dutch friend and I share the opinion that neither of us has seen anything like it in 20 years here. Which was the reason that I eventually told Amanda that, given the option of dealing with Miele here or with Miele UK when I'm next there, it was a no-brainer. No matter how better Miele Spain might be than the average Spanish operator, I was bound to face problems and delays.
The USA
Trump should be punished for inciting the Capitol violence but Democrats would be wise to prioritise national healing. Easy to say but . . .
Arnold Schwarzenegger makes some pertinent points in this impressive video.
The Way of the World
An American commentator: The concept of a 'Just the facts' newscast designed to be consumed by everyone has died out. We have an informational system that profits from division and conflict. . . .It’s time to admit this is a failed system. You can’t sell hatred and seriously expect it to end. . . We need a new media channel, the press version of a third party, where those financial pressures to maintain audience are absent. Sounds rather like the BBC to me. The full article is here.
Finally . . .
A tale to melt your heart. Or something.
* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.
2 comments:
The Way of the World. I remember reading about this in June 2014. The final report was published on 12th January 2021.
In 2012, the Irish Health Service Executive raised concerns that up to 1,000 children had been sent from the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Galway, Ireland, for the purpose of illegal adoptions in the United States & without the consents of their mothers. Separately in 2012, a local historian, Catherine Corless published an article documenting the history of the home. Her research led her to conclude that nearly 800 children had died there & had been buried in an unmarked and unregistered site at the Home.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bon_Secours_Mother_and_Baby_Home
Lysenkoism, the deliberate distortion of scientific facts or theories for purposes that are deemed politically, religiously or socially desirable.
During the 1930s, the Soviet Union gave both political support & full acceptance of Trofim Lysenko's ideas. Lysenko rejected science & genetic selection in agriculture in favour of the now discredited non-Mendelian theories of Lamarckism, the notion that an organism can pass on to its offspring, the physical characteristics that the parent organism acquired through use or disuse during its lifetime.
More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned & numerous scientists were executed in the campaign to supress scientific opposition to the Lamarckian "inheritance of acquired characteristics" theory. Nikolai Vavilov, the president of the Agriculture Academy, had encouraged Lysenko, but he was sent to prison and died there. Soviet genetics research was effectively destroyed. Research and teaching in many other biological disciplines were harmed or banned.
To varying degrees, other countries of the eastern Bloc including Poland, Czechoslovakia & the German Democratic Republic accepted Lysenkoism as the official "new biology", as did Communist China for some years, until its leaders realised that following Lysenko's ideas had reduced crop yields & contributed to the one of the largest man-made disasters in human history, the Great Chinese Famine of 1959-61.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine#Initial_cover-ups
Lysenko played an active role in the famines that killed millions of Soviet people and his practices prolonged and exacerbated the food shortages. In 1964, physicist Andrei Sakharov spoke out against Lysenko in the General Assembly of the Academy of sciences of the USSR.
"He is responsible for the shameful backwardness of Soviet biology and of genetics in particular, for the dissemination of pseudo-scientific views, for adventurism, for the degradation of learning, and for the defamation, firing, arrest, even death, of many genuine scientists".
After Khrushchev's dismissal in 1964, the president of the Academy of Sciences declared that Lysenko's immunity to criticism had officially ended. An expert commission was sent to investigate records kept at Lysenko's experimental farm. His secretive methods and ideas were revealed. A few months later, a devastating critique of Lysenko was made public. Consequently, Lysenko was immediately disgraced in the Soviet Union. After Lysenko's monopoly on biology & agronomy had ended, it took many years for these sciences to recover in Russia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko#After_Stalin
Could it be that the current hysteria over Carbon Dioxide & an allegedly abnormal, rather than natural & cyclical change in global temperatures, is a deliberate distortion of scientific facts or theories for purposes that are deemed politically, religiously or socially desirable. In other words, a re-emergence of Lysenkoism?
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