The Humiliator

It’s certainly odd that the 23 players in the Women’s team, La Roja, that won the football World Cup in Sydney, beating the English Lionesses in the finals, shouldn’t be the protagonists of this story, but rather it’s the fellow who kissed the unwilling Jennifer Hermoso during the presentation of the gold trophy who has taken over the entire news networks, becoming inter alia the turd in the punch-bowl of women’s pride.

This week, even Donald Trump’s angry mug-shot was relegated to the inside pages.

We have found a balance in the classroom; a parity in politics; harmony in the workplace and even equality in the army; but the sports-ground remains the preserve of the alpha male: the Spanish macho.

The 2010 world champion Iker Casillas said, “We should have spent these five days talking about our girls! To be proud of winning a title we didn’t have in women’s football, but, no…”

The losing English team meanwhile put out a message on Saturday, describing the Real Federación Española de Fútbol as ‘a sexist and patriarchal organisation’. Luis Rubiales is a football chauvinist, but he’s certainly not alone.

With this humiliation doled out (once again) to half of the Spanish population. Rubiales and his mates show that parity and respect for women in sports is as far away as ever.

So, we shall leave him and his 700,000€ annual income (plus his 3,000€ monthly housing support from the RFEF) for now.

He doesn’t really need anything more to be said about him here.

 

Political News for the Summer: Nothing Much until Late September

The first hurdle was to choose the Presidente del Congreso de los Diputados (Speaker of the House) with a third dark-horse candidate, Ignacio Gil Lázaro from Vox, helping the vote towards the PSOE-backed candidate Francina Armengol (ex-president of the Balearic Islands) to the angry detriment of the PP’s own Cuca Gamarra.

The PP’s strategy was in tatters, after Vox had surprised them at the last moment with their particular candidate in retaliation for a slight from Feijóo. Indeed, the PSOE candidate would have won anyway, by a short head, with the backing of the rest of the House, including Junts. The choice remained the same: progressive or regressive.

Or fresh elections.

Since the probable PP candidature of Isabel Díaz Ayuso would be popular with the electorate (although she is closer to Vox than Feijóo ever was), a supposed election might not be the best thing at this juncture – as the date for one – if it were to come to this – has now been fixed for Sunday, January 14th 2024.

The King duly met with party leaders on Monday and Tuesday – starting with the smaller groups – to try and find a presidential candidate he could propose for a parliamentary debate.

Tricky, since the two sides are running neck and neck.

On Tuesday night, following the consultations, Felipe VI proposed a parliamentary investiture session with Alberto Núñez Feijóo as the candidate (he has the support of Vox, Coalición Canaria and UPN to bring him 172 deputies. Just four short of the 176 needed as a majority). The debate will take place in late September. If Feijóo fails to win a majority, then the King will propose that Pedro Sánchez makes the attempt. 

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Until a new government is chosen, Pedro Sánchez remains as presidente en funciones. Following a possible/probable failure by Núñez Feijóo to bring home a conservative government in late September (El País here), Pedro Sánchez will have two months leeway to negotiate with the smaller groups to find enough backing to form a government. The complication being Junts per Catalunya. The story is at Público here.

Sometimes, a deputy switches sides and gives his vote to The Other Guys. He may do this through conviction, or more likely, for some other reason not unconnected to his finances. This is popularly called un tamayazo (in honour of Eduardo Tamayo) or transfuguismo. We hope that this kind of activity won’t be finding its way to the current front pages…

A Murder in Thailand

 Daniel Sancho is a handsome looking chap with long hair, a big physique and a winning smile. He looks like our idea of Tarzan. His parents are both noted Spanish actors and Daniel works as a cook doing podcasts and videos from his kitchen in Thailand.

When not cooking up a storm, the twenty-nine-year-old appears to have other pastimes, including the apparent murder and dismemberment of a Colombian friend called Edwin Arrieta, a plastic surgeon, on August 1st. Bits of Edwin were later found by the police is his kitchen, with other parts scattered between a rubbish dump and the sea. ‘It took me three hours to dismember him’, says the accused.

Daniel (with his handcuffed hands blurred in one video) has confessed, says Marca (and a hundred other news-sources): ‘I’m guilty, but I was held by Edwin like a hostage’, and he was duly hauled off by the police (after a dinner and night in a fancy hotel, paid for by the cops) and is now cooling his heels in a Thai jail.

Messages in Daniel’s phone apparently show Edwin threatening to kill him if he broke off a relationship between them. A mess. Daniel says ‘I did it, but I was trapped by Edwin’.

‘I’m sorry this all happened’ says Daniel to a cameraman (and no doubt a clutch of reporters). ‘Don’t forget me’, Daniel tells his friends before passing the prison gates.

Premeditated murder is frowned upon in Thailand, and Daniel could end up with life imprisonment or even a lethal injection at the Bang Kwang Prison in Bangkok. 

Of course, there’s a thing out there called ‘the Gay Panic Defence’, where, um, a normal person loses his cool when trapped in a homosexual relationship. Maybe that’ll fly…

The sordid item has been reported and discussed endlessly in Spain during this past few weeks, with much sympathy for Daniel; and there are those that consider, like a stringer from the ABC newspaper, that Daniel is a victim rather than anything else and that he should be returned home as quickly as possible.

The Spanish naturalist Frank Cuesta, whose wife spent over six years in a Thai prison (for possession of 0.005g of cocaine) says that prison there ‘is very hard – and very expensive’.

The reason this is the lead story in every newspaper in Spain is that there’s not much else going on at the moment (besides global melting, the Ukrainian War, Donald Trump being threatened with jail, Brexit fallout and the current Spanish political crisis).

Meanwhile, in Poland, another Spaniard, a war-correspondent for Público called Pablo González, has been held for the past eighteen months accused (but not charged) of spying. There’s nothing much in the media about his situation, nor any apparent effort from the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs to resolve his case.

He’s not as pretty as Daniel though. There’s that.

Plastic Meltdown

I was wandering around the Internet and came across this: ‘Recycling is a lie. Plastic manufacturers spent $1B to make you think it’s working’. 

The article says that recycling campaigns are designed purely to sell more plastic.

To solve the problem of the plastic trash, a dilemma we all accept is nothing short of dreadful, why, we just sort our trash into different containers, and voilà, the plastic trash is taken to a special place, where – we hope – it will be recycled into another bottle, plate, packaging material or (if its lucky), maybe a ball-point pen.

Nat Geo says that a million plastic bottles are sold every minute in the entire world.

Wikipedia says that ‘plastic recycling is the processing of plastic waste into other products. Recycling can reduce dependence on landfill, conserve resources and protect the environment from plastic pollution and greenhouse gas emissions’.

Plastic is used in 50,000 different products, says Consumo Claro, and it’s usually made to be sturdy – after all, no one wants their shampoo bottle suddenly melting on the shelf.

However, most of it, the sources above agree, simply isn’t recycled. We are fed a fantasy about how the manufacturers are working to clean the planet (and only the irresponsible consumers are failing by not putting their emptied water bottles into the big yellow bell). In short, around 9% of single-use plastic is recycled worldwide – the rest isn’t. The first thing to know is that recycling isn’t easy (there are many different types of plastic which need different processes), and secondly – it’s a lot cheaper just to make some more out of its base materials: crude oil, cellulose, coal, salt and natural gas.

Here in Spain, according to El País, we’ve been bucking the numbers, with 51.5% recycled. This may be, reading between the lines, that just over half of all of our plastic waste finds its way into recycling bins, although that too seems unlikely. Or perhaps the figure comes from the plastic recovered from the bins. Then it would be sorted into its different base components? Greenpeace is less sanguine, and reckons it’s nearer 30% recycled.

I wonder, do we care that our bottle of pop is made from recycled plastic – and do we wonder for what purpose exactly did the recycled plastic fulfill in its earlier incarnation?

Those tiny grains of plastic in the sea; those rotting sheets of it hanging from the frames of discarded invernaderos; the endless number of plastic bags, juice cartons and water bottles in the countryside; the huge piles of plastic waste in the dumps – which often end up as landfill or (in some terrible and completely unforeseen accident) on fire.

We could ease our dependence on plastic, with paper, cardboard, metal or glass (all easily recycled), but the plastic industry has other ideas; and we know that money talks – Hell, even when it’s plastic.