The lost post - no, not Ireland or italy

THIS IS WHAT I STARTED TO WRITE ABOUT TWO WEEKS AGO WHEN I RETURNED TO BATH.

On Wednesday I caught a train from Seville to Malaga...a town on the Mediterranean coast. As I was laying out on the beach (that's right, tanning like girls do...minus the bikini) I looked over and saw a thermometer sign that said 29 degrees celcius (85 F). Within 3 or 4 hours I was back in England. It was cold and wet! The day before Lola invited me to Hugo's christening but the flights were too expensive so I told her unless I changed my mind about paying that much that I probably wouldn't be coming. I slept at a friend's house in London that night, took a train to school the next morning, then went home and did some homework. The whole I time was missing Spain a lot. The weather didn't bother me here until I went to Spain and got a reminder of what warmth is like. As soon as Ian got home from work we started talking about Spain and the christening and how it was too bad I wasn't going to be able make it. Then I decided that I didn't care. So, next week I'm going back to Spain to enjoy the sunshine, friends, and the food.

Before that, I spent about 9 days working on a little farm. This lady Angela I was staying with was a rad lady. She had good food, a nice room for me to stay in, and all the beer that I could want. The stone workers that worked for her would start at 8 take a break for breakfast and beer at 10 work til about 1 or 2, return at 3 then work til 5. In a day they drank about 12-14 beers. It was a great work culture I thought. One friend told me that if the spanish aren't offered beer when they work they won't work much. I built a chicken coup out of used materials, some removable screens for her window in the bug season, and did a bit of garden work. All in all I had a great time.

Almost every night I went down into town, about a kilometer away, to a bar called cafe jardin. The first night I went in there I met these English dudes. The thing about the European Union is that you can go to any member country and work, own property, whatever. So, one of them had come as a wwoofer (the organic farm thing I was doing) about 10 years ago and stayed, had a kid, bought property, and is just there now. For the rest of the week we all hung out almost every night after I was done working on Angela's place. I went to a rad hippie party with then and all kinds of other things. It was a blast.

On a monday I took a train to seville and got a hostel. I met up with Lola and her friend one night, then hung out with the kids (baby Hugo and Joseph) then went out again that last night I was there. I managed to arrive in Seville during Semana Santa (holy week -- the week before easter) in time to see the processions. Basically, there is one cathedral and tons of smaller churches. Each church has a float that represents some point in the biblical story of Jesus. These things are huge...many of them take 40 guys to carry them. They are accompanied by music, marchers that look like KKK members, and all sorts of other things depending on the church. They march from their church to the main cathedral and back. Often it's more than a 20 km walk which takes maybe 24 hours of so. It's nuts. Even if you're not a religious person you can't help but be a little moved by the art and ceremony of it.

From there I went to Malaga, the beach, and the bad weather of England -- as the story begins.

Below are pictures. I didn't feel like taking the time to add caption or give the narrative journey by pictures as I normally do. Go ahead and make up your own captions.

The first NINE are of ORgiva, the others are from Seville and MAlaga

more on politics

That last post about what's really going on with the world got me to thinking about all kinds of things that governments do. Now, I'm going to be talking about politicians here but I do not mean to make politicians the bad guys and not governments. The job of the government is simply to perpetuate itself. The politician is simply a tool. Now, that leaves the question of who the government is if the politician is just a tool for it. I could answer that but I'll let you think about it.

The more time I've spent over here the more I've begun to hate the British government. Recently there was a scandal where Members of Parliament were using legally allocated money for their living and travel expenses to enrich themselves if they live outside of the main London area. One woman claimed her sister's house as her primary residence and got something like 100,000 pounds per year for it even though it was not her primary home. Her real house would have gotten her significantly less.

Gordon Brown's statement was that the law for this kind of compensation needs to reduce the compensation and ensure that it cannot be abused to assure the voting masses that MPs "serve the public and not themselves." Well Mr. Brown, when a vast majority of people resent the fact that your government is closing down all of the post offices, you're not serving them. When you install CCTV virtually everywhere, you're controlling the population through fear of reprisal not serving them. When you allow the National Health Service to revoke the credentials of a nurse who secretly filmed abuse and neglect of elderly patients due to institutional failures, you are not serving the public. I'm amazed to say it, but the government here is worse than the government in the United States.

One thing I miss is the ability to talk cops and border agents however I wish. Although the constitution is a giant pile of crap, it serves me some good in that way. Here, I do not have nearly the same freedom as I do in the US in terms of that. However, encounters with the police are much rarer here. I don't think I've ever seen a cop pull anyone over and the only people I've seen them stop are people who are blatantly drunk and causing problems. And as a side note, they aren't allowed to carry guns or tasers, only mace and a truncheon (beating stick).

That's not to say that I like the US...even though the gods sent Obama to clean things up. First of all, and I've mentioned this before, his economic team is on the side of the wealthy elite, not the other 95% of Americans. Those guys have made an absolute fortune on Wall Street -- of course the plans they have developed involve no risk for the companies and no benefit for the tax payers. More than that, I recently read that Obama's new budget is going to actually increase military spending by 4%. The navy is going to get a bunch of this to fight a new enemy with some fancy speed boats -- PIRATES! I've said it before and I will say it again. WE CREATED THOSE PIRATES!! They first began pirating when chemical companies began dumping waste off the Somali shore because the "government" there had no ability whatsoever to patrol the shore with the chaos we destabilized, then started to fix then, tragically bailed on.


There's more than just pirates and rich bastards but I'll leave those for another time. For now, I'm going to write a few of my several final papers and work on a post about Spain with a ton of pictures. To the bar!!

The News

The news in the UK is absolutely flooded with the news of that ship captain who was recently released. Before that? It was all about how there is an American captain being held by pirates. Apparently when the navy people finally did their little offensive and got the captain back they killed three of the pirates. Something that is most likely being overlooked by most people is that in each statement by any pirates there, they start off by saying that they are only interested in the ransom mainly because life in Somalia is hard and this is a way that they can make money. Let me remind you that to a great extent we did that to them. In fact, our miserable failure there is the reason that your president Clinton sat by and refused to call the genocide that was going on in Rwanda exactly that.

The other thing I have to say about this is that IT DOES NOT MATTER!!! You have a president now who is giving a shit load of money to the exact corporations who got the US, and the world for that matter, into the mess they're in now. There are workers all over the country who make barely enough to live on -- not because of this whole financial mess, but before this. In fact, the majority of workers, in order to afford a place for their families to live. But, while Obama is pretending to get stuff done by saying 'it's in the right timeframe of the plan he laid out in his campaign', which somehow has a great pacifying effect, the financial advisors he hired are helping out their wallstreet friends. Anyone who thinks that each tiny upsurge in the market is a sign of improvement is an idiot. Let me digress a bit to say that at least he is putting some restrictions (though not many) so that the tax payers won't completely lose out unless the whole system absolutely collapeses...this is more than I can say for what I think the other guy would have done. And back to it. Even if things do get better financially the suffering has already occurred and it will continue to occur as long as people are forced to accept that the value of their lives can be determined by money.