Baltasar Porcel is really letting us down. He's just boring again today, he's been boring all week. But never fear, Eulàlia Solé, sociologist and author, is here! The thing about Lali Solé is that her column only appears once a week rather than every day like Porcel's, and her idiocy / dullness ratio is about 1 : 1 while Porcel's is about 1 : 10. That is, for every joyfully imbecilic Lali column, there's merely one boring, stupid one. You have to read through ten boring, stupid Porcelazos before you get one that shines with the intense glowing imbecility that Porcel is capable of. We know a guy who spent a couple of years in the sociology department at the university before switching to philosophy and getting his Ph.D.; he says that Lali is far and away the dumbest professor in the sociology department and one of the three or four dumbest at the whole university. Anyway, Lali's text is in italics below; our comments are in standard type. The title is "The fruits of war".

The results of the war for the Afghan people could well be called rotten fruits. It's because of this that Afghanistan has stopped appearing on the news, that no one has heard anything from Karzai, his government, and the warlords, nor about the promised reconstruction of the country, nor about the supposed liberation of the women. Just as the capture of Bin Laden has been a failure, the makeup used to beautify the military operation, as if that were possible, has been too. There is nothing farther from being fulfilled than the obligations acquired by the US regarding the political, economic, and human development of the country.
Profundity Score on a 1 to 10 scale, with ten representing, say, Immanuel Kant and one representing, say, Tipper Gore: -3 for getting all her facts wrong.

From health to food, from education to freedom, everything is shamefully lacking. Many people have to walk for days in order to reach a health center, in which the most basic services are lacking. Sometimes it's even worse and they find the health center levelled by bombs. Food is scarce for the immense majority of people, dreadfully poor after 23 years of military conflicts and finished off by the last one. As far as the refugees returning home, they find themselves with a panorama of destruction, unemployment, hunger, and lack of clean water. Lack of personal safety is also permanent, with the warlords doing as they want. Very few women have access to work, and very few have managed to free themselves from the burka, still submitted to the will of those in charge and frightened of being attacked.
Profundity Score: -5 for expecting the US to have already turned Afghanistan into Denmark and for not blaming at least some of the Afghans' problems on, say, the SOVIET invasion which started all this off back in 1979.

While some things are just the same as before the last war, the rest have gotten worse. If the bombings have borne any fruit it is that of mass poverty for the population, as we have already said, and that of becoming even more evil (envilecimiento) for those who have gotten rich off the conflict.

Profundity Score: -9 for blatantly lying, for accusing the Americans of having profited off the Battle of Afghanistan, and for calling the United States evil without mentioning a single scrap of evidence.

When we get down to it, there's nothing new under the sun when it comes to war. The landscape that weapons leave behind is always monotonously the same. This reiteration does not only not faze those who make money off devastation, but encourages them to probe its possibilities even more deeply. A man as lucid as Gabriel Jackson denounces, in the last issue of "Vanguardia Dossier" the attempt of the Bush Administration to revoke the ABM treaty, signed in 1972 to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons. To the entire deadly arsenal that threatens the survival of defenseless civilians, they want to add the radioactive weapons that new countries may make. Insanity which we'll have to put the brakes on in some way.
Profundity Score: -17 for not having any idea of what the ABM treaty deals with, for thinking that the US wants more countries to have nuclear arms, and for accusing the Americans of making war to make money again.

The way is not starting another war, this time against Iraq under the pretext that it has dangerous armaments. It makes no sense to accuse someone else of having weapons of mass destruction when you have even more of them yourself. It's true that it's urgent to put an end to the potential danger that threatens the future of humanity, but that will only be possible if the weapons accumulated in every single country, including the one that claims to dispense justice, are eliminated.

Profundity Score: -13 for failing to see the difference between nukes in American or British hands and nukes in Iraqi hands, for being a pacifist imbecile who actually thinks that weapons can be abolished, and for gratuitously insulting the US.

Civil society must become aware both of the risk it is running and of the pressure it can exercise to remove from power the enemies of both peaceful development and a democratic distribution of the wealth of the world.

Profundity Score: -21 for claiming that Communism is the answer.

I've been accused of being too sensitive to anti-Americanism. But when faced every day with this kind of blind hate, it's kind of hard not to be. And don't believe the anti-Americans when they claim to hate the American government but respect the American people. They don't. They hate Americans as individuals, too. It's pure racism. And many Europeans like Eulàlia Solé, whose face I will cheerfully spit in if I ever get the chance, are chock-full of anti-American racism. Like, for example, the above column. No European has ever had to listen to his country reviled in the way that I have to every day.