Chemical Lali Solé, in another turgid and self-contradictory piece in La Vanguardia, says: "I read in the e-magazine Sin Permiso that in Texas (United States) the creationists have achieved an important goal...in Texan textbooks the existence of our world is explained from the perspective of intelligent design, denying the theory of evolution. A posture that rationalists call obscurantism more proper to ancient times." (Sentence fragment sic.)

Naturally Chemical Lali didn't bother, actually, say, fact-checking said electronic magazine. I did, and I found that according to the National Council for Science Education, a pro-science organization, that nothing of the sort is true. The most recent science-education news from Texas is that a pro-evolution moderate Republican won the primary for a vacant seat on the state Board of Ed, that the Texas Academy of Sciences supports the teaching of evolution, that the Institute for Creation Research has applied for state certification as a graduate school and said certification will almost certainly be denied, and that the state director of science curriculum was fired after using her official e-mail account to urge subordinates to attend an anti-intelligent-design speech, on the ground that it wasn't her job to take sides on the issue.

Sin Permiso's scare story about creationism taking over in Texas, which Chemical Lali completely misinterpreted, is taken from an Austin website called The Atheist Experience.

So where is Sin Permiso getting its information? Well, they say right up front that they're a "socialist" publication, which generally means "Communist" in Europe when written with a small S. They re-publish opinion articles by other writers that they find simpáticos. If you check their file on articles about the US, you get the usual suspects as authors: Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Howard Zinn, Greg Palast, Barbara Ehrenreich, Eric Hobsbawm, Angela Davis, George Lakoff, Lewis Lapham, Alexander Cockburn, Michael Moore, Ralph Nader, Cindy Sheehan, Tariq Ali--and our very own Andy Robinson!.

So if you're wondering where Europeans get their crazy-ass ideas about the United States, there are a few simple steps. The anti-American ideas start in the febrile brains of the far left of the US Democratic party, and the renegades even farther left than that lot. They get mistranslated to Spanish by our local press, which is also leftist in its sympathies, and picked up on by lefty politicians looking for an issue as well as lefty academics looking for a quick publication. Then they filter down to the mass media, and from there to the general public, nearly always in a further mutation, and next thing you know La Vanguardia is saying that in Texas teaching evolution is banned.