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Posted 14:36 by John

Here's a link from Front Page; it's some real red-meat Nelson Mandela-bashing. It has some good Mandela quotes. It is by Lowell Ponte and therefore is just a bit hysterical in tone.

Posted 14:23 by John

It looks like Iraq crisis news is cooling off; the lead headline on today's Vanguardia is "Alleged parking garage murderer arrested". They got him yesterday. Video cameras at a bank branch and at a subway stop identified him, his photo checked with the guy who had rented a motorbike parking place for a month, and they arrested him and compared his DNA with the hairs found in the first victim's hand. Fair cop. He's from La Mina, a crappy neighborhood in far northeast Barcelona largely populated by gypsies--there are some 16,000 there. La Mina has a bad rep partly because of them and partly because of the payos who live there. The murderer is a payo, a non-gypsy, and the gypsy community is much relieved that it wasn't one of them. La Mina is full of dirtbags--the bunch of thugs that beat a guy to death for fun last year outside the Puerto Olímpico, a complex of nightspots down by the harbor, were from La Mina. They were payos, too. Fortunately, La Mina is rather distant from downtown Barcelona and if you come as a tourist you will get nowhere near it since there's nothing worth seeing within a five-mile radius of the place. Everyone is very happy that this guy has been busted. There's a general feeling of relief. I imagine the public outcry (it never reached exactly panic stage, but people were afraid over this case--maybe something similar to the public reaction to the Washington snipers on a smaller scale) that was caused was partly because of the upscale neighborhood and the respectable nature of the victims, and partly by the general tone of concern and worry, not quite fear, prevalent here due to the international situation.

Anyway, on the front page below the fold, the Vangua's top international headline is "US manages to divide Europe", in reference to the letter from eight European leaders in support of the European-American alliance. Slovakia and Albania, of all countries, have signed onto the letter. The story behind it is that the Wall Street Journal contacted several European leaders to suggest they write an article in support of the trans-Atlantic alliance. José María Aznar wrote the first draft and circulated it. They didn't even bother sending it to France, Germany, or Greece (Greece is one of the most anti-American countries in Europe, even worse than France), and the Dutch declined to sign because they didn't want to contribute to any division within the EU.

German Chancellor Schröder has said that Germany will not vote under any circumstances, in the UN or anywhere else, in favor of military action. The German liberal / Christian Democrat opposition, which is quite strong and getting stronger, is making a big stink about Germany's possible diplomatic isolation. Schröder's party, the Social Democrats, is going to get creamed in two key state elections (Germany's federal, it has states like America, more or less, which in particular have a lot of economic power). In Hesse, one of Germany's richest states (its major city is Frankfurt), the conservative Christian Democrats, who already hold the state, will roll with an absolute majority. In Lower Saxony, northwest Germany, rather more industrial and poorer than Hesse, the Christian Democrats will sweep the current Social Democrat state government out of power; the polls are saying Christian Dems 46-48%, Social Dems 35-37%. This gives the Christian Dems control of the Bundesrat, the upper legislative house, from where they will be able to block pretty much any Social Dem proposal they want. Schröder's popularity is plummeting as unemployment increases and the economy fails to heat up. He's using the anti-war platform to try to swing these state elections to his party, and he's failing. I don't think this defeat will bring down the government, but Schröder's not far from having to resign simply because the opposition will blockade anything he tries to do--and his international posturing looks like mere bluffing when it can be seen that his own people don't support him on anything except being antiwar, and even there there's a division of opinion.

Former Spanish Prime Minister Felipe González (to whom this country really does owe a great deal despite little things like, uh, the government organizing a death squad) has been talking a lot more left since he left power--Mario Soares of Portugal has been doing the same thing. Felipe called Aznar "Bush's altar boy", and said that "The (WSJ) letter means a breaking of the European Union treaty and opens up a wound that will be difficult to repair." Oh, shut up, Felipe. If you're worried about opening up wounds and causing divisions, why don't you consider moderating your antiwar position instead of demanding that everybody else moderate their pro-alliance position and calling that "negotiation"?

Remember. We're not pro-war. We're pro-alliance. Now, if the Atlantic alliance (except for a couple of weasels) should be in favor of a war with Saddam, who are we here at Iberian Notes to say no? I think that's a pretty good label to stick on those of us who are in favor of a tough policy toward terrorists and rogue states. Pro-alliance. Hey, if the pro-abortion people can call themselves pro-choice, we can adopt some slightly misleading way to frame our position too. (Note: I'm in favor of legal abortion on demand in the first trimester of pregnancy, and afterward only in case of a threat to the mother's life, mostly for practical political reasons: restricting abortion any more than that would cause a political blowup much bigger than any the anti-abortion people have managed to cook up so far.)

Nelson Mandela is blowing whatever little credibility he has left. I believe that Mandela is a strong person but not necessarily a good person. I think messiah figures, from Gandhi to Kenyatta to Lenin to Hitler to Nkrumah to Mandela, tend to be self-aggrandizing and utterly convinced of their own rectitude and messiahhood. They can do horribly evil things--don't tell me Mandela didn't know about the murders that the ANC committed--and justify them for the Cause. Anyway, Mandela accused President Bush of wanting to "sink the world into a holocaust" and of "acting outside the United Nations". Well, accusation number two is fair in spirit but wrong in fact, because Bush is acting within the United Nations--if not, why is Colin Powell going to speak there on February 5? And accusation number one is ad hominem bullshit which can't be taken seriously by any adult.

Meanwhile, the European Parliament voted 287-209 to reject "any unilateral military action". The Parliament considers that a preventative strike against Saddam would be a violation of international law and that the violations of SC Resolution 1441 that have been exposed by the UN inspectors "do not justify the resort to military action." The Socialist, Liberal (which surprises me, these guys are supposed to be pretty moderate), Green, and European Left parliamentary groups supported the measure. The three Catalan nationalist Eurodeputies also voted in support. An amendment by the Popular group to add an amendment that would have called Saddam's violations of Resolution 1441 to be "continual and serious" was voted down 251-255. The Spanish PP leader in the Europarliament called the vote a manifestation of "a false, irresponsible pacifism". The leftist Eurodeputies had a good old time holding up "No War for Oil" signs.

The Vatican has shot off its mouth, showing extremely bad moral and political judgment. Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Vatican secretary of state, said, "The United States has not learned the lesson of Vietnam," and called for the Vatican to work to prevent a war against Saddam. He suggested that the Vatican send an envoy to Baghdad, and said "If this war is declared the gates to Hell will open", quoting approvingly Amer Moussa, foreign minister of Egypt and secretary of the Arab League. This is not a move calculated to win the sympathy of American Catholics, many of whom are furious at the Church because of the boy-buggering bishops in black and the craven coverup of the corruption of children. Expect defections to increase. American Catholics are often "Reagan Democrats" and fiercely pro-American. They are not gonna like this when they hear about it.

Posted 19:03 by John

Crime update: The cops claim to have identified the parking garage murderer and they are now looking for him. As for the Tarragona doctor's boyfriend, he's definitely run off to Holland and the case is in the hands of Europol. If you're in Holland and you see a blondish balding well-built 30-ish Spanish guy, rat him out to the nearest cop.

Posted 18:47 by John

OK. I've been putting this off all week. Our city's beloved FC Barcelona, "more than a club", the most important civic institution in the city with the possible exception of giant savings bank La Caixa, is having the worst season of its history. The glorious Barça, symbol of Catalonia, is in twelfth place (out of 20 teams) with a record of 6 wins, 5 ties, and 8 losses for a total of 23 points at the exact halfway point of the season. Real Sociedad is in first with 12 wins, 7 ties, and 0 losses for 43 points.

Except for a couple of seasons in the postwar era in Spain (the World War II era in Europe), Barcelona has never played so poorly. Nobody can remember a Barça this bad. I can't remember the Barça ever finishing lower than fourth. The last bad season they had was 87-88, and even that year the Barça qualified for European competition. This year they won't. It will be the first time since European competitions began that Barça will not qualify, which I believe is a European record. They need to come in at least fourth to qualify for the Champions League; currently in fourth place is Betis with 33 points. No chance. They need to come in at least seventh to qualify for the now fairly pathetic UEFA Cup, which is considered much more of a minor-league competition now that it takes the 5th, 6th, and 7th teams from the major European leagues rather than the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th teams that it used to take. In seventh place is Mallorca with 27 points, which I guess is surmountable. They may make the UEFA after all.

Anyway, despised coach Louis Van Gaal has been canned. After his firing, he agreed to renounce €2.5 million of his €6 million three-year contract. This is less than most of us expected him to be making and adds to the suspicion that Dracula, Mr. Burns himself, despised team president Joan Gaspart, only hired Van Gaal because he was available cheap after being fired by the Dutch national team when he failed to qualify them for last year's World Cup. Gaspart is a mama's boy. You know how some poor kids get picked on and bullied at school because they're small and weak? I hate that. If I ever catch any kid picking on any other in my class I blast him verbally until I've got him frightened and then I send him to the director's office. (That's not really a plan. It's just what I do because I get so angry. This is one reason why I cannot teach children any more. Somebody would get hurt and I'd go to jail.) But you know how there are a few kids who are little weasels who provoke everyone else and deserve every ass-kicking they get because of all the trouble they stir up? That's Gaspart all over. He whines and whimpers and is just a huge crybaby in general.

And he's incompetent. Barcelona is one of the richest clubs in football, or at least it was, and they banked something like sixty million dollars for Luis Figo straight of Real Madrid's pocket. So what does Gaspart do with the money? Overpays for overrated over-the-hill players (Petit, Overmars, Andersson) or overpays for overrated young guys who do well in South American leagues. From what I've seen of Saviola and Riquelme, they're competent players, but they're not big stars. They looked great back in the Argentinian league, but most of the really good Argentinian players are in Europe, so they weren't facing top-quality competition back home. Rochemback, usually on the bench, and Geovanni, who has already been loaned out to Benfica for what's left of the season, also both cost way too much money. So did Gerard, when they bought him back from Valencia, where he had played well, to the Barça, where he hasn't. And Gaspart gave Rivaldo away for free to save six million euros.

Anyway, last weekend Barcelona lost 2-0 in Vigo to Celta and that was it for Louis Van Gaal. A short recent history of FC Barcelona: Johan Cruyff as coach: 90-91 won Spanish League, 91-92 won League, Champions Cup, 92-93 won League, 93-94 won League, lost final of Champions Cup 4-0 to Milan, team broken up, 94-95 nothing, 95-96 nothing. Bobby Robson as coach: 96-97 UEFA Cup. Louis Van Gaal: 97-98 League, 98-99 League, 99-00 nothing. Llorenç Serra Ferrer as coach: 00-01 nothing. Charly Rexach as coach: 01-02 nothing. Louis Van Gaal as coach: 02-03 nothing. The fans are fed up waiting for a winning team and Van Gaal is not providing it. He has been booted and it looks like Charly Rexach, Barcelona's jack-of-all-trades, will finish out the season as coach, mostly because they don't have any money to spend on anyone else.

Posted 14:59 by John

The Vanguardia's headline today, which seems a bit sensationalistic to me, is "Bush begins countdown to war". Well, I suppose it's true. The Vanguardia is taking for granted that there will be an Iraq war and that it will begin soon. There's a lot of replay of Bush's State of the Union speech, including a full page with the most newsworthy sections. The general take is that it was a good speech, well-done, and that it accomplished the important purpose of laying out clearly when and where damning evidence against Saddam will be presented.

A letter signed by eight European leaders, President Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic, and prime ministers Aznar of Spain, Blair of the UK, Berlusconi of Italy, Barroso of Portugal, Medgyessy of Hungary, Miller of Poland, and Rasmussen of Denmark expressed solidarity with President Bush and asked that the EU show unified support for the United States.

The letter says, "The true link that unites the United States and Europe is represented by the values we share: democracy, individual freedoms and human and legal rights."

"The attacks of September 11th showed how far the terrorists--those enemies of these common values--are capable of going in order to destroy them...Today more than ever the trans-Atlantic link is a guarantee of our freedom."

"The relationship between we Europeans and the United States has stood the test of time...thanks to the continual cooperation between Europe and the United States we have been able to guarantee peace and freedom on our continent. The trans-Atlantic relationship should not become a victim of the persistent attempts by the Iraqi regime to threaten world security."

"We should remain united insisting on the disarmament of the Iraqi regime. The solidarity, cohesion, and determination of the international community constitute our best hope of achieving it peacefully. Our strength is in unity."

"Saddam continues to maintan the same line as always: deception, rejection and failure to fulfill the resolutions of the United Nations. Our governments share one responsibility: standing up to this threat. If we do not, we will be negligent toward our own citizens and the world."

"We can not tolerate that a dictator should violate systematically these resolutions. If he does not fulfill them, the credibility of the Security Council will disappear and world peace will be affected."

That's pretty strong language. I'd sign that letter. "Eight European leaders and Iberian Notes agree on declaration of principles and intentions." Terrific stuff. This ought to show that Europe is behind the United States despite what the French and Germans would have you think. The Axis of Weasels has signed up Belgium and Luxembourg on their side in NATO; they are blocking any NATO response to the United States' request for logistic help in case of war. That's it. That's all the support they've got. They have NOBODY ELSE behind them. They are risking being left out in the cold diplomatically, not to mention the other foreseeable consequences of backing the wrong side in a war. That is why I think Chirac will allow himself to be persuaded to, at the very least, change his NATO vote and support UN Resolution #2. I'm not so sure about Schröder. Even he may come over, though it may cost him the next election.

Posted 19:52 by John

This is mind-boggling. The second edition of the huge TV hit "Operación Triunfo" (a sort of Pop Stars / Big Brother thing--contestants all live together, learn to be pop singers, play concerts, and the winner represents Spain at the hallunicinatorily bad Eurovision Song Festival next summer) closed out Monday night with the victory of Ainhoa Cantalapiedra--great Castilian surname, her family must be from Soria or Burgos originally. Arnaldo Otegi, who is most likely a paranoid schizophrenic from what I've observed, and I'm pretty good at these diagnoses, since I have some experience in the field of mental illness, said that Ainhoa's win was a setup, see, because Ainhoa is a Spanish-speaking Basque girl. "There are people who have an interest in, at the next Eurovision Festival, seeing all us nice little Basques there all rooting for Ainhoa, which is just like rooting for Spain," said Otegi, spokesman for whatever Herri Batasuna, the political branch of ETA, is calling itself these days. Otegi then took his pills and soon after drifted into a catatonic state from which he was not aroused for the next fourteen hours.

The only conspiracy theory I've got about "Operación Triunfo" is that the fat chick automatically wins because she is the one the majority female audience sympathizes with most. This is the second year in a row, and the program is only two years old, in both of which the fat chick has won. People identify with her more than with the hotter babes.

Speaking of which, my pal Clark, with whom I am entangled in a couple of arguments down in the Comments section (hey, people, keep those comments coming, that's what they're there for), is the Most Famous English Teacher in the World, because he's in charge of the English-class part of the program. About 7,500,000 people watched the finale Monday night, and all of them follow the show so they all know who he is. It looks like ratings are down by about a fourth since last year, but what they got is still pretty good, solid hit-show numbers. No longer runaway-success numbers, but good enough so that they're casting OT III for next year. OT comment: OT contestants had 6 of the top 10 LP/CDs in Spain in 2002. The Spanish music industry is really pissed because these OT punks are getting their sales and gigs.

Hey, Clark, why don't you come over after work Thursday, or failing that, Murph and I have tentative plans to go to Miguel's on Friday night. You in? I haven't seen you for a while.

Posted 19:06 by John

A few days ago we mentioned the "parking garage murders". Two women were murdered in the same parking garage within twelve days in the middle-class neighborhood of El Putxet, right next to our neighborhood of Gràcia. The garage was a private one, open only to the owners or renters of the parking spaces located in the basement of a large apartmemt building. The only way in is if you have the key or the remote control that open the door, unless you somehow manage to sneak in directly behind an entering car and not get noticed. It is held as a condominium by the owners of the parking spaces, most of whom live or work very close by. The murdered women, coincidentally, both held parking place number 15 but on different floors. Everybody associated with the parking garage has apparently been checked out.

The most interesting lead is a guy who telephoned the first woman's husband asking for €2000 in exchange for the identity of the murderer; they set up a meet with him but he didn't show. The cops definitely suspect him. They're passing around photos of known criminals who meet the following description: 30-ish, white, well-built. The killer, assuming it's the same guy, is known to have stolen the first victim's bank card and to have withdrawn €300 from her account from a cash machine without a videocamera, but the motive is thought to have been murder rather than robbery. The most interesting speculation that I've heard is that the second victim's husband hired a hit man to kill her. He screwed up the first time and killed the wrong woman on the wrong floor of the garage but in the right space. So he went back after the heat was off and killed the right woman. The reasons I like this hypothesis are that it provides a motive for both actions. Also, whoever did it was a pro as he left few clues behind him. This would also provide a reason for the different methods of the two murders; the first one was stabbed and the second woman was beaten to death. The pro did it that way because he knows that normally a killer uses only one technique no matter how many people he kills, and in this way he throws off the cops.

The neighborhood is in terror. Some people are parking in the street because they're afraid to go into parking garages. Husbands are picking up wives who work in the neighborhood. They're setting up impromptu watch organizations though there are "more police than at the Moncloa". The Vanguardia reporter says that the tension in the neighborhood is growing rather than shrinking because of the lack of progress made in the investigation and that "no one talks about anything else (in the cafés), not even Van Gaal (Barcelona's much-hated just-fired soccer coach)."

Also, a young woman doctor from Tarragona disappeared eleven days ago and there's no trace of her. The cops are looking for her boyfriend, who disappeared the day after the woman. He took money out of a bank machine near the airport and is suspected to have taken a flight to Holland. A blanket from the woman's bedroom, stained with blood, and fingerprints were found inside her car. He is known to have quarreled with her recently because he told her a stack of lies about himself, including that he was a teacher of English, when he was really a taxi driver. However, their wedding was still on for the upcoming autumn. The cops are waiting for some DNA results to come back before they put out a warrant for him.

Posted 17:58 by John

Everybody in town seems to be talking about only three things, and that's pretty much what you see on the TV news too: Iraq, the Barça, and the "parking garage" murders.

The Vanguardia's lead story is on Bush's State of the Union speech; they call it "one of the most transcendental speeches of his term." Bush accused Saddam of lying and specifically said that Saddam holds 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulism toxin, 500 tons of sarin gas, mustard gas, and VX nerve gas, and 30,000 warheads capable of carrying chemical weapons. That sounds to me like a solid, direct, specific accusation of a "smoking gun" that Bush will now have to back up. Bush also said that there is evidence linking Iraq and terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, obtained through espionage, secret information, and the statements of arrested prisoners. Colin Powell will present this evidence, which includes photographs, to the UN Security Council on February 5. The Vangua has reported that the British will have a draft resolution ready by then.

The Vangua pays comparatively little attention to the rest of the content of Bush's speech, though they do resume the key points: a $674 billion tax cut over ten years (good move, George!), the necessity to extend health care protection to more of the uninsured (Important problem! Let's hear some specifics. This is a public quality-of-life issue, and it's perfectly justifiable to spend tax money for everybody's benefit to control contagious diseases like TB and AIDS and hepatitis C--they said on today's news that one million Spaniards may have hep C and most don't know it--and to improve the general level of health of the population. How about my plan for a National Preventative Health?), and federal subsidies for religious groups that rehabilitate drug addicts and alcoholics (Bad move, George! The government shouldn't subsidize any religious institution except for, of course, giving it a tax exemption as a charity. Exception: education vouchers "spent" at religious schools. You could argue that the subsidy is not being given to the school, but to the parent, who has the option of choosing one of a number of schools, some public, some private, and some religious.

Back to Iraq. The Vangua has a good report on the diplomatic maneuvering going on right now in Europe. It looks like Blair, Aznar, and Berlusconi, the Gang of Three, the Triple Alliance, the Troika, the Third Triumvirate, are on board with Bush despite a few quibbles. Australia, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary are also listed as being on board. In addition, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are behind the US. Anyway, Berlusconi is meeting with Blair today and will meet with Bush tomorrow, after which he will go to Russia and get Putin on board; Putin will need to have his palm greased but will almost certainly go along. Berlusconi and Putin are known for being simpáticos. They're both crooks, so that might have something to do with it. Tomorrow Aznar is meeting with Blair in Madrid. Bush and Blair are meeting at Camp David on Friday, and Blair is then going to France where he will meet with Chirac on Monday and get him on board. Bush, meanwhile will meet with Leszek Miller, prime minister of Poland (remember that name, you'll be seeing it a lot in the weeks to come) on Monday. Miller is already on board so this is probably a pep talk.

All of this makes me think that there will be a showdown in the UN Security Council on February 5 and that the British will propose a second resolution authorizing the use of armed force against Iraq. The US, UK, Spain, France, and Russia will vote yes. China and Germany will abstain. The resolution will pass and the war will begin very soon, within a few days. It will end very soon with a complete collapse of the Iraqi regime. Fewer than 1000 Iraqi civilians will be killed in the fighting, but there will be some gruesome scenes when rough justice is meted out by the people against Saddam's thugs. Very unpleasant stories will come out and many former anti-war people will be convinced of the war's justice after all of Saddam's atrocities are revealed. We then will have to occupy Iraq for at least five years. Since they can produce three million barrels of oil a day, the income from that ought to be more than sufficient to rebuild the country.

Spain has announced that it will not send troops, but will authorize United States use of its bases here. Spain will take charge of logistics in the Mediterranean, and will prepare to back up the Turks if that should be needed. It will provide hospitals and, after the war, a specially trained Guardia Civil unit with experience in Kosovo will form part of the occupation and peacekeeping force in Iraq. That sounds like cooperation pretty much to the limit of Spain's abilities. They really haven't got much of a military.

The Socialists have been challenging Aznar to go to the Congress of Deputies (Parliament) and state his case on the Iraq war. He will do so on February 5, the same day that Powell goes to the UN. Gee, you think Aznar might know something about what Saddam's got up his sleeve that they're not telling us yet? The Socialists are puffing out their chests and bragging that Aznar is only going to speak to the Parliament because they pressured him into it. The Socialists these days are really a bunch of jerks. Felipe González is not my idol, but he did preside over Spain's climb to real First World status during his administration between 1982 and 1996. The guys they've got now, though, are small-minded and petty; they have no plans or ideas except that of opposing Aznar and his governing PP, and so they whine, whimper, and complain every time Aznar announces he's thinking of getting someone to mow the lawn at the Moncloa.

Also, the Americans shot a bunch of Talibans in Afghanistan, eighteen says the Vanguardia, and captured another dozen. These guys were hiding out in the mountains near Pakistan, from where what's left of the Taliban are obviously being supplied. This is the biggest anti-Taliban operation since last March's Anaconda. Anaconda was, of course, much bigger.

Posted 15:00 by John

The Vanguardia's take on the Iraq situation is that the inspectors' report was "ambivalent". They didn't say that they'd found any weapons of mass destruction yet, but that they certainly weren't ruling out that Saddam may have some. The inspectors complained about lack of "full and sincere" cooperation on the part of Saddam, and they suspect that Saddam is hiding important quantities of chemical and biological weapons. Hans Blix asked specifically about what happened to massive amounts of VX nerve gas, mustard gas, and anthrax, which Iraq definitely had in the nineties and has not accounted for, much less in their 12,000-page declaration on the weapons in their possession; Blix called the pile of documents the Iraqis gave him "recycling". That is, garbage. Blix also suspects that the 16 warheads adapted for chemical weapons that were found may be "the tip of the iceberg". Blix says that he believes that the Iraqis are attempting to hide information from him. However, he asked for more time to continue inspecting.

We think the United States should just say No. (Not to drugs. I'm saying No to saying No to drugs. To further inspections.) First, this was supposed to be Saddam's last chance to come clean. He was supposed to be totally forthcoming with all the information he had and to directly answer all the inspectors' questions while letting them go wherever they wanted. He hasn't been. He is clearly trying to hide something. That right there is a breach of the UN resolution by Saddam. Second and most important, the UN inspections have been merely a distraction. They have not addressed the real point, which is this: In the wake of 9-11, the United States has decided that further terrorist massacres are not going to happen again. The United States suspects that Saddam's government, based on its more than twenty-year record of international criminality, may be working towards another such massacre. Therefore, the United States has decided to get rid of Saddam Hussein, and I am sure that Saddam Hussein is merely the first name on the list. All the UN blah-blah and mumbo-jumbo is merely window-dressing, aimed at tranquilizing those consciences that haven't gotten it through their heads yet that the war is already on and it was Saddam who declared it.

Interestingly, Ari Fleischer contrasted Saddam's obstructive behavior with that of Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and South Africa when they denuclearized for real. Those countries would have been more than thrilled to show UN inspectors their own secret porno collections should the inspectors have requested it. They'd have submitted to the international equivalent of proctology. They said, "Please, please, come inspect us! Ooh, ooh, inspect us some more, don't stop now! Oh my God......" Levity aside, they were serious about what they were doing. Saddam obviously is not.

I wonder what Bush is going to say about the State of the Union. I bet he lets loose at least one of the cards he has up his sleeve, probably one which will prove that Saddam really does have weapons of mass destruction and we can prove it beyond a doubt. If that happens, the French and Germans will have one more chance to get on board when Bush asks for a second Security Council resolution for appearances' sake in the first week of February. If France vetoes it or Germany votes "No", that's their business, and they will face the diplomatic consequences, but that's not to be worried about at this point. The Allies are likely to act soon after the passage (or failure) of the resolution. If they act after a No resolution, the United Nations will be fatally wounded--well, really, it'll just be the coup de grace for the UN, which has proved itself to be little more useful than the League of Nations. Lots of "ifs" here, I know.

By the way, Bush called up Aznar on the phone again, something Aznar is always ready to make public; Fleischer called Spain "a close ally whose counsel is much valued in the current circumstances." Fleischer congratulated Spain on the recent Al Qaeda bust. In case you were wondering, all sixteen of the arrested still in custody have been bound over for trial and are sitting in a lovely Spanish prison. Let's hope they don't put these guys in Can Brians, our local jail that's about as hard to break out of as a chicken farm with no chicken wire.

Posted 19:52 by John

Catalunya TV is reporting that Hans Blix has given his report to the UN; Iraq has not made clear what happened to quantities of VX gas, anthrax, and Scud missiles, among other things. The only cooperation the Iraqis have given has been passive. Sounds to me like there's a smoking gun here.

Posted 18:48 by John

Just a comment. I noticed on TV that Hugo Chávez was speaking from behind a lectern on which was draped a Venezuelan flag. Now, my trusty World Almanac has a picture of the Venezuelan flag, with a broad yellow stripe on top, then a blue stripe, and then a red stripe, with seven stars in a rainbow arc in the middle of the blue middle stripe. The flag Chávez was using, though, had a large black Venezuela below the arc of stars, and the shape of Venezuela on that there flag did not correspond to that on your National Geographic map. It corresponded to that of Venezuela AND Guyana. Seems that Chávez is claiming that Guyana is part of Venezuela. Now, there's been a long-standing border dispute between Venezuela and first, the British, who took over Guyana as a colony and held it until the 1960s, and then the Guyanese, when they became independent. The Americans at one point at the turn of the century were called in to mediate the border dispute between Britain and Venezuela. Now it looks like Chávez is claiming the whole thing. He's the typical nationalist jerk who gets wrought up over lines in the jungle, and that kind of person is very dangerous; look what happened in 1995 between Ecuador and Peru, Official Dumbest Latin American War of the Nineties. (The Official Dumbest Latin American War of All Time would be the time El Salvador took on Honduras over the results of a soccer game--or the time Paraguay went at it with Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay and only like 30,000 Paraguayan men survived, so polygamy had to be introduced to restock the population--or when Peru and Bolivia went after Chile and got creamed--or that time Bolivia and Paraguay had it out over the utterly useless Chaco--or the other two previous Ecuador-Peru wars--or Argentina deciding to take on the Royal Navy--or Santa Anna taking on the US again in 1846, after he'd already been beaten by just the Texans. Only Cool Latin American War Effort Ever: when Brazilian troops fought with the Allies in the Italian campaign between 1943 and 1945.)

Posted 18:19 by John

Is anybody in America writing about this incredible piece of irony: that France has unilaterally deployed military forces in the Ivory Coast, also known as Côte d'Ivoire? An attempted coup in that former French colony has turned into a nasty civil war. France brought together a group of other West African countries, most of which are French satellites and are considered to be within Paris's sphere of influence, and representatives of both sides in the conflict, at a meeting under the supervision of Jacques Chirac and Kofi Annan in Paris. Now's when the story gets good. This is from today's Vanguardia; the reporter's name is J.R. González Cabezas, who's in Paris.

Violent anti-French reaction in Ivory Coast capital

The capital of the Ivory Coast was yesterday the scene of violent demonstrations against France, in rejection of the agreement reached in Paris to put an end to the civil war. The riots broke out while the conference of West African leaders was preparing to ratify an agreement in the French capital itself, under the active protagonism of Chirac and with the approval of the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan. What happened in Abidjan confirms the fragility of the commitment formalised in Paris and also the risk assumed alone by France in its diplomatic and military adventure.

After intervening personally on Saturday to obtain President Laurent Ghagbo's acceptance of the agreement, Chirac had to intervene again on Sunday to demand Ghagbo's energetic call to put an end to the violent anti-French riot in Abidjan. The (French) minister of Foreign Affairs, Dominique de Villepin, did not doubt in attributing the events to "extremists close to power".

Starting on Saturday night, dozens of thousands of furious supporters of President Ghagbo, many of them armed with machetes and clubs, invaded the center of Abidjan and assaulted the French Embassy, which was attacked with stones and Molotov cocktails. Hundreds of exalted demonstrators tried to penetrate into the 43rd batallion of marines' military base; they are garrisoned in the capital. The French cultural center, a students' group, department stores, and various business and government offices were also attacked there.

The French soldiers used anti-riot weapons to repel the demonstrators, who also burned the Burkina Faso consulate; that country is accused of supporting rebel groups. Air France suspended its two flights to Abidjan, while Ghagbo and the French ambassador hurried back to the country, where 16,000 French nationals live.

The agreement for the formation of a government of national reconciliation with the presence of the three rebel groups is considered as a finish by Ghagbo's followers. "When the war is not won, one discusses and arrives at compromises, and I have not won the war," he said before leaving Paris, after formally agreeing and promising to put the accord completely into practice, as Chirac demanded. France's unusual interventionism has gone so far as to name, in Paris, the "consensus" prime minister and new strongman of the Ivory Coast, Seydon Diarra, age 69, a Muslim from the north. The EU has pledged €400 million to reconstruct the country.

I am staggered at, first, how much this looks like any early-20th century American intervention in some banana republic, and second, that the French are acting just as unilaterally as you please. They got their other West African dependents to put their stamp of approval on the French military intervention, but I don't recall France consulting with, say, the United States on this, and Kofi Annan is apparently looking on smilingly, though I don't remember ONE SINGLE UN RESOLUTION SAYING THA...OK, OK, I'll calm down and, like chill out for a minute. There. Nice, calm, dignified. I even edited out a seven-letter present participle.

Posted 17:14 by John

The Vanguardia's take on the Iraq situation today is that the US has made it public that it is willing to go it alone and attack Saddam Hussein. Colin Powell, the designated dove in the Administration, the good cop as opposed to Rumsfeld's bad cop, said at the World Economic Forum in Davos that the Americans "will act although others are not ready to join us", that "if Iraq doesn't disarm, it will be disarmed", and that "It is a fact that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction".

Meanwhile, the Social Forum, the Rainbow Festival of the Perenially Indignant in Porto Alegre, Brazil, has kicked off, and though absolutely nothing useful or original will be said or done there, it is getting big coverage in Spain. Lula da Silva said that he wants us to give him some money. He also said "Peace is not a moral obligation, but a rational imperative, and a peaceful solution at the hands of the UN must be found." The Vanguardia's correspondent mentioned that Da Silva talked a lot about poverty and stuff but said nothing concrete in the way of plans to do anything. Lula's pal Hugo Chávez showed up and "was received with enthusiasm" and "harvested support". Chávez claimed that he will introduce the "Tobin tax" "against monetary speculation" in Venezuela, which I calculate ought to deepen Venezuela's crisis regarding currency reserves. He didn't bother mentioning how, when, or with what he is going to do this.

Maybe we could call Castro, Chávez, and Lula the "Axis of Evel Knievel", since they're all like motorcycle stunt riders, either accelerating at full speed towards the jump off the cliff over the Snake River into oblivion (Lula), already well out over the canyon and heading into a steep nosedive (Chávez, who has also lost control of the steering mechanism on his bike), or having crashed straight into the canyon floor when his (red) parachute failed (Castro).

Posted 14:38 by John

Cultural note: Barcelona is quite a civilized place to live. It has a brand-new "National" Theater and 34 other stages for plays. Stuff that you might have heard of that's currently on includes "The Vagina Monologues" (hey, I didn't say it was all good or anything), "La Casa de Bernarda Alba" (there's always a Lorca revival on), "Sexual Perversity in Chicago" (there's almost always a David Mamet on, too), "Excess" by Neil La Bute, and "Arsenic and Old Lace". There are two bits of existential pretentiousness on, one by Bergman and the other by Camus. There are two local comic "showmen" on, Ángel Pavlovsky and idiotarian Pepe Rubianes, the internationally-known mime group El Tricicle, four musicals (two local originals) that I've never heard of before, and two plays by local dramatists (J.M. Segarra and J.M. Benet i Jornet, both of whom are also pretentious as all hell, but hey, at least they're producing local drama in big theaters and people go to see it). Local favorite actors Joan Pera and Paco Morán, who are very funny and who always have a crowd-pleaser--these guys' shows, Neil Simon-like comedies, run for months and sell out on the weekends--have another one out. Part of their schtick is they adapt these foreign plays so that the characters and their actions fit in with Catalan and Spanish daily life and popular culture--Oscar is a Barça fan, of course, in their version of "The Odd Couple". Also, fitting in with bilingual real life here in Barcelona, Pera (the straight man) speaks Catalan on stage and Morán (the clown) speaks Spanish. It's a masterful formula. Everybody's happy linguistically and can sit back and enjoy the show.

I am not much of a fan of classical music and don't claim to understand it, but if you like that sort of thing, Barcelona has a first-class opera house, the recently rebuilt and expanded Liceu, and two major concert halls, the much-criticized new Auditori and the Art Nouveau Palau de la Música Catalana, inside a spectacular Domenech and Montaner building. If you're a music fan you'll want to make a concert at the Palau part of your agenda while here. There's something on almost every night and prices are quite cheap. You don't have to dress up though, like, leather shoes, slacks, and a shirt with a collar might be nice.

There's a major trend that I've noticed here. All kinds of Eastern European orchestras are touring Western Europe playing popular favorites. They are advertised on billboards and with stick-up posters around the city. Coming to Barcelona soon are the Bielorussian Chamber Orchestra doing Handel's "Water Music" and Vivaldi's "Four Seasons", the Bulgarian State Opera Orchestra and Chorus doing chorales by Verdi and Bizet and "Carmina Burana", the Minsk Symphony doing De Falla's "Aranjuez", Rachmaninoff's Second concert for piano, "Swan Lake", and "Scheheradze", and the Russian National Orchestra and Chorus doing Bach's "Passion of Saint Matthew", Beethoven's Ninth, and Schubert's Unfinished. They must be making money doing this, giving the people what they want, and they must not have been making too much dough back home because if they had been, they'd be there, not here.

The Communists produced too many classically-trained musicians, more than their internal market could support, and not enough pop and rock and gadinga-dinga music. This is a beautiful example of the laws of supply and demand--there's not enough demand and too much supply of classical music in Eastern Europe since Communists disdained pop music and trained musicians only in classical styles, underemployed Eastern classical musicians see there's money in the West but not much demand, they create a demand by advertising they're going to play pieces that ordinary Joes like me have actually heard before, and they carry around prestigious-sounding names to reassure the casual concert-goer that he's seeing a real quality performance.

Meanwhile, I'll bet five bucks that Western pop groups are raking it in in Eastern Europe due to the lack of tradition of commercial pop over there. I know there are a lot of American groups playing American music--country, blues, gospel, rockabilly--who tour around Western Europe calling themselves authentic Americans with real roots and soul. There are a lot of Europeans interested in those kinds of music, but not enough of them to make that stuff part of the mainstream over here--but enough to pack a club. What these Americans are is competent bar bands who'd make a decent living back home but get treated as if they were, like, the real thing over here. Often, if it's a smaller band playing in a small club, only the frontman will be American and his sidekicks will be locals.

Posted 18:14 by John

In the Sunday section of today's Vanguardia, there's an article titled "A State Crime?". It's a full-page story, and the hook is that one William Pepper has published another book, this one called "An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King". William Pepper is a notorious conspiracy fruitcake whose crowning achievement was, in 1999, to persuade a mentally borderline Memphis jury to decide, in a civil case, that one Lloyd Jowers had been behind the King conspiracy. The award was $100.

The best book on the King assassination is Gerald Posner's Killing the Dream, which concludes that James Earl Ray did the murder, possibly with the help in the planning and the getaway of at least one of his brothers. It cannot be excluded that there was a low-level conspiracy, as it was a well-known rumor in America's prisons that there was a reward out, to be paid by some racist businessmen, for King's head. There's an outside chance that rumor might have been true.

I googled "william pepper king conspiracy" and found these five articles from fairly respectable sources, all of which condemn Pepper as a fraud, a nut, or both: The Washington Post (by Gerald Posner, a must-read), Court TV, CNN/Time, Slate, and the Boston Globe (another must-read, by Christopher Hitchens).

Here's the article, in italics, of course.

Maybe it was because of the glacial cold that froze the large neogothic tower of the Riverside church in Harlem last Thursday, but an audience of thirty people didn't seem like much to listen to the lawyer and former collaborator with Martin Luther King, William Pepper, at the release of his new book, "An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King". The work is the fruit of an investigation which has stretched on for more than ten years, in which Pepper has brought to life a series of evidence that prove that King was the victim of a plot coordinated by various American intelligence services, with the collaboration of the Army, the Memphis police, and the local Mafia.

"The media in the United States doesn't want to listen, this book will never come out in the newspapers," assured Pepper. And, in fact, despite the unending homages to the black leader rendered these days because of Martin Luther King Day, only the weekly Village Voice has published an article about the book. The New York Times asked Pepper for an op-ed, but they pulled out at the last moment.

Although Pepper's exhaustive investigation seems made for Hollywood, after the success of Oliver Stone's JFK, not even television has shown any interest. White but committed, Pepper worked with King during the year prior to his assassination on April 4, 1968. "They were times," Pepper recalls, "in which the reverend and civil rights activist became radicalized, strengthened his opposition to the Vietnam War, and widened his accusations to include "economic racism".

Just a year before falling, hit by a sniper's bullet on the balcony of a Memphis hotel, King had made a speech in the selfsame Riverside church in New york, and the rebellion of the Afro-Americans spread throughout the country and combined with the campaign against the war. "After that speech in this church," Pepper explains, "a hundred cities were under siege and the country in flames. They were very frightened in Washington, and King had to be eliminated."

This lawyer's arguments do not have much to do with the movies. Pepper is Professor of Law at Oxford University (???--not the one in England) and has been accumulating abundant evidence since he began representing James Earl Ray, the small-time crook who was accused of the death of King because of alleged racist motives and who remained in jail until his death in 1998.

"Ray was a docile, passive person who was no more racist than any working-class guy," explains the researcher. "He told me that he said he was guilty because they'd warned him that if he didn't confess, he'd fry in the electric chair." In any case, as soon as Ray entered jail, he asked for another trial. "Ray," says Pepper, "was set up in an operation planned together by the Army's military intelligence staff and a group of arms traffickers linked to the Mafia."

For this chronicler of the life and death of King, it is proven that the intelligence services considered that it was an absolute priority to subvert the civil rights movement, so they even infiltrated its ranks. The King operation was carried out by the Army, "because it had more blacks than the CIA and so it would have to take care of the protests."

"The role of the Army and other governmental agencies that collaborated in the murder of Dr. King," writes Pepper in his book, "has been one of the most sinister secrets of our country." According to his version, that afternoon of April 4, 1968, a team of Green Beret snipers just arrived from Vietnam had traveled to Memphis with one order: to assassinate Martin luther King and another black leader, the reverend Andrew Young.

Two of them, who now, after changing identities, live in Costa Rica and are Pepper's direct sources, were posted on the roof of a building nest to the Lorraine Motel, where King was staying the day before leading a demonstration of sanitation workers, principally blacks, as part of his campaign against economic racism.

Forced to change the room he had been given on the first floor for 306, on the third floor and much more exposed. King leaned over the balcony and was hit by a bullet that entered his jaw, went through his neck, and lodged in his shoulder. He was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital.

Nevertheless, it wasn't the military intelligence agents who had fired, says Pepper. When he was aiming at Young, the military sniper, Pepper's source, heard another shot. It had been fired, Pepper assures, by Earl Clark, a Memphis policeman who was hiding with one of the members of the gang of arms traffickers among the weeds of a nearby vacant lot. Clark, according to the investigator, was following orders from the Mafia padrino of Memphis Frank Liberto and his superior in the New Orleans Mafia, Carlos Marcello, involved in illegal arms trafficking to Latin America.

After King's assassination, the protest movement in which the campaign against the Vietnam War and the struggle for Afro-American civil rights entered into decline. A year before, Malcolm X--another irreplaceable leader--fell victim to another bullet. "Do you think the government killed Malcolm, too?" asked a middle-aged black woman in the Riverside church. "In the case of Martin Luther King I know for sure," Pepper affirmed; "with Malcolm X it would be a speculation, but yes, I believe the government killed him too."

Many of those present, survivors of the struggles back then, let it be known that they think the same thing. "The groups of special operations went to the demonstrations with photos of thise who the authorities considered to be dangerous, with orders to select them as targets in case a riot broke out," said Pepper.

What was said that day in Harlem should have been a front-page news story, if not in the United States, in the rest of the world. But it was too cold for the journalists to go to the Riverside church.

You see what we're up against over here? This article can kindly be understood as the ravings of a paranoiac schizophrenic or unkindly considered as the cynical lies of a charlatan, depending on what you believe William Pepper is. What it's not, though, is anything that anybody with the slightest common sense could believe. It is out-and-out bullshit. Bullcrap. And bullfuck. Yet it is published in La Vanguardia, the conservative leading newspaper--200,000 or so daily circulation--in Spain's second-largest city, as if it were fact. They didn't bother looking up William Pepper, that's for sure, so they're guilty of gross journalistic negligence at the very least. Of course, if they did look up Dr. Pepper, as he likes to be called, and discovered what a nut everybody respectable says he is, then they're guilty of bad faith. I suspect the latter, though the former can't be ruled out. Probably some combination of the two.

But if you're an average intelligent educated Spanish Joe who believes what he reads in the paper and sees on the TV news about the US, you see this crap and you believe it. Perfectly reasonably, they say, "Hey, that's what I read in the newspaper, so I believe it's true." No wonder they all think America is Satanic, if this is what the conservative press stakes its journalistic respectability to print. Imagine what the leftist press is like.

I did look up the Village Voice piece. It's mildly skeptical, not nearly enough. It does mention that Dr. Pepper's next mission is to go to Venezuela and preside a "fact-finding commission"--at Hugo Chávez's personal request.

Posted 17:37 by John

It's an incredible day in La Vanguardia. I'm going to be here translating and typing all afternoon (hey, people, if you need an English-Spanish / Spanish-English translator with lots of experience, just e-mail me at crankyyanqui@yahoo.com). Why? Because the only weapons we have against the idiotarians are logic, reason, facts, and ridicule in our war for the hearts and souls. Translating this vile steaming putrid suppurating filth (remember that disgusting room that Luke and Han Solo and Chewbacca get stuck in in Star Wars? Even more maggot-infested than that) gives us an ability to use those weapons against idiotarianism.

I've wondered whether what I've been doing here is mere "preaching to the choir", since I've been asked about it. I've decided that no, what I write is not going to convince too many people who have already decided that I'm wrong. However, it might convince some people who are right now sitting on the fence, not sure of what to think. It might also reinforce the opinions of those people who are predisposed to sympathize with my libertarian free-market hawkish perspective. So, since I'm not convincing a lot of Socialists and anti-Americans, am I wasting my time? I don't think so. It's not a waste of time at all to either provide more ammunition to your side or to try to bring over people who might not have made up their mind yet.

Now, what I need to try to do better is to focus my posts. I want some of them to give support to other people who share my ideas, and perhaps influence my allies on smaller points within the general framework of a democratic capitalist system (e.g. we may both be free-market on economics but you might believe in, say, exclusively private health care, while I would defend a mixed private-public system). But I want other posts to try to convince middle-of-the-roaders to come over to democratic capitalism, to vote for candidates and parties that support a democratic capitalist system. One thing I'm going to do in those posts is to cut down the ridicule and sneering (and bad language) that I so gleefully fill this blog with. Middle-of-the-roaders are people who aren't sure what they think, who can't choose between two or three or four options, and who are looking for someone to persuade them and win them over. Being straight-up, treating your opponents with respect, and trying to see the merit in opposing points of view while being firm in your own basic convictions is what will persuade the undecided of your decency and reliability.

Now we'll see whether I can actually do that. To paraphrase St. Augustine, "Give me good taste, credibility, and dignity--but not yet!"

Anyway, Cinderella Bloggerfeller has a post on today's Bartasar Porcel eruption. Someone also provided a rather free translation of Porcel's column at the Axis of Porcel HQ. Our translation here is somewhat more traditional yet less expressive. It's in italics. Wiseass comments by us which will only serve to annoy moderates and drive them away are not.

Models of War

The American secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, has insultingly nicknamed us "Old Europe". Well, he did it to France and Germany, which means the same thing. Because if it turns out that Spain, because Aznar blindly follows Bush's war drums, is the New Europe, we're ready: we're Luis de Galinsoga's (a Francoist writer) "sentinels of the West" again! Rumsfeld adds that the new center of European gravity has moved to the east. Where? Russia, Chechenia, the former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, places they barely know the location of? I don't think Bush is ignorant, as they say; I think his whole team is. Besides, so inefficient in preparing war--these months of rummaging around bellowing at thousands of soldiers have exasperated the Americans themselves--or in hunting Bin Ladin like Aznar has done and is doing with the chapapote (Galician oil spill).

Comments: a) the last sentence is out-and-out incomplete, with no subject or predicate, and can't be justified as a case of intentional rule-breaking for stylistic purposes. It's a case of Porcel's not even bothering to go over the three or four paragraphs of rant that he sents in to the Vangua every day. b) Porcel knows less about preparing war than my cat Oscar. c) Note the standard canard that Americans know less about geography than the cultured Europeans. My response when confronted with someone who tries this one--"Americans don't know where Barcelona is"--is always, "Oh, I managed to get here just fine. You just fly from New York to MADRID--that's BARAJAS Airport, near Madrid, which is the CAPITAL of SPAIN. Barajas, near Madrid, is a BIG airport to which LOTS of flights come from New York. Then you change to a SMALLER plane to fly on to Barcelona." If they persist I say, "Look, give me one really good reason why someone in Kansas needs to know where Barcelona is. It's not like he cares or anything." Fisticuffs are normally threatened at this point. d) Note that Porcel proudly includes himself among the "Old Europeans" without any invitation at all to do so. e) Note Porcel's obvious bad faith; he knows perfectly well that Rumsfeld and Fleischer were talking about NATO allies Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and, yes, Bulgaria, rather than Russia and Chechenia and Serbia, as the "New Europe". Were I from a Western European country, I would not shoot off my mouth regarding what happened in the former Yugoslavia.

Saddam is a brutal dictator who is only good at oppressing the people and submitting it to hunger, but Bush wants to overthrow him, we don't know exactly why, unless it's to give it to other masters, like for instance his allies the Saudi rulers, one of the major embarrassments on the planet and who whip up the fundamentalism that blew up the Twin Towers more than Saddam himself. And all because of the chapapote! Why doesn't Bush go to Galicia and get what's there, which has even been blessed by Fraga (the conservative prime minister of Galicia, rather a Strom Thurmond figure). It's shocking that international politics have reached such low quality.
Comments: a) Nice "yes, but". b) More bad faith or just stupidity: Iraq will not be turned over to the Saudis. That is just not on anyone's agenda. c) The Galicia oil spill, of course, had nothing to do with American international policy. Porcel is blatantly trying to swing both disparate clubs the Spanish anti-Americans and anti-Aznarites are trying to bash Aznar on: the oil spill and the upcoming Iraq war, which are entirely unconnected.

But we should be specific: the minister in Washington labels us old-fashioned because we don't believe in war or in war without reasons. That is, Germany, with three horrible wars in a century, the biggest that humanity has seen, and France, unleashing them too or suffering from them, while the peace of the EU has broght us an unimaginable tranquility and prosperity, should embrace weapons because (America says so), with blind enthusiasm. Donald Rumsfeld: we must remember that name and, if we see him on one side of the street, cross over to the other side. Russia, massacring the Chechens yesterday and today, and with its gulags behind it, has become the model: uf!

Comments: a) Russia is not the model for anything. It's Poland, the Czechs, and Hungary who are the model. This was explicitly stated. Porcel's bit of bad faith and / or ignorance is repeated, making it clear that the first time wasn't a mistake. b) Mr. Porcel, you and the rest of the European Left did damn little to dump the gulags on the trashpile of history. c) The contempt for Rumsfeld is rather pathetic, since it's fairly obvious who the better man is when we compare Rumsfeld and Porcel himself, and anyone who's been writing a newspaper column which opines on international issues for like about the last fifteen years ought to know who Donald Rumsfeld is already. d) Europe has enjoyed peace since 1945 because of NATO and the American nuclear umbrella, not because of anything the European Union ever did. Since Mr. Porcel is so eager to consider himself alluded to by the phrase "the Old Europe", he might remember Old Europe's admirable skill and dexterity in handling the Yugoslavian debacle. Old Europe neither can nor will fight and so it tries to make a virtue out of this.

It's true that the United States was basic and decisive in freeing western Europe from Naziism and we must be thankful. But this constant desire to go to war, whether with the Rifle Association which has the country under siege, with General Custer and company eliminating the Indians, with the ferocious internal racism, with the exporting of films with demential violence, or with its protection for the dictatorships of the south, it is not at all convincing, no.

Comments: a) Note the SECOND "Yes, but" of this article. b) It's obvious that Porcel's concept of the US comes almost completely from the movies, not from any sort of research into or reading about the subject. c) Boy, a good Porcelazo doesn't come along too often, but when we get one, it's a good one.

Posted 06:28 by John

John Bono from No Replacement for Displacement has a hilarious takedown of the Rolling Stones' pretentious anti-global-warming concert.

Posted 23:25 by John

I just do not get this column from NRO. If I read it right, the author is saying that real pirates and buccaneers were horrible people, and it is incongruent that pirates have rather a rebellious, devil-may-care image today when in real life they were horribly frightening. So far so good. Then he tells us that he thought it was appropriate that the Patriots won the Super Bowl last year because of their name. OK, no prob. Then he says we should root against the Buccaneers because their name is so inappropriate, like calling a team the Rapists or the Robbers or the Murderers. I'm still with him, but the problem here is that the Buccaneers' rival is the Oakland Raiders. Uh, the Raiders use pirate imagery, too, and have been using it for more than forty years, while the Bucs have only existed since '77. In order to be consistent, we would have to root against both teams for glorifying pirates. I always root against the Raiders, no matter what--I could no more root for the Raiders, ever, even if they were playing the SS Amerikanisch Fussball Reichsformationgruppe team, than I could for the Cowboys, or the Yankees, or the Lakers--so I'm going to ignore the whole glorifying-pirates issue and root for Tampa Bay. Even though they have some insufferable loudmouths on their team and I like Rich Gannon and Jerry Rice.

Posted 22:20 by John

Just a few jottings while wondering whether Shane McGowan ever got his teeth fixed...Sandra Bullock, in Madrid to flog a movie with Hugh Grant, said, "Why doesn't Bush take a vote so that the American people can give their opinion?" Uh, Sandy, we already did that. It's called an election. Hugh Grant kept his mouth shut, demonstrating that he really is smarter than most actors...The "parking garage" murderer is still on the loose after killing two women in twelve days in the same uptown Barcelona parking garage. The papers are really hinting that the cops are interested in the second victim's husband. In both cases the killer took the victim's credit card and tried to use it; he got 300 euros out of a bank machine after the first murder...A band calling itself the Misfits, with Jerry as the only original member left, Marky Ramone on drums, and Dez Cadena of Black Flag on guitar played here in Barcelona. They did about forty songs, including half a dozen Ramones covers. I'm sorry I missed it, though those guys are just as big dinosaurs now as the Floyds and Zeps and ELPs that they started out as a reaction to were then...Johann Mühlegg, the "Spanish" "winner" of two gold medals at the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, has been hit with a two-year suspension for what they call "doping" over here. He got mad at the German Olympic committee and decided to change nationality, so he sold himself to the highest bidder, who turned out to be Spain--€72,000 per gold medal. Mühlegg won two gold medals in cross-country skiing. He then came in first in the main event, the 50-km race. He then failed a drug test. They stripped him of the medal for the 50-km race but allowed him to keep the other two. His suspension will run out before the next Olympics, so he's training away...Pau Gasol almost had a 20-20 game; he had 24 points and 17 rebounds against Sacramento. The FC Barcelona basketball squad's pride and joy, Slobovian (or some country called something like Slobovia) small forward Gregor Fucka, is having a disappointing season. We have nicknamed him, of course, "Mutha".

Posted 18:12 by John

According to La Vanguardia, the State Department has announced that Americans living abroad should be prepared for a possible evacuation. I'm not too worried, but I am going to call up the consulate and let them know where we are just in case. You never know.

The Vanguardia's take on the current diplomatic turmoil is that the Americans and British are willing to wait a few more weeks for the UN inspectors to continue inspecting between now and the eventual attack on Iraq, which everybody seems to have decided sometime during the week is now inevitable. There's definitely a feeling in the Spanish media that the decision has been made and the war is on, that it's only a question of when. The purpose will be to do a little more convincing and arm-twisting on Congress and American public opinion while giving Germany and France another chance to get on board. Meanwhile, Spanish Foreign Minister Ana de Palacio met with Secretary of State Colin Powell yesterday in Washington and backed the American position in the press conference afterward. Madrid "is considering" a second Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq. That means Spain, with a seat on the Security Council (though no veto--we're not a permanent member, only on for two years) will vote yes should the Americans and/or British introduce such a measure. The Vangua mentions that the NYT reported that a White House source says that Bush talks with Aznar more often than with any other European leader. Good. Aznar deserves recognition for his gutsy stand with the US and UK and Australia and Canada against terrorism.

I suppose you've all heard that Donald Rumsfeld referred to Germany and France as "the old Europe" and Ari Fleischer emphasized that the US was by no means "going it alone", that we have the support of the UK, Australia, Spain, Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic, and several other Eastern European nations. Boy, did the Axis of Weasels ever get mad. Said elegant, sophisticated Roselyn Bachelot, the French minister of Ecology, "Merde." That was also the title of the lead editorial of Libération, the French Socialist newspaper. Jacques Derrida said "It is a shocking, scandalous, and typical statement. (Rumsfeld's) words do no more than underline the importance of European unity." Derrida, therefore, seems to wish that the US and Europe were enemies rather than friends. Jürgen Habermas said "Rumsfeld is responsible for a security doctrine that laughs at international law. The criticisms of his European friends trip over the American ideals of the 18th century." Romano Prodi said, "It's not age that makes Europeans oppose the war, but prudence. The Europeans are not old, they are wise." Jorge Semprún said, "We could turn the question around and say: the problem is Bush. While Europe tries to prevent an unjust and absurd war it will be, whether old or young, in the correct position." Le Figaro called Rumsfeld's words "an insult to Europe" and Le Monde said "Old Rumsfeld's words reveal the incapacity of America to tolerate an independent ally that will be called Europe." Régis Débray, who got himself thrown in jail back in the sixties for helping Che Guevara start a failed revolution in Bolivia and who probably should have been shot then, said, "The joint opposition of France and Germany against America and their rejection of war make me happy and fill me with hope...At last Europe has a dimension of foreign policy."

Huh. These Europeans are mighty sensitive. Who was it who said the Americans were simplistic or cowboys or warmongers or crudely imperialistic? Who called Israel a shitty little country? Whose newspapers are full of vicious anti-Americanism every day? Seems that they can dish out insults but can't handle the truth. The truth is this. Europe was the most important place in the world from about 1500 to 1945. In 1945, America and Russia took over as most important, but between 1945 and 1991, Europe was one of the most important places in the world in American eyes--remember we all thought that if war with the Russians came, it would be triggered by Soviet economic weakness and come in the form of a Soviet conventional invasion overrunning Germany? I remember thinking that until about 1988. We needed the Europeans then, not only for diplomatic support, but to fight.

What happened, though, is that when the Warsaw Pact collapsed everybody cut defense spending hugely. America did, too, and hawks repeatedly claimed that Clinton had been underfunding the military for eight years. But the Europeans, even the Brits, cut their defense spending so much that they didn't really have legitimate armed forces anymore. They left themselves dependent on the idea that there would be no more threats, that they could finally relax, that the threat of war that hung over the whole twentieth century (1914-1991) in Europe was finally finished. They also left themselves dependent on the United States for protection against outside threats, whether they realized what they were doing or not; no European country is now capable of fighting a real war alone. If you are a dependent, your status is different than that of a smaller equal.

Check out this metaphor. Imagine that you, a generally decent and fairly moral person, go to a tough high school where there are bullies who sometimes gang up against smaller, weaker people. You are a big, strong guy, and the bullies can't push you around. They don't even try. You worry, though, about all the bullies ganging up on you at once, and so you need friends. There are some other decent, moral fellows in the school who don't like the bullies, either, and so you all naturally gravitate toward one another and help one another out. If you have to fight one of the bullies, your friends watch your back. They may not be as big and strong as you are, but you need them, and you respect them. Now, you also have dependents. These are guys who can't take care of themselves, who aren't strong enough to fight the bullies. You, being a fairly decent guy, sometimes interfere if the bullies start picking on these guys. These dependents really hate you, because they hate themselves for being weak, and you always have to watch out for them. They are actually a danger to you, because they're untrustworthy and indecisive and are so insecure that they'll take unfair advantage to move up the pecking order and regain some self-respect. They can even be brought to side with the bullies against you if they think that it will help them regain status.

So, anyway, you finally cow all the bullies. Some of your friends remain your friends, ready to fight bullies, though their help isn't needed anymore. Others forget that they once needed to fight and sink to the level of dependents.

Europe is no longer one of the most important places in the world to the Americans, and hasn't been one for about twelve years. Britain, Spain, and Italy have been realistic; they've seen that it is both intelligent and right to be friendly with America even though they have lost importance in America's eyes. The Norwegians, Danes, and Dutch have similar attitudes. They don't like bullies and aren't going to stand for any bullying. Even though America doesn't need them, they're decent folks and will still watch America's back. Other countries like Sweden and Belgium have generally been more neutral, but have not usually fallen into unfriendliness. France and Germany, however, have ranged from pricklish neutrality to downright unpleasantness. They've become dependents. They've lost their moral strength so much that they either stupidly don't recognize or, worse, cravenly connive with, the small bullies who are still around trying to stir up whatever trouble they can.

Posted 14:27 by John

Thanks to InstaPundit for instapunditing us and Ibidem. All y'all first-time visitors, thanks for coming by and we hope you'll stay around a while and set a spell.

Posted 02:51 by John

The Al Qaeda arrests here in Barcelona (see below) are significant news. They are solid proof that Al Qaeda is a threat to the civilized world. They planned to commit acts of terrorism, apparently using chemicals, right here. And in London, Paris, and Strasbourg. If this doesn't convince Europeans, including those in France, for God's sake, that it's time to draw a line in the sand and say "Take your stand. You're either with us and against the terrorists, and we mean all the terrorists; you're neutral and will enjoy the advantages and also suffer the drawbacks of having been a fence-sitter; or you're on their side. Which is it?"--then I don't know what will. And if anyone doesn't see by now that Al Qaeda is in cahoots with Hezbollah, Al Fatah, Islamic Jihad, the PFLP, and all those other flaming bags of shit, you are willfully ignoring the obvious. And where do those people get their money, weapons, and support? Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, North Korea, Sudan, Algeria. AND certain people, some highly placed, in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and everywhere else in the Arab / Muslim world and a lot of places outside it.

What I find amazing are all the educated, intelligent people who are perfectly willing to believe that mobile phones fry their brains, that Monsanto is trying to take over the world, that the CIA or the Mafia or the Teamsters killed Kennedy, that there's a conspiracy between the government, the referees, and some obscure figures with "muchos intereses" to screw FC Barcelona out of the League again this year, that opening the window when it's hot outside is bad for you, that you can catch a cold if the wind blows on you, that crystals have a lot of power and so do pyramids and that everyone has an energy field (and that mine is negative), that feng fuckin' shui is something more than a millenarian superstition, that electric power lines give off radiation, that there are people out there who pay untold sums of money to watch snuff movies, that there are Satanic cults sacrificing babies infiltrating our nursery schools, that it's possible to lose weight without eating less, exercising more, or both, that AIDS is a plot by the federal government to exterminate blacks or gays or both, that the CIA was running drugs from Nicaragua into the USA to fund the contras, that you can learn a foreign language by paying thousands of dollars and sitting at a computer terminal, that the US Army had hit squads to kill deserters in Vietnam, that O.J.'s son was the one who really did it, or that this whole war thing is a devilish plot cooked up between the oil companies, the Pentagon, the arms manufacturers, Dick Cheney, and the Bavarian Fuckin' Illuminati, yet they are unwilling to believe that there are governments and organizations out there that are working together with the goal of destroying everything that we all cherish about our Western society and that maybe we ought to take action against them now while we still can rather than wait until we can't anymore.

Posted 02:13 by John

The Vanguardia is reporting (click here for their 10:30 PM local time update) that the 16 suspected terrorists in custody in Spain are members of the Salafista splinter of the Algerian GIA. They provided information and infrastructure to Al Qaeda. Spanish police made 12 raids in Barcelona and the surrounding autonomous region of Catalonia. Among the items confiscated, as well as some chemicals (earlier reports said "ricin", this update says "resins") and explosives, along with bomb-making materials and all sorts of electronic gear, not to mention enough radio gear to contact Algeria and Chechenia, and a few guns and lots of papers and documents, was equipment for forging documents and credit cards. The forged credit cards were a source of income.

Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar confirmed that the "suspects" were preparing attacks with explosive and chemical material. He stated that this was "an important unraveling of a network of terrorists linked to al Qaeda", and a "strong blow" at the terrorists' financing network. He also confirmed that the suspects had been in contact with those arrested in Britain and France who had planned attacks in Strasbourg, Paris, and London. Minister of Interior (law enforcement) Ángel Acebes said that Spain was "at the forefront" of the struggle against Islamic and all other forms of terrorism, and pointed out that 35 suspected Islamic terrorists have been arrested in Spain since Sept. 11, 2001.

Two different groups were broken up; one was based in Barcelona and led by Mohamed Taraqui, and the other was based in Banyoles, a small city with a fairly large population of Arab immigrants near the French border, and was led by Bard Eddu Farji. Both men are Algerian, as were some of the other men arrested; others are Moroccan and Pakistani. All those arrested have been identified and their names released except two.

The origin of the trail leading to today's actions begins with the arrest of Mohamed Bensakhria by the Spanish police in Alicante in June 2001. He was the leader of Al Qaeda's operations organization.

For lots more information check Ibidem.

Posted 18:26 by John

Here's Catalunya TV's take on the Al Qaeda arrests in Catalan. What they say here is pretty much what everyone else is reporting. They clarify that if the arrestees are not charged with any crime in Spain they will be extradited to France. The anti-government spin on this one is that the government screwed up and looked like doofuses. My take on this one is the government arrested sixteen terrorist dirtbags and while doing so arrested three people who were later released and incorrectly broke down some drunk old slag's door. So far there have been no further updates of importance.

Posted 17:57 by John

Here's Fox News's report in English on the Spain Al Qaeda arrests; it's their top international story. Check out Jesús Gil's Ibidem for more info; he's all over this one.

Posted 15:59 by John

Breaking News: Major Al Qaeda Bust in Barcelona

Click here to read La Vanguardia's online story in Spanish.

Acting on information from the French judicial police, Spanish police arrested 19 people in Catalonia this morning in an operation that began at 3:30 AM. Three of them have been released. Eleven have been sent to Madrid where they will be held under tight custody. More than 150 police officers participated in the more than a dozen raids made. Guns, bomb-making material, explosives, and two barrels of ricin were confiscated. The arrested are allegedly linked to Al Qaeda and to an Algerian radical splinter group. They have been linked to the bombing in Bali, the planned attempt to blow up Strasbourg Cathedral, and the plans to release gas in the Paris metro and the London underground.

The arrests were made in Barcelona and Girona provinces, some in Barcelona and Girona themselves, and others in Banyoles, Olot, Salt, Santa Coloma de Gramanet, and L'Hospitalet. The arrested are of Algerian, Pakistani, and Moroccan ancestry. They had apparently planned to use the confiscated material for actions in Algeria and Chechenia.

I have checked three news sources; La Vanguardia and Television Española emphasize the arrests, the confiscated material, the police work, and the terrorist connections of the arrested. TV Catalunya, however, controlled by the Catalan nationalist government, emphasized the police errors--they interviewed one of the arrested who was later freed and he said, "They came in with guns and kicked down the door and my wife and kids were in there." (Sorry, dude, if you're suspected of being a terrorist they can kick your door down and arrest you with a warrant, which they had. Be thankful you live here where you get turned loose if you're really innocent, unlike, say, wherever you come from.) They interviewed a Catalan friend of one of the others arrested, who looked like a goddamn squatter (the Catalan guy), and he said, "He's not guilty of anything. And if he's guilty of something, then it's being a good person and letting some people stay at his house." (Uh, I think that's called harboring, if those people were terrorists and he knew it.) They showed several of the kicked-down doors and a couple of weeping wives. (Sorry they took hubby away. Hope he's innocent for both of your sakes. But I'll bet he's not.) In general, they made it look like this was the act of the oppressive police going after framed people. The police did bust down one wrong door, realized they had the wrong place--TV Catalunya gave a long interview to the woman, who looked like an old slapper and was clearly drunk while the reporter was talking to her--said, "Sorry," left, and busted down the right door.

Posted 17:52 by John

A cursory look at today's Vanguardia tells us that the French and Germans are making antiwar noises again. I don't think it means too much, though French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin suggested that France might use its veto on the Security Council to torpedo any authorization for war on Iraq. I'm not demanding that it's France's duty as an ally to support us. I am saying that it's their duty as an ally not to actively oppose us. I don't care if they abstain. It doesn't even really matter whether Germany backs us up or not, though a German no vote in the Security Council would be a clear sign of lack of German common decency. But if France vetoes a US-UK proposal to go to war in Iraq, I vote we revoke all France's privileges. They should no longer be considered even a friend, much less an ally. No need to make an enemy of them, but no reason to do them any favors, either. We'll nod politely as we pass one another on the street, and that'll be it.

In Venezuela, underhanded Chávez maneuvers--he's retroactively fired one of the judges and invalidated all decisions he had taken part in--caused the Supreme Court to suspend the February 2 non-binding referendum demanding that Chávez resign which opposition petitions, signed by more than 2 million people, had legitimately demanded. Sounds a lot like what the Nazis did in order to seize power in Germany. Instead, Chávez bussed thousands of his rural supporters into Caracas with the objective of intimidating demonstrators. Sounds a lot like the March on Rome. (The Blackshirts didn't march, they traveled by train. You think Mussolini could have marched more than about twenty feet with that gut?) Venezuela is looking at a 25% drop in GNP, unemployment up to 28%, hyperinflation, and hyperdevaluation of the currency. They will have to suspend payments on the national debt within weeks.

What the Cataloonies seem most offended by, in Chief Judge of the Constitutional Court Manuel Jiménez de Parga's verbal diarrhea against the "historical nationalities", is that he said their ancestors were dirty and unwashed 1000 years ago while a great civilization flourished in Andalusia. Boy, did that ever make them mad. Meanwhile, the Catalan shopkeepers' association have said that they have no problem with the Generalitat law on the commercial use of Catalan, but they have requested subsidies in order to buy new signs. Yep; if the government is interfering with private businesses in matters that aren't related to public safety, it--that is us--ought to pay for the costs of its interference until we get together and vote said government out of office. One of the requirements of the law is that there must be at least one employee capable of attending clients in Catalan. So if I move to Barcelona from, say, Cáceres, because I want to open a comic book shop there, I have to either learn Catalan myself or hire someone who knows Catalan. What if I don't want to hire any employees? I have no choice. Catalan-language laws are effectively barriers and constraints on trade and employment. I should be allowed to use whatever language I want. If I want to attend clients in Latvian, that's my business. It might be smart for me to hire someone who knows Catalan, but I shouldn't be forced to do it. As PP Justice Minister José María Michavila said, "The problem is when language is not used as an element of communication but, on the contrary, when there are people who want to use it as an element of confrontation."

In a survey of 12,000 students between 12 and 16 years old in the five Spanish autonomous communities with most young immigrants, Madrid, Catalonia, Andalusia, Valencia, and Murcia, 36.5% have a negative point of view toward immigration, and 9.5% of them "totally reject" immigrants. It seems that Spanish parents do not object to immigrants if there are less than about 10% of them among the students; teachers do not see problems until the immigrant percentage gets up to 15-30%. Several elementary schools in the Barcelona immigrant ghettos downtown--Pakistanis on Sant Pau, Dominicans on Carders, Chinese around Princesa, Filipinos on Bonsuccés, Arabs and South Americans in several areas--have 60% or more immigrant children. The reporter lets an ethnic judgment slip through, implying that schools with a low percentage of Arabs among the immigrants have fewer problems than those with a high percentage of what are now called "Maghrebies".

A second woman was murdered inside the same parking garage in the Putxet area, right next door to Gracia, only fifteen or so minutes away from my apartment on foot, within the past two weeks. El Putxet is an upper-middle class area where nothing ever happens--at least not until a woman was stabbed to death twelve days ago by an unknown assailant. Somebody, either the same guy or someone else (sharp thinking there!), killed another woman yesterday; this time she was beaten to death. Looks like the cops might suspect the second woman's husband, at least in her own death.

Lay's gets busted! Lay's, the number one potato chip brand in Spain (pronounced "Lies"; "Roof-lehs" are also popular) has gotten itself into trouble for deceptive advertising. Lay's advertised one of its products, Lay's Mediterranea, as being made with olive oil; they went far enough as to hire Antonio Banderas to do TV ads. Well, only 6% of the oil used in the production of Lay's Mediterranea is real olive oil. So a judge sentenced Lay's, which is a subsidiary of Pepsi, to cease and desist and to pay the court costs. All right! Get those corporate cheaters! False advertising really pisses me off.

Posted 16:27 by John

Pau Gasol of Memphis in the NBA gets a lot of attention over here, since he's a native of Barcelona. He gets outrageous praise in the local media since he's a hometown favorite. I googled around through the sports sites to see what real NBA writers had to say about Gasol, to see whether the press he gets here is overhyped. It isn't. Gasol is really considered to be one of the best young players in the NBA and a future All-Star, maybe as early as next year. He struggled for a while early this season, but so did everyone else on the team, and that was largely due to coaching confusion--Memphis fired its coach early in the season after going 0-8 and brought in old-school Hubie Brown, who is like 96 years old but who has stabilized the team. Hubie hadn't coached since 1986. Gasol has played quite well so far in January. He had four straight 20-point 10-rebound games. As a check, I googled "pau gasol sucks". No hits. Therefore, none of the many sports blogs, which are often highly critical and foul-mouthed and also often are dead-on in their puncturing of overblown jock egos, have it in for big Pau. That's unusual. To confirm, I googled "pau gasol blows". No hits. He really must be pretty good. The criticism I saw of him is that he needs to bulk up--he's still only 23, seven feet and 240 pounds--and that he has to play more consistently and, particularly, play tougher on defense. Hubie Brown ought to be able to convince him to do that, and those criticisms are rather mild compared to the praise Gasol gets--he can score 20 a game, he's got a nice touch, he's extremely well-coordinated for someone so tall, he's fast, he's a good rebounder and passer, he's a good outside shooter, he's a crowd-pleaser (loves to slam-dunk), and, according to this gay sports site I came across, good-looking. They ranked him as the fourth-hottest NBA foreign player. Not bad.

Posted 17:16 by John

There's a discussion going on down the page in the Comments section about Dick Cheney's connections with Halliburton and Iraq. I googled "cheney halliburton iraq" and figured that these five articles from relatively respectable sources, National Review, UPI, the Washington Post, the Observer, and the Nation, summed up the story pretty well. Even the Nation admits that the two deals Halliburton did with Iraq, involving oil equipment worth some seventy million bucks, while Cheney was its boss during the period of the embargo, were legal under the oil-for-food arrangement. The deals were never a secret nor were they covered up by anyone. Regarding financial matters, Cheney's Halliburton pushed the law pretty close to its limit and got caught breaking it once, for which it was fined. In general, it looks to me like Cheney's conduct was not pure as the driven snow but not outrageously out of line for the boss of a big company. They've got nothing on him, which is why the matter has been dropped. A comment, by the way, is that Cheney has consistently opposed sanctions and embargoes as a part of US policy.

Posted 16:33 by John

Here's a link to a National Review article by Andrew Stuttaford on cults, specifically the Raelians and suchlike. The article points out that Jimmy Carter once claimed to have seen a flying saucer, which is true. This one is on Chávez and Venezuela, from FrontPage. Comment: an ad hoc international "Friends of Venezuela" group has been formed to try to assist in negotiating a bloodless solution to the Chávez problem. It consists of the US, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. Sounds good, the Americans, the Iberian democracies, and the three most important relatively stable democracies in Latin America. Respectable folks, for the most part. Chávez wanted to add Russia, China, and Cuba to the group. Not even Lula would go along with that and the group has remained at six. Here's another one on Venezuela, originally from the Washington Times.

This one is from National Review; it's a review of the Almodóvar flick, "Hable con ella", which won the Golden Globe for best foreign movie. It's a fairly positive review, though it points out the weakness of all his flicks: they get stuck in the plot about halfway through and then either the story chugs along and peters out or something totally absurd that torpedoes the movie's believability happens. The Vangua said a couple of days ago that it was ridiculous that "Hable con ella" wasn't chosen as Spain's candidate for the Oscar for best foreign movie, and attributed this failure to the efforts of Almodóvar's enemies being small-minded and getting back at him through the Spanish Academy. It's going to look especially stupid if "Hable con ella" pulls an Oscar nomination in a regular (non-foreign) category, which it might in this very weak year for Hollywood. I repeat that I am no fan of Almodóvar, but I respect his competence, professionalism, and creativity. He certainly makes more interesting movies than almost anyone else in Spain. By the way, the Spanish film industry is yelling again for more subsidies from our tax money. They shouldn't be getting a duro, of course; it shouldn't be the government's job to finance movies. Well, they already get some, and they want more so they can "level the playing field" against the big American studios. Sorry, guys, the big American studios get zero government subsidies. The playing field is not only level, it's tilted toward the Spanish industry, and further subsidies would only serve to make more movies that nobody will ever see. No kidding. There are at least several movies completely financed by the Catalan government alone that are still in the can and have been for up to several years because they're so unwatchable that not even Catalan TV will show them. I don't think Almodóvar gets subsidies, and if he does, he doesn't need them.

Here's another review from NR, this one of "The Gangs of New York", and on the real history behind the movie. Scorsese apparently confuses his gangs. According to Luc Santé in Low Life, the first dangerous gangs in New York were Irish and sprung up in the 1820s and 30s in the Five Points, a rough part of the lower East Side. They included the Roach Guards, the Plug Uglies, and the Dead Rabbits. In response to them, other gangs sprang up in the poor Bowery area, especially the Bowery Boys and also the Atlantic Guards and the O'Connell Guards. The disputes between Five Points and Bowery gangs were more territorial and classist (the Bowery gangs were working poor, the Five Points gangs were underclass) than ethnic; though some of the Bowery gangs were Irish and others nativist Americans, they would join together to fight against the Five Pointers. By the 1840s the Dead Rabbits had become the undisputed leader of the Five Points gangs and faced off in conventional, planned, almost ritual battles with the Bowery Boys. Says Santé,

As vocational schools, the two gangs had their different specialties. The Dead Rabbits turned out numerous keepers of dives...and enforcers, shoulder-hitters, mayhem artists...The Bowery Boys, on the other hand, specialized in supplying votes for political entities, for poll fixing, poll guarding, repeat voting, and any number of other activities. The clash between Tammany and nativist factions constantly threatened the stability of the gang, which somehow always survived....Both gangs probably reached their apex in the summer of 1857. At the time the city had two competing police forces, the Municipal Force and the Metropolitan Force, as a result of political machinations...and as rival cops showed more interest in fighting each other than in curtailing crime, the city was virtually unpatrolled.

On the night of July 4th a large party of Dead Rabbits and Plug Uglies raided the clubhouse of the Bowery Boys and the Atlantic Guards at 42 Bowery. An all-night battle ensued during which the Bowery side seemed to prevail....The next day...the Roach Guards joined the Rabbits and the Uglies in an attack on a Broome Street dive called the Green Dragon, which they demolished with iron bars and paving stones while drinking up the entire stock of liquor. The Bowery gangs hastened to the scene...the riot swelled as reinforcements for both sides arrived from all over the city...The police of both forces would make sporadic arrests...Three National Guard regiments arrived late in the evening, and the fighting stopped. The toll was officially set at eight dead and over a hundred wounded, but these figures seemed absurdly low.

The following day the New York Times ran the following notice: "We are requested by the Dead Rabbits to state that the Dead Rabbit club members are not thieves, that they did not participate in the riot with the Bowery Boys, and that the fight in Mulberry street was between the Roach Guards of Mulberry Street and the Atlantic Guards of the Bowery. The Dead Rabbits are sensitive on points of honor, we are assured, and wouldn't allow a thief to live on their beat, let alone be a member of their club."

The other significant New York gangs at that time were out-and-out criminal organizations of muggers, thieves, and robbers operating on the waterfront, of whom the Daybreak Boys were the most famous. Their specialty was robbing ships at anchor at all hours. Their two leaders were hanged in 1852 and then "Slobbery Jim and Patsy the Barber had an epochal fight over the division of twelve cents from the pockets of a German immigrant they had killed, in the course of which Jim murdered Patsy; he was never seen again." The police reported killing twelve of them in the single year 1858. These dirtbags were obviously treated quite differently by the authorities from the mostly non-habitually criminal Dead Rabbits and Bowery Boys.

In 1863, spurred on by their unwillingness to be drafted to fight in the Civil War, the New York mob rose in the most serious civil disturbance in America, the Draft Riots. The targets of the rioting were blacks, many of whom were lynched, and wealthy Republicans. There may have been as many as 100,000 rioters and nobody knows how many people were killed, though I'd be willing to believe up to several hundred in the several days of violence. It took troops hustled from the Gettysburg battlefield to put down the rioters. They were most likely led by the Five Points gangs, but it's not fair to simplify matters and say that the rioters were all Irish and that their only motive, if anybody had a motive, was racism. Nor is it fair to go on and on about the discrimination that the Irish faced when they came to America; most of those Irish had it rough in the first generation, not too bad in the second, and up to an approximation of the average in society in the third. I don't think they had it much worse than anybody other group of immigrants.

Anyway, the Scorsese movie conflates the Dead Rabbits-Bowery Boys gang wars with the Draft Riots. The NR review explains all about that.

Posted 16:17 by John

The Cataloony Language Enforcement Squad is out on the loose again. Seems that five years ago they passed the Linguistic Policy Law, and that law came into effect at the beginning of the year. It obligates private business establishments to put all signs in Catalan, whether inside or outside the store, including the signs above the doors, all posted signs for products on sale, signs indicating the bathrooms, and restaurant menus. It will be permitted to use other languages in addition to Catalan, but Catalan will be required as the minimum. From now on, new businesses will have to observe this law, or they won't get a license to open. Also, the Generalitat, the Catalan government, has a program of subsidizing small businesses with a sum of between €3000 and €6000 to renovate their establishments. (I'd be in favor of this if it were guaranteed low-interest loans given by savings banks for mom-and-pop shops, say employing three people or fewer with less than €100,000 gross per year. Or something like that.) More than 1000 of these subsidies were given out last year, and to receive one from now on you will have to conform to the Linguistic Policy Law. And who's going to enforce this? Uh, we dunno, the municipal cops. And don't the municipal cops have anything better to do, like, say, give out parking tickets or harass people who look foreign? Besides, how many dumbass municipal cops can read Catalan anyway? (Real cops are the National Police and the Guardia Civil. Municipal cops here are overpaid glorified traffic wardens who mostly drink carajillos and watch TV in bars.)

The following is one reason why I hate squatters. Judge Baltasar Garzón has indicted Laura Riera, a nice Catalan young girl from a middle-class Terrassa family who is in her young twenties, for murder. Riera, who worked in the Terrassa City Hall, passed information about possible victims to the ETA. She put the finger on Francisco Cano, a PP City Councilman in Viladecavalls, who was murdered on December 14, 2000; Fernando García Jodra, already convicted for two ETA murders (those of Socialist politician and useful idiot Ernest Lluch and Barcelona municipal cop--poor bastard--Juan Miguel Gervilla, who accidentally interrupted an ETA squad on their way to kill radio host Luis del Olmo) blew Cano up in his car with a bomb under the front seat of his van.

So what's the connection with the squatters? Riera was hanging around with the Terrassa squatter crowd and one of them, Zigor Larredonda, had connections with the ETA. Riera passed her information (Cano's license number) to Larredonda, who passed it on to García Jodra, the hitman. The exalted atmosphere that exists in the squats, which is plainly visible in the violent graffiti they paint on every wall in town, the gang fights they get into with the local skinheads, and the unpunished vandalism and destruction that the squatters get away with infected Riera. A constant diet of "Smash capitalism," "Gora ETA," "You fascists are the real terrorists", "Police=Murderers", "Die Aznar", "ETA Kill Them All", romantic stories about Che and Durruti and Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin at the Finland Station, Big Lie bullshit put about by irresponsible leftist partisans, and youthful stupidity combined to make this "just like you and me" girl from next door into a murderer. I blame the squatters.

You may remember that this blog was one of the few that was openly skeptical about Pim Fortuyn and whether he signified anything in the grand scheme of things, even before he was murdered. Fortuyn's party will be wiped out in the upcoming Dutch election, and was more a symptom than a cause of feeling against immigration in Holland.

The Bush Administration wants to know what happened to some 30,000 warheads and several tons of anthrax, VX nerve gas, sarin, and other chemical and biological weapons that Saddam is known to have had in his possession. It does not believe Saddam when he says "Who, me?" It is therefore going to kick the crap out of Iraq sometime very soon. We're sending the Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt to the area. That ought to take a couple of weeks. We sort of hope the war starts on February 8, because that's the anniversary of our blog. We'd love to have a big story for that day; we just hope as few people as possible, especially on our side, get killed.

According to a Vangua story, some twenty German intellectuals led by the indefatigable idiotarian Günter Grass and including Christa Wolf--wasn't she the "official author" of the old East Germany? Wasn't she a spy for the Stasi who reported on her acquaintances? Or do I have the completely wrong person?--and a bunch of other people whom I have never heard of before and have no desire to hear of again have signed a petition saying that Bush is a big poophead.

Rafael Poch, official Vanguardia geopolitical conspiracy theory reporter and mouthpiece for the Russians, is plumping a Russian trial balloon that would "denuclearize the Korean peninsula". The North Koreans would give up their nukes and the Americans would pull their nukes out of South Korea. Russia would just love that. It's not gonna happen, so you can quit playing with yourself, Mr. Poch. First, does the US really have nukes in South Korea? I will google this and report back later. Second, we're not the ones threatened by a nuclear North Korea. That's Vladivostok, Peking, Seoul, and Tokyo, not us, though of course we do have tens of thousands of troops there who must be considered. Third, North Korea is sword-rattling because they're weak, not strong. This is not the time to make concessions of any kind that would artificially lengthen the life of the rapidly dying North Korean regime. Fourth, though the consequences of losing the bet would be so catastrophic that it cannot realistically be placed, I bet the North Koreans really don't have nukes. If they do have one or two, I bet they can't rely on their delivery systems. Fifth, if we bend over now and become a North Korean butt-boy again like we were under Clinton, the rest of the world will take note and behave accordingly, figuring that if we put out for Kim we'll put out for them. I think the most appropriate metaphor for the world is a maximum-security prison; you'd better be ready to fight because you sure don't want to be turned out.

Jimmy Carter is attempting to mediate in Venezuela. May God help the Venezuelan people. We Americans wish you Venezuelans no ill will and wholeheartedly apologize for Mr. Peanut's actions, nay, mere presence, mere existence. Iberian Notes would like to point out that you have the sovereign right to deport him and suggests respectfully that you do so.

Posted 14:45 by John

It seems like a weird day today, at least according to the Vanguardia. The lead story is that the president of the Constitutional Court, Manuel Jiménez de Parga, shot off his mouth about Spanish nationalisms. Remember, there are three "historical nationalities", as they're called in Spain: the Catalans, here in Catalonia, the Basques in the Basque Country, and the Galicians in Galicia, where regional languages are used as well as Spanish and where many inhabitants identify themselves as, say, Catalan, before or in place of Spanish. Spain is divided into seventeen "autonomous communities" which normally correspond with generally accepted regions--Aragon, Castile-Leon, Andalusia, Extremadura, and so on; Catalonia, the Basque Country, Galicia, and Andalusia have more autonomy than the others, except for Navarra, which has a special status going back to its medieval laws, the fueros. Valencia and the Balearic Islands are largely Catalan-speaking but their inhabitants overwhelmingly identify with Spain rather than "the Catalan Countries", as the Cataloonies call it, or "Greater Catalonia", as I call it. Valencia and the Canary Islands do have a couple of privileges that other communities lack; the Balearics don't. They have the same degree of autonomy as most of the rest of Spain. To clear up confusion right now, the seventeen autonomous communities each consist of one or more of the fifty-two provinces, so the autonomous community of Aragon is made up by the provinces of Huesca, Zaragoza, and Teruel, for example.

Recap: Historical Communities: Catalonia, Basque Country, Galicia, Andalusia. Weird Medieval Status: Navarra. A Couple of Extra Privileges: Valencia, Canaries. Just Like Everybody Else: Asturias, Cantabria, La Rioja, Aragon, Castile-Leon, Madrid, Castile-La Mancha, Balearics, Murcia, Extremadura.

Jiménez de Parga said, at a conference in Madrid, "A thousand years ago those historical communities didn't even know what bathing every weekend was, while in Andalusia we had various dozens of baths of all different flavors and smells...An organization of nationalities like Spain, full of history from north to south, cannot see itself reduced to second-rank regarding three communities which say they are different...The concept of historical nationalities began to be used during the Transition (to democracy) and this appellation has endured as what's politically correct. This is, with all due respect, a grave error."

Jiménez de Parga has done a Trent Lott. It is politically not acceptable in today's Spain to even criticize the three historical nationalities, much less to assert that political power should be taken away from their autonomous communities. Some people talk in places like Toledo and Salamanca about how the Catalans need to be cut down to size, but those people have no national political potential. (Example #1: Rodríguez Ibarra, loudmouth Catalan-bashing Socialist Prime minister of Extremadura.) All the political parties except the conservative PP have blasted Jiménez de Parga and called for his resignation. I add my voice.

First, the system is working. Spain is a reasonably prosperous and successful country whose citizens enjoy a high quality of life and who are generally pretty happy. It ain't broke. Don't fix it. Don't monkey around with it. It's working just fine now and don't risk screwing it up. It's irresponsible on the part of both the Catalanists and the centralist dinosaurs to whip up popular emotion on this subject, and Jiménez de Parga certainly behaved irresponsibly. Second, there was absolutely no reason for him to go off at the mouth like that. There was no direct provocation that he was answering. He was just talking off the top of his head. If you do that, like Trent Lott did, you yourself are responsible for the consequences. Third, how can a Constitutional Court judge fairly deliberate on constitutional questions regarding the powers of the autonomous communities, which are not extremely unusual, after showing himself to be a public partisan of one of the two extremist positions on the issue? Fourth, Jiménez de Parga is from Andalusia himself but doesn't seem to know that his own autonomous community enjoys the same level of autonomy as Catalonia and Galicia.

Posted 13:53 by John

Ibidem, formerly known as Atlético Rules, at least to us, has changed URLs, to www.ibidem.blogmosis.com. So go check it out. He's got a really nice-looking new site. Change your bookmarks.

You know, blog-naming is still inexact. Most blogrolls we're on list us as "Iberian Notes"; that's what InstaPundit does, and he's by far our biggest referrer. Some use "Inside Europe: Iberian Notes". A couple use "John and Antonio". We don't really care what blogname you use to link to us with; we're just happy to be linked to. I kind of like the "Inside Europe" part; it's a tribute to journalist John Gunther's first book. He wrote a whole series titled things like Inside Asia and Inside Latin America, and his most famous book is Inside U.S.A., a late-40s look at America which is still often considered the best book written on the 48-state United States. Gunther said that the only books whose titles he liked were Inside U.S.A. and Inside Europe, because those were places he felt he was an insider (he was a longtime foreign correspondent in Europe). He wanted to call the other books, for example, Outside Asia, since he considered himself "an outsider looking in" regarding the rest of the world. The book by Gunther that you're most likely to have seen is Death Be Not Proud, the story of his son who died of cancer.

Back to blognames. I still like "Atlético Rules" better than "Ibidem", but I will finally bow to the fact that Jesús Gil doesn't, since he's eliminated all reference to "Atlético Rules" except for a prominent link to Atlético's homepage in English. See, a blog is generally referred to either by its title, the name of its owner, or its URL, and "Atlético Rules" is no longer part of his URL, so I have no excuse to use it any longer.

By the way, in case you're wondering about Antonio, he hasn't contributed much since about mid-November. His mother's been in poor health and that takes up a lot of his free time. I see him once a week or so; last time was yesterday. He doesn't even read the blog except when he comes over here, since he doesn't have a computer at home. He's so reactionary on some aspects of modern life. He does have a cell phone, though, which is something I'm still holding out against. I suppose I'm cheating, since my wife Remei has a cell phone and we carry it whenever we go out of town in the car in case we break down or have an accident. I'd feel rather less secure without it, so I'm glad we have it for that purpose. Oh, yeah, for Jessica from Chloe and Pete, Antonio's very excited about the nickname, "The Sexy Scourgers." He says he can die happy now that an American girl has called him "sexy", but he regretfully points out that he just turned forty-nine. I personally think he looks rather distinguished; he's Mr. Clean, Neat, and Well-Dressed.

Posted 02:48 by John

Here's an article from FrontPage on gypsies in Europe. It is rather harsh. Gypsies are, as I have said repeatedly, not especially beloved in Spain, and some of the reasons are their own fault. The author's surname is obviously Romanian in origin, which may or may not bias his viewpoint; gypsies are even less beloved in Romania than in Spain.

Posted 19:15 by John

Jordi Solé Tura, an ex-Commie who went over to the Socialists and is currently a senator, which doesn't really mean anything, has an op-ed in today's El País. Its title is "United States: from the old to the new winning of the West." Here goes. I've taken the liberty of editing it down a little.

dirty and disgusting bla bla bla papier-mache soldiers yak yak yak our government a bunch of second-rate butlers woof woof woof american government does whatever it wants yap yap yap brain spasm duh duh duh our prime minister says yes yes ok ok burp burp burp treat us like messenger boys doink doink doink head is spinning can't focus ralph ralph ralph who will grab the world's oil jaw jaw jaw the world is in the hands of a few whine whine whine iraq iran oil yip yip yip iraq world's second biggest oil well drool drool drool what's that hammering in my skull slurp slurp slurp the feared condoleeza rice yada yada yada a puppet government in baghdad nyah nyah nyah oil in the hands of american multinationals yip yip yip turn the country into tribal warfare waah waah waah lights in my head go off and on gab gab gab american penetration of former soviet zone snif snif snif russians control drug market america controls oil market division of labor yak yak yak slap in spain's face bla bla bla i'll call my dad he's bigger than yours duh duh duh humiliation for spain jaw jaw jaw american weapons of mass destruction nah nah nah america only boss of world yap yap yap economic social cultural waah waah waah europe a factor of sensibility against rudimentary american thinking bawk bawk bawk china and other countries can put on the brakes yada yada yada insane american pressure honk honk honk i'll show you mine if you show me yours dorf dorf dorf new ferocious conquest of old and new west.

Posted 14:38 by John

The front-page headline on today's El País is "France and Germany declare at UN that nothing now justifies attack on Iraq." Well, as for the Germans, this is just them missing their chance to take part in the first morally justified German military action ever, and as for the French, I think we ought to stop calling them "Frogs". Frogs are green. I think we ought to choose a more appropriately colored animal. How about if we call them "Sapsuckers"? Or maybe we can call them "Tweety Birds", since Tweety is an obnoxious little yellow bastard who gets himself into trouble and then has to scream to Granny and her umbrella ("Big Stick") to come save his worthless ass. See any coincidences here? I vote we let Sylvester eat Tweety next time.

By the way, Spain's government is backing the United States and Great Britain. "We cannot categorically exclude the use of force as a last resort. The 27th is an important day. We'll have to listen to Blix's report and make our decisions from there. I don't think it would be good to prejudge the discussions. The center of the problem is the noncompliance of Saddam Hussein. Now we have to analyze its extent (that is, of Saddam's noncompliance)," said Spain's Foreign Minister, Ana de Palacio. Spain, by the way, has just begun its two-year term on the UN Security Council. That means we can count on three votes, Britain's, Spain's, and our own. I vote when this is all over we remember who our friends were when it counted. The Aznar government has solidly backed the United States since Aznar became prime minister in 1996. Every single time. Even when Spanish public opinion has been anti-American, as it is now; the basic rule of thumb is that PP supporters are mostly pro-American and pretty much everybody else is anti.

Posted 14:21 by John

In case you want to e-mail me personally, the address is crankyyanqui@yahoo.com.

Posted 20:17 by John

We Scoop Taranto!

In his groovy Best of the Web daily column on the Opinion (Wall Street) Journal, which is a must-read for everybody, James Taranto mentions today that Gerhard Schröder is all mad about his sex life being dragged into public by the sensationalistic press. We commented on that back on January 9, eleven days ago! Iberian Notes really is your one-stop source for dirt from the vile European gutter press.

Posted 19:35 by John

Here's today's Oscar (named after my cat. He's just over a year old, is slim and lithe, friendly, curious, and playful, very demanding and rather spoiled. He's jet-black with a tiny white "bowtie". His hobby is licking his nads) for America-bashing. Today it goes to nad-licker Oriol Pi de Cabanyes for his article, "Amen", in today's Vanguardia. I've only translated the first paragraph, since it's by far the best.

Some consider that Amen, the excellent Costa-Gavras film, is an attack against the Catholic Church. It isn't one. But the fact that there is a crusade against its prestige is evident. Above all, in the United States, where day after day the media continue their scandal-hyping regarding the alleged pederasty of some clerics. Who benefits? we should ask ourselves, in the old Roman style. In whose interest is it that the Catholic Church lose its capacity to influence in the world? In that of the most bellicose sectors of the American administration, that of the very influential Jewish business sector, that of the hard core of monopoly capitalism which, after the fall of the Wall, has been left with no real alternative in the world. And now that the Catholic Church is now almost the only hope of counterbalancing the voracity of unleashed capitalism, the solid alliance between Washington and the Vatican, formed in those not-so-long-ago times in which Lech Walesa and general Wojciech Jaruzelski played cat-and-mouse in Poland, goes and gets broken up.

It's in the interest of the very influential Jewish business sector in the United States to calumniate the Catholic Church? Someone call Simon Weisenthal or Elie Weisel to perform an emergency anti-Semitismectomy on this guy. And alleged, my ass. There have been some convictions in court, not to mention a public apology by and the resignation of Cardinal Law. There is a problem right now with boy-buggering priests in the American Church, and he who tries to cover it up or who declares that the problem does not exist is no friend of the Church. He who admits there is a problem and works to solve it is the truly faithful and loyal Catholic.

Posted 18:36 by John

Here's a problem that we have over here that y'all don't really have to deal with in America: buildings falling down. It's not incredibly unusual for a building, normally old, cheaply-made, and run-down, to at least partially collapse. It's also not unusual for a stone or tile or whatever to fall off the façade of a building. There were a couple of well-known cases of that fairly recently, a German tourist walking down the Paseo de Gracia when a rock fell on her head from the building she was passing in front of, and a young adult who was leaning against the rail of a balcony (from the inside) when the rail collapsed.

Well, here we go again: an Art Nouveau (modernista) building on the Ronda Sant Pau here in Barcelona is in the news. Two years ago it was torched; the fire started in a clothing warehouse on the ground floor. It was arson though I don't know whether anyone was convicted. Anyway, the back half of the building collapsed then though no one was hurt. The building was, of course, condemned and abandoned. It's still there, with the front in a lamentable state and no back at all. A bunch of squatters have moved in and are all pissed off because the building is finally going to be torn down. Get this, they're going to preserve the façade because it has artistic value. Looks to me like one of many hundreds of buildings in Barcelona of which I would say, "Look, it's a nice old building, leave it standing and fix it up if it's in decent shape, but for God's sake tear it down and screw the façade if it's a safety hazard, which it is."

Posted 15:12 by John

Well, there are a few things from the Vanguardia over the last couple of days that are worth writing about. They did a survey of Barcelona voters about the mayoral election that is coming up, probably in May since the last one was in June 1999 and the term is a maximum of four years. Currently the mayor is Socialist Joan Clos, whose party is by far the biggest of the three in his governing coalition; the others are the Communist Initiative for Catalonia and the Catalan-independentista Republican Left. The candidates for the five parties that have a chance of getting on the City Council are, in order of their poll results: Socialist Clos with 45.0% of the vote, down from 45.2% in 1999; Catalan nationalist CiU's Xavier Trias with 26.1%, up from 21.7%; the conservative PP's Alberto Fernández Díaz with 10.6%, down from 14.9%, the Republican Left's Jordi Portabella with 10.4%, up from 6.5%, and the Communist-wacko Initiative for Catalonia-Green-United and Alternative Left coalition's Imma Mayol--she lives on my street but I sure the hell ain't voting for her--with 7.6%, up from 5.8% for Initiative only in 1999.

The breakdown for Council seats would be 19-20 for the Socialists, 11-12 for CiU, 4 for the PP, 4 for the Republican Left, and 2 for Initiative. A Socialist-Republican Left coalition would be sufficient to govern Barcelona for four more years should the election turn out like this, but I imagine they'd invite Initiative in anyway. Pas d'ennemis à gauche.

To the question "What's the biggest problem in Barcelona today?", 27% said crime, 17% said housing, 13% said immigration, 8% said unemployment, 8% said the cost of living, and 5% said traffic. 22% said "other". Allow me to pontificate: the 8% who said unemployment are those who are actually unemployed or underemployed, and the 8% who said cost of living and the 17% who said housing are lower-middle- / middle-class people who are not rolling in wealth. This adds up to 33% who are almost certainly going to vote for the Socialists or the Commies. The 5% who said traffic are taxi drivers and truck drivers, small-businessmen who are conservative by nature and will go with the PP or CiU. The 27% who said crime are likely to be conservative (middle-class, professionals, and small businessmen) and will go CiU or PP. The 13% who said immigration are nativists who will go with CiU or the Republican Left. And, of course, the whole point of the election is winning those 22% of "other" voters, which is what will push one party or another over to victory.

The caveat here, and I'm not just saying this because I sympathize with them, is that it is not socially acceptable in many circles in Barcelona to support the PP. The other four parties are OK because it's virtuous to be leftist and/or Catalan nationalist. The PP is the only one that is neither. So the estimate of the PP vote is a "hard" estimate; those are the people who are not ashamed to say they'll vote PP. They're already solidly committed voters and unlikely to change their minds between now and the election. Polls always undercount the PP vote. I'd estimate it at somewhere between 13 and 17% of the total on election night in Barcelona. I remember in 2000 when Aznar won reelection in a landslide; all the polls had been giving him a bare majority and predicted that he'd be forced into another coalition. A significant number of people wouldn't admit they were going to vote PP. The estimates for the other parties are "soft"; the Republican Left and Initiative, the two most radical alternatives, tend to do better in the pre-election polling than in the election itself, when people faced with the ballot box decide to go for the useful vote and give it to the Socialists.

Posted 14:12 by John

Check out this article from the Washington Times. Seems as though Canadians, most of whom when visiting Europe wear a Canadian flag baseball cap, a Canadian flag T-shirt, and have sewn a Canadian flag patch on their backpacks just so no one will think they're Americans, have been warned that they'd better not because Canadians may be targets for Islamic terrorists. I'm splitting my sides laughing at the irony. The Wash Times article mentions that some chickenshit Americans try to pass themselves off as Canadians while overseas, which I have run across and find repulsive.

I remember that back around Gulf War I, the State Department sent out guidelines for Americans to follow while in Europe. We were supposed to avoid wearing baseball caps, avoid chewing gum, avoid wearing American sports-team or university clothes, avoid wearing jeans and sneakers, avoid listening to Walkmans, avoid going to American chain restaurants, avoid being seen with American newspapers, and avoid talking loudly in English in order to disguise our Americanness. Someone commented to me at the time that except for the last two, the list of Amerikanisch things to avoid could perfectly well have described any Spanish college kid.

By the way, the once-ubiquitous Walkman, which everyone in Spain used to carry around and listen to while on public transport, has been completely replaced by the mobile phone, which everyone in Spain now carries around and fools with on public transport.

Posted 13:46 by John

I've been thinking about health care and what is sometimes called "socialized medicine". Here in Spain we have socialized medicine, what they call here Social Security and what I call the National Health to avoid confusion. (In America, for you foreigners out there, Social Security refers to the government pension plan.) My experience with the Spanish National Health has been very positive. They unblocked my vas deferens (invasive surgery, four days in the hospital), they fixed my leg the time I cracked my fibula, they send me to a psychiatrist and pay for the expensive pills I take, and I can go in for a checkup anytime I want to which includes a complete blood test. Any emergency I might have, no matter how catastrophic, is covered all the way. In addition, they're going to pull an impacted wisdom tooth I've got--it's inconvenient, I had to go in first for an exam and another time for an x-ray and next time I go in the damn tooth will finally get pulled. So I don't buy the horror stories that occasionally show up in the American conservative press about public health care systems.

I will agree that a Western European-style National Health system would not work in the United States, but what I would be willing to pay for out of our tax money is a national preventative health care system. You could go in, say, a maximum of once every six months--or nine, or five, or whatever--for a general checkup which would include things like a blood test, a mammogram, and whatever other tests are predictive of illness. (Then you'd go to your insurance company and your private doctor to cure any problems discovered.) The National Preventative Health would also take care of such public-health matters as VD and contagious-disease control, vaccinations, flu shots, and the like. Antidotes to common chemical or biological weapons could also be stored in case of emergency. All of this wouldn't cost too much and would be the way to stop trouble before it happens, which is always much cheaper and better in the long run than fixing it after it's happened. I would include this condition that would really keep costs under control: you can't sue the National Health for malpractice. If you take advantage of its services, which you as a citizen have the right to, the risk is on your head. You can always choose to transfer the risk to a private doctor that you or your insurance company pay for and can sue. Using the National Preventative Health would be an option, not an obligation, but I would like it to be an attractive option for basic health maintenance that most people would choose.

I would get my doctors like this: we'd require, as now, a bachelor's degree in a hard science and then the standard four years in med school for an M.D. With a doctorate in medicine, you'd do a one-year internship with the National Preventative Health at full pay, and if your work was satisfactory, you'd become a regular staff physician. The NPH would give prospective doctors low-interest loans in exchange for five years' work after graduation (maybe three years' should they choose to serve as military doctors). Your income would be, say, between fifty and a hundred grand a year, enough to be solidly upper-middle class and comfortable. Nurses and staff would be well-paid, at market rates. Unionization and strikes by NPH personnel would be prohibited--that's the trade-off they would make in exchange for not being liable to lawsuit.

No, this isn't a part of a big-spending plan; I'm all in favor of reducing government spending as much as possible, which could be easily done in all kinds of ways that would allow us to pay for this. In addition, we'll quickly begin to see savings on both Medicare and Medicaid, which right now cost us more (together) per year than what we spend on defense. It's not part of a big-government plan, either; I would like to see the federal government's power to be considerably more limited than it is now. I do think, though, that there are several things that are so important to the functioning of a society that the government (whether federal, state or local), which is supposed to represent all of us, needs to take charge of them. National defense, police protection, the laws and courts, and foreign relations are among the most obvious. I would personally add education, which need not be provided by government but needs to be guaranteed by the government, the most basic food, clothing, and shelter for those who cannot take care of themselves, and, yes, preventative health care. It could be provided by private companies contracted by the government through open bidding, sure, I wouldn't mind that, but preventative health care is something that I see that people in America need and people in Spain have.

Posted 12:25 by John

Here's Christopher Hitchens, the gutsiest leftist there is, on the demos and the peaceniks. If you haven't already read it, read it now.

Posted 16:35 by John

Belligerent Bunny Blog has an excellent photo-essay on the demo in Washington. According to BBB's photos, pretty much everybody at the Washington demo was a fellow-traveler out for a festive morning of protesting and donuts while listening to aboriginal didgeredoo music. (Should you be interested in the Washington Times's take on the story, click here.)

The lead story in today's Vanguardia international section is headlined, "Pacifists defy Bush". Eusebio Val, who replaced the X-man as the Vangua's American correspondent, says, "Dozens of thousands of activists from across the country participated in the march in the federal capital." Sebi interviews idiotarian protester Brenda Bayne, "a fifty-year-old music teacher who spent 13 hours on the road from Gainesville, Florida. 'Although I recognize that the Iraqi regime is a problem, we think it is immoral to strike first,' she declared to this newspaper. 'The US has more weapons of mass destruction than any other country in the world and it has used them most often. George Bush's Administration is a gang of hypocrites. None of them has been in the army or has children in the army. If there's a war, most of those who die will be blacks or Hispanics. What makes me most indignant is that our press silences these protests and to find out things I have to listen to the BBC or read the French press by Internet.'"

Time out for cogent analysis. 1) Note the conspiracy theory mentality. The press is silencing the truth so she has to go to the BBC and Le Fuckin' Monde Diplomatique to learn it. This nimrod must never have heard of, oh, the New York Times or CNN, among other major news outlets not notorious for their sympathies toward the Bush Administration. 2) Look, let's be quite frank here and lay off all the hero-worshipping-of-our-soldiers shit. These folks took the King's shilling. They volunteered, most of them because the Army provides a means to get the education necessary to be successful in America. They are what used to be called "regulars". They can be sent off to whatever war we want to send them off to; that's their job and they understand it that way. Who cares whether any of the Administration (Colin Powell, for example) has ever been in the army? That's wholly immaterial. (I am not impugning servicepeople's patriotism. I'm sure almost all of them are very patriotic. I'm also sure that almost all of them are ready to cheerfully fight in the service of their country, no matter what their race is.) And what does it matter whether there are proportionately more blacks and Hispanics in the army than in the general population? The main reason for that is that the army is the least racist important institution in the US, or the world. They really don't care what your color is if you can do the stuff you're supposed to do. Another big reason is that the Army provides vocational training, money to go to the university, something solid to put on your resumé ("Sergeant, US Army" looks a lot better than "Assistant manager, Hardee's"), and room, board, and a salary. This looks awfully good to working-class folks, like many ambitious blacks and Hispanics who know a university degree is the ticket to the white-collar world and that with a skilled trade you can write your own ticket. Also, it's not like we're going to suffer major losses in this war, anyway. 3) If it's immoral to strike first, exactly what has Saddam been doing over the years to Iran, Kuwait, the Kurds, and everyone in range of the terrorist gangs he supports? And wasn't 9-11 a first strike against us by the International Dirtbag Alliance that Saddam is part of? Isn't 9-11 supposed to be what we're trying to prevent from ever happening again? And isn't the best way to do that to eliminate those we suspect might want to see another 9-11? Anybody out there remember 9-11?

Enough cogent analysis. Sebi has found somebody who's in favor of a war against Saddam. Among the several dozen counterdemonstrators was Scott Shumen, a 32-year-old computer programmer, who said, "I don't think there's any other alternative. Saddam spends his money on dozens of palaces and hundreds of statues of himself while he is repressing the Shiites and the Kurds. We're here to support our troops."

There's a sidebar with the headline, "The world shouts out against war". Naturally, they're talking about the war in Ivory Coast, where French troops have unilaterally intervened in an internal civil war without asking anyone's permission. Oops, no, it's those rascally Americans again. They got 6000 grenouilles rouges out in Paris, which seems to be the biggest turnout anywhere in Europe. A few hundred people showed up at the Madrid demo, mostly carrying red flags. In Damascus they had a demo requesting Saddam Hussein to attack Israel. Yeah, the world sure shouted loud: there were several hundred demonstrators in Cologne, Bonn, London, Geneva, Naples, and Istanbul. My ears are still ringing.

Posted 00:11 by John

FC Barcelona just got creamed in its home stadium, 2-4, by defending League champions Valencia. You read it here first, just half an hour after the tragedy was consummated and the fat lady sang. Barça came out hesitant and intimidated and immediately made a horrific defensive blunder which Pablo Aimar capitalized on. 0-1. Valencia continued on the attack and quickly made it 0-2 on a corner headed in by Carew. Barcelona tried to put up a fight and Xavi made a good through-pass to Motta who faked out a defender and put it in the net. 1-2, and Barcelona was still showing signs of trying to win at this point. They had a couple of chances at goals, though so did Valencia, and throughout the game Valencia played much more as a team than Barça did. Late in the first half there was another through-ball to Kluivert and Valencia's goalie Santi Cañizares tackled him outside the penalty area. Cañizares was, of course, red-carded and replaced by Palop; Valencia pulled Baraja out of the game and was left with only ten men.

Barça came out for the second half throwing everything they had at the Valencia goal, but couldn't make it through an iron Valencia defense. Valencia played with two defensive lines of four men each and Carew up front looking for the fast break, and the break came after thirty minutes of failed Barça attacks; Fabio Aurelio scored to make it 1-3 and the game was over. Barcelona gave up. Valencia would go on to score once more, and Kluivert scored a meaningless goal with two minutes to play while Valencia's players just stood around.

SSSSLLLUUUUURRRRRPPPPP. They sucked. The players sucked. The coaches sucked. The team sucked. Van Gaal, the coach, will almost certainly be fired now. If he's not, I want to know why. Gaspart, the club president, should resign. He's lost all credibility. There were enormous quantities of booing and whistling (a major insult in Spain except at rock concerts, where they've learned that whistling means you love the band and are probably holding up a cigarette lighter) and waving good-bye with handkerchiefs, what they call a pañolada. This is also a sign of major disapproval. FC Barcelona is having its worst season in its history. They'll be lucky to qualify for the UEFA Cup, much less the Champions' League. Barça is now 6-5-7, won-tied-lost, under .500 at midseason.

And they got rid of Rivaldo to save $6 million after signing Geovanni, Rochemback, and Overmars for more than $20 million each.

Posted 14:44 by John

I love the Internet Public Library. I've been reading some stuff by Booth Tarkington, who was an American popular novelist about a hundred years ago. I had read Penrod when I was a kid; it's a collection of short stories about a twelve-year-old in about 1910 and his struggles with authority. All Tarkington's novels are comedies of manners, social class, and snobbery; the basic plot is that some people who get to thinking they're something special get their comeuppances. Penrod fights against what he sees as a feminizing tyranny that makes him go to dancing classes and learn to be "refined" by making asses of snobbish adults all around him; in Seventeen, a snobbish, stuck-up teenager named William gets what's coming to him, and in The Magnificent Ambersons (the book the Orson Welles movie was based on) a snobbish, stuck-up young adult named George who gets what he's got coming.

Tarkington was born in 1838 and wrote most of his more-read books late in life; he is thus a contemporary of Mark Twain, whose works Tarkington's rather resemble, though Tarkington never became bitter like Twain did. I would compare Tarkington directly to F. Scott Fitzgerald, as they write about exactly the same themes. In fact, Tarkington does a better job of satirizing upwardly mobile social climbers than Fitzgerald did, and this is probably because Fitzgerald was a social climber himself who had all the common sense of the beer-drinking pig they have at Aquarena Springs near San Marcos, Texas. Tarkington only briefly antedates Fitzgerald, since the former died the year he published The Magnificent Ambersons, 1918, while Fitzgerald's big splash came in 1919 and his notoriety lasted through the Twenties. I cannot help but think that Fitzgerald had thoroughly absorbed his Tarkington, which he must have read during his adolescence.

Tarkington also reminds me of John O´Hara, who also wrote novels of social class in small-town America, though where O´Hara sees only darkness, corruption, and filth behind carefully maintained apperarances, Tarkington sees silly but harmless fools who pay far too much attention to what they imagine the opinion of others to be. O'Hara started in the Thirties and he, too, must have read Tarkington as a teenager; everybody else of his generation did. Sinclair Lewis is a Nobel Prize winner who also owes a debt to Tarkington; one similarity is that both authors' characters are types, representative of various attitudes toward life and of course the resemblance of their themes, social life in a Midwestern town. Lewis, again, is darker than Tarkington.

One problem with Tarkington, and one reason why he may not be much read any more, is that he was an out and out racist; in Penrod he calls Penrod and Sam "of a slightly higher stage of evolution" than their black childhood friends. It's not that Tarkington accidentally let one slip through; writers from George Orwell to Dorothy Sayers have let occasional, accidental-seeming racist or anti-Semitic comments slip through. Tarkington goes out of his way to portray blacks, always the same way, as either lazy old gentlemen who spend all day fishing, hired hands who are not too smart but kind and loyal, or bad-tempered domestic servant women. Each of his novels has at least one of these three black characters. Now, Tarkington's racism is not hateful, he doesn't want to lynch blacks or burn their churches or hunt them down in the streets, he just thinks that black people are not as smart as white people. Morally, Tarkington's blacks often behave better than his white characters. Mentally, they're obviously inferior. That was quite a respectable, decent attitude to hold if you were born in 1838, very "White Man's Burden-esque". Blacks are good people but not very intelligent, and it's the duty of decent white people to help them. Thinking this way was positively liberal a hundred years ago. It's not too acceptable now.

Paul Fussell, one of my favorite essayists, has a piece on Penrod, which he calls (after Orwell) a "good bad book". Fussell is angry because his child has been given in school a bowdlerized version of the Penrod stories with offending comments excised as much as possible. I rather agree with Fussell; Tarkington's offhand racism is a very important aspect of his time. A hundred years ago people in America were just plain racist, just like Tarkington. We don't much like to be reminded of that, I think, and this is one reason why few American books from before the First World War are read today. Tarkington's world is very Edwardian, nay, Victorian, and his writing is pre-War in style. His attitudes seem naive to us today and his language seems old-fashioned. Also, we today are very different people from what we were a hundred years ago. Tarkington's characters are actually concerned with what people they don't know might think about their shoes. Modern readers just can't identify with that; the First World War was a dividing point for literature and painting and the arts in general, and we're distinctly still on the post-War rebound, a hundred years later. Of course, if your grandfather had gone barefoot, like Tarkington's characters' grandfathers probably had, you might be pretty concerned with making sure everyone knew that you, yourself, had never done so.

Hope that made sense.

Posted 17:12 by John

There are a good few things in the Vanguardia from the past couple of days that I could comment on, but don't really feel that I desperately need to comment on. Oh, well, here goes. Pasqual Maragall, the Socialist candidate for Prime Minister of Catalonia in the 2004 election, is calling for voting weight to be taken away from the three largely rural Catalan provinces of Girona, Lleída, and Tarragona and given to Barcelona. As of now, the three rural provinces receive a disproportionate amount of seats in the Catalan Parliament, which of course elects the PM. Wouldn't be a coincidence that the three rural provinces, especially Girona and Lleída, vote heavily for the Catalan Nationalist CiU party (as does rural Barcelona province, the area north of Manresa), while the Barcelona metro area votes heavily Socialist except for the wealthy neighborhoods of the Eixample and the Zona Alta, would it?

The Portuguese lefties, led by Socialist ex-president Mario Soares and Communist Nobel Lit prizewinner José Saramago, have come out with an antiwar petition. It's the same old steam table lefty conspiracy theory crap--"warlike propaganda is at the service of the interests of anonymous international capital, and it constitutes a threat to the sovereignty, the dignity, and the liberty of the nations and peoples", but it includes a couple of twists: they're against the "demential violation of the Palestinians' most elemental human rights" and they're worried about "the silence and manifest ignorance of how much the process of globalization, in opposition to the most elemental ethical principles, represents." One of the weaknesses of the antiwar left, as I've read elsewhere several times in recent days, is they're not, just plain not, ordinary American folks who don't like war. Those people exist, and they're not doing a good job at all of getting their (much more defensible than, say, ANSWER's point of view) message out. The people who are getting the anti-war message out are the same old anti-Americans we've been hearing from for years, and the evidence is that all their proclamations get off the point of a possible war against Iraq and onto the same old America-bashing--free Mumia, stop the pipeline, no oil drilling, lift the embargo on Castro, stop McDonald's, hurray for Lula, smash capitalism, ban toy guns, rights for transgendered chimps, whatever. That's why they're failing in America, which is the only place where public opinion might affect what's going to be done. Americans see these Christic Institute No Nukes Michael Stipe kooks and are repelled by them, and they tar whatever respectable antiwar movement there may be.

The Attorney General (fiscal general del Estado), Jesús Cardenal, has begun the investigation which will lead to the prosecution of the alleged environmentalist organization Nunca Máis for fraud in their fundraising, for convincing people that contributions would, like, actually help people, when the donations were actually used in a partisan political attempt to discredit the government through the media. This scam is going to backfire big time on those goddamn obnoxious Gallego independentistas.

Here's a UN study on gypsies in Eastern Europe, specifically the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, that says that 15% of them suffer from hunger every day. I dunno. I don't buy it. They're poor and discriminated against, but I don't think they suffer from hunger, if only because so many of the women are overweight. The stats on their standard of living are at once discouraging and also indicative of problems within gypsy culture. Infant mortality, infant malnutrition, poor women's health (too many pregnancies from too young an age), and educational levels are at sub-Saharan Africa levels. Up to 70% of these gypsies receive welfare payments from their governments, which have contributed to the typical "vicious circle" that leads them to avoid work--why work if you can get money from the government? And if they're getting government aid, how can they be hungry? Only 37% of Eastern European gypsies have finished elementary school and 6% have finished high school. Meanwhile, traditional gypsy crafts and trades are now obsolete; there isn't much of a market for tinsmiths and peddlers and street musicians and fortunetellers. 46% of gypsies in these five countries are unemployed. Gypsy spending habits are also misprioritized; 59% have running water and 55% have dishwashers! 11% of Bulgarian gypsies who claim to go hungry have satellite dishes. What's the UN's solution? Affirmative action, of course. They think everything would be better if gypsies "integrate productively into national societies through work, education, and political participation." Well, yeah, that'd be great. Any ideas? And, no, not affirmative action. We'd like ideas that work, please, not ideas that we merely wish would work.

70% of movie spectators in Spain saw American movies in 2002. 12.5% saw Spanish movies. This is because not even spaniards can stand Spanish movies. The three big movies this year are, number one, "El otro lado de la cama"; the plot summary in the movie section says, "A couple breaks up because she admits to him that she is in love with another man: his best friend.". Number two is "Los lunes al sol", described in the movie section as "A group of ex-workers from a Galician shipyard try to deal with the situation of unemployment they find themselves in." I've heard it better described as "Like "The Full Monty", but not funny." Number three is "Hable con ella", the Almodóvar flick, which I haven't seen because I don't like Almodóvar flicks, but people who have seen it say it's a pretty good Almodóvar flick for those who like that sort of thing. None have been seen by more than two and a half million people. This is because the Spanish movie market has "been kidnapped by the Americans", not because they make boring, predictable movies that no one wants to see.

Van Gaal wants to buy Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink from Chelsea. Great, we've got Kluivert and Saviola, so of course we need a goal-scorer who's 31 and has a history of injuries. Well, he will score some goals, that's what he does with every team he plays for. Now, he doesn't do much else while on the field, but he does score goals. Barça needs goals. It's a real sign of a failed attempt to put together a squad when you have to get a new goal-scorer, the equivalent of the cleanup hitter or the running back or the shooting guard, at midseason. This is not like the Yankees landing another DH or middle reliever at midseason like they always do, this is looking for a new basic part of the machine. Bad sign. I hope Hasselbaink does well, but he's not a savior and he's not going to get us into fourth place. And it's not a good sign when you're spending big bucks on a 31-year-old mercenary who'll be around for a season or two. Big bucks should be spent on top young players like, say, Joaquín from Betis.

Two illegal immigrants drowned and twelve are missing off the Canary Islands; their raft sank. Poor bastards. It pisses me off that we don't knock down trade barriers that keep Third World products out of our American and European markets. You can't expect them to grow economically and feed their people if they can't sell their stuff to us, the people with the money to buy it. We tell them to invest and produce and when they do it, then they're kept out of our markets by tariffs. So people get drowned.

Today is San Antonio Abad. Traditionally, in Catalonia, this is the day in which you can take your animals to church and the priest blesses them. Historically it's been for horses, mules, burros, you know, working animals, but people bring their pets, too. My mother-in-law brings her dog every year. Also, I saw something that was just weird on the local news. Seems that there are lots of wild bunny rabbits in the area around the town of Verdú, near Remei's hometown, and it's been decided that humane measures will be taken. So, get this. They've got hawks and other birds of prey, and they put, get this, protective gloves on their talons. They then put a muzzle on a ferret and turn him loose down a rabbit hole. The rabbits flee, terrified. Then they let loose the hawks, who catch the poor rabbits and bring them back. The rabbits are then vaccinated and taken somewhere else. They showed the whole process on TV; damn, those hawks are good hunters. They mentioned on the news that stress might be caused to the rabbits. Uh, yeah, no duh, being chased out of your hole by a ferret and then grabbed by a hawk and carried back through the air to some humans who stick needles in you and then drop you off miles away from home is pretty much a bad day for a rabbit. This seems to me like an extremely stupid idea. Why not use, say, humane traps to catch the bunnies? I'm waiting for PETA to weigh in on this one.

Posted 15:32 by John

Just in case you were wondering, here's the link for Indymedia Barcelona. It's really quite puerile and the same old, same old, and my guess after looking at the contents is that it is run by squatters. Anyway, their big causes are: 1) freedom for 14 rioters going on trial for, well, rioting, at a far-left assault on a group of right-wingers celebrating the Día de la Raza (as Franco called what is often known in Spain as the Día de la Hispanidad; many Catalans prefer to call it the day of the Virgen del Pilar) on Oct. 12, 1999. They put on a pretty good riot in the Sants neighborhood, taking over several streets and wrecking what was wreckable along them--shop windows, phone booths, car windows, garbage containers. By the way, if you're looking for some idiotarians to boycott, the rioters have the support of actor / comedian Pepe Rubianes and rock musician Gerard Quintana, formerly of El Último de la Fila. 2) There's a squat that's being closed down. They're against it. I'm for it. 3) Some rioters got arrested in Valencia a while back. They want them turned loose. 4) They hail the first anniversary of the revolution in Argentina. Uh--what? 5) They oppose the anti-Chávez strikes in Venezuela. 6) They urge support for Nunca Máis, the Bloque Nacionalista Gallego anti-government "environmentalist" front group.

Pretty standard lefty crap, though their actions seem to focus most on their activists who have been locked up and on their own lifestyle as squatters. That is, their goals are really selfish. They want to live the way they want to live and do the things they want to do without interference from anyone but with government subsidies whenever they can get them (e.g. they constantly solicit municipal subsidies on the ground their squats are youth centers (casals de joves). I have no problem with their living the way they want to live as long as they pay rent just like everybody else, which they don't, and obey municipal ordnances related to such things as hygiene, safety standards, running open bars without a license, and not making too much of a racket after three in the morning, which they don't, and avoid interfering with other people's rights (e.g. by not painting graffiti on all the walls, by not occasionally trashing a bank branch or a phone booth, by not holding demonstrations that are both aggressive in manner and without municipal permits, and by not occasionally intimidating the locals), which they don't.

Posted 15:07 by John

I got a Google hit from someone wanting to know the price of hashish in Gibraltar. No idea, but here in Barcelona if you have a decent connection you can get a good-sized chunk of average-quality stuff for 25 euros. I advise against buying in the street here, since they'll sell you overpriced wax.

Posted 15:03 by John

Here's another edition of Peninsular Spanish expressions to brighten up your vocabulary. These, as usual, appeared in Sin Control, and are standard Spanish informal language.

fatal--terrible. Genial--great. Pepe dijo que la película era fatal, pero Paqui dijo que era genial.
un rollo--a pain in the neck, a drag. Es un rollo tener que trabajar los sábados.
¡Vaya ____!, ¡Qué ____!--What a ____! ¡Vaya rollo! Tengo que fregar el suelo otra vez.
charlar--to chat. Pepi siempre está charlando con Maru.
groggy--As in English. Groggy, dizzy, sleepy-headed. Ya estaba groggy cuando llegamos a casa a las dos.
darse rabia--To make someone angry. Me da rabia cuando Blogger me come un post.
enterarse--to find out, to understand. No me enteré de que ella fuera su novia hasta que estaba demasiado tarde.
morirse por--To be anxious to do something, to be dying to do something. ¡Me muero por saber si Chenoa está embarazada!
estrenar--To do something for the first time, to have a new something. Manolo estrenó su nuevo coche ayer y lo estrelló contra un arbol después de pasarse con los chatos en la bodega del Maño.
engancharse--to get hooked on something. Muchas personas se han enganchado a leer Iberian Notes cada día.
boca abajo--face down. Boca arriba--face up. Duermo boca abajo, pero mi mujer duerme boca arriba.

Posted 15:59 by John

Here's a little bit of linguistic weirdness. If you are from the United States, in Spain, you are a norteamericano or an estadounidense, if they're being polite, or it you are. If they're not, they'll call you either a yanqui or a gringo. Yanqui is not particularly friendly, and gringo is distinctly hostile. I tend to excuse myself when in the presence of folks who repeatedly use those terms, though I do the same when anybody repeatedly uses ethnic or racial slurs in general.

The word americano means, in Spain, according to the dictionary, someone from América, the whole Western Hemisphere or New World, as we'd call it, which they see as being just one continent. Now, in English and French and German, it doesn't mean that, it means someone from the United States. Some Spaniards profess to consider that the use of American or américain or Amerikanisch or whatever to mean American in these tongues is offensive and a sign of typical gringo arrogance. My usual response is, "Hey, we declared independence first, so we had first dibs on the name. The other languages went along with us. If the Latin Americans had wanted the name, they should have grabbed it before we did. They were about forty years too late." If my interlocutor fails to laugh and instead gets mad, then I excuse myself.

I once heard an American Communist of my acquaintance over here say that we should all call ourselves "USAmericans". I also once heard her call Gulf War I "an imperialist massacre, not a war", and I once heard her say that racism in the United States was worse than the Nazi Nuremberg Laws. I now avoid her. It's good for my blood pressure.

The funny part is that it's Spanish dubbing of American movies where you hear the term americano--when speaking Spanish, most of us yanquis use one of the two terms they prefer, since it is their country, after all. I use norteamericano because my tongue always trips over estadounidense. Spanish takes more syllables than English to say something, in the first place, so they have to shorten what the movie characters are saying in English anyway. Then, obviously, in the original American version of a movie, the word the actors say is "American", four syllables. Americano is the closest equivalent, at five syllables, so it's always used in Spanish versions of American movies. Estadounidense and norteamericano both contain seven syllables, which would mean that the character's voice would continue to sound for two syllables more while his lips had already stopped. Can't have that in dubbing, so they just use americano. This is considered by anti-yanqui Spaniards to be an impermissible sign of yanqui imperialism. I avoid these people.

By the way, this is why American movies are considered stupid over here. First, they don't get all the American cultural references, so they miss at least half the jokes. (Well, first, a lot of American movies really are out-and-out stupid, but Hollywood turns out twenty or so fairly decent flicks a year, and then there are some pretty good indie jobs, and then there are British flicks, too, which often have some American input. Spain is lucky to produce three watchable films a year.) Second, the dialogue is just different when it's dubbed. It's not anywhere near as interesting, as complete, as detailed as the original, and their having to synch the dubbing with the actors' on-screen mouths doesn't help. Third, some second-rate local actors replace the expressive voices of the original actors. So let's see, we, the Spanish movie distributors, take a regular movie and make the script worse and the actors worse and then we release it. No wonder ordinary Spanish people who see these denatured dubbed movies think they're dumb.

Posted 15:08 by John

If you've been following this blog for a while you'll remember the chains of Barcelona English schools, Opening and Brighton, that crashed and left an extremely bad odor in a lot of people's nostrils. A third has now gone down, Oxford English, leaving 4500 students without classes. I personally hadn't heard any nasty gossip about them like we'd heard about Opening and especially Brighton, but they were running one of those multimedia pay-for-a-year-in-advance teach-yourself-and-learn-at-your-own-speed things, too. That language-learning strategy only works if someone is methodical enough to discipline himself to spend hours a week at a computer terminal, but not so methodical that he's too damn square-headed to learn a language, and what's funny is that the stuff they charge you to use on their computer is inferior in quality to a lot of free sites for students of English available on the Net. Well, charged. The language-teaching industry is under a very dark cloud right now in Barcelona, since company after company is going broke and out of business, with people who had paid for their services in advance left up Shit Creek with a turd for an oar.

Posted 11:17 by John

Folks, if you want to know the real truth about what happened on September 11, 2001, click here. And click here if you want to know the real facts about the First World War, the Napoleonic Wars, the French Revolution, Marxism, General Pike, and the coming Third World War. And this site will tell you the real truth about Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, as well as sell you a copy of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion". For the straight story on American history, click here; this site has a lot of highly informative links, too. And, finally, David Icke will tell you the truth about everything, especially reptilian shape-changers. The very second we clicked on davidicke.com, the chair my pal Murph was sitting on collapsed under him--and the chair was made of solid wood. And, to top that, the computer then got hung up and behaved bizarrely. We're not too sure you ought to click on any of these sites after all.

Posted 21:51 by John

Lessee. Does anyone actually believe Pete Townshend went to kiddie-porn sites on the Internet in order to investigate child abuse for a documentary film that he was going to make? The Spanish press is reporting that the rumor is that another showbiz figure and two political figures are mixed up in this kiddie-porn bust. And the rock-and-roll heroes of the Sixties and Seventies continue to show themselves unworthy of the adulation they received, heaped upon them by the counterculture.

Posted 21:37 by John

Well, the Pope's antiwar speech has made a big effect over here. It's getting a lot of play. I have a good deal of respect for the Pope, especially the part he played in the transformation of Poland, though of course I disagree with him on such measures as divorce and birth control. And we shouldn't forget that one of the Ten Commandments does say, effectively, "Thou shalt not kill". Of course, nobody's paid too much attention to it over the years. However, the Church also propagates the just war theory, and I can't think of too many wars more just than one that would get rid of Saddam Hussein. I also think that if the Pope wants to spread a general message of peace that's wonderful. That's his job. I am not so certain that the Pope should take the side of a dictator with bloody hands, which he effectively does when he says, "What is there to say about the threat of a war on the people of Iraq, the land of prophets, a people already in dire straits because of more than twelve years of embargo?...The peoples of the Earth sometimes have to have the courage to say no to death, to selfishness, and to war, which is never simply fate....The solution to the Middle Eastern crisis can never be imposed through terrorism or through armed conflict, in the false belief that the way out consists of military victory." I dunno, Mr. Wojytla. I think the first step on the way to solving the problem is to eliminate Saddam and his regime, and that the only way to achieve that is through military victory. Turning the other cheek is all very well, but Saddam is one of those guys who'll smack you on it if you do.

Posted 21:57 by John

On the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Victor Davis Hanson has an article on anti-Americanism that doesn't really say anything we haven't said here, but certainly does say it a lot better. One quibble: Hanson devotes a good bit of space to those fatuous celebrities who are stupid enough to anger their fans by attacking their country, and to European elitists and their patronizing gaze down their rather large, deformed noses, but not much to what I think is the real problem, the anti-Americanism of the average Western European Joe, the skilled blue-collar or the white-collar worker, the car mechanic, the accounts payable guy, the photocopier repairman, the administrative assistant. That's the guy whose opinion America has to change, and his opinion is now dominated by the leftist, socialist, big-government European civil servant / journalist / teacher class that runs the European media. Right now the average European Joe is still much more limited in his sources of news than the average American Joe. He gets six TV channels, plus, if he wants, some extremely non-intellectual channels on his satellite dish. If he lives in Catalonia he has his choice of five newspapers, none of which promote a free-market point of view. That's it. There are popular radio talk shows, but most of the commentators are socialist / progressive. All his news sources are either leftist economically / politically anti-American, or conservative nationalist anti-American. There's no cable TV, no conservative talk radio, no newsmagazines, no political magazines, no Web presence. Europe is, intellectually and politically, at about where America was in the late 70s. It's going to take them a few more years to realize that ideas we thought might be good (between about 1962 and the last gasps of the Carter administration) have proved not to be. They'll have to find it out for themselves, because they're not smart enough to learn from our experiences.

Posted 16:28 by John

The Barça tied last night in Málaga, 0-0. The game sucked. It was such a dull, sloppily-played game that I went home from the bar at about minute 70, knowing no one would score. The team sucked. They're like thirteen points behind Real Sociedad and twelve behind Madrid. Or whatever. They suck. Most of the players are just plain mediocre. They all suck. I know their players are a lot worse than Madrid's and somewhat worse than Deportivo's and Valencia's, but it's starting to look like the Barça's not even as good as Celta and Betis. They suck. SLLLUUURRRRPPPP.

Posted 16:22 by John

Here's the way elections work in Spain, and we'll take for example the Madrid municipal elections, coming up in May. Say there are 25 seats on the City Council. Each party nominates 25 candidates, who are called the party's list. Representation is proportional to the percentage of the vote the party gets. (This is simplified. The real system they use is d'Hondt's.) So say I'm the People's Party, the conservative PP, and I get 60% of the vote. That means that I get 60% of the seats, or 15 of them. So the top 15 names on my party's list go on the City Council. You need 5% of the vote, minimum, to get a seat, and the higher on the list you are, the more likely it is that you will get one of the party's seats. The top of the list of the party with most seats is the mayor. Coalitions are sometimes necessary. Right now the Socialists hold the Barcelona mayoralty in coalition with Initiative (the Communists) and the Republican Left, for example. The PP holds Madrid straight-out, and it also holds the mayoralties of most of Spain's larger cities.

There have been a few fireworks so far in the Madrid election. First the Socialists picked Trinidad Jiménez, an attractive female, as number one on their list, and chose a Glamour Shot of her, all dolled up in leather and looking come-hither, as the campaign photo. Of course, there were protests, from aggrieved feminists and from the other parties, as well as some Socialists who just thought it was kind of tacky. I figured the whole time it was a publicity stunt, since they retracted the picture and got even more newspaper space--the Vanguardia didn't even pick up on the story until the censorship angle on it came out--for "submitting to censorship". Then Prime Minister Aznar's wife, Ana Botella, announced she would run high on the PP's list for the City Council, and that gave them something to talk about on the radio for a few days. Now the Communist United Left's number two, Carlos Gutiérrez, has resigned his place on the ballot because it came out that he hadn't paid child support for this three kids. Real moral folks, those Communists. Ethical and all that. Responsible and the like.

By the way, we have, I think, four Communist parties in Spain. There's the United Left, the official CP for Spain, and then they had a split-off and some of their guys left to start another party, which has apparently sunk like a stone. In Catalonia, the United Left's arm is the United and Alternative Left, which itself is a split off Initiative for Catalonia, the Catalan nationalist Communists. That's fine with me. They're so dumb they can't even figure out that they should all get together.

Posted 16:02 by John

Here's a good one. Right after the Prestige oil spill, an organization called Nunca Maís (Never Again in Galician) made a big old hoo-haw about the whole thing, and specifically spent a lot of time slamming the conservative People's Party, which governs in both the Galicia region and Spain, for having screwed up the whole thing. Nunca Maís tried to place the blame for the whole mess on the government, which after the shipwreck and spill might have taken different actions that might have been more successful, true. But they were faced with a crisis and did what they saw as best, and of course, they did nothing to cause the problem, as Nunca Maís implied. The organization did a lot of fundraising, too, and received money from people all over Spain who thought they were helping either a) the cleanup effort or b) the fishermen out of work because of the oil spill. Well, all the money went into divulgation and education and consciousness-raising on the part of Nunca Maís. That is, it went to bash the government. Interestingly enough, the folks behind Nunca Maís turned out to be the Bloque Nacionalista Gallego, the thoroughly obnoxious left-wing Galician nationalist political party. Contributors from all over Spain are now reclamando their money back, since they thought they were chipping in to help folks in trouble, not to fund a partisan political organization.

Posted 15:43 by John

You want idiotarianism? We got idiotarianism! This article is from today's La Vanguardia. It's labeled "Analysis", and it's on page four in the International News section, making it the second lead story. It's by Rafael Poch, longtime Moscow correspondent, who has an amoral and realpolitik (according to his lights, however dim) view of the international scene. He believes that every action taken by a power has an ulterior motive, that there is always a hidden interest concealed behind everything any country does. Everything is a Bismarckian matter of balances of power. Since he who triumphs in such a world must be the most deceitful and the most ruthless, America, though not the root of all evil, is where evil is most deeply rooted. I get the feeling that he has been infected with this attitude by those who surround him in Moscow; the Latin mindset is also disposed toward Gnosticism, conspiracy theories, and general suspicion. (They think we're naive and innocent; we think they're cynical and corrupt.) Anyway, here's the article.

The Victim is North Korea

That is the title of an article by Gregory Clark published in the Japan Times day before yesterday. Clark is a veteran expert in Asiatic issues and president emeritus of the Tama University in Tokyo. He says the complete opposite of what 80% of the Western media (which dominate 95% of the world market) are saying, but he is completely right: the victim of this absurd "nuclear crisis" is North Korea.

Clark does not quote him, but let's start by reading "The Right Man", the latest book by David Frum. Have you heard of Frum? He is recommendable. Until last year he was one of the "plumbers" who wrote Bush's speeches. They asked him for "ideas to justify a war against Iraq", to be formulated in the State of the Union speech. He coined the term "axis of hatred", but those upstairs transformed it into the "axis of evil".

The Axis part reminded us of the Second World War, but it wouldn't stand up on one leg, so they added Iran and, at the last moment, North Korea. Baghdad-Teheran-Pyongyang fit well with Berlin-Rome-Tokyo, explains Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker.

This has nothing to do with 9-11. It's a cheap Hollywood script and its primitivism is plainly obvious, but it's working, even with the "vassal states" (the term is Ignacio Ramonet's in the editorial of Le Monde Diplomatique) of the European Union. In Korea, Bush destroyed the 1994 accord. With it, Pyongyang agreed to dismantle its plans to build a nuclear plant capable of producing nuclear warheads in exchange for the normalization of relations with Washington, non-aggression guarantees, and two light water reacters, militarily useless, that would substitute for the one cancelled.

Bush destroyed the three things. As soon as he arrived in power, he said he "detested" the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il; he censured the policy of breaking the inter-Korean ice carried out by the South Korean President and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Kim Dae Jung; he stopped building the reactors, and not only did he interrupt the dialogue with North Korea, he stuck it in Frum's improvised axis, with a postscript added by the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, mentioning North Korea among the countries susceptible to being the object of a "preventive nuclear attack".

In North Korea they didn't think it was a bluff, because another country placed in the same category, Iraq, was already being bombed and a military invasion was hanging over its head. Also because, in South Korea, the American army has nuclear arms stored. The expression "life or death" must sound fairly literal to the Pyongyang regime. The current crisis is nothing more than the Koreans' desperate demand (reclamación) to return to the 1994 agreement.

Everything North Korea has done since October--demand (reclamar) its right to defend itself by every means, dismantle the control mechanisms on its nuclear plants, and pull out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation agreement--should be interpreted not as insanity, but as what it is: a desperate response. Its demand (reclamación) for guarantees that it will not suffer aggression, like Iraq and Yugoslavia, by the most powerful Army in the world, should be taken seriously, because it is reasonable. Fortunately, Moscow and Peking see it like that. Where is the European Union, our Europe?

Lemme see. This guy is proposing a European-Russian-Chinese alliance to support North Korea against American aggression. Sounds real smart to me. You guys can do a better job taking this apart than I can, so I won't bother. But I'll bet none of the rest of y'all can find a more idiotic screed published this year. I am, right now, declaring the above to be the Official Iberian Notes Dumbest News Article of 2003. Just a comment: the verb reclamar implies that the demand is just. One more: when the revolution comes, I personally vote we put Ignacio Ramonet up against the wall. He is that most hateful thing, a Hispano-French leftist intellectual, and he has all the worst qualities of the Spaniards, the French, the leftists, and the intellectuals without a single one of their redeeming virtues. OK, a third: somebody write David Frum and tell him he's been mentioned, nay, lauded, in this here geniusy commentary. I'd love to see his reaction.

Posted 19:08 by John

Jesús Gil II (c'mon, how can you defend Jesús Gil I? He dissed Luis Aragonés, the coach and lifetime colchonero, in public, and Luis Aragonés is much more the heart and soul of the Atlético than some sleazy corrupt building contractor who bought the team to increase his notoriety) of Atlético Rules would like everyone to know that it's cold in Madrid, and that the Madrid cold is more unpleasant as that back home in interior Oregon. The Barcelona cold can be just as unpleasant as that in Kansas City, because in KC inside your house and anywhere else you might go it's nice and warm. We've got central heating in the Midwest. We've got butane space heaters in Barcelona. You can't really justify central heating because the cold isn't too bad most of the time, so you put on the space heater in the living room when it gets chilly--it never gets below about 35º F here, but when it's 35º outside it's 55º inside, unless you're sitting in front of the space heater, where it's like 80º. The cats hang out around the space heater, especially when Remei is sitting in front of it eating roast chicken. Here in the back bedroom it's about 55º right now. I'm perfectly comfortable wearing a regular shirt and a cotton sweater, blue jeans, and two pairs of socks, except that my hands are getting cold. Fortunately, the faster I type the more exercise my fingers get.

Anyway, next week the weather will get back to normal, mild and sunny. I hope.

Posted 16:15 by John

Here's an update on the "gypsy queen" story we talked about two days ago. (Part One of the story is here.) Seems that they packed up and left Sant Cugat, only to move down the road to Castellbisbal. The headline, from La Vanguardia, is, "Castellbisbal permits gypsies to stay extra day for party." It's also by Paloma Arenós.

After signing an eviction order yesterday to force some sixty trailers to leave the improvised gypsy campground that was set up on Thursday in Castellbisbal, the mayor of the municipality, Joan Playà, had a 180-degree change of attitude. Playà went to the Castellbisbal Sud industrial zone to learn the plans of the calé squatters. "They've asked me to let them stay the night here (Friday) because they want to have a party in the evening. They've promised they'll leave on Saturday at 10 AM and that they'll clean up the area," said Playà.

The trailers arrived there after being expelled on Thursday by the mayor of Sant Cugat, Lluís Recoder. Those camping in Castellbisbal yesterday were visited by the president of the Federation of Gypsy Associations of Catalonia (FAGIC), Manuel Heredia, who volunteered to act as mediator between the community and the City Council. He was disappointed by the lack of responsibility of the group. "They don't have a valid spokesman. Each one says something different, that they'll be here ten days, that they're on vacation for a month...This is chaotic," he said with irritation.

The supervisor of the Philadelphia Evangelical Church of Catalonia, Ricardo Díaz, said that he has no knowledge that these nomads belong to his religious congregation, as they have reiteratedly insisted. The principal excuse for the settling down in Sant Cugat was the celebration of the wedding of the "gypsy queen", a 17-year-old adolescent. "Maybe some of them are believers and know the Evangels, but we don't know anything about them as a religious community in Spain," warned Díaz, worried that they might take advantage of the good name of the congregation in their own benefit.

Paloma's not a bad young reporter; she's new, I've never seen her by-line before this series. She's been to the campsites and she's gone out and gotten some good quotes. She needs to pare down her style; it's much too wordy in a typically Spanish sort of way. She also needs to improve her lead paragraphs, which don't give you the answers to all the six questions right away but screw around and waste space. But she got the story.

I imagine that having a thousand gypsies come to your small town is rather like having a biker rally show up. Now, they're probably harmless, but they're definitely going to make their presence known, and some actions that flout community norms are going to take place. The best policy is to grin and bear it; as long as nothing seriously nasty happens, which is unlikely if you treat them with decency and respect, everything will be more or less fine. But you want to move them on. Maybe only one bunch of adolescents shoplifts in the local supermarket, no biggie. But if it happens every day, which it's likely to, pretty soon it becomes a biggie. There's a big party with a lot of noise and drinking and a couple of fights, we can live with that. One night. Two is pushing it. Three is not acceptable. But you're at risk, because they might retaliate if they think you're mistreating them. So you treat them with kid gloves and hope and pray that they just move on with no trouble and as soon as possible.

They gave Manuel Heredia the back-page interview today. It's a long one but it's interesting.

Q: What's all this mess about the wedding of a gypsy queen that was going to happen around here?
A: We gypsies don't have kings or queens. They're calling the bride a queen in an affectionate way. The bride is from a Ludari family...

Q: Ludari? What's that?
A: Among gypsies there's a great variety of groups: the calés (those from Spain), the Caldera (Kalderash?)...The ludari are Hungarians, with very large, nomadic families.

Q: Ah. So what are they doing around here?
A: A big Ludari family came to the Vallés (north of Barcelona) years ago, while another part travels around southern France and other countries. I wouldn't rule out that the groom, visiting here now, and tired of being far from his bride, "stole" her!

Q: Stole? What do you mean?
A: It's a way of asking for the bride's hand that obligates the father to get them married immediately. Because, if they don't, it means the dishonor of the father!

Q: But they've packed up the campsite: what will happen to the bride and groom, to that father?
A: They'll get married somewhere near here, for sure, ha, ha! The authorities have forced them to move away from where they were because today there are still not campsites with facilities for these big gypsy campouts, as there are in France.

Q: Are you a nomad, too?
A: No! We calés are sedentary: we've always had our own house! My grandfathers were, one, a horse dealer, and the other, a peddler, at fairs and farmhouses down in Granada. But both families had their houses!

Q: Were both grandfathers gypsies?
A: Yes, I'm gypsy on all four sides, I'm a "seven-and-a-half rib" gypsy!

Q: And are gypsy weddings always so elaborate? They said this one would last days and days...
A: Before they were, because the payos (non-gypsies) refused to deal with gypsies, so the families did everything themselves: buy everything, share it out...And that takes days! Not today, now we go to a payo restaurant, we pay, and that's it. But we make it as Pharoahonic as we can, that's for sure!

Q: By the way, those are some cars, trailers, and satellite dishes the Ludari have! They're rich!
A: No. They're nomads! That is, all their capital is here, what you see. And they can't drive small cars because they wouldn't make it up the hills: all the money that you put into your house, they put into their cars and trailers!

Q: OK, but there must be some rich ones...
A: There are poor gypsies and rich gypsies, but every gypsy dies poor!

Q: Why?
A: Because gypsies spend it all while they're alive. He works to live, he doesn't live to work! But when we decide to do something, we're the best! We put heart, faith, and care into it...

Q: Let's go back to the wedding: do you still check the virginity of the bride before the wedding?
A: Yes. That's sacred! Before the wedding, an expert woman (we call her the "gardener") meets with the bride and, among dirty jokes, gives her the virginity test, which the father's honor depends on. And the test is shown to the father.

Q: The honor of the father?
A: Of course. It's as if your daughter got a college degree and showed it to you: you're proud of her because that means she hasn't been doing what she shouldn't. The handkerchief with the mark of the three roses of her virginity is like that diploma; your daughter hasn't been doing what she shouldn't!

Q: The three roses?
A: Yes, certain little wrinkles in the handkerchief...

Q. Did you do that with your daughters?
A: No, because they married payos, and they (the husbands) didn't ask me to do the test.

Q: Does it bother you that they're married to payos?
A: No. I just want them to be happy. And they are, so I'm thrilled!

Q: Aren't you gypsies a little sexist?
A: Ask that to the gypsy women. They'll tell you they're the happiest women in the world! Look, a gypsy won't do anything, anything! without the previous agreement of his wife. And look at them at any celebration: jeweled, beautiful, tall, splendid...

Q: What happens if a gypsy beats his wife?
A: With the payo law, nothing! With ours, yes: the gypsy council will rule that that man must distance himself from the woman until further orders. And if he doesn't obey, then the woman's family has the right to act against him.

Q: You dictate forcible divorces, then...
A: But correctly done! Not like those that the payo judges dictate. When a mare has a foal, the foal is part of the deal!

Q: That's from your grandfather, right? Explain it to me.
A: The children should stay with the mother. What's all this moving the child around from one side to the other? No! That's dividing the child in two, traumatizing him! Children, with the mother.

Q: I see that you have your own laws...
A: We gypsies don't care about being from one country or another, one ideology or another, one system or another, we don't care if this square is called the Plaza de España or de la República. The gypsy only belongs to his family, and to nothing or nobody else!

Q: But there are other things in life...
A: Yes. God. All us gypsies believe in God. Look: in Spain they've expelled Jews, Muslims, they've gotten rid of everyone different. They tried as hard as they could with us, and here we are! Couldn't it be because God is helping us a little?

Q: Maybe, but...is anybody else?
A: Fortunately, there isn't any more institutional racism. Social racism...that's another story. My struggle now is pressuring gypsy parents so that not a single gypsy child drops out of school. We have to be educated and finally get some political power!

Q: In order to defend the family.
A: Everyone defends his own family. Look: you'll never see a single old gypsy in a nursing home! And if we ever see one, we'll expel his family! Because anyone who does that....is no longer a gypsy.

One thing I like about Spanish journalism is the lack of political correctness. The interviewer, Victor M. Amela, pulls no punches and isn't afraid to challenge the interviewee. Heredia seems like an ideal representative of a discriminated-against group, ready to stand up for his people and proud of his heritage but also ready to compromise, be realistic, and set goals to work toward. I'm not nearly as sanguine as Heredia about women's place in gypsy society, but it could be a lot worse, I suppose, and his goal of education is laudable. Heredia admits, though, that his people hold no allegiance to Spain or Catalonia; frankly, this is a rejection of full integration into payo society. It's a little contradictory to want the privileges of the payo lifestyle without assuming all the responsibilities; still, I imagine that improvements in gypsies' educations and job skills will lead to a growing identification with society in general.

Also, it's an excellent sign that both Heredia's daughters are married to payos and he doesn't mind. Ethnicity and race and sex make up the last taboo left in America, according to Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom, who are normally of the disposition that racial issues in America are not as dividing as they may seem. The Thernstroms say that these days, whites, Hispanics, Asians, and American Indians have no problems intermarrying and are doing so more and more frequently. The sexual / marriage taboo has disappeared between these four groups for all practical purposes. Anecdotal evidence from my life supports this idea. (I also believe that religious differences, whether someone is non-religious or Jewish or Catholic or whatever brand of Prod, make little difference these days in America. Hell, I'm not sure I ever nailed a Protestant chick way back in the unrestricted free-agent days, and that was the 80s.) However, blacks tend to be more unwilling to marry outside of the black group, and the other four groups are more unwilling to marry into the black group. This taboo has lessened a lot in recent years, but a goodly percentage of whites would still object to their kid marrying someone who was black, and an even higher percentage of blacks would object to their kid marrying someone who was white. Fortunately, those numbers are dropping, but we're not color-blind yet back home in America. Here in Spain, though, there are really four groups, payos, gypsies, Arabs, and miscellaneous immigrants. Spanish people--that is, payos--have no problem marrying miscellaneous immigrants. Arabs--well, if the guy is integrated here and speaks Spanish and doesn't make her wear the burqa and has a job and the like, most payos wouldn't kick up much of a fuss, less if the guy was born here, and even less if the Arab is a Christian. Gypsies and payos still normally do not intermarry except at the very lowest social level. Heredia's daughters, I hope, are part of a trend toward making gypsy-payo intermarriages less taboo.

Posted 20:49 by John

Check out this piece of Salvador Dalí alleged art. It's pretty tame compared to some of the stuff on display at the Dalí Museum in Figueras, an hour and a half north of Barcelona by train. I am not a big fan of Dalí; he was a notorious publicity hound and his work is superficial, though he was imaginative and good at tricking the eye. Still, his real aim in life was to be rich and famous, live in high style, and épater les bourgeois, and at those feats he succeeded brilliantly.

Posted 19:18 by John

In today's news, the Federal Appeals Court in Richmond has ruled that the President, as commander-in-chief, may indefinitely detain American citizens suspected of being "enemy combatants" without filing charges or providing access to a lawyer. The judge said, "Whatever his nationality, anyone who takes up arms against the United States in a foreign theater of war can effectively be described as an enemy combatant and treated as such." This decision only applies to two people, Yasser Esam Hamdi and José Padilla. The Supreme Court is not likely to hear an appeal. Another federal judge had already ruled that the treatment of the prisoners at Guantánamo was legal. There go the anti-war folks' challenges to the legality of American actions.

Meanwhile, in Venezuela, 80% of bank employees went out on a two-day strike, and the transport workers' union has called a two-day strike to start Monday, January 13. These guys are the Venezuelan Teamsters and they're going out against the government. With the transport workers and the oil workers out on strike, Chávez can't claim that the opposition to him is only middle-and upper-class. The Vanguardia's correspondent, Joaquim Ibarz, with whom I have had my differences, reports, "The opposition can count on the majority of civil society, a majority that is mobilizing, that is active, that will listen to any call that is made on it that concerns disobeying and ignoring the government...Chávez has been radicalizing his discourse over the last several days...he can't manage to reactivate the petroleum industry, which is vital in order to normalize the country. The government has neither the management skills nor enough political leadership to get the principal source of income back to work." Let's hope Chávez falls by the end of the month with no bloodshed, though if they want to go Ceauscescu on his ass it's fine with me if they don't kill anyone else. Unfortunately, Venezuelan papers are reporting that the government is going to use groups of armed civilians (otherwise known as "vigilante gangs", "lynch mobs", and "death squads") and Army elements to "contain the people's protests". How the international Left can support this man I have no idea.

An interesting phenomenon is that when people, whether Spaniards or Americans, get back from living several years in the United States and come back to Spain, they suddenly love America. It's so convenient, the waiters pay attention, you can get anything you want, everything's clean, and so cheap, people are so responsible, and you've got elbow room to move around a little, and people smile at you, and the streets get fixed and the phones work, there are tennis courts in the park, and there's often something good on TV, and the food's really not that bad, and how come Wal-Mart doesn't come to Spain? I've seen this syndrome over and over, and I went through it once when we came back here in 1994. Xavier Mas de Xaxàs, the X-man, former Vangua correspondent in the US, is going through it now. When he was in America he couldn't say anything good about it, but now that he's back here everything was so wonderful over there.

Anyway, Barcelona's Socialist mayor, Joan Clos, gave a "state of the city" address, and here's Mas de Xaxàs's sidebar column:

Mayor Joan Clos lives in the contradiction of being American and anti-American. He dreams of a world government that would neutralize the imperialism of the United States. He doesn't say it in so many words, because he speaks in dialectic meanderings, but he makes it clear that he does not like the Bush Administration. He believes that 9-11 is "a clash of civilizations" and that the possible war against Iraq would "finish off the revenge" for those attacks. He criticizes the "divine references" that Bush often makes and, against them, assures us that "in Europe we work for secularism, the separation between Church and State, republicanism in the French sense of the word." French republicanism, however, was inspired by American, and both of them by the Enlightenment. Mayor Clos confuses the religiosity of one man with that of a republic that protects the Church from the interference of the State. The progressive (here with its literal meaning, that of making progress) and businesslike nucleus of Joan Clos's discourse, however, is very American.

I might also point out to Mayor Clos that the United States is the country whose Constitution separates Church and State, and that the Spanish State is not secular at all; its official religion is, of course, Roman Catholicism. On your income tax form there's a checkoff; if you mark Yes, a small sum of your tax money goes to the Catholic Church. Mayor Clos also errs when he praises French republicanism; Spain, remember, is a constitutional monarchy with King Juan Carlos as titular head of state. It ain't no republic, and the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party does not call for the removal of the monarchy. As I recall, the French cut their king's head off when they declared their republic back in the good old days; I certainly hope Mayor Clos is not really calling for the decapitation of Juan Carlos, who seems like a perfectly nice, normal guy except for his (and his family's) mild speech defect.

Joke. Crown Prince Felipe goes to his father the King and says, "Papá, soy gay." The King responds, "No. Yo soy el Gey, y tu madre es la Geina."

Posted 17:57 by John

I saw my London Irish friend Murph last night. I went over to his house and we played with his kid, Patrick, who is three and a half. Patrick asked for a glass of wah-tuh, in his British accent. Murph, who was in the kitchen, didn't hear and I relayed the message, "Patrick wants a glass of wah-ter." Patrick spoke up and said, "No. Wah-tuh." Well, he was right according to his standards, so I didn't argue the point. Murph said that Patrick corrected his pronunciation once, too. Seems that Patrick was watching a Barney the Dinosaur video in which there appears a character named Bob, pronounced "Bahb" in American because, well, Barney's an American purple dinosaur. Murph made a reference to the character, saying something like "What's Bob ("Bawb" in British) doing now?" And Patrick replied, "Not 'Bawb'. 'Bahb'." So Barney the Dinosaur's pronunciation trumps Dad's. Murph claims to have explained that Barney just talks funny like John and Clark, but I bet Patrick remained unconvinced.

Posted 13:58 by John

Our page view count is through the roof because both Andrew Sullivan and PejmanPundit linked to the interview with Susan Sontag that we translated out of the Vanguardia. So, all you idiotarians, be careful what you say in Spain because Iberian Notes is watching you. Don't think you can get away with America-bashing quotes intended only for foreign consumption anymore. And, for all you new visitors, we'd sure appreciate it if you'd look around and stay a spell.

Andrew Sullivan asked about the rest of the interview with Susan Sontag; I only translated the part that was interesting. If you want to see the whole thing in Spanish, though, it's in the "La Contra" section of the December 30 Vanguardia.

Posted 00:16 by John

Jesús Gil, the most obnoxious owner ever of a Spanish soccer team, says on his blog, Atlético Rules, that the Fulton County alleged animal shelter in Atlanta has an 82% kill rate, meaning thousands of dead cats and dogs and other animals. Well, in Barcelona the animal shelter has gone no-kill (except for sick and dangerous animals). As a fellow host-city of the Olympic Games, Barcelona officially challenges Atlanta to measure up to our standard. If Atlanta can't do it, why not? Will Atlanta allow Barcelona to be superior? Fellow-bloggers and blog-readers concerned about animals--I mean people against unnecessary cruelty, conservationists, folks who respect animals, folks who want to do no unneeded harm--ought to write to the Atlanta city council and ask them why they can't do what Barcelona can do.

The mayor of Atlanta's e-mail is mayorfranklin@ci.atlanta.ga.us, so you can send her an e-mail. Her name is Shirley Franklin.

Posted 16:26 by John

Here's a translation of an article from today's Vanguardia by Paloma Arenós. The headline is " 'Royal' wedding in Sant Cugat / Thousands of guests camp in the city for the wedding of a 'gypsy queen' ".

They're having a major celebration and they've taken over some private lands to show it. According to her parents, inhabitants of France but of Hungarian origin, on January 16 the "gypsy queen" will get married in Sant Cugat del Vallés (a Barcelona suburb). Since the beginning of the year, a trail of 200 trailers from all over Europe--yesterday they were still arriving--have installed themselves on a vacant lot near the Boehringer company's building, between Rubí and Sant Cugat, with the intention of celebrating a big caló wedding. Beginning tomorrow, Friday, there will be ten days of unstoppable partying, and it's predicted that 300 more trailers will arrive from Italy, Germany, France, Switzerland, and even Morocco.

The protagonist of the event is Moraica Lobis, a 17-year-old adolescent, whose father, José Lobis Costa, "is a Hungarian gypsy prince, according to our tradition," says Josefa, the proud mother of the bride. Moraica will marry a boy fom Naples. Why have they come to Sant Cugat? "We have a lot of relatives that live here and in Rubí, and it was a very good meeting point," some say. "Besides, we didn't have anywhere else to go, and we're having a wedding with the whole international gypsy people invited," Lobis points out. The mother of the bride explains that "We don't have any money to move on somewhere else," and yesterday asked for some open lands, offering to "pay whatever". Josefa explains that they wanted to put up a gazebo on the vacant lot to "celebrate a big wedding," but continual police surveillance--they record license numbers and ask for ID every time someone enters or leaves--has put a damper on their plans. "We're afraid they'll kick us out," she comments.

Now some French musicians are playing, some little kids are running around between the trailers, the Mercedes, and the BMWs, farther along some women are showing off their party dresses...This squatting has not pleased the Sant Cugat city government at all. The mayor, Lluís Recoder (CiU--Catalan nationalist), ordered the thousands of people concentrated on a vacant lot on Calle Prat de la Riba to give up "this illegal campsite" before 2 PM this afternoon. If this decree is not obeyed, Recoder will call in the National Police and the Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan regional police) to carry out the order.

The city government laments that since the various families arrived, "they haven't stopped giving different excuses to stay: first they've camped here because they have sick relatives, then their vehicles have broken down, and the last one is the wedding of the alleged bride." The president of the FAGIC (Federation of Gypsy Associations of Catalonia), Manuel Heredia, was surprised at the news of this massive campsite. "Neither the city government nor anybody else has told me about this officially. Tomorrow (today) I'm going to investigate to find out their plans, " he said, after pointing out that the area "has traditionally been used by nomadic gypsies." Heredia wants to make sure people know that "In the Spanish, French, and English gypsy traditions, the figure of the gypsy queen does not exist. Perhaps they're calling her that in an affectionate way, as if they were saying she was beautiful."

This is not the first time the city council has had to deal with a gypsy campsite. Along with the FAGIC, they have been working for months for the sociolaboral integration of another group of gypsies who in April moved out of some government housing in Rubí and camped next to the Molins de Rei highway within the Sant Cugat city limits.

I love that phrase, "sociolaboral integration". I think it means "get a job and move out of your house trailer".

This is what I know about gypsies, and it's not a whole lot. There is a group of at least several hundred who have lived here in Gràcia for years and who are "sociolaborally integrated" just fine. They've adopted the Catalan language and have a perfectly respectable reputation. There is another group in the downtown Raval neighborhood around the Calle de la Cera who are also sociolaborally integrated; they're known for producing musicians like Peret. These people never cause any problems, either, and are a welcome addition. However, there's a group living up on El Carmel, a hillside above the city, and they've got a nasty reputation as thieves, drug dealers, and general dirtbags that is at least partially deserved. I won't go up there, mostly because I have no reason to. And the worst neighborhood in town is Can Tunis, down between Montjuic and the commercial harbor, which is Barcelona's hard-drugs supermarket. Taxi drivers won't go there. Some of its inhabitants are gypsies. All of them are criminals. They're isolated out there on the other side of the Ronda Litoral, the coastal-side loop around the city. Every couple of weeks some junkie gets himself run over trying to cross the freeway on foot. Can Tunis is as bad as any neighborhood in Kansas City.

You will see gypsies working as scam artists on tourists downtown; the most common is the woman who pushes a carnation upon you and asks for one peseta. If you let yourself get distracted or, even worse, get out your wallet, your pocket will be picked. The ketchup scam is pretty common; they'll squirt ketchup on you while you're sitting outside and then, while "cleaning you up", among a thousand apologies, they'll steal your wallet. Another one is that of asking a tourist for directions to someplace really obvious, like the Ramblas, and picking his pocket while he's trying to say "Over there" or something like that. Groups of kids surrounding you, waving pieces of cardboard in your face to confuse you while they go for your wallet, are now a lot less common than they used to be.

Gypsies in Spain have always been severely discriminated against; Spaniards almost universally dislike them, though leftists won't admit it, and many gypsies have become famous musicians and dancers. Gypsies are all thought to rob, cheat, and steal, and it doesn't help their cause that a lot of them do. Nomadic gypsies are more disliked than those who have settled down; some of those who have settled down, like our gypsies here in Gràcia, are quite well-liked. Of course, none of them rob, cheat, or steal. The gypsies are considered to have a different culture from Spaniards in general and to live according to their own code of behavior and laws. They're thought to be secretive around non-gypsies. Common stereotypes are that "Gypsies won't steal from each other, but they think it's all right to steal from payos (non-gypsies)", "Gypsy men don't work, only the women work", "Don't mess with gypsy women if you value your life, because the men are really jealous", "Gypsies all carry knives and are expert knife-fighters", "Gypsies look poor but they really have a lot of money", "Gypsies eat dogs and cats", and the like. I once read this, written by a Spaniard whose name escapes me, "The Americans and the English think we are savage, hot-blooded, passionate, jealous, violent; they think of us in a way not dissimilar from the way we think about gypsies." From what I can gather, Spanish gypsies all can speak Spanish, but they also have their own language called caló. I've never heard caló spoken, but there are some songs that use it, even by a group as poppy as the Gypsy Kings.

Most Spaniards are very curious about gypsies but don't really know very much about them. I certainly don't, and a lot of what I know comes through the filter of the prejudices of Spaniards. By the way, I'm not dissing the Spaniards as bigoted racists. Some of their stereotypes have foundation in truth. Gypsies commit crimes in disproportionate numbers. With honorable exceptions, they do not tend to be model citizens. They openly flout many of society's established norms. That's not the reputation you usually get if you, as a group, are hardworking, studious, and sober. I mean, say, the Germans are hardworking, industrious, and sober, at least most of the time. The gypsies are the anti-Germans, if that makes any sense.

Posted 14:48 by John

The Vanguardia is reporting that Hugo Chávez has brought in strikebreakers to work the oil wells in Venezuela; their incompetence has caused spills and fires at oil facilities. The El Palito refinery has suffered two serious accidents in three days, including one that caused fifty-foot-high flames and an enormous cloud of smoke that covered the whole town, and oil has been spilled all over Lake Maracaibo. In a town called Anaco the oil spilled managed to work its way into the sewers and the water supply. Where are the environmentalist leftists who are so worked up about the Prestige oil spill? Where are the labor unions, who should be screaming bloody murder at both Chávez and Lula da Silva for strikebreaking? And Lula's a union man himself! One of the accidents at El Palito included a large explosion which killed one worker and injured others. Journalists who tried to get access to the huge refinery were kept out by Chávez's "Bolivarian Circles", gangs of street-fighting thugs comparable to Hitler's SA. Only eight percent of Venezuela's normal daily oil production is being produced due to the strike. The banks, meanwhile, which have been on semi-strike--open three hours a day--are going on a two-day full strike. Not even credit cards will work. The Venezuelan people are showing real courage, putting their jobs and their bodies on the line for freedom. Chávez must go.

Posted 14:27 by John

In political news, Rodrigo Rato, economics minister and "vice prime minister", has officially announced that he'll be a candidate to succeed Prime Minister Aznar when he steps down at the end of 2004. He looks like he has a very good shot at the position, since he's known for being competent and boring. Spain has been into competent and boring for the last ten years or so, after fourteen years of charismatic Socialist leader Felipe González. Rato is not especially popular, but he's respected and not disliked. Aznar's wife, Ana Botella, who does not call herself "Ana Botella de Aznar" (nobody uses that formula any more), is going to run for a seat on the Madrid City Council. She's certainly intelligent and qualified enough. This wouldn't be something new around here; Felipe González's wife, Carmen Romero (according to rumor, she's the official wife and González has had a series of, uh, close female friends. Then again, Aznar is probably the only prominent male in Spain who isn't rumored to have had a series of extramarital affairs) was a Socialist deputy in Parliament for years; for all I know, she still is. Also, in France, both President Chirac and Prime Minister Raffarin's wives hold political posts, one on a city council somewhere and the other in a regional parliament. By the way, there's a nice sex scandal shaping up in Germany; Chancellor Schröder, according to the German sensationalist press, is having an affair with a well-known German female TV personality. He's suing a small paper that broke the story, but the biggest German paper, Bild, and the British Mail on Sunday have both headlined it. Schröder has already won one libel lawsuit; in May, he won a judgment against a news agency that had reported that he dyed his hair. Schröder apparently has rather Clintonian proclivities; he's currently on his fourth wife.

Posted 13:50 by John

This morning I was walking home from the clinic and I passed through the Plaza del Nord. There was a toddler playing in the dirt there and his overdressed mom was yelling at him to get up and get out of the pile of crap he was sitting in. The kid paid no attention and Mom screamed at the top of her lungs, "Em cago en la Mare de Deu!" (I shit on the mother of God, in Catalan.) Only in Spain.

Posted 18:59 by John

Here's a piece of outright stupidity and ignorance from José Martí Gómez in today's Vanguardia. He gets his own space at the bottom of the op-ed page every day to make three or four short comments of unfailing imbecility.

A reader sent me a photocopy including the carve-up of the pie of the United States budget for the new year. 51.63% goes to military spending and the rest is chump change: 6.78% for education, 6.39% for health care, 4.30 for the justice system, 3.78% on housing, 2.61% on labor and employment, and 1.04% for Social Security, just for a few examples. General indignation. That's the least it deserves. (No hay para menos).

Mr. Martí Gómez is obviously too goddamn lazy to bother doing anything like, I dunno, LOOKING THINGS UP. If he'd gone to the Office of Management and Budget website, he'd have seen this as the proposed 2003 budget:

Discretionary Spending:
Defense $368 billion
Non-defense $405 bn
of which
Health and Human Services $85.9 bn
Education $50.3 bn
Housing and Urban Development $31.5 bn
Justice $21.9 bn
Energy $21.0 bn

Mandatory Spending:
Social Security (federal pensions) $472 bn
Medicare (health care for old people) $231 bn
Medicaid (health care for poor people) $159 bn
Other mandatory spending $297 bn

Interest payments $181 bn

Total spending $2128 bn

Receipts $2048 bn

Deficit $80 bn

According to the real 2003 federal budget, defense spending is 17.3%, not the 51.6% that Mr. Martí Gómez's photocopy claims. Yeah, great, some schmuck sends me a photocopy and what's the first thing I do? Why, put it in the paper without even bothering to check it! You'd be seriously disciplined on an American newspaper if you pulled a dumb stunt like this, publishing something that's blatantly false without the most minimal fact checking. I mean, what I did was to google "budget 2003 united states" and the first thing on the list was the Office of Management and Budget. It took about fifteen seconds. Here's the link if you want to check it out yourself.

Additionally, of course, this is the federal budget. Education, transportation, housing, public services, justice, and other such things are largely the responsibilities of state or city governments (which have the power to tax in the US), not of the federal government; that is, the $50.3 billion that the federal government will spend on education does not include the money that the states and municipalities will be spending.

Posted 18:07 by John

An article appeared in yesterday's Vanguardia that made me so indignant that I've just barely managed to calm down. It reports the publishing in Spanish of a 1993 Italian book by "Communist militant" Rossana Rossanda and Carla Mosca consisting of interviews with Mario Moretti, leader of the terrorist gang the Red Brigades. The Red Brigades are most famous for the 1978 kidnap-murder of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro. (I think they killed an American general or someone like that, too, among their other sundry crimes.)

Says Ms. Rossanda, "The Red Brigades were not a criminal or terrorist group, but a political phenomenon." Look, the emergence of the Green Party is a political phenomenon. The claim of both the old Italian Communists and neo-Fascists to have become democratic parties is a political phenomenon. The fact that the Nader voters threw the 2000 election to Bush is a political phenomenon. Killing people and blowing up stuff for political reasons are terrorist crimes.

Ms. Rossanda also says that "the Red Brigades used political violence, but they were neither inspired by nor organized like the IRA or ETA. Their objective was not to sow terror indiscriminately." Oh, so they only terrorized the people who deserved it, huh? Bullshit. I remember the stories out of Italy in the late '70s, and there were terrorist attacks right and left (literally) in those days. Seemed like every day there was another bomb in the Rome airport. (I remember a '70s board game in which one had to build up an airline. The worst possible destination was Rome because like every three turns there was a hijacking there.)

Moretti, in the book, claims that he personally killed Moro. "I wouldn't have let anyone else do it. It was a terrible test. You wear the scar for the rest of your life." Oh, how psychologically tragic. Moretti's life should have been pretty short after his arrest and conviction for murder and terrorism; the noose, the firing squad, the guillotine, or the lethal injection would have been appropriate methods of ensuring that he would not be long troubled by his scar.

And these Italian so-called journalists are apologizing and making excuses for him. Ahh, Europe, the continent where the Americans are brutal warmongers but the Red Brigades are idealist dreamers.

Posted 17:46 by John

My pal Clark and I have been having an argument down there in the Comments section after I blasted Lula da Silva. Clark says, basically, that I shouldn't be so quick to make judgments and that I should give Lula a chance before criticizing him.

My real answer, I suppose, is that if Lula behaves in accordance with the way he's talked over the years, then he doesn't understand that democratic capitalism is the only system that really works. See, Francis Fukuyama was right. History, with a capital H, has come to an end. Remember, Fukuyama's a Hegelian and he believes in using dialectic. His definition of History is the dialectic process among the various forms of government--oligarchy, theocracy, monarchy, Communism, feudalism, mercantilism, anarchism, thugocracy, and the lot. Democratic capitalism has proven itself superior to all the rest; its last enemy standing, Communism, fell in 1991. Sure, there are states that have not accepted democratic capitalism, and states that have not been at it long enough to see the positive results, but it's really pretty easy to see that the successful countries in this world are all democratic capitalist. Also, among Third World countries, the closer they are to democratic capitalism, the better off they tend to be. I would say that democratic capitalism is a necessary but not sufficient condition for national success.

(History with a small h, the chronicle of the things that have happened, of course will continue for as long as the human race is alive.)

Lula da Silva is not a democratic capitalist. What he is, more than anything, is a Latin American populist union man and career politician. He likes Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro. All the Spanish idiots who always get everything wrong love him. His supporters are the usual suspects. That is all I need to know to be able to figure out that this guy is going to take Brazil down the good old nationalist-Socialist trail, and the Socialist trail leads to nowhere but disaster.

Posted 17:51 by John

Here's Susan Sontag from a Vanguardia interview published on December 30:

Sontag: I've lived in Paris for a long time, and in other countries in Europe. I'm attracted by its culture, its willingness to debate...Most of the things I like are in Europe!
Interviewer: What do you dislike about the United States?
S: That the whole primordial dream was overrun by consumptionism, the ideology that "to live is to buy". That's the ideology today. It makes the people stupid, it makes their principal values shopping and having fun.
I: I've read that you've said you're ashamed of being American.
S: No, that's an incorrect headline, and I thank you for allowing me to clear this up: what I'm ashamed of is not being American but the aggressive American foreign policy and the warlike exercise of political power by the Bush Administration!
I. Saddam's worse: he murders his people!
S: Saddam is the worst monster in the world! He is hateful, like Islamic fundamentalism. But the United States is hateful for its imperialistic fundamentalism!
I: The United States has saved Europe several times, it's provided solutions...
S: Not everything my country has done has been negative, but today the United States isn't a solution, it's a danger! A world dominated by the United States would be horrible, and Bush's imperialism frightens me. I hope Europe will show us a road to follow.

I could give a take on this interview from any number of different angles, but perhaps the most interesting is that of "consumptionism". It's not an ideology, in the first place, it's more like a lifestyle. In the second place, I think the Europeans mean by it what we mean by "materialism". There are materialistic people everywhere, not only in the United States; there's a lot more conspicuous consumption here in Barcelona than there is in Kansas City, and the freakin' world capital of conspicuous consumption has always been Ms. Sontag's Paris. Third, nobody is in favor of consumptionism or materialism. It's the easiest imaginable straw man for a dissatisfied social critic to knock down, but let's get real: nobody really believes that "to live is to buy". Now, many people like nice things, and there's nothing wrong with that if they can afford them. Many people enjoy shopping. What's wrong with that? I hate it, myself, but if you like it, that's OK with me. Some people are concerned with keeping up with the Joneses, but if they're that insecure, that's their business, and the Joneses phenomenon exists everywhere, not just in America. In fact, it's much more common in newly wealthy countries like Spain, where the generation born in the late Forties and Fifties is the first to enjoy real wealth at a mass level, than it is in countries like the States where people are more used to having money. And a lot of people have a lot more money than they know what to do with everywhere in the West, because the West's system of democratic capitalism is the one that works. Maybe that's really what Ms. Sontag objects to. Oh, yeah, as for the value of having fun, hell, remember that bit about "the pursuit of happiness", the right to do as you please as long as you don't interfere with anyone else's right to do the same.

By the way, it's interesting that the Left is now the side of the ideological spectrum that criticizes materialism or consumptionism or whatever you want to call it, but the original people who the original middle-class Leftists were trying to reach were precisely the poor workers of the Industrial Revolution. And their message was, "You're poor and exploited and that's why you don't have your share of material things. Join us and everybody will get his share." The Left's message is still "Income is unfairly distributed, and you, the poor, aren't getting your share of the wealth." So they're promising the people more material things, yet they criticize an excess of materialism at the same time.

Posted 16:51 by John

FC Barcelona won its second straight League game to jump to eighth place, and there's still more than half the season left. Barça stomped Recreativo de Huelva, the worst team in the First Division, 3-0 at home, on an own goal, a hard shot from outside the area by Rochemback, and a nice give-and-go between Cocu and Motta that Cocu chipped in from short range. Hey, Xavier, you said I blew all my football cred by wanting to use Cocu and Gabri as defensemen; well, last night, Cocu played defense and Gabri was going to before he was scratched due to injury; Gerard took his place. It worked. Agreed, against el Recre, but it worked. Now let's see how they do against midtable Málaga next week. By the way, both Saviola and Riquelme were benched last night. So was Mendieta. The standings are now Real Sociedad 36 points, Real Madrid 33, Deportivo 29, Valencia 28, Celta 27, Betis 26, Mallorca 23, Barça 22. Mallorca will fall by the wayside. Betis and Celta will be tougher to catch. Valencia and Depor aren't too far away, nor does either team have significantly better players than Barcelona. They are within range if Barcelona manages to put together a decent non-losing streak--if they win a few games and tie a couple. Madrid is out of range, and does have significantly better players than Barça. If they keep playing like they're playing--they beat Valencia 4-1 last night--they'll win the League this year for sure. As for Real Sociedad, they're beginning to stagnate just a little. Three of their five best players--De Pedro, Xabi Alonso, and Kovacevic--were out with injuries last night, and they don't have a deep bench. They're good, but they'll be caught, at least by Madrid and possibly by somebody else. Here's a prediction for the League 2002-03: Real Madrid, Valencia, Real Sociedad, Deportivo, Barcelona, Betis, Celta. Barça fails to qualify for the Champions' League.

Here's my classification of the Barça squad based on their performance this season:

Stars (significantly better than average, guys who can really make a difference): Kluivert, Puyol.

Superior (above average, the kind of guys that a good team can use): Xavi, Luis Enrique, Cocu, Overmars.

Replacement (average guys who are generally available on the market; you can easily buy someone as good) with Future Potential: Saviola, Riquelme, Rochemback, Motta, Iniesta, Navarro. These guys are young and are likely to become Superior players and are worth holding onto as a long-term investment. A couple of them will fail and one just might become a Star. If I had to bet on one to become a Star, it'd be Iniesta.

Replacement Forever (you should sell these guys and get someone cheaper): Gabri, Gerard, Dani, Mendieta, Bonano, Enke, Reiziger.

Just Get Rid of 'Em Now: De Boer, Christianval, Andersson, Valdés.

Already Gone (to Benfica): Geovanni.

In comparison, Real Madrid has five Stars (Ronaldo, Figo, Zidane, Raúl, Roberto Carlos), and the rest of their starters are Superior. They never have to play anyone worse than a Replacement guy with potential. Neither does Depor or Valencia. Barça, on the other hand, just has too many guys who were thought to be Stars who are really Replacements with potential, or just plain Replacements.

Posted 16:05 by John

Francesc-Marc Álvaro of La Vanguardia cites an imaginary friend of his as saying, "Nobody talks about what is really in our interest...Do you know why nobody is protesting the National Library's demential measure to separate Catalan and Valencian as different languages in its cataloguing? Do you know why we live in a country where, despite the use of Catalan in the schools, there are almost no toys available in Catalan? Do you know why the politicians don't really support the official recognition of the Catalan national soccer team, with the exception of friendly matches?" The imaginary friend then says that the silent majority in Catalonia is concerned about these issues and that--conspiracy theory alert!--the central government in Madrid manipulates people's feelings on a daily basis.

No. About 20% of Catalans, the Cataloonies, actually care about these things, and they're so obsessed with them that they think about nothing else. Going back to George Orwell's indispensible "Notes on Nationalism", "A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of comparative prestige...his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs, and humiliations...Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception." Only a nationalist--an uncommonly stupid nationalist--could get worked up about something so ridiculous as a Catalan national football team. (Or, for that matter, burning the American flag or saying the Pledge of Allegiance in school.) Fortunately, most people in Catalonia are more worried about such issues as prices, economic growth, unemployment, housing, crime, education, health care, transportation, and the like.

Posted 15:44 by John

Venezuela is at the point of complete collapse. The rumors are that "a state of exception" will be declared, which will allow the Chávez government to shut down the press and force the banks to open, among other things. All constitutional guarantees to the citizenry can be suspended. A TV poll says that 81.5% of the Venezuelans will not abide by the "state of exception", although I have no idea whether they've got any choice in the matter. One thing, though, is that when the shooting starts, which it will, Chávez will not go down without a fight. The people have turned completely against him except for his hard core of lumpenproletariat (that is, poor and not too bright or law-abiding) supporters, less than 10% of Venezuelans. Meanwhile, the month-long general strike is hurting the government badly; it will have to suspend payments on its international debt if the strike goes on into February. Chávez had already wrecked the Venezuelan economy with Peronista-like reckless social spending of money the government didn't have, and lack of economic professionalism and competence on the part of the government. Now he's not collecting any tax money, either, and the economy has ground to a halt. There's not even any oil, since the workers are striking, and Lula da Silva has to send oil from Brazil to prop Chávez up. The banks are threatening to strike, too, and the government has announced that it will intervene if they do. 40% of the Venezuelan banks' money is on loan to the government, which means they are hostages; it the government doesn't pay back what it borrowed, they crash. The two big Spanish banks, Santander and Bilbao Vizcaya, hold $1.5 billion in Venezuelan government bonds; their investment is starting to look like it's really worth about $1.50. Venezuela is at the brink. If Chávez won't step down, which he won't, the military needs to step in. If the coup in Chile in 1973 was justified, which I think it was (NOTE: the killing of some 4000 people in the wake of the Chilean coup was NOT justified), this one is even more so.

According to the World Almanac per-capita income in Venezuela was $8000 in 1999. Chávez has probably managed to cut that in half, and with the strike, people's incomes are approximately $0. No situation like that can last long.

Posted 15:51 by John

I just heard an ad on "Internet radio" for a website that gives weather forecasts. The characters were these layabout British lout rock stars who are very obviously supposed to be the Gallaghers from Oasis. (The actors are obviously Americans doing Spinal Tap British accents--Spinal Tap may also be an inspiration for the ad.) One of them suggests trashing the hotel room, and the other says, "Wait, let's check the weather so we'll know what it's like outside when we get thrown out." I laughed. I'm not going to use the service, though. Who needs to around here? The weather's always the same. Predictably nice but kind of boring. As for Spinal Tap, it never came out in Spain. They've never heard of it. Someone ought to release it on video.

Posted 21:41 by John

Here's some wonderful news. The Barcelona "animal shelter" (perrera) has become a real shelter. It's gone no-kill. From now on the only animals that will be put down are those that are sick or dangerous. In 1999 86% of dogs and 98% of cats were put down, and in 2002 36% of dogs and 27% of cats were given the lethal injection. In 2003 those percentages will be almost zero. An organization called the Altarriba Foundation is taking over the Barcelona pound; they run the shelter in Mataró, exposed a couple of years ago as a dog pound that put down animals inhumanely. 85% of animals in the Mataró pound get adopted as pets. All we can say is great, terrific, swell, etc. Altarriba is also managing 31 colonies of stray cats within Barcelona, sterilizing them and giving them basic care. We must admit that Jordi Portabella of the Republican Left is the pro-animal guy on the City Council. Because we're soft on animals too, we give you leave to vote for Portabella when the municipal elections come up, probably in May.

Posted 17:32 by John

Here's an article from Slate about the New York Times's buying the Washington Post's share of the International Herald Tribune. Those of us who have lived in Europe for a long time have a soft spot in our hearts for the old IHT. Until we all got computers between '95 and '97, we depended on the IHT for news from America. We got all the big news filtered through the Spanish perspective from La Vanguardia, El País, and either Spanish or Catalan TV. We didn't get the little news, though; if it wasn't something related to international affaris, a very important political initiative, or something sensational, the Spanish media didn't pick it up. So we depended on the IHT, which cost about four times what a local paper cost (so it was a fairly serious investment; Spanish daily papers have always cost the equivalent of a buck, two bucks if you consider purchasing-power parity. When I got here in '87 the Vanguardia cost 60 pesetas. Now it's a euro, 166 pesetas), for the baseball scores, what was up in Congress, the last thing the president said, the comic strips, the latest fads and trends, the reviews of whatever books were coming out, and what a lot of people bought it every day for, the market quotes.

I remember budgeting myself to buy it twice a week, back when I had a really crappy job. I also remember that, if you had one, you didn't toss it, you gave it to someone else when you were through. I distinctly remember rather pushily asking people if I could have theirs when they were finished--I've always been pretty generous but also pretty demanding, and I'm especially demanding for reading material. If you knew me personally, you'd always be lending me books. You'd always get them back, but sometimes not for like six months.

Anyway, though, when you got a computer you didn't need the IHT anymore. You got all that stuff and more off the Internet. Even when Internet was expensive, which it was over here in 1997, it was a lot cheaper than buying the IHT every day--and if what you were interested in was the stock quotes, the Internet could give them to you minute-by-minute. Suddenly we didn't need the IHT anymore. Now that hotels have Internet connections for their guests, you won't even have to buy it if you travel to another non-American city. I haven't bought the Herald Tribune since the very day I got my Internet connection.

The article from Slate said that the Times paid $70 million for the Post's share, and speculates that Howell Raines is going to put big money into the IHT. I think it's a rotten idea and that the Times is going to lose a ton of money, because the Net is going to knock the IHT out of business sooner or later. Why buy the IHT when you can get the Kansas City Star, Time, Sports Illustrated, USA Today, Fox News, the Telegraph, the Washington Times, the New Republic, and everything else you want for free? And now that there are Internet cafés everywhere in the world, even in the fifth pine tree, even in Assboink, Idaho, where an hour of Internet surfing costs a dollar or two, who needs a thin sixteen-page paper with five or six pages of it taken up by ads and the market quotes? Sad day for the Times...wait, I hate the Times! And Howell Raines! And the whole Times staff except William Safire! Good. I hope they go broke on this big-time loser of an acquisition.

Posted 15:32 by John

I'm listening to an early-morning country radio show on a station called "Clear 99" from Boonville / Columbia, Missouri, the heart of Little Dixie. So far they've already played "You're the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly" and "When the Squirrel Went Berserk in the First Uprighteous Church". Also, down at the Lake of the Ozarks, they're having "Eagle Days". Eagles flock to the lower Midwest in winter; we've been to the same thing at the wetlands wildlife refuge north of St. Joseph. They've got a ranger out there explaining all about eagles, and they've got at least one tame eagle (found as a fledgeling, grew up around humans, can't be released), or anyway they did last time I went. They've got a platform up with high-powered binoculars, and you can check out the huge birds close-up. They're tremendous and there are hundreds of them. Another place you can almost always see eagles in winter is downstream from the Massachussetts Street bridge over the Kansas River in Lawrence. The water's turgid there and is apparently warmer, which seems to attract raptors. Also, they have tame, or should I say caged raptors at the Deanna Rose Children's Farm in Overland Park, a Kansas City suburb. These are all birds that flew into power lines or got hit by cars or got shot or something and are missing eyes or limbs, so they can't be released. The most enormous eagle I've ever seen, though, was at a mountain pass in the Maestrazgo, in Aragon. Remei and I got out of the car at this sign that said, "Yoquesécomosellama Pass, Niflores meters altitude" for a stretch, and suddenly this huge bird took off right under our feet. Only about fifty meters away from the road there was this enormous cliff and the eagle just soared off it and into the air over the valley. I swear its wingspread was eight feet. It was golden-brown and the sun glanced off it as it glided down and across.

Posted 14:20 by John

Here's an excellent takedown of Commie historian Eric Hobsbawm, originally from the New Criterion, that Front Page picked up.

Posted 13:33 by John

Betty from Sin Control is going to dar a luz--give birth--to a baby within a couple of weeks. Congratulations! Here are some more colloquial terms she uses in her blog that you might want to know. These are, again, standard Spanish "respectable" slang, known and used by everyone. As you know, this is a more or less weekly feature; this is the third installment.

alucinar--to marvel at something, to be, like, "Wow". Aluciné cuando vi el nuevo Ferrari de Pepe "El Quinqui".
pegarle una paliza a alguien--literally, to beat someone up. El polícia le pegó una paliza al okupa. Figuratively, to bore someone to death. ¡Deja de pegarme la paliza con tus historias de la mili!
trabajar como un negro--To work very hard. Literally, to work like a black man. El jefe me hace trabajar como un negro. This is not considered racist in any way in Spain and they don't mean anything pejorative by it. Spanish sensibilities toward race are not at anywhere near the fever pitch they're at in the PC Anglophone world. Another example can be seen these days on the streets of Barcelona. The Three Wise Men, the "Wizard Kings", bring children toys on January 6, and various stores have "real" Wise Men whose laps kids can sit on and whom children can ask for presents from. Traditionally, one of the Wise Men is black, and if they can't find a real black guy, they paint up a white guy in blackface. That is by no means considered racist, either.
montárselo bien--to get yourself fixed up with a good situation. Se lo ha montado bien--sólo trabaja tres días a la semana.
un/una cotilla--a gossip. Pili es una cotilla, siempre contando todo lo que sabe. Cotillear is "to gossip".
estar líado--to be busy. Estoy líado con mi nuevo proyecto. Also, to be romantically entangled. Paco y Maruja se han líado / están líados. Pepita tiene un lío--Pepita has a (casual) boyfriend.

Betty's blog is great for people who have an intermediate level of Spanish. She makes no errors (unlike most people do on the Internet), she's obviously careful to proofread, and she uses standard language with a lot of common colloquialisms that are pretty easy to figure out from the context. Reading her is like listening to a college-educated Spanish woman just chatting about everyday things, like real people do in everyday life. This is the most difficult thing to reproduce in a foreign language text--authenticity. Conversations in textbooks just never sound real. Betty is real. People working on their Spanish should check it out.

Posted 18:00 by John

Atlético Rules has a terrific post up, an interview with the Spanish ambassador to the UN. If you don't believe that Europeans who talk sense exist, listen to this guy. There's a link to the whole interview. Check out this well-informed Eurocritical blog called The Radical. I think the blogger's using the word "radical" with its original meaning, "from the roots". There's an excellent post on why foreign forces can be tried legally by US military tribunals (short answer: because there are precedents and the Supreme Court says it's OK). Cinderella Bloggerfeller links to this site called the Maoist Internationalist Movement that is laughable beyond belief. Click here for "What's Your Line?", their botanical classification of all the lefties in the united $tates of amerikkka, as they call it. They're down on "Brezhnevites", "Hua Guofengites", and "Miscellaneous Revisionists". Get this: they have a movie reviews section. Click here for their take on the Spanish Civil War as seen through Maoist eyes; then look through the list for movies you've seen, reviewed by someone who seriously believes that Socialism in the USSR ended in 1953. There's a brand-new one up of "The Sum of All Fears". It concludes that Communism is the answer. In case you were wondering.

Posted 17:36 by John

The first two foreign leaders who Lula da Silva met with after his inaguration were Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro. Said Fidel, "Latin America is going through a desperate situation, comparable to the crisis that Cuba went through in 1959." Fidel added, "Leaders like Lula, Chávez, and me appear due to the accumulations of tremendous problems and the crisis that is affecting our nations. Leaders appear at moments of crisis, they are dreamers who are searching for a better world. I feel happy that our ideas are advancing." As a general rule, things that make Fidel Castro happy have the opposite effect on the citizenry. Don't be surprised when Lula drives Brazil straight over the cliff. Best-case scenario: Lula wrecks the economy and they pull a Joseph Estrada on him. Worst-case scenario: Lula wrecks the economy and it's Pinochet ´73 all over again. I advise the United States to be very publicly neutral, not friendly but not an enemy either, and to continue current trade relations with Brazil, so they can't blame us when it's Thelma-and-Louise time. (My favorite scene in the history of motion pictures occurs when Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis go over the cliff into the Grand Canyon. If only it could be true! And with Tim Robbins in the trunk!)

Posted 17:20 by John

Five illegal immigrants drowned yesterday when their launch sank off Tarifa, in the Straits of Gibraltar. The boat was filled with some 45 Moroccan illegals when it ran aground on some rocks. Normally what happens is that the "agent" or "trafficker" or "coyote" or whatever you want to call him dumps the immigrants off fairly near the coast and they swim to shore--if they can. A lot of people drown like this; more than 70 bodies were found in 2002, and more than that number are likely to have died trying to cross the Straits. Another group was found in the vicinity, this one of 17 people, some African blacks, some Asians, and a Moroccan. This is not Spain's fault, in the sense that Spain has to have some kind of immigration policy; you can't just let everybody in all at once. It's a damn shame, though, that these poor, desperate people die trying to come to the Promised Land, and it makes me furious that rotten corrupt kleptocracies run the places these people are willing to risk their lives to leave. I also wouldn't mind taking the "coyotes" out and shooting them without further ado, but I guess we can't do that.

Two of those bastards got caught a couple of weeks back, one of whom (a Palestinian) had three warrants out for his arrest; the other one was Moroccan. They got locked up in the Málaga jail along with three other North Africans, apparently merely illegal aliens awaiting deportation. The Palestinian, who had a record as long as John Hol--well, pretty long, set the cell on fire last Friday. He and his fellow exploiter of immigrants were among the four to die, and the fifth is in critical condition. Four others, also illegals, are hospitalized. The Málaga calabozo had no plan in case of fire and the ventilation system was counterproductive, since as well as sucking smoke out it let fresh oxygen in, thereby fanning the flames. The victims died of burns, not of smoke inhalation. This kind of preventable tragedy--I wouldn't wish that way to die even on a trafficker of immigrants--is, unfortunately, not unusual here in Spain, the Country Without Safety Precautions. Slogan: "We Laugh at Death".

Top Ten Ways to Die in Spain:

10. Get burned up in a jail cell
9. Get run over by a moron local cop
8. Have a construction crane fall on your head
7. Try to save fourteen pesetas by buying unbottled "olive oil"; get poisoned
6. Fall off the Sagrada Familia
5. Get burned up in some disco with no emergency exit or worse, the emergency exit locked
4. Get flattened by the Euromed express train at an unmarked grade crossing
3. Get blown up because your neighbor has inadvertently turned a butane tank into a bomb while trying to hold an urban barbecue
2. Have a huge rock fall on your head off the façade of an officially recognized historic building while walking along the Paseo de Gràcia
And the winner is....
1. Get thrown into Barcelona Harbor by disco security guards!

All of these forms of shuffling off this mortal coil have been tried in Spain. They all worked.

Posted 00:06 by John

Check this out: the movie Slap Shot was based on a real minor league hockey team, and the "Hanson brothers" were real hockey players. This is hilarious.

Posted 21:12 by John

John Hawkins from Right Wing News asked a list of questions to several bloggers more distinguished than us about their predictions for 2003. We've already made our predictions, but just to get on the record, we'll answer the questions from the list.

1. War in Iraq before March 2003? Yes.
2. Saddam still in power Jan. 1, 2004? No.
3. Terrorist attack in the US killing more than 100 people? No.
4. Casualties on our side in Iraq war? Maximum a few hundred, maybe zero from enemy fire.
5. Syria still support Hezbollah? Really don't know. Doubt it.
6. Large battle in Afghanistan? No.
7. Independent Palestinian state? No.
8. Revolution in Iran? No.
9. US-North Korea sign deal to put end to NK nuke program? No because NK state will collapse, Bush wouldn't bargain with them anyway since they can't be trusted.
10. Yasser still in power? Yes, of the PLO, not as leader of a real state.
11. Anthrax case solved? Domestic or foreign terrorism? Unsolved, "lone nut" rather than conspiracy.
12. Osama? Already dead.
13. Dem pres candidate 2004? Nader-Barbara Mikulski 3% of vote. Independents McCain-Lieberman 41%, Bush-Rice 56%.
14. Bush end year above 60% in popularity? Yes.
15. Dow Jones above 10,500? No, with at least two more years of a slow economy, rather early 90s-ish; then another long growth period. Just guessing.
16. Human baby cloned? It's possible now. Won't be done, though, till the Chinese get hold of the technology in ten-twenty years.

Feel free to give your own answers in the comments section below, and we'll see how we've done twelve months from now.

Posted 18:58 by John

The Media Research Center has given their awards for the worst reporting of 2002. Good God, some of these people are stupid. Everyone else has been linking to this, so I figured I would, too. Here's the link to the complete list. Check it out if you haven't already. You'll need to scroll down to find the awards, which confused me for a few seconds.

A couple of comments. One, that I've heard repeated over and over, is that Carter has been the best ex-President. Nonsense. Carter has been a publicity hound who has been publicly annoying the poor of the world for years. If I had to pick a best ex-President, it would be either John Quincy Adams, "Old Man Eloquent" of the House of Representatives (he was the guy who argued for the slaves in the Amistad case, so you've seen him in the movies); William Howard Taft, who became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court; or Theodore Roosevelt, who continued to play an important role in politics between the end of his term in 1908 and his death in 1919. Richard Nixon, who wrote several books on politics and international affairs after his resignation, would be fourth. Harry Truman was a party elder after his presidency, and a lot of Americans remember him because he lived so long, twenty years after his term ran out.

We bragged a while back that this blog had actually broken a story, the time we noticed that Noam Chomsky's department at MIT gave unanimous support to the anti-Israel petition going around a while back. We're calling co-dibs on another one, too, the story of Jessica Lange's dissing of America on September 25 in an appearance at a film festival in San Sebastián, which won one of MRC's awards. Both Iberian Notes (on its old site) and Atlético Rules had the story in translation for our readers the next day. It didn't hit the US mass media till more than a week later.

Posted 18:00 by John

I was flipping through my Goode's World Atlas and came upon a world climate map, which explains a lot about why the world works as it does.

What looks like the most desirable climate zone for humans is Humid Subtropical. If you drew a line from Washington to about Wichita and then down to Corpus Christi, south and east of that would be the Humid Subtropical zone in the US. Its characterics are good rainfall, warm summers, and cool winters. Other important stretches of Humid Subtropical land are China south of the Yellow River valley, most of Japan, South Korea, and the northern Indian plain, helping to explain why so many people live in those areas. And there's southern Brazil and the Rio de la Plata drainage basin, also well-populated but ridiculously poor compared to what it ought to be. The Europeans who immigrated en masse to that area between about 1880 and the First World War managed to set up just disastrous governments at about midcentury. They tried almost everything but capitalism and democracy, and nothing they tried worked. What they wound up with was a system reminiscent of "bossed" cities in America in the early and middle 20th centuries. Now Argentina is a basket case and Brazil will be pretty soon, and there's just no excuse for this. They can't blame the Americans for the way they themselves screwed up and keep screwing up. You could understand their being poor if they weren't so obviously living in a place with all the geographic advantages of the southeastern United States.

North of the Humid Subtropical zone in the US is the Warm Summer Humid Continental zone, which also looks to be a great place to live. Draw a line from Boston straight across to about Buffalo, Flint, Green Bay, Minneapolis, and Fargo, and then down to Wichita, and Warm Summer Humid Continental is inside it. The winters are colder than in Humid Subtropical, but the rest is pretty much the same. The only other large Warm Summer Humid Continental zone in the world is China north of the Yellow River valley.

North of the Boston-Fargo line is the Cool Summer Humid Continental zone, which is not such a nice place to live in many Americans' opinion. It includes the inhabited parts of Canada west to Sasketchewan. In Europe, Oslo, Stockholm, and Helsinki are in this zone, as is Poland and most of the inhabited parts of Russia. In this zone winters are very cold and summers cool. No wonder Russia has never been a prosperous country. You try and try and the climate's still like Duluth, Minnesota. Or worse, because a lot of Russians live in the next zone up, Subarctic. No one lives in the Subarctic part of Canada. It just isn't worth it for us to settle large communities of people up there. But the Russians didn't have much other choice except to expand into Siberia--and then Stalin made them go out there and build cities.

The other important zones in the US are Mediterranean, which includes Southern California, most of the Mediterranean coast including nearly the whole of Iberia, parts of Iran and Turkey, part of Australia, Capetown, and central Chile. This is a fairly small zone in terms of land area but a lot of people live in it. The rest of the US Pacific coast is Marine West Coast, along with most of Western Europe, another small zone. A lot of the Southwest is Tropical Desert, and the Great Plains are Middle Latitude Steppe. Tropical Desert has never been desirable, hell, it wasn't even habitable before aqueducts and air-conditioning, and Middle Latitude Steppe is pretty marginal land, not worth much without irrigation. It can support a sparse population, which is what it has in America. I mean, nobody lives in Wyoming or North Dakota. Or western Kansas.

Really, if you look at it, two-thirds of the Earth is water and one-third of it is land. I'd bet that the sum of the four most desirable climates, the Humid Subtropical, Warm Summer Humid Continental, Marine West Coast, and Mediterranean zones, isn't more than one-fifth of the land on Earth. (So one-fifth of two-thirds is two-fifteenths, which is the amount of land on Earth that is really desirable.) I'd also bet that two-thirds of the people on Earth live in one of these four zones, and I'm pretty sure that these are the only four zones either you or I would want to live in. Exception: what is called Undifferentiated Highlands on the map, which includes areas where the different climates depend on the altitude. Denver and Mexico City are both among the Undifferentiated Highlands.

Posted 14:35 by John

Lula da Silva, Brazil's new president, was sworn in yesterday. I don't want to seem churlish--Lula, by all accounts, is a fine man, dedicated and compassionate--but I smell disaster coming. Latin American populist politicians are always a prelude to a big mess, and half a million people showed up at Lula's inaguration. He said that he would put an end to hunger in Brazil; the Vanguardia says that there are 54 million hungry people in Brazil, a third of the population. That can't be right. Brazil's per-capita income in 1999 was $6150 adjusted for purchasing power, according to the World Almanac. That's almost $25,000 for a family of four. Of course, the rich have a lot more wealth than the poor, and, yes, I've seen the documentaries about the favelas, but I seriously doubt that more than a very few people in Brazil don't get enough to eat. (Hell, I know people--I have relatives --in the States who don't make that much.) I imagine that the problem in Brazil is that the people's expectations haven't been met; they jumped ideologically from Marxism-syndicalism to free-market democracy in a bound and believed that democracy and capitalism would make them just as rich as the Americans. It hasn't happened yet. Things like this take a while.

So, anyway, Lula plans for a "peaceful and planned" agrarian reform, which sounds fishy to me. He stood up to the damn Yankees, saying that the Middle East crisis should be resolved "peacefully and through negotiations". He beat the patriotic drum, using language that would be laughed at by Europeans if it came out of an American mouth. He blasted what the anti-globos call "neoliberalism", saying, "Faced with the decline of a model that produced recession, unemployment, and hunger, of the failure of the culture of the individual and the hopelessness of the families, Brazilian society chose to change and made the change itself." Uh-oh. This kind of rhetoric tends to lead to large social-engineering projects. Lula is already faced with having to break two of his campaign promises; he can't raise the minimum wage or cut interest rates without touching off inflation. Let's see what he chooses. My hopes are not high, as two of the honored guests at the inaguration were Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez; Brazil is sending half a million barrels of gasoline to Chávez to help him deal with the Venezuelan strike. Way to go, Lula! That's what they call "strikebreaking" in union circles in America; it's the direct opposite of supporting the workers. I firmly believe that you can tell a man by the company he keeps, and Lula is cuddling up to dictators awfully fast. Prediction: He will be Brazil's Alan García. Brazil will suffer serious internal strife within a year or two, at least at the level of today's Argentina and possibly at the level of today's Venezuela.

One Carla Fibla has been sent to Baghdad by the Vangua as special correspondent. She has apparently been taken on the official Potemkin tour, you know, the one where they show you the infant formula factory and orphanage that the Americans blew up. She got some quotes. Said Yassid, "Saddam is like our father, our family, the leader for whom we will sacrifice our lives." Said Karim, "Bush is a coward...Saddam Hussein is the strongest leader, the best in the world.". Carla did point out that the journalists were allowed to talk to people on only one street, and said that "The official control of every word is constant, the inhabitants are observed by local authorities while they all agree on the same thing. The enemy is clear and the national attitude is unanimous." It also looks like Saddam set up a demonstration for the foreign journos. A thousand Iraqi kids with olive branches held a "peace march" while chanting slogans in favor of Saddam. Their teachers said that "They aren't afraid because they won't need anything while our president is with us" amd "Every Iraqi child knows what he has to do when war comes." There's a nice photo of the Iraqi kids, who have pretty clearly been indoctrinated into the Saddam Youth.

Mario Soares, Socialist ex-president of Portugal from 1986 to 1996, has a long, dull Vangua op-ed today with occasional bursts of America-bashing. He says that America is operating with "absolute indifference toward human rights and international law", and that the American "spirit of reprisal" is "the opposite of justice, international legality, and even a contradiction of common moral sense". He accuses America of wanting to carry out a "holy war" and says that that would be "the worst thing that could happen to us!" Soares calls Donald Rumsfeld "bellicose" and "threatening", "arrogant" and "imprudent". He accuses the Americans of treating their captives unjustly, and says that this is "a world like the one George Orwell described". And he finishes up by saying "Utopian alternatives may be the most realistic ones today."

The op-ed itself is a turgid mound of crap, poorly written and badly reasoned. And the brilliant Jean-François Revel would most distinctly tell the dull-normal Mario Soares to go to hell for having written this steaming pile of warmed-over socialist rhetoric that was dead and buried intellectually well over a century ago. This, my fellow Americans, is what European Socialists really believe. My vote is that we deal with European conservative and moderate leaders and let the Socialists understand that they are beyond the pale of respectability as far as we're concerned.

Posted 14:22 by John

Well, now that the Christmas holidays are come and almost gone--we still have Epiphany, the day of the Three Wise Men, or as they're called here, los Reyes Magos, on January 6--it's time to get down and do some serious blogging. On New Year's Eve, I stayed home and Remei went out with her friends Leonie and Elisabeth to this bar called the Sidecar, where what's left of the forty-year-olds who were hip and cool twenty years ago go to do stuff that was hip and cool twenty years ago. Like cocaine, which Remei says the bathroom was full of people snorting up while she had to pee and had to wait like fifteen minutes. You'd be surprised how much cocaine use goes on around here. Then again, maybe you wouldn't.

Parenthetical note: I hate holidays. The only thing I like is not having to work. As for the rest of it, it irritates me to have to get happy just because the calendar says I'm supposed to. Then everybody calls me a party-pooper, and I respond by asking them where they were the other 364 days of the year, when I would be perfectly willing to go out and do anything with anybody. Well, anything not including handcuffs, Crisco, amyl nitrate, and cigarette butts being put out on my bare flesh. You know what I mean. And as for going out to party on holidays, everybody else in Spain is doing it and there are huge crowds of once-a-year drunks who can't handle their liquor smashing empty cava bottles in the Plaza Catalunya. It's amateur night. Vomit, fights, broken glass, high prices, noise--who needs it? Well, if you want to get laid, I see your point, as holiday nights are normally excellent for getting-laid purposes since all the girls are drunk. But those of us who have already been claimed in the free-agent draft aren't looking for any of that.

What you're supposed to do on New Year's Eve is eat twelve grapes for good luck. As the church bells chime twelve times to mark twelve o'clock, you eat one grape per stroke of the bells. I officially gave this custom up at New Year's 2000 as it certainly wasn't bringing me any goddamn luck. Should you be in a Spanish home on New Year's, you will be given a saucer full of green grapes at about 11:45. Do not eat them now. The TV will likely be turned to the Puerta del Sol in Madrid on TV1 as a break from an atrocious holiday special variety show featuring the same loser TV personalities as last year. Do not eat your grapes until other people start, because first they're going to ring four times, the cuartos, to show that the hour is up; at quarter past, they ring once, at half past twice, at quarter to three times, and on the hour, you guessed it, four times. Then you will see people stuffing grapes into their faces. Do not worry, yourself, about doing this right, since nobody will be watching you. There are two schools of thought regarding what you have to do to get the good luck for next year. The first maintains that you must actually have swallowed all the grapes by the end of the twelfth stroke of the bells, which I consider to be physically impossible; the second only obliges you to have all twelve grapes in your mouth at the end of stroke twelve. This is quite doable, especially if you have a big mouth like me. I highly recommend deseeding the grapes first in the minutes leading up to the big moment.

I do not know where this custom comes from. There are those who say it's a traditional Mediterranean thing and it symbolizes the endless cycle of life, since the grapevines come back every spring, and that the grape is an essential part of the Mediterranean culture, and so on. Then there are those who say the alleged custom was invented in the Twenties by some guys who had some grapes to sell.