Check out Atlético Rules for the scoop on the oil spill off the coast of Galicia. Someone said on TV3 that if the spill had been crude oil instead of fuel oil it would have been even worse, since fuel oil is slightly heavier than water and tends to sink whereas crude oil floats on top of the water and is more easily carried to shore. I don't know whether this is true--could someone who knows basic physical science tell us? There's also been some complaining about Gibraltar, as that was the oil tanker's destination. The tanker was apparently substandard and in violation of several laws, one of which was that it was supposed to be double-hulled but was only single-hulled. Those responsible should, of course, face the consequences; the captain of the ship is in jail in Galicia. Seems to me that it ought to be the shipowner in there if anyone's going to jail. I'm really not sure what Gibraltar has to do with anything, but certain sectors of the media seem to be trying to draw a connection between the existence of Gibraltar as a British colony and this oil spill. I don't get it.

Thanks to Patrick Crozier from CrozierVision and UK Transport for adding our new slogan to the template--we're too astonishingly untechnological to figure that out, though we have figured out how to add links to the blogroll at least, and thanks again to Jessica from The Blog of Chloe and Pete for being so quotable. Check 'em all out. UK Transport is, despite its title, interesting; Patrick explains how things work from an informed perspective and throws in lots of libertarianism and economics knowledge as a bonus. If he called it something like "Next Stop: Disaster. Mind the Gap", he'd get a lot more readers. Jessica is an awfully good writer.

Check out this story about three European kids and their swell behavior; one of them is a Spaniard. (We found this through Best of the Web.) Are we surprised? Unfortunately, no.

First, you need to remember who European exchange students are. They are rich kids. Participating in an student exchange is not free. Also, your English needs to be good before you get to America or you're going to have real problems. Only rich kids have the money to go to the kind of private schools where they make sure you learn English. The father in the story said they were spoiled, which I have no problem believing with a Spanish kid, especially a boy, who really is the king of the house. These rich kids are super-hip; they're from big cities and are used to hitting snazzy discos on weekends and going sailing and the like. They have every kind of electronic gear imaginable and they use it, so they're absolutely up-to-the-minute on what's in and what's out in London, Paris, Berlin, and New York. Also, these kids drink and use recreational drugs. They can afford it. The absolute last place to send them is Utah, for God's sake. Of course they're going to hate it.

America, unfortunately, except for New York, is not hip in the eyes of the rich kids. What's hip now is being anti-globalistic and solidarious and the like. The children of the wealthy are always the first to jump on every trend--they've got the motive, social competition, the opportunity, being able to find out instantly what's hip in Tokyo, and the ability, since they have tons of dough. Anyway, the trend now is pretending you're a squatter. Walk through rich parts of Barcelona like La Bonanova and Sarrià and you'll see fourteen-year-old kids dressed like Sixties hippies and with shit stuck through their faces.

But almost all of America is square; high schools in Utah ask you to do silly stuff like take the homecoming game seriously and rent a tuxedo to go to the Prom. These Euro-kids are just going to be bored with that. And they're going to be bored in school, too, since European private schools are at least two grade levels above average American public schools. It shouldn't be too surprising that they should get into mischief--they're used to getting away with everything anyway. Also, part of being hip is being anti-American. You can't be hip and like George Bush, not even in America and especially not in Europe. What it's really hip to do, in fact, since being a squatter is so hip, is to mouth the squatters' ridiculous political slogans, which usually have something to do with smashing capitalism or justifying the ETA and other terrorists. Sixteen-year-old kids never see the contradictions between their lifestyles and radical politics.

So you've got three immature though worldly rich urban European kids who think America's uncool and that Utah is especially uncool--the poor kids begged to be taken to Ogden, for God's sake, for a little urban atmosphere! And they do something really dumb and in rotten taste instead of, say, going back home when they decided they didn't like it. Nobody should be at all surprised. Also, I'm not surprised that the FBI checked them out, either--they damn well should have, with these morons filming themselves with a gun and yelling infantile squatter stuff about how terrorism is cool. You never know what the hell they might be up to.

I have had several Spanish students in my Proficiency-level classes who had done an exchange in high school in the United States. They all had very positive experiences; I'm sure it helps a lot that these were nice rich kids whose parents hadn't spoiled them. These were kids who were interested enough in learning English that they continued trying to improve though their English was already very good. And none of them could remotely be described as hip. Thank God. Really, I think people who have friends over for dinner and go to a movie or maybe for a few drinks on Saturday night probably have a lot more fun, and are certainly a lot more fun to be around, than people who care so much about how others see them that they go out of their way to do silly crap so that other folks will think they're hip. Like stay out until seven in the morning in expensive discos listening to crappy music that's so loud you can't hear what people are saying and they have to yell in your ear while swallowing pills whose contents you're really not too sure about.

This has been today's Startlingly Obvious Sermon. Thank you.

We assume everyone has by now heard the so-called news that John Kennedy was in very poor health and took a whole pile of drugs, some consciousness-altering. Here's a link from Fox News. These findings (they certainly seem to be completely legitimate) are interesting but not new, though they certainly do serve as confirmation for what was previously reported.

Paul Johnson wrote in A History of the American People, published in 1997, "(Joseph Kennedy's) lies centered on certain areas. One was Jack's health. Old Joe had learned many tricks in concealing the true state of his retarded daughter, Rosemary, buried alive in a home. He used them to gloss over the seriousness of Jack's back problems and his functional disorder, eventually diagnosed as Addison's disease. Strictly speaking, Jack was never fit to hold any important public office, and the list of lies told about his body by the Kennedy camp over many years is formidable. The back pain Jack suffered seems to have increased after he became President, and his White House physician, Dr. Janet Travell, had to give him two or three daily injections of novocaine. Jack eventually found this treatment intolerably painful. But he did not fire Travell, fearing that, though she had hitherto been willing to mislead the media about his health, she might now disclose his true medical history. Instead, he kept her on the payroll but put himself into the hands of a rogue named Dr. Max Jacobson, who later lost his medical license and was described by his nurse as 'absolutely a quack'. Known to his celebrity clients as 'Doctor Feelgood' , because of his willingness to inject amphetamines laced with steroids, animal cells, and other goodies, Jacobson started to shoot powerful drugs into Jack once, twice, even three times a week. Although he turned down a request to move into the White House, he had succeeded, by the summer of 1961, in making the President heavily dependent on amphetamines." Johnson says later that Kennedy's chubby cheeks, which he only developed after becoming President, were the result of all the cortisone that was being injected into him.

Find out if your blog is banned in China! We're not, unfortunately; we've done too much France-bashing and not enough Commie-bashing. Here's our position. China is a dictatorship but from what we read things could be a lot worse there, and were a lot worse pretty recently. Still, things could be one hell of a lot better, and one of the reasons is that, despite all the economic growth along the coast from Shanghai to Hong Kong, China is still a Communist state, and Communist states suck to live in. The West should do everything possible to encourage the development of human rights in China, though besides issuing firm protests whenever the Chinese government decides to treat somebody unpleasantly, I'm not sure what else we can do. This does not extend to cutting off trade with China or slapping sanctions on them or going off on some military adventure. China's simply too big and important to be ignored, and all we can do is deal with them at a level of diplomatic courtesy. We are not China's friend, nor do we want to be, but it would be reckless folly to turn China into an enemy. This does not apply to, say, Cuba. Cuba is, fortunately, not so important that we have to deal with the Castro regime. We can shun Castro and we are right to do so. But we just can't shun China, no matter how much we'd like to. Is this enough to get us censored? Anyway, click here to find out if you're banned in China. (Thanks to Horologium for the link.)

Iberian Notes scoops Reynolds! InstaPundit says that Bush is going to snub Gerhard Schröder at the upcoming NATO summit in Prague. We wrote about this back in October! Check our old website if you don't believe us. It's still up at www.johnandantonio.com/InsideEuropeIberianNotes.

This story from the Onion is just plain hilarious, besides being politically and economically dead-on-target.

In the financial section of yesterday's Vanguardia, there was an interview with unpleasant arrogant French marketer and psychologist Clotaire Rapaille. M. Rapaille "lives in a mansion in Tuxedo, New York. His consulting firm has branches in Europe and the United States and advises 50 corporations out of the Fortune 100. He bases his theories of psychoanalysis and archetypes on the work of Freud, Jung, and Levi-Strauss," so you can see just how up-to-date and visionary M. Rapaille's ideas are. M. Rapaille brags about his use of focus groups to determine that Nestlé should emphasize how good its coffee smells in its advertising and that General Motors should give its cars an aggressive image. M. Rapaille is definitely pushing the creative envelope and showing his general state-of-the-artness here. The questions, of course, are Q., and M. Rapaille's answers are A.

Q. What is American culture like?
A. You can sum it up in one word: adolescent. Obsessed by violence, sex, and food. In reality, since it's adolescent, there's not much sex and a lot of violence.

Q. Why adolescent?
A. Because the US has never had a father. It has an enormous Oedipus complex. They never had to kill the king or the aristocrats, which are paternal figures in Europe. That's why there's so much obsession with age in the US. They think they can be "forever young", like the song.

Q. And since 9-11?
A. 9-11 has had a profound impact on the American mentality. They've never been invaded. The only wars were the ones in Hollywood. The answer is fear and the desire to fight. People want to say, don't mess with me! We've seen an incredible increase in the security budget. The US is becoming a militarized country.

Q. How does this influence consumption?
A. Things like the adaptation of a military vehicle, the Hummer, or bullet-proof vests have become fashionable. Executives from one of my clients, DuPont, have remarked to me that they are selling huge quantities of Kevlon, a material five times stronger than steel. I think we're going to see a comeback of bomber jackets. And military boots.

Q. But "military chic" already existed.
A. This is no longer military chic. This is real, much more visceral.

Q. In what sense?
A. I divide the motivation of the consumer in three categories. The cortex, which is intellectual. The limbic, which is realted to emotion. And third, the reptilian: an instinct for survival and reproduction. The reptilian is winning out. Although it may look for an intellectual alibi, power is reptilian and in the US, now more than ever, it is what's in charge since the events of 9-11.

Q. Like the Hummer, for example.
A. A car is much more than a vehicle to get from point A to point B. A car is a message. There's no need to have a Hummer to go shopping at the mall. But I think there's a reptilian instinct under the surface, in the depths of the mind, the message they want to emit is something like "Don't mess with me. If there's a collision, you're going to die and I won't." In Europe this would be perceived as too simplistic. But the United States is simplistic.

Q. Will it stay like that?
A. In reality, I think that 9-11 should mean the coming of age for the Americans. And this should express itself in respect for other cultures. Until now, the United States has had no foreign policy becuase they thought that the rest of the world was nothing more than a bunch of small countries that would wind up becoming little Americas.

Q. How will this affect the strategies of the big corporations?
A. Look at McDonald's. It's a symbol of old-time globalization. One product for the whole world. But this model was already being questioned and it died definitively on 9-11. Now they have to diversify, recognize that in France we like cheese as something alive with a smell, that's not dead like pasteurized American cheese.

Q. Give some examples.
A. A good one is L'Oreal in Japan. They've been very successful because of their respect for Japanese aesthetics, so different from the French. To do this you have to be sure of yourself. And L'Oreal has this because it's French. American companies can't rely on their culture because it's so poor. That's their problem.

We won't comment too much here, except to say that we're shocked that DuPont, General Motors, and forty-eight of the other top Fortune 100 companies are actually paying this guy enough money to live in a mansion for spouting this drivel. We are also shocked that these companies are paying this guy to talk shit about their own country. We don't need to hire any Frenchmen to do that. We already have Chomsky, Vidal, Sontag, Lewis Lapham, Bill Moyers, Ramsey Clark, Susan Sarandon, Jessica Lange, Alec Baldwin, and Woody Harrelson. We suggest that if you, the reader, work for a company that hires Monsieur Clotaire Rapaille, or if you own stock in such a company, you might gently propose to someone on the board of directors that the company save some money by no longer hiring said unpleasant arrogant anti-American French psychologist to tell them crap they could have picked up from an intro marketing book, a bad Psych 101 textbook, and a couple of Naomi Klein manifestoes.

We'd also like to point to good old nationalism as a reason for M. Rapaille's anti-Americanism. This is clearly visible in his last three answers. He thinks America doesn't respect other countries, like France, where we mistakenly tried to sell them non-stinky cheese. Such an affront to la belle France! Meanwhile France, so superior, is "successful in its exportations" because it respects other countries' cultures; it can do this because it has a rich culture, not a poor one like the American. M. Rapaille would not fall into such obvious chauvinism were he not a nationalist, blinded into thinking that his culture is superior to the adolescent American. He just can't understand why America is richer, more powerful, and more successful than his own beloved France, and he refuses to admit it just may be because American culture is superior to French in several important fields. Now, we'd prefer to say that America, as a culture, excels at some things, and France, as a culture, excels at others. Two of the things that America excels at are marketing in particular and business in general, and these are two things in which the French have always been weak. They have even historically turned up their Gallic noses at such matters; remember Napoleon's jibe that the British were "a nation of shopkeepers"? Well, the shopkeepers kicked Napoleon's superior French ass when it came down to the real fighting. British culture won out over French, and don't think the French don't know that and don't resent it (which is why they can be so snotty about French--they can't stand it that English is the world's first language rather than French), especially since France was, until the mid-1800s, the most populous country in Europe except Russia and should have been able to beat the English militarily, as with more inhabitants they should have had both more men and more money than the British. Yet since the War of the Spanish Succession, which ended in 1713 and in which France took a serious loss, France has been on the winning side in only one important war: the War of the American Revolution. Since then, they've lost all the big ones; I would hand them a loss in World War One since they'd have been conquered again if it hadn't been for first the British, for four long years of trench warfare, and then the Americans, with their 1918 contingent of fresh fighting men. They're clear losers in World War Two, no matter how much the postwar settlement tried to disguise that fact. Face it, Frenchmen: you're lousy at business and war. Be proud of the good things about your culture instead of bashing the British and Americans for being better at some things than you are.

Check out Merde in France, who claims to have spent "20 years behind enemy lines" and has quite a lot to say.

My pal Murph came over this morning and we got cranking on the porno translations; if this job turns out well, which we think it will, we have a lot more similar work coming. We got them finished in record time, it isn't difficult at all. What we are figuring is that the most important part is to make sure the pervos correctly understand how to pay. We were very careful about getting that exactly right, as we were about the various legal disclaimers. We actually don't think the rest of the text matters too much at all. The site we translated is one of those "Barely Legal" ones that feature young-looking girls; the owner proclaims that all models are 18 or over and openly offers a list of the modeling agencies that he hired the girls from, several of them in Hungary and the rest in Britain, so we figure he's legit and that nothing unethical is going on here. We have no ethical problem about providing the necessary material that pervos need as long as no minors or animals are involved and nobody really gets hurt. As Remei says, "If it's legal, money is money." Her very Catholic dad used to be the doorman at a cabaret, which was the thirty-years-ago equivalent of a strip club, so I bet that's where she came up with that expression.

Ali of True Porn Clerk Stories says that 100% of the pervos that rent barely legal videos are men over 45, so we figure that's the market our translations are aiming at. We did a little "research" with Google for barely legal sites in Spanish and discovered that they contain a lot of diminutives, especially to refer to parts of the female anatomy. The plot of the text that accompanies the photos always contains some reference to not being ashamed or embarrassed, which we figure is supposed to reassure the pervos, who are quite likely ashamed of themselves. The text emphasizes that the girls in the photo like to "play", which reminds the pervo that these girls are young and contains connotations of innocence, but it also emphasizes that the girls are inviting you, the pervo, to come and play with them. They are willing partners. They want to play with you. They like to play. It's OK because the girls like it. So you're not a bad person if you like it, too. At least, that's what the website is telling the pervo. Also, there's always a section in which the model "addresses" the viewer directly and explains how much she likes taking off her clothes and how sexually excited it makes her. This section is always full of juvenile slang, as if it had really been written by a teenager. Somewhere in here the girl "says" that she's always wanted to be a porno model and she's so happy that she's old enough now. The price of the service, by the way, is $35 a month, so they're not aiming at the "let's look up a porno site for fun" market here. They're aiming at real porno fans who have enough money to pay thirty-five bucks to look at pictures of 19-year-olds with pigtails wearing Catholic school uniforms exposing their genitals. The masturbating-with-a-stuffed-animal motif is also popular, as is playing with a hose, I suppose because of its connotations, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.

Thanks to Horologium for linking to us. It's a good site. Check it out. In other blog news, the always avant-garde Sasha Castel and the boys from Dodgeblog have merged into one single blog, giving you not one but four good reasons to click on Sasha's site. This is quite likely the beginning of something new. Blogs are no longer a trend; they've matured. There's been a shakeout of a lot of the warblogs that started up post-9-11 or post-Sullivan, Kaus, and Reynolds. The blogs that had just one thing to say, that they were angry about 9-11 and wanted justice to be done, have mostly folded. Only the polyblogs (I think it's a better term than "warblogs"; it implies that you deal with many subjects, and "poly" sounds like the first half of "politics", which is one of the subjects that a true polyblog deals with) that had many different things to say have stuck around. For examples, look at the way such bloggers as Jane Galt and Sgt. Stryker have constantly expanded the number of subjects they write about, and they both changed the formats and names of their blogs when their lives changed. Jane and the Sarge, of course, are committed bloggers, but most people would just give it up when they got a challenging new job or moved all the way across the country. For instance, I quit for a month, in August, when I was on vacation in Kansas City. I think a lot of current bloggers are going to give it up in the next few months, or certainly years. We're going to get married or get new jobs or move to Seattle or have a kid and "full-time" blogging will become impossible. I mean, blogging is cool, and if it didn't exist a lot of people would be a lot worse-informed than they are, but if your blog's more important than your life, your priorities are wrong.

Sasha and the Dodgeblog boys have come up with a solution to this problem by merging their already well-established blogs. I imagine that we'll see a lot of mergers within the next few months as people who want to continue blogging come to see it as a solution to the problem of not being to post at least every couple of days. Merging looks like a very convenient way of assuring that there are always a lot of high-quality new posts up on a blog and that traffic will remain high, as the new merged blog will reap the collected goodwill of both established blogs.

Anyway, I think that there will be a continued influx of new polybloggers to take the place of those who just plain drop out, and established polybloggers will increasingly merge with others instead of simply giving up their blogs altogether when their life situations change. I really think mergers will provide more and better blogs, as people who post less frequently will average higher-quality posts.

I don't know what the rest of your bloghabits are, but I find I can't keep up with more than about thirty blogs. I check in with all the ones on my blogroll at least once a week, and there are a few others that I look at occasionally that I really ought to link to. I check InstaPundit and the Spain-Europe oriented blogs every day and four or five others--Jane Galt, Steven Den Beste, Sullivan and Kaus, Samizdata--at least every two or three days. I imagine most blogreaders are sort of like me in their habits: there's a limit to how much of blogdom we can absorb at once. Merging blogs will reduce the number of blogs within our personal bloglimits, without giving up and allow us to read and keep track of more new, up-and-coming blogs.

I am an idiot. My favorite writer on the NFL is Gregg Easterbrook, the Tuesday Morning Quarterback. He'd been writing that column over the last two years in Slate and it didn't come back this season. I thought, Well, too bad, he's doing something else (Easterbrook is a very level-headed issues and politics journalist who in the past has been a frequent contributor to the New Republic, which is where I picked up on him during TNR's Andrew Sullivan-Michael Kelly period, back when TNR was really good), maybe writing another book (I read a terrific one by him, the name of which I have unfortunately forgotten, on the environment; his conclusion was that the market and improved technology have been the major causes of today's much-cleaner-than-25-years-ago environment and should be allowed to keep doing their work, and that overregulation is not only economically unsound but in the long run environmentally harmful, since it causes resources to be wasted that could be more productively employed elsewhere. He's a be-concerned-but-don't-panic guy on environmental issues, which I consider moderate and reasonable.) Anyway, the reason I like his football writing so much is that he doesn't pretend to be a sportswriter; his point of view is that of a generally well-informed, amused but rather detached TV spectator who uses the reasoning skills he developed writing about politics and issues to give readers a perspective that you never see anywhere else. I just found him. He's on ESPN and he's still writing on football; he's just getting paid more for it, I hope a lot more. Check him out.

The Vanguardia's Saturday TV magazine includes a two-page section on what's happening in the celebrity social scene around the world. This week they include photos and explanatory test about Gerard Depardieu. Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake, Vincent Pérez (he's a European actor), fatherhood and Phil Collins, Guy Ritchie, Ethan Hawke, Michael Douglas, Andre Agassi, and Jude Law, Woody Allen and that poor girl, the Ketchup girls, Edward Burns and Christy Turlington, Chelsea Clinton, and Caroline Kennedy. That's three Europeans and a whole lot of Anglo-Americans; the Kennedys are reported on in Europe as if they were a royal family, and they're trying to do the same with Chelsea Clinton, to establish her as some kind of American princess. Poor Chelsea. It's not her fault her parents are who they are.

This horrific murder case in Wichita and this equally horrific one in the Kansas City area are why Kansas voters brought back the death penalty: so it can be used on these psychopaths who have amply demonstrated that they are not fit to live.

We just found this site called Bartleby.com which absolutely rules. It provides you with access to hundreds, literally hundreds of canonical Great Books. You can no longer say, if you've never read Aristophanes, that you always wanted to but never managed to get hold of a copy, because here it is. Along with everything else we've never read but sure have run across the title or author of a lot. "Oh, yeah, Pico della Mirandola. Italian Renaissance. Uh, what else.....?" Real readers will love this site. (No, we're not some kind of super-intellects who normally spend hours of our spare time reading Greek theater, though perhaps we should. We came across it by accident while searching for info about H.L. Mencken.)

Here's one from National Review Online showing that enviro-nuts and peace freaks, who are generally the same people, fall into a massive contradiction according to their own alleged reasoning when they oppose a good Saddamizing of Saddam. Jerry Taylor, one of the authors, is someone who's written other articles, all enviro-nut-bashing, that I've read. He generally has the goods, as far as I can tell; that is, what he says as far as the facts go almost always checks out with what other writers and sources I know and trust also say. My problem with him, though, and let me emphasize that I generally agree with what he says, is that he's such an anti-enviro partisan that I sometimes feel he'd be capable of twisting evidence, of making the facts fit the theory, just to score a few debating points. Maybe it's because of his style. I can't but help think that he's a lawyer, and if I remember right he used to be a lobbyist. It seems like there's a little drop of Three-in-One on everything Taylor writes, he's so slick. Just not quite slick enough; if your slickness shows, you're not really slick. Now how's that for an unfalsifiable hypothesis?

Check out this article on the false, multi-culti belief in a great Islamic civilization from Front Page; the author has the facts right and his conclusion is, sadly, quite correct, with the partial exception of Muslim Spain, which was actually a pretty decent place between about 750 and 1000 AD..

Antonio says that the majesty of Islamic civilization is stressed in Spanish schools, or at least was when he was there; he thinks the real reason is that Spain was conquered by the Muslims from the Christians and then reconquered by the Christians after a war that lasted, on and off, for almost eight hundred years. Spain and Christianity look quite heroic as the vanquishers of such a powerful and rich culture, so said culture's real level of power and wealth tends to be inflated.. Also, several of the finer moments in Muslim history did occur in tradition-rich Córdoba under the Umayyad Emirate, which continued holding power in Muslim Spain long after the Abbasids had overthrown them (750 AD) in the rest of the Muslim world. Islamic Spain was thus politically independent of the rest of the Muslim world, the only independent Muslim state outside the Baghdad Caliphate, and it shouldn't be a surprise that Muslim rule in Spain was different from Muslim rule across the Straits. Spanish Islam under the Umayyads was rather tolerant, the emirs and later caliphs established a functioning government and promoted agriculture and commerce, and Córdoba was genuinely cosmopolitan. This generally happy state of affairs crashed after the death of Almanzor in 1002, when Islamic Spain broke up into tiny warlord states which were rather similar to the feudal duchies and counties of Christian Europe. Everything in Islamic Spain then proceeded to go straight to hell and only got worse until the Muslims finally got the boot from their last little enclave in 1492.

The Spaniards quite reasonably feel somewhat proprietary about the accomplishments of Muslim Spain, since the number of foreign Muslims who came to occupy the land that is now Spain was small. Most Spanish Muslims were the same old Celt-Iberian-Roman-Visigothic people who had always lived in Spain who got converted, though there's no question that occupying Muslims left plenty of their genes to be passed down along with those of the folk who had already been there. (Also, the occupying Muslims brought many Slavic and black African slaves to Spain, where they of course reproduced and blended in with the already-existing mix.) There is still a definite tendency in Spain today to distinguish the noble Moors who fought against El Cid from the nasty Moroccans who pick lettuce.

Source: Atlas histórico de España y Portugal.

Cinderella Bloggerfeller has a translation of an interview with Alain Finkelkraut, another intelligent French intellectual, much as that might strike you as four words that don't fit together. Check it out. And check out "Jesus Gil" at Atlético Rules and Xavier Basora at Buscaraons while you're at it.

Baltasar Porcel has been merely dull of late, not completely imbecilic, but for imbecility there's a regular Vanguardia columnist named Eulàlia Solé who outstrips even him. She's billed as a "sociologist and author", which right there ought to send chills up your spine. Back on Nov. 1 she published this screed in the Vangua, and I've been saving it for a slow day. Here goes. The title is "Badly Governed". Sole's text is in italics.

Those who govern should be more intelligent and reasonable than those they govern. Those who direct a society must not be incompetent and, in addition, greedy and insensitive to the misery of others. This shouldn't happen, but it does.

Profundity Score, on a scale of 1 to 10, with a ten score going to, say, Aristotle and a one score for, say, Jimmy Carter: 1.5.

Their spokesmen try to distract us by waving around the crimes committed by small-time crooks who steal their victims' wallets. They try to ignore the fact that real insecurity comes from other sources. From the risk of catastrophic nuclear wars or accidents; from terrorist actions that can strike anywhere; from the constant war ultimatums. These spokesmen do not mention that after 9-11 the method used to put an end to terrorist attacks has failed. They refuse to recognize that the violence of war in Afghanistan, the deaf ears turned to the violence between Palestinians and Israelis, do nothing but generate more violence.

Profundity Score: 1.2.

As if human beings did not know how to communicate and negotiate, the most important of those who govern only promote the use of force and completely ignore the possibility of reaching a negotiated settlement. Is this mere short-sightedness or a reflection of an execrable moral status?

Profundity Score: 1.1.

Bush and his sidekicks want to assure themselves of the power of petroleum and they are ready and willing to massacre human lives. If they haven't done so yet, it is because those who are governed have declared themselves against it in many demonstrations and those who govern have been obligated to ask the permission of a UN that is not behaving as docilely as on other occasions. In Russia, President Putin prefers to prolong the war against Chechenia instead of signing an agreement similar to those reached with other ex-Soviet republics, while he responded to the terrorism personified in a Moscow theater by provoking more than two hundred deaths.

Profundity Score: -8 for calling Bush and Powell and Rumsfeld and Rice and Cheney murderers, as well as for thinking that the anti-war left has accomplished anything significant and for comparing apples and oranges in the case of Bush and Putin..

No, they are not governing us well. And what does humanity do? What do the voters do in democratic systems or the oppressed under political or theological dictatorships? They distract themselves from their impotence with consumption, small thefts, religious fanaticism. But, are we really impotent? In the streets and among intellectuals and scientists there are more and more voices that question the established order and demand a different use and distribution of the wealth that comes from industry and nature.

Profundity Score: -6, since this paragraph includes a defense of Communism.

Against those who want to get drunk on petroleum without caring about the blood that must be spilled, more intelligent people of good will are promoting hydrogen as a clean source of energy, affordable by all countries and a generator of peace. Those who govern badly are those who refuse to modify their actions. What would then happen to their war-making arsenal, to the weapons factories, to the power that they accumulate by terrorizing the whole world? But hydrogen is there, unlimited, equitative. Clearer, less-selfish heads are already advancing its use.

Profundity Score: -5 for grave scientific and economic stupidity and ignorance, as well as for the repeated "blood for oil" canard.

We want to open this up for a vote. Who is a more ignorant fool, Baltasar Porcel or Eulàlia Solé? Where does Haro Tecglen rank? How do they compare with such Anglo-American jackasses as the Baghdad Three, Maureen Dowd, Eric Alterman, Norman Mailer, Susan Sarandon, Woody Harrelson, or the Noamster himself? By exposing these clowns as what they are, are we just wasting our time? I'm not trying to convince the clowns themselves they're wrong, of course; they're unconvincible. I hope, though, that more people will take these ridiculous arguments these clowns make and refute them to their faces. We just may be able to convince a few bystanders that the clowns are just that. On this blog, however, we sometimes feel like we're preaching to the choir, that we're making the band laugh but not the audience. Well, there's nothing we can do about it except keep plugging away and hope that a few undecided bystanders fall into the clutches of the Blogosphere where we can grab them and slap some sense into their heads.

Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar spoke with President Bush yesterday by telephone for 25 minutes. The two leaders agreed that they greatly distrusted Saddam. Spanish government insiders are filtering the official line, "If Baghdad hasn't paid any attention to the UN for years, there's no reason to think that this time will be any different." Aznar repeated to Bush that he will of course give permission for the US to use its bases in Spanish territory as part of a war on Saddam. They also discussed the upcoming NATO summit in Prague and the Turkish situation; Aznar will be meeting with the new Turkish leader on Monday and will transmit a message from Bush.

Aznar's calm and patient diplomacy and his strong support for Spain's ally, the United States, have made him one of Europe's key movers and shakers; don't forget that Aznar is the elder statesman of European Union leaders, in office since 1996. Spaniards generally do not know about the high regard in which Aznar is held internationally; they often underestimate him as a little man with a silly mustache who lacks charisma. That's his external physical appearance, and it has nothing to do with what's inside the man's brain.