I received this bit of spam today. It looks like one of those typical Nigerian scams, but this one has an interesting twist. The baited hook is that if you don't cooperate and open a bank account with your money so they can transfer alleged funds there, the money in question will go to buy arms "to promote War in Africa". So it's your moral duty to help these guys get this money out of the country. In addition to the greed motivation, they're appealing to the altruistic motivation. Great scam. Somebody must bite occasionally, or they wouldn't continue sending these things to everybody in the world.

You want to see a piece of real American history? Check this out. When you get there, click on "Gallery of Photos". This was a famous museum exhibition a few years ago. People with sensitive stomachs should not click here, and young children should not see this. This is what we had to overcome, all of us Americans, and we're not all the way finished with overcoming it. But the great majority of us are pretty decent people, and we're doing what we can. As for the rest of you, please don't condemn us without remembering the similar horrors in your recent pasts. You have to confront the past head-on if you're going to make any real changes in your society. This is why I am a moderate libertarian conservative. I firmly believe that a representative democracy with the rule of law, a Constitution, and a Bill of Rights, with government as limited as possible and individual freedom as extensive as possible, and with emphasis on the rights of life, liberty, property, and, yes, Jefferson was right, the pursuit of happiness, is the way to promote everybody's well-being. If I weren't convinced that democratic capitalism is the best system for everyone, the rich and the poor, the Americans and the Mozambicans, then I wouldn't be in favor of it.

And I hate those evil people who monopolize power without respecting the intrinsic human rights supposedly guaranteed to everyone by democratic capitalism. I can live with some dictatorships, though I don't love them--but reasons of state sometimes take precedence. You think I like being allied with Musharraf, for example? Hell, no, but sometimes you just have to hold your nose. There are some dictatorships that are so evil they must be crushed, though, like the Allies crushed the Axis or like NATO crushed Communism. I seriously think that the point has come where it is time to say that enough is enough and, since we helped to get rid of our former dictator friends like Marcos, Duvalier, Somoza, Pinochet, Chun Doo Hwan, and Trujillo, who apparently got so out of control even the Americans couldn't stand him anymore and had a CIA hit squad knock him off, it's about time we got rid of the former Soviet satellite governments in Iraq, Syria, and Libya, as well as the goddamn Saudis. We can do it. We've got the men, we've got the ships, we've got the money too, as the old rhyme went.. Come on, you international Leftists. How can you possibly defend these regimes that not only tyrannize their own people but also pose a threat to their neighbors? Anyone really in favor of human rights would be jumping up and down and screaming "Three cheers for the 101st Airborne and the Desert Rats!" as they captured brutal jailers and secret police assassins while rolling straight to Baghdad, Damascus, and when we get through with them, Riyadh. Note that I didn't mention Iran; I'm convinced that they're evolving toward democracy, maybe a sort of weird kind of it--imagine a country with free elections but a rather modernized version of the sharia law code. Iran was never a Soviet stooge; they hated the Soviets even more than the Americans, and I think they're salvagable without violence. As for the rest of them, somebody needs to let them know that flights to the French Riviera are quite cheap and it might be real smart for them to be on the next one.

Des is in transition between troll status and useful citizen status like the rest of us; he's got another good question which deserves a good answer. We talked about this back on the old site (which for some reason hasn't been taken down yet), several times, but it's about time we talked about it again.

How is Spain and the ordinary Spanish Juan coping with the North African influx?
Des | Email | 11.30.02 - 10:53 p

a href="http://www.lavanguardia.es/web/20020522/23891892.html">This link is to a May 22, 2002 article from La Vanguardia on the subject. When asked their opinion of immigration--and everyone in Spain associates immigration with North African Muslims--42% of Spaniards said they had positive feelings about the general concept of immigration, while 31% were against. I suppose the other 27% are confused and could go either way depending on how things develop. However, here in Catalonia, the figures were 37% negative-35% positive, with 28% not real sure how to spell their last names, much less opine on anything of serious import. (Look, everywhere you go 50% of people are of below-average intelligence by definition. Catalan dumbasses are no smarter nor dumber than dumbasses anywhere else, with one possible exception.) The theory that Catalans are more anti-immigration because they are one of the regions of Spain with most immigrants is defeated by the fact that other Spanish regions like Madrid and Andalusia also have a lot of immigrants and their citizens are much more favorable toward immigrants than the Catalans. What I'm afraid this means is that, simply, there are more racists in Catalonia than in other parts of Spain. A clue to this is that 52% of Catalans, but only 41% of Spaniards in general, say there is a connection between immigration and crime. The age groups in all of Spain that were most anti-immigration were the over-55 group, which isn't too surprising or too worrying, because these folks are going to die off, and the 18-24 group, which is something that Spanish society ought to be concerned about. The lower, lower-middle, and middle classes are anti-immigration, while the upper-middle and upper classes are in favor. (Remei says, "They're hypocrites. They'd never eat with a Moroccan.")

Gràcia, where I live, is a very multi-culti and boho kind of place, and here we're all pro-immigrant, because we see the advantages of immigration. First, the first thing immigrants do is open up restaurants, and now there are many Lebanese, North African, Egyptian, and Syrian places around here. At some of them you get good food and two of them are rather high-dollar, or should I say high-euro. Second, this is a very crowded neighborhood, the most crowded in Barcelona, which is the most crowded city in Europe as far as inhabitants per hectare goes. I calculated it once and Gràcia is well more densely-populated than Manhattan. This means that there is all kinds of small-scale economic activity around here, and I mean shops the size of your bedroom are all over the place. So a lot of cheap labor is needed, and everywhere we go we're faced with immigrants from somewhere. You can either say, "Well, it's cool, I don't care who they are if they don't break the law," or you can get all bitter and nasty and wind up getting nowhere in the end. Most people here have made the wise choice and welcomed immigrants. And, as far as I can tell--I spend a good bit of time in rural Catalonia because my wife's family has a house there--country people don't have a problem, either, as long as you can pick lettuce or whatever they've hired you to do. Seriously, the central Catalan agricultural area of la Segarra, l'Urgell, la Noguera, les Garrigues, and la Conca de Barberà would have real problems if it weren't for North African workers, and there are in particular a lot of Arabs in the slaughterhouses in Guissona and the prefabricated housing factories in Sta. Coloma de Queralt. The people there aren't real enlightened but do recognize that these people are human beings.

This isn't true in more working-class neighborhoods. Remei has family in the industrial suburb of Terrassa, and these people are stereotypical racists. They believe and repeat such well-known urban legends like the one where the government is giving free apartments to immigrants who then proceed to use the bathtub for a coal scuttle or whatever. I seriously think a lot of the problem is sexual; the sexual taboo is the only one that still exists between the races in the United States, and the United States is a hell of a lot more enlightened on racial / ethnic matters than Catalonia is. It shouldn't be surprising that if that's the only taboo surviving in America, then it certainly exists here. There have been several serious ethnic disturbances in Catalonia, mostly in lower and lower-middle class industrial areas, and the one in Terrassa about two years ago in the Ca'n Anglada slum is the one I remember. Arab youths lounging around a plaza made comments or something to some local girls and a scuffle turned into a gang fight turned into damn near a pogrom, with Arab-owned bars and shops assaulted. Good thing no one was too badly hurt. Remei's redneck relatives, of course, were terribly offended that these scumballs were daring to speak to local girls.

The Vanguardia article, self-exculpatorically, names three possible factors to explain the greater rejection of immigrants in Catalonia than in other parts of Spain. The first is the controversy about a proposal to build a mosque in Premià up the coast; the locals were afraid it would attract bad elements. Joder. People who attend religious services don't tend to be people who do bad things. Now, certain Muslim leaders in Catalonia have said certain very stupid things in public, but no dumber than what I've heard some Christians say, and so I vote we give the Muslims the benefit of the doubt and wait till we see some Talibans hanging around the mosque before we start to get too worried. The second is that Artur Mas, now Convergence and Union official candidate to succeed current Catalan Prime Minister Jordi Pujol, in office for 22 years, shot off his mouth about there being a disproportionate number of North Africans in Catalonia. That didn't help anything any. The third seems to me to be a crock of crap: they blame the Madrid central government's denouncing immigrants as the cause of the most recent crime wave, which I don't remember happening at all. I think La Vanguardia is making it up. I do remember statistics being released that said that 40% of those arrested in Spain were foreigners, which I believe, but not all foreign dirtbags are North African.

Different people have different interests for different reasons. I'm from Kansas City--my ancestors come from Texas and Kansas and before that Tennessee; they originally came over from England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland (before the American Revolution, who knows exactly when or how; they were definitely largely Scots-Irish, Ulstermen who mostly emigrated during the first part of the eighteenth century) and from Austria during the 1880s. Well, Harry Truman was from Independence, Missouri, which for a long time was an important town on the trails West but now has been absorbed as a suburb of KC, and Ike Eisenhower was from Abilene, Kansas, about a hundred or so miles west of KC and definitely within its catchment area of influence. So between 1945 and 1961, perhaps the most critical decade-and-a-half of the 20th century, America was governed by people who were from where I'm from. This is why I'm fascinated by Truman and Eisenhower and their times. I know I'm a partisan, but I really think they were two of the four best Presidents of the 20th century; the other two would be Franklin Roosevelt, despite all his faults, and Reagan. TR would be number five and Wilson would be damn near at the bottom, though above Kennedy and Carter.

This was a good question from the Comments section, and I thought it deserved a good answer, so here it is.

Just a thought, but why didn't the victorious allies get rid of that cunt Franco at the end of the war?
Des | Email | 11.25.02 - 8:55 pm

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

During the war, Franco's personal sympathies were with the Axis. However, he managed to avoid openly committing himself to their side (in part he got lucky; he made major demands on Hitler in 1940 in exchange for joining the Axis, which Hitler refused. If Hitler had met those demands Franco would have entered the war and gone down for sure) and by '44 Churchill was openly flirting with Franco, knowing the war was won and not wanting to make it any longer by having to fight Spain, too. Using military force to overthrow Franco was never on the Allies' menu.

Anyway, on June 19, 1945, at the San Francisco Conference, the United Nations (which was the reincarnation of the Allied Powers) voted unanimously to exclude Franco's Spain. Then, at the Potsdam Conference later that summer, Stalin proposed that everyone break all relations with Spain, a worldwide total boycott, and that the Allies should aid the "democratic opposition" within Spain; Truman was in favor, though he feared another civil war, but Churchill wasn't. (This might be the last time the Americans and Soviets ever agreed on anything.)

Churchill pointed out, first, that Britain had strong trade links with Spain and the last thing anybody needed in Britain in 1945 was more people out of work due to a trade cutoff. He also said that "interference in the internal affairs of other states was contrary to the United Nations Charter." (Paul Preston, Franco, p.540; Chapter XXI in general). So Churchill made the same argument against getting rid of Franco that the anti-war people are making against getting rid of Saddam, who, to use your terminology, is an even bigger cunt than Franco was. Now, I'm not saying Franco wasn't a right cunt in many ways, but Saddam manages to out-cunt him, in my opinion. In the middle of Potsdam, Churchill lost a general election to Clement Attlee, who became Prime Minister; Attlee and Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin did not change British policy toward Spain. Anyway, the decision made at Potsdam was to definitely exclude Spain from the UN, but not to use economic and other diplomatic sanctions to try to force Franco out. Britain won out over the Soviets and Americans.

Bevin washed Britain's hands when he said to the Commons on 20 August 1945, "The question of the regime in Spain is one for the Spanish people to decide." Charles de Gaulle, president of the French Council of Ministers, "sent a secret message to Franco to the effect that he would resist left-wing pressure and would maintain diplomatic relations with him" sometime in summer 1945; French Foreign Minister Georges Bidault was also against action against Franco.

In January 1946, Dean Acheson, American Undersecretary of State, "suggested a joint declaration from France, the United States, and Britain that for Spain to be accepted into the international community, the Spanish people would have to remove Franco and set up a caretaker government to organize elections." But by then Washington was coming around to London's position, and Lord Halifax, the British Ambassador in Washington, pointed out the danger of a Communist takeover in Spain to Acheson. "American pressure diminished...British policy in fact aimed at restraining the French and the Americans from taking precipitate action against Franco." (p.552)

On 26 February, a month after De Gaulle's resignation, the French government closed the frontier with Spain and broke off economic relations after Franco executed ten left-wing guerrillas. France wanted to bring the question of a total economic blockade of Spain to the UN Security Council, but both London and Washington did not want to give the Soviets a chance to influence anything. On 4 March Paris, Washington, and London released the Tripartite Declaration, in which they called Franco a right cunt but said "There is no intention of interfering in the internal afairs of Spain." Franco privately accused Truman of being a Mason, which, of all things, he really was. It was no secret; it's in his autobiography.

Then on 5 March Churchill made the "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton, Missouri, and it was all over.

Good news. I went to see my shrink today with the most recent blood analysis they did on me in hand. There's no problem with the cocktail of pills I'm taking. I have to go on a healthy diet, which I don't mind doing; I've been surviving on a pizza-and-tangerine based diet and it's about time that I started eating lentils and garbanzos and rice and salads and vegetables and fruits and no eggs or dairy products or stuff like that. I actually like healthy food, I'm just too lazy and incompetent to make it every day. That's going to have to change. I need to start getting more exercise, too. I take a twenty-minute walk every morning, but I'm going to get my bike fixed so I can ride it at least on the weekends. That ought to be enough exercise, a 20-minute walk every day and two or three one-hour bike rides a week. I'm allowed to drink beer in moderation (no more wine; bummer) and, get this, I don't have to quit smoking. Cigarettes or cannabis. I'm under doctor's orders NOT to quit smoking because it would cause me too much stress. I love Spain. No wonder they live longer on average than us Americans. Your doctor tells you to eat right, exercise, relax, and avoid stress. And you can smoke whatever you want.

Hey, people, you know, the Comments section down there under each post is for you to make comments. I especially like questions. If I don't know the answer I'll make something up. Also, should you want to e-mail me, the address is crankyyanqui@yahoo.com.

Check out Atlético Rules, who has a nice post on celebrating Thanksgiving in Spain. I don't celebrate it, because I don't like holidays. Most Americans over here do something, though. I remember a particularly eventful Thanksgiving a few years ago at our friend Jane's place. Cinderella Bloggerfeller has pulled off a hilarious spoof of the "delinking" issue that is suddenly all over Blogistan. He's also been adding to the Axis of Porcel, which should have a rapidly expanding readership after this inspired publicity stunt. And Sasha Castel and Andrew Ian Dodge have something to say, so y'all ought to go on over there and check it out. Merde in France, which you ought to be reading--it's even good French practice, since it's bilingual--links to Dissident Frogman and Sofia Sideshow, the first belonging to a rather non-traditional Frenchman and the second to an American who is apparently a movie producer. The Jedman has something growing in his belly button.

Here's a site, called the Expatriate Café, which is aimed at people living or planning to live in Spain. It doesn't appear to have a blogmeister, but is open to all posters, and some people post there a lot. I'm an Old Barcelona Hand so I already know most of this stuff, but it might be of interest to some of you. The site is rather full of youthful exuberance, and I advise anyone influenced to do something based on what he read there to check with me first. There are, unfortunately, people looking to exploit new arrivals, and I noticed a couple of them as posters to this site. (Check out Bob, who'll have $100,000 in five years because of a lawsuit, who is looking for investors in a disco-bar. I wonder if the laws regarding interstate fraud would allow the Attorney General to bust Bob, as his fraudulent ass is hanging out in all fifty states through the Net.) The great majority of the posts look legit, but you should beware of anyone who asks you for a significant amount of money no matter under what guise. I'm exaggerating a little; if you see somebody selling, say, hams over the Net, and you decide you want to buy one, that's perfectly reasonable, but "business opportunities" are clearly something very different, and anything that sounds too good to be true is.

Christopher Hitchens, a writer whom I normally like despite disagreeing with him 90% of the time, has had a falling-out with his friends on the Left over the War against Terrorism. Hitch is for it and almost all his other pals are against it. The situation has become so tragic that Hitch has had to leave the American left-wing rag The Nation; this means there is now no longer any possible reason I might have to read The Nation. He's got two posts up in Slate, one on anti-Americanism and another that I don't agree with but will link to out of fairness on Henry Kissinger; it wouldn't be fair to claim Hitch as a complete convert to the Right. Not yet. I bet he's well on the way, though, just as I figure that Orwell, his hero, if he'd lived, would have come over to the Right on economic and international issues. Orwell was too anti-totalitarian to have sided with the Russians in the Cold War, as we know from his list for the British government and Nineteen Eighty-Four. As for economics, a lot of intelligent Brits of Orwell's age were some kind of radical Socialist. They'd grown up and lived their young adulthood in Britain between 1914 and 1945, an especially rough span of years to be British. No wonder they were pissed off at the system in general. Everyone was poor, nothing worked, and it always seemed like another war was right around the corner. The most intelligent of that lot figured out by about 1956 that capitalism could be combined with a lot of social-democratic rhetoric and some social-democratic action (though most didn't come all the way over to capitalism), and that Soviet Russia was definitely an evil to be resisted. If they didn't figure that out after Hungary in 1956, they weren't smart enough to ever figure it out. Orwell would have been one of those who was smart enough to figure it out. By '56 he'd have become a hawkish supporter of Labour.

In soccer news, last night Barcelona beat Bayer Leverkusen away, 1-2. Van Gaal started a rough, defensive team with only one forward, Kluivert, in what looked like a slightly confused 4-5-1. (Four defensemen, five midfielders, one forward.)Near the end of the first half Bayer scored on a header off a corner kick. At halftime Van Gaal pulled out Mendieta, who needs a benching, and defensive midfielder Gabri, and put in Riquelme and Saviola, changing to a 4-3-3 with Riquelme playing behind Saviola and Kluivert and feeding them passes. Saviola almost immediately stole the ball and ran a give-and-go with Riquelme; Savi blasted the ball into the goal from close range. One-one. Then they fouled Kluivert in the area and Riquelme blew the penalty kick. Barça kept attacking and they put in Overmars for Motta, making the alignment even more offensive, really a 4-2-4. This was very exciting football, with two chances for Savi, one for Riquelme, and a header by Kluivert off a corner, with Bayer defending all-out but one step behind the Barça players. Then, with only a couple of minutes left, Riquelme fed Kluivert in the area, who unselfishly fed Overmars, who crossed up the goalie and drove the ball to the far post. One-two. Barça has won its last seven European games, in contrast with their extrememly mediocre performance in the Spanish League.

In Barça's Group A, it's Inter Milan and Barça with three points each and Bayer and Newcastle zero. In Group B, Valencia tied Ajax last night, 1-1; the standings are Arsenal 3, Ajax and Valencia 1, AS Roma 0. Group C: Borussia Dortmund and AC Milan 3, Real Madrid and Lokomotiv Moscow 0. Group D: Manchester U 3, Deportivo and Juventus 1, Basel 0.

The fallout from the fans throwing crap on the field last Saturday in FC Barcelona's Camp Nou is hitting the fan. Some joker threw a (roasted) piglet's head at Madrid player Luis Figo. Other possibly dangerous stuff, like mobile phones and a whiskey bottle, was also thrown. You need to remember, as the National Geographic survey proved, not all Europeans know too much about geography. The most that most people in Europe know about Barcelona is the soccer team, which, until now, was highly respected in the rest of Europe. (OK, people remember the Olympics, too. Gaudí is known among those who can read.) This episode has not made either the team or the city look too good. The German papers headlined, "Achtung! The pig throwers are coming!" over their stories about Barça's visit to Leverkusen. That is not precisely the image the city fathers wish to promote. Get this, one of the Barça executives commented regarding the piglet's head, "It's a setup by the Madrid papers. Here in Catalonia we don't eat roast piglet." (It wasn't a setup. It really happened; the TV footage shows it.) Van Gaal also had a good quote when some German reporter asked him how his team was reacting to the vilification of everything regarding the Barça by the German press: "I don't think my players read the Bild am Sonntag."

In war news, the Vanguardia is reporting that the American plans for Iraq include a small, fast invasion aimed at paralyzing the Iraqi state's communication channels and energy supplies. There are some 30,000 soldiers now in position to be used and there are 45,000 more who can be deployed in the area within a few days. There are more than 1000 tanks and thousands of tons of supplies at American facilities in Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrein, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Turkey, and Diego Garcia, ready to be used. Hundreds of land-based planes are stationed in the area, and there are two carrier groups on the scene, the Abraham Lincoln and the George Washington. Three more are on the way: the Constellation, Kitty Hawk, and Harry Truman. Each carrier group can attack 700 targets a day, four times as many as in Gulf War I. CIA operatives have supposedly already infiltrated northern Iraq, and, we wouldn't believe this if they hadn't cited Time magazine, Israeli units have already swept Iraq's western desert looking for Scud launch bases. Meanwhile, should Iraq fire at any British or American aircraft patrolling the no-fly zones, as they have the bad habit of doing, there will be retaliation--not just the destruction of antiaircraft batteries and radar installations, but also of command and communications centers and the Iraqi fiber-optic network.

This is overwhelming force. Saddam's government and army will fold up like a house of cards when it is turned loose. We just hope they get him before he can gas or infect our guys, which he will undoubtedly do if he gets the chance, since he knows the only outcome of this is his head on the end of a pike no matter whether he uses bio-chem weapons, which he certainly possesses, or not. There should be no retaliation by Allied forces with bio-chem or nuclear weapons. We'll win anyway, even without them, and it would be silly as well as inhumane to use that stuff on troops who are only a day or two away from surrendering anyway, not to mention any unfortunate civilians in the area. And how much do you want to bet they're planning some sort of Skorzeny-rescuing-Mussolini caper, ready to jump in there and grab Saddam by surprise? If they could somehow pull that off it would save a lot of lives.

Said Susan Sontag in Madrid, as quoted in yesterday's Vanguardia: "I've always been a little ashamed to be American." (I've always been a little ashamed that you're American, too. You know, if you're ashamed of it, you could easily emigrate to a country you could feel proud of. I hear there are opportunities for sugar-cane choppers in Cuba.) "This is something that comes from long before 9-11 and Bush." (Let me get this straight. 9-11 makes you embarrassed to be American?) "It's a good thing to feel uncomfortable." (Perhaps this is why Ms. Sontag enjoys autoflagellation so much.) "Now there's no political debate there." (Gee, I looked at today's Washington Post and Fox News and it looked to me like there was plenty of political debate.) "We have only one party there, the Republicans, because the Democratic opposition doesn't exist." (Doesn't exist? What party do the Baghdad Three, Maxine Waters, and Terry McAuliffe belong to, not to mention Billy "White Stain" Clinton and Al Gore? And whose fault is it that they keep losing elections? America is a democratic republic, remember, and if the Dems are out of power, it's because the people put them there.) "They're building a new, horrible imperialism." (You call it what you want, Susie. I think "national security" is a better term, myself.) "A lot of people are against this, but they have no voice or political representation." (Remember, Susie, we've had a couple of elections in the last two years, and a handful of smart people like you torpedoed Al Gore in 2000 because he wasn't quite nutty enough for you. You had to go bolt the party and vote for Nader. Now, I'm thrilled that you did, because you took enough of the Democrat vote to put Bush in. It was the Left, using its voice and political representation, that got Bush elected. As for your European pals, the French Left is so dumb, even dumber than the American Left, that they went out and did the same thing a couple of years later by wasting their votes on assorted Trotskyites and got their man Jospin massacred in the first round.) "Since 9-11 I've received death threats, in writing and by telephone. But as long as they don't shoot me, it doesn't bother me." (Susie, you're so brave and heroic. Look, you are so insignificant in the global scheme of things that it's not worth anybody's while to take the necessary risks involved to kill you. If you are assassinated, I will personally eat The Road to Serfdom at high noon in the Plaza Sant Jaume with all-i-oli and salsa brava.)

Here in Spain we not only have the ETA, we've also got a minor-league terrorist gang called the GRAPO. They're not nationalists like the ETA, though ETA also proclaims itself to be Marxist; they're extreme leftists, like the Baader-Meinhoffs or the Red Brigades. The last really bad thing they did was a couple of years ago when they robbed an armored car in Galicia and a couple of security guards, I believe, were killed in the shootout. Their most famous recent crime was the kidnapping of prominent Zaragoza businessman Publio Cordón a few years back; the GRAPO claims that they got the ransom money and turned Cordón loose. They've been quite insistent about it over the years, but Cordón has never turned up. I'm sure they didn't kill him; killing a kidnap victim after you've received the ransom money is very bad business. The most popular theory is that Cordón died on them in captivity of a heart attack or something along those lines. Another hypothesis is that Cordón took the opportunity to disappear after he was set free and is now living it up in Rio or Bangkok.

Anyway, the GRAPO is just about finished and a good solid nail was driven into its coffin by the Guardia Civil, who busted seven of its leaders on Tuesday in Madrid. Among the arrested were two of the three members of the command troika and several smaller fish in the propaganda, finance, and communications organizations. Good. Lock 'em up and throw away the key. One of the arrestees, María Carmen López Anguita, was released from prison in 1999. She had been sentenced to 385 years in 1979 for the murder of eight people in a Madrid coffee shop. Two of the other arrestees have also done serious time.

Here's a good piece from National Review on what college international relations textbooks are teaching about terrorism these days. If you want to read a real right-wing American hawk, check out this article by Victor Davis Hanson. And here's Jonah Goldberg's Thanksgiving column, which he had the gall to reprint from last year.

For some insane bullshit regarding the ETA check this out. Check out the rest of the site, too. These people are nuts. I hope they're too insignificant to be dangerous.

The Vanguardia has a table on the sources of petroleum pollution in the oceans. In thousands of tons of petroleum and its derivatives spilled into the oceans per year, these are the six biggest sources:

Sewers (urban and industrial waste): 1,343.
Ship maintenance (cleaning, etc.): 466.
Atmospheric emissions (carried by rain to the sea): 340.
Natural sources (undersea geological releases): 229.
Tanker accidents: 126.
Oil drilling platforms (maintenance and accidental spills): 51.

What the chart shows is that tanker spills have a disastrous effect but only in small, specific places. The best thing that can be done to protect the environment in general from petroleum pollution is to build water treatment plants and hazardous waste disposal sites and to stop dumping the stuff straight from the sewers into the ocean. This kind of pollution is concentrated in poor countries, since the rich ones have already built the necessary facilities. Barcelona has barely started on its water treatment plants; they've built a small one on the Llobregat south of town, but they have to build another to take care of all the crap from the Barcelona suburbs out there. As for the Besós north of town, they're building a big plant right now which will go into operation within a couple of years. But, right now, of the crap that Catalonia dumps into the Mediterranean, only about a fourth of it is treated; this hasn't been permitted in America since the Seventies. The other thing that really needs to be done is some enforcement of the international maritime standards on when and where you can clean the bilge out of your ship. Again, this kind of pollution tends to be concentrated in the Third World--the Equatorial Guinea harbor police, say, probably aren't nearly as efficient, or existent, as those in Copenhagen. After that, doing things to reduce emissions into the atmosphere, like mandating unleaded gas and getting cars with primitive, i.e. pre-Nineties in America, emissions systems off the road is important not only for air quality but for water quality, too.

If I were to put my anti-pollution money where my mouth is, the first thing I'd do is get rid of my 1988 Renault and buy a new car with a catalytic converter. (The Spanish government runs a successful plan every few years to get old hunks of junk off the road, giving you a big tax break if you buy a new car and junk one that is more than, say, ten years old. They also have a strict vehicle-inspection program, and crappy old cars just don't pass it. We applaud both measures.) The second thing I'd do is demand that my taxes be raised in order to build bigger, better water treatment plants so that my poo will no longer just float on out to the Mediterranean. Well, I'm all for spending lots of my tax money on water treatment plants. That should be a major governmental priority. I'm just against spending it on some of the other dumb stuff they currently spend it on--not so much the conservative central government, which has balanced its budget three years in a row, but the Catalanist regional and Socialist municipal governments, neither of whom even bother to pretend not to be lavishly spending our money on toys.

Note on American sports in Spain: Basketball is very popular. The Spanish league is one of the two or three best in Europe, and many former NBA players play over here. The Catalans are very proud of their homeboy Pau Gasol, who plays for Memphis in the NBA. The Spaniards just don't get the concept of baseball, perhaps justifiably. As for American football, the Barcelona Dragons of NFL Europe are not precisely a hot ticket. A common Spanish complaint is that it's exciting when there's a nice pass or a good tackle or a long runback, but the game is just too slow and has too many interruptions.

What I'd do to get rid of all the damn interruptions is to set up a very simple rule: Allow no substitutions during a series of downs and allow only thirty seconds between plays. Substitutions during a series could only be made if a player was injured, and that player couldn't return to the game. This would reduce the time between plays and would force the team to always have a player who could kick on the field, since you wouldn't be allowed to bring in specialist kickers and punters. The all-around player would have a big advantage over the specialist; you'd want decathletes instead of sprinters and weightlifters. You wouldn't see nickel backs or designated pass-rushers or third-down backs or deep snappers or quarterbacks who can't do anything but throw. Teams would go for it more often on fourth down and a 40-yarder would become a long field goal again. If you proceeded to get rid of TV timeouts, allow the same 30 seconds for a change of possession as for any other break between plays, get rid of the two-minute warning, get rid of video replays, and cut rosters to 40 players to force everyone on the team to be able to play both ways and in several positions, that should bring the game down to a little over two hours and make it a lot more exciting, much more like the glory days of the late fifties and early sixties that old-time fans remember as the best years of the NFL. As for TV commercials, there would be a lot fewer, sure; that would make them more valuable so the networks could charge more for each one--and if the game became even more popular because it was faster and more exciting, the ad spaces would cost advertisers that much more. Will they do this? Naah.

Spanish Cannabis Slang:

hashish: chocolate, costo, grifa.
marijuana: maría, hierba.
a joint: un porro, un canuto, un petardo.
a hit: una calada.
stoned: fumado, colocado.
a stoner: un fumeta.
to light (a cigarette or a joint): petar.
to roll (a joint): liar.

La Ley del Fumeta:
El que lo lia lo peta.
The Smoker's Law:
The guy who rolls it lights it.

I felt like getting out of the house last night so I went down to Miguel's bar downtown. It's sort of like a speakeasy--it doesn't have a sign, you have to push a button outside that lights up a bulb inside, so they know to let you in. It's all stone inside, what used to be the stable and the basement storage rooms of a large fifteenth-century house. The effect is kind of like that of an opium den with heavy metal on the stereo. It's not like an exclusive place or anything; I've never seen anyone turned away, but you do have to know where it is. Miguel sells, uh, herbacious and other organic substances. He has a code that I think is more of a joke than anything else; you ask for, say, a twenty-five euro ticket to the Al Green concert. This will get you six or seven grams, which is a pretty good deal. You can also ask for tickets to James Brown or Barry White. I don't do Barry White. It's a lot easier to get James Brown around here, since we're so close to Morocco. The Rif is the world's number one producer of hashish, and smoking hash is really very traditional among those social classes along the margin of respectability in Spain. People used to pick up the habit doing military service in old Spanish Morocco, the Spanish Sahara, Ceuta, and Melilla. Al Green is so much more bulky than James Brown that they don't ship Al in from Morocco--it's all locally-grown. When you can find Al, which isn't always, it's available at a better price-per-puff than James since it only passes through one or two hands between the grower and the seller. But you can always find James at reasonable prices. The supply is guaranteed.

Miguel's place is interesting because not only is it an emporium for organic substances, but it's a regular bar that people come to for regular bar reasons. There wasn't much business last night, so I sat down with Miguel, this guy Lluís, and this Dominican guy named Mike who lived in New York for a few years. He likes me because he can speak English with me--he's justifiably proud of his good English, and I understand his English better than his Spanish anyway because his Dominican accent is so thick. Dominicans drop word-final S, among other consonants, and they don't distinguish between the Y and LL; both sound like an English ZH. Mike pronounces the name Lluís "zhoo-EE", while a Catalan would say something like "lyoo-EES". We engaged in mild substance abuse and watched the soccer on TV--Milan beat Real Madrid in Champions' League play, 1-0, and Deportivo tied Juventus 2-2. Both games were very good, and in deference to this blog's 75% American readership, I shall speak of soccer no more today, except for this TV note: All Champions' League games on the same day are played simultaneously, so they show one game live on the main Televisión Española channel, TV1, and don't tell you anything about the other one. Then, when the live game is over, you switch over to TV2 and they show the other game as if it were live, and since you don't know the final score, it might as well be. This is why, when Miguel let somebody into the bar during the second game, the first thing he said was "SSSHHHHTTTT!" just in case the guy was going to spill the beans. It's a great, compressed, three-and-a-half hour sports extravaganza, the best teams with the finest players in the biggest stadiums with the loudest fans, and you can see two whole games in the time it takes you to watch just one NFL game.