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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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!)

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.

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.

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.