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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We Scoop Taranto!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hope that made sense.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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