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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some more Gregg Easterbrook pieces from TNR on a variety of subjects, mostly related to environmentalism, energy, the Third World, and the like. This one on foreign aid, this one on energy policy and especially oil, this one with specifics on Bush's environmental policies, this one on SUVs and oil drilling in the Arctic, this one on how buying Gulf oil funds terror, this one on how oilmen view the world, this one on air pollution, and this one on the California electricity disaster are all well worth reading.

Here's a classic article on European anti-Americanism by German journalist Josef Joffe from the New Republic.

I was looking through Gregg Easterbrook's environmental articles in the New Republic and found this one praising George Bush's environmental record. Easterbrook, a centrist Democrat, admits to being surprised at the general good sense with which the Administration has acted regarding the environment. The article's from 2001 but I bet it's still accurate. Does anyone know anything about Bush's environmental record during 2002? Easterbrook points out, yet again, that nobody wanted the Kyoto treaty to pass, that Bush did nothing less to implement it than Clinton, that the Senate had voted 95-0 against its ratification during the Clinton era, and that it was the Europeans who torpedoed the treaty by refusing to accept American proposed modifications. The Europeans didn't like the Kyoto agreement any more than the Americans, and have managed to paint Bush as responsible for its lingering death, thereby looking virtuous in the eyes of their home constituency.

According to today's Vanguardia, Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar will launch a publicity campaign in order to try to swing public opinion toward Government policy regarding a possible American-Allied strike against Iraq. The Aznar government has long been one of the United States's best friends abroad. Spanish public opinion is strongly against an attack on Iraq: the latest CIS (official government statistics bureau) poll, which dates from September (maybe they ought to take another now that three months have passed?) says that 66.2% of Spaniards either oppose or strongly oppose "taking some type of international action regarding Iraq"--the Vanguardia itself points out that this does not necessarily mean using the military option--and only 16.9% are in favor or strongly in favor.

Aznar will, most importantly, try to show that Saddam is a real threat that must be dealt with, and also try to demonstrate that he is not just "obeying Washington's orders". He will emphasize the fact that Baghdad has already broken umpteen million UN resolutions. Aznar will also point out that the United States has helped Europe many times and that American citizens do not understand how European countries can turn their backs when "American blood has been spilled in the defense of Europe". He will say, in addition, that the United States has shown its solidarity with Spain through its cooperation against ETA. The article adds that Aznar, in private conversation, has made the point many times that "What would Spanish and European public opinion be if an airplane had been crashed into the Eiffel Tower and killed 3000 people?" It also says, straight out, that "the Government will not include questions about what interests Bush is hiding behind a hypothetical attack on Iraq". Oh, I think the interests are pretty straightforward. Saddam's Iraq is a nest of terrorism and crime. For everyone's safety, his government must be eliminated before he gets his hands on a bomb and commits nuclear blackmail against the world. However, faithful to the Latin conspiracy-theory aesthetic, the Vanguardia reporter states, in a news article, that Bush has got to be hiding something. Nothing is what it seems and some evil fiend is manipulating everything behind our backs! And the sky is falling! And here comes the Big Bad Wolf!

The article reminds us that the very first time the subject of support for the United States came up during Aznar's administration, on September 3, 1996, the Spanish government announced that it would "support the selective military operation" that the US carried out against Iraqi military targets when Saddam mounted a campaign against the Kurds, in order to force Saddam to "fulfill all his obligations".

Meanwhile, the lead international story on page 3 is headlined

US sanctions double standard
Washington promises diplomacy toward North Korea and force against Iraq

Seems that Colin Powell went on TV and said that there were still diplomatic cards to play against Pyongyang. The Bush Administration believes that North Korea is at its limit and will be forced to abandon its nuclear program through lack of resources to sustain it. They do not think that the North Koreans really have the bomb. North Korea will have to cooperate or the oil embargo against them will continue. Condi Rice added that Pyongyang poses a less immediate threat than Baghdad because of North Korea's lack of economic resources, while Iraq has made $3 billion from petroleum smuggling and has spent it all on armaments.

The other reason for the double standard is that America doesn't need anyone's permission to deal with Iraq. However, our allies South Korea and Japan would have to give us the green light to take military action against North Korea, since they're the ones within range of Pyongyang's missiles. Also, this area of the world is definitely considered by the Chinese to be within their sphere of influence, and we would have to take Russia's opinion into consideration too. Therefore, we cannot treat North Korea as we would like to, and must tolerate North Korean belligerent actions without responding militarily. Donald Rumsfeld said out loud and on the record, though, that the US has the capability to take on Al Qaeda, Iraq, and North Korea simultaneously if we should have to.This statement avoids the repetition of a mistake the US has
made before, that of not drawing a clear line about the kind of behavior that will provoke American military action, has thus been avoided; remember when we failed to make it clear we would fight for South Korea in 1950 or for Kuwait in 1991.

In case you haven't already seen it, this article by Andrew Ferguson from the Weekly Standard is fascinating. And convincing. If you like investigations into history, which I do, you'll like this one.

Here's a story from the Onion for all you cat-fanciers out there.

Everybody seems to be doing this, so I'll make a few predictions, too, for the year 2003:

There will be war in Iraq in the first three months of the year, which will be won by the Allies in a walkover, of course. Once ground combats begin, Saddam's regime will fold up and so will his army within the week. Do not rule out a Delta Force snatch operation to grab Saddam somewhere he thinks he's safe. No one will strongly object to a US-Allied attack, though France and Germany will grumble. China doesn't care and Russia will receive a free hand with the Chechens, who will be dealt with very harshly and will fight to the death. Neither gas nor germs will be used against Allied forces; those officers responsible will defy Saddam's orders to use them. Saddam will be captured alive and will receive the treatment that Ceausescu received at the hands of his military. There will be reprisals taken by the Iraqi people against those they consider sympathizers of Saddam, which Allied forces will not be able to control for at least a couple of days. America will be blamed by leftists everywhere for the "Tikrit Massacre", severely clouding world opinion toward the Allies. Meanwhile, news of horrible atrocities within Saddam's Iraq will be denied by Noam Chomsky and Susan Sontag.

Iran's government will not collapse. Iran will become, over the next few years as there is an evolution toward a more liberal society, at least economically, rather like China, not really a friend but not really an enemy, either. North Korea's government, however, will fall. The most likely scenario is that the government will run out of food and will be unable to feed even the army. Starving North Korean troops along the DMZ will lay down their arms and cross the parallel, followed by millions of North Korean civilians. Many of these refugees will be beyond help and will die soon,and film will be broadcast that will shock people like the films of Belsen did. Noam Chomsky and Susan Sontag will charge that it's a CIA frameup. There is the chance that the completely unbalanced North Korean leadership will go nuts and launch either conventional missiles into Seoul and Tokyo causing many deaths and much damage, or a nuclear warhead--I would be very surprised if they have one that works--causing a holocaust wherever it blows up, most likely on the launching pad but possibly in Seoul or Tokyo. America, Britain, Canada, and Australia, as well as Japan and South Korea and even China, will rush to send as much aid as possible. Sean Penn and Ed Asner (or am I thinking of Abe Begoda? One of those self-righteous guys from Seventies TV, anyway) will criticize these countries for not sending enough food fast enough.

India and Pakistan will not go to war; tensions will release after Saddam goes down. Somebody, either Assad, Mubarak, or King Abdullah--maybe even Musharraf--will be assassinated. Qaddaffi will somehow hang onto power in Libya. So will Castro in Cuba. Hugo Chávez will be overthrown by the Venezuelan military, and several hundred people will be killed in the fighting. There will be very little violence in Northern Ireland. The Chechens will commit several nasty atrocities in Moscow. The intifada will continue.

No dreadful terrorist actions will occur, at least not of the Islamic fundamentalist kind. Osama Bin Laden's body will be found, or whatever's left of it, in a Tora Bora cave. The Saudis will not stop supporting Islamic fundamentalism. Al Qaeda will be effectively exterminated mostly through police work, but other nutso organizations will try to take their place. Afghanistan will not stabilize.

Richard Simmons will not come out of the closet. At least one major sports figure will admit to being at least bisexual, though, possibly Magic Johnson; Dennis Rodman is another possibility. A famous ´60s British rock star--Charlie Watts? Ringo? Pete Townshend? but not Keith Richards--will die of something quite normal, a heart attack. Maybe Joe Cocker. Whitney Houston will be arrested for something and then very publicly go into rehab. Paparazzi will catch Bill Clinton with another woman, maybe Demi Moore, in compromising circumstances, a Gary Hart thing. Hillary will file for divorce, but will not challenge Bush until '08. The Dems will dig up some financial dirt on someone in the Bush family, perhaps having to do with the sale of the Texas Rangers. America won't go all hysterical, but there will be tough going for Bush despite the success of the Iraq war. If North Korea gets ugly, the political future is good for the Administration, since it will be very scary.

The economy will putt-putt along, pretty slowly with not much growth, but there won't be a severe recession. An easy win in Iraq will push the Dow Jones up. Dot com companies will continue to crash left and right; Amazon and ebay won't be among them but Yahoo will. Time Warner will try to get rid of AOL. There may even be a decline in consumer spending, mostly because people pretty much already have what they want.

Wild-ass prediction for the 2004 election: Bush and Rice defeat independent candidacy of McCain and Lieberman; Dem ticket of Nader and McKinney wins 3% of vote. Somebody tries to run on a black separatist platform, maybe Farrakhan, and gets stomped.

In the Catalan regional parliamentary elections, which will take place as scheduled, Socialist Pasqual Maragall, in coalition with what's left of the Communists, will thoroughly defeat Convergence and Union candidate Artur Mas. Both the People's Party and the Republican Left will make big gains as Convergencia's more conservative voters will move to the PP and its more nationalist voters will move toward the Republican Left. Sometime during the summer or fall Aznar's successor will be chosen, probably handpicked by him; I expect it will be Rodrigo Rato, though Jaime Mayor Oreja (but they need him to head up the ticket in the Basque Country) and Mariano Rajoy (but he really didn't look good during the oil spill mess) are also candidates. Everyone else is out of the question except maybe for Eduardo Zaplana, recently nominated a Cabinet minister and the Valencia party boss.

FC Barcelona will finish fifth in the Spanish league this season and will not be classified for the Champions' League next year. They will make it to the quarterfinals of this season's Champions' League and be knocked out by another Spanish team. Louis Van Gaal will be fired as coach and replaced by either Pichi Alonso or José Ramón Alexanco to finish out the season. Ronald Koeman will be signed from Ajax and will be next season's coach. There will not be enough money for any big signings, though several defensemen will be added--I like Curro Torres and García Calvo. Players who will not be with the team next season: Cocu, De Boer, Reiziger, Mendieta, Dani. Shocker: Xavi will be sold and replaced by Andrés Iniesta. They'll want to get rid of Overmars but will find no takers, and nobody will want to pay anything like the price the Barça paid for Rochemback and Geovanni. Valencia will win the League this season. Longshot: Arsenal will win the Champions' League this season.

The Chiefs will miss the playoffs this year but will be in strong position to put together a good team next season. Their offense is set. They need to draft all defense and pick up a half-decent cornerback or two from the free agents available. The Royals will suck again, as usual. Mike Sweeney and Carlos Beltrán will leave the team after the '03 season when the Royals lose 110 games. Serious talk about moving the team will start. This year's Super Bowl? How about the Packers? The '03 World Series will be won by a team with a payroll of $75 million or more.

Pee Wee Herman will get arrested again, Mike Tyson will hit somebody and go back to jail for assault and battery, neither Arnold nor Sly nor Bruce will appear in a hit movie, and everybody will forget all about Winona Ryder.

The top headline on the Vangua's front page is about the tougher treatment of prisoners that the Spanish government's new proposal is promising. The second, with a total lack of irony, says:

CIA Mistreats Al Qaeda Prisoners

Page Three, the most prominent international story, leads off with the headline:

United States Verging on Torture
Washington Post denounces inhumane treatment of Al Qaeda prisoners

And continues with this paragraph:

Since 9-11, some 3000 suspected terrorists have been captured in the whole world. Those within the power of the United States are detained, in the immense majority in secret installations in foreign countries, and subjected to interrogation by CIA agents. They are anonymous people in legal limbo, without the right to a lawyer or access to organizations like the Red Cross.

Now get what happens to these poor victims: if they don't "collaborate" with the CIA (many Europeans consider the CIA as the very heart of the Jewish-Masonic-Illuminati American Empire conspiracy; the three letters CIA indicate the anti-Americanness of a foreign paper: the more prominently "CIA" features, the more America-bashing you're going to have to sit through) they are, horrors, required to remain kneeling and blindfolded. Oh, the humanity. Sometimes they suffer from sleep deprivation or, even worse, the lights are left on all day and all night. So tragic. They use techniques of "stress and coercion", and if these techniques don't work, the prisoners are threatened with being turned over to Jordan, Egypt, and Morocco. These countries have much more ruthless secret services than the Americans, see. In effect, the Americans are causing these poor fellows stress by threatening to turn them over to their Muslim brothers. The tears are flowing freely down my cheeks--my ass-cheeks, too--in sympathy. Sometimes, even, get this, the interrogators are women. "This conflicts with their cultural patterns and contributes to their psychological pressure." How could those perfidious Americans stoop so low. Imagine, a woman asking you questions.

Here's the ineffable "Fettucini" Alfredo Abián in the Vangua's signed Page 2 editorial comment today:

Liberties in times of war

The crimes against humanity that were committed on 9-11 call for justice, not revenge. Amnesty International expressed it that way on the first anniversary of the apocalypse that struck New York, where 3000 people from more than sixty countries died. Remembering that the struggle against terrorist madness is not only a question of security but of values, it seems convenient at a time when bellicose rhetoric threatens to enslave liberties and those who defend them. The mercenaries of so-called order are taking advantage of the widespread fear among the citizens to shamelessly break the rules of the game. It's the same to investigate tens of thousands of foreign teachers and students who live in the United States as it is to hold the hundred of arrested residents, indefinitely and without charges, without communication with the outside and without legal assistance, all according to the fearsome Patriot Act. Now, the Washington Post shows that the Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners are tortured within the Allied bases in Afghanistan. Hundreds of them suffer in the same situation at the Cuban base of Guantánamo. And, beyond all reason, many of them are old, retired, farmers, shoemakers, illiterate Afghans whose only crime was to be recruited by force by the Taliban right before the invasion.

Now wasn't that a just lovely "Yes, but"? And the Vanguardia is the most pro-American paper in Spain. Imagine what they're writing over at the País, the Socialist paper, which is so solidarious with the poor that they've started charging to reach their Internet site, thereby taking away free access to the news. Since I refuse to pay a nickel to the País, I guess we'll never know.

UPDATE: Looks like everybody else linked to this one, too. Well, Fettucine Boy Abián stated right out that the Americans use torture, while the original Washington Post story only implied it. The news side of the Vangua also very strongly implied that America uses torture, though the closest they came to saying it outright was "US verging on torture" in the headline, which is of course what people will remember.

One of the most important sources of anti-Americanism is the American press. The Europeans, at least the journalists, read Time and Newsweek and the New York Times and the Washington Post. These officially prestigious news outlets bend over backward to give the liberal side of the story, as we all know. Well, imagine yourself a columnist sitting in Barcelona. You need a topic to write on. You flip through the newspapers on your desk looking for the last crusade that the American left and the American media have gone off on. That's not hard to find. Especially as horrible as the Times and the Post are. You find that crusade after about three hours of digging through news articles that you barely understand, because, let's face it, your English sucks. You then exaggerate what the largely leftist American news media says that coincides with your pre-established ideas. For example, we have caught Fettucine Boy red-handed upgrading an implied accusation of Americans using torture, as the Post rather sleazily made, to a flat-out statement that Americans use torture.

Now imagine, my fellow Americans, that the spin on the story they give in the New York Times and Newsweek was taken as gospel by 99% of foreign correspondents in Washington and New York, who are all too lazy to do any work and can't speak English anyway. I repeat: European reporters in America are morons who just do a half-assed translation of something from the NYT and palm it off as reporting. What opinion would you have of America if the crap they print in the New York Times were the only news you ever got about it?

I therefore conclude that the self-hating anti-Americanism of the Democrat Party's peace and justice wing, expressed through the major US media of communication, is one of the major causes of foreign dislike of or distrust of or hate for America and the American people.

Well, there's some news today to comment on. As it stood until now, the maximum possible amount of time a convicted felon could stay in prison was either twnety years or thirty years, depending on the crime. And, since the Spanish judicial system is extremely lenient, you can get all sorts of things like time off for good behavior and so on. Well, up until now people have been sentenced to ridiculously high numbers of years, 500 or 800 or just whatever. I seem to recall that the record was once held by a con-man, who got something like three thousand years. The deal with the sentencing is that by law, for every count you are convicted of, you get the sentence set by law for that crime (the judge may consider aggravating or mitigating circumstances). So if you kill five people, you get the stipulated time (let's say fifty years) for murder, multiplied by the number of counts you're convicted on--in this case you'd get 250 years.

Now get this. Those sentences seem ferocious, but nobody ever does more than thirty years in prison, ever. Until now, people with 250-year sentences have had their time off for good behavior counted from the 30-year maximum, so if they behave, they get out in say, twenty years. From now on, though, if you're a terrorist or if you've committed an especially horrible crime, you'll have your time off counted from your actual sentence and not from the thirty-year maximum. So you would have your time off calculated from a base of 250 years and not thirty years. I have no problem with this. At least these guys will do their full thirty years from now on; of course, the measure isn't retroactive. Also, if you stole public money, you can't get furloughs from prison or day-release (what they call here the tercer grado penitenciario) until you give it back.

Here are three examples of people who got off easy: a) Ex-police officer José Amedo, a member of the GAL government hit squad (?????!!!!? OK, I'll explain in a minute), got 117 years. He spent six years actually in the slam, and then had six years of tercer grado. Now he's out on parole. b) "Josu Ternera", the Number One, the big cheese, the capo di tutti capi of the whole goddamn ETA for its ten bloodiest years, 1979-89, got arrested in '89. He was in jail in France until 1996 and was then in jail in Spain until 2000, when the Supreme Court turned him loose on the grounds that trying him again would be double jeopardy since he'd already been tried for those crimes in France. He was then turned loose, and he got himself elected to the Basque Parliament on the EH (pro-ETA) party ticket. Meanwhile somebody, probably Judge Garzón (who must find himself quite handsome since he likes being photographed so much), filed new charges against him; "Ternera" disappeared and is now in hiding. c) ETA terrorist Félix Ramón Gil was sentenced to 298 years for various illegal stuff he did. They let him out of the Big House in October 2002 after serving thirteen years of his sentence. He committed suicide after a few weeks of his release.

Since you've already read about the Vanguardia's big scoop about how evil the Americans are in their treatment of captured terrorists, we remind you of 1980s Spanish government policy--when the Socialists were in power-- toward the ETA. What they did was set up a death squad called the GAL, made up of local cops and mercenary hired gunmen, that claimed to be something along the lines of a vigilante movement of outraged citizens. The GAL killed and / or kidnapped a few people, sometimes the wrong ones; Segundo Morey, a French businessman innocent of criminal involvement, was kidnapped by the GAL, who were at least decent enough to turn him loose when they found they had the wrong guy. Two real ETA terrorists, Lasa and Zabala, were tortured and murdered by the GAL. Eventually it was discovered that Interior (i.e. law-enforcement) Minister José Barrionuevo and his number two, Rafael Vera, were in on it, as well as the Basque Socialist party honcho, García Damborenea, and several smaller fry. They all swore on their mother's graves that Prime Minister Felipe González had no knowledge. Yeah, right, just like Reagan didn't know anything about the Iran-contra affair.

There's not much news and I've been mentally lazy for about the last three days. So what I figured I'd do is translate some articles from Catalan that appeared in Avui, the Catalan-language newspaper, by Miquel Porta Perales. I translate a lot of America-bashing stuff, so I figured I'd be fair and give all of you something by an intelligent local writer. Catalonia is not just full of dummies like Eulàlia Solé and Baltasar Porcel and Manuel Vázquez Montalban. There are local voices worth listening to, like Pedro Schwartz and Xavier Bru de Sala and Porta Perales. Aleix Vidal-Quadras is brilliant and ultraconservative, so much so that when in 1996 Aznar had a relative majority in Parliament, but not an absolute one, and so had to cut a deal with Convergence and Union, their price was the defenestration of Vidal-Quadras. Miquel Roca was the best politician we've ever had around here, a guy who I would not only vote for but would volunteer for; he writes occasionally in the papers. He's so centrist that neither the left nor the right is willing to claim him as one of their own. Also, he's now the richest lawyer in town, and I don't think he wants to get back into politics. Quim Monzó and Eduardo Mendoza are two of our best local writers. Also Juan Marsé. Anyway, here's an article by Porta Perales from the November 30 Avui titled "Anti-American reserve". It's in italics.

The first anniversary of the terrorist barbarism that fell upon New York and the hypothetical American military intervention in Iraq is standing straight and tall before the traditional myopia of the rancid Left. For example, beginning internationally, articles by Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, or Don de Lillo either include an anti-American "Yes, but" or proclaim their belief that what happened on September 11 was not directed against civilization and humanity but rather against that "conspicuously terrorist state" (Chomsky dixit) which is the USA. We could continue with the Italian Dario Fo or the Briton Ken Loach, who criticize others who either denounce terrorist barbarism from any point of view that isn't their own or attack the USA, which they consider to be the root of all evil. Back at home, a bunch of leftist ex-celebrities--we won't say their names, but if you think about writers, singers, editors, urban planners, and architects you can guess them easily--have jumped on the "We, the undersigned" bandwagon and signed a manifesto in favor of pluralism and against war and ideological uniformity. It is very funny to see those who were once spokesmen for (Marxist) ideological uniformity denounce it now.

But what's not so funny is the Manichaeanism and sectarianism that seeps through the manifesto and that shines most brightly in the case of a signer who, all on his own, stated that "We are threatened by president Bush's new Fascism and aggressive imperialism". For this old Stalinist who certainly never criticized the Fascism and aggressive imperialism of the hammer and sickle that he wore on his chest, isn't there any other threat than a supposed American Fascism? Really, the most worrying thing is not the Manichaeanism or sectarianism of the so-called progressive Left, but its myopia. How else could an intelligent and well-educated gentleman call Bush a Fascist? How is it possible that some ladies and gentlemen who have been involved in this thought and politics stuff for many years are so ingenuous as not to face up to threats and attacks like those of September 11? Why is our Left solely capable of making abstract proclamations? I think that the answer lies within psychology: there are some people who need a whipping boy on which to work out their own political frustration. That's why Catalonia, a country full of the ideologically defeated, is the spiritual reserve of Western anti-Americanism.

Check out this op-ed from today's Vanguardia by Fernando Ónega, who could probably be best classified as a neo-Fascist; he's a reactionary anti-capitalist. I included the prefix "neo-" because I'm sure he doesn't support the restoration of a dictatorship.

It seems that one of the last legends, that of people's capitalism, is crashing. this people's capitalism--what a contradiction!--appeared with the privatizations (of the government monopolies) and the stock market fever. Millions of citizens put their small savings into this form of investment and reached for a dream: to become rich. So we've all seen taxi drivers reading the "salmon pages" (business newspapers in Spain are normally printed on salmon-colored paper). In my town there are peasants who connect to the Internet to follow their bursatile ruin. Six million Spaniards dreamed about being Emilio Botín, president of the bank SCH.

Now, there are fewer and fewer stockholders in the middle class. Us poor people don't have a place on the board of directors, or among the elect. Some are going broke slowly, wondering who the hell told them to get into so many complications. Some escape with the shirts still on their backs and look for safer investments. And there are very few who had the wits or the intuition to get out in time. The only sure thing is that the variations of the market are kicking the poor out of the Promised Land, little by little, investor by investor, without the slightest lament for the end of the experience.

It's natural. Who tells the poor to have these dreams of riches? What us poor have to do is lose money so that the rich can gain it. This is the natural law of the economy. not everyone can win at the same time. All the rest is demagogic politics. The middle and lower classes have to stay where they always were: secure investments at guaranteed interest, which keeps them calm but doesn't make them rich. And buying bricks, the motor of an economy that ties you to a mortgage for a quarter of a century.

Anyway, when we get to the end of the year, we people's capitalists are still permitted two incursions into the world of money: investing in a pension plan--with the commitment not to touch it until retirement--and buying a lot of lottery tickets. The EU is pushing us towards a pension plan, with the caution that a public system may not arrive until 2020. We push ourselves toward the lottery, believing that it's the last outpost of social justice and that the winners should be from Galicia or wherever solidarity is neccessary. It happens sometimes, and with that hope we renew our investments. We can do it every week. The stock market, on the other hand, usually only gives you one chance.

a) The lottery is the worst possible "investment", as it pays off half the money it takes in, at most. The odds say the average player will lose half his bet, and that's in a generous lottery. Hope of winning is a false hope, and I'm speaking as someone who won a fourth in the 1998 Christmas lottery. The lottery hurts the poor much more than the rich, as a rich man can buy ten tickets without thinking, but a twenty-euro ticket is a lot for a poor person. It doesn't hurt the rich man to throw away a couple of hundred euros on the lottery.

b) Ónega just does not understand the basics of the system of capitalism, like most people. He thinks of the market as a sinister organism controlled by "the rich" and "the elect" that is out to defraud the poor, rather than what it is, a measure of what the supply of resources is and what the demand for them is. He believes in zero-sum economics, that the rich always win and their piece of the pie gets bigger while the poor's piece grows smaller.

c) He doesn't get the concept of the stock market, either. People who buy stocks because they think their value is going to increase are what is normally called speculators, not that there's anything wrong with that. Speculators are just betting that a stock is going to go up or down. It's not quite like roulette, in which every spin is completely random; it's more like blackjack, in which experience and intelligence can be used by players to increase their chances of winning. But the odds at blackjack are always the same in every hand, while the odds at any one moment in the stock market are different than those a minute before or the minute after. It's much more complicated to play the stock market than play blackjack. However, intelligent long-range investments in the stock market pay off. If you buy stock in solid companies that pay high dividends for their price, you'll make money in the long run--generally. You're an investor, not a speculator. You're betting that your company shows good long-term prospects, sure, but that's a pretty safe bet. Of course, don't put all your eggs in one basket.

d) Note the conspiracy theory. Who's responsible for this? (In the conspiracy theory mindset, nothing is accidental; every event serves the occult interests of those who really control everything.) There's some evil fiend telling the poor that they should invest in stocks, so of course the poor all go do it. Then they get burned because the rich (the Jews, the Masons, the big corporations, the Americans, the kulaks, the whites, the Republicans, depending on the time or place) always win in the end. If you put two and two together, it's obvious that the rich are cheating the poor, that the rich are the evil fiend. They're not rich because of their own or their family's efforts, but because they are rapacious parasites. This is not a new conspiracy theory, of course; Simon Schama says that the belief in conspiracy was one of the main causes of the French Revolution and of its violence. The "poor" (actually the middle class and working class, not truly poor indigents) could not believe that the Revolutionary economy was becoming much weaker due to prolonged war, disorganization, and the people's insecurity; they believed that if they were getting poorer, which they were, there must be a conspiracy against them, a nest of traitors inside the government, and that those traitors secretly working in the interests of the rich must be killed. That's what happened to Danton and Desmoulines.

e) Note that Ónega describes himself twice as one of the "poor". Now, this guy earns at least in the high five-figure range, in either dollars or euros. You're not poor if you have food to eat, clothes to wear, a house to live in, and a job or a government subsidy. By those standards, Mr. Ónega is one of the most privileged people ever to live. The daily necessities of his life are more than covered, and what was once untold luxury is his, and mine, and yours, thanks to democracy and capitalism.

f) I can't help but think that Mr. Ónega was one of the dopes who invested in Internet fur-bearing trout farms dot com or some other ludicrous company of those. Listen, Mr. Ónega, that's your own damn fault and your personal responsibility. You gambled and lost. Don't expect any sympathy from me. Nobody cheated you but your own self and your greed.

As I'm sure you already know, the Iraqis shot down an American Predator pilotless plane over the southern no-fly zone. This is, of course, just another casus belli. Iraq has regularly fired at American and British manned planes on patrol over the exclusion zone, something that up until now has been tolerated, I don't know why. Seems to me that shooting at our planes is an act of war; they have been trying to kill our pilots and aircrew. Of course, no one died this time, but it seems to me that if you shoot at us, we get to shoot back at you. And I vote we do a lot of shooting back.

There are a lot of historical precedents. In 1845 Mexico fired on American soldiers in the disputed territory between the Rio Grande and Nueces Rivers, and we used this as an opportunity to declare war. In 1812 we went to war with the British because they'd been seizing American ships on the high seas and impressing the sailors into the Royal Navy. It wasn't the first time we'd done that--we fought an undeclared naval war with France under the Adams administration for pretty much the same reason. We had no justification at all for attacking Spain in 1898, since now it is clear that the Spaniards did not blow up the Maine, though at least some people really believed they had at the time. In 1804 we went to war against the Barbary Pirates on Africa's north coast because they'd been boarding and capturing American-flagged ships and threatened to sell their prisoners into slavery. The main cause of American entry into World War I was German submarine warfare; though the Lusitania sinking happened in 1915 and the Americans didn't declare war until 1917, when the Germans resumed sinking civilian ships without warning. Then, of course, came the Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which the North Vietnamese fired on Navy ships. The proximate cause of the American Civil War was the Confederate shelling of Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor. I would say that our grounds for going to war against Iraq are as strong as our grounds were in any of these cases.

Lots of news from over the weekend. Ibon Fernández, one of the etarras arrested in France and ETA operations chief, escaped from the Bayonne police station where he was being held. He managed to climb through a ventilation duct, from where he got out of the building and then climbed a wall. It took them several hours to notice he was missing, by which time he was long gone; they had him locked up in what usually serves as the drunk tank. Now, you don't need much security in the cell that's for the winos, since they're most likely not going to be thinking up an escape plot. They're more likely to be throwing up than acting up. However, professional terrorists should probably be kept in something a little harder to break out of than the drunk tank. This is a case of serious negligence and heads will roll.

Well, we didn't hit El Gordo, the big prize in yesterday's Christmas lottery, though we had three numbers that won the lowest prize, five times what you bet. Fifty-five dollars. That's about what we spent on tickets. The towns where the big numbers hit, first prize at 10,000 euros per euro you bet, second prize at 4800 times your bet, and third prize at 2400 times what you bet, were Aranda de Duero (Burgos, €198 million), Vélez Rubio (Almería, €162 million), and Calahorra (La Rioja, €138 million). As usual, the prize money tocó en barrios populares and was muy repartido. There is a common belief that Christmas lottery money always goes to areas that have suffered some kind of disaster, but Galicia as a whole won only €34 million. Catalonia gambled a total of €352 million and won only €4 million. The first, one of the fourths, and one of the fifths of the prize numbers this year were 08103, 00091, and 00457, "ugly numbers". The numbers range from 00001 to 66999. People don't like low numbers, nor, for some reason, numbers that end in 0. The third prize, 31203, is an example of an attractive number, since it begins and ends with the same digit. Numbers with repeated digits or numbers that are palindromes or close to palindromes are popular, and so are numbers that end in 5. This is pure superstition, of course.

On December 9 an armed gang killed two security guards; the guards were picking up the weekend take at a multiplex movie theater in Terrassa. These guys were cold-blooded, as the first thing they did when they saw the guards was open fire. Three shooters fired 17 shots and both guards were DOA. The total amount stolen was €214,000. The cops got onto their trail when witnesses recognized Juan Pedro L. F. as one of the three shooters. (In Spain they're not supposed to reveal the surnames of people who have been arrested and charged but not convicted yet. I don't know whether this is a law, an official guideline of some kind, or just generally accepted practice. This code is not universally practiced, especially by the more sensationalistic papers.) Anyway, Mr. L. F. had been spotted earlier that day near the theater, obviously casing out the job. He and his pals were known as big-time scumballs by the local cops; there was a warrant out for his arrest, since he'd been sentenced to 19 years for armed robbery and sexual battery and jumped his bail. A little research work led to his girlfriend, Soledad R. M., whose sister, Manuela R. M., is married to José Antonio N. A. Witnesses recognized Mr. N. A. as another of the shooters. They had recruited two well-known professional criminals, Javier L. M. and Sergio C. A.; Mr. L. M. probably drove the getaway car and Mr. C. A., who is only twenty-five but already a multiple killer, was most likely the third shooter. All these people have criminal records as long as Long Dong Sil--well, pretty long, for good stuff like car theft, drug dealing, armed robbery, and the like. The original hypothesis was that this was a gang of Balkan criminals, but it turned out to be just local losers. These guys had been on the cops' shit list for a long time, as they had a very ostentatious and expensive lifestyle, including heavy drug consumption, and had no visible means of support. They are suspected to be the gang who tried to hold up a whorehouse in October; some of the clients were also carrying guns and the robbery was unsuccessful. The same gun was fired in both occasions, the whorehouse job and the killing of the security guards. All four of these guys really could use a good hanging, and the women are guilty at the very least of hiding the gang out.

Several years ago they did an education reform in Spain, one of the Socialist government's bad ideas. Up until about the early nineties, Spanish education worked like this: you had to go to school until you were fourteen. If you passed the eighth grade, you got a certificate called the Graduado Escolar, which was the minimum educational acheivement. It certified that you could read, write, and do arithmetic. After you got the Graduado Escolar, you went either to an academic high school, called BUP; if you graduated from BUP after eleventh grade, you went on to COU, a twelfth-grade university preparation year. If you weren't an academic kind of person, you went to FP, Professional Formation, which gave you a three-year course in how to do something. Ambitious FP students, after graduating from FP I, could go on and do three more years of vocational training in FP II. People who passed FP II pretty much had a decently-paid job as some sort of skilled worker. Now, this was an elitist system. Only the top 15% or so of students finished COU. The others either went to work at age 14 or got FP training. However, BUP and COU were hard. They weren't a giveaway pass; you had to work to get through and go to college.

As a teacher, I like this system. You're not wasting both the kid's time and yours by trying to teach people who want to be car mechanics about Western civilization. The people in your BUP and COU courses are motivated to do well in order to get to college, and the kids in FP are learning useful skills that they can see the value of. There are a lot fewer discipline problems when things are run the old way. Agreed; the old Spanish system is guilty of tracking students. Big deal. Students should be tracked into remedial, regular, vocational, and college-bound; in that way, students will learn what's appropriate for them.

Well, what they did was listen to a bunch of "educational experts" who should all be shot at dawn who went off and got doctorates in education in the States and brought back all the half-baked ideas floating around American education departments. It was immediately decided that the old system just didn't work and that everybody had to be given the same curriculum. What they wound up with was mandatory education until 16, with no tracking, putting the future scientists of Spain in with the future car mechanics and the future unemployed. Now high school is too hard for the car mechanics and too easy for the future scientists. Everyone's pissed off, especially the teachers, used to teaching bright, ambitious, cooperative kids who want to learn and succeed in BUP and COU, now stuck with classes of widely varying ability and interest, not to mention attitude. The governing PP keeps talking about going back to the old way. And the teachers, for once, are in the PP's camp. There is some strange cognitive dissonance going here. Almost all teachers are lefties, especially in Spain, yet the lefty movement in education has obviously failed disastrously and the teachers have learned this firsthand--but they feel very strange about, for once, agreeing with the conservative government PP and wanting to turn back the clock to a system which had its problems but made sure that students would learn more or less what they needed to know.

P.J. O'Rourke once said, "Anyone who doesn't know what's wrong with education must never have screwed an elementary-ed major."

I wasn't going to do any blogging today, but I couldn't resist noting that bluegrasscountry.org just played a nice little country tune called "Osama Got Run Over by a Reindeer". They announced, by the way, that they're the fourth-most-listened-to Internet radio station.

Des, who is no dummy because the questions he asks are closer on-target than those that most journalists ask, wanted information about Portugal a few days ago. I did the necessary research and will write about Portugal during the Franco regime. Just gimme till tomorrow.