I'm listening to KHYI in Dallas through Internet radio--they're playing mostly cheesy American patriotic songs today, since, of course, it is the Fourth of July. They just played "The Fightin' Side of Me" by the Hag and I cranked it up. They also had a big Dixie Chicks celebration in which they played the originals of all the Dixie Chicks cover hits; the Chicks are not on their playlist, and I don't think they were on it too often before Natalie Maines' public insults to President Bush, either.

Texas musicians they play a lot whom I like: the Derailers, Jack Ingram, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Moe Bandy, Joe Ely, Houston Marchman, and Chip Taylor and Carrie Rodriguez. Carrie plays a mean fiddle. They also play BR-549, a band that I support because they started out many years ago in Lawrence, Kansas, as the Homestead Grays. They were good then and they're good now, though I think the only original member is Chuck Mead, the singer.

Well, last night I met up with Franco Aleman over in Sant Gervasi. He's a very nice guy, intelligent, articulate, and well-informed. We had a good long conversation over a couple of beers. One thing he said, and I don't think I'm betraying a confidence, is that sooner or later there is going to be a major shakeup at the Vanguardia. There is too much just plain lying in that newspaper and they are going to be exposed.

We discussed the political circus still going on in the Madrid region; so far, the situation is that they are going to hold new regional elections sometime during the fall. The Socialists are still screaming corruption without the slightest real evidence; their lawsuit over the whole mess got thrown out by the Supreme Court yesterday.

Franco's theory is that the two Socialist turncoats, Tamayo and Saez, had been promised posts of prominence in the regional cabinet in exchange for their support of Rafael Simancas as the Socialist candidate for the presidency of the Madrid region. Unfortunately for the scheme, the PSOE and Simancas reneged on their promises to these two on order to give said posts of prominence to the Communists, whom they made a post-electoral coalition with. Tamayo and Saez took their revenge by bolting the party.

My theory is that Jose Bono, the Baron of Castile-La Mancha, who was barely defeated by Zap in the last vote on who would be the Socialist party leader (and Zap had the support of Tamayo and Saez and their faction within the party, that's what put him in power), is cynically taking revenge on Zap in order to force him out now and put Bono in as the candidate for Prime Minister for the 2004 general elections. Bono got to those two and promised them a lot more than Simancas and Zap had promised them in order to make Sim and Zap's faction of the party look even stupider than they do already.

I imagine there is some truth in both theories.

See, Zap is a moron. We translated an interview with him a few weeks ago, and he is simply not very smart. There are plenty of smart leftists, leftists are mostly not stupid (a little misguided, maybe), but Zap is just not one of them. Zap also just got creamed by Aznar in the annual State of the Nation parliamentary debate held earlier last week. Aznar slaughtered him. Zap was not prepared. Aznar can be unpleasantly arrogant, and boy, did he show it. He despises Zap, and his scorn drips from every word. I think Aznar would increase his percentage of the vote by five points if he'd just be a little nicer. On the other hand, if he were a little nicer, maybe he wouldn't be where he is today.

The Socialists have been reduced to whining that Aznar was mean to Zap. That's about the only spin they can put on the aftermath of the debate, since their man lost and lost badly.

The hot news is that the Madrid serial killer, the Playing Card Murderer, so-called because he left a playing card by the bodies of his six victims between January 24 and March 16, turned himself in in Ciudad Real. They're sure it's him because he gave details of the crimes which only the killer could have known. He is an ex-corporal in the Army and served in Bosnia. Prepare for various columns by Maruja Torres on how his military service brutalized him and made him a psychopath. Watch for articles by Vicente Verdu on how these killings are a manifestation of the Americanization of Spanish society.

We can't let a day go by without transmitting the wisdom of the Vanguardia: here's an article by Rafael Ramos from yesterday's news section, not marked as analysis or opinion. I sort of condensed it.

American Blackhawk helicopters...White House...paternalist...impotence...unequal war...losers of the postwar...Indochina...Vietnam...propaganda..."we will impose our will"...pseudo-colonial governor of a rebel province...myopic...triumphalism...where are the arms of mass destruction...lies or half-truths...how many more British soldiers will be sacrificed on the altar of Bush's imperial ambitions...the improving organization of the Resistence...Vietnam.

Oh, yeah, David Beckham. Talk about media feeding frenzies. My guess is that the Spanish media is going to hate Becks and that they are especially going to hate Posh. These two are the apotheosis of working-class Englishness and that doesn't go over well outside England (my theory is that the working class is the most authentically English or Spanish or French group of people in England or Spain and France, and since nationalisms automatically dislike one another, the more working-class a foreign phenomenon is, the more it will be disliked, if that makes sense).

Posh is a ho. She showed up at the official media feeding frenzy press conference wearing a faux leopard top showing off enormous quantities of silicone. Becks showed up with his shirt unbuttoned all the way down the front. This is not going to go over well. Lots of soccer players are married to models here in Spain--Figo, Karembeu, Raul, Guti, Ronaldo--but they're all fairly discreet, though undoubtedly tacky in a flashy working-class sort of way. In Spain they'll leave you alone if you make it clear that you're not going to do anything newsworthy--if you're a fairly normal, non-obnoxious person who doesn't get drunk and punch out photographers and spend every night at the exclusive discos. Not that Becks does that kind of thing, but he does keep getting himself in the gossip magazines. Figo and Raul and company are reasonably discreet. Becks and Posh are not and they're going to be the most hated people in Spain. I hope I'm wrong, I wish them no ill will, but I bet I'm right.

For those curious about the state of civil liberties in the United States, check out this article by Robert Bork, the well-known jurist who ought to have been on the Supreme Court for the last twelve years or so. Bork's arguments won't convince everybody, but this is an article you need to read if you want to talk intelligently about the subject. (From Commentary via Front Page.)

The Weekly Standard has a lovely bash-piece on Doctor Demento, Howard Dean, the Great Left Hope for the Dem presidential nomination in 2004. I would personally love to see Dean win the nomination: 50-state victory for Bush, for sure. Dean takes DC and its three electoral votes. Here's a paragraph:

There is Republican Red America, and there is Democratic Blue America, and there is this evening's crowd at Dave and Missie Schroeder's house, which is probably as blue as you can get without being sucked into a colorless void. After Dean, parked between the sink and stove, delivers an abbreviated--and notably "progressive"--version of his standard spiel, he opens it up to questions and comments. Whereupon one respectable-looking, articulate, and deadly earnest lady announces that she's "terrified" over a rumor that "at the next election, George Bush is going to drag out the war and declare a national emergency and suspend the election." Dean makes no effort to reassure her. "I've actually heard that," he says, with a facetious, speculative aside about whether "that's in the Patriot Act or not." Another guest wonders if Dean can identify the one question he'd most like to ask George Bush in a televised general-election debate--if, that is, the president could be shamed into debating him in the first place. "Who's your favorite philosopher?" comes the governor's reply. The Schroeder house fills with knowing, derisive laughter.

Maybe it's an urban legend, but I remember reading that this actually happened during the early stages of the primary campaign before the last election. It's a debate in some little town in Iowa and some joker asks the candidates precisely that question. First candidate says Descartes or whatever. Second guy says John Locke or whatever. Third guy says Socrates or whatever. It's Bush's turn at bat. He steps up to the plate and whacks that hanging curveball right over the left-centerfield fence: "Jesus Christ". Walk-off home run. Debate over.

OK, we laid off for a couple of days. Now we're going to give you a few more Vangua translations in the interests of cross-Atlantic harmony. Here's Barcelona Badboy Balt Porcel from last Sunday's edition:

The sales sector and the financiers are beginning to feel the economic recession and Wall Street has not believed in the new cut in interest rates decreed by the Federal Reserve and which is the lowest in the last half-century; the economy needs more consumption in order to catch a breath, that is, people need to go into debt in order to spend the money right away. But the successive recent cutbacks in the said bank rate don't seem to be helping and unemployment is up. Like the number of beggars and marginalized. And prices. And the bad quality of products.

A symptom: the number of bank robberies has tripled. But not assaults with machine guns and all the rest, now they are very discreet people who approach the window of a small bank branch, carry a revolver hidden in a newspaper, and demand the money in the drawer, 100 or 1000 dollars, and then immediately disappear. Are these family men for whom this works out better than getting a loan? Mayor Bloomberg is getting worried. His predecessor, Giuliani, became famous precisely for getting rid of crime by repressing, with wildly exaggerated force, petty crime, which he considered to be the source of hard-core crime. So, it was necessary to cut off any tolerance at the root. Is the old spiral beginning?

Oh, God. Help us all, please. Rule Number One of Punditry: Do not write about economics without ever a) having taken a university course in Econ and b) looking up a fact or two. Check out these facts: In the first quarter of 2003 American GDP increased by 1.9%. Therefore, Balt, THERE IS NOT A RECESSION. I think they teach you this on the first day of Econ 101. Balt must have skipped that class because he didn't have his textbook yet. Consumer spending was up 2.0% and several continuing studies (by the likes of the University of Michigan) consider US consumer confidence to be high. As for inflation, the Consumer Price Index was down 0.3% in April after increasing by 0.3% in March. The Producer Price Index was down 1.9%, indicating low inflation or maybe even mild deflation for summer 2003. Retail sales dropped 0.1% in April, mostly because gasoline sales dropped 5.9%, of course because of higher gas prices. Meanwhile, Balt, interest rates are low in order to further devalue the dollar and thereby increase US exports by lowering their price. As the dollar drops, the euro rises, and the euro rather than the dollar is now the currency that's overvalued; European exports are in decline (Europe's running a trade deficit of 19.4 billion euros), and if anybody's going to go into recession it's going to be Europe, which is a lot more dependent on foreign trade than the US. As for unemployment in the US, I haven't bothered to look it up because I'm almost as lazy a blogger as Porcel is a columnist, but it's either in the 5s or the low 6s. In the Eurozone it's 8.7% and Spain it's 11.5%. Also, by the way, President Bush is concerned about the United States' low business investment rate, which was down an unpleasant 4.8% in the first quarter. That is one reason he wants to reduce taxes on investment income. See, if taxes on investment income are lower, more people will want to invest more money. We need to promote not only consumption but also investment. Got that or is it too simple for you to understand, porridge-head?

Has anyone else besides Balt noticed that beggars are teeming in the streets of New York due to the nonexistent recession, or is it just the same old homeless bums as always? Has anyone else noticed skyrocketing prices? Are any of you folks out there in the Great Satan suffering through an epidemic of bad product quality? I don't went to be a jerk, but product quality is generally a good deal higher in the US than Spain, except for food products, which are better over here; especially so when you consider the comparative quality-price ratios.

Bank robberies have tripled? According to whose statistics? Source, please. The modus operandi of bank robbers, Balt, has always been what you describe. The guys with the machine guns were in something they call "movies". And, no, nobody's dad is robbing banks because he doesn't want to get a loan. That is just completely ludicrous. And what's this Giuliani police-state crap? We had that debate in the States about fifteen years ago, Balt, and it was conclusively determined (to my mind, anyway, and to James Q. Wilson's, too) that tolerated petty crime produces an atmosphere in which serious crime flourishes. You get the petty criminals (who are often also wanted serious criminals) off the streets and you produce an atmosphere in which social norms are upheld and in which hassling passers-by and picking their pockets and mugging them and painting crap on the walls and stealing motorbikes and usurping property are not tolerated. Unlike in certain Catalan cities I can name.

Thanks to Kaleboel for bringing the latest reappearance of the Partit Humanista / Partido Humanista / Humanist Party to general attention; they've got their own blog now. The Partido Humanista is a front for a cult run by an Argentinian Marxist mystic who calls himself Silo whose magnum opus is a pile of gibberish called "Cartas a mis amigos"; this link demonstrates the connection between the Partit Humanista de Catalunya and Silo.

Here's a piece I wrote more than a year ago on the Silo cult on the old Homestead site:

Cults in Barcelona, Part II
Mar. 2, 2002: The Humanist Movement seems to follow me around Barcelona. When I lived over in Virrei Amat about seven years ago, they had a center in my apartment building. Now that I live in Gràcia, I discover that they have a center on my street. Their technique of gaining adepts is the same now as then: they post flyers around the neighborhood looking for contributors to a "humanist magazine" and for people who are against war and capitalism and other stuff like that to come to meetings. They also pose as people taking a survey and stop passers-by to ask them three questions: "What's your opinion about our current society?", "Do you think it needs to be changed?", and "Do you feel that your actions and your beliefs are coherent?" If the interviewee expresses dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs, he is invited to a meeting.

The founder of the group is Mario Rodr?guez Cobos, better known as Silo, who calls himself "The Messiah of the Andes". The organization was founded in Argentina in 1969 and soon expanded to the rest of Latin America and to Spain, Portugal, and France. It is made up of three different sections: The Community, The Movement, or the Humanist Movement, which is the group itself, the Humanist Party, which is its political arm, and the now-defunct Green Ecologist Party, an attempt to hijack the legitimate Green movement. The political party's purpose is largely to take advantage of the campaign laws which cede TV airtime just before elections, which the Community uses to run ads promoting themselves. The political party received as many as 22,000 votes in the 1989 European Parliament elections in Spain.

Siloism is a confusing mess of quarter-baked hippie philosophy and a totalitarian-style organization. Silo is always right and so he controls everything through a very strict hierarchy. The organization's exclusive purposes are to promote Siloist thought and so glorify Silo, and to raise money, half of which goes to the "World Fund" and the other half of which goes to the national organization. Members pay dues which can be very high, and are required to devote a great deal of time to the organization, sometimes so much that they quit their jobs. We wonder where the local DA's Fraud Squad is.

The Community and Siloism have been around long enough that there are several sites in Spanish critical of them, such as www.sectas.org.ar , www.humanoidex.com, and www.aciprensa.com/sectas/algunassectas.htm There are also thousands of pro-Silo sites on the web. The Community is apparently not active in the United States.

Here's a link to a site run by a group of ex-Silo cultists, with further links to a variety of pieces in various languages on Siloism. Most of them are in English, Spanish, or French.

We translate a lot of piffling nonsense from the Vanguardia by the likes of Chemical Lali, Balto Porcel, and Remei Margarit, so we thought we'd be nice this time and translate an article by non-idiotarian Quim Monzo.

Another World Is Possible

Just over a week ago the French police arrested Jose Bove so that he could serve, once and for all, the ten-month sentence that was imposed on him for destroying a field of GM rice. Bove leaped to fame years before when he trashed a McDonalds and, as time went by, he became the most media-friendly antiglobalization of peasant farmers. When they found out that he had finally been thrown in the slammer, the Greens protested, and Bove's union called protests in favor of his release. In the media, it's said that next Monday, July 14, the French national holiday, President Chirac may use his privilege and award Bove a presidential pardon, thus whitewashing this particular problem.

Then, I found, surfing on the internet, www.liberaux.org, a petition regarding Bove, but this petition was not in favor of his release; rather, the exact opposite, that he should stay in jail. The text asks the reader to send an e-mail to Chirac with this suggested content: "Dear Mr. President, it has been said in the press that you may have the intention of announcing an amnesty for Jose Bove next July 14. If I may be so bold, I suggest that you not do this." The text continues with the justifications: that the justice system has already been too benevolent toward Bove for too long; that this benevolence is a result of his fame; that to pardon him would be to give in to those who, when the result of an election goes against them, respond with violence. Finally the text says, "I hope, Mr. President, that you will be responsive to these observations, and I beg you to accept my most humble salutations."

Usually, those who set up massive e-mail petitions are groups acting in defense of human rights and democracy, such as in the recent case of Ali Lmrabet. (Mr. Lmrabet is a Moroccan journalist who has been imprisoned by the King. There has been a movement on the Spanish Left in favor of his release. Some suspect the Spanish Left of not really giving a crap about Mr. Lmrabet's fate but of trying to distract attention from human rights abuses of journalists in Cuba. --JC) But frequently the motives are not so clear; rather, they are nebulous. The driving forces behind these actions are an amalgam between the "progres" and their sheep-like followers, those people whom Jordi Barbeta calls the Gullibility International. Well, now it turns out that it is the "others"--the supposed mortal enemies of the Gullibility International--who are proposing a massive e-mail petition that nobody should deny Bove (the guru of agrarian protection and the eternal subsidy) his well-deserved ten months' jail time. By the way, speaking of the eternal subsidy, there are a few fervid supporters of this creed among ourselves...

Creatively, the Gullibility International has become stagnant in its politically correct routine: blocking traffic, camping out, chanting "We Shall Not Be Moved", pot-banging, and then starting over again. In Gracia, as part of the annual fiesta, they are going to have a special exhibit: pots which were savagely banged during the populist ruckus of a few months ago. What a bunch of navel-gazers and self-satisfied prigs. Saccharine, mushy, humorless, and full of the tragic concept of life, the last thing they need now is for "the others" to move in and squat on the deserted ground which is the sense of humor they have abandoned.

Quim Monzo has caught the grim humorlessness of the Left. They're not funny anymore, at least not intentionally. Really, when you go back and look at lefty humor idols like Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks, the first thing you notice is they were never funny at all. Christopher Hitchens, OK, he's sometimes funny. He's also moved over to the Right. Name me any other funny leftists from the last twenty years.

The Dissident Frogman is apparently under fire from a bunch of jerks because of his little photo essay on what he didn't see at the D-Day Memorial Museum in Bayeux, Normandy. (Guess what he didn't see there.) Check out his post on the subject and give him some support.

Check out this article from the BBC on the Liberian boat people sailing for the ivory Coast and Ghana as Liberia descends into anarchy. Meanwhile, this story from the Telegraph on the EU's lifting of their ban on genetically-modified foods shows that somebody in Europe is beginning to think sensibly about this very important subject. Here's an archive on GM foods from the New Scientist. Check out the story on improving cotton yields for poor black women farmers with AIDS in South Africa--I mean it, these are the people who directly benefit, and who the hell is against poor black women farmers with AIDS in South Africa? Jose Bove and the German Greens and the French ag lobby, that's who.

The hot news from Barcelona is that the Stones came last weekend and 60,000 morons paid way too much to see the World's Most Overpaid Rock and Roll Band at the Olympic Stadium up on Montjuic. Hey, the Stones were great before 1972 and good between Exile on Main Street (their most overrated, yet still pretty cool, album) and Tattoo You. After that they began to suck, and then they started to suck really bad, and now they blow donkey dongs. I can't believe more of 'em aren't dead from either the party rock-and-roll lifestyle--I mean, how could Mick Jagger possibly have avoided AIDS?--or old age.

Also, they had some sort of international Harley festival here last week. This was a total company promo job, and they didn't make any secret of it. They got some 5000-6000 Harley riders from around Europe--the wealthy weekend biker types, not the smelly greasy ones who take a lot of speed and yell "Show yer tits!" at fat girls and occasionally shoot people or at least fuck 'em up good with pool cues--to this Harley convention thing they put on. I guess it must have filled up the hotels and brought a lot of money into town, because they sure made a big deal out of it.

Murph says he heard that there was a major coincidence between the Harley convention and Gay Pride Day parades--a lot of the same folks showed up for both, it seems. Gay bikers? Only in Europe. Murph claims there's an overlap between the gay crowd and the biker crowd. I told him to go to San Berdoo and say that.

Anyway, though, they had a Harley Parade and blocked off all the streets downtown, and supposedly 100,000 people came out to see it. And hear it. Well, cool, lots of motorbikes for people who are into that. Fine. But do these people recognize that they have just provided enormous amounts of publicity for the Harley-Davidson company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA?

See, here's the thing. The Spaniards are wild about American popular culture. They're fascinated by really stereotypically American stuff like convertible '57 Chevys and roadside diners--every damn ad on TV seems like it takes place in an American roadside diner--and Levi's blue jeans and dead brands of cigs like Luckies and Chesterfields and Ray-Ban sunglasses and Zippo lighters and other props they've seen in movies.

It's interesting that so many of these images that Spaniards carry of America in their minds, and that they love so much, are commercial. Maybe that's why one of the most common impressions they carry of America is that it is consumerism-ridden.

Also, I noted that both of these events were very decaffeinated, very theme-park America. The Stones aren't rock and roll, at least anymore. I'll admit they used to try, but it was so obvious that they were always trying. The harsh fact is they're a bunch of middle-class English dilettantes, not guys who actually know how to play blues guitar with a bottleneck. I mean, Jerry Lee Lewis or Chuck Berry or James Brown or Hank Williams, those were real rock and roll lives.

As for the Harley parade, lovely, very nice, everyone had fun. But these guys had as much to do with real bikers as I have to do with Sonny Liston. Bikers are not fun. They are scary. They pack guns and deal drugs. They will beat the shit out of you if they feel like it. Remember when they kicked the shit out of Hunter S. Thompson? Good move, I'll have to admit, but I'm glad it wasn't me. These so-called bikers are so, well, European.

The following items are packed in their studded leather pillion bags:

1 1/2 liters of chilled Evian water bottled at the source
Sandwiches of Camembert and glacé mushroom paté
Various back issues of L'Uomo Vogue
The Michelin Guide to Spain's Finest B & Bs
A seven-inch dildo with spikes on the end
Extra Vuitton sunglasses
Hair gel
A crescent wrench with a studded-leather handle
Band-Aids

The Barcelonese just couldn't handle the real America.

The Corner links to this piece on "Whistler's Mother", as it is popularly known, from the Financial Times. I like stories about artists. I think Whistler's style is a lot more European than American, though, and I'm pretty sure he lived most of his life in Europe.

John's Favorite American Painters

6. Childe Hassam
5. James McNeill Whistler
4. John Singer Sargent
3. Thomas Eakins
2. Mary Cassatt
1. Winslow Homer

Honorable Mention: The Midwesterners (Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, Grant Wood), the Ashcan School, the Illuminationists, and the Illustrators (from Charles Dana Gibson to Norman Rockwell). And whoever painted Dempsey vs. Firpo, the greatest sports painting ever.

Here's an article from CNN on the situation in Liberia and a possible US intervention. First, my position on going into somewhere and overthrowing dictators or warlords is the same as Tony Blair's: "I wish I could overthrow them all. I will help to overthrow all that I can. I can't get rid of the Burmese military, as much as I would like to, for example." He said something like this; it's not a direct quote.

We can't go into the Congo, at least not now. We can't get enough supplies and security in there to make sure all our guys don't get killed and eaten like one of those tribes was doing to the Pygmies. It requires an enormous amount of preparation to move the United States Army, and the Army needs a safe home base; remember, it's estimated that they need eight to ten rear-echelon guys to support one fighting man. That means if you've got 10,000 combat soldiers on the ground, you need a safe home base to keep, we'll say, 75,000 support soldiers. Well, as far as I know, we've got only ten active Army divisions, plus several brigades of Marines, and some of them need to be in Korea and others in Europe and others in the Middle East and others at home. We don't have a lot of spare military capacity, and we just can't get to central Africa. The United States is not omnipotent.

We made it into Somalia with no problems, though, since Somalia's on the coast and easily supplied, and we weren't too worried at that time about anything. We had this military power sitting around doing nothing, and it's always a temptation to try out your new toys. Somalia looked perfect, we'd go in and restore order and feed the people and we'd be the big heroes. Too bad it ain't that simple.

So here's the deal with Liberia, in my mind: 1) We owe them something, we have some responsibility, since we set up the country in the first place as a colony for "repatriated" slaves 2) It's on the coast so we could get there fairly easily 3) We don't have a lot of excess military capacity, so we're going to need allies 4) What do you know, the Brits are in Sierra Leone, north of Liberia, and the French are in the Ivory Coast, south of Liberia. Maybe we need to all get together and see what we can do to pacify the region in general. We'll give the French a chance to get out of the doghouse and prove they have something useful to contribute instead of just whingeing 5) We only send in our guys if we're prepared to fight and take losses. If we're not willing to do that, we do not go in. I'd be prepared to fight on this one, since what's happening in West Africa has been just horrendous over the last 25 years. But I'm not the American people as a whole 6) Are we too busy right now in the Middle East to take on such a serious responsibility as Liberia? That's a question only the President can answer. I'll bet we're not, but I'm not an expert on American military capabilities.

Here's John Bloom, also known as Joe Bob Briggs, on affirmative action from the National Review. Our position is very simple: Racial quotas have to go. Now.

I am particularly anti-affirmative action because I feel like I was one of those who got screwed over by it. I was a typical bright young male student in high school, not grades-crazy but I had something like a 3.5 GPA in all honors classes. I never studied much, partly because I was actually doing extracurricular activities (track and cross-country, school newspaper, College Bowl) and partly because I was busy leading a normal life. I scored 1430 on the SAT--780 verbal, 650 math, just the opposite of what bright boys usually score--, which is 99th percentile; in fact, I have never taken a standardized test in which I didn't score in the 99th. I also scored over 700 on 3 College Board achievement tests, English, European history, and American history. I figured that ought to get me into any college in the country. Was I ever wrong. They all turned me down, because I'm a middle-class white boy from Johnson County, Kansas, and I wound up at good old State U. while a whole lot of people with considerably fewer achievements than mine--I bet none of them ever finished a marathon in three hours, twenty-seven minutes--got into all the fancy schools.

I blame affirmative action.

But, surprise, surprise. My mother and her sisters have been doing some genealogical digging around and they've now got the papers. Their grandfather (my great-grandfather, of course), James Lafayette Shoemake, was not on the 1924 Cherokee Nation roll, but his two brothers were, and we can now prove it in a court of law if necessary. (For some reason I had thought they were Choctaw.) They've found their graves in Talequah, Oklahoma, along with a bunch of other information. James Lafayette didn't use Indian ways, he was a cowboy and worked on the Border Patrol out in West Texas, but he was a honest-to-God half-Injun. Half at the very least, that is. They still haven't found much about James Lafayette's mother. My Aunt Johnine, who is still in her early fifties, is going to get herself registered as a Native American, since that ethnic classification can only help her in her public school teaching career.

I just might do the same thing if it's not too much trouble. Jeez, an Indian with a 1430. I could have written my own ticket. I'd have gotten Jayson Blair's job on the New York Times.

Now, of course, I'm about as Indian as Prince Charles, culturally speaking. But if you can use the system to your benefit, it's not your fault, it's the system's. And all the affirmative action system does is give places in universities and jobs that were actually earned by someone else to undeserving middle-class "minorities". I'm fed up with it. I think I'm gonna be a minority.

Here's a great story from the Weekly Standard about how nutty the competition to get into the top schools can get, and about how nutty parents can get while making their kids into superachievers, or, like the girl in question here, hollow, empty superachievers. Definitely read this one.

When children are good, their parents permit them to breakfast upon cereals with over 50% sugar content. When they are bad, they get porridge. Well, you've all been very, very bad little readers, so today you get--you guessed it--a big old helping of Balt-O-Meal. That's right, old Balto finally finished his series on the United States, and you guys get to read the best parts! Here we go from last Friday:

Years ago I saw a sensational cartoon in the American press: a middle-class couple was eating dinner unworriedly in their house, while hidden under the table there was a Chinese with a knife between his teeth. the caption: "The Yellow Peril". And, without an atrocious fear, aggression has almost no motive. This explains, also, the philosophy of the neoconservatives we talked about yesterday. Which, nonetheless, is beginning to stop disrespecting Europe for its "cowardice" and "old-fashionedness", as has so often been said, and has begun fearing it: have not France and Germany demonstrated enormous moral and political strength by opposing the United States, which only had the support of modest, average countries like Spain? Not counting Great Britian as usual, of course. And the fact that the value of the euro has finally passed that of the dollar benefits American exports by lowering the price of its products, but it shows that when we go beyond missiles, the Old Continent stands firm on its rich complexity, as another influental American conservative magazine, the New Republic, laments, alarmed at the confluence of postnationalism that the EU is designing, becoming the standard of the anti-Americanism that is boiling in this world.

Oh, good Lord. A "Yellow Peril" cartoon? Maybe in the Hearst papers during Korea. Balt, please provide your source. Where did you see this? The meme that the Americans are pissing their pants in fear is repeated over and over in anti-American circles in Europe. Uh, Balt, don't underestimate the Yanks so easily. They've shown a great deal more courage in the last two hundred years than, say, the Mallorcans. Strength? France? In Le Monde Diplomatique's wet dreams. The one thing everyone outside France seems to agree on, no matter what other disputes they might have, is that the French government are a bunch of weasels. They've managed to deal themselves out of any major hand that's going to be played on the world scene in the next twenty years. And I'm not gonna be the guy who calls up Marty Peretz at the New Republic to tell him he's running a "conservative" magazine.

P.J. O'Rourke is grumpy about Hillary Clinton's novel over at Front Page. What I'm wondering is whether P.J. has been out-curmudgeoned by the blogosphere. Remember back in the late Eighties and early Nineties when P.J. seemed like the only hip guy out there taking on the idiotarians, and doing it with vicious irony? Remember P.J. tearing into the likes of homeless advocates, Sandalistas, and Soviet wannabes? Now everyone's got his own blog and is gleefully skewering all the latest stupidities of the Illustrated and Enlightened Among Us, or as P.J. used to call them, the Perenially Indignant, within hours of the occurence of said stupidities.

Now, this is a perfectly good article and a lovely Hillary-bash, for those of you who like that kind of thing (I certainly do), but everybody in the blogosphere has already written the same piece. Hillary's book is just so early June, and P.J.'s behind the curve on this subject. It used to be, ten years ago, that a guy had a couple of weeks of time to put an article together and have it still be current when it came out--you had TV, the daily papers, the weekly newsmagazines, and the "serious" political / critical journals, in that order of decreasing immediacy and increasing detail. You used to have some breathing space between when you wrote the piece and when it hit the Atlantics and the New Yorkers and the National Reviews as a still-fresh topic. No longer. P.J., time to join the blogosphere!

Here's Mark Steyn on getting felt up by dead racist Strom "Who the Hell Needs Viagra?" Thurmond. Lester Maddox just died, too. I calculate that the only old segregationists still not only alive, but in power, are the notorious Klansman Robert Byrd and South Carolina's other Senator-for-Life Fritz Hollings. Both Democrats. As were ol' Strom when he started out, and Jesse Helms, too. (Is Jesse dead yet? Boy, if anyone can filibuster St. Peter into letting him into heaven, it'd be ol' Jesse.)

Fred Barnes over at the Weekly Standard gives six reasons why Bush looks good going into next fall's elections. He's even daring to use the L-word--that is, landslide. I've been very good at picking elections recently, and I will stick my neck out right now and say Bush takes forty states in November 2004, and that's assuming the Dems nominate somebody electable like Lieberman. If Nader or somebody like Chomsky runs on the Green ticket and knocks a couple percent off the Dems' vote again, Bush wins forty-seven to fifty states.

NYAAH-HAH-HAH-HEE-HEE-HEE! See, the Dems have to move left, or at least they think they do, so that no one can out-left them this time around like Nader did last time. And, by doing that, they move even farther away from the center, which is where the votes grow and are just looking to be harvested by a war-winning President riding a strong economy. Their goofy far-left candidates like Kooch and Carol "What, Is That The F---ing Ethics Committee Again?" Moseley-Braun and Brother Al the Pimp and Howie Dean are going to pull the already very lefty Dem primary electorate even farther to the left by bringing out the university Socialist cadres and the Seattle antiglobo wackjobs, whether the mainstream Dems want it to happen or not. The Dems have tremendously high negatives; the Republicans don't. About half the people in the United States just cannot stand the sight of the Clintons or Algore; there's a hard core of 20-22% or so on the Left who hate Bush with a passion, but Bush's positives are well up in the 60s and his negatives are staying below 25%. Barring unforeseeable disaster ("PRESIDENT FATHERS JACKO'S ALIEN LOVE CHILD"), Bush gets reelected easily.

New Trends in Self-Body-Modification
by Alan Murphy, Guest Style Counselor

Is there a wave of copycat self-severing on the horizon? The Sydney Morning Herald reports an Aussie miner cut off his own forearm this weekend when it got lodged under machinery. According to a witness: "Col got out his Stanley knife... By the time the bloke had walked around to the other side of the front-end loader, Col had completely severed his [own] arm."

Most disturbing is the detail that, according to a psychologist, his action “may have been influenced by a case last month when an American mountaineer amputated his arm after being trapped for five days by a boulder in a Utah national park”.

So, is self-amputation going to be this summer’s fad, the hula-hoop of the 21st century? With the success of Jackass, anything is possible. John already tipped the colostomy bag to be the fashion accessory of summer 2003. Split tongues are just so last year, and trepanning came and went with only a few fashion pioneers prepared to have their crania drilled like a colander. However, self-amputation is so much bolder a statement, it’s so – like, radical – that it cannot fail to gain adepts before you can say Vincent Van Gogh. For those eager to do the deed, I recommend a story by Bill Burroughs, I think called “The Hand”, in which the hero chops off aforesaid member as an artistic statement. A store-bought box-cutter or Stanley knife costs only around $2.00 and was sufficient for the job in the case of the Aussie. Only thing we need is a summer pop hit to back up the trend. Suggestions?

Check out Mlle. Sabine Howard. She's not only a babe, she's also smart. I hate people like that. But thank St. Hayek for her; she's actually bringing attention to "liberal"--i.e. free-market--thinking in France. If this woman can get 80,000 people out to hear her speak, maximum power to her.

My vote for hottest conservative babe goes to Michelle Malkin. She is truly stunning, one of those people Tom Wolfe called a sort of nuclear fusion meltdown among all the groups of people who have come over to the US. Michelle is part Asian and part black, obviously, and I bet she's got plenty of other ancestors from different places. And she's smart, too! This is great. Normally conservative writers are hairy old guys; Michelle is smarter than most of them and also a hell of a lot more attractive.

Here's a piece in National Review about Dennis Miller, the comedian; he's one of the few who have come over to the correct side, along with Christopher Hitchens and Murph, over the war. Check it out.

You know, we don't pay nearly as much attention to Dark Blogules as we ought to. It's Angie Schultz's blog; you'll recognize her name from the Comments section, in which she once famously exposed Vanguardia plagiarist Marius Serra. Her blog is intelligent, sharp and funny. Check it out. By the way, we're weenies--can't stand light type on a dark background--so Angie thoughtfully includes a link where we can flip the light-on-dark around to dark-on-light.

Cinderella Bloggerfeller wrote a light, funny little piece on avoiding cliches in one's writing. It's actually, like, witty and all, and it includes jokes that are generally better than mine. It is not the slightest bit controversial in any way. So guess what? Some moron is giving him shit in his Comments section. Jesus. Sometimes you can't please anybody. Go read his piece and then the Comments and give him some support.

Jesus Gil at Ibidem has an excellent historical debunking piece on the "Black Legend" of the Spanish Inquisition and its demonization. A lot about the Inquisition was not pretty but its victims were few, certainly if you compare them to the French Wars of Religion or the Thirty Years' War or the Protestant witch hunts (though the number of victims of the witch hunts is often as exaggerated as the number of victims of the Inquisition). One minor quibble: Jesus may be exaggerating the power and influence of the Masons. My grandfather was a Mason. He worked on the railroad. I've read--more like flipped through--his Masonic books. It's just a bunch of gibberish not much different from any other fraternal organization's mystical BS.

Still don't believe Saddam had weapons of mass destruction? Check out this article from the Wall Street Journal. (Via Front Page.) And here's Byron York from National Review making a similar case.

Guess what, everybody! Baltasar Porcel is doing, not just an article but a series, on the United States! Of course I'm not going to spare you. Read it and suffer. He started it on Tuesday:

The Americans invoke God frequently and George W. Bush belongs to a church or cult (secta)--it's difficult to differentiate between them--which might be Anabaptist and is simplistic and, also, more or less fundamentalist, and for which he felt a frenzy of devotion when he grew up and needed to maintain ethylic sobriety. That is, based on Bush's self-evident possession of the truth, interpreted loquaciously by a Texan priest reading the Bible in a clean little clapboard church with a little garden, lying has become the great support of American politics. Bush has aggravated it because in the economic world, for example, it's beeen going on for a long time; let's remember Enron, accounting fallacies and legal frauds, definitely robberies of the citizenry, which is now affecting another giant, one of vast social responsibility, the company that controls 18%! of the mortgages in the country.

A) Bush, as I said recently, is a Methodist, the third-largest church in America after the Catholics and the Baptists and not precisely a cult. It is not seemly for Mr. Porcel to ignorantly slam the Methodists because he don't know a damn thing about them. Mr. Porcel shows here a great miscomprehension of the various Protestant churches, which is sadly very common in such a heavily Catholic-culture country as Spain. The Methodists, for folks who may not know, are a moderately liberal Anglo-American church, which originally split off the Anglicans in the late eighteenth century. They allow, nay, encourage, women ministers; they are not anti-abortion or anti-divorce or anti-gay. There are virtually no Anabaptist groups surviving. The Baptists, the only Protestant church bigger than the Methodists, have nothing to do with the Anabaptists or Germany; they are a further split off the Anglicans. They are generally more conservative than the Methodists, but there are several different brands of them. By the way, the Bush family is historically high-church Anglican. George W. converted to the Methodists when he married Laura. As for the lying and corruption in business crap, they've found about five or ten occurrences of fraud. Those people involved are being prosecuted. There is no indication that America under Bush is any more corrupt than anywhere else, and it is certainly one hell of a lot less corrupt than the Spanish Socialist Party.

X comments on this to me in his little office in the center of Wall Street, in New York, that miracle of miracles. Pure finance, the stock market, are the systematized miracle: from nothing to everything, from the nonexistent to the tangible. X's several computers vomit forth lists of numbers and names, but he is desolate: "Lying for so long, until disasters break out, like these top directors do, shows a hedonistic and publicitary ambition which has nothing to do with the strict Protestant moral. Old Henry Ford didn't even have a car. Tom Wolfe in his bitter novels has best portrayed this unhinged capitalism." He points to the huge void of the Twin Towers, right there, he adds: "Bush has made war on Afghanistan and Iraq to catch the terrorists and their terrible arsenal, but we know nothing of Bin Laden, of Saddam, or his chemical weapons. Tricks and failures, like the famous odyssey of Jennifer Lynch."

Mr. Porcel, who is X? Is he a real person or someone, as I suspect, whom you made up and in whose mouth you put words? No one talks like this except you yourself, you old blatherskite. Note further lack of comprehension of Protestantism and the absurd statement that Henry Ford didn't have a car.

He explains. The supreme heroic act of the Americans in Iraq consisted of the commando attack by the Special Forces on the hospital where Private Jessica Lynch lay among Republican Guards who had captured her after shooting her full of holes and torturing her without stopping. Well: Lynch's famous wounds were from a car accident and she was better cared for than the indigenous patients, the hospital had been abandoned by the (Iraqi?) soldiers a couple of days before, and what the commandos did was to grab stupefied docters and blow up doors that were open, while their television was filming it and Bush cried happily. And as for the legendary and amnesiac Lynch, they are selling various objects on Internet with her name trademarked.

First, note that this particular account of the rescue of Private Lynch has nothing to do with the truth. Second, note Mr. Porcel's scorn for the Americans' puffing themselves up as heroes. The truth, of course, is that no puffing up was done. Instead, alleged puffing up was invented out of thin air by the Left looking for something, anything, to criticize after the overwhelming Allied victory in Iraq. Third, I just Googled "jessica lynch" and "trademark", and then "brand name", and there are no products for sale. Mr. Porcel done told a lie.

Here's old Balt's next emission, from Wednesday:

Yesterday, regarding Bush, I alluded to the Christian fundamentalist cults and churches. It is like Islamic terrorism, though it seems difficult to equialze both concepts. And in the United States they have a notorious influence, while the Catholic Church, with its cases of pedophilia and homosexuality, which several bishops are mixed up in, is in anguish. These fundamentalists believe that the "Caucasian" or white race, descended from central and Nordic Europe, is the authentic descendant of the lost tribes of Israel and occupies a preeminent place in the divine plan for the Earth, while they hate the State because of its permissive legislation on abortion, attacking clinics to this effect.

WHAT?!? Balt, there are about eight nutcases in Assboink, Idaho, who believe that stuff. Please try to get your facts minimally correct. You see how hard it is to talk sense to Spaniards about the US? How is it possible when their brains are drenched daily in such drivel? And then they dare to call us ignorant.

Not long ago Eric Rudolph, suspected of the massacre committed at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, and who is linked with the cults Christian Identity, Army of God, Church of Israel, or is protected by them, was accidentally arrested after being one of the most wanted fugitives. We are dealing with a world that is primitive, obsessive, poor, psychologically stunted. Which after September 11 has acquired fierce power, with its preaching based on the idea that America's sins have been punished through Arabs and Moslems, inferior races and beliefs. But the Arabs are much more persecuted than these Christians.

WHAT?!?!? Oh, never mind. Balt wants to believe that America is sinister and evil. Informing him that, no, these groups are not precisely influential in America today will do him little good after the 847 BBC and Channel 4 documentaries Catalan TV keeps repeating over and over that he's seen.

Rudolph has shared media sensationalism with Hillary Clinton's memoirs, which have gained her 8 million dollars and which are selling well, though it seems not so much. I ask several young people in Soho and Brooklyn about them, but they shrug their shoulders; they know the book has come out, but they don't care. The "New York Times" type of press has been severe with the book. Those who buy, therefore, are people of a low cultural level who are stereotype fodder, a stubborn and wide middle class shrunken with fear after September 11 and mesmerized by Bush's tanks. But, is the interest in Mrs. Clinton's book based on the Lewinsky scandal and all? Not exactly: her readers know that she will go off on the tangent and that she is looking for money as she is testing the waters of a possible presidential future. That is, people buy the book knowing it is a scam, in order to know up to what point it is one.

WHAT?!?!? does that have to do with anything? Yeah, right, Balt, I can just see your skinny white ass down in the hood discussing Hillary Clinton's memoirs. Note the contempt Mr. Porcel feels for the ordinary American. Next time some European tells you he likes the American people but he doesn't like the government, explain to him that he is lying through his teeth. Do so politely. Wouldn't want to offend any Europeans, would we?

Now here's today's dose of Balt. Get a load of the absolutely shameless self-logrolling in the first paragraph.

Alexis du Tocqueville, the French thinker of the first half of the 19th century and whom today we would call a liberal or a democratic conservative, appears as one of the key historical characters in my novel "L'Emperador or L'ull del vent"; the other is, without a doubt, Napoleon. Or his immense possessive shadow. So, in Paris, not long ago, at the presentation of the Prix Mediterranee to this novel in its French version, a member of the jury, Jean Daniel, the director of the influential weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, talked to me about how they analyze the American neoconservatives who inspire Bush, for whom the European genius was Tocqueville, who as an aristocrat was a renegade from the Old Regime, accepted the revolution as an evolution, traveled to the United States rather than disdaining them, and studied its democracy with stunning lucidity. "For these neoconservatives he was the opposite of the French of today; we have become activists of anti-Americanism, they think for no reason," smiled Daniel.

Uh, Balt, I thought the neoconservative conspiracy was built on the works of Leo Strauss. Lord, I can't stand this anymore. You're going to have to read the rest of it for yourself. Try the Axis of Porcel HQ.

I have been accused of speaking scornfully of Catalan intellectuals. But, come on, if this is the best they can do, no amount of scorn is unjustified. And remember, Baltasar Porcel is the Official Catalan Candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Wouldn't it be great if they actually gave it to him one of these years?