Friday, July 18, 2003
Check out these poll results from Fox News on Bush and on various issues, foreign and domestic. Bush is enjoying a positive rating of 59%, a few points below where he was this spring, but nonetheless damn good. The Dems are completely divided and many of their candidates are little-known. The doomsayers are going to be proved wrong. We'll predict right now that, barring disaster (BIGAMIST BUSH WEDS GAY SPACE ALIEN IN SATANIC CEREMONY), Bush will win reelection easily.
Rundown of the Vanguardia news and commentary staff:
IDIOTARIANS
Rafael Poch, Tomas Alcoverro, Rafael Ramos, Andy Robinson, Balto Porcel, Xavier Bru de Sala, Gregorio Moran, Remei Margarit, "Chemical Lali" Sole
ANTI-IDIOTARIANS
Quim Monzo, Xavier Sala i Martin, Miquel Porta Perales, Pedro Schwartz
Here comes Monzo, from Wednesday's Vangua. It's titled "I have a dilemma".
Last week Juan Ruiz published, in El Periodico, an article in which he depicted with perfection one of those situations with which the Gullible International cheers us up occasionally. Turns out that at the recent Sant Cugat (a wealthy Barcelona residential suburb) fiesta mayor, in the area for the young people and the so-called alternatives, they decided not to serve Coca-Cola. It's imperialistic. Juan Ruiz explains, "The organizers boycotted that drink. In its place, they served Mecca-Cola, the combative soft drink invented by a French businessman of Tunisian origin." Mecca-Cola has been on the Spanish market for four months and, they say, in the beginning the importers thought that it would be very popular among the immigrant Muslim population. But that didn't happen. The immigrant Muslim population prefers other brands of cola, including the perfidious Coca-Cola. The reasons for this preference are varied and the article remarks upon them. One is the price. A 1 1/2 liter bottle of Mecca-Cola costs €1.60. However, the other brands cost only €1.20. We must keep in mind that Mecca-Cola has pledged to destine 10 percent of the profits to the Palestinian cause.
The importers have wound up discovering that the immigrant Muslim population doesn't give a hoot about Mecca-Cola, but the supporters of "responsible consumption" do. Well, that's better than nothing. That is: you will not find Mecca-Cola in the mom-and-pop groceries of the Raval (the downtown slum district with a heavily Muslim immigrant population)--which is where they thought it would sell the best--but you will in the shops belonging to the Network of Solidarious Trade. Juan Ruiz also reproduces the statements of Carles Montanya, the spokesman for the importer, who says that the consumers are all Christians and that "the Muslim population in Spain is not politically aware". Take that.
In the same style as those shwarma and falafel joints where they serve water and soft drinks but not even one sad little beer, the bottles of Mecca-Cola also show a discriminatory attitude toward alcohol. On all of them it says, "Please do not mix with alcohol." And you think, why not? Why not, if, as the importers say, all the drink's consumers are Christians, and, to begin with, the Christians not only have no problem with alcohol, but their priests get hammered on slurps of wine during Mass? My question now is which position I should adopt. I'm writing this article at mid-afternoon. A good time to have myself a "raf"--ice, gin, a wedge of lemon, cola...But which cola do I use? If I add Coca-Cola, I am helping the maximum symbol of the malevolent, perverse, and evil Yankees' evil, perverse, and malevolent capitalism. Of course it's not going to be Pepsi--I'd rather die. I'd almost choose to put in Mecca-Cola, in order to compensate for the immigrant Muslim population's lack of solidarity and in order to be 10 percent fraternal with the Palestinian cause in general and the French businessman of Tunisian origin's company in particular. But if it says on the bottles, "Please do not mix with alcohol", that means, for them, mixing the drink with alcohol is some sort of offense. So I don't know what to do. If I put Coca-Cola in my rum I'm siding with imperialism. If I put in Mecca-Cola I'm offending them. What would you do in my place?
If you would be kind enough to advise me, I would appreciate it if you would send your letters to me, care of the Opinion section of La Vanguardia, Calle Pelai, 28, 08001 Barcelona, Spain. Should you prefer to do it by e-mail, send it to opinion@lavanguardia.es. Thank you very much.
Good column, Mr. Monzo. Here's my advice: NEVER mix Coke and gin. It tastes like hell. In college we called it an "Aqua Velva", because it tastes and smells like that cheap American brand of cologne. Mix your gin with Schweppes tonic instead. Reserve Coke to mix with rum or bourbon (of Four Roses-Evan Williams quality, not Maker's Mark or Weller or Wild Turkey). Use limes rather than lemons, if you can, if you want to add a citrus taste. (Not that I have anything against lemon, I just like lime better.) And, here in Spain, we are privileged to have many different varieties of good wine available at reasonable prices. Drink good Spanish wine whenever you get the opportunity. Try the Pazo brand from Galicia. It's a light (10%) wine that's crisp and refreshing, and very cheap. It would be no sin to turn it into a spritzer.
IDIOTARIANS
Rafael Poch, Tomas Alcoverro, Rafael Ramos, Andy Robinson, Balto Porcel, Xavier Bru de Sala, Gregorio Moran, Remei Margarit, "Chemical Lali" Sole
ANTI-IDIOTARIANS
Quim Monzo, Xavier Sala i Martin, Miquel Porta Perales, Pedro Schwartz
Here comes Monzo, from Wednesday's Vangua. It's titled "I have a dilemma".
Last week Juan Ruiz published, in El Periodico, an article in which he depicted with perfection one of those situations with which the Gullible International cheers us up occasionally. Turns out that at the recent Sant Cugat (a wealthy Barcelona residential suburb) fiesta mayor, in the area for the young people and the so-called alternatives, they decided not to serve Coca-Cola. It's imperialistic. Juan Ruiz explains, "The organizers boycotted that drink. In its place, they served Mecca-Cola, the combative soft drink invented by a French businessman of Tunisian origin." Mecca-Cola has been on the Spanish market for four months and, they say, in the beginning the importers thought that it would be very popular among the immigrant Muslim population. But that didn't happen. The immigrant Muslim population prefers other brands of cola, including the perfidious Coca-Cola. The reasons for this preference are varied and the article remarks upon them. One is the price. A 1 1/2 liter bottle of Mecca-Cola costs €1.60. However, the other brands cost only €1.20. We must keep in mind that Mecca-Cola has pledged to destine 10 percent of the profits to the Palestinian cause.
The importers have wound up discovering that the immigrant Muslim population doesn't give a hoot about Mecca-Cola, but the supporters of "responsible consumption" do. Well, that's better than nothing. That is: you will not find Mecca-Cola in the mom-and-pop groceries of the Raval (the downtown slum district with a heavily Muslim immigrant population)--which is where they thought it would sell the best--but you will in the shops belonging to the Network of Solidarious Trade. Juan Ruiz also reproduces the statements of Carles Montanya, the spokesman for the importer, who says that the consumers are all Christians and that "the Muslim population in Spain is not politically aware". Take that.
In the same style as those shwarma and falafel joints where they serve water and soft drinks but not even one sad little beer, the bottles of Mecca-Cola also show a discriminatory attitude toward alcohol. On all of them it says, "Please do not mix with alcohol." And you think, why not? Why not, if, as the importers say, all the drink's consumers are Christians, and, to begin with, the Christians not only have no problem with alcohol, but their priests get hammered on slurps of wine during Mass? My question now is which position I should adopt. I'm writing this article at mid-afternoon. A good time to have myself a "raf"--ice, gin, a wedge of lemon, cola...But which cola do I use? If I add Coca-Cola, I am helping the maximum symbol of the malevolent, perverse, and evil Yankees' evil, perverse, and malevolent capitalism. Of course it's not going to be Pepsi--I'd rather die. I'd almost choose to put in Mecca-Cola, in order to compensate for the immigrant Muslim population's lack of solidarity and in order to be 10 percent fraternal with the Palestinian cause in general and the French businessman of Tunisian origin's company in particular. But if it says on the bottles, "Please do not mix with alcohol", that means, for them, mixing the drink with alcohol is some sort of offense. So I don't know what to do. If I put Coca-Cola in my rum I'm siding with imperialism. If I put in Mecca-Cola I'm offending them. What would you do in my place?
If you would be kind enough to advise me, I would appreciate it if you would send your letters to me, care of the Opinion section of La Vanguardia, Calle Pelai, 28, 08001 Barcelona, Spain. Should you prefer to do it by e-mail, send it to opinion@lavanguardia.es. Thank you very much.
Good column, Mr. Monzo. Here's my advice: NEVER mix Coke and gin. It tastes like hell. In college we called it an "Aqua Velva", because it tastes and smells like that cheap American brand of cologne. Mix your gin with Schweppes tonic instead. Reserve Coke to mix with rum or bourbon (of Four Roses-Evan Williams quality, not Maker's Mark or Weller or Wild Turkey). Use limes rather than lemons, if you can, if you want to add a citrus taste. (Not that I have anything against lemon, I just like lime better.) And, here in Spain, we are privileged to have many different varieties of good wine available at reasonable prices. Drink good Spanish wine whenever you get the opportunity. Try the Pazo brand from Galicia. It's a light (10%) wine that's crisp and refreshing, and very cheap. It would be no sin to turn it into a spritzer.
Thursday, July 17, 2003
Well, a Catalan won a stage of the Tour de France for the first time I can remember. Joan Antoni Flecha broke from a group of eight riders with ten kilometers to go and held on all the way to Toulouse. Bike racers dream of winning a Tour stage, and this is Flecha's first year of competition. That's like hitting a home run on your first day in the major leagues. Congratulations to Flecha.
Check out this surreal piece of bike-racing analysis--socioeconomic theorizing--film criticism from today's Vangua. It's by one Rafael Vallbona.
"The Snail Strategy" was an excellent movie that denounced the abusive tactics of some real estate speculators to kick out the tenants from a building and so, once remodeled, rent the apartments at an exaggerated markup. The tenants come up with a defensive strategy that, finally, leaves the businessmen looking foolish. Well, more or less this is what the first ten stages of the centennial of the Tour have given us, leaving out Beloki's crash. Seeing that it would not be at all easy for him to break the humble tenants of the peloton, realizing that he could not humiliate his adversaries on the Alpe d'Huez and impose the law of the powerful just as he had planned; Armstrong decided, on the way to Gap, to ask the Quick Step team for help (in exchange for the mountain-leader's jersey for Virenque) to overcome Jaksche's break from the pack, to dedicate himself to the speculative economy, in the style of his friend Bush, and to leave aside for a better occasion the industrial economy, which would give chances to Mayo, Zubeldia, or Vinokurov and work to their own. At that instant the American and his team were weak. The Tour was wide open. Then what happened to Joseba happened and the centennial Tour came to an end, if Mayo can't break the race open on Luz Ardiden. The Pyrenees will be a sea of ikurrinas (Basque flags). Despite the controversy over the deal with Batasuna, only the Basques can save the race. They will have to be the snails from the movie.
Just a few comments: a) Armstrong hasn't been seriously challenged yet b) why would he be afraid of Jaksche, who's in 18th place 7:05 back c) why would he ask Virenque for help, since Virenque is a bigger threat to him than the German d) it's too bad Beloki crashed, but he showed few signs of being able to do any better than second or third again in the stages before his accident e) note the scorn for Lance's team, which includes the "weak" turncoat Spaniards Heras (in 8th place), Beltran (in 13th), and Rubiera (in 28th, out of 171 riders) f) I am guessing that Postal's strategy was to win the team time trial, give Lance the lead going into the Alps and hold it, pick up a couple or three more minutes in the two upcoming individual time trials, and hold on in the Pyrenees--if he can't break it open there himself g) There are still five competitive stages ahead, three in the mountains and the two time trials, and not being optimistic for Mayo's chances (he's only 1:02 back) and Mancebo's (he's just 1:37 behind) is chicken-heartedly throwing in the towel already. Of course, I think Armstrong is going to win, but these guys are less than two minutes back! Don't give up yet! Root for your guys, that's terrific, I like Mayo a lot and I hope he comes in second, and it would be a great story if he won--"Underdog Dethrones Armstrong"--but don't start whining that it's time to go out and eat some mud when the majority of the race hasn't even been ridden yet.
For the benefit of the unenlightened, here's the deal with bike-racing teams. They're sponsored by companies or organizations, and each team is considered to be from the country where its sponsor is from. For example, Credit Agricole is considered a French team. The teams have no connection with any government, and they may contain riders from any country. US Postal, I believe, has three Americans, three Spaniards, one Colombian, and one Russian. For some reason the US Postal Service decided it would be good advertising to sponsor a bike-racing team; they say it costs them four million bucks a year and gets them $18 million of publicity. The French and Italian national lotteries also sponsor teams, as does the Spanish organization for the blind, the ONCE, which runs a lottery of its own.
Oh, yeah, as for capitalism and neoliberalism, Cofidis, a French team, is a consumer-loan company. Now, we all know that these companies perform a legitimate service--they lend small amounts to borrowers with lousy credit at high rates of interest. This used to be called usury. Now it is one of the less attractive hard facts of the free-market system; that is, the higher the risk the lender takes, the more interest he charges the borrower. But if we're going to attack neoliberal capitalists, maybe Lance Armstrong wouldn't be as good a target as a consumer-loan company that CHARGES POOR PEOPLE HIGHER INTEREST THAN BANKS DO.
Check out this surreal piece of bike-racing analysis--socioeconomic theorizing--film criticism from today's Vangua. It's by one Rafael Vallbona.
"The Snail Strategy" was an excellent movie that denounced the abusive tactics of some real estate speculators to kick out the tenants from a building and so, once remodeled, rent the apartments at an exaggerated markup. The tenants come up with a defensive strategy that, finally, leaves the businessmen looking foolish. Well, more or less this is what the first ten stages of the centennial of the Tour have given us, leaving out Beloki's crash. Seeing that it would not be at all easy for him to break the humble tenants of the peloton, realizing that he could not humiliate his adversaries on the Alpe d'Huez and impose the law of the powerful just as he had planned; Armstrong decided, on the way to Gap, to ask the Quick Step team for help (in exchange for the mountain-leader's jersey for Virenque) to overcome Jaksche's break from the pack, to dedicate himself to the speculative economy, in the style of his friend Bush, and to leave aside for a better occasion the industrial economy, which would give chances to Mayo, Zubeldia, or Vinokurov and work to their own. At that instant the American and his team were weak. The Tour was wide open. Then what happened to Joseba happened and the centennial Tour came to an end, if Mayo can't break the race open on Luz Ardiden. The Pyrenees will be a sea of ikurrinas (Basque flags). Despite the controversy over the deal with Batasuna, only the Basques can save the race. They will have to be the snails from the movie.
Just a few comments: a) Armstrong hasn't been seriously challenged yet b) why would he be afraid of Jaksche, who's in 18th place 7:05 back c) why would he ask Virenque for help, since Virenque is a bigger threat to him than the German d) it's too bad Beloki crashed, but he showed few signs of being able to do any better than second or third again in the stages before his accident e) note the scorn for Lance's team, which includes the "weak" turncoat Spaniards Heras (in 8th place), Beltran (in 13th), and Rubiera (in 28th, out of 171 riders) f) I am guessing that Postal's strategy was to win the team time trial, give Lance the lead going into the Alps and hold it, pick up a couple or three more minutes in the two upcoming individual time trials, and hold on in the Pyrenees--if he can't break it open there himself g) There are still five competitive stages ahead, three in the mountains and the two time trials, and not being optimistic for Mayo's chances (he's only 1:02 back) and Mancebo's (he's just 1:37 behind) is chicken-heartedly throwing in the towel already. Of course, I think Armstrong is going to win, but these guys are less than two minutes back! Don't give up yet! Root for your guys, that's terrific, I like Mayo a lot and I hope he comes in second, and it would be a great story if he won--"Underdog Dethrones Armstrong"--but don't start whining that it's time to go out and eat some mud when the majority of the race hasn't even been ridden yet.
For the benefit of the unenlightened, here's the deal with bike-racing teams. They're sponsored by companies or organizations, and each team is considered to be from the country where its sponsor is from. For example, Credit Agricole is considered a French team. The teams have no connection with any government, and they may contain riders from any country. US Postal, I believe, has three Americans, three Spaniards, one Colombian, and one Russian. For some reason the US Postal Service decided it would be good advertising to sponsor a bike-racing team; they say it costs them four million bucks a year and gets them $18 million of publicity. The French and Italian national lotteries also sponsor teams, as does the Spanish organization for the blind, the ONCE, which runs a lottery of its own.
Oh, yeah, as for capitalism and neoliberalism, Cofidis, a French team, is a consumer-loan company. Now, we all know that these companies perform a legitimate service--they lend small amounts to borrowers with lousy credit at high rates of interest. This used to be called usury. Now it is one of the less attractive hard facts of the free-market system; that is, the higher the risk the lender takes, the more interest he charges the borrower. But if we're going to attack neoliberal capitalists, maybe Lance Armstrong wouldn't be as good a target as a consumer-loan company that CHARGES POOR PEOPLE HIGHER INTEREST THAN BANKS DO.
Wednesday, July 16, 2003
Here's Phil Taylor's comment on two recent bits of baseball-linked buffoonery, the "vicious" assault upon someone getting paid for dressing up in a sausage costume by a ballplayer in Milwaukee, who was then dragged off in handcuffs, and manager Dusty Baker's slightly bizarre but basically harmless attempt at historical anthropology. Dusty is no ignorant racist, of course--for those who may not know, he's black; he's an experienced, respected, and successful manager who previously had a fine career as a player.
Check out this chronological list of bizarre team-mascot incidents from CNN-SI. It's a gas.
The films of the Great Sausage Beating and the arrest of the player were shown on Spanish TV, along with other shots of beanball brawls and those two disgraceful incidents when some morons charged the field and assaulted a first-base coach and an ump, as signs that American culture is degenerating into a downward spiral of violence.
Oh, please. Remember Heysel? Or Sheffield? Or Glasgow? Or the time the FC Barcelona hooligans, the Boixos Nois, stabbed a French fan of crosstown rival Espanyol to death? Or when some Atletico Madrid thugs stabbed a Real Sociedad fan to death while shouting "Let's get those fucking Basques!" Or, just this season, the pig-head-throwing antics of the so-called Barca "fans", or when the crowd in Seville mobbed and beat a security guard? Total killings in American sports due to fan violence: zero, as far as I know, over the last fifty years, outside Detroit anyway. Those people are nuts.
Most Representative Sports Hero of a City: New York, Lou Gehrig. San Francisco, Joe Montana. Chicago, Michael Jordan. Detroit: Ty Cobb. Cobb was so racist he used to fly into rages at the very sight of a black person. Somebody called him "nigger-lover" once from the stands and he charged the bleachers and beat the loudmouth half to death. Players in those days wore shoes with sharpened metal spikes, and Cobb "spiked" the other team's players at every opportunity. He also fixed at least one game while he was a manager.
By the way, they're having the world swimming championships here in Barcelona. The American team has been booed by the crowd at almost every event. Fine. If that's the way they want it, that's the way they can have it.
On an upbeat note, how about those Kansas City Royals? They were supposed to stink this year. Who figured Michael Tucker or Angel Berroa or Jose Lima, of all people, would be having good years? I can't believe they're seven games up in the AL Central at the All-Star break. In a nice bit of inclusiveness, this year's slogan is bilingual: "We believe -- nosotros creemos". Several notable Royals--Beltran, Ibanez, Febles, Hernandez, Lima, Berroa--are Hispanic, as is manager Tony Pena.
The pathetic Barca can't get anybody signed. They've backed down and are going to have to pay Patrick Kluivert's huge contract, variously reported as €6m-8m a year. Kluivert is not a bad player, but he is not a superstar and he is making superstar money. Man U is going to beat out Barca in the race for Paris St-Germain's Ronaldinho, since their offer is €10m higher than Barca's. Joan Laporta, Barca president, said, "We've made our offer. They can take it or leave it". Wanna bet PSG leave it? They've signed Marquez, the Mexican center defenseman from Monaco, which does address a need, and he's still pretty young, so it's a good signing. They also want to add Valencia's center defenseman Ayala, who is Argentinian. He's a real thug. They've signed Rustu, the Turkish goalie. That means that three of Barca's four spaces available for "extracommunity" player are taken. That leaves Saviola, Riquelme, and Rochemback; two of them have to go. They're trying to send Rochemback off on loan to Sporting Lisbon, and they're desperate to dump Riquelme. They are whining that Rustu should be considered a "community" player on some specious grounds--wait a minute, didn't we all believe that we should keep Turkey out of the EU just a few months ago? Now it's to the Barca's benefit for Rustu to be considered a community player, so what do they do but make another wild claim that the UEFA will laugh about for five minutes and then circular-file.
Jose Bove's sheeplike followers interrupted the Tour de France yesterday in order to protest Bove's imprisonment for vandalism. The funny thing is that Bove is identified in the news stories as a "French farmer." He's about as much a farmer as Subcomandante Marcos. Bove is a middle-class city boy with hardcore lefty-green beliefs who "went back to the land" a few years ago and started agitating. If he can be labeled as anything, it would be "professional activist".
Check out this chronological list of bizarre team-mascot incidents from CNN-SI. It's a gas.
The films of the Great Sausage Beating and the arrest of the player were shown on Spanish TV, along with other shots of beanball brawls and those two disgraceful incidents when some morons charged the field and assaulted a first-base coach and an ump, as signs that American culture is degenerating into a downward spiral of violence.
Oh, please. Remember Heysel? Or Sheffield? Or Glasgow? Or the time the FC Barcelona hooligans, the Boixos Nois, stabbed a French fan of crosstown rival Espanyol to death? Or when some Atletico Madrid thugs stabbed a Real Sociedad fan to death while shouting "Let's get those fucking Basques!" Or, just this season, the pig-head-throwing antics of the so-called Barca "fans", or when the crowd in Seville mobbed and beat a security guard? Total killings in American sports due to fan violence: zero, as far as I know, over the last fifty years, outside Detroit anyway. Those people are nuts.
Most Representative Sports Hero of a City: New York, Lou Gehrig. San Francisco, Joe Montana. Chicago, Michael Jordan. Detroit: Ty Cobb. Cobb was so racist he used to fly into rages at the very sight of a black person. Somebody called him "nigger-lover" once from the stands and he charged the bleachers and beat the loudmouth half to death. Players in those days wore shoes with sharpened metal spikes, and Cobb "spiked" the other team's players at every opportunity. He also fixed at least one game while he was a manager.
By the way, they're having the world swimming championships here in Barcelona. The American team has been booed by the crowd at almost every event. Fine. If that's the way they want it, that's the way they can have it.
On an upbeat note, how about those Kansas City Royals? They were supposed to stink this year. Who figured Michael Tucker or Angel Berroa or Jose Lima, of all people, would be having good years? I can't believe they're seven games up in the AL Central at the All-Star break. In a nice bit of inclusiveness, this year's slogan is bilingual: "We believe -- nosotros creemos". Several notable Royals--Beltran, Ibanez, Febles, Hernandez, Lima, Berroa--are Hispanic, as is manager Tony Pena.
The pathetic Barca can't get anybody signed. They've backed down and are going to have to pay Patrick Kluivert's huge contract, variously reported as €6m-8m a year. Kluivert is not a bad player, but he is not a superstar and he is making superstar money. Man U is going to beat out Barca in the race for Paris St-Germain's Ronaldinho, since their offer is €10m higher than Barca's. Joan Laporta, Barca president, said, "We've made our offer. They can take it or leave it". Wanna bet PSG leave it? They've signed Marquez, the Mexican center defenseman from Monaco, which does address a need, and he's still pretty young, so it's a good signing. They also want to add Valencia's center defenseman Ayala, who is Argentinian. He's a real thug. They've signed Rustu, the Turkish goalie. That means that three of Barca's four spaces available for "extracommunity" player are taken. That leaves Saviola, Riquelme, and Rochemback; two of them have to go. They're trying to send Rochemback off on loan to Sporting Lisbon, and they're desperate to dump Riquelme. They are whining that Rustu should be considered a "community" player on some specious grounds--wait a minute, didn't we all believe that we should keep Turkey out of the EU just a few months ago? Now it's to the Barca's benefit for Rustu to be considered a community player, so what do they do but make another wild claim that the UEFA will laugh about for five minutes and then circular-file.
Jose Bove's sheeplike followers interrupted the Tour de France yesterday in order to protest Bove's imprisonment for vandalism. The funny thing is that Bove is identified in the news stories as a "French farmer." He's about as much a farmer as Subcomandante Marcos. Bove is a middle-class city boy with hardcore lefty-green beliefs who "went back to the land" a few years ago and started agitating. If he can be labeled as anything, it would be "professional activist".
You know, the beauty of the Internet is that it's unregulated. It's freedom of expression taken to the max. People in Iraq and Iran and such places can use the Net to let the rest of us know what's going on in their countries--Salam Pax and all the Persian bloggers are an example. Intelligent people like engineer Steven den Beste and law professor Glenn Reynolds and musician Dr. Frank and businessperson-diplomat Jane Galt and Christian Jesus Gil and atheist Laurence Simon, who wouldn't have been published in the old days (circa 1998) because they're just a little offbeat for the big media, publish themselves and are a wonderful addition and complement to what we thought the news was just five years ago. Us dummies, like me and most of the rest of us, get to spout off about whatever's on our little minds, and we are comforted by the fact that at least somebody is listening to what we have to say. I love the Internet and I love the blogosphere.
But the problem with freedom is when it gets abused. As readers of this blog do not know, there was an extremely dumb serious blogfight last month involving (at least tangentially) heavy hitters Treacher, Blair, Olsen, Harris, and Slade. We just found out about it ourselves and thought we'd do a little research. If you check out this thread of comments from when the issue was hot, you will see some obvious lying and paranoia going on, and, what shocked me, death threats.
Now, there are various legal restrictions on the freedom of expression. False advertising is illegal, as is any form of fraud involving false promises. You can't write or say malicious lies about someone; that's called libel or slander. You can't lie under oath; that's called perjury. In many democratic countries Nazi propaganda and other racist material is illegal. Here in democratic Spain apology for terrorism is illegal. In the democratic US "hate speech" or "racial intimidation" is considered an aggravating factor to a crime. In democratic Japan and Canada pornography is tightly restricted. In some democratic places, like Belgium and Catalonia and Quebec, the choice of whichever language is used in certain situations is regulated by law. You can't shout "Fire" in a crowded theater, and you can't incite a riot, and you can't discuss a plan to break the laws--that's called conspiracy. In the United States you may not advocate the armed overthrow of the government. And you can't make threats, especially not threats involving violence; if there's no violence involved, it's called blackmail, and if violence is involved, it's assault. (If you carry out the threat, it's assault and battery.) You are also not allowed to encourage people to make threats or to break any other laws; remember the movie The Accused, based on a real Massachussetts case, where those who verbally encouraged a group of gang-rapists were convicted and imprisoned. Same goes for assault and blackmail, of course.
You will notice that several of the posters in the thread I linked to made threats, some involving assault and others merely involving blackmail, and that other posters encouraged them to continue to do so.
That is not acceptable behavior. In fact, it's against the law.
And it's the kind of bullshit that is going to get us all regulated if we don't keep our free expression within the grounds of legal behavior. Hey, I mix it up and I insult people and I'm irritatingly outspoken, but I don't think I've ever broken any laws on this blog. Please correct me if I am wrong about this (breaking laws, that is, not shooting off my mouth) and I will immediately change my behavior. But I think I'm well within my rights and within the law, and this here blog is full of not only my free expression but also of the commenters'.
And I like it that way, and I don't want the government breathing down my neck (or getting my Internet provider breathing down my neck, which is more likely) about what I say. I think I am responsible enough to use my freedom of speech without anybody's supervision.
And I think the above-linked thread of comments demonstrates that some other people are not so responsible.
But the problem with freedom is when it gets abused. As readers of this blog do not know, there was an extremely dumb serious blogfight last month involving (at least tangentially) heavy hitters Treacher, Blair, Olsen, Harris, and Slade. We just found out about it ourselves and thought we'd do a little research. If you check out this thread of comments from when the issue was hot, you will see some obvious lying and paranoia going on, and, what shocked me, death threats.
Now, there are various legal restrictions on the freedom of expression. False advertising is illegal, as is any form of fraud involving false promises. You can't write or say malicious lies about someone; that's called libel or slander. You can't lie under oath; that's called perjury. In many democratic countries Nazi propaganda and other racist material is illegal. Here in democratic Spain apology for terrorism is illegal. In the democratic US "hate speech" or "racial intimidation" is considered an aggravating factor to a crime. In democratic Japan and Canada pornography is tightly restricted. In some democratic places, like Belgium and Catalonia and Quebec, the choice of whichever language is used in certain situations is regulated by law. You can't shout "Fire" in a crowded theater, and you can't incite a riot, and you can't discuss a plan to break the laws--that's called conspiracy. In the United States you may not advocate the armed overthrow of the government. And you can't make threats, especially not threats involving violence; if there's no violence involved, it's called blackmail, and if violence is involved, it's assault. (If you carry out the threat, it's assault and battery.) You are also not allowed to encourage people to make threats or to break any other laws; remember the movie The Accused, based on a real Massachussetts case, where those who verbally encouraged a group of gang-rapists were convicted and imprisoned. Same goes for assault and blackmail, of course.
You will notice that several of the posters in the thread I linked to made threats, some involving assault and others merely involving blackmail, and that other posters encouraged them to continue to do so.
That is not acceptable behavior. In fact, it's against the law.
And it's the kind of bullshit that is going to get us all regulated if we don't keep our free expression within the grounds of legal behavior. Hey, I mix it up and I insult people and I'm irritatingly outspoken, but I don't think I've ever broken any laws on this blog. Please correct me if I am wrong about this (breaking laws, that is, not shooting off my mouth) and I will immediately change my behavior. But I think I'm well within my rights and within the law, and this here blog is full of not only my free expression but also of the commenters'.
And I like it that way, and I don't want the government breathing down my neck (or getting my Internet provider breathing down my neck, which is more likely) about what I say. I think I am responsible enough to use my freedom of speech without anybody's supervision.
And I think the above-linked thread of comments demonstrates that some other people are not so responsible.
William Safire has a piece republished in Front Page on a rather unpleasant side of Harry Truman. As Safire correctly sees, though, Truman managed to divorce his anti-Semitic and anti-black personal feelings from what he decided was the right thing to do--for example, integrating the Army and recognizing the statehood of Israel. You might call him a reformed segregationist, something like George Wallace when he was governor of Alabama in the late seventies and early eighties.
I always believed Wallace really had a change of heart and I think that the assassination attempt that left him incontinent in a wheelchair had a lot to do with it. I think Truman had some kind of change of heart, too, though as an old man in the Sixties he did not approve of the civil rights movement. Even if Truman never changed his ideas at heart about Jews and blacks, he was wise enough to overcome said ideas for the good of the country.
I always believed Wallace really had a change of heart and I think that the assassination attempt that left him incontinent in a wheelchair had a lot to do with it. I think Truman had some kind of change of heart, too, though as an old man in the Sixties he did not approve of the civil rights movement. Even if Truman never changed his ideas at heart about Jews and blacks, he was wise enough to overcome said ideas for the good of the country.
Well, here at Iberian Notes we took a short summer vacation; not a hell of a lot happened while we were gone anyway. Our old pals the Jedman from KC and Joan and Shannon from Oakland showed up last week. Jed decided it would be a good idea to show up and surprise me. I was pretty surprised but happy to see them after the initial shock wore off. We farted around here in Barcelona and took them to the beach in Tossa del Mar and to Remei's village, Vallfogona. In general we had a party-ass good time; I put them on the train to Madrid this morning. It's always great to see your old friends again, and real friends wear well. They might get faded or get paint dripped on them or pop a fly button but they're still the same comfortable pair of jeans. So, naturally, while they were here, blogging took a back seat.
The big story today in all the papers was Joseba Beloki's horrific crash yesterday in the Tour de France. Beloki was going too fast downhill into a left hairpin turn with Lance Armstrong only a couple of lengths behind him. Beloki hit the brakes hard and skidded on the burning-hot pavement; his rear tire blew out and he wiped out spectacularly. Armstrong couldn't go either to the right or straight ahead, so his instant reaction was to swerve left off the road, out of control, and across a wheatfield. Miraculously, he wound up on the road on the other side of the hairpin turn and kept going; he holds the lead in the general by like 22 seconds or something. Beloki broke his wrist, broke his elbow badly--the bone was showing--and broke his femur and pelvis. The TV cameras focused right in on him screaming in pain like a wounded animal. It was not pretty. There goes the Great European Hope to dethrone Armstrong. Beloki had finished, I believe, second once and third twice in previous Tours, and he was one of the five or ten best cyclists in the world before the accident. Now the question is whether he's ever going to come back and if he does, whether he'll ever be the same. If Armstrong wins this Tour, giving him five straight and tying Miguel Indurain's record, prepare for an avalanche of articles saying that it doesn't count because Beloki would have beaten him. No matter what, we wish Joseba Beloki a speedy recovery. He's universally known as a good guy and a fine competitor. And he just might have beaten Armstrong, but sports, like life, is partially a roll of the dice, and Beloki, sadly, sevened out.
Two evil ETA dirtbags got busted this morning in Navarra. They planted a bomb in a Pamplona hotel timed to coincide with the end of the San Fermin festival; it didn't go off. They are suspected of killing two policemen earlier this year in the town of Sanguesa. Both are veterans of the "kale borroka", the street thugs aligned with the ETA who torch buses and bomb bank branches and beat up anyone they feel is insufficiently Basque. Try 'em and if they're guilty, hang 'em.
Jacques Chiraq bragged that he "has always maintained a relationship of cooperation with, not submission to, Washington." We have decided that we believe in being typical Americans. Therefore, we must arrogantly insult France. Here goes, Jacques. You don't cooperate worth shit, and you will submit when we decide you are going to. Over and out.
Lula da Silva is demonstrating that he is a fairly reasonable leader of Brazil; at least he's clinically sane, unlike Castro and Chavez. He is, however, up to his neck in trouble. The Brazilian pension system is leaking badly. Public workers, some 800,000 of them, retire at age 53 if they are men and 48 if they are women; they receive pensions that are actually higher than what they earned while they were working, and they are allowed to double-dip, continuing to work for the State and collecting both their salary and their retirement pension. Some 20,000 are currently doing so. The system is running a $35 billion (with a b) a year deficit. Lula has, of course, proposed a reform and, of course, he's run up against the unions and the bureaucracy. Meanwhile, he's had to jack the interest rate up to 26% to control inflation, which has slowed the economy--they're in mild recession, minus 0.1% in the first quarter of 2003, and unemployment's running 13 percent while consumer confidence is crashing. Brazil's on the Road to Nowhere at the corner of Desolation Row, and let's all just hope they don't take that hard left turn onto the Highway to Hell. I see Lula as at best Jimmy Carter and at worst Alan Garcia. But he's not crazy, which is a relief.
The Turks' investigation says that the Ukranian plane carrying 62 Spanish soldiers home from peacekeeping duty in Afghanistan, which went down between Trebizond and Ankara killing everyone aboard, crashed due to pilot error, not due to mechanical failure. I still wouldn't fly in any plane called a Yakovlev 42. The usual idiots are claiming some kind of conspiracy.
Zap said that the globalization of the economy allows many decisions to escape democratic political control. (Like, say, what you want to invest your own money in, for example.) Somehow he managed to give the example of the Socialist crackup in the Madrid regional parliament as evidence. Zap also says, get this, that the Madrid mess is a reflection of the struggles within the PP over the succession to Aznar--rather than being the corrupt, divided, and incompetent Socialists' own damn fault. I cannot believe that anyone can take this guy seriously--he is the man who was elected Socialist leader by the skin of his teeth due to the votes of the very Balbas-Tamayo-Saez faction within the Party that just went off the reservation. He is the man who is just about to get tossed over the side by his own party because of his own utter incompetence. Even Vanguardia reporter Jose Maria Brunet criticized Zapatero's lack of continuity in his speech. I will be very surprised if Zap is still running the party at Christmas.
I read somewhere that somebody said, "The thing about people who call George W. Bush stupid is that none of them are as intelligent as George W. Bush." Zap, though, really is stupid. He might get elected to the city council in Overland Park, Kansas, if we somehow had a city-wide epidemic of salmonella poisoning and the latest Asian flu on election day that kept everyone who had graduated from high school home. That's about how far he'd get in American politics, not because of his leftist ideas, because he doesn't have any ideas, but because any sentient human being can tell he's a moron. Jose Bono, who is a real politician, is going to toss Zap's ass onto the Almunia-Borrell scrap heap just as soon as PSOEmonkey Rafa Simancas gets trashed in the upcoming re-vote in the Madrid region.
Zap's also going off on how he wants the Anti-Corruption prosecutors to investigate the PP in order to "guarantee the correct functioning of democracy". Of course, Zap's party is the one that produced Interior Minister Jose Barrionuevo, Deputy Interior Minister Rafael Vera, Bank of Spain president Mariano Rubio, Guardia Civil commander Luis Roldan, and Basque Socialist Party president Ricardo Garcia Damborenea, all of whom went to jail, like Socialist-connected financiers Mario Conde and Javier de la Rosa. For, uh, corruption. And / or running a death squad.
Socialist candidate for Catalan prime minister Pasqual Maragall collected more than $300,000 at a dinner with important business folk last night. Among those present were representatives of Freixenet, La Caixa, Caixa Catalunya, Gas Natural, La Seda, Almirall, Aguas de Barcelona, Borges, Casa Tarradellas, and Damm. The construction sector was especially well-represented by the bosses of Llave de Oro, Colonial, Amrey, Vertix, Habitat, and FCC. Now, the very same Socialists are claiming that the mess in Madrid was caused by evil conservative property developers and construction companies in the pay of Aznar and the PP. Oh, hell, you figure out the irony yourself.
It's hot. It's dry. There are lots of forest fires. Fortunately we had a wet spring or the fires would be a lot worse. So far no really serious damage has been done. Knock on, uh, wood. Maybe it'll rain in the next couple of days.
400 black Africans have showed up in the town of Alcarras, near Lerida, looking for work as fruit pickers. Unfortunately, the locals have decided they much prefer to hire white Christians from Poland or Romania or Bosnia. These people seem to not have a whole lot of trouble getting papers. The growers like to hire them on in their home countries and bring them here to Catalonia. So the Africans are camped out outside of town with nowhere to go and the local city government is telling them to go away. These guys, by the way, don't do crimes. They're here to work and they're straight-up. Both African and Eastern European immigrants are largely trouble-free except for the organized criminals from like Albania, who normally do not seek work as fruit pickers. Meanwhile, two more boat people drowned off Tarifa. Ho hum.
The big story today in all the papers was Joseba Beloki's horrific crash yesterday in the Tour de France. Beloki was going too fast downhill into a left hairpin turn with Lance Armstrong only a couple of lengths behind him. Beloki hit the brakes hard and skidded on the burning-hot pavement; his rear tire blew out and he wiped out spectacularly. Armstrong couldn't go either to the right or straight ahead, so his instant reaction was to swerve left off the road, out of control, and across a wheatfield. Miraculously, he wound up on the road on the other side of the hairpin turn and kept going; he holds the lead in the general by like 22 seconds or something. Beloki broke his wrist, broke his elbow badly--the bone was showing--and broke his femur and pelvis. The TV cameras focused right in on him screaming in pain like a wounded animal. It was not pretty. There goes the Great European Hope to dethrone Armstrong. Beloki had finished, I believe, second once and third twice in previous Tours, and he was one of the five or ten best cyclists in the world before the accident. Now the question is whether he's ever going to come back and if he does, whether he'll ever be the same. If Armstrong wins this Tour, giving him five straight and tying Miguel Indurain's record, prepare for an avalanche of articles saying that it doesn't count because Beloki would have beaten him. No matter what, we wish Joseba Beloki a speedy recovery. He's universally known as a good guy and a fine competitor. And he just might have beaten Armstrong, but sports, like life, is partially a roll of the dice, and Beloki, sadly, sevened out.
Two evil ETA dirtbags got busted this morning in Navarra. They planted a bomb in a Pamplona hotel timed to coincide with the end of the San Fermin festival; it didn't go off. They are suspected of killing two policemen earlier this year in the town of Sanguesa. Both are veterans of the "kale borroka", the street thugs aligned with the ETA who torch buses and bomb bank branches and beat up anyone they feel is insufficiently Basque. Try 'em and if they're guilty, hang 'em.
Jacques Chiraq bragged that he "has always maintained a relationship of cooperation with, not submission to, Washington." We have decided that we believe in being typical Americans. Therefore, we must arrogantly insult France. Here goes, Jacques. You don't cooperate worth shit, and you will submit when we decide you are going to. Over and out.
Lula da Silva is demonstrating that he is a fairly reasonable leader of Brazil; at least he's clinically sane, unlike Castro and Chavez. He is, however, up to his neck in trouble. The Brazilian pension system is leaking badly. Public workers, some 800,000 of them, retire at age 53 if they are men and 48 if they are women; they receive pensions that are actually higher than what they earned while they were working, and they are allowed to double-dip, continuing to work for the State and collecting both their salary and their retirement pension. Some 20,000 are currently doing so. The system is running a $35 billion (with a b) a year deficit. Lula has, of course, proposed a reform and, of course, he's run up against the unions and the bureaucracy. Meanwhile, he's had to jack the interest rate up to 26% to control inflation, which has slowed the economy--they're in mild recession, minus 0.1% in the first quarter of 2003, and unemployment's running 13 percent while consumer confidence is crashing. Brazil's on the Road to Nowhere at the corner of Desolation Row, and let's all just hope they don't take that hard left turn onto the Highway to Hell. I see Lula as at best Jimmy Carter and at worst Alan Garcia. But he's not crazy, which is a relief.
The Turks' investigation says that the Ukranian plane carrying 62 Spanish soldiers home from peacekeeping duty in Afghanistan, which went down between Trebizond and Ankara killing everyone aboard, crashed due to pilot error, not due to mechanical failure. I still wouldn't fly in any plane called a Yakovlev 42. The usual idiots are claiming some kind of conspiracy.
Zap said that the globalization of the economy allows many decisions to escape democratic political control. (Like, say, what you want to invest your own money in, for example.) Somehow he managed to give the example of the Socialist crackup in the Madrid regional parliament as evidence. Zap also says, get this, that the Madrid mess is a reflection of the struggles within the PP over the succession to Aznar--rather than being the corrupt, divided, and incompetent Socialists' own damn fault. I cannot believe that anyone can take this guy seriously--he is the man who was elected Socialist leader by the skin of his teeth due to the votes of the very Balbas-Tamayo-Saez faction within the Party that just went off the reservation. He is the man who is just about to get tossed over the side by his own party because of his own utter incompetence. Even Vanguardia reporter Jose Maria Brunet criticized Zapatero's lack of continuity in his speech. I will be very surprised if Zap is still running the party at Christmas.
I read somewhere that somebody said, "The thing about people who call George W. Bush stupid is that none of them are as intelligent as George W. Bush." Zap, though, really is stupid. He might get elected to the city council in Overland Park, Kansas, if we somehow had a city-wide epidemic of salmonella poisoning and the latest Asian flu on election day that kept everyone who had graduated from high school home. That's about how far he'd get in American politics, not because of his leftist ideas, because he doesn't have any ideas, but because any sentient human being can tell he's a moron. Jose Bono, who is a real politician, is going to toss Zap's ass onto the Almunia-Borrell scrap heap just as soon as PSOEmonkey Rafa Simancas gets trashed in the upcoming re-vote in the Madrid region.
Zap's also going off on how he wants the Anti-Corruption prosecutors to investigate the PP in order to "guarantee the correct functioning of democracy". Of course, Zap's party is the one that produced Interior Minister Jose Barrionuevo, Deputy Interior Minister Rafael Vera, Bank of Spain president Mariano Rubio, Guardia Civil commander Luis Roldan, and Basque Socialist Party president Ricardo Garcia Damborenea, all of whom went to jail, like Socialist-connected financiers Mario Conde and Javier de la Rosa. For, uh, corruption. And / or running a death squad.
Socialist candidate for Catalan prime minister Pasqual Maragall collected more than $300,000 at a dinner with important business folk last night. Among those present were representatives of Freixenet, La Caixa, Caixa Catalunya, Gas Natural, La Seda, Almirall, Aguas de Barcelona, Borges, Casa Tarradellas, and Damm. The construction sector was especially well-represented by the bosses of Llave de Oro, Colonial, Amrey, Vertix, Habitat, and FCC. Now, the very same Socialists are claiming that the mess in Madrid was caused by evil conservative property developers and construction companies in the pay of Aznar and the PP. Oh, hell, you figure out the irony yourself.
It's hot. It's dry. There are lots of forest fires. Fortunately we had a wet spring or the fires would be a lot worse. So far no really serious damage has been done. Knock on, uh, wood. Maybe it'll rain in the next couple of days.
400 black Africans have showed up in the town of Alcarras, near Lerida, looking for work as fruit pickers. Unfortunately, the locals have decided they much prefer to hire white Christians from Poland or Romania or Bosnia. These people seem to not have a whole lot of trouble getting papers. The growers like to hire them on in their home countries and bring them here to Catalonia. So the Africans are camped out outside of town with nowhere to go and the local city government is telling them to go away. These guys, by the way, don't do crimes. They're here to work and they're straight-up. Both African and Eastern European immigrants are largely trouble-free except for the organized criminals from like Albania, who normally do not seek work as fruit pickers. Meanwhile, two more boat people drowned off Tarifa. Ho hum.
Tuesday, July 08, 2003
Hey, here's some news. Akaky has set up a real blog called Passing Parade and it's damn good. Check it out. I love his subtitle: "Cheap Shots from a Drive-By Mind".
David Horowitz blasts Ann Coulter for demonizing Dems! Friends, this is news. Horowitz also runs through the history of American anti-Communism. His perspective is that Joe McCarthy's irresponsibility and recklessness did a great deal of damage to the anti-Communist cause, because there really was a very serious threat caused by Communist infiltration of the US government. The threat was more or less already cleaned up by the Truman Administration before McCarthy got started in 1950. Here's Andrew Sullivan on the same subject.
Sullivan also links to the story of Michael Savage's totally deserved firing for gay-bashing on the radio. It's a perfectly legitimate political position to oppose gay marriage or gays in the military or whatever. It is a completely different thing when one wishes for gays "to get AIDS and die". I wouldn't have someone who thought or talked like that on my radio station.
I do not much like Ann Coulter. I have chuckled more than once at her outrageous rhetoric, but she is not a responsible commentator and is not to be taken seriously. Pas d'ennemis a droite, my ass. If we can tone down Coulter and get rid of Savage, like we did with Morton Downey Jr., the conservative movement will get a lot more respect in centrist circles. and the centrists are who we need to convince if we want to grow. There's very little room to the respectable right of the Republican Party, but plenty of room to grow in the direction of the center. And if the Democrats manage to make a circus out of this primary campaign, which I'll bet you euros to croissants they manage to do, lots of those middle-of-the-road folks are going to look at the Republicans and say, "All right, here's your chance. These Democrats are losers, you can't count on them. So show me why I should think about voting Republican."
Well, I think there are already plenty of good answers for that, which I won't go into, but Ann Coulter and Michael Savage totally turn off the centrists. Of course they have a right to free speech, but can't we toss a blanket over 'em and muffle them somewhat?
PS--I don't think Coulter is all that good-looking. Attractive compared to most normal people, of course, maybe a 7 or an 8 on a 10 scale, but we're not talking supermodel here.
Here's another one from Front Page. This isn't a particularly good book review, but it does make a point that I have written about before and that I still believe. I think you can judge a person on how he treats animals. I don't mean you have to just wuv kittycats and puppydogs, I mean that a decent person has to oppose any unnecessary cruelty and suffering that animals are put through. Like, I know, people eat meat and so animals must be killed. But let's do it as humanely and painlessly as possible, at least.
One kind of unnecessary suffering a pet animal might go through is owner neglect and carelessness. Does anybody really believe that Bill Clinton gave a crap about the poor old PR dog, Buddy, that he got himself when the Monica situation was beginning to heat up? Well, not long after Bill became ex-president, Buddy got hit by a car. Bill was shocked and saddened, of course. I guarantee you Bill got sick of him and turned him loose in traffic. He's that kind of self-absorbed son-of-a-drunken slut.
Sullivan also links to the story of Michael Savage's totally deserved firing for gay-bashing on the radio. It's a perfectly legitimate political position to oppose gay marriage or gays in the military or whatever. It is a completely different thing when one wishes for gays "to get AIDS and die". I wouldn't have someone who thought or talked like that on my radio station.
I do not much like Ann Coulter. I have chuckled more than once at her outrageous rhetoric, but she is not a responsible commentator and is not to be taken seriously. Pas d'ennemis a droite, my ass. If we can tone down Coulter and get rid of Savage, like we did with Morton Downey Jr., the conservative movement will get a lot more respect in centrist circles. and the centrists are who we need to convince if we want to grow. There's very little room to the respectable right of the Republican Party, but plenty of room to grow in the direction of the center. And if the Democrats manage to make a circus out of this primary campaign, which I'll bet you euros to croissants they manage to do, lots of those middle-of-the-road folks are going to look at the Republicans and say, "All right, here's your chance. These Democrats are losers, you can't count on them. So show me why I should think about voting Republican."
Well, I think there are already plenty of good answers for that, which I won't go into, but Ann Coulter and Michael Savage totally turn off the centrists. Of course they have a right to free speech, but can't we toss a blanket over 'em and muffle them somewhat?
PS--I don't think Coulter is all that good-looking. Attractive compared to most normal people, of course, maybe a 7 or an 8 on a 10 scale, but we're not talking supermodel here.
Here's another one from Front Page. This isn't a particularly good book review, but it does make a point that I have written about before and that I still believe. I think you can judge a person on how he treats animals. I don't mean you have to just wuv kittycats and puppydogs, I mean that a decent person has to oppose any unnecessary cruelty and suffering that animals are put through. Like, I know, people eat meat and so animals must be killed. But let's do it as humanely and painlessly as possible, at least.
One kind of unnecessary suffering a pet animal might go through is owner neglect and carelessness. Does anybody really believe that Bill Clinton gave a crap about the poor old PR dog, Buddy, that he got himself when the Monica situation was beginning to heat up? Well, not long after Bill became ex-president, Buddy got hit by a car. Bill was shocked and saddened, of course. I guarantee you Bill got sick of him and turned him loose in traffic. He's that kind of self-absorbed son-of-a-drunken slut.
Monday, July 07, 2003
One of the things I enjoy about July in Spain is, surprisingly, the TV--yeah, I know I just spent several paragraphs crapping all over Spanish television. But in July every day they show the footage from the daily running of the bulls during San Fermin (los sanfermines) in Pamplona. That's part of the afternoon news every day. Then, after the news, the Tour de France is on TV2. Watching bicycle racing, for me, is strangely relaxing, though I know that the Tour is considered to be the most grueling of official sporting events this side of the Ironman Triathlon. (By the way, Lance Armstrong started out as a triathlete.)
San Fermin started today with the very first running of the bulls. Nobody was seriously injured; scrapes and bruises were about as bad as it got.
We DO NOT recommend running before the bulls. It seems like a good way to get yourself hurt doing something stupid and macho. But lots of people from around the world come to San Fermin in order to do just that, so here are a few hints.
1) Watch them do it at least once before you try it.
2) Do not try to run drunk.
3) Get some locals to tell you what to do--wear a red beret, carry a rolled-up newspaper, etc.
4) Be able to run a hundred meters or so pretty damn fast. None of you two-pack-a-day smokers ought to try this.
5) Consider lying about it instead of doing it.
There are, by the way, encierros (bull-runnings) in other places in northern Spain, especially in Navarra, at about this time. You can look 'em up yourself--try googling "encierros Spain" or the like. You won't believe this, but somewhere in southern Catalonia near Tortosa they had a "running of the ostriches", since ostriches are now farmed in these parts. The poor things were chased around by the local street urchins and all their feathers were pulled out. They actually have mini-encierros for kids with little tiny bulls with their horns covered in sponge.
Then, after lunch, it's time for the Tour. Lance Armstrong is the heavy favorite again, and I don't see any reason he might lose unless he takes a bad fall. Lance is one of the best-known athletes in the US, with something like a seventy-percent name recognition rating. But absolutely nobody in the United States watches bicycle racing. I don't think the Tour is available at all on American TV, despite the about nine different sports channels that must be aching to fill up time.
Every single Old European out there is rooting for Lance to get smoked, since he's won their big prize for the last four years in a row. A bunch of assholes spent half of last Tour yelling "Dop-PAY" (doped, on drugs) at him. Of course, Lance has passed every doping test he's ever taken, unlike, say, all the Italians, or Jan Ullrich, the last guy before Armstrong to win the Tour, or like that Lithuanian guy who came in second last year whose wife got busted trying to cross an international frontier carrying not only his dope but the rest of the team's.
It is sheer heresy for an American to run away with such a hallowed Old European competition as the Tour. They just can't stand it. He must be cheating somehow. Uh, what if he's the fittest rider with the best team? Lance's team is awesome, featuring his two favorite sidekicks, Americans George Hincapie and Floyd Landis, and two of Spain's best riders, Roberto Heras and Jose Luis Rubiera. Also keep an eye out for fellow-American former Armstrong sidekicks Tyler Hamilton and Levi Leipheimer, who are now heading up their own teams and who are threats to place in the top ten. Imagine a one-two-three American sweep; it's within the range of possibility, though extremely unlikely, of course.
Now, if we only knew why the US Postal Service is sponsoring Lance's team. I guess they're trying to compete with UPS and Federal Express and the like.
San Fermin started today with the very first running of the bulls. Nobody was seriously injured; scrapes and bruises were about as bad as it got.
We DO NOT recommend running before the bulls. It seems like a good way to get yourself hurt doing something stupid and macho. But lots of people from around the world come to San Fermin in order to do just that, so here are a few hints.
1) Watch them do it at least once before you try it.
2) Do not try to run drunk.
3) Get some locals to tell you what to do--wear a red beret, carry a rolled-up newspaper, etc.
4) Be able to run a hundred meters or so pretty damn fast. None of you two-pack-a-day smokers ought to try this.
5) Consider lying about it instead of doing it.
There are, by the way, encierros (bull-runnings) in other places in northern Spain, especially in Navarra, at about this time. You can look 'em up yourself--try googling "encierros Spain" or the like. You won't believe this, but somewhere in southern Catalonia near Tortosa they had a "running of the ostriches", since ostriches are now farmed in these parts. The poor things were chased around by the local street urchins and all their feathers were pulled out. They actually have mini-encierros for kids with little tiny bulls with their horns covered in sponge.
Then, after lunch, it's time for the Tour. Lance Armstrong is the heavy favorite again, and I don't see any reason he might lose unless he takes a bad fall. Lance is one of the best-known athletes in the US, with something like a seventy-percent name recognition rating. But absolutely nobody in the United States watches bicycle racing. I don't think the Tour is available at all on American TV, despite the about nine different sports channels that must be aching to fill up time.
Every single Old European out there is rooting for Lance to get smoked, since he's won their big prize for the last four years in a row. A bunch of assholes spent half of last Tour yelling "Dop-PAY" (doped, on drugs) at him. Of course, Lance has passed every doping test he's ever taken, unlike, say, all the Italians, or Jan Ullrich, the last guy before Armstrong to win the Tour, or like that Lithuanian guy who came in second last year whose wife got busted trying to cross an international frontier carrying not only his dope but the rest of the team's.
It is sheer heresy for an American to run away with such a hallowed Old European competition as the Tour. They just can't stand it. He must be cheating somehow. Uh, what if he's the fittest rider with the best team? Lance's team is awesome, featuring his two favorite sidekicks, Americans George Hincapie and Floyd Landis, and two of Spain's best riders, Roberto Heras and Jose Luis Rubiera. Also keep an eye out for fellow-American former Armstrong sidekicks Tyler Hamilton and Levi Leipheimer, who are now heading up their own teams and who are threats to place in the top ten. Imagine a one-two-three American sweep; it's within the range of possibility, though extremely unlikely, of course.
Now, if we only knew why the US Postal Service is sponsoring Lance's team. I guess they're trying to compete with UPS and Federal Express and the like.
A quick roundup of the news here in Mudville. They've got a shell (from a gun, not the beach) that they can connect to the guy who confessed to being the Madrid "Playing Card" killer. I still haven't seen any articles linking this guy, who shot six people dead and wounded a couple of others over the space of a month and a half, to the Americanization of Spanish society. If you wait for it, it will come.
Yola Berrocal, a professional prostitute who sometimes strips in the Barcelona imitation version of American girlie bars, has been on a TV program called "Hotel Glam", a Survivor / Big Brother-like atrocity that was later rehashed every night on "Cronicas Marcianas", Javier Sarda's trash-TV vehicle which I got to be on once. The twist was that the contestants were all people on the fringe of celebrity society, sort of like Spanish Sally Kirklands or something. One of them was the notorious semi-celebrity asshole Pocholo, old Generalisimo Franco's grandson, who apparently said all kinds of awful things about Yola on these two really sickening TV programs.
Get this. During the time of the Iraq war, Pocholo was apparently slagging off Yola big-time on Hotel Glam and then later on Sarda's program. Yola is accusing Prime Minister Aznar of being behind Pocholo's verbal aggression toward her, because he wanted to divert people's attention from the war.
I once came across a first-person my-experiences travel story on Salon in the late Nineties by a young American guy who'd gone out big-time partying in Madrid. Seems he latched onto a crowd of Madrid pijos and they all wound up at Pocholo's house. Drugs were being passed around freely, the guy noted, and Pocholo was a lousy pool player but thought he was hot shit.
American TV is awful. British and Japanese TV are worse than American TV. But Spanish TV is a grade Z ripoff of all three of them. At any one time they have two or three of these people-living-on-a-desert-island programs going, not to mention Sarda's nightly recap of the whole thing. Something like a quarter of all Spaniards follow these televised atrocities. Then there are the "Noche de fiesta"-type variety shows, a format as dead in the United States as Ed Sullivan, in which sixty-seven year-old chanteuses who are on their seventh facelift show up, lipsynch their way through a bad disco number, and do an interview with the gushing, airheaded hosts about their latest husbands from Cuba and babies adopted from China. Or vice versa. Whatever.
Yola Berrocal, a professional prostitute who sometimes strips in the Barcelona imitation version of American girlie bars, has been on a TV program called "Hotel Glam", a Survivor / Big Brother-like atrocity that was later rehashed every night on "Cronicas Marcianas", Javier Sarda's trash-TV vehicle which I got to be on once. The twist was that the contestants were all people on the fringe of celebrity society, sort of like Spanish Sally Kirklands or something. One of them was the notorious semi-celebrity asshole Pocholo, old Generalisimo Franco's grandson, who apparently said all kinds of awful things about Yola on these two really sickening TV programs.
Get this. During the time of the Iraq war, Pocholo was apparently slagging off Yola big-time on Hotel Glam and then later on Sarda's program. Yola is accusing Prime Minister Aznar of being behind Pocholo's verbal aggression toward her, because he wanted to divert people's attention from the war.
I once came across a first-person my-experiences travel story on Salon in the late Nineties by a young American guy who'd gone out big-time partying in Madrid. Seems he latched onto a crowd of Madrid pijos and they all wound up at Pocholo's house. Drugs were being passed around freely, the guy noted, and Pocholo was a lousy pool player but thought he was hot shit.
American TV is awful. British and Japanese TV are worse than American TV. But Spanish TV is a grade Z ripoff of all three of them. At any one time they have two or three of these people-living-on-a-desert-island programs going, not to mention Sarda's nightly recap of the whole thing. Something like a quarter of all Spaniards follow these televised atrocities. Then there are the "Noche de fiesta"-type variety shows, a format as dead in the United States as Ed Sullivan, in which sixty-seven year-old chanteuses who are on their seventh facelift show up, lipsynch their way through a bad disco number, and do an interview with the gushing, airheaded hosts about their latest husbands from Cuba and babies adopted from China. Or vice versa. Whatever.
You know, I suppose, that both the Washington Times and UPI are owned by Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, better known as the Moonies.
I hate the Moonies. I hate cults in general. About all I am willing to say in favor of the Moonies is that at least they're not one of those cults that gets all its members to commit suicide. And that's damning with faint praise.
This is why I take everything I see in the Washington Times with at least several grains of salt, occasionally approaching a half-pound or so. However, when the WT prints a story based on facts and interviews--this article on Bush's record regarding Africa seems to be a thoroughly professional reporting job--I'm willing to judge the piece on its merits, and this one is pretty good.
If I were a professional reporter I would not work for the Washington Times. I cannot help but think that the reason some legitimate people choose to report for the WT is that it's one of the very few papers that is openly conservative; there are simply not that many options open for conservative journalists. The Times's staff claim that "Reverend" Moon is not involved in choosing the contents of the paper. I dunno. I'd be a lot happier with the Times if if were run by somebody respectable instead of a cult leader.
I hate the Moonies. I hate cults in general. About all I am willing to say in favor of the Moonies is that at least they're not one of those cults that gets all its members to commit suicide. And that's damning with faint praise.
This is why I take everything I see in the Washington Times with at least several grains of salt, occasionally approaching a half-pound or so. However, when the WT prints a story based on facts and interviews--this article on Bush's record regarding Africa seems to be a thoroughly professional reporting job--I'm willing to judge the piece on its merits, and this one is pretty good.
If I were a professional reporter I would not work for the Washington Times. I cannot help but think that the reason some legitimate people choose to report for the WT is that it's one of the very few papers that is openly conservative; there are simply not that many options open for conservative journalists. The Times's staff claim that "Reverend" Moon is not involved in choosing the contents of the paper. I dunno. I'd be a lot happier with the Times if if were run by somebody respectable instead of a cult leader.
Saturday, July 05, 2003
Friday, July 04, 2003
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.
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.
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.)
Thursday, July 03, 2003
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.
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.
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.
Wednesday, July 02, 2003
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.
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.
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