The Seven Dwarves go to church and all sit down in the back pew. They're all nudging and winking at one another and whispering to Dopey, "Ask the priest, ask the priest." The priest, slightly irritated, says, "Now, please, you're interrupting the service. If you have any questions, ask me, and I will be happy to answer, and then we will return to prayer." So Dopey stands up and says, "Father, are there any midget nuns in the Church?"

The priest, mystified, says, "No, my son, there are no midget nuns. Now, let's return to our service."

After a few seconds, though, the nudging and winking and "Ask him again, ask him again" begins, and the priest is now really irritated. He stops and says, "Now, this is the last interruption I will tolerate. If you have any questions, please ask, and then please be silent." So Dopey stands up again and asked, "Father, are you sure there aren't any midget nuns in the Church?"

The priest is exasperated. He shouts, "NO! There never have been and there never will be any midget nuns in the Church! Now sit down and shut up!"

Sudden, total silence. Then six of the Seven Dwarves look at one another, nod conspiratorially, and break into a chant:

"Do-pey screwed a pen-guin! Do-pey screwed a pen-guin!"

The Relative Cultural Power of Languages

My Economist Pocket Handbook has a list of the top 27 countries in book sales, from the year 1999, in millions of dollars. For rough purposes, let's assume that the money spent on books in a language is equivalent to the real cultural importance and strength of said language. We'll also assume, unless stated otherwise, that all book sales in a country are in that country's language. I know this is very quick and dirty but I think the figures mean something.

Book Sales, 1999, millions of dollars

1. English $34,138m (US 26876, UK 4611, 80% Canada 1193, Australia 1165, South Africa 383)

2. German $10,642m (Germany 9806, 70% Switzerland 450, Austria 387)

3. Japanese $9,913m

4. French $3,813m (France 2840, 50% Belgium 488, 20% Canada 296, 30% Switzerland 189)

5. Spanish $3,245m (80% Spain 1929, Argentina 702, Mexico 614)

6. Chinese $3,009m (China 2387, Taiwan 622)

7. Portuguese $2,856m (Brazil 2506, Portugal 350)

8. Italian $2,658m

9. Dutch $1,471m (Netherlands 983, 50% Belgium 488)

10. Korean $1,740m (obviously South only)

Other languages whose countries make the top 27: Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Polish, Danish, and Vietnamese, in order. Non-Spanish languages within Spain, figured at 20%, would be a very solid $482m in annual sales, in the same league as Polish or Danish. If a language can't beat Vietnamese at $339m in book sales per year, it ain't on the list, and if a country doesn't spend as much on books as Vietnam, it ain't on the list either. That means Russian, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and all the Indian-subcontinent languages don't make the cut.

Notice that the amount of book sales in dollars in English, which we are claiming here is at the very least correlated with the cultural strength and importance of English, is not much less than that of the following nine languages combined. Then ask yourself why not too many foreign novels are translated to English.

Per Capita Book Sales, 1999, in dollars

#2 Germany, $120
#3 US, $98
#7 Japan, $78
#7 (tie) UK, $78
#14 Spain, $61
#19 France, $47
#20 Italy, $46

Feel free to read anything you want into this.

The Month of the Cat continues apace here. In addition to our five beasts, we have George visiting for a couple of weeks and we're now officially in charge of taking care of Anna and Raul's--they're our downstairs neighbors--two kittycats while they're away on vacation. That's eight. This is certainly a cathouse we're running here.

Back when we had only four beasts, before we got Oscar, I named this apartment "Els Quatre Gats" after the famous Boho bar where Casas and Rusinyol and Picasso and the boys used to hang out. In Catalan (and in Spanish) "four cats" means "you and me and the lamppost"--that is, just a few unimportant folks. Only four cats, the avant-garde Boho art dudes, hung out there, which is one reason it closed down like a hundred years ago. There is now a bar called "Els Quatre Gats" located on the same street as the original bar, but in a different (though Modernista) building. To my knowledge there is no connection between the historic and the actual places but the name. The existent bar is a perfectly decent place, though rather touristy. Still, these folks are tourists who know who Picasso was and therefore deserve credit for having heard of and wanting to visit the namesake of the bar he designed the menu cover for, his famous first paid job. These people are not morons, and hanging out where they hang out is officially declared Non-Cheesy. Especially since it stays open late.

It is also officially declared Non-Cheesy to go to the Cafe Moka on the Ramblas, where barricaded government soldiers had a stand-off with Orwell's POUM militia, who were up on the roof of the Tabacos de Filipinas building across the street.

Franco Aleman sent me this bit of drool from the Commie intellectuals, the Enlightened and Illustrated Among Us. I'm not going to bother translating it but it's pretty easy to get the gist if you can figure out words like "imperio" and "dignidad" and "plutocracia". The only signers who I recognized are dumb-as-dirt old-lady actress Rosa Regas and Manu Chao's dad.

I like Andrew Sullivan and I like sociological analysis, so when the two get together it's well worth a read. Check out this piece on "bears", the regular-guy subset of gay men. I get along a lot better with this kind of down-to earth gay dude, of whom I've met several, than with the fussy fruity gays living up to the stereotype, who just drive me up the wall sometimes.

One disagreement with Sullivan--he says toward the end of the story that he thinks straights feel more comfortable around the flitty fairy type of gay or around cross-dressers because we know how to categorize them and so they're not a threat, and that bears are challenging precisely because they don't fit the stereotype.

I think a lot of us have graduated beyond that stage. Most of the people I know don't particularly care if you're gay and understand that gay people differ among themselves just as extensively as any other group, whether religious or ethnic or whatever. I, personally, and I think a lot of fairly clueless straight guys like me, feel much more comfortable around anybody, straight or gay, who isn't putting on an act. I just can't stand flirty silly girls, they're so obviously trying to be the center of attention, and I feel the same way about the Richard Simmons-like mincing frootloops. Drag queens make me particularly uncomfortable because they're so phony. I've met a couple, both Barcelona theater types. I mean, what do you talk about? "I think you really ought to try some much more subdued tones of makeup for the fall season. And eighty-six the mascara." Or, "So how exactly do you get into a panty girdle? Duct-tape your schlong to your butt or what?" Or, "I don't care what you're dressed like, I am not going to give you the ritual Spanish man-woman kiss on both cheeks." But I've got no problem with bears and with anybody else who isn't trying to make an impression at all costs. Bears aren't putting on a show, they're being themselves, and I think a lot of us straight people can appreciate that.

By the way, the article is from Salon and so you have to click through an ad before they'll let you in.

Here's some staggeringly important news for the London metro blogosphere: Remei and I will be in London between about September 8 and 14. We're staying with our friend Elisabeth, who lives west of town near the Ealing Broadway tube stop. If any of you folks would like to get together while we're there--you know, spend an evening in a pub or the like--just drop a note in the Comments section or e-mail us at crankyyanqui@yahoo.com.

I swear I'll dive over the balcony railing if I ever hear that damn song that goes, "Last night a DJ saved my life" again. I thought momentarily about writing a parody version, since I've got the damn song playing back in my head, and substituting "BJ" for "DJ", but I decided not to.

Thursday night Clark had a little party down by the beach, so I got to hang out with supermodels. Clark's girlfriend Clara and her Uruguayan friend Ana are advertising models, and are definitely much hotter than the average babe. We're talking nine on a ten scale here; they're both a lot better looking than Ann Coulter, for instance. there's just no comparison. Clara's little sister was there, too, visiting from Buenos Aires, and she's possible future supermodel material. No grass, however, on the infie--God, I can't believe I even thought about saying that. That's so gross. Forget I ever brought it up.

Chick goes into a tattoo parlor and says, "I love the Beatles. I want John Lennon's face tattooed on my left inner thigh, and Paul McCartney's face tattooed on my right inner thigh." So she strips off, the tat guy does the job, and when he's finished he shows the chick in a mirror, and she says, "That's terrible! They don't look anything like Lennon and McCartney. I'm not going to pay you for that." So the tat man says, "Look, I'll go outside and get the first person who walks by, and we'll show them the tattoos, and see what they think." The chick says OK, and the tattoo guy gets the first person walking by the shop. It's the town drunk. The tat man says, "Look, Mac, does the guy on the left look like John Lennon and does the guy on the right look like Paul McCartney?" The drunk tries to focus his bulging, yellowish-red, Pasqual Maragallish eyes and slurs, "I dunno about either of them two, but that dude in the middle looks just like Willie Nelson."

One awful thing about summer here, besides the stifling heat, is the "cancion del verano", the "song of the summer". Pop-music producers compete to see who can come out with the catchiest ditty that will take the country by storm. There's a different one every year. It's always hellaciously bad, and it's always a lowest-common-denominator disco-pop job calcualted to appeal most of all to fourteen-year-old girls. The most infamous recent examples are "Macarena" and "Asereje", but there are dozens of others from summers past that you will hear played by some goddamn pachanga gadinga-dinga band at every goddamn fiesta mayor in the whole goddamn country.

This summer, though, they've done a hell of a marketing job. I don't even remember what product it is, but the TV ads feature a bunch of goofy dudes and / or chicks, rather in the style of beer commercials, singing a silly new song that they have supposedly written in hopes of scoring the "cancion del verano". I believe there are three different ads with three different songs. Anyway, everybody loves the ads, and, guess what? Professional, polished versions of the silly songs have just been released. Get ready, world.

The other thing they have are disco record advertisements. They're all called "Ibiza Mix" or "Playa Mix" or "Cancun Mix" or whatever, and they feature what's called here "musica maquina", "machine music"--i.e. a repetitive pulsating drum-and-synth beat with a simple pop melody (often stolen from public-domain songs; I particularly remember an extremely obnoxious maquina version of "Camptown Races" from a couple of years ago) over the top. The canciones del verano only last three minutes. The goddamn disco-mix CDs last for what seems like hours when your neighbor's kid has one. The commercials are all the same, showing lots of silicone chicks in skimpy bikinis dancing around a swimming pool while some dork sprays them with a hose. Note the very obvious phallic symbol, so obvious that even fourteen-year-old boys get it.

Meanwhile, of course, good Spanish musicians get ignored. I mean, say, Juan Perro or Kiko Veneno may not be everyone's cup of tea, but you can't deny their talent.

There's a lovely scandal brewing down south. The real Jesus Gil, not our pal from Ibidem--which is off the air, I don't know why--but the crooked property developer, former owner of Atletico Madrid, and convicted felon, is the power behind the throne in Eurotrashy Marbella on the south coast near Malaga. His political party is the Grupo Independiente Liberal, GIL--get it? Gil himself has been banned from standing for office due to his enormously long rap sheet, but he runs things anyway, sort of like old Edwin Edwards used to in Louisiana. Anyway, get this, Gil's handpicked mayor, who is currently "enjoying an idyll" with, that is, shacking up with, diva singer Isabel Pantoja, who used to be married to the now-dead bullfighter Paquirri, has somehow pissed Gil off, probably by saying something like "Look, dude, it looks kind of bad if we approve more than ten of your nouveau-riche Mafia-aesthetic imitation-Vegas luxury-condo projects a year in this town". So Gil is trying to dump his own mayor and he's got the Socialist Party and the Andalucist Party backing him up. Imagine that George Steinbrenner put in his man, who was having an affair with Liza Minnelli, as mayor of Palm Springs, and then decided to force the guy out with the help of Ted Kennedy and Lyndon LaRouche. It's something like that.

The cops busted a safe house in Valencia where the ETA cell that set off the bombs in Alicante had been hiding out; the terrorists had left but a lot of their stuff was confiscated, including three kilos of dynamite. This cell will go down very soon, leaving only the cell operating in the North on active status. They won't last long, either. These guys are a bunch of poorly trained amateurs drafted from the youth movement. ETA is on the ropes. They just cannot commit crimes with impunity anymore. The government's strategy of not giving in, of not negotiating when there's nothing to negotiate about, and of using massive police pressure--just what the bleeding-heart Left, the "intellectuals and noted public figures", the Enlightened and Illustrated Among Us, repeated over and over would not work because it was "repressive"--is working.

Here's Andy Robinson in today's Vanguardia.

With a few exceptions, Americans--differently from Europeans--do not read foreign novels, a "dangerous" tendency in the world after September 11, according to editors and cultural critics in New York and Washington. But there are large discrepancies over whether the problem is one of supply or demand. The New York Times, in a recent story titled "America Yawns at Foreign Novels", depicts an American with a closed mentality, paradoxically more chauvinist because he believes that American multiculturalism includes all the diversity in the world.

Of the 100,000 books published in the US between 1999 and 2000, 11,500 of them novels, only about 300 of them are translated...The contrast between the US and Europe is important. All the important American novelists are translated to the principal European languages--which proves the caricature of the anti-American European to be false--and some, like Paul Auster, are more successful in France and Spain than in the US....Marketing experts reject many foreign novels because, as one said in the New York Times, "they are less action-oriented, they are more philosophical than we are used to".

Oh, Andy, Andy, Andy, where do we start?

1) Europeans are no more "cultured" nor "open" than Americans, whatever that means. The Great Unwashed in both continents is equally uninformed.

2) Are you saying that translated novels are not very popular in America because of our alleged fear of foreignness that appeared after September 11? So why are you using data from 1999-2000 to support your claim?

3) Remember, Andy, English is the language we use in America. That means that books from Britain, Australia, South Africa, Canada, Ireland, and also many from India, Pakistan, Africa, and the Arab world, which are written originally in English, ARE NOT TRANSLATED though they are "foreign" books.

4) English is by far the most creative language in the world, in the sense that it produces the most creative products, for lack of a better word, of whatever kind. The Summer Institute of Linguistics says that English has 322 million native speakers, of whom almost all are literate (they have the ability to read and write) and well-off enough to be consumers of culture, though that culture may be as lowbrow as pro wrestling, country music, and People magazine. I will be willing to bet that Japanese, with 125 million native speakers, is the second most creative language. German, with 96 million, would be third. French with 72 million would be fourth. Almost all these people are literate consumers of culture. Spanish has 332 million, but how many are both literate and well-off enough to consume cultural products? Half? Portuguese has 170 million; same thing. As for Mandarin Chinese with its 885 million, Bengali with 189 million, and Hindi with 182 million, while they are of course the languages of great cultures, not many of their speakers are literate cultural consumers.

But if we assume that the users of English, Japanese, German, and French are all equally culturally productive, then English produces more creative works per year than Japanese, French, and German combined, simply because of the number of speakers. And, if we consider the bell curve--that is, the more subjects under study, the longer the tails on each side will be--the peaks of English literature will tend to be higher than in other languages, because the competition for the status of "exceptional" is much greater.

5) I thought we'd all agreed that the New York Times was full of dog doo.

6) What do you expect a bunch of Manhattan literary types to say about their fellow Americans, anyway? That they're grateful we buy the stuff they put out and make them all rich? No, that we're a bunch of stupid midwestern oafs. There's nobody more anti-American than a snobby Manhattanite.

7) There's a great deal more cultural diversity in the United States than anywhere else in the world. The population of the US is about 11% immigrants. It's not chauvinistic to say so when you live on the same street with people from Colombia, Cuba, Poland, and India, as I did when I was a kid, or when you work with people from Nigeria, Vietnam, Ukraine, Iran, Korea, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Egypt, as I did when I worked at the university.

8) What do you mean the "caricature" of the anti-American European is false? The books the Europeans translate are the ones that will play over there. They publish some Paul Auster crap for the pseudo-intellectuals and lots and lots of John Grisham and Stephen King and Tom Clancy and Danielle Steel and other such sub-high school stuff for the Non-Illustrated and Enlightened. You won't find anything by any conservative American authors in any Spanish bookstore except maybe Saul Bellow. And you won't find any American non-fiction, almost 90% of the books published in the US, translated, except for Noam Chomsky's gibberish and Who Moved My Cheese.

9) Also, we just agreed that it makes demographic sense that a lot more books are translated from English than into English.

10) You can't win either way with Andy. If you publish 100,000 titles a year, does he say, "Gee, the Americans sure publish a lot of books. That means they must read a lot and be cultured people"? No, he looks for the black cloud within the silver lining every time. Seems that not enough of these 100,000 books are translated from other languages for Andy's liking, though surely a great number come from other countries and were written originally in English. Like, say, the Harry Potter books, which are very British--they're just an update of the old Billy Bunter school stories--and not American at all in their cultural environment. Yet they sell in isolated, ignorant America, only interested in American things.

Blogging has been light recently because there's not too much interesting news and because much of my free time has been spent on cat matters recently. You'll remember we found that kitten hiding in the engine of a parked car; we gave her away to a friend of a friend in Sant Feliu. It's a woman and her two kids; they're thrilled with their acquisition. Oscar has lower urinary tract problems that are pretty serious; we have to fill him full of antibiotics and vitamin C--that's to make his pee more acid, which will help dissolve the tiny stones in it. Twice a day we have to poke pills down his throat. He hates it and so do we, but if we don't do it he's going to be a dead little Osky and no one wants that to happen. At least he's doing a lot better than he was a week or so ago. Finally these English people we know, Lucas and Heather, have gone back up there for a couple of weeks, so we're taking care of their cat George, who is one of those huge placid males. So far he won't come out from under the bed in the guest room.

I promised to blog on Baghdad Bob Fisk, but I really don't feel like translating any of his crap. He basically says that the Iraqi Resistance is trying to drive out the hated imperialist Yankees. The various articles I linked to below make it pretty clear that Mr. Fisk is full of crap. Tikrit Tommy Alcoverro is off on some kick about Hamas and Hezbollah being social-welfare organizations (yeah, right, so were the Black Panthers) and about how the Baath Party supported social equality and the nationalization of the oil for the dignity of the Iraqi people and, get this, equal rights for women. The Baath Party also supports killing anybody Saddam Hussein wants to kill.

I find it interesting that Leftists, who are supposed to be at least sympathetic to the ideas of Karl Marx and other scientific socialists, tend to place a great deal of importance on the dignity and the honor of a people or a class. No matter how much evidence you have on how big a sonofabitch Fidel Castro is, for example, the leftist guy arguing against you will say that Fidel restored dignity to the Cuban people and that's more important than, say, the right not to be put in prison or shot at the whim of a dictator. Or the right to eat. Seems to me that appeals to national or class dignity and honor are about as irrational and unscientific as appeals can get.

Most of the news on TV these days is about a) how hot the weather is b) forest fires all over southern Europe c) Real Madrid's tour of China and FC Barcelona's tour of the US d) another domestic violence murder--the latest big one was a cop up the coast in Premia who cut his wife's throat and then chopped her up into little pieces. I'm sure somebody will top that today. Common Myth: Domestic violence does not know class. Fact: With a few horrifying and very well-publicized exceptions like the Premia cop, domestic violence correlates with low socioeconomic level and substance abuse e) what they call around here "Operacion Salida", the mass exit from the major Spanish cities with the beginning of the August vacations. Freeways are blocked up for hours, and it's the busiest few days of the year at the airports and train stations. For some reason most Spanish vacationers go to somewhere on the Valencia-Andalusia coast, when the north is so much prettier and more interesting and cooler. I guess the north is also more expensive. My favorite parts of Spain are Catalonia, northern Aragon and Navarra, the North Coast, and Castile-Leon--the whole upper third of the country. My least favorite parts are the southeast and south-central areas, Murcia and Castile-La Mancha and Almeria.

Beirut Bob Fisk is back in action; there have been a couple of articles by him in the Vangua over the last two days, and I'm going to wait for a couple more and then take him to task. But in case you have been hearing "quagmire" talk, which is all over the place here, check out this piece by Wall Street Journal honcho Robert Gigot.

Also check out this lovely shredding of Michael Moore from the City Journal. (Via Front Page.) And have a look at Mark Steyn's vicious slagging-off of the loony left British media, if you haven't already. (Via Andrew Sullivan.) Sullivan himself has a nice piece on why the Alliance is right and the off-slaggers are wrong.

You know, there's a lot to blog on, but none of it really strikes my fancy. The biggest news is that ETA is making a show of force this week; a large (30-kilo) car bomb went off in the parking lot at the Santander airport. The bomb threat was called in to the newspaper Gara; the airport terminal was evacuated and flights were rerouted. Fortunately there were no injuries.

Recently there have been ETA bombings in Benidorm, Alicante, Lizarra, and Pamplona, with no serious damage done. The cops think that the bombs in the north are the work of an established ETA cell in the Basque Country or Navarra. They haven't announced any leads on the Alicante bombings.

A pioece of big news last weekenc was the Rodney King-style beating of a Danish tourist in Calella, just up the coast, by a local cop. It was caught on video and boy, it doesn't look good. The victim was pretty good-sized and obviously a kid (he's 18), and he was hassling people around the swimming pool at his group's hotel, spraying them with a fire extinguisher. He certainly appeared to be drunk or on drugs. The hotel management called the cops.

So far so good. You've got a violent situation, you call the cops. That's the responsible thing to do. Anyway, the cops show up, three Catalan police and one local yokel.

Now, I've seen pro cops take care of drunks. At Luton Airport, of all places, there was this fortyish big working-class Brit, tattoos and a shell suit, the whole nine yards, and he was drunk off his ass. I guess he was part of a package tour to Torremolinos or something. The cops were attempting to reason with him--it seems that he'd been causing a disturbance in the terminal and they weren't going to let him get on the plane because intoxicated passengers are not allowed on board for obvious reasons. He must have said something the cops didn't like because all of a sudden they had him on the ground and then in handcuffs. It took them like five seconds, and then five seconds later they were dragging him off to wherever they take guys like that. Nobody got hurt in the slightest, not even the drunk. It was real professional police work.

That is not what happened in Calella, which is a notorious dive of a beach town catering to the very cheapest of package tours. It particularly appeals to Eastern Europeans, who can't afford to go anywhere nicer. If you go to Tossa or Platja d'Aro or Cadaques, you'll see signs in French and English and Dutch and German. If you go to Calella the signs are in Polish, Czech, and Russian. The townsfolk of Calella earn their living by serving large quantities of cheap alcohol to foreigners and then providing a place near the beach for them to sleep it off.

Now, this is one thing about Spain. Spanish people, in their own environment, are usually wonderful folks if you make the slightest effort to appreciate their country or region or city. However, these beach towns are not a Spanish environment, and the Spanish folks who work in beach towns tend to be pretty contemptuous of the tourists. Most of the tourists deserve a good deal of contempt in the beach towns, since they're just there to party till they puke. Imagine Spring Break at Cancun or Padre or Lauderdale. It's that kind of morons behaving like that, except they're Europeans instead of Yanks.

Therefore: Avoid crappy beach towns and other moron-tourist hellholes. Go to nice places, approximately ninety-seven percent of the country. In nice places you will be treated with appreciation if you're a nice person. In moron-tourist hellholes you will be treated like a moron-tourist. Like in Calella, for example.

So this Danish guy is acting like a first-class jerk out by the pool, anyway, and the cops decide they are going to remove him from the premises, which sounds like a great idea to me if they do it the way they did it in Luton Airport, and there were only two cops there and the Brit they took down looked pretty tough to me. Here out by the pool we've got four cops and one teenager. So, anyway, the local cop pulls out his billyclub and starts whacking the Dane over the head. He whacks him like twenty times, bang bang bang on the top of the head. The next thing we see is the Dane being dragged off, just like the Brit in Luton, except he's lying on a stretcher and they're taking him to the hospital with blood all over his head--he got worked over a lot harder than Rodney King did by the LAPD.

This has created a big stink in Denmark, especially since it turned out that the victim is schizophrenic. What happened, of course, is that the Calella cop said to himself, "Another drunk moron-tourist idiot. I'm sick of these guys," and just beat the crap out of the Dane. While that is perhaps understandable, it's not exactly professional behavior. It's also abuse of power.

Fidel Castro informed the European Union that he would refuse any aid from the EU. Good. Why were we ever giving him any in the first place? Fidel gets an awful lot of press over here, I suspect because Spain's emigration links are closer with Cuba, Venezuela, and Argentina than with other parts of Latin America that got less immigration from the Peninsula. Those three countries receive considerably more coverage than the rest of Latin America put together. Of course, they have been pretty newsworthy places lately, but it seems you never hear anything about Mexico or Peru.

They're all screaming for the Yanks to intervene in Liberia. Don't we have to get UN permission first? The Quai d'Orsay is floating the story that the Yanks want to move into West Africa to get the oil off Sao Tome and Principe, of all places. I hadn't heard anything about oil in Liberia. I remember the same chorus shouting that we were only after the oil in Iraq and Afghanistan and Somalia, for God's sake. Oh, well, Balto Porcel says we're trying to corner the market in water, so what we're probably going to do is seize the Niger River and charge the peasants to water their fields or something base and evil like that. We are sending in three thousand Nigerian troops, to whom we will provide logistical support.

Former Socialist minister Cristina Alberdi has come out firing from the lip, slamming Zap and Simancas and all the other PSOE doofwads for completely screwing up the political situation in the Madrid region and then trying to blame it on nonexistent PP corruption. She's calling for resignations. She also took a piece out of Pasqual Maragall, who came out with another goofy off-the-top-of-his-head-after-a-three-martini-lunch idea, something about restoring the Crown of Aragon. She said something about how Maragall should shut the hell up instead of making proposals that he hasn't run by anybody else in the party. The problem here is that Maragall has to appear independent of the Spanish Socialist Party in order to attract Catalan nationalist votes. In fact, he and the Catalan Socialist Party are not independent of Madrid. If Madrid decides that Maragall should shut up, he shuts up. You'll never hear another word about the Crown of Aragon from Sausage-Lips Pasqui.

Well, Lance Armstrong has won his fifth consecutive Tour de France, joining Miguel Indurain of Spain as one of the two men to accomplish said feat. Jan Ullrich of Germany was second and Alexandr Vinokourov of Kazakhstan was third. Today's stage was largely ceremonial, since it was held over a flat course; everybody can keep up with the peloton when the course is flat and the stage win goes to one of the several guys at the front who sprint the final couple hundred meters or so--but nobody gains any overall time on anybody else in the general, as opposed to stage, classification. Time is gained and lost on the mountain stages and the time trials.

Yesterday was the last competitive stage of the race, a time trial ending in Nantes. As soon as I saw the weather I said, "Looks good for Lance". It was cool, wet, and windy, just the kind of weather Armstrong likes and American cyclists often do well in. (It is said that Mediterranean riders don't like the bad weather, sort of like dome teams in American football.) Then I saw Jan Ullrich on this weird bike with the handlebars way low, more aerodynamic but harder to control and balance, and the announcers said that he'd never used this bike before in competition and I said "He's gonna crash". It was a nasty time trial and guys were crashing all over the place, including the stage winner, David Millar of Great Britain, who got up and just kept going. Ullrich left next to last and he was pushing the curves to the limit on the wet asphalt. Armstrong, knowing he had more than a minute to play with, didn't take risks. Ullrich couldn't gain any time on Lance, though, and two-thirds of the way through he did crash. Fortunately, he wasn't hurt, but that put the kibosh on his chances. Millar was first, Tyler Hamilton was second, and Lance was third. Great day for les anglosaxons.

The reaction of the Spanish commentators was perfectly reasonable; of course they were rooting for the Spanish riders, but they were fair to everyone else. It was clear that their sympathies were not with Armstrong, but that's understandable since it's much bigger news if someone beats the champ than if the champ wins another one.

Can Armstrong win next year? Who knows. He just proved he's still the best, but he won by only a minute this time, not by six or eight like he has in the past. However, there are no truly brilliant young stars coming up to take his place, though there are, of course, a lot of excellent riders. How about this: I wouldn't bet against him.

In other sports news, FC Barcelona plays Juventus tonight in Boston in a game that I will be boycotting due to Barca's hypocrisy in dissing America and then going there to make some big money--they'll receive $1.1 million for their American tour, $800,000 more than they got for playing against Qadafi's son's team. Watch out for flying pig heads.

Barcelona forward Patrick Kluivert had a few difficulties getting into the US. Seems he has a conviction for vehicular homicide and reckless driving in Holland. He was also acquitted once on rape charges. Anyway, Dutch people normally need just a passport to get into the States, but convicted felons need a special visa. Kluivert forgot this, which is kind of dumb of him because we already refused him entry once a couple of years ago. So he shows up at the airport, flies off to Boston, and they don't let him in because he doesn't have his visa. They sent him back to get the visa here and he'll be back in the States on Monday. Of course, he misses tonight's game.

The Volokh Conspiracy pays tribute to the source of our name:

On another note, I am a big fan of John Gunther's Inside USA, a tour guide of sorts, major edition published in 1947 but still fresh and vital. Explains what regional America is really about and why places like Duluth are important for our history. The tone won't appeal to highbrows, but this is the closest thing to a second Tocqueville we are likely to find. Plus it is ideal for bathroom reading, just bite off the small bits you are interested in, it is organized by state and region.

A correspondent, Dell Adams, writes: "More than the Tocqueville, I'd call him [Gunther] the Herodotus of his time. If you haven't read Inside Europe (published months before WW2) and Inside Asia (months before Pearl Harbor), by all means do so. Someone who can visit 30-40 countries, strange to him, within a year, and get THE story every time, is a journalist for the ages."

If only Gunther had had a blog. I like the South America book as well.

Front Page has a symposium on Ann Coulter's book, Treason, which is a valuable work in that it is forcing people to take another look at American anti-Communist policies during the late Forties and early Fifties and redebate the issue. The book has been criticized for being a whitewashing of Joe McCarthy and for being unduly harsh to the liberal Democrats of the time.

In Spain everybody knows what el maccartismo is, that evil time when sinister capitalist propaganda and the CIA drove all the Americans crazy so they would arrest all the freethinkers and dissidents and accuse them of being dirty no-good Commies because that's the way Wall Street wanted it. The word is used now in Spanish to refer to anything resembling a witch-hunt. Every few weeks our friend the Vangua refers to something as "the new McCarthyism". Interestingly enough, the term "McCarthyism" was coined by the Daily Worker.

We've got to get a few things straight here. Franklin Roosevelt's leftist New Deal movement (about which many good things can be said, of course) was made up mostly of honest liberals and Democrats, but there were a few pro-Soviet bad eggs in the omelet. During the 1930s nobody cared too much because, contrary to what some history books will tell you, it was the Nazis rather than the Commies we saw as the immediate threat. (Check any American book on international affairs published between about 1935 and 1941.) During World War II the Soviets were our allies and our espionage and security services were aimed at the Nazis and the Japanese, not the USSR. But once the Nazis were beaten--Japanese militarism is a system that is not going to be too popular anywhere outside Japan, we've got everybody's hearts and minds agreed on that case--the only threat left to the United States became the Soviet Union, clearly more powerful and dangerous than Nazi Germany had ever been. And the Soviet Union was expansionist. It expanded into Eastern Europe and it wanted to expand into Western Europe and it wouldn't have minded in the least expanding into America.

By about 1947 it was pretty clear, due to several defections and the Venona transcripts (this information was of course not made public at the time) that we had a bad problem with Soviet agents, literally hundreds of spies, within the federal government, especially at State and Treasury. President Truman became convinced of the Communist threat and purged Communists from Federal jobs in 1948. The House Un-American Activities Committee, meanwhile, was purging Hollywood, and the famous Hollywood Ten went to jail in 1947, while other folk like Lillian Hellman and Pete Seeger lied their way out of trouble. The Communist Party USA leadership was convicted under the Smith Act and sent up the river. Alger Hiss was convicted of espionage.

Truman got himself reelected in 1948 despite the defection of his predecessor as Vice-President, Henry Wallace, to the Communist-influenced Progressive Party; the Progressives got only a million votes from the most extreme New Deal leftists and failed to carry any states. In 1950 the Rosenberg espionage ring was broken up. Meanwhile, overseas, Truman sent aid to Turkey and Greece under the Truman Doctrine, which committed us to stopping Communism from expanding. NATO was established. We fought the Communist invasion of Korea.

Then Joe McCarthy appeared on the political scene.

Joe'd been elected back in forty-six and needed to get reelected in fifty-two, if I have the dates right. He didn't do much until he jumped on the anti-communist train in 1950. By then almost all the real action needed to clean Soviet spies and agents out of the government and out of the Hollywood "propaganda department" had been taken. So Joe blew hard and made up a bunch of stuff and accused almost nobody specifically by name--except Truman, Dean Acheson, and George Marshall, the Democratic foreign-policy leadership, all liberal Democrats and all strongly anti-communist, like Hubert Humphrey and Walter Reuther and Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson. Joe, a Republican, was accusing the ANTI-COMMUNIST Democratic leadership, which had taken very strong measures against communism, including that of sending American troops into battle, of being "soft on Communism".

This was unadulterated bullshit and the whole country knew it. Maybe you didn't think Harry Truman was worth much--a lot of people didn't--and maybe you couldn't stand Acheson for being snobby and talking with that damn phony English accent, and maybe you thought Marshall was a cold son of a bitch, which he was, but these men were not traitors. McCarthy was widely hated. It didn't help that he was ugly and was drunk most of the time and was obviously a nasty person. When Truman left the Presidency in 1953, Republican Ike squashed McCarthy--let him hang himself and then came down on his neck with a guillotine, just in case one was needed. And nothing more was heard from him except when the Senate publicly censured him. Then he drank himself to death.

The Truman Administration's error was to deny that there had ever been a problem with Soviet infiltration rather than to say, "Well, there were some Russian spies but we caught 'em".

Note: Richard Nixon, who was a leading member of HUAC, had nothing whatsoever to do with Joe McCarthy. Nixon was a representative from southern California and McCarthy was a senator from Wisconsin. Nixon was a Quaker. McCarthy was an Irish Catholic. Nixon was cold, aloof and calculating. McCarthy was a "one of the boys" back-slapper. Nixon was highly intelligent, with intellectual interests; McCarthy was as dumb as, well, most guys whose brains have been dissolved by a quart of whiskey a day since age twelve. Think Shane McGowan. McCarthy was a caveman; Nixon was a rather liberal Republican, and never an isolationist. Nixon was a professional politician, not a loud-mouthed demagogue. He knew better than to get involved with that irresponsible lout McCarthy. And Nixon had made his name years before McCarthy came along.

About the only thing the two had in common was that they were both poor boys who wanted to make it big in politics.

I recommend you read the whole thing; I think the admission by well-known Dem and Friend Of Hillary Susan Estrich that

The Anti-Joe camp suffers from the American Liberal Left's pathological inability to admit that it was wrong about most, if not all, of the big issues during the first 10 to 20 years of the Cold War. For example, it is now established, as a matter of historical record, that the Rosenbergs were spies; that Hiss was a member of the Communist underground and engaged in espionage; that Stalinist Russia had designs on Western Europe and anything else the Comintern thought it could get its hands on; and that the Soviets deliberately infiltrated, and attempted to manipulate, both Hollywood and the American civil rights movement.

These are the facts. The truth is that all of the old shibboleths of the American Left -- "Hiss was framed by Nixon!"; "The Rosenbergs were framed by Hoover!"; "Stalin was Papa Joe!" -- just weren't true. The Commies were out to get us, whether the American Liberal Left wants to admit it or not. To this end, there were secret Reds in the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations -- whether the American Liberal Left wants to admit it or not.

This is the first time I have read an American Liberal Leftist like Ms. Estrich admit that not only was the Left tremendously wrong about something of critical importance, but that the American Left of that time, 1945-50 or so, was strongly under Communist influence.

Here's Emory University historian Harvey Klehr:

While I deplore McCarthy and his tactics, I agree with those who note that his influence had been exaggerated all out of proportion. There was no reign of terror in the United States during the 1950s. Several thousand people lost their jobs--some unjustly or unfairly--and a few hundred went to prison for brief periods of time--including some who probably should not have been prosecuted. Two--Julius and Ethel Rosenberg--were executed for conspiracy to commit espionage, although Ethel should not have been subjected to that punishment. Compared to the violations of civil liberties during previous American wars--and remember that we were fighting both a Cold War with Russia and a hot war in Korea when McCarthy rose to prominence--this hardly justifies the fevered and breathless suggestions that Americans were living in a state of sweat-drenched fear and that it took real courage to challenge the ogre from Wisconsin.

Here's historian John Earl Haynes from the Library of Congress.

I think it is important to add that, by the time, 1950, that Joseph McCarthy became a national figure in the debate about domestic communism the American public, the government, and both major political parties, were already well awakened to both the domestic and foreign Communist threat. McCarthy appeared years after Truman's order setting up a loyalty program to remove Communists and security risks from government service, after the announcement of the "Truman Doctrine" that implemented America's Cold War containment strategy against Soviet aggression, after the Marshall Plan to save Western Europe from economic collapse and Communist takeover, after the CIO expelled Communists from their power base in some trade unions, and after the Popular Front liberal allies of the Communists had withdrawn from the Democratic Party and embarked on their disastrous Progressive Party venture.

The new young liberal stars of the Democratic Party were men such as Hubert Humphrey who had risen to the leadership of the Democratic party in Minnesota (Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party to use its exact title) by defeating the Popular Front liberals and their secret Communist allies who had seized control of the Minnesota party in 1946. And among Republicans, Richard Nixon's work on the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1948 on the Hiss-Chambers case contributed greatly to arousing public opinion in regard to the seriousness of Soviet espionage. Nixon's activities both preceded that of McCarthy and were far more responsible.

You guys might check out CavBlog by Eugenio for a whole bunch of good commentary. The Baseball Crank, besides providing lots of excellent and enlightened baseball thought (how many of the rest of you has Bill James influenced? James, as an advocate of clear thinking, has been as influential on me as anyone else. Yeah, he's using his talents on something comparatively insignificant like baseball, but he's using baseball debates--who was better, Mantle or Mays?--to show us how to approach a question, frame its possible answers, and choose among them) has a lot of other good stuff about politics and law and the like. He was also nice enough to link to us, so check him out. I also linked to Aaron's Baseball Blog, which is another terrific source of info from a Jamesian perspective. If only Aaron weren't a Twins fan. I hate the Twins. Anyway, he's still young and I've got the idea he'll be a real sportswriter in the future. He's only twenty, still in college, hasn't yet gotten his minor-league contract with the Ottumwa Warthog or the Sioux Falls Hookworm ("All the News Here in Sioux; Published Bimonthly"), but he'll go high in the draft within a couple of years and you've gotta figure he'll peak between ages 24 and 30. The rumor is he's prone to carpal-tunnel syndrome, though...Rob and Rany on the Royals is by far the best team blog out there; its two authors are real writers, Rob Neyer with ESPN and Rany with the Topeka Capital-Journal. Now, the CJ is one of those papers you subscribe to for the coupons and the comics, but it is a paid job writing, which is more than I've got. Also, Rany's a doctor when he's not a baseball columnist, so I get the idea the CJ gig is something he does more for fun than anything else. Rob--well, I won't call him an idiotarian politically, but let's just say we disagree a lot about everything. He sure does know his baseball, though, and he's not a bad writer at all.

The Basque Nationalist Party's frontman, Juan Jose Ibarretxe, has got himself a plan to reform the Basque statute of autonomy. Every single newspaper in Spain except maybe Avui and Egunkaria is just plain appalled--not only ABC, El Mundo, and La Razon but also La Vangua, El Periodico, and El Pais. Aznar called the plan "crazy" and "not viable" with "zero chance" of becoming reality; the Socialists and Communists are just as irritated.

Ibarretxe's plan would basically give complete independence to the Basque country, along with incorporating Navarra and the three Basque districts in France. Of course it ain't gonna happen. Most of the people in the Basque Country are against independence, and the Navarrese and French Basques are overwhelmingly against. So why do Ibarretxe and the Basque Nationalist Party boss, Xabier Arzalluz, keep banging on the drum with unrealistic proposals that can only come true in a dream world?

My guess is it's all they've got. What other reason is there to vote for the Basque nationalists, who remind me a lot of the far-out Christian Right in the United States--socially conservative, economically pro-redistribution, desirous of an intrusive State, fanatically nationalist, with a violent hardcore and youth fringe. This is about as dumb as a political movement can be. It's supported by people who want to turn back the clock on modernity because they don't like the changes that come with it, people who identify with the group rather than themselves as individuals, people who want to be able to depend on the State, people who only want to be around other people just like them.

Fortunately most Basques, like most Catalans, are not crazy. They understand that we live in a surprisingly libertarian and prosperous representative democracy with a Constitution and the rule of law. They know that people in Spain are generally happy, free citizens, and fairly well-off. Anyone who can count to eleven with his fly buttoned has to admit that things are better now in 2003 with Aznar as Prime Minister than they were in 1996 with Felipe as Prime Minister--just like anyone who knows his ass from a hole in the ground has to admit that things were better in 1996 with Felipe as PM than they were in 1982 when Calvo Sotelo was PM. And things in 1982 were immeasurably better than they'd been just ten years before under the Franco dictatorship.

It's obvious, at least to me, that the path toward an even better life for the citizens of Catalonia--and the Basque Country and Spain as a whole--is to stop wasting our energy on fruitless silly battles over whose flag ought to fly on the Manresa City Hall and get to work on innovation and research and improved technology--and good old production of your standard Catalan farm products and light industrial goods, development of the tourist market our economy is so dependent on, and continual development of the infrastructure, and an improvement of the educational system, which fortunately we're going to get now that Aznar has thrown away the goddamn "Reforma", and the maintenance of the welfare state, which may not be the smartest policy economically but which an overwhelming majority of Catalans want, so if we've got to have it--this is, after all, a democracy--we might as well manage it as effectively as we can.

What I'm saying isn't obvious to a lot of other people, though. Their minds are stuck in the 1850s and the Catalan Renaixement and the idea that any bunch of people with the same language have to have an independent state. Said idea of the nation-state first became widespread with the 1860s unification of Italy and the 1871 unification of Germany. If the Italians and the Germans are both a nation and a state, why not us too? They've been using the same argument for a hundred and fifty years. You can't appeal to fervent nationalists with reason--it will do no good reminding them that the late 1800s heyday of the nation-state, between the 1850s and 1914, largely contemporaneous with the reign of Queen Victoria, with its concurrent militarism, imperialism, xenophobia, centralization, regimentation, and conformity, is the source of both Communism and Fascism and both the First and Second World Wars. This is the twenty-first century and nation-statalism is a dead old doctrine, as rotten and decaying as phrenology, spiritualism, Esperanto, psychoanalysis, anarchosyndicalism, homeopathy, eugenics, the masturbation-blindness link, and other bits of nineteenth-century conventional wisdom.

Now, nationalism, under a truly repressive government, is an important psychological tool to use to organize a resistance. The Continental states in which nationalism grew up during the second half of the 19th century, the German, Austrian, Russian and Ottoman dominions, were pretty damn repressive. You can understand why a group of people would get angry at their treatment--say if you're a Pole in Germany or a Czech in Austria and you see not only yourself, but everybody who talks like you or goes to your church or lives in your town, discriminated against in favor of Germans or Austrians. I'd sure get angry. This ain't Germany, though, and this ain't 1871. Comparing the semi-dictatorial and quite repressive German Empire with today's democratic Spain, and comparing the current lot of Catalans and Basques to the lot of the Poles 100 years ago, is like comparing me and John Holm--uh, never mind.

Just a note. I'm not glibly dissing the Victorian Era. The advances made during that time in science, technology, the arts, medicine, human understanding, and the individual standard of living, were enormous. I am rather a fan of the Victorian Era in many ways. But I'm not real fond of some of the ideas, most notably nation-statalism and Socialism, that sprang up largely in Central Europe (but also in other places) during that time.

Here's the periodic State of the Blog address. We're looking at about 10,000 page views for July, which is about what we had in May and June. That's a lot more than we had at the beginning of the year, but it's down from our peak of about 15,000 a month for March and April. Not bad. I am assuming there's been a general fall of blog readership from the height of the Iraq War, since there's less news happening now. We've got about 60 inbound blogroll links, more than we've ever had; on N. Z. Bear's Blogosphere Ranking chart, we're now classified as "Marauding Marsupials". We'll never be "Higher Beings", but it's nice to at least have made the Mammalia class. Our major sources of readers from blogroll links are InstaPundit, by far, and Samizdata.

I'm not sure I've given the guys at Samizdata, the British libertarian blog, any props recently, but they deserve large quantities thereof. Samizdata was the first major blog to blogroll us, to link to our material, and to provide us with encouragement, all the way back in February 2002 when we were just getting started on the old Homestead site. Patrick Crozier, one of the Samizdata mob, was both the first person to send us positive e-mail and the guy who set up this Blogger website for us--we're so computer-illiterate that we wouldn't have been able to figure it out ever. In their honor, we've tried to be generous about adding links to our blogroll--we try to link every blog we come across that we like, and we especially try to blogroll good blogs that are just starting out. If you've got a blog and we haven't linked you, let us know and we'll probably do it.

Those two bastards are cold meat, to paraphrase Orwell. The air around here smells just a little better. I imagine that this American coup by a CIA-Delta Force hit squad will turn the tables against the doomsayers for the next week or so. It ought to shut up the Bush Lied Brigade for a while; that's just so early July. It also ought to do serious damage to the cause of the thuggish, murderous Baath-Saddam loyalists, the cause Tikrit Tommy Alcoverro and Rafael "I Interviewed Brian Epstein" Ramos have baptized the Iraqi Resistance.

Meanwhile, the unfortunate David Kelly suicide is becoming seen by many to be more his own and the BBC's fault than the British government's. Perceptions are changing. The BBC is going to take a tremendous hit over this, because they've been forced to admit that Kelly really was their source--and their only one. That is, they did not get double, independent corroboration of their story the way they're supposed to and the way Woodward and Bernstein did during Watergate. And Kelly lied under oath before Parliament. The BBC must have known his claim not to be the BBC's sole source was false. Yet they did not say so; they covered up the truth for at least 24 hours.

ETA struck today with two bombs in hotels, one in Alicante and the other in Benidorm. Both are popular Mediterranean vacation spots. A total of thirteen people were wounded; a German tourist is in a coma. Among the injured were five cops trying to localize one of the bombs. The Vanguardia is reporting that ETA is planning a campaign of small-time kidnappings, Latin American-style, looking for small but quickly paid ransoms of a few thousand euros. I am convinced that ETA is badly hurt and is about to collapse, despite its support on the street from radical youths. The recent bust of nine ETA members in Mexico didn't help them much; the arrested were part of ETA's financial apparatus. They cannot keep an active cell operating for more than a couple of weeks; the dirtbags who killed the two cops in Sanguesa were arrested only a few days after their crime. This cell will be quickly broken up, too.

In case you haven't seen it yet, Qusay and Oday look like they're well on their way to their 72 virgin sheep, goats, and donkeys in hell. American troops think they found them and shot them full of holes.

FC Barcelona's soccer team leaves on July 25 to play a series of exhibition games (that is, friendly matches) against, I believe, Manchester United, Juventus, and Milan, on the US East Coast. They'll be playing in Boston, New York, and I think Washington.

Now, we Americans are polite people. We don't boo at foreign athletes because of where they come from, unless we're Detroit hockey fans, and then we don't bother booing, we throw switchblades on the ice. Seriously, in Kansas we don't boo at any athletes ever unless it's college basketball, and then it's good-natured and considered part of the atmosphere. But, anyway, you may have noticed our mentioning a couple of times in this blog that here in Barcelona, the fans have booed and whistled (an insult in Spain) at the American competitors at the World Swimming Championships repeatedly. For no good reason. Just because they don't like Americans.

I have a suggestion. Consider the following facts:

1) FC Barcelona hired Serbian Milosevic-supporter Radomir Antic last season as the fill-in head coach.
2) FC Barcelona played an exhibition game in its own stadium against Libyan dictator Qaddafi's son's team in exchange for 300,000 euros.
3) FC Barcelona organized an anti-American demonstration (they called it anti-war) in their stadium, with their players appearing on the field wearing "FC Barcelona for peace" T-shirts.
4) Normal behavior for FC Barcelona fans consists of throwing whiskey bottles, mobile phones, and pig's heads at players they don't like.
5) The citizens of Barcelona held a demonstration of several hundred thousand people, supposedly against the war in Iraq but actually against the United States and Israel, judging by the public statement made at the culmination of the demonstration.
6) The citizens of Barcelona held a pot-banging demonstration in protest the night Baghdad fell to the US military.
7) Again, they're booing American swimmers just because they're American.

No, my suggestion is not that you boo the FC Barcelona players. My suggestion is that you BOYCOTT the games FC Barcelona plays. Why should you give FC Barcelona any of your money? Don't attend any matches they play, and don't watch them on TV, either.

They've told America loud and clear what they think of America and Americans, and they've shown by their actions that they mean it. It's time for Americans to stand up and show them what we think of them. We don't have to be rude. Just don't go to the games. If you already have tickets, tear them up. It's that simple.

If you agree with me, please e-mail this post to someone else, preferably any sportswriter you might know.

--John Chappell, www.iberiannotes.blogspot.com

Thanks to HispaLibertas for the link--check 'em out for some damn good classical-liberal commentary in Spanish. If'n y'all cain't read none of that thar fuzzy furriner talk, they do post lengthy quotations in English.

Check out Cinderella Bloggerfeller, the most erudite of bloggers, with lots of fascinating stuff up about languages and alphabets and Transcaucasia and stuff like that. Biased BBC is fighting the good fight and has plenty of info on the dust-up between the BBC and the Blair government. The OmbudsGod is ombudsing everything he can find to ombuds, so check him out. We'd like to know his feelings on Vanguardia ombudsidiot J. M. Casasus. Eamonn Fitzgerald has a brand-new piece on the Tour and a long appreciation of Cormac McCarthy. If you're not keeping up with Merde in France, it's your own fault. And Dark Blogules gleefully skewers idiotarians right and left, mostly left.