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".
Wednesday, July 16, 2003
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.
We translate a lot of piffling nonsense from the Vanguardia by the likes of Chemical Lali, Balto Porcel, and Remei Margarit, so we thought we'd be nice this time and translate an article by non-idiotarian Quim Monzo.
Another World Is Possible
Just over a week ago the French police arrested Jose Bove so that he could serve, once and for all, the ten-month sentence that was imposed on him for destroying a field of GM rice. Bove leaped to fame years before when he trashed a McDonalds and, as time went by, he became the most media-friendly antiglobalization of peasant farmers. When they found out that he had finally been thrown in the slammer, the Greens protested, and Bove's union called protests in favor of his release. In the media, it's said that next Monday, July 14, the French national holiday, President Chirac may use his privilege and award Bove a presidential pardon, thus whitewashing this particular problem.
Then, I found, surfing on the internet, www.liberaux.org, a petition regarding Bove, but this petition was not in favor of his release; rather, the exact opposite, that he should stay in jail. The text asks the reader to send an e-mail to Chirac with this suggested content: "Dear Mr. President, it has been said in the press that you may have the intention of announcing an amnesty for Jose Bove next July 14. If I may be so bold, I suggest that you not do this." The text continues with the justifications: that the justice system has already been too benevolent toward Bove for too long; that this benevolence is a result of his fame; that to pardon him would be to give in to those who, when the result of an election goes against them, respond with violence. Finally the text says, "I hope, Mr. President, that you will be responsive to these observations, and I beg you to accept my most humble salutations."
Usually, those who set up massive e-mail petitions are groups acting in defense of human rights and democracy, such as in the recent case of Ali Lmrabet. (Mr. Lmrabet is a Moroccan journalist who has been imprisoned by the King. There has been a movement on the Spanish Left in favor of his release. Some suspect the Spanish Left of not really giving a crap about Mr. Lmrabet's fate but of trying to distract attention from human rights abuses of journalists in Cuba. --JC) But frequently the motives are not so clear; rather, they are nebulous. The driving forces behind these actions are an amalgam between the "progres" and their sheep-like followers, those people whom Jordi Barbeta calls the Gullibility International. Well, now it turns out that it is the "others"--the supposed mortal enemies of the Gullibility International--who are proposing a massive e-mail petition that nobody should deny Bove (the guru of agrarian protection and the eternal subsidy) his well-deserved ten months' jail time. By the way, speaking of the eternal subsidy, there are a few fervid supporters of this creed among ourselves...
Creatively, the Gullibility International has become stagnant in its politically correct routine: blocking traffic, camping out, chanting "We Shall Not Be Moved", pot-banging, and then starting over again. In Gracia, as part of the annual fiesta, they are going to have a special exhibit: pots which were savagely banged during the populist ruckus of a few months ago. What a bunch of navel-gazers and self-satisfied prigs. Saccharine, mushy, humorless, and full of the tragic concept of life, the last thing they need now is for "the others" to move in and squat on the deserted ground which is the sense of humor they have abandoned.
Quim Monzo has caught the grim humorlessness of the Left. They're not funny anymore, at least not intentionally. Really, when you go back and look at lefty humor idols like Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks, the first thing you notice is they were never funny at all. Christopher Hitchens, OK, he's sometimes funny. He's also moved over to the Right. Name me any other funny leftists from the last twenty years.
Another World Is Possible
Just over a week ago the French police arrested Jose Bove so that he could serve, once and for all, the ten-month sentence that was imposed on him for destroying a field of GM rice. Bove leaped to fame years before when he trashed a McDonalds and, as time went by, he became the most media-friendly antiglobalization of peasant farmers. When they found out that he had finally been thrown in the slammer, the Greens protested, and Bove's union called protests in favor of his release. In the media, it's said that next Monday, July 14, the French national holiday, President Chirac may use his privilege and award Bove a presidential pardon, thus whitewashing this particular problem.
Then, I found, surfing on the internet, www.liberaux.org, a petition regarding Bove, but this petition was not in favor of his release; rather, the exact opposite, that he should stay in jail. The text asks the reader to send an e-mail to Chirac with this suggested content: "Dear Mr. President, it has been said in the press that you may have the intention of announcing an amnesty for Jose Bove next July 14. If I may be so bold, I suggest that you not do this." The text continues with the justifications: that the justice system has already been too benevolent toward Bove for too long; that this benevolence is a result of his fame; that to pardon him would be to give in to those who, when the result of an election goes against them, respond with violence. Finally the text says, "I hope, Mr. President, that you will be responsive to these observations, and I beg you to accept my most humble salutations."
Usually, those who set up massive e-mail petitions are groups acting in defense of human rights and democracy, such as in the recent case of Ali Lmrabet. (Mr. Lmrabet is a Moroccan journalist who has been imprisoned by the King. There has been a movement on the Spanish Left in favor of his release. Some suspect the Spanish Left of not really giving a crap about Mr. Lmrabet's fate but of trying to distract attention from human rights abuses of journalists in Cuba. --JC) But frequently the motives are not so clear; rather, they are nebulous. The driving forces behind these actions are an amalgam between the "progres" and their sheep-like followers, those people whom Jordi Barbeta calls the Gullibility International. Well, now it turns out that it is the "others"--the supposed mortal enemies of the Gullibility International--who are proposing a massive e-mail petition that nobody should deny Bove (the guru of agrarian protection and the eternal subsidy) his well-deserved ten months' jail time. By the way, speaking of the eternal subsidy, there are a few fervid supporters of this creed among ourselves...
Creatively, the Gullibility International has become stagnant in its politically correct routine: blocking traffic, camping out, chanting "We Shall Not Be Moved", pot-banging, and then starting over again. In Gracia, as part of the annual fiesta, they are going to have a special exhibit: pots which were savagely banged during the populist ruckus of a few months ago. What a bunch of navel-gazers and self-satisfied prigs. Saccharine, mushy, humorless, and full of the tragic concept of life, the last thing they need now is for "the others" to move in and squat on the deserted ground which is the sense of humor they have abandoned.
Quim Monzo has caught the grim humorlessness of the Left. They're not funny anymore, at least not intentionally. Really, when you go back and look at lefty humor idols like Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks, the first thing you notice is they were never funny at all. Christopher Hitchens, OK, he's sometimes funny. He's also moved over to the Right. Name me any other funny leftists from the last twenty years.
The Dissident Frogman is apparently under fire from a bunch of jerks because of his little photo essay on what he didn't see at the D-Day Memorial Museum in Bayeux, Normandy. (Guess what he didn't see there.) Check out his post on the subject and give him some support.
Check out this article from the BBC on the Liberian boat people sailing for the ivory Coast and Ghana as Liberia descends into anarchy. Meanwhile, this story from the Telegraph on the EU's lifting of their ban on genetically-modified foods shows that somebody in Europe is beginning to think sensibly about this very important subject. Here's an archive on GM foods from the New Scientist. Check out the story on improving cotton yields for poor black women farmers with AIDS in South Africa--I mean it, these are the people who directly benefit, and who the hell is against poor black women farmers with AIDS in South Africa? Jose Bove and the German Greens and the French ag lobby, that's who.
Tuesday, July 01, 2003
The hot news from Barcelona is that the Stones came last weekend and 60,000 morons paid way too much to see the World's Most Overpaid Rock and Roll Band at the Olympic Stadium up on Montjuic. Hey, the Stones were great before 1972 and good between Exile on Main Street (their most overrated, yet still pretty cool, album) and Tattoo You. After that they began to suck, and then they started to suck really bad, and now they blow donkey dongs. I can't believe more of 'em aren't dead from either the party rock-and-roll lifestyle--I mean, how could Mick Jagger possibly have avoided AIDS?--or old age.
Also, they had some sort of international Harley festival here last week. This was a total company promo job, and they didn't make any secret of it. They got some 5000-6000 Harley riders from around Europe--the wealthy weekend biker types, not the smelly greasy ones who take a lot of speed and yell "Show yer tits!" at fat girls and occasionally shoot people or at least fuck 'em up good with pool cues--to this Harley convention thing they put on. I guess it must have filled up the hotels and brought a lot of money into town, because they sure made a big deal out of it.
Murph says he heard that there was a major coincidence between the Harley convention and Gay Pride Day parades--a lot of the same folks showed up for both, it seems. Gay bikers? Only in Europe. Murph claims there's an overlap between the gay crowd and the biker crowd. I told him to go to San Berdoo and say that.
Anyway, though, they had a Harley Parade and blocked off all the streets downtown, and supposedly 100,000 people came out to see it. And hear it. Well, cool, lots of motorbikes for people who are into that. Fine. But do these people recognize that they have just provided enormous amounts of publicity for the Harley-Davidson company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA?
See, here's the thing. The Spaniards are wild about American popular culture. They're fascinated by really stereotypically American stuff like convertible '57 Chevys and roadside diners--every damn ad on TV seems like it takes place in an American roadside diner--and Levi's blue jeans and dead brands of cigs like Luckies and Chesterfields and Ray-Ban sunglasses and Zippo lighters and other props they've seen in movies.
It's interesting that so many of these images that Spaniards carry of America in their minds, and that they love so much, are commercial. Maybe that's why one of the most common impressions they carry of America is that it is consumerism-ridden.
Also, I noted that both of these events were very decaffeinated, very theme-park America. The Stones aren't rock and roll, at least anymore. I'll admit they used to try, but it was so obvious that they were always trying. The harsh fact is they're a bunch of middle-class English dilettantes, not guys who actually know how to play blues guitar with a bottleneck. I mean, Jerry Lee Lewis or Chuck Berry or James Brown or Hank Williams, those were real rock and roll lives.
As for the Harley parade, lovely, very nice, everyone had fun. But these guys had as much to do with real bikers as I have to do with Sonny Liston. Bikers are not fun. They are scary. They pack guns and deal drugs. They will beat the shit out of you if they feel like it. Remember when they kicked the shit out of Hunter S. Thompson? Good move, I'll have to admit, but I'm glad it wasn't me. These so-called bikers are so, well, European.
The following items are packed in their studded leather pillion bags:
1 1/2 liters of chilled Evian water bottled at the source
Sandwiches of Camembert and glacé mushroom paté
Various back issues of L'Uomo Vogue
The Michelin Guide to Spain's Finest B & Bs
A seven-inch dildo with spikes on the end
Extra Vuitton sunglasses
Hair gel
A crescent wrench with a studded-leather handle
Band-Aids
The Barcelonese just couldn't handle the real America.
Also, they had some sort of international Harley festival here last week. This was a total company promo job, and they didn't make any secret of it. They got some 5000-6000 Harley riders from around Europe--the wealthy weekend biker types, not the smelly greasy ones who take a lot of speed and yell "Show yer tits!" at fat girls and occasionally shoot people or at least fuck 'em up good with pool cues--to this Harley convention thing they put on. I guess it must have filled up the hotels and brought a lot of money into town, because they sure made a big deal out of it.
Murph says he heard that there was a major coincidence between the Harley convention and Gay Pride Day parades--a lot of the same folks showed up for both, it seems. Gay bikers? Only in Europe. Murph claims there's an overlap between the gay crowd and the biker crowd. I told him to go to San Berdoo and say that.
Anyway, though, they had a Harley Parade and blocked off all the streets downtown, and supposedly 100,000 people came out to see it. And hear it. Well, cool, lots of motorbikes for people who are into that. Fine. But do these people recognize that they have just provided enormous amounts of publicity for the Harley-Davidson company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA?
See, here's the thing. The Spaniards are wild about American popular culture. They're fascinated by really stereotypically American stuff like convertible '57 Chevys and roadside diners--every damn ad on TV seems like it takes place in an American roadside diner--and Levi's blue jeans and dead brands of cigs like Luckies and Chesterfields and Ray-Ban sunglasses and Zippo lighters and other props they've seen in movies.
It's interesting that so many of these images that Spaniards carry of America in their minds, and that they love so much, are commercial. Maybe that's why one of the most common impressions they carry of America is that it is consumerism-ridden.
Also, I noted that both of these events were very decaffeinated, very theme-park America. The Stones aren't rock and roll, at least anymore. I'll admit they used to try, but it was so obvious that they were always trying. The harsh fact is they're a bunch of middle-class English dilettantes, not guys who actually know how to play blues guitar with a bottleneck. I mean, Jerry Lee Lewis or Chuck Berry or James Brown or Hank Williams, those were real rock and roll lives.
As for the Harley parade, lovely, very nice, everyone had fun. But these guys had as much to do with real bikers as I have to do with Sonny Liston. Bikers are not fun. They are scary. They pack guns and deal drugs. They will beat the shit out of you if they feel like it. Remember when they kicked the shit out of Hunter S. Thompson? Good move, I'll have to admit, but I'm glad it wasn't me. These so-called bikers are so, well, European.
The following items are packed in their studded leather pillion bags:
1 1/2 liters of chilled Evian water bottled at the source
Sandwiches of Camembert and glacé mushroom paté
Various back issues of L'Uomo Vogue
The Michelin Guide to Spain's Finest B & Bs
A seven-inch dildo with spikes on the end
Extra Vuitton sunglasses
Hair gel
A crescent wrench with a studded-leather handle
Band-Aids
The Barcelonese just couldn't handle the real America.
The Corner links to this piece on "Whistler's Mother", as it is popularly known, from the Financial Times. I like stories about artists. I think Whistler's style is a lot more European than American, though, and I'm pretty sure he lived most of his life in Europe.
John's Favorite American Painters
6. Childe Hassam
5. James McNeill Whistler
4. John Singer Sargent
3. Thomas Eakins
2. Mary Cassatt
1. Winslow Homer
Honorable Mention: The Midwesterners (Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, Grant Wood), the Ashcan School, the Illuminationists, and the Illustrators (from Charles Dana Gibson to Norman Rockwell). And whoever painted Dempsey vs. Firpo, the greatest sports painting ever.
John's Favorite American Painters
6. Childe Hassam
5. James McNeill Whistler
4. John Singer Sargent
3. Thomas Eakins
2. Mary Cassatt
1. Winslow Homer
Honorable Mention: The Midwesterners (Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, Grant Wood), the Ashcan School, the Illuminationists, and the Illustrators (from Charles Dana Gibson to Norman Rockwell). And whoever painted Dempsey vs. Firpo, the greatest sports painting ever.
Here's an article from CNN on the situation in Liberia and a possible US intervention. First, my position on going into somewhere and overthrowing dictators or warlords is the same as Tony Blair's: "I wish I could overthrow them all. I will help to overthrow all that I can. I can't get rid of the Burmese military, as much as I would like to, for example." He said something like this; it's not a direct quote.
We can't go into the Congo, at least not now. We can't get enough supplies and security in there to make sure all our guys don't get killed and eaten like one of those tribes was doing to the Pygmies. It requires an enormous amount of preparation to move the United States Army, and the Army needs a safe home base; remember, it's estimated that they need eight to ten rear-echelon guys to support one fighting man. That means if you've got 10,000 combat soldiers on the ground, you need a safe home base to keep, we'll say, 75,000 support soldiers. Well, as far as I know, we've got only ten active Army divisions, plus several brigades of Marines, and some of them need to be in Korea and others in Europe and others in the Middle East and others at home. We don't have a lot of spare military capacity, and we just can't get to central Africa. The United States is not omnipotent.
We made it into Somalia with no problems, though, since Somalia's on the coast and easily supplied, and we weren't too worried at that time about anything. We had this military power sitting around doing nothing, and it's always a temptation to try out your new toys. Somalia looked perfect, we'd go in and restore order and feed the people and we'd be the big heroes. Too bad it ain't that simple.
So here's the deal with Liberia, in my mind: 1) We owe them something, we have some responsibility, since we set up the country in the first place as a colony for "repatriated" slaves 2) It's on the coast so we could get there fairly easily 3) We don't have a lot of excess military capacity, so we're going to need allies 4) What do you know, the Brits are in Sierra Leone, north of Liberia, and the French are in the Ivory Coast, south of Liberia. Maybe we need to all get together and see what we can do to pacify the region in general. We'll give the French a chance to get out of the doghouse and prove they have something useful to contribute instead of just whingeing 5) We only send in our guys if we're prepared to fight and take losses. If we're not willing to do that, we do not go in. I'd be prepared to fight on this one, since what's happening in West Africa has been just horrendous over the last 25 years. But I'm not the American people as a whole 6) Are we too busy right now in the Middle East to take on such a serious responsibility as Liberia? That's a question only the President can answer. I'll bet we're not, but I'm not an expert on American military capabilities.
We can't go into the Congo, at least not now. We can't get enough supplies and security in there to make sure all our guys don't get killed and eaten like one of those tribes was doing to the Pygmies. It requires an enormous amount of preparation to move the United States Army, and the Army needs a safe home base; remember, it's estimated that they need eight to ten rear-echelon guys to support one fighting man. That means if you've got 10,000 combat soldiers on the ground, you need a safe home base to keep, we'll say, 75,000 support soldiers. Well, as far as I know, we've got only ten active Army divisions, plus several brigades of Marines, and some of them need to be in Korea and others in Europe and others in the Middle East and others at home. We don't have a lot of spare military capacity, and we just can't get to central Africa. The United States is not omnipotent.
We made it into Somalia with no problems, though, since Somalia's on the coast and easily supplied, and we weren't too worried at that time about anything. We had this military power sitting around doing nothing, and it's always a temptation to try out your new toys. Somalia looked perfect, we'd go in and restore order and feed the people and we'd be the big heroes. Too bad it ain't that simple.
So here's the deal with Liberia, in my mind: 1) We owe them something, we have some responsibility, since we set up the country in the first place as a colony for "repatriated" slaves 2) It's on the coast so we could get there fairly easily 3) We don't have a lot of excess military capacity, so we're going to need allies 4) What do you know, the Brits are in Sierra Leone, north of Liberia, and the French are in the Ivory Coast, south of Liberia. Maybe we need to all get together and see what we can do to pacify the region in general. We'll give the French a chance to get out of the doghouse and prove they have something useful to contribute instead of just whingeing 5) We only send in our guys if we're prepared to fight and take losses. If we're not willing to do that, we do not go in. I'd be prepared to fight on this one, since what's happening in West Africa has been just horrendous over the last 25 years. But I'm not the American people as a whole 6) Are we too busy right now in the Middle East to take on such a serious responsibility as Liberia? That's a question only the President can answer. I'll bet we're not, but I'm not an expert on American military capabilities.
Here's John Bloom, also known as Joe Bob Briggs, on affirmative action from the National Review. Our position is very simple: Racial quotas have to go. Now.
I am particularly anti-affirmative action because I feel like I was one of those who got screwed over by it. I was a typical bright young male student in high school, not grades-crazy but I had something like a 3.5 GPA in all honors classes. I never studied much, partly because I was actually doing extracurricular activities (track and cross-country, school newspaper, College Bowl) and partly because I was busy leading a normal life. I scored 1430 on the SAT--780 verbal, 650 math, just the opposite of what bright boys usually score--, which is 99th percentile; in fact, I have never taken a standardized test in which I didn't score in the 99th. I also scored over 700 on 3 College Board achievement tests, English, European history, and American history. I figured that ought to get me into any college in the country. Was I ever wrong. They all turned me down, because I'm a middle-class white boy from Johnson County, Kansas, and I wound up at good old State U. while a whole lot of people with considerably fewer achievements than mine--I bet none of them ever finished a marathon in three hours, twenty-seven minutes--got into all the fancy schools.
I blame affirmative action.
But, surprise, surprise. My mother and her sisters have been doing some genealogical digging around and they've now got the papers. Their grandfather (my great-grandfather, of course), James Lafayette Shoemake, was not on the 1924 Cherokee Nation roll, but his two brothers were, and we can now prove it in a court of law if necessary. (For some reason I had thought they were Choctaw.) They've found their graves in Talequah, Oklahoma, along with a bunch of other information. James Lafayette didn't use Indian ways, he was a cowboy and worked on the Border Patrol out in West Texas, but he was a honest-to-God half-Injun. Half at the very least, that is. They still haven't found much about James Lafayette's mother. My Aunt Johnine, who is still in her early fifties, is going to get herself registered as a Native American, since that ethnic classification can only help her in her public school teaching career.
I just might do the same thing if it's not too much trouble. Jeez, an Indian with a 1430. I could have written my own ticket. I'd have gotten Jayson Blair's job on the New York Times.
Now, of course, I'm about as Indian as Prince Charles, culturally speaking. But if you can use the system to your benefit, it's not your fault, it's the system's. And all the affirmative action system does is give places in universities and jobs that were actually earned by someone else to undeserving middle-class "minorities". I'm fed up with it. I think I'm gonna be a minority.
Here's a great story from the Weekly Standard about how nutty the competition to get into the top schools can get, and about how nutty parents can get while making their kids into superachievers, or, like the girl in question here, hollow, empty superachievers. Definitely read this one.
I am particularly anti-affirmative action because I feel like I was one of those who got screwed over by it. I was a typical bright young male student in high school, not grades-crazy but I had something like a 3.5 GPA in all honors classes. I never studied much, partly because I was actually doing extracurricular activities (track and cross-country, school newspaper, College Bowl) and partly because I was busy leading a normal life. I scored 1430 on the SAT--780 verbal, 650 math, just the opposite of what bright boys usually score--, which is 99th percentile; in fact, I have never taken a standardized test in which I didn't score in the 99th. I also scored over 700 on 3 College Board achievement tests, English, European history, and American history. I figured that ought to get me into any college in the country. Was I ever wrong. They all turned me down, because I'm a middle-class white boy from Johnson County, Kansas, and I wound up at good old State U. while a whole lot of people with considerably fewer achievements than mine--I bet none of them ever finished a marathon in three hours, twenty-seven minutes--got into all the fancy schools.
I blame affirmative action.
But, surprise, surprise. My mother and her sisters have been doing some genealogical digging around and they've now got the papers. Their grandfather (my great-grandfather, of course), James Lafayette Shoemake, was not on the 1924 Cherokee Nation roll, but his two brothers were, and we can now prove it in a court of law if necessary. (For some reason I had thought they were Choctaw.) They've found their graves in Talequah, Oklahoma, along with a bunch of other information. James Lafayette didn't use Indian ways, he was a cowboy and worked on the Border Patrol out in West Texas, but he was a honest-to-God half-Injun. Half at the very least, that is. They still haven't found much about James Lafayette's mother. My Aunt Johnine, who is still in her early fifties, is going to get herself registered as a Native American, since that ethnic classification can only help her in her public school teaching career.
I just might do the same thing if it's not too much trouble. Jeez, an Indian with a 1430. I could have written my own ticket. I'd have gotten Jayson Blair's job on the New York Times.
Now, of course, I'm about as Indian as Prince Charles, culturally speaking. But if you can use the system to your benefit, it's not your fault, it's the system's. And all the affirmative action system does is give places in universities and jobs that were actually earned by someone else to undeserving middle-class "minorities". I'm fed up with it. I think I'm gonna be a minority.
Here's a great story from the Weekly Standard about how nutty the competition to get into the top schools can get, and about how nutty parents can get while making their kids into superachievers, or, like the girl in question here, hollow, empty superachievers. Definitely read this one.
Monday, June 30, 2003
When children are good, their parents permit them to breakfast upon cereals with over 50% sugar content. When they are bad, they get porridge. Well, you've all been very, very bad little readers, so today you get--you guessed it--a big old helping of Balt-O-Meal. That's right, old Balto finally finished his series on the United States, and you guys get to read the best parts! Here we go from last Friday:
Years ago I saw a sensational cartoon in the American press: a middle-class couple was eating dinner unworriedly in their house, while hidden under the table there was a Chinese with a knife between his teeth. the caption: "The Yellow Peril". And, without an atrocious fear, aggression has almost no motive. This explains, also, the philosophy of the neoconservatives we talked about yesterday. Which, nonetheless, is beginning to stop disrespecting Europe for its "cowardice" and "old-fashionedness", as has so often been said, and has begun fearing it: have not France and Germany demonstrated enormous moral and political strength by opposing the United States, which only had the support of modest, average countries like Spain? Not counting Great Britian as usual, of course. And the fact that the value of the euro has finally passed that of the dollar benefits American exports by lowering the price of its products, but it shows that when we go beyond missiles, the Old Continent stands firm on its rich complexity, as another influental American conservative magazine, the New Republic, laments, alarmed at the confluence of postnationalism that the EU is designing, becoming the standard of the anti-Americanism that is boiling in this world.
Oh, good Lord. A "Yellow Peril" cartoon? Maybe in the Hearst papers during Korea. Balt, please provide your source. Where did you see this? The meme that the Americans are pissing their pants in fear is repeated over and over in anti-American circles in Europe. Uh, Balt, don't underestimate the Yanks so easily. They've shown a great deal more courage in the last two hundred years than, say, the Mallorcans. Strength? France? In Le Monde Diplomatique's wet dreams. The one thing everyone outside France seems to agree on, no matter what other disputes they might have, is that the French government are a bunch of weasels. They've managed to deal themselves out of any major hand that's going to be played on the world scene in the next twenty years. And I'm not gonna be the guy who calls up Marty Peretz at the New Republic to tell him he's running a "conservative" magazine.
Years ago I saw a sensational cartoon in the American press: a middle-class couple was eating dinner unworriedly in their house, while hidden under the table there was a Chinese with a knife between his teeth. the caption: "The Yellow Peril". And, without an atrocious fear, aggression has almost no motive. This explains, also, the philosophy of the neoconservatives we talked about yesterday. Which, nonetheless, is beginning to stop disrespecting Europe for its "cowardice" and "old-fashionedness", as has so often been said, and has begun fearing it: have not France and Germany demonstrated enormous moral and political strength by opposing the United States, which only had the support of modest, average countries like Spain? Not counting Great Britian as usual, of course. And the fact that the value of the euro has finally passed that of the dollar benefits American exports by lowering the price of its products, but it shows that when we go beyond missiles, the Old Continent stands firm on its rich complexity, as another influental American conservative magazine, the New Republic, laments, alarmed at the confluence of postnationalism that the EU is designing, becoming the standard of the anti-Americanism that is boiling in this world.
Oh, good Lord. A "Yellow Peril" cartoon? Maybe in the Hearst papers during Korea. Balt, please provide your source. Where did you see this? The meme that the Americans are pissing their pants in fear is repeated over and over in anti-American circles in Europe. Uh, Balt, don't underestimate the Yanks so easily. They've shown a great deal more courage in the last two hundred years than, say, the Mallorcans. Strength? France? In Le Monde Diplomatique's wet dreams. The one thing everyone outside France seems to agree on, no matter what other disputes they might have, is that the French government are a bunch of weasels. They've managed to deal themselves out of any major hand that's going to be played on the world scene in the next twenty years. And I'm not gonna be the guy who calls up Marty Peretz at the New Republic to tell him he's running a "conservative" magazine.
P.J. O'Rourke is grumpy about Hillary Clinton's novel over at Front Page. What I'm wondering is whether P.J. has been out-curmudgeoned by the blogosphere. Remember back in the late Eighties and early Nineties when P.J. seemed like the only hip guy out there taking on the idiotarians, and doing it with vicious irony? Remember P.J. tearing into the likes of homeless advocates, Sandalistas, and Soviet wannabes? Now everyone's got his own blog and is gleefully skewering all the latest stupidities of the Illustrated and Enlightened Among Us, or as P.J. used to call them, the Perenially Indignant, within hours of the occurence of said stupidities.
Now, this is a perfectly good article and a lovely Hillary-bash, for those of you who like that kind of thing (I certainly do), but everybody in the blogosphere has already written the same piece. Hillary's book is just so early June, and P.J.'s behind the curve on this subject. It used to be, ten years ago, that a guy had a couple of weeks of time to put an article together and have it still be current when it came out--you had TV, the daily papers, the weekly newsmagazines, and the "serious" political / critical journals, in that order of decreasing immediacy and increasing detail. You used to have some breathing space between when you wrote the piece and when it hit the Atlantics and the New Yorkers and the National Reviews as a still-fresh topic. No longer. P.J., time to join the blogosphere!
Here's Mark Steyn on getting felt up by dead racist Strom "Who the Hell Needs Viagra?" Thurmond. Lester Maddox just died, too. I calculate that the only old segregationists still not only alive, but in power, are the notorious Klansman Robert Byrd and South Carolina's other Senator-for-Life Fritz Hollings. Both Democrats. As were ol' Strom when he started out, and Jesse Helms, too. (Is Jesse dead yet? Boy, if anyone can filibuster St. Peter into letting him into heaven, it'd be ol' Jesse.)
Fred Barnes over at the Weekly Standard gives six reasons why Bush looks good going into next fall's elections. He's even daring to use the L-word--that is, landslide. I've been very good at picking elections recently, and I will stick my neck out right now and say Bush takes forty states in November 2004, and that's assuming the Dems nominate somebody electable like Lieberman. If Nader or somebody like Chomsky runs on the Green ticket and knocks a couple percent off the Dems' vote again, Bush wins forty-seven to fifty states.
NYAAH-HAH-HAH-HEE-HEE-HEE! See, the Dems have to move left, or at least they think they do, so that no one can out-left them this time around like Nader did last time. And, by doing that, they move even farther away from the center, which is where the votes grow and are just looking to be harvested by a war-winning President riding a strong economy. Their goofy far-left candidates like Kooch and Carol "What, Is That The F---ing Ethics Committee Again?" Moseley-Braun and Brother Al the Pimp and Howie Dean are going to pull the already very lefty Dem primary electorate even farther to the left by bringing out the university Socialist cadres and the Seattle antiglobo wackjobs, whether the mainstream Dems want it to happen or not. The Dems have tremendously high negatives; the Republicans don't. About half the people in the United States just cannot stand the sight of the Clintons or Algore; there's a hard core of 20-22% or so on the Left who hate Bush with a passion, but Bush's positives are well up in the 60s and his negatives are staying below 25%. Barring unforeseeable disaster ("PRESIDENT FATHERS JACKO'S ALIEN LOVE CHILD"), Bush gets reelected easily.
Now, this is a perfectly good article and a lovely Hillary-bash, for those of you who like that kind of thing (I certainly do), but everybody in the blogosphere has already written the same piece. Hillary's book is just so early June, and P.J.'s behind the curve on this subject. It used to be, ten years ago, that a guy had a couple of weeks of time to put an article together and have it still be current when it came out--you had TV, the daily papers, the weekly newsmagazines, and the "serious" political / critical journals, in that order of decreasing immediacy and increasing detail. You used to have some breathing space between when you wrote the piece and when it hit the Atlantics and the New Yorkers and the National Reviews as a still-fresh topic. No longer. P.J., time to join the blogosphere!
Here's Mark Steyn on getting felt up by dead racist Strom "Who the Hell Needs Viagra?" Thurmond. Lester Maddox just died, too. I calculate that the only old segregationists still not only alive, but in power, are the notorious Klansman Robert Byrd and South Carolina's other Senator-for-Life Fritz Hollings. Both Democrats. As were ol' Strom when he started out, and Jesse Helms, too. (Is Jesse dead yet? Boy, if anyone can filibuster St. Peter into letting him into heaven, it'd be ol' Jesse.)
Fred Barnes over at the Weekly Standard gives six reasons why Bush looks good going into next fall's elections. He's even daring to use the L-word--that is, landslide. I've been very good at picking elections recently, and I will stick my neck out right now and say Bush takes forty states in November 2004, and that's assuming the Dems nominate somebody electable like Lieberman. If Nader or somebody like Chomsky runs on the Green ticket and knocks a couple percent off the Dems' vote again, Bush wins forty-seven to fifty states.
NYAAH-HAH-HAH-HEE-HEE-HEE! See, the Dems have to move left, or at least they think they do, so that no one can out-left them this time around like Nader did last time. And, by doing that, they move even farther away from the center, which is where the votes grow and are just looking to be harvested by a war-winning President riding a strong economy. Their goofy far-left candidates like Kooch and Carol "What, Is That The F---ing Ethics Committee Again?" Moseley-Braun and Brother Al the Pimp and Howie Dean are going to pull the already very lefty Dem primary electorate even farther to the left by bringing out the university Socialist cadres and the Seattle antiglobo wackjobs, whether the mainstream Dems want it to happen or not. The Dems have tremendously high negatives; the Republicans don't. About half the people in the United States just cannot stand the sight of the Clintons or Algore; there's a hard core of 20-22% or so on the Left who hate Bush with a passion, but Bush's positives are well up in the 60s and his negatives are staying below 25%. Barring unforeseeable disaster ("PRESIDENT FATHERS JACKO'S ALIEN LOVE CHILD"), Bush gets reelected easily.
New Trends in Self-Body-Modification
by Alan Murphy, Guest Style Counselor
Is there a wave of copycat self-severing on the horizon? The Sydney Morning Herald reports an Aussie miner cut off his own forearm this weekend when it got lodged under machinery. According to a witness: "Col got out his Stanley knife... By the time the bloke had walked around to the other side of the front-end loader, Col had completely severed his [own] arm."
Most disturbing is the detail that, according to a psychologist, his action “may have been influenced by a case last month when an American mountaineer amputated his arm after being trapped for five days by a boulder in a Utah national park”.
So, is self-amputation going to be this summer’s fad, the hula-hoop of the 21st century? With the success of Jackass, anything is possible. John already tipped the colostomy bag to be the fashion accessory of summer 2003. Split tongues are just so last year, and trepanning came and went with only a few fashion pioneers prepared to have their crania drilled like a colander. However, self-amputation is so much bolder a statement, it’s so – like, radical – that it cannot fail to gain adepts before you can say Vincent Van Gogh. For those eager to do the deed, I recommend a story by Bill Burroughs, I think called “The Hand”, in which the hero chops off aforesaid member as an artistic statement. A store-bought box-cutter or Stanley knife costs only around $2.00 and was sufficient for the job in the case of the Aussie. Only thing we need is a summer pop hit to back up the trend. Suggestions?
by Alan Murphy, Guest Style Counselor
Is there a wave of copycat self-severing on the horizon? The Sydney Morning Herald reports an Aussie miner cut off his own forearm this weekend when it got lodged under machinery. According to a witness: "Col got out his Stanley knife... By the time the bloke had walked around to the other side of the front-end loader, Col had completely severed his [own] arm."
Most disturbing is the detail that, according to a psychologist, his action “may have been influenced by a case last month when an American mountaineer amputated his arm after being trapped for five days by a boulder in a Utah national park”.
So, is self-amputation going to be this summer’s fad, the hula-hoop of the 21st century? With the success of Jackass, anything is possible. John already tipped the colostomy bag to be the fashion accessory of summer 2003. Split tongues are just so last year, and trepanning came and went with only a few fashion pioneers prepared to have their crania drilled like a colander. However, self-amputation is so much bolder a statement, it’s so – like, radical – that it cannot fail to gain adepts before you can say Vincent Van Gogh. For those eager to do the deed, I recommend a story by Bill Burroughs, I think called “The Hand”, in which the hero chops off aforesaid member as an artistic statement. A store-bought box-cutter or Stanley knife costs only around $2.00 and was sufficient for the job in the case of the Aussie. Only thing we need is a summer pop hit to back up the trend. Suggestions?
Saturday, June 28, 2003
Check out Mlle. Sabine Howard. She's not only a babe, she's also smart. I hate people like that. But thank St. Hayek for her; she's actually bringing attention to "liberal"--i.e. free-market--thinking in France. If this woman can get 80,000 people out to hear her speak, maximum power to her.
My vote for hottest conservative babe goes to Michelle Malkin. She is truly stunning, one of those people Tom Wolfe called a sort of nuclear fusion meltdown among all the groups of people who have come over to the US. Michelle is part Asian and part black, obviously, and I bet she's got plenty of other ancestors from different places. And she's smart, too! This is great. Normally conservative writers are hairy old guys; Michelle is smarter than most of them and also a hell of a lot more attractive.
My vote for hottest conservative babe goes to Michelle Malkin. She is truly stunning, one of those people Tom Wolfe called a sort of nuclear fusion meltdown among all the groups of people who have come over to the US. Michelle is part Asian and part black, obviously, and I bet she's got plenty of other ancestors from different places. And she's smart, too! This is great. Normally conservative writers are hairy old guys; Michelle is smarter than most of them and also a hell of a lot more attractive.
Friday, June 27, 2003
Here's a piece in National Review about Dennis Miller, the comedian; he's one of the few who have come over to the correct side, along with Christopher Hitchens and Murph, over the war. Check it out.
You know, we don't pay nearly as much attention to Dark Blogules as we ought to. It's Angie Schultz's blog; you'll recognize her name from the Comments section, in which she once famously exposed Vanguardia plagiarist Marius Serra. Her blog is intelligent, sharp and funny. Check it out. By the way, we're weenies--can't stand light type on a dark background--so Angie thoughtfully includes a link where we can flip the light-on-dark around to dark-on-light.
You know, we don't pay nearly as much attention to Dark Blogules as we ought to. It's Angie Schultz's blog; you'll recognize her name from the Comments section, in which she once famously exposed Vanguardia plagiarist Marius Serra. Her blog is intelligent, sharp and funny. Check it out. By the way, we're weenies--can't stand light type on a dark background--so Angie thoughtfully includes a link where we can flip the light-on-dark around to dark-on-light.
Cinderella Bloggerfeller wrote a light, funny little piece on avoiding cliches in one's writing. It's actually, like, witty and all, and it includes jokes that are generally better than mine. It is not the slightest bit controversial in any way. So guess what? Some moron is giving him shit in his Comments section. Jesus. Sometimes you can't please anybody. Go read his piece and then the Comments and give him some support.
Jesus Gil at Ibidem has an excellent historical debunking piece on the "Black Legend" of the Spanish Inquisition and its demonization. A lot about the Inquisition was not pretty but its victims were few, certainly if you compare them to the French Wars of Religion or the Thirty Years' War or the Protestant witch hunts (though the number of victims of the witch hunts is often as exaggerated as the number of victims of the Inquisition). One minor quibble: Jesus may be exaggerating the power and influence of the Masons. My grandfather was a Mason. He worked on the railroad. I've read--more like flipped through--his Masonic books. It's just a bunch of gibberish not much different from any other fraternal organization's mystical BS.
Still don't believe Saddam had weapons of mass destruction? Check out this article from the Wall Street Journal. (Via Front Page.) And here's Byron York from National Review making a similar case.
Jesus Gil at Ibidem has an excellent historical debunking piece on the "Black Legend" of the Spanish Inquisition and its demonization. A lot about the Inquisition was not pretty but its victims were few, certainly if you compare them to the French Wars of Religion or the Thirty Years' War or the Protestant witch hunts (though the number of victims of the witch hunts is often as exaggerated as the number of victims of the Inquisition). One minor quibble: Jesus may be exaggerating the power and influence of the Masons. My grandfather was a Mason. He worked on the railroad. I've read--more like flipped through--his Masonic books. It's just a bunch of gibberish not much different from any other fraternal organization's mystical BS.
Still don't believe Saddam had weapons of mass destruction? Check out this article from the Wall Street Journal. (Via Front Page.) And here's Byron York from National Review making a similar case.
Thursday, June 26, 2003
Guess what, everybody! Baltasar Porcel is doing, not just an article but a series, on the United States! Of course I'm not going to spare you. Read it and suffer. He started it on Tuesday:
The Americans invoke God frequently and George W. Bush belongs to a church or cult (secta)--it's difficult to differentiate between them--which might be Anabaptist and is simplistic and, also, more or less fundamentalist, and for which he felt a frenzy of devotion when he grew up and needed to maintain ethylic sobriety. That is, based on Bush's self-evident possession of the truth, interpreted loquaciously by a Texan priest reading the Bible in a clean little clapboard church with a little garden, lying has become the great support of American politics. Bush has aggravated it because in the economic world, for example, it's beeen going on for a long time; let's remember Enron, accounting fallacies and legal frauds, definitely robberies of the citizenry, which is now affecting another giant, one of vast social responsibility, the company that controls 18%! of the mortgages in the country.
A) Bush, as I said recently, is a Methodist, the third-largest church in America after the Catholics and the Baptists and not precisely a cult. It is not seemly for Mr. Porcel to ignorantly slam the Methodists because he don't know a damn thing about them. Mr. Porcel shows here a great miscomprehension of the various Protestant churches, which is sadly very common in such a heavily Catholic-culture country as Spain. The Methodists, for folks who may not know, are a moderately liberal Anglo-American church, which originally split off the Anglicans in the late eighteenth century. They allow, nay, encourage, women ministers; they are not anti-abortion or anti-divorce or anti-gay. There are virtually no Anabaptist groups surviving. The Baptists, the only Protestant church bigger than the Methodists, have nothing to do with the Anabaptists or Germany; they are a further split off the Anglicans. They are generally more conservative than the Methodists, but there are several different brands of them. By the way, the Bush family is historically high-church Anglican. George W. converted to the Methodists when he married Laura. As for the lying and corruption in business crap, they've found about five or ten occurrences of fraud. Those people involved are being prosecuted. There is no indication that America under Bush is any more corrupt than anywhere else, and it is certainly one hell of a lot less corrupt than the Spanish Socialist Party.
X comments on this to me in his little office in the center of Wall Street, in New York, that miracle of miracles. Pure finance, the stock market, are the systematized miracle: from nothing to everything, from the nonexistent to the tangible. X's several computers vomit forth lists of numbers and names, but he is desolate: "Lying for so long, until disasters break out, like these top directors do, shows a hedonistic and publicitary ambition which has nothing to do with the strict Protestant moral. Old Henry Ford didn't even have a car. Tom Wolfe in his bitter novels has best portrayed this unhinged capitalism." He points to the huge void of the Twin Towers, right there, he adds: "Bush has made war on Afghanistan and Iraq to catch the terrorists and their terrible arsenal, but we know nothing of Bin Laden, of Saddam, or his chemical weapons. Tricks and failures, like the famous odyssey of Jennifer Lynch."
Mr. Porcel, who is X? Is he a real person or someone, as I suspect, whom you made up and in whose mouth you put words? No one talks like this except you yourself, you old blatherskite. Note further lack of comprehension of Protestantism and the absurd statement that Henry Ford didn't have a car.
He explains. The supreme heroic act of the Americans in Iraq consisted of the commando attack by the Special Forces on the hospital where Private Jessica Lynch lay among Republican Guards who had captured her after shooting her full of holes and torturing her without stopping. Well: Lynch's famous wounds were from a car accident and she was better cared for than the indigenous patients, the hospital had been abandoned by the (Iraqi?) soldiers a couple of days before, and what the commandos did was to grab stupefied docters and blow up doors that were open, while their television was filming it and Bush cried happily. And as for the legendary and amnesiac Lynch, they are selling various objects on Internet with her name trademarked.
First, note that this particular account of the rescue of Private Lynch has nothing to do with the truth. Second, note Mr. Porcel's scorn for the Americans' puffing themselves up as heroes. The truth, of course, is that no puffing up was done. Instead, alleged puffing up was invented out of thin air by the Left looking for something, anything, to criticize after the overwhelming Allied victory in Iraq. Third, I just Googled "jessica lynch" and "trademark", and then "brand name", and there are no products for sale. Mr. Porcel done told a lie.
Here's old Balt's next emission, from Wednesday:
Yesterday, regarding Bush, I alluded to the Christian fundamentalist cults and churches. It is like Islamic terrorism, though it seems difficult to equialze both concepts. And in the United States they have a notorious influence, while the Catholic Church, with its cases of pedophilia and homosexuality, which several bishops are mixed up in, is in anguish. These fundamentalists believe that the "Caucasian" or white race, descended from central and Nordic Europe, is the authentic descendant of the lost tribes of Israel and occupies a preeminent place in the divine plan for the Earth, while they hate the State because of its permissive legislation on abortion, attacking clinics to this effect.
WHAT?!? Balt, there are about eight nutcases in Assboink, Idaho, who believe that stuff. Please try to get your facts minimally correct. You see how hard it is to talk sense to Spaniards about the US? How is it possible when their brains are drenched daily in such drivel? And then they dare to call us ignorant.
Not long ago Eric Rudolph, suspected of the massacre committed at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, and who is linked with the cults Christian Identity, Army of God, Church of Israel, or is protected by them, was accidentally arrested after being one of the most wanted fugitives. We are dealing with a world that is primitive, obsessive, poor, psychologically stunted. Which after September 11 has acquired fierce power, with its preaching based on the idea that America's sins have been punished through Arabs and Moslems, inferior races and beliefs. But the Arabs are much more persecuted than these Christians.
WHAT?!?!? Oh, never mind. Balt wants to believe that America is sinister and evil. Informing him that, no, these groups are not precisely influential in America today will do him little good after the 847 BBC and Channel 4 documentaries Catalan TV keeps repeating over and over that he's seen.
Rudolph has shared media sensationalism with Hillary Clinton's memoirs, which have gained her 8 million dollars and which are selling well, though it seems not so much. I ask several young people in Soho and Brooklyn about them, but they shrug their shoulders; they know the book has come out, but they don't care. The "New York Times" type of press has been severe with the book. Those who buy, therefore, are people of a low cultural level who are stereotype fodder, a stubborn and wide middle class shrunken with fear after September 11 and mesmerized by Bush's tanks. But, is the interest in Mrs. Clinton's book based on the Lewinsky scandal and all? Not exactly: her readers know that she will go off on the tangent and that she is looking for money as she is testing the waters of a possible presidential future. That is, people buy the book knowing it is a scam, in order to know up to what point it is one.
WHAT?!?!? does that have to do with anything? Yeah, right, Balt, I can just see your skinny white ass down in the hood discussing Hillary Clinton's memoirs. Note the contempt Mr. Porcel feels for the ordinary American. Next time some European tells you he likes the American people but he doesn't like the government, explain to him that he is lying through his teeth. Do so politely. Wouldn't want to offend any Europeans, would we?
Now here's today's dose of Balt. Get a load of the absolutely shameless self-logrolling in the first paragraph.
Alexis du Tocqueville, the French thinker of the first half of the 19th century and whom today we would call a liberal or a democratic conservative, appears as one of the key historical characters in my novel "L'Emperador or L'ull del vent"; the other is, without a doubt, Napoleon. Or his immense possessive shadow. So, in Paris, not long ago, at the presentation of the Prix Mediterranee to this novel in its French version, a member of the jury, Jean Daniel, the director of the influential weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, talked to me about how they analyze the American neoconservatives who inspire Bush, for whom the European genius was Tocqueville, who as an aristocrat was a renegade from the Old Regime, accepted the revolution as an evolution, traveled to the United States rather than disdaining them, and studied its democracy with stunning lucidity. "For these neoconservatives he was the opposite of the French of today; we have become activists of anti-Americanism, they think for no reason," smiled Daniel.
Uh, Balt, I thought the neoconservative conspiracy was built on the works of Leo Strauss. Lord, I can't stand this anymore. You're going to have to read the rest of it for yourself. Try the Axis of Porcel HQ.
I have been accused of speaking scornfully of Catalan intellectuals. But, come on, if this is the best they can do, no amount of scorn is unjustified. And remember, Baltasar Porcel is the Official Catalan Candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Wouldn't it be great if they actually gave it to him one of these years?
The Americans invoke God frequently and George W. Bush belongs to a church or cult (secta)--it's difficult to differentiate between them--which might be Anabaptist and is simplistic and, also, more or less fundamentalist, and for which he felt a frenzy of devotion when he grew up and needed to maintain ethylic sobriety. That is, based on Bush's self-evident possession of the truth, interpreted loquaciously by a Texan priest reading the Bible in a clean little clapboard church with a little garden, lying has become the great support of American politics. Bush has aggravated it because in the economic world, for example, it's beeen going on for a long time; let's remember Enron, accounting fallacies and legal frauds, definitely robberies of the citizenry, which is now affecting another giant, one of vast social responsibility, the company that controls 18%! of the mortgages in the country.
A) Bush, as I said recently, is a Methodist, the third-largest church in America after the Catholics and the Baptists and not precisely a cult. It is not seemly for Mr. Porcel to ignorantly slam the Methodists because he don't know a damn thing about them. Mr. Porcel shows here a great miscomprehension of the various Protestant churches, which is sadly very common in such a heavily Catholic-culture country as Spain. The Methodists, for folks who may not know, are a moderately liberal Anglo-American church, which originally split off the Anglicans in the late eighteenth century. They allow, nay, encourage, women ministers; they are not anti-abortion or anti-divorce or anti-gay. There are virtually no Anabaptist groups surviving. The Baptists, the only Protestant church bigger than the Methodists, have nothing to do with the Anabaptists or Germany; they are a further split off the Anglicans. They are generally more conservative than the Methodists, but there are several different brands of them. By the way, the Bush family is historically high-church Anglican. George W. converted to the Methodists when he married Laura. As for the lying and corruption in business crap, they've found about five or ten occurrences of fraud. Those people involved are being prosecuted. There is no indication that America under Bush is any more corrupt than anywhere else, and it is certainly one hell of a lot less corrupt than the Spanish Socialist Party.
X comments on this to me in his little office in the center of Wall Street, in New York, that miracle of miracles. Pure finance, the stock market, are the systematized miracle: from nothing to everything, from the nonexistent to the tangible. X's several computers vomit forth lists of numbers and names, but he is desolate: "Lying for so long, until disasters break out, like these top directors do, shows a hedonistic and publicitary ambition which has nothing to do with the strict Protestant moral. Old Henry Ford didn't even have a car. Tom Wolfe in his bitter novels has best portrayed this unhinged capitalism." He points to the huge void of the Twin Towers, right there, he adds: "Bush has made war on Afghanistan and Iraq to catch the terrorists and their terrible arsenal, but we know nothing of Bin Laden, of Saddam, or his chemical weapons. Tricks and failures, like the famous odyssey of Jennifer Lynch."
Mr. Porcel, who is X? Is he a real person or someone, as I suspect, whom you made up and in whose mouth you put words? No one talks like this except you yourself, you old blatherskite. Note further lack of comprehension of Protestantism and the absurd statement that Henry Ford didn't have a car.
He explains. The supreme heroic act of the Americans in Iraq consisted of the commando attack by the Special Forces on the hospital where Private Jessica Lynch lay among Republican Guards who had captured her after shooting her full of holes and torturing her without stopping. Well: Lynch's famous wounds were from a car accident and she was better cared for than the indigenous patients, the hospital had been abandoned by the (Iraqi?) soldiers a couple of days before, and what the commandos did was to grab stupefied docters and blow up doors that were open, while their television was filming it and Bush cried happily. And as for the legendary and amnesiac Lynch, they are selling various objects on Internet with her name trademarked.
First, note that this particular account of the rescue of Private Lynch has nothing to do with the truth. Second, note Mr. Porcel's scorn for the Americans' puffing themselves up as heroes. The truth, of course, is that no puffing up was done. Instead, alleged puffing up was invented out of thin air by the Left looking for something, anything, to criticize after the overwhelming Allied victory in Iraq. Third, I just Googled "jessica lynch" and "trademark", and then "brand name", and there are no products for sale. Mr. Porcel done told a lie.
Here's old Balt's next emission, from Wednesday:
Yesterday, regarding Bush, I alluded to the Christian fundamentalist cults and churches. It is like Islamic terrorism, though it seems difficult to equialze both concepts. And in the United States they have a notorious influence, while the Catholic Church, with its cases of pedophilia and homosexuality, which several bishops are mixed up in, is in anguish. These fundamentalists believe that the "Caucasian" or white race, descended from central and Nordic Europe, is the authentic descendant of the lost tribes of Israel and occupies a preeminent place in the divine plan for the Earth, while they hate the State because of its permissive legislation on abortion, attacking clinics to this effect.
WHAT?!? Balt, there are about eight nutcases in Assboink, Idaho, who believe that stuff. Please try to get your facts minimally correct. You see how hard it is to talk sense to Spaniards about the US? How is it possible when their brains are drenched daily in such drivel? And then they dare to call us ignorant.
Not long ago Eric Rudolph, suspected of the massacre committed at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, and who is linked with the cults Christian Identity, Army of God, Church of Israel, or is protected by them, was accidentally arrested after being one of the most wanted fugitives. We are dealing with a world that is primitive, obsessive, poor, psychologically stunted. Which after September 11 has acquired fierce power, with its preaching based on the idea that America's sins have been punished through Arabs and Moslems, inferior races and beliefs. But the Arabs are much more persecuted than these Christians.
WHAT?!?!? Oh, never mind. Balt wants to believe that America is sinister and evil. Informing him that, no, these groups are not precisely influential in America today will do him little good after the 847 BBC and Channel 4 documentaries Catalan TV keeps repeating over and over that he's seen.
Rudolph has shared media sensationalism with Hillary Clinton's memoirs, which have gained her 8 million dollars and which are selling well, though it seems not so much. I ask several young people in Soho and Brooklyn about them, but they shrug their shoulders; they know the book has come out, but they don't care. The "New York Times" type of press has been severe with the book. Those who buy, therefore, are people of a low cultural level who are stereotype fodder, a stubborn and wide middle class shrunken with fear after September 11 and mesmerized by Bush's tanks. But, is the interest in Mrs. Clinton's book based on the Lewinsky scandal and all? Not exactly: her readers know that she will go off on the tangent and that she is looking for money as she is testing the waters of a possible presidential future. That is, people buy the book knowing it is a scam, in order to know up to what point it is one.
WHAT?!?!? does that have to do with anything? Yeah, right, Balt, I can just see your skinny white ass down in the hood discussing Hillary Clinton's memoirs. Note the contempt Mr. Porcel feels for the ordinary American. Next time some European tells you he likes the American people but he doesn't like the government, explain to him that he is lying through his teeth. Do so politely. Wouldn't want to offend any Europeans, would we?
Now here's today's dose of Balt. Get a load of the absolutely shameless self-logrolling in the first paragraph.
Alexis du Tocqueville, the French thinker of the first half of the 19th century and whom today we would call a liberal or a democratic conservative, appears as one of the key historical characters in my novel "L'Emperador or L'ull del vent"; the other is, without a doubt, Napoleon. Or his immense possessive shadow. So, in Paris, not long ago, at the presentation of the Prix Mediterranee to this novel in its French version, a member of the jury, Jean Daniel, the director of the influential weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, talked to me about how they analyze the American neoconservatives who inspire Bush, for whom the European genius was Tocqueville, who as an aristocrat was a renegade from the Old Regime, accepted the revolution as an evolution, traveled to the United States rather than disdaining them, and studied its democracy with stunning lucidity. "For these neoconservatives he was the opposite of the French of today; we have become activists of anti-Americanism, they think for no reason," smiled Daniel.
Uh, Balt, I thought the neoconservative conspiracy was built on the works of Leo Strauss. Lord, I can't stand this anymore. You're going to have to read the rest of it for yourself. Try the Axis of Porcel HQ.
I have been accused of speaking scornfully of Catalan intellectuals. But, come on, if this is the best they can do, no amount of scorn is unjustified. And remember, Baltasar Porcel is the Official Catalan Candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Wouldn't it be great if they actually gave it to him one of these years?
FrontPage has a nice typically lefty-bashing article on the latest wacko protests in Sacramento. The first half of the story shows how nutty these extremist activists are; the second half rips into them for their propaganda against genetically modified foods. Anybody with the interests of people at heart is completely in favor of GM; the examples given in the article, a type of rice that contains vitamin A implanted from a daffodil gene, a sweet potato that is resistant to viral infection, and corn that contains a natural pesticide that is harmless to both humans and "friendly" insects, are exactly the kind of improved-quality food plant that will help the poorest people in the world obtain a better diet and higher quality of life for less money.
Jonathan from Puerta del Sol has a post on "the recovery of historical memory", which is rather a buzzword these days in Spain. It refers to an effort by apologists for the Spanish revolutionary Republic and by the political left--Vazquez Montalban is mixed up in this, of course--to call attention yet again to the atrocities committed by the Franco regime. Their website, which Jonathan links to, includes criticism of the conservative governing PP. They do not pretend to be neutral politically.
Now, I am completely in favor of historical investigation, and if this movement "for historical memory" unearths some new facts about how rotten Franco and his killers were, great. My problem with it, though, is that this is as one-sided as always. See, the revolutionary Leftist killers, the Communists, the Anarchists, the POUM, were just as bad as the Franquistas. They were ALL murderers. One famous Leftist murderer, Santiago Carrillo, is now a lauded hero of progressive socialism.
The thing, though, is that in both the Spanish and the international intelligentsia, the revolutionary Republicans are considered glorious freedom fighters while the reactionary Franquistas are condemned as Fascist scum. I haven't read anything, and I mean anything except for Pio Moa, a couple of books from the Montserrat press, and Stanley G. Payne, that has attempted to restore the "historical memory" of those tens of thousands of Spaniards massacred by the organized Left. On the other hand, I have read dozens of books and articles condemning the Franco repression, and if you read El Pais daily, you're sure to get three articles a week on what an evil bastard Franco was.
As I've said before, Iberian Notes does not take sides on the Spanish Civil War. We're in favor of the victims and against the killers. That means we detest both sides, the revolutionaries and the reactionaries, equally. We therefore cannot approve of this particular movement for "recovering historical memory" because it lionizes one side and demonizes the other. We demand that legitimate history remain as neutral and objective as humanly possible without picking sides, and we reject history written with a bias in order to make a political point as not legitimate.
Now, I am completely in favor of historical investigation, and if this movement "for historical memory" unearths some new facts about how rotten Franco and his killers were, great. My problem with it, though, is that this is as one-sided as always. See, the revolutionary Leftist killers, the Communists, the Anarchists, the POUM, were just as bad as the Franquistas. They were ALL murderers. One famous Leftist murderer, Santiago Carrillo, is now a lauded hero of progressive socialism.
The thing, though, is that in both the Spanish and the international intelligentsia, the revolutionary Republicans are considered glorious freedom fighters while the reactionary Franquistas are condemned as Fascist scum. I haven't read anything, and I mean anything except for Pio Moa, a couple of books from the Montserrat press, and Stanley G. Payne, that has attempted to restore the "historical memory" of those tens of thousands of Spaniards massacred by the organized Left. On the other hand, I have read dozens of books and articles condemning the Franco repression, and if you read El Pais daily, you're sure to get three articles a week on what an evil bastard Franco was.
As I've said before, Iberian Notes does not take sides on the Spanish Civil War. We're in favor of the victims and against the killers. That means we detest both sides, the revolutionaries and the reactionaries, equally. We therefore cannot approve of this particular movement for "recovering historical memory" because it lionizes one side and demonizes the other. We demand that legitimate history remain as neutral and objective as humanly possible without picking sides, and we reject history written with a bias in order to make a political point as not legitimate.
Wednesday, June 25, 2003
The erudite and stylish Christopher Buckley has a very nice article on "Patrick Dennis" and his hit 1955 novel, Auntie Mame, in the Weekly Standard. Buckley describes Auntie Mame as a cultural breakthrough, a predecessor to the collapse of what remained of Victorian morals in the 1960s. Mame was promiscuous, irresponsible, brilliant, and full of fun, and the model for what we think of as an attractive, sexy, independent woman today.
Here is an excellent comment from NRO's Deroy Murdock pointing out the stupidity of the war on drugs and especially the war on cannabis. One of the reasons I appreciate Spain is its tolerance for cannabis use. I think it might be because all working-class men and most middle-class men over about 30 years old have done military service, and they learned to smoke dope in the Spanish Army. No kidding. There wasn't anything else to do, and Spain controlled northern Morocco (including the Rif, where more dope is grown than anywhere else in the world) until 1956 and the Spanish Sahara, due south of Morocco, until 1975. Spain still controls Ceuta and Melilla, outposts on the coast of the Rif, and the Canary Islands, just a few miles off the Moroccan coast. Andalusia is a short boat ride from the heart of the Rif. All these guys who were in the Army smoked dope, and they learned from personal experience that it's no big deal. Therefore they don't think it's some sort of evil monster.
By the way, I guarantee you Bill Clinton smoked tons of dope way back when. Everyone else who shared his political tendencies did, and Bill is not known for his ability to resist sensual pleasures. I've hated him ever since that "I didn't inhale" crap. He should have said, "Yes, I used to smoke pot. Now I don't. But I'm not ashamed of what I did, and I think marijuana possession and growing your own should be legal, or at the very least decriminalized, because it's pretty harmless, not as unhealthy as tobacco and alcohol. Anyone providing pot to minors should suffer the same penalty as anyone providing alcohol to minors, and those who operate vehicles or machinery are, of course, prohibited from operating under the influence." He should have had that answer all planned out because the question is pretty obvious.
By the way, I guarantee you Bill Clinton smoked tons of dope way back when. Everyone else who shared his political tendencies did, and Bill is not known for his ability to resist sensual pleasures. I've hated him ever since that "I didn't inhale" crap. He should have said, "Yes, I used to smoke pot. Now I don't. But I'm not ashamed of what I did, and I think marijuana possession and growing your own should be legal, or at the very least decriminalized, because it's pretty harmless, not as unhealthy as tobacco and alcohol. Anyone providing pot to minors should suffer the same penalty as anyone providing alcohol to minors, and those who operate vehicles or machinery are, of course, prohibited from operating under the influence." He should have had that answer all planned out because the question is pretty obvious.
Today the Vanguardia is leading off, again, with the Church's role in the opposition to a war on Saddam. The Pope is sending the former Papal nuncio in Washington, Pio Laghi, another Latin European in a high place in the Church, to jaw at President Bush for a while; the Pope may go to the UN to speak on April 11. Enric Juliana, Catholic bigot, says in an analysis piece, "Maybe many (antiwar) young people will suffer from a great disappointment soon, but they will keep in their memories the image of an old man dressed in white, who is at their side with the valiant stubbornness of an adolescent. They will have time to learn that the Pope of Rome was, in the year 2003, the "uncontrolled factor" (i.e. loose cannon) by the fine strategists of the American Enterprise Institute, and that the Vatican and republican France shared a side for once in history, so that the astute Dominique de Villepin, the hussar who enjoys the suave perfume of the violet, Napoleon's favorite flower, was not the only hero of the cause of peace."
Yecch. That's revolting. The Pope is the man who has declared a day of fasting and prayer in favor of "peace". He's taken a side and that side is that of the anti-American, pro-Saddam international left. The Pope is supporting a cruel and dangerous tyrant in the name of peace. There goes his place in history. The man who would have been remembered as one of the heroes of the struggle against Communism will now be remembered as a partisan of Saddam Hussein. The Kurt Waldheim episode had been forgotten; it will now be revived. Glenn Reynolds is ripping the Pope and the Church a new one, and he's not being entirely fair about it, but if you've got Glenn Reynolds mad it means that you've lost the American center. Reynolds is not always right but he is no radical on anything but guns, and he's plugged in to what middle-class, middle-income, Middle America think. You don't want to lose these people, and I think the Church has lost them.
I wouldn't be hammering on this so much if the Vangua weren't so insistent.
The eight Cataloony human shields left in Iraq (the rest, showing admirable good sense, got smart and took off after being treated to too many Potemkin tours of Baghdad; those remaining are hardcore ultra-leftists) will not be sent to a hospital. Instead they will be placed at an oil refinery, two electric power plants, a silo, and a water treatment plant. I don't think we're going to hit any of these places because we'd just have to build them again after the war. Meanwhile, most of the Brits went home after Rumsfeld made it clear that their presence didn't matter a damned thing to him. That is, when they heard they might actually get killed if they stayed, they cravenly fled back home. Cluck, cluck, cluck. Cock-a-doodle-doo! Bawk! Bawk! The Spanish Communist Party has sent a delegation to Baghdad. They weren't allowed to talk to anyone in the opposition, but they did get a meeting with Tareq Aziz in which they denounced, like, war and stuff. Maybe if we attack right now we can blow them straight to hell. It really wouldn't bother me if those guys never came back, and if they get killed the cause of death ought to be recorded as "suicide".
The Red Brigades are back in Italy, middle-class punks, wannabe revolutionaries, just plain assholes. Two of them shot it out with the cops on a Rome-Florence express; a policeman and an asshole were killed. Another policeman was wounded. The second asshole, a woman, has been arrested.
Jacques Chirac has announced a "new Franco-Algerian alliance" in Algiers in a "passionate speech" before the parliament. At least 100,000 people have been killed in Algeria since the 1992 military coup. More than 100 people were massacred by either government troops, paramilitaries, or Islamist radicals in the first week of January 2003 alone. 7000 people are currently listed as "disappeared" by no less than Human Rights Watch, not suspicious of pro-Americanism. Representatives of the Berber opposition in the Cabilia region east of Algiers were not permitted to meet with Chirac. And these people dare to criticize the Americans. France has been directly responsible for what has happened in Algeria both before and since they lost the civil war in 1962. Algeria was a French colony for more than 130 years. During the 1954-62 war both sides murdered and tortured civilians left and right, tens of thousands of them, and then the French ran off and left their Algerian allies to be massacred. No modern colonial power has ever behaved worse except for the Belgians in the Congo.
They actually had a cool anti-war protest here in Barcelona. First there was a manifesto that was a typical anti-Yankee tantrum, but then they read Lysistrata, the comedy by Aristophanes in which the women of a city at war refuse sex to their husbands until they stop the war. Well-known local actors, to whom I will give no publicity, were the readers. That's pretty classy; I much prefer Greek theater to the normal fare at a demo.
Yecch. That's revolting. The Pope is the man who has declared a day of fasting and prayer in favor of "peace". He's taken a side and that side is that of the anti-American, pro-Saddam international left. The Pope is supporting a cruel and dangerous tyrant in the name of peace. There goes his place in history. The man who would have been remembered as one of the heroes of the struggle against Communism will now be remembered as a partisan of Saddam Hussein. The Kurt Waldheim episode had been forgotten; it will now be revived. Glenn Reynolds is ripping the Pope and the Church a new one, and he's not being entirely fair about it, but if you've got Glenn Reynolds mad it means that you've lost the American center. Reynolds is not always right but he is no radical on anything but guns, and he's plugged in to what middle-class, middle-income, Middle America think. You don't want to lose these people, and I think the Church has lost them.
I wouldn't be hammering on this so much if the Vangua weren't so insistent.
The eight Cataloony human shields left in Iraq (the rest, showing admirable good sense, got smart and took off after being treated to too many Potemkin tours of Baghdad; those remaining are hardcore ultra-leftists) will not be sent to a hospital. Instead they will be placed at an oil refinery, two electric power plants, a silo, and a water treatment plant. I don't think we're going to hit any of these places because we'd just have to build them again after the war. Meanwhile, most of the Brits went home after Rumsfeld made it clear that their presence didn't matter a damned thing to him. That is, when they heard they might actually get killed if they stayed, they cravenly fled back home. Cluck, cluck, cluck. Cock-a-doodle-doo! Bawk! Bawk! The Spanish Communist Party has sent a delegation to Baghdad. They weren't allowed to talk to anyone in the opposition, but they did get a meeting with Tareq Aziz in which they denounced, like, war and stuff. Maybe if we attack right now we can blow them straight to hell. It really wouldn't bother me if those guys never came back, and if they get killed the cause of death ought to be recorded as "suicide".
The Red Brigades are back in Italy, middle-class punks, wannabe revolutionaries, just plain assholes. Two of them shot it out with the cops on a Rome-Florence express; a policeman and an asshole were killed. Another policeman was wounded. The second asshole, a woman, has been arrested.
Jacques Chirac has announced a "new Franco-Algerian alliance" in Algiers in a "passionate speech" before the parliament. At least 100,000 people have been killed in Algeria since the 1992 military coup. More than 100 people were massacred by either government troops, paramilitaries, or Islamist radicals in the first week of January 2003 alone. 7000 people are currently listed as "disappeared" by no less than Human Rights Watch, not suspicious of pro-Americanism. Representatives of the Berber opposition in the Cabilia region east of Algiers were not permitted to meet with Chirac. And these people dare to criticize the Americans. France has been directly responsible for what has happened in Algeria both before and since they lost the civil war in 1962. Algeria was a French colony for more than 130 years. During the 1954-62 war both sides murdered and tortured civilians left and right, tens of thousands of them, and then the French ran off and left their Algerian allies to be massacred. No modern colonial power has ever behaved worse except for the Belgians in the Congo.
They actually had a cool anti-war protest here in Barcelona. First there was a manifesto that was a typical anti-Yankee tantrum, but then they read Lysistrata, the comedy by Aristophanes in which the women of a city at war refuse sex to their husbands until they stop the war. Well-known local actors, to whom I will give no publicity, were the readers. That's pretty classy; I much prefer Greek theater to the normal fare at a demo.
Tuesday, June 24, 2003
Here's an article from the Public Interest on the intellectual bases of anti-Americanism, which go back a long, long time. Check it out. (Via InstaPundit.)
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