There hasn't been a good wild one from La Vangua recently; Baltobrain Porcel is on vacation, and someone's told Chemical Lali Sole to go back to howling about gender discrimination rather than to continue howling about the intrinsic evil of the United States. But Jose Ignacio Gonzalez Faus is still in business. Mr. Gonzalez Faus is a Jesuit priest, billed as the "academic director" of Cristianisme i Justicia. Our pal Jose Manuel, who knows a lot about Church matters, says that Gonzalez Faus is "for a Jesuit, a pretty good Marxist." We'll call him Nacho, the nickname for Ignacio, which is especially appropriate because Mr. Gonzalez is about half-flaky and about half-soggy, just like ballpark nachos. He's also pretty indigestible and just generally hard to stomach.

Ten years ago I had already written about the danger that "we will end up selling our prized liberty for a mess of pottage" and that we were on the road to "a world-level Fascism, infinitely more difficult to escape from than when one is dealing with Fascism in one or two countries." It wasn't a fatalistic verdict; life has "surprising mechanisms of correction" and we can expect that we will function. But "perhaps one of these mechanisms is that somebody warn of the danger".

OK, Nacho, you're Cassandra. We are now warned. Shut up already.

Ten years later, my fear is growing. In its yearly report, Amnesty International is launching a similar warning. The situation of the world has gotten worse with the change from the old "balance of terror" to the current unbalanced terror, where only one country can arm itself to the teeth and with no control, while the rest, if they arm themselves, will be condemned to death as a terrorist threat.

Calm down, Nacho. Are you saying China and Russia and Taiwan and India and Pakistan and South Korea and Israel and Britain and France aren't "armed to the teeth"? And are you saying that the United States' defense policy should be under the control of others? What others? Are you saying that Afghanistan and Iraq weren't terrorist threats? Have you noticed those are the only two governments we've taken out? If what we were trying to do was silence criticism, we'd have taken out France, not the Taliban. And are you saying that the world was better BEFORE the fall of the Soviet Union?

The coming Fascism is a transvestite Fascism, dressed up as democracy. This is not negated but sterilized. The separation of powers is annulled in fact, though not by law: the "fourth estate" becomes the property of the executive (the Berlusconi case) and the judicial branch is nominated by the executive which puts it at the executive's service (the Cardenal case).

OK. Globalization is Fascism, huh? Of course, Nacho is using "Fascist" according to the standard leftist definition: "anybody who's smarter than I am." If you're saying the United States is not a democracy, sorry to inform you you're wrong; the government does not own any of the media of communication, and we conservatives like it that way. We don't want either Berlusconi or Red Ken to get hold of any state-controlled media. And, of course, in the US federal judges are nominated by the executive but must be confirmed by the legislative, and if Nacho had the slightest idea about American politics, he'd know that during all of President Bush's term he's been having problems getting judicial appointments confirmed by the Democrats in Congress. He'd also know that some big names, like Robert Bork, have been kept off the bench by the Congress.

A Guatemalan author once said that dictators are not a cause but an effect. Searching for the causes of this devalued democracy, we might point out the neoliberal separation between policics and the economy. Political life is becoming more and more controlled by the economy. Now look: capitalism is an excluding system, while democracy tends to be inclusive--votes for everyone, health and education for everyone. For a while democracy braked and partially held back capitalism. Now capitalism, free of political controls, is threatening to put and end to democracy.

What? Look, doofus, capitalism is not only an ECONOMIC system but the only effective one. Democracy is a POLITICAL system. You could have a (mostly) capitalist democracy (the US), a capitalist dictatorship (Pinochet), a Socialist democracy (Sweden, more or less), or a Socialist dictatorship (the USSR). The United States has plenty of brakes on unscrupulous people who misuse the capitalist system, like the Federal Reserve system, the IRS, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the insider-trading laws, the regulation of banks and insurance companies, the regulation of corporations, the antitrust laws, the laws allowing labor unions and collective bargaining, the Treasury Department, the contract-enforcing judicial system, and an extremely long etcetera.

As for votes for everyone, of course. That's democracy. Health care and education for everyone--that's not democracy, that's the welfare state. Don't confuse the two. Now, it is true that I support access for everyone to health care and education, and that's what we've got in the States--sure, a lot of the public schools suck, and only old people (Medicare) and poor people (Medicaid) get government-subsidized health care. You can't be turned away from an emergency room, though. The American welfare-state system could be improved and I yell and scream about it all the time, but it does exist. Most European countries have considerably more generous welfare-state systems than the US, but it's just a lie to imply that capitalism implies no government spending on welfare.

More fertile ground for the new Fascism would be this: human beings, at least today's Occidentals, can be defined as an "insecure animal" And the two great principles of modernity and democracy--the dignity and the liberty of man--imply a sizable dose of insecurity, risk, and trouble as part of human life. Maybe this insecurity is what puts the idea of preventive war, which is not new, into circulation: "We have the moral obligation, we have the obligation to our people, to kill those people who, with no doubt, will kill us." These are not the words of Bush or one of his idolators. They are from a speech by Himmler in 1943. But they coincide with Bush in two points: the "moral duty" to kill and the "no doubt" which justifies it--Saddam Hussein had, without a doubt, weapons of mass destruction.

Oh boy. Comparing Bush with Himmler, huh? That's a new low. It's really obscene, not to mention ignorant. The current War on Terrorism, of which Afghanistan was the first campaign and Iraq the second, is not a preventive war. It was started on September 11, 2001, in case you don't remember, and it's nowhere near finished yet. Second, Himmler was talking about the moral duty to massacre people because of their religion, which is of course sickening; Bush is talking about his sworn duty to defend the United States. Himmler wanted to kill as many Jews as he could; Bush wants to kill as few as possible of anybody who isn't actively fighting for the terrorists and the rogue states.

By the way, all animals are insecure. The rabbit never knows when the fox or hawk is going to get him. Humans today, at least outside Africa, are more secure than they have ever been. A Westerner today is about as safe as any animal has ever been in history; not too many rabbits or foxes or hawks die of old age. And Saddam did have weapons of mass destruction. He used them on the Iranians and the Kurds, and the Boston Globe is reporting that he ordered chemical weapons to be used against Allied troops in the March-April war.

Another factor could be the current "culture of demotivation" that the mass media broadcasts. The people sometimes intuits the danger and protests or goes out in the streets for a few days. But if time is allowed to pass, the people ends up getting tired. Then they can admit freely that they lied: that there was no solid evidence to attack Iraq, that the only solid thing was the desire to drop bombs. The lie will be admitted without anybody's feeling obligated to resign. And when lies become installed in public life, democracy is very threatened.

The fact is that issues like the Iraq war don't affect the people of Spain at all, except for making them somewhat safer in the long run, which they generally don't recognize. There are no immediate benefits or losses for the Spaniards relating to this issue, so a little bit of feel-good, we're-so-moral protesting went on. It was more of a fashion statement than compassion for the Iraqi or Afghani peoples; I still remember TV slut Yola Berrocal showing up on Tele 5 wearing only a bikini, with a "No War" sticker hanging off her tit. If something really affected the lives of Spaniards, like the ETA, you'd see mass demonstrations all over the place. Which you see. It's Maslow's hierarchy; if you've got enough to eat and a place to live and physical safety for yourself, then you can allow yourself to spend your energy demonstrating against the damn Yankees because it makes you feel good about yourself.

But what this people wants is not to struggle (the struggle for life is already tiring enough), but some idol to cheer for and some gadget to become idiotized by. It doesn't matter of they're Beckhams today or Butraguenos tomorrow; modern man needs to identify himself with some social legend in order to feel positive about himself and accept himself peacefully. But when a people has lost its sensitivity to measure the level of its own ridiculousness (the Beckham case), the immunological system of the society is threatened.

Well, sure, there's a lot of stress these days, but "struggle for life"? In Spain, where if you're hungry or homeless it's not the government's fault, life is less of a struggle than anywhere else in history. That's why people can afford to waste time going to public demonstrations instead of, say, digging up worms. And plenty of ridiculous ephemeral shit goes on all the time in any society that can afford it. Methinks that what Nacho is really complaining about is that the lumpenproletariat has plenty of money and spare time, two things that Western democracy and capitalism have provided them with, and they choose to spend their excess money buying tacky garbage they don't need and their excess time absorbed by bad television. Set up the re-education camps! Nacho's in town, and it's 24 hours straight of documentaries about Peruvian fishermen and Social Realist theater! He knows what's best for you!

Some symptoms of this Fascism might be the discredit of democracy, fallen into the hands of the BBA (I'm not referring to any bank but to the trio Bush, Berlusconi, Aznar) Or the different way in which the United States believes that justice should be administered whether we are dealing with alleged American criminals (the negative to the International Criminal Court) or those from other countries (the cases of Guantanamo and Iraq) Typical of all forms of fascism faw the practice of preventive prisons with no judicial process against those who are suspicious or opponents: and now the Department of Justice is justifying the admitted violations of human rights in Guantanamo as necessary to prevent new terrorist acts.

So the United States, Bush, Aznar, and Berlusconi are all Fascists? What the hell definition of Fascism is Nacho using? I thought it had something to do with absolute dictatorship and the (non-capitalist) corporative state, neither of which accurately describes the aovementioned four. (I will freely admit that I think Berlusconi's a crook, but he did get elected, and he's PM of Italy until their judicial system gets him.) As for human rights and Guantanamo, that's a red herring. Nobody's being mistreated there; the Russian citizens--probably mostly Chechens--imprisoned at Gitmo want to stay instead of being sent home to face the music there. What the Gitmo prisoners are is illegal bearers of arms caught in the act. In the old days they'd have been shot out of hand. Today we're not sure what to do with them, but we do know if we turn 'em loose they'll be back in business as fast as a Barcelona mugger.

Oh, yeah, the US problem with the ICC is that a bunch of jokers like you, Nacho, would immediately trump up charges against anyone ever involved with the US government and military. We prefer to try our own citizens, thank you. That's called national sovereignty, which you yourself, Nacho, are so fond of defending when it comes to Cuba or Iraq.

That's enough. If I translate any more of this shit I'll puke. Nacho is really spiteful and hateful, isn't he? I've never read anything angrier with less reason. My guess is he's a transferred nationalist and his base loyalty is to communism and the Soviet Union. The collapse of his dream, everything he spent his life working for, has left him with no God except the one up there he probably doesn't really believe in, and as a dialectical materialist he has a Manichean point of view about good and evil (good: the Party line, evil: everything else). His God's dead but his Satan, the United States, is stronger than ever.

He does mention, toward the end of the article, that Martin Niemoller said, "When they came for the Communists, I wasn't a Communist, so they said nothing. When they came for the union men, I wasn't a union man, so I said nothing. When they came for me there was nobody left to say anything." Well, actually, if I remember correctly, Niemoller mentioned those damn Jews at the top of his list. Nacho has intentionally falsified a quote.

Big stink in San Sebastian. The pro-ETA psychopaths ("la izquierda abertzale") had a demo yesterday. The Basque Interior Department (law enforcement) tried to ban the demo on the grounds that it might provoke violence or rioting. The Basque Supreme Court overruled Interior on Saturday on the grounds that there was no evidence that the demo was organized by Batasuna, ETA's political branch; the permit to demonstrate was applied for by a private citizen. The Mayor of San Sebastian, the Socialist Odon Elorza, says the Basque Supremes are nuts.

So the psychopaths had themselves a lovely time, shouting "Gora ETA!" over and over in the public streets. Arnaldo Otegi, ETA-Batasuna's spokesman, the most hated person in Spain, gave a fiery speech in which he said there would have been no deaths or bombs if "ETA's proposal to advance toward a national, democratic space for the Basque people had been accepted". Sounds to me like he's speaking in the name of ETA. I'd arrest him and charge him with apology for terrorism, which is illegal here, and then lock his ass up. (Note: in this context "apology" doesn't mean saying sorry, it means arguing in favor of.) Three psychopaths with their faces covered, which is also against the law here, came out on stage and torched a Spanish flag, which is also illegal. Otegi's comment was "Wow, the Spanish flag sure stinks".

Now, I'm not big on symbols. I think burning the American flag or any other national symbol (as long as you bought your own flag to burn) ought to be legal, and I do not think that a secular society ought to protect religious symbols. Of course, if you knock down some church's cross because you hate Christians, for example, then we bust you for vandalism and property destruction and anything else we can throw at you, but we don't bust you for desecration, because that shouldn't be a crime if you're torching your own Star of David or whatever. We consider you a bigot and an asshole, but that symbol is your property and you can do whatever you want with it.

I do think that burning the Spanish flag, though, shows hate for both Spain and the Spanish people. Sure, it ought to be legal. It's also despicable and shows exactly what kind of people we're dealing with here.

I think recall, initiative, and referendum elections are absolutely ridiculous, a system of procedures thought up during the Progressive / Populist era that should have been tossed out with all that other lefty World War One-era crap like the laws which restricted banks to only one state or the various laws against chain stores or, for God's sake, Prohibition.

My major problem with this system is that it smacks of too much democracy. Yep, you heard me right, too much direct democracy. We are a representative democracy, which means you vote for the people who make the laws; you don't make the laws yourself.

The purpose of representation is that one person is elected to be the voice of everybody in an area, and then all the people's elected representatives get together and make laws, restricted by the Constitution. What this does is eliminate the "Let's kill Socrates" danger of mobocracy.

It is also supposed to allow the elected representatives a certain amount of time to make policies work; you're elected for two or four or six years and one of the consequences of this is political stability rather than the indecisiveness of a government that can be thrown out on a whim. Recall elections make it impossible for political leaders to implement unpopular but necessary policies.

Recall, initiative, and referendum are all procedures that interfere with the functioning of representative democracy. Initiative and referendum takes the right to legislate away from the legislature and puts it in direct popular hands. Recall allows an unpopular elected official (not one who has behaved criminally--crooks shouldn't be removed by recall, they should be removed by impeachment and prosecution) to be removed before the end of his term.

The only thing I ever learned in philosophy class was Immanuel Kant's Categorical Imperative. It says, more or less, that any action you do that you wouldn't be willing for anybody else to do is immoral. Would you be willing to live in a society where everybody pissed in the street? No, you wouldn't, so your pissing in the street is unethical.

Would we be willing to have the President subjected to recall elections? Are you nuts? Of course not. Adams, Madison, and JQA would all have been recalled. Lincoln would have been recalled in 1862. Truman would have been recalled in 1951. The Seventies would have been a series of recall elections. Reagan might very well have been recalled in 1982 and 1987, and Clinton might have been in 1994 and certainly would have been in 1998. Right now there would be plenty of leftists willing to sign a Recall Bush petition. Boy, that'd give the world confidence in steady, responsible American leadership. What it would do is require the President to follow the polls slavishly, much more so than they do now.

Since we don't want recall elections for President, we don't want them for any other post, either. If you still don't like your elected representative when regular election time comes around, that's when you speak out against him and support some other candidate.

The Europeans are having a lovely time making fun of this California circus, which is what they're calling it and what it is. For once the Vanguardia is right when it bashes America. I don't care how much you hate Gray Davis, he did get elected governor, he is not a crook so you can't impeach him, and he gets to serve out his term. That's the way it ought to work, anyway.

Here are a couple of pieces from the Weekly Standard on the oil business and the Saudis. Check 'em out.

Hey, guess what? We're twice as popular as Howard Dean! That's right, according to N.Z. Bear's Blogosphere Ecosystem, we have 59 incoming links while Howard Dean's 2004 Call to Action, or whatever it is, only has 30. Twice as many bloggers think we're worth reading as think Governor Mean is!

So why are all the damn journalists following him around instead of me?

Remember: Vermont has what, around 400,000 people? That means managing that state is about as hard as being mayor of Kansas City--no, actually, much easier, since the KC mayor has to deal with a rotten school system, a high crime rate, several significant and difficult-to-deal-with interest groups, and keeping General Motors, US Sprint, and the GSA happy so they won't move away and take all our jobs.

In Vermont they can waste the State Lege's time debating about gay marriage. In KC the City Council has to deal with things that are much more basic, like what are we doing to reduce the murder rate on the east side or how in the hell can we get some more money without raising taxes again?

The Vangua's big front-page headline today refers to the "Iraqi resistance". There is no Iraqi resistance. There are a bunch of Fedayeen / Baath / Saddamites running around commiting crimes and terrorist acts within a small parcel of land to the west of Baghdad. These people are not patriots. Tikrit Tommy Alcoverro keeps going on about the humiliation of the millenarian Iraqi people. The smart ones consider themselves liberated from a bloody dictator. And if I were Iraqi, what I'd feel humiliated about is that such a scumball had been governing my country for so long and that the native opposition to said scumball hadn't managed to get rid of him. Besides, what Iraqi people? Iraq is three old Ottoman provinces stuck together artificially after World War I as part of the worst peace settlement of all time. Would Tikrit Tommy have written a bunch of stories about the supposed humiliation of the Germans and the Japanese in 1945?

The Vangua is also trying to split the alliance by praising the British troops around Basra for being culturally sensitive while blasting the Yanks for being arrogant and imperialistic for driving around Baghdad and Tikrit and Fallujah with guns. There is a reason for that: as I said before, all of the violence is in a small area near Baghdad where the people are from Saddam's clan and served as his power base. There is no violence in the British occupation area in the south or in the American occupation zone of Kurdistan in the north, because all those people are thrilled beyond relief to be rid of Saddam. It's only the hardcore Saddamites, who were just as bad as he was, who are shooting at the Americans.

First major fire of the year in Catalonia; they had to evacuate a couple of thousand people up in Massanet. It's well under control now. This is going to be a very bad summer for forest fires, since we're still under the heat wave; in interior Spain it's well over 38ºC (100ºF) every day, and it's around 45º in interior Andalusia and Extremadura. There are no signs of a break in the heat for another week. The forests are dry and ready to burn. About the only good thing, speaking aguaficially, is that there's no threat of a water shortage except in the southeast, since the reservoirs got nice and filled up during the wet winter and spring.

Media feeding frenzy news story: two miners got trapped by a collapse in a coal mine in El Bierzo, a mining region of Leon. It took them more than two days to dig these guys out, but they made it and the two miners survived.

Everybody's blaming the bombing of the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad on Ansar-el-Islam, a terrorist group with connections both to Saddam and Al Qaeda. Come on, people, it is NOT a wacko conspiracy theory to say that there is a loose alliance between Islamic terrorist gangs and Islamic rogue states.

The Vangua printed some crap that they got directly from the French Consulate on how the Americans are going into Liberia in order to get a stranglehold on West African oil. Uh, MM. les Grenouilles, that's like saying we went into Kosovo in order to corner the market on goulash. Liberia is an awful long way away from where there's any oil. That's Nigeria you're thinking of, the country with all the oil there.

There are also a couple of nuts from the Vangua, one of whom is the X-man, who say they see some weird shadowy shapes on the fuselage of one of the airplanes that crashed into the World Trade Center. They demand an explanation. How about this one: Those shapes are an optical illusion. You guys are crazy. Get a real life. I know there's August and not much real news but don't just make stuff up.

Here's an article from Fox News on fat pussycats. All of ours are in pretty good shape (Oscar's doing much better. By the way, the Hill's Prescription didn't acidify his pee so we changed brands to Royal Canin and it did) although they're indoor cats, of course. The article suggests taking your cat for a walk on a leash. Yeah, right, in Barcelona that's sure a great idea.

The fat cat is my mother-in-law's, Fidel. (I named him Fidel Cat-tro.) He's huge. He just wandered into her town, Vallfogona, looking pretty skinny and beat-up, and she took him in. He very quickly caught on to the concept "I been poor and I been rich, and honey, rich is better." He has vowed that he will never go hungry again and so he eats everything he can find and demands more. He's probably about a twenty-pounder, maybe a little more. Boy, is he a tub of goo. When he sits down you can't see his back feet, only his Friskies gut bulging out.

This is La Vanguardia's page two signed editorial from yesterday. Now, in Spanish and Catalan politics, the Vangua is a tolerably good and not overly prejudiced source. They really are pretty moderate; if you're a non-extremist CiU or PSC voter, they're up your alley. They don't much like the PP, though they respect Aznar, and they're not big fans of the Republican Left or the Communists, either.

When the Vanguardia turns on a Socialist leader, it's all over. Zap has been getting slammed by the standard right-wing papers, ABC, El Mundo, and La Razon, and that's understandable, but the Vangua doesn't slam a Socialist until it's pretty clear he's a loser.

Historical note: Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile completed the Reconquest of the Iberian Penuinsula in 1492, conquering the Nazari kingdom of Boabdil with its capital in Granada.

Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero is spending a few days of rest with his family in Granada. There he'll have the meditate about the devastating effects that the lack of leadership, the internal "family" struggles between the Muslims themselves, and, above all, the implacable efficiency and military discipline of the Castilian-Aragonese troops had on the Nazari Muslim kingdom. Boabdil, as we know, had to sign the surrender before the Catholic Monarchs and turn over the keys of the Alhambra before the scorn of the last sultan's own mother: "Don't cry like a woman over what you couldn't defend as a man," they say she snarled at her own son. In his vacation refuge in the Granadan town Almunecar, Zapatero must meditate over whether he has confronted the terrible crisis of credibility that having so many public officials whose real job is that of a property-development agent is causing the Socialist Party. Far from grabbing hold of the tiller, the Socialist leader seems to have opted to wait, probably because he is desperate. But he should not forget that inaction is lethal when you are facing Jose Maria Aznar, whose political discourse--despite his manners--and propaganda machine are just as effective as Ferdinand the Catholic's troops against the indecisive and defenseless Nazari sovereign.

Zap is toast. I mean, getting compared with Boabdil around here is like, I dunno, who's the biggest loser in American history? Jefferson Davis? Cornwallis? Walter Mondale? The '62 Mets?

Here's Mark Steyn on New York's new public Gay High School. This is a terrible idea. The last thing we need are more barriers keeping people apart.

The pro-segregationists' argument is that gay kids are bullied in normal high schools, so they'll be better off if they're only exposed to other gay kids. This is, of course, not precisely the best way to help people get along better with one another. Also, it's reminiscent of real-estate agents' arguments for promoting de facto residential segregation: "Oh, black people will be more comfortable around other black people anyway, so it's in their interest if we steer them toward black neighborhoods."

Here's Steyn's comeback:

...If it's unrealistic to expect Mayor Bloomberg's schools to crack down on bullying, wouldn't it be more cost-effective just to move all the bullies into Bully High School?

There they can bully each other to their hearts' content--or, as the educators would say, celebrate their identity in a purpose-built mutually threatening learning environment.

He's absolutely right. The main reason why public schools don't work any more is that they're full of kids who don't want to be there. Get them out of there. At age 14, eighth grade, you're old enough to get a job. If you don't give a crap about school, leave.

It's those students who don't care about learning who wreck the whole system. They're the ones who disrupt classes, the ones who attack and curse at teachers, the ones who bring their gang fights inside school walls, the ones who pick on anyone weaker than they are, the ones who make the "too cool for school" attitude de rigueur, and the ones who make it hard for the people who want to be there to learn anything in a regular high school, much less a high school in a tough neighborhood.

Get the bullies and the toughs and the punks out of the schools at age fourteen. If they can't read, that's their problem. (As a society, of course, we must provide adult education for those who somehow fell behind as children; I'll bet at least a few of our bullies will sign up for that around age 17 or 18 after three years working at Mickey D's.) They don't want to be in school, so give 'em job training if they want it and if not, turn 'em loose.

Note on Steyn: I like him a lot, but he has a real fixation on continuously reminding us of his heterosexuality. This is probably because everyone just assumes all theater critics are gay, but it seems to really bother him big time.

Seems there have been quite a few gay issues in the news recently, what with the Episcopalians' gay bishop (hey, it's their business, they're a private religious organization, if they want to make Saddam Hussein a bishop they can, and if you don't like it go join the Catholics); the gay marriage hoo-haw (I'm for it as long as they have to go through the same divorce crap straights do when they break up, including the high court costs. That'll cut way back on the number of gays who want to get married and make sure it's limited to people with real commitments instead of people who just want to get married as a political statement); and the Vatican's recent pronouncement (it's a private religious organization, the Pope can say whatever he wants and that's the deal. That's been official policy for a couple thousand years. If you don't like it, go join the Episcopalians.)

One final note on Gay High: I can't help but think that a few homosexuals are in favor of the public gay high school because of clannishness. I know several gay people--as an English teacher, I couldn't avoid it even if I wanted to--who do not like to be around straights unless they are in a position of control. There are two guys at my old school who refuse to treat straight male colleagues courteously. Fair enough, if they want to be bigots it's their problem, but I do not think this attitude is extremely rare, and I do not like gay separatists any more than I like any other kind of bigot. I also don't think it's any coincidence that these two guys are extreme left-wingers politically.

Check out this article from today's El Periodico, Barcelona's working-class paper. It's titled "Three million innocents", and it's about the Parque Guell, the park designed by Antoni Gaudi up the hill above Gracia, half a mile or so from our place. The Parque Guell is a major tourist attraction, and well it should be.

Something strange is happening at the Parque Guell, comments Carlos, one of the regulars at Gaudi's oasis. His opinion counts, he says, because he's been coming here every day for years, above all in the morning. He stays here until about three in the afternoon, he says, because that's when the tourists begin to disappear. It would be better not to reveal why he loves strolling through the park, spending so much time among the mosaics, with the sun beating down on the central plaza where there are no trees. We can't take a photo, either, in order to conserve his anonymity, his secret, and his business.

That is, Carlos is a thief. There are plenty up there.

He doesn't believe in plots or conspiracies, but he knows all about what's happening in the park, where three million visitors came last year during the Gaudi Year. Some days more Japanese come, some days more Europeans, and there are a few days when there is suddenly an American invasion. He doesn't know whether it's because a cruise ship just docked in the port, or whether there is a convention that attracts a lot of Yanquis (sic).

And then, the days that the Americans are wandering around among the magic of Gaudi, the clothing of the policemen in the park changes. The Municipal Police (who are good for nothing except giving out parking tickets) practically disappear and in their place members of the National Police (real cops) multiply.

That is, says Carlos, some Big Brother is watching, though there are barely a few police videocameras in the Parque Guell. It angers him, this is true, that apparently George Bush's citizens deserve more protection than the rest. But protection against what?

The pickpockets and other unscrupulous crooks aren't afraid of uniforms, whether they belong to the National Police or the Municipal Police. To them, those three million visitors are an appetizing market, because they mean a million bags and backpacks, two million cameras, almost three million wallets, and several million tons of innocence and absent-mindedness.

Their favorite places to work are among the crowds around the interminable mosaic bench and at the few outdoor cafes selling drinks and food that the park has. But the worst place, for tourists, is around the back gate, where those who have chosen the Metro arrive. (Those who use the Bus Turistic go in through the front gate and tour buses park near a side gate at the Carretera del Carmel.) Those who use the metro get off at Lesseps or Vallcarca and, after climbing the Bajada de La Gloria, what they find is the misery of a threatening knife.

Check out this "diversity"-related atrocity from the Wall Street Journal. At a university? Some government bureau? Nope, it's the NFL.

Here's the CNN report on the wave of fires in Southern Europe. Fortunately none of them are happening anywhere near here, but Portugal's on fire and Prime Minister Durao Barroso has declared the whole country a disaster area. Fires are also burning out of control in southwestern Spain, in Huelva and Extremadura and Salamanca. People have died, at least 11 in Portugal and at least three in Spain. And the weather is going to be just as hot and dry as it already has been. No changes this week, anyway.

It looks like the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta is serious, that the death toll is going to be high. I'll bet ten-to-one it's an Al Qaeda job, showing how their reach has been reduced; they can't attack in Europe or North America, so they strike in places like Indonesia where security is much weaker. I'm advocating more of the same security policies that seem to be working, with one exception: I don't see anything wrong with ethnic profiling. My appearance fits the profile for someone who smokes dope and I often get checked when traveling. Doesn't bother me. I like security on airplanes.

FC Barcelona has announced that its losses over the last season added up to €150 million, which is just a hell of a lot of money for a sports team. Barca's total debt is about €220 million; a typical yearly budget for the club is between €125 and €150m. They owe a lot of money to the taxman and they're writing off all the loser players they spent too much money on, so that's a major depreciation hit. €36 million for Marc Overmars! And that's not including his big fat salary. Dani, Alfonso, Bonano, and Enke are all going to go, too, and De Boer, Geovanni, Rochemback, and Christianval are all gone. Remember just a couple of weeks ago they unconditionally released Christianval and ate the €16 million he cost. He'll catch on in the Swiss league or something major like that.

The team so far looks like this: Rustu in goal; Puyol, Marquez, Cocu, and Oscar Lopez on defense; Quaresma, Xavi, and Gerard in midfield; and Kluivert, Ronaldinho, and Saviola at forward. Luis Enrique is finally going out of the starting lineup; about time. That guy can only play about 30-45 minutes a game before he breaks. He should be the first sub coming off the bench rather than a regular starter. Overmars is going to ride the pine a good bit, too. They're still trying to sign someone to play left defense; Fernando Navarro is still injured from last season, and Lopez is even younger and more inexperienced than he is. They'd like to sign Gabriel Heinze from Paris St-Germain to play there. Meanwhile, they're trying to get rid of Riquelme, who has said he'll only play loaned out to Boca Juniors. Boca won't pay his full salary, though, which is a problem.

Two well-known Spanish cycling teams, ONCE and Banesto, are going out of business. This is an opportunity for some American company to set up a team around Tyler Hamilton. A good-sized budget for a cycling team is about five million bucks. For ten million they could sign Hamilton and Levi Leipheimer, and they could pick up Spaniards Joseba Beloki, Igor Galdeano, and Ibon Mayo, and then fill out the team with a couple of tough Americans and two or three very good Spaniards. You'd win some stages with that team and you'd be really competitive in the team standings. Maybe you couldn't beat Lance, but you could beat everyone else.

And, the thing is, an American major league sports team would cost you hundreds of millions of dollars to buy. But you could set up a competitive cycling team for five million bucks a year. And for ten million, you'd have the best team out there. This would be a good investment for a company like Coca-Cola, which wants to push its image in Europe. At the same time, cycling is becoming more popular in America, what with the fitness trend and Armstrong's publicity. I think it would be ad money well spent, since you'd get your name on the front pages of all Europe's sports papers every single day.

I posted this in the Comments section and I actually did some research for it, so I thought I'd post it up here too.

I'm assuming that the more money that is spent on books in a language is an indicator of the strength and influence of that language's culture(s)--that is, the bigger the market, the more competition there is, and the more competition there is, the higher the average quality of works in that language is going to be. Thus many works are translated from English and few are translated from Cambodian.

It makes sense that since many more quality works originally in English are available than in any other language, there's not that big a market for foreign books in translation in English-speaking countries, and only the very best get translated to English.

However, in a country like Finland, which produces many fewer original works in its own language, there's going to be a much bigger market for translated books, and I bet at least half of them are translated from English.

According to El Pais Anuario, of the ten biggest bestsellers in Spain in 2002, six were by English-language authors (Tolkien, Ken Follett, Katherine Neville, Arthur Golden, J.K. Rowling, Noah Gordon). They also have a list called "Most Read Authors". I have no idea how they calculate that, but Stephen King and Frank McCourt are on that one, too.

That is, the English language produces many very professional high-quality books aimed at the lowbrow-middlebrow audience that are translated to languages around the world, just like it does in cinema. No other language does that. Middlebrow-lowbrow works written in other languages are not translated to English. Why should we read foreign crap? Our own crap is better. We only translate the very best foreign stuff.

Note that none of the abovementioned authors exactly form part of the Western canon. The more prestigious American authors--Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Thomas Pynchon, Richard Ford, T.C. Boyle, Cormac McCarthy, and the like--are not bestsellers in translation in Spain any more than they are in the States.

Miguel de Cervantes is also on El Pais's "Most Read" list, which is why I take said list with several pounds of salt.

Kaleboel links to this excellent webpage called "Street Scams in Barcelona". I've never seen it before, but it's been around for seven years and is full of first-person testimonials.
Petty street crime in Barcelona has always been bad, but it's gotten worse over about the last three or four years now. Violence, now rare, has become common. You will not be murdered--I have never heard of a tourist being murdered in Barcelona, a city with only 40-50 murders a year, almost all domestic violence. You WILL, however be a target of Barcelona street criminals while here. Somebody WILL try to take you off, no matter how cautious you think you're being or how travel-savvy you think you are.

Some British guy (his name is Terrence, so he ain't from, say, Indiana) on the Street Scams thread suggests that one should avoid dressing like an American tourist. Doesn't matter. They'll pick you out as a tourist anyway, no matter if you're wearing the Official Grayish-Black Barcelona Uniform or not. He also suggests that one should not talk to strangers in Barcelona, just as one would not talk to strangers in Atlanta or Chicago. Terrence has it just the wrong way around: Americans WOULD talk to strangers in Atlanta or Chicago, because anywhere travelers go--the downtown streets, the tourist attractions, the shopping areas, attractive restaurants and bars, airports--in the United States is safe. Bad things in America happen in places far away from where tourists or business travelers go. The problem is that bad things in Barcelona happen exactly where tourists go.

Most of the city is very safe from petty crime. But the tourist areas are definitely not. All of the Old City, inside the Rondas south of Pl. Catalunya between Paralelo and the Parque Ciudadela, is dangerous; so are the areas around the Parque Guell and the Sagrada Familia.

Remember that ninety-seven percent of Spaniards are wonderful folks, but the Spaniards who earn their livings dealing with moron-tourists are not. They deal with so many morons that they assume all foreign tourists are morons. Even if you're not, you will be treated like one. The locals will give you no sympathy if you get taken off on the Ramblas. If you somehow get in trouble away from the Old City, though, the people you'll deal with aren't used to dealing with moron-tourists and so will consider you to be a real person.

How to Avoid Being a Victim

1. Stay in a hotel and eat in restaurants outside the Old City. The Eixample, Sarria, St. Gervasi, and Gracia are all very nice and outside the high-crime areas. Sure it's more expensive. It's cheaper in the long run. And the food's better because real locals eat in those places up there.
2. When going touristing in the Old City, leave everything in the hotel safe. Bring a twenty-euro note and a disposable camera. No passport, no credit cards, no fancy equipment, just enough for a sandwich and a cup of coffee.
3. Watch your ass when arriving with your bags and leaving with them. That's when you are most vulnerable. By the way, travel light.
4. Avoid gypsies and Arabs. Assume they are thieves until proven otherwise. And don't stay around them long enough to give them a chance to prove anything. Damn right I'm prejudiced.
5. Avoid anyone who stops you and tries to get your attention, especially if you are in a car anywhere or on foot in the Old City. Let 'em get the time or a light or directions from someone else. Just shrug and move on. If the person becomes insistent, move on really fast.
6. Don't give any money to street performers, and don't stop and watch them. That's when your pocket gets picked.

Scams and Robbery Techniques They've Tried on Me

1. Mustard-on-your-shirt scam
2. Gypsy-women with carnations scam (dozens of times--just get away)
3. Asking-for-directions scam
4. Asking you the time scam
5. Asking for a cigarette scam
6. That American woman who begs near the Plaza del Pi
7. Asking for a few euros for a train ticket (maybe 200 times)
8. Trying to grab your card at an ATM
9. Offering to "give" you a cigarette lighter
10. Trying to pick your pocket in the subway (uncountable times)
11. Begging with doped dogs as alms bait (uncountable times)
12. The "football scam"--one kid shows you Ronaldo's moves while another robs you
13. Surrounding you and overpowering you (four or five times--never got me but two friends, yes. One guy whacked me with a metal bar while I was getting away.)
14. Taking you down with a stranglehold from behind (twice. It worked once.)

Two that I haven't seen mentioned yet:

1. They say they're from a school for the deaf and show you some phony ID. Then they sell you some fifty-cent piece of leather crap for five euros. I have seen this scam in both Madrid and Barcelona.

2. They set up a "petition drive" and ask people to sign against drugs or against AIDS or something else that everybody's against. While you are signing and your attention is distracted, your pocket will be picked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Relative Cultural Power of Languages

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

Book Sales, 1999, millions of dollars

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

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

3. Japanese $9,913m

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

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

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

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

8. Italian $2,658m

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

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

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

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

Per Capita Book Sales, 1999, in dollars

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

Feel free to read anything you want into this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's Andy Robinson in today's Vanguardia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then Joe McCarthy appeared on the political scene.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's Emory University historian Harvey Klehr:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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