La Vanguardia has given its featured space on the letters to the editor page to one Juan López de Uralde, the executive director of Greenpeace Spain. López slams Bjorn Lomborg ad hominem, claiming that Lomborg is a liar when he said he was a former member of Greenpeace. In fact, Lomborg never appeared on any official Greenpeace membership list. Says López, "In order that Lomborg's media strategy function, it is basic that he present himself as a "repentant ecologist". He knows why he had to invent a past he does not have." In other words, it's a conspiracy! Typical Spanish logic.

Lomborg's response is that he believed that a person like him who gave money and support to Greenpeace and went to meetings and protests and signed petitions and the like was a member. Lomborg was never on any Greenpeace list of official members, but the Greenpeace organization includes only a hard core of a few dozen cadres in each country where it is present as official members--and they make all the decisions. Very few Greenpeace activists are actually members with a voice in the organization.

Also, Lomborg does not present himself as a "repentant ecologist". He is an environmentalist. He simply believes that the environmental movement would be much better off if it stuck to the facts rather than using scare tactics.

López also says, "The book "The Skeptical Environmentalist" has been denounced in Denmark for "faults of scientific rigor" by the Public Committee in charge of guaranteeing the rigor of scientific publications."

This is Lomborg's statement on his website:

"The Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty (DSCD) have finally ended their case on March 12, 2004, rejecting the original complaints. They have decided that the original decision is invalid and has ended any further inquiry.

The Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation has, on December 17, 2003, repudiated findings by the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty (DSCD) that Bjørn Lomborg’s book “The Skeptical Environmentalist” was “objectively dishonest” or “clearly contrary to the standards of good scientific practice”.

The Ministry, which is responsible for the DSCD, has released a highly critical assessment of the Committee’s January 7 ruling. The Ministry finds that the DCSD judgment was not backed up by documentation, and was “completely void of argumentation” for the claims of dishonesty and lack of good scientific practice.

The Ministry characterises the DCSD’s treatment of the case as “unsatisfactory”, “deserving criticism”, and “emotional” and points out a number of significant errors. The DSCD's verdict has been remitted."

So. Mr. López of Greenpeace has slandered Mr. Lomborg, accusing him of having ulterior, hidden, conspiratorial motivations behind his statements and publications, calling him a liar regarding his environmentalist activist past, and saying that the Danish Committee on scientific dishonesty has censured Lomborg's book without mentioning that said committee's censure has been repudiated by the government ministry in charge of that committee.

What I find interesting is that Mr. López of Greenpeace didn't bother to come up with one factual argument to rebut Mr. Lomborg's position.

Also, if we want to go ad hominem, Greenpeace is a wonderful target. Greenpeace was indicted in a US court for criminal conspiracy in 2003. Greenpeace has been accused in the US of money laundering--of transferring tax-free donations to a non-tax-free subsidiary without paying the required taxes. The Greenpeace organization has been repeatedly criticized for its lack of transparency and the dictatorial control that its cadres exercise over it. Greenpeace is a big business; it takes in more than half a billion dollars every year, including contributions from major foundations such as Merck and Rockefeller. Greenpeace has repeatedly broken the law in its protests and endangered the lives of both its activists and others.

No links, of course. However, I suggest Googling the words Greenpeace, indictment, money laundering, foundations, membership, and transparency. There's a lot of interesting stuff out there.

You may be wondering how La Vanguardia gets away with publishing crap like this letter or Ramon Aymerich's article. The answer is that nobody from the outside ever reads it or has the slightest idea what kind of libels it is spreading, so it never gets sued. Yet 200,000 Spaniards read it every day and, presumably, believe it. No wonder most of them are gibbering imbeciles when it comes to economics, politics, and any other significant issue. And La Vanguardia is probably the best newspaper in Spain. Imagine what people who read El País believe.

Here's another "Modern Parents" by John Fardell out of the latest issue of the British comic Viz.

The Ethically Aware Parents Group are having a cookout; we can see boxes marked "Vegan Garlic Burgers", "Whole-Grain Garlic Rolls", and "Eco-Friendly Charcoal". They all have scraggly beards (if male), nose rings (if female), and are dressed ethnically. Meanwhile, Tarquin and the other children are off behind the shed cooking up some sausages and hamburgers.

Malcolm: I hope the young people have got plenty of sunblock on...the global warming's really bad today.
Nigel: Yes, this sunny weather just isn't natural. We never used to get hot weather in July.
Malcolm: I know. Just think of what this is doing to the polar ice caps.
Trevor: The icebergs will go extinct.
Sylvia: All the planet's rainforest regions will turn into barren deserts.
Cressida: All the Earth's water vapor must be escaping out through the hole in the ozone layer.

Nigel: I blame Western science.
Daphne: Absolutely. And now all these polluting scientists are pretending to be environmentally concerned. It makes me sick!
Trevor: All scientists are white middle-class males. That's the problem.
Sylvia: If we all lived like the pre-industrial non-science-based peoples of the Third World, everything would be lovely. It's been scientifically proven.
Nigel: It's all to do with the Environmental Chaos Theory. If an extinct butterfly can't flap its wings in Borneo, you get a hurricane in Wales. It's been proven.
Daphne: I blame overpopulation.
Malcolm: Well, absolutely. All those millions of unwanted Thrid World people are breathing out far too much carbon dioxide. The planet can't sustain them.
Sarah: Western pharmaceutical companies have kept Third World populations artificially high so that they've got more people to sell their contraceptive pills to.
Cressida: That's right. These people are deprived of a scientific education so they don't understand the risks.
Sylvia: When we went to see the Taj Mahal, there was hardly room to stand.

Nigel: Now it's starting to rain! It isn't natural. We never used to get rain in July.
Malcolm: I know. Just think of what all this rain is doing to the endangered butterflies in Borneo.
Trevor: Their wings will get too soggy to flap.
Daphne: The rain will cause sea levels to rise. Half of London will be underwater.
Cressida: All the planet's desert regions will turn into floodplains.
Sarah: All this rain must be pouring through the hole in the ozone layer.

Nigel: The earth has never seen such extreme weather as we see now. Mankind used to live in peaceful harmony with the elements.
Malcolm: Gaia, the Great Earth Spirit, is angry. Her forces of Nature are turning against mankind.
Sarah: It's all the fault of our Western consumerist society.
Trevor: Total environmental meltdown is just around the corner.
Cressida: Gaia will restore her eco-balance by wiping us all out with skin cancer, food shortages, and rising sea levels.

(Seven hundred years ago. Our ethically aware parents are m, s+tanding around outside a hut wearing fourteenth-century clothes.)

Proto-Nigel: The world hath never seen such extremities of weather as we do suffer now.
Proto-Malcolm: God is angry. Mankind hath incurred His great wrath.
Proto-Sarah: It be all the fault of our sinful ways of living.
Proto-Trevor: The end of the world is nigh.
Proto-Cressida: God will restore His order by destroying us all with plague, famine, and flood...

Not too subtle but a pretty good point.

La Vanguardia is particularly bad today. Asshole Andy Robinson has a "news" piece from New Madrid, Missouri, in which he conclusively demonstrates that midwestern Americans are a bunch of ignorant fanatical Jesus freaks. I hope Andy makes fun of the wrong guy in the wrong bar around those parts. He also denounces those midwesterners who dare to go to the Republican convention in the holy city of Manhattan, where they obviously should stay out of since progressive New Yorkers don't want them around. They're so gauche, you see.

One Ramon Aymerich has an article that exemplifies a lot of typical Spanish bad logic and bad faith in argument. It's about Bjorn Lomborg, whose book is well worth reading.

"The case of the Dane Bjorn Lomborg must be unique in the field of social science. A statistician of vaguely environmentalist beliefs in his youth, Lomborg switched sides after reading the economist Julian Simon. He wrote three articles in which he denies several basic assumptions of environmentalism: global warming, the lack of biodiversity, and deforestation. Collected in the book "The Skeptical Environmentalist", they brought him to fame."

Yeah. Lomborg slaughters an awful lot of environmentalist sacred cows in his book, and he does it with the same numbers and the same studies the environmentalists use. He does not investigate or do research; he is not a scientist. What he does is examine whether the conclusions that environmentalists draw from said studies and numbers are legitimate according to the laws of statistics and probability. He demonstrates conclusively, in my mind, that the environmentalists' conclusions are generally bogus. Lomborg shows that the panic over global warming, dimunition of biodiversity, and deforestation is greatly exaggerated.

"From the beginning, Lomborg has gained the hate of the ecologists and the enthusiasm of the businessmen who contribute the most to global warming. His theses are tranquilizingly simple: the environmental apocalypse has been exaggerated, there's nothing technology can't solve, and the market will decide how urgent these problems are when their costs have been quantified..."

An extremely common argument around here is to call an argument you disagree with simple or simplistic. Lomborg's arguments are anything but. His book references hundreds of studies with thousands of footnotes. Lomborg does say that those environmentalists howling disaster are wrong. He emphatically does not say that there's nothing technology can't solve; he says that technology will solve some problems and create others. Duh. The whole point of new technology is to be able to do something you couldn't do before--that is, solve a problem. And Lomborg is absolutely right when he says that any government making environmental laws needs to look at the economic costs and benefits thereof. Also, note that Aymerich has already begged a question when he says that those businessmen who contribute most to global warming support Lomborg's analyses. No, no, first you have to prove that global warming a) exists and b) is a problem before you go around accusing people of profiting by it. That would get you flunked out of Introduction to Logic where I went to school.

"...What if Lomborg really isn't the convert he pretends to be? And what if he were merely a professional sophist whose discourse is used now from the neocons' trenches in order to pulverize three decades of environmental research?"

What if you, Mr. Aymerich, stopped assuming everything is a conspiracy? What if you didn't insinuate that people who disagree with you have been bought off by the powers that be? What if Mr. Lomborg is a honest man who actually believes his analyses are correct? And note that Mr. Lomborg's theses are based on the statistical analysis of the studies published during a lot more than three decades of environmental research. Lomborg does not attack the studies. He attacks those who draw unwarranted conclusions from the studies because they don't know jack-shit about statistics and probability.

"Just like the Bush administration has questioned birth-control policies because of their Malthusian connotations, Lomborg is useful now to settle accounts with books free of all suspicion such as "The Limits of Growth" by the Club of Rome (1972) or the Carter administration's Global 2000 report (1980). The ideological swing is so strong that Lomborg's adepts' crusade against the theory of global warming is very similar to that which the fundamentalists began twenty years ago against the theories of Darwin."

Note Mr. Aymerich's use of guilt by association. If you agree with Bjorn Lomborg, you're doing so for ideological reasons, you're some kind of anti-Darwin fundamentalist, and you most likely are going to vote for George Bush. Lomborg's whole point is that statistics have no ideology and that if anyone's been manipulating the facts for ideological reasons, it has been the people who have shouted that the sky is falling based on faulty conclusions drawn from ignorance of mathematics. Does anyone understand that line about Bush and Malthus, by the way? Also, just one more point: Global 2000 and "The Limits to Growth" have both been long since discredited, mostly because everything they predicted was wrong.

"Lomborg's relevance--you guessed it--is in the opportunism of his discourse in the middle of the debate over Kyoto and CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. But it is surprising and strange that the anti-Kyoto sectors don't make recourse to dissident scientists (there aren't any) to invalidate the theory of global warming, and on the other hand they get a statistician--something like the pharmaceutical industry's getting an industrial engineer to deny that AIDS existsd. Strange and surprising, but there it is: Lomborg, the man with the easy answers."

See? Lomborg's a creature of the evil corporations who want to stop the Kyoto accord. Well, first, the Kyoto accord has been dead ever since the U.S. Senate rejected it unanimously, 95-0, back in 1995. No significant nations have actually made any plans to meet its criteria. Second, there are plenty of scientists who disagree with the standard environmentalist doctrine on global warming. Third, it's cheating to compare global warming with AIDS; AIDS exists. You still have to prove that global warming exists and is significant, Mr. Aymerich. Fourth, I certainly would consult an industrial engineer if I were going to manufacture anti-AIDS drugs, just as I would consult a statistician if I were going to draw conclusions based on statistics. Fifth, notice how Mr. Aymerich insinuates again that Lomborg is part of a conspiracy.

Conclusion: Ramon Aymerich is unintelligent, a poor writer, a worse logician, dishonest in argument, ideologically biased, and a conspiracy nut. Par for the course in Spain.

Oh, just one more comment: Mr. Lomborg is openly gay. I just bet he's in league with those Christian fundamentalists.

Want some more bad losership? For some reason, men's field hockey is a traditional Spanish strength. Many top-level field-hockey players come from the Catalan city of Terrassa, where the sport is more important than soccer. Except for the Barça, of course. Anyway, this is the top Olympics story in today's La Vanguardia. It's by J. R. Casanova.

"Two illegal goals, including the one in sudden death overtime that gave the victory to Germany two minutes into the second overtime period, pushed Spain off the podium that its team deserved...they deserved the medal that the Danish judge took away from them...The Spaniards had already protested the very first goal scored against them..."We saw it clearly. It shouldn't have been a goal," said Kiko Fábregas. "I think we did more than they did to win."

Waah. Waah. Waah.

Waah, waah, waah. Crybabies. Whiners. Poor sports. Bad losers. Bush-leaguers. Pussies. Excuse-makers. Spoiled children. Faced.

Today's Vanguardia shows everything that's wrong with the Spanish attitude toward sports and toward the United States. They just cannot deal with the fact that they lost. Somebody must have cheated.

I quote from Juan Antonio Casanova's article:

"The USA had two decisive weapons yesterday: the outside shot and the immeasureable help of the referees...the Americans did everything--committing clear traveling and three times the fouls that were called on them...the referees gave them all the doubtful loose balls, some that clearly belonged to Spain...No surprise because of the official interest that the USA continue in the Games...Why was there no European referee?...The referees' abuses kept increasing and Gasol could not score in the last eight minutes..."

Did you get that? He's saying that it was all fixed beforehand anyway because the powers that be wanted the Americans to win, so the referees gave the game to the USA. Otherwise, of course, things would have been radically different.

Says Juan Bautista Martínez, regarding a time-out that US coach Larry Brown called late in the game with the US up by eight, "Brown's action exemplifies the arrogance of NBA basketball, which, when the outside wrapping of the marketing comes off, will use any dirty trick, not to win seductively, but to crush the opponent and stomp on his throat with their boots...Everyone (in the arena) wanted to see the USA lose because of their players' petulance...they aggressively booed the controversial referees' decisions, and the excessive permissiveness of the referees in the paint. When they refereed the game according to the NBA rules, the Spanish players, especially Navarro, became unhinged..." He also accuses American assistant coach Greg Popovich of "physically intimidating" Spanish coach Mario Pesquera when Pesquera threw a temper tantrum and got in Larry Brown's face, screaming and finger-pointing, at the end of the game.

I don't think I can root for the Spanish basketball team any more, and I will actively root against any team that Pesquera coaches or that Navarro or Calderón (the two whiniest and most babyish players) plays for in the future. Also, if I were one of the American players, I might be tempted to give Pau Gasol an exceedingly hard time next time I saw him on an NBA court. Within the rules, of course.

Notes: The two referees were from Australia and Mexico. They called 27 fouls on the Americans and 18 on the Spaniards.

There's been a huge explosion of bad losership today in the Spanish press regarding Spain's loss to the US in Olympic basketball. Really pathetic. The following article from CNN-Sports Illustrated is by Jack McCallum. I'd link and italicize but since those buttons are not on my screen due to the atrocious Blogger redesign, screw it.

JACK McCALLUM:

As long as the United States was playing the part of inept Colossus, bricking 3-point shots, getting dazed and confused by international rules, generally looking like a team that was going home without a medal for the first time in Olympic history, everything was all right in the world of Olympic basketball. But when the U.S. kicked it into gear on Thursday afternoon against Spain in the quarterfinals of the medal round, all hell broke loose.

Playing in front of an anti-American crowd that booed and whistle-jeered them throughout -- King Juan Carlos of Spain was there but I don't know whether he was booing -- the Americans finally found their shooting touch, and their aggressiveness, during a 102-94 victory over Spain, which was the best team in the tournament during pool-round play and now finds itself playing for seventh place. Spain's players and its coach, Mario Pesquera, have reason to be peeved at a system that has them go unbeaten in five games, then get eliminated by a team that had lost twice.

Not surprisingly, the U.S. emerged as the bad guy, but not merely for ending Spain's medal hopes.

Enraged by a late timeout that Team USA coach Larry Brown had called with America leading by a comfortable margin, Pesquera (a) said his respect for Brown was a thing of the past because of the late timeout, (b) charged that "the game had been played by NBA rules and not FIBA rules," which permitted too much traveling and physical play, (c) hinted that the Americans had laid down in the pool round and (d) stuck the knife even deeper into Brown by commenting that Dean Smith, one of Brown's coaching heroes, "would've never done anything like that."

I've been a consistent critic of the U.S. play in Athens, but Pesquera was out of line for a variety of reasons.

Brown was too cautious in calling for the late timeout and, in retrospect, probably wouldn't do it again. But he says that he tried to signal for the timeout earlier, with the U.S. up eight, but didn't get the attention of the refs until 23 seconds were left and the lead had grown to 11. Then Brown tried to cancel the timeout, which can be done in international rules, but the refs granted one anyway. I don't know whether that is true, but I do know that teams have blown big leads in short amounts of time and that this American team is not particularly reliable at holding onto the ball or making free throws.

Brown and two of his assistants, Gregg Popovich and Roy Williams, tried to explain all of this to Pesquera after the game, but the Spanish coach would have none of it. There was an angry exchange as the teams left the court, and Pesquera may well have gone after Brown physically had there not been a crowd around.

Second, the game was indeed physical and, for wont of a better term, NBA-ish. But that's partly because Spain plays that way, too, a fact that Brown had talked about the day before the game. Though no one in the U.S. camp would say it publicly, the Americans were ecstatic with this first-round draw because they knew it was an ideal matchup.

Third, the U.S. didn't lay down in the pool round; it just played abysmally, primarily because it couldn't shoot, an aspect of the game that is inevitably beginning to improve. (It could hardly have gotten worse.) Pesquera's implication is that the U.S. laid down to arrange a certain matchup; otherwise what's the point of laying down? That charge is groundless. The Americans had no way of knowing what team would end up where in the other group and, in fact, didn't even know that it had finished fourth in Group B until the results were in on games over which they had no control.

Finally, the comment about Dean Smith was simply bush. Pesquera should've directed his anger at the system; I had some sympathy for him in that regard. After five preliminary games, the pool winners, in this case Spain from Group A and Lithuania from Group B, should be allowed to come back and contest for the bronze if they lose a first-round game in the medal round. But Pesquera chose to lash out at the obvious target, which is certain to amp up the anti-American feeling for Friday's semifinal game, probably against Argentina.

I just watched the US and Spain play basketball. The Americans won though Spain was in the game until about the last five minutes. The Spaniards played very well; the only one with NBA-level talent is Pau Gasol, but Navarro, de la Fuente, Fernandez, and a couple of others are fine players who would have done very well at the NCAA level.

I started out rooting for Spain for various reasons. First, I live here. Second, I'm a Pau Gasol fan. Third, I don't like the American team; you've read all the people who know more about basketball than I do explain why they suck. Fourth, as a KU alumnus, I have very mixed feelings about Larry Brown--on the one hand he coached the Hawks to their only NCAA title, but on the other hand he got them put on probation and took off for a better job. Fifth, I tend to root for the underdog, as I imagine most people do.

Anyway, the announcers on TVE1 were very fair and balanced during most of the game, but with about five minutes left, as the Americans began to pull away, they suddenly became very nasty. They started complaining about the referees' calls, as did the Spanish players and coaches. The Spanish coach started screaming and finger-pointing, and several of the Spanish players broke into mock applause of the US team in the last few seconds. Then the announcers started complaining about the fact that if you lose in the quarterfinals, you're out of competition for a medal. Now, of course, these were the rules set up beforehand, which everybody agreed to before the Olympics even started. But the sudden outburst of "bad loserness", to coin a phrase, made me so irritated that I wound up cheering when the Yanks won.

Spaniards tend to be very bad losers, and I think I know why. It's because of the extreme rivalry between Barcelona and Real Madrid. If you're a real Barça supporter, you know the whole thing is fixed so that you'll lose and Madrid will win no matter how well your team plays. You honestly believe this, and you honestly believe that it's somehow important in the scheme of things. Every time your team loses it's because the other guy cheated and the refs were fixed beforehand, and the bitterly partisan sports press floats dozens of rumors about the other team's skulduggery. And, of course, Real Madrid is not merely a sports team. It's evil incarnate. The players are crooked, the club management is corrupt, and the fans are thugs.

If you're a Madrid fan, you tend to take the rivalry a little less seriously--it's kind of like Red Sox fans take the rivalry a lot more seriously than Yankee fans. The bitterness of the fans of the team that normally loses is greater than the arrogance of fans of the team that normally wins. But the Madrid press and Madrid supporters are just as obnoxious as Barcelona fans, and according to them Barcelona has never beaten Real fair and square, either.

This extreme rivalry in which you never accept that hey, our team lost and that's all there is to it, the other guys played better, that's what happens in sports, has carried over to all sports in Spain. If we win, we're the greatest ever; if we lose, it's because the fix was in.

Besides, people, this is just sports. It's not like it actually matters which bunch of eight foot tall guys throws a ball in a hole the most times.

Comment: America has certainly not supported its Olympic basketball team this year, for many reasons. Just for example, they suck at playing as a team, and I could go on from there for several more paragraphs. But I wonder how much of it has to do with the fact that all the players are black.

Get this one. Miguel Angel Moratinos, Spain's Foreign Minister, is all mad because the Iraqi government and the Americans are not respecting the "Olympic truce" in Najaf. What Olympic truce? Did the Russians pull out of Afghanistan during the 1980 Summer Games? What about the goddamn PLO in Munich in 1972? Are Al Sadr's boys observing the alleged truce? Olympic truce, my ass. The Olympic Games are just a show. All that alleged Olympic idealism is just so much bullshit. It's all about the money and the TV ratings, baby. But it seems to provide a rationale for Moratinos to do some self-righteous posturing.

Moratinos, you might recall, is the guy who claimed that he had been asked by the powers that be to mediate between the Israelis and the Palestinian Lack of Authority. He also got called on the carpet by Tony Blair and then went outside after the short, tense meeting (all by himself) and said that the British were perfectly happy with the Socialists' weaselly behavior regarding Iraq. I know a little something about mental illness, and I suspect Moratinos suffers from an inferiority complex which causes him to overestimate his own importance in the scheme of things.

Haven't written for a long while. It's August here and really not too much is happening. I suppose you might have seen the minor flap created when the eight female ministers in Zap's cabinet (yes, like a good politically correct well-meaning idiot, he's named a cabinet that's 50-50 men and women) posed for Vogue. Of course, they got criticized both from the far left, for objectifying women, and from the PP, who accused them of not taking their roles as ministers seriously enough.

They've been having the Fiesta Mayor of Gracia over the last week or so. Gracia, the neighborhood where I live, is known within Barcelona for having a unique personality--sort of politically aware working- / lower-middle- / petit-bourgeois- class. Up here we still talk about "going down to Barcelona" when we mean going downtown (we're perched on the side of a hill above the city); it's almost like a small town within Barcelona. There's definitely a strong local identity. Anyway, they have a big bash of a Fiesta Mayor in which they have lots of traditional stuff, like dances in the squares and decorating the streets in high-school-gym-dance style and lots of free food if you know where to look for it. That and lots of booze, of course. The local squatters, however, have decided to take over the fiesta and raise hell until six in the morning while fighting it out with the local skinheads. Meanwhile, all the drunks who normally hang out in uncool places are showing up here from all over the metro area. Everyone up here is royally pissed off because Gracia is already the coolest party district in town, if you're an adult who prefers listening to good music and a couple of quiet beers in an interesting bar to partying and puking all night. The locals get pretty pissed off about all the noise, with some reason, and the Fiesta Mayor has been pretty much the last straw. People are mad up here.

The Forum is an absolute and complete disaster. They've gone so far as to announce false attendance figures. Meanwhile, they had to shut down the main building for a couple of days because it was leaking--for some brilliant reason, they decided to cover the roof of the building with water.

The Vangua hasn't said too much that's horribly offensive recently--you know, just some more of the same crap about how Americans are stupid and ignorant mixed in with pro-Saddam arguments. Same old everyday thing that I've already translated eight hundred times. It looks like Asshole Andy Robinson, special British correspondent in New York, has been paying some attention to me and Franco A. and Trevor, because he's started documenting his articles. However, he still doesn't bother mentioning that all his sources are from the extreme left. Tikrit Tommy Alcoverro is reporting on Najaf from back home in Beirut. He sure seems to have a vivid imagination. Anyway, virtually nobody in Barcelona is exposed to any information that might somehow be interpreted as, well, not anti-American. At least not from the newspapers and the TV. There's a right-wing radio station, the COPE, but they're often just as dumb as the local left. As for information from the foreign media, Josep Sixpack doesn't know English or any other non-local languages.

Thought I'd do a piece on the American elections for a little change of pace. La Vanguardia's lead editorial says that the Bush-Kerry race looks like it will be very exciting, that there is a great deal of "polarization", and that there will be a large electoral turnout. Meanwhile, some Frenchman named Pascal Boniface, who is the director of the Institute of International and Strategic Relations in Paris, and who appears to think he's very smart, has a piece on the op-ed in which he takes eight paragraphs to call George Bush a poophead. See, the US overthrow of Saddam was "morally unjust" and "inefficient strategically" because of the "American quagmire in Iraq". Such geniuses as Michael Moore, Benjamin Barber, Dick Clarke, George Soros, and Zbig Brezinski think Bush is a poophead, too, so this is evidence that being anti-Bush isn't the same as being anti-American, because all those people are American, too. Boniface actually says that "The best proof of this is that in the US more and more personalities are adopting deeply severe postures with respect to George W. Bush. These attacks, on occasion very vehement, cannot be interpreted as anti-American, since they come precisely from the US." It's just like being anti-Sharon doesn't make you anti-Semitic, says M. Boniface.

Hold it right there. If you dislike Bush just because he's the US president, and you dislike Sharon just because he's the Israeli prime minister, then you ARE anti-American and anti-Semitic. And how could a good French intellectual be anything else? M. Boniface gets off a pre-emptive strike, calling those of us who insist he IS anti-Semitic and anti-American scum guilty of making "a dishonest amalgam of ideas."

Anyway, for some serious talk about the elections. With help from the excellent site Election Projections, here is what one probable outcome might look like.

Bush MUST WIN: The eleven states of the Deep South (Virginia 13 electoral votes, North Carolina 15, South Carolina 8, Georgia 15, Kentucky 8, Tennessee 11, Alabama 9, Mississippi 6, Arkansas 6, Louisiana 9, Texas 34). If he loses more than one of these states, he loses. He'll almost certainly sweep the Republican Solid South, though.

The fourteen states of the Intermountain West and High Plains (Alaska 3, Idaho 4, Kansas 6, Montana 3, Nebraska 5, North Dakota 3, Oklahoma 7, south Dakota 3, Utah 5, Wyoming 3, Colorado 9, Wyoming 3, Colorado 9, Arizona 10, Nevada 5, New Mexico 5). Bush can afford to lose at most two of these states, and New Mexico and Arizona are probably going to be close. If Kerry can win five or six Southern and Western states, he wins the election.

Kerry MUST WIN: The four states of the Pacific West (California 55, Oregon 7, Washington 11, Hawaii 4). Oregon and Washington look a little iffy; if I were Bush I'd spend some time up there and make Kerry fight.

The thirteen states of the Northeast (Maine 4, New Hampshire 4, Vermont 3, Massachussetts 12, Rhode Island 4, Connecticut 7, New York 31, Pennsylvania 21, New Jersey 15, Maryland 10, Delaware 3, District of Columbia 3, West Virginia 5). Kerry needs a sweep here; he can only afford to lose Maine, West Virginia, and New Hampshire. Bush will fight hard in Pennsylvania and if he can win there, things look very good for him all over.

UP FOR GRABS: The eight states of the Midwest (Ohio 20, Indiana 11, Illinois 21, Michigan 17, Wisconsin 10, Minnesota 10, Iowa 7, Missouri 11). This is where the real war will be fought. Bush's Southern and Western support base will more or less balance off Kerry's Pacific and Northeast base. Bush will win Indiana. Kerry will win Illinois. No questions there. Bush must win Ohio and Missouri and pick up at least two other Midwestern states. Iowa and Wisconsin look like his best bets.

Florida (27). This atypical state--or maybe super-typical because of its variety--is as up-in-the-air as it comes. Whichever candidate wins it will likely win the election.

By the way, here are the current polls: Bush's job approval was 51% according to Gallup on 8/11 and 46% according to Pew on 8/10. In a Bush-Kerry-Nader race, Zogby on 8/12 has Bush 43%-Kerry 47%, Gallup on 8/11 has Bush 48%-Kerry 46%, and Pew on 8/10 has Bush 45%-Kerry 47%. Looks to me like the popular vote is very close three months before the election.

If the popular vote is this close at this time in the election year, it's a pretty safe bet that the incumbent President is going to win. First, Kerry has already had his convention bounce, the surge in the polls that's supposed to happen after the candidate gets the spotlight at his party's convention. Bush hasn't had his yet. Second, Bush is a known quantity. People know what he stands for. Kerry doesn't have much of a national image and is still little-known to many Americans. Many people are therefore susceptible to having their image of Kerry framed by Bush's people. Third, the Kerry campaign hasn't got any dirt on Bush. If they had, the Dems would have used it back in 2000; remember, the best dirt they had on Bush was a 30-year-old drunk driving conviction. They released it the weekend before the November election, and this cost Bush in the vote. We don't know what kind of dirt Bush has on Kerry, but I get the feeling the Bush campaign knows several things about Kerry's Vietnam days and Seventies political career that might be troublesome.

Fourth, the economy's doing fine and the big issue everyone is up in arms about is gay marriage, not Iraq. If people's attention is focused on this minor question rather than on issues which Kerry has some basis to criticize Bush about, Bush wins. Fifth, my bet is that we have more and more success in Iraq and the War on Terrorism, and that the Bush campaign will use 9/11 to remind people of why the war is being fought. Sixth, Kerry is boring and a jerk and people don't like him, and the more they're exposed to him the less they're going to like him. At least some people like Bush. Nobody, but nobody, likes John Kerry. Seventh, some of the radicals are going to vote for Nader again, costing Kerry a percent or so, which might make the difference.

So, barring disaster, I see a fairly easy Bush victory. Not a landslide; Kerry will win a minimum of 150 electoral votes. I doubt it will be nearly as close as people around here are guessing, though.

Well, the Olympics are on TV so since I have nothing real important I have to do I have it on channel 2 (advantage: all-day coverage of even minor sports; disadvantage: Spanish announcers much more chauvinist than even American announcers. Bob Costas is Mr. Neutrality and Professionalism next to these guys) while I listen to "Blonde on Blonde" and read "Fascism" by Stanley Payne in Spanish.

I figure the Olympics need to be culled. What I would do is get rid of embarrasingly minor sports and only have those sports where winning the Olympic medal is the biggest thing you can do in the sport. So I would say:

KEEP: Track and field; boxing (that is, honest boxing); gymnastics; wrestling; swimming; diving; weightlifting.

CULL: All the rest for either being minor boring sports (e.g. team handball) for which the yearly championship is much more important; important professional sports where Olympic competition is well below top standards (e.g. basketball, tennis, soccer, baseball, cycling, even volleyball and water polo); or traditional military sports of no interest today (pistol shooting, archery, fencing).

Well, here's the news. There's some silly arguments going on about whether Spain is one nation or whether it is a plurinational nation or whether it isn't a nation at all, and whether this ought to be in the Spanish Constitution or the European Constitution or whatever. Maragall and Sevilla and Bargalló and company all have something nonsensical to say.

Boy, I dunno. On one level these Gibraltar-Catalonia-Basque Country-Spain nationalist arguments are juvenile and childish efforts whose only purpose is to gain more prestige for the groups they champion and more power for themselves. On another level, this is a really basic question that hasn't been completely answered yet, and that problem is political legitimacy.

This is difficult for us Americans because there's no problem of political legitimacy in the United States. It's safe to say that at least 98% of Americans agree that the United States government is legitimate. If you ask them why, they'll just look at you funny. "Well, you know, we vote for the Congress, and they make the laws, and we vote for the President, and it's all organized and written down in the Constitution, and we've been doing it for more than two centuries now and the last major complaint we had was between 1861 and 1865." Even extreme leftists and rightists, of whom there are proportionally quite few in the US, often proclaim themselves the real upholders of American democratic values, as against the major parties who have "betrayed" them.

This isn't true in Spain. You'd be surprised at how long memories go back around here. The current royal dynasty, the Bourbons, were placed on the throne in 1714 after the War of the Spanish Succession; Catalonia and the other regions of the Crown of Aragon were forcibly incorporated into a Spanish nation-state. Before that the Aragonese territories had had different laws and privileges than the other Spanish kingdoms. So there's grievances number one and two: the Bourbons are an illegitimate dynasty in the first place, since they were placed in power by the various European states after the War of the S. S., and their control over Catalonia is illegitimate because it has imposed a foreign system of laws and rights different from those that were previously accepted in Catalonia.

(Note: the ultra-Spanish nationalists who get their underwear all knotted up over Gibraltar should reflect that the Treaty of Utrecht, which gave England Gibraltar, also gave to the Bourbon dynasty and the centralized Spanish state direct control of the former territories of the Crown of Aragon. Seems to me they might reflect before calling Utrecht neocolonialist and imperialist and all that.)

Skipping a couple hundred years of alleged Bourbon oppression and two or three rebellions by the Carlists, who never accepted the legitimacy of the Bourbon dynasty, our man Franco overthrew a communist government in 1939 (after an anti-communist coup d'etat by General Casado), which in turn had overthrown anarchist and far-left militias in 1937, which had overthrown a parlimentary Republic in 1936, which had pushed out a limited monarchist parliamentary state in 1931. Meanwhile, the Catalanistas in Barcelona and the Socialists and other leftists in Asturias, in 1934, also attempted to overthrow the Republic but failed.

So right there you have a bunch of people who don't respect the legitimacy of the current Spanish state: those who say the current government isn't legit because of its Franco heritage, those who say only a leftist state can be legit, those who are against all monarchies, those who are particularly offended by the Bourbons, those who claim the '34 revolt was legit, those who hold a brief for those romantic but sickeningly violent anarchists that Christopher Hitchens still fantasizes about, and so on. Now, these folk are nowhere near a majority, but you'd be surprised to hear what we consider normal and rational people to go off on a ranting tangent related to some 300-year-old war. This is what they mean by Old Europe. Really Old Europe.

Somebody called the World Survey of Values has come out with the results of a questionnaire about religion. Check out these stats. Of those surveyed, 96% of Americans, 85% of Spaniards, 72% of the British, 100% of Egyptians, and 99% of Iranians believe in God. 88% of Americans, 51% of Spaniards, 56% of Britons, 100% of Egyptians, and 98% of Iraqis believe in heaven; 75% of Americans, 37% of Spaniards, 35% of Britons, 100% of Egyptians, and 98% of Iranians believe in hell. 81% of Americans, 53% of Spaniards, 58% of Brits, 100% of Egyptians, and 98% of Iranians believe in life after death.

60% of Americans and 36% of Spaniards go to church at least once a week; 71% of Americans and 33% of Spaniards pray.

I'm not at all surprised, though the Vanguardia's first line in the story is "The image that Spaniards themselves and many foreigners have as a unanimously Catholic and very religious country is not true." That shouldn't be news to anyone who has actually spent some time here. Sure, they have a lot of religious festivals, but they're mostly an excuse to get drunk and party. Most people, especially the younger, the more urban, the better-educated, the better-off economically, and the more, uh, male, are not particularly religious. The family that only comes to church for Christmas, Easter, and first communions and weddings, is a local stereotype.

Here's Alfredo Abián's signed editorial on page two of today's Vangua: "...the United States wins a medal, because there 75% of those surveyed takes for granted that hell exists. The problem is that Bush's homeland has become a theme park of sects in need of a supernatural threat. Without counting the reverend "telepreachers", the American paratheological fair includes deacons capable of finding the Mark of the Beast on a bottle of Heinz ketchup, clerics who pray for the Antichrist to come and let loose the final Armageddon; ultra-enlightened Mormons who have split off from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, along with all kinds of born-again Christians." Mr. Abian says that it's just as well that Spain isn't particularly religious, which I actually agree with him about, since I'm a hardline agnostic, and adds that the four countries where absolutely nobody doubts that Satan is out there are Pakistan, Indonesia, Egypt, and Morocco.

I'll respond to Mr. Abián by saying that most American religious believers are perfectly stable people, that there are a bunch of sectarian wackos who get a lot of media attention but who have very little influence, that one aspect of religious belief in the US is that blacks are the most religious and socially conservative Americans, and that Mr. Abián certainly wouldn't want to do anything so un-PC as to critically stereotype blacks or Hispanics or immigrants, who add up to some 30% of Americans, for generally being religious believers. I'll add that in the US people have almost an infinity of religious choices they can make, unlike Spain, where the only option has always been Catholicism. I'll also add that just because Tom Cruise and John Travolta are Scientology wackos and that Madonna seems to have lost her last marble with this kabala crap does not mean that those jokers in Hollywood have anything to do with real American life. And, by the way, as Mr. Abián is kind enough to point out, the real dangerous religious nuts tend to pray on Fridays.

Anyway, the Vangua has been interviewing tourists on the Tourist Bus. They came across three young Belgian girls who said this: " 'This getting up at 10 AM is great, and taking a nap after lunch is wonderful. In Belgium people get up at seven and have no free time after lunch, though we get off work earlier. In Barcelona, in Spain, everything is calmer, people take things much less seriously, while in Brussels everything is much more sped-up. And here it's always sunny.

(Editor's note: They're right about the taking things less seriously. That's one reason why Spain's GDP per capita is several thousand bucks a year below Belgium's. They're also right about the after-lunch debate--that is, do you prefer ninety minutes or two hours for lunch in Spain, but a quitting time of seven or seven-thirty, or quitting time at 5 or 5:30 but only half an hour for lunch like in the rest of Europe. That seems like a personal choice to me. They're also right about the sun. They're wrong about the briskness of life here; this is August and half the city has shut down. Most of the year there are lots of people rushing around in vain, late to three different appointments, looking for the right goddamn bureaucratic paperwork necessary to, like, pay their automobile tax or something.)

The stereotypes keep coming. 'The bad thing is the food. Everything is too greasy and heavy, with lots of eggs and meat dishes, always chicken, omelets, and fried potatoes. In summer, especially with this heat, fresh and light food is more appetizing, like vegetables, fruit. That's much healthier.'

'Yeah, the bad thing is the food, but the worst thing is the way men look at you, the things they say in the street without knowing you at all. The first time it's funny, it calls your attention, but then you get really tired of it. I was on an Erasmus scholarship in Seville, for six months, and I got tired of telling men that just because I was blonde I wasn't necessarily German and I didn't necessarily speak English. In Belgium people don't do that. Ever.'

(Editor's note: They're right. Spain is still a pretty sexist place, and lots of men do make comments, often rude, to passing women, and they're not shy about trying to pick up foreign women. Blatantly. It's not just, "Hi, honey, you're a hot babe", but more like "Great tits! So, your place or mine?" Anyway, at this point a couple from Seville sitting there butts into the conversation, furious at the alleged stereotyping.)

'In Seville we like pretty women, and we don't think it's bad if it's done with gracia,' says Emilio from the next seat, turning around. 'And, excuse me, little girl, but do you know what gaspacho and salmorejo and salad and ensaladillas are?' asks his wife, María José. 'You can't come to Spain for two days of sightseeing, eat in a couple of fast-food places, and talk like that about the cooking. It's absurd.'"

(Editor's note: Note how free Spaniards are throwing around stereotypes of other countries but how they can't stand it when they're stereotyped? First, the girl who was in Seville for six months, not two days, knows what she's talking about. Second, Spanish food is particularly bad when served at affordable restaurants that cater to tourists and/or working-class locals. It is greasy and fried and heavy and served hot and is just the thing to make you sick on a ninety-degree afternoon. Gazpacho and salad are generally not available. Ensaladilla rusa, which is just potato salad with egg and mayonnaise, is, but it's likely to give you salmonella. Now, if you go to a good restaurant, you'll eat very well, but you'll pay for it. Just like pretty much everywhere else. Third, Spaniards are notorious for ripping off tourists in vacation spots, and they get more than 50 million to rip off every year.)

Now, I like Spain very much. But those Belgian girls are a lot closer to the truth about Spain than Alfredo Abián is to the truth in the United States.

I don't think anybody over here gives much of a crap about the Olympics.

Well, it's still hot and humid and I'm doing a lot of sweating; if you think you can beat the stinkiness of my feet, please send your putrid sneakers and socks to: Partido Socialista Obrero Español, C/Ferraz, Madrid, Spain. I'm sure they'll appreciate it.

We went out to the pueblo last weekend and it was nice and pleasant as usual. We went swimming and farted around generally and did nothing useful.

Here's the goofy new bit of Catalooniness. for the last couple of years it's become popular among many Spanish young folks to wear T-shirts with the profile of the Osborne bull on them. Osborne is a big maker of brandy down in Jerez--their most popular brand is Veterano, which is just fine to dump in your coffee in the morning. Their symbol is a profile of a bull in black, and they began putting up huge signs with their bull symbol all over Spain on the highways way back when, I guess something like the old Burma-Shave signs there used to be all over the US. So, the Osborne bull has become sort of symbolic, like an old-time thing that everyone knows about that's always been there. And some smart guy started printing the Osborne bull on T-shirts, and people thought it was cool and bought them. Then people started putting little Osborne bull stickers on the back of their cars.

(NOTE: this is a sure sign of someone's being tacky and tasteless here in Spain: does the guy put stickers on the back of his car, especially those which are the equivalent of those "Makin' Bacon" bumper stickers that people buy at Stuckey's? If so, he most certainly hasn't been to college.)

So the Cataloonies decided they needed to hit back against this Osborne bull epidemic. They've come out with two sticker and T-shirt possibilities: one is the typical Catalan donkey, which is on at least one of every ten cars, and the other is a black cat (CAT = Catalonia, get it?), which seems to be much less popular. Some people, I guess as a joke, have started putting on stickers of a moose in profile. I'm not sure what that would have to do with anything.

Well, it's hot and humid here in Barcelona as usual in August. My strategy is knocking off as early as possible from whatever I'm doing and go sit in a nice air-conditioned bar. We've spent a couple of weekends out in the pueblo and we're going back this Saturday. It's hot there, too, but the air is dry and clean and there's always a breeze. The house is nice and cool, too, down in the cavelike basement.

Half the city has left town for the August month of vacations. Many shops and other places are closed; others are on reduced hours. Up here in Gracia it seems strangely empty; downtown, or course, is swarming with tourists. Advice for Non-Eurail Semi-Adult Visitors: Try to find somewhere to stay outside the Old City. It's much more relaxing. Spend a day looking around the Ramblas, sure, and then get away from there and check out the rest of town.

John Kerry is going over very well over here, largely because everybody just hates George Bush. Now, nobody in Spain actually knows anything about either of the two men, but they've all got plenty of opinions. Meanwhile, Zap is doing quite well in the polls, for some unknown reason. Here's the saddest part: "What are the three main problems that exist in Spain today?" Answers: Unemployment 61.1%; ETA terrorism 47.4%; Crime 20.1%; Housing 19.7%; Immigration 17.0%; Economic problems 13.0%. Gee, wasn't it about five months ago that almost 200 people were killed in Madrid by terrorists of the Al Qaeda variety? How come that's not on the list? Answer: The Spanish genuinely beleive that Islamist terrorism is not their problem, and that the pullout from Iraq has gotten them off the Islamist hitlist. You may have seen that they have just warned of an Al Qaeda plot against American financial centers and have raised the alert level: the Vanguardia, of course, claims it's just a political ploy by Bush. These people have conspiracies for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Guess what? The Forum has come out with a strong condemnation of sexist violence and patriarchy!

Cartoon on Friday in La Vangua. George Bush, flanked by two military officers on a podium, announces: "After Afghanistan and Iraq, our next humanitarian objective is to liberate the oil fields of Sudan--excuse me, I meant free the refugees." That's right, they've been printing story after story over here explaining that there is apparently some oil in Sudan--big deal, there's almost certainly oil under my parents' backyard in Kansas City. So of course, all this talk about people starving to death and evil militias and slavery and oppression of Christians is just a cover-up for another oil grab. Just like Afghanistan, Panama, Haiti, Somalia, and Bosnia were all oil grabs. And, of course, everything is a conspiracy.

Breaking News: Jerry Falwell Supports Gay Marriage; Britney Spears Scores 1600 SAT; Robert Fisk Writes Something Not Totally Anti-American. In yesterday's Vanguardia he's got a piece about the Iraqi police and how proud and loyal they are. About time, since it's been the Iraqi police those terrorist bastards are mostly trying to kill. I suppose the anti-American angle is that Fisk portrays these guys as poorly-paid, badly-armed, and not getting the respect they deserve. OK, I can see his point, though I don't believe the bit about their Kalashnikovs jamming after firing two shots. My understanding is that 1) Kalashnikovs are simple, sturdy, and effective weapons that will function with minimal care and 2) there are enough guns floating around Iraq that the cops ought to be able to get something better than Kalashnikovs anyway.

The 3-11 commission has adjourned without deciding anything. Both the Socialists and the PP behaved like idiots, the PP trying to justify their (our) major screwup--not act of bad faith, screwup--in originally attributing the bombings to ETA, and the Socialists attempting to insinuate that there was, too, an act of bad faith, which is just not true to my knowledge. La Vanguardia ran a pro-American editorial (more breaking news) on the 9-11 commission, saying that it actually did what it purported to do, investigate and draw a conclusion without letting politics get in the way. This whole 3-11 commission has been, pretty disgracefully, an opportunity for partisan sniping and nothing more.

Everybody's in a snit about the alleged diplomatic offense committed by the British government in sending defense minister Geoffry (sic) Hoon to next Wednesday's celebration of the 300th anniversary of the capture of Gibraltar by the British. Everyone from the PP to Izquierda Unida is all fired up. Izquierda Unida has censured the British government for its "imperialist and philo-Fascist attitude". The Socialists said Britain's behavior was "colonialist". The PP said Zap was too incompetent diplomatically to persuade the British that such activities don't do much good except to inflame the most revanchist side of Spanish nationalism. Nobody pointed out that Gibraltar is British territory according to a treaty Spain signed, that if the Crown wants to nominate Ozzy Osbourne to serve as the Grand High Poobah of Gibraltar, it has no obligation to consult Spain on the matter, and that the people of Gibraltar are unanimous on only one issue: they don't want to join Spain.

The latest outrage the Spanish public is up in arms about is a proposal to charge each person who visits the National Health one euro per visit. I think it makes sense. One euro is a small enough amount that paying it won't hurt anybody, not even the poorest widow on a pension, and certainly not the average Joe, yet it's a round enough number that people might take it seriously enough not to show up at the local clinic every day just for something to do.

Also, I remember reading an interesting study done by some education people (still more breaking news!) on English-as-a-second-language programs aimed at immigrants in the United States. What they did was test different groups at the different centers offering English-for-immigrants in, I think, Queens or somewhere like that. Some groups were charged a nominal sum, ten dollars or the like, for their semester of English classes, and the rest were given the classes for free. What they found was that the students who were paying the small sum were considerably more motivated and--this is key--had much better class attendance. They therefore learned much more, on average, than the students who were not paying. The small payment of their own money gave them a stake in the class and made them want to get their money's worth out of it. Let's see if people start taking the national health service (which, as I have stressed, is excellent in my opinion, though overbureaucratic. The doctors and personnel are first-class and the equipment and medicines are, of course, the latest) a little more seriously.

Back on page 35 of Friday's Vanguardia there's a story about the opening of a new art exhibition; it's called "From Paris to the Mediterranean: The Triumph of Color". They have 85 works by mostly French artists painted in Provence attempting to catch the light of the Mediterranean between about 1860 and 1940, and the painters include Manet, Renoir, Van Gogh, Corot, Modigliani, Cezanne, Vlaminck, and Utrillo, as well as many other big names. There are also several major works by less well-known painters like Maguin, Signac, and Picabia. I'm going to go check it out, of course; no hurry, it's on till October 10. Ironically, this little exhibition is of a great deal more cultural value than the whole damn Forum, excluding of course the Chinese warriors. And it cost probably about one-one thousandth of that whole shebang.

FC Barcelona and Real Madrid are both touring East Asia raking in some cash playing exhibitions while beating up on some J-legue teams. At this point I'm guessing we're going to see a 4-3-3 lineup like this one: Valdés; Belletti, Puyol, Márquez, Sylvinho; Deco, Xavi, Van Bronckhorst; Giuly, Ronaldinho, Larsson. Expect to see plenty of Gabri, Gerard, Luis Garcia, and Iniesta. Oleguer and Navarro will be the backup defensemen. That leaves nobody but Xavi and Puyol as starters from the horrible team of two years ago. Rustu is going to be sold to somebody; they can't keep a player of his quality on the bench and they can't use him because they'll have too many "extracommunitarians" on the roster. I believe they can have four on the roster and three on the field at any one time. Gerard is horribly overpaid; I imagine if he stays on the team he either has taken or will take a salary cut. They are probably going to get rid of Saviola; he has apparently pissed them off by playing for Argentina in the South American cup instead of training with the Barça club. He played well, but what that's done is raise the price they can get for him. The big soccer news around here has been over Etoo, who is from Cameroon, plays for Mallorca, and is owned 50-50 by Mallorca and Madrid. Supposedly Barcelona wants to buy him, but Madrid is asking a very high price for their half of his contract. This is apparently very exciting news.

The Barcelona housing market, as we've mentioned several times, is through the roof. Second-hand apartments in the city have gone up 25% in a year, and every square meter will cost you 2,658 euros to buy, meaning that your basic 100 m2 four-bedroom place will run you a cool 265,800 euros, something like three hundred grand.

God knows why. I'm no real-estate expert but I think it's got something to do with several factors: 1) Barcelona is a very pleasant and desirable place to live 2) there is basically nowhere left within the city to put up any new buildings 3) several older neighborhoods have been gentrified 4) zoning restrictions are tight, making it difficult to add to housing stock 5) most of the suburbs are crappy and people don't want to live there. What I would do is completely rezone the city and move everything that's non-commercial or -residential (warehouses especially but also workshops and small factories) to the crappy suburbs.

This is somewhat of a bubble. A lot of people made some big dough on the stock market and are looking for somewhere to put it. Also, it is said that if you have money obtained on the black market, which a lot of apparently respectable people have around here, real estate is one of the easiest ways to launder it. It's not all a bubble, though; prices are going to come down, I wouldn't buy now, but there's not going to be a massive drop in the market because apartments are tangible. If you overpay for one, you still have it and you can live there. If you overpay for a stock with a bad price-earnings ratio, though, and then it bottoms out, you've got nothing. This is why the standard stock-market advice in Spain is to buy into Bodegas Riojanas. If it goes up, you're smiling, and if it goes broke, you can have a hell of a party with the inventory.

The Weekly Standard has a piece on the four candidates' personal wealth. Bush is worth about $18 million, though of course the rest of his family is all wealthy and has been since time immemorial. Bush made his big strike when he sold his share of the Texas Rangers baseball team. John Edwards, who earned his money as an ambulance chaser, is worth about $50 million, and so is Dick Cheney, who also started out working-class and made his dough in corporate boardrooms. John Kerry, however, is worth more than $1 billion because his wife owns 4% of all the Heinz ketchup and baked beans in all the world. Kerry owns five multi-million dollar mansions and has a private jet, and his modus operandi seems to be marrying women much wealthier than he is; his first wife was also a richie. If he is elected, he will be the first mega-rich president in American history. (The Roosevelts, Kennedys, and Bushes are not mega-rich, though they are of course extremely well-off. Their status comes from much more than their money. Lyndon Johnson was probably the President who died the wealthiest.)

Spain wants to send troops to both Afghanistan and Haiti, I suppose to erase the stain of giving in to terrorist demands over Iraq. Fat lot of good that'll do. They want to send two hundred guys to Haiti, get this, in a joint force with Morocco. Most likely all they'll manage to do is get in the way. If you actually want to help, guys, send money and leave your now very demoralized troops at home.

The 3-11 parliamentary commission has been meeting for a while but hasn't decided anything yet and seems to be getting itself all tangled up in minor questions, especially when we already know who did it, how, and why. The Socialists seem to be just trying to embarrass the PP, as if there were anything more embarrassing than getting out of the kitchen because you can't stand the heat.

The National Institute of Statistics did a sex survey! Around 30% of Spanish men and 10 percent of Spanish women admit to sexual promiscuity with casual partners in the last year. The fun part is that only in 41% of, uh, casual contacts was a condom used. About six percent of adult Spaniards are virgins. Men lose their virginity, on average, at 18, and women at 19. (This has something to do with teenagers' lack of automobiles and the driving age of 18.) 3.9% of men and 2.7% of women have had same-sex, uh, contacts. 1.4% of men have had only homosexual sex. 27% of Spanish men have had sex with prostitutes.

I don't get it. The bold, italic, and link buttons still aren't showing up on my Blogger screen. what the hell is the point of a blog with no links? Oh, well, here we go again with the usual pile of shit from La Vanguardia.

They've hit a new low with their front-page banner headline today: "Aznar's government paid to get the U.S. Congressional Medal". Their own story inside proves the headline false. The Aznar Government contracted a legal firm to lobby for Spain and take care of PR. It seems that one of the various things Piper Rudnick did was lobby the House of Representatives in order that José María Aznar would receive a distinction from the U.S. Congress. Hiring the firm for its various activities cost two million bucks. The legal firm in question is the well-known Piper Rudnick. More than 70 nations, including Great Britain and France, have hired lobbying firms in Washington. Spain itself has had a lobbyist in Washington since Felipe González hired the first one in the 1980s.

The headline, though, clearly implies that Aznar's government paid cold hard cash for the distinction. Nothing could be further from the truth. Complete and total bogosity.

A lot of people over here aren't clear on what a lobby is, so I'll explain. A lobby is an organization that attempts to influence government policy in a particular direction. For example, the NAACP is the black civil rights lobby. It attempts to help fashion government policies that it believes will be beneficial to black people. It does this by issuing press releases, calling press conferences, talking to lawmakers and executives and bureaucrats, holding meetings, trying to get on the TV news, and so on. Other lobbies include the American Heart Association, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the Association of Widget Manufacturers, and the AFL-CIO. The firm Spain hired had the responsibility of lobbying for Spain in Washington, nothing more and nothing less.

Everybody seems to be pissed off at Esquerra Republicana for being a bunch of loudmouthed jerks. The problem is that they have only one issue: Independence for Catalonia. That means that they're unproductive as members of the governing coalition. The Parliament is talking about something serious like the budget and up jumps some ERC idiot to complain about how Catalan isn't an officially recognized language in the European Union or whatever. They act like they're still in the opposition; their modus operandi is to attempt to torpedo anything that isn't related to The Only Important Political Question In The World. Maybe the easiest way to define them is as a bunch of stubborn, willful, pigheaded, not-yet-grown-up children.

In local quality-of-life news: they're going to kick the goddamn bongo-players out of the Parque Ciutadella. About time. There are hundreds of them there on Sunday afternoon and everybody for about a mile radius can hear them. Nothing against bongoers, let them bongo all they want, but somewhere where they're not bothering other people, please.

Oh, a couple of days ago they ran another bullshit misleading headline over an unusually foul and stinking article by Robert Fisk, in which Mr. Fisk recounts his interview with a Shiite cleric, to whose asshole his lips remain firmly attached throughout the piece. Fisk almost orgasms when the cleric dedicates one of his books to his brother Robert, with best wishes. The Shiite cleric says some nasty things about the Yanks--standard boilerplate crap, it's all a Zionist plot, whatever. And the headline is "US Trying to Steal Iraq's Oil." Now, that is a statement the Shiite cleric did make. However, running it as the headline all by itself is not precisely unbiased.

One of the more common Cataloony causes around here is the Estatut d'Autonomia. It seems certain elements want a new one. Now, the Estatut is the Catalan constitution. Francesc de Carreras points out some of the dumb arguments for a new Estatut: It's 25 years old. So what? Society has changed in 25 years. So it has, and if those people who believe the Estatut should be amended, perhaps they should explain to us exactly what they're going to change, which they haven't. The argument in the worst bad faith is that of the old leftists, who claim that the Estatut is too conservative because it is based on a political compromise. Very wrong. All basic governmental structures should contain as many compromises as possible. No one should get things all his own way, and especially not if he's a praying, believing, testifying Communist. And the most naive argument is that somehow a new Estatut is going to be the answer to all our problems because it will be so enlightened.

Andy Robinson has two pages on Michael Moore. They're so vile I can't bring myself to quote from them, except to say that Mr. Robinson is attempting to slide the fact that everything Michael Moore says is twisted (something admitted by even the Vanguardia's movie reviewer, who doesn't recommend the movie unless you like to watch TV political spots) past his readers by claiming that Moore demolishes all criticisms of him on his website.

Lance Armstrong has been taking an incredible amount of abuse this week. As you might have seen, the crowds along the roads have been enormous, barely leaving enough room for the cyclists, and Armstrong publicly blasted Tour management for poor security, saying he was afraid when riding through crowds of aggressive drunken Basque supporters and that he was more disgusted than anything else at the behavior of many drunken German fans. He criticized the record level of poor sportsmanship directed his way, saying he'd never seen it in cycle racing before: he's constantly spit on, insulted, and threatened. Chechu Rubiera, one of Lance's Spanish teammates, said he'd never seen anything like it, either, and that the crowd insults him merely because he's a member of the US Postal team. When Armstrong won yesterday, he was greeted with an enormous chorus of boos and whistles; seems that people, including the incredibly prejudiced Spanish announcers, thought he was arrogant or something for winning three stages in a row. What should he have done, ride less than his best? Throw the race? Let somebody else win? If I were Lance, I'd go out of my way to rip their balls off tomorrow at the individual time trial just to piss them off. I just hope nobody sticks a knife into him.

I've had several arguments with a British guy I know named Simon. He's not a bad guy, but he thinks he actually knows something about the United States because he's read Naomi Klein and Michael Moore, and he is anti-American in the sense that some people are anti-Semitic: everything the United States has ever done, is in the process of doing, or may perhaps do in the future is bad. If George Bush started giving out free condoms to homeless lesbian illegal alien single mothers, Simon would find something negative to say about it.

Simon believes that the United States is a jungle where we cut one another's throats for money or promotion, that we're interested only in ourselves and care nothing about the poor, that we're cruel and heartless and mean and that we abuse the poor. He was especially struck by that idiot woman in the Michael Moore movie who was raising rabbits and skinning them to make money off the fur. "If people in America have to do that just to survive..." and you know the rest.

He thinks there are a few rich people (Bush and his fat-cat oil friends), a lot of poor people, some abused women and children and minorities, and a lot of homeless people. He won't believe you if you tell him that poverty in the States is somewhere around 12-14%, that the poverty line is something above fifteen grand for a family of four, that poor people qualify for all kinds of government aid like Medicaid, food stamps, and so on, that poor people get what's called the Earned Income Tax Credit, meaning that they get an income tax refund rather than an income tax bill if they have the worst-paying jobs, and that most Americans completely agree with the idea that it's society's responsibility to help the unfortunate, including old people, poor people, and sick people.

The following post from Mickey Kaus at Slate debunks all that heartlessness of American society crap. (It's not italicized because for some reason the italic, bold, and link buttons are not appearing on my Blogger Create New Post screen.)

"There's a bit of Reich in every Ehrenreich! Barbara Ehrenreich writes:

'... I have been endeavoring to calculate just how many blue-collar men a T.A.N.F. [welfare] recipient needs to marry to lift her family out of poverty.

The answer turns out to be approximately 2.3, which is, strangely enough, illegal.'

I can't tell if Ehrenreich is joking about the "2.3" or if she's up to her old tricks (as when she wrote in 1986, with Frances Fox Piven, that long-term recipients were only a "tiny minority" of welfare mothers, when in fact they were nearly two-thirds of those on the rolls at any one time). If she's serious, how exactly did she calculate that 2.3 figure? ....Some numbers: The 2004 government poverty line for a family of four is about $18,850. For a family of three it's about $15,500. (The exact amount depends on whether you're using the Census or HHS line.) ... Even at the current minimum wage, a full-time worker earns $10,700 a year and an Earned Income Tax Credit of $2,500 (three person family) to $4,200 (four person family). Add in $3,000-4,000 of food stamps and subsidized Medicaid or CHIP health care for the children, and you're well above the poverty line even with a single breadwinner and a stay-at-home mom. ... Is Ehrenreich saying the poverty threshold is set too low? Fine--I'd have trouble living on it even without a family--but then she should tell us what idiosyncratic definition of "poverty" she's using. Is she assuming the "blue collar" man can't find even minimum-wage work? If so, again, why not make this assumption clear? ... Or is Ehrenreich, in the fashion of some left-wing organizers, simply ignoring the programs (especially the Earned Income Tax Credit) liberals have struggled to put in place to help low-income earners? ... P.S.: I doubt it's intuitively obvious to most Americans that the families of women married to typical blue-collar workers live in poverty. (Most blue collar workers make more than the minimum wage, and most wives work too.) The burden would seem to be on Ehrenreich to explain her startling stat."

BREAKING NEWS

BARCELONA, June 19--Today is D + 1. Squatter forces disembarked yesterday, by land, sea, and air, at the Barcelona Forum of Cultures. They quickly overcame light enemy resistance and successfully completed their first day's objective.

Seaborne squatter marine troops embarked at the Nova Mar Bella beach in northern Barcelona at 11 AM on July 18. A flotilla of rafts and canoes carried them toward their landing target, the jetty at the Forum beach. Though a few cuts and bruises were suffered, the triumphant squatters successfully landed and proceeded to accuse the Guardia Civil of having tried to sink their navy.

Meanwhile, land-based squatters tore down a fence and poured through the gap into the Forum reserved area. The two corps successfully linked up, at which point airborne reinforcements arrived in the form of a motorized hang-glider.

After the linkup, the squatter forces marched victoriously through the main square of the Forum, 400 strong, with arms linked and the Jolly Roger waving at their head. Police detachments retreated and did not offer resistance. Private contractors (also called "security guards") attempted to put up a fight with their batons as the three squatter corps, united, marched toward the exit, but were overcome.

Jordi Oliveras, general director of the Forum, received several kicks in the region of the derriere when he attempted to negotiate with squatter leaders. Said Oliveras, "We would have had even more complications if the reaction of the organization had been otherwise. We resolved the conflict within a few hours." Squatter leaders did not respond; reporters noted that the conflict was resolved when squatter forces decided to leave.

During the march from the central square to the exit, effective spray-paint assaults were carried out upon all available surfaces. At the Solidarity Fair area, squatter demolition teams took out various booths, banners, and signs. Several food stands were successfully assaulted, sacked, and looted by squatter light commandos.

No arrests were made.

We haven't done this for a while; let's take a look through the pages of the most recent numbers of the Vanguardia. This should be fun.

The Vangua is making a big deal about the International Court of Justice's finding that the Israeli wall (never 'fence') is illegal. They don't mention anywhere that the jurists who made the decision were mostly from non-democratic countries and that the head of the tribunal was Chinese, for God's sake. Or that the reason that the wall is causing so much anger is that it works. Terrorism is way down within Israel. Comparisons with the Berlin Wall are ridiculous, as the Israeli wall is built to keep violent criminals out, while the Soviet wall was built to keep innocent civilians in.

They're having lots and lots of boring political party conventions. Meanwhile, the British nuclear sub Tireless docked in Gibraltar over the weekend; everybody, from right to left, complained that this was a British "provocation". Left unanswered? Why would the British want to provoke Spain into anything except sitting down and shutting up? Seems that Zap is floating the story that this is somehow payback for Spain's switch to the Froggo-Toadish party line. Yeah, I know, sending a message to Spain by docking a British Navy sub at a British possession doesn't make much sense to me, either. Foreign Minister Miguel Ángel Moratinos is meanwhile taking credit for the initiative that international troops should leave Iraq in January 2006. This guy has delusions of grandeur.

Xavier Sala i Martin skewers an idiot by the name of Vicente Navarro who seems to be some kind of Marxist economist. Navarro claimed, in a public dressing-down of Sala, that under Reagan economic growth had been less than under his predecessors and successors, and that poverty in the US had increased "as never before" under Reagan.

Sala points out that average economic growth per year was 2.68% under Nixon, 1.50% under Ford, 3.20% under Carter, 3.34% under Reagan, 2.11% under Bush-41, and 3.17% during Clinton's first term. As for poverty, it decreased by 0.5% points during the Nixon Administration, did not change under Ford, rose by 2.4% points under Carter, dropped by 1.2% points under Reagan (from 14% in 1981 to 12.8% in 1989), and rose by 1.6% points under Bush-41. Navarro claims to have been an advisor to Hillary Clinton between 1992 and 1994, when poverty rose by 0.3% points, from 14.2% to 14.5%. He then entertains three hypotheses, that Navarro was talking off the top of his head based on his own prejudices and didn't look anything up when he made his statement; that he's a deliberate liar; or he doesn't know that 3.34% is more than, say, 1.50%.
Sala doesn't say, but my guess is some combination of the three.

Manuel Trallero points out what we said a few days ago and which nobody else has mentioned anywhere, to my knowledge:

We're very lucky to be Catalans, yes, sirree. If one is Catalan he can obtain some information--not all of it, of course--about what happens, say, in jails in Iraq. One can see, through shocking images, the tortures the American troops inflicted on Iraqi prisoners; one can even read some very deep analyses among all sorts of condemnatory comments; one can also, if one wishes, hear the public apology that the United States Secretary of Defense made, and one can even discover that the first court-martials have already happened, that some of those found guilty have already been sentenced, and that those responsible for the prisons were instantly fired from their jobs. But, of course, the Americans are bad, and Bush is a natural assassin.

Here in Catalonia things are fortunately very different, because in the same way that the Americans are bad, we, the Catalans, are not just good, but supergood. And if there are tortures in a regional government police (Mossos d'Escuadra) station in Rosas, it's just an isolated incident, and if at the Quatre Camins prison, after a prison riot on April 30, 26 prisoners were mistreated, it's--according to the statement of the Counselor for Justice, Mr. Vallés--an "indication of irregular conduct among prison personnel with reference to the use of force," and so far only the medical subdirector of the prison has lost his job. Mr. Vallés uses the euphemism of "indications of conduct" just like, under Franco, "the forces of public order were obliged to intervene."

...I don't know what Catalan public opinion wants to know, but I know exactly what I want to know, and that is what happened, and I want to know now--more than two months seems to me to be enough time for prudence before the release of information--with the same sort of details with which I know, for example, what happened in a jail in Iraq, because I, at least, when I went on the streets to shout for "Llibertat, amnistia, i Estatut d'Autonomia", did not contemplate that torture would be used in the prisons of my country. I could say this louder, but not much more clearly.

That's a pretty good satire-bomb, that is. I very often disagree with Mr. Trallero, but I like him. Of all things, he's an antique-dealer by trade who works semi-professionally for La Vangua as a columnist and sometimes features writer. This means that he has a rather different perspective on life; he actually knows how to, say, run a business or get through government red tape. He is also highly cultured, and that's exactly his job, putting his historical and artistic knowledge to practical use and making money off it. So many alleged journalists around here have no knowledge of anything. (For example, Trallero is currently doing the entire pilgrimage to Santiago on foot and sending in a daily chronicle to the Vangua. It's quite interesting. I'd translate it but it's much too long. I think that a collection of quality travel writing by Spaniards about Spain--right off the bat I can think of Cela and Pla--might do quite well translated into English. You gotta figure there are some half a million Spain buffs out there who might be interested.)

OK. FC Barcelona is getting rid of Cocu, Reiziger, Quaresma, Mario, Enke, and Davids. Luis Enrique is retiring, I think. Kluivert and Overmars are for sale. They've picked up Belletti to play right back, Giuly for left wing, Larsson for center-forward, Deco for attacking midfielder, and Sylvinho for left back. Supposedly they still want to sign another forward who can actually score goals. Sergio García, Óscar López, and Ramón Ros will be loaned out to other Spanish First Division clubs.

Right now this leaves them with a lineup of something like Valdés; Belletti, Puyol, Oleguer or Márquez, Sylvinho or Van Bronckhorst; Giuly or Luis García, Ronaldinho, Deco, Xavi or Motta or Gabri; Larsson and Saviola or Mystery Signing. I would say the only untouchables are Puyol, Ronaldinho, and Deco. Deco and Motta count as Europeans, as will Sylvinho in about a month. That makes your four non-EU players Márquez, Ronaldinho, Belletti, and Saviola. I don't know what they're going to do with Rüstü, who's from Turkey and whom I suspect they would prefer to use rather than Valdés in goal. I heard some bogus claim about how the Barça was going to sue in order to get Turkey considered as a EU nation for soccer purposes, or something absolutely ridiculous like that.

As for the Tour de France, Armstrong is in fine form. Yeah, a few guys have about a ten-minute lead on him, but they're sprinters and will burn out about halfway through the first mountain stage. There's no good reason why, barring accident, he shouldn't repeat. Oh, yeah, there's the Lance Conspiracy Theory. See, the organizers didn't want Lance to win again, so they picked a fairly undemanding course with less emphasis on the mountains and the time trials, Armstrong's twin strengths. Meanwhile, though the course is not real tough, it is real dangerous. There have been an awful lot of crashes, at least one a day; the organizers included two sections over cobblestones, literally, which they hadn't done for like fifteen years. They also ran the first third of the course through wet, rainy Belgium and Atlantic France rather than the drier central and southern areas. Avoiding crashes is partly skill--and Lance manages his bike as well as anyone--but also partly luck. If the guy right in front of you takes a spill, it's probable you'll go down too, and you just might get badly hurt. Armstrong's already been involved in one crash from which he emerged unhurt. So, basically, what they've done is increase the luck factor; the easier course reduces the necessary and sufficient talent needed to win, the course design plays against Lance's strengths, and the risk factor makes it more likely that a rider will go down and be eliminated through a random accident. You know, it's a conspiracy theory and all, but I wouldn't put it past the French.

Check out this bit. It's from the Reader's Encyclopedia of the American West, a volume intended as a reference for the fairly well-educated reader, written by mostly western state-college academics in the 1960s. That is, it's by people who perhaps weren't great stylists (though they all write very clearly and correctly, unlike most academics today) or well-read in medieval Icelandic literature or the Bhagavad-Vita, and certainly didn't know jack about Foucault or Fanon, but who knew their branch of history cold and reported it honestly. Their like is long-gone on today's American campuses.

Well, it seems that Idaho, in the 1860s when it was a territory and hadn't reached statehood yet, consisted mostly of the parts of the Northwest that other states didn't want because they were out in the middle of Assboink, Bumsquat. There was a mining area in the northern part of the state centered on Lewiston and an agricultural area in the southern part centered on Boise. The Boise area had nine-tenths of Idaho's population, and the Lewiston area only 10%, so guess which part of the state got its way. The only way to get between Lewiston and Boise was via Portland, San Francisco, and Salt Lake City, because of a rough range of mountains and canyons and desert between the two towns. It didn't help matters any that many of the Boise area people were Mormons moving up from Utah; Mormons were not real popular along about that time in that place. Anyway, not only could they not figure out what Idaho's boundaries were supposed to be, they couldn't decide which town would be the capital.

Even without the boundary arguments, few territiories had anything like the sad experience that afflicted Idaho while setting up a territorial government. William Henson Wallace, the governor who organized the territory, immediately got himself elected to Congress as Idaho's delegate. His successor, Caleb Lyon, a political oddity from upstate New York, moved from one catastrophe to another. During the 1864 capital dispute, Lyon attempted to solve the problem by delivering five speeches on his experiences in the Holy Land. He also escaped clandestinely from Lewiston under the pretence of hunting ducks. "Fleeing from the mandate of a probate judge", he left Idaho with no executive department at all; finally, his private secretary decided to take over until a legal official might show up. Afther three months a new territorial secretary, C. DeWitt Smith, reached Lewiston. With military support, he took the territorial seal and archives away from a vigilant armed guard provided by Lewiston's alert citizens, who were resisting permanent location of the capital in Boise. Smith did not last long in Boise. At the end of a strenuous chess game in Rocky Bar, August 19, 1865, he suddenly expired from the effects of a "dismal and melancholy disease". That left Idaho once again with no government. No one knew for sure where the capital was, and the supreme court had not yet succeeded in organizing itself into existence. Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., Caleb Lyon beat W.H. Wallace in a hard-fought contest for the dubious honor of returning to Idaho as governor.

While Lyon was on the way to Boise, Horace C. Gilson took over the government and soon got himself appointed secretary. An ill-chosen associate of C. DeWitt Smith (who had found him in a San Francisco saloon), Gilson came poorly recommended because of his doubtful "moral antecedents". Gilson and Lyon made an interesting pair. They managed to dodge serious conflict with a bitterly hostile Democratic Party legislature, but in the spring of 1866 they quietly left town. Gilson took along the entire territorial treasury of $41,062 in federal funds, and Lyon escaped with the entire Nez Percé Indian treasury of $46,418.40, to have been used for treaty payments. Lyon had been dismissed because of his policy of treating the Indians decently. Refusing to go along with local sentiment, he blocked a campaign to exterminate the local Shoshoni. But he learned his lesson quickly, and when he got through, nobody could doubt that he had made up for his mistake in trying to help the Indians. No recovery was ever made from either Lyon or Gilson in this defalcation.

With Lyon's departure in April 1866, Idaho ended up with no government again. Location of the capital was still in litigation, but at last the supreme court got organized in time to dismiss the Lewiston complaints and injunctions on June 14. Just then David W. Ballard turned up as governor, and from then on, Idaho at least had a functioning territorial administration. It was about time. A few loose ends from the period of original chaos had to be cleared up. The supreme court, for example, noticed at last that Congressional delinquency in drafting the Idaho organic act had forced the territory to operate without criminal law until early in 1864, when the legislature corrected the oversight. Straightening out territorial finances posed more of a problem and took until 1869.

I forgot who said it, probably H.L. Mencken or Robert Benchley or someone of that ilk: "God looks out for children, fools, drunks, puppy dogs, and the Republic of the United States of America."

Ten Best Rolling Stones Lesser-Known Songs

10. "Factory Girl"
9. "Sweet Virginia"
8. "Rip This Joint"
7. "Let It Bleed"
6. "Stray Cat Blues"
5. "Sway"
4. "Moonlight Mile"
3. "Shine a Light"
2. "Memo from Turner"
1. "Tumbling Dice"

Dishonorable Mention:

5. "Dead Flowers"
4. "Country Honk"
3. "Dancing with Mr. D"
2. "Bitch"
1. "Cocksucker Blues"

Not much news from around here, I'm afraid. There seems to be a lot of crime going on around here, though I'm not sure whether it's a real increase over the old days or just better reporting and police work or straight-out media sensationalism. My guess is mostly choice number three. It does seem like there's been a wave of men killing their wives / girlfriends / exes / female acquaintances, though. Naturally, the Left is blaming this on sexist Spanish society.

Well, they sort of have a point. Spain is a good bit more macho than other European countries, at least among the working class. Many Spaniards from lower-middle-class on down are machistas; in fact, being machista is like waving a big sign saying "I'm unenlightened!" The middle class and up (roughly described as those who have spent at least a year in college) make a big deal out of being non-machista, though.

HOW TO RECOGNIZE A SPANISH MACHISTA: If you are a male, he will repeatedly attempt to demonstrate that his penis is bigger than yours. For example, he may aggressively insist the group go to his favorite bar, which always sucks; he will almost certainly grab as many low-priced checks as he can, but will lay off if a bill for three or more rounds come his way; he will brag about either how fast his car is, or how subserviantly his wife satisfies his every sexual need except for that extra libido he gets rid of down at the puticlub.

If you are a female, he will look you up and down completely, focusing especially on your breasts, before presenting himself to be kissed on two cheeks as is customary in Spain. He will take advantage of this local ritual to grab your hip or butt and plant one flat on your lips. If challenged by you, he will merely laugh. If challenged by your husband / date / friend / dad, he will laugh and say something about it being all a big joke.

Fortunately, the Spanish machista is dying out, though perhaps not as fast as some would like. Anybody who presumes to be the slightest bit enlightened would never stoop to acting machista. However, a lot of Spanish men still think enlightened is what you are if you wswallow a lightbulb.

Our local feminists are yelling and shouting about an epidemic of gender violence, of course. Normally an intellectual fashion takes about ten to twenty years to get from the American universities, where they are generally started, to Spanish enlightened opinion. The rhetoric being thrown by our local Chemical Lali Solés is straight out of about vintage 1985 Dworkin / McKinnon--that is, everything is men's fault. For the appropriate antidote, read Christina Hoff Summers's Who Stole Feminism?.

For some more Moore mierda, check this out:

Joke only comprehensible by south-midwest folks of a certain social class:

What's the difference between white trash, rednecks, and hillbillies?

Well, white trash folks get invited to a wedding and just throw on a stinky old Iron Maiden 1982 tour T-shirt, leave the trailer door open, and show up. Rednecks get invited to a wedding, take a shower, shave, get all fixed up, throw on a brand-new Dale Earnhart Jr. T-shirt, lock the trailer door, and show up. Hillbillies just ask, "What's a trailer? What's a door?"

Check this one out. While in these here parts there has been much rending of garments and gnashing of teeth regarding the abuses at Abu Ghraib, our local Socialist-Communist-Catalanist-Green coalition had a prison uprising at Quatre Camins to deal with back on April 30. Naturally, the uprising was put down violently. So far, so good. I have no problem with the crushing of prison uprisings.

Here's the fun part, though. 26 of the prisoners involved in the uprising were "mistreated" by jailers after the uprising had been put down. These jailers are responsible to the Generalitat, the Catalan government, not to the central government.

Let's follow the story as it develops and compare it with the American reaction to Abu Ghraib. The American government admitted wrongdoing. There was a serious internal investigation in which names were named. Those accused of the actual abuses are being tried by military courts and will be punished severely if convicted. Several top military officers (Karpinski, Sanchez, Abizaid) have had their careers ruined.

Now, of course, the enlightened Socialist-Communist-Catalanist-Green government we have here in Catalonia had a lovely time damning the Americans after the Abu Ghraib news broke. Wonder how they'll react now that their people are the torturers?

For some reason my former Yahoo e-mail account stopped functioning; I can't get into it.

Note new e-mail:

iberiannotes@mail.com

Sorry if anyone was inconvenienced by my temporary inaccessibility.

Sorry I haven't written for more than a week. I'm just fine, but I don't have much to say. This is the boring time in Spanish politics, when the Congress is out of session and the parties are having their conventions. Of course, nothing of any interest is ever said at those things.

Last thing of any real interest said around here was when Eduardo "Señor Genocide" Haro Tecglen wrote in El Pais that (paraphrasing) Hitler killed millions in order to increase inequality between the peoples, while Stalin's sin is much less since he killed millions, too, but in an attempt to increase equality. Too many people around here, like say almost everybody, failed to call the old, failed, bitter apologist for mass murder what he is. And make no mistake: if Haro and his beloved PCE had ever gotten anywhere near real power, Franco's atrocities would seem like a spit in a bucket.

Comment on Franco's atrocities: some of them were pretty bad, but there's never been any call for the prosecution of Francoist police or military or jailers or executioners, not even since it became clear along about 1985-1990 that there was not going to be another military coup no matter what. Possibile answers to this question: 1) everybody has genuinely forgiven everyone else 2) too many people collaborated; you'd have to try the whole country 3) it would wake up too many embarrassing memories among those Socialists who joined the party only after Franco died 4) there would be a call for the trial of the assassins of the Left, like Carrillo, who managed to escape the first time around. I tend to go for some combination of answers 2, 3, and 4, mostly 2. It ain't 1.

The Forum is continuing to suck. They're getting nobody during the day; everybody's at the beach. I now have eight beer labels, so that leaves only sixteen to go to get us both in.

Comment: I really hate going to the beach unless we're going somewhere pretty or where the swimming is good. I'd say the Costa Brava counts as nice enough, and very nice in its better parts. The water's clear and cool and clean all the way up from Tossa past Collioure. Sitges is also a pretty town, but the water's not incredibly sanitary there. Now, I am not a neat freak or a paranoid health-nut wacko. I like swimming in a nice, clean sea. That simply doesn't exist south of about Calella or so in these here parts of the world. It's a muddy, gritty, not overly attractive sea along most of the rest of the Catalan coast. They tell me it's cleaner way down south along the Delta del Ebro. Dunno, haven't been there, but thought I'd mention it.

Besides, you get all hot and sweaty, and I get sunburned, lying on the beach. And it's boring, unless you want to go swimming, which I don't really want to do unless at Cadaqués or Ampurias.

I prefer to go out to the house in the village, which is 1) at about 2000 feet altitude, so cooler at night, not to mention dry 2) has nice, clean air and pretty paths and dirt roads to walk along through fields and forests and olive groves and vineyards and the like 3) has a very clean and meticulously maintained swimming pool, half in the shade of some pine trees, and, get this, bar service. (No real glass, so your rum and Coke comes in a plastic cup. Smoking is, of course, encouraged. Cigarettes, that is.) Also, there are lots of bored teenage girls from Barcelona spending the summer, and they hang out at the pool, so all you teenage boys take note.

Oh, yeah. A few days ago Tikrit Tommy Alcoverro claimed again that the Americans had armed Saddam. Tommy has absolutely no idea of what he's talking about, of course, or he'd know that the great majority of Saddam's arms came from the USSR, China, and France, in that order. The US got less than 1% of Saddam's military spending.