Thursday night was the First Occasional Blogger Bash here in Barcelona. Franco Alemán of Barcepundit presided and Golan of HispaLibertas, in town from Malaga, was the life of the party. Several other bloggers and blogreaders were there, including Trevor from Spain Media and Nihil Obstat, a total of fifteen or so, and a good time was had by all. The only problem was since it was Thursday, no serious drinking or visiting of gentlemen´s clubs or anything of the sort went on since people had to work the next morning. Also, we need more chicks next time; only one showed up, and, while she was lovely and gracious, a bunch of babe magnets like us should have attracted the nipple rings of a few irresponsible young right-wing heiresses with tailbone tats. Other than those minor complaints, the evening was a great success and I vote we do it again. There were several people I didn't really get a chance to talk to.

Common note: Everyone in the group was thrilled to be among a group of people among whom we didn't have to watch what we said. It is, at best, socially unacceptable to be conservative or classical liberal or non-Catalanista or anti-anti-American (and especially pro-Israel) around here. I've been told off several times, and I'm careful not to let people I don't know well in on what my genuine ideas regarding politics and society and suchlike are. I think in general leftists are much more intolerant of rightists personally than vice versa; I noticed this to be true even in Kansas City.

The Vanguardia today is priceless. Page Three, top of the International Section, by Sebi Val, begins, "The American elections of November 2 will not be held with the guarantees of democratic integrity worthy of a developed country. Ex-president Jimmy Carter warned of this several weeks ago. Other voices and the facts on the ground are confirming this. Twenty international observers, invited by the pro-human rights organization Global Exchange, have come to the same conclusions."

Jesus Christ. This is actually not an uncommon tactic among anti-Americans of the European Left; they flat-out deny that the United States is a democracy. Based on what? Well, Sebi and Global Exchange admit that "there have been advances made in order to avoid new chaos like that of 2000". But: 1) the officials who supervise the elections in the various states "have a partisan character". That means, uh, that these folks are elected by the voters. That's grass-roots democracy, it seems to me. 2) Convicted felons are barred from voting in eight states, says Sebi. Huh. I thought it was more. So what's the problem with that? Who wants people like George Steinbrenner to be allowed to vote? Well, seems that "4.7 million citizens--with a high proportion of African-Americans and Hispanics" are affected. Seems to me that this disenfranchisement is merely a symptom of a root problem, which is that felonies are committed to a disproportionate level by blacks and Hispanics. 3) There are confusing rules about voting. Yeah, that's what happens when you put the government in charge of something. It gets all bureaucratic and complicated. I've complained about this before. However, the main cause of the complexity is that each jurisdiction, and there are literally tens of thousands of them in the US, conducts its own elections. More grass-roots democracy, it seems to me.

Get this, though. "The most negative consequence of many of the weaknesses and faults is discrimination against voters of minority groups--Hispanics, African-Americans, and American indigenous people". Oh, please. The sum total of these complaints is that stupid people might not figure out how to vote, that criminals can't vote, and that elections are held at the local rather than national level. That does not invalidate America's status as a democracy, the best damn one there's ever been.

Jimmy Carter really is an international embarrassment.

This is even worse, of course, it's Andy Robinson on page 4. Andy's been to a Bush rally at Hershey, Pennsylvania. "...the 20,000 Republicans who attended the rally paraded under the rain to their 4x4s shouting "Four more years!" Then they came across a small group of Democratic demonstrators. "Communists!" shouted Heath Gephart, 31, pilot and Baptist. "The Democrats are a bunch of liberals, more or less the same as Communists," he explained. "They're against the ethical principles of this country. Against the culture of life. They support murdering babies. We are the moral majority." Chris Thomas, a soldier of 34 years who has just arrived from Iraq, could not control himself when he saw the demonstrators' poster that said "Protect life, leave Iraq". "They're lucky there are guys like me so that they have the freedom to protest", he said. "Get a real job!" another shouted. Hundreds of Republicans circle the demonstrators. Some of the demonstrators begin to cry..." Andy then begins to beat conservative Protestants over the head for a while. If you believed Andy, you'd think that all of America was like the Ozarks. Or, even worse, most of England.

You know, actually, I agree one hundred percent with the obviously fictional Chris Thomas. Heath Gephart--great name, Andy--is even more obviously phony.

Anyway, on page 6 Xavier Batalla has a long dull opinion piece on whether the Americans can afford to pay for both the Iraq War and the social welfare system (Answer: Yes, Xavier, we can. The $422 billion deficit Bush has run up is a blip compared to the size of America's $9 trillion economy. You just wasted seven triple-length Spanish paragraphs.)

In the editorial section, Balto Porcel says that really bugs the Europeans about American throwing around its weight is the fact that the Americans do it so incompetently. He says, "(There is) a global feeling of insecurity, we know we are tied to its leadership, but it seems brutal and clumsy to us, as incapable of solving conflicts as absolutely hegemonic among the peoples. Why does the United States go to war if it doesn't know how? Why does it try to lead the world if its leaders are that lousy Bush, his Texas oilmen, and his radical and arrogant thinkers? It's incomprehensible...Warning: This problem, like that of relations with all of Islam, comes from the old Palestine-Israel chaos also sponsored by the United States and which has gotten worse under Bush."

In other words, Balto objects not to US imperialism but to incompetent US imperialism. It would be okay if we killed people more effectively, you see, like the NKVD and the Gestapo used to do. How long do you think the Iraqi "resistance" would last if we went after them like, say, Lenin or Goering would have? Oh, by the way, it's all Israel's fault in the long run. Balto, like most Europeans, has forgotten that the trouble down there is not the fault of Israel, which openly expresses its desires for peace, but that of Palestinian terror organizations, who continue massacring civilians inside Israel and thus forcing retaliation. Continued: "These elections will cost more than $650 million...twice Barcelona's Forum." Wrong. The Forum cost more than €2 billion.

Friday Sebi Val had a piece on how the NRA and the Bible-banger Protestants are powerful lobbies with lots of money. They're powerful lobbies with lots of money because a lot of people support them, you dipstick! They have political muscle, it's true, but no more than their share. Meanwhile, we are informed that the Dems are sending out ten thousand lawyers to contest the vote everywhere they lose. I am genuinely angry at the Democrats for this strategy of impugning the elections if your man didn't win. What they're trying to do, in case you haven't noticed, is take away the political legitimacy that the candidate who has won an election has earned. Also, Andy Robinson informed that "the African-Americans of Philadelphia feel genuine rage about the robbery of black votes in Florida and other states in the previous presidential elections." Now, come on. A more accurate sentence would be something like "The Democratic Party has as usual been trying to play the race card in the inner cities by falsely making claims that black voters were somehow cheated in the 2000 elections, and they have had some success by repeating this distorsion ad nauseum."

News from around here: I really haven't been keeping up with it but there's been a struggle for power within the PP. Seems that Esperanza Aguirre beat out Alberto Ruíz-Gallardón for control of the Madrid party. Aguirre is a standard-model conservative and Gallardón is the most "moderate" PP leader, which I think means "the guy who has been trying to distance himself the most from Aznar". Watch out for Mr. Gallardón. Seems like someone with ambition to me. This is mostly notable because it's been the first major stink within the party for some time; under Aznar, everyone was disciplined. Now that Rajoy's the boss, some people are going to try to test his authority.

There's a survey about Barcelonese opinion regarding municipal services. The most criticized areas are parking, traffic, and crime, in that order. Citizens are the happiest about the subway, the buses, citizens' information, cultural information, and public street festivals. I'l agree with the parking, traffic (which really isn't that awful, it's just scary) and crime as aspects of life that could certainly be improved, and crime is the worst. I'll also agree about public transport being generally good; you can actually get around town without a car, which a lot of people do. As for information, though, give me a break, and as for as popular cultural street fiestas, here in Gracia we're sick of them. Revealing stat: Gracia was the only neighborhood of town whose main complaint is noise, most specifically the noise made by the goddamn Fiesta Mayor. The poorer areas all said crime or immigration; the wealthier areas said cleanliness or parking; and we said noise. I'll agree with the wealthier areas that the city is quite dirty, one of the dirtiest in Western Europe, and that some of the dirt (along with the noise, traffic and parking problems) is because the place is so crowded.

The big sports whoop-te-doo here is--the World Series! No, six million Catalans don't give a damn. The Patriots' win streak! No, six million Catalans don't give a damn. The big whoop is that the Catalan roller-hockey team (roller hockey! Is there a dorkier sport?) has been internationally recognized and has won a place in the International Roller Hockey Premier Division or whatever it's called. This is the main sports story.

Something that the local lefties are criticizing with good reason is the government's handling of the plane crash that killed 62 Spanish soldiers on their way back from Afghanistan on May 26, 2003. Yes, I know tragedies and accidents happen, and that something like one-fifth of combat soldiers killed are done in by friendly fire. But this one didn't have to happen. It was a Soviet Yakovlev plane with a Ukrainian crew, and, I'm sorry, I wouldn't fly in a Soviet plane no matter what. Couldn't they have hired somebody flying American or European planes to do it, or, failing that, couldn't they have done it themselves? I would certainly hope that the Spanish Air Force is at the very least capable of transporting 62 soldiers from Afghanistan back home. If it isn't, something's very wrong. There are also allegations about poor airplane maintenance and an exhausted crew that had been on duty for 23 hours.

Finally, congratulations to Loyola de Palacio, currently vice president of the European Commission, who said she hoped Fidel would kick off as soon as possible because that's the only way there will be change in Cuba ("I'm not saying kill him. I'm saying let him die," she clarified), pointed out that Castro is "a sinister dictator with many deaths upon his shoulders", and poured scorn on the Socialist government's attempt to improve relations with Cuba, saying "That's playing the game of distinguishing between good dictatorships and bad ones." The implication is, of course, for Zap and the Socio-Communist-Cataloony government in charge, Castro's is one of the good ones. You go, Loyola!

Further information released by the police shows that there was a connection between the terrorist cell that was just rounded up, the one that was going to blow up the Audiencia Nacional, and the cell that committed the March 11 bombings. In addition to the nine arrests of suspected terrorists, nine more suspects already in prison have been identified as part of the same gang. The link is the Algerian Armed Islamic Group, and three of the nine suspects already in prison have been linked to Allekema Lamari, leader of the March 11 cell. Lamari's remains were just identified last week; his was the last unidentified body from the apartment in Leganés where what was left of the March 11 cell blew itself up.

Congratulations to our pal Franco Alemán from Barcepundit (just click on Barcepundit over there on the left, then click for Barcepundit in English) for being Instapundited. Franco has the link to the just-released film from a security camera of the March 11 bombing at Atocha Station in Madrid. I haven't seen it, but from what I read in La Vanguardia what struck me was that when the bombs went off everybody panicked. That strikes me as much more like normal human behavior than what we see in the movies.

I'm not sure what the effect of this film of the bombing will have; I hope it brings back a little of the anger toward terrorism that seemed to disappear right after the March 14 election. Kicking out Aznar and the PP seemed like a catharsis--oh, now we've voted in the nice peaceful candidate and he's pulling our troops out of Iraq, the rest of us have nothing to worry about, what happened to them won't happen to us. You'd hardly believe that 191 people had been murdered en masse on their way to work only seven months ago from the way it's been whitewashed from the collective public mind.

While Zap and his Ministry of Clowns keep themselves amused, the Spanish intelligence and police services are doing their jobs very well and deserve our congratulations. Last weekend there was a major ETA bust that took down a lot of what was left of the gang's infrastructure, not to mention an enormous arsenal. Now there's been a bust, this Monday, of eight Islamists who were planning to set off a 1000-kilo suicide truck bomb to blow the Audiencia Nacional and Judge Garzón to hell and gone. The arrestees are all Algerians and Moroccans, and they seem to have met up in jail where they were doing time for minor common crimes. The leader, Mohamed Achraf, is allegedly a member of the Algerian Armed Islamic Group; that´s their connection to international terrorism. These guys just arrested were quite possibly a lone group, with no connections to the outside except Achraf, who was constantly traveling back and forth from Switzerland. They are not connected with the March 11 bombing crew or ETA.

Two ironic bits: the Spanish media has sided with Fidel Castro over this deportation of the Spanish Member of Parliament from Cuba. They pretty much all agree that the guy's trip to Cuba to meet with dissidents was a provocation and an attempt to stir up trouble at the same time that the European Union is debating the relaxation of its strictures against Cuba. See, it's all a conspiracy run by these right-wing nuts who don't believe in the Revolution. Meanwhile, Pasqual Maragall and the leader of the opposition, Artur Mas, went to China. Quite logically, they portrayed Catalonia as a Chinese springboard into the Spanish market as a whole rather than as a destination in itself.

Some folks would say that's an example of typical Catalan common-sense seny (be the salesman, get the investment) beating out the Catalan wilder side, known as rauxa (get all proud about how special we are). I think Robert Hughes made up this theory.

See, Catalan nationalism's bases are fairly fragile. I think there are three of them. The first is what's left of old 19th century nationalism, the common belief held by the English or Germans or French (or Catalans) that they were somehow a superior people chosen by God or somebody and so their desire for more power and glory is justified by the fact that Catalans are special. This rhetoric is widely used even today, though not so blatantly as I've put it, as it fell into general intellectual disfavor around 1919 or thereabouts.

Second is the Catalan language, something solid that actually exists. One common answer to the question "who's Catalan?" is "someone who speaks Catalan". That sounds fair enough. The problem is that it's exclusive of those who do not speak Catalan for whatever reason, and that all Catalan-speakers also speak Spanish while many Catalan-speakers don't consider Catalan to be an integral part of their identity, so it makes just as much sense to say that everyone in Spain who speaks Spanish is Spanish--which is the argument that the Catalanists hate the most. Anyway, though, I think the language claim is a pretty solid one--we speak a different language, so we're different. It runs up against the fact, though, that life outside the big cities is pretty much the same in Catalonia, Aragon, Navarra, and Old Castile.

This is where argument number three, the fet diferencial, comes in. If we renounce aggressive blood-and-thunder nationalism, and if we agree that the language plank is strong but not sufficient to make Catalonia completely unique, we're left with redrawing Catalan culture to suit the idea of a fet diferencial, a "differencing factor". This is why the regional government spends jillions of euros subsidizing obscure variations of popular dance, theater, puppetry, and the like--you see, that's stuff that only exists here! So it makes us different!

I think this is what the common identification of the Catalan character as being a yin-yang between calming Appolonian seny and agitating Dionysian rauxa comes from. It's an opportunity to say, "See, look, we're different, we have our own national character. Seny plus rauxa--that's us.". The problem is that everywhere you go, most people act with common sense most of the time and occasionally do something stupid. This is by no means a trait unique to Catalonia. In fact, I'd be surprised to find any group of people where some balance of rationality and irrationality wasn't struck.

The Vangua says that an EU study shows Spain with the highest automotive death rate. In deaths per 10 billion vehicle-kilometers, Spain comes out with 28, more than double the EU's average of 13. Holland has 9, Sweden 8, and the UK 7. I have no idea where to find the equivalent stats for the United States.

FC Barcelona plays at AC Milan tonight. Should be a hell of a game. Samuel Etoo of Cameroon, one of Barcelona's new signings who is genuinely a spectacular player, and young, too, has been going about making slightly obnoxious racial comments (e.g. "I'm going to have to do a lot of running to keep up with that nigga" (Cafú) or "I´m here to work like a nigga and get paid like a white man". I guess they're not any worse than what you hear in and around the NBA, which is probably where he got the idea in the first place.

In other news, one Gersende Rambourg of AFP lets European lefties know that John Kerry is the man most sympathetic to them on the question of capital punishment. Kerry has spoken out against the death penalty several times in the past. For some reason this is a huge issue to the European left; they love to beat America around the head with the fact that some states execute some murderers. Interestingly, they never criticize Japan or India, the other two large democracies that use the death penalty, nor are they swift to condemn Cuba whenever Castro has somebody shot.

If anybody ever comes up to you with that ridiculous argument about how the rest of the world should be allowed to vote in the American elections since America rules the world, try this string of arguments on him: 1) America doesn't rule the world in the first place 2) why should you jokers vote on issues that only concern us anyway--what do the Belgians know about water issues in the Far West 3) we'll let you vote in our elections if you let us vote in yours--if you have them, that is 4) you can't have representation without taxation, so when y'all start kicking in to the US treasury that's when you get to vote 5) if you want the vote in US elections, you must agree to live under US constitutional law, or else what's the point?

We sure are getting lots of coverage of the US elections around here. Sebi Val from the Vanguardia says, as part of his news article, "The electoral campaign, in its homestretch, has gone back to the path of the purest propaganda, with both sides appealing to the citizens' fear of terrorism and to the anxieties and emotions generated by the Iraq war". Gee, that seems a little excessive to me, and I was there just a week ago. Sebi thinks this is the most deeply emotional campaign since 1964 when "they"--that is, Johnson's campaign--appealed directly to the fear of nuclear holocaust. Oh, come on, name one Democrat campaign between 1972 and 1988 that didn't appeal directly to the fear of nuclear holocaust.

The Vanguardia's editorial says, "Analysts agree that whatever happens on November 2, things will not be the same as before: President Bush, if he is reelected, will have to change his unilateralist policies." Oh, he will, will he? Says who? And besides, what unilateralist policies? I thought pretty much everybody was on our side except for a few Third World dictatorships, France, Germany, and the European Left.

Duran Lérida has been reconfirmed leader of Union, half of the Convergence and Union conservative Catalanist coalition. Union is the Christian Democrat wing and Convergence is the centrist wing, to simplify. Union´s come out hardcore against gay marriage, gays' rights to adopt children, and in favor of state money to Catholic schools. In response to Pasqual Maragall's blathering on about how now here in Catalonia there are seven million of us, Duran said, "Here at Union we want there to be seven million of us too, but not only through immigration, but because the regional government maintains a policy in favor of the family that allows Catalan families to have children when they want."

The European Union currently has a fairly strong position against the Castro dictatorship that is largely the fruit of the labors of the old Aznar government. The new Socialist government is trying to change this; they want an EU policy that favors the Castro régime more. So, get this. A PP member of Parliament, Jorge Moragas, was deported upon arrival by the Castro government because he was going to meet with Cuban dissidents. Foreign Minister Moratinos officially deplored such treatment of a Spanish MP, but Rafael Estrella, a PSOE backbencher, accused Moragas and the PP of trying to torpedo the Socialist government's moves to improve relations with Castro. Communist leader Gaspar Llamazares couldn't resist demanding that the Socialist government "maintain its commitment to reestablish dialogue with Cuba and the Cuban people, which has always existed, except when Aznar interrupted it."

Barcelona beat Espanyol 0-1, goal by Deco. Madrid tied Betis 1-1 and Valencia lost to Sevilla 1-2, leaving Barcelona at 6-1-0 and 19 points, well above second-place Seville and Valencia with 14 each and Real Madrid in eleventh place with 10. Next week Barcelona plays Osasuna at home, a game they ought to win, and Madrid plays Valencia at home, so whatever the result is one Barcelona rival will be hurt. Several Barcelona players are injured, including Giuly, Sylvinho, Edmilson, Gerard, and Gabri, leaving Rijkaard with only 14 first-team players and guys off the youth squad. I dunno--it still looks like a pretty good team to me.

I'm back in Barcelona and Iberian Notes is ready to come back full-blast. Everything sure is small here. And the streets are really full of people.

The big stink around here is utterly symbolic. October 12 is Spain's national holiday, the Día de la Hispanidad, commemorating of course Columbus´s first voyage. Every year the Army has a parade because it´s also Armed Forces Day. The more politically correct among us like to call it "el Pilar", since October 12 is also the day of Our Lady of the Pillar, Aragon´s patron.

So, anyway, this year they rather pointedly decided not to invite the Americans to participate in the parade, as they had done the past two years. The Americans rather pointedly had the ambassador blow off both the parade and the King´s reception afterwards. La Vanguardia made a very big deal of this, from the rather surprising perspective that the Zapatero regime needs to be somewhat more solicitous of the US government.

Meanwhile, somebody had the geniusy idea that they would invite both a Spanish member of the Leclerc division, the allegedly French military formation that allegedly captured Paris in 1944--there were a good few Spanish Republican refugees in France, and some of them joined up with Allied forces as they passed through--and a member of the División Azúl, the allegedly volunteer force of 18,000 Spaniards that fought as part of the German Army against the Soviets on the Eastern Front. Both. At the same time. Brilliant plan. That'll prevent controversy.

Pasqual Maragall showed up at the parade for the first time for a Catalan prime minister. Jordi Pujol had always blown it off. The Republican Left, the Communists, and Convergence and Union all had a great time booing and hissing Maragall for attending such a show of support for the evil rotten Spanish army that so brutally oppresses us all.

Foreign minister Miguel Ángel Moratinos and party bigwigs José Montilla and Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba threw a snit about the American ambassador´s absence from the big fiesta. They looked like third-graders.

The problem here is, when you get right down to it, symbolism such as this shouldn't really mean a crap. The best way to deal with such a thing is to do the minimum necessary without standing out either for your enthusiasm or your indifference. Somebody has a ceremony? Show up, smile for the photographers, shake hands, go home, and jack off. Don´t make a big deal about it. It´s that simple.

The Vangua is not escatimating on the coverage of the US elections. Today there´s a story titled "Xenophobia against the Hispanic invasion" from Arizona--this is a drum that Spanish journalists love to beat on, claiming that Hispanics are mistreated in the US. They've got an op-ed piece by one Jeremiah Purdy, who if my memory is correct is a former child prodigy who wrote a book about how we were all too ironic and didn't take things seriously enough, calling Bush a poophead. (If we don't elect Kerry, "the country will be drawn toward an ultraconservative society that, we must fear, will be like Brazil: divided, unequal, and frightened.") Andy Robinson, of course, has dredged up a weirdo who claims he´s an ex-porn addict who´s now leading Jesusheads for Bush or something and is using him as an example of how Americans are all a bunch of religious nuts, Andy´s pet theme. Andy, this technique is called "pointing out the extreme example and framing it as the norm".

Yesterday they dug up James K. Galbraith, whoever he is, with a bad economics piece about how the Federal Reserve is wrong when it predicts a 2004 economic growth rate of about 4% for 2005, it's all Bush's fault, and Kerry and Edwards should win the election and then "sit down at a table with the real leaders of business and labor in order to seriously examine the real situation we're in and the policies we should adopt." No, I think it would be better to sit down around an oil drum with a fire lit inside it with the homeless guys down by the waterfront and seriously examine the real situation we´re in and then shake down everyone for a quarter apiece to get another pint of Mad Dog. Eusebio Val had a piece on how the Indians are discriminated against, and there was a story on Bruce Springsteen and "Rock My Head" or whatever it´s called.

Oh, yeah, the current stink involving gays is that some Italian guy who's up for European Commissioner said that homosexuality was a sin, so there was a big foo-faw. This gentleman´s name? Rocco Buttiglione. Sounds like Sylvester Stallone´s character´s name in "Party at Kitty and Stud´s". Then some guy named Mirko Tremaglia, who sounds like the actor who plays the dude who always carries the ammo until he´s the first of the good guy's squad who gets blown away in a Jean Claude Van Damme flick, said that it was too bad the majority of Europeans are "culattoni", which is apparently Italian for "rump rangers". The Perenially Indignant are, of course, all indignant, and we must admit that Mirko might have gone a bit too far when he claimed that the EU is dominated by the homosexual lobby. (Insert Greek Army joke here.)

The Presidential debate is just about over and I'm getting my thoughts down on it pre-spin. I would give Kerry a win on points, but he didn't land anything like a knockout punch. Kerry is a more articulate speaker than Bush, no question about that, and he wins on style. What Bush was trying to do is characterize his opponent as a flip-flopper, and he harped on that theme to the exclusion of almost everything else. Kerry, on the other hand, attempted to characterize the Iraq war as a failure and tried to slam Bush on the issue of possible nuclear proliferation. Nobody really made any new points or said anything that hadn't been said before. The weirdest thing was the emphasis that wound up occuring on the question whether bilateral talks with North Korea (Kerry) or multilateral talks including Russia, China, South Korea, and Japan (Bush) would be more successful at countering the possible North Korean acquisition of nuclear weapons, which by the way happened on Clinton's watch. That bit was a waste of everybody's time.

Effect on the campaign: This ought to shore up Kerry's position, which has been rapidly collapsing over the last couple of weeks, but it won't help him mount a comeback. Bush wins with 35-38 states, I still think.

I don't bother to read Andrew Sullivan any more. He's a very intelligent man and an excellent writer; there's not any question about that. But he's gay and that's the most important thing in the world to him. He doesn't seem to give a damn about whether George Bush or John Kerry would be a better President, although anybody who's taken the positi0ns Sullivan has taken over the last couple of years can only support Bush. But Bush has come out in favor of a Constitutional amendment that would leave gay marriage up to the states and that would permit states such as, say, South Dakota to refuse to recognize gay marriages that took place in, say, Massachussetts.

I am going to be honest here. Gay people would probably think of me as a homophobe. I guess I am. I believe that if you want to suck other guys' dicks, that's your business, but don't ask me to celebrate it, or even approve of it. I personally find the concept repulsive, and I think that men who want to have other men's penises inserted into their rectums are psychologically ill--and, folks, I know whereof I speak, since I have spent some time in a mental hospital. If you believe you are homosexual, I certainly think that you should have the right to do whatever you want with other consenting adults--but do not ask me to consider your behavior to be normal.

What repulses me about Sullivan is his record--he has AIDS but hangs around in gay chatrooms for people who like to "ride bareback", which means having anal sex without a condom. Meanwhile, he used to support President Bush (if you want to see some serious ass-kissing, go back and look at Sullivan's pieces written during the six or eight months after 9/11), but has changed sides because the President has come out against legal recognition of homosexual couples. Now, people, there is a major difference in the importance of the two issues. President Bush's stance on terrorism affects every single person in the United States and in the rest of the world. His stance on gay marriage affects a bunch of fruit loops in NY, SF, and LA. But which is more important to Andrew? His own naked self-interest, of course.

I've seen almost no news either from or about Spain for a long time; I can only assume that not much has happened there. I will point out that many American people may know nothing more about Spain than one fact: in the wake of the Madrid bombing and the following incredibly biased media hysteria, the majority of Spaniards chickened out and let Al Qaeda determine the results of their election. Here's a quote from National Review's Jay Nordlinger:

Lincoln Chafee, the Republican senator from Rhode Island, will not say that he will vote for Bush: "It's no secret that I have big differences with the president on a host of issues, whether it's the environment, the war in Iraq, women's reproductive freedoms . . ."
"Reproductive freedoms"? What ever could that mean? Who is stopping women from having babies?
Chafee continued, "And, like all Americans, I'll be really looking at this war and what happens over the next number of weeks."
Ah! What does that mean? That the terrorists have only to keep applying the pressure, and Chafee will pull a Spain?

"To pull a Spain". That phrase should become part of the world's vocabulary, standing for cowardly surrender to and appeasement of terrorists when challenged by them. I am saddened by the fact that the majority of the people in a country I love did such a thing. I suppose the translation to Spanish should be "hacer una espanolada" (pardon the lack of the tilde on this keyboard). Previously, "una espanolada" referred to doing something in the tradition of cheesy movies from the Sixties with feel-good scripts including several pseudo-flamenco musical numbers, multiple bad jokes, low-budget production, frequent transvestitism, and the presence of Marisol, Joselito, or Paco Rabal. Now, forever, it will be associated with backing down before Bin Laden. Before March 14, Nordlinger would most likely have said "pull a Munich". Chamberlain's 1938 surrender to Hitler has now been eclipsed.

On a completely different note, I am repeatedly surprised by how blatantly the Left appeals to emotional references to romantic comradeship in fighting the good fight.

This is a story from the Associated Press today. The AP is in italics. My comments are in regular type.

As world leaders gathered Monday for the annual U.N. General Assembly, French President Jacques Chirac — already deeply at odds with the Bush administration over the war in Iraq — accused Washington of obstructing a worldwide campaign to eradicate poverty.
Chirac spoke after the U.S. administration declined after two high-level meetings to endorse a final declaration that was supported by 110 countries. The nonbinding document called for a "renewed political mobilization" to help more than 1 billion people trying to eke out a living on less than $1 a day.

Note the words "nonbinding" and "declaration" and "political mobilization". In other words, nothing serious, just another blast of hot air aimed at taking the high moral ground. Sorry, M. Chiraq, we all know that such empty posturing is the behavior of the weak. The strong do not posture. They act.

"However strong the Americans may be, in the long term, you cannot successfully oppose a position taken by 110 countries," Chirac told a news conference. "You can't oppose that forever."
Chirac planned to return to Paris Monday night, making it impossible for him to meet with President Bush who speaks before the General Assembly when it officially opens Tuesday. Bush did not attend the Monday meetings.

We certainly can oppose something so meaningless with absolutely no damage whatsoever. As for meeting with President Bush, even if Chiraq had stuck around I don't think he'd have gotten one.

Chirac said he and and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva would propose new approaches to fund the alleviation of poverty, although the preparatory meetings resulted in no specific proposals.
"The price of selfishness is rebellion," he warned. "We should ensure that the world's unprecedented wealth becomes a vehicle for the integration, rather than exclusion, of the most underprivileged. It is up to us to give globalization a conscience," he said.

Wait a minute, Jack. Are you calling us selfish and exclusive and concienceless? That's rich, seeing as how the United States has provided more aid (99% wasted) to the Third World than France, Germany, and Spain put together, and seeing as how everybody in France would be living in mud huts eating grass right now if not for the Marshall Plan. France has certainly been generous to folks like Saddam, though, I will say that. As for the dumb "root causes of terrorism" argument, that's already been so completely shot down that I won't bother doing it again. By the way, note the words "no specific proposals".

Bush has said his speech will emphasize international humanitarian concerns as the world body begins two weeks of meetings in the midst of an upsurge of violence in Iraq and a massive humanitarian crisis in western Sudan.
The document adopted after Monday's meetings, but not signed by the Americans did not make specific anti-proverty proposals but said the time had come "to give further attention to innovative mechanisms of financing — public or private, compulsory and voluntary, of univeral or limited membership" to raise funds to fight poverty.

I saw Bush's speech. He pointed out that we're spending fifteen billion dollars in Africa to fight AIDS, malaria, and other diseases. That sounds specific to me. Again, no specific proposals by Chirac, just a load of wank. And I think "innovative methods of (compulsory, public) financing translate to "Give France some control over your money, you evil rich Americans, so we can waste it propping up our former Empire of cheap-ass African dictators."
U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ann Venemen rejected the idea of a global tax proposed in a February U.N. report and favored by some of the participants, including France, saying it was impossible to impose.
"A global tax is inherently undemocratic," she said.

That's right. Nobody but the US government is going to tax US citizens. The rest of y'all around the world can do whatever you want.

Silva said overwhelming hunger and unemployment in developing nations was contributing to international violence.
"How many more times will it be necessary to repeat that the most destructive weapon of mass destruction in the world is poverty?" he asked during a speech at a session that focuse on a U.N. report about the growing divide between the world's haves and have-nots.
Asked later whether he was concerned by the lack of U.S. support for the declaration, Silva told journalists that the United States had taken an important step by sending a representative.

There goes Lula again with the root causes argument. You want to cure poverty in Brazil, Lula, there are a few things you can do all on your own. Just ask Xavier Sala i Martin. Anyway, poverty doesn't cause violence, fanaticism and greed (both caused by envy) cause violence.

The report said the income gap between the richest and poorest countries has widened over the past four decades and the vast majority of the world's population could fail to see the benefits of globalization.
"Fair globalization must begin with the right of everyone to a job," Silva said, stressing that "dignified work, like the fight against hunger, cannot wait."

First, the fact that the rich are getting richer faster than the poor are getting richer is not a bad thing, it's a good thing, since everyone is getting richer. Second, I'm tired of the word "globalization". The world economy has been global ever since it began sometime during the Neolithic age, and it's never been fair. And third, nobody has the right to a job, since rights are free (they do not have a cost) and your "right" is somebody else's obligation. You have the right to look for a job, but nobody has the obligation to give you one.

According to Bjorn Lomborg, who cites UN figures, world life expectancy has risen from 30 to 67 years since 1900. Only 18% of people in the Third World suffer from hunger, down from 35% in 1970. Only 16% of young people in the developing world are illiterate, down from about 75% in 1915. 80% of Third World people have clean drinking water, up from 30% in 1970. In the last ten years caloric consumption in the Third World has risen 8%. People around the world are richer, healthier, and better off than they ever have been. That does not mean things are good enough. It does mean that they aren't nearly as bad as one might think after listening to Chiraq and Lula.

"We have more leisure time, greater security and fewer accidents, more education, more ameneties, higher incomes, fewer starving people, more food, and a healthier and longer life. This is the fantastic story of mankind, and to call such a civilization 'dysfunctional' is quite simply immoral." (Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist, pg. 328.)

I just watched Bush's speech at the UN. I'm not sure it was a home run but it was definitely a triple off the wall. Bush made the case for democracy around the world and emphasized the idea of "human dignity" as what the US and its allies are fighting for in the War against Terrorism. He linked Afghanistan and Iraq as different battlefields in the same war against murdering fanatics. He openly spoke in favor of a Palestinian state and criticized Israel's settlements policy as he called yet again for peace in Palestine: his emphasis, though, was on the corruption and cruelty of the current Palestinian leadership, as he said that peace would be impossible while the current leadership was in place. Bush talked tough about Darfur, calling the current situation genocidal. The two things that most impressed me were 1) that Bush accepted partial American responsibility for the situation in the Middle East, stating that American policy had too often worked in the interests of stability and not enough in the interests of democracy and freedom and 2) that he did not back down on Iraq; he said America and its allies would stand firm and achieve victory. No flip-flopping or panicking here.

This was the speech of a President, not that of a mere politician.

The terrorists in Iraq have murdered another American and they are holding one more American and a Briton. They will undoubtedly be killed soon. Every atrocity they commit should merely make the will of the West stronger. Excluding our friends in Paris, Berlin, and Madrid, of course, who have no will whatsoever. There is only one way to stop terrorism and that is to kill those people who are committing it. I'm surprised that so few people are willing to say this publicly, even over here in supposedly conservative Kansas City.

Time magazine has a piece on our friend Zap and an interview with him. No comment, except to say that Zap is a dope.

I certainly did mistranslate El Pais's slogan for the advertisement they produced the other day: as well as using the photographs of the World Trade Center atrocity in an attempt to stir up business, they used the slogan "Un dia da para mucho." This has two different meanings: the first is, as I said, "A lot can happen in one day". The second, even more offensive, is "You can accomplish a lot in one day." Fortunately, El Pais has done the decent thing and apologized on their editorial page--though I still think that what they're really sorry about is letting their real feelings for the US slip through.

As for our friends Dan Rather and CBS, thay've finally admitted they were wrong about the phony memos. Jeff Greenfield was on CNN; Judy Woodruff asked him how this could have happened and Jeffy said it was human error. Judy mentioned that there are some people who think the media has a liberal bias and might possibly be gunning for Bush. Jeffy said nope, that it was an honest mistake. Jeffy went on to say, insinuatingly, that it is the Bush campaign that has benefited as a result of this hoo-hah. No, no media bias there at all.

The Chiefs suck. Can you say "six and ten"?

You guys should absolutely check out Franco Aleman's Barcepundit. From there, if you don't read Spanish, just click on Barcepundit in English. Franco is holding down the fort while I'm gone and doing a hell of a job as usual, with comments on CBSgate, El Pais, La Vangua, those idiots in the Spanish government, and just about everything else. In particular, he reproduces an advertisement from El Pais which shows a photo of New York taken the morning of Sept. 11 and another one taken on Sept. 12, with the obvious difference that there are two large buildings in the left photo that don't appear in the right one. The slogan? "A lot can happen in one day. Subscribe to El Pais and get three months free." Gee whiz, why didn't they use photos of, say, Atocha Station before and after the events of March 11 this year? Or maybe a before-and-after of one of the kids in the school at Beslan? What poor taste. Disgusting.

Quick update on coverage from Spain in the American press: CNN has been reporting that 1. Aznar is going to speak before the Parliamentary commission investigating the 3-11 bombings and the government's response thereto and 2. ten Pakistanis have been arrested in Barcelona, accused of forming a low-level organized crime syndicate dealing in phony IDs and p[assports and pirate CDs and DVDs. They are apparently not linked to Al Qaeda but allegedly have provided money and logistical support to radical Islamist groups. The KC Star has a paragraph on the arrests.

Comment on the KC Star: Its coverage of local issues--city and state government, mostly, and local occurrences--is first-rate, considerably more detailed than what you find in Spain. Its coverage of national issues is a good bit more sketchy and mostly depends on the wire services. It's not a bad summary, but you'd want to, at the very least, read one of the national newsmagazines and/or the Sunday New York Times and/or the Wall Street Journal and/or listen to talk radio and/or watch TV news, in addition, as far as the mass media goes. As far as international issues, there's really not very much and it's all off the AP wire. Exception: Iraq, where the coverage is both more detailed and less prejudiced than what you get in Europe. For anything else about the rest of the world, the Kansas City Star is not sufficient.

I suppose this has everything to do with local folks' priorities. The KC metro area is about 1.5 million people; there are some 2.5 million people in all of Kansas and like 4.5 million in Missouri. Add up Missouri and Kansas and you get an entity very like Catalonia in population, though much greater in size. Missouri and Kansas put together would be a medium-small European country in population that batted well above its weight economically, and that's about most people's everyday scope. Chicago? Denver? Dallas? Those places are beyond our local scope.

Since American government is much more decentralized than European governments generally are--that is, most decisions about education, police and fire protection, public utilities, government social services, criminal and civil law, banking and insurance regulation, public and private transport, intrastate commerce regulation, and some taxes are made at the state or local level with between some and no federal input--people tend to be a good bit more concerned about state and local news than they would be in Europe. National news is also very important, since the federal government is responsible for a lot of stuff, too. International news just isn't so big a deal except for Iraq and other fronts of the War on Terrorism to most people around here, which is why coverage in the KC Star is so limited. Maybe a proper comparison would be, for media purposes, that a US state (in our case, two states since we're right on the line) is comparable to a European country, that the federal government is comparable to the European Union, and that you don't hear much about the rest of the world either in the US or Europe unless something big happens there.

Note for confused people about local geography: Kansas City is in Missouri, right on the Kansas state line, where the Kansas River flows into the Missouri River. The rivers were named long before there were any white permanent settlers in the area. Missouri became a state in 1821, and Kansas City was founded about that time, though it didn't become important until 1850 or so. Kansas didn't become a territory until about 1850, and it became a state in 1861. So the story is that the municipality of Kansas City was named for the Kansas River and has nothing to do with the state of Kansas. Later, as Kansas City, Mo., grew, its metro area spilled over into Kansas. There is a city called Kansas City, Kansas, about 1/5 the size of KCMO, across the state line. (Most of it is a real hellhole.) South of KCK is Johnson County, Kansas, where many of the middle-class suburbs are, including Leawood.

Well, we've been here for a couple of days now in lovely Leawood, Kansas. Here are some first impressions after two years outside the United States:

1. Everyone seems to be very prosperous. Not that people in Barcelona are poor, but it's clear that the standard of living here is much higher, and real estate has gone up in price a good deal though not as much as in BCN. I see virtually no real poverty. There isn't anyone who doesn't have the minimums except for the few local homeless. Working class folks ain't rich by any stretch of the imagination, and dad and mom both have to work at least part-time, but things aren't too bad for anybody and are pretty good for most people. This does not strike me as a temporary blip; it strikes me as a real gain.

2. Government services are not anywhere near as ungenerous as they are painted by the lefties in Europe. Just for example, if you are a family of four and you earn less than 170% of the poverty level income (170% is $34,000 or so), your kids qualify for reduced price school lunches. $34,000 is a hell of a lot more than Remei and I make, put together, in Barcelona.

3. The only big problem I see that people here have is health care. Now, I pay 8% of my income in Spain for social security (=health care plus pension) taxes. I don't think most people in the US pay 8% of their incomes for health insurance, but I don't have the facts, either. What I do see is people who would be in big trouble if they didn't have decent insurance, like my parents. This is what most people I know seem to be concerned about. I really don't know what I would do to fix the situation; I believe that strict controls on malpractice suits and jury awards would help a lot, I do not think insurance should cover bogus so-called alternative medicine (e.g. chiropractic, vitamin therapy, acupuncture, psychoanalysis--google the website Quackwatch for the real information on this), and I think that Americans have a silly fixation on the idea that "I want to choose my own doctor". No, if you're not paying for it out of your own pocket, you don't get to choose your own doctor. By the way, doctors in America make way too damn much money. But from these personal prejudices of mine to a coherent plan there is a long way.

4. People are nowhere near as dumb as the average bigoted European thinks. Most Americans are much better informed about domestic affairs than most Spaniards are about their domestic affairs, and most Americans are not ill-informed about significant international affairs. Yes, probably only about 2% of Americans can identify the prime minister of Spain, probably not much more than 5% have ever heard of the Catalan language, and I doubt more than 10% could accurately place (not find--any idiot who can read a map can do that) Barcelona on a blank world map. You did hear me say "significant", though.

As for what they call in Spain "general culture", everybody who's ever been to college has plenty. People who haven't been to college often don't. Is that a surprise? I think what bothers Spaniards is that in Spain, there's a connection between cultural level, class, and money. It is expected that someone with enough money to travel the world is of at least bourgeois, social class. In America there are a lot of working-class people with lots of money and no culture who have never been anywhere near a university except to supervise the installation of the air-conditioning and earn more for doing that than an assistant professor makes in six months.

5. People here are very polite. And they don't shout and scream and get angry all the time. Also, service in bars and restaurants and the like is good, and you generally tend to get what you pay for.

6. People have lost weight since about five years ago. There's a real move toward eating healthier and doing more exercise. It's not a "cult of the body" thing, it's people behaving more sensibly in general. Yes, there are fat slobs out there, but they're about 15-20% of the people. Then there is everybody else, many of whom are slightly or moderately overweight, but that's not incredibly unhealthy or unsightly. There sure are a lot of people around here who wear ugly clothes, though--except that one thing you see a lot more of in Spain than here is people wearing polyester. Americans tend to wear ugly natural fabrics.

7. It sure seems like there are a lot of people who want to be victims. Everybody can now identify himself as a victim of some kind who can demand special treatment. "Treat me with more respect! I have Asshole Personality Disorder and it interferes with my ability at social interaction in a way that unfairly influences my ability to..." You know what I mean. Gays are especially obnoxious about this.

8. New music sucks. So does new TV. And new movies. Good thing there are a lot of interesting books and plenty of old music out there to discover.

9. The mainstream American media is tremendously biased toward the left. This is also true in Spain, but at least they don't pretend to be neutral or unbiased over there.

10. The Chiefs' defense bites the big one. No way they'll get beyond the first round of the playoffs. Jed says we should go for it on fourth down every time, and onside kick after every score, since the other team will score whether or not the Chiefs punt or kick off deep.

8. People drive much more carefully than they do in Spain.

We're leaving for Kansas City today for a bit of vacation. Stay tuned for more stupidity-bashing from the other side of the Atlantic, including an evisceration of the Kansas City Star, within the next few days.

Well, it looks like the Dems have decided to play dirty. InstaPundit has the link. Susan Estrich, who is most likely operating as a Hillary stooge as usual, has a nasty piece out accusing Bush and Cheney of being alcoholics, stating with no evidence that they have racked up several drunk driving arrests between them (Bush has one from the early Seventies before he quit drinking), and also insinuating that Bush is cheating on his wife. Evidence: Seems there's a Kitty Kelley book coming out, and we all know how reliable she is. For good measure, she throws in some more unsubstantiated accusations of draft-dodging.

The Dems are flailing. They're furious that Kerry's Vietnam record is being challenged. The man's Vietnam service is part of his public record. Well, folks, that's what he's running on, so it's logical that the Reps would attack it. That is not a dirty trick. Bush and Cheney are not running on a platform of marital fidelity and sobriety, and their personal lives are not part of the public record.

Also, the challenges the Reps have made against Kerry have been made based on evidence, not innuendo, exactly the opposite of Estrich's charges. Susan, let's see the facts. If you can prove Bush and Cheney are philandering drunks, do it. Then the American people will be able to decide whether it matters or not. Seems to me that the Reps have managed to prove that John Kerry lied about his Vietnam record. And the American people seem to be deciding that that does matter.

This was the part of Estrich's piece that struck me:

"The arrogant little Republican boys who have been strutting around New York this week, claiming that they have this one won, would do well to take a step back. It could be a long and ugly road to November."

This is not the first time I have seen radical feminist women attack men's adulthood and sexuality. So the Republicans are "little boys", are they?

What would Ms. Estrich think if we said that she and her beloved Hillary are just little girls who should stay out of things that are the business of real men?

And, if the Dems want to play dirty regarding sex and drugs, I imagine there's plenty more good stuff out there on Kerry. You're telling me that a wealthy liberal counterculture young man in the 1970s wasn't doing cocaine? What about Kerry's divorce? Might there have been some screwing around related to that? (Here in Spain, it would probably look worse to be the cuckolded husband than the deceived wife, by the way.) And--the big one--money. Why precisely did John marry Teresa? Was it her unattractive face or her unpleasant personality, or maybe was it some other reason? That, to me, is a much uglier possibility than any accusations of drunk driving or adultery. See, if the Dems like innuendo, the Reps can come up with lots worse.

Finally, if Estrich actually had anything good, she'd save it for an October surprise, the way the Dems did back in 2000 when they released Bush's drunk driving arrest at the last minute before the election. And I don't think they have anything good, because if they did they'd already have used it back in 2000.

Point Number One: The Chechens have a legitimate beef against Russia. They were incorporated against their will into the Czarist empire during the 19th century. They were savagely mistreated by Lenin and Stalin, so much so that when the Nazis invaded, they collaborated. In revenge, Stalin deported the lot, along with the Ingush, to Siberia in 1944. Khrushchev allowed them to go back home, but thousands had already died. The Chechens then had to put up with more decades of Soviet misrule.

Point Number Two: This is no excuse for taking over a school and murdering four hundred people, mostly children.

Got that? I don't care how badly your people have been screwed over in the past. That was then and this is now. If you're going to go back to the days of Caucasus blood feuds, we're going to have to stop you, and "we" means the civilized world.

I am appalled by the comments of Spanish Socialists Javier Solana and Miguel Angel Moratinos, demanding explanations from Vladimir Putin and yammering on about dialogue and finding the root causes of terrorism and all that crap. Terrorists only understand one language, and that language is what comes out the muzzle end of an assault rifle.

I also believe that this is all the same war. If the Chechens aren't in league with Al Qaeda and the other Middle Eastern terrorist gangs, like the boys from Hamas who just murdered sixteen Israelis, or the Saddamites in Iraq who just murdered twelve Nepalis, not to mention seven Iraqi policemen in Kirkuk, then what were ten Arabs doing among the hit squad that took over the school in Beslan?

Finally, I'm not sure how Vladimir Putin can be blamed for this tragedy. My understanding of what happened in Beslan is that the terrorists took over the school, held more than a thousand children and other people hostage without food or water for two days, somehow caused an explosion that made many of the hostages attempt to flee, and then fired on those escaping, shooting them in the back. The Russian security forces had the place surrounded and the bombs and the gunfire started. Bodies were falling left and right. What were the security men going to do? They reacted quickly and went in shooting. I don't know who gave the order, or if there was one, but it seems safe to say it wasn't Putin because, of course, he wasn't on the scene.

It's the same enemy, folks. The civilized world has got to destroy them. Or else we're next. Remember the WTC. Remember Bali. Remember Madrid. Remember Fallujah. How short some of our memories are. Particularly those of the Spanish Socialists.

Problems with Nationalism: George Orwell wrote in his essay, "Notes on Nationalism", that there is a difference between patriotism and nationalism. A patriot is someone who loves his country, its people, and its culture, but has no desire to force his culture or religion or lifestyle on anyone else. His patriotism is only one of the many factors, both emotional and rational, that forms his worldview. A nationalist, on the other hand, is someone whose worldview is emotionally based on his love for his chosen power unit, which may be a state, a people, a political system, a religion, or whatever. A nationalist thinks only or mostly about the comparative prestige and power of his chosen unit.

According to Orwell's definitions, I consider myself an American patriot. I don't want the United States to annex anybody else's territory. I see no need to force American culture on anybody. I believe that if you leave us alone, we ought to leave you alone. Sure, I have emotional, non-rational feelings toward the United States, but I try to keep them under control and not let them dominate my thinking.

Excessive nationalism can have various negative consequences.

1) Irredentism. You believe that your power unit should control territory that doesn't belong to it. Milosevic's Greater Serbia and Hitler's Greater Germany are classic examples. When Catalan nationalists start talking about the Països Catalans, including not only Catalonia proper but also Valencia, Baleares, and Roussillon, as a single unit, that's a problem since none of those places want to be part of Catalonia. And let's not even mention Gibraltar. Oops, I just did.

2) Internal divisions. You believe that some of the people within your unit are not part of your group. Hostility toward immigrants is a very common consequence of this. We see this in the United States; some Americans fear that the country is being flooded by Spanish-speakers. Our man Jordi Pujol recently made a very nasty crack about how immigration is going to make Catalonia a land of mestizos. This is made even worse when there are several groups who have lived within the same territory since time immemorial; for example, in Catalonia, there are some people who believe that others are not good Catalans because of the language they speak or the political party they vote for. In Spain, there are people who believe that many Catalans are not good Spaniards for the very same reasons. When taken to an extreme, this leads to ethnic cleansing and even genocide. Fortunately we're nowhere near that around here...but up in the Basque Country...

3) Falsification of history. Nationalists have the habit of ignoring facts when they don't fit into their chosen worldview. For example, Sabino Arana invented his own history of the Basque country which has nothing to deal with reality. Some Spanish nationalists claim that there is a Black Legend (the Inquisition, expulsion of Jews and Moors, ethnic purity, foreign aggression) that has been greatly exaggerated by foreigners who wish to slander Spain's name.

4) Excessive emphasis on symbolism. September 11 is the Catalan national holiday. So what are they fighting about? What flag should fly over the City Hall. Who should lay flowers at the Holy Statue of Rafael Casanova. This is a serious distraction from real issues.

5) Excessive emotionalism. This leads to poor decision-making. The classic example is probably Japan in 1941; they knew they were going to lose but went to war anyway.

6) Ignorance of other groups. Nationalists have the bad habit of assuming that either everybody is just like them (a common American error) or that everybody else is completely different. This is generally because nationalists are obsessed with their own unit to the point that there's no room in their brains left for the comprehension of other units. What this leads to is stereotyping of others. In Barcelona there's a real problem with this: many people who think they're well-educated about the world are so self-absorbed with nationalist issues that their comprehension doesn't extend south of about Tortosa.

7) Bitterness. Some Catalans, for example, live in a constant state of anger because they believe that Catalonia is an oppressed nation under the Spanish jackboot. They obsess over it. This is probably not good for their mental health, and it makes them unpleasant to be around.

George W. Bush is going to win the election. The Democrats are so mad they could spit. Just look at Slate or Salon or the New Republic. They can't stand it. Bush's convention bounce is going to be enormous and they know it. I don't think Mickey Kaus minds, though.


The Democratic convention was a big fat zero. Nobody was impressed. Nobody's mind was changed, or even influenced. But Zell Miller, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Laura Bush, Dick Cheney, Rudy Giuliani, and company have successfully gotten the Republican message out. The bases are loaded and two runs are already in. And Bush hasn't even spoken yet. He doesn't need a home run; a line-drive single will do.

The message is very clear. If you want to win the War on Terrorism, vote for Bush. And John Kerry is not fit to be President. The Republicans have completely blown away any pretense he ever had to be taken seriously as a national politician. If I were a Dem, I'd just give up on Kerry now and vote for Ralph. At least he believes what he says.

I think I know what's gotten into Andrew Sullivan. (Have you read some of the crap he's been putting out?) When you get right down to it, Mr. Bareback is a single-issue commentator. He cares only about gay rights; everything else, even the War on Terror he has supported, is secondary to him. Bush is against gay marriage; therefore, Bush must lose. Sullivan has blown all his credibility. Sad. Go back to Provincetown, Andrew.

On Sunday La Vanguardia published an interview with Carles Fontserè, an old Spanish leftist (now 88) from Civil War days who designed propaganda posters. He fled to France after the war was over, where he complains about being mistreated by the French, who weren't sure what to do with the horde of leftist refugees (some of them very dangerous people) and so locked them up in camps. That's where we start, in France in 1939 before the outbreak of World War II. I quote:

"INTERVIEWER: ...How did you feel when you saw yourself so mistreated?

CARLES FONTSERE: First, discombobulated. We arrived there thinking we were a collective, part of an army. Soon I saw that I had to fight for myself, take care of myself. I decided my obligation was to escape from that concentration camp. Other comrades, on the other hand, enlisted in the Foreign Legion or in work brigades for France, a job for slaves! Then, when those comrades were captured by the Nazis, they sent them to the camps as prisoners of war of an enemy army, which they were.

INT: Did you escape?

CF: I refused to be a slave for France. I put all my intelligence and all the strength of my 23 years into escaping from there. I studied the wire fence and the routine of the guards, and I discovered a possibility. And, crawling like a snake under the wires, I escaped.

INT: Bravo!

CF: When I did so, I deserted from the honorable ranks of the antifascist martyrs. I gave them all the finger: the guards and the prisoners! I rebelled against that fate of martyrdom.

INT: You say that as if the rest decided to be martyrs.

CF: I think that's true, many of them accepted that fate. Not me. And today it seems that you are only one of the good guys if you have suffered a lot. Well, although many "good guys" may become indignant, I will say that I had fun in exile, I had a good time.

INT: Did you make it to Paris?

CF: Yes, with no money or papers. At the beginning, I was hungry, but when I got some pencils and paintbrushes I earned a good living drawing for various publications.

INT: Was there a cultural life in Nazi-occupied Paris?

CF: A great deal. Jean-Paul Sartre began to be known during those years, and Albert Camus expressly left Algeria for that Paris in order to present his works successfully. There was a lot of intellectual, artistic, and cultural life in Paris under the occupation!

INT: Clandestine?

CF: No! The Nazis organized free concerts in the streets of Paris. I came from a lousy concentration camp and I found music in the streets: marvelous!

INT: But they were Nazis!

CF: Look, the German soldiers entered Paris hand in hand with the French soldiers, and they loved Paris, and they protected it. The economic activity in France didn't change: there was electricity, telephones, everything. The head of the German General Staff in Paris, Hans Speidel, met with French artists and intellectuals like Cocteau, Guitry, Gallimard...In the streets, the German officers stepped off the sidewalks to let you pass. In the five years I was in Paris I never saw an armed German soldier in the streets. They didn't need to (carry arms)! They gave chocolate to the people in the streets.

INT: Wasn't there any resistance?

CF: Of course not. That's a myth, invented later by Gaullists and Communists. There was agreement, there was collaboration. According to what I saw, there were 40 million Petainist Frenchmen! The Germans respected the French army, and Petain, with that agreement, saved Paris and the French from destruction. It was intelligent and sensible. Remember that Germany had the most powerful army in Europe...The Nazis respected the Spanish Republican fighters more than Franco. They admired the way we had formed a Popular Army, the way we resisted for three years. Hitler, who was a Socialist, respected the Spanish Reds.

INT: But the Germans turned over Lluís Companys (the leftist, Catalanist president of Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War) to Franco.

CF: Companys made a mistake. Instead of presenting himself proudly to the Germans as president of the Generalitat, he walked around Paris like everybody else. I tried to free him when he was held prisoner a few days in La Santé in Paris: along with other Catalans, we wrote a letter to the German commander. It didn't work. But the Germans didn't like the way Franco had him shot, and after that they never permitted a single Spaniard to be turned over to him.

INT: You always excuse the Nazis.

CF: No, I just say what I know, and the truth is that Germany represented at that time the most avant-garde and advanced of Europe. Their rulers were young, while the French were ancient.

INT: Young and perfidious.

CF: Look, Goebbels was wrong: while the Americans made dozens of movies about perfidious Nazis played by the leading Hollywood stars, the Germans didn't make even one about the Americans! What a lack of propaganda! Also, the Nuremberg trials were more propaganda than justice.

INT: Come on...

CF: They executed four of them who they didn't need, but they accepted in the United States scientists who had made Nazi bombs, like Von Braun! Thanks to him the Americans made it to the moon. And where do you think senator McArthy (sic) got those lists of Reds?

INT: Where?

CF: From the Gestapo archives that they bought from Colonel Muller, a Nazi who had them in Switzerland and went over to the United States with his dollars.

INT: Meanwhile, you stayed in Paris.

CF: I was there from 1939 to 1948, yes. (Later he went to the United States, where he lived until his return to Spain in 1973.)"

My only comment is that Carles Fontserè is the most amoral person I have ever heard of, and he dares to boast about his amorality. I wish the so-called Free French had shot the son-of-a-bitch back in '44.

Oh, yeah. For more fun with Google, try some combination of "Not in Our Name", "ANSWER", "Workers World Party", "Revolutionary Communist Party", and "Communist front". Fascinating what turns up.

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.