As everyone knows, North Korea's long-range Taepo Dong II missile test has failed. The effect, of course, will be to strengthen links between Japan, South Korea, and the US, and to make possible North Korean allies China and Russia nervous. According to Slate:

Kim Jong-il, these past few years, has adroitly played his otherwise miserable hand because of two cards that everyone believes he holds—nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. Yesterday's dud raises the possibility that the missile card's a bluff, that there may be (as Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland) "no there there." The next tempting step is to wonder about the nukes. We know that he has enough plutonium to build some bombs, but has he built them? Can he build them?

From a strictly objective viewpoint, the test would have meant little, even had it succeeded. In Cold War days, the United States and the Soviet Union would each test-launch a new intercontinental ballistic missile 20 times before deeming it "operational." The North Koreans, until yesterday, hadn't fired a long-range missile since 1998, and no serious analyst thinks they can make a nuclear weapon small enough to fit inside a missile's nose cone.

Looks to me like Kim has been left with No Dong in his hands.

Rafael Poch, La Vanguardia's completely insane correspondent in Peking, says:

The question why North Korea is so stubborn about launching missiles is almost banal, because of the fact that it is not prohibited and everybody launches them, the Russians and the Americans, even France.

What?!? North Korea doesn't give a rat's ass what international law permits and prohibits, and the fact that Country X test-launches missiles itself does not mean that Country X will not consider itself threatened if Country Y test-launches a missile, especially if Country Y is run by a bunch of crazies led by a certifiable lunatic. North Korea launched those missiles in order to threaten its neighbors, Mr. Poch, you dope, and it's the United States's business because two of those neighbors are close allies of ours.

Mr. Poch adds:

In the Middle East there is a crisis, they say because Iran wants to develop nuclear arms, but in Israel those very arms, some 200 bombs, have existed since the 1970s, though they are not talked about. In the middle of this general irresponsibility, it can be affirmed with some security that the North Koreans are not the only inhabitants in the global insane asylum.

Note the moral equivalence here that Mr. Poch is making between Israel and the US on the one hand and Iran and North Korea on the other. The difference between the two is clear: North Korea and Iran are aggressive totalitarian dictatorships. The US and Israel are not. The US and Israel would be happy to leave North Korea and Iran alone if those countries stopped behaving aggressively. North Korea and Iran have no intention of stopping their aggressive behavior. To quote the Slate article:

"The missile launch is an issue that is entirely within our sovereignty," a (North Korean) foreign ministry official said. "No one has the right to dispute it. … We are not bound by any agreement." The statement is true but beside the point. The worrisome thing about the prospect of North Korean nukes isn't so much the nukes as the North Korean. The missile launch confirms the worst fears about Kim Jong-il—not merely that he's a guerrilla diplomat who takes wild gambles but that sometimes the gambles go awry.

But Mr. Poch continues:

North Korea is not a threat except to its own population, which suffers from one of the toughest regimes in the world. But while the only choice offered to them is regime change, its only play will be missiles and ambitions for a nuclear bomb, for which the real evidence is zero, according to the most trustworthy observers.

Who are those trustworthy observers, Mr. Poch? A few drunks at the hotel bar in Peking? As for being a threat to no one, Mr. Poch, then what are the missiles and warheads and enormous army on the South Korean frontier for?

This was La Vanguardia's page three international lead news story today, not an opinion peace. People, this is not news, it is analysis, and pretty stupid analysis at that.

Read all about it: New Zealand peace activist puts British rock singer in coma!

Here's Timothy Garton Ash in the Guardian, of course. "Most of us" is a reference to the British.

Unlike many continental Europeans, most of us do not rule out war as a means of last resort. We think you sometimes have to fight to defend your way of life, but that you should fight clever, keeping a cool head, a strong grasp on reality and a sense of proportion. We've lived with terrorism for years, and we know you can lick it, especially if we don't overreact and make unnecessary sacrifices of liberty in the name of security - for freedom is its own best defence. Between cheese-eating surrender monkeys and fire-eating war junkies, we look for a middle way. Americans have every cause to be proud on July 4. And on July 7, I'm rather proud to be British.

Ash is making several question-begging assumptions here: The US-led coalition is not fighting cleverly or proportionately or in a well-considered manner; IRA terrorism is comparable to Islamist terrorism; Great Britain "licked" the IRA (in reality, of course, they cut a deal); the US has sacrificed liberty for security; and, most blatant, there is some "middle way" between war and peace in Iraq. Note the turn of phrase: "fire-eating war junkies." Does Ash really believe that the Bush administration is addicted to war?

One point, just to avoid misunderstandings: I agree with Ash that British citizens have a great deal to be proud of, and if I were British I would certainly be proud of it. In fact, I'd make a better Brit than a lot of Brits I know.

For lots of anti-Americanism, read the comments below the article.

Barcelona Reporter links to this horror story on US Immigration's treatment of a tourist from Barcelona at the Seattle airport. Immigration is notorious for being unpleasant to foreign visitors, but all bureaucrats, who universally consider themselves overworked and underpaid, are capable of being major jerks. This seems like a typical bureaucratic screwup to me. Another factor, of course, is that the US receives something like 50 million tourists a year, and some small percentage of people is bound to be mistreated. None of this makes it OK, of course.

For some perspective on the issue, watch this video.

National Review is very good today. Check out this review of a new biography of William Jennings Bryan; I plan to read the book when I get hold of it. Furriners might be interested in Bryan, as he's virtually unknown outside the United States. They've also got a piece comparing Teddy Roosevelt to George W. Bush. Both articles stress that both Bryan and TR would have been sympathetic to today's Republicans, despite Roosevelt's Progressivism and Bryan's populism. And urbane paleocon John Derbyshire explains why he has some doubts about Bush on a personal level.

The mistake these geniuses are making is assuming that just because some action is permitted, it is therefore a good idea to do it.

Iberian Notes is back after a month of vacation. The Spain Herald is defunct. They told me they couldn't find advertisers and it was costing too much money. No hard feelings; they always treated me decently. My only complaint, which I've already written about several times, is that I strongly disagree with the conspiracy theory on the March 11 bombings that they're pushing.

Major news from Spain today, unfortunately. A subway train went off the tracks on Line 1 in Valencia at 1 PM today, between the Plaza España and Jesus stations, and at least thirty-five people were killed. Thirty more were injured and taken to the hospital; among them is a woman in the last stages of pregnancy. The first thing authorities did was rule out a terrorist attack as the cause; apparently the train was A) going too fast (how can a subway train go too fast?) and B) one of the wheels broke, derailing two cars. According to TVE, there may still be some bodies that haven't been recovered.

More bad news. Two "sub-Saharan" (Spanish politically correct for black) illegal immigrants were killed trying to cross the boundary fence between the Spanish city of Melilla and Morocco in a group of about fifty who tried to use the "human avalanche" technique, tried several times earlier this year. And about twenty more drowned at sea when their open boat capsized on the way from the West African coast to the Canaries. At least one thousand, and probably many more, sub-Saharans have died at sea so far in 2006 trying to reach the Canary Islands.

This is a massive humanitarian tragedy happening here. It is getting no publicity around the world. The Spanish navy and coast guard seem to be doing what they can, and they've been rescuing most of the open boats, called cayucos, before they sink. Some of the West African countries, like Mauritania and Senegal, are officially trying to patrol their coastlines, but I'm not sure how effective that is. Spain, at least, has gone on a diplomatic offensive in the area, sending special envoys to half-forgotten places like Mali and Guinea-Bissau, for whatever good that'll do.

The most significant news of the month was, of course, Zap's announcement that he's going to negotiate with ETA. My position is that there's nothing to negotiate about except when and where ETA is going to turn over its weapons. I have no problem with dragging out the process a few years, IRA style, as long as ETA doesn't go back to murder and extortion. I'll accept letting them save a little face.

The concession I am willing to make is the relegalization of Batasuna, just as soon as it officially announces that it condemns violence. That does not mean pardoning crimes, such as exaltation of terrorism or conspiracy to extort, that may have been committed by Batasuna leaders in the past. Prosecutions should continue, and, of course, all ETA criminals should serve out their full prison sentences.

Relegalizing Batasuna wouldn't even really be a concession, since as far as I know, the Constitution requires us to do it anyway if they renounce violence.

The extortion, though, hasn't stopped. The basis of ETA's finances has always been the "revolutionary tax" it blackmailed Basque businesses and individuals into paying. Among companies rumored to pay off ETA are Eroski, Azkoyen, and Fagor; there are dozens of others. French Basque soccer player Bixente Lizarazu was the most famous individual victim; he most honorably went straight to the police when he was threatened, rather than pay a dime. I certainly hope that I would have the courage to face down a blackmailer like that.

Big News Number Two was the Catalan statute of autonomy, which was comfortably approved in a referendum. Abstention was heavy. I frankly didn't care much one way of the other, since it isn't going to change things very much. I imagine the statute--the equivalent of a state constitution in the US--will not affect anybody's everyday life. I also think that it will be overturned by Spain's supreme court when the various challenges filed by the PP and several other autonomous regions finally get there, so the whole shebang doesn't much matter anyway.

Big News Number Three is that the Catalan Tripartite has crashed and burned, bringing down Pasqual Maragall with it. This fall there will be early elections for the Generalitat, the Catalan regional government, and PSC secretary-general and industry minister Jose "Josep" Montilla will run as the Socialist candidate. This is the first time a charnego, the pejorative term used by some racist rednecks around here to refer to Catalans of Castilian-speaking ancestry, will have a real chance at becoming regional premier--Montilla was born in Cordoba. Seriously. This is a big deal. It's like Kennedy becoming the first Catholic president, or Reagan becoming the first divorced president, or Condi becoming the first woman and black president all at once. It's symbolic proof that anyone, despite his or her previously despised condition, can rise as high as possible in a society.

Other news: It's hot and it hasn't rained much for a while. We are running the air-conditioner almost constantly, except on the weekends when we go out to the pueblo (Vallfogona de Riucorb, a very pleasant place; there's a "casa rural" there, and the Hotel Regina down at the spa. Yes, Vallfogona was an early 20th-century resort town; the medieval stone town, where the 100 citizens live and which was once a Templar fief, and the spa, which includes two hotels, an old folks home, and some "chalets" for rent, are about a kilometer apart on the road through the Riucorb valley.)

The cats hate the air-conditioner. They insist on going into the back room to sleep. One advantage of running the AC is that you close the windows, which keeps out a good bit of the noise. Just for example, there was this drunk kid stumbling down the street this afternoon, while I had the windows open, singing the Barça song (you know, "Tot el camp es un clam") at the top of his lungs. This sort of disagreeable noise significantly diminishes with the window closed.

Speaking of soccer, of course the World Cup is on. We're down to Germany, France, Portugal, and Italy, and I'm forced to root for France, perish the thought. I hate Italy's football team and could never support it. They cheat, they're dirty, and they're corrupt. Worst of all, they're boring. Portugal has had two dirty games so far, with the Netherlands and with England, and they put on such a pathetic show that I can't support them either. That leaves me with Germany and France, and, well, France was on our side in 1778 back when it counted.

The US was not very good at all; I wasn't surprised. We just don't have any very good players. None of the US team could even hope to play for Barça. Over here we're spoiled; we're used to seeing the best possible football. Of course, any top club team could beat any national team, since A) top clubs can choose from all players in the world, not just the subset from their country, and B) club teams are much more used to playing together and to their positions than national teams are.

Iberian Notes has moved

Iberian Notes is back in business! We are now affiliated with the Spain Herald. Daily commentary and links on Spain, Europe, politics, culture, history, and lots of other stuff is now available at http://www.spainherald.com/iberiannotes. So don't forget to change your bookmarks, and happy reading.

I am personally damned glad that some sort of position has been taken on torturing prisoners.

My attitude is this:

You treat prisoners, no matter who they are, as you would treat your own soldiers in your own military prison. Don't baby them, but don't torture them either.

My logic is this:

We deserve to win because we are better than they are.
One of the reasons we are better than they are is that we don't torture people.

So us going out and torturing people kind of fucks up that logic, doesn't it?

I don't mind harassment-type interrogations with all the psychological stuff they can think up. We do that to our own people when the cops are grilling them. But inflicting pain is not what we do. Which is why I'm glad we're not going to be doing it anymore.

I'm still for the war, more so than a few months ago. The success of the election in Iraq makes me even more positive. We're going to win and fewer people are going to die and everybody, especially the Iraqis, is going to be better off than with that mass murderer, on whom I would cheerfully pull the trigger, and no joke, I could do it, running the country. They should have just shot him as soon as they determined his identity, Ceaucescu-style.

And one of the reasons we're going to win is that Bush has promised that the Americans d0n't torture people. He's put his neck on the line, and if there's any evidence that any torture goes on in the future, his credibility becomes zero. This gives us a major piece of the moral high ground. See, everybody knows that the terrorists torture people. And we have a lot of winning of the moral high ground to do, so let's get right to it.

10 People I'm Happiest We Fried

10. Marion Pruitt, sicko spree killer of five.
9. Aileen Wournos, murdered seven johns.
8. Alton Coleman, spree baby-rapist, eight victims.
7. Kenneth McDuff, sicko spree murderer of 14.
6. William Bonin, homosexual "Freeway Killer," 14 victims.
5. Douglas Gretzler, spree torture-killer of 16.
4. Ted Bundy, 22 victims.
3. John Wayne Gacy, child-rapist, 33 victims.
2. Gerald Stano, Florida torture-killer of 41.
1. Pee Wee Gaskins, psycho Southerner who may have killed more than 100.

And, of course, Tim McVeigh is hors de categorie.

These people are so morally foul that I just can't see leaving them alive, whatever the other arguments on capital punishment are.

A big stink is being made over here about a Spanish citizen under a death sentence in the Philippines. The alleged criminal, Francisco Larrañaga, is the son of a Spanish jai alai player and an upper-class Philippine woman, whose family has political connections. The victims are two young women, about 20 years old, whose surname is Chiong. Their father works for a guy who is a big shot in the local mafia. Supposedly, on the island of Cebu, Larrañaga and seven others, who were spoiled rich brats on drugs, picked up the two Chiong girls one day in 1997, raped them, and killed them. One's body has never been found; the other's was found at the bottom of a ravine. Supposedly. Larrañaga's lawyers claim that it has not even been proven that the body is that of Marijoy Chiong. Larrañaga claims to have an alibi, but the only witnesses--agreed, there are more than 20 of them--are friends or classmates of his. Several other witnesses identified Larrañaga and the other seven in a car with the two Chiong girls. I am not sure if any of these people are telling the truth. Especially not the main prosecution witness, a guy named Rusia, who was one of the eight. Rusia, who turned state's evidence and got off, says he and the other seven did the crime, raped and killed the girls. However, he's been in prison twice in the US and his whereabouts are unknown. There seem to have been irregularities at the trial as well; Larrañaga's lawyers claim he was not allowed to testify on his own behalf. He and the others were convicted and got life in prison. Then, something very strange happened: the case was reviewed, and the punishment changed to death. I wasn't aware that such a thing could happen in any legal system. Oh, yeah, in here somewhere the judge, who had convicted these guys in the first place, there was no jury, committed suicide. Maybe.

Larrañaga's family is mounting a media campaign to save him. Philippine president Gloria Macagapal Arroyo says she will not sign any death warrants, which means that Larrañaga is at least temporarily safe from lethal injection. However, temporarily is not permanently.

My attitude is that I am not in favor of coddling criminals, and I think those convicted of heinous crimes deserve the death penalty. Kidnapping, raping, and murdering two young women is about as heinous as it gets, and if these guys did it, fire up the syringe. The problem is I am not convinced these guys are guilty. Exhume the body of the girl said to be Marijoy Chiong and DNA-test it to see if it's her, and to see if any of these guys' DNA are on it. Then proceed from there. But don't execute people if there's a reasonable doubt to their guilt. Hell, you're not supposed to convict people if there's a reasonable doubt to their guilt.

One thing to remember is that Larrañaga is getting all the attention because he's an EU citizen and his family has money. You have to wonder how many people get railroaded by the system, especially in the Third World; I'll bet surprisingly few, but I'll also bet it happens sometimes, and disputes between local elites and mafias are just the sort of context that someone getting railroaded might happen in. Interest in these cases is only taken in places like Europe when there's a Westerner involved.

My understanding, by the way, is that since the US brought back the death penalty in 1977 nobody innocent has been executed.

One reason I haven't posted recently, besides being busy with the Spain Herald and all--I think we've improved it, I really do--is that I've been having a debate with myself over the Iraq war. I don't like blood and killing and death and terror and I think it's a terrible thing for both the civilians and the Allied troops, not to mention the now-legitimate Iraqi government and military.

I suppose what we did was trigger a civil war, mostly pitting two ethnic groups (Shiite Arabs and Sunni Kurds) against one (Sunni Arabs). The Sunni Arabs had run the place since it stopped being an Ottoman colony in 1917, which it had been for the last about four hundred years, and became a British colony. I'm really not sure exactly when it stopped being a British colony, though the year 1932 comes to mind; I remember that the British invaded Iraq in World War II and overthrew a pro-Nazi regime. And grabbed the oil. I do know Iraq had governments somewhere between lousy and horrific between the end of World War II and the overthrow of Saddam by the Allies in April 2003. And those governments were all run by Sunni Arabs for Sunni Arabs. Obviously, in a democratic Iraq, the Sunni Arabs would no longer run everything. Therefore, many Sunni Arabs oppose the democratic government, and a fraction of them are willing to kill.

So we have an ethnic civil war on our hands--again, most Sunni Arabs don't want to fight against the democratic government, only a few do, but that few is enough to cause lots of trouble, which we see every day on the news.

Meanwhile, there is a separate but linked war going on between the Allies and Al Qaeda and its terrorist allies. That war is being fought all over the world, as the explosions in Jordan and Pakistan and Spain and Britain and Morocco and Indonesia show. It is also being fought in parts of Afghanistan, on the ground, against Taliban loyalists. And Al Qaeda has joined in the Iraqi civil war on the side of the violent minority of Sunni Arabs.

So how do the Americans fit in here? Well, one of the mistakes we made in Vietnam was to bail out and ditch the South Vietnamese and Cambodian governments. Just look at the horrors that led to. We can't ditch the democratic Iraqis, no matter what. Doing so would undoubtedly lead to much greater horrors than those we see on television news now. So we're effectively in a civil war on one side. I think if we admit that this is the situation, it might clear up a lot of our thinking. We've got to fight Al Qaeda around the world, because not doing so is suicide. And we have to fight antidemocratic forces in Iraq. Let's make sure we can keep the two separate.

Al Qaeda is basically an ideological movement. The Sunni Arabs are basically a nationalist movement. They're fighting on the same side in Iraq. Al Qaeda is also linked to nationalist groups in many Muslim countries, including Algeria, Morocco, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and the Philippines. They're fighting on the same side in those countries, too.

I suppose this means that no matter how much we dislike seeing the results of the latest bombing in Baghdad, and knowing how much people are suffering, bailing out of Iraq would mean giving a victory to Al Qaeda, which would then have a home base even more convenient than Afghanistan to plot terror, and giving a victory to the insurgent Sunni Arabs, who would then certainly genocide the Kurds and Shiite Arabs. I think, practically and ethically, looking back to examples such as Munich and the Vietnam pullout, the West has to beat them here and now in Iraq. This means no American pullout. Even though two thousand of our guys have been killed, and I would guess at least 15,000 Iraqi civilians. Not to mention large quantities of terrorists, both nationalist Sunnis and Al Qaeda, who will bother us no more.

What's our exit strategy? Well, let's admit we don't really have one, just like Roosevelt really didn't have one in 1942. Whatever we have to do to win the war, because we don't want to fight it in New York and Washington. And Madrid.

Does the end justify the means? I don't think so in the case of torture. I think it's pretty clear that nobody's being tortured in Guantanamo. As for those bleeding hearts who seem to care more for terrorists' rights than for Westerners' simple right to live, what do you want us to do with them? Turn them loose? That's not going to happen. If people are being tortured in secret CIA prisons, well, that would be very wrong if it were happening. Although I haven't seen the slightest real evidence that it is. I also think it's clear that the Abu Ghraib tortures, from which apparently no one died, were an aberration and an isolated incident.

Also, let me make this clear, if it turns out there are secret CIA torture prisons, we can't do that. That wouldn't make me want to stop the war or bail out of Iraq, but it would make me want to fire lots of our intelligence, military, and political leaders and get us some new ones who can win the war without torturing people.

And the Iraqi people are going to suffer less if we stay than if we go. So we have to stay now that we touched off the fuse. The fuse was going to blow sometime, Iraq couldn't go on as it was under Saddam, but we lit it and we need to be honest with ourselves about that. I, personally, was in favor of lighting it back in 2003.

Don't forget to read the Spain Herald.

Thoughts on the disaster:

1. What the natural world is capable of is astounding. Good thing it isn't like this all the time.

2. The European press and assorted American idiots are blaming the disaster on global warming. Wrong. Global warming, according to the theory, will change the climate in the long term rather than the weather in the short term. Also, first, lots of responsible scientists don't believe that global warming even exists, and second, a lot more say that even if it does exist, it's a natural phenomenon that isn't caused by human behavior and that humans can't do very much about.

3. The same people are also saying that there would have been a better response to the disaster if not for the Iraq war. Wrong. Only about 12 percent of the American military is stationed in Iraq.

4. There has been a terrible failure of the American civil defense system, and the guilty parties are the local governments in and around New Orleans and the state of Louisiana. They had NO PLAN, and they are the government bodies in charge.

5. The FEMA is also responsible, as they should have made sure that those jokers down there had a plan.

6. The disaster isn't the fault of the levee system, as the river levees held and the lake levees, which were the ones that failed, were only built to handle a Category Three hurricane. This was a cost-benefit decision. We have to make those sometime, somewhere, and I'm not going to blame the people who made that one. The lake levees, which had recently been inspected, were in good condition before the hurricane hit.

7. The federal government screwed up as soon as they didn't take control within six or so hours of the levee break. Agreed, I'm blasting them for a sin of omission. Well? Look at the consequences. I knew hell had broken loose as soon as the announcer on KBON radio (Paul Marx) said the levee had broken, and he sure as shit did, too, because you should have heard his voice. Somebody among the top guys in the Administration should have figured this out, too.

8. I bet next time an evacuation is ordered people will actually obey it. I've seen too many photos of smashed-up cars that people could have used to get out. Blaming the victim? No, not those who were too poor or too weak or too sick to get out. But the rest of the victims made a terribly bad decision. This doesn't mean we should not rescue them or that their deaths are not tragic. But not evacuating when you can is like parking your car downtown with the door unlocked. If it gets stolen, well, some of it is your fault for not taking basic minimum precautions.

9. The reason most of the victims are black is that most residents of New Orleans, something like 60%, are black. Most black residents are poorer than most white residents, and are more likely to live in mostly-black neighborhoods, which tend to be lower-lying than wealthier mostly-white neighborhoods. You also have to figure that there were at least 10,000 people who really were so poor they didn't have a way to get out of town and that 99% of them were black. This does not say good things about American society. You judge a country by how it treats its weakest and we failed this time. We don't always fail. Most of the time we succeed. But this time we failed.

10. Fortunately, we don't always fail at everything. This is never going to happen in the United States again, because we have more than learned our lesson.

11. I demand that EVERY state and EVERY county write up an emergency evacuation plan within thirty days, because I'm a lot more worried about enemy-made disasters than I am about natural disasters, at least outside fault zones and hurricane country. If this had been a nuclear, chemical, or biological bomb, which just might go off in Leawood, Kansas--why not? It's just as likely as anywhere else--would Kansas City have been prepared? At the very least, would there have been a plan? This needs to be a top priority. Those places that already have evacuation plans, congratulations on your sense of responsibility, and publicize them right now.

12. Things would probably have gone a lot better without so many damn guns all over the place.

13. I've thought about it and I don't believe we ought to rebuild New Orleans where it is, just as I wouldn't rebuild San Francisco where it is after the earthquake hits it, and as I wouldn't rebuild a city that got nuked no matter where it was. The site is just too dangerous. Move any buildings worth saving and dynamite the rest of it. And while we're at it, let's allow the Mississippi to assume its natural course, which is down the Atchafalaya. Since we're going to need some big-scale social engineering in Louisiana anyway, let's do it all now.

14. President Bush has not been impressive. Not that I think President Kerry would have been.

New Orleans is a dead city; it will never be rebuilt as it was. Almost 100% of the city's housing has been destroyed, along with everything else, the shops and offices and hospitals and schools. If I were President Bush I would deliver a biting-the-bullet speech declaring that more than a million Americans' lives have been completely uprooted and will never be the same, since they will not return to where they came from. Then I would proceed to start resettling people permanently. Where to get the money? Slap a special one percent income tax on the American people. Our social contract says that we bail one another out when disaster strikes, and I help you today because tomorrow I might need your help.

It makes no sense to rebuild New Orleans, since we've known for hundreds of years that the site of the city is impractical. Blow it all up and let it return to swamp. Move any historic buildings deemed to be salvageable to Memphis or Shreveport. The only reason the city was there was to serve as America's largest port. The port isn't there any more, and Baton Rouge will work just as well as the large seaport needed as the entrepot to collect mid-America's riches carried down the Mississippi and transfer them to ocean-going ships.

What do we do with the people? Well, America, here's your chance to be generous. Let's figure there are a million people who are going to need new homes. We have fifty states, some larger and richer than others. I figure Kansas ought to be ready to take in twenty or thirty thousand people at least; I call on the Shawnee Mission school district to open its ample, safe, dry school gyms up to everybody they send us. If we can do that, what can California do?

Most of those who evacuated in time ought to be able to pretty much take care of themselves until their insurance payments come in. Of course, they'll need all sorts of help, but we can provide that. Problem Number One are all the people, maybe 100,000, who did not evacuate in time and are now either dead or barely surviving among the wreckage. First we need to get the survivors out of there, and I am disappointed that it took us so long to get the armed forces helicoptering and boating people out of there. The moment the hurricane had passed by was the moment to evacuate everyone possible. Now we're running out of time, and the death toll is going to climb among those still stranded.

(Note: The Vanguardia is blaming the slow federal reaction on the Iraq war, of course. Seems that all our military strength is over there in Iraq. Yeah, right.)

Problem Number Two is that probably 95% of the people who didn't evacuate on time are poor and black, according to the photos I've seen. That's who the looters are, and I'd be looting abandoned grocery stores too if I were stuck in what's left of New Orleans because I didn't have a car to get out. (Though, of course, I wouldn't be stealing stuff I didn't need, but I don't think I can expect everyone to live up to my ethical standards, especially when surrounded by floating dead bodies.)

Who cares about looting now. Taking material things doesn't bother me. Problem Number Three isn't stealing from stores, it's the armed gangs going around taking advantage of the complete collapse of law and order. This is what anarchy means, all you blackshirts out there on your Pacific Northwest college campuses. Those who are strong, that is, young men with guns, are victimizing those who are weak, who are pretty much everybody else. I don't see any other solution for this but getting the weak out of there. There's no point in spending resources on stopping the aggressors when the victims are going to die anyway if they're not moved.

Nice, white-bread Johnson County, Kansas, is going to have to learn its lesson. We're all Americans and that means we have to move these now-homeless people, whom many of us scorn, in with us. This is going to create more than one headache as we learn to deal with the New Orleans poor among us.

That's what we get for not having learned that the New Orleans poor count as "us" before. There is still far too much racial and class segregation in the United States, inherited from what Paul Johnson called one of America's two original sins, slavery. Agreed, it's gotten much better over the last forty years, but forty years isn't that long compared with 250 years of slavery and 100 more of apartheid.

Now it's time for well-meaning folks around the country to put their money where their ideals are, and take poor black people from New Orleans into their homes, neighborhoods, and schools. If your community isn't willing to take in as many refugees as it can hold, and pay for their upkeep until they can be resettled there permanently, then there's something wrong with it.

It's a damned shame that such a historic, beautiful city (in parts; 80% of town was an absolute hellhole) is materially dead, but its people will carry its best traits--along with its worst, I fear, but what do you do now--to the rest of the fifty states.

Here's a piece from today's La Vanguardia by Eusebio Val on the Amurrican Peepul in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Active resignation 'made in USA'

Seasoned by furious nature, Americans are less prone to call for help from the State

The Americans are not a people prone to complain or to wait for the State to solve their problems. The heirs of pioneers who suffered many setbacks, of millions of immigrants who arrived with the clothes on their backs, seasoned by furious nature, they normally accept with active resignation situations like those created by Hurricane Katrina and the frequent disasters caused by floods, extreme cold, tornadoes, droughts, and forest fires. The American character is pragmatic and solidarious, in addition to carrying optimism in its genes. It demands that the authorities contribute to alleviating misfortune, but it knows well that in the long run it is one's own efforts and those of the community one lives in which make the difference. This is why volunteerism at all levels is a national institution, as is taking up collections. A foreign observer is surprised at the speed and effectiveness with which they get to work.

In American culture the idea of starting over from zero, of reinventing oneself, of moving thousands of kilometers to get a new job and overcome a crisis, does not frighten as much as in Europe. With this disposition, with the persistent idea that "we'll get out of this," it is easier to face the always painful loss of a home or destruction of a business.

Active resignation is expressed in several ways when faced with adversity or simple unexpected discomforts. In the sometimes chaotic American airports, passengers accept delays and cancellations with stoicism and patience. They are aware that dense air traffic and the weather cause things to go wrong. Instead of throwing useless tantrums, they prefer to find some other alternative in order to get home as soon as possible.

After the devastating hurricane Isabel, which leveled North Carolina in September 2003 and caused serious damage in the Washington area, the residents of the suburbs came out onto the streets as soon as the storm was over in order to assess the damage and begin clearing up themselves. Improvised brigades of residents with chainsaws cut up the fallen trees in the streets in order to reopen the way through. Hundreds of thousands of customers, including La Vanguardia's office, were without electricity for days or weeks.

Despite the discomfort of living without electricity in such a technical society, citizen reaction was very moderate. Everyone did whatever he could to make the best of the problem. Gasoline generators were sold out, as were batteries and butane stoves. Bars in areas with electricity were filled with people with portable computers. As occurred after other hurricanes, some people organized collective barbecues with the food they had stored in their freezers.

Mr. Val, that's more than fair enough. Iberian Notes pardons your past sins. Note that in order for the Americans to get any praise from the Europeans we have to suffer a disaster. Also note what Mr. Val stresses as American characteristics, because if he's pointing them out to Spanish readers, then they're much rarer over here.

This emergency blog is covering Hurricane Katrina. WWOZ in New Orleans is off the air. KBON.com in Eunice, LA, is alternating music and news.

They just ran a bit on Catalunya TV on about 50 renegade Americans who held a demonstration in Madrid against Bush and his evil war for oil, holding up signs with all the standard slogans. Most of them were your typical granolas. The camera focused on this effeminate fratboy leading chants of "One, two, three, four, we don't want your fucking war." Wrong decade, guys. And, whatever your thoughts about the Iraq war, it's disgraceful to demonstrate against your own nation while in a foreign country. I forgot who said "Never praise your own country while at home and never criticize it while abroad," and I know that's a paraphrase, but I concur. And I seriously question the demonstrators' patriotism.

By the way, you all know what They in the media and Hollywood are trying to do. They're trying to tell us again how much fun being against the Vietnam war was back in the sixties and show us how much fun it can be again to resist American warmongering tyranny (at no cost to your own self in the short term). I would worry, because They are going to puff up media stunts like the Cindy Crawford brouhaha as much as they can, and They are going to portray the military and the government as negatively as possible in mainstream entertainment.

I think We need to pull a preemptive strike. Our side of the media needs to emphasize 9-11, how it provoked America's attempt to destroy international terror, and how it led to our overthrowing Saddam Hussein. People have forgotten all about 9-11. Eighteen-year-old kids now were 14 when it happened. I think it's time to remember why America is in Iraq in the first place and why we can't leave until Islamist/Arab nationalist terrorism is dead, and I mean literally dead, as in turning the bodies of those who participate into small pieces.

And I think the upcoming fourth anniversary of 9-11 would be an excellent excuse for an all-out media blitz, using athletes, college coaches, country musicians, and local TV personalities. We're not fighting for the hearts and minds of the Upper West Side and the Castro, we're fighting for the hearts and minds of those who watch the mainstream media in Columbus and Des Moines.

The Brits have had a few pints too many this week, methinks. From the Guardian:

Here, in the heart of London Zoo, there has been another sighting of a species not native but increasingly common to Britain, Homo exhibitionist.

It is not a native species, but its origins are shrouded in mystery. Some believe it was accidentally imported from the US while others insist it could only have arisen from genetic mutation. Whatever the explanation, the sudden appearance of three males and five females on the zoo's Bear Mountain is thrilling.

We may be watching evolution in action. Or, we may be watching eight intrepid volunteers shivering their way through an inclement August Bank Holiday as part of the world's first "human zoo". They will live in an open enclosure for three days (though in a nod to the insulatory inadequacies of fig leaves, they will be allowed home each night) as part of a project designed to demonstrate man's impact on the environment and reveal his fundamentally atavistic nature.

Whether three days will be long enough to secure some real Lord of the Flies moments is a matter of debate, but let's hope someone is keeping an eye on the fat guy.

Thirty people applied to take part. Those who made the cut included veterinary student Simon Spiro, "zoo-obsessed" Anna Westbury, Thomas Mahoney who wanted to get back to nature, and actor, model, musician and martial arts expert Brendan Carr. He secured his place by writing a poem. "I got a laugh like a hyena but get the hump like a camel, so cover me in fig leaves as I'm the ultimate mammal," went one persuasive, if sub-Popish couplet.

The volunteers will be treated like animals but kept amused with games, music and art. And if that isn't enough to incite them to violence, what is? Expect pigheads on sticks by Monday.

It would be so cool if this actually does get ugly and Brendan freaks out and blood is spilled. I imagine the zookeepers would break it up before he actually chewed through Anna's throat wolverine-style.

First things first. As far as I know, squatters as they exist now got started in the late '60s in hippie liberated places like Copenhagen, Amsterdam, London, and West Berlin. What they did was move into unoccupied houses and apartments and live there for free. After the hippie thing died out a few squatters hung on, and they showed up in Barcelona in the early '90s. That is, long after Franco was dead.

Those who hung on were not the flower-power types, who were all nice and middle-class and by about '71 were social workers or teaching el-ed. They were street people, and they still are. They may claim to know something about politics, and a few of them actually may, but basically they're nihilists and extreme hedonists. Dionysians, if you will. They proclaim they are anarchists and certainly act like they have the right to destroy whatever they want.

There are something like 20-35 squats in and around Barcelona, each one with 5-10 people living in it and a larger group of hangers-on. The real squatters are hardcore leftist radicals, dedicated to the overthrow of everything by every means possible. They look and act like your standard punks. They are generally streetwise and individually out for their own interest--they live off the hangers-on and their contributions, and are very careful about not sharing any of their own stuff.

The hangers-on are middle-class college kids who will mostly get slightly smarter in a couple of years and get nice middle-class jobs at La Caixa but pretend they're still radical and do dumbass things like vote for Esquerra or Iniciativa. They generally don't know they're being used by these hardcore squatters, and they actually think they believe the nihilist anarchist rhetoric. If a middle-class college kid spends more than about three years with these guys he's likely to join up with them and not get out for years.

Here in Barcelona the squatters are loosely organized. There are a couple of what they call collectives that claim to have representation from the various squats and to be in a position to negotiate with city authorities and the like. They do have access to lawyers, we know that, and are more than happy to use the loopholes in the law to save themselves punishment. A strategy they use is--since they can't be kicked out without a judicial order, and the owner of the property has to file a brief with the court to get said order--is for the lawyers to look through the property register for places that have a lien on them so that there's no legal owner who can go to court. Catch-22.

La Vanguardia is reporting that a good deal of the conflicts we've been having between civilized people and the local squatters are the fault of a bunch of Italian anarchists who have moved in here because Spanish law is weak and not enforced anyway. I buy that up to a point. The main thing the local squatters are pissed off about is that a handful of them are going on trial in Madrid for some rioting they did here back in around 2002, and I don't see the Italian connection there. As for the rioting here in Gracia at the recent fiesta mayor, they arrested a couple of Italians, but they also arrested some locals, one of whom is from the posh suburb of Sant Cugat.

La Vangua's campaign is in favor of more "civic behavior," but I've got news for them: Very few of their readers are out on the streets setting up barricades and throwing shit at the cops. The only thing that's going to stop uncivic behavior is arresting the people who behave uncivically, and that is something they do not do around here. Too much of Catalan society is still anti-law and order and looks benignly on dumb kids raising hell for no good reason because they're answering the contradictions of modern postindustrial dehumanizing society with humanistic self-expression.

This goes back to pre-Franco days: Much of middle-class society here was mixed up with very unpleasant elements (Esquerra Republicana and Estat Català, just for starters) during the twenty years before the Civil War. Then the Franco regime was obviously unpopular among these same people. Now that there's nothing whatsover to be angry about and we live in a prosperous democracy, this bunch is still not happy because, like, they didn't get everything they wanted from the Constitution so they constantly whine about it. This lot still doesn't deal very well with the concept that everybody has to obey the law, even their own kids.

They're also denouncing Lance Armstrong, two pages at the beginning of today's sports section, on no evidence whatsover for allegedly having taken EPO in 1999. Damn, the Europeans hate to lose. What crybabies. Of course, this comes from the French press. In addition, Andy Robinson claims that Google's plan to provide direct access to over 60 million books is somehow satanic. And, of course, France is afraid that somehow the Americans are going to take over world literary heritage, so they're trying to get the EU to spend more than a hundred million euros on its own program. Seems thay're worried that--guess what--people will read books on European history by American authors. Says the head of the French national library, "It's normal that there is an 'Anglo-Saxon' perspective on cultural heritage, but there should also be a European viewpoint. It is politically essential." And, of course, Portugal is on fire and everyone's unscientifically blaming it on global warming.

I want to know something. Who the hell is the government to tell me what I can put in my body? If I want to drink alcohol, that's my business. I should be able to drink as much alcohol as I want to without anyone telling me the bars close at 3 AM and the liquor stores close on Sunday or whatever. And who are we people over 21 years old to be telling those under 21 the same thing? There should be no minimum drinking age at all. If a six-year-old can get enough money, he ought to be able to buy a shot of Jack instead of a Hershey bar if he wants.

And by the way, who is the government telling that kid he can't go out and get a job to earn money for all the Jack or Hershey's he wants? And as for this taxes to discourage drinking shit, like they have in those tight-ass Scandinavian socialist states, that's a bunch of crap. Who is the state to tell me that they want to discourage my vice, but they don't want to discourage all those fucking people who eat meat, thereby murdering literally billions of animals every year, making Americans and Europeans into a bunch of fat slobs, and seriously offending the Hindu religion, to whom cows are sacred. Yeah, you. Every time you eat a burger you're eating a murdered cow and violating one of the most basic tenets of Hinduism, which I might point out has a hell of a lot more adherents than the goddamn Shiites and commits a lot less terrorism.

And as for this government controlling what other drugs I can take, that's bullshit too. I should be able to put anything I want into my body. That includes Laetrile and heroin. Why can't I just take all the antibiotics I want? That's my business. Same for getting vaccinations. Why should the government make me literally risk my life by putting a substance known to be poison into my body by force? And what's the deal with the American Medical Association, a fascist-style corporate guild, allowing only the self-selected few holders of the holy M.D. to tell the rest of us what we can take? Again, I'm manic-depressive. Why does that guy have the right to tell me I can't take whatever pills I want in order to treat my officially-diagnosed illness? I'd like to have what Elvis had, thank you, and plenty of it, please.

Now this gets me into that other thing which pisses me off, and that's the government telling me I can't drive as fast as I want while I'm on Quaaludes. What is the state doing telling me I can't drive eighty miles an hour wherever I want? I'm an independent actor, and one would think I would always have my own self-interest in mind. I'm smart enough to make my own decisions, even after a couple of Percodans. I can be trusted to make the correct decision about whether driving that fast is safe or not, and I will only do it where it's perfectly safe. I'm a really good driver, so I drive eighty a lot of places where most people would only drive, say, thirty-five, and I don't need to wear a seatbelt, either, and it's bullshit for anyone to tell me I have to do that, or follow any other so-called safety rules, either. Look at the Nascar circuit. A Nascar racetrack is the absolutely safest place to be in the world because all the drivers are highly professional and handle their cars perfectly. What would be, say, "cutting off another driver" (a bullshit anti-independenceist term for "exercising your freedom to travel?" They've got no right to tell me where I can't drive, and if somebody else wants to drive there too, well, hell, may the fastest driver win. The other guy needs to accept he's lost, get over it, and move on. If he chooses to object by, say, honking his horn and making obscene gestures at me, well, that's his business, and no one has any right to stop him from expressing himself.

And don't even let me get started on airplanes. Or guns.

Here's an entertaining little puff piece from Sports Illustrated about going mountain biking with President Bush.

There have been three consecutive nights of rioting here in the Gracia district of Barcelona with the excuse of the neighborhood Fiesta Mayor, which kicked off Sunday night and runs for a week. The Fiesta Mayor is a century-old tradition in which the residents of different streets compete to see who can decorate theirs most attractively. The themes and their realization are typical high-school dance stuff most of the time, though real money goes into putting the Fiesta together; the budget is several hundred thousand euros, much of which comes from taxes. Traditionally, the various streets hire dance bands, hold public dinners, and have puppet shows and the like. Oh, by the way, they sell beer. Lots of beer. On the streets, with the money going to each street's decorating committee. The local bars also make plenty of money.

What's happened over the last few years is that crowds of locals from all over the metropolitan area show up and get completely blitzkreiged, and the crowds get bigger and more violent every year. Our friends the squatters have taken over and run wild every night. Here are some quotes from La Vanguardia:

Some 300 youths faced off with the police early Wednesday morning...garbage skips were burned, motorcycles and urban furniture destroyed, several people were injured, including two regional and one local police officers, and two minors were arrested.

At around three in the morning the squatters and their friends got together in Plaza Rius and Taulet, about 1000 of them, and started bongoing and raising hell. At four the cops told them to go home, since the residents were furious and they had to clean the streets and pìck up the garbage anyway. The squatters started throwing bottles and other crap at the cops, and they set up two barricades on the Travesera de Gracia. The firemen showed up to put out the fires and were attacked as well.

Then, early Thursday morning, there was more squatter violence. Between three and six AM

the confrontations of the previous morning were repeated, with greater virulence, between youths and police officers. Garbage skips were burned and wastebaskets, portable toilets, phone booths, and other street furniture was destroyed. Some street decorations were destroyed, such as the giant sardine on Calle Tordera. Eight members of the riot squad and eight more youths were injured. Damage was estimated at €25,000. There were no arrests.

The police did identify thirteen leaders, who will be charged. Interestingly, Tordera is the only one of the 22 decorated streets that does not sell alcohol.

Now here's the really fun part. Guess who La Vanguardia's reporter focused on?

"This is the most exciting moment of my vacation," said Paul, an English tourist, while he ran through the streets of Gracia during the conflicts between the police and youths..."My night as an urban guerrilla" is the title of a page of the diary that Alessandro, an Italian tourist, is keeping during his stay here...In Calle Progrés, a group of tourists swam naked in the swimming pool that formed part of the decoration.

That's right, blame the tourists instead of the local scumballs and urban trash!

Check out this comparison between each of the 30 major league baseball teams and its most similar character on the Simpsons.

Here's a fun story about Kinky Friedman, who is supposedly running for governor of Texas. He couldn't be any worse than some of the other characters who have been governor in that state, like Pa Ferguson and Pappy O'Daniel. The serious question I'd ask him is whether he'd be willing to sign a death sentence.

My favorite Kinky song is "Asshole from El Paso."

Update on the helicopter crash: It happened near Herat, where some 850 Spanish troops are based as part of the peacekeeping force preparing for the September elections. NATO says the crash was an accident, but so far the Spanish administration is not ruling out the possibility that the chopper was shot down.

A Spanish helicopter crashed in Afghanistan killing 17 troops. Fox News has the story; nothing more than this in the Spanish media. Our sympathy and condolences to the families and the Spanish military.

People like me who are country-folk-Americana music fans and Cold Warriors will want to read this City Journal piece on Pete Seeger, "America's most successful Communist." Here's Kurt Andersen explaining why profiling not only makes sense but is absolutely necessary via Slate. As a fairly young-looking male with an earring and a beard I get checked on all the time, and I'm glad they do it. I have received some serious going-overs in San Antonio, Kennedy Airport, London, Brussels, the Franco-Spanish border, and innumerable times in Spain. Thank you, security officers. I appreciate people who keep me safe. Here's Niall Ferguson on Iran. I vote we bomb their reactors now, not tomorrow, and definitely before some peacenik gets elected in 2008. And if that makes them mad, tough shit. We've got the men, we've got the planes, we've got the money too. Here's a thoughtful piece by Ramesh Ponnuru in National Review with a somewhat different take on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; I don't agree, but you ought to read it. Finally, James Taranto's dismemberment of radical anti-American Cindy Sheehan, who is receiving amazing amounts of coverage from the usual suspects over here in Pinkoland, is a must-read.

Remember the famous New Yorker magazine cover showing America from a New Yorker's point of view? Turns out the gag wasn't exactly original. Check out this illustration from a rather unfunny Irvin S. Cobb book dated 1924. You'll need to go to page 39.

http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=moa;cc=moa;sid=0dcba0a449eb121574d37caedf726f21;q1=portnoy;rgn=works;rgn1=citation;idno=ACB1348.0001.001;view=image;seq=00000015

I've been watching the world track and field championships on TV; one good thing about Spanish TV is they give us all the races and just the races, none of those dumb features about so-and-so overcoming her personal demons in order to triumph like those they always run during the Olympics in the States. Of course the commentators are biased in favor of the Spanish competitors, which is perfectly understandable and happens in every country.

So they ran the men's 1500 finals yesterday. It was a slow race, with the winner, Rashid Ramzi, crossing the line more than ten seconds short of the world record. I saw no fouls and no one was disqualified. The greatest 1500 runner ever, world-record holder, four-time world champion, and 2004 Olympic champion El Guerrouj or however you spell his name, wasn't there. Without him, it wasn't a bad race or anything, I'm not complaining, and these guys are a hell of a lot faster than I was in high school; my best time for the mile in a real race was 4:52, and I barely broke sixty seconds in the quarter, which is why I never got to run it in real races.

Here's the AP's story.

HELSINKI, Finland (AP) -- Morocco played a major role in the men's 1,500-meter final at the world athletics championships Wednesday, although the greatest Moroccan wasn't even there.

With four-time defending champion Hicham El Guerrouj missing the championships because of illness, Moroccan-born Rashid Ramzi gave his adopted nation of Bahrain the gold medal with a time of 3 minutes, 37.88 seconds.

Adil Kaouch of Morocco was second in 3:38.00, barely holding off Rui Silva of Portugal, who settled for bronze in 3:38.02.

Ramzi became a citizen of Bahrain after moving to the Gulf nation to take up a job in that country's armed forces. But he retains a Moroccan passport and trains with old coach Khalid Boulami.

"This medal is very important for me and my country," Ramzi said. "I am very proud to have been able to deliver this gold medal."

Ramzi stayed near the front and stepped up the pace coming out of the final bend and safely cruised home on a wet, windy and cool night.

"There were no tactics in the race," he said. "The weather was a big problem, we just couldn't get the right rhythm.

"I was hoping we would spread it out a little so I would have more space to run my own race, but I had to wait until the last lap to beat them with my speed," Ramzi said.

Kaouch once ran as El Guerrouj's pacemaker and returned to competition in 2004 after two knee operations.

"I am not even tired at all," he said. "I focused on the 1,500 this year, prepared well for Helsinki and it paid off. ... We are all very happy and very proud of this result today."

So guess what La Vanguardia's take was? It's natural that they would focus on the Spanish competitors, and I wouldn't expect anything else, but this is a bit excessive. They gave two whole pages in the sports section to this one particular competition, in which there were three not-particularly-good Spanish runners. Their best, Reyes Estevez, won bronzes at the world championships in 1997 and 1999, and is now way over the hill. The three came in fifth, sixth, and eleventh (Estevez), and none was ever a factor in the race. Here we go with La Vanguardia's conspiracy theory, however, and you'll never guess the nationality of the bad guy. Also check out the warlike imagery.

Casado, Higuera, Estevez fail in dirty 1500 meter final

American Alan Webb committed suicide...a dirty and mysterious race...no one expected the American's attack to be so savage, so desperate, so cruel...Webb's attack was very violent, absolutely disproportionate..."Webb committed suicide. His attack made no sense," said Reyes Estevez.

It seems that Mr. Webb committed the awful sin of trying to win the race by running fast.

Earth's most intellectual sports columnist, Gregg Easterbrook, is back with the first Tuesday Morning Quarterback of the season on NFL.com, of all places. It's pretty weak Easterbrook, but give the guy a break, they just had the first exhibition game and he doesn't have much to write about. The column itself is just one more example of why the NFL is the best-managed sports league in the world by far: the league hires a brain-truster from the New Republic and the Atlantic, two magazines .0001% of football fans have heard of much less read, to write an enormously long column making fun of it and its alternative reality on its own website. The NFL is so cool that it gets the joke.

Students of the Spanish Civil War might be interested in this Catholic website detailing the religious persecution carried on by the leftist revolutionaries. It includes detailed information and photographs.

I went downtown this afternoon. There was a guy wearing a T-shirt with the silhouette of a terrorist carrying an AK-47 and the slogan in English, "Kill Bush". Scum.

You've probably heard that the space shuttle landed safely. Good. Now can we close down the whole damn thing, get rid of this manned spaceflight crap, and sell off most of NASA? About the only useful things it does are long-range scientific probes.

As for Peter Jennings, I'm sorry he's dead, but I thought he was terrible and that he was one of the main reasons the network news lost so much influence. My guess is that within five years the three mainline networks will all close down their news divisions; at the very least they'll have closed down the national nightly news. They'll probably keep a morning show of some sort and a magazine show or two, but the content won't be hard news. Local news, of course, will keep going strong, as will Fox News and CNN.

Here's a very interesting piece on economic sociology by Virginia Postrel from the Boston Globe (via A&L Daily), and here's another one on "intelligent design" by Cathy Young. What's with the Globe? All the brain-dead editors must be away for August. Michael Barone slams multicultis, who seem to love only "each century but this and every country but their own" in Real Clear Politics. And here's another guy from the Guardian who's broken with the left over the excesses of the multi-culti, or as he calls them "the middle-class left." Welcome to the Club!

And as for all those dumb releases of "white doves of peace," check out this piece from Slate on what actually happens to the birds.

Ten Things Iberian Notes Doesn't Care About At All:

10. Electronic gadgets
9. Movie stars and other alleged celebrities
8. Opera
7. Fashion
6. So-called popular music
5. Dieting
4. Motor vehicles
3. Hollywood product
2. Anything related to computers (except the Internet)
1. Wilson, Plame, Rove, Novak, etc.

I'm coming out of the closet.

I'm anti-gun-nut. I think the things are way too dangerous to be sold the way they are. I mean, the purpose of a gun is to kill living beings, and there's nothing innocuous about that. Everything else I can think of that's dangerous, like cars and medicines and chemicals and poisons and explosives and such, is strictly controlled.

Yeah, the Second Amendment says that we have the right to keep and bear arms, and that's a right that's guaranteed as much as any other in American society. But come on, rights are limited. We've got the right to freedom of speech unless it's libel or slander or perjury or false advertising or negotiating a contract you don't plan to fulfill or shouting "fire" in a crowded theater or using fighting words or making threats. Or advocating the armed overthrow of the government. Or high treason, which is merely using your "freedom of speech" to tell the enemy national secrets. That is, the right to freedom of speech is by no means absolute, and the freedom to keep and bear arms isn't absolute either. If you can think of one right in the Constitution that isn't somehow limited, let me know.

I can understand why some people would want a gun in order to protect themselves. And, though I strongly dislike hunting, it is unfortunately necessary since we've wiped out most predators. These are the only two legitimate reasons I can think of for owning a gun.

One reason I'm anti-gun is that I'm pro-cop, and the cops are unanimously in favor of strict gun control. I figure they know what they're talking about better than a bunch of gun hobbyists.

Gun nuts often claim that guns are necessary to defend the people against government encroachment of their rights. Come on. Not any more. If the army pulls a coup we're going to resist it with pistols and shotguns? Yeah, right. Or if we get invaded and taken over by some evil foreigners. If they can take on our military and win, there's no way a bunch of farmers with twenty-twos is going to defeat them.

I think the real motivation of gun nuts is that they like shooting guns as a hobby. It makes them feel powerful. This is obvious in posts by bloggers I otherwise mostly agree with, like Glenn Reynolds, James Lileks, and Samizdata. Check out some of the photos these guys put up showing themselves heavily armed and proud of it. Well, I'm sorry, just because you like something is no reason you should be allowed to do it if there are good reasons for not letting you. Me, I like drinking a lot and driving fast, but I can't do that because it's dangerous and other people will get hurt.

I don't know what I'd do about the United States's gun problem. There are something like 200 million guns out there, which is about 199 million too many. I'd really like to confiscate them all and then require people to prove they have a good reason for owning one before they get a license, but that would be impossible. I honestly don't know what could be done short of some drastic measure like that.

My sister, Shannon, and brother-in-law, Phil, have posted more baby pictures, and the whole family on both sides appears, except for me and Remei, of course. Just click here, and then click on the left where it says "John Wesley" for lots of cute photos from a nice middle-class Middle Western/Highland Southern family. This is the real America, families living their regular lives, not the crap you see on TV and read in the press, and it ain't those pretentious jerks on the Left Coast being cooler than thou, either.

Oh, by the way, Shannon and Phil have five college degrees between them--two B.A.s, two M.A.s, and a Ph.D. Among my parents and me, we've got five more. Six if you count my father's M.B.A. equivalent from General Electric's auditor-training program. So don't call us a bunch of gringo hicks until you can beat that, even though we do talk a little funny and my parents do horrible old-fashioned stuff like go to church. Hear that, Manuel Castells?

A little defensive? Hell, yeah. According to certain people who think they're sophisticated there's nothing of value between New York and L.A. They call it "the flyover." You won't believe how much wank I've heard from Californians about how cool they are in comparison with, say, me.

Here's today's page two signed article from La Vanguardia by Alberto Abian. The background is that a couple of days ago the Guardia Civil beat some poor bastard to death in the Roquetas de Mar police station.

From Los Angeles to Roquetas

Until now we thought that the California police forces were the only ones capable of being involuntarily videoed by amateurs while beating black citizens to death. Now, it turns out that some Civil Guards seem to have emulated their colleagues in Los Angeles, with the difference that the camera was in the police station itself and the victim was a white farm worker from Almeria.

WHAT? When was the last time the L.A. cops beat a black citizen to death? And why this comparison, when there are police forces around the world that really beat people to death, or worse, all the time? And there has been more than one police brutality scandal right here in Spain, like when the cops right here in Catalonia put a schizophrenic Danish kid in the hospital and got filmed doing it a couple of years ago. And if you thought the Rodney King beating was ugly, you haven't seen this one. So let's lay off the shocked innocence, Mr. Abian.

Here's Spain's dumbest intellectual, Manuel Castells, a couple of days ago in La Vanguardia.

We're at war, they say. And in war all measures are valid. It was with that argument that Iraq was invaded, razed, and destabilized in search for weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist.

My ass. What a cheap straw man. No one argued that all measures are valid, because if we thought that way we wouldn't have lawyers attached to every unit telling them what they can do and can't, and there would be a whole lot more dead Baathists than there are now if we did everything we could to them. And as far as "destabilized," is Mr. Castells saying he prefers Saddam's allegedly stable sadistic tyranny?

Legal insecurity for everyone is growing, especially for those who look like Pakistanis or Somalis or Moroccans or Arabs or Afghans or any other imaginary face of the habitual suspects, including Brazilians and Ecuatorians (or dark Spaniards?)

Oh, what a crock of crap. Note that Mr. Castells wants to sign up the Spaniards to his list of victim groups that evil racist Western society is oppressing.

Indiscriminate restriction of civil liberties leads to Al Qaeda's first victory: they are changing our societies into something very far away from the democratic way of life.

What an old, tired argument. The British pacifists made that argument in World War II, saying that if we resist the Nazis we'll become just like them. And what indiscriminate restriction of civil liberties?

...Bush threatens the only thing he knows, bombing.

And they call the Americans simplistic.

...the Israelis have changed from an open and democratic society to a militarized and paranoid country with strong racist tendencies.

You heard it here first. Israel is racist, paranoid, militaristic, undemocratic, and closed, says Mr. Castells. I personally think Mr. Castells is bigoted, superficial, incompetent, and a worshiper of totalitarianism and violence, as he never criticizes any of the groups that are really militaristic and undemocratic, like the PLO, PFLP, Hezbollah, Hamas, and company.

There's a lot more but I've had enough.

New stuff of interest on international politics: Victor Davis Hanson, Anne Applebaum, John Leo, and Niall Ferguson.

Here's Charles Krauthammer agreeing with me on "intelligent design."

This one is for my sister and brother-in-law, who are both anthropologists/archaeologists. It's from the Nation back in 2000, and it's about how almost all American arkies contributed to the World War II effort. Even Margaret Mead.

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20001120&s=price

It's interesting how WWII is the only war ever that had virtually 100% support among the American people. Even university social scientists were in favor.

The Spain Herald is on vacation for August, since we're more of a political news website than anything else, and both Madrid and Brussels close down for August so that everyone can pack the beaches and sweat like hell on the dirty sand while paying exorbitant prices.

Recommendation: Find a small town as far away from the Mediterranean as possible and go there. Try Galicia or Leon or Navarra or Huesca. Don't come to Barcelona. It's packed, and I mean packed. Downtown is so full of tourists you can barely move. There's no way you'll find anywhere to stay. Half the places of business are closed and the rest are tourist traps. Come to Barcelona in mid-October or so when things are much more relaxed.

Check out this story from Soccer Net. I think I'd have picked a different headline.


Young Boys Wankdorf erection relief

BERN, Switzerland, July 31 (Reuters) - The supporters of Young Boys Bern have not had too much to celebrate in the 19 years since their team last won the Swiss league title.

Long since eclipsed by the likes of FC Basel and Grasshoppers Zurich, the club from the Swiss capital has even got a reputation for enjoying its status as a perennial loser.

But this weekend Young Boys sought to shake off their old image by officially opening the 32,000 Stade de Suisse Wankdorf stadium -- which cost 350 million Swiss francs ($271.3 million) -- with an uncharacteristically flashy homecoming party.

'I'm extremely happy, because I'm convinced this is the stadium from which Young Boys can finally launch themselves back into sporting success,' Swiss president, and Bern native, Samuel Schmid told spectators just before Saturday's show got underway.

This is from Chris Suellentrop in Slate. Note the line I boldfaced. And the one word I boldfaced in the second paragraph. Slate is a LIBERAL website.

During the buildup to the Gulf War in 1990 and 1991, Carter unsuccessfully worked to undermine the foreign policy of America's democratically elected president, George Bush. Carter behaved as the Imperial Ex-President, conducting a guerrilla foreign policy operation that competed with the actual president's. What's disturbing about this behavior is not that Carter opposed war with Iraq. Many Democrats opposed going to war, and they worked within the American system to try to prevent a war that many predicted would be bloody (which it was, for Iraq). But Carter went further than merely lobbying Congress to oppose military action or speaking out in an effort to tilt popular opinion against the coming war. He used his status as a former president to engage in foreign policy, a deliberate effort to subvert the democratic process.

In November 1990, two months after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, Carter wrote a letter to the heads of state of the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. He urged the countries to drop their support for Bush's proposed military solution. Instead, as Douglas Brinkley outlines in The Unfinished Presidency, his glowing but not uncritical assessment of Carter's post-presidential years, Carter asked the countries to give "unequivocal support to an Arab League effort" for peace. (As Brinkley notes, Carter's anti-war position conflicted with the Carter Doctrine he had outlined as president: Any "attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such force will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.") Right up to Bush's Jan. 15 deadline for war, Carter continued his shadow foreign policy campaign. On Jan. 10, he wrote the leaders of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria and asked them to oppose the impending military action. "I am distressed by the inability of either the international community or the Arab world to find a diplomatic solution to the Gulf crisis," he wrote. "I urge you to call publicly for a delay in the use of force while Arab leaders seek a peaceful solution to the crisis. You may have to forego approval from the White House, but you will find the French, Soviets, and others fully supportive. Also, most Americans will welcome such a move." Former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft later accused Carter of violating the Logan Act, the law that prohibits American citizens from conducting unofficial foreign policy.

Here are some excerpts from a piece by National Review's Jay Nordlinger. Among his sources are Time's Lance Morrow and the New Republic's Joshua Muravchik.

(Carter's) low moment, however, came during the run-up to the Gulf War, when he wrote members of the U.N. Security Council — including Mitterrand’s France and Communist China — urging them to thwart the Bush administration’s effort. Our government found out about it when the Canadian prime minister, Brian Mulroney, called the defense secretary, Dick Cheney, and said, “What the . . .?” Some people actually allowed themselves to utter the word “treason.”

Arabs are heavy-duty funders of the Carter Center, and they get a lot for their money.
No one quite realizes just how passionately anti-Israel Carter is. In the 1990s, Carter became quite close to Yasser Arafat. After the Gulf War, Saudi Arabia was mad at Arafat, because the PLO chief had sided with Saddam Hussein. So Arafat asked Carter to fly to Riyadh to smooth things over with the princes and restore Saudi funding to him — which Carter did.

While in office, Carter hailed Yugoslavia’s Tito as “a man who believes in human rights.” He said of Romania’s barbaric Ceausescu and himself, “Our goals are the same: to have a just system of economics and politics . . . We believe in enhancing human rights.” While out of office, Carter has praised Syria’s late Assad (killer of at least 20,000 in Hama) and the Ethiopian tyrant Mengistu (killer of many more than that). In Haiti, he told the dictator Cédras that he was “ashamed of what my country has done to your country.”

He did even better in North Korea, singing praises to Kim Il Sung, one of the most complete and destructive dictators in history. Said Carter of the “Great Leader,” “I find him to be vigorous, intelligent, surprisingly well informed about the technical issues, and in charge of the decisions about this country” (well, he was absolute ruler). He said, “I don’t see that they [the North Koreans] are an outlaw nation.” Pyongyang, he observed, was a “bustling city,” where shoppers “pack the department stores,” reminding him of the “Wal-Mart in Americus, Georgia.”

How did this man ever become president? What a piece of shit.

Mr. Bush, you missed an excellent opportunity to shut up.

From Fox News:

WASHINGTON — President Bush said Monday he believes schools should discuss "intelligent design" alongside evolution when teaching students about the creation of life.

During a round-table interview with reporters from five Texas newspapers, Bush declined to go into detail on his personal views of the origin of life. But he said students should learn about both ideas, Knight Ridder Newspapers reported.

"I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought," Bush said. "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes."

The theory of intelligent design says life on earth is too complex to have developed through evolution, implying that a higher power must have had a hand in creation.

Fortunately, Bush has no power to decide what is taught in the public schools; that's the job of local school boards. But, quite simply, "intelligent design" is not science, it's religion. And it's not a theory, it's an assertion. It's based on the logical fallacy of the "argument from ignorance"; that is, it says "Intelligent design must be true because there's no other way that life could have developed." That's deduction. Science is inductive. You start with the evidence and then develop your theory, rather than starting with your assertion and then looking for evidence to fit it.

And exposing public school students to different schools of thought is only a good idea when each of the different schools of thought has solid support among experts in the field. For example, there are about fourteen different theories on the causes of the First World War, all of which have some support from some historians.

But no legitimate scientist believes in "intelligent design."

I'm not an idealist about pre-university education. I believe its purpose is to prepare people to go to college or vocational school and get a job. Well, if you go to college and study biology, and you give the prof your "intelligent design" catechism on the final exam, you will receive a large F. If you try to get into med school with "intelligent design," they'll have a good laugh over your application before circular-filing it. No laboratory or hospital or university or corporation will hire biologists who believe in "intelligent design".

If you believe God made the world and created life, that's just fine. You can believe that all you want, and I won't complain in the least. But don't dress your faith up as science, and don't insist that other people's kids study your faith. You wouldn't want your kids studying someone else's faith, would you? So let's keep everybody's faith out of the schools.

I would suggest that Mr. Bush quietly drop this subject and say no more about it.

Here's a fascinating essay from Bartleby. It's titled Five American Contributions to Civilization, and it was written in 1895, 110 years ago. Seems pretty up-to-date, though. Highly recommended.

La Vanguardia is at it again. They've published a special article on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in their Sunday magazine supplement. It contains about fifteen pages on the tragedy of the deaths of 200,000 people, but does not mention, say, the Rape of Nanking or the Bataan death march or the sack of Manila or the attack on Pearl Harbor or the invasions of China, Indochina, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Burma. Here are a few quotes:

Was it absolutely necessary to raze two cities populated mostly by children, women, and old people?

Hiroshima was the headquarters of the Japanese Second Army and about 10,000 of the dead were Japanese soldiers.

The bomb had no military justification; the defeat of Japan was a fact and its unconditional surrender was a question of a few months...The new artefact contained a message of world power...whose real addressee was the Soviet Union...The United States wanted to show that it had the bomb and that it was willing to use it without moral reservations, without limits, without the brake of pity. Why did the United States choose the cruelest option?

In summer 1945, American casualties were about 1000 a day, 7000 a week, 30,000 a month. The sooner the war ended, the fewer Americans would die. The American government's goal was therefore quite obviously to end the war as soon as possible, not "in a few months."

Japan was clearly defeated after the battle of Midway in 1942, but was unwilling to surrender. Instead, it fought on for three more years, and it wanted to fight to the death. Japan had 10,000 kamikaze planes, 2,350,000 trained troops, and a civilian militia of 28 million armed with bows and arrows, spears, and muzzle-loading muskets ready to resist the Americans. No Japanese force, not even a single battalion, ever surrendered to the Americans during the whole war until its very end. As late as August 9, 1945, after the bombing of Nagasaki, the Japanese inner cabinet (the "Big Six") was split three-to-three on surrender and Hirohito finally broke the tie. This was the very first time surrender was even considered.

Conventional bombing was not going to make Japan surrender. We had hit their sixty largest cities beginning in February 1945 and pretty much burned them out, and we created a firestorm in Tokyo that killed more than 100,000 people on the night of March 9, 1945, more than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

The number of people killed if America had invaded Japan, which it planned to do in two stages, an invasion of Kyushu in November 1945 and then a final assault on Tokyo in March 1946, while the British invaded the Malay Peninsula and retook Malaya and Singapore in November 1945, would have dwarfed the number of victims of the atomic bomb. We now know that the Japanese anticipated the Kyushu invasion and had fourteen divisions on the island. The US military estimated that there would have been 100,000 American casualties in the landings, and these calculations were based on fighting only three Japanese divisions, which is what we thought they had on Kyushu. It's more likely that American casualties would have been on the order of several hundred thousand, and if we had had to invade Honshu, over a million. The American planners assumed that fighting in Japan itself would have been like fighting on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the most horrible battles fought in modern history. At Okinawa we lost 12,500 dead and the Japanese lost 185,000 dead, half civilians. More than a million Japanese would certainly have been killed in an American invasion.

Meanwhile, the Americans had wiped out Japan's merchant fleet, as the Japanese had no concept of submarine warfare. And what we learned in Germany, after years of trial and error, is that the best bombing targets are railroad junctions. The plan was to hit a dozen key bridges and about fifty key railway yards and junctions along the Pacific coast of Honshu and destroy Japan's capacity to transport food. Tokyo, for example, produced only 3% of the food it needed. With no ships or trains to deliver food, literally millions of Japanese civilians would have died within a few weeks--they were already down to rations of fewer than 1500 calories a day--and the country would have been completely destroyed. And we were planning to use chemical warfare on their rice crop, if necessary, as well as poison gas. There would be no Japan today.

As for charges that the Americans were trying to scare the Soviets, the answer is quite simply no. They were trying to put an end to the war. The Soviets already knew we had the atomic bomb, as the Klaus Fuchs spy ring had kept Stalin informed.

To quote Richard Frank, "The atomic bomb was the least abhorrent choice." And to quote Paul Fussell, "Thank God for the atom bomb."

I'm not sure if you know that Jimmy Carter came very close to committing high treason in his atempts to sabotage the American war effort in the first Gulf War. He contacted foreign leaders on his own, attempting to carry on parallel diplomacy in opposition to the democratic will of the American people through their elected President and Congress. I honestly think that if they had wanted to prosecute, they'd have had a very good case, and right now instead of bothering poor people in Latin America Jimmy would be doing twenty-to-life in Marion.

I'm not sure whether Carter is evil or just extremely stupid. I think both, but that's just me.

You think this guy is pro-democracy and anti-terrorist? I certainly don't. As a matter of fact, I think he is despicable. And I am amazed that he didn't fuck up our country a lot more than he managed to do.

Possibly the greatest thing that happened in American history after the victory in World War II was Reagan's defeat of Carter in the 1980 election, when the American people convincingly repudiated the weak and irresponsible Carter. As an incumbent President, he was only able to swing 44% of the vote, the most pathetic showing for an incumbent since William Howard Taft had to run against both Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson in 1912.

Look at these very recent quotes from Carter.

BIRMINGHAM, England — Former President Jimmy Carter said Saturday the detention of terror suspects at the Guantanamo Bay Naval base was an embarrassment and had given extremists an excuse to attack the United States.

Carter also criticized the U.S.-led war in Iraq as "unnecessary and unjust."

"I think what's going on in Guantanamo Bay and other places is a disgrace to the U.S.A.," he told a news conference at the Baptist World Alliance's centenary conference in Birmingham, England.

"I wouldn't say it's the cause of terrorism, but it has given impetus and excuses to potential terrorists to lash out at our country and justify their despicable acts."

"What has happened at Guantanamo Bay ... does not represent the will of the American people," Carter said. "I'm embarrassed about it, I think its wrong. I think it does give terrorists an unwarranted excuse to use the despicable means to hurt innocent people."

Carter, who won the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, has been an outspoken critic of the Iraq war.
"I thought then, and I think now, that the invasion of Iraq was unnecessary and unjust. And I think the premises on which it was launched were false," he said Saturday.

Gee, I dunno, but that sounds like sabotaging the war effort to me, not to mention insulting the President, the Congress, and the military. By far the worst thing, of course, is calling the President a liar with zero evidence. Sounds like Jimmy wants America to lose. Typical. What a piece of shit Carter is.

By the way, I figure that winning the Nobel prize for Peace or Literature is an excellent sign that you are a complete asshole. If you can't find anyone better to honor than Jimmy Carter, Dario Fo, Jose Saramago, Rigoberta Menchu, or that dumb Costa Rican president, whoever he was, it's clear that the point is giving out money to leftists rather than actually honoring people who have made a contribution.

If I ever meet Carter I'll spit in his face, and he's probably too much of a pussy to take a swing at me. If he does I'll deck him and I hope they charge me with assault because that would give me a platform to prove in court that the bastard is a traitor. He is forty years older than me and it wouldn't be a fair fight, but who cares when it's Jimmy Carter. Of course, his bodyguards will drag me away, but it'll be worth it.

I suppose everybody has heard about the hanging of the two gay teenage boys in Iran.

I am shocked, disgusted, sickened, and angered.

These poor kids were hanged just for being homosexual. What a miscarriage of justice.

The Europeans constantly bash the Americans for executing some murderers, though they don't seem too outraged when Japan or India or Thailand or Malaysia or Jamaica or the Philippines(all democracies) does the same thing, and it's been years since I read a complaint about the way the Communist Chinese dictatorship hands out death sentences like they were popcorn. They spend pages and pages of newsprint calling us evil for toasting Ted Bundy and his ilk. And we're even worse because we very occasionally fry some bastard who did his evil deed while under 18.

Where is the European anger at this atrocity? The Iranian government hanged two kids under 18, not for murder, but for playing with one another's penises. Where is the outrage? Where are the calls for international sanctions against Iran? Where are the calls for the overthrow of such an evil regime?

The answer is there isn't any. They're saving it all up for the next time the Americans kill some terrorists. The difference in the number of pages in the Spanish press devoted to the poor Brazilian who was shot by the police in London and the two boys hanged in Iran is 100 to one. The difference in the rage shown against Middle Eastern crimes against humanity and Western attempts at self-defense is 1000 to one. Even after the Islamists murdered 192 people here in Spain just seventeen months ago.

I can't wait until Mumia Abu-Jamal has his date with the executioner. La Vanguardia will undoubtedly publish a special edition.

The Europeans are a bunch of fucking hypocrites, and the Spanish press is the worst.

Al Qaeda and Islamist national-fundamentalism must be destroyed.