ANNOUNCEMENT

Beginning Sunday October 8 (that is, this weekend) I, personally, will be tending bar and spinning CDs, on Sunday and Monday nights, between about 8 PM and 2 AM, at:

MICKEY'S HONKY TONK

C/Banys Vells, at the corner of C/Brosoli

between C/Argentaria and C/Montcada

near Santa Maria del Mar and the Picasso Museum

Metro: Jaume I

There will be country, blues, and rock and roll music, along with cheap beer and a pool table.

Hope to see you there. Mention Iberian Notes and get a free beer. (Note: This offer expires Monday the 9th, or else Mickey will not be pleased with me.)

Wednesday afternoon blog roundup while listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival:

Biased BBC disposes of some commentator's bloviation about "What's Wrong with America."

Fausta has tons of interesting stuff every day.

The Fourth Rail is a tremendous resource on the war against terrorism and the Middle East, and USS Neverdock focuses on Islamism around the world. Both are daily reads for me.

I don't know if it's just me, but I've noticed several bloggers commenting on Islamism's inability to coexist with the liberal state. Here's Perry from Samizdata, and here's Pave France on the Robert Redeker tempest.

Akaky is articulately ironic.

Frank McGahon is Hayekistically against central planning.

Publius Pundit has two different pieces on Hugo Chavez, one on how he's pissed off Chile and the second on the decline and fall of Citgo.

La Liga Loca has fresh Spanish football news, including speculation about Real Madrid's finances and Ronaldinho's mediocre form. There is an amazing amount of pressure put on star players over here, and Ronaldinho has merely been above average, not brilliant, over the last two or three games. Maybe he's tired, maybe his knee is tweaked, maybe his girlfriend dumped him, maybe he's been filming too many commercials. Big deal. He'll become brilliant again pretty soon; he's got a track record for doing so.

La Vanguardia is fascinating today.

The banner headline on page one reads, "Third-generation mobile phones unleash millions in investments."

The subheads read, "Telecoms to spend €14.5 billion over next three years; Renovating infrastructure and increasing competence, the companies' goals; France Telecom's purchase of Amena revolutionizes sector. Page 66."

This is getting interesting. Let's note that the only companies mentioned by name are France Telecom and Amena, and go to page 66.

Page 66, the first page of the business section on the first business news day of the week (not a lot of new stuff on Monday, since the markets are closed Sunday), is entirely devoted to this exclusive. Headline: "Telecoms to invest €14.5 billion over next three years." Subhead: "France Telecom's purchase of Amena revolutionizes sector." Hmm. France Telecom gets another mention, and so does Amena.

Then there is a large photograph of a gentleman in a suit and tie next to a large sign showing Orange's logo; the photo is purposely cropped to include both the gentleman and the logo. The caption reads, "The president of France Telecom, Didier Lombard, yesterday in Madrid announced the union of Amena and Wanadoo."

Here's the lead paragraph. "A silent revolution is occurring in the telecommunications sector. Technological changes have begun a new investment cycle that will bring telecommunications to take over protagonism after the stock market debacle of 2000. In the next three years, Telefonica, Vodafone, Ono, and Xfera plan to invest more than €13 billion. France Telecom joined in this wave of investment, announcing investments of €1.5 billion over the next three years in the Spanish market."

So France Telecom gets another mention, though its investment is only one-tenth of the total amount that all the telecoms companies are supposedly going to put up, which I will believe when I actually see it. There's also a mention of the stock market and new "protagonism" by the telecoms sector.

Now, here's the real, buried lead paragraph, the second one: "The CEO of France Telecom España, Belarmino Garcia, said that "We will be the principal foreign investor in the telecommunications sector." He said that after the disappearance of the mobile phone operator Amena and of Wanadoo, France Telecom's new brand Orange will comprise the company's mobile-phone, fixed-line phone, internet, and television services in order to become an authentic alternative to Telefonica. Forecast net income is €4 billion annually, with 3300 employees."

Reads like a France Telecom press release.

Paragraph three: "The purchase by France Telecom of Amena and the acquisition by Ono of Auna Cable have revolutionized the sector. "Both operations attracted the attention of private equity funds because they represent the beginning of real competition in the sector," said Didier Lombard."

Note that so far the tone of the article is very bullish on telecoms sector stocks and especially France Telecom, of course.

Paragraph four: "The first response was Telefonica's announcement that it would invest €9 billion over the next four years." Excuse me! Isn't this the big news? Telefonica's investment will be six times France Telecom's.

We skip a couple of paragraphs, down to the next-to-last:

"Telecommunications is probably the sector that devotes the largest part of its income to investment, among companies listed on the stock market, In the last ten years, it has reinvested almost 18% of its income, far above cement producers (16%) or automobiles (13%)."

Hmm. More bullishness on the sector.

Here's the last para:

"Regarding France Telecom's investments in Spain, the CEO stressed that much of the €1.5 billion will be destined to the construction of its third-generation network. "Currently only 200,000 of the 11 million clients that we have use UMTS technology, and our goal is to accelerate its implantation in order to gain 25% of the market." By the end of the year, 75% of the population will have coverage. France Telecom considers Spain as a key country in its strategy, as it demonstrated when it acquired Amena for €10.6 billion one year ago."

Also, there's a sidebar, which begins, "The next battle in the telecommunications sector will be the implantation of telephones which offer both fixed-line and mobile services. This telephone was launched a few days ago in France by France Telecom and will soon be introduced in Spain."

Gee, I dunno, but it seems to me that La Vangua has done an awful lot to promote the telecoms sector and especially France Telecom with this whole shebang, especially the front-page banner head and the first business page.

By the way, if we flip five pages back to the stock market quotes, we see that France Telecom is down 13.96% on the year.

Now, here's something really interesting. On page 5, the first full-page ad in today's edition of La Vangua is for...Orange! It's just a black page with the slogan, in orange, "Life is better when everything really important to you is within your reach. Mobile. Internet. Fixed-line. TV. Orange."

How do I get in on this deal?

Last night TV3, on its 8:30 PM nightly news, led off with the shooting at the Pennsylvania schoolhouse and followed up with the Congress of Deputies stunt. At 9 PM, Antena 3 led off with the video stunt and followed up with the Pennsylvania shooting. I understand why the schoolhouse shooting would lead off the news in the US, but in Spain? Didn't anything more important happen in the rest of the world?

Spain is fascinated by the Amish, whom they first found out about in the Harrison Ford movie Witness, which was a huge hit over here and is repeated ad nauseum, along with Mississippi Burning and The Shawshank Redemption, on weekend afternoon TV. They can't get over these folks' living without modern technology and with old-time family and community ways in the heart of the United States, which they identify with the latest in heartless modernity.

The Antena 3 reporter finished off his story last night with some remarks about the bucolic idyll of the Amish country and how this shocking episode of violence seemed impossible there, "but, when we're talking about violence, nothing is impossible in the United States." That's a direct quote, I wrote it down at the very moment it came out the guy's mouth.

The shootings are one of the top stories on TV3's afternoon news today at 2:30 PM, too, with extensive follow-up coverage; they just can't get enough of it.

Lula and social democrat Gerardo Alckmin are going to a second round in the Brazilian election; Lula got 48.6% and Alckmin 41.6%, with minor candidates getting 9.8%. I'm guessing Alckmin dethrones Lula, as even more corruption stories come out and the anti-populist opposition unites.

The Mark Foley scandal is serious bad news for the Republican party. I had thought until now that the Reps would have no problem winning both the Senate and the House in the November elections, but this is going to hit the Republican base right in the guts. A Republican congressman was soliciting minors for sexual purposes, and we don't know whether he actually had sex with any of them or not--and other Republican congressmen knew about it, at least enough to warn pages away from Foley. House speaker Dennis Hastert claims that Republican leadership did not know anything about Foley's pedophilia, and I hope he's telling the truth, because if he's not the Republicans are guilty of the same thing the Catholic Church was, not immediately getting rid of anyone whose sexual behavior toward children is questionable.

Question: What percentage of gay men are pedophiles, and what percentage of heterosexual men are, and is there a difference? I honestly don't know. And what percentage of gay pedophiles act on their urges, and what percentage of straight pedophiles do, and is there a difference? I have a guess.

Obviously, youth is a component of heterosexual attractiveness; you don't see too many women over the age of 22 in Sports Illustrated's swimsuit issue, and high school cheerleaders are most certainly both minors and officially sanctioned sex objects. I might add that there are a whole lot of "Barely Legal" porno sites out there, featuring explicit sex involving very-young-looking 18-year-old girls; I know this for a fact because I once translated the captions to the photos for one of them. (Yes, I was paid quite well, ten euro-cents a word. I learned lots of new vocabulary in Spanish, too.) No question that lots of straight men are attracted to teenage girls; that's why the term "jailbait" exists. No question that lots of hetero perv pedophiles spend their Augusts in Cuba with the teenage hookers. But what percentage acts on it?

I have the impression, though, that the gay men who are attracted to what I will euphemistically call "youths" tend to act on it more frequently than the heteros. Go back to the ancient Greeks and the kouros statues, or to any modern city and its rentboys. My guess is that most gay men discovered their orientation as teenagers and began to act on it as soon as possible with everyone possible. Therefore, they see nothing wrong with sex with teenagers, because they did it themselves as teenagers with older men. The hetero "community," on the other hand, does have a norm prohibiting sex between adults and teenagers, and though a hetero might be tempted to violate it, and some do so, he knows that it is wrong.

Please don't get too angry--this is just a hypothesis. Feel free to prove it wrong in the comments section.

Oh, yeah, Foley has checked into rehab. See, his problem was caused by the demon alcohol that was making him do what he did, not the fact that he is a pervert. Oops, excuse me, "boy-lover," as NAMBLA would have it.

John Derbyshire from National Review, whom I generally like except when he's calling for a race war, approvingly reproduced a letter to the Economist perpetuating two urban legends.

LETTER OF THE MONTH ...This particular one was to the editor of The Economist, and appeared in the “Letters” columns of the September 23rd issue.

An earlier issue of The Economist (Sept. 9th) had run a spoof piece titled “Welcome Aboard,” pretending to be the in-flight announcement of something called Veritas Airways, “the airline that tells it like it is.” Sample: “Your life-jacket can be found under your seat, but please do not remove it now. In fact, do not bother to look for it at all. In the event of a landing on water, an unprecedented miracle will have occurred, because in the history of aviation the number of wide-bodied aircraft that have made successful landings on water is zero…”

Well, the letter-writer in the Sept. 23rd issue had the following to say:

"Sir — The bright yellow life-jackets are not intended to act as flotation devices. They are there to make it easier for the recovery services to spot the bodies strewn across rough terrain. (I was once asked to put on a life-jacket over central Germany, some 300 miles from the sea.) And the advice to adopt a head-down fetal position in the event of a crash landing does nothing to preserve life, given that the stall speed of a modern airliner means it will connect with the ground at terminal velocity. However, the position does tend to preserve dental data, useful for identifying dilapidated corpses."

News you can use.

The life-jackets legend is debunked at Yahoo Answers, and Snopes debunks the brace-position legend.

The embarrassing part for Derbyshire is that, in the very same column, in the middle of a discussion on IQ in which he advances the theory that people do not communicate well when there is more than a 15-point IQ difference between them, he says,

Highly intelligent people are good at weighing evidence and making inferences, yet are still, as that Poul Anderson character implied, capable of believing nutty things, those nutty things being walled off in “zones of commitment” where evidence counts for nothing and logic is suspended. Contrariwise, even very dim people, who live mostly in a fog of superstition and false inference, manage to cross the street safely, do basic arithmetic, and anticipate the sunrise.

And, despite living in a fog of superstition and false inference, so foggy that they fall for decade-old urban legends that could be checked out by any moron with an Internet connection, they manage to write the occasional column for NR as well. Either that or their own personal zone of commitment has something to do with race and intelligence.

Monday afternoon blog roundup while listening to Alison Krauss and Union Station:

Davids Medienkritik reports on a German news program's slander of the United States armed forces. A must-read, including the video and a translated transcript.

Trevor at Kalebeul neatly disposes of a prominent and rather bigoted Francophone.

La Liga Loca's "Heroes and Zeroes" neatly sums up the Spanish football news of the weekend.

Pave France has a terrific piece on Airbus's troubles, with lots of documentation and everything.

¡No Pasarán! tells the story of Robert Redeker, a French philosophy professor under a death threat for his views on Islam. There are several further updates, including a mention of the fact that Communist newspaper L'Humanité has not mentioned Redeker at all.

Eamonn at Rainy Day is in fine eclectically cultural form; he's had several fascinating posts over the last week.

Fausta and Publius Pundit have lots of stuff on the Brazilian election.

Watch this video before it gets taken down. Some jokers in Madrid, helped out by a worker at the Congress of Deputies building, sneaked into the legislative chamber and "stole" Prime Minister Zapatero's chair. They filmed the whole thing and posted it on YouTube yesterday, and it's made the news. The worker at the Parliament who let them in will be "disciplined," and prosecutors are talking about filing charges.

This shows exactly how lousy security around here is. What if that had been Al Qaeda or ETA instead of some dopey kids, and what if they'd had a bomb instead of a video camera? Heads need to roll.

Here is the link to these idiots' website.

UPDATE: Turns out to have been, get this, a stunt pulled off by an advertising agency as part of a guerrilla marketing campaign for a UN world hunger day. They set up a blog and posted the video on YouTube yesterday. The cops finally got to the bottom of it today and identified those responsible. Here's Libertad Digital's story, and here is El Periodico's.

The point about security holds, since the filmmakers really did connive with a worker to let them sneak into the legislative chamber without informing higher authority.

Pointless thoughts while listening to Junior Brown:

(Hey, do you guys ever listen to any of the music videos I link to?)

Local music news is that a well-known non-commercial flamenco performer, "El Capullo de Jerez," has been charged with setting a six-year-old girl on fire. Yep, you read that right. He was apparently completely drunk in a bar and got in an argument, left, and decided the way to get revenge was by torching his antagonist's child. Wonderful what alcohol does to promote clear thinking. I never heard of this guy before, but they showed him on TV, and he is obviously suffering the effects of long-term alcoholism, schizophrenia, or both. The guy's artistic name is great, too, "The Blossom of Jerez." However, "capullo," that is, "blossom," has a much more common slang meaning, which is "dickhead." I assume the double entendre was intentional.

In other crime news, today Spain's 55th domestic murder of the year took place. Also, a Barcelona court decided that selling pirate CDs and videos in the streets (which is referred to as "top manta" around here, I suppose because the pirate discs are displayed on top of a manta, that is, a blanket) is not a crime, but rather an administrative violation. Those caught can be ticketed and fined, as if they had parked illegally, but not arrested, tried, or jailed. 100% of top manta vendors are illegal aliens, usually Africans or Moroccans.

Wonder if the name of the fish, the manta ray, comes from the fact that it looks rather like a blanket?

Further Catalunacy: For some reason your ultranationalists around here have made a big deal about Catalan national sports teams. International sporting federations do not recognize Catalonia as an independent country, and its "national teams" cannot participate in international competitions such as the Olympics or World Cup, because Catalan players play for Spain in those things.

They can, of course, organize exhibition games against any other team they can convince to show up, and every Christmas somebody pays a foreign team--one year they got Brazil, I remember--to come play an exhibition against the Catalan side, normally featuring three guys from the Barça, two from Espanyol, and some second division players. Everyone gets in free and a good time is had by all, unless they get the Electrica Dharma to play a concert before the match.

So, anyway, the regional government, the Generalitat, ran an ad showing children from around the world wearing different uniform shirts playing soccer. A child wearing a Catalan uniform shirt tries to join the game, but another child wearing a red shirt (coincidentally the Spanish national team's color) refuses to let him play. Infuriating. What is public tax money being used for here? Why is the Generalitat buying TV time to run any ads at all, especially this tendentious whining tantrum?

Over here governmental bodies, especially the regional and municipal ones, run what they call "institutional advertising." These paid ads, which run on TV and radio and in newspapers, serve two purposes: A) patting the leaders of the governmental body which pays for the ad on the back, thereby serving as a permanent political campaign in favor of those currently holding power, and B) providing not-so-invisible government subsidies to local media outlets. Another way subsidies are handed out by newspapers is through "institutional subscriptions"; the Generalitat pays for more than 10,000 daily subscriptions to La Vanguardia, for example.

The votes are being counted in Brazil as I type and it looks like Lula de Silva is going down against the Social Democratic candidate, the first LatAm left-populist to get booted by his country's people. Corruption, and the failure of Lula's paternalistic welfare scheme, have disillusioned many Brazilians, and fortunately the reaction is taking place at the polls. And one thing must be said for Lula, he's not a Chavez or Lopez Obrador; if he loses, he'll turn over power democratically.

Some doofus posted this in the comments section:

John: Why aren't you pushing the 11-M Conspiracy Theory? You and your blogging friends have a duty to tell the world that Zap and his muslim allies planned 11-M! OK, well maybe that particular conspiracy theory is falling apart day by day, but you should keep pushing it to sow confusion. Or better yet, come up with another conspiracy. You're good at it.-- Otro Gráciano

Buddy, all I can say is you haven't been reading Iberian Notes very carefully. Here's the first paragraph of June 3's post:

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.

Aimless thoughts while listening to Big Bill Broonzy:

FC Barcelona just defeated Athletic Bilbao 1-3 at San Mamés on an own-goal by the Athletic defense and scores by Gudjohnsen and Saviola for Barça. Athletic's Yeste scored first, but then at about the 20th minute an Athletic player was sent off in a very harsh decision by the ref; even the TV3 announcers thought he'd gone too far. Foul, yes, yellow card, probably, but red card, excessive. That pretty much sealed the game, because there's no way to beat Barcelona with only ten men. Barça didn't play particularly well, but came away with the points. Athletic is in very serious trouble. Their club president--Athletic, Osasuna, Real Madrid, and Barcelona are the only four teams left in the Spanish league that are still owned by their membership--had to resign last week, and has been replaced by a woman, the first ever in Athletic's 104-year history.

I've been trying to avoid gloom-and-doom forecasts of future confrontations between European "Christians" and Muslims, but people here in Barcelona seem considerably more worried about immigration than in the past. The mass car-burnings in France last year got a lot of people around here talking about how France had failed its Muslim immigrants, some of whom are now third-generation French citizens but are also still foreigners. The wave of black Africans washing up on the shores of the Canaries, which the world media is still ignoring, has stirred up more concern, especially since the Zap government has literally been evacuating these immigrants to the mainland and just turning them loose with a sandwich and a bottle of water in downtown Madrid. And the alleged crime wave of armed home invasions and burglaries in the Catalan countryside has some rural folks literally up in arms, patrolling their vicinities in vigilante groups just like in Arizona.

Actually, the black Africans coming to the Canaries (maybe 30,000 total so far, I'm guessing) are a small minority of the number of illegal immigrants, most of whom simply get off the plane at Barajas or cross the frontier from France. The Zap administration legalized a whole bunch of them last year, more than 600,000, and there's not any question that this has attracted even more to arrive in hope of a new mass legalization.

Even Vallfogona de Riucorb, my wife's village, has seen immigration, with several Romanians and a South American family renting apartments there. They either work at the spa hotel, if women, or as casual laborers, if men. So far they're a novelty and very well treated by the townspeople, who appreciate the fact that these folks are law-abiding and here to work. I just hope things stay this way, because when a house in the village is broken into, which will happen sometime just because of the laws of probability, I'm afraid immigrants will be blamed.

The town's social center is the bar, and the weekly major social event is the Barça game on TV there. The immigrants all show up, among with the locals; sports bring them together. (None of the Romanians seem to be Real Madrid fans, or things might be different.) So that's one positive sign for the future.

My Barcelona neighborhood, Gracia, is quite multiculti, with a good few Latin Americans, Chinese, Pakistanis, Lebanese, and Moroccans. Most Graciencs are pretty liberal, it's a boho-lefty neighborhood, and I haven't heard much complaining about the changes we've seen over the last ten years. But I might be hanging out at the wrong bars.

Random thoughts while listening to Van Morrison:

The latest frenzy of Catalunacy broke out last week over the official address kicking off Barcelona's fiesta mayor, the Mercé; for some reason, they invite somebody famous to read a speech every year. This year those responsible chose Elvira Lindo, a Madrid writer best known for the Manolito Gafotas series of children's books, and it was announced that she would make her speech in Spanish, which makes perfect sense since that is the language she speaks and everybody in Barcelona understands it. However, Esquerra Republicana, a National Socialist party, pitched a fit at the idea that Ms. Lindo would not speak in Catalan, and many stupid things were said in the nationalist me(r)dia. Fortunately, the great majority of Barcelonese understood that Ms. Lindo was an invited guest and received her hospitably, but the ERC jerks showed up at the Plaza Sant Jaume holding up opened black umbrellas in order to demonstrate their opposition to her presence.

These people are an embarrassment to Catalonia, and unfortunately they are the ones who form opinions about our region (don't forget, él que viu i treballa en Catalunya és català, so that includes me) in the rest of Spain. I have a friend in Madrid named Carlos, who is a very well-educated, creative, and intelligent guy. He once asked me, "How can you stand to live in Barcelona? I suppose there's the climate, but..." See, Carlos's image of Barcelona has been formed by these ERC clowns, and he thinks they actually represent most people here, which they don't, since they only get about 10% of the vote.

(I will add that many Barcelonese have an equally false stereotype of Madrileños, reactionary Franquista Spanish ultranationalists, which of course the great majority are not.)

The regional elections for the Generalitat, the Catalan government, are coming up on November 1, and campaigning is in full swing. No predictions here on who's going to win; I think the PSC's Jose Montilla is the favorite, but anything could happen. I suppose, out of the realistic possibilities, that I would prefer a coalition between the two most moderate and mainstream parties, Convergence and Union and the Catalan Socialists. Sure, that's voting for more of the same, but things actually function more or less pretty well around here. We're prosperous and comfortable.

Montilla is a Socialist party hack, just another politician with nothing special about him. He was the president of the PSC and Zapatero's industry minister, and he took a lot of heat from the PP when he was in the cabinet, especially over the various proposed utilities mergers. What makes him interesting is that he is not Catalan by birth. He's from Córdoba, and your more racist ERC goons call him a charnego, that is, not a real Catalan. He is the first charnego to have a serious shot at becoming premier of Catalonia since the regional government was established in 1980.

He represents the Spanish-speaking descendents of immigrants from other parts of Spain who settled in Barcelona's industrial suburbs in the '50s and '60s, and now form the majority in places like Cornellà, where Montilla was mayor for a decade, Santa Coloma, Manuela de Madre's home base, Celestino Corbacho's L'Hospitalet, Catalonia's second-largest city with nearly half a million people, and other such cities from Sant Boi to Badalona.

It looks to me like it's these people's turn to run things for a while.

They're making an enormous deal in the media over here about the school shooting yesterday in Colorado. According to the Spanish media, all American high schools are powder kegs of violence just waiting to be touched off. Doesn't sound much like Shawnee Mission South in 1983. Have things changed that muchg or is the media full of crap?

Unfortunately, Samuel Etoo got broken last night and is out for three months. Gudjohnsen and Saviola are going to have to step up. You still have to figure Barcelona as favorite for the Champions League, though, and there's no way anybody else is going to win the Spanish league.

Hello, everyone. I've been rather depressed during the last month, actually, and I haven't done very much but some proofreading for a textbook company. I haven't even been on the internet, and I haven't checked my e-mail, either--just had no interest in doing so.

One of my cats, Niau, died on August 23; he apparently died peacefully out in our house in Vallfogona. I went downstairs at about 8:30 PM, leaving him on our bed along with the other four; when I went back up to where the cats were, at about 9:30, I found him stretched out dead in his cat bed. Probably a heart attack, or he just died of being old; we don't know how old he was, but we believe at least 15, since he and his twin brother moved in with us at the end of 1995, and they were full-grown adults.

The brother, Tail, is still disoriented, since he and Niau are quite obviously identical twins and had been together all their lives. They're very distinctive-looking; they're clearly a mix between Siamese and red tabby, since they have red points instead of black ones, and red tabby stripes up the tail. The two were inseparable, always together, and usually sitting on top of somebody, especially house guests, whom they liked to make welcome. They are by far the friendliest and best-natured cats I have ever seen, much less lived with. Now, of course, Tail doesn't know where his companion is.

We buried Niau in a small plot of land that belongs to Remei in the valley down by the stream the next morning. I'd hoped it was just a bad dream, but there he was, and it was quite clear he was dead, so the only thing to do was bury him. We bought some ceramic-tile letters spelling out his name and cemented them to a stone we put on his grave.

I saw my friend Franco Aleman yesterday, though, and a couple hours of talking with him inspired me to start writing again, so regular blogging will resume tomorrow. Tonight is the Barça game, and I'm of course going down to the bar to watch it, so that's one thing I'll report on. There is a regional election coming up, an immigration crisis, a new Barcelona mayor, more merger fun in the utilities sector, police corruption, Catalooniness right and left, the inmates taking over the PP asylum, and all kinds of other fun stuff to write about.

Blogging will be light to nonexistent until August 11, since my parents are in town for a visit. There's plenty of news to comment on, from Hezbollah's assault on Israeli cities while Israel sits and waits, reports that the Qana "massacre" is reminiscent of the one in Jenin with the death toll dropping by the day, the not-yet-announced death of Fidel Castro, ETA's threats to return to violence if they don't get what they want from the Zap administration, Iberia's cave-in allowing the wildcat strikers to keep their jobs, and much more. But you'll have to read about it on some other blog; I suggest the ones in the blogroll to the left.

Monday blog roundup while listening to Dwight Yoakam:

Davids Medienkritik gives sleazy tabloid mag Stern a good fisking.

Damian Penny has links and comment on Qana; Expat Yank blasts anti-Israeli bias at British AOL; Harry's Place has more; so does Right Wing News.

Trevor has a history piece on medieval Barcelona and the decline of the city-state.

Pave France comments acidly on the French blogosphere.

Samizdata agrees with us on the Spanish Civil War.

The top story on everyone's evening news tonight was the Israeli attack on Qana, which killed at least 50 people in an apartment building, at least some of whom were civilians. Half of them were children.

TV1 used the word "massacre" at least 15 times during its news broadcast, which seemed rather partisan to me.

Israel's answer is that these deaths are Hezbollah's fault because Hezbollah started the war, and because Hezbollah uses civilians as human shields. That is, if Hezbollah hadn't wanted those civilians there, they wouldn't have been there.

And, of course, the Israelis do not blow buildings up at random. They hit that particular one because they knew that weapons were being stored there.

And, of course, the Israelis had warned the people of Qana that their town would be bombed, as it was a Hezbollah base, and that they should leave. The argument that all the roads were destroyed doesn't fly. Israel hasn't blown up every road in Lebanon. The civilians could have left the city on foot with no problems for the great majority--all they'd have to do is get a couple of kilometers out of town at most. If I were credibly informed that Barcelona would be bombed within the next few days, I would leave as soon as possible and on foot if necessary. Why didn't they?

Israel says that it fired two missiles into the building a couple of hours after midnight, and that the building did not collapse, killing many of the occupants, until nearly noon, eight or ten hours later. Assuming the Israelis are telling the truth, why didn't the inhabitants get out when they had the chance?

This tragedy happened because irregular forces, such as Hezbollah--guerrillas, terrorists, whatever you want to call them--hide behind non-combatants. Regular forces, such as the Israeli army, must answer to military law and to the chain of command. They are specifically prohibited from hiding behind civilians, and if they do so, they will be punished by their own superiors. Hezbollah terrorists are responsible to nobody, and they believe that the martyrdom of innocents helps their cause. So they do everything they can to promote it, in their own country and in other people's.

Today Hezbollah fired more than 150 rockets into Israel, the express purpose of each one to kill civilians.

El Periodico's bag of shit editorial cartoonist Ferreres today accused Israel of intentionally targeting the UN observation post where four "peacekeepers" were killed last week.

Dialogue:

Kofi Annan: "A UN post bombed? Weren't there signals indicating it?"

"Peacekeeper": "Very well. That's why they hit it so accurately."

"Tikrit Tommy" Alcoverro, La Vanguardia's Beirut correspondent, has this to say in Sunday's Vangua:

Three weeks into the war, around 2000 Hezbollah guerrillas courageously resist deadly and devastating Israeli aerial bombings and land incursions, and their strategists continue launching rockets at objectives of the Jewish state, farther and farther away. Hezbollah leadership, despite the devastation and the exodus of the Shiite population, is still decided on continuing the war, and boasts of having stopped the plans of the Israeli general staff. In the south, as occurred before, one of the most powerful armies in the world is facing a guerrilla organization, which, like a fish in water, is fighting on its own terrain. If Sheik Nasrallah committed an undeniable error in challenging Israel by capturing two of its soldiers, not foreseeing these disproportionate reprisals, the Jewish military leaders have had to reduce their offensive projects before (Hezbollah's) surprising armed resistance and the hecatomb and destruction caused to this innocent and unprotected populace. Lebanon is a small country of only 10,000 square kilometers with some 4 million inhabitants. We must also recognize that this war is almost exclusively carried out against Hezbollah, established among the Shiite population of the south, of the Bekaa, and of the Beirut suburbs. It is, therefore, the Shiite community that suffers in its flesh the incessant reprisals of the Tsahal.

Not hard to see whose side Tikrit Tommy is on, is it?

My question about Alcoverro is the same as my question about Beirut Bob Fisk. Both these guys live in Beirut and have done so for many years. Who, exactly, are they paying their insurance costs to? And in what form? I don't for a moment believe that any Westerner could live for so many years in Beirut without the risk of being kidnapped or having his house blown up, unless he had an insurance policy, and I don't mean the kind you get from State Farm or Prudential.

Further aimless thoughts while listening to KHYI out of Dallas (click on "Click Here to Listen"):

The wildcat strike at El Prat lasted all day yesterday, though the airport is functioning more or less normally now. The strike caused more than 500 flights to be canceled yesterday and a great number to be diverted to other airports, thus thoroughly messing up the rest of Spain's air travel sector as well. Today more than 100 flights had to be canceled as well, about 20% of the scheduled number.

What happened is that the mainstream labor unions, the UGT and CCOO, called an informative meeting of the Iberia handling workers yesterday at 9 AM, and the meeting got out of hand. Radical elements led by the anarchist labor union CGT took over and passed a wildcat strike motion; the runways were immediately blocked. Finally, at about 7 PM, an agreement was reached in which the workers went back to work and management promised to do something so no one would ever ever get fired again no matter how much crack he smoked on the job.

The question now is who is going to reimburse all the passengers who missed flights because of the strike. If you figure there were, I don't know, 10,000, and if they paid an average of, say, €250 for their tickets, that's a pretty good chunk of change.

Note: The anarchist union that panicked the workers' meeting, the CGT, is also the bunch whose logo appears on the "Israel Estat Genocida" banner (scroll down to the fifth photo for a good view) at last week's anti-Semitic demo. These guys are left over from the old CNT-FAI, the most powerful anarchist organization ever at its peak in late 1936.

The boats are still washing up on the Canaries; there have been several more deaths among the West African illegal immigrants who make up the boat people. Over 600 of them arrived just this week.

The world's number one blowhard, Hugo Chavez, told Al Jazira: "The Jews are doing the same thing to the Lebanese that Hitler did to them." Chavez's next stop on his world tour is Iran.

Pamela Anderson and Kid Rock got married. The sheer redneckiness (redneckosity? redneckization?) is overwhelming. Let's hope the kids have her looks and neither's brain.

I didn't make this up, but it's always seemed accurate to me: The difference between white trash, rednecks, and hillbillies is that, if they get invited to a wedding, white trash throw on a stinky old Iron Maiden '82 tour T-shirt and a torn-up pair of tennis shoes and show up. Rednecks, on the other hand, put on a brand-new freshly-ironed Dale Earnhardt Jr. T-shirt along with their biggest, roundest belt buckle and a pair of alligator-skin cowboy boots and show up. Hillbillies, on the third hand, put on the suit their great-grandpappy Jethro was buried in and show up with a chicken under their arms.

Letters to the editor from Friday's El Periodico:

Anti-Semitism might be an even bigger problem than terrorism. Terrorism
might come to an end someday with more justice for everyone, while destroying a country with illegal cluster bombs, with the result of many dead civilians every day, in exchange for two kidnapped soldiers, might make anyone an anti-Semite...
Signed: Francisco Masdeu, Barcelona

I ask Solana: Why don't they send NATO to bomb the terrorist state of
Israel? This action would be much more justified than that of Serbia in 1999 (to my understanding, there was no reason for it.)
Signed: José Luis Calzada Puig, Barcelona

In the Warsaw ghetto, for every German killed 100 Jews were executed. The
Israeli chief of staff, Dan Halutz, threatened to destroy ten buildings in
Beirut for every missile Hezbollah launched. He kept his promise.
Signed: Josep Robert Reig Miró, Barcelona

Note that these were not only letters sent to El Periodico; they are letters El Periodico chose to print.