New developments from out here in the badlands west of the Besós:

El Pais is reporting that Fidel is in "very serious" condition with diverticulitis, which is apparently what that Spanish doctor, whose salary we all pay, went over to treat him for. He's reportedly had three operations.

El Pais didn't mention that Miguel Valdés Tamayo, one of the 75 Cuban dissidents jailed in 2003, died last Wednesday at age 50 in a Havana hospital after suffering two heart attacks. He was prohibited from leaving Cuba in order to seek medical treatment abroad. Valdés Tamayo, by the way, was an Afro-Cuban with hundreds of years of ancestral heritage in the country, while Castro is a second-generation immigrant middle-class white boy from Spain. Valdés Tamayo's father might have worked on Fidel's father's plantation.

I would say El Pais is likely to be a credible source on the Castro story, since it's the unofficial organ of the Spanish Socialist Party, which has good relations with the Castro government. If El Pais is reporting that El Comandante has taken a turn for the worse, it's likely true.

There was an article in La Vanguardia a few days ago which rather stridently said that the Cuban exiles should be excluded from having any voice in what happens to Cuba after Fidel. Dude, those people either are Cuban citizens or would be if not for Castro's dictatorship, so I don't quite see how they either should or can be kept out.

For some reason (probably leftist indoctrination in the schools and media), around here public opinion is very strongly against the Cuban exiles, especially among those living in Florida. They are portrayed as Fascist mafiosi, not just the few who are shady--and among any group of people, a few are going to be shady no matter what. It was claimed around here that the Cuban-Americans were responsible for Bush's victory in 2000, because most of them vote Republican, and Bush won Florida by only a few thousand votes. That's reductionism, of course; you could equally well make that argument about any group that tends Republican.

In Parliament, Zapatero and Rajoy had a big fight about what to do about ETA. Rajoy was very harsh, blasting Zap for negotiating with the terrorists, and he had a point. However, politically I'm not sure Rajoy's hard line is going to play well with the center, unless the Barajas bombing has moved the center toward the hard line. Rajoy's biggest weakness is that most non-PP voters see him, and especially the Zaplana-Acebes wing of the party, as mean and nasty. Zap's biggest weakness is that most non-PSOE voters see him as a weakling and a wimp.

Zap's appearance in Parliament didn't help anything. He seems bewildered. He thought he could trust ETA and they betrayed him, and now he doesn't know what to do. Rajoy nailed him to the wall, saying, "If you don't obey them, they'll commit bombings, and if there aren't any bombings, it's because you've given in." Zap wasn't able to point out the bad logic here--that is, he should have said that he now understands that ETA would commit bombings no matter who was prime minister, and that a lack of bombings might very well mean that state security has the terrorist gangsters up against the ropes. He didn't. Instead he demanded that Rajoy take back what he had said, and Rajoy of course refused.

Local big stink: They've been digging a tunnel along the route of the AVE, the high-speed train that is supposed to run from Madrid through Barcelona to the French border, in the suburbs directly southwest of the city. Poorly-constructed buildings in places like El Prat de Llobregat have begun to develop cracks. This is worrying, and shows an unfortunate lack of planning, since one of the first things they should have done is consider the effects of this massive construction project on its environment. Oh, well, maybe it'll turn into an excuse to tear down some crappy old buildings and put up some decent ones.

It's Martin Luther King Day in the US, so everybody's got a day off work. This 2005 post shows my ambivalence toward King, who (like Gandhi) I think is a bit overrated.

They hanged Saddam's half-brother and secret police boss. The noose ripped his head off.

Bummer.

UPDATE: In case you're wondering what this looks like, they hanged train robber Black Jack Ketchum in New Mexico in 1901 with similar unfortunate results.

There's been some controversy around here over the world's oldest mom. That's right, a 67-year-old woman gave birth a few days ago to twin boys in a Barcelona hospital after in vitro treatment in the United States. Local opinion is not particularly sympathetic, though there are some who say that what a woman chooses to do with her body is her business. I suppose my perspective is that the woman is within her rights, but I would not choose to do such a thing myself.

The other controversy, more political, is about these damn demonstrations that they've had here in Spain over the weekend in reaction to the Barajas bombing. I personally do not give a crap, since I scorn symbolic politics. Barcepundit and Publius Pundit have more on the story, so check them out; Barcepundit takes a well-deserved whack at the New York Times and Reuters, while Publius takes the demos more seriously than perhaps he should.

The Bad Rash takes a rather undeserved whack at the PP and the AVT, saying those groups are against peace because they boycotted the Socialist- and PNV-organized demos. No, what they're against is a compromise peace. The PP and AVT, and I agree with them, want a victorious peace and the defeat of ETA.

Finally, for a pro-ETA perspective, check out Eusko Blog. This guy is nuts. Here's a quote:

(Rodriguez Zapatero) thought he could bring ETA to the negotiating table while steping up the Spanish repression in Euskal Herria. And while Rodriguez was using the international forums to claim he was engaged in a peace process, all the while he was hammering down on one of the columns of peace, justice. Now, if only Rodríguez and his PSOE and Rajoy and his PP can get it through their thick heads that they need to stop their genocidal violence against the Basque people, maybe in the near future we can finally see justice served, which in turn will usher a new age of peace. Read that again, justice first, and then peace will take place as part of a natural process.

The author wrote this AFTER the Barajas bombing. This is the mindset we are dealing with around here. Probably 15% of the Basque people agree with this guy.

An Excuse to Link to Some Softcore Porn

I've been getting a lot of Google hits for "miss lepe." The story is that a PP city councilwoman in the city of Lepe has entered the Miss Lepe 2007 beauty pageant, and has posed for tasteful but rather revealing photographs. Here's the link to El Periodico's story, which includes one of the photos.

This is funny because a) of course the PP is the conservative party, and PP women don't normally go around posing nude for photographers and b) Lepe is the Spanish equivalent of our Polish jokes--that is, people from Lepe are supposed to be remarkably thick-witted. Just mentioning the word Lepe will normally get bad comedians a laugh out of their audience.

Well, actually, if you have to explain it then it isn't funny.

Here's a link to the other nude photos in the news around here: A woman from Galicia was in the news a few months ago when she was arrested at the Cancun airport. A few bullets were found in her suitcase, and apparently it all turned out to have been a mistake, but they kept her in jail for a few days there and it became a media cause celebre. Well, now she's posed topless for softcore trash mag Interviú, and there's some media controversy over whether the girl is a skank or not. I would say that she has a nice figure but not quite the face of a model, if you know what I mean.

Sad news in the world of bunnies. Robert, the German Giant rabbit pictured in this famous photo (scroll down just a little), has been sold to the North Koreans. I fear Robert's fate will be closely intertwined with a stewpot.

Fox Sports is reporting that David Beckham will sign with the Los Angeles Galaxy of MLS. Beckham is the most famous soccer player in the US, though he is of course nowhere near the best player in the world. The guy can still play, though; he's probably one of the world's top 50 players, and one of the top five free-kick specialists.

This is a good move. MLS needs to improve its quality; right now it doesn't even pay enough to keep American stars at home. Most of those guys are playing in England, Germany, or Holland. Beckham will give the league much-needed star power, and his arrival will encourage other top European players to spend their declining years in the US--if MLS can raise the salaries.

Right now the players belong to the league, not the "clubs," which are actually franchises, and there's a rigid salary structure that prevents anyone from earning more than around $200,000. The league recently passed what has become known as the "Beckham Rule," which would allow each franchise to sign one player without salary limits. I expect they will expand the number of exempt players and raise the salary structure in order to attract better players in the future.

Sometimes Spanish symbolic politics drives me up the wall. Every time there's some civic tragedy, they have a big demonstration in order to show they're against it, and the big demonstration is always big news, though it's just symbolic.

(Note: I think this Spanish particularity is the cause of a common misunderstanding among Spanish commentators. Pretty much the entire Spanish press has accused the Bush government of trying to cover up the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq, because there are no big public funerals and mass demonstrations in America if a local kid gets killed in combat. American funeral services are private affairs, and the press is not invited; also, we do not have big public demos on such occasions, as they do in Spain. This cultural difference causes some Spanish reporters to scream "Conspiracy! Coverup!" when there is, of course, nothing of the sort going on.)

So the story is that the Basque PNV government has called a big demo for tomorrow "for peace and dialogue" in the wake of the Barajas bombing that killed two men. Batasuna, ETA's political stooges, has announced that it will join in the demo, which is a first, since Batasuna has never been publicly critical of ETA before. However, I wouldn't march in any demo that Batasuna was marching in. Meanwhile, the Basque Socialist Party has announced that it is boycotting the demo because it does not explicitly condemn ETA.

Symbolic politics. Who gives a crap? Lock the bastards up and throw away the key. Crush ETA while we have the chance. Dialogue, my ass; looks like at least some of the Socialists have learned that you can't negotiate with terrorists, you have to kill them before they kill you.

You'll want to read this article, from the Guardian, of all places, on French complicity in the Rwanda genocide of 1994. The author charges that France was so obsessed with the grandeur of la Francophonie and its own status as central African hegemon that it aided and armed the pro-French Hutu government while the killings were happening.

One caveat here: You may know that Iberian Notes is pretty sensitive to anti-Americanism, and the standard I use to define it is: Does the speaker or writer show bias against the whole society or just opposition to some American government policy? Does he who judges the US show balance by pointing out the good as well as the bad, or does he portray everything as bad because it's American and so it must be?

Well, while reading this, my anti-American sensors went off, except this time what I detected was anti-Frenchness. The writer of this article clearly doesn't believe that France ever does anything right.

However, if what he reports is even half true, French conduct in Rwanda was despicable.

Key paragraph:

As the French left, years of anger among Rwanda's Tutsis spilled out over the price they believe they have paid for Paris's unique view of its place in post-colonial Africa - a role critics say is shaped by an obsession with the influence of its language and culture that led Paris to support a murderous regime because its opponents spoke English. France went on backing the killers even as the bodies piled up in the streets, churches and football stadiums. "France wants to blame us, the ones whose families were murdered, the ones who put a stop to the murderers; they want to blame us for the genocide because they cannot face their own guilt," says Rwanda's foreign minister, Charles Murigande. "The French armed the killers and they trained them even when they were saying they were going to kill the Tutsis, and France supported the genocide regime right up until the end, even helping the killers to escape." Why? "Because they have this obsession with Anglo-Saxons."

This paragraph from Wikipedia's biography of Real Madrid's Brazilian footballer Emerson can't possibly be true.

When Emerson was a child he learned at an early age that he was gay, however, he didn't come out of the closet till he was 18 and playing proffesional soccer. After this not many teams wanted to sign him because of his sexual orientation. Though none of the owners stated this.

I Googled it and got nothing, leading me to believe that it's false. Also, if such a prominent player had come out of the closet, I'd probably have heard about it by now.

If it is true, though, that's just one more act in Madrid's three-ring circus. Supposedly Madrid's GM, Pedja Mijatovic, told the Italian media that Beckham's contract would not be renewed next year. The US media has been reporting for months that Beckham is on his way to MLS.

Meanwhile, Ronaldo and Robinho are in the doghouse for going out and getting drunk last week and showing up for practice hung over two days in a row.

Coach Fabio Capello told the Spanish media yesterday that, basically, his team sucks and he doesn't know why, except that a lot of the players don't seem to give a crap. He declared, though, that he wouldn't resign.

The Spanish press is reporting that Beckham, Ronaldo, Cassano, and Salgado are on their way out at Real. That's not enough. They also need to get rid of Roberto Carlos, Cannavaro, Helguera, Raul, Guti, Diarra, and Emerson. This team needs to be broken up, like Barcelona broke up Van Gaal's team in 2002-03, and then regroup.

The following are young players with promise who I would keep: Robinho, Marcelo, Ramos, Reyes, Gago, Higuain, Diogo (now on loan to Zaragoza), and of course Casillas. In addition, they have four fairly young defenders from the youth squad, Bravo, Pavon, Miñambres, and Mejia. Among these four guys, a couple at least ought to be able to play reasonable center-defense. I'd also keep the veteran striker Van Nistelrooy, since he's new, not contaminated by the bad attitude of the other veteran players, is doing OK this year, and should still have a decent year or two left in him.

Meanwhile, Barcelona does not look great, though they hold second place with one fewer game than league leader Sevilla. They've been moving the ball slowly and not taking advantage of opportunities to score. They have been hurt by injuries, especially to Eto'o and Messi, and when these two come back in February or so, Barça will get a lot better quick. One thing to remember, of course, is that if you're going to have a bit of a cold streak (two consecutive League draws), January is a good time to have it. You need your best players to step up for the stretch run in April or May, not in January.

Of this year's signings, only Gudjohnsen has been good. He's not Eto'o, and he knows it, but he is a competent player and has done exactly what they asked him to. Zambrotta has been OK, not awful, but not an upgrade over Belletti and Oleguer either, which is what they did ask him to be, and Thuram has not been good. I suspect he's over the hill and needs to play somewhere else next year.

You Americans who don't have a soccer team to follow might adopt Sevilla; they're young and hungry, and they've been playing very well this year. They've got several very good players like Kanouté, Luis Fabiano, Alves, and Navas, who are worth watching. They're the underdog, the little guys, in comparison with behemoths Barça and Madrid; also, they put a lot of emphasis on their youth squad and so a lot of their players are homegrown, guys who actually believe in the team.

History buffs will be glad to know that Time magazine has opened up its archives going all the way back to 1923. There is lots of fascinating stuff here. In many cases, the articles tell you more about American society at the time than about the subject. You could just browse around in here for hours.

I searched for "spain," just to see what would turn up, and this is some of what did:

A 1962 article on Spain after Franco.

A 1966 article on Spain's modernization.

1975: Franco dies.

1992: Before the Olympics.

1946: Spain after World War II.

1982: Felipe gets elected.

1931: The Republic takes over.

1936: One month into the Civil War.

1977: Spain's first election.

Fascinating stuff, full of useful information.

Yesterday we linked to a Pave France post on a new book by Frederic Martel called On Culture in America. La Vanguardia made the book its main story in the Culture section last Saturday, and in a tone of some surprise, reported that the American "cultural model" has its virtues.

According to La Vangua: "The United States is not only a dominant cultural power because of its imperialism, but 'because, with its immense minorities, it has become the world in miniature'." Well, I question whether American cultural imperialism even exists, but that's fair enough.

The article adds that among Martel's points are a) US government spending at all levels on culture oscillates between $25 and 50 billion dollars a year, more per capita than France b) private donations to culture add up to $13.5 billion a year, four times the French culture ministry's budget c) The US has 4000 universities, 700 museums, 2300 performing arts centers, 110 publishing companies, and 3500 libraries d) some universities, like Harvard, have tons of money--Harvard's endowment is $26 billion e) the US has seven times as many libraries per capita as France.

Quotes from Martel: "A continuity exists between the cultural activities of the universities, the non-profit institutions, and the commercial sector," the result of "fierce competition in the non-profit sector." He adds, "The powerful European culture ministries, which so often distribute subsidies arbitrarily, opposes the American policy of massive tax exemptions, which empowers those actually in the field."

Martel criticizes high prices (true for top-line performances, but every city with a university has theater and music with some standards at accessible prices), puritanical donors (that's not much of a problem; if donor X won't give you money for peeing on a statue of the Virgin Mary, donor Y probably will just to look avant-garde), and the growing "mercantilization" of charitable foundations and nonprofits, which he is spot on about. From what I have seen, there are a lot of mediocre careerists in the nonprofit foundation bureaucracy.

My only question for the writer of the article, Oscar Caballero, who is generally more than fair to US society, is why he's so surprised at the flourishing of the cultural industry in the United States.

People interested in the Spanish Civil War will want to read this American Heritage article from 1969 on the Lincoln Battalion.

Blog roundup:

All you need to know about Hugo Chavez and Venezuela is at Publius Pundit. Check out the links.

¡No Pasarán! pokes a hole in French hypocrisy.

The EU Serf is pessimistic on reform.

Angie Schultz meditates on the infamous "plastic turkey."

Pave France comments on a new book about American culture in France; we'll post later on how La Vanguardia dealt with this subject.

Davids Medienkritik castigates a Yank-bashing German politician; here's the follow-up post.

Finally, check out this bit of Catalan nationalist dogma; it's a rather partial history of FC Barcelona and its Cataloony connections.

News from around here: ETA issued an official communiqué this morning claiming that their "permanent cease-fire" is still in effect. Yeah, right, what happened at Barajas?

Batasuna did publicly criticize the Barajas bomb, which I believe is a first, and this adds weight to the thesis that there are two factions among ETA and its supporters, the soft-liners and the hard-liners. Both groups are still demanding an independent Basque country, the annexation of Navarra, an amnesty for jailed ETA terrorists, and other such absolutely unacceptable things; the difference is that the soft-liners are now against using violence because they're hoping not to spend the rest of their lives in jail when they get caught.

Speaking of caught, the French cops busted two members of the ETA cell that abandoned large quantities of explosives and bomb-making materials a few days ago in a rural area of Vizcaya. One of them was Asier Larraniga, the guy that they had identified and were trying to hunt down.

Zap and Rajoy had a meeting. Nothing happened. Zap's reaction to the bombing has not been good; he's been repeating the same platitudes about negotiations and peace that he was repeating before. Other top Socialists, like Rubalcaba and Blanco, have sounded much more realistic and responsible.

TV3 is running this crazy conspiracy theory, which you know they got from the Quai d'Orsay, claiming that the Americans hit the Al Qaeda base in Somalia for geostrategic reasons since they want to increase their influence in Africa and control the exit to the Red Sea. Europeans are full of geostrategy, probably left over from their mercantilistic pre-capitalist economic ideas.

See, they haven't figured out that free trade makes it unnecessary to have political control over areas that don't belong to you. That is, in the bad old colonial days, Belgium had a monopoly over the mineral riches of the Congo, and nobody else could buy any of the minerals unless Belgium said it was okay. Now, with the elimination of trade barriers, those minerals are available to the highest bidder. You don't have to occupy the Congo to buy those minerals. You would have to do so if you wanted to STEAL the minerals--grab them without having to pay--but that's terribly inefficient, costly in lives and treasure, and wrong anyway.

This is why the United States and Great Britain did not go into Iraq to grab the oil. The oil is available on the world market at the market price, and there was no need to steal it when we could just buy it.

Aaron Hanscom has a piece up on Pajamas Media called "The Islamification of Europe's Cathedrals," in the wake of Muslim requests/demands that Islamic services be held at Cordoba Cathedral, which was formerly a mosque. (If you've never been there, it's well worth a visit.)

Check it out. I think the article is a little bit alarmist, but you be the judge.

A&L Daily links to this review of a book called "American Fascists" by a guy named Chris Hedges. You'll have no problem guessing who the so-called Americanazis are, but in case you needed a hint, he's not referring to the Osama fans out there.

Check out this bit:

Hedges concludes the United States today faces an internal threat analogous to that posed by the Nazis in Weimar Germany.

There are problems with this analogy. First, democracy in America is much stronger than it was in Weimar Germany in 1933. Nor is the Christian right as widespread or powerful as Hedges suggests. Among conservative Christians who are working class or lower class, "a dramatic majority" voted for Bill Clinton for president — that's the finding of sociologists Andrew Greeley and Michael Hout in their recent book "The Truth About Conservative Christians." A 2004 survey for "Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly" on PBS found that a majority of evangelicals have an unfavorable view of Falwell and that a significant minority of them are more concerned about jobs and the economy than about abortion and gay marriage.

And it isn't as if conservative Christians are the only obstacle to gay marriage: Yes, 85% of white evangelicals oppose gay marriage, but in the general population the figure is 61%. In fact, the differences between today's Christian right and the movements led by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini are greater than the similarities. Hitler was more pagan than Christian. Street violence was a key tactic of Mussolini's Brownshirts; the Christian right has focused on nonviolent demonstrations outside U.S. abortion clinics and on changing laws at the ballot box. And there's a big difference between supporting laws against gay marriage and putting gays in concentration camps.

Nevertheless, Hedges concludes that the Christian right "should no longer be tolerated," because it "would destroy the tolerance that makes an open society possible." What does he think should be done? He endorses the view that "any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law," and therefore we should treat "incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal." Thus he rejects the 1st Amendment protections for freedom of speech and religion, and court rulings that permit prosecution for speech only if there is an imminent threat to particular individuals.

Ironically, Mr. Hedges's disdain for the rights of freedom of thought, expression, and religion, and his totalitarian streak that makes him want to ban speech he disapproves of and punish those who do not conform make him much more similar to the real Fascists than the American Christian conservatives are.

Now get this. Mr. Hedges is a reporter for the New York Times. How can he claim to be an unbiased reporter when he thinks that more than a quarter of his fellow citizens are Fascists? Has his newspaper no judgment at all in who it hires?

Naturally, of course, both he and his editors would scream bloody murder if anybody tried to interfere with their own precious rights.

Note: This is how a lot of anti-American crap gets over here to Europe. Our own left wing thinks it up, and the Europeans just parrot what they hear from renegade Americans.

Check out this girly-man slap-fight between Diogo and Luis Fabiano in yesterday's Zaragoza-Sevilla game.

I think I set a record in last week's Spanish First Division soccer picks. I went 0-for-10. Got every single one of them wrong. That leaves me at .000 for the week and .000 for the year.

Here's next week's picks; I can't possibly do worse.

Espanyol-Barça 2
Nastic-Getafe X
Celta-At. Madrid X
Osasuna-Betis 1
Racing-Real Sociedad 1
Valencia-Levante 1
Sevilla-Mallorca 1
Recreativo-Deportivo 1
Athletic Bilbao-Villarreal X

I got a Google hit for something like "spain three kings blackface offensive." Yep, it is true that traditionally in Spain, one of the Three Kings paints his face black.

The story is that every city has a parade on Three Kings Eve, Jan. 5, when the Three Kings (the Wise Men from the Bible), all dressed up in flowing robes, ride through the streets on their way to bring presents to all the good little boys and girls and caca i carbó (poop and coal) to the bad ones. (Now, the poop and coal are meringue candy with brown or black food coloring.) In Spanish tradition, one of the Three Kings is blond and wears a blond wig and beard, and one of them is black. Since black people in Spain were extremely rare until about five years ago, and are still rare in a lot of places, they usually get a white guy to black up in order to be the black King--I think Baltasar is his name. The other two are Melchor and Gaspar. As far as I know, here in Barcelona they get a real black man to play Baltasar, but in smaller places they paint someone's face.

Come on, people, this isn't offensive. They're not making fun of black people here; they just need someone to dress up as a black Wise Man. Remember, the character of Baltasar is a good guy, one of the wise Kings of Orient who brings pressies to the kids. He doesn't do a minstrel-show Stepin Fetchit act, he throws candy to the kids lining the streets and waves at them.

People interested in language ought to look at this report from the American Dialect Society. I like the verb "to pluto," and plan to use it on every occasion. I hate "truthiness," though. Just awful.

Check out this paranoid crap from the Guardian. The headline should read, "Britons Who Choose to Visit the United States to Be Scanned for National Security Reasons." See, if you stay in Britain, none of this will happen to you!

Get this: Britons already have their credit card details and email accounts inspected by the American authorities following a deal between the EU and the Department of Homeland Security.

1. Only if they choose to visit the United States! 2. My understanding is that such transactions are merely monitored--that is, Homeland Security can easily find out if you sent an e-mail to Osama, or sent cash through your Visa card to Hamas, but they can't inspect the contents without a court order, just as they always could monitor your mail, but not open it without a judge's permission.

Look, people, if you choose to go visit another country you have to obey their laws. When I applied for Spanish residency, they fingerprinted me, and I had to have a medical checkup, which the government knows the results of. What's the problem? I have to carry my ID card at all times here. So what's the big deal? I have to inform the government every time I change address. Who cares? I'm not allowed to work for the civil service (which includes teaching in the public schools) because I'm not a Spanish citizen. I'm not complaining. These are the Spanish government's policies, and if I don't like it I can leave.

News update: The cops found sixty more kilos of explosives in the Basque Country all ready to be used, the third important find in two days. They're looking for a four-person ETA cell in that area, probably traveling together; the only one identified so far is one Asier Larrañaga. They searched a couple of apartments in Bilbao, but didn't find much.

The bomb scare at the Bilbao airport, fortunately, was just a scare.

They found the body of the second man killed in the airport bombing under tons of rubble this afternoon. He was an Ecuadorian immigrant who'd been sending $300 a month to his family back home; the TV crews went to his hometown to get his family's reaction. Those people are poor. Way to go, ETA.

Socialist party head honcho hack Jose Blanco admitted that the Zap administration had been a bit naive regarding its dealings with ETA, and promised they wouldn't do it again.

In case you were interested, TV3 made a big deal out of Keith Ellison's being sworn into the House of Representatives on a Koran; they let him use one from the National Archives that belonged to Thomas Jefferson. They emphasized that Ellison had been criticized for being "un-American." I think they erred in their emphasis, since it was one idiot Congressman who said that, and everyone else told him to shut up.

La Liga Loca has its predictions for next weekend up; it's back in business after the long Spanish winter break in league play.

Our picks:

Atletico Madrid-Nastic 1
Real Sociedad-Osasuna X
Zaragoza-Sevilla 2
Getafe-Barça 2
Betis-Celta X
Levante-Racing X
Mallorca-Athletic Bilbao 1
Espanyol-Recreativo X
Deportivo-Real Madrid 2
Villarreal-Valencia X

National Public Radio ran a debate the other day on Hollywood and anti-Americanism, and they've got it up on their website, so you can listen to the whole thing. Check it out. I haven't listened to it yet, because it's an hour and a half, but there are plenty of ideas here.

Arts and Letters Daily links to this piece from Commentary on the Robert Redeker affair, anti-Semitism, and just plain bad judgement in France. Check it out. Two key paragraphs:

The effect of these views on the wider political discussion in France is profound. The present generation of Orientalists is omnipresent in the French media, unavoidable on radio and television. They assure the country that the progressive Islamization of European suburbs, plain for all to see, poses no danger. They suggest that the problem with Israel is its very existence. They inspire the open sympathy with Hamas, Hizballah, and Iran that can be found in newspapers like Le Monde and Libération. And they encourage the use of the term “Islamophobia” (a coinage of Iranian clerics) in order to delegitimize all those who might be tempted to disagree with them—individuals like Redeker.

I am neither an Orientalist nor any kind of expert on the issue of Islamism. But I have spent years in the Middle East, as well as in other Muslim countries, and I know that the situation in the Islamic world corresponds very little to the wishful thinking of so many French scholars, journalists, and political leaders. A quick look at a world map—from Chechnya to Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, Kashmir, southern Thailand, and the southern Philippines—reveals that the planet’s most devastating wars are now of the jihadist type. All are fueled by Islamism.

From the News-in-These-Here-Parts department: TV3 is reporting that there has been a bomb threat at the Bilbao airport, and it has been evacuated. We'll update this if it turns out to be important.

The cops found a hundred-kilo bomb apparently abandoned by ETA near the side of a road in the Basque Country, along with the timers and detonators and other stuff necessary to make it go boom. I think this means that ETA is on the offensive again.

I've seen several analyses recently backing the theory that there are two different factions within ETA. One is made up of people who haven't committed murder and those who have served their sentences, and they're broadly in favor of negotiations. The other is made up of current prisoners and others who have blood on their hands, and they want to keep killing until the government agrees to an amnesty. According to this theory, faction number 2 has won out in the internal struggle. All I can say is amnesty, over my dead body.

Here's Bill Buckley on the ethics of watching the Saddam hanging video. I watched it. I suppose what surprised me most was the effectiveness of hanging: Saddam was dead as a doornail five seconds after the trap dropped.

This, of course, is not the first death video on Internet; you'll remember that when Nick Berg was murdered, the killers released the video. I didn't watch it, nor do I have any plan to watch anything of the sort.

I had no problem watching Saddam hang, though. I suppose the difference is that I hated, feared, and despised Saddam, and I'm glad he's dead.

Those shocked by the execution of Saddam Hussein probably should not look at these photos.

The full video of Saddam's hanging is probably the first socially acceptable snuff film ever.

Blog roundup:

Our man Franco Aleman at Barcepundit takes a well-deserved whack at Robert Fisk.

Davids Medienkritik, in a must-read post, points out that the majority of Europeans are in favor of hanging Saddam; even in Zap's Spain, 51% are in favor.

Chicago Boyz reviews Mark Steyn's new book, America Alone, which somebody can send me through Amazon. Like maybe my dad. Hint. Hint.

Eursoc reports that the new EU passports are incredibly easy to forge.

Expat Yank comments on anti-Americanism in Europe, and kindly links to us.

Guirilandia links to a novella he wrote, set in Barcelona. I haven't had the chance to read it yet, but I will. If any of you have some spare time, check it out and give him some feedback. This is one for Jessica Harbour and Angie Schultz.

¡No Pasarán! links to this impressive example of French musical suckitude. They also beat the crap out of the New York Times.

Not much big news around here. The biggest story is that a member of a well-known family in the trucking business named Joan Alsina was murdered inside his luxurious Sant Cugat home a couple of days ago, and they just found the body. The question is whether this was an intentional hit, a settling of individual scores, or whether it was a home invasion robbery gone bad. People in Barcelona are becoming very concerned about crime, though it's still pretty low around here compared to most of the rest of Europe or the US. (Exception: Street crime against tourist victims in Barcelona. That's incredibly high.) There are people talking in the local cafés about how they'd like to have a gun, talk you wouldn't have heard a year ago.

More details on the ETA Madrid airport bombing: They found the body of one of the missing men. The bomb was bigger than previously announced, maybe as much as 600 or 700 kilos of explosive. It did some €35 million damage to the parking garage, which has been converted into thousands of tons of rubble. Hundreds of vehicles were destroyed. Interior minister Rubalcaba announced that the alleged peace process was definitely over, "liquidated," he said.

Five guys were arrested, three of them in Catalonia, for helping suspects in the March 11, 2004 Madrid bombings to escape from Spain. No prize for guessing their ethnic and religious backgrounds.

Over the last few days I've been watching this game show on Catalan TV in which minor local TV celebrities, like a couple of sports reporters, a couple of actresses, and the like answer questions, most of which are fairly easy but a few of which are challenging. I was surprised how many questions related to the US the contestants blew, and these people are supposed to be at least media-savvy. One of them, Rosa Andreu, a stage actress and one-time talk-show hostess, was pretty sharp and obviously educated and cultured--and she was smart enough to make educated guesses when she wasn't able to think of the answer. The rest of them had rather low wattage, if you know what I mean.

• They didn't know that New England was a US region--they guessed Canada.
• They didn't know the Grand Canyon was in the US--they guessed Mexico.
• " " " that Hillary Clinton is senator from New York--they had no guess.
• When asked "What's George W. Bush's middle name, William or Walker?" they guessed "William."
• They didn't know that Coppola directed "Apocalypse Now" or that Woody Allen directed "Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex..."
• Didn't know that F. Scott Fitzgerald was American--they guessed Irish.
• They guessed that the Arkansas River was in Brazil.
• They didn't know that the longest land frontier is between the US and Canada--they guessed Russia and China.
• They didn't know that the MOMA is in New York.
• They didn't know that Omaha is in the US.

The only ones they got right were that Brooklyn is a neighborhood (actually a borough) in New York and that the secretary of defense who recently resigned is Donald Rumsfeld.

Two people, both Ecuadorians, are missing and presumed dead in yesterday's Madrid airport bombing. They were both apparently sleeping in their cars. What I'd like to know is how the cops missed them while they were evacuating the place.

So ETA has murdered again. Of course, the only thing to do is what we'd said all along, keep the police and the courts coming down hard on them. What's there to negotiate about?

By the way, a standard report on Spanish TV news is some ETA killer being tried for some murders he did back in the '80s; one of the most recent is "Txapote," for example. The ETA killer is always intransigent, arrogant, and contemptuous of both the court and society. It's hard to believe that anyone who sees these near-nightly television performances by unrepentant murderers can maintain the slightest sympathy for ETA and its political branch, Batasuna, yet many leftists who should know better, especially your ignorant foreigners (cf. Mark Kurlansky), still try to justify or at least comprehend their acts.

The bomb was enormous, around 200 kilos of explosives. It completely destroyed an entire section of the three-story parking garage.

Iberian Notes sends greetings to new EU members Romania and Bulgaria. Welcome to lots of free subsidies! Seriously, of course, it's good news for all concerned. Stability is a good thing down in those parts, and EU admission means those places are now officially stable--since, of course, you get kicked out of the EU if you do something like pull a military coup or nationalize the banks.

Those folks who got all joyous and celebratory when Pinochet died don't seem to be doing much jumping up-and-down at the news of Saddam's hanging. Saddam, of course, was about one million times as evil as Pinochet. Approximately.

Here's Tikrit Tommy Alcoverro's lead on his Page 3 report in the Vanguardia:

"We heard how his vertebrae broke. It was horrible," said Iraqi judge Munir Hadad, one of those present at the execution of ex-president Saddam Hussein.

Sounds to me like Saddam got a cleaner and quicker death than most of his victims. You remember the ones he ran through paper-shredders. Also, "ex-president"? How about "mass murderer," or at the very least, "ex-dictator"?

Now get this:

The character, energy, and calm that Saddam showed in the last moments of his life have made forgotten the humiliating images that were transmitted around the world when he was captured in the hole in Tikrit, broken, hirsute, opening his mouth to be examined by an American military doctor.

Huh? Praise and sympathy for Saddam? Now get this:

The Iraqi ex-president Saddam Hussein is the first ruler executed by a court in his country, under foreign domination, in this region of the Middle East. His humiliating burial, his burial as one of those defeated by history, will be moving for millions of Arabs.

Tikrit Tommy sure thinks "humiliation" is a big deal. I don't see why Arabs should be humiliated by the execution of Saddam, just as I don't feel humiliated when Westerners who commit crimes are punished for their wrongdoing.

Now the last sentence:

Some day, not now, history will judge him.

Oh, I think history's verdict was pretty well settled about 1965 or so when Saddam, as a Baath Party hitman (supposedly he committed his first murder in 1958), was one of the leaders of the coup d'etat that put that gang of murderous fascists in power.

From the Cataloony department: The Generalitat has decided not to punish the various airlines that operate out of Barcelona, including British Airways, Air France, and Alitalia, for--wait for this--not issuing passenger tickets, boarding cards, and baggage claimchecks in Catalan! Seems the airlines, by using Spanish or English or French or Italian or whatever, are breaking the Linguistic Policy Act. The Catalan Consumer Agency has been spending its time, instead of checking whether our food meets minimal standards--there's been a minor stink about pesticide residues in vegetables, especially peppers--investigating what language the airlines are issuing official documents in. Why the hell weren't they investigating whether Air Madrid was flying safe planes or not, or whether it was selling tickets on flights it knew would never leave the ground? This is just ridiculous.

Saddam Hussein is cold meat, as you undoubtedly know. The air is a little bit cleaner now that he's not breathing it.

This morning's big news in Spain, though, is that ETA planted a car bomb in the parking garage at Terminal 4 of Barajas international airport in Madrid. The explosion occurred at around 9 AM local time; the police evacuated the area, but one man, who was apparently asleep in his car, is missing and feared dead. About twenty more persons suffered non-serious injuries, several of them police officers.

The bombing is the end of their nine-month "permanent cease-fire," and certainly puts an end to the alleged peace process. It's definitely ETA, as Interior minister Perez Rubalcaba said at a press conference; they made two warning phone calls, one telling the cops to stay away since the bomb was a big one, and after the explosion they made another call claiming responsibility.

The airport is currently all snarled up, of course, on one of the year's biggest travel days, and thousands of people are stuck at Barajas. Hope you're not flying through there.

ETA has intentionally made Zap look like a complete moron, since last night he gave his year-end speech and said he was "convinced" that the negotiations with the terrorist gang "would be going better than now" within a year. To quote La Vangua on page 13 today, "Zapatero made a commitment to the citizenry that guaranteed the continuity and advance of the peace process, a continuity that did not seem so clear a few weeks ago."

This is going to mean a big hit to Zap's reelection chances; expect a several-point swing to the PP in the next surveys with only a year or so left before the next general election. I think he's a one-term accidental prime minister, a Spanish Jimmy Carter.

91,664 abortions were performed in Spain in 2005, 8% more than during 2004. That seems rather a lot when you consider that abortion on demand is technically against the law.

The Barcelona PP is calling for a ban on women wearing burkas in public. That's ridiculous. If somebody wants to wear a burka, it's that somebody's business. I would agree that police officers should have the right to demand that a burka-wearing woman uncover her face for identification purposes, but aside from such security concerns, keep the government's nose out of what people wear.

Irony: The Catalan Tripartite running the city of Barcelona, including the very Green and very Red Imma Mayol, is shipping off "organic urban residues," 50 tons a day, to somewhere in Murcia, nobody knows exactly where, to be "treated" and dumped in a landfill. The treatment plant, in Abanilla, has a lousy environmental record. Get this: the Metropolitan Environmental Authority, which is supposed to be in charge, had no idea this was going on. That's competence for you.

Tonight on TV 33, Catalunya TV's intellectual and avant-garde public channel, they're going to be showing two rock-pop-folk concerts at 11 PM and midnight that, one assumes, are supposed to appeal to a wide audience; this is a major TV-viewing night, one of the biggest of the year. So who's it going to be, maybe Dylan or Springsteen? U2 or Paul McCartney? How about Catalonia's most popular band, Estopa? Nope, it's old hack ultra-leftist Quico Pi de la Serra and then, get this, one of the guys from the mega-nationalist Electrica Dharma. I bet a total of 28 people tune in. If you have not yet seen total musical suckitude, here it is.

La Vangua says that Pau Gasol is going to demand a trade if Memphis doesn't get rid of him first; the article claims that Gasol's complaints were behind the firing of coach Mike Fratello, which if true makes the guy clubhouse poison, someone I wouldn't want on my team. This injury Gasol suffered in the national world championships has made him persona non grata, since he missed the first 22 games of this season, thereby immensely hurting the club that pays his high salary, and he's been playing lousy since he came back. I sure hope that world title was worth it, because this could be the beginning of a down-spiral that sees big Pau wearing blue and red stripes again.

Here's a New Year's roundup of links:

The Straight Dope message board has a very long and quite interesting thread explaining US popular culture and everyday life questions to foreigners, such as: What's the difference between "college" and "university"? What are those organizations with Greek letter names? Why do sports clubs move around from city to city? Is high school football really that important? What do the numbers 101, 411, and 911 refer to? Check it out.

Articles from recent issues of American Heritage that anyone interested in knowing more about the US might want to read:

A rather softball but interesting history of beer in America (June 2002)

A non-worshipful history of the FBI (August 2002)

A very disturbing history of eugenics in the US (February 2003)

US relations with France (by Richard Brookhiser of National Review--August 2003)

Presidential debates (August 2004)

An argument that slavery was much more economically important than often thought (February 2005)

This little bit, from Fametracker, is the funniest thing I've seen in months:

"Hi, I'm Tom Cruise. Good for you, Madonna. Adoption is great. I adopted my first two kids, but then when I met Kate, I just felt the time was right to try out biological procreation with a human female, and the feeling...I just can't put into words what it was like for me. And I've read lots of books about the sensations and mechanics of it, but even so, I still just find it indescribable. You know how, when you get into bed with a woman, and she's naked, and it's like...she has kind of an extra butt, but it's in the front?"

Blog roundup:

Expat Yank deals Agence France-Presse a good fisking.

Guirilandia comments on the Health Ministry, Burger King, and the Spanish diet.

Fausta opines on the Spanish surgeon who treated Fidel, among other things; as you know, she's prolific and wide-ranging.

Notes from Spain explains the concept of the chapuza, photo included.

Pave France looks back on the Chiraq administration.

The Euroserf is cynical about the EU's achievements in 2006.

Davids Medienkritik takes another well-deserved whack at Stern.

It's been a nice Christmas break here at Iberian Notes. On the 21st Murph and I went to the Camp Nou to see Barça play Atletico Madrid; they tied, 1-1. It was a pretty good game; the Barça players gave it all they had, and they were operating at about 80% since they'd just come back from Japan. We got to see Ronaldinho score on a free kick, which is pretty cool. I don't go out to the stadium very much, and I really should go more often, since it's not that expensive, €30 for the cheap seats. You can see what's happening on the whole field, while the TV cameras only follow the ball.

We had the annual Christmas dinner at my mother-in-law's apartment; fifteen people, among aunts and uncles and cousins, showed up. Remei did the cooking; she made escudella i carn d'olla, which is basically chicken noodle soup with meatballs, and then chicken and shrimp in romesco sauce, which is based on nuts and olive oil. As the local vegetarian, I had salad. Spaniards don't get vegetarianism at all, and if they do get it, they think you're a health-food nut. They can deal with the concept of someone who denies himself the pleasure of eating ham for health reasons; that seems more or less reasonable. What they don't get is someone who takes no pleasure out of eating ham, and wouldn't do it if you paid him. The concept that a person might find eating our fellow mammals a form of cannibalism goes way over their heads, too.

My mother-in-law was a pain in the ass as usual; she's a cranky old bat who has always been a bully, and she feels herself losing power as she gets older and can't get around as well as she used to. Her response to her decline is to get angry, and she's decided to pick on me about speaking Catalan. Now, I speak Catalan to her, since that's what she wants, but when actually trying to talk to other people about difficult or complicated subjects I almost unconsciously switch to Spanish, since I speak it better than Catalan. So dinner-table conversations with other people were salted and peppered with demands for linguistic normalization, and none of the rest of us killed her, since everyone else is as sick of the woman as I am.

Note: This behavior is a complete aberration. No one else I have ever met is this obnoxious about Catalan. The rest of the family and I are always glad to see one another and it doesn't matter which language is spoken.

Get this. The chief of surgery at Madrid's Gregorio Marañón hospital, which is publicly owned and operated, flew off to Cuba to treat Fidel. He says Fidel doesn't have cancer. I bet he's lying. His trip was paid for by the Cuban government, and was approved by Esperanza Aguirre's Madrid regional government. He brought "medicines and technological equipment that the island's heath service does not have." Doctor García Sabrido, at the press conference, applied his lips firmly to Castro's buttocks, saying that Fidel has "a fantastic, innate intellectual activity." Aguirre wondered publicly whether Cuban political prisoners get the same level of health care.

The alleged peace process with ETA is going nowhere in the wake of the discovery of an arms cache near Bilbao. The Zap government is claiming that the cache was an intentional setup by ETA so that the general public would know that the gang still has its weapons and is ready to at. I think the Zap government is nuts and that the discovery of the arms cache along with the robbery of the pistols in France shows that ETA is just waiting for its chance to strike again. Street violence continues in the Basque country, and Basque businessmen are still receiving extortion demands.

James Brown and Gerald Ford died. May they both rest in peace. Congratulations to those who picked them in this year's Dead Pool.

Meanwhile, the Zap government's health ministry is still trying to crush Burger King's ad campaign calling on consumers to pig out on a half-kilo monsterburger. La Vanguardia referred to the product in question as a "Doble Whooper," which sounds to me like somebody who is going to break out a family-size can of whoop-ass. Seems to me that people ought to have enough common sense to decide what they want to eat, and if they want to eat crap they have every right to eat crap.

The local cause celebre for the last ten days or so has been the manslaughter charge slapped on a man who shot a Romanian armed robber in a town near Manresa. From what I've pieced together, a group of suspicious people had been casing out the luxury house belonging to the Tous family, a well-known clan who own a chain of jewelry shops. Then, one night, the family's security director, also a son-in-law of the patriarch, got a robbery call. Two men were inside the wall surrounding the family property. The security guy drove up to the Tous house, where two guys were waiting out front in a car. He opened fire, killing one and wounding the other. They were Romanians equipped with burglar kits.

The security guy was charged with manslaughter and jailed without bail. He will presumably come up for trial in about three years, as the slow wheels of Spanish justice turn. I assume they will eventually grant him bail. In Texas they would have given him a public service medal. You need to remember that traditionally the first question a Texas jury asks itself is, "Should the deceased have departed?"

Our man Franco Aleman at Barcepundit links to this Heritage Foundation piece demolishing Zap's brainchild "Alliance of Civilizations." Definitely check it out. Here's a good paragraph:

The Alliance of Civilizations is a disappointment. Far from offering a "bridge" to cross the divide, the Alliance of Civilizations report offers little more than platitudes and wishful thinking, one-sided analysis, justification for constraining freedom of expression and religion, and repackaged calls for increased assistance from Western countries. The lack of substance and originality in the report—the report itself acknowledges several times that many of its recommendations and initiatives are already in place or being pursued—explains the lack of interest in the report since its release in November.

Somebody asked about rent control in Spain, so I thought I'd look it up. And whaddaya know, there's a monograph in English on the subject available on the Net. It's not well-translated and is written in a highly legalistic style, but this is what I gleaned:

Only about 11% of Spanish households rent their dwellings. One-third of new dwelling units are purchased for investment purposes. In places with little government regulation, a person who buys a place for investment purposes (what the left calls "speculation") rents it out, in order to receive a steady income, until he decides to sell.

In Spain, however, the minimum lease on a dwelling unit is five years, and the rent can only be raised annually by the rate of inflation. So if the housing market is gaining, say, 10% a year in value, and you're the landlord and you can only raise the rent, say, 4% a year, you're losing money. And you can't sell the place until the five years is up. Meanwhile, there are lots of persnickety little clauses regulating what the landlord can do.

These laws, of course, make it unattractive for people who own vacant dwellings to rent them out. So there aren't many places to rent, and the ones out there are pricey.

By the way, if you were lucky enough to rent your place before 1985, you can stay there forever and they can't raise your rent more than the rate of inflation. No tenants ever give up these rental contracts, and this of course keeps a good chunk of rental housing off the market.

In last Sunday's issue of the Vanguardia, which is the big classified-ads day, there is only one page of flats for rent (compared to about 30 of flats for sale) in the whole Barcelona metro area, Here are a few of the flats on offer here in Gràcia:

75 square meters, €1200
3 bedrooms, €950
4 bedrooms, €900
80 square meters, 3 bedrooms, €1080
2 bedrooms, €800
Studio, €700
60 square meters loft, €900
Studio, €800
4 bedrooms, €1000
3 bedrooms, €900
2 bedrooms, €850

Not awful by London or New York standards, but this is Barcelona, and lots of middle-class white-collar people only earn €1000 a month.

Anne Applebaum has an article in Slate on the EU, the US, and Iraq. Check it out. Also read Ms. Applebaum's book Gulag as soon as you get the chance.

Tom from The Bad Rash doesn't believe that anti-Americanism is rampant in Europe and the Middle East, as Iberian Notes and Barcepundit and Davids Medienkritik and Biased BBC and Expat Yank and ¡No Pasarán! have been saying for years.

I'd like to recommend that Tom read this 2004 interview with Paul Hollander (note: I think the questioner is guilty of anti-Islamic bias) and this Iberian Notes post from October. I would recommend the link in the October post, but it's broken now.

I haven't done a blog roundup for a long time, so here's a short but sweet one.

Barcepundit reports on a police roundup of suspected Islamist terrorists in Ceuta.

Davids Medienkritik has another one from the "If This Had Happened in Cleveland" department.

Expat Yank takes a chainsaw to the BBC and Amnesty International. Blogger Robert is highly prolific.

Pave France fills us in on Le Pen's new multiculti campaign.

Samizdata reflects on the series of murders in East Anglia, which have gotten little press here.

¡No Pasarán! reports on political correctness gone mad in Austria.

Most of the 120,000 people stuck without a ride home in Europe and Latin America in the wake of Air Madrid's suspension of activities are still there. The Fomento ministry has chartered five airliners, who have transported 5000 people so far. Looks like ticket-buyers are only going to get some of their money back. Air Madrid was selling tickets up until the very morning they closed down, and there's obvious breach of contract here, so somebody is going to jail in about 12 years, given the way the wheels of Spanish justice turn. The people hurt are almost all Latin American immigrants in Europe, who can't afford to lose this money.

Get the latest genius Generalitat plan to deal with the high cost of housing. If you own a dwelling that is vacant for more than two years, you will be legally obligated to rent it out, even if you don't want to. One reason many people don't want to rent out property they own is because of government rent control. So how do we solve the problem? More government interference in the market, of course. This trial balloon is going to get shot down in flames.

Barça choked again this morning, losing 1-o to Internacional Porto Alegre in the world club championship match. They played OK, but couldn't score; one reason was that Internacional slapped two guys on Ronaldinho and pretty much shut him down. This is arguably the fifth big choke of the season, after the loss to Sevilla in the Euro Supercup final, the loss and draw vs. Chelsea in the Champions' League first round, and the loss to Real Madrid in the League a few weeks ago. Hey, I know you can't win them all, and nobody is about to jump off the bandwagon here. Still, Barcelona hasn't done well this season in big games.

Wacky Art Watch: Some local brilliant artist has rewritten an Ionesco play, I don't know why. Naturally, it is now set at a McDonald's. One of the three characters has been recast as Uncle Sam. This is actually playing at a Barcelona theater. Can't wait for the Broadway version.

The big news around here is that low-cost airline Air Madrid has suspended operations, leaving 120,000 passengers stuck in Latin America. Seems that the Ministry of Fomento (business regulation, etc.) threatened to pull their license because of maintenance problems and long delays. The company closed down in response. No one knows anything right now about what's going on, and people holding tickets are probably screwed. Hope you're not one of them.

The Zap government is trying to pass the pompously titled Recovery of Historical Memory Act, which is a terrible idea. The law's purpose is to revive memories of the Spanish civil war; it would allow persons who consider themselves victims of the war or the Franco dictatorship to demand that the authorities recognize injustice done them. Basically, the law is just symbolic, it won't change much.

The problem, of course, is that the Spanish Civil War wasn't good guys against bad guys, it was bad guys against bad guys. Neither the Republicans nor Nationalists behaved anything like democratic governments are supposed to behave. Both sides executed thousands of civilians.

The difference between the Spanish Right and the Spanish Left is that the Right has basically admitted that its side was in the wrong in the Civil War. You will hear no right-wing politicians exalting the Franco government or the Nationalist side in the war. The Left, however, with its "hyper-legitimacy complex," continues to exalt the Republic. It will not admit that its side was in the wrong, too.

Here in Barcelona air pollution is so bad--it exceeds EU standards almost 100 days a year--that the Generalitat is going to cut the speed limit on the freeways in the metro area from 120 kph to 80. Actually, that's probably a pretty good idea, as cars really do produce a lot more emissions at higher speeds. I'll bet it doesn't go over very well, though. One thing they need to do is get a lot of old junker light trucks and vans off the roads, since they're major smog producers.

It's not unusual, up here in Gracia, to look down over the city and see a greyish-brown haze in the air down there. It really is pretty nasty and something needs to be done; I vote in favor of spending our some of our tax money on making the air less stinky, instead of, say, subsidizing movies in Catalan that will never be shown. Ever. Anywhere.

Speaking of which, there's an education controversy going. Seems that the Zap government in Madrid has decided that kids in elementary school here in Catalonia must study ONE MORE WHOLE HOUR A WEEK of Spanish language. That will make a total of THREE WHOLE HOURS A WEEK. The Cataloonies, of course, are livid. What's wrong with this picture?

Anti-Americanism Watch: They had a debate on TV2, you know, the serious (seriously leftist, that is) public TV station, on the question: Is understanding possible between the West and Islam? The purpose of the show, of course, was to promote Zap's egghead do-gooder Enlightened and Illustrated Alliance of Civilizations. The debaters were PSOE ministry of foreign affairs heavyweight Bernardino León, who is a reasonable and serious person; PP shadow foreign minister Gustravo de Aristegui, of whom the same is true; a reporter from El Pais named Javier Valenzuela; and some silly woman who claimed to be a writer. Of course, it turned into a debate on you-know-what.

Valenzuela, of course, took the first swing at the Americans, saying something like "How can we tell the Muslims what to do when we do things like the horrific torture at Guantanamo?" which seemed completely off the subject to me. Then the silly woman said something like, "How can we criticize Islamist fundamentalism when George Bush is the biggest fundamentalist in the world?" She went on to justify terrorism by saying, literally, that Israel was committing genocide. Both continued with their moral equivalence between Islamist terrorism and the West's, and especially America's, response to it.

The fun part was that more than 75% of the people who called in--of course, viewers were supposed to call in with their opinions--voted No, that understanding is not possible. The moderator of the debate was very disappointed.

My attitude, of course, is that Islam is one thing and Islamist terrorism something else, and that understanding with Islamist terrorism is not possible. I will point out that Islamist terrorism is operating in almost every Islamic country, and the great majority of violent conflicts in the world involve extremist Islamists.

From El Periódico, by Havana correspondent Mauricio Bernal:

"Our prostitutes are the best-educated in the world," bragged Fidel Castro at the beginning of the '90s, when the large increase in prostitution in Cuba began. A boast in bad taste which made light of a reality that leaps into your eyes in the streets of Havana, including its most traditional streets: friend from the First World, there's a mulatto girl for you. Being a man and traveling alone to Cuba makes you suspected, and maybe that's why your flight's closed-circuit TV repeatedly runs an announcement warning about child prostitution. The message is clear: be a bad boy, but not a pervert.

It is no secret that Cuba is one of the countries with the highest level of HIV in Latin America. There's a reason some Cubans advise tourists to look for an ugly woman instead of a mulatto girl with a good figure, since the risk is less. But the warning, just look at the streets of Havana, is not heeded. It isn't that Cuba is the country of mixtures; it's the fact that in every hotel lobby, every disco, and every tourist restaurant, there is a European who has paid in order to be well-accompanied.

The son of a Cuban writer told me that Cuban prostitutes are not prostitutes in the full sense of the word, and that all they want is a good time, to be taken to a good restaurant and a nice discotheque. Places where, if it were not for the tourist's wallet, they could never enter.

Reflections on Pinochet and Franco:

1. These two dictators are by far the most hated historical characters among the international Left. This is probably because both of them brutally turned back a pre-revolutionary, internationalist Leftist movement. Many of those executed in Chile were young leftists who had come from other countries to help the revolution along, what were later called "Sandalistas" in Nicaragua. And, of course, the Spanish Left received Soviet aid both before and during the Civil War. During the war, as everyone knows, the International Brigades were run from Moscow.

2. Both were bloody killers. Franco was probably responsible for about 100,000 executions/deaths through mistreatment, and Pinochet was probably responsible for about 4000. (Castro is probably responsible for about 15,000-20,000. Mussolini was probably responsible for fewer than 1000. Mao was responsible for as many as 65 million deaths of all kinds, including those from famine.)

3. Both were generals who led military coups against a democratically elected Leftist government that had begun to behave very undemocratically. Both military coups were resisted and resulted in great violence. Both claimed to be responding to the chaos caused by an incompetent and pre-revolutionary government. Both had significant popular support. Both were backed by conservative elements--business interests, the Church, the middle classes, farmers, nationalists, anti-Communists.

4. Both gave up power peacefully, through an organized transition, though Franco did not do so until his death.

5. Both established the economic order necessary to allow constitutional democracy to succeed them.

6. There was no serious domestic opposition to either of them during their regimes. Nor did either receive serious external pressure.

7. Both enjoyed some cooperation from the Western democracies. During the Civil War, Britain, France, and the US embargoed arms sales to the Republic, and to the Francoists too--but since the Francoists were getting what they needed from Germany and Italy, they were not hurt by "non-intervention." While the US was not behind Pinochet's coup, we did know about it in advance and did nothing to stop it. Later on in their regimes, both were treated in a fairly friendly way by the US and UK.

8. Both were on the right side, among the winners, of the Cold War. Leftists hate this fact, and for some of them it invalidates our victory. However, few of them seem to be pissed off that Stalin and Mao were among the winners of World War II.

Go read this article from the Economist on the PP and its problems--specifically, its need to move toward the center. I've been saying this for at least eighteen months, and this article has come out now that Rajoy really is trying to position himself closer to the center. Here's an excerpt:

National politics in Spain is a two-party affair. If the PP is to oust the Socialist prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, it needs voters in the centre. But it shows no sign of wooing them. Instead, it angrily opposes all government initiatives, from gay marriage to Catalan devolution, to peace talks with the Basque terrorist group, ETA. Like Britain's Conservative Party in the past, it risks seeming to be a “nasty” party...Yet at the root of the PP's troubles is its inability to shake off the trauma of its loss of power. This came three days after Muslim terrorists killed 191 people on Madrid trains. The day before the vote, angry protesters came out on the streets demanding to know who was to blame. Was it ETA, as Mr Aznar insisted, or Islamists? As the evidence leant towards the second, voters who had been ready to vote for the PP shifted.

Correction: The Aznar government admitted it might not have been ETA late on the very day of the bombing, and by election day official announcements made it clear that Islamic terrorists were guilty. I'm not so sure that many PP voters switched parties; I think what happened was that many usual abstainers came out and voted against the PP.

I'm translating away pretty much full-blast around here, but found time to read this excellent article by Christopher Caldwell in the Weekly Standard on West African immigration to Spain. Don't miss it. We have been posting about this for years, and this is the first extensive piece I've seen on the issue.

Here are a couple of interesting paragraphs:

Spanish laws towards foreigners are generous, and punctilious about human rights. They also invite chicanery. You cannot detain an immigrant for more than 40 days unless you charge him with a crime, and you cannot deport an immigrant unless you know where he comes from. If he can keep his mouth shut for a month or so, or if he can mis direct the bureaucracy until his 40 days have elapsed, he's in like Flynn. A common way to throw authorities off balance is to pretend to be from somewhere else. Since Spain does not have an extradition treaty with strife-torn Ivory Coast, for instance, many of the Senegalese who have arrived by boat in recent weeks have claimed to be from there (even though the two countries speak mutually exclusive sets of African languages).

And:

The often proclaimed motto of the migrants--which horrifies Senegalese public opinion and would horrify Spaniards if they ever heard it--is Barça mba barsakh. Translated out of Wolof, this means "Barcelona or Death!" Barcelona in the sense of the soccer team, not the place. One of the kids at the camp near Esmeralda told me that when he got to the Spanish mainland he wanted to live in "Real Madrid" (another soccer team, of course). What courage! What ignorance! And how hard it is to say which of the two predominates.

Semi-random notes while listening to Jelly Roll Morton and making excuses for not having posted for a couple of days:

Actually, I've been busy with a translation and so have had little desire to do any more typing. One thing running this blog taught me how to do is touch-type, and I'm actually pretty fast now.

The media over here has given a lot of attention to the so-called Baker Plan, which I doubt will actually lead to anything. I don't like the idea of negotiating with Iran and Syria--it reminds me of Captain Furillo negotiating with the gang leaders on Hill Street Blues--and I particularly don't like the linkage of Israel and the Palestinians with Iraq. Oh, well, everybody will have forgotten about it in a week.

Robert Gates got some press when he said during his Senate hearing that the US was not winning the war in Iraq. However, they paid little attention to his later statement that the US was not losing, either.

I will admit that there seems to be a little less anti-American rhetoric over here since the Democrats won the congressional election and Bush began to build bridges both domestically and internationally. That's "opinion": folks angry about one particular policy, rather than "bias," folks who just hate America. Unfortunately, while a lot of the "opinion" antis have calmed down a good bit, the "bias" antis are just as loud as they ever have been.

From today's La Vangua, credited to "Agencies," on page 6, regarding sales of the "Baker Plan" in book form in the US: "Once again, American citizens have surprised the entire world with their voracious reading and interest in politics. In only 24 hours (the Baker Plan) has become a best-seller, both in the country's principal bookstores and the Internet." Fair enough, but why would the entire world be surprised at Americans' civic behavior? Oh, wait, because you guys in the European media have been telling the entire world for years that we're a bunch of morons.

The local media also made a big deal about the Seminole tribe's buying the Hard Rock Cafe chain. The photo of the Indians all dressed up in "traditional clothing" on the balcony of the New York outlet made the front page of La Vangua and the TV3 news, too. TV3 claimed that those evil white people had tried to commit "genocide" on the Seminoles, which of course is not true. Several long, desultory wars were fought in Florida beginning before 1820, and many Seminoles were deported to Oklahoma. Remember, though, the Seminoles were one of the Five Civilized Tribes, those that practiced sedentary agriculture, white-man style--and owned black slaves, whose descendants are known today as Black Seminoles. The whites never tried to wipe the Seminoles out. (Nor, as far as I know, did they ever attempt to wipe out a whole tribe, though there were certainly wars and massacres.) The history of the way they treated the Seminoles is ugly enough, and there's no need to make it worse.

Here in Barcelona the big news seems to be the squatters. The media is reporting that there are more than 300 squats here in town, ranging from small houses to large factories. More than 60 of the squats are in my neighborhood, boho Gracia. Last week the cops kicked them out of an old factory in Poblenou, and they immediately moved in and took over another unused factory. They actually hired private security guards, who allowed people to enter and leave while the place was supposedly surrounded by the police! Supposedly the squatters use these places to exercise their creativity, claiming that their squats are cultural centers. I don't buy it for a second, since several of them are open as unlicenced, illegal bars. I will say that they are centers for the diffusion of ultra-leftist political philosophy.

Many of these people are not locals; they've come from all over the world to hang out here. They have a political agenda, calling themselves "anti-system," and they frequently riot and commit vandalism. Most people in Barcelona are heartily sick of them and the disturbance their mere presence causes, and resent their moving into unoccupied houses and buildings without paying a duro in rent or tax. What broke the camel's back was the suspension and then cancellation of the EU's housing summit, involving diplomats and officials from all 25 EU countries, and a nice feather in the cap for Barcelona, when local authorities informed the Zap government that they could not guarantee security against squatter anarcho Black Bloc rioting.

Wacky bit of Catalooniness: Regional cabinet counselor Joan Puigcercos of ERC, a former member of Keystone Kops terrorist gang Terra Lliure, ordered that the Spanish flag be taken down in front of his department's offices. This is against the law, which clearly states that the Spanish flag is to fly at all government buildings, whether national, regional, or municipal. New Premier Montilla made him put it back up, thereby demonstrating that he is not going to put up with any clownishness from these guys.

Libertad Digital has an extensive interview this week with Stanley G. Payne, who I think is the best historian of Spain; he is also one of the least leftist. The interviewer is Fernando Diaz Villanueva, who I have met a couple of times; nice guy. The questions are in boldface, and Payne's responses are in normal type, for legibility reasons.

Mr. Payne, you were born in Texas. Why did you become a historian of Spain? What attracted your attention to our country?

My interest in Spain did not begin until I began my doctoral studies. When I was 19 or 20, I knew very little about Spain and its history. I knew something about Spanish literature because of some university courses, and little more. A few years later, the summer I began my doctorate, I read two books that called my attention to Spain, one British titled "The Spanish Temperament," and another on Spanish medieval art, which I liked very much.

When I began my doctorate I decided to specialize in contemporary European history and the question came up: Which country? I decided on Spain, because I already knew some Spanish and because I met a series of professors who motivated me, to become self-educated in Spanish history, since at that time there were almost no Hispanists, and even less so in the United States.

Your first books about Spain were censored, so they had to be published (in Spanish) in Paris by the Ruedo Ibérico publishing firm. Why were they censored?

For obvious reasons. My first two books were about, first the Falange and then the army, which at that time were the dominant forces in the Franco regime. I think it was inevitable, because both studies were critical.

Why does the Spanish Civil War still have so much international repercussion? Was it that important an event in twentieth-century history?

I don't think it has that much international repercussion today. There is some interest, but not the same as thirty or forty years ago. When I began my studies there was great interest in the Spanish war, both because of its political components and having been the preamble of the World War. Today, memories of the war are still alive inside some groups, but there is no doubt that there has been a serious decline. In fact, among American historians, their main specialization is modern history, the period of the Spanish empire. Specialists prefer the Golden Age to the Civil War, which has long lost that special air it had forty years ago.

The Spanish left has been using the Civil War for electoral purposes for more than a decade. What do you think this anomaly is due to?

It's the process of a complex. It began during the 1993 election campaign, when for the first time Felipe Gonzalez waved the bloody shirt of the war despite the fact that he had always respected the pact of the democratic transition. He did it because it was the first time in ten years that he saw his power in danger. In Spain the Left has a historical complex that goes back to 1931. Since then the Left has had a super-legitimacy complex, as if it had the right to govern. That is, they are the only ones worthy of the people, and the others, the conservative parties, are nothing more than decorative elements that represent nobody. In this way the Spanish Left does not accept the fact that it might lose, it does not accept any adversaries. In addition, by the 1990s the army had already lost its role of preponderance in Spanish politics and this, which had meant the end of the specter of the risk of a coup, made the left feel stronger. Don't write off the ideological factor, either. In the last fifteen years the worldwide Left has experienced an ideological evolution toward the dominant ideology today, which is political correctness or do-gooderism. Finally, the culture of victimism, which has taken root in the Spanish Left, has something to do with it. This can be seen in its interpretation of the Civil War in a sectarian and victimist manner.

In contrast with other European countries which suffered dictatorships (which are almost all of them), Spain has not learned to live with its past. Why?

European history is complex, and curiously, the Germans have confronted their past better than the other Europeans. They have accepted their historical past and have found a democratic balance. In the Spanish case, what I see is a cultural deficit whose roots are in the belated modernization of Spain. The fact is that today, the modernization of Spain has been a total success, but nevertheless, the same effects as in the rest of Europe have not happened.

Why?

I think there are a lot of factors. The dictatorship, for example, lasted much longer than in Italy or Germany, until a very late date. But there is also another aspect: in Spain there is a Leftist culture of opposing the adversary that is more extreme than in other Western countries. There has been a tendency toward maximalism among the Spanish Left that is stronger than in countries like Germany. In any case, there is so much in this question that I'd have to write a whole book about it.

Is there a "Spanish singularity" in comparison to other Western European countries, or is our history in general similar to that of the French, the Germans, or the British?

The answer is both yes and no. Spain is a fully Western country, it has always had the same institutions: the monarchy, the parliament, the Church...Nevertheless, the history of these institutions, the way of using them, has been different. Spanish history is very much marked by the Islamic invasion and the Reconquest. After this period, which was very long, there was another dominated by constant war and world preponderance. Other European countries do not have these peculiarities. Religion, for its part, has always been very closed in Spain, for centuries. Finally, modernization was very slow, and it came late. By the 20th century, revolutionary movements were much more virulent than anywhere else in the West. This revolutionary effervescence wound up in a civil war and an abnormally long dictatorship, in Western terms. The weakness of Spanish nationalism, that is, the process of national integration during the 19th century, was also important. This was nothing like France or even Italy, which is the most similar country to Spain.

Going back to the Civil War, what would have happened in Spain if the army had not risen up?

There would have been a Leftist government for some time, that's for sure. Then, anything could have happened. The Popular Front government might have broken up as in France, where it lasted only one year. Another possibility is that the revolutionary forces would have taken over the situation by turning the government over to Largo Caballero, who would have tried to carry out his revolution. It is possible that as time went on, there would have been some sort of civil war among the Left, as happened in the real Civil War in May 1937.

Was the Spain of July 1936 still a democracy with completely guaranteed rights?

No, by that time no. It was a democracy with most rights, not all of them, guaranteed. Since February, due to the policies of the Popular Front government of not enforcing the laws and of violating the Constitution, democracy had been devalued. During those months, the activities of the revolutionary movements, illegal demonstrations, and generalized violence put democracy up against the ropes. By July it can be said that Spain was no longer a full democracy, but something similar to a Latin American country...The truth is that the military rebellion was a rising more against the lack of democracy than against the excess of it. If democracy had been maintained, the officers who were not democratic would have had no complaint, and this would have made the rising much more difficult. What happened in the end was that democracy was not recovered with the rising, but another class of republic was formed.

Seventy years after the Civil War, debate about it has become sharper. Why didn't this happen before?

Among many cultural sectors, there is no debate, but rather a very biased and distorted line of interpretation. What is dramatic now is not the abundance of debate, but the absence of debate. What there is, is a well-organized movement on the Left to use the Civil War with political ends. This is linked to the idea of super-legitimacy that I discussed before. The Left feels very strong in the cultural and academic spheres, and it shows its power in this way. In addition, the Communists, parties like the United Left, or the Catalan left wing, have an imperious need to use their version of history as a political argument. Really, it's the only thing Communism has left in ideological terms.

Pío Moa is today, probably, Spain's most controversial historian. What do you think have been his principal contributions to the history of the Second Republic and the war?

Moa has succeded in opening up debate and making a very important analysis of the Republic and the origins of the Civil War which, I think, is his most important contribution, his research on the period between 1933 and 1936. His analysis is really original and his conclusions have not yet been refuted. He has been denounced and ostracised but they have not managed to disprove his theses about the Republic. I consider what he has written on the war and on Francoism to be more controversial.

The "battle of historians" taking place currently in Spain is especially virulent, and personal attacks are not uncommon, at least against historians like Moa or Cesar Vidal. How did we arrive at this?

Because of the convergence of two historical-cultural processes. One, which has occurred in the entire West, is the unstoppable rise of political correctness, whcih wants to impose its version of everything, exclusively, silencing the voices of those who disagree. The other, more specific to Spain, is the development of this new Leftist culture in the state universities, which are the majority. This has made discourse monolithically Leftist and always dominated by the same people. Those who disagree are denounced and eliminated from the debate.

The United States, your home country, also suffered a civil war in the 19th century. Did its effects last as long as in Spain?

The effects are always more traumatic among the defeated than among the victors. In this case we would have to compare the South with the Republic. Half a century later, in the first decade of the 20th century, there was no longer so much interest on the part of Southern society about the war, and it began to be considered one more historical event. In some social sectors there was a certain resentment, but without political ends. I think that by the time of the Spanish-American war reconciliation had already happened. In Spain a similar point was reached during the transition, which is when the idea of "the two Spains" began to decline...Sixty years after the war, this desire for revenge on the part of the defeated did not exist in the United States. Anyway, it was not the same kind of civil war. In the war between Confederates and Unionists, there were no major differences except for the emancipation of the slaves and the right to secession. In Spain there was a very ideological civil war, framed within the revolutionary struggles of the 20th century. Spain's was a fight to the death, a battle between two ways of understanding civilization, almost a religious war, radical and revolutionary, which opened up an abyss between the two sides.

IBERIAN NOTES GOES DOWNMARKET!

Well, of course, first we need the porn, so here are those photos of Britney Spears bottomless that you might have heard about. Sure looks intentional to me. For publicity purposes, I assume. Well, she's gotten plenty. Let's see if this starts a trend.

Second, we need celebrity scandal, so click on perezhilton.com to find out who's doing cocaine and who's gay and who's had nasty plastic surgery. Perez, who is apparently good with colors himself, calls on the following closet cases to come out: "Anderson Cooper, Jodie Foster, Kevin Spacey, Clay Aiken, Queen Latifah, Ricky Martin, Matt Dallas, Wentworth Miller, Richard Simmons, (and) Sean Hayes." I'm not sure who most of these people are--Jodie Foster and Kevin Spacey are of course real movie stars, Ricky Martin is a real pop star, and Richard Simmons is a way over-the-hill TV guy. Never heard of the rest. But, in case you were wondering, they're gay.

Now, sports. In case you haven't seen it, or want to see it again, here is the video of Ronaldinho's goal "a la chilena" last week against Villarreal. It's definitely the best goal of the year--and I would argue the second best in the history of FC Barcelona. This one, by Rivaldo, is the best. Artistically, both goals rate a 10. But Ronaldinho's was scored late in a 4-0 walkover of a mediocre team. Rivaldo's was scored the last day of the season in the dying minutes of what was going to be a loss to Valencia, which would have knocked Barça out of European competition for the first time ever. Talk about in the clutch--Rivaldo's goal gave Barça the last-minute draw and clinched them a spot in Europe.

Next, we need the violence, so here's the video of the greatest NBA fight ever and the most famous movie scene ever.

And transvestites!