The Comment Is Free section at the Guardian is the Internet's top repository of anti-American hatred in English, and it's not usually so much the columnists--most are lefty but sort of reasonable, though they run a couple of pieces every week that are insane moonbattery, such as this one--as it is the commenters. Some of these people just spew bile.

Check these out. I haven't reproduced any comments that contain the slightest bit of reasonable criticism; there are a good few comments that show anti-American bias but have at least some redeeming bit of constructive criticism or sympathy and concern for the ordinary American person, so I haven't listed them here. The comments below are the worst of the worst.

PapaKarl
April 18, 2007 8:11 AM

Sadly the EU is full of Yank-worshippers like Jenkins but Yanks themselves arent's so hot about their country and each other despite all the boisterous flag-waving. Sure, they all cheer when their army goes and bombs the crap out of some dark-skinned third-world nation and they all snivel in unison when the body bags pile up but the fiercely individualistic winner-takes-all-losers-cringe-in-shame society they live in makes them see every other Yank as a potential rival and enemy. And the ubiquitousness of guns allows them to do something about it. And they do, more than any other civilized nation on earth
.
Murder is a fundamental part of Yank culture, both of other nations and of each other. They invented the serial killer. Well OK, Britain has the original patent maybe (old Jack) but Yanks mass-manufactured it. They invented the mass killer (like this one). Britain invented the carpet-bombing of cities (as demonstrated by Bomber Harris on Dresden) but Yanks exported this new form of mass murder to the whole world.

They are just killers and their culture of social darwinism coupled with their celebration of violence (TV, movies, and so on) and the ready availability (and glamorization) of the most lethal means with which to effect it (like Glock pistols) turns the black underclass as well as frustrated immigrants like the Korean student into killers as well.

grundrisse
April 18, 2007 10:00 AM

America's grossly unequal 'winner/loser' culture - which spans both the economic and the social sphere - generates the despondency, deviance, frustration and, in this case, unbridled fury that leads to such acts.

The culture of unforgiving, breakneck competitiveness - for money, influence, attractiveness and 'popularity' (almost a cult in the US education system), creates 'losers' who are disparaged, excluded and, often, ridiculed by the 'winners'. It is the internalisation and emotional consequences of being deemed inadequate and worthless that leads to the fermentation of these feelings, while this becomes dangerously intensified amongst those who are also socially isolated.

ThelemaBoy
April 18, 2007 9:49 AM

What these regular and consistent massacres show is how America is declining into a third world country...America will cease to exist has a functioning country/society by 2050 due to an unstoppable increas in gun violence and vigilante militas. America is a third world country.

theedudester
April 18, 2007 6:07 AM

...AMERICANs are among the most herded and thought controlled people in the Western world and they are ALL ARMED
.
You don't need guns for protection against oppression you need educated, critical thinkers who have a culture of free thinking and cynicism towards sources of authority, corporate and Governmental. You also need varied and accountable political parties as well as transparent electoral systems. A varied and publicly accountable media is also essential.
In case you hadn't noticed these are all things AMERICA lacks!!!!

Free thinking debaters are not as macho as walking around with guns. Its not freedom from oppression guns represent in the US, its personal power.
Americans are among the most thought controlled westerners on earth. You only have to criticize any war (pick one) and shouts of "traitor" come raining down on any one who disagrees with the dominant view.
If there is one thing Americans love its authority, if its an authority with guns they love it all the more.
In a culture as underdeveloped as the modern US, banning all Guns would be the only civilized step forward.

rosross
April 18, 2007 6:49 AM

There are a number of reasons why these crimes happen in America and yes, easy access to weapons is one reason. The others include, a culture which is by its nature aggressive; a school culture which is unkind at best and cruel at worst to far greater degrees than other developed nations; a society which has high levels of racism, elitism and plain old-fashioned bullying which goes on in the society in general and in schools in particular; high exposure to the most shocking levels of gratuituous violence on television and in film; a cultural myth which 'teaches' that ultimately the downtrodden or abused will triumph through power and can then take revenge against those who wronged them (watch a few dozen teen movies if you don't believe me).... hardly surprising that those who do not triumph financially, corporately or academically can always triumph with the gun; a culture which glorifies success at any cost (how many heroes in American movies break the law and get away with it in the name of success); a society which has a cult of celebrity where the infamous are 'honoured' as much as the famous; a society which 'blames' people for failure and sets up the unsuccessful to be permanently labelled as 'losers,' and, last but not least a society which medicalises its children and young people to a far greater degree than any other nation on earth...a relatively unknown fact perhaps is that one of the common factors between all of these campus and schoolyard killers is that they were on medication .... legally prescribed medication, usually for depression, but medication which it is already known can have side-effects which lead to violence or suicide. In short, American kids kill in this way first because they can and second because their society in all sorts of ways encourages violence.

commonground
April 18, 2007 12:17 PM

Hey guys don't knock killing, killing is one of the great American pastimes. Killing Indians, killing buffallo, killing blacks, killing Iraqis, killing Vietnemese, killing each other, killing whoever. Thats why they all have flags outside their houses to remind them of what great people they are and of their glorious traditions, one of which, is killing.

ShatterFace
April 18, 2007 9:26

Without the death penalty, America would turn in to the wild west, with gun-wielding lunatics wandering the steets taking potshots at people.
Oh.
America has tried deterence. If they don't execute you in prison, you'll still come out with a bumhole like wizard's sleeve.
You can't solve a country's internal problems by killing everyone who gets in your way, anymore than you can run a foreign policy that way.

What a tragedy at Virginia Tech. The university is saying that the gunman was a student. One of the first things they cleared up is that it has nothing to do with terrorism. Now they're saying the killer was a South Korean student, that he had only one gun, and that he committed suicide.

It's the big story in the Spanish media, too, top story on the news last night and banner headlines in the press this morning. Says La Vanguardia, "The massacre brings that certain cult of guns that exists in the United States back to the forefront of the news," in its page 2 signed editorial, and mentions Columbine High and the Amish elementary school. Eusebio Val's lead on the page 3 news story is, "A demented individual and too easy access to firearms yesterday again created a deadly cocktail in the United States."

They did something I've never seen before: two La Vanguardia reporters used MySpace to contact Virginia Tech students and get their responses, which are published on page 6. One of the students told them to go fuck themselves, and they printed it.

The TV3 afternoon news is just kicking off right now at 2:30 and Virginia Tech is the lead story; the second sentence had something to do with American society being shocked, which it is, and the "eternal" debate over legal guns, which exists mostly among the European media and academic elite. I did notice that InstaPundit was arguing that if some of the people on campus had had guns, this wouldn't have happened--guns are not permitted on the Tech campus, except I suppose in the hands of the police and security guards. I dunno; if you've got a crowd of 25,000 people on campus every day, it might be a good idea if they're not carrying guns.

Now they're doing a piece on Michael Moore and "Bowling for Columbine," saying that in the US there is a gun culture that goes back to the foundations of the country, and that the right to bear arms is in the Constitution. They interviewed some Catalan history professor saying that the right to bear arms goes back to the 18th century "but now, for God's sake, we're in the 21st." They blamed the NRA and John Wayne and Clint Eastwood for "the place of firearms in the American collective imagination," with film clips of "The Alamo" and "Dirty Harry" included. I didn't know we had one of them collective imagination things. Quote from TV3's web site: "In the United States no type of license is required to own a gun." That's wrong.

Mayhem.net, a truly sick site, has a list of the worst mass murderers of all time. Top US school killer was Andrew Kehoe, who blew up an elementary school in Michigan in 1927, killing 45 people. Top spree shooter was Martin Bryant, who shot 35 people to death in Port Arthur, Australia, in 1996. Most notorious spree shootings: George Hennard killed 23 people at a Killeen, Texas Luby's cafeteria in 1991. James Huberty killed 21 people at a McDonalds in San Ysidro, California, in 1984. Charles Whitman killed 18 people from the tower at the University of Texas in Austin in 1966. Top European spree killer: Thomas Hamilton, who killed 17 people at a preschool in Dunblane, Scotland, in 1996. Second is Michael Ryan, who killed 16 people in Hungerford, England, in 1987. Latin America's Number One: Genildo Ferreira de Franca, who killed 15 people in 1995 in Natal, Brazil. The top US post office shooter was Pat Sherrill, who killed 14 people in Edmond, Oklahoma, in 1986. Canada's Number One was Marc Lepine, who killed 15 people at a Montreal university in 1989. The Columbine killers murdered 13 people in 1999.

More European spree shooters: Eric Borel killed 13 people in Cuers, France, in 1995. Richard Durn killed 8 people in Nanterre, France, in 2002. Mauro Antonello killed 7 people in Chieri, Italy, in 2002. Mattias Flink killed 7 people in Falun, Sweden, in 1994. Josef Gautch killed 6 people in Austria in 1997. Jean-Pierre Aillan killed 5 people near Rennes, France, in 1996. Tommy Zethraeus killed 4 people in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1994.

And check out this one:

Jesús Andrés Iglesias (4) Before being riddled with bullets, Jesús -- a 40-year-old, mentally disturbed man -- fired more than 30 shots with his double-barrelled hunting rifle at a religious procession passing below his window. The "Corpus Christi Massacre" as it was immediately dubbed by the Spanish media, ocurred in Herreros de Rueda, a tiny village of 35 inhabitants near León in northwest Spain.

Three people in the procession - Victorico Martínez, 73, Herminio Martínez, 72, and Eva González, 22 - were shot in the back and died on the spot. A young sergeant of the Civil Guard died during the ensuing gun battle. "Everyone knew the killer was disturbed, loco. But why did the police let him keep his guns? Why was he allowed a licence?" one of the villagers said. "This is what happens when you allow just anyone to have a gun."

The killer had a history of confrontation with the villagers. He was often abusive and threatening. He was known to fire several rounds from his rifle every night into the trees in his yard. "We complained several times to the Civil Guard," one villager said, "but they never did anything. They said that he hadn't hurt anyone."

The US has quite definitely had more spree killers than Europe, but Europe's not doing too badly in the standings. There are also a lot of people from Russia, Australia, and New Zealand who went on shooting sprees.

As for your standard pervert weirdo serial killers, Europe's right up there with us, too. Erzebet Bathory and Gilles de Rais are legendary. Harold Shipman may have murdered as many as 300 people. Seems that Weimar Germany produced a particularly large amount of them, with four (Bruno Ludke, about 80 kills; Karl Denke, more than 30; Fritz Haarman, at least 27; Peter Kurten, 9) operating during that period. Hungarian Bela Kiss killed 24 during World War I. Frenchwoman Helene Jegado, a mass poisoner, killed at least 23 in the 1850s. Thierry Paulin and Jean-Thierry Mathurin killed 21 in Paris in the mid-1980s. Lucian Staniak killed 20 in Poland in the mid-1960s. German Gerd Wenzinger committed 19 murders in Germany and Brazil during the 1990s. Leszek Pikalski killed at least 17 in Poland in the 1980s. Donato Bilancia killed 17 in the Genoa, Italy area in the 1990s.

Spain's top serial killer, Jose Antonio Rodriguez Vega, killed at least 16 in Santander in the 1980s. He was murdered in prison by fellow inmates in 2002.

All of these serial killers outmurdered Jeffrey Dahmer.

More European serial killers: Dennis Nilsen killed 14 in England in the early 1980s. Thomas Quick killed at least 15 in Sweden in the late 1990s. Joachim Kroll killed 14 in West Germany in the 60s and 70s. Peter Sutcliffe killed 14 in England in the 70s and 80s. Marie Besnard, another poisoning Frenchwoman, killed at least 12 in the 30s and 40s. Jack Unterweger killed at least 12 in Austria and the US in the 90s. Fred and Rosemary West killed at least 12 in England in the 70s and 80s. Joseph Vacher killed at least 11 in France in the 1890s. Marie Becker killed 11 in Belgium during the 30s. Henri Landru killed 11 in France in the 1910s. Martin Dumollard killed 10 in France in the 1860s. Ian Brady and Myra Hindley killed 9 in England in the 1960s. John Christie killed 8 in England in the 1940s and 50s. Jean-Baptiste Troppmann killed 8 in France in the 1860s. Guy Georges killed 7 in Paris in the 1990s. Hungarian Andreas Pandy killed between 6 and 13 in Belgium in the 1970s. Ferdinand Gamper killed 6 in Italy in the mid-90s. Marc Dutroux killed at least 5 in Belgium in the 1990s.

Observations on the Spanish media and racial controversy in the US: The Spanish media has been running a lot of stories recently on the Don Imus flap and on the German video of a drill instructor inciting recruits to imagine themselves killing blacks in the Bronx. I'm not sure why; neither is exactly important news along the lines of, say, Iraq or Iran.

My opinion is that a lot of people need to calm down a lot regarding what is racist and what is not. Language is racist if it a) calls Group X inferior to Group Y b) calls Group X immoral or evil compared to Group Y c) promotes violence or discrimination against Group X. Language is tasteless if it hurts the feelings of someone whose feelings do not deserve to be hurt.

"Nappy-headed hos" is tasteless but not racist. The Rutgers women's basketball team are young women aged 18-22 who are not public figures and never did anything to deserve such namecalling. Their feelings were justifiably hurt, and their demand for an apology was absolutely correct. However, if Don Imus called Whoopi Goldberg, a rather obnoxious public figure, a "nappy-headed ho," it wouldn't bother me in the least. And if he called Pamela Anderson, another rather obnoxious public figure, a "white trash redneck bottle-blonde ho," it wouldn't bother me either. Actually, the sexism (calling women hos, that is, alleging that they are sexually loose and therefore immoral) is worse than any racism in Imus's words.

The German army drill instructor, however, told the recruits, "Imagine you're in the Bronx and a pickup truck pulls in front of you. Three African-Americans get out and insult your mother. Before each shot I want to hear you yell 'motherfucker' real loud. Fire away."

That's racist because it portrays American blacks as violent criminals, and encourages killing them. As an American, I don't like it, and if I were a black American from the Bronx, I'd be especially pissed off.

Here's La Vanguardia's reaction:

At first glance, this is no more than a tough-guy scene in military training, as could happen in all armies...But in the global era, when caricatures of Mohammed in a Danish newspaper can cause violent protests thousands of kilometers away, as happened last year, nothing is innocuous. This weekend, in Germany, the video was almost unnoticed: some private soldiers saying the wrong thing. But its shock wave--by means of Internet--has reached New York.

So it's no big deal for a sergeant to fire up his recruits by encouraging them to kill black criminals in the Bronx, but it's terrible if Tele Madrid makes a documentary alleging that Spanish is discriminated against in Catalonia.

Cartoon on La Vanguardia's editorial page today: A gentleman says, "So you think that they only manipulate the news and lie about the Spanish language in Catalonia?" The Catalan media will not turn loose the Tele Madrid documentary. They have been stung badly.

Comment: Internet does make it a lot more difficult to get away with telling different things to different audiences, or with saying something outrageous without it getting out. You can't get up on stage in London and say you're ashamed to be from Texas anymore, at least if you don't want to face massive flak when you get back home. I remember seeing a Bob Dylan show in Kansas City in around 1987, and he commented from the stage in his confused manner that Leavenworth Prison was nearby and that "some people are in there for doing good things." Since there was about one newspaper reporter there, the critic from the KC Star, and he didn't mention it in his review, no one ever heard about it. You do that now and fifty people who were there will put it on their blogs and the shit'll hit the fan: "Stoned-Out Dylan Praises Criminal Jailbirds."

Latest news from the linguistic front: TV3 has been putting heavy emphasis on a story out of El Prat, a largely Spanish-speaking industrial suburb of Barcelona. Seems a doctor working at a municipal gymnasium would only speak to clients in Catalan, refusing to speak Spanish, and they fired her. Stinkorama. So TV3 is all outraged, saying the woman was fired "for speaking Catalan."

No, she was fired for being rude to the clients and for breaking the official rules. Around here the unwritten social rule is that you speak whatever language you want in private. Many people prefer to adapt to the language the other person in the conversation speaks, and some people insist on speaking their own preferred language. You'll get conversations in which one person speaks Catalan and the other Spanish. So far, fair enough. There is actually very little conflict among individuals in Catalonia over which language to speak. The little conflict that exists is usually caused by people who are just jerks, and language is just one more thing for them to be jerks about.

(Problem for Catalonia's image in the rest of Spain: If some guy comes from Zamora to visit Barcelona, he's likely to talk to some twenty people a day, and the probability is that one of them is going to be a jerk because at least 5% of people are jerks wherever you go. That jerk will refuse to speak to the Zamoran in Spanish. The Zamoran is justifiably irritated, and he goes back to Zamora with memories of the jerk, not the 95% of adaptable normal people that he met. He will then tell everyone he knows about the jerk. Thus all Catalans get an unfair reputation as jerks, as refusing to speak Spanish though you know how is a particularly Catalan form of jerkishness that exists nowhere else.)

However. If you work for the government, your obligation is to speak with the citizen in the language that he prefers, and if you are a private-sector worker who deals with the public, then the social expectation is that you do the same with the client.

This doctor blew it both ways; she did not fulfill social expectations by using Spanish with clients who preferred to use that language, so she was being rude, and she did not fulfill her obligation as a municipal employee by using Spanish with citizens who preferred to use it, so she was breaking the rules. No wonder they fired her. She was pissing people off with her attitude, and you can't do that if you're a public servant. It's ridiculous that TV3 should try to make her some sort of martyr.

Catalonia is steaming mad over the Tele Madrid documentary (link about four posts down).

El Periódico, on Thursday, called it "biased," "an unreal situation of persecution or at least discrimination," and "giving protagonism to the extremes" in an editorial. Meanwhile, the Generalitat, the PSC, CiU, Communists, and ERC, and the labor unions CCOO, UGT, and CGT all condemned the documentary. Antoni Bassas, in El Periódico, says the documentary "would get an F, for lying, at any university," and called it part of "a strategy of provocation of Catalonia." He demanded that Madrid regional premier Esperanza Aguirre apologize for the documentary's contents.

But Toni Soler, who is a jerk, takes the prize for his comments in today's La Vanguardia. He mentions the documentary's "incendiary tone, hilarious dramatism, and peculiar manner of understanding journalism (sic)," and calls it "trash TV."

However, he then says, "However, the Tele Madrid documentary is not just a bunch of lies. It is true that in Catalonia official signs are in Catalan, there is no public education in Spanish--except in individual cases--and in some areas knowledge of Catalan is obligatory." For example, if you want to be a civil servant in Catalonia, you must pass the Level C exam in Catalan, basically impossible if you are not a native speaker. This effectively eliminates all non-Catalan-speakers from being candidates for tens of thousands of jobs.

Soler continues, "It is useless to say that there is no conflict, that Spanish is not discriminated against, and that any child can go to school in the language he wants...Let us admit that, by a democratic mandate, the Generalitat's linguistic policy discriminates against Spanish."

At least Soler is honest; he believes Spanish should be discriminated against because "Catalan is our own language, and it is at a disadvantage because of historical, demographic, and market reasons." Wow. He actually admits that government favoritism to Catalan over Spanish violates the concept of the free market. I've never seen a Cataloony do that before.

He's full of shit about the democratic mandate, though. The rule of law trumps the verdict at the ballot box. No matter if some politician calls a referendum on bringing back the death penalty and 90% of Spaniards vote in favor, Spain cannot bring back capital punishment because the Spanish consititution explicitly prohibits it. No matter what the voters vote to do, if it's unconstitutional or illegal then it can't be done.

The Spanish constitution quite clearly prohibits discrimination against Spanish-speakers. Hell, it says straight out that Spanish is the national language and that all citizens have both the right to speak it and the duty of knowing it. The Catalan language laws are unconstitutional.

Perhaps now a few people at TV3 will be a little bit more sensitive to the negative manner in which the United States is invariably portrayed in the documentaries that it runs, since everyone's so offended at the negative portrayal of Catalonia in this one.

Naah, I doubt it.

So last night I go down to the bar on the plaza for a couple of beers and a chat with the patrons, and I'm sitting on a stool talking with this guy David, who's interested in American Indians and always asks me questions. He notices a pack of cigarettes on the floor and asks me if they're mine; I say no, I've got my own pack, and he picks up the pack and hands it to me and says, "They're yours now," since he doesn't smoke.

I flip up the top of the box; it's half-full of Camels, and contains a packet of rolling papers as well. I say, "Hmmm," turn it upside down, and a lump of hash falls out. Everyone sees it, including the bar's owner, Luc from Bruges, and there's a general round of laughter. I claim the booty as my own and stash it in my jacket pocket. David says, "There were a couple of teenagers sitting here before you showed up. I bet they dropped it."

What do you know, half an hour later the teenagers came back asking whether anyone had found a pack of cigarettes. Of course we all said no, and they left, downhearted and dejected.

I figure my actions in this incident were morally justifiable, since those teenagers shouldn't have been smoking tobacco in the first place, much less hashish, so I saved them from spiraling down into the hell of addiction. They should thank me.

By the way, the hash isn't much good, what they call "culero" around here, the bottom grade of stuff that actually works. You have to smoke a good bit of this shit in order to get the effect you'd get off a couple of bong hits of good marijuana.

Spain is taking the terrorist attacks in Algeria and Morocco very seriously. An organization called Al Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb has claimed responsibility for the bombings in Algiers. It is apparently a fusion of the Salafist Combat Group and several other Islamist terrorist groups. They killed twelve people in Cabilia, the Berber region to the east of Algiers, during December. It seems that they got themselves organized in February of last year after the Algerian goverment turned loose 2300 suspected Islamist terrorists.

The Zap government has put Spain on a "level 2 alert." This is the second highest level of security, and it means that places where crowds collect or which provide basic services (e.g. airports, power plants) are to be closely watched. Each police unit is to file individual reports on anything suspicious they see. There are at least 70 undercover agents operating in Ceuta, according to La Vangua, which says that there are at least as many infiltrated spies among the Islamists there. Ceuta contains at least 3000 Maghrebi illegal aliens, among whom the Islamists recruit heavily.

Al Qaeda, in its communique claiming responsibility for the bombings, declared, "We will not rest until we have liberated the land of Islam from Jerusalem to Al Andalus." Al Andalus, in case you didn't know, is Spain. Looks like Zap's cutting and running from Iraq didn't do a damn bit of good. Appeasement never does.

Says Walter Laqueur in today's La Vanguardia, "Why call for a Muslim reconquest now? Spain, after all, withdrew its troops from Iraq as a gesture of good will." Because the Islamists want to dominate the entire world, remember, and Spain is to be one of the very first dominoes to fall. People who don't understand this and think that negotiations of any kind are going to work with Islamists are dreaming.

La Vanguardia ran an interview with Baltasar Garzón yesterday; Garzón says a) "We should consider that in Spain we are facing a very high risk of a new Islamist terrorist attack" b) Al Qaeda has training camps in southern Algeria near the Mali frontier c) The Spanish cities of Ceuta and Melilla on the north coast of Morocco are Al Qaeda's number one target d) We must take Al Qaeda's threats against "Al Andalus" seriously, because they do e) It's very hard to investigate these Islamist terrorist groups because they're mostly semi-independent at least.

Meanwhile, Al Qaeda is using retarded children as suicide bombers in Iraq. The United Nations, whose word I would normally never take seriously, cites twelve documented cases, including the March 21 Baghdad market bombing. One 13-year-old suicide bomber was sold by his parents to Al Qaeda for $10,000. And there are still people who don't understand that we, and I mean the liberal, civilized West, are fighting pure evil, and Iraq is the number one battlefield.

Comment on the Tele Madrid documentary: The Catalan media is absolutely furious, much more so than Iberian Notes ever gets at Catalan media anti-Americanism. La Vangua calls the documentary "false," "biased," and "exploitative" on today's editorial page. Funny how they don't say things like that when Catalan TV shows documentaries like the one on the Aryan Nations that they rerun so often, the one on "Jesus Camp," those nutcase jobs claiming the US government was behind 9-11, or Bowling for Columbine. Or the Al Gore movie and traveling circus sideshow. Looks like the shoe's on the other foot now and they don't like it one bit.

Good news. They're going to run the Barcelona subway all night on Saturdays starting next week. If they're going to tax us, I don't particularly mind if the money goes to such useful forms of public transportation as the subway. Much better than Catalan national sports teams. At least spending the money on the subway gets people where they're going, as well as hopefully reducing traffic and drunk driving accidents.

Guirilandia has an awesome post on a common scam here in Barcelona. Definitely check it out.

I've never worked for one of those places here. I worked for one, called Entertel, while I was in college in Lawrence, Kansas in the mid-'80s. Entertel was a boiler room that was careful, apparently, to operate within the limits of the law. For example, when we made a sale, we were supposed to inform the customer that we were going to record them consenting to buy the product, and we had to tell the customer that we were calling from Lawrence.

It was standard boiler-room procedure, though. We were given a script and told to call up people and sell them something called "credit card insurance." The deal was that if someone stole their card the insurance company would pay back all losses. However, in real life, you're only liable for I think fifty bucks on a stolen card--my card was stolen once and the thief ran up 130,000 pesetas on it, and I wasn't liable for anything since I reported the theft to the police--so the product was completely useless.

What happened was that I did pretty well the first day, but the supervisor constantly pushed me to work harder and faster. They didn't try to fire people up with silly stunts, as I've heard boiler-room operators do, but you were supposed to be constantly calling, dozens of calls an hour.

The second day I made a sale to somebody who was obviously pretty dumb, and after she agreed to buy it she asked me, "Now, what did I just buy?" I explained and she decided not to buy it after all. I figured this job was not the right one for me, since I didn't need the money that badly, I didn't like the pressure, and I didn't feel too good about selling junk that people didn't need, basically cheating them, for minimum wage and pie-in-the-sky commissions. Maybe if the thirty pieces of silver had really existed, I might have stuck around despite my ethical qualms, but they didn't and so I didn't. I quit at the end of the day, and got a job in cataloguing down at the university library, which suited me much better, since it was just honest minimum wage for working with books.

Here's a wonderful new Spanglishism (or maybe Catalanglesism) coined by, of all people, the Barcelona city government. Seems they read somewhere that in places like Amsterdam there's a government-owned bicycle-rental system, and so they decided to start one here. There will be ten or twelve points around the city where you'll be able to pick up or drop off a city-owned bike. The new system is to be called "bicing," which sounds like sexually ambiguous stuff you would use to frost a cake. Yep, they just took the "bic" from "bicicleta" (or "bicycle") and stuck an "-ing" on the end. I figure it's actually supposed to be pronounced "bee-seen," both syllables getting the same stress.

Why this will not work: Barcelona is a Mediterranean city, not a Nordic one. As everyone knows, urban cleanliness and civic behavior decline as you go from north to south in Europe. So Oslo is cleaner than Amsterdam (or London), which is cleaner than Paris, which is cleaner than Barcelona (or Milan), which is cleaner than Naples, which is cleaner than Athens, which is cleaner than anything south of the Med. So what is going to happen is that within a month half the bikes are going to disappear and the other half will be already rusted out due to lack of maintenance.

Besides, there are already several privately-owned bicycle-rental services in the city. My impression is they do most of their business at the Parque Ciutadella. If there was a market for people to rent bikes to travel point to point in the city, these guys would already have thought of it. Also, bikes aren't expensive, and pretty much everyone who wants to ride one already owns one. Finally, traffic is hellacious in Barcelona, and people who don't know the city or how to ride well are going to get themselves killed. The liability insurance on this bright idea must be enormous. Some dumb American kid is going to get run over by a bus and his parents are going to hire some high-powered lawyers to sue the city and bribe a judge (not that difficult around here; remember Pascual Estevill?) and we're all on the hook for God knows how much in damages.

This smells a little like a make-work project, since I'm sure three or four employees at each of the pick-up points, along with twelve or fifteen supervisors, are going to be necessary. There's a lot of labor-intensive public work here; one I think is funny is that two guys with brooms go around sweeping street garbage into the path of a very noisy and very small vacuuming truck that also dampens the ground under it. After they've been through, the street looks the same as it did before. There must be a hundred of these things going around town at any one time. I don't know why they don't buy larger trucks with real suction power and a real water tank.

So I hear that Jimmy Wales is working on some kind of bloggers' code of conduct. May I be blunt? My ass. My conduct is limited by the law. If I commit libel, or exalt terrorism, or make threats, or blackmail somebody, or engage in financial fraud or false advertising, I can be taken to court. If I don't break the law, nobody can do anything to me. My conduct is also limited by the standards of readers--that is, the market. If I behave in a way that they don't approve of, they will stop reading. The market is a much more effective regulator than anything Jimmy Wales can think up.

So I don't need some Internet watchdog organization limiting my freedom of speech in any way, and I will not participate in any kind of voluntary rating system.

As far as the comments section goes, if you break the law on it, it's my responsibility as editor and publisher to censor you. I haven't seen anybody break the law yet except for the occasional death threats I get, so I haven't censored anyone but anonymous cowards.

Spain is taking the Islamist terrorist attacks yesterday in Casablanca very seriously. Moroccan police decided to hunt down three suspected terrorists. Two of them blew themselves up; one killed a policeman, jumping on his back from a low rooftop and blowing them both up. Another terrorist was shot to death by police. A fourth terrorist then blew himself up in the middle of a street, killing at least five and wounding at least fifteen people. The police have evacuated an entire neighborhood of the city. Moroccan police have arrested hundreds of people in anti-terrorist roundups during the last month; they claim to have gotten all twelve of the cell they started investigating a month ago, along with seven "sleeper" suicide bombers. Everyone involved is suspected of connections with Al Qaida.

Meanwhile, today an explosion in Algiers killed at least twenty people; it was apparently an assassination attempt on the prime minister. The three countries of the Maghreb, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, are going to be important fronts in the war on Islamism.

Rafael Ramos, in his dispatch from London for La Vanguardia, makes the following claims: 1) "The British and Italian governments have learned...that their military presence in countries where they are not welcome, against the wishes of their public opinion, is never going to provide them with propaganda victories." Raffy, propaganda victories are not the point here, and foreign military presence is not welcome anywhere but is often necessary--for example, in Kosovo right now, or in South Korea, or in Iraq and Afghanistan. 2) "All governments negotiate with terrorists no matter how much they deny it." Sure, we have to negotiate sometimes with terrorists like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the PLO, because left-wingers like you supported them back when they could still have been stopped. But do all governments swap hostages with terrorists? I doubt it. 3) Ramos is still claiming that the Americans turned over an Iranian agent they were holding in exchange for the fifteen British hostages. I have seen nothing of the sort anywhere else in the Spanish press. 4) "People are realizing that the Karzai government is the fruit of a compromise with the Taliban, and Western powers have strategic interests in Russia's back yard." Hoo boy. The Afghan government is supported by the Taliban? And that old geopolitical claim that the West is trying to surround Russia. Note that Ramos considers Russian intervention appropriate in Central Asia ("Russia's back yard"), while American intervention in the Caribbean is not appropriate.

This is hilarious. Catalan TV (€13 billion in debt) habitually runs extreme anti-American documentaries which all share the same faults:

a) they have a pre-set point of view, and report only on items that back their thesis; b) they take a small part of the whole (racist extremists in Idaho, snake-handlers in Tennessee, Mormon polygamists in rural Utah) and then generalize it to the entire society; c) they interview leftist sociologists and the like, people whose views are nowhere near the mainstream even in academia, and accept the opinion of these alleged experts as the truth; d) they interview disgruntled individuals who are pissed off at society, without interviewing the great non-pissed-off majority; e) they fail to interview any historians, writers, academic figures, or political officeholders who disagree with the alleged experts; f) they take minor issues and blow them up completely out of proportion to their real importance; g) they depend on shocking or very unusual images which do not reflect the experience of ordinary people in ordinary situations.

So Tele Madrid just did a hatchet job on Catalonia.

They ran a documentary saying that Spanish speakers are discriminated against in Catalonia. And they used all the same tricks that constantly show up in anti-American documentaries.

The Catalan media, led by La Vanguardia, is howling like a hit dog. La Vangua calls the Tele Madrid documentary "a very harsh diatribe" in its subhead.

The documentary says that Spanish speakers in Catalonia "are threatened," have "no freedom," and "must leave Catalonia if their rights are to be respected." Spanish-speaking children "are discriminated against" at school; the documentary focuses on two families who cannot enroll their children in Spanish-speaking schools. (La Vangua denounces the use of hidden cameras, which they curiously never held against Michael Moore.) Shopowners who put up signs in Spanish are "persecuted"; Spanish-speakers must seek justice at courts that speak only Catalan.

And they got loudmouth and rather stupid TV3 personalities Joel Joan and Miquel Calzada to shoot themselves in the foot. Joan said, "Catalonia is a people who are inside a union (Spain) but without freedom. We must decide whether we are Spanish or not." Calzada said, "Why are there people who say 'don't speak Catalan to me'? I feel bad, but please get out. With no regrets."

Finally, they got local disgruntled folks Albert Boadella ("my work is totally boycotted") and Arcadi Espada ("I was attacked by a violent gang while I was giving a speech, something that has been fairly common lately in Catalonia") to spout off against the status quo.

La Vanguardia openly accuses Tele Madrid, which belongs to the PP-controlled Madrid autonomous regional government, of propagandizing in favor of the PP with the goal of bringing out the vote in the May municipal elections. I do not recall La Vangua ever saying anything critical of the way the CiU government used to abuse, and the PSC government now abuse, their control over TV3.

Interestingly, TV3 hasn't said anything about the documentary.

Here's the link to the video of the whole thing.

The slaughter continues on Spanish highways: 103 dead during the four-day Easter long weekend. (You get Friday and Monday off in Catalonia, Valencia, Basque Country, and Navarre, and Thursday and Friday off in the rest of Spain.) Most Spanish roads are pretty good, but there are a few places that are so poorly designed (case in point: trying to get off the Diagonal on to the Ronda de Dalt) that they cause total disaster. Another problem is Spanish herd vacation behavior. The highways around here are built to handle more or less normal traffic, but Spaniards leave major cities en masse on long weekends and for the August holidays. This means the traffic load is tripled or quadrupled and the whole system crashes. On Monday afternoon a 33-kilometer traffic jam built up at the Tarragona tollbooth. We missed the gridlock because we come into town off the N-II from Lleida, which gets little traffic compared to the routes up and down the coasts and to the Pyrenees.

Latest French survey: Sarkozy 28%, Royal 24%, Bayrou 18%, and Le Pen 16% heading into the first round of the presidential election, to be held April 22. Of course, the idiot French Left is shooting itself in the foot once again by running several extremist candidates, including a Commie, a Green, two Trots, and Jose Bove, who just might suck up enough of Royal's vote to squeeze Bayrou through to the next round.

What an embarrassing fiasco for the British armed forces Iran's little game has been. The Iranians have just raised their bet with their announcement that they're producing nuclear fuel "on an industrial scale." I vote we call; right now they've got a pair of deuces to our four aces, but if we wait much longer they'll have a royal flush and there ain't nothing that beats one of those.

Get this. Our regional government, the Generalitat, has spent €2.6 million in tax money over the last three years promoting official Catalan "national" sports teams. Specifically, they gave the money to the Platform Pro Catalan Sports Teams, headed by a member of ERC. Interestingly, ERC promised to contribute €1.2 million a year to the Platform, and to spend €7.5 million a year promoting Catalan "national" teams.

And the Catalan Radio and Television Corporation, the Generalitat's own propaganda organ, is €13 billion with a B in debt. That's 11.4% of Catalonia's annual GDP. How can they possibly spend that much money? You could make 130 Hollywood big-budget spectaculars, or 1300 clever comedy or dramatic movies, for that amount of cash, and people might actually want to watch them.

Meanwhile, Manuel Castells, the most overrated alleged intellectual in Catalonia, denounces corruption in La Vanguardia--both abroad, including allegations against Bush, Blair, Chirac, Putin, Lula, the Chinese government, and the yakuza, and in Spain, specifically mentioning Andalusia, Valencia, Madrid, and the Balearic Islands. Interestingly, in his article covering two-thirds of an opinion page, the eight little letters "Cataluña" don't appear. Or the letters CiU or PSC or ERC. Or the famous number 3%.

More from La Vangua: Manuel Trallero neatly disposes of Catalonia's own Katie Couric, Monica Terribas, who thought she'd try to get smart with Colin Powell on live television.

Ingenuous Monica Terribas thought she'd have Colin Powell for lunch. Hey, if you're a black man who grew up in a ghetto, became Chief of Staff of the greatest world power, and even made it to Secretary of State, then the journalist who tries to interview you should behave fashionably leftist (hacer monerías progres). Powell ate her with potatoes and left her like a sardine, just the bones. It's one thing to wear sandals to show off your little feet and your painted toenails while you interview Zapatero, and another entirely to try to tangle with a guy who doesn't just look tough.

La Vangua also gives massive quantities of publicity to the new UN bogosity on global warming, and criticizes by name the United States, China, Russia, India, and Saudi Arabia for being unwilling to go along with the report's conclusions. Now wait a minute. Seems if you can't get either the Americans or the Chinese to go along with your report, then the consensus you're claiming may not exist.

ETA has been making its usual threats again; among them was that they were going to kill a cop if De Juana Chaos had died on his hunger strike. They gave an interview to their house newspaper, Gara, featuring a photo of two ETA thugs wearing masks. The thugs said:

"ETA cannot imagine elections without the "abertzale" (pro-ETA) left." (Translation: Their puppet party, Batasuna, is banned and can't participate in the May municipal elections.)

"If the government carries out its attack against the abertzale left, ETA will take it very seriously." (Translation: If their party doesn't get un-banned, somebody dies.)

"The peace process is still blocked because the Spanish government has not listened to what the people say." (Translation: The only people whose say counts are us.)

"Basque society knows perfectly that the keys to solving the conflict are territoriality and the right to decide." (Translation: The killing continues until an ETA-governed Basque Country including Navarra gains independence.)

"With its action at Barajas, ETA is trying to redirect the peace process and send a clear message to the government to think about: it is necessary to fulfill your promises, to deactivate the repressive machinery it uses against the Basque homeland." (Translation: Let our terrorists out of jail or we'll kill some more people like we did at Barajas.)

These cynical, ironic bastards. I hate them for what they do, and for how they do it.

We spent Easter weekend (holidays in Catalonia: Good Friday to Easter Monday) out in the pueblo. Nice weather, very tranquil, far away from computers and translations. We took the dog out every day--walked up the Segura road, up the road to L'Ametlla, down toward Guimerà, up the valley to the spa. Perla the dog loves bounding through wheatfields; that's quite practical now that the wheat is still green and about a foot and a half high.

It's rained a great deal here recently, the first real hard rain since winter 2005, more than three inches in Barcelona. When you figure Catalonia gets 20-25 inches of rain a year, three inches is a lot. So everything out in the country is green and looks like Ireland. This'll last until about the end of May or so, when the dry summer begins to kick in. Out in Vallfogona they don't irrigate anything except the vegetable gardens along the bank of the stream, but parts of central and western Catalonia do irrigate extensively.

Remei made me haul out a bunch of old junk, which weighed a ton, out of the top two floors of that enormous old house we have. Remei's mother, of course, pitched a fit that we were throwing out her beloved garbage, but she calmed down pretty soon and was actually very well-behaved in general. I mean this stuff was garbage, too, broken doors and smashed-up chairs and mattresses from the 1950s; we didn't throw out anything that was either useful or had any possible sentimental value. Remei gave Ramon from Cal Matruqueu fifty bucks to drag the crap to the dump in his tractor and wagon; it was the big news in town on Sunday afternoon. "Hey, look, they're throwing out a bunch of crap at Cal Elvira and the Anglés is getting all sweaty and Rosa is hollering at him. Let's go check it out."

Vallfogona has a couple of Rumanian families; everyone seems to get along fine, though the Catalans say the Rumanians aren't very communicative. Let me tell you, small-town Catalans can be pretty damn uncommunicative at times, too. Everybody seems to respect these Rumanian folk because they're family people with jobs; I doubt the locals would tolerate any outsiders who weren't. Pretty much the only social mixing seems to be at the Barça games on TV at the local bar, which the whole town shows up for. I noticed there was a sign up in the bar in Rumanian saying that Orthodox religious services are held in Rumanian at the church over in Arbeca on Sundays. I bet ten years from now half the people who live in Vallfogona year-round will be Eastern Europeans.

This is kind of embarrassing. I've never been interested in pornography; obviously, watching porno has the same effect on me as it does on every other male, but it's not something I seek out. Probably one reason why I have so few computer and spam problems is that I never go to Internet porn sites.

But I've become fascinated by this book that I mentioned a month or two ago called My Secret Life by an anonymous Victorian gentleman. My guess is that it's a combination of his real experiences, stories other people told him, and his fantasies. A lot of it rings very true, though, because the author doesn't conceal anything about himself. He doesn't mind telling stories that make him look like a fool, or an arrogant jerk, and he enjoys telling stories that make him look rather like a pervert--some of the stuff about thirteen-year-old virgins is pretty unpleasant, not real erotic at all.

I'm not sure I've ever read an author who was so honest, even though at least half of his book is made up. His feelings and actions ring true even in situations that are probably his fantasies.

And it's expanded my vocabulary.

pego=penis
doodle=penis, probably children's word
gun=penis
baudy, leud (adverbs)=horny, excited--"I felt baudy and leud when I saw..." Also adjectives, e.g."my baudy cock"
gamouche=perform oral sex on a female
minette=perform oral sex on a man; also a noun
bum furrow=buttcrack
mucilage=semen
to spend=to reach orgasm (both male and female)
button=clitoris

Most of the other standard words in English were used then in just the way they are now. One that people seem to think was used during Victorian times, "to roger," doesn't appear in My Secret Life, making me think it's bogus.

La Vanguardia was rather interesting today.

Banner headline: "Iran seeks dialogue with liberation of 15 British sailors."

Gee, I'd say Iran is playing the Godfather and letting us know he can extort us like this whenever he wants.

Rafael Ramos, Vangua correspondent in London, kicks off his Page 3 article, top of La Vangua's international section, with:

"And the Oscar for best performance in the political theater goes to.....Mahmoud Ahmadinejad!" The rest of his article is at the same level. I'm so tired of Spanish commentators explaining everything in images. It's a serious fault. I suppose we do it, too, but they really read a lot into images.

Ramos claims there was a swap of hostages, that the Americans turned over an Iranian diplomat they'd captured committing crimes inside Iraq in exchange for the smiling, handshaking Brits.

Tikrit Tommy Alcoverro, La Vangua's paid-off correspondent in Beirut, announces on page 4 that the Syrian regime is thrilled with Speaker Pelosi's visit. Official regime newspaper Al Bass, mouthpiece of the Syrian Baath Party, said that Pelosi's "valorous mission recognizes the part played by Syria and shows that there is more than one criterion in dealing with the Damascus Government." I think anything you do that the government of Syria praises is absolutely the wrong thing to have done just by definition.

Joaquim Ibarz, La Vangua's respectable and serious Latin American correspondent, says that Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez are full of crap when they say things like "Ethanol means the internationalization of genocide," since Chavez set up a project to convert Venezuelan sugarcane into ethanol just weeks before Bush announced he thought it was a good idea. Cuba and Venezuela plan to jointly modernize ten sugarcane-to-ethanol plants that already exist in Cuba. Brazil is irritated at Castro's big mouth.

Scandal: Spanish taxpayers' money is to go to Cuba in the wake of foreign minister Moratinos's visit. Cuba's debt of €1.7 billion to Spain is to be "renegotiated." "Bilateral cooperation" is to be "renewed in all fields: economic, financial, cultural, and developmental." A "permanent and formal mechanism of political dialogue" is to be created between Spain and Cuba, under conditions of "mutual respect, equality, and acceptance of respective political and legal structures."

Meanwhile, Cuban foreign minister and chief gamouche Perez Roque said, "The prisoners in Cuba are not part of this agenda."

Hey, Zap, doesn't look like you got much of a quid pro quo for getting your tongue all covered with the shit dripping out Fidel's tumor-riddled asshole, does it?

Just a few quick links:

The Telegraph's US correspondent comments that he agrees with Michael Cherkoff that the US does not have the same problem with radical Islamist immigrants as Europe does. Check out a couple of the wacky responses by commenters.

Commentary, in a fairly gutsy move, runs a Charles Murray piece with the thesis that Ashenazi Jews have a higher average IQ than other groups for genetic reasons. I could buy it if the thesis is that all historically trading / commercial ethnic groups that have been ghettoized inside larger and wider societies, including the overseas Chinese, the overseas Lebanese, and the Armenian diaspora, are likely to have undergone a process of selection, in which being clever would greatly improve your survival and reproductive chances, and that all these groups are likely to have high average IQs.

Jonah Goldberg shoots fish in a barrel. Come on, Jonah, this is too easy for you.

Front Page features a defense of free trade.

Actually, Keith Richards probably really didn't snort his dad's ashes mixed with cocaine no matter what he said.

Well, Iran has released the British hostages, which is excellent news for everyone, especially them and their families. Ahmadinejad said he was "pardoning them as a gift to the British people" in honor of Easter and Muhammed's birthday.

Britain needs to strike back as soon as its hostages are safe. The absolute minimum they can do is cut all relations of any kind with Iran, especially commercial relations, and freeze all Iranian assets in their power. Agreed, Britain probably couldn't launch a military action all by itself, and since nobody got killed, starting the shooting would look bad in the eyes of the Independent and those other surrender monkeys who blamed this whole thing on the Americans for capturing some Iranian agents inside Iraq.

Thucydides said that wars are fought out of interest, fear, or honor; interest and fear are already both factors in our dealings with the mullahs. And honor has just been lost. You can't let a tinhorn theocrat capture your sailors and then magnanimously pardon them, or no one will take you seriously again in that part of the world.

In strategy--and make no mistake, this is a game of strategy, I'm absolutely positive Iran planned this whole thing out--your opponent makes his decisions based at least partly on what he thinks you are going to do. Iran was betting that Britain and America would do nothing if it took some hostages, and Iran will have won its bet if there is no sharp and immediate response. If there is not one, Iran is going to up the stakes and see how far it can push in order to find out how strong the West's will really is. Be prepared for another stunt like this one in the near future, another test of strength.

By the way, I do not know what I would do if I were taken hostage by the Iranians. They wouldn't have to put too much pressure on me to get me to cooperate; I have no illusions about my own personal courage. I wouldn't smile for the cameras while shaking hands with my captor, though, and I wouldn't wish him success, either.

I think a gentleman named Jose Ramon Ubieto, who is billed as a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, may have set the all-time record for Spanglishisms per paragraph in an article in La Vanguardia today. The subject seems to be self-esteem, body image, and what's wrong with superficial consumerist society.

Check these out:

"...una felicidad prometida pero que en realidad sólo atisbamos en su versión low-cost..."
(a promised happiness that we can only reach in its unsubstantial version)

"...una serie de placeres minúsculos y algo efímeros que constituyen los estándares de ese bienestar prêt-à-porter."
(a series of minuscule and rather temporary pleasures that are the basis of that easily-purchased well-being)

OK, I know, and so does Mr. Ubieto, since he's so careful with the accents, that pret-a-porter is originally French, not English, but he's using it as international gobbledygook.

"...Es el don't worry, be happy!"
(It's don't worry, be happy!")

I'm not exactly sure what he means here.

"...nos anestesiamos con una moral light sostenida en el fun..."
(We anesthetize ourselves with undemanding social mores based on enjoyment.)

"...Se trata de planear sobre la vida, como hacen los jóvenes practicantes del parkour..."
(We try to glide over life, like the youths who do parkour)

Whatever parkour is. Sounds pseudo-Franglais.

"...Así nació el body building como sueño de recreación de la propia anatomía..."
(Thus body-building was born as the dream of recreating one's own anatomy)

"...ciudadanos de a pie que aspiran al nothing is impossible..."
(Ordinary citizens who hope they will be able to reach their goals)

"Ahora nos llegan los exitosos (en Estados Unidos) makeover televisivos que prometen un cambio radical..."
(Now the successful (in the United States) television makeover programs that promise a radical change are arriving..."

"¿Radical? Dejémoslo en un lifting del yo que alcanza para lo que alcanza."
(Radical? Let's call it a superficial change in the ego that does whatever good it does."

"¿Se acuerdan cuando surgió el primer reality show?"
(Do you remember when the first reality show came out?"

I count ten and one-half Spanglishisms and one and one-half international Franglaisisms. In nine paragraphs. That's pretty good.

I bet if you asked Mr. Ubieto why he used so many bits of non-Spanish in only nine paragraphs, he'd probably tell you something about his text shows the superficiality of modern language use in the imprecise and pretentious incorrect use of foreign words and phrases.

I also bet that the real answer is that Mr Ubieto's own thoughts are rather superficial themselves, and he didn't feel the need to work real hard expressing them in clear language when he could just throw in a few easy international code words.

The ETA dirtbags the cops rounded up last week were going to pull a hit on anti-ETA Basque author and philosopher Fernando Savater. Meanwhile, they found 170 kilos of explosives in the apartment that one of them was renting. 12 persons have been arrested in Spain and 12 more in France on ETA-related charges since they called off the alleged truce three months ago.

So let's see. A huge bombing of a parking garage at the Madrid airport that killed two people. Caches of hundreds of kilos of explosives. Information on police officers and political office holders, and a plan to murder one of the most notable members of your community. Not to mention another cheap attempt by your illegal political branch to start up under a new name and thereby try to dodge the law.

Yep. Zapatero's right. This must be because ETA wants to get the peace process going again.

Scandal: The Zap administration sent foreign minister Miguel Angel Moratinos to Cuba; he arrived today. He'll meet with Raúl and chief asslicker Pérez Roque, but not Fidel, who has time for Chavez but not Moratinos. I haven't noted any changes in the behavior of the Cuban regime--it seems just as repressive, brutal, and stupid as ever--so I'm not sure why Spain would want to cozy up to Castro in such a way. Zap already got the EU to lift its diplomatic sanctions on Cuba back in 2004. Unless Zapatero just likes Communism. Which I think he does, at least emotionally. Moratinos's line was, "Spain cannot be absent from Cuba." He didn't say anything about the democratic opposition.

Somebody anonymous told the Vanguardia that Moratinos's trip is "the logical culmination of the strategy of normalization of relations that has been followed since the change of government with regard to Cuba." The anonymous person added that there would be both political and economic "normalization," which I think means our tax money is going to be heading down Havana way. Mr. Anonymous also said that "Cuba's future must be decided by the Cubans," in reference to the Zap government's opposition to the Czech and Polish hard line on Cuba within the EU. Yep. I agree. I think we do everything possible to help the democratic opposition set up free elections, so the Cubans can decide their own future. I don't see how tongueing Fidel's kid brother's balls is going to contribute to that.

La Vangua's take on the Catalan political circus is that ERC offered to cut a deal with CiU in order to remind everybody that it holds the key to the Montilla administration, and when it withdraws its support the Tripartite comes crashing down.

It's Holy Week and they're having processions again. Everyone, even agnostics like me, should have a look at a Spanish Holy Week celebration once. Then, when you've seen one, you've pretty much seen them all; I'm not much of a fan. Some people really get into it, though. Barcelona is not a big procession town; I'm not even sure they have one. They have a little one in my wife's village and all seventy-five people at least stick their heads out the window.

Barcelona opened up a two-point lead over Sevilla with a 2-1 victory over Deportivo, with Ronaldinho back in form and goals by Messi and Eto'o. Three-quarters of the League is over with, and Barça is stepping up and playing better precisely when they need to. If they can pull out a win next week in Zaragoza they'll have gone a long way toward a third consecutive League title.

They're going to beatify John Paul II, which is no less than he deserves as one of the most significant contributors to the fall of the Soviet empire. They have a French nun who said the Pope cured her of Parkinson's. I'm not sure why they're still insulting people's intelligence with such claims. Surely the Church must know by now that nobody swallows this miracle stuff any more. It is simply impossible. We know that the paranormal and supernatural do not exist.

Christianity seems actually more spiritual (for lack of a better word) to me without earthly saints walking around curing people. I mean, we are supposed to believe in God out of our faith in his goodness, not because we believe getting cured of illness by some saint is our earthly reward.

Interesting historical article on Amelia Earhart at Fox News. Check it out.

I generally like Jack Shafer, Slate's media critic, but his last piece is pretty lame. The subject is April Fool's jokes, which is a dumb seasonal topic on which any buttmunch in his first year on the features desk at the Topeka Capital-Journal can churn out a quick one.

Shafer didn't do too much work digging up his funny examples to fill out his article, either, since most of them are referenced at either the Museum of Hoaxes, a very good site which Shafer credits extensively--in fact, his article would totally suck if not for info from that webpage--or Snopes, the world's best urban legends website. I've linked to them both in the past--to Snopes just a couple of days ago.

Nobody's perfect, but that one was kind of crap, Jack.

The West cannot allow Iran to take hostages.

Britain should apologize to Iran.

The hostages will be freed.

Then we take out their nuclear plants and military command and control.

If they respond by invading Iraq, then we respond by bombing everything resembling an Iranian military base.

That ought to provoke a revolution in Iran.

If it doesn't, well, we bomb everything resembling an Iranian tank and if innocent people get in the way, that's what happens in wars, and if Iran doesn't like it, maybe they shouldn't have started it.

This might also be a good object lesson for certain other countries I can think of.

A must-read: Der Spiegel (with its long history of America-bashing, as Davids Medienkritik has been pointing out for years) has an anti-anti-American article. Check it out.

Remember when the Catalan Generalitat designated the Latin Kings as a cultural organization and started handing them subsidies? Well, four Latin Kings went on trial today in suburban Madrid for the gang rape of a 16-year-old girl.

Everyone in Spain is talking about the silliest possible thing: Zap went on TV Tuesday night to answer questions from an audience. He didn't say anything new or different, of course; the whole thing was a waste of time. Some joker asked Zap how much a café solo costs, and he said eighty cents, which is a bit low--most places charge a little more than a euro. This somehow caught everyone's attention, and is the only thing people will remember about this little publicity stunt. It's Rajoy's turn next month, by the way.

Spain's national soccer team sucks, as usual. They beat Iceland 1-0 last night, and are in third place in their qualifying group for next year's Eurocup, behind such traditional soccer powers as Northern Ireland and Sweden. They've got good players: half of Valencia, Xavi, Iniesta, and Puyol from Barcelona, and a few other guys like Ramos, Alonso, and Cesc Fabregas. But they have never played up to their potential, possibly because none of them are top-level international stars who are capable of carrying a whole team and because they have never had a good coach. Luis Aragones should be fired now--actually, he should have been fired right after Spain crashed out of last summer's World Cup. By the way, Iniesta should definitely be a regular starter for Barcelona, and they need to sell off Deco to give him a spot--though Rijkaard says that none of the "big four" international stars, Ronaldinho, Deco, Eto'o, and Messi, are going to be sold. Ronaldinho is openly flirting with Milan in order to hold Barça up for a raise, though he's signed through 2010. I'd tell him to piss off, that if he doesn't like his contract he shouldn't have signed it in the first place.

Note: Some Spaniards and Catalans are a bit persnickety about the Spanish Ñ and the Catalan Ç, which we normally change to N and C in written English. Seeing "Barça" written as "Barca" or "La Coruña" as "La Coruna" just drives some of them up the wall. However, Barça and Iceland player Gudjohnsen's surname actually doesn't have a D in it; rather, where we and the Spaniards write a D, Icelandic has what looks like the phonetic symbol for the TH sound in English. Inconsistencies like this are a bit annoying sometimes. I think I'll start a campaign to get his name spelled right around here. Somehow, I don't think anyone will give a crap, since nationalists get their feathers ruffled only about minor symbolic things like this when they are directly affected; they don't care at all about what people from other national groups might think.

Speaking of which, I think we American conservatives need to start a campaign to take over the Guardian's Comment Is Free section. They've got a policy of running several opinion pieces a week on the United States, most of which are unfairly critical and even offensively bigoted, and the posters in the comments section are even worse than their writers. Also, they habitually drag in America even when it has little or nothing to do with the subject. Normally I'd say live and let live, we have our sites like LGF and Free Republic, and the lefties have theirs like Kos and Democratic Underground. The Guardian is different, though, because it is a newspaper that is supposed to present a variety of opinions, but generally doesn't. I vote we go over there en masse and stomp those dopes with our superior ideas and rhetoric.

Check out this moronic piece on Cuba, for example. A few quotes: "Cuba, being a secular country, avoided the anti-homosexual religious overtones of its neighbours. However, repression of homosexuals continued after the 1959 revolution under the umbrella of a dogmatic interpretation of Marxism. It is a tribute to the humanistic essence of the Cuban Revolution that its leadership was able to face up to its mistakes and change course. Cuba is now set to become the most socially liberal country in the Americas...Another set of people who can claim some credit for Cuba's enlightened approach is the international left and solidarity campaigns. While the pressure for equal rights came principally from within Cuban society, there is little doubt that the government also listened to their friends and supporters abroad, those who unconditionally stood by Cuba throughout her struggle against US-sponsored invasion and terrorism, and the 45-year-long economic blockade." (Boldface mine.)

What economic blockade? There's an embargo, not a blockade. Cuba is free to trade with any other country that wants to deal with them.

Spanish foreign minister Moratinos is going to visit Cuba on April 2 and 3 in order to help prop up what's left of the regime there. Gee, I thought the EU was trying to pressure the Castro dictatorship into freeing its political prisoners. Guess not.

Meanwhile, in Britain, the big story is of course the kidnapping of fifteen British sailors by the Iranian regime. The Iranians now have their hostages, and they will do the same with them as they did with the Americans in Teheran and Westerners in general in Lebanon. I vote we take their nuclear sites out tomorrow; there's nothing they can do about it but kill the hostages, and that gives us an excuse to take out the whole regime once and for all.

More rioting in Paris: train company employees stopped a scumbag without a ticket at the Gare du Nord station, and it degenerated into a six-hour riot that ended in nine injuries and 13 arrests, along with the sacking of the train station shops.

Deep analysis of American politics in today's Vanguardia: a story on page 10 runs down Giuliani's and McCain's histories of marital problems, and claims that they will be the key to the Republican nomination. The story contrasts Giuliani and McCain with Mitt Romney, saying, "Although his Mormon religion permits polygamy, he has only married once and has shared his life with Ann for 37 years." Uh, no, the mainstream Mormon church does not permit polygamy. There are a few isolated splinter groups way up in the Utah hills that still practice it, but they have no power or influence and are considered a bunch of weirdos by all concerned.

I find it interesting that La Vangua never said anything about John Kerry's marital history; what's most suspicious about that is Kerry's obvious marriage for money. Why else would he have married that harpy Teresa?

The cops busted eight ETA terrorists yesterday in the Basque Country and Navarre; they found thirty kilos of explosives, timers, detonating wire, and chemicals to manufacture chloratite. Lock them up and throw away the key.

New illegal immigration technique: Sign up for a cruise, get off at Barcelona, and don't get back on the boat. Spain now requires Bolivians to have a visa to enter the country, and there's a cruise ship in Barcelona harbor with 82 Bolivians on board who they won't let into Spain.

All of the Spanish media has, of course, paid tons of attention to Halle Berry, who's in Madrid promoting her latest movie. She is certainly a fabulous babe, and looks great in the photos they took. Also, she did not pull a Sarandon and slag off the States as so many Hollywood types do when they get over to Europe. My question is, simply, why is it such a big deal when an American movie actress comes to Spain?

Just a few quick links this afternoon.

Snopes reproduces an e-mail that's going around comparing Gore's energy-guzzling house with Bush's eco-friendly ranch, and judges it to be true.

Fox News reports that a cyber-asshole took one last shot at Catherine Seipp by posting under her name while she was dying.

At National Review, John O'Sullivan comments on the EU's fiftieth anniversary and David Freddoso takes a whack at the EU's Kyoto hypocrisy.

Anne Applebaum notes that most Europeans paid no attention to the Berlin celebrations because they're pretty apathetic about the EU.

The Wall Street Journal is rather positive about the EU, and there's a good historical piece about the anti-immigrant motivation behind Prohibition (and the progressive middle-class do-gooders who put it through).

Reason has an article reminding us, in response to the doomsayers, that the world is actually going along pretty well in most ways in most places.

Robert Hughes has a groovy article in the Guardian on surrealism, one of the artistic movements I most despise.

No post today; I've been working like an African-American on a translation and am pooped.

In college, my friend Jed and I had great fun saying horribly racist or offensive things using politically correct euphemisms, which was in fact rather daring in those heavily PC mid-80s. Some of our favorites were:

"He wanted twenty bucks, but I Israelied him down to fifteen."
"No, you can't have it back, you Native American-giver."
"What a total mess. It was an East Asian fire drill."
"When you put your car in neutral while going downhill, that's called Latino overdrive."
"Wanna get the football and play Smear the Alternative Lifestyle Guy?"
"Something funny's going on. I think there's a person of color in the woodpile."

The big political news around here is that the Catalan independence party, Esquerra Republicana, has offered to dump the Tripartite and back CiU for control of the Catalan regional government, the Generalitat. CiU leader Artur Mas would become premier. The catch: Mas would have to promise to call a referendum on independence for Catalonia.

How completely irresponsible. We were hopìng for a little bit of governmental stability around here. I am not Socialist premier José Montilla's biggest fan, but he's a reasonably competent political hack with plenty of experience. Montilla has shown no signs of being about to screw everything up. He's not going to improve things much, but a few years of gray boredom and dullness would be just fine around here now that the Pasqual Maragall traveling circus has folded its tents.

So here goes Esquerra, which is part of the current Catalan governing coalition along with the Socialists and the Communists, and offers to dynamite the coalition in order to turn over power to the Socialists' Number One enemy, CiU. Now, this is probably just a tantrum whose goal is to get attention, since CiU is a) nationalist but not pro-independence and b) fairly practical; it knows that any referendum on independence would be unconstitutional and non-binding and therefore meaningless.

Oh, by the way, the loudmouth who actually made the proposal in question is Francesc Vendrell, a former member of the political branch of the Cataloony terrorist gang Terra Lliure (final score: Cops 4, Terrorists 1, game over circa 1990. It would be Cops 5, Terrorists 1 if we count Juan Carlos Monteagudo, who when Terra Lliure broke up went and joined ETA and blew up a bunch of Guardia Civil families at the cuartel in Vic and got Clyde Barrowed when they tracked him down three days later.)

Here's the difference between minor sports in America and in a mid-sized country like Spain. Seems they had the world championships in synchronized swimming and Spain's team did rather well, winning several medals. Now, does anybody really give a crap about synchronized swimming? Hell, no. Like team handball and rhythmic gymnastics, synchronized swimming is one of those collectivist sports that they tried to make the opiate of the masses in places like East Germany and the former Yugoslavia. Boring.

But since the Spanish team did well, it's all over the news, leading off the sports report on the TV news for the last several days and getting an editorial of congratulations from La Vangua today. Now, I think the Americans got at least one medal, since they beat out Spain for a bronze in one of the various events, and the Spanish coach accused the judges of distributing medals according to political criteria. But have you heard about the synchronized swimming world championships over there in the US? I'll just bet you haven't.

Marius Carol gets obnoxious in La Vanguardia. Seems that Wolfgang Puck announced that he won't serve foie-gras any more, since geese are force-fed to make their livers fatty and it's sort of cruel. Carol, by the way, mistranslates "humane standards" as "standards of humanity" and makes fun of Puck for misusing language. He then says:

By the way, if Puck is so worried about the standards of humanity in his state, he might make a statement against the death penalty in California, although the meat of the condemned is not served in brochettes. The United States is a curious country, where the Chicago city council prohibited the possession, sale, and consumption of foie gras as if it were a drug.

What a smart-ass. Comparing laws requiring humane treatment of animals and the death penalty is like comparing geese and people. Geese are not responsible for committing first-degree murder, which people have to do in order to get the death penalty in California.

Nobody is going to ban eating animals, but the laws do demand that animals being slaughtered for meat be treated with minimum decency and killed with as little suffering as possible.

Forcefeeding geese so their livers get fatty and swollen violates the minimum-decency standard, which says, "Don't make animals suffer or die unnecessarily." We don't need foie-gras or fur coats. Meat, yes, people are naturally omnivores (though I'm a vegetarian), and animals must die to provide meat. And as long as the cow dies, you might as well make her skin into leather. Medical experimentation on animals is necessary, but other kinds of experimentation are not and should be banned.

In a world closer to the ideal, we wouldn't eat mammals. I don't criticize those who do, because it's natural for humans. Birds are borderline. Chickens and turkeys are pretty dumb, a less clear-cut case than mammals, which are all at least as intelligent and self-aware as very retarded people. As for your cold-blooded animals, fish aren't too bright and mollusks and arthropods are very primitive. I wouldn't have the slightest moral qualm about eating shrimp or mussels, though I don't. I don't think a shrimp is any smarter than a plant.

Andy Robinson gets a front-page teaser headline for his denunciation of homelessness in New York on page 31 of today's La Vanguardia. He tosses out all the usual claims from the usual suspects; you've heard it all before. Andy adds that "economic polarization in New York is reaching levels of inequality comparable with cities in the Third World." He claims that many families only earn $1000 or $1500 a month, and that a two-bedroom apartment is $1000 a month.

I dunno. If we calculate minimum take-home pay at $5 an hour, which is far less than anyone actually earns in New York, and multiply that by 40 hours, we get $200, or a little more than $800 a month. Multiply that by two, and you get a family income of a little more than $1600 a month, not counting aid from the government, which you will get if you earn that little. That would be the absolute rock-bottom for the working class. Unemployment is, what, 5% in New York? Probably less. Seems to me that anyone who wants a job can get one.

Here's what the Census Bureau has to say:

Real median household income in the United States rose by 1.1 percent between 2004 and 2005, reaching $46,326, according to a report released today by the U.S. Census Bureau. Meanwhile, the nation’s official poverty rate remained statistically unchanged at 12.6 percent. The percentage of people without health insurance coverage rose from 15.6 percent to 15.9 percent (46.6 million people).

That's not perfect, but it's a damn sight better than a lot of other places. And, agreed, there are some other places that are more generous with government assistance than the US.

In New York state in 2005, the median family income was $59,686. Not too bad.

As for homeless statistics in the US (and these stats come from a homeless advocacy group, who in turn says it got them from the federal department of Housing and Urban Development), one study says that there were 744,000 in the US in 2005, of which about one-quarter were chronically homeless. That's fewer than 200,000 chronically homeless in the US. The US population is almost exactly 300 million, meaning that one of every 1500 Americans is chronically homeless. Yes, that's a shame, and all good-hearted people support aid to those of us who cannot take care of themselves, but one out of every 1500 isn't a lot.

Barça news: Rumors flying this week with no league matches, since the national teams are playing qualifiers. Spain plays Iceland tomorrow. Whooptedoo. Supposedly Barça wants to sign Terry and Lampard, and they've already got Cristiano Ronaldo in the bag. Also, rumors have it they want to buy Xabi Alonso from Liverpool, and got a quote of €26 million from Sevilla for Alves. They resigned all their fullbacks, so won't be needing Alves anyway. Alonso would presumably replace Motta and Edmilson. On their way out: Motta, Edmilson, Giuly, Ezquerro. Probably out: Saviola. Rumors surrounding: Deco (swap for Cristiano Ronaldo?) and Ronaldinho (skips training, flirting with Milan and Inter).

Baseball season starts in a week. Kansas City looks below-average but not horrible, like last year and, actually, most of the last decade except that one year they got so lucky.

The lineup I'd like to see, along with a conservative prediction for OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging)

DeJesus, cf, 800
German, 2b, 800
Teahen, rf, 900
Gordon, 3b, 875
Shealy, 1b, 825
Butler, lf, 850
Gload/Brown, dh, 800
Buck, c, 700
Peña, ss, 675

Not a bad-hitting lineup except for the 8 and 9 holes. Peña's defense is supposed to make up for his weak bat. Buck is just not a very good player, but he is still young and might improve. This year is probably his last chance. It's the starting rotation that is going to be trouble; the bullpen looks like it's OK, at least better than the past. We're hoping for 75 wins, development of young players Gordon and Butler, and Grudzielanek, Sanders, and Brown being shipped out for prospects at the trade deadline. Sweeney will, of course, get hurt.

The Zap government just blew it big-time with Batasuna leader Arnaldo Otegi. Otegi was to be tried before the National Court yesterday on charges of exaltation of terrorism. If convicted, he would have had to go to prison, because he's already got a fifteen-month suspended sentence that would have been unsuspended upon conviction. So the prosecutor's office, which to my knowledge is part of the Justice ministry and responsible ultimately to the prime minister, dropped the charges and Otegi walked.

This is just ridiculous. Exaltation of terrorism is against the law. I'm not especially fond of laws that block free political expression, but I can understand them in a country that's lost 800 dead to ETA. Therefore, the law should be enforced and those who exalt terrorism should go to jail, no matter how much popular support they have in the Basque Country.

Besides, the government's strategy should be to put as much legal pressure on ETA and its political branch, Batasuna, as it can. The goal should be to lock the bastards up and keep them there until they agree to a real peace, which would start when ETA renounces violence and turns over its arms. The only concessions I would be willing to throw them would be a) release of prisoners in for political crimes (e.g. Batasuna members in for illegal demos or exaltation or holding meetings of a banned party), but emphatically not of anyone involved in a violent crime b) the legalization of Batasuna (after a public renunciation of violence, of course), but with any member convicted of an ETA-related crime to be permanently inhabilitated from holding public or party office.

The PP is right on this issue. The Zap government screwed up badly, and it is responsible.

By the way, parts of the more extreme wing of the PP have been raising the specter of a breakup of Spain as a result of the Catalan statute or Zap's climbdowns in the De Juana Chaos and Otegi cases. That's a bit of an exaggeration. It's not going to happen anytime soon, among other reasons because the current Spanish constitution makes it impossible for any part of Spain to secede. You'd have to change the constitution before any region could split off legally.

Anyone trying to split off illegally would certainly face military intervention by the central government, and nobody's that dumb except for ETA and its crowd. Also, of course, no one splitting off illegally would be invited into such organizations as the EU, UN, and NATO.

I suppose my attitude, as an outsider on the inside, is that if a region of Spain (Asturias, for example) really, really wanted to be independent, and proved it by voting massively (say, two-thirds or three-quarters of the vote) in favor of a non-violent, democratic party that wanted Asturian independence at three or four elections in a row, then you'd have to change the constitution and let Asturias have a referendum on independence. The thing is, of course, that there is no region in Spain in which such a party gets more than about 15% of the vote. Neither CiU nor the PNV favors independence; ERC does.

By the way, I'd feel the same way in the US. If Alabama voters voted overwhelmingly in several consecutive elections for an Alabama Independence Party, I'd want to change the Constitution and let them go. That, of course, is highly unlikely. Yes, I know this argument leads to the question, "What about the Civil War?" Well, first, the Southern states were not a practicing democracy by my definition, since slavery was legal. Second, the (white) people of the Southern states never voted in favor of secession in a referendum. Secession was voted by the (elected, it's true) state legislatures. Third, many white people in the South (though not a majority) did vote for the Southern Democrat candidate, Breckenridge, in the 1860 election. However, Breckenridge was not calling for secession during the campaign. We can't say a vote for Breckenridge was a vote to secede. And anyway, he got less than a majority in one election, not a huge majority in three. And fourth, I'd have been against starting a war with the South in order to preserve the Union. So was Lincoln, though he figured that the South would start the shooting sooner or later. The South did start the war by firing on Union troops, and once the war starts, you need to win it--and while you're at it, abolish slavery.

I just reread that long post I wrote this afternoon on the campaign organized by the Catalan establishment in favor of its taking over control of the Barcelona airport. I didn't make my specific accusation clear enough.

It is: La Vanguardia intentionally tried to torpedo Iberia's stock price.

They ran a banner front-page headline saying, "Iberia stockholders look for buyer." No other newspaper ran anything similar anywhere near its front page. I therefore conclude that La Vangua gave excessive importance to its report, and that it must have had some reason to do so. And, as Marxist conspiracy nuts say, it's no accident that the big Catalan establishment whooptedoo about the airport happened on the same day La Vanguardia ran that headline.

Here's my bit of conspiracy-theory paranoia here in Catalonia. TV3 and La Vanguardia, the two organs of the local establishment, are running a campaign in favor of "making Barcelona airport more important." So today the Chamber of Commerce, the employers' association (Fomento), and the Royal Automobile Club held what La Vangua called "an academic act" at IESE "in defense of the future of the Barcelona airport." The various universities, including UB and the Pompeu Fabra, backed the meeting, as did several professional organizations, including the engineers. So, of course, did the regional government, the Generalitat.

(Translation: Barcelona airport is building a new terminal, so it will have more flight slots. Right now the airport is run by a Spanish state-owned company called AENA. AENA's management has generally been somewhere between rather and extremely crappy. AENA will also have the right to decide which airlines get which slots for which flights in the new terminal. The Barcelona establishment wants more long-distance flights to prestige destinations like Tokyo and New York, and fewer cheap-ass EasyJet low-cost companies flying in drunken teenagers from non-prestige destinations like Manchester and Dusseldorf. Therefore, the Barcelona establishment wants the right to decide which airlines get which slots for which flights all for itself.)

Now come on. This is not news, and it is not from the grassroots, either. This is what was vulgarly referred to in those old Sinclair Lewis novels, like Babbitt, as "boosting." The local powers that be, from the government down to the media, have decided that what Barcelona needs are more long-distance flights, and they are trying to polarize public opinion behind them. That is a textbook example of what is called "manipulation" of the media and the public by your average everyday Chomsky worshippers around here. So manipulating the media is so bad we have to falsely accuse the Bush administration of doing it, but it's OK if it's done in our economic interest?

This is pure business. There's nothing but money involved here. There's nothing high-minded or idealistic about this campaign at all. The Catalan establishment is trying to get something it wants, and it has no qualms about mobilizing the local government, media, universities, and professional organizations.

Comment: I don't think the establishment is ever this unified in Kansas City. There are always dissenting voices, from the universities, which often take pride in their anti-business attitude, to the no-growth people, of whom there are a surprising amount, from the civil-rights organizations demanding their piece of the pie, from the unions demanding theirs, from the media, which are pretty much pussycats in KC compared to the rest of the US but are dangerously radical investigative Woodwards and Bernsteins compared to La Vangua's reporters.

Here's what TV3, which belongs to the Socialist-controlled Generalitat, had to say to kick off today's afternoon news:

Representatives from more than one hundred organizations from the business and academic world had a united public meeting in order to demand pressure that would permit El Prat airport to continue as a world reference as a node of communication, with international connections, and that the regional and municipal governments, along with society, should have the capacity to decide on the strategic actions that affect it...

This is not news. This is publicity. And you note they are not demanding that the airport be privatized. They are demanding that the Barcelona airport be turned over to them--specifically, the regional and municipal governments. And "society," whatever that is. I bet it's the Chamber of Commerce itself.

TV3 ran a visual, "OBSOLETE AIRPORT MODEL." Below it was this statistic: Intercontinental Flights Daily; London, 868; Madrid, 168; Barcelona 19.

That is not news, it is advocacy, and of the cheapest kind: blaming everything on Madrid. Look, I personally do not think that the airlines are dumb. I think the model of competition provides us consumers with the best of all possible worlds. If there was a demand for direct flights from Barcelona to, say, Tokyo or New York, someone would be filling that demand, and those flights would be available. Sounds to me like the Catalan establishment doesn't like what the market has to say--that is, the people who want to come here are mostly drunken teenagers from Newcastle and Rotterdam--and they want the government to do something about it.

La Vanguardia, meanwhile, headlines on the front page: "Iberia stockholders look for buyer," and below it, "El Prat fifth fastest-growing airport in world." The Catalan establishment is royally pissed off at Iberia, the former state-owned airline based in Madrid, because it decided to pull most of its flights out of Barcelona and hub out of Madrid. La Vangua is therefore thrilled to slam Iberia. It's talking up the report that Iberia is up for sale, that several major stockholders including Caja Madrid, BBVA, and El Corte Ingles are looking to cash in now and get rid of their shares, since Iberia stock is up 31% since January 1.

The Catalan establishment is quite open about talking up what they want AENA to do: grant as many slots as possible to Spanair / Star Alliance. So they are throwing all their support, mobilized by the local media, to back the interests of a particular corporation. This is what's wrong with the way things are sometimes done around here.

Inside, in the business section, there's a list of the airports with most passenger traffic. Unsurprisingly, the top five are Atlanta, Chicago, Heathrow, Narita, and LAX. There's a rather lame joke about not even being able to get to Heaven without changing planes in Atlanta on the way. 15 of the top 30 are in the US, including such metropoli as Denver and Minneapolis. Madrid is #13, with 45 million passengers a year, and Barcelona is #34, with 30 million. Barcelona's 10.5% yearly growth is trumpeted. But you have to look at the figures pretty closely, though, to see that Madrid's growth is 8.1%! Seems to me that both airports are going to gain more passengers, as economic growth in Spain continues at more than 3% yearly, and tourism is growing enormously.

Meanwhile, Zap said that the central government, through AENA, would keep its power to decide which airlines get which slots at the new terminal. He had a whack at the Catalan establishment, too, saying that the reason they were concerned about the airport was that the central government had spent €3 billion on it. La Vanguardia called Zap's attitude "state unilateralism."

Please tell me that I'm wrong, I'm paranoid, and that I'm a conspiracy nut. There are no economic interests behind political forces here in Spain, are there? If there really are economic interests behind political forces in Spain, might that not influence Spanish opinion about what is behind political forces in other countries, particularly the "Anglo-Saxon" ones? Is it possible that Spaniards might overestimate the influence of, say, the oil industry in the US, since economic interests are so powerful over here?