Arts and Letters Daily links to a TCS interview with Bryan Caplan; we linked to a longish article by him on the same subject a few days ago. Caplan's thesis is that voters often make irrational decisions, especially regarding free markets, and that sometimes the voters should not get what they want. Check it out.

I knew I'd seen Caplan's name before and here's where: a few years ago he wrote a fascinating article titled "The Anarcho-Statists of Spain," one of the best pieces I've ever seen on the Spanish Civil War.

I've always thought that Gandhi, King, and Mandela, the multiculturalists' holy trinity, were highly overrated. Their chief virtues were their bravery--it takes some guts to stand up against the authorities when you're a member of what they consider an inferior group--and Gandhi's and King's non-violence. Mandela, notoriously, approved of violence.

However, none of the three was particularly altruistic--each worked toward the benefit of his own people, just like any other nationalist does. We're not talking Wilberforce or Henry Ward Beecher, members of the dominant group who worked for the rights of the dominated group. Or Lyndon Johnson and Earl Warren, who did much more to put an end to Jim Crow than King did. Johnson rammed literally dozens of civil rights laws down Congress's throat, and Chief Justice Warren backed him all the way. Or Eisenhower; when Little Rock tried to defy the Supreme Court and maintain segregated schools, Ike sent in the Airborne and Arkansas got the idea that things had changed.

Also, working against a system that does bad things does not necessarily make you a good person. Look at the Communists around the world. Sure, here in Spain they opposed Franco, and Franco was a bad guy, but the Communists were just as bad and might have been even worse. We're not talking about a democratic opposition or intellectual dissidents here.

Finally, Gandhi, King, and Mandela were fighting British imperialism, American Jim Crow, and South African apartheid, respectively. All bad things, I will agree, and they are all happily long gone. But these three men were dealing with more or less civilized opponents, who shrank from using extreme violence and repression. None of them would have lasted five minutes under Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Castro, Ho, Kim, or Saddam. Or even such comparatively mild dictators as Mubarak, Pinochet, or the king of Morocco.

Quick news brief: The cops found an ETA car with 100 kilos of explosives and detonators in Huelva province. It was not set to explode; presumably, the explosives and detonators would have been used to make several bombs.

A Madrid judge declared the Latin Kings an illegal organization. In Catalonia, though, they're an officially recognized cultural group that gets subsidies from the regional government.

A big kerfuffle is being made over the negotiations on Germany's proposed lite EU treaty. Spaniards, who are real big on the EU because it gives Spain lots of money and because a lot of them trust European bureaucrats more than Spanish politicians, hope that opposition from the UK and Poland will fail. Don't be so sure. I don't think many of the EU states are going to want to give up much more power to Brussels. France and Holland already voted no, remember, and no British government is going to give up its control over the currency or its own foreign and defense policy.

Puyol popped a ligament at an exhibition game in South Africa and will be out for three months, which is probably not such a bad thing because he needs the rest. Oh, get this, the Barça players were invited to meet Nelson Mandela and only five showed up. Garments are being rent over the squad's lack of solidarity.

From Wikipedia:

In 1961, Mandela became the leader of the ANC's armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (translated as Spear of the Nation, also abbreviated as MK), which he co-founded. He co-ordinated a sabotage campaign against military and government targets, and made plans for a possible guerrilla war if sabotage failed to end apartheid. A few decades later, MK did indeed wage a guerrilla war against the regime, especially during the 1980s, in which many civilians were killed. Mandela also raised funds for MK abroad, and arranged for paramilitary training, visiting various African governments.

What a disgrace. In Austin, Texas, a lynch mob killed a passenger in a car that hit a child, who was slightly injured. There aren't many details, fortunately, but it seems that the crowd surrounded the car and beat the passenger to death.

This would be getting a lot more press if it were a white lynch mob killing a black man, but in this case it was a black lynch mob killing a Hispanic man.

Now let's see what law enforcement does.

It's been a long time since we did a blog roundup. So let's do one.

A Fistful of Euros has a good, long piece on European demographics in response to an article in the Economist. Check it out.

Biased BBC reports on the internal BBC study that determined the network is indeed biased.

Colin Davies has more groovy stuff on Gallego politics and fiestas and weather.

Ray comes out of the closet at Davids Medienkritik! Congratulations!

Eursoc comments on the French legislative election.

Expat Yank slaps around pro-Argie Brits.

Guirilandia has the dope on Barcelona street scams (with video) and deviant sexuality. Notes from Spain features more deviancy.

Kaleboel warns us that Spanish vultures have invaded Holland, with video.

La Liga Loca has the first half of his report on the Spanish football weekend up. Nicholas Mead has more.

LA-Madrid Files demolishes a self-hating Yank.

Spanish Pundit has more on Spain, the EU, Cuba, and Palestine.

I thought this was funny. I'm mother-in-law sitting, and I put on my Pogues greatest hits CD. My mother-in-law asked, "Isn't the singer really old?" Well, yes, his body probably had about 80 years on it by the time this stuff was recorded, and probably has 80 more on it now, making him 160 in Shane years. I remember once he claimed he had been drunk since the age of thirteen. Not that he'd been drinking, that he'd been drunk.

She actually doesn't care what kind of music I play, though she seems to prefer swing and standards. She'll tolerate the Ramones, though.

The political news around here is that the Convergència i Unió coalition may break up. CiU is moderate-conservative and Catalan nationalist, and they're the second-biggest vote-getters in Catalonia. Convergencia is the more moderate and more Catalanist of the two parties, and Unio is more conservative and less Catalanist; Unio is part of the European Christian Democrats.

A lot of people think that Convergencia was basically Jordi Pujol's personalist party, and that it will fragment into at least three groups, one aligning with ERC, one with the PP, and the third with Unio. Pretty much the only things that ever held this lot together were Pujol and the fact they all hate the Catalan Socialists.

There's a conflict on between Convergencia leader Mas and Unio leader Duran Lerida; both want to be the overall boss of the coalition. In addition, Convergencia would prefer to center on the region of Catalonia; they hope to cut a deal with the Socialists in Madrid, putting Mas in as Catalan premier. In exchange for backing Zap in the Congress of Deputies, Montilla would step down at the Generalitat. Unio would prefer to focus on Spain and gain a couple of ministries in a Zap cabinet, a nice juicy one for Duran Lerida.

Note: Both Convergencia and Unio are counting a few chickens before they hatch. General elections are coming up in January or February, and both C's and U's plans are based on doing well. If they do badly, they won't be in a position to cut any deals, and especially not if Zap gets beat by Rajoy, which might happen. Or if Zap takes an absolute majority, less likely but still possible.

Also, if CiU breaks up, they'll divide the moderate nationalist vote and dilute its strength, making it even less likely that they'd be in a position to cut a deal with anyone.

Soap opera in France. Segolene Royal and François Hollande have split up sentimentally and politically. Now they're going to fight it out for Socialist leadership. He wants to stay in till 2008, and she wants him out now. This is great. How much you want to bet that if Hillary doesn't become president in 2008, she divorces Bill in 2009? Meanwhile, Sarko's UMP comfortably won the second round of the legislative election last weekend, though they actually lost about fifteen seats. He will have no problems putting through whatever legislation he wants.

EU weaseliness: The EU's foreign ministers voted to "reopen an open and general dialogue" with Cuba, at the request of Zap and Moratinos. I despise Zap, but I'd dislike him less if he weren't so pro-Castro. I don't get it; I don't see what he has to gain by backing a Communist dictatorship. All I can figure out is that he must actually like Castroism and believe in the Revolution. What a dope. The Zap regime also introduced a proposal to, get this, lift the diplomatic sanctions the EU laid on Cuba after the 2003 roundup of dissidents. The dissidents have not been freed, by the way. The UK, Sweden, and the Czechs, to those countries' credit, blocked that bit of groveling; the Czechs wanted to slap heavier sanctions on Cuba.

The Boys of the Squad, our regional police force, is supposedly tracking down three Islamist cells in Catalonia. Two of them recruit jihadis to go commit terrorism in Iraq, and the other falsifies documents in order to get Pakistani Al Qaeda prospects into Spain. I'm not sure they should have announced this until they'd actually captured these guys.

Rumors: Barça may unload Rafael Márquez as well as the other eight guys who are definitely out. La Vanguardia says they want to sign Eric Abidal, fullback at Olympique Lyon; Yaya Touré, midfielder at Monaco; center-back Chivu at Roma; and Thierry Henry. Supposedly they want to buy Diego Forlán; that rumor's been around for a while. I would not sell Marquez, he's young and has upside though he had a poor season, and I wouldn't spend a lot of money on Henry, he's only got about one more year left. Gudjohnsen supposedly has an offer from Man United. Saviola's pissed off, and he's claiming he might go to Real Madrid. Ronaldinho and Eto'o are staying, says the club. Deco was not mentioned. Frank says he's going to be a tough disciplinarian next season. Everybody seems to agree that there was not enough discipline last season, and that's why they blew the title. Sounds like a simplification to me, but I'm all for being a hardass on the players. If I were paying these guys millions of euros, you can guarantee there'd be clauses in their contracts specifying no doing anything the slightest bit unhealthy.

Nobody in Spain was talking about anything but football today. The League championship was down to the last game. If Real Madrid won, they won the league; if they didn't, then Barça could take the title with a victory. The games were played simultaneously, and Barça got out to an early lead over Nastic while Mallorca took the lead over Real Madrid. For about sixty minutes it looked like the title was Barcelona's, and then Madrid scored, and scored, and scored again, and they won the league fair and square. There is no way Barcelona should ever have let this one get away, they had a lead of several points with just a few games to go, but they did. You can't win them all, but this was one they shouldn't have lost.

The papers are saying no big shakeup of the Barça squad. Rijkaard will stay, and so will Ronaldinho and Eto'o. On their way out: Motta, Sylvinho, Edmilson, Belletti, Gudjohnsen, Giuly, Ezquerro, and Saviola. Supposedly they're going to sign Chivu; this rumor is a little solider than others I've heard because it was in La Vanguardia and not one of the notoriously unreliable sports papers.

I noticed something down at the bar this evening, since of course the game was on pay-TV. The place I go is frequented by working-class guys who are perfectly OK but not too refined or well-educated or anything like that, and none is particularly good-looking. However, three of them have recently scored with fairly attractive chicks who they normally wouldn't have a chance with, and they were all there for the big game tonight.

All three of these girls are Eastern European, and a Spanish working-class guy with a steady job looks pretty good to them. So there's one social result of immigration: it has improved the sex lives of at least a few of the locals no end. I'm guessing that Asian, Latin American, Arab, and African girls tend to stick with their own folks, but the Eastern Europeans, who I'm guessing are often more mature and self-reliant and came here on their own, aren't so locked into their own communities. I'm also guessing that Spanish guys are much more likely to hit on white women than those of other races.

On the exclusion of writers in Spanish from the Catalan delegation at the Frankfurt Book Fair:

Josep Bargalló, extremist Cataloony and head of the Institut Ramon Llull, in charge of this shindig which is costing all Spanish taxpayers €12 million from the Ministry of Culture, said in the regional Parliament on March 7, "The protagonists will be the writers who express themselves in Catalan; if we invite them, the authors in Spanish will come only for the dialogues and to talk about Catalan literature...We want to explain our reality as it is and, yes, we are plurilingual, but what makes us different from others is the Catalan language; without it there would be no Catalan culture in Frankfurt."

From La Vanguardia on May 6, 2007: "Until a week and a half ago, the principal Catalan authors in Spanish had not received an official invitation from the Generalitat to go to Frankfurt."

Quimera has an excellent summary of the whole kerfuffle, reminding us that on May 26, 2006, the Catalan Parliament passed a confusing resolution; "CiU and ERC were completely convinced they had agreed to the absence of Spanish at the fair. The press interpreted it that way as well. PSC and ICV understood, however, that they had agreed to give preponderance to Catalan without excluding Spanish. But from the text of the parliamentary resolution, according to which Catalan was "the unique identifying characteristic" of Catalan literature, it was difficult to deduce anything but the exclusion of authors in Spanish."

Extremely obnoxious snobbery from yesterday's El Periódico: Woody Allen is in town making preparations for his next movie, which is to be filmed here. Now, though I haven't liked any Allen movies since Annie Hall, and I can't stand the man personally, I admit this is news, and that a visit from Woody would get coverage in any city that he was going to film in. The local press has gone nuts, though, reporting on Allen's every movement in Barcelona, and Arturo San Agustín wonders in his column whether the excessive attention lavished on Allen is a sign that Barcelona is more provincial than it would like to believe.

So far so good; that's actually not a bad topìc for a throwaway column.

Now check out San Agustín's last sentence:

"Woody Allen (is) a director who some of us Europeans like more than the numerous fat Yankees who come here on cruise ships."

What a dick.

CNN reports on bullfighter José Tomás's comeback corrida in Barcelona, which has sold out the Monumental bullring, which seats 19,000. The local press is reporting that thousands of out-of-town aficionados are paying scalpers up to €600 for a seat.

This is controversial around here because Catalan nationalists consider bullfighting to be non-Catalan, a foreign import. That's not true; Barcelona has held bullfights for centuries, had three bullrings operating in the early 1900s before heavy migration from the rest of Spain, and in 1835 saw a local revolt touched off by a bullfight gone wrong. In addition, bullfighting is popular in the town of Olot and in the Catalan towns on the Ebro.

It is true, though, that bullfighting is not as popular in Catalonia as in other parts of Spain. Andalusia and Castile are the heartland of bullfighting, but it's also popular in the Basque Country, Navarre, Aragon, and Valencia. As far as I know, the only Latin American countries where bullfighting is big are Mexico, Colombia, and Peru.

One thing is that it's not considered a sport, but rather a performance. Those who appreciate it consider it an art. I am not one of them.

I've changed my position on bullfighting at least twice. At first I thought it was barbaric and repulsive. Then I began to think that, well, I don't like it but it is part of the culture and has a long history, and who am I to tell Spaniards what to do? Now I've sort of gone back to my original idea. Just because it's part of the culture doesn't make it right, but so many people like it that you really can't ban it, that would be a miscarriage of democracy. But people should damn sure stop patronizing it unless they stop killing the bulls. The Portuguese don't kill the bull. Seems to me that doing it Portuguese-style would be a reasonable compromise.

Check this out. Fark links to this story explaining that the rules for the Miss Spain contest have been changed, and from now on mothers will be allowed to compete as well.

Here's what Fark didn't link to. Ms. Angela Bustillo, the lady who was disqualified as Miss Cantabria because she had a child, got a boob job and took off most of her unmentionables for Spanish trash mag Interviú. Check out the whole gallery of photos. Not safe for work unless you work at a strip bar.

Interesting example of European coverage of the United States in today's La Vanguardia. Washington correspondent Eusebio Val, who is normally pretty reasonable, puts up a softball piece today on page 12 of the international section. It's old news by now, at least three or four months, but some dinky little town in Louisiana banned wearing droopy pants that let your underwear show.

Now, this is not precisely big news.

Val does point out that the black mayor of the town denied that the measure was racist, as it's mostly black kids who dress like this; he's backed by the local black Baptist churches. But then he has to get all analytical, and this is where he slides off into bogosity.

Quoth Val, "The controversial law against droopy pants is a symptom of the complicated and often contradictory relationship between the Americans and questions of sex and morality." Huh? It's a little town in the middle of nowhere, not the whole country we're talking about here.

Addeth Val, "The problem goes back to the Puritan origins of the nation." I don't think the Puritans ever had much influence in Louisiana. Catholics, Baptists, Cajuns, Creoles, New Orleans ethnics, blacks, and rednecks add up to a state where they sell daiquiris at drive-through bars and where a governor once won re-election on the slogan "Vote For The Crook."

He continues, "The United States is the world's largest producer of pornographic material." Yeah, that makes sense, since we're the world's largest producer of a lot of things, including anything related to Internet.

"However, there is enormous shyness (pudor) to show certain things, and it is unthinkable to see at newsstands covers of magazines showing skin, TV programs with nudity, or topless women at the beach." I always thought that the rule was that public life is PG-rated and that private life is most distinctly rated between R and NC-17. Reason: We have a lot of people from a lot of places with a lot of different ideas, so don't embarrass other people with your own selfish behavior. Behavior that a sizable minority objects to should be done privately--don't bug the Baptists by pulling out your peter at the public pool as if you were in Germany or something. Suntan nude in your own back yard. If you want to look at skin mags, buy them and take them home with you. If you want to see sex on TV, get cable. If you want to go topless at the beach, go to a topless beach. But don't make a spectacle of yourself; that's in poor taste.

"Such an extreme is reached that it is even very difficult to find in the shops skirts for girls which do not have underpants attached inside so that their panties cannot be seen." Wait a minute. I didn't know or care about this, and I sure hope Mr. Val knows about it because he has a three-year-old daughter. If not, he shows an unhealthy interest in the subject. By the way, there's sort of a difference between this "extreme" and, say, the burka.

Then, on page 14, the next news page, there are a few international briefs, obviously much less important than the droopy-pants law in Assboink, Louisiana. One is merely a quote from the Dalai Lama in Australia: "Whether it's intentional or not, cultural genocide is happening. Without a Tibetan people, our language and culture will disappear in less than fifteen years." The second's headline is, "North Korea: Death penalty for mobile phone users." It continues, "Pyongyang has increased public executions of users of mobile phones and those who send information out of the country. The North Koreans are prohibited from communicating with the rest of the world, but some manage to listen to foreign news and use mobile phones using Chinese communications systems."

You probably already know this, but the AP is reporting that Hamas is defeating Al Fatah in the battle for Gaza; Hamas terrorists have been executing captured Fatah terrorists. The Israelis say they will do nothing unless one of the two sides attacks them. Best hope: Egypt takes over Gaza and enforces order. Not too likely. At least 20 dead and 80 wounded so far today. The bloodshed is just getting worse. And it's not America's or Israel's fault.

You were wondering where the American Black Legend comes from? Answer: A lot of it comes from the propaganda of the Old Left, both in its American and international versions. Yesterday, in La Vanguardia's post-mod culture supplement, one Robert Saladrigas, reviews John Steinbeck's newspaper reports on migrant workers in 1930s California, which have been translated into Spanish. along with Dorothea Lange's famous photographs.

Says Saladrigas, "...the tenant farmers who, dragged by the drought and the dusty winds, went with their families to California for the harvest and were treated like human garbage...he was the witness to absolute evil that surpasses any fiction...he saw with his own eyes the subhuman living standards and the deaths from consumption of the dispossessed families...living in cardboard shacks...under the tyranny of police and bullies...they saw how their children literally died of hunger...a spine-chilling human landscape...the eyes of Florence (who appears in a Lange photo) are an icon of pain, impotence, and the barbarism of soulless capitalism...savage oppression by rich Americans of other, poorer Americans."

Boldface mine.

That seems a bit excessive, no? I actually know something about the Dust Bowl, since all four of my grandparents lived through it in West Texas, and I've heard hundreds of stories. They weren't rich folks, either, they were working and lower middle class, and had all grown up on farms or ranches. Times were tough and sometimes you didn't know when you'd get paid next. It was hard to get work, and if you got work it wasn't well-paid. You didn't have a lot of spending money and there wasn't always much to spend it on. Your diet was boring and your lifestyle very basic. Some people had very bad housing and clothing.

But nobody starved to death. Times were hard but not that hard. Many people have fond memories of those years, as others do of Britain during World War II, for example. Literally millions of people starved to death in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, but the American Dust Bowl gets one thousand times the attention of the Ukrainian famine, just as Joe McCarthy's nonsense (there were no executions, of course, and nobody spent more than a couple of years in jail) gets one thousand times the attention of the Stalinist purges.

Keith Windschuttle torpedoes Mr. Saladrigas's ignorance in an excellent article titled "Steinbeck's Myth of the Okies," which appeared in the New Criterion in 2002.

Says Windschuttle,

Steinbeck’s book was presented at the time as a work of history as well as fiction, and it has been accepted as such ever since. Unfortunately for the reputation of the author, however, there is now an accumulation of sufficient historical, demographic, and climatic data about the 1930s to show that almost everything about the elaborate picture created in the novel is either outright false or exaggerated beyond belief.

Just one of many good paragraphs:

This entourage (Steinbeck's Joad family) would have been demographically unusual. Rather than large families extending over several generations, the most common trekkers from the southwest to California were composed of husband, wife, and children, an average of 4.4 members. Only twenty percent of households included other relations. Most were young. Of the adults, sixty percent were less than thirty-five years old. They were also better educated than those of the same age group who stayed behind. In other words, they were typical of those who have undertaken migration in every era, whether over the Rockies or across the Atlantic: upwardly rather than downwardly mobile young people seeking better opportunities for themselves and their children.

Another one:

In the film of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck’s statement that people owned their land not because they had a piece of paper but because they had been born on it, worked on it, and died on it is given to the half-crazy character Muley Graves. His sentiments, and the injustice of the dispossession behind them, resonate throughout the drama. Again, however, these remarks bear very little relationship to the real farmers of Oklahoma. American rural communities have rarely been populated by the permanent, hidebound settlers that urban journalists and novelists have so condescendingly assumed. Southwestern farmers in the early twentieth century were highly mobile people who felt free to move about in search of better land or even to leave the land for opportunities in town. At the 1930 Census, forty-four percent of Oklahoma farmers and forty-seven percent of those in Arkansas said they had been on their current farms for less than two years.

And another:

Rather than a tragedy, the Okie migration was a success story by almost any measure. By 1940, well before the World War II manufacturing boom transformed the Californian economy, a substantial majority of Okies had attained the goals that had brought them west. Eighty-three percent of adult males were fully employed, a quarter in white-collar jobs and the rest evenly divided between skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled occupations. About twenty percent earned $2,000 or more a year, a sum that elevated them to middle-class status after less than five years in their new state. While their average incomes were beneath those of longer established Californian families, their earnings were significantly higher and their unemployment rate significantly lower than that of their compatriots who remained in the southwest. In short, despite the Depression, California delivered on its promise.

And his conclusion:

Rather than a proletariat who learned collectivist values during a downward spiral towards immiseration, all the historical evidence points the other way. The many sociological studies made over the last forty years confirm the same picture. In the 1940s and beyond, the migrants retained their essentially individualist cultural ethos, preserved their evangelical religion, and prospered in their new environment. In popular music, Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads proved a bigger hit with New York bohemians than with California Okies, who much preferred Gene Autry and Merle Haggard. By the 1960s, the Okies and their offspring constituted an important part of the conservative coalition that twice elected Ronald Reagan governor of California.

Game, set, and match to Windschuttle.

Jonah Goldberg linked to this fascinating map. Each US state is labeled with the name of a country with approximately the same GDP. The map demonstrates why it would be very stupid for the United States to go to war for raw materials: it just wouldn't be worth it. War is bad for business. It sucks up lives and treasure. It's destabilizing. And if we took over Saudi Arabia, the great king of oil exports, all we'd be getting is the equivalent of Tennessee--a lovely state to be sure, home of my sister, brother-in-law, and nephew, but not worth enough to go to all the trouble of invading somebody and fighting a war over. If we took over Iran, all we'd get would be the equivalent of Alabama. There's no equivalent given for Iraq, but I bet it's no more productive than, say, Delaware.

There's no equivalent for Spain either, but probably Texas or Florida would be about right. Shocking: Russia's economy is no bigger than New Jersey's. How the mighty have fallen. What a complete disaster area of a country. They have never had a decent government in their whole history--probably the best ruler ever was Catherine the Great, who was comparatively enlightened, being German and all. And that wasn't precisely a liberal free-market constitutional democracy. France is economically about the size of California, meaning the only countries whose GDP is larger than any state's are Japan, Germany, and the UK. Kansas is comparable to Malaysia, which is a pretty successful country, and Missouri is comparable to Poland.

Check out the whole blog. It's cool.

Fortunately, it's a rather dull week here in Barcelona (knocks on skull). TV3 is playing up the latest bit of Catalunacy: Seems that "Catalan culture" is the "guest of honor" at the Frankfurt book fair. The Institut Ramon Llull, whatever that is, has decided that only Catalan authors who write in Catalan will be represented. That means Catalan authors who write in Spanish will not be.

Catalan authors who write in Spanish, to be excluded: Eduardo Mendoza, Juan Marsé, Javier Cercas, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Carlos Ruiz Zafón.

Catalan authors who have received the Katalanisch seal of approval: Pere Gimferrer, Baltasar Porcel, Quim Monzó, Joan Francesc Mira, and Carme Riera.

Gee, is there some difference in the quality and reputation of the authors in the first group and the second? I submit there is, that the first group is much better, and also sells a hell of a lot more books. Monzó is the only author in Group Two you might want to consider reading; the rest produce boring wank. Especially Porcel, the stupidest intellectual this side of Harold Pinter. Besides, Porcel is Mallorcan, not Catalan at all.

Since Mendoza is no less Catalan than Monzó, it seems to me that the writers in Spanish are being unfairly discriminated against, and if there is a dime in tax money going to this shindig then a big stink should be made. It also seems to me that, since all these books are to be sold to foreign publishers to translate into their own languages, it doesn't matter what the original language they're written in is. As far as I know every book by a Catalan author in Spanish is immediately translated to Catalan anyway.

And this is a subject that has been "bitterly debated for months." Why? Should such a small thing be such a big deal? The problem with identity politics is that nobody can see beyond his own little group.

International news: Hamas is shelling the crap out of Gaza. 36 dead and 50 wounded so far. No one is indignant. Of course, if it were the Americans or, God forbid, the Israelis... I feel very strange, knowing that Al Fatah are actually the least bad of the two warring forces. Hamas is even worse than Arafat's corrupt thugs.

With the Palestinians killing each other, naturally British intellectuals have decided to boycott Israel. I am therefore boycotting all British intellectuals who are boycotting Israel. Step One is not reading or listening to or watching any British media but the Telegraph. Goodbye Guardian, Independent, and BBC.

Here's Rafael Ramos on page 10 of La Vanguardia yesterday: "The British university professors' union...joined by groups of doctors, journalists, architects, and even the Church of England are enthused by the possibility that a boycott similar to that decreed against apartheid South Africa may push the government, the Israeli ruling classes, and the Jewish lobby in the United States toward the real search for a solution to the Palestinian conflict...The disproportionate influence that the Israeli community exercises in North America (sic) is already well-known."

Complete and total anti-Semitism. Boycotting Israel while not boycotting Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Zimbabwe, Burma, et cetera, shows that the boycotter has his priorities confused, and the reason is that he doesn't mind leftist murders but he hates Jews. Comparing democratic Israel to apartheid South Africa is a foul, stinking piece of moral equivalency. And saying the Jewish lobby in the United States is behind Israeli policy equals believing that the Jews are running America for their own purposes. As an American, I call bullshit on that. The Americans are running America, and calling America a Jewish sock-puppet is the rankest Protocols of the Elders conspiracy theory.

More Ramos gems: He accuses Alan Dershowitz of "threatening" the British anti-Semites by calling for a counter-boycott, calling it "an attempt at intimidation." Says Ramos, "Money rules...the pressure organized by the hardest-line sector of the Israeli lobby in the US will probably succeed in watering down the boycott."

Largest immigrant communities in Spain: Morocco 575,000; Rumania 525,000; Ecuador 420,000; UK 315,000; Colombia 260,000; Bolivia 200,000; Germany 165,000; Argentina 140,000; Itasly 135,000; Bulgaria 120,000; China 105,000; Peru 100,000. Regions with more than 12% immigrants: Madrid, La Rioja, Catalonia, Valencia, Murcia, Balearics, and Canaries. Makes sense; except La Rioja, that's where the jobs are. Northern and western Spain get the fewest immigrants.

La Vangua's foreign correspondent in Havana reports that food rationing is making poor Cubans fat since they get lots of greasy carbs and not much else. Those rations last ten days or two weeks. Then they have to scrape up the rest of their food through the black market, theft, money sent by relatives, and prostitution. He also says that a high-capacity submarine fiber-optic cable is being laid between Cuba and Venezuela, which will multiply Castro's communications capacity by 2500. Since Cuba has about eight phone lines, prohibits Internet, and has no use for such a cable, since one-tenth of the cable's capacity would be enough to monitor all Venezuelan phone calls, and since a Cuban-Venezuelan company got a contract from Chavez to produce new ID cards and passports for all Venezuelan citizens (including a chip with all personal information), he is a bit suspicious.

The cops found two GRAPO weapons caches, one outside Barcelona and the other in Murcia. Let's hope this really is the end of the road.

Finally, under pressure by CiU, the Catalan "historical memory law" will pay homage to all the victims of the Civil War, and "not just those of the Francoist repression." The law will refer to "the memory and the dignity of the victims of political violence in the Republican rear-guard and the persons who suffered persecution because of their religious option." Pretty good but not good enough. If the law refers specifically to Franco and the Nationals as a band of murderers, but doesn't do the same to the Republican government in general and the CNT, POUM, and Communists in particular, it's not balanced.

Get this. The Air Force actually considered spending $7.5 million back in 1994 to research a chemical weapon ("hormone bomb") that would turn enemy soldiers gay; presumably, they would then proceed to arrange flowers and stage musicals while our troops would just, uh, cruise on by.

Not much big news. Zap and Rajoy had their meeting and nothing really happened. Maragall formally resigned as president of the Catalan Socialist Party, but he's been effectively in retirement since Montilla took over the Generalitat. Spain topped the 45 million mark in population; 4.5 million, a full 10%, are immigrants. Sarkozy's UMP cleaned up in the first round of the French parliamentary elections, with 40% of the vote; the Socialists got 25%, Bayrou got 8%, and the Commies, Greens, and National Front all got less than 5%. The runoff is next weekend and the Socialists are in a panic, calling on all the left parties to back them to "fight against the hegemony of the right." Bet it don't do no good.

Saturday night football was wild. With about one minute left in the simultaneous matches, Barça was beating Espanyol on two goals by Messi, one with his hand, and Zaragoza was beating Madrid. Barça would nearly have clinched the league title, as they'd have a three-point lead with one game to go. But Tamudo scored for Espanyol and Van Nistelrooy scored for Madrid, and both games suddenly ended in a draw. The Bar Els Rossos became very quiet and Xavi, the owner, went outside and smashed his signboard over one of the posts that keep people from parking on the sidewalk. Now Madrid has nearly clinched the league title, since all they have to do is beat a weak Mallorca team, and it doesn't matter what Barça does.

Barça had the league in its pocket twice, and gave up goals in the last minute first to Betis and then to Espanyol. They blew it. You can't win them all, though, and I wouldn't shake up the squad too badly. Ronaldinho and Eto'o still have upside to their careers, not to mention Messi.

Note: I do not know all the details of this story, but I do know that Messi signed with Barça when he was only about 13, and they gave him growth hormone, saying that he was undersized and had a deficiency. Players signing for pro teams below age 16, and pro teams giving their kids such powerful drugs, both seem wrong to me.

Andy Robinson, La Vanguardia's New York correspondent, is one of those guys who can never pass up an opportunity to sneer at American society. Never once has American society ever done anything sensible or reasonable, in Robinson's way of thinking.

So Andy decides to write a softball piece on food in the US. Naturally, he has criticized what he sees as the burger-laden "American diet" many times, never considering that many Americans do eat fresh vegetables and fish and lots of healthy stuff like that.

Now he's suddenly discovered that there is such a thing as a farmers' market. In case you'd never heard of them, every town of any size has one at least once a week. Local truck farmers sell their produce. My dad goes to the one in downtown Overland Park every Saturday morning in season to buy green beans and tomatoes and canteloupes and peaches and corn on the cob. You get a good deal both on quality and price. Not everybody shops there--Andy says only about 8-10% of Americans--but it's an available option that's becoming more popular. Andy adds that there are 44 farmers' markets in New York, more than ever before, which means that it's not only us folks out there in Kansas who can get this stuff.

This looks like a promising trend, Americans buying healthy fresh food locally, doesn't it?

Nope. Andy's take is that the reason behind it is that the Yanks are--get this--"frightened of the contamination of massified foods." The headline is, "Global fear, local food." It wouldn't be because the Americans are developing better tastebuds or want to be healthier or any other intelligent reason, it has to be because they're afraid. The Europeans constantly peddle the line that everything we do in America is because of fear.

He adds, "Ironically, 30 years ago massified and scientifically reconstructed food was considered safer and more hygenic than natural, local products." Huh? I remember lots of natural, local products available for sale in 1977. Hell, I remember going out to the local pick-your-own strawberry farm every summer, to the apple orchard every fall, and planting a fairly large garden as well. I don't remember anyone ever saying that such food was unsafe or not hygenic, at least not if you washed it first. In fact, that was the collectivist Seventies, when everybody was into brown rice and stuff like that. Duh. The other thing I remember people doing, which they don't do as much anymore, is putting up fresh foods for the winter in Mason jars.