What an awful day. Terrorists, presumably Hamas, blew up a bus in Jerusalem and killed at least twenty people, and the Saddamite terrorists blew up the UN headquarters in Baghdad, killing twenty more. These people, along with the three thousand on 9-11 and the two hundred at Bali and those murdered at the US Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya and the victims of the Cole explosion and the US and British troops murdered by the Saddam Fedayeen and its Al Qaeda allies, and the hundreds of Israeli citizens killed by nationalism-crazed psychopaths should not be forgotten.

I've got the solution for the Israeli problem. Very simply, pull all the settlements out of the West Bank. (This is the major Israeli political problem. It's got to be Sharon who makes the deal--a weak Labour government wouldn't be able to pull it off.) Pull all your troops out, too. Build an impermeable wall along all Israel's pre-1967 frontiers, though including the Golan Heights. Let foreigners in and out as you wish through official checkpoints. Let the Palestinians set up whatever governments they want in the West Bank and Gaza and do whatever they want, as long as it doesn't include violence against Israel or sheltering terrorists. If those things happen, Israel should be free to retaliate as it sees fit. If those things don't happen over a span of, say, five years, tear down the wall.

As for Iraq, check out this story on page four of today's Vangua by Eusebio Val. I was extremely surprised when I saw this.

...The attack (in Baghdad) has been the latest step in a series of actions against the so-called "soft targets"--of a non-military character and very vulnerable--such as the Jordanian Embassy, the oil pipelines, and the running-water infrastructure. The escalation seems to respond to a well-detailed plan to sabotage the reconstruction of the country, to generate chaos, to increase internal discontent, and frighten away foreign aid.

The terrorists have crossed a line and their message is unmistakeable: not only the occupying troops from the US and the coalition which supports it are in constant danger, but also all those who collaborate in any manner with the reconstruction, whether they are company executives or members of international organisms. Not even the personnel under the flag of the united Nations is safe, as the secretary-general's own special envoy, the Brazilian diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello.

In the eyes of the terrorists, they are all accomplices of the policy designed by the White House which--we should remember--was approved in a large part in Resolution 1483 passed by the Security Council last May. This resolution, passed by 14 out of 15 votes, accepted the new status quo after the war and gave the Anglo-American occupation coalition supreme power in Iraq for at least a year...

Yesterday's attacks, added to the escalation of recent weeks and the unstoppable attacks on the American troops, support the thesis that Iraq might become an El Dorado of terrorism in the Middle East, the favorite destination of jihadists--Muslim extremists in favor of a holy war against the West, like Al Qaeda--and agents from the countries of the region--Syria? Iran? Sectors of Saudi Arabia itself?--who have no interest in Iraq's stabilization and progress under a democratic experiment that might spread.

It is an ironic paradox that a war officially fought within the framework of the world struggle against terrorism, has fertilized and sown the land for Iraq to become a terrorist magnet. It was never proven that during the Saddam era, Al Qaeda was active in Iraq. No one doubts that it certainly is now.

The spectacle and the media impact of the actions of the Iraqi resistance to the occupation are frustrating for Washington and eclipse the successes which have occurred in many aspects of the everyday life of the Iraqis and the relative tranquility with which, despite the avalanche of negative news, most parts of the country including the capital enjoy, as Joshua Hammer reported yesterday in Newsweek.

Good God. This is the most sensible thing I have ever seen written in the Vangua. Note the emphasis (I added the bold type), that Mr. Val gives to calling a terrorist a terrorist. Note that Mr. Val mentions that most of the country is calm. Note that Mr. Val could sort of deal with the concept of these terrorists fighting the American occupation troops, but he went ballistic when the terrorists started blowing up international do-gooders. Fair enough, I guess, but chalk up one correspondent from the Vangua on the side of the angels.

Alfredo Abian goes spastic in the page two signed editorial:

The dispersed Iraqi resistance is showing itself more and more active. So much that we don't know anymore what the line is between an open insurrection and the ambushes, the bomb attacks, or putting a bullet into an American soldier's head while he is buying a CD...The resistance is in no mood for diplomatic sophistications. To it, all are invaders now, including the very same UN that tried to stop the occupation.

Alf, it would be an insurrection if the people en masse were grabbing guns and standing in the street facing off with the occupation troops. This is a bunch of terrorist gangs, to wit: the Saddam Fedayeen--Saddam's SS, who are all criminals and deserve no pity--Ansar Al Islam, a terrorist gang operating in north-central Iraq with ties to Al Qaeda and many Muslim-fanatic volunteers from other countries--and Saddam's Marielitos, the guys he turned out of the jails, are just plain criminals operating criminally in small gangs. This is not a resistance, since resistances are fighting for their national survival, and the Iraqi terrorists are destroying their country rather than helping it build itself up.

I see several very positive sides to the current struggle in Iraq: a) it is now clear to the whole world outside Berkeley and Barcelona that these are bad guys, as if it weren't clear already, but you must have your head up your ass if you can somehow argue that these murderers are fighting for the right b) we're fighting the terrorists in their territory, not ours, and that's where we want to fight them c) if Iraq is a terrorist magnet, all the better, we can get 'em all in one place d) everybody is recognizing that the reconstruction people are trying to do something good and decent rather than being ruthless imperialists e) we're going to win if this is the best they can do. They've got a limited number of loyalists and I don't think they're going to get too many new ones outside the Tikrit triangle. Assuming our Special Forces are not complete morons, which I just bet they're not, they ought to be cracking down on some of these terrorist cells f) there's a swing toward seeing the war as legitimate, if a paper like the Vangua can print an article like Eusebio Val's using words like "terrorist" g) our guys keep busting more and more of Saddam's top henchmen--the ten of diamonds just got nailed.

The Vangua prints several very good George Bush quotes:

"The civilized world will not allow itself to be intimidated and these murderers will not determine the future of Iraq, which is on an irresistible route toward self-government and peace."

"The terrorists have demonstrated their fear of progress and their hatred for peace. They are enemies of the Iraqi people. They want to go back to the days of the tortures and the mass graves."

"We will persevere through all difficulties, we will continue this war against terrorism, and we will win."

Remember the Casablanca bombing that killed 45 people, incluiding four Spaniards? The Moroccan government held the trial. 87 members of the terrorist group Salafiya Yahadiya were convicted. Four death sentences. Life imprisonment for 37. 30 years for 16. 20 years for 16 more. Lesser sentences for thirteen.

Morocco, for a North African country, is pretty decent. It has a fairly stable and legitimate government. Its people live acceptably, at the level of, say, Turkey or Brazil or Thailand. It is a US ally. I vote we do whatever we can to strengthen ties with Morocco (without going into opposition of Spain, of course) and make it a high-level project to induce the absolute Moroccan king to increase the country's amount of democracy and liberalize the economy. Morocco could be a real success story in five or ten years with a couple of pushes in the right direction.

In the Barcelona metropolitan area approximately 900 more people died during the heat wave than during that usual stretch of time. We're about 1/10 the population of Spain, four million or so, depending on where you draw the metro area line. 9000 extra dead in Spain? That might be way too high, but I guarantee you it's in the thousands.

The Catalans are all thrilled because there was a big feature in the Travel section of the New York Times, which I haven't read but which I gather was very positive. It mentioned Ferran Adria's restaurant as having the most creative cuisine in the world, and pointed to Spanish cooking as able to stand up to the best France can offer.

The story also mentioned hiking at Aiguestortes National Park, the scenery in the Valle d'Aran, and the Romanesque churches in the Valle de Boi. I've been to all of those places and highly recommend them. The local people up there are great because the tourists they get are not millions of sun-sea-sangria morons, but several thousand appreciative people who like their country--and are high-dollar tourists, too, interested in nature and culture and good food. The other tourists you meet are cool people, too, not chalky-white fat guys from Sunderland with tattoos on their faces but people who know the difference between Romanesque and Gothic architecture and that the Pyrenees has some of the best hiking trails in the world.

By the way, check out Trevor over at Kaleboel if you want to set up a hiking trip; that's what he does, organizes cool hikes in Catalonia.

The Spinning of a Story: How La Vanguardia Covered the Blackout

Friday, August 15: The blackout is a breaking story for La Vangua's staff and they obviously can't tear down their whole paper. Their front page headline, in a one-column box to the left above the fold, is "Giant Blackout Leaves New York, Other US and Canadian Cities in the Dark". The full story is on page five, and it is credited to "Agencies", which means, I guess, EFE, AFP, AP, and Reuters. The story reports that rumors of a terrorist attack were quickly quashed, that various American and Canadian authorities were blaming one another for what had happened, that the nuke plants were shut down and there was no danger, that hundreds of thousands of people got stuck because of transport problems and had to walk home or spend the night in their offices or whatever, that there were no civil disorders, that seven major airports were closed down, and that President Bush, Governor Pataki, and Mayor Bloomberg were up on the situation and had announced that it was under control and the power would be back on soon.

The "human interest" details were that a lot of people, as long as they had nothing better to do, went to bars and restaurants to finish off the cold drinks and fresh food and that restaurants were offering free food because it would just spoil without registration.

Fair enough. That's pretty good. It looks to me a lot like what I saw in other sources.

Saturday, August 16: Front-page lead headline: "Giant Blackout Affects 50 Million Americans; Power Returns Slowly to New York and Other US, Canadian Cities; Thousands of Citizens Sleep in Streets, Unable to Reach Home; Washington and Ottawa Blame One Another for Biggest Blackout in History". Further stories are on pages 2-6 and on the editorial page.

From Alberto Abian's signed page 2 editorial: ...No matter how surprising it might seem, the first world power controls, even militarily, the principal energy-producing zones, but it is incapable of delivering this transformed energy to its citizens, who for one night must have felt the same sensations of fear and impotence that the Iraqis of Basra must suffer: they live above an immense lake of petroleum and they have to use candles for light. Bush himself admitted yesterday that his country's electrical grid had become obsolete. A euphemism which hides the lack of investment and the chaos which the deregulation of the sector, whose costly investments in infrastructures are incompatible with the immediate profitability that some Wall Street sharks want. The Californians, for example, have suffered from blackouts caused by the companies themselves in order to raise their prices and gain more official subsidies. In the light of this dark experience, the American neoliberals (=free-marketeers) will be able to see in their own retinas that the privatization of this sector should not be incompatible with the maintenance of some type of intervention on the part of the State.

Great. First sign of the spin: Reducing the powers of the government through deregulation and privatization is bad and it caused this blackout mess. Problem: Most Spaniards seem to believe that there is no government regulation whatsoever in the United States. In fact, there is plenty, especially in the energy sector.

(Technical Stuff I Really Don't Understand): My understanding, from what I can figure out, is that there are three phases of getting electricity to your house: the production of the power in a coal or hydro or nuke or whatever plant, the transmission of large quantities of power from the power station to the local power companies, and the distribution of small amounts of power from your local power company to your house and everybody else's. The power plant is the factory, the transmission company is the wholesaler, and the local power company is the retailer.

The current problem is not so much in production or distribution but in transmission, it seems. Apparently the problem is due to TOO MUCH government regulation of the prices transmitters of power can charge, and they're not making a profit and so have no money to invest in their infrastructure. There are other problems, like the effective monopolies that local power systems have--it's like the Seventies, when you got your phone service from Ma Bell or nobody. Well, in KC, you get your power from KCPL or from nobody. The consumer has no choice. Also, our friends the Greens and our tinfoil-hat wackos about the dangers of radiation from transmission lines haven't been any help in getting new connections built.

Second, notice the Yankee-bashing beginning right here, with the reference to "now the damn Yankees know what it feels like to be an Iraqi in Basra". Also note the continuing emphasis on fear in all reports from the United States. The Vanguardia has been pushing this line for years, that the Yanks are panic-stricken cowards crapping in their pants at the slightest pretext. I guess it makes them feel better to think the Americans are richer and their country is more powerful, but they're forced to live in a society that keeps them in terror.

Sunday, August 17: "Light Returns to New York" is the full-page head, with a huge color photo of the New York skyline with the lights on again. And here's Andy Robinson on page four:

...a young woman was caught in a human wave trying desperately to get on the ferry to New Jersey: "There was a real riot to get on and I was pretty scared," she said.

No matter what, luck always respects money, and more so in New York than anywhere else. There were those in the opulent downtown having a sushi dinner by candlelight before the fish could spoil. They even celebrated "warm champagne" parties. But for the masses of service workers who walked sweating down the great avenues of Manhattan, the closing down of public transport meant long walks to the workers' neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Queens or the Bronx. "I had to walk five hours," said a young Polish waitress.

Almost all New Yorkers of a certain economic level followed the advice of the mayor, Michael Bloomberg, and took Friday off--though his advice to go to the beach became less attractive when it was announced that thousands of tons of excrement had been dumped into the sea after the shutdown of the water treatment plants. The silent immigrant working class, however, walked back to Manhattan on Friday to clean empty offices or wait in the kitchen for the return of the electricity.

In the luxurious neighborhood of Soho small generators with cables were connected to the sumptuous lofts. In the cafes they were charging fifteen dollars for a sandwich, charging the blackout tax. But in any case the electricity would return soon to neighborhoods like Soho or the Upper East Side, next to Central Park. The Wall Street brokers had electricity at the regular opening time thanks to a generator in the stock market. But three blocks away in Chinatown and the Lower East Side, the neighborhoods with the lowest incomes in South Manhattan--there was no light until nine PM.

Hoo boy. According to Yank-hating Brit Andy, this whole blackout was a lesson in class consciousness and about how in supposedly egalitarian America the rich party and the poor suffer.

So let's see. There was a blackout in New York. It was reported neutrally by the international news agencies. As soon as the Vanguardia got a chance to opine, though, they immediately spun as negatively as possible. The blackout means something profound, you see. This means that American-style deregulation, privatization, and market liberalization are bad. This also means that Americans should reflect on the terrible suffering they are causing the Iraqis. It is a symbol of the panic in which Americans live. And it is proof of the abysmal difference between rich and poor in the United States.

That's quite a spin job, that is. But what did you expect?

The almost always superb James Taranto wrote a doubting piece about the 3000 dead from the heat in France.

Does anyone else find this claim suspicious? "France's worst heat wave on record has killed an estimated 3,000 people across the nation, the Health Ministry said Thursday, as the government faced accusations that it failed to respond to a major health crisis," the Associated Press reports from Paris.

Three thousand deaths? In a Western European country? Because of the weather? This is the kind of death toll usually reserved for Third World natural disasters--Chinese earthquakes, Bangladeshi floods and the like. Has the heat really killed 3,000 Frenchmen?

As it turns out, the AP dispatch gives ample reason to regard the French claim as fishy. For one thing, the Health Ministry says the 3,000 figure includes deaths "linked directly or indirectly" to the heat. Who knows how tenuous the link would have to be to say a death was "indirectly" linked to the heat? And it turns out the claim rests at least in part on a correlation without any proof of cause and effect:

In a statement, the ministry said its estimate was partly drawn from studying deaths in 23 Paris regional hospitals from July 25-Aug. 12 and from information provided by General Funeral Services.

According to 2002 figures, the Paris regional hospitals that were surveyed could have expected some 39 deaths a day, the ministry said. But Tuesday, they recorded nearly 180, it said.

"We note a clear increase in cases beginning Aug. 7-8, which we can regard as the start of the epidemic of deaths linked to the heat," the statement said.

Morgues and funeral directors have reported skyrocketing demand for their services since the heat wave took hold. General Funeral Services, France's largest undertaker, said it handled some 3,230 deaths from Aug. 6-12, compared to 2,300 on an average week in the year--a 37 percent jump.

Might it be noteworthy that the French are claiming almost the same number of deaths from the heat as America suffered on Sept. 11? A popular lunatic conspiracy theory on the "European street" has it that George W. Bush is to blame every time the weather is bad. (This cartoon from Le Monde hints at the idea.) Don't be surprised if the America-haters' next talking point is that by renouncing the Kyoto Protocols Bush killed as many people as Osama bin Laden did.

Jim, Jim, Jim. Not even the French ALWAYS lie.

Their stats are almost certainly true, if you look at the figures for excess deaths in Barcelona. Let's just say, since the heat wave lasted (it's finally broken!) more than fifty days, that only on the last twenty days did people with asthma and other respiratory diseases and just generally old or sick or weak people die in large numbers due to the heat. Well, Barcelona was averaging about fifty deaths a day more than normal during the end of the heat wave. Fifty times twenty is two thousand. Take just one-quarter of that figure, to be conservative, and you've got five hundred extra dead people in Barcelona alone this summer.

So what's different about this August and any other August that would account for the excess number of deaths? No epidemics. No weird mutant flu viruses. Nothing medical especially strange. But, well, it's been incredibly hot for a long time with no relief this August. That is not true of a normal August. That seems to me to be the difference.

Such huge death tolls are not unusual in the United States during extreme heat waves. Says my 2002 World Almanac:

June-Sept. 1980, E and Central US heatwave. Approx. 10,000 dead.
Summer 1988, E and Central US heatwave. Approx. 5000-10,000 dead.
July 12-17 1995, MW and NE US heatwave. Approx. 800 dead, incl. 560 in Chicago alone.
Summer 1998, S US heatwave. Approx. 200 dead.
Summer 1999, continental US heatwave, 502 dead.
Summer 2000, US heatwave, 140 dead.

Looks to me like in a big heatwave in the US as many as 10,000 people have died, and I remember that 1980 one. We were living in Dallas and the temperature hit 100 every day for more than a month. So it seems to me that the 3000-deaths number the French have come out with is by no means out of line.

Sorry, Mr. Taranto. You blew this one.

Great. I go away for a long weekend in the country and you guys go and have a blackout. I know absolutely nothing about complex technical stuff like power generation, which is why I teach English. This morning's interview from Fox with the US Energy Secretary, Spencer Abraham, is pretty informative. It's not quite "Power Generation and Distribution for Dummies", which is what I'd really like to see. I'll bet Den Beste has something up like that; that's one place I'll definitely be checking during the next few minutes.

What pleasantly surprised me is that there were very few reports of looting and violence, and what there was happened in Detroit, surprise, surprise, and Canada. The overwhelming majority of those who lost their electricity seem to have behaved very civically with a "we're all in this together" spirit. At least that's what I'm putting together from the TV news and the Vangua.

France is admitting it: there are more than 3000 dead officially recognized by the French government due to the heat wave. That means you gotta figure a couple thousand each in Spain and Portugal. They finally stopped the fire near Terrassa and that one's under control, but there's another one broken out up near Massanet, up the coast from Barcelona. That one's caused 4000 evacuations.

Most of these fires seem to be springing up in exurbs. I imagine this has something to do with the reason that tornadoes always hit trailer parks. What really happens, of course, is that when a tornado hits someplace that's solidly constructed, the damage it does is pretty minimal and people don't get killed, well, maybe one or two if they get real unlucky. It's quickly forgotten. But when a tornado hits a trailer park, where the alleged buildings are just boxes bolted to a concrete slab, everything gets blasted to hell and gone and a lot of people die and it sticks out in our memory.

Same with these fires. There are a lot of subdivisions (called urbanizaciones here) within, say, fifty or sixty kilometers of Barcelona. They're often built in foresty areas with a lot of the local vegetation, white pine and scrub oak (encina), all over the place. But those urbanizations get all dry, almost as dry as just plain forested land, when it's hot and parched like it is right now. So the area around them catches fire and everybody has to be evacuated just in case. Those are the fires that get on the news. Now, there's not enough dry vegetation to catch fire in Barcelona or its inner suburbs, and nobody ever hears about the fires out in the middle of nowhere. The news-making fires happen in these exurbs, rural enough to catch fire.

God only knows what causes them; I suspect either Catalonia's decades-old electricity grid infrastructure of sparking most of them off, or the occasional farmer doing something dumb like burning off his fields. There seems to be a mass conspiracy theory going on here, though, because I just don't believe that these fires (there will be the odd exception) are started by pyromaniacs, as so many reports state. Almost always the fire department's verdict is that it could have been caused by firebugs, but it could have also been caused by everything from a trail bike's sparking off or some picnic barbecuers who didn't put out their charcoal to the typical moron who tosses his cigarette out the car window.

Yesterday the Vanguardia printed a letter to the editor from some paranoid who thinks the fires were started because there are significant hidden money interests behind it. Yeah, right, if I'm a developer I want to torch forest land so my urbanization will consist of houses intersperced with charred tree trunks. This guy's probably thinking some really devious people like Jews and Masons and the Trilateral Commission are behind the whole thing for dark, obscure reasons that will only become clear centuries after.

Prediction: within days somebody will come out with a story saying a) the heat wave is due to global warning b) global warming is all the United States's fault c) the US is to blame because it rejected the Kyoto Protocol d) therefore the fires here in Southwestern Europe are the United States's fault e) the Americans are all murderers because their energy consumption is causing the climate change that is causing all these French people to die.

Kittyblogging and Complaining:

It's hot. The fire that has already killed five people near Sant Llorenc Savall is burning out of control, and it's joined with another fire that started near the village of Gallifa. The conjoined fires are moving north and they can't stop them. Several hundred people have been evacuated and the death toll from the heat has hit 32 in Spain. I'll bet there are going to be a lot more than that. The Vangua published a photo from a weather satellite, in which an enormous smokeball covering central Catalonia is visible.

Oscar and the Siamese Twins are in the hall, Bart is under the living room sofa, Lisa is under the dining table, and George is under the bed. They are all stretched out on the comparatively cool floor and moving as little as possible. They are not happy. I wouldn't be, either, if I was wearing a fur coat. We have the bathtub full of cool water for occasional dips, and Oscar, who is a water cat, can't resist climbing onto the side of the tub and dipping his little paw in and splashing a bit. Except this time he fell in. Didn't like that one little bit.

They're predicting a break, maybe, for Friday or Saturday. We all sure hope so.

In case you'd forgotten (I certainly had), here is a collection of statements made about the Saddam regime in Iraq and using military force against it--by folks who immediately began carping at President Bush when he began to do precisely that. Honorable Exception: Bill Clinton, who publicly expressed his approval of the war on Saddam.

A writer I like who doesn't seem to get much attention is Slate's media critic, Jack Shafer. I've linked to him before. This is a good solid Shafer column that shows a couple of different sides of the guy. If you like it, check out his archive.

There's a rather manufactured controversy going on regarding a supposed feud between Rush Limbaugh and the blogosphere. InstaPundit and several other bloggers have picked up on it.

My take is this: The radio audience is much bigger than the blogosphere will ever be. Rush Limbaugh is an excellent, professional talk show host, and he will continue to be an important influence on popular opinion as long as he keeps going. Rush's target audience is approximately high school graduate level, same as Time and Newsweek and the network news. Radio gets huge numbers of listeners, and if I am correct, Limbaugh has the single most popular talk show in America. There are few choices on the radio, though--there are not many information sources, 20 or 30 stations in a city of which two or three are news-talk, and a whole hell of a lot of information receivers, anyone with a radio.

The blogosphere is just the other way around. There are a tremendous amount of information sources and a much smaller number of information receivers. How many people, bloggers and blogreaders, are active in the political B-sphere? We're not counting kittybloggers or techheads, we're counting Reynolds and Den Beste and Quick and their ilk, and let's define active as reading at least one blog a week. I bet it's fewer than one million people all totaled. Limbaugh gets what, five million listeners a day?

Blogs are also generally aimed higher than mass-market radio; I figure most political blogs are written for a college-graduate audience. One thing this means is that blogs are only going to appeal to the top 30% socioeconomically, while Rush appeals to that big middle seventy percent. (There are overlaps, of course, but the bottom twenty percent are reachable only through the most basic TV programs.)

So I'm really not sure what the big deal is. Limbaugh and bloggers, I think, are aiming at different audiences and so there's not that much competition between them. Sure, some of the blogosphere also listens to Limbaugh, but I don't see that either is taking audience away from the other, unlike what the blogosphere and the net in general are doing to the daily newspapers (showing how much they suck) and the weekly newsmagazines (showing how out of date they are; it's a dying format).

Prediction: Limbaugh is a loudmouth but he is very far from being stupid. He might not have been too hip to blogs before this little contretemps, but I'll guarantee you he is now, and I would not be at all surprised to see him mention several of the more prominent conservative bloggers on an upcoming program. Why turn the bloggers into an enemy when he can so easily have them as an ally?

Comment: One of the shibboleths of the left is Rush Limbaugh. You have to hate his guts if you're a liberal. Well, I've actually listened to Limbaugh with some frequency, and he is the opposite of angry, mean, and rude, as his enemies paint him. He's actually one of the calmer and less obnoxious radio talk-show hosts. He's made several well-publicized errors, but that'd be hard not to do when you're on the radio 900 hours a year. I wouldn't put myself down as a big fan, but Rush is definitely the best radio guy in America now in his field.

Tragedy near Terrassa. Five people were killed--asphyxiated--in Sant Llorenc Savall. There is a major fire up there that is still burning out of control; several hundred people have been evacuated from the area. Portugal, Spain, and France are burning; square miles of forest are going up and people are dying. High temperatures are ranging from about 95 to 110 F over southwestern Europe; Barcelona, where the highs are around 95, is getting off comparatively easy because of our seacoast location, though the surface temperature of the seawater is around 78-82 F, extremely warm. There are no signs of a break this week.

I've seen a few American bloggers calling the Europeans a bunch of wimps because it's a big deal that it hit 100 F in London, which has never happened before. See, you Yanks over there don't understand that we don't have air conditioning. Everybody in KC has air conditioning. 98 percent, anyway. It's a necessity of life when it's 90 F every day for two months like it is there. That never happens here in Europe. Nobody in Britain has A/C--hell, it gets hot enough to use it maybe three days a year. I don't have A/C because 85 F or so is as hot as it ever gets in Barcelona--but this year we've had 52 consecutive days with temps above 90 and there's no sign of any letup. They don't have A/C in a lot of hospitals, which is causing hundreds of deaths. Only fifty have been reported in Paris, but there'll be hundreds more all around Europe.

As usual the loonies are shouting that it's global warming. Folks, the whole point of global warning is that it's a gradual increase in temperatures caused by the buildup in carbon dioxide, right? It's supposed to be something we will see in the years to come, according to the theory. This here we're experiencing isn't a change in climate, it's a weather phenomenon caused by two enormous high-pressure systems. It is nasty hot weather, all right, but it is neither proof of nor a symptom of climate change.

Record-breaking temperatures, you say? Well, there are 365 days in a year, which means one record high temp and one record low temp for each of them 365 dates. In Barcelona records have been kept since about 1860, about 140 years. You do the math, but it looks to me like you ought to have an average, every year, of two record-breaking high temp days and two record-breaking low temps. Some years you'll have zero. Most years you'll have a couple. Every twenty or fifty or whatever years you'll have a big year and 20 or 30 new records. This is a big year for record high temps.

There hasn't been a good wild one from La Vangua recently; Baltobrain Porcel is on vacation, and someone's told Chemical Lali Sole to go back to howling about gender discrimination rather than to continue howling about the intrinsic evil of the United States. But Jose Ignacio Gonzalez Faus is still in business. Mr. Gonzalez Faus is a Jesuit priest, billed as the "academic director" of Cristianisme i Justicia. Our pal Jose Manuel, who knows a lot about Church matters, says that Gonzalez Faus is "for a Jesuit, a pretty good Marxist." We'll call him Nacho, the nickname for Ignacio, which is especially appropriate because Mr. Gonzalez is about half-flaky and about half-soggy, just like ballpark nachos. He's also pretty indigestible and just generally hard to stomach.

Ten years ago I had already written about the danger that "we will end up selling our prized liberty for a mess of pottage" and that we were on the road to "a world-level Fascism, infinitely more difficult to escape from than when one is dealing with Fascism in one or two countries." It wasn't a fatalistic verdict; life has "surprising mechanisms of correction" and we can expect that we will function. But "perhaps one of these mechanisms is that somebody warn of the danger".

OK, Nacho, you're Cassandra. We are now warned. Shut up already.

Ten years later, my fear is growing. In its yearly report, Amnesty International is launching a similar warning. The situation of the world has gotten worse with the change from the old "balance of terror" to the current unbalanced terror, where only one country can arm itself to the teeth and with no control, while the rest, if they arm themselves, will be condemned to death as a terrorist threat.

Calm down, Nacho. Are you saying China and Russia and Taiwan and India and Pakistan and South Korea and Israel and Britain and France aren't "armed to the teeth"? And are you saying that the United States' defense policy should be under the control of others? What others? Are you saying that Afghanistan and Iraq weren't terrorist threats? Have you noticed those are the only two governments we've taken out? If what we were trying to do was silence criticism, we'd have taken out France, not the Taliban. And are you saying that the world was better BEFORE the fall of the Soviet Union?

The coming Fascism is a transvestite Fascism, dressed up as democracy. This is not negated but sterilized. The separation of powers is annulled in fact, though not by law: the "fourth estate" becomes the property of the executive (the Berlusconi case) and the judicial branch is nominated by the executive which puts it at the executive's service (the Cardenal case).

OK. Globalization is Fascism, huh? Of course, Nacho is using "Fascist" according to the standard leftist definition: "anybody who's smarter than I am." If you're saying the United States is not a democracy, sorry to inform you you're wrong; the government does not own any of the media of communication, and we conservatives like it that way. We don't want either Berlusconi or Red Ken to get hold of any state-controlled media. And, of course, in the US federal judges are nominated by the executive but must be confirmed by the legislative, and if Nacho had the slightest idea about American politics, he'd know that during all of President Bush's term he's been having problems getting judicial appointments confirmed by the Democrats in Congress. He'd also know that some big names, like Robert Bork, have been kept off the bench by the Congress.

A Guatemalan author once said that dictators are not a cause but an effect. Searching for the causes of this devalued democracy, we might point out the neoliberal separation between policics and the economy. Political life is becoming more and more controlled by the economy. Now look: capitalism is an excluding system, while democracy tends to be inclusive--votes for everyone, health and education for everyone. For a while democracy braked and partially held back capitalism. Now capitalism, free of political controls, is threatening to put and end to democracy.

What? Look, doofus, capitalism is not only an ECONOMIC system but the only effective one. Democracy is a POLITICAL system. You could have a (mostly) capitalist democracy (the US), a capitalist dictatorship (Pinochet), a Socialist democracy (Sweden, more or less), or a Socialist dictatorship (the USSR). The United States has plenty of brakes on unscrupulous people who misuse the capitalist system, like the Federal Reserve system, the IRS, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the insider-trading laws, the regulation of banks and insurance companies, the regulation of corporations, the antitrust laws, the laws allowing labor unions and collective bargaining, the Treasury Department, the contract-enforcing judicial system, and an extremely long etcetera.

As for votes for everyone, of course. That's democracy. Health care and education for everyone--that's not democracy, that's the welfare state. Don't confuse the two. Now, it is true that I support access for everyone to health care and education, and that's what we've got in the States--sure, a lot of the public schools suck, and only old people (Medicare) and poor people (Medicaid) get government-subsidized health care. You can't be turned away from an emergency room, though. The American welfare-state system could be improved and I yell and scream about it all the time, but it does exist. Most European countries have considerably more generous welfare-state systems than the US, but it's just a lie to imply that capitalism implies no government spending on welfare.

More fertile ground for the new Fascism would be this: human beings, at least today's Occidentals, can be defined as an "insecure animal" And the two great principles of modernity and democracy--the dignity and the liberty of man--imply a sizable dose of insecurity, risk, and trouble as part of human life. Maybe this insecurity is what puts the idea of preventive war, which is not new, into circulation: "We have the moral obligation, we have the obligation to our people, to kill those people who, with no doubt, will kill us." These are not the words of Bush or one of his idolators. They are from a speech by Himmler in 1943. But they coincide with Bush in two points: the "moral duty" to kill and the "no doubt" which justifies it--Saddam Hussein had, without a doubt, weapons of mass destruction.

Oh boy. Comparing Bush with Himmler, huh? That's a new low. It's really obscene, not to mention ignorant. The current War on Terrorism, of which Afghanistan was the first campaign and Iraq the second, is not a preventive war. It was started on September 11, 2001, in case you don't remember, and it's nowhere near finished yet. Second, Himmler was talking about the moral duty to massacre people because of their religion, which is of course sickening; Bush is talking about his sworn duty to defend the United States. Himmler wanted to kill as many Jews as he could; Bush wants to kill as few as possible of anybody who isn't actively fighting for the terrorists and the rogue states.

By the way, all animals are insecure. The rabbit never knows when the fox or hawk is going to get him. Humans today, at least outside Africa, are more secure than they have ever been. A Westerner today is about as safe as any animal has ever been in history; not too many rabbits or foxes or hawks die of old age. And Saddam did have weapons of mass destruction. He used them on the Iranians and the Kurds, and the Boston Globe is reporting that he ordered chemical weapons to be used against Allied troops in the March-April war.

Another factor could be the current "culture of demotivation" that the mass media broadcasts. The people sometimes intuits the danger and protests or goes out in the streets for a few days. But if time is allowed to pass, the people ends up getting tired. Then they can admit freely that they lied: that there was no solid evidence to attack Iraq, that the only solid thing was the desire to drop bombs. The lie will be admitted without anybody's feeling obligated to resign. And when lies become installed in public life, democracy is very threatened.

The fact is that issues like the Iraq war don't affect the people of Spain at all, except for making them somewhat safer in the long run, which they generally don't recognize. There are no immediate benefits or losses for the Spaniards relating to this issue, so a little bit of feel-good, we're-so-moral protesting went on. It was more of a fashion statement than compassion for the Iraqi or Afghani peoples; I still remember TV slut Yola Berrocal showing up on Tele 5 wearing only a bikini, with a "No War" sticker hanging off her tit. If something really affected the lives of Spaniards, like the ETA, you'd see mass demonstrations all over the place. Which you see. It's Maslow's hierarchy; if you've got enough to eat and a place to live and physical safety for yourself, then you can allow yourself to spend your energy demonstrating against the damn Yankees because it makes you feel good about yourself.

But what this people wants is not to struggle (the struggle for life is already tiring enough), but some idol to cheer for and some gadget to become idiotized by. It doesn't matter of they're Beckhams today or Butraguenos tomorrow; modern man needs to identify himself with some social legend in order to feel positive about himself and accept himself peacefully. But when a people has lost its sensitivity to measure the level of its own ridiculousness (the Beckham case), the immunological system of the society is threatened.

Well, sure, there's a lot of stress these days, but "struggle for life"? In Spain, where if you're hungry or homeless it's not the government's fault, life is less of a struggle than anywhere else in history. That's why people can afford to waste time going to public demonstrations instead of, say, digging up worms. And plenty of ridiculous ephemeral shit goes on all the time in any society that can afford it. Methinks that what Nacho is really complaining about is that the lumpenproletariat has plenty of money and spare time, two things that Western democracy and capitalism have provided them with, and they choose to spend their excess money buying tacky garbage they don't need and their excess time absorbed by bad television. Set up the re-education camps! Nacho's in town, and it's 24 hours straight of documentaries about Peruvian fishermen and Social Realist theater! He knows what's best for you!

Some symptoms of this Fascism might be the discredit of democracy, fallen into the hands of the BBA (I'm not referring to any bank but to the trio Bush, Berlusconi, Aznar) Or the different way in which the United States believes that justice should be administered whether we are dealing with alleged American criminals (the negative to the International Criminal Court) or those from other countries (the cases of Guantanamo and Iraq) Typical of all forms of fascism faw the practice of preventive prisons with no judicial process against those who are suspicious or opponents: and now the Department of Justice is justifying the admitted violations of human rights in Guantanamo as necessary to prevent new terrorist acts.

So the United States, Bush, Aznar, and Berlusconi are all Fascists? What the hell definition of Fascism is Nacho using? I thought it had something to do with absolute dictatorship and the (non-capitalist) corporative state, neither of which accurately describes the aovementioned four. (I will freely admit that I think Berlusconi's a crook, but he did get elected, and he's PM of Italy until their judicial system gets him.) As for human rights and Guantanamo, that's a red herring. Nobody's being mistreated there; the Russian citizens--probably mostly Chechens--imprisoned at Gitmo want to stay instead of being sent home to face the music there. What the Gitmo prisoners are is illegal bearers of arms caught in the act. In the old days they'd have been shot out of hand. Today we're not sure what to do with them, but we do know if we turn 'em loose they'll be back in business as fast as a Barcelona mugger.

Oh, yeah, the US problem with the ICC is that a bunch of jokers like you, Nacho, would immediately trump up charges against anyone ever involved with the US government and military. We prefer to try our own citizens, thank you. That's called national sovereignty, which you yourself, Nacho, are so fond of defending when it comes to Cuba or Iraq.

That's enough. If I translate any more of this shit I'll puke. Nacho is really spiteful and hateful, isn't he? I've never read anything angrier with less reason. My guess is he's a transferred nationalist and his base loyalty is to communism and the Soviet Union. The collapse of his dream, everything he spent his life working for, has left him with no God except the one up there he probably doesn't really believe in, and as a dialectical materialist he has a Manichean point of view about good and evil (good: the Party line, evil: everything else). His God's dead but his Satan, the United States, is stronger than ever.

He does mention, toward the end of the article, that Martin Niemoller said, "When they came for the Communists, I wasn't a Communist, so they said nothing. When they came for the union men, I wasn't a union man, so I said nothing. When they came for me there was nobody left to say anything." Well, actually, if I remember correctly, Niemoller mentioned those damn Jews at the top of his list. Nacho has intentionally falsified a quote.

Big stink in San Sebastian. The pro-ETA psychopaths ("la izquierda abertzale") had a demo yesterday. The Basque Interior Department (law enforcement) tried to ban the demo on the grounds that it might provoke violence or rioting. The Basque Supreme Court overruled Interior on Saturday on the grounds that there was no evidence that the demo was organized by Batasuna, ETA's political branch; the permit to demonstrate was applied for by a private citizen. The Mayor of San Sebastian, the Socialist Odon Elorza, says the Basque Supremes are nuts.

So the psychopaths had themselves a lovely time, shouting "Gora ETA!" over and over in the public streets. Arnaldo Otegi, ETA-Batasuna's spokesman, the most hated person in Spain, gave a fiery speech in which he said there would have been no deaths or bombs if "ETA's proposal to advance toward a national, democratic space for the Basque people had been accepted". Sounds to me like he's speaking in the name of ETA. I'd arrest him and charge him with apology for terrorism, which is illegal here, and then lock his ass up. (Note: in this context "apology" doesn't mean saying sorry, it means arguing in favor of.) Three psychopaths with their faces covered, which is also against the law here, came out on stage and torched a Spanish flag, which is also illegal. Otegi's comment was "Wow, the Spanish flag sure stinks".

Now, I'm not big on symbols. I think burning the American flag or any other national symbol (as long as you bought your own flag to burn) ought to be legal, and I do not think that a secular society ought to protect religious symbols. Of course, if you knock down some church's cross because you hate Christians, for example, then we bust you for vandalism and property destruction and anything else we can throw at you, but we don't bust you for desecration, because that shouldn't be a crime if you're torching your own Star of David or whatever. We consider you a bigot and an asshole, but that symbol is your property and you can do whatever you want with it.

I do think that burning the Spanish flag, though, shows hate for both Spain and the Spanish people. Sure, it ought to be legal. It's also despicable and shows exactly what kind of people we're dealing with here.

I think recall, initiative, and referendum elections are absolutely ridiculous, a system of procedures thought up during the Progressive / Populist era that should have been tossed out with all that other lefty World War One-era crap like the laws which restricted banks to only one state or the various laws against chain stores or, for God's sake, Prohibition.

My major problem with this system is that it smacks of too much democracy. Yep, you heard me right, too much direct democracy. We are a representative democracy, which means you vote for the people who make the laws; you don't make the laws yourself.

The purpose of representation is that one person is elected to be the voice of everybody in an area, and then all the people's elected representatives get together and make laws, restricted by the Constitution. What this does is eliminate the "Let's kill Socrates" danger of mobocracy.

It is also supposed to allow the elected representatives a certain amount of time to make policies work; you're elected for two or four or six years and one of the consequences of this is political stability rather than the indecisiveness of a government that can be thrown out on a whim. Recall elections make it impossible for political leaders to implement unpopular but necessary policies.

Recall, initiative, and referendum are all procedures that interfere with the functioning of representative democracy. Initiative and referendum takes the right to legislate away from the legislature and puts it in direct popular hands. Recall allows an unpopular elected official (not one who has behaved criminally--crooks shouldn't be removed by recall, they should be removed by impeachment and prosecution) to be removed before the end of his term.

The only thing I ever learned in philosophy class was Immanuel Kant's Categorical Imperative. It says, more or less, that any action you do that you wouldn't be willing for anybody else to do is immoral. Would you be willing to live in a society where everybody pissed in the street? No, you wouldn't, so your pissing in the street is unethical.

Would we be willing to have the President subjected to recall elections? Are you nuts? Of course not. Adams, Madison, and JQA would all have been recalled. Lincoln would have been recalled in 1862. Truman would have been recalled in 1951. The Seventies would have been a series of recall elections. Reagan might very well have been recalled in 1982 and 1987, and Clinton might have been in 1994 and certainly would have been in 1998. Right now there would be plenty of leftists willing to sign a Recall Bush petition. Boy, that'd give the world confidence in steady, responsible American leadership. What it would do is require the President to follow the polls slavishly, much more so than they do now.

Since we don't want recall elections for President, we don't want them for any other post, either. If you still don't like your elected representative when regular election time comes around, that's when you speak out against him and support some other candidate.

The Europeans are having a lovely time making fun of this California circus, which is what they're calling it and what it is. For once the Vanguardia is right when it bashes America. I don't care how much you hate Gray Davis, he did get elected governor, he is not a crook so you can't impeach him, and he gets to serve out his term. That's the way it ought to work, anyway.

Here are a couple of pieces from the Weekly Standard on the oil business and the Saudis. Check 'em out.

Hey, guess what? We're twice as popular as Howard Dean! That's right, according to N.Z. Bear's Blogosphere Ecosystem, we have 59 incoming links while Howard Dean's 2004 Call to Action, or whatever it is, only has 30. Twice as many bloggers think we're worth reading as think Governor Mean is!

So why are all the damn journalists following him around instead of me?

Remember: Vermont has what, around 400,000 people? That means managing that state is about as hard as being mayor of Kansas City--no, actually, much easier, since the KC mayor has to deal with a rotten school system, a high crime rate, several significant and difficult-to-deal-with interest groups, and keeping General Motors, US Sprint, and the GSA happy so they won't move away and take all our jobs.

In Vermont they can waste the State Lege's time debating about gay marriage. In KC the City Council has to deal with things that are much more basic, like what are we doing to reduce the murder rate on the east side or how in the hell can we get some more money without raising taxes again?

The Vangua's big front-page headline today refers to the "Iraqi resistance". There is no Iraqi resistance. There are a bunch of Fedayeen / Baath / Saddamites running around commiting crimes and terrorist acts within a small parcel of land to the west of Baghdad. These people are not patriots. Tikrit Tommy Alcoverro keeps going on about the humiliation of the millenarian Iraqi people. The smart ones consider themselves liberated from a bloody dictator. And if I were Iraqi, what I'd feel humiliated about is that such a scumball had been governing my country for so long and that the native opposition to said scumball hadn't managed to get rid of him. Besides, what Iraqi people? Iraq is three old Ottoman provinces stuck together artificially after World War I as part of the worst peace settlement of all time. Would Tikrit Tommy have written a bunch of stories about the supposed humiliation of the Germans and the Japanese in 1945?

The Vangua is also trying to split the alliance by praising the British troops around Basra for being culturally sensitive while blasting the Yanks for being arrogant and imperialistic for driving around Baghdad and Tikrit and Fallujah with guns. There is a reason for that: as I said before, all of the violence is in a small area near Baghdad where the people are from Saddam's clan and served as his power base. There is no violence in the British occupation area in the south or in the American occupation zone of Kurdistan in the north, because all those people are thrilled beyond relief to be rid of Saddam. It's only the hardcore Saddamites, who were just as bad as he was, who are shooting at the Americans.

First major fire of the year in Catalonia; they had to evacuate a couple of thousand people up in Massanet. It's well under control now. This is going to be a very bad summer for forest fires, since we're still under the heat wave; in interior Spain it's well over 38ºC (100ºF) every day, and it's around 45º in interior Andalusia and Extremadura. There are no signs of a break in the heat for another week. The forests are dry and ready to burn. About the only good thing, speaking aguaficially, is that there's no threat of a water shortage except in the southeast, since the reservoirs got nice and filled up during the wet winter and spring.

Media feeding frenzy news story: two miners got trapped by a collapse in a coal mine in El Bierzo, a mining region of Leon. It took them more than two days to dig these guys out, but they made it and the two miners survived.

Everybody's blaming the bombing of the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad on Ansar-el-Islam, a terrorist group with connections both to Saddam and Al Qaeda. Come on, people, it is NOT a wacko conspiracy theory to say that there is a loose alliance between Islamic terrorist gangs and Islamic rogue states.

The Vangua printed some crap that they got directly from the French Consulate on how the Americans are going into Liberia in order to get a stranglehold on West African oil. Uh, MM. les Grenouilles, that's like saying we went into Kosovo in order to corner the market on goulash. Liberia is an awful long way away from where there's any oil. That's Nigeria you're thinking of, the country with all the oil there.

There are also a couple of nuts from the Vangua, one of whom is the X-man, who say they see some weird shadowy shapes on the fuselage of one of the airplanes that crashed into the World Trade Center. They demand an explanation. How about this one: Those shapes are an optical illusion. You guys are crazy. Get a real life. I know there's August and not much real news but don't just make stuff up.

Here's an article from Fox News on fat pussycats. All of ours are in pretty good shape (Oscar's doing much better. By the way, the Hill's Prescription didn't acidify his pee so we changed brands to Royal Canin and it did) although they're indoor cats, of course. The article suggests taking your cat for a walk on a leash. Yeah, right, in Barcelona that's sure a great idea.

The fat cat is my mother-in-law's, Fidel. (I named him Fidel Cat-tro.) He's huge. He just wandered into her town, Vallfogona, looking pretty skinny and beat-up, and she took him in. He very quickly caught on to the concept "I been poor and I been rich, and honey, rich is better." He has vowed that he will never go hungry again and so he eats everything he can find and demands more. He's probably about a twenty-pounder, maybe a little more. Boy, is he a tub of goo. When he sits down you can't see his back feet, only his Friskies gut bulging out.

This is La Vanguardia's page two signed editorial from yesterday. Now, in Spanish and Catalan politics, the Vangua is a tolerably good and not overly prejudiced source. They really are pretty moderate; if you're a non-extremist CiU or PSC voter, they're up your alley. They don't much like the PP, though they respect Aznar, and they're not big fans of the Republican Left or the Communists, either.

When the Vanguardia turns on a Socialist leader, it's all over. Zap has been getting slammed by the standard right-wing papers, ABC, El Mundo, and La Razon, and that's understandable, but the Vangua doesn't slam a Socialist until it's pretty clear he's a loser.

Historical note: Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile completed the Reconquest of the Iberian Penuinsula in 1492, conquering the Nazari kingdom of Boabdil with its capital in Granada.

Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero is spending a few days of rest with his family in Granada. There he'll have the meditate about the devastating effects that the lack of leadership, the internal "family" struggles between the Muslims themselves, and, above all, the implacable efficiency and military discipline of the Castilian-Aragonese troops had on the Nazari Muslim kingdom. Boabdil, as we know, had to sign the surrender before the Catholic Monarchs and turn over the keys of the Alhambra before the scorn of the last sultan's own mother: "Don't cry like a woman over what you couldn't defend as a man," they say she snarled at her own son. In his vacation refuge in the Granadan town Almunecar, Zapatero must meditate over whether he has confronted the terrible crisis of credibility that having so many public officials whose real job is that of a property-development agent is causing the Socialist Party. Far from grabbing hold of the tiller, the Socialist leader seems to have opted to wait, probably because he is desperate. But he should not forget that inaction is lethal when you are facing Jose Maria Aznar, whose political discourse--despite his manners--and propaganda machine are just as effective as Ferdinand the Catholic's troops against the indecisive and defenseless Nazari sovereign.

Zap is toast. I mean, getting compared with Boabdil around here is like, I dunno, who's the biggest loser in American history? Jefferson Davis? Cornwallis? Walter Mondale? The '62 Mets?

Here's Mark Steyn on New York's new public Gay High School. This is a terrible idea. The last thing we need are more barriers keeping people apart.

The pro-segregationists' argument is that gay kids are bullied in normal high schools, so they'll be better off if they're only exposed to other gay kids. This is, of course, not precisely the best way to help people get along better with one another. Also, it's reminiscent of real-estate agents' arguments for promoting de facto residential segregation: "Oh, black people will be more comfortable around other black people anyway, so it's in their interest if we steer them toward black neighborhoods."

Here's Steyn's comeback:

...If it's unrealistic to expect Mayor Bloomberg's schools to crack down on bullying, wouldn't it be more cost-effective just to move all the bullies into Bully High School?

There they can bully each other to their hearts' content--or, as the educators would say, celebrate their identity in a purpose-built mutually threatening learning environment.

He's absolutely right. The main reason why public schools don't work any more is that they're full of kids who don't want to be there. Get them out of there. At age 14, eighth grade, you're old enough to get a job. If you don't give a crap about school, leave.

It's those students who don't care about learning who wreck the whole system. They're the ones who disrupt classes, the ones who attack and curse at teachers, the ones who bring their gang fights inside school walls, the ones who pick on anyone weaker than they are, the ones who make the "too cool for school" attitude de rigueur, and the ones who make it hard for the people who want to be there to learn anything in a regular high school, much less a high school in a tough neighborhood.

Get the bullies and the toughs and the punks out of the schools at age fourteen. If they can't read, that's their problem. (As a society, of course, we must provide adult education for those who somehow fell behind as children; I'll bet at least a few of our bullies will sign up for that around age 17 or 18 after three years working at Mickey D's.) They don't want to be in school, so give 'em job training if they want it and if not, turn 'em loose.

Note on Steyn: I like him a lot, but he has a real fixation on continuously reminding us of his heterosexuality. This is probably because everyone just assumes all theater critics are gay, but it seems to really bother him big time.

Seems there have been quite a few gay issues in the news recently, what with the Episcopalians' gay bishop (hey, it's their business, they're a private religious organization, if they want to make Saddam Hussein a bishop they can, and if you don't like it go join the Catholics); the gay marriage hoo-haw (I'm for it as long as they have to go through the same divorce crap straights do when they break up, including the high court costs. That'll cut way back on the number of gays who want to get married and make sure it's limited to people with real commitments instead of people who just want to get married as a political statement); and the Vatican's recent pronouncement (it's a private religious organization, the Pope can say whatever he wants and that's the deal. That's been official policy for a couple thousand years. If you don't like it, go join the Episcopalians.)

One final note on Gay High: I can't help but think that a few homosexuals are in favor of the public gay high school because of clannishness. I know several gay people--as an English teacher, I couldn't avoid it even if I wanted to--who do not like to be around straights unless they are in a position of control. There are two guys at my old school who refuse to treat straight male colleagues courteously. Fair enough, if they want to be bigots it's their problem, but I do not think this attitude is extremely rare, and I do not like gay separatists any more than I like any other kind of bigot. I also don't think it's any coincidence that these two guys are extreme left-wingers politically.

Check out this article from today's El Periodico, Barcelona's working-class paper. It's titled "Three million innocents", and it's about the Parque Guell, the park designed by Antoni Gaudi up the hill above Gracia, half a mile or so from our place. The Parque Guell is a major tourist attraction, and well it should be.

Something strange is happening at the Parque Guell, comments Carlos, one of the regulars at Gaudi's oasis. His opinion counts, he says, because he's been coming here every day for years, above all in the morning. He stays here until about three in the afternoon, he says, because that's when the tourists begin to disappear. It would be better not to reveal why he loves strolling through the park, spending so much time among the mosaics, with the sun beating down on the central plaza where there are no trees. We can't take a photo, either, in order to conserve his anonymity, his secret, and his business.

That is, Carlos is a thief. There are plenty up there.

He doesn't believe in plots or conspiracies, but he knows all about what's happening in the park, where three million visitors came last year during the Gaudi Year. Some days more Japanese come, some days more Europeans, and there are a few days when there is suddenly an American invasion. He doesn't know whether it's because a cruise ship just docked in the port, or whether there is a convention that attracts a lot of Yanquis (sic).

And then, the days that the Americans are wandering around among the magic of Gaudi, the clothing of the policemen in the park changes. The Municipal Police (who are good for nothing except giving out parking tickets) practically disappear and in their place members of the National Police (real cops) multiply.

That is, says Carlos, some Big Brother is watching, though there are barely a few police videocameras in the Parque Guell. It angers him, this is true, that apparently George Bush's citizens deserve more protection than the rest. But protection against what?

The pickpockets and other unscrupulous crooks aren't afraid of uniforms, whether they belong to the National Police or the Municipal Police. To them, those three million visitors are an appetizing market, because they mean a million bags and backpacks, two million cameras, almost three million wallets, and several million tons of innocence and absent-mindedness.

Their favorite places to work are among the crowds around the interminable mosaic bench and at the few outdoor cafes selling drinks and food that the park has. But the worst place, for tourists, is around the back gate, where those who have chosen the Metro arrive. (Those who use the Bus Turistic go in through the front gate and tour buses park near a side gate at the Carretera del Carmel.) Those who use the metro get off at Lesseps or Vallcarca and, after climbing the Bajada de La Gloria, what they find is the misery of a threatening knife.

Check out this "diversity"-related atrocity from the Wall Street Journal. At a university? Some government bureau? Nope, it's the NFL.

Here's the CNN report on the wave of fires in Southern Europe. Fortunately none of them are happening anywhere near here, but Portugal's on fire and Prime Minister Durao Barroso has declared the whole country a disaster area. Fires are also burning out of control in southwestern Spain, in Huelva and Extremadura and Salamanca. People have died, at least 11 in Portugal and at least three in Spain. And the weather is going to be just as hot and dry as it already has been. No changes this week, anyway.

It looks like the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta is serious, that the death toll is going to be high. I'll bet ten-to-one it's an Al Qaeda job, showing how their reach has been reduced; they can't attack in Europe or North America, so they strike in places like Indonesia where security is much weaker. I'm advocating more of the same security policies that seem to be working, with one exception: I don't see anything wrong with ethnic profiling. My appearance fits the profile for someone who smokes dope and I often get checked when traveling. Doesn't bother me. I like security on airplanes.

FC Barcelona has announced that its losses over the last season added up to €150 million, which is just a hell of a lot of money for a sports team. Barca's total debt is about €220 million; a typical yearly budget for the club is between €125 and €150m. They owe a lot of money to the taxman and they're writing off all the loser players they spent too much money on, so that's a major depreciation hit. €36 million for Marc Overmars! And that's not including his big fat salary. Dani, Alfonso, Bonano, and Enke are all going to go, too, and De Boer, Geovanni, Rochemback, and Christianval are all gone. Remember just a couple of weeks ago they unconditionally released Christianval and ate the €16 million he cost. He'll catch on in the Swiss league or something major like that.

The team so far looks like this: Rustu in goal; Puyol, Marquez, Cocu, and Oscar Lopez on defense; Quaresma, Xavi, and Gerard in midfield; and Kluivert, Ronaldinho, and Saviola at forward. Luis Enrique is finally going out of the starting lineup; about time. That guy can only play about 30-45 minutes a game before he breaks. He should be the first sub coming off the bench rather than a regular starter. Overmars is going to ride the pine a good bit, too. They're still trying to sign someone to play left defense; Fernando Navarro is still injured from last season, and Lopez is even younger and more inexperienced than he is. They'd like to sign Gabriel Heinze from Paris St-Germain to play there. Meanwhile, they're trying to get rid of Riquelme, who has said he'll only play loaned out to Boca Juniors. Boca won't pay his full salary, though, which is a problem.

Two well-known Spanish cycling teams, ONCE and Banesto, are going out of business. This is an opportunity for some American company to set up a team around Tyler Hamilton. A good-sized budget for a cycling team is about five million bucks. For ten million they could sign Hamilton and Levi Leipheimer, and they could pick up Spaniards Joseba Beloki, Igor Galdeano, and Ibon Mayo, and then fill out the team with a couple of tough Americans and two or three very good Spaniards. You'd win some stages with that team and you'd be really competitive in the team standings. Maybe you couldn't beat Lance, but you could beat everyone else.

And, the thing is, an American major league sports team would cost you hundreds of millions of dollars to buy. But you could set up a competitive cycling team for five million bucks a year. And for ten million, you'd have the best team out there. This would be a good investment for a company like Coca-Cola, which wants to push its image in Europe. At the same time, cycling is becoming more popular in America, what with the fitness trend and Armstrong's publicity. I think it would be ad money well spent, since you'd get your name on the front pages of all Europe's sports papers every single day.

I posted this in the Comments section and I actually did some research for it, so I thought I'd post it up here too.

I'm assuming that the more money that is spent on books in a language is an indicator of the strength and influence of that language's culture(s)--that is, the bigger the market, the more competition there is, and the more competition there is, the higher the average quality of works in that language is going to be. Thus many works are translated from English and few are translated from Cambodian.

It makes sense that since many more quality works originally in English are available than in any other language, there's not that big a market for foreign books in translation in English-speaking countries, and only the very best get translated to English.

However, in a country like Finland, which produces many fewer original works in its own language, there's going to be a much bigger market for translated books, and I bet at least half of them are translated from English.

According to El Pais Anuario, of the ten biggest bestsellers in Spain in 2002, six were by English-language authors (Tolkien, Ken Follett, Katherine Neville, Arthur Golden, J.K. Rowling, Noah Gordon). They also have a list called "Most Read Authors". I have no idea how they calculate that, but Stephen King and Frank McCourt are on that one, too.

That is, the English language produces many very professional high-quality books aimed at the lowbrow-middlebrow audience that are translated to languages around the world, just like it does in cinema. No other language does that. Middlebrow-lowbrow works written in other languages are not translated to English. Why should we read foreign crap? Our own crap is better. We only translate the very best foreign stuff.

Note that none of the abovementioned authors exactly form part of the Western canon. The more prestigious American authors--Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Thomas Pynchon, Richard Ford, T.C. Boyle, Cormac McCarthy, and the like--are not bestsellers in translation in Spain any more than they are in the States.

Miguel de Cervantes is also on El Pais's "Most Read" list, which is why I take said list with several pounds of salt.

Kaleboel links to this excellent webpage called "Street Scams in Barcelona". I've never seen it before, but it's been around for seven years and is full of first-person testimonials.
Petty street crime in Barcelona has always been bad, but it's gotten worse over about the last three or four years now. Violence, now rare, has become common. You will not be murdered--I have never heard of a tourist being murdered in Barcelona, a city with only 40-50 murders a year, almost all domestic violence. You WILL, however be a target of Barcelona street criminals while here. Somebody WILL try to take you off, no matter how cautious you think you're being or how travel-savvy you think you are.

Some British guy (his name is Terrence, so he ain't from, say, Indiana) on the Street Scams thread suggests that one should avoid dressing like an American tourist. Doesn't matter. They'll pick you out as a tourist anyway, no matter if you're wearing the Official Grayish-Black Barcelona Uniform or not. He also suggests that one should not talk to strangers in Barcelona, just as one would not talk to strangers in Atlanta or Chicago. Terrence has it just the wrong way around: Americans WOULD talk to strangers in Atlanta or Chicago, because anywhere travelers go--the downtown streets, the tourist attractions, the shopping areas, attractive restaurants and bars, airports--in the United States is safe. Bad things in America happen in places far away from where tourists or business travelers go. The problem is that bad things in Barcelona happen exactly where tourists go.

Most of the city is very safe from petty crime. But the tourist areas are definitely not. All of the Old City, inside the Rondas south of Pl. Catalunya between Paralelo and the Parque Ciudadela, is dangerous; so are the areas around the Parque Guell and the Sagrada Familia.

Remember that ninety-seven percent of Spaniards are wonderful folks, but the Spaniards who earn their livings dealing with moron-tourists are not. They deal with so many morons that they assume all foreign tourists are morons. Even if you're not, you will be treated like one. The locals will give you no sympathy if you get taken off on the Ramblas. If you somehow get in trouble away from the Old City, though, the people you'll deal with aren't used to dealing with moron-tourists and so will consider you to be a real person.

How to Avoid Being a Victim

1. Stay in a hotel and eat in restaurants outside the Old City. The Eixample, Sarria, St. Gervasi, and Gracia are all very nice and outside the high-crime areas. Sure it's more expensive. It's cheaper in the long run. And the food's better because real locals eat in those places up there.
2. When going touristing in the Old City, leave everything in the hotel safe. Bring a twenty-euro note and a disposable camera. No passport, no credit cards, no fancy equipment, just enough for a sandwich and a cup of coffee.
3. Watch your ass when arriving with your bags and leaving with them. That's when you are most vulnerable. By the way, travel light.
4. Avoid gypsies and Arabs. Assume they are thieves until proven otherwise. And don't stay around them long enough to give them a chance to prove anything. Damn right I'm prejudiced.
5. Avoid anyone who stops you and tries to get your attention, especially if you are in a car anywhere or on foot in the Old City. Let 'em get the time or a light or directions from someone else. Just shrug and move on. If the person becomes insistent, move on really fast.
6. Don't give any money to street performers, and don't stop and watch them. That's when your pocket gets picked.

Scams and Robbery Techniques They've Tried on Me

1. Mustard-on-your-shirt scam
2. Gypsy-women with carnations scam (dozens of times--just get away)
3. Asking-for-directions scam
4. Asking you the time scam
5. Asking for a cigarette scam
6. That American woman who begs near the Plaza del Pi
7. Asking for a few euros for a train ticket (maybe 200 times)
8. Trying to grab your card at an ATM
9. Offering to "give" you a cigarette lighter
10. Trying to pick your pocket in the subway (uncountable times)
11. Begging with doped dogs as alms bait (uncountable times)
12. The "football scam"--one kid shows you Ronaldo's moves while another robs you
13. Surrounding you and overpowering you (four or five times--never got me but two friends, yes. One guy whacked me with a metal bar while I was getting away.)
14. Taking you down with a stranglehold from behind (twice. It worked once.)

Two that I haven't seen mentioned yet:

1. They say they're from a school for the deaf and show you some phony ID. Then they sell you some fifty-cent piece of leather crap for five euros. I have seen this scam in both Madrid and Barcelona.

2. They set up a "petition drive" and ask people to sign against drugs or against AIDS or something else that everybody's against. While you are signing and your attention is distracted, your pocket will be picked.

The Seven Dwarves go to church and all sit down in the back pew. They're all nudging and winking at one another and whispering to Dopey, "Ask the priest, ask the priest." The priest, slightly irritated, says, "Now, please, you're interrupting the service. If you have any questions, ask me, and I will be happy to answer, and then we will return to prayer." So Dopey stands up and says, "Father, are there any midget nuns in the Church?"

The priest, mystified, says, "No, my son, there are no midget nuns. Now, let's return to our service."

After a few seconds, though, the nudging and winking and "Ask him again, ask him again" begins, and the priest is now really irritated. He stops and says, "Now, this is the last interruption I will tolerate. If you have any questions, please ask, and then please be silent." So Dopey stands up again and asked, "Father, are you sure there aren't any midget nuns in the Church?"

The priest is exasperated. He shouts, "NO! There never have been and there never will be any midget nuns in the Church! Now sit down and shut up!"

Sudden, total silence. Then six of the Seven Dwarves look at one another, nod conspiratorially, and break into a chant:

"Do-pey screwed a pen-guin! Do-pey screwed a pen-guin!"

The Relative Cultural Power of Languages

My Economist Pocket Handbook has a list of the top 27 countries in book sales, from the year 1999, in millions of dollars. For rough purposes, let's assume that the money spent on books in a language is equivalent to the real cultural importance and strength of said language. We'll also assume, unless stated otherwise, that all book sales in a country are in that country's language. I know this is very quick and dirty but I think the figures mean something.

Book Sales, 1999, millions of dollars

1. English $34,138m (US 26876, UK 4611, 80% Canada 1193, Australia 1165, South Africa 383)

2. German $10,642m (Germany 9806, 70% Switzerland 450, Austria 387)

3. Japanese $9,913m

4. French $3,813m (France 2840, 50% Belgium 488, 20% Canada 296, 30% Switzerland 189)

5. Spanish $3,245m (80% Spain 1929, Argentina 702, Mexico 614)

6. Chinese $3,009m (China 2387, Taiwan 622)

7. Portuguese $2,856m (Brazil 2506, Portugal 350)

8. Italian $2,658m

9. Dutch $1,471m (Netherlands 983, 50% Belgium 488)

10. Korean $1,740m (obviously South only)

Other languages whose countries make the top 27: Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Polish, Danish, and Vietnamese, in order. Non-Spanish languages within Spain, figured at 20%, would be a very solid $482m in annual sales, in the same league as Polish or Danish. If a language can't beat Vietnamese at $339m in book sales per year, it ain't on the list, and if a country doesn't spend as much on books as Vietnam, it ain't on the list either. That means Russian, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and all the Indian-subcontinent languages don't make the cut.

Notice that the amount of book sales in dollars in English, which we are claiming here is at the very least correlated with the cultural strength and importance of English, is not much less than that of the following nine languages combined. Then ask yourself why not too many foreign novels are translated to English.

Per Capita Book Sales, 1999, in dollars

#2 Germany, $120
#3 US, $98
#7 Japan, $78
#7 (tie) UK, $78
#14 Spain, $61
#19 France, $47
#20 Italy, $46

Feel free to read anything you want into this.

The Month of the Cat continues apace here. In addition to our five beasts, we have George visiting for a couple of weeks and we're now officially in charge of taking care of Anna and Raul's--they're our downstairs neighbors--two kittycats while they're away on vacation. That's eight. This is certainly a cathouse we're running here.

Back when we had only four beasts, before we got Oscar, I named this apartment "Els Quatre Gats" after the famous Boho bar where Casas and Rusinyol and Picasso and the boys used to hang out. In Catalan (and in Spanish) "four cats" means "you and me and the lamppost"--that is, just a few unimportant folks. Only four cats, the avant-garde Boho art dudes, hung out there, which is one reason it closed down like a hundred years ago. There is now a bar called "Els Quatre Gats" located on the same street as the original bar, but in a different (though Modernista) building. To my knowledge there is no connection between the historic and the actual places but the name. The existent bar is a perfectly decent place, though rather touristy. Still, these folks are tourists who know who Picasso was and therefore deserve credit for having heard of and wanting to visit the namesake of the bar he designed the menu cover for, his famous first paid job. These people are not morons, and hanging out where they hang out is officially declared Non-Cheesy. Especially since it stays open late.

It is also officially declared Non-Cheesy to go to the Cafe Moka on the Ramblas, where barricaded government soldiers had a stand-off with Orwell's POUM militia, who were up on the roof of the Tabacos de Filipinas building across the street.

Franco Aleman sent me this bit of drool from the Commie intellectuals, the Enlightened and Illustrated Among Us. I'm not going to bother translating it but it's pretty easy to get the gist if you can figure out words like "imperio" and "dignidad" and "plutocracia". The only signers who I recognized are dumb-as-dirt old-lady actress Rosa Regas and Manu Chao's dad.

I like Andrew Sullivan and I like sociological analysis, so when the two get together it's well worth a read. Check out this piece on "bears", the regular-guy subset of gay men. I get along a lot better with this kind of down-to earth gay dude, of whom I've met several, than with the fussy fruity gays living up to the stereotype, who just drive me up the wall sometimes.

One disagreement with Sullivan--he says toward the end of the story that he thinks straights feel more comfortable around the flitty fairy type of gay or around cross-dressers because we know how to categorize them and so they're not a threat, and that bears are challenging precisely because they don't fit the stereotype.

I think a lot of us have graduated beyond that stage. Most of the people I know don't particularly care if you're gay and understand that gay people differ among themselves just as extensively as any other group, whether religious or ethnic or whatever. I, personally, and I think a lot of fairly clueless straight guys like me, feel much more comfortable around anybody, straight or gay, who isn't putting on an act. I just can't stand flirty silly girls, they're so obviously trying to be the center of attention, and I feel the same way about the Richard Simmons-like mincing frootloops. Drag queens make me particularly uncomfortable because they're so phony. I've met a couple, both Barcelona theater types. I mean, what do you talk about? "I think you really ought to try some much more subdued tones of makeup for the fall season. And eighty-six the mascara." Or, "So how exactly do you get into a panty girdle? Duct-tape your schlong to your butt or what?" Or, "I don't care what you're dressed like, I am not going to give you the ritual Spanish man-woman kiss on both cheeks." But I've got no problem with bears and with anybody else who isn't trying to make an impression at all costs. Bears aren't putting on a show, they're being themselves, and I think a lot of us straight people can appreciate that.

By the way, the article is from Salon and so you have to click through an ad before they'll let you in.

Here's some staggeringly important news for the London metro blogosphere: Remei and I will be in London between about September 8 and 14. We're staying with our friend Elisabeth, who lives west of town near the Ealing Broadway tube stop. If any of you folks would like to get together while we're there--you know, spend an evening in a pub or the like--just drop a note in the Comments section or e-mail us at crankyyanqui@yahoo.com.

I swear I'll dive over the balcony railing if I ever hear that damn song that goes, "Last night a DJ saved my life" again. I thought momentarily about writing a parody version, since I've got the damn song playing back in my head, and substituting "BJ" for "DJ", but I decided not to.

Thursday night Clark had a little party down by the beach, so I got to hang out with supermodels. Clark's girlfriend Clara and her Uruguayan friend Ana are advertising models, and are definitely much hotter than the average babe. We're talking nine on a ten scale here; they're both a lot better looking than Ann Coulter, for instance. there's just no comparison. Clara's little sister was there, too, visiting from Buenos Aires, and she's possible future supermodel material. No grass, however, on the infie--God, I can't believe I even thought about saying that. That's so gross. Forget I ever brought it up.

Chick goes into a tattoo parlor and says, "I love the Beatles. I want John Lennon's face tattooed on my left inner thigh, and Paul McCartney's face tattooed on my right inner thigh." So she strips off, the tat guy does the job, and when he's finished he shows the chick in a mirror, and she says, "That's terrible! They don't look anything like Lennon and McCartney. I'm not going to pay you for that." So the tat man says, "Look, I'll go outside and get the first person who walks by, and we'll show them the tattoos, and see what they think." The chick says OK, and the tattoo guy gets the first person walking by the shop. It's the town drunk. The tat man says, "Look, Mac, does the guy on the left look like John Lennon and does the guy on the right look like Paul McCartney?" The drunk tries to focus his bulging, yellowish-red, Pasqual Maragallish eyes and slurs, "I dunno about either of them two, but that dude in the middle looks just like Willie Nelson."

One awful thing about summer here, besides the stifling heat, is the "cancion del verano", the "song of the summer". Pop-music producers compete to see who can come out with the catchiest ditty that will take the country by storm. There's a different one every year. It's always hellaciously bad, and it's always a lowest-common-denominator disco-pop job calcualted to appeal most of all to fourteen-year-old girls. The most infamous recent examples are "Macarena" and "Asereje", but there are dozens of others from summers past that you will hear played by some goddamn pachanga gadinga-dinga band at every goddamn fiesta mayor in the whole goddamn country.

This summer, though, they've done a hell of a marketing job. I don't even remember what product it is, but the TV ads feature a bunch of goofy dudes and / or chicks, rather in the style of beer commercials, singing a silly new song that they have supposedly written in hopes of scoring the "cancion del verano". I believe there are three different ads with three different songs. Anyway, everybody loves the ads, and, guess what? Professional, polished versions of the silly songs have just been released. Get ready, world.

The other thing they have are disco record advertisements. They're all called "Ibiza Mix" or "Playa Mix" or "Cancun Mix" or whatever, and they feature what's called here "musica maquina", "machine music"--i.e. a repetitive pulsating drum-and-synth beat with a simple pop melody (often stolen from public-domain songs; I particularly remember an extremely obnoxious maquina version of "Camptown Races" from a couple of years ago) over the top. The canciones del verano only last three minutes. The goddamn disco-mix CDs last for what seems like hours when your neighbor's kid has one. The commercials are all the same, showing lots of silicone chicks in skimpy bikinis dancing around a swimming pool while some dork sprays them with a hose. Note the very obvious phallic symbol, so obvious that even fourteen-year-old boys get it.

Meanwhile, of course, good Spanish musicians get ignored. I mean, say, Juan Perro or Kiko Veneno may not be everyone's cup of tea, but you can't deny their talent.

There's a lovely scandal brewing down south. The real Jesus Gil, not our pal from Ibidem--which is off the air, I don't know why--but the crooked property developer, former owner of Atletico Madrid, and convicted felon, is the power behind the throne in Eurotrashy Marbella on the south coast near Malaga. His political party is the Grupo Independiente Liberal, GIL--get it? Gil himself has been banned from standing for office due to his enormously long rap sheet, but he runs things anyway, sort of like old Edwin Edwards used to in Louisiana. Anyway, get this, Gil's handpicked mayor, who is currently "enjoying an idyll" with, that is, shacking up with, diva singer Isabel Pantoja, who used to be married to the now-dead bullfighter Paquirri, has somehow pissed Gil off, probably by saying something like "Look, dude, it looks kind of bad if we approve more than ten of your nouveau-riche Mafia-aesthetic imitation-Vegas luxury-condo projects a year in this town". So Gil is trying to dump his own mayor and he's got the Socialist Party and the Andalucist Party backing him up. Imagine that George Steinbrenner put in his man, who was having an affair with Liza Minnelli, as mayor of Palm Springs, and then decided to force the guy out with the help of Ted Kennedy and Lyndon LaRouche. It's something like that.

The cops busted a safe house in Valencia where the ETA cell that set off the bombs in Alicante had been hiding out; the terrorists had left but a lot of their stuff was confiscated, including three kilos of dynamite. This cell will go down very soon, leaving only the cell operating in the North on active status. They won't last long, either. These guys are a bunch of poorly trained amateurs drafted from the youth movement. ETA is on the ropes. They just cannot commit crimes with impunity anymore. The government's strategy of not giving in, of not negotiating when there's nothing to negotiate about, and of using massive police pressure--just what the bleeding-heart Left, the "intellectuals and noted public figures", the Enlightened and Illustrated Among Us, repeated over and over would not work because it was "repressive"--is working.

Here's Andy Robinson in today's Vanguardia.

With a few exceptions, Americans--differently from Europeans--do not read foreign novels, a "dangerous" tendency in the world after September 11, according to editors and cultural critics in New York and Washington. But there are large discrepancies over whether the problem is one of supply or demand. The New York Times, in a recent story titled "America Yawns at Foreign Novels", depicts an American with a closed mentality, paradoxically more chauvinist because he believes that American multiculturalism includes all the diversity in the world.

Of the 100,000 books published in the US between 1999 and 2000, 11,500 of them novels, only about 300 of them are translated...The contrast between the US and Europe is important. All the important American novelists are translated to the principal European languages--which proves the caricature of the anti-American European to be false--and some, like Paul Auster, are more successful in France and Spain than in the US....Marketing experts reject many foreign novels because, as one said in the New York Times, "they are less action-oriented, they are more philosophical than we are used to".

Oh, Andy, Andy, Andy, where do we start?

1) Europeans are no more "cultured" nor "open" than Americans, whatever that means. The Great Unwashed in both continents is equally uninformed.

2) Are you saying that translated novels are not very popular in America because of our alleged fear of foreignness that appeared after September 11? So why are you using data from 1999-2000 to support your claim?

3) Remember, Andy, English is the language we use in America. That means that books from Britain, Australia, South Africa, Canada, Ireland, and also many from India, Pakistan, Africa, and the Arab world, which are written originally in English, ARE NOT TRANSLATED though they are "foreign" books.

4) English is by far the most creative language in the world, in the sense that it produces the most creative products, for lack of a better word, of whatever kind. The Summer Institute of Linguistics says that English has 322 million native speakers, of whom almost all are literate (they have the ability to read and write) and well-off enough to be consumers of culture, though that culture may be as lowbrow as pro wrestling, country music, and People magazine. I will be willing to bet that Japanese, with 125 million native speakers, is the second most creative language. German, with 96 million, would be third. French with 72 million would be fourth. Almost all these people are literate consumers of culture. Spanish has 332 million, but how many are both literate and well-off enough to consume cultural products? Half? Portuguese has 170 million; same thing. As for Mandarin Chinese with its 885 million, Bengali with 189 million, and Hindi with 182 million, while they are of course the languages of great cultures, not many of their speakers are literate cultural consumers.

But if we assume that the users of English, Japanese, German, and French are all equally culturally productive, then English produces more creative works per year than Japanese, French, and German combined, simply because of the number of speakers. And, if we consider the bell curve--that is, the more subjects under study, the longer the tails on each side will be--the peaks of English literature will tend to be higher than in other languages, because the competition for the status of "exceptional" is much greater.

5) I thought we'd all agreed that the New York Times was full of dog doo.

6) What do you expect a bunch of Manhattan literary types to say about their fellow Americans, anyway? That they're grateful we buy the stuff they put out and make them all rich? No, that we're a bunch of stupid midwestern oafs. There's nobody more anti-American than a snobby Manhattanite.

7) There's a great deal more cultural diversity in the United States than anywhere else in the world. The population of the US is about 11% immigrants. It's not chauvinistic to say so when you live on the same street with people from Colombia, Cuba, Poland, and India, as I did when I was a kid, or when you work with people from Nigeria, Vietnam, Ukraine, Iran, Korea, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Egypt, as I did when I worked at the university.

8) What do you mean the "caricature" of the anti-American European is false? The books the Europeans translate are the ones that will play over there. They publish some Paul Auster crap for the pseudo-intellectuals and lots and lots of John Grisham and Stephen King and Tom Clancy and Danielle Steel and other such sub-high school stuff for the Non-Illustrated and Enlightened. You won't find anything by any conservative American authors in any Spanish bookstore except maybe Saul Bellow. And you won't find any American non-fiction, almost 90% of the books published in the US, translated, except for Noam Chomsky's gibberish and Who Moved My Cheese.

9) Also, we just agreed that it makes demographic sense that a lot more books are translated from English than into English.

10) You can't win either way with Andy. If you publish 100,000 titles a year, does he say, "Gee, the Americans sure publish a lot of books. That means they must read a lot and be cultured people"? No, he looks for the black cloud within the silver lining every time. Seems that not enough of these 100,000 books are translated from other languages for Andy's liking, though surely a great number come from other countries and were written originally in English. Like, say, the Harry Potter books, which are very British--they're just an update of the old Billy Bunter school stories--and not American at all in their cultural environment. Yet they sell in isolated, ignorant America, only interested in American things.

Blogging has been light recently because there's not too much interesting news and because much of my free time has been spent on cat matters recently. You'll remember we found that kitten hiding in the engine of a parked car; we gave her away to a friend of a friend in Sant Feliu. It's a woman and her two kids; they're thrilled with their acquisition. Oscar has lower urinary tract problems that are pretty serious; we have to fill him full of antibiotics and vitamin C--that's to make his pee more acid, which will help dissolve the tiny stones in it. Twice a day we have to poke pills down his throat. He hates it and so do we, but if we don't do it he's going to be a dead little Osky and no one wants that to happen. At least he's doing a lot better than he was a week or so ago. Finally these English people we know, Lucas and Heather, have gone back up there for a couple of weeks, so we're taking care of their cat George, who is one of those huge placid males. So far he won't come out from under the bed in the guest room.

I promised to blog on Baghdad Bob Fisk, but I really don't feel like translating any of his crap. He basically says that the Iraqi Resistance is trying to drive out the hated imperialist Yankees. The various articles I linked to below make it pretty clear that Mr. Fisk is full of crap. Tikrit Tommy Alcoverro is off on some kick about Hamas and Hezbollah being social-welfare organizations (yeah, right, so were the Black Panthers) and about how the Baath Party supported social equality and the nationalization of the oil for the dignity of the Iraqi people and, get this, equal rights for women. The Baath Party also supports killing anybody Saddam Hussein wants to kill.

I find it interesting that Leftists, who are supposed to be at least sympathetic to the ideas of Karl Marx and other scientific socialists, tend to place a great deal of importance on the dignity and the honor of a people or a class. No matter how much evidence you have on how big a sonofabitch Fidel Castro is, for example, the leftist guy arguing against you will say that Fidel restored dignity to the Cuban people and that's more important than, say, the right not to be put in prison or shot at the whim of a dictator. Or the right to eat. Seems to me that appeals to national or class dignity and honor are about as irrational and unscientific as appeals can get.

Most of the news on TV these days is about a) how hot the weather is b) forest fires all over southern Europe c) Real Madrid's tour of China and FC Barcelona's tour of the US d) another domestic violence murder--the latest big one was a cop up the coast in Premia who cut his wife's throat and then chopped her up into little pieces. I'm sure somebody will top that today. Common Myth: Domestic violence does not know class. Fact: With a few horrifying and very well-publicized exceptions like the Premia cop, domestic violence correlates with low socioeconomic level and substance abuse e) what they call around here "Operacion Salida", the mass exit from the major Spanish cities with the beginning of the August vacations. Freeways are blocked up for hours, and it's the busiest few days of the year at the airports and train stations. For some reason most Spanish vacationers go to somewhere on the Valencia-Andalusia coast, when the north is so much prettier and more interesting and cooler. I guess the north is also more expensive. My favorite parts of Spain are Catalonia, northern Aragon and Navarra, the North Coast, and Castile-Leon--the whole upper third of the country. My least favorite parts are the southeast and south-central areas, Murcia and Castile-La Mancha and Almeria.