Congratulations to our friends at HispaLibertas and to Franco Aleman for getting Instapundited! Here's the link to an excellent piece on the LA Times's coverage of Spain. Go read it now. If you can read Spanish I highly recommend that you make HispaLibertas an everyday stop--and even if you don't, make it an everyday stop because Franco will be posting there, I assume at least sometimes, in English.

Just a little comment about Steve Earle--Mickey Kaus linked to a little piece about him. I like Steve Earle, I think he's a hell of a good country / rock musician. Several of his songs, like "Guitar Town" and "Copperhead Road", are classics, and all his songs are good. He's also known for playing hot live shows.

Now, Steve is also known as a lefty loudmouth. He is, but he's more responsible than some, and I've never heard him bitch too much about the way the media treat him, unlike the Dixie Chicks.

The thing about Steve is 1) he's not a mass-market star and he's not all over mainstream country radio 2) he's been around for a long time and everybody knows he's kind of a weirdo and he used to be a junkie and he's been in jail and all that 3) he's never pretended to be anything he's not 4) he was a lefty back before being a lefty was cool 5) even before he came out and said so everyone already knew he was against the war. So he didn't surprise anybody and he didn't get "Dixie Chicked". Mainstream country radio never played him anyway, and alt-country radio didn't quit playing his stuff after he spoke up on the war.

The problem with the Dixie Chicks was that they were selling an all-American wholesome image and making the big--no, huge--bucks off it. (Steve Earle probably still lives in a trailer park. I don't think he's ever made any money and whatever he's made he's spent on Evan Williams and crank.) Nobody knew or cared what they thought about politics. They were pretty girls and good musicians who played nice country songs. Then, suddenly, they go off the deep end and criticize the President--and the state of Texas--in pretty harsh terms in a foreign country, then, when people get angry, they whine that all the folks who bought their records and subsidize their opulent lifestyle are ignorant warmongering evil scum, then they get naked on a magazine cover, and then they tell all their fans to fuck off and that they're not a country band anymore.

Therefore, mainstream country radio and fans told them to fuck off in return. The people didn't know what kind of human beings the Dixie Chicks were and they were pretty surprised when they found out. Everybody has always known what kind of human being Steve Earle is and so he didn't surprise anyone in the least.

That is why I am supporting Steve Earle and boycotting the Dixie Chicks. If you haven't heard Steve's music, you might check it out.

InstaPundit links to Nick Denton who links to this collection of Spanish female hot newsreader babes caught with ecstatic porno queen expressions on their faces. There are a couple of, uh, head shots of future Queen of Spain Letizia Ortiz. Denton's direct link is to Antena 3's Susana Griso, who is a genuinely hot babe and whose brother I had in class once. No, I can't get you a date. Warning: I make no promises about whether you might get on some penis-extension spam list by clicking here.

Well, they gave Susan Sarandon some kind of award in Sevilla and she insisted on shooting off her mouth as soon as she saw a camera and a microphone within range. Said Susie, according to El Periodico, the Barcelona daily:

It terrifies me to think that today's patriotism means following the government's line without questioning it. It's a dangerous form of democracy that is becoming Fascism...I think I was the first woman to speak out and they've been talking about me as if I had committed treason. As if I were putting our troops in danger. It's very unpleasant.

...There is the idea that only bad actors get involved in politics. but in a free country, everybody has the right to get into politics...As a citizen and an actress I do not lose the right to criticize them, above all if Arnold is occupying a public position...I've spoken with Spanish actors and it was very moving for me that in the Goya Awards ceremony (Spain's mini-Oscars) they were able to raise their vioces against the war. (In my country) there is no freedom of expression. In the United States you cannot say things out loud. And this is a terrifying situation for democracy, because whatever the government says, we artists are free to express ourselves.

Right, Susie. I think artists like, say, I dunno, Willem de Kooning (is he still alive?) or Roy Liechtenstein, or Frank Gehry, or Jeff Koons, or David Hockney--my favorite living painter--, or my man Stan Herd, the Kansas crop-art guy, genuinely creative people, ought to speak out even if they don't make any sense, because they see the world from a real original artist's viewpoint and that's something the rest of us ought to pay attention to. Life isn't just economic statistics. These folks have demonstrated that they are worth hearing out because of their creativity and originality and hard work and intelligence. I wouldn't go out and elect one of them President, but they are real creative artists and deserve our respect even if we do later decide they are full of crap politically.

But Susie, you, an artist? Fugeddaboudit.

Sports Update: The Chiefs blew out Cleveland and are now 9-0. If they keep playing like that they'll go down as the greatest team in NFL history. FC Barcelona has won three straight games against two schloops (Mallorca and Murcia) and one decent team (Betis) and are currently in fourth place behind Deportivo, Real Madrid, and Valencia. Things don't look too bad; they're learning how to play as a team. Coach Frank Rijkaard has a set starting lineup: Valdes; Gabri, Puyol, Cocu, Van Bronckhorst; Xavi and Gerard (or Motta); Quaresma, Ronaldinho, Luis Garcia; Saviola. Marquez has seen some action in midfield and has done very well, scoring a goal last night. Kluivert went in for Ronaldinho, who got himself mildly injured, early in last night's game, and also scored a goal after an incredibly infantile error by the Betis goalie. Maybe he'll break out of his slump.

Some guy from England wrote in late last football season and told me I'd blown all my cred for suggesting a defense with Gabri and Cocu (and Gerard, who hasn't been tied down there yet). Yeah, blown my credibility my ass, right now Gabri and Cocu are both starting defenders and Gerard plays either at defender or as a defensive midfielder.

Catalan NBA Watch: It's pretty incredible that a small place like Catalonia, with six million people, has produced not one but two NBA players. They are Pau Gasol of Memphis, in his third season, whom any casual fan like me recognizes and who might well be on his way to an All-Star season this year. He's a seven-foot power forward who can rebound, shoot, and play D, and he's Memphis's best player. The other guy is Raul Lopez of Utah and this is his first NBA season. He got drafted two seasons ago but was out all last year with injuries. He's getting about twenty minutes a game at point guard and is making the most of them, with ten fourth-quarter points in his last game, precisely against Memphis. It was the first time two Spanish, let alone Catalan, players have competed against one another in an official NBA game. Spain's only other NBA player was Fernando Martin, who was with Portland a couple of years in the early 80s.

Congratulations to both Gasol and Lopez, and to FC Barcelona's basketball program, which produced both of them.

New Partido Popular leader Mariano Rajoy was interviewed in today's Vanguardia about the upcoming elections for the Catalan Parliament. Here are a few of the things he said. This is pretty good. It is not typical governmental guff. Mr. Rajoy, in the interview, demonstrates himself to be a well-informed and thoughtful leader who shoots straight. I often complain about Spanish politics, but I admire the Spaniards as a whole for producing such a competent, responsible, and professional political party as the PP, and then electing it.

Look at the piece we did on Zap way back when in May he gave an interview to the Vangua. We translated some of his utterances then. Compare the intellectual and moral level of the two men, Zapatero and Rajoy. The difference is shocking.

Says Rajoy, ...What we want, as I said before, is to be able to work with the "rules of the game" in place now; with the Constitution and Statute of Autonomy, which have been useful and which have allowed a great advance in the self-government of Catalonia, and also in the well-being of the citizens. We hope to achieve, in the upcoming years, real convergence (equivalence in GDP per capita with the rest of the EU) and full employment, and let nothing distract us from that situation. It's a problem of priorities. Our priority is not reforming the Constitution and the Statute, and I don't think that's the priority for the majority of Catalans, but rather working so that Catalonia will become better and better off. Let's not forget that Catalonia has seen large growth over the last few years. It's the second autonomous region in Spain as far as the active (percentage of) population, outranked only by the Balearics, and its employment rates are very reasonable. We plan to continue in this line and to continue working in favor of governability in Catalonia, as we did during these eight years of getting the (regional) budgets passed. We are satisfied by this, as we are satisfied by the cooperation that Convergence and Union gave to the Administration of Spain.

...I believe that the agreement there has been during the last eight years has been positive; sincerely, it's been positive. That is, to give you a figure that is enormously significant, the budget of the Generalitat since the PP has been in the Administration has increased more than a billion (US=trillion) of the old pesetas, more than six thousand million (US=billion) euros, which is not pocket change. That has meant an enormous increase in the capacity of self-government.

From another point of view, I think that the economic growth that has occurred is enormously relevant in Catalonia. And, look, I think it's been that way from the perspective of investment, because the average investment (in Catalonia) during the years of Socialist Administrations was 8% of the total spent by the Ministry of Development (Fomento); in our first legislative term, when we had an agreement with CiU, it was 11%, and in more recent years it's been 16%, arriving at 17% of the 2004 budget. Therefore, cooperation has been positive, and what I think is not positive is distracting ourselves from what is really important to us, which is continuing to work toward growth and employment.

In the year 1978 the whole of Spanish society decided to look forward and forget a history that had certainly been complex, to put it like that. And there was a political agreement, a social agreement, there was an agreement that permitted that in Spain the PSOE or the PP could govern with a majority, allied sometimes with the (regional) nationalists, sometimes not; that is, it permitted governing with everyone and establishing a territorial agreement (division of governmental power between the central government and the regions) that was very difficult to reach. And the territorial agreement was established fundamentally because of the special situation that responds to history, and not to something just made up, of Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia. And there we all said, "We're going to move from a centralist State to a State decentralized politically, legislatively, and administratively." Today, the autonomous regions in Spain have a level of public spending very superior to those of the decentralized European models, concretely Germany and Austria. They have authority over the fundamental large public services, and with the PP Administration we passed the new model of regional financing that has produced the greatest autonomy of income that there has ever been, because before there was authority to spend but not to generate income.

The Generalitat can make decisions about taxes that are important to the people, like income tax, inheritance tax, gift tax, judiciary acts, VAT, et cetera. And this is a very relevant fact. From there on, that was the big decision we made when we (the Spaniards) passed the Constitution and the Statute.

Note several things about Mr. Rajoy. His thoughts are organized. He knows his facts cold. He has his priorities straight. He avoids using demagogic rhetoric. He is a dealmaker, not a divider. He is a moderate, not an extremist. Compare Mr. Rajoy's statements with Zap's again, and two things just leap out at you: 1) Mr. Rajoy is professional and competent and will do a fine job as Prime Minister, which we all know he's going to be. 2) Zap is a dope. How the hell did he ever get to be leader of anything, much less the major opposition political party in a major European democracy?

By the way, if you want some political guff in Catalan, here's the link to the PP's program for next weekend's elections. It's just baloney, mumbo-jumbo, bushwah, gobbledygook, horsehockey, whatever, but it is MODERATE above all else.

WE SAY SOMETHING NICE ABOUT SQUATTERS: In other news: NASA confirms moon-green cheese theory, Generalitat designates bullfighting "element of traditional Catalan culture", Saddam endorses Bush for 2004

The squatters down in the plaza copped a break: the cops were going to kick them out last week, but the judge decided they couldn't because he had not received a direct formal request from the owners of the property that he eject said squatters. Looks like they'll be around a while longer. Anyway, they hang around the plaza a lot, and there are several squat dogs that look sleek and well-fed and behave themselves a good bit better than their owners, who keep painting defiant violent slogans on the walls about how they want to blow everything up. I am pro-dog, and these guys are pretty obviously dumped pets that the squatters picked up somewhere and took in. So you have to give them credit for something. There's one of them, a Spanish hunting dog (big, ugly, goofy, good dogs as a rule) with a bandanna around his neck, who insists on sniffing my crotch when he sees me. It's a friendly gesture. I hope.

Catalan regional elections are next weekend; the Vanguardia's poll has Convergence picking up 48 seats, the Socialists 47, the Republican Left 18, the PP 14, and the Communists 8. Convergence loses 8 seats, the Socialists lose five, the Republican Left gains six, the PP gains two, and the Commies (Initiative-Greens) gain five. All the other newspapers have polls, too, and they're all about the same. One of them has the Socialists winning more seats than CiU, but that doesn't really matter. The facts, Jack, are that all the polls show that a PP-CiU coalition AND a CiU-Republican Left coalition would fail to win a majority. The only winning ticket possible, if the actual voting comes out like the surveys say, is what we said a couple of days ago: a Red-Green-Light Brown Popular Front coalition of the PSC, the Republican Left, and Initiative-Greens. Precisely what we have now in the Barcelona City Council.

They had a debate on TV last night. It wasn't very interesting. The only candidate I like is, of course, the PP's Josep Pique. Convergencia's Artur Mas is a lightweight, the PSC's Pasqual Maragall is a blowhard, the Republican Left's Josep Lluis Carod-Rovira is a one-issue candidate, and Initiative-Greens' Joan Saura is dumb. Intellectually. He's a smart politician running on Marxist hot air and exaggerated criticisms of everyone else, and he got most attention in the debate.

Xavier and Murph and I have a debate going on about whether the PP is or is not "monolithically centralist". They say it is. I say the PP is not in favor of greater autonomy for the regions, but it doesn't have a problem with the system of autonomous regions as it stands, and that it would be willing to consider some changes in the system.

Josep Pique, the PP's candidate (and the most qualified candidate: Maragall was Mayor of Barcelona for many years and has proved that he has political credibility. I don't like him, but I admit that a lot of reasonable people do. If you're a Clinton-Gore Democrat, Maragall's your man. Neither Mas, Carod, or Saura has ever held an important position. Pique was a Cabinet minister in Madrid three different times in three different posts, including that of Foreign Minister) said this during the debate:

"The PP defends the Estatut (the Statute of Autonomy, the Catalan regional constitution), and we are the only ones. And here are four political forces that want to destroy it. We won't close ourselves off intellectually to reforms, if it continues to be the Estatut of all Catalans."

There you go. The PP is satisfied with the level of Catalan autonomy as it is. And it is open to certain changes. That, to me, is not monolithically centralist, it's pretty damn reasonable.

The Vangua got itself into a nasty little mess. It seems that activist idiot actor Joel Joan (our Woody Harrelson, sort of) got up on a stage at a Republican Left rally and told about going to an Italian place called La Corza Blanca in Barcelona's Vila Olimpica. Joan says he went into the restaurant and asked for a table for seven in Catalan, and he was treated rudely and basically told to fuck off. Quim Monzo fell for this one and repeated it in a rather hysterical Vanguardia column last week titled "The Harassment of Catalan".

Explosion. The people from La Corza Blanca and their clients raised a huge stink, saying that they weren't an Italian place, first, and that second, they never treated clients badly and always used the language the client preferred, Catalan or Spanish. They got a bunch of signatures from their regulars over dinner that night and wrote in to the Vangua the next day. Monzo and Joan both had to retract.

Now, let's think for a minute. Let's say you run a restaurant and Joel Joan, who has been on TV and in movies a lot and whom you certainly recognize (he's about six foot six and quite distinctive-looking), walks in with six other people and asks for a table in Catalan. What do you do? You think, humm, at seven people and twenty-five euros each that's €175, and if they get into the wine list or order whiskey or brandy that's €300 at least, and you also figure that if you give them good service and treat them right they'll come back and cough up more dough at your place, and you think that if you have Joel Joan as a regular client he'll tell his friends and your place will look fashionable and hip and maybe you can even get an autographed picture or something.

What you do is say "Si, senyor, es clar, aqui mateix. O on vulguin." And then you rub your greedy little restaurant-owning hands all the way to the bank. Have you ever heard of a business owner offending a client in the way Joan says he was offended?

Here's what happened. Joan repeated an urban legend that he's heard more than once. It didn't really happen to him; he repeated something that "happened" to "a friend of a friend" that he thought was a good story. Joan, as a hardcore radical Catalan nationalist, enjoys playing the victim, and this story of alleged discrimination against Catalan-speakers was too good not to use, so he appropriated it. That is, he lied.

WARNING: The Partido Humanista is running in these elections. It is a front group for a cult that calls itself La Comunidad and is controlled by an Argentinian "visionary" named Silo. They recruit at a very grassroots level among idealistic far-leftists, and their modus operandi is well-known since they've been at it since the Sixties. The organization consists of an inner circle around the mysterious Silo which receives contributions sent by cult branches around the world.

Their political party is merely an opportunity for them to take advantage of the free airtime provided by Spanish television to parties during elections; it never gets more than about seventeen votes. Most notorious was what they pulled off in the '91 election, when they adopted the name "Ecologistas Verdes" and skimmed off some 20,000 votes from those who thought they were supporting a legitimate Green Party rather than a front for a cult.

Don't believe me? Google some combination of "silo" and "partido humanista" and "la comunidad" and "cartas a mis amigos" (the title of Silo's magnum opus.) Just look what you'll find.

Lluis Foix, former editor-in-chief of La Vanguardia, goes off the deep end in Thursday's op-ed section:

The plot thread of these hypotheses is that the terrorist organization Al Qaeda could not have had such a sophisticated level of preparedness to carry off such a perfect and successful attack. It is questioned, for example, whether the suicide terrorists were sufficiently trained in aeronautic navigation as to carry off an attack with so much precision and such synchronicity against New york's Twin Towers.

I am never in favor of conspiracy theories and I look at the facts that are in front of my face. However, why didn't the American intelligence services act correctly, knowing as they knew that a terrorist attack of great dimensions was being planned using commercial airplanes?...

Where is Bin Laden? Was that terrible massacre prepared in Afghanistan? If the official version is true, the power of the terrorists could strike the most unexpected objectives. I don't give a lot of credit to the hypotheses going around. But it's difficult to believe that the perversity of the terrorists was so perfect.

Louie, Louie, Louie. Bin Laden said he did it, and we know how it was done. We also know he pulled off sophisticated attacks on our African embassies three years before 9-11. Your logic, Louie, is that of conspiracy theories, despite how many times you try to throw us off the trail by claiming you don't believe in them--because this is a pretty big one. Louie is using that same old anti-American bias, thinking the USA is the All-Powerful and that so nothing can happen without its say-so.

Louie, what happened is that our intelligence services got caught with their pants down and their asscracks sticking out behind. That happens much too frequently for my taste, and the incompetence of that bunch of bunglers is proof that all CIA-based conspiracy theories are false, because there's no way the CIA could actually make something so complex as Al Qaeda's 9-11 plan work. You need a tight, organized, motivated terrorist cell run by professionals to pull that off.

Are you seriously suggesting, Louie, that the United States government is lying about what happened on 9-11? Your use of the words "official version" and your last sentence seem to show that you are. So why would they lie about it? Obviously because the US government was really behind 9-11. Come on, Louie, admit that's what you're saying. And then think for a minute about exactly why the US government would intentionally get 3000 innocent people killed. Obviously because the US government is evil enough to murder innocents for its own nefarious purposes. Just come out and say it, Louie, tell us what you really think.

The shocking thing is that 1) such ignorant and baseless speculation is taken seriously enough by a prominent journalist to get in the paper and 2) Louie tells us that his column is in response to a growing number of rumors in Europe that 9-11 was an American government setup. I've personally heard those rumors spread by ignorant people I know, including some of my in-laws whom I don't have to go visit anymore. My guess is that within a year most Europeans will come to believe in the 9-11 conspiracy theory that Louie lays out while telling us he does not believe in conspiracy theories. If they don't already. Eurostat ought to do a poll on this one, if they can keep their hands out of the till long enough to do their so-called job. I bet half the Europeans think 9-11 was an evil CIA plot.

Oh, yeah, Louie, the power of the terrorists CANstrike the most unexpected objectives. Like the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They missed the White House thanks to the efforts of the cowardly, fear-stricken Americans who charged the cockpit and caused the terrorists to crash the plane in the Pennsylvania mountains. That's why we're fighting this war. 9-11 must never be allowed to happen again, whether in New York--or Barcelona. Don't fool yourself that they wouldn't take a shot at Barcelona. They would if they saw a good chance.

Lluis Foix, you are a stupid asshole. You are too stupid to recognize that the United States is not the All-Powerful and that is why you indulge in masturbatory fantasies about an arch-villainous American government pulling the string behind everything that happens in the world. You are also too stupid to realize that international terrorism has you on its list, too, and that wishing it away with antiwar demonstrations and whining for peace will serve for absolutely nothing when you are behind the eight ball, which you may be one day. And you are such an asshole that you accuse those people who are in charge of the US government of being callous murderers with absolutely no proof, just the wildest speculation. That's what we call libel where I come from.

I love listening to the early morning show on KHYI in Dallas. First, they play great country music. Second, the DJs are generally personable and sometimes even funny. Third, they take a lot of calls, and about five percent of the time the callers are really bright and witty. Half the time they're just regular Joes. The rest of them range from a little slow to real dumb. Seems that many of them have been up all night drinking, like the guy who just phoned in, said, "I jus' wanned to--BURP--uhh, some Mac Stallings." The DJ instantly put on "Think I'll Just Stay Here and Drink". They run this thing they call "Earl Pitts, American" at about 8:20 Central time, which is worth tuning in for. Earl is an Angry White Male.

Christopher Hitchens is off the reservation. He's rolled over, flip-flopped, jumped the fence, changed his coat--joined the Right. Welcome, Chris. You may remember that we predicted this would happen several months ago, but we were still awaiting his recantation of his past sins before we would currently accept him into the congregation. Here it is. He hath repented. Kill the fatted calf, the prodigal has come home. Note the bold type.

An example: In trying to justify the earlier eviction of Saddam from Kuwait, Secretary of State James Baker put forward the case that "jobs" were the main justification. I thought that to be both stupid and ignoble at the time (and was generally antiwar at that date) but did not think that it automatically, or even partially, invalidated the case for restoring Kuwaiti sovereignty by force of arms.

He was a little more than antiwar at that date. In fact, he spent a great deal of his time slandering Bush I in particular and the United States in general at that date. But hidden and convoluted as it may be, that's the mea culpa we needed. Chris is in the club.

I think it's interesting that Hitchens's hero is George Orwell, and I can't avoid thinking that Orwell's thought developed greatly during the years. As late as 1937 he was still parroting the Trot / Left Socialist doctrine about the coming war against the Nazis being a dastardly capitalist plot. Then he went to Spain and learned that it was possible for the Left to be not only wrong but evil. From 1938 Orwell was anti-Soviet. From 1939 he was pro-war. But until at least 1940 he was anti-Semitic:

25 October (1940)

The other night examined the crowds sheltering in Chancery Lane, Oxford Circus, and Baker Street stations. Not all Jews, but I think, a higher proportion of Jews than one would normally see in a crowd this size. What is bad about Jews is that they are not only conspicuous, but go out of their way to make themselves so. A fearful Jewish woman, a regular comic-paper cartoon of a Jewess, fought her way off the train at Oxford Circus, landing blows on anyone who stood in her way...

Surprised to find that D., who is distinctly left in his views, is inclined to share the current feeling against the Jews. He says that the Jews in business circles are turning pro-Hitler, or preparing to do so. this sounds almost incredible, but according to D. they will always admire anyone who kicks them. What I do feel is that any Jew, i.e. European Jew, would prefer Hitler's kind of social system to ours, if it were not that he happens to persecute them. Ditto with almost any Central European, e.g. the refugees. They make use of England as a sanctuary, but they cannot help feeling the profoundest contempt for it. You can see this in their eyes, even when they don't say it outright. (War-time Diary, 1940)

Lovely, George. Xenophobic and antiSemitic all at the same time. But he grew over the years. I am convinced that when he says "you" in the following famous passage from 1945, he is talking about himself:

As for the nationalistic loves and hatreds that I have spoken of, they are part of the makeup of most of us, whehter we like it or not. whether it is possible to get rid of them I do not know, but I do believe that it is possible to struggle against them, and that this is essentially a moral effort. It is a question first and all of discovering what one really is, what one's own feelings really are, and then of making allowance for the inevitable bias. If you hate and fear Russia, if you are jealous of the wealth and power of America, if you despise Jews, if you have a sentiment of inferiority toward the British ruling class, you cannot get rid of these feelings simply by taking thought. But you can at least recognize that you have them, and prevent them from contaminating your mental processes. (Notes on Nationalism)

The second passage is a great deal wiser and more mature than the first. This is Orwell's recantation of his antiSemitism, twisted as it is: "I admit I despise Jews, but I don't like that fact about myself". I think he's being honest.

I have a feeling that Orwell's movement toward the Right would have continued if he had survived; he might well have moved as far as Muggeridge or Paul Johnson did. Certainly his two best-known books, written after 1943, were savagely anti-Soviet, and he's known to have made a list of literary figures who were untrustworthy because of their Communist affiliation, in his judgment. I think Hitchens is passing through the same intellectual process that Orwell did.

Apropos of nothing, but I just thought this article from the Weekly Standard by Joel Engel on Rod Serling and his battles with censorship was very interesting and well-done, so I figured you might enjoy it too.

The Spanish government, as you may already know, has pulled out most of its staff at the embassy in Baghdad. Several staffers will be staying on and the Embassy will not close. "State security forces" recommended that the embassy be moved to a larger and more secure building; the new building will be able to house the entire delegation. Before, some embassy staffers lived in private residences in the city, and one was murdered several weeks ago. Prime Minister Aznar announced that the government would take advantage of the situation by calling diplomats back to Madrid for high-level consultations. Most Embassy staff should be back in Baghdad by the end of the month. Said Foreign Minister Ana Palacio, "This is a temporary measure. The representatives who have gone to Amman will return soon."

Robert Fisk pitches a fit in today's Vangua. Seems Edward Said died and some people said some things that were not very nice about him. Mr. Fisk thinks this is repugnant and unhealthy and insulting and execrable and in bad faith. He thinks we're all racist against Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular. He is especially miffed that some people have accused Hanan Ashrawi of favoring Palestinian suicide attacks. Mr. Fisk is particularly angry at one Zev Chafetz, so he attempts to discredit him by pointing out that Mr Chafetz was an Israeli government spokesman back in 1982, and he says that all this is the work of "supposed friends of Israel" and "Israeli pressure groups". I say Mr. Fisk is a big poop head.

The Catalan regional election campaign continues apace. Both Jaime Mayor Oreja of the PP and Jose Bono of the PSOE have blasted the Catalan nationalists for their fence-sitting regarding the Ibarretxe plan for a semi-independent Basque Country. Bono called CiU (!) and the Republican Left (well, OK) a bunch of radicals. Here's our official election prediction, and remember we haven't been wrong yet: A Socialist-Republican Left-Communist coalition takes over the Generalitat with Pasqual Maragall (who has botoxed his narrow piglike eyes so he doesn't look like as big a drunk as he did before) as Prime Minister. Convergencia, the moderate nationalist party, is going to take a bath and the PP is going to get the same 15% of the votes it always gets. As Jordi Pujol, Catalan Prime Minister for the last 23 years, goes into retirement, the party he held together all these years is going to begin to crack up. The less Catalanist and more conservative CiU voters will move to the PP, the more Catalanist CiU voters will go to the Republican Left, and the more social democratic CiUsters will go over to the Socialists, holding their noses maybe, but they will. CiU will become a minority party probably under the leadership of its Christian Democratic faction, Democratic Union, and its boss Josep Antoni Duran Lleida. (Note: If you ever want to irritate a Catalan nationalist call this guy "Duran Lerida", using the Spanish version of his second surname. The explosion will last at least five minutes.)

Some of the more idiotic Cataloonies have been making noises implying that the nasty Spaniards planned this royal wedding thing to distract attention away from the Catalan elections. This is known as thinking that the world revolves about one's own navel. Toni Soler is unhappy with the choice of Letizia Ortiz because he thinks she was just a mouthpiece for the evil antiCatalanista TV1 while she was doing the news (up until last Friday. Letizia note: she's way too skinny. She also has a camera-friendly large head compared to the rest of her body.)

Letter to La Vanguardia: ...Many theater, dance, and review shows use, absolutely bare-faced, the Yankee model for inspiration, without this impeding the same people from later scorning everything American after performing it on stage. Or is all this antiAmericanism and scorn for their way of life, their culture, and their customs, just a mask to cover up the envy we have for them?

MIGUEL MASSANET, Begues

Andy Robinson simply cannot shut up about the fires in California. I think he's written as much about the California fires as the whole Vanguardia staff did about this summer's heat wave, in which at the very least several hundred people died in Barcelona and several thousand in all of Spain. Says Andy, wrong again about American history, The suburban model was promoted by Anglo-American real-estate developers and car manufacturers like Ford, who did not understand its incompatibility with the unpredictable and extreme Mediterranean ecosystems. The move to a suburban model--a middle-class dream made in the very same California--has been brutal in recent years and has coincided with the destruction of the rural economy.

Oh, Lord. Suburbanization has been a constant in American history going way back; check out the book Gotham, a well-known history of New York, which makes it clear that New York had residential suburbs going back at least two hundred years--what do you think Harlem was until about 1910? For other examples, look at the net of leafy towns around Boston, the Philadelphia Main Line, Fairfield County, Westchester, Queens, Grosse Pointe, Shaker Heights, Oak Park and the North Shore, et cetera. Those places all existed long before the automobile. Henry Ford and the evil real estate guys didn't cause the phenomenon. And the idea of the American dream goes back to the pioneers and the immigrants, not merely to the LA metro area.

Michael Moore's opus "Stupid White Men" is Number 1 on the Vangua's best-seller list in both Spanish and Catalan. That might have something to do with this story from yesterday's Vangua:

MAJORITY OF EUROPEANS BELIEVE US, ISRAEL AGGRESSIVE STATES: Spaniards view Bush's America as most dangerous country on planet

The majority of Europeans consider that Israel and the United States as a threat toward world peace, according to a study performed by the statistical office of the European Commission, Eurostat, published yesterday. Israel comes in first, with 59% of those surveyed seeing that country as a danger. George W. Bush's America is not far behind, since 53% of those consulted see it as dangerous to the world, as many as Iran and North Korea, and more than Afghanistan (50%) and Pakistan (48%).

Seems that the figures for those who "see the Jewish state as a threat" are 74% in Holland, 69% in Austria, 64% in the UK (!), and 56% in Spain. Those who see the US as "threatening" are 88% in Greece and 61% in Spain. 68% of Europeans surveyed said the coalition attack on Iraq was unjustified, 58% said the UN should be in charge of Iraqi reconstruction, 65% said the US should pay for said reconstruction, and 54% opposed sending their troops for peacekeeping in Iraq. The study was carried out between =ctober 8 and 16 and consisted of 7515 telephone interviews.

Now, Eurostat is up to its neck in corruption, there's a major scandal going on there, but I don't think the survey is incorrect. I think the results reflect EU opinion pretty well, which leads me to one conclusion: They don't like us.

What should our response be to this ejaculation of America and Israel bashing? I'm tempted to say this: Screw European public opinion and the European public. The results of the survey make it pretty clear that most Europeans want us to go home. I vote we do so. Why should we volunteer to defend the Greeks? Let's pull out of NATo and replace it with a series of bilateral treaties, since there's no reason for us to stick out our necks for these people. Goodbye nuclear umbrella, goodbye American bases, goodbye American intervention in Europe, if that's what they want. Also goodbye most-favored trade status. I'm not calling for isolationism here, I'm calling for a realistic foreign policy based on our interests and exclusively our (and our friends') interests. If Greece doesn't want to be our friend, fine. They don't have to be. But then they shouldn't expect any favors, either.

InstaPundit links to this article by Jonathan Rauch on American "unilateralism". Check it out for a review of debunking arguments shredding the "big bad USA" stereotype. Front Page links to this Daniel Pipes article which basically says that the Europeans are all mouth and whining and bitching but no action. They talk big about the US as a threat but their governments do nothing effective that would indicate they really believe in that alleged threat.

Since it's Tuesday, it's time for the weekly TMQ-tribute NFL Power Rankings. There were a good few surprises last week, but our rankings haven't changed that much.

Rank. (Last week) Team; Won-Lost; Ratio points for / against

1. (1) Chiefs; 8-0; 1.89
2. (2) Colts; 7-1; 1.61
3. (3) Dolphins; 5-3; 1.46
4. (4) Bucs; 4-4; 1.43
5. (6) Vikes; 6-2; 1.36
6. (7) Titans; 6-2; 1.34
7. (5) Rams; 5-3; 1.34
8. (12) Niners; 4-5; 1.33
9. (10) Cowboys; 6-2; 1.32
10. (9) Seahawks; 6-2; 1.31
11. (11) Ravens; 5-3; 1.23
12. (8) Broncos; 5-4; 1.23
13. (14) Pats; 7-2; 1.19
14. (13) Packers; 4-4; 1.19
15. (15) Panthers; 6-2; 1.09
16. (17) Giants; 4-4; 0.98
17. (16) Bills; 4-4; 0.97
18. (21) Eagles; 5-3; 0.93
19. (18) Jets; 2-6; 0.93
20. (19) Saints; 4-5; 0.92
21. (22) Bengals; 3-5; 0.88
22. (20) Browns; 3-5; 0.88
23. (23) Jedskins; 3-5; 0.78
24. (24) Raiders; 2-6; 0.75
25. (25) Steelers; 2-6; 0.73
26. (28) Bears; 3-5; 0.71
27. (30) Lions; 2-6; 0.71
28. (26) Jags; 1-7; 0.69
29. (29) Texans; 3-5; 0.64
30. (27) Chargers; 1-7; 0.61
31. (32) Cardinals; 3-5; 0.53
32. (31) Falcons; 1-7; 0.53

Note there is barely any difference between #5 and #10; those teams could be mixed up in any order. The Dolphins and Bucs look to be overrated by the system, though I still like both teams. The Patriots are definitely underrated, though I don't think the Panthers are; I think the Panthers are a middle-of-the-pack team, rated about right. I guarantee the Cowboys are not overrated. I think the Niners are too high, that they're not as good as their ranking. Too inconsistent. The Jedskins, Raiders, and Steelers are all finished for the year. The Eagles are moving up slowly but surely. The Jets are ranked too high; they ought to be down there with the other 2-6 teams. The Ravens are for real. The Broncos will keep sliding.

Last week we "broke even" again, with the Bucs letting us down and the Ravens covering the spread against the Jags. So we're now down forty bucks after two weeks. We've got three picks this week: we like Indy at Jacksonville, giving 6 1/2 points (this is 7-1 Indy ranked Number Two playing 1-7 Jax ranked Number Twenty-Eight), we like the 6-2 Vikings to snap out of it at the expense of the horrible 1-7 #30 Chargers in San Diego, giving six points; and we like Dallas at home to beat the Bills by more than four points. We think Dallas is really a legit playoff team and that the Bills are mediocre at best.

Check out this article from Slate which shows that there's not a correlation between making campaign contributions to the Republicans and receiving Iraq or Afghanistan reconstruction contracts. Yes, Bechtel and Halliburton have received big contracts, largely because they are the best-known and most-experienced companies in their field, I assume. They are also very well-known contributors to the Republicans. That's their right. They're allowed to make publicly-announced campaign contributions and there's nothing wrong with their doing so. But a lot of companies that have made only tiny contributions or none at all have also received Iraq / Afghanistan contracts, demonstrating that the quo is not necessary to get the quid.

Here's another article by the same author, Daniel W. Drezner, from the New Republic, which tells us not to panic at the apparent backlash of antiglobalism and antiliberalism in Latin America; it supports a couple of the things we said in yesterday's post about moral equivalence. There's another piece by Andrew Sullivan in TNR, in which he shreds Andy Rooney's idiotic 60 Minutes rant on the Iraq War (and provides stacks of evidence demonstrating that the ilk of Moore and Franken and Rooney are baldly lying when they accuse President Bush of doing just that) that is well worth reading. And if you want some more discrediting of Al Franken's screeds, check out this story by David Frum from Front Page.

Finally, Sullivan links to this old British magazine, Homes and Gardens, from November 1938. Just like Becks and Posh show off their houses in Hello! and OK!, Adolf Hitler shows the fawning reporter his mountain house at Bertechsgaden in the Bavarian Alps. Read the article to learn how delightful it is to spend time with der Fuehrer and his cultivated guests, while Frauen Goebbels and Goering entertain the local children, suave cosmopolitan Ribbentrop chooses the wine at dinner, and Putzi Hanfstaengel, Hitler's court jester, plays post-prandial piano.

There are two interesting City Journal pieces that Front Page links to today; the first is Victor Davis Hanson on the Europeans, and the second is a look at the new conservative hip media. Check them out.

You want moral equivalence? Here's some really shocking and extremely stupid moral equivalence from El Periodico last Friday. the author is one Jose Ovejero, billed as a "writer". The title is all you need to know: "Not All Violence Is Terrorism". In case you're a masochist, though, and actually want to read it, check this out.

In recent years a strange and repetitive consensus has been developing in the Western world, according to which all violence not generated by democratic states is intrinsically condemnable. Paraphrasing the Prime Minister, Jose Maria Aznar, in his recent speech before the UN, the nobility of a cause cannot serve as an alibi for the ignominy of the act--terrorist--an affirmation which not only the great majority of politicians support, but also Western commentators and columnists. Let me quote Kofi Annan, the secretary-general of the UN: "No goal gives anybody the right to kill innocent civilians..."

Violence seems to be only a legitimate recourse in the hands of democratic states; then the cause does justify the ignominy of the act: Aznar himself, to defend Spanish participation in Iraq, affirmed with noticing any contradiction, that "guaranteeing the security and the freedom of the world...seems like a noble cause to me": the civilian victims, a priori unacceptable, become in this way the painful but necessary price of a noble objective, at least if anybody still thinks that a war can be fought without causing casualties among the civilian population.

We should not think that those who say things like terrorism is everywhere, violence is never justified, or that the Zapatistas and ETA are the same thing, as a Socialist politician said after a visit to Mexico, have become pacifists overnight and repudiate all violence. What is rejected is terrorist violence, which seems to be defined as that directed against the democratic states, their citizens and their companies. Which gives us at least two problems.

The first, the definition of a democratic state. Is it enough to have elections and a theoretical freedom of the press and of expression to talk about democracy? Do countries like Bolivia, Colombia or Mexico live in democracy, which makes any use of violence to achieve social or legislative gains condemnable? We must suppose so, because otherwise we cannot understand that Western countries sell arms and give logistic and intelligence support to the Government of Colombia, or have friendly--and economic--relations with those of Bolivia and Mexico.

Well, yeah, Mexico, Colombia, and Bolivia are all countries striving to move toward greater democracy and better social conditions, and the fact that there are a bunch of communist guerrillas running around each of the three countries is not helping a whole hell of a lot. Is this guy saying it should be OK to use violence to weaken those governments? If so, just who elected those people who are killing others in order to "achieve social and legislative gains"? Oh, by the way, the biggest difference between the ETA and the Zapatistas is that the Zapatistas aren't nearly as proficient at killing people.

The fact that in one of those countries 85% of the population lives in poverty (presumably Bolivia, per capita GDP 1999 about $3000, literacy 82%, unemployment 11%--so it's poor but not that awful, not comparable with Africa. Says the World Almanac, "Since 1985, Bolivia has implemented economic changes that have been phenomenally successful. Still at the bottom of the South American economic ladder, its economy has steadily improved over the last fifteen years. Political stability has helped."), that the Government of another is pushing the civilian population to implicate themselves in the war--creating networks of civilian informers and with its plans to recruit peasant-soldiers--and in which the connivences between the army and the paramilitaries are obvious (that means Ovejero doesn't have to prove this, he just says it's "obvious"; also, what's wrong with encouraging the population to do their civic duty?), and another in which numerous crimes are planned and protected by a corrupt system, does not seem to make Western politicians and businessmen uncomfortable, although many more people die the victims of those false democracies than because of terrorist or guerrilla--if that distinction is permitted--actions. (Well, no, the distinction is not permitted. What this guy is saying is that it's OK for people to organize private armies, beholden to no one, in order to overthrow the imperfect governments of Mexico, Colombia, and Bolivia, and presumably the rest of the Latin American countries, in order to "achieve social and legislative gains", whatever those may be. I imagine they are similar to the gains Fidel Castro has made.)

The second problem is posed by the fact that the democratic countries are only democratic within their own territory, but they use reprehensible and even criminal means in the territories of others. They have no problem with allying themselves with dictators that defend their interests (false; the US has never supported a dictator unless he was the lesser of two evils, as during the Cold War, and it's never enjoyed doing so), they sell weapons and military technology to countries that are far from being democratic, even with the knowledge that they might be used against their citizens (the only nondemocratic countries I know America is supporting are precisely in the Middle East where they are still the lesser of two evils; I won't vouch for the French, though, with their network of client states in Africa and their deals with Saddam and Assad and, well, everybody else with money who wanted to destroy Israel), and they bribe corrupt bureaucrats so that they will approve projects that are often damaging--and even fatal--to the population of the country in question, that, for example, is expelled from its lands to give room for exploitation of forests or petroleum or the construction of a dam. (Give me one example of the US government doing this, please. I thought the last place they built a huge dam and made like a million people move was China.) While they pretend to fight terrorism with one hand they feed it with the other. (Here's his real point. Those goddamn Yankees are just reaping what they sowed and deserve whatever happens to them.)

So, deciding that all terrorism--all non-state violence--is the same, that is, persisting in ignoring its causes and its distinctive characteristics, is not only stupidity; it is also a subtle way of leaving aside a crucial question: how the political and economic interests of the First World are responsible, often directly, for the appearance of violence in the Third World. And not accepting that responsibility is a way of perpetuating the violence we are supposedly condemning.

Wow. That sure is some moral equivalence there. We're even WORSE than the terrorists because their violence is OUR fault. I would estimate that the majority of Spaniards who read the papers or watch the news on TV believe this stuff, because this is a common message in the Spanish media. It's not usually stated quite so bluntly, but it's a very common belief. I'd say most Spaniards who don't vote for the PP believe this line and actively parrot it. Fortunately the PP is going to win again in 2004, so we won't have to worry about these demented fools coming to power again until 2008.

An American helicopter was shot down over the Saddam Triangle. There are 15 dead soldiers. It seems to me that we should perhaps increase our efforts in pacifying said Triangle, to the effect of blowing the crap out of anybody who's carrying serious armament. The rest of the country seems to be doing pretty well, the 80% of the country that is either Kurd or Shiite, with universal allegiance to the new government and the occupying powers, but the Saddamites haven't given up yet. OK, whatever it costs, we have to level them, because we're fighting the whole damned Terrorist International here. And I vote we spend money rather than lives as far as possible. But let nobody be fooled. This is the War on Terrorism and we're going to have to be ready to fight on several fronts at once, because either we take the war to them like we're doing right now, or they're going to take the war to us like they did on September 11.

Well, Prince Felipe, the Principe de Asturias, the heir to the throne, has officially announced he's going to get married. Everybody was expecting this to happen pretty soon, since Felipe is 35 and it's about time he got around to producing his own heir. The future Queen is a very attractive young woman who has had a good bit of plastic surgery and was, until Friday, one of the newsreaders on the 9 PM TV1 newscast. Her name is Letizia Ortiz and she is from a middle-class family in Asturias. She is 31 and has been married (civilly, not religiously) and divorced, so there are no phony standards of virginity operating here.

Prince Felipe has a long history of romances attributed to him; the three most famous former aspirants to the throne were Isabel Sartorius, of the minor Spanish nobility, with whom he actually had a long romance, or at least what was publicized as one; Giselle "Gigi" Howard, an attractive upper-class New Yorker; and Norwegian model Eva Sannum. There are only two possiblilities about our Prince. Either he's a real lady-killer, since his name has been linked with everybody's from Elle McPherson to Tatiana of Liechtenstein. Or he's got Prince Edward / Albert of Monaco problems and all the women are smokescreens. It's one or the other.

The Spanish media are absolutely wild with the news; the Royal Family is actually pretty popular. They're not known for being a bunch of Eurotrash or spendthrifts or perverts or whatever (can you say "Belgium"?); their behavior is exemplary. They are a comparatively poor bunch of nobles--it's not like they're homeless or anything, but their resources are limited. There was a big stink a few years ago about the taxpayers' paying for the King's yacht, and it hasn't been that long since they sold off a couple of palaces back in the Eighties. One of them that they unloaded was the palace in Santander; my impression is they turned it over to the State in lieu of taxes. We are not talking the British royals here, we are talking about fairly shabby nobility. They are pretty popular but I don't think many people have a real affection for the monarchy. I doubt many people would mind if Spain were a republic.

Catalan feeling seems to be, great, lovely for them, big deal. They are not precisely swept up in the excitement.

To demonstrate the good sense of the Spanish Royals, Juan Carlos's and Sofia's first daughter, Elena, who is apparently a little retarded and maybe a little autistic, married minor Spanish noble and fellow borderline person Jaime de Marichalar. They've had two children who seem pretty normal. The ceremony was held in Spain's third city, Seville. The second daughter, Cristina, who is perfectly normal and quite pretty, married Inaki Urdangarin, an Olympic and FC Barcelona team handball player from the Basque bourgeoisie. These two apparently carried on a secret romance for years, and their marriage was celebrated in--Barcelona. They have three kids. Cristina "works" here in Barcelona. The big wedding, that of the heir to the throne, will of course be in Madrid.

The only thing nasty that's rumored about the Royals is that the King supposedly has problems keeping his pants zipped. Supposedly he has gone through half the women in Spain. There is allegedly a videotape of the King in action with aging starlet Barbara Rey which has been covered up, paid off, whatever. He is also supposed to like a drink but not to be a Boris Yeltsin. Maybe not even as bad as Ted Kennedy.

The Jedman is back in business. Check out his experiences with mafia dudes in Grandview, Hooter's girls, at Arrowhead, and as public address anouncer at junior high basketball games.

We're going to hold a "Win a Date with the Jedman" contest. Minimum requirements: 18 years or over. Female. (Or maybe very persuasive gay male, I don't know.) Write in down in the Comments section explaining why you want to date a bald guy with a bad back who speaks two languages badly and has taught them both to impressionable children. The winner gets to go out with the Jedman. Second place gets to go out with the Jedman twice.

Here's a Fox news story on the most recent US poll; it looks to me like anti-Bush sentiment hit its peak during the summer and it's nosing ever so slightly downward. Depending on how you measure it, more than half of Americans approve of Bush--the poll says he has a 56% favorable rating. The third year of a term is normally when a president has his lowest ratings; during the last year the "excitement" of the campaign tends to firm up support for the Prez. Bush has made damned sure that no recession is going to torpedo him like that one back in '91 torpedoed his daddy, so his financial "negligence" has redounded to his short-term political benefit. This is only smart if we can clean up Iraq within the next year. I think Bush thinks we can, if that makes any sense. He's going to need the people to be more or less happy with the economy if he's going to get the support we're going to need to win the War on Terrorism fairly quickly, at least that stage of it that's being fought in Iraq. But how long will popular support hold out if victory drags on and on? Not more than a year, I don't think, counting from now. That'll be enough to get him reelected, something I do not doubt will happen barring absolute disaster. The problem will be in 2005, which is when Bush has put off the recession until. If we haven't pretty much won the Iraq stage of the war by then, though, he's going to be in a weak position due to the inevitable roll of the business cycle. Bush has held it back long enough to win a second term. If we haven't pacified Iraq by then, I won't bail out, but a lot of people who are currently willing to stay the course will. That includes the entire right wing of the Democratic Party, the Joe Lieberman wing, and the left wing of the Republicans, all those moderate Republicans from the Northeast, the civilized, non-barbaric ones. That'll quite likely leave an unpopular President Bush beginning in 2005 and the country heading for a Democratic win in 2008 behind Hillary.

This is why we need to win in Iraq within a year. Boy, I hope I'm being pessimistic in the long term. Hey, I'm optimistic in the short term. Look at the answers to the individual questions at the bottom of the news article.

I slammed English authors who wrote about American cultural stuff and how they just get it wrong no matter how hard they try. Well, here's an American writing about Spanish stuff and getting it totally wrong. It's George V. Higgins, now deceased, a pretty decent writer of thrillers. His schtick was that his novels took place mostly in dialogue. This is from the 1991 mystery-procedural The Mandeville Talent. An investigator, young Joe Corey, has called a Spanish Claretian priest named Luis Delatorre to testify about a land deal. Delatorre has a "minder", Father Dawes. Corey has just asked whether Father Delatorre would like to speak through an interpreter.

"My goodness, no," Dawes said, recoiling, "that would upset him most greatly. Father Delatorre is Hidalgo. His family is very old. Of the nobility. Very close to El Caudillo, during the Regency. You have perhaps heard of his cousin, Francisco Delatorre.

"No," Corey said, "I can't say I have."

Dawes raised both eyebrows. "Well, of course, the passion for the art is limited in this country. But when Father Luis was in the Panama, of course, much of his ready acceptance and his honor by the peasants whom he dealt with originated, he told me, in his blood connection to the famous matador. It was felt by many at that time that Francisco was in truth superior to both Dominguin and Ordonez. But of course I do not know."

Delatorre then addresses Corey's pal, investigator Baldad Ianucci, in this way: "So often do we see, do we not, Senor Baldad, the pain of the men and the women..."

Delatorre is simply not a convincing character (if you read the novel, he will testify at length, and his errors will not be those typical of a Spanish-speaker using English).

a) Nobody's used the term "hidalgo" for like the last two hundred years.
b) Bullfighters come from the very lowest stratum of society, like boxers. They do not come from the type of old-line cultivated middle-class family that produces Claretian fathers and military officers and liberal professionals and the like.
c) Nobody ever called the Franco regime the Regency.
d) Members of the nobility do not go into the Church, as a general rule.
e) Native Spanish-speakers do not call the person they're addressing "Senor Baldad" when speaking in English. They avoid using Spanish honorifics. They use English ones, and Father Delatorre would have said, "Mr. Ianucci", just like anyone else.
f) To my knowledge bullfighting is not practiced in Panama, and if it is famous matadors do not perform there. Spain is the center of real top-class bullfighting, and Mexico, Colombia, and Peru are the Latin American countries where it is popular. A big Spanish matador might fight in Mexico; one got murdered last year in Colombia, of all things, so I don't think they go there any more. He certainly wouldn't go to Panama; the pay is too good in Madrid and Sevilla. No Panamanian peasants would have heard of a famous matador any more than they'd have heard of, I don't know, a famous golfer. At least not back in the early Sixties when Delatorre was supposed to have been in Panama.

Lesson for authors of all nationalities: Don't pretend knowledge of a foreign culture that you don't have, and this applies to everyone. Hey all you Spaniards: The way your authors generally portray us has exactly the same faults and stupidities as Higgins' portrayal of Spaniards. Vazquez Montalban's fictional portraits of Americans, for example, have little to do with reality. They include exactly the same errors as Higgins does, errors that cause any knowledgeable reader to lose his suspension of disbelief.

Have you ever seen those articles in the Onion signed by Herbert Kornfeld about his life as a gangbangin' accountant? I just found who they ripped the idea off from--or who they're parodying, to put it more politely. His name is Madd Ronald and he's from the Rollin' 20s Bloods in LA. Here's his newest screed, just came out yesterday, hot off the silicon. Should you care to peruse more of Madd Ronald's work, there's plenty more where that one came from.

Update on the Latin Kings. Our pal Akaky wrote in saying that the American Latin Kings are big on the East Coast of the States. It seems that they dress in black and yellow (or gold), and use a three-fingers-up "crown" hand symbol. Here's a 2001 article in Spanish from an Ecuadorian paper on these guys' appearance in that country. It says that the gang (and perhaps its rivals) was founded by foreigners--I assume people who had been in the States--and that its leaders are between 25 and 40 and come from the world of music, nightclubs, and entertainment. Apparently Ecuadorian immigrants, of whom there are a lot, both in Barcelona and Madrid, brought the gangs over here with them. They've appeared only in the last year or so in Barcelona; they didn't turn up until April 2003 in BCN, according to the cops.

Anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism are sadly much more common in Western Europe than one would hope at this late date. The two, of course, are closely related.

The basic mindset of the anti-Semite and the anti-American is the same: there is some all-powerful person or organization or institution that controls the world. The All-Powerful, whoever he or they are, is responsible for everything that happens, both good and bad. Therefore the All-Powerful is guilty for everything bad, which always happens for a reason--if it weren't in the interest of the All-Powerful, of course, it wouldn't happen. Now here comes the logical twist--therefore, the All-Powerful always acts exclusively in its own interest. So, it never acts altruistically or with the intention of doing good. It always acts selfishly. Everything good, honest, solidarious, caring-and-sharing, and the like comes from those who OPPOSE the All-Powerful.

The Americans and the Jews, as I said, are the peoples most commonly accused of being the All-Powerful, and they are quite frequently considered to be the same thing--or don't you remember the El Periodico cartoons of the American flag with the Star of David in the corner blue field? This is where the meme "The Jewish lobby controls the USA" comes from, in case you were wondering.

This is also why it's just as offensive for a European to say, as so many do, "Oh, individual Americans are all right, you're cool, it's just most of them are ignorant or materialistic or whatever, and it's the system's fault, the society's fault" as it is to substitute "Jews" (or "Catalans", as many people in Castile would--the Catalans aren't seen as the All-Powerful themselves but rather as sellouts to the All-Powerful) in that statement for "Americans". It's the same conspiracy theory.

I'm not letting us Americans off the hook. A lot of your moron Americans who believe in idiot conspiracy theories--the CIA killed Kennedy, the Defense Department is covering up what they know about UFOs, there are satanic perverts running our nursery schools--are guilty of the same thing, except the US government is the All-Powerful in their eyes. Unless it's the UN or the Masons or the Trilateral Commission or the British royal family or just "big business" or "the corporations" or the cattle mutilators or whatever.

Anyway, check out this article on anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism from Front Page. I especially liked this section:

But another element of the new anti-Semitism is often overlooked: The time frame for this resurgence of judeophobia corresponds with the intensification of international links that took place in the 1990s. “People are losing their compass,” observes Dan Dinar, a historian at Hebrew University. “A worldwide stock market, a new form of money, no borders. Concepts like country, nationality, everything is in doubt. They are looking for the ones who are guilty for this new situation and they find the Jews.” The backlash against globalization unites all elements of the political spectrum through a common cause, and in doing so it sometimes fosters a common enemy—what French Jewish leader Roger Cukierman calls an anti-Semitic “brown-green-red alliance” among ultra-nationalists, the populist green movement, and communism’s fellow travelers. The new anti-Semitism is unique because it seamlessly stitches together the various forms of old anti-Semitism: The far right’s conception of the Jew (a fifth column, loyal only to itself, undermining economic sovereignty and national culture), the far left’s conception of the Jew (capitalists and usurers, controlling the international economic system), and the “blood libel” Jew (murderers and modern-day colonial oppressors).

Yep. That's what we have here in Catalonia. All European nationalisms are mildly, at least, anti-Semitic, and Catalan nationalism is no exception. Fortunately our "browns", the Republican Left more obnoxious than Convergence, aren't too awful. Neither is real hardcore right wing and they both at least make nice noises about diversity occasionally. They do tend to be instinctively anti-American culturally--of course, that's why they're nationalists, they don't want non-Catalan stuff, or at least they don't want non-Catalan stuff that they didn't carefully choose for themselves, and America is by far the most culturally active and therefore "aggressive" society on earth, so it's the biggest enemy of the Catalan nationalist since it has more influence than any other (except the Castilian-Andalusian culture, which is much more of a threat to the Catalanistas because it's much closer and there's an enormous Spanish-speaking fifth column in the high schools recruiting nice Catalan-speaking boys and girls into smoking hash, getting tanked up in the streets ("el botellon"), listening to Estopa, and pronouncing "es que" "ejjjkay").

Our greens are linked both with our browns--ecologism and "land and blood" nationalism tend to go together--and our reds. My impression is that there are two different green parties in Catalonia; one is more nationalist and conservative, and it's linked to the Republican Left, and the other is more internationalist, hard leftist, and Spanish-speaking, and they're linked with Initiative for Catalonia, the local Communists' official name.

The Catalan Socialist Party occasionally attempts to appeal to all these motivations to be anti-American or anti-Semitic: they'll go brown and talk about being Catalanistas and against American culture, sometimes they'll go green and talk about being ecologically concerned and anti-American because the US is destroying the planet, and sometimes they'll go red and start talking Marxistically. You already know what that leads to.

What all the groups are capable of doing is using the blood libel: the All-Powerful is manifesting itself in the Middle East leaving blood dripping in his path. The Jews are murdering the Palestinians (local genius Baltasar Porcel says it's because they want the water) and the Americans massacred the Afghans and now they're massacring Iraqis. We're murdering them so we can grab the oil, see.

Of course, the only major political organization in Spain that openly opposes the idea of an American-Jewish confabulation that runs the world is the People's Party.

The government has announced that Spain is 0.5% over budget this year to the tune of $3.5 billion, the fifth straight year of a basically balanced budget (no deficits above 1%). Congratulations to Prime Minister Aznar and Economics Minister Rodrigo Rato; we've got the healthiest economy in the European Union. Overall economic growth is at 2.9%, the third best in the EU after such big and important countries as Ireland and Greece. The Eurozone growth average is under 2%. Zap, of course, is complaining that the extra cash in the budget should be spent on "social programs". Aznar and Rato are going to use it to pay down the national debt, of course.

No one can deny that the average Spaniard is much better off under Jose Maria Aznar than he was under Felipe Gonzalez. Felipe used to run 6-7% budget deficits year-in and year-out. The killer stat is this one: Spanish per capita income was 78% of the EU average in 1995, the year before Aznar took over. In 2003 per capita income is 85% of the European average. I submit that you've got to give the government big-time credit on this one.

Zap claims that Spanish economic growth is based on the construction sector, which has caused an increase in families' debt and a real estate bubble. The Socialists are really going off on the real estate bubble; the question is whether there is one. Housing prices have increased dramatically, but Spain is still very cheap compared to the rest of Europe. One would figure if our income is 85% of Europe's, our housing prices ought to be about 85% of Europe's. I don't know anything about European housing prices, but I can tell you that the average price in Barcelona is 3000 euros per square meter, meaning that an 80-square-meter flat ought to go for about €240,000. This is pretty cheap compared to most big cities around these parts, I think.

The real housing problem is this. The great majority of Spaniards are homeowners. Renting an apartment is not as common as it is in other big cities. Now, the rent control system put in way back when prevents landlords from jacking up the prices on old rental contracts, so there are an awful lot of people still paying forty euros a month on enormous flats in fine neighborhoods.

Corollary to the Law of Supply and Demand: When the government sets the price of a good at below that good's market value, that good will disappear from the market. That's why you can't rent a cheap place in Spain. All the rental apartments are already taken, because nobody wants to give up his old contract that allows him to live basically free. Rental apartments only come on the market when these folks actually die off. (I'm exaggerating slightly but not much).

The fact that you can't rent a cheap place means that instead of moving out of home at age 21 or 23 or even 25, people stay with their parents until they're past thirty, have established jobs, and plan to get married. There are lots of consequences of this system, to wit:

a) Close family ties. Generally a good thing but sometimes frustrating. b) Immature young adults whose moms take care of them until age 30. c) Lack of independence, conformism among young people. d) Low birth rate--people don't have kids till their thirties and then they have only one. e) A tendency toward laboral overqualification--while kids are sitting at home during their twenties they tend to collect more and more academic credentials of questionable utility. f) Lower consumption of goods--if the kid is living with mom and dad instead of his own place, that's a washing machine less that the economy sells. There are probably a hundred more but those are the ones that come off the top of my head.

Minister of the Treasury Cristobal Montoro, by the way, told Zap openly in the Parliament that he didn't know a damn thing about economics, which he doesn't (an open mike caught one of his advisers explaining to him the difference between progressive and regressive taxation while up on stage recently; Zap had confused them while speaking--and they call Bush dumb). Montoro then rubbed it in by saying, "You'll never get your budget through, because you'll never be Prime Minister, and you won't even be the leader of your party because you're gone after you lose the next elections. You're going from defeat to defeat leading up to the final debacle". Boom, boom, out go the lights.

By the way, we also have the healthiest pension system in Europe; it's running a 0.8% surplus with a €13 billion reserve fund.

Meanwhile, the Frogs and the Toads are both over the 3% budget deficit that the EU agreement permits them to run, and they are going to just flat-out break the EU rules on this. Who can stop them? They run the EU and will break as many agreements as they feel like. That's our friends the French and Germans.

Street gang murder in Barcelona: A bunch of Latin American street punks killed a fellow Latin American teenager outside the San Jose de Calasanz high school near the Sagrada Familia. That's where Remei went to high school, by the way. The killers supposedly come from a gang called the Latin Kings; they dress up like American gangbangers. I do not know whether these guys are affiliated with the American street gang the Latin Kings or whether they're just copycats; I assume the latter. In the past year there has been a wave of gang crime in the schools, with young thugs (often of immigrant origin, it must be said) hanging out near schools and robbing the kids when they enter or leave. Says the city government, "The high school (in question) is not conflictive and violent groups have never appeared, either inside or outside...This is an isolated case." Yeah, right. Everybody else in town hates these punks. And we know they exist because we see them every day. Some of them hang out in the Plaza del Norte, outside the La Salle Gracia high school. In the Vanguardia editorial they say it's just like West Side Story. Uh, no. Manhattan's West Side is a good deal safer, as far as street crime goes, than Barcelona.

Oh, yeah, the Vanguardia's Andy Robinson says that the people who live in the places where the fires are burning in southern California are there because of "white flight" (all Andy knows about LA is that he thinks "City of Quartz" is the gospel truth). They're all multimillionares living in opulent mansions--Andy likes the word "opulent". He thinks the fires are their own fault because they voted against higher taxes. See, if taxes were higher, then there wouldn't be any fires. Or something like that.

I've been rooting around in the mire of hate groups on the Internet. The great majority of them are simply nuts. These folks, however, the League of the South and the Council of Conservative Citizens, might fool unaware people into believing that they're something they're not. What they are is white supremacy groups. They're a lot slicker than the Klan, and they don't say anything about violence--well, not much. They do recommend that "European-Americans" should carry guns or other weapons just in case, well, you know what them big black bucks all want to do to our sweet little white girls.

I would take these guys semi-seriously. They're 25,000 people between the two of them, which is not a lot, but is enough to bring them to public attention. There is a photo of Haley Barbour at a CCC barbecue on the homepage of the Council of Conservative Citizens' website. I would suggest that Mr. Barbour immediately disassociate himself from these people, or that the Republican Party should immediately disassociate itself from him.

Note that both sites openly support Maurice, the racist barbecue guy from South Carolina, in his battle against Wal-Mart. Maurice didn't integrate his restaurants until the Supreme Court made him in 1976.

Please, all you foreigners, don't assume that these guys are typical of either conservatives or Southerners. They're not. There are still some unpleasant racist white people left in the South (some of them are related to me; hear that, Larry, you goddamn redneck from Lufkin)--and everywhere else--but they're dying out slowly but surely. Racism is still alive and ugly, as these websites show in a slightly slicked-up way. But it ain't what it used to be.

Andrew Sullivan mentions Fred Phelps today. Fred's picketing someplace in Long Island for some reason. I'm from Kansas. I know all about Fred Phelps. He's been at it for years. I remember back in the mid-eighties when I was at KU in Lawrence; Fred was already very well-known then. He used to show up on campus a lot with his small flock and his "God Hates Fags" and "AIDS Cures Fags" signs. From what I hear, he still does, but he went nationwide years ago. His website has attracted over 3.5 million visitors.

Fred is the self-appointed pastor of his own minuscule Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, which to my knowledge has no affiliation with the American Baptists or the Southern Baptists or any other legitimate group of Baptists. All of his church's members are his relatives; he has like twelve kids, a few of whom are estranged from their father but most of whom are his followers. Fred may have attracted a few nutcase loyalists outside his family, but since even Jerry Falwell thinks he's crazy, he's well out of sync with the most conservative wing of the Christian Right.

What frightens me about Fred is not that he's going to attract a mass movement of followers; he's too far out for anyone except for those people with nine toes and eight teeth who move out to Idaho or down to the Ozarks and live in incestuous and heavily armed compounds that the Feds roust every so often and some nutjob's poor innocent kids wind up getting shot. I'm worried that some Alan Rudolph type is going to be encouraged by Fred to go on an anti-gay killing spree. In fact, I pretty much guarantee you it's going to happen one of these days, sooner or later.

Also, what is tremendously offensive is the sheer hate that Fred exudes toward gays. He's not a "hate the sin, love the sinner" type; at least those guys are nonviolent. In fact, much of his rhetoric is obscenely scatological, as he continually refers to gays as "filthy" and "pigs" and "dogs" whose sexual practices include "fornicating with feces" and "drinking urine and semen". (I saw a rather attractive young female the other day wearing one of those tiny T-shirts. This one had the Pepsi logo on the front, but instead of "Pepsi" it said "Sperm". If I weren't married I'd have asked for her phone number.)

This, of course, is the good old dehumanizing tactic used by such lovely folks as the Nazis. You really ought to check out Fred's stuff, though, for the ultimate in crude hate propaganda. Here's a collection of his pieces called "God Hates America". Warning: click at your own risk. This stuff is vile.

What can we do to stop Fred? I think nothing. Fred's speech is protected by the First Amendment--up to a point. I don't think the law can close him down until some Fred follower shoots up a gay rights parade; then we can get him for inciting to violence, at least implictly. It looks to me like he's pretty careful (he's a lawyer) to avoid doing that explicitly; that is, he says that gays are sodomite pigs who have destroyed America, but he never takes the next logical step: he never out-and-out calls for violence.

Note to foreigners: Do not assume that Fred Phelps is a typical American from the heartland. He is not. Ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent of the population of Kansas, not to mention the rest of the country, thinks Fred Phelps is demented.

Here's this week's tribute-to-TMQ Power Rankings for the NFL, based on the ratio of the teams' points for / against ratio just like we did last week.

This week. (Last week); Won-loss; Ratio

1. (3) Chiefs; 8-0; 1.89; 4 blowouts, 4 close wins
2. (2) Colts; 6-1; 1.65; 4 close wins
3. (6) Dolphins; 5-2; 1.65; 5 wins, 5 blowouts
4. (4) Rams; 5-2; 1.57; 4-game win streak, 4 blowouts
5. (9) Bucs; 4-3; 1.54; 4 wins, 4 blowouts
6. (1) Vikings; 6-1; 1.47
7. (10) Titans; 6-2; 1.32; 3-game win streak, 5 blowouts
8. (5) Broncos; 5-3; 1.30; 2-game loss streak
9. (8) Seahawks; 5-2; 1.30
10. (7) Cowboys; 5-2; 1.29; lost 2 blowouts
11. (16) Ravens; 4-3; 1.21
12. (11) Niners; 3-5; 1.21; 4 close losses
13. (13) Packers; 3-4; 1.20; 3 blowouts, 3 close losses
14. (14) Patriots; 6-2; 1.19; 4-game win streak
15. (15) Panthers; 6-1; 1.13
16. (12) Bills; 4-4; 0.97; lost 4 blowouts
17. (20) Giants; 3-4; 0.96
18. (17) Jets; 2-5; 0.94
19. (19) Saints; 3-5; 0.90
20. (18) Browns; 3-5; 0.88
21. (22) Eagles; 4-3; 0.88; 2-game win streak
22. (21) Bengals; 3-4; 0.87
23. (22) Jedskins; 3-4; 0.78; 3-game loss streak
24. (24) Raiders; 2-5; 0.77; 3-game loss streak
25. (25) Steelers; 2-5; 0.73; 4-game loss streak, blown out 4 times
26. (26) Jags; 1-6; 0.69; blown out 4 times
27. (27) Chargers; 1-6; 0.64; blown out 4 times
28. (30) Bears; 2-5; 0.63
29. (29) Texans; 2-5; 0.61
30. (28) Lions; 1-6; 0.60
31. (31) Falcons; 1-6; 0.52; blown out 5 times
32. (32) Cardinals; 2-5; 0.51; blown out 4 times

Thoughts:

I like the Dolphins over the Patriots for the AFC East title. The Bills are not going to contend. The system seems to be underrating both the Patriots and the Panthers; then again, it might be telling us they're not as good as their records. It's pretty clear that all twelve of the playoff teams will come from the top fifteen in the power rankings, with the possible exception of the Eagles. If the Eagles can win a couple more games, we'll have to take them seriously as a playoff contender. It looks like the system is overrating both the Niners and the Packers, telling us they're not as solid as a lot of us thought they were--or maybe it's telling us they're still better than their records. The Broncos are almost certainly ranked too high, based on their quarterback troubles and losing streak. The Bucs and Rams are not ranked too high; they're going to the playoffs. Gotta like the Rams' four-game win streak since Bulger took over as QB. The Steelers and Raiders are through. Finished. Kaput. I love it when the Raiders suck. I hate the Raiders, everything about them from Al Davis down. Remember when Davis used to force Marcus Allen to sit the bench before Allen finally got liberated in Kansas City?

As for NFL imaginary betting, we're down twenty bucks on the year--remember, you gotta pay a ten-percent vig to the bookie, so if you bet a hundred and win, you win ninety, and when you bet a hundred and lose, you're out 110. St. Louis beat up on Pittsburgh, as we foresaw, but the Niners choked and lost to the Cardinals. This week's bets: we're giving the points both times. A hundred imaginary bucks on the eleventh-ranked Ravens at home, favored by 6 1/2 points over the Jags--the Ravens are playing well, have home-field, and the Jags suck, and a hundred imaginary bucks on the Bucs--I like that--favored by 8 1/2 at home over New Orleans. The fifth-ranked Bucs, playing at home, are on a roll and the Saints are merely mediocre.

The news from Iraq is not good at all; 40 people were killed in a wave of bombings in Baghdad. All of them were Iraqis except for one American soldier. The bombings hit the Red Cross international committee's headquarters and four Iraqi police stations.

Robert Fisk, in today's Vanguardia, says that

During Ramadan--the press likes to call it the "month of sanctification of the holidays," which is only appropriate up to a point--Muslim feeling flourishes: during these days, a Muslim feels that he or she has to do something important so that God will listen to him or her. There is no passage in the Koran related to violence during Ramadan, nor about suicide bombings--just as there is nothing in the New Testament that calls upon Christians to perpetrate genocide or "ethnic cleansing", in which they became experts during the past two centuries--but the loyal Wahabi Sunnis have gotten used to combining holy war with the "message", the "dawa" during Ramadan.

As a consequence, what has the message been? In Baghdad, the political message of the last two days has been clear: it indicated to the Iraqis that the Americans cannot control Iraq, and it told--something more important, perhaps--the Americans that their country cannot control Iraq...which is a sign to the Iraqis that--an even more essential factor--they must not cooperate with American forces! (By the way: After yesterday, who's going to want to be an Iraqi policeman?)

...We must add, of course, what happened at the headquarters of the Red Cross, the last "honest broker" for the Americans, the last truly neutral international organism--after the double suicide attacks against the United Nations--still able to provide a certain degree of communication in the actual circumstances between American forces and their adversaries. But now that possibility is finished. It is possible that some elements hostile to the United States really come from other Arab countries...but most of the armed opposition to the American presence comes from the Iraqi Sunnis. Not from the "remainder" of Saddam's forces, from his "hardcore sympathizers" or "people with no future" (Paul Bremer's typical expressions, covering up a real and growing Iraqi resistance), but from men who in many cases hated Saddam.

They don't work for Al Qaeda. They don't work for Mullah Omar or for Osama Bin Laden. But they've learned their own vision of history. Attack the enemy during the holy month of Ramadan, Learn form the war in Algeria. And from the war in Afghanistan. Learn the lessons of the "war against terrorism" that the United States is waging. Go for the throat. Remember that about "Bring them to me"...Kill their leaders. And then "You're either with us or against us. You're either collaborators or patriots."

That was the lesson of yesterday's bloodbath in Baghdad.

Now, Mr. Fisk's celebration of these events in Baghdad is, of course, disgusting, but Mr. Fisk is not stupid. Evil, probably, but not stupid. He is actually an expert propagandist, which is what has led him to make so many mistakes in the past and to get people to forget about them, since he's always off on a new wild tangent, more reckless than the last. This time he has not made a mistake. As a longtime sympathizer with dictators and totalitarians, he well knows what Step One is in organizing your "people's struggle movement." Step One is: Kill all of your people who don't want to struggle and would prefer a negotiated peace to a victorious--or losing--violent conflict. This is why the Palestinians are so united while the Israelis are all divided--because any Palestinian who openly disagrees with the people's struggle movement has an appointment with a death squad.

The most notorious places this strategy has been practiced include Vietnam, with the Vietminh and Vietcong; Spain, where anarchist terrorists murdered workers who opposed the CNT, the anarchist union; and Algeria. Says Paul Johnson in his book Modern Times (pages 497-98), on the post-1945 civil war:

These (Algerian FLN terrorists), who had absorbed everything most evil the twentieth century had to offer, imposed their will on the villages by sheer terror; they never used any other method. Krim told a Yugoslav paper that the initiation method for a recruit was to force him to murder a designated "traitor", mouchard (police spy or informer), French gendarme or colonialist: "An assassination marks the end of the apprenticeship of each candidate." A pro-FLN American reporter was told: "When we've shot (the Muslim victim) his head will be cut off and we'll clip a tag on his ear to show he was a traitor. Then we'll leave the head on the main road." Ben Bella's written orders included: "Liquidate all personalities who want to play the role of interlocuteur valable." "Kill any person attempting to deflect the militants and inculcate in them a bourghibien spirit." Another: "Kill the caids...Take their children and kill them Kill all those who pay taxes and all those who collect them. Burn the houses of Muslim NCOs away on active service." The FLN had their own internal reglements des comptes too; the man who issued the last order, Bachir Chihani, was accused (like Roehm) of pederasty and sadistic sex-murders, and chopped to pieces along with eight of his lovers. But it was the Muslim men-of-peace the FLN killers really hated. In the first two-and-a-half years of war, they murdered only 1,035 Europeans but 6,352 Arabs (authenticated cases; the real figure was nearer 20,000). By this point the moderates could only survive by becoming killers themselves or going into exile.

The FLN strategy was, in fact, to place the mass of the Muslims in a sandwich of terror. On one side, the FLN killers replaced the moderates. On the other, FLN atrocities were designed to provoke the French into savage reprisals, and so drive the Muslim population into the extremist camp. FLN doctrine was spelled out with cold-blooded precision by the Brazilian terrorist Carlos Marighela:

"It is necessary to turn political crisis into armed conflict by performing violent actions that will force those in power to transform the situation into a military situation. that will alienate the masses who, from then on, will revolt against the army and the police...the government can only intensify its repression, thus making the lives of its citizens harder than ever...police terror will become the order of the day...The population will refuse to collaborate with the authorities, so that the latter will find the only solution to their problem lies in the physical liquidation of their opponents. The political system of the country will then become a military situation."

Of course, this odious variety of Leninism, if pursued ruthlessly enough, has a certain irrestible force.

Robert Fisk doesn't seem to have any problem with it, though. You might remember that attacks that fit in with the above perverse but effective strategy have already happened at the UN headquarters, the Jordanian Embassy, two mosques (one was a moderate Shiite leader's in Najaf, where 83 innocent people died), and several Iraqi police stations.

This is why backing out now will only make things worse. Yes, I'm aware that's what they said in Vietnam. We have some advantages in Iraq: 1) there's no big nearby country that is supporting the terrorists within Iraq with weapons, supplies and cash 2) armor and airpower are a lot more effective in the desert than the jungle 3) our own equipment is many times better than what we had in Vietnam 4) our soldiers are volunteers, not draftees 5) we know damn well that these people may not be exactly the same folks who blew up the World Trade Centers, but they're fighting on the same side.

Just a few thoughts while wondering what ever happened to Charo...It's a journalistic custom to refer to the leadership of a political party by the name of the street their headquarters is on; therefore in Madrid Socialist headquarters is "Ferraz" and PP headquarters is "Genova", and in Barcelona Socialist headquarters is "Tarragona" and Convergence headquarters is "Corsega"...Genova rocked and rolled last night, with the most printable chant: "Simancas, jodete, Madrid es del PP"...Ferraz was so worried about being tainted (nationally) by their foreseeable (regional) loss that they had their (regional) election-night convention-press-conference-party thing at a rented-out auditorium, not at Ferraz itself...The province of Alava is now talking about seceding from the region of the Basque Country whether or not the Basque Country declares independence from Spain, and Navarra wants nothing to do with Ibarretxe or his party or his plan that would include them...Barcelona beat Mallorca 1-3, saving the players from the lynch mob this week at least...Deportivo beat Valencia 2-1 in a spectacular game, full of action, giving Depor first place in the League followed by Valencia and Real Madrid...I was drunk the day my ma got out of prison and I went to pick her up in the rain...The Chiefs are eight-and-oh. Is this finally the year?...People I think are probably bigger stars in Europe than America: Nicole Kidman, Madonna, Mariah Carey, Robbie Williams, Kylie Minogue, Claudia Schiffer, Abba, Cher, Mia Farrow, Julio Iglesias, Sharon Stone, Lorenzo Lamas, Cliff Richard, Boney M, oh my god.....

Well, they done had them elections in the Madrid region and conservative People's Party candidate Esperanza Aguirre was elected Prime Minister of the region with 48.4% of the vote. Rafael Simancas of the Socialists took 39.0% and Fausto Fernandez (yeah, this guy's name is Faust, which is probably one reason he came in third) of the Communist United Left took 8.5%. The PP has 57 seats in the regional Parliament; the PSOE won 45 and the United Left 9, so not even a Popular Front coalition can overturn the PP absolute majority.

Esperanza Aguirre is one of the conservative political figures most hated by the Spanish Illustrated and Enlightened Among Us because she's a member of the Madrid haute bourgeoisie and is married to a minor noble. She's often portrayed as an idiot when quite the opposite is true; she passed the highest-level Civil Service exam, which is not real easy to do, and she's been involved in politics as a representative in the Madrid regional parliament, a representative in the national parliament, minister of Culture, and president of the Senate, ever since 1981.

A common urban legend cherished by the Spanish Left is that when informed that Saramago had won the Nobel Prize for literature, Ms. Aguirre y Gil de Biedma responded "Who is Sara Mago?" Ha, ha. Ms Aguirre obviously knows who Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago is, since she's smart enough to read El Pais just like all the geniuses who like to make fun of her. She probably doesn't think much of his writing. I don't, either.

I'm in kind of a cranky mood so I've been digging up a bunch of crap on the Net. Here's the first chapter of Vicente Verdu's The American Planet translated to English by somebody else, obviously an Illustrated and Enlightened Brit. Check it out for El Pais columnist and self-proclaimed sociologist Verdu's sophisticated analysis of American culture, which ranges from the postmodern to the reactionary and has the general characteristics of getting pretty much everything wrong and being wildly praised by both the Marxist Left and Jihadist Right. This particular book spent a year or so on the bestseller list in Spain back in the late nineties. It's probably been read by at least a million people in Europe. If you're interested in "how others see us", this should be enlightening.

If you want more Vicente Verdu, I can provide it, but I'll only translate that crap if I get a request.

Intelligent Life in Spain Watch: Looking around El Periodico's website, I found this here collection of sixty opinions provided by local celebrities of one kind or another on the war in Iraq back in February. I'm not going to translate it all, but you guys might want to check it out if you can read Spanish. It's pretty scary to see how uninformed and stupid these people are; a lot like celebrities in the United States, I guess.

Remember P. J. O'Rourke's hierarchy of ratings for celebrity statements, as if they were movies? S stood for "silly", VS stood for "very silly", and SML stood for "Shirley McLaine". These are all good, solid SMLs.

Here are some of the better quotes from some of the better-known celebs:

Javier Clemente, soccer coach: "The Government is getting into something it shouldn't."
Laura Garcia Lorca, bearer of famous surnames: "Federico would demonstrate against the war."
Gay Mercader, concert promotor: "Bush thinks Sharon is a man of peace."
Baltasar Porcel, genius: "I won't go out in the street, I'll demonstrate through my writing."
Emilio Aragon, actor, professional clown: "You can't build democratic societies on fear."
Jose Ramon de la Morena, sports talk-show host: "Aznar is acting as Bush's spear-carrier."
Fernando Delgado, newsreader: "Preventive war is an attack against intelligence."
Mercedes Mila, reality-show host: "I feel closer to Chirac than Aznar."
Inaki Gabilondo, talk-show host: "Blair, Berlusconi, and Aznar are Old Europe."
Gemma Nierga, the Spanish Ricki or Rosie: "I would prefer a government in favor of dialogue."
Some guy I never heard of: "If you applaud the USA you are a genocidist by empathy."
Victor Manuel, singer: "There are hidden interests behind the buildup to war."
Luis Eduardo Aute, singer: "Uncle Sam hates it that his name rhymes with Saddam."
Concha Velasco, old bat: "I'm proud of (the Yank-bashing protest) at the Goya Awards."
Boris Izaguirre, Spain's Paul Lynde: "This is only good for imperialism."
Josep Maria Benet i Jornet, soap-opera scriptwriter: "Words are the only thing we have left against barbarism."
Coto Matamoros, convicted drug trafficker and reality-show personality: "I'll march against the war and against the government."

Euro Anti-Semitism Watch: In yesterday's El Periodico, the back-page cartoon is by some piece of shit in human form named Ferreres. It shows Ariel Sharon, depicted as hugely fat with a big nose and thick lips (exactly as if El Periodico were Der Sturmer). Sharon is pushing a wheelbarrow full of human skulls and standing in front of an enormous wall of more skulls. Three innocent-looking folks, whom I assume are Palestinians, are saying to him: "The UN has condemned the construction of the wall." Sharon responds, "There's a lot of anti-Semites around here. Besides, in the caricatures, they always draw me as fat. I don't know why!" The Periodico's all-time classic cartoon, which they run several times a year, is an American flag with the Star of David in the place of the fifty stars.

Click here if you want to see the Ferreres cartoon.

On the very same page, the unintelligent, uninformed, anti-American, fat Catalan "journalist", Joan Barril (this guy is so fat that his neck bulges out over his shirt collar and makes him look like a swollen-up frog in the photo that accompanies his newspaper column. I met him once briefly. He's an asshole as a person--Spaniards who are not confident in their own intelligence, like Barril and Vazquez Montalban and Javier Nart, and especially the vicious dragonlady Maruja Torres, but who somehow have risen to levels where they are considered geniuses by the Great Unwashed, tend to be major assholes, unlike most of the rest of them--and he's much uglier in person than in that photo), has an article on the Madrid Donors' Conference. Here's an excerpt:

In half a year we've moved from preventative demonstrations to the smoke of the bombings, from the threat of weapons of mass destruction to nothing, from a war which was supposed to be a liberation to a painful and bloody occupation. Even to wage war well you have to be competent, and something is telling us that the most professional army in the world has behaved with little professionalism. And now they're appealing to the generosity of the First World, not so much to help Iraq but to pay the American bill. If you don't want to spend your money on construction, don't spend it on destruction. A donor is someone who gives. But a forced donor is not a donor, but a victim. We don't become philanthropists by handing over our wallet to a mugger.

With the recently arrived cold weather there's plenty of time to think about the sum of injustices of this war and this postwar. I imagine those generals, those pilots, and that secretary of Defense at the moment of deciding the bombing of inhabited cities with fragmentation bombs. War also has its syntax. There are bombs designed to penetrate and mutilate bodies and others to blow up buildings or cut off highways. the cost of the mutilated body is not contemplated in the fund-raising in Madrid, maybe because the cost of an anonymous Iraqi has no price and on the other hand a section of a pipeline has an incalculable value. Now everything is turning out to be very expensive. And they're asking the world to pay for the aggressors' party. And the world isn't just governments. We taxpayers are going to contribute the money so that some Spanish company can make a small profit with the crumbs from the table that Dick Cheney's friends leave behind.

Challenge: How many lies, exaggerations, and stereotypes can you find in these two paragraphs of Mr. Barril's?

Update: I have just torn out said back page of the Periodico and taken it to the toilet, where I used it for target practice. Bombed it, strafed it, and sank it.

Today is Election Day in Madrid; it's the repetition of the regional elections. In case you don't remember, back in March they had elections to determine the composition of the autonomous-region governments. In the Madrid region, the Socialists and the United Left made a coalition after the election to keep the conservative People's Party out of power; together they eked out a majority of one seat in the regional parliament over the PP. However, two Socialists, members of a minority faction, abandoned the party alleging that the Socialist Party was turning over too much power to the Communist United Left and bolted the party. They refused, however, to add their votes to the PP's side, so nobody had an absolute majority and the elections had to be repeated. The Socialists tried to turn the whole thing into a bribery scandal, alleging that powerful developers and constructors close to the PP had paid off the two rebel Socialists to bolt. They had zero evidence and looked really stupid when their charges did not pan out. If I were the PP I'd sue them for libel.

The PP candidate Esperanza Aguirre is expected to win, narrowly, and become the next prime minister of the Madrid region. It's a very important job because Madrid is a very large metropolitan area with more than five million people, nearly as many as in all of Catalonia. Most of the growth happening in the Madrid area is to the outside of the city, as the city is by now pretty much built up, so the regional government is even more important than it used to be since it controls the biggest-growth region in Spain. (Note: North of the city are the rich suburbs like La Moraleja; south of town are the working-class suburbs. For a good look, catch the bus to Toledo from the bus station in south Madrid and then ride through miles and miles of tower blocks plunked down on the dusty plains.)

An uninformed foreigner visiting Spain these days would, pardonably, think that Basque president Juanjo Ibarretxe was the most important man in the country. He's announced that he has a plan to give the Basque Country greater autonomy--it would become a "free associated state"--and the right to secede and has been going on about it since July. What he's succeeded in doing is piss everybody off. See, his plan would violate the Spanish Constitution in about eighteen different ways (articles 145, 155, and 161)--the Basque Supreme Court would be the highest judicial authority there, there would be such a thing as Basque nationality and citizenship, secession would be legal as would referendums on secession, and so on. Aznar has already announced that the plan has "a zero percent chance of success."

Even the Catalanista Vanguardia is slamming Ibarretxe; their front-page headline says that Juanjo is "defying the Constitution". They point out that he wants to add the French Basque Country as well, and that might lead to "the French Legion taking San Juan de Luz and, who knows, Pamplona." They add that the plan is "a contract that only one of the two parts can break unilaterally"--that is, the Basques would get to decide if they want to stay in Spain or not, but the rest of Spain wouldn't have the right to kick them out, something that a lot of people wouldn't mind doing. They would also have the right to continue calling repeated referendums on seccession, Quebec-style, until they somehow happened to win one; nobody believes that an independent Basque Country would allow a referendum on whether to reunite with Spain. Another factor is that right now some 15% of the Basques vote for openly independentista parties, and they are the ones who are currently unhappy with the situation in the Basque Country; if the Basque Country were independent, we assume that those 85% of Basques who vote for non-independentista parties would be unhappy--or at the very least the 50% of Basques who vote for non-nationalist parties would be. Also, the Basque Country's commercial relations with Spain would not change under the Plan. That is, they would get to leave Spain if they wanted (and the central government wouldn't be allowed to tax property in the Basque Country even if they didn't leave), but we wouldn't be allowed to slap a tariff on their products as a reaction.

The province of Alava, one of the three Basque Country provinces, has already threatened that if the Basque Country secedes from Spain, they'll secede from the Basque Country. (Alava is largely Spanish-speaking and votes for the PP).

Everybody also seems to be forgetting this: If the Basque Country declared independence, even if there weren't a civil war or mass disturbances, Spain and France would both blackball the Basques from the European Union and the United Nations and every other international organization. Is that what they want? Total isolation, like Albania? That's what independence would bring them.

What the hell has happened to Gregg Easterbrook? The guy has had a respected twenty-five year record as a top journalist and commentator. He wrote the best single book I've ever read about environmental policy. Then, a couple of weeks ago, he gets his words all tangled up, enough to make him look anti-Semitic, which we all know he's not. (Easterbrook's mangling of logic is certainly nothing to compare, as far as anti-Semitism goes, with what we read in La Vanguardia every day. The Vangua uses "judio" and "israeli" as synonyms, so you'll read about the "Jewish army" or the "Jewish government". Of course, most Jews are not Israelis and many Israelis are not Jews.)

And now this. Where did he come up with this crap?

IT'S THIS SIMPLE: COME CLEAN ON WMD, OR LEAVE IRAQ: I'd like to propose a simplification of the entire Iraq/WMD debate. It's this: If the reason we went into Iraq really, truly was that the Bush administration really, truly believed Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, then there is nothing of which the administration need feel shamed --but the United States must immediately leave Iraq.

We now know there is no significant banned-weapons program in Iraq. Any serious manufacturing facilities for banned weapons would have been detected by this point. If we went in to stop a banned-weapons program genuinely believing one existed, and now know one did not exist, then our military must depart immediately. This is the only honorable course.

Alternative: The administration admits that other reasons, possibly valid, were the real reasons all along.

posted 10:24 a.m.

Where did Easterbrook get the idea that leaving Iraq would be the morally right thing to do? Does he want us to leave those people with no government, with no security, with no hope for the future? That, to me, would be the height of amorality, to abandon twenty-five million people to their fate over an abstract question of principle. It would be neither just nor kind nor decent nor reasonable nor logical nor in American interests.

As for weapons of mass destruction, we KNOW (not just "really, truly believe") Saddam had them because he USED them on the Kurds and the Iranians. We KNOW, through David Kay's report, that Saddam DID continue his WMD programs after the first Gulf war. We KNOW that Saddam stopped cooperating with UN and American authorities regarding inspections in 1998 and that that, in itself, is a casus belli.

The most important reason we went after Saddam was not his possession of WMD, which we know that Israel and South Korea and Taiwan and Turkey and Pakistan and several of our other pals have. The thing is that we're not afraid any of them are going to slip a few tons of anthrax or a battlefield nuke to some terrorist gang. (Well, the Pakistanis...) We were justifiably afraid that Saddam would do exactly that because Saddam was a wealthy, powerful dictator with a serious bone to pick with the United States; we KNOW (not just "really, truly believe") that Saddam had terrorist connections (Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Ansar el-Islam), that he gave money to the families of Palestinian suicide terrorists, that he recruited thugs from all over the Middle East for his Fedayeen, that he gave shelter to wanted terrorists (Abu Nidal, for example), and he bought arms illegally from lovely countries like North Korea and France. (The US sold him some sixty helicopters after the end of the Iran war and before the Kuwait war. That's all we ever sold him.)

Oh, by the way, as a "collateral benefit", we got rid of one of the worst dictators ever and are now trying to build Iraq into a stable nation. Got any problems with that, Mr. Easterbrook? Or was that immoral? And wouldn't it be the absolute worst thing imaginable if we pulled out right now and let Saddam Hussein come back to power? That would be beyond immoral. That would be perverse and evil. That would be much worse than Bush's alleged lying about whether he "really, truly believed" Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Which he did, I genuinely think. Believe, that is, not lie.

The conference of nations that will donate to the reconstruction of Iraq is underway in Madrid. Here's Libertad Digital's (an online Spanish newspaper run by leading conservative and "liberal" journalists) take on what's happened so far.

Reconstruction in Iraq: Optimism at Donors' Conference regarding hopes raised in Madrid

The organizers of the Donors' Conference for the reconstruction of Iraq, now being held in Madrid, are optimistic. It is predicted that the most optimistic forecasts for the collection of funds will be surpassed. Security in Iraq worries investors, though members of the provisional government assert that problems are not serious. At the opening of the conference, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan asked participants to send a "sign of optimism" to Iraq.

The International Conference of Donors to Iraq, being held in Madrid, is preparing for its second and definitive session after finishing its first phase, in which the fundamentals for the donations were agreed upon and in which the current situation in Iraq was discussed.

At the end of the first day, one of the members of the Iraqi government council, Adnan Pachachi, gave a press conference in which he said that international calculations on the necessities for the reconstruction of his country are "the imprescendible minimum." The UN and the World Bank estimate the financial necessities of Iraq for the period 2004-2007 at about 36 billion dollars, to which should be added the 19.4 billion dollars calculated by the Coalition Provisional Authority as the cost for the recovery of sectors not evaluated by the two international organizations. On Friday the final figure will be announced.

The Spanish commissioner for the Reconstruction of Iraq, Fernando Diaz Moreno, said that in the meetings held Thursday no country has suggested "in official or public terms" any conditions in exchange for donations to this process, though he did add that "this will be seen" on Friday. Asked insistently for the figures on the contributions of the various countries and organizations, Diaz Moreno said that we would also have to wait until Friday for them to be made public, and to learn exactly how much money will be added to the monetary fund and how much will be contributed directly through bilateral agreements with the Iraqi Administration.

The European Union's contribution will be 1.4 billion euros, according to the European Commisioner for Foreign Affairs, Chris Patten, who added that it will be divided, fifty percent for help with reconstruction and humanitarian aid. The US has announced that it will contribute around 20 billion dollars, while Japan will kick in 1.5 billion. Adnan Pachachi announced that the Arab countries' contributions will be "fairly important" and expressed hope that France and other countries that have shown their "reservations" about donating will change their attitude and "eventually see the necessity of helping Iraq."

Parallel to the Conference, there has been a meeting with businessmen, who have made clear that their investments are linked to an improvement of public safety in Iraq, the installation of a stable government, and the establishment of a financial system. The Iraqi minister of Education, Ali Adyuman, who participated in this forum. told the businessmen that there would be no restrictions on the entrance of international investors in any sector except that of energy, which will remain under state control. He also reminded the businessmen that Iraq is in the middle of an expanding market area and so can serve as a platform for access to Turkey, Iran, and the Persian Gulf.

Regarding security, the Iraqi minister of Commerce, Ali Abdul Amir Allawi, said at a press conference that "in Iraq there is not an uprising like that in Vietnam. Resistance is sporadic and concentrated in a few parts of the country. Compared with Latin America or southeast Asia, the situation is not as serious in Iraq," he said. Also, Allawi stated that "many" investors have shown themselves in Madrid to be "interested in the posibilities of doing business in Iraq and that even "some have announced that they will open offices in Baghdad." He promised that all contracts signed by his government will be validated under succeeding governments.

During the first day of the Donors' Conference, a thousand people, according to the police, appered in Calle Atocha in Madrid to demonstrate against it. The demonstrators carred signs with slogans like "Donors' conference, occupiers' looting" and "Invading troops out of Iraq". The group marched in downtown Madrid from Atocha to the Puerta del Sol. Some forty local associations in Madrid, leftists, ecologists, and students, supported the demo, called by the Assembly Against Globalization and War.

At the head of the demonstration were the director of International Solidarity for the (Communist) United Left party, Angeles Maestro, accompanied by the author Rosa Regas, who read a manifesto in the Puerta del Sol. However, Socialist party leader Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero did not appear, nor did United Left general coordinator Gaspar Llamazares. The demonstrations called by these two parties, along with other social and union organizations before, during, and after the war, reached a total of 500,000 people. According to the COPE radio network, the number of demonstrators grew while the protest march advanced, but the total was not above a few thousand.

Well, it's pretty obvious that the reporter is not a leftist, but that doesn't seem too unbalanced to me (though he uses the word "optimistic" three times in paragraph 1; whenever a word is repeated, it's very important to the writer). He lets the participants speak for themselves and is careful to look at the general picture. Just for example, if they can't get any foreign investors, they're not going to have much of an economy. The Iraqis are therefore trying to encourage foreign investment and are being as positive as possible about the situation in their country. I'd say our reporter is looking at the glass as if it were at least half-full. I've got no problem with that, myself.

The rest of the Spanish press, though, has not been as kind as Libertad Digital. The Vanguardia's not too bad, though they do imply that Halliburton is going to make a whole pile of money in Iraq and that there's something fishy about that. I figure Halliburton is one of the about three companies in the world capable of doing what they do, so it's not at all surprising that they'd be involved in Iraq's reconstruction. Remember, selling their oil is how the Iraqis are going to make a few bucks to get their economy up and running. Iraq suffers from 50% underemployment, so there's plenty of room to grow--and when some of these underemployed folks get jobs, there'll be a lot less discontent.

The Periodico and the Pais have gone ballistic, though, with the concept that the Madrid conference is merely the dividing up of the Iraqi pie. As good socialist Third Worldists, they believe that foreign investment is somehow bad and only benefits the few big bosses who are all in league together, anyway, and run everything. Let's prove them wrong by staying the course. I think it's a pretty good course, myself.

There's been a stink about the "Rumsfeld memo"; in case you don't know, Donald Rumsfeld sent a confidential memo around that got leaked to the press; Rummy's acting all pissed off, though I bet he leaked it himself. If I worked for Mr. Rumsfeld and he told me something was confidential, I wouldn't dare to leak it, you can believe that. Anyway, Rummy harshly criticized the conduct of the postwar and asked several searching questions.

I think this is a good sign; there's no Vietnam syndrome in the Administration's mind. There is freedom to debate within Bush's Administration, freedom to disagree; there's not one party line everyone must toe. They're not trying to pretend unpleasant facts don't exist.

Here's how I, as an uninformed oberver, would grade the Administration's performance:

Post September 11: A. Excellent.
Afghanistan: A. Excellent.
Pre-Iraq: C-, barely adequate, for bungling the whole UN thing. Bush should have done the military buildup faster and avoided even mentioning the words "United Nations", and we should have gone in sometime in fall 2002.
Iraq War: A-. Three weeks to Baghdad. Little unnecessary destruction, very few civilians killed.
Post-Iraq War: C+. Could have been better and faster and more efficient, but terrorism is under control and the country is getting back to normal. If Iraq is pretty much pacified and sort of functioning a year from now, I'll raise that grade to a B+.

The meme or trope or nugget going around enlightened and illustrated Barcelona circles now is that Iraq (a "rich country", they always say) needs to be reconstructed because the Americans destroyed it either with the first Gulf War or the embargo or the second Gulf War. 1) More than thirty years of Saddam's corrupt and brutal dictatorship is what destroyed the country. 2) Saddam started wars with everybody and his dog and that wasn't real good for the country either. 3) The embargo was a UN attempt to force Saddam to spend his corrupt rake-off on the treasury on his people instead of on weapons. Didn't work that way, but don't blame us, blame Saddam. 4) Iraq's desperately poor. All the oil in the world doesn't mean a damn thing if nobody's getting it out of the ground and transporting it to where it's needed and refining or otherwise processing it so it can be used. That's where the money is, in turning raw materials into things people want to buy, not just producing the iron ore but making it into steel and then from steel into something useful.

This attitude is, of course, "damned if you do, damned if you don't" anti-Americanism. Here's a list of memes and tropes and nuggets that have been tumbling over one another in Old European minds.

I. The Yankees just want the oil. When that was disproved, it changed to
II. The Yankees can't win the war. When that was disproved, it became
III. The Yankees are massacring the Iraqi people. When that was disproved, it became
IV. Epidemics and starvation are widespread in Yankee-occupied Iraq. When that was disproved, it turned into
V. The Americans don't care about the Iraqi people's welfare. When that was disproved, it changed to
VI. The Americans and their lackeys are looting Baghdad. When that was disproven, it became
VII. The brave Iraqi resistence is fighting for Iraqi freedom. Now that that's being disproved, it has become
VIII. The Americans are repressing the poor Iraqis. When that was disproved, it went back to the good old standards
IX. The Yankees just want the oil, they created Saddam anyway, and this whole thing is just a setup so Dick Cheney can get richer. And BUSH LIED!!!!!

In the absence of anything more interesting to write about, I figured one of the problems with our previous football chart--you know, the one ranking the teams by the ratio of the points they score to the points they give up--is that it doesn't distinguish a big win or loss from a close game. See, a big win is proof you're a better team. You manhandled them, pushed them around, beat them up, and blew them out. A close game, on the other hand, could feasibly have gone the other way. If you beat the other guys by only one score, then if a break had gone to them instead of you, you might have lost.

So what I've done is award three points to each team for each big win (by ten points or more--ten points is two scores, a touchdown plus 1-point conversion and a field goal), two points for each close win, since you did win after all, one point for each close loss (by nine points or less--you were in the game, you had a chance to win) and zero points for each big loss. Then I divided that purely arbitrary number of points awarded by the number of games the team's played to come up with a ratio for each team of points awarded per game. Here's what it looks like:

1. Vikings 2.67 (have won four blowouts)
2. Chiefs 2.43 (four close wins)
3. Dolphins 2.33 (four wins, four blowouts; two losses, two close games)
4. Colts; Cowboys 2.17
6. Broncos; Titans 2.14 (Titans have four blowouts)
8. Rams; Seahawks 2.00 (Rams got blown out Week 1; Seahawks got blown out by wild-card rival Packers)
10. Bucs; Panthers 1.83
12. Packers 1.71 (three close losses)
13. Niners; Bills; Patriots 1.57 (Bills two losses by 10 points, Patriots blown out by Bills but Bills blown out by Jets)
16. Ravens; Browns 1.42
18. Saints 1.29 (wins vs. pathetic Hou, Chi, Atl)
19. Bengals 1.17
20. R******s, Raiders 1.14 (Raiders four close losses but no big wins)
22. Jets, Giants, Steelers 1.00 (Steelers blown out three times)
25. Eagles 0.85
26. Lions; Texans 0.83
28. Bears 0.80
29. Jaguars; Chargers 0.67
31. Falcons 0.57 (blown out five times)
32. Cardinals 0.50 (blown out four times)

I'm going to make minor changes in my playoff predictions based on considering these rankings and those I posted yesterday.

AFC
East Dolphins
West Chiefs
North Ravens or Browns
South Colts
Wild Cards Broncos; Titans

NFC
East Cowboys
West Rams
North Vikings
South Bucs
Wild Cards Seahawks; Panthers

I'm going to stick with the two teams I picked to bet on, the Rams over the Steelers and the Niners over the Cardinals; I'm putting an imaginary hundred bucks on each one. Since the Falcons and the Cardinals always get blown out, it's a pretty fair bet that they will again, at least if playing a decent team. I'd consider this when placing bets.

Since Gregg Easterbrook has been fired from his NFL-commentary job at ESPN, Iberian Notes will try to fill the gap Easterbrook leaves.

Now, I love Bill James's writing about baseball and statistics and conventional wisdom, but there are a lot more individual pitcher-batter pairups in baseball, enough to make individual statistics like on-base percentage or strikeout-walk ratio comparable among various players. You can use stats to say that player X is a better hitter than player Y.

That's harder to do with stats in football. Sure, Priest Holmes is obviously an above-average running back. But he doesn't necessarily have the highest yards-per-game average or the most touchdowns-per-minutes played or whatever because things all depend on the team and the context in which the play is called--Priest is a lot more likely to rack up big yards in a game against a battered defense than he is against Tampa Bay, for example. Also, the whole team has an effect on Priest's success, much more so than in baseball. If the O-line doesn't make its blocks and if the WRs don't decoy the cornerbacks and if the QB botches the handoff, Priest loses two yards instead of gaining eight. Whether Barry Bonds jacks a homer or not depends only on him and the pitcher.

So it seems to me that, while established statistics are a pretty good indicator of some things about individual players, full team stats are the best way to judge the quality of a football team as a whole.

What's the point of football? To win the game. How do you win games? By scoring points and not giving them up. Let's say that the ratio of a team's points scored to points given up is a measure of its quality. Teams that score a lot and don't get scored on much will tend to beat teams that don't score much and do get scored on a lot. I buy that. That seems clear to me. Our only problem is sample size--that is, you can't base a firm opinion on the results of only one or two games. You need five or six games to establish that a team has a pattern of scoring more points than it gives up.

Well, every team has played either six or seven games at this point. That's a between a third and half of the 16-game NFL season. I'm going to say that's enough information to figure out each team's ratio of points scored to points given up and use it as the basis for a Power Rankings.

Rank. Team, Games Won-Lost, Points For / Against, Ratio

1. Vikings, 6-0, 179/104, 1.72
2. Colts, 5-1, 178/105, 1.70
3. Chiefs, 7-0, 208/125, 1.66
4. Rams, 4-2, 170/108, 1.57
5. Broncos, 5-2, 178/115, 1.55
6. Dolphins, 4-2, 118/77, 1.53
7. Cowboys, 5-1, 150/100, 1.50
8. Seahawks, 5-1, 146/104, 1.40
9. Buccaneers, 3-3, 134/97, 1.38
10. Titans, 5-2, 194/150, 1.29
11. Forty-Niners, 3-4, 159/126, 1.26
12. Bills, 4-3, 138/110, 1.25
13. Packers, 3-4, 200/166, 1.20
14. Patriots, 5-2, 145/126, 1.15
15. Panthers, 5-1, 118/105, 1.12
16. Ravens, 3-3, 134/126, 1.06
17. Jets, 2-4, 94/94, 1.00
18. Browns, 3-4, 112/121, 0.92
19. Saints, 3-4, 152/168, 0.90
20. Giants, 2-4, 105/123, 0.85
21. Bengals, 2-4, 111/132, 0.84
22. Eagles, 3-3, 95/119, 0.80
23. R******s, 3-4, 135/171, 0.79
24. Raiders, 2-5, 125/161, 0.77
25. Steelers, 2-4, 111/146, 0.76
26. Jaguars, 1-5, 110/154, 0.71
27. Chargers, 1-5, 115/169, 0.68
28. Lions, 1-5, 101/160, 0.63
29. Texans, 2-4, 100/170, 0.59
30. Bears, 1-5, 97/176, 0.55
31. Falcons, 1-5, 114/220, 0.52
32. Cardinals, 1-5, 82/140, 0.46

There's obviously a correlation between the points scored/allowed ratio and the win-loss record. I actually used to be able to figure some of that stuff out. Can't anymore. Anyway, if we take that ratio as an indication of the real quality of a team, we need to name the teams that are better than their records (and are likely to see their won-lost records improve) and the teams that are worse than their records (who are likely to see their won-lost records decline).

Better than Won-Lost Record: Rams, Buccaneers, Forty-Niners, Jets
Worse than Won-Lost Record: Patriots, Panthers, Eagles, R******s

Of course, we also need to pick our playoff winners; we won't be able to tell if this system works until it's tested in the playoffs. If I get most of these right I claim the system works.

National Football Conference
East: Cowboys
West: Rams
North: Vikings
South: Buccaneers
Wild Cards: Seahawks; Forty-Niners or Packers

American Football Conference
East: Dolphins
West: Chiefs
North: Ravens
South: Colts
Wild Cards: Broncos; Titans or Bills

And, of course, we have to put our money where our mouth is and make some betting picks. The only two games where I think using this chart gives you a significant advantage are the St. Louis Rams at the Pittsburgh Steelers and the San Francisco 49ers at the Arizona Cardinals. Both the Rams and the Niners are far above their respective rivals in the rankings, about 0.80 percentage points of difference in both cases. The current betting lines are the Steelers favored over the Rams by 1 1/2 points and the Niners over the Cards by seven. I think the Rams will beat the Steelers outright and the better-than-their-record Niners will blow out the Cards, by far the worst team in the league.

I am not a gambler, but doesn't the following betting strategy make sense? Only Bet When You Know More Than the Average Punter, and by that I mean 'bettor', not 'kicker'.

Our ratings don't give us a clear advantage over the average Joe in any other game, since the betting lines correspond in general to our ranking chart. So we don't bet on those games; we bet on teams the charts show as big favorites over their opponents. We're figuring that not only will we not need the points they're spotting us on the Rams, but that the Rams will stomp the very bad Steelers even though the Steelers are at home, and that the Niners are going to blow out the Cardinals by more than a touchdown. There'll probably be more Niners fans than Cardinals fans at that game. The crowd-noise factor and home-field advantage will work against Arizona. Those both seem like pretty safe bets to me, especially the Rams-Steelers game.

NOTE: I am not risking any real money on this, of course, nor do I recommend that you risk yours, unless it's some small-time harmless office pool. If you do so and you lose, it's your own fault. If you do so and you win, send me a check.

UPDATE: Football Outsiders is trying to pick up the no-TMQ slack. Check them out, and check out their Bill James-style system for analyzing teams' and players' performance. Observe their rankings and see how they compare with ours; then go over to Sports Illustrated and see how the Outsiders' take (complicated, based on stats) differs from our take (simple, based on stats) and from CNN-SI's Peter King's (based on his own feelings).

Here's Amer Taheri from Canada's National Post (via FrontPage) on Malaysian leader Mahathir Muhammad's anti-Semitic and anti-Christian speech. Check it out.

At the Asia-Pacific Economic Council meeting, President Bush criticized Muhammed's remarks. Here's La Vanguardia's Washington correspondent Eusebio Val's reaction on page four of Tuesday's paper, in the lead international news article (NOT opinion or analysis) jumped over from page three.

At the margin of the summit a tense episode occurred with the reprimand president George W. Bush meted out to the prime minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Muhammad, for a recent commentary on the Jews. According to White House spokesman Scott McClellan, the American president, in a meeting with Muhammad, told him that his assertions were "wrong and a cause of confrontation". During a recent Islamic summit, the Malaysian prime minister stated that "The Jews govern the world through their representatives." "It's other people who fight and die for them," he added.

The speech of the prime minister of Malaysia was not bellicose; rather, it called upon the 1.3 billion Muslims in the world to respond to the "few million Jews" without violence, with more unity in the defense of their interests and an improvement of the education of their young people.

Gee, you could have fooled me. All it looks to me that Mohammed said was that the Jews run the world (so therefore everything bad is the Jews' fault, he did not say, but he sure implied) and the Muslims need to all get together and stop them. But without violence!

The American secretary of State, Colin Powell, also brought up the subject in a meeting with his Malaysian homologue, Syed Hamid Albar. Albar emphasized, before the American secretary of State, that Mohammed's speech had been eminently critical towards Muslims themselves and that only "one or two fragments" were problematic.

Yeah, he was criticizing the Muslims for letting the Jews and their lackeys, the decadent, perverted Christians, run the world, that's all, and he just called upon them to unite to do something about it. Nothing much. He's not calling for a clash of civilizations or anything like that, just explaining to all us naive innocent ingenuous stupid folks that the Jews are our secret bosses. He wasn't nearly as anti-Semitic as Gregg Easterbrook, not at all. And Eusebio Val isn't reporting this defense of Mohammed because he sympathizes with Mohammed's "non-bellicose" (in his words) comments. He wouldn't be an anti-Semite either, of course, just like Andy Robinson and Baltasar Porcel and Xavier Bru de Sala (he has been known to write on the theme that the Jewish / Israeli lobby controls the American government) aren't anti-Semites. They're just telling us the truth about the Jewish conspiracy.

Note: A lot of Spaniards, including the guys from Libertad Digital, are anti-Masons. Yes, I know there was a Masonic lodge in Italy that served as the cover for a high-level financial fraud ring. That's one example. But the idea that the Masons are a secret organization operating for nefarious purposes (mostly getting rich and running the world) is widespread here. Of course, that's ridiculous. The Masons are a social organization just like the Shriners and the Elks with a little bit of excess fraternity-initiation mumbo-jumbo. My grandfather the rich and powerful railroad repairman was a Mason, for God's sake. He had the Masonic members' secret book. I looked at it. It's just dumb, not scary. These dopes are playing at having a secret club, like we all did when we were ten.

Ironically, anti-Masonism exists on both the Spanish Left and Right. The Left thinks of them as just capitalist bloodsuckers, while the Right thinks of them as both atheistic traitors and capitalistic bloodsuckers. Back in the Franco days there used to be a lot of heated rhetoric about "the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy."

Oh, yeah, congratulations to President Bush for speaking out against anti-Semitism.

Boy, I feel like an idiot after getting canonization and beatification mixed up. I should know better, and most of the time I do. About the only excuse I've got is that I'm not a pro journalist and so if I make a mistake, well, at least I'm not getting paid for it.

Gregg Easterbrook also put his foot in it, it seems; I read the offending statements the day they came out on his New Republic blog, before the big hoo-ha started, and I didn't think they were too offensive. I mean, if you want offensively anti-Semitic, look at what Andy Robinson wrote a few days ago in La Vanguardia--just scroll down. Or, if you want, you can go back a few months and find when Baltasar Porcel said that in the Williamsburg neighborhood of NYC was the greatest concentration of wealth in the world. Well, OK, Easterbrook apologized. That, to me, is good enough. I'm convinced he's not a bigot, since I've been reading his stuff for like fifteen years. So what do you do? Well, you give the guy a break. If he comes out standing next to Pat Buchanan at a Jew-baiting rally, then we boycott him. If, as I will bet, he never offends any ethnic group again, then we say, "OK, we questioned whether this guy was legit, he's turned out to be so. Good enough."

The dumb thing is that ESPN fired him and has pulled all his Tuesday Morning Quarterback articles off their archive. This little tempest in a teapot has nothing to do with ESPN or football or anything else, and one would think that ESPN's attitude would be, "The guy screwed up, mostly because he didn't take the time to express himself properly. He said he was sorry and means it. He's been with us a couple of years and has always been all right. What he said has nothing to do with ESPN or football. We will therefore suspend judgment and allow him to continue in his job. If he ever writes anything that seems anti-Semitic again, then we fire him."

The respective slogans the main political parties are using: PP, "Guarantee of Good Government"; Socialists, "New Solutions". Which party is on the left and which on the right? Not too difficult a question, I don't think. By the way, the Socialists' "new" slogan isn't new; it sounds eerily like Gary Hart in 1984.

Astronaut Pedro Duque got shot up in space by a Russian Soyuz, and he got out on the International Space Station. His function will consist of performing three experiments, two of which are related to observing fruit flies. The negative talk going around is that it cost Spain thirteen million euros to get Duque up on the Space Station and that it's just a prestige thing, and should we be spending money on hollow prestige? Duque went up on the Space Shuttle several years ago to become the first Spanish citizen in space; Michael Lopez-Alegria, born in Madrid of Spanish parents who emigrated to the States when he was about three, was the first person born in Spain in space sometime during the nineties. He, of course, is an American citizen.

The big news today is Mother Teresa's promotion to saint; it was the lead story on both TV3 and TV1. They got some 250,000 people out in Rome. The Pope presided, and looked comparatively pretty good. The unofficial story they're reporting is that this is a big event for him, that her sainthood was a cause he'd been pushing. The Vanguardia overwhelmed us with Pope stories during the week, since this is the 25th anniversary of his papacy.

I wonder--I know this is morbid--whether this isn't part of his big adios. I've heard--can't guarantee that it's true--that people who are in poor health often manage to hang on for significant upcoming events, say a family visit or the birth of a grandchild or a wedding anniversary or birthday. They make it to the big event and then fairly soon, their last mission accomplished, die. I can see this being true in this case, since the golden anniversary of the papacy and the sanctification of Mother Teresa are certainly big events.

Mother Teresa trivia: She's the first Nobel Prize winner to become a saint, and the time elapsed between her death and sainthood, six years, is the shortest ever.

Let me make it clear that I will be sorry when the Pope dies. While I disagree with him about a lot of things, I know he's a good man. As for Vazquez Montalban, he was a Stalinist propagandist. Leni Riefenstahl, a Hitlerist propagandist, just died, too. My reaction to their deaths is exactly the same.

They've been reporting a good deal about the situation in Bolivia, rather partially, of course; one thing nobody around here is making very big noise about is that Spanish energy company Repsol YPF, one of the seven or so really large Spanish corporations (the others are Banco Santander, Banco Bilbao Vizcaya, telecoms operator Telefonica, and energy companies Gas Natural, Endesa, and Iberdrola), is one of the companies involved in the partnership to export Bolivian natural gas. Repsol has invested more than half a billion dollars in the project.

The campaign for the Madrid and the Catalan regional elections is heating up. El Pais, El Mundo, and La Razon all ran polls giving the PP an absolute majority over the PSOE-IU SocioCommunist coalition. Zap frothed at the mouth some about the illegal and immoral war on Iraq and how Spain ought to pull ought right now and like not be allies with America anymore or something. Aznar reminded him that the Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis conceded last week and that the Security Council has reaffirmed its support for the Iraqi reconstruction plan, and asked him if, since he's running a campaign that sounds like the slogan on a sign at a demonstration, his next banner is going to say "Socialists Against the UN".

Artur Mas's Andorra sports plan got savaged by absolutely everybody, even the superCatalanista Republican Left's Carod-Rovira, who called it an insult to both Catalonia and Andorra. We shall hear no more about it, I am sure.

It's cool and rainy, has been for a couple of days. It's fall, it's rainy season. So it rains. And every time it rains hard, the traffic lights short out. This produces a lot of minor accidents and long traffic delays at each intersection. Traffic backs up on all the access roads into town and everybody's two hours late to work. The local urban legend is that more people use their cars rather than public transport to get to work if it rains. I'll agree that that could be a factor, but I think it's more likely to be the following: Spain's not quite Sweden or Holland yet.

The electrical system that runs the traffic lights works just fine day in and day out, but whenever it gets stressed, like by the rain, it goes out. This happens between five and ten days every year, and it's something that people just assume to be a truth of life. It rains hard, the lights short out, and then there's a massive traffic jam and everybody's two hours late to work. Hell, you can "unintentionally on purpose" show up late on a rainy day and say your bus got caught in traffic. Meanwhile, the access roads in and out of town are built to handle normal traffic about ten years ago, so they can't stand any excess amount of cars, which happens every weekend anyway. Push over one domino and the whole system comes down, because it's built to be only as good as it needs to be most of the time instead of being as good as it needs to be in a fairly bad--not even worst-case--scenario.

Barca got stomped last night at the Camp Nou, 0-2 by Deportivo, on national TV. Barcelona wasn't really that bad, they just weren't particularly good, and they were outclassed by a better team. There is just not any question that Valencia, with 19 points out of 21 after they slaughter 0-2-4 Espanyol tonight, Deportivo, with 18 points out of 21, and Real Madrid, with 16 points out of 21, are all clearly superior to Barcelona, with just nine points out of 21. Only Ronaldinho and Van Brockhorst, of this year's signings, are playing. Xavi has been benched. Kluivert is openly up for sale. Saviola just isn't physical enough to play forward for Barcelona--too small, too slow. Motta and Gerard just aren't particularly good. Luis Enrique is officially old--this ought to be his last season. Nobody knows why Overmars is on the team. Marquez bitched about not getting to play--Rijkaard says he's out of shape--, so now he never even makes it on the list of 16 players that are the roster for each game. This team is the New York Mets of international soccer: too many expensive bad players.

Spain. Oh, yeah, Spain. that's what this blog's supposed to be about, right? Spain. Not the Violent Femmes and Ethan Hawke.

Barcelonese author Manuel Vazquez Montalban kicked off, of a heart attack at the Bangkok airport at age 64. De mortuis nil nisi bonum, my ass. Vazquez Montalban was a prick, a disagreeable person, who was in addition a loudmouth unreconstructed Yankee-bashing Communist. Besides, his books suck, and his newspaper articles were horrific. This isn't a case of Gore Vidal or Graham Greene, authors I disagree with politically but whose obvious talent I recognize. This is more like a case of, say, Michael Moore. Remei says he's probably in hell with his buddy Stalin.

Spain will contribute $300 million to the Iraqi reconstruction fund, making them the fourth nation on the list of contributors after the US, the UK, and Japan.

October 12th is a holiday in most of the Spanish-speaking world; we call it Columbus Day, and Spanish correspondents are annually amazed to find that in the States it's the Italian-American holiday. This is partially based on their belief that Columbus was Spanish or, even better, Catalan. (He was a Genoese, of course.)

This holiday has a lot of different names. If you're an orthodox Spaniard, you probably call it the Dia de la Hispanidad. If you're a fundamentalist Spaniard, it's the Dia de la Raza; this name has rather Franquista overtones these days, though I believe it's the name used in Latin America. If you're an anti-centralist Spaniard, you probably call it the Dia de la Virgen del Pilar (Our Lady of the Pillar or the Column, patroness of Aragon). If you're a squatter you've probably been spending the last couple of weeks spraypainting "12-O NO N'HI HA RES A CELEBRAR" or "ESPANYA GENOCIDA" and stuff like that on the walls of your neighborhood bank branch.

Since it is the national holiday of centralist Spain, they had a military parade in Madrid, the way they always do. That's fine with me, I actually kind of like parades. In Barcelona said parade is considered an excuse to make fun of the old-fashioned patriotism of Spain allende el Ebro for the nationalists or a reason for public outrage and breast-beating by the Commies. Anyway, though, all these dignitaries always come out to the parade and sit on the reviewing stand as the Spanish Army marches past, normally in the company of allied troops. This year they invited the other countries whose troops make up (along with Spain's) the Plus Ultra brigade occupying part of Iraq; those countries are the United States, Poland, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras.

So when the American flag passed by, opposition leader and Socialist candidate Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, on the reviewing stand, refused to stand up and applaud like you're supposed to do. Everyone from the PP to Convergence and Union slammed his behavior as childlike; La Vanguardia quite justifiably questioned whether anyone with so little sense as to break established protocol in order to throw a tantrum is fit to become Prime Minister. (Good one for once from the Vangua.) Zap just keeps digging himself deeper and deeper; his behavior offended even many moderate Socialists on the grounds that it was an embarrassment to the King, the Head of State, up there on the stand presiding the ceremony, and to the Spanish Army, which had invited these other nations' troops as guests. Basic rule: if you do something that causes the King to apologize to the American ambassador on your behalf, you've fucked up pretty big-time.

Here's the biggest bit of Catalooniness I've ever seen, speaking of symbols--and the flag of a country is just a symbol, after all. (I personally am not especially offended by Zap's dis of the US flag, I'm just surprised at his stupidity and public childishness, and I really hope he doesn't get elected.) One thing nationalists do is take symbols far too seriously, and this is especially true in Catalonia. It seems that Artur Mas's soul is wounded to the quick that Catalonia does not have official national sports teams. Well, they actually do have a "national soccer team"; they hire some other country to come play a Catalan all-star soccer team every Christmas, and a big deal is made thereof. Once they got Brazil to come. With our tax money, of course. But these games don't count for anything because Catalonia is not independent, and so the international committees that run sports like the FIFA and the IOC don't recognize it as a real national team.

I don't much care either way, personally; my life is not affected by whether Catalan athletes play for Spain, as they've always done, or for a specifically Catalan team. It just don't make me no never mind. It does seem to me like an unnecessary hassle, and discussion is academic anyway because these international sports bodies are not going to recognize Catalonia, because if they did they'd have to recognize Bavaria and Flanders and Chechenia and Alabama and everybody else who wanted them to.

Here's Artur Mas's solution to this grave problem: see, there's this country called Andorra in the Pyrenees between Catalonia and France. They got seventeen people and a goat and some tax-free booze-and-cigs shops. However, Catalan is the sole official language of this tiny place, about the size of a Kansas county. Mas's proposal would set up an Andorran-Catalan national team, and Catalan players would play for it rather than for Spain. Naturally, everybody's against it, on the grounds that it violates IOC and FIFA rules and the Andorran Constitution, along with just plain common sense, viz: Catalans play for the Spanish national sports teams because Catalonia is part of Spain. And anyway, don't we have three hundred more important things to talk about? And why would the eighteen people and a goat who live in Andorra want to be represented by a bunch of pijos from Barcelona anyway?

Here's Cristina Sen from La Vanguardia in Madrid.

Rodrigo Rato's face said it all yesterday. The First Vice-Prime Minister arrived at the press conference following the Cabinet Council meeting without having read in the newspapers about Convergence and Union candidate Artur Mas's proposal for Catalonia to go to the Olympic Games under the Andorran flag, and when he heard the first question about the subject he was speechless and then turned red trying to conceal--unsuccessfully--his laughter, which was contagious to the two ministers at his sides, Eduardo Zaplana and Angel Acebes.

It was the Administration's first response, and an obviously spontaneous one. Before Zaplana gave the Administration's official version, trying to avoid being too critical, Rato whispered to him, asking if Mas's proposal was for real, and Zaplana nodded his head. The Vice-Prime Minister kept smiling.

This bright idea sprang from, where else, the Generalitat's Department of Culture, also known as the "Ministry of Truth". The very first thing I would do if I were Catalan Prime Minister is completely axe the Department of Culture and start over again, much less ambitiously and expensively.

Hey, don't get me wrong, I'm thrilled that this year's media hype regarding the Cubs' and Red Sox' runs at a World Series berth has gotten a lot of people into baseball. It's a terrific sport, both to play (well, I couldn't play hardball at age 37 but if there were a softball beer-league around here I might go out for it) and to watch, and I'd say I'm a semi-serious fan of baseball, the NFL, and soccer. I feel qualified to pronounce on these three sports. You won't see me pretending to know much about basketball or tennis or college football, or anything about golf, ice hockey, rugby or cricket, though.

Now, I love newcomer fans, and am confident that in a season or two of watching a sport say, weekly, a newcomer fan learns as much about the sport as any veteran fan knows. But please don't make any pronouncements until you've reached that point where you know what you're talking about! Thank you. This has been today's Cranky Little Sermon.

English novelists often make this mistake when writing about the US; they insist on putting in scenes where two Americans talk about baseball, and they just get it all wrong. (Note: I think this is why few American novelists stick cricket matches in their novels.) Here's a scene from a novel called On Green Dolphin Street by Sebastian Faulks, a good middlebrow writer. His most famous books are Birdsong and Charlotte Gray.

The male lead in the story is Frank, a hard-boiled hard-drinking old-style Chicago reporter; the story takes place in 1960. Frank takes the female lead, Mary, to a working-class bar in New York, where he is greeted by the bartender with one-of-the-boys familiarity. I think the purposes of the scene are to help establish Frank's macho working-class credentials, which Mary finds romantic and attractive, and to show Frank taking Mary into his "sanctuary", the place he goes when he needs somewhere to go. It's supposed to be a step in the growing intimacy between them.

"Still shouting for (rooting for) that bunch of losers?" said the barman as he pushed the beer over to Frank.
"Listen, we have the most valuable player in the National League."
"Ernie Banks? He's just a big black (Wrong word, unfortunately, for a working-class guy in 1960 to use about an African-American. The most PC expression you'd have gotten was 'colored') slugger."
"Oh yeah? And the Yankees? You're nothing without Yogi. Think you're still so great?"
"We are great, mister, that's the truth. Mickey Mantle, he's the best you've ever seen."
"More speedy than a slugger, more sluggy than a speedster, and less of both than either. Was that what the boss said?"
"Hey, don't give me that Stengel crap. Pardon me, ma'am. He don't talk good, but he can sure coach (manage) a team."
"Do yourself a favor. Get over to Chicago and see a real game."

Now, Mr. Faulks has looked up the basics. He's got Ernie Banks on the Chicago Cubs, and Banks did win the 1959 MVP. Correct. He's got Yogi Berra and Mickey Mantle on the New York Yankees, and he's got Casey Stengel as their manager. Correct. Good job. But no real baseball fans in 1960 would have carried on such a preposterous dialogue. I've made the three necessary vocabulary changes in parentheses above, and in addition:

1) The Yankees had just won the 1959 World Series. And the 1958 one. And the 1957... They were by far the dominant team in baseball and Frank would have known that. He wouldn't have made any boasts about the very mediocre Cubs of that time in the home of a Yankee fan.

2) Frank, as a knowledgeable fan, would never have compared Mickey Mantle with Ernie Banks. Mantle was one of the two or three best players in baseball, along with Willie Mays and Stan Musial, in the late fifties. Banks was good, but there's no comparison between the two. Also, Frank would have known that the MVP award is not always given to the guy who's really the best player. Frank wouldn't have dissed Yogi Berra's replacement, Elston Howard, who was also a fine player, though admittedly not in Yogi's class.

3) Frank and the bartender wouldn't have referred to themselves as "we" when talking about their teams. (They do this in England, I think, because the fans are dues-paying club members and so they feel quite justifiably that the club is "we", but it doesn't work like that for pro teams in the US. Exception: College sports; if you went to the university you're cheering for you can say "we." My buddy John Ortiz, who went to KU and roots for Kansas in basketball, is allowed to say "we won", because he went there. But if he ever says "we won" again when referring to Notre Dame, the college football team he roots for, I'll smack him one.)

You do that in any sports bar in the US--"I'm a big Packers fan and we're going to win the Super Bowl this year!", the answer you'll get is "Who's we? You on the team? What position do you play, assistant waterboy?"

Maybe I'm picking nits, but Mr. Faulks just made several of the sort of mistakes that jar me out of the suspension of disbelief necessary to keep your interest up.

Here's an example. I once saw a mediocre little movie called Reality Bites. It's the early nineties. Ethan Hawke is a cool slacker dude who is trying to win the love of alternative chick Winona Ryder. He's so cool he sings in a band. He gets frustrated by his undeclared love during one of his band's gigs that Winona is in attendance at. So they break into the Violent Femmes' song "Add It Up", which is intended to show Ethan's feelings toward Winona.

Now, no cool band would EVER cover "Add It Up", because it's too well-known. It's too obviously intended to be shocking, what with the schtick about the psycho narrator of the lyrics who's got an Oedipus complex and a gun. Maybe it was shocking the first time we heard the record in about 1982, but it's become much less so after a couple of hundred hearings.

Anyway, the key "shocker" line of the song is "Why can't I get just one fuck?" In the movie, though, Ethan Hawke sings it as "Why can't I get just one UUHN?" And we see him looking right into Winona's eyes while he's singing and she gets all like choked up and pissed off simultaneously and runs offscreen. I think.

See, singing this song is supposed to be like Ethan's big proclamation of his love for Winona. But NOBODY covering "Add It Up" would EVER sing "UUHN" instead of "fuck". If you don't sing "fuck", the shocker line becomes non-shocking, and then what's the point of singing "Add It Up"?

This is absolute total proof that Ethan is not cool, but an idiot. This display of unequalled dorkiness and uncoolness makes us immediately lose all sympathy with him, if we ever had any, which we probably didn't anyway.

See what I mean about taking a wrong step and making your audience lose their suspension of disbelief? Avoid doing so. Don't just assume that an old song (symbol of coolness; back in '82 "Add It Up" really was a symbol of coolness. It lost that status within about two years) is still cool when it's become cool's antithesis. And don't just assume you can write dialogue that rings true about a subject that you know absolutely nothing about. This is why I avoid writing about working-class Irish life like Roddy Doyle does, and I avoid writing about thirtysomethings in London like Nick Hornby does.

There's a resurgence of Third Worldism over here what with the violence in Bolivia. Naturally, the only side of the story that gets told is Ivo Morales's. Here's the other side, an article by Michael Radu from Front Page.

I figure at least half the readers of this blog are American, so I'd appreciate some answers to the following questions: Are you unhappy? Anguished? Anxious? Nervous? Insecure? Frightened?

La Vanguardia thinks you are, and they're telling their readers that you are. 200,000 buy the paper every day and probably double that number read it, maybe more; it's a local custom here in Spain, the country where people don't buy the paper daily, for the cafes and bars and lunch counters to have a newspaper for their clients' perusal. That's a lot of readers. In addition, the Vangua is considered to be the most prestigious of Catalan newspapers (not Catalan-language, since 98% of it is in Spanish).

The Vangua has been firing out this trope or meme or whatever the hip word is these days full-blast for years, but they seem to have decided to pour on the heavy artillery recently. You're probably bored with my writing about it, because it keeps coming up and I keep denouncing it. I promise this is the last time for a couple of weeks, no matter how persistent they are with their propagation of their "Americans are unhappy and frightened" theme.

What I bet you're wondering is why this is so important to them. I mean, an article every few months on this subject wouldn't be too big a deal, but they're hammering this one home almost every single day. This image of America must be very dear to their hearts.

I suspect that it has the same cause as a lot of anti-Americanism, envy and jealousy (which you can see dripping off the first two sentences of the interviewer's introduction). Catalonia is a medium-sized region of a medium-sized European country, and Barcelona is a medium-sized European city. In the eyes of the world they're no big deal and they know it, and they don't like it. It's a self-esteem thing. In order to make up for their relative political and economic insignificance, one of the things that Catalans insist on is your agreeing with them that Catalonia is the most wonderful place in the world to live. We may not be the richest or the strongest or the best-educated or the most powerful or the most creative ethnicity in the world, but goddammit, we have the best lifestyle. This is very important to their viewpoint about the world.

Now, it's perfectly reasonable for Catalans to want to believe this. The problem, though, is that they want other people to accept the "fact" that the Catalan lifestyle is "the best". Well, actually, everybody believes that his neck of the woods is the best. Now, I like Catalonia very much, and that's why I live here, and I enjoy the Catalan lifestyle, but I don't rank it as the best lifestyle in the world and this is what really bothers Catalan nationalists about me.

I don't think you can rank lifestyles. I like the lifestyle pretty much everywhere in North America and Western Europe. If you told me to go live in Montreal or Denver or Charlotte or London or Milan or Madrid or Toulouse, I'd be just about as happy, probably. Each of those places is going to have its advantages and its disadvantages, just like Catalonia does.

Oh, well. Here we go. The interviewer is Lluis Amiguet and the interviewee is Mark Costello, billed as an American author of crime fiction of some significance. He is an ex-DA. I had never heard of him, but he gets the daily back-page interview today.

The power of nations is not that of its armies or companies. The measure of the greatness of a country does not come from its area or its budget, but from its capacity to provide well-being to all its citizens. The United States is the first military power, but today it is vary far from being the happiest country on Earth, and because of this the novels of Costello, De Lillo, or Franzen are the grain of sand in the gearbox of the American happiness machine. They uncover the anxiety vomiting hidden behind a Mickey disguise in some toilet at Disney World...

Q. I don't think you're an optimist.
A. I'm not. I had my first war against terrorism long before Bush. The gangs in the ghettos were direct terrorism against the poorest Americans who are shot dead every day, but the millionaires who sent an army to Iraq don't care about or worry about these deaths.
Q. The surveys supported that war.
A. Really? Everything is virtual. Now those who rule can conveniently label anyone with a foreign face a terrorist and continue leaving our neighborhoods abandoned in terror.

Q. There are secret agents in your novels.
A. Yes, but they're not the ones that appear in Tom Clancy books or the movies.
Q. They're bored, fed up, anxious bureaucrats. They seem like spies out of Sartre.
A. America has given its culture to the world, a culture of instant gratification until you're sick. Thirsty? Have a Coke. Hungry? There's a McDonald's. Nervous? A cigarette. Bored? Read Tom Clancy. That's literature in my culture.
Q. A best seller can be entertaining.
A. It is. And Americans learn to believe that the immediate satisfaction of every need is happiness. If you're not hungry, thirsty, nervous, or have a headache, if you never get bored because you always have something to do or at least to look at, you must be happy.
Q. However...
A.We share with you the human condition of postmodernity: the citizens of the opulent world live dispersed, anxious, nervous, because this anxiety is the price of so much supply.

Q. What kind of supply?
A. Hundreds, thousands of products you can buy and an infinite variety of travel, of TV channels, of movies, books, museums, theaters, shops...
Q. And, unfortunately, Visa cards to spend with without stopping.
A. We're overexcited and overinformed. The result of so much opulence is that we always feel as if we should be somewhere else.
Q. And maybe we should be.
A. We should certainly start by turning off the TV and looking at the sky. This anxiety caused by the pressure of the supply of consumer goods day and night in the form of thousands of daily advertising impacts is universal and I see it portrayed by Gunter Grass, Primo Levy (sic), or Eduardo Mendoza, but in America we give it a different answer.

Q. Do they eat more?
A. Of course, but above all it's the violence and the constant fear of violence. Obsession about security, paranoia toward all the real or imaginary dangers that threaten us. Because, in addition, they teach us from a very young age that everything is possible and the past does not exist. This is very democratic, but it causes us a lot of insecurity.
Q. "The Frightened States of America".
A. Yes, the bad thing is that we've caused the whole planet to feel our fear. And if a country doesn't feel like us, threatened by the terrorist who are no doubt out there in some faraway country, it is our enemy. That's why today to the Third World we don't stand for liberty or democracy, or even soda pop: we stand for armies and bombs. We are terror.

Q. Cheer up, mate. things will get better.
A. My job is not selling happiness. I'm not Tom Clancy. I can't say do your job and you'll get your reward and you're in the best country in the best of all worlds. I can't say that because it isn't true.
Q. Are things getting worse?
A. Americans and Europeans are getting more and more different, we're going in different directions, and it's going to be more difficult to understand each other.
Q. Everyone could change for the better.
A. I love my country, the country of Jefferson and Lincoln. the country of refugees from all dictatorships, but not that of George Bush, who hasn't even won a clean election, at least not yet.

No point responding to this guy. He's full of half-baked rewarmed Chomsky and thinks he's cool for being able to refer to "Candide", as if he were the only person who'd ever read it. I imagine all of you can take Mr. Costello's ravings apart just as well or better than I can, so I won't bother. I do believe all moderate Americans, mainstream Democrats or Republicans, would consider this guy Costello to be an extreme leftist whose ideas are not shared by most Americans or by most foreign observers; he's not representative. Yet by giving him the back-page interview, that's exactly what La Vanguardia is presenting him as.

And boy, they're insistent about finding any source possible of the "Americans are a miserable sad frightened people" meme or trope or libel or stereotype or insult or condescension or whatever you want to call it. Wonder where they dug this Costello guy up?

I have Andy Robinson, anti-Yank British correspondent for La Vanguardia, dead to rights for at best gross incompetence and at worst anti-Semitism. Here's his story in today's Vanguardia.

US FOUNDATION AWARDS AZNAR WORLD STATESMAN PRIZE
Andy Robinson

NEW YORK--In his second honorific appearance in six months before the highest representatives of the powerful Jewish business community in the US, Jose Maria Aznar received the World Statesman Prize from one of the principal foundations in New York, the Appeal of Conscience Foundation. The prize was given to the Prime Minister, according to the director of the foundation, Rabbi Arthur Schneier, for "his courageous leadership and as an indefatigable advocate for democracy, liberty, and tolerance."

In his speech, Aznar mentioned the neccesity for a solid relationship between the United States and the European Union and the need to continue working together in the struggle against terrorism. Some 800 people--among them leaders of different religious organizations, although there were no Muslim leaders--attended a banquet in homage to Aznar at the luxurious Hilton Hotel in Manhattan, for which they paid between $1000 and $100,000 per table. It is an example of the generalized practice on the part of political pressure groups in the United States of raising funds through the celebration of gala dinners to which important political or business personalities are invited. The president of the German bank Deutschebank, Josef Ackermann, also received the prize. Phil Condit, the president of Boeing, John Negroponte, US ambassador to the UN, and the ex-head of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, among others, attended.

[PHOTO OF AZNAR RECEIVING AWARD FROM SCHNEIER; CAPTION: Aznar receives his prize from the hands of Rabbi Arthur Schneier]

Aznar was invited in May to give the keynote speech at the general assembly of the Jewish American Committee (AJC), another important pro-Israeli lobby. "To us Spain is a good friend of the US and of Israel," said Ken Bandler, spokesman for that committee.

The Jewish associations "are giving out invitations to all the leaders who support Israel and the war in Iraq," said Norman Finkelstein, the Jewish author of "The Holocaust Industry" (Siglo XXI, 2002), which denounces alleged acts of corruption on the part of Jewish associations in the redistribution of the indemnizations for Nazi genocide, to La Vanguardia.

Two weeks ago there was a major controversy after the decision of another pro-Israeli group, the Anti-Defamation League, to award a prize to Silvio Berlusconi at another gala fund-raising dinner at the Plaza hotel in Manhattan, weeks after he spoke about Mussolini in favorable terms. The Nobel Prize-winning Jewish economist Paul Samuelson criticized the decision as "frightening for anyone who knows Berlusconi's personal history."

You read whatever you want to into Andy's article, but what I'm reading into it is that he's saying that rich Jews are giving out bribes to their international supporters, as they use those supporters for their own political purposes.

There are a couple of factual errors in Andy's story; he could have avoided the most significant by Googling the Appeal of Conscience Foundation and its president, Arthur Schneier. If he'd done so, he'd have found this as its mission statement:

The Appeal of Conscience Foundation, founded by Rabbi Arthur Schneier in 1965, has worked on behalf of religious freedom and human rights throughout the world. This interfaith coalition of business and religious leaders promotes peace, tolerance and ethnic conflict resolution. The Foundation believes that freedom, democracy and human rights are the fundamental values that give nations of the world their best hope for peace, security and shared prosperity.

Appeal of Conscience delegations have met with religious and government leaders in Albania, Argentina, Armenia, Bulgaria, People's Republic of China, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), Cuba, Czech Republic, El Salvador, Germany, Holy See, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Japan, Morocco, Panama, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovak Republic, Switzerland, Spain, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom and the former Yugoslavia. The Foundation also hosts delegations from abroad to acquaint them with the diversity of American religious life and its contribution to a civil society.

The Appeal of Conscience Foundation has long held that "a crime committed in the name of religion is the greatest crime against religion." The struggle for human rights is ongoing and tolerance can be achieved by promoting open dialogue and mutual understanding. After September 11th, the foundation has rallied religious leaders worldwide to take a stand against terrorism and to use their influence to halt violence and promote tolerance.

Note two things, Andy:

1) The Appeal of Conscience Foundation is NOT a Jewish organization. Look at word two, sentence two, paragraph one: "interfaith". It happens to have a Jewish leader, which is pretty logical since he's the guy who founded it.

2) The Appeal of Conscience Foundation is NOT a pro-Israeli organization. It is a pro-peace and tolerance and, especially, religious freedom organization. If you check some of the other sites you turn up through Google related to this group, you'll learn that the foundation has been spending most of its time on issues related to the former Yugoslavia (Schneier seems to have spent all his time betwenn 1993 and 1999 bringing ecumenical pressure, along with Catholic, Orthodox, and Muslim leaders, against the war), religious freedom in countries like China and Cuba, serious involvement with Romania, I'm not sure why, and its annual awards. Last year's World Statesman prize went to, of all people, Jean Chretien. If you're awarding a 2002 prize to antiwar and anti-American Chretien, you must be a real lackey to the Israeli lobby.

Also, I would suggest that Andy stay well away from Norman Finkelstein unless he would like to be tarred by association. My feeling is that since Andy cites Mr. Finkelstein approvingly, he's aready tarred. Anyway, all you need to know about Mr. Finkelstein is summed up in this interview with him from Counterpunch (of course). He indicts himself repeatedly in his own words. If you want some more info on him, there's plenty of it right here at a site maintained by David Irving. If that's not damning I don't know what is.

UPDATE: I watched the afternoon news on TV Catalunya, TV3, at 2:30 this afternoon and then went over to Television Espanola, TV1, at 3 PM. Both channels covered the story. Both referred to the Foundation as "ecumenical". TV3 did not mention the word "Jew", though they perfectly reasonably noted that the president of the organization and the presenter of the award was a rabbi. TV1 did mention the word "Jew", when they gave examples of how ecumenical the Foundation is--they pointed out there were Orthodox, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim leaders in the organization, and they showed a guy who looked pretty Muslim to me up on the dais. (TV1 went so far as to give the Foundation a nice puff, saying that they were an important interfaith NGO that had worked for peace and freedom since 1965.) This gives the lie to Andy Robinson again, as he specifically stated that there were no Muslims in attendance at the banquet. He's either blind, stupid, or lying, none of which are qualities you want in a newspaper reporter (hey, I'm not dissing blind people here, there just ain't too many blind reporters. I don't see why a blind person couldn't be an editor. It sure seems like La Vanguardia's copyeditors are blind sometimes.)

I would suggest that Andy Robinson's usefulness as a La Vanguardia reporter has reached its expiration date, unless La Vanguardia likes being known as a newspaper which hires reporters that are at best just incompetent or, more likely, both incompetent and anti-Semitic, and which doesn't have editors with enough sense to just never publish crap such as Mr. Robinson's article today.

How can we believe anything this guy writes now that we know he's made such grievous errors in his reporting and that he considers Mr. Finkelstein a legitimate source?

Here's a historical What If? I was just thinking that the Allies took French Morocco and Algeria in Operation Torch in November 1942 and met up with Montgomery's army moving in from the East. They took Tunisia and then Sicily was obviously the next step. What if, though, they'd invaded Spain rather than Italy next, in early or mid 1943?

Consider: We know, with 20/20 hindsight, that the Italian campaign was, if not a complete disaster, certainly not a success. A lot of Allied troops got tied up in Italy, on territory that is not exactly propititious for an attacking army, and the Germans sure chewed them up. We can see on the map that Italy is very mountainous and easy to defend, so that should have given us a clue. Spain is mountainous, too, but the example of the Spanish Civil War should have given us a lot of examples on how to successfully campaign in Spain. One reason for invading Italy was to knock Mussolini out of the war, but by then we knew that Mussolini was a paper tiger. He could wait. Hitler was the enemy.

Now, I need to know things that I'm not going to bother to look up to actually make this plausible. I need to know:

what forces the Allies had available to invade Spain. Let's assume that you had eight infantry, two airborne, and three armored divisions to work with.

what forces Franco had to resist with. Let's say virtually nothing, since Spain was completely broke, still half-destroyed, and deeply divided politically, and had no navy, air force, or armor to speak of.

what forces the Germans had in southern France, how quickly they could get into Spain, and what other units the Axis could move into the peninsula. Let's say two armored divisions and ten infantry could make it across the Pyrenees on fairly short notice.

We don't know those things, but I think my assumptions are fairly realistic.

So here's what you do. You pulled off the North Africa landings with virtually no interference from the German U-boats and air force, but you have to figure on some losses going in to both German subs and the Luftwaffe. Still, you should be able to surprise them; I don't think they're going to be expecting this one too far in advance, and you know from breaking their codes that they're not ready for such a move.

You send in commando units and airborne brigades to seize the ports of La Coruna/El Ferrol, Gijon, and Santander in the north. If you have real stones and more units than I've calculated, grab Bilbao too. With a bunch of Royal Navy and US battleships and cruisers off the coast and with the air forces flying from Morocco and Britain, you blast Spain's air force off the map and hit the Luftwaffe over France. Use your heavy bombers to knock out transport centers in southern France in order to impede the Germans from moving quickly; then go back to bombing the Ruhr the next night. Now that you've got the ports, send in a couple of armored divisions and about six infantry--they can just land there, you don't have to worry about resistance--and drive on Bilbao and the pass into southern France at Irun. Send a division toward Madrid from the north. In order to wipe up the Spanish regime, also seize the ports of Algeciras and Cadiz in the south with an armored division and whatever infantry you've got left. Drive up toward Madrid by way of Extremadura and Toledo just like General Franco did in '36. The regime will fall in a couple of weeks, if not sooner. Expect a bunch of wacky Falangistas to try to put up a fight at, say, Puertollano, and get plowed over. Resistance should cease.

Now, what do you do if you're the Germans? Realistically, you have two choices: dig in at the Pyrenees or move south into Spain. Really the only obstacle in front of the Pyrenees is the Ebro River, which would also be a good defensive line. Meanwhile, more Allied units and tons of supply are pouring in at the ports of both northern and southern Spain. If you're the Germans, you do not try to fight them in the open on the Spanish plain because there are a lot of Allied units coming at Madrid from both north and south. Allied bombing is interrupting your access to the battlegrounds by blowing up bridges over the Garonne and railroad junctions all over the place. The war in the air over France would have been bitter and bloody and rougher in, say, July or August 1943 than what we saw in June 1944, since the Luftwaffe wouldn't have been as weak a year earlier, but I think the Allies would have won.

So, me being the Germans, I'd try to hold at the line of the Pyrenees. No point in trying to prop up the Franco regime with about fifteen Allied divisions rolling through and more on the way, coming in through the northern Spanish ports, and the Ebro line is longer and less defendable than the Pyrenees. There will probably be a very rough battle around Irun and Bayonne as the Allies pour through to the west of the Pyrenees, and maybe another one around Portbou and La Jonquera on the east side. I think the Allies would have won, though, and at August or September 1943 you'd be on the French side of the Pyrenees. From there you ought to be able to launch an invasion of Western Europe much more efficiently than from the capture of a defended bridgehead, like at Normandy. You wouldn't be throwing your guys away like in the fight through Italy, and you'd have the sum of both the troops that wound up in Italy and those that wound up in France striking together at the Germans, and probably a lot of useless Italian troops too.

If we'd done this we might have considerably shortened the war at less cost, and a lot of people who got killed might have survived.

What's our moral justification for attacking neutral Spain? Well, Spain wasn't neutral, it was officially "non-belligerent". Spanish "volunteers", the Division Azul, were fighting against the Soviets on the Leningrad front. Spain was openly pro-Axis diplomatically, and it had a dictatorial government that had been put in place, at least partially, by Hitler and Mussolini. Those are all casus belli (help, Dr. Weevil, what's the plural?) in my book.

So what do you think? I'm expecting a hail of brickbats, rotten tomatoes, and dead cats...

Here's an article worth reading on Leftist West German traitors who worked for the Stasi during the Cold War.

Now, this is a pretty negative article aimed straight at people I really don't like: Soviet (or East German, doesn't matter) agents. I, therefore, have a knee-jerk tendency to approve of it. Yet whenever I see articles generalizing about a country's society, I take them with a couple shakersfull of salt. I've seen so many articles in Spain unfairly and incorrectly generalizing about America. Seeing such pieces on other countries makes me want to ask a bunch of questions like: What percentage of West German leftists were really traitors? Were most far-lefties traitors? Were most moderate lefties traitors? What do most Germans in both the West and the East think about old East Germany today?

I just listened to a hell of a football game on Internet radio through KCFX in Kansas City. The Chiefs went into Lambeau, spotted the Pack 14 points, then scored twice to tie it at 14. The Packers ran the score up to 31-14, the Chiefs came back to tie it at 31, and then Green Bay kicked a field goal, and then the Chiefs tied it at 34 with one second left. Overtime. Chiefs win the toss, work the ball into place for a 50-yard Morten Anderson field goal try, and the Packers block the kick. They run their first play and fumble the ball; former Barcelona Dragon Mike Maslowski recovers for the Chiefs on the 49. Trent Green, on his first play, hits Eddie Kennison for a touchdown. Chiefs 40-Packers 34 and it's sudden death. I've never seen--well, heard--anything like it. The Chiefs are 6-0. Next week the Raiders. Geez, they're interviewing Vermeil and he's crying.

Here's Susan Sontag at the Frankfurt book fair, according to La Vanguardia:

The always combative Susan Sontag proved in Frankfurt that reaching 70 years has not taken away a bit from her mordacity when expressing her opinion of everything happening in the world. Especially regarding questions which, as she says, oblige her to "open her mouth". The targets of her harsh criticisms yesterday were Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Arnold Schwarzenegger, George W. bush, Henry Kissinger, Silvio Berlusconi, ETA terrorism, and even the Spice Girls. The American author--winner of the 2003 Principe de Asturias Prize for literature along with the Moroccan Fatima Murnissi, and who today will receive the German booksellers' Peace Prize--did not mince her words. Asked about the election of Schwarzenegger as governor of California, she replied that it was "a bad joke come true". "Nevertheless," she added, his election is significant, the same as Berlusconi in Italy, because the people elected them because of characteristics that have nothing to do with politics. Schwarzenegger is not very intelligent, he's an idiot. but he is successful and in the movies he has always represented violence, something seductive today in the United States. The election of both of them shows that we are living in a post-political era. Policies are no longer made by people who are professionally in charge of them and who look for the best solutions through debate. Something similar is happening in other areas. The people don't listen to Mozart, but to the Spice Girls. We're living through the dissolution of the old order."

Sontag also criticized the direction of her country ("it's changing from the Republic to the Empire") and its political system ("there's only one party, the Republicans, and its wing that calls itself the Democrats, but 30 or 40 percent of the people are not represented politically") described Bush as "that horrible man from Texas", and called Kissinger "one of the greatest war criminals of all time". In her opinion, Hillary Clinton does not have a chance to become the first woman president of the United States, because only "a very conservative woman" could ever win.

Sontag, in addition, revived her controversy with Garcia Marquez because of his silence about the Castro regime's violations of human rights. "Regarding Cuba," said Sontag, "Garcia Marquez has silenced things he knows and therefore he has not been honest. His answer was ridiculous when he said that in private conversations he has helped many dissidents to leave Cuba." The author also rejected the violence in the Basque country. "I am against the armed struggle in the Basque Country. I've been there and I've talked with the people. I know that Basque extremist groups do not represent the whole population."

Punctualizations:

1) We completely agree with Ms. Sontag on Cuba, Garcia Marquez, and the ETA, and we congratulate her for speaking out on these subjects when it might have been more politically correct of her not to do so.

2) Arnold Schwarzenegger may or may not turn out to be a good governor, but he is distinctly not an idiot.

3) We don't like Berlusconi either. He's a crook. A pro-American crook, but a crook nonetheless.

4) Since when is violence more seductive now in the US than in the past? Murder rates are way down and general violent crime is much worse in Europe than the US. And the stupidest violent movies I've ever seen were when the university movie theater put on Jean-Luc Godard Week once when I was there.

5) Most of us are much happier when politics are run by non-professional politicians. Besides, I thought we agreed that Powell and Rice and Rumsfeld and Cheney and company are very important in helping Bush run things, and they know all about policies and politics, don't they?

6) Fifty years ago people were complaining about those damn teenagers listening to Elvis instead of Mozart.

7) Ms. Sontag does not seem to like Texas or Texans very much. My impression is that, in general, Texas and Texans don't much care for Ms. Sontag, either. Exceptions: Molly Ivins, Ann Richards.

Check out this one.