Aimless thoughts while listening to Doc Watson:

The cost of housing is Spaniards' main concern, not Iraq or North Korea or the Congo; La Vangua reports that housing prices are climbing at 9.8% a year. I sat through a long harangue last night on how the government ought to take over the housing market and produce cheap houses for everyone. I refrained from remarking that that's been tried many times and it hasn't worked, because whenever the government situates the price of anything below its true market value, that good disappears from the market. That's the problem now; restricted zoning and complicated bureaucratic procedures, along with strict rent control, mean it is generally unprofitable to build unless you are paying someone off to fix your zoning classification, and that owners of properties that could be rented hold them off the market because they will never be permitted to raise the rent more than the rate of inflation again. Let the free market rip!

(By the way, I personally benefit from rent control, as I am paying 1998-era rent, half what this place would go for on the market. Then again, if rent control were lifted, prices would presumably drop as more renters entered the market and competition increased. So who knows?)

Fox News is reporting that North Korea is backing off, that they've apologized for the nuclear test and will promise not to carry out any more if the US will make concessions. This is what happens when you let a rogue state obtain nuclear weapons. Still, jaw, jaw is better than war, war.

Barça was defeated on Wednesday night 1-0 by Chelsea, who clearly played better even though they were forced to use their third-string goalie. Don't worry, Barça will be fine. They can't win every game and we can't expect them to. Losing 1-0 at Stamford Bridge isn't precisely a disgrace. Comments: Puyol needs a rest, but I'll bet he plays against Madrid. He shouldn't. Both Marquez and Thuram are fitter right now. Edmilson also needs a rest; he really hasn't come back from the injury that kept him out of the World Cup. Gudjohnsen will be fine. Zambrotta has been merely OK so far. Messi has been very good but I still think he's overrated. Bit of strangeness: On the left wing of the attack, Barça uses a right-footed player, Ronaldinho, and on the right wing of the attack, they use a left-footed player, Messi. Completely the opposite of what tradition says. Agreed, both of these guys are pretty good with their "weak" legs.

The best bit of political news is that the Communist youth brigade was using the slogan, "Folla't a la dreta, fes-t'ho amb Iniciativa," literally, "Fuck the right wing, do it with Initiative (the Commies' official name)," while passing out condoms. Chemical Imma Mayol then announced that her life-partner, Commie candidate Joan Saura, was "tender and imaginative" in the sack, which was a little more than we needed to know, and that they had gone straight to bed on their first date, a degree of intimacy which rarely becomes public in American politics until some congressman starts sending dirty e-mails to minors.

This proves one thing: Saura and Mayol are, shock, practicing heterosexuals. How square. With Initiative's ultra-politically-correct ecosocialist orientation, you'd think they'd be transsexual lesbians of color involved in a mutually fulfilling five-way marriage with a goat, a beret-wearing bearded deconstructionist of indeterminate gender, and a trisexual illegal alien from Neptune named Grok.

Says Antoni Puigverd in today's Vangua:

You, candidate Saura, are the champions of the game of moral superiority. As Catalanist as it is possible to be, "real, genuine" leftists, more solidarious than anyone, and the only lovers of nature. You float above the other parties in your sanctity! The risk of showing such a clean heart, candidate Saura, is that when one slips, one becomes spectacularly dirty.

The Vangua also reports that the London betting line on the Catalan election has Mas as the favorite at 2-3 odds, with Montilla at 6-5, Saura at 37-1, Carod-Rovira at 54-1, and Piqué at 74-1. I assume that winning the elections means getting the most votes, which does not necessarily make you regional premier.

Tonight is the debate between the five candidates, TV3 at 9:45. I'll be watching and taking notes rather than going out partying, as most voters probably will be doing. Whose idea was it to have the debate on Friday night? Why not Sunday afternoon after lunch, peak viewing time, in order to reach more of the people? And after the debate tonight, get this, they're showing "Tango and Cash" dubbed into Catalan. No wonder they think Americans are idiots over here with the crappy movies they run on TV.

This election hasn't stirred up a great deal of passion except maybe among the Communist youth brigade. But in case you're interested, here are some videos of the five candidates:

Three different interviews with Artur Mas, one from Vilaweb, one from Canal Latino, and one from TV3. Lots and lots more Mas stuff available out there.

Two rather unfunny gags about Montilla from a TV3 "humor" program. Hey, Montilla supporters, you'd better get some good videos of your candidate up on YouTube.

Carod-Rovira giving a fiery nationalist speech on the Diada this year. This ought to be all the Carod you need to see.

A quick sound-bite of Pique. Nothing more.

An interview with Saura, and a speech at a rally. There's lots of Saura stuff up; Initiative and Convergencia seem to be the only two parties that have caught on to YouTube.

Wednesday blog update while listening to Commander Cody:

I was rather snotty about Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk a few days ago; A Fistful of Euros has a nice piece on Pamuk's writing.

The Rottweiler, in his inimitable and rather foul-mouthed style, snacks on British Muslims angry, get this, that the 2012 Olympics will be held during Ramadan.

Chicago Boyz has an insightful piece comparing English and Spanish economic and cultural history.

Fausta is always entertaining. Just start at the top and scroll down; note news from Ecuador and Venezuela.

Eursoc has a post on the contest between Guatemala and our friends in Venezuela for the Latin American seat on the UN Security Council. Go Guatemala!

USS Neverdock is one of my favorite linking blogs; Marc has six or eight links every day that are worth checking out.

Samizdata comments on Islam and intolerance.

Guirilandia is back with a feature on the legendary Seat 600, with photos.

Daniel W. Drezner has a post on the success of American culture in anti-American places.

For those who read and/or understand Spanish, here's Xavier Sala i Martin's interview with José Montilla, the Socialist candidate for Catalan premier, in which Montilla is reduced to a quivering wreck. He totally lost his cool and marched out of the interview while spewing insults. (Via Barcepundit.)

Sports update: As you probably know, Barcelona is now alone in first place in the Spanish football league. Valencia and Real Madrid both lost last week, and so Valencia is three points back and Real Madrid is five points down.

A massive refereeing screw-up gave Atletico Madrid a 2-1 victory last weekend over Recreativo Huelva. First the ref called a penalty in favor of Recre when there was no foul. Then he failed to call a penalty in favor of Recre when there was a very obvious and blatant foul. Then he called a penalty in favor of Atletico when there was no foul. Then he allowed a goal in favor of Atletico when Aguero quite obviously knocked the ball in with his hand. And then he gave an Atletico player a second yellow card but failed to send him off; the linesman had to remind the ref that the guy was out of the game. Just pathetic. They need three on-field refs and four linesmen, all of whom should be professionals.

Last night Madrid beat the crap out of a very poor Steaua Bucharest team in Champions League play; Madrid and Olympique Lyon should have no problem in their group. And tonight Barcelona plays Chelsea, so I will be going down to the bar to watch it. Should be a hell of a game, Ronaldinho vs. Henry and all that. These are probably the two best teams in the world. If you're in the States, look for the match on ESPN 7 or one of those marginal sports channels; one of them ought to be showing it, or maybe one of the Spanish language channels.

La Liga Loca has a rundown on the week in soccer; we agree with him that Robinho is probably Real Madrid's best player and should be on the field every match.

Also, Real Madrid won't start playing well until Guti and Sergio Ramos get rid of those fruity haircuts that make them look like teenage girls.

Pointless thoughts while listening to the great Frank Sinatra:

The regional election campaign is well under way and there is no news, just the various parties slagging one another off. The Bipartite (the Catalan Socialists and Communists), the Esquerra Republicana national socialists, who are no longer part of the Tripartite, and moderate nationalist Convergence and Union are all running against the PP, and each is accusing the other of wanting to make a post-election coalition with the pariahs. Convergence and Union actually did this while Aznar was PM, and so CiU candidate Artur Mas went to a notary and swore he would never make a deal with them no matter what happens. CiU, meanwhile, is accusing both the PP, the PSC, and the Communists (who prefer to be called "ecosocialists") of not really being Catalan parties, but rather "branch offices" of the national People's and Socialist parties.

La Vanguardia's survey, released on Sunday, has CiU with 35.5% of the vote and 52-54 seats in the regional parliament; the PSC has 29% and 38-40 seats; Esquerra with 12.1% of the vote and 16-18 seats; the PP with 10.5% and 13 seats; and the Communists with 10.4% and 12-13 seats.

Parliament has 135 seats, and you need 68 for a majority, so the math is pretty clear. A CiU-PP conservative coalition would just barely not sum up enough seats. A CiU-Esquerra nationalist coalition would form a majority, and so would a repeat of the Socio-Commie-ERC Tripartite. What I think most of us would prefer is a CiU-PSC grand coalition in which the two major parties, who are also the two parties considered most moderate by the voters, cut a deal.

Spain, itself, basically has a two-party system, with the conservative PP and the social democratic PSOE. The Communists always vote with the PSOE. There are powerful regional parties in Catalonia, the Basque country, and Galicia, however, which makes the system much more complicated in those places. The PP doesn't really count as a major party in either Catalonia or the Basque country, while the Socialists have a significant presence in both places.

The problem with Esquerra is that they're a wild card. They can't be trusted as part of a coalition, because they are an opposition party by nature. They want to yell and scream for Catalan independence, and nothing more. The only proposals they make are ones that would increase Catalan autonomy. They are a single-issue party, and have no program worth describing on any issue that really means anything.

Actually, it's rare for a Spanish party to have what we'd call a program in the United States. What the various parties mostly do is make wild promises of all the money they're going to hand out to the voters, fail to specify where they are going to get it, and then cheerfully forget those promises when the election's over.

This campaign season, the most-discussed issue has been government subsidies for parents. I will personally eat a barretina in the Plaza Sant Jaume if a single one of the measures proposed by the various parties is ever adopted.

Oh, by the way, speaking of adoption, this movie-stars-going-to-the-Third-World-and-adopting-kids-to-be-treated-as-pets has to stop now. How insulting to those countries. Hey, Madonna, why don't you invest all your dough setting up a microcredit bank in Malawi? That would actually do some good for the children there, helping their parents build a future. Or how about setting up a real adoption program for kids whose parents have died of AIDS so that thousands of them could go live in the First World instead of just one?

InstaPundit links to a Hillary Clinton statement saying that the US government can use torture in exceptional cases if the president orders it and it is secretly reported to Congress. Boy, that shows you how things have changed since September 11. Before that moment, I think we all would have said, "Torture? That's the Nazis or the Spanish Inquisition. Or the French in Algeria. We don't do that." Now, even Hillary is willing to contemplate using torture.

I'm still against it, and I think some of the techniques used now during interrogation of prisoners, such as sleep deprivation, exposure to cold or heat, or being forced to listen to Barry Manilow at 110 decibels for hours, border on torture. But what would I do if I were president and we caught Zarqawi? Probably break out the rack and hook up the electrodes and make him talk, under amoral utilitarian "greatest happiness for greatest number" reasoning; that is, if we can make him talk by hurting him terribly, it will save lives, and Zarqawi's pain is secondary to innocent people's lives. But that's the same end-justifies-the-means logic that says it's OK for Stalin to kill the kulaks because their existence impedes the general happiness of all of society.

They're running one of the grossest ads I've seen on TV ever. The product is some skin cream that will help you look younger, and the big sales point is that it is made with "snail slime" (baba de caracol, literally "snail drool"). There are shots of slimy snails, and we are told that snail slime is the substance that allows snails to repair their shells when broken. Great, that really makes me want to use the stuff. I'll wipe snail snot on my face and it will harden into a shell and then I'll look really great. Who the hell buys this crap?

By the way, I have nothing against snails. I rather like them. I kept a few in a fishbowl as a kid. What I do think is gross is the way people around here go out and collect them and then eat the poor little things by the dozen. Ick.

Here's the vile Andy Robinson, New York correspondent, in his blog for La Vanguardia.

It's possible that after publishing this post I will receive indignant e-mails and commentaries in various blogs accusing me of holding questionable attitudes about the Jews...My best American friends are Jews.

Thanks for letting us know that, though I'm a bit surprised they'll socialize with you. Must be pretty tolerant folks. Either that or Andy considers the Jewish bartender at his watering hole his best friend, since he hasn't got any others.

I'm glad to announce two pieces of very good news from downtown Manhattan. One is that, finally, the play "My Name Is Rachel Corrie" by the Britons Katherine Viner and Alan Rickman about the valiant pro-Palestinian activist who was run over and murdered by an Israeli bulldozer while protesting against the demolition of Palestinian houses in the Gaza Strip in March 2003.

The Israelis are murderers, huh? Gee, I'm not Jewish and I'm already pissed off.

The play was a box-office and critical success at the Royal Court theater in the West End of London. But the New York production at the New York Theater Workshop was suspended before opening night from fear--according to the authors and others--of offending the patrons of the theater, who in many cases are steely defenders of the Israeli "right to self-defense" (it's a saying) in the Palestinian territories.

And, of course, "the authors and others" are trustworthy sources. Meanwhile, no theater has any obligation to put on any play, whether it might offend people or not.

Newspapers like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal wouldn't have liked it very much either.

Because they're Jewish-controlled?

The director of the theater, James Nicola, said the decision was because of Hamas's victory in Palestine and a tight production schedule. Rickman, an actor from the Harry Potter series, responded then, "I don't want to underestimate the difficulties of financing in a theater in New York, but that doesn't stop this from being censorship."

1. Another reason to boycott Harry Potter movies.
2. Censorship is when the government says you can't put on your play, not when a private organization decides it would be better not to.

At that time, many said that nobody in New York would dare to "bite the hand that feeds them" with an anti-Israeli production. But things change, and now the off-Broadway Minetta Lane Theater will premiere the play on October 15.

And if I were in New York I'd be out front with a protest sign. Note that Andy himself calls the play "anti-Israeli."

The second piece of good news from New York, with its powerful Jewish community, is that, after being a taboo subject for so long, a minefield for those who fear being accused of anti-Semitism, is that it is beginning to be openly questioned whether the pro-Israel lobby exercises too much influence over American foreign policy.

Yep, it's them damn Jews again, they run everything, and so we all live in fear of being labeled anti-Semitic.

A couple of weeks ago at the Cooper Union in Manhattan, at an auditorium full of people, a panel of experts--composed of two diplomats from the Clinton administration, an Israeli ex-foreign minister, two academics who denounced the existence of a lobby, and a Palestinian intellectual--held an unprecedented debate on the question, sponsored by the British literary weekly London Review of Books.

1. Of course there's an Israeli lobby. It's called AIPAC. Every other group you can possibly think of, including the Arab-Americans, has one too. The question is whether AIPAC has too much influence over American foreign policy. My question is, since the Saudis and Taiwanese and British and Poles all have powerful lobbies in Washington, why are we all so concerned about the Israelis and only the Israelis?
2. What do you mean unprecedented? This question has been debated over and over, and every time it gets debated, we all end up deciding that America is not too pro-Israeli, if such a thing were possible. Except for Pat Buchanan and David Duke, who are in full agreement with Andy.
3. Note that Andy only considers stuff from England to be really intellectual.

That magazine published a long essay titled "The Israel Lobby" in March by two prestigious foreign policy experts, Stephen Walt,. professor at Harvard's Kennedy School, and John Mearshimer, from the University of Chicago, who participated in Thursday's debate. The Atlantic Monthly had commissioned the article but decided not to publish it at the last moment. "The significant thing is that the authors are not Noam Chomsky but from the conservative mainstream," said Roane Carey, staffer at the weekly The Nation, after the debate.

Walt and Mearsheimer demolishingly criticized the "special relationship" between the United States and Israel, and a pro-Israeli lobby that includes--according to the authors--pressure groups in Washington such as the powerful AIPAC--it has 100,000 members and spends $47 million on its activities--and the neoconservatives in the Bush administration, including commentators in various newspapers and even Christian evangelists, now fervently pro-Israeli.

1. The term "special relationship" is, as far as I know, applied only to that between the US and the UK.
2. You mean the Jews can buy America for a measly $47 million? Boy, they must be even cleverer and sneakier than we thought.
3. And you know, of course, that if the neocons in the Bush administration and the Christian conservatives agree with a policy, then it must be evil.

According to Mearsheimer, the influence of this heterogenous group of steely defenders of Israel explains the privileged treatment that successive administrations, both Democrats and Republicans, have granted to the Jewish state. Israel is the principal beneficiary of American economic and military aid--more than $2.5 billion this year, $140 billion since the Second World War--despite being a rich economy and despite the fact that its policies in the Palestinian territories violate international law.

1. "Privileged"? Does that imply that Israel is undeserving of its status as a close American ally? Or does the fact that Israel is the only Middle Eastern democracy have something to do with it?
2. "Violate international law"? You mean like suicide bombers and rocket attacks and stuff like that?

The authors of the article state--more arguably--that the Iraq War has been fought principally because it is in Israeli interests. "The US has a terrorism problem largely because it is so closely allied to Israel," they say. For the pro-Israeli lobby, "It is essential to control the debate," say the authors--"because if there were a frank discussion on the Israel-US relationship, the Amjericans might decide they want to change it."

Yep, those damn Jews started the Iraq war, too, and it's their fault all those people got blown up at the World Trade Center. And, besides, they control the media, so the rest of us can't express our real opinions.

Curiously, according to members of the panel, it is easier to speak openly and without fear about Israel in Tel Aviv than New York, if one compares the press in the two cities.

In America you can't criticize Israel without being afraid? What, is the AIPAC Gestapo going to knock on your front door and haul you away some dark midnight?

Predictably, the essay was explosive in the American universities and communications media, setting off a series of accusations of anti-Semitism. Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, author of Case for Israel (sic), called it "an article that stinks with the desire to segregate the Jews." The Anti-Defamation League, a group that constantly warns about an alleged intensification of anti-Semitism, which is not visible to the rest of us, called the article anti-Semitic. Harvard professor Michael Oren said in the Washington Post that the two authors, and not only their article, were anti-Semitic.

Yeah, that's what we call "free and open debate." These guys have the right to spout off about the Jews, and their opponents have the right to call them anti-Semites. Note that Andy doesn't mention any of these critics' arguments or reasoning.

At last Thursday's debate Martin Indyk, former US ambassador to Tel Aviv during the Clinton administration, returned to the attack, accusing Mearsheimer of "descending to the level of anti-Semitism." Indyk is a former director of AIPAC. Shlomo Ben Ami said that the article has "anti-Semitic connotations." Dennis Ross, another ex-diplomat with the elder Bush and Clinton and an ex-director of AIPAC, called it "dangerous."

Gee, think any of these guys might know what they're talking about? Again, Andy doesn't explain why these people believe the article is anti-Semitic.

But these accusations back up the thesis of the article, Mearsheimer said. "It's almost impossible to have a free and open conversation about Israel without being accused of anti-Semitism," he said on Thursday. Tony Judt, NYU historian, said that his own article in defense of Mearsheimer and Walt ("A lobby, not a conspiracy," April 19) was about to be rejected by the New York Times. "They asked me if I was Jewish and only published it because I said I was." Rashid Khalidi, professor of Arab studies at Columbia, said, "This debate is not carried on rationally, either in the media or in the Capitol."

1. Not even I believe Judt's charge against the NYT, that you must be a Jew to criticize Israel in its pages. And I hate the New York Times.
2. Khalidi accuses the Jews of running not only the media but also the legislature, and then he's surprised he gets called an anti-Semite.
3. Seems to me this little debate demonstrates that freedom of speech in the US is alive and well. Hey, Andy, you think Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Syria, or Al Fatah would allow you to trash their system while living inside their territory?

Walt told me that since publishing his article, "a few invitations made to me by politicians in Washington have been canceled." But several large publishing houses seem willing to break files for the first time. Farrar Strauss & Giroux will publish a longer version of Mearsheimer's essay. In addition, last week a new book by the former editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, Stephen Schwartz, on the alleged crisis inside the pro-Israeli lobby--"Is it good for the jews?: the crisis of the Israel lobby" (Doubleday, 2006) (sic)--after the case of espionage which involved neoconservative members from the Defense Department.

Andy, publishing companies have been coming out with books critical of Israel for decades. I'm surprised you didn't know that. Maybe you should go down to the library or something.

Here's the original Walt and Mearsheimer article from the London Review of Books, along with a video of the debate held on September 28.

This is CAMERA blasting Judt and the New York Times.

Alan Dershowitz's response is here.

The American Thinker's response is here.

Here's James Taranto from the WSJ's Opinion Journal.

This is a piece in Spanish from El Mundo on the controversy.

By the way, part of the fun here is that the Mearsheimer-Walt essay came out in March and the controversy was over by the end of April--but Andy's all over it in October. Just six months too late.

Saturday blog roundup while listening to George Strait:

Barcepundit has posts on Zap and the US flag, and on the cancelled housing ministers' meeting. And here's Publius Pundit on Zap.

La Liga Loca has its weekend preview up. The best match, Barça-Sevilla, won't be televised, even on pay-TV, due to contractual issues between the Sevilla club and the TV networks. I agree with LLL--home win.

Eursoc has an excellent piece on a Times interview with Segolene Royal, and Pave France comments on Ms. Royal's debate problem. Meanwhile, here's ¡No Pasarán! with a blast at French racism.

And Expat Yank has another excellent piece on the British court's judgement against the US Army.

This is Back Talk on why the Lancet study claiming more than 600,000 dead in Iraq is bogus. I mean, jeez, it's an extrapolation based on non-random interviews.

Roncesvalles comments on anti-semitism in Germany.

This is funny. I think.

Muhammad Yunas and the Grameen Bank won the Nobel Peace Prize this year; finally, a good pick, someone who has actually improved hundreds of thousands of people's lives by inventing a system to extend credit to the very poor and bring them into the market. This is the first time I remember them giving the Peace Prize to a capitalist. Some Turkish guy I never heard of won the Literature Prize; I think the last good choice for that was V.S. Naipaul and I can't think of any others I like since about William Faulkner or so. The Americans swept the rest of the prizes, you know, the ones they give out for doing something useful.

The fun political campaign news is that moderate nationalists Convergence and Union have come out with a 14-chapter campaign film blasting Maragall's Socio-Commie-Cataloony Tripartite coalition, whose crash led to these early regional elections. CiU isn't my favorite party, they're a little too nationalist and a little too statist for my admittedly finicky taste, but it's a perfectly reasonable moderate choice. The link takes you to their website and the movie, which comes in 14 chapters which you can pick and choose from. I haven't seen it yet, but it sounds like fun.

Here's what seems a bit novel: they're producing one million DVDs of this film, and one will be included along with every Sunday paper sold in Catalonia. Let's see if it works. Sounds like a good idea to me.

The latest Socialist screwup has the city of Barcelona, the region of Catalonia, and the Spanish central government all blaming one another for the cancellation of the meeting of EU housing ministers, which was to have been held here. Everyone was afraid that the squatters were going to riot, and so they called it off. The cops estimate there are about 250 active rioters, a mix of squatters and anarchists, based in between 50 and 100 squats. What everyone in town is suddenly asking is: how did this situation get so out of hand?

Barcelona's tolerance is part of what makes it a nice place to live, but that tolerance is sometimes carried too far. Until a short time ago, these youth riots were looked on indulgently by the relics of 1968 in charge of the Socialist party machine, along with the rest of our Illustrated and Enlightened folks around here--"prohibiting is prohibited" and all that. Now we've got them firing homemade bazookas at the cops.

Crush them. Repress them. Make their lives unpleasant to the fullest extent of the law. Ban the open bars they run on weekend nights, with which they fund themselves, and arrest them when they don't comply. Make these Black Blockheads move on to some other more congenial city for squatters. When the hard core moves along, the local middle-class wimp hangers-on (absolutely no squatters are working class; they're either homeless bums, professional agitators from the middle class, or hangers-on) will find something else to do, like go to the sex shop or something.

Meanwhile, yesterday they held the big Day of Hispanicness armed forces parade in Madrid; the Americans were invited this time, and Zapatero stood up when the American flag went past, which he hadn't done the last time the US was invited, in 2003, before he became prime minister. It won't help him with the Bush administration, with whom Zap is persona non grata.

Speaking of Zap, he touched off some turmoil when he said that he'd halt criminal trials of members of Batasuna, ETA's political branch, if the party agreed to renounce and condemn violence. Lots of people aren't very happy about this. I think what I'd do is compromise just a tiny bit, and drop all criminal charges arising from pro-ETA political behavior. The ones I would not drop, though, are charges arising from actual ETA activities. Prosecute those guys just as strictly as anyone else.

Wednesday afternoon blog roundup while listening to Dale Watson:

Check out this hilarious piece on North Korea's sock-puppet Western sycophants. (Via Eursoc.)

Expat Yank comments on Islam, Iraq, and Western nations.

Read about corruption at Atlético, drugs at Valencia, and tonight's friendly against Argentina over at La Liga Loca.

¡No Pasarán! reproduces an anti-American French cartoon whining about "secret personal information" being turned over to the evil CIA by European airlines.

Publius Pundit has a roundup on the anti-Chavez demonstrations in Venezuela.

Meryl Yourish writes on "the tyranny of the Muslim minority."

Frank McGahon comments on the contradictions between environmentalism and "social justice."

Davids Medienkritik blasts downmarket German magazine Stern.

Daily Pundit agrees with us on the Spanish Civil War.

The Rottweiler comments on the war, the Republicans, the Democrats, and the upcoming congressional elections.

The gloriously named Andrew Buncombe ("bunk" is derived from the older "buncombe" or "bunkum," meaning nonsense, which is what his article is) frets in the Independent's lead story about America's population reaching 300 million.

The tone of the article is set by this paragraph:

Lester Brown, the director of the Earth Policy Institute, an environmental group also based in Washington, said: "In times past, reaching such a demographic milestone might have been a cause for celebration - in 2006 it is not. Population growth is the ever-expanding denominator that gives each person a shrinking share of the resource pie. It contributes to water shortages, cropland conversion to non-farm uses, traffic congestion, more garbage, overfishing, crowding in national parks, a growing dependence on imported oil and other conditions that diminish the quality of our daily lives."

Lester Brown is a well-known no-growth environmentalist nut. Dude, as civilization grows and prospers, the resource pie changes. And what the world is going to see is an increase in value of human resources and a decrease of value of natural resources as the information revolution continues and even more accountants in Bangalore and programmers in Bangkok begin to prosper through working online.

The only counterargument the article mentions is by Gregg Easterbrook, whose first name they misspelled. They give him one sentence, and don't allow him to explain why he thinks what he does. It also doesn't mention why Easterbrook is worth listening to (he has written two well-reviewed books and dozens of articles for top political magazines on science and the environment):

Some commentators believe this growth has a modest impact on the nation's resources and can bring many benefits. Greg Easterbrook, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based, independent research and policy institute, recently wrote: "What should not worry us about continuing US population growth ... is the question of whether we can handle it - we can," he said.

But today's real bit of fun comes from the Indy's opinion page, where one Andrew Gumbel grumbles about those fat, uncouth Yanks in a piece titled, "Americans want it all and hang the consequences."

Get this para:

The severely limited impulse to conserve is not only about economics. It is also deeply cultural. The United States is a place where the prevailing instinct is to want it all, no matter the consequences. Sure, there may be wars in the Middle East, Islamic militants on the march, smog in the air, pollutants in the water, hurricanes, floods and other tangible side-effects of global warming but that's not going to stop most people from hankering after a big car and a big house with state-of-the-art gadgets.

WHAT?!? Dude, I know both Spain and the UK pretty well, and most people in both those places hanker after big cars, big houses, and modern conveniences too. Even my Communist friend Pedro owns a big stereo system and a brand-new computer. And if you don't believe me, check out the number of Mercedeses, Beamers, and 4 x 4s driving around Barcelona, and the real estate frenzy which has made my 75-square-meter apartment in Barcelona more valuable than my parents' five-bedroom house on half an acre in an attractive Kansas City suburb. People are by nature materialistic; it's not just an American thing.

And get his conclusion:

Telling Americans to consume less doesn't work. Giving them environmentally smarter versions of the same things - more fuel-efficient cars, better insulated houses, less heavily packaged food - may be a more promising avenue. Until the government, however, gets serious about forcing manufacturers to produce these things, the age of the more rational American consumer will remain a distant prospect. (Boldface mine.)

The solution is more government control of the economy, says Mr. Gumbel, as if the Independent ever had any other solution to anything, because those silly childish Americans are too stupid to know what is good for them, you see.

The radical Cataloonies are at it again. This time a group of about 50 of them were blocking the access of PP leaders Josep Piqué and Angel Acebes to the site of a political rally in Martorell. Pushes and punches broke out as the radicals shouted "Fascists" and "murderers" at the PP supporters, threw plastic water bottles full of urine, and shot off fireworks in their direction. The leaders needed police protection to enter the building, and were forced to leave by the back door after a 40 minute delay for their own safety. Nonetheless, they were pursued to their cars by the radicals, who tried to physically attack them.

Disgraceful, of course. A blatant attempt to interfere with the rights of Piqué and Acebes to express their opinion, and the rights of their supporters to hear said opinion. This, Mr. Carod-Rovira, is truly anti-democratic behavior, but somehow I doubt you will condemn it.

By the way, as I write, this is the top story on El Periódico's website (photo included) and it's the third on La Vanguardia's. Fascinating, though, it doesn't even make TV3's webpage.

This episode comes in the wake of confrontations last Thursday between radical nationalist squatters and police in Barcelona, in which the rioters fired at the police with a homemade bazooka and threw dozens of bottles of paint at the facade of the MACBA, a modern art museum. These morons attacked an art museum! How much more anti-cultural and anti-intellectual can they get?

Now, get this. The housing ministers of the EU countries were to have held a meeting next week in Barcelona, but it has been canceled, apparently because the regional administration and the Barcelona city government did not feel able to guarantee security after these incidents.

Boy, that sure makes us look great in the eyes of the rest of Europe, don't it?

Meanwhile, on Sunday, the Catalan and Basque "national" soccer teams faced off before 55,000 screaming fans in the Camp Nou. Now, that of course is just fine, let them play and everyone can have a good time watching a soccer game and cheer for their homeboys. Terrific. Unfortunately, as always, it was turned into a political event by the radical Cataloonies, including the burning of a Spanish flag.

The non-Cataloony moderate nationalists are somewhat to blame here, I'm afraid, since CiU has been trying to make a political issue of Catalan "national" sports teams in this upcoming regional election. The UEFA, Europe's football federation, reminded everyone that only countries recognized as independent by the UN can compete at the national level, and Catalonia and the Basque Country therefore do not qualify. This isn't nasty Spanish centralism, as even the moderates are trying to paint it (remember the TV ad where the Spanish kid won't let the Catalan kid play?) It's official UEFA and FIFA policy for everyone. Great Britain is the one and only historical exception; England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland (who recently whupped Spain's butt in an official Eurocup qualifying match) each has its own team; that's because the various British national teams existed before there was an international soccer governing body.

Oh, by the way, I found the video of asshole "comedian" Pepe Rubianes insulting Spain and the Spaniards on TV3. Note the way the host, Albert Om, encourages him, and the audience applauds.

Translation: "I don't give a shit about the unity of Spain. Let them shove Spain up their fucking asses and see if it explodes inside them and leaves their fucking balls (unintelligible). Let fucking Spain go shit at the beach. Ever since I was born, it's been fucking Spain. Fuck them."

Rubianes is clearly a very violent and hateful person. I don't know why anyone pays any attention to him at all, since he's so obviously vile.

Note: This was on an afternoon TV show, the equivalent of, say, Donahue or Oprah. Such potty mouth would, of course, be completely unacceptable in the United States.

As everyone knows by now, the North Koreans announced today that they had performed an underground test of a nuclear weapon. South Korea said that it had picked up a seismic movement of about 3.5 on the Richter scale in an isolated area of the North. Australia and the US have confirmed this. The question, of course, is whether the thing actually works; we will have to assume it does. The entire international community is frightened, of course; TV3's news this afternoon spent a lot of time on all the international denunciations coming in from Japan, South Korea, and others, and also on the emergency meeting of the UN Security Council.

TV3 reported on the statements by Bush and Japanese prime minister Abe that all American military commitments in the area will be honored, and that the two countries, united, will introduce a very strong condemnation of the NoKo bomb. The network said absolutely nothing critical about American and its president, for once.

The impression I get over here, just from watching the news, is that Europe isn't sure what to do, and probably believes there is nothing it can do. Europe knows it hasn't got the military power to take any action, and is dependent on the US and the four powers surrounding North Korea, Japan, Russia, China, and South Korea, to do something. Would Europeans object to a war against North Korea? I bet they wouldn't, as long as somebody else did the fighting.

According to La Vangua's website, "The Spanish government, in the words of foreign minister Miguel Angel Moratinos, condemned the 'serious provocation' of the nuclear test, and called on Pyongyang to "immediately return to diplomatic negotiations," As if the North Koreans give a shit what Moratinos says.

Meanwhile, TV3 is reporting that South Korean foreign minister Ban Ki-Moon has been elected new UN secretary general by the Security Council. I wonder if it has anything to do with the NoKo nuke test; Fox News says the move is not a surprise, though, and that Mr. Ban has spoken many times about his wish to make North Korea the focus of international diplomacy, for whatever that's good for. It's a positive sign; this will be the first secretary general to come from a country that's part of the Western alliance. Let's see if Mr. Ban can turn the UN into a useful organization instead of a sounding board for (and a channel of cash to) corrupt brutal Third World dictatorships.

Sunday afternoon sports update while listening to Marcia Ball:

Spain's national soccer team stunk up the stadium last night against Sweden, losing 2-0 and seriously complicating their classification for the 2008 Eurocup. Remember, they already lost against Northern Ireland, which is pathetic, and did poorly at the World Cup, making it out of the first group but falling in the round of 16.

The entire country is screaming for the head of coach Luis Aragonés, best known internationally for his racist reference to Thierry Henry while trying to fire up his team. No question that Aragonés must go. As someone down at the bar said to me last night, "I'm rooting for us to lose so Aragonés will get fired. Fuck the Eurocup, we'd never qualify anyway with him as coach."

Names being thrown around as possible replacements are Miguel Angel Lotina and Vicente del Bosque. I'd give the job to either Emilio Butragueño or Txiki Beguiristain, both of whom are intelligent, respected, and well-spoken, are former star players, and have spent time as general managers of big clubs. Bernd Schuster would be another good choice, if the Spanish federation would accept a foreign coach, and I'm not sure why they shouldn't. Schuster, current coach with Getafe and former player on Barça, Real, and Atlético, knows Spanish football as well as anyone. For sure, it's time that Spain breaks with the Aragonés generation of coaches and goes with somebody younger, 40 or 45 years old, who can communicate with this generation of players and who is hungry for success.

With the exception of the football team, Spain is riding high on sports successes. The basketball team won the world championship, Rafael Nadal won the French Open, and if you call going around in circles really fast a sport, then Fernando Alonso in Formula One and Dani Pedrosa in Moto GP are both world champions. Alonso is quite a piece of work, blaming his pit crew and his teammate Fisichella whenever something goes wrong. What a capullo. The basketball guys, though, came off as all-Spanish clean-cut heroes, with Pau Gasol as the hero sitting on the bench with a broken foot in the championship game cheering his teammates on.

The Cataloonies are now hacked off at Gasol because he made a big deal of how much he loved playing for Spain and being with the other guys on the team and all. Seems that this somehow makes Gasol a renegade Catalan, in these people's eyes.

Gasol doesn't seem to have integrated into American life, and this might be one reason he enjoys playing with Spain so much. He's a middle-class white boy from Sant Boi, and has absolutely no connection, nothing in common with these NBA gangsta dudes. Every once in a while some Spanish reporter will run a story about how unhappy Gasol is in Memphis, a city he and his family (who live there, too, along with him) do not like. La Vangua interviewed his mom during the basketball thing and she said that life there was difficult for her, she didn't like the daily schedule or the food, and it wasn't an attractive place to live.

There was a funny ad on television starring two of these hot commercial properties. The scene is a TV commercial shoot, and a nervous Rafael Nadal is standing straight and still with a tennis ball balanced on his head. A confident Pau Gasol is ten meters away with a basketball in his hand, taking aim--he's going to knock the tennis ball off Nadal's head, it seems. He lets fly and nails Nadal right in the face and Nadal drops like a sack of potatoes as the tennis ball goes flying. The director says, "Pau, you're going to need to do better." Gasol says, "What do you mean? I hit him perfectly." ("Pero sí que le he dado.")

Remember, make your plans now to come down to

MICKEY'S HONKY TONK

c/Banys Vells at the corner of c/Brosoli, near Santa Maria del Mar

Sunday night between about 8 PM and 2 AM

where yours truly will be tending bar and spinning CDs.

Mention Iberian Notes and get a free beer! (this weekend only, of course)

Saturday afternoon blog roundup while listening to Willie Nelson:

Davids Medienkritik has a must-read long post on anti-Americanism in the German media. If you read only one thing this weekend, make it this one.

Expat Yank, back in New York on vacation, comments entertainingly on "entertainment issues."

Pave France has more on the Airbus debacle, with links and documentation as always.

Pejman has a good piece on Angela Merkel's future; I can't figure how to link to just one post on his blog, so this brings you to his blog's front page.

Rob and Rany on the Royals have new thoughts on where our boys in blue are headed next year. (Hint: They're improving, but improving for the Royals means losing only 90 games and coming in fourth.) Again, no permalinks. Rob Neyer is another person whom I vaguely knew in college; we lived in the same dorm back in 1984.

¡No Pasarán! comments on surveys of Iraqi citizens and how the European media is paying no attention to them.

Publius Pundit opines trenchantly on the Thai coup d'etat.

La Liga Loca has updates on Espanyol, Real Sociedad, and Valencia, among other Spanish football news. This blog is definitely your single best Spanish soccer source.

Fausta is fascinating and prolific, as usual. Just start at the top and keep reading.

Chicago Boyz is, unfortunately, correct on the loss of momentum in the War on Terrorism.

Free Will Blog reports on our state disgrace, Fred Phelps, and his planned picketing of the Amish funerals. If my parents are reading this, one thing they might consider doing is getting the Leawood United Methodist Church, of which they are members, to do something showing that sincere religious people in Kansas repudiate this guy.

The EU and US have made a deal on international airline security. The EU agreed to provide the American government with certain personal information about passengers on flights to the US. This debate has been going on for a while; we've mentioned it before.

So what focus does El Periodico, Barcelona's working-class tabloid, give to the story?

Banner page one headline: "FBI and CIA to be able to dig around (hurgar) in our information."

Of course, that's wrong; passenger information will be provided to the FBI, CIA, and Homeland Security, but US law enforcement will only have access to that particular information. They won't be able to wiretap your phone or any of the other panic-stricken European repression fantasies that are going around here.

(Many Barcelonese believe the US is a police state, with the cops watching everyone at all times and listening in on everyone's phone calls and monitoring everyone's e-mail and such. The cops are typical incompetent Americans, and all crooked anyway, and that's why there's so much more crime there than in Spain, you see. Lots of people around here watch way too much TV.)

And, of course, if you do not travel to the United States, no American governmental organization will have any more access to anyone's personal information than before. So if you're afraid that the CIA will open a file on you if you fly to New York, the answer is simple: don't fly to New York.

Best recent Google searches on my referrals log:

6. trafficking algeria balearics

Trafficking what? Where can I get some?

5. iberia air hostess worker

Somebody's got a uniform fetish.

4. CNT spanish civil war anarchism compadre

Oh, no, another idealistic youth about to learn all the wrong facts.

3. wahhabist salafist al-qaeda charities mosques nigeria

I have the unfortunate feeling that this guy wants to make a donation.

2. image analysis of velveeta by mel ramos

The image I have of Velveeta is quite negative and needs no analysis. For you non-Americans, Velveeta is a fake cheese-like substance, which I believe is manufactured by Kraft, of course.

1. spanish voters will repent

I'm afraid they will.

Random thoughts while listening to BR-549 (by the way, I vaguely knew the lead singer for this band, Charlie Mead, back in Lawrence, Kansas, in the mid-'80s. He was the frontman for a very good semi-cowpunk band called the Homestead Grays back then.)

Elements of the PP have completely gone crazy with the conspiracy theory about the March 11, 2004 bombings. This one is just as dumb as the JFK conspiracy theory, or the ones going around about September 11. (Most widely heard theory recently around Europe: the Pentagon was hit not by a passenger jet, but by a cruise missile.) According to a sector of the PP (Zaplana-Acebes) and of the media (COPE radio, El Mundo), there was somehow a conspiracy among ETA, the actual bombers, and the Socialist party to blow up the trains in order to defeat the PP in the March 14 election.

People, come on. The Islamist cell, which was part of Al Qaeda, set off the bombs with no help from ETA, and the police and the Interior Ministry did their jobs correctly. Of course there are a few minor inconsistencies in the parliamentary report; there are going to be some unexplained aspects of every real conspiracy, and there's no doubt that there was a real conspiracy to bomb the trains--it's just that only Al Qaeda guys were part of it. Let me also point out that the initial police work which very quickly led to the real bombers was done while the PP was still in charge of the Interior Ministry, before Zap's Socialist administration took office--so how could law enforcement have been in on any Socialist-ETA plot at that time? People appointed by the PP are the ones who came up with the official report.

The most recent "piece of evidence" is something about boric acid. I haven't bothered to learn the details because it is just more conspiracy theory crap and I have better things to do with my time, like say clip my toenails or clean out the cat box.

Let me repeat. I don't like Zap. I don't like the Socialists. I would not vote for them. But they're not evil conspirators, they are the legitimately elected government. And I do not like the way that the Acebes-Zaplana sector of the PP is trying to undercut democratic institutions. Zap won the election, much as I may not like it, but he won. And the way to beat Zap in the 2008 election is not by whining about the 2004 results.

Rajoy is too mixed up in this conspiracy stuff to continue as PP leader--he's let the crazies get out of control. He must go so the PP can put up Madrid mayor Ruiz-Gallardon in 2008, who is the only candidate with a chance to beat Zap. Anything else is political suicide.

Also, of course, the Zaplana-Acebes-COPE-El Mundo rhetoric is seriously torpedoing PP candidate Josep Pique's candidacy in the Catalan legislative election set for November 1. Pique is a mild-mannered classical liberal, not a fire-breathing reactionary, exactly the kind of candidate who should do well in a globalized world, but the PP is going to come in fourth as usual, ahead of only the Communists.

The illegal African immigrants are still washing up on the Canaries; about twenty are known to have drowned yesterday when their cayuco capsized. The last bunch that came in was flown to Barcelona and turned loose into the care of non-governmental organizations. The Zap government does not know what to do with them, and its only solution is just to fly them to mainland Spain and dump them in the streets. Interestingly enough, what they all want is an expulsion order, because when the next amnesty comes the order is incontrovertible proof that they have been living in Spain since the day the order is dated. Of course very few illegals actually get deported, despite the Zap government's tough talk.

La Vanguardia reports that the Spanish contingent in Afghanistan gave Real Madrid uniforms to soccer and volleyball teams in the province of Badghis, where the Spaniards are stationed. Expect Carod-Rovira to denounce this repugnant centralism by tomorrow.

Fernando Garcia reports from Luxembourg: "The George W. Bush administration's obsession with preventive security is becoming bothersome and tiring, not only for citizens of the whole world but also for some European political bodies." Gee, Fernando, so sorry you find security procedures bothersome and tiring. So far they've worked, haven't they? Al Qaeda hasn't pulled off any more strikes in the US, has it? In fact, several Al Qaeda plots have been uncovered and aborted, isn't that right?

If citizens of the whole world do not like American security procedures, they do not have to visit the United States. If I did not like Spanish legalization procedures, I was under no obligation to solicit resident status in Spain. Makes perfect sense to me.

The "Moros y Cristianos" flap has hit the international news. Seems that many Spanish towns, especially in Alicante province, hold yearly celebrations commemorating the Reconquest of Spain from the Moors, and dress up and hold parades and the like. Of course, the Christians are the good guys and they always win. One standard part of the celebration is they make a dummy of Mohammed, put firecrackers in his head, and blow it up. Cool, I say. No one would object to a similar "Muslims and Crusaders" festival in, say, Damascus, commemorating Saladin's brave and chivalrous butt-kicking of the Christian Crusaders.

Well, what they've done is, under no pressure whatsoever, change the events of the festival so as to be inoffensive to anyone. Now, I remember it took a bunch of pressure from both inside and outside Spain in order to make them abolish traditional local festivals which featured cruelty to animals--there was one town where they threw a live donkey off the church tower, and another where they hung a live goose from a bridge and people in boats below tried to pull the goose's body off its head. Those quite revolting "festivals" were only banned in the '90s, and despite all pressure from civilized persons and countries, bullfighting is still very popular in most of Spain. It's particularly big in the Basque Country, for instance, as well as Valencia, Madrid, Castile, and Andalusia.

Language note: The word "moro" has two meanings in Spain, one historical and one an ethnic slur. "Moro", historically, means "Moor", referring to Muslims during the medieval and Reconquest period, and it is perfectably acceptable. In modern speech, though, referring to someone from North Africa, it's a slur, sort of like "nigger" in the United States. Politically correct Americans would be surprised at how much language we consider racist is in common usage around here.

Eulàlia Solé, billed as a "sociologist and writer," goes off her anti-American nut as usual today in the opinion section.

The country considered the most advanced in the world, the United States, has just institutionalized torture.

No, it hasn't. The only evidence there is that anyone was tortured is the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and that was so far from being institutionalized--it was a unit gone out of control--that those guilty were promptly and severely punished by the US army itself.

Terrorism has increased, as everyone recognizes, though we are not dealing only with this evidence, but of the danger that every one of us may seem guilty of terrorism, arrested, imprisoned, and tortured indefinitely. It's that simple and horrible.

Does anybody really think that an ordinary person can be arrested, imprisoned, and tortured indefinitely by the United States government? Well, Ms. Solé actually does. She really believes that she is in danger of being thrown into a CIA torture prison. I think this is called "schizophrenia."

How many innocent people are currently in that situation? It is impossible to know, and much less from now on, when the torch-bearer of the West has given itself unlimited powers.

Does anybody really think that the US government has unlimited powers? Ms. Solé actually does. If the US government had unlimited powers, of course, Iran and North Korea and Al Qaeda would be as peaceful as little lambs, or dead, one or the other. And people like Ms. Solé, who did not put their lives or even careers on the line during the Franco years, as they well remember, would obviously be too terrified to speak up now.

Anyway, she then calls for European governments and citizens to mobilize against "such practices," charges that her telephone and e-mail are being tapped, which they aren't, and then analogizes the US to early Rome; she wants the plebeians of the world to rise up and "contain the power of the patricians and their praetors." Naturally, of course, this would involve violence, which Ms. Solé appears to think is OK when carried out against the United States.

Directionless thoughts while listening to Dr. John:

The campaign for the November 1 regional legislative election is in full swing, with both major candidates promising lots more government handouts in an attempt to gain votes. Convergence and Union's Artur Mas kicked it off by announcing three different new subsidies for parents, to cover things like nursery school and the like. Socialist candidate Jose Montilla upped the ante by promising subsidized optical, auditory, and dental care for old folks and children. So Mas came back yesterday and promised to subsidize half of the rent for "youths" (under thirty years of age, part of a legally recognized "couple"). Swell. At this rate somebody will promise to subsidize half the rent that 40-year-olds pay, and I will fervently recommend that everyone vote for him.

Minor scandal: Montilla challenged Mas to two different debates, one in Catalan and, horrors, the other in Spanish, to be broadcast to all of Spain. Mas doesn't like this idea at all, but there will be negotiations, and, apparently, debates. Carod-Rovira, our ERC national socialist, called the proposal "undemocratic" since he will be left out. Dude, the only thing that has to be democratic is the election. Everyone gets to vote, democratically. But there's nothing in the definition of democracy that says Carod-Rovira must be included in all debates held.

An ETA terrorist is near death from a hunger strike he went on when he was told he would not get out after serving only eighteen years, that he had twelve more to go. This guy killed more than twenty people in his bloody career. All I can say is good riddance and what took you so long, but plans are actually being made to take this killer to a hospital and make sure he doesn't die. Sounds like a waste of taxpayers' money to me.

In 1999 3.66% of Catalan citizens reported a crime "against personal safety," that is, involving violence. In 2005 8.21% did. This sounds like a major problem. Property crime is actually slightly down over those six years, but 2.89% of Catalans had their bags robbed last year, 1.83% suffered violent threats, 1.29% had their mobile phones stolen, 0.65% suffered armed robbery, 0.65% were physically assaulted, and 0.48% were mugged. That seems like a lot of crime. 90,000 mobile phones were stolen last year, and 45,000 persons were assaulted. A total of 18.6% of Catalans have suffered a violent crime at some time in their lives. The Boqueria market on the Ramblas has requested more police presence, as in a typical morning there are at least 15 robberies or thefts there. "They're basically Moroccans and Kosovars," said Manuel Ripoll, president of the market's business association. He added that the vendors recognize the thieves, and can easily identify them to the police. In the parking lot behind the market, fences have established a market in stolen goods that attracts as many as 100 people at any one time.

Here's the ineffable Rafael Ramos in Monday's Vanguardia. He's got a story titled "The US doesn't win anymore" in the sports section, which is sort of interesting because Ramos is the London correspondent. That is, he came up with the idea for the story on his own, because I somehow doubt the editor assigned the London correspondent a US sports article.

Get this quote: "With the least popular president of all time, George W. Bush, in the White House, a foreign policy that has lost all prestige, and the memory of Hurricane Katrina still opening wounds in the skin of a country that took five days to begin to help their compatriots in New Orleans, the Americans need, like spring rain, sports successes that will make them forget the arrival of coffins from Iraq, the crash of the real estate market, the fear of an "economic crash," and various other miseries. But they will have to find consolation in other things."

Ramos is clearly gloating, he's thrilled that the Americans have failed to win several recent sports competitions. What makes his gloating ridiculous, of course, is that the Americans don't really care, and it's sort of dumb to gloat when the other guy's reaction is, "So what?". They don't pay much attention to world sports, and don't particularly care how the US does in foreign competition. They're interested in the NFL, the NBA, and major league baseball. I think what he's doing is projecting: that is, Spain is feeling very athletically successful of late, and it has done something to the national mood, at least if my bar-ometer is accurate. Suddenly everyone in Spain has been a basketball fan all his life.

Just a few comments on Rafa's soliloquy, though:

1) Bush isn't the most unpopular president in US history; both Truman and Nixon left office with popularity ratings below 30%.

2) US foreign policy has lost all prestige? So that's why everyone is constantly trying to influence, above all other countries, the United States, of course.

3) Of course it did not take five days for aid to reach New Orleans and the rest of the central Gulf Coast after Katrina, and we now know the performance of emergency services was much better than the media was reporting.

4) No matter how infantile Ramos thinks the American people are, the government does not use sports to distract them from the country's real problems. The regimes that tried to do that were the South American military dictatorships in the '70s and '80s with soccer. Anybody remember the 1978 World Cup?

5) I didn't know there had been a real estate crash, and, in case Ramos hasn't been paying attention, the stock market is hitting record highs.

ANNOUNCEMENT

Beginning Sunday October 8 (that is, this weekend) I, personally, will be tending bar and spinning CDs, on Sunday and Monday nights, between about 8 PM and 2 AM, at:

MICKEY'S HONKY TONK

C/Banys Vells, at the corner of C/Brosoli

between C/Argentaria and C/Montcada

near Santa Maria del Mar and the Picasso Museum

Metro: Jaume I

There will be country, blues, and rock and roll music, along with cheap beer and a pool table.

Hope to see you there. Mention Iberian Notes and get a free beer. (Note: This offer expires Monday the 9th, or else Mickey will not be pleased with me.)

Wednesday afternoon blog roundup while listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival:

Biased BBC disposes of some commentator's bloviation about "What's Wrong with America."

Fausta has tons of interesting stuff every day.

The Fourth Rail is a tremendous resource on the war against terrorism and the Middle East, and USS Neverdock focuses on Islamism around the world. Both are daily reads for me.

I don't know if it's just me, but I've noticed several bloggers commenting on Islamism's inability to coexist with the liberal state. Here's Perry from Samizdata, and here's Pave France on the Robert Redeker tempest.

Akaky is articulately ironic.

Frank McGahon is Hayekistically against central planning.

Publius Pundit has two different pieces on Hugo Chavez, one on how he's pissed off Chile and the second on the decline and fall of Citgo.

La Liga Loca has fresh Spanish football news, including speculation about Real Madrid's finances and Ronaldinho's mediocre form. There is an amazing amount of pressure put on star players over here, and Ronaldinho has merely been above average, not brilliant, over the last two or three games. Maybe he's tired, maybe his knee is tweaked, maybe his girlfriend dumped him, maybe he's been filming too many commercials. Big deal. He'll become brilliant again pretty soon; he's got a track record for doing so.

La Vanguardia is fascinating today.

The banner headline on page one reads, "Third-generation mobile phones unleash millions in investments."

The subheads read, "Telecoms to spend €14.5 billion over next three years; Renovating infrastructure and increasing competence, the companies' goals; France Telecom's purchase of Amena revolutionizes sector. Page 66."

This is getting interesting. Let's note that the only companies mentioned by name are France Telecom and Amena, and go to page 66.

Page 66, the first page of the business section on the first business news day of the week (not a lot of new stuff on Monday, since the markets are closed Sunday), is entirely devoted to this exclusive. Headline: "Telecoms to invest €14.5 billion over next three years." Subhead: "France Telecom's purchase of Amena revolutionizes sector." Hmm. France Telecom gets another mention, and so does Amena.

Then there is a large photograph of a gentleman in a suit and tie next to a large sign showing Orange's logo; the photo is purposely cropped to include both the gentleman and the logo. The caption reads, "The president of France Telecom, Didier Lombard, yesterday in Madrid announced the union of Amena and Wanadoo."

Here's the lead paragraph. "A silent revolution is occurring in the telecommunications sector. Technological changes have begun a new investment cycle that will bring telecommunications to take over protagonism after the stock market debacle of 2000. In the next three years, Telefonica, Vodafone, Ono, and Xfera plan to invest more than €13 billion. France Telecom joined in this wave of investment, announcing investments of €1.5 billion over the next three years in the Spanish market."

So France Telecom gets another mention, though its investment is only one-tenth of the total amount that all the telecoms companies are supposedly going to put up, which I will believe when I actually see it. There's also a mention of the stock market and new "protagonism" by the telecoms sector.

Now, here's the real, buried lead paragraph, the second one: "The CEO of France Telecom España, Belarmino Garcia, said that "We will be the principal foreign investor in the telecommunications sector." He said that after the disappearance of the mobile phone operator Amena and of Wanadoo, France Telecom's new brand Orange will comprise the company's mobile-phone, fixed-line phone, internet, and television services in order to become an authentic alternative to Telefonica. Forecast net income is €4 billion annually, with 3300 employees."

Reads like a France Telecom press release.

Paragraph three: "The purchase by France Telecom of Amena and the acquisition by Ono of Auna Cable have revolutionized the sector. "Both operations attracted the attention of private equity funds because they represent the beginning of real competition in the sector," said Didier Lombard."

Note that so far the tone of the article is very bullish on telecoms sector stocks and especially France Telecom, of course.

Paragraph four: "The first response was Telefonica's announcement that it would invest €9 billion over the next four years." Excuse me! Isn't this the big news? Telefonica's investment will be six times France Telecom's.

We skip a couple of paragraphs, down to the next-to-last:

"Telecommunications is probably the sector that devotes the largest part of its income to investment, among companies listed on the stock market, In the last ten years, it has reinvested almost 18% of its income, far above cement producers (16%) or automobiles (13%)."

Hmm. More bullishness on the sector.

Here's the last para:

"Regarding France Telecom's investments in Spain, the CEO stressed that much of the €1.5 billion will be destined to the construction of its third-generation network. "Currently only 200,000 of the 11 million clients that we have use UMTS technology, and our goal is to accelerate its implantation in order to gain 25% of the market." By the end of the year, 75% of the population will have coverage. France Telecom considers Spain as a key country in its strategy, as it demonstrated when it acquired Amena for €10.6 billion one year ago."

Also, there's a sidebar, which begins, "The next battle in the telecommunications sector will be the implantation of telephones which offer both fixed-line and mobile services. This telephone was launched a few days ago in France by France Telecom and will soon be introduced in Spain."

Gee, I dunno, but it seems to me that La Vangua has done an awful lot to promote the telecoms sector and especially France Telecom with this whole shebang, especially the front-page banner head and the first business page.

By the way, if we flip five pages back to the stock market quotes, we see that France Telecom is down 13.96% on the year.

Now, here's something really interesting. On page 5, the first full-page ad in today's edition of La Vangua is for...Orange! It's just a black page with the slogan, in orange, "Life is better when everything really important to you is within your reach. Mobile. Internet. Fixed-line. TV. Orange."

How do I get in on this deal?

Last night TV3, on its 8:30 PM nightly news, led off with the shooting at the Pennsylvania schoolhouse and followed up with the Congress of Deputies stunt. At 9 PM, Antena 3 led off with the video stunt and followed up with the Pennsylvania shooting. I understand why the schoolhouse shooting would lead off the news in the US, but in Spain? Didn't anything more important happen in the rest of the world?

Spain is fascinated by the Amish, whom they first found out about in the Harrison Ford movie Witness, which was a huge hit over here and is repeated ad nauseum, along with Mississippi Burning and The Shawshank Redemption, on weekend afternoon TV. They can't get over these folks' living without modern technology and with old-time family and community ways in the heart of the United States, which they identify with the latest in heartless modernity.

The Antena 3 reporter finished off his story last night with some remarks about the bucolic idyll of the Amish country and how this shocking episode of violence seemed impossible there, "but, when we're talking about violence, nothing is impossible in the United States." That's a direct quote, I wrote it down at the very moment it came out the guy's mouth.

The shootings are one of the top stories on TV3's afternoon news today at 2:30 PM, too, with extensive follow-up coverage; they just can't get enough of it.

Lula and social democrat Gerardo Alckmin are going to a second round in the Brazilian election; Lula got 48.6% and Alckmin 41.6%, with minor candidates getting 9.8%. I'm guessing Alckmin dethrones Lula, as even more corruption stories come out and the anti-populist opposition unites.

The Mark Foley scandal is serious bad news for the Republican party. I had thought until now that the Reps would have no problem winning both the Senate and the House in the November elections, but this is going to hit the Republican base right in the guts. A Republican congressman was soliciting minors for sexual purposes, and we don't know whether he actually had sex with any of them or not--and other Republican congressmen knew about it, at least enough to warn pages away from Foley. House speaker Dennis Hastert claims that Republican leadership did not know anything about Foley's pedophilia, and I hope he's telling the truth, because if he's not the Republicans are guilty of the same thing the Catholic Church was, not immediately getting rid of anyone whose sexual behavior toward children is questionable.

Question: What percentage of gay men are pedophiles, and what percentage of heterosexual men are, and is there a difference? I honestly don't know. And what percentage of gay pedophiles act on their urges, and what percentage of straight pedophiles do, and is there a difference? I have a guess.

Obviously, youth is a component of heterosexual attractiveness; you don't see too many women over the age of 22 in Sports Illustrated's swimsuit issue, and high school cheerleaders are most certainly both minors and officially sanctioned sex objects. I might add that there are a whole lot of "Barely Legal" porno sites out there, featuring explicit sex involving very-young-looking 18-year-old girls; I know this for a fact because I once translated the captions to the photos for one of them. (Yes, I was paid quite well, ten euro-cents a word. I learned lots of new vocabulary in Spanish, too.) No question that lots of straight men are attracted to teenage girls; that's why the term "jailbait" exists. No question that lots of hetero perv pedophiles spend their Augusts in Cuba with the teenage hookers. But what percentage acts on it?

I have the impression, though, that the gay men who are attracted to what I will euphemistically call "youths" tend to act on it more frequently than the heteros. Go back to the ancient Greeks and the kouros statues, or to any modern city and its rentboys. My guess is that most gay men discovered their orientation as teenagers and began to act on it as soon as possible with everyone possible. Therefore, they see nothing wrong with sex with teenagers, because they did it themselves as teenagers with older men. The hetero "community," on the other hand, does have a norm prohibiting sex between adults and teenagers, and though a hetero might be tempted to violate it, and some do so, he knows that it is wrong.

Please don't get too angry--this is just a hypothesis. Feel free to prove it wrong in the comments section.

Oh, yeah, Foley has checked into rehab. See, his problem was caused by the demon alcohol that was making him do what he did, not the fact that he is a pervert. Oops, excuse me, "boy-lover," as NAMBLA would have it.

John Derbyshire from National Review, whom I generally like except when he's calling for a race war, approvingly reproduced a letter to the Economist perpetuating two urban legends.

LETTER OF THE MONTH ...This particular one was to the editor of The Economist, and appeared in the “Letters” columns of the September 23rd issue.

An earlier issue of The Economist (Sept. 9th) had run a spoof piece titled “Welcome Aboard,” pretending to be the in-flight announcement of something called Veritas Airways, “the airline that tells it like it is.” Sample: “Your life-jacket can be found under your seat, but please do not remove it now. In fact, do not bother to look for it at all. In the event of a landing on water, an unprecedented miracle will have occurred, because in the history of aviation the number of wide-bodied aircraft that have made successful landings on water is zero…”

Well, the letter-writer in the Sept. 23rd issue had the following to say:

"Sir — The bright yellow life-jackets are not intended to act as flotation devices. They are there to make it easier for the recovery services to spot the bodies strewn across rough terrain. (I was once asked to put on a life-jacket over central Germany, some 300 miles from the sea.) And the advice to adopt a head-down fetal position in the event of a crash landing does nothing to preserve life, given that the stall speed of a modern airliner means it will connect with the ground at terminal velocity. However, the position does tend to preserve dental data, useful for identifying dilapidated corpses."

News you can use.

The life-jackets legend is debunked at Yahoo Answers, and Snopes debunks the brace-position legend.

The embarrassing part for Derbyshire is that, in the very same column, in the middle of a discussion on IQ in which he advances the theory that people do not communicate well when there is more than a 15-point IQ difference between them, he says,

Highly intelligent people are good at weighing evidence and making inferences, yet are still, as that Poul Anderson character implied, capable of believing nutty things, those nutty things being walled off in “zones of commitment” where evidence counts for nothing and logic is suspended. Contrariwise, even very dim people, who live mostly in a fog of superstition and false inference, manage to cross the street safely, do basic arithmetic, and anticipate the sunrise.

And, despite living in a fog of superstition and false inference, so foggy that they fall for decade-old urban legends that could be checked out by any moron with an Internet connection, they manage to write the occasional column for NR as well. Either that or their own personal zone of commitment has something to do with race and intelligence.

Monday afternoon blog roundup while listening to Alison Krauss and Union Station:

Davids Medienkritik reports on a German news program's slander of the United States armed forces. A must-read, including the video and a translated transcript.

Trevor at Kalebeul neatly disposes of a prominent and rather bigoted Francophone.

La Liga Loca's "Heroes and Zeroes" neatly sums up the Spanish football news of the weekend.

Pave France has a terrific piece on Airbus's troubles, with lots of documentation and everything.

¡No Pasarán! tells the story of Robert Redeker, a French philosophy professor under a death threat for his views on Islam. There are several further updates, including a mention of the fact that Communist newspaper L'Humanité has not mentioned Redeker at all.

Eamonn at Rainy Day is in fine eclectically cultural form; he's had several fascinating posts over the last week.

Fausta and Publius Pundit have lots of stuff on the Brazilian election.

Watch this video before it gets taken down. Some jokers in Madrid, helped out by a worker at the Congress of Deputies building, sneaked into the legislative chamber and "stole" Prime Minister Zapatero's chair. They filmed the whole thing and posted it on YouTube yesterday, and it's made the news. The worker at the Parliament who let them in will be "disciplined," and prosecutors are talking about filing charges.

This shows exactly how lousy security around here is. What if that had been Al Qaeda or ETA instead of some dopey kids, and what if they'd had a bomb instead of a video camera? Heads need to roll.

Here is the link to these idiots' website.

UPDATE: Turns out to have been, get this, a stunt pulled off by an advertising agency as part of a guerrilla marketing campaign for a UN world hunger day. They set up a blog and posted the video on YouTube yesterday. The cops finally got to the bottom of it today and identified those responsible. Here's Libertad Digital's story, and here is El Periodico's.

The point about security holds, since the filmmakers really did connive with a worker to let them sneak into the legislative chamber without informing higher authority.

Pointless thoughts while listening to Junior Brown:

(Hey, do you guys ever listen to any of the music videos I link to?)

Local music news is that a well-known non-commercial flamenco performer, "El Capullo de Jerez," has been charged with setting a six-year-old girl on fire. Yep, you read that right. He was apparently completely drunk in a bar and got in an argument, left, and decided the way to get revenge was by torching his antagonist's child. Wonderful what alcohol does to promote clear thinking. I never heard of this guy before, but they showed him on TV, and he is obviously suffering the effects of long-term alcoholism, schizophrenia, or both. The guy's artistic name is great, too, "The Blossom of Jerez." However, "capullo," that is, "blossom," has a much more common slang meaning, which is "dickhead." I assume the double entendre was intentional.

In other crime news, today Spain's 55th domestic murder of the year took place. Also, a Barcelona court decided that selling pirate CDs and videos in the streets (which is referred to as "top manta" around here, I suppose because the pirate discs are displayed on top of a manta, that is, a blanket) is not a crime, but rather an administrative violation. Those caught can be ticketed and fined, as if they had parked illegally, but not arrested, tried, or jailed. 100% of top manta vendors are illegal aliens, usually Africans or Moroccans.

Wonder if the name of the fish, the manta ray, comes from the fact that it looks rather like a blanket?

Further Catalunacy: For some reason your ultranationalists around here have made a big deal about Catalan national sports teams. International sporting federations do not recognize Catalonia as an independent country, and its "national teams" cannot participate in international competitions such as the Olympics or World Cup, because Catalan players play for Spain in those things.

They can, of course, organize exhibition games against any other team they can convince to show up, and every Christmas somebody pays a foreign team--one year they got Brazil, I remember--to come play an exhibition against the Catalan side, normally featuring three guys from the Barça, two from Espanyol, and some second division players. Everyone gets in free and a good time is had by all, unless they get the Electrica Dharma to play a concert before the match.

So, anyway, the regional government, the Generalitat, ran an ad showing children from around the world wearing different uniform shirts playing soccer. A child wearing a Catalan uniform shirt tries to join the game, but another child wearing a red shirt (coincidentally the Spanish national team's color) refuses to let him play. Infuriating. What is public tax money being used for here? Why is the Generalitat buying TV time to run any ads at all, especially this tendentious whining tantrum?

Over here governmental bodies, especially the regional and municipal ones, run what they call "institutional advertising." These paid ads, which run on TV and radio and in newspapers, serve two purposes: A) patting the leaders of the governmental body which pays for the ad on the back, thereby serving as a permanent political campaign in favor of those currently holding power, and B) providing not-so-invisible government subsidies to local media outlets. Another way subsidies are handed out by newspapers is through "institutional subscriptions"; the Generalitat pays for more than 10,000 daily subscriptions to La Vanguardia, for example.

The votes are being counted in Brazil as I type and it looks like Lula de Silva is going down against the Social Democratic candidate, the first LatAm left-populist to get booted by his country's people. Corruption, and the failure of Lula's paternalistic welfare scheme, have disillusioned many Brazilians, and fortunately the reaction is taking place at the polls. And one thing must be said for Lula, he's not a Chavez or Lopez Obrador; if he loses, he'll turn over power democratically.

Some doofus posted this in the comments section:

John: Why aren't you pushing the 11-M Conspiracy Theory? You and your blogging friends have a duty to tell the world that Zap and his muslim allies planned 11-M! OK, well maybe that particular conspiracy theory is falling apart day by day, but you should keep pushing it to sow confusion. Or better yet, come up with another conspiracy. You're good at it.-- Otro Gráciano

Buddy, all I can say is you haven't been reading Iberian Notes very carefully. Here's the first paragraph of June 3's post:

The Spain Herald is defunct. They told me they couldn't find advertisers and it was costing too much money. No hard feelings; they always treated me decently. My only complaint, which I've already written about several times, is that I strongly disagree with the conspiracy theory on the March 11 bombings that they're pushing.

Aimless thoughts while listening to Big Bill Broonzy:

FC Barcelona just defeated Athletic Bilbao 1-3 at San Mamés on an own-goal by the Athletic defense and scores by Gudjohnsen and Saviola for Barça. Athletic's Yeste scored first, but then at about the 20th minute an Athletic player was sent off in a very harsh decision by the ref; even the TV3 announcers thought he'd gone too far. Foul, yes, yellow card, probably, but red card, excessive. That pretty much sealed the game, because there's no way to beat Barcelona with only ten men. Barça didn't play particularly well, but came away with the points. Athletic is in very serious trouble. Their club president--Athletic, Osasuna, Real Madrid, and Barcelona are the only four teams left in the Spanish league that are still owned by their membership--had to resign last week, and has been replaced by a woman, the first ever in Athletic's 104-year history.

I've been trying to avoid gloom-and-doom forecasts of future confrontations between European "Christians" and Muslims, but people here in Barcelona seem considerably more worried about immigration than in the past. The mass car-burnings in France last year got a lot of people around here talking about how France had failed its Muslim immigrants, some of whom are now third-generation French citizens but are also still foreigners. The wave of black Africans washing up on the shores of the Canaries, which the world media is still ignoring, has stirred up more concern, especially since the Zap government has literally been evacuating these immigrants to the mainland and just turning them loose with a sandwich and a bottle of water in downtown Madrid. And the alleged crime wave of armed home invasions and burglaries in the Catalan countryside has some rural folks literally up in arms, patrolling their vicinities in vigilante groups just like in Arizona.

Actually, the black Africans coming to the Canaries (maybe 30,000 total so far, I'm guessing) are a small minority of the number of illegal immigrants, most of whom simply get off the plane at Barajas or cross the frontier from France. The Zap administration legalized a whole bunch of them last year, more than 600,000, and there's not any question that this has attracted even more to arrive in hope of a new mass legalization.

Even Vallfogona de Riucorb, my wife's village, has seen immigration, with several Romanians and a South American family renting apartments there. They either work at the spa hotel, if women, or as casual laborers, if men. So far they're a novelty and very well treated by the townspeople, who appreciate the fact that these folks are law-abiding and here to work. I just hope things stay this way, because when a house in the village is broken into, which will happen sometime just because of the laws of probability, I'm afraid immigrants will be blamed.

The town's social center is the bar, and the weekly major social event is the Barça game on TV there. The immigrants all show up, among with the locals; sports bring them together. (None of the Romanians seem to be Real Madrid fans, or things might be different.) So that's one positive sign for the future.

My Barcelona neighborhood, Gracia, is quite multiculti, with a good few Latin Americans, Chinese, Pakistanis, Lebanese, and Moroccans. Most Graciencs are pretty liberal, it's a boho-lefty neighborhood, and I haven't heard much complaining about the changes we've seen over the last ten years. But I might be hanging out at the wrong bars.