El Cardenal says "forget"
No, this isn't another post about my favourite Cardenal (Mendoza), but about the big bish himself, Rouco Varela, president of Spain's Episcopal Conference.
Rouco Varela has spoken out again to say that Spaniards really need to forget what happened in Spain during the civil war and the dictatorship, and that people should stop banging on about ancient history.
Today is the feast day of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, 'martyred' approximately 1700 years ago, according to legend.
Cardenal Rouco Varela before the Episcopal shindig yesterday
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BNP Membership list leaked online
What appears to be the complete 2008 membership list for the British National Party has been leaked online today. The list includes names, addresses and occasionally phone numbers, qualifications and even hobbies.
There are already suggestions that this could lead to a collapse in the BNPs funding (by a mass exodus), and that the list might have been posted by a disgruntled party official.
This latest incident appears to be yet another debacle reflecting the seriously divided state of the BNP. While I'm not going to post a link to the list, it is easily available if you do a quick blog search (I've seen it). Sod it: Wikileaks has a copy of the list here.
UPDATE: I'm receiving an abnormally large number of direct visits (i.e. no referrer data) today. Could one of you please let me know where you saw my URL posted, so I can see the context, please?
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thebadPoll: How should the British press refer to ETA?
Today's news of a senior commander's arrest in France has brought ETA into the British press again, rasing as it always does the question of nomenclature.
It is standard for British media organisations to refer to ETA as 'the Basque separatist group, ETA', a title which seems perfectly logical to me but which clearly upsets some Spaniards. So this week's poll considers the linguistics of terror and asks: how should the British press refer to ETA? Please feel free to use the comments section to explain why you picked what you picked.
UPDATED: Oops, forgot one of the choices.
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thebadPoll: Will the G20 Finance Summit achieve anything?
As previously mentioned, the 20 largest economies meet this weekend to 'fix the world financial crisis' and 'stop it ever happening again'. With people like Gordon Brown arguing that laissez-faire free market capitalism has died a death, can we really expect anything to change as a result of the summit or will the result be more of the same, please!
The question is simple. Will the G20 Finance Summit achieve anything? Possible answers are: Yes, No, or I would rather have polls about Catalan. Vote early, vote often.
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thabadMonth – top posts in the last 30 days
These are the five most popular posts on thebadrash this month... the Vagina Institute one is more down to odd Google searches than anything else, and the Nazi Pop Twins one was submitted by someone to StumbleUpon. The alternative poll was linked, as some may have guessed, to a comments thread on another Catalonia-based blog. Next week, I'll go into some more detail about how the Catalans are the most evil people in history and how their insistence on speaking Catalan is worse than the Holocaust. The people deserve to know the truth.
- thebadPoll - should everyone understand Catalan?
- Nazi Pop Twins Documentary
- The weird world of the Vagina Institute
- Alternative poll: is requiring a nivell C certificate for all civil servants "the same" as the forced tattooing of Jewish prisoners in Nazi concentration camps?
- thebadPoll - Who should be the next US president?
I will probably fin a WordPress plugin to do this automatically for me from now on.
By the way, thebadPoll has been a generally popular new feature. I wasn't sure whether I should write a post summing up each poll's results, or just let the numbers speak for themselves. For the moment, don't forget that you can access all the previous polls here.
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Yes, Zapatero, you will go to the ball!
Spanish PM Jose Rodriguez Zapatero will attend the global financial shindig, to be held next week in Washington D.C. Spain's presence has been made possible by French President Sarkozy's offer to allow Zapatero to have one of the two seats he had to fill, in his capacity as EU President.
The last-minute success for Zapatero will be considered a real coup for the PSOE leader, who had staked his reputation on getting an invite to the summit, which President Bush had done much to prevent. Bush, in a classic display of the shallow vindictiveness that has marked his disatrous eight year presidency, seemed determined to stop Spain from attending because he and Zapatero have a strong mutual animosity, based on differing opinions on democracy and illegal war (Zapatero supports the first but opposes the second, a point of view Bush seems to find sickening).
Whether Zapatero's presence means anything for Spain other than yet another lost chance for the PP to win some political points (they don't have actual policies so they tend to thrive on mocking the PM's world standing), remains to be seen. I see little chance that the summit will come up with anything different to "more of the same", given that all the attendant parties are committed to the global capitalist system. It would have been nice if the organisers could have invited members of labour organisations but they probably wouldn't even have made it through immigration controls.
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Alternative poll: is requiring a nivell C certificate for all civil servants "the same" as the forced tattooing of Jewish prisoners in Nazi concentration camps?
Because some people think it's the same thing. Just wondering what visitors to thebadrash think about this issue.
In the nazi concentration camps the prisioners had to have a number printed on their skin - for being considered a genuine catalan you need to provide your catalan certificate in order to work. Could anyone tell me where are the differences?
Yeah, seriously. Or perhaps I'm the crazy one.
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thebadPoll: republic versus constitutional monarchy in Spain
Over the last 30-odd years, Spain's politics have been relatively stable. Despite the occasional fascist coup attempt or the more frequent ETA bombings, Spain's constitutional monarchy seems to have stayed the course. But democracy in Spain wasn't always presided over by a king. The Second Spanish Republic, target of the 1936 military rebellion, aimed to create a Spain without kings or princes, while Franco's dictatorship is still praised by some sections of Spanish society for its imposition of order and Catholic purity.
In the end, the Republic failed for various reasons. This week's poll asks you to pick the best way ahead for Spain. The choices are fairly simple: Constitutional monarchy, republic, or dictatorship. There's also an "other" option for those who'd like to propose an alternative. As always, your comments are welcome.
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Palin: criticism threatens my freedom of speech…
...or, yet another reason why this is not someone we want becoming president of the USA.
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My dream about George W. Bush
I'm not someone who regularly remembers dreams. On the whole, my only dream memories seem to be packed with Freudian friction and incredibly odd symbolism. Like last night, I dreamt that I pissed on a bush* and then this guy took us to Berry Pomeroy castle (near where I grew up) and they'd built a huge car park in front of it (it was being dismantled)... but the dream didn't really go anywhere.
A few months back, I had another dream that I woke remembering. I was strolling around a pleasant Mediterranean town (it looked both Catalan and French) when I happened upon a bar with a couple of tables outside. Sat at one of them was George Bush Jr., nursing one of those Spanish brandy glasses with a pitiful measure of rubbish brandy. There were no Secret Service guys around, so I stepped up and immediately recommended Cardinal de Mendoza as a good Spanish brandy.
He was grateful and bought me a glass too, so I sat down and had a chat with him. My main memory of this chat is that Bush was a charming guy, occasionally clipped but mainly talkative. As I smoked a Ducado, I chatted with Bush about Iraq (he admitted he was wrong but that it had happened so there was nothing much to do).
But when we moved on to crime, we disagreed. I said that I thought that America hadn't dealt with poverty sufficiently under his presidency. He argued that the sort of people I was talking about were mostly criminals. Shortly afterwards, we went our separate ways; I crossed a bridge and saw Bush's bodyguards come out of the woodwork.
After I woke, I had the dream of Bush, the good ol' boy, the bon viveur, the OK guy on my mind... and the taste of Cardenal de Mendoza brandy in my mouth. I liked him.
=
* Yeah, I know
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...a blog by Tom Clarke in Barcelona, Catalonia, covering politics, culture and society
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