My Facebook Wall: February ’11

My friends’ quotes, both questions and responses, are in italics.

3: I’m having a wonderful time at Chinese New Year! I just wish my stomach was bigger without looking bigger, like a Final Fantasy item bag that can fit 99 potions.
5: For want of 20 cents of Oversized Envelope postage on a card I tried to send from one side of Carmel to the other over Christmas, the Postal Service Returned to Sender…I’d written down my Taipei address, and it finally arrived here on Friday.
6: I’ve finished my post-vacation vacation. Chinese New Year is everything the not-quite-Irish want St. Patrick’s Day to be: feasting, family, fireworks, fine arts, and fambling (that word means “low-stakes gambling with family,” and I just invented it to finish my alliterative flurry). Let’s make it an American holiday and call it “Taiwanese New Year.”
6: The difficult stories to translate aren’t the ones with big words; they’re the ones with people doing unusual things. “That can’t be right…I’d better check that sentence again.”
6: Chrono Trigger fans will appreciate this mashup.
7: Five months after moving in, I finally met the friendly compsci student living in the room across from me. I bump into my other neighbors regularly, so he must be teleporting in and out. 可見 he is Neo, and I am part of The Matrix. No he’s actually traveling through the internet connection. After all, he’s compsci.”)
8: Congratulations to the Green Bay Packers, the only team in major American sports owned by its own fans (as stockholders) rather than some millionaire!
9: If our perception of time accelerates as we age, then perhaps babies have trouble sleeping because 24 hours feels like a week to them.
11: It’s my lucky year! Bob Dylan is performing in Taipei April 3, and tickets go on sale on Monday at noon! (On the 14th, “Not so lucky after all. The concert sold out before I could get a crack at any tickets!”)
12: Philosophical question of the day: Can one truly has cheezburger? If you could, you wouldn’t have to go back to the site for more, right?
14: Etta James – My Funny Valentine. Honorable Mention: Outkast’s “Happy Valentine’s Day”
15: Tonight’s youth ministry featured a topic not yet explored in my tenure: One of the kids asked about the compatibility of Socialism with Catholic social teaching. A fantastic question owing to Fr. Ted’s statement (“Socialists would like gov’t to mandate support, and the Church teaches it is our moral obligation to assist those less fortunate”), the first Christian communities described in Acts, the Christian Democratic parties of Europe, liberation theology, the Catholic Church’s relatively close relationship with the Democratic Party prior to Roe v. Wade, and the paucity of discussion of Rerum Novarum. They discovered that over the last 150 years, several popes have written very thoroughly on the subject – and said many of the core assumptions of Socialism make it incompatible. Such as the rejection of private property and Original Sin.
16: For the record, I was rooting for the humans in this latest Jeopardy exhibition.: According to the news, “Watson appeared to have breezed through Double Jeopardy, but that was apparently not the case. During the course of the game, Watson had crashed multiple times during the taping, said NOVA producer Michael Bicks, who had been at the taping of the show. The half hour match took four hours to tape, he said.” Ahh, good. There is still time left for humanity.
17: Because I am no longer a resident of Japan, my hard-earned Japanese driver’s license is no longer valid, but I can only get an International Driving Permit from my own country. The return postage will cost more than the application itself.
18: “I hate hotel pillows with a vengeance. They are the first things I examine when I go into a hotel room, and my heart sinks when I discover that they are too soft or too hard.” -Professional golfer (ergo frequent traveler) Colin Montgomerie. A little too intense, but can anyone else relate?
18: Fox News is the most biased & evil news network I have ever seen. And that means you are blessed. It’s a brutal world outside America’s borders, my friend.
19: I like it when the traditional farmers’ calendar matches the actual weather. Today was 雨水, and there was plenty of Rainwater, all right.
19: In response to criticism of Sonic the Hedgehog: I was too young to know any better when I played them, but the music, especially #2′s (scored by Dreams Come True, one of the biggest Japanese bands of the ’90s), has always stayed with me. Maybe the BGM is what made the games fun to play, actually.
20: One of my teachers said to me one day, “杰輝, I don’t think you like sleeping.” I said, “Of course I do! Who doesn’t?!” I never get around to actually doing it, though, so maybe she’s right.
20: No matter how many times I practice ordering curry over the phone, they can always tell I’m a foreigner. It’s not just your accent. It’s your insufficiently supplicant tone of voice.
20: It would’ve been even more mind-melting if Blake Griffin had dunked over this.
20: Joe Posnanski: Thoughts in a Bookstore
21: I loved the dunk contest yesterday. Serge Ibaka was the best last-place finisher ever. Everyone was so creative that I couldn’t get to sleep right away because my brain kept coming up with new dunks.
22: On Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s Future: If you’re going to push the limits of your mandate, you do it immediately after taking office because if you fail, there’s still time for everyone to forget what happened, and if you succeed, you have more power than you imagined. It’s right out of “The Prince.”
23: Fresh mind, thawed body: first workout of spring.
24: Question of the Day: If you could have a fully-functional Zelda item/gadget, what would it be? (No, you can’t choose the Triforce. You can choose the glass bottle, but you’d be dumb) I used to daydream about having a hookshot, and [a fairy in a bottle for resurrection] would be fantastic. I thought of the Moon Pearl, which would allow me to keep my form if I had to enter the Dark World.
25: Taiwan’s GDP grew 10.82% last year.
26: I’m finishing out the month at a monastery in the countryside (台東)!

Defending Organized Religion and the Catholic Church’s AIDS Policy

Argument: Organized religion is not good for the world.  Dogmatic belief systems create a rigidity of thought that makes it much harder to affect change if it goes against what people were brought up to think.

Can’t you say “large numbers and organization lead to rigidity” argument about organized groups of anything? Political parties, schools and classes, artists, dinner parties? But sometimes the whole is greater than the sum of its parts – for a basic example, after the Beatles broke up, none of the four members could make music as good as the group’s was. This question is just too broad to be answered with a yes or no.

Rigid rules of behavior make traffic possible. Organized words make communication possible. Organized exercise makes the Olympics possible. Organized music makes Beethoven’s 9th possible. Anyone who can’t think of 10 great things organized religion has made possible isn’t knowledgeable enough about this subject.

In thinking of these 10 things he might see, as I do, that there are way way way too many data points for anyone to answer this question. There are literally billions of them, considering my own personal (and positive) experiences as a Catholic are a data point themselves, and they go back for all of human history! And we are just young people with other research interests who are sitting in front of computer screens.

Why does the Catholic Church oppose condom distribution in Africa?

Condoms as AIDS prevention are like morphine as a painkiller. They soothe the effects but don’t treat the cause, which is the average African male’s sexual behavior, and besides that they are intrinsically harmful. A friend of mine says they’re like putting out a grease fire with water. Everyone knows water puts out fires, but water makes grease fires worse.

How are condoms harmful? I’ll leave aside theological and personal aspects for now because social science’s argument is so compelling: risk compensation.

In a Washington Post editorial, Harvard researcher Charles Green says, “The Pope was right.”

When we know our risk is decreased, we sometimes overcompensate with riskier behavior. The most common example is overeating after exercise, but it also applies to driving, skydiving, oil drilling, and, yes, sex.

The risk of pregnancy or STDs from abstinence is 0, and if you’re committed, it’s hard to get into a situation where you’ll make a mistake. According to the Guttmacher Institute, “Fifty-four percent of women who have abortions had used a contraceptive method (usually the condom or the pill) during the month they became pregnant. Among those women, 76% of pill users and 49% of condom users report having used their method inconsistently, while 13% of pill users and 14% of condom users report correct use.” So there is a small rate of product failure and a larger rate of human error (forgetting or forgoing your contraceptive) which would be more pronounced in a place like Africa where contraceptives are not a native part of the culture. You can only get pregnant 3 days a cycle, which means that STDs are even more dangerous. If the failure rate is just 1%, if you have sex a hundred or a couple hundred times, you’re in danger.

High Quality Plunder for the Pirates from Alex de la Iglesia’s Vault

High Quality Plunder for the Pirates from Alex de la Iglesia’s Vault
El País: Un botín de alta calidad para los ‘piratas’: Alex de la Iglesia
Ramón Muñoz, reporting from Madrid, February 25, 2011

A screen capture of the exclusive marked copy of Balada triste de trompeta downloaded from the website Seriesyonkis

The debate over La Ley Sinde and la piratería has a new chapter which will will surely intensify the controversy. Alex de la Iglesia’s movie Balada triste de trompeta has been posted on download sites. That’s nothing special; it happens to all movies after they’ve run a few days. The unusual thing is that not just any copy is online; rather, it’s the exclusive marked copy the members of the Film Academy received for viewing before voting for the Goya awards.

De la Iglesia, president of the Academy, has spearheaded a confrontation with the Ministry of Culture and a large part of the film industry for requesting understanding of the downloading phenomenon. The director radically changed his position towards downloading after meeting with lawyers for web sites and Internet professionals who are against the legislation the government prepared to combat websites which post copyrighted content. De la Iglesia declined this paper’s request for comment on the pirated copy of his film.

During various parts of the version circulating the web, you can read in capital letters, “Academy members’ copy.” The image and sound are truly excellent, something absolutely rare for such a “premiere.”

Normally, the movies on websites were filmed without permission by video camera inside the theater, and the image and sound are both very deficient. These are known as “screener” versions.

Without a doubt, the version of Alex de la Iglesia’s latest movie which can be downloaded on pages as popular as Seriesyonkis has excellent resolution and impeccable sound. Its quality is classified as DVRip, similar to that of DVDs put on sale. Its size, for one thing, is 1.16GB, compared to the 600MB average for a screener.

It seems, judging from websites, that this version was posted for the first time on February 19 – the Goya awards were Sunday the 13th – as a link on The Pirate Bay connected to a P2P torrent archive. Afterward, the film was also posted on hosting sites like Fileserve and Megaupload, which permit direct downloading, which is much faster. From Seriesyonkis, with a 30Mbps connection, one can download the film in 10 minutes.

There is much speculation over who has posted the pirated version. The producer, Tornasol, sent hundreds of promotional copies to academics, journalists, and people related to the industry. Any of them could have posted the movie or given it to someone else to put online.

Online commenters speculate that an academy member or industry professional wanted to take “vengeance” on De la Iglesia for changing his position on piracy.

It is the Copernican turn of De la Iglesia over downloads – legal in Spain until now – that has raised hackles in the community. At first a fanatical defender of the anti-piracy law who spoke for the Minister of Culture, he went on to admit large parts of his Internet antagonists’ arguments, then went on to say the problem is not piracy but cinema’s business model, which is at odds with the digital world and seeks to sell its products the same way it has for decades, expensively and stingily.

The director’s change of position provoked a torrent of criticism from the film sector and an equal amount of support from social networks. Iciar Bollain, vice president of the Academy, stated that De la Iglesia had opened “an unnecessary and very damaging crisis” for Spanish cinema by “representing himself and not the collective who voted for him.”

Gerardo Herraro, producer of this film, went so far as to say “Alex has lost his mind because of Twitter. He has contracted Stockholm Syndrome for the Internauts. It would be like if the Ministry of Public Health negotiated with cocaine traffickers.” Under this hostility, De la Iglesia announced his resignation.

A Much-Discussed Premiere
Balada triste de trompeta debuted last December 17. First of all, it was the latest film from one of the most respected Spanish directors, who was besides that the president of the Film Academy. Four days later, the lower house of parliament defeated the [anti-piracy] Sinde Law. The director, Alex de la Iglesia, defended the law on Twitter against online detractors ranging from lawyers to bloggers.

After that, De la Iglesia accepted an invitation to sit down and debate. He did so on December 30, and from that day began to communicate his “conversion” on Twitter. The director appealed to the Ministry of Culture and his cinematic coreligionists to open a dialogue. Criticism rained down on him. De la Iglesia presented his resignation. The law, amended by the Popular Party, was passed in the upper house. It is a sad ballad for thousands of Internauts.

Surprise Birthday Album for David Ensor

Surprise Birthday Album for David Ensor

David Ensor was born in November. So of course I am posting this album now. I’d prefer you call me sneaky, not lazy. We celebrated with Korean Barbecue, a Communist Bar, and Drunken Jenga.

The Grill

The Ventilator

The Men

The Meat

Paris Commune Company No. 12

Cuba Libre is still served here.

The most aesthetically pleasing part of the bar, which says a lot about Communism.

The Jenga was intense.

All good things must come to an end.

ICLP電子報第43期：第十九屆臺北國際書展 ~ 19th Taipei International Book Exhibition (featured in 43rd ICLP Bulletin)

第十九屆臺北國際書展照片 ~ 19th Taipei International Book Exhibition Photos

43rd ICLP Bulletin – 臺大國際華語研習所 電子報 第43期: 參觀第十九屆臺北國際書展後報告

The 19th Taipei International Book Exhibition took place in the Taipei World Trade Center February 9-14. The Taipei Book Fair Foundation announced that roughly 800 publishers and 300 authors from 59 countries attended this year’s fair, making it the biggest not only in Taiwan but in all of Asia. 590,000 people attended, the most in the history of the exhibition. This year’s book sales, especially manga, also posted significant growth.

Changtan International Culture Company [a publisher] invited six ICLP students to the fair. One of their editors, Huafan University lecturer Rosa Xiao, also gave us a tour. We had a great time. Afterward, two students told me their favorite experiences.

Laura Tucker:
The Taipei International Book Exhibition was awesome! I found a really special picture book, Made in Taiwan by Golo. Although the author is French, because he describes a Frenchman’s experiences here, the work is closely related with Taiwan. This book uses pictures to discuss Taiwan’s history and culture. Also, it uses both French and Chinese! So if you’ve studied French, you can practice French and study Chinese at the same tie! I think this book makes a great souvenir because it captures Taiwan’s environment so well. I recomend everyone read it!

Evan Osborne:
I love reading, and my wife and I had a pleasant time. I only ran into one problem, and it wasn’t related to Chinese but rather to a foreign language. I bought a French book. Afterward, the Taiwanese staffer used French to try to convince me to buy a members’ card. Although I can read French, I can’t speak it. So I asked her to speak to me in French or English. (Her French sounded excellent, but I decided not to buy the card.)

Ms. Xiao also explained to me what her company publishes, how the market is, why they participate in the book fair, and the exhibition’s strong points:

Rosa Xiao:
Our company (Changtan International Culture Company) has published children’s magazines, children’s books, and magazine-style encyclopedias for ten years. We have 100 employees, and we do business through direct sales or book fairs. So the annual Taipei International Book Exhibition is very important to us. We rent four booths and advertise in the brochures.

I love this book fair, first of all because I can see many of my friends in the business: I think publishers are endearing, but we usually have very little time to get together and talk. Also, I can observe how the domestic publishing industry has fared over the last year. Because I focus on publishing children’s books, I also go to a children’s book fair in Italy to buy publishing rights for foreign books. That book fair has 6-8 exhibition halls, all devoted to children’s books, so the selection is plentiful, and the decorations are more flashy and colorful than those of Germany’s Frankfurt Book Fair.

In recent years, book fairs, especially the Taipei International Book Exhibition, have emphasized digital production. Since the business model for digital publishing isn’t fully developed, many companies still aren’t willing to invest in it, but the market has continued to develop, so the book fair is a good opportunity to learn what’s going on. In recent years, the TIBE has planned several in-depth discussions and speeches in order to nurture and cultivate domestic companies, and I think this has been very helpful. Foreign book fairs also host discussions and speeches, but because time is short and language is a barrier, I rarely attend them. The TIBE also sets up meetings between publishers and authors in order to facilitate communication and opportunities to work together, which is wonderful; at the foreign book fairs I’ve attended, every company was on its own, and the authors had to bring their works to company stands themselves.

World-First Invention Instantly Measures Whether One Overate

In case your stomach isn’t reliable:

World-First Invention Instantly Measures Whether One Overate
Yomiuri Shimbun: 「食べ過ぎ」瞬時にわかります…世界初の測定器
Staff Report, February 23, 2011

Tanita’s invention measures whether someone has overeaten. This time, the test says you “ate a little too much.”

Tokyo-based health equipment manufacturer Tanita publicly tested a world-first invention, a handheld device which analyzes one’s urine after a meal to determine whether one overate, on the 22nd.

The current model is cylindrical, 17.6 cm long and 3.7 cm in diameter. After the cap is removed and the tip is placed inside the urine, a sensor inside the device instantly measures the sugar content. The LCD screen then displays whether the person overate.

The company has been performing tests with 200 men and women ages 30-60, and after improving the product’s precision, it plans to manufacture the device within the next two years. The estimated price is 10,000 yen (~$120US). The company says, “Until now, there was no precise way to know whether the size of one’s meals was appropriate. This will help people diet safely.”

Original Japanese Under the Jump:

Silk Tree School Defrauded: Millions of Dollars in Damages But No Unease About Daily Operations

Silk Tree School Defrauded: Millions of Dollars in Damages But No Unease About Daily Operations

Yomiuri Shimbun, ねむの木詐欺「被害数億円、運営は心配ない」

Staff Report, February 19, 2011

The Silk Tree School outside Kakegawa City

The faculty of the Silk Tree School for physically handicapped children in Kamitaruki, Kakegawa City, Shizuoka Prefecture learned on the 17th that one of its staff members was suspected of stealing large sums of money from the school’s principal, 83-year old former actress Ms. Mariko Miyagi, through bank fraud.

The next morning, the embarrassed teachers came to work and managed a perfectly ordinary school day. The school has told the prefecture it will continue operating as normal. It has received supportive phone calls and fax messages from all over the country.

According to the staff, on February 17, 56-year old suspect Yumiko Kondō, a senior faculty member who had worked for the school for over 30 years, was arrested and dismissed from her post. Since she was responsible for the school’s accounting, she also managed Ms. Miyagi’s bank account. Her official residence is the school’s women’s dormitory, but she usually lived in Tokyo and was rarely seen at the school. When asked about her, staff members shook their heads and said, “There was nothing flashy about her. She was a normal person who didn’t stand out. We don’t understand why this happened.”

Arrested along with Kondō was 57-year old Nakei Asahina (real name Noriyuki Hirosawa), who had visited the school frequently some years before. He had given a Christmas cake to the children and volunteered at one of the school’s art exhibitions outside the prefecture, among other things. His connection with Kondō is unknown.

The damages are potentially steep, but the faculty said “there are separate bank accounts for managing the school, so we’re not worried about providing the necessities for the children or salaries for the teachers.”

According to the prefecture, Ms. Miyagi and her lawyer visited the Prefectural Office on January 6 and explained the situation. Ms. Miyagi said the damages “are in the millions, but the management of the school is not in danger.” The prefecture gave oral instructions on how to manage the case. On the 18th, the prefectural Office of Welfare for the Disabled called the school to confirm that everything was proceeding as normal.

Original Japanese Version Under the Break:

陳先生、ありがとうございました

陳盈樺先生４月に中国語を教えるように来日します。去年の秋学期中は先生には大変お世話になりました。私は「来台」以前の２年間は熊本県でALTとして勤めていました。先生は私の話すなんとなく日本語のような中国語を分かってくださり、親切に正しい中国語の表現を教えて下さいました。特別な教授以上に陳先生の思いやりが私に深い印象を与えました。開学時期に私が授業で緊張を抑えられなかったとき、先生の激励と賛辞のおかげで徐々に落ち着いてきました。私達の授業が三時間目の予定だったので、その間、私はしばしば空腹になってしまいましたが、先生は必ず美味しいお菓子をくれて空腹を満たすことができました。度々先生の生徒たちは彼女の家庭で豊富な中華料理を頂きました。ご家族は非常に友好的で旧暦の大晦日にも先生は私達を招待してくださいました。期末の日に先生から素敵な記念DVDをいただきました。先生の事を絶対忘れられません。彼女をよろしくお願いいたします！

Japanese Comfort News

China: “There is Still Much to Learn” from No. 3 GDP Japan
Yomiuri Shimbun: 中国、ＧＤＰ３位日本に「まだ学ぶ点多い」
Ōgi Seima reporting from Beijing, February 19, 2011

Upon officially overtaking Japan as the world’s No. 2 economy by GDP, the Chinese Communist Party’s People’s Daily published an opinion piece on February 16 calling for the country to “look to Japanese development strategies now more than ever” and to establish a Japanese-style social security network.

The essay, titled “Another Side of Japan,” called Japan’s quick economic growth “a miracle” and pointed out that the country’s “immediate establishment of a social security network was another miracle.” “The reason Japanese society, which has suffered the effects of the economic crisis longer than other developed countries, hasn’t irreparably collapsed is the perfection of its social security network.”

“There is still much to learn from Japan. We must not change our spirit of learning.”

Singapore: Japan Continues to Command Respect and Shouldn’t Lose Heart
Yomiuri Shimbun: 日本尊敬され続ける、くじけるな…シンガポール
Satoshi Okazaki reporting from Singapore, February 19, 2011

Japan mustn’t be despondent.

So said the Tokyo correspondent for Singapore’s leading newspaper, the Straits Times, in a February 17 editorial. He wrote that Japan is still a technological innovator, it still produces several outstanding products and services, and “it will remain for a very long time a country to look up to.”

“Headline figures [like GDP] alone do not tell the entire story about a country,” said the columnist, pointing out that last week, four Japanese musicians won Grammy Awards, the most prestigious prizes in the world of music. “It was a timely reminder that the Japanese are not to be written off just yet, be it in music or the economy.”

The author cites dedication to and pride in one’s work and a sense of orderliness as reasons for these “great achievements of a global standard” and as some of the countless qualities of the Japanese spirit which cannot be measured by numbers.

Ichiro’s Physical Shows He Still Has the Body of a Player in his 20s
Yomiuri Shimbun: イチロー身体検査、２０歳代選手並み肉体維持 (English quotes sourced from House of Japan)
Fushi Kaidzu reporting from Peoria, Arizona, February 19, 2011

Ichiro Suzuki of Major League Baseball’s Seattle Mariners had his preseason physical at the team’s training camp in Peoria, Arizona.

Mariners trainer Takayoshi Morimoto says that Ichiro’s 6% body fat percentage is the same as last year. “You couldn’t tell that he was 37 years old just by looking at his body,” he said. “Players in their 20s are competing against Ichiro. He’s off the charts for an athlete in his 30s.” This season, Ichiro is aiming for a major league record 11th 200-hit season. After his physical, he worked up a sweat with an hour of catch and indoor batting practice, kicking off his training the same way he does every year.

Zapatero “Uses Foreign Policy to Score Points in Spanish Politics”

The Great Filtration
Zapatero “Uses Foreign Policy to Score Points in Spanish Politics”
The documents reveal conversations with the King, Zapatero, Rajoy, Felipe González, and Aznar – the Embassy manipulated and threatened to achieve its ends; it also released devastating reports. A cable classified the bilateral relationship as “zigzagging erratically.”
El País: “Zapatero usa la política exterior para ganar puntos en España”
Jan Martínez Ahrens, reporting from Madrid, November 29, 2010

Condoleezza Rice leaves La Moncloa in 2007. (Ricardo Gutiérrez)

The 3620 documents of the United States’ Embassy in Madrid analyzed by this newspaper (103 secret, 898 confidential, and 2619 unclassified) offer a unique vision of the tableau of priorities, strategies, and secret pressures of Washington toward Spain from 2004 until this year, a period that corresponds almost completely with the government of Socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. The cables which El País will publish in the following days illuminate the most agitated and unknown moments of this relationship between a superpower and a mid-sized ally with whom there was no risk of rupture, although there was friction. Those areas of disagreement, replete with shadows, include the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, the Kosovo crisis, Spain’s links with Cuba and Venezuela and its commercial relations with countries suspected of terrorism, and other matters under judicial investigation; the secret and confidential papers allow us to look through the keyhole and see for the first time the maneuvers behind the scenes (and “behind the scenes” is one of documents’ most repeated phrases) of the powerful legation. This operative, discrete, and ligne claire literature includes calls, meetings, warnings, and threats directed toward people with decision-making power or privileged information.

In this agenda figure the King (mentioned in 145 cables, including those from other embassies), José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (111), Mariano Rajoy (129), Felipe González (76), José María Aznar (53), ministers, judges, attorneys, businessmen, and representatives of the highest institutions of state. All these top-level contacts are profiled in detailed reports sent as analysis to the Washington machinery (the peak year is 2007, with 928 cables, 80% more than the annual average), and they reproduce conversations which the Spanish interlocutors did not expect to be disseminated and whose content leaves them in ethical gray areas or compromised before public opinion. These include the cables over judicial cases which affected American interests. The scheme is repeated in other episodes of political or entrepreneurial nature, with the consequent deterioration of the delegate, who was many times situated at the cusp of power. At these points, we should not forget the bias of the reports which, far from any pretense of neutrality, simply value actions by whether they advance the interests of the Embassy, an observer which is neither independent nor antiseptic but rather a pure agent of the United States.

The fundamental object of the Embassy’s work is the Socialist government. Its three ambassadors in the last six years (multimillionaire George L. Argyros and Cuban-American Eduardo Aguirre of the Bush administration and philanthropist Alan D. Solomont of the Obama Administration) profile in many secret letters to Washington (carbon copied to the CIA) the highs and lows of their relationship with Zapatero and his team. They bring to light the ins and outs of high Spanish politics and facilitate an unedited X-ray of American interests in Spain, which are at times very different from the interests of Spaniards. White hot topics on the Iberian Peninsula like ETA are considered domestic affairs and sustain only the habitual bureaucratic curiosity of the Department of State, except when the truce was broken and the subject acquired political significance of the first order, capable, in the diplomats’ judgment, of bringing down the government.

A key point in this great political fresco is the Socialist victory and the end of Aznarism. Zapatero’s entry into La Moncloa, which the diplomats attribute in part to the PP’s poor management of the Madrid train bombings [11-M], generated a wave of secret and confidential cables destined to inform their chiefs who the Socialist leader was and what his desires were; the diplomats considered him to belong to an “old-fashioned and romantic” left wing.

From the beginning, they warned of problems over Latin America but over all of the possible retirement of troops from Iraq, which in short time was confirmed. This decision chilled relations to the point that Bush did not even make the customary congratulatory call to Zapatero for his second electoral victory. From that low point, the Embassy papers show how confidence was slowly restored, with Spain throwing itself into remaking the relationship, but with the United States, knowing the Spanish desire to make up lost ground, forgetting neither its central objectives nor its carrot and stick politics.

A report by ambassador Eduardo Aguirre sent to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice affirms that “Zapatero is playing a game for the benefit of his leftist and pacifist electoral base, and uses foreign policy to score points in Spanish politics, rather than to address to key priorities of foreign policy or broader strategic objectives (…) This has led to a bilateral relationship that is zigzagging erratically.”

This unequal correlation of forces is reflected in a tract which dispenses reports on Spanish political figures. No one inspires enthusiasm except the king (to the point that advice is given on how to make oneself agreeable to him) and perhaps the military. The description of the President is very different. From the beginning of his rule, he has been considered a problem for certain vectors of American foreign policy, a short-term politician who puts electoral calculations above the common interest.

It is much the same for his ministers. In the papers, we see them receive all kinds of admonitions from the American ambassador of the time, most of all from Aguirre.

The responses to these pressures cover a wide spectrum, many of them conciliatory, others conniving, others flatly negative. This occurred, for example, when the Spanish Secretary of State was confidentially sounded out about the accelerated extradition of an arms trafficker; without changing tone, he reminded the representative of the most powerful nation on the planet that he would never put the person in question “on a 3 A.M. flight to the United States” because in Spain, such processes are completed with guaranteed rights and transparency.

It’s one more scene from the hundreds of secret (and often not so reassuring) maneuvers captured in the papers of the United States Embassy in Madrid. Some were apparently relaxed meetings, others hard and direct pressures, and others devastating reports about the highest figures of the state. This is to be expected in a world steeped in confidentiality and secrecy. Only this time, everything has been discovered.