Here's a funny piece from the National Review on the Academy Awards. It made me laugh. It always surprises me what a big deal is made about the Academy Awards over here. They show it live on TV and a few people actually stay up till like four or the morning and watch the whole thing. NR also has a symposium of its writers saying wise-ass stuff on the Oscars.

It's a good day at NR. They've also got a Jonah Goldberg piece on the decline of black-white racial conflict in the US in recent years, and one by Victor Davis Hanson on international relations in general and the Middle East in particular.

Here's a must-read piece from Foreign Policy on the politics of sexual frustration. You know, sex is much more important in politics than most people think. Sex tourism is a massive problem: basically, what happens is that rich Westerners visit the Third World and screw the cheap hookers. It's especially unpleasant when the hookers are kids, as in the Gary Glitter case. I hope he rots in the Hanoi Hilton. Then there's the problem of foreign women forced into prostitution through debt slavery; it seems that Spanish whorehouses are full of them, and of course they wouldn't be here if there weren't a market. These sex clients are all clearly sexually frustrated and it makes them do things they might not do if they had normal lives. Another comment is that in the United States, the two most resentful social groups, sexually, are black women and Asian men. It seems that both black men and Asian women tend to marry outside the ethnic group with enough frequency to anger those who believe that others are stealing their own prospective mates. A third comment is that a lot of intra-neighborhood conflict here in Spain is because probably 90% of North Africans living here are men, there aren't enough North African women to go around, and so they start making advances to Spanish women. In lower-class neighborhoods this is not usually acceptable. Such conflicts caused the race riots in El Ejido and Terrassa a couple of years ago.

Here's a piece at Frontpage on those wacky leftist Historians Against the War and their silliness. Howard Zinn is often cited as an authority on American history over on this side of the Atlantic, and they should know better but don't. I would bet that most Europeans, if they've ever read one book on US history, are likely to have read Zinn's People's History of the United States, which is the rankest possible anti-American propaganda. It's a big seller in Spain, in Spanish of course. I would also bet most Europeans don't know that the field of American history at the universities is dominated by Marxists, that is, professors who view everything in history through the class struggle.

Here's a nice story from Slate on a man and his pet donkeys. I'd like to have a donkey or two. There's actually an organization here in Spain that is trying to conserve traditional farm working donkey breeds. See, this is the sort of crunchy-conservativism that I like. I'd provide lots of tax money for folks trying to keep the rural heritage alive; this is one of the few things I actually agree with the Cataloonies about. You have to give them credit, they do try to keep their past alive, though in a slightly theme-parkish fashion. That is, say, they hold these medieval markets and sell food made according to old-time recipes, for example. This is very cool, except that no medieval peasant could have afforded any of these medieval delicacies, which only the middle class and up consumed, and that the ceremonies are never kicked off with a breaking-on-the-wheel or a burning-at-the-stake, as often happened in the good old days around here. No dogfights, no bear-baiting, no one biting the heads off chickens. And portable chemical toilets are provided, removing a lot of the medieval atmosphere right there.

Here's an article from Gerald Baker of the Times on European fears of American isolationism. Robert Kaplan in the Washington Post is skeptical about Middle Eastern democracy.