Just plain silliness seems to have taken over the news in the last few days. First Evo Morales shows up for his meetings with the Grand Panajarandums of the Persons Solidariously Organizing Entropy (PSOE) Party wearing a ratty old sweater. Who cares? Then certain Spanish media outlets made a big deal out of it. Now they're going to start selling official Made in Bolivia sweaters just like Evo's. That's how fast it takes the trendy leftists to jump on anything they think is new and alternative and squeeze some capitalist cash out of it. Like those Che T-shirts. I wonder how many billions of dollars have been spent on Che T-shirts, doing much more good for the world by helping keep its economy going that Che ever did in his murderous life.

The Civil War archive is also in the news. I mean, who cares? They're a bunch of old papers. Does it matter where they're stored? How many scholars actually look at this stuff anyway, like ten a year? It's already on microfilm anyway. But no, the Catalan nationalists had to make a big deal out of it, and then the Spanish nationalists had to make a big deal about it from the other side, and this turns into a major political issue of both sides being unwilling to back down and nobody having enough common sense to say, "Look, this is all unnecessary. Rule Number One is don't waste the taxpayers' money. Moving these old papers from a perfectly good archives building halfway across the country for no reason except warped nationalistic pride is a waste of the taxpayers' money."

There's also a project to test the DNA of a couple of thousand people surnamed Colom to see if they match the son of Columbus, whose body is interred in Seville Cathedral. This comes from the insistence of a few mostly Cataloony historians that Columbus (Colombo, Colón, Colom, in various languages) was Catalan. (He is believed by most historians to have been Genovese.) There are several theories, one of which says that Columbus confused and hid his real identity because his family was Jewish, and another of which says that he had been a pirate and mercenary and so needed to obscure his past. Anyway, even if all these Coloms turn out to match Columbus's son's DNA, all that proves is that they were descended from him, no? It doesn't prove that Columbus didn't come from Genoa to Barcelona and then deposit his Genovese genes into the Catalan pool.