ANOTHER REPORT that Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Meshud is dead, this time from CNN. FWIW.

YAY! "Beer May Be Good For Your Bones"

ACTUALLY I CAN SEE WHY:

The authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed warbling “My Way” in karaoke bars over the years in the Philippines, or how many fatal fights it has fueled. But the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed the “My Way Killings.”
 
The killings have produced urban legends about the song and left Filipinos groping for answers. Are the killings the natural byproduct of the country’s culture of violence, drinking and machismo? Or is there something inherently sinister in the song?

Urban legend or not, the truth is that I'm not surprised. If there were a wave of "Unchained Melody Killings", or "Any Song by Whitney Houston Particulary That One From The Bodyguard Killings" I would understand too. Karaoke bars are evil.

JUST WHAT SPAIN NEEDED: instead of a government reading the signs coming from everywhere (economists, EU, IMF, World Bank, etc) pointing to how bad the situation is and looking at themselves to see if they're to blame, the country has leaders who -- I assume in desperation -- have turned paranoid. Literally:

The Spanish government is convinced it is being unfairly treated by foreign investors and the media. José Blanco, Spain’s public works minister, hit out at “financial speculators” for attacking the euro and criticised “apocalyptic commentaries” about Spain’s finances.
 
Appealing for patriotism, Mr Blanco said in a radio interview: “Nothing that is happening in the world, including the editorials of foreign newspapers, is casual or innocent.”

It's like the European version of Venezuela.

SPECIAL DELIVERY: a graphic report from Michael Yon on the supplying of US troops in Afghanistan.

"WE'RE DOWN, But Don’t You Dare Count Us Out":

While the crackpot despots of Third World hellholes dare to mock the US Dollar and the armchair fatalists clog their blogs and Twitter streams with daily predictions of this nation's impending demise, it gets easy to forget how substantial the roots of America are - and how deeply they are planted.

Read it all.

GOOD THING we're on recession: Spain's lawmakers are still in their 48-day Christmas break. Come think of it, the longer, the better. At least we only waste their salaries, not the funds for the laws they pass...

THINGS that are hard to say when you are drunk. LOL.

SPAIN'S development minister does a mini-Reagan with air traffic controllers.

AS USUAL, Spain always takes PC further than anyone else, so much that it even outdoes Arabs in anti-Israel decisions. To wit: even Arab students are circulating a petition against Spain's boycott of an Israeli university team in the Social Decathlon, a competition between universities to build a sustainable solar house, because its college is in the West Bank.

AN EXTREMELY simple way of downloading YouTube videos. So easy that even I understand it!

OUCH: "Premier Zapatero may have started as the Spanish Kennedy and will finish as the Spanish Bush Junior."

The country's economy keeps getting worse and worse, and the impact in the stock market is huge.

And the general mood has totally changed. You can count the number of people who still defend the government with one hand, even among leftists. The commentariat, pundits and bloggers were just brutal yesterday, and so far it seems today it's going to be the same. We've reached a turning point that, alas, the stubborn Zapatero doesn't seem to get.

UPDATE. Stubborn and deluded, clueless, or lying, you choose:

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, facing investor concerns about Spain's indebtedness, said on Thursday his country was financially "solid" and would rein in its public deficit.

Speaking at a conference in Washington, Zapatero said Spain faced big economic challenges, but did not have to inject funds into its financial system like other countries.

"That will help reduce the public deficit," he said, addressing one of the main worries that made stocks .IBEX plunge almost 6 percent on Thursday and increased pressure over bonds.

True, there hasn't been any injection of public funds into Spain's financial system, but it's a matter of time, considering that Spanish banks hold about $450 billion -- an equivalent of 30% of the country's GDP -- in nonperforming loans, as I wrote the other day. So either he doesn't know, which would be unacceptable or, as teenagers do, he knows and thinks that the problem will disappear by itself just by denying it, while people won't notice. It's really difficult to know which is worse.

UPDATE II. If you think I'm exaggerating, take a look at this chart by McKinsey showing Spain's total debt, including government, non-financial business, households and financial institutions, as a staggering 366% of GDP (click to enlarge):

Also, while it may be true, as the Zapatero government spin goes, a 56% public debt over GDP (60% forecasted for 2011) is much lower than many countries, what makes it different is that the debt is very short-term, about one year. If you add the €100bn deficit ($137 bn) in 2009, plus other €125 bn (€$171 bn) maturing within 2010, it's going to be extremely difficult to raise that much money at a reasonable price. We're talking about €225 bn ($308 bn).

REMEMBER a few days ago when it looked like Zapatero had suddenly changed tack on the economy and announced he would delay the retirement age to 67? Turns out that yesterday morning he sent an austerity plan to the European Union with that measure, and also with a promise to increase the years that Spaniards need to pay to be entitled to a pension, from 15 to 25 years. Just three and a half hours later, the Spanish government sent an amended version of the plan without those measures. I'm sure it's gonna play wonders with the country's credibility...

UPDATE. Darn: Blogger ate the links again. Added; sorry about that.

THE BIG, REAL PROBLEM for the Euro is not Greece but Spain, says Paul Krugman.

THE CRUELTY OF COMPASSION: Social cohesion has become an excuse for avoiding necessary reforms in Europe.

SOCIAL cohesion is one of those values all decent Europeans can sign up to: less social conflict and less of the inequality that America and Britain (see article) put up with. Some countries, notably Germany, really do manage to marry social harmony and economic reform. In the past decade Germany has—thanks to good management and obliging unions—kept its public sector in check, partly freed its labour market, held down unemployment, and regained competitiveness. Elsewhere, though, the need to preserve social cohesion, parroted by European politicians from left and right, has become a self-defeating excuse to avoid reform.

One of the most glaring examples in the article is, of course, Spain. Read it all.

IF YOU'VE LOST The Guardian, you've lost everything:

Ahem:

Phil Jones, the beleaguered British climate scientist at the centre of the leaked emails controversy, is facing fresh claims that he sought to hide problems in key temperature data on which some of his work was based.
 
A Guardian investigation of thousands of emails and documents apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to them could not be produced.

Jones and a collaborator have been accused by a climate change sceptic and researcher of scientific fraud for attempting to suppress data that could cast doubt on a key 1990 study on the effect of cities on warming – a hotly contested issue.
 
Today the Guardian reveals how Jones withheld the information requested under freedom of information laws. Subsequently a senior colleague told him he feared that Jones's collaborator, Wei-­Chyung Wang of the University at Albany, had "screwed up".

ZAPATERO must have had a not too pleasant breakfast this morning upon reading this by Victor Mallet at the Financial Times:

Elena Salgado, the normally sprightly Spanish finance minister, could not disguise her discomfort when she announced an austerity plan designed to slash successive budget deficits and restore the country's credibility on international markets.

She had good reason to be uneasy. The table of figures she presented on Friday showing Spain's "fiscal consolidation path" through €50bn ($69bn, £43bn) of savings over four years had some embarrassingly blank spaces for projected budget deficits in 2010, 2011 and 2012.

Spain, the empty boxes tell us, wants to reduce its total public sector deficit from 11.4 per cent of gross domestic product in 2009 to the European Union target of 3 per cent of GDP in 2013, but is not sure if it can - or how to do it.

Central government intends to play its part, but budget cuts need the support of autonomous regions, local authorities and trade unions. They may not co-operate.

It is bad enough that investors have lost faith in Greek economic policy but, if the eurozone is to remain intact, it is essential that Spain swiftly restores order to its public finances.

As one of the "big four" eurozone economies - with Germany, France and Italy - Spain is four times as large as Greece, five times the size of Ireland and six times that of Portugal.

Yet Spain's immediate prospects are dismal.

It goes on.

UPDATE. If this didn't sour Zapatero's breakfast, this has probably done it: "Spain January Jobless Claims +3.1% On Month, +22% On Yr " And that's registered unemployment; joblessness is much bigger.

OBAMA is not coming to Europe for the EU-US summit, though he does plan to go to Australia in the spring (and while he's at it, to Indonesia so visit where he spent several years of his childhood). I guess it shows he has at least some idea of who America's real allies are. Still, it's the first time a US president doesn't attend that summit. Can you imagine what would have people said if Bush had dissed Europe like this?

GUM MASSAGER? Yeah, right.

NOW THAT Obama seems to have killed the Moon mission, an open source plan to a Moon base? Whoa.

LIKE GOOGLE MAPS meets Time Tunnel: an interactive aerial map, with hi-res photos, of New York in 1924. Very cool.

(via)

LOL:

One day shortly after the Second World War ended, Winston Churchill and Labour Party Prime Minister Clement Attlee encountered one another at the urinal trough in the House of Common's men's washroom. Attlee arrived first. When Churchill arrived, he stood as far away from him as possible. Attlee said, "Feeling standoffish today, are we, Winston?" Churchill said: "That's right. Every time you see something big, you want to nationalize it."

UNILATERALIST COWBOY disregarding the allies:

The White House has decided that President Barack Obama will not attend what has been an annual summit with the European Union this spring, as Mr. Obama scales back from his record-setting foreign travel last year.
 
White House officials said Sunday that the subdued travel schedule was always planned. But it comes as the president's domestic agenda is faltering and he is focusing on economic and political troubles at home. His State of the Union speech last week concentrated heavily on economic and domestic issues, with just a small section on foreign policy.
 
The decision to skip the EU summit will likely disappoint many Europeans, especially in Spain, current holder of the rotating EU presidency, which expected to host the summit in Madrid in May. It may also feed fears that Mr. Obama views the EU as irrelevant. Most Americans, though, are unfamiliar with the meeting.
 
A spokesman for the Spanish foreign ministry had no comment.

They're drying tears... They were looking forward to the Messiah coming.

TALIBAN LEADER IN PAKISTAN HAKIMULLAH MEHSUD has been killed by a US drone, according to Sky News citing Pakistani TV. The local paper The Nation, though, says the attack took place on January 14; Mehsud was injured and succumbed three days later.

Few will shed any tears for him. Of course, if instead of being blown into pieces by a missile he had been taken to Gitmo and forced to stand up for a few hours, or listen to Metallica at loud volume, we'd hear many people accusing the US of torture...

UPDATE. For the life of me, I don't know why the links I had in this post just vanished. I'm positive I added them...

UPDATE II. Pakistani Taliban deny their leader is dead.

JUST IMAGINE for a second if it had been a Bush cabinet member who said that Hurricane Katrina "the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans," instead of Obama's education secretary Arne Duncan.

SPAIN'S JOBLESNESS jumped to almost 19 percent, which doubles Europe's average. Now, after having demonized anyone who dared to suggest the need to raise the retirement age and implement serious budget cuts, labeling them as "un-Spanish", "irresponsible alarmists" (literally, I'm not kidding), the Zapatero government plans to do exactly that: raise the retirement age from 65 to 67, and cut €50 bn in spending in 3 years. Which, of course, is a bucket in an ocean of deficit: in these 3 years at the current pace of 12 percent yearly, the deficit in those 3 years would reach a staggering €360 billion.

So going back to a 3% deficit in 2013, as dictated by the European Union (a not too realistic target, if you ask me), would require a wide range of measures. Some of them are not likely to be applied by Zapatero, such as liberalizing the economy, particularly the notoriously disatrous employment laws, making easier for companies to fire people and, consequently, giving them an incentive to hire more. Others are measures that Zapatero doesn't mind applying, but without announcing them in advance because they're extremely unpopular, like raising taxes. When he does, he'll destroy once and for all any chance of recovery.

JILLIAN KEY MELCHIOR on Climategate; read it all.

Incidentally, I still like "Climaquiddick" better, because of the role by the media in trying to cover it all up like in Chappaquiddick, while in the Watergate the press wanted to air everything. I must be the only one, though, since "Climategate" seems to have catched on.

DECLAN McCULLAGH on why people won't pay for privacy on the net, in spite of efforts by a few commercial companies. Lots of paradoxes involved.

IT HAD TO HAPPEN: Hitler responds to the iPad. LOL.

WHAT THE HELL is this supposed to mean? The Spanish EU presidency want to give the Internet "the ability to forget." I don't they know it what it means themselves; it's just one of those empty phrases that actually shows they don't have a clue what they're talking about.