Domingo, 8 de enero de 2012

David Beckham was in the news again last week, the world's most famous footballer announcing his decision to spend another year in Los Angeles where his family are happily ensconced, rather than accepting a lucrative offer to return to Europe. But being the world's most famous footballer is not the same as being the best. Despite being amusingly nicknamed Goldenballs by his wife, Beckham has never won the real Golden Ball: the Ballon d'Or, the venerable award presented to the player of the year, which is almost certain to be given, for the third year in a row, to Lionel Messi, the little Argentine who plays for Barcelona, currently the world champion club.…  Seguir leyendo »

A friend of mine once told me how her son, then eight years old, had thrown a tantrum and threatened to walk out on her. She dared him. Fuming, he packed and prepared to set out. He never did. By nightfall he realised that his bravado couldn't survive the big, bad world outside.

His reaction is emblematic of Jamaica's relationship with the UK. There has always been rage against Britain, for almost 200 years of slavery and more than 100 years as a wrung-out colonial dishrag. But we've generally huffed and puffed and done nothing about it.

Now Jamaica has seemingly summoned up the cojones to go one better than my friend's son: it's putting out the old lady (in this case, the Queen).…  Seguir leyendo »

Todos los partidos tienen aversión a la competencia. La asocian con crisis, inoperancia y fracaso. Su estado preferido es el monopolio. Lo asocian con orden, resultados y éxito. La carrera hacia la secretaría general del socialismo volverá a demostrar lo ineficiente de semejante prevención.

La competencia por el liderazgo ni refuerza, ni debilita a una organización política. Todo depende de la calidad de los competidores. Si los contendientes son listos y recuerdan que el rival siempre está ahí fuera, el partido gana. Si los contendientes lo olvidan y se lanzan a la caza del enemigo interior, el partido pierde. En el socialismo rivalizan dos candidatos que están demostrando saber que para ganar, salir fuerte y con una organización mejor dispuesta, hay que activar la conexión emocional con los militantes.…  Seguir leyendo »

Pocas veces en una derrota ha tenido tan poca culpa el perdedor. Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba era el cabeza de lista, pero el derrotado fue José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, que ni siquiera se presentaba. La gente quería cambio de partido gobernante. Rubalcaba puso la cara por una causa perdida e intentó decir la verdad, aunque fuese contradictoria con algunos aspectos de la gestión del Gobierno Zapatero, del que había formado parte.

Encima, convirtió el cara a cara con Mariano Rajoy en un solemne aviso de lo que vendría si ganaba el PP: la contradicción con lo que había prometido. Ha bastado el primer Consejo de Ministros operativo de la nueva situación para que España compruebe que el aviso era certero.…  Seguir leyendo »

Por mucho que he buceado en fuentes diversas no he logrado averiguar por qué a los libretistas de la opereta de Franz Lehár La Viuda Alegre se les ocurrió bautizar como Pontevedro el país imaginario en cuya embajada parisina transcurre la acción. A lo más que he llegado es a la hipótesis de que, puesto que estos dos señores, llamados Léon y Stein, y el propio compositor húngaro se inspiraron en la comedia L'attaché d'ambassade de Henri Meilhac y éste a su vez fue quien escribió los diálogos de la Carmen de Bizet, se produjera una especie de contagio de la explotación escénica del exotismo español.…  Seguir leyendo »

La noche es la oscuridad, la amenaza, un mundo no controlado por la razón, y todos los niños la temen. Llega la hora de acostarse y, a causa de ese temor, no quieren quedarse solos en sus camas. Es el momento de los cuentos, que son un procedimiento retardatorio. Quédate un poco más, es lo que dicen los niños a los adultos cuando les piden un cuento. Y el adulto, que comprende sus temores, empieza a contárselo para tranquilizarles. Muchas veces improvisa ese cuento sobre la marcha, pero otras recurre a historias que ha escuchado o leído hace tiempo, tal vez las mismas que le contaron de niño los adultos que se ocupaban de él.…  Seguir leyendo »

Los demógrafos llaman millennials a los nacidos entre 1982 y 2000. Nosotros, los denominados baby boomers, somos sus padres y llevamos tiempo batiéndonos en retirada. No deberíamos.

Muchos millenials creen que el paro es su primer problema vital. No es así: nosotros lo somos. El excepcional dividendo demográfico que benefició a nuestra generación, cuando había mucha gente adulta pero pocos abuelos, se ha agotado y no volverá.

En España, la diferencia entre el número de las personas nacidas en 1952 y en 1982 es de 77.000 a favor de las primeras. Pero la que media entre los nacidos en 1970 y en 2000, respectivamente, es de 266.000.…  Seguir leyendo »

Los últimos días de 2011 produjeron algunas noticias cubanas que nos ayudan a comprender las ambivalencias del capitalismo autoritario que se implementa en la isla. Junto a una reforma crediticia, que facilitaría la consolidación del emergente sector no estatal de la economía cubana, el Gobierno de Raúl Castro decretó duelo oficial por la muerte del más retrógrado de los últimos dictadores comunistas del planeta, el norcoreano Kim Jong-il, y diluyó una reforma migratoria elaborada y defendida por el ala aperturista del poder.

Es importante retener las palabras de Raúl Castro en la última sesión de la Asamblea Nacional del Poder Popular.…  Seguir leyendo »

La filosofía es la cenicienta de la cultura española. Es cierto que ha tenido grandes cultivadores, como Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, Xavier Zubiri y María Zambrano, pero todos ellos pertenecen a circunstancias y generaciones anteriores a la segunda mitad del siglo XX y a este inquietante inicio de milenio. Por otra parte, la red de hispanistas que, sobre todo en Norteamérica, mantiene viva la llama sagrada del pensamiento español es muy reticente a ampliar esa nómina de filósofos del pasado, tan valiosos como sujetos a su circunstancia y a la razón histórica que rebasa los años sesenta y setenta.

Un excelente programa en la cadena 2 de televisión, de igual título que este artículo, emitido los domingos a las 11 de la noche, ha tenido el extraordinario mérito de recordar que en España hay pensamiento, que la filosofía no ha muerto, y que generaciones nuevas, hoy ya veteranas, han sabido, durante los últimos cincuenta años, reavivar ese gusto filosófico que, a veces, en nuestro país, parece atrofiado.…  Seguir leyendo »

En el incierto mundo en que vivimos se insinúan, sin embargo, algunas certidumbres por lo que se refiere al futuro inmediato. Ninguna casa de apuestas londinense aceptará una apuesta como la de quién será elegido presidente de Rusia el próximo mes de marzo, ya que todo el mundo sabe el resultado. A menos que pierdan el testigo en el camino, los jamaicanos ganarán la prueba de relevos 4x100 en los Juegos Olímpicos. Cabe estar menos seguro sobre quién será el próximo presidente francés el próximo mes de mayo (para no hablar de la elección del presidente islandés en las mismas fechas) o sobre si se avanzará en la unificación política europea.…  Seguir leyendo »

From the outside, China often appears to be a highly centralized monolith. Unlike Europe’s cities, which have been able to preserve a certain identity and cultural distinctiveness despite the homogenizing forces of globalization, most Chinese cities suffer from a drab uniformity.

But China is more like Europe than it seems. Indeed, when it comes to economics, China is more a thin political union composed of semiautonomous cities — some with as many inhabitants as a European country — than an all-powerful centralized government that uniformly imposes its will on the whole country.

And competition among these huge cities is an important reason for China’s economic dynamism.…  Seguir leyendo »

Kim Jong-Un can count himself lucky that his first birthday in power falls today, on a Sunday, obviating the need for a new national holiday to be created at an awkward time. But the ease with which the new “supreme leader” has taken over North Korea has little to do with luck. For one thing, the propaganda apparatus did its job well. We now know why Kim Jong-un was such a peripheral figure on the evening news until his father’s death: so that North Koreans’ first long look at the pampered young man would be at the rarest of times — a time when he was suffering more than anyone.…  Seguir leyendo »

A revolution in cognitive neuroscience is changing the kinds of experiments that scientists conduct, the kinds of questions economists ask and, increasingly, the ways that architects, landscape architects and urban designers shape our built environment.

This revolution reveals that thought is less transparent to the thinker than it appears and that the mind is less rational than we believe and more associative than we know. Many of the associations we make emerge from the fact that we live inside bodies, in a concrete world, and we tend to think in metaphors grounded in that embodiment.

This metaphorical, embodied quality shapes how we relate to abstract concepts, emotions and human activity.…  Seguir leyendo »

It was another bad week for the west's great Enlightenment tradition. On Monday, the Hungarian government of Viktor Orbán, leader of the highly conservative Fidesz party, introduced its controversial new constitution allowing itself discretionary authority over the media, courts, the central bank and even personal conscience.

There is to be no division of powers in Hungary between the executive, legislative and judiciary; no guaranteed freedom of the press, nor judicial impartiality; no freedom of worship. Abortion and same-sex marriages are outlawed. And echoing other horrific moments from Europe's dark past, Orbán proposes to offer ethnic Hungarians living in neighbouring countries Hungarian citizenship, rather as Hitler did for ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia.…  Seguir leyendo »

Despite some small signs of optimism about the United States economy, unemployment is still high, and the country seems stalled.

Time and again, Americans are told to look to Japan as a warning of what the country might become if the right path is not followed, although there is intense disagreement about what that path might be. Here, for instance, is how the CNN analyst David Gergen has described Japan: “It’s now a very demoralized country and it has really been set back”.

But that presentation of Japan is a myth. By many measures, the Japanese economy has done very well during the so-called lost decades, which started with a stock market crash in January 1990.…  Seguir leyendo »

On Wednesday, America’s detention camp at Guantánamo Bay will have been open for 10 years. For seven of them, I was held there without explanation or charge. During that time my daughters grew up without me. They were toddlers when I was imprisoned, and were never allowed to visit or speak to me by phone. Most of their letters were returned as “undeliverable,” and the few that I received were so thoroughly and thoughtlessly censored that their messages of love and support were lost.

Some American politicians say that people at Guantánamo are terrorists, but I have never been a terrorist.…  Seguir leyendo »

I left Guantánamo Bay much as I had arrived almost five years earlier — shackled hand-to-waist, waist-to-ankles, and ankles to a bolt on the airplane floor. My ears and eyes were goggled, my head hooded, and even though I was the only detainee on the flight this time, I was drugged and guarded by at least 10 soldiers. This time though, my jumpsuit was American denim rather than Guantánamo orange. I later learned that my C-17 military flight from Guantánamo to Ramstein Air Base in my home country, Germany, cost more than $1 million.

When we landed, the American officers unshackled me before they handed me over to a delegation of German officials.…  Seguir leyendo »

Over the last three years, as I delved into the world of American nuclear weapons, I felt increasingly as though I had stepped into a time warp. Despite the nearly total rearrangement of the international security landscape since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, the rise of Islamic terrorism and the spread of nuclear materials and technology to volatile nations like Pakistan, North Korea and Iran, the Defense Department remains enthralled by cold war nuclear strategies and practices.

Barack Obama took office determined to change that. He has made progress on many fronts. Last week, he outlined a new, no-frills defense strategy, downsizing conventional forces.…  Seguir leyendo »

Egypt's final round of parliamentary elections won’t end until next week, but the outcome is becoming clear. The Muslim Brotherhood will most likely win half the lower house of Parliament, and more extreme Islamists will occupy a quarter. Secular parties will be left with just 25 percent of the seats.

Islamism did not cause the Arab Spring. The region’s authoritarian governments had simply failed to deliver on their promises. Though Arab authoritarianism had a good run from the 1950s until the 1980s, economies eventually stagnated, debts mounted and growing, well-educated populations saw the prosperous egalitarian societies they had been promised receding over the horizon, aggrieving virtually everyone, secularists and Islamists alike.…  Seguir leyendo »

Margaret Thatcher has long been reviled by the British left, so much so that the singer Elvis Costello once fantasized about stomping on her grave in his 1989 song “Tramp the Dirt Down.” But Mrs. Thatcher achieved more than any other British peacetime prime minister of the 20th century. It is rumored that, when she dies, she will receive a state funeral — an honor rarely accorded to anyone except monarchs. There are also plans for a public celebration.

Her life is the inspiration for a new movie that opens later this month, starring Meryl Streep as “The Iron Lady.” It chronicles Mrs.…  Seguir leyendo »