What were two members of a violent Basque separatist group doing with 11 members of Colombia's narco-Marxist insurgency in a remote corner of southwestern Venezuela in August 2007? According to a blockbuster indictment handed down by a Spanish judge last week, they were participating in a kind of intercontinental terrorist training camp held under the aegis of the Venezuelan military.  

Elisabeth Rosenthal has a smart piece looking into Spain's failed experiment with solar-power subsidies. What happened was that in 2007, the Spanish government announced a new policy of "feed-in tariffs" for solar power. Anyone who built, say, a solar-thermal plant or installed photovoltaic panels on their roof could sell that electricity to the grid for above-market rates.

Meyer Schapiro Abroad: Letters to Lillian and Travel Notebooks

Edited by Daniel Esterman

(Getty Research Institute, 243 pp., $39.95)

I.

Europe is a mess. Greece is the country on the continent closest to utter wreck. (And, if not for statements yesterday by Chancellor Merkel and President Sarkozy, there would literally be no hope for a life raft anywhere near Athens soon. This morning's FT smothers even those wan hopes.) Spain, Portugal and Ireland are not far behind ... or under.

Each of these countries has views on how Israel deals with the Palestinians, and they don't like it at all. Neither do the past and present "foreign ministers"—so to speak, but not exactly—of the European Union. The previous one also a past foreign minister of Spain, Javier Solana, whose main claim to distinction is that he is the grand nephew of Salvador de Madariaga, historian, politician and chief of the ill-fated League of Nations mission for world disarmament. It's a shame, neither Hitler nor Mussolini (nor Tojo) wanted to cooperate. So Solana's blood runs thick with hope and thin with achievement. He did spend his six years as a physics graduate student at the University of Virginia, with a good deal of his energy there siphoned off to march against the Vietnam war. Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh! Ha. Ha.

Solana's successor, the Baroness Ashton of Upholland (neé Catherine Ashton), was Labor leader of the House of Lords, testimony to the diminishing stature of the peers. In the eighties, she was treasurer of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND); this was long after nutty but brilliant Bertie Russell was dead but in the midst of the deepest financial machinations of the Soviet Union in the atomic or anti-American atomic effort. Of course, she didn't know about that—although it is estimated that nearly 40 percent of the campaign's money came from Moscow. And, if she didn't know that, she is capable of knowing nothing.

Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone

By Stanislao Pugliese

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 426 pp., $35)

In June 1950, Ignazio Silone and Arthur Koestler, two of the most prominent anti-communist writers of that era, attended a convivial dinner party in West Berlin. They had gathered with several other intellectuals to celebrate the founding conference of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an American-sponsored riposte to the Soviet Cominform’s “peace conferences” of the preceding year. Those were the early days of the Cold War, and more than a hundred Western writers, critics, and cultural figures had converged on the blockaded city of Berlin to demonstrate solidarity with its people and to resist the Soviet cultural and political offensive. According to Koestler’s wife, Mamaine, Koestler got drunk and repeatedly accused Silone of ignoring Koestler’s fraternal feelings for him. Silone was behaving, said Koestler, “as if he were a broad-bottomed Abruzzi peasant” and Koestler “a cosmopolitan gigolo.”

Silone made some mollifying remarks and claimed to be mystified by the outburst, but he was probably bluffing. Taciturn and even morose by inclination, and an uncharismatic speaker, he had the satisfaction of having just bested the loquacious Koestler in their public discussion about policy, while Koestler’s volubility reflected his own frustration at having lost the argument. The dispute had been about how best to respond to Soviet propaganda. Koestler advocated fighting fire with fire and carrying the propaganda war to the enemy by means of radio stations beamed at the satellite countries and the publication of books, magazines, and newspapers aimed at the Soviet bloc. Silone urged a less confrontational policy of promoting social and political reforms at home and merely showcasing Western cultural achievements abroad, so as to teach by example.

It’s one of those hideous little episodes making minor headlines this week that will be forgotten by the media next week. 15-year-old Vada Vasquez of the Bronx is in a coma with a bullet in her brain, after being caught in the crossfire when a group of Bloods took aim at 19-year-old Tyrone Creighton (and succeeding; he’s in the hospital, too).

The Bloods went after Creighton at the behest of friends of a man in Rikers who suffered a beatdown by Creighton’s two brothers in Rikers with him. The shooter was allegedly little 16-year-old Carvett Gentles, “baby-faced” as the stories are terming him with the regularity of a Homeric epithet.

There's a fairly basic question about climate policy that gets asked a lot: Can a cap-and-trade program actually cut carbon-dioxide emissions? Set aside the question of cost and the endless debate over whether a mythical carbon tax would be sleeker. Can a cap on carbon actually do what it's supposed to do? Right now, the best example of an up-and-running cap-and-trade system is in Europe. And, for years, the continent was seen as a hopeless failure at cutting emissions. But judging by the latest data, the evidence is fairly encouraging that a carbon cap can actually work.

Under the Kyoto Protocol, members of the EU-15 had agreed to cut their greenhouse-gas emissions 8 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. To get there, the EU set up its Emissions Trading System, which first got underway in 2005. Initially, the program got ensnarled in all sorts of embarrassing mishaps: Regulators gave away way too many pollution permits (so that companies could easily comply with the cap without making any cuts) and utilities were allowed to hike up rates without having to reduce emissions. The whole plan looked like a total flop. But, by 2007, the kinks were getting smoothed out, and, as a Lehman Brothers analysis concluded, the system "succeeded, and fairly quickly, in imposing a price on carbon."

That carbon price appears to have had an impact. According to new data from the European Environment Agency (EEA), all of the EU-15 members except Austria are now on track to exceed their Kyoto obligations. In fact, the group as a whole will likely slash emissions more than 13 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. That's not as ambitious as the 20 percent figure European leaders have been murmuring about, but it beats what Kyoto demanded. So how'd they do it? Here's the breakdown:

Via Tom Lawasky, the E.U.'s now testing out "road trains" in Britain, Spain, and Sweden as a way to make long-distance car travel more enjoyable. And what, pray tell, are road trains?

All dictators, from Creon onwards, are victims.­ --Gabriel García Márquez

I.

Many years later, in the course of writing his memoirs, Gabriel García Márquez was to remember that distant afternoon in Aracataca, in Colombia, when his grandfather set a dictionary in his lap and said, "Not only does this book know everything, it’s the only one that’s never wrong." The boy asked, "How many words are in it?" "All of them," his grandfather replied.

We, like everybody else, have a lot of interest in the nature, size, and costs of developing a "green economy," and so are interested in understanding the existing scholarship. One of the most influential scholars on the subject recently has been an associate professor at King Juan Carlos University in Madrid, Gabriel Calzada Álvarez. Unfortunately for the quality of the debate, his much-touted findings fail to hold up under some fairly simple scrutiny and provide an extremely flimsy basis for policy-making.

In recent testimony he gave a rather bleak assessment of the Spanish government’s effort to spur green jobs through fiscal policy: “For every one green job financed by Spanish taxpayers, 2.2 jobs were lost as an opportunity cost....Since 2000, Spain has committed €571,138 ($753,778) per each ‘green job.’”

These dismal numbers are based on an unpublished working paper that he wrote with two co-authors in March of 2009. This work has been discussed widely in various advocacy and media outlets (including last week’s Washington Post) and even critiqued by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory. While some have pointed out that his jobs data understate those published by the UNEP (by almost a quarter) and Spanish government sources, he obtained his figures from a 2003 study from the European Commission’s Monitoring and Modelling Initiative on the Targets for Renewable Energy (MITRE), a reputable source. As it happens, many other issues have been raised, but I will focus on one that generally has not been discussed, his cost calculation.

Keep reading for the full breakdown of the assumptions and estimates, but the first thing to realize is that Calzada’s calculation that 2.2 jobs are “destroyed”--the opportunity cost--for every green job comes from this simple formula:

Strong advocates of our new G20 process are convinced that it will bring legitimacy to international economic policy discussions, rule-making, and crisis interventions. Certainly, it’s better than the G7/G8 pretending to run things--after all, who elected them?

But who elected the G20? The answer is: No one. And, in case you were wondering, there is no application form to join the G20 (although you can crash the party if you have the right friends, e.g., Spain). The G20 has appointed themselves as the world’s “economic governing council” (to quote Gordon Brown).

Is this a good idea?

 The Spanish Civil War was the iconic international struggle of the thirties. Franco and "los cuatro generales" were the villains. And the Spanish people were the victims. Their songs were our songs, Pete Seeger our medium. We did not travel to Spain; we boycotted Spain. We paid homage to Guernica by visiting Picasso's gruesome mural of that name at MoMA (and hanging posters of the painting in our dorm rooms.) We choked up whenever we saw Robert Capa's famous photograph "Falling Soldier." This was the first war against fascism, and democracy was defeated.

The image of heroic Republican Spain has long since been compromised. George Orwell did it first in Homage to Catalonia. The Communists actually murdered comrade Trotskyites and anarchists in battle. The International Brigades, of which the Abraham Lincoln Brigade was the American unit, were under Stalinist discipline, and Stalinist discipline meant killing, random killing and targeted killing and just plain killing.

Proper history has now put the legend of Republican Spain to bed. Read Ronald Radosh et al, Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union and the Spanish Civil War and a review of it by David Pryce-Jones in National Review. There is by now a vast scholarship taking apart the legend of the virtuous republic.

Now, don't get me wrong. Virtue was on the side of the Republic in many ways and among many of its loyalists. There were true democrats and socialists and liberals in its ranks. But they were all overtaken by communists and the Communist power to the east.

Picasso: Mosqueteros--Gagosian Gallery

Younger Than Jesus--New Museum

The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984--Metropolitan Museum of Art

Compass in Hand--Museum of Modern Art

The exhibition of Picasso's late work at the Gagosian Gallery this spring was a phenomenon. Day after day, Gagosian's huge space on West 21st Street attracted a remarkably heterogeneous public, a mix of artists, art students, Brooklyn hipsters, well-heeled professionals, and European and Asian tourists, gathered together in a way I do not recall seeing before, certainly not in Chelsea. People did not just come and look. They stayed and talked about the quickening, raucous power of the paintings and prints that Picasso was making in his late eighties and early nineties. Anything by Picasso is of course a draw, and it helped that John Richardson had organized the exhibition. He knew Picasso in his later years, and the Gagosian show, while it surely had its commercial motivations, was given an intellectual lift by Richardson, whose magnificent biography of Picasso, of which three volumes have appeared, is written in a prose as elegant, easy, and exact as any being produced today.

In late May, some 40 Pakistani journalists received a summons to an unusual press conference given by Baitullah Mehsud, the rarely photographed leader of the Pakistani Taliban, who is accused of orchestrating the 2007 assassination of Benazir Bhutto, of sending suicide bombers to Spain earlier this year, and of dispatching an army of fighters into Afghanistan to attack U. S. and NATO forces in recent months. Surrounded by a posse of heavily armed Taliban guards, Mehsud boasted that he had hundreds of trained suicide bombers ready for martyrdom.

The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945

By Saul Friedlander

(HarperCollins, 870 pp., $39.95)

CATHOLIC MATTERS: CONFUSION, CONTROVERSY, AND THE SPLENDOR OF TRUTH

By Richard John Neuhaus

(Basic Books, 272 pp., $25)

John Ruskin: The Later Years by Tim Hilton (Yale University Press, 656 pp., $35)

In 1967, at the height of the Six Day War, Israeli jets strafed and firebombed a seemingly hostile ship near the Sinai coast. Israeli torpedo boats quickly converged to finish the job, then abruptly ceased fire and offered assistance to the battered crew. Israel had attacked the USS Liberty. In all, 34 Americans died, and 171 were injured. Israeli leaders apologized promptly and profusely, explaining that they had mistaken the Liberty for an enemy vessel--an explanation that subsequent investigations in both the United States and Israel upheld.

I

Excuse me for noticing, but haven't we been commemorating Columbus's quincentennial in the wrong year? I know that dates and math aren't America's strong suit right now, but it doesn't take advanced calculus to figure that 1492 plus 500 equals 1992.

Be a craftsman in speech, for the tongue is a sword to a man, and speech is more valorous than fighting. --Akhtoy III