world cup day

--You can see it in every pass. How Spain plays is how Barcelona plays. They can hardly be beaten—Joachim Loew, German coach. NYT 7-11-2010, S6
--Johan Cruyff, the great Dutch player of the 1970s who also played for and coached Barcelona, said he is supporting Spain in Sunday’s final “Spain, a replica of Barca, is the best publicity for football,” Cruyff wrote in his Thursday column in Barcelona’s El Periodico deCatalunya. “Who am I supporting?” I am Dutch but I support the football that Spain is playing.” NYT 7-10-2010, B10
--People wearing Catalan flags are seen traveling in a subway car after a demonstration Saturday in Barcelona. More than a million people gathered Saturday in Barcelona to demand greater regional autonomy for Catalonia and protest a recent court ruling forbidding the region from calling itself a nation.—SBT, -11-2010
--When people work on social justice issues, they don’t win much and wind up dropping out. To laugh at oneself from the beginning is essential.—Father Callahan—NYT-7-11-2010
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FURTHER READING
Twain’s opposition to incipient imperialism and American military intervention in Cuba and the Philippines, for example, were well known even in his own time. But the uncensored autobiography makes it clear that those feelings ran very deep and includes remarks that, if made today in the context of Iraq or Afghanistan, would probably lead the right wing to question the patriotism of this most American of American writers.
In a passage removed by Paine, Twain excoriates “the iniquitous Cuban-Spanish War” and Gen. Leonard Wood’s “mephitic record” as governor general in Havana. In writing about an attack on a tribal group in the Philippines, Twain refers to American troops as “our uniformed assassins” and describes their killing of “six hundred helpless and weaponless savages” as “a long and happy picnic with nothing to do but sit in comfort and fire the Golden Rule into those people down there and imagine letters to write home to the admiring families, and pile glory upon glory.”
He is similarly unsparing about the plutocrats and Wall Street luminaries of his day, who he argued had destroyed the innate generosity of Americans and replaced it with greed and selfishness. “The world believes that the elder Rockefeller is worth a billion dollars,” Twain observes. “He pays taxes on two million and a half.” –NYT 7-10-2010 A3