Inside Europe: Iberian Notes

2008-07-10T02:35:00.002+02:00

I'm sorry I've been neglecting Iberian Notes. We've been doing all this stuff for MundoFreaky.com, and we're actually having lots of fun with it. I've figured out--and have been taught by Murph--a lot about how to make this running a website work.

The weirdest thing happened to me tonight. I'd been down to see Murph and Clark at Miguel's downtown, and we broke it up when midnight came around. I caught the last metro going up on the yellow line, and there was this trashy-looking couple with a kid about a year and a half old. They were smoking heroin off aluminum foil.

I noticed what was going on, and I don't have a cellphone, and so I alerted the people around me quietly (didn't want to call attention to myself and get attacked by the messed-up male). And no one would do a damn thing. I said call the cops, somebody's got to stop this, these people are junkies and they're dragging around a baby. Nobody did anything. I got shrugged shoulders and who gives a shit.

So after about eight minutes of these people failing to get the baby's bottle in its mouth and smoking heroin and behaving all fucked-up, I got off the train at my stop and alerted the security guard, who called it in.

I should have given those people a twenty and taken the kid.

2008-06-29T22:37:00.003+02:00

Congratulations to the Spanish national football team. They finally won one. I didn't think they could. I didn't think they'd get past Italy. But they won fair and square, and they played better than the Germans. Everyone played well; probably Xavi and Torres were the best. Senna has had a great Eurocup, and his value has probably doubled. Possibly the main advantage Spain had: the average age of the players is the youngest of all the Eurocup squads, something like 26.8 years. Stats show baseball players peak at age 27; if that translates to soccer, and I bet it does, Spain's guys are, on the average, just hitting the best years of their careers.

Puyol had a good Eurocup, which surprised me, because he was all beat up physically during the late unlamented Barça season. Iniesta was OK. Xavi was excellent. Fabregas was very good, and he'll be playing here again within a couple of years.

Barcelona needs a forward. I wonder if they make a big offer for Torres with the, say, €50 million they're going to get for the three big stars who will be leaving soon.

The celebration isn't too wild around here; there are a few firecrackers going off, but it's not as if the Barça had won something. Toni Soler had a piece today in La Vangua about the people like him who "don't care" if the Spanish team wins; of course, what they want is for Spain to lose, but saying so would seem unsporting.

It is true that the announcers have been obnoxiously nationalistic through this whole thing; there have been a good few pieces in the Catalan papers about this, and they're right. Rather than, say, reporting on the game, they've been leading cheers.

Anyway, congratulations to the players, and we hope the fans are happy. I bet a lot of people show up for work hung over tomorrow.

2008-06-26T22:56:00.002+02:00

Well, the Spanish football team has proven me wrong; I didn't figure they'd get past Italy, much less win the semifinal as well. Germany will be tough to beat in the final, but there's no reason Spain can't beat them if they play like they have so far. Hard to believe that a team coached by that ancient jackass Aragones has made the final of the Eurocup, proving that the coach doesn't have much to do with the way the team plays, I guess.

Housing starts in Spain over the first trimester of 2008 are down 36% over the same period last year; all the real estate statistics, secondhand housing sales and number of new mortgages and that stuff are significantly down. To my unscientific eyes, asking prices for apartments in Barcelona have fallen by a third over the last year. The stock market is down as well, about to drop below the psychological barrier of 12,000 points; it's off something like 15% on the year. Rising interest rates--the Euribor is at 5.3%--and high oil prices--$140 a barrel--don't help matters any.

Weird pervert news around here. The guy who raped the horse last year got five months in prison for cruelty to animals. This kind of sicko needs to be kept away from everybody for a long time. And remember Javier Rodrigo dos Santos, the Prevert of Palma, the guy who ran up €50,000 on a municipal credit card in gay brothels? He's now been accused of child sexual abuse. Jeez. We've got just about as many weirdos around here as they do everywhere else.

2008-06-21T14:52:00.003+02:00

We're going off to the pueblo for the long weekend; Iberian Notes should be back on the air Tuesday. I've been putting some effort into MundoFreaky.com, and it's looking pretty good. A couple more tweaks, some publicity, and systems are go. We're planning to go to this Spanish blogger thing called the Blogellón in Zaragoza on July 4, so that ought to be fun.

It's San Juan weekend, and I hate San Juan in Barcelona because of all the damn firecrackers. They bother me and frighten the pets.

News from these here parts: Rajoy got what he wanted at the PP convention. He's the candidate for the next election, and Dolores de Cospedal is the new party secretary-general. Two Spanish soldiers were killed in a helicopter crash in Bosnia. Our Castro-loving government, led by Zap and Moratinos and other weasels of that sort, persuaded the EU to lift its symbolic diplomatic sanctions on Cuba. Of course whoever writes Fidel's articles said that wasn't good enough for him, that the Europeans were hypocrites. I'm amazed the Europeans haven't twigged yet that the Cuban pattern is: whenever you get a concession, demand more.

Nasty crime among gypsy drug dealers in Tortosa, two murdered, a mother and her son. Spain's population topped 46 million, 5.2 million of them immigrants. Top 14 nationalities: Romania 730,000: Morocco 645,000; Ecuador 420,000; UK 350,000; Colombia 280,000; Bolivia 240,000; Germany 180,000; Italy 160,000; Bulgaria 155,000; Argentina 145,000; Portugal 125,000; China 125,000; Peru 120,000; Brazil 115,000. It's pretty clear that Spain is not Eurabia, with the Moroccans the only Muslims among the top immigrant groups. And three-quarters of a million of our immigrants are well-off Europeans, often retired.

2008-06-18T15:13:00.002+02:00

We've got MundoFreaky.com pretty much the way we want it now. We had a bit of a struggle with WordPress; what we've discovered is that you can do all kinds of stuff with it, that it's much more versatile than Blogger, but it's also much less user-friendly. Remember, I'm a complete technological disaster, I don't even have a cell-phone and I don't know how to use one, and even I can figure out Blogger. WordPress is above the capabilities of the average idiot, that is, me. Anyway, now, MundoFreaky.com is mostly a question of content and getting the word out; the technical stuff is mostly dealt with.

News from these here parts: The commuter trains were down again yesterday and this morning due to heavy rain in some areas. Sau, the biggest of the reservoirs that supplies Barcelona, is at 80% of capacity, so fears of the drought have completely subsided. The PP opposition to Rajoy has pretty much folded, and will not be abataining from the vote of confidence to be held at the party convention. That crook Joan Puigcercós got elected head of Esquerra Republicana, at least until he goes to jail over the comissions scandal.

Building starts were down 21% in Spain this April over the previous year. They busted 25 municipal employees and elected officials in Estepona, governed by the PSOE, for massive fraud, embezzlement, extortion, abuse of power, and other groovy things. Every single political party in Spain runs a crooked political machine that looks out for the interests of its clients first and everything else second, so municipal corruption exists everywhere no matter what the governing party.

Everybody's talking about this sex pervert who called himself "Nanysex," a pederast who molested very young children. He's been sent off to jail and supposedly the other prisoners tried to torch his cell and burn him to death.

That clown Moratinos went to Venezuela and hugged Hugo Chavez and talked about the bilateral "intense and solidarious connection" between the two regimes. Every time I start thinking, "Oh, Zap's not all that bad, things could be a lot worse, at least he hasn't nationalized the Internet," something like this happens and makes me want to puke.

As expected, Spain qualified for the quarterfinals of the Eurocup without much problem, easily defeating Russia and Sweden. Tonight they play Greece in a meaningless game, and they'll face Italy in the quarters, where Spain will be eliminated as usual. If I had any money I'd bet some of it on the Italians, especially with decent odds. Holland is the team that's played the best so far, with Portugal and Croatia this year's dark horses.

Guardiola made his first speech as Barça coach. He confirmed yesterday that he was going to ship out Ronaldinho, Deco, and Eto'o. So all the teams making offers for those guys must have tried to lowball the management directly afterward, because today they said that they wouldn't sell the Tainted Three if they didn't get enough money. Yeah, right, I seriously doubt that any of those guys will ever play for Barça again. Now they're speculating Dinho to Man City, Deco to Chelsea, and Eto'o to Newcastle or West Ham. For what that's worth. Milan will probably come up with the cash for at least one of them.

2008-06-14T12:59:00.003+02:00

Don't forget to read MundoFreaky.com just for grins.

The big news in the States related to Spain is the extradition of Monzer al Kasar, a Syrian arms trafficker who has lived in Madrid for years, to the US on charges of conspiring to sell ground-to-air missiles to the FARC. This guy has sold arms to many of the worst scuzzballs around the world, from Nicaragua to Iran. This is getting almost no coverage in Spain; La Vanguardia gave it one paragraph on page 10. I get the idea the Zap government is trying to downplay this one.

The truck drivers are still refusing to work, but the blockades and violence by "picketers" have at least partly petered out. Yesterday they blocked off the motorways at Sant Cugat and Amposta, snarling things up good, but not completely. The government actually arrested a few of these guys who were blocking the border at La Jonquera. One of the "strikers" got run over by a pissed-off driver down in Andalusia and got killed.

Panic hoarding has pretty much stopped; most of the gas stations in Catalonia ran out during the week, but they've been resupplied. There's plenty of food in the supermarkets; besides staple nonperishables, which they never ran out of, fresh meat and fish are available again. Fresh vegetables and fruit are still scarce. The port is back in business, as is the central wholesale market.

Transport is still a mess; two trains broke down on the main Renfe commuter line yesterday, and they had to shut down the line to the airport. Meanwhile, the independent taxi operators called a work stoppage for yesterday, so millions of working hours were wasted, one more time.

Seems to me like public services have been real crappy around here for about the last year; first the Carmel subway tunnel collapse, then the blackout last summer, then the commuter train crisis, exacerbated by the AVE foulups, then the drought for which adequate measures had not been taken, now this mess that has been a huge pain in the ass to the whole country. And there have been at least a dozen minor events that have caused large hassles for the citizenry. I say we hold the Socialists and their Red-Green-Brown friends responsible and vote them out of office, but that might be just me.

Get this. A 24-year old American tourist died yesterday in Barcelona after being mugged. A Moroccan with a police record as long as your arm (he has been arrested "dozens of times") pulled a knife on him near the funicular station on Montjuic in front of numerous witnesses. La Vanguardia says "This is an area historically plagued with thieves who besiege the tourists who visit the Olympic area and the Miró Foundation." SO WHY DIDN'T THE AUTHORITIES JAIL THEM ALL YEARS AGO?

The American didn't fight back and handed over his camera. Witnesses say he apparently went into some sort of state of shock, walked a few steps, and then collapsed, hitting his head. An Italian tourist, who is a doctor, tried to give him first aid, but he died, either of a heart attack or of head injuries.

The amount of street crime against tourists in Barcelona is absolutely disgraceful, and the authorities aren't doing anything about it. I have always recommended that people come to Barcelona anyway, since the good things about the city have always outweighed the bad ones, and if you're careful you can greatly reduce your personal risk. I'm starting to change my mind, after the murder of the Danish tourist a couple of weeks ago and now this.

My position now: Come to visit Barcelona at your own risk. If anything happens to you, you've been warned. By some amateur with a blog, not by the police and government authorities, whose business it is.

2008-06-10T16:55:00.002+02:00

Big news around here: This morning they arrested eight Algerians on charges of belonging to Al Qaeda in the Maghreb. This lot was providing logistical, financial, and recruiting support to Al Qaeda activities. The arrests were made in Castellon, Barcelona, and Pamplona. Ten more people were detained; their nationalities and involvement have not yet been announced.

This bunch has carried out five attacks in five days in Algeria, the worst on Sunday, killing 13 people. They are not related to the Pakistani group rounded up in Barcelona in January on charges of plotting to suicide-bomb public transport. The United States believes this bunch of Pakistanis is linked to the outfit run by Baitullah Mehsud, suspected of organizing the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

2008-06-09T20:33:00.002+02:00

Don't forget to go read MundoFreaky.com. I improved it some more today, and added a few more posts.

So the damn truck drivers blocked up all the highways in and around Barcelona today, as well as the border crossing at La Jonquera, causing immense chaos. Gasoline hoarding has begun; 40% of the gas stations in Catalonia are sold out and there's no telling when more will get there. This is simply not tolerable. Groups of people cannot be allowed to infringe everyone else's rights. If they want to stay home and not work, fine, but that's not what they want to do. I say simply pull their licenses, tow away their trucks, and jail them. Naturally, nothing of the sort is going to happen. And, get this, the taxi drivers are going to shut down (it's not a "strike") on Friday, and probably go around acting like a bunch of dickheads too.

(By the way, a bunch of shithead parents brought out their kids, the height of irresponsibility, and blocked off the Diagonal to protest the latest education law. That's setting a good example of how your own selfish petty demands are more important than everyone else's civic rights. And, get this, this lot are the conservative Catholic parents, not a bunch of goddamn hippies or something.)

You want more bad law enforcement? Here's some bad law enforcement. One Alejandro Martínez Singul, a serial rape-o, raped twelve girls between the ages of 9 and 18 in Barcelona in the early '90s. They locked him up in 1992. AND THEY LET HIM OUT IN 2007. Look, people, the reason we have jails is to protect the citizens from people who want to hurt or rape or kill us, and who we're too soft-headed to hang as they deserve.

So Alejandro the rape-o raped a girl in Perpignan, France, and the cops arrested him today in Cardedeu. I hope he falls out the back of the police van going 120 kph while trying to escape. I bet that can be arranged.

There's a big stink going on in the Spanish Constitutional Court. María Emilia Casas, the chief justice, committed the indiscretion of giving informal legal advice to a woman she knew whose husband had been murdered; that woman has now been indicted for said murder. Oops.

Finally, the board of the Autonomous University tried to hold a meeting today. They called out the cops to protect the board members. About fifty middle-class student punk squatter wannabe poseurs, protesting the so-called Bologna process, decided they'd charge the cops, and the cops beat the crap out of them. Good job, Cops!

2008-06-08T17:23:00.004+02:00

MundoFreaky.com is in full swing. We still have organizational stuff to do, but we've got content up and going, and "Liffey" is fixing our mistakes. I think it's pretty funny. It's not all hilarious, some of it is just curious, but we think there's a place for such a website in Spain. So go visit it and link to it and tell your friends about it.

By the way, please make suggestions if you have any.

Big news from around here: ETA again. They exploded a small bomb in front of the offices of the Bilbao newspaper El Correo, with no warning, at around 3 AM today while about 50 people were working inside. No one was hurt, fortunately.

Political stuff: Interior minister Rubalcaba told Basque premier Ibarretxe that it doesn't matter what the Basque nationalists do, "self-determination" for the Basque country is out of the question. Of course Ibarretxe is going to carry on with his plans for a referendum, and he's going to say it's binding, and the Spanish government is going to say it's not binding, and this will all end up signifying nothing.

PP founder Manuel Fraga said that Ruiz-Gallardon would make the best successor to Rajoy as head of the PP, and that Gallardon has a majority among the Madrid branch of the party. Gallardon, of course, has declared his support for Rajoy more than once, so the question is whether Fraga meant "now" or "after Rajoy loses us the 2012 election."

30% of the women murdered in domestic violence cases in Spain this year had already filed charges against their abusers. This is entirely unacceptable. A great deal more must be done in this country to protect people, especially women in abusive relationships, against violence. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I honestly don't know whether there's a battered women's shelter anywhere in Catalonia, and you'd think a guy like me who reads the paper (and filters through the Internet, and watches the news on TV) every day would have heard about it if there were one.

The shitbag truck drivers who are refusing to work because they don't like the price of gas went out and blocked up the highways near the Montmeló racetrack this afternoon, a race day, causing five kilometers of traffic jams and an uncountable quantity of irritation. I have no idea why the police don't haul all these shitbags off to jail for about seventeen felony traffic violations each, not to mention interfering with the citizens' right to travel, creating a public nuisance, and generally being assholes, and tow their trucks away to the vehicle pound, along with pulling their licenses.

Speaking of shitbags, four punk kids were arrested last night in Sant Feliu after smashing the windows, headlights, and mirrors of 50 parked cars, along with denting the metalwork with iron bars. They must have caused at least €100,000 of damage, figuring about two grand per car. When asked why they did it, they said, "Just for fun." I bet almost nothing happens to them.

We had some fun yesterday afternoon here in Gracia. The goddamn squatters had them a big old "Freedom for Franki" demo, which I went down to check out in the Plaza Virreina. They were pretty much what you'd have figured, dirty and drunk, swigging out of bottles of Xibeca and chanting "Prisoners on the streets, freedom and amnesty." That's a well-known ETA chant. They finished off their march by torching a few dozen paper Spanish flags in the Plaza Rius i Taulet. I was unimpressed. No discipline. These people are more of a poorly organized sub-lumpenproletariat than a social movement, and they could be scattered with just one firehose.

2008-06-07T13:04:00.002+02:00

I've been occupied during the last few days setting up MundoFreaky.com, which is starting to look really good, I think. Our volunteer editor, "Liffey," is doing a great job fixing our mistakes and cleaning up our prose. We have plenty of content, and we're still learning all we can do with WordPress. Next step: Get some publicity.

My poor little dog, Perla, has had a terrible month. On May Day she ran out into traffic on Calle Providencia and got hit by a van. I thought she was dead for sure, but the van driver slammed on the brakes--it wasn't his fault--and didn't run over her, just hit her pretty hard. She spent two days at the vet's; fortunately, it was mostly just a scare. We learned something from this, though: Perla absolutely needs to be leashed whenever she's anywhere near a car.

Then yesterday we took her in for an operation we'd scheduled months ago: dogs have little scent glands on each side of their butt, and Perla's are constantly getting infected, with unpleasant consequences. So we had the vet extirpate them. Now Perla is wearing one of those plastic funnel things around her neck so she can't lick her bottom, and she does not like this at all.

She has to go back to the vet in ten days to have the stitches out. Let's hope that's the last time she has to go there until her vaccinations next year.

News from these here parts: ERC is holding a primary election among its 10,000 members; they've got four candidates to choose from, including the crook Joan Puigcercos, all of whom I hope lose. The entire Spanish press is orgasmic for Obama. Spending our tax money wisely: the Zap government is beginning an ad campaign in the world financial press explaining what a great job it is doing with the economy. They're going to kick it off with a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal. God knows what that'll cost. PSOE hypocrisy: The Aznar government hired a Washington PR firm to lobby for Spain in Washington for €2 million, and the Socialists raised hell about it. Now the situation's reversed.

Barça bought Dani Alves from Sevilla for €29 million, and Martin Caceres from Villarreal for €16.5 million. That's pretty expensive for a pair of defensive players, though they are both very good and Caceres is very young as well. The Eurocup starts today with Switzerland facing the Czech Republic in what's sure to be a thrilling 0-0 defensive battle. Spain's got an easy group and should have no problem qualifying for the quarterfinals, where they will lose as usual.

Two dirtbag doormen of Spanish nationality refused to let three Moroccans into a disco in Fuenlabrada, a Madrid suburb. It got violent and the thugs stabbed one of the Moroccans to death. Of course, Spain's not racist or anything. And this morning five Spanish dirtbags were injured in downtown Madrid in a gang fight involving baseball bats and, get this, axes.

There's an unfortunate tendency to blame all crime in Spain on immigrants; immigrants commit a disproportionate amount of crimes, of course, but there are logical reasons for that. Immigrants are generally of low socioeconomic status in their home country--if they were middle-class and well-educated, they wouldn't have to emigrate. They're also in an unfamiliar and sometimes frightening situation, away from home, where they don't speak the language well and don't understand some of the things happening around them. And, along with the 98% of immigrants who are good citizens and valuable acquisitions for Spain, we also get 2% who are criminals in their home countries, on the run from justice there or looking for opportunities to prey on their own vulnerable compatriots here.

The truck drivers are going on strike beginning Monday in protest against the high price of gasoline. This actually isn't a strike, it's not workers against management, it's a bunch of small operators refusing to work, so it's really more of a lockout than a strike. I believe in the right to strike, but I'm a bit puzzled about why you'd strike against the price of raw materials. What do they want, for the government to magically increase the oil supply so that the price goes down? Probably what they want is more government subsidies for themselves, some tasty Treasury pap.

And you just know they're going to pull a bunch of crap, blocking the public highways with roadblocks of burning tires and facing off against the cops.

2008-06-04T14:32:00.002+02:00

Good news. We got our silly-news-in-Spanish site up and running at mundofreaky.com. So go check it out and see what you think. And tell all your friends. And call up everyone you know and tell them to buy advertisements.

2008-06-02T13:02:00.002+02:00

Quick Monday blog roundup:

Biased BBC fondly recalls the most outrageous Beeb moments ever. Read the comments, they're entertaining.

Colin Davies is reliable, always there with more insights from Pontevedra.

Eursoc has more on food prices and EU agricultural subsidies.

Expat Yank suggest that Susan Sarandon move to Spain. He also has a whack at European Obama-worshippers.

Gates of Vienna reproduces a sonnet written in SMS-speak on everybody's favorite punching bag.

Iberian Nature has good stuff; check out these photos of bears, wolves, and eagles.

La Gatita Gringa does not much care for bullfighting. I don't, either. LA-Madrid Files has his own perspective.

No Pasaran! takes the Euros to task about making phony comparisons with the US in order to prove the EU is, like, better.

Observing Hermann denounces more EU subsidies for Airbus and EADS.

Oliver Kamm says that Obama has no idea about foreign policy at all.

2008-06-02T12:13:00.003+02:00

No news today. The green line of the metro went down today between 8:30 and 9 AM, thereby screwing up the system during morning rush hour. Meanwhile, a car wreck on the motorway leading into town from the suburbs in the Vallés at around 8:30 AM caused a seven-mile backup. Probably nearly 100,000 people got to work an hour late, costing us that much productivity. When one piece of the puzzle goes down, the entire infrastructure feels it.

Three-quarters of Spanish workers are suffering from workplace stress and feel burned out. Of these, three-quarters claim to be suffering health problems due to said stress. Causes: Not knowing what is expected of them, not being permitted to make decisions, and not feeling secure about their future.

I would add generally distant management that is not able to convince the worker that his and the company's interests are the same. I would also add that small businesses in Spain often try to exploit their workers big-time, I believe more so than in the United States. My wife Remei has only been satisfied with the way management has treated her at one of the small companies she's worked at; I can personally state that small language academies in Spain are generally very badly run.

More boat people: 34 black African illegal immigrants arrived near Almeria today, having crossed the Mediterranean from Morocco. The foreign press didn't notice.

44% of Spanish university students admit having used a cheat sheet on an exam, and 47% admit copying off another student's paper. Now they're trying electronic tricks, using MP3s and the like to store information. I can't claim to be Mr. Ethics and Morality, having fallen short of my own standards many times, but I never cheated on a test. One thing is that I was always good at school, so I never felt like I had to.

In America they take this really seriously. I knew a guy at KU who got expelled from the university for cheating on a chemistry final exam. Not much loss; he was a jerk anyway. Ted Kennedy got kicked out of Harvard for cheating on a Spanish final.

Latin gang fight in Madrid last night: two stabbed, one seriously, and three arrested. At least in Madrid the Latin Kings aren't a "cultural organization."

Heavy rains and flooding in the Basque Country, especially near Bilbao. They've evacuated parts of several towns, including Guecho and Santurce. Some of the highways are closed down, and the trains have been seriously delayed. Nobody's died yet or anything really bad like that. Here in Catalonia the reservoirs are all above 50% of capacity, and several are higher than that.

Barcelona sold Zambrotta to Milan for €9 million and Giovani dos Santos to Tottenham for €8 million. I think they gave up on Giovani too quickly, he's got tremendous talent, but the story is that he picked up a lot of bad habits in Rijkaard's free-and-easy clubhouse.

2008-06-01T15:32:00.002+02:00

ETA again. This time it was a bomb at 2:30 this morning in Zarautz, Viscaya, a prosperous Bilbao suburb. They called in a warning first. The target was one of the companies that is working on the high-speed train line from Madrid to the Basque country. It wasn't a big bomb, about five kilos of explosives, small enough to be carried in a backpack. Not much damage was done; three people were slightly injured, but they're OK.

Zap promised he wouldn't let the companies raise electricity rates any higher than the rate of inflation, which is a problem because such a fixed price is well below what it costs them to produce the electricity.

Eto'o, in Cameroon, head-butted a local journalist in a fit of pique. That's assault and battery. Of course he's going to get away with it because he's God down there. Supposedly Milan wants to buy him. Barça is asking for €50 million and Milan says that's too much. They already bought Zambrotta, but the price hasn't been announced; it's probably about €8 million or so. It's pretty clear they want to get rid of Giovani dos Santos, probably to Tottenham. Bargain sale at the Camp Nou!

The Royals finally won a game after like twelve straight losses.

2008-05-31T15:16:00.005+02:00

Other news from around here:

Zap says he's going to turn over management of the Barcelona commuter train system and the Barcelona airport to the Generalitat. Somehow I think this will mean that they go from being badly administered by Spanish bureaucrats to being badly administered by Catalan bureaucrats. How about a little privatization?

Domestic violence increased by 29% in 2007 in Barcelona, while sexual assaults increased by 32%. I imagine most of the increase is due to a higher percentage of crimes being reported, but this is not good.

More African boat people: a cayuco with 55 persons on board reached Tenerife. I am tired of the international media ignoring this story.

Basque prime minister Ibarretxe is going on and on about his October 25 referendum on self-determination for the Basque Country. The problem, of course, is that such a referendum is unconstitutional, besides having no legal value. But Ibarretxe says he's going to hold the damn thing anyway, and that its results will be binding if approved by the Basque Parliament. He's wrong, of course, since the Constitutional Court outranks the Basque regional government.

For comparison's sake, imagine if Alabama were to hold a referendum on reinstating segregation, banned by the US Constitution. Or on outlawing abortion, protected by the US constitution. Or establishing the Baptist Church, executing juveniles by burning at the stake, raising the voting age to 30, or banning the Communist Manifesto. What do you think would be the consequence, whether they passed it or not?

Ruiz-Gallardon announced his support for Rajoy in a speech at which Esperanza Aguirre did not show up. Read into that what you will.

So the government polling agency CIS, and why we need one I don't know, did a survey ranking world leaders in popularity here in Spain. Michele Bachelet was first, and Lula de Silva was second. Bush came in third from last, followed by Castro and Chavez.

Spanish heartthrob pop singer Alejandro Sanz is appearing in the Spanish-language pro-Obama ad, titled "Podemos." Although Sanz is not American, of course, he does have freedom of speech and so he can say what he wants, including endorsing a candidate in another country's elections. I remember back in 2000, though, when the American singer Gloria Estefan campaigned for Jose Maria Aznar, and the entire Spanish left became very indignant at this foreign interference. So which is it, people?

The Lakers, featuring Catalan power forward Pau Gasol, made the NBA finals, where they'll play Boston. Everybody's getting all excited about it over here, especially the media, and of course 100% of them are backing the Lakers. I don't care because I 'm not interested in the NBA; half of me wants the Lakers to lose because I've never liked them and their big-city Hollywood glamour image, and the other half wants the Celtics to lose because it would piss off Bill Simmons so much. I suppose I'll be rooting for Boston because former Kansas star Paul Pierce plays for them.

The orgasmicness over Gasol, billed as the first Spanish player in the NBA finals by TV1 and the first Catalan player in the finals by TV3, is going a bit too far; he's a good player, but not an All-Star. Oh, well, he's happy to get out of Memphis, which he bad-mouthed for years in the Spanish press, and get him some media spotlight.

Oh, yeah, speaking of TV3, they've taken it off their site now, but last night they headlined their story about the "new" Amazon tribe, "A tribe that has never seen white men before." Uh, guys, they've never seen black people, or East Asian people, either. Not to mention women of any of those races. Talk about sexist ethnocentrism. I demand an investigation. Heads must roll.

2008-05-31T14:14:00.002+02:00

The Colombian government announced today that FARC has been plotting with ETA to murder Colombians in Spain, including vicepresident Francisco Santos and ex-president Andrés Pastrana, along with cabinet ministers and ambassadors, since at least 2003. ETA members trained in Colombia in that year, and ETA and FARC have had contact since at least the early '90s, when they held a meeting in Cuba, of course. Two ETA men gave the FARC an explosives and car-bomb master class. During the ETA "truce" in June 2006, a FARC member traveled semi-openly to the Basque Country to take part in a meeting with pro-ETA front groups, organized by banned ETA-front party Batasuna.

What I want to know is why nobody on the European left will believe that the whole lot of extreme left gangs around the world, from the Montoneros to the Red Brigades to FARC to the Japanese Red Army to the Sandinistas to the PFLP to ETA, are creations of the Cold War. Every single one of them received Soviet support and money, often laundered through Cuba. Of course ETA and the FARC have connections going way back, and the very most basic foundation of those connections is called the KGB.

The far-leftist propaganda machine is already rolling, trying to discredit the computer files discovered by the Colombians during the anti-FARC raid into Ecuador. It won't fly. They're guilty as hell, and so are Chavez and Correa, who are bankrolling them and providing them with shelter.

Zap, do you get it now? Your friend Hugo Chavez, who you sold military weapons to, is supporting a gang of terrorists guilty of kidnapping, drug trafficking, and murder, not to mention trying to overthrow a democratically elected government. And that gang of terrorists is an ally of our very own Spanish gang of terrorists that is murdering members of your very own political party. And the connection between them all is Raul Castro's Communist dictatorship in Cuba. And you yourself are continually seeking to lift European Union sanctions against the brother and handpicked heir of the Godfather.

2008-05-30T17:40:00.003+02:00

Jesus. I got another one of these. Showed up on my referrals log because Iberian Notes is becoming your one-stop shop for incest porn. This guy is from Medan, Sumatra, Indonesia, and he did a Google search for "sun fuck whit mather." Four words. Three spelled wrong. Note which one he got right. What a freak.

If I were into stereotyping people I know nothing about, like certain readers of El Pais, I'd say that the Oedipus complex runs rampant among males in Islamic countries. As does bad spelling.

2008-05-30T16:04:00.003+02:00

El Pais has a big exclusive scoop: Dunkin' Donuts inadvertently ran an ad campaign in the US featuring Rachael Ray, whoever she is, wearing a Palestinian scarf. El Pais says that the keffiyeh "was made by Yasser Arafat into the symbol of the resistance of the Palestinian people against Israel...It is worn by all sympathizers of the cause." You can see why some people got mad.

Naturally, neither the company nor the actress had any idea of what the thing means. So they received protests and pulled the ad. Obviously. They don't want to run any ads that offend any of their customers. That's bad business. For the same reason, they probably wouldn't dress their spokesmodels up in Obama T-shirts, McCain baseball caps, or a Red Sox jacket in a New York ad. Or the Confederate flag. Or a Che Guevara T-shirt. Or a KKK hood. Or an SS uniform.

In fact, I bet Spanish companies do the same thing. I bet you don't see a lot of American flags in Spanish ads, and that they wouldn't use someone in a US army uniform to promote a product in Spain. I bet they wouldn't use the Catalan flag in Madrid, or the Spanish flag in Barcelona, either. I doubt you would see a Spanish republican flag anywhere. I bet they don't show people wearing Falange blue shirts. Or Franco-era gray police uniforms. Or those T-shirts with big marijuana leaves on them. And I know for a fact that they never show anyone wearing either an Arab headscarf or a Jewish kipa.

In fact, I don't recall ever seeing anyone in a Spanish advertisement wearing a keffiyah, either.

So here are some of the comments:

More proof that Israel really governs in the US. No matter what they say, the Israelis are the most important power in the world: just remember their 60 years of occupation of Palestine, and the rest of the world letting it happen. FREE Palestine!

The poor Americans!

Multinationals take over everything because everything can become a consumer product. They've done it with hippie and punk symbols, and now "Palestinians" (apparently among some Spaniards an Arafat scarf is called merely a "Palestinian") Before, wearing a "Palestinian" had ideological connotations, now everybody wears them because they're in fashion. The ones who used to wear sweaters with American flags now wear "Palestinians." It is an abusive appropriation by the global multinationals to homogenize thoughts and appearances.

There are a lot of Jews loose around here.

Horrible! She's wearing pants too!!! Bin Laden wears pants too!!! People who cover their legs are terrorists!!! Worse than terrorists!!!

If you read the New york times (sic) you'll learn that the suicide rate in the navy (sic) is the highest in history, but why would they worry about that? Instead let's make a fuss about the Palestinian scarf.

What is coffee sweetened with? Sugar. What country produces sugar? Cuba. So the advertisement is communist propaganda. They're imbeciles.

In the US, they're truly ignorant, but they should not be excused. This ignorance is the fruit of their social, cultural, and economic dictatorship. This country is a real danger for our society, and not the "sources of immigration." They provoke and generate so much hate.

As Obelix would say, these Americans are crazy!

I imagine that many young consumers wear whatever is the most fashion (sic) without seeing any militant allegiance. Knowing the cultural level of many Americans, I would not be surprised if it is just another fad. In any case it is one more example of the intolerance that they have accustomed us to.

No comment...Thank you, Lord, that I am not American.

This is one more sign that the gringos are panicking, which is an ideal weapon for the conservative extremists in the United States, who are trying to eliminate all the cultures and religions different from theirs.

But does nobody remember the scandal of the nipple at the Super Bowl? This is more of the same. They don't worry about Guantanamo or other disasters, though.

Is this story serious? It seems so ridiculous to me that I can't believe it's true! Carrying an 8mm Magnum in your pocket is totally normal, moral, and legitimate, and wearing a "Palestinian" is a proclamation of terrorism? And I thought they used guns in war instead of "Palestinians"!

What a country...I hope we never become like them.

These Americans (from the North) with their mental illnesses, are stepping on individual and collective rights (traveling comfortably, wearing a scarf, or a T-shirt). The bad thing is that here there are many imitators of their model. Will we end up goose-stepping?

They can't show a scarf, but rifles, pistols, machine guns, tanks, bombs, that's not censored, on the contrary.

It's completely logical. Everybody knows that Palestinian scarves were produced by Arafat in a high-tech laboratory in order to make everyone who wears them a potential terrorist.

What poorly thinking people! Poor country! Ignorance cubed.

Even being a great power, the United States of North America, "paladins of freedom," are not precisely an example to imitate, but exactly the opposite. Their expansionist ambitions, united with their great ignorance about many subjects, the ease with which they let themselves be influenced by Zionist groups, have led them to commit innumerable errors that many of our countries refuse to condemn. CYNICISM, and nothing more.

All advertising actors should wear a Palestinian scarf in all the ads on European TV networks. It would be a good chance to remind the Americans of the holocaust they are committing against the Palestinian people.

I will never buy products with that brand again. We should prohibit all videos that show the American flag, which is the most bloodstained symbol in the history of humanity. It often appears in videos of people torturing in Guantanamo, dropping cluster-bombs, invade countries, kill democratically elected leaders of other countries, massacre entire peoples, and a long list of crimes against humanity. The United States is the greatest international terrorist.

THE RADICALS ARE THE AMERICANS!!

If this is the contry that calls itself "the land of freedom," where is that FREEDOM? I'm sure if she had been wearing a Jewish kippa or any other Zionist or militarist garment, then there would have been no problem. The only adjectives that fit are "UNEDUCATED", "IGNORANT", "ZIONISTS", "ILLITERATES", "MANIPULATORS", and their synonyms.

The message of the advertisement is exactly that: "choosing." Choosing my coffee shop, my coffee, my donuts, choosing to wear a Palestinian or Hindu scarf or live in an igloo...but retrograde and ignorant American society cannot understand these subtleties.

And then the Western world considers them tolerant and democratic! What repression! And what if the actress had been wearing a veil? Then, people who think differently are called anti-Semites. Please, it's just a scarf.

If they have such a bad opinion of Palestinian scarves, what must they think of Palestinian people?

Proven: 1. Human stupidity has no limits. 2. The power of the Jewish lobby in Israel.

There are Yankees who have no idea where they live.

These Americans are crazy. Ridiculous. They love looking for problems where there aren't any.

What a list of supine foolishness to justify fear of others. This is like fried potatoes, that became freedom fries instead of french fries because of pure chauvinism. Really, they make me sick. Because of a scarf!

What an absurd country! What if they worried about things that are really important!

I have 4 "Palestinians." This stupidity could only happen in the United States, where carrying a gun and killing people is normal, but having a cloth around your neck is bad. Ridiculous. What a "country of freedom."

This is ridiculous. I've been wearing a "Palestinian" since I was 15, and I do not support extreme Islamism, simply, I support a cause that has cost many lives, and I repudiate the injustice that has no end because it's not in the interest of the US.

Radical Islamists often wear blue jeans too. Let's prohibit them!

This perfectly shows the Islamophobia of the Americans. Now pieces of clothing are offensive and promote radicalism. Next thing they'll prohibit dark-skinned people or those who look like Arabs from television, we wouldn't want then to be Islamists and we don't realize it!

So if I drink Coca-Cola I'm an accomplice of Guantanamo? Of course, we've forgotten that the Americans are friends of the Israelis, and the Palestinian scarf is a symbol they don't like. They've given me an idea, I'm going to go out now and buy one.

Note the fact that many of these commenters don't know how to read; they've confused the decision of a private company with some sort of national ban on "Palestinians." Also note the fact that "Palestinians" are so fashionable in Spain that they have their own slang term; one guy even brags that he has four. Note the psychological need that many commenters have to feel individually superior to Americans. Note the widespread stereotyping of and ignorance about American people. Also note the bitter sarcasm, which is the verbal weapon of he who knows he has already lost.

Finally, note that the commenters drip hate for Americans individually and the American people as a culture and a nation. Though most anti-Americans deny such hate, claiming that they merely dislike the policies of the American government, they're lying.

By the way, did this story even make the news in the US? I haven't seen it anywhere, and I cover news on the Net pretty thoroughly. El Pais's article says they got it from the BBC, which isn't surprising, knowing the Beeb's particular biases.

2008-05-30T15:15:00.003+02:00

Not much news today. Econ stuff: The national budget for 2009 will be €160.2 billion, a 5% increase over 2008. Solbes proyects a balanced budget for the next two years, and then a surplus in 2011. However, these projections are based on a 2-3% annual growth rate, and the private sector's predictions say it mignt not be even half that.

Meanwhile, economics counselor Antoni Castells announced that the Generalitat's budget deficit for 2007 was €762 million, €300 million more than projected.

Car sales in May were down 18% over May last year. Consumer spending must be way down.

Other news: These idiot chefs are still arguing with one another over whether it's OK to use chemical additives in haute cuisine, and everybody is talking about it, which means our frivolity level here in Spain is high, as usual. That's one of the things I love-hate about Spain: there's a lot of excitement about things that aren't important at all. Which I guess is true in America as well, but I notice it more here.

The Barcelona press is split: La Vanguardia is supporting Santamaria, probably because he is the spokesman for a long-running promotion they're doing, distributing cooking utensils. El Periodico is supporting Adria, probably because Santamaria is backed by the eternal rival La Vangua.

Complaint about the newspapers: They're always running eight million promotions at the same time. La Vanguardia is promoting an atlas, a CD series, a book series, and a collection of exotic bugs encased in plastic, as well as the kitchen stuff. I wish they would lay off the damn promotions and charge less for the paper.

By the way, El Pais has raised its price to €1.10. I imagine the other papers will soon follow suit. They very obviously practice price collusion; I'm not going to claim that the papers are actively conspiring to rip us off, but it's clear that nobody is willing to compete on price.

The 150,000 members of FC Barcelona are mad. 9000 of them signed a recall election petition against club president Joan Laporta, double the necessary number. So it looks like there will be an election. Barça elections are always fun because they're full of outrageous skullduggery. Somebody's already stolen a computer with access to the entire Barça database, and has allegedly tried to sell it for a million euros to an opposition candidate.

2008-05-29T13:47:00.002+02:00

Yearly inflation in Spain hit 4.7% in May, a five-point increase over April. It is directly caused by the increase in oil prices, and by the subsequent increase in the price of every other raw material. Inflation is not a good thing. Better low growth than high inflation.

The CIS, the government polling agency (and why we need one I don't know), says that the PSOE would beat the PP in a general election held today, 43.6% to 37.6%. I'm surprised to see the PP so high, what with the internal power struggle and the poor electoral campaigh they ran. Zap is a very weak incumbent and they had no business losing to him.

Oh, by the way, I'm going on record right now to say that McCain is going to win the US election handily, taking the Republican heartland along with the big three swing states, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida. Hillary is not going to give up; she's going to take Obama all the way to the convention. And the Republicans are going to jump all over Obama's past record, and lack thereof. He and his crazy wife and their past and present associations are going to make him unelectable. I will bet they have some oppo dynamite on him, too. McCain will win both the center and the right, which has nowhere else to go. They may not much like McCain but they will come out to vote against Obama.

I think Bobby Jindal would make an excellent vice-presidential candidate. He's young, attractive, more conservative than McCain, more qualified than Obama, and being East Indian-American and a convert to Christianity isn't going to hurt. This guy gets elected in Louisiana, so his appeal to the Southern Christian vote is real. He ought to nail down the Bible Belt for the Republicans. He'll also be appealing to the naturalized citizen vote, as he's the son of immigrants, who tend to be very socially conservative. And he'll make it possible to vote Republican and not look racist, for people who think that's important. Jindal can talk technocrat with the college graduates and talk Jesus in the small towns. Besides, he and his family are vegetarians, which I think is totally cool. I also think McCain should offer Secretary of Defense to Joe Lieberman, and announce it now if Lieberman agrees. I wonder when the Democrats are going to kick Lieberman out of the party.

Water update: The reservoirs that supply Barcelona have reached 50% capacity, and it's even higher in the reservoirs in the Ebro watershed. They are going to build the aqueduct between Barcelona and Tarragona in case of future emergencies, but they will not transfer any water this year. The tanker ships will continue bringing in water until August. The current water restrictions will be lifted very soon. Also, the rains have been so good that the danger of forest fire this summer is very low, at least until September.

My former boss Jimenez Losantos is definitely off the reservation; he's bolted the PP. He accused Ruiz-Gallardon's witnesses, Acebes, Zaplana, and Aguirre, of "total bald-faced manipulation." These three used to be Losantos's favorite politicians, and they've thrown him under the bus. They are more loyal to Gallardon (and Rajoy) than to Losantos. He is definitely going to lose this lawsuit; the only support he got was from Pedro J. and Luis Herrero. One thing is that Gallardon doesn't come off looking too great, either; he seems like a whiny little kid who says everybody's calling him names.

Something just happened that really pissed me off. Some woman came to my door (I have a sign on my door saying "No solicitors or Jehovah's Witnesses") saying she was not a saleswoman, she was from Endesa and wanted information about my use of natural gas. I said to myself, hell, it's a survey, I'll help her out and tell her how much gas we use. So I go find the latest gas bill to show her that we used eleven euros worth of gas last month. She asks me to show me the bill, which I do, and she starts writing down stuff. I look and see that it's a form to get me to change companies, from Gas Natural to Endesa. I say, "What's going on here? I don't want to change companies." She said, "If you don't change companies you don't get the discount." I said, "So you are a saleswoman, trying to get me to buy something I didn't ask to buy," and shut the door on her.

Has Endesa, or any other company, tried this on you? It's most certainly an unethical business practice, and somebody ought to complain to the consumer protection people.

2008-05-28T18:05:00.002+02:00

I'm working on a new idea: a silly-news website. Right now I'm beta-testing it. Monday and Tuesday I worked on finding content. Today I learned how to post photos. Tomorrow I hope to learn to size and place them correctly. If you have a spare couple of minutes, go over there and see what you think. I'm already aware of one weakness: I need an editor to check my Spanish for grammar mistakes and the occasional semantic error.

2008-05-28T13:58:00.004+02:00

The Colombian terrorist group FARC had tentative plans to murder anti-FARC Colombians living in Madrid, according to the computer files captured during the raid into Ecuador. Interpol confirms that the information is authentic. Can our local moonbat left please stop kissing the feet of this gang of kidnappers, extortionists, drug traffickers, and murderers, and the clownish Mafia don Chavez who bankrolls them?

The Spanish real estate market has reached the status of "flaming gasbag," as housing sales were down 39% in the year ending in March. Secondhand housing sales were down 46%. 42% less money was lent out by banks in the form of mortgages. By the way, 98% of Spanish mortgages are variable-rate.

You may wonder why I've been paying so much attention to real estate; it's because the majority of most Spaniards' accumulated wealth is plowed into their dwelling, and when real estate prices drop everybody loses wealth, at least on paper. Nobody gains wealth, not the banks nor the government nor the big companies, contrary to the opinion of most folks, believers in the "physical fallacy."

My old boss, Federico Jimenez Losantos, the hard right-wing host of the morning program on Cope radio, is in trouble. Madrid mayor Ruiz-Gallardon has sued him for libel, since in 2006 Losantos claimed that Gallardon "didn't care" about the March 11, 2004 victims, though he planned to use them for political purposes, and that he was collaborating with the PSOE. The case has now come to court, and I think Losantos is going to lose. Some big wheels have been called to testify, including Aguirre, Acebes, and Zaplana, along with the editor of El Mundo, Pedro J. Ramirez.

Spanish libel law is a good bit looser than American; in the US you have to prove that the defendant lied intentionally with malicious intentions toward the plaintiff, while in Spain you can sue for insults and "injuries."

Amnesty International has released its annual report, and La Vanguardia gave it all of Page 4. As usual, AI is much more indignant about the shortcomings of democratic governments than it is about the crimes committed by dictatorships, but at least somebody is trying to keep track of what's going on.

La Vanguardia's account focuses on "extrajudicial arrests, the prison at Guantanamo, restrictions of freedom, and abuses carried to the absurd such as requiring an old man to take off his shoes at an airport." I detect an unhealthy interest in what Paul Hollander called "a relentless critical impulse toward American social, economic, and political institutions, traditions, and values."

At least AI flays China for supporting the oppressive governments in Burma, Zimbabwe, and Sudan. It criticizes the European Union for "not investigating its member states about human rights, turning over terrorism suspects to the US (the CIA's secret flights), restricting the rights of immigrants...and marginalizing the gypsy minority."

The most important criticism of Spain, which I think has some validity, is "the difficulty of women who are victims of violence to obtain protection, justice, and restitution, especially in the case of immigrants, who do not go to the police for fear of being deported. 48 of the 71 women murdered in Spain in 2007 were immigrants."

I do think the government ought to make it clear that the legal resident status of people who go to the police to report crimes will not be investigated, that those who denounce crimes will not be deported as a consequence of doing so.

Get this; it's in La Vanguardia's print edition but not online. Here in Barcelona they invited "the Iraqi journalist and writer" Eman Khamas to speak at the press conference marking the release of the report. She said, "They talk about a civil war in my country, but it isn't a civil war, it's a war against the occupation that some Iraqis have benefited from. The US insists that security has improved, and it's a dirty lie. The proof is that they sent 30,000 more soldiers at the beginning of the year."

Uh, Ms. Khamas, the reason that security has improved in Iraq is precisely because the Americans sent more soldiers. It's called "the surge." Some guy named Petraeus is in charge of it. They've been doing it for a while now. Deaths of US soldiers have been more than cut in half since the surge began.

Oh, by the way, CIA secret flights? What CIA secret flights? Minister of Defense Alonso told Radio Euskadi that the Zapatero Government "has checked and confirmed the reports of US flights that use bases in Spain and has not detected any sort of illegality. The Government has systematically reviewed all information about US military flights. As Minister of Defense the first thing I did was ask for the reports about the suspicious flights. There is no evidence that anything illegal has been done in Spanish territory. If it had, it would not have been tolerated, since regarding human rights, we must not be complacent."

And another conspiracy theory, this one promoted by El Pais, deflates.

They found a body floating in Barcelona harbor this morning. The cops have not identified it yet, or explained what the person died of. I hope it was a squatter who shot up a bunch of heroin and then fell off the walkway to Maremagnum.

La Vanguardia's reader photo of the day is of a sign painted on the wall of a junkyard in Prat de Llobregat. It says, "Me cago in los muertos y en to su puta madre del ke me robe," which translates as, "I shit on the dead ancestors and the whore mother of whoever steals from me." La Vangua's commentary is, "The photographer hopes you laugh along with him." So far there have been no cultural analyses of the vulgarity and obscenity of the language used by most Spaniards, or the role it plays in the Spanish collective imagination, whatever that is.

2008-05-27T14:30:00.004+02:00

Yet another moral disaster for the UN. The NGO Save the Children has accused UN peacekeeping troops, and members of other "peace" and "humanitarian" groups, of routinely committing sexual abuse of children in the countries where they are stationed. The countries mentioned are Haiti, Liberia, Congo, and Ivory Coast. Some children are telling horrific stories. I know that charges of sexual abuse are often false--for an example, look at the wave of late '80s-early '90s false stories of Satanic child sex abuses at several US preschools, all of which were bogus--but Save the Children has so many independent accusations that at least some of them must be true.

I really think that when the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are over, the US ought to consider pulling completely out of the UN, which is rotten to the core, and help set up an organization of established democratic states only, based on NATO. And I mean democratic; Turkey, Singapore, Thailand, and Russia don't qualify, much less Morocco and Pakistan and Angola and Venezuela and China. I would be willing to give such an organization, which would be very hard to get into and not very hard to get voted out of, veto power over American overseas use of the military.

Interior minister Perez Rubalcaba said yesterday that ETA has already reestablished a new leadership, just a few days after the capture of the bull goose etarra, Lopez Peña. He added that he was going to put 800 more cops on the terrorism beat.

More PP infighting: Gabriel Elorriaga, the PP's press secretary, has come out against Rajoy. Elorriaga is known as a moderate, which is a change from the others questioning Rajoy's leadership; the rest of them are all from the right / Spanish nationalist wing of the party.

Another near-disaster in Catalonia. Get this one. A truck driver ran his truck off a bridge near Solsona in Lleida province this morning, crashing partway through the guardrail. The truck is now hanging off the side of the bridge, with the driver still in the cab. Nobody died. So what's the big deal? The truck is full of explosives. The area has been evacuated, and the cops are waiting for a large crane to arrive so they can pull the truck and driver to safety. Let's hope it works.

What I want to know is exactly how a guy driving a truck full of explosives manages to drive it off a bridge. Shouldn't he be going like ten miles an hour?

The combination of high oil prices, crashing real estate prices, and Zap's social programs have cut the budget surplus by 56%. Government income has declined, due to lower VAT receipts caused by the construction slump, and lower gasoline tax receipts due to the high price and decreased consumption. Spain is still running an €9 billion surplus, so we don't need to worry yet, and a little deficit spending won't hurt. But let's not make the American mistake of borrowing to keep consumer spending high and keep the economy out of recession. A short sharp shock might well be salutary for the US, and it looks like it's coming here too.

Ana Obregon update: Ana Obregon is an aging Spanish slutty bimbo and sometime TV actress. She has had sex with at least one-eighth of the men in Spain. Her last program was the repulsive "Ana y los siete," in which her character was the nanny for a large family by day and a stripper by night; the most horrifying sight in the history of Spanish TV was la Obregon's seminude silicone-laden body. So she's in trouble now for offering to pay her bodyguard to beat up a TV host who had made fun of her. I say that's conspiracy to commit assault and battery, a violent crime, and that she ought to go to the slam for it. Obregon denies the story and is threatening to sue the magazine that published it. I bet she doesn't do it, that she's all hat and no cattle.

(Contrast: I wouldn't want to put Isabel Pantoja in jail, even though she's mixed up in this Marbella corruption case and is almost certainly guilty of tax fraud, at the very least. She's a nonviolent, economic criminal, who shouldn't suffer loss of her physical freedom, but rather of her economic freedom. Sentence her to five years in public housing, scrubbing floors and eating off food stamps.)

Oh, by the way, you know the urban legend in which a celebrity with mega-fake boobs is on an airplane that loses cabin pressure, and her juggernauts explode? Here in Spain that celebrity is Ana Obregon. I've heard it in the US about Dolly Parton and Pamela Anderson.

Dumbest controversy of the year: Catalan chef Santi Santamaria has accused Ferran Adria and other celebrity chefs of ruining Iberian cuisine by using artificial chemical ingredients in their fancy expensive avant-garde dishes. So everybody's all excited, and, get this, they're debating the question on TV and the radio, and taking sides on it. Who gives a crap? It's obvious that nothing interesting has happened yet this week.

The death toll of the construction accident at the new CF Valencia stadium has reached four. Three of the dead have been identified, an Ecuadorian, a Bolivian, and a Spaniard. They're arguing about the causes now, but it's obviously not the fault of the men who fell, it's the fault of whoever was in charge of putting up the scaffold.

Barça update: Keita has officially signed. Pique is coming for sure. Rumor has it they want to sign forward Dani Guiza, who led the league in goals last year, from Mallorca, Hleb from Arsenal, Villa from Valencia, and Alves from Sevilla. Villarreal (not Recreativo; he was merely on loan there last year) is demanding €20 million for Uruguayan defender Martin Caceres.

Meanwhile, the Royals are dashing our hopes yet again. The season started out so nicely, and now they've lost eight straight on a road trip to Boston and Toronto, including a no-hitter by Jon Lester, a guy who has just come back from having cancer. Congratulations to Lester, it's a great story, but you hate it when it happens to your team.

Here's the Royals' best possible lineup in my opinion. By the way, OPS (On-base average Plus Slugging percentage) is the best statistic that measures a batter's performance, I think. You want your guys at the power positions (3B, RF, LF, 1B) to have at least an 800 OPS, and your guys at the skill positions (C, SS, 2B, CF) to have at least 750. A weak-hitting shortstop might have a 700 OPS, while a top hitter like Manny Ramirez or Albert Pujols might be well over 1000. Barry Bonds used to rack up a steroid-fueled OPS of like 1300 every year. Under 700 and you're a marginal player, one step away from the minors, unless you're an exceptional fielder or a reliable catcher.

L DeJesus CF 694
R Grudzielanek 2B 710
L Gordon 3B 799
R Guillen LF 718
R Olivo C 911
L Teahen RF 681
R Butler 1B 669
S Callaspo SS 660
R Buck DH 690

That just blows. Only Olivo and Gordon are doing their jobs, and Guillen is hitting well now after a disastrous April. That's it. Everybody else is hitting far below average for his position. And both Callaspo at SS and Butler at 1B are below-average defensive players, to boot. (The rest of the team is average or above-average, at least.) The Royals have above-average defensive players at both those positions. The problem is that 1B Gload's OPS is 573, and SS Peña's OPS is 388, which might be the worst in the history of the major leagues--and they've already given him more than 140 at-bats.

2008-05-26T11:42:00.007+02:00

Typical Monday, not much of a news day, especially since it's Memorial Day in the States and everyone's down at the lake. Bit of weirdness: Some Spaniards, including Baltasar Porcel, get snippy at America's celebrating Halloween, a kids' dress-up holiday, at the same time Spain celebrates Todos los Santos, the day when dead people are remembered in Spain. Porcel has accused the Yanks of turning a solemn ritual into commercialized kitsch.

Of course, Todos los Santos (All Souls' Day) is a CATHOLIC holiday, and the people of the US are religiously mixed. We have our own secular day to remember the dead, Memorial Day. In fact, we have another similar holiday, Veterans' Day in November, when those who died for their country are remembered. You could argue that Americans are therefore even more respectful of their dead than the Spaniards.

Another piece of evidence: Most Spaniards know nothing about their family history. Remei, for example, doesn't know about any of her ancestors before about 1900. Many Americans, on the other hand, are interested in genealogy and in the lives of their ancestors. My family knows, for example, that some of us were Tennessee-Texas Scotch-Irish (including a couple of Confederate soldiers and Methodist circuit riders; at least one owned slaves), some of us were Kansas Germans from Bukovina in the old Austrian Empire, and that one branch, my mother's maternal grandfather's line, was Oklahoma Cherokee. They were all farmers or ranchers; we're from the landowning-peasant class, not the urban proletariat. An aunt and several of my cousins have married Mexican-Americans, meaning that I have Hispanic relatives as well, none of whom speak Spanish. Family surnames include Chappell, Colley, Whitney, Shannon, Stuart, Aust/Ast, Shoemake, and Walz. My favorite distant-relative surname is Schimmelpfennig.

Spaniards are surprised when they find out I know all this, but it's not unusual among Americans; we all know we're half-Irish, one-quarter Italian, and one-quarter Polish, or whatever the mix may be.

So the Jaume Bofill Foundation did a study and found that only 2% of immigrants in Spain who have been here at least ten years want to go home. Well, duh. If they wanted to go home they'd already have left. Wonder how much the Generalitat subsidized this one with.

Living on the infrastructure edge: This morning the main commuter-train line lost power in a tunnel near Plaza Catalunya and went down for forty minutes, thereby snarling up everything as usual. Another train broke down south of Sabadell and fouled up that line as well. I figure at the very least 50,000 people were an hour late to work, costing us 50,000 production hours that could have been used to increase our GDP.

It rained again this morning, and the five reservoirs in the Ter-Llobregat watershed that supply Barcelona are now at 40% of capacity. Worries about running out this summer are rapidly disappearing. Now they're talking about halting the shipments of water by tanker and calling off the Tarragona-Barcelona aqueduct plan. I don't know; I wouldn't start feeling too safe and secure yet.

Tragedy in Valencia: A scaffold collapsed this morning at the construction site of CF Valencia's new stadium, killing two and injuring four. Jeez. Somebody screwed up bad here, because scaffolds are supposed to be firmly attached to something so they don't fall down. There are entirely too many deaths on the job in Spain, and it's frequently due to half-assery, ignoring the most elemental safety precautions. There is also far too much drinking on the job.

Two squatter punks used climbing equipment to dangle themselves off the front of the Sabadell city hall this morning, in order to demand the release of Franki from jail. If I were the cops I'd give the punks five minutes to cease and desist and then cut their ropes. That would put a rapid end to this crap. I hope Franki is enjoying his stay in the Modelo.

The Spanish real estate developer Habitat is in massive trouble. They already laid off 350 workers at their Don Piso subsidiary, and now they're laying off half their staff, 160 more workers. The Spanish real estate Zeppelin has crashed and burned. Their own company forecast is, get this, to lose €650 million between now and 2010. They've made a deal with the 39 banks to which they owe €1.6 billion to reschedule payments, saving them from bankruptcy, at least for now. The contractor Ferrovial owns 20% of Habitat. I'm glad I don't own any Ferrovial stock.

14 million Spaniards saw the Chiki-Chiki guy perform on Eurovision, a 78% share. That's one-third of the population. I missed it. Damn.

The Japanese yakuza who murdered the mayor of Nagasaki has been sentenced to death. In Japan they hang the condemned in secret, without informing his family until he's dead. No one around here has yet criticized the primitive, barbaric, brutal Japanese for using capital punishment.

Barça update: Edmilson is going to Villarreal. Inter Milan wants to buy Deco. Negotiations for Ronaldinho and Zambrotta continue with AC Milan. Manchester City's offer for Ronaldinho is the best they've received. He's exactly the player a midtable club like that doesn't need. I'd spend that money on five competent young players with a future. Instead of buying one ex-superstar with mysterious injuries and bad habits, get five real, solid pros. Supposedly Barça is going to buy the 21-year-old Uruguayan defender Martin Caceres from Recreativo.

2008-05-25T13:10:00.002+02:00

The Chiki-Chiki guy bombed at Eurovision and came in 16th. Bummer.

More boat people: A cayuco carrying 68 black African illegal immigrants washed up on Grand Canary early this morning. Two of them had died at sea, and three more were urgently hospitalized, suffering from exposure, shock, and thirst. Fifteen of them were minors. El Pais gives the story two paragraphs. La Vanguardia doesn't mention it.

It's raining pretty good today, and the rains will continue for most of the week, which is just what we need. Reservoir capacity in Catalonia is now at 35%, up from 20% just a few weeks ago. Now they're talking about not needing the aqueduct from Tarragona or the tanker ships full of water. I dunno: we're going to have more dry years sometime in the future, and having the aqueduct there will end fears of Barcelona running out of drinking water.

Good news: The Colombian air force killed the FARC leader, "Tirofijo" ("Sure Shot"), in a bombing raid back in March. Hope he's finding it nice and warm where he's gone. The Colombian government says it's the strongest blow ever suffered by that gang of terrorists.

Hillary's gaffe about Robert Kennedy has made the press over here, and there's wild speculation that the Americans are so racist they'll never elect Obama in the first place and if they do he'll be assassinated.

The pro-ETA crowd in the Basque country had a demo yesterday "against the Spanish flag." They managed to bring out 250 people in San Sebastian. It never ceases to amaze me that 15% of the Basques support ETA, terrorists and organized criminals, extortionists and murderers. If this were an oppressive dictatorship such as Burma or Sudan or Syria I'd understand--hell, I'd support--a resistance movement, but Franco's been dead for 33 years now.

The Prado has a very cool exhibition opening soon and running through September: the subject is Renaissance portraits, 70 of them, by Durer, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian, Van Eyck, and Botticelli, among others. El Pais has a slideshow that you should check out. I'm going; it'll give me an excuse to take a weekend trip to Madrid.

2008-05-24T14:05:00.005+02:00

From today's El Pais in an article titled "Cuba and a hope named Obama": 'A Cuban academic declared that, differently from other occasions, the American electoral process is being taken very seriously this time in official circles. "In previous elections it didn't matter who won. Now it is different. McCain represents immobility. It would be the same policies as always there, and the same response as always here. But an Obama victory would move the whole political scene,' said this analyst, a member of the Communist party."

Another near-disaster here in Barcelona: Yesterday they were loading a cargo of dimethylamine off a ship in the harbor, and the crane dropped it, so the nasty poisonous inflammable stuff got all over the place and they had to shut down the seafront part of the motorway loop around the city for nine hours. The traffic jam was amazing.

I think one of the problems with Barcelona's infrastructure is that we're living on the edge. The system works OK in normal conditions, but let one thing go wrong--a rainstorm that shorts out the traffic lights, a sinkhole that closes down a commuter rail line, a power cable that comes down atop an electricity substation, a bunch of squatters blocking off the Via Laietana with their latest attempted riot--and the whole thing collapses, making everybody's life impossible and costing innumerable hours of work time, thereby decreasing our productivity and hurting our economy.

So CiU wants €5 billion more in tax money for the Generalitat from the central government. That would be OK if they were going to spend it usefully, but you know what they want it for: to pass out to their own clients in their own political machine. More money for TV3! And the Department of Linguistic Normalization! And their pet newspapers (mostly in provincial towns like Lleida, Girona, Manresa, etc.)! And their own "consultants"! And all the 175,000 civil servants employed by the Generalitat!

The cops have been running an anti-drug operation in the Zona Franca, one of Barcelona's most degraded slums. They've arrested and jailed 48 persons for drug trafficking, and have pressed charges against 373 more for drug dealing and 33 for illegal possession of a weapon. The story only mentions the nationality / ethnicity of two of those jailed, both Spaniards.

So everybody's excited about the Eurovision festival tonight. God help us all. Check out the video of Spain's candidate. El Pais says this whole thing is paid for with taxpayers' money through the Cervantes Institute (whose job is to promote Spanish culture around the world) and TVE, the state-owned (and why we need one I don't know) television network.

Supposedly Barça has bought the French-Malian midfielder Keita from Sevilla for €14 million, and has repurchased the Catalan defender (and product of Barça's youth team) Pique from Manchester United for €5 million.

2008-05-24T13:38:00.002+02:00

The Spanish government-owned news agency EFE (and why we need one I don't know) got an interview with Obama. Highlights:

Obama promised to "open a new chapter" in US-Spanish relations, and said he would work with Spain on issues like preventing terrorism and climate change.

He promised closer ties to Spain, saying, "As someone who did not support our initial invasion of Iraq, I am not in the same position as the Bush administration." Obama added that Bush "judges his allies on whether they support his agenda or not," and promised a "different attitude toward foreign policy, with energetic diplomacy with the international community."

Said Obama, "Spain has always been one of the United States's strongest allies, and we want to make sure that we will be able to continue working on the issues that are important for both countries." He stated that his Latin American policy would be "guided by dialogue," and that he was willing to talk with every country, including Cuba and Venezuela.

He declared, "Obviously, it will be necessary to complete a series of steps before having any serious diplomatic conversations." Obama volunteered to take the first step toward Cuba; in order to show his "good faith," he will relax restrictions on US residents sending money to and going to visit their relatives in Cuba. Before talking to Chavez, he said, the Venezuela-FARC connection needs to be "uncovered."

Obama concluded by stating his position on illegal immigration: "I believe it is important that we have solid border security and that we penalize businesses that intentionally hire undocumented workers, but I also think we need to find a way toward citizenship for those who have no papers."

All this might sound good in Spain but it's not going to play in Peoria or convince the little old lady in Dubuque.

Says Charles Krauthammer:

Before the Democratic debate of July 23, Barack Obama had never expounded upon the wisdom of meeting, without precondition, with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashar al-Assad, Hugo Chavez, Kim Jong Il or the Castro brothers. But in that debate, he was asked about doing exactly that. Unprepared, he said sure -- then got fancy, declaring the Bush administration's refusal to do so not just "ridiculous" but "a disgrace."

After that, there was no going back. So he doubled down. What started as a gaffe became policy. By now, it has become doctrine. Yet it remains today what it was on the day he blurted it out: an absurdity.

2008-05-23T15:05:00.002+02:00

I just heard this song on KHYI internet radio out of Dallas; I haven't found out who does it:

"I never kissed a girl till I went to college
She got drunk and cheated on me
And I never kissed a boy till I went to prison
Murder in the first degree."

Way better than Raimon.

2008-05-23T12:21:00.005+02:00

So the PP infighting is getting worse: the San Gil and Rajoy supporters have each called demonstrations by SMS for this afternoon. This is a terrible, irresponsible idea, and Gustavo de Aristegui, at least, agrees. A political party that's going to win an election needs to show an undivided front; if it can't make up its own mind what it wants, then it's never going to convince the voters.

The average retirement pension in Spain has increased 7.3% over the last year to €813 a month, which is an improvement but still not enough for old folks who have worked hard their whole lives. So I guess Zap can claim to have done something more or less useful, for once.

Let me clarify that I am by no means a tax-and-spend left-liberal / social democrat--I'm generally in favor of keeping taxes and spending as low as possible--but when it comes to helping out people who deserve it, I think we can afford to be generous. More money for retired people, and less for consultant reports and agricultural subsidies and culture ministries and state-owned TV and concerted Church schools and subsidies to the press and foreign aid to Cuba and propping up decaying rust-belt industries and supporting a bloated bureaucracy and payoffs for underemployed Andalusian "agricultural laborers" who for some reason always vote for the PSOE.

The goddamn squatters had themselves a big old time here in Gracia last night; they torched 25 plastic garbage containers. So how much is it going to cost us taxpaying citizens to replace them, and where do we put our garbage in the meantime? This ain't Naples; we don't live in filth around here.

I hate these dirtbags. They contribute absolutely nothing to the community, and they detract from it by committing vandalism and and shoplifting and living rough and dirty in abandoned buildings. So I bought a black indelible marker pen, and I've been writing "Okupas fuera" and "Okupas = parasitos" on the fly-posters they stick up on all the walls calling for anarchy and freedom for Franki.

So with all the foreign news out there they could be reporting on, La Vanguardia devotes a page to Ellen DeGenerate inviting John McCain to be the best man at her lesbian wedding. Wow, that's hot breaking political news. The most interesting part of the whole thing is that they spelled McCain's name wrong.

Get this. It's very weird. Santiago Cañizares, Valencia's goalie, formerly on the Spanish national team, is being investigated for child sexual abuse and has been subpoenaed to testify. Cañizares is known for having, well, unusual ideas, and hanging around with occult psychic cultish pseudophilosophical types. Specifically, he's been hanging around with a Uri Geller-type called "El Brujo," or "The Wizard." Seems that The Wizard has been charged with sexual abuse by 15 young women between the ages of 11 and 22. The Wizard instructed the girls that they needed to have sex with men as part of their "recovery" therapy. That's rape. How exploitative. What a betrayal of trust. Well, one of the girls has identified Cañizares as one of those men.

The Wizard was jailed in February 2007, and refused to testify until February of this year. Cañizares's agent denies any wrongdoing, but says Cañizares will not make any public statements. I say if he did it then we lock him up.

Headline from La Vanguardia: "Moving performance by Raimon in Madrid commemorates student revolution during dictatorship: 1000 people, among them ministers Sebastian, Soria, Aldo, and Salgado, attend singer-songwriter's concert."

You know an "artist" sucks when he's the official singer-songwriter of the current political regime. Here in Spain, there are several alleged artists--Llach, Sabina, Serrat, Ramoncin, and that lot, of whom Raimon is probably the worst--who pretended to be all radical back in the Sixties but never actually got beat up themselves. Now all those parlor-pinko lefty chuckleheads who think they were cool back in the good old days pretend to like these clapped-out used-up old farts.

The thing about Raimon is he cannot sing, he cannot play the guitar, he cannot write melodies, and his lyrics are stupid.

2008-05-22T16:48:00.002+02:00

Judith Miller has a long piece in City Journal on ETA and terrorism in Spain. Go read it. There are a few small inaccuracies, but there are also some things I didn't know, such as the following paragraph:

American intelligence and counterterrorism officials have repeatedly traveled to Madrid, American officials say, to urge the Spanish government to close loopholes that international terrorists have exploited in its legal system, reduce the self-defeating envy among Spain’s warring police forces, improve police training, and step up bilateral and multilateral counterterrorism cooperation. Some of this has occurred. Spain recently approved the stationing of an NYPD detective in Madrid to monitor counterterrorist operations. But most U.S. pleas have had limited impact, perhaps hampered by the tension between Washington and Madrid over Iraq and other issues.

2008-05-22T14:51:00.004+02:00

PP infighting news: Maria San Gil will not stand for reelection as the Basque PP leader; that is, she's getting out of the way. Very responsible, and worthy of Ms. San Gil, famous for her courage and honesty. She's receiving support from Gustavo de Aristegui, an intelligent man who is the PP's shadow minister for foreign affairs, and former Prime Minister Aznar's wife, Ana Botella, a Madrid city councilwoman. De Aristegui said, "Rajoy is makeing a profound mistake," which is pretty strong language when you're talking about your own party's leader. Rajoy, meanwhile, got support from Andalusian PP boss Javier Arenas.

Drugs and alcohol update: Of Catalan high-school students between 14 and 18, within the last month, 25% have consumed cannabis, 3.5% have consumed unprescribed prescription drugs, 31% have consumed tobacco, 61% have consumed alcohol, and 2.6% have consumed cocaine. Where do teenagers get enough money to buy cocaine?

Well, those little bastards, the Barcelona street criminals, have killed somebody. They bag-snatched an 80-year-old woman, a Danish tourist, and threw her to the ground on Tuesday. She was taken to the hospital, where she went into a coma, and she died yesterday. The cops say it's going to be almost impossible to find the murderer--under Kansas law, anyway, this is capital murder, committed during the commission of a felony--unless somebody talks. What cowards, victimizing old women who can't defend themselves. I vote we hang them, but you already knew that.

They arrested two more people for Internet kiddie porn here in Spain, where punks mug old ladies with impunity, but at least we round up pervo pederasts by the dozen. Get this: One of these pervs is a pediatrician. Glad I didn't send my kid to him.

The Euribor, the Eurozone's base interest rate, hit 5%, and oil has hit $135 a barrel. This means higher mortgage payments and higher food and gasoline prices, so it's time to pull in the old belt a notch or two.

What America should do: Reduce energy dependence on the Middle East. Despite the drawbacks, with oil this high, using ethanol makes sense. We have enormous coal reserves; let's use them. Drill in Alaska: it's an enormous place and a few oil wells are not going to drive polar bears into extinction. And it's not like anyone lives north of the Brooks Range. Wind power makes sense with oil this high, as well, and there are lots of windy places in Kansas where nobody lives where they could put up thousands of windmills. Build state-of-the-art nuclear plants; the risk is negligible though the cost is high. Sure, all this is going to cost money, but I'll bet private corporations could more than handle it.

Today it's Corpus Christi, and in an ancient Barcelonese tradition, they place an blown-out egg on top of the stream of water shooting up from the fountain in the Cathedral cloister, along with a dozen other medieval churches. The stream of water elevates the egg and it "dances," held up by the water. It's called "l'ou com balla," and is definitely worth having a look at if you're in town.

Get this: Nearly half of all Spaniards do not shower every day, according to a Proctor and Gamble survey. And with water restrictions, it's only going to get worse this summer.

2008-05-22T14:08:00.002+02:00

Today La Vanguardia has nothing in the news pages on the Catalan consultant-reports corruption scandal, not surprisingly. However, Francesc de Carreras has an opinion piece buried back on page 20 in the print edition, the first opinion piece I've seen on this issue. They don't link to it from their website.

Remember, while reading, that the major issue in Catalan politics has been the new regional statute, which is supposed to make sure that Catalonia gets the same amount in government services as it pays out in taxes. Catalan nationalists' justification for this is that the regional government, the Generalitat, is badly financed and does not receive enough tax money to pass out in pork-barrel spending.

De Carreras points out that some of the reports commissioned had titles like "Ten arguments in favor of non-sexist toys" and "Design for a parcheesi board and jigsaw puzzle made from cardboard";

that 70% of the reports were billed at less than €12,000 and therefore not subject to competitive bidding;

that the Generalitat's budget for this year is €33 billion;

that the Generalitat has paid the Platform in Favor of Catalan National Sports Teams over €4 million in the past five years, along with the rent on a luxurious office, and just day before yesterday they received €1.2 million more;

that in 2007 the Generalitat subsidized pro-Catalanist organizations outside of Catalonia with more than €2 million;

that they gave €2.9 million last October and €625,000 just last week to the La Bressola Foundation in order to provide Catalan classes for 600 students in schools IN FRANCE;

that the Generalitat employed 126,510 civil servants in 2003, and 178,948 in 2007, an increase of more than 50,000 in four years;

that the Generalitat is opening "embassies" in foreign capitals, including Berlin (already open), London, Paris, New York, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and Peking;

and that Generalitat-owned TV3 gives discounts of up to 95% to certain favored advertisers.

His conclusion: "This is happening just at the very moment (the Generalitat) is asking for a new financing system due to the insufficiencies of the previous one...Is the Generalitat badly-financed or does it waste money and pay off its clients?"

La Vanguardia doesn't have room in its news pages for this story, but they have plenty of space for Robert Fisk, in a news story titled "Where will the madness end?" on page 8, not labeled either analysis or opinion, to vomit hatred for President Bush and Israel and cheer on Islamist terrorists.

Says Fisk: "This George W. Bush declared in Jerusalem that 'Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas will be defeated because the Muslims in the whole region recognize the inanities of the terrorist perspective and the illegitimacy of their cause.' But where will this madness end? At what point do words lose their meaning? Al Qaeda is not being defeated. Hezbollah just won an internal war in Lebanon with similar dimensions to the victory of Hamas in Gaza. Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Gaza are horrendous disasters. But this stupid and pitiless dunce of a man has lied to the world again...he explains the benefits of Israeli democracy to the world, as if the Palestinians benefit from a democracy that continues taking the land that they have owned for generations away from them."

Interestingly, they don't have a link to the Fisk story on their website either.

2008-05-21T15:19:00.004+02:00

Catalan "consultant reports" corruption scandal news: The 1583 reports were commissioned by the Catalan government in 2007 alone. They include a one-page report billed at €11,999 (€12,000 is the line above which government contracts are subject to competitive bidding), many reports cut-and-pasted from Internet, and many invoices made out blank, without the recipient's name appearing on the bill.

Others include a €28,000 report on a species of clam, a €11,965 report on the cultivation of tiger nuts ("chufas"), and a €150,000 37-page report on Chinese culture.

And there are those damn tiger nuts again.

Among the "consultants" paid are the former Communist deputy in the Catalan parliament, Bet Font, and ERC Girona leader Enric Pujol Casanovas. Health counselor Marina Geli paid €29,999 in advance for a report on family medicine and €11,999 to create a "virtual library." Neither report has yet been received.

CiU says that during its last year in power, 2003, it paid consultants €67 million, while in 2007 the Pink-Red-Brown-Green Tripartite coalition paid them €317 million.

La Vanguardia buried this story on Page 16, giving it about a quarter of a page. And, get this, it's not even on their website, so I can't link to it. I'm appalled but not surprised, since La Vanguardia is also part of the Catalan influence-peddling endogamic system of political machine clientelism. I wish La Vangua would publicly announce how much money it receives from local and regional governments for the thousands of subscriptions they buy; I will bet they pay for at least 10,000, and maybe double that. A yearly subscription to La Vangua costs €360, so you do the math.

In addition, neither El Periodico, nor El Pais, nor Avui links to the story. Wonder how many subscriptions the Generalitat buys from them.

Meanwhile, Zap's goverment passed the Dependents Law last year as one of its major social programs: "severe dependents" (that is, retarded, disabled, senile, etc. people) are supposed to receive benefits, an average of €516 a month, each.

Great, I'm all for it. I believe it's part of the social contract that we help the weakest among us, and I think it's the government's job to make sure it happens. And for €516 a month, you can have a caregiver come in a couple of hours every day, or you can feed your grandma pork chops and fresh fish instead of weenies, or you can send your disabled kid to special physical therapy. As Rosa's primary caregiver during the last nine months of her life, I can tell you that such things make an enormous difference in the dependent's quality of life.

So 23,000 severe dependents in Catalonia, have not received their Dependents Law benefits yet, though the law has been in effect for a year now. That's more than a third of them. Carme Capdevila, of ERC, the Generalitat's counselor (=cabinet minister) for Social Action, admitted that there have been delays in implementing the program, because, you see, a year is just not enough time to put a law into practice.

Carme Capdevila, in case you don't remember, is one of the seven Generalitat counselors under investigation in the consultant report scandal. So she had time to make sure that her party's clients got the kickbacks they had coming, but not enough to make sure that all the severe dependents got their benefits before a year had passed.

2008-05-21T14:41:00.002+02:00

Big ETA news: The French police, in a coordinated French-Spanish operation, arrested four ETA members in Bordeaux last night at about 11:30. These are big fish, the leaders of ETA's political branch, and Francisco Javier López Peña is the biggest of them all. Interior minister Rubalcaba said that López Peña is the bull goose etarra, the leader of both the political and operational branches.

He was known to have been, at one time or another, ETA's political leader, in charge of ETA's weapons cache, in charge of ETA training, and in charge of ETA safe houses in France. López Peña was part of the ETA delegation that met with the Zap government in December 2006, and he is thought to be the leader of the faction that decided to break the most recent ETA alleged truce (March-December 2006) with the Barajas bombing.

The other three etarras arrested were also members of the leadership of ETA's political branch. They are Ainhoa Ozaeta, the daughter-in-law of notorious ETA boss "Josu Ternera," who was the masked etarra who read ETA's March 2006 "truce" communiqué; Igor Suberbiola, who planned a series of 2004 bombings and who already had a warrant out for him; and Jon Salaberría, a former leader of the ETA youth brigade Jarrai and an ex-member of the Basque parliament from ETA's front party Batasuna.

The four were captured while meeting in a safe house in Bordeaux; each was carrying a pistol, they had a small amount of explosives, and they also had a lot of files and documents, which should prove very useful.

This morning the former Batasuna mayor of Andoain, José Antonio Barandiaran Ezama, was arrested. He is alleged to have met with the four arrested terrorists. The person who rented the Bordeaux safe house has also been arrested. I will bet that a whole string of arrests will happen within the last couple of days. And you know everybody in ETA is scrambling right now, because a load of evidence has just dropped into the laps of the police.

This is a major step along the way to destroying ETA.

2008-05-20T15:33:00.002+02:00

Spanish political news: Pacifist defense minister Carme Chacon gave birth yesterday in Barcelona to a boy named Miguel. Interior minister Rubalcaba will take over her duties while she is on maternity leave. Zap and Basque premier Ibarretxe had a meeting and they didn't agree on anything. Madrid mayor Ruiz-Gallardon announced his support for Rajoy and his move toward the center, while Aznar warned Rajoy not to abandon or ignore the right wing of the PP. Looks like Gallardon will be the next PP secretary-general.

Spain's carbon-dioxide emissions are up 1.8% over last year. Since 1990, Spain's CO2 emissions have increased 52%, while the Kyoto Protocol permits an increase of only 15%. It's a good thing Zap's prime minister, because he's an ecologist who believes in the Kyoto Treaty to the point that he criticizes George Bush for not signing it. You can really tell that reducing pollution is one of Zap's top priorities.

Another Spanish justice system disaster. You won't believe this one. A young man named Daniel, from Lleida, raped six women at the age of 14. They sent him to juvie in Barcelona, where they allowed him out on furlough, and he raped eleven more women. So in 2002, they sent him to five years of prison, where he held a knife on a fellow inmate and forced him to perform fellatio. Now his five-year sentence is up, and his fifteen-month sentence for the prison rape runs out in October. Daniel has refused to participate in any sort of rehabilitation, and the prosecutor's office considers him "highly dangerous."

So the National Court has decided to release him now. This unrehabilitated serial rapist should obviously be locked up for life far away from the rest of society. If Spain's justice system won't do that, then there is something seriously wrong with it. I would suggest that the PP should pick up this issue and bash Zap around the head with it repeatedly.

National Health disaster update: Another patient died at the 12 de Octubre hospital in Madrid of a hospital-acquired bacterial infection, this time staphylococcus aureus. Looks like the 12 de Octubre hospital features a variety of bacteria to infect its patients with.

The Catalan corporation Abertis, in a consortium with La Caixa and Citigroup, has won the bidding to manage the Pennsylvania Turnpike for the next 75 years for a total of €8.3 billion. Abertis's most important businesses are turnpike and airport management, along with logistics. The Barcelona savings bank giant La Caixa owns nearly 29% of Abertis, and is the company's largest stockholder.

Note: The Spanish toponyms for American states are usually the same as in English. Exceptions: The states whose names include "New," which is "Nuevo/a," the ones that include a direction (e.g. "Dakota del Norte"), Pennsylvania ("Pensílvania"), Missouri ("Misuri"), Mississippi ("Misisipí"), Louisiana ("Luisiana"), Hawaii ("Hawai"), and sometimes Texas ("Tejas"). Frequently the Spanish pronunciation is quite different, even when the spelling is the same; for example, Virginia is "Beer-HEEN-ee-ah," and Georgia is "Hay-ORE-hee-ah."

2008-05-19T15:35:00.002+02:00

United States Senators who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned segregation in all public services, whether publicly or privately owned:

Republicans:

Tower, TX
Hickenlooper, IA
Goldwater, AZ
Mechem, NM
Simpson, WY
Cotton, NH

Democrats:

Russell, GA
Harry F. Byrd, Sr., VA
Ellender, LA
Hill, AL
Eastland, MS
McClellan, AR
Fulbright, AR
Johnston, SC
Holland, FL
Robertson, VA
Sparkman, AL
Stennis, MS
Long, LA
Smathers, FL
Gore, TN
Ervin, NC
Thurmond, SC
Talmadge, GA
Robert Byrd, WV
Walters, TN

Robert Byrd is notoriously still in the Senate. Fulbright is the scholarship guy. Gore is Al Gore's dad. Thurmond is the one who lived to be 100. Ervin is the Watergate guy. Long is one of the Long dynasty.

2008-05-19T12:39:00.005+02:00

ETA again: They set off a truck-bomb loaded with 60 kilos of explosives on the beachfront street in Guecho (Getxo), Vizcaya, at 1 AM today. They called in a warning an hour before the bomb went off, so nobody was hurt. For a big explosion--it left a crater a foot deep and six across--it did surprisingly little structural damage.

Constitutional Court confusion: Justice Roberto Garcia-Calvo, a conservative, died suddenly yesterday, leaving another vacancy among the court's twelve members. The Court had been divided six to six between "progressives" and "conservatives," with the progressive Chief Justice breaking ties. No one knows who's going to replace Garcia-Calvo, especially since four of the current Justices' terms expired in December and the PSOE and PP haven't been able to agree on who'll replace them, either.

Here in Catalonia the focus is, of course, on the controversial Catalan statute of autonomy (= regional constitution), which was passed by the Catalan and Spanish parliaments, but which has been held up by judicial appeals from both the opposition PP and from other Spanish regions. With Garcia-Calvo dead, the "progressives" would have an advantage if a decision on the statute were to be made now. Which is highly unlikely.

The Spanish construction sector's production was down 10% from a year ago as of March, the highest drop in the EU; the EU average is a mere 0.1% decline.

72% of Spanish soccer fans would rather watch soccer than have sex, which might have something to do with the birth rate around here.

ERC Catalunacy: Pepelu Carod-Rovira is going to Portugal to request support for Catalan independence. Why would he possibly think he's going to get any? Meanwhile, accused embezzler and influence-peddler Joan Puigcercos wants to be the party's candidate in the 2010 regional election so he can get Catalonia all ready for independence in 2014.

Defense Minister Carme Chacon said yesterday, "I am a pacifist woman, and the Army is pacifist too."

They had a big old demonstration in Amposta, a small Catalan city on the Ebro River, against sending any of their precious liquid to keep us clean and hydrated here in Barcelona. As usual in Spain, the organizers and the authorities claimed radically different turnouts; this time the organizers said 35,000 and the authorities said 6000. The selfishness is appalling, since the Ebro Valley towns and farms don't need the water to be sent to Barcelona through the new "mini-transfer" aqueduct supposedly already under construction. The whole point of sending this Ebro water to Barcelona is that Barcelona is buying the excess water that the Ebro Valley farmers aren't going to use.

I bet the murder in Reus becomes a big stink; the victim was a law-abiding citizen, a 37-year-old engineer from a nearby small town, while the alleged killer is a Spanish gypsy. That is not going to go over well around here, where gypsies are stereotyped as knife-wielding criminals. Which some of them are.

The Spanish First Division soccer season is over. Real Madrid is champion; other Champions League teams next year are Villarreal, Barça, and Atletico de Madrid; Racing, Sevilla, and Valencia (Cup champion) will play the UEFA Cup; and Levante, Murcia, and Zaragoza are relegated to Second. Just wait till next year. Meanwhile, this summer we'll have the Eurocup to keep us entertained.

2008-05-18T13:20:00.004+02:00

The PSOE has decided to grab onto the immigration issue, since their surveys tell them it's the PP's strongest weapon against them. Get this: the PSOE promises to "guarantee respect for social norms that, before the arrival of immigrants, our society had never seen broken, in such important areas as housing, quality of life, commerce, opening hours, or the use of public space, which have suffered evident tensions because of the arrival of foreigners coming from different cultures." They also promised to "prioritize employment for Spaniards." Yet Socialist deputy prime minister De la Vega just made a fool out of herself by criticizing Italian immigration policy as racist and xenophobic.

Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Moratinos announced that he wanted to "take ambitious steps" to make Spain's relationship with the US "deeper and more profound." Unfortunately, Zap took a couple of ambitious steps in the other direction a few years ago which are going to keep bilateral relations cool as long as he's prime minister.

The Ted Kennedy story is getting play over here; of course, it's news only because he's a Kennedy. If some other Democratic senator had a couple of seizures and was hospitalized, it wouldn't be trans-Atlantic newsworthy.

Another thing that's getting massive press is the 40th anniversary of May 1968. Every newspaper is literally devoting entire pages every day to romanticizing a bunch of pseudorevolutionary middle-class mama's boys. I'll spare you the reminiscences of those who claim to have been in Paris at the time. May 1968 has to be the most overrated historical event ever, since it changed absolutely nothing.

Relatives of the 14 alleged terrorists arrested in January for plotting suicide bomb attacks in the Barcelona subway, among other places, held a demo demanding their release. The high point was when a young daughter of one of the arrestees made a weepy plea for her daddy's freedom. They got a mere 200 people out, which shows that almost everyone is happy that these guys are behind bars because at least in jail they can't blow us up. Naturally, our friends the Communists, along with the rest of Barcelona's trendy suicidal extreme left, helped them organize it.

Sometimes I can't believe the crazy shit that gets talked up around here. The Basque Parliament has passed a resolution accusing the Socialist Zap Spanish government of torturing ETA prisoners. Can you imagine an American state legislature passing a resolution accusing the federal government of torturing, say, that lot in Guantanamo?

National Health hospital infections update: A court ruled that the Madrid regional government had to pay an indemnity of €90,000 to the family of a baby girl who died of the pseudomona aureginosa bacterium contracted at the 12 de Octubre hospital. In the US a jury would award them at least $9 million.

Remember the Great Barcelona Blackout of last summer? The city's electrical system won't be completely repaired until June, a mere eleven months after the breakdown.

You may have heard that the Spanish cops arrested five hackers--it made the American press--who were going around breaking into other people's websites, including the US government's. Don't worry, they're not ideologically oriented, they tried breaking into everybody's site, including that of the Spanish Communist Party; they substituted caricatures of Rajoy and Zap for the Commie website's content.

Get this headline from El Pais: "Woody Allen fills Barcelona with intelligence." Seems Woody's Made in BCN movie has been released. Penelope Cruz is in it, which is the only reason to pirate it when it comes out on DVD; I wouldn't bother paying to get in at the theater. I think the last Woody Allen movie I liked was "Annie Hall."

Lynching in Reus, right here in Catalonia: A mob of six to ten persons were chasing two men through the streets at 4 AM in the city's downtown. One of the men tripped, was caught, and was stabbed to death. The press is not reporting the ethnicity of those involved.

Barça finished its regular season last night with a 3-5 victory in Murcia, already sentenced to relegation to the second division. The press is unanimous that this was a season to forget. Eto'o is leaving, along with Ronaldinho, Deco, Zambrotta, and company. Marquez will stay because Milito is out until at least January. Supposedly Alves and Keita have already been signed from Sevilla, and Piqué from Man United. Champions Real Madrid play relegated Levante tonight, but the club owes the Levante players millions of euros in back pay, and they've threatened to strike.

2008-05-18T12:56:00.002+02:00

I found out what happened re: gunfire here in Gracia. Just before dawn on Friday, a car tried to escape a police roadblock on the Travesera de Dalt, headed down Torrent de les Flors, and the cops fired on the car near the corner of Torrent and Legalitat. The car stopped and those inside were arrested; the driver was an Iraqi. Nothing to do with terrorism, we have been assured.

I don't think it was a very good idea for the police to shoot at a car in the middle of Europe's most crowded residential neighborhood, unless the car contained extremely bad people who could not possibly be allowed to get away. If these guys were just car thieves or hash smugglers, they should have kept the guns holstered.

2008-05-16T16:47:00.002+02:00

Here's some nice Spanish racism from El Correo Gallego via our compadre Colin Davies. Yes, you're right, this cartoon was published in a mainstream newspaper, not in the Ku Klux Klan Kronikle. It's a reference to De la Vega's outburst of horror in Niger after being photographed with a Nigerese businessman and his three wives.

2008-05-16T14:31:00.007+02:00

There was gunfire early this morning on Calle Torrent de les Flors two blocks away from my house; when I went down to the café with my newspaper and the dog, there were three cop cars and they had the street blocked off. Nobody seems to know what happened, whether anyone was hurt or why the guy did it. There is a consensus that it's got nothing to do with terrorism. The local press hasn't picked up on it yet.

Gracia is a very peaceful place but we do have the occasional murder; within the last three or four years an Argentinian girl was knifed by her boyfriend, an old guy murdered his wife over on Principe de Asturias street, there was a Chinese mob killing at a restaurant on Calle Providencia, and some psycho murdered two women at a parking garage just the other side of Plaza Lesseps. The wildest one was when this guy fell in love with a prostitute and shot her Albanian pimp at a bar in the Plaza Rius i Taulet; the pimp survived. ("Just like in the movies," everyone said.) All that sounds pretty bad, but remember we've got 200,000 people packed in here; we've got the highest population density of all Barcelona neighborhoods, and Barcelona is the most densely populated city in Europe.

The boat people continue arriving; this morning a boat containing 76 black African illegal immigrants washed up in Almeria, and another boat with 26 more was found off the Granada coast. These voyages across the Mediterranean from Morocco are much safer than the attempts to reach the Canaries from the Mauritanian and Senegalese coasts. It's still a shame and a tragedy, and what we in the West can do to help is stop interfering with their commerce. Put an end to protectionist tariffs and stop subsidizing our own producers, especially farmers. That's the best way to help out the Third World: give them a chance to compete.

ETA update: They seem to have re-established their car bomb factory in France; the French cops raided their last one in September 2007 and confiscated 400 kilos of explosives. It's thought that the new bomb workshop cell turned the van-bomb over to the Vizcaya operational cell, who proceeded to set it off in Legutiano yesterday. They tried something similar last year in Logroño, but the bomb didn't go off, as ETA's bomb-making expert, Luis Ignacio Iruretagoyena, who made the enormous Barajas bomb that destroyed an entire concrete parking garage, had already been arrested during the French roundup. Since then ETA has only exploded small, amateurish bombs, since they didn't have the explosives or expertise to make big ones. Until yesterday.

More PP infighting: Now the Basque PP says it backs Rajoy against Maria San Gil's challenge to his leadership. That is, they're supporting the national party leader over their own regional party leader. This can only strengthen Rajoy's position.

Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega has made a damn fool out of herself again. There's been a backlash in Italy against Romanians in general and Romanian gypsies in particular. There are 550,000 legal Romanian immigrants in Italy, and 195,000 illegals. Among them are 42,000 Romanian gypsies, and also 28,000 Yugoslavian gypsies. As usual, there has been a populist working-class backlash against them, exacerbated by several well-publicized crimes; the ones that angered many Italians were when a Romanian gypsy woman tried to steal a baby from another woman's arms, and three rape-murders committed by Romanians. Gypsy camps have been burned by mobs in Naples. This is a problem.

So the Berlusconi government in Italy is setting up three police brigades specifically to deal with gypsies, one in Milan, one in Rome, and one in Naples. Yesterday morning the Italian cops rounded up 400 illegals and deported a bunch of them, and more raids are coming.

Racism? That's a factor, but no country is free of racism. Especially, no European country is free of anti-gypsy racism; Spain is notorious for it. The problem is that there's some justification for disliking many gypsies, especially some of the Romanians, who even the Spanish gypsies fear. Many gypsies just do not follow the rules of European society; it's not their different but harmless customs and beliefs that are disliked, it's the stealing and bullying and drug dealing and throwing garbage around and begging and abusing women and not working.

Anyway, De la Vega felt it necessary to spout off about Italian internal affairs, and accused Berlusconi of "exalting violence, racism, and xenophobia." She added that she disagrees with the deportations "because it does not respect the law and the rights of immigrants. Our government repudiates violence, racism, and xenophobia, and therefore cannot accept what is happening in Italy."

Oh, shut up, you self-righteous ninny. Take a look at the La Mina gypsy neighborhood here in Barcelona if you want to find a few social problems that your Socialist government might want to do something about.

In the mood for some irony? La Vanguardia says today that "integration is a failure in Catalan schools." Half of the immigrant children in Catalonia would have to be forcibly transferred to another school in order to desegregate. Some public schools have become effectively ghettos for immigrant children, because when the tipping point of immigrant students is reached, all the Spanish parents pull their kids out of the school. 85% of immigrant children in Catalonia go to public schools, and so the nice, white, often Catholic (which equals no Muslims) private schools are the obvious refuge. Funny, I thought "white flight" was only a problem in racist countries like the United States and Britain, and that moral, high-minded people like Spaniards would never succumb to it.

Example: In the working-class Fondo neighborhood in the Barcelona suburb of Santa Coloma, the percentage of immigrant children is 35%. One public elementary school there is 69% immigrants. The neighborhood "concerted" (fee-charging Catholic school that receives state subsidies) elementary school has only 4% immigrant children.

Reality tops Viz. Viz is a vulgar English comic magazine that features the running character Eight Ace. Eight Ace is a pathetic alcoholic addicted to Ace beer, which goes for one pound forty-nine an eight-pack at Mr. Patel's off-license down the street. His family, which includes his violent wife and an indeterminate but large number of children, lives in a shack on the edge of town, though Eight's wife often makes him sleep in the shed, especially when he urinates on himself, which is usually.

In every episode, Eight tries to reform, and he's well on the way to becoming an upstanding citizen, when somehow the sum of one pound forty-nine reaches his hands. Eight can't resist the call of the Ace, and he backslides yet again, gets beaten up by his wife, and is forced to sleep among the debris in the front yard once more. My favorite was when he decided to be a good father and took his kids to the zoo, but unfortunately people had thrown 1.49 in change into the crocodile pen. The last frame shows a horribly mangled Eight, leaving a trail of blood behind him, dragging himself down to Mr. Patel's.

Naturally, of course, there's no beer in England called Ace, and definitely no beer in England that goes for less than five pounds for six cans down at the off-license. But here in Barcelona, in today's La Vanguardia, Caprabo has an ad advertising Aurum beer, which I've never heard of before, at 18 euro-cents a can. A little multiplication means that an eight-pack would cost €1.44. And if we convert that into pounds--one euro is about 0.8 pounds--an eight-pack of Aurum would set our man Eight back by only one pound fifteen. Amazing. Eight cans of beer for one pound fifteen. Eight ought to move down here, he'd save money in the long run.

2008-05-15T14:47:00.002+02:00

In case you haven't noticed, I figured out how to make the polls stay open for longer than a week, so you can now vote in all of them if you scroll down and look on the right side.

2008-05-14T19:22:00.000+02:00

Tragedy update: Now they're talking 20,000 dead in China and 100,000 dead in Burma, with 1.5 million people in danger of death from hunger, disease, and exposure. When are we going to start bombing Burma with parachute-loads of rice and medicines? To hell with the junta and what they want us to do. Slate has two pieces worth reading, an Anne Applebaum denunciation of the Burmese junta and an explanation of how disaster casualties are estimated.

Al Qaeda is making Internet threats to carry out bombings in Switzerland and Austria during this summer's soccer Eurocup. Let me point out that both Switzerland and Austria are constitutionally neutral nations, that neither has troops outside its borders, that neither is a member of NATO or an American ally, that neither is participating in the Iraq or Afghanistan occupations, and that neither is especially pro-Israeli. Many people in Spain still don't get the basic fact that Islamist terrorism wants to kill us all or force us to submit. Zap: Spain is still a target and don't forget it.

Spain news: Rajoy and Zap are making a show of unity in the wake of the ETA bombing in Alava. We'll see how long this lasts. Maria San Gil is not going to get on the bus: she had a meeting with Rajoy and told him that she has no confidence in his leadership. The price of rented flats in Spain increased by almost exactly the inflation rate, 4.2%, over the last year, so while sale prices are dropping, rental prices are holding.

The water wars continue: Aragon wants the Zap administration to halt construction of the aqueduct that is to carry water from the Ebro to Barcelona. The European Central Bank says the eurozone countries are going to go through "a prolonged period of inflation." Remember that Alan Greenspan said it might be necessary to sacrifice growth in order to hold inflation down. Fallout from the housing market: The Barcelona real estate agency Don Piso, which belongs to the developer Habitat, is going to close the 120 offices it owns and fire 350 people. They will keep their 140 franchised offices open. Habitat's yearly sales are down 66%, they lost €444 million in 2007, and they're expected to take further losses in 2008 and 2009.

Remember a few weeks ago when La Vanguardia ran a photo taken in the US of a joke sign reading "No trespassing. Violators will be shot. Survivors will be shot again," and everybody went wild about gun-nut Americans and their violent society? Well, today they ran a photo taken in Sant Boi of a sign reading "All dogs that shit here will be exterminated," that was then rectified to "The owners of all dogs that shit here will be exterminated." No one is going wild about how violent Catalan society is, though.

Speaking of violence, I came across this Wikipedia entry; it's a list of murder rates around the world, and it includes a color-coded illustrative map. According to Wikipedia, these are the most recently available national murder rates per 100,000 people; they're from between 2004 and 2006. I've selected a few of them:

El Salvador 55
Jamaica 49
Venezuela 45
South Africa 41
Colombia 37
Brazil 27
Russia 17
Mexico 13
Argentina 9.5
Thailand 8.5
United States 5.9
Spain 3.4
Switzerland 2.9
United Kingdom 2.0
Canada 1.9
France 1.6
Japan 1.1
Germany 1.0

So Spain is actually more violent than the UK, and not that far behind the US. By the way, many countries are not included in the list, including China and India, as well as most of Africa and a good part of Asia.

The homicide rate in the US is actually a good bit lower than it was in the "good old days." Except for an unusually peaceful period between 1947 and 1968, the American murder rate has always been high. In 1916 it was 6.5, in 1921 it was 8.1, in 1928 8.6, in 1933 9.7, in 1939 6.4, in 1946 6.4, in 1969 7.3, in 1974 9.8, and in 1980 10.2. It declined dramatically in the mid-1990s to more or less the current level.

2008-05-14T14:18:00.004+02:00

Pilar Rahola is angry, and she has a devastating piece titled "Apology for terrorism in Barcelona" in La Vanguardia today. The Barcelona Council of Youth, which receives large government subsidies, has invited Leila Khaled to speak on "the Palestinian cause." Ms. Khaled, in case you didn't know, is a member of the Marxist-Leninist PFLP terrorist gang, and was involved in several notorious hijackings in the early '70s. Khaled's speeches include such statements as, "Negotiations are useless. The occupation will only be ended by armed struggle."

Says Rahola:

The problem, unfortunately, is not that in Palestine there are people who support bombing schools, buses, and weddings with the sole goal of indiscriminately killing civilians in order to sow terror. The problem is that this kind of individual receives the support of Catalan organizations, is invited with public money, and is allowed to give speeches that are evidently apologies for terrorism.

Of the many Palestinians that the Barcelona Council of Youth could have invited, the brilliant members of the Council decided to choose one of the most hate-filled voices in the history of Palestine, only surpassed by some Hamas leaders. The most tragic thing is that Leila Khaled's party, which is classified as terrorist by the European Union and the US Department of State, has always defended European terrorism, and it has a historical relationship with the IRA. In Barcelona, thanks to the support of institutions like the Barcelona City Council and the Catalan Department of Interior, today speeches can be made that justify and defend terrorism as a means of conflict resolution.

The question is as simple as it is ugly: after Leila Khaled, will our worthy Barcelona Youth Council invite an ETA member to speak about the necessity of armed struggle? What does the Council consider to be terrorism? Does it depend on whether they kill us or kill others? Is killing Israelis an epic feat and killing Spaniards tragic? And what does the radical position of a leader of a Palestinian terrorist organization have to do with the problems of the youth of Barcelona?

The vision of the lunatic Left, which confuses solidarity with nihilism, and believes that defending the Palestinian cause means defending Palestinian bombs, is delirious. In their twisted view of the conflict, they do not realize that many Palestinian parents are horrified at the idea that their children might be entrapped by terrorism. So today, in the city of Barcelona, paid for with public money, someone who is a hijacker, who defends terrorism, and who does not believe in a negotiated peace, will give a speech. If this is the Council's idea of teaching values to our youth, then it's time to flush the toilet.

It's especially ironic that Khaled will speak today, the same day that ETA murdered a Civil Guard in the Basque Country with a car bomb.

In case you'd like to see some vile Spanish anti-Semitic Israel-bashing, check out this cartoon by Ferreres, who is lower than what you scrape off your shoes after you walk through a barnyard, in yesterday's El Periodico. There are two Israeli soldiers holding automatic rifles on blindfolded Palestinians on their knees in front of a high wall with a watchtower flying a pirate flag. The first soldier says, "Sixty years ago our free state was born democratically." The second soldier says, "We invited those who lived here to leave. Democratically, of course. But it looks like some of them didn't understand."

2008-05-14T13:01:00.004+02:00

ETA bombing update: They used a car bomb loaded with more thn 100 kilos of explosives. The explosion scattered debris in a radius of 100 meters. Serious damage was done to the barracks. The four wounded officers are in good condition at the hospital; one was trapped in the wreckage for two hours, and is currently in intensive care, but he's going to live. The cops found the car the terrorists escaped in; it was booby-trapped and the bomb squad deactivated a gasoline incendiary bomb. Can we please not negotiate with these terrorists ever again?

Electricity prices, which are regulated by the government in Spain, are going up; the National Energy Commission has approved an 11.3% rate hike to take effect in July. Econ minister Pedro Solbes says the administration will almost certainly sign off on the increase. The problem is that electricity rates are fixed by the government below the market price, and the utilities are €5 billion in the hole this year and €15 billion all totaled. It just doesn't work to force businesses to charge less than cost price for their goods. Looks like we're going to have to do a bit of belt-tightening around here, with higher mortgage rates, high food and gasoline prices, increased unemployment, and low economic growth. Every boom has its bust.

Speaking of which, Spanish GDP growth in the first trimester of 2008 was 2.7%; it was 3.5% in the last trimester of 2007. Solbes is calling it "rapid deceleration." Good news: Telefonica posted a €1.5 billion profit for the trimester, which will help out everybody's pension plan and mutual funds.

PP news: Maria San Gil has threatened to resign as PP president in the Basque Country if Rajoy doesn't move away from his new moderate position on regional nationalisms. Ms. San Gil, we all respect your courage and decency, but we've lost two elections in a row and something's got to change. Either get on the bus or get out of the way with as little fuss as possible. She has, by the way, ruled out challenging Rajoy for party leadership at the June convention.

Remember the Jose Couso case? He was the journalist killed in Baghdad when the Americans took the city back in 2003. He was pointing a camera out the window of the Palestine Hotel in central Baghdad and an American tank fired on him, thinking he was an enemy fighter or spotter. His family and the Spanish far left have never stopped trying to take the US Army, and specifically the three soldiers involved in Couso's death, to court in Spain for "murdering" him. So Spain's National Court has just thrown out their case for the second time. Maybe they'll get the message now: we're sorry he got killed, but bad things that are not crimes happen in battles.

Barça report: There's a movement taking shape to call a no-confidence motion against club president Joan Laporta. I bet it doesn't work. Supposedly they've already signed Alves from Sevilla, they're interested in Hleb and Drogba, they've offered Ronaldinho, Zambrotta, and €20 million to Milan for Kaká, and Puyol is mad and is talking about leaving.

2008-05-14T11:08:00.002+02:00

Breaking news: ETA has killed again. They exploded a car bomb at the Guardia Civil barracks in Legutiano, Alava, killing one Guardia and wounding four, at 3 AM today. The murdered man´s name is Juan Manuel Piñuel Villalón; he was 41, married, with two children. One of the wounded was trapped in the wreckage for two hours. Two of the wounded Guardias are women.

ETA must be destroyed.

2008-05-13T21:30:00.002+02:00

Wow. The Associated Press has a piece on Barcelona's water problems, and Fox News's site is giving it some play. The local press is not going to like this at all:

Spain's worst drought in decades forced the proud city of Barcelona to start shipping in drinking water Tuesday, an unprecedented step that business leaders bemoan as a public relations nightmare for one of Europe's top tourist destinations.

A Panamanian-flagged tanker loaded with water docked in Spain's second-largest city, launching a mission by an emergency, six-vessel flotilla scheduled to operate for at least three months.

Tuesday's scene was humbling for Catalonia, the capital of which is Barcelona, with more than 100 journalists crowded at the dock to record the water delivery.

The region likes to say it stands out from the rest of Spain for its efficiency and economic might. But it has been among the regions hardest hit by Spain's worst springtime drought since record-keeping began 60 years ago...

The crisis is the latest in a string of embarrassments for Catalonia. Last year sink holes delayed construction of a high-speed rail line from Madrid to Barcelona, and other engineering problems with it shut down commuter rail lines for days. In July, a blackout left 350,000 people in Barcelona without power for three days.

Now Catalonia is buying extra water, even from France; some of the emergency ships will come from Marseille.

They're not going to like this one bit.

2008-05-13T17:04:00.003+02:00

Thought Americans were bad at geography? Check out this Swiss Airlines map of the Americas via Strange Maps. Among other blunders, it puts Sao Paolo in the Atlantic, San Jose, Costa Rica, in Nicaragua, and Santo Domingo and San Juan near the Cayman Islands. They don't seem to have bothered labeling Santiago de Chile. As for US cities, they've put Portland and Sacramento in Idaho, Seattle near Spokane, Indianapolis on Lake Michigan, Chicago in northern Wisconsin, Memphis south-east of Nashville, Little Rock in mid-Kentucky, Pittsburg (without the H) and Columbus on Lake Erie, Minneapolis near the Canadian border, Detroit in Lake Huron, and Oakland on the coast north of San Francisco. Washington is on the Delaware and Philadelphia on the Hudson, with New York somewhere near Springfield, Massachussetts. As for Canada, Toronto's nowhere near Lake Ontario, and Ottawa is in south Quebec.

My guess is that most people are ignorant of geography outside their own area; I've met few Europeans who know much about the world outside Europe, and few Americans who know much about the world outside America.

2008-05-13T12:30:00.006+02:00

Corruption bombshell in Catalonia. Seven regional government counselors (the equivalent of cabinet ministers in the national government) have been accused of embezzlement, influence-peddling, and abuse of power by the Catalan prosecutor's office. What they did was hire "consultants," to the tune of €32 million, to write up unnecessary reports, more than 1500 of them. This money, of course, wound up in the pockets of political clients and the bank accounts of the parties, the PSC, ERC, and ICV.

Specifically, most of the "consultants" involved are former government or party officials belonging to one of the Tripartite parties. They were all paid less than €12,000 a report; any government project that costs more than €12,000 has to be open to competitive bidding.

Those involved are: Socialists Joaquim Llena (Agriculture), Marina Geli (Health), and heavy hitter Joaquim Nadal (Public Works); from ERC, Carme Capdevila (Social Action), Joan Manel Tresserras (Culture), and Joan Puigcercós (Public Administration), who is challenging Pepelu Carod for ERC leadership; and the Communist Joan Saura (Interior), Chemical Imma Mayol's "partner."

I would like nothing more than to see Puigcercós and Saura behind bars. And I will bet this brings down the Montilla administration within a few months.

The first ship bringing in drinking water arrived at Barcelona harbor yesterday. It contains enough to provide one day's consumption for 170,000 people. There will be six ships carrying water to Barcelona, making a total of some 65 voyages a month, and costing €22 million a month. Tourists, don't worry, it looks like we won't have any water cutoffs this summer, and you can make your plans now.

The yearly inflation rate declined to 4.2% in April, which is good news. Meanwhile, new housing prices are down between 20 and 40% across Spain, and discounts of up to €40,000 are being offered. La Vanguardia thinks that demand is going to stay low until prices in Barcelona drop to an average of about €240,000, a psychological barrier since it translates to 40 million old pesetas. You can buy a nice place in a smaller city for a lot less than that; a 65 m2 flat that would go for €270,000 in the Barcelona suburb of Badalona would cost you only €150,000 in Valladolid.

Spanish oil giant Repsol earned more than €1.2 billion in the first four months of 2008. That's 37% more than last year. This is good for everybody's pension plans and mutual funds.

Split in the PP: Former defense minister Federico Trillo has joined Maria San Gil, Esperanza Aguirre, and Aznar's wife and Madrid city councilwoman Ana Botella in criticizing Rajoy and his crew's move toward appeasing the regional nationalisms in Catalonia and the Basque country. The Madrid PP is in open rebellion.

Get this, from La Vanguardia's TV critic, of all people, reacting to De la Vega's "horror" at being introduced to a Nigerese polygamist and his three wives, and the popularity of Catalan NBA forward Pau Gasol and the LA Lakers:

Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega should be very wary if she decides one day to visit the home court of the Utah Jazz, the basketball team in the semifinal playoff in the Western Conference against the Los Angeles Lakers. Because the percentage of Mormons who watch the games in Salt Lake City is very high, and therefore the possibility and danger of being photographed with a local polygamist is extremely high.

How ignorant. The mainstream Mormons banned polygamy more than 100 years ago, and 0% of the people living in Salt Lake are polygamists. There are tiny fragment splinter groups of ultra-fundamentalist Mormons living up in the remote Utah hills that practice polygamy, but they don't total more than a few thousand people, and that lot wouldn't go to a basketball game anyway.

Just a comment: The Utah Jazz and the Los Angeles Lakers are two of the dumbest team names in sports, since they don't play jazz in Utah and there are no lakes in LA. What happened is those teams moved from New Orleans and Minneapolis, respectively, and kept their original names. The name I most dislike, though, is the Buffalo Bills. How corny.

US soccer league team names win the dumbness crown, since they've been imitating European names and now we've got atrocities like FC Dallas, Real Salt Lake (what, there's a fake Salt Lake?), and DC United. What I would have done is adopt appropriate football-sounding team nicknames already used in England and Scotland. Teams could be called the Spurs, the Rovers, the Gunners, the Red Devils, the Blues, the Reds, the Wanderers, the Rangers, the Celtics, the Hammers, the Hearts, the Wolves--there are dozens of possibilities. Maybe the Chavs or the Pikeys or the Yobbos or the Spivs or the Asbos.

2008-05-12T17:05:00.003+02:00

Tragedies around the world. 7000 dead in an earthquake in Sichuan, probably 200,000 dead in Burma with the refugees locked up in concentration camps, and the Lebanese civil war has broken out again. Burma finally let the Americans send in one planeload of supplies from Thailand. Supposedly the junta is stealing half the aid that comes in. 2 million people are at risk. I vote we parachute in loads of supplies, and if the Burmese government doesn't like it there's not much they can do.

In Spain: The PP has ruled out primary elections to nominate its candidate for the 2012 election. Basque PP leader Maria San Gil has announced that she's mad at Rajoy for toning down the rhetoric on regional nationalisms, and Esperanza Aguirre is backing her. Montilla's been complaining about regional financing, wanting the share of public spending pork that the not-yet-in-force Catalan statute guarantees for Catalonia. Zap told him to shut up.

De la Vega admitted that the gender violence law has done nothing to stop gender violence. Of course not. To stop men beating up on women, you have to protect the woman and jail the man, and this is exactly what Spain is not doing. Telma Ortiz, Princess Letizia's sister, has pressed charges against 57 media outlets for not leaving her alone, as she is a private person, not a member of the royal family. Good for her. Down with the trashy press, and kudos to Ms. Ortiz for not playing the scandal magazines' game.

The rain over the weekend has the reservoirs at an average of 28% full, which means that the restrictions on watering gardens and filling swimming pools may be lifted, and that we probably won't have any cutoffs this summer. Meanwhile, the first tanker ship carrying drinking water will arrive at the port May 15.

Barça choked again last night against Mallorca in their last home game of the season, also Rijkaard's goodbye. He was well-received by the crowd, but Deco, Eto'o, and Henry got booed in what was almost certainly their last game in the Camp Nou. Ronaldinho didn't even show up. Barça got ahead 2-0 and then let Mallorca come back and score three. They're not going to get second place, either, which means they have to go through a playoff to reach next year's Champions League, and if they blow it then the club loses literally tens of millions of euros.

Everybody wants president Joan Laporta to resign. I bet he holds out. A good season next year would save his neck. If they have another disastrous season like this one, though, he's finished and so are his political aspirations.

2008-05-11T20:33:00.003+02:00

Disaster at the National Health. 18 people died in the intensive care unit at the 12 de Octubre university teaching hospital in Madrid, one of the city's most important, due to an outbreak of the Acinetobacter baumanii bacteria, which is antibiotic-resistant. Hospital management denies the patients died directly from the bacterial infection, but rather from something else. I'm not sure what the difference is; they were infected with the bacteria and they died.

El Pais says that more than 250 people were infected, 101 have died so far, and 18 of the deaths are directly attributable to the bacteria. The outbreak lasted from February 2006 to October 2007. The authorities finally tore down the ICU and built a completely new one.

Enough of a scandal has been stirred up that deputy prime minister Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega announced from Niger that the prosecutor's office would investigate.

Said Juan Carlos Montejo, an ICU doctor, "(The outbreak) should not cause alarm or call into question the health care offered, but rather teach us about an important clinical problem around the world: bacterial infections contracted in hospital are more and more resistant."

What a load of shit. If 250 people get infected over nearly two years with a deadly bacterium, the quality of the health care provided at that hospital is lousy and somebody needs to pay.

I will point out that my mother-in-law died from a generalized bacterial infection she picked up in a Barcelona National Health hospital. We gave her to them with a broken leg, and they gave her back to us dead.

This is going to be a political football, with the PSOE blaming the PP regional government in Madrid, and the PP blaming the PSOE Ministry of Health. The PP also claims that El Pais timed its report in order to distract attention from the Coslada municipal police mafia scandal, which I doubt.

De la Vega weirdness from Niger: She posed for a photo with a Nigerese businessman and three women, who later turned out to be the gentleman's wives. So De la Vega announced she was "horrified." Wait, what's the problem? It's Niger. They're Muslims. Polygamy is not only legal, but a cultural tradition. I thought Socialists were supposed to be all, like, multicultural and stuff. I really don't get the horror: has she never met a Gulf oil sheik and his entourage? Marbella's full of them.

By the way, the Nigerese businessman in question is partners with a Spanish businessman, which is why De la Vega was introduced to him. Their company processes "chufas," called tiger nuts in English, and it employs 500 women directly, while buying its chufas from some 3000 Nigerese farmers. I would say that these two guys have done more good for more people than De la Vega has in her life.

(Note: I was thinking about attempting a joke along the lines of "If my hand was full of tiger nuts, I'd let go really quick," but decided not to.)

2008-05-10T15:16:00.003+02:00

Publico, surprisingly, has a front-page editorial that I largely agree with. "Secular" ("laíco") is a fetish-word for the Jacobin European Left that goes back to the French Revolution, and all good Jacobins, anticlericals to a man, believe in the secular state. Well, I do, too, but I think my definition of "secular" may be different from theirs. I agree that there should be no established church, and that the churches should stay out of other people's business. I don't want to tear down the Catholic Church, though, and I think the anticlericals need to accept that Catholicism is one of the bases of Spanish culture.

Here's Publico's ten commandments for the secular state:

1. No more government subsidies for Church schools. Completely agreed. The problem is that Spain doesn't have enough public schools for everybody, so one-third of the kids go to "concerted" schools, Catholic schools partly funded by the state. Changing this situation would require massive investment on the part of the state.

2. No more religion classes in the public schools. Completely agreed. Right now all schools must offer classes in Catholic doctrine, which are elective for the students. If parents want their kid to get religious training, they should send their kid to a religious school, not a public one.

3. No religious symbolism at occasions of state. Completely disagree. The example they give is Calvo-Sotelo's state funeral, held at a Catholic church and presided over by a Catholic priest. Well? Calvo-Sotelo was Catholic, and that's the kind of funeral he would have wanted. Such symbolism is basically harmless. No one is offended except people who want to get offended.

4. No state presence at religious celebrations. Completely disagree. Their example is government officials in Semana Santa processions. So what? Nothing's being imposed on anybody. If you don't like Semana Santa processions, don't watch them.

5. No more state religious holidays. Absolutely, totally disagree. Why change the tradition and make everybody angry? Believe me, nothing's going to piss off the people more than removing the holiday status of Christmas. Besides, about a third of Spaniards are observant enough to do stuff like take the day off to go to church on Good Friday; might as well make the day a holiday for everyone.

6. No Catholic representatives in non-Church institutions. Completely disagree. Their examples are Army chaplains and chapels in hospitals. It makes sense to me to allow soldiers religious consolation, and to have a priest around the hospital to administer last rites. Again, nothing's being forced on anyone; you don't have to go see the chaplain if you don't want to.

7. The state should confiscate Church property. Absolutely, totally disagree. Their example is "Who does Burgos cathedral belong to, humanity or the Church?" The Church, of course. I have no problem with state subsidies for the preservation of privately owned historical treasures, and such a program is an incredibly tiny portion of the budget anyway.

8. Make apostasy easy. Agreed, but who cares? Yes, the Church should allow people who want to un-baptize themselves and take themselves off the membership rolls. But if you're an atheist, who cares if you were baptized in the first place, since you believe it's a meaningless ceremony anyway?

9. State-owned media should not televise religious programs. I agree in the sense that there should be no state-owned media, period. I disagree in the sense that some people are interested in religious programming on Sunday morning, and the customer should get what he wants. If you don't want to watch it, turn the channel over to Playboy TV or whatever you like better. Nothing's being imposed on you.

10. The Church should be 100% self-financed. Completely and totally agree, with a few tiny exceptions such as, say, government cooperation with Church homeless shelters and such things. Right now there's a check-off box on your income tax if you want to give a euro or whatever to the church; get rid of that. If you want to give the church money, do it yourself and not through the tax system.

I think it's interesting that Publico didn't mention the divorce and abortion laws, both of which include religiously-based impediments to individual decisions.

2008-05-10T01:33:00.002+02:00

I noticed that visitor traffic was way up yesterday, more than 300, when it's usually about 180 on Fridays. So I checked, and discovered I was getting dozens of Google hits for Javier Rodrigo de Santos, the Pervert of Palma, the Vice Mayor, mostly from Germany but also Austria, Switzerland, and central Europe generally. I checked even further, and discovered that Der Spiegel has picked up the story; their interest is due to the large number of Germans on Mallorca.

I don't speak German, of course, but I was able to figure out a little of the article. For example, "Gruppensex," "Koksorgien," and "Dildogeschichten." And "das Happy End einer Massage," as well.

I'm going to add Dildogeschichten to my vocabulary. "It was kind of a kinky porno vid. There were three couples swapping partners and positions, and after about ten minutes the Dildogeschichten started."

2008-05-09T14:11:00.006+02:00

The drought has finally broken. There's a low-pressure system over the western Mediterranean bringing counterclockwise winds from the east carrying moist air. It's going to rain until at least next Wednesday, at least four inches total in all of Catalonia, and this should make an appreciable difference in reservoir levels. It'll be a green summer out in the country.

The situation in Burma is beyond scandalous. It's openly criminal. Figures (probably exaggerated) of half a million dead are being thrown around, and there are reports of cholera and malaria outbreaks. The Americans and several other countries, including the Brits and Aussies and of course the Thais, are just waiting for permission to start flying in aid, and the xenophobic Burmese junta won't let them. Even the UN and Amnesty International are denouncing the junta. Meanwhile, of all things, they're having a pseudo-election tomorrow, a referendum on a new constitution. If this doesn't bring the government down--remember last year's rioting, brutally put down?--I don't know what will.

Meanwhile, in one of those slightly admirable and slightly silly ceremonies they have around here, the Generalitat's Catalonia International Prize has been jointly awarded to Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi and a Burmese woman doctor. The honorees will receive €100,000 in cash (rather generous) and an Antoni Tapies sculpture (rather worthless). My problem here: It seems to me that the moral stature of the awardees is higher than that of the awarders, and that the awarders are attempting to buy moral stature by associating themselves with the awardees.

Monica Terribas has been named president of TV3, so good-bye to hopes of its de-politicization. Even though the Socialists are in power, TV3 will always be the heart of nationalist influence in Catalonia. Monica is probably most memorable, at least to me, for her adrenaline-fueled (?) performance the night of the 2004 US election, and for her interview with Colin Powell, when she got a bit snippy and he bulldozed her.

Our friends in Esquerra Republicana have pitched in on the Free Franki crusade. Puigcercos and Pepelu Carod are vying to see who can be Cataloonier; Puigcercos has called on the government to liberate him. Carod took it farther and denounced "the impunity enjoyed by those persons and media that insult, defame, and lie about Catalan reality, its institutions, or its political representatives." Wow. Sounds like Pepelu's against free speech for everybody but him.

ETA update: The French cops found the car used by the terrorists who killed the two Guardias Civiles near Bordeaux, but the killers are still at large. No news on the murderers of Isaías Carrasco, who are also still at large.

Get this: 36 local cops, including the police chief, have been arrested in the Madrid suburb of Coslada for extorting protection money from bars and discos, and for collaborating with a Romanian gang that trafficked in prostitutes. I'm pretty sure that corruption among local cops is pretty well entrenched in Spain. I know some places in Barcelona that have been operating illegally for years, and they must be paying somebody off.

The cops rounded up yet another bunch of Internet kiddie-porn pervos, 17 this time. Jeez. These guys are just crawling out of the woodwork.

The Barça firestorm is growing. All the fans are mightily pissed off that the team looked so bad against Real Madrid. Eto'o, Edmilson, Xavi, and Bojan were harassed as they drove away from practice yesterday. There's a movement to get rid of Laporta, but I don't think it'll be successful. Rijkaard is officially out as coach and Guardiola in, and Beguiristain shows no signs of stepping down as general manager.

2008-05-08T14:31:00.003+02:00

Just a comment: I've been getting several Google hits a day for "javier rodrigo de santos," the Pervert of Palma, the guy who spent €50,000 of city money at gay brothels. The fun part, of course, is that he'd posed as a traditionalist family values advocate, married with kids and all. I don't understand the international interest in him, though. Maybe he has a lot of foreign, uh, friends.

I also got a Google hit this morning for "insid a hores rectom." I'm curious about whether he meant "horse's" or "whore's." Either way it's pretty gross. The searcher is in Crowville, Louisiana, which means he's probably a native English speaker, and he managed to spell all three words longer than one letter incorrectly. I hope I never go to Crowville, Louisiana.

2008-05-08T13:03:00.003+02:00

It's even worse in Burma than had been thought. They're talking 100,000 dead. Survivors report mountains of bodies.99,000 of the dead would still be alive if their government weren't so incompetent and corrupt. I didn't know this: The main road from Mandalay to Rangoon wasn't even paved. Now it's not there anymore.

The xenophobic and autarchic nature of the Burmese dictatorship makes it very hard to get news out of there, and the information available is very limited. Some aid is coming in through Thailand, high-energy cookies, blankets, and medicine. La Vanguardia reports that the Burmese junta has deigned to accept American aid; the Americans have offered $3 million as long as American officials get to supervise the distribution. People from the UN's World Food Program are having trouble getting in because the junta won't give them visas. People are getting desperate in the Irrawaddy delta, and there have been food riots.

You know there's not much news when La Vangua puts a photo of Madonna tongueing one of her dancers on the front page of their website with the headline, "Another Madonna lesbian kiss." Has anybody cared what Madonna does since about 1992? I never cared about what she did at all, ever. I imagine that most male Madonna fans are heterosexuality-challenged.

Econ minister Pedro Solbes says that the housing market needs to adjust (that is, deflate), and that he's not going to take any "artificial measures" to stop it. Now he's hoping that growth will return to 3% in 2010, and that Spain needs some "financial austerity." That sort of contradicts Zap's stimulus package and all the money-raining promises he made during the campaign. Whatever happened to the day-care centers at every company, or the job training for ex-construction workers, or the six-month government mortgage guarantees?

Spain is claiming that the American salvage company Odyssey "expoliated" the wreck of a Spanish navy ship which sank in 1804, found by Odyssey last year. They want the treasure that the company discovered, valued at some $500 million, for themselves, though Odyssey did the work of finding it and then bringing up the gold. I dunno. If the shipwreck wasn't found in Spanish territorial waters, I don't think Spain has much of a claim; they lost their ownership of it when they abandoned it under water for two hundred years. And if anybody but Odyssey has a claim on the treasure, seems to me it would be Peru, not Spain, right?

Remember Franki the flag-burning squatter punk? A couple of his buddies used climbing equipment to suspend themselves between the towers of the Sagrada Familia over the weekend, and this morning they suspended themselves off a bridge over the motorway into Barcelona through Sant Joan Despi, and the cops had to cut off traffic in order to get them down. If I were the cops I'd give them five minutes to get the hell out, and then cut their ropes if they didn't comply. By the way, Franki is supposedly mixed up with Laura Riera, the Terrassa girl who put the finger on a PP town councilman murdered by ETA.

The number of abortions performed yearly in Spain has increased by 99%--that means it's doubled, from 51,000 to 101,000--in the last ten years. Spanish women have their first child at age 31 on average, the highest age in the EU.

Barça played dreadfully last night and was humiliated 4-1 by Real Madrid. Everybody was terrible. I was completely wrong about TV viewership: it was the most-watched Madrid-Barça since 2004, and the most-watched program in the history of Tele 5.

Just a reminder: The name of the city is Barcelona. The C is pronounced TH in Spanish and S in Catalan. It is never abbreviated in speech. It is sometimes abbreviated in writing as Barna or BCN (after the airport three-letter identification code.) I call it B-ville or Barneytown, but nobody else does. Often in the Spanish press Barcelona is referred to as "la Ciudad Condal," the "City of the Counts." This is never used in speech. The name of the football team is FC Barcelona, abbreviated as Barça, in both speech and writing.

2008-05-07T15:58:00.002+02:00

Two stories in La Vanguardia's international section on US news: Georgia executed a murderer, and Obama won North Carolina while Hillary took Indiana.

From La Vangua's comments section on the death penalty:

What a civilized country! The master of the lives and deaths of its citizens...

And this is the country that "demands" that others respect human rights. Even though the crime rate in that country is very high, its causes should be studied, and possibly many would be surprised to see that their own lifestyle is one of the principal causes. Then they act like they're the example for other countries to imitate. What an example!

The causes and the errors are part of the vices of the Americans, especially the ease of obtaining guns. We have nothing to envy the people of the US, nothing at all.

I know about somebody who, if the laws of his own country were applied to him, would have to die...his name is George Bush...have you heard of him?

The Americans like death. It doesn't matter if it's an invasion with hundreds of thousands of victims or an electric chair or lethal injection. These people's moral evolution is less than minimal.

THERE IS NO BIGGER MURDERER THAN BUCH (sic).

From La Vangua's comments section on the Obama-Hillary story:

I hope they all lose, Obama, Clinton, and the Republican candidates. They represent nothing but extreme vulgarity and foolishness and they are the antithesis of what politics should be. They do nothing but support the economic mafias, the real powers, the multinationals, which sadly hold dictatorial economic power over the world we live in. A short life to all of them. They deserve nothing else, all of them, than total ostracism!

All the candidates are mafiosos, always absolutely in favor of the economic lobbies that dominate the US and the world. With this scum, because that is what they are, we will never have a world in which equality exist, but the gap between rich and poor will keep getting bigger and bigger. A bad, very bad thing. In reality, they are candidates made by the rich and the privileged.

If Obama wins we will have a Republican government for another 4 or 8 years. McCain will beat Obama easily and the Bush era will be extended in time. What are the Americans thinking? Have hamburgers filled their brains with toxins? The bad thing is all we Europeans are going to suffer. Obama, you false Democrat, withdraw for the good of your country and the world!

Obama's advisors think they have everything covered, but as soon as there is a violent Muslim attack against American interests, the nigger will lose the elections because he's a darky...and we'll have Bush's shadow eight more years. Vote for the African, the world is "de puta madre."

The average American may make thousands of mistakes, but the establishment, which really rules, above the president himself, have already thought about how to eliminate somebody who sticks his nose in. Go ask Kennedy...

THERE IS A NUCLEAR SUBMARINE AT GIBRALTAR AND THIS NEWSPAPER HAS NOTHING TO SAY.

2008-05-07T15:16:00.004+02:00

Virtually no news today. All the papers are reporting, get this, that Franco fixed the 1968 Eurovision contest so the Spanish singer Massiel's "La, la, la" would beat out Cliff Richard's "Congratulations." Yeah, right. Franco had better things to do with his time. He was a traditional military man, a cold, hard-headed realist capable of cruelty, not someone who cared about such silliness. The number of people on the unemployment rolls increased by nearly 40,000 in April, the largest increase since 1997. Nearly half of the newly unemployed are from the construction sector. Barça plays Real Madrid tonight at the Bernabeu, but nobody cares because Madrid's already clinched the League title. I bet the TV networks are really pissed, because Barça-Madrid matches are usually among the year's top five programs in the TV ratings. Rumor has it that Milan wants to buy Zambrotta but not Ronaldinho, and that Barça is interested in some kind of Henry-Cesc swap, which I wouldn't do if I were Arsenal.

2008-05-07T14:56:00.003+02:00

On anti-Semitism in Spain: I've come across it personally four times in the last couple of weeks.

1) An extreme left-wing gentleman of my acquaintance informed me that Hillary Clinton is the bought-and-paid-for tool of the Jewish-Israeli lobby, which won't tolerate an Obama victory.

2) An elderly gentleman of my acquaintance asked me about the US election; I explained that Hillary and Obama are competing for the Democratic nomination, and that John McCain has already clinched for the Republicans. He thanked me and asked me which candidate the Jewish lobby was supporting.

3) A relative of Remei's informed me that Israeli insurance companies are behind the conspiracy to spray anti-hail chemicals into the Catalan atmosphere.

4) Another relative of Remei's informed me that the Israelis were war criminals who were exterminating Palestinian children. (This occured last week, right after Hamas mortared and rocketed an Israeli city, the Israelis responded with an air-to-surface missile, a Palestinian family was killed, and La Vanguardia ran the photo of the bodies at the funeral on page 3 above the headline "Massacre of children in Gaza.")

2008-05-06T16:37:00.002+02:00

Peter (not Paul) Preston had a poorly-written piece about crime in Barcelona with several inaccuracies on the Guardian's website. The piece is so poor that the Guardian has taken it off its Comment Is Free archive, but you can still access it on Google.

However, Preston is absolutely right about one thing: Street crime is rampant in Barcelona, and all tourists are targets. You're not likely to get hurt, but it is likely that somebody will try to pick your pocket or snatch your bag. Watch for groups of Moroccan teenagers wearing expensive sports clothing and for Bosnian women pickpockets on the tourist bus.

You should be OK if you take proper precautions and keep an eye out. Don't carry anything valuable on you. Don't let your possessions get out of your sight at a restaurant or bar. Don't get sloppy drunk, don't try to buy drugs, don't go down any dark streets, stay out of the Raval at night, and it's best if you go out accompanied. Consider staying at a hotel outside the Old City, in the Eixample or Sant Gervasi, which are considerably safer areas. Particularly dangerous tourist areas: Public transport, the Ramblas and Barrio Gotico, the Sagrada Familia, La Pedrera, the Picasso Museum, and the Parque Guell. Whatever you do, stay away from the three-card monte dealers on the Ramblas. Not only is the game a scam, of course, but pickpockets act in the crowd watching it. Also, if you are driving, and somebody (not a marked police car) indicates that you should pull over, don't do it until you get to a place where there are some other people.

2008-05-06T15:10:00.004+02:00

Tragedy in Burma: 25,000 dead after a typhoon. I hope the US Navy is in action right now, bringing in food and medicine, no matter how awful and repressive the government is, and even though probably half the aid will get stolen by people by people who will profiteer off it.

Note the difference between Burma and Louisiana. In Louisiana, even though the city and state governments completely bungled the whole operation, from evacuation to relief, only about a thousand people died. Media hysteria didn't help, of course. But at least Louisiana, admittedly America's little corner of the Third World, had the infrastructure and organization to do something. Burma doesn't, largely because its government is corrupt, tyrannical, and xenophobic. So the country had no warning system or evacuation plan or, apparently, anything else.

Nobody's blamed global warming for this yet, though I'm sure it'll happen soon.

Food prices: Oils are up 41% over the past year, wheat flour up 28%, sterilized milk 24%, and dried pasta up 20%. Canary Islands bananas are up 19%, oranges up 15%, fresh chicken 13%, and eggs 11%. Prices that have dropped: fresh tomatoes down 17%, potatoes down 7%, onions down 7%, carrots down 5%, and lettuce down 4%. So this is good news for us salad-eating vegetarians. The cost of the official food of Spain, the tortilla de patatas, stays about the same, with eggs up but potatoes and onions down.

Note: Spanish people say Canary Islands bananas taste better than Latin American bananas. I can't tell the difference, myself.

Get this. Spanish judges have handed down 270,000 penal sentences that have not been carried out. That means there are a hell of a lot of people out there who ought to be in prison but are just walking around free, and quite possibly committing more crimes. One of the reasons for the delay is that there was a strike by the judicial civil servants, which balled things up for a while, but the two main reasons are 1) the wheels of justice grind far too slow and 2) they don't have enough prison space.

What I would do is imprison only violent criminals, and I would imprison them for a good long time. The rest of society needs to be protected from these people. There are other ways to punish non-violent criminals. What I'd do to economic criminals, from bad-check writers to fraudsters to corrupt politicians, is sentence them to poverty for a term of years. They wanted to get rich by breaking the rules? Force them to be poor, make them live in public housing and work at McDonalds. This punishment would allow these lawbreakers to keep their physical freedom, but lose their economic freedom.

Here's some guys I'm all in favor of putting in jail: They busted five pro-ETA punks who'd been committing street terrorism in and around Baracaldo. Among other things, they completely wrecked a commuter train station, torched a couple of city buses, and firebombed local PNV headquarters.

Former Barça star midfielderJosep Guardiola will be FC Barcelona's next coach, according to TV3. I think it's a good hire; I like the idea of hiring young coaches with recent playing experience. Let's just hope Guardiola can discipline these guys, because the clubhouse got out of control in Rijkaard's two last years. Rumor has it that Liverpool will make an offer for Abidal, that Edmilson will go to Newcastle, and that Ronaldinho may wind up at Manchester City, of all places.

There's a story in La Vanguardia saying that Ronaldinho failed a physical, supposedly for AC Milan, and that he's so badly out of shape that he can't play at all. This may be why Berlusconi announced that Milan was no longer interested in him. Right now the question is whether to let him play the last home game of the season as a last hurrah, and the answer will probably be no.

TV3's Washington correspondent has set up an election blog. Today he reports that he challenged a Republican voter in Indiana who said that Obama didn't have enough experience with, "And what experience did Ronald Reagan have?" Well, he'd been governor of California for eight years, the corporate spokesman for General Electric, the president of the Screen Actors Guild, one of the leaders of the anti-Communist backlash in Hollywood, a successful movie actor, and a pioneer radio announcer, and he came from a much poorer family than Obama did. Reagan is the only US president to have been the president of a labor union. Obama, on the other hand, is a professional politician who's been in the US Senate for two years, and before that was in the Illinois state senate. He's done nothing else but write self-justifying books and hang out with Chicago black nationalists and sixties-leftover ex-terrorists.

2008-05-06T14:34:00.002+02:00

If you want bluegrass, country, and Americana music, the real thing, WDVX.com from East Tennessee is by far America's best radio station. Just click on "Media Player" for the music. WDVX is a non-commercial station funded by its listeners, so you might want to send them a few bucks. Every weekday at noon Eastern US time, which is 6 PM Spanish time, they have a live concert by an up-and-coming artist. This is worth tuning in to; occasionally it's bad, but usually it's very good. Non-Americans will enjoy the disc jockeys' Highland Southern accents.

WDVX broadcasts on several different frequencies out of several different Tennessee cities; one of them is Instapundit's Knoxville, and another one is Sevierville, where my siblings-in-law Kerry and Brenda (is my brother-in-law's brother my brother-in-law, too? I think so) live. Sevierville is right next to the Great Smoky Mountains national park, America's most-visited, probably because it's the closest national park to the big Eastern cities. It's beautiful up there, though the tourist-trap towns of Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge are best avoided unless you're going to see a band play at one of the many venues there.

2008-05-05T14:29:00.008+02:00

Angel Acebes announced he was officially stepping down as PP secretary general. Good. Manuel Pizarro, to have been Rajoy's economics minister had the PP won, is going to resign his seat and go back to the public sector. They've also announced that the convention will be June 20-22 in--guess where--Valencia.

La Vanguardia says there's an informal alliance between Valencia and Catalonia to work together in the common interest, claiming that Valencian premier and PP heavy hitter Francisco Camps wants more Catalan-style financial autonomy for his region, that he wants better transport infrastructure between the two cities, and that he wants to form a strategic alliance to counterbalance the power of Andalusia and Madrid. Camps is willing to compromise on the water issue and on linguistic politics.

Barcelona and Valencia have historically been enemies; Barcelona sees itself as Madrid's rival for the number 1 spot in Spain, and Valencia as an ally of Madrid. Valencia has always seen itself as Barcelona's rival for the number 2 spot in Spain, and would rather play second fiddle to Madrid, which it sees as the unquestioned number 1, than to Barcelona. In addition, Valencia holds a grudge over what it sees as Barcelona's veto of the damn water plan.

All this leads to incredibly silly controversies over whether Valencian is a form of Catalan or an independent language. It's also made Valencia into the PP's strongest region. Hypothesis: Camps, a Rajoy ally, knows that the PP needs to win a lot more votes in Catalonia if Rajoy is to be elected in 2008.

The prices of food imported into the Eurozone increased by 28% in 2007. Highest increases: Oils, up 43%, and grain, up 33%.

Get this: Barcelona's homeless are moving out of the Old City to outlying areas like Montjuic because young local drunks and Romanian gypsies beat and rob them. That's disgraceful and cowardly, victimizing the weakest among us, going so low as to steal their blankets. They've got a problem with homeless people at the old hospital in the Raval, which is now a library and art school, who have moved into the courtyard en masse. Maybe for protection in numbers, I don't know.

Remember Borat's hometown in Kazakhstan? That was actually filmed in a Romanian gypsy village.

The Spanish press is making a big deal about the US State Department's report on terrorism and what it said about Spain. To wit:

1) Spain is "an important transit area at a strategic crossroads...a logistical base" for terrorists operating in Western Europe 2) Jihadi terrorists travel from Spain to Iraq 3) Most Islamist terrorists operating in Spain are North African 4) Spain's government has "acted aggressively against terrorist recruitment" and arrested 47 suspects in 2007 5) "Spain cooperated closely with the US to investigate and pursue terrorists...Spain was the first EU country to sign an agreement to exchange information on suspected terrorists" 6) The trial of the 3-11 terrorists was "exhaustive, deep, vigorous, and transparent" despite public emotion and high political tension 7) "Spain's government and citizens are aware that Spain is a major target of Islamist extremism and terrorist acts."

I'm not so sure about number 7, and it was probably Aznar's government that signed the agreement on exchanging information, but in general that sounds pretty positive, giving credit where credit is due.

Barcelona beat a Valencia team that didn't bother to show up 6-0 last night, but it didn't matter because Real Madrid clinched the League title with a 1-2 victory at Osasuna. Congratulations to Madrid, which I don't think is a very good team, but it has proven that it's by far the best of the not very good teams in the Spanish league. Milito popped an ACL and is out for six months. Rumors have Barça interested in Poulsen, Navas, Torres, and Coloccini. Some reporter followed Ronaldinho around the night before Barça played at Man U, when Ronnie was supposedly injured; he stayed out drinking and dancing "in good company," until at least 5 AM, when the reporter packed it in. Now AC Milan is backing off on its offer to buy him.

Too bad. He was such a good player for three years here, and he was really having fun out there. He seemed like a nice guy, which some jocks are not. The fame and high living got to him, though. I'll bet he has a couple more pretty decent years in him, but the rest of his career is going to be an injury-laden disappointment.

2008-05-05T13:53:00.002+02:00

We got back from the pueblo last night. Everything is all green out there now; it's yellow and brown for ten months out of the year, but the wheat and barley is nearly knee-high right now. Remei's cousin Santi, who farms up in Albió, says it's going to be an excellent harvest. Then again, he also believes in the crazy "insurance companies spraying anti-hail chemicals and causing the drought" theory.

I talked to two older people about the Civil War in Vallfogona and learned: 1) the town was divided 50-50 into "rojos" and "fascistas" 2) the "rojos," CNT and POUM, set up a collective, but didn't force anyone to join 3) the "rojos" killed four people at the beginning of the revolt, a doctor who lived at the spa and three men from Cal Felip 4) the "fascista" air force bombed the bridge on the Riu Corb two kilometers up the valley from the spa 5) the Regina Hotel was used as a Republican hospital during the Battle of the Ebro, and that's where the bodies buried in the cemetery came from 6) Ramon from Cal Matruqueu may have made up the story about dumping the bones that they dug up in the ravine 7) some of the locals hid the priest and guided him along the back roads to Igualada; the CNT came looking for him but he was already gone 8) the "rojo" government came around regularly and confiscated the peasants' farm produce, or at least what they couldn't hide.

2008-05-05T13:17:00.002+02:00

Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo, Spanish prime minister for nearly two years (February 1981-December 1982) died on Saturday at age 82. He was an accidental prime minister, succeding Adolfo Suarez after the latter's resignation; he was defeated in the 1982 election by Socialist Felipe Gonzalez. Calvo-Sotelo was the second prime minister of democratic Spain, and the first to die.

(Sadly, Adolfo Suarez doesn't have long to live; he has a severe case of Alzheimer's.)

Calvo-Sotelo's most important achievement was surviving and keeping the young democracy alive. Elements of the army and Guardia Civil attempted a coup on February 23, 1981, the day Calvo-Sotelo was invested with the premiership. He weathered the storm, overcame another abortive coup conspiracy, and was also forced to deal with a severe economic downturn (with inflation and unemployment both at 15-20%) and ETA's murderous rampage (they were killing fifty people a year in the early '80s). Most importantly, he led Spain into NATO and established the basis for Spain's admission into the EU.

Calvo-Sotelo had been a technocrat in the late Franco regime, held a couple of ministries (Commerce and Public Works) in the post-Franco transition government, and then became Suarez's top economic advisor before succeeding him as premier. He was considered honest, competent, and moderate, and was respected by all political groups.

2008-05-01T14:11:00.003+02:00

Quick news brief before we take off for Vallfogona for the four-day weekend. It's International Commie Day. They had the usual union marches this morning, and a few thousand people came out: I remember twenty years ago they really managed to pull off mass demos, but now it's all rather perfunctory, as if it were more an obligation than something people get all excited about.

Everybody's talking about the pervert in Austria who imprisoned and violated his own daughter. The general tone down at the café this morning was pro-death penalty, and some discussion ensued over which precise method should be used.

ETA exploded three small bombs at labor ministry buildings in the Basque country; nobody was hurt, fortunately. They called in warnings for two of them, but not for the third. Speculation is that the bombings are a response to the jailing (on charges of membership in a terrorist organization) of the pro-ETA mayoress of Mondragon, the town where ETA's last victim, Isaías Carrasco, was murdered in March. By the way, Carrasco's killers have not yet been caught.

La Vanguardia reports that Angel Acebes is being demoted from his position in the PP leadership. Good. About time his head rolled.

Efficient management: The estimated cost for line 9 of the Barcelona metro, which will run from El Prat to Badalona looping around Barcelona on the northwest, has multiplied by more than three to €6.5 million. Apparently much of the extra cost is due to improvised, ad hoc changes to the original plan. Not to mention the three percent kickback from the construction companies to the political parties in power.

Massive Barça firestorm after the elimination from the Champions League. New coach: either Guardiola or Mourinho. I'd go with Guardiola. 80% of the fans want president Joan Laporta to resign, but he's not going to. Players whose contracts expire who won't be back: Edmilson, Thuram, Ezquerro, Pinto. Players on the shit list, to be sold or given away: Ronaldinho, Deco, Henry, Marquez, Zambrotta. Player on thin ice: Eto'o.

Meanwhile, Ronaldo is in big trouble after his little escapade with the transvestites: his girlfriend has left him, and Nike is talking about breaking his contract--presumably there's a morals clause, and the cops are investigating his possible cocaine use. But baseball pitcher Roger Clemens is in bigger trouble: he's been having an affair with drug-addled country singer Mindy McCready. So what? you may ask. Well, they met when she was fifteen. In addition to the steroids charges, he's looking at Statue Tory Rape. I would say at this point there are several players whose reputations are permanently trashed. In order: Clemens, Canseco, Bonds, Palmeiro, McGwire. I will bet these guys all get blackballed from the Hall of Fame, except Canseco, who would never have gotten close anyway.

2008-04-30T12:54:00.003+02:00

You already know that Man United eliminated Barça from the Champions League last night with a 1-0 victory; Scholes blasted home a shot from outside the area after a bad clearing kick by Zambrotta early in the match. Barça put up a fight, but just could not score a goal--I think this is the fifth straight game they haven't scored. Now what they have to do is catch up with Villarreal in the league and make sure they get second place so they don't have to play an elimination round in next year's Champions.

Both general manager Beguiristain and head coach Rijkaard are out, though I bet team president Joan Laporta weathers the storm. Out of the players I would keep: Eto'o, Messi, Bojan, Iniesta, Xavi, Toure, Milito, and Valdes, along with Sylvinho and Puyol if they don't mind not being starters. Sell all the rest of them and buy good young players. Specifically, I'd buy Fabregas from Arsenal and Xabi Alonso from Liverpool, along with Navas from Sevilla.

Al Qaeda has called on its members to carry out attacks on European maritime interests off the Somali coast in particular and in the Indian Ocean in general. No, Zap, you didn't buy us immunity when you bailed out of Iraq. And now you've lost your friends in France and Germany, and you've made the Americans mad, and your pet project the Alliance of Civilizations is dead on arrival, and your best friends now are Latin American populists.

The EU's stats bureau reports that Spain is the EU country in which unemployment has climbed most in the past year, from 8.1% to 9.3%. Meanwhile, the Euribor interest rate hit 4.8%, meaning everybody's mortgage has gone up an average of €600 a year. The Zap government has made an informal agreement with Spanish lenders to allow mortgage holders to extend their term and thereby pay less a month, with no charge. Let's see if the lenders actually stick to this.

There are 280,000 immigrants living in Barcelona, 17% of the population. In the Old City 40% of the residents are immigrants. The largest groups are Ecuadorians and Italians over 20,000 each, Bolivians, Pakistanis, and Peruvians over 15,000 each, Moroccans, Colombians, Chinese, and French over 10,000 each, and Argentinians, Brazilians, and Dominicans over 7000 each.

Comments: By far the largest number of immigrants are Latin Americans, who integrate very well as a general rule, as they already speak Spanish and are Catholic, as well as sharing other cultural values. Barcelona is definitely not becoming Eurabia, since the only large Muslim groups are Moroccans and Pakistanis. A sizable percentage of Barcelona foreigners are Europeans, especially Italians and French; they don't tend to stand out, since they look and dress much like Spaniards. I doubt most of these people are here to stay. I'm surprised that Eastern Europeans didn't show up on the list.

One thing: 3 of every 10 children born in Barcelona has at least one foreign parent.

In case you didn't notice, I love statistics.

From La Vanguardia, page 3 today: "(Bush) denied that one of the principal causes of the food situation is the diversion of corn and other cereals to make ethanol and biofuels in general. According to him, the basic reasons for the price increase are the climate, the increase in demand, and the rise in energy prices."

OK; I thought the US only used corn to make ethanol, and it's not climate change that's to blame, it's a bad harvest in the Southern Hemisphere, but OK.

From La Vanguardia, page 4: "UN director for the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler, stated that turning crops into biofuels and financial speculation, along with the IMF's aberrant policy (which forces many countries to orient agriculture toward exports at the cost of the subsistence economy), are the main causes of the price rises...Ziegler called for a "total moratorium" on biofuels for at least five years. "We must fight climate change but without starving people to death," said the Swiss sociologist. Several days ago, Ziegler had already told the media that "the use and encouragement of biofuels is a crime against humanity.""

Now, wait a minute. Seems to me that the use of biofuels is due to two causes: high oil prices caused by cartel control of the resource, and the global warming panic touched off by the Greens. So if anyone's guilty of a crime against humanity, it would be OPEC and the environmentalists, no? Note that Ziegler blams the Jew-American financial speculators and IMF policy encouraging competitive advantage--that is, market forces--for the current crisis.

From La Vanguardia, page 64: "The high cost of agricultural staples in the international markets is due to the increase in biofuels in the United States." That seems to be rather a stretch, no?

Meanwhile, Thailand is organizing an Organization of Rice Exporting Countries, to include Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Burma. They're going to set up their own cartel and strike back at OPEC, and the very poorest in the world are going to get screwed over again.

So the Generalitat's traffic department predicts that 550,000 vehicles will leave Barcelona beginning this evening for the Mayday long weekend; Friday is International Commie Day, and people are taking a couple of extra days off. I would like to point out that talking environmentalism and fretting about grain prices are incompatible with car ownership.

Obama and Reverend Wrong are getting plenty of press over here, but the big story in all of Europe is the pervert in Austria whose kids are also his grandkids.

2008-04-29T15:09:00.005+02:00

Other news: PP hard-liner and conspiracy-theorizer Eduardo Zaplana has announced that he is retiring from politics and taking a job at Telefonica. He doesn't want to get in the way of the renovation of the party, he says. Good. More proof of the PP's movement toward the center, merely two-and-a-half years and one blown election too late. Next to go: Angel Acebes.

The freed crew of the Spanish tuna boat say that they were treated very badly by the pirates, though they were not physically abused. While they were captives, they were able to talk to their families on cellphones, and obviously told them that everything was fine so they would not worry. I guarantee you that these criminals only hold crews of Western boats for ransom, and just massacre everybody else.

By the way, the Spanish press continually referred to the 26 crew members as "five Basques, eight Galicians, and 13 Africans." Why not 13 Spaniards and 13 Africans? Or even better, they could have taken the trouble to mention the Africans' nationalities, too. Are they Ivorians, Tanzanians, Angolans, or Cameroonians? There's a big difference, you know.

They've finished the work necessary at the port, and it's ready to recieve water brought in by tanker ship from Tarragona and Marseille. The first shipments should arrive by May 15, and will supply 12% of the metro area's water needs.

Good economic news: In April yearly inflation declined four-tenths of a point, to 4.2%, and econ minister Solbes predicts it'll keep declining. This is in line with what Alan Greenspan said about how controlling inflation is right now more important than stimulating growth.

El Periodico reports that Raul Castro has promised to commute several death sentences to mark the sixth Cuban Communist Party congress. However, Raul "specified that this decision does not mean that capital punishment will be removed from the penal code, since "it would be ingenuous and irresponsible to renounce the dissuasive effect that capital punishment provokes among the real terrorists, mercenaries in the service of the Empire." You know, I've heard thousands of complaints about the death penalty in the US over here, but never once about Cuba. Note, by the way, that Raul thinks the death penalty dissuades criminals, something American conservatives have been saying for years.

La Vanguardia has finally picked up on the Obama and Reverend Wrong story, correctly concluding that the Rev is going to torpedo Obama's candidacy and that the fight to the death between Obama and Hillary is going to benefit only the Republicans. Vangua reporter Eusebio Val did point out that the Rev would not back off "God damn America" or his "the government invented AIDS" crackpottery, nor did he back off his "America deserved 9-11" filth, and that he repeated his "they're attacking the black churches through me" conspiracy theory.

2008-04-29T14:22:00.002+02:00

Former Barça star Hristo Stoichkov, a great player but an offensive jerk of a human being, a nasty piece of work, beat up a photographer outside a Puerto Olimpico bar several days ago. He punched the guy in the teeth, knocked him down, and then started kicking him, while pushing away the guy's pregnant wife and screaming obscenities and threats. He ought to be in the Modelo right next to Franki.

If you come to visit Barcelona, I'd stay away from the Puerto Olimpico and Maremagnum at night. Nothing good ever seems to happen there, and the clients are a bunch of drugged-up drunk chavs. There are hundreds of more interesting bars in this city.

And get this one: Former Barça star Ronaldo picked up three prostitutes last Monday night in Rio de Janeiro. They turned out to be transvestites. Ronaldo paid them $600 to go away, but one of them demanded $30,000 in blackmail, threatening to expose Ronaldo's allegedly kinky tastes and to accuse him of drug use, so all four of them wound up at the police station. Seems that Ronaldo had turned his car over to one of them to go buy cocaine in a shantytown, and the guy kept the ownership papers, which is why Ronaldo went to the police.

So the former Barça star trifecta is now in play. Prediction: The next one to get in trouble is going to be Patrick Kluivert, and what he does is going to be a lot worse than these two. He's been convicted of vehicular manslaughter and acquitted of rape so far, and, as a convicted felon, he's banned from entering the United States, as Barça found out once when they did a tour over there and Immigration at Kennedy Airport put Kluivert on the next plane back home.

And tonight's the big game, do or die against Manchester United at Old Trafford in the second leg of the Champions League semifinals. Barcelona needs to win or to draw by 1-1 or more. An 0-0 draw goes to penalty kicks. The way Barça's been playing, a victory's unlikely, but anything can happen. Probable lineup: Valdes; Zambrotta, Puyol, Milito, Abidal; Xavi, Toure, Deco; Messi, Eto'o, Iniesta. On paper that's a good lineup, but it just hasn't been getting the job done.

2008-04-29T14:06:00.002+02:00

Some punk kid who goes by the name "Franki" decided back in 2002 that it would be a good idea to get some of his buddies, go to the Terrassa city hall and charge right in, get in a tussle with the cops, and torch the Spanish flag hanging off the front balcony. As the wheels of justice grind exceedingly slow, his 32-month prison sentence has been delayed for years, until now. The judge ordered the cops to go get him and lock him up in the ancient Modelo prison, the "Black Hole of Catalonia," for "insulting the flag."

Comments: 1) I don't think flag-burning should be against the law, though I consider it to be very offensive 2) I'd put the guy in jail for fighting with the cops, trespassing, and destroying public property, not for burning the flag.

So Franki's in the slam and his squatter punk friends graffitied my street last night with slogans like "Freedom for Franki," "Cops get out," "PSOE = oppressors," and the like. They also graffitied a bank branch with "Speculators" and a supermarket with "Steal here." The municipal street brigade hasn't gotten around to cleaning it up yet.

Of course, these jerks have no idea of how to go about civil disobedience: you break a law you consider unjust and then you accept society's punishment, thereby establishing your superior moral status. Whining about getting jailed is not civil disobedience, it's wanting to get away with breaking the law, which establishes your inferior moral status.

2008-04-28T21:54:00.003+02:00

Quick news update: Another crazy-ass drunk truck driver, this one in Almeria. He blew nine times the legal blood-alcohol level. Spain seems to specialize in these guys.

Speaking of which, remember the scuzzbag who beat up the Ecuadorian girl on the train in Barcelona, and the film went around the world? He hasn't been tried yet on those charges, but he got fined €1000 and lost his license for ten months after getting busted for drunk driving. It's the same scum who keep committing the same crimes.

The EU commissioners are predicting a 2008 economic growth rate of 2.2% in 2008 and 1.8% in 2009. That's pretty much in line with the Spanish econ ministry but well higher than what the private sector forecasts.

Home sales are down 24% in Spain over the last year, and mortgages issued are down 26%. In Catalonia those numbers are worse: 41% and 36%, respectively. Oops. Meanwhile, farm prices are up 11%, so we can now cut some of their subsidies, please.

El Periodico has a story on Al Qaeda in the Maghreb and its preparations in Algeria; they have mortars and grenade launchers, as well as satellite communications and, most importantly, money. The Algerian press says they have more than 1600 active members, present in all areas of Algeria, and with their base in rural Cabilia. They are continually training new recruits, and El Periodico reminds us that their leaders have threatened Spain specifically and repeatedly.

The health ministry annouced that of the 800 brands of sunflower oil on sale in Spain, 200 are guaranteed safe, and the other 600 present minimal health risks. Health minister Soria told a press conference, "Bring me a bottle and I'll drink it right now!" I'd still throw out any sunflower oil I'd bought recently--it's not like it costs more than one-twenty a bottle or so.

2008-04-27T16:24:00.002+02:00

It's time for another warning on an organization calling itself "Humana People to People," which is a front for a cult called Tvind. Humana has eleven shops in Barcelona, and it is running advertisements in the local giveaway press that read: "By shopping at Humana, or donating the clothing you no longer use, besides helping us carry out cooperative projects in several countries in Africa, you also contribute to not creating thousands of tons of waste that pollutes our planet. We have been recycling for more than 20 years."

From The Times:

Hull-based CICD is Tvind's main British outpost. Nobody knows what to make of the organisation - it is part "schools co-operation", part "clothes-recycling project", part "Third World volunteer organisation", part instrument of world revolution, part multinational business concern. Some people devote their lives to it, but many believe it is exploiting naive young people.

...Tvind is very controversial in its native Denmark. Its ability to claim millions of krone from the State in funding for its schools has led to attempts to change the Constitution. Most Danes are aware - and concerned - that Tvind has become a multinational business concern as well as, according to its own lights, an educational and aid charity. Apparently funded by its own members, volunteers, public donations and official grants, Tvind has reportedly invested in property, fruit plantations, old-clothes trading in Central America, Africa and the Pacific - though these commercial ventures are rarely disclosed to young volunteers.

From the Boston Globe:

The members of the group's inner circle, known as the Teachers Group,
commit to staying with the movement for life, donating their salaries to a
communal fund, and relocating anywhere they are needed, according to Danish
prosecutors and former members.

At first, the group's efforts gained renown in Denmark, attracting
thousands of volunteers. But as the schools and charities spread across
Europe, critics accused group leaders of negligence, cloudy finances, and a
near-fanatical demand for loyalty from members. Denmark passed a law
forbidding state funding for the organization. French authorities
classified the group as a nonreligious cult.

''It's huge, and nobody can really work out what's at the bottom of it,''
said Michael Durham, a British freelance journalist who created a Web site
aimed at exposing Pedersen and the dozens of charities and for-profit
companies he allegedly controls. ''Is it about money? Is it about power? Is
about this one man? Or is it about left wing politics?''

2008-04-27T14:33:00.002+02:00

The Somali pirates released the 26 hostages and their fishing boat yesterday; the owners of the boat paid a $1.2 million ransom, and it is now on its way to the Seychelles accompanied by a Spanish frigate. The deal was cut in London; I wonder who was representing the pirates. The Zap administration announced that it, along with the diplomatic service and the owner of the boat, had been in on the negotiations.

What I don't understand: Spain's frigate had reached the area, and they had permission to use the French air base at Djibouti. When the pirates left the Spanish boat, which they did while still 22 miles off the coast, why didn't the navy and air force blow them up as soon as the hostages were safe?

Comment: The pirates repeatedly pointed their guns at the hostages, and threatened them by making throat-cutting motions. How much you want to bet that every time they capture a Third World boat, they massacre everybody aboard, since nobody will pay a ransom for them?

Deputy prime minister De la Vega said, "Piracy on the high seas must be fought more rigorously, and to do so the participation of the whole international community is necessary." That is, NATO ("OTAN no, bases fuera") and the militarist warmongering United States, whose flag Zap refused to stand up for during a military parade. Question: If American participation is necessary to fight piracy, why isn't Spanish participation necessary to fight terrorism? But Spain pulled its troops out of Iraq with no warning, and then publicly encouraged other members of the Coalition to abandon it.

Also notice that La Vanguardia has not even mentioned the US-French diplomatic offensive at the UN Security Council against Somali piracy, or the fact that if military action is taken against piracy, then it'll be the US Navy that does most of the job.

Even El País said, "The US provided the Spanish government information on the movements of the captured boat and of the pirates, which contributed to their release, according to diplomatic sources today. The US military also provisioned the Spanish naval and air units in the area."

El País also has an interview with defense minister Carmen Chacón, who said she was a pacifist, and that she wanted Spanish society to understand that the military is a force for peace.

Failure to coordinate: A contaminated shipment of sunflower oil came in from Ukraine, and the central government issued a warning and announced that the contaminated oil had been withdrawn from the market. Health minister Bernat Soria told the citizens not to worry, and even if they have consumed contaminated oil, it's not a serious health risk. But the Generalitat told everyone not to use sunflower oil until Monday at least. Remei and I only use olive oil anyway; we buy five-liter jugs from the cooperative in Nalec, which is virgin and varietal (made from arbequina olives). It's good stuff.

La Vangua has an good business story today on the machinations going on in the utilities sector. Remember the long-drawn out war between La Caixa / Gas Natural and E.ON over Endesa? There might be another one coming. "Last Monday afternoon the president of La Caixa (35% of Gas Natural) Isidre Fainé, and the president of Repsol (30% of Gas Natural), Antoni Brufau, asked for the approval of economics minister Pedro Solbes for a merger between Iberdrola and Gas Natural, and to tell him that a delay would only facilitate a takeover of Iberdrola by a foreign corporation. A merger would create a large energy company, with La Caixa, Repsol, BBK, Bancaja, and Unicaja (30% total of the merged company) as the chief stockholders." Note that four of the major owners would be savings banks, which have essentially become holding companies that own large shares of Spanish corporations.

Remember the "Las Vegas in Los Monegros" scheme? Turns out that the promoters can't even raise enough money to buy the land, and, get this, they haven't decided exactly where it's supposed to be built yet. Looks like the whole thing was a giant scam, and the Aragonese regional government (PSOE) fell for it.

The cops got word of a Latino gang fight and stopped it with a preventive strike, a raid on a disco frequented by a Dominican gang called the "Panteras Negras." Eight arrests were made, one for drug-dealing, two for outstanding warrants, two for being illegal aliens, and three for drug possession. Good. However, the Generalitat is still handing out subsidies to the Latin Kings, registered as a "cultural association."

Meanwhile, in Valladolid, some guy grabbed a gun and started shooting last night at 4 AM. One killed, three wounded. Though violence is less frequent in Spain than in France or Britain, there's still more than enough of it.

The ETA-front organizations tried to put on an illegal demo yesterday in Durango, and the cops arrested thirteen people, who have been released on bail. They tried to have a riot, set up barricades in the streets, and held out for three hours, but at least this time some of them got busted.

Deportivo stomped Barça last night, 2-0, and Barça is now in third place. Barça was terrible, everybody played lousy. Pinto, the backup goalie, was horrible. Other especially bad players were Thuram, Henry, Giovani, and Márquez. A pathetic show, with most of the good players on the bench. There are rumors around here that young Giovani is entirely too fond of the nightlife and may be on his way out, and that Henry is on his way back to Arsenal, perhaps in some sort of deal including Cesc Fàbregas.

Meanwhile, everybody is making a big deal out of the Formula 1 race today at Montmeló, not far from Barcelona. I really don't care a whit about car racing in any shape or form. So far there haven't been any racist incidents, though Lewis Hamilton received a round booing and whistling. Homeboy fan favorite and general peckerhead Fernando Alonso had to drop out of the race. Kimi Raikkonen won. Supposedly there were 140,000 people out there.

2008-04-26T19:51:00.003+02:00

I just got a Google hit from a gentleman in Cairo, Egypt. He was searching for "sun fuck mather". It took me a minute to figure out what he was looking for, and it has nothing to do with Ra getting it on with Cotton Mather. Jesus. There's all sorts out there.

2008-04-26T14:00:00.004+02:00

So La Vanguardia and El País both got interviews with the Pulitzer-winning American novelist Richard Ford, whose book The Lay of the Land has just come out in Spanish. El País's interview is longer and more detailed, but Ford told both of them pretty much the same thing.

From La Vanguardia:

I set the novel in the interim between the election and the judicial decision about the election in 2000, because the way George Bush was named president was flagrantly perverse, since the Supreme Court overruled the will of the electorate, and much more importantly, I think the American voters allowed this to happen without protest. In other countries, such an event easily could have caused a coup d'etat or some kind of civil revolt against a plutocratic and oppressive regime. But the Americans just went to sleep during this serious constitutional crisis, whose consequences have been disastrous, of course, for our national morals, for our sense of right and wrong, but also disastrous for the rest of the world, especially for Iraq and other countries.

Americans are not interested in politics anymore. They want to abdicate their civic duties and turn them over to the "experts," who supposedly act in our name, but in reality they are acting in the first place to keep their jobs and then in order to serve the interests of the greatest fortunes, who have bought their access to public office. Americans are no longer citizens. As political entities, they are asleep from a moral point of view, and they don't want to be woken up, they just want to be allowed to keep living the life they are living--working, buying, getting rich at the expense of the poor and of our own future. It's not a pretty sight.

1) No wonder the Europeans have a bad image of Americans, if this is what our cultural leaders are telling them. 2) Note that Ford dislikes the American people, who are ignorant, selfish, and shallow in his view, as well as active agents in "exploiting the poor." 3) Note the conspiracy theorizing: the rich folks run everything in a plutocratic and oppressive regime. 4) How come Spanish newspapers never interview any pro-American Americans?
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From El País:

It's a fact that America is a very violent society. When I began to write about New Jersey in the year 2000, every time I imagined a scene and thought about what would be the background sound, there was always a police car. It's part of American life, we are numbed by our violence, and by the violence we are inflicting upon other countries.

I was a Democrat. Not any more. Although I voted for Obama. But I'll never be a Democrat again. The Democratic party isn't even a party, it's splintering up.

I'm going to vote. I'll vote for whoever the Democrats nominate. But I don't want them to consider me as one of their party...But I'll never be a Democrat again in my life. They're a bunch of liars, a bunch of narcissists, they're disorganized, they waste money, they're irresponsible and untrustworthy. No. That's it.

(McCain's election) is worse than frightening. It would be a disaster. Not just for America. It would be a disaster for America's relations with the rest of the world, that's what scares me the most. Our relationship with those countries that we have every reason to get along with. And our relationship with the Muslim world. We've burned our bridges there, and that terrifies me. Not personally, I don't fear for my life. It terrifies me spiritually. The things I think my country represents or should represent in the human spirit are being abandoned. My country has become pseudo-democratic and imperialist. We make five enemies for every friend.

My European readers are more important for me (than my American readers). I feel privileged to be read by Europeans and Latin Americans, because I believe they are better readers in general. They understand the value of art in a complex cultural scene. I'm American, so I suppose I write for American readers, but, based on what I feel, I think I reach my goals better with the European audience.

1) I think Mr. Ford is suffering from a cultural inferiority complex. No Yank who has lived in Europe for more than a month believes that the average European is any brighter or has better taste than the average American. 2) There's not much more violence in the US than in the UK. Violence is simply not part of the lives of the great majority. Agreed, Spain is less violent than either place, but here in Barcelona we hear plenty of police sirens just like in Jersey. 3) He dislikes his fellow Americans so much that he even puts down his own readers. I wonder if his contempt includes the voters for the Pulitzer Prize and the Faulkner Award. 4) Note all the Marxist jargon, imperialist and pseudodemocratic and plutocratic and oppressive. 5) There are some American interviews with Ford linked on his Wikipedia page. He doesn't say anything like this in any of those. 6) Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Mr. Ford is absolutely right about the Democratic Party.

2008-04-25T16:34:00.003+02:00

From the Stephen Roth Institute at the University of Tel Aviv:

There is tremendous ignorance in Spanish society about Judaism and the Jews. This pertains not only to their historical presence for 15 centuries but also to the Jewish reality of today. The majority of Spaniards do not even know a Jew. Therefore, their knowledge of Jews is very limited and distorted by anti-Jewish stereotypes and prejudices that have persisted until today...

Reports about Israel occupy a disproportionate amount of international space in the Spanish media. Most coverage of the conflict is superficial and sensationalist, with Israel, and by extension, the Jews, being discredited (and sometimes demonized). While the media’s use of antisemitic stereotypes has been documented throughout Europe, some important elements differentiate the Spanish media from its European counterparts:

Uniformity of opinion across ideological lines. Only a few writers can be counted upon to consistently go beyond stereotypes or denounce manipulation. Unlike elsewhere in Europe, there are almost no Jewish intellectuals or journalists to provide a voice for the community. In most cases, when Jewish writers are published, they often oppose Israeli policy or represent minority views and only serve as justification for existing biases.

Anti-Americanism. While this trend is certainly not unique in Europe, the level of intensity is quite possibly higher in Spain, due to former Prime Minister Aznar´s role in the war in Iraq and anti-Bush and the anti-war policy of the Socialist government. This trend was noted in the November 2003 European Union Monitoring Center ‘Eurobarometer’ report (p. 78), which demonstrate that the majority of Spaniards consider the United States the number one threat to global peace, ahead of Israel.

Intensity. Antisemitic discourse in the Spanish media has a long history and reaches levels of intensity that would be considered unacceptable elsewhere in Europe (banalization of the Holocaust, portrayal of Israel and Judaism as cruel and vindictive, biased editorial/opinion pieces and opinionated news items, distorted notions of Jewish power, double standards vis-à-vis terrorism, etc. – see, for example, “Antisemitismo en el Humor Gráfico: Caricaturas y Viñetas de la Prensa Española sobre el conflicto Israelí-Palestino, 2000–2002,” Guesher, 2003). When confronted with the accusation of antisemitism, journalists, as well as editors and opinion columnists in the press, generally deny it, claiming they are justifiably criticizing the policies of Israel.

Also highly recommended: This long article (PDF) titled "European Anti-Americanism (and Anti-Semitism): Ever Present though Always Denied" by Andrei Markovits, a professor at Michigan, published by Harvard's Center for European Studies.

2008-04-25T15:28:00.002+02:00

From the AP:

The U.S. Navy has led international patrols to combat piracy along Somalia's 1,880-mile coast, the longest in Africa and near key shipping routes connecting the Red Sea with the Indian Ocean...

The U.S. and France are drafting a U.N. resolution that would allow countries to chase and arrest pirates off Somalia's coast, responding to a spate of attacks, including this week's hijacking of a Spanish tuna boat.

France's U.N. ambassador, Jean-Maurice Ripert, said the resolution would authorize foreign governments to pursue pirate vessels into territorial waters, make arrests and prosecute suspects.

"We want to do it fast, but it could take one or two weeks because it has to be by consensus — it's not confrontational," he told the AP...

The push by key U.N. Security Council nations to tackle the issue follows an alarming increase in piracy by well-armed bandits, prompting international demands for better protection of the world's shipping lanes.

Interesting that none of this makes the news in Spain.

From the Daily Telegraph:

"The ministry of defence has alerted Nato and contacted France, Britain, and other allied countries with a military presence in the area," said Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the prime minister.

"Other allied countries with a military presence in the area," huh?

2008-04-25T14:00:00.008+02:00

So some jerks in a town in the Aragonese Pyrenees had nothing better to do, and they thought it might be a good idea to pull down the abandoned church's bell tower. And, get this, they posted the video on YouTube, under the title "Down with the church," to the tune of a punk-rock parody of the Lord's Prayer. La Vanguardia has the video (to the right of the news article). Now, the abandoned church is of fairly recent construction and has almost no historical or artistic value, so this isn't a cultural tragedy like when the Taliban blew up the giant Buddhas. But I just don't get the point of destroying something for the fun of it.

More cultured, sophisticated European behavior in the Andalusian town of Ecija: on Sunday six members of the same family died in a fire. Tragic, of course. But the rumor began to spread that the firemen had taken thirty minutes to respond to the alarm (the mayor said it took less than five minutes), and a lynch mob of locals began to attack the firemen, throwing rocks at them, while they were still trying to put the fire out. Now the Guardia Civil has arrested seven of the mob. Good, for once somebody who violently breaks the law gets arrested around here.

Complaints are being made that the French killed three innocent Somali victims in their raid on the pirate base. This news got one sentence at the bottom of a page 6 story in La Vanguardia yesterday. Wonder how much play it would have gotten if it had been another case of unilateral colonialist Yankee warmongering?

Much is being made of a potential world food crisis around here. Comments: 1) Rice is going up, but wheat is coming down 2) Amartya Sen said that famine is not caused by there not being enough food, it's caused by food not getting to the people who need it 3) I think we have the technology to get emergency food to anywhere in the world outside remote places in Africa 4) Let me repeat that I am completely in favor of ending agricultural subsidies in the First World, and I've been talking about it for years 5) The Spanish press is blaming "speculators," which sounds to me like Jew-American capitalists, for the potential problem 6) Law of unintended consequences: The Greens say use less fossil fuel. The Americans start using corn to make less-polluting fuel. Now American greed for energy is killing babies in Chad. You can't win either way 7) Demand for grain has risen for many reasons, but over here all they can talk about is biofuels 8) Since the demand for grain has increased, the supply is going to increase too, and pretty damn quick 9) Lula da Silva is in favor of biofuels, too, but nobody ever criticizes Brazil for chopping down the Amazon to plant sugarcane or for using that sugarcane to make fuel 10) Nobody, ever, criticizes the OPEC cartel for artificially keeping petroleum prices high, which is probably the most important factor in the rise of food prices.

Is Barcelona the only city in the world where airline routes are big news? All the papers are reporting that American Airlines has instituted nonstop service between El Prat and New York. I'm sure it's got something to do with the city's raging self-esteem problem: we must be important because we've got a nonstop flight to New York! Note the standard Spanish love-hate attitude toward America: we resent American power and influence, but at the same time we bask in reflected glory when America pays attention to us.

Jeez. Econ minister Solbes just won't leave Disneyworld. Now he's predicting 2.3% GDP growth for both 2008 and 2009, though the private sector says it'll be half that.

Meanwhile, 246,000 people were added to the unemployment rolls in the first quarter, putting the number of Spanish unemployed over 2 million, a rate of 9.6%. The only two regions that didn't see a rise in unemployment were the Basque Country and Extremadura, while Catalonia saw the largest increase, 39,000 more unemployed. It's going to get worse before it gets better, people.

The percentage of flats in Barcelona priced at under €240,000 has doubled since 2006 to 18%, and you see a few under €200,000 now. El Periodico says that these places are of generally good quality, too, while two years ago cheap flats were all very undesirable. Problems: 1) the mortgage interest rate is high right now, with the Euribor at 5%, depressing demand 2) credit is tight and banks aren't giving out mortgages to everybody and his dog anymore.

You probably saw that Barça drew with Man United at the Camp Nou, 0-0; they had a dozen opportunities but couldn't score as usual. United played it safe and stuck to defense and fast breaks, and they'd have won if Cristiano Ronaldo had made his penalty kick in about the second minute. Wayne Rooney was disappointing. Barcelona's best players were Iniesta and Touré. Now they have to play the second ninety minutes at Old Trafford, which will not be easy. But anything could happen, and all hope has not been abandoned. Rijkaard has given up on the League; this weekend he's sitting his good players to rest them up for the rematch with Man U.

2008-04-24T14:54:00.003+02:00

It's been literally months since we did a blog roundup, which used to be a regular feature around here. It needs to become a regular feature again.

Publius Pundit has lots of stuff on Russia, including this piece on declining oil production.

Fausta fears that Paraguay has joined the Axis of Evel Knievel.

Wirdheim in Vilanova has some nice Sant Jordi photos.

Spanish Pundit has more on Zaharawi, Ceuta, and Melilla. (Scroll down for English.)

South of Watford comments on the Barcelona water situation and Spanish politics.

Notes from Spain reminds us that Correos sucks.

No Pasaran! destroys an anti-American French blogger. Check this one out.

La Gatita Gringa has the latest on Spain's Eurovision entry. One comment: It's not politically charged; they just threw in Zap and Rajoy's names as examples of how everyone likes to dance the chiki-chiki, and that's been cut from the Eurovision version, as even the most innocuous political content is banned.

Iberia Nature updates us on the Iberian lynx, with cool photos.

Eursoc says that though it's super-PC in Catalonia to get excited over Sant Jordi, it's very un-PC to do so in England.

The Dissident Frogman has a must-read on the problem with Brigitte Bardot and those she associates with, and he weighs in on a blog dust-up between Little Green Footballs and Gates of Vienna.

Davids Medienkritik has a nice one on the German media's pet issues when reporting on the US.

If you like Iberian Notes, you'll love Colin Davies--just as informative and much less obnoxious.

The Brussels Journal has a must-read piece by a professional analyst on the PP power struggle. Highly recommended.

2008-04-23T14:02:00.006+02:00

It's Sant Jordi, so there are rose and book stands up all over town, and it's a beautiful pre-summer day. Lots of bustling around downtown, with the combination of Sant Jordi crowds and the Man U supporters, who haven't committed any major atrocities yet. The city government is trying to concentrate the English fans in the Puerto Olimpico, as they did with the Glasgow Celtic fans at the Forum.

Of course, like all holidays, Sant Jordi has its capitalist side; in fact, you could argue it's the most commercial national holiday in the world, since it's the only one centered on buying things. Six million roses will be sold today in Catalonia, 60% of the yearly total, which is fifteen million euros if you figure they go for an average of two-fifty. Only 25% of the roses are produced in Catalonia, and the rest come from Colombia, Ecuador, and Kenya. La Vanguardia says a Catalan rose wholesales at 50 eurocents, while one from Kenya wholesales at just 20. So buy a rose and help out Third World agriculture.

This is also the big day for book sales, and the Barcelona press actually handicaps the various authors to see who sells the most. This year's favorite is Carlos Ruíz Zafón, who's come out with another of those medieval historical fiction things, and who is by the way detested by literary snobs. Eduardo Mendoza and Quim Monzó are also expected to do well. The three biggest foreign authors of best-sellers are Ken Follett, John Boyne, and Noah Gordon, all of whom I believe are in town to sign books; another Sant Jordi marketing thing is that authors show up and sign purchasers' copies at bookstores. The press always has a couple of laments over what they call "media books" (by the likes of Andreu Buenafuente, Toni Soler, and whoever's the latest TV3-created pseudo-celebrity is) that are based on TV programs and take the bread out of the mouths of hard-working hacks who've knocked out yet another unreadable 160-page monograph on linguistic politics.

ABC is reporting that Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda's number two, has called on the Moroccans to "struggle against the allies of Satan," i.e. Spain, and free Ceuta and Melilla "from Spanish occupation." Listen, Zap, I've been saying it for years, we are a target no matter how much Alliance of Civilizations wanking about that you do. The Madrid bombings would have happened no matter what Aznar's policies had been, and you took political advantage out of it. You better just hope that the PP doesn't take that same advantage of you next time we get bombed.

Remember Zap's budget surplus? In the first three months of 2008 it was cut in half. Payouts are up 13% while income is only up 1%. This includes the €266 million the Zap government has already paid out as subsidies to parents of newborns, but does not include the €6 billion in tax refunds, half to be paid out in June. Now, we can afford a little deficit spending. Let's not fall into the trap of making it lots of deficit spending.

Esperanza Aguirre has apparently decided that she will not challenge Rajoy at the June convention, but that she will do so before the 2012 election. She has proposed a primary election to determine the 2012 PP candidate. This means party disunity for the next three years, which is the best way to lose the next election.

Meanwhile, there's a three-way power struggle in the Catalan PP between current president Daniel Sirera and challengers Montserrat Nebrera, a moderate, and Alberto Fernandez Diaz, of the old guard. It's pretty clear that Sirera is going to be defenestrated; the influential moderate Francesc Vendrell has proposed a Fernandez Diaz-Nebrera leadership. Just a comment: Though the PP got twice as many Catalan votes as Esquerra Republicana in the last election, the ERC power struggle is getting about ten times the TV3 coverage.

The Spanish Navy has sent a frigate, the Méndez Núñez, toward the Somali coast, and Moratinos announced that it is "several sailing hours" from where the Spanish fishing boat is anchored. "Other countries and organisms," which means the US, UK, France, and NATO, have provided Spain with the necessary intelligence, and have granted Spain the use of their communications systems. We'll see what happens. Meanwhile, Spain has sent its ambassador in Kenya to Mogadishu in order to negotiate with the Somali government. I didn't know there was a Somali government, and I doubt it has much influence among the pirates.

Worst-case scenario: The pirates are really Al Qaeda, and the Spanish fishing boat is bait to get a Western naval ship within range of some kind of missile they've managed to get hold of. I hope I'm just being paranoid.

Now Berlusconi, the owner of AC Milan as well as incoming Italian prime minister, says that Barça is asking too much for Ronaldinho. They're offering twenty million for both Ronaldinho and Zambrotta, and Barcelona is demanding fifty million for them. I say Barça should take Inter's offer of thirty million for just Ronaldinho, though I'm all for getting rid of Zambrotta as well.

And tonight's the big game, Barça-Man U in the first leg of the Champions' League semifinal. Man U is of course the heavy favorite to make the final, but in two games, three hours of play, anything can happen, which is why they play the games in the first place. Valdés needs to be perfect, because he's not going to get any help from his back four, and Iniesta needs to find Eto'o with a couple of through balls. Hey, it could happen. The Giants won the Super Bowl. The Cardinals won the 2006 World Series. Truman beat Dewey.

Oh, yeah, get this. Burglars broke into soon-to-be-ex-coach Frank Kijkaard's house last week while he and his family were inside. They didn't realize the burglars had even gotten in until they found that some €300,000 worth of cash, jewelry, and watches were gone. My question: What the hell were they doing with all that stuff in their house in the first place?

2008-04-22T11:59:00.004+02:00

More PP infighting: Esperanza Aguirre announced yesterday that she was not a candidate for the presidency of the PP at the June convention, and that she would vote for Rajoy. But she didn't get all the way off the pot: she also announced that she might change her mind, and that she thought another convention should be held in three years to choose the candidate for the 2012 election. The last thing the PP needs is a Rajoy-Aguirre conflict for the next four years. Look how much damage the Hillary-Obama conflict over the last four months has already done to the Democratic party.

Speaking of Hillary and Obama, the Spanish press is eating it up. Nonstop entertainment. Each of the newspapers runs a story every day on the campaign. However, I haven't seen a single article looking into their policies, and little attention has been paid to their records. They're also ignoring McCain, the one person we know for sure is going to be on the ballot in November.

The Spanish fishing boat captured by Somali pirates is anchored near the coast, and Spanish authorities are apparently negotiating the payment of a ransom, and they've asked for help from the French and the Americans, since Spain has no naval presence in the area. I vote we help them out, since piracy is against everyone's interest (not to mention evil), and then never let them forget it.

Much irony here: when Zap's really in trouble, who you gonna call? The imperialist hyperpower, of course. Also, this type of incident makes nationalist Spaniards feel weak and insignificant, since Spain cannot defend itself and is effectively a NATO protectorate, and it makes them even more resentful of those who defend them.

Get this. At the beginning of April, Somali pirates captured a French yacht. The French paid the ransom, got their people back, and then mounted a raid on the pirate base with fifty commandos, a dozen special forces, and five helicopters. They captured six pirates and recovered $200,000 of the ransom money.

I think that's great. Good for the French. The only thing they could have done better would have been summarily hanging the pirates off the yardarm.

Of course, if the Americans had done exactly the same thing, certain elements in Europe would have gotten mad and accused us of colonialist unilateral warmongering.

Want more irony? The fishing boat involved belongs to Basques, as does much of the Spanish fishing fleet. The Basque Nationalists (PNV) are all mad because Spain doesn't have an Indian Ocean naval presence, and they'd called for a Spanish patrol boat to be stationed off Somalia in June of last year. I thought the Basque Nationalists were against Spanish militarism and in favor of Basque self-determination, and now here they are all pissed off because the central government doesn't have enough military power.

Economics minister Pedro Solbes has backed off his overoptimistic prediction for 2007 GDP growth, and scaled it back to 2.4%, still higher than the forecasts we've seen from the private sector. He's predicting 2.1% growth for 2009, which is still way too bullish. He also claims that unemployment won't top 10%.

Meanwhile, an organization of small Catalan builders has announced that its members have 2000 new dwellings already constructed in Catalonia, mostly in the suburbs around Barcelona and Tarragona, and they're selling them at cost, between €120,000 and €180,000. That's half the price those places were going for a year ago. The association of manufacturers of construction materials says that orders are down by 30%.

Barcelona suburb Badalona, Catalonia's third largest city, is looking at a major problem: there are more than 1000 immigrants, mostly Pakistanis and Romanian gypsies, who can't pay their rent and are going to be evicted. These people don't have legal leases, just a verbal agreement, so they don't have the massive protection Spanish law gives renters. And, since the tenants can't pay the rent, the apartment owners, also Pakistanis, can't pay their mortgages, and so the apartments are going to be repossessed. City authorities fear that those evicted will simply move in with compatriots, and thus increase overcrowding and worsen hygiene.

Tomorrow is Sant Jordi, the rose and book day, the day of the year on which Barcelona is most attractive, and the weather is going to cooperate, warm and sunny. And, since Barça hosts Man U in the Champions League semifinals, some 7000 English fans are going to be here. Let's hope they behave themselves. All the city's bars have ordered extra beer supplies. It costs €200,000 to bring out the police officers necessary for crowd control whenever a big crowd of soccer fans come here. There is a lot of complaining about this, generally aimed at the nasty guiris who get drunk and pee on everything. However, it also costs the cities that Barça visits about the same amount to keep their traveling fans under control, so it all balances out.

Don't forget to put down your bet on Manchester United, no matter how bad the odds are, since Barça is in a dreadful slump--they couldn't score in a Tijuana whorehouse--and has completely thrown away the League, and all its best players are either "injured" or injured.

2008-04-21T13:01:00.003+02:00

PP infighting news: Last weekend Mariano Rajoy announced that anybody who didn't like the way he's running the party can leave, which has been universally interpreted as a challenge to Esperanza Aguirre to make a decision. The expectation is that she'll make some kind of announcement today. Rajoy feels confident because he's got the regional party bosses behind him; he and Camps and Valcarcel and Feijoo want to make a move toward the center, while Aguirre's position is farther to the right.

The only thing I can say is it's about time the PP distanced itself from everyone involved in the 3-11 conspiracy theory; Aguirre was not one of them, but she's got the support of the Acebes-Zaplana hard-line wing.

The problem here is when Aznar was running the party, he kept everyone else in line and on message. Rajoy appears to have lost that near-dictatorial power. One advantage the right has had in Spain is that it's united; there's no other national party to the left of the Socialists, while the Socialists have always had to share their support with the Communists. If the PP splinters, though, that's a major advantage they're losing.

Get this: Somali pirates off the east African coast captured a Spanish fishing boat, and they are holding the 26 crew members hostages. They've said they just want money and that they are not political. The defense ministry is sending a ship to the area. This is the second episode this month of pirates taking a Western ship in the area. Piracy is a genuinely serious international problem, and of course those who are hurt most are the poor, since pirates are much warier of Western ships than of small Third World boats. I vote in favor of an armed response by Western navies; if we can't suppress piracy on the high seas, then what do we have a navy for?

Somebody called in a bomb threat against an Air Europa plane just before it was supposed to take off from Caracas for Madrid; they had to evacuate it, and a fifteen-hour delay proceeded.

They're starting another mass trial of members of ETA-front organizations; this time it's Gestoras Pro Amnistia, which supported amnesty for ETA terrorists before Judge Garzon banned it in 2001. 27 of them are facing sentences of up to ten years for membership in a terrorist organization. They are, of course, guilty as hell, and most of them are going to be convicted.

The rains last weekend filled up the reservoirs a bit, and now they're at 22.6% of capacity. Some more would be nice.

One good piece of economic news: 10.6 million tourists visited Spain over the first quarter of 2008, up 5.3% over last year. Tourism is such a huge industry in this country. Just a guess: Lots of Europeans are feeling slightly pinched and are downscaling their vacations from the Seychelles or the Caribbean to the Costa Brava, which is still very cheap compared to most other Euro vacation spots, and easy to reach as well.

I probably dislike Pepe Rubianes as much as I do anyone. He's announced he's taking six months off to recuperate from lung cancer. Unlike Rubianes, I don't wish death on anyone who's not going around killing other people, and I hope Rubianes recovers. And shuts the hell up instead of spewing poison, as he so often does.

Hey, everybody, look at this! La Vanguardia has another reader photo! This time it's a sign in a Barcelona shop window reading "Sale. New electric chairs starting at €3200." Says La Vangua, "The author of the photograph noticed this unusual sale in a shop on Calle Córsega in Barcelona that sells orthopedic products for handicapped people, and he wondered whether the electric chairs are imported from overseas. "Do they come from the United States? No to the death penalty."

Paul Hollander defined anti-Americanism as "a relentless critical impulse toward American social, economic, and political institutions, traditions, and values."

2008-04-20T17:12:00.005+02:00

Our friends in ETA exploded a bomb at 3:25 this morning at Socialist party headquarters in Elgoibar, Guipúzcoa. They called in a warning, and the cops were able to evacuate the area, so fortunately no one was injured, but serious property damage was done. Three kilos of explosives were used. This was the second bombing of a Socialist headquarters in three days.

Nasty incident in Málaga: a drunk driver passing illegally ran a bus full of Finnish tourists off the road, where it rolled over. Nine were killed and fifteen seriously injured. The drunk survived, thereby pointing out a flaw in the Darwinian model.

Drivers from other European countries might want to be extra-careful in Spain, which has pretty near the most dangerous highways in Western Europe. All the drinking doesn't help, and the dreadful road signs don't help much either, nor does all the speeding that goes on. There really is more machismo among the Latins than the Nordics, and it comes out in the way some of them drive.

Check out this nonsense by Bru Rovira in La Vanguardia today:

Hunger is a structural problem of the globalized world today. A tragedy that demands collective solutions to the shared responsibility of the chief actors on the new scene of politics, and transnational markets, especially the rich countries, which have dictated the rules and exercise political and economic control of globalization.

Looks like the Jew-American conspiracy against the world is poisoning the wells again. We wouldn't want to imply that many poor countries are poor because of their own social structure or corruption or thieving dictatorial governments, would we?

(According to the UN) technical progress applied to agriculture "has produced very unjust profits." In order to correct it, the Unesco recommends fostering sustainable agriculture that respects the fragility of natural resources and protects the local production of food, bringing the producer closer to the consumer.

Sounds like protectionism to me. By the way, the corrupt thieving dictatorial governments that impoverish their own people are well represented at the UN. I'm not surprised that they're trying to blame the situation they created on the Jew-American conspiracy and its "unjust profits." I also note that our author has no concept of competitive advantage: the countries that are best at producing food should do so. Other countries should concentrate on producing other goods that they can produce more efficiently and trade those goods for food. In that way everybody takes the fullest advantage of its economic potential.

As can be seen now, although production has increased, distribution is unequal, and the poorest countries have not only gotten poorer because of the difficulties of reaching the markets and unfair competition against their products exercised by rich countries slashing prices with subsidized products (dumping), but they now see that having lost their food sovereignty, self-sufficiency within the poverty in which they lived has directly become hunger, because they now depend only on the markets and the prices that the large producers set, with whom they cannot compete

.

Our author is absolutely right that agricultural subsidies in First World countries need to be stopped now; these subsidies are genuine unfair competition to Third World farmers. However, I was not aware that "slashed" food prices caused hunger; I figured the lower the price the consumer pays, the better. Guess I was wrong. Our author also believes that prices are set by the producers rather than the market, by the way. Finally, he does not understand that the way to make Third World countries wealthier is by improving farming technology to increase production there, along with hanging their corrupt dictators.

2008-04-18T13:48:00.007+02:00

It's raining again this morning, and they've already gotten half an inch up in the Pyrenees; we had more than an inch yesterday here in Barcelona. A couple of rainy days do not an April make, but it's better than nothing. The content of the reservoirs is slightly up, though some of that is due to mountain snowmelt, not rain.

The transfer of water from the Ebro to Barcelona has hacked off PP-governed Valencia and Murcia, who are demanding that the old PP water plan be revived. Their argument: Barcelona needs water. Send them water. We need water. Send us water too. This issue is amazingly touchy. The lying sod Francesc Baltasar continues to call the planned Tarragona-Barcelona aqueduct a "mini-transfer," since the Spanish left made "No water transfers" a rallying cry against the PP back in 2004. Now that the capital of the Spanish left is thirsty, of course, a water transfer is needed at all costs, but we still can't call it that.

I think this is what Lakoff means by "framing the issue"--inventing euphemisms.

By the way, La Vanguardia is calling this whole kerfuffle "The War for Water." The Cataloonies are, get this, blaming the PP for trying to use the water issue to stir up anti-Catalan feeling in the rest of Spain. No, I think the PP is trying to stir up anti-Zapatero feeling in the rest of Spain.

2008 will be the first year since 1997 in which housing prices have increased by less than the rate of inflation. The five most expensive cities for housing in Spain, per square meter: San Sebastian, Guecho, Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao.

Oh, Lordy. You know we're in real economic trouble when Spanish beer consumption declines, 5% in 2007.

The Basque police arrested ten pro-ETA punks for "street terrorism," vandalism and rioting, in Guipuzcoa province. These dirtbags had committed more than twenty "acts of sabotage," several of them against the railroad system, which sounds like attempted train-wrecking to me. Seems to me the cops could have arrested them after, say, one or two, but the wheels of justice grind exceedingly slow. Three of them put up a fight and got busted for resisting arrest as well. These little shits are violent criminals and need to be locked up.

More little shits: The so-called university students against the Bologna Plan, the EU reform that is supposed to actually make them go to class and learn something, had a sit-in today at the Autonomous university. They're still there; about thirty of them locked themselves in the auditorium. I say we send in the cops to beat the crap out of them and arrest the lot for creating a public nuisance, disturbing the peace, disobeying a police officer, trespassing, and mopery.

They don't get the concept of "civil disobedience" in Spain. See, as Thoreau envisioned it, you were supposed to break laws that you believed to be unjust, and then submit yourself to society's punishment, as a sign that you believed morality to be above the law. You are not supposed to try to escape punishment, which is what these little shits who think it's fun to play radical always do. By the way, when Thoreau actually tried this by refusing to pay his taxes on the ground he was against the Mexican War, and they came and got him, his aunt bailed him out.

2008-04-18T12:32:00.002+02:00

Chemical Lali Solé, in another turgid and self-contradictory piece in La Vanguardia, says: "I read in the e-magazine Sin Permiso that in Texas (United States) the creationists have achieved an important goal...in Texan textbooks the existence of our world is explained from the perspective of intelligent design, denying the theory of evolution. A posture that rationalists call obscurantism more proper to ancient times." (Sentence fragment sic.)

Naturally Chemical Lali didn't bother, actually, say, fact-checking said electronic magazine. I did, and I found that according to the National Council for Science Education, a pro-science organization, that nothing of the sort is true. The most recent science-education news from Texas is that a pro-evolution moderate Republican won the primary for a vacant seat on the state Board of Ed, that the Texas Academy of Sciences supports the teaching of evolution, that the Institute for Creation Research has applied for state certification as a graduate school and said certification will almost certainly be denied, and that the state director of science curriculum was fired after using her official e-mail account to urge subordinates to attend an anti-intelligent-design speech, on the ground that it wasn't her job to take sides on the issue.

Sin Permiso's scare story about creationism taking over in Texas, which Chemical Lali completely misinterpreted, is taken from an Austin website called The Atheist Experience.

So where is Sin Permiso getting its information? Well, they say right up front that they're a "socialist" publication, which generally means "Communist" in Europe when written with a small S. They re-publish opinion articles by other writers that they find simpáticos. If you check their file on articles about the US, you get the usual suspects as authors: Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Howard Zinn, Greg Palast, Barbara Ehrenreich, Eric Hobsbawm, Angela Davis, George Lakoff, Lewis Lapham, Alexander Cockburn, Michael Moore, Ralph Nader, Cindy Sheehan, Tariq Ali--and our very own Andy Robinson!.

So if you're wondering where Europeans get their crazy-ass ideas about the United States, there are a few simple steps. The anti-American ideas start in the febrile brains of the far left of the US Democratic party, and the renegades even farther left than that lot. They get mistranslated to Spanish by our local press, which is also leftist in its sympathies, and picked up on by lefty politicians looking for an issue as well as lefty academics looking for a quick publication. Then they filter down to the mass media, and from there to the general public, nearly always in a further mutation, and next thing you know La Vanguardia is saying that in Texas teaching evolution is banned.

2008-04-17T18:05:00.003+02:00

ETA exploded a bomb at around 6 AM today outside a Socialist headquarters in Bilbao. They called in a warning first, so the cops were able to evacuate the neighborhood. Serious material damage was done, as the bomb contained five kilos of explosives. Good thing nobody was killed, but seven Basque police officers were slightly injured.

A lot of Spaniards get very indignant when the English-speaking press calls ETA a "Basque separatist group," when it is in reality a gang of terrorists who have killed more than 800 people. They have a point.

We finally had a good rain today, both in the morning and the afternoon, including a thunderstorm, which are comparatively rare in Spain. The cats and the dog don't like thunderstorms at all, and there was some yelping and cowering going on here. It rained all over Spain, since there's a low-pressure system over the Bay of Biscay bringing in counterclockwise moist Atlantic winds. It's supposed to be rainy all weekend; they said it already rained more than an inch in the Pyrenees, and this should fill up the reservoirs a couple of percent. The stinky season has been put off for another couple of weeks.

The incompetent lying greenie-Communist Catalan environmental counselor, Francesc Baltasar, now says we won't need to go into the "drought pre-emergency stage" until May, as the recent rains have increased reservoir contents by a percent or two.

Good news: The cops carried out a mass raid in Madrid, arresting 87 Nigerians for running the well-known Internet e-mail fraud. They may have scored upward of €170 million; the cops have evidence that they took in at least €20 million. Most of the 1200 victims defrauded were foreigners in Europe and the US, and they got taken for an average of €18,000 each. More than 200 computers were confiscated, along with reams of other documents.

Archaeological update: In Constantí, near Tarragona, a ruinous medieval building collapsed and the remains of a Roman aqueduct, later renovated during the medieval era, was found under it. The arcade is 60 meters long, and the aqueduct seems to have been for irrigation. They're taking this seriously enough to change the plan to build a new train line between Barcelona and Valencia, which would have passed right by the site.

Check out this headline on La Vanguardia's website today: "Hundreds of Palestinians mourn cameraman murdered in Gaza." Neutral. Objective. Unbiased. I like that in a newspaper. Naturally, the usual gang of idiots showed up to post anti-Semitic comments, which I won't bother to quote.

Economics update: The Spanish savings banks association predicts GDP growth for 2008 to be 2.0%, and to be 0.9% in 2009. Unemployment will top 11% in mid-2009, housing starts will drop 7% this year and 15% next year, and there will be an 0.6% budget surplus this year and a 1.2% budget deficit next year. Household consumption will rise 2% this year, down from a 3.2% increase last year. Even Pedro Solbes had to admit that his ministry's forecast for this year was outrageously optimistic.

2008-04-16T14:09:00.002+02:00

Jesus. Get this one. Some guy in Santomera, Murcia, chopped off his mom's head with a samurai sword, and then carried it through town while kissing and talking to it. He had already served two prison sentences for violently abusing his mother, and there was a restraining order out on him that expired last August. Get this: The mother appeared on a trash-TV program back in 2001 because she was afraid of her son. Seems like everybody in Spain who suffers a tragic death has been on trash TV.

The psycho son has been locked up in a prison psychiatric unit. He is clearly as nutty as a turrón and should stay there for the rest of his life. And the judicial system did a terrible job of protecting the mother, since there was plenty of warning that something like this was going to happen. As usual.

Though Spain has a high property-crime rate, its violent crime rate is very low, among the lowest in Europe, and one-fifth that in the United States. That doesn't mean violent crime is non-existent, though. One more thing: If Mom had had a gun this might not have happened.

2008-04-16T13:24:00.002+02:00

Get this, by Eusebio Val in La Vanguardia from Washington reporting on the Pope's visit:

Despite being a Methodist, (Bush) is very much attracted to aspects of Catholic morality and the attitude of this Pope in particular. It has even been said that, secretly, Bush is a Catholic. It is true that he has given a great deal of protagonism and power to Catholic public figures, among them the two new Supreme Court justices he nominated, the conservatives John Roberts--the Chief Justice--and Samuel Alito.

Wow. I didn't know Bush was a secret Catholic. I thought he was one of those crazy evangelicals who thinks God speaks to him personally, as La Vangua has so often repeated. I also had no idea that the Catholicism of Bush's Supreme Court appointees had anything to do with their nomination. By the way, Val also calls the Church "the most numerous religious minority in the country." I've never thought of the Catholics as a minority; I've always thought of them as the largest US Christian denomination.

And get this one, from Público yesterday, by a fellow named Enrique Meneses:

The USA, which has made a totem out of machismo (sic) throughout its history, will have difficulty in facing a withdrawal from this war without an exit with the flag flying and martial music. The memory of Saigon lives on in the collective memory. A troop withdrawal in stages was vetoed by George Bush a long time ago. He is leaving that job for his successor. His excuse: the threat of a civil war in Iraq.

But isn't what is happening now in Basora a civil war? Is it necessary to keep lying? There are only two ways out for the Americans: close themselves off in two or three well-fortified bases in strategic places and withdraw the majority of their troops, or leave as Spain did, in an orderly manner while protecting their rearguard in order to suffer the smallest amount of casualties. In the first case the two Shiite sides and the Sunnis, financed by the USA, will end up finding a leader who can negotiate about petroleum. Even if he's a dictator.

Wishful thinking, of course; Mr. Meneses would love to see the Coalition flee Iraq, and he doesn't seem to give a damn about the Iraqi people. And since when has the US been particularly noted for its historical machismo? What the hell is historical machismo?

Mr. Meneses includes his e-mail address in his article: it's enrimeneses@gmail.com. Should you decide to drop him a note, please be polite.

2008-04-15T17:43:00.002+02:00

Severo Moto, the leader of the Equatorial Guinean opposition, was arrested today in Toledo on arms-trafficking charges, though the guns he's accused of trafficking in consist of two shotguns and a pistol. I really don't know anything about Moto, except that he's been in trouble in Spain before but managed not to get expelled. I have no idea whether he's any more democratic than Teodoro Obiang, the very nasty dictator currently running that place.

This is important in Spain because Equatorial Guinea was Spain's only sub-Saharan African colony, and there are some Guineans living here, frequently exiles.

Repsol shares are up more than 13% today, on a report that they're in on the consortium to develop offshore oil in Brazil in a big new field.

Unpaid debts in Spain are way up no matter how you measure it, and the Bank of Spain is "moderately concerned."

The Zap government says the €10 billion stimulus package will cut the budget surplus to 0.6%, down from the predicted 1.15%. My question is whether they've taken 1-2% growth into consideration with these figures. I bet they haven't. The €400 tax refund will come half in June and the rest in monthly installments of €33. They're going to raise €4 billion with off-budget borrowing. And the regional and city governments are going to be hit very hard by the real-estate decline and corresponding loss of taxes, and they'll have to cut back spending drastically.

Meanwhile, the Montilla government has its own €2.7 billion economic stimulus for Catalonia all ready. Looks to me like it mainly consists of public works and subsidies to the construction industry.

Housing starts are going to be down 8% in 2008 in Catalonia, after a 2% increase in 2007. This will be the first decline in ten years. Pop goes the bubble.

2008-04-15T15:31:00.010+02:00

Bad news from the US for the Spanish economy: Wholesale prices were up 1.1% in March. Inflation in the US means more inflation in Spain, and we're already close to 5% over the last year.

There is a great deal of concern in Spain about the sharp increase in grain prices (up 80% since 2005), since Spain is an exporter of vegetables and fruits but an importer of cereals. The grain price rise is because of bad harvests in 2007 in Australia and South America, growth in India and China, the sharp hike in oil prices (as oil is necessary to process and transport grain), and the use of grain to make fuel. Of course, increased grain prices mean increased meat and dairy prices as well, since farm animals eat grain too.

And the people who are hurt worst by food price inflation are, of course, the poor of the world, since they spend a much greater proportion of their incomes on food than wealthier people do. Methinks that Europe's Enlightened and Illustrated should denounce the selfishness of the oil cartel in limiting production to keep prices high and thus hurting poor folks everywhere. Not gonna happen, though.

Geopolitical point: Most of the OPEC countries don't export anything significant except for oil, so they have to spend the money that they're taking in on food and other necessities, all of which they import. This means that the US, as the world's largest grain exporter, pretty much has the non-grain-producing world over a barrel in the same way that the OPEC countries do; the difference is the Americans don't use food as an economic weapon. Not yet, anyway. The countries that are really going to get squeezed are those that don't produce either energy or grain. Spain, for example.

La Vanguardia's editorial today talks about a possible "food hecatomb," meaning mass starvation. They specifically blame it on using grain to make biofuels, and claim that "staple foods are the objective of international speculative capital." If I didn't know any better I'd say they're blaming it on those damn Jews again. Anyway, they want somebody (the UN security council, specifically) to make everybody else stop converting grain to fuel.

Get their conclusion: "While the United States has always considered grain production as a geostrategic factor, in Europe it has not been so. Here farmers have even been subsidized not to produce it. It is time to change the policy. The Unesco stresses the urgency of changing the rules of world agriculture, which is under the dictates of the large multinational corporations, to the detriment of global well-being."

1) Actually, I don't think the US has ever considered grain production as geostrategic, though that may change 2) the US has also paid farmers not to produce grain 3) "Changing the rules of world agriculture"? That is, putting the Alliance of Civilizations in charge of it instead of the market? 4) "Multinational corporations" dictate everything? Sounds like those damn Jews and Americans one more time. 5) Notice that La Vanguardia does not say one word about the role of oil prices in general and OPEC policy in particular in the high cost of food. It's all the speculative capitalist multinational corporations' fault.

You probably saw Berlusconi got elected for the third time as Italian prime minister. He's a crook, but at least he's a pro-American and pro-NATO crook. Good news: The Commies won zero seats. They got an 80% turnout, which is really high, especially by American standards.

The press is making a big deal out of Carmen Chacon's first review of the troops as Defense minister because she's a pregnant woman and the Army is traditionally very unfond of change. I guess it is sort of a big deal, symbolically, since it stresses that the Army is under civilian control, and Spain was a military dictatorship for four decades and then had a real coup attempt in 1981. However, the army has been substantially reformed and most of the old Franco guys have been retired or dead for years. They haven't seriously interfered in politics since the coup attempt, which was opposed by the great majority of the officers anyway. I doubt they felt humiliated by receiving orders from a woman, since the troops have been taking orders from women noncoms and officers for years now.

The plagiarist Marius Serra records an urban legend / conspiracy theory traveling around the Catalan Internet: the "multinational insurance companies" are flying a squadron of small planes over central Catalonia that are spraying silver sulfate in order to prevent hail, so that they won't have to pay out on their policies, and that the drought is a consequence of this practice. Supposedly three hundred people have seen the planes. Wow. You'd have to be more than abnormally stupid to believe that. Inbreeding in Solsona?

There are a lot of language purists running around claiming that our kids can't write correctly because they use their own jargon, spelling, grammar, etc. in SMSs and e-mails. No, our kids are smart enough to distinguish between two different registers. They just don't know how to write correctly in either of them.

Looks like the goddamn bus drivers and the city have agreed on a last-minute deal and the strike will come to an end. The city caved in: the drivers will get two days off a week, and fewer hours, with no pay cut, and no disciplinary action, even against those guilty of sabotage. The sabotage has continued, though; over the weekend thirty ticket-validating machines were destroyed, and last night nine buses had their tires slashed and a non-striking driver was attacked (they threw red paint all over him). No arrests were made, of course.

I get a lot of Google hits for Isabel Pantoja. Pantoja fans: Her boyfriend Julian Muñoz, accused of stealing everything in Marbella that wasn't nailed down, went back to jail in la Pantoja's car after a three-day furlough presumably spent with his sweetie. Co-conspirator Juan Antonio Roca, charged with extortion, embezzlement, tax fraud, money-laundering, leading an criminal organization, forgery, illegal weapons possession, influence-peddling, and abuse of power, got out of jail on €1 million bail.

Reminds me of a joke: Lincoln had to pay back Pennsylvania Republican party boss Simon Cameron for his crucial support, and he made Cameron his first secretary of war though he knew what Cameron was like. Supposedly one day Lincoln said, "I believe Cameron would steal anything, excepting a hot stove," and a Cameron supporter said, "Take that back," and Lincoln said, "All right, I believe that Cameron would steal anything, including a hot stove."

2008-04-14T15:16:00.002+02:00

In case you're interested, readership is up from an average of about 150 a day to about 200 since the layout change.

The last 100 visitors were from:

United States 42
Spain 34
United Kingdom 7
Germany 3
Belgium, France, Norway, Sweden, Canada 2
Hong Kong, Estonia, Taiwan, Colombia 1

2008-04-14T13:45:00.003+02:00

The new Zap cabinet hasn't been slow in announcing what its economic plan is: Solbes, at the IMF meeting in Washington, said that they're going to spend €10 billion ($15 billion), more than 1% of GDP, on stimulating the economy. So there goes the balanced budget out the window, and inflation will roll on indefinitely, as the Zapsters try to keep consumer spending high and unemployment down. Ironic that Zap and his admirers are always going around criticizing the strawman of Dehumanizing Globalized Neoliberal Consumer Society and how shallow it is.

About €6 billion of the stimulus package is Zap's €400 per taxpayer refund, half of which will be paid in July and the other half in December. If we're going to stimulate the economy, then I thoroughly agree that the best way to do it is to give the taxpayers some of their own money back so they can do with it as they see best. Again, it's interesting that this is a flat tax refund, rather than (as one would think knowing the Zapsters) a progressive refund giving back more to the poor than the rich.

The other €4 billion, though, looks like it's mostly free money given out to special interest groups. It will go to 1) aid for small and medium businesses, basically a government subsidy for the petite bourgeoisie 2) guarantees for mortgages on dwellings under "official protection," basically a government subsidy for the banks 3) public works spending, which if done right doesn't have to be a mere government subsidy for the construction industry, but if done wrong will be just that 4) "reordering the energy industry," which sure sounds like a government subsidy for Repsol and the electric and gas utilities 5) paying immigrants to go home, which is of course a government subsidy for said immigrants, and an indirect subsidy for the unions, whose members will face less competition.

Solbes also said that the government's three economic priorities would be innovation, modernization, and "expanding equality between men and women." Seems to me that gender quotas would cause a negative effect on innovation and modernization.

He's still living in Disneyworld on economic growth: the IMF says Spain's growth rate for 2008 may be as low as 1%, and the Spanish banks predict between 400,000 and 600,000 Spaniards will be added to the unemployment rolls by December.

The Socialists have been nattering on about George Lakoff and how their political strategies are based on his theories. From what I can tell, Lakoff thinks humans interpret everything as a metaphor, which of course is unscientific, and taken to the extreme means that humans are incapable of truly abstract thought. Lakoff's political metaphor about conservatism being a "strict father" and left-liberalism a "nurturing mother" is not precisely original. He adds that leftist politicians should attempt to define and frame the issues according to the metaphors they believe in, which again is not precisely original; he seems to really be saying that leftists should invent euphemisms to avoid using what he believes to be conservative discourse and metaphor. So it figures that Zap and the Socialists would buy into such tosh. Karl Rove or Lee Atwater would eat these guys up and spit out the bones.

2008-04-13T13:02:00.002+02:00

The List Universe has a post containing 11 videos of James Randi debunking pseudoscientific bullshit: graphology, astrology, psychometry, crystal power, aura reading, telekinesis, clairvoyance, dowsing, thought transference, faith healing, and homeopathy. Great stuff. Definitely check it out.

Coincidentally, La Vanguardia has a two-page piece today on something called ayurveda, which they call a "millenarian science...millenarium wisdom...ayurveda does not cure symptoms, like Western medicine, but rather goes to the roots and establishes an integral or holistic diagnosis of the individual." Naturally, it's nothing but superstition and fraud.

Wikipedia says:

Critics object to the lack of rigorous scientific studies and clinical trials of many ayurvedic products. The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine states that "most clinical trials of Ayurvedic approaches have been small, had problems with research designs, lacked appropriate control groups, or had other issues that affected how meaningful the results were."

There is evidence that using some ayurvedic medicine, especially those involving herbs, metals, minerals, or other materials involves potentially serious risks, including toxicity.

Quackwatch says that ayurveda as it is known today is based on the fraudulent claims of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Deepak Chopra, and adds, "Because Ayurvedic medicine relies on nonsensical diagnostic concepts and involves many unproven products, using it would be senseless even if all of the products were safe."

The Skeptic's Dictionary also describes ayurveda as "pseudoscience," and says it "confuses metaphysical claims with empirical claims."

Even La Vanguardia says, tucked away at the bottom of the article, "Nonetheless, there are those who criticize the fact that ayurveda only cures those who are not ill. In case of emergency, ayurvedic doctors themselves resort to Western medicine."

So why did the newspaper bother using two whole pages to encourage people to travel to India for ayurvedic treatment?

2008-04-13T12:28:00.002+02:00

There's no news today except more reactions to Zap's new cabinet. Our friends at La Vanguardia have a good few opinions:

1) Zap's inner circle consists of De la Vega, Solbes, Rubalcaba, PSOE general secretary Jose Blanco, PSOE Congressional leader (and ex-defense minister) Jose Antonio Alonso, Jose Enrique Serrano, who is Zap's chief of staff, and David Taguas, Zap's top economics advisor.
2) Maleni Alvarez didn't get fired, and Bibiana Aido got a cabinet post, because of the influence of Andalusian party boss Manuel Chaves.
3) Zap and Montilla do not get along either politically or personally, and Montilla had to swallow Alvarez's continuance in her post. Montilla's reward for the big Socialist victory in Catalonia were the cabinet posts for Chacon and Celestino Corbacho, even though Corbacho is more a Zap guy than a Montilla guy.
4) Elena Salgado at Public Administration is considered to be very competent by political insiders.
5) Jesus Caldera, Zap's campaign manager, wanted to be deputy premier in charge of social issues. Zap, who doesn't seem impressed with Caldera at all, gave him the boot and sent him off to set up a PSOE think tank, a copy of the PP's FAES.
6) The purpose of the new Ministry of Equality will be to establish gender quotas in the private sector and to fight against "machista violence."
7) Zap is going to make a big deal out of environmentalism and climate change and all that Greenie crap.
8) Nobody likes Moratinos or Alvarez.
9) Apparently the big favor Miguel Sebastian did for Zap was agreeing to run for mayor of Madrid against Gallardon on short notice after Jose Bono bailed out on him. Cristina Garmendia at Research and Development and Beatriz Corredor at Housing are Sebastian's people, as well.

2008-04-12T15:57:00.004+02:00

Not much other news, as is common on Saturdays. ETA set two booby-trap bombs at a telephone relay station in Navarra, hoping to blow up some cops, but the second bomb didn't work. Fortunately, nobody got hurt.

El País says that 800 Spaniards have contracted Creutzfelt-Jakob disease (of which one cause is eating "mad cows") since 2000, which means that there most likely is something strange going on. I'm glad I'm a vegetarian.

More than one-third of Spanish university graduates are working at jobs for which they are overqualified, a higher percentage than in any other EU country but Ireland and Estonia.

The mini-aqueduct between Tarragona and Barcelona, to carry unneeded water destined for irrigation from the Ebro to the thirsty metro area, will be finished in six months and cost €150 million ($225 million). So let's see: it ought to come on line by the first of November, assuming that they get started now and everything goes according to plan. That means about four months of showering once a week here in Can Fanga, during what will become known as the Stinky Summer of 2008.

Milan general manager Adriano Galliani is coming next week to buy Ronaldinho. Supposedly the offer is €8 million a year for Ronaldinho and €16 million to the Barça for his contract. Barça wants €30 million, and the story is they've already got a €25 million offer from Inter. I say make them bid against one another and see how much the club can get.

2008-04-12T15:13:00.004+02:00

Zap's named his new Cabinet, with some changes, but mostly continuity.

María Teresa Fernández de la Vega: First Deputy Premier and Cabinet chief. Holdover.
Pedro Solbes: Second Deputy Premier and Economics. Holdover.
Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba: Interior. Holdover.
Elena Salgado: Public Administration. Holdover.
Carme Chacón: Defense. Last legislature: Minister of Housing.
Celestino Corbacho: Labor and Immigration. Last legislature: Mayor of Barcelona suburb L'Hospitalet.
Mariano Fernández Bermejo: Justice. Holdover.
Bernat Soria: Health. Holdover.
Miguel Ángel Moratinos: Foreign Affairs. Holdover.
Miguel Sebastián: Industry, Tourism, and Commerce. Lost 2006 mayoral campaign in Madrid.
Mercedes Cabrera: Education, Social Affairs, and Family. Last legislature: Deputy from Madrid.
César Antonio Molina: Culture. Holdover.
Elena Espinosa: Agriculture and Environment. Holdover.
Cristina Garmendia: Research and Development. From the private sector.
Magdalena Álvarez: Public Works. Holdover.
Bibiana Aido: Equality. Last legislature: Deputy from Cadiz in Andalusian parliament.
Beatriz Corredor: Housing. Last legislature: Member of Madrid city council.

So that's a Cabinet made up of 17 ministers, nine women and eight men, though of the women only De la Vega, Chacón, and Álvarez hold top posts. It's the first time that a Cabinet has had more women than men, and the first time there's been a woman Defense minister.

Solbes is the minister who is most trusted by the Spanish public. I'm surprised Zap didn't fire Maleni Álvarez. Spain's most important international posts, Foreign Affairs and Defense, are in very weak hands, a wimp and an airhead. Rubalcaba is a holdover against his desires; he'd wanted to change posts. He's done OK at Interior, I have to admit. At least they got the new research and development minister from the private sector, so she might actually do a good job.

I have no idea what a minister of Equality is going to do; I suspect it's going to involve gender quotas. I thought Miguel Sebastián's political career was over after that embarrassing 2006 defeat; Zap must have owed him a big one in the favor bank. Former Barcelona mayor Joan Clos got booted at Industry; I wouldn't hire Clos to paint my back fence. And Cristina Narbona's head rolled at Environment, as I'd speculated.

2008-04-11T19:19:00.002+02:00

Too bad the poll on La Vanguardia's worst correspondent is finished, or Rafael Poch would have gotten a few more votes. I ran across a Rafa piece on George W. Bush's 2004 speech at Normandy. Check out Rafa's take on World War II history (the translation is not mine):

Many think that John Wayne and soldier Ryan saved Europe from fascism, that Angloamerica saved the old continent, and that the disembarkation in Normandy was the great decisive action. It was not so...

But, would there have been a "second front" if the things had gone well to Hitler in the East?

The Anglo-American disembarked in the remotest and worse places to alleviate the pressure undergone by the USSR...

The United States had supported the Italian dictator from his arrival to power in 1922, including the Italians’ excesses, since they represented, after all, a the threat to the Bolsheviks...

On the Western part it is accepted, for example, that the German-Soviet ’39 pact demonstrated the kinship between nazism and stalinism. Of the shames of the democracies, of their attitude towards fascism on the eve of the war and of their imperial kinships with Hitler and Mussolini, hardly anyone speaks. Surely because of the manifestation of that fascism in the present times...

...if the USSR had been attacked (by Hitler) instead of having attacking Poland first, would have been applauded by the democracies...

The most formidable propaganda apparatus and public relations in world history has made a legend of its ever-victorious history. Hollywood, the mediatic industry in the hands of tycoons, the systems which are the official feeders of that industry and, of course, the army of paid affluent conformists in charge to transmit it, have written the most “advisable” version: the victory was America’s...

Vindicating the only positive role that the foreign armed intervention of the United States has had in its history in the last century, the President sells his present-day crusades. The French, the Italians, the Belgians and the Dutch are thus eternally grateful to America and the Europeans’ serfdom to soldier Ryan is maintained, even when confronted with a long list of unpunished crimes committed by the American militarism since then and the ongoing destruction of the fragile international rights.

The man (George W. Bush) who, according to polls, embodies the war and promotes global destabilization for most Europeans, spoke today in Normandy about morality, liberty and principles, and received the tribute and the applause of the leaders of the "old Europe".

The generosity and heroism of the 10,000 killed in those French beaches served, as well, to assert its "war against terrorism", the destruction of the fragile rudiments of international law and arms control, the preventive or "humanitarian" aggression, the arms race and the trivialization of the use of nuclear weapons in conventional wars. It's time to remember who was the main representative of those same trends in the world of 60 years ago.

The war was not won Private Ryan in Normandy, but a dangerous unworthy claims its glory.

Trevor from Kalebeul had an excellent post when Poch's article came out originally in 2004. He summed up the problem perfectly:

Stalin apologist Rafael Poch has published an article in La Vanguardia which belittles, falsifies, misrepresents the Normandy landings. That’s a common line here, where quite large numbers of people still believe that Stalin (substitute Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Companys etc as you will) was a benevolent (although misunderstood) genius.

Here's what Poch has to say about EU China policy:

The communicative strategy to be adopted by the EU in the rhetorical construction of its dialogue with China should be fully cognizant of and sensitive to the criteria of China’s moral order as outlined in this study and specified in the Five Principles (mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity; non-aggression; non-interference in each other’s internal affairs; equality and mutual benefit; and peaceful coexistence), the Spirit of Shanghai and the ASEAN Way, with special emphasis on mutual recognition, parity of esteem, and mutual benefit. Any other discourse will be perceived semiotically as unilateralist and exploitative.

Somebody claiming to be Rafael Poch posted this as a comment at a Time magazine blog in the original English:

Western optimism and ignorance about his own history, takes for garantted that there is nothing worse for China as the CCP. A realistic example of "Democracy in China" is the so called "Cultural Revolution" not your idealistic corporate western democracy, where the people decides very, very little. Make the people irrelevant for big decissions was the confessed pourpose of the western "fathers of Democracy" from the very begining (just read!).
Democracy in the West was the result of a very gradual and controlled process, extended for two centuries and plaged whith carnage and social rebellion. My point is that it is hell dificult to analyse "democracy in China" without analizing western democracy model as well.

It is hell difficult to be "international correspondent" without analizing english language model as well.

2008-04-11T17:19:00.003+02:00

The Times has a nice little weekend travel special about Barcelona. Pretty well done, though just a bit too enthusiastic, as most travel articles are. Their recommendations are mostly pretty good if you have money to spend, though to their credit they do mention a couple of budget places.

One criticism: The article doesn't mention street crime, of which there is plenty, mostly of the non-violent sort. Tourists coming here need to be aware that they are targets, especially in the Old City and anywhere else there are a lot of other tourists. If you keep an eye out and don't get sloppy drunk, you should be OK. And, racist as it may be to say so, stay away from groups of Moroccan teenagers wearing brand-name sports gear.

2008-04-11T13:37:00.004+02:00

Check out what I found over on YouTube. It's a collection of short films called "Private Snafu" made for the Army during World War II. The idea was Frank Capra's, and the cartoons themselves were done by the Warner Brothers people, including Mel Blanc as Private Snafu, using his Bugs Bunny Brooklyn accent. The best of them, including "Rumors" and "Spies," were written by Dr. Seuss himself. Fascinating stuff. I'd never heard of it before, much less actually seen the films.

The point of the movies was to teach soldiers what not to do by showing a bad example. The Americans were big into psychology during World War II, and these films were obviously much more effective than your standard instructional movie.

"Coming! Snafu" introduces the character. In "Spies" Snafu gets drunk and gives away military secrets. "The Home Front" addresses GIs' gripes about non-combatants living it up back in the States. "The Chow Hound" warns against wasting food. In "Private Snafu vs. Malaria Mike," Snafu fails to take proper precautions. "Snafuperman" is a superhero who doesn't read his field manuals. "Rumors" shows how spreading gossip may backfire. In "Fighting Tools," Snafu fails to maintain his weapons and his jeep. "Censored" shows what might happen if soldiers try to dodge the censorship of letters home. In "Outpost," Snafu gets bored on observation duty and nearly loses a battle. "Booby Traps" warns soldiers to pay attention when occupying new territory, and comes pretty close to showing some boobies. Bugs Bunny makes a cameo in "Gas," as Snafu loses his gas mask.

Note that all the movies include lots of cheesecake.

2008-04-11T12:15:00.003+02:00

Not much news today, not even any obnoxious media anti-Americanism. Zap will be officially seated as Prime Minister today. Looks like the Zap government prefers the water scheme that would send unused water, currently destined for irrigation, from Tarragona to Barcelona. Supposedly they could build the 60-km aqueduct in six months. Yearly inflation has hit 4.5%, with an 0.9% increase in March alone. As well as oil and grain, clothing and shoe prices are leading the increase. La Vangua claims that Barça is negotiating with AC Milan, Inter Milan, and Manchester City to sell Ronaldinho, and that Inter has offered €25 million.