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.

We spent the four-day Easter weekend out in Vallfogona, where we did what we usually do: go walking/hiking/trudging with the dog and sit around the fire. It's cold in that old stone house. (By the way, an architecture student is going to do his project on our house, I suppose as an example of architectural folkways. He paid his first visit over the weekend, and his first comment was, "You don't have to worry about this place falling down," since the walls are two feet thick.)

One thing I notice every spring is the first day that the leaves on the trees are thick enough to obscure the bare branches: it's today in Barcelona, and the weather couldn't be prettier, with the sun out and the sky brilliant blue because a cold front from the northwest blew all the pollution away.

The cold front brought a pretty good snowfall up in the Pyrenees, six or eight inches, which is unusual this late in March. It won't alleviate the drought much, though, since it'll only provide enough water to supply Catalonia for a week. Still, every little bit helps, and normal rainfall is predicted for this spring.

The biggest news over the weekend was that ETA set off a car bomb in Calahorra, La Rioja. They called in a warning first, so the area was evacuated and nobody got hurt. It was a big bomb, sixty or seventy kilos of explosives, and it blew the crap out of the street where it exploded.

The PSOE has made its post-election, pre-seating of the Congress plans pretty clear: they're trying to reach an agreement with the PNV and CiU to form a centrist coalition. No more Catalan Tripartite in Madrid, no more power for the Commies and ERC. Good. I much prefer it when Zap has to bargain with parties that are more conservative than he is rather than parties that are farther left than he is.

Zap is still talking about reshuffling the cabinet. Apparently Moratinos stays on at Foreign Affairs, and despite asking to be moved, Rubalcaba stays on at Interior. Alonso moves from Defense to PSOE leader in the Congress, Jauregui becomes party secretary general, De la Vega stays on as the Cabinet's spokeswoman, Miguel Sebastian gets a new Research and Development ministry, and Carmen Chacon gets a new Social Affairs ministry. At least so go the rumors.

Pepelu Carod-Rovira says he's stepping down as president of Esquerra Republicana, which we were all expecting sometime pretty soon; he won't rule out running as the party's chief candidate during the next regional elections, though. First they have a party convention in June to get through, featuring a Carod-Puigcercos power struggle. I hope the party splits and both fractions crash and burn.

63 people were killed on the Spanish highways over Semana Santa, 40% fewer than last year, but still far too many. Our roads are three and a half times more dangerous than those in the UK. So far 460 people have been killed in traffic accidents in Spain this year.

Get this. The average Spanish wedding costs €20,800, more than $30,000, and one-third of Spanish couples go into debt to pay for it. Seems like somebody's got his priorities misplaced.

Economics minister Pedro Solbes has again reduced his prediction for Spain's 2008 GDP growth to 2.6%, while the savings bank association says it will be 2.5%. Long-term predictions for 2009 are hovering around a mere 2%. It seems that a rule of Spanish economics is that if growth is less than 3%, unemployment increases, and everyone is expecting a steep rise in the number of jobless. This will reduce Social Security payments in, and increase unemployment insurance payments out, putting Zap's balanced budget in danger. (No matter how much I love slamming Zap, at least he hasn't unleashed government spending and endangered economic stability.)

Average apartment rent in Barcelona: €1040 a month. Not many people can afford that. Gracia, by the way, is the most expensive neighborhood in town per square meter rented, since everything here is miniature-sized, little toy streets and buildings. You have to buy tiny appliances to fit them in your tiny apartment. Americans don't believe it when I tell them that the bar where I watch the Barça games is maybe 400 square feet, and we can fit about 35 people in there. 400 square feet is an average-sized bedroom in Kansas City.

There are 1,130,000 Muslims living in Spain, about 2.5% of the population; for comparative purposes, that's about the percentage of Jews in America. Fears of Eurabia in Spain are a paranoid fallacy.

Barça stomped a weak Valladolid on Sunday, and Real Madrid lost to no-longer slumping Valencia, leaving Barça four points back with nine games to go. Nobody seems to want to win the League. Ronaldinho was benched again, and Barça fans are united on the need to get rid of him over the summer. Bojan, who is still only 17, scored two goals. I still think Villarreal and Sevilla are playing the best football in the league. Racing Santander is this year's surprise team, currently sitting in fifth place and qualifying for the UEFA Cup next year.