The big news in Spain is the Mari Luz case. Down in Huelva some sex pervert kidnapped and murdered a little girl named Mari Luz back in January, and they just found her body a few days ago. The perv has been arrested, and here's the fun part: he had two prior convictions for child sexual abuse, once on his own daughter, and they never bothered actually putting him in jail.

The judiciary is being seriously questioned over this one, since the pervert never should have been anywhere near this child. Jail is made for sick bastards who go around sexually abusing kids, not for people who smoke pot or write bad checks. Spain, by the way, does not have a register of sex offenders, though it does have one of woman-beaters, and there is no law requiring that people be informed if a sex offender is living in their neighborhood, either.

Mari Luz was from a gypsy family that is integrated into society, while the perv seems to be a lower-class payo. The Huelva gypsies are understandably very angry, and they've tried to lynch both the perv and one of his brothers (who is almost certainly innocent, though the perv's wife might have helped him cover up the crime).

This guy would be a clear death penalty candidate in the US, and I'd have no problem voting for it if I were on the jury.

So the Zap government has blocked the proposed transfer of water from the Segre to the Llobregat, thereby showing who is really running things in Catalonia, and it ain't Montilla. Lleida province is happy, while the city of Barcelona is not.

I am not sure whether this is a good idea or not. Spanish teenagers, especially in the south, like to all get together in the street and drink till they puke; this is called "el botellón." So in Granada last night the city government cordoned off an area and told the kids to go to it. 12,000 teenagers showed up, and they're still there as I write. Four of them have been hospitalized for alcoholic poisoning so far. (By the way, the legal drinking age in Spain is 18, but nobody pays any attention.)

On the one hand, some consequences of drinking are kept under control, since there were 200 municipal cops there, and so there was no fighting, vandalism, or drunk driving, and anybody who got sick could receive medical attention. On the other hand, officially permitting botellones is effectively giving them society's approval, and it must cost the city an enormous amount of money both to pay the cops and clean up the mess.

By the way, these gatherings are almost always organized by Internet: some guy says, "Hey, let's have a big old botellón," and he e-mails and SMSs all his friends, and they do the same, and it snowballs, and next thing you know there are 12,000 drunken teenagers sprawled out all over the streets.

I do think Spain's attitude toward adolescent drinking is preferable to America's, since it's not treated as if it were a deadly sin here. There are a couple of complications in the US that don't exist here, though: 1) teenagers in the US usually have to drive home after drinking parties, while in Spain they don't; 2) many families in the US consider drinking to be sinful for religious reasons, meaning that kids have to hide their drinking, while this is not true in Spain; 3) there's a binge drinking tradition in the US that hasn't existed here until recently with these botellones.

However, the Spaniards can please stop bitching about tourists drinking in the streets, since their own kids are pretty good at it themselves.

So they got three hundred people out in Madrid to protest against Chinese repression in Tibet, just 0.005% of what they could have gotten if they were protesting Uncle Sam again.

Slow news day. This is good news since it means no domestic violence, Latino gang fights, terrorist bombs, or attempts by Zap to renationalize the phone company.

Economics stuff: The Ibex 35 market index rose 3.6% yesterday, led by the blue chips Telefonica and Banco Santander. It reached 13,430 points, which is still 11.5% off since January 1, when the index was over 15,000. La Vanguardia credits the recovery on Wall Street, the bailout of Bear Stearns, and the increase in second-hand housing sales in the US. The general feeling of impotence and dependence among Spanish investors on the American market must have a lot to do with free-floating anti-Americanism, even among people who should know better.

Second-hand housing sales in January were down 42% in Catalonia and 27% in Spain as a whole compared with one year ago. Pop goes the bubble.

So after literally years of whining about the PP's water plan to transfer Ebro River water to Valencia and Murcia, the Catalan government has come up with its very own redistribution of water resources, supposedly to be ready for late summer or early fall. They're going to build an emergency aqueduct between the headwaters of the Segre River, which flows into the Ebro, and the headwaters of the Llobregat, which supplies Barcelona with much of its water supply. Naturally, Lleida province is furious: "Those goddamn city slickers are stealing our water!" So Catalonia as a whole gets angry if water is to be sent to another Spanish region, but Barcelona doesn't think twice if water is to be taken from another Catalan province.

Talk about crazy contradictions: There is an association up in the Pyrenees that is trying to conserve the traditional Catalan breed of donkey. Great, I'm all for it. So last weekend they got 400 people together for a big old donkey fiesta. Great, sounds like fun. Except those dumbasses KILLED some donkeys and then ATE them, as the main event of the fiesta. Naturally, the animal-rights groups are angry enough to kick the barn door down. Bonus: They did the same thing last year and received so many protests that they naturally had to do it again.

Rafael Poch, La Vanguardia's man in Peking covering the Tibet crisis from half a continent away, reiterates that "The international media ignored the Tibetan pogrom against the Chinese in Lhasa," and "Official sources attacked foreign media manipulation of information."

Nancy Pelosi was in town yesterday for a stopover on the way home from visiting the Dalai Lama in India. She met with regional premier Montilla and Barcelona mayor Jordi Hereu, supposedly about ecology. God only knows why. Aren't there about two hundred more important people in Europe to meet with? Oh, well, it can't hurt anything.

The Spanish press didn't pay too much attention to the Obama and Reverend Wright fooferaw, nor have they even mentioned McCain's gaffe when he confused the Sunnis and the Shiites, but they're all over the Hillary-lied-about-Bosnia story. Reason? There's a good image, the film of Hillary and Chelsea at the airport receiving a state welcome and receiving a gift from a little girl with no sniper fire anywhere.

You know, I can actually see giving Hillary a break over this one. We all have the tendency to remember things in a way that puts us in the best possible light. She probably really did believe that she was facing danger there in Sarajevo, and has built it up in her mind to the point that she falsely remembers snipers being there. I doubt she was deliberately, premeditatedly lying.

As for Obama and Reverend Wright, this is only going to get worse as more of Wright's crack-brained crap comes out on video. Obama has not successfully distanced himself from this guy, and I'm not sure if he can. He's way in too tight with Wright, taking the title of his book from one of Wright's sermons and everything, Now, I doubt Obama really believes Wright's "The government invented crack and AIDS in order to genocide the blacks" stuff, but what I think it shows is that Obama really doesn't believe anything in particular. He's willing to go along with anyone and any idea that he thinks will help his career, and if that means sucking up to radical black racists in South Chicago, he's happy to do so if it will get him elected to the state senate.

McCain is already ahead of both Hillary and Obama in the surveys. The Democrats are going to blow this election.

Slow news day, always a good thing. New construction starts are down 8% in Spain since January 2007, the largest decline in the EU-27. The stock market is down just a little, two-tenths of one percent or so. British Airways increased its share of Iberia to 13%, but they're not going to take over the airline, since it would lose its valuable semi-monopoly of Spain-Latin America flights if it passed to non-Spanish hands. Meanwhile, the airlines have reduced the number of Barcelona-Madrid flights because of competition from the new high-speed train, meaning there are plenty of slots at El Prat for any company that wants to fly in and out of here. Now let's see if Barcelona's market can support more traffic.

La Vanguardia ran a special culture section on the changes the city has experienced since the late ´80s, when I came here. It's mostly pomo-critical theory architecture--design--urban planning stuff, and it seems like there are several overriding themes: 1) Barcelona is the most wonderful place in the world 2) the city took advantage of its Olympic Games more effectively than most other cities have 3) government urban planning works in Barcelona and other cities should follow our example 4) there are too many damn tourists spoiling things for us Barcelonese 5) America sucks.

(My reaction: 1) they have a good point. Barcelona is probably one of the ten most desirable cities in the world to live in 2) they really did use the Olympics to put the city on the world map: Barcelona used to be a fourth division city and now it's near the top of the second division 3) government urban planning in Barcelona has been fairly successful, but there have also been some very serious errors 4) Shut up already about the tourists. We live off them. And they're a natural consequence of getting on the world map, which Barcelona is so proud of 5) Yeah, around here they can't even run a culture supplement about their own city without slagging off the Yankees.)

So check out this piece (of crap) by one Josep Oliva, billed as "an architect and urban planner":

USA: the urban anti-model

With a few honorable and notable exceptions, the typical American city is the urban anti-model. Though I would call it the domestic city, conceptually speaking it is a human settlement that does not reach the category of a city as it is correctly defined. The most representative example is Los Angeles, which is the paradigm of unsustainability and the absence of urban values.

Yeah, I hate L.A. too, but a lot of people like it, so many that it's America's second largest metro area. Are all of those folks lacking in proper urban values? And where does this joker get off telling us that Kansas City, say, is not really a city? What is it, a vat of Crisco?

Various factors explain the existence of these non-cities. According to V. Verdu*, the preeminence of the home over the street, the private over the public, utilitarian individualism and distant communication, all this is genuinely American. To these characteristics of privacy, individualism, and a certain dehumanization, one must add the omnipresent liberalism** and the suburban mentality typical of the Anglo-Saxon and Nordic countries as a consequence of climactic determinism, Besides, there is the role of the economy, which impregnates everything.

*Verdú wrote the notorious Yankee-bashing screed The American Planet.
**Remember, in Spain "liberal" means "capitalist," more or less.

Note the stereotyping of Americans as private, selfish, distant people, a common cliché among all Mediterranean Europeans. However, most Europeans don't straignt out call Americans dehumanized like this guy does. One comment: Americans don't hang out on the streets much because they have spacious, attractive homes with yards rather than cramped, overcrowded apartments, and instead of meeting at the local bar they actually invite one another over to their houses. Americans often (mistakenly) consider Spaniards as cold and unfriendly because they never invite you over to their place. And does the economy not impregnate everything in Barcelona too, or do people here not have jobs or anything?

For years, the US has exercised great influence in the whole world and in every aspect of life, including the construction of cities.

Yep, here's the problem. The United States is more influential than Catalonia, and therefore one must whine and complain about it.

Verdu points out that such a cruel and intense phenomenon of colonization, so absolute and devastating, has never received so little opposition, and that it does not operate in the crude manner of oppression, but rather with the refined strategy of seduction. It's not exploitation, but "modernizing." And so we copy them, uncritically adopting their way of life, and we are fascinated by the "modernity" of their images.

Cruel? Devastating? Colonization? What? Suburbs are cruel? Note that our author admits that the European stereotype of the American city is, despite its devastating colonization, seductive. It's American, so it's no good, but those clever Yankees trick people into thinking it's attractive. And note what's really bothering him: some people around here aren't totally anti-American and think living in a suburb might be kind of nice. Also note that he's judging America on images again, just like other bigots from over here who don't know crap about anything outside their own little pond.

Why should we copy a model with no future, because it's unsustainable, the product of unbridled liberalism, which ignores public space and scorns the added value of enjoying the city in itself?

In this sentence I count two straw men, the alleged stereotype (model) of the hypothetical American city and the traitorous Catalan seduced by Yankeeism; one case of begging the question, saying that this stereotype (model) has no future because it is unsustainable when those things are synonyms; one use of a scare phrase, unbridled liberalism; and two unsupported and unfalsifiable hypotheses, that Americans ignore public space (like Central Park or the Mall or Boston Common?) and make cities unenjoyable (like Boston or Chicago or New York or San Francisco?).

They talk about modernizing our urban tradition and projecting it into the future, but banal novelties are one thing and solid modernity destined to establish itself in atemporality is another.

I have a big solid turd destined to establish itself in the Barcelona sewer system in about an hour or so.

Diagonal Mar, the courthouse complex, the autistic shopping malls, and the business parks are examples of the application of American non-urban criteria. It is strange, because it is incoherent, that the compulsively anti-American left follows the dictates of this domestic city in major urban interventions that reflect urban planning from the opposite side of the political spectrum. Among others, this is the case of Caufec in Esplugues.

So this guy is annoyed at the Catalan left wing because it's not anti-American enough? And why are shopping malls so awful? It's not like hundreds of thousands of people don't go to them here in Catalonia every weekend. And when did shopping malls become politically conservative? Finally, note that our author has gone through this entire rant because he wants to denounce some construction project out in Esplugues. Jesus.